Chen Ming, "Transcend Left and Right"

Chen Ming, “Transcend Left and Right, Unite the Three Traditions, Renew the Party-State :  A Confucian Interpretation of the China Dream”[1] 
 
Introduction and translation by David Ownby
 
This is a translation of the transcription of an oral presentation by Chen Ming 陈明 (b. 1962), who is Professor of Philosophy at Capital Normal University in Beijing and the editor of Yuandao 原道, a leading Confucian journal in China.  Chen's presentation is a key-note address at a conference featuring Chen,  Zhao Guangming 赵广明, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Center of Religious Research, Liu Haibo 刘海波, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Center of Legal Studies, and Tang Wenming 唐文明, Professor of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, on March 17, 2015 at the Beijing University Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies北京大学高等人文研究院.  Only Chen Ming’s opening remarks are translated here.  Originally available on line at http://www.rujiazg.com/article/id/4939/ . 
 
Introduction
 
Chen Ming’s text (in fact, the transcription of an oral presentation) is a striking example of the recent arguments advanced by the cohort of intellectuals now known as “Mainland New Confucians.”  The addition of the adjective “mainland” signals that the group has consciously broken with New Confucians in the Chinese diaspora—Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States—over political issues.  Diaspora New Confucians, who constituted the mainstream (of a fairly minor movement) throughout much of the twentieth century, generally sought to defend Confucianism as a philosophy or a cultural outlook grounded in Chinese tradition yet ultimately compatible with Western, democratic values.  For these thinkers, a well-known representative example of which is Tu Wei-ming 杜维明 (b. 1940), a modernized Confucianism would carve out its own space within a range of globalized, universal values, as a communitarian counter-weight to the potentially corrosive discourses of individual liberty and free markets.  Mainland New Confucians reject such notions as small beer and set their sights on more ambitious goals, notably, filling the ideological vacuum at the core of China’s post-Mao regime.

The objective of Chen’s talk is to provide Confucian content to Xi Jinping’s 习近平“China Dream,” the nationalist, aspirational—and somewhat vague—slogan launched at the beginning of Xi’s mandate in 2012.  The idea that a “collaboration” between the Party-State and Confucianism might be a possibility first emerged during the 2000s, when Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 (b. 1942) and Wen Jiabao 温家宝 (b. 1942) began to emphasize “harmony” as a central regime objective, a concept that New Confucians found congenial.  But Chen Ming and other Mainland New Confucians push the envelope much further.  The text below offers a fundamental reimagining of China’s modern historical experience with an eye toward recreating a uniquely Chinese way of thought and government, grounded in nationalism rather than universalism.  What is genuinely “Confucian” about the project is not always clear.

Chen’s three major points are identified in the title of the text:  Transcend left and right, unite the three traditions, renew the Party-State.  The notion of “transcending left and right” indicts China’s liberal tradition, the notion that China’s modernization will inevitably lead to Western-style democracy, as well as its socialist heritage, particularly its internationalist aspects, as well as Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.  The “transcendence” will be based on the “Chinese people/nation” 中华民族—the two are conflated both linguistically and discursively and their/its concrete needs—rather than on abstract ideas based on Enlightenment discourse.  By “uniting the three traditions” (a notion first associated with Gan Yang 甘阳 (b. 1953), translated elsewhere on this site), Chen means the construction of a new historical narrative that will reunite the experiences of the Qing empire, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic, despite the ruptures that the current historiography has emphasized.  Again, Chen stresses the theme of reviving the Chinese people/nation, which, indeed, runs through the history of the three eras.  By “renew the Party-State,” Chen implicitly calls on the party to adopt the spirit of his proposals, apparently at the expense of a formal embrace of socialism or Marxism-Leninism—although Chen is not explicit on this point.   

Twenty years ago, Chen Ming was a “liberal” New Confucian who endorsed the American anthropologist Robert Bellah’s theories of “civil religion” and argued that Confucianism could play the same role in China as the Protestant tradition has played in the United States.   Obviously, much has changed.  Chen’s text is in fact of a piece with a flurry of Mainland New Confucian writings in the first part of the decade of the 2010s.  Cheered by China’s rise and by Xi Jinping’s apparent sympathy for Confucian ideas, thinkers like Chen Ming, Jiang Qing 蒋庆 (b. 1953), Kang Xiaoguang 康晓光 (b. 1963), and others worked to fashion a “political Confucianism” that they hoped would suit Xi's fancy and that of the CCP elite.  To some extent, “Confucianism” in this context seems to serve merely as a foil for nationalism and Chinese exceptionalism, although some Mainland New Confucians have attempted to devise institutional means to bring Confucianism back into Chinese politics.  The tone of the New Confucians’ writing during this period was often strident, their texts full of name-calling and denunciations.  Reading through one such text, What is Universal?  Whose Values? 何为普世？谁知价值？, a transcription of a conference held in Shanghai in 2012, I felt like I had stumbled into an internet comments section; the text drips with disgust for foreigners, liberals, women, and much else, and to my mind is very unConfucian.  The tone of Chen Ming’s text is somewhat more elevated, but there are hints of this brashness.

In any event, as I write this introduction in late May, 2018, the Mainland New Confucian movement seems to have lost its momentum, or at least to have missed its political mark.  A scathing essay by the historian Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光 (b. 1950), a translation of which is published elsewhere on this website (“If Horses Had Wings:  The Political Demands of Mainland New Confucians in Recent Years”) lays bare the intellectual weaknesses of the New Confucians, at least from a liberal perspective.  And texts like Chen’s, which less than a year ago were available on many different Chinese websites associated with Confucianism, are now harder to find.  Chen’s critique of socialism and of Mao Zedong, and his proposition to re-sinify Communist Party ideology to conform to the fundamental “national forms” of Chinese culture, i.e., Confucianism, may well have earned him unwanted attention.
 
