ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we examine the extent to which China’s post-1989 rise, and its more recent emerging narrative of global leadership, might dent Western-style liberal democracy as teleology of progress. The second section will then explore why the Tang era (CE 618–907) is so frequently evoked as a blueprint by the contemporary authors of China’s aspirational narrative of global leadership, with particular emphasis on the interplay between state and religion. Explicit in our focus on China is the argument that China poses not just the most serious economic challenge to the US in the post-Cold War era, but also a much more comprehensive, serious and historically grounded ideational challenge to the US than is commonly acknowledged. Foregrounding China as the challenge is, however, not self-explanatory. In fact, up until Hu Jintao’s tenure (2002–2012) as General Secretary of the CPC, China’s rise had been perceived by most Western scholars as a fillip to Francis Fukuyama’s notion of triumphant liberal democracy. Indeed, much of Jiang Zemin’s decade in power (1989–2002) had been portrayed as a period when China would increasingly converge with Western market and international-citizenship norms.
