CHINESE TRIBUTARY SYSTEM RECONSIDERED: THEORY, HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE PROBLEM OF EXCEPTIONALISM

Résumé

This article argues that the Chinese traditional tributary system’s apparent exceptionalism and modern applicability are by no means undisputed historical facts or intrinsic historical realities, but the product of a selective historiographical construction, consolidated through classicist and romantic scholarship and increasingly contested by realist, comparative, and relational research. Crucially, this construction emerged within a Western analytical horizon: the “tributary system” itself originated as a semantic borrowing that imposed familiar Western political vocabulary, accompanying order, system, hierarchy, and sovereignty, onto heterogeneous practices surrounding chaogong phenomenon that predated Westphalian international relations. Only later was this concept partially retro-translated into Chinese academic and political discourse, where it acquired the appearance of an indigenous, internally coherent tradition. Instead of offering an alternative model of international order, chaogong concept thus more reveals how civilizational narratives crystallize around academic cherry-picking practices, which are subsequently mobilized to legitimize contemporary political and theoretical claims.