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The Tributary System as International
Society in Theory and Practice
Zhang Yongjin*y and Barry Buzanz
How have different cultures and peoples constructed their political communities and organized their international life in history? In which ways has
order been differently conceptualized and pursued through a diverse range
of institutional practices in different cultural and world historical contexts,
and why? What were world orders like before the rise of capitalism and the
expansion of Europe and the imposition of the Westphalian model? How is
it possible to explain why different international societies, as we understand
them today, have created different fundamental institutions and adopted
radically different institutional designs in their pursuit of peace and cooperation across space and time? Why is it important to consider the transformation of international orders beyond European history in theorizing
International Relations? From where does the current global order emerge
in deep world historical terms? These are among a number of key questions
raised in collective critical reflections on and re-evaluation of the theorizing
enterprise within the discipline of International Relations (IR). They are
questions that have been explored and interrogated during the last two
decades as part of our efforts to understand the still unfolding systemic
transformation of international relations. The search for answers to these
questions marks a discernible turn in the studies of IR to History.
Ostensibly, this historical turn in IR theorizing is a critique of the Realist
claim of ‘timeless wisdom’ and, more broadly, of the failure of mainstream
IR theories to take history seriously. It is an expression of dissatisfaction
with universalizing IR theories. Contemporary IR is said to be ‘historophobic’, as ‘it views historical analysis as superfluous, or exogenous, to
y
Zhang Yongjin is Professor of International Politics at School of Sociology, Politics and
International Studies, University of Bristol.
z
Barry Buzan is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and honorary professor at Copenhagen and Jilin Universities.
He can be reached at [email protected].
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
ß The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
4 Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
the subject matter of the discipline’.1 Waltzian neo-realism is said to be
‘cleansed’ of history in the sense that history becomes ‘reducible to perennial
anarchical structure’ in international relations.2 History matters in IR, if at
all, only ‘as a field of data to be mined, for cases to be shoehorned in the
pursuit of grand theory building, and for evidence of the cycles of history
that realists used to mark historical time’.3 In a scathing criticism of the
‘underdeveloped conception of the international system’ in mainstream IR
theories, Barry Buzan and Richard Little argue that conceptualization of the
international system has been bedevilled by presentism, ahistoricism,
Eurocentrism, anarchophilia and state-centrism.4 If Eurocentrism and
ahistoricism are mutually constitutive, both Eurocentrism and ahistoricism
in IR theorizing have made us oblivious to the simple fact that the fundamental institutions in contemporary international society—contractual
international law and multilateralism—have, as Reus-Smit reminds us,
been with us for little more than 150 years, and represent significant
institutional variations from their predecessors.5 By the same token, both
the so-called ‘Westphalian order’ and the putative transformation of global
politics today (i.e. we are going beyond Westphalia) are historically
contingent.
These criticisms suggest an imperative to develop greater historical and
cultural sensitivity to the evolution of international orders and their transformations in world history. They encourage research to historicize the past
as a way to understanding the present as problematic and the future as
contingent on history. More profoundly, therefore, this historical turn
necessitates reorienting and reconfiguring the substantive research agenda
of International Relations, which aims at an ambitious disciplinary progress,
i.e. to develop historically sensitive theorizing and theoretically informed
international history.
It is in this intellectual context that growing interest has developed within
the discipline of IR in the tributary system in East Asian history—the
Chinese world order—not just as historians’ imagination but as an enduring
historical puzzle. More broadly, there has been growing interest in the
1
2
3
4
5
John M. Hobson, ‘What’s at Stake in ‘‘Bringing Historical Sociology Back into
International Relations?’’ Transcending ‘‘Chronofetishism’’ and ‘‘Tempocentrism’’ in
International Relations’, in Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson, eds., Historical
Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5.
Benno Teschke, ‘Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and
Theory’, International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 2(1998), pp. 325–358.
Michael Barnett, ‘Historical Sociology and Constructivism: An Estranged Past, A
Federated Future?’, in Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson, eds., Historical Sociology
of International Relations, p. 100.
Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp.18–22.
Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999).
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
The Tributary System as International Society 5
traditional Chinese political and moral thinking, in the philosophical discourse, in both Ancient and Imperial China, about peace and war, conflict
and cooperation in relations between states and political communities, in the
historical articulation of the Chinese vision of a world order and in the
construction of institutions in regulating and governing the practice of
international relations in East Asia.6
There are, too, compelling political and policy rationales for the growth of
such interest. The rapid rise of China has caused ‘a cauldron of anxiety’7
within both academic and policy communities worldwide, and provoked
fierce debate about power transition and/or hegemonic succession between
the United States and China and the implications for the future global
order.8 It has invited reflections on whether an emerging hegemonic China
is likely to take the future of Asia back to its past,9 and, more recently, there
has been a marked shift from a discourse of China’s rising power to that of
its purpose. ‘What will China want?’;10 ‘What Does China Think?’;11 ‘What
kind of a world does China hope to shape?’12 and ‘What kind of world does
China want?’13—these are new questions asked and debated in the media
and among academics in Washington and European capitals. That such
questions are bluntly asked and publicly debated testifies to the urgency
and the importance of understanding how traditional Chinese worldviews,
philosophical legacies and discursive practices in regard to international
relations in Chinese history inform the present Chinese leadership of their
visions of the future of global order and rising China’s role in shaping this
order.
Scholarship produced in China constitutes this historical turn in IR theorizing. In the Chinese epistemic community, the philosophical reflections
of Zhao Tingyang on the traditional concept of Tianxia have caused
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Yan Xuetong, Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
Robert Zoellick, ‘Whither China: from Membership to Responsibility: Remarks to
National Committee on US–China Relations’, http://www.ncuscr.org/files/2005Gala_
RobertZoellick_Whither_China1.pdf.
John Mearsheimer, ‘China’s Unpeaceful Rise’, Current History, No. 690 (2006), pp. 160–
162; John G. Ikenberry, ‘The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal
System Survive?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 1 (2008), pp.23–37; Ian Clark, ‘China and
the United States: a Succession of Hegemonies?’, International Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 1
(2011), pp. 13–28.
Amitav Acharya, ‘Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?’, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 3
(2003/2004), pp. 149–164.
Jeffrey Legro, ‘What Will China Want: The Future Intention of a Rising Power’,
Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2007), pp. 515–534.
Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (London: Fourth Estate, 2008).
Fareed Zakaria, ‘What Does China Want?’, Washington Post, June 7 2010, http://www
.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/06/AR2010060602924.html.
Alistair Burnett, ‘What Kind of World Does China Want?’, BBC News Editors blog,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/11/what_kind_of_world_does_china.html.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
6 Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
considerable excitement as well as controversies.14 This best represents an
intellectual effort in China to re-imagine the future world order by rediscovering Chinese intellectual and philosophical heritage. Renewed interest
within China in exploring the theory and practice associated with the traditional notion of Tianxia has captured the scholarly imagination globally.15
It has also evoked a strong sense of unease, scepticism, anxiety and even
suspicion of an unspoken political agenda to re-invent a Sino-centric world
order and revive China’s hegemonic ambition to dominate and order the
world once more.16
In leading the efforts to bring scholarship produced within and beyond
China on these subjects together on the same platform, The Chinese Journal
of International Politics has made a special contribution to nurturing interest
in ancient Chinese international thought and to encouraging and promoting
a debate about the discursive and institutional practices in Chinese international relations in East Asia before the arrival of the European international
society. Dr. Zhou Fangyin’s article, ‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary
System’, published in CJIP in 2011, deepens and extends this debate
and offers a glimpse of contentions and controversies in recent Chinese
scholarship on the tributary system.17
Starting with a summary critique of the existing scholarship on the
tributary system in China, Zhou sets out to unravel the central puzzle,
which he defines as the stability and historical continuity of the tributary
system.18 Noting that, ‘The value of research into the tributary system lies in
its being not just an imagined system or a conceptual construct, but an
actual configuration of institutions’, Zhou treats the tributary system as a
set of institutional frameworks within which ‘the Middle Kingdom and the
periphery states engaged in ongoing strategic interactions’. Using a game
theoretical approach, Zhou attempts to construct a model that explains the
dynamic equilibrium of the tributary system which represents, in his words,
‘a spontaneous order, an endogenous and self-reinforcing institutional
14
15
16
17
18
Zhao Tingyang, Tianxia tixi: shijie zhidu zhexue daolun (The Tianxia System: A Philosophy
of World Institutions) (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005); Zhao Tingyang,
‘A World Political Philosophy in Terms of All-Under-Heaven (Tianxia)’, Diogenes,
No. 221 (2009), pp. 5–18.
For example, Stanford University held a Tianxia workshop in May 2011. See ‘Tianxia
Workshop: Culture, International Relations, and World History’, http://events.stanford.
edu/events/272/27253/.
William Callahan, ‘Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-hegemonic or a New
Hegemony?’, International Studies Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2008), pp. 749–761.
At the same time, it should be noted that Zhou’s research has engaged only a limited
amount of the existing literature published in English on the topic, both in his theoretical
deliberation and historical investigation. The case study in his article of the Qing expedition to Burma makes no reference, for example, to Dai Yingcong, ‘A Disguised Defeat:
The Myanmar Campaign of the Qing Dynasty’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1
(2004), pp. 145–189.
Zhou Fangyin, ‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary System’, Chinese Journal of
International Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2011), pp. 147–178.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
The Tributary System as International Society 7
arrangement of East Asia, which appeared and was reproduced as an outcome of continuous strategic interactions among actors within the region’.
Throughout Zhou’s theoretical construction and empirical analysis, there is
an explicit assumption of states as rational actors who are driven by material
interest and incentives in their strategic reaction and interaction. The
equilibrium is, in his words, ‘the result of rational choice and strategic interaction among China and its neighbouring states’.19 Effectively, this reduces
Zhou’s conceptualization, as well as analysis, of the tributary system to a
defensive mechanism for Imperial China, and characterizes the institutions
embedded in the tributary system as ultimately no more than instrumental.
