Chinese World Order John K Fairbank1

Traditional Chinese World Order
Li Zhaojie {James Li)

With nearly five-thousand years of recorded history, Chinese civilization
is one of the oldest in the world. Until the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644
1911), age, culture, size and wealth had made China the natural center of East
Asia and perhaps, also one of the most powerful countries in the world.
During this long period of history, however, geographical barriers insulated
China from regular contacts with the other centers of civilizations. As a result,
the development of Chinese civilization had been largely indigenous; it owed
very little to the world beyond East Asia.4
The history of China was by no means that of an isolated country whose

only contacts with other great civilizations were with its closest neighbors. On
the contrary, more than two millennia before the last century, China's vast
historical records have well-documented instances of relations between the
Chinese on the one hand and West Asian and European peoples on the other.
Outlined below are only a few of the most far-reaching contacts pre-modern
China had with the outside world, of which the earliest date back more than
2,000 years before the Han Dynasty (206 B.C -A.D. 220).5
Seeking allies against the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu), the nomadic enemies of
China's Han Dynasty, the Han Emperor Wudi, in 139 B.C., sent his envoy
^hang Qian to the west across the desert of Xinjiang to establish an alliance
with the Da Tuezhi (Great Yue-chih) people, a Central Asian tribe living in the
Amu-Darya valley in what is now Uzbekistan. Despite great difficulties, ^hang
and his men managed to reach the destination and return to China in 126 B.C.
Seven years later, he set out again for what was then known as the "western
region" (Xiyu) to seek an alliance with the Wnsun people, another central Asian
John King Fairbank, A Preliminary Framework, in: John King Fairbank (ed.), The
Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations (1968), 5.
John King Fairbank, China, A New History (1992), 186.
Noticeably, China is guarded on the east by the endless oceans, on the north by the
barren steppes, on the west by the vast desert, and on the southwest by the world's
highest mountain system.
Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (1975), 3, 6.
China's contacts with the outside world prior to the Opium War (1840-1842) are
outlined in Liu Peihua's Jindai ^hongwai Guanxi Shi (Modern History of China's
Foreign Relations) (in Chinese, 1986), vol. 1, 1-54.
Downloaded from chinesejil.oxfordjournals.org by guest on August 21, 2011
I. China's Contacts with the Outside World prior to Modern

Times
Li, Traditional Chinese World Order
21
6
7
12
Id., 2-4.
C.P. Fitzgerald, The Chinese View of Their Place in the World (reprinted in 1971),
7-8.
Id., 8.
Liu Peihua, above n.5, 5.
Fitzgerald, above n. 7, 9-10.
Liu Peihua, above n.5, 6.
,
Id., 6.
tribe living in the Hi Valley north of the Tarim Basin. In addition to travelling
himself, Zhang also sent his assistants to visit Ferghana, Bactria and Sogdiana
and the oases of central Asia.
These two missions brought China into contact with Hellenistic culture
established by Alexander the Great. They also brought back first-hand
knowledge about the lands of central Asia. For the first time, China came to
know of the existence of the Persian and Indian worlds. Perhaps, the most
significant achievement of these journeys was the opening of what is
commonly known as the Silk Road, the first trade route linking China with the
West.7
In military campaigns during the last quarter of the first century A.D.,
Chinese armies advanced almost to the edge of the Roman Empire. The
description of the Romans was well documented in Han Histories, which
recognized the existence of a people of an equal civilization. The Roman
Empire was honorably called by the Chinese "Da Qin", meaning "Great Qin",
since the Romans were viewed as civilized as the Chinese viewed themselves
(Qin) but taller in stature. The Chinese also discovered that the Roman Empire
had a great demand for China's silk, and promoted the trade. 8 In A.D. 97, a
Chinese envoy was dispatched to the Roman Empire across Persia. When it
prepared to cross the Red Sea, however, the Persians stopped it because they
did not want to see any direct relation between China and Romans, which
would jeopardize their monopoly in the silk trade.
Late in the Han Dynasty, the sea route between the Chinese and the
Romans was also established. In A.D. 166, an embassy from "An Dun King of
Da Qin" arrived at the Han court by sea. The "An Dun King" turned out to be
the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. In A.D. 226, another
Roman merchant, Qin Lun, arrived mjianye (Nanjing),1 and about sixty years
later, shortly after the collapse of the Han Dynasty, another embassy, from
Carus or Diocletia, reached China.
Direct contact between China and the outside world took a new turn
during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907). Indeed, until modern times, the Tang
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13
Fitzgerald, above n.7, 19.

Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization (translated byJ.R. Foster, 1982),
283.
15
Id.
16
Id., 277-281.
17
Id.
Dynasty had been the golden age of China's contacts with foreign
civilizations. Not only was trade with merchants from central Asia through
the Silk Road growing in importance, but the two big currents of civilization
flowing from Persia and India began to spread widely in China. With the
expansion of the Tang frontiers and the augmentation of the dynasty's prestige,
the Tang emperors became involved in the politics of Persian kingdoms. In
A.D. 638, an embassy from Persia arrived in Changan (Xian), the capital of the
Tang Dynasty, to request Chinese aid against the Arabs, who were attacking
their kingdom. Later, when that kingdom perished, its King took refuge in
China, where he was welcomed by the Chinese and also given the post of
officer with palace guards. In A.D. 643, an embassy from the King of Fu Lin
(the Byzantine province of Syria), believed to have been sent to China by the
Eastern Roman Emperor Constans II, was received by the Tang court. '5
By the Tang Dynasty, Buddhism had taken root in China for so long that
it was no longer a foreign religion. Its links with its Indian origin, however,
were renewed and strengthened with the return to Changan in A.D. 645 of the
most renowned of all Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Xuan <ag.'6 In order to
procure classical Buddhist treatises and enlarge his knowledge, Xuan ang, an
already established Chinese monk of Buddhism, set off alone across the deserts
of central Asia in A.D. 628. In a span of seventeen years, he toured what is
now Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan and the whole of India. On his return to
China, he directed until his death the most prolific translating teams in the
whole history of Chinese Buddhism. Moreover, one of his disciples used his
travel notes to compile a general work on the countries that he had visited.
The book provides information about climate, produce, manners and customs,
political systems and history, as well as information about the state of
Buddhism in these various regions of Asia.'
In A.D. 635, a Nestorian monk known in Chinese as A Luo Ben (A-lo-pen)
arrived at the Tang court and was welcomed by the Tang emperor. Shortly
after, he was authorized to translate into Chinese the Nestorian Christian texts
he had brought with him. The translation seems to have been enjoyed by the
court. Soon, the construction of Christian churches in the Tang capital began
and the preaching of the Gospel was ordered. This new religion seemed to
23
18
19
20
Id., 283.
Id., 287-289.
Id., 373-374.
have spread to the provinces, at least to many large cities. A famous discovery
in 1625 in Changan of a bilingual stone tablet in Syriac and Chinese told die
story of the uhen-quite-recent evangelization in China. Nestroianism, however,
scarcely had time to secure Chinese devotees. With the advent of the great
proscription of foreign religions in the years A.D. 841-846, it seemed to have
disappeared completely.
Later, with the rise of the Arab world, Tang's increasing contacts with
central and western Asia led to the introduction of Islam to China. The
earliest contacts between the two cultures can be traced to the time of the
Arab expansion in the area between Mesopotamia and Lake Balkhash, though
there is evidence that Arab merchants brought Islam to Guangzhou (Canton)
by sea at about the same period. The meeting of the two cultures facilitated
the transmission of certain skills from China to the Arab world and then to
Europe. The best known example is that of paper. By the time of the Arab
conquest, Chinese paper manufacturers, weavers, goldsmiths, and painters
were found on the banks of the Tigris.
During the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368), the Mongol expansion
throughout the central and west Asia and up to the lands of the Eastern
Europe renewed the importance of the old trade route that had linked China
and the West since Han times. Contacts between East Asia and the Hellenic
world, however, and later with Islam via the sea route, were available. This
land route was systematically organized by the Mongols, who extended to it
the Chinese institution of postal relays. As a result, contacts between Outer
Mongolia and the northern part of China on the one hand, and Russia,
Persia, and the Mediterranean, on the other, increased remarkably. The
Mongol domain was traversed by men of every nation, and because of the
links between business and administration in the Mongols' political system,
certain foreigners were even allowed to serve as officials in the Yuan court.
By this time, countries of the Western Europe had decided to send
Franciscan missionaries to China. Among many of these Catholic
missionaries, the names of the famous Venetian merchants Niccolo, Maffio,
and Marco Polo will be always remembered. The brothers Niccolo and Maffio
left Venice in 1254 on a journey to China via the land route. They returned to
Italy in 1269, and set off again in 1271 with Marco Polo, son of Niccolo and
nephew of Maffio. They arrived in Beijing in 1275, where they were warmly
welcomed by the Yuan emperor. Very impressed by Marco's extraordinary
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23
precise.
II. Traditional Chinese View of World Order

