MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Peter Zarrow’s review of All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order, by Zhao Tingyang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/zarrow/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
All under Heaven:
The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order
By Zhao Tingyang
Translated by Joseph E. Harroff
Reviewed by Peter Zarrow
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2025)
Zhao Tingyang, All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order Tr. by Joseph E. Harroff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 332 pp. ISBN 9780520325005 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780520325029 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780520974210 (ebook).
Tianxia 天下 is an ancient term, found on Zhou bronzes and in early classics such as the Book of Odes (詩經), Book of Documents (書經), and the Analects (論語). The Anglosphere has found it convenient either to translate the term more or less literally as “All-under-Heaven” or, capturing its practical usage, as “kingdom” or “empire”—that is, China.[1] In the former guise, Tianxia might be regarded as similar to ancient theocratic empires: it performs legitimacy while also providing the conceptual basis for what was politically possible. The more territorialized sense of Tianxia, in turn, might be regarded as a self-reference that various dynasties found useful. This is not the understanding presented by Zhao Tingyang 赵汀阳 in All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order. For one, both understandings of Tianxia treat it as a form of the state, whereas Zhao points to the classical distinction between Tianxia and guo 國 (state) to suggest it is something else. Namely, Tianxia refers to the world and therefore in no sense does it refer to a state (in contrast to the Greek polis, for example). Zhao finds the concept emerging in China’s most ancient period, “too early for its own time” (xiv), while the “Tianxia system” (if not the concept) emerged with the Zhou and ended in 221 BCE.
Haroff’s fine translation captures Zhao’s style and conveys his sometimes technical philosophical terminology and his restatements of ancient texts in ways that should make sense to Western political thinkers as well as Sinologists, yet without flattening the particularities of Zhao’s ideas. In this review, I first present a summary of Zhao’s argument, and then a critique. Use of the term Tianxia in modern scholarship took off in the early 2010s, at least according to Google’s N-gram counter, in both the original Chinese and in its romanized form. Zhao’s first major work on Tianxia, published in 2005, did much to prompt discussion. This revival of an ancient concept has sometimes been seen as a kind of ideological mask for Chinese dominance: “The tianxia system is defined as a Sino-centric hierarchical relationship among unequals, governed according to Confucian principles of benevolence,” in June Teufel’s words.[2] Zhao Tingyang would deny he seeks any kind of Chinese dominance. For Zhao, Tianxia is a resource or a “method” to ameliorate our anarchic, violent, and oppressive world order. In All under Heaven, he argues for the need to reinvent Tianxia in the wake of the failure of the Kantian search for world peace and the contemporary disasters of international politics. Zhao begins his interdisciplinary but mainly philosophical study of Tianxia by calling it “an ideal concerned with achieving cosmopolitical order,” but also sees it as a tool (in the realm of reality as opposed to the ideal) and “also [as] a methodology” (vii). In Zhao’s understanding, in the Tianxia system there is no dichotomy between the inner and outer, since nothing can exist outside of the world. Likewise, there is no distinction between friend and enemy—there are differences but no goal of annihilating the Other. Zhao would keep “national sovereignty,” but the powers of states would be limited by “world sovereignty” (22), with both sovereignties existing in the same system. When questions affecting all humanity are at stake, those would be in the field of world sovereignty. Conflict is thus ultimately futile; “relational reasoning” (mutual aid, in a sense) ultimately works better than “individual rationality” (maximizing self-interest). In a word, Zhao believes Western political theory, centering on the nation-state, can be and should be replaced by theories that define politics as the “art of shared living” (36) on the global level.
Part One, consisting of ten chapters, describes the concept of Tianxia and its origins. Zhao argues that the Tianxia system was a creation of the Zhou, the beginning of Chinese politics (as opposed to simple military hegemony), and that it was in effect necessitated by the Zhou’s relatively weak position vis-à-vis the Shang and other early Chinese states. The Zhou vision of alliance rather than hegemony fostered a “world system” based on mutual interests of the “myriad states” and cemented through rituals, music, and ideas of virtue based on shared benefits. Zhao notes that of course Tianxia did not refer to the world literally—but that it pretty much referred to the known world of the day. Zhao points to two other meanings as well: a kind of general consensus (民心), and the world political order. He has less to say about Tian itself as a religious or philosophical concept, but he relates its correlatives of Nature and propensities to the “tasks of Tianxia,” namely to provide “access to a world of compatibility and coexistence” (56).