Translation
 
In the past, notions of left and right had very strong political and even moral overtones.  Today things are somewhat different.  Today’s world is complex, and no single thought system can describe things clearly, or even less explain problems thoroughly.  So by left and right we mean different choices of issues and ways of solving problems when we confront the world.  We have evolved out of a unified society, and there is a process involved in getting used to our current divisions and plurality.  Since society is a pluralistic puzzle, then thought must also be expressed as pieces of different shapes and colors, cut in different shapes to reflect a picture of the world.  I think that from the perspective of the overall structure, and for our country and our people, the existence of different viewpoints is necessary and positive, and should be viewed as part of the new situation. 

Let’s get down to business.  Everyone is quite familiar with Confucianism as a thought system.  But in the realm of contemporary thought, what is a Confucian intellectual standpoint, a Confucian intellectual methodology, what are its views on modern questions?  This is less clear.  Tang Wenming [also a speaker at this conference] once said that he felt like everyone had to be either left or right, but that he wasn’t clear about himself.  I feel that Confucians are somewhat different from left- and right- wing thinkers, first because Confucianism was not born as a political theory and does not directly reflect a form of political discourse, and second because it doesn’t really deal with modern political questions.  Thus in today’s political discussions Confucianism is first of all a cognitive screen or order applied to various points of view, and hence can appear to be either left or right, or neither one nor the other.

Yet beneath all of this, or maybe from a methodological standpoint or a value statement or in any basic discussion, Confucianism is in fact its own system and thus is completely different from the left and the right.  There are both historical and present-day reasons for this.  For example, modernity is an attack that came from outside of China, and in the changes wrought by modernity, Confucianism was essentially part of the social mosaic, maintaining a posture of moderation.  It was not like the Nationalist Party (GMD) or the Communist Party (CCP) which, for a variety of reasons, established their own political parties, nor did Confucianism articulate its own political goals or arguments.  Now, as China joins the process of globalization and the economy advances to a certain level, the thought systems of the left and right have both encountered certain difficulties, and since Papa Xi 习大大[2] has announced his intention to proceed to a recalibration of ideology, we can and should see certain questions more clearly.

China needs to modernize, but China’s path to modernization should be different from that of others.  China’s construction of a modern state, which requires a transformation from a traditional empire toward the form of a modern state, is a problem, but the resolution of this problem requires a new way of thinking.  We can neither maintain past models, nor can we divide the so-called nation-state into two modes of national construction, one based on class and one based on citizens.  What we clearly need now is to choose the great revival of the Chinese nation as a solution, and imagine experiments to explore this approach.  This is a question of modern history, and indeed is the main question of modern history.  Current discussions of Confucianism, or rather the fact that Confucians are starting to speak out, should be seen as Confucians' having regained their lost voice in modern history, which is a correction to the extreme currents of thought existing since the May Fourth period.  The question of China’s uniqueness, her unique national characteristics, must be addressed with the help of Confucian value systems and methodology.  Only in this way will a reliable solution be found, while mindlessly copying either the models of the Western left or the Western right may well result in errors that prevent us from getting where we want to go.

Here I propose to carry out an experiment, and basing myself on changes that the ruling party has made to the policy of reform and opening, and especially ideological adjustments, I will engage in a Confucian interpretation or exercise in imagination, creating a Confucian reading of the “China Dream,” making reference to history throughout.
 
Some people say that the China Dream is Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream or the Duke of Zhou’s book of dream interpretation.[3]  This kind of nonsense illustrates that many people, including people involved in traditional culture, actually do not understand or even reject the notion.  Yet in the context of the ruling party’s ideological explorations and changes, such as  Deng Xiaoping’s suspension of Marxism via his theory of the early period of socialist development, the three principles [i.e., Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents”], and the theory of scientific development,[4] we can see that the China Dream is actually an important turning point, signaling that the mainstream guiding thought of the CCP is moving away from the international communist movement, and toward the resolution of China’s current problems.  In other words, it is moving away from the pursuit of universal, speculative, utopian ideals, and toward the realization of those changes that will satisfy the internal needs of the Chinese people.  Having achieved this precondition, the successful evolution of a politically revolutionary or class-based party toward a ruling party, a party of the entire people, can be achieved. This is the basic precondition allowing Xi Jinping to approach Confucianism, and of course is also the basic precondition allowing us to craft our interpretation of the China Dream from a Confucian standpoint.

What is the Confucian position?  Confucians have a basic understanding of the world, which is that they worship heaven as something that exists at the highest level.  This heaven has life force and will, as well as value.  This heaven is not same as the Daoist heaven where “Heaven and earth are not ren 仁 [human-hearted]: they treat the things of the world as straw dogs”[5]. Confucians believe that “the great attribute of heaven and earth is the giving and maintaining of life” 天地之大德曰生[6].  The concept of ren or human-heartedness which is at the core of Confucianism refers to the living heart of this heaven.  When applied to political philosophy, the highest value is accorded to the development and security of life, or to use the words of the Zhongyong 中庸 [Doctrine of the Mean], it means realizing oneself and bringing things into being, or “helping all under heaven to fulfill their lives” 与天下共遂其生.[7]  Aristotle took happiness as the greatest good.  Happiness means that life and livelihood must be peaceful and must evolve, or, in a word, must flourish [in English in the original].  This means that everyone is living well, all is right in nature, everyone is coexisting and thriving.  We find this kind of political ideal in all times and places.  Confucius’s highest political realm, that of the sage, promised to spread benefits broadly, which meant that the sage cultivated himself so as to bring peace to the people.  This can be reconciled with modern political principles, with Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people and for the people” and the Three People’s Principles of nationalism, democracy and the people’s livelihood.

