Liang Zhiping, "Tianxia and Ideology" Part 3

Liang Zhiping, “Imagining ‘Tianxia’:  Building Ideology in
Contemporary China”

Translation by David Ownby

Part Six

Clearly, the emergence and popularity of the idea of tianxia conveyed the excitement felt by the academic and intellectual world in China in response to various internal and external stimuli, and at the same time, this excitement itself served in turn as a bracing stimulus within the same academic and intellectual world.  As a response to this, direct criticisms of tianxia like those offered by Ge Zhaoguang were clearly not sufficient.  What was needed was a theory that could replace it and offer some balance.  In fact, such theories and proposals do indeed exist, and what is intriguing is that the best known proposal seeking to oppose tianxia theories came to be known as the “new tianxia-ism.”[1]

Professor Xu Jilin 许纪霖 (b. 1957), whose earlier publication of Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in Contemporary China 当代中国的启蒙与反启蒙[2] offered a penetrating study of trends in the contemporary Chinese thought world, from the beginning clearly paid attention to the tianxia ideas that were destined to become the focus of discussion.  In 2015, Xu published a special issue[3] on “New Tianxia-ism and the Contemporary World,” in volume 13 of the journal Essays on Intellectuals 知识分子论丛, which he edited, the first article of which was Xu’s “New Tianxia-ism and China’s Internal and External Order.”[4]  This essay belongs to a series of others, published before and after, all touching on subjects related to China’s modern transition, nation-building and self-identity.  These essays in turn became part of yet another new book, Family-State and Tianxia:  Individual, State, and World Identities in Modern China 家国天下：现代中国的个人，国家与世界认同.[5]

Like Zhao Tingyang, the starting point of Xu Jilin’s thinking about tianxia is dissastisfaction with the current state of the world, and this dissatisfaction is linked to the roles played by nationalism and statism in the present age.  The difference between the two is that Zhao’s dissatisfaction is with the lack of order in a nationalist world, while Xu’s dissatisfaction is first with China, and with the increasing number of tense internal and external situations China has faced over the course of its rise.  Xu Jilin believes that the basic factor producing these tensions is the “idea of the supremacy of the nation-state,” introduced into China from the West in the late nineteenth century, and which has since become the “dominant way of thought” of the entire society.  The way to counter this, in Xu’s opinion, is to establish a mode of thought that goes against nationalist thinking, a mode of thought that he calls “new tianxia-ism.”

As the name suggests, “new tianxia-ism” has its roots in China’s ancient tradition, which is what we today call the civilizational tradition of tianxia-ism.  The main feature of this civilizational tradition is that “the values of tianxia are universal and humanitarian, and not the unique possession of one nation or state.”  Even if ancient Chinese talked about “the distinction between Chinese and barbarian,” this distinction “was not a fixed, racialized concept, but was rather a relative cultural concept that contained the possibility of communication and transformation.”  A tianxia-ism with universal concerns “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.” 

Sadly, after modern China imported nationalism from Europe, the civilizational spirit of this tianxia-ism basically disappeared.  Xu Jilin also cites Lucien Pye’s famous remark that China is a civilization pretending to be a state, arguing that in fact the situation is the opposite, that contemporary China is actually a state pretending to be a civilization, “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.”  As noted above, this is what Xu considers to be the crux of the issue.  For this reason, what today’s China must do is not only accomplish the revival of the people and the state, but also “the redirection of its nationalistic spirit toward the world,” or in other words, “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,” which is “the new tianxia-ism that will emerge in the form of universal values.”

As for what is new about the “new tianxia-ism,” Xu Jilin emphasizes two points:  first, that it must be de-centered and non-hierarchical; and second that is must be a tianxia that creates a new universalism.  The first point is related to the China-centered “power/civilizational order” of traditional tianxia-ism with its sense of hierarchy and difference, and the method Xu proposes begins from “the principle of the sovereign equality of nation-states” according to which, internally, China must realize legal equality between the Han and other ethnic minorities, and externally, respect the sovereignty of other countries and live in peaceful coexistence with them.  He calls this the “politics of recognition.”  The latter point is directed at “the narrow perspective that places national interest above all else,” and Xu argues that China must employ universalism as a counterweight against particularism, and use the principles of universal civilization to constrain national sovereignty.  He calls this a “commonly shared universalism.”  This kind of “new tianxia is a mutual transcendence of both traditional tianxia-ism and the nation-state.”

Xu’s proposition to substitute “the principle of the sovereign equality of nation-states” for the hierarchy and difference of the “power/civilizational order” is easy to understand from the perspective of international relations, but how do we get to a “new tianxia-ism made up of a commonly shared universalism?”  Xu explains that the universalism of the past tianxia was based on a certain core people, but once this people directed its spirit toward the world, it created the universal civilization which is part of the new tianxia-ism, one that “does not emerge out of the variation of one particular civilization but instead a universal civilization that can be mutually shared by many different civilizations.” 

