ONE AND ALL: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty | By Laikwan Pang

While much scholarship in international relations focuses on the struggle of Chinese state sovereignty for its own autonomy against external interferences in the complicated world order, Laikwan Pang’s book, One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty, offers a different perspective. It draws attention to the domestic processes of Chinese state sovereignty, especially how the state communicates with the people to justify its power over them, and how the people become willing (or not) to yield to state authorities in exchange for the economic security and political empowerment the state promises. Pang underscores that the cultural, discursive, and figurative dimensions of such state-people communication matter as much as the pragmatic performance of state sovereignty to our understanding of China’s modern sovereign logic.

This book is structured into two parts. Part 1 delves into the theories and histories of Chinese sovereignty from premodern to modern times, whereas Part 2 explores three types of sovereignty and their representations in different mediums. Each part comprises three chapters.

Chapter 1 elucidates the fundamental structure of China’s Confucian-Legalist sovereignty theory. It does so by explicating the three interlaced concepts: tianming (Heaven’s mandate), tianzi (emperor), and tianxia (all under heaven). Chapter 2 deconstructs the spatial myth of singular, indivisible, and unified sovereignty by recalling the historical moments of plural, compromised, and disunified sovereignty from late imperial to contemporary China. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the series of revolutions from the late Qing to Xi Jinping’s era fail to serve as a foundation for constructing a robust regime that allows the sovereign to both grow with the people and respond to the people’s changing needs.

Chapter 4 discusses how three generations of fiction writers in the Republican era responded to the consecrated popular sovereignty as the ruling ideology. Chapter 5 examines the socialist landscape painting developed in the 1950s and 1960s, a new genre that interweaves the traditional shanshui (mountain and water) painting and the modern xiesheng (sketching from life) method to aestheticize territorial sovereignty. Chapter 6 uses the bio-political-economic metaphor of jiucai (garlic chives) in China’s cyberspace to dissect the precarious economic indebtedness between the state and the people, which constitutes the gist of today’s PRC economic sovereignty.

Pang’s book provides a historically nuanced lens for understanding the Chinese intellectual’s role in negotiating the sovereignty between the state and the people. For example, Confucian scholar-officials constructed the daotong sovereign philosophy to counterpoise the zhengtong sovereign power so that the literati could advise the ruler how to rule. During the Republican era when sovereign unity was mostly absent, intellectuals promoted the federation movement of self-ruled provinces. Whereas many writers in the 1920s expressed their frustration with and suspicion of both the state and the popular sovereignty discourses, the socialist artists aimed to align the state and popular sovereignty through their creative work. Regarding the post-socialist period, Pang delves into the paradoxical rhetoric of a harmonious society and incessant struggles in the statist discourses, alongside the emergence of popular discourses of noncompliance in cyberculture. Yet the role of the intellectual is absent from this discussion of China’s post-socialist sovereigntism: Do they continue to “hold, convey, and transform power” to be appropriated by both the state and the people (158)? Alternatively, have they lost their role as cultural mediators, where the state can directly communicate with the people, and the grassroots have found means to express themselves in the digital era?

In addition to its insightful deconstruction of the myth of sovereign unity, Pang’s book also sheds light on the question of why there has been an enduring obsession with sovereign unity in modern China. The top-down effort to hammer in the urgency of national unity through actively seeking internal and external enemies helps hide the stratification of governmental processes, plays down domestic diversity, and further legitimizes and strengthens the state’s power. Pang also remarks that people often desire sovereignty intensely when they feel insecure about their economic well-being and political institutions (81). Then, can it be argued that the bottom-up yearning for unity in modern Chinese history—if there is any—could be a reaction to the Chinese people’s collective experience of continued insecurity and instability, as they keep looking for economic comfort and political possibilities? It is true that unity can only exist as “a myth for all sovereign orders,” especially for a country like China that was “seldom really unified and autonomous” (55). To probe the mythical nature of unity, a pertinent question to ask is: What impacts can those “fables” of unity have on domestic and international realpolitik? Can those political fables, precisely because of their transparent fictionality, offer imaginary solutions to realpolitik problems? To what extent is a healthy dose of hypocrisy necessary to maintain a peaceful national and world order?

Pang compellingly demonstrates the ways new socialist landscape paintings visualize China’s new sovereignty, where an enduring sublime beauty is marked by an assemblage of territorial icons and infused with a transcendental spirit of revolution. Pang astutely critiques the absence of everyday human struggles and spatial connectedness in highly stylized landscape paintings like Li Keran’s Redness All over Ten Thousand Mountains (1962–1964). Yet, further dissonance could be detected if we turn to Li Keran’s other paintings that embed human figures within a sublime landscape, such as Lu Xun’s Hometown, Shaoxing City (1962). First, Li’s minimization and trivialization of human activities suggest human minuteness, which contradicts the socialist realist ideology that promotes the idea of people conquering nature. Additionally, the dark ink colors used to paint the city may allegorize the everyday difficulties people face, thereby disrupting the Daoist-Confucian theme of harmony with nature and the socialist imperative to celebrate the bright side of society. Further research could more closely examine how some socialist landscape paintings simultaneously strengthen and undermine the socialist jiangshan imaginary that links the state with territory and people.  

Pang’s study investigates the appropriations of popular sovereignty by different regimes, intellectuals, and commoners for liberal or illiberal purposes. “Popular sovereignty is not democracy,” Pang keenly cautions, because the consensus assumed in popular sovereignty can be achieved through either participatory democracy or populistic sentiments (110). Pang’s study offers a timely analysis of the sovereign logic of Xi Jinping’s reign, particularly regarding the state’s attempts to mobilize popular support through anti-corruption, anti-Western, and anti-virus rhetoric, as well as endeavors to coopt China’s population as hard-working, risk-taking, and rule-abiding economic subjects striving for personal wealth, only to encounter passive resistance from the people in response to the intensified involution under statist neoliberalism. Ultimately, Pang encourages us to think beyond the framework of territory-based sovereignty and to develop a new sovereign logic that respects individuality and plurality, which is but a difficult project demanding our continued effort.

Renren Yang

The University of British Columbia, Vancouver