1
Introduction: The Ancient Greeks in China?
There are, of course, no ancient Greeks in modern China — nor anywhere else, these
days. But over the past century, the philosophical and political texts of western antiquity,
especially those of ancient Athens, have sparked the interest of Chinese intellectuals, journalists,
reformers, and 21st-century nationalists. Works by Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and to a lesser
extent Cicero and Vergil, generally unknown to the Chinese during the millennia-long dynastic
system,1 have shown themselves “good to think with” in contemporary China, both at moments
of crisis and revolution, and at moments of increasing confidence and nationalism.2 Especially in
the last decades of the Qing dynasty and the early days of the short-lived new republic, these
“classics” were considered relevant to the development of China and were a source of public
debate in journal essays and newspaper articles. In the China of today, such texts are often
studied in academic settings, precisely where one might expect material about western antiquity
to seem most at home. However, for a number of prominent intellectuals and their interlocutors,
the arena remains a surprisingly public one, and in these circles ancient thinkers of the West
continue to be treated seriously as a source of reflection, however problematically, on China
herself. First treated as relevant to China’s problems of modernization, now more likely to be
invoked in discussions of what the Chinese feel (or claim to feel) is loss of moral compass of
contemporary Europe and the United States, the western classics continue to matter in China far
1
Chinese contact with some of these texts through the Jesuit mission will be discussed in Chapter One.
2
In this study, I use the unpopular binary terminology of “China and the West,” knowing full well that
this opposition is not only inadequate but also brings with it a load of political and ideological issues.
Unpacking that binary, however, would be a book-length study in itself. Consider, for example, the view
of Xiaomei Chen (1992, 688) that “the Chinese government uses the essentialization of the West as a
means for supporting a nationalism that effects the internal suppression of its own people.”
2
more than the Chinese classics matter, or have ever mattered to the West. Ironically enough, the
importance accorded these texts is all the more noteworthy in light of the growing feeling, in the
very cultures that “the classics” helped to shape, that the works of classical antiquity have little
to say to us, and may not even deserve a place in our educational system. As universities in the
United States are closing down their classics departments, judging them useless, or the province
of the elite, or worse still purveyors of imperialism, China is institutionalizing the study of these
texts at major universities—albeit slowly.
The reasons for this interest are embedded in Chinese culture as well as in the changing
circumstances of the country’s political situation. For one, the Chinese deeply respect their own
classics. The texts of the 2,500 year-old Confucian tradition (and, to a lesser extent, the Daoist
and Buddhist traditions) have not ceased to be studied and to shape Chinese culture and
thought. Although the Confucian belief system was denounced by Mao after the CCP’s rise to
power in 1949 (and suppressed in the following decades), it has since rebounded and is treated as
if it has considerable relevance for contemporary Chinese society. Some modern thinkers (most
prominently, Tu Wei-ming) are even suggesting that only a return to Confucian values will
rescue the modern Chinese state from its current malaise, as it floats somewhere between its
various manifestations as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a market economy, a major
political player on the world stage, and even a representation of the tired idea of “the other” vis-
à-vis the west. Today in China, ancient Chinese philosophy3 is cited in the rhetoric of
nationalism, and at the highest levels: Confucius’ legacy, for example, is deemed important
enough that President Xi Jinping regularly quotes him in his speeches. In 2015, 135 of Xi’s
3
Note, however, that the Chinese did not originally have a term that correlated with the western concept
of philosophy. No single Chinese term for philosophy. Eventually they fixed on zhexue, a gloss imported
from Japan in the late nineteenth century.
3
quotations from classical Chinese philosophy were even published in a book titled Xi Jinping’s
Classical Quotes (习近平用典 Xi Jinping Yong Dian) by the main Communist Party newspaper,
the People’s Daily (人民日报 Renmin Ribao).4 Most of Xi's quotes come from such Confucian
classics as the Analects of Confucius, The Book of Rites, Mencius, Xunzi, and The Book of
History, and they often invoke the duties of the benign monarch in governing the country. For
example, one citation Xi cites from the Analects reads, “When a prince’s personal conduct is
correct, his government is effective without the issuing of orders. If his personal conduct is not
correct, he may issue orders, but they will not be followed”5— presumably meant to reassure the
Chinese that however much power Xi may hold, the President’s authority is fundamentally
moral, not authoritarian.6
Western scholars, on the other hand, may have Platonic and Aristotelian principles
lurking deep in their marrow, but if so, they rarely reflect on it, and American leaders rarely
quote from such texts. Many who are not historians or classicists assume that the modern U.S.
