wang is a form of benevolent superpower, based on sagely morality and political power that leads by example. If China becomes a wang-style great power, others will see its magnanimous ways and will want to emulate them. Therefore, the Chinese elites will never need to use coercion, because everybody will want to become like them. The juxtaposition between US and Chinese leadership is thus rendered in stark opposition: Chinese wang “humane authority” means “to lead the world”; American ba “hegemony” means “to dominate the world” (Ibid.: 71). How should we understand Yan’s development of ba and wang in this manner? Most immediately, Yan’s analysis conceptualises self and other, good and bad, wang and ba in strongly dichotomous terms. If this Chinese development of pre-modern thought exemplifies a “Chinese ontology”, it falls back on precisely the kind of dichotomous thinking that it is said by thinkers like Zhao to guard against. What is more, Yan’s and others’ imagination of a good Chinese self in opposition to a bad US/Western other falls back on essentialised ideas of these categories, and perhaps of “Chineseness” in particular. Matthias Liehr’s chapter in this volume engages with the “internal Orientalism” of Han China’s relation to Tibet. Bhavna Sing describes, in another chapter, how the deployment of Chinese “soft power” abroad has led many to understand their diasporic “Chinese” self and host country “other” in antagonistic terms. These analyses reflect something similar, perhaps, to the chauvinistic self-strengthening logics that are at work in Chinese discussions of ba-style hegemony. The concept is used as part of a nationalist “patriotic worrying” that is widespread in Chinese scholarship (Davies, 2007), and that is primarily concerned with offering policy advice that can help China rise and, as Yan puts it, “defeat America” (Yan, 2011b). To one commentator, Yan thus “liberally draws from historical discourses to pass moral judgement and … promote realist foreign policy in the People’s Republic of China” (Schneider, 2014: 6).
This is an important awareness that will escape scholars, policymakers and publics in the West who are not aware of the implications of the term to Chinese-speakers. Likewise, some Chinese-speakers might be less hostile to American thinkers if they did not think they were purporting their own ba-style immorality as a virtue. Given the contours of the Chinese debate about hegemony that has been outlined here, the intended outcome of such a project to escape from the problematic imagination of self-other relations of Western notions and practice of hegemony appears far from reach. As Callahan has argued, the Tianxia concept that Zhao advocates as a new and better imagination of world order works through conversion of difference, turning other into self (Callahan, 2008; see also Nordin, 2012b; under review). He therefore concludes that “rather than guide us toward a post-hegemonic world order, Tianxia presents a new hegemony where imperial China’s hierarchical governance is updated for the twenty-first century” (Callahan, 2008: 749). I have also described elsewhere how both Yan and Zhao imagine time and space, sameness and difference, self and other in a way that positions others as “behind” in just the way that Wang Yiwei and others have criticized “Western” thought or IR for doing (Nordin, under review). Both accounts operate on the conversion of “the bad” into “the good”, of other into self. Both are explicitly imagining such conversion as led by China, or the Chinese elites who properly understand how to be a “humane authority” of Tianxia. For this reason, Linsay Cunningham-Cross and Callahan have suggested that Yan’s idea of a new world order directed by the moral leadership of the Chinese political elite may have been more astutely grasped, not by the term “humane authority” but precisely by the “kingly way” (Cunningham-Cross and Callahan, 2011: 349). In this manner, these Chinese alternatives to Western/American hegemony replicate the difficulties they identify as a “Western” problem. They reproduce an imagination of a hegemonic world system – it is just that this time it has China rather than the US at its helm.