Towards a Confucian geopolitics

Introduction

China is an increasingly important player in the international political and economic arena, and its geopolitical influence continues to grow through its role in BRICS (an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) (see Blanchard and Flint, 2017; Brewster, 2017; Carmody and Owusu, 2007; Maswana, 2009; Park, 2015; Sidaway and Woon, 2017). ¹ Like many other states, Chinese geopolitics are deeply embedded in global geopolitical trends, yet still rest on a unique set of cultural, economic, and political assumptions that differ markedly from other states. Several scholars who focus on Chinese studies have tended to see China’s values as diverging from rather than converging with these globalising values (see Callahan, 2012; Jacques, 2009; Kang, 2007), even if they hold that China is becoming more integrated into the modern international system alongside its industrialisation, marketisation, and globalisation. For these writers, China is modernising in its own way by reworking its inheritance of traditional legacies. However, while Confucianism and its modern status have been widely discussed in some other fields like history or philosophy (Hang, 2011; Yao, 2000), it has rarely been discussed in conjunction with the concept of geopolitics. The leaders of the current Chinese state do often use Confucian ideas to express their geopolitical deployments. Accordingly, it is vital to explore the complex links between Chinese geopolitics and the distinctly cultural legacy of Confucianism.

Previous studies have analysed Chinese geopolitics through the lens of Communist geopolitics, placing Chinese geopolitics (both narratives and practices) in the binarism of communism-capitalism (e.g., Li, 1993; Shlapentokh, 1995; Treadgold, 1977). Other studies have used nationalism as a lens to observe Chinese geopolitics (e.g., An et al., 2016; Hughes, 2000; Manson, 2010; Wu, 2008; Xu, 2012; Zhou, 2005). The nationalist approach explains Chinese geopolitics through a dichotomous framework of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘non-Chineseness’ in which patriotism and national identity (rather than the cultural identity of Confucianism) are regarded as the foundation for Chinese geopolitical visions. Finally, realist geopolitics – which focuses on politicians’ ambitions for national security as a fundamental factor, triggering international politics (Dalby, 2013) – has also been put forward as an explanation for Chinese geopolitics. Realist thinking is predominantly informed by geo-security (e.g., Overholt, 2007; Liu, 2009; Scott, 2008) and geo-economy (e.g., Rolf and Agnew, 2016; Zhang, 2009; Zeng et al., 2015). These approaches reveal a common belief that the security of China’s territorial and economic interests is the core driver of Chinese geopolitics.

This work on Chinese geopolitical theories, however, tends to overlook the influence of distinctly Chinese cultural and normative values (An et al., 2017) despite a few noteworthy exceptions (see Agnew, 2010, 2012; Callahan, 2010; Park, 2015; Woon, 2012, 2018). For instance, Callahan (2010) deduces China’s international relations discourse logic by analysing contemporary Chinese narratives of national shame, and, by doing so, argues that the ‘civilisation and barbarism’ distinction (also called the ‘Hua and Yi’ distinction, which will be discussed later) emphasised in traditional Chinese political culture continues to frame the Chinese understanding of geopolitical identity and national security. Park (2015) tries to use the traditional Chinese notion of ‘Sino-centrism’ as a superordinate concept that encompasses China’s historical and current developing path to explain China’s increasing capital investment in Africa, whereas Woon (2018) unpacks China’s historical narratives of Sino-centrism, and in doing so examines how these historical claims to China’s rise constitute deterministic accounts to provide discursive backing for China’s self-defined geopolitical position in the coming decades. Although such disavowals are frequent in recent theoretical and empirical writings, what is notably absent from them is a consistent analysis of the cultural basis for Chinese geopolitical theories, thereby advancing an alternate geographical understanding of the geopolitical aspect of China’s ascent.

