Gao and Tian, "Naturalization and Conservative Constitutionalism"

Gao Quanxi and Tian Feilong, “A Discussion of Naturalization Law, Liberal Empire, and Conservative Constitutionalism”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

Both Gao Quanxi (b. 1962) and Tian Feilong (b. 1983) are constitutional scholars and conservative liberals in China, Gao at the Faculty of Law of Jiaotong University in Shanghai, and Tian at Beihang University in Beijing (where Gao taught before moving to Shanghai).  Gao is older and better-known (although Tian is no slouch:  here’s his Aisixiang page), respected for his authoritative works on the history of modern and contemporary China’s constitutions, as well as for influential essays such as this one on “the political maturity of Chinese liberalism.”  Tian works on similar topics, and he and Gao, together with Zhang Wei, who did his Ph.D. under Gao’s direction, jointly published, in English, a volume entitled The Road to the Rule of Law in Modern China (Springer 2015). 

Gao, Tian, and presumably Zhang as well, represent a strain of liberal thought in China that focuses on the constitution, both as a formal statement of the “rule of law” which they earnestly desire, but also as an embodiment of a country’s culture and traditions.  Constitutions should be organic statements of history and practice, not empty declarations of abstract principles.

The text translated here is a self-organized discussion between Gao and Tian of a massive biography of Edmund Burke, the well-known 18th century British conservative philosopher and politician, written by the British scholar Richard Bourke, entitled Empire and Revolution：The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, 2015).  Tian has also translated another biography of Burke:  Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics (William Collins, 2013), by Jesse Norman, and has written extensively about Burke’s thought and influence.

Gao and Tian’s long discussion is divided into four parts:  “Naturalization Law and the Conservative Nature of Constitutional Rule,” “Themes and Variations on Empire and Revolution,” “The Sinicization of Burke and the Liberal Order,” and “A Look Back at Burke and The World on Fire.” 

I apologize in advance to readers for having violated my own policy of publishing only translations of complete texts, but part two, “Themes and Variations on Empire and Revolution,” a lengthy, intricate discussion of the export of French “liberalism” at the hands of Napoleon (this is what “liberal empire” refers to in the title) was simply a bridge too far on a pleasant summer day (or four).  The point of translating entire texts is to provide the larger intellectual context necessary to understanding an author’s ideas, and I think that translating three of the four sections will be sufficient. 
 
The  Burke-Bourke discussion (happily, it’s a bit clearer in Chinese) is in fact merely a pretext for a broad-ranging discussion of what liberalism means and how it should be applied to China.  This has been a central focus of Gao’s work over the past few years, and this text is in fact a helpful summary of his views, which are, in a nutshell, that China should build what we might call “liberalism with Chinese characteristics.”  In other words, rather than taking potshots at the government because China’s rule of law does not measure up to the West’s, Chinese liberals should build their own system based on their own historical experiences and political traditions.  Burke appeals to Gao, and to Tian, both because he respects tradition (Gao appreciates Confucian culture, but wants nothing to do with Confucian politics) and because he condemns the French revolution for its violence and “conquest” (i.e., imperialism and domestic violence). 
 
What does any of this have to do with Trump? you might be thinking.  Well, at various points in the text, Gao defends Trump’s election, as well as Brexit, as examples of Burkean conservatism.  Trump and Brexit are standing up against “conquest” at the hands of foreign immigrants and refugees, and for a self-interested, hard-nosed politics of “this is who we are and this is what we want.” To Gao, this is history, tradition, practice, and interest fighting abstract principles.  By contrast, Germany’s “surrender” to the “refugee crisis” (consistently in quotes in the text) represents a capitulation to just such abstract values.
 
Gao could I suppose have made his argument without reference to Trump and Brexit, but then what would he have said about the two shining beacons of the liberal world?  Gao is a close friend and colleague of Xu Zhangrun 许章润 (b. 1962), the law professor and dissident who was recently detained (and subsequently released) for his scathing, courageous criticisms of Xi Jinping, and I am convinced that Gao is sincere in his discussions of the value of the rule of law and of genuine constitutions that serve to anchor that rule in political realities. 