has been shaped comparatively little by those ancient thinkers, and that their greatest moment of
influence in American history was during the colonists’ struggle for independence, when the
founding fathers looked to ancient Greece and Rome for guidance (or foil). James Madison, for
example, famously eschewed the model of Athenian direct democracy and argued in The
Federalist Papers No. 55 that “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian
assembly would still have been a mob.” Madison was wary of “the mob” because he viewed it as
too easily swayed by passion, a phenomenon antithetical to rational leadership (Plato, as we’ll
see, would agree!). But such moments of our direct public engagement with western antiquity
4
A second volume was published in 2018 with 148 more quotations from classical Chinese.
5
Analects, Chapter 13. Ref. http://classics.mit.edu/Confucius/analects.3.3.html
6
In fact the whole political system is most often represented as meritocratic in defenses directed at the
West.
4
have become scarcer, and even in academia are viewed warily as the source of racist or
reactionary values. In contrast to a mere century ago, no one needs an education in Classical
Greek and Latin to be considered well-educated,7 nor do all western universities offer degrees in
Classics. Even though we Europeans and Americans live in cultures born out of the Renaissance
and Enlightenment discovery of “ancient knowledge,” most of us are comparatively unengaged
with that same ancient knowledge. True, much of our art and architecture has looked back to that
period—but decreasingly so.
One reason for the Chinese interest in our classics, then, is a case of reasoning by
analogy. Looking to the continued vitality of ancient thought in Chinese culture, they assume
that the study of western antiquity is a (similarly) valuable source of information about the
contemporary West and that modern westerners are as much the product of that antiquity. Even
high school textbooks proclaim that that western civilization arose from ancient Athens.8 So
close is this connection deemed to be that the standard history textbook (普通高中课程标准实
验教科书 Putong Gaozhong Kecheng Biaozhun Shiyan Jiaokeshu)9 simply describes Ancient
Athens as the source of modern western democracy, a significantly misleading statement (2012,
24).10 This sentiment is as old as the writings of the Chinese thinker and reformer Liang Qichao a
century ago, who identified Ancient Greece (especially Athens) as the source of contemporary
western civilization in his 1902 article “On Ancient Greek Scholarship” (論希臘古代學術 Lun
7
I confess I have no idea if Boris Johnson’s Oxford Ph.D. was of use to his political ambition.
8
Unsurprisingly, the textbook also stresses aspects of classical Athenian values that resemble the values
of contemporary China: the control of “disrupters” of society by exile, the disappearance of class, the
government by and of the “proletariat,” and the importance of meritocracy (pp. 24-26).
9
Normal High School Curriculum Standardized Experimental Textbook
10
Changsha, 2012 (Vol. 1). At https://bp.pep.com.cn/jc/, a website by the People’s Education Press one
may find digital versions of all official textbooks from elementary school to high school. It includes the
Spring 2020 version of the History Vol. 1 textbook
[https://bp.pep.com.cn/ebook/gzkblsbxyi/mobile/index.html]. On p. 24, under Unit 2 (“The Political
Order of Ancient Greece and Rome”), there’s remains a similar quote: “The theory and application of
Athenian democracy laid the earliest foundation for the political order of the contemporary and modern
West” ( 雅典民主的理论与实践，为近现代西方政治制度奠定了最初的基础 ).
