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

• Main Author: CALLAHAN, William A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Chinese world order; Tianxia; Datong; Tributary system; Communist utopia; Traditions; International relations; Asian Studies; International Relations; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4151
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.