Like his fellow liberal Xu Jilin, Gao has the right to object to the social justice warrior aspect of contemporary American liberalism (although the parallels are not exact, Gao’s, and Xu’s, critique of American liberalism reminds me of the refusal by the Anglican-Episcopal church in Africa to follow the mother church’s lead on issues of homosexuality and gay marriage in recent decades.  “You taught us civilization,” the Africans more or less said, “and now you turn around and try to sell us this??!!”).  Less charitably, at various points in the text, Gao’s discussion of  “conquest” and “empire” in the Chinese context made me think that he was trying to find space for a Chinese liberalism that would more or less continue present policies in Xinjiang and Tibet.
 
In addition, I could not help but be struck by the contrast between the intellectually rigorous discussion of Burke and his world and the simplistic discussion of Trump and Brexit.  To take Trump or Boris Johnson as principled examples of anything strains credulity for anyone who is watching them with any degree of attention.  In addition, Gao simply accepts as truth right-wing talking points about immigrants—that they are criminals and terrorists who exploit the US or Britain without attempting to fit in.  Depicting America, particularly, as a “nation of immigrants” is not an exercise in political correctness, but for Gao, in this context, Burkean abstractions seem to have been more important than American realities (although the American political refusal to engage in a serious debate about immigration policy is indeed maddening). 

I was also somewhat troubled to discover that Tian Feilong, despite his embrace of Burkean gradualism, is also a major voice supporting China’s National Security Law in Hong Kong (see, for example, this text from July 9).  This strikes me as hypocritical, but then again, Burke might have seen the Hong Kong protests as an example of “French liberalism.”
 
Translation
 
Naturalization Law and the Conservative Nature of Constitutional Rule
 
Tian:  Greetings, Prof. Gao, I am delighted to have the occasion for another scholarly discussion with you.  If I remember correctly, these discussions probably started in 2011, and we had four scholarly dialogues on questions concerning political constitutions, the 1911 Revolution, the 1982 Constitution and the CCPCC.  These discussions were part of my intellectual education and exploration, but for you it was more a matter of expressing and systematizing your thought.

The academic path you have travelled is fairly standard for scholars of the reform and opening period.  You started with classical German philosophy and then moved toward British and American empirical philosophy, before changing again and studying the fields of legal philosophy and constitutionalism.  Your recent history is all the more cross-disciplinary, using law and philosophy to open up a unique kind of "study of constitutional development 宪制发生学," which offers a new way to study Chinese political constitutional science. 

I’m also happy to see that your work has born fruit in recent years in terms of publications, notably Political Constitutionalism and Our Future Constitutional Order (2016) and Liberal Politics and Republican Government (2017), both published by the City University of Hong Kong Press.  The topics we will discuss today are closely related to these publications, and I understand that you would like to talk about Burke’s ideals of conservative constitutional rule.

Gao:  That’s right.  Burke is quite unusual in the context of the history of Western political thought and constitutional theory.  Few constitutional scholars talk about Burke, and in fact Burke is not easy to discuss, because his thought is complex and lacks overall clarity, which doesn’t fit well with the way in which constitutional scholars like to wrap up their ideas, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about or read Burke.

I was happy to see that while you were in Hong Kong you translated an intellectual biography of Burke (Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics), and published your initial work on Burke’s thought on political constitutionalism.  The author of the biography was Jesse Norman, a senior Conservative MP in Britain, who is heartbroken by the way the Burkean tradition has been forgotten or obscured, which shows that Burke is still of great significance to contemporary Britain and the entire modern political world.

I also once had a graduate student, Zhang Wei 张伟, who did his Ph.D. with me on Burke’s political constitutional thought, and published his thesis, Edmund Burke and the Transformation of English Constitutional Rule.

Today we will start with another recently published intellectual biography of Burke, Empire and Revolution：The Political Life of Edmund Burke, the author of which is Richard Bourke of the University of London, where he is professor of the history of political thought.  As luck would have it, we can also talk about my recent work on American naturalization law, because I discovered that behind problems of naturalization lie deep political theories of human nature and issues of conservative constitutional rationality.
 
