American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power and the End of History
Salvatore Babones
Abstract
The United States has become the central state of a global world-system. Analogous in structure to China's historical Ming Dynasty tianxia ("all under heaven"), the American Tianxia is centered on the United States but incorporates other countries in proportion to their acceptance of individualistic world-society principles like human rights, democracy, and rule of law. Contrary to declinist narratives, the prominence of the United States in global distinction hierarchies is solidifying, because the externalities generated by membership in global networks ensure that people value access to t ... More
The United States has become the central state of a global world-system. Analogous in structure to China's historical Ming Dynasty tianxia ("all under heaven"), the American Tianxia is centered on the United States but incorporates other countries in proportion to their acceptance of individualistic world-society principles like human rights, democracy, and rule of law. Contrary to declinist narratives, the prominence of the United States in global distinction hierarchies is solidifying, because the externalities generated by membership in global networks ensure that people value access to these networks even when the interests of their countries clash with US interests. In the state-centric world-view of international relations scholars, China is a potential challenger to US unipolarity, but by 2010 the five Anglo-Saxon countries are likely to reach population parity with China, while over the same period hundreds of thousands of elite Chinese are likely to move their families to the United States, primarily through birth tourism. Continued US dominance is based on the incentive structures faced by these and other individuals, not on the vagaries of international relations. The American Tianxia is thus the Hegelian universal and homogeneous state that Francis Fukuyama was looking for but did not find at the end of history. It constitutes a new, millennial world-system that is very stable and likely to last for several centuries.
Keywords:
American Tianxia,
USA,
China,
World-system,
Human rights,
Democracy,
International relations,
power
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781447336808 |
| Published to University Press Scholarship Online: January 2018 |
DOI:10.1332/policypress/9781447336808.001.0001 |