5
Xila Gudai Xueshu).11 This purported tie between classical antiquity and western modernity is
then seen as a useful tool for understanding the West today, which in turn is seen as a project in
China’s best interests. This belief that we are as fundamentally shaped by our classical antiquity
as the Chinese themselves (or that we have recently fallen away from this ideal) has guided the
Chinese engagement with the West from the beginning to the present day.12
A century ago such understanding was taken to be an important first step in the project of
emulating the West; these days the relationship (outside the limited circle of Chinese professors
interested in antiquity for its own sake) has proved to have the more aggressive goal of
outstripping the west. One might invoke, for example, the editorial statement of The Chinese
Journal of Classical Studies (古典研究 Gudian Yanjiu). Founded in 2010 by Liu Xiaofeng, a
leading public thinker and current conservative (i.e. on the Far Left) who has written on
Christianity, Leo Strauss, and the western classics, the journal proclaims on its editorial pages
that its mission is to “interpret the perennial classics of Chinese, western, Hebrew and Arabic
civilizations on the basis of concrete texts from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary
perspective.”13 The emphasis is actually on Greek philosophical texts; most of the articles
published in the 16 issues that have appeared to date are on the perennial classics of Western
civilization. But the journal’s raison d’être is specifically to use these classics to grasp the future
destiny of Chinese civilization, which has been thrown into chaos by modern western culture:
11
In simplified Chinese,论希腊古代学术.
12
To be sure, one might reasonably ask: To what extent can we make generalizations about Chinese
culture at large on the basis of a single journal which most Chinese have never heard of? This is a valid
question, and I hope the subsequent chapters of this book will show that this journal echoes a much wider
cultural sentiment about constructing China via some relationship to the west, whether emulative or
oppositional or, most likely, more complex than these binaries suggest.
13
The journal is now offline, but the text of this statement may be found in the prefatory material of Issue
1, No. 1.
6
Chinese civilization has a surefooted and temperate education [sic] tradition.
However, under the impact of the modern culture initiated by Western
civilization, this tradition has already been shattered to pieces. For over 100 years,
scholars of our country have faced the yet unfulfilled historical mission to
command a profound understanding of Western civilization and then to restore
the spirit of the traditional civilization of China… If we do not know the classical
civilization of the West, we are probably unable to have a comprehensive and
profound grasp of modern civilization of the West, and if we do not have a
thorough understanding of the whole pattern of civilization of the West, still, we
will not be able to fully and deeply understand and grasp the spiritual situation of
the Chinese civilization and its future destiny.
Here the ultimate reason for the study of ancient western texts (and, to some degree, Hebrew
ones) is to benefit China herself: the betterment of China herself.
This interest, as I have said, is barely older than a century, for while the dynastic system
was still in place and China had little contact with the outside world, the Chinese believed
themselves to be not only the geographically central “Middle Kingdom,”14 but also a culture
superior to that of other nations, in which they accordingly took little interest. The dynastic
system was supported by the so-called “Mandate of Heaven” ensuring that the emperor held his
position by divine fiat, and changes of dynasty simply meant that the Mandate had passed to a
new emperor “of all the lands under heaven” (tianxia). According to the historian Sima Qian (ca.
14
Which, of course remains the name by which the Chinese people and nation refer to themselves, 中国
(Zhongguo).
7
200 BC), “Wherever there is a sign of human presence, all are subjects of the emperor.”15
However, this longstanding belief in a culturally superior China crumpled over the second half of
the 19th century, as the Chinese experienced military defeat at the hands of the British and French
in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60. Subsequent attempts at internal reform contributed
to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, which was followed by a republic torn by political
chaos and rival warlords until the war against the Japanese in 1937–1945 and the subsequent
triumph of the CCP in 1949.
The first decades after the fall of the Qing at the hands of the west were rich in debate
about what a post-dynastic China should look like. In particular, the overthrow of the Russian
Empire in 1917 and a national sense of humiliation caused by China’s treatment by the European
powers who crafted the Versailles Treaty led many reformers and thinkers to look beyond China
for new ideas about citizenship, government, and national development. This sense that the
country could learn from the western powers was influential in producing the “May 4th
Movement” of 1919, whose members called for democratic values, a commitment to science,
and an end to patriarchal culture.16 We will take the May 4th movement as a point of origin for
the chapters of this book, but (as we shall see) the nature and content of Chinese readings of
ancient western texts have varied greatly since then, responding to the changing political and
social circumstances of China from the late early 20th century (late 19th century?) to the present
day. In fact, the very metamorphoses that took place during this reception make the history of
such encounters valuable: changes tell us about the issues, concerns, ideologies and forms of
15
Sima Qian, “Qin Shihuang benji” (Annals of the Qin Shihuang) in Shiji (Hong Kong: Zonghua shuju,
1969), 245.