Tian:  The naturalization law angle is very interesting, and links up directly with where contemporary American constitutional politics is heading.  I noticed that anti-immigration was an important part of Trump’s electoral campaign, and once elected, the immigration ban imposed on Muslims was a constitutional adjustment within the framework of US citizenship and naturalization law.  But American opinion seems to be split on the issue, and behind all this is the normative clash between the liberal pluralism that comes out of the equal rights movement and the conservatism represented by Trump.

Even if America in general is an “ethnic melting pot,” exclusionist cases and incidents have occurred often.  I have recently been reading a book by Teemu Ruskola, a law professor at Emory University, entitled Legal Orientalism:  China, the United States, and Modern Law, which examines the constitutional basis for the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s, which argued that the Chinese, as products of the culture and legal institutions of Oriental despotism, lacked the ideas of rights, rule of law and virtue that an American citizen should have, and hence should not be incorporated into American society. 

Today, this idea of “Orientalism” and the exclusion once directed at the Chinese has increasingly shifted to Muslim immigrants who are of another religion and have links to terrorism.  Trump is attempting to use conservative thought and actions to protect the uniqueness of the American people and their civil religion, and to oppose the weakening of American society due to unrestrained pluralism.  The tensions between the different sets of values are important, and touch issues of political correctness. 

Gao:  The British are also opposed to uncontrolled immigration, especially immigrants without skills, or refugees with different notions of identity or virtue.  Otherwise why bother with Brexit?

My understanding is that Brexit in England and Trump’s election in the United States reflect a certain return of social conservatism in the two countries, and the question behind it all is:  Who is fit to be an American citizen or a British citizen?  Whose ideas are in accord with the notions underpinning the British and American constitutional order and with ideas of virtue?  Where are the boundaries of identity politics in England and the United States?  How can we revive the British and American tradition of conservative ideals through politics and law? 

By way of contrast, the human rights revolution developing out of value of equal rights has brought with it an increasingly “borderless” pluralism, resulting in a gradual loss of principles and virtues as everyone engages in universal mutual recognition and accommodation, on the premise that the “huddled masses” deserving of political and social rights have no understanding of culture and virtue.  This is a kind of thought that Burke was clearly against.

Of course, my goal in studying American naturalization law is not to appeal to extreme racism or nationalism, nor do I want to completely oppose the pluralism which is the mainstream of contemporary liberalism, but rather to provide a necessary reflection from a conservative position.  My feeling is that Burke offers a fully appropriate intellectual resource in this context.  I also feel that it is not just me, but the Western academic world is also leaning in this direction, and the question we are all asking is:  What position and function do conservative political notions of society, virtue and identity politics continue to have in the contemporary political and legal order? 

If we don’t address this basic question seriously then we will have great difficulty in resolving a series of questions faced by contemporary Western societies concerning unity, cohesion, and morality, and we may also have difficulty resolving the question of the balance between tradition and freedom in the evolution of our own “Oriental society” toward modernity.  To my mind, this is a fundamental and universal question of the political theory of human nature and constitutional order.

Tian:  Bourke’s book and Bourke himself are both examples of the reflection underway in the Western academy that you mentioned.  Bourke is a scholar, but Jesse Norman is a politician, and both realized the great significance of revisiting Burkean conservatism.  In his book, Norman dubbed what you called liberal pluralism “liberal individualism,” which he sees as the intellectual origin of the overweening demand for rights, the loss of moral order, and the social collapse of contemporary Western society.

Of course, there is nothing new about this conservative intellectual trend or about the tradition itself.  I have noted that there has existed all along in Western thought a conservative reaction or reserve in the face of Enlightenment modernity, and the American Supreme Court has always been divided into conservative and liberal wings.  Certain decisions on extreme rights cases have been among the most controversial, such as the 1974 case concerning abortion rights, and recent cases involving gay marriage. 

When Plato discussed the decline of a political regime at the end of his “The Ideal State,” his description of a situation in which a democratic regime’s insistence on “complete equality” led to a multiplication of rights and a hollowing out of moral principles seems to be confirmed by certain political and legal situations in the contemporary West.  This means that in discussing Burke, we are not opposing liberalism, but instead extending the conservative angle of liberalism as well as the moral basis of freedom.  

Gao:  Freedom should of course be linked to virtue, but not necessarily to a particularly “thick” virtue, which is different from how virtue was understood in classical political regimes.  Of course, if virtue is too “thin,” you can also have problems.

