by Alex Lo, South China Morning Post
It was no accident that President Xi Jinping cited the “Thucydides Trap” during his summit in Beijing with Trump, putting it forward as something for both superpowers to avoid. The theory, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, digs into an episode in Greek history to warn against the danger of war between a rising power and a declining one.
Meanwhile, more scholars – both Western and Chinese – are examining the Chinese tribute system and the peace it maintained in East Asia over several centuries. In “The Lessons of the Long Confucian Peace”, an essay in Foreign Affairs, authors Michael J. Gigante, Joshua Stone, Daniel Druckman and Ming Wan argue that “from 1598 to 1894, most of East Asia – China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom (now part of Japan) and Vietnam – was largely devoid of internal fighting”.
The key to this peace, the authors say, “was a shared ideology: Confucianism”. Led by China, they were all Confucian states, “so they had a joint political philosophy that emphasized harmony and made it easy for them to engage in diplomacy. They established an interconnected system of regional governance centered on China, the most powerful state, that helped ensure security and prosperity. They also traded frequently.”
This long peace was, however, undermined by Western imperialism and by Japan adopting its aggressive ideology of territorial conquest.
The essay aims to turn the Thucydides Trap on its head. It questions whether a 21st-century version of a system of international peace – once associated with dynastic China – could be emerging and possibly replace the 20th-century US-led order.
I asked Daniel Bell, chair of political theory at the Univ. of Hong Kong and an authority on Chinese political philosophy, what he thinks about the idea. While the essay focuses on the Confucian-guided external relations between East Asian states, Bell refers to the age-old Confucian values inculcated in Chinese literati up to the emperor himself. Chapter 4 of Bell’s latest book, Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters, offers a long discussion of Confucian and Legalist philosophies on war and peace and speculates how they might apply to the situation in Taiwan.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Bell said, Mencius-inspired Confucianism was the official state ideology: “Mencius was explicitly critical of unjust wars launched only for the sake of expanding territory and plundering resources, which may have served as a constraint on warfare.”
Though hierarchical, dynastic China was inclined to respect diversity. “One of the most famous lines in the Analects is: ‘Exemplary persons pursue diversity in harmony rather than uniformity [or] conformity’, meaning that we should tolerate, or even celebrate, diversity and pluralism,” Bell said. “China was inclined to respect diversity in its tributary states, which may also have served as a constraint on warfare.” Furthermore, according to Bell, “there was no effort to use force to export the Chinese way of life or political system, unlike Western imperial adventures”. “No major Chinese thinker or political tradition celebrates warfare,” he said, “in contrast to, say, ancient Greece and Rome, where courage in warfare was viewed as an important virtue and soldiers were celebrated for their courage and manliness.” Contemporary China demands respect, but not dominance.
