ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses most common ways of thinking about China in the harmonious world, what the author have called a unit-based cosmology and a holistic cosmology. A vast majority of academic commentary treats harmonious world' as a straightforward state policy or inherently Chinese idea promoted by the People's Republic of China under Hu Jintao, against the backdrop of the state-centric assumptions that are embedded in our most common approaches to IR. The state system, which is perhaps the clearest example of the unit-based political cosmology and the consolidation of this kind of imaginary, is said to have emerged from this particular European experience. Furthermore, and just as in the unit-based cosmology, differences are convened under the sign of temporal sequence. The temporal convening of space is hence being used to increase distance and in the process creates a hierarchy where the difference and otherness of others does not need to be taken seriously.
