China’s traditional, modern, and neo-socialist world orders

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

10-2024

Abstract

To explore twenty-first century discussions of China’s alternative world order, this chapter argues that we need to not only consider traditional world orders (All-under-Heaven – tianxia; Great Harmony – datong, and the Tributary System) but also examine the twentieth century’s modern revolutionary world orders (Kang Youwei’s Great Harmony, Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles and Mao Zedong’s Three Worlds). Importantly, this is not simply a chronological “history of ideas” that traces China’s transition from traditional empire to modern nation-state. Rather it argues that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tradition and modernity are entangled: Kang and Sun revived All-under-Heaven and Great Harmony to think about China’s global role in the early twentieth century; Mao Zedong used Great Harmony and Kang Youwei to think about his communist utopia, and Xi Jinping mixes All-under-Heaven, Great Harmony and Marxism in his new ideology of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics for the New Era.” The chapter explores how twenty-first century world orders, thus, are not post-socialist but “neo-socialist” in the sense of syncretically mixing Chinese tradition, capitalist modernity and socialist modernity.

Keywords

Chinese world order, Tianxia, Datong, Tributary system, Communist utopia, Traditions, International relations

Discipline

Asian Studies | International Relations | Political Science

Research Areas

Political Science

Publication

Routledge Handbook on Global China

Editor

Maximilian Mayer, Emilian Kavalski, Marina Rudyak, Xin Zhang

First Page

52

Last Page

66

Identifier

10.4324/9781003044710-5

Publisher

Routledge

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

William A. CALLAHAN

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003044710-5

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