The rise and fall of great powers and the transformation of the world order has caught the attention of historians and political scientists alike over the past few centuries – with Chinese academics being no exception. While world history has been reflected upon by Chinese scholars so as to identify potentially destabilizing trends and those development paths that should not be repeated, Chinese academic world order debates have started to turn back to pre-modern state philosophy and Chinese history. The underlying claim is one of particularity and cultural uniqueness: retroperspective analyses of the history of tianxia argue that the Chinese empire operated with a distinct ordering structure that provided security and stability based on a ritually rooted hierarchical order. This pattern has been identified not only as an alternative to the “Western” principles of international relations and world order, but also as a mind map inspiring Chinese politics up to the present day. Contrary to the assumptions of socialization theory, the integration of the PRC into the post-Second World War international institutional order did not trigger transformation and democratization via learning processes nor the internalization of Western values. The launching of the PRC's “New Silk Road Initiative” and the establishment of new financial institutions (the Silk Road Fund and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) seem to signal that the PRC might undergo a transformation from being a rule taker to becoming a rule maker. The study of the historical and cultural roots of Chinese world order visions hence becomes crucial, both for academia as well as policy practitioners.

This edited volume undertakes some meta-reflections on the re-excavation of the tianxia paradigm by Zhao Tingyang, and the re-activation of pre-Qin philosophy by Yan Xuetong (and the Tsinghua team), from the perspective of intellectual history. This is a quite valuable contribution to the current debate on Chinese culturalism and the instrumental re-imagination of the country's cultural traditions, as different authors engage in an in-depth discussion of the historical reality and ex-post narration-based reconstruction of tianxia (see the chapter by Mark Edward Lewis and Mei-yu Hsieh). Furthermore, they look at the reception and selective re-interpretation of Confucian (tianxia) ideas by Chinese literati scholars, inter alia the late-Qing reformist intellectual Kang Youwei (chapters by Wang Hui and Ban Wang). The book also includes three chapters (by Viren Murthy, Lin Chun, and Lisa Rofel) dealing with transcultural flows and the travelling of world order conceptions to and from China. Lin Chun, for example, examines the compatibility of socialism and Chinese tianxia traditions, outlining the conceptual differences between cosmopolitanism and (communist) internationalism. The volume concludes with some critical investigations by Haiyan Lee (chapter ten) and by Chishen Chang and Kuan-Hsing Chen (chapter 11) stressing the perceptual gaps between the Chinese tianxia debates and the impression of the international community of states of a rising China that is following its own norms and ordering principles. Daniel A. Bell discusses the philosophical roots of (re-invented) Chinese Confucianism, and points out some of the incompatibilities between these abstract normative Confucian notions and China's positioning and strategic options in international politics. The red thread weaving together all of the contributions is the notion of tianxia – which Prasenjit Duara assesses in connection with “planetary sustainability.” Others follow, meanwhile, in the footsteps of the well-known path-breaking analyses compiled and edited by John K. Fairbank (1968) and Morris Rossabi (1983) of tianxia as Chinese “world order,” as well as the milestone studies by David Kang (2011) and Brantley Womack (2010) on the stability of China's regional order as based on a complex, asymmetric hierarchy.

Overall, the edited volume compiles a fascinating multiplicity of philosophical thoughts and historiographic accounts of the Chinese tianxia – not only summarizing the inner-Chinese debates but also engaging in further meta-theoretical contemplations about pre-modern and contemporary Chinese political cosmology. However, a few caveats should be noted. The division of the volume into four topical sections is not always reflected in the chapters grouped under these overarching categorizations. The quality of the individual chapters is indisputable, but they do not engage in any concrete dialogue with each other. Some sections of the various chapters hence appear slightly redundant, especially the various paragraphs dealing with the historiographic accounts of the Chinese tianxia. The volume, which begins with an excellent and succinct introduction by Ban Wang sketching out the broad context of the tianxia debate and a brief discussion of the state of the field, would definitely have benefited from some concluding remarks and a summary of the volume's main findings. The reader is drawn deeper into the myriad debates on Chinese tianxia theory and practice, but is not provided with any initial conclusions regarding the relevance of the ongoing efforts to reactive China's cultural traditions. As the book is “sub”-titled Chinese Visions of World Order, the obvious question to be addressed would be whether the “world” that Chinese debates are referring to is the (regional) Sinicized one of ancient times or the global realm of the 21st century – and, indeed, how this relates to key term of modern “Euro-Atlantic” theories of international relations and “world” politics. As the volume's detailed analysis of Kang Youwei's Datongshu, and also the chapter by Zhou Yiqun on China's intellectual encounter with Greek antiquity, illustrate, Chinese political philosophy has long absorbed “foreign” political thought and traditions (reciprocally, Chinese pre-modern philosophy has inspired Europe's intellectual history and philosophy of science). Identifying “Chinese” world order visions hence becomes almost impossible.

Nonetheless, the volume provides an excellent starting point for the more advanced reader to rethink the role(s) ascribed to China (or those claimed by China) both in pre-modern times and in the 21st century. As Ban Wang highlights in the final part of the volume's introduction, the current world is trapped in anarchy and chaos. Ways to establish a “better world” order have haunted intellectuals both in and beyond China over the past few centuries. At this abstract level of normative ideas, the reactivated tianxia debate might become part of the ongoing quest for reforming the post-Cold War international system. In this vein, the late-Qing views on “great harmony” (datong) resonate with the current international debate on cosmopolitanism and the construction of a “transnational” world order. That said, the volume is a good read for anyone interested in Chinese intellectual history and philosophy, but also for those following the recent debates on Chinese identity and status claims in the 21st century – as well as for those engaged in the “world-wide” debates on philosophical communitarism and cosmopolitan universality.