While these instances, and others, illustrate that throughout Chinese
history, China has dealt with foreign nations, the long-asked question is why
these contacts did not develop into a system of inter-state relations in the sense
in which it emerged in the seventeenth century in the Western world. To
answer this question, one must first bear in mind that, due to the geographical
barriers that blocked China from the outside world, contacts with foreign
nations in the early days were at best a weak, long link, susceptible to constant
interruptions. Although the contacts became more extensive and frequent in
later dynasties, no sustained, purposeful burst of cultural borrowing ever took
place. The significance of these contacts was further weakened by the great
Id., 374-375.
22
23
The naval force comprised several dozen big "treasure-ships", which displaced more
than 3,000 tons apiece. In the first voyage, Zheng He was accompanied by a staff of
70 eunuchs, 180 medical personnel, 5 astrologers, and 300 military officers, who
commanded a force of 26,800 men. See Fairbank, above n.2, 137-138.
Id.
24
Immanuel C.Y. Hsu maintains that the main streams of Chinese and Western
civilizations moved in divergent directions. The major currents of the two
civilizations could not meet until one of them had developed sufficient power and
technology, coupled with interest, to reach the other. See, Hsu, above n.4, 6-7.
talent, the emperor assigned to Marco Polo the task of governing the big
commercial city of Yangzhou, and later, entrusted him with various different
missions. In 1292, after spending about a quarter of a century in East Asia,
Marco Polo returned to Venice. A few years later, his memoirs were published
as the famous Book o/Ser Marco Polo, an immortal masterpiece of information
about oriental civilization during the medieval period.21
The Ming Dynasty (1368-1643) witnessed the rise of great maritime
expeditions conducted by the Ming Emperor Yongle's Grand Eunuch, heng He.
From 1404 to 1433, heng led seven expeditions with large naval forces. The
first three voyages reached the southeast coast of Vietnam, Java, Sumatra,
Malacca, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Siam and the western coast of southern India.
The fourth went beyond India to Hormuz, and the last three visited ports on
the east coast of Africa, as far south as Malindi (near Mombasa). Detachments
of the fleet made special side trips, one of them to Mecca. As was the case with
other envoys to distant countries, the 1405-1433 maritime expeditions led by
Zheng He were followed by the publication of geographical works that enlarged
Chinese knowledge of the oceans and overseas countries and made it more
25
distances and long periods through which these cultural imports had to travel,
and by the fact that these contacts were conducted via intermediaries rather
than through direct interactions with the centers that produced these imports.
More importantly, until the Western powers' invasion in East Asia in the
nineteenth century, the conduct of China's foreign affairs had been primarily
directed under the traditional Chinese world outlook based on a political
philosophy that had been in effect since time immemorial. Thus, in order to
understand China's response to the head-on confrontation with the West in
the nineteenth century and the calamitous consequence thereof, one has to
first understand the nature of the traditional Chinese conception of world
order.
For a long time, geographical barriers kept the whole region of East Asia
separate from the West. To Westerners, East Asia was a remote and seemingly
inaccessible land at the end of the earth. Even today, in European parlance,
"the Far East" still remains in common use. However, the Chinese did not
perceive their world the same way the Westerners did. The Far Eastern region
in Chinese eyes became Tianxia, literally, "all under Heaven," of which China
perceived itself to be the very center.27 Thus, China's name, ^hongguo, denoted
a sense of "the central country" or Middle Kingdom which embraced the
whole world known to it. Such traditional Chinese perception of its place in
the world is what Western historians have meant by the term, "Sinocentrism,"
which generally is used to characterize traditional China's relations with other
nations.
Of course, China's self-image as the center of the world is a false idea in
modern geographical terms. Throughout history, however, such idea
accorded closely with the facts of East Asian experience, and seemed to be
reinforced by practical reality. The Chinese world (tianxia) originated in an
agrarian-based cultural island in the Yellow River valley in what is now North
25
26
Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, China's Entrance into the Family of Nations (1960), 5-6.
Moreover, Fairbank has identified a set of assumptions which underlie the origin
and growth of the traditional Chinese view of world order. See, Fairbank, above n.l,
4-14.
Hsu, id., 6.
27
Fairbank, above n . l , 2.
/ . Sinocentrism and Cultural Supremacy
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28
Historians agree that, in the earliest literate period, China was a group of states
living in what is now North China, linked by culture and by language, and
surrounded by barbarian tribes. See Fitzgerald, above n.7, 3-5.
Wang Gungwu, Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia: A Background Essay, in
Fairbank, above n.l, 37.
31
T.F. Tsiang, China and European Expansion, in Immanuel C.Y. Hsu (ed.),
Readings in Modern Chinese History (1971), 130.
Wang, above n.29.
33
John K. Fairbank, 1 Tributary Trade and China's Relations with the West, Far
Eastern Quarterly (1942), 129.
In the formative age of the Chinese empire, the Chinese civilization moved mainly
southward to the Yangzi River valley, where the way of life was, like that of the
Chinese, sedentary agriculture, but backward. As the nomadic peoples were not rice
cultivators, and the Chinese and southerners were not pastoralists, the southern
China. This area was insulated from the rest of the world by geographical
barriers, and surrounded by minority tribal groups, Man, Ti, Xiong and Di, the
four quarters. It was this closed world that nurtured the growth of Chinese
civilization, which was at no time in direct contact with any people of an equal
level of civilization. The subsequent movement of Chinese civilization, mainly
southward, and then to other parts of China, expanded the Chinese world by
absorbing both surrounding territories and people into the Chinese domain.
The process of such development was so gradual that it was impossible to say
in which year any given territory came under the Chinese control.
The result, however, was solid and invariable: whether through military
campaigns or sustained cultural influence, it was always the "alien" people, or
the "barbarian," to use the Chinese term, who were either ejected from the
Chinese domain or admitted into the Chinese world. Consequently, an
assumption was created that China remained the center of civilization, and
the Chinese form of civilization was superior. Moreover, as Fairbank notes,
the Chinese were impressed that their superiority was not one of more
material power but of culture. Indeed, so great was their virtue, so
overwhelming the achievements of the Middle Kingdom in art and letters and
the art of living, that no barbarian could long resist them.33 In the end, when
the Chinese tianxia reached its outposts, all peripheral countriesKorea,
Annam (Vietnam), Siam (Thailand), Burma, Japan, and the small island
kingdom of Liuqiu (Ryukyu Islands)came under the powerful shadow of
Chinese civilization. China's cultural, political, economic, and military
preeminence caused it to remain the "natural" center of East Asia with a
group of tributary states clustered on its borders. This confirmed the Chinese
in their belief that their civilization was matchless and supreme.
27
2. The Concept of Universal State
Coupled with the sinocentrism was a vague but pervasive sense of allembracing unity of the Chinese tianxia, in which the Chinese emperor claimed
to be Tianzi (the Son of Heaven), who had supreme power to reign and rule
over all human affairs. The Book of Poetry expressed this sentiment in the
following words:
Under the wide heaven, there is no land that is not the Emperor's, and
within the sea-boundaries of the land, there is none who is not a subject
of the Emperor.
peoples could be absorbed, civilized, and made into "Chinese," and gradually
admitted into the circle of the civilized states. The northern nomads, however,
remained beyond this pale. Their steppes yielding no crops, it was profitless to
expand to such a country, and all that could be done was to keep its dangerous
inhabitants from raiding China. Thus, the Great Wall was built up along the ridges
of the northern mountain chain, ranging from the sea coast to the borders of the
central Asia desert. The Great Wall was also regarded as the physical limit of
civilization, beyond which the northern nomads might live, or die, as they would;
their realm was no part of China. Id. See also Fairbank, above n.l, 5; Hsu, above
n.25, 6; and Hsu, above n.4, 6.
35
Book of Poetry (Shi Jing, Xiaoya, Beishan in Chinese) has been literally translated as
Book of Odes. The original Chinese reads pu tian zfri xia, moftu, shuai tu zhi bin, mo.
38
This is cited from Immanuel C.Y. Hsu's translation which is more literal. See Hsu,
above n.4, 6. The most recently revised version of the Chinese-English Bilingual
Series of Chinese Classics (1991), 437 gives the following translation: "Under the
whole heaven, every spot is the sovereign's ground; to the borders of land, every
individual is the sovereign's minister."
Fairbank, above n. 1, 5.
It is said that the Xia stood for a group of separate states loosely linked together by
common culture and by language. Id., 4.
Id, 6.
The notion of a universal state ruled by a universal emperor had long

preceded the first effective political unification of the Chinese world, and
persisted throughout Chinese history.
The existence of China as a unified world may be dated back to
prehistorical times when the Chinese knew their Central Kingdom as Xia
(approximately 2200-1700 B.C.).37 Later, the Shang Dynasty (approximately
1700-1100 B.C.), which replaced Xia, was believed to have once ruled over all
China.38 When the %hou Dynasty (approximately 1100-256 B.C.) replaced the
Shang at the end of the first millennium B.C., the concept of the Middle
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39
Fairbank, above n.2, 49.

The Chinese view of their origin has been firmly held to this date, and seems to be
more supported by archaeological evidence.
Fairbank, above n.l, 5, 279.
As Fitzgerald writes, "The contest of the warring kingdoms, north and south alike,
were seen as the struggles of princely houses for supremacy, not as the conquest of
one people by a foreign race. Statesmen, nobles and warriors could change their
allegiance, travel the land in search of a just prince or a worthy master. This was not
treachery, no sense of betraying the home country deterred men from taking service
under a prince who might become the enemy of the ruler of the wanderer's native
land." Fitzgerald, above n.7, 5.
Kingdom was born. Despite the fact the %hou disintegrated into many
adversary vassals in the periods known as the Spring and Autumn (722^476
B.C.) and the Warring States (475-221 B.C.), and despite the fact that each of
them claimed to be independent by centering themselves in their walled
capital, the notion of universal state had hardly been challenged. These
"inter-state" contests were seen as the rivalries of princely houses for
supremacy instead of the conquest of one people by another.40 There still
existed a general sense of unity based on the same language, and cultural and
racial identity among these states which was expressed in the belief that all the
Chinese peopleboth the rulers and the ruledwere descended from the
Yellow Emperor {Huang Di), the semi-divine Sage King of remote antiquity.
As a result, the subordination to the universal rule of the %hou persisted, at
least in theory.
The Qin's unification of all the warring states and the consequent
founding of China's first centralized dynasty, the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C.,
substantially reinforced the long-held belief that the Chinese world was a
united and centralized whole.4 What followed the Qin Dynasty had been a
history of dynastic cyclethe fall of old dynasties and the rise of new ones.
China as a unified empire under one dynasty rather than divided between two
or more, however, had never ceased to exist. Even when China was subject to
partial conquest by northern nomads during periods of internal chaos and
weakness, the idea of a universal state was only slightly impaired. In order to
administer the conquered land, the nomad invaders, the minority group in
terms of population and the inferior group in the arts of civilization, had to
cooperate with the Chinese majority. To obtain this cooperation the nomad
invaders had to utilize the Chinese tradition and adapt themselves to the arts
29
3. Civilization v. Barbarity
Since the concept of Chinese universal empire was that of an allembracing domain, which included the whole world known to it, it was social
in nature rather than limited by geographical boundaries. For this reason, the
traditional Chinese perception of the world had a characteristic absence of
national sentiment in its modern meaning; the concept of nationality in the
sense in which it appeared at very early times in the West remained unknown
to the Chinese throughout history. In addition, there was no national flag in
Imperial China; there were only dynastic or royal banners. After centuries of
solitary grandeur as the center of Eastern Asia, what the Chinese developed
may be described as a spirit of culturalism, which mattered only with the
distinction between civilization and barbarity. However, barbarity was not
tested by race, religion, language or national origin as the semantic force of
As compared by Fitzgerald, in the former Roman world the differences of race,