16
Perhaps exaggerating the impact of the movement, in 1949 Mao Zedong wrote that the May 4th
Movement “marked a new stage in China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and
feudalism” and argued that “a powerful camp made its appearance in the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, a camp consisting of the working class, the student masses and the new national bourgeoisie.”
“The May Fourth Movement” (1939), Selected Works of Mao Zedong.
8
resistance — or appropriation — that such readers (from different historical contexts) brought to
the text. In short, Chinese responses to the political and philosophical texts of classical antiquity,
in all their varieties, afford us an illuminative lens into aspects of Chinese culture and politics at
the moment of the encounter, and they continue to do so today.
Before we can turn to our topic, however, we must ask: is there something to be learned
by and for the West from looking at the Chinese engagement with classical antiquity — with
texts, that is, that many westerners themselves feel have little relevance to everyday life in
modernity?17 Although I have explained why the Chinese have looked to such texts, I have yet to
suggest why the West might want to pay attention to the Chinese engagement with our classical
canon. After all, apart from scholarly interest in comparative reception studies, is there a point to
observing Chinese thinkers reading Plato or Aristotle? The answer, as I hope to show, is an
emphatic yes. For one, the Chinese encounter with the western classics remains a valuable, if
understudied, topic for mutual cultural understanding. But equally importantly, it functions as an
illuminative mirror held up to the assumptions of many westerners about themselves. Often these
assumptions are in fact so axiomatic to us that they do not feel like assumptions at all, but basic
truths: that philosophy is based upon rationally deductive principles, that democracy is the best
form of government, that the category of the citizen is or should be a universal one, that the
independent Cartesian ego stands at the foundation of selfhood (i.e. I am a bounded, complete
person whether or not I am embedded in a society) — and so forth. Many such beliefs derive
from different aspects of classical western culture.
17
Here and throughout this volume, I use modernity as a loose synonym for the past century rather than as
the technical term(s) it has become in the humanities and social sciences. See for example the entry in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, which points out s.v. that “To participate in modernity was to conceive of one's
society as engaging in organizational and knowledge advances that make one's immediate predecessors
appear antiquated or, at least, surpassed.
9
Indeed, these axioms feel natural because we have rarely paused to ask if there is
something unenlighteningly circular about interpreting the texts of classical antiquity while
having ourselves been shaped by a culture that grew out of classical antiquity (along with the
influence of Christianity). The ancient Greco-Roman world has shaped our language, law,
philosophy, politics, and much else, all the more so because the rediscovery of the western
classics in the 14th and 15th centuries led Renaissance humanists to believe that classical antiquity
represented a pinnacle of human excellence that had been disappeared after the fall of the Roman
Empire. Now Man himself was elevated by figures such as Pico della Mirandola to a creature of
dignity and worth rather than a wretch tainted by original sin and blasted by an all-powerful
God.18 The values I have referred to, and many more — values around logic, citizenship,
individualism, debate, self-examination, republicanism, democracy, and much else — could
roughly be said to date back to that re-encounter with antiquity. However, the encounter with
China shows us that these Enlightenment values are not universal, they are merely ours (and not
even consistently ours over the spread of time). Unless we are willing to be cultural chauvinists,
we must understand that while we come to western antiquity already primed to find many of its
categories and its discourses “right,” the Chinese do not share the same tendency. For this
reason, a study of the Chinese reception of these texts has the capacity to reveal our own
assumptions to ourselves.
This book follows an arc in time from the mid-16th century, when the Jesuits first brought
classical texts to China, to the events of the tumultuous 20th century—a time of reform,
revolution, and repression—and the present day. The contemporary situation in China is the
18
As in the well-known quotation from his Oration on the Dignity of Man: “But upon man, at the moment
of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life… And
if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he
will there, become one spirit with God…” Pico della Mirandola (1956, 8-9).