Some people denounce the Confucian ideal of the family-state 家国, and argue that Confucians cannot deal with the question of coexistence with strangers [i.e., diversity or pluralism], and further argue for this reason that Confucianism is not sufficiently universal.  In fact, these detractors overlook the fact that the Confucian family-state is of a piece with tianxia 天下 [i.e., the traditional Chinese notion of universalism].  There are gradations of love 爱有差等, and in terms of experience, one begins with one’s own family.  The idea of “bringing all nations to live together peacefully” 协和万邦 [8] is an important one that many of us confront in life practice, but its logical position is secondary [i.e., love starts in the family, and universal love only comes later].  In addition, the idea of “gradations of love” is not an exact science, which means that there is no necessary contradiction between the two or a conflict with universality.  My teacher, Yu Dunkang 余敦康 (b. 1930) [9], as well as Li Zehou 李泽厚 (b. 1930)[10] and Western scholars that I have encountered all acknowledge that harmony is a value.  Not only is it universal, it is more basic than things such as freedom.  What I want to add is that this kind of harmony is sustained by beliefs in the way of heaven expressed in Neo-Confucian terms like “benevolence generation after generation” 生生为仁.  Looking at the China Dream from the perspective of this faith and that of political philosophy, I feel that there are three levels of meaning that we should pay attention to.  The first is transcending left and right so as to return to our native soil; the second is merging the three traditions 通三统 so as to rebuild historical unity; and the third is to renew the party-state, elevating the original party-state version 1.0, constructed along class lines, through the theory of nationalism, version 2.0, so that the direction of the path of the great revival of the Chinese nation will be clear, dynamic and secure.
 
1.  Transcending Left and Right:  Breaking through the Two Meta-Narratives of the May Fourth Revolutionary Discourse and the Enlightenment Solution
 
Let’s talk first about transcending left and right.

When I refer to left and right here, I’m talking both about a set of historical philosophies and political institutional proposals that we might label, respectively, as revolutionary discourse and the solution of the Enlightenment.  Revolutionary discourse has been practiced for many decades. In China as well, it has already had its time in the sun[11], and what have the results been? I think the results have not been so great.  Prior to 1949, the international faction within the CCP, due to its dogmatism, could not fit in and was ousted by the nativist faction.  Later on  the Cultural Revolution practice of permanent revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat brought the national economy to the verge of collapse.  Prior to 1949, Mao in fact held a nativist view, whether in terms of values or knowledge, by which I mean that he chose socialism in order to save China and not to obey the great plan of any international movement.  Yet after 1949, and particularly after Khrushchev’s reforms, Mao apparently felt that he might himself become the leader of an international movement, and thereupon either moved beyond or betrayed this prior nativist orientation and nationalist stance, and adopted Leninism or even Stalinism, and on this exalted base developed his so-called theory of permanent revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.  This is the nature and origins of what we might call his errors of old age.  In fact it was the theories of Mao’s opponents—Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇 (1898-1969) and Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1904-1997)—concerning the suppression of class struggle and the early period of socialist development, that represented the correct understanding of China’s problems and the correct way of thinking about a solution to these problems.  Later, it was precisely under the leadership of what we came to call Deng Xiaoping theory that we moved from a focus on class struggle to a focus on economic development, and the policies of reform and opening finally saved the day for the country and for the ruling party.

We haven’t gone down the Enlightenment path yet in China, and precisely because there has been no systematic practice, its theoretical halo continues to possess a great romantic power.  But the current situations in the Philippines and in India, and well as the changes that Russia has undergone, or even Taiwan’s ups and down, all should prompt us to think about whether the institution and decisions associated with the Enlightenment have been a success.  When we reflect on the choice of an institution, is this in order to establish a certain value, or is it to obtain a better life?   When we think about the organization or function of an institution, do we wonder if there are existing obstacles or conditions?  When we think about the best theory, does this mean the best results?  What are the obstacles and conditions in our country and society that we should think about?  In the list of China’s problems, which are those that merit immediate attention?  How do we maintain a balance?  Are the remedies and solutions offered by the left correct and effective?

I feel that there is something off in this line of inquiry.  In modern times, China’s main problems have been those of national salvation, the national pursuit of wealth and power, the salvation of the nation, the race, and the religion.  While we cannot deny that contract theory and individualism have a very positive significance in practice as a kind of critical theory [i.e., a mirror for self-reflection], their fictional character and ahistorical nature [in the Chinese context] mean that their usefulness in practice and theory is worth scrutiny.  China’s liberals seem not to have given this question the attention it deserves, and they seem somewhat impatient, or even arrogant.  As it so happens, recently there was a video that was very popular on the web, in which Eric Li ridiculed the meta-narratives of both the left and the right.[12] The left and the right readied their powder but finally neither said anything, and even the mainstream media seems to have appreciated the clip.  In my view, the true practical value of the video is in its analysis of the narrative of utopian communism, because the right-wing Enlightenment narrative has not been integrated with political power in China to take the form of institutions and policies.  So to a great degree, the Enlightenment project in China exists only on a spiritual plane.  If those in question understood Li’s video and still reacted this way, does that mean that in their heart of hearts they are truly enlightened? [i.e., if they said nothing, maybe it means they know they are wrong].

This is a question of reflecting and taking stock.

