History, however, offers some succour for China ’s ambitions. Until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, China enjoyed overwhelming regional dominance: it was to the Middle Kingdom that all others, in varying degrees – depending on their distance from Beijing – paid homage, acknowledging their status as the Celestial Kingdom ’s inferior. It was a hierarchical system of relations whose tentacles stretched across much of East Asia, with China at its centre. In the tributary system, as it was known, non-Chinese rulers observed the appropriate forms and ceremonies in their contact with the Chinese emperor. Taken together, those practices constituted the tribute system. During the Qing period they included receiving a noble rank in the Qing hierarchy, dating their communications by the Qing calendar, presenting tribute memorials on statutory occasions together with a symbolic gift of local products, performing the kow-tow at the Qing court, receiving imperial gifts in return and being granted certain trading privileges and protection. [856] If a ruler recognized the superiority of Chinese civilization and paid tribute to the emperor, then the emperor generally pursued a policy of non-interference, leaving domestic matters to the local ruler. It was thus an essentially cultural and moral rather than administrative or economic system. The emperor exercised few coercive powers but maintained control for the most part symbolically. The fact that Chinese hegemony was exercised in such a light and relatively superficial way enabled it to be maintained over a huge and very diverse population for long periods of time. The tributary system was far from universal, but Korea, part of Japan, Vietnam and Myanmar all paid tributes to China, while a large number of South-East Asian states, including Malacca and Thailand, either paid tribute or acknowledged Chinese suzerainty. Those countries that were closer to China in terms of geography and culture were considered to be more equal than those that were not. So, for example, China was considered the big brother, Korea a middle brother and Japan a younger brother.
Given the extent of the system, the diversity of the countries and cultures embraced, and the vast time-period involved, it would be wrong to conceive of the tributary system as uniform or monolithic. Varying from country to country and from dynasty to dynasty, [857] the Chinese world order might appropriately be described, in the Chinese historian William A. Callahan’s words, as ‘one civilization, many systems’. [858] Although they shared things in common, the tributary system worked very differently, for example, for Japan and Korea, with Japan enjoying much greater autonomy from China than Korea, and from time to time even rebelling against the tributary system. No doubt this partly explains why later Japan was able to display such remarkable independence of action in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, with its rejection of the Sinocentric world and its turn to the West. [859] Perhaps it also helps to explain South Korea ’s recent turn towards China. Notwithstanding these variations, however, the common thread running through the tributary system was an acceptance of China ’s cultural superiority. This was the reason why the acceding states voluntarily acquiesced in an arrangement which they regarded to be in their interests as well as the Middle Kingdom’s. [860] The relative stability of the tributary system over such a long historical period was partly a function of its flexibility but, above all, because China was overwhelmingly dominant within it: inequality, in other words, served to promote order. [861] From the second half of the nineteenth century, with the growing power of the European nations and the decline of China, the European-conceived Westphalian system, together with its colonial subsystem, steadily replaced the tributary system as the organizing principle of interstate relations in the region, or, more accurately, perhaps, was superimposed upon the existing system. [862]
