Lawfare Daily: Ancient China and Modern Politics

Summary

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The Lawfare Podcast: Ancient China and Modern Politics

Date: May 21, 2026
Host: Michael Feinberg (Lawfare Senior Editor)
Guest: Daniel Bell (Professor, University of Hong Kong, author of Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the relevance of ancient Chinese political philosophy for both the development of Chinese governance and contemporary global policy debates. Host Michael Feinberg interviews Daniel Bell, whose new book presents key dialogues between classic Chinese philosophers, drawing lessons for understanding modern China’s political outlook, public policy, and international relations. The discussion reveals how foundational ideas compete, adapt, and resonate within today’s China, moving beyond surface comparisons with Western philosophy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Parallels and Distinctions: Western vs. Chinese Political Thought

Timestamps: 05:36–10:32

• Comparative Approach:
  Feinberg admits initially reading Bell’s book by mapping ancient Chinese thinkers onto familiar Western figures (e.g., Machiavelli, Schmitt) — and asks if this is Orientalist or heuristic.
  • Bell’s Response: Drawing parallels helps, but must be balanced with attention to profound differences.
    “There are commonalities...but you have to keep in mind key differences as well. I think the legalists in China...are more like hardcore Machiavellians than anything Machiavelli ever said.” (Daniel Bell, 08:47)
  • Legalist thinkers like Han Fei Zi and Shang Yang are compared with, but seen as far more radical than, Machiavelli.

2. Why Pre-Qin Era? The Intellectual Flowering

Timestamps: 12:12–14:54

• Choice of Historical Focus:
  Bell examines the “Warring States” and “Spring and Autumn” periods before China’s unification in 221 BCE, arguing this was the apex of Chinese political theory.
  • Notable for freedom of movement and robust debate among thinkers, whose ideas deeply shaped Chinese statecraft.
  • Direct, sometimes life-or-death intellectual rivalries, e.g., Xunzi and his student Han Fei Zi.
  • Memorable quote:

    “These guys were really at each other's throats...Han Fei Zi was literally arguing for policies that would justify the physical elimination of his teacher.” (Daniel Bell, 13:19)

3. Bell’s Eight Dialogues: Selection and Rationale

Timestamps: 16:16–21:41

• Why These Thinkers?
  Bell chooses eight figures representing four major traditions: Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, and Mohism.
  • Laozi omitted in favor of Zhuangzi for depth and dialogical clarity.
  • Four dialogues:
    1. Confucius vs. Zhuangzi: State enforcement of family virtues.
    2. Han Fei Zi vs. Xunzi: Law vs. ritual for reducing corruption.
    3. Mozi vs. “Yue” (the Record of Music/Confucian View): Should the state fund music and the arts?
    4. Mencius vs. Shang Yang: When is just war justified?
  • “Zhuangzi is ultimately a deeper and more original thinker than Laozi, who may have been more widely cited.” (Daniel Bell, 17:09)

4. Contemporary Impact: Confucius and the CCP

Timestamps: 25:18–31:29

• Revival of Confucianism:
  Confucian thought, once blamed for China’s “backwardness,” is now promoted for values-based legitimacy, educational importance, and complement to modernization.
  • Used as a tool for “values-based legitimacy” after Marxism’s ideological decline.
  • Confucianism always persisted at a social level, e.g., in family relations, even under 20th-century suppression. Example: Qingming “grave sweeping” tradition became a national holiday due to popular demand.
  • “By the time we get to the 2008 Olympics...one character was selected to represent Chinese tradition...‘he’, which is usually translated as harmony.” (Daniel Bell, 27:49)

5. Legalism’s Legacy and Modern Statecraft

Timestamps: 36:41–44:41

• Legalism’s Enduring Influence:
  Legalist principles, especially rule by law and bureaucratic meritocracy, faded from official ideology after Qin, but informally remained vital.
  • The infamous military meritocracy (number of decapitated enemy heads as metric) and harsh laws resonate in periods of external insecurity.
  • Even Confucian systems absorbed parts of Legalist impartiality, e.g., in civil service examinations.
  • “Legalist aspiration to govern society by these laws...is literally a totalitarian aspiration.” (Daniel Bell, paraphrased, 40:28)
  • Return of political meritocracy in modern China, e.g., gaokao and exams for public officials.

6. Debates over Culture, Arts, and the State

Timestamps: 44:41–48:03

• Mozi vs. Confucians (Contemporary Resonance):
  Should the state spend on culture and rituals or focus on eliminating poverty?
  • Ongoing debate in today’s China, e.g., within academia at Shandong University (Bell’s own experience).
  • Discussion reflects regional and class divides, not just academic concerns.

7. Just War and the Taiwan Question

Timestamps: 48:06–52:06

• Ancient Debates, Modern Decisions:
  Ancient arguments about just war recur in current PRC-Taiwan-U.S. strategic deliberations.
  • Confucian: War as last resort, with strict conditions.
  • Legalist: Maximum force justified by effectiveness, “more Machiavellian than Machiavelli”.
  • Bell notes these debates are not abstract; Chinese officials have organized forums for such dialogues, explicitly drawing on classical thinkers.