This last point is particularly clear in Zhou’s selection of historical case
studies. He gives rich historical details of both Imperial China’s relations
with Burma under Emperor Qianlong and its relations with the Korean
Peninsula during the Sui and Tang dynasties. He focuses on examining
the tributary system as a complex of institutional arrangements and
practices for dealing with a particular security challenge to Imperial
China, which could be defined as frontier pacification. As Zhou candidly
states, such historical analysis ‘makes apparent the respective advantages
and disadvantages of the tributary system as a strategy for maintaining
border stability’. By taking this narrow focus, however, he fails to see
these institutions as a more broadly conceptualized social structure with
particular institutional innovations geared to solving a wide range of
problems, among states in East Asia, of co-existence and cooperation.
This particular analytical bias, although possibly enlightening in one way,
as Zhou clearly demonstrates, is at the same time self-limiting and, hence,
unsatisfactory. In particular, it is devoid of any social analysis of the construction and constitution of the tributary system as a particular historical
social structure in East Asia, or as a particular set of institutional and
discursive practices that define, govern and regulate the so-called Pax
Sinica. This is a tributary system, so to speak, without soul. Nevertheless,
Zhou’s equilibrium analysis of the tributary system has teased out two genuine puzzles of great theoretical interest. The first is that of the longevity,
resilience, adaptability, malleability and relative stability of the tributary
system. The second is the institutional arrangement, configuration and
innovation associated with the system as a collective solution invented by
and consented to among East Asian states to counter the perennial problems
of inter-state conflict, co-existence and cooperation. Implicit in Zhou’s
analysis of Imperial China’s relations with the Korean Peninsula during
the Sui and the Tang dynasties is a suggestion that culture matters, and
that internalization of the Chinese system and culture ‘played an important
role in bringing about the equilibrium’.20
19
20
Ibid.
Ibid.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
8 Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
In the discussions that follow, we take up the challenges issued by
Zhou. Before setting out our approach, it is worth noting that the use of
the ‘tributary system’ as the key analytical term in the studies of China’s
traditional foreign relations, introduced by John King Fairbank, among
others, has many critics.21 It is clear that the application of this analytical
term in explaining how Imperial China conducted its relations with other
polities and peoples is not unproblematic.22 Rather than abandoning
the term, in order to transcend the limits of its traditional usage, we have
chosen to conceptualize it differently in the following discussions, in international society terms, as informed and inspired by the English School of
International Relations and constructivism. In so doing, we hope to offer a
different, but ultimately complementary, analytical approach to unravelling
the puzzles associated with the tributary system that Zhou has already
partially teased out.
Instead of the instrumental reasoning and strategic rationale that
Zhou focuses on in explaining the rationality of the tributary system, our
approach emphasizes cultural elements and the social constitution of the
tributary system. We look at the tributary system not just as a structure
of strategic interaction and economic exchange between Imperial China and
other participants in the system, but as an articulation of the existence of
international society in East Asia, constitutive of a social order in East Asian
history and politics. This approach is heavily influenced by the English
School of International Relations and richly informed by the constructivist
insight of fundamental institutions as constitutive of the normative foundation of international society. We, therefore, conceptualize the tributary
system as an international society with its own social structure which embodies complex social relations among participating and constituent states,
and which has a particular set of institutions that help to define norms of
acceptable and legitimate state behaviour.
We contend that the tributary system is not just a defensive mechanism
invented and exploited by Imperial China as a hegemon for its frontier
pacification, as Zhou argues rather persuasively in his article, but more
importantly, an institutional innovation by East Asian states as institutional
solutions to a wide range of problems in inter-state cooperation. Rather
than presupposing the instrumental and strategic rationality of the tributary
system, we investigate the institutional rationality and moral purpose of the
state in this Society. Instead of making an a priori assumption of China’s
21
22
For an interesting discussion of the tributary system and its critics in both the Chinese and
Western historiography, see James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual
and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 9–15.
Zhang Feng, ‘Rethinking the ‘‘Tribute System’’: Broadening the Conceptual Horizon of
Historical East Asian Politics’, in Zheng Yongnian, ed., China and International Relations:
The Chinese View and the Contribution of Wang Gungwu (London: Routledge, 2010),
pp. 75–101.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
The Tributary System as International Society 9
superiority, in both materialistic and ideational senses, as a hegemonic state
in East Asia with a historical reality, we argue that the Chinese hegemony
does not exist outside social recognition by other states and interrogate
hegemony as an indispensable institution in managing the tributary
system. In contrast to Zhou’s game-theoretical approach, ours is more
critically reflective and interpretive. Our overall purpose is to suggest an
alternative analytical perspective which, we argue, can significantly enrich
our understanding of the tributary system as a historically and culturally
contingent social order in East Asia.
Conceptualizing International Society
Hedley Bull articulates the classic conceptualization of international society.
In his words, ‘A society of states (or international society) exists when
a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common
values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be
bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and
share in the working of common institutions’.23 To differentiate international society from international system, as conceptualized by the English
School, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson later state that ‘By an international
society we mean a groups of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political communities) which not merely form a system, in the sense that
the behaviour of each is a necessary factor in the calculations of the others,
but also have established by dialogue and consent common rules and
institutions for the conduct of their relations, and recognize their common
interest in maintaining these arrangements’.24 Bull further identifies five key
institutions in contemporary international society, namely, the balance of
power, international law, diplomacy, war and great power management,
that help maintain and uphold a world order, which he defines as ‘a pattern
of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of
states, or international society’.25 This conceptualization of international
society is much more than Terry Nardin’s notion of international society
as ‘a practical association’26 can accommodate or would allow.
Extending the classical English School definition of international society,
Barry Buzan defines the existence of Bull’s ‘anarchical society’ in terms of
23
24
25
26
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), p.13.
Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), p.1.
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, p. 8. Because Bull has already fixed anarchy as the
organizing principle of the international society, he discusses (as opposed to suzerainty,
medievalism or some other structure) sovereignty and territoriality as institutions that are
already implicit in his analysis as the unit characteristics that are the other side of the coin
from anarchy at the system level.
Terry Nardin, Law, Morality and Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983).
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
10
Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
‘acceptance of the deep rules of the game that states share with each other
sufficiently to form a kind of social order’. The most visible manifestation
of the existence of such a social order, Buzan argues,27 is in the primary
institutions that evolve to constitute both the players and the game of
international relations, and, as Clark argues,28 to define what behaviour is
and is not seen as legitimate. These organic institutions—such as sovereignty, non-intervention, territoriality, nationalism, war, balance of power,
international law, diplomacy, great power management, the equality of
peoples, colonialism—are composed of principles, norms and rules that
underpin deep and durable practices. They are distinct from the more
familiar secondary institutions (such as regimes and intergovernmental
organizations) that are recent, instrumental, mainly state-designed expressions of the underlying social structure of modern international relations.
Primary institutions form the social structure of international society, which
is dynamic and always evolving, albeit usually slowly and with a great
deal of continuity.29
Building on the idea of primary institutions, anarchic international societies at any level can be arranged along a spectrum from relatively shallow
and thin to relatively deep and dense. The following four types reflect basic
organizing principles inherent to increasing degrees of international social
order:
Power Political represents an international society based largely on
enmity and the possibility of war, but where there is also diplomacy,
alliance-making and trade. Survival is the states’ main motive, and no
values are necessarily shared. Institutions will be minimal, mostly
confined to rules of war, recognition and diplomacy.
Coexistence represents a Westphalian system in which the core
institutions of interstate society are the balance of power, sovereignty,
territoriality, diplomacy, great power management, war and international law. States seek to retain both diversity and a degree of order.
Cooperative requires developments that go significantly beyond
coexistence, towards the pursuit of specific joint projects. It can come
in many guises, depending on the type of values that are shared and
how/why they are shared. Examples of interstate cooperative projects
might include the creation of a shared market economy, the pursuit of
human rights, joint pursuit of big science, collective environmental
management and the like.
27
28
29
Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Kalevi Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
The Tributary System as International Society
11
Convergence means the development of a substantial range of shared
values within a set of states to make them adopt similar political, legal
and economic forms. The range of shared values has to be wide enough
and substantial enough to generate similar forms of government (liberal
democracies, Islamic theocracies, communist totalitarianisms, etc.) and
legal systems based on similar values in respect of such basic issues as
property rights, human rights and the relationship between government
and citizens.30
In a scheme that runs partly in parallel with what Buzan labels as ‘primary
institutions’, Chris Reus-Smit conceptualizes ‘fundamental institutions’.
Such institutions are, in his words, ‘‘generic’’ structural elements of international societies’.31 They are authoritative because they embody ‘sets of
prescriptive norms, rules, and principles that specify how legitimate states
‘‘ought’’ to resolve their conflicts, coordinate their relations, and facilitate
co-existence’.32 What is perhaps most insightful is Reus-Smit’s argument
that these fundamental institutions are shaped by ‘higher order values’,
which he calls ‘constitutional structures’ of international societies,
metavalues that define legitimate statehood and rightful state action.
‘Constitutional structures’, in his words, ‘are coherent ensembles of
intersubjective beliefs, principles, and norms that perform two functions in
ordering international societies: they define what constitutes a legitimate
actor, entitled to all the rights and privileges of statehood; and they define
the basic parameters of rightful state action’.33 This view is supported by
Clark34 who argues that ‘the evolution of specific legitimacy formations
forms the essential history of international society’, where legitimacy is
defined in terms of rightful membership and rightful conduct.35 Reflecting
on the history of European international societies, Reus-Smit further posits
that three normative elements are constitutive of such constitutional structures. They are: a hegemonic belief about the moral purpose of the state; an
organizing principle of sovereignty; and a norm of pure procedural justice.