10
major concern of my study, for much of the other material has already been analyzed in depth by
scholars who have written on the Jesuit mission, the “New Culture Movement” of 1919 (新文化
运动, xin wenhua yundong), and the events in the ’80s that preceded the Tiananmen incident.19
However, because the influence of the western canon in the three decades since the crisis of 1989
cannot be understood without this historical and ideological context, the first chapter of this book
introduces the reader to these three “moments” in the history of reception. The Jesuit mission, of
course, was not at the Chinese court to proselytize on behalf of ancient philosophy, but much
ancient thought was woven unobtrusively into the Christian materials they used, even if they did
not acknowledge this before their Confucian audience. Later, after a period of several hundred
years, classical texts once more came to the surface in the writings of the would-be reformers of
the Qing dynasty at the turn of the 20th century, many of whom seized on western political theory
as relevant to the question of what should go into a reform of the dynastic system — or indeed,
into a post-Qing China? They turned to thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau20— and also
to Aristotle’s Politics, which was cited for the argument that human beings were unfulfilled
unless they were also citizens of a state and political actors--perhaps another way of emphasizing
responsibility as well as individualism. 21 Some thinkers even traced the triumph of democracy
and science in the West, the reformers’ twin desiderata, to causes as old as the culture of
classical Athens.
Ultimately the revolutionaries calling for total overthrow of the dynastic system
triumphed, bringing about the collapse of the dynasty in 1911. In its wake, came not a lasting
19
There is also fascinating comparative work being done with ancient Greece and ancient China by such
prominent scholars as Haun Saussy, Zhang Longxi, Walter Scheidel, Lisa Raphals, Steven Shankman,
Stephen Durrant, Zhou Yiqun, Alexander Beecroft, François Jullien, Wiebke Denecke, and the giant
figure of Sir G.E.R. Lloyd.
20
See Gu (2001) for the impact of Rousseau on the reformers’ understanding of democracy.
21
As Henry Zhao points out (communication of 9/9/2020), it is interesting that this Aristotelian tenet at
least partially concedes the more Confucian emphasis on general social embeddedness.
11
Chinese Republic on the mainland22 but several decades of chaos as local warlords squabbled for
power. From 1929 onwards, a fledgling Communist Party fought an intermittent civil war with
Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government. Although the two sides joined forces to fight the
Japanese in World War II, by 1949 Mao Zedong and his CCP had gained control of mainland
China and forced the ROC to retreat to Taiwan. The next decades, unsurprisingly, saw little
interpretive work on the western canon as “Mao Zedong Thought” swept through Chinse society.
Still, translations from the English continued to be published until the Cultural Revolution of
1966 – 1976.
After Mao’s death, as is well known, Deng Xiaoping gradually moved the country away
from Maoist principles, initiating the so-called “reform and opening-up of China” (gaige kaifang,
改革开放) and implementing market-economy reforms. In 1981 the CCP formally announced in
the Sixth Plenary Session of the Central Committee that the Cultural Revolution was
“responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the
country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”23 At the same time, Deng
introduced "socialism with Chinese characteristics” and opened China to foreign investment and
the global market. He was the Time Person of the Year twice, in 1978 and 1985. It was — or
seemed to be — a new era.
Under this new leadership, students and workers once again turned to many of the
demands of the original New Culture Movement. They called for freedom of the press,
democratic reform, and the rule of law. They were angry at corruption within the Party, the
unfair distribution of economic incentives, inflation, restrictions on political participation, and
22
Taiwan, of course, is now known as the “Republic of China.”
23
“Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s
Republic of China,” adopted by the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China on June 27, 1981. Resolution on CPC History (1949–81). (Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 1981). p. 32.
12
the limited and nepotistic job market. Now, not only western writings but even a popular TV
documentary supported the idea that the West had left China in its wake. The death of a top Party
official sympathetic to the movement, Hu Yaobang II (胡耀邦), in April 1989 24 led to calls for a
revival of his legacy, and thousands of students began to gather at Tiananmen Square to make
public their demands. They were obdurate, not even vacating the square for a state visit by
Gorbachev. Finally, Deng authorized a martial crackdown that lead to the events now simply
known as “Tiananmen Square,” even though most of the deaths occurred outside of the square,
in the west of the city. The leaders of the protests and the most conspicuous pro-democracy
activists were exiled or imprisoned; those charged with violent crimes were even executed.25
Silence now descended upon students, protestors, intellectuals and professors. By the time their
voices — and their comments on the texts of classical antiquity — slowly began to be heard
again, there had been a sea of change in what prominent intellectuals, some at major universities,
had to say. That sea change is one of the topics of this book.
