Source: Reading the China Dream (10/15/18)
Xu Jilin, “The New Tianxia: Rebuilding China’s Internal and External Order”[1]
Translation by Mark McConaghy, Tang Xiaobing, and David Ownby
Introduction by David Ownby
Although the major themes of this 2015 essay are found in many of Xu’s essays, they are woven together here in an imaginative way to address a topic that Xu does not often address—Chinese foreign policy. He starts with a fairly familiar presentation of the traditional notion of tianxia 天下 (literally “all under heaven”) which, in Xu’s words, connoted both “an ideal civilizational order, and a world spatial imaginary with China’s central plains at the core.” In one sense, then, China was tianxia, the embodiment, when the system functioned at its best, of the set of principles that justified imperial Confucian rule. But tianxia was open, not closed; like the 20th century American dream,tianxia was understood, by the Chinese, as a kind of universalism to which other cultures could aspire. Xu illustrates his point less through discussion of China’s traditional tribute system, and more through exploration of the historical relations between the Han people and the various non-Han “barbarian groups” on China’s peripheries, his point being that the processes of assimilation, borrowing, and integration were multiple, complex, and non-problematic at an ideological level. In other words, prior to the arrival of the notion of the nation-state, “Chinese” and “barbarian” were not understood in racial terms but in civilizational terms. An open, universal tianxia welcomed Asia’s “huddled masses” as long as they recognized tianxia’s brilliance.
Xu then uses this history lesson to turn the tables on his familiar adversaries: in this instance, China’s ultra-nationalists and those, like Zhang Weiwei 张维为(b. 1957) or Pan Wei 潘維 (b. 1964),[2] who use China’s “uniqueness” to argue that China must ignore the West and return to its own civilization. He argues that their patriotism and national pride are based in a misreading of Chinese history: when China was great in the past, China was open, not closed, and if China wishes to be great again it most adopt the same posture because civilizations by definition must be universal. He argues further that even the patriotism and national pride of those who preach a narrow-minded China Dream are the products of China’s embrace of the nation-state and the nation-state’s goals of wealth and power. In other words, the pride that China’s rise has inspired is largely a pride born of playing the West’s game well. China’s own “game” is still forgotten.
Xu then attempts to imagine a world in which some version of tianxia replaces China’s contemporary state-driven posture. In the context of China’s problematic relations with non-Han people on the peripheries—chiefly but not exclusively Tibetans and the Muslim peoples of Xinjiang—Xu suggests that the Qing dynasty politics of “multiculturalism,” which recognized self-rule for minority groups within certain limits, functioned better than current policies, which are a mixture of forced integration and forced modernization. In the context of the geopolitics of East Asia, Xu imagines a world based on shared tianxia values rather than interest-based alliances or antagonisms. And in the world at large, Xu proposes the creation and propagation of a tianxia 2.0, which will be “de-centered and non-hierarchical,” and hence ready to contribute to the construction of “new universalisms”—i.e., to give substance to the post-modern order.
The rise of China may well be the event that will have the greatest impact on the twenty-first century. Yet despite the expansion of China’s power, the country’s internal and external orders have grown increasingly tense. Domestically, national greatness has not generated a centripetal force attracting the various minority nationalities in the border regions to the center. Instead, ethnic and religious conflicts continually erupt in Tibet and Xinjiang, to the point that one now sees extreme separatism and terrorist activities. Internationally, the rise of China has made its neighbors nervous. Conflicts over islands in the South and East China Seas have brought the threat of war to East Asia, and the outbreak of military hostilities is a constant danger. Nationalism has reached soaring heights not just in China but throughout East Asia, in a spiral of mutual antagonism. The possibility of regional war is increasing, in an atmosphere similar to that of 19th-century Europe.
With crisis drawing ever closer, do we have a plan? It’s easy enough to make a list of national policies to alleviate the situation, but the essential is to extirpate the roots of the crisis. And the origin of the crisis is nothing other than the mindset that accords utter supremacy to the nation, a mindset that entered China in the late 19th century and has since become the dominant way of thinking among officials and the common people. Nationalism has always been an integral part of modernity, yet when it becomes the highest value of statecraft, it can inflict destructive calamities on the world, as in the European World Wars.
To truly address the problem at its roots, we need a form of thought that can act as a counterpoint to nationalism. I call this thought the “new tianxia,” an axial civilizational wisdom that comes from China’s pre-modern tradition, interpreted anew along modern lines.
The Universal Values of Tianxia
What is tianxia? Within Chinese tradition, tianxia had two essential meanings: an ideal civilizational order, and a world spatial imaginary with China’s central plains at the core.
The American sinologist Joseph Levenson (1920-1969) argued that in China’s early history, “the notion of the ‘state’ referred to a structure of power, while the notion of tianxia pointed to a structure of values.”[3] As a value system, tianxia was a set of civilizational principles with a corresponding institutional system. The Ming dynasty scholar Gu Yanwu 顾炎武 (1613-1682) distinguished between “the loss of the state and the loss of tianxia.” Here, the state was merely the political order of the dynasty, while tianxia was a civilizational order with universal application. It referred not only to a particular dynasty or state, but above all to eternal, absolute, and universal values. The state could be destroyed, but tianxia could not. Otherwise humanity would devour itself, disappearing into a Hobbesian jungle.
While today Chinese nationalism and statism have risen to tremendous heights, behind these ideologies lurks a value-system that emphasizes Chinese particularism. As if the West had Western values and China had Chinese values, meaning that China cannot follow the West’s “crooked” path but must follow its own particular path to modernity. At first glance, this argument looks very patriotic, giving pride of place to China, but in fact, it is very “un-Chinese” and untraditional. This is because China’s civilizational tradition was not nationalistic, but rather grounded in tianxia, whose values were universal and humanistic rather than particular. Tianxia did not belong to one particular people or nation. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism all are what the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) called “axial civilizations” of the premodern world. Just like Christianity or the civilization of Ancient Rome, Chinese civilization took universal concern for the whole of humanity as it starting point, using the values of other peoples as a kind of self-judgement. After the modern period, when nationalism entered China from Europe, China’s vision narrowed considerably and its civilization was diminished. From the grandeur of tianxia, where all humans can be integrated into the cosmos, Chinese civilization narrowed to the pettiness of “this is Western, and this is Chinese.” Mao Zedong once spoke of “China’s need to make a greater contribution to humanity,” arguing that “only when the proletariat liberates all of humanity can it liberate itself,” revealing a broad vision of internationalism behind his nationalism. But all we find in today’s China Dream is the great revival of the Chinese nation.