As for the Zhou-dynasty historical Tianxia system, Zhao grants its hierarchical aspects but sees it fundamentally as a web of networks of what were not so much states as various ruling clans that themselves ruled over numerous tribes. The Son of Heaven had ultimate authority while the numerous vassal and tributary states—too numerous and hence too small to threaten the Son of Heaven—were essentially self-governing. Zhao notes that this was an ideal rather than the reality, but also sees it as a combination of idealism and rationalism, as well as a system in decline for the final five hundred of its eight hundred years of existence. What Zhao stresses is the “no outside” of the Zhou system, which is why demoted ministers could move from one to another vassal state and still not be regarded as having gone “outside” (one could add traveling teachers here). Zhao points out that this was still not the highest ideal of Tianxia in the eyes of Confucians, because it fell short of the world as common property (天下為公), but he finds the Confucian view excessively idealistic in this regard. He does not think the traditional distinction between civilization and barbarism (華/夷) marked a border or reflected ethnocentrism, since the barbarian tribes lived within the Four Seas and a degree of mutuality with the more developed center marked their relations. One practical consequence of this worldview was the legitimacy that non-Han conquerors of China were able to repeatedly claim over centuries. In turn, that legitimacy rested on the “revolution” (革命) carried out by the Zhou: the Shang’s claims to exclusive clan possession of heavenly power were turned into: “universal tianming (天命). The Zhou transformation reinterpreted the heavenly decreed order [in the Shang formulation] as belonging to a universally compassionate worldview. . . . The universality of tianming was a most important basis for the tianxia concept” (82). The Zhou, in Zhao’s view, not only defined tianming in terms of morality, but also understood therefore that people, not divine forces, created the future.
Zhao argues that the Zhou concept of Tianxia was coincident with the family: world becomes family and family becomes world, though the starting point mattered. That is, a Tianxia-state-family formula, starting with Tianxia, emphasizes the political and the universal, while a family-state-Tianxia formula, starting with the family, emphasizes the ethical order. They thus converge, and the result is a “hermeneutical circle of interpretation between the ethical and the political” (67). The extension of ethics from family to Tianxia turns the emperor into a parent and creates “the world as one family,” while the extension of the political order of Tianxia throughout the realm guarantees the security of every household. Zhao finds that the tensions between these two formulas gave the Zhou system a kind of self-correcting capacity. The Zhou institutions of enfeoffment, ritual, and music were apparently chosen after consideration of the successes and failures of Xia and Shang institutions, but they reflected the principles of Tianxia, moral rule, and harmonious relations. The institutions and principles together, if I understand Zhao rightly, formed a political strategy giving the Zhou revolution its legitimacy.[3] The notion of “revolution” here refers to what Zhao sees as a shift from the more purely coercive Shang regime marked by the strong commanding the weak (“natural”) as opposed to the Zhou’s virtuocracy (“political”).
But how was it that Tianxia soon declined? Zhao variously attributes this decline to an enfeoffment-tribute system in which the Zhou gave out more than it took in; to its inability to continue to distribute land; and to the selfish self-enrichment of the vassal states. In other words, the ancient technology and economy failed to create a material world sufficient to support its shared political institutions. The founding of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE marked the total annihilation of the Tianxia system—but the Tianxia concept lived on. Thus, Zhao urges, we can use the Tianxia concept as a “world-encompassing viewpoint” (113), a framework broader than international relations, to think through world problems today. There is “no outside” in this vision, but the inside is understood in all its pluralism, “rejecting any one-sided, unilateral universalism and any forms of cultural imperialism” (114).
Part Two, consisting of four chapters, highlights the ways Tianxia shaped Chinese history from the Neolithic period through the Qing dynasty. Zhao argues that the Qin unification created China as a nation-state, and even while dynasties and territories changed over the following centuries, the Tianxia ideal—seen in the political theology of Grand Unification (大一統)—described a quest for power but also the reality of peace (sometimes). Regardless of the periods of disunion, Zhao understands China as a continuously existing entity, but not one comprehensible in terms of the Western ethno-nation-state, polis, or empire—precisely because of the reproduction of the “gene” of Tianxia. That is, while there was a cultural core surrounded by peripheral territories, it was a single system that Zhao describes as an expanding “whirlpool” drawing in the peripheries. Even before the Shang, Zhao posits, a kind of Tianxia notion already existed that was shaping the evolution of the concept of China as religiously numinous. Legitimacy could not be based on ethnicity but rather on cultural and political participation: “In reality, the concept of ‘China’ has always been the outcome of mutual transformations among a plurality of cultures and the resulting shared institutional structures” (150).
