What do you think?
Rate this book
China - The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom
China is a rising economic and political power. But what is the message of this rise? Tongdong Bai addresses this increasingly pressing question by examining the rich history of political theories and practices from China's past, and showing how it impacts upon the present. Part of Zeds World Political Theories series, this ground-breaking work offers a remarkable insight into the political history and thought of a nation that is becoming increasingly powerful on the world stage.
- GenresChina
218 pages, ebook
First published October 11, 2012
5 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 12, 2020
The book takes the daunting task of presenting chinese political philosophy to a public unfamiliar with chinese philosophy overall.
The author addresses a western public and sets himself the goal to establish that the age of great philosophers such as Confucius and Mencius was modern and comparable to the European post-feudal society to justify the thinkers' relevance to political philosophy today.
I do not believe this step was necessary, and I think that, while Bai argues well for it, it may have weakened the book. We respect thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato or Thomas of Aquinas even if their live circumstances happened in societies different than ours.
The book acts as a counterweight to the western canon of political philosophy. The author wants to establish the legitimacy of the thinkers he discusses. As such it sometimes feels as if he is justifying or defending Chinese philosophy as a whole from a subaltern position. However this may lead him to be overly defensive about the thinkers and especially about the thesis of modern day relevance and modernity as mentioned above.
The author is biased towards Confucianism and Han Fei Zi. However his presentations of thinkers are rich and he brings a lot of original translations. The access he gives the reader to classical Chinese political philosophy makes this book definitely worth a read, even if some parts are to be taken with a grain of salt.
The aspiration to portray classical Chinese thinking as relevant to modern day political philosophy comes with the positive that he approaches thinking very systematically, takingthe writings and argumentations and framing them around questions of institutions and translating them into modern political vocabulary such as feminism or checks and balances. Bai digs out the essence of texts, exploring the underlying questions about what a good ruler should be and what he should do. He points out that ancient Chinese thinkers have in some cases voiced issues and raised questions which we associate to later-born western thinkers. But other arguments fall flat such as the case for confucianism as a feminist philosophy.
Overall the book is worth reading. It offers a good introduction into Chinese political philosophy which is hard to get in general when one does not understand Chinese.
The author addresses a western public and sets himself the goal to establish that the age of great philosophers such as Confucius and Mencius was modern and comparable to the European post-feudal society to justify the thinkers' relevance to political philosophy today.
I do not believe this step was necessary, and I think that, while Bai argues well for it, it may have weakened the book. We respect thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato or Thomas of Aquinas even if their live circumstances happened in societies different than ours.
The book acts as a counterweight to the western canon of political philosophy. The author wants to establish the legitimacy of the thinkers he discusses. As such it sometimes feels as if he is justifying or defending Chinese philosophy as a whole from a subaltern position. However this may lead him to be overly defensive about the thinkers and especially about the thesis of modern day relevance and modernity as mentioned above.
The author is biased towards Confucianism and Han Fei Zi. However his presentations of thinkers are rich and he brings a lot of original translations. The access he gives the reader to classical Chinese political philosophy makes this book definitely worth a read, even if some parts are to be taken with a grain of salt.
The aspiration to portray classical Chinese thinking as relevant to modern day political philosophy comes with the positive that he approaches thinking very systematically, takingthe writings and argumentations and framing them around questions of institutions and translating them into modern political vocabulary such as feminism or checks and balances. Bai digs out the essence of texts, exploring the underlying questions about what a good ruler should be and what he should do. He points out that ancient Chinese thinkers have in some cases voiced issues and raised questions which we associate to later-born western thinkers. But other arguments fall flat such as the case for confucianism as a feminist philosophy.
Overall the book is worth reading. It offers a good introduction into Chinese political philosophy which is hard to get in general when one does not understand Chinese.
January 21, 2016
Toward the end of a long drought regarding serious English-language scholarly treatments of Chinese philosophy, here is a quite accessible and even refreshing take. This is a suddenly renewed arena which had long been allowed to remain the province of a small number of “classics” of the genre. These standard texts only slowly now being replaced in schools and colleges, represented a reasonably accurate transport into English scholarly writing of the received understanding in China from within its own scholarly tradition. Many were written by English-literate Chinese scholars before or during China’s communist revolution.
Of course there are long bookshelves of popular takes on Chinese philosophy, imported along with acupuncture and martial arts and Chinese food according to western tastes. But among serious scholars, one senses a backlog pressure, releasing an entire new assessment of Chinese traditional thought in the context of a rising China.
Our drought in the West was a reflection of China’s absence from the world scholarly stage across the decades of Maoist transformation. Where classical thought – and especially Confucius – had been plowed under along with everything bad about the corrupt and moribund imperial system, it is now back out in the mainstream, with Confucius on the rise again along with China.
I am writing here of course as a customer of Amazon among a population of literate Americans, and not as a scholar. I am aware of only a few recent scholars: Tu Weiming out of Harvard and back to Beijing University, China’s flagship, who writes and speaks eloquently about the relevance of Chinese traditional thinking to the modern world and for liberal education. Liu JeeLoo out of Taiwan and Cal State Fullerton who promises to inject streams from Chinese philosophy into the most “advanced” of Western philosophical discourse along with her first post-drought full treatment of Chinese scholarly tradition in textbook format. There are probably many more of which I am not aware.
Bai Tongdong could well be a crank or a patriot in scholar’s clothing, as he gave up his tenured spot in the US to return to China and take a place at FuDan University, flagship of Shanghai, China’s cosmopolitan center. But I think his colleagues across the globe take him seriously enough.
Bai gets my immediate confidence by offering accessible and no-nonsense usage for both the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘universal,’ and in the same sentence! He got his start in physics, but he doesn’t seem to be revisiting those late twentieth-century attempts to bring scientific thought processes into the realm of philosophy and literature.
Still, it seems entirely odd that he proposes to examine Confucianism not just for the coherence of its political philosophy, but for its relevance to modern political life. Just imagine someone proposing the same for the political philosophy of Plato’s Republic!
Well, differences abound, since the Confucianism examined here was not only the philosophy which can be extracted from its – as Bai explains them – non-systematic seminal writings; records of dialogues rather just as Plato wrote. But unlike Plato’s dialogues, the systems implied by these records were also quite actually enacted in the forms of government, and honed across the years in China. The “modern” Western republic didn’t experience its birth until the nation-state emerged from a long dark period of messing around with political arrangements already finished with in China.
China is strange that way, and its language is as well. Because the written language was written to accommodate a wide variety of spoken tongues – broader than those in Europe, according to Bai – it has also traversed the years in ways that no European writing could. No wonder that it might seem fair to consider Confucianism a candidate political “system” for the contemporary world. Bai is proposing nothing less than that!
Sure, we may be aware of growing numbers of Confucius Institutes around the globe, but we assume those are the cynical grab for soft power emanating from that bogus commie state which continues to arise so ominously to our East. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick in either direction, Bai cautions.
Astonishingly, the thesis which professor Bai sets out to defend is that the beginnings of the political order in China upon the dawn of the Qin dynasty, were in fact an early rehearsal of the beginnings of the “modern” political order in Europe some two thousand years later. Bai knows that this thesis is outrageous on its face, which is part of what makes reading him so compelling.
Anyhow, it’s here where I must locate at least an implicit critique of Western Science from Bai, since is it not on that great and universal procedural means for progress that we base all notions of modernity? Again, I’m writing as a generalist, incapable to scale the peaks of specialist writing along with my consumption of Netflix and popular literature across my daily grind.
Maybe Bai has actually entered the territory of post-modern criticism, which would be slightly comical. Still – my affection for it to the side for the moment – post-modernist rhetoric must be the singularly most culturally insular rhetorical genre on the planet, readable only by the most privileged and narrowly educated as produced exclusively by Western institutions of higher learning. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe the possibility exists in the Chinese language for any kind of post-modern discourse. According to Bai, that’s because all Chinese writing since the beginning of the civilization-state called the Middle Kingdom – “The Central Bulwark of Civilization” as Martin Jaques might translate it – is already post-modern.
And guess what? Professor Bai, again implicitly, hands me that one. He does so by finding an entirely unfussy and extremely accessible language for most any well-read person to follow an argument which traverses the very ground of post-colonial critiques of power. And English is not even his first language! He covers this post-modernist territory by the simple expedient of standing almost entirely outside of what that discourse attempts to do. We don’t need no stinkin’ post-modernist ecofeminist postcolonialistic talk if we’re coming from some entirely different order which never did colonize, um, quite. We don’t need to bring down the man if we can replace him with a much nicer one.
[Therefore!] I would say that in these political days, most everyone really *should* read this book. It’s a quick read, a great critique of all the same things which our most erudite scholars from any discipline are wanting to criticize, and it does so in almost the manner of an alien from a different planet; that famous trope regarding what a Martian would think if he came to Earth and tried to make sense of it.
OK, true confession. I'm writing this having just finished reading The Three Body Problem in its original Chinese, which is all about how we here on Earth might look from a very distant and different alien perspective. It’s also about how we might (or might not) come together as a planet in the face of a distant threat. Also as I write the American political experiment seems to have come apart at the seams, with individuals having no more reading ability than a television might afford feeling competent to judge which of those talking (or screaming) heads is the most real, straightforward and honest. And they seem to be coming up with Donald Trump! Well, I guess Reagan didn’t do us in, but still . . .
So back to the book. At its weakest moments, this book reads like a Confucian political screed, almost as though Bai were calling for a new political party (perhaps he actually is?). In his treatment of both Daoism and Legalism – the two other main streams of Chinese political thought which he promises to treat – he can barely hide his preference for Confucianism, which comes off somewhere between flag-waving and utopianism, but in any case one can only imagine him quite clean-shaven in the exhortations.
He doesn’t hide his contempt for tree-huggers and hippies and others who might be persuaded in the Daoist direction, citing truths from within that tradition to caution them about unintended consequences. He does the same against the Maoists, and fair enough.
But I believe he entirely misreads the Daoist canon (I am on very shaky ground here), which must be read as a cautionary tale not about the overreaching of do-gooders, but the overreaching of even a very moderately dogmatic Confucian order. Daoism is the refuge for honest politicians, ground out of the state, not for enemies of the state. It provides a mental resting spot for those who thought that the world must end when Ronald Reagan got elected.
So what? In the end this is a very well-read scholar who brings the essentials (if not the essence) of classical Chinese political philosophy before the educated class of English-language readers. While often posing direct challenges to what he seems to see as the lazy liberal core of Western political thinking, complacent in our certainties about democracy and strict public/private divides, he also offers a surprisingly attractive alternative, which is not so crazy at it might first seem.
Conundrums of class, wealth distribution, meritocracy and its relation to schooling, and many more are unraveled with surprising dexterity, and in a way this reader has never seen from among scholars of the Chinese traditions, from either inside or outside that universe. Bai straddles both traditions, and does so with considerable poise.
The opening chapter on Confucianism is by far the strongest, but it is worth the entire price of admission just to get that far. It could stand alone as a vessel of calming oil to be spread over our churning political waters. Except that we in these democratic United States simply can’t get past the notion that there is some actual truth out there.
Righteous indignation is our most consistent stance. I feel far less indignant after reading this little book. After writing this, I feel a lot less righteous too.
Of course there are long bookshelves of popular takes on Chinese philosophy, imported along with acupuncture and martial arts and Chinese food according to western tastes. But among serious scholars, one senses a backlog pressure, releasing an entire new assessment of Chinese traditional thought in the context of a rising China.
Our drought in the West was a reflection of China’s absence from the world scholarly stage across the decades of Maoist transformation. Where classical thought – and especially Confucius – had been plowed under along with everything bad about the corrupt and moribund imperial system, it is now back out in the mainstream, with Confucius on the rise again along with China.
I am writing here of course as a customer of Amazon among a population of literate Americans, and not as a scholar. I am aware of only a few recent scholars: Tu Weiming out of Harvard and back to Beijing University, China’s flagship, who writes and speaks eloquently about the relevance of Chinese traditional thinking to the modern world and for liberal education. Liu JeeLoo out of Taiwan and Cal State Fullerton who promises to inject streams from Chinese philosophy into the most “advanced” of Western philosophical discourse along with her first post-drought full treatment of Chinese scholarly tradition in textbook format. There are probably many more of which I am not aware.
Bai Tongdong could well be a crank or a patriot in scholar’s clothing, as he gave up his tenured spot in the US to return to China and take a place at FuDan University, flagship of Shanghai, China’s cosmopolitan center. But I think his colleagues across the globe take him seriously enough.
Bai gets my immediate confidence by offering accessible and no-nonsense usage for both the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘universal,’ and in the same sentence! He got his start in physics, but he doesn’t seem to be revisiting those late twentieth-century attempts to bring scientific thought processes into the realm of philosophy and literature.
Still, it seems entirely odd that he proposes to examine Confucianism not just for the coherence of its political philosophy, but for its relevance to modern political life. Just imagine someone proposing the same for the political philosophy of Plato’s Republic!
Well, differences abound, since the Confucianism examined here was not only the philosophy which can be extracted from its – as Bai explains them – non-systematic seminal writings; records of dialogues rather just as Plato wrote. But unlike Plato’s dialogues, the systems implied by these records were also quite actually enacted in the forms of government, and honed across the years in China. The “modern” Western republic didn’t experience its birth until the nation-state emerged from a long dark period of messing around with political arrangements already finished with in China.
China is strange that way, and its language is as well. Because the written language was written to accommodate a wide variety of spoken tongues – broader than those in Europe, according to Bai – it has also traversed the years in ways that no European writing could. No wonder that it might seem fair to consider Confucianism a candidate political “system” for the contemporary world. Bai is proposing nothing less than that!
Sure, we may be aware of growing numbers of Confucius Institutes around the globe, but we assume those are the cynical grab for soft power emanating from that bogus commie state which continues to arise so ominously to our East. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick in either direction, Bai cautions.