This universalism will be “characterized by the ‘overlapping consensus’ of all civilizations and cultures,” thus bringing to fruition the Confucian ideal of “harmony without assimilation 和而不同.”  Xu also cites an analysis by the Taiwanese scholar Qian Yongxiang (Sechin Yeong-Shyang Chien) 钱永祥 (b. 1949) concerning three types of universality, in which he points out that the claims to universality of any state, people, or civilization necessarily “deny the universality of the other.” [6]  By contrast, the “universal values” proposed by liberalism from the position of “value-neutrality” of which it is so proud, because they “disregard the internal differences that exist between different cultures and civilizations,” belong to a kind of “transcendent universalism.”  As for the “commonly shared universalism” of new tianxia-ism, “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,” and thus represents a kind of “universality based on recognition of the other.”

At this point, people might wonder where, in fact, we might find this “universalism commonly shared by the people of tianxia,” this “’overlapping consensus’ achieved through interactions between different civilizations and different cultures.”  What concrete form does it take?  Xu Jilin provides a preliminary answer to this question:  In an earlier essay, he talks about the “universal civilization and universal human rights of the modern Enlightenment,” that “transcends the civilizations of the axial ages,” and argues that this can serve as a harmonious foundation for all civilizations.  In more concrete terms, this foundation consists of “freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, peace, and justice as defined by the various proclamations and decisions of the United Nations, and which make up the value system of universal civilization.”[7]

This essay will not explore in detail how new tianxia-ism might be applied to China’s internal and external order.  I will merely cite the last paragraph of Xu’s essay, to give an overview of Xu’s proposals:

“Traditional empire is different from the modern nation-state, which seeks to homogenize and incorporate everything 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 with 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.” 

What needs to be pointed out is that even if, on the surface, Xu’s essay seems not to engage directly with other tianxia theorists, in fact his text is a direct confrontation.  For example, Xu stresses the distinction between civilization and culture, and argues that the former is about “what is good” or even what is universally good, while the latter concerns merely “what is ours.”  This is directly aimed at arguments based on China’s uniqueness.  He also draws a special distinction between two objectives of the late Qing strong-country dream:  civilization on the one hand, and wealth and power on the other.  Xu argues that civilization contains value goals and ideals, including universal values such as freedom, democracy, equality, and justice, while the objectives sought in the context of wealth and power are divorced from values, and are purely technical.  Here, Xu is addressing the ever-popular ideal of nationalism. 

He also points out the inadequacies of traditional tianxia-ism, especially the hierarchical distinction between center and periphery established on the basis of receiving the mandate of heaven, arguing that the time for this is long past.  In this context we cannot help but think of all of the theories of the heavenly mandate currently making the rounds.  Xu clearly notes that new tianxia-ism must transcend “any kind of Sino-centrism,” as well as Euro-centric views, “it does not imagine that any particular civilization will represent the twenty-first century.”  We need “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.”  Such remarks are clearly directed at arguments frequently encountered in the works of tianxia theorists.

Also worth noting is the role that China will play in the process of elaborating and implementing this new tianxia-ism.  In his essay on “How Can China Present itself to the World as a Civilized Great Country? 中国如何以文明大国出现于世界?” which is addressed to Yao Zhongqiu’s 姚中秋 (b. 1966)[8] argument that this is “China’s moment in world history ,”[9] Xu asks:  “Is China herself ready to respond to her moment in world history?  How will China present herself to the world?  As a follower of Western civilization?  As a challenger?  Or as a developer?  And another question:  Who’s world history is it?  And what kind of ‘China’s moment’?” 

Xu observes:  “The twenty-first century world is facing a complex scenario unseen over the past few centuries, which will change and bring an end to Western control of history,” which of course does not mean that China will be the center of the world.  In any event, “employing China’s tianxia wisdom to reconstruct the plural civilizational order of the future world is a desirable path to follow.”  This is because, in this era of “post-axial civilization,” when the past monotheistic civilizational order of Europe and America will be replaced by a polytheistic civilizational order, “the concept of harmony in Chinese Confucian civilization can contribute important Eastern wisdom to the construction of the world’s new polytheistic order.” 

To Xu, this is what is meant by “China’s moment,” and the arrival of this moment “will not simply be a matter of China’s participating in the existing world order, but instead must mark the moment when China’s wisdom redefines world history and changes the world order.”  The problem is that, over the course of the past century, China has lost track of “civilization” in its pursuit of wealth and power.  “China’s rise, to this point, has only been the rise of wealth and power, and not the rise of civilization.”  “Should we wish to continue to develop and become a world-nation capable of changing tianxia, then the next step is the rise of civilization.”  However, you do not accomplish the rise of civilization all by yourself, but rather by “complying with mainstream civilization,” by “absorbing the universal values recognized by all axial civilizations and nation-states,” and “creating and developing” the existing order on that basis.  Only in this way can China “truly become a world-nation, and Chinese civilization truly make a great contribution to humanity.”