But why was the “Central Plain” the Chinese core? To explain its original success in war and the competition for power and its continuing centrality, Zhao turns to Mancur Olson’s theory of state formation, which emphasizes the importance of the capacity for collective action—seen here in the ethics and institutions of the “sage-kings”—and also, Zhao thinks, due to the low costs of war in the Central Plain, which was relatively easy to occupy. He also seems to stress the importance of writing to shamanistic practices there, which linked the spiritual world to a Chinese historicity. Again, it was the task of the Zhou to clarify this link by claiming the Mandate. The “whirlpool” continued through the Zhou’s demise and the rise and fall of subsequent dynasties even as the military-political center of the Central Plain moved somewhat east and north and the economic (and cultural) center moved south. Zhao insists that early China saw no distinction between Han and non-Han peoples—peoples from the north and northwest “had already deeply inhabited the Central Plain” (169). At the same time, the “spiritual attraction of Han culture” (174) led to its widespread appropriation. Also, Zhao states, “China’s continuous existence lies in the fact that China itself is a method of growth . . . continuity in change” (179).
The six chapters of Part Three are where Zhao suggests how a more Tianxia-oriented practice would solve many of today’s problems. He begins by commenting that globalization as we know it today is but an expansion of European colonialism; “world history” is therefore still highly partial. What we need is not “one state, or faction, establishing the rules of the game for the world,” but instead “the world” should establish the rules for all states (185). That was the Zhou Tianxia, except the Zhou Tianxia was of course limited to one region of the physical planet. In today’s world, there is some recognition of common goals and the necessity of cooperation, but the interests of nation-states demand they operate within an exploitative international system. Zhao suggests we cannot get to a world system through contemporary international politics based on Westphalian sovereign nation-states, and therefore the United Nations model is not the way to go. Furthermore, Zhao seems to suggest that the structure of global inequality means that the interests of the working class of developed nations are in conflict with the interests of workers in undeveloped nations. Though Zhao is not explicit, readers may conclude that he thus sees little hope in Marxism. He throws cold water on the visions of Thomas Piketty and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—equality within nation-states could actually make international exploitation worse (189–190). Nor does he see hope in Kant’s plan for world peace, which even if not too idealistic, is still an international system, not a world system. Nor does he put any hopes in Habermas’s notion of dialogue under ideal speech conditions. At the same time, such pessimism does not lead Zhao to follow Huntington’s view of the inevitability of civilizational clash. “Exteriority,” or cultural difference, need not be hostile, though a dogmatic insistence on the possession of universal truth necessarily creates the enemy. This, Zhao argues, has been the role played by Christianity, followed by the European Enlightenment’s faith in “universal civilization” that is nothing of the sort. The Tianxia concept, by contrast, envisions a plurality of spiritual worlds in harmony rather than sameness. Institutionally, Zhao offers a brief proposal for “smart democracy” based on universal suffrage, with people given two votes, one negative and one positive on a given proposal, and supplemented by veto rights given to two scientific committees, one chosen from researchers in the natural sciences and one from the humanities.
On the one hand, Zhao remarks (somewhat in passing) that institutional and intellectual convergence is occurring today as governments learn from one another. On the other hand, he regards strong, clear borders as a feature of modernity that prioritize exclusive interests over shared interests. Zhao posits two forms of modern political units: individuals and nation-states, both precluding the development of world-based politics. The theory of national sovereignty did not, however, impede the continuing development of imperialism, now seen in American domination of trade, finance, and knowledge—and perhaps also in American domination of values. Zhao mentions American use of human rights to trump national sovereignty as an example of false universalism that in practice is used to advance American interests. The contradiction of imperialism is that it seeks a kind of universalism through domination but cannot truly envision a universal order of “no outside.” It has no chance of creating a true world order.
