China In The World, Three Years Later w/ Ban Wang

Autumn Landscape in the Method of Fan Kuan by Wang Hui…but not that Wang Hui. This is the one that lived from 1632 to 1717. Source

Ban Wang is a professor at Stanford University, known for his expertise in Chinese literature and culture, as well as comparative literature. He has written the following books: The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (1997), Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (2002), Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (2004), China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (2022), and At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor and Critical Ecology in Modern China (2023).

Today’s interview will focus on his 2022 work, China in the World. Throughout the book, Wang traverses China’s extensive history and socio-cultural shifts and how they influence present thought in China. He emphasizes the importance of soft power and the morale of the population. Additionally, he mentions an educational deficit: Chinese people know a lot about the United States, but American people don’t know as much about China. Although these numbers are decreasing, many Chinese students travel to the United States to study. The reverse does not occur as often in China. Although there are some programs in place, they are far fewer than in the United States. Wang argues that this leads to a lack of understanding of Chinese culture from the United States’ side. For example, China is often perceived as a monolith, despite its great diversity.

China’s historical resistance to the nation-state model has made its politics difficult to understand using a Western lens. Wang does the important work of providing a history of China through leaders, influential figures, dominant ideologies, and the arts. He notes that although there are fundamental differences between Chinese and American cultures, there are also key overlooked similarities that would go a long way to shift public perception and soften the tensions between these two global superpowers. He mentions specifically the concept of tianxia 天下 (all under heaven) as a guiding principle of Chinese governance and how it has evolved.

Three years after this work was published and in the wake of a tense trade war between China and the United States, the ideas in China In The World once again have come to urgent salience. The following interview is a deep dive into the ideological frameworks Wang works within, and how they apply to China-U.S. relations today.

Grace Osborn: What made you decide to write this book?

Ban Wang: The rise of China has been a highly controversial event in this century. Around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Chinese around the world were celebrating and welcoming the Chinese torch relays running through the streets of San Francisco, London, or Paris. But small crowds of protesters disrupted the relay and even bullied the torch carriers. The detractors felt that the Chinese have no right to run a global affair like the Olympics. China’s increased power is seen as a threat to the status quo of Western domination. The incident left me wondering: Why cannot China take on the responsibility to make the world a better place? Why should the Chinese be barred from the table of world organizations? I started to probe into Chinese visions of world order inherent in the millennial tradition of datong 大同 and tianxia 天下. This vision imagines that the world’s people as being enfolded into a family and ritual relations and that different cultures and ethnicities can comingle and stay in harmony. The vision is different from the image of the world based on the discrete, divisive nation-state of the Westphalia framework. Around this time, Chinese scholar Wang Hui published the four-volume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. The journal boundary 2 asked me to write a review of the book. Wang Hui’s book traces how Chinese intellectual traditions have thought about the world, governance, and politics over two thousand years. Studying and writing about Wang Hui’s book was enlightening and inspirational. I went on to teach seminars at Stanford and started to write my own book. I wanted to tell a story about how the Chinese world vision has been enacted, debated, dialogued, and mutated in relations with cosmopolitanism, internationalism, socialism, decolonization, and globalization.

GO: What is the difference between tianxia 天下, a nation-state, and tianxia-state? And how does this relate to cosmopolitanism and nationalism?

BW: Historically, tianxia refers to a vision of civilization based on morality, ritual, and a multiethnic community. Tianxia embodies a worldwide public perspective rooted in a normative and political thinking. Instead of the use of force to exercise authority over bounded territories, tianxia projected a harmonious, civilizational world order. This is an order without clear state boundaries and ethnic divides and is associated with a shared sense of cultural world and of participation in civilization. The idea arose as a response to the historical reality of the warring and fragmented kingdoms in China’s Warring States era (475-221 BCE). In modern times, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao revamped the idea in response to the colonial and imperialist interstate wars and decried the nation-state as the source of conflict and war. The nation-state names a polity based on the unity of a language, ethnicity, and a cultural tradition as the basis of nationalism. The nation is ruled by a people with bounded territory, equipped with a military as well as national economy. Early Chinese thinkers embraced the western-style nation-state as the ticket to enter the forests of nations and as the bulwark for survival and self-defense. Nationalism in this context is an ideology that shores up the patriotic mindset of the population and tends to divide “us” from “them.” Liang Qichao, however, asserted that a Chinese nation-state is not valid in and of itself, but is only the threshold toward the “cosmopolitan or tianxia state.” A nation-state without tianxia is selfish, divisive, and meaningless. The concept of tianxia-state claims that individual nation-states can and must work together with others beyond their self-interest. The tianxia-state should share and exchange its culture and contribute to the betterment of the world.

GO: You make the point that the power of spirit and morale is more important than military might. How would you say this ideal applies in China’s politics today?

