II. Inventing a political metaphor: mishellenism and the 1941 party purge

‘Platonic men freed from the caves of Pao An want to spend their lives in the daylight, to hear the sound of industry borne on the wind,’ sings Mao in John Adams’ opera Nixon in China. Pao An was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) headquarters in the mid-1930s, where American journalist Edgar Snow famously visited Mao. The aria, titled ‘We No Longer Need Confucius’, draws attention to the CCP’s subversion of the traditional dynastic system and cultural heritage. The lyrics reflect the literary imagination of librettist Alice Goodman: by juxtaposing the Platonic cave with modern industrial civilization, she insightfully captures the intellectual undercurrents of Mao’s era and key issues in modern Chinese history. One such issue is the view that Graeco-Roman civilizations serve as the precursors to modern Europe and America, suggesting that ‘Western’ modernity is a descendant of classical antiquity. The historical Mao referred to ancient Greece as the harbinger of Euro-American civilization during his meeting with Greek ambassadors in 1964. He also acknowledged the pivotal roles of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the history of philosophy.Footnote ⁴ In his 1949 New Year’s message, ‘Carry the Revolution through to the End!’, Mao alluded to Aesop’s fable of ‘The Farmer and the Viper’ and likened anti-communist figures to ‘snake-like scoundrels’ unworthy of kindness or compassion.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, it makes sense that Mao did not make a positive reference to Plato during Nixon’s 1972 visit if we consider the historical facts about him and the circumstances that shaped his ideology. In the early 1940s, Mao had criticized his party rivals as ‘philhellenic’, a label that came to be stigmatized in CCP discourse and continues to shape contemporary political rhetoric.

To put Mao’s mishellenism in context, we need to recall the events leading up to it. On 19 May 1941, shortly before the Yan’an Rectification Movement (1942–1945) arose, Mao delivered the keynote speech ‘Reform Our Study’ at a meeting. He pointed out the sectarianism and dogmatism within the party and expressed concerns about the intellectual tendency to ‘Hellenize’ China:

Elsewhere Mao also considered many Chinese historians specializing in ‘their own ancestors’ to be ‘muddle-headed’, especially those serving the then-ruling Kuomintang government.Footnote ⁷ But Mao had something other than scholarship in mind. He thus polemically accused his party rivals who attended the meeting, particularly Wang Ming of the pro-Soviet faction, of using Russian dogmatism or ‘Russianization’ to poison young minds, and consolidated his own leadership of the party under the pretext of the Sinification of Marxism, which insists on preserving the uniqueness of local elements, such as concentrating on China’s rural areas to encircle the cities and undertake radical agrarian revolutions. For the pro-Soviet faction, this contradicted the Marxian theories and had contributed to the establishment of a mere ‘Peasants’ Party’, rather than one for the working class.Footnote ⁸ The consequences of the speech were readily apparent. It dealt a major blow to Wang, who eventually chose a kind of voluntary exile in Moscow after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In Fifty Years of the CCP, Wang provided accounts missing in the party discourse and ‘orthodox’ historiography. In this self-defence, Wang referred to the Greek classics and Shakespeare to challenge Mao’s literary and artistic perspectives. He aimed to refute the notion of economism or vulgar Marxism, which claims that literary and artistic works in a modern society with higher productivity are inherently superior to those of earlier eras like the Classical or Elizabethan.Footnote ⁹ But this fact alone does not allow us to characterize Wang as a philhellene. According to his memoirs, Mao confronted him in August 1943 and admitted that ‘constantly commending Hellas’ had indeed been directed against him:

It can be seen that Mao’s metaphor was targeted not so much at classical reception as at the dogmatic application of ‘Russified Marxism-Leninism’ to China proper, and he generally bracketed the ‘Russified’ modernization in the category of ‘Western’ civilization that primarily includes modern Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, since the CCP was not fully established in the early 1940s and was heavily dependent on Soviet support, he had to be careful not to weaken the pro-Soviet faction by anything more than innuendo. Mao’s tricky relationship with Stalin and Moscow dated back to the 1920s. Before the Rectification, he had almost seized control of the military command and personnel arrangement of the party, but the pro-Soviet faction still exerted influence in the ideological domain, especially the intellectual and literary circles in Yan’an. This forced Mao to back down. As early as 1928, Wang had spread the idea at Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University that ‘Marxism-Leninism cannot come out of gullies.’Footnote ¹¹ While Wang was a talented public speaker and had a good command of Russian, Mao struggled to speak fluent Mandarin due to his pronounced accent. When he was an assistant librarian at Peking University, Mao recalled, professors and students had often lacked the patience to listen to his ‘southern dialect’.Footnote ¹² This situation could be compared to Moscow as a metropolis and Yan’an as its rural province.

