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Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a word three millennia old, long absent from republican and later communist vocabularies, has resurfaced in the intellectual debates of the People’s Republic of China and even surfaces in its official phrasing: tianxia, “that which is under Heaven.” It once denoted the terrestrial sphere subjected to the Heaven’s law through its sole representative, the sovereign who reigned from the center of the world. Reinvested with opportunism that accepts inconsistencies, the All-under-Heaven of the Zhou dynasty’s ancient kingship is today used to articulate what China thinks of itself, of the West, and of the world order it wishes to shape. Behind this revival of universalism lies a belief almost as old: unity would be the sole condition for order, peace, and power.
From All-under-Heaven to the nation, and back
From Bronze Age kingship to the empire’s fall in 1911, tianxia signified a realm with blurred boundaries, within which the ruler’s ritual and moral authority held sway. The tianxia is what a dynasty “acquires” or “loses” according to the Mandate of Heaven (tianming), a doctrine forged by the Zhou to legitimize their victory over the Shang around 1045 BCE: Heaven entrusts the mandate to a virtuous man and withdraws it from his descendants if they prove undeserving. Lands lying beyond the space where the ruler’s virtue shines renew their allegiance through tribute. The term thus encompasses both a moral cosmology and an ideal of universal subordination.
At the end of the Qing dynasty, at the dawn of the last century, this ideological construction clashed with gunboats and unequal treaties. Liang Qichao (1873-1929) and the reformers of his generation reproached their predecessors for living in an outdated imagination: by believing themselves the center of the civilized world, the Chinese had ignored the Darwinian law of competition among states. It was therefore urgent to invent what the country lacked: a name, borders, a national language, a majority ethnicity, a continuous history, and a founding ancestor, the Yellow Emperor. American historian Joseph Levenson summarized the modern history of China with this shift from tianxia to guojia, the nation-state.
In the last two decades, the movement has reversed. Having become a prosperous and powerful nation-state, China rehabilitates the imperial past against which it had built itself. One must also nuance this rejection: the People’s Republic had rejected the regime, deeming it “feudal,” while scrupulously preserving the Qing territories. The heir to imperial frontiers now revives that rhetoric. Three voices emerge: the official discourse, which uses tianxia only sparingly in classical quotes and prefers the “community of shared future for humanity”; philosophers and jurists, who treat tianxia as a system; and their critics, who also belong to the academic milieu. These theorists are more than mere propagandists, and their critiques of the West are often incisive, even if they do not demonstrate the viability of their own project.
The figure of good governance
It takes only a single horizontal stroke to render the most formidable digit: the One, the primal reality, the germ of totality. During the Warring States (5th–3rd centuries BCE), it became the sole focal point for a world immersed in total war. The Liang king Xiang asks Mencius how the world will find its footing; “Through unity,” replies the Confucian adept. And who can unify it? “The one who has no desire to kill.” The latter answer was probably less heeded than the first. The rival schools no longer argued about the end, but about the means: arms or virtue. The failure of the multipolar order of the Spring and Autumn period, with its alliances, oaths, hostages, and hegemons, convinced them that there would be peace only through absorbing all kingdoms under the rule of a single sovereign. The Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü, compiled on the eve of imperial unification, articulated the materialization of this principle: an army needs one (unique) general and a country needs one (sole) prince—the World’s Son of Heaven—because unity yields order, and duality yields only chaos.
Admittedly, no one would instinctively distrust praise of unity, harmony, or the great Concord. The difficulty begins when the ideal lodges itself in institutions marked by two thousand years of imperial ideology, then by a repressive regime. The scholars debated the best way to govern the empire, and Huang Zongxi (1610-1695) could condemn the emperor who treats the world as his private property; yet these controversies remained internal to the monarchy. Between unity and chaos, the middle ground was excluded. It is precisely this median space that Western political modernity endeavored to invent with pluralism and checks and balances.