Of course, pre-modern Chinese people spoke not just of tianxia but also of the difference between barbarians (夷) and Chinese (夏). However, the pre-modern notion of Chinese and barbarian was completely different than the China/West, us/them binary discourse on the lips of today’s extreme nationalists. Today’s binary thinking is the result of the influence of modern racism, ethnic consciousness, and statism: Chinese and barbarian, us and the other, exist in a relationship of absolute enmity, with no space for communication or integration between them. In traditional China, the distinction between Chinese and barbarian was not a fixed, racialized concept, but was rather a relative cultural concept that contained the possibility of communication and transformation. The difference between barbarian and Chinese was determined solely on the basis of whether one had a connection to the values of tianxia. While tianxia was absolute, the labels of barbarian and Chinese were relative. While blood and race were innate and unchangeable, civilization could be studied and emulated. As the Chinese American historian Hsu Cho-yun (b. 1930) put it, within Chinese culture “there are no absolute ‘others,’ there are simply relational ‘selves.’”[4] History has many examples of Chinese being transformed into barbarians, as in the case where Chinese were assimilated into the “southern barbarians” known as the Man 蛮people. Likewise, history provides many examples of the reverse process, with barbarians being transformed into Chinese, an example of which would be the western, nomadic Hu 胡people’s transformation into Hua 华, or those who have embraced tianxia. The Han people were originally a farming people, while the majority of the Hu people were a grassland people: during the periods of the Six Dynasties (222-589), the Sui-Tang (589-907), and the Yuan-Qing (1271-1911), farming China and grassland China underwent a dual-directional process of integration. Chinese culture absorbed much of the culture of the Hu people. For example, Buddhism was originally the religion of the Hu people; the blood of the Han people has mixed within it elements of barbarian peoples; from clothing to daily habits, there is not a single area where the people of the central plains have not been influenced by the Hu peoples. For example, in the earliest periods, Han people were accustomed to sitting on mats. Later they adopted the folding stools of the Hu people, and from folding stools they developed towards backed chairs: in the end they ended up changing their customs completely.
The reason that Chinese civilization did not decline over the course of five thousand years is precisely because it was not closed and narrow. Instead, it benefitted from its openness and inclusiveness, and never stopped transforming outside civilizations into its own traditions. Employing the universal perspective of tianxia, China was concerned only with the question of the character of these values. It did not ask ethnic questions about “mine” or “yours,” but absorbed everything that was “good,” connecting “you” and “me” in an integrated whole which became “our” civilization.
However, today’s extreme nationalists see China and the West as absolute, natural enemies. They use absolute distinctions of race and ethnicity to resist all foreign civilizations. Even in the academic world there is a popular “theory of the original sin of Western learning,” according to which anything created by Westerners must be rejected out of hand. The judgements of these extreme nationalists regarding standards of truth, goodness and beauty no longer display the universalism of traditional China. All that is left is the narrow perspective of “mine”: as if as long as it is “mine” it must be “good,” and as long as it is “Chinese” then it is an absolute good that does not need to be proven. This kind of “politically correct” nationalism seems like it is extolling Chinese civilization, but in fact it is doing just the opposite: it takes the universality of Chinese civilization and debases it into nothing but the particular culture of one nation and one people. There is an important difference between civilization and culture. Civilization is concerned with “what is good,” while culture is merely concerned with “what is ours.” Culture distinguishes the self from the other, defining the self’s cultural identity. However, civilization is different, seeking to answer the question “what is good?” from a universal perspective transcending that of one nation and one people. This “good” is not just good for “us”, it is also good for “them,” and for all humanity. Within universal civilization, there is no distinction between “us” and “the other,” only human values respected universally.
If China’s goal is not simply to strengthen the nation-state, but rather to become once again a civilizational power with great influence on world affairs, then its every word and deed must take universal civilization as its point of departure, and in dialogues with the world it must have its own unique understanding of universal civilization. This understanding cannot be culturalist, and it cannot be littered with standard forms of self-defense like “this is China’s particular national character,” or “this concerns China’s sovereignty, and no one else is allowed to discuss it.” It must use the values of universal civilization to persuade the world and demonstrate its legitimacy. As a great power with global influence, what China must achieve today is not just its dream of rejuvenating the nation and the state, but more importantly the redirection of its nationalistic spirit toward the world. What China needs to reconstruct is not just a particularistic culture suited to one country and one people, but rather a civilization that has universal value for all humanity. A value that is “good” for China, particularly core values that touch on our shared human nature, must in the same way be “good” for all humanity. The universal nature of Chinese civilization can only be constructed from the perspective of all humanity, and cannot be grounded solely in the particular interests and values of the Chinese nation-state. Historically speaking, Chinese civilization was tianxia. To transform tianxia, in today’s globalized era, into an internationalism integrated with universal civilization is the major goal of a civilizational power.
China is a cosmopolitan power, a global nation that bears Hegel’s “world spirit.” It must take responsibility for the world and for the “world spirit” it has inherited. This “world spirit” is the new tianxia that will emerge in the form of universal values.
A De-centered, Non-hierarchical New Universalism
When Chinese talk about tianxia, neighboring countries will react with a fear born of history,[5] worrying that China’s rise heralds the return from the dead of the arrogant, self-important, imposing Chinese empire of yore. This concern is not baseless. Alongside universal values, the traditional tianxiaalso had a geographic and spatial expression: a “differential mode of association 差序格局,” to use an expression coined by sociologist Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910-2005) based on China’s central plains. Tianxia was organized through three concentric circles: the first was the inner circle, the central areas directly ruled by the emperor through the bureaucratic system; the second was the middle circle, the border regions that were indirectly ruled by the emperor through the system of hereditary titles, vassal states, and tribal headsmen; and the third was the tributary system, which established an international hierarchical order bringing many countries to China’s imperial court. From the center to the border areas, from inner to outer, traditional tianxia imagined and constructed a tripartite concentric world with China at the center, in which the barbarian peoples submitted to central authority.
Over the course of Chinese history, the process of the expansion of the Chinese empire brought sophisticated religion and civilization to bordering areas and countries, and at the same time was replete with violence, subjugation, and enslavement. This was true of dynasties like the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming, ruled by Han emperors, as well as the Mongol Yuan and the Manchu Qing, which had rulers from the border regions. In today’s era of the nation-state, with our respect for the equality of peoples and their right to independence and self-determination, any plan to return to the hierarchical tianxia order, with China as its center, is not only historically reactionary but is in fact merely wishful thinking. For this reason, tianxia needs to pick and choose and revitalize itself in the context of modernity, so as to develop towards a new configuration: tianxia 2.0.
What is “new” about the new tianxia? In comparison with the traditional concept, its novelty is expressed in two dimensions: one, its de-centered and non-hierarchical nature; two, its ability to create a new sense of universality.
Traditional tianxia was a hierarchical concentric politico-civilizational order with China as its core. What the new tianxia should discard first is precisely this centralized and hierarchical order. What is “new” about the new tianxia is the addition of the principle of the equality of nation-states. In the new tianxia order, there is no center, there are only independent and peaceful peoples and states who respect one another. Nor will there be a hierarchical arrangement of power in terms of domination and enslavement, protection and submission; instead it will be a peaceful order of egalitarian co-existence, one that spurns authority and domination. Even more important is that the subject of the new tianxia order has already undergone a transformation: there is no longer a distinction between Chinese and barbarian, nor between subject and object. Instead it will be something like what the ancients said: “Tianxia is the tianxia of tianxia people.” In the internal order of the new tianxia, Han people and the various national minorities will enjoy mutual equality in legal and status terms, and the cultural uniqueness and pluralism of the different nationalities will be respected and protected. And in the international, external order, China’s relations with its neighbors and indeed every nation in the world, regardless of whether they are great or small nations, will be defined by the principles of respect for each other’s sovereign independence, equality in their treatment of each other, and peaceful co-existence.