Wang, still the head of the Women’s University of China in Yan’an, remained popular among bourgeois intellectuals and young students. His pamphlet The Struggle for a More Bolshevikized CCP gained widespread circulation and he himself regarded it as a significant contribution to the party. In March 1940, assured of Stalin’s backing, Wang reprinted the pamphlet in an attempt to make a comeback in the ideological domain by promoting the line of Russianization. To counter Wang’s attack, Mao began editing the Secret Party Documents since the Sixth National Party Congress, which collected historical documents on the ‘Leftist’ and ‘Rightist’ dogmatism of Wang and other pro-Soviet members since 1928. It consisted of 519 articles of about 2.8 million words (i.e. Chinese characters), but contained censorship, interpolation and even falsification to serve Mao’s purposes. This is not only political idealism and calculation, but also personal vengeance disguised as a party purge. Seen in this light, Mao’s critique of ‘Hellenization-Westernization-Russianization’ was the result of prolonged struggles and accumulated grievances, shaped by both the idealism of revolutionary aspirations and political ambitions, as well as personal emotions. Hu Qiaomu, a principal secretary of Mao, described his works during this period as ‘wrathful compositions’ and ‘a huge eruption of his long-term dissatisfaction with the past.’Footnote ¹³

Through his own ideological lens, Mao urged Chinese intellectuals and party members to reform ‘their’ studies within the framework of the Sinification of Marxism. By inventing political metaphors to stir debates over the interpretive authority of ideology, Mao strategically sought to reinforce party unity, cultivate a strong sense of national identity and even provoke xenophobic sentiments in response to the dynamics of the power struggle. But he deftly channelled his personal enmity and lust for power into the debate over ‘Hellenization-Westernization-Russianization versus Sinification’. Through metaphors, metonyms and proxy expressions, he obscured his true intent to monopolize power in the early stages, eventually shaping this ideological discourse into a political movement that enabled his rise to absolute authority. For this reason, there is a strong consensus among scholars specializing in modern China studies that the Yan’an Rectification Movement established a precedent for later mass movements, where the use of metaphor and stigmatization played a crucial role. They tend to interpret Mao’s speech as a prelude to the Rectification, ‘constantly commending Hellas’, ‘tales of ancient Greece and other foreign lands’, ‘dogmas’ and ‘gramophones’ being neologisms designed to stimulate national identity and collective prejudice against foreign cultures. In other words, the metaphorical expressions served as a trademark strategy of Mao to advance his partisan goals.Footnote ¹⁴

In terms of power struggle and ideological interpretation, ‘Reform Our Study’ was influenced by the 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. In the closing remark of the speech, Mao called on all party members to adopt the textbook as the principal material for studying Marxism-Leninism.Footnote ¹⁵ It was not only a bedrock of Stalinist ideology but also a guide to discipline and orthodoxy that shaped how Mao envisioned political indoctrination within the CCP. There is no evidence that Mao ever developed a keen interest in the Graeco-Roman world that features in the History and other Marxian historiographies of pre-capitalist societies, especially as an example of the slave mode of production within the Stalinist division of human history into five stages.Footnote ¹⁶ Mao seems to have bypassed this intellectual trajectory. An appraisal of The Struggle for a More Bolshevikized CCP and the Secret Party Documents also reveals no ‘Hellenized’ or ‘philhellenic’ material in the party discourse from 1928 to 1941, apart from a brief report on the mass strikes in modern Greece. The same holds true for A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, which only mentions Ronald Scobie and the British forces in Greece during the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁷ Did Mao’s metaphor stem from an implicit critique of intellectual dependency on foreign frameworks, or was it a rhetorical device aimed at cementing ideological purity and rejecting indiscriminate borrowing from external traditions? By singling out ‘Hellas’ and coupling it with dogmatic mimicry, he reframed philhellenism as a symbol of political detachment and theoretical stagnation. This raises the question: aside from political concerns, what intellectual background led Mao to use this expression in parallel with ‘tales of ancient Greece and other foreign lands’, ‘dogmas’ and ‘gramophones’?