To achieve this aim, we draw on the development of Confucian philosophies in different historical moments to convey traditional Chinese political culture. Thereafter, we will analyse national foreign policy texts of the Chinese government to explore contemporary influences of Confucianism on Chinese geopolitics. In doing so, we will present a model of Confucian geopolitics that embeds Confucian philosophies within the explanations of Chinese geopolitics. In this regard, the present article aims to provide a far more nuanced analysis and genealogy of Chinese geopolitics.

To present our model of Confucian geopolitics, this article is divided into three sections. The next section outlines classic Confucian theory, defining its geopolitical dimensions in terms of its spatial division of the world. Subsequently, we then explore the extent to which classic Confucian theory helps describe the geopolitical narratives of the modern Chinese state. Through this exploration, we argue that current Chinese geopolitics is evidently more than simple classic Confucian theory. We thus conclude by proposing a hybrid Confucian geopolitical theory as a more effective lens for examining the entanglement of Chinese cultural values with the geopolitical narratives of today. Throughout this article, we distinguish between narratives and practices. We do so to emphasise how the strategic appropriation of Confucian narratives can be used to legitimise state actions that both converge with and diverge from Confucian accounts of morality and philosophy. In other words, narratives can directly express and shape strategic actions (as ‘ideal types’), but they can also be used to mask and hide practices that directly contradict narratives (as with the case of neoliberal reform since the 1990s). In either case, Confucian narratives are used to support Chinese state practices on the domestic and global stage.

Given that Confucian geopolitics advocates a set of historically-rooted but often implicitly stated cultural and normative values, it is theoretically and empirically valuable to tease out the complex and changing Chinese geopolitical ideas underpinning Chinese geopolitical projects in current times (the BRI in particular), which previously received scrutiny mainly within Western geopolitical optics (Blanchard and Flint, 2017; Brewster, 2017; Sidaway and Woon, 2017). Thus, this article also offers an empirical contribution because it can serve as a springboard towards an alternative understanding of these geopolitical projects, even though detailed empirical unpacking of these projects is only a secondary purpose of this article. Taking the BRI as an example, the notions of mutual learning, complementarity (huxue, hujian, hubu), and a community of humankind’s shared destiny (renlei mingyun gongtongti) all reflect Confucian geopolitics’ pursuit of the ideal geopolitical order – ‘harmony in difference’ (i.e. seeking similarity without eradicating differences). This study does not dwell at length on this issue but certainly broaches an opening for nuanced empirical work in the future.

Harmony, hierarchy, and order: Classic Confucian theory

The spatiality of Confucianism

Confucianism also involves interesting discussions of geography. The geographical aspect of Confucianism is mainly reflected in its understanding of two geography-based concepts: ‘Hua’ and ‘Yi’. ‘Hua’ and ‘Yi’ have each distinguished between different ethnic, economic, political, and cultural spaces over the course of Chinese history. For example, the spaces viewed as ‘Hua’ include areas inhabited by the Han Chinese, those having an agricultural or ‘civilised’ economy, those spaces under the direct political impact of the central government, and, most importantly, spaces influenced by Confucian values. On the other hand, spaces viewed as ‘Yi’ include those inhabited by ethnic minorities, those with a nomadic economy, those that are out of the reach of the central government, and those that push back against Confucian doctrines. The Hua-Yi distinction reminds us of a similar theory originating in the Western world, namely Orientalism (Said, 1978), which rests on a series of geographical imaginations – again, juxtaposing an ‘exotic’ and ‘wild’ outside against a civilised interior. The difference between the Hua-Yi division and Orientalism is that while Orientalism fits into a convenient explanatory structure for the Western-centric geopolitical imagination, the Hua-Yi division establishes a Sino-centric, Han-centred (hereafter China-centred) geopolitical division.