8. Which Tradition Dominates Today?

Timestamps: 53:56–57:48

• Dynamic Tradition, Not Uniformity:
  China’s political thought remains in “dialectic” contest: Confucianism is dominant but constantly adapting and borrowing.
  • Legalism rises in times of perceived encirclement/threat; Confucianism gains sway in stability and reform.
  • Younger generations are less supportive of censorship, perhaps paving way for more open embrace of Confucian values.
  • “I think it’s more dynamic...Confucian tradition has been so influential because it’s constantly engaged with other traditions and taken on board its insights.” (Daniel Bell, 53:56)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Legalism's Distinction:
  “I think the legalists in China...are more like hardcore Machiavellians than anything Machiavelli ever said.”
  — Daniel Bell (08:47)

• On Confucianism’s Endurance:
  “...there's so many books from diverse perspectives on the Confucian tradition. In a way, it's good that the government hasn't said this is what we mean by an official interpretation...because that means everything else might be prescribed.”
  — Daniel Bell (28:30)

• On Contemporary Policy:
  “We're in a current time where if China feels encircled by other powers...the legalist school, even if it's not labeled as such, will become more influential.”
  — Daniel Bell (55:06)

• On Optimism for Future Openness:
  “Nobody I met, literally under like 50, favors increased censorship. Once those people get in power, I think we can be a bit more optimistic.”
  —Daniel Bell (57:43)

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Recap of Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | |--------------------------------------------|---------------| | Parallels with Western thinkers | 05:36–10:32 | | Focus on Warring States period | 12:12–14:54 | | Choosing eight classic thinkers | 16:16–21:41 | | Confucianism’s resurgence | 25:18–31:29 | | Legalism and modern bureaucracy | 36:41–44:41 | | State arts funding debate (Mozi/Confucius) | 44:41–48:03 | | Just war & Taiwan: ancient debates, today | 48:06–52:06 | | Which philosophy dominates? Dynamic process| 53:56–57:48 |

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Final Thoughts

The episode ends on an unusual note of optimism, considering Chinese political discourse:
“Perhaps that is a good place for us to leave it—on a fleeting and rare moment of hope for this podcast.” (Michael Feinberg, 57:48)

Daniel Bell’s scholarship offers a much-needed window into how timeless debates from China’s ancient philosophers remain alive in the PRC’s statecraft, policymaking, and social fabric. These traditions—Confucian, Legalist, Daoist, Moist—don’t merely linger as history but are repurposed, reinterpreted, and continue to structure China’s political imagination and its engagement with the world.

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Recommended for listeners wanting to understand the intellectual foundations of Chinese politics and how these shape policy at home and abroad.

Transcript

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[Daniel Bell]

So along came legalist thinkers, and I think Xiangyang is as negative as, like, pessimistic about human nature as Chen Fei's is. Xiangyang came first. He's the one who first developed this view that we need to rely on harsh laws to govern society.

[Michael Feinberg]

Michael it's the lawfare podcast. I'm Michael Feinberg, senior editor at lawfare, sitting down today with Daniel Bell, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who recently wrote why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters.

[Daniel Bell]

We're in a current time where if China feels encircled by other powers and if it feels that its security is under a great deal of danger, frankly, the legalist school, even if it's not labeled as such, will become more influential.

[Michael Feinberg]

We're gonna talk about the antecedents and early days of Chinese philosophy and what those various schools of thought can tell us about Chinese public policy and international relations in our own era. I will confess I was very much looking forward to reading this book when I saw the sort of preview of it in Princeton University Press's catalog, because despite having studied Chinese culture and the Chinese language myself, my knowledge of Chinese political theory and Chinese philosophy, particularly in the pre unification period, really represented a lacuna in my education. And as a result, I approached this book in a very particular way. And I'm going to start with a question that is both a confession and an invitation for you to critique me about how I read it, which I realize is a bit unusual, but I think would be a good way for us to sort of dive into things. And because United States audiences are not really taught at any point in any mandatory curriculum about Eastern political philosophy, I. I kept in my head comparing the figures you wrote about to Western philosophers with whom I was familiar. It was very hard for me to read about the legalist scholars without instinctively thinking of people from Machiavelli to Carl Schmitt and everything in between. And you have one dialogue in the book where one of the proxies for the philosophers argues against this sort of indulgence in music that is so much a part of Western culture. And I'm almost positive you did not intend this. But I instantly thought back to Alan Bloom's closing of the American Mind, where he has a chapter that has very much not aged well, where he blames much of 1980s society's ills on rock and roll. Is this a fair way to approach learning about Chinese political theory, or am I guilty of sort of othering it or engaging in what, you know, Edward Said would have called Orientalism?

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

No, I know.

[Daniel Bell]

I think it's. It's very useful to. It's a good question, actually. It's very useful to draw parallels with thinkers and ideas that one is already familiar with, because there are commonalities and part of. I selected the political traditions that argued about issues that are timeless and that don't just apply in one particular society or at one particular time. So I would expect the reader to draw comparisons with ideas that they're already familiar with.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

That said, I mean, it's worth keeping in mind key differences as well. Right? I mean, I think the legalists in Chinese, it's fajia. Sometimes it's translated as realism. I think they're more like hardcore Machiavellian

[Daniel Bell]

than anything Machiavelli ever said. I mean, on issues like, you know, for Han Fezer, for example, who's the great.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

The thinker who systematized the different strands

[Daniel Bell]

of the legalist tradition, he was pretty.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

The idea that you're born bad and

[Daniel Bell]

you stay bad, I mean, there's no compromise there.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

And he didn't foresee the possibility of a kind of society that relies more on what we'd call today soft power to achieve social order. Whereas Machiavelli in the Prince it was particular text directed at a ruler and he was hoping to get into power. But when he was a he that wasn't thought successful and when he was a pure political theorist, he defended something that's much closer to republican ideals. In the case of Khan Faiza, you know, and I think Shangyang, the other legalist thinker that I deal with, I mean they were really, really hardcore realpolitik thinkers who thought the only way to secure social order, especially in the chaotic times that they were writing in, is to have a kind of ruthless commitment

[Daniel Bell]

to laws that generate fear and punishment with no mercy. And also to have a kind of objective military meritocracy as a way of increasing state power. You know, and as, as you'll recall in the Shanghai it's literally measurable by the number of decapitated heads of enemy soldiers. They really don't care what goes through people's minds. You know, it's a purely, you know, they thought there's purely objective and behavioral way of securing social order. And that's. And we need to rely on those, on those harsh means to do it. And they didn't force. So it's more consistently, let's say Machiavellian than anything Machiavelli ever wrote.