III. The intellectual context of Chinese philhellenism: from Mencius to Liang Qichao

The phrase ‘constantly commending something or someone’ can be traced back to classical Chinese literature. As early as the fourth-century BC Mencius, it was used to convey the Confucian thinker’s nostalgia for legendary sovereigns and idealistic societies. ‘Mencius spoke about human nature being good, constantly commending Emperors Yao and Shun.’Footnote ¹⁸ The Mencius is a classic celebrated for its literary eloquence and style, and thanks to the commentary by the inimitable Confucian Zhu Xi, it became a standard textbook in the old-style private schools, where Mao received his early education. Given that Mao visited Mencius’ birthplace during his grand tour in the 1920s and frequently referred to the Mencius in his writings, we might plausibly assume that the phrase was borrowed from this passage.Footnote ¹⁹

But Mao was no slavish imitator. In using ‘Hellas’ (Xila), he showed a preference for a rather modern phonetic rendering, which appeared much later than the Mencius. The stylistic hybridity gives the impression of a ‘half-literate’ expression when one reads ‘constantly commending’ together with ‘Hellas’. Since Mao was born in 1893, we can rule out the possibility that Wu Mi and the Critical Review Group, who made extensive use of Graeco-Roman material in the 1920s and 1930s, had a decisive influence on the political metaphor. Nor did the textbooks on high school-level European history during the Republican Era (1912–1949), since the national curriculum was not issued until 1913, by which time Mao was already an adult, and most of the textbooks dealt with the Graeco-Roman world as a whole.Footnote ²⁰ We can trace Mao’s preoccupation with ancient Greece to Liang Qichao, a philhellenic figure who towered above his contemporaries and whom Mao often claimed to have admired in his early years. Known for his crucial role in the reform movements and the ‘half-literate’ journalist style, which was widely adopted in the Journal of the New Citizen, Liang interspersed colloquialisms and contemporary issues with classical language to draw a wider audience, and was regarded as a cultural icon by the young Mao. In his interview with Edgar Snow, Mao recalled that in middle school he had read the tales of ancient Greece and considered Liang a model for his own literary practice.Footnote ²¹ In the 1920 treatise Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period, Liang described his ‘new style’ as a liberation from classical Chinese: ‘The elders hated it and maliciously described it as something like a wild beast … For the readers, this in itself has a special magical power.’Footnote ²² As an imitator, Mao Zedong faced a similar experience, enduring the disdain of his elders:

Liang published many articles on ancient Greece in the Journal of the New Citizen. In the 1902 essay ‘Major Trends in the Development of Western Scholarship’, he used the pen name ‘New Citizen of China’ and wrote that Greece was the cultural matrix of modern Europe:

In the 1902 essay ‘New Historiography’, he described Europe as a ‘projection’ of Greece and Greece as a ‘microcosm’ of Europe.Footnote ²⁵

Contact between China and the Mediterranean world dates back to the missions of Zhang Qian and Gan Ying to the so-called ‘Western Regions’. As early as the reign of Mithridates II in the second century BC, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty sent envoys to Parthia. Diplomatic exchanges between the two political entities continued during the reign of Pacorus II (ca. 78–110). By the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties, the influx of Greek works brought by Jesuits for the purposes of evangelization grew significantly. However, it was not until the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898 that philhellenism became a distinctive phenomenon among the governing elites and gentleman scholars. Following the 1885 Chinese adaptation of Charles Fyffe’s History of Greece (1869) by Joseph Edkins, specialized translations and scholarly introductions to Greek civilization began to spread widely. Renowned Confucian scholar Wang Shunan authored Notes on Greek Studies in four books (1901) and Greek Annals in eight books (1904). Liang’s mentor, Kang Youwei, also attempted Sino-Greek comparisons in the Journal of Irrepressible Sentiments, which he founded in 1913.Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, their influence never surpassed that of Liang. In 1890, while preparing for the imperial examinations in Beijing, Liang discovered a chapter about ‘Hellas in Europe’ in Xu Jiyu’s Concise Records of the World (1849).Footnote ²⁷ In 1897, when drafting the ‘Practical Affairs’ section of the ‘Hunan Academy Curriculum’, he explicitly acknowledged the historical significance of Greece as a source of reflection for China:

In other words, ‘whenever discussing an issue or matter, one must compare both ancient and modern times to explore their successes and failures, and further use comparisons to prove the argument.’Footnote ²⁹ The idea of ‘cherishing the old to acquire the new’ was already reflected in The Analects 2.11. According to Confucian doctrine, one who does so is truly worthy of being a role model. With this approach, Liang adopted Kang Youwei’s method and developed another form of ‘using the ancient to reform the present government’ (tuogu gaizhi), drawing on both classical antiquity and Euro-American modernity.Footnote ³⁰