BW: The power of spirit is part of the revolutionary discourse of voluntarism. It is the ardent belief that subjective factors constitute a military capability and power and could propel the fighting army to victory. This sounds like magic or foolhardy, but comes out of necessity in dealing with the asymmetry of power relations between China and its rivals–not just in the military but on all fronts of socio-economic development. To bridge the gap in material, technology, and arms, the politics of spirit calls for a spirited transformation of willpower and dedication into material strength to make up for the lack of technology and resources. The price was, of course, the enormous sacrifice of human lives. The war films in my analysis, in fact, recognize the importance of advanced weaponry, but weapons must be complemented by will power and self-sacrifice. Today, China’s military leadership still values the spirit of courage and sacrifice, at least as a motivational rhetoric. But haunted by the past bloody memory of sacrifice and loss, China is rapidly building up advanced weaponry to match the most powerful military in the world.

GO: You ask: “Is ‘Chinese literature’ a meaningful concept? Should it be replaced with ‘world literature’?” What would this accomplish?

BW: If professors and critics only obsess with “Chineseness” and its deep millennial tradition, Chinese literature would seem a form of parochialism or tribalism. It would limit our view of Chinese literature and blindside its aesthetic and intellectual value as civilizational achievements—achievements that are not exclusively owned by the Chinese but are sharable by other peoples. The narrow-minded view of Chinese literature is not very meaningful and productive. On the other hand, when Chinese literature is placed in the global circulation with literature of others on equal footing and engages in a gift exchange of borrowing and loaning and conversation, it becomes part of world literature. My book discusses how world literature, in the Lu Xun Arts Academy in revolutionary Yan’an, was studied amid military struggles against Japanese invasion. In it, Walt Whitman, Balzac, Gorky, and Tolstoy were studied enthusiastically as world literature. The reason is not that these writers are American, French, or Russian masters of their unique national literature. The real reason is that they write for the world’s people regardless of their ethnic and national origins—people of human civilization on the planet. World literature in this context resonates with tianxia: it does not replace a national literature; it incorporates it into a planetary melting pot for all under heaven.

GO: You say that China breaks the “empire-nation binary.” What is this binary, and why does it matter?

BW: The concept of empire is frequently opposed to nation-state. Empire denotes a military and administrative governance with the capability of holding a vast land and different ethnically diverse populations together. In China’s imperial dynasties, the empire worked together with tianxia as a regime of value and ritual; it is often regarded as pre-national and pre-modern. Eastern empires are often regarded as dominated by a unified religion. The nation-state, on the other hand, is a product of modernity. Historians of China often rely on the empire-nation binary and account for clear epochal transitions from empire to modern nation-state. But my book attends more to empire in the modern garb. I trace and find the lingering motifs of empire and tianxia cosmology embedded in the modern nation-state. There are ways of thinking, feeling, imagining, and relating that look like building blocks of empire and that are very much alive among people as citizens of a modern nation. In this context, I kind of agree with Carl Schmitt’s notion of political theology, which claims that the apparently modern state is an expression of secularized and thinly disguised theological concepts.

GO: The comparison between socialist internationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism underscores a lot of the discussion in your book. What are these principles, and how do they guide China’s policy?

BW: Liberal cosmopolitanism assumes that the world is flat, and that the individuals of different cultural traditions can recognize and respect each other. They can freely converse, relate, and exchange, making the world a big family. It is a great idea, but it is a pipe dream against the context of the structural asymmetry of colonial and imperial power over the colonized and subjugated. In the culture sphere, liberal cosmopolitanism envisions a free world forum and market, where commodification and canonization of literature consecrate formal properties of literature and arts and elevate them to an exalted space of “the world republic of letters.” As literary scholars, we are very much in love with this idea as we read books in the classroom or discuss them at the conference. But this nice dream ignores the reality of who and what is in control of these processes of circulation, publication, and market forces.

Socialist internationalism does not throw away this nice idea; it in fact inherits some of it. But socialist internationalism believes that a colonized country will be able to achieve liberal cosmopolitanism only when all the subjugated countries, through a worldwide class liberation, become emancipated and stand equal to the former colonizers. As equals, the newly independent people will be invited to the world’s party to celebrate the real cosmopolitan spirit in literature and the arts. Liang Qichao, in his novel The Future of New China, paints a picture of liberal cosmopolitanism. All former colonial and imperial powers came to China to celebrate the birth of the Chinese Republic. We have seminars and trade fairs where people around the world converse, exchange, and buy and sell. It turns out to be a flat world, after all. In the revolutionary era and Mao’s era, China tried to achieve this equal dialogue by translating tons of Western literature and importing Western cultures. Today, even when China criticizes Western hegemony, most Chinese are deeply enamored with Western culture. I majored in English at Beijing Foreign Studies University. After mastering reading proficiency, we studied intensely Chaucer, Christophe Marlowe, and Shakespeare through Victorian and modern novels in a two-year curriculum. When I came to the US, I was surprised to find that we had covered more English literature than most college students in an English department in the US.