language, and later of religion reinforced a separation which the Adriatic already
imposed; in China, however, an identity of race, language, and tradition reinforced
a unity, see above n.7, 1417.
* M., 4-7.
Hsu, above n.25, 6.
48
Thus, before the Opium War (1839-1842) broke out, when the British
superintendent of trade in China urged the Viceroy of Canton to settle the
differences between the "two nations" peacefully, the Chinese viceroy was puzzled
by the term "two nations," which he took for England and the United States." Hsu,
above n.25, 13.
favored by the Chinese. Soon they found themselves assimilated into the
Chinese world.
With the deeply-ingrained and commonly-shared belief in belonging to a
civilization, the ideal of a unified empire was seen as normal and right,
whereas division, which only resulted from weakness, confusion, or partial,
passing foreign conquest, was aberrant, and thus could not survive. With the
continuing outward expansion of the Chinese tianxia, which brought the
culture of the old center of Chinese civilization to the surrounding regions,
any barbarian tribes who adopted the ways of China, accepted its ideas, and
submitted to its rule were susceptible to being civilized, and were thus
transformed into the fold as "new" Chinese.46 By the time the Chinese
frontiers were pushed to the edge of the Far East, China had become, in fact,
a world onto itself.47
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52
53
Mancall, The Ch'ing Tribute System: An Interpretive Essay, in: John King
Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations
(1968), 63.
Hsu, above n.25, 6-7.
Id. Hsu also points out: "In their utter ignorance of the beauty of the Chinese way of
life and in their lack of sufficient intellect to appreciate reason and ethics, the
barbarians were considered no different from the lower animals. Nothing expresses
these sentiments so well as the ideographic Chinese characters used to designate the
barbarians. The designation for southern barbarians, Man, is written with an
"insect" (ch'ung) radical, and that for the northern barbarians, 77, is written with a
"dog" (ch'uan) radical. Ch'iang, a Western tribe, is written with the "sheep" (yang)
radical."
Id.
Id., 8.
the term was to Greeks and Latins. Instead, civilization and barbarity were
conceptually related in that they defined each other.49 "He was barbarian who
did not accept Chinese civilization and who knew not the refinement of
ceremony, music, and culture."50
By definition, Chinese superiority over the barbarians was based on a
cultural rather than political ground. The only test of barbarity rested on the
standard of cultural achievement. In Chinese eyes, barbarians were simply
those who were ignorant of the beauty of the Chinese way of life and not
sophisticated enough to appreciate reason and ethics as the Chinese did. They
were not foreign peoples but uncultivated, outlandish peoples waiting for
assimilation into the Chinese world. From this it followed that the sign of the
barbarian was not race or origin so much as non-adherence to the Chinese
way of life. Those who did not follow the Chinese way were ipso facto
barbarians. Barbarians could become Chinese "when they advanced to the
Chinese level of civilization." By the same token, "the Chinese became
barbarians if they debased themselves through uncivil practices."53
Such a spirit of culturalism dictated that the power to move others came
from right conduct according to certain virtuous norms. Thus, the ruler could
gain prestige and influence over people merely by being virtuous. By a logical
expansion of this theory, the emperor's virtuous action was believed to attract
irresistibly the barbarians who were outside the pale of Chinese civilization
proper. The corollary of this theory was that the way to assimilate barbarians,
as admonished by the Chinese classical teachings, was to win their admiration
for the grandeur of Chinese civilization through a virtuous and benevolent
concern for their welfare given by the Son of Heaven. It was the function of
the emperor to be compassionate and generous. His tender cherishing of men
from afar (huairou yuanren) is one of the cliches in all documents on foreign
31
55
56
However, it was generally essential that barbarians should recognize the unique
position of the Son of Heaven. Thus, the relationship which inhered between
barbarians and the emperor was by no means unilateral and indeed could hardly
exist except on a reciprocal basis. Fairbank, above n.33, 130-131.
Id., 9.
Id.
relations. In return, the barbarian were expected to voluntarily seek to come

and be transformed (laihua) and so participate in its benefits.
Accordingly, die Chinese did not feel the need to go out to bring die
blessings of their way of life, dieir ideas, their values, and their political system
to the outlandish tribes. When these tribes adopted elements of Chinese
culture, they did so for their own reasons, and the Chinese were always
encouraging those who wished to transform themselves into members of
civilization; but they did not, like the Western powers in die nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, try to convert and civilize die world by subduing it and
turning it into a replication of themselves. As Hsu apdy suggests, die Chinese
policy towards barbarian people was colored with a passive laissez-faire attitude
to "expect them to come to obtain transformation of their own accord."
This policy particularly accounted for China's defensive approach to the
situation where barbarian peoples who were not willing to submit to
civilization kept disturbing China. Then, and only then, must a physical limit
be set to the bounds of civilization. Thus, when northern nomads refused to
accept the benefits of civilization and continued to raid China, the only thing
China could do was keep them from making trouble. First, long walls along
the ridges of the mountain chain which separates North China from die
Mongolian steppe were built and, later, these walls were linked together to
form the Great Wall, running some ten thousand li from the sea in the east to
the borders of the Central Asian deserts in the west. Beyond the Great Wall,
the nomads might live, or die, as they pleased. China had no interest in their
realm, for "the Chinese believed that if the barbarians did not aspire to a
higher life, there was no need to force them to do so."
As revealed by the foregoing survey, however, there were exceptions to
this passive policy. For instance, military campaigns during the last quarter of
the first century A.D. were launched by Chinese armies to bring the vast xiyu
(the West Region) under Chinese control or influence. In the Ming Dynasty,
the maritime expeditions led by Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 reached as
far as the east coast of Africa. The primary motivation of these voyages was to
spread out the Ming emperor's divinity and omnipotence so as to persuade all
outside countries to submit to the rule of China. But, as Hsu points out, these
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instances were always attributed to ambitious emperors or powerful ministers;

they were exceptions to the general approach towards barbarian affairs.
During the Qing Dynasty (16441911), several wars were waged in Central
Asia, Burma, and Vietnam. But these wars would not have happened without
the presence of the non-Han Manchu Dynasty and its special commitment to
military achievement in Central Asia. Moreover, in all these cases, the main
objective was to extend and consolidate the tribute system, a peculiar
relationship between China and its neighboring countries, rather than to
annex these countries into the Chinese territory.
4. Hierarchy and Anti-Egalitarianism
57
Id., 9.
58
Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The Modernization of China (1981), 25-26. As for the nonHan rule under the Manchus, see Hsu, above n.4, 19-28.
Zhang Guohua and Rao Xixian (eds.), /[hongguo Falu Sixiang Shi Gang (History of
Chinese Legal Philosophy) (in Chinese 1984), Vol. 1, 86.
This relationship of benevolence and obedience was later summed up as san gang
(Three Cardinal Guidances), namely father guides son, husband guides wife, and
ruler guides subject. Id.
Since earliest times the Chinese world had been structured on a rigid
hierarchical and patriarchal order, which integrated visions of the family and
the state, or of morality and politics, together with nepotism, male chauvinism,
filial piety, seniority, obedience and reverence as the basic governing
principles.09 Within this social order, man dominated woman, father over
child, husband over wife, senior over junior and, in return, benevolence and
care should be expected from the former to the latter. At the apex of this order
was the Son of Heaven,60 "who eventually became in theory omnicompetent,
functioning as military leader, administrator, judge, high priest, philosophical
sage, arbiter of taste, and was more than human. In sum, the state (shejt) as a
whole was conceived of as an extended family, and the importance of filial
piety in the family corresponded to the emphasis on the duty of absolute
loyalty and obedience on the part of subjects to the ruler.
More importandy, this hierarchical social order was heavily colored with
ideological orthodoxy, particularly the conception that the power to rule over
tianxia came from the mandate of a broader, impersonal deity heaven, whose
endowment might be conferred on anyone who was virtuous and worthy of
responsibility. This so-called virtue (de) took the form of a set of established
ritual norms (It), which, in a broader sense, meant the whole corpus of
33
Later the moral and virtuous responsibility was developed into the so-called wu chang
(Five Constant Virtues): humanity,righteousness,propriety, wisdom and fidelity.
1 Id' 8-
Id., 2. Norton Ginsberg seems to maintain similar view. See On the Chinese
Perception of a World Order, in: Tang Tsou (ed.), 2 China in Crisis, 80.
governmental laws, regulations, social institutions, and proper human

