Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-hegemonic or a New Hegemony?

Lately, there has been increasing interest among international relations (IR) scholars in Chinese thought, both as an alternative to Eurocentric IR, and because the PRC as an emerging power will soon have the institutional power to promote its view of the world. Rather than look for suitable Chinese parallels to “international,”“security,” or other mainstream concepts, this article will examine the concept of “Tianxia All-under-Heaven” to understand Chinese visions of world order. Tianxia is interesting both because it was key to the governance and self-understanding of over two millennia of Chinese empire, and also because discussion of Tianxia is becoming popular again in the twenty-first century as a Chinese model of world order that is universally valid. After outlining a popular discussion of the “magnanimous” and all-inclusive Tianxia system, the article will examine some of the theoretical problems raised by this reading of Tianxia, in particular how its approach to “Otherness” encourages a conversion of difference, if not a conquest of it. It will conclude that Tianxia’s most important impact will not be on the world stage, but in China’s domestic politics, where it blurs the conceptual boundaries between empire and globalism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Hence rather than guide us toward a post-hegemonic world order, Tianxia presents a new hegemony where imperial China’s hierarchical governance is updated for the twenty-first century.