Doing Justice to Others 41standing with China, while relations with other, lesser, countries continued
on the basis of the tribute system. Th e most important of these kuo states
was an especially formidable and well- organized people known as the Khi-
tan, on the Celestial Empire’s northern fl ank. In a peace treaty concluded in
1005, the Khitan state was treated as entirely the equal of China itself. In
fact, the treaty expressly provided for annual payments by China of silver
and silk to the Khitan rulers. An internal government memorial prepared
shortly aft er this treaty, surveying China’s foreign- relations position gener-
ally, reveals the Chinese to have been well aware of how precarious their
offi cial claims to universal empire were. It was clearly perceived to be neces-
sary in practice to be fl exible in dealing with other powers and to take due
account of prevailing power relations.
Even if these concessions to reality were necessary, however, they re-
mained distasteful to the Chinese. It is evident from internal government
rec ords that the Chinese continued to regard their neighbors as inferior,
however powerful they might be at a given time. Treatment of foreign pow-
ers as equals, in other words, was regarded as a regrettable anomaly, and not
as a point of principle. As such, the practice was to be abandoned at the fi rst
available opportunity.
It is tempting to dismiss the Chinese offi cial claims to universal rule as a
bemusing combination of bluster, hypocrisy, and self- delusion. But that would
be to miss an important point. It is more pertinent to regard the Chinese ex-
perience as a revealing demonstration of the way in which ideas can have a
signifi cance of their own, even in the face of opposing material forces. Chi-
nese rulers may have been well aware of the de facto equal status of the major
Asian states of their borders. But the stubborn and continued denial of that
equality in principle constituted a fi rm conceptual barrier against the devel-
opment of an image of a world of in de pen dent states of equal legal status—
that is, against the very idea that would be at the core of later international
legal thought.
Instead of regarding the world as a congeries of equal and in de pen dent
states, the Chinese continued to think of it instead as, in eff ect, simply a
large- scale version of China’s own social system. Ideas of equality and in de-
pen dence of states would eventually be developed. But not by the Chinese.
Th at major intellectual contribution would come instead from the Mediter-
ranean world.