Not ‘Sinocentricism’ but deep pluralism: Insights from historical Asian interconnections

We are in the midst of global order change. The current order, the West-centric international order of the past two centuries, has been a core-periphery world given the vast power asymmetries between the West and the rest as well as the westward orientation of the rest of the world. However, the contemporary rise of Asia is heralding a new world order. While the shape of the emerging world order is a much-debated issue in scholarly and policy circles, the rise of China is at the vanguard of this transformation. Not surprisingly, many scholars and policymakers have turned to China’s – and Asia’s – past to understand if these can tell us anything about other possible configurations of ordering the world.

Interestingly, and disappointingly, the dominant view in scholarly and policy circles also points toward a core-periphery configuration when it comes to China’s and Asia’s past. This view posits a Sinocentric order as opposed to the West-centric core-periphery order of the past two centuries.

Often termed the “tribute system”, this Sinocentric world literally places China at the centre of a world order surrounded by tribute bearing subordinates. This tribute system is also believed to be the template for a future Sinocentric world order. According to Jim Mattis, when he was the US Secretary of Defense in 2018, contemporary China was looking at the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) as “their model, albeit in a more muscular manner, demanding that other nations become tribute states kowtowing to Beijing”.

While recent scholarship has rightly emphasised that this Sinocentric perspective was, at best, the worldview of the Sinocentric elite as opposed to “a factual description” of the world order, it has erroneously – and widely – been interpreted as real. In fact, it is also believed that this Sinocentric order lasted for two millennia before the rise of the West in recent centuries.

In part, this misreading stems from treating contemporary world regions such as East Asia – with China at its centre – as full-fledged and self-contained “regional worlds” in the centuries past that lived in splendid isolation from each other. This “closed” regional worlds configuration is at the core of the Sinocentric scholarship. According to the late John Fairbank, the historian associated with this Sinocentric world order in academia, “geography” kept East Asia “separate from West and South Asia and made it the most distinctive of all the great culture areas”.

However, contemporary world regions like East Asia were never hermetically sealed off from the wider Asian world in the past. These regions were “open” and overlapped because historical Asia was deeply interconnected via overland and maritime networks. While the nature of these interconnections certainly varied over the centuries, they make it clear that a two millennia-long Sinocentric system did not exist in history as “a factual description” of reality.

For example, if Central Asia is seen in an interconnected framework with East Asia during the early Ming (~1400 CE), then it is clear that imperial China sought “political equality” with the Timurids of Central Asia while claiming “world supremacy [only] in China”. Similarly, the Ming was not at the centre of the maritime world of Southeast Asia in the 15th century, where port-polities like Melaka were politically and commercially oriented toward the Indian Ocean and Perso-Islamicate culture even as they valued their economic links with China.

In other words, instead of “closing” and isolating East Asia by analytical fiat, the interconnected perspective of Asian history decenters China from the centre of the world order irrespective of the rhetoric of the Sinocentric elite. Notably, the Buddhist connections between China and India in the first millennium fostered a decentered Asian order, and also had a profound impact on the Sinocentric worldview.

During the Sui-Tang period (589-907 CE), China suffered from a “borderland complex” vis-à-vis Buddhist India as it was at the periphery of the Indian Buddhist holy land. Notably, the Chinese themselves did not use the term zhongguo or “the Middle Kingdom” to refer to China then. Instead, that term was used to refer to India. This dislocation in China’s worldview was acute and intense because the India of that period was a realm of multiple kingdoms, not a single unified empire.

Nevertheless, given the term zhongguo’s association with (Sino)centrism, it has even been argued that China knew that it was “not the centre of the world” during the Sui-Tang. According to Amitav Acharya, the so-called Silk Roads (or long-distance commercial interconnections across Eurasia) and Buddhism had “introduced to China the idea of a world with multiple centers” since the early centuries of the Common Era, thus completely upending the traditional and dominant narrative of a two-millennia-long Sinocentric world order.

As such, Asia’s past indeed offers us a radically different vision of a world order by pointing toward a decentered world of multiple centres. There were myriad interconnections – political, military, commercial, and cultural – across these centres, and they had a deep impact on geopolitical configurations and the identities of the actors. What is even more noteworthy is the crucial and formative role of Asia’s smaller powers in forging these interconnections.

Along the maritime routes between China and India, it was Southeast Asian shipmasters and traders who pioneered these connections, and they continued to play a pivotal role through the centuries in keeping Asia interconnected using ships built in Southeast Asia that sailed using Southeast Asian techniques. In other words, Southeast Asia was hardly a periphery of any Chinese or Indian centre, and that Southeast Asian agency was constitutive of the Asian world order. While power asymmetries certainly existed in Asia’s past, the Asian world order was collectively built and sustained by its multiple actors.

This interconnected Asian past of multiple centers that collectively built long-lasting world orders that were decentered (not core-periphery) and in which no single power exercised global (or Asia-wide) hegemony offers an alternative and arguably more attractive vision of world order for our future.

The key to realising such a world, where the great and small powers collectively build their international order, is by embracing deep pluralism. While material power asymmetries may continue in such plural and “multiplex” worlds, they do point toward an order where co-existence and stability amidst cultural and commercial dynamism is possible irrespective of the ideologies of the actors, whether Confucian, Buddhist, Perso-Islamicate, or something else.

Manjeet S Pardesi (manjeet.pardesi@vuw.ac.nz) is Associate Professor of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. This commentary draws from the author’s recent article, “Interconnected Asian History and ‘Open’ World Orders”, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Politics, April 17, 2024.

This article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.