Although the ethnic, economic, and political dimensions sometimes play an important role in understanding ‘Hua’ and ‘Yi’ in various historical stages in China, the most influential and dominant dimension for judging what is Hua and what is Yi is according to Confucian values. As Callahan (2004) suggested, this Hua-Yi distinction is more frequently understood as a discourse that takes shape as the opposition between civilisation and barbarism, rather than as a set of essentialist qualities such as race or ethnicity. What is important to note is that Confucianism has long been treated as the mainstream ideology by the ruling power (e.g. during the Zhou Dynasty, Han Dynasty, Song Dynasty, and Ming Dynasty) and thus has had a profound impact on Chinese political culture. Therefore, Chinese politicians usually referred to a Confucian framework to distinguish Hua from Yi (Wang, 2003). In this perspective, anyone following Confucianism is Hua; conversely, anyone not accepting Confucianism is Yi (Wang, 2003). Here, it merits emphasising in advance that the status of Confucianism itself has undergone intense transformation, even if its influence on Hua and Yi has remained considerable in modern China (Callahan, 2010). The cultural movement (e.g. the May Fourth New Cultural Movement in the Republic of China, and the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China) has provoked a wide range of anti-Confucianism sentiment.

As a brief summary, the Hua-Yi distinction was applied across the divisions of different ethnic groups, economic systems, and political communities. However, to a great extent, the cultural identity (whether it fits into Confucian values or not) is viewed by Chinese politicians as the ultimate standard for dividing Hua and Yi. This is the most important part of Confucianism’s spatiality. For example, Chu, a former Yi area located on the southern edge of China inhabited mainly by ethnic minorities, is viewed as Hua by other Hua polities because of its benevolence towards ordinary people in the spring and autumn of the warring states period (771 BCE–221 BCE).

From this brief history we can see that the Hua-Yi division has mapped a loose core-periphery (Hua-Yi) system, from which the most basic political geographical structure of ancient China is illustrated. This loosely political geographical structure between Hua and Yi can be evidently seen in an ancient map we found at the Shaanxi Historical Museum, which mapped the official Chinese understanding of the Hua-Yi division in the Song Dynasty (see Figure 1). In this map, we can see an open and borderless Hua (except the Great Wall from the north that divides Hua and Yi from the north, namely Di) with a basic terrain of natural mountains and rivers. In the four directions of the map, including the north with the Great Wall as a boundary, as well as the other three directions, the plotter used descriptive accounts to record the vague geographical locations, life features, and histories of the tribes on the edge (see notes in Figure 1). Even though this map pinpoints the approximate geographical distinction between Hua and Yi, we can clearly see that it does not delineate clear Hua-Yi boundaries, which can be interpreted as evidence for the fluidity and porosity between Hua and Yi identities. Despite its indeterminacy, this structure has provided the basis for national governance of ancient China, and it was because of this that the Hua-Yi division in this period was primarily limited to describing China’s internal political, economic, and social relationships. However, the situation changed alongside the rise of the modern concept of ‘nation-states’ in the international arena that has largely impacted the understanding of Hua and Yi in Chinese society and thus influenced the formation of China’s approach to foreign affairs. It is here that a globalising China began to rework the Hua and Yi geographical imagination. This story began from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) and the Republic of China, during which the word ‘Yi’ gradually evolved from a notion depicting Chinese ethnic minorities, nomadic economies, and undeveloped spaces into a concept describing nation-states outside China. This change can be traced back to a political crisis in the early Qing Dynasty. Qing China was founded and dominated by Manchu, a former Yi group (ethnically, economically, and politically) living in northeast China. According to Confucian values, it was legal for Yi groups to hold dominant positions only if they accepted Hua culture (Qi, 2000). That is, Yi groups had to erase their so-called ‘barbaric’ features if they were to occupy state positions. Hua culture thus became a kind of ‘civilisational’ standard.

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Figure 1.

Map of the Chinese and the barbarians. This map identifies the Chinese (Hua) and the barbarians (Yi) in 1136, during the Song Dynasty. Source: Shaanxi Historical Museum, unknown author. The notes on the map have been added by this article’s authors.