It, hence, follows that as the emergence of international societies is contingent on different historical and cultural contexts, international societies vary
in their constitutional structures, which inform the establishment of different
fundamental institutions.36
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Barry Buzan, From International to World Society?, pp.158–160.
Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, p. 4.
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
p. 245.
Ibid, pp. 2, 9.
Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, pp. 27–31.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
That there existed an indigenous social order in the history and politics of
what we call East Asia today is beyond dispute, be it called the Chinese
world order, the tributary system, Pax Sinica, the East Asian order,
international society in East Asia or any other. Acknowledging this is to
recognize that East Asian states and peoples had historically chosen and
established complex institutions and practices informed by their history
and culture in dealing with challenges of security, conflict, co-existence
and cooperation. As Adda Bozeman astutely observed, this social order,
or ‘international’ system, ‘proved to be more enduring and successful than
the comparable order of any other historical nation’.37 The question, then, is
in what way the English School’s conception of international society, as
embodied in common institutional practices, can help us understand the
tributary system as an institutional puzzle, and whether the constructivist
insight of constitutional structure informing fundamentally different institutional practices in comparable international societies can shed light on,
and be enriched by, the East Asian historical experience. The answer to
these questions entails an analytical framework that takes the tributary
system as informed, shaped and constrained by its constitutional structure.
If this is granted, an analytical understanding of the historical and cultural
particularity that underlies the framing of this constitutional structure is
in order.
Culture and the Constitutional Structure of the
Tributary System
Martin Wight once famously claimed that, ‘We must assume that a
states-system will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity
among its members’.38 This claim has been subject to critical examination,
particularly in the light of the existence of a universal global international
society today. One critical question that has been asked is whether, following
Wight’s logic, ‘a society of states lacking a shared culture because it has
expanded beyond its original base will be unstable’.39 Wight’s claim,
however, seems to hold validity in a number of historical cases he chose
to study, which Hedley Bull accepted ‘were all founded upon a common
culture or civilization’.40 If, historically, common culture is prior to international society, as speculated by Wight, and if Reus-Smit is right that
37
38
39
40
Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1960), p. 143.
Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), p. 143.
Barry Buzan, ‘Culture and International Society’, International Affairs, Vol. 86, No.1
(2010), pp. 1–25.
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, p. 16.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
The Tributary System as International Society
13
constitutional structure is a higher order value that shapes fundamental
institutions of international society, it is reasonable to infer that shared
cultures by different groups of states are likely to lead to framing and
forming of international societies with different institutional designs and
practices, whose constitutional structures vary as they are informed by
different cultures and civilizational influences in different historical
periods. Is this, then, what happened in East Asia historically? Given that
China was historically the cultural heartland of East Asia, and that it
was Imperial China that imagined, constructed and, to a considerable
extent, sustained the East Asian order, the key question becomes: How
did Chinese culture and civilization influence the creation and assertion of
the constitutional structure that informs the evolution of the tributary
system?
Prevalent in Ancient China was a moral conviction that the universe is one
peaceful and harmonious whole. Such a moral conviction long predated
Confucius and his contemporaries. It assumed a natural harmony between
heavenly and earthly forces and projected an image of the entire universe as
a world-embracing community. Central to the conception of this cosmic–
social order is the notion of universal kingship. The Confucians, however,
‘restated and amplified’ this universalist thought.41 ‘The Confucian conception of tian xia’, in Joseph Chan’s words, ‘refers to an ideal moral and
political order admitting no boundaries—the whole world to be governed
by a sage according to principles of rites (li) and virtue (de)’.42 This ideal
moral order, in other words, has universal applicability. It follows that
‘the political order, being an instrument in promoting the moral order, is
naturally seen as also universal, having no boundary of territory or of
ethnicity’.43 This dominant Confucian discourse has exercised decisive and
perpetual influence on the Chinese imagination of order and human agency
in relation to this order. The preordained order of natural harmony in such
cosmic unity could only be realized, Confucians repeatedly emphasized,
when man’s conduct correlated to it by observing strictly five important
human relationships appropriately formulated. They were: those between
husband and wife; father and son; older and younger brother; friend
and friend; and sovereign and minister. All kinds of political conduct
must conform to these norms within and beyond the family as well as the
state and in the sphere of humanity taken as a whole.
This clearly suggests that the moral purpose of all political and social
communities and institutions, be it family, tribe, state and empire, is to
41
42
43
Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History, p. 134.
Joseph Chan, ‘Territorial Boundaries and Confucianism’, in Daniel A. Bell, eds.,
Confucian Political Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 69.
Ibid., p. 71.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012
14
Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
promote, establish and maintain moral and political order and social and
cosmic harmony. This belief is deeply embedded and explicitly expressed in
the Confucian worldview. As Benjamin Schwartz asserts, ‘The orthodox
line of Confucianism considered the main purpose of the state to be the
support and maintenance of the moral, social and cultural order of social
peace and harmony’.44 This is, then, the hegemonic belief of the moral purpose of the state in the Chinese world. As a key component of the constitutional structure, it is decidedly different, both from that conceived for the
Ancient Greek society of states, which is the cultivation of bios politikos and
from that of modern international society, which is an augmentation of
individuals’ purposes and potentialities.45 This observation is of particular
importance because the difference explains crucially why a particular set of
institutional designs was chosen as we find in the tributary system, and
where fundamentally East Asian order differs historically from other
comparable social orders.
Associated with the Confucian notion of universal kingship is a specific
Chinese cosmology that China is not a higher civilization, but the civilization—the centre of the world—around which the world was organized
hierarchically, in civilizational terms. As Paine succinctly, if harshly, puts
it: ‘Only in the late nineteenth century did the Chinese learn that civilization
had a plural’.46 This assumption of cultural superiority is accompanied by a
perennial discourse on the distinction and relationship between the Chinese
and the barbarians. The discourse is about cultural unity of the Chinese
world as much as about how civilization and barbarism define each other.
Chinese is, however, a more culturally than racially and ethnically defined
concept. Non-Chinese ethnic groups, peoples and states can, therefore, be
sinicized—i.e. barbarians can be transformed—in theory, by exposure to
Confucianism and to Chinese culture and civilization. Distinctions can
therefore be maintained between ‘inner’ barbarians (more sinicized) and
‘outer’ barbarians (less sinicized). All ‘uncivilized’ barbarians could
become ‘civilized’ barbarians, if they are willing to be ‘transformed’.47
Evolving from this discourse is a rigid dichotomy in Imperial China’s
conceptualization of its relationship with other peoples and political entities;
a relationship of super-ordination and subordination as a system of
co-existence between the Chinese and the non-Chinese world in full compliance with the Confucian assumptions of cosmic harmony. This Confucian
44
45
46
47
Benjamin I. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yan Fu and the West (Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 10.
Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, p. 7.
S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5: Perceptions, Power and Diplomacy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 336.
Yang Lien-sheng, ‘Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order’, in John King Fairbank,
ed., The Chinese World Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 21.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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conception of a civilizational world sees China sitting at the centre, pretending to assign to others a proper place according to how ‘civilized’ they are.
An elaborate set of rituals (li) are designed and evolved as a traditional
‘standard of civilization’ for others who wish to enter, or to be accepted,
into the Chinese world to observe and fulfil.
This discourse of Chinese and non-Chinese—civilization vs. barbarism—
informs the construction of the constitutional structure of the tributary
system in two important ways. First, it determines that the organizing
principle of the tributary system has to be what we call ordered sovereign
inequality. Pax Sinica is inherently unequal, as it has a concentricallystructured social hierarchy defined in cultural and civilizational terms.
As David Kang notes, social status in this hierarchy ‘was a function
of cultural achievement, not economic wealth or military power’.48
Participants and aspiring participants in Pax Sinica, nevertheless, remained
sovereign entities, to the extent that they retained their autonomy and
independence in conducting their domestic and ‘foreign’ affairs, even
when they intersubjectively accepted or acquiesced in this rank-ordered
social hierarchy. Second, it means that Chinese ritual practices define
the prevailing systemic norms of procedural justice acknowledged and
accepted by participants in Pax Sinica. Contestations that Imperial
China’s purported tributary states not infrequently mounted to these
norms of procedural justice throughout history are testimony to the institutional importance of such discursive practices to the functioning of the
tributary system.
The constitutional structure of international society in historical East Asia
is, therefore, radically different from the European ones that Reus-Smit
investigated (see Table 1), as three normative components of such a structure, namely, the moral purpose of the state, organizing principle of sovereignty and norm of procedural justice, were conceived and conceptualized in
historically specific cultural and historical contexts. Although this constitutional structure entails historically contingent imagination and creation of
fundamental institutions in the East Asian society of states, basic institutional practices so entrenched must nonetheless reflect and embody
metavalues constitutive of the constitutional structure. The tributary
system emerges both as an articulation of such metavalues in practice and
as an historical institutional choice and innovation to manage problems of
conflict, coexistence and cooperation between China and other East Asian
states.
48
David Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 71.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
Table 1 Constitutional Structures and Fundamental Institutions of International
Societies: A Comparison
Ancient Greece Imperial China
Modern Europe
Cultivation of
bios politikos
Promoting cosmic
and social
harmony
Augmentation of
individuals’ purposes
and potentialities
2. Organizing principle
of sovereignty
Democratic
sovereignty
Ordered (sovereign) Liberal sovereignty
inequality
3. Systemic norms of
Procedure justice
Discursive justice Ritual justice
Legislative justice
Interstate
arbitration
Contractual international
law and multilateralism
Constitutional Structures
1. Moral purpose of
state
Fundamental Institutions
Tributary system
Sources: Zhang Yongjin, ‘System, Empire and State in Chinese International Relations’, Review of International
Studies, Vol. 27, No. 5 (2001), p. 57; Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, p. 7.
