‘Thinking through the world’: a tianxia heuristic for higher education

ABSTRACT

Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or ‘all under heaven’, the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which first shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–1771 BCE). Second, the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Both strands have been influential through Chinese history. In the last twenty years discussion of tianxia has revived, especially through Zhao Tingyang, stimulated by globalisation and the need for practical relations beyond the nation state. This paper proposes one version of tianxia as a heuristic for understanding, rethinking and remaking ethical relations in worldwide higher education. It reviews different understandings of tianxia in China, identifies a world-centred (rather than China-centred) tianxia , and discusses the potentials of tianxia in higher education. Tianxia is appropriate to world higher education because of its spatiality and its ethical commitment to universal benefit in diverse settings on the basis of mutual respect. The article suggests four clusters of relational values that could constitute a tianxia order in higher education, and compares tianxia to existing practices of globalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Tianxia
• higher education
• globalisation
• global higher education
• China
• Chinese culture
• Chinese civilisation

Acknowledgements

We warmly thank the reviewers and editor for their time and helpful comments. An early version of this paper [Yang, L., Marginson, S., & Xu, X. (2022). Thinking through tianxia: A new/old heuristic for worldwide higher education (Yi ‘tianxia’ si tianxia: tianxia sixiang dui quanqiu gaodeng jiaoyu de xin qifa). Tsinghua Journal of Education (Tsinghua Daxue Jiaoyu Yanjiu) (2): 1-13.] was published in Chinese. This version was revised and submitted with permission from both Tsinghua Journal of Education and Globalisation, Societies and Education, and has been revised further during the peer review process. Some parts of the paper were presented at a Centre for Global Higher Education webinar. We thank the participant audience at the webinar for their helpful comments and questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘溥天之下, 莫非王土; 率土之滨, 莫非王臣。’《诗经·小雅·北山》

2 ‘寡助之至, 亲戚畔之; 多助之至, 天下顺之。’《孟子·公孙丑下》

3 ‘天下一致而百虑, 同归而殊涂。’《易传》

4 ‘为政以德, 譬如北辰居其所, 而众星共之。’《论语·为政》

5 ‘管仲言于齐侯曰: 臣闻之, 招携以礼, 怀远以德, 德礼不易, 无人不怀。’《左传·僖公七年》

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted in the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education, supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/T014768/1.