Of course, it would be folly to claim that I could actually capture everything being done
with the Classics in China; I am not even looking at the treatment of ancient literary works, such
as Greek drama. Nor do I claim there exists (or did exist) a single point of view or one standard
interpretive technique with which Chinese readers approach the western classics. At the very
least, there are several genres of audience that we could delineate: general university students,
professors specializing in philosophy or history (to the best of my knowledge, there are no
Departments of Western Classics in China to this day), the general literate newspaper-reading
public, and a small group of widely-heard intellectuals, themselves professors, who hope to have
some effect upon the government. It is the last group that has the loudest voice and the most
24
Hu, the General Secretary of the CCP from 1980 to 1987, was handpicked by Deng to succeed him. His
support for this and earlier student movements, however, led to his removal from power.
25
Estimates of the death toll from martial law generally range from 1000 – 3000.
13
radical approach to the work of interpretation, and they are unusual; on university campuses,
most academics study and teach these western texts much as their peers do in Europe or the
United States, focusing more on mastering the languages and the history than on obvious
appropriation of particular texts. I am interested in all these audiences, but for obvious reasons
the scholars who address themselves to the party at the public are the most relevant to this
project: they are the ones who publish in newspapers, speak on television, debate each other
publicly, and hope to create an audience and a following—and perhaps even to gain the
favorable attention of Xi himself. They are the most visible and influential of the Chinese who
are reading classical texts. Some of them have even flipflopped from their views of the 80s to
new pro-government perspectives. For all these reasons, they are a fascinating object of study.26
As Fredrik Fällman puts it, “What topics are discussed in Chinese academia reflect the state and
the trends of the country as much as reports on economy and politics.”27
Instead of an impossibly all-encompassing book on the twists and turns in classical
reception over the past quarter-century in China, I have chosen to present a set of focused studies
to follow the introductory material of Chapter One, “Jesuits and Visionaries.” These case studies
are broadly representative of trends in contemporary China, but they involve various groups of
people whose views are not necessarily in harmony with one another. Chapter Two, for
example, will show us a number of different ways of “dealing” with the Western classics. Still,
what all these scholars generally share is a belief in the validity of “ancient values,” whether
26
How to even ensure that the studies I cite are in some way representative of broader sentiments than
those of the authors in question? In my research I found that general patterns emerged even at random,
but I also took pains to select from the most-cited articles on the Chinese database CNKI, both pre- and
post- June 1989, for many of the topics I discuss. In the case of the most visible intellectuals and
influential intellectuals, their work is discussed in public media as well. I also simply searched for the
most relevant blogs and news pieces online in Mandarin, using Google. There is much out there that is
inaccessible to a non-speaker of Chinese, which is one of the reasons this study demands learning that
very difficult language.
27
Fällman (2014, 66)
14
Confucian or Platonic. Some consider it the outcome of our divergence from antiquity that such
problematic ideologies as “democracy” (which Plato hated, incidentally) are now valued in the
West. It is an intensely political debate, for it is seen as providing an answer to the global
question of whether the Chinese or the Americans now deserve to represent the acme of moral
values in their domestic and foreign policy. It also points to the reason for the recent (but now
quiescent) popularity of Leo Strauss in certain Chinese academic circles, a topic to be explored
in Chapter Five.
Chapter Three continues this angle with a close study of the reception, both preceding
and after the Tiananmen incident, of a fraught and famous section of Plato’s Republic: the
picture of the “ideal polis” painted by Socrates (ironically? earnestly? allegorically?) for his elite
audience in the text. This proposed city-state, Kallipolis, has often deeply disturbed modern
scholars of Plato for its eugenic vision of an ideal society in which people are ranked according
to birth.28 Are you born gold, silver, or bronze? Like a caste system, this will determine your
fate. The (golden) rulers of this ideal city are those who engage in the greatest degree of rational
thought of all—they are so rational, in fact, that they realize this world is an illusion, and that
only mathematics and concepts (what Plato calls the Forms) are really real. Chinese reactions to
Kallipolis are fascinating allusive: for example, if you praise your own system by claiming you
are ruled by the equivalent of a philosopher-king, it’s difficult for the reader to gauge whether
that is actually praise or rather critique, all depending on the impossible to assess goal of the
author. Reader: it’s complex.