However, the Manchu group did not abide by this Confucian value. Records show that the Manchu army slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people in some of the cities they seized (see the Chinese History Research Institute, 1982, for the archives on the Jiading and Yangzhou massacres during the early Qing Dynasty). Upon seizing control of the government, they continued to kill and exile Han Chinese; many were arrested for merely using the word ‘Yi’ to refer to the Manchu in their poems (from Shunzhi, the first emperor in Qing Dynasty, to Qianlong, the fourth emperor, there were approximately 130 poem prison cases in total; see Zhang and Zhang, 2010). The Han Chinese organised uprisings to resist the Manchu government. Simultaneously, international communications between Qing China and the outside world increased, giving Manchu governors an opportunity to label outsiders as ‘Yi’ (Liu, 2011). Consequently, Manchu governors deliberately established a ‘Yi’ discourse to refer to nations outside of China, to distance themselves from the derogatory ‘Yi’ label, and to alleviate Manchu-Han tensions. In this sense, for political reasons (the crisis between Manchu and Han) as well as geographical reasons (the Chinese people had a greater chance to obtain knowledge about the outside world), ‘Yi’ has gradually become a term referring to foreigners. Here, it is worth noting that in the late Qing Dynasty, because China had experienced failure in foreign wars (especially the Opium Wars), the derogatory term ‘Yi’ was resisted by foreign forces, and later a more positive term, ‘Yang’ (even better than ‘Hua’), was adopted on a large population of Chinese society. In this context, the Hua-Yi binarism has been gradually obscured in Chinese society, particularly modern Chinese society.

Furthermore, the concept of ‘Hua’ has shifted from describing the Han Chinese, and areas having a more advanced economy within the reach of the centralised government, to being characterised as a modern nation state. Despite the fact that a large number of Chinese emperors had attempted to unify Hua and Yi into a ‘Great Unity’ (Liu, 2011), none were able to establish a state with nation state significance until late in the Qing Dynasty when China as an agricultural country was challenged by international industrialisation. At that time, several Chinese politicians and scholars began to reconsider the meaning of ‘Hua’ (Feng, 2011). They used the Western concept of ‘nation-state’ to revive Hua. For instance, Liang Qichao (2006 [1902]), one of the most famous scholars during this period, created the concept of the Chinese nation, which included all Chinese ethnicities (see also Han, 2014). The proposal of the Chinese nation took hold, and today, Hua, broadly speaking, refers to China as a unified entity. What is also noteworthy is that this change is not a sudden one but rather a long historical process lasting hundreds of years. Most importantly, this new understanding of Hua and Yi has formed the basis of a modern Chinese approach to foreign relations.

Revolt and reflection: Confucian theory in Communist China

Throughout history, Confucian thought has profoundly influenced Chinese political culture, even if such thought has primarily existed in the form of an ideal political geography structure that is loosely practiced in real politics. However, during the era of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (when the Chinese Communist Party took power), the significance of Confucianism in Chinese political culture markedly weakened. Chinese politics in this period was significantly affected by Maoist communism, which was both anti-capitalist and anti-tradition. However, although recent Chinese politics has also been characterised by the same anti-tradition sentiment, various studies find that tradition still plays an intricate role in Chinese political thought (Wang, 2018). This section therefore focuses on how Confucian tradition is still manifested in communist China and discusses how Confucianism influences current Chinese geopolitical theories. To understand how Confucian thinking has been mobilised in communist China, it is helpful to analyse it within two distinct historic periods: from the 1950s to the 1970s, characterised by radical communist geopolitics; and from the 1970s to the present, characterised by Chinese socialist geopolitics. ³