What I want to say is that revolutionary discourse and the Enlightenment project occurred during the May Fourth and the New Culture movement.  As for the right wing, we know Li Zehou’s theory of how Enlightenment and national salvation interacted.  What he says is that in modern times, national salvation has suppressed the Enlightenment, so that the historical plan embodied in the Enlightenment project has consistently been attacked and interfered with, blunting its full development.  In the 1980s, he said that we had to catch up, through new democracy, through the growth of the bourgeoisie, in other words, through the Enlightenment project.  In the 1980s Xu Jilin 许纪霖 (b. 1957)[13] and Wang Yuanhua 王元化 (1920-2009) [14] launched a “New Enlightenment” intellectual movement in Shanghai, the goal being to renew the Enlightenment, or to make up lost ground.  All of this is based on the five-stage theory of historical philosophy, or in other words a kind of single-line determinism with the West at the center of the story, all of which includes a teleology and a set of historical laws.  The teleology leads to the establishment of a rational kingdom, and the laws stipulate that you go from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization, which in fact is capitalism and the bourgeoisie and all the rest.  This is the theory of the right wing.  The left wing’s historical materialism is even clearer:  the cannon fire of the October Revolution sent us Marxism-Leninism.  The theoretical and the organizational basis of the CCP, the Chinese branch of the Komintern, was precisely this.  According to Marxist-Leninist theory, its goal is to emancipate all mankind, and in terms of strategy the idea was to first emancipate mankind and then emancipate itself [i.e., the original CCP was not attuned to needs of China, and was only a cog in the wheel of the international communist movement].  Nonetheless, because the May Fourth imported these two meta-narratives, and again because these two narratives were incorporated into a certain political power, they wound up being strengthened, and confirmed as true.  And as a result of this process, May Fourth became the beginning of the new century and the touch-point of politics and culture.  What should be pointed out is that this starting point has been arbitrarily ripped out of the history that preceded it, and in terms of national salvation, which is the main theme of modern Chinese history, “May Fourth as origin” is a reinterpretation, a distortion, and a cover-up.  Even if by hook or by crook this notion propped us up over the course of the 20th century, given the maturity or our current thought and society, we cannot but reflect on and take stock of our ideas on this point.

The reason why May Fourth was the May Fourth was because of New Youth’s 新青年[15] opposition to the “twenty-one demands.”[16]  New Youth took moral enlightenment as the ultimate enlightenment, and attributed modern China’s backwardness and weakness to the cause of a backward culture.  The “twenty-one demands” occurred because China was unable to secure the return of German interests in Qingdao, Shandong, which were instead turned over to Japan.  This is part of China’s painful modern history, part of the central question of national salvation.  Thus, no matter how you look at it, May Fourth should be seen as an organized part of the modern national salvation movement.  Yet because of the import of the narratives on the left and the right, and the success of these narratives in controlling thought and politics, the entire description of the May Fourth has been rewritten, in the course of which China’s problem became no longer how to seek wealth and power so as to achieve national salvation, but rather how to establish a modern system, be it capitalist or socialist, the type of system that would bring about the establishment of a rational society, a utopia.  In other words, through these two grand narratives, the son swallowed the mother, and 5,000 years of history were negated.  The historical efforts of great Confucians such as Zeng Guofan 曾国藩 (1811-1872)[17], Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 (1837-1909)[18] and Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858-1927)[19] were obliterated in an act of patricide and matricide, resulting in the removal of our ancestors.  In just this way, the May Fourth became the common ancestral tablet of both the left and right, but it was also their common Achilles’ heel.

When I say that Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” transcends left and right, this is because he takes modern history and the great revival of the Chinese nation as the basis for his theoretical reflection and the goal of his political search.  But if he is setting his sights on building things, this also implies a certain destruction. 

What is to be destroyed?  The two meta-narratives established by the May Fourth.  National salvation is the will of a people to survive in times of crisis and the expression of their desire.  National salvation and reconstruction are two sides of the same coin.  Now authorities have put “wealth and power” at the head of the list of core values, which is where we find the deepest significance and meaning.  Hence I say that the first theoretical significance of the China Dream is that it transcends left and right and returns things to the context of China’s modern history, it returns to our native mentality and concerns.  In the context of national salvation, relations between China and West are relations of competition and rivalry based on political economics and military matters between nations and peoples.  Yet the revolutionary discourse and the Enlightenment plan transforms these into cultural relations and class relations, and dissolves the already existing contradictions and tensions, which clearly is absurd.  Worse is that the way in which they solve the problem becomes a self-negation, and an identification with universal truth.  This is the key point, which today must be brought to light.  The basic goal of revealing and clarifying this key point is to negate and discard both left and right ideologies and their meta-narratives, to emerge from the cave and return to our true life-world. 

How do we accomplish this transcendence?  Not to fall into abstractions, the central concept in the leftist narrative is class, and in rightist ideology it’s the individual.  Let’s leave class aside for the moment.  As for the existence of individuals, we all know that we exist as individuals, and individual needs and desires surely possess a certain rationality.  But in the case of China, national salvation requires that we construct a sovereign nation that can enter the modern world, that can participate in the games of international politics, because in today’s world it is nation-states that engage in competition and are judged on their competitiveness.  The colonialist movement and World War I imposed on us the world of the jungle and its rules, so the first goal of the construction of this sovereign nation-state is that it can establish itself in the jungle world, which means an effective response to strength, and not, as today’s left and right insist, to resolve insignificant problems of social autonomy or individual freedom , or labor relations or carrying out communism…These are extras, luxury items that we can use to mobilize people, but our goal is national salvation, the preservation of the race, the nation and the culture, this is what we must pay attention to!  So this cannot produce something like the Mayflower Compact—which to Native Americans must have seemed much more like a pact among robbers to divide the spoils [i.e., a set of ideas imposed from outside which do not consider the needs of the “natives”].  This was all produced by historical differences; our fate is not ours to choose.  If we admit these differences, then we cannot imagine that we will begin from the position of the individual, or from that of the class, and follow someone else’s model to set up our system.  We already paid too high a price for the Soviet model; we can’t fall in the same ditch twice.  This is an important point.