The next chapter, appropriately enough, focuses on the troubled reception of “Western
rationality,” which (in a certain form) is associated by many Chinese intellectuals to have a
negative impact on the contemporary western world. The issue had its original roots in
28
The chance of rising or falling through the three “natural classes” are extremely small.
15
approaches to the comparative rationality of eastern and western philosophy (the difficulty of
defining the term “rationality” being part of the problem). Since then, however, it has turned out
to be not so much a sophisticated inquiry into what both cultures even mean by the term (though
such studies do exist),29 but into an ideological weapon, a club with which the various parties
involved can bludgeon each other. Most of us would be surprised to hear that rationality has
been the ruin of the west—at least a certain kind of rationality), and certainly all of us who read
Plato would be startled to hear that his emphasis on the value of rationality was the butterfly’s
wing that led to the Holocaust.
Chapter Five, on the recent popularity of the conservative political thinker Leo Strauss in
China, explores just what this popularity means. At least part of the answer has to do with
Strauss’s own views on the value of classical texts, which gives them a political and
philosophical importance essentially in eternum that could not be found in the modern world. As
Btz in SEP so well puts it, Strauss was deeply concerned with “the modern philosophical
grounds for political and moral normativity as well as about the philosophical, theological, and
political consequences of what he took to be modern philosophy’s overinflated claims for the
self-sufficiency of reason.” His answer lay in the tenets of ancient philosophy, in pitting
absolute moral values and Plato against (say) Hobbes and historical relativism. Such answers
were to be found in philosophers such as Maimonides and Spinoza as well, especially when read
by Strauss: for Strauss held that one could read between the lines of any philosopher wary about
offending those in power, and thereby find two often contradictory meanings in the text. The
“apparent” meaning allowed the majority of readers to receive one message while the second
could only be discovered by a small majority of the philosophical elite—a procedure Strauss
described as “esoteric reading.” Through ingenious interpretations, the Chinese Straussians
29
See, e.g., Ames (1992), Xiaomang (2011), Gernet (2010), Lloyd (2017), Reding (2004)
16
claim to find secret meanings in a number of classical texts, secret meanings which aim to be at
least partly consonant with Strauss’s own views. I wonder if it might be too cynical to say that
esoteric reading allows the most violent forms of appropriation of western texts, inasmuch as it
gives the interpreter latitude to do pretty much do what he or she wants.
The book ends with a discussion of the continuing florescence of Confucian-based
nationalism over the past 15 years. This is not only a far cry from the status of Confucian texts in
the earlier days of the CCP, but it also represents an internal, not foreign, intellectual and ethical
history. It is difficult to extract exactly what might suit the current government from these texts,
but many Chinese intellectuals are certainly giving it a go, with some going so far as to link
Confucianism to ecology and sustainability. Less obviously politically, comparisons of Socrates
and Confucius in academic conferences and publications have moved away from declaring the
two great thinkers equal or in agreement, and more in the direction of showing why Plato’s
teacher was simply deficient in a number of ways not shared by the Chinese sage. Socrates’
agonistic relationship with many of his interlocutors bears little similarity to the teaching style of
the Analects, in which Confucius generally announces his moral views. A preference for one
style or another is deeply shaded by culture. It is also striking that Confucius claimed to be
upholding extant cultural ideals while Socrates seems to have spent more time seeking their
destruction.30 Perhaps this is why Confucius can come to the rescue of the government in a way
that Socrates never would (for all his adherence to its laws).
30
Such scenarios give us dangerous room for generalizations that may nonetheless contain a shred of
truth. For example, the Chinese verb xue, to learn, originally meant to copy or imitate, a way of doing
philosophy that is much emphasized in the Analects; as Tseng-tzu says in Analects 1.4, “Every day I
examine myself ... [as to] whether I have repeated again and again and practiced the instructions of my
teacher faithful; and whether I have not repeated again and again and practiced the instructions of my
teacher."
17
In closing this introduction, I would like to remind readers why a topic that seems
esoteric is actually of broad importance. The Chinese reception of particular western classics is
valuable, because it tells us something about the issues, concerns, ideologies and forms of
resistance—or appropriation—that different readers at different times have brought to the text.