The flight plan toward a “new era”
The canonical form that shapes the current narrative is the report delivered by Xi Jinping to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017. It lays out a three-stage teleology: a descent into misfortune since the Opium War, the Chinese nation has risen, then grown wealthy, and is poised to become powerful. The report attributes these steps to the Party alone; its commentators will read the names Mao, Deng, and Xi. China now approaches the center of the global stage and offers to countries seeking development without sacrificing their independence an “entirely new option,” a “Chinese wisdom,” and a “Chinese solution.” By mid-century, it will be a modern socialist power, “prosperous, powerful, democratic, civilized, harmonious and beautiful” — the third attribute is no less audacious.
The shift toward an authoritarian tone crystallizes in a slogan borrowed from Mao: “Party, government, army, people, study; east, west, south, north, center: the Party directs everything.” In everyday Chinese, the five directions simply mean “everywhere.” Yet the ear trained in scholarly discourse still detects a cosmogram, one of those ancient schemata where the world is arranged around a center. Where the Son of Heaven once resided, the Party has taken its place. The Congress report then expands the idea of unity to every scale. Ethnic groups are urged to press together “like the seeds of a grenade” and religions to become “Sinicized.” Concerning Taiwan, no one will ever be allowed, at any time or in any form, to detach a fragment of the territory. Abroad, China pledges never to seek hegemony and to build a “community with a shared future for humanity.” In its closing passage, the report quotes the Book of Rites: “When the Great Way prevails, all under Heaven belongs to all.” The report ends by reiterating the 9.6 million square kilometers of the national territory: the world that belongs to all still has the clear borders of the People’s Republic.
A world without outside
The most accomplished architect of this grafting of celestial order onto the modern state is the philosopher Zhao Tingyang, born in 1961, whose The System of Tianxia (first published in 2005) gave the debate its philosophical form. Zhao does not belong to the apparatus, but his theses fit the regime’s ambitions so well that little was needed to sponsor them. His diagnosis is that of a world still close to the Hobbesian state of nature, where states coexist in anarchy. He opposes a “world without outside” (wuwai), in which no nation could impose the cost of its actions on others, where everyone would seek to reduce hostility before increasing gains, and where no one would advance unless all advance with it. In Zhao’s view, the West has known only a politics of enmity, from the Christian partition of believers and heathens to the “clash of civilizations,” and an imperialism that, with American hegemony, has become “globalized.”
The problem lies in Zhao’s rereading of history. Faith in the “great unification” (da yitong) is not enough, in his view, to explain the longevity of Chinese unity; it requires an objective dynamic, which he locates in a “turbine model.” The peoples on the margins would have been attracted toward the Central Plain as a matter of competition’s stake, and Mongols or Manchus, by conquering China, would have merely entered the game. The narrative transforms expansion into attraction and leaves the armies out of the picture. Zhao moreover forbids applying the imperialism concept to Chinese history, reserving it for the West. If the West has empires, China has only vortices.
Zhao defends himself, however, against charges of sowing uniformity. He invokes a distinction, attributed to the ancient Zuo Commentary to the great minister Yanzi, between harmony (he), which accommodates diverse elements, and conformity (tong), which reduces everything to sameness. Even if the court chronicle he cites says otherwise, he draws from this polarity the imperative to safeguard cultural diversity. The mandate of Heaven remains. Zhao cites the Book of Documents, which says Heaven sees with the eyes of the people. Yet one must know how the people express themselves. Zhao answers with an “intelligent democracy” drawn from the same classic: among five voices, the king, the ministers, and the people each have one, and the two latter, once reserved for divination, would today belong to science. If these two learned voices oppose a decision, the decision is abandoned, even if the king, the ministers, and the people approve it unanimously.
Variations on the One
Other writers work, with even more zeal, to reconcile what Chinese history has opposed.
