Sublime

Nonetheless, the early twentieth-century traditions of rural reconstruction, especially the ideas of Liang Shuming, have had a major impact on the contemporary rural-reconstruction movement in China.

Additionally, Wang Mingming tells us that the cosmology of tianxia cannot be grasped in a singular fashion. Rather, it has to be understood in its two different varieties datable to the periods before and after the Qin unification of 221 BCE.

Jennifer Lemche has studied this process that she calls the “greening of Daoism,” in which Laozi has morphed into the God of Ecological Protection (Shengtai baohu shen (生态保护神)).

The recent revival of yangsheng practices in everyday life, where classical ideas intersect with contemporary needs and new ideals, to achieve a better integration of individual life with family, community and nature, reveals that dialogical transcendence is alive and well in China and being tapped in similar ways.7

While Zhao acknowledges that the post-Qin ideal of tianxia is transformed, his conception continues to offer a top-down method of political ordering as the essence of the tianxia system. I submit that I have trouble with this model.

I want to see how the environmental program and movement in China may be able to incorporate such a long-term salvationist agenda of sustainability by touching upon the discourses and practices that are shaping it.