China and the Pursuit of Harmony in World Politics

Understanding Chinese International Relations Theory

Adam Grydehøj, Ping Su

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000531824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on the role of harmony in Chinese international relations (IR) theory, this book seeks to illuminate Chinese understandings of world politics and foreign policy.

Taking a decolonial approach and rooted in China's cultural and epistemic terms, the title first describes three traditions of the concept of harmony in ancient Chinese thought and then analyses three strands of contemporary Chinese IR theory that draw upon this traditional thinking. Despite their similarities in advocating a radical deepening of China's relations with other countries and intense interdependence as essential for global peace and prosperity, these Chinese IR theories understand the concept of harmony in different ways and present different recommendations for achieving harmonious relations. Based on this framework of harmonious IR, Chinese social scientists also argue for new directions in Chinese foreign policy in a manner that is complementary with China's policymaking system. In the case-study section, the authors apply harmonious IR perspectives to the Belt and Road Initiative and demonstrate how a better understanding of Chinese IR theories can shed light on motivations behind Chinese foreign policy.

This work will be a valuable reference for scholars, students, policymakers, and general readers interested in Chinese politics, Chinese foreign policy, Chinese IR theory, and ancient Chinese philosophy.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259794-1

The world is everything

The great Chinese international relations (IR) theorist Qin Yaqing begins his book on world politics with a metaphor: the social scientist is like a person standing on a mountain, only able to see from their own perspective, forever unable to view the mountain in its entirety.¹

We are part of the world, and the world is everything. There is no inside or outside. So we use metaphors to make reality more manageable.

The metaphors we choose are significant. They are a result of how we see the world, and they affect how we act in the world. If your metaphor for the world is a garden, then perhaps you might think of planting trees. If your metaphor is a stormy sea,² you might seek safe harbour. If your metaphor is a beehive, you might attempt to emulate bees’ industriousness, foresight, artistry, craft, fraternal selflessness, or adherence to hierarchical structures, all depending on what it was that attracted you to bees in the first place.³

This book is about theory. More specifically, it is about IR theories, which aim to help us understand world politics. More specifically still, it is about how IR theories that originate in different parts of the world may (or may not) produce different visions of the world.

To assist us in understanding this rather abstract topic, we too use a metaphor. Our metaphor illustrates the relationship between theorists, the world of theory, and the world itself.

Ours is a metaphor of gardens.

A metaphor of gardens

You are standing in a classical garden somewhere in China, looking out over a lake. Perhaps you are in Hangzhou, at West Lake. Or at the Summer Palace, in Beijing, Xuanwu Lake, in Nanjing, or Luhu Lake, in Guangzhou. The specific garden matters; all these gardens are different. But for the purpose of our metaphor, any of these gardens will do.

We will call it a ‘Chinese garden’.

You are standing in a Chinese garden, looking out over a lake. If it is a sunny day, the surface of the lake reflects the trees along the shore and the green mountains beyond. Or perhaps mist rises from the lake, obscuring trees and mountains, merging land, water, and sky. A sprinkling of islands. A pagoda would be appropriate. Somewhere on the opposite shore, a vertical bridge between heaven and lake.

These are visions of nature in harmony. But the Chinese garden is not ‘natural’ in the sense in which the term is usually understood in the West. The mountains have been landscaped, possibly for agricultural, religious, or aesthetic purposes. The trees by the shore have been planted and maintained. The pagoda looks as though it has always been there, but it too has been built and rebuilt over the centuries. The lake is artificial, comprehensively transformed and sculpted from its ancient original form, now lost to our imperfect knowledge. The garden as a whole is the work of a succession of individual people—we may call them ‘landscape architects’—who envisioned perfect forms for the garden and overlaid these upon those which came before, in ages past.

But it is not only, or even mostly, landscape architects who have produced the garden. There have also been countless numbers of gardeners, who have created and maintained the garden out of land, water, and sky, sometimes cleaving closely to the vision of this or that landscape architect but always, inevitably, adding something of themselves to the work. And there have been rulers, merchants, farmers, monks, poets, tourists, tour guides, and so many more whose ideas about the garden have conditioned landscape architects’ visions of what could be possible and how, in collaboration with others, their landscape vision could be put into practice.

The garden is not the world. (Who could mistake a mere garden for the whole world?) The garden is but an intervention in our way of understanding the world. The garden is a theory, and the landscape architect is one of its many theorists. The landscape architect must envision a garden that strikes a balance between creating an ideal world and working within the real world. This balance must be struck, for a garden that too plainly diverges from the reality of the world is a garden that cannot inspire others to act in a certain manner in the world.

Within traditional Chinese culture, harmony is the ideal state of the world. This is encapsulated in the ancient concept of tian ren he yi (天人合一), literally ‘unity of heaven and humankind’. When translated into English, tian (天) often becomes ‘nature’, rather than ‘heaven’. This elision is misleading: from a Western perspective, ‘unity of nature and humankind’ suggests that humans are part of and inseparable from nature. People must understand they are part of a natural system. This is an argument against

Figure 1.1 A Chinese garden.

