Democracy in China?

I stumbled across LCIB’s (Library of Congress Information Bulletin), dated August 2004 vol. 63 no. 8, which features a report about a 45-minute lecture delivered by the 2003-2004 Kissinger Chair of International Relations and Foreign Policy in the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, Lanxin Xiang. It was about how the American assumption that democracy is the only “correct” model for China will only undermine the Chinese-American relations.

Mr. Lanxin Xiang begins by stating that liberal democratic theory is “not just culturally parochial but also anachronistic.” Backing him up, accordingly, on this regard are the different philosophical schools of the French structuralists (Foucault school, particularly), the German conceptual historians (especially Koselleck), and the English empiricists (from Collingwood to Skinner) as these schools of though dwell on to scrutinize John Rawls’ works.

Now, taking off from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s proposition that language is problematic in philosophical discourse, Xiang seeks to disentangle the word “politics”. According to him, for the Greeks, “polis” was created but the question of how to organize power and authority was never resolved. Actually, the West needed to wait until Machiavelli who provided Europe and Anglo-America with a compass on power and authority. Precisely on this account, echoing the observation of Geoffrey Lloyd, a renowned scholar on Ancient Greece, Xiang says that the Greeks’ polis was sterile.

In China, however, Xiang posits that politics (read: power) and the moral quality of the leader (read: authority) are inseparable. And this is the result of consensus among the Chinese over the issue – which for Greece resulted to political chaos. Xiang says that throughout China the term for politics, “zheng,” was consistently translated as “righteous human act.” To date, the Chinese term for politics is “zheng zhi” was imported from Japan during the Meiji reform to allow a spatial relationship or division of power. But conceptually China never separated “heaven from earth;” and in traditional Chinese education, the study of ethics, state affairs, rituals and language are all made in connection to the “zheng.”

In brief, what does Xiang say? The academic says that America’s belief that it can transplant democracy in all cultures is mistaken. For in consideration of its culture China is antipathetic to democracy – a lesson learned by and from the May Fourth Movement of 1919.