Pax Sinica and the limits of Confucianism

Recent Renaissance of Confucianism in China, with massive projects of knowledge production, demonstrated a new wave of discursive construction of normative political order. Confucianism and its epistemic operations provide a convenient political order that situates the center and the peripheral in a clearly defined hierarchical and familiar ethics in the name of the Great Unity (大同), a harmonious and borderless world. The central paradox of such normative discourse of Confucianism is that, while stressing the Confucian moral virtues within the framework of the Great Unity, a closed dependent system of center-peripheral hierarchy is established. This image of the pre-modern Chinese empire is easily applied to the newly emerged Pax Sinica on today’s world economic stage. Would this new Pax Sinica replace the position taken by Pax Americana that has lasted since the 20th century? Would the Pax Sinica of the 21th century offer a different mode from the other greater forces that had seized the hegemonic power in history in the previous centuries? This paper addresses the paradox in the normative discourse of Confucianism and analyzes how such discourse reverberates the several waves of legitimization of the military hegemony in the name of the revival of Confucian tradition.