Zhao Tingyang’s Ethnocentric Tianxia

Zhao Tingyang might be China’s most referenced current philosopher, but after reading his 2019 book Redefining a Philosophy of World Government, I was left questioning whether there is now any substantial philosophy happening inside the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The book is a thirty-thousand word summery of his global tianxia proposal for a world government system to replace the current international order.

Zhao’s tianxia is based on the ancient Han worldview of the emperor ruling “all under heaven” (“tian-xia” in Mandarin). The idea was that whoever was king of the land area we now call China was actually the spiritual and political ruler of the entire world. Zhao believes that this model of global governance is superior to the current post-Westphalian model which is led by the United States and embodied in the United Nations and other global institutions.

It becomes awkwardly obvious less than half-way through the book that Zhao is only thinly veiling an ethno-supremacist worldview. He claims that the north China plains possess superior and “unrivaled” cultural resources that allow it to become the center of a vast whirlpool that will eventually draw the entire planet into a single system of semi-Confucian morality and common “rites”. He claims this will happen without violence because it is written into Chinese civilization’s “genes” that unity is a product of cultural attraction and China is not imperialistic like Western civilization. He thinks that there are two great models of global order: imperialism, which was invented by Rome, and tianxia, which was invented by China (does he think Rome was the first empire?).

Most of Zhao’s arguments are founded on what can only be described as extreme ethnic bias. His historical claims about Western civilization are almost all negative while his claims about Chinese civilization are bizarrely optimistic. His definition of “China” is based on three “consensuses” about Chinese history, but none of them are accepted by mainstream international scholars outside the PRC. The oft repeated and increasingly ridiculous claim that China is the only civilization that is “uninterrupted” begins his list of three pseudo-consensuses. He claims many times, against even the most cursory reading of Chinese history, that the current extensive land area of the PRC was slowly collected in a completely peaceful way and never through imperialism, war, or genocide. Is there a single international historian who would agree with this? A huge portion of his book is predicated on these myths. In one section, he spends numerous pages discussing the imaginary battles of an ancient deity as if these events were actual history that provided proof for his historical interpretations.

Who is Zhao’s audience? The only people who might find him convincing are either people who know nothing at all about China or else PRC pupils who were indoctrinated from youth with official propaganda. One might think he’s trying to appeal to people who hate the West, but then he systematically ignores all other civilizations except the West and China and myopically pretends that only the West and China have ever had ideas about world politics.

I doubt any non-Chinese person could finish Zhao’s book without suspecting that he has very little familiarity with the world outside China. He argues that China is uniquely open to absorbing different cultures and therefore uniquely positioned to become the new center of a global tianxia system, but then he supports this claim with seemingly irrelevant evidence like the fact that Chinese universities teach Western philosophy. Is he not aware that universities in every part of the world also teach it? He repeatedly claims that China is uniquely open and beyond the us-vs-them mentality that he thinks characterizes the West. The audacity of this claim is astonishing. China is either the second or third most isolated and censored place on the planet. China is so isolated that most Chinese people have never had a conversation with a foreigner in their entire lives. China built the Great Firewall to isolate its people from international ideas and people. China is easily the least cosmopolitan major country in the world.

The problem with Zhao’s thinking, and one that has increasingly infected PRC society over the last few years, is that China is now so isolated that it no longer knows how isolated it is. People like Zhao don’t even realize how peripheral China has become. They don’t realize that so many places they ignore, like Thailand or Argentina or Romania, are already integrated into a global tianxia that developed decades ago while China was still mired in extreme poverty under Mao Zedong.

At the very end of the book, Zhao acknowledges two criticisms of his tianxia proposal. Firstly, that it is nothing but a Han-supremacist project to place China at the center of the world. Secondly, that America has already built tianxia without China’s participation. Instead of seriously addressing these criticisms, Zhao simply claims that they’re not true and dismisses them. However, it’s clear by Zhao’s shrill angry denunciations of Christianity and the West that he suspects, on some level, that the Christian church and the United States have already achieved a more substantial world system than anything China has ever built or is ever likely to build in the foreseeable future.

Perhaps Zhao himself is the best rebuttal of his own claims and proposals. He is so lost in a labyrinth of PRC propaganda that he cannot understand our world nor what has happened in history. The global culture that Zhao thinks China will lead has already been forming for centuries. It started with the spread of Christianity and has continued via the institutions and ideas that marked Western expansion into every part of the globe. We live today in the Pax Americana where traditional influences, immigration, pop-culture, and the internet have already formed a tianxia world system with the United States serving as the central country (zhong-guo). If Chinese people embrace Zhao’s worldview, it will ensure their perpetual status as “outer barbarians” (wai-yi) who will then remain unfamiliar with the rites of the civilized world.

I wrote this review before reading Salvatore Babones’ excellent little book American Tianxia. Read it if you want to explore this topic more.