Given the above, 1902 can be considered a landmark for philhellenism in China. In that year, the exiled Liang translated Lord Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ into Chinese for the first time, embedding it in his utopian political novel The Future of New China.Footnote ³¹ In the Euro-American context, philhellenism and Hellenomania often took the form of (neo)classicism or support for Greek independence from Ottoman rule.Footnote ³² Similarly, Liang’s novel is set against the backdrop of the Russian occupation of Port Arthur (modern-day Lyushunkou, China). He had a fictional character recite Byron’s poem, using the Greek independence movement as a metaphor for the revival of China, which was then a colonized and declining empire. Liang’s effort elevated ‘The Isles of Greece’ to become the sole Western poem widely embraced at the time. Later, figures like Hu Shi reworked and expanded upon this initial translation, creating a significant cultural phenomenon.Footnote ³³ Just so, Liang may have influenced Mao on the ‘Hellas’ theme as he inspired the Greek craze in China. In the Journal of the New Citizen that same year, he published ‘Short Notes on Athens’ and ‘Short Notes on Sparta’. In the former essay, Liang described modern Europe as the successor of ancient Greece, characterized the Athenian Empire as the prototype of modern Britain and praised Western civilization as a guide for China. He used the expression ‘speaking highly of Hellas’ (zeze dao Xila), which is fairly close to ‘constantly commending Hellas’:

Liang’s knowledge of foreign languages was modest, and many of his articles relied on Chinese and Japanese translations.Footnote ³⁵ His work often reflected second-hand interpretations and revealed traces of nationalism and cultural determinism. The collectivist perspective prioritized national independence over individual freedom. This ‘classical’, if not Athenocentric, view of liberty was common among many in developing countries, where individual freedoms were subordinated to the pursuit of national sovereignty.Footnote ³⁶ Even today, for many in China, the Olympic Games remain a tool for the rejuvenation of a postcolonial nation-state through international sports.Footnote ³⁷ The concept of cultural determinism, too, is so pervasive that many societies have attributed their political and economic systems to their unique ideas and customs. In the context of classical reception in China, it suggests a connection between classical antiquity and ‘Western’ modernity, whether viewed positively (the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) or negatively (the Platonic sōphronistērion and the Holocaust). In other words, the Greek classics are important for Europeans and Americans as significant formative elements in their past. The overarching aim is to demonstrate how ‘Western’ civilization has evolved as a continuous entity, rather than being fragmented by historical disruptions.Footnote ³⁸ But Liang pioneered a novel approach: understanding the ‘other’ to enrich the ‘self’ and leveraging the past to illuminate the present. Stylistically, the expression ‘speaking highly of Hellas’ bears no resemblance to the Mencius, but they share a core value in using the past to address the needs of the present. The key difference lies in their focus: while Mencius and later generations of Confucians were fixated on the local, Chinese past, Liang broadened his perspective to encompass foreign, Western history. By adopting the idea of classical antiquity as the foundation of Euro-American modernity, he used ancient Greece as a resource in his attempts to transform the Chinese people from ‘subjects of the emperor’ into ‘citizens of a nation’, thereby ushering in the rise of philhellenism.

Liang’s fascination with Greece never progressed to rigorous theoretical inquiry or practical political application, and The Future of New China remained an unfinished draft. In an era where revolution overshadowed enlightenment, Mao soon abandoned his early fascination with this youthful idol, whom he had once considered the best candidate for China’s foreign minister.Footnote ³⁹ Later, in 1958, in a meeting with subordinates Mao delivered his final verdict, saying that Liang’s life was ‘something of an anticlimax’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The expression he used translates literally as ‘a tiger’s head with a snake’s tail’ and he also used it to caution against giving up in party affairs such as struggles against corruption. Paired with the phrase ‘lost his unswerving determination to reform’, it suggests that in Mao’s view, despite styling himself a ‘New Citizen’ and ‘New Historian’, Liang fell short and was not as revolutionary as he should have been. In a letter home in 1927, Liang Qichao even voiced scepticism about the CCP, predicting that communist China would succumb to dictatorship and totalitarianism.Footnote ⁴¹

IV. Metamorphosis of classical reception after the communist conquest

It seems likely that, well before the Yan’an Rectification Movement, Mao had become wary of Liang’s humanist perspective on Greek and Western culture, which radically contradicted his own communist and nationalist ideals. Beyond these distant concerns, there were more immediate factors that led Mao to invoke ‘Greek’ themes in the party purge. While China never experienced a philhellenic movement on the scale of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, nor produce Byron-like heroes, many figures can still be classified as what we might now call philhellenists. Luo Niansheng, a distinguished translator of the Greek classics, made the following observations in 1934, the same year that Fustel de Coulanges’ La cité antique was translated into Chinese:

Mao Dun, among others, served as a liaison for the CCP. It is not surprising that this intellectual trend spread to Yan’an, the holy land of the Chinese Communist Revolution from the 1930s onwards, with Xiao Jun as one of its exponents. There is no evidence that Mao’s reflection on philhellenism was specifically directed at Xiao, who, unlike the towering figure Liang, was just a soldier in the Hellenized hoplite phalanx. However, since Xiao was a regular guest of Mao before the Rectification, his personal views may well have come to Mao’s attention; and indeed the presence of such a philhellenist makes Mao’s mishellenism more easily intelligible. Xiao arrived in Yan’an in 1940 and openly criticized the corrupt practices and privileges within the party. He not only labelled Wang a petty-bourgeois official but also envisioned reshaping Mao’s revolutionary ideology. He asserted, ‘to shoot a man, shoot his horse; to capture the foe, capture their chief. Thus, I must first change Mao before I can change the vulgar tendencies of all party members.’Footnote ⁴³ This expression is drawn from Du Fu’s classical poem and attests to Xiao’s romantic imagination. Among his reading materials were Zhou Zuoren’s annotated translations of Greek literature and the 1930 translation of Lynn Thorndike’s A Short History of Civilization.Footnote ⁴⁴ Here are three notable passages from his Yan’an Diary:

As a novelist and poet, Xiao evokes a value-laden, Winckelmannian vision of Greece. While he promoted heroism and individualism, the CCP insisted on enforcing collectivism and ideological conformity. Although short-term cooperation between them was possible, friction and confrontation were inevitable over time due to ideological incompatibility. Xiao’s philhellenism can be seen as inheriting the tradition of Liang, both men viewing ancient Greece as the cradle of Western civilization and a mirror for China’s modernization. On 2 May 1942, Mao delivered a speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in which he emphasized that literature and art should serve politics while minimizing the roles of criticism and satire. This speech brought the party purge to its logical conclusion and became the cornerstone for policies relating to revolutionary and mass culture after the communist conquest. Undeterred by the leader’s authority, Xiao was the first to speak after Mao. He gave a 40-minute response that he later published as ‘My Views on Current Issues in Literature and Art’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This moment signified a renewed confrontation between ‘Westernization-Hellenization’ and ‘Sinification’. As a non-party outsider, Xiao sought to intercede on behalf of the victims in the Rectification. The humanistic tone, fascination with ancient Greece and advocacy of liberalism exacerbated the tensions in the conflicting ideas about philhellenism and mishellenism. Xiao was soon suppressed, later subjected to harsh punitive treatment in subsequent mass movements and was rehabilitated only after Mao’s death. In December 1943, he voluntarily exiled himself to a small village. Although he returned to Yan’an shortly afterwards, Xiao vehemently criticized the Rectification in his diary, which to some extent validates Liang’s prediction.Footnote ⁴⁷ Therefore, we should distinguish Mao’s critique of philhellenism from scholarly reflections on the limits of ‘Hellenization’.Footnote ⁴⁸ His mishellenism was not a position reached from academic discussion but a response to pressing political realities. While Liang and Xiao embodied an idealized view of Greece, the metaphor of ‘constantly commending Hellas’ signified the shift in this interpretive paradigm towards political discourse and ideology. Mao’s attack on the philhellenists marked the first wave of mishellenism in China. This, alongside works like ‘Reform Our Study’ and the speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, paved the way for the rise of a totalitarian party state. It also heralded a new ideological era and continues to influence China’s educational frameworks and cultural outreach to this day.

A ‘half-literate’ expression, Mao’s metaphor can be seen as a product of the Transitional Period of modern Chinese intellectual history. According to Chang Hao’s definition, this period begins in the 1890s, in particular with the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and is characterized by the rise of political parties, learned societies, the elite press and the intelligentsia. It ends with the May Thirtieth Incident in 1925, a significant labour and anti-imperialist movement that marked the transition into the Ideological Period.Footnote ⁴⁹ During the Transitional Period, governing elites and gentleman scholars not only began to abandon their old world-views and archaic writing style, but also championed the idea of wholesale or partial ‘Westernization’ through learning from Europeans, Americans and their Greek ‘ancestors’. By the time Mao conquered China in the Ideological Period, communism, nationalism and utopianism had replaced the ‘universal’ values that had prevailed in much of the West since the Renaissance and Enlightenment, giving rise to mishellenism. Because Mao straddled both periods, his metaphor became a term familiar to the bureaucratic system, intellectuals and even the general populace.

The cultic worship of Mao as supreme leader has endured since it flourished in 1949, and his many political writings have become compulsory reading at various stages of education. For example, the so-called ‘Three Old Articles’ were studied by everyone during the Cultural Revolution, and many can recite the complete texts even today.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘Reform Our Study’ has also occupied a cardinal position, featuring in the school curriculum for more than half a century. As it has long been included in secondary school textbooks, the expression ‘constantly commending Hellas’ has become a catchphrase in the Sinosphere. A search in the massive Chinese research database CNKI yields over 5,000 results.Footnote ⁵¹ The teaching of the Chinese language in China’s secondary schools has undergone many changes since the CCP came to power, but the focus on integrating ideological and political education into teaching activities has remained consistent. A 1959 teaching plan shows that ‘Reform Our Study’ was placed at the top of the list of Chinese lessons for high school seniors. This textbook emphasized Sinification and communist ideologies and placed Mao’s work alongside Chinese literature and translated passages of Soviet literature.Footnote ⁵² A textbook from 2020 for students in the same grade also included Mao’s speech. The editors added a footnote to ‘constantly commending Hellas’, explaining it as dogmatic application of ‘foreign principles’ while acknowledging the Greek influence on European culture.Footnote ⁵³ More intriguingly, in the same unit of this textbook, ‘Reform Our Study’ was paired with a translated passage from Plato’s Crito exploring the concept of justice. Is this a mere coincidence, a revival of Liang’s philhellenism or an ironic manoeuvre on the part of the editors?

