A Political World Philosophy in terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia)

Abstract This paper presents an overall view of the Philosophy of Tian-xia, a particular form of neo-universalism developed by its author and very much debated in the last years. The system of Tian-xia, or ‘all-under-heaven’, is a philosophical re-elaboration of an ancient form of Chinese universalism. The world is constituted as a global unity and a basic concept of political philosophy. It aims at a world institution as a way to rethink all problems in the world as problems of the world . Zhao Tingyang has analytically developed this view in some recent publications in Chinese. This article represents the most recent attempt to provide a synthetic view of his philosophy of ‘all-under-heaven’.