Zhao sees globalization, along with the accelerating rate of technological development, as deconstructing modernity. Modernity may be inextricable from exploitation, but “as globalization increasingly becomes the universal process of modernization, and especially as informational networks are rapidly universalized, monopolizing and colonizing knowledges are more and more becoming common knowledge. The asymmetrical advantages of the exploiting nation-state will gradually disappear, and all the hitherto ordered zero-sum competitive political games will become increasingly pointless” (223). Of course, a happy ending is not guaranteed as new technologies can support a higher level of despotism as well, or even a world apocalypse. Still, Zhao suggests it may be possible to follow the Heavenly Way (天道) or harmony with Nature, acting creatively and inclusively (or, in Zhao’s terms, “no outside”); to use relational reasoning, thinking in terms of mutual security and benefit; and to recognize truly universal values, deriving values from relations with others. What Zhao calls “Confucian amelioration” or improvement for all rather than only oneself is also integral to a Tianxia system. This is not, of course, the Zhou’s Tianxia system with its rituals and music but a vision for the future derived from it. Zhao denies that his is a utopian vision but rather argues that it “is intended to aid us in remaking a world so that we might better manage the world-scale problems of the present global era” (250).
Zhao’s All under Heaven has been greeted as “a landmark text in global political philosophy…. a challenging intellectual tour de force.”[4] It is rooted in, or in dialogue with, the likes of Confucius, Xunzi, Kant, Hobbes, Leibniz, Rawls, Habermas, Huntington, and others. But there are obvious tensions in the text. First, assuming we agree with Zhao’s goal—and who is going to argue for more war and greater exploitation?—Zhao says virtually nothing about how to reach that goal. And second, Zhao says little about what a Tianxia system would really look like. Finally, as a historian, I cannot but raise two more issues. One is: does Zhao’s vision of Tianxia lead him to prettify Chinese history? And another is: how do we understand Zhao in the context of modern Chinese and global intellectual history? After all, “one-world” thinking is hardly an entirely new phenomenon. Although the argument that Tianxia is a fig leaf for Chinese expansionism applies to some of the larger Tianxia discourse, it clearly does not apply to Zhao.
If Zhao says little in specific terms about how we could construct a Tianxia system today or how it would work, what is his book about? In my reading, it is, first, a kind of meditation on what past insights can mean for the present. Though this is probably not the best parallel, perhaps Zhao is using ancient writings on Tianxia in ways like advocates of civic republicanism use Renaissance humanism, Catholic Social Theory rests on the Bible, or Americans repeatedly return to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.[5] Second, I read Zhao as a critique of the present world order and its Western roots in Christianity, the Enlightenment, and current American hegemony. Third, for my part, I cannot help seeing special pleading for Chinese wisdom, a species of Orientalism, and, at least by implication, a blindness to China’s own participation in imperialism and domination in the past and today.[6]
If at first glance Zhao’s Tianxia seems excessively idealistic, we can stipulate that there is, at least, nothing sacred, universal, or transhistorical about the nation-state in its constitutional form. In the words of Partha Chatterjee, “The period of decolonization following the end of the Second World War made the nation-state the universally normal form of the modern state. Popular sovereignty became the universal norm of legitimacy; even military dictators and one-party regimes began to claim to rule on behalf of the people.”[7] In a somewhat broader context, John Dunn made the same point that today “there is a single clearly dominant state form, the modern constitutional representative democracy republic, distributed across the globe.”[8] Understandably, then, Zhao sees the world in terms of nation-states. When he speaks of political actors in today’s worlds, he means nation-states. Zhao works with two definitions of nation-state. One is the relatively centralized regime, which might or might not also be characterized as an empire, as when he refers to the Qin dynasty as a nation-state, in contrast to the Zhou’s Tianxia order. Another is the modern nation-state heuristically rooted in Westphalia. But Zhao’s Tianxia vision transcends any kind of nation-state; it is of a world dominated by a global consciousness, not particularistic loyalties to the nation.