It would be valuable here to discuss further how the other sources intersected with, and played into, Mao’s portrayal of phil-/mishellenism. Noteworthy is the stigmatization of Zhou Yang by Yao Wenyuan, a member of the Gang of Four. It is reported that some liberalist critics, such as Hu Feng, borrowed Mao’s metaphor and coined phrases like ‘constantly commending Maoism’ to express their concern about the CCP’s oppression of free speech. As Hu Feng had already been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Yang was accused of being a backstage manipulator. It would admittedly be quibbling to complain that Zhou Yang showed a preference for Russified literary criticism. As one of most important literary theorists, Zhou Yang was once referred to as a ‘good person’ by Mao.Footnote ⁵⁴ As early as the Yan’an period, he emerged as the arch-rival of Xiao and other liberalist critics. However, in Yao Wenyuan’s accusation, this was cast aside in such a way that ‘constantly commending Hellas’ became a struggle slogan used to discredit political opponents, whether they were philhellenists or not:

This long essay, ‘A Commentary on Zhou Yang, Double-Dealer and Counter-Revolutionary’, was first published in 1967 in the Red Flag, one of the CCP’s official journals, and then spread as a political pamphlet in China and within leftist circles in Hong Kong. As a result, during the Cultural Revolution, ‘constantly commending Hellas’ became a way of describing people as worthy of disgrace in party discourse and ‘orthodox’ historiography, much as anti-Stalinists could easily be labelled ‘Trotskyists’, regardless of whether they actually were. By this point, the expression had been thoroughly politicized, disregarding the facts to smear political opponents, whether or not they sought to ‘Hellenize’ China.

Yet the philhellenists proved themselves resilient in confronting challenges. Thanks to his reading of George Grote’s A History of Greece, Gu Zhun perpetuated Liang’s philhellenism by juxtaposing ancient Greece with modern Britain: he privileged pluralism over monism and favoured Anglo-American empiricism over the continental rationalism which ultimately gave birth to Marxism. These intellectual inclinations made him a pioneer of Chinese liberalism and market economy. He was a financial official and senior cadre of the CCP. Due to persecution during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, he spent his later years in prison and re-education centres, yet this did not prevent him from becoming a pioneering thinker. It can be said that Gu, through his personal efforts, transformed phil-/mishellenism from a metaphor for factional struggles into a pursuit of intellectual autonomy. Ancient Greece served as a window to the West during this tumultuous period. According to the recollections of his younger brother, Gu encouraged him to explore works on ‘Western’ civilization:

There is good reason to believe that this passage contains direct quotations from Gu. We can see how his words both partook of Mao’s mishellenism and departed from the political metaphor. They aptly encapsulate a liberalist notion that, when Maoism itself became dogmatic, philhellenism could serve as an antidote. By alluding to Mao as ‘someone’, Gu found an ingenious way, what we now call self-censorship, to circumvent the communist regime and state control. Mao and Gu represent two distinct strands of the same intellectual current: while Mao stirred up disputes and antagonisms between ‘Hellenization’ and ‘Sinification’, Gu sought to reconcile them in an attempt to transform the minds of modern China through the ‘Westernized’ process of modernization and enlightenment. Gu reversed the mishellenist trend and facilitated the revival of philhellenism represented by Liang and Xiao. Since most of the discussions were preserved in private notes, diaries, conversations and correspondence, the publication of Gu’s posthumous works became an intellectual event. By transforming ‘constantly commending Hellas’ from a metaphor for factional power struggles into dissident expression, Gu should be regarded as the one of the most influential philhellenists in China.

