Tianxia

= chinese concept for 'relational rationality'

Discussion

Zhao Tingyang:

"The ancient Chinese concept of tianxia, which roughly translates to “all under heaven” coexisting harmoniously. This concept of world order was embraced for hundreds of years from around 1046 to 256 B.C. during the Zhou dynasty, China’s longest-lasting.

To explain the concept of tianxia, let me introduce an imitation test, a game that reveals the concept’s philosophical roots. In this game, each player seeks to maximize his or her own self-interest within a Hobbesian state of nature, and each player learns and imitates the successful strategies deployed by the other players.

As a result, none of the successful strategies dominate for long, since all of them are copied by others and soon become common knowledge. The stable equilibrium among strategies finally comes about when all players have learned all available successful strategies and thus have become equally smart or equally stupid.

An imitated strategy could be one of hospitality or hostility. A strategy is irrational if it leads to self-defeating consequences when universally imitated. A rational strategy — where the first consideration is coexistence — continues to produce positive rewards when copied by other players. It is the only strategy not to incur any retaliation and thus successfully to withstand the challenge of others imitating it.

Tianxia is thus a rational worldview. In game theory, it is the best conception of an undefeatable strategy or a stable evolutionary strategy. And it is precisely what the world needs today at this historical juncture.

The concept of tianxia defines an all-inclusive world with harmony for all. It often refers to the physical world in early literature, but it is essentially a political concept consisting of a trinity of realms.

First, tianxia means the Earth under the sky, “all under heaven.” Second, it refers to the general will of all peoples in the world, entailing a universal agreement. It involves the heart more than the mind, because the heart has feelings. And third, tianxia is a universal system that is responsible for world order. The world cannot achieve tianxia unless the physical, psychological and political realms all coincide.

About 3,000 years ago, the Zhou dynasty brought the tianxia system — the only one ever practiced — to prominence. The dynasty sought to bring the whole world together under one tent as a way to eliminate any negative external influence, and thereby conflict, within what was then considered the civilized world. Tianxia thus defines the concept of “the political” as the art of co-existing through transforming hostility into hospitality — a clear alternative to the more modern concepts of German legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s recognition of politics as “us vs. them,” Hans Morgenthau’s “realist” struggle for power and Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.”

The idea of “perpetual peace,” famously associated with philosopher Immanuel Kant, proved possible during the Zhou dynasty in a region that was mostly culturally homogenous, but it was ineffective in settling the kind of civilization clashes noted by Huntington. A “tianxia peace” for our hyper-connected, interdependent world would have to go a big step further. It would have to be built on the broader foundation of a compatible universalism that includes all civilizations — not an exclusive unilateral claim of one civilization to universality.

To put it in philosophical terms, and to go back to my imitation test, the methodology for possible tianxia must be what’s called relational rationality. Or, to put it another way: existence presupposes coexistence. Everyone can live if — and only if — they let live; otherwise everyone will suffer from unbearable retaliation. This truth is captured in the Confucian concept of ren, which literally means that being is only defined in relation to others, not by individual existence.

Aversion to risk is much stronger when guided by relational rationality than when guided by individual rationality. As I define it, relational rationality emphasizes the minimization of mutual hostility over the maximization of self-interest. Tianxia suggests that relational rationality should have priority over individual rationality in political and economic practices.

Relational rationality and universal consent are essential for a sound world order that includes all peoples. Confucius was the first to have understood this and proffered his principle that one becomes established if and only if one lets others be established, and one is improved if and only if one lets others improve. Hence, tianxia could be named the “Confucian optimum” as a more acceptable alternative to the so-called self-interest-driven “Pareto optimal.”

I can think of no better overarching concept for governing our present world, which is, more than ever, an interdependence of plural identities. Seeking to maximize self-interest in such a world is only a recipe for endless conflict to the detriment of all.?"

More information

Book

* Book: Chinese Visions of World Order. Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics. Edited by Ban Wang, with contributions from Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Lin Chun, et al. Duke University Press, 2017

URL = https://www.dukeupress.edu/chinese-visions-of-world-order

The Confucian doctrine of tianxia (all under heaven)' outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to Chinese Visions of World Order examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system.

Table of Contents:

Introduction / Ban Wang 1

Part I. Tianxia, Confucianism, and Empire

1. Tianxia and the Invention of Empire in East Asia / Mark Edward Lewis and Hsieh Mei-yu 25

2. From Empire to State: Kang Youwei, Confucian Universalism, and Unity / Wang Hui 49

3. The Chinese World Order and Planetary Sustainability / Prasenjit Duara 65

Part II. Tianxia, Cross-Cultural Learning, and Cosmopolitanism

4. The Moral Vision in Kang Youwei's Book of the Great Community / Ban Wang 87

5. Greek Antiquity, Chinese Modernity, and the Changing World Order / Yiquan Zhou 106

6. Realizing Tianxia: Traditional Values and China's Foreign Policy / Daniel A. Bell 129

Part III. Tianxia and Socialist Internationalism

7. Tianxia and Postwar Japanese Sinologists' Vision of the Chinese Revolution: The Cases of Nishi Junzo and Mizoguchi Yuzo / Viren Murthy 149

8. China's Lost World of Internationalism / Lin Chun 177

9. China's Tianxia Worldlings: Socialist and Postsocialist Cosmopolitanisms / Lisa Rofel 212

Part IV. Tianxia and Its Discontents

10. The Soft Power of the Constant Soldier: or, Why We Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the PLA / Haiyan Lee 237

11. Tracking Tianxia: On Intellectual Self-Positioning / Chishen Chang and Kuan-Hsing Chen 267