The first period (1950s–1970s) was defined by the communist ideology. Chinese geopolitical views and practices during this period were imbued with strong anti-capitalist and anti-Western features – see Mao’s elaborations in ‘The Capitalist Road Does Not Work in China’ as well as Mao’s attitude towards traditional cultures (Chinese Communist Party’s Archives Research Centre, 2003: 429–431, 1553–1559). That is, Confucian thought in communist China was disregarded in mainstream geopolitical thinking during this period. The most significant geopolitical strategy at this time for China was to stand with the Soviet Union. However, this alliance was soon rocked by a series of geopolitical events, including the Bandung Conference (1954), the requirements for the Soviet Union to build submarine bases and there being common fleets in the South China Sea (1958), China becoming a permanent member of the United Nations (1971), and the proposal of Mao Zedong’s Three Worlds Theory (1974), ⁴ which together shaped a geopolitical convulsion that pushed China to reconsider the geopolitical alliance with the Soviet Union and its own geopolitical path. In 1971, China was formally elected as a permanent member of the United Nations, giving China a solid diplomatic foundation, which provided great political confidence in the transformation of China’s geopolitical thinking at that time. Consequently, the Chinese ruling powers began to derail from the Cold War geopolitical logic and to reconsider the role of external and traditional geopolitical thinking.

Thus, the second period (1970s–present) demonstrates a uniquely Chinese approach to socialist geopolitics. In this period, Chinese socialist leaders selectively reused Confucian geopolitical values to explain current Chinese geopolitics. On the one hand, under the influence of globalisation as well as China’s in-depth participation in international affairs, China is increasingly aware that it is deeply embedded in globalised economic, political, and cultural systems, which essentially obscures the Confucian binarism between the Chinese nation (Hua) and foreigners (Yi/Yang). In this regard, China has accepted the significance and role of the nation state system in world politics, and has abandoned both the Hua-Yi division and a Sino-centric hierarchy. These changes are expressed in one of the key foreign policies of current China, ‘The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, introduced by former Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in his meeting with an Indian delegation, and thereafter established as the core of Chinese foreign policy (Keith, 2009). The policy highlights equality and mutual benefit; mutual respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity; and non-aggression, non-interference in other state’s affairs, and peaceful coexistence among different states. The new policy statement effectively removes any Sino-centric hierarchy from Chinese geopolitical theory (Keith, 2009). On the other hand, during this period, China has actively integrated its unique cultural heritage into the political ideal of communism by reconsidering the role of cultural continuity (in particular, the Confucian mindset). That is, the geopolitical convulsion that occurred during the earlier period has finally led to a more meaningful reintegration of Confucianism to create a distinctly Chinese version of socialism. The particularity in this Chinese version of socialist geopolitics can mainly be observed in the emphasis on Confucian philosophies.

Before explaining the Confucian geopolitical dimension of current Chinese politics, it is essential to discuss how Confucian values participate in domestic Chinese governing practices, beginning with China’s current policy of ‘governing the country with morality’ (yide zhiguo). In the process of exploring socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Chinese government and socialist leaders have gradually established a set of ways to govern the country that have relied on both law and morality (Jiang, 2006). To some extent, the morality emphasised here is precisely a way for the traditional Chinese Confucian mindset to participate in modern Chinese governance. More specifically, we can find many Confucian traditions in the morality emphasised by socialist China. For example, the proposal of ‘socialist moral construction’ (shehuizhuyi daode jianshe) by Jiang Zemin (2006), the promotion of ‘socialist views on honour and disgrace’ (shehuizhuyi rongru guan) by Hu Jintao (2016), and the consolidation of ‘socialist core values’ (shehuizhuyi hexin jiazhiguan) by Xi Jinping (2017) – all of them interpretations of morality by these Chinese socialist leaders – can find a basis in Confucian classics, such as the Confucian advocacy of self-transcendence, harmony, and humaneness. This is a way for the ruling power to use morality as a narrative strategy to guide the behaviour of various groups in current Chinese society.

