Volume 6.2 (Fall 2022)

The Complexities of Inheritance: Introduction Shadi Bartsch and Jue Hou

The six essays in this special issue focus on China’s use of antiquity, both its own and that of the West. They treat the various interpretations and appropriations of the “classics,” East and West, in China from the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976) to the present day. Of course, they cannot be representative of the topic in any comprehensive way, but all of them engage with appropriations of antiquity that are in some way relevant to China’s present. And in that focus, they represent a still nascent field. Other ways of engaging with antiquity have been more common; recent studies have focused on the reception of classical literature by Chinese literary authors of the twentieth century; comparative ancient philosophy; comparative ancient medicine and other cultural comparisons related to Greco-Roman and Chinese antiquity; and comparative history, whether of ancient empires or of China’s rise to power without an industrial revolution. While these studies show the growing interest in China as a sort of mirror to the West, or as a culture that is “good to think with,” they are largely scholarly and do not engage with contemporary China as an ideological and political entity.

However, there is a font of young Chinese professors teaching in the United States as well as a new generation of graduate students who want to study precisely the influence of the classics on contemporary Chinese political and philosophical thought. Leihua Weng (Kalamazoo College) has written “The Straussian Reception of Plato and Nationalism in China,” addressing the Straussian moment spearheaded by Liu Xiaofeng, and an essay by Yiqun Zhou (Stanford University) in the volume Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics treats the reception of the classics by Chinese reformists in the century before 1989.1 Another recent book, The Great Dragon Fantasy, by Wu Guanjun of East China Normal University, takes a chapter to investigate the position of another public intellectual whose work engages an entire gamut of the classics, West and East, but in a politicized way.2 Meanwhile, several senior scholars who have engaged with the Western classics continue to do so, some within the context of the discipline in university departments (e.g., Huang Yang in this volume), others in a more public way. Liu Xiaofeng (Renmin University) is reinvigorating the study of the Chinese classics by turning to a Confucian tradition (and Plato’s Republic) to endorse Mao and Xi Jinping as ideal philosopher-kings, while Gan Yang (Tsinghua University) is arguing for a united Confucian-Communist-market tradition that is to characterize modern China. It is to this emerging genre of how the Chinese are reading the classics today that this volume belongs as well.

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Hermeneutics and Politics: Going beyond the Book Zhang Longxi

The New Text school Gongyang Commentary on the Confucian classic the Spring and Autumn Annals operates on the principle that the classical text contains deep meanings that lie beyond the literal sense of the words and need to be discovered by reading between the lines. Such a principle of the hermeneutics of suspicion makes it possible for the interpreter to fit the text into any context or framework with political implications, and the Gongyang school commentaries have indeed often been used for a particular political purpose, with the general tendency of establishing the dichotomy of the Chinese and the barbarian in political Confucianism. Although the Gongyang commentaries did not have much influence for a very long time in Chinese history, it was revived during the last imperial dynasty of Qing and by the royalist and reformist Kang Youwei at the end of Qing. Some Chinese scholars have taken a new interest in the Gongyang commentary tradition for expressing their views on contemporary geopolitics, and therefore it is important to review the Gongyang Commentary and its hermeneutic principles to help us better understand the connection of hermeneutics with politics in contemporary scholarship in China.

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Which Tradition, Whose Authority? Quests and Tensions in Contemporary Chinese Reception of Greek Antiquity Yiqun Zhou

What is the mission of classical studies in present-day China? Is it a professional discipline governed by Western models and standards, or should it have its own agendas and methods? Should classical antiquity be studied first and foremost on its own terms, or does the most important value of such study lie in the lessons and tools it could provide for China’s persistent quest for an alternative modernity? This article explores the deep rift over these issues between two camps of Chinese scholars by examining an academic controversy that occurred in 2015. This dispute bears strong echoes of two much earlier conflicts: that between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz in the late nineteenth century, and that between Mao and the Comintern in the 1940s. The analysis of these intriguing historical parallels and the light they shed on the nature of the 2015 event reveals that the highly contested role of classical studies in China’s modernization process has taken on new significance in the twenty-first century.

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A Reinvention of Mao: Plato, Confucius, and Nationalism Leihua Weng

This article examines the leading Chinese Straussian Liu Xiaofeng’s talk on Mao in 2013 and his other related writings. It holds that, in his eclectic selections of various sources, Liu creates in Mao a hybrid philosophical and political figure as a “Confucian sagely ruler,” a “Platonic philosopher-king,” and a “revolutionary” and thus presents Mao as a timeless figure in a nationalist temporality, connecting the present and the remote past and also directing it toward a promised future. Nationalism is defined in this article as a set of discourses of searching or affirming a common descent through allegiance to the power of nation-state and advocating or implementing cultural and political homogeneity. It is discussed in this article as a neutral term based on culture, not on race.

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Rebirth of the Classical Scholarship: A Political Imagination, or a Historical Critique? Nie Minli

Classics has a long tradition whether in China or in the West. This article tries to analyze its history, its nature, and the ideological struggle within classics from the following three aspects: (1) classics is not necessarily conservative, and in essence it is the project of modernity; (2) the tradition of classics is permeated by a cultural imagination of the past, presuming some particular political lifestyle of the ancients with a kind of metaphysical and transcendental correctness; (3) German classics is a distinctive dual combination of historicism and romanticism, which produces profound influence on the humanities and academics in modern China. In the end, this article tries to argue that classics is a historical science and its methodology should be of historical critique.

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Thucydides in China Huang Yang

At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese historiography went through a revolution in that traditional historiography was replaced with nineteenth-century Western historiography with Rankean doctrines at its core. This set the stage for the reception of Thucydides, who was seen as the model of an objective historian. At the same time, appraisal of Thucydides was also dictated by the political ideology of the times. More recently, as China emerges as a global power, the importance of international relations has been elevated and Thucydides appeals to many because of his realpolitik interpretation of history popularized by Graham Allison’s theory of “Thucydides’s Trap.” At the same time, the extremely influential Chinese Straussians, mindful of China’s rise and contemplating a leading role for her, see in Thucydides the value of political education for the future elites. Underlining all these trends is a strong nationalist tone.

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Rupture, Revolution, and Rhetoric in the Disciplinary Formation of Classical Studies in Contemporary China Jue Hou

This article probes the various stakes of the rise of classical studies as a discipline in contemporary China, taking as a case in point Liu Xiaofeng’s shifting intellectual and political allegiances in his transition from a scholar of liberalist persuasion during the 1990s to a much decried advocate of the Mao cult over the past two decades. Outlining the reinvention of the “classics” as an inherently comparative new discipline that incorporates both Greek and Roman antiquity and ancient Chinese texts, the article argues that a consistent driving force behind the rise of classical scholarship is an attempt on the intellectuals’ part to amend cultural and intellectual ruptures that had ensued from political turmoil during the twentieth century from the modernizing May Fourth Movement to the Cultural Revolution. This categorical imperative of “making whole,” however, has assumed radically different forms, leading to the seeming discrepancy between Liu’s earlier “liberalist” stance to a more recent willingness to comply with the regime. In particular, through examining Liu Xiaofeng’s esoteric rhetoric in his reading of the Confucian scholar Xiong Shili, the article demonstrates that the will to cultural preservation that underlies Liu’s advocacy of classical scholarship eventually translates into an attempt to depoliticize philosophy and philology and hence a proneness to complicity with state power.

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