This metaphysics established not only the difference between animals and humans in the hierarchy of beings, but civilised people and barbarians, and additionally, the fully human and the merely subhuman.

For centuries thereafter, those outside Christendom were uncivilised or semi-civilised, and therefore, not fully human. Subjugating – or harshly “educating” – them was therefore little different from domesticating animals.

In what I call an apt phenomenological description of how Western imperialist-racists saw other people, the original inhabitants were seen as part of the indigenous flora and fauna of nature, rather than fully developed people with their own social and cultural norms and institutions, that is, people with a history.

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This powerful and enduring racist “metaphysics” was behind the justification of black slavery in the United States and the genocidal wars against the North Amerindians during the country’s westward expansion sometimes called “manifest destiny”.

It was also behind the most racist statements made by the greatest of European philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his famous lectures on the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, Hegel castigated Indian and Chinese philosophies and societies as barely rising above nature and said their societies had no real “history”. Only civilised Western societies could have history, something that Thucydides also touched on at the very start of his History of the Peloponnesian War.

In other words, Western-specific racism, white Christian supremacy, or whatnot, was the sine qua non of Western imperialism – and not the other way around – as someone like Lenin and the Marxists would have it.

Now, you may ask, as I did, why Xiang fretted so much about Western racial supremacy in a book titled Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea.

That’s because she is playing a double game here. On the one hand, she needed to establish the causal-historical connection between racism and imperialism that was and arguably still is unique to Western societies and history. This is because, according to Xiang, much of contemporary sinology has uncritically, or worse, deliberately, projected the Western-specific experience of imperialism and racism onto premodern or dynastic China. Philosophers may call that a category mistake, but worse, it may just be ideological whitewashing: “See, we weren’t that bad. The Chinese had been doing it long before us.” In this regard, Xiang especially singles out the work of Frank Dikötter at the University of Hong Kong for criticism. All that is found in the footnotes and glossary, which, unlike most books, are well worth reading along with the main text.

On the other hand, once she has done all that, she has cleared the grounds for a fresh re-examination of how premodern Chinese approached other peoples in their “metaphysics”, that is, historically, culturally and philosophically.

It’s a fascinating clearance of the intellectual debris, to practise what the late French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault called an “archaeology” of ideas and practices. For this forgotten ancient “cosmopolitanism” – accommodating and understanding the others rather than denigrating and conquering them – was long buried in modern Chinese history, through the May Fourth Movement, Western liberalism and Chinese communism, according to which Confucianism was a fossilised ideology at best or the cause of paralysing state and societal corruption and stasis at worst.

That means Xiang has had to re-examine the classic Confucian and Daoist texts, and related literature throughout Chinese history, and reinterpret how these “cosmopolitan” ideas and cultural trends and norms were realised through actual political and social practices and “foreign” policies that recurred in different dynasties.

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Indeed, Xiang argues it is this very self-limitation – and not because of the lack of available early modern technologies – that differentiated the Chinese from racially driven Western imperialism, and which often actually imperilled what we today call “national security”. More often than not, for a supposed celestial empire, appeasement and accommodation of other powerful tribes and peoples were preferred over conflict and confrontation.

It’s probably better though, that you don’t set out to agree or disagree with her, but to find out what she has to say, because it touches on some of our most fundamental assumptions about self and difference, openness and violence, as they are deeply buried in racial relationships, then as now.

Xiang brings to her task a deep knowledge of, and engagement with, the Western and Chinese canons with awesome scholarship and linguistic skills. It’s less important whether she is right than that she offers a deeply informed perspective to confront our own often half-understood or misunderstood beliefs about ourselves and others.

In the worsening rivalry between China and the West that could bring on the third world war, changing our own perspectives may be a start, if it’s not already too late.