Dao (2018) 17:147–151

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-017-9596-0

Zhao, Tingyang 趙汀陽, A Possible World

of All-under-the-Heaven System: The World Order
in the Past and for the Future 天下的當代性: 世界秩序的實
踐和想像
Beijing 北京: Zhongxin Chubanshe 中信出版社, 2016, 283 pages

Cheng YUAN 1

Published online: 21 December 2017

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2017

Since the first publication of The Tianxia System: A Philosophy for the World Institu-
tion 天下體系: 世界制度哲學導論 (Nanjing 南京: Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe 江蘇教育出
版社) in 2005, ZHAO Tingyang’s 趙汀陽 philosophical construction of the tianxia 天下
(all-under-the-heaven) theory has greatly influenced philosophy, theories of interna-
tional relations, China studies, and public discussion. It also brings about heated debate
and invites criticism. Ten years later his new book, A Possible World of All-under-the-
Heaven System 天下的當代性, draws attention again. The reader might be interested in:
What developments or improvements has Zhao made in this new work? How would he
respond to criticisms, doubts, and questions with regard to his earlier writing? In the
Introduction of this book, Zhao starts from “re-defining political conception from
tianxia” and states his theoretical motif clearly: by changing the starting point of
political analysis and shifting the basic conceptual “units” or “entities” in considering
global political issues from “nations” to “world (tianxia),” Zhao wants to overturn the
patterns of political thought, or in his words, “political grammars” (3), which have been
systematically dominated by modern political theories. The three chapters that follow
the Introduction therefore can be regarded as the historical presentation of this guiding
idea. Roughly in sequence of history, Zhao explores the creation of the tianxia idea in
the Zhou 周 dynasty, its development throughout Chinese history, and its current
situation. How could the Zhou, as a single feudal principality, rule a large number of
subordinate feudal states? Zhao ascribes it to the political design of Zhou and the
openness of the tianxia system that could incorporate heterogeneous political powers
into a common political framework. Moreover, Zhou’s tianxia did not perish along with

* Cheng YUAN
yycc9958@sina.com

1
Department of Philosophy, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100089, People’s Republic of China
148 Cheng YUAN

the replacement of the Qin 秦 dynasty’s centralized system. On the contrary, this “all-
inclusiveness principle” remained influential in the course of Chinese history as an
innate spirit and finally produced the great picture of various and plural political entities
within one common structure. In modern times, the tianxia principle encounters the
Western system, which is presented as the Westphalian system and the idea of
independent states-sovereignty. For Zhao, there is no hope that this Western system
can save the world from division, even though different nations are willing to cooperate
with international organizations (e.g., the UN) and settle conflicts through the making
and enforcement of law, conventions, and contracts. The reason is that these cooper-
ative organizations and conventions are formed on the basis of the very fact of divisions
and the implicit principle of independence. The effort of healing the division implies
acknowledgement of this division. That is to say, if we do not think of the parts
(nations) from the perspective of the whole (world) at the very beginning, we will
never combine the parts to form a whole later. This is the difference between “inter-
national” and “global” and the methodological significance of tianxia: thinking of
nations (parts) from the perspective of the world (whole), fundamentally and entirely.
Generally speaking, in this book Zhao tries to locate a point to connect his tianxia
theory with the development of Chinese history. In many ways he makes fruitful
observations by this connection, such as presenting his “vortex model” (xuanwo moshi
漩渦模式) to explain the historical dynamics of China which, as an internal force, drives
the development of Chinese history (135); or proposing a mutual circulating structure
of “tianxia-state-family” to replace the common view of co-structure of family-state
(81), the new interpretation of the Great Wall (201), and so on. In this review, however,
I will show his ideas mainly by clarifying the prevalent critiques, controversies, and
misunderstandings about Zhao’s tianxia theory since the publication of his Tianxia
System ten years ago. I take this clarification as a central task not to defend the author
himself but to highlight the methodological significance that Zhao’s theory could
have—especially its significance on political epistemology that readers and
commentators usually neglect.
One of the common critiques comes from the perspective of historical studies, which
either blame that Zhao distorts historical resources (e.g., historian GE Zhaoguang 葛兆
光 holds this view), or point out Zhao’s insufficient attention to historical texts. To this,
I shall say that Zhao’s theory is historically-based indeed, but basically through a
theoretical medium with explicit methodological orientation. For him, the Chinese
story is told through theories (“China is a story, tianxia is a theory.” See p. 1).
Undoubtedly, tianxia is part of Chinese experiences, but it seems to him an experiment
in political thought that stems from this “Chinese experience.” On the one hand, even
when the idea of tianxia got its sufficient form, viz. the Zhou 周 dynasty, the scope of
tianxia at that time was less than half of the modern China, and the actual size of area
and scale of governance is hard to compare with that of the entire modern “world”; on
the other hand, the Zhou dynasty, as the paradigmatic model of tianxia in history,
sustained about eight hundred years. During the last five hundred years, it finally went
into fall, and tianxia finally crumbled as “a good order” (118). All of these historical
facts seem to undermine the validity of tianxia theory, but they do not invalidate the
paradigmatic role of the Zhou’s tianxia as creative political practice. Although the
“world” that the people of the Zhou could see at that time was geographically limited, it
still offered enough space to explore the basic principles in multi-political game and
Review of A Possible World of All-under-the-Heaven System 149

