The Tribute System and the World Imagined in Early Modern East Asia

The field of international relations has long treated the Westphalian system and states in the territorial sovereign sense as the standard or ‘normal’ in IR. The World Imagined by Hendrik Spruyt boldly challenges this habit as the biases of our times and instead brings non-European historical international systems into their rightful place in our study of international order and international relations theorising more generally. Unpacking Spruyt’s discussion of ‘the East Asian interstate society’, the article argues that an in-depth examination of what is known as a ‘tribute system’ and early modern East Asian historical orders richly illuminates the book’s arguments on the heterogeneity and diversity of order-building practices. It also argues that from a practice-oriented approach, the experience of early modern East Asia presents a compelling case that legitimation holds the key to explaining order building processes at both the domestic and international levels, with legitimation at these two levels working in tandem.

The Foreign Policy Doctrine of Traditional China

The article is a continuation of the cycle of theoretical works by Oleg E. Nepomnin (1935–2020) published in previous issues of the “Oriental Courier” [Nepomnin, 2019, 2020, 2021]. Oleg Nepomnin was among the most brilliant theorists of the development of Eastern societies. The author considers the foreign policy doctrine of traditional China as an integral part of China’s social perceptions of the world order. Based on the concepts of “world–cosmos” and “world-society”, the Chinese foreign policy doctrine was based on the fundamental idea of the oneness of the world order. In the “world of men”, world laws were embodied by the Chinese emperor — the Son of Heaven — and Chinese statehood. Next to China and its emperor, there could be no equal states and no equal monarchs. In this view of the world, China had borders and the Celestial Empire had none, implying the worldwide scope of the power of the Son of Heaven. On this ideological basis emerged the foreign policy dichotomy “civilized centre — savage periphery”, or “China — barbarians”. The author examines the origins of this influential concept from antiquity to the fall of the empire in China in the 20th century. A “tribute” system of interaction with other states was a logical continuation of ideas about the world order in China and its place in it. But the author stresses that despite China’s desire to maintain the illusions of a functioning “tribute” system, strengthen the prestige of imperial power and carry out monopolistic state trade with “barbarians”, “barbarian” embassies themselves often arrived in China with purely pragmatic goals: to establish trade, receive rich gifts from the emperor, elevate official status, get investiture and the Chinese title. In fact, China lost its status as the hegemon of the ‘tribute” system and the “Centre of the Universe’ after the Opium Wars in the 19th century. China was relegated to the level of the “sick man of Asia”, although the “tribute system” itself continued to function long after that. Even as the “Chinese world order” rapidly collapsed in the 70–90s of the 19th century, and previous Chinese “tributaries” were turned into colonies and semi-colonies of the capitalist West, Beijing’s rulers clung frantically to the “tribute” system. Up to the fall of the empire, the Manchu rulers could not get rid of the burden of traditional notions of China as the “Centre of the Universe” surrounded by the periphery and “barbarian rebellion”.

Riflessioni su un frammento di Policleto di Larissa (FGrHist 128 F3 = Strab. XV 3, 21): interpretatio graeca dell’attività economica del Gran Re?

The aim of this article is to propose an historical analysis of the fragment FGrHist 128 F3 (= Strab. XV 3, 21) of the historian Polykleitos of Larissa. Polykleitos reports mostly administrative and economic news on the Persian Great King’s activity and testifies to a new approach to the study of the Persian Empire and its tribute system compared to Herodotus: these are complex evidences clarified in the light of the Aristotelian reflection on the oikonomia and the politics of Macedonians in Asia.

China’s Legacies in Southeast Asia

This chapter traces the history of China’s legacies in Southeast Asia. Historically, China has loomed large—geographically, culturally, militarily, and economically—over Southeast Asia. This was particularly the case before the sixteenth-century arrival of European colonial powers, which encroached upon not only Southeast Asia but China itself, and began to limit earlier Sino-Southeast Asian interactions. Prior to that time, they were a mixture of cross-border migration and economic exchanges; a flourishing maritime trade; outright occupation and subjugation in one case (Vietnam); and ritualistic expressions of the “tribute system” for many others. These four legacies are all extraordinarily complex, for which there are not particularly good historical records. Thus, how one interprets these pre-modern interactions between China and Southeast Asia really does have to do with the available sources, and it seems that the lack of preserved Southeast Asian sources has had the impact of tilting interpretations in favor of the Chinese tributary paradigm. The chapter then describes this long sweep of Sino-Southeast Asian pre-modern and modern interactions in a relatively condensed fashion before turning to the post-1949 period.

Interpreting the Maritime and Overland Trade Regulations of 1882 between Chosŏn and the Qing: How logics of appropriateness shaped Sino–Korean relations

Prior research on Qing China’s relationship towards Chosŏn Korea in the late 19th century suggested that China’s influence over Korea was a continuation of the tribute system. However, the Qing’s awareness of Westphalian laws altered Sino–Korean relations. In 1882, Qing China signed the Maritime and Overland Trade Regulations with Chosŏn Korea. Unlike the previous treaties that China signed with western states, the Qing negotiated terms economically beneficial to China in the agreement. The Qing officials determined much of the terms found in the Regulations. The Qing officials had leverage over Chosŏn officials partly because China had amassed cultural capital through centuries of tributary exchanges. The logics of appropriateness (LoA) or ‘bounded rationality’ of the tribute system shaped the Qing’s and Chosŏn’s responses, even in treaty negotiations. We argued that the Regulations reflected the Qing’s attempts to ‘modernize’ tributary relations with Westphalian LoA in light of the Qing’s own domestic crisis. Domestic insurrections such as the Taiping Rebellion led members of the self-strengthening ( Ziqiang) movement to focus on foreign affairs and adopt Westphalian international laws. The Qing’s goals to self-strengthen via an unequal agreement with Chosŏn, however, failed when westerners criticized China’s perceived suzerain authority over Korea. The criticisms highlighted the cleavages between the tributary and Westphalian systems as individuals attempted to justify their roles within these institutions.