relationships, and were, therefore, applied to govern every aspect of social life
ranging from affairs of state to private individual transactions.62 The aim of li
was to achieve social stability, and the means to such an end was to make a
distinction between persons. Hence, every person in such a society had an
assigned status, including barbarians, and no one was supposed to or
permitted to overstep the dividing line. Whereas virtuous responsibility
constituted the legitimacy of the Chinese world order, observing ritual norms
as the symbol of one's authority as a ruler, official, or superior man, gave one
prestige and power among others. This responsibility would serve as a vital
mechanism to maintain stability and order, which were the highest virtues in
the cosmological continuum.
Such an ideologically-charged hierarchical social order reached not only
throughout China proper, but continued outward beyond the borders of
China to all mankind. Fairbank uses a model of zonation in characterizing
the scope of this Chinese world order. According to him, there were three
main zones. The first was Sinic Zone, which consisted of the closest and most
culturally-similar tributaries, Korea and Vietnam, parts of which had been
within the Chinese empire in ancient times, along with the Liuqiu (Ryukyu)
Islands and, at brief times, Japan. The second was the Inner Asian Zone,
which embraced tributary tribes of the nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples of
Inner Asian, who were not only ethnically non-Chinese but were also less
influenced by the Chinese cultural heritage. The third was the Outer Zone of
the outer barbarians generally at a further distance over land or sea which
eventually included Japan and other states of Southeast and South Asia and
Europe that were supposed to send tribute when trading with China.
Within this zonal hierarchy, China, situated in the center, took the
position of the head dejure, if not always de facto, and the smaller nations on its
periphery assumed the position of junior members. In effect, the Chinese
image of world order as such was no more than a corollary of the Chinese
internal order and, thus, an extended projection of Chinese civilization on the
"inter-state" plane. Its underlying tenet was the concept of subordination of all
local authorities to the central and awe-inspiring power of the Son of Heaven,
34
Chinese JIL (2002)
Note here that the Son of Heaven carried two personalities. As a tianzi, he was a son
not in a biological but in a holistic sense, whereas as an emperor, he stood at the
apex of organized civilization, and in this personality, he could stray from the path
of true virtue, betraying his role as son of heaven and causing disharmony in the
universe.
id
r9 -
This was particularly reflected in the tributary system, in which the closer the
relationship between China and a tributary state, the larger and more frequent the
tributary mission. For tributary relations, see Part III of this article.
As Fairbank suggests, in general, China's relations with non-Chinese nations (in a
Western sense) developed between two extremes, namely, the extreme military
conquest and administrative control on the one hand and that of complete nonrelations and avoidnace of contact on the other. The former led to efforts to
incorporate non-Chinese into the bureaucratic empire, while the latter meant a
refusal to acknowledge their existence.
who was the embodiment of virtue, and by whose very nature carried out the
rites required for the continuing harmony of the universe in both its natural
and its social aspects. Such hierarchically-structured world order was
therefore characterized by the absence of state-to-state relations on the basis of
principles of sovereign equality and territorial independence like the European
world order, which, with its focus on precise division of territories among
sovereigns of equal status and its own concepts of legitimacy, laid the
foundation of modern international law. 7 The Chinese world order, in
contrast, was unified and centralized in theory by the universal preeminence
of the Son of Heaven, in which all other non-Chinese nations had to be
submissive and obedient, and were expected to accept their inferior status if
they wished to have relations with China. Just as every person within the
Chinese society had an assigned status, every non-Chinese nation that desired
contact with China had its assigned place in the Chinese world order, and it
had to contact China through the medium of the so-called tribute system.
It should be noted that the legitimacy of the hierarchical and antiegalitarian Sinocentric world order rested more on moral virtue than military
power. In other words, the concept of the universal state ruled by the Son of
Heaven with a cosmic virtue was richer in cultural symbolism than in political
dynamics, more passive than active, and thus, more defensive than
imperialistic. Indeed, except for a few isolated cases as indicated earlier, the
Chinese image of world order, on balance, did not lead to dynamic and
aggressive imperatives to expand and impose its will upon recalcitrant nonChinese states. China's cultural and economic preeminence was used as a
35
72
73
This was manifested in the established assumption that the Chinese had nothing to
gain from the barbarians but those who desired contacts with China were expected
to accept the Chinese way of life.
Id., 9.
The Khitan Liao Dynasty (907-1125) was established by the Khitans (Qulan), an
ethnic nomadic tribe living in today's North China. It was later subjugated by the
Jin (Chin) Dynasty (1115-1234), another nomadic Jurched tribe, living in today's
Northeast China (Manchuria). As the concept of "nation" or "nationality" in its
modern sense was characteristically absent from the traditional Chinese perception
of world order, the semantic force of the term "alien" or "foreign" should not be
confused with the term's modern sense. "Alien" in traditional Chinese eyes was
synonymous with barbarian. It denoted a cultural and ethnic meaning rather than
territorial implications, as the term is commonly understood today. Thus, Khitans,
Mongols, and Manchus were "aliens" only vis-a-vis the "native Chinese". But the
Chinese view was less concerned than the Western over what was alien because the
Son of Heaven was in any case superior to all rulers and peoples and their status
therefore might easily shift back and forth through various degrees of proximity to
his central authority. It is noteworthy that, today, through the long and gradual
historical process of cultural assimilation, most of the "alien" ethnic minority groups
in the traditional Chinese world have become part of the Chinese vis-a-vis a foreign
state. When referring to this phenomenon, I will use the term "non-Han" to replace
the term "alien" which is commonly used by Western scholars, in order to avoid the
confusion.
means to make its unique position prevail. But sometimes, this was not
sufficient. Before the use of firearms, cavalry from the Inner Asian and
northern grassland tribes played a very important role in war and politics
within the Chinese empire. As Fairbank aptly reminds us, it became an
established practice that, when China itself was too weak to maintain the
Sinocentric world order, mounted nomadic bowmen would become die final
arbiter of batde in die Sinocentric world and non-Chinese rulers could
become the actual Sons of Heaven at the apex of the hierarchy. Such a nonHan takeover of the imperial function culminated first in the conquest of part
of China by the Khitan Liao Dynasty after A.D. 907 and the Jurched Jin
Dynasty after 1122," and, later, in the conquest of all China by the Mongols
and Manchus, who established the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) and the Qing
Dynasty (16641911) respectively. Noticeably, as will be discussed, once in
power, these non-Han dynasties utilized the Chinese tradition without
exception in governing China and, to a large extent, in conducting dieir
foreign relations.
36
Chinese JIL (2002)
5. Confucianism and the Chinese World Order

Benjamin I. Schwartz, The Chinese Perception of World Order, Past and Present,
in Fairbank, above n. 1, 277.
As the rule of the hou emperor was declining, any powerful duke could use the
emperor's name to order others. The usurp of the duke power by ministers and
overstep of authority by assistants became pervasive. Zhang Guohua and Rao
Xixian, above n.59, 47-50. Mencius later described: "Again the world fell into
decay, and principles faded away. Perverse speakings and oppressive deeds were
rampant again. There were instances of ministers who murdered their sovereigns,
The culturally-based organizing principle of superordinationsubordination in the Sinocentric world order does not mean that the Chinese
were innately more prone to arrogance than any other peoples. As Schwartz
points out, claims of universal kingship had been made by many empires of
early times. Also, the superordination-subordination structure was used in East
Asia between non-Chinese regimes in situations in which the rulers of China
did not participate at all.74 To that extent, what happened in ancient China
just conformed to the general pattern of early civilization of human society.D
What was unique about the Chinese case is that the development of the
traditional Chinese world order throughout centuries, though pre-Confucius
in origin, was strongly and progressively fortified by the refinement of the
Confucian concept of a moral social order, which warranted methods
amounting to a justified avoidance of certain of the principles that would
otherwise have governed the Chinese foreign relations.
To be sure, Confucianism is not a religion. Instead, it is a school of
political and ethical philosophy founded by Confucius (551-479 B.C.) and his
disciples. As it was reinstated in the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 24)
as the state ideological orthodoxy, Confucianist cosmopolitan outlook became
integrated into the practical aspects of social and political life in China and
formed the most dominant political and cultural force in shaping the
traditional Chinese view of world order. Confucius lived in the so-called
Spring and Autumn period (770-476 B.C.) when the ^hou Dynasty
disintegrated into vassal states. Because the rule of the ^hou king became a rule
in name only, each of these vassal states claimed to be an independent
sovereign in its relations with others. All the vassal states fought among
themselves and with the peripheral barbarian tribes for hegemony. This
situation, lamented by Confucius as "libeng yuehuai" (the collapse of
observances of propriety and the ruin of music), caused tremendous political
and social disorder in the Chinese world.
37
The drastic changes during this period resulted in the growth and
flourishing of various schools of social and political ideas known as the
"hundred schools of thought," which competed with each other for solving
political and social problems. What made the Confucian school stand out
among others was its value of peace (ping) and harmony (he) as the ultimate
goal of the order of tianxia culminating in the Son of Heaven. As advocated by
Confucius himself,
In the light of Confucian teachings, when this universal path was pursued,
...the world community was equally shared by all. The worthy and able
were chosen as office-holders. Mutual confidence was fostered and good
neighborliness cultivated. Therefore, people did not love their parents
only, nor treat as children only their own children. Provision was made
for the aged till their death, employment for the grownup, and the
means of growing up to the young. Old widows and widowers, orphans,
childless people, as well as the sick and the disabled were all well taken
care of. Men had their proper roles and women their homes. While they
hated to see wealth lying about on the ground, they did not necessarily
keep it for their own use. While they hated not to exert their effort, they
did not necessarily devote it to their own ends. Thus evil schemings
stopped to appear and robbers, thieves and other lawless elements failed
to arise, so that outer doors did not have to be shut. This was what is
called Universal Commonwealth. 8
and of sons who murdered their fathers." See The Chinese-English Bilingual Series
of Chinese Classics, above n.35, 381-383.
The Doctrine of the Mean in The Chinese-English Bilingual Series of Chinese Classics,
above n.35, 24-27.
Li Ji (Li Yun), as quoted in Frederick Tse-Shyang Chen, The Confucian View of
World Order (with minor changes), in: Mark W. Janis (ed.), The Influence of
Religion on the Development of International Law (1991), 32.
While there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy, the mind
may be said to be in the state of EQUILIBRIUM. When those feelings
have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what
may be called the state of HARMONY. This EQUILIBRIUM is the
great root from which grow all the humans acting in the world, and this
HARMONY is the universal path which they all should pursue. Let the states
of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will
prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished
and flourish.
38
Chinese JIL (2002)
Noticeably, what Confucius portrayed about world order was not only
the proper norm in human relations but also in relationships between man
and nature. All Confucian teachings may be seen as aimed at achieving these
norms characterized by peace and harmony. The Book of Great Learning, a
Confucian canonical text, regarded as "the gate by which first learners enter
into virtue," pronounced four steps which people should take as the way
leading to these norms. Before the accomplishment of these four steps, people
should make sure to start with rectifying their hearts by making their thoughts
sincere through investigating things and acquiring complete knowledge.
Accordingly,
In a hierarchical and nonegalitarian society, however, these four steps, as

Fairbank notes, constituted, in effect, the means of education and
indoctrination from which the right standards of behavior would be instilled,
and in return, peace and harmony would be promoted between the rulers and
ruled. Therefore, no matter how idealized such a philosophy of peace and
harmony might sound, they served as a political and social doctrine designed
to justify and perpetuate the conservative status quo. In the realm of foreign
relations, such socio-political status quo was to be preserved within the Chinese
world order through a symbolization of universal peace and harmony. It was
also essentially the Sinocentric universal state based on the principle of
superordination-subordination which prevailed in the Chinese hierarchical
and anti-egalitarian domestic social order. As Confucius himself advocates,
The duties of universal obligation are five,...[They are] tJiose between
ruler and subject, between father and son, between husband and wife,
between elder brotiier and younger, and those belonging to the
intercourse of friends.8'
The Book of Great Learning, in The Chinese-English Bilingual Series of Chinese

