This short book tackles a big concept: tianxia, Chinese for “all under heaven.” As China has come to play a major role in global affairs, Chinese scholars have resurrected this classical Confucian term to describe the kind of international system they would like to see: harmonious, ethical, relational, and (it literally goes without saying) centered on China. The classical Chinese tianxia was an East Asian world-system focused on one central state (China) to which all other peoples looked for legitimation and leadership. Today's millennial world-system is similarly focused on the United States. As the title of Chapter One says: right concept, wrong country.

The size of the US economy and its location at the center of the world-system has led to a merging of US and global systems of distinction: in almost every field, success in the world means success in the US, and vice versa. This is most true in business, where global value chains are overwhelmingly dominated by US companies, but it is true in most other fields as well. The result is that when Russian President Vladimir Putin complains of a world in which there is “one master, one sovereign” (the title of Chapter Two), it is not just the United States government that irks him. It is the entire American system, what might be called the American Tianxia.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is similarly unhappy to live in a US-centered world, but unlike Putin he has the resources to do something about it. That “something” is his “One Belt, One Road” initiative to link all of Afro-Eurasia into Chinese economic networks. The problem for Xi is that the countries that have most eagerly welcomed integration with China are too small and too poor to matter. Thus Chapter Three showcases one belt and one road to nowhere. Even China can't afford to purchase enough people's loyalties to set up an alternative global system, and the fact that it has to pay for what allies it has shows that the effort is unsustainable.

The American Tianxia is an extraordinarily stable world-system configuration.