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303 Conclusion Multi-Polarity in Asia and Appropriateness in Tang Foreign Policy The history of Tang China’s external relations provides ample evidence of Asia’s shift toward a multi-polar world. In this world, Tang China remained a formidable but not the dominant power. The gaps between Tang China and the rest of Asia were shrinking, and power relations in Asia ceased to be zero-sum games. In the face of these profound changes, Tang emperors and courtiers admitted that China’s power alone would not suffice to freeze the perpetual evolution of Asia’s geopolitical landscape. Accepting fluidity as the norm for international relations, they deliberated concerning the disorderly mobility in Asia, and they attempted to understand the causes behind that mobility and to manage it. Although some Tang courtiers still articulated permanent spatial domination of borders when dealing with frontier issues, many realized that such territorialism was an unsustainable dream built on shifting sands.1 An understanding of a multi-polar Asia and the fluidity in frontier regions formed the intellectual foundation for Tang foreign policy. Although they still justified their foreign policy proposals with such moral values as “virtue” and “righteousness,” Tang officials quietly dropped the axiomatic rationale that moral values alone would lead inescapably to an orderly world. China needed a wide range of policies to manage mobility in external affairs, from coercion and arbitration to patronage and persuasion. And these policies needed to be appropriate to China’s power relationships with its neighbors at a specific time. To many Tang officials, appropriateness was not a mere abstract principle for China’s foreign policy; it was morality in action in foreign affairs. This mode of strategic thinking was, however, not always self-evident in Chinese primary sources. Confucian scholars and official historians were reluctant to acknowledge Asia as a multi-polar world in their works. They customarily described international relations in Asia as unipolar in nature with China as the center. China maintained sovereignvassal relationships with its neighbors. Foreign rulers acknowledged China’s suzerainty by sending tribute-paying missions to the Middle Kingdom. In return, Chinese emperors provided them with military 304 | Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia protection, political recognition, and cultural and material benefits. These arrangements symbolized China’s centrality, and they constituted a tributary system. Some modern scholars have also adopted this interpretation.2 The real Asian world, however, did not operate according to this idealistic and simplistic tributary pattern. The very phrase “paying tribute ” (chaogong) that traditional scholars employed to describe foreign countries’ contact with China was value-laden and problematic. It ignored foreign countries’ real intention in contacting China. Moreover, the centrality of China in Asia that the term chaogong implied was also questionable. To enjoy such centrality, China needed to hold dominance, or at least appreciable advantage, over other countries in three areas: material wealth, the capacity to project force to China’s periphery and beyond, and ideas or attractiveness through which China could shape the Asian world. Unfortunately, China did not always enjoy advantageous positions in these areas. While it commanded a palpable lead on the material front, China sometimes lacked the military means to match its ambition abroad. Some Asian countries, such as Silla and Tibet, were in fact China’s equals, if not superiors, in military strength. The former stubbornly resisted Tang occupation and successfully forced Tang troops out of Korea. The latter directly challenged Tang’s presence in the Western Regions, exerted considerable pressure on the metropolitan area, and once even seized the Tang capital. Tibet’s military activities compelled the Tang to reconsider its entire military strategy. As a result, the Tang court abandoned its ambition over Korea to focus on Tibetan threats. With the center of China’s geostrategy shifted from the northeast to the northwest, the Tang court lost control of Korea and Manchuria. This development had a significant long-term impact on China’s security that Tang officials failed to perceive. Manchuria would become the cradle of successive powerful nomadic states from the late tenth century onward. They threatened China, and, eventually, the Mongols and then the Manchus would defeat and incorporate China into their empires.3 In the area of ideas and attractiveness through which China could influence its neighbors, the real situation was also more complex than it appears. Throughout the Tang, China maintained the capacity to shape Asia through diffusion of its norms in culture, law, and governance, a capacity that was far from negligible. China’s neighbors...

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