[Michael Feinberg]

I would totally agree with that. And you talked about the chaotic time in which these thinkers lived. I want to go through three questions and we'll take them one by one, but I think they're a good background. Before we get into the substance of the book, the first question is going to be you have a very firm temporal cutoff in terms of the period which you were examining. There are a number of political theorists who came after the Qin dynasty, but you stop before unification. So I want to talk about why you chose that period. Then I'd like to talk about why you chose the eight thinkers that you did in particular. And then I want to talk about an intuition I had in reading the book as a whole before we get to the individual dialogues. But so let's start with the time question. Even the, the American public that is most familiar with Chinese history probably doesn't know a lot about the era you're writing. If you look at Jonathan Spence's search for modern China, which is probably the best selling soup to nuts history of the mainland in the United States, the ratio of like 20th century to everything beforehand is something like 10 or 15 to 1, just in terms of raw page numbers. So what was the advantage or the decision process that led you to focusing entirely on the pre Chin era?

[Daniel Bell]

So I, I'm a political theorist, and I'm interested first and foremost in great political theorizing. And I think that the greatest political theorists in China's history were in that period. It was the spring and autumn and later Warring States period, before China was unified in 221bce and there was, especially in the Warring States period, as the name suggests, constant warfare between states struggling for supremacy. But what's interesting is that there's tremendous amount of intellectual freedom. I mean, these thinkers could literally roam from state to state, try to persuade

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

rulers to adopt their ideas.

[Daniel Bell]

And if they succeeded, fine.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

If they didn't, they would go to another state.

[Daniel Bell]

And it's. And this sort of atmosphere, I think,

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

allowed for this tremendous flourishing of great ideas and the four major political traditions that were most influential throughout Chinese history. I mean, the great founding thinkers emerged from this period. So you had the Confucian tradition, you know, with Confucius and Mencius and Xuanza as the three great thinkers.

[Daniel Bell]

You had the Daoist tradition with. And I think Zhuangzi is the, is the, is the greatest thinker in the Daoist tradition. And then you have the legalist tradition, as we already discussed. You had thinkers like Xiangyang and Han Fei Zi and then the Moist as well, who were arguably the, after the unification of China, the least influential. But they're still argued about issues that are timeless and fascinating. And, and, and these, what's also interesting is that these, these thinkers were arguing with each other. I mean, they were literally, sometimes they were written in dialogue. I mean, and it's not, it's real dialogue, not like, I mean, I, I learned Plato, like, like many of us, and, and a lot of the Platonic texts are thinking, yes, Socrates. I agree. Socrates. Please go on, Socrates. These guys were really at each other's throats, you know, and then literally, in some cases, like, you know, when Xuanzi, to my mind, the greatest political thinker in the Chinese tradition, who systematized the different strands of the Confucian tradition. And then he had a student, Han Fezi, who systematizes strands of legal, who was literally arguing for policies that would justify the physical elimination of his teacher. You know, can you imagine that level of difference? Right. So you had these really great thinkers in these times who literally set the intellectual agenda for much of Chinese history, and they were arguing about issues that are still highly relevant today. Like just and unjust war, you know, whether we should use law or morality to reduce corruption government, whether states should fund musical arts and culture, and also what is a appropriate kind of family law. So I don't know if that's a good enough justification.

[Michael Feinberg]

No, it is. I think what you're describing is a very real intellectual flowering that is not limited to one school of thought. The thing that came to mind is sort of the great debates in, you know, 19th and 20th century between analytic schools of philosophy in Great Britain and the continental schools. Only even that seems narrow compared to what was going on during the States period. And part of that capaciousness of those dialogues that were happening in China and is that there were dozens of thinkers and writers in any given school. You mentioned the four main schools and you mentioned some of the thinkers, but you ultimately go with eight thinkers in particular. And there was one that I was sort of curious you did not go with. And you actually address that in your. Afterwards, which you frame almost as a mea culpa. So know, because I kept thinking like, why is not. Why is Laozi not mentioned at any point? And you actually provide a very good answer at the end. But I was wondering if you could sort of speak just as to how you selected the eight thinkers in specific to represent or serve as metonyms for their general schools of thought.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Well, I think there are thinkers that

[Daniel Bell]

had the deepest ideas and also the greatest political influence. Lao Tzu, of course, you know, the

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

author of the Tao Te Ching, this

[Daniel Bell]

classic Way and Virtue. I mean, he. Of course, it's a hugely influential text, but it's little lines and very kind of obscure and almost impossible to interpret

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

in a way that sounds persuasive and definitive. So. So I prefer Zhuangzi to. As a representative of the Taoist tradition.