My research into American naturalization law also has to do with my own experiences of travel and observation.  I have met or heard people talk about Chinese immigrants to America, or immigrants from other countries, and my impression is that not of a few of these people were involved in crime and corruption in their home countries, or that they lacked moral character, or were religious extremists.  Most of them appear to be consuming American culture without studying or identifying with American culture.  No matter whether they have a green card or have the right to become citizens, they remain “the other” in American culture and the American republic.  They are moral “outsiders” and even latent “enemies.”

American liberal democracy and welfare arrangements can perhaps absorb these people; this is a question to be decided by American culture and .  American values.  But we can still look at things from the other side and ask:  Are these people really welcomed by the American people 本土的美国人 [literally, “indigenous Americans,” but Gao clearly does not means Native Americans]?  There are more and more of such people in America.  Are they making a positive contribution to the character of American culture and society, or are they pulling America backward?  America is big and strong, but its resources and space are ultimately limited, and it may well by that politics and morality cannot be borderless.

So when I saw your translation and the publication of Zhang Wei’s book, as well as Bourke’s huge volume on Burke, I found it very gratifying, and it also stimulated my interest in talking about Burke.

Tian.  OK.  I basically understand your problématique and what you want to discuss.  Let’s start with Bourke’s book….

[Omitting Part Two]

The Sinicization of Burke and the Liberal Order
 
Tian:  You brought up the question of sinicizing Burke, the question of how Burke might be understood and digested in the Chinese context.  China’s reform and opening since 1978 at least conforms in a methodological sense to Burke’s conservatism, and in recent years the rise of the Mainland New Confucians has also raised questions of Chinese culture and political conservatism.  In terms of liberalism, Burke has always been seen as very special sort of political resource, and Burkean conservatism has been seen by Chinese liberal groups as being on the right, or as being a privileged avenue for understanding British liberalism. 

Of course, the development of this conservative liberalism is related to the “Hayek craze” in China beginning in the 1990s and to the increasing appreciation for the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Common law, representative democracy, spontaneous order, reformism—all of these can be seen as related to Burke in a broad intellectual perspective.
 
Gao:  In fact, revisiting Burke means revisiting the huge question of intellectual methodology within liberalism, which also relates to the question of how to evaluate individual value and practice.
 
The New Confucian scholar Qiu Feng 秋风 (b. 1966)  once wrote an extremely influential essay entitled “The Decline of Liberalism over the Past Twenty Years.”  I don’t really agree with his overall argument, but he offers a critique of “Enlightenment liberalism” that has a certain value.  This kind of fundamentalist, dogmatic liberalism attacked by Qiu is extremely similar to the liberalism that Burke faced in the form of the liberalism of the French Revolution. 

But this point is not sufficient for Qiu Feng to negate liberalism’s value and legitimacy as a whole, nor its vitality and future prospects.  In fact I am not a dogmatic liberal, nor are many of my liberal friends, and we are all searching for a politically mature form of Chinese liberalism, a maturity that will fully encompass the vision of Burke’s conservatism. 
 
By political maturity, I mean that we cannot solely rely on abstract liberal principles to anticipate or promote political and social reform, but instead must completely integrate basic liberal principles into the context of Chinese practice.  There must be a dialogue with Chinese tradition, and this liberalism must link up with China’s reforms, with ideas of social justice.  It must respond to calls for democracy and the rule of law, in seasonal language 时令语言 [?], it must be “grounded 接地气.” 

Liberalism must develop out of practice, and must respect, absorb, and integrate existing values in China, promoting a creative transformation that accords with modernity, slowly but firmly cultivating free spirit and free practice within the social order.  In the simplistic liberalism of the Enlightenment, this kind of work involving the “slow cooking” of the basic elements of a free society is discounted, but in fact it is the most valid liberal practice.
 
In my view, with the help of the Burkean perspective, we can properly distinguish between two kinds of liberalism: one is a verbal, in-your-face liberalism that promotes liberty as a universal value and esteems radical change, resulting in either in weak, pie-in-the-sky moral appeals, or evolving into the tyranny of French liberty, a return to the "spirit of conquest" [represented by the “liberal imperialism” of the Napoleonic empire] which Burke strongly opposes.

