This is not a good book, and it's a shame, as Professor Bai is a well-respected Chinese philosopher published by a good press. Several major problems plague the text: (1) Bai has not kept up with the latest research on early China, so that his early China is barely distinguishable from late imperial China (the “oldest continuous civilization” narrative), in contrast to all of the newest studies (mostly based upon excavated materials) attesting the vast gulf that lay between the pre-Qin, Qin, and Han eras from those of Southern Song, in economics, social relations (including gender), educational policies and institutions, and court politics; (2) Bai apparently believes that the Chunqiu and Zhanguo periods (Spring and Fall Warring States—SAWS for short) were “modern states” “before their time” (16), in utter defiance of the insights gained from such classics as Patricia Crone's Pre-Industrial Societies (1989; repr. 2003) or M. I. Finley's The Ancient Economy (1973), which identify the main features of modernity as pervasive professional specialization, a highly integrated world economy, fervent patriotism devoted to the nation-state, and the burgeoning potential for the modern nation state to utilize totalitarian control mechanisms; and (3) Bai is wont to make simplistic or unsubstantiated claims that do not hold water, whether his subject is China or the United States. Thus, the author says little about modern Europe's path of development; he contrasts the United States with Japan or South Korea (which he calls inheritors of the “Confucian heritage”), in the context of talking of income inequality (70), but ignores Hong Kong (also an inheritor), which has one of the worst Gini-coefficients on the planet. His analysis of the four problems facing today's democracies (77–78) does not explain how the bicameral reforms he proposes would resolve those problems, nor does he see that many adherents of democracy have just given it “two cheers,” as did E. M. Forster. Nor does it explain why Wen Jiabao's family has acquired, under a “socialist” regime, some sixty million dollars. Corruption in China is much more rampant than in the United States which is certainly bad enough. Meanwhile, Bai's book displays not a little self-Orientalization, beginning with the title itself, since the phrase “Middle Kingdom,” an unfortunate rendering of the term Central States 中國, courts once closely allied with the Zhou kings, derives its current popular usage from the late-nineteenth-century missionary literature referring to the supposed insularity of China, as well as Korea; likewise, guojia 國家 doesn't mean “state-family” in early China, but “ruling house,” a term with utterly different connotations.

Regarding my first point, Bai seems unaware that no sectarian “schools” can be found in the pre-Qin period, making it extremely difficult to determine who is a classicist, a Ru 儒, even if a handful of dedicated followers of Kongzi/Confucius or “Confucians” (also Ru) can be named in addition to Kongzi himself. In general, Bai seems to overlook very important evolutions in specific vocabulary items, as when he states that Xunzi emphasized “laws” (63), rather than “models” and “institutions” (with all signified by the single term fa 法 in classical Chinese). Nor does Bai consider the findings of scholars who insist that “Daoism” doesn't begin until 150 CE in Sichuan, with the Celestial Masters religious organization, so that treatments of Laozi and Zhuangzi are best confined to discussions of the books bearing those masters' names, without a superimposed “ism.” In addition, Bai ties himself up in knots trying to explain “non-action” or wuwei 無為 and “naturalness,” when A. C. Graham decades ago already taught us that wuwei does not refer to the absence of action, but to “nonpurposive” (i.e., noninterfering) action and “naturalness” to “conformity with the Dao,” which usually comes only after much training has been undergone. It would have been interesting had Bai discussed the large areas of overlap that the Confucians/classicists share with Laozi and Zhuangzi. Several of the most famous Legalists weren't primarily interested in laws (114). Nor did Mohism “die” in early imperial China, judging from the extant sources; rather it colored the Confucian value of humaneness, according to Benjamin Wallacker's study. Xia is not a historical dynasty (17). Noble clans continued to exist well after Qin times (20). One could go on and on.

Bai intends to compare the main Chunqiu and Zhanguo thinkers with modern thinkers, starting with Kant and Hegel, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Dewey, on the presumption that both sets of thinkers, East and West, are “dealing with issues of modernity” (27). But Bai evidently equates the content of the Enlightenment thinkers with the contemporary thinkers who have borrowed their ideas. None of the Enlightenment figures are proponents of “short-term material interests,” in my view (66). Every once in a while, for good measure, Bai throws in Socrates or Plato (e.g., 74), usually with mixed results. This approach ignores the obvious fact that ideas gain currency within specific sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts, and consequently, superficial similarities among thinkers seldom yield truly comparable cases with thinkers so widely separated in time and space. Bai's thoroughly ahistorical account, of course, raises the question: Why, if China was already modern before unification in 221 BCE, did it fail to fully modernize under the early empires? Bai never explains this, and indeed, no answer can possibly come in response to such a misguided question, whether we look to Bai's account or to that of Victoria Tin-bor Hui, whose work has garnered favor among political scientists, if not historians. Nor has Bai figured out how to make his early texts address recent issues like “environmentalism, animal rights, and feminism,” although some efforts could be made in this direction via the antique concepts of “equity” and “dignity,” presumably. Bai owes his readers the basic information that his early texts were written by members of the governing elite for other members of the governing elite, so that the terms he translates as “every human being” and “worthy” do not anticipate universal mass education (61, 71) or social mobility, except within those ranks (chap. 3, 60ff.). Needless to say, it should be relatively easy to “extend” the early insights to larger populations, moving from a preoccupation with the “king's men” to “mankind” or “humanity” in general (both ren 人 or min 民), as has already been done in the case of the ancient Greeks' philosophical texts, but still, the original frames of reference deserve mention.

Designed to anchor his entire analysis, Bai's account of “Confucian” thought is deeply flawed. Bai is still pushing the old story about Han Wudi (r. 141–87 BCE), when scholars following Michael Loewe's lead have thoroughly discredited the tale dating the “victory of Confucianism” to the middle of the Western Han dynasty. He writes, to take another example, that “Confucians consider government a source of good,” but “potential” must modify the word “source” (67), lest readers think the government can do no wrong. He casts Kongzi and Kongzi's early self-identified followers as a coherent group dedicated to reverently upholding received customs, when nearly all the relevant sources emphasize that they, like the Mohists, were what we might call “countercultural” agitators, impatient with contemporary customs, that did not, in their view, correspond to the best and most efficacious practices associated with the ancient sage-kings of old. Bai dubs all Confucians “sincere” (86), which characterization most Confucian masters, including Yang Xiong, would have scoffed at, not to mention latter-day skeptics like Li Ling 李零, author of the vitriolic Sang jia gou 喪家狗 (Homeless dog). Curiously, Bai fails to celebrate many of the most startling achievements associated with Confucian learning. One thinks of Xunzi devising a highly complex pleasure theory replete with proposals for reformist institutions to induce career-minded men to undertake the arduous course of social (not “self-”) cultivation. Then, too, when Xunzi argued for orthopraxy (right [ritual] practice) rather than orthodoxy (right thought), that thinker went a long way to saving imperial China—before the late twentieth century, at least—from engaging in the bloody religious persecutions that were fairly routine in premodern and early modern Europe. Bai's account of Xunzi's theory of human nature, if it comes to that, is one-sided (“human beings are by nature bad”), when Xunzi's writings also posit a second nature that can be ceaselessly improved until the person becomes a sage.

When all is said and done, this book highlights the enormous chasm that currently exists between Euro-American and PRC scholarship on a great many issues relating to the early empires in China. Tying scholarship so tightly to contemporary politics does not make for careful analyses likely to ameliorate long-standing disputes between the two great continental powers, as is Bai's ostensible goal. Instead, this book will irritate knowledgeable readers while confirming others in their old prejudices.