The principle of the sovereign equality of nation-states is in fact a kind of “politics of recognition” in which all sides mutually recognize each other’s autonomy and uniqueness, and indeed recognize the authenticity of all peoples. The new tianxia that takes the “politics of recognition” as its base, differs from the old tianxia. The reason that the old tianxia had a center was due to the belief that the Chinese people who inhabited the center had received the mandate of heaven, and their legitimacy to rule the world thus came from the transcendent will of heaven. This is why there was a distinction between the center and the margins. In today’s secular age, the legitimacy of nations and states no longer derives from a universally transcendent world (regardless of whether you call it “God” or “heaven”), but instead from their own authentic nature. The authentic nature of every nation-state means that each has its own distinctive values. A healthy international order must first require that every nation show mutual respect and recognition to all other nations. If we say that the traditional tianxia, with the mandate of heaven as its core, was built on the hierarchical relationship of center and periphery, then in the new tianxia, in the secular age of the “politics of recognition,” this relationship will be that of sovereign equality and mutual respect between all nation-states.
The new tianxia is a mutual transcendence of both traditional tianxia and the nation-state. On the one hand it transcends the sense of centrality of traditional tianxia, yet maintains its universalist attributes; on the other hand, it absorbs the principle of the sovereign equality of nation-states, yet overcomes the narrow perspective placing national interest above all, using universalism to balance out particularism. The authenticity and sovereignty of the nation-state are not absolute, but subject to outer constraints. This form of constraint is the principle of universal civilization provided by the new tianxia. Its passive dimension emerges from its de-centered, non-hierarchical nature; its active dimension attempts to construct a new tianxia universalism, one that can be commonly shared.
While traditional tianxia was a universal civilization for all humanity, it was like other axial civilizations such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, India’s ancient religions, and the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome: its universal character took form during a central time in a particular people’s history, in which a sense of holy mission was expressed through the principle of “Heaven has given a responsibility to this people” to save a fallen world. In this way, a people’s particular culture was elevated to become a universal human civilization. The universality of ancient civilizations emerged from a particular people and region who were able to transcend their particularity through communication with a transcendent holy source (either God or heaven), creating a transcendent and abstract universality. The universal value expressed by China’s traditional tianxia found its source in the transcendent universality of the way of heaven, the principle of heaven, and the mandate of heaven. The difference between Chinese civilization and the West was that in China the holy and the secular, the transcendent and the real, did not have absolute boundaries: the universality of the sacred tianxia was expressed in the real world through the secular will of the common people. Nonetheless, China’s tianxia was similar to other foundational civilizations in that they all took one people chosen by heaven as their center. As the people’s spirit subsequently oriented itself towards the world, it expanded toward its neighbors and toward larger territories, establishing the universality of tianxia. Modern civilization, which the Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923-2010) has called the “second axial civilization,” appeared first in Western Europe and then expanded towards the rest of the world. Like tianxia it had an axial character: it moved from the center to the margins, from a core people to every corner of the world.
What new tianxia wants to undo is precisely this axial civilizational structure, which is shared by both traditional tianxia and other foundational civilizations, all of which move from a core people towards the world, from the center to the margins, from a singular particularism to a homogenous universalism. The universal value that the new tianxia seeks is a new universal civilization. This kind of civilization does not emerge out of the variation of one particular civilization; it is rather a universal civilization that can be mutually shared by many different civilizations.
Modern civilization emerged in Western Europe, but in the process of its expansion towards the rest of the world, it experienced differentiation, stimulating the cultural modernization of various peoples and axial civilizations. By the latter half of the twentieth century, following the rise of East Asia, the development of India, the revolutions in the Middle East, and the modernization of Latin America, many variations of modern civilization had emerged, and modernity no longer belonged to Christian civilization. Rather, what emerged was a multivalent modernity that was integrated with many different axial civilizations and local cultures. The universal civilization that new tianxia seeks is precisely this modern civilization that can be collectively shared by different nations and peoples. In his Clash of Civilizations and the Reconstruction of World Order, Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) clearly differentiated between two different narratives of universal civilization: the first appeared within the binary analytical framework of “tradition and modernity,” which was part of Cold War ideology. Such a framework saw the West as the standard for universal civilization, and deserving of imitation by all non-Western countries. The other narrative employed the analytical framework of plural civilizations, which understood the concept as the common values and accumulated social and cultural structures that could be mutually recognized by various civilizational entities and cultural communities. This new universal civilization takes shared mutuality as its founding characteristic. While it shares historical origins with the West, in its current development it has separated from and transcended the West, and is now shared by the entire world.
The new universality sought by the new tianxia is a shared universality, and in this sense differs from the universality of the old axial civilizations. The traditional tianxia and the old axial civilizations possessed universals that were distilled from the particularism of a given people, in communication with each of these people’s transcendent worlds. But the universal character of the new tianxia is not founded on the basis of any one particularity, but on many particularities. As such it no longer possesses the transcendental character of traditional tianxia, nor does it need the endorsement of the mandate of heaven, the will of the gods, or moral metaphysics. The universality of new tianxia takes as its basic characteristic each civilization’s and culture’s “accumulated common knowledge.” In one sense, this is a return to the Confucian ideal of the world of the “superior man 君子:” “The superior man acts in harmony with others but does not seek to be like them.”[6] The different value systems and material pursuits of various civilizations and cultures are accommodated in the same world using harmonious methods, sharing the most basic consensus regarding mutual values.
The universality sought by the new tianxia transcends both Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism. It does not seek to create a civilizational hegemony on the basis of an axial civilization and national culture; it does not imagine that any particular civilization will represent the twenty-first century, to say nothing of representing humanity’s vast future. The new tianxia rationally understands the inner limitations of all civilizations and cultures, and accepts that today’s world is plural and multipolar, whether from the perspective of civilizational order or political alignments. Despite the discourse of power and the hegemony of empire, the true wish of humanity is not the domination of a single civilization or system, no matter how ideal or great it might be. What the Russo-French scholar Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) described as a “universally homogenous state” is always terrifying. The truly beautiful world is the one praised by the German Enlightenment intellectual Johann Herder (1744-1803), perfumed by the aroma of many different flowers. But for a pluralized world to avoid massacres between civilizations and cultures, one needs a Kantian universalism and an everlasting peaceful order. The universal principle of world order cannot take the rules of the game of Western civilization as its standard, nor can this principle be built on the logic of resistance to the West. The new universalism is one that all people can enjoy: the “overlapping consensus,” in the American scholar John Rawls’s (1921-2002) words that has emerged from different civilizations and cultures.
In his essay, “How Does the Subject Face the Other?” the Taiwanese philosopher Qian Yongxiang 钱永祥 (b. 1949) differentiates between three different kinds of universality. The first emphasizes the struggle between domination and subjugation, life and death, where one achieves the “universality of the negation of the other” through his conquest. The second uses avoidance to transcend the other, pursuing a kind of neutrality between the self and other and achieving a “universality that transcends the other.” The third is produced out of the mutual recognition of the self and the other, based on respecting difference and actively seeking dialogue and consensus, a “universality that recognizes the other.”[7] A universalism that takes either China or the West as its center belongs to the first category of dominating and “negating the other,” while the kind of “universal values” that liberalism promotes disregard the internal differences that exist between different cultures and civilizations. Liberalism aims, in a “value-neutral” way, to transcend the particularism of both the self and other on its way to constructing a “transcendent universalism.” However, behind both domination and transcendence lies a lack of recognition and respect for the uniqueness and pluralism of others. The “mutually shared universality” of the new tianxia is similar to Qian Yongxiang’s third category: a “universality based on recognition of the other.” It does not seek to establish the hegemony of one particular civilization among many different civilizations, cultures, peoples, and nations, nor does it belittle the particular paths taken by major civilizations. Instead, it seeks dialogue and the achievement of shared commonality through equal interactions among multiple civilizations.