Chinese responses to the political and philosophical texts of classical antiquity, in all their
variety, afford us an illuminative lens into aspects of Chinese culture and politics at the moment
of the encounter, and they continue to do so today. Indeed, a war is being waged right now in
Chinese academic circles on the very question of what to do with the western Classics. A 2015
interview with 10 foreign-trained Chinese classicists showcased their desire for the study of
these texts to be formally institutionalized in university departments.31 The interviewees called
for strict language training and exposure to Western scholarship. They would like to collaborate
with contemporary Western classicists. And they spoke also of their distance from other, more
prominent figures who have been explicit about their pro-Chinese agenda, such as Gan Yang and
Liu Xiaofeng. The president of the Chinese Comparative Classical Studies Association (who?)
has openly echoed the sentiment of the editorial pages of the journal Gudian Yanjiu: that
ultimately the study of the western classics must be to the greater good of China, even if what
that study does is merely show the importance of native, not foreign, intellectual traditions.
This is, in the end, a bold compliment: for there is no parallel of scholars on the Western
side delving diligently into Confucian texts as a way of understanding ourselves by
31
On this interview, see Zhou Yiqun, “Which Tradition, Whose Authority? Quests and Tensions in
Contemporary Chinese Reception of Greek Antiquity”, forthcoming in Shadi Bartsch and Jue Hou eds.,
Complexities of Inheritance: The Ancient Greeks in Modern China. As Zhou points out, it was first
published February 6, 2015 in Wenhui xueren as “Various Controversies in Classical Studies in China”
(Yu Ying, “Gudianxue zai Zhongguo de shishi feifei,” Wenhui xueren) but reprinted the next day in
2.7.15 Pengpai xinwen, an important web-based news media site, with the new title, “Classical Studies is
Not the Way Liu Xiaofeng and his Associates Do It” (Gudianxue bushi Liu Xiaofeng tamen gaode
natao,” 古典学不是刘小枫他们搞的那套 Pengpai xinwen, February 7, 2015. One professor, Zhang
Wei, even said "Westerners do not speak of usefulness, their scientific spirit is to investigate the truth of
nature itself. This belief comes from the Greeks."
18
understanding others to make relevant life in the 21st century. Even specialized American and
European classicists would find such a goal odd, and I have never heard them express interest in
Chinese scholarship on the classics, whether that scholarship takes the form specialized
philology or overtly political gambits. This is a pity; we have much to learn from all the Chinese
interpretations of our own intellectual traditions, whether they seem unbiased or not. I must end
this introduction with an apology, then, to Chinese scholars who do seriously philological and
historical work that should be read in all Classics departments,32 because this book is not about
them. The book is about the fewer, but more prominent Chinese classicists who form the
“squeaky wheel” of Classics interpretation in China: the ones who write in the newspapers, the
ones who tackle issues such as nationalism, the ones who issue the most translations, the ones
students want to follow. And the book is also about public opinion, editorials, and ideology,
about blogs and Party statements. Apologies, then, to my colleagues Huang Yang, Nie Minli,
Gao Fengfeng, Weng Leihua, Cheng Jingling, Zhang Longxi, Jiyuan Yu, Yichun Zhou, and
many others who have devoted themselves to the rigorous study of classical antiquity for its own
sake.
Finally, a note of humility. Although I spent much of my childhood in Asia, my
education has largely taken place in Europe and the United States, and I have been shaped into a
creature of those intellectual and cultural traditions. And although I have studied Mandarin for
eight years (including at a Chinese university), paid many visits to different parts of China, and
read much about the Chinese 20th century, I will never be culturally Chinese or fully understand
the myriad complex ways in which their present is informed by their past. This book is an effort
by a British-American classicist to see how the texts I study have fared in a very different
32
A random example: Huang Yang (2009), a study of the romanticizing associated with the term
“Hellenism” in Europe in the 19th century.
19
culture. Let me apologize in advance: for I will make mistakes, I will overemphasize some things
and underemphasize others, I will end up generalizing when I should not do so. Many pitfalls
await me—and I have already irked some of the scholars I write about. 33 One Chinese graduate
student went so far as to inform me that I was well-known in China, but mostly because a
number of scholars dislike my work. I hope this book will not earn me the same result in the
English-speaking world.
33
See Gan Yang’s 2019 interview at https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_5384161.