V. Evolving trends in the post-Mao era

Chinese scholars only began to acknowledge the under-developed state of their teaching and research following the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policy in the 1980s. This realization led to the establishment of ‘Ancient World History Studies’, a field dedicated to the study of ancient history in non-Chinese regions. Lin Zhichun created this discipline almost single-handedly, in particular through founding the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations at Northeast Normal University in 1984, which has since trained a sizeable number of graduate students and researchers in classical studies in China.Footnote ⁵⁷ Recent scholarship has revisited his role in the debate over the Marxian theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production and questioned whether he was (even half-heartedly) a ‘red professor’ collaborating with the state. However, a closer examination of his diaries, correspondence and reading notes reveals a more nuanced and multifaceted perspective on authoritarian regimes held by this centenarian.Footnote ⁵⁸ For instance, his private copy of Karl Marx’s ‘Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction’ reveals critical reflections on state control over free speech, where he underlined in red ink the passage ‘an authority which regulates, even more than the Roman censors did, not only the behaviour of individual citizens, but even the behaviour of the public mind’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Compared to Xiao and Gu, Lin’s resistance strategy was moderate. On the one hand, he openly criticized the rigid application of Marxism-Leninism in Chinese academia, mocking the excessive veneration of Marxism as ‘constantly commending Marx and Lenin’. On the other hand, he avoided referencing Mao’s metaphor, opting instead for a tacit approach that conveyed subtle dissent without overt commentary.Footnote ⁶⁰ Lin was also a pioneering scholar in comparative studies. He used historical parallels to draw lessons for China’s development as a ‘modern’ civilization. He argued that Early China possessed a political structure similar to the Greek poleis and sought to position Chinese and Greek civilizations along a shared historical trajectory. Drawing inspiration from Liang’s essay ‘On the Similarities and Differences between Chinese and European Political Systems’, Lin compared the Chinese concept of the ‘statesman’ in pre-Qin texts with full citizenry of Athens. While Liang observed that in the Zhou dynasty, ‘its people were also of one body with the state’, Lin aimed to demonstrate that there were moments in Chinese history when democracy was emerging.Footnote ⁶¹ As early as the 1930s, Ichisada Miyazaki had associated the poleis of ancient Greece with early Chinese ‘city-states’ based on archaeological evidence such as city walls.Footnote ⁶² Lin went a step further to give valuable insights into the potential of China’s political past. There is no evidence that he had access to Japanese scholarship; his comparative analysis was shaped directly by Liang. In this respect, Lin did not transcend the frameworks of nationalism and cultural determinism, but his efforts to place Chinese and Greek civilizations on equal terms broadened the philhellenist perspective.Footnote ⁶³ Building on the idea of using the past to serve the present, Lin laid the groundwork for exploring the political practices of city-states within a Chinese context, ancient and modern alike. Like Gu, his scholarship illustrates how philhellenism, especially the study of Athenian democracy, could empower the Chinese nation to achieve intellectual autonomy.

After Lin, academic rigour became a crucial criterion in evaluating Chinese ‘Hellenomania’. While this shift narrowed the field and reduced its capacity to engage with broader public discourse, it also limited the appeal of the nationalist interpretive paradigm of the ‘Straussian school’, which is seldom congenial to classicists. Lin and the leading figures of this school represent two contrasting paradigms; that is, normalization versus naturalization. The latter approach integrates Confucian statecraft with Platonic and Aristotelian meritocracy, treating Greek texts not so much as objects of critical inquiry as repositories of political prescriptions to be naturalized within a Chinese framework. Yet this school remains an active and evolving movement rather than a closed historical episode. Its future is uncertain, since it may grow or decline, as the closure of the Leo Strauss Center suggests.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nonetheless, the tension between ‘Westernization-Hellenization’ and ‘Sinification’ persists in the post-Mao era. The cumulative effects of mishellenism have even led nationalist and pro-government scholars to maliciously dismiss Graeco-Roman antiquity as a Renaissance fabrication.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘Hellenomania’ becomes a double-edged sword: while researchers and general readers usually discuss concepts like the ‘Thucydides Trap’, the ruling authorities continue to wield this political metaphor to challenge ‘Western’ values, as well as ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘pro-American’ intellectuals.Footnote ⁶⁶ On 29 May 2022, the social media of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the highest internal control institution of the CCP, used this metaphor to downplay the tendency in the school textbooks to take over ‘Western’ values wholesale:

This does make a point of giving Chinese culture its due on the one hand, and on the other stands in stark contrast to the 2020 textbook, which placed Mao on an equal footing with Plato.

