China's Harmony Doctrine vs the West's Hegemony Habit: A Scholar's Diagnosis

Two Civilizational Lenses on World Order

When Michael Dunford sat down with CGTN for an interview published on August 19, 2026, the emeritus professor at Britain's University of Sussex was not discussing a single summit or a trade dispute. He was offering a diagnosis of two civilizational ways of seeing the world: one, he argues, rooted in the impulse to impose form on others; the other, in the pursuit of harmony through relationships. The conversation arrives at a moment when the vocabulary of order - hegemony, sovereignty, non-interference, a community with a shared future - has become the working language of great-power competition across the Indo-Pacific.

The West's Mold: Imposing Form on the World

Dunford's central claim about Western thought is that it treats the world as matter to be shaped. "Western thought is rooted in the idea of imposing form - a mold - on matter, and the matter to be shaped is other parts of the world," he says in the interview. "The mold is its own image." From that premise, he argues, follows a habit of claiming moral superiority: if one's own institutions are the template, then intervention, regime change and war can be justified as acts of enlightenment rather than domination.

The scholar links this worldview to the founding assumptions of Western liberalism. Individuals and nations, in that tradition, are self-interested actors who cannot reliably agree on the common good; a national state must impose domestic order, and in the international anarchy that follows, powerful states reach for hegemony to protect their security and interests. Dunford's critique, written at greater length in a December 2025 essay for Beijing Review, is that this story generalizes one region's experience - and then treats it as universal law.

Harmony as the Root of Chinese Philosophy

Against that mold, Dunford places a Chinese tradition that begins with relationships. "Chinese philosophy starts with relationships: how we can live in relation to others, how we can create a harmonious society," he tells CGTN. In the international sphere, that relational outlook translates into an order built on non-interference, mutual respect and shared interests rather than conflict.

The intellectual vocabulary is distinctive: tianxia, or "all under heaven"; guanxi, the web of reciprocal relationships; and gongsheng, symbiosis - the idea that the self, whether a person or a nation, exists only in relation to others. Dunford quotes the Confucian adage: "If you want to establish yourself, help others to establish themselves; if you want to be successful, help others to be successful." Success, in this reading, is collective or it is not durable.

From the Five Principles to the Four Initiatives

These are not merely ancient ideas. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence - mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit - were codified in 1954 and remain the stated foundation of Chinese diplomacy. In December 1972, Dunford recalls, Mao Zedong updated a Ming dynasty stratagem into the pledge: "Dig deep tunnels, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony" - drawing on the classical distinction between a king who rules by benevolence and a hegemon who rules by power.

In the modern era, Xi Jinping has built on that frame. At the United Nations in Geneva in January 2017, Xi posed five questions about the state of the world; at the Belt and Road Forum that May, he identified deficits of peace, development and governance, adding a "deficit of trust" in 2019. The response Beijing offers is a cluster of four initiatives - the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilizations Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative - all aimed at the construction of what Xi calls a community with a shared future for humanity. Dunford's point is that this framework is not a slogan but the expression of a different philosophical starting point, one that emphasizes peaceful coexistence, mutual respect, non-interference, dialogue, cooperation and shared and equitable development. At Davos in January 2021, Xi framed the goal as upholding the "common values of humanity" - peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom - while warning against "ideological prejudice," a direct challenge to the assumption that Western institutions are the only legitimate container for those values.

The Critics' Rebuttal

Dunford's framing is not uncontested. Western analysts note a persistent gap between China's harmony rhetoric and its behavior in flashpoints from the South China Sea to the Taiwan Strait, where assertive military activity has accompanied diplomatic language about shared interests. The term "Global South," some international-affairs commentators argue, is itself a political construct that Beijing promotes to reset the global order around sovereignty and non-interference while diluting Western concepts of rule of law, democracy and human rights.

The debate is therefore not simply philosophical; it is a contest over the language in which the next international order will be written. Whether Beijing's vision is a sincere tradition or a strategic instrument - or both - is itself a central question of the current era, and one that no single interview can settle.

Why the Asia-Pacific Is the Testing Ground

For Japan and the wider Asia-Pacific, this is not an abstract seminar. Tokyo has spent the past year deepening its security alignment with Washington - lifting defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP, establishing a National Intelligence Bureau in July under Prime Minister Takaichi, and updating its defense white paper in early August - precisely the kind of alliance-based order that Beijing's harmony doctrine challenges. China, for its part, has accelerated military cooperation with Russia, including joint patrols around Japan, while offering the region an alternative architecture of connectivity and non-interference.

The result is a region that speaks two languages of order at once. Southeast Asian states, in particular, resist choosing between them, preferring a hedging diplomacy that borrows from both. Dunford notes that East Asia once operated a polycentric gongsheng system in which large and small states found a proper place through voluntary trade and peaceful coexistence over millennia - a historical memory that Beijing now invokes as an alternative to bloc politics. The philosophical contrast he describes is thus visible in real time in every summit, patrol and infrastructure deal across the Indo-Pacific, and it shapes how smaller states calibrate their relationships with both Washington and Beijing.

What to Watch For

The harmony-versus-hegemony debate will sharpen as the United States and China compete for the loyalties of the Global South and the swing states of Asia. Watch for three signals: the vocabulary of major-power summits (whether Beijing can keep non-interference and "common values" in the joint communiques), the direction of regional security architecture (the balance between alliance-based groupings and China-led frameworks), and the reception of China's initiatives in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, where Dunford's relational framing may find its most receptive audience.

For Japan, the stakes are existential: a neighbor that sees the world through harmony and a partner that sees the world through hegemony are asking Tokyo to help build two different futures. The choice, as Dunford's interview suggests, is not merely strategic - it is philosophical.

By Kenji Tanaka, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: CGTN, Beijing Review, University of Sussex.