What I am calling global consciousness might be thought of as a mentality, or in Zhao’s words, “world spirituality.” At the level of individual consciousness, it seems to refer to identity. When Zhao speaks of the fundamental political units of today as the individual and the nation-state, he is strangely missing the family (how can a Chinese person miss the family?), the local community, and also the cosmopolitan. These are social formations that are also identities that shape our politics and are, indeed, political agents. The “cosmopolitan” might include all those whose national identity has been weakened by other commitments: to a transnational corporation or business interests that lie across national borders, to dual loyalties felt by migrants and expatriates, and perhaps to any eclectic cultural commitment that includes Kungfu movies, Renaissance painting, South American novels, and whatever global mix suits one’s taste—from Davos Man at the top to stateless refugees at the bottom of our globalized world. If I am not mistaken, Zhao’s psychology of Tianxia suggests simultaneous identities with a practical or institutional commitment to understanding global problems at the level of the planet. As he insists, the ideal of “no outside” does not mean no difference; rather, pluralism is key, implying local commitments.
As for how we get there, in my reading Zhao implies, first, a change of consciousness: we can and should choose “Confucian amelioration” (which need not involve reading Confucius specifically). Second, Zhao also thinks that progress may come due to the historical forces of continued globalization and technological progress, which he suggests will prove impossible to monopolize. This is to adopt a passively optimistic reading of world historical forces. However, not only does Zhao not explore how this might occur in any detail, he actually devotes more space to examining how globalization and technology create the conditions for world autocracy and exploitation.
If we compare Zhao’s Tianxia to Kang Youwei’s 康有為 Book of Great Unity (大同書), which was written around the turn of the twentieth century, there are some remarkable similarities. Although Zhao denies he is engaged in utopianism, I do not know what else to call it, if we think of his vision as an ideal scheme for the future. Kang Youwei’s relentless abolition of boundaries—of class, race, gender, and especially states—is quite like Zhao’s Tianxia, and perhaps even more logical in its way. In abolishing nations, Kang would leave no rivals for his one-world system. And Kang, too, looks to world historical forces to create his ideal system, though at an infinitely longer timescale than Zhao has in mind. Unlike Zhao, Kang seems to have little use for pluralism, and although people living in the Datong would seem to have freedom of conscience and there would be a variety of lifestyles and beliefs, Kang left little room for the distinct evolving cultures that we would see in Zhao’s Tianxia. Zhao resists Kang’s universalism. Nonetheless, a tension in Zhao is his acceptance of the continued existence of states, and indeed he seems to regard them as the primary agents of the kind of change he wishes to see.[9] On one level, this would seem to be a considerably more realistic approach than Kang’s nation-less world federation—but on another level this would seem to be a naïve (utopian) way of thinking about how any known state has ever operated.
A question that the intellectual historian cannot avoid is whether Tianxia can indeed be understood outside of the political context of our own times. Like Zhao, the prominent intellectual Wang Hui emphasizes that “The difference between Tianxia and the state is not based on geographical scope, nor is it based on a political structure. These two concepts indicate two different social formations: On the one hand, ‘the state’ has its society maintained by a political system (such as a state dominated by one family name, a dynasty). On the other hand, Tianxia indicates that society is built upon the conditions of a universal virtue (that transcends the domination of one family name). Tianxia has a community of rites and music, which is coherent through the institutional practices that preserve the internal relationship between heaven and humans.”[10] Both Zhao and Wang Hui cite Gu Yanwu (顧炎武, 1613-1682) on the distinction between the destruction of a state (dynastic change) and that of Tianxia (or here, I would say, civilization): “When evil blocks humanity and righteousness and causes beasts to devour humans, and when people starve and eat each other’s flesh.”[11] In the first case, it is the responsibility of the emperor and his men; in the second, all humanity. If we take “state” as guo (國), then Tianxia would appear to be more inclusive if not a categorically-opposed concept. However, if we understand Tianxia as a claim to stand at the center of the world, then it is precisely the claim made by the various Chinese guo, or Zhongguo (中國).[12] Not every state was Tianxia, but every Tianxia (though of course there could only be one) was defined by the state that made its claims to it. Tianxia, insofar as it was a cosmology, was centered on human society: an emperor unified this society and linked heaven and earth through a social—and hence political—hierarchy. In other words, the concept of Tianxia is inseparable from state form, and that state made a claim of some sort to the right to rule the whole world. In cruder political terms, the historical emperors were happy to quote Mencius (5A4, quoting Confucius): “Heaven does not have two suns, and the people do not have two kings (天無二日，民無二王).
