It is singularly appropriate that the dust jacket of this elegant, small volume has behind the title and the name of the distinguished author slightly blurred characters for tian xia, “All Under Heaven,” the implications of which are a major strand in Wang's discussions from beginning to end. Of the five chapters and an appendix, only one chapter has previously appeared in print, and five of the six are revised versions of lectures. The perspectives on tian xia begin in chapter 1, where the use of the phrase in the Yi jing leads to Wang's gloss that “All changes under Heaven (tian xia 天下) implied progressive steps toward civilization, something common to all people who seek improvement” (pp. 5–6). A dimension of political order clearly is involved, as is the possibility that the tian xia will be centered in a single political order of a Central Kingdom, Zhong Guo, and Wang shows nicely how the quest for improved coherent patterns of human flourishing developed in China through ages of multi-state conflict, imperial unity, and Great Qing, when a masterful unity of the Chinese tian xia had a common center with a Manchu-centered Central Asian realm in which Han Chinese had little role except to fund and feed the Manchu armies.
But the reality and potentiality of tian xia were seen already, in the Yi jing and other classics, as a network with a single center and no insuperable contradictions. Wang shows us at the end of chapter 1 and in chapter 2 that that framework could not be maintained after the Opium Wars, with foreign soldiers, merchants, and missionaries within the empire, pursuing quite different webs of human improvement, convincing some Chinese of their superiority, forcing others to bend to their ways. Among the first to sense that China no longer could seek a tian xia without neighbors were Chinese who had emigrated to Southeast Asia and found that they were “Chinese people” living alongside Thai people, Malay people, and so on. They would play important roles in the search for the concept and reality of a Chinese nation among other nations. Wang returns to them in the appendix, showing their amazing range of agendas, from the arch conservative Ku Hung-ming (Gu Hongming) to Eugene Chen, who did not speak Chinese very well but had his uses as a diplomat for the Republic. For these people, Wang argues, tian xia had little resonance (p. 146).
In chapter 3, Wang takes up another foreign concept that he argues has been less than helpful in China's quest for a sustainable relation with the modern interactive world, sovereignty. The Chinese, he argues, cannot move ahead with their quest for modes of human flourishing as long as the separateness of Taiwan violates their indivisible sovereignty. Metaphors of family relations have some appeal, and the partial separateness of Hong Kong was successfully worked out because it was basically granted by the sovereign People's Republic. That does not get very far toward an answer on Taiwan, nor, I would add in 2014, the troubled relations with Vietnam.
Chapter 4 shows very nicely how, although the post-1980 changes in the People's Republic could be described as revolutionary, they are always referred to as “reform and opening”; the idea of revolutionary opening to new futures has been completely discredited by the excesses of Mao Zedong's last years; this may understate the undercurrent of nostalgia for those times of purity and total commitment, but that current may be waning with the passing of an older generation.
Chapter 5 confronts the tangles of the question of the distinctiveness and value of Chinese culture, starting with Liang Qichao's brilliant and brave project of being both modern and Chinese and moving quickly to the corrosive negativity of Lu Xun. Today there is a great deal of writing about Chinese culture, but a widespread sense that “China has lost its cultural moorings” (p. 107).
In December 2001, Wang Gungwu and others who were making great strides in breaking down the barriers between studies of China and of Southeast Asia (Anthony Reid, Carl Trocki, Philip Kuhn, and others) gathered for a colloquium in southern California. Driving Wang from one venue to another through Koreatown, South Central, rich people's coastal enclaves, and a mall and supermarket catering to émigré Chinese, I was delighted by his alertness to all the variety. And then he started exclaiming about all the American flags flying from cars and trucks. On September 11, 2001, America's innocent, single-centered tian xia had been shattered. I think neither of us noticed at the time that our first day on the road was December 7, the anniversary of an earlier shattering of American isolation.
Wang Gungwu's texts are best read as traces of his many displacements and epiphanies—from early years in British Malaya, to 1947–48 at the National Central University in Nanjing, to graduate study in London and scholarship on a period of disunion in China in the 900s, to teaching and institution-building in Kuala Lumpur, Canberra, Hong Kong, and Singapore—and of his sense that Chinese heritages have much to offer the still very tentative global tian xia. He and others will continue to show how China can contribute to it, especially as they notice the importance given to China in recent major works of world history by Victor Lieberman, Jürgen Osterhammel, and many more. Everyone trying to think about these issues will profit from the range of reading, especially in Chinese, reflected in Wang's notes. By the time this review appears, responses to his themes and questions probably will be crackling across the huge Chinese blogosphere.