[Daniel Bell]

First of all, he wrote in dialogue form.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Right. Including dialogues with Confucius, Kongzi and some of his students. And as you know, this book is written in dialogue form, so it's easier to draw on Zhuangzi for that purpose. Yeah, so I really. I mean, I had to make some

[Daniel Bell]

choices, and I think Zhuangzi is ultimately more deeper, a deeper and more original thinker than.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Than Laozi, who may have been more. More widely cited.

[Daniel Bell]

I'm not sure.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, well, the proverbs, like nature of Laoza makes him easier to cite, particularly for people who have not done a deep dive into this. So I was going to make a very unflattering comparison that I will refrain from, but it's sort of like I Don't know. To me, Ring Zhuangzi is like reading an actual Zen master even though he's not Zen, while reading Laoza is kind of like trying to learn about Zen from reading Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's there. There's a level of depth and probity present in one that I don't think is as present in the other.

[Daniel Bell]

Yeah, I agreed.

[Michael Feinberg]

But just for the benefit of our audience who has not read your book yet, can you just give a quick introduction? We needn't take more than a few minutes on who the eight speakers are and what they represent, and then we'll get into the specifics of the dialogues you posit.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Okay, thanks. So it's four chapters, and each chapter has two thinkers in dialogue with each

[Daniel Bell]

other, and they represent quite radically different perspectives. And I try to present each thinker in as persuasive a way as possible, drawing on their original words to the extent possible. And often those thinkers were in dialogue with each other in their times. So the first dialogue is between Confucius and Zhuangzi on to what extent the state should enforce family virtues, or, for example, divorce law, or whether the state should promote filial piety, caring for and reverence for the elderly and for ancestors. I think both thinkers have very different views on that. So I selected Confucius, of course, because he's, as the name suggests, the most influential thinker in the Confucian tradition. But actually, the name in English, Confucian tradition is a bit misleading because we think of Buddhism, we think of Buddha and Buddhism as like the Founding Father, and the rest is pretty much all details, or Christ and Christianity. But Confucius himself, in Chinese, it's. The tradition is. So it's a tradition without the name of Confucius being part of a tradition. And he himself viewed himself as an interpreter of an older tradition, and he even claimed that he didn't have any original ideas. I'm not sure that's true. So he's an influential thinker in this tradition, but not like the Founding Father by any means. And then Zhuangzi, as we were saying, I think, is the deepest thinker in the. In the Daoist tradition. These schools became labeled as such only after the China was unified in the Han Dynasty. In those days, they weren't kind of formal schools. They were great thinkers who were arguing from certain perspectives, and subsequently their views became labeled as schools and traditions. So that's the first dialogue. The second one is between Chan Feitze, who, as mentioned, he's the great thinker who systematized the legalist tradition with

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

his

[Daniel Bell]

teacher in actual history. And Shinza had a view that he was right. They were both operating in the worst time of the Warring States period, when it was absolutely. It was very, very difficult to be optimistic about human nature, constant warfare, incredible cruelty on an almost daily basis. And Xunzi, he thought, well, we have a tendency to badness, but we can overcome that through education, through reading great books, through having great teachers, and especially through participating in rituals that generate a sense of community among participants. Whereas his student Han Veda said, no, we're born bad and we stay bad. And the only way to establish order is through these harsh laws. So that dialogue is about how should we use law or ritual to reduce corruption in government. And that's an ongoing theme still today. I mean, frankly I don't know many

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

people in the Chinese government, but when I do speak to them about this

[Daniel Bell]

current anti corruption campaign, you know, the

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

language I'll use, it's sometimes they'll criticize,

[Daniel Bell]

it's too legalist and we need more Confucianism that they'll never invoke Marxism or the liberal tradition, which has very little to say on these issues. It's quite fascinating to what extent these thinkers are still so influential today in the discourse.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Sometimes private discourse, sometimes public.

[Daniel Bell]

So a third dialogue is between Mozi, who's the founding, well, we could call him the founding father of the moist tradition. And these were things that like today we would use word populist to describe them. They're from kind of the lower class and they were. They view themselves as representatives of lower class people. And they thought the main task of the state is to secure the material well being of the people, not waste money on these elaborate ceremonies that Confucian's like, whether it's funerals and certainly not waste money on musical arts and culture which appeal only to an elite, on the other hand. So I have a debate. I have a combination of two people here. One is Xuanze, who's mentioned earlier, but the other is there's this text called Yue Ji, which means the record of music. So I imagine that thinker as Yue, it's a she in this, in this text represents that the Confucian tradition, why music is important in our life and why the government has an important role in promoting music. And the last one is a dialogue between Mencius, Mongzi in Chinese, who arguably was the most influential Confucian after Confucius himself. And he had a very elaborate theory. What we would call today just war, under what conditions it is morally appropriate to launch a war, whether it's a defensive war or what he called punitive expedition, which is what today we'd call humanitarian intervention, as opposed to Shangyang. He was the thinker before Han Fei Zi, who was hugely influential in Chinese history because he had great. He was an advisor to the state of Chin, which relied to a certain extent on his means to strengthen the state and ultimately to unify China and have them debate about just war. And the case study here is whether mainland China can use military force to reincorporate Taiwan. However you want to describe that, and

[Michael Feinberg]

we'll certainly get to that debate in particular before the end of this podcast. But I want to sort of. I want to do two things at once. I want to go through the dialogues one by one, but I also want us to sort of fast forward 2000 years and contextualize these with contemporary Chinese debates. And your book does this to a certain extent, but I want to draw it out a little bit more. Your first debate is about the merits, fundamentally, of Kong's teaching, Confucianism, and the way Confucius has been either praised or criticized by the government of China from pretty much the Mao era going forward, I'm thinking in particular the way that Confucius was used in criticisms of Zhou Enlai when he fell out of favor. There's no real analog in American politics or really anywhere in the Anglosphere for using a thinker of antiquity as frequently or as pointedly as Confucius has been used in contemporary China. And I was wondering if you could speak to that phenomenon a little bit, explain to people, perhaps better than I am what I'm talking about. Exactly. And maybe posit a reason or two for why Confucius thoughts have lasted so much longer in the PRC than any political thinker in the west has ever really lasted in his or her own country.