Certainly, the Tianxia state and the Greek polis were entirely different objects; so too Zhongguo and the Westphalian state. However, Tianxia would seem to be one version of the larger class of state forms we term “empire,” even if that capacious concept is derived from Western political theory. In broad terms, there was nothing unique about ancient China’s political theology, as Allen Chun trenchantly remarks, since “as a cosmological conception of society predicated on hierarchical continuity of people to sacred kingship, it is hardly dissimilar from other traditional societies and empires in history.” As for what Tianxia might mean today, Chun continues:
What requires explanation, on the other hand, is the radical nature of the modern nation-state…. The worldism of tianxia seems misplaced: it should invoke less a notion of globality in territorial terms than a notion of society as cosmology constituted by the continuity of men to a sacred hierarchical order. Empires everywhere have always been multiethnic and cosmopolitan, united instead by an elite classical language rather than by the shared values of a mass national culture and radiating directly out of a sacrilegious center instead of being policed along bounded borders. I have serious doubts about the conceptual centrality of tianxia in Chinese thought except as a convenient metaphor for the world….[13]
Historically speaking, Zhao wants to have it both ways. He posits that the Western Zhou Tianxia system entered into permanent decline by the eighth century BCE, but that the concept survived. So far, so good, but then he describes many of the institutions of post-Qin China in terms of Tianxia. Most notable is Zhao’s insistence that to some significant degree “no outside” marked a Chinese worldview across the centuries. But even if we find the concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” inapplicable, the distinction between civilized and barbarian certainly established a boundary between the us and the them.[14] Of course, this was a shifting and porous boundary, and the Chinese empire was multiethnic (like all empires); nonetheless, that Han culture may have been attractive to some outside groups at some times, as Zhao rightly points out, does not make such groups any less “outside.” And conversely, that outside groups conquered China and were sometimes accepted as orthodox dynasties in the historiography, such as the Yuan and the Qing, does not mean that their “outsidedness” was entirely erased. Over the centuries, the Chinese empire(s) exercised both tolerance and a foreign relations approach to some groups, on the one hand, and expansion and coercive assimilation (教化), on the other. There is a question of perspective here. As Zhao essentially recognizes, for all their close contacts with China, Koreans and Vietnamese scarcely recognized themselves as insiders.[15] They worked hard to maintain their borders physically and culturally. Or even if, say, the Kangxi emperor regarded his dynasty as a carrier of Tianxia, did the Dzungars ever accept this view? And therefore, once the Qing had expanded its borders to encompass the Dzungars, what distinctions actually disappeared? Even here, I would say Tianxia worked to exclude as much as include. In sum, I would suggest that historically, Tianxia is best seen as an instrument of power acting to legitimate and normalize empire.
Be that as it may, there is no denying the strengths of Zhao’s critique of the existing international order, its power imbalances and inability to deal with urgent global problems that we can all think of: pollution, climate warming, the threat of nuclear war, ecosystem collapse, and so forth. It is thus surprising that he has so little to say about capitalism. On the grounds we already understand its “exploitative nature” and so there is little more to be said, his brief mention of capitalism immediately morphs back into imperialism (188-190). Zhao rightly points out that the interests of the workers of Europe and America are not coterminous with those of other regions; in other words, under conditions of international inequality, we simply cannot speak of a global proletariat. This is to say that to achieve equality and democracy in some advanced country would do nothing for the people in a developing country. But it is also to avoid the question of what kind of economic system should be built for the Tianxia world that Zhao envisions. If he says little about its political structure, he says nothing about its social structure and economic basis.
Allen Chun has further remarked of contemporary China:
Whatever China’s new globalizing political economy is, reference to tianxia gives too much credence to traditional legacy, when it is clear that China’s being in the world had already been mutating radically after modern nationalism beyond the Cold War and Maoist humanism to a distinctively new kind of geopolitics and global economy, which invites precise definition…. The new rise of China has clearly been about the advent of capitalism, not as a free market economy but in collusion with the evolution of the state and fueled by cultural nationalism.[16]
It might be argued that this analysis speaks to some discussions of Tianxia but misses Zhao’s argument, which has little directly to do with contemporary China. But it challenges Zhao’s essentially benign vision of the nation-state as the basis for Tianxia, rather than, say, more organic communities or civil society.