To a significant extent, this constitutional structure is of ‘China’s own
imagining/making’. The tributary system, as the basic institutional practices
underwritten by this constitutional structure, is clearly a hegemonic construction: the institutional preference of the hegemonic power. The
normative pattern in Imperial China’s foreign relations, the so-called
Chinese world order, Fairbank observed, ‘was a set of ideas and practices
developed and perpetuated by the rulers of China over many centuries’.49
It is also true that a critical examination of Chinese historical records demonstrates that the Chinese themselves found their assumptions of cultural
superiority to be more myth than reality.50
These comments, though, miss an important social dimension of the
phenomenon. David Kang raises an interesting argument in his observation
that Imperial China’s lack of interest in proactively exporting its own ideals
and values, ‘allowed surrounding peoples and polities to contest, modify and
adapt Chinese ideas to their own ends’.51 Different degrees of acceptance of
the superiority of Chinese culture and civilization imply that the claim is not
just a type of pure cultural arrogance on the part of Imperial China. Without
social recognition or rejection, social acceptance or contestation, the ideas
and practices of the Chinese world order and Chinese cultural assumptions
of superiority would have no substantive social existence in East Asian
international relations. They would play no significant structuring role in
49
50
51
John King Fairbank, ‘A Preliminary Framework’, in John King Fairbank, ed., The
Chinese World Order, p. 1.
Wang Gungwu, ‘Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia: A Background Essay, in John
King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order, pp. 34–62.
David Kang, East Asia before the West, p. 25.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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shaping the norms of legitimate and acceptable behaviour for, and social
identity of, not just Imperial China, but, equally, of other constituent states.
Ideas, beliefs, norms and values central to the constitutional structure of
Imperial China’s own imagining become intersubjective to varying degrees
(or not) among Imperial China and others only through a long and
tumultuous historical and social process of assertion, imposition,
contention, contestation, rejection, acquiescence and acceptance.
As Mancall argues, ‘on the plane of social philosophy, the tribute relationship was conceived of as extending the social structure of civilization
into the realms beyond the immediate power of the emperor’.52 In this sense,
the tributary system provides an indispensable social milieu within which
Imperial China tried to socialize others, through assertion, coercion or coaxing, into accepting basic institutional practices favoured by Imperial China
in managing its relations with others and, perhaps more importantly, the
metavalues underwriting and sustaining those institutional practices.
It, thus, also becomes a social locale where others selectively contest,
reject, embrace and internalize those norms, institutions and values through
its socialization. It is only through a dynamic interaction of mutual contestations and contentions that the constitutional structure and fundamental
institutions associated with it are confirmed and their legitimacy conferred
as foundational to the tributary system.
Contestations to normative components of the constitutional structure
happened frequently throughout East Asian history. The organizing
principle of ordered (sovereign) inequality was under unrelenting assaults
both in the Han and the Song Dynasties, and Imperial China did concede to
accept, albeit perhaps tactically and temporarily, sovereign equality, in the
first instance with the Xiongnu, and in the second with the Liao and the
Jin.53 The systemic norms of procedural justice were famously and visibly
contravened by Lord MaCartney in his audience with the Qianlong
Emperor in 1793. Both the organizing principles of ordered (sovereign)
inequality and the systemic norms of procedural justice sustained prolonged
challenges even from Japan, a Sinic state, under the Tokugawa.54 In general,
however, the constitutional structure per se and, more specifically, the moral
purpose of the state, arguably the most important normative component,
52
53
54
Mark Mancall, ‘The Ch’ing Tribute System’, p. 74.
See Yang Lien-sheng, ‘Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order’; Suzuki Chusei,
‘China’s Relations with Inner Asia: The Hsiung-Nu, Tibet’, in John King Fairbank, ed.,
The Chinese World Order; Morris Rossabi, China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and
Its Neighbours, 10th to 14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);
Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East
Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Zhang Feng, ‘Rethinking
the ‘‘Tribute System’’ ’, pp. 75–101; Zhou Fangyin, ‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary
System’, pp. 147–178.
Shogo Suzuki, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European
International Society (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 46–54.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
were not fundamentally questioned until the second half of the 19th century.
The fact that the tributary system was replicated in managing bilateral
relations among Imperial China’s peripheral states—the reproduction of
the Japan-centred tributary system and the Annam-centred tributary
system, for example—only lends legitimacy to the constitutional structure
of the tributary system and its metavalues. So do attempts, successful or not,
to adopt or usurp Imperial China’s central position in the tributary system,
either by the Mongols, or the nomads, or the Japanese.55
The Tributary System as International Society
The constitutional structure of the tributary system, as we have argued
above, is unquestionably informed mostly, if not exclusively, by Chinese
culture and civilization. It is through participation, socialization as well as
contestation, largely within the institutional framework of the tributary
system, however, that this constitutional structure and its metavalues
become accepted (or not), to varying degrees, as intersubjective ideas, beliefs
and understanding between Imperial China and the participants in Pax
Sinica. The tributary system, in this sense, constitutes a social milieu not
just of Imperial China’s own making. This goes well beyond what the central
arguments in Zhou’s article would allow and could accommodate. The
tributary system is, nevertheless, also a bundle of fundamental institutions
constitutive of a broad social order in East Asia. Only insofar as these
fundamental institutions and common institutional practices become
shared norms and conventions, constitutive of deep rules of the game in
the relations between Imperial China and other constituent states, does
the tributary system constitute the social structure and become the
articulation of international society in East Asia. Owing to the nature of
its contestable constitutional structure, it is perhaps to be expected that the
tributary system and its institutional configurations had a turbulent
evolutionary story, and that the institutional practices within this framework
varied greatly across time and space in East Asian history and politics.
This understanding opens up the discussion of the tributary system in one
important direction. The tributary system embodies, and is designed to deal
with, a whole spectrum of interstate relationships from power-political to
co-existence and from cooperation to convergence, reflecting relatively
shallow and thin and relatively deep and dense societal features and
attributes. As we have argued above, the organizing principle of ordered
(sovereign) inequality defined in civilizational terms makes the political and
cultural order centred on Imperial China concentrically hierarchical. This
concentric circle arrangement, however, could also be seen as defined by
55
Morris Rossabi, China Among Equals; S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5;
Shogo Suzuki, Civilization and Empire; David Kang, East Asia before the West.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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different degrees of prevalent international social order. As will be discussed
below, there is clearly an identifiable core to the tributary system, wherein
cooperation and convergence prevail in the relationship between Imperial
China and the so-called Sinic states, while Imperial China’s relations with its
nomadic neighbours to the north remain intensely power-political, with
co-existence as the optimal goal.
This kind of careful differentiation of social orders as co-existent within
the tributary system is largely absent from the existing literature of historical
analysis and theoretical understanding of the tributary system. Without such
careful differentiation, it is difficult to understand how, and in what sense,
fundamental institutions of the tributary system provide ‘a range of flexible
institutional and discursive tools’56 in dealing with the various problems
encountered in establishing and maintaining different social orders as
appropriate to the system’s geopolitical and cultural contexts. Zhou’s
study, for example, makes no attempt to differentiate Imperial China’s
relationship with Korea, a Sinic state, from that with Burma, a non-Sinic
state concentrically further away from the core of the tributary system.57
Before looking at the societal attributes of the evolving tributary system in
more analytical detail, three brief observations are due. First, paying tribute
is an ancient institutional practice not unique to Imperial China. John King
Fairbank58 noted that the tributary system is, ‘a system that handled the
interstate relations of a large part of mankind throughout most of recorded
history’. Vattel,59 in his Law of Nations, observed that ‘the custom of paying
tribute was formerly very common—the weaker by that means purchasing
of their more powerful neighbour an exemption from aggression, or at that
price securing his protection without ceasing to be sovereign’. The practice
of tribute-bearing and tribute-paying in the East Asian history and politics,
however, as will be discussed later, serves more than these instrumental
purposes and has significant normative import in confirming legitimate
statehood and rightful state action. Second, the relationship within the
Chinese tributary system is always bilateral, i.e. Imperial China and one
other participant. It is never multilateral. Accordingly, in the structural
sense, the tributary system is almost inescapably Sino-centric. Third, as
the Chinese conception of the world is civilizational, the tributary system
is open to anyone who wishes to participate on terms defined largely by
Imperial China. By implication, any participant can exercise agency to
withdraw its participation, and this was not uncommon in practice, as
Zhou’s stories show. The tributary system, thus, has open access and is
also inherently elastic.
56
57
58
59
David Kang, East Asia before the West.
Zhou Fangyin, ‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary System’, pp. 147–178.
John King Fairbank, ‘A Preliminary Framework’, p. 1.
Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, trans. Joseph Chitty (Philadelphia: T. & J. W.
Johnson, 1849), p. 3.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
Although giving a full account of the evolution of international society as
such in East Asia is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted that
there is wide acknowledgment of the precarious and contentious existence of
the tributary system throughout Chinese history. The origin of the tributary
system as special trading arrangements can be traced back to the Han
Dynasty (202 BC—220) and before. Early historical records of China’s
tributary relations included various missions from the ancient Roman and
Persian empires.60 By, and during, the Han Dynasty, tribute-paying also
played important political and diplomatic functions in keeping peace with,
as well as winning allies against, the aggressive Xiongnu, the principal threat
from the north to the security of the Chinese Empire. It has been widely
observed, however, that tributes flowed both ways, from the Xiongnu to
Imperial China and vice versa. Both ‘heqin’ (peace and friendship) as an
important diplomatic institution and the various peace treaties with the
Xiongnu and the granting of ‘diguo’ (equal adversary state) status to the
Xiongnu implied recognition of equality.61 The tributary system as such
does not presuppose either the existence of common culture or shared understanding of the constitutional structure of the tributary system as a cultural
construct. The Chinese, the Xiongnu and, later, the Mongols made no
pretence of sharing the same culture and civilization, not least the cultural
assumptions underpinning the Chinese conception of the tributary system.62
It is an expedient arrangement acceptable to both parties to facilitate
strategic interaction and economic exchanges in search of security.
