The “rise of China” has become a fixture of historiographical discourse. The trope of China's rise, however, brackets much of the historical complexity of Eurasia. Long ago, before the dominance of Western European political ideologies, statecraft in Asia was much more diverse – ethnically, culturally, politically, linguistically, and spiritually – than the monolithic nation-state model reveals today.
Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan is an attempt to see the Asian past in all the richness of this pre-modern diversity. Edited by University of British Columbia History Department Chair Timothy Brook, senior fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of California-Davis Michael van Walt van Praag, and Miek Boltjes, director of dialog facilitation at non-profit conflict resolution organization Kreddha, Sacred Mandates is the fruit of five roundtable discussions held between April 2010 and November 2012. Some six dozen scholars gathered for dialog on topics such as the Mongol empire, the political and spiritual relations among Asian states and within the sphere of Tibetan Buddhism, and the nature and history of the Manchu Qing. These discussions were then winnowed to “contributions from sixteen specialists” to create a “multivocal, multiperspectival format” (xii).
The overarching argument of Sacred Mandates is that the current political arrangement in Eurasia conceals much more pre-modern history than it reveals. “In Asia,” the editors write, “the modernist paradigm […] of […] equal independent states exercising exclusive sovereignty within their borders and engaging in equal relations with each other […] is a fiction with shallow historical depth” (ix). Instead, “polities and their rulers in Asia were never presumed equal; indeed, relationships were typically unequal. Rulers exercised authority over other rulers who owed allegiance to them and possibly to other stronger rulers as well” (2). To avoid the distortions of Westphalian analysis (3), the editors use the term “interpolity relations” instead of “international relations” (3).
Following John King Fairbank's 1968 edited volume The Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations (5), the editors and contributors of Sacred Mandates see this pre-modern Asian interpolity history as in part a complex bevy of tribute. However, the editors do not share Fairbank's notion that China was the “‘natural center’ of the East Asian world,” and they eschew Fairbank's reliance on Chinese-language sources alone (7). Here, the debt to Sacred Mandates contributor Pamela Crossley, and to the New Qing History which Crossley helped pioneer, is apparent. Sacred Mandates does not take China as a monolith or as an historical given, but understands the “‘world order’ that spanned the Asian continent from the Pamirs to Pusan” as having been “constituted not from one center alone but from three,” namely “Chinese, Mongol, and Tibetan Buddhist” (8). Chinese dynasties (including, especially, those formed by non-Han peoples) were well aware of the diversity of Asia. So, for example, the Manchu Qing sometimes “asserted authority through Chinggisid norms (so called for having been derived from the traditions and bloodline of Chinggis [Genghis] Khan),” while with other polities “adopted modes of communication, legitimation, and relation from the Tibetan Buddhist world” (9). Unlike the political and confessional intrastate absolutism engendered by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg principle of cuius regio, eius religio, pre-modern Asian rulers accepted a world of overlapping and hierarchical relationships and worked within, not against, the given frame. “What mattered to the Manchus,” the editors write, “was that they obtain support for and compliance with what they perceived to be the interests of their empire, and they wielded a broad variety of means to bring this about” (9).
The editors appeal to Marco Polo, who sojourned in the “Mongol empire between 1271 and 1295” (9), to establish “four basic legal principles that governed relations between states in Asia” during the Mongolian ascendancy, seeing this as a general pattern for relations before the arrival of the West (10). First, “the legitimacy of rulers is derived in accordance with the principles of lawfulness governing the particular civilizational world to which the ruler belongs” (10). Second, “emissaries of a sovereign are entitled to protection when they are within the jurisdiction of another sovereign” (10). Third, “relationships between states were mediated by relationships between sovereigns” (10). Fourth, “the subjects that Chinggisid law brings into being are hierarchically ordered. […] Khubilai was acknowledged as the Great Khan of the entire Mongol empire; Arghun, as the khan of one part of that empire. […] The relationship between the two sovereigns was based on a mutually recognized difference of position, the sovereignty of the first (Khubilai) exceeding and overlapping the sovereignty of the second (Arghun)” (11). In short, in Marco Polo's time and well into the High Qing, the personal mattered – it was, in fact, the bedrock of the political.
The editors understand pre-modern Asia to have operated under a kind of international law rooted in the above four principles. This was not the uniform, globalized international law of today, but, as “international jurist Malcolm Shaw” writes, “a series of rules regulating behavior, and reflecting, to some degree, the ideas and preoccupations of the society within which it functions” (12). “Sovereignty was not necessarily exclusive,” the editors write, “and did not always imply that there was no greater authority than the sovereign prince, khan, king, sultan, or hierarch. Unlike in the world of equally sovereign states, sovereignty in historical Eurasia was usually layered or shared and rarely supreme. It most often derived from material power that was legitimized by a variety of ideologies, usually sacred in reference, placing its source in higher divine spheres – be it the sky, heaven, god, or enlightened beings – and by recognition by other rulers” (15–16).
