They who accord with Heaven are preserved;
they who rebel against Heaven perish.
— Mencius
王道 和 霸道
Wangdao and Bàdào
It was November 28 in the year Taishō 13, according to the Japanese nengō calendar, which also happened to be Year 13 of the Republic of China’s post-imperial minguo calendar, and the year 1924 by the Gregorian calendar. Sun Yat-sen, the Premier of the Kuomintang, had traveled to Kobe, on the north shore of Osaka Bay, upon the invitation of Tōyama Mitsuru, the founder of the paramilitary Black Dragon Society, a Japanese ultra-nationalist, and (seemingly paradoxically) an ardent Pan-Asianist. After his audience with Tōyama, Sun made his way to the auditorium of the Kobe Prefectural Girls’ High School, where he was to deliver what would become one of his most famous speeches, on a subject near and dear to his and Tōyama’s hearts, namely da yazhouzhuyi, or Pan-Asianism.
The previous year, in a letter to the venerable Japanese statesman Inukai Tsuyoshi, Sun had expressed his admiration for Japan’s modernization efforts, acknowledging that “Japan’s Meiji Restoration was the cause of the Chinese revolution, and the Chinese revolution was the result of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Both are originally connected and work together to achieve the revival of East Asia.” As a fierce critic and opponent of colonialism, however, the Chinese premier had grown increasingly concerned about Japan’s adoption of the imperialist tendencies of its Western models, and so he presented his audience with an overture and a stark choice:
我们讲’大亚洲主义’，以王道为基础，是为打不平。是求一切民众为和平解放的文化，你们日本民族，既得到欧美的霸道文化，又有亚洲王道文化的本质，从今以后对於世界文化的前途，究竟是做西方霸道的鹰犬或是做东方王道的干城，就在你们日本国民去详审慎择。
[We propose Pan-Asianism, based on the kingly way, to fight injustice. It is a movement that seeks the peaceful liberation of all people. You, the Japanese people, have inherited both the hegemonic culture of Europe and America while possessing the essence of the kingly way of Asia. From now on, the future of world culture, whether to be the henchmen of Western hegemony or the bulwark of Eastern kingly way, is for you, the Japanese people, to choose in a careful and deliberate fashion.]
Adherence to the Confucian concept of the moderate, cooperative “kingly way” (wangdao), defined in opposition to the “hegemonic way” or “tyrannical way” (bàdào), would, according to Sun, ensure that “not only China and Japan but all the peoples in East Asia will unite together to restore the former status of Asia.” Some months earlier, Sun had complained in a speech on Chinese nationalism that “other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat.” Pan-Asianism was meant to turn the tables by creating a “united front against the Occidentals.”
As China seduces its international partners and former rivals with talk of multilateralism … at home it continues to crack down on any and all forms of dissent.
Sun Yat-sen’s speech on da yazhouzhuyi, while disseminated far and wide and much read to this day, was not entirely persuasive. Curiously, given his close relationship with the stridently anti-communist Tōyama Mitsuru, Sun Yat-sen was full of praise for the nascent Soviet Union. “She insists on the rule of Right and denounces the rule of Might,” he maintained against all evidence. “She advocates the principle of benevolence and justice and refuses to accept the principles of utilitarianism and force. She maintains Right and opposes the oppression of the majority by the minority.” As Sun Yat-sen was delivering his speech, the Red Army and the Cheka were in fact wrapping up a brutal campaign of repression against the Georgian people in the aftermath of the August Uprising, a terrible crime in and of itself, and a harbinger of even worse to come. It is difficult to understand how anyone, let alone a political philosopher of Sun Yat-sen’s calibre, could arrive at the conclusion that the Soviet Union was based on anything other than “the principles of utilitarianism and force.”
This fundamental misunderstanding of the brutal nature of the Soviet regime — bàdào made manifest — exposed an almost childlike naïveté present in Sun’s worldview, as did his fateful misreading of the Japanese partiality toward Pan-Asianism. The paramount leader of China’s 1911 Revolution would not live to see it, but the Empire of Japan would indeed pursue its own sort of Pan-Asianism, in the form of the Dai Tōa Kyōeiken, the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, an expansionist project that would result in 20 or 30 million deaths in China alone. Imperial Japanese Pan-Asianism would not resemble Sun’s “kingly way,” instead being epitomized by the infamous Sankō Sakusen, the “Three Alls” policy — kill all, burn all, loot all.
The kingly way is seldom faithfully traveled in this earthly vale of tears, but it remains an attractive idea all the same. China’s present-day paramount leader, Xi Jinping, is particularly enamored with the concept, speaking as he does of the need to achieve “fairness and impartiality through wangdao.” Yet he has also been known to quote a maxim of Chairman Mao’s, as during his address at a meeting of the Standing Committee of Lankao County, Henan Province, held on May 9, 2014:
身为党员，铁的纪律就必须执行。毛泽东同志说，路线是“王道”，纪律是“霸道”，这两者都不可少。
As a Party member, you must adhere to iron discipline. Comrade Mao Zedong said that the guiding principle the “kingly way,” and discipline is the “hegemonic way.” Both are indispensable.