Classics, above n.35, 2-5.
The Doctrine of the Mean in The Chinese-English Bilingual Series of Chinese Classics,
above n.35,40-41.
Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons
being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being
regulated, their States were righdy governed. Their States being righdy
governed, the whole empire (tianxia) was made tranquil and happy.
39
Thus, if "affection between father and son, righteousness between the

ruler and the ruled, separate function between husband and wife, proper order
between old and young and fidelity between friends" could be maintained,
peace and harmony could be achieved. As one Confucian exponent later
claimed,
If a society follows the order in which subjects serve their ruler, son
serves his father, and wife serves her husband, society will be in peace
and harmony, otherwise, the society will be in chaos. This principle will
perpetuate forever.
no
84
The Work of Mencius, Teng Wen Gong, Part 1, in The Chinese-English Bilingual
Series of Chinese Classics, above n.35, 358-359.
Zhang Guohua and Rao Xixian, above n.59, 331.
Mark Mancall, China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy (1984), 22-23.
The cornerstone of the Confucian world view, as the outgrowth of the

cultural preeminence of early Chinese civilization, was the concept of the
universethe entire cosmoas an unbroken, orderly stasis-continuum. The
Confucian view conceived the world as being, which is by definition different
from becoming. Process, change, competition, and progress were therefore all
concepts unnatural to Confucianism, none had temporal relativism, a
cornerstone of Confucian thinking. Virtue, as reflected in social hierarchy and
inequality, was thereby absolute and enduring. Stability and orderthe
highest virtues in the cosmological continuumwere secured through the
maintenance of hierarchy and the performance of ritual ceremonies. Thus,
the Confucian world outlook placed emphasis on the righteous life on earth
and felt no need for seeking the ultimate reality. In practice, it always directed
the thoughts of the Chinese to the pragmatic ordering and refining of human
relations.
However, an excessive reliance on peace and harmony as the regulatory
norm of the social process poorly equipped the Chinese to play a role in
international politics, which became more and more based on Social
Darwinism. The concept of the balance of power or alliance was also alien to
the Chinese official world, since there never had been an ally of equal status or
strength in Sinocentric international relations. The hierarchical and antiegalitarian image of Confucianism made Chinese officials and intellectuals
incapable of conceptualizing foreign relations in egalitarian terms. As a result,
the Chinese expected the Western powers to make whatever adjustments were
necessary to fit their relations into the hierarchical and anti-egalitarian
40
Chinese JIL (2002)
framework of the Chinese world order. Ensuing confrontation between the

two mutually-exclusive systems resulted in the advancing Western system
eclipsing the Chinese system, and when China was forced to entered the
Western family of nations, it became an inferior member.
6. The Role of Law in the Chinese World Order
Comprehensive legal codes were enacted in both the Qin and Han dynasties.
However, the oldest surviving code today is the Tang code, which was promulgated
in die seventh century A.D. The Tang code also laid down the foundation on which
the later codes of the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties were developed. See
Zhang and Rao, above n.59.
Within the traditional Chinese world order, law as a means of social

control in the term's modern sense never attained the prestige and importance
that it gained in the West, although for well over two-thousand years China
had maintained and developed a very sophisticated system of legal codes and
of institutions for their application. In light of the precepts of Confucianism,
the conduct of social relations should rely on the ritual norms (It), instead of
being governed by a set of rules that are backed up by state-imposed sanctions
in case of non-compliance and are, so to speak, exterior to each individual. In
other words, people should first and foremost learn and then internalize the
rules of appropriate behavior through a painstaking process of education,
suasion, and socialization. Only when a person proved extremely recalcitrant
or when the educational system failed, would it be necessary to use severe
punishment of law. Therefore, law in the eye of Confucianism was not
deemed a major social achievement and a symbol of rectitude. Instead, it was
regarded as a rather regrettable necessity, principally employed by the state as
the last resort to maintain social order. When society was functioning
peacefully and harmoniously, law was something to be avoided, because resort
to law was seen as essentially an admission of the loss of virtue and failure in
human and communal relations. More laws did not make for a better or more
peaceful and harmonious society.
As advocated by Confucius and his disciples, to maintain the peace and
harmony of the Chinese world order, emphasis should be placed on the merits
of government by education, persuasion, and moral example. The ruled
should be taught what was right and wrong with the li so that they would
behave properly according to their conscience and not merely because of the
threat of punishment. The rulers themselves should also try to behave
virtuously, so as to set good examples for their subjects to follow. In this
regard, Confucianism stressed that government should be able to win the
41
Individuals have legitimate interests, to be sure, and in the good society

these interests will be taken care of (in accordance with requirements of
B. I. Schartz, On Attitudes Toward Law in China, in: M. Tatz (ed.), Government
under Law and the Individual (1957), 27.
hearts of the people rather than securing their outward submission through
the use of law. This is because the emphasis on law would lead people to think
only in terms of their self-interest and make them more litigious and loopholehappy (by trying to manipulate the laws to suit their own interests), and would
also divert attention away from the more important work of moral education.
As Schwartz noted, "in a society dominated hyfa Paw], the people as a whole
will all develop the peculiar talents of the shyster lawyer and the sense of
shame will suffer." In a society where people were governed by li, however,
disputes and conflicts easily would be resolved through friendly negotiation,
mediation and mutual compromise. People would not assert their self-interest
in an utterly acquisitive manner but would instead adopt an attitude of selfrestraint and conciliation so as to arrive at a common understanding with
other parties. In this way, peace and harmony would be achieved. Litigation
would be avoided, and a system of explicit legal rules rendered unnecessary.
Thus, in the traditional Chinese world, the role of law was considered
only secondary as well as supplementary to ritual norms. This attitude
accounts for some salient features of the legal concern of the traditional
Chinese world order. Firstly, until the beginning of this century, there had
existed no jurisprudential distinction between criminal law and civil law. The
written codes as well as decrees addressed mainly matters which would be
classified under criminal law and administrative law in the light of modern
standard. In these circumstances, private law for personal and property
relations among individuals was conspicuously under-developed. Disputes
concerning personal and property matters were usually settled informally by
virtue of mediation, conducted by respected leaders or elders of family clans,
villages, and guilds in the light of customary rules and prevailing notions of
morality. Thirdly, there was no formal separation of judicial power from other
powers nor was there the doctrine ofjudicial independence. Fourthly, the legal
profession and education in the term's modern sense did not exist. Last, but
not least, the concept of the rights of the individual or of the people was
conspicuously lacking. The traditional Chinese legal system was based on
people's duties and obligations rather than their rights and interests. Thus,
there was no conception of individual rights enforceable against the state or
other authorities. As Schwartz has succincdy described,
42
Chinese JIL (2002)

the individual's social status). To surround these interests with an aura of
sanctity and to call them 'rights,1 to elevate the defence of these
individual interests to the plane of a moral virtue, to 'insist on one's
rights'is to run entirely counter to the spirit of li. The proper
predisposition with regard to one's interests is the predisposition to yield
rather than the predisposition to insist."87
87
Schwartz, id., 32.

Chang Wei-jen, Traditional Chinese Attitudes toward Law and Authority, in: A
Symposium on Chinese and European Concepts of Law (held in Hong Kong, under
the auspices of the Chinese Law Programme, Center for Contemporary Asian
Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, March 20-25, 1986), 31. In traditional
Chinese legal philosophy, there was no lack of elements which emphasized the
ruler's need to have regard for the well-being of the people. Chinese scholars
identify these as the ideas of minben zhuyi (the people-as-the-basis doctrine).
Mencious, Confucius' most important disciple, for example, has been frequendy
quoted to say that, in the order of importance of governance, "The people are of
first importance; the state is the next; the ruler is the least important. In relation to
the emperor's responsibility to Heaven and the interpretation of the Mandate of
Heaven, Confucian classics also maintained that "Heaven sees as the people see,
Heaven hears as die people hear." Even a right of revolution was asserted against
tyrannical rulers in extreme situations. A successful rebellion meant that the original
Mandate of Heaven had been forfeited and a new mandate had been bestowed
upon another virtuous person, usually the leader of the rebellion. Cited in Albert
In this regard, the emperor had an absolute power to rule and the people
were under an absolute obligation to obey. As discussed earlier, the emperor
was the highest legislative, judicial and executive authority. He made laws,
which were binding on all but not on himself. The only restraints on his
exercise of power were political ethics, rationality, and precedent, none of
which, as shown by history, could always check the caprice of the ruler. Under
such a system of the rule of man, the possibility of popular participation in
government affairs and legislative process was precluded. Since the ruled
could only be the objects of the ruler's whims and could only hope but had no
right to assert that the ruler would be good and benevolent, they felt so
impotent vis-a-vis the law and the governmental authorities that they
developed a phenomenal behavioral syndromethey either withdraw and
subjugate or defy and rebel. The Chinese people, as noticed by a
commentator, never learned how to treat government officials as ordinary
human beings equal to themselves. "The officials were either benevolent
guardians or high-handed oppressors. They were [either] to be obeyed or [to
be] revolted against but not checked and supervised."
43
7. The Influence of Foreign Religions
91
92
H.Y. Chen, An Introduction to the Legal System of the People's Republic of China
(1992), 10-11.
Mancall, above n.84, 11.
In the opinion of the authors of The Modernization of China, there were three major
cultural imports to China, namely, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. However,
Chinese scholars generally recognize the first and the last ones. This is because
Islam mainly took root in China's border provinces of the west and spread
throughout China as a pervasive Chinese minority religion and culture. Gilbert
Rozman, above n.58, 24.
Schwartz, above n.75, 279.
Until the onslaught of Western imperialistic invasions in the nineteenth

century, the proclamations of continuous and solitary splendor of the Chinese
world order remained persistent and unchallenged by genuine peers. In other
words, the growth of the Chinese view of the outside world was by and large
indigenous in the sense that it had owed very littie to cultural exchange from
other civilizations. True, China was aware of the Roman Empire, but the
contact had not in any way resulted in a political impact on Chinese statecraft.
When ancient Chinese civilization reached its peak by the time of the Tang
Dynasty, most of Europe was just emerging from the Dark Ages. On the other
hand, China's knowledge about the outside world developed not because
Chinese craved for information, but generally because foreigners coming to
China brought information that struck the Chinese as delightfully quaint.
These circumstances further contributed to confirm the Tightness of the
Sinocentric world outlook. Thus, even though cultural imports from the
outside world continually came to China throughout history, no such imports
had ever been recognized at any time as the products of higher civilization.
Such a statement needs to be qualified, however, when examining two
major implants from outside the Chinese cultural sphere. The first is
Buddhism, which entered China from India during the late Han Dynasty, a
period of political and social disunity and upheaval, and was until modern
times "the major, almost the only strong foreign influence affecting the
Chinese culture, and the only one which left a permanent mark." As
Schwartz suggests, "[T]he fact that millions of Chinese looked to a source
outside the Chinese cultural orbit for salvation and for highest wisdom must
certainly have shaken the general cosmology on which the Chinese perception
of world order rested."92 While the influence of Buddhism on Chinese art,
literature and religion was great and lasting, however, the Indian perception of
44
Chinese JIL (2002)
93
94
Id., 280.
world order as expressed in Buddhist teaching turned out to be devoid of