The influence of classic Confucian geopolitical theory based on current Chinese geopolitical views is manifested in two aspects. The first is reflected in most geopolitical discourses of China today. For example, China has gradually unveiled its ambition for expanded global engagements, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, through projects like the BRICS, the BRI, and the FOCAC. China’s rise has been increasingly discussed as a threat to changes in the global geopolitical landscape (Jeffery, 2009), whereas the Chinese governing powers have gradually applied the idea of harmony as a geopolitical discourse to establish a uniquely Chinese geopolitical framework. In many occasions, the importance of establishing a harmonious and multipolar international community has been emphasised repeatedly by a succession of Chinese Communist leaders and quotations from Confucian classics underscore the origins of their thinking (see Deng, 1994; Hu, 2016; Jiang, 2006; Xi, 2014, 2017). This Confucian underpinning in China’s current geopolitical discourse is particularly evident in the discursive repackaging of China’s economic interventions in Africa, where China claims a moral supremacy compatible with the profit logic, reminiscent of the Chinese socialist views of morality-profit (Liu and Lou, 2018). In this discourse, Chinese leaders remark that China’s economic presence in Africa should balance the morality-profit relationship and establish a model of economic relations in which there could be more morals and less profits, and even full morals and no profit.

The second aspect is reflected in the geopolitical deployments of China, most of which regard the Confucian cultural legacies as an important theoretical basis for geopolitical strategies. Taking China’s BRI as an example because of its striking resonances with Mackinder’s (1904) Heartland theory in terms of the concerned geographical regions, the BRI is frequently linked to China’s ambition to seek geopolitical domination over the Eurasian continent (e.g. Clover and Horny, 2015). Even studies that draw on Chinese-language writing in the BRI discuss how China’s geopolitical strategies are articulated in China’s intellectual productions, underlining how China attempts to legitimise its ambition for a new economic order (Sidaway and Woon, 2017). However, in fact, they ignore a key part of the BRI, namely its Confucian cultural orientation. Confucianism emphasises that the laws of interactions among various polities are based on connections of the mind rather than materials (i.e. Confucianism as a discussion of the balance between morality and profit), so the most important part of the BRI is actually the cultural purpose. Although the BRI emphasises a loose spatiality of economic cooperation (like the loose Hua-Yi mapping in ancient China), its essence still lies in a cultural dimension (just like the main basis of Confucianism for the discrimination of what is Hua and what is Yi in ancient China). Specific to the BRI, according to the relevant explanatory documents released by the Chinese government, its core concepts are mutual learning and complementarity (huxue, hujian, hubu), which aim to promote inter-cultural understanding, identification, and integration in order to achieve effective communication among various cultures. In an era of populism, xenophobia, and extreme right-wing tendencies in the current global cultural shift (McCarthy, 2019), the cultural spirit advocated by the BRI undoubtedly has very important cultural strategic value.

From these examples, we can see how present-day Chinese governing powers have discursively mobilised traditional thinking (particularly from Confucian philosophies) to create a framework for current Chinese geopolitics, ⁵ thereby setting China apart from both Soviet-style communism and Western countries. To a notable extent, these distinctly Chinese socialist geopolitics can be read as using the language of Confucianism as part of a narrative of Chinese exceptionalism: China is not the Soviet Union, nor is it a Western country; it is a different sort of global power that claims to be driven by morality and the search for harmonious order. While certainly bound to geopolitical narratives of power, morality, and difference, China nonetheless expresses and arranges them differently.

In addition to the reintegration of Confucian philosophies into current Chinese geopolitical narratives, Chinese socialist geopolitics are also characterised by the integration of external geopolitical and economic theories. Taking neoliberalism as an example, this mode of production has been an important factor in China’s current economy (Harvey, 2005). Alongside China’s ‘open and reform policy’ in the 1970s, the marketisation and privatisation that were advocated by neoliberalism have transformed the fabric of Chinese society. In Zhu’s (2006) analysis of China’s housing reform, and He and Wu’s elaborations on China’s urbanism (2010), neoliberalism is found to be an important geopolitical element that triggers tensions between the central and local government, increases social polarisation and spatial segregation, and heightens opposition between the state and markets. In the international arena, the liberalisation of capital controls is considered by ruling powers to be essential to the fulfilment of China’s geopolitical objective to challenge the US-centred global geo-economic structure (Vermeiren and Dierckx, 2012). In this context, neoliberalism significantly impacts and guides Chinese geopolitical practices. Once again, there is a need to be wary of the difference between Chinese geopolitical narrative and practice. The influence of neoliberalism on China’s geopolitics is obvious at the practical level. Nevertheless, the term ‘neoliberalism’ remains relatively taboo at the level of official discussion. This demonstrates once again the analytic need to separate Chinese geopolitical practice and narrative with a more critical perspective when discussing Chinese geopolitics.

