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Overview
The author draws upon a wide range of previously untapped primary sources, including China's policy pronouncements and voting record and over a hundred personal interviews with UN delegates and international civil servants. He finds that Chinese participation has made the United Nations not only more representative but also more relevant as the global political institution responding to the challenge of establishing a more humane and just world order.
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691631714 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Center for International Studies, Princeton University , #1427 |
| Pages: | 610 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.20(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
China, the United Nations, and World Order
By Samuel S. Kim
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10076-0
CHAPTER 1
THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE IMAGE OF WORLD ORDER
The image of world order in traditional China seems to bear out the sociological maxim that men — and nations — react not to the objective reality of the world but to their image of that reality. In theory, if not always in practice, the traditional Chinese image remained tenaciously resistant to change. It was the Chinese officials' perception of what the world was like, not what it was actually like, that determined their response to international situations, and provided a comprehensive and unifying frame of reference for the conceptualization and execution of external ("barbarian") policy throughout most of Chinese history. The strength and persistence of this perception were most dramatically revealed during the first half of the nineteenth century, when China was faced with a continuing threat from the dynamic and expansionistic West.
The Chinese Self-Image
What is so striking about the Chinese image of world order is the extent to which it was colored by the assumptions, values, and beliefs of the Confucian moral order. Indeed, the traditional Chinese image of world order was no more than a corollary of the Chinese image of internal order, and thus really an extended projection of her self-image. Hence, the chief concern of China's traditional foreign policy centered upon the ways and means of making diplomatic practice conform to that idealized self-image. Even when the empire was weak and lacked the power to translate her image of world order into a political reality, China persisted in acting out her self-image in international relations. At times, the desire to preserve the purity of self-image led to a distortion of the official record so as to square deviant practice with idealized theory.
The essence of the traditional Chinese world order was Sinocentric cosmology. China perceived herself to be the center of human civilization — hence the name Middle Kingdom (Chung-kuo) — and the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven (t'ien-tzu), had de jure, if not always de facto, the right to reign and rule over all human affairs. Although pre-Confucian in origin, the notion of a universal state ruled by a universal king developed and culminated in the state orthodoxy of the Confucian order. The Son of Heaven ruled by virtue (te) in order to promote and preserve universal harmony and order among all things and all men. Thus, the Chinese world order logically led to an ordinance of Pax Sinica, which all non-Chinese states and peoples had to accept if they were to enter into any relations with China. The history of China's relations with her Asian neighbors lent some credence to such a claim. As a result, the claim was transformed into a creed, and the dividing line between the Chinese image of what the world order ought to be like and the changing practical reality virtually disappeared from the Chinese world view.
To the extent that Pax Sinica was claimed as a function of China's cultural superiority and moral virtue, the Chinese image of world order may have been more ethical than political. Such a view needs to be qualified, however, when we examine its ideological components. Clearly, the value of harmony (ho) stands out as a salient feature in the Chinese images of domestic and world order. The Doctrine of the Mean, a Confucian canonical text that guided the socialization process of traditional China for centuries, idealizes harmony in the following terms:
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 human actings 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.
Note here that harmony is romanticized not only as the proper norm in human relations but also in the relationship between man and nature. Whatever aesthetic appeal such an idealization of harmony may possess, it also served as a political and social doctrine designed to perpetuate the conservative status quo. The written Chinese language, which is rich in evocative symbolism, was used extensively in schools, civil service examinations, and the Court as the conveyer of harmony as a supreme value. Indeed, the symbols of harmony became all-pervasive "in innumerable era names, place names, personal names, street, palace, temple, and studio names throughout Chinese history."
However, the sociopolitical status quo to be preserved in the Chinese world order through a universal symbolization of harmony was hierarchical and antiegalitarian, based on sex, kinship, age, and social function. The Confucian orthodoxy laid heavy stress on the doctrine of superordination-subordination in the Five Relationships — ruler and subject, husband and wife, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, and friend and friend — as well as in the distinction between the superior men who work with their brains and the inferior men who labor with their muscles. The Confucian social stratification also ranked the classes hierarchically in the order of scholar-official, farmer, artisan, and merchant. Harmony in such a sociopolitical context really aimed at replacing individual originality and creativity with individual subordination and submissiveness. Moreover, the hierarchical social order at home provided an absolute criterion for conceptualizing China's relations with non-Chinese states.
