Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (book excerpt)

Shuchen Xiang's provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference

Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea, Professor Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism.

Xiang explains that “Chinese” identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy—described as “harmony”—with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one’s position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today’s multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.

Shuchen Xiang (PhD, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and King’s College London, summa cum laude) is the Mount Hua professor of philosophy at Xidian University, China. She is the author of A Philosophical Defense of Culture: Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer, the coeditor of How China Shaped the Enlightenment: A Transcultural History of Modern Thought (Routledge, forthcoming) and The Islamic-Confucian Synthesis in China, the translator of History of Chinese Philosophy Through Its Key Terms, and the author of over thirty academic articles.

Praise

"[E]ye-opening. . . . [Xiang] offers a deeply informed perspective to confront our own often half-understood or misunderstood beliefs about ourselves and others."—Alex Lo, South China Morning Post

“The author succinctly connects Eurocentric metaphysics and ontology to the racialized discourses that shaped European imperialism, and she compellingly shows how Chinese philosophies provide alternative frameworks for cosmopolitanism. One of the book’s most original contributions is the author’s critique of sinological methods through the lens of critical race theory. This book is timely and important.”—Leah Kalmanson, University of North Texas

“Shuchen Xiang advances a series of original, nuanced, and thought-provoking arguments in this extraordinarily erudite book. She brings nuance to the study of Chinese history and the complex, hybrid formation of the people now globally known as ‘Chinese.’ The deftness of scholarship through which these conclusions are made evident is marked by a multitude of epistemic virtues, among which are not only multilingual nuance but also an eschewing of epistemic apartheid and the pitfalls of colonial sinology. The book’s implications for thought beyond Chinese philosophies are palpable. Chinese Cosmopolitanism is, in short, a tour de force and necessary book for our times and beyond.”—Lewis R. Gordon, author of Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization

“In this impassioned and densely documented work, Shuchen Xiang argues that the violence disfiguring Europe’s history of religious wars, colonialism, enslavement, and genocide is not the result of a faulty ‘national character,’ but may be a product of a tragically mistaken metaphysical framework. Taking Chinese history as a test case, the record shows that the absence of substance dualism in China overall permitted the development of less violent and more accommodating approaches to racial and cultural difference. Her bold thesis offers pragmatic alternatives for a world dangerously addicted to war as the option of first choice. All who care about the future of our fragile world will find in this book much of substance to reflect upon.”—Martin Powers, University of Michigan

Alex Lo, the South China Morning Post columnist, wrote in a recent commentary on the book “according to Xiang, much of contemporary sinology has uncritically, or worse, deliberately, projected the Western-specific experience of imperialism and racism onto premodern or dynastic China. Philosophers may call that a category mistake, but worse, it may just be ideological whitewashing: ‘See, we weren’t that bad. The Chinese had been doing it long before us.’"

On the other hand, Xiang practiced “what the late French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault called an “archaeology” of ideas and practices. For this forgotten ancient ‘cosmopolitanism’ – accommodating and understanding the others rather than denigrating and conquering them – was long buried in modern Chinese history,” according to Lo’s Rediscovering an ancient Chinese openness and tolerance.

Lo added, “I imagine many Westerners and Westernised Chinese who bother to read her book will find many things to disagree with, if not be seriously offended by.”

Well, buckle up for an excerpt of Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea published by Princeton University Press. Part of the Princeton-China Series, the book won Honorable Mention for the Asia and Asian America Section Book Award, American Sociological Association. 

Professor Xiang chooses the excerpt below.

Excerpted from Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea by Shuchen Xiang. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic. Europe’s first encounter with significantly different peoples on a large scale—during its “Age of Discovery”—led to the decimation of 95 percent of the native Amerindian population in what one historian calls “the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world” (Stannard 1992: x). The European encounter with difference also gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade, which, according to demographers’ estimates, may have halved Africa’s population through deaths on the continent and exportation of its population (Bayley 2004: 409). The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, and South Africa were all founded on the extermination, displacement, or herding onto reservations of aboriginal populations (Mills 1997: 28). By 1914 colonialism had brought 85 percent of the earth under European rule as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths (29). This colonial world order is now being challenged by China, which has a different way of understanding difference. It is little realized in the West that China and Chinese culture have not been static throughout the country’s history. With a dynamic identity created out of difference, China has always been “cosmopolitan.” Throughout history, the Chinese have dealt better with difference than have the Europeans, owing to fundamentally different philosophical and cultural assumptions.