In summary, we can see the selective (or, perhaps more correctly, the strategic) use of Confucian traditions and narratives of Chinese exceptionalism to maintain the vitality and ongoing significance of present Chinese geopolitics. However, despite the influence of Confucianism on Chinese geopolitics, it has evolved to include elements from communist ideology and other geopolitical and geo-economic systems. In this regard, we assert that current Chinese geopolitics is neither a direct continuation of classic Confucian theory, nor is it a simple imitation of communist geopolitics or other geopolitical forms. Current Chinese geopolitical theories and practices are a strategic blend of the traditional Chinese philosophy of Confucianism along with communist elements and other external geopolitical theories. Therefore, we suggest that present-day Chinese geopolitics is grounded in a framework of classic Confucian theory, but that it is also much more than that.

Hybrid Confucian geopolitics

Current Chinese geopolitics cannot be fully understood through the framework of classic Confucian theory. Instead, we recognise the complex weaving of Confucian ideals into the fabric of other social and economic factors in Chinese geopolitical thinking. We thus propose a theoretical framework of ‘hybrid Confucian geopolitics’ in which to situate the historical and geographical complexity of Chinese geopolitics.

Our hybrid theory not only acknowledges the strong role of Confucianism in the continuity of ancient Chinese culture up to the present but also emphasises the strategic adaptability of Confucianism to allow mainstream Chinese political culture to respond in new ways to changing contexts (for example, in the Han Dynasty, the Tang-Song-Ming Dynasties, and communist China). In other words, this hybrid theory acknowledges that factors other than Confucianism have influenced Chinese geopolitics, while simultaneously recognising the important role that Confucian thinking continues to play in supporting and legitimising state power. Such a perspective attempts to bring to the forefront of Chinese geopolitical study the widely shared, but often implicit, Confucian elements, while also examining other possible explanations for modern Chinese geopolitics. This hybrid theory views the Confucian geopolitical tradition as the foundation for current Chinese geopolitics, yet also leaves space for analysing how contemporary power structures strategically interpret (and appropriate) Confucianism into their practices.

First, in our model, Confucianism is a vital and lively culture that conditions Chinese society and Chinese geopolitics. This is not only reflected in the example of the BRI mentioned above, which has proposed a loose global framework based on Confucian culture in the context of global cultural shift, but also in how Confucianism has been practiced to varying degrees by Chinese politicians in different periods (both historical and modern). For example, several generations of Chinese communist leaders have discussed the importance of developing ancient Chinese culture within contemporary Chinese political narratives. Deng Xiaoping (1994) emphasised the importance maintaining social stability for China’s long-term development; Hu Jintao (2016) theorised the Confucian idea of constructing a harmonious society into a distinctly Chinese socialist theory. When Xi Jinping came to power, he used Confucianism’s views on morality-profit as a very clear moral dimension for guiding China’s diplomatic practices, and in so doing he distinguished Chinese geopolitics from the interest-based and zero-sum model of realist geopolitics (Xi, 2017). These cases show that the tradition of Confucianism is being widely mobilised in the grand political narrative structure of present-day China. In this sense, the influence of Confucianism on current Chinese politics is not a passive choice, but rather a strategic initiative buoyed by historical pathways. It is not a blind acceptance of the classic Confucian geopolitical theory, but rather a selective reuse and reorganisation of Confucian values.

