ABSTRACT
The compensatory dimension of egalitarian global justice may appear extraordinarily appealing to the Chinese because of the unpleasant aspects of China’s modern history, and its economic-welfarist concerns may be taken as a self-evident approach since it happens to coincide with China’s successful development strategies during recent decades. As a result, the justification of coercive power may be unwarrantedly excluded from our thinking about distributive justice. The argument for egalitarian global justice presupposes the status of states as moral agents, but this presupposition is groundless without the legitimation of state coercion. This chapter, unlike the views on coercion developed by Western philosophers, holds that the real dynamic that state power triggers for domestic egalitarian justice is not its coercive nature in itself but its unique character of dual coercion which does not exist at the global level. A radical attempt to move beyond the present nation-state system, as imagined in the tianxia system theory inspired by ancient Chinese wisdom in favor of global justice seems to be a condition too weak to refute libertarianism. The argument in this chapter, if tenable, indicates that, for those underdeveloped countries, the justification of state power enjoys priority over egalitarian global justice.