If he eschews class and does not choose the individual, then what concept does Papa Xi use to transcend left and right to establish the theoretical basis and the practical support for his political program?  The Chinese nation.  The content of the “China Dream” is the great revival of the Chinese nation, and this is precisely what the modern history of national salvation has bequeathed to us as our most treasured intellectual awakening, theoretical accomplishment, and political heritage.  Faced with the Western powers, the Chinese people living on this territory share a common emotional fate, as well as the idea of  political unity.  This requires that we transcend ethnic identities such as Manchu, Mongol, Muslim, Tibetan and Han; it requires that we transcend the institutional form of the great Qing empire [presumably, Chen means that border peoples have to be genuinely integrated into the PRC].  It brings with it the pursuit and the possibility of the notion of the construction of a country that is both modern and national [i.e., its national uniqueness is not lost in its modernity].  Because the Chinese people are a nation, and nation is first and foremost a political concept.  Zhao Guangming, who is here today, is a Muslim, while I am Han, and there may be other ethnic groups present.  Here, people 民族 is an ethnic concept, but together we make up a nation, which is the Chinese nation, and on the basis of that political nature and legal nature we obtain a new kind of identity.[20]  I think that this is a major problem in modern history.  I am stressing this point, that we need to return to modern history, to return to our native land.  Where are we coming back from?  From the old, heterodox paths of left and right—we should probably call them both “forked paths.”  Only the China Dream is a true, straight road.  I have written a few things, and if you are interested you can read my blog…I can communicate with you through that channel.  Of course, if you want to go buy my book, Confucianism and Civil Society, than that’s even better.  I’ve said enough about this.  Discussion is much more important than one person prattling on.
 
2.  Unifying the Three Traditions:  Fully Affirming the Positions of the Qing and the Republic in China’s Political Genealogy so as to Reconstruct our History
 
The second point is unifying the three traditions so as to rebuild history.  What does “unifying the three traditions” 通三统 mean?  The word tradition 统 originally referred to the calendar promulgated by the first emperor of a dynasty, a way of marking the beginning of a new period of time.  The three traditions meant the calendars of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties.  The Tang and Wu revolts 汤武革命 [which overthrew the Xia and Shang dynasties, respectively] are usually seen as new dynasties replacing old dynasties in a way that pleased heaven and the people.  But in larger Confucian discourse, Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen and Wu 尧、舜、禹、汤、文、武 are all part of a “tradition;” they are linked together and unified with heaven.  The meaning of “unifying the three traditions” is that while Tang’s replacement of Jie 桀 and King Wu’s defeat of Zhou 纣 were changes of mandate, these changes were carried out in accord with the way of heaven, following the principles and rhythm of the heavenly mandate.  Any political antagonism is shaped by the complexities of experience and history, but political power itself truly belongs to heaven, and hence has a holistic existence that requires a certain support and expression.  Unifying the three traditions is meant to embody this.  It basically aims to express two meanings :  one is that a newly constructed political power must be in some way different from the dynasty it is replacing, while at the same time there must also be some overlap, which makes clear the flow and continuity of the way of heaven;  second is that the new rulers must treat the old rulers well, on the principle that “the world does not belong to one family” 明天下非一家之有.  The most important point is to emphasize absolute respect for the way of heaven, and to seek to ground one’s own political legitimacy on the basis of that respect.

Using Gongyang Confucianism’s 儒家公羊学[21] idea of unifying the three traditions to discuss Xi Jinping’s China Dream is mostly based on this latter consideration.  Xi Jinping’s China Dream is based in China’s modern history, and takes the Chinese nation as its theoretical starting point. The concept of the Chinese nation transcends the individual, and also transcends class.  If we use leftist ideological discourse, then the Qing was a feudal society, dominated by the landlord class; the Republic was a capitalist society, dominated by the bourgeoisie; the current regime is socialist, under the leadership of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  The three are defined by class contradictions and class struggle, and hence political changes within the period are the result of violent actions in which one class overthrows another, which is completely different from explanations of regime change in Confucian political philosophy.  When I was young during the Cultural Revolution, I liked to listen to the radio, and what left the greatest impression on me were essays like those of Chi Heng 池恒[22] and Liangxiao 梁效[23], an example of which would be, “As proletarians we will realize a complete break with concepts of the old tradition.”  In arguments like these, all generations are antagonistic, which means rupture.  There is no common base at all.  This obviously is a kind of historical nihilism, a nihilistic view of history.  At the core, this is a Christian concept; it’s teleological, apocalyptic.  These kinds of utopian ideals, with their final judgments, it’s all theological, and it’s completely different from our Chinese—or perhaps, Confucian, or Daoist—view of history.  Utopianism is not good for historical facts or for current needs, nor is it easy to use, and this is not how we thought over the ages.  Because according to the theory of unifying the three traditions, what is important is political continuity, the legitimacy of heaven’s way.  It is grounded in real moral discussions, and in questions of order and ethics.  Sun Yat-sen deeply identified with the way of Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, Wu and the Duke of Zhou. Mao Zedong also said that we had inherited everything from Confucius down to Sun Yat-sen, but neither his political thought nor his policies reflected this.  For various reasons, Mao disliked Confucians and preferred Legalists.  Perhaps out of impatience, and because utopian ideas give rebels historical value, Mao turned the values found in the regular histories upside down, so that Yao, Shun, Yu, Wen, Wu, Zhou and Confucius were all backwards, corrupt and reactionary, while Chen Sheng 陈胜 and Wu Guang 吴广, the Red Eyebrows 赤眉 and the Yellow Turbans 黄巾, along with Huang Chao 黄巢, Chuang Wang 闯王, and Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全[24] became progressive representatives of the future.  This produced a complete historical rupture and a negation of values.

But the China Dream is not like this.  Xi Jinping has made it very clear:  the China Dream is the common pursuit of all righteous Chinese people in the modern era.  The very idea of the Chinese nation is inclusive, not exclusive, and does not begin with the idea of class.  Respecting history’s continuity also builds historical holism, as it expands one’s own historical base.  I don’t know if the authorities have understood this point, but I feel that this is an affirmation of all righteous Chinese people from late Qing times forward, and not a negation from a class standpoint, which is what we find in our interpretations of literary works :  “The True Story of Ah Q” 阿Q正传[25] proved that the landlord class was bad; Midnight 子夜[26] proved that the bourgeois class was bad; Fortress Besieged 围城[27] proved that the intellectuals are bad, after which the author trotted out his own viewpoint.  The importance of this is great, in terms of both strategy and technique.  If we believe that seeking wealth and power and revitalizing China are the key questions of the modern period, which we should carry forward, then we must think:  what we should do first in the context of the modern era, in the context of the international situation?  Without a doubt, the priority is to construct a sovereign state. The notions of wealth and power, indeed the notion of China, are concepts deployed against the superpowers and the invaders, and have no direct relationship to questions of class or individual.  National construction does not mean building tall buildings on flat land, as in the United States, but for us it is rather a question of the transformation of an empire, much like the case of the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire.  This is decided by our history.