Xu's essay ends with the question “Is China ready?”  Clearly, his answer is no.  For this reason, Xu offers hope and guidance on the question of “China’s moment.”  In any event, as we have seen in the case of other tianxia theories, Xu Jilin has great confidence in China’s rich civilization.  Because, as Xu argues, “China is not an ordinary people, but instead has been a world people since Pangu 盘古[10] separated heaven and earth, a people with concern for tianxia-ism, a people that takes responsibility for the spirit of the world.”  In recent arguments about tianxia, we find two diametrically opposed responses concerning this confidence and hope in China or the Chinese people.

In June of 2017, the influential journal Foreign Affairs published an article by the American sociologist Salvatore Babones.  The title of the essay is “American Tianxia:  When Chinese Philosophy Meets American Power,”[11] in which Babones applied the popular Chinese idea of tianxia to the American-led world order.  In his view, today’s United States is no longer merely a country, but rather “the cultural, economic, and institutional center of a world that it has partially recreated in its own image.”  Babones argues that the Western world has yet to settle on an appropriate term to describe America in this broad sense, because the modern West has never before seen a country like contemporary America.  The last time the world was organized in this way around a single country was in the fifteenth century, when East Asia was organized around the Ming dynasty.  At that point, China was not only the leader and hegemon of East Asia, but was also the core country of a political and cultural kingdom extending from Burma to Japan.  At the time, this world was called “tianxia.” 

Most of the tianxia theorists discussed in this essay would probably disagree with Babones’s taking Ming dynasty China as an example of tianxia, but his argument perhaps signals that his view of tianxia is grounded in a more practical vision.  As for those Chinese scholars who talk about the perspective of a new tianxia emergining in the twenty-first century, Babones bluntly asks the question:  Who is the ruler of tianxia?  In Babones’s view, even if China’s rise in an unchangeable fact, the ruler of tianxia in the twenty-first century will certainly not be China, and can only be the United States.  The United States occupies the central position of all the world’s systems and networks, one result of which is that the United States is not only the world’s favorite place to invest, but, more importantly, is also the favored immigration destination of people throughout the world (which of course includes Chinese people).  The multinational elite coming from China and elsewhere to live in the American tianxia all share a common link with America, and on this basis come to share common values, the most important of which is the American value of individual self-fulfillment. 

​Babones writes that: “The idea that ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are inalienable rights is distinctively American, but it is no longer uniquely American. These days, elites all over the world have learned that it is right, even moral, to prioritize their own happiness over traditional national and religious attachments.”  It is precisely because countless individuals throughout the world (especially among the elite) feel this kind of internal relationship with centrally-positioned America that the American tianxia transcends the nation-state, and becomes limitless.  Finally, when tianxia is unified in a single hierarchy, what people worry about is climbing up the ranks, and not tearing down the system.  “That makes the American Tianxia more stable than any system the world has ever known, including the old tianxia of Ming China. It may not always be fair, but it is harmonious, and it is here to stay.”

A massive work in Chinese history, appearing at about the same time as Babones’s “American Tianxia,” offers a stark contrast with Babones’s work.  In this strikingly ambitious work, the young Chinese historian Shi Zhan 施展(b. 1977) uses a Hegelian methodology to offer a new narrative of three thousand years of Chinese history in his The Hub:  Three Thousand Years of China 枢纽：3000年的中国.[12]

From the beginning, Shi’s study addresses the work of scholars such as Zhao Tingyang, Xu Jilin, Ge Zhaoguang and others, all of which are, for Shi, symbols of the “history craze 历史热” that has emerged in China in recent years.  In Shi’s view, this “history craze” reflects “deep concerns about identity,” arising out of profound changes in China and surrounding areas brought about by China’s rise, to the point that past references no longer hold, and even national objectives, based on these previous references, have lost direction.  

In Shi’s view, the Chinese people “have reached an unmarked intersection, and know not from whence they came or where they are going.”  This has produced, within the spirit of the Chinese people, a thirst for a new historical narrative or a new philosophy of history, which will not simply reproduce the past, but rather “provide a kind of spiritual order, a sense of meaning to the past, defining where we are at present, and outlining our future direction.”  These new histories must “help a people see their future through their past, and at the deepest level, inform a people concerning who they are, what they want, where they are going.”  In a word, this history must answer the very basic question of “what is China?”

Shi begins his argument with the idea that China’s history is unique.  In his view, “the basic uniqueness of Chinese history” reveals itself in two points:  first, China is the vehicle for an axial civilization; second, China’s scale is super-sized.  The first characteristic is linked to universality:  “The special feature of axial civilizations lies in their orientation toward universalism; they think in terms of tianxia, and absolutely not in terms of one people or one place.  Correspondingly, an axial civilization will not define itself as being in charge of a particular ethnic group, but instead is solely concerned about whether civilization itself is being universally transmitted.  This special feature of axial civilizations means that the structure of the Chinese spirit naturally possessed a tendency toward universalism.” 

