Sublime

King Wen, who ruled for decades, nurtured the state’s power, implemented strong economic policies to foster the people’s welfare, and fashioned a strong reputation for Virtue.

Chiang loyalist Wu Zhongxin

autocracy.

In Zhao’s view, the contemporary extension of the tianxia model would involve a ‘world institution’ controlling a larger territory and military force than that controlled by the autonomous substates.

In a recent essay, Zhao gives us some insights about how the tianxia worldview emerged in the transition from the Shang to the Zhou dynasty at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. A limited power that succeeded a much larger empire, the Zhou dynasty devised a worldview to control the larger entity by making global politics a priority over the

human mercenary instinct.