As a political power made up of a minority people, the Qing empire was destined to weakness and decline.  The Taiping movement and the conflict with the Western powers rapidly pushed the process toward full crisis, with the result that it was not only an internal power shift, but instead the disintegration of the state and nation.  How to avoid or overcome this crisis has been the basic question of the modern era.  Even if one cannot say that questions of individual liberation or class liberation did not exist at all, they were insignificant questions that would become relevant only after the basic question was resolved.  Only when you are clear on this point can you see where you really are and where you really need to go.  The reduction of external pressure became the functional precondition that had to be satisfied so as to construct the new country that we desired.  Here one obviously cannot borrow Western theories like “contracts” to describe, analyze or critique the situation.  The emergence of the form of the modern nation-state was to a great degree a product of internal growth and maturation throughout the world.  The position of new social strata rose, and made new demands, power was reapportioned and the old state was replaced, peacefully or violently.  Political power and rights were reorganized in terms based on comparative social power.  England’s nobility and commoners, France’s clergy and the third estate…many situations were like this.  But ours was not.  Faced with an outside challenge, what needed to be done was to effectively carry out social mobilization to relieve the outside pressure, and then solve internal problems. 
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This then became the problem of the transformation of an empire, which constituted the path to be followed and the goal to be pursued in the resolution of the problem.  Here, organization and mobilization were the most important considerations, so as to not lose territory or see our people divided.

From a world perspective, the transformation of empires always ends in a division into a number of ethnic countries.  This was the case for the Austro-Hungarian empire and for the Ottoman empire.  Was China’s situation like this?  This is a problem.  Our right-wingers argue that China should indeed be like this.  They take the individual as the base unit, and give priority to order.  When we apply this logic to history, division is completely natural.  Right-wingers also tend to equate ethnic nations with modern nations.  Although this theory looks good, in fact it is quite absurd.  On this point the left wing might be a bit better, as they basically believe that the country cannot be split up—the notion that the working class has no country is a separate thing.  As a Confucian I believe in great unity; the idea that the borders and territories do not change, that the different ethnic groups not be divided is for me completely possible and completely desirable; this is the greatest political correctness for the maintenance of the great Chinese nation.  This is something that no theory or ideology can change.  A modern transformation based on this understanding is the only one that is consistent with the great revival of the Chinese nation.  The Chinese nation is a nation organized out of 56 ethnic groups, externally independent, internally flourishing.

Narrowly speaking, this territory was established by the Qing.  Some people see the abdication letter of the last Qing emperor as an important constitutional document, and they’re right.  The establishment of a republic composed of China’s five chief ethnic groups was the Qing hope, as well as the desire of the republic, and of course it should be the ideal of any republic.  The idea of unifying the three traditions means fully affirming the position of the Qing and the Republic in China’s political genealogy, fully affirming their function in modern history.  Only in this way will our history be complete and continuous, and only in this way can our current reality be complete and harmonious.  When Papa Xi takes the concept of the Chinese nation as the subject of his narrative, and begins the story from the modern era, it possesses just this significance.  This is the first level of meaning when I said that unifying the three traditions was necessary so as to rebuild historical completeness.  From this we can deduce the second level of meaning:  acknowledging the reconstruction of historical completeness through unifying the three traditions will clarify what our current problems are.  They are the structure of the state and the structure of the people, which is a mission that has yet to be completed.   Forget Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan.  At present, many unstable elements are appearing in Hong Kong.  All of these problems can be traced back to the Qing and to the modern era, and belong to the category of questions relating to the structure of the state and people.   This is a basic question, which we must grasp firmly, and not allow interference by any theory of the individual or class as favored by the right and the left.  The right wing always starts from the question of individual rights, and individual rights are important, I agree, but not that important.  The space for individual rights in the current institutional setting has not been sufficiently exploited, which means that at present it is merely a technical question.  The question of class is even more ridiculous.  It makes sense in the context of political struggles, if we confine its use to rhetoric.  When it’s real it’s a pain, and can lead us back to the Cultural Revolution.     

Thus unifying the three traditions will restore historical completeness and make clear that our political problem lies in transcending left and right and finding a logic that ties everything together.
 
3.  Renew the Party-State :  People, Nation, and State as Basic Concepts
 
Hence we arrive at the third question, that of renewing the party-state.  If we understand that our problem is that of the transformation of an empire, if we understand that the point of that transformation is to diminish internal and external pressure, and that the point of diminishing internal and external pressure is to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation, then in our interpretation, the evaluation of various activities and phenomena in modern history should provide plot points that we can follow.  And within this frame of reference, the party-state, understood as basic systemic characteristics shared by both the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, is the first question to deal with.

