Ross Terrill adorns the first page of his book with a Chinese saying: "Know the Future in the Mirror of the Past." (Jian wang zhi lai). It appropriately describes his intention to explore China's centuries of history, the imperial dynasties that ruled over the vast country and to analyze how such a long past can affect the present. The present is a China with a future as an economic power in the age of globalization. But the country is still run by authorities that are deeply influenced by past concepts and a socialist system that permeates every aspects of the daily life of their population. The author is one of the world's most formidable China experts, who has spent years studying and researching a civilization that has lasted longer than any other on earth. But in 1911-1912, the Confucian-Legalist monarchy that governed China for more than 2,500 years was ended by revolution. Since 1912, Ross Terrill says, "China has neither established a worthy and just political system nor adapted to being a nation-state."

Events in the past decades have shown that the government in Beijing has flirted with aspects of freedom, but it has always returned to repression as a way of governing the country with the world's largest population. "The failure to find a respected, modern replacement for monarchical rule is connected with Communist Beijing's clinging to the ways of empire," the author says. The empire in China began in the 16th century B.C. with the Shang dynasty and ended with the Qing in 1912.

"Its final dynasty, the Qing (Manchu), was very much an empire, and it is this China that the Chinese Communists control today," he says. The People's Republic of China (PRC) is not an empire in the traditional sense, and its imperial behavior is limited to the country and to the region. Beijing's leaders have reinvented an autocracy deriving from the monarchies that existed for 2,500 years to control its people and to keep pressure on non-Chinese in neighboring countries, the author says. Under such conditions, China today is not functioning as a nation-state. Ross Terrill says China is a "misfit" in the late 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century.

The chapters in the book are devoted to explaining how the Chinese empire worked in the past, when emperors believed themselves to be the "Son of Heaven" with a mandate to rule over the world from the "Kingdom of the Middle." Emperors during those centuries demand that barbarian countries - meaning non-Chinese countries - pay tribute to them. The Chinese system of governance lasted for centuries because it was based on a working relationship between philosophies of Confucianism and Legalism. But dynasties and emperors ended or collapsed, one after the other.

Sun Yat-sen, leader of the 1912 revolution bestowed much of his empire to Chiang Kai-shek. Ross Terrill said Chiang was unlike Sun in that he held power and survived long enough to put his ideas of a modern China into practice. The author describes his vision as that of a semi-traditional military dictatorship, which integrated the Nationalist Party into the state apparatus. Chiang, in a sense, continued the system left by the Qing dynasty and also introduced elements of Fascism during his reign in Nanjing.

The "Red Emperor," or Mao Tse-tung, in the chapter of the same title, is described as having embraced the same concept of one-party state that Chiang instituted. But Mao pushed that concept a step further by making society totally subservient to the state. Throughout the book, the author cites examples of events that have taken place under past emperors to illustrate and explain the behavior of present Chinese leaders.

Ross Terrill says several scenarios of Chinese politics will mark the next 20 years. China will continue policies initiated by Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. This will worry the US because China will be economically strong while remaining an authoritarian state. The Chinese regime will relax its authoritarian system to allow the emergence of more freedoms, economic development and a degree of political pluralism, or the regime will face social and political unrest as a result of being a WTO member. In the event the economy takes a dive, China will be split between Marxist and Leninist factions, some of which believe that market economy is totally incompatible with the Communist system.