ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitanism, in its most basic sense, means feeling at home in the world. This definition, of course, depends on what is meant by ‘world’ and what is meant by ‘home’, or one’s own cultural polity. To highlight the distinctiveness of contemporary Chinese cosmopolitanism, it is important to review the previous cosmopolitanisms in China. Each historical period in China has manifested a different kind of cosmopolitanism, because there have been different ‘worlding’ projects at work. Prior to the twentieth century, the Chinese polity was an imperial realm with dynastic rule. The world in which this polity existed, especially up until the early nineteenth century, was primarily an Asian world, consisting mainly of Northeast, Inner and Southeast Asia, with China at its apex. Indeed, the name for China in Chinese, Zhongguo, means ‘central (or middle) kingdom’. While this Chinese imperial world had indirect trade ties to Europe, the world economy that Europe re-envisioned as centered on itself led to more intensive cosmopolitan ties to Europe and a colonial Asia that de-centered China’s imperial cosmopolitanism. With the 1949 socialist revolution, China participated in yet a different kind of cosmopolitan world, the world of international socialism. Finally, in the post-Mao era, China’s worlding project and consequent cosmopolitanism has focused on the United States.