[Daniel Bell]

Yeah, okay, that's. I think maybe we need to go back a little bit further. So after. So Confucius wasn't so influential in his own day. Right. He only became hugely influential starting the

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Han dynasty, when Confucianism was made into

[Daniel Bell]

the official value system of the state, and then it was promoted throughout most of Chinese imperial history as such. And so in the last two great dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, all

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

public officials had to enter public office

[Daniel Bell]

through these examinations and centered first and foremost on learning the great Confucian texts. So by the time of the early 20th century, first the examination system ended, and then the whole imperial system collapsed, as you know, in 1911, 1912.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

And then many of the students and intellectuals and political thinkers, they began to blame Confucianism for what they considered to be China's backwardness and poverty. They said, look, these Western states are so powerful and we need to learn from them and we need to shed the ideas that they consider to be feudal and patriarchal and backwards looking and anti militaristic, frankly, in order for China to develop into a strong state that would allow us to compete with these Western powers and to prevent us from being carved up by Western powers and by Japan. So it started in 1919 especially, and it went all the way to the Cultural Revolution as you're saying, between 1966 and 76. So the dominant tradition in the 20th century, if I can oversimplify this tradition of anti traditionalism, where Chinese intellectuals and eventually the Chinese government blamed China's traditions for its backwardness. And there was an all out effort to stamp out the influence of those traditions. And it took an extreme form in the Cultural Revolution. But what happened after that, after 1976 is. Well, all of a sudden several things happened. First, there was a recognition that we went way too far in this anti intellectual kind of way and that actually there's a lot of great ideas in these thinkers, including the Confucian thinkers that ought to be revived and including that are useful for China's economic development and modernization. But Confucianism is a very much a this worldly tradition. I mean, it's very diverse, but it has hardly anything to say about the afterlife, has certain commitments about working hard, about education, about saving for a few generations, and that all those kind of traits are actually useful for economic development. And also what happened after the late 1970s that Marxism lost its hold as a kind of motivating ideology for reformers

[Daniel Bell]

and for young people. And there was a need to achieve some sort of values based legitimacy that drawn a much longer tradition with the Confucian political tradition at its core. So that also helps to explain its revival. So by the time we get to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, you might remember, one character was selected. There was nothing about Marxism, nothing about socialism. One character was selected to represent Chinese tradition. And it was this character of he, which is usually translated as harmony, but I think a better translation is diversity and harmony. And so this Confucian tradition was very much brought to the fore for this mixture of economic, I think, intellectual and political reasons. And it's made a huge comeback over the past 40 years, which is very much an ongoing comeback. And it literally received its stamp of approval in 2014 when, when President Xi went to Chufu, which is like ground zero for the Confucian tradition, and he was handed two books about the Confucian tradition, he said, I will study this diligently. So now the Confucian tradition is taught in schools and universities and it's very much central to the educational system and also to the, let's call it the values based legitimacy of the government. And there's also this huge intellectual flourishing of Confucian thought. I mean, as we know, there's been increasing censorship in China and most intellectuals are obviously are against that. But that said, the actual, the Confucian tradition is much more open than, for example, works on the liberal tradition. So you go to bookstores in China, there's so many books from diverse perspectives on the Confucian tradition. In a way, it's good that the government hasn't said this is what we mean by an official interpretation of the Confucian tradition, because that might be the kiss of death, because that means everything else might be prescribed. Actually, that's a bit what happened to the Marxist tradition as an intellectual tradition. Frankly, it's not very vibrant in China because there's one interpretation and others are not discouraged or sometimes not encouraged, sometimes actively discouraged. So I think that helps to explain the flourishing of the Confucian tradition. But let me just say, even in the worst days of the 20th century, meaning the worst days of this tradition of anti traditionalism, Confucian is always there under the surface. Like when it comes to family relations, it was, you know, this commitment to feel piety. You know, it's so central to the kind of ethical system of ordinary Chinese. It never went away. And, or to give you another example of how some of this is driven by the bottom up, there's this tradition, there's this national holiday called the Qingming Festival, which is usually translated as a grave sweeping festival. How did that come about? Well, tens of millions of Chinese took the day off to go sweep the graves of their ancestors. And finally the government just, you know, literally caved in and said, let's just make it international holiday so that people, to make it easier for people to do that. And another interesting part is that, you know, Hong Kong is still very different than mainland China. And as you know, one country, two systems. Okay, fine, there's nothing as strong a legal protection as there used to be. But still on issues like family law,

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

it's very different system. But in Hong Kong, you've always had this Strong commitment to fill piety.

[Daniel Bell]

You know, half the people live in

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

public housing and they can get a

[Daniel Bell]

subsidy if they live with their elderly parents.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

You know, I'm from Canada and it would be hard to imagine that sort of policy in Canada.

[Daniel Bell]

Right. You have similar policies in Singapore, you

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

know, in Vietnam, in all the Confucian heritage countries, regardless of the huge differences in their economic and political systems. It's quite fascinating to me the last so that said, there's also a lot of empirical research by social psychologists who work on these issues and they measure it, how these values influence people's outlooks. And again, there's huge and very measurable differences between.

[Daniel Bell]

There's a great book by Li Jin,

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

family name is Li.

[Daniel Bell]

It's called Cultural Foundations of Learning by Cambridge University Press. She also has a new book and she demonstrates empirically how there are very significant differences in in between East Asians and Americans approaches to learning. And some and the Asian Americans somehow are somewhere in the middle. You know, she demonstrates this empirically. It's quite fascinating.

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[Chelsea Clinton]

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[Michael Feinberg]

Now when I hear you describe Confucius in the way you just did. I think of it very much as almost a virtue based system. But the next dialogue focuses on legalism, which although these ideas are promulgated, if not simultaneously contemporaneously, legalism is not something I would associate with virtue, at least in the sense that it does not rely on the personalities or intentions of citizens. Quite the opposite. I think it's fair to say that FASA might, Han FASA might have the most negative view of humanity of any thinker ever. I mean, this is somebody who makes John Calvin look like Mary Poppins in terms of optimism about the human condition. So how does legalism spring up roughly at the same time as Confucianist thoughts make their way through society? And how has it been adopted by latter day China?

[Daniel Bell]

So the legalist tradition, it's somewhat later than the Confucian tradition and it really reached its apogee in the, the Warring States period, especially towards the end, the most violent and chaotic part of the Warring States period. And this was a time when literally you as a state, you had to, it was an extreme form of like Social Darwinism, you had to kill others or else die yourself. I mean, that was the dominant perception. And in that context, not surprisingly, these Confucian ideas for political rule, which rely more on what we call today soft power like persuasion and education and rule by moral example and informal rituals that generate a sense of community and love among participants, were not very effective in that context. So along came legalist thinkers. And I think Shangyang is as negative, you know, as like pessimistic about human nature as Han Fei's is. Xiang Yang came first. He's the one who first who developed this view that we need to rely on harsh laws to govern society. And in terms of foreign policy, we need to have this, as mentioned, this military meritocracy that relies strictly on observable criteria to promote soldiers, number of decapitated heads of enemy soldiers, and the whole military bureaucracy, so to speak. Bureaucracy by the Qin state was reformed along those lines. And the Qin eventually succeeded in unifying China.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

And the first dynasty right by the self styled emperor. Qin Shi Huang ruled China largely according to these legalist ideas. But it only lasted 15 years. And why is that? Well, Shinze, who was Han Fei's teacher, he predicted, he says, yes, the Qin

[Daniel Bell]

is the most powerful state and you

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

might succeed in the short term by relying on these harsh means. But eventually people will rebel. They don't like to be ruled by these cruel means. And once they get an opportunity to rebel, they'll find it and they'll do so. Plus loss can't cover everything. There's always these gray areas and people will find ways around these gray areas. So even this kind of legalist aspiration to govern society by these laws that it's literally a totalitarian aspiration to govern people by means of these laws that govern almost every our everyday actions, regardless of what people think. As you say, it's not a virtue based society, quite the opposite. It's strictly, you just look at people's behavior. Who cares what goes in people's minds? Xunze said that's not going to work. Eventually people will rebel. And he was right. He actually predicted it would take three or four generations. It took only 15 years. And after that, the legalist tradition largely died out as part of the official

[Daniel Bell]

discourse because the Confucians won the fight, so to speak. That said, as an informal kind of way of governing. Legalism continued to have huge influence and arguably even the Confucian tradition took on board some of these legalist ideas, like for example, this emphasis on impartiality, rule by impartial means. Of course, everyone, the ruler himself, and it's usually him, was exempt from the rules. But the ruler should implement this rule of law that applies to everybody equally, regardless of whether it's the ruler's kind of friends or family. They should be subject to the same rules that everyone else is subject to. This commitment to impartiality that actually influenced the Confucian tradition. Later, even the examination system, which I think is China's great invention, you know, the, there's arguably the, no, let me

[Michael Feinberg]

interrupt you for a second because I, I, I fear, you know, the civil service examination system that China had is something that is very much going to be unfamiliar to most of our listenership. So can you sort of just not just explain what it is? But I think the important thing about the examination system is also how much importance was placed on it. It, it had a sort of totemic significance that no application process in American government, for example, could ever reach.

[Daniel Bell]

Yeah, so that's right. So first of all, there are some ideals, right, a political meritocracy that were argued for by the Confucians and, and, and certain extent by other traditions too. And they argue that everybody should have an equal opportunity to participate in government, but then there should be mechanism in place to select and promote public officials with superior ability and virtue. And different means were trying to institutionalize this idea, none of which were very successful. But eventually in the Sui dynasty they came up with this wonderful idea. This is about 1,300 years ago that, well, let's try written examinations that would be open to all. All men, of course, not women were not eligible. And then whoever succeeded at the examinations, they could give them posts at lower levels of government and we. And we could promote them, see if they're successful, and they could rise to power that way. Now that examination system became very refined and made more systematic.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

