Beware the dragon - Erik Durschmied

As one of the world's most populous countries, China has always flexed its muscles beyond its borders, the result being a thread of conflict woven into the fabric of the nation's history. In the mid-13th-century Mongol hordes obliterated an army of Europe's finest knights, and 700 years later China went to war with Japan, took on UN forces in Korea, and squared up to the Soviet Union and America. Over the centuries in between, the Chinese sought bloody conflict with Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists and survived political conflicts that claimed tens of millions of lives. Today China stands on the threshold of global economic domination with an economy estimated to become twice as wealthy as those of the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy combined within a generation. This unique history traces China's passage through 1,000 years of war, colonial adventurism, and internecine politics in an effort to understand what this huge and unstoppable country has become, as well as what the future holds for a fragile world in which China is quickly becoming a dominant superpower.