There is an interesting parallel here in European history. The Ottoman
Empire developed extensive and intensive political, strategic, economic and
cultural relations with Europe for over half a millennium from the 14th until
the 19th century. Yet, such engagement did not make it an unquestioned
part of the European international society.63 For two millennia or more, the
Xiongnu, the Mongols and, more generally, the nomads to Imperial China’s
60
61
62
63
Geoffrey Hudson, Europe and China: A Survey of Their Relations from the Earliest Times
to 1800 (London: Edward Arnold, 1961); Yu Yingshih, Trade and Expansion in Han
China: A Study in the Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967).
Yu Yingshih, Trade and Expansion in Han China; Yang Lien-sheng, ‘Historical Notes on
the Chinese World Order’; Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies; Zhang Feng,
‘Rethinking the ‘‘Tribute System’’ ’.
For example, Dong Zhongshu, an influential Chinese philosopher during the Han
Dynasty, is quoted as saying that, ‘While gentlemen can be moved by principle, greedy
people can be moved only by profit. People like Hsiung-nu (Xiongnu) cannot be converted
by humanity and justice, but can only be appeased with high profit, and tied down with an
appeal to Heaven’. Quoted in Yang Lien-sheng, ‘Historical Notes on the Chinese World
Order’, p. 28.
Thomas Naff, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the European States System’, in Hedley Bull and
Adam Watson, eds. The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), pp. 143–169. A. Nuri Yurdusev, ‘The Middle East Encounter with the Expansion of
European International Society’, in Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez, eds.,
International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 70–91.
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The Tributary System as International Society
21
north remained an indispensable political and strategic player in both
Imperial China’s domestic politics and interstate relations. None, however,
was part of the Imperial-China-centred inner circle of international society.
What is most interesting is that even after taking over imperial power from
the Ming (1368-1644) and establishing the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the
Manchus continued to regard the Mongols, whom they had recruited as
their strategic ally to fight against the Ming, as belonging to fan ( )
(inner barbarians) and created and maintained a bureaucratic institution
Li Fan Yuan (Ministry of Outer Dependencies)64 to manage the Qing’s
relationship with the Mongols, the Tibetans and other nomad peoples.65
The tributary system existed in a rather precarious fashion between the
Han Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when the Chinese empire
itself was more divided than united. It was during the Tang, after
re-establishment of imperial unity, that the tributary system witnessed
rapid and aggressive expansion and institutionalization. It extended to include the participation of many non-Chinese states and polities in Central,
South and Southeast Asia.66 Certain Tang records claim that Imperial China
had as many as 72 tributaries.67 The hegemonic political, military and economic power of the Tang Dynasty is certainly important in understanding
the re-establishment, whether by force or through persuasion, of the tributary system as an institutional expression of Pax Sinica. For the Chinese,
more importantly, the Tang hegemony seems a confirmation of their basic
cultural assumptions of the superiority of Chinese civilization: that the
superior Chinese moral authority is reinforced undeniably by the unrivalled
material power of Imperial China. The tributary relationships embodying
political and cultural submission of barbarians, thus, became the only
acceptable normative order that did not contradict the Chinese worldview.
By the same token, as a superior moral power, Imperial China was responsible for maintaining and harmonizing this system and order with the moral
examples it set, with institutional innovations it cared to come up with and
with military force, if necessary. Through the tributary system, the moral
authority of Imperial China can then be translated into what Michael
Mann calls ‘normative pacification’ in the social order it presided over.68
64
65
66
67
68
This translation is by Hevia. As he noted, ‘this term has been translated variously as
Barbarian Control Office and Court of Colonial Affairs’, which he regarded as unsatisfactory. A translation from the Manchu term offered by Ning Chia is Ministry Ruling the
Outer Provinces. Hevia’s translation is adapted from Chia’s.
Other aspects of Qing’s foreign relations were managed by Li Bu (
)—the Board of
Rites.
He Fangchuan, Huanyi zhixu lun (‘A Study of Pax Sinica’), Beijing daxue xuebao-zhexue
shehui kexue ban (Journal of Peking University-Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition),
No. 6 (1998), pp. 28–40.
Fang Yaguang, Tangdai duiwai kaifang chutan (Preliminary Studies of Tang’s Opening
Policies)(Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 1998).
For more discussions of this point, see Rodney Bruce Hall, ‘Moral Authority as a Power
Source’, International Organization, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1997), pp. 591–622.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
The cultural assumptions behind the re-established tributary system and
the normative order during the Tang Dynasty did not go uncontested either
in theory or in practice, particularly in dealing with states outside the
Chinese cultural influence. Even at the height of the Tang power, it treated
Tujue and Tufan, Imperial Tang’s two rival states to the north, in terms of
equality. After the Tang, during the Qidan Liao Dynasty after 907 and
the Jurchen Jin Dynasty after 1122, both of which ruled large parts of the
territory of Imperial China, emperors of the Song Dynasty paid tribute to
the Liao and the Jin dynasties. In certain extreme instances, they even
accepted the vassal status of Imperial China to the Liao and the Jin.69
During the Song, Imperial China was said to be operating effectively in a
multi-state system among equals.70 Such behavioural deviations from
normative assumptions, regardless of whether or not Imperial China was
militarily strong (as in the Tang Dynasty) or weak (as in the Song Dynasty),
remain enduring puzzles in exploring the theory and practice of the tributary
system, which will be further discussed below.
It is not until the Southern Song Dynasty in the 12th century, when the
Chinese empire was at its weakest and suffered humiliation as a result of
invasion by the ‘northern barbarians’, that the ascending neo-Confucian
philosophy formulated a dogma with respect to Imperial China’s foreign
relations. The dogma asserts that:
national security could only be found in isolation and stipulates that whoever
wished to enter into relations with China must do so as China’s vassal, acknowledging the supremacy of the Chinese emperor and obeying his commands, thus
ruling out all possibility of international intercourse on terms of equality.
It must not be construed to be a dogma of conquest or universal dominion,
for it imposed nothing on foreign peoples who chose to remain outside the
Chinese world. It sought peace and security, with both of which international
relations were held incompatible. If relations there had to be, they must be
suzerain-vassal type, acceptance of which meant the acceptance of the Chinese
ethic on the part of the barbarian.71
This neo-Confucian dogma informed the Ming rulers in their attempts to
consolidate and expand the tributary system. The consolidation, expansion
and eventual contraction of the tributary system during the Ming, however,
was also closely related to the rise and fall of the political influence and
military power of the Ming. The Qing inherited from the Ming the tributary
system and a bundle of cultural and moral assumptions behind it. ‘Under the
69
70
71
Yang Lien-sheng, ‘Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order’, pp. 20–33; Tao Jin-shen,
‘Barbarians or Northerners: Northern Sung’s Images of the Khitan’, in Morris Rossabi,
ed., China Among Equals, pp. 66–85; Charles A Peterson, ‘Old Illusions and New Realities:
Sung Foreign Policy, 1217–1234’, in Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals,
pp. 204–241; Zhang Feng, ‘Rethinking the ‘‘Tribute System’’ ’, pp. 75–101.
Herbert Franke, ‘Sung Embassies: Some General Observations’, in Morris Rossabi, ed.,
China Among Equals, pp. 116–148.
Tsiang T. F., ‘China and European Expansion’, Politica, Vol. 2, No. 5 (1936), p. 3.
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The Tributary System as International Society
23
Ming and early Ch’ing [Qing] the theory of China’s material-and-moral
superiority continued, with greater sophistication, to be the principal assumption of her foreign relations’.72 The tributary system as the East
Asian world order, in other words, ‘achieved its classic form in the Ming
and Ch’ing [Qing] periods’.73 Zhou notes also that the tributary system
reached ‘an acme of sophistication during the waning years of the Ming
and the Qing Dynasties’.74
This brief historical sketch, contentious and contestable as it surely is,
nevertheless highlights a number of important points in our analytical
understanding of the tributary system as an international society. To
begin with, the tributary system exists, first and foremost, as a discourse,
articulating the ideas of a cosmic–social order with universal kingship
centred on the Chinese civilization, and of an all-inclusive moral and
political order presided over by the Chinese emperor as the embodiment
of benevolence and virtue. As such, this discourse, as apparent in official
Chinese records and intellectual history, has a high degree of consistency, in
spite of the tumultuous, violent and destructive ‘international’ history of
Imperial China over two millennia—a consistency that is in sharp contrast
to the precarious historical existence and fluid functioning of the tributary
system itself. Second, this moral, social and political order is not culturally
exclusive. It transcends culture. It is meant to incorporate into the Chinese
world states and peoples with similar cultural heritage and a shared
Confucian worldview. It is, at the same time, open to the participation of
culturally and ethnically different groups of people and their states, either
through persuasion, when they wish to, or by force, when necessary.
Third, the assertions of non-Chinese views and non-Chinese power
constitute contestations and rejections of the cultural assumptions behind
Pax Sinica as well as its legitimacy. They are constitutive of the evolution of
the tributary system, affording it contested social attributes and important
social recognition. Fourth, the Chinese grand designs of the tributary system
as ideal types often vary from the actual institutional practices of Pax Sinica
because of geopolitically contingent strategic imperatives, political expedience, and the economic interests of constituent states, as well as the contingent nature of Chinese power at any historical moment. Fifth, a number of
institutions underwrite the tributary system, among which are diplomacy,
war, balance of power and trade, but also ordered sovereign inequality
(associated with a culturally-determined hierarchy and ‘civilized’ identity),
tribute and rites.75 The last three are clearly institutional innovations
informed, in particular, by Chinese cultural assumptions, which embody
72
73
74
75
John King Fairbank, ‘A Preliminary Framework’, p. 15.
