这是美国著名的中国问题专家-费正清先生（John K. Fairbank）的一篇文章：《从历史的视角观察中国的对外政策》，共分两部分，这是第二部分。

CHINA'S FOREIGN POLICY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE（02）

By John K. Fairbank

The emperors of the Han (202 BC-220 AD) subscribed in theory to the Confucian doctrine of rule-by-virtue. As the "Analects" said: "If distant people are not obedient to China, Chinese rulers should win them over by cultivating their own refinement and virtue": by his own supremely cultivated and sage-like example, the emperor would command respect and allegiance Unfortunately, this basic tenet of the Confucian faith, like modern political doctrines, worked best within the confines of the culture, among the indoctrinated, and was not efficacious across the cultural gap in Inner Asia.

During most of four hundred years the Han court faced the warlike Hsiung-nu, ancestors of the Huns, along the Great Wall boundary. They were bested at times by Chinese arms but did not respond to Confucian preachings of "civility and etiquette " At other times the Hsiung-nu defeated the Han, who then had to buy them off with money and goods plus an imperial princess or two. Then the Han emperor might have to accept the egalitarian brother-to-brother relationship with the Hsiung-nu chieftain.
But however bitter the facts, the Chinese court consistently rectified the record by using tributary terminology, preserving the written tradition of Chinese supremacy.

The myth of the emperor's superiority beyond the Wall was part of the Confucian ideology by which he ruled within it. People who had once been brought to accept the Confucian teachings of the primacy of social order, hierarchic status and the duty of obedience, could be more easily controlled from the top down. The trick was therefore to bring foreign rulers to participate in the Confucian network of "civility and etiquette," This was done most notably at New Year's in the rituals of the state cult of imperial Confucianism, After the emperor had kowtowed to Heaven, tribute-bearing envoys of lesser rulers kowtowed to the Son of Heaven, By the time T'ang armies of the seventh century had pacified East Asia in all four directions, dynastic historians solemnly concluded that peoples inside and outside the empire had all submitted because of the imperial virtue, or te,the power that Confucianism attributed to the superior man's edifying example.

This theory uniting Chinese power with Chinese culture was shattered by the Mongol conquest, for it was a triumph of naked power without any pretensions to culture. All three Sino-barbarian dynasties—Liao, Chin and Yuan—now had to be accepted as legitimate and their histories compiled in the traditional terminology, but historians avoided comment on how they had achieved the imperial power. It remained for the Ming, after expelling the Mongols, to prove anew that the Son of Heaven's imiversal kingship, his all-compelling virtue, emanated from a fusion of power and culture, force in reserve plus right conduct in practice.

The first Ming emperor, a man of enormous vitality, sent envoys to all known rulers, announcing that he viewed them all with impartial benevolence (i^shih t'ung-jen) and included them within the bounds of civilization {shih zvu-zvai), His successor, the Yung-lo emperor, with his great maritime expeditions pushed this idea of inclusiveness to the limit. He not only conferred Chinese titles and seals and the use of the Chinese calendar on tributary foreign rulers in the usual fashion, in some cases— Korea, Viet Nam, Malacca, Brunei, Japan, Cochin in South India—he even decreed sacrifices to the divinities of their mountains and rivers, which might therefore be added to the map of China, or else he enfeoffed their mountains, a ceremony which brought them in a cosmic sense within the Chinese realm. While I hesitate to interpret the full significance of such literary deeds, they suggest that the Yung-lo emperor, following out the principles of impartiality and inclusiveness, was laying the theoretical foundations for a world order emanating from China, It is equally noteworthy that after 1433 the Ming bureaucracy, ever jealous of the very personal role of eunuchs, failed to carry
forward Yung-lo's expansive, eunuch-led beginnings overseas.

After 1644, when the Manchu conquest repeated the M^ongol disaster in less drastic form, the Chinese bureaucracy soon cooperated in the Manchus' Sinification, so that in the end power and culture remained united under the Ch'ing dynasty.

Thus the doctrine of the emperor's superiority, symbolized in tributary ritual, had many uses. When force was available, it rested on force; when Chinese power was lacking, it could rest on the retrospect or prospect of Chinese power; or it could rest solely on the lure of trade. If foreign rulers were within reach, the Son of Heaven could legitimize them, protect them, honor them, pay them or punish them, all within a context of benevolent admonition or righteous wrath from the apex of the human pyramid. Within the Chinese culture area, toward North Viet Nam (Chinese Annam), Korea, the island kingdom of Liu-ch'iu

and Japan, his supremacy was sanctioned by the whole Confucian civilization in which they participated. Among the pastoral and increasingly Buddhistic peoples of Tibet and Mongolia it was sanctioned by his patronage of the Dalai Lama, Among the Islamic traders of the Middle East and the Turkestan oases, it rested on the emperor's control of trade.