political imperative, and, as a result, had little impact on the long established
Chinese cosmology.
This might be due to the underlying philosophical difference between
Buddhism and Confucianism. While the state of Nirvana as advocated in
Buddhism shares in a sense with the Confucian ideal of peaceful and
harmonious universe, the process of entering this state was, nevertheless,
through soul-transmigrations and reincarnations which would take a long time
and many lives as well. Furthermore, the ultimate goal of Buddhism
personal annihilation or total submergence in the primal unitycertainly runs
counter to the Confucian idea of world order and the Great Path leading to it.
Thus, anti-Buddhist campaigns were "marked by a most vehement and
absolutist reassertion of the Chinese image of world order."93 As a result, in
contrast to the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, the
introduction of Buddhism to China had more the character of acclimatization
than a true Buddhist conquest of the Chinese world view.94 The influence of
Buddhism was further weakened by the fact that India, the cradle of
Buddhism, never became a politically coherent society; in no way was it
comparable with China which remained far more often united and wellorganized from the time of the Tang Dynasty. In fact, Buddhist shrines in India
were falling into neglect by the time of the Tang Dynasty.
A second major import was Christianity, which was brought to China by
Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century when European learning
quickened the interest of the Chinese intelligentsia in the progress of physical
science in the non-Chinese world. Among these missionaries were many
scholars of great distinction in the field of sciences of the West. Their
knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, geography, and physics was more
advanced than it was in China. They introduced to the Chinese the Western
sciences of astronomy, mathematics, architecture, geography, and
cartography. They translated Chinese classics and historical works into
Western languages. In addition to imparting scientific learning to the Chinese,
the missionaries' major undertaking was to convert China into Christianity.
Their success in this respect, however, turned out to be limited, even nonexistent. The Chinese never felt that their bridge to the interest in Western
sciences required the abandoning of the major tenets of their view of world
order, for scientific principles were seen as universal rather than culturally
bound to the men who imparted them. The very fact that the Chinese had
45
never had any overriding religion eventually defeated the missionary

,
95
8. Factors o/Wbn-Han Conquests
As noted earlier, the source of power to maintain the Chinese world

order was basically non-military. In view of the fact that there were periods
when China had to accept the military supremacy of the surrounding
barbarians, the chief concern was how to maintain Chinese superiority. As
demonstrated by Fairbank's work, solutions included cessation of contact;
indoctrinating the non-Han rulers in the Chinese view by cultural-ideological
means; buying them off by marriage, honors or material inducements or both;
95
Note here that trained in the European tradition and soaked in its history both
theological and lay, the missionaries could not realize that the Chinese simply lacked
some of the assumptions of Western culture. The Chinese were unfamiliar with the
ideas of revelation, infidelity, heresy, and "false gods." Id., 29-30.
During the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1736-95), the missionaries merely continued
to perform useful work in their own accepted roles as technical and scientific
assistance for the Qing court in the time-honored tradition of alien service within the
realm of the Sinocentric world order. In the provinces, however, persecution grew,
and the number of Christians fell dramatically. By the time the pope dissolved the
Jesuit order in 1773, the history of the Catholic attempt to convert China could be
read only as a record of failure.
enterprise.
Also, as Fitzgerald suggests, the Christian religion, in all its forms, was
foreign. To the Chinese this was already a serious failing. Accepting this
foreign learning implied that the wisdom of China was deficient, and that the
foreigner had something better to offer. This certainly ran counter to the timehonored assumption of Chinese cultural superiority. Foreigners, even though
some of them had valuable knowledge in limited fields, were, after all,
members of distant barbarian peoples who could not be expected to be the
equals to the Chinese in any respect. In addition, the governing ideological
orthodoxy in China was Confucianism, and any questioning would threaten
the legitimacy of existing authority and was thus ruthlessly suppressed. As a
result, while their introduction of scientific knowledge was highly appreciated
by the imperial court, their influence was limited only to a small group of
Chinese scholars and officials in the ruling circles. They left little imprint on
China's political institutions, social structure, or economic systems. Despite
thriving throughout the entire seventeenth century, missionary activities were
later restricted, confined to a few bases, and eventually forbidden.
46
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Fairbank, above n.l, 13-14.

Hsu, above n.25, 11.
As for the origin of the Manchus and the Qing Dynasty, see Hsu, above n.4, 19-28.
101
Id.
102
Samuel S. Kim, China, the United Nations and World Order (1978), 22.
98
using one barbarian against another through diplomatic maneuvers and, at

the extreme, accepting barbarian rulers at the apex of the Chinese world. 7
For example, when the Han emperor Gaozu (206-193 B.C.) lost the battle
to the Xiongnu, he adopted the suggestion of his minister that peace be bought
at the price of marrying a Chinese princess to the chieftain of the enemy. By
doing so, the future chieftains of the Xiongnu would be his grandsons and great
grandsons and hence, less likely to be rebellious. A more glowing example of
the above-mentioned alternatives was the relationship between the Song
Dynasty (960-1279) and Liao, an ethnic minority nation. The Song Emperor
^henzong made an agreement with the Liao king by which he consented to treat
the Liao Empress Dowager as "an aunt," and the Liao king agreed to treat the
Song Emperor as an "elder brother." In addition, the Song agreed to supply the
Liao with 100,000 taels of silver and 200,000 rolls of silk annually. For 160
years ad hoc envoys were exchanged between the two on an almost equal
footing on such occasions as New Year's Day, royal birthdays and deaths, and
the ascension to the throne of new emperors and kings.
Yet, only in the Chinese way of life could non-Chinese rulers rule over
the Chinese world. The vitality of the Sinocentric world order was therefore
even reinforced by the non-Han conquests. The Mongols and Manchus
respectively seized the whole of China through military forces, and established
their rulesYuan (1279-1367) and Qing (1644-1911) dynastiesfrom top
down. But nothing in these non-Han conquests sufficed to convince the
Chinese that their long-established Chinese world view was inadequate.
Being culturally less advanced, these non-Han conquerors soon found
themselves incompetent in running a country of great wealth and high
civilization. They had been superior in military matters, but in these alone.
For the details of constructive administration, they had to adopt and adapt a
Confucianism-based superstructure.102 Ironic as it seems, the non-Han
conquerors subdued China militarily, but in the end they themselves became
victimized by the glory of Chinese civilization. The relative short life of the
Mongol rule may have been due to a violent breach in Chinese traditions. In
order to avoid the fate of Mongols, the Manchus, who had been strongly
influenced by Chinese culture, had to be very careful to champion the
47
103
III. The Tribute System

As the foregoing survey has indicated, the concept of the Chinese world
order was based on die notion of a Sinocentric universal state, colored with
By the mid-nineteenth century, the triumph of Chinese civilization over the Manchu
was nearly complete, with the abolition of Manchu even as a secondary official
language. Id.
Gilbert Rozman, above n.58, 26.
106
Id.
107
Id., 27.
grandeur of Chinese civilization. It is therefore not surprising that when

European imperialist expansion reached China in the mid-nineteen century,
its evident superiority in military power "did not impress the Chinese as proof
of cultural equality, but tended to show them in an unfavorable light."101
In addition, economic factors also contributed to strengthen the Chinese
self-image of world order. Up to the nineteenth century, the Chinese economy
had basically been agrarian and self-sufficient and tenaciously resisted the
importation of products through foreign trade. The lack of commercial
impetus coupled with perennial concerns about land frontiers and the military
security of Inner Asia had always directed the attention of the Chinese rulers
to the continent. As a result, maritime potentials had rarely become a
priority. This may pardy explain why the great maritime expeditions led by
keng He between 1405 and 1433 abrupdy came to an end, and were never
resumed.
Although foreign trade developed, it was not because the Chinese
thirsted after foreign goods but rather foreign merchants came to China to
trade. Also, the trade routes ended far to the south, and were in the hands of
private traders who dealt with principalities dimly seen and poorly understood
in Beijing. This led Chinese officials to develop a strong mentality that the
distant barbarians had nothing of value to communicate. To them, the fact
that foreign merchants came to China to trade despite difficulties and distance
might have indicated the importance of trade with China for the countries
concerned. Thus, their ultimate resource lay in the power to stop that trade
altogether.107
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese world stood aloof from
the mainstream of world affairs. It was uninterested in seeking outside values,
ideas, and goods as well. It was unprepared to face the impending challenge
coming from another system which carried its own normative expectations.
48
Chinese JIL (2002)
108

Id.
" Id., 13.
'"id., 13-14.
John King Fairbank and S.Y. Teng, the Traditional Role of Tribute, in: King C.
Chen (ed.), The Foreign Policy of China (1972), 14.
Fairbank, above n. 1, 7; see also, Zhang and Rao, above n.59, 45.
" 4 Fairbank and Teng, above n.l 12, 18-22.
" 5 T.F.Tsiang, above n.31, 131.
Hsu, above n.4, 182; see also, Mancall, above n.84, 14-20.
109
the assumption of cultural and normative superiority over less advanced

