Deng Xiaomang, Zhao Tingyang and the Sustenesis framework I have proposed point in three different directions on the question of how Chinese and Western thought might connect. Strictly speaking, however, they are not three competing solutions operating at the same level. Deng and Zhao address the relationship between Western philosophy and Chinese intellectual culture directly. Sustenesis begins with more general philosophical questions. It was not created to bridge East and West; interpreting their differences is one possible extension of its foundational framework into the cultural domain.
The terms “Western philosophy” and “Chinese intellectual culture” are broad conveniences here. Western philosophy contains empiricism, rationalism, German Idealism, phenomenology, analytic philosophy and many other traditions. Chinese thought is likewise divided among Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, Legalist, Buddhist and Neo-Confucian traditions. This essay compares three ways of handling relations between systems of thought. It does not offer a comprehensive judgement on either intellectual world.
Traditional Chinese thought is first of all a civilisational form of intellectual culture. It contains substantial philosophical reflection, but philosophy was not separated into an autonomous field in the same way as it was in modern Western thought. Ethics, politics, self-cultivation, religious experience and everyday practice were usually intertwined, rather than clearly divided into relatively independent areas such as ontology, epistemology, ethics and logic. “Chinese philosophy” as a unified modern discipline is, to a considerable extent, the result of retrospectively organising traditional Chinese thought through classifications inherited from Western philosophy.
This does not mean that traditional China had no philosophy. It means that Chinese thought and Western philosophy did not begin as two systems with the same form and directly corresponding concepts. Every later attempt to bridge them has therefore had to confront this structural asymmetry.
Deng Xiaomang takes a path that extends from the West into China. His principal theoretical resources come from Kant, Hegel and Marx. He introduces subjectivity, free will, universal reason and self-reflection into the Chinese context in order to analyse traditional ethics, cultural psychology and modern personhood. His development of New Practical Aesthetics and New Criticism, together with his critique of Confucian ethics, all contain clear personal judgements and original contributions.
These contributions emerge chiefly where Western philosophy meets Chinese problems. Kant and Hegel provide the basic conceptual resources, while Chinese culture is primarily the object of analysis and criticism. Deng argues that traditional Confucian ethics is more deeply grounded in blood ties, affection, social identity and concrete relationships, and that it did not fully develop independent personhood, universal rules or the reflective mechanisms of the modern subject. Drawing on Kantian free will and moral autonomy, he therefore re-examines Confucian ethics.
This approach has produced significant cultural criticism and encouraged a reinterpretation of German Idealism in a Chinese context. Its theoretical direction, however, remains asymmetrical. Western philosophy mainly supplies the method and criteria, while Chinese culture mainly supplies the questions and material. Outside the Chinese context, Deng remains a distinctive scholar of Kant and Hegel. His studies of self-negation and reflection in Hegelian dialectics, and of the unity of logic, epistemology and ontology, also make interpretive contributions of their own. Yet those contributions remain largely within an existing Western philosophical tradition and do not constitute a foundational philosophy independent of Kant and Hegel.
Deng’s work can therefore deepen the application of Western philosophy to Chinese questions, but it does not establish a set of basic concepts generated jointly by the two traditions. This is not a denial of its value. It is a way of identifying the theoretical level at which it operates.
Zhao Tingyang moves in almost the opposite direction. Rather than using Western philosophy to explain China, he seeks to reconstruct the Chinese concept of tianxia, or “all under heaven”, as a universally significant political philosophy of the world. Through ideas such as the absence of an outside to tianxia, relational rationality and the world understood as a whole, he hopes to move beyond a modern political order organised around individuals, sovereign states and international competition.
Zhao’s intellectual resources are Chinese, but his method of theory construction is not simply the method of traditional Chinese thought. He abstracts, systematises and universalises a historical concept that combines geographical space, civilisational order, political legitimacy and ethical relations. He then places it in dialogue with Hobbes, Kant, cosmopolitanism and modern international relations theory. This kind of conceptual reconstruction and universal argument belongs largely to the working methods of modern academic philosophy.
Zhao therefore does not operate only within the language of traditional Chinese thought. He uses modern philosophical methods to turn a Chinese cultural concept into a theory addressed to the world. Deng mainly brings Western philosophy into Chinese questions; Zhao seeks to bring a Chinese concept into world philosophy. The scope of Zhao’s theoretical aim is consequently larger.
His difficulty arises precisely within this transformation. Tianxia carries dense Chinese historical meanings involving geographical space, a civilisational centre, political order and ethical relationships. If those meanings are retained, the theory can appear to be a Chinese cultural programme, and may invite suspicion that it preserves an unequal relationship between centre and periphery. If they are removed completely, tianxia may become another form of cosmopolitanism, relationalism or global governance already familiar within Western philosophy, and thereby lose its distinctiveness.
This predicament arises first from structural differences that Chinese and Western thought have developed over long periods, but it cannot be separated entirely from Zhao’s philosophy itself. Any theory that seeks to raise a culturally embedded concept to the level of universal philosophy must explain how it addresses individual rights, political consent, limits on power, cultural difference and institutional legitimacy. Structural difficulty can explain why Zhao’s project is hard to complete, but it cannot complete those arguments for him. Resolving them is part of the work his theory must undertake.
