About the Book
In this succinct yet ample work, Zhao Tingyang, one of China’s most distinguished intellectuals, provides a profoundly original philosophical interpretation of China’s story and also develops a Chinese worldview for the future. Over the past few decades, the question Where did China come from? has absorbed the thoughts of many of China's best historians. Zhao, keenly aware of the persistent and pernicious asymmetry in the prevailing way scholars have gone about theorizing China according to Western concepts and categories, has tasked both Chinese and Western scholars to "rethink China." Zhao introduces what he terms a distinctively Chinese centripetal "whirlpool" model of world order to interpret the historical progression of China’s tianxia (All under Heaven) identity construction. In this book, Zhao forwards a compelling thesis not only on how we should understand China, but also on how China until recently has understood itself.
Table of Contents
Foreword to the Chinese Edition
Foreword to the English Edition
New Foreword by Odd Arne Westad
Translator’s Preface
Introduction. A Redefinition of Tianxia as a Political Concept: Problems, Conditions, and Methods
Part I The Tianxia Conceptual Story
1. Politics Starting with the World
2. The Three-Tiered World of Tianxia
3. Correlating with Tian (peitian 配天)
4. Institutional Layout
5. No Outside (wuwai 无外)
6. Circle of Family and Tianxia
7. Tianming 天命 (Heavenly Invoked Order)
8. Virtuosic Power and Harmony
9. Why Might Good Order Collapse?
10. Tianxia as Method
Part II The Encompassing Tianxia of China
11. A Whirlpool Model
12. A Condensed Version of Tianxia
13. Why Go Stag Hunting in the Central Plain?
14. Existing through Change
Part III The Future of Tianxia Order
15. A World History Yet to Begin
16. Kantian Questions and Huntington's Problem
17. Two Types of Exteriority: Naturalist and Constructivist
18. Borders and No Outside
19. Materializing Conditions for a New Tianxia
20. New Tianxia: A Vocabulary
Appendix. Jizi's Lost Democracy: A Continuing
Narration of Tianxia—Toward a Smart Democracy
Notes
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index
