A debate is spreading around the world: How will authoritarian China – some say totalitarian for its untrammelled data and security resources – change the world’s open societies, as it gathers geopolitical steam off decades of massive economic growth?

Since erupting into the open last year in Australia,1 thinkers in open societies have been busy coining new terms and popularizing previously wonkish ones to explain the nature of the challenge to usually uncomprehending – and often incredulous – publics. Key terms include: Chinese interference,2 sharp power,3 United Front.4

These mean: The exercise of covert influence overseas by the CCP and the Chinese state, or their direct or indirect proponents; a new kind of power neither hard nor soft but disruptive and manipulative; and the United Front Work Department, an organization chiefly tasked with winning over ethnic Chinese around the world to carry out the party’s goals.

The terms are essential, as far as they go, and the impact of the tactics they describe has been demonstrated in numerous reports by journalists, think tanks and officials.5 Yet do they go far enough in describing and explaining China’s rise?

They do not, for to understand that fully one must look behind the modernist curtain of power of the People’s Republic of China which has engrossed western political science and democratic societies since the western-influenced CCP seized power in 1949, to look at older, enduring norms of power and statecraft being ingested and reproduced by the CCP to project power and build legitimacy. The result: A hybrid, yet monistic, set of power and truth claims that encompasses both modern and pre-modern thought (monism being a worldview that ascribes to all varied phenomenon one truth).

This unique set of norms is rooted in a cosmological worldview located in “the center,” where, under the emperors, and today under the party, final authority resides.6

So here are some more terms to add to the popular toolkit of democracies to help understand China’s rise in broader, cosmological, cultural power terms, even as the country chases a hyper-modern, data-driven, AI future: Tianxia 天下, “all-under-heaven,”7 or the whole world known to the emperors; tianchao 天朝, “heavenly empire,”8 the actual Chinese imperial state and its power; and jimi 羁縻,9 animal husbandry, literally “bridling and feeding” horses and cattle. This was a dynastic technique of control that rendered non-ethnic Han territories outside the empire populated by foreign barbarians, yi 夷, safe for “the center” where the emperor and power resided with a simultaneous mixture of trade and threat, or bribe and force, to create vassal states.

Applied to international relations today, the result is an outward expanding system of direct or indirect control aimed at making the world safe for China (or, more accurately, for the party), as it engages more deeply with the world than ever before in history. Only on such terms is the party comfortable with “going global.”

Here’s the crux: In imperial times, tianxia, tianchao and jimi affected China and its geographic neighbors. Yet by definition tianxia was, and is, borderless – where can, where does, “all-under-heaven” end? In a globalized world with porous borders the necessary next step to keeping “the center” safe must be to influence everywhere.

China already has a powerful concept of cyber sovereignty at home, which rests on controlling information that enters the country via the internet. Real-world goods, business and aid decisions, made overseas, that affect China must be controlled too, through the creation of a different kind of sovereignty: a sovereignty of influence.

This is easily visualized by widening the concentric circles of the traditional vassal states to take in the world. In the core is the PRC (including Hong Kong), while southeast, northeast and western Asian nations are – more or less – within a second ring, and countries such as Australia within a third ring. Others are even further away, depending on their geopolitical proximity, trade relations and political openness to China. Of course, the rings shift in response to changing relations and deals.

Understand this and suddenly, in an “aha” moment, we see influence and interference by the party-state from Australia to Germany, from South Africa to Iceland, from the Philippines to the United States, in a far clearer light. Growing reports over slush funds, bribery, and overly large “aid” projects that create debt assume a deliberate pattern.10 One recent paper described this process as “economic statecraft.”11

At the Munich Security Conference last February, Germany’s former foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, noted China was employing “sticks and carrots” in its foreign policy. What he was describing is jimi (though he did not use the term).12

It’s important to remember that while the overall picture can be seen as disruptive, tianxia itself is in reality flexible and ambiguous. It offers ideas such as “a peaceful life for all” (天下为公, all-under-heaven for everyone).This traditional concept that could take many different directions; today its meaning is defined by the party.