As for the second characteristic, China’s super-sized scale, this was expressed not only in terms of population and wealth, but also in terms of the diversity of China’s geography and the complexity of the order of China’s empire.  These two features were woven together with China’s historical development in a spiraling process by which particularities were continually transformed into universalities.  For this reason:

“A new historical narrative must be able to uncover the consistency between particularity, universality, and diversity on the following dimensions:  in terms of space, it must uncover the internal consistency between the area of the North China plain 中原 and areas outside the North China plain, as well as the internal consistency of China and the world; in terms of time, it must uncover the internal consistency between the spiritual phenomena and scholarly logic of ancient and modern histories.  In such a manner, China’s borders will be calm 内安边疆, as will China’s neighbors 外安四邻.  And only in such a manner can the underlying tendencies toward universalism in the consciousness of the Chinese people, as well as the clearly visible attributes of China’s great size and her hidden potential as a world historical people, achieve genuine release so as to be deployed in a constructive direction.”
It is up to the readers to decide if Shi accomplished his self-appointed mission.  My goal is provide a simple outline of his basic thought process, so as to better understand “the consistency between particularity, universality, and diversity” so important to Shi’s new historical narrative.

First, as already noted, this is a Hegelian historical narrative, and many of its key concepts clearly come out of the Hegelian toolbox.  The most important of these is that history is understood as a process of the free development of spirit and of self-realization, achieved through a dialectical movement in which particularity is continually subsumed in universality.

Second, the development of Chinese history is seen as having followed this spiritual movement, but this complicated process in which particularity is constantly transformed into universality, which once again becomes particularity, to be subsumed yet again into universality, stopped in the Qing dynasty, when history fell into the dilemma of a historical cycle, which China could not resolve on the basis of its own spiritual resources.  At this point, the mutual encounter between China and Western civilization provided Chinese civilization with another possibility of transcendence.

Third, the revolutions and reforms of the twentieth century have led China to a new developmental phase, the spiritual characteristic of which is the emergence of a “global perspective” through the medium of communism.  “This global perspective is the expression of a vast vision that had never appeared in the course of thousands of years of Chinese history, a refined, superior version of the ideal of universalism in the Chinese tradition,” and which “provides the necessary spiritual capacity” for China to transcend itself.

Finally, looking toward the future, “modern Western value systems of legal rights and legal techniques will be integrated into the Chinese spirit,” which in turn will bring about the “synthesis” of “the particularity and universality of each [i.e., China and the West],” which will ultimately resolve the problems faced by the traditional Chinese empire.  In the course of this process, Western culture will also “break through the obstacles it currently faces, achieving genuine universality.”

Clearly, such a summary of a wide-ranging volume of some seven hundred pages is overly simplistic and abstract, and ignores many subtleties.  For this reason, to supplement what I have said so far, below I discuss the elements of Shi’s argument that relate most directly to the themes of this essay, providing a bit more explanation.

Question one, tianxia.  Clearly, tianxia is not the object of Shi’s discussion, and the term does not appear frequently in his book, but at the same time it is not an exaggeration to say that tianxia figures among the core themes of Shi’s work.  This is because tianxia is understood as possessing a “universalistic orientation,” which is in fact the basic feature of China as the vehicle for an axial civilization, which took the form of the “basic particularity of Chinese history.”  Of course, viewing China as “a vehicle for an axial civilization” is the same thing as an argument that China was a “civilizational-state.”

Question two, nationalism.  Compared to concepts like tianxia, nationalism clearly belongs to the category of particularism, and for this reason, even if under particular historical conditions nationalism inevitably becomes legitimate, ultimately it is something to be transcended [from the point of view of universalism].  At present, this transcendence is expressed at two levels:  one is the transcendence of Han chauvinism to arrive at [an inclusive] “Chinese nationalism;” and the second is to transcend “Chinese nationalism” to arrive at a “universalism of all peoples 普世民族主义,” which will finally eventuate in the realization of “China’s world-historical mission.”

Question three, world order.  In his book, Shi argues that “since the age of discovery…the world order has been the exteriorization of the Western order.”  This world order “in principle was for humanity as a whole, but the fact of Western leadership meant that the formal justice it promised was not ‘formal’ enough, and the actual form of justice practiced by the West on other civilizations became in fact a form of oppression.”  For example, in the American-led world order, because “in practice there was no mechanism to counterbalance the unique hegemon’s pursuit of self-interest, its [claims to] universalism came to be doubted.” 

​Consequently, hopes for a “genuine universal world order” were projected onto a “more open future.”  As the result of repeated interaction “between possibly divergent ideals of universalism,” “there will eventually emerge a universal order that transcends all particular ideals.”  In other words, the ultimate goal is to “allow formal justice to become true formal justice,” and “to allow justice to achieve its proper goals in practice.”