Word spread all across Asia that the lucrative foreign trade at Peking was utilized for politics, and so any merchant could trade with China by becoming or claiming to be a tribute-bearer, Joseph Fletcher has described how the Central Asian trade with China was funneled through the tribute channel. When every merchant to Peking had to enroll as a "vassal," this "left Central Asian trade in Central Asian hands but under imperial control, , . . For Central Asia, relations with China meant trade; for China, the basis of trade was tribute," This point remained true right down to New Year's 1795 when the last Dutch embassy kowtowed at Peking so vigorously in hopes of trade concessions.
Most of their kowtows were performed along the main axis of the great capital, where today China's rulers stand with foreign guests atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace to watch the celebration of the new order's birthday on October First.

Few on either side were fooled by this Chinese use of material means to buy political prestige—foreign profit, Chinese face— but the institution of China's universal kingship was thereby
preserved in ceremonial form. The political theory of the Son of Heaven's superiority over foreigners, in short, was part and parcel of the power structure of the Chinese state. Supreme within
his empire, he claimed never to have dealt with equals outside it, and this helped him remain supreme within it.

Historians today are actively showing up this claim: Yung-lo of the Ming actually wrote to the Central Asian ruler Shahrukh as an equal in 1418; the Ch'ing treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia was on equal terms in 1689; Manchu envoys performed the kowtow in Moscow and St, Petersburg in 1731-32; and the Ch'ing emperor addressed the ruler of Kokand as "my son"—i.e. not as a vassal—after 1759, Meanwhile, Peking between 1663 and 1866 solemnly sent eight missions to invest the kings of Liu-ch'iu as loyal tributaries, although the lords of Satsuma had made Liuch'iu their vassal and controlled it behind the scenes ever since 1609, None of these anomalies, however, was publicized in China. Today Mao extols egalitarian struggle, not hierarchic harmony. He uses a language of all-out revolutionary militancy, not "civility and etiquette," But the ancient idea of China's central superiority flourishes under his care. As in former times, the doctrine can be used to abet power abroad or equally well to substitute for it.

WHAT REMAINS OF THESE TRADITIONS TODAY?

Six decades of change in the nineteenth century and six in the twentieth have destroyed China's inherited order and created an unprecedentedly new one, yet those who see China as broken loose from her old moorings and adrift on the flood of revolution are using an inapt metaphor. One can better say the old structure collapsed, its foundations washed out, new plans were imported and rebuilding is under way, but the site is recognizably the same, the sense of identity remains and continuities as usual reappear, mixed in with discontinuities.

First, as to China's feeling of superiorit5^ Her dimensions in time and space so far outstrip all other countries in sheer size of population and time-span of organized government—a contemporary
of ancient Rome, bigger than ever and still vital among us—that intense national pride was to be expected. But history has compounded this self-esteem. To begin with, China was creatively self-sufficient and never a borrower on any scale until very recently. Buddhism was borrowed, to be sure, but quite early, and it was soon Sinified in the process while it also declined in the land of its origin and had an independent development in China, Second, the tribute system saw to it that foreign contact generally seemed to reinforce the idea of Chinese supremacy. Outsiders were welcomed at court and recorded for posterity only when they accepted the forms of the system. Thus the Chinese people were insulated and seldom even heard of a ruler who was equal to the Son of Heaven, Third, the classical education in the imperial Confucian orthodoxy year after year indoctrinated China's literate elite in a philosophical-religious ethnocentrism that went so much deeper than "nationalism" that we need nother word for it entirely. The "national-culturalism''' that has been inherited by Chinese patriots of today is roughly equivalent to an amalgam of modern Europe's notions of Christianity, the classical tradition, individualism and nationalism, all combined. Fourth, this whole package of Sinocentrism—of society-and-state, learning-and-politics, culture-and-power, integrated in the Chinese Way—has remained to this day walled off in East Asia behind the barrier of the Chinese writing system, through which foreign ideas filter only at the cost of Sinification, (The social influence of Chinese writing is a topic still awaiting intelligent study. Its effect is still so profound that Sinologists are almost incapable of recognizing it,) Students of other cultures
can of course chip away at this thesis of Sinocentrism by citing similar aspects of "centrism" elsewhere in history, but they cannot point to any of comparable magnitude.

The tradition of Chinese superiority has now been hyper-activated, both by a new consciousness of the past century's humiliations and by the peptic euphoria of revolutionary leadership. It will confront us for a long time to come.

It follows that policies of "bringing China into the world," getting the Chinese to "take their place in the international order," may be a long time getting results, "Containment without isolation," our recent effort to improve on mere "containment" (itself of dubious value from the beginning when applied to China), has a spotty future. Whenever we try to negotiate China's participation in international arrangements, whether journalistic, tourist, commercial, scientific or nuclear, she will retain a bargaining advantage because of her size and self-sufficiency, and also because of her implacable self-esteem. We shall continue to meet righteous vituperation, arrogant incivility. In
the end, we outsiders will probably have to make many more adjustments to China's demands than we now contemplate.

