This stimulating collection, as explained in Professor Dallmayr's preface, results from “the collaboration between a Western political theorist and a Chinese philosopher,” and intends to present “the spectrum of political ideas and intellectual debates in contemporary China.” Addressing the enduring problems of ignorance in the West about ideas in the East, “accompanied by an often gross misunderstanding and a tendency to resort to simplistic stereotypes,” the book invites direct reading of 13 essays authored by native Chinese scholars on some important issues faced by China at its developmental crossroads.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one maps “contemporary issues and debates” from various angles by Ji Wenshun, Zhou Lian, Zhao Tingyang and Zhang Feng. Part two focuses on Confucianism and its modern function, with contributions from Liu Shuxian, Chen Ming, He Baogang and Ni Peimin. Part three gathers essays representing “post-Maoism and the New Left” by Ci Jiwei, Cui Zhiyuan, Frank Fang, Wang Shaoguang and Cheng Guangyun. This is an impressive line-up (and also, alas, an all-men show), although the qualities of essays are uneven. Given the rarity of similar books, this effort of providing an opportunity for readers in the English-speaking world to acquire even just a gleam of China's political and intellectual landscape is valuable and welcome.
The selection could be controversial for the exclusion of the predominant market liberal trend and, for that matter, the concentration on neo-traditionalism or new leftism. This bias would be entirely legitimate if it were reflected in the book title. But a quick sampling of the contributions demonstrates that the volume is otherwise up to date, timely, and deliberately open to bridging positions across borders. Rejecting conventional IR, Zhao Tingyang proposes a universal framework based on the ancient Chinese worldview of tianxia (“all under heaven”) as an alternative to existing globalization. His “ontology of coexistence” and “methodological relationism” (pp. 50, 62–63), argued to be superior to the limited Kantian project of perpetual peace, would ground the construction of a new world order of human rights as much as human obligations. This philosophical exercise may appear all too transcendental at a time of perpetual wars and other forms of destruction, the validity of its fundamental concern cannot be dismissed. At the national level, He Baogang examines ideal-type models in debating the relationship between Confucianism and democracy. Even if such comparative evaluations inevitably involve standardization or oversimplification, the review is ably and usefully done. However, he could have also pondered on his starting point as to whether and why this relationship should be considered so important. Engaging concrete democratic struggles, Wang Shaoguang's critique of the anti-state tendency inherent in the ideology of democracy and democratization is a notable clarification. Wang has written extensively on democracy in both theory and practice, and here with regional examples he explains why “the presence of an effective state is a prerequisite for democracy” (p. 243). Along the way, he has also offered a conceptual delineation of “state capacity,” which should be distinguishable from negative capacities of a predatory state. Ci Jiwei revisits his well-known thesis of the dialectic of communist trajectory in China from utopianism to hedonism via nihilism. Against the background of a consumerist “desublimation,” he asks if the country is not experiencing a process of partial and self-contradictory “resublimation” today. Noting that the protracted moral and legitimacy crises are impossible to resolve “without fundamentally changing the new social paradigm itself” (p. 179), he stops short of any elaboration of that change – whether, what and how. Finally, Cui Zhiyuan returns to his advocacy famously branded a “petty bourgeois socialist manifesto” (see his chapter “Liberal socialism and the future of China: a petty bourgeois manifesto” in Tianyu Cao (ed.), The Chinese Model of Modern Development. London: Routledge. 2005). He discusses the “liberal socialist” tradition from Proudhon and John Stuart Mill to Silvio Gesell, James Meade, Fernand Braudel, Fei Xiaotong and Roberto Unger, and explains where China's search for a “socialist market economy” can make that tradition its own invaluable resources. His argument is not so much about cross-cultural borrowing as about shared innovations in political economy the world over.
Reading these essays one could not help questioning Dallmayr's framing of Chinese intellectual life as revolving around divisions between “anti-Westernism and pro-Westernism” (p. 1). It is indeed highly problematic to define a cohesive “Westernism” in the first place, or view any “rigid ideological positions” as geo-cultural in nature. This book is itself a testimony at least of the plurality of thinking and positioning in the East itself. The total lack of common language or communication between the neo-traditionalists and new leftists, for example, is illuminating. In the same vein, the hope that philosophy can be “a means of conflict resolution and a pathway to peace” (p. vii) is illusory. Ironically, missing in the underlining conception of a purposeful representation of political debates is politics itself. But “culture” or “civilization” cannot themselves explain or determine anything; the shifting powers and dynamic social forces behind historical movements find their expressions in political and ideological struggles, domestic and international.
This book may serve us best if read together with edited volumes by Chaohua Wang (One China, Many Paths; Verso, 2005), Mark Leonard (China 3.0; ECFR, 2012), and Ban Wang and Jie Lu (China and New Left Visions; Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).
