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Title:
Threat cognition, aim for order and maintenance strategy of ancient Chinese tributary order
Abstract:
The tributary order formed in ancient East Asia, although spanning thousands of years, was often disrupted and challenged. In ancient China, as a suzerain state, there were motives to adopt appropriate strategies to maintain the tributary order in terms of moral responsibility and interest protection. However, history shows that under the same situation, rulers would adopt different maintaining strategies, like war, compellence, sanction, huai-jou (to cherish and to soften), and appeasement. So this paper focuses on exploring what factors affect the choice of maintaining strategies and what is the logic behind it, hoping to enrich the theoretical content of traditional Chinese foreign policy, further clarify the behavior logic of ancient China in foreign relations and its impact on contemporary Chinese diplomacy. Most of the existing studies on the maintenance of tributary order explain why the tributary order can continue for thousands of years, and why actors were willing to join the tributary order. Some studies related to specific maintaining strategies are also faced with many problems such as vague concepts and not detailed classification of types, so that the explanatory power is insufficient. Through the sorting and comparative analysis of cases of order maintenance between the Ming and Qing dynasties and typical tributary states, this article finds that the threat perception faced by ancient Chinese rulers towards the tributary order and their aim of the tributary order influenced the choice of maintenance strategies. Under the guidance of the principle of ritual(li) , they worked hard to balance the costs and benefits of order, achieving a balance between compliance with ritual and pragmatism.
