Jiang Shigong on the Taiwan Issue

Jiang Shigong, “The Rise of a Great Power and the Revival of Civilization: The Taiwan Issue and the ‘Enduring War of Civilization’”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Jiang Shigong (b. 1968) is a Professor of Law at Peking University and a leading spokesman for China’s New Left.  His work figures prominently on this web site, and as the CCP prepares to hold its 20th Congress in October, rereading Jiang’s important piece on “Philosophy and History:  Interpreting the ‘Xi Jinping Era’ through Xi’s Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP,” might be a worthwhile exercise.
 
The text translated here piqued my interest because Chinese establishment intellectuals rarely write about Taiwan, which, like Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, is one of those taboo topics where there is little room to say anything interesting, hence they basically say nothing at all.  It was only after working on the text for several days that I discovered that it was originally published in 2005, and subsequently republished by the Beijing Cultural Review on August 6, 2022 with the title “Will the Taiwan Straits Change the World?  According to a Peking University Professor, There is Yet Another Hidden War to Be Won.”  The editors noted that the piece was recycled, but pointedly did not give the original date of publication, which makes me wonder if they were not hoping to “trick” their readers into reading something is in some ways less important than it seems to be.  A 16-minute summary of Jiang’s text available on YouTube does not mention that it was originally published in 2005, leading me to believe that I was not the only one to be deceived.
 
If you read the piece without knowing that it was written 17 years ago, it is quite shocking, because Jiang basically argues that solving the Taiwan problem will require that China confront its “modernity issue” and develop politically and culturally to the point that it can win over the “hearts and minds” of the people of Taiwan in order to bring about reunification.  The text is also littered with statements like “today's China needs great statesmen” to resolve the Taiwan issue, a very strange thing for a champion of Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping Thought to say on the eve of the 20th Party Congress (or at any other time, for that matter).  In sum, a quick, uninformed reading of Jiang’s text suggests that Russia’s ill-conceived war in Ukraine had led Jiang Shigong to the conclusion that caution was paramount in China-Taiwan relations and that Xi Jinping needed to wake up to the perils of the situation and get China’s own house in order before contemplating foreign adventures.
 
Of course, this is all largely irrelevant once you find out that the text was originally published in 2005.  At the same time, why the editors of the Beijing Cultural Review chose to publish this particular text at this particular moment—presumably with Jiang’s consent—is worth thinking about.  The message of the text is quite conservative, as well as implicitly critical of China’s leadership.  In my reading, this is one more hint that many Chinese establishment intellectuals are uneasy with the prospect of Xi Jinping’s third mandate and with the unbridled expansion of Xi Jinping Thought that has led up to that prospect, although I would not have thought that Jiang Shigong was one of those intellectuals.
 
Read on its own terms, Jiang’s essay will of course be more important to those interested in the history and evolution of his thought and work.  In many ways, the text strikes me as some version of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations “with Chinese characteristics,” because Jiang talks a great deal about how China should take the lead in rebuilding Confucian civilization throughout East Asia.  Why Jiang chose to sound this theme at this particular moment is not clear; Huntington’s book had been available in Chinese translation for some years already by 2005, and presumably had already been discussed in depth by Chinese intellectuals.  I don’t know what happened in 2005 (or 2004) to spark Jiang’s interest in the topic.  China’s parliament passed the anti-secession bill in March of 2005, authorizing the use of force should Taiwan declare independence, which might have prompted Jiang to think about the issue in larger terms.
 
Otherwise, the text is an early example of Jiang’s wrestling with many of the themes he has addressed in more recent work, in ways that strike me as somewhat less coherent and focused than most of Jiang’s writings I have dealt with, as well as somewhat more conciliatory.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“On the surface, the international political struggle is ostensibly a struggle for political leadership among different states, but in reality it is a struggle for discursive leadership and ultimately for civilizational dominance. In a clash of civilizations, each civilization needs a core state in order to maintain the power of that civilization. In the Confucian civilizational tradition, China is the undisputed core state, but in the modern transformation of Confucian civilization, Japan became a world power by ‘leaving Asia and joining Europe,’ in the words of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901), and now exerts considerable influence in East and Southeast Asia. If China and Japan were to form an alliance, America would of course lose its domination of East and Southeast Asia, but based on the historical contradictions and current conflicts of interest between China and Japan, unless China gains a decisive advantage, Japan is bound to continue to ‘rely on the support of foreigners’ and ally with the U.S. to oppose China.” 
 
“Therefore, if China wants to revive its traditional civilization, it must achieve political leadership in East Asia, and if it is to achieve political leadership in East Asia, it must achieve reunification with Taiwan.  From another perspective, if China wants to achieve reunification with Taiwan, it must establish political leadership in East Asia, and to establish political leadership in East Asia, it must rebuild the influence of its traditional civilization in East Asia. The Taiwan issue thus involves a contest between two civilizational forces in Asia, the outcome of which will affect the future of human civilization.”
 
“What makes the current situation in the Taiwan Straits so dangerous is that the political power in East Asia as a whole is in a state of unbalanced confrontation. The U.S.-Japan alliance in is trying to use its overwhelming advantage to contain China's rise, and Taiwan is merely a bargaining chip to achieve these hegemonic ambitions. If containment leads to war, it will not only be a painful civil war, but a worrisome regional international conflict that, if not effectively managed, might well turn into a worldwide conflict. Should we lose this conflict, the result would be not only a divided country and a collapsed political system, but extinction of  our dreams to revive our nation and civilization. This war is so critical and important that we must be very clear as to who our enemies are and what the consequences of war would be. The more serious the danger of Taiwan independence, the more urgent the task of achieving Taiwan’s reunification, and the greater the possibility and danger of war; the more serious the consequences of war, the more seriously we must take the prospect of a real war, do our best to prevent Taiwan independence, and avoid war.”
 
“On the issue of war, we must oppose both naive pacifism and timid capitulationism, as well as a purely economic viewpoint, the argument that war will put an end to economic development, which fails to see that national security is the cornerstone of economic development.  We must also oppose an adventurism that disregards issues of national power and rash actions that pay no attention to timing, so as to prevent war from becoming an end in itself and a reckless gamble that ignores possible consequences.
 
Both tendencies are childish manifestations of a nation's political immaturity, the former lacking political will and the latter lacking political rationality. A truly mature politician must strike a constant a balance between strong political will and sure political instincts one the one hand, and cool-headed political restraint and thoughtful political calculation on the other.  He must rationally choose appropriate and feasible tools to achieve his noble political principles, must realize that war is but one of these possible tools, and that war must be subordinated to the grand strategy of the nation.”　　
 
Translation

The Rise of a Great Power and the Revival of Civilization: The Taiwan Issue and the "Enduring War of Civilization"
 
 In a complex political situation, the Taiwan issue has become a key problem in China's domestic governance and foreign policy. On the one hand, whether China’s rise can be accomplished peacefully is closely related to how to resolve the Taiwan issue, a problem that needs to be examined in the context of the reorganization of the international political landscape; on the other hand, the Taiwan issue is closely related to China's gradual political transformation, and how to resolve the Taiwan issue is not only a choice of what means to employ, based on the current situation, but relates as well to the construction of China's future political system and the revival of Chinese civilization.
 
The Taiwan problem is not only a political issue, but also an ideological issue, involving not only the internal question of unification and division and the international matter of China's rise and the world context, but also the question of the future of humanity and whether Chinese civilization can be revived. This is in fact a problem that China has been facing since it entered the modern era, so thinking about the Taiwan issue begins with thinking about the dilemma of modernity confronting China.
 
The Dilemma of Modernity in China
 
The national transformations China has undergone since the beginning of the modern era have undoubtedly opened up a wide space for civil liberties, and our collective creativity has given new life to an ancient civilization. Today, we have not only created a miracle in the history of human economic development and a unique "Beijing model," but we are also engaged in an unprecedented human endeavor to promote constitutionalism, the rule of law, and democracy.  Contemplating modernity’s destiny, should we take the path of the end of history in the posture of a “follower,” or should we instead chart a new historical path for mankind with the mentality of a political nation? Rather than seeing this as a challenge or a test that history poses to Chinese civilization, we should instead see it as an opportunity bestowed on us by history. 
 
However, in contrast to the vibrant freedom and creativity of each individual, we are faced with unprecedented difficulties and complex problems, because we have had to experience in a single century the process of modernization that took thousands of years in the West.  Problems of fairness, morality, corruption, education, population, environment, etc., are piling up, transforming individual freedom into acute social conflicts: conflicts between the rich and the poor, conflicts between the government and the people, regional differences, urban-rural differences, etc. While these contradictions certainly require the establishment of a harmonious