John Rawls once envisaged an order of universal justice for constitutional states and a global order of the “law of peoples,” the title he gave to his 1999 book on the subject. He argued that the constitutional state could establish a politically liberal internal order based on a “common understanding” arising out of the “overlapping consensus” drawn from different religious, philosophical, and moral systems. In international affairs, a globally just order could be constructed out of universal human rights. Here, Rawls perhaps errs in reversing the paths to be followed. A country’s internal order of justice requires powerful common values with substantive content; it cannot use an expedient “overlapping consensus” as its base. But for many axial civilizations, the elements of international society that co-exist with national culture, and the use of Western human rights standards as the core value of “the law of peoples,” has appeared to be too substantive. Internally, the nation-state requires a thick common rationality, while international society can only establish a thin minimalist ethics. Such minimalist ethics can only take the “overlapping consensus” of different civilizations and cultures as its foundation: this is the de-centered, non-hierarchical shared universality that the new tianxia seeks.
Tianxia’s Internal Order: Unity in Diversity as National Governance
Tianxia was the soul of pre-modern China, and the systemic body of this soul was the Chinese empire, which differs greatly from the form of today’s nation-state. The systemic form of the nation-state is one nation for one people, a nation that establishes an internally unified market and institutional system, as well as a unified national identity and national culture. The methods of governance of an empire are more diverse and flexible: it does not demand uniformity between the inner regions of the empire and its border areas. As long as border regions maintain their allegiance to the central government, the empire can allow the peoples and regions under its administration to maintain their religions and cultures, and in the political realm maintain a sense of relative autonomy. All successful empires in history, including the Macedonian, Roman, Persian, or Islamic empires of the ancient past, as well as the modern British empire, shared similar characteristics in the realm of governance. The Chinese empire, whose two thousand-year history stretches from the Qin-Han period to the end of the Qing, has left us with an even greater supply of governing wisdom that deserves to be appreciated.
Even though China transformed itself into a modern European nation-state after the end of the Qing dynasty, the vast population which it governed, made up of peoples and ethnicities of different religions and cultures, as well as the vast and intersecting plains, highlands, grasslands, and forests which made up its territory, meant that China remained an empire, despite taking on the systemic form of a modern nation-state. From the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China, generations of central governments have sought to construct a highly unified administrative system and cultural nexus, and to create the Chinese people as a homogenized national group. Yet after one hundred years, not only has systemic, cultural, and national unification not been achieved, instead, in the past ten years religious and ethnic problems in border regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang have become ever more severe, to the point that separatism and terrorism have emerged. Where does the problem come from? Why was it that under the traditional empire the minority peoples of the border regions could exist in relative peace, but in the framework of the modern nation-state multiple crises have arisen? Can the experience of governance under the empire provide guidance for today’s modern nation state?
In terms of its conceptualization of space, tianxia was a differential mode of association with the central plains at its center. The Chinese empire’s style of governance employed a series of mutually supporting concentric spheres. In the inner sphere, where the Han people lived, it used the bureaucratic system developed by the first Qin emperor. In the outer sphere, the border regions inhabited by the minority peoples, it employed a variety of local forms of governance such as the systems of hereditary titles, vassal states, and tribal headsmen, which were based on the different historical traditions, ethnic characteristics, and territorial situations of each region. As long as the minority peoples were willing to recognize the governing authority of the central dynasty, the former could have considerable autonomy, maintaining the cultural customs, religious beliefs, and local politics that had been passed down through history. The “one country, two systems” concept proposed by Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) in the 1980s for Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan traces its origins to the wisdom of pluralistic governance of the pre-modern imperial tradition.
In Chinese history there were two different kinds of centralized monarchies: one was the ethnic Han dynasties of the central plains, which included the Han (206 BC-220 AD), Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279), and Ming (1368-1644); the other was the dynasties of the border peoples, including the Liao (907-1125), Jin (1115-1234), Yuan, and Qing (1644-1911). The Han people were a farming people, and the territory under their control was essentially agricultural. Except for brief periods during the Western Han and at the height of the Tang, the Han people never achieved long-term, peaceful, stable rule over the nomadic peoples of the grasslands. The reason for this lay in the vast differences between the farming peoples and nomadic peoples in terms of lifestyles and religious beliefs. The Han people could successfully bring the ethnic groups of the south under direct imperial rule, because they, like the Han, were farmers who used the slash and burn method to work the land. Yet the Han could not use the magic of the civilization of the central plains to assimilate and conquer the nomadic peoples of the north and west. Indeed, only the central dynasties established by the border peoples were able to unify the agricultural regions and the nomadic regions into one empire, forming contemporary China’s expansive territory. The Mongol Yuan dynasty lasted only a scant 90 years, and we’ll not discuss the success of that rule. The Manchu Qing dynasty, by contrast, was a multi-centric, multi-ethnic unified empire that was very different from the Han dynasties of the central plains. The Qing successfully integrated farming peoples and grassland peoples, who to this point had had difficulty coexisting in peace, into an imperial order. For the first time, the central government’s power successfully expanded to the northern forest and grasslands and the western highlands and basins, achieving an unprecedented unified structure.
While the Manchu people came from the deep forests of the Greater Khingan Range in today’s northernmost Heilongjiang province, they possessed first-rate political intelligence. For many years they lived and developed among farming peoples and grasslands peoples; they had been conquered and had also conquered others. They had a deep understanding of the differences between two different civilizations, and once they entered the central plains and took the central government they set out to reconstruct a great and unified empire, and their accumulated historical experience of survival was transformed into a political intelligence employed to govern tianxia. The great unity established by the Qing was very different from the great unity established by the first emperor of the Qin. It was no longer founded on “unifying cart axles, the written language, and rules of conduct.”[8] Instead, it built on a dual-track political and religious system that was situated within a multi-ethnic empire. In the eighteen provinces making up the home territory of the Han people, the Qing dynasty continued the historical system of Confucian rites, using Chinese civilization to govern China. In the border regions of the Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan peoples, they used Lama Buddhism as a common spiritual link, and employed diverse, flexible, and elastic methods of rule in order to achieve historical continuity. As such, the conquering dynastic empires of the Mongolian-Yuan and the Manchu-Qing were very different from the Han-Tang dynasties of the central plains: the former was not a tianxia unified in religious, cultural, and political terms, but was rather defined by the harmony of cultural diversity, a dual-form system of mutual co-existence.
The irreconcilable differences in lifestyle and religion between farming and nomadic peoples were reconciled, within the governing experience of the Qing empire, through this dual system. In today’s China, both the Han farming people and the nomadic border nationalities are encountering a more powerful, more secular industrial civilization, which entered China through the economic and political conquests of the European seafaring peoples, and fundamentally transformed the Han farming people, so that they now resemble nineteenth-century Europeans, with their inexhaustible desire for material wealth, their unending pursuit of secular happiness, and their intense competitiveness. Moreover, with the opening up of the western and northern nomadic territories, this disruptive secularism was brought into the grassland and plateaus, in the same way the imperial powers had brought it into China. Yet we tend forget that nomadic and grassland peoples are different from farming peoples; their understanding of happiness is completely different from the secular Han. For a people with deep religious beliefs, true happiness is not found in the satisfaction of material desire or the pleasures of secular life; instead, it is found in the protection of the gods and the transcendence of one’s soul. When the central government uses the unified vision of the nation- state to spread the universal principles of the market economy, the uniformity of bureaucratic management, and secular culture into the border regions, they encounter an intense backlash among some members of minority groups, who will staunchly resist secularization, much like the resistance found in certain parts of the Islamic world of Southwest Asia and North Africa.