So by the time we get to the Song dynasty, they developed this idea

[Daniel Bell]

of the examinations would be graded blind, meaning that they would be copied out

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

by somebody else so that the examiner wouldn't recognize the handwriting of the person who wrote the exams. And in some cases in the Song dynasty, if you did well in the exams, you'd be given directly post at the highest levels of government. I don't like the translation civil service because we think of in the west, we tend to think, well, we have civil servants who are select. They can be selected by examinations in a meritocratic way. But then we have elected politicians. And in principle, the civil servants serve the politicians. But in the case of the examinations, all public officials, except for the emperor himself, would need to go through the examinations as a first step and maybe sometimes final step to having political power. So I prefer the translation examinations for public officials. And that has been part of the revival of the tradition is Starting the late 1970s, two forms of examinations were used to select public officials. The first is the gaokao, which is the examination to get into universities again. Now, of course, it's gender blind. All people have equal opportunity to get into university. And after that you have these other examinations called, which means, I think a good translation is examination for both public officials. They have to go through those two examinations in order to be put on the road to political power. So it's quite fascinating. You have the same same kind of method in form that you had throughout imperial history, meaning first examinations and then performance evaluations at lower levels of government that has been re established more or less in the same way that you had it throughout Imperial China. The content is differed, of course, but the form is more or less the same. It's quite fascinating, this continuity.

[Michael Feinberg]

Now I want to move on to your third dialogue, and I'll confess I was a little taken aback by it. And that is probably simply because I personally have always focused much more on China's external relations than on how the CCP views its obligations to its own citizenry. And your third dialogue is fundamentally, and I'm vastly oversimplifying things Here, so feel free to push back. But it's fundamentally about state subsidization of the arts. Can you sort of talk about why you felt that was an important topic to place within the context of all these other dialogues? Just because I'll be honest, it's not something I'm really familiar with as a major debate within the prc.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

Well, so I served as dean at Shandong University and Shandong University, it's the home of the Confucian culture, right. And part of my mission was to promote Confucianism. And the Confucians place heavy emphasis on the promotion of rituals and music as a way of generating a sense of community care and harmony among participants. And that is a very ancient view that was constantly invoked when I was dean. But then we also faced a kind of counter reaction against. Now it's less framed as Mohis but as sometimes it's.

[Daniel Bell]

It's they're.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

They label themselves as Marxists who would say this is all kind of stuff for the elites. No, look at Shandong, it's a hundred million people. We still have so many people living in poverty. We should first and foremost deal with poverty, with providing for people's basic material well being. This was a very much a live debate. And these ideas of who argued against these Confucian emphasis on music, they were the Moas who were literally were going right after the Confucians precisely for that reason. And then Shinzi towards the end of the Warring States period was arguing very forcefully against the Maoists for being having a kind of very vulgar view of human flourishing. You know, they didn't care. They didn't seem to be very. I mean they didn't deny that music is beautiful and joyful, but they just said that it's not the task of the state to promote music.

[Daniel Bell]

And so these same issues were very much live when I was in Shandong province. That's why I set this dialogue in a kind of poor part of Shandong province where you can imagine people arguing about these issues. And actually one of the interesting parts about China is that of course it's not a democracy, but you have some democratic mechanisms, including the experiments with deliberative polling. And so I imagined one. And some of them were in parts of China, not in Shandong as far as I know. So I had to. It was a bit of creative license. I imagine the liberative poll in this poor part of Shandong province with farmers, largely farmers selected at random. One person arguing from a moist perspective against funding a community center for culture and music and another who's more Moist inspiration, arguing, no, we should focus first and foremost on poverty. So, again, my book has two aims, right? One is to present these debates, make them accessible, easy to understand in a fairly entertaining way. But the others, to show they're still highly relevant today. And I thought it made sense to

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

set it in Shandong province, where these debates are very familiar to me when

[Daniel Bell]

I served as dean of a school of public policy.

[Michael Feinberg]

Makes sense. I do want to move on to your fourth dialogue, largely because we are recording this podcast as a major summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping is concluding. And based on the earlier reports I've digested so far, it doesn't really look like much of substance was decided. We'll see what pronouncements come out from the respective governments in the days ahead. But there was a lot of anticipation and a lot of consternation about what was the PRC going to demand with respect towards US Taiwan policy, and how was the United States going to react and either reaffirm its defense commitment to Taiwan or sort of pull back in the hopes of gaining concessions in other areas from the prc. And your fourth dialogue is very much a debate about whether the PRC should, you know, promote unification through peaceful, conciliatory, persuasive means, or whether it should resort to, and I don't mean this in a denigrating way, sort of a brute force, militaristic approach. There is a lot of speculation that Xi Jinping ultimately is more inclined or at least willing to consider the brute force approach if the conciliatory approach appears to be taking, frankly, not much longer. And I guess I'm curious, how much do you think the debate you created in your dialogue mirrors the debates that are going on within the corridors of power of the CCP as we speak?

[Daniel Bell]

Well, it's hard to know exactly. Right. But what I do know is that at least until recently, the Ministry of Foreign affairs would sometimes host debates between thinkers who have presented different perspectives and have them argue about those issues, literally in Jungnan High sometimes. So I tried to imagine thinkers who represent these two major traditions that are close. I mean, if you want to use kind of Western analogies, one is closest to the more idealistic view, this Confucian view, that we should rely if. If it comes to war, we should rely. We should. War should be the last resort, and there should be very strict conditions before we could morally launch a war. Whereas the legalists were saying, no, no, no, whatever works is fine. If we can use force in an effective way, we should. And who cares about the morality and they explicitly say, you know, in fact, this is where they're more Machiavellian than Machiavelli himself. Like Shang would say, we need to be more cruel than our enemies. That's the only thing that works. So Taiwan is a red line. And in this debate, I imagine that it would be triggered by more events in Taiwan and maybe US where we can imagine if Taiwan moves closer towards declaring formal independence, and if there seems to be some sort of support in the US for that move. It's very. We can predict with like, high level of certainty that mainland China will face a lot of pressure to use military power against Taiwan. So in that context, I imagine a debate between these kind of ultra realists and these more soft hearted Confucians, and to what extent it's realistic. I mean, of course I'm sure there'll be other factors involved, but I just thought to make these debates very accessible and show how they're still timeless, this would be one effective way of doing so. I'm not sure it was effective.

