Abstract
With China’s global rise, both its state leadership and key academics have engaged in developing a civilisational discourse for the twenty-first century partly based on ancient cosmological concepts. This article explores the meanings of and intentions behind this discourse, including its promise of a Chinese-led world order, and discusses its intended audience and international appeal. In the backdrop of theoretical debates on empires and their missions, the article claims that without a corresponding cultural appeal, China’s rising economic power and geostrategic clout are insufficient conditions to realise an empire in the classical sense. Growing inconsistencies mar the country’s imperial ambitions, such as those between a global civilising outreach and a toughening domestic embrace. Instead, imperial rhetoric is cautiously integrated in the party-state’s restoration of a Chinese “empire within,” indicating self-centredness and a lurking re-traditionalising of Chinese state power.
Highlights
Inspired by China’s global economic rise, a range of its writers and political actors have participated in the reconstruction of a civilisational discourse since around 2000, in which ancient cosmological concepts and their reinterpretations play a key part
We argue that China’s global civilising discourse follows neatly in the wake of nationalist and nativist discourses in the previous decades, and serves the same purpose: mobilisation for the survival of the party-state in a globalising and increasingly complex cultural and political setting
We review below debates on China’s rise and global civilising project to match them up against the general characteristics of empires outlined above
Summary
Inspired by China’s global economic rise, a range of its writers and political actors have participated in the reconstruction of a civilisational discourse since around 2000, in which ancient cosmological concepts and their reinterpretations play a key part. Building on previous attempts to promote Chinese values for a new and better world order, including the work of Tu Weiming and other scholars of New Confucianism, tianxia has re-entered the philosophical–political debate in the early twenty-first century, and is closely linked to popular Chinese calls to reassert its historical identity as an empire rather than a country or a nation (French, 2017).
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