possible strategies to reach a kind of compatible order. As Zhao says: “The size of area
is not essential; it is the consciousness of ‘tianxia’ that matters” (55). The institution of
the Zhou dynasty was finally replaced by the centralized authority of the Qin 秦
dynasty, but its attempt at combining plural political entities (fiefdoms) into one sharing
political system-net can still be regarded as significant “methodological legacy in
politics” (127) that the system of the Zhou left to our time.
Another critique is concerned with the feasibility of Zhao’s idea theory. The critique
reckons Zhao’s tianxia as some kind of Utopia and suspects whether this utopian-like
theory can be brought into the non-ideal political circumstances in which we actually
operate (e.g., XU Yingjin 徐英瑾 maintains that the improvement approach is better than
the reconstruction approach). First of all, it is a misjudgment to ascribe Zhao’s tianxia
to utopian theory or “utopianism.” Zhao’s project of tianxia neither shares similar
religious form of belief with Christian Utopia nor attempts to build Communist
colonies like the classical socialist. In the Communist colonies, for example, all
particular social institutions and technical details have been planned: from land own-
ership and property distribution to schedule of labor. More importantly, the establish-
ment of tianxia serves as a “methodology” to widen the horizon of political thought.
We can say that Zhao establishes “the best possible world” mainly out of a logical
reason. That is to say, according to the “symmetry principle” (9), if there is a “worst
possible world” as one extreme presented by “Hobbes’ hypothesis,” then logically
speaking there should also be a “best possible world” without insecurity and hostility.
Together this “best possible world” and “worst possible world” outline the space of
political thought. Possibly Zhao himself is aware that many readers misjudged his idea
of tianxia as Utopian, so in this new book he claims clearly that his “best possible
world” cannot be taken as “a perfect world” (10). To sum up, what interests Zhao most
is the logical structure of “possible worlds” and the methodological issues: if we take
the “world” itself as the primary subject in global-political considerations, what
different rules of political games with peaceful purpose can we expect? If we take a
tentative change in political grammar, what potential consequences in political thought
can be produced and what difficulties of the present political theories can be revealed?
So to speak, Zhao’s construction of tianxia is not to envisage a best world but to inquire
into the best conditions or assumptions (especially in thought) that would make this
ideal world possible. Put it more explicitly, it is not related to the question of what a best
possible world actually should be (its peculiar components or blocks to build this ideal
world), but to the question of if this best world is desirable, in which way or how we
should think of it; more fundamentally, how we should start to think of it.
To make this point clearer, I would like to adopt the “scientific analogies” in the
current debate of political philosophy. In order to explain the methodological role of
“ideal theory” and especially to defend Rawls’s perfect assumption of justice, the
proponents take the function of ideal model in scientific discovery as support (see
Jenann Ismael, “A Philosopher of Science Looks at Idealization in Political Theory,”
Social Philosophy and Policy, 33 [2016]: 11–31). In scientific research, such as those
on mechanics or thermodynamics, by suppressing exogenous factors and isolating
certain relationships, the scientific laws are clearly revealed; similarly, theorists in ideal
political theory (e.g., Rawls) take the approach of idealization and focus on the ideal
part of the theory, thus making the political principle more transparent and the
foundation of justice more clear. I think Zhao’s idea theory of tianxia does the same:
150 Cheng YUAN

by suppressing distractive factors and systematizing our understanding of the world-