Is the concept of Tianxia relevant to today’s world? Precisely because of the uses that have been made of it so widely in the last two decades, can we conclude that it is simply a floating signifier? Zhao can surely say: here, in The Analects, in Xunzi, in the rites and music of the Zhou, in certain attitudes seen in later dynasties, here are some resources useful for humanity to construct a better future. However, we can ask if Tianxia is a living tradition whose resources are available to us, or is it a product of a particular time and place that we would have to disinter from a rather deep grave before it could be set to work again? And would the work needed to revive Tianxia be worth the payout? If we are concerned with global crises and global justice, is this an efficient use of intellectual resources? Zhao says ‘yes’ to all the above, but I remain skeptical.
Peter Zarrow
University of Connecticut
NOTES:
[1] In his classic work The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), Mark Elvin speaks of the Chinese empire being formed with the Western Zhou (12th c. BCE). Coming into the Qing conquest of the seventeenth century, Frederic E. Wakeman takes tianxia as “empire”: The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of Californiaty Press, 1985). Scholars of ancient thought, on the other hand, tend to use “All-Under-Heaven” as in Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Or see the multipronged approach of Yuri Pines: “An ostensibly endless chain of unifications, subsequent disintegrations, and renewed unifications of the oikoumenē, “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia), is a distinctive feature of the Chinese empire”: The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 11. Conversely, whether the Western concept of “empire” (帝國) is capacious enough to apply to Chinese political systems is much discussed in contemporary Chinese circles (see further below).
[2] See, e.g., June Teufel, “The ‘Tianxia Trope’: Will China Change the International System?” Journal of Contemporary China vol. 24, no. 96 (2015), pp. 1015-1031; quote from p. 1015; see also William A. Callahan, “Tianxia, Empire and the World: Chinese Visions of World Order for the 21st Century,” pp. 91-117 in Callahan and Elena Barabantseva, eds., China Orders the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). For a broad spectrum of views, see the essays in Ban Wang, ed., Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). For an effort to take Tianxia and the revival of Confucianism generally in a direction of tolerance and universalism, see Xu Jilin 许纪霖 and Liu Qing 刘擎, eds., Xintianxia zhuyi 新天下主义 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2015).
[3] Whether Zhao believes such a “hermeneutical circle” should be reconstituted today as part of his Tianxia project is not clear. Hannah Arendt, for one, warned against what she saw as a modern conflation of the public and private realms, the former (ideally) a realm of freedom and independent action, the latter the realm of the household governed (despotically) by its head and shaped by economic necessity. See The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), chapter 2. Arendt is seemingly one of the few Western political thinkers that Zhao does not cite.
[4] Kirill O. Thompson, Review of All under Heaven by Zhao Tingyang, China Quarterly no. 252 (2022), pp. 938-940.
[5] For civic republicanism, see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997); idem., On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, and On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963). The origins of Catholic Social Teaching are generally traced to Pope Leo XIII’s Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the condition of labor) of 1891.
[6] See also Odd Arne Westad’s “New Foreword” in the volume, p. xx.
[7] Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 11.
[8] John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 209-210.
[9] Here, too, see Westad, “New Foreward,” pp. xix-xx.
[10] Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, ed. Michael Gibbs Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), pp. 302-303.
[11] Wang, Rise, p. 302; Zhao, p. 148.
[12] See Ge Zhaoguang, What is China: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History, trans. Michael Gibbs Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 19-20.
[13] Allen Chun, “All under Heaven; or, The Evolving World Ethos of a New Greater China,” boundary 2 vol. 52, no. 1 (2025), pp. 25–48; quote from p. 29.
[14] Possibly, a distinction may be made between a binary racialized view of us-them, in which the barrier between groups is absolute, on the one hand, and a cultural or civilizational view of us-them, in which the groups may blend more easily, on the other. Hsu Chu-yun argues that the latter view prevailed in imperial China precisely due to the openness of Tianxia. Xu Zhuoyun 许倬云, Wozhe yu tazhe: Zhongguo lishishang de neiwai fenbu 我者与他者：中国历史上的内外分布, (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2010). However, even if this was historically the case, a shifting boundary is no less a boundary.
[15] Zhao cites openness to intermarriage, commenting that only in the Song and Yuan were any restrictions instituted (172), but actually the Qing’s prohibitions lasted into the twentieth century.
[16] Allan Chun, “All under Heaven,” pp. 41, 44.