Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics ed. by Ban Wang (review)

Confucius is finally rehabilitated. Party dignitaries kneel at his ancestral shrine. The benevolent Confucian is a new image of China for outsiders and for Chinese dealing with the collapse of ideology and of the moral fabric of their society. The word tianxia is usually translated “all under heaven.” It has a complicated history and a complicated contemporary appropriation in a desperate ideology-cum-PR campaign. The tianxia idea is that China has for millennia been a government of all under heaven. It was such a government in the past, is one today, and offers the whole world its benevolent alternative to liberalism and democracy.

More than one contributor to this strong collection of interesting essays suspects that the Confucian revival is an act of desperation. As soft power, Confucianism may be no match for global capitalism. Soft power is not readily synthesized by official campaigns. Its genuine source is in everyday life, and the life of ordinary Chinese is without much resonance beyond their borders. The whole world uses Chinese electronics, though almost none but the Chinese read their books, watch their television, or listen to their music. The world’s love affair with China is fixated on the economic numbers and is no less capricious.

It has never been clear whether tianxia means a cultural realm without political boundaries, as is urged by modern ideologists, or is just another word for China, which is how modern Chinese dictionaries explain it. On the official account, membership in “all under heaven” is a matter of shared culture, sustained by affective ties rather than coercion, but it is a culture that values order over freedom, ethics over law, and authority over democracy and human rights. Outsiders worry that tianxia is the cloak of a rising hegemon. The important audience, however, for lofty talk of tianxia may be internal. Whether foreigners really trust it may be less urgent than for the Chinese to believe it about themselves. Postsocialist China has no unifying vision and has yet to scrutinize official socialism honestly. The new discourse of tianxia speaks to their need for a vision of their place in the world. The image of a tianxia government of benevolent authority may be more useful for identity within China than for offering the world a viable alternative to democracy and belief in human rights.