Party-state means that the party is above the state, that power is concentrated in the hands of one party.  The right wing begins from contract theory, and uses the idea of “the party capturing the state” from Western political theory to negate criticism.  The left wing begins from Leninism, and uses the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to affirm and praise the party-state.  In fact, fundamentally, the party-state system of the CCP and the GMD was completely determined by the context of modern Chinese history and national salvation, an institutional choice that was made with this goal in mind.  That one party chose Leninism was pure happenstance.  Of course, if you use left-wing theory to criticize this, then you will completely miss the main point.  After failing three times at revolution, Sun Yat-sen discovered that accomplishing the mission of saving the country would require a powerful organized force.  An organized body of elites, possessed of a sense of idealism and responsibility and a spirit of sacrifice, under the direction of a leadership, was the only way forward.  In fact, this had a bit of Confucian flavor, of taking tianxia as one’s personal responsibility 以天下为己任.  Power was perhaps used in a way that was dictatorial, authoritarian, but the goal of the use of power was to save the country and save the people.  Look again at modern China, with crises arising on every front, the Chinese people a sheet of loose sand 一盘散沙.  Externally, China had to fight for its sovereignty and internally, preserve the people’s rights.  How was this going to be easy?  It’s like trying to make a barrel out of seven long and eight short pieces of wood; you need strong iron staves to bind it together.  So, from the angle of organized power, organizational efficiency and goals, we might arrive at a certain historical sympathy and understanding when we think about the organization of the party-state.  At the time, the state was hardly a state, and the party was organized precisely to save the state and the people, so the idea of the party capturing the country is ridiculous.  What real country can be captured by a party?  For this reason, we cannot understand the party in the simplified Western sense of a political party.  That’s a part of it, but a political party is the tool and form by which different social forces and interest groups compete for political power in a system where the state already exists and the political platform has already been established.  You cannot fully discuss the CCP or the GMD in that light.  They were a means of self-salvation chosen by a mistreated people suffering from colonialism; these were parties to save the county, to build the country.  If we have to use Western political discourse, they were both parties of the entire people.  In this way perhaps we can arrive at a historical sympathy for and understanding of the party-state.

 Yet this kind of historical legitimacy is not eternal.  When the original goal of saving and rebuilding the country has been fully realized, then there should be adjustments permitting the country to develop even further.  This is a principle that should be part of a nation-saving party or a nation-building party.  According to Leninist arguments, or class arguments, the goal is to build communism, and once so-called communism is realized, then the state as well as the party disappear, because there is no longer any need for them.  I call this the Leninist party-state version 1.0, in other words the theory of the party-state built on a class basis.  In the context of modern history, that the CCP accepted this theory was, in my view, an historical accident.  Because even if the establishment of the CCP was prompted by external elements, nonetheless those Bolsheviks subsequently failed completely and faded away as a result of their political and military experiences, and they were replaced by the Yan’an spirit and by indigenization.  The indigenization faction, with Mao as their representative, accepted Marxism at the outset not as an “ism,” not because of any felt identity with communism—what they were looking for was a truth to save the nation.  Mao once said that only socialism could save China.  That proves that for him, socialist was a utilitarian means to an end, while saving China was his value goal.  This logic, if you turn it around, means that if something cannot save China, or worse yet, if something is going to harm China, then you certainly have to go back to the drawing board.  Mao evolved this imported Leninism to its highest point, during the Cultural Revolution creating the theory of the permanent revolution of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which achieved the opposite of what it set out to do, and pushed the national economy to the point of collapse.  Then Deng Xiaoping emerged, and based on his theory of the initial period of socialism suspended Mao’s utopian thought, and although China remained a party-state, its theoretical basis was beginning to change.  Deng Xiaoping said that he was the son of the Chinese people, and that he deeply loved the motherland, not an ordinary feeling, but a love of deep significance.  His choice of words constituted a negation of Mao’s utopia.  Then came the change to the “party constitution” in which the CCP became the “vanguard of the Chinese nation!”

Papa Xi has grasped even higher, talking about the China Dream, about the great revival of the Chinese nation, and about people’s happiness as the goal and responsibility of those who hold power.  The upgrade is that after achieving the mission of wresting independence from external forces, and after the achievement of the great mission of national reconstruction, the nation-saving party became the ruling party, and the happiness of the people has become the goal of the exercise of power.  So what are the indices of the people’s happiness?  Surely the right to define this belongs to the people themselves.  National sovereignty and national safety, this is step one.  Next comes housing and employment, and next comes making your own decisions.  This is Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs, which move upward step by step.  If you use your mouth basically to eat, then the economy is what matters; if you use your mouth basically to talk, then freedom of speech is most important.  Since we have acknowledged the happiness of the people, then surely heaven hears what the people hear, and sees what the people see 天听自我民听、天视自我民视.[28]  Thus, within the theory of the China Dream, there have been changes and upgrades to the party-state theory; we’re already at version 2.0 where the people, the nation, and the state are the basic concepts.

Deng Xiaoping said that only the CCP could accomplish the great revival of the Chinese nation, and in a certain sense this has been accomplished.  Today’s China has many parties, the Chinese Democratic League 中国民主同盟, the China Democratic National Construction Association 中国民主建国会, as well as the GMD, the People’s Progressive Party 民进党 [29]…These parties obviously could not do what the CCP has done, because they didn’t have the ability to satisfy the requirements for organization and mobilization.  In other words, if we want to maintain the unity of the nation, as well as its prosperous standard of living, then we have no other choice than to invest our hopes and expectations in the best methods.  This is not a lack of progress, nor is it a tragedy.  In fact I am very optimistic, because the version 2.0 of the party-state not only conforms to the needs of the current historical period, but also contains within it positive possibilities for future development, and in terms of theory and logic contains the possibility of the division of party and country, as I already touched on briefly.  As for when we might reach that point, there remain many factors to be considered.  The authorities talk about the “two centenaries,”[30] which might help us understand the timetable.  Currently, the 18th People’s Congress has promoted the core values of socialism :  “wealth and power, democracy, civilization, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, rule of law, patriotism, dedication to work, sincerity, friendship.”  We can imagine obtaining many of these.  Wealth and power, democracy, civilization and harmony fit together well with national revival.  Freedom, equality, justice, and rule of law are closely linked to the people’s happiness.  If we say that “wealth and power” match up with the state, solidifying the establishment of sovereignty and public power, then “democracy” and “freedom” match up best with the protection and development of private rights.  So can we understand this to be the priority of the value goals in the ruling party-state’s political plan?  Can we understand this as the map of the path of the realization of the China Dream?  Does this inherit and develop the mainstream values of modern China?  Can we implicitly understand this as the progressive implementation of Sun Yat-sen’s scheme of military rule, tutelage, and constitutional rule?  “The efforts of several generations will truly build a China whose power comes from the people, a constitutional country governed by the rule of law and fairness.”[31]  In political philosophy the maintenance of a government’s ability and the protection of individual rights is a contradiction; it’s like finding a balance beyond Nietzsche’s “superman” and Heidegger’s “Nazis.”  This is something that the Confucian middle way values and pursues, and properly achieving and reconciling the revival of the state and the people is both our historical goal as well as an opportunity for theoretical innovation, even if on all fronts it remains full of opportunities and challenges. 

With that, I’ve basically covered my three points.  I feel that I have given a reading, or an extension, of the China Dream from a Confucian perspective.  This is how I have been thinking for twenty years.  I have been hassled by both the left and right wings, but this is a good thing, as it proves that Confucians have their own intellectual standpoint, which is different.  I don’t dare say that I represent the Confucians, there are just my individual reflections.  And I hope, on this platform, to get feedback and criticism from the left and right as well as from my fellow Confucians.  Thank you!
 
Notes 
 
[1] "超左右、通三统、新党国——中国梦的儒家解读."

[2] “Papa Xi” is a term of endearment employed in China’s media to refer to President Xi Jinping.

[3]A famous passage in the Zhuangzi 庄子 discusses an episode where either Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreamed he was Zhuangzi.  The Duke of Zhou’s book of dream interpretation is the Yijing 易经, which is often used for fortune telling.  I assume Chen Ming is being humorous.

[4] These are all various ideological formulations having to do with “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in the post-Mao era.

[5] A passage from Laozi’s 老子Classic of the Way and its Power道德经.  See Robert Eno’s online translation at http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Daodejing.pdf.  The contrast Chen wants to make is between Confucians, who focus on humanity, and Daoists, who argue that humanity went astray when it began to focus on itself. 

[6] Citation from the Yijing. 

[7] The definition of ren 仁 given by the Qing Confucian Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724-1777).  See Anthony C. Yu, Comparative Journeys:  Essays on Literature and Religion East and West (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 337. 

[8] Passage taken from the Book of Shang 尚书. 

[9]  A professor of Philosophy at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, now retired.

[10] One of the most important scholars and intellectuals of the post-Mao era, Li sought to incorporate Confucianism into a fundamental rethinking of Marxism.  Li now resides in the United States.

[11]  Chen actually uses a song title, “Take a Graceful Stroll” 潇洒走一回, from a popular 1990s song by Sally Ye 叶倩文; xiaosa 潇洒 means to be casually elegant, and in the context of the song, which emphasizes how life and love are fleeting, conveys the notion of “holding your head up,” or “taking your best shot” despite life’s inevitably sad ending.

[12] See https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems?language=zh-cn. 

[13] A prominent liberal public intellectual who teaches at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

[14] An important figure in the PRC literary establishment who turned to liberalism late in life.

[15] Founded in 1915, New Youth was the leading journal of the New Culture Movement.

[16] The “twenty-one demands” were presented by the Japanese government to China in 1915, hoping to increase Japan’s presence and influence in China while the West was preoccupied by WWI. 

[17] Zeng Guofan was a conservative Confucian statesman best known for his role in defeating the Taiping rebellion.

[18] Zhang Zhidong was a major figure in the politics of reform of the late Qing, responsible for the slogan “Chinese wisdom as essence, Western wisdom as function 中学为体，西学为用.”

[19] Kang Youwei was an important figure in the 1898 reforms, and sought to transform China into a constitutional monarchy with a Western-based educational system and a Confucian national religion.

[20]  In Chinese, as in many languages, words signifying “people,” “ethnicity,” “country” and “nationality” often draw on similar etymological roots, which makes distinctions between them unclear.  Since the same vocabulary lies at the root of the discourse of modern political nationalism, the same terms are often super-charged with political meaning.  In this passage and elsewhere, Chen is attempting a maneuver with a high degree of difficulty:  he wants the Chinese “people/nation” to encompass both the Han people and recognized ethnic minorities in China; and he wants the Chinese “people/nation” to be completely modern and free of the constraints of universal meta-narratives.

[21] The Gongyang commentary was one of three on the Spring and Autumn Annals 春秋, a basic Confucian text, which has served as the basis for numerous critiques of orthodox Confucian thought over the course of Chinese history.  The Gongyang commentary was a source of inspiration for Kang Youwei, and for the contemporary New Confucian Jiang Qing.

[22] The penname of a group of writers who wrote for Red Flag 红旗, the main theoretical political journal published by the CCP.

[23] The penname for groups of writers associated with Beijing University and Tsinghua University--梁效 is a play on words for 两校, “two schools”—during the anti-Confucius, anti-Lin Biao campaign of the early 1970s.

[24] All of these were leaders of important rebellions in Chinese history.

[25] Lu Xun’s 鲁迅 famous story about the farce of the Republican revolution in China’s countryside.

[26] Mao Dun’s 茅盾 1933 novel about social life in Shanghai.

[27] Qian Zhongshu’s 钱钟书 1947 novel ridiculing intellectual life in Nationalist China.

[28] Quote from the Book of Shang.

[29]  The Chinese Democratic League and the China Democratic National Construction Association are pre-PRC parties that continue to exist in China.  They are subservient to the CCP.  The People’s Progressive Party is a Taiwanese political party that supports the eventual independence of Taiwan.

[30] 2021, the centenary of the founding of the CCP, and 2049, the centenary of the founding of the PRC.

[31]  This is taken from Deng Xiaoping’s ”political will,” 邓小平《遗嘱》 a text that spread on the internet after Deng’s death, in which Deng supposedly proclaimed, among other things, his admiration for the US constitutional system and his impatience for the pace of political change in China.  See http://chinascope.org/archives/6122.  The sentence that follows the one quoted here is: “This was also the dream of Sun Yat-sen.”