Sinocentrism, in all its pretense of paternalistic benevolence and cultural chauvinism, was an outgrowth of centuries of Chinese contacts with surrounding peoples in the Sinic (East Asian) world order. The notion of the Middle Kingdom originated in the Chou dynasty, when "China" was a group of feudal states around the Yellow River, surrounded by the "barbarian" tribes at the four quarters of the kingdom — jung on the west, i on the east, ti on the north, and man on the south. Chinese historical scholarship records a glorification of Chinese civilization at a time when other contemporary states such as Korea, Vietnam, and Japan were all cast under the powerful shadow of Chinese culture. Thus, the absence of any rival civilization became a potent factor in the development of the Chinese image of world order.
True, the Chinese were aware of the existence of Pax Romana, but it seems to have had little direct impact on their own world view. Limited contacts with west Asia and the Byzantine world during the T'ang dynasty (618-906) merely confirmed the Tightness of the Sino-centric image. Even the Buddhist invasion, the most serious foreign challenge to Chinese culture until modern times, failed to modify Chinese perceptions. The Indian world view as expressed in Buddhism was devoid of political imperative. While Buddhism exerted a substantial and lasting influence on art and religious thought in traditional China, it had little political impact on Chinese cosmology. On the contrary, the anti-Buddhist campaign was marked by "a most vehement and absolutist reassertion of the Chinese image of world order."
In a remarkable way, even the alien conquerors — the Yiian or Mongol (1279-1367) and the Ch'ing or Manchu (1644-1911) — contributed to reinforcing the Sinocentric world order. They seized political power through military conquest and ruled from the top down, without altering the ideological continuity of Confucianism or the Chinese image of world order. The relatively short tenure of Mongol rule may have been a result of inadequate Sinicization of the Mongols. As if determined to avoid the fate of the Mongols, the Manchus, the most thoroughly Sinicized of all the alien dynasties, became staunch champions of the Chinese cultural heritage. 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. The Manchus themselves no longer knew their mother tongue. An imperial edict of January 1862 acknowledged this fait accompli by exempting Manchu candidates in the civil service examinations from translating Chinese classics into Manchu. "If the government of the Ch'ing had faults," observed the reformer K'ang Yu-wei, "they were the ancient faults of the Han, T'ang, Sung, and Ming — 'It was not a special Manchu system'."
In addition, natural geographical barriers exerted some influence in the evolution of the Chinese image of world order. China is guarded on the west by almost endless deserts, on the southwest by the Himalaya Mountains, and on the east by vast oceans. Admired but often attacked by the "barbarians" of the semiarid plateau lands on the north and west, and cut off from the other centers of civilization by oceans, deserts, and mountains, China gradually developed a unique sense of her place under heaven. The geopolitical dimension of the Chinese world order has been analyzed by some scholars in terms of a model of hierarchical concentric zonation. "For centuries upon centuries," one scholar has written, "the perceived political spatial system remained Sinocentric, zonal, roughly concentric, without formal boundaries, characterized by a distance-intensity relationship between power and territorial control, almost exclusively Asia-oriented, and separated from the rest of the world by indifference or ignorance. Nowhere in those centuries of China's history for which the model appears to apply did China perceive of herself as a state of states, a neighbor among neighbors, a member of a family of nations."
In short, the Sinic world order was a concentric extension of the hierarchical principle which prevailed in the domestic social structure of the Middle Kingdom. It was a system of "interstate" relations unto itself with its own rules of the game. It was not a system of international relations in the modern European sense, whose stability was maintained by the balance of power among more or less equal member states. It was instead a system of hierarchical harmony enforced by the preponderance of power and virtue anchored in China.
The Tribute System
What have been the practical or operational consequences of the Sino-centric image of world order? Although there is no comparable Chinese term, "tribute system" has been used by Western Sinologists to designate the sum total of complex, practical, and institutional expressions of the Chinese world order. International diplomacy or international relations, as we understand the terms today, were alien to the letter and spirit of the tribute system. Such principles as national independence, national sovereignty, and national equality, upon which modern international law is built, were meaningless for the Chinese; in fact, they were repugnant to their sense of a universal state and civilization. The boundaries in the Chinese world order were strictly cultural, separating the civilized from the barbarian. Likewise, the dividing line between power and virtue — that is, between "might" and "right" — was never drawn. In fact, one could argue that in traditional China "right" defined "might," not the other way around, and that national power was viewed as the reflection of national virtue.