GO: In your book, you also discuss Third World internationalism. Does that still guide political thinking in Beijing?

BW: Third World theory was a logical extension of socialist internationalism into the Cold War era. Mao raised the idea in the 1940s to analyze the geopolitical dynamics of colonized, intermediate regions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The theory anticipated that the colonized agrarian people would aid each other in national liberation and decolonization. Later in the Cold War era, the vision evolved into a strategy to support Asian, African, and Latin American nations in struggles against colonialism while pursuing post-independence development. The Tanzania-Zambia Railway was a good example. The Third World movement was an anti-hegemonic, popular movement among the world’s poor and marked a strategy to respond to neo-imperialist hegemony. Today, little is left of this movement. But China’s political thinking is still indebted to the memory of Third World alliances. China’s growing influence, cooperation, and close ties with countries in the Global South often evoke past Third World relations as “South-South.” Although the current relations are more about trade, commerce, and development, the South-South endeavor is a joint effort to free the developing countries from dependence and control by the G7 Euro-American domination.

GO: When Mao posed the question: “Can a communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but must be.” What does this mean in the context of Chinese ideology?

BW: Conventionally, nationalism is antithetical to cosmopolitanism or internationalism. But Mao’s claim of patriotism (an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist nationalism) was compatible with socialist internationalism. During the war of resistance, when Japanese troops were killing your families and burning the villages, patriotism was absolutely vital for national defense and for the recovery of lost territories. But national resistance is aligned with decolonizing movements of other nations—movements understood as the decolonizing and emancipatory class action by victims of colonialism and imperialism. The nexus between patriotism and internationalism appeals to the idea of “class-nation” and is inherent in socialist internationalism. Thus, anti-Japan patriotism makes for “applied internationalism,” as Mao asserted, because “only by achieving national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation.” Today, the concept of class-nation does not seem to work, but the growing divide between the North and the South, and between the privileged and disadvantaged, still implies a sense of class conflict and class alliance cutting across nation-states.

GO: What are Kang’s principles of gong (公) and si (私) and how do they align with China’s socioeconomic policy today in 2025?

BW: Kang’s notion of gong is captured by a quote from the Li Ji (book of etiquette, 475-221 BCE): “When the Great Way was practiced, the world was shared by all alike. The worthy and the able were promoted to office and men practiced good faith and lived in harmony. Therefore they did not regard as parents only their own parents, or as sons only their own sons. The aged were cared for till the end of their lives, the able-bodied pursued proper employment, while the young were nurtured in growing up.” This principle announces that all the world’s wealth belongs to the community, and each member has a fair share, and is secure and cared for. In contrast, si is crystallized in an image of the destruction of the commons through privatization: “everything under Heaven is the possession of private families. Each regards as parents only his own parents, as sons only his own sons; goods and labor are employed for selfish ends. Hereditary offices and titles are granted by ritual law, while walls and moats must provide security.” This means the pursuit of selfish gains and privatization of the commons become prevalent, breaking up communities and creating inequality. In China today, we see a tug of war between capitalist private pursuits of profit at the expense of the commons and working people. But the leadership, if it is true to the old ideal of tending to the people’s welfare, must take care of the livelihood of common folks and make fair distribution policy. The policy of bridging the gap between the economically depressed villages and the urban centers, for example, can be said to belong to the idea of gong.

GO: You end the book, “with the legacy of tianxia and socialist internationalism, will China rule the world or bring harmony to it?” How would you answer that question now, and is your answer any different from what it would have been at the time of writing this book?

BW: It is my belief that indebted to tianxia and some forms of cosmopolitanism, China is trying to bring harmony into the world. The country is teaming up with a lot of developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and building financial, economic, and infrastructural cooperations, such as the BRICS alliance, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road initiative, and many others. These moves harken back to the traditional ideal of taking care of and improving the livelihood of working people of the world rather than for a wealthy and powerful elite. I believe the Chinese government and people have no desire to rival and replace the US and to become another hegemon. Peaceful coexistence with others is the goal and deeply embedded in the cultural DNA, so to speak. Critics may quickly point to China’s growing military might and expansion in the South China Sea. But China’s military expansion is defensive. Anyone who is aware of the trauma and devastation of imperial wars and post-war American presence in East Asia would feel that military strength is necessary for the country to preserve peaceful economic and social conditions and to participate in world affairs.

The views expressed in this article represent those of the author(s) and not those of The Carter Center.