WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Throughout the history of Sino-Western contact and exchange, Western scholars gradually developed a tradition of using the term “tribute” as a keyword to describe and explain the ancient Chinese “Chaogong” ( 朝 贡 ). Eventually, John K. Fairbank created the concept of "tribute/tributary system" to express a hierarchical world order centered on China. However, the word “tribute” in Western history and context implies an unequal relationship between the suzerain and the vassal and economic power exploitation. Using it to describe “Chaogong” has changed the original Chinese meaning of “Chaogong” in the Western context, resulting in the “tribute/tributary system” in the English context and “Chaogong Tixi” (朝贡体系) in the Chinese context have different connotations, leading to a negative perception of the “Chaogong”, particularly among Westerners. This paper attempts to analyze this issue by comparing the foreign relations reflected in the Western concept of “tribute” and the Chinese concept of “Chaogong.”

In the early 20th century, China and the Balkans faced, almost simultaneously, the epochal challenges of imperial disintegration and the construction of emerging nation-states brought about by ethnic nationalism. After reflecting and redefining the concept of ‘nation’, China has gradually stepped out of the ideological cage of ethnic nationalism and achieved a transition to a unified multi-ethnic state’; the Balkans, by contrast, became mired in the quagmire of ethnic conflict and fragmentation. This paper will undertake a historical review and comparison of nation-building in China and the Balkans in the early 20th century exploring how nation-state construction can overcome the challenges of ethnic conflict and fragmentation. A theoretical hypothesis of this paper is that the regional civilizational system constitutes the historical resources that ensure the successful construction of unified multi-ethnic state.

My project takes “using the other as a mirror” as its analytical lens, and centers on how China and Yugoslavia introduced, disseminated, interpreted, and absorbed each other ’ s experiences of liberation struggle and national construction. The study follows two main strands: first, it examines the process through which the Chinese and Yugoslav communist parties, through early contacts in the 1920s–1940s, came to understand each other’s experiences of liberation struggle, with particular attention to how the experience of the Long March circulated within Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist resistance; second, it analyses exchanges of experience in national construction and development from 1949 to the early 1990s, focusing especially on China’s attention to Yugoslavia’ s self-management in the late 1970s and on the resonance of China ’ s reform and opening-up experience in the Yugoslav context of the 1980s crisis.

Rooted in the intellectual peace-making mission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the architects of UNESCO sought to delineate and operate within the “sensible” international community and demonstrate the agency of art and culture in forging global peace. UNESCO looked to non-Western art traditions, including Chinese art, to overcome the aesthetical Eurocentrism and present a truly global perspective on art. Against the backdrop of the Cold War East-West confrontation, the dynamics of decolonization and the expansion of its membership, UNESCO launched the Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values to promote international understanding of diverse cultural values on a global scale, including the exhibition “Orient-Occident.” This presentation will discuss the subtleties and politics of communicating and exhibiting Chinese art through the platform of UNESCO during the High Cold War.