To many in the West, China’s rise is an indisputable fact. Commentators celebrate its success in language not seen since an earlier generation of political tourists gushed over Mao’s China: in February, after returning from a visit to the country, the investor and columnist Steven Rattner averred that China’s “model of state-directed capitalism” had helped produce “the colossus that dominates global manufacturing while making extraordinary progress in fast-growing, technology-oriented fields that have long been American led.” The economic historian Adam Tooze declared last year that the country “is the master key to understanding modernity.” Others seem resigned to asking narrow, technocratic questions: Will its military be ready to invade Taiwan next year, or a few years down the road? Can its authoritarian political model provide a stable succession when Chinese leader Xi Jinping dies? Can it overcome sanctions and produce cutting-edge chips? In doing so, they treat the permanency of the People’s Republic of China as a foregone conclusion.

What’s often lost in these discussions is that the country’s own leaders implicitly doubt the very concept of their nation. Government officials and many ordinary people vehemently proclaim the sanctity of China’s borders, even as many of its border regions are run under a state of near-martial law. Official narratives, meanwhile, forbid a coherent explanation of how China obtained these lands. As part of a broader intellectual decay, many of the country’s brightest minds have exiled themselves, either through inner emigration and self-censorship or by leaving the country altogether.

China shouldn’t have much of an identity crisis. It boasts an ancient civilization and culture instantly recognizable around the world. Its intellectual inheritance—rich traditions in martial arts, medicine, philosophy, and religion—is widely admired and imitated in global popular culture and the high arts. But Chinese leaders behave as if they were running an upstart nation with no history—one that has to demand that visitors refer to it as “the People’s Republic” and repeat that there is only “one China,” located within sacred and immutable borders. The country today “is a multiheaded creature of no certain or reliable identity,” Xu Guoqi writes in his new book, The Idea of China: A Contested History. “If there were a clear or reliable identity, today’s leaders would not be so obsessed with trying to impose one.”

In the nearly 15 years since Xi took power, in 2012, he has tried to define China by fusing the glories of communism—sacrifice, duty, perseverance—and some elements of traditional culture, especially filial piety and obedience. But by emptying both of these ideologies of their subversive kernels—their emphasis on social justice and the right to disobedience, to name two—Xi has failed to construct a convincing vision of what China stands for. It remains unclear whether Xi’s version of China has any values beyond holding on to the territories of the old Qing empire and keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power, or whether the CCP’s project is capacious enough to accommodate the country’s historical hybridity.

To Xu, the party’s answer—building a “house of cards” atop the country’s multifarious history—could be its downfall. In the Soviet Union, a similar attempt to build a modern nation-state on the foundations of an empire fell apart after its leaders could not resolve the inherent contradictions of such a project. The CCP, The Idea of China suggests, might meet a similar fate if it does not change course.

The political and economic success of the last four decades will likely prevent the People’s Republic from collapsing like the Soviet Union. Still, Xu’s book should make one skeptical about the assumption that the China that exists today is the China that will exist long into the future. Instead, Xu reminds readers of the different possible paths China might have taken, and the consequences of its not doing so. At its most powerful, the idea of China was civilizational, helping hold together multiethnic empires and vast territories without extreme violence. But when it relied on force, China became brittle and unstable.

Over the past century, China has solved its material shortcomings, emerging as a global economic and scientific powerhouse. But its national........

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