Before concluding our brief reflection on contemporary tianxia theories, I should mention two more books of completely different styles.  One is a best-seller of a few years ago, Wu Jiaxiang’s 吴稼祥 Tianxia for All  公天下.[13]  The goal of this book can readily make people think of Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲 (1610-1695),[14] and to the critical tradition found within the tianxia concept.  And in fact, one of the central threads of Wu’s work is indeed to provide a critical view of China’s traditional political institutions through the concept of tianxia for all.  Yet Wu’s principal focal point is rather a more functionalist issue:  how does a super-sized political community manage to maintain stability without stifling vitality?

In distinction to the tianxia theorists discussed above, Wu argues that tianxia was not possessed uniquely by China, despite the role it played in Chinese history.  This is because, in Wu’s definition, tianxia first of all is a question of scale:  “What we call tianxia is a political community of considerable scale, without clear borders and containing plural ethnicities.”  He further argues that when the state is combined with civilization, when the political body overlaps with the cultural body, then “this kind of unified body of state and civilization” is called “tianxia.”  According to this definition, political entities in the history of the world that can be called “tianxia” are not limited to the case of Chinese civilization.  At the same time, only China’s tianxia has survived to the present despite having experienced many internal and external traumas.  This in turn means that over the course of thousands of years, China has constantly faced the stability-vitality question, a political dilemma which, in Wu’s view, China has not solved in the four thousand years since Emperor Yu 禹帝. 

In other words, all political arrangements in Chinese history found themselves somewhere between stability and vitality, without ever achieving the ultimate balance.  The basis focus of Wu’s work is hence to divide up the different types of political arrangements, measure their position in terms of the ultimate balance between stability and vitality, rank these various arrangements and finally to explain the reasons and the mechanisms behind these rankings.  In that case, what does this work of “historical political science” have to do with the tianxia for all idea?  Wu argues that “the question of vitality and stability in Chinese politics, viewed from the perspective of political practice, is in fact a question of divided powers and centralized powers.”  In historical terms, this refers to the endless debates over the bureaucratic system versus the feudal system, and the tianxia for all ideal is the value basis for the institutional arguments that criticize feudalism.

Clearly, Wu’s tianxia for all comes from the idea of “the world is for all 天下为公” found in the Liyun 礼运 section of the Book of Rites 礼记.  Wu calls this the “one world principle,” whose core contents include the following.    First, highest state power is not concentrated in one person nor conferred for life, hence the principle of “abdication 禅让.”  Second, the state is not one person’s private property, hence the idea of “the world is for all” as opposed to “the world is mine 天下为家.”  Third, neither the highest [central] power nor the right to local rule is hereditary, hence the saying that “one must not treat only his sons as sons 不独子其子.”  This ideal was what the ancients thought of as the Way or the Great Way, the “established law of the ancestors of the Chinese people, or in other words, China’s unwritten constitution.”  Even in later periods when China’s rulers practiced instead “the world is mine,” the earlier ideal remained, and even had its place to varying degrees within state institutions. 

Concretely, Wu divides these types of regimes into five variants, those that bring peace to tianxia 平天下, those that unite tianxia 兼天下, those that brutalize tianxia 霸天下, those that divide tianxia 分天下, and those that monopolize tianxi 龙天下, and Wu subsequently grades these variants in terms of their ideas, their structure, and the pressure they bring to bear on society.  For example, in terms of concepts he evaluates the size of the “family 家.”  The bigger the family, the closer the regime approaches to the highest Chinese political ideal, where “tianxia belongs to all.”  From the point of view of structure, multi-centered rule is superior to rule by a single center, because it is more accommodating to the pressures resulting from scale.  In terms of pressure, lower pressure is better than higher, because the latter means the loss of individual and local autonomy, and the stifling of social vitality and creativity. 

Consequently, the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn political regimes created by Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou were an example of a polity that “united tianxia,” and because of its “multi-centered governance,” its “unitary feudal order,” and its “anti-pressure politics 负压政治,” and hence it earns Wu’s highest marks.  By contrast, the regime through which the Qin dynasty achieved victory and the subsequent practices followed by the autocratic system over the course of the dynasties was an example of a polity that “brutalized tianxia,” and its “concentration of power,” its “unitary bureaucratic system” and its “high pressure politics” earned it Wu’s lowest rating. 

The problem is that the best regime in Chinese history is not only too distant from the present day, but also was unable to preserve stability on a permanent basis.  And even if the tianxia theorists celebrate the Han, the Tang, and above all the Great Qing, in Wu’s ranking, only the beginnings of these periods stand out as worthy, while the policies of the latter Han, the middle Tang, the Song, Yuan and Ming, as well as the late Qing are all among the worst, grouped together with the Qin, who monopolized tianxia. Regardless of this, Wu’s work reveals the principles and mechanisms of Chinese governance, as well as pointing the way out of predicament, as suggested by the sub-title of Wu’s work:  “Multi-Centered Rule and Dual-Level Legal Rights 多中心治理与双主体法权.”

