The ancient international system in East Asia differed from the existing worldwide international system originating in Europe in that the former was dominated by one great power while the latter saw a number of countries in a dominant position. The power domain supporting the Chinese empire was far more resourceful than all those in its surrounding countries put together, while none of the modern great powers can claim a perpetual capacity for sustaining an exclusive hegemony over the rest. In terms of its order-maintenance mechanism, the Pax Sinica has adopted a policy of appeasement based on strength called haltering-or-leading [Ji mi in Chinese], while both Pax Britannica and Pax Americana have advocated a balance of power. Consequently, ancient China developed some distinct diplomatic orientations such as Sino-centricism, culture-over-and -above-race, nonexpansiveness, noninterference in tributaries' internal affairs, thrust-and-withdraw, and cultural dispersiveness, which were little known by the parochial founding fathers of both the existing international system and the international Communist movement. Communist China in one way or another inherits these Confucian characteristics. In its conflicts with the United States in Korea and Indo-China, with India, the soviet Union, and Vietnam, China struck out first and then withdrew with no intention to seize others' territories. Even during the radical Maoist period (1936-1969), what China aspired to in its moral and material support for Communist insurgencies in the Third World was a recognition of Mao's spiritual leadership and an admiration for Chinese virtue rather than territorial expansion, Chinese racial or partisan dominance, or regional hegemony. On the other hand, there are some significant difference between the ancient and the modern Chinese states, such as the Maoist juxtaposition of a Communist party-to-party relationship-a relationship between non-state actors-with conventional state-to-state relationships, a Marxist-Leninist approach little known by ancient Chinese rulers, and the Dengist withdrawal from the concept of China as the centre of the world or of the world revolution which results from the pulling back from the aforementioned juxtaposition. However, the Dengist "One state, two systems" policy in essence is a refurbished version of the ancient haltering-or-leading approach designed in general terms to adjust relations between the centre and the peripheries in a political system. Through these observations, it is safe to infer that the historical process of use Chinese culture to remold alien ones [Yi Hua bian Yi in Chinese] has never been given up.