Mark Mancall, ‘The Ch’ing Tribute System: An Interpretive Essay’, in John King
Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order, p. 66.
Zhou Fangyin, ‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary System’, pp. 147–178.
Zhang Feng, ‘Rethinking the ‘‘Tribute System’’ ’.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
norms, principles and rules prescriptive of acceptable behaviour of peoples
and states that came into contact with Imperial China. Not surprisingly,
these institutional practices are also those most contested throughout
history.
Variations in the institutional practices of the tributary system as a
trans-cultural construct, therefore, are the norm rather than an exception
or deviation. This is the key to understanding the tributary system as
operating simultaneously at different societal levels. At one extreme, the
tributary system surely operated to enable and to regulate European
economic and diplomatic participation in the existing East Asian order
between the 15th and early 19th centuries, particularly in its trading
networks and the China market. The existence of international society in
this instance, if at all, is shallow, thin and precarious, at best. At the other
extreme, Korea, as a model tributary, fully embraced the tributary system,
as well the cultural assumptions and legitimation claims behind it, until the
end of the 19th century. It is indisputably a member of the society of states
centred in Imperial China. Is there, then, a cultural explanation of such
variations of the basic institutional practices within the tributary system?
The idea of Pax Sinica as hierarchically concentric presupposes a core
consisting of Imperial China and surrounding states most influenced by
Chinese culture and civilization. Fairbank76 made the classical statement
about the common cultural heritage of the so-called Sinic states, ‘The
societies of East Asia—China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan and the small
island kingdom of Liu-ch’iu (Ryukyu)—had all stemmed from ancient
China and developed within the Chinese culture area, the area most influenced by the civilization of ancient China, for example, by the Chinese
ideographic writing system, the Confucian classical teachings about family
and social order, the official examination system, and the imperial Chinese
monarchy and bureaucracy’. Noting China’s cultural, economic and
political influence as ‘dominant, direct, and pervasive’ over its surrounding
Sinic states, David Kang is more specific in his most recent study. In his
words,
These three East Asian states [Korea, Vietnam, and Japan] were centrally
administered bureaucratic systems based on the Chinese model. They developed
complex bureaucratic structures and bear more than a ‘family resemblance’ in
their organization, cultures, and outlooks. This form of government, along with
the calendar, language and writing system, bureaucracy, and education system,
was derived from the Chinese experience, and the civil-service examination in
these countries emphasized a knowledge of Chinese political philosophy,
classics, and culture.77
76
77
John King Fairbank, ‘A Preliminary Framework’, pp. 1–19.
David Kang, East Asia before the West, p. 33.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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Voluntary emulation, copying and replicating of Chinese institutional and
discursive practices by these Sinic states are not only found in their ‘state
formation, and societal practices, from language and religion to political
institutions and economic activities’.78 As Shogo Suzuki79 shows persuasively, Japan under the Tokugawa reproduced a ‘Japan-centric’ tribute
system as a contestation to the Sino-centric tributary system, from which
Japan increasingly withdrew. This Japan-centric tributary system remains,
nevertheless, an emulation of Chinese discursive practices in its fundamental
cultural assumptions, but with Japan replacing Imperial China as the most
‘virtuous’ and more ‘civilized’ and in its replication of rituals of the
Sino-centric system as its normative foundation. The Chosen Korean
court, David Kang80 writes, ‘had divided foreign contacts—such as envoys
from Japan, the Ryukyu, and Jurchens—into four grades, with several statuses within these grades’. Further, it ‘borrowed, adapted, and expanded
upon rights and policies of the sinocentric tribute system’ in order to develop
‘a tribute system design over time in part to organize interactions with a
broad collection of Japanese elites and separate them into a multi-level hierarchy for reception and ritual purposes’. In the words of Hevia, ‘the Korean
king constituted his rulership through rituals similar to those of the Qing
emperor, organizing, as it were, cosmo-moral order unmediated by the Qing
rulership’.81
Among Imperial China and other surrounding Sinic states, there is, in
other words, a significant degree of convergence in terms of their fundamental values and shared Confucian worldviews. These shared values generated
highly similar government forms, constitute and define these states’
social identity and condition their understandings of not just the sociallysanctioned legitimate statehood, but the nature and purpose of the state as a
social agent. This is not to suggest that there was total agreement among
these states, or that each did not interpret those shared fundamental values
and basic institutional practices in its own culturally specific and historically
contingent way, and did not accept them solely on their own terms. In
general, however, the Confucian moral conviction of a universal cosmic–
social order that underwrites the constitutional structure of the tributary
system was unquestionably accepted. There was deeper shared belief in
Imperial China’s civilizational claims and self-declaration of its imperial
virtue as essential to maintaining this universal moral order. There was
clear acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the authority of Chinese hegemony derived from its cultural achievements and not from material power.
There was explicit (though, in the case of Japan, sometimes grudging)
78
79
80
81
Ibid., p. 25.
Shogo Suzuki, Civilization and Empire.
David Kang, East Asia before the West, p. 72.
James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, p. 50.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
acceptance of the civilizational hierarchy and associated rank order for
constituent states.
Coupled with these states’ rational strategic, political and economic
calculations, these shared values inspired as well as constrained their
institutional imagination and choices that informed the deeper rules of the
game in their relations with Imperial China. There was a manifested desire
for their ‘civilized’ status to be conferred by their relationship with Imperial
China, which was indispensable to their claims to legitimate statehood. The
Chinese investiture, i.e. the blessings of the Chinese emperor of a particular
ruler as legitimate, therefore, was often eagerly sought.82 Tribute missions,
which functionally serve both diplomatic and economic purposes, were regularly and frequently sent and received as expressions of mutual legitimation.
The frequency of such missions was taken on either side as confirmation of
the degree of their ‘civilized’ status. Rituals, inclusive of all prescribed appropriate formalities and ceremonies in their contact with Imperial
China, were strictly observed.
At the core of the tributary system as a trans-cultural construct, therefore,
is a mini tributary system among Sinic states, or in the English School
parlance, a readily identifiable and more closely knit international society.
This is where the ideal type of the tributary system as a discourse seems to
have found its matching incarnation in actual institutional practices. This
observation would have little significance if this mini tributary system
had not ‘worked’, so to speak, as an institutional solution to the interstate
cooperation between Imperial China and these Sinic states. As Kang
observes, there was ‘a lasting peace’ among China, Korea, Vietnam and
Japan over the five centuries between 1368 and 1841 spanning the Ming
and Qing dynasties, with only two major interstate wars—China’s invasion
of Vietnam from 1402 to 1428 and Japan’s invasion of Korea from 1592 to
1598. He continues, ‘Apart from those two episodes, these four major
territorial and centralized states developed and maintained peaceful and
long-lasting relationship with one another, and the more powerful these
states became, the more stable were their relations’.83 This is in sharp
contrast to seemingly perpetual conflicts and violence that characterized
the relations between Imperial China and its nomadic neighbours throughout the same historical period. If common culture explains why different
institutional solutions to co-existence and cooperation between Imperial
82
83
Ch’en Ta-tuan, ‘Investiture of Liu-Ch’iu Kings in the Ch’ing Period’, in John King
Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order, pp. 135–164. This practice is not restricted to
just the Sinic states mentioned here. As Zhou writes in his article (pp. 17–18), for example,
even the Burmese King Bodawpaya sought the investiture from the Qinglong Emperor
after he had fought a bloody war with the Qing. In a letter to the Qianlong Emperor, he
asked specifically that Imperial China ‘follow the ancient rites, accept tribute and issue due
title; stop fighting forever, and let peace between our states reign’.
David Kang, East Asia before the West, p. 2.
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The Tributary System as International Society
27
China and its surrounding states are necessary and possible, it also raises an
interesting question in another comparative perspective. Both this society of
states in East Asia and the modern European international society emerged
out of a common cultural area. Why is it, then, that the East Asian international society enjoyed five centuries of lasting peace and stability between
1368 and 1841, whereas the European international society emerging from
Westphalia saw three centuries of endemic wars and inherent instability
between 1648 and 1945?
The Tributary System, Hegemony and ‘Organized
Hypocrisy’
Thinking about the tributary system, a hierarchical order, as international
society has two interrelated problems. One is that the tributary system is
often mischaracterized, unwittingly, as suzerainty. Accordingly, the relationship that Imperial China had with other constituent parts of Pax Sinica is
often described as that between a suzerain and a vassal. This is found in both
Wight and Watson.84 Partly, this is perhaps because there is no alternative
English word that can better describe and capture the nuances of the
institutional practices of the Chinese tributary system.85 This is rather
unfortunate, as the typical suzerain–vassal relationship, in the context of
the Ottoman Empire, is marked not just by the limited autonomy of
vassal states in domestic rule but also by the suzerain’s control of foreign
policies of vassal states.
This is clearly not the case in the Chinese tributary system. As the
foregoing discussions show, although tribute-paying was unmistakably a
fundamental institution in regulating relations between Imperial China
and its tributaries, as the purported ‘suzerain’, Imperial China made no
attempts to control foreign policies of the tributary states other than those
towards Imperial China. Participants in Pax Sinica did accept ordered
sovereign inequality as the organizing principle of the system. But, to the
extent that they retained their domestic autonomy and remained largely
independent in conducting their ‘international’ affairs, they carried with
them the most important attributes of sovereign entities. In other words,
the tributary system, hierarchical as it was, remained a system of multiple
actors. Imperial China acted more like a hegemon than as a suzerain,
through its moral authority as well as material power. Indeed, Zhou’s article
84
85
Martin Wight, Systems of States; Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society
(London: Routledge, 1992).
