Theory Brief #5: Shadi Bartsch (2023), ‘Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism’

Shadi Bartsch (2023), Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.

Shadi Bartsch, a Classics professor at the University of Chicago, has written an interesting, if uneven, book that starts as a study of the reception of the Western classical tradition in Chinese public discourse, before veering off into something far more ambitious and, perhaps as a result, hazy and ill-defined: A mapping out of what one might call contemporary Chinese ideology, the convergence of Confucianism and state socialism in the era of Xi Jinping, and its rhetorical appropriation of parts of the Western tradition.

While professing to study the reception of “The Greek Classics,” as the subtitle has it, the book also discusses such varied topics as the Jesuits’s attempts at introducing Christianity to China in the 1600s, the recent Chinese intellectual fascination with the conservative philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss (who has enjoyed a huge, and surprising, following among some Chinese intellectuals for several decades), and the ridicule Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis has been met with, to name but a few tangents and offshoots from the main story. This makes for a somewhat frustrating read: For while these asides are interesting in their own right, it isn’t entirely clear what they’re doing in a book aimed at answering the (wholly worthwhile) question, “What would an entirely different civilization with its own traditions — namely, China — make of the Greek classics?”

Add to this that the book is — or so the author claims — not about how Chinese classicists have understood the Western classics, but rather how the writings of thinkers and writers like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides have been received in public (semi-)intellectual discourse, and there are real risks of analytic overshoot and misfirings. Lacking clearly demarcated criteria of textual selection means that with such magnitudes as the whole sweep of the Chinese intelligentsia (including the Journal of the Fujian Provincial Committee Party School and humble bloggers), one is simply going to find a huge range of opinions expressed. But a power-sensitive discursive approach has to weigh the nodal points uncovered in the course of analysis: Not all utterances are created equal (or are given equal efficacy within the social system).

At times, the sourcing does seem strangely eclectic, and this is despite the author’s initial claims that “[t]he Chinese scholars I do investigate promote public and ideological responses to classical texts and are widely influential and well represented in the public arena” (p. xi). To take but one example of how the author deviates from this otherwise sensible methodical precept: In the book’s closing section on Francis Fukuyama, Bartsch writes about one Chen Guan and his blog on Zhihu, a Chinese website “modeled on Quora,” the author writes (p. 185). But upon closer inspection, Chen Guan, a self-styled “Independent thinker,” enjoys no more than a paltry 146 followers on the platform in question at the time of this writing — hardly the reach of an influential public intellectual. To read his views as somehow indicative of Chinese (informed or intellectual) opinion would require far more stringent reflections about representativity and generalization. Why should we expect this blog post, taken seemingly at random (perhaps discovered through a bit of unsystematic Googling?), to be representative of the wider field?

Not every example is as flagrant as this one, of course, and Bartsch clearly has read widely and certainly discusses influential intellectuals, but this one is particularly egregious; one can only imagine what level of seriousness a Chinese cultural critic of contemporary American society who latches onto the fulminations of a blogger with around 150 readers would be taken. With Bartsch casting herself as the Virgil to our Odyssey through Chinese public intellectual waters, to mix our metaphors a bit — the author recounts spending a decade learning Mandarin Chinese in pursuit of this project — the question of method seems all the more important.

Bartsch recognizes this, too. In a half-apologetic footnote after citing the Chinese Journal of Classical Studies, probably aimed at forestalling criticism, Bartsch notes, “To be sure, one might reasonably ask: to what extent can we make generalizations about Chinese culture at large on the basis of a journal which most Chinese have never heard of?” (p. 192, footnote 20). This is a sensible question, of a slightly different kind than the one suggested above, but without a satisfactory answer offered.

In Search of Hexie, or Harmony

Bartsch’s thesis, in brief, is that the Chinese (non-scholarly, public-intellectual) appropriation of the Greco-Roman corpus serves to bolster the claim that its own system of political-economic governance is superior to that of Western liberal-democratic capitalism. After the crackdown on Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, so the story goes, the liberal-democratic impetus receded, and a whole class of intellectuals was mobilized to find textual support for the legitimacy of the state and party. In recent years, these intellectuals have sought support from Western classics.

But, as Bartsch writes, “Turning to western texts to support Chinese claims of civilizational superiority requires a complicated balancing act on the part of the Chinese intellectuals” (p. 9). After all, one would have to explain why Western societies, to whom these texts would seem to ”belong” — at least to a greater extent — have failed to live up to their at times concealed ideals.

And many interesting potential convergences between Eastern and Western thought are on display here. Plato’s kosmos (order) could be read as converging upon the Confucian notion of hexie (harmony); Plato’s attack on music and poetry bears a certain resemblance to Confucius’s concern with elegant and vulgar music and criticism of “new” songs. “In Plato’s Laws especially, the connection of music, text, and chorus to social order seems strikingly Confucian.” And Chinese intellectuals have been eager to show how Socrates’s concern with justice in Kallipolis (the good or noble city) is actually Confucian harmony, or hexie, in disguise:

“Justice is essentially a kind of order and harmony,” emphasizes Wen Tao, adding that “The essence of justice lies in harmony.” “Justice is harmony and order,” says Rong Guangyi. Zhang Xiaomei argues that “justice was the benefit of harmony.… Justice was overall harmony”. (pp. 154–155)

Obviously, Bartsch doesn’t accept this interpretation of Plato/Socrates. Still, it has the merit of being clearly understandable within the broader framework of something like what we might call “contemporary Chinese ideology.” Peace, calm, and order are to state-oriented intellectuals a kind of higher-order justice, in which harmony arises as the ultimate and foundational form of justice. Of course, it is certainly possible to critique the understanding of Confucius that lies behind these harmony/hexie-centered readings of the Western classical tradition, and Bartsch helpfully quotes the Australian Marxist theologian Roland Boer, who attended a Party conference on the Chinese master in 2019: “As I listened to papers and spoke with many there, it became clear that the Confucius of today is a rather truncated sage. We heard of harmony with diversity, of welcoming friends of like minds from all over the world, of peace over the four seas (there seemed to have been fewer of those 2,500 years ago)” (p. 159).

Bartsch adds, “Anything objectionable or antiquarian in Confucius’s views tends to disappear (it has been harmonized!). The sage’s insistence on the centrality of ritual and the ancestor cult, his low regard for women, his distaste for profit — these are not useful for a modern Chinese nation.”

In fact, after reading Bartsch’s book, one gets the sense that its central concern — to prove the importance of Western classical philosophy to contemporary Chinese ideology — is somewhat overstating its case. Far more important seems Confucius and China’s homegrown philosophical tradition, with ”135 of Xi’s quotations from classical Chinese philosophy…even published in a book titled Xi Jinping’s Classical Allusions…by the main Communist Party newspaper, The People’s Daily” (p. 5).

Bracketing Methods, Querying the Thesis

But let us for a moment accept the central thesis of the book, namely that the Western classics have been weaponized to advance Chinese nationalism (though perhaps civilizationism would be a more apt descriptor, given the scale involved), allowing a seamless fit between intellectuals and state, with texts either supporting the view that what is needed is “harmony” or a “strong state” (a via positiva) — or that disorder, inequality, etc., said to be associated with Western neoliberal democracies (a via negativa), must be avoided.

Could we not still object that this has been the lot of the classics even in our Western civilization? Hasn’t the U.S. done the same, extracting and yes, weaponizing, the classical texts, picking and choosing what it wants and needs to suit the ideological order of the day? The classics are, after all, almost endlessly malleable. Bartsch is right to quote Alfred Whitehead’s observation that all of Western philosophy are but footnotes to Plato (p. 83); but the interpretive “footnotes” span the whole field from direct-democratic council communism to heavy-handed, right-wing authoritarianism (with the two sometimes overlapping in paradoxical ways). In Plato, as in the Bible, one largely finds what one is already looking for. These texts can be made to fit nearly any political purpose or aspiration.

Bartsch very nearly notes as much: “Indeed, the texts of this reception study have shown themselves to be almost infinitely flexible. Epictetus can serve Christians proselytizing to Confucians; Plato can emphasize rationality or harmony; Aristotle can call for democracy; and classical Athens itself can be a locus of the absence of freedom” (p. 179)

However, the author does not draw the deeper ideological lesson, namely that the Chinese reception of figures like Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle is far from unique in instrumentalizing the philosophy of philosophy for domestic political purposes. American liberalism is founded on the notion of a “new Athens,” an interpretation of Socrates/Plato likely as alien to the ancient Greeks as the Confucian-state-socialist reading of Plato’s Republic and Laws. But one senses that the author agrees more with the system derived from the former misappropriation than the latter; hence it passes without notice. Ideology is that which goes unnoticed, that which has one’s tacit acceptance, as Marx and, later, Žižek remind us. Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson in reading the classics: They do little but reflect our own concerns. As we read the classics, we inevitably come face-to-face with the central tenets of our own social systems, both stated and tacit.

But perhaps even more interestingly, when we read how others read the classics, we are also mirroring ourselves; the reception of reception studies would itself be a worthwhile object of analysis, one largely left untouched in this book. For who will interpret the interpreters? And what can we learn about the concerns and prejudices of our own intellectual classes as they begin to peer eastwards and construct their “interpretations of the interpretations”?