Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam has recently published a chapter entitled “Tianxia as Anticosmopolitan and Protoracial: A Case Study of Late Imperial Vietnam” in a book entitled Tianxia in Comparative Perspectives: Alternative Models for a Possible Planetary Order that was edited by Roger T. Ames, Sor-hoon Tan, and Steven Y. H. Yang (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023).

“Tianxia/Thiên Hạ” is a very old concept in East Asia. It literally means “All Under Heaven,” and it is a term that was used to refer to such concepts as “the empire” or “the (important) people in the empire” or “the known world,” etc.

Over the past couple decades, Chinese scholar Zhou Tingyang has attempted to develop a philosophy for world order that could serve as an alternative to the Western world order of nation states. To do this, he has examined the Chinese past, and has found inspiration in the concept of Tianxia.

In this chapter, Dr. Kelley tests this theory from the perspective of Vietnam.