neighbors. It was organized on hierarchy and anti-egalitarianism, and
legitimized by orthodox Confucian culturalism. Within this order, there
existed only civilization and barbarity. In the sense that "civilization was an
empire without neighbors,"' the Chinese empire was not a nation-state in the
modern sense of the term. Rather it was "the administration of civilized
society in toto." Therefore, what was established within the Chinese world
order was but an indigenous family of nations with its own rules that "cannot
be explained in modern terms of international law.""0
In seeking to understand the operational aspect of the traditional
Chinese view of world order, Western Sinologists have come up with a special
term, namely, the "tribute system," to describe the sum total of complex,
practical, and institutional expressions of the Chinese diplomatic practice.
The tribute system was a natural outgrowth of the cultural superiority of early
Chinese civilization."2 Its origin can be traced back to the ancient Chinese
practice whereby the emperor "invested" ifeng)fiefs,titles and authority in a
number of hereditary "vassals" {fan), who in turn were obliged to present to
the emperor their local products {fang wu) as "tribute" (gong), which had
originally meant a sort of tax payments. As inherited from history, paying
tribute to the Chinese emperor was gradually developed into a political system
and was applied to the relations between China and all non-Chinese nations
which desired to enter relations with China.
As formalized by the Ming Dynasty and perfected by the Qing Dynasty,"5
the tribute system was refined into a highly ritualistic performance which
operated as an institutional mechanism to translate into diplomatic practice
the ideological assumptions, values and beliefs which underlay the Chinese
world order." The tribute system survived even after the Opium War with
Britain, which marked the beginning of the disintegration of the aged Chinese
world order, and petered out slowly as the unequal treaty regime took hold of
LA, Traditional Chinese World Order
49
117
John King Fairbank, The Early Treaty System in the Chinese World Order, in
Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations,
above n. 1,258.
John King Fairbank and S.L. Teng, Ching Administration: Three Studies (1960),
165-169.
Hsu, above n.4, 182. Also, Fairbank has elaborated the main elements of the tribute
system of the Qing Dynasty. See Fairbank, above n.l, 10-11.
Chinese foreign relations. The last tributary mission was sent by Nepal in
118
1908, the eve of the Chinese Revolution.
The tribute system was a comprehensive institution under which all
types of contacts between China and non-Chinese countries were supposed to
take place. Yet the tributary relationship was strictly bilateral in that the
tribute receiver was always China, and the bearer always a non-Chinese state
that desired to participate in the China-centered family of nations. Also, the
rights and duties involved in the tributary relationship were reminiscent of
Confucianism-sanctioned proper relationship between individuals, namely,
ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife.
The tribute system can be likened to a family unit. Within the system,
China, occupying the position of patriarch, took the leadership. Depending on
a given situation, the Chinese emperor had authority for sending envoys to
officiate at the investitures given by the imperial court to the rulers of tributary
states, conferring on them the imperial patents of appointment and noble titles
in the hierarchy of Imperial China, and granting to them official seals for use
of correspondence. China also had responsibility for assisting tributary states
in times of foreign invasion or natural disaster. In return, tributary states, who
came into contact with China as the part of the family but in a subordinate
position, were obliged to honor China as the superior state by presenting
periodic tribute of local products and tribute memorials of various sorts on
appropriate statutory occasions as well, by requesting the investiture of their
rulers, and by dating their communications by the Chinese calendar-based or
the reign of the emperor." 9
As the Chinese emperor maintained supreme authority over all rulers
and peoples of tributary states, he was seated in his palace, usually the
Forbidden City, to receive the envoys of tributary states, who had to take
specially-designated routes in traveling to and from China. Entry into the
emperor's presence and presentation of tribute to the emperor had to follow
the correct performance of ritual ceremonies of which the most important and
solemn part was the so-called three kneelings, of which each was accompanied
by three kowtows (san gui jiu kou li). In the Chinese view, this performance
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symbolized the recognition not only of China's superior civilization but of

civilization itself, of which the highest point was the Chinese emperor. Thus,
refusal to perform these rituals was tantamount to an insult to the universal
scheme of things, an unnatural act that could not be tolerated by the emperor
since it was his role to maintain the peace and harmony of universe.
The rigidity of the tribute system was especially reflected in the Collected
Statutes of the Qing Dynasty (Da Qing Huidian), which were issued both as a record
121
Fairbank and Teng, above n.l 12, 15.

Id., 14.
122
Masataka Banno, China and the West 1858-1861: The Origins of the Tsungli
Yamen (1964), Z-\.
123
Mancall. above n.84, 15.
124
19;
Hsu, above n.4; 182.

of administrative practice and as a guide to bureaucratic day-by-day

activities. In the Collected Statutes were prescribed regulations in specific terms
on such matters as the frequency and size of tributary missions, the designated
points of entry and departure, as well as the routes to be traveled in China by
each mission, the appointment of Chinese envoys to deliver imperial edicts to
the rulers of tributary states, and ritual requirements to be observed at the
court. Each state that entered relations with China was required to follow
these rules.
Between 1662 and 1911, over five-hundred tribute missions called at the
Qing court from sixty-two different countries.12 As recorded in Fairbank's
work, Korea collected tribute four times a year, and presented the tribute all
together at the end of the year. Liuqiu (Ryukyu) twice every three years,
Annam (Vietnam) once every two years, Siam every three years, Burma and
Laos every ten years. This survey indicates that the closer the relationship
between China and a tributary state, the larger and more frequent the
mission. Because the Chinese view of world order was devoid of graduated
relationships, the Qing court insisted that die tribute system applied not only to
the peripheral states of Asia but also to all other states which wanted to
establish relations with China. Therefore, even if the Western trading nations
did not formally belong to the system, the Collected Statutes still listed them
alongside other regular tributary states, requiring them to be treated as though
they were tributary bearers if they came to China on their own.126 Given the
sporadic nature of these missions, however, the Western trading nations were
precluded from maintaining a fixed schedule for bringing tribute in view of
51
127
127
Id.
Id.,5.
For the Macartney mission, see Hsu, above note 4, 206-214.
130
Id., 14.
131
132
Hsu, above n.25, 14-15.
133
Hsu, above n.4, 150-166.
134
Id., 162.
135
Id., 165.
136
Id., 164. Also see Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, Russia's Special Position in China during the
Early Ch'ing Period, in: Hsu (ed.), Readings in Modern Chinese History (1971),
113-123.
their great distance from China. Of the seventeen early Western missions to
China from 1655 to 1795 (six from Russia, four from Portugal, three from
Holland, three from the Papacy, and one from Britain), all but the last, under
Lord Macartney, yielded to the Chinese demand for the kowtow to the Chinese
emperor, albeit reluctantly.128
Although the rigidity of the tributary system in China's relations with
Western officials was uncompromising (with the Macartney mission as the
only exception129), it did not mean that traders in their private individual
capacity could not visit or even reside in China. On the contrary, until the
Opium War, traders from the Western maritime nations were allowed to
reside in Macao and to conduct trade in Guangzhou (Canton).130 Russians also
lived in Beijing almost continuously after 1727.'3' However, this apparent
contravention of the tribute system was interpreted as a special imperial favor
towards men from afar. But private Western traders were prohibited from
seeking entries into any direct relations with Chinese officials. If they had
complaints, "they could only 'petition' through the Chinese monopolistic
merchants and the Customs Superintendent, known as the Hoppo."132
In the face of constant Russian challenge, Qing policy and practice
constituted a marked exception from relations with the Western maritime
nations. It concluded its first equal treaty, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, with
Russia in 1689, which set the eastern border between the two countries.
After the Treaty of Kiakhta of 1727, Russians were allowed to maintain an
Orthodox Church in Beijing with a language school attached to it.'35 Although
Russian missions to China were recorded as tribute bearers, and although they
performed Kowtow to the Chinese emperor, Russia was not officially listed as a
tributary state in any of the five editions of the Collected Statutes.'3 On the other
hand, the Chinese envoys to Russia performed the Kowtow to the Russian
52
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137
ruler. Russian traders were also treated very well under the two treaties.
They were allowed to come to Beijing every three years in groups of two
hundred, and although they paid their own way, their goods were brought in
duty-free. In a nutshell, Qing policy and practice concerning its relations with
Russia demonstrated a remarkable degree of capacity to compromise the
rigidity of the system to the realities of power.
Under the tribute system, the Chinese emperor also sent his envoys to
foreign nations to show compassion to those at a distance, to bring them into
the tribute system, and to confer the rulers of these foreign nations the
imperial seal. Of many Chinese envoys dispatched for this purpose, the most
famous one was perhaps the aforementioned Zheng He's seven maritime
expeditions between 1405 and 1433 during the Ming Dynasty. As has already
been noted, these expeditions took the Chinese envoys to India, the Persian
Gulf, and the East African coast almost a century before the more well-known
Portuguese navigators reached those places by sea around Africa. The
motivation of these expeditions is believed to have lain in the desire of the
Ming court to perfect its claim to rule all men by showing that no one was left
outside the Chinese world order.
The immediate achievement was splendid. Most of the forty nations that
Zheng visited sent back tributary envoys to China. During the Qing period,
imperial missions were dispatched only to the three important tributary states
of Korea, Liuqiu, and Annam, and as a rule, this was occasioned in wake of the
newly throned tributary king sending a special envoy to Beijing to request
investiture.
Certainly, the tribute system did not operate in the light of the principle
of sovereign equality, which, as part of the fundamental principles of the
contemporary international law, directs political and economic transactions
between states on the basis of reciprocity. On the contrary, the periodic
presentation of tribute by a non-Chinese state followed by the performance of
the required ritual ceremonies functioned as the acknowledgement of China's
inn
138
Id.
Id., 165.
139
This is an exemplary example, as noticed by Fairbank, that the traditional Chinese

world order suffered from a chronic problem of how to square theory with fact, the
ideological claim with the actual practice. This phenomenon may be explained by
the fact that the traditional Chinese perception of world order was richer in cultural
symbolism than in political dynamics. Fairbank, above n. 1, 3.
John King Fairbank, The United States and China (reprinted in 1983), 149-151.
Wang Gungwu, above n.29, 51-60.
141
Id., 183.
137
53
142
Fairbank and Teng, above n. 112, 15.

144
Cited in Hsu, above n.25, 13.
cultural superiority and the Chinese family of nations headed by the Son of
Heaven. It also worked as a reminder of the tributary bearer's inferiority in
power and culture. In return, non-Chinese nations "were given their place in
the all-embracing Chinese political, and therefore ethical, scheme of things."
Although such a system made no "realist" sense, it served a vital symbolic
function by exemplifying and legitimizing the myth of the universal state
governed by the Son of Heaven. As Fairbank suggests, even during the golden
era of the Sinocentric world order, "China's external order was so closely
related to her internal order that one could not long survive without the
other."143 In other words, even imperial China with all its pretensions of
normative self-sufficiency could not really live in isolation; it needed
outlandish barbarians in order to enact, validate, and institutionalize the
integrity of its universal overlordship: whoever wished to enter into relations
with China was supposed to acknowledge the supremacy of the Chinese
emperor and obey his commands.
The persistence of the system was mostly revealed in Qingh
unresponsiveness to a continuing threat from the expansionist and dynamic
West during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was thus not until 1861
after the Western powers forced China to agree to permanent diplomatic
residence in Beijing that the Qing court began to recognize the Western states
on equal terms as required by international law. Corresponding to this
unresponsiveness was the distinctive character of the mechanisms under which
the tribute system was managed. Because the tribute system constituted the
operational part of the Sinocentric world order, which was presumed to
reproduce itself in a concentrically larger expandable circle as the correct
cosmic order, there was no awareness of the necessity for the establishment of
a foreign office in its modern sense within the Chinese bureaucracy to
centralize the management of foreign affairs, for "the existence of a foreign
office in a state presupposes an awareness of the necessity for relations with
other more or less equal states."
During the Ming time, the tributary affairs were under the supervision of
the Reception Department of the Board of Rites, the highest government
office that was committed to the maintenance and correct execution of the
rituals that were of central importance to Confucianism-based world order.
Also, a department of the Board of War, the government's military office, was
charged with responsibility for the management of tributary relations when
54
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145
145
Mancall, above n.84, 16-17.

