By: Merics
July 18, 2018
China’s presence and influence is not confined to its own borders or East Asia anymore, but has reached a global scale. In the new MERICS China Monitor Perspectives, “China’s cosmological Communism: A challenge to liberal democracies,” journalist and former MERICS Research Fellow Didi Kirsten Tatlow shows how imperial philosophy meets Marxist orthodoxy in Beijing’s global ambitions.
Tatlow argues that to fully understand China’s rise one must look at deeply embedded norms of power and imperial statecraft, which are reproduced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to project power and build legitimacy. In her paper, she traces the relevance of the terms tianxia (“all-under-heaven”), tianchao (“heavenly empire”), and jimi (literally “bridling and feeding” horses and cattle) for modern CCP politics.