After more than a century of continuous revolutions in ideologies and regimes since the fall of the Qing dynasty (1911), the current ruling ideology of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is difficult to pin down using common terminology. Prominent scholar Pang Laikwan argues in this new book that the term “sovereigntism” best describes the logic of China's current sovereignty. This sovereigntism is obsessed with the security of the state and economic development and is not ideologically picky about how it pursues these goals but is “primarily utilitarian” (2). To understand how China reached this point, Pang astutely examines how concepts in China's long political history, like the Mandate of Heaven (tianming), reverberate through China's transition from a dynastic system to a nation-state and coexist with the adoption of political philosophies and systems from the West. Pang's expert and engaging analysis of current events, political philosophy, history, literature, and art paints a clearer picture of the PRC's sovereign logic and makes One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty a fruitful read for scholars of China and of other fields, and the general intellectual public.

Chapter 1 explores how rulers earn the Mandate of Heaven's legitimacy through their ethical behavior and effectiv