[…]
At a time when China’s global profile is rising, misunderstanding China is likely to have significant geopolitical consequences. It is thus imperative that the nature of Chinese self-identity, the Chinese worldview with regard to difference, and the Chinese historical view of the “other” be more clearly understood. Second, I believe it is important to correct a pervasive assumption in modern academia that colonialism, genocide, racial violence, and hatred of the other arise from universal and stable characteristics of human nature. Instead, as I argue here, these phenomena are culturally contingent. Third, it is my hope to correct the increasingly popular assumption among many contemporary Sinologists and Western academics, that the Western discourse of race is applicable to the Chinese tradition.

[…]

A contemporary example of the Great Chain of Being psychology in action could be seen in the shock-and-awe tactic employed by the US Army in its 2003 invasion of Iraq. Nothing better captured domination through erasure than the US military camp built on the archaeological site of the Babylonians’ famous Ishtar Gate south of Baghdad (built in 575 BC). Around three hundred thousand square meters were covered over with gravel; three areas were flattened to make a helicopter landing pad, a parking lot, and a site for portable toilets; and trenches were dug, dispersing brick fragments bearing cuneiform inscriptions (Sigal 2018). Arguably, the psychology that is informed by the ideology of the Great Chain of Being is not a mere historical curiosity but still shapes Western practice today. There is no place, however, for the Chinese tradition’s understanding of efficacy within the (Western) framework of the Great Chain of Being, where the physical eradication of a people and place is a sign of virtue. The very different metaphysics of the Chinese tradition has helped
to shape the noncolonial behavior of Chinese states throughout history.

[…]

The Chinese tradition’s assumptions, under a metaphysics of processual holism, that there are no ontological boundaries between what is immanent to nature, that nothing transcends this processual whole, and that a person becomes human through acculturation have important implications for traditional Chinese attitudes toward the non-Chinese. As I have argued elsewhere (Xiang 2019b, 2019c), otherness became problematic in the Western context only because the (racial) other was understood, under a substance ontology, as essentially other—that is, ontologically distinct from what is properly human. Under the traditional and processual Confucian Chinese metaphysical view of the self as a human becoming, however, humanness is not a congenital and eternal essence, but a quality acquired through acculturation and the practice of culturally appropriate actions. Under this view, those who are (initially) perceived to be other can always become acculturated according to Chinese norms and so become Chinese. This cultural-processual identity as opposed to a racial-ontological identity is reflected in the central tenet of Confucianism: the perfectibility through education of all humans. In the dualistic Greek-Western view, by contrast, the barbarian is a Manichean other who is ontologically distinct from proper humans and so is incapable of becoming “properly human.”

[…]

We can summarize the sources of Chinese cosmopolitanism by way of the contrasts between the Chinese and Western traditions:

1. The Chinese tradition was more empirical in that it accepted the fact of change. Without the idea that only the unconditioned and eternal is to be esteemed, the Chinese tradition did not repudiate humans’ embodied and contingent nature. As such, it did not suffer the West’s malaises and nightmares of its own making consequent upon the psychological evasion of this fact, such as “barbarians.”

2. On the premise that what is is change itself, the Chinese tradition did not understand the structure of the world in terms of a static, ontological, metaphysically determined hierarchy. […]

3. The Chinese tradition therefore understood identity, whether at the
level of the individual or of collective culture, as creatively indeterminate and always in process.

4. The Chinese tradition had an anti-representationalist account of
experience and culture that was related to its acceptance that order in the world is not predetermined and static.

5. The Chinese tradition’s empirical recognition that our identities are dynamic in nature and always changing and that the only meaningful difference between humans is not essential (racial) but cultural, combined with an anti-representationalist understanding of culture, led to a willingness to hybridize different cultures. […]

6. The Chinese tradition understood that hybridization, which involves
being pliant and accommodating (that is, being cosmopolitan), secures longevity by bringing different peoples into a hybrid whole. […]

7. The Chinese tradition understood that dominating others— aggressively taking control of other peoples’ lands and treating conquered peoples as inferiors—is not sustainable in the long term and thus is not efficacious. […]

Excerpted from Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea by Shuchen Xiang. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

The entire Introduction of the book is available on Princeton University Press’s webpage.

Further reading

How the West invented colonising racism: Philosopher Xiang Shuchen talks to My Take columnist Alex Lo about her new book, which argues premodern China had no conception of biologically determined races, only a culture of mutual assimilation that may serve as a template for contemporary cosmopolitanism

Rediscovering an ancient Chinese openness and tolerance: Digging through layers of Western historical and scholarly assumptions, a new book by a young philosopher has resurrected a forgotten Chinese cosmopolitanism that may yet guide the country’s future

Listen to a New Book Network podcast featuring Shucheng Xiang’s Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea