Of course, restoring China’s traditional Confucian ritual order and bureaucratic politics is impossible. That would first require the restoration of the imperial system and the revival of the clan order. A wholesale return to the old is hopeless, and unnecessary as well. No matter how Chinese politics develops in the future, it is bound to be Westernized and modernized. So, amid all this, what can Chinese tradition still bring, what elements can it still provide?
Of course, you may think that not a single element of so-called Chinese tradition is needed at all, and that it would be enough simply to introduce Western modern democratic institutions. But a complete Westernization, like a complete return to the old, is probably unrealistic, because political institutions are not something suspended above tradition and ways of life—something self-sufficient, something that can be air-dropped and transplanted. Political institutions are entangled with culture and ideas, social etiquette, technical media, traditions of belief, and so on. Although modern China has undergone a tremendous rupture from the ancient tradition, the thread has not been entirely severed; the strands still connect it, and it has not been fully Westernized after all. Of course, some people hope to devote themselves wholeheartedly to moving in a Westernizing direction; that is also a path one may pursue. But I still maintain that we should stop and take a look: among the elements in Chinese tradition that have not yet been lost, or that can still be recovered, which ones may be beneficial to the exploration of modern politics?
First of all, we need to note that in Chinese tradition there is in fact no concept that corresponds to the Western politics. The concept of “politics” seems closer to ruling, administration (govern, manage), and so on; however, as far as the concept of “governance” is concerned, Chinese tradition contains a broader range of meaning than the West does. Chinese tradition lacks the kind of thing crucial to Western politics—something akin to the so-called “public sphere”—but dimensions such as ritual and moral education, family relations, clan ideas, the historiographical office system, and so on, which are contained within traditional Chinese politics, are absent from Western political science. Many things that would be regarded in the Western tradition as belonging to sociology, cultural studies, or history are, in the Chinese tradition, contained within the concept of politics itself.
In Arendt’s formulation, the so-called “politics” of the modern West is no longer truly politics as public relations, but rather an expanded family relation, and has become domination. In China, however, people have consciously established an inner connection between family relations and governance and rule from ancient times on. Whether in China or in the West, the structure of the family in some sense determines the structure of rule; Chinese family relations produced such relations as “the son of Heaven” and “parent-officials,” while Western feudalism corresponds to primogeniture, and modern democracy corresponds to the atomic family.
Of course, perhaps we should once again distinguish the public sphere from the private sphere, and restore the political realm as a realm of publicity. Even so, modern society still inevitably has to face the question of “domination,” and political science in this sense must necessarily take family relations into its domain as an internal constitutive element. To turn the political question entirely into a question of domination is certainly a failure to grasp something essential; yet wanting to eliminate any issue of domination outside the family and retain only a pure public sphere is also a fantasy. We should acknowledge that “domination” is unavoidable; the question is how to exercise it.
Family relations, or relations of domination, imply a relation of inequality. Chinese tradition places the greatest emphasis on such graded relations. The so-called three bonds and five constant virtues are a core idea. Setting aside the specific requirements and placements of various identities in the tradition, we may note instead that the basic idea behind these requirements is the emphasis on “identity.”
Modern Western politics also emphasizes “identity,” but it emphasizes only that one so-called “citizen identity.” This is an egalitarian identity, without rank or hierarchy. This model derives from Christian egalitarian thought: this equal, innate human right was first guaranteed by God, then justified through human rational capacity, and now is realized through citizenship rights. This transformation in the concept of identity is also related to the transformation in spatial notions from the “closed world to the infinite universe.” “Identity” is a kind of “position,” a “placement” in which people each occupy their own place; and in the modern world, space is homogenized and isotropic, so “identity” has become such a thing as well.
But such an “identity” is precisely the abolition of identity. Does the leveling of “identity” eliminate social inequality? Or is this merely a form of evasion? Does it avoid the real differences among human beings and cover its eyes with an empty, abstract notion of equality? A person’s individuality lies precisely in his differences, and society’s distinctiveness lies precisely in its mutually supporting structure. No one can live by himself alone; human life is always constrained and supported by others, and different people play different roles. This is the real condition of human existence. The issue is not whether differences exist, but what kind of structure of differences constitutes a reasonable relation. Yet modern political science, with the ritual formula of “one person, one vote,” plugs its ears while stealing the bell, as if it thereby eliminated the inevitable relations of inequality among people and treated everyone as equal. But this very egalitarianism is purchased at the cost of erasing human individuality and the sociality of society; it is bought by treating human beings as nothing but a string of empty numbers.
The graded structure prescribed by the three bonds and five constant virtues in Chinese tradition is no longer suitable to modern society, but this does not mean that concern for “identity” itself has become outdated. “Differences in rank” do not necessarily lead to discrimination or oppression. When we say that “do” is “lower” than “mi,” this “lower” is a difference in rank, but it does not mean that do is worse or inferior to mi. When we say that students should obey teachers and children should be filial to their parents, this also does not mean that either side is being discriminated against or enslaved. In Western politics, such relations of difference are merely described in a watered-down way as a kind of contractual relation; after all, the two sides to a contract are still equal. This too is a form of concealment and evasion, as if each person, outside the real world, as an abstract, independent, equal individual, keeps signing one contract after another beyond actual life, so that the relations of difference in reality are merely the fair outcomes already established by those equal contracts. Apart from offering a kind of self-comfort to those obsessed with “equality,” this line of thought has not much meaning. I would rather understand the unequal position I occupy in real society through tradition and history, and need not borrow those fictitious “contracts.” The main purpose of these ethereal contract theories is nothing more than to ensure some abstract “equality”—but why must things be equal at all?
The Christian-rationalist tradition of the West is obsessed with human equality, whereas the Chinese tradition of “ritual and music” can accommodate and confront human difference. “Music” is precisely such a chordal state, rich in differences yet arranged with pattern and order. In this kind of graded society, each person has some real “place” of his own (identity, status), and around each person’s place, people unfold relations of interaction in a harmonious (rather than leveling) manner. It is unlike a so-called equal society, in which everyone has an abstract identity, and people sign ideal contracts in some virtual world on the basis of this abstract, equal identity, while in the real world they cannot find a proper home.
The reason I say that everyone has “some” position rather than “one” position is that people’s identities are indeed multiple. In ancient times, the saying “the ruler be ruler, the minister be minister, the father be father, the son be son” often applied to a single person in multiple ways as well: one person can simultaneously be a minister and a father and a son, a teacher and a student, an official and a taxpayer. Marx said that man is the sum of social relations; as far as the individual as a political participant is concerned, that is indeed so. People have never participated in political activity as atomized, solitary “individuals” with such an empty “identity.” When I assert rights or fulfill obligations on behalf of “myself,” that “myself” has never been a bare sign; it always appears “as …” “As a student, I demand …” “As a teacher, I ought to …” Of course, “citizen” is the most basic, and therefore also the emptiest, identity; in terms of this identity, I naturally possess certain most general rights or political status. But in actual political life, the more real political relations and claims among people are mostly not put forward in the identity of “citizen.” People always participate in politics “as” members belonging to some group. If so-called “democracy” merely considers the equal claims of atomic individuals as citizens, then in fact it is an empty politics: the “citizens” have not substantively let “themselves” participate in politics, but have first erased “themselves” into an empty sign in order to “participate” in politics. But the real individual should be able to express himself and participate in governance in actual multiple relations, precisely through graded identities. And if one wants to recover the real self in political life, one must first break the illusion of the atomic self and place the self within the community. In this sense, true “democracy” ought to be communitarian.
December 21, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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