Although it appears in the sub-title, “dual-level legal rights” is a new concept that only appears in the final chapter of Wu’s book, and his explanation of it is extremely simplistic.  To use a concept with which people are more familiar, “dual-level legal rights” is the same as “citizens’ legal rights” together with “local legal rights,” the former being “a new form of authority” and the latter “new multi-centered governance.”  “In the United States, this system of dual-level legal rights means one person-one vote (election rights), a governor for each state 一州一长 (through popular elections) and two votes for each state 一州两票 (in the Senate).  In Western political theory, these are seen as being “in conformity with the constitution” or as part of “federalist democracy.” 

These kinds of “dual-level legal rights, in the context of a large-scale political regime, not only serve the function of relieving and equalizing pressure; in terms of structure they serve to stabilize pressure.”  At the same time that they carry out these functions, they also “facilitate the joint achievement of tianxia for all, large-scale unification, creativity and vitality.”  Here, Wu again employs “dual-level legal rights” to define directly what the “greater public” means in the context of political institutions.  He writes:  “A system with multi-centered governance and dual-level legal rights is what is referred to in this book as ‘the greater tianxia for all,’ the goal of which is to achieve both scale and vitality, surpassing Shun and Yu, approaching and catching up to the United States.”

Let me add two more points of explanation of Wu’s gong tianxia argument.

First, regarding axial civilizations.  Wu brings up axial civilizations twice, but even if he devotes relatively little space to the concept, its importance to his argument is obvious.  On the one hand this is because Chinese civilization was one of four mentioned in Jaspers’s theory of “world historical axes;” another reason is the “’axial age’ was a period of great breakthrough in the spiritual civilization of humanity,” in which the transformation of the human spirit “from myth to rationality, from transcendental to empirical, from particular to universal” was realized.  It is no coincidence that the Chinese people, chosen by Jaspers as one of the axial peoples, achieved their greatest form of government during that period.  In addition, Wu also discovered that the other three great civilizations of the axial age—ancient Greece, Israel, and ancient India—at the time also found themselves in the “age of multi-centered governance,” and all were seeking the “rational principle of ‘universality.’”  By contrast, “In the age of large-scale empire, mankind’s spirit withdrew into the ‘particularity’ of myth and superstition.”  Wu argues that this is perhaps because “despotism needs myths and ghost stories, while autonomy needs reason and reflection.”

Second, on future world civilization.  Although he talks about other civilizations, nonetheless, in distinction to many other tianxia theorists, the object of Wu’s narrative is basically confined to China, and as a result, the “future world civilization” falls outside his realm of discussion.  Nonetheless, two citations in the final chapter provide us with a clue as to Wu’s basic stance on the question.  In both instances, Wu cites himself.  One passage relates to a comparison of the “basic ingredients” of Chinese and Western civilization, and Wu’s basic view is that:  the basic ingredients of Western civilization all derive from the Ancient Greek “logos,” while the basic ingredients of Chinese civilization come from the “Way.” 

One basic difference between the two is that the former seeks self-understanding while the latter is in flux; a second is that the former has only one impulse, which is “exteriorization” or “objectification,” while the latter has impulses toward “exteriorization” as well as “interiorization.”  “If we view exteriorization as diffusion 传播 and expansion 扩张, and interiorization as absorption and nourishing 生养, then Western civilization is a civilization of linear expansion 直线扩张,” and “the ‘process’ of exteriorization or expansion is the constant state of this kind of civilization.”  In another passage, Wu notes that “the exteriorization of the basic ingredients of the Chinese Way is the great ultimate,” which has its own expansive nature, represented by the taijitu 太极图,[15] which has three characteristics:  it is perfect 完善, invincible 无敌 , and inclusive 包容.  The taijitu lacks for nothing, sees nothing as its enemy, and has no fear of contact or of difference; on the contrary “it development is achieved through contact with the other followed by transformation of the elements that can be absorbed.”  “For this reason, Chinese civilization, with the Way as its basic substance, is completely capable of absorbing and including Western civilization, resulting in a world civilization with Eastern characteristics.  We might call it the ‘new civilization of great harmony 新大同文明.”

Clearly, “civilization” is a core concept in all tianxia theories.  Yet what is hard to understand is that while tianxia theorists like to use this concept, they seem to pay little attention to what it means.  This might be because, since late Qing times, the term “civilization” has been widely used in such a way that its meaning is obvious.  At the same time, when tianxia theorists bring up civilization, they generally do so from a macro-historical or philosophical perspective, and perhaps do not feel the need to explore its significance or more recent evolution.  This does not mean, however, that this is an adequate way of dealing with the idea of civilization.  I would argue the opposite, that since China is a vehicle for a kind of civilization, and civilization one of China’s attributes, then answers to questions like “What is China?” “What is tianxia?” “What is good order or the best political institutions? will to a large degree depend on how the theorist understands the meaning of civilization.  With an eye to this, I now turn to the thoughts on an anthropologist on the question of “civilization and China.”

I mentioned earlier in this essay Levenson’s famous statement on modern China’s intellectual transformation,” that “for the most part, the intellectual history of modern China has been a process of transforming ‘tianxia’ into a ‘nation-state.’”  As we have already seen, in the eyes of many tianxia theorists, this inevitable historical transformation was at the same time a Procrustean process of “cutting off the feet to fit the shoe 削足适履.”  This process created certain basic problems China still faces today, and the resolution of these problems first requires that we return to the standpoint of “civilization” to arrive at a new understanding of China. 