[Michael Feinberg]

I found it effective, I thought. I mean, I quite enjoyed it. We did another podcast, an episode of a podcast called Rational Security, where we were talking about cross straight issues itself. So when I got to that chapter shortly after recording that podcast, the timing was very fortuitous. And I think I got more out of it than you maybe even may have intended, because it forced me to question a lot of my own assumptions about what I perceive as the uniformity of thought within the Chinese government with respect to Taiwan. But you sort of disabuse readers of the notion that there is a uniformity thought. So I guess that leads to my final question for today, which is, of the various schools that you explicate and who provide the thoughts behind the statements and the dialogues, do you think that there's one which, at least in this moment in contemporary times, is really prevalent in China, or are we better off understanding political theory in the prc? And I'm emphatically not using this word in the Marxist concept, but should we consider political theory in China more of a dialectic where the various schools of thoughts are still very much in dialogue, still very much contending with each other and creating syntheses that maybe their original progenitors would not have considered? In other words, is this a dynamic process? Or has one school of thought, at least in our contemporary moment, gained supremacy?

[Daniel Bell]

Oh, I. I think. I think it's. It's more dynamic. And one of the reasons to go back to an earlier point that you raised, why the confucian tradition has been so influential is that it's constantly engaged with other traditions and taken on board its insights. So now the, those who defend Confucianism today you have this school called Progressive Confucians and they want to reinterpret the tradition so that it's more compatible with for example modern ideas of gender equality and also giving a greater role for common people in the political system. And all these schools now are, have a lot of scholarly, current scholarly reinterpretations. Which one is dominant? I mean, I would think it's still the Confucian tradition because it's, it's much richer and diverse than other traditions. That said, we're in a current time where if China feels encircled by other powers and if it feels that its security is under a great deal of danger, frankly the legalist school, even if it's not labeled as such, will become more influential. So it depends a bit on China's future in times of chaos and warfare.

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

I'm afraid that the soft hearted Confucians

[Daniel Bell]

won't have much impact. But to be a bit optimistic, I mean, I think these are, as we

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

know, there's increasing repression in China and increasing constraints on freedom of speech. So yeah, no doubt about that.

[Daniel Bell]

I wrote a book about my experience

[Interviewer/Host (possibly Michael Feinberg or another Lawfare host)]

serving as dean and the longest chapter was on constraints on academic freedom. But I'm still a little bit optimistic about the future, meaning that there'll be more open society in China in which case the Confucian tradition will become more dominant again. And that's for I guess, a few reasons.

[Daniel Bell]

One is that the current generation of leaders, they went through the Cultural Revolution which really gave them a very pessimistic and paranoid mindset. But the next generation of leaders won't have gone through that. And they might be, I think they might be more open to, let's call it a more open form of society. If the U.S. i think Donald Trump arguably is the most kind of pro engagement person in the Trump administration. If that sort of view prevails and China feels less threatened by the US and I think people from outside, they can't change China. But what it can do is certain people in the kind of pro security people in the Chinese government, they can latch on to these threats, you know, to increase their own power, you know, like when, or to put it a different way, when China joined wto, you know that those who are pro economic reform, they could say look, we have to go this way, it's not our fault, we joined this and we have to go proceed in this way. So if there's less external pressure on China, I think these forces within the government that are more pro reform and pro open society will, will will have more power. And it also relates to the anti to the anti corruption campaign, which in my humble opinion has gone on much too long and it's relied more on legalist means, which has created so many enemies in the political system, which makes the leaders more paranoid. If that transitions towards a more kind of Confucian way of dealing with corruption, then I think also there'll be fewer enemies in the political system and the and the leaders will feel a bit more relaxed. But ultimately what really gives me a little bit of hope is that the younger generation again, whether it's liberals or you have very lively debates in Chinese academia and in the government too, whether it's liberals or Confucians or Marxists, like nobody I met, literally under like 50 favors increased censorship. Right? Once those people get in power, I think we can be a bit more optimistic. That said, I've been often wrong in the past and so please take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

[Michael Feinberg]

Yeah, well, right or wrong, it is very rare that in any of our podcasts that touch up on Chinese policy or Chinese politics that a speaker expresses much optimism. So perhaps that is a good place for us to leave it on a fleeting and rare moment of hope for this podcast. So Daniel Bell, I very much enjoyed your book why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters. For our listenership who is not familiar with the antecedents of Chinese policy and Chinese culture, this is an excellent place to start and thank you again for joining us today.

[Daniel Bell]

Thanks, you're very kind and I enjoy the conversation.

[Michael Feinberg]

The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad free, you can become a Lawfare material [e-mail] support supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath and Escalation. Our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written [e-mail] the podcast is edited by Jen Pacha with audio engineering by Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music and as always, thanks for listening.

[Chelsea Clinton]

Do you ever find yourself scrolling through headlines and thinking, possibly screaming at least on the inside, that that can't be true? There's rising rates of vaccine preventable diseases and someone on the Internet saying that watermelon juice is a natural alternative to sunscreen. Just, no, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and that can't be true. It's back for season three. My guests and I cut through a lot of chaos to help all of us understand what is true, what is overblown and what's false.