As early as 2005, Gan Yang called for “uniting the three legitimate lineages” (tong san tong): those of Confucius, Mao, and Deng. He borrows this formula from Dong Zhongshu, who applied it under the Han to the first three dynasties. Philosopher Chen Lai adds to these syntheses a metaphysics of the One: in his Ontology of Ren (2014), the Confucian virtue of humanity makes all beings into a single body. Jurist Jiang Shigong, a professor at Peking University, provides the interpretation closest to the official version in a 2018 article that comments, sometimes pedantically and scholastically, on the report of the 19th Congress. The leader, the Party, and the masses form a single agent, “organic and unified,” and communism is no longer a society to be realized here below but a faith and a spiritual value. Jiang gives the Party’s global ambition two roots—the Confucian tradition of tianxia and the communist belief in the liberation of humanity—and assigns to it the mission of extending Chinese civilization to ever more parts of the world. The two universalisms once thought to be rivals, that of the scholars and that of the revolutionaries, merge in the Xi Jinping era.
Objections from within
This enthusiasm for tianxia is far from unanimously accepted in China. In 2015, the eminent historian Ge Zhaoguang of Fudan University published in the Taiwanese journal Sixiang a thorough demolition of “the imagination of tianxia.” The old tianxia has, he notes, always rested on three partitions: between inside and outside, between the Chinese and the barbarians, and between those who command and those who obey. The Han and the Tang expanded it through expeditions, and it was after crushing the Eastern Turks, in 630, that Emperor Taizong of the Tang was granted by steppe leaders the title of “Heavenly Khan.” As for the passage from the Lîe (Book of Rites) cited by the 19th Congress report, it belongs to literati’s reveries, and the idea of a world where “near and far, great and small, are one” is an idea that, Ge notes, never took root within imperial orthodoxy. Ge sees in these theories the product of China’s rise and a curious transfer: Western critiques of imperialism, from Said to Hardt and Negri, nourished in China a nationalism that presages, after the American century, that of tianxia. He asks whether tianxia might become a nationalism dressed in internationalism, and poses the question his promoters dodge: who would be the head of this great family, who would set its rules, who would dispense justice? In the absence of an answer, tianxia would revert to an empire, under whatever name it is given.
That same year, liberal historian Xu Jilin tried to salvage the concept for its champions. His “tianxia 2.0” preserves the old universalism but trims away the center and the hierarchy: it rests on the sovereign equality of states and on mutual recognition, since, in a secular age, no people can claim the mandate of Heaven. A universalism that rejects Eurocentrism must also renounce Sinocentrism. One could level the complaint E. H. Carr directed at interwar utopians: assuming an inherent harmony of interests that power politics denies every day. On the domestic front, his proposal has a real edge. Noting that the revived grandeur does not attract minorities to the center, he proposes extending the principle “one country, two systems” to border regional autonomies. But he openly borrows his model from empires, which tolerated frontier peoples’ customs so long as they acknowledged the center’s authority. His tianxia is decentered outward and centered inward.
The West in the Chinese mirror
Chinese critiques of the West contain a good deal of truth. The United States offers no credible leadership on climate, has not adopted policies commensurate with the inequalities its own people face, the predominance of capital over politics nourishes a populism that threatens democracy, and the liberal order established after 1945 has never looked so fragile. China can claim a tradition that elevates the political above capital and has invested massively in green technologies, even if it remains far and away the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Europe, which long believed that growth in China would spawn a middle class, and that the middle class would bring democracy, misread an agenda that has never lacked coherence or clarity. Yet sick Western democracies do not prove the health of a country ruled by a single party. A successful state-capitalism would offer regimes of authoritarian governance, not a centuries-old wisdom, but a toolkit of surveillance and repression without precedent.
Preaching and practice
The harmonious coexistence Beijing has failed to grant its own margins—Tibet and Xinjiang subjected to forced assimilation, Hong Kong reattached to direct authority in 2020—Tianxia theorists propose that it be offered to all countries on Earth. In a world that belongs to all, someone must declare what is common. Zhao leaves the final word to scholars whose names he does not disclose or the basis on which they are chosen; Jiang Shigong is more explicit with his fundamental claim: the leader, the Party, and the masses form a single entity. The celebration of the Great Unity is now monumental: unity of past and present, Confucianism and Marxism, State and Party, Party and people, classes and ethnicities. Yet the regime that proclaims it lacks unity on one point: between the benevolent intentions proclaimed to the world and the rigidity of a power that tolerates no dissent, the duality remains conspicuous.