Second, as to the aborted tradition of Chinese sea power, I suppose that nuclear power now has the symbolic and potentially strategic value that the nascent Chinese navy once had.

After all, the gunboat appeared on the China coast in 1840 as the decisive weapon of its day, Japan later responded to the Western impact by building a battle fleet, and China began to do the same. Missiles are today's rough equivalent, at least in prestige and in military theorizing. The real question here is whether modern China, having failed to develop naval power when it counted, will now succeed in creating the diversified armaments of a first-class power of the late twentieth century,
nuclear missiles and all. This protean question we cannot answer here except to appraise how far China's tradition may make for expansion.

On this point one can only state personal impressions:

(i)China's bureaucrats through the centuries have shown much interest in taxes but little interest in religious proselytism or individual adventure abroad and not much faith in the expansion of commercial enterprise. Missions, exploration and trade, three of the main engines of European expansion, have not bulked large in China's values,

(2) Despite Mao's best efforts at "permanent revolution" against any ruling class, China will have to
remain some kind of bureaucratic state, essentially inward-looking (because of the sheer mass and growing complexity of the body politic) and concerned with social order more than mere growth. Even at the recent apogee of revolutionary ardor under Mao, "politics in command" has put order above growth, orthodoxy above production,

"Expansion" of course does not occur everywhere the same, like gravity, but only in certain areas, with certain aims and means. Within the Chinese culture area, the formula of Korean or Vietnamese local autonomy and China's cultural superiority has long been acknowledged on both sides. For example, after North Viet Nam had been ruled by China from i n BC to 965 AD, there were major invasions from China half a dozen times, but each time, even after Ming government had lasted twenty years, China found it preferable to give up local control and accept tribute relations instead. "Tribute" of course did not mean a European-type feudal vassalage with economic payments and military support, and patriots today who mark Southeast Asia on a map as formerly part of the Chinese empire are asserting nonsense. Today's equivalent of tribute is more political-ideological than military-administrative.

In the Inner Asian area, which is now part of the Chinese national realm, expansion has already occurred, most notoriously in the case of Tibet, When Britain decided, after the Younghus band expedition of 1904, not to assume a protectorate over Tibet, it was kept out of Russian hands by recognizing it as part of China, and on that basis the Tibetin state and people have now been swallowed by the Han, Outer Mongolia, on the other hand, with Russian protection has avoided this fate in power politics.

Meanwhile in the third sector of Inner Asia, the Turkic and other ethnic minorities of Sinkiang (Uighur, Kirghiz, Kazakh, etc) now find themselves subordinated on a frontier of Chinese development, facing a rival Soviet communism across the border.

If it is true as many believe that Peking today accords strategic primacy to Sino-Soviet relations on their long frontier, this Chinese concern with Inner Asia should not surprise anyone.

For us, China's possible expansion into Southeast Asia is now of chief concern. But Communist China's westward movement of today follows a more ancient precedent and is more feasible than would be a Chinese southward movement. Central Asia has seen Chinese armies and garrisons in successive eras of Chinese vigor ever since the Han, and no modern non-Chinese nations have grown up there. To be sure, the Moslem rebellions of the nineteenth century all showed latent anti-Chinese potentialities. But they were never realized and have now been smothered.

In contrast, Ch'ing invasions of South or Southeast Asia by land (Nepal 1792; North Burma 1766-70; and North Viet Nam 1788-89) were not attempts at conquest but merely over-theborder chastisements to reestablish the proper order in tributary capitals. There is even less tradition of Chinese invasion of Southeast Asia by sea. The Mongols' warlike expedition to Java in 1392 was almost the first and last major attempt at maritime conquest from China, The Ming fieets under the eunuch admiral Cheng Ho, seeking tribute, not conquest, might have led on into colonialism, but they were never followed up. Western shippers and planters facilitated the nineteenth-century migration of Chinese coolie labor but the response of the Ch'ing government was simply to renew its ban on Chinese going abroad. Consequently, overseas Chinese communities in Manila, Cholon, Bangkok, Singapore or Batavia were on their own and never expected or received Chinese government acknowledgment or support until the very last years of the dynasty. The fears of the late 1940s that the overseas Chinese would serve as Mao's fifth column have not been borne out. In country after country of Southeast Asia, nationalism has proved itself a barrier to Chinese expansion, both in theory and in practice, and not least in North Viet Nam,

One may conclude that the best way to stimulate Chinese expansion is for us to mount an over-fearful and over-active preparation against it. History suggests that China has her own continental realm, a big one; that Chinese power is still inveterately land-based and bureaucratic, not maritime and commercial; and that we are likely to see emerging from China roughly the amount of expansion that we provoke.