Duke University Press Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics

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. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou Review " Chinese Visions of World Order is the best kind of edited volume; it gives the impression that its diverse array of contributions have been curated rather than commissioned."--Salvatore Babones "MCLC Resource Center" (2/1/2018 12:00:00 AM) "Compiles a fascinating multiplicity of philosophical thoughts and historiographic accounts of the Chinese tianxia . . . . A good read for anyone interested in Chinese intellectual history and philosophy."--Nele Noesselt "The China Quarterly" (6/2/2018 12:00:00 AM) Review "Literally meaning 'all under heaven,' tianxia is a paradigmatic figure of universality. Like any concept, however, it also carries specific meanings and connotations, and this pathbreaking volume examines the various ways tianxia has been deployed in Chinese philosophy and politics from antiquity to the present." Author: Carlos Rojas, coeditor of Source: Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China From the Author Ban Wang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University and the author of several books, most recently, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China. About the Author Ban Wang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University and the author of several books, most recently, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China.