The era under study in Sacred Mandates begins with the “major shift [that] occurred in 1206, […] the year in which Chinggis Khan took the title of Great Khan (khagan, also qaghan, qa'an) and declared the founding of what the Mongols would come to call the Mongol Great State. Chinggis's subsequent campaign to bring the known world under his rule remade the political space of Eurasia; it also remade the very idea of rulership as an assertion of authority that could potentially claim universal sovereignty” (17). Much of Sacred Mandates is an attempt to understand how this Chinggisid “major shift” shaped subsequent Eurasian statecraft. Rulers in China claimed a heavenly mandate (tianming) to rule “all-under-Heaven” (tianxia), and “Buddhist monarchs […] claimed universal rule as chakravartins on the basis of enlightened wisdom” (17). The Great Khan, by contrast, “regarded himself as having been singularly blessed by what the Mongols called the Blue Sky Above, [and] interpreted the idea of universal rule literally and imposed it on an unsuspecting world” (17). How these ruling imaginaries interacted is the motif of Sacred Mandates.
After the theoretical groundwork of Chapter One, Sacred Mandates proceeds in six further chapters. In Chapter Two, “Chinggisid Rule and the Mongol Great State,” Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, Lise Meitner Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the National University of Mongolia, tracks the “emergence of the Chinggisid state” (29–33), and Koichi Matsuda, professor at Osaka International University, investigates the “imperial subjugation of polities and extension [by the Mongols] into Tibet” (38–45).
University of Hawai'i associate professor of history Liam Kelley's section on “convergence and conflict: Dai Viet in the Sinic order” is a standout from Chapter Three, “Interpolity Relations and the Tribute System of Ming China.” Thus viewing China from the south provides a diachronic perspective stretching from before the Mongol incursions. Dinh Bo Linh, “who established a dynastic enterprise in the Red River delta in the 960s” (83), shored up regional power first before envoys to the Song court. The Song, which did not control Dai Viet, nevertheless elevated it to a kingdom and a tributary state. “Viet ‘independence’,” Kelley writes, “thus came in the form of an unequal relationship with China” (83).
Chapter Four, “The Tibetan Buddhist World,” is the heart of Sacred Mandates, because the Tibetan spiritual–political paradigm, “the symbiosis of spiritual and temporal authority” (94), determined much of what John Ardussi, Senior Fellow at the Tibet Center at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, calls “state building in the Himalayas” (107–113). Beyond the Himalayas, too. Director of the Research Center of History and Geographical Studies of China's Frontier Regions and Nationalities at Minzu University in Beijing Dalizhabu's section on “Mongol pilgrimages and the transfer of wealth to Tibet” details “Mongol pilgrimages to Tibet after the second Mongol conversion to Buddhism from the early sixteenth through the nineteenth century” (101). The “chö-yön [teacher-benefactor] relationship” between “Altan Khan, ruler of the Tümed Mongols” and “the Gelugpa leader, Sonam Gyatso” (101) set the stage for ongoing spiritual commerce between Mongols and Tibetans. With pilgrimage also came an enormous “transfer of wealth in the form of offerings by Mongol pilgrims to Tibetan lamas and religious institutions and the trade that this engendered” (105). The Qianlong Emperor encouraged this economically beneficial pilgrimage system (104), while the earlier Ming emperors “hoped that the conversion of Mongols to Buddhism would reduce nomad attacks on Ming border regions” (105).
In Chapter Five, “The Great Manchu State,” we learn from Nicola Di Cosmo, the Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, how Qing “state formation and legitimation” grew from Nurhaci's conscious emulation of Mongol concepts of big-thinking statecraft. Nurhaci modeled his ambitions on the earlier Jin dynasty, and his “clan name, Aisin Gioro,” was readable as “golden clan,” which harkened to the meaning of jin (gold) (129). This historical rhyming “also contained a clear reference to Mongol politics in that the Chinggisd royal line was referred to as altan urugh, or ‘golden lineage’” (129–130). Furthermore, Nurhaci's deployment of “doro,” or “sovereign power,” connoted “above all a transcendental quality of rulership applicable to the creation of an all-encompassing and transformational political project” (131). Nurhaci's project was an attempt to establish “transferability (a sort of translatio imperii) across separate political communities” (132).
In Chapter Six, “Transitions to the Modern State System,” Shogo Suzuki, politics lecturer at the University of Manchester, explains how Western international law helped drive “Japan's quest for a place in the new world order” (159–166). Kirk Larsen, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, works deeply in nineteenth-century Chosŏn diplomatic history to find that “Korea's supposed entry into the family of nations was […] a process of replacing its old, ‘Asian’ status as a Qing tributary with the new, ‘international’ status of Japanese colony” (174). As Alex McKay, alumnus fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, puts it, the “mandala” of the Tibetan spiritual–political concept of statecraft (176–177) gave way to a modern, European paradigm which left Tibet, the former spiritual center of East Asia, exposed to the new machinery of geopolitics (182).
Chapter Seven, “The Presence of the Past,” sees this abrupt recalibration of the interpolity landscape as a “great transformation” from the “Great State (yeke ulus, da guo, amban gurun)” (191) to secular Western models. That said, the editors maintain that “although modern conceptions of statehood, popular legitimacy, and materialism have supplanted the sacredness of mandates that conferred legitimacy on rulers, not all that colored historical interpolity relations has been erased or forgotten. The presence of the past in policy-making, especially in conflict situations, is palpable in Asia” (199).
Sacred Mandates is a careful, responsible re-reading of the Eurasian past, opening up the diversity of statecraft prior to the Westphalian flattening of the political to the ideological and the numinous to the secular. This volume is a must-read for anyone interested in East or Central Asian history or modern international relations, because the “presence of the past” is indeed “palpable in Asia” and is crucial to a full understanding the present. Sacred Mandates is the best guide I have yet encountered to the complexities of the world beneath the current “rise of China.”