Id., 17-19. In addition to these two main organs, Huitong Siyi Guan, or Common
Residence for Tributary Envoys, supervised by a senior secretary of the Board of
Rites was designed for reception and accommodation of tributary envoys. See Hsu,
above n.25, 13-14. And even the Board of War was involved with the task of
escorting the tributary envoys to the frontiers. See Wang Tieya, International Law
in China: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, in: 221 Recueil Des Corns (1990II), 224.
' Cited in Mancall, above n.86, 16.
148
Id.
149
The Works of Mencius, Teng Wen Gong, part 1, in The Chinese-English Bilingual
Series of Chinese Classics, above n.35, 360-361.
they involved certain aboriginal tribes along China's cultural frontiers. This
administrative structure was later modified and refined by the Qing Dynasty
when it set up Li Fan Yuan, or the Barbarian Control Office, as the institution
to specially handle Mongolian, Mohammedan, and Russian affairs while
leaving tributary relations with East, Southeast, and South Asia to the
jurisdiction of the Board of Rites.'46 In addition to this organizational
structure, the power to deal with trade relations with the Western maritime
nations was entrusted to the governor-general at Guangzhou (Canton), who
managed foreigners through the Hoppo, the superintendent of maritime
customs and the cohong, the guild of Chinese merchants.
It is especially important to note that the tribute system functioned as a
defensive mechanism in social nature: "it translated barbarian impingements
on Chinese society into social terms comprehensible to the Confucian
Chinese, thus minimizing fluctuations like a kind of conductor-reductor that
filtered barbarian pressures into a Confucian conceptual context."147 To this
extent, the system served as a perfect process within the boundary sphere
between the "purely barbarian" and the "purely Chinese." As mythically
assumed by the Chinese, barbarians could not help but be transformed (laihua) by the awe-inspiring virtue of Chinese civilization. From this it followed
that the barbarian who wished to be transformed and so participate in the
benefit of civilization had to recognize the supreme position of China's
culture. As Mencius advised, "I have heard of men using the doctrines of our
great land to change barbarians, but I have never yet heard of any being
changed by barbarians."' 4
A corollary of cultural transformation was the doctrine of nonintervention in, and non-exploitation of, the barbarians. As indicated earlier,
the Confucian proposition as to barbarians was to win their submission
55
through benevolent and virtuous concerns for their welfare. As advised by the
Book of History,
Be kind to the distant, and cultivate the ability of the near. Give honor to
the virtuous and your confidence to the good, while you discountenance
the artful:so shall the barbarous tribes lead on one another to make
their submission.150
b0
151
152
Cited in Hsu's work. Hsu, above n.25, 7.

T.F. Tsiang, above n.31, 131.

F.T. Tsiang, above n.31, 131.
134
153
As indicated earlier, the tribute system was by no means a system which

facilitated imperialistic expansion, exploitation and oppression, as compared
with the Western colonial regimes' thrust upon the Asian and African nations
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the contrary, the tribute
system in general imposed nothing on foreign peoples who chose to remain
outside the Chinese world. As mentioned earlier, during the Ming Dynasty,
the Chinese maritime expeditions reached as far as the eastern coast of Africa.
Although China's precedence over the West at that time in naval architecture,
navigation, and the nautical arts in general was clearly manifested, the
Chinese simply lacked the type of expansive urge that the Western powers
demonstrated a century later. As far as tribute bearing nations were
concerned, China never made a profit out of the tribute system in pure
economic terms since all tributary travel expenses and maintenance of the
missions in China were borne by the Chinese government. Given the
frequency, size and travelling distances of these missions, maintaining
tributary relations in effect was a considerably expensive business. In
addition to the enormous cost for the operation of the system, the Chinese
emperor's gifts were usually more valuable than the tribute he received.'53
Yet, barbarians always had to be watched with vigilance in order to
prevent their infiltration into the heartland of China and their mixing with the
Chinese populace, acts that threatened to adulterate the established way of
Chinese life. This laissez-faire and defensive attitude towards barbarians later
crystallized into a policy of segregation and of constant precaution. Thus,
when the tributary envoys called upon China, they were escorted over
designated routes, closely watched over, and were subject to many restrictions.
They were not allowed to purchase Chinese weapons or books while in die
56
Chinese JIL (2002)
!6
Hsu, above n.4, 182-183. However, it should not be understood that the
presentation of tribute by a specific country was a prerequisite for commercial
exchange between a country and China. Trade might take place along the frontier
without the presentation of tribute. The British East India Company traded at
Canton regularly until the Opium War. Mancall, above n.86, 76.
158
Fairbank and Teng, above n.l 12, 17. However, they warn that this conclusion may
be an over-simplification which runs counter to the whole set of ideas behind die
system, and it also overlooks the interesting possibility, which deserves exploration,
of an imperial economic interest, for instance, in the silk export trade.
capital, lest they make trouble or become too wise, and they were not allowed
to roam about freely in the streets without securing permission from the
proper Chinese authority, who would then specially guard the streets they
were to pass through.
On the part of the tributary states, the imperative of the tribute system
was multi-dimensional. For the rulers who maintained very close relations
with China, this was the system which operated to recognize their legitimacy
at home, heighten their prestige before their peoples, and offer them
protection against foreign invasion and natural disaster. For others,
particularly those from the Inner Asian and Outer zones, their association
with China as junior tributary states provided them with enormous trade
opportunities. As a rule, each tributary mission was allowed to be
accompanied by a large number of traders, and trade followed immediately
upon the presentation of tribute to the emperor at the capital. Sometimes,
trade was even conducted by the mission itself. In these cases, trade was also
permitted at the frontier. For instance, market places were set up on the SinoKorean and Sino-Mongolian frontiers, and in ports along the China coast.
Bearing in mind that Chinese court bore all expenses of the trip, including
accommodations while the tributary mission stayed in Beijing, commercial
transactions as such were certainly highly profitable.D Motivated by the
tremendous commercial value of the tribute system, those who might see their
relationship with China in far different terms at their end accepted the tribute
system, only superficially or tacitly, at least in part, as a matter of expedience
to advance trade benefits.'5'
Thus, as Fairbank and Teng concluded, the tribute system served
benefits for both sides, the moral value of the system being the more important
in the minds of the rulers of China, and the material value of trade in the
minds of the tribute bearers.158 To the extent that the system functioned as an
institutional expression of the time-tested Chinese view of world order, trade
57
F.T. Tsiang, above n.31, 131.

Fairbank and Teng, above n. 112, 17.
161
T.F. Tsiang, above n.31, 130.
162
Kim, above n. 102, 46.
permission given to tributary states was intended to be a mark of imperial

bounty and a means of keeping the barbarians in the proper state of
submissiveness.'5 On the part of tributary states, the fact that the China trade
was lucrative sufficed to justify their subjection to whatever humiliation was
entailed in the observances of the ritual requirements. In such a case, however,
the submission of tributary states to the Chinese world order worked in
reverse, because it was actually bought and paid for by the trade conceded by
China.
It is apparent that the tribute system left no room for the principle of
sovereign equality. Although such system cannot be said to be of neither
crusading nor colonial nature, it created a formidable barrier to a foreign
policy based on the concept of equality between or among sovereign states as
understood in the term of international law.' ' As Kim rightly observes, "The
burden of adjustment always fell on the tributary states."'62 It was this system
of the "family of nations" that the Western powers encountered when they
began to expand to East Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. The stage was set for conflict and confrontation as more and more
Westerners arrived in China. They could not accept this system ideologically
or institutionally without sacrificing valued principles of state sovereignty and
diplomatic relations based on the European system of international law. The
West mistook what was a culturally-dictated and politically-oriented institution
in China for purely political and legal reasons. Hence, the arrival of each
Western mission in China invariably sparked an occasion for quarrel. Western
nations felt that their submission to the tribute system was a humiliation and
disgrace, and they insisted on application of the European system of
international law as the governing norms for their relations with China.
Yet, the fact that the Kowtow ceremony had been performed by envoys
from several Western nations erroneously impressed China that even those
Western nations had submitted themselves to the supremacy of the Son of
Heaven. Accordingly, it could hardly see any reason to sacrifice this cherished
system simply because of the argument of the Western barbarians. The
Chinese advanced equally rhetorical logics: "We have not asked you to come;
if you come you must accept our ways," as put by Hsu. Inevitably, the
Chinese world and the Western one, with their distinct claims of superiority
58
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based on different world outlooks, collided head on. Without the support of
military forces, yet anxious to achieve trade benefits, early Western envoys
usually yielded grudgingly to the Chinese practice. Beginning from the late
eighteenth century, however, the circumstances changed drastically. The
Industrial Revolution had generated vastly increased surplus production
capacities in the West, which was in turn transformed into a powerful drive to
seek and open new markets as well as sources of raw materials abroad.
Released from the Napoleonic Wars, Western nations, notably Britain, with
the wild ambition for an imperialistic empire where the sun never set, resolved
to force open China's door and come to China on its own terms.

Chinese World Order John K Fairbank1

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Traditional Chinese World Order

Li Zhaojie {James Li)

The history of China was by no means that of an isolated country whose

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I. China's Contacts with the Outside World prior to Modern

Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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Fitzgerald, above n.7, 19.

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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II. Traditional Chinese View of World Order

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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/ . Sinocentrism and Cultural Supremacy

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

2. The Concept of Universal State

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The notion of a universal state ruled by a universal emperor had long

Chinese JIL (2002)

Fairbank, above n.2, 49.

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

As compared by Fitzgerald, in the former Roman world the differences of race,

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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relations. In return, the barbarian were expected to voluntarily seek to come

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instances were always attributed to ambitious emperors or powerful ministers;

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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governmental laws, regulations, social institutions, and proper human

Chinese JIL (2002)

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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5. Confucianism and the Chinese World Order

Fairbank, above n.l, 9.

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

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In a hierarchical and nonegalitarian society, however, these four steps, as

The Book of Great Learning, in The Chinese-English Bilingual Series of Chinese

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Li, Traditional Chinese World Order

Thus, if "affection between father and son, righteousness between the

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The cornerstone of the Confucian world view, as the outgrowth of the

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framework of the Chinese world order. Ensuing confrontation between the

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Within the traditional Chinese world order, law as a means of social