From another perspective, a key difference between the modern nation-state and the traditional Chinese empire is that the nation-state wants to create a unified citizenry: the Chinese people. Composing more than 90% of the population, the Han people are the dominant and mainstream ethnicity, and for this reason often consciously or unconsciously imagine their history and cultural traditions as representing those of the Chinese people, and as the mainstream ethnicity they will seek to assimilate other ethnicities under the name of the “state” or the “citizens”. However, the modern meaning of “nation” is not what we mean by the common understanding of “people,” a group of people possessing natural customs, habits and religious traditions, such as the Han, the Manchus, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Mongols, the Miao, the Dai, etc. The idea of “nation” is, rather, intimately related to the concept of “state,” producing a people that is fused with the nation-state. This notion of people incorporates natural historical and cultural traditions, but also possesses highly artificial elements that have emerged at the same time as and, indeed, produced by the modern nation-state. This is the fundamental difference between modern citizens and historical people.
The “Chinese people” are not a “people” in way we normally understand the term, but are like the American people: a citizenry that appeared and was forged together with the modern state. Although the notion of the Chinese people takes the Han as its subject, the Han are not the equivalent of the Chinese people. Pre-modern China had the idea of the Han, but not the notion of the Chinese people as citizens. The Qing Dynasty created a multi-ethnic state whose contours are roughly those of modern China, but it did not attempt to forge a uniform Chinese people. The emergence of the concept of the Chinese people comes after the late Qing period, first in discussions by politicians such as Yang Du 杨度 (1875-1931) and intellectuals such as Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873-1929). The Republic of China established in 1911 was a nation-state based on a “republic of five peoples.” This meant that the Chinese people were not limited to the Han, nor could one use Han historical cultural traditions to narrate and imagine the past and future of the citizenry that was to be the Chinese people. Pre-modern China was a multiple China. There was the China of Han civilization, which took the central plains as its center; there was also the China of the minority ethnicities of the grasslands, forests, and plateaus. Together they made up pre-modern China’s history. The five-thousand years of Chinese history is a history of the mutual interaction between the peoples of the plains and the borders, the farming peoples and the nomadic peoples. Within this history, Chinese became barbarian and barbarian became Chinese. Finally, Chinese and barbarian melded into a common current, and in the Qing period transformed into a modern nation-state, and began to cohere as the body of citizens known as the Chinese people.
Forging a multi-ethnic citizenry is much harder than constructing a modern state. The problem is not the attitude of the mainstream ethnicity, but in the degree to which minority ethnicities identify with the citizenry. Professor Yao Dali 姚大力 (b. 1949), a well-known scholar of China’s border areas, has pointed out: “On the surface, the extreme demands of minority ethnic nationalism and state nationalism seem to be completely antithetical, but in reality, they are most certainly the exact same thing. History often reminds us that hidden within state nationalism is the ethnic nationalism of a given state’s main ethnic group.”[9] From the first late Qing attempts at building a citizenry down to the present day, the Han have often been have been taken as the equivalent of the Chinese people, and the Yellow Emperor imagined as the common ancestor of all the Chinese people. Hidden behind this citizen nationalism lies the true face of ethnic nationalism. The construction of a citizenry on the foundation of a single ethnic group is doomed to fragility, because once country experiences a political crisis there will be a backlash from the suppressed ethnic minorities, creating problems of separatism. The disintegration of the Soviet empire is a most recent example.
Fei Xiaotong developed a classical view of the Chinese people, calling it “unity within diversity.” What he calls “unity” is the unity of citizens that make up the Chinese people; what he calls “diversity” refers to the mutually recognized cultural autonomy and rights to political self-governance that all minority nationalities and ethnicities possess. While the Manchu Qing empire did not set out to create a unified citizenry, they did have a number of important successes in maintaining this “unity within diversity:” they realized diversity by employing the dual-track system of religion and governance, and they realized “unity” through a shared multi-ethnic dynastic identity. This “unity” was not based on an identification as a citizen, but instead on identity with a universal dynasty. Han scholars-officials, Mongolian dukes, Tibetan lamas, and southwestern tribal chieftains all recognized the monarch of the Qing Dynasty. The sole symbol of the state, the Qing emperor was called different names by different peoples. Han people called him emperor, Mongolian dukes called him the Great Khan, the leader of the alliance of the grasslands, and Tibetans called him Manjusri, the living Bodhisattva. The core of the state identity of the Qing empire was a political identity whose symbol was monarchical power, behind which was not only violence but also culture. Yet this culture was multi-faceted: one monarch, multiple expressions.
The Chinese “unity” created by the Manchu Qing dynasty through identity with the monarchy is not suitable for the era the nation-state. Today, China requires a unified citizen identity. Yet the problems emerging in the border regions and among the minority nationalities illustrate that we have not yet found the appropriate equilibrium in our “unity in diversity.” In the areas where we need “unity” we have been too “diverse.” For example, in the application of the law to cases regarding ethnic minorities we have, for purposes of stability, been overly lenient, which has generated resentment and opposition among the Han living in the border regions.[10] In the areas where we need “diversity” we have been too “unified.” For example, we have lacked respect for the religious beliefs and cultural traditions of the ethnic minorities, and we have insufficiently implemented the right to autonomous rule in minority regions. These phenomena all exhibit a tendency towards Han chauvinism.
The tension that exists between diversity and unity is a shared concern of all multi-ethnic nations in the world today. Ethnic questions have their own complexity and democratic systems offer no simple solutions. According to some liberals, the so-called ethnic question is a false one. They believe that as long as you have genuine, universal self-governance for the minority regions, and a federal system replaces centralized political power, then the ethnic question will be solved at once. However, we know from Chinese and foreign history, and from past and present examples, that once a revolution occurs in a highly centralized country, followed by the introduction of democratic processes resulting from the weakening of the power of the centralized government, long-suppressed ethnic minorities in the border regions will seek to free themselves and demand independence. As such, the unified nation will face a crisis of disintegration. Both the Ottoman and Soviet empires collapsed under such conditions.
How, in the process of democratization, can a country prevent ethnic separatism leading to the breakup of the nation while, at the same time, rigorously implementing the cultural and political self-governance of minority peoples? Obviously, a model of unified national governance that puts too much emphasis on economic, political, and cultural integration will struggle to solve this intractable problem. And the successful experiences of pre-modern empires with a plural system of religion and rule can provide us with historical wisdom and guidance. In today’s China, “constitutional patriotism” can, in the realm of the law, provide individuals of different nationalities and regions with the equal status and mutual respect due to citizens. As citizens, this will strengthen the national identity of each minority nationality and ethnicity. The transformation that still needs to be effected is to take traditional dynastic identity, based on the symbol of monarchical power, and transform it into a national identity based upon a modern nation-state with the constitution as its foundation. At the same time, we need to draw on the traditional empire’s plural system of religion and governance, allowing Confucianism to serve as the symbol of the cultural identity of the Han people, while also protecting the religious, linguistic, and cultural uniqueness of the minority nationalities, recognizing their collective rights and providing them with systemic guarantees. “One country two systems” should be used not only in relation to Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. It should be expanded to become a guiding principle of governance for the autonomous border areas. It is only through such measures that the internal order of the new tianxia can be built, realizing a structure for the citizenship of the Chinese people that is both “unified” and “diverse.”