The anthropologist Wang Mingming 王铭铭 (b. 1962) is among those who hold such views, but his encounter with the question is marked by his particular academic background and intellectual attachments.  To put it simply, Wang argues that modern social sciences originally developed in a national context in which the goal was to satisfy the needs of the modern nation-state, and when this particular knowledge system was imported into China, it became what we might call “statist social science” because of the imperative need to “strengthen the country.”[16]  However, as a knowledge tool, this knowledge system, constructed with the nation-state as its basic unit, could not provide a satisfying explanation of China.  This is because China was neither the model nation nor the model state held up by these social science theorists, having conserved its characteristics as a “civilizational body:”  a society in which were found many societies, a culture that included many cultures, a state made up of many peoples. 

Older scholars such as Wu Wencao 吴文藻 (1910-1985) or Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910-2005) called it, respectively, “one country with many peoples 一国多族,” and a “pluralistic order 多元一体,” while Wang Mingming calls it an “ultra-social system 超社会体系.”    According to Wang’s text, by “ultra-social system” he means the same thing as “tianxia” and “civilization” in anthropological terms, and the reason that China is viewed as as “ultra-social system” is because the Chinese people have conserved the idea of tianxia and because China has always been a civilized body.  On this point, Wang elaborates on the “three-circle theory” of China:  traditionally, there were those identified as “civilized 熟 [lit. “cooked”] who resided in the “core circle,” those who were half-way between civilized and primitive and who resided in a “middle circle,” and finally those viewed as “uncooked 生” who lived in the “outer circle.” 

Objectively speaking, these three circles made up the ”Chinese world order,” and subjectively “Chinese world wisdom,” both of which are synonyms of “tianxia,” “civilization,” or the “ultra-social system.”  The same terms serve as part of a “discursive outline” in attempts to re-understand and re-narrate China, an effort seen as necessary “because we find unsatisfactory the separate definitions accorded to society, culture, people, and state in the age of nationalism, as well as the dichotomies imposed by these separate definitions on the centers and peripheries of social entities,” dichotomies such as “economic base and economic superstructure,” “center and locality,” “greater and lesser peoples,” “center and exterior,” etc.  Moreover, the same discourse means that “explanations of the complexities of the internal social orders of non-Western societies are relegated to the historical or methodological particularities of those societies—those ‘other civilizations,’ ‘other worlds,’ ‘other perspectives’ that the social sciences of modern Western civilization seek out when dealing with non-Western societies.”  And in this context, “the ‘ultra-social system’ as part of the ‘China problem’ represents a kind of historical return to the ‘state’ as being part of a civilizational body,  the point of which is to incite social science researchers working in the age of nationalism to rethink the ‘principles of social order’ and pluralize their notions of society.”

Wang Mingming’s arguments are couched in the language of anthropology, but to this point the logical path he has followed is not much different from that of other China-civilization thinkers.  What follows, by contrast, is different, and the difference is expressed in the following ways.  First, even if the “ultra-social system” was created in the context of the “China problem,” nonetheless the “ultra-social system is not a ‘Chinese particularity,’” because “there is no society that does not possess an internal pluralism and an expansive view of the outside world,” and in this sense, “all societies are ultra-societies.”  In other words, Wang’s theory of the ultra-social system is not a “theory of Chinese uniqueness.” 

Second, Wang’s view of civilization is similar.  Concretely speaking, he internalizes the conflicts emphasized by those who talk about clashes between civilizations, seeing them as relations within civilizations, and consequently greatly complicates our view of civilizations, and at the same time interprets what people often see as the hard core of a “civilization” as being much more in flux, full of tensions and changes.  Wang interprets his “three circles” in just this manner.  Finally, from the perspective of the theories of the French anthropologist Mauss that Wang likes to cite, “the history of civilization is the history of the exchange and circulation of objects and accomplishments of different societies.”  He stresses that civilization is made up of “different combinations of shared agency and shared culture,” in which on the one hand “you contain my difference,” while on the other “I am in you and you are in me.”  For this reason, if we really want to “understand China” we much “transcend China.”  Moreover, “allowing mutual exchange to correct the civilizational self-infatuation of the state” is the “only path toward hope.”[17]

​Wang Mingming’s argument concerning civilization and China is very scholarly, and we can identify three principle sources for his ideas and scholarship:  first, Western anthropological and sociological theory since the nineteenth century; second, research on China by scholars like Wu Wenzao, Fei Xiaotong, Maurice Friedman and William G. Skinner; and third, fieldwork and theoretical reflection in which Wang and other Chinese anthropologists and ethnographers are engaged.  This background of theory, practice and reflection have led Wang to note that, compared to marginal academic fields like archeology, folklore studies, ethnography, and religious studies, the “thought world,” which finds itself “at the center of scholarly opinion,” pays little attention to the scholarly observation noted above concerning “the relativity of the definitions of center and periphery and the multiple possibilities of civilizations,” and instead remains “immersed in an imaginary of an internally unified ‘national culture.’” 