Second, and most importantly in our model, Confucianism is inclusive of other geopolitical and geo-economic cultures, and the adaptability and openness of Confucian culture to other ways of thinking is an important component of hybrid Confucian geopolitical theory. Since late Qing China, Chinese culture has continuously experienced challenges and influences from outside cultures. The challenges have come primarily from the West, including several movements to spread Western-style education to China, as well as the ‘reform and opening-up policy’. These movements have brought new kinds of political and economic thinking into China, and in so doing have influenced Chinese geopolitical views. The spread of Western-style education to China, for example, has promoted modern nationalist thinking, which stresses national identity, national equality, national independence, and the consciousness of national suffering (Zheng, 2006). Later, when Marxist and communist ideology arrived in China, such ideas quickly became established as mainstream cultural values, and they tended to exert a strong influence on Chinese political culture. On the other hand, the ‘reform and opening-up policy’ opened China to other Western philosophies. Neoliberal ideas, developed during the post-reform era, are important elements shaping the current practice of Chinese geopolitics across the globe (even if rarely spoken) (He and Wu, 2010; Vermeiren and Dierckx, 2012; Zhu, 2006). Despite several challenges associated with it, however, Confucianism has been adjusted to fit with outside cultures, and simultaneously, has adapted external cultures to fit with itself. This helps explain why the ruling powers in China have called for inheriting excellent cultural traditions from ancient Chinese philosophies, while simultaneously adopting outside ways of thinking that might benefit China. This point is also evident in the case of the BRI. Although we have argued that the essence of the BRI is a cultural strategy with Confucianism at its core, it is undeniable that the BRI is structurally symbiotic with the free trade system between countries and regions which, to a great extent, can be interpreted as a consequence of being influenced by neoliberal thinking.

Confucian philosophies are thus essential to our understanding of current Chinese geopolitics, even if they have been largely ignored in the existing literature on Chinese geopolitics. We therefore argue that Confucian elements need to be brought back into Chinese geopolitical studies to be studied alongside nationalist, communist, neoliberal, and other socioeconomic forces to understand the Chinese geopolitics of today. To accomplish this, we advocate a hybrid Confucian geopolitical model, emphasising Confucian values as foundational (yet mutable) ideals for explaining Chinese geopolitics, and simultaneously acknowledging other influences on Chinese geopolitics. Just as the term ‘critical geopolitics’ has brought together two terms that were considered contradictory (Sharp, 2013), there seems to be a contradiction in the term ‘Confucian geopolitics’. The term ‘Confucian’ focuses on harmony, hierarchy, and social order, whereas ‘geopolitics’ analyses geographical influences on politics – in particular, on violence and conflict. The concept ‘Confucian’ looks like an antique with thousands of years of history, whereas the term ‘geopolitics’ is largely embedded in the modern political system with a strong anti-tradition sentiment. Most importantly, whether in ancient or modern China, there is a tension between the narratives and practices of Confucianism. However, it is exactly within these contradictions that a new way of thinking about geopolitics can emerge. This study has attempted to trace the influence of ancient Chinese cultures on current Chinese geopolitics to better understand the role of China in a multipolar world – from a Chinese perspective.

Given that ‘hybrid Confucian geopolitics’ exerts an ongoing influence on contemporary international geopolitics, we expect that this model could be used to examine other Chinese geopolitical rhetoric and practices in the future. For example, as the influence of China in the international political and economic arena continues to rise, geopolitical events related to China have become the focus of the world, such as the BRICS, the BRI, the FOCAC, China’s participation in global environmental governance, and China’s participation in polar affairs. These events do not easily map onto Western imaginations and geographies, and they require their own heuristic. In this regard, the ‘hybrid Confucian geopolitics’ model gives theoretical space to understanding China as a unique, non-Western actor with centuries of cultural, political, and economic changes. These changes continue today, as China adapts to other global geopolitical powers.