In fact, while in the ideological domain ‘constantly commending Hellas’ conveys a negative notion of ‘Western-slanted’ pedantry, in academic discourse it is typically used in a positive sense to describe someone who is ‘open-minded’ and ‘enlightened’. Even more paradoxically, the CCP may find itself embarrassed by the numerous references to the Greek world in the works of Marx and Engels, which form the theoretical foundation of the party. In the 1883 Dialectics of Nature, for example, Engels argued that modern Europe was something like a revival of ancient Greece:

If the Marxian new age signifies a (re)turn to ancient Greece, then Chinese-style modernization and socialism will be deprived of their theoretical legitimacy. The inaugural World Conference of Classics, held in Beijing in November 2024, alongside the establishment of the Chinese School at Athens, exemplifies notable initiatives. The government has invested considerable resources into these projects with the aim of enhancing China’s cultural soft power and expanding its geopolitical influence. However, because ancient Greece frequently engages with ‘sensitive’ topics such as democracy and freedom, the government has shown a degree of reluctance to fully embrace these efforts, revealing a nuanced and somewhat ambivalent stance.Footnote ⁶⁹ The dialectical theory of development can be applied to ‘Hellenomania’ in China, as the oscillation between philhellenism and mishellenism reflects the pattern of ‘negation of the negation’. Not only Mao, but also his predecessors, contemporaries and successors have demonstrated the extent to which classical antiquity can be (ab)used in political discourse. ‘Hellenomania’ in China is like a contemporary sculptor’s Discobolus in a Mao suit. It can serve simultaneously as both enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, politicization and depoliticization. As the late Ian Jenkins said, the sculpture offers us ‘a metaphor for the intellectual and artistic constraint of communist-era China’.Footnote ⁷⁰

In the absence of great Latinists like Theodor Mommsen, Chinese thinkers have often assigned the Romans a secondary role within the narrative of classical antiquity.Footnote ⁷¹ The depoliticization under totalitarian rule has refined philhellenism as a compensatory response to their curtailed political agency. In terms of intellectual autonomy, this has fostered a new discourse on the interplay between Chinese and Western cultures, particularly through an intensified focus on Athenian democracy. The Chinese path to modernization has failed to resolve the question of political subjectivity. That is the reason for the swing of the pendulum. Therefore, no other subject is as prevalent or as widely discussed as ‘Hellenomania’, nor did Mao ever criticize anyone for ‘constantly commending Rome’. To sum up, classical reception in modern China can be divided into five stages that oscillate between philhellenism and mishellenism. Its development corresponds to China’s evolution from a nation-state in the past to a party state in the present, and potentially to a city-state in the future, one that is ‘modern’ and integrated into the global mainstream. The following summary seeks not so much to establish a rigid chronological framework as to illuminate both the continuities and the ruptures across the Late Qing period (ca. 1840–1912), the Republican Era (1912–1949) and the People’s Republic of China (1949–). Accordingly, although Liang and Xiao belonged to different generations, their philhellenism took shape in a public sphere marked by greater latitude for expression before the 1949 communist conquest. Likewise, Gu’s solitary reflections had little influence during the Cultural Revolution, yet would come to be recognized shortly after being rediscovered in the post-Mao era.

• (i) After the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, the world-views of the governing elites and gentleman scholars underwent significant changes. China came to be seen as a declining civilization in a new global order, and its ‘modernization’ was envisioned as a process of imitating Western civilization that could be traced back to classical antiquity. Early philhellenists such as Liang and Xiao are representative figures of this Transitional Period, when China was transformed from a hereditary monarchical regime into a nation-state.

• (ii) Although ancient Greece held a position of honour, controversies arose over the tension between ‘Hellenization-Westernization’ and ‘Sinification’. In the party purge of 1941, Mao invented the political metaphor of ‘constantly commending Hellas’ and characterized the pro-Soviet faction as ‘philhellenic’ and ‘Westernized’, launching not only an attack against party rivals but also the first wave of mishellenism.

• (iii) After the communist conquest in 1949, ‘constantly commending Hellas’ became a buzzword in the power struggle. Especially during the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four used it to stigmatize those who were allegedly Western-leaning and anti-Mao. This second wave of mishellenism was framed within the context of total Sinification and provoked confrontation.

• (iv) In unofficial discourse, the positive use of the metaphor can be traced back to Gu, who studied Grote’s A History of Greece during the Cultural Revolution. By styling himself as a philhellenist, Gu revived the tradition of juxtaposing classical antiquity with modernity, paving the way for the renaissance of philhellenism in the post-Mao era.

• (v) In the post-Mao era, Lin played a crucial role in establishing ‘Ancient World History Studies’ as a professional discipline. By proposing the existence of Greek-style poleis in Early China, he placed Chinese antiquity on an equal footing with classical Graeco-Roman antiquity. This offered a pathway to breaking free from conventional frameworks of philhellenism and mishellenism, signalling a shift towards more academic and balanced perspectives.

In conclusion, philhellenism and mishellenism are held together in a precarious equilibrium in China. The conflicting tensions between them persist to this day, and the dynamic adds an important perspective to the study of the cultural interactions and confrontations between East and West, both historically and in contemporary contexts. The (ab)use of ‘Hellenomania’ constitutes a topic worthy of continued exploration. In this spirit, the present article aims to carry its legacy into the future, in dialogue with public discourse, academic circles and everywhere in between.