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In China in the World, Ban Wang traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning "all under heaven," has constantly been updated into modern outlooks that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as key to overcoming interstate conflict, social fragmentation, and ethnic divides. Instead of geopolitical dominance, China's worldviews stem as much from the age-old desire for world unity as from absorbing the Western ideas of the Enlightenment, humanism, and socialism. Examining political writings, literature, and film, Wang presents a narrative of the country's pursuits of decolonization, national independence, notions of national form, socialist internationalism, alternative development, and solidarity with Third World nations. Rather than national exceptionalism, Chinese worldviews aspire to a shared, integrated, and equal world.
List of contents
Series Editor's Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Empire, Nation, and World Vision 1
1. Morality and Global Vision in Kang Youwei's World Community 19
2. Nationalism, Moral Reform, and Tianxia in Liang Qichao 40
3. World Literature in the Mountains 59
4. Art, Politics, and Internationalism in Korean War Films 80
5. National Unity, Ethnicity, and Socialist Utopia in
Five Golden Flowers 101
6. The Third World, Alternative Development, and Global Maoism 123
7. The Cold War, Depoliticization, and China in the American Classroom 148
8. Using the Past to Understand the Present 170
Notes 187
Bibliography 201
Index 211
About the author
Ban Wang is William Haas Professor of Chinese Studies at Stanford University, editor of
Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, also published by Duke University Press, and author of
Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China.
Summary
Ban Wang traces the shifting concept of the Chinese state from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how the Confucian notion of tianxia—“all under heaven”—influences China’s dedication to contributing to and exchanging with a common world.
