The following passages are extracted from Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, A ‘Third Culture’ in Economics? An Essay on Smith, Confucius and the Rise of China, in: The Adam Smith Review, Vol. 8, ed. Fonna Forman-Barzilai, London: Routledge, pp. 83-110.

Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Research Professor Economics and Evolutionary Sciences, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany; Fellow, Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University, Germany; Distinguished Visiting Professor of Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University, China.

China and Cosmopolitanism: A View on the Chinese Origins of Modern Economic Thought
In order to entice the reader to open up her mind to what follows, I wish to introduce a viewpoint that was developed by the Chinese economist Sheng Hong in the past two decades (Sheng 2010). Until recently, Sheng Hong was Director of the Unirule Institute at Beijing, an autonomous think tank in economics. The Unirule Institute was established in 1993 by a number of leading Chinese intellectuals and economists under the leadership of Mao Yushi, himself an economist with focus on the United States and an influential voice in the Chinese public, who heralded the need to find a synthesis between economic growth and moral principles, both in his writings and in his many grassroots activities. The name of the institute is more expressive in Chinese, Tianze yanjiusuo. The use of tianze 天则refers to the‘principles of the heaven’ and is inspired by a citation from one of the oldest Confucian classics, the Shijing: tian sheng zheng min, you wu you li 天生民，有物有则, which roughly translates as“Heaven generates humankind, with matter and rules”, meaning that all human beings follow naturally endowed rules. The use of the term tianze in the title of an economics research institute signals the idea that there are natural principles according to which the economy operates, and which should not be disturbed by external interventions, beyond the establishment of institutions, which are mainly seen as evolving endogenously. In this sense, the name of the institute reflects a liberal position in economic policy, with a special emphasis on the perspective of institutional economics. Even more so, the philosophical implications of the motto come close to fundamental principles of the Scottish enlightenment.

In his works, Sheng Hong consistently strives to reconcile Chinese tradition with modern economic development and modern economics. His recently published book makes some of his papers accessible which were published in the 1990s in influential journals such as Du shu (‘Reading’) and Guanli shijie (‘Management World’), so reaching a broad audience in the intellectual elites. In these papers, Sheng argues that classical Chinese thinking was not only compatible with modern economics, but even presaged it and exerted impact on it. Sheng boldly asserts that certain fundamental notions of modern economics stemmed from China, at least implicitly and indirectly.

I do not want to discuss the philological validity of these propositions (but see a few remarks below). What is important is that an influential Chinese scholar discusses in much detail the question of a possible synthesis between Chinese thinking and the Western tradition, especially with regard to basic notions such as a liberal economic order. Sheng proposes that this synthesis could be a transcultural exchange in a multicultural world, which would not assign the exclusive status of modernity to one of them. He calls this synthesis ‘ecumenical’. The word ‘ecumene’ is sometimes used in English translations of the Chinese tianxia 天下, which Sheng refers to in his call for tianxia zhuyi, hence ecumenical thinking, which he confronts with ‘globalism’ shijie zhuyi. In European history, the term ‘ecumene’ shows a similar vacillation of semantics as the Chinese tianxia, with denoting the reach of human civilization in Greek times, and the empire in Roman times. To avoid these semantic repercussions, and yet without stretching the argument, I would propose to translate tianxia zhuyi as ‘cosmopolitanism’, in the sense of the current debate, especially in the context of Adam Smith (Forman-Barzilai 2010). This is because in the etymology of the term, the word tianxia refers to two overlapping, but different meanings. Originally the term referred to the land that was controlled by the Chinese emperor, including the territories that were aligned via tribute relations. Later, the term turned more abstract and referred to the reach of human civilization. This is also the sense of the famous dictum tianxia wei gong 天下为公 in the calligraphy by Sun Yatsen, which became part of the staple of catchwords in the global green movement (here, implying that ‘the Earth belongs to all’). Sheng uses the term in this broader sense, so that we can say that tianxia zhuyi is the idea of a global civilization that encompasses a diversity of cultures. In fact, this interpretation matches with the historical evolution of the Chinese empire, which was a multiethnic body politic based on certain universal civilizational principles and artefacts such as the Chinese script (Schmidt-Glintzer 1997).