In the conclusion to an essay addressed to his academic colleagues, but which also serves as an introduction to some of the tianxia arguments discussed in this essay, Wang remarks that:  “the contemporary Chinese thought world is anxious to reconstruct its self-knowledge on the basis of a linear timeline.  The ‘Liberals,’ the ‘New Left,’ and the ‘New Confucians’ all divide things clearly into the national past, present, and future, so that their arguments will make logical sense.”  Consequently, no matter what their viewpoint, they all tend to “define ‘Chinese civilization’ as being a territory that is internally simplified and clearly different from the outside world.”  Wang clearly does not share this viewpoint.  Finally, he concludes his essay with the following sentence:  “Civilizational self-knowledge relies not solely on the tradition handed down by the ancestors, but also on those civilizations outside of civilization.”  

Notes

[1] Translator’s note:  By adding “new” and “ism” to tianxia, Xu Jilin surely aims to highlight the contemporary reconstruction of the tianxia idea, the notion that any return to tradition is a reinvention of tradition.

[2] Beijing:  Shehue Kexue Wenxian 2011.  On the basis of its content, this book should be included among the critical reactions to tianxia, but strangely enough, these critical reactions were completely absorbed into the proposals Xu labels “new tianxia-ism.”  This posture displeased Ge Zhaoguang, who offers his criticisms of Xu in his “对‘天下’的想象：一个乌托邦想象背后的政治，思想和学术,” 思想 29.

[3] Issues 10 and 11 of the same journal, also edited by Xu, bore the titles “What Kind of Civilization?  Rethinking China’s Rise 何种文明？中国崛起的再思考,” and “Individual, State, and Tianxia Identities in Multidimensional Perspectives 多维视野中的个人，国家与天下认同,” and were clearly focused on the same issues.

[4] Among the other essays appearing in this special issue, I would like to single out Liu Qing’s 刘擎 “In Pursuit of a Collaboratively Constructed Universalism:  From the Tianxia Ideal to a New Internationalism 寻求共建的普遍性－－从天下理想到新世界主义.  Liu does not deny the virtues attributed to the traditional ‘tianxia’ concept by tianxia theorists, such as openness and flexibility, but instead focuses on the modern transformation of the traditional tianxia viewpoint, by which he means the search for a “collaboratively constructed world” in the course of “cultural encounters.”  In Liu’s argument, cultural agency is not a fixed idea, but rather a changing, living concept in which lines between inner and outer are constantly being explored.  The object of the critique of Liu’s “new internationalism” is clear.  Translator’s note:  A translation of Xu’s essay is available on our site at:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/xu-jilin-the-new-tianxia.html.

[5] Shanghai:  Shanghai renmin, 2016.

[6] Translator’s note:  Qian’s text is 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).

[7] 许纪霖，“中国如何以文明大国出现于世界？” in 家国天下。Translator’s note:  See also Xu Jilin, “What Kind of Civilization?  China at a Crossroads,” and “Universal Civilization, or Chinese Values?  A Critique of Historicist Thought since 2000,” in Xu, Rethinking China’s Rise:  A Liberal Critique (David Ownby, trans.), Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 1-19 and 61-94.

[8] Translator’s note:  Yao Zhongqiu, who often publishes under the penname Qiu Feng 秋风 is professor of philosophy at Shandong University and a prominent Mainland New Confucian who was originally known for his liberal tendencies.

[9] Translator’s note:  This is a reference to a 2012 conference devoted to this question, that resulted in a number of publication.  An abstract of the conference proceedings is available here:  http://www.opentimes.cn/Abstract/1858.html.  Xu Zhangrun’s response to Yao’s question is available in translation here:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/xu-zhangrun-chinas-moment.html.

[10] Translator’s note:  the creator of the universe in Chinese mythology.

[11] Translator’s note:  available here, but behind a paywall:  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-06-22/american-tianxia.

[12] Nanning:  Guangxi Shifan Daxue, 2018.

[13] Nanning:  Guangxi Shifan Daxue, 2013.

[14] Huang Zongxi was an important late-Ming Confucian philosopher and historian, known particularly for his attacks on autocracy and promotion of ideas of local automony.

[15] Translator’s note:  The taijitu is the basic representation of yin and yang, the two opposing forces whose harmonious and cyclical interaction defines the basic dynamics of the universe in Chinese cosmology.

[16] See Wang Mingming, 超社会体系：文明与中国, Beijing:  Sanlian, 2015.

[17] Another influential recent work on the topic civilization in the Chinese academic world is 刘禾 Liu He, ed., 世界秩序与文明等级：全球史研究的新路径 The World Order and the Hierarchy of Civilizations :  A New Direction in the Study of the History of Globalization, (Beijing, 2016).