Source: Lin Guangyu, 2021

anthropocentrism: who do humans think they are, to believe they can control nature?

From a traditional Chinese perspective, ‘unity of heaven and humankind’ asserts that humans carry out the will of heaven. Through virtuous behaviour, humans contribute to the harmonious ordering of the world, in line with heavenly precepts. Everyone, whether ruler or peasant, landscape architect or gardener, embodies heaven, though differences in social status and station mean that this (ideally) comes to expression in different ways for different people. In this worldview, humans are not merely part of the world; virtuous human action is essential to the proper ordering of the world.

This, at least, is one vision of Chinese culture and tradition. Its existence does not exclude the existence of others.

We return to the Chinese garden, with its lake, trees, islands, pagoda, mountains, sky. Humans have created the garden to reinforce the world’s pre-existing or ideal harmony. An understanding of the world as flowing toward harmony encouraged a landscape architecture and gardening practice conducive to deepening harmonious thought.

But let us say you are standing in a different garden, in a formal garden somewhere in Europe. Perhaps at Versailles, outside Paris, Villa di Castello, in Florence, or Frederiksborg Castle, in Hillerød. We will call it a ‘European garden’. There are ponds. There are plants, a palace, and, indeed, sky. The garden juxtaposes these various elements: in straight lines, in perfect curves, in strict spatial divisions, ruled by geometry.⁴ Although both the Chinese garden and the European garden seek to order nature, their ambitions and effects diverge. Whereas the Chinese garden creates harmony by merging elements and bringing them into reflection and interaction, the European garden creates peace by balancing distinct features alongside, within, and atop one another, without compromising their autonomy.

Both kinds of gardens are the result of immense and continual human labour, but the Chinese garden pursues the illusion of effortlessness, of happy circumstance, of being a product of natural processes. In contrast, the European garden is forthright about its origins in processes of control. It foregrounds power and effort. A worldview that sees power as emanating from central points encourages a landscape architecture practice that heightens attentiveness to the sources of this power and the centrality of control. These two opposing impulses make it difficult to gain an understanding of gardens in general: gardening practice trembles within “a polarity, which has on the one side nature and on the other the human ego.”⁵

We must not be essentialist. There are informal gardens in Europe, including whole traditions of landscape architecture emphasising ambiguous relations between elements.⁶ There are also formal gardens in China. Even so culturally significant a site as the Forbidden City, in Beijing, has been constructed in an architecture redolent of centralised power. And while classical Chinese gardens reflected wider Chinese thought, the cosmologies within this thought changed over time and across space, producing gardens attuned in different ways to Shamanistic, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions.⁷ Furthermore, classic Chinese gardens, though envisioned as microcosms, specifically matched the microcosmic imaginations of the social elite, of scholars and officials.⁸ What does it say about the connection between gardens and culture that Chinese tradition could simultaneously inspire so fluid and decentralised a garden as the one in which we have chosen to stand and so fixed and centralised a garden as the Forbidden City? Is it even possible to understand gardens in general if we cannot do so simply by studying particular, individual gardens?

So let us be clear. Our Chinese garden is not the only garden in China, and it certainly is not ‘China’. It is just a garden. But it is this particular garden that we have chosen as the best site for contemplating the nature of gardens. After all, everyone must stand somewhere. Every study is conditioned by its positioning. No study, however abstract its subject, exists without context.

This metaphor of gardens expresses the premise of the present book. Neither the Chinese nor the European garden is inherently right or wrong, better or worse than the other, yet the two types rely upon different epistemologies or ways of thinking. From the perspective of someone immersed in the deceptive naturalism of Hangzhou’s West Lake, the meticulous symmetry and effortful artifice of the Gardens of Versailles would be far from harmonious—and vice versa.

The two gardens represent different understandings of gardens and thus of the world as a whole. The way we see the world changes how we act in the world: the European landscape architect has no desire to envision a Chinese garden. Theorists who perceive the world in different ways will create different theories to reflect and improve practices in the world.

About this book

This book concerns the role of ‘harmony’ in present-day IR theory in China and how harmony-oriented IR theories influence and are influenced by Chinese foreign policy.

The Chinese IR theorists who we consider in this book are not, generally speaking, particularly interested in structuring their work and expressing their arguments in ways that resemble major schools of mainstream IR scholarship. This has, in fact, been part of the reason why Chinese IR theory has not always been recognised or acknowledged as theory.⁹ It would thus be counterproductive to ins...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Culture, theory, and methods
• 3 Harmony in traditional Chinese thought
• 4 Approaches to harmony in Chinese IR theory
• 5 Using the past for the present
• 6 Applying Chinese IR theory to foreign policy practice: harmony in the Belt and Road Initiative
• 7 Conclusion
• Index