New Tianxia’s External Order: Beyond the Sovereignty of the Nation-State
The nineteenth century through the present day has been the era of the establishment of distinct nation-states. National sovereignty above all else, national survival as a core interest, clear territorial boundaries from land to sea…in China, all of these tenants of nationalist consciousness, so different from traditional tianxia thinking, have already entered deeply into people’s hearts, from the officials down to the common people. In Europe, those responsible for the violence finally absorbed the bloody lessons of two World Wars and began to weaken statism, moving towards a European union and emphasizing globalization. Yet the East Asian world (including China) has seen an unprecedented resurgence in nationalism and statism, with the potential for military conflicts to erupt at the drop of a hat.
Can the new tianxia act as an antidote for this deformed, surging statism? The American China-scholar and political scientist Lucien Pye (1921-2008) once said that China is a civilizational empire masquerading as a nation-state. If we accept this judgment, then today’s China remains a traditional monarchical empire rather than a European state based on a single nationality insofar as it refers to China’s diverse border regions and multiple nationalities. Yet from another angle, we can also say that today’s China is actually a nation-state masquerading as a civilizational empire, because it uses the methods of the nation-state to govern a massive empire, and in international affairs and conflicts regarding its own interests it relies on a mentality that accords absolute primacy to national supremacy.
China’s rise has made neighboring countries uneasy. They fear that the soul of the Chinese empire will be reborn in a different body, to the point of asking the United States, the greatest of the imperialists, to enter East Asia in order to balance China’s growing power. Recently, in an article entitled “The East-Asian Meaning of the Theory of the Chinese Empire,” the Korean professor Yông-sô Paek observed that: “China’s pre-modern empire did not break up into different nation-states, and to the present day has still maintained its medieval imperial personality. This particularity has decided contemporary China’s mode of existence. At the same time, if we say that the modern period is one of rapid transformation from nation-state to empire, then in a certain sense one can say that China’s original imperial character not only will not disappear, but will in fact grow stronger.”[11] Why is it that even as China repeatedly states that its rise is peaceful it cannot convince its neighbors? One important reason is that within China’s terrifying imperial body lurks a frightening soul that values national supremacy above all else, an empire without consciousness of tianxia.
Behind the traditional Chinese empire was a tianxia consciousness for all humanity, a universal set of values that transcended the individual interest of any given dynasty. Its source was in the moral way of heaven and it served as a standard to measure right and wrong, constraining the behavior of rulers and deciding the legitimacy of a given dynasty’s rule. But an empire without tianxia consciousness means that the imperial body no longer contains a civilizational soul with universal values to put people at ease. In its place, there is nothing but calculations regarding the interests of the nation-state. The concept of modernity that came from Europe has two dimensions: one is the technical dimension aiming to strengthen and enrich the nation; the other is the values dimension, with freedom, the rule of law, and democracy at its core. The former concerns itself with strength, the latter with civilization. However, if you look at China’s report card after a half-century of imitating the West, it gets high marks in the technical dimension of strengthening, practically performing as a child prodigy. But as for civilizational values, it failed. It has even completely forgotten traditional tianxiadiscourse, to say nothing about the discourse of modern civilization. The spokespeople for China’s foreign ministry often uses the following phrases to express China’s national will: “This is a domestic political matter, we do not permit foreigners to meddle;” or “This regards China’s sovereignty and core interests, how can we permit foreign countries to intervene?” In an international society that has already established measures of universal value, China remains a stranger to the discourse of universal civilization, and protects herself through the rigid discourse of national sovereignty. The traditional Chinese empire attracted many countries to its court over the years not because neighboring countries feared the empire’s military force, but because they were attracted by its advanced civilization and institutions. This kind of civilizational attraction is precisely what is meant by a country’s soft power.
The supremacy of national interest will only convince those on “my side” who stand to benefit; it has no way to convince “the other.” The greatness of Confucianism came precisely from its capacity to transcend the interests of the individual “small person” and of the dynasty of a particular family. It is above the state, and possesses the universal values of tianxia, which is the greatest of “great selves,” humanity’s “great self.” The Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth period carried forward the tianxiaspirit connecting the individual to humanity via the internationalist spirit of the modern era. The scholar and linguist Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896-1950) had a well-known saying that represented the psychology of the May Fourth intellectuals: “At a high level, I only acknowledge the existence of humanity. Of course, ‘I’ exist in my small world, but the things that mediate between me and humanity, like classes, families, regions, and the state, they’re nothing but idols.”[12] Even Liang Qichao, who was the first to bring the notion of the nation-state into China, and who during the late Qing furiously expounded on the absolute supremacy of the nation-state, during the May Fourth period abruptly awoke to the fact that “Our patriotism cannot embrace the nation and ignore the individual, nor can it embrace the nation and ignore the world. We must rely on the protection of the nation to develop to the utmost the innate abilities of one and all, so as to make a great contribution towards the entire global civilization of humanity.”[13] The patriotic movement of the May Fourth was thus grounded in internationalism. The students took to the streets not to struggle for narrow national interests, but rather for common principles of international society. Rather than using force to resist force, they used principle. This was the heart of the May 4th patriotic tianxia consciousness. The concept of the nation-state came to China from Europe via Japan, and it melded with Darwinian ideas of the “survival of the fittest” so that by the late Qing it had penetrated deeply into people’s hearts. Yet the May Fourth intellectuals were alarmed by the devastation of the First World War, and they sought to use internationalism as a remedy. Today, when the nationalism of every country in East Asia is once again on the rise, fanned by politicians and public opinion, the question of how we can overcome the supremacy of the nation-state and find a new universalism for East Asia and the world has become a concern for all engaged intellectuals in East Asia. The world center of the twenty-first century has already moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The East Asia that stands on the western shore of the Pacific cannot be an antagonistic East Asia, but must be a community of common destiny.
East Asia’s community of common destiny has already appeared, from the 15th to the 18th century, in the form of the China-centered tribute system. As explained by the famous world-systems scholar Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005), in his Re-orient: The Global Economy in the Asian Age, this was an “Asian era” that took place before Europe’s industrial revolution, in which Asia was the center of the world’s economic system. The hierarchical tributary system was tianxia’s form of external order, as well as the outer extension of the corresponding concentric spheres that defined China’s imperial order. In this twenty-first century era of new tianxia, which requires a new shared universalism that is de-centered and non-hierarchical, the tributary system is of course no longer suitable. However, certain factors from the tributary system can be incorporated into the framework of interstate relations of the new tianxia, provided that they are de-centered and non-hierarchical. For example, the tributary system acted as a kind of complex ethical, political, and commercial network. It was entirely different from the unidirectional domination that defined the era of European imperialism, in which there were masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, pillagers and pillaged. The tributary system put greater emphasis on the mutual interests and benefits shared between countries. It did not just emphasize commercial “interests,” but rather saw commerce as having to conform to a notion of “justice” grounded in ethics: through commodity, capital, and financial commerce, warm neighborly relations could be established, and in this way a community of common destiny in East Asia was formed.