Astonishingly, the thesis which professor Bai sets out to defend is that the beginnings of the political order in China upon the dawn of the Qin dynasty, were in fact an early rehearsal of the beginnings of the “modern” political order in Europe some two thousand years later. Bai knows that this thesis is outrageous on its face, which is part of what makes reading him so compelling.
Anyhow, it’s here where I must locate at least an implicit critique of Western Science from Bai, since is it not on that great and universal procedural means for progress that we base all notions of modernity? Again, I’m writing as a generalist, incapable to scale the peaks of specialist writing along with my consumption of Netflix and popular literature across my daily grind.
Maybe Bai has actually entered the territory of post-modern criticism, which would be slightly comical. Still – my affection for it to the side for the moment – post-modernist rhetoric must be the singularly most culturally insular rhetorical genre on the planet, readable only by the most privileged and narrowly educated as produced exclusively by Western institutions of higher learning. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe the possibility exists in the Chinese language for any kind of post-modern discourse. According to Bai, that’s because all Chinese writing since the beginning of the civilization-state called the Middle Kingdom – “The Central Bulwark of Civilization” as Martin Jaques might translate it – is already post-modern.
And guess what? Professor Bai, again implicitly, hands me that one. He does so by finding an entirely unfussy and extremely accessible language for most any well-read person to follow an argument which traverses the very ground of post-colonial critiques of power. And English is not even his first language! He covers this post-modernist territory by the simple expedient of standing almost entirely outside of what that discourse attempts to do. We don’t need no stinkin’ post-modernist ecofeminist postcolonialistic talk if we’re coming from some entirely different order which never did colonize, um, quite. We don’t need to bring down the man if we can replace him with a much nicer one.
[Therefore!] I would say that in these political days, most everyone really *should* read this book. It’s a quick read, a great critique of all the same things which our most erudite scholars from any discipline are wanting to criticize, and it does so in almost the manner of an alien from a different planet; that famous trope regarding what a Martian would think if he came to Earth and tried to make sense of it.
OK, true confession. I'm writing this having just finished reading The Three Body Problem in its original Chinese, which is all about how we here on Earth might look from a very distant and different alien perspective. It’s also about how we might (or might not) come together as a planet in the face of a distant threat. Also as I write the American political experiment seems to have come apart at the seams, with individuals having no more reading ability than a television might afford feeling competent to judge which of those talking (or screaming) heads is the most real, straightforward and honest. And they seem to be coming up with Donald Trump! Well, I guess Reagan didn’t do us in, but still . . .
So back to the book. At its weakest moments, this book reads like a Confucian political screed, almost as though Bai were calling for a new political party (perhaps he actually is?). In his treatment of both Daoism and Legalism – the two other main streams of Chinese political thought which he promises to treat – he can barely hide his preference for Confucianism, which comes off somewhere between flag-waving and utopianism, but in any case one can only imagine him quite clean-shaven in the exhortations.
He doesn’t hide his contempt for tree-huggers and hippies and others who might be persuaded in the Daoist direction, citing truths from within that tradition to caution them about unintended consequences. He does the same against the Maoists, and fair enough.
But I believe he entirely misreads the Daoist canon (I am on very shaky ground here), which must be read as a cautionary tale not about the overreaching of do-gooders, but the overreaching of even a very moderately dogmatic Confucian order. Daoism is the refuge for honest politicians, ground out of the state, not for enemies of the state. It provides a mental resting spot for those who thought that the world must end when Ronald Reagan got elected.
So what? In the end this is a very well-read scholar who brings the essentials (if not the essence) of classical Chinese political philosophy before the educated class of English-language readers. While often posing direct challenges to what he seems to see as the lazy liberal core of Western political thinking, complacent in our certainties about democracy and strict public/private divides, he also offers a surprisingly attractive alternative, which is not so crazy at it might first seem.
Conundrums of class, wealth distribution, meritocracy and its relation to schooling, and many more are unraveled with surprising dexterity, and in a way this reader has never seen from among scholars of the Chinese traditions, from either inside or outside that universe. Bai straddles both traditions, and does so with considerable poise.
The opening chapter on Confucianism is by far the strongest, but it is worth the entire price of admission just to get that far. It could stand alone as a vessel of calming oil to be spread over our churning political waters. Except that we in these democratic United States simply can’t get past the notion that there is some actual truth out there.
Righteous indignation is our most consistent stance. I feel far less indignant after reading this little book. After writing this, I feel a lot less righteous too.
August 8, 2022
A solid first introduction to China's ancient/modern political philosophy. After reading this move on to Tao Jiang's comprehensive 'Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China'.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews