Towards a Confucian Geopolitics: A Critical Remark

This commentary reviews An et al.’s (2021) article, ‘Towards Confucian Geopolitics’. It first acknowledges the article’s achievement in highlighting the importance of reading geopolitics by excavating the Chinese traditions and cultural perspectives. However, the commentary also points out that An et al.’s article has failed to understand the complex nature of the Confucian ideology by differentiating between real-world political struggle and cultural idealism. The lack of an evolving political geography has made their reading of Confucianism as either an official ideology or spatialisation unable to correspond with concrete historical realities. Specifically, it has resulted in over-simplification in benchmarking Chinese history and the dichotomous understanding of Hua-Yi division. The commentary further points out that the above problem is a general issue with the culturalist approach to world politics