It would be erroneous, Bozeman argues, to refer to the arrangement in the Sino-Korean
relations in the tributary system as ‘ ‘‘vassalage’’ in the western sense of the word’, as
‘Korea viewed her dependency on China as an honour or mark of civilization to which
barbarians could not attain.’ Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International
History, p. 144.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
implicitly suggests the idea of Imperial China as a hegemon and the role of
hegemony in maintaining the tributary system, although he does not explicitly explore it in detail, either in theory or in practice. Zhou’s investigation
of the occasional punitive expeditions that Chinese emperors mounted,
either to help restore order in a neighbouring country (Zhou’s case study
of Korea during the Sui and the Tang) or with the aim of frontier pacification (Zhou’s case study of Burma during the Qing) and his discussions of the
investiture from the Chinese emperor sought by and bestowed (or not) upon
rulers of Korea (a Sinic state) and Burma (a non-Sinic state)—all show
certain acceptance of Imperial China as the undisputable hegemon and its
legitimate role in maintaining the stability and working of the tributary
system.86 In discussing the relationship between Imperial China and
Southeast Asian kingdoms during the Qing, noting in particular ‘the
Burma wars’, Hevia observes instructively that ‘armed conflict did not
preclude the possibility of reconstituting supreme lord-lesser-lord relations’
between Imperial China and its Southeast Asian neighbours.87
Language and concepts, therefore, are part of the problem, which is
one reason why the Pax Sinica case is so interesting and important for
developing IR theory. If, however, the tributary system is not suzerain but
hegemonic, how does hegemony work historically in the formation and
operation of a hierarchical international society like the tributary system?
Can we have both hegemony and international society at the same time?
This poses a theoretical challenge to the English School, the existing
scholarship of which has focused mainly on international societies close to
the anarchic end of Watson’s spectrum ranging from anarchy, through
hegemony, suzerainty and dominion, to empire.88 It could be argued that
the concept of international society is relevant only to the anarchic side of
the spectrum, because hierarchy removes the multi-actor condition required
for a society. This issue has not yet been much addressed in the English
School literature, though there is rising interest in hegemony,89 with Clark,
in particular, making a detailed case for hegemony as a socially-constructed
86
87
88
89
Imperial China’s punitive expedition against the Koguryo during the Sui, and the Ming’s
refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Gwanghaegun rule, both of which Zhou’s article
examines in some historical detail, are good examples of Imperial China’s hegemonic
maintenance of the tributary system.
James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, p. 52.
Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society, pp. 13–18.
Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society; Adam Watson, The Limits of
Independence: Relations Between States in the Modern World (London: Routledge,
1997); Gerritt W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984); Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values and the
Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tim
Dunne, ‘Society and Hierarchy in International Relations’, International Relations,
Vol. 17, No. 3 (2003), pp. 303–20; Evelyn Goh, ‘Hierarchy and the Role of the United
States in the East Asian Security Order’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Vol. 8,
No. 3 (2008), pp. 353–77.
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The Tributary System as International Society
29
institution of international society along lines that well fit the Chinese case.90
Both Watson’s spectrum and the analysis of classical empires by Buzan
and Little also suggest that there is room for international society well
towards the hierarchical end of Watson’s spectrum in which hegemony
itself could be a primary institution.91 Most classical empires were varied
and flexible constructions containing many types and degrees of relationship
between the constituent parts and the imperial core. As Watson’s spectrum
suggests, many of the component units of an empire could have a considerable degree of autonomy and this makes room for diplomacy, war, balance
of power and other institutions that are hallmarks of international society.92
This view that the internal structure of empires contains substantial scope
for ‘international’ relations is nicely captured by van der Pijl’s observation
that:
The subjects of the empire relate to the state as members of bodies that have
constituted themselves prior to it, and to which their primary allegiance
pertains . . . An empire is a hierarchic conglomerate of ethnic or quasi-ethnic
social bodies, and its internal structure will often resemble foreign relations
of a tribal type.93
Seen in dynamic perspective, classical empires often look like centralizing
phases of an international society that will, at other times, take a more
decentralized form. The idea that a given set of states/peoples moves
through different phases of centralizing and decentralizing modes of
political organization makes the case for thinking of empires as forms of
international society. More research from an English School perspective
needs to be done on cases towards the hierarchic/imperial end of the spectrum, both to understand and compare cases and to understand better and
map more systematically, the nature, practices and institutions of
non-anarchic international societies. We hope that, just as the English
School can offer a useful ‘international society’ perspective to the study of
Pax Sinica, so also will the study of Pax Sinica help to enhance and develop
the English School’s conceptualization of international society by providing
an in-depth opportunity to study not only a hierarchical case of it in action,
but one that is particularly distinctive in being more based in culture than
in raw power politics.
As noted, Ian Clark has recently made a major theoretical breakthrough
in the study of hegemonic international societies.94 His main problem case is
90
91
92
93
94
Ian Clark, ‘Towards an English School Theory of Hegemony’, European Journal of
International Relations, Vol.15, No. 2 (2009), pp. 203–28; Ian Clark, Hegemony in
International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History, pp. 176–188.
Ibid., pp. 176–182.
Kees van der Pijl, Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political
Economy, Vol. 1. (London: Pluto Press, 2007).
Ian Clark, ‘Towards an English School Theory of Hegemony’, pp. 203–28; Ian Clark,
Hegemony in International Society.
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30
Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
the one that most other post-Watson English School writers concerned
about hegemony worry about—how the English School should handle the
fact of American hegemony in an anarchical international society. He traces
carefully how the English School literature slid into the thinking that anarchy was the necessary condition for international society, and, therefore,
that hegemony, or anything further down the spectrum towards hierarchy,
must be antagonistic towards it. He neatly excavates the potential for the
logic behind the institution of great power management as applicable also to
hegemony, and nicely compares hegemony as a primary institution of war:
both can be either antagonistic to international society or constitutive of it,
depending on the circumstances.
For Clark, the key is that other members of the society accord legitimacy
to hegemony. Legitimacy as the key links Clark’s thinking and Reus-Smit’s
scheme as discussed above. Clark’s thinking is a timely theoretical development and can certainly be applied to the East Asian case. The Chinese
hegemony within the tributary system, in terms of both material power
and moral authority, as our discussions above suggest, did enjoy a certain
degree of legitimacy accorded by other participants in Pax Sinica. Yet, the
East Asia case has features not easily captured by a theoretical language
derived from Western history and experience. Pax Sinica was too formally
stratified to count as an anarchic structure, even though a kind of sovereignty was clearly in evidence. And, because of the strong role of culture in
the hierarchy, its structure does not fit with the conventional understanding
of suzerainty either. Hegemony is the best fit; but even then, this is not
hegemony in the generally more political–military form common in the
Western experience.95 The challenging question still remains: historically,
how did hegemony work as a primary institution in the functioning of
the tributary system as international society in East Asia?
There is yet another analytical challenge. The tributary system is at
once an enduring discourse and a set of basic institutional practices.
The remarkable consistency of this discourse in China’s imperial history
contrasts sharply with the striking variations in the institutional designs
and functional operations, as well as the fluid and precarious existence, of
the tributary system. This has led to rather contentious assessment and
understanding of the tributary system. At one end, the emphasis is on the
tributary system as a set of ideas and discursive practices imagined and
perpetuated by Imperial China, intellectually and politically, and as an
enduring order in the Chinese world over centuries. At the other end is
the observation that the tributary system as such ‘was constantly under
95
In the parallel time span of the last two millennia, perhaps only the Byzantine, and some of
the early Islamic, empires come close to the Pax Sinica model of cultural hegemony. Rome
was too much in thrall to earlier Greek culture, and Russia too conscious of a more
dynamic European civilization to its west.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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challenge, breaking down, being reconfigured and rebuilt. It was never
stable, fixed or uniform’.96 There is, in other words, a serious disjuncture
between what ‘ought to be’ and what ‘is’ in the theory and practice of the
tributary system.
It is all too clear that there are obvious contradictions between the grand
design of Pax Sinica as imagined by Imperial China and highly flexible
institutional arrangements in maintaining and facilitating an order of
co-existence and cooperation between Imperial China and other constituent
parties. The systemic configuration is often contingent on geo-strategic
imperatives, political expediency and economic considerations. There is
little question that normative claims of Imperial China’s moral and cultural
superiority were constantly contested by those purported tributaries.
Cultural differences between Imperial China and its tributaries, ‘led the
two parties to see their relationship in far different terms at either end.
Generally tributaries from Inner Asia and Outer zones had their own
non-Chinese views of their relationship to China and accepted Chinese
views only in part, superficially or tacitly, as a matter of expedience.
As the mystique of the imperial virtue grows thin across the cultural gap,
in Lhasa, Moscow, and Batavia, alternative theories of politics were asserted
and sometime clashed with the Chinese doctrine’.97 The idea of Chinese
cultural and moral superiority, nevertheless, is not just simply a sustaining
and comforting myth or pure fiction. As we have shown in the discussions
above, this idea was generally accepted among Sinic states at the core of the
tributary system. Such acceptance makes it possible to design and construct
a different institutional complex with a highly differentiable set of norms,
rules and principles that govern the relationship between Imperial China
and the Sinic states concerned.
How can we explain these contradictions? Is it possible to square theory
with practice, ideological claims with actual policies? To answer these
questions, it is useful to think of the tributary system as characterized by
what Stephen Krasner calls ‘organized hypocrisy’ as an enduring attribute in
international relations. By ‘organized hypocrisy’ is meant the presence of a
set of longstanding norms and rules defining appropriate behaviour within
an international society that actors frequently violate but who do not, however, at the same time necessarily challenge the legitimacy of that society.98
Seen in this light, any behavioural deviations from, and contestations of, the
prescribed norm, rules and principles are but ‘the normal state of affairs’ in
the tributary system. It may indeed be argued that there are purposive institutional ambiguities embedded in the systemic design which allow
96
97
98
Peter C. Perdue cited in Zhang Feng, ‘Rethinking the ‘‘Tribute System’’ ’, p. 91.
