Comment: China’s Middle Kingdom Complex. (1992, 20 Marks)
China’s name for itself, Zhongguo, means the “central state”, usually rendered “Middle Kingdom”. The Middle Kingdom complex is the disposition that grew from it: a belief that China is the civilisational centre of the world, that its neighbours stand in a hierarchy beneath it, and that a world order is natural only when China is at its apex. Historians from John King Fairbank onward have traced it; whether it still explains Chinese behaviour is the real question.
Origins: tianxia and the tributary order
- Tianxia (“all under heaven”) imagined a single moral order radiating from the emperor, the Son of Heaven, rather than a system of equal sovereign states.
- The hua–yi distinction separated the civilised centre from “barbarian” peripheries, which were ranked by their closeness to Chinese culture.
- Fairbank’s The Chinese World Order (1968) described the tributary system: Korea, Vietnam, Ryukyu and others sent missions and accepted investiture in return for trade, gifts and recognition.
- The Qianlong Emperor’s reply to Britain’s Macartney mission in 1793, that “we possess all things”, is the classic expression of this self-sufficiency.
Inversion: the century of humiliation
The Opium Wars, the unequal treaties and Japanese invasion turned superiority into wounded pride. Modern nationalism is therefore double-edged: a memory of centrality and a grievance at its loss. Mao Zedong‘s declaration in 1949 that the Chinese people had “stood up” cast the revolution as standing restored.
Contemporary expressions
- Rejuvenation: Xi Jinping‘s “Chinese Dream” promises the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, restoring a rightful place rather than seeking a new one.
- Historic rights: the nine-dash line rests on historical claims that the 2016 arbitral award rejected; Beijing refuses the McMahon Line as a colonial imposition and keeps renaming places in Arunachal Pradesh.
- Hierarchy in diplomacy: the 2010 remark by Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi to ASEAN counterparts that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries” is often read as tributary thinking revived.
- Intellectual revival: Zhao Tingyang (The Tianxia System, 2005) recasts tianxia as a model for world governance; Yan Xuetong argues for “humane authority” drawn from pre-Qin thought. The Global Civilisation Initiative (2023) rejects any single universal model.
- For India, the complex appears in Beijing’s reluctance to treat it as a peer: the 1962 war, the shielding of Pakistan and no endorsement of a permanent Security Council seat. Shyam Saran (How China Sees India and the World, 2022) treats the self-image as largely imagined: Beijing selects from its past to serve present claims, as over Tibet and Aksai Chin, while discounting the debt to India that Xuanzang’s seventh-century journey records.
Limits of the idea
- History was more pragmatic than the model: the Qing negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) with Russia as an equal, and historians such as Peter C. Perdue show that tribute often disguised trade and power politics.
- Hierarchy was not always aggression: David C. Kang argues that the China-centred order brought East Asia long periods of peace.
- Realism explains as much: for John J. Mearsheimer, China’s assertiveness is what any rising great power does, culture aside.
- The risk of essentialism: reading behaviour through a timeless psychology can become an Orientalist shortcut that ignores interests and the Party’s legitimacy needs.
Conclusion
The Middle Kingdom complex is real as historical memory and political resource, but not a fixed psychology that determines policy. After Tiananmen, Deng Xiaoping counselled China to hide its capabilities and bide its time; growing power has since let the Party mobilise civilisational pride for nationalism and hierarchy in Asia. It is best read as culture amplified by power: neighbours, India above all, must manage both.