This chapter explores China’s engagement with international law from the nineteenth century to the 1940s. It examines China’s transition from its traditional world view to acceptance of and participation in international law. Despite the encounter with Western powers in the nineteenth century, China maintained its traditional world view. After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 China began to change its stance, culminating in the establishment of the Republic of China, which embraced international law. Using Confucianism and the concept of tianxia, the chapter examines how Chinese civilization influenced China’s engagement with international law. It also explores how Chinese civilisation contributed to a more inclusive international legal order in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, the chapter aims to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Chinese civilisation in shaping China’s international legal practice and the international legal order as a whole in the twenty-first century.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

According to Dazai Shundai, the Way of the ancient Chinese sage kings was established for the purpose of practicing political economy. The methods of the sages can be found in the Six Classics of ancient China, but this is not to say that the government of the sages should be practiced in its entirety in the present with no changes, as their methods must be adapted in response to present-day circumstances. Political economy requires an understanding of the “times” that one lives in, the regularities in things represented by “principle,” the “force” that can temporarily overcome this principle, and the “human feelings” of the people of the realm. A key aspect of the “times” of Tokugawa Japan is its decentralized feudal system of government, which resembles the feudalism of China during the time of the sages. This is in contrast to the centralized system of government that arose later in Chinese history and that was also used in Japan before the rise of military rule.

According to Dazai Shundai, the original purpose of Confucian teachings is to aid in governing the state, but Confucians since the Song dynasty have lost sight of this goal, focusing instead on cultivating the individual heart. The same misunderstanding of Confucian teachings has appeared in Japan as well, so the aim of the current work is to restore Confucianism to its proper role in Japan as a set of techniques for government.

According to Dazai Shundai, ritual and music are essential elements of the government of the sages. They complement each other, with ritual drawing strict distinctions of status and establishing ethical standards for different types of human relationships, while music functions as a gentle force for bringing people together in harmony. Compared with other methods of governing, the superiority of ritual and music lies in their ability to enter people on a deep level and transform their customs, creating long-lasting stability without the need to rely solely on explicit laws. In order for ritual and music to work properly, though, they must be established by rulers who look back to the traditions of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan learned such ritual and music from China and used these to govern, but in recent times, vulgar ritual and music have arisen from among the common people, with detrimental effects for Japanese society. To remedy this situation, vulgar ritual and music need to be suppressed and replaced with proper ritual and music.

Shundai addresses the transition from feudal agrarianism to an urbanized commercial economy in early modern Japan. He accepted the inevitabile growth of commerce, but sought to counteract its disruption of traditional hierarchies through a series of institutional reforms to solidify state power, including policies to shift control of commerce from the ascendant merchant class to the ruling samurai class. Shundai draws on the views of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who defined the Confucian Way as a set of techniques for rulership derived from the sage kings of ancient China, as opposed to the metaphysical theories and focus on personal moral cultivation promoted by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and his Japanese followers. Shundai’s samurai authoritarianism owes much to Sorai, but he is innovative for his pragmatism and flexibility, as reflected in his willingness to employ non-Confucian methods of governing and to adapt Confucian ideals to contemporary reality. After Shundai, writers on political economy in early modern and modern Japan developed increasingly ambitious visions of state-managed economic growth, presenting such policies not merely as a pragmatic compromise, but as an unalloyed good.

Alongside the rise of Romanticism, which emerged as a reaction to the perceived excesses of modernism and industrialization that threatened humanity’s integrity, came the rise of Romantic Orientalism as an academic field, institutionalized in universities and scholarly associations in the nineteenth century. Romantic Orientalists sought to rediscover in the East the lost innocence of human minds, or the pure knowledge of God, obscured by industrial civilization. Romantic Sinologists revived many of the Jesuits’ idealized views of China, immersing themselves in Confucian texts and Chinese folk religious practices to seek the untainted, original human soul and God-inspired morality. Notable Sinologists such as James Legge and J. J. M. de Groot exemplified this tradition in the study of classic texts and ethnography, respectively. They argued that Chinese civilization had remained continuous and unchanged for thousands of years, and its divinely inspired morality was equal to or superior to that of Europe.

A significant percentage of listed companies are under the influence of founding families by stock ownership and/or family managers, even in developed countries, including the United States. In the United States, when the founders retire, they tend to hire professional managers and sell out their shares. In Japan, approximately 50% of listed companies are family firms, many of which are managed by founders’ heirs without substantial family ownership. In China, although family firms are relatively new because Chinese law traditionally prohibited private enterprises, family firms have grown rapidly since the transformation from a planned to a market-oriented economy in 1978. Generally speaking, founder firms’ performance is significantly better than that of non-family firms in most countries, but heir-managing firms’ performance varies in different countries. Prevalent types of listed family firms and their relative performance to non-family firms reflect minority shareholder protection law, the size of the manager market, and the corporate governance practice of each country.

Democracy is a contested concept; utilizing four rounds of national survey data, this chapter elucidates the characteristics of the Chinese public’s perception of democracy and its longitudinal changes over the past few decades. The findings indicate a growing percentage of individuals who understand democracy in procedural terms. This popular perception of democracy holds significance, as those who adopt a substantive view tend to perceive democracy as less compatible with China and to overestimate the democratic nature of the current regime, compared to those who approach democracy procedurally.

Chinese traditional culture is perceived as a sustaining factor for political trust within the authoritarian regime. Given the complexity and multidimensionality of Chinese cultural traditions, it is inadequate to address this notion through a singular index. This chapter categorizes Chinese traditional values into two dimensions: a nonpolitical dimension, encompassing traditional family and social values, and a political dimension, which includes traditional political values. I then empirically examine how these varying dimensions of Chinese cultural traditions influence ordinary people’s orientations toward political institutions and government officials.