Historically, the Chinese empire used the mutual benefits of the tributary system to make alliances in many places, even turning enemies into friends, and maintaining long-standing relations of peace with neighboring countries. Tianxia has its own civilization, complete with an understanding of and a quest for a universal ethical order. The Chinese empire did not need enemies, and its practical goal was to turn enemies into friends, transforming the antagonism between enemies into relationships of equality and mutually beneficial trade. Its highest ideal was to cherish tianxia and establish a moral universe. The Chinese empire of the past had friends everywhere, yet today rising China has enemies all around. Some hawks in the military have even complained that “China is surrounded on all sides.” Whether these enemies are real or imagined remains to be seen, but what is clear is that the form of thinking that places national supremacy above all easily creates enemies, even where there aren’t any. Another dimension of the problem is that while “national supremacy above all else” is now a universal mindset shared by both officials and the common people, and the severity of China’s domestic crisis indeed requires that a new shared national identity be constructed, contemporary Chinese nationalism has been emptied of its civilizational meaning, and there remains nothing left but an immense, empty symbol. External enemies need to be created to fill up this internal emptiness. Where there are no enemies, foes are imagined, and once the predators appear, the fragile “us” can be protected from the confrontational “other.” In this way national and state identity is established. This has made China’s relationship with its neighbors, and with the world, ever more tense. In the past Mao Zedong proudly proclaimed that “We have friends all over the world,” yet today’s China is just the opposite: we have enemies all over the world.
In today’s East Asian societies, including China and Japan, nationalist sentiment is on the rise. The controversies surrounding various islands in the East and South China Seas have, in particular, become lightning-rods which could set off war with one rash incident. Is sovereignty clear in matters of oceans and their various islands? In the pre-modern East Asian world this was simply not a problem. Professor Takeshi Hamashita 滨下武志 (b. 1943), a Japanese authority on the tribute system, has noted that: “In East Asian history, from the perspective of territorial cooperation, the sea was to be used by all. The sea could not be carved up and was to be used by all seafarers. Yet the Western perspective regarding the sea was completely different. They saw the sea as the extension of land, beginning with the Western traditions of the Portuguese and the Spanish. Yet Western regulations are not the only regulations, and indeed have caused much conflict since the beginning of the modern period. The conflicts regarding the seas in Asia are a product of these Western regulations.”[14] In historical East Asia, while the sea separated countries from one another, the waters were common to all and to be mutually enjoyed. The sea and its islands were collectively owned and enjoyed by all countries. This is the sea as understood by farming peoples. It is only in the modern period, when the sea-faring peoples of a rising Europe sought to control the sea’s resources out of commercial need, thus imposing hegemony across the world, was the sea looked upon as an extension of land, as something that belonged within the purview of national sovereignty. As such, the collective sea was cut up and every inch of every single island the subject of conflict. In the era of the sovereign nation-state, it was the logic of sea-faring peoples that imagined the international order and decided the rules of the game of in relations between countries. However, when a struggle of sovereignty over the sea and its islands erupted, if one looked upon the notions of sovereignty possessed by the sea-faring peoples from the perspective of the past, they would have no legitimacy whatsoever, because the historical sea did not possess modern sovereign borders. If you wanted to look at the matter from the perspective of who actually controlled the seas, this kind of international law was clearly grounded in a logic of power, which enabled and encouraged violence and wars over who had the right to practical control of the sea. Yet if we use a different mode of thought and employ traditional tianxia’s understanding of a commonly shared sea, then the “backward” intelligence of the farming people can in fact provide an entirely new method to resolve the conflicts created by the principles of the “advanced” sea-faring peoples. In the proposal that Deng Xiaoping offered in the 1980s to resolve the Diaoyutai Island (known as Senkaku in Japanese) dispute, “Avoid Conflict, Collectively Develop,” we see the intelligence of traditional tianxia playing an important role in contemporary international society. Yet to the present day, people only pay attention to the strategic meaning of the proposal. They lack an understanding of the Eastern wisdom that lies behind it, an intelligence that provides new principles for dealing with rules of the international games that are played in the ocean.
On the Possibility of an East Asian Community of Common Destiny
The construction of China as a civilizational nation was intimately related to the order of East Asia. Professor Yông-sô Paek has pointed out that: “if China is not grounded in democracy, but instead seeks to legitimize its power by reviving the historical memory of a great unity, then what it will have done is to follow the modern model of modernization in which the motive force is nationalism. It will have been unable to create a new model that can overcome this limitation. As such, though China wants to lead an East Asian order, it finds it difficult to get neighboring countries to participate voluntarily.”[15] If China successfully implements democracy and the rule of law, becoming a civilized country like the United States or England, would this put neighboring countries at ease? Given China’s power, size, and population, once it rises it will be a great power with the capacity to dominate. Even if it becomes an “empire of freedom,” it will make neighboring countries fearful, particularly small ones. Korea and Vietnam are both independent countries who split off from the Chinese empire’s tributary system. As such, they are particularly vigilant toward the country that was historically their suzerain. In no case will either of them be willing to become China’s vassal state again, even if China turns itself into a civilized nation.
All of this means that the reconstruction of a peaceful order in East Asia cannot be as simple as some Chinese liberals have suggested: it cannot all be reduced to a question of China’s internal political reform. The reconstruction of East Asia’s peaceful order is a worthy cause in its own right. Its precondition is not that China must become a Western-style democracy. In fact, even if China is a non-democratic benevolent country, with a domestic order based on the rule of law, and a basic respect for international rules, then it is possible that it can participate in the reconstruction of East Asian order.
In his essay “Asia’s Territorial Order: Overcoming Empire, Towards an East Asian Community,” professor Yông-sô Paek points out that historically, East Asia has had three imperial orders: the first was the traditional tributary system with the Chinese empire at its center; the second was the Japanese Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which replaced China as the region’s hegemon in the first half of the twentieth century; the third was the post-World War II Cold War order established in East Asia out of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.[16] Recently, with the rise of China, American’s “pivot” towards Asia, and Japan’s attempts to act once again as a normal country, an imperialistic conflict for hegemony has once again emerged in East Asia. This is why East Asia finds itself on the edge of war, with conflict possible at any moment. For this reason, as Professor Paek suggests, how to discard the centralism of empire and establish a community of common destiny in East Asia based on equality has become the common mission of all countries in the region. A modern empire based on the supremacy of the nation-state, in which sovereignty dominates all, is grounded in a hegemonic logic that sees oneself as the only subject, while making neighboring countries into objects. How to learn peaceful coexistence and the recognition of each other’s subjectivity is the goal of the new tianxia. Indeed, this goal is the new internationalism upon which the community of common destiny in East Asia will be constructed.
A new East Asian order of peace requires a new set of universal East Asian values. With the end of the Cold War, East Asia lost any sense of universal value, even of the oppositional kind. What remained between each country was nothing but interest-based alliances or antagonisms. The alliances were nothing but short-term plans based on expediency, lacking any deeply shared common values to ground them. The antagonism emerged from conflicts over interests: the fight for power in the realm of resources, trade, and the control of islands. Because the East Asian world no longer has universal values, alliances and conflicts are all defined by disorder, variability, and instability. Today’s enemies are yesterday’s allies, and today’s allies may well be tomorrow’s enemies. From the perspective of interests, there are no eternal enemies, nor are there eternal friends. This constantly churning “Three Kingdoms”[17] drama, these unending games, do nothing but increase the looming danger of war, turning East Asia into one of the world’s most unstable regions.
The East Asian world today is reminiscent of Europe during the first-half of the twentieth century, the heyday of national interests, when multiple countries gambled in games of confrontation, resulting in the eruption of two world wars. Europe after the Second World War saw the reconciliation of France and Germany, followed by the long Cold War period, finally achieving European integration at the turn of the century. The establishment of a common community in Europe was grounded in two universal values: the first was a historically shared Christian civilization, the second was the values of Enlightenment of the modern period. Without Christian civilization and the universalizing values of the Enlightenment, it would be very difficult to imagine a stable European union. Any community established solely on the basis of interests is always temporary and unstable. The only lasting and stable community is one in which universal values serve as a base of shared consensus. Even if there are conflicts over interests, negotiation can lead to compromise and exchange.
