The Empty Centre of National Rejuvenation: Chinese Centrality, Defensive Sovereignty, and the Failure to Imagine a Post-Westphalian Order

This paper argues that the weakness of contemporary China lies not in the absence of power, but in the absence of defining power. The central question is not whether China can become stronger still, but whether it can define the world that should gather around it. The paper distinguishes material power from defining power and treats the latter as the decisive form of political power: the capacity to fix the meaning of order, establish the standards within which power becomes intelligible, and define a sustainable order within which others can locate themselves. On that basis, the paper develops three linked claims. First, contemporary China has risen within an order it did not create—one shaped by American primacy, the dollar, English, Westphalian sovereignty, and international law—yet has not shown that it can define an order capable of replacing it. Second, although the present party-state invokes civilisational memory and national rejuvenation, it remains structurally dependent on the Westphalian grammar of defensive sovereignty; and in diplomacy, even after attaining the scale of a great power, it still often conducts itself in a manner closer to small-state stratagem than to central statecraft, revealing a deficit not only of order-definition but of trust and political stature. Third, the paper argues that the final institutional form of a genuine post-Westphalian order is a World Federal Government: a layered federal structure in which the nation-state ceases to be the final unit of sovereignty, while inherited institutions and protected freedoms remain preserved within lower layers of order. The paper further argues that one of the clearest structural tensions of the present lies in the contrast between two scales of history: Qin unified Zhonghua in 221 BCE, and approximately 2,246 years have passed since that act, yet contemporary China still seeks centrality from within a Westphalian framework only 378 years old. In this sense, China is not post-Westphalian. It is a Westphalian state that invokes pre-Westphalian civilisational memory when it seeks expansion, and Westphalian sovereignty when it seeks protection. The paper concludes that the contemporary Chinese centre is empty not because it lacks power, but because it has neither defined a sustainable order nor displayed the trustworthiness proper to a true centre.

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