Western concepts of the individual, rights, sovereignty and the state, and Chinese concepts of relationship, family, tianxia and order, are outcomes of different historical conditions. Behind each lies a largely unstated body of cultural experience and structural assumptions. Attaching tianxia directly to modern political philosophy resembles grafting two already mature intellectual structures together in mid-air. Their concepts can make contact, but contact alone does not give them a common foundation.
When I proposed Sustenesis, my starting point was not the problem of bridging Chinese and Western philosophy. Sustenesis first addresses more general philosophical questions — how existence is possible, how knowledge forms, how subjects emerge, and why structures can be sustained, dissolve and transform.
Sustenesis takes difference, constraint and sustained coherence as its basic concepts. Existence is not a self-contained entity completed in advance of relations; it is the sustained coherence of a sustenetic structure. Knowledge need not presuppose a transcendental knowing subject. It is a sustained coherence that can be preserved, retrieved, tested and revised, and that remains effective in operation. Subjects, intelligence, cultures and institutions are likewise not pre-given. They are sustenetic structures formed when differences are organised under particular constraints.
In this sense, Sustenesis has a metaphilosophical function because it re-examines philosophy’s basic categories and the conditions under which different theories can be established. But it is not merely metaphilosophy. It also makes first-order philosophical claims about existence, knowledge, subjects and structures, and is therefore a foundational framework for ontology and epistemology.
Sustenesis did not begin with the relationship between Chinese culture and Western philosophy. It can be used to examine chaos, quantum entanglement, life, artificial intelligence, consciousness, knowledge and free will. Each field necessarily has its own scientific methods and evidence. Sustenesis cannot replace physics, mathematics or AI research, but it can ask at a more general structural level what differences are present, what constrains them, which relations form sustained coherence, and under what conditions a structure transforms.
Because Sustenesis does not, in its theoretical intention, begin from a core concept belonging to one culture, it allows the relationship between Chinese and Western thought to be reconsidered within a common framework. Western forms of subject-centred personhood, Chinese forms of personhood organised around relations and roles, the nation-state and tianxia no longer function as unquestioned theoretical starting points. They become sustenetic outcomes that require explanation.
Sustenesis must explain which differences and constraints contributed to Western concepts of the individual, rights, universal reason and the philosophical subject, and which contributed to Chinese kinship ethics, relational order, the family-state structure and practically oriented thought. It need not ask Chinese thought to accept the standards of Western philosophy, nor elevate a single Chinese concept into a new universal principle. Its task is to explain how the two traditions formed, what conditions sustained them, and why they produced different accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and order.
Bridging East and West is therefore neither the founding purpose of Sustenesis nor an achievement that can be declared in advance. It is a natural extension of the theory’s possible applications. If the same basic concepts can explain the formation, persistence and transformation of different intellectual traditions, then their connection need no longer depend on matching concepts that have already been completed. It can instead be grounded in more fundamental structural conditions.
That possibility still requires detailed argument. Sustenesis must identify the relevant differences in each domain, show how constraints operate, specify how sustained coherence can be recognised, and explain why one structure forms while another does not. It must also show what its account adds to existing historical, cultural and philosophical research. If any phenomenon can be redescribed after the fact in terms of difference, constraint and sustained coherence, these concepts risk becoming a general vocabulary rather than a philosophical explanation with real power to distinguish among alternatives.
Sustenesis must also pass another test. Although it does not intend to privilege either East or West, difference, constraint and sustained coherence are still expressed through the language of modern philosophy and science. The theory must therefore demonstrate that these concepts are not another unnoticed cultural presupposition. Nor can it treat Chinese thought merely as material used to confirm a framework already settled in advance. Its foundational level will be genuinely open only if research across different domains can test and revise the theory in return.
The three approaches can now be described as application, reconstruction and foundational explanation. Deng uses Western philosophy to interpret Chinese questions. Zhao reconstructs a Chinese concept as a theory addressed to the world. Sustenesis did not begin with East–West relations, but its foundational account of existence and structure can extend naturally to the conditions under which Chinese and Western thought formed.
This is not a simple ranking of three thinkers. Deng has developed an important form of cross-cultural criticism. Zhao has proposed a political philosophy with ambitions for the world. Sustenesis sets itself a more foundational task, but for that very reason carries a heavier burden of argument. The more foundational a theory claims to be, and the broader its proposed reach, the more it must demonstrate.
Deng largely observes one intellectual building from within another. Zhao attempts to construct a bridge between two buildings already standing. Sustenesis asks why those buildings took different forms, what foundations sustain each of them, and whether there are more basic conditions capable of explaining how both were built.
The point at which Chinese and Western thought might genuinely connect may not lie between their completed conceptual systems, but in the conditions through which those concepts form, persist and transform. Whether Sustenesis can offer an effective explanation at that level remains a task for further research.
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