John King Fairbank, ‘A Preliminary Framework’, p. 12.
Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
tributary states some room to interpret systemic rules and norms without
challenging the legitimacy of the tributary system. For example, ‘There was
never any attempt to be precise about what tributary status meant, and the
Chinese were probably wise to leave the question vague and the position
flexible’.99 While maintaining nominal tributary relations, Imperial China
did not hesitate to pay tribute in reverse.100
Even on the fundamental assumption of Chinese moral and cultural
superiority there seems, in practice, to have been sufficient flexibility.
Imperial China often compromises rather readily this cardinal principle in
its relations with the purported tributaries for domestic political purposes.
Joseph Fletcher concludes in his study of historical tributary relations
between Imperial China and its Central Asian tributaries that:
Within the empire, the myth of world suzerainty was a useful ideological
instrument for ruling China, and as Shahrukh’s ambassadors and the khojas
found, it was not to be compromised. But in foreign affairs the myth often
proved a hindrance. Then quietly, the emperor practiced what he pleased, not
what he preached. Relations on an equal basis with Heart, Lhasa, Kokand, or
Moscow were not exceptions to Chinese practices at all. They were customary
dealings on the unseen side of a long-established tradition.101
Characterizing the tributary system as ‘organized hypocrisy’ captures well
its philosophical assumptions and its actual institutional practices as the two
contentious and contradictory sides of the same coin. In this way, it goes
a long way to explaining why Chinese ruling elites ‘were able to move back
and forth between the assertion of myth and the acceptance of reality so
frequently and for so long a time without abandoning this superior view of
themselves’.102 It does not, however, help explain another larger puzzle.
Why did the tributary system persist even when the Chinese empire
was militarily weak and divided as during the Song Dynasty? Why did
rival institutional alternatives not emerge to replace the constitutional
structures and fundamental institutions of the tributary system during
the period of non-Chinese domination of the Chinese empire, as in the
Yuan Dynasty with Pax Tartaric and the Qing Dynasty with the Manchu
rule? All considered, then, what explains the longevity and resilience of
the tributary system as an indigenous social order throughout history in
East Asia?
99
100
101
102
Wang Gungwu, ‘Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia: A Background Essay, in John
King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order, p. 57.
Yang Lien-sheng, ‘Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order’, pp. 20–33; Herbert
Franke, ‘Sung Embassies: Some General Observations’, pp. 116–148; Zhou Fanyin
‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary System’, pp. 147–178.
Joseph Fletcher, ‘China and Central Asia, 1368–1884’, in John King Fairbank, ed., The
Chinese World Order, p. 224.
Wang Gungwu, ‘Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia’, p. 62.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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In earlier discussions, we have suggested that what makes the tributary
system a social order distinct from, for example, other historical orders in
Europe, is its deep constitutional structure, which is shaped and conditioned
by contingent historical, cultural and social contexts in East Asia. While this
constitutional structure is a hegemonic construction of Imperial China,
contentions and contestations to this constitutional structure by others, in
particular to its two key components, namely, the organizing principles
of ordered sovereign inequality and the systemic norms of ritual justice,
have reproduced and reconfirmed this constitutional structure with certain
degrees of social acceptance and social recognition. This shared understanding of the constitutional structure enhances the legitimacy of the tributary
system. As Schwartz asks rhetorically, ‘can one maintain that the Yuan
dynasty did not in the end come to accept the Chinese perception of
world order? Can one state the Ch’ing [Qing] dynasty did not become totally
committed in the end to this perception of world order in spite of the peculiar Manchu institutions which it had preserved?’103 We have also suggested
that the hegemonic belief deeply embedded in Confucianism about the
moral purpose of the state, arguably the most important component in
the constitutional structure, is rarely challenged, if at all.
We would further suggest here that the persistence and unchanging nature
of the dominant idea about the moral purpose of the state over two millennia simultaneously does two things to the tributary system: it exercises critical constraints on institutional architects, in particular, those from Imperial
China, in their imagining any alternative institutional designs as possible
solutions to Imperial China’s problems in its ‘international’ relations; and,
in making other institutional designs unimaginable, it so legitimizes the
tributary system as the only acceptable social order. The tributary system
as a particular social order, therefore, endures as long as the Confucian
belief in the moral purpose of the state prevails as a shared understanding
among Imperial China and other constituent actors of the system. This
suggests a partial unpacking of the larger puzzle mentioned above. First,
the tributary system continues to prevail in times of Imperial China’s
military weakness and its lack of material power precisely because neither
military nor material power is a necessary or a sufficient condition for the
maintenance of this social and moral order. Second, as long as those
non-Chinese elites in the Yuan and the Qing dynasties accept, as their
Chinese counterparts do, the fundamental assumptions underlining the
prevailing belief of the moral purpose of the state, no alternative
institutional designs seem to serve the purpose better.
103
Benjamin Schwartz, ‘The Chinese Perception of the World Order, Past and Present’, in
John King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order, p. 277.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
Conclusion
The tributary system, as Zhou rightly argues, is ‘more than just a conceptual
construct’. In our analytical scheme, however, it is also much more than ‘an
actual set of policies’ or ‘a continuous set of abstract principles that were
applied to both diplomatic strategy and foreign policy over several thousand
years of Chinese history’.104 It is a historically and culturally contingent
social order in East Asia. In tracing the historical and cultural particularity
that underlies the framing of the constitutional structure of the tributary
system, we have suggested that this constitutional structure is in the first
instance of Imperial China’s own making/imagining. It is through long,
tumultuous and never-ending historical and social processes of assertion,
imposition, contention, contestation, rejection, acquiescence and acceptance
that ideas, beliefs and metavalues constitutive of the constitutional structure
of the tributary system become intersubjective, to varying degrees, between
Imperial China and other constituent parties of the tributary system.
Fundamental institutions defined and shaped by these processes, therefore, do not just reflect the hegemonic institutional preferences, but also
represent a collective solution invented by, and consented to among, East
Asian states to the perennial problem of inter-state conflict, co-existence and
cooperation. The institutional innovations of the tributary system make the
East Asian order appreciably different from other regional orders in world
history, from Europe to the Middle East. An examination of the constitutional structure of the tributary system, we have also shown, provides
important insight into understanding the institutional rationality (in contrast to the strategic rationality as emphasized by Zhou) of the tributary
system. In so doing, it casts new light on the enduring puzzle of the longevity
and resilience of the tributary system in East Asian history and politics.
Using the analytical lens of the English School of International Relations,
we have argued more specifically that the tributary system, as a bundle of
shared and common institutional practices, is the articulation of international society in East Asia, as it is constitutive of deep rules of the game in
the relations between Imperial China and other constituent states. In this
understanding, strategic interaction between Imperial China and its neighbours within the framework of the tributary system, as investigated by
Zhou, is but a small, though significant, part of the whole story.
Conceptualizing the tributary system as an international social structure
opens up our understanding of the concentric circles of the Chinese world
order, not just as defined in cultural and civilizational terms, as found in
most existing literature, but in terms of how it is configured in structural
terms, from power-political and co-existence in the outer circles, to cooperation and, up to a point, convergence in the inner ones. We have examined
104
Zhou Fangyin, ‘Equilibrium Analysis of the Tributary System’, pp. 147–178.
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The Tributary System as International Society
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in some detail the existence of an identifiable core of the tributary system,
where convergence clearly prevails in the relationship between Imperial
China and a number of Sinic states of close geographical proximity.
Our purpose is to highlight the existence of different layers of international
society within the tributary system which arguably leads to significant
variations in the constitution, construction and practice of fundamental
institutions, both temporally and spatially. The malleability of the tributary
system is, then, a necessary virtue, which is aimed at accommodating
different challenges in institutional practices in Pax Sinica.
For the English School, this classical East Asian case offers a particularly
rich and complex model for thinking about historical international social
structures in international society terms. Because the tributary system is
hegemonic, rather than suzerain, a more specific challenge to English
School scholars is to enquire how hegemony, as a primary institution
of international society, historically works in the tributary system.
Adam Watson was clearly on to something with his enduring and worldhistorically informed concern about hegemony both in, and as a form of,
international society.105 The present concern noted in the English School
literature is mainly about hegemony within anarchical international
societies. Because of its strong cultural quality, the Chinese case offers a
distinctive, if perhaps not unique, type of hegemony, which has a certain
Gramscian character. Studying this case, and other non-Western models,
should bring greater conceptual refinement and depth to English School
concepts. It might also be usefully compared with other approaches to
hegemony such as hegemonic stability theory (HST),106 which centres
hegemony in the economic rather than in the cultural sphere, or
Ikenberry’s work, which argues for a kind of hegemony of (liberal) ideas.107
Even on the basis of the preliminary work done in this article, we can
point out a small improvement on Reus-Smit’s scheme.108 We used it to
structure our enquiry, but, in retrospect, it is clear that he mistakenly puts
‘organizing principle of sovereignty’ as the second constitutional structure in
his scheme. He does this because his book takes place entirely within that
principle. He should, however, have left it open just by saying ‘organizing
principle’. As becomes clear in his discussions of Ruggie, and by opening up
a distinction between configurative and purposive change, he allows that the
105
106
107
108
Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society; Adam Watson, The Limits of
Independence; Adam Watson, Hegemony and History.
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981); Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987).
John G. Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006);
John G. Ikenberry, ‘Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal
World Order’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol.7, No. 1 (2009), pp. 71–86.
Chris Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, p. 7.
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Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan
organizing principle can be something other than sovereignty.109 Making
this change allows a much wider application of his scheme outside the particular context of Western history. Abstracting such conceptual frameworks
away from the hegemony of Western history is an ongoing and important
task in IR. One of the great attractions of East Asian history is precisely
the contribution it can make to that task, as well as more generally developing historically-sensitive IR theorizing and theoretically-informed world
history.
109
Ibid., p. 162.
The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, 2012