An extraordinary admission, if you think about it. Tyranny, for the Chinese Communist Party, is “indispensable.” Whereas Sun Yat-Sen urged his countrymen and his neighbors to follow the kingly way, Mao and Xi have interpreted the kingly way as something to which lip service should occasionally be paid, while following the hegemonic way through domestic persecution, “wolf warrior” diplomacy saber-rattling, militarization of South Sea islands, the encirclement of Taiwan, and the despoliation of the oceans by distant water fishing fleets. Xunzi, the Confucian philosopher of the late Warring States period, defined wangdao as “the way of humane authority,” something seldom in evidence in Beijing’s halls of power, as opposed to bàdào, which has always defined the communist regime.
天下
Tianxia
Towards the end of 2016, the deputy director general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Department of Asian Affairs, Chen Hai, took issue with South Korea’s plans to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile systems, which had the potential to tip the strategic balance in a prospective East Asian theater. Officials from South Korea’s Foreign Ministry reported overhearing Chen complain that “a small country was refusing to listen to a big country.” And here we encounter another ancient Chinese philosophical concept, that of tianxia, “all under heaven.”
Given that Chinese emperors, the very sons of Heaven, were said to have been given the Mandate of Heaven (tiānmìng, lit. “Heaven’s command”), it stood to reason that he (or she, in the case of the Tang dynasty’s Wu Zetian) who ruled China was entitled to universal imperium. There would be, of course, various tributary states and crude barbarians living along the borders of the empire, but it was ultimately the goal for China’s rulers to “unify all under Heaven.” This was a worldview that did not survive sustained contact with the West, since the many military defeats, the Unequal Treaties, the imposition of foreign-controlled concessions, and a “century of humiliation” necessarily undermined the supposed primacy of the Middle Kingdom. And even given the ongoing geopolitical rise of China, the notion of tianxia has become increasingly untenable in an increasingly multipolar world of nation-states, hence recent attempts to adapt it for present purposes.
In books like The Tianxia System: An Introduction to the Philosophy of a World Institution (2005), Investigations of the Bad World: Political Philosophy as the First Philosophy (2009), and The Whirlpool That Produced China: Stag Hunting on the Central Plain (2024), the Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang has sought to present a kinder, gentler version of tianxia. In Zhao’s conception, “all under heaven” is really a sort of double entendre, owing to the various meanings of “heaven,” and can therefore refer to all the land under the sky, or a global institution governing those lands, or the totality of human hearts and minds. Zhang Feng of Tsinghua University has summarized this worldview thusly:
The tianxia system thus imagines a world institution that can: 1) make the common interests of the whole a priority over individual interests, so that the benefits of joining the system will always be greater than the benefits of leaving it; 2) create a structure of harmony where individual interests are so interlocking and mutually constituted that anyone’s gain will always result in a gain for others, and anyone’s loss will always lead to a loss for others; and, 3) create common values by being inclusive of all cultures while denying the dominance of any one of them, so as to transform enemies into friends and realize world peace.
There is something deeply Confucian about Zhao’s vision of a tianxia system that operates to “the exclusion of nothing and no one,” and is based on harmony — “Western thought can think about conflict, but only Chinese thought can think about harmony,” he writes — and the present-day Chinese Communist Party, with its embrace of ersatz Neo-Confucianism, has eagerly adopted this less literal interpretation of “all under heaven.”
As with the doctrine of the “kingly way,” Xi Jinping has become quite enamored with the notion of tianxia. Speeches and other forms of government propaganda regularly feature phrases like “all under heaven as one family” (天下一家) and “a sincere desire for a community with a shared future for mankind” (人类命运共同体的真诚愿望). At the same time, Xi’s idea of a “common destiny for mankind” differs considerably from that of Zhao. Olivia Cheung of the China Institute at SOAS University of London has argued that
Xi’s vision of tianxia suggests that it is unrivalled Chinese power and universal acceptance of Chinese influence that sustain world peace and prosperity. Xi conceives of economic globalisation and international institutions, especially the United Nations, as instruments for advancing tianxia, not as instruments of the liberal international order, hence Beijing invests in making them more reflective of China’s interests.
What Zhao had envisioned as a set of principles aimed at bringing peace, harmony, and repose to a “bad world,” a “failed world,” is instead being used to further specifically Chinese interest, which is why so many critics have derided Zhao’s version tianxia as either utopian or cynical or outmoded; Chishen Chang, in his 2011 article “Tianxia system on a snail’s horns,” dismissed Zhao’s theory as mere “chinoiserie,” while Henry Hopwood-Phillips has called it “cod-philosophy” and “a polemical apologia for Chinese exceptionalism.”
