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The Tenacious Tributary System Journal of Contemporary China ISSN: 1067-0564 (Print) 1469-9400 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjcc20 The Tenacious Tributary System Peter C. Perdue To cite this article: Peter C. Perdue (2015) The Tenacious Tributary System, Journal of Contemporary China, 24:96, 1002-1014, DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2015.1030949 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2015.1030949 Published online: 07 May 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 479 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjcc20 Download by: [University of Warwick] Date: 12 October 2015, At: 04:49 Journal of Contemporary China, 2015 Vol. 24, No. 96, 1002–1014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2015.1030949 The Tenacious Tributary System PETER C. PERDUE* Recently, some writers on Chinese foreign relations have argued that the tributary system is a useful concept for describing imperial China’s relations with its neighbors, and that it can even serve as a model for the future of international relations in East Asia. An examination of China’s historical practice of foreign relations shows that there was no systematic tributary system, but instead multiple relationships of trade, military force, diplomacy and ritual. Furthermore, China’s neighbors did not accept the imperial center’s definition of hierarchy and subordination, but interpreted ritual relationships in their own way. Even in the 1930s, when scholars invoked Chinese history to advocate peaceful relations, they recognized the importance of military force, colonial settlement and domination in East Asian state relationships. The current myth of the tributary system ignores historical reality and misleads us about China’s true position in East Asia and the world. Introduction The concept of a ‘tributary system’ regulating China’s relationships with foreign countries has held a tenacious grip on analysts and critics. Even though no Chinese dynasty ever used this term to describe its own strategic thinking, and well-informed historians have repeatedly denied that such a system ever existed, it somehow still irresistibly attracts scholars and journalists seeking to explain the PRC’s foreign policy today. For these analysts, the tributary system, because it expresses eternal values of Chinese civilization, continues to direct how PRC elites and citizens see the world. It is a basic component of ‘Sinospeak’, William Callahan’s term for the current version of Orientalist ideology, positing an Asian civilization with radically different features from an equally essentialized West. Callahan shows that the Downloaded by [University of Warwick] at 04:49 12 October 2015 popular books of Martin Jacques, David Kang and Liu Mingfu, alongside the best- selling ruminations of Henry Kissinger, continue to propagate this discourse, despite the best efforts of historians. Bruce Cumings similarly skewers the recent ‘Orientalist * Peter C. Perdue is Professor of History at Yale University. He has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 AD (Harvard University Press, 1987) and China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005). He is a coeditor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity (Routledge, 2008), and a co-author of Global Connections, a world history textbook (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Asia Inside Out, three volumes on inter-Asian connections forthcoming from Harvard University Press. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers, Chinese environmental history and the history of tea. The author can be reached by email at [email protected] q 2015 Taylor & Francis THE TENACIOUS TRIBUTARY SYSTEM craze’ of commentary on the ‘rise of China’ as a metaphor which has little to do with reality.1 The authors who invoke the tributary system metaphor argue that a peaceful system of international relations governed East Asia in the past, up to about 1800, because China dominated its neighbors by cultural superiority, not by military force. Suisheng Zhao’s article in this issue summarizes these arguments. These authors claim that only the aggressive impact of foreign imperialism in the nineteenth century upset this enduring structure, inaugurating China’s century and a half of humiliation. But now, they say, a new rising China will once again dominate East Asia by virtue of its economic attractions and cultural soft power.2 In William Callahan’s analysis, this vision of a specifically ‘Chinese-style international relations theory’ aims to revive a hierarchical world order based on the image of the tributary system. Assertions of the PRC’s resemblance to peacefully hegemonic early empires have run up against some inconvenient truths in the last five years. The PRC’s current rhetoric on the South Sea island disputes expresses ‘hard realism’ much more forcefully than Confucian harmony. If it echoes any historical tradition, it follows the Legalists who believed only in coercion rather than cultural assimilation. Such realism, all too familiar to Western analysts, makes China look not so different from Western empires after all. Current Chinese statements seem to confirm all too easily John Mearsheimer and his disciples’ theories of inevitable clashes between rising powers and the existing world order.3 Edward Luttwak likewise argues that, following the ‘universal logic of strategy’, China cannot become a dominant world power, because rival powers will inevitably create coalitions to balance against it,4 but this author is uncomfortable with using one current crisis to confirm a universal theory. The author agrees that we need to view China’s relations with the world in a longer perspective, but which history is the most useful for this purpose? Nearly all historians who have investigated the actual conduct of foreign relations by Chinese dynasties have rejected the validity of this concept. Odd Arne Westad, in his recent survey entitled China’s Restless Empire, summarizes the scholarly consensus by stating flat out that ‘there was no tributary system, unlike what some 1. William A. Callahan, ‘Sino-speak: Chinese exceptionalism and the politics of history’, Journal of Asian Downloaded by [University of Warwick] at 04:49 12 October 2015 Studies 71(1), (2012), pp. 33–55; Bruce Cumings, ‘The “rise of China”?’, in Catherine Lynch, Robert Marks and Paul Pickowicz, eds, Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China: Essays in Honor of Maurice Meisner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), pp. 185–207; Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); David C. Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011); Liu Mingfu, Zhongguo Meng: Hou Meiguo Shidai de Daguo Siwei Zhanlue Dingwei [The China Dream: The Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age ] (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2010). 2. Suisheng Zhao, ‘Rethinking the Chinese world order: the imperial cycle and rise of China’, Journal of Contemporary China 24(96), (2015), DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2015.1030913; William Callahan, ‘History, tradition and the China dream: socialist modernization in the World of Great Harmony’, Journal of Contemporary China 24 (96), (2015), DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2015.1030915. 3. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001); Yuan-Kang Wang, Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 4. Edward Luttwak, The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 1003 PETER C. PERDUE historians have claimed’.5 And yet, despite the best efforts of academic historians, the concept, like the Chinese pop-up doll, the budaoweng 不倒翁, keeps coming back. Clearly, writers who endorse and predict the coming hegemony of China in Asia, especially advocates of the ‘peaceful rise’ theory, find the tributary system concept useful. If the tribute system was the fundamental Chinese method of dealing with the outside world, and tribute relations were inherently harmonious and hierarchical, then China’s efforts to subordinate Asian nations will look different from coercive and exploitative methods of Western imperialists. A surprisingly heterogeneous collection of people agree upon this type of apologetics for the PRC. They include former Marxists, searching for an alternative to American neo-liberal capitalism, Chinese nationalists who support Beijing’s foreign policy goals, and the American business community, once again lured by the attractions of the large Chinese market into the seductions of authoritarianism. All of these prevalent delusions about China have historical precedents. Foreign observers have often claimed that the large cultural differences between China and the West rule out a liberal-democratic political system. The political scientist Frank Goodnow, President of Johns Hopkins University, looked to the Yuan Shikai dictatorship of the 1910s as the model government for China: It is extremely
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