The other is a liberalism in practice, animated from within by ideas and imaginings of freedom, but focusing more on contextualized and concrete policy issues, translating the spirit of freedom into concrete practical processes through legitimate struggle. The "free spirit" of liberalism can always be guaranteed by the gradual accumulation of liberal political and social experience, rational debate and consensus-based action.
 
Tian:  You have always claimed to be a “golden mean” liberal, so we might call this second kind of liberalism “golden mean” liberalism. You associate the first type of liberalism with the "spirit of conquest," and with good reason, since the French Revolution in history did start with freedom and end in dictatorship. Later on, the modern political transformation of many countries imitated the French model, and most of them experienced many difficulties and detours that ultimately allowed Britain and the United States to assume world leadership, while Europe with great difficulty rejoined the mainstream world system after two world wars and post-war reconstruction.
 
In Professor Bourke's book, Burke does not reject the "right of conquest" because, on the one hand, modern England is the result of the Norman conquest, which was the basis for Thomas Paine’s criticism that Britain lacked both a “constitution” and “liberty.”  And on the other hand, the way in which Britain acquired its colonies was also obviously through "conquest," and if "conquest" is illegitimate, then so is everything that followed. Burke recognizes the historical legitimacy of the established political order not so much in terms of how it originated, but in terms of whether or not the society in question has gradually evolved a "free spirit" and free institutions.  As long as liberty exists, certain “original sins” in history can be forgiven.
 
However, even a society with the "spirit of freedom" can regress and take up the "spirit of conquest," a process with two basic models.  The first is the conquest and oppression that accompanied the expansion of the British colonial empire, or in other words, the failure to grant liberty after conquest. The second is the French Revolution, which destroyed property rights, religious rights, and customary rights at home, and exported the revolution abroad, imposing regime changes and building the French Empire, thus displaying a barbaric "spirit of conquest."
 
The "spirit of liberty" in England, preserved by wisdom across the generations, common law, and representative government, was the historical basis and source of confidence for Burke’s conservatism. By contrast, the French "spirit of liberty" is degenerate and alienated, dependent on revolutionary dictatorship and the export of revolution for its preservation, and thus a variant of the ancient European "spirit of conquest." Rousseau's social contract theory essentially supports the French Revolutionary model, since Rousseau asserts that coercion does not form the basis of rights; only the original process of the construction of the social contract, and hence consent, constitutes legitimate rule.

This leaves an enormous challenge: many political orders in history cannot locate in their origins the conditions demanded by social contract theory.  Are they thus all illegitimate regimes that should be overthrown through total revolution? Strict enforcement of Rousseau's theoretical line is required, and Paine's disparagement of the English constitution in The Rights of Man is based on precisely this logic .
 
Gao:  Continental liberalism has a tradition of radicalism, and displays an extreme fastidiousness on questions concerning the legitimacy and purity of historical origins.  Hence the temptation of the path toward total revolution, because revolution is a collective act of people engaging the public sphere, an observable and empirical social contract, the most perfect and vivid demonstration of the logic of freedom. However, society is not a laboratory of ideas or an operating table for political doctors, but is instead a conscious agent with its own civilization and norms which constitute the foundations and prerequisites of the political system.

If the principles of freedom, tested in thought experiments or through comparative observation, are to take root and flourish, they must be transformed through deep dialogue and practice with the social order of the country in which they are adopted. So, I argue that a liberal “golden mean” principle is needed in China, one that is uncompromising in its conception of liberty, but in practice is open to experimentation.  In other words, I call for a reasonable, participatory, practical liberalism.
 
We must firmly believe that all political orders are subject to historical change, and that the lingering spirit of an age has a specific historical dimension.  Practical liberalism is becoming a pole and even a dominant factor in the spirit of the age, and has every right to do so.
 
Tian:  Still, whatever we think of Burke's conservatism, its sinicization is bound to encounter difficulties with traditional Chinese culture—principally Confucianism. The twentieth century was the century of Confucianism's greatest decline, what the Confucian scholar Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909-1978) called its “withering,”[2] the century when Confucianism became something of a “museum piece.” 

