While this story plays out on front pages,  coincidentally I have been reading a wonderful work of world history, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 by John Darwin, a lecturer and fellow at Nuffeld College, Oxford. Among many things, Darwin’s book is a persuasive debunking of the Plato-to-NATO story, which with retrospective coherence sees the triumph of the West as foreordained, certainly by 1492. To the contrary, Darwin shows, there were equally — or more — plausible scenarios for the world’s future as late as 1750. Indeed, Darwin argues, between Tamerlane’s death and the Industrial Revolution, an “early modern equilibrium” developed in which a number of huge, stable empires — Chinese, Mughal, Persian, and Ottoman — seriously outclassed Europe and its nascent empires.

For our purposes, the most relevant story is China’s. (The most interesting is Russia’s.) In the West’s current telling, both China and Japan in the 17th century turned fatally inward, disengaging from world commerce and expansion, “drifting into cultural stasis and economic stagnation behind the political barrier of xenophobic diplomacy” at the very moment when its rewards were quickening. That blithely ignores the astonishing accomplishment of the Manchu (Ch’ing, nowadays) emperors, who over the course of a century consolidated military, dynastic, and economic control over South China, then moved westward, expanding into Siankiang and Tibet and forever shutting the door to challenger-hordes from the great Asian steppes. In the 18th century, China’s population tripled, cultivated land doubled, economic activity greatly increased, book production soared. To say that China shut itself off from the world is to look through Western eyes only. It’s better to see China not as turning its back to the sea, but as turning its face south and west to a vast inland empire, a market and territory which it consolidated and developed in a successful sinocentric system that was not seriously challenged till the Opium Wars began in 1839.

What looks like censorship today may be better explained as an example of China brushing off and updating a commercial strategy that served it well in the past. Nations do tend to pattern their economic plans after what they have done before. Barnard College president Debora L Spar’s wonderful book Ruling the Waves; From the Compass to the Internet, a History of Business and Politics along the Technological Frontier recounts how the US, Britain, and continental Europe followed characteristic political-economic operating models through succeeding waves of technological innovation: on the continent, a government-run PTT model, later deregulated; in the UK, a state-chartered monopoly corporation, later opened up; in the US, an entrepreneurial land rush followed by crash, consolidation, and regulation.

If this view is right, China is not so much shutting out competitors as it is developing its internal market — doing what the Ch’ing did four centuries ago. Not in all sectors, mind you: As my colleague Ed Tse points out, there is an “Open China” (consumer goods, medical equipment, and many other sectors, including some in technology); it is the yang to the Google story’s yin. Thus China is simultaneously making life difficult for some foreign technology and networking companies — but also developing the world’s largest Internet market and powerful domestic competitors. Thus China  is an adamant opponent of international regimes to control carbon emissions — but also is aggressively developing what might be the world’s most advanced green technologies. George Santyana famously said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But, hey, if something worked once, why not do it again?

Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company. Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.