To truly make East Asia into a community with a common destiny, one cannot employ interests to temporarily bind it together, nor can one regard the West as the other through which the self is recognized. This community should be historical and constructed. From a historical perspective, the notion of a common East Asian order is not a hollow imaginary community. The historical tributary system, the deeply interrelated movement of peoples, the sphere of culture defined by Chinese characters, and the civilizations of Buddhism and Confucianism that spread across East Asia: all of these provide the East Asian community with historical legitimacy. The Japanese philosopher and literary critic Karatani Kôjin 柄谷行人 (b. 1941) has pointed out that “even though nations that have emerged out of one common empire may have strong antagonisms, they still possess religious and cultural commonalities. Generally speaking, all modern countries emerged out of the breakup of world empires. As such, when they experience threats from other world empires, they will work hard to preserve the unity that once bound them in the old empire. This can be called ‘Imperial Return.’”[18] Yet this is not a simple return. In the era of the nation-state it requires new elements of creativity, namely, the attempt to establish a de-centered, even anti-imperial, community of peaceful nations. East Asian universalism must be reconstructed and recreated on the basis of the region’s historical inheritance. The new tianxia is just such a new universalistic program that embraces and transcends history. Developed out of the imperial tradition, it possesses cultural characteristics that are united and universalistic. At the same time it works to expel the centralism and hierarchy of empire, preserving internal religious, institutional, and cultural diversity. One might say that this is the rebirth of a de-imperialized empire, an internally peaceful, trans-ethnic, transnational community.
East Asia’s community of common destiny requires a soul, a universal value that is waiting to be created. It also must have an institutional body. The community cannot rely simply on alliances between nations to form a peaceful union that transcends the nation-state. What is required even more is that the intellectuals and common people of each East Asian nation engage in dialogue, producing a “people’s East Asia,” which will be more able than the states themselves to overcome the barriers between various nation-states. This “people’s East Asia” will overcome various old centralisms and hierarchies, for it will itself possess a natural sense of equality, becoming the deep social ground from which the new universal values of East Asia will emerge.
The new tianxia emerges from the historical wisdom of pre-modern China, discarding and de-centering traditional tianxia. Rejecting hierarchy and placing mutually-shared equality at its core, it attempts to establish a new and “commonly shared” universalism. Historical tianxia used imperial methods of governance to serve as its institutional body. Traditional empire is different from the modern nation state, which seeks to homogenize and incorporate all into a single system. In traditional empire, the internal order honored diversity in the realm of religion and institutional governance, and the external order was an integrated political, commercial, and ethical network, one that placed the mutual benefits of the tribute system at its center, sharing in international trade. The traditional empire’s tianxia wisdom can provide us insights today in the following ways: the overly singular and uniform logic of the nation-state cannot, internally, resolve the minority issues in the border regions, while externally it is not helpful in easing conflicts over political sovereignty with neighboring countries. To the unified logic of the nation-state should be added the flexible diversity and multiple-systems of empire, providing balance. In sum, in the core regions of China, “one system, different models” should be implemented; in the border regions, “one nation, different cultures” should be realized; in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, “one civilization, different systems” should be experimented with; in East Asian society, “one region, different interests” should be recognized; in international society, “one world, different civilizations” should be constructed. In this way, the internal and external order of the new tianxia can be established, creating the conditions for the mutual co-existence, indeed the mutual benefit, not only for all of China’s domestic ethnicities but for all East Asia’s nations, creating a new universalism for a future world order.
Notes
[1] 许纪霖,“新天下主义：重建中国的内外秩序,” in Xu Jilin and Liu Qing 刘擎, eds., 新天下主义, 知识分子论丛 (New Tianxia, Intellectuals Series) no. 13 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2015), also available online here.
[2] Translator’s note: For English-language works by Zhang Weiwei, see, among others, China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State (Hackensack, N.J.: World Century Pub Corp, 2012); for Pan Wei, see Western System versus Chinese System (Singapore : East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, 2010).
[3] Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate. Xu cites the Chinese translation.
[4] See Xu Zhuoyun (Cho-yun Hsu) 许倬云, 我者与他者：中国历史上的内外分布 (Self and other: Distinctions between inner and outer in Chinese history), (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2010).
[5] Translators note: Xu uses the expression 谈虎色变 which means that “anyone who has actually been bitten by a tiger will blanch at the mention of the word, while others talk about tigers without difficulties.”
[6] Translator’s note: The “superior man (junzi),” is a key concept in the Confucian Analects, representing the end result of Confucian cultivation. The full quote, in the Eno translation available online, is “The junzi acts in harmony with others but does not seek to be like them; the small man seeks to be like others and does not act in harmony.” See http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Analects_of_Confucius_(Eno-2015).pdf, 13.23 .
[7] Qian Yongxiang 钱永祥, “主体如何面对他者：普遍主义的三种类型” (How does the subject deal with others? Three types of universalism), in Qian Yongxiang, 普遍与特殊的辩证：政治思想的发掘 (The dialectics of universal and particular: The exploration of political thought), (Taibei: Taiwan yanjiuyuan renwen shehui kexue yanjiu zhongxin zhengzhi sixiang yanjiu zhuanti zhongxin, 2012), pp. 30-31.
[8] Translator’s note: Although this passage is often taken to describe the unification efforts realized by the Qin, it in fact comes from the Book of Rites, which was written prior to the Qin unification.
[9] Huang Xiaofeng 黄晓峰, “姚大力谈民族关系和中国认同” (Yao Dali discusses ethic relations and Chinese identity), 东方早报, December 4, 2011.
[10] Translator’s note: Ethnic minority groups were not required to follow the “one-child policy” by which China hoped to limit population growth. Certain Han Chinese found this unfair.
[11] Yông-sô Paek 白永瑞, “中华帝国论在东亚的意义” (The meaning of Chinese imperialism in East Asia), 开放时代2014: 1.
[12] Fu Sinian 傅斯年,” 新潮之回顾与前瞻” (Review and future perspectives for “New Wave”) in Fu Sinian, 傅斯年全集 (The complete writings of Fu Sinian), (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), p. 297.
[13] Liang Qichao 梁启超,” 欧游心影录” (Records of impressions of a European trip) in Liang Qichao, 梁启超全集(The complete writings of Liang Qichao), (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1999), vol 5., p. 2978.
[14] “滨下武志谈从朝贡体系到东亚一体化” (Takeshi Hamashi discusses from the tribute system to the integration of East Asia) in Ge Jianxiong 葛剑雄, ed., 谁来决定我们是谁? (Who decides who we are?), (Nanjing: Yilin chubanshe, 2013), p. 124.
[15] Yông-sô Paek 白永瑞, “东亚地域秩序：超越帝国、走向东亚共同体” (East Asian regionalism: Transcending empire, moving toward an East Asian community), 思想 3 (2006).
[16] Ibid.
[17] Translator’s note: The reference is to the famous novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三国演义, attributed to Luo Guanzhong 罗贯中, which recounts the history of conflict and machinations in the wake of the fall of the Han dynasty.
[18] From Karatani Kojin’s Lecture at Shanghai University” 世界史之结构性反复” (The reversal of the structure of world history), presented on November 8, 2012.