By Christopher A. Ford
China is rising as a twenty-first-century worldwide superpower. even supposing China is a global chief in glossy enterprise and know-how, its old background exerts a strong strength on its international coverage. This name strains China's self-image and its position on the planet order because the age of Confucius.
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Additional info for The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations
Sample text
Just as a family can have only one father, so can stable, long-term order in a Confucian system really exist only under a single ruler—a sage-king whose virtue-derived authority unifies the Sinic geographic core and causes even remote barbarian tribes to turn in tribute toward the Son of Heaven as iron filings toward a magnet. In effect, Confucian ethics thus presumes that there cannot be interstate relations in the sense that we conceive them in the modern West. The notion of an irresistible, virtue-driven dynamic of progressive imperial accretion is central to the traditional Confucian conception of world order.
6 This upheaval marked the end of what was thereafter known as the Eastern Zhou period. The succeeding Western Zhou period saw the further decline of Zhou fortunes, with the Zhou wang (king) reduced from the status of feudal overlord to merely the head of one of a number of rival kingdoms that grew out of the remnants of his former domains. , were known during their preeminence as the pa (or ba)—a term variously translated as overlord or (more commonly) hegemon—of China. ), no state ruler remained with enough power to preside as pa by coercing the others.
Thus it is that a great state, by condescending to small states, gains them for itself, and that small states, by abasing themselves to a great state, win it over to them. In the one case the abasement leads to gaining adherents, in the other case to procuring favor. ”9 As did the Confucians, Lao Zi saw harmony as more a vertical than a horizontal virtue. Also like the Confucians, the philosophical Taoists viewed Chinese Power and Order in Other Chinese Traditions 41 history as a story of moral decline from a legendary golden age in which the people were happy and prosperous and harmony prevailed.