Yet there is something to be said for Zhao Tingyang’s quixotic attempt to bring tianxia into the twenty-first century. His emphasis on “non-exclusion” and “internal harmony of diversity,” when considered within the context of Xi Jinping’s campaign of Sinicization, surveillance, and suppression, is subtly provocative, a philosophical Trojan Horse of sorts. Real Confucians believe in “harmony but not uniformity” (和而不同), a principle wholly alien to the communist authorities in China, and by resuscitating the idea of tianxia, Zhao has, one could make a case, managed to smuggle traditional concepts alien to scientific socialism back into Chinese political and philosophical discourse, which is not such a bad thing, chinoiserie and cod-philosophy allegations aside. Whether this will eventually pay off remains, for the time being, more a matter of hope than expectation.
宽容
Kuan Rong
Given the scale of political and religious repression in China, the constant raids conducted against temples and churches, the destruction of religious monuments, the soul-crushing indoctrination campaigns, the cynical manipulation of state-recognized religions for propaganda purposes, the crackdowns on dissidents, and the internment of millions of souls in “reeducation” camps, and so on, it is a sick irony that so many Chinese communists fancy themselves Neo-Confucians. Where, in any of these enormities, is any inkling of the perhaps most important Confucian, and indeed Chinese, value of all, that of kuan rong, or tolerance? (RELATED: Sede Vacante: China’s Provocations Against the Vatican)
Kuan rong is derived from the words for “broad” and “inclusion.” In Confucianism, as Xunwu Chen has noted, “the earth is the paradigmatic example of tolerance,” effortlessly bearing as it does a profusion of mountains, oceans, and species, and Confucius himself spoke constantly of the need to accommodate varying beliefs and values. In Taoism, meanwhile, we find the sage Zhuangzi advising his readers that “constantly tolerating different things, and bearing different peoples, this is the supreme virtue,” and even in the more rigid philosophy of Legalism we encounter, in the philosopher Li Si’s Memorial on the Proposed Expulsion of Foreigners [谏逐客书] the assertion that the “Tai mountains becomes a great mountain as it is now because it does not exclude different soils amid their diversity. An ocean becomes a vast ocean because it does not exclude streams amid their diversity.” (RELATED: Confronting the Shadows: Shūsaku Endō’s Rediscovered Masterpieces)
There was a time, early in Xi Jinping’s reign, when it seemed as if the previous regime’s policy of “Reform and Opening Up” might lead to a more tolerant Chinese state. During a February 18, 2014, summit with a Taiwanese delegation including Honorary Kuomintang Chairman Lien Chan, Xi Jinping waxed eloquent on the subject of national rejuvenation, cross-strait cooperation, and the shared legacy provided by Sun Yat-sen:
两岸同胞要携手同心，共圆中华民族伟大复兴的中国梦。实现中华民族伟大复兴，实现国家富强、民族振兴、人民幸福，是孙中山先生的夙愿，是中国共产党人的夙愿，也是近代以来中国人的夙愿。我们说的中国梦，就是这个民族夙愿的生动表述。
Compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait must work together to realize the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, achieving national prosperity, national rejuvenation, and the people’s happiness, such was the long-cherished wish of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the long-cherished wish of the Chinese Communists, and the long-cherished wish of the Chinese people since modern times. The Chinese Dream we speak of is a vivid expression of this long-cherished national aspiration.
How different the rhetoric from the Zhongnanhai has become a decade or so later, as Xi talks ominously of the inevitability of Taiwanese reunification, and Chinese warships and bombers circle the democratic island like vultures on a daily basis. Oppression at home and revanchism abroad — where is the kingly way of wangdao, the harmony of tianxia, the broad-mindedness of kuan rong in any of this?
In an effort to exploit pervasive anti-American animus in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s multi-front trade war, the Chinese have been waging a sustained charm offensive, extolling the virtues of multilateralism and cooperation, as opposed to “unilateralism, protectionism and economic bullying.” Conciliatory moves have been made towards India, with the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently suggesting that the two Asian powers must become “partners” rather than “adversaries or threats,” while the Chinese ambassador to India, Xu Feihong, has lamented how prevalent “power politics and the law of the jungle” have become. This persuasion campaign appears to be bearing fruit, viz. numerous global surveys showing that China has overtaken the United States in net favorability, and polls that show Australians are more concerned about American tariffs than China’s military build-up. Like it or not, a hit to the pocket-book right now evidently matters more than some notional Pacific geopolitical armageddon at some point in the future.
As China seduces its international partners and former rivals with talk of multilateralism (多边主义), win-win cooperation (合作共赢), “seeking common ground while maintaining differences,” and the need for a “diversity of cultures of development paths,” &c., at home it continues to crack down on any and all forms of dissent. Pro-democracy activists are still being arrested, house churches raided, hundreds of stupas and statues torn down in Sichuan’s Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and elsewhere. Such is the true face of the communist regime, disfigured as it is by bàdào, and only partially hidden by a sham mask of indoctrination and propaganda. Until the Chinese authorities begin to follow the kingly way, embrace the internal harmony of diversity, and accept that supreme virtue of tolerance, they should never be considered trusted partners in the world community, and our own policymakers would do well to press this point home, rather than risk driving allies (present, erstwhile, or prospective) into Beijing’s waiting, grasping arms.
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