order, Zhao makes his notion of “world-order” transparent and possibly opens a
horizon in which fundamental relations in a global society can be detected.
In general, it is a less interesting work to conjecture about the author’s theoretical
motivation when he raises a theory. However, it seems very attractive for some
commentators of Zhao to do just that. Some of them appreciate the fact that Zhao’s
“rethinking China” presents China’s rising consciousness of responsibility. By contrast,
the skeptics believe that Zhao’s work encourages a discourse of the “rise of China” and
aims to justify her central position as a particular political power. For them, the revival
of tianxia is essentially a kind of anachronism—by returning to the “golden age” to
resolve modern problems, which is “at best disingenuous and at worst dangerous”
(June Teufel Dreyer, “China’s Tianxia: Do All Under Heaven Need One Arbiter?” Yale
Global, October 30, 2014).
Certainly, Zhao’s theory is so specific that one can hardly get it away from the
ideological considerations. However, it is still misleading to read Zhao’s theory of
political knowledge simply as a “political action” (Alain Le Pichon,“Looking for a
Transcultural Order in Time and History—Some Remarks about ZHAO Tingyang’s
Philosophy of Tian Xia,” World Philosophy 6 [2008]: 98–109). First, Zhao’s work is
primarily a philosophical investigation with conceptual analysis rather than a pure
claim of cultural ideas. The reader can see this from “Lexicon of Tianxia,” an appendix
to this new book. Second, it is not fair to take Zhao’s tianxia as the theoretical
justification for a particular political power. According to Zhao’s project, tianxia is a
kind of political net-like governance which consists of a central power and other
decentralized parts as participants of the global-political game. Among this gover-
nance-net, it allows a position as the highest political entity. Indeed, the label of “the
central power” makes it easy for readers to associate it with one particular sovereign
state nowadays, likely America or China as an alternative. However, in Zhao’s project,
this “central power” in principle can be played by any power or participant in the global
political game, regardless of America, China, or any other possibility. I think that it is
the reason why Zhao, at the end of this book, declares that “the tianxia system belongs
to the whole world rather than any particular states” and “it is open to every nation and
her people and is better regarded as a universal invitation to all of them” (279). In other
words, it is the tianxia—as an entire system and the condition of keeping this structure/
system—rather than any particular nation, that really matters. Therefore, readers
(including Zhao himself) should refrain from excessive association with ideological
attention, and shift from the question of “who” would take the central position or who
will replace “whom” to the stringency of tianxia theory itself.
It is not a good place here to sort out all the misconceptions of Zhao’s tianxia idea.
The impartial interpretations I illustrated above show the same neglect about the
methodological significance of Zhao’s theory. However, I should say that these mis-
understandings partly stem from the author himself. In Zhao’s earlier book The Tianxia
System: A Philosophy for the World Institution in 2005, be it his theoretical advocacy of
“rethinking of China” or his radical negation of Western contributions to the
world-consciousness, his pro-China views and dichotomic narration of China
versus the West are clearly shown. In this new book, Zhao explicitly or
implicitly continues these comparisons: starting from the binary political stories
of tianxia (China) and Polis (Greek-West) (50), he proceeds to the contrast
Review of A Possible World of All-under-the-Heaven System 151

between the Chinese “becoming” (bian 變) as the Chinese way of being and the
Western static “conceptualization” of being (140), and between the idea of
“corporative politics” of Xunzi 荀子 and “conquest the externalities” of Hobbes
(232). This antithetic narration develops very obviously in the last part of
Chapter 3. When he reflects on the limitations of modern Western politics,
we can see an obvious style of postcolonial criticism. The use of such
concepts/terms as “neo-imperialism” and “American-imperialism” and intensive
critiques about “dollar hegemony,” “human-rights hegemony,” “technology he-
gemony,” and “hegemony of English” (244–246) lead the reader to make
excessive associations in political ideological considerations. This ideological
style directly results in his judgments about Western theories of cosmopolitism
and global justice. In criticizing Rawls’ global political theory, he believes that
Rawls abolishes the “difference principle” and denounces Rawls’ intervention-
ism simply as a kind of “modern neo-imperialism.” This astonishing claim is
directly at odds with Rawls’ claims. In both Political Liberalism and The Law
of People, Rawls maintains the principle of liberal tolerance to nonliberal
societies, whether they are religiously dominated or hierarchically well-ordered.
In fact, in the search of a universal foundation and an independent framework
compatible for various forms of traditions, Rawls should not be Zhao’s target of
attack but rather his possible partner in conversation. Zhao is well known for
his methodological claim of “non-stand analysis,” but it seems that there is a
gap between the “non-stand” and this prima facie “Sino-stand.”
In conclusion, the “ideal theory” is an encouraging enterprise and the tianxia theory
is still a promising exploration: by renewing the framework and starting-point of our
global political thought, the intrinsic limitations of modern politics have been revealed.
Zhao makes a valuable move, but there is further work to do. For example, if the
problems of global politics can only be resolved on a world scale, how about the
problem that different worlds have different notions of “world” and use the term in
different senses? Also, as Zhao describes, the tianxia system can be seen as a compet-
ing game; that being the case, what is the real “shared benefit” in this world nowadays
for the players to compete? Is it the “living space” (or German “Lebensraum”) or the
humane value of a common community? A similar question is: if the present-day
globalization movement is destined to fail, can we find some positive factors that could
promote the emergence of world-consciousness? Responding to these questions seems
to be more theoretically meaningful and interesting, rather than constantly sticking to
the question of the so-called “Chinese-style” global politics.