Viewed in this light, China was neither a state nor a nation but a civilization ruled by the Son of Heaven. The idea of nationality or nationalism as yet had had no impact. For example, when Charles Eliot, the British superintendent of trade in China, urged the viceroy of Canton on the eve of the outbreak of the Opium War (1839-42) to settle the differences between the two nations peacefully, the viceroy was quite puzzled by the term, "two nations," for he took them to mean England and the United States. Even the concept of barbarians was devoid of any racial or nationalistic imperative, as it merely conveyed to the native-born that the people so designated stood outside the pale of Chinese cultural and linguistic refinement. In addition, we find in traditional China a conspicuous absence of any institution corresponding to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the West. The Book of Rites ordained in fact that "the officials of the Empire shall have no intercourse with foreigners."
Until the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese world order was subjected to a massive onslaught by the Western powers, all types of external intercourse were supposed to take place within the established norms and precedents of the tribute system. Formal intercourse was bilateral merely in the sense of involving the two parties at a time, not in the contemporary sense of a mutual exchange of ambassadors or of political and economic activities flowing more or less equally in both directions. The Son of Heaven was the tribute receiver who was firmly anchored in the Forbidden City, while all other states were tribute bearers whose envoys had to follow the specifically designated routes to and from Peking in the course of their tributary journey. Curiously, the 1818 Collected Statutes of the Ch'ing Dynasty (Ta-Ch'ing hui-tien) categorized Tibet, Corea (Korea), Liu Ch'iu (Ryu-kyu), Cambodia, Siam, Sulu, Holland, Burma, Portugal, Italy, and England as tributary states, while Russia, Japan, Sweden, and France were listed merely as states having only commercial relations with China.
The regulations governing tributary missions were spelled out in the Collected Statutes in specific terms for each tributary state. They included 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 the ritual requirements to be performed at the Court. In purely economic terms, the tribute system made little sense to China; in fact, it represented a financial burden since all expenditures incurred during the tributary envoy's sojourn in China were paid by the Chinese government. Yet to the extent that the tribute system served as an institutionalized expression of the Chinese image of world order, economic considerations had to be subordinated to cultural symbolism.
It should also be noted that the source of Chinese authority over tributary states was not always military, as there were periods when China had to accept the military supremacy of the surrounding barbarians, and the cycle of alternating Chinese military superiority and inferiority became a recurring feature in Chinese history. Yet the Sinocentric image of world order was seldom compromised, because it was seldom challenged in any fundamental way. As noted earlier, the Ch'ing dynasty was the last example of alien rule of China within the realm of the Chinese image of world order.
The tribute system worked relatively well for centuries, reaching its height of classical refinement in the Ming (1368-1664) and Ch'ing dynasties. Its longevity may have been due to its ability to foster mutually complementary interests on the part of the tribute receiver and the tribute bearer. For the Chinese, the system proved to be politically and culturally useful as it served as a first step in bringing the barbarians into the edifying influence of Chinese civilization. The smug assumption that the barbarians could not help but be transformed (lai-hua) by the awe-inspiring virtue of Chinese civilization was once expressed by Mencius: "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." The tribute system also served as an acceptable vehicle for regulating commercial relations with other states. Finally, it was an ever-present symbol exemplifying and legitimizing the Sinocentric world order.
The interests and motives of the tributary states were more complex and less subject to neat generalizations. For many, the system had a commercial value. It was accepted as an unavoidable price to pay for the privilege of trade, and the China trade was sufficiently lucrative to justify suffering whatever humiliation might be entailed in the ritual requirements, especially the performance of the kowtow — three kneelings and nine prostrations (san-kuei chiu-k'ou-li) — symbolizing acceptance of the Chinese world order. In such a case, "the tributary system really worked in reverse, the submission of the barbarians being actually bought and paid for by the trade conceded to them by China."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from China, the United Nations, and World Order by Samuel S. Kim. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Tables, pg. ix
- Figures, pg. xi
- Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
- Abbreviations, pg. xvi
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. The Traditional Chinese Image of World Order, pg. 19
- 2. The Maoist Image of World Order, pg. 49
- 3. Global Politics in the General Assembly, pg. 97
- 4. China and the Security Council, pg. 178
- 5. The New International Economic Order, I: The Inaugural Process, pg. 242
- 6. The New International Economic Order, II: The Implementation Process, pg. 282
- 7. China, Functionalism, and the Specialized Agencies, pg. 334
- 8. China and International Legal Order, pg. 405
- 9. The Chinese Image and Strategy of World Order, pg. 471
- Interview Schedule, pg. 503
- Appendixes, pg. 509
- Bibliography, pg. 531
- Index, pg. 567