It was also the century when China's imported and experimented with various Western social and intellectual trends and political models. Since reform and opening, with the relative rapprochement of ideology and traditional Chinese culture, and the rapid rise of China's own national and cultural self-confidence, it appears that Confucian discourse, which used to be controlled by "overseas New Confucians", is now undergoing a transition toward "Mainland New Confucians."
 
The coming into being, over the course of the 20th century, of "overseas New Confucianism" depended on a reconciliation of Confucian values with Western liberalism at a normative level, and finally on the triumph of a "Confucianism of the Heart"[3] whose basic nature remains intact today.   The key point in this context is that this kind of Confucianism voluntarily withdrew from the public, political sphere, accepting Western democracy and science and reducing Confucian value claims to the realm of personal cultivation. By contrast, "Mainland New Confucianism," especially in terms of its most recent developments, has grown out of the political context of China’s rise to great power status, following on a century of cultural humiliation and academic repression resulting in a sort of “tragic consciousness.” 

As a result, Mainland New Confucianism is hastening to reclaim its “public” character,  and competing once again for the right to set the definitions and norms of the public realm in China, as we see in the appearance of “political Confucianism” (Jiang Qing 蒋庆, b. 1953), "constitutional Confucianism" (Qiu Feng), and "the politics of meritocracy" (Daniel Bell), among others, one after another, a trend that has increasingly taken hold among Chinese cultural conservatives.
 
I know that you are Confucian sympathizer or a friendly critic.  How do you view all this?  Is their interpretation and use of conservatism relevant to Burke, does it reach Burke's depth?
 
Gao:  Confucianism is our inescapable cultural tradition and way of life. For example, no matter what our beliefs are, we still retain many features of Confucian ethics in terms of household management, the way we treat people, how we go about our lives, which is a kind of cultural collective unconscious, but this does not mean that modern Chinese politics should completely “return to Confucianism.” 

China's history of humiliation and struggle over the past century leaves us with three basic questions: First, why is China's modern era marked by repeated failure? Second, what does China depend on for its continued existence and modernization? Third, what kind of normative order does China wish to move toward? On these issues, many Confucians have chosen to mourn their past failures, distort who they are at present, and fabricate a future. 
 
Their current arguments suffer from a number of shortcomings of general orientation.  The first is cultural reductionism, which reduces all political and social issues to cultural issues, and is totally convinced of the omnipotence of culture, which is ridiculous in terms of political philosophy and political reasoning.   The second shortcoming is that Mainland New Confucianism fails to inherit and carry forward in a reasonable way the positive stance of the "overseas New Confucians" toward the values of freedom and political modernity, and instead plunges back into the Chinese classics, pouring over its authoritarian heritage of imperial rule or meritocratic politics, thus creating a normative conflict with the direction of democratic politics and clashing with China's evolution toward a mass society. 

The third problem is their lack of sensible evaluations or theoretical views concerning existing political systems, a lack of political clarity and self-consciousness, a tendency to see plots everywhere.  The fourth problem is their failure to achieve a truly modern creative transformation of traditional Confucianism in terms of systemic doctrine, and the yawning gap between their forms of discourse and practice and what exists in China as a modern society and a modern people.
 
Such a Chinese conservatism is at best close to Burkean conservatism in a methodological sense, but still far in terms of values and theory. As a golden mean liberal, I am opposed to both “fundamentalist” liberalism and the restoration of archaic Confucian traditionalism. I have stated my specific position on several occasions, and I will reiterate it here.  First, given the modern nature of Chinese society and its future, Confucianism is unlikely to be the leading solution, but can only be a supplementary resource.  Second, the Confucian return to politics has no possibility of a real theoretical or practical future without an intellectual revolution as painful and magnificent as the "Scottish enlightenment movement.”
 
Tian:  You mentioned cultural reductionism, which here involves a complex relationship between culture and politics. I also disagree with reductionism because it is a form of cultural determinism, which, if it were true, would create a rigid typology of cultural constitutionalism, positing either a strong correlation between Christian culture and the democratic order, or between Confucian culture and the authoritarian order of East Asia. The strong correlation imagined here is a very biased kind of causation in social science, because system causes are complex, and while culture is important, it is by no means the only determining factor. This understanding of conservatism is also too rigid.
 
Conservatism is not cultural determinism; true, it places more value on history, but within the framework of history, culture is only one factor, alongside society, religion, movements in terms of cultural exchange, political decisions, etc. As Burke said, history is "a preceptor of prudence." We need to listen to the wisdom of history, not just sink into the monotony of cultural narratives.

Even Christian culture, with its variations on the Protestant Reformation, is the result of historical practice and social progress. The relationship between culture and politics should be adaptive and mutually constructive, rather than one of unidirectional determination. If culture determines politics, we wind up with the unification of church and state. If politics determines culture, the risk is that of political dictatorship. Burke's conservatism teaches us that there is a certain amount of elastic space and role mediation between culture and politics, and that free social practice is the agent of mediation.
 
Gao:  Burke did not preach a return to the ancients, and was not really a reactionary conservative, but, as you suggested, was very much focused on the functional mediation of the relationship between culture and politics. His vision was always fluid and forward-looking, and he always presented himself as a reformist in parliamentary debates and question periods. He was opposed to radical revolution, but not to reform.  He viewed reform as a process of conservative amelioration, meaning that it has to be based on the virtues of political prudence and deliberative rationality, to be implemented through a deep and rational constitutional dialogue with tradition and order. Any reform that does not respect tradition and order will inevitably fall into the trap of  French-style liberalism and eventually regress into the historical category of "the spirit of conquest."
 
Burke had an excellent sense of history, and thus a very good sense of political philosophy and the direction of political reform. The British scholar and politician Harold Laski (1893-1950), who was also fascinated by British political reform, once offered heartfelt praise of Burke’s subtle and insightful philosophy of reform:   “ He brought to the political philosophy of his generation a sense of direction, a sublime sense of purpose, power, and a complete knowledge of political complexity that no other politician has ever possessed. The power of his insight pierced the hidden depths of political complexity in a way that few others can equal... He wrote an immortal chapter that will forever remain the supreme analysis of the politician's craft." This is high praise.
 
To my mind, the important dimensions of the Burkean task of renewing the liberal order or liberalism in China are the following.  First, we must affirm the "spirit of freedom," which is closely related to property rights, religious rights, and customary rights, because the re-establishment of China's social order must foster a spirit a liberty based on these three dimensions and establish a rule of law that will protect these and related freedoms.  Second, the "right of conquest" can be acknowledged as a reasonable historical fact, but can only be gradually legitimized if we are moving in the direction of reforms that embody the “spirit of freedom.”  Third, a legitimate "right of conquest" and its corresponding institutions may also regress to a "spirit of conquest" in the process of imperial expansion, thus requiring the adoption of a conservative approach to the "spirit of liberty."[4]

Fourth, cultural or political conservatism without the "spirit of liberty" is not the way to build the rational moral foundation of a modern constitutional system, and such an approach must be subjected to a normative critique, leading to reconstruction and transformation.  Fifth, we are opposed to a radical revolution of the French style, based on abstract ideas of rights, and advocate instead a kind of practical liberalism.  Sixth, we must firmly embrace the direction of reform, and focus on free social practice and the cultivation of a spirit of freedom.
 
A Look Back at Burke and The World on Fire
 
Tian:  Let's take another at Burke's relevance in today's world, and his continued importance from a global perspective. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, has written a best-selling book about the United States, called The World on Fire:  How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003).   Chua argues that the export of the liberal democratic order has created problems of disorder in countries like those in the Middle East. In fact, the "refugee crisis" that now haunts Europe is also related to this.
 
Gao:  In my view, the export of democracy is certainly liberal, but the way that it is exported recalls the model of the French Revolution, in that it contains an unrestrained spirit of radical social experimentation and conquest, thus creating political upheavals similar to what we saw in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

​After all, France, with its traditional foundations of Western civilization and a large democratic culture, could gradually emerge from the turmoil, but once the countries of the Middle East have become disorderly "failed States," the road back to order is fraught with difficulty and it is not at all sure that they will take the direction of “free spirit.” The "Islamic State" phenomenon is a case in point. Fukuyama, who initially proposed the "end of history," rethought his ideas and came up with his "political order theory" to analyze the origins and historical conditions of politic order in a broader comparative context, a somewhat more conservative approach.
 
History does not simply end because of ideas; instead, ideas constantly adapt to historical practice and complexity. It is possible to gain better and deeper insights into through further study of Burke's conservatism.
 
Tian:  Actually it's not just the Middle East that's on fire.  We can even include such archetypal sites of order the United States and Great Britain, as illustrated by the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election. These two events are of great world-historical significance and are often labelled "anti-globalization" in academic circles. Britain and the United States, the leaders of globalization, cannot be anti-globalization, but they wound up being unable to bear the burdens and costs of traditional globalization, as illustrated by one of the major problems, which is the uncontrolled acceptance of refugees and immigrants.
 
Both events have occurred against the backdrop of a resurgent Anglo-American conservatism, but the paradox is that the UK is pursuing Brexit through a politically radical referendum, and the United States, the ethnic "melting pot," elected Trump to enforce an immigration ban. Conservatism has once again brought into focus the political boundaries of the Anglo-American world, where the due process of citizenship has given way to substantive moral standards. The adjustment is consistent with the interest principle of democratic politics and with the protective logic of conservative views of culture and society.
 
Gao:  I was in the U.S. during the election and had a close view of the election process and American public mood, and after I got back to China, we discussed similar issues at the Law Faculty Salon of Capital Normal University. Brexit and Trump are not aberrations in Anglo-American politics, but the logical consequence of their conservative political traditions. However, it is also true that the entry of referendum culture into British constitutional politics is the result of a change in the tradition of British conservatism, and if even the Scottish independence question is to be settled by referendum, it could create a crisis of national disintegration, as well as a crisis of elite politics and the ethics of responsibility in Britain.
 
This brings us back to the question of naturalization laws with which we began this discussion. Brexit and the US immigration ban can both be seen as conservative constitutional choices that are part of an effort to "re-constitutionalize" naturalization law. Anglo-American societies are no longer great "melting pots" of egalitarian pluralism, and indeed many immigrants from different religious backgrounds cannot be integrated at all. Instead, they have become scourges of social welfare, destroyers of social order, and enemies of the cultural and political order. Anglo-American societies have thus developed a self-protective political consciousness that supports, through referendums or elections, a higher standard of scrutiny of immigrants, which is perhaps in conflict with human rights and pluralism, but certainly in line with the general logic of democratic politics and the fundamentals of conservatism.
 
For a long time, naturalization law, which was once a strictly constitutional issue, has become instead part of administrative law, a kind of misplaced legal categorization. I think it is precisely because of the conservative tradition in Britain and the United States that such measures of social self-protection have been re-constitutionalized.  By way of contrast, continental Europe, and especially Germany, have lost this conservative dimension and they continue to suffer under the pluralist political correctness of human rights in the context of the "refugee crisis." Behind the European Union's fear of making sound political decisions on migration policy lies a doctrinal limitation of "fundamental rights" in the form of the German Basic Law, which has surely inherited some of the logic of the “liberal Enlightenment.”
 
Tian:  Yes, I appreciate your nuanced definition and adherence to conservative liberalism, which is difficult and can be misunderstood and even perceived as both not "left" enough and not "right" enough. Perhaps this is Burke’s true teaching, the essence of a conservative, golden mean, constitutionalism. Burke is too rich, and Professor Bourke's reading is too nuanced, but our conversation cannot continue indefinitely, so we will have to end it here.
 
To use Burke to nourish and correct China's liberalism and cultural conservatism, to re-consolidate social consensus and to explore the rational basis for continued reform, these are the fundamental starting points for our reading of this book and for this dialogue. With this in mind, we have every reason to continue reading Burke and to think about the direction and path of reform in China.
 
Notes
 
[1] 高全喜, 田飞龙, “ 归化、自由帝国与保守宪制,” originally published in 开放时代, 2018, # 1, and available online here.

[2] Translator’s note:  The reference is to the title of a book by Tang.

[3] Translator’s note:  The reference is to one particular school of Neo-Confucianism, but in this context, the meaning is Confucianism as personal cultivation rather than political engagement.

[4] Translator’s note:  Gao’s references to conquest and empire here must surely be related to Chinese control of Tibet and Xinjiang.