Ge Zhaoguang on Tianxia and Utopia

New on the site this month, Ge Zhaoguang on “Imagining 'All Under Heaven:' the Political, Intellectual and Academic Background of a New Utopia,” a follow-up to the longer piece on tianxia by Liang Zhiping that we published in February. Liang in fact cites Ge as a prominent critic of tianxia thought and theorists, and Ge’s article is of a piece with his scathing takedown of Mainland New Confucians published somewhat later. Both texts argue that neither tianxia nor the New Confucian program has any genuine grounding in history. Both are instead political projects masquerading as cultural conservatism.
​
I was wondering whether to translate Ge’s piece on tianxia when I discovered that it had already been translated by Michael and Josephine Chiu-Duke of the University of British Columbia. Our warm thanks to them for letting us publish it here.