The Mind of Empire: China's History and Modern Foreign Relations

6. Sinic Universalism in Theory and Practice

6 Sinic Universalism in Theory and Practice World Politics as King of the Hill In the increasingly chaotic and bloody era of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, China in some ways resembled the later European state system and displayed some balance-of-power characteristics. This embryonic balance-of-power system was unstable, however, because its participants lacked the “commitment to legitimacy” and system of “shared values” identified by scholars such as Henry Kissinger as being key to the relative success ofthe post-Westphalia system1 —values that owe much to legal philosophers such as Grotius. As Alex Wendt has pointed out, international behavior is socially constructed; that is, it is powerfully conditioned by how states identify themselves and their role in the international system.2 In China, however, while the warring states did seem to have a clear sense of particularist self-identity, their concept of self seems to have been less that of emergent, permanent separate nations than that of rival contenders in a winner-take-all struggle for imperial supremacy over All under Heaven. In China of the post-Zhou era, the separate states had become in many ways proto-nations. Their squabbles were, as Gernet has noted, no longer merely “a series of family quarrels which allied, yet rival, principalities , united by the same traditions and the same type of culture, strove to settle by force of arms.” Instead, they had developed into different regions, each with “original characteristics and a personality” of its own.3 Traditional writings from the period were quite regionalist, assigning to different peoples or states different characteristics. According to Sawyer, “these concepts were so powerful and prevalent, constituting an essential part of the literate person’s worldview that their principles and assumptions 80 THE MIND OF EMPIRE unavoidably influenced the tactical theorists [of the bingjia] and their expectations when, for example, traveling or campaigning in the west, a region associated with fall, death, and the element metal.”4 Yet the conflicts between these proto-nations were mitigated by no shared understanding of a legitimate international order. The relationship between participants in the ancient Chinese states system increasingly became an unblinking, zero-sum game of King of the Hill: all understood that there was only one hill and that there would ultimately be only one king. The states system of ancient China during the period before the Qin unification displayed some balance-of-power characteristics. In the late fourth century b.c.e., for instance, the so-called Horizontal Alliance (which ran generally along a north-south axis) grew up, organized by Qin to attack others, and the countervailing Vertical Alliance (which ran westeast ) formed to resist Qin’s growing power.5 There were also suggestions, during this era of plural Chinese states, of the embryonic development of interstate codes of conduct. Confucius, after all, held conscientiousness to be a key moral obligation, and this was no less true of ruling princes than of individuals: both must keep their word.6 The feudal vassal rulers of the late Zhou era had observed some elementary chivalrous “international li” in their mutual conduct—such as not attacking an army preoccupied with fording a river and not sending emissaries across another state’s territory without permission7 —and the princely courts of the postZhou states employed officials known as hsing-jen who were responsible for protocol, tributary relations, and other dealings with diplomatic representatives from other states.8 An account of ancient Chinese schools of thought by Liu Hsin (ca. 46 b.c.e.–23 c.e.) also suggests the existence of an embryonic diplomatic establishment, describing a philosophical school called the “Diplomatists” whose adherents “had their origin in the Ministry of Embassies.”9 Despite these intriguing developments, however, the underlying ethos of the Chinese states system seemed to point emphatically toward unification, not toward the Westphalian approach of an at least partly rule-governed dynamic tension between formal equals. The concept of the hegemon (pa or ba) apparently first emerged in Chinese history in connection with the primacy of Duke Huan of Ch’i at the head of a league of warring states in 678 b.c.e. charged with preserving (general) peace and defending the honor of the then still nominally ruling Zhou king.10 In time, hegemony came to mean any state that managed to achieve dom- Sinic Universalism in Theory and Practice 81 inance over the others. The cardinal...