Confucianism, among most other Chinese classics, was already quasi-international relations theory in its time to the extent that it began as a philosophy to rescue the all-under-heaven order from decaying into a Warring system among kingdoms. Kingdoms were initially feudal domains bestowed to the kin of Zhou. Contrast to other contending schools of thoughts of the time that have achieved fame among the elite strata, Confucianism stressed morality but nonetheless shared with them one important platform—restoring the order via rectifying names. Names presumably provided the population a code of propriety abiding by which they could interact orderly. Confucius and his disciples believed that the best way to promote propriety was to embed it in moral consciousness. Confucians of later generations disagree on how to enhance moral consciousness. Confucius himself had conviction in kinship, which he argued arose from spontaneous love. He insisted spontaneous self-restraint in everyone’s caring and loving families be essential to the restoration of order. He hoped that a metaphor of kinship abiding by the classic Book of Rites could breed benevolence via spontaneous self-restraint. Other Confucians appealed to rituals and teaching, instead of kinship, to breed moral consciousness. Further away from Confucius was the School of Legalism, which turned to strict law in order to enforce the named duties. Self-restraint became compulsory, not spontaneous, under the Legalist circumstance. Classic Confucianism and contemporary post-Western international relations face almost exactly the same situation and mission—the breakdown of a hegemonic order and the quest for post-hegemonic order, not to be unilaterally enforced by a hegemonic center any longer. Bringing the previously silenced genealogy to world politics and provincializing, as a result, the hegemonic order, post-Western international relations attend to geo-cultural distinction of a site in its re-appropriation of hegemonic IR. Confucianism appealed to specific nostalgia for a bygone utopia as its reference of preferred order while post-Western IR, indefinite strings of nostalgia for a sited genealogy everywhere to prevent the striking back of hegemonic theorization. Incidentally, the advocacy of the Chinese School of IR in China shared the same Confucian nostalgia for either a relational order or a benevolent hierarchy regardless of the Marxist indoctrination of those scholars in their earlier career. In the light of post-Western determination to resisting any plausible hegemonic order, the Chinese School’s propensity for hierarchy understandably causes alert. Nevertheless, Confucianism coped with the arriving of anarchy and endeavored to control it. The conviction that anarchy should and could be controlled lied in the imagined state of nature in accordance with the ancient classics over a thousand of years before Confucius. For Confucianism and its contemporary, anarchy was not the state of nature but the reality nonetheless. A revisit to Confucianism in the 21st century can thus inform both post-hegemonic and post-Western theorization in the sense that the former is preoccupied likewise with anarchy, though as the state of nature rather than deviation from it, and the latter, the pursuit of multiple sites of genealogy each rooted in its own geo-cultural distinction. The Confucian notion of benevolence rings the post-Western bell of geo-cultural genealogy on one hand, and alerts the post-Western IR to the potential of an emerging hegemony to name duties and enforce their concomitant self-restraints around the world on other hand. In the sense that Confucianism homes a mainstream IR’s anarchical sensibility and a post-Western identity of sited genealogy, it can contribute at least to the explanation of the post-hegemonic IR in the self-reflection of a Chinese school on China’s own strategy of survival, either hegemonic or sited. To a significant extent, Confucius and his contemporary coped with both international and domestic politics. Self-restraint was their advice for Kings to maintain order internally and attain reputation internationally. Internally, benevolence could be reified through reduction of levy. Externally, the population elsewhere would long for the arrival of the benevolent king. As a result, no one would treat the naturally self-restraining king and his clans as tyrant inside or threat outside. The relationship between warring states could calm down and their named duty to surrender to the reign of the emperor of Zhou would be back to spontaneous order. This attested to what Confucius called the Way, which ought be so broad due to spontaneous self-restraint of all that all could relax on walking along one another. Needlessly to say, the Western counterpart has similarly had its utopia, for example the idea of critical peace or the world government, both of which obscure the international from the internal. Transcending the territorial boundary seems to characterize all post-hegemonic versions of utopia, be it Confucianism or post-Western IR. Confucianism is concerned with the preparation of foreign policy for relationality, mutuality, embeddedness, and contextuality, unfailingly making Sinification, historical as well as contemporary, an all-directional movement void of teleology. Consequently, China is hardly a distinctive analytical entity, but a cosmology. These cultural processes either introduce or rejuvenate Chinese worldviews as defined by the values of harmony, group orientation, and uanxi culture. Guanxi, a metaphor of kinship, is particularly pertinent to BoR. It refers to the cultural belief, in the IR context, that nations cannot survive without coupling their existence to one another’s in certain mutually agreed and practiced relationships. The quest for guanxi makes reciprocity an intrinsic component in any rational, bilateral exchange. In the future discussion, however, one needs not aim to assert China’s distinctiveness, but to arrive at a general thesis that one can discover via a Confucian route.
