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- [00:00]
Nick Bunin
May I welcome you to this talk in a series of European provocations, the reform of European philosophy. European provocations might sit a bit strangely with the topic tonight, although it's related.
- [00:19]
Leichenko
I was wondering that myself.
- [00:21]
Nick Bunin
It's related. Tzangzhou was a extremely important and productive political theorists in the early part of the long 20th century. I was born in the early 1880s and was active mainly starting just after the turn of the century onwards. He started as a radical and is thought of, somewhat misleadingly, as a computer conservative in his later development. And I say somewhat misleadingly because he is interesting for us, I think because of some European influence, partly related to his study at Edinburgh University, but also partly because he was a radical, he was a conservative, he was a traditionalist and modernizer. He was a person who looked for Chinese orientation as well as an openness to Western influence. So that many ways in which people quite generally and crudely try to determine what sides are involved in different intellectual conflicts and later political military conflict in China over 20th century, would try to pigeonhole someone on one side or the other. But with his attitude toward what he calls accommodation, that is a sense of bringing together with people, with groups, with different interests, different aims, different analyses, and to collaborate in a public use of political activity to achieve things that alone they couldn't do. And to see a political terrain which is deeply involved in individual idiosyncrasy and difference, of searching for and finding and in Confucian terms, developing and transforming itself towards a political maturity and a personal maturity. We find something much more complex and much more interesting than a single level cartoon figure. Well, Leichenko is going to be talking about him, and I hope that you'll have questions at the end.
- [02:45]
Leichenko
I'm sure they will, yes. All right, well, thank you everyone for having me here. I was also wondering how I ended up being slotted into a European philosophy lecture. I hope you all are aware I won't be talking entirely about European philosophy. There's a bit of it here. I do talk a bit about liberalism and John's British influences. But in any case, it's a delight and an honor to be here, and I welcome your questions. And I especially thank Nick Bunin for setting this up and Juliana for all of her work in helping me get ready. So, the first. July 2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Zhang Shijiao, who was born in Changsha, hunan province, in 1881 and died in Hong Kong in 1973. Now, Zhang was a pivotally influential Chinese intellectual Batman. Admittedly, most people have never heard of until they listened to Nick's introduction, in which case now you're a bit more familiar. But in general, you have to admit you've probably never heard of this guy until you read the title for my talk. He advanced a nuanced and moderate position to counter the extremist rhetoric of a war torn China. Like many other intellectuals who proposed conciliation during periods of crisis and violence, Zhang's ideas have been buried by histories which reduce the story of modern China to to a battle of polarized opposites. Tradition versus modernity, conservatives versus radicals, old versus new. A controversial figure who arguably straddles all of these categories at once, Zhang Shijiao rubbed elbows with some of the most diverse and interesting characters in China's long 20th century. As someone hailing from Hunan Province in central China, he enjoyed quite strong ties with his fellow provincials, the well known conservative Liang Shuming, as well as the even more well known Mao Zedong. As a journal editor in the mid-19 teens in Shanghai and Tokyo, he worked closely with then future communists Chen Duxiu and Li Da Zhao, even as he eventually resisted their radical politics in favor of moderate liberal parliamentarism. And as an opinion leader, he maintained a strong friendship with Hu Shi, but argued constantly with him over the need to continue teaching classical Chinese rather than the vernacular Chinese that Hu was promoting. Zhang Shijia's relative obscurity today is belied by the magnitude of his influence in the early 20th century when he was hailed by Chang Nai De in his A Short History of Chinese Political Thought as one of the greatest political thinkers China had ever produced. In fact, he spends as much time talking about Zhang Shijiao in this book as he does about Confucius, which really says something about Zhang's contemporary influence. So in this talk I will be explaining Zhang's life and times, and I will also delve more deeply into Zhang's theory of difference, including how he thought engaging such difference on personal and social as well as political registers could, in his words, found a polity. That's the Chinese term. This will be based on my recent monograph published with Cambridge University Press titled Making the Political Founding An Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shijiao. So if you're dying for more analysis of Zhang's theory after this talk, I would encourage you to take out a second mortgage on your home and buy this book. I think it's something like £65 at this point, which is much more than I think anyone should really spend before I do this. Let me check first. Can everyone hear me? It's all right. Yes. Okay, so before I do this and get into the substance of my talk, I want to explain my own motivations for looking at Chinese thought in general. I was always explaining my own approach in using Zhang Shijiao as the source of what I call theory. Much of my own motivations for looking at Chinese thought actually have to do with the fact that I studied Chinese thought before I actually studied political theory or philosophy. As an undergraduate, I studied economics and Chinese and had never actually taken a class in political theory or philosophy until I went to graduate school. So all along the way I thought, of course I can study Chinese thinkers because they study political thought, they argue in political ways, they have lots of ideas that are politically meaningful to contemporary life and contemporary political life. And it was only when I reached graduate school and did a graduate program in political theory that I came to understand. Political theory as defined in most modern academic settings around the world, is in fact identified with a rather parochial Western set of texts, concerns and ideas. And so as a result, I found myself becoming more interested in the emerging, back then emerging and still I think, emerging field of what's called comparative political theory. Comparative political theory has sort of articulated its concerns as how to include ever greater differently situated voices, that is typically understood culturally situated voices, into a shared conversation of political life. And I do think that as a methodological insight, it's important and necessary. But I fear that the field in general is stuck on what they call dialogic encounters with differently situated others. Basically, they're obsessed with understanding how we can learn more about our own sort of self positioning or enhance our own self reflexivity by coming into contact with sort of cultural others, rather than actually learning about what these cultural others think, say, believe, and whether or not those ideas can be applicable to our self understandings or our approaches to politics. Often in comparative political theory, these dialogues are still centered on what could be argued as cherry picking. They rely often on translations or sort of specific extractions from much larger debates that fail to capture the rich context in which these texts articulated themselves and formulated ideas. And so, coming to this field, I found it useful in labeling what it was I was doing. But I felt it was still insufficient. Rather than looking for new answers to shared questions, as many in the field do, I felt that it was at least equally important to think about what kinds of new questions might emerge from encounter with non Western or historically marginalized forms of thought. My formulation of this response, I call it Chinese thought as global theory or non Western thought as global theory, which could easily be confused with many more recent explorations of things like Asian values, which tend to see Confucianism and other isms that have emerged in East Asia in particular as a source of timeless values for the people in inhabiting those regions. Alternatively, much more recently, the Chinese government in the People's Republic has turned to asserting a very distinctive form of Confucianism, which feeds into a kind of Chinese nationalism and sees China as the center of a new emerging world order. But I actually think, although these debates have actually helped us draw attention to the fact that there's more going on in the world, I actually think that we need to think about the ways in which Chinese thought does not amount simply to a list of essentialist values that inherit all Asians across time and space, but rather how I think of it as threads of ongoing conversations and debates which offer both structural and empirical insight into the dilemmas of politics in their context as well as other contexts, including our own. So my formulation of global theory here departs a bit from how theory is often invoked in the social sciences and humanities, where the term typically means some kind of systematized body of thought often identified with the particular lineage of thinkers or an ideological ism such as Marxism or post structuralism. My own research agenda is and has been to develop and defend a broader notion of thinking theory, defining it simply as a generalization in which conditions in one place or at one time or both, are articulated in such a way to apply to other places or times. So put differently, theory is the deterritorialization of ideas to produce new and broader insight into social and political conditions elsewhere. To theorize this means to reimagine diverse contexts, to visualize their similarities in ways that throw light on their differences, vice versa. Marx was theorizing when he posed the term capital to capture specific continuities in otherwise disparate historical contexts, enabling him to argue for their underlying and perhaps otherwise overlooked similarities and modes of production. But Mao Zedong and his colleagues were also theorizing when they applied Marx's concept of feudalism to Chinese economic history using an indigenous term, feng jiang, and realized that the meaning of both fang jian and Marx's feudalism required considerable revision before either could say something intelligible about the possibility for communism in China. As has been frequently noted in the modern era, theory has traveled almost exclusively in one direction from European and American intellectual discourse often associated with or referred to as the west. Despite its geographic diffusion across the world and toward the diverse experiences of Asians, Africans, Middle Easterners, and many others whose particularity at one point or another became subsumed within the hegemony of modern Western knowledge production. The influence of Eurocentric theory was enabled through European colonization and missionary work throughout the world, sustained by the economic, technological, and military power of the industrialized West. The challenge for contemporary scholarship which I attempt to confront in my work on Zhang Shijiao and his contemporaries is thus how to reverse this historical directional arrow. I do not speculate about the methods for doing so in this talk, but those methods do constitute my current book project. So if any of you are interested, I can say something in the Q and A. But here I attempt to perform the movement of theory from China toward other regions of thought, including what we might identify with the modern west in scare quotes. Whether it works is up to you, as I turn now to examining Zhang Shijia's controversial life and times. Zhang Shijia was born in 1881, when European and American powers were continuing their military and commercial incursions into Chinese territory. He can be grouped with the more radical of those reformers who, following China's humiliating international defeats and eventually domestic collapse, dynastic collapse with the Revolution of 1911, began urging fundamental political transformation of the Chinese state, including military modernization, economic and trade reform, and representative constitutional government. He began political life as a member of an assassination squad against the Qing government and even invented the now established term traitor to the Han race, hanjian, after a stint in Japan and a longer term as a master's student at the University of Edinburgh. As Nick mentioned, however, Zhang Shijia became convinced that education, not violence, was the key to what he and others at that time called saving the nation. Jiu Guo, at the behest of his good friend Sun Yat Seng, returned to China from Edinburgh to help build the nation's first Republican government. In 1912, however, when the first republican president, Yuan Shikai, attempted to install himself as emperor, Zhang used his considerable grasp of Western political and social media theory, what he called Li Lun. He was one of the first to coin this term to counter public opinion in the face of Yuan Shikai's increasingly autocratic power. Zhang argued instead for the cause of free government in his journal Jiayinza, or the Tiger, named for the year of the Chinese zodiac in which it was founded, 1914. Historians today recognize Zhang's work in that journal as providing the groundwork for the progress radicalism of the new culture. In May 4, movements that followed these movements called for more attention to Western ideas about Society and politics and a critical reappraisal of China's traditional culture. Going along with this trend, Zhang was one of the first people in China to translate and disseminate concepts such as habeas corpus and to explain a connection between attitudes such as toleration and the institutional frameworks of liberalism which he had observed in action during his time as a master's student. Ironically, however, Zhang is probably best known today for his reactionary leanings after 1919, his quote unquote reactionary leanings. Increasingly wary of popular radical movements which called for the total destruction of China's traditional culture in what to Zhang seemed an unduly totalizing form of Westernization, Zhang joined his fellow provincial Liang Shumi, to urge rural reconstruction as an alternative to urban industrialization as the foundation of China's future economic development. His reputation as a reactionary was deepened when, like actually many other moderates of his age, including the more well known case of Liang Sichao, he took office under a warlord government after Yuan Shikai's death resulted in the fragmentation and regionalization of power throughout the territory of the former Qing Empire. Many saw Zhang's terms as Education and Justice Minister under the warlord Duan Qi Rui as self serving and unpatriotic. But to Zhang and indeed other moderates, including Liang Sichao, serving under a warlord offered the prospect of securing some measure of law and order to a country that had been in continuous upheaval for more than three decades. For his part, while in office, Zhang attempted several unsuccessful educational reforms and dealt harshly with corruption in government. Zhang saw his path from radical to moderate to conservative as guided by the value that he was. He called appreciating difference Shang yi. This stemmed from a fierce independence of opinion that resisted party affiliation his entire life. This was a value Zhang defended not only his political ideas, but as his political theory will quickly make aware, will make you aware of in his own actions. His roster of friends from all over the political spectrum speaks to how much Zhang personally savored disagreement and contestation. But he also took many political risks in the cause of advancing difference in the face of imposed conformity. So committed was Jiang to the value of appreciating difference that at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he wrote two passionate letters to Mao Zedong urging him to protect freedom of speech. Quite a bold act at the time, believe me. At the time of his death in 1973, Zhang was even in the process of coordinating a third attempt at cooperation between the Nationalists or the KMT who had fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and the Chinese Communist Party. Fortunately for Zhang, his early relationship with Mao Zedong while at Beida Beijing University, which included raising money for Mao's eventually abortive trip to France, secured him some measure of protection against the wrath of the Red Guards. He was foster father to Zhang Hanshi, who would later become Mao's English language tutor and translator. His granddaughter Hong Huang is a prominent Beijing based media personality whom the international media has dubbed China's Oprah Winfrey. And I'm actually proud to say that Ms. Hong recently contacted me to let me know she read my book on Zhang Shijiao in the process of writing an English language biography of her father, her grandfather. So that makes her the most famous person I know personally. The anniversary of John's death, just as just this past July I think offers us an opportunity to remember his intellectual legacy. He wrote for decades about difference and its value to a healthy self ruling political community. He promoted accommodation or and tried to explain why accommodation of difference not only in political but also personal and social life could challenge the status quo as well as open common ground between polarized differences in a society that not only was lacking any kind of serious consensus, but also lacked any history of democratic practice or pre existing cache of democratic sentiment. These ideas continue to remain valuable and in my mind constitute important contributions to a global history of ideas. So what were those ideas? Zhang's theories took their most substantive shape in the pages of the journal he founded, the Tiger, where he named accommodation as the foundation of government. Zheng Bun, in an essay of that name, the foundation of Government, which inaugurated the journal in 1914, Zhang declares founding a government has a foundation. Wherein lies this foundation? I say it lies in having tolerance, what is called having tolerance. It means not favoring the same and not hating the different. In the years following, Zhang would use the expanded page lengths the Tiger to explore exactly what it meant to not favor the same and not hate the different. Or as he put it, accommodation, according to Zhang, was toleration of difference. He identified this as a process quote born of mutual agonism and developed through mutual concessions. He argued that it was best embodied in parliamentary government, leading many of his commentators to identify his sense of accommodation with those liberal notions of toleration that developed in step with constitutional government in Europe and England. Although Zhang drew explicitly on British theorists of parliamentarism such as Walter Bagehot and Alfred Ben Dicey, he did not share their concerns to secure tolerance by means of a division between a secular public realm and A private realm of expression. Difference for Zhang was moreover, unrelated to questions of religious practice that that prompted the elaboration of toleration in European and American liberal thought. Zhang did, however, uphold a central premise of million liberalism, typically resisted by Chinese thinkers the permanent existence of political and moral disagreement. Now, this relates to translation number one on your handout, if you have them. Apparently not. Ah, okay. I thought I was supposed to pre circulate translations, right? What was I supposed to do? Oh, was I supposed to prepare handoffs?
- [21:09]
Nick Bunin
It's on the website.
- [21:10]
Leichenko
Oh, it's on the website. Okay, it's on the website. I'm gonna read it anyway. It doesn't really matter. Okay. Could you read the website out for us? Which website is it on? They will tell you. It's on the form. It's on the form. It's on the home page as well. If you had one of those fancy phones, you could. No. And then you spend time doing what my students do in class. Reading the text, of course. Anyway, in any case, okay, this would be the translation one on the handout, if you had one, but you don't. In any case, it's about a paragraph long and I'll read it slowly. Zhang says, and I quote, the only hope for a solution lies precisely in finding an opportunity to allow all the intelligence and forces of talent of every person in the country to achieve advancement and their emotions, pains and pleasures to find a melding together and to take these elements and frame them in a constitution, develop them into national customs and together respect them. Within any given country, feelings, pleasures and pains are all mixed together. And unless they are each one allowed to develop their abilities and come to terms with their inadequacies, the group will collapse. Unless the group uses the spirit of mutual feeling, mutual discussion, etc. No other long term plan is possible for national order. I want to argue here, however, that Zhang's work offers more than simply a Chinese translation of Western ideas. Confronting a fractious world and a community with no history of democratic practice, Zhang used a variety of global sources to formulate a creative solution. Drawing on Neo Confucian beliefs about the relationship of self cultivation to wider social and political order, Zhang saw the accommodation of differences in terms of reorienting oneself internally. That is, he believed that fostering in oneself and openness to difference would begin to change one's social and political environments, both by setting a powerful example to others as well as by literally setting setting into motion the kinds of actions that characterize a better world. Specifically, accommodation acts to foster good relationships between persons despite their political differences. For Zhang, it was important that people see the political world as comprised of interdependent but differently motivated agents. Zhang regarded personal expression as idiosyncrasy, a term he used positively, and political expression as dissent. Both these terms were expressed using the same Chinese character, yi, meaning different. These possibilities can only be enacted, however, by persons who, in his words, have a self. It was in fact this elaboration of individualistic selfhood that Zhang eventually became known. But his sources are not merely British and not merely what we would consider typically liberal. Indeed, here is Elsewhere, Zhang draws on earlier Chinese precedents for thinking about how the particular orientation of individuals in terms of their moral outlook and personal fortitude can make a difference in wider society. He then goes on to apply these possibilities to democratic and bottom up politics. At this point, I'm going to be talking about the second translation, which if you want to look it up on the website, you have a few more sentences of time to do that now. So this passage that I'm about to discuss comes from an essay titled the Nation and the Self, in which Zhang responds to those who, facing the repeated failures of republican government in China, are ready to give up in some way, either move away to Europe or the us, give themselves up to dissolution and brothels and drinking establishments, or become the modern equivalents of hermits and live up in the mountains. Zhang urges them to instead focus on exerting their utmost effort, a phrase which, literally translated, would mean something like exhausting that which lies in oneself. Zhang claims that if each person exerts his utmost effort, then the public political goals of nation building can be accomplished. Zhang claims the logic here is easy to understand. Because a usurper such as Yuan Shikai requires the help of outside people, he cannot proceed to usurp something on his own. If we simply do not forget ourselves, in Zhang's words, and refuse to allow him to usurp, Yuan has no way of doing anything. So, in other words, this is an argument from complicity. He's saying we're all implicit in complying with what Yuan is doing, and if we withdraw our complicity, then Yuan will have a much harder time of actually using usurping the autocratic power he's aggrandized to himself. But then, Zhang worries, there are still skeptics who think that the capacity for such effort just applies to those particular people who are what they call the backbone of society. In response, Zhang claims that this way of thinking about a solution risks the dangers of shirking one's responsibility and self confusion. And here the translation begins. It's a bit of a long one, so I'm gonna take a drink before I. Before I head in. He says, quote, what do I mean by shirking one's responsibility? Those who believe that the amount of good and bad in the world is not something that can be increased or lessened by one's own involvement. These people say, nowadays I am always hindered by one thing or another, and although I want to become involved, I cannot because I cannot overcome these hindrances. But even if I don't get involved, there are probably 33,999 other people out there who can ensure that nothing bad will happen. And incidentally, I'm not sure where he's getting this number of 33,999. It's not a number I've seen come up anywhere else in any of the materials I've read from this period or any other time. I think it's just meant to indicate that there's a lot of people out there that are going to do something, and if I don't act, I won't make a difference. So he says, however, you do not know how many other people are thinking the same thing you are. If all of those 33,999 people did the same thing you do and none get involved, then this means the entire nation has lost itself, has lost its wa. It's me. What do I mean by self confusion? Those who think that their talents are commonplace. These people say, even if I get involved, what difference will it make? But these people, Zhang explains, do not understand that the nation needs talent just as a warehouse needs goods. All goods are meant to end up in the warehouse. And all talent should take becoming involved in the nation as its goal. However small a talent, it will not be refused. The more extreme example are those who possess great talent of value to the world, but they still do not get into why? Because they do not properly use themselves. Long ago, Su Shen was a Song dynasty literatus. He was father of the more famous Su Shi right around the 11th century. Once said, is that talent with which nature has endowed me really just a coincidence? Yao could not give it to his son Dan Zhu Xun could not give it to his son Shang. Jun, Yao and Shun were legendary sage kings of ancient China. And Shun's evil father, Gu Seou, could not snatch it away from Shun. This talent begins from the heart. It issues forth in words, finds expression in important matters, and corrects what it cannot change, sages cannot give it to other people, and fathers cannot snatch it away from their sons. Therefore, in seeing what nature has given me, it is certainly not coincidental. Now the quote from Xu Sheng has ended, Zhang interjects, this truly can be called having a self. That was the entire quote. It took a while, but I'm done now. Okay, so this can truly be called having a self. For Zhang, this having a self, or what he sometimes theorized as self awareness, was key to linking personal orientations to the possibilities of political self rule. Zhang ties self awareness to the ability of individuals to see their political and social selves critically and imaginatively in the context of China's imminent post revolutionary political demise. He argues that from these particular vantage points, a new republican regime can be triangulated built on the incremental changes that accumulate as individuals shed their roles as imperial subjects and envision themselves as distinctive intellectuals sorry as distinctive citizens of of a republic with a variety of skills, perspectives and talents to offer. Where other intellectuals of his time claimed a right to educate and manipulate the masses, Zhang works to disaggregate the group concept, the Chun concept, central to contemporary elite political thinking about popular rule and attempts to open greater spaces for political participation. Consonant with his resistance to a public private binary that divides action into discussion, distinct and autonomous spheres, Zhang uses self awareness as one means by which people change their political worlds by changing themselves. By encouraging citizens to rethink how their distinctive personal lives affect political outcomes and vice versa, Zhang hopes self awareness will consolidate republican practices in a deeper way than elite led transformations could make possible. It affects this transformation by presuming a link between theory, building capacity and the efficacious action that build and sustain regimes of self rule. The active re Seeing oneself, everyday activities and environment in a different light, Zhang seems to think both motivates and constitutes social and political transformation. So in this sense, self awareness stands both as a primary defense and as an embodiment of the need for difference understood in personal relationships, most often as idiosyncrasy. For Zhang, respecting oneself and others as idiosyncratic meant that one was closer to recognizing that differences are inevitable. He saw idiosyncrasy as necessary for invigorating political association, arguing that a productive gap between individuals need not provoke hostility. So rather than provoking violence or suppression, Zhang argued, difference can also invite interpretation and engagement. Zhang's ideas are helpful in explaining how a shared vision of community may be possible among disparate self aware individuals. What he tried to construct was a process of recognition and accommodation that would allow political differences to be productively debated in public culture toward a solution that would reflect the best compromise for all parties. John characterized dissent, the second meaning of difference, as motivating an interplay of forces, ideas, or interests among participants. He saw it as a means for sharpening the commitment of participants to a shared goal, but without encouraging mutual exclusivity. Zhang's ideas about a spirit of dissent and an inclination towards compromise, which he saw as necessary for China's political environment advancement, come from the work of British thinkers Walter Bagehot and John Morley. John claimed, quote, only once a nation allows dissenting opinions to flourish, can have cabinet government, unquote. So, in other words, he didn't think that you could just build cabinet government and have people fill it automatically with practices and practice it in a way that they would be familiar with, because you first had to get people on board with the idea that dissenting opinions were okay. China must not only have a parliamentary system, but a range of options to express in it. In other words, he envisioned China as transitioning peacefully and incrementally to democratic rule. For that to occur, he argued, accommodation was vital, for it alone could resolve the problems of difference in a disagreement that were bound to arise. But this too, turned on a certain kind of personal orientation. Excuse me. To describe this orientation and its relevance to political and seemingly more public realms, Zhang alludes to a story from the Mencius, a seminal text of the Confucian tradition that Zhang's audience have most likely memorized in early childhood. He uses the story to locate the spirit of self awareness in a very personal, indeed painful, reaction to political power. He says, as follows, quoting from Mencius. Mencius said to King Hui of Liang, now suppose your majesty is having music. The people hear the noise of your bells and drums and the notes of your fifes and pipes, and they all, with aching heads, knit their brows and say, our king so enjoys his music, but why does he reduce us to such an extreme state of distress? Fathers and sons in this state cannot see one another. Elder brothers and younger brothers, wives and children, are separated and scattered abroad. That's From Mencius, book 1. John's Gloss in this passage goes as getting a headache from this situation is a reaction you can't say is not a source for self awareness. But it doesn't go a step further and say, now that I'm in such an extreme state, how can I act myself as a king? Because our state lacked this kind of true self awareness for millennia, we have had only a history of rulers and not a history of the people. The Ming, unquote, Zhang portrays the disjuncture between some ideal state of affairs and a gravely troubled political reality as an actual physical pain, a headache, as indicated by the etymological derivation of the Chinese character FL herself from suffering, this pain is most acutely felt on the individual register. This individualized pain prompts reflection on how I can act as a king, in the process transforming the individual from an imperial subject to one who participates in ruling. As Zhang portrays it here, self awareness is a process of interrogating who the rulers are supposed to be and how those who do rule undertake effective action in the world. Although an implicit part of rule by the people because it in some way constitutes the agents, the agency of the people's history, the headache that facilitates self awareness nevertheless does not entail questions about membership and exclusion, as do many contemporary political theories, which I'll get to in a moment. As much as a cultivation of a very particular internal kind of self orientation, with the turn to individualized feeling, Zhang reduces government by the people to an awareness of and by the self, here articulated as the I or the me, the wo, urging the particularization of distinct selves and abilities from what was formerly treated as a blind, passive mass. The very process of an individual coming to a realization and making a decision is precisely what constitutes the state. Indeed, once this radio realization is made, in Zhang's words quote, the work of creating a state is already half done, so the connection between inner cultivation and outer world ordering that runs throughout Zhang's thought highlights the importance of individual actions in society and politics. He proposed a path to be taken neither in deliberate concert with others nor completely independently of them. Zhang's mind model challenges contemporary perceptions of the political as an exclusively collective and public endeavor by focusing instead on the internal state of individuals and how they affect and are shaped by external transformations, his ideas are helpful in understanding how diverse kinds of individual moral effort, experience, and perspective can be meaningful and politically effective. Most importantly, Zhang encouraged his readers to make such self improvement improving efforts despite the circumstantial and institutional factors that were beyond the capacity of any one individual to control. To conclude, I'd like to make some remarks about Zhang Qizhou's possible global significance in light of these ideas. His ideas offer a fresh perspective from which to consider ideological slogans such as harmonious society in China today under one party rule. The idea of harmony, in direct contrast to Zhang's concept of accommodation, I argue, presumes the absence of difference both individually and collectively. His Ideas are also powerful rejoinders to the common stereotype of East Asians as emphasizing public conformity rather than dissent and disagreement. Although letters written to Zhang Shijiao as editor of the Tiger reveal that his views on difference in accommodation were anything but original orthodox, his work did decisively shape the views of moderates such as Zhang Dong sun and Li Jianlong in the years preceding the May 4th movement. In present day Chinese scholarship, Zhang's ideas continue to be explored as a less radical alternative to Chinese political development. Indeed, revisiting Zhang's work today gives us an opportunity to think about how Chinese ideas can contribute solutions to global problems. Much of the thinking about democracy in the Western academy is undertaken by scholars who live in advanced industrial societies with long histories of liberal democratic government. As such, their work is preoccupied with refining democratic norms rather than thinking about how democratic communities might be established in the first place, including how democratic practices and orientations might begin to take shape in places with no prior experience of democratic rule or how democracy in general might be justified in light of other competing alternatives. This is something I had to confront when I taught for four years in Singapore. The Jong's dilemma sheds light on the problems of many non democratic or emergingly democratic societies around the world. He did not have some cache of pre existing democratic sentiment on which to draw in order to insist his fellow Chinese to defend the promise of public life. He urged accommodation as a way in which a political association could be built from as well as open itself to radical challenges in ways that legitimated public expression, that legitimated public expressions of difference. In these respects, Zhang's writings resemble the critical pluralism and difference politics of contemporary Euro American political theory. Difference theorists such as William Connolly, Chantal Mouff, and Irish Young have argued that transcendent values present enormous difficulties for the establishment of a meaningful political community. This is because transcendent values inevitably trump competing values and their supremacy that cannot be challenged. The antidote, they argue, is the inclusion of marginalized groups into political discussions, opening the terms of political community, including such questions as who belongs and how to public contestation. The importance of defending difference, as these theorists pose it, is to unsettle and disturb established norms, enabling new understandings of received and sometimes objectionable identities, institutions, and modes of association. So often they're arguing for people so such as historical minorities, historically excluded groups such as gays, women, et cetera, and they're arguing that these people should in a way challenge these received or accepted norms. And so there's important differences between Zhang and this set of present Day theorists, Zhang did not directly pose or respond to questions that mark difference politics, namely those arising from contests about identity, inclusion or representation that largely arise in contexts where identities or institutions are well functioning, sedimented and long standing. So rather, what Zhang was most concerned to elaborate was a theory of polity building in which he understood political community as a goal rather than a realm in which action could always already take place. For Zhang, accommodation was vital to polity building. His ideas remain useful today because they address the most basic of political questions. How does one begin to build a peaceful and functional community in the presence of difference and disagreement? Zhang's solution, of course, was that we had no other place to start than ourselves. Thank you. I will replace the term where it's at.
- [41:59]
Nick Bunin
Thank you very, very much. Lee. The last political philosophy talk that I attended a couple of weeks ago was in Prague by Chantal Mouff, talking in a conference about democracy in times of crisis. And it was very clear from a pan European audience that part of the crisis is the passivity of members of the public in the new or renewed democracies of Central Europe and also the crisis of the movement away from political activity in Western European political political societies. It seems to me that the theories that you outlined have something to say to us as British and European people in terms of how we see ourselves related to a political sphere which is troubled. However well established the sentiment of background of political practice in a public sphere might have been. But I'll ask for questions. Yes, you want to if you wish. You don't have to. If you want to identify yourself, you.
- [43:17]
Leichenko
May or remain anonymous. Yes.
- [43:21]
Martin
Martin, anonymous. Thank you very much. Very interesting. I just wondered, you know, obviously since Deng Xiaoping, China has somehow combined a form of free market capitalism with a sort of formal acknowledgement of Marxism. Still, do you think Zhang would have found that interesting? Creative compromise.
- [43:44]
Leichenko
So it's always a question of how these ideas, and this is, you know, early 20th century, relate to things, to developments that in fact transform China. I mean, so I don't think that Zhang would have necessarily found the China of today recognizable. I think from perhaps from an intellectual standpoint, he was a very tolerant and open minded guy. So I'm sure if someone like Deng Xiaoping said, how about this socialism with Chinese characteristics thing, he would, he would have probably been. That's an interesting concept. I'm not so sure how successful he would have found its execution. And there's certainly lots of unresolved tensions in Chinese society today between this drive for market expansion while trying to Maintain something of the welfare state that was the socialized welfare state that was under existence until Deng Xiaoping. So I'm not sure. I think the thing he would say to do about it would be to just make sure that there are places to debate its benefits and costs, which don't, of course, exist in China today. That, to him, was the most important thing, protecting this capacity for public criticism and expression of all.
- [44:44]
Martin
Quick supplementary. He's obviously interested in Confucius and met. Has he any interest in early Daoism and the notion of small government and laissez faire, which is in Dao Te Ching.
- [44:56]
Leichenko
Yeah. So it's hard when we talk about these thinkers. They were. Thinkers like Zhang occupied a transitional space between sort of the traditional Chinese empire where everybody grew up. You know, most educated men grew up having memorized these things, texts in early childhood. They were familiar with them. They had read them, and they had sort of internalized them. And a generation of people who had gone abroad to study, as Zhang had. So he was sort of caught in the middle. He had a classical education, and he also went abroad. So when you say that he was interested in Mencius, I think he wasn't so much interested in Mencius so much as Mencius was simply one of that. One component of that larger infrastructure of thought in which he was brought up, and. And so, too, was Taoism. So he doesn't make. One of the frustrating things about Zhang Shijiao, as I was beginning to read him, he writes in a very beautiful but very dense form of classical Chinese. And his allusions to classical texts like the Mentius are not. They're not cited with footnotes. He just sort of. He just writes words. And you're expected to know that this is exactly coming from the Menches because he'll quote it directly without citing it. And so there's a bit of that in all of these thinkers. He himself does not spend that much time talking about the Taoists. There is this critique of the state which was popularized by Liang Qichao, that comes from Zhuangzi, not from the daojing about, you know, if a. If a person steals a hook, he's considered a thief, but if he steals a state, he's considered a king. And so there's a lot of discussion about this concept in particular, but there wasn't a whole lot of direct. By Zhang Shija by other thinkers. There were, but by Zhang Xiaja, not a lot of direct inference from. From Dallas thought specifically.
- [46:39]
Martin
Yes.
- [46:41]
Leichenko
How did.
- [46:43]
Martin
Well, the question I've got.
- [46:44]
Leichenko
He had Some relative Nazi time.
- [46:46]
Unnamed Academic 1
I think he tried to relate the liberalism of Anglo American philosophy with the Marxism of Marx.
- [46:53]
Martin
Is that my understanding that he tried.
- [46:55]
Unnamed Academic 1
To bring it back to them, which might be.
- [46:57]
Leichenko
So at the time he was writing Marxism had not. The idea of Marxism hadn't entered Chinese discursive space at that time. I mean, there were anarchist ideas floating around that he wasn't necessarily involved in. He was. He was born in 1881 and he died in 1973. And Mao was actually his younger. Right. So Zhang Xuzhou was like Lao Zhang. He was like, you know, the guy that Mao Zedong was supposed to. To be looking up to. And they were. They both grew up near each other in Hunan Province and they got to know each other in Beijing, but Mao Zedong himself did not actually. How do you say, he didn't start becoming popular or start writing things until after Zhang Shijia had written a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about. So at this point in time, I guess Mao Zedong was the young whippersnapper and John Xujao was the guy who had all the connections and owned the journal that could publish it. So there wasn't actually a lot of. He wasn't. That he wasn't exposed to Marxism at this time. Yeah. Yes.
- [48:06]
Unnamed Academic 2
Taking that question a little bit further, I guess the way presenting John, he is providing a bridge from IP what I would consider to be a very elitist, hierarchical view of society that he was both educated in, as well as occupying the milieu of which, to the extent that it saw any kind of political activism or participation is strictly reserved to those who are educated well enough to even responsibly contribute to the discourse. Because the Confucian ideal.
- [48:47]
Nick Bunin
Confucian.
- [48:50]
Unnamed Academic 2
Context that he grew up in was one that, you know, if you're not really well educated to the classics, your opinions don't really count, right?
- [49:01]
Leichenko
That's right.
- [49:02]
Unnamed Academic 2
So in that sense, it is a certain view of a very, very thin 1% intellectual elite. They're the only ones that could contribute to global discourse and global change.
- [49:14]
Leichenko
That's right. And he's fighting that.
- [49:16]
Unnamed Academic 2
Yeah, he's fighting that. And of course, even though you said when he met Mao, when he influenced Mao, when he befriended Mao, Mao had not yet struggled towards Marxism, you know, at some point about a decade after he started, it became very, very much part of the intellectual view of China, at least among the radical front, there was this new, very, very powerful revolutionary idea where you have a different view of society, which is one based on class, economic Class. So it's a different kind of hierarchy, but one based on economics as opposed to intellectual prowess.
- [49:57]
Leichenko
Yeah.
- [49:57]
Unnamed Academic 3
So.
- [50:01]
Unnamed Academic 2
How did he manage this very tricky position between two, in my opinion, very, very hierarchical views of society. One based on intellectual pedigree and one based on economic access. His view is kind of. It's not clear to me where these differences come from, if not from intellectual ability or from.
- [50:25]
Leichenko
Oh, okay, I see. I see. This is a good question. I think that you've understood everything I've said, and now you're sort of asking me to extend. So I can do this in two ways. One is to sort of answer the question of what the difference is consistent. And the other is to tell you a bit about his activities in the late 1920s and 1930s. So don't let me forget to do that latter thing while I answer the former thing I have a tendency to forget. So the kind of differences he was talking about here specifically related to something called talent, which. Which we understand as a specific kind of expertise. But he was trying, exactly to get people thinking about the ways in which everyone makes contributions to society in different kinds of ways. He even said, you can open a shop, you can start a journal, like I did. You could organize people in your community. There's lots of different ways that people have always already been acting, including people in rural areas that have never been registered as public, political, or as meaningful or as contributing to social change. So a lot of what he does is he's trying to say, okay, people think that because they don't have this, as you described it very well, these elite qualifications, in order to enter the discourse of the Confucian literati, that they couldn't make a difference. He's trying to say, no, everything that we do, everyone makes up a society in different ways. And he was trying to draw attention to the fact that each of these spheres of life have their unique talents. And we need to understand how, if we have our own specific point of view or perspective, we don't need to simply passively wait for, say, the emperor to call upon us and dispatch us to an official post. But rather, we have to start thinking like democratic citizens and thinking about how we can make a difference economically, politically, socially, personally, in our families and in our small communities. So that's the kind of thing he was talking about. And in the late 1920s and 1930s, after movements like the May 4th Movement were calling for totalistic Westernization of Chinese life, people started to reassess whether or not Westernization was actually something that was desirable Precisely because it seemed to generate all of these bad outcomes like imperialism and worldwide economic disparities in income, world wars, etc. And so at that time there was actually a wide diversity of debate. Now we of course, we know pretty much Mao Zedong's solution, right, which was to adopt communism. There were still some anarchists who were advocating, you know, the demise of the state entirely. A group of moderates argued that, you know, we could, that it would be possible to borrow piecemeal from the west without replicating the same kinds of institutional mechanisms that have reproduced inequality. But Zhang Shijiao and a few of his fellow, his fellow Hunanese Liang Xiuming, believed that China represented an opportunity to do something completely different economically, which was something they called rural reconstruction, where they sort of combined this old Confucian mandate to educate the uneducated and enable them to take control of their life, particularly in the countryside, introduce to them some new technologies, methods of farming, etc. And from there build a new economic system. That wasn't capitalism, that wasn't communism, but that was sort of something unique to China and it didn't work. But I mean, they were one of the few people outside of the communists who were actually paying attention to the fact that 80% of China's population lived in the impoverished countryside. But it didn't have a future. I don't know that it wouldn't have worked, but it didn't work. It didn't have a future.
- [53:52]
Nick Bunin
If I remember, there was a laity led Buddhist revival in that same period which also had the sense of transforming rural life village by village as a name. So again, that has been erased from the sense of cultural and political history, intellectual history from the century. But that was their, as a powerful force and also was put down after 49 as an alternative that was not welcomed by the new government.
- [54:25]
Leichenko
Yeah, I mean, so that's actually what happened with Zhangshuzhao in general. And a lot of these Ideas from say 1890 to about 1949, there was a lot of alternatives and a lot of debate and a lot of rich sort of discourse. And all of that, as you said, sort of got ignored when the conflict Communists took over and began sort of telling a new story about the Chinese past. And only now, today is a lot of this stuff being recovered by many by Chinese historians who are sort of looking for alternative histories, alternative forms of continuity. And they're uncovering a lot of this. And Zhang Shijao was sort of uncovered in the last 10 years or so. I mean he's, he was really prominent, as I said, in the beginning, but then people sort of forgot about him. He was confined to the dustbin of history, so to speak speak, until people realized, oh, he was important and had interesting ideas.
- [55:13]
Nick Bunin
Yes.
- [55:14]
Leichenko
What was his view regarding the Hunted Flowers campaign? Was that something that he would have promoted to the game? He would have loved the idea of let a hundred flowers bloom because he was all about advocating difference. He wouldn't have been about the part where, you know, Mal comes in and then says, now we know who all the dissidents are. It cuts them off at the knees. Yeah, no, he would not have been in favor of that. But I mean, there were lots of, you know, movements from the 1930s to the 1950s where ideas were sort of allowed to flourish or end more openly, but invariably they were followed by a crackdown of sorts. And as I said, Zhang Shujao actually wrote letters to Mao Zedong in the 1960s. So this would have been a bit later, after 100 flowers. But he was writing to him saying, you need to protect people, need to be able to express different opinions. That's the only way that a nation will be strong. And saying that to Mao Zedong at that time is quite dangerous. But he was a brave person for doing it. It didn't have any effect, obviously.
- [56:15]
Nick Bunin
Yes.
- [56:17]
Unnamed Academic 3
It seems to me, listening to a thinker that I never heard of before, that the problem that he is wrestling with is the fact that you think about European society. Democracy emerged in an organic way in European society where there was a pre existing pluralism, a great variety of different forces, contending forces, cities, the church, etc. Etc. He's really talking about how you, how you effect change or democratic change perhaps in society that is polarized between an extremely powerful state and a pulverized or atomized community when there is no community. So in a sense he's saying that you can only really build political democracy on the basis of a pre existing civil society. So how do you get to democracy where you don't have a civil society? And it seems to me that he is arguing for the creation of civil society as a preliminary to developing democracy. In a sense, he is confronting the same kind of problem as Tocqueville was in the early 19th century, that out of the ruins of an absolutist monarchy where you have a very powerful state and that led to a very powerful military dictatorship torn apart, how do you, how do you create a functioning democracy? So he goes to America and he finds all the associations, etc. He is theorizing well, how do you create out of this pulverized, atomized society?
- [57:57]
Leichenko
That's right.
- [57:58]
Unnamed Academic 3
How do you create a civil society? How do you create active citizens, if you like, that at some future point will provide a social basis for Western style parliamentary, Am I right?
- [58:12]
Leichenko
Yes, with some qualifications. So the Tocqueville example is actually quite interesting because it shows that democracy was not an inevitable outcome of European social processes, but rather it was something people had to think about, they had to practice, they had to sort of dedicate themselves to. Now, admittedly, many of those people had, you know, read the Greek, you know, read Plato and Aristotle and had a sense of how a democratic society might have functioned. In ancient Athens, for example, China didn't have even that. And it's also the case that the China that Jiang was confronting didn't even have a strong state. In fact, that was the whole problem. There was nothing strong about it at all. There were people coming in, threatening its border as it began.
- [58:49]
Unnamed Academic 3
Strong state for long periods. And then what had happened, it had completely collapsed and there'd been social chaos and another strong state had arisen. You know, that's the cycle.
- [58:58]
Leichenko
But there was no. Yeah, but there was no strong state at this point time. I mean, not at all, not for decades.
- [59:03]
Unnamed Academic 3
China had been in those conditions previously.
- [59:07]
Leichenko
There's some. Yeah, there's some scholarly debate about what. Whether or not the extent to which the Chinese state under the various empires were strong was centralized. There were. Every empire had its own way of sort of managing the bureaucracy. Particularly in the Ming and parts of the Qing, there was a lot more decentralization. But there's. I, I don't work on the social history, but apparently I do know there's some debate about that. You can't just say China had the central state and didn't, because apparently that's controversial. But all I can say is historians.
- [59:37]
Nick Bunin
Are now looking at local history rather than grand narrative for the national court as the center of things. And there's a lot of revision going on about the accepted view that you had consolidation of strong imperial centers and then their decay, chaos and emergence of a new centralized leadership. There's nothing entirely wrong with that, but it's not entirely right either.
- [60:06]
Leichenko
Well, it's actually important to know about this revisionist history that's going on because Zhang Shijiao was one of the few people. I don't mention it here because there was too much to say, but he was one of the few people who actually argued for a federalist system, for governance, a decentralized Federalist system them with local parliamentary assemblies. And he was drawing on centuries of practice and theory in China about what was called local self government, in which local gentry leaders would sort of organize most services and institutions that we would associate with governments like sanitation, irrigation, tax collection, all of that stuff was. And in some cases the raising of a provincial army. Many of that was handled by local officials. So there's a lot of nuance there actually in the Chinese historical record that I think awaits further investigation. The other important qualification to understanding is that I think it's true that he was hoping for some version of a civil society, except that it seems to me that much of the way we think about civil society is as a public space that's in some ways imperial, importantly divorced from private concerns or private functionings or private self understandings. That's definitely not a division that he countenanced. He was very much in favor of understanding sort of the self as continuous with what I call personal, social and political registers, so that what we do personally actually affects our political sort of our political ordering. This is a very neo Confucian idea. My students in the back know I've been lecturing on Chinese political thought this term, and they know it comes from Neo Confucianism. That's right. And I think in fact that that understanding of the self is sort of nested within this set of relationships is part of what helps them overcome this bootstrapping problem of, well, we have nothing. Where do we go from nothing to something? Well, we have to start cultivating ourselves because that's the only thing we have. Right.
- [62:01]
Nick Bunin
Let me just interject just a small comment that I think the theory of citizenship in early 20th century is extraordinarily fascinating. Liang Qiqiao said that China lacked a constitution and that one of the things that was necessary was to have a new relationship to supplement the Confucian key relationships. And that was citizen to citizen, an.
- [62:23]
Leichenko
Equal relationship to replace the hierarchical relationships of Confucian.
- [62:26]
Nick Bunin
Precisely. So that the idea was to have a notion of equal participation, but that filling out the notion of citizenship was also contested is related in the west to republican versions of democratic theory or alternatives to democratic theory, where you have a system of responsibility as well as rights. And that attention between republican interpretation, democratic interpretation fits right into these concerns about. About how should you shape and understand the notion of citizenship? For China, it's still the problem today for those who think that maybe the way to reform is to have citizen activity in associations as a stepping stone towards a kind of democratic or Republican politics. There's a question in the back. Yes.
- [63:20]
Leichenko
The question of social change is quite curious. I just have this idea in terms of the Zhang Xizhou not being very.
- [63:32]
Martin
Well known, in terms of the modern.
- [63:35]
Leichenko
Post modernist, the new China that's rising.
- [63:38]
Unnamed Academic 1
Beyond.
- [63:40]
Leichenko
Challenging the old world order. Would you say in your experiences that those theories, or no questions of social change is still relevant, considering he wrote all these thoughts in the last century, or say, last millennium, considering, Sorry, all the. That his theories are still relevant in terms of the comparisons of what's happening in China now? Yeah. So the people that sort of rediscovered Zhang Shuzhou were Chinese scholars who were interested in alternatives to what they saw as an overly. As an excessive emphasis on a revolutionary history, on revolutionary action, on constant upheavals of the social structure that you had under Mao Zedong. And so it was like in the late 1990s, after Deng Xiaoping, in the early 2000s, that Zhang Shijia became a bit more popular among Chinese intellectuals and Chinese historians. So they obviously think that he does pose an alternative. And one of the things that they. One of the things that they're particularly interested in him for is actually his theory of accommodation, his belief that in a Chinese society you could have accommodation of differences and that certain kinds of attitudes could be cultivated to enable this kind. This proliferation of difference to flourish. So you didn't just have the party state sort of telling everybody what could be said in public discourse. So he was a touchstone for a lot of people who are trying to articulate that space in Chinese intellectual discourse in the 1990s and 2000s. The stuff on social change. That's one of my own interests, and it stems from a larger concern I have, that much of what we study in contemporary political philosophy, in Anglophone, contemporary political philosophy, tends to ignore what we as individuals do in our everyday life and how that contributes to democracy or contributes in general to the social state in which we find ourselves. And I think, Nick, when you. In your opening remarks, you sort of mentioned that Chantal Mouff was sort of complaining about the complete passivity and desiccation of public spaces. And it's precisely because there isn't a citizenship that's sort of active and self aware. And the fact is, Zhang Shija would have said, well, there's only one way to get that kind of active citizenry, which is to start being that active citizenry. Unfortunately, you can't force people to do this. No institutional structure is going to make people want to be democratic citizens. So he was thinking very carefully about how, on an individual level, individuals influence other individuals. They provide models for other individuals. And from these very small micro political processes, they end up having wider and wider political effects. So that was. And I think that's still quite important. We too often focus on institutional changes and social change, but an important part of social change is also changing people's mind.
- [66:32]
Nick Bunin
Yes.
- [66:35]
Martin
I'm based on what they all concerned, which I sympathize with. Trying to create a global political philosophy, put political philosophy into a global perspective in the context. I was struck by two of the responses from the chair to your comments. You seem to imply somehow that we in the west had a sort of functioning Finnish democracy, which, you know.
- [67:00]
Leichenko
Was.
- [67:00]
Martin
A standard, which in some sense the musical of the Third world should aspire to it, including your philosopher Chang.
- [67:08]
Leichenko
Well, I'm not advocating that view. I'm saying that people are sort of assuming that because they're not responding to this.
- [67:12]
Martin
And this question of the dialogue between liberalism and republicanism, which I think is interesting as well. Now, in terms of the context of this discussion today, European philosophy. I've just read Alan Badgier's the Rebirth of History. I know you're familiar with that, which is really an attempt too, I think, to think about the nature of contemporary democracy, drawing interestingly, of course, on his continued commitments, most fashionable to the Cultural Revolution, which he was a strong supporter in the late 60s, and which he still seems to feel is something which we can learn from constructively. What he's also trying to, of course, is to build on the experience of collective democratic practice that we saw in the Occupy movement. And he's drawing there. This was relevant to your Jiang thinker. He's drawing there on a Rousseauian conception of active democracy, which draws on the idea of the general will. And it struck me that if Zhang was only exposed to the ideas of Morley.
- [68:07]
Leichenko
He knew Rousseau as well. He read Rousseau. Yeah, yeah.
- [68:10]
Martin
He was basis for democratic politics. He was having to build, you know, democratic politics on rather uncertain foundations. I just wondered if he had, in fact, you know, tried to draw that republican tradition with a much more active sense of creating a polity and engaged polity, you know, which indeed would meet this issue of one improving proxy in China, but also improving it in the west, but also creating a democracy that didn't just restrict itself to a liberal conception of difference, but also invoked a republican section of the public good, a more active sense of democracy, which is very much what Baggio does. I mean, I think Baggier at times. There are totalitarian implications. I think in some of his arguments. But nevertheless, he is trying to rethink what democracy means. It doesn't just mean the summation of individual your attitudes, consciousness, experiences. It means some collective sense of public purpose. And I didn't really feel that was something you'll think showed much familiarity with because perhaps he didn't know the work of Rousseau. Melody?
- [69:10]
Leichenko
Well, he did, and I will explain in a minute. Yeah, first you mentioned that I sort of set this up. I sort of, at the end of my talk, I sort of criticized contemporary political philosophers for sort of ignoring the fact that democracies emerging in different societies and we don't attend enough to the possibility that certain groups and practices may not have an existing cache of democratic sentiment on which to draw. And I didn't mean to state or to claim that, you know, contemporary European American democracies were finished or complete, but rather that much of the literature on this in political theory, people like Bonnie Honig, Hannah Pitkin, Hannah Arendt, nevertheless sort of reproduce this assumption by saying, well, no matter what happens in the west, the ultimate way forward is always to just constantly renew this heritage that we have, that we have this. We have lots of examples of how to act democratically. We have a history of it. We draw upon that in order to propel us forward. And this was very famously Hannah Arendt's, in particular her response to totalitarianism. You know, she was looking at totalitarianism in Europe and wondering, you know, where do we go from here in the 20? And she was saying, wow, we've always had ancient Athens, right? And many people have sort of followed her to sort of say, oh, the problems of democracy can be solved by drawing on this heritage. But then the question arises, of course, what if you don't have such a heritage? And that was John's question, right? John Chigot actually was extensively exposed to the ideas of someone like Rousseau. But as I was explaining to Nick in our discussion before the talk, often what we take out of Rousseau today or why we think is important is obviously not going to be the interpretation that Jiang Kuzhao had of Rousseau or why he thought he was important, simply because at the time, you know, people thought different things were important and they didn't always necessarily have. They didn't understand Rousseau as a republican thinker. That's something that I think an identification that has become lately more important and more salient. That was not as salient for Jiang Shisha. But he does understand the sale. He does argue that there should be a kind of collective sense of Some kind of shared, we'll say shared political good in the sense that we all need to have some way of living together, of talking together, of understanding each other as different. But I think he was one of the few people that really pushed back against this idea of a public good precisely because it was being advocated by so many of his contemporaries as a kind of monolithic, elite driven, singular notion of what goodness was. It wasn't simply about an emergent sort of bottom up kind of modus of envy or prudential kind of arrangement, but rather was something imposed from the top down by people who knew better. And John was very much opposed to that. And I think in the case of Rousseau, the reason he finds Rousseau so exciting and interesting is because Rousseau posits the idea that we can have individual selves or a sense of rights that are not necessarily given to us by a king, but rather come into being because we're all political beings. And he has a long debate actually with another intellectual name, Yen Fu, on this very point. But I mean, he doesn't get a badooine reading of Rousseau out of it, unfortunately. No, but until Badu. Has anybody gotten a badu in reading of Rousseau? Right.
- [72:19]
Unnamed Academic 3
Well, you could think that Mao is legislated, couldn't you?
- [72:24]
Leichenko
Well, so I spent a bit of time in this. Yeah, I spent a bit of time in this book talking about what's called the founding paradox, right? So if we want to found a community that's based on democratic principles, there's no way of founding that community democratically. And Rousseau demonstrates this in his in the Social Contract by introducing this convenient figure, the lawgiver who comes in, makes everybody what they should be, and then they can come together and self constitute. Right as a polity. And Zhang Shuja was aware of this. He had different ways of talking about it. His was an opposition to what at the time was sort of identified with sagely rule or rule by virtue, in which one singular virtuous sage comes and comes along and just sort of unites everyone. And many people thought that that person would be Yuan Shikai. But obviously Yuan Shikai turned out to be. Well, when he declared to declare himself emperor, people starting to get suspicious, right? So he was very, very skeptical that there was ever any such person, that any such person could ever come along. He was very much a bottom up kind of collective, you know, like emergent sort of collective, prudential organization kind of guy. Not a top down, imposing order kind of guy.
- [73:35]
Unnamed Academic 1
Yes, in fact, the Zhang Jiu, if I try to deconstruct him. I find there are quite a few strands of thoughts. One is what it compares to me very kind of a deluge because I mostly dwell on Deleuze kind of discourse is the identity and difference. When you say that the very inner cultivation actually implies that the outer world ordering. And is it the other way also you say that you deny the possibility of that it can't be kind of a top down approach where everything comes from the top. And then that probability would redefine me. So that's one thought. Second is that I find it's a very striking similarity with the very philosophy of cosmopolitanism. You know, anything that the synop of Diosyn promotes to the very current exponent, like the Anthony Paez kind of cosmopolitanism, where he said that, you know, all the dissenting ideas, they all can coexist. It's a very similar kind of thing with our different identities. We still coexist, but that coexisting would require kind of a very different kind of approach to ourselves. You know, the way that I have to actually estrange myself from my own identity. So you know that the kind of the singularity it creates the estrangement from that singularity. I mean, thinking that in a very. Is it kind of a cosmopolitanism perspective of Jiang Sia Jo, which probably not been discussed. And since he has been found in last 10 years, it's good that I. Similarly, I think about the very epic book like. Like the Art of the World, which all discovered in 1970 and these last 40 years we only have been thinking about the art of the world. I think yes, probably that's one thing should be given its due in terms of the cosmopolitanism narrative of Jan. Yeah.
- [75:40]
Leichenko
On the Deleuze point, actually I mentioned a bit of Deleuze in contemporary interpreters of Deleuze in political theory. So people like Jane Bennett and William Connolly and these people have been drawing attention to something like they call variously like micropolitics or microprocesses of the political, in which sort of activities of our daily lives are seen to have meaning. And they're drawing some of this from Deleuzean understandings. But I contrast Zhang Shijia with these understandings in one important respect, which is to say that for many of these people, they are reasonable reacting against sedimented identities or reified exclusionary institutions that they're trying to break apart and rupture and sort of challenge. Right. So people like William Connolly are worried about, you know, the security state, for example. They're worried about powerful forces in society and they want to kind of disturb and disrupt them and sort of open space for individual self identity and self cultivation in a sense. But Zhang was sort of the opposite because as I said before, he didn't have a strong state to contend with. There was no state at all. He was literally trying to rather bring people together and to make them strong in order to resist, say, European imperialism, in order to revive the domestic economy and basically establish a stable government which China hadn't had for 20 years at that point. So he's really trying to sort of do the same sort of method, but different, ultimately a different effect. I've never thought about the cosmopolitan angle before. I mean, I don't explore his thought from an angle of cosmopolitanism, but I think it sounds like something that is indeed quite similar. And this point that you have about the extent to which this coexistence of ideas requires us to estrange ourselves from our own identity, I think that there is a bit of that going on there because with this concept of self awareness, John asks us to sort of become aware of ourselves, which sort of involves a kind of stepping outside to sort of see ourselves as an other right, to see ourselves as situated differently and as somebody who has. Who can do something that is different from what he or she has already done. So it's an interesting angle which I haven't explored, but I think you're right that the time is right to just start opening these ideas up.
- [77:54]
Nick Bunin
Yes.
- [77:56]
Martin
So moving on from the previous question about the social change aspect, the kind of individual side of it, I find.
- [78:05]
Unnamed Academic 1
That interesting, but I find it very.
- [78:06]
Martin
Hard to visualize where that would sit. I mean, how does he envisage to.
- [78:12]
Unnamed Academic 1
Activate that social change activism?
- [78:15]
Martin
I mean, without a kind of a conception of movement or collectivism or solidarity, or all the things that we really set aside as essential for social change in this individual conception, how is this activated and maintained, that activism?
- [78:30]
Leichenko
So for Zhang, this is ultimately about oneself and one's relationship with one's closest others, so one's family, one's friends, the people one encountered in daily life. And he believed that by acting virtuously in this sense, by acting with confidence, like a self aware citizen, that other people would see you and they'd be able to emulate you. This is a very ancient idea. I mean, it's not just Confucian. It's not just a Confucian line either. You see it in things like, for example, when I got married, the Episcopalian minister said, you know, in this church, when you get Married, as a married couple, it's supposed to be a testimony to marriage. You're supposed to demonstrate what marriage is so that other people can see you and understand what marriage is. I mean, that's a very similar concept. Like what's motivating is just you have to go out there and be the best you can be, so to speak. And other people will see and respond to that intuitively. And in fact, that's the best and only way to learn things and to be motivated by them sometimes. I'm not saying that it's a great solution to all of the world's problems, but quite frankly, neither is collectivism or solidarity, because these things aren't happening when we want them to either. Right. And so John was thinking very carefully about, well, how do we literally start? We just start. Have myself, right? And in the book, I talk a bit about what it means to matter and what it means to make a difference. And in the quote that I. That I read out, I use that to sort of interrogate this idea of threshold points and cascades, where we might see a tipping point happening when a certain number of, you know, one more person joins a crowd and then there's a cascade effect. That the fact is, you can't ignore the fact that all these other people also had to sort of line up and devote their energies to one thing before this cascade or this threshold could sort of be overcome. And I think he's trying to draw our attention to that, that we just need to sort of recognize this and call to arms, so to speak. But again, it's not a solution. But then again, there weren't any solutions.
- [80:25]
Nick Bunin
There's something that brings together Deleuze and Confucius thought, and that is the notion of creativity, which I think is related to his conception of difference and agency on an individual basis, partly exemplary and partly just to get stiffened relations freed up for endeavors. And that Deleuze thinks that philosophers are those who create new ideas and new ways of doing things. And at least one interpretation of Confucianism is in relating it to the metaphysics of the Book of Changes and the centrality of creativity, creative creativity, in that being taken into Confucius notion of both of how to live and transform oneself and also ritual. So that it seems to me there's a wider network which can help to make sense of the particular text that Dung is using and his own interpretations that have a kind of optimism that creativity, if it's practiced, will have good effect rather than disastrous effect.
- [81:46]
Unnamed Academic 1
Yes, One view I have been interested is in the systems view, looking at history. And if you look at history as, say, or the world system as a like pudding, which is being then heated up by various underlying conflicts, what is happening is that there are things like boys being put up every now and then over which you have no control and you don't know where these boils are popping up. Various grievances of groups, papers which were historically perhaps suppressed suddenly pop up at very inconvenient times. So this tendency to try to move towards the good state always tends to get upended by this process. So I wondered whether you had any particular view on that, this kind of systemic view of history.
- [82:38]
Leichenko
Yeah, but I guess the problem that John would have, and I think I have too, is that if you say it's all systems and they're going to pop up regardless of what we do, I mean, the only solution then is to roll over and die. Which he wasn't willing to do. Right. I mean, he thought that human agency, as I do, I mean, I agree that there's always structural effects or systemic effects, but it's not the case that as human beings we can do nothing about them or that we can't think, you know, critically about them and intervene in their further eruption, so to speak.
- [83:09]
Unnamed Academic 1
Hi.
- [83:11]
Nick Bunin
Okay.
- [83:12]
Unnamed Academic 1
If he was in charge of China today, let's say he'd taken power. What kind of China would we see? Would it be like an empire? Would it be a human rights or democracy? What actually would he.
- [83:26]
Leichenko
I'm going to problematize your question, which is to say John would say that's exactly, exactly the wrong way to think about government, where you have one person in charge who then decides how other people act. He's saying that it's precisely the case we have to think about how everyone acts. And the fact that people like Yuan Shikai are in power is precisely because other people are supporting him. So that's what's important. That's what we need to focus on. All right, I understand, I understand. That's a facetious response. Yeah.
- [83:49]
Unnamed Academic 1
What would we have?
- [83:53]
Leichenko
I think, I mean, he would if he were, say, he were arguing from the sidelines. I don't think that, you know, he would even feel comfortable being a ruler in that sense. But I think he would argue for something like constitutionally limited parliamentary democracy. Thank you. Sorry. Rather unexciting, ultimately. Right. But yeah, very helpful.
- [84:15]
Unnamed Academic 2
That's a good setup for the question either. I thought it was very interesting. You mentioned that for certain things, time, he worked for one of the warlords as someone Who's Chinese? That's considered a period of China when, you know, it's not considered a good period because it's run by a bunch of self motivated, authoritarian, militaristic, strong men.
- [84:39]
Leichenko
But later China became ruled by enlightenment.
- [84:45]
Nick Bunin
Not all warlords were the same. Some were progressive.
- [84:47]
Leichenko
And.
- [84:50]
Unnamed Academic 2
Obviously in Europe, to take the plural theory point, there have been some very interesting moments in European history when a variety of contending states, even warring states in ancient Greece, in early modern Italy, you get a flowering of political theory and political theorism. Obviously in China also during the Warring States period, that's a very fertile firmament because there's lots of clients for, you know, the Kissingers of time to walk around and, you know, feeder advisors, you know, feeding skin doctors. So did he conceptualize his role working for one of the strong men in that fashion, or is it simply opportunistic?
- [85:41]
Leichenko
No, I don't think it was opportunistic. I think what was going on from our perspective, it's easy to see the warlord. I mean, they were called Warlord Jun fa. The warlord period is, you know, chaos and fragmentation. But the fact is at the time, people weren't sure what the borders of China were, right? Because the Qing dynasty borders had expanded and contracted and there were parts of it that got, you know, taken over by other people and parceled out here and there. So it was not clear to them as it is to us today, that the borders of the Chinese nation state look like this. Right. Many people, including John, were, as I said, interested in local self rule. And many people saw working for these, we'll say, regional hegemons as an opportunity to actually try to implement a stable political society on a more provincial level. But it was not obvious to anyone that it would necessarily result in. It wasn't necessarily a fragmentation so much as another alternative possibility for how things might turn out. I mean, they didn't end up turning out that way. And so when we retell history, that seems like either a, you know, sort of a path not taken at best, or at worst, you know, an unpatriotic and horrible time in China's otherwise unified history. But I think that that's a myth.
- [86:53]
Unnamed Academic 2
Like a European path, a small continent of many, many small states.
- [87:00]
Leichenko
And so I do believe, and I think that he, along with Liang Sichao, I mean, they would work for these more progressive guys as a way of trying to actually implement and practice what they had been arguing in theory for so long. And it was an attempt to really consolidate a bit of stability in a place that had just sort of been fighting and in revolution for so long. Yeah.
- [87:21]
Nick Bunin
Well, we've run out of time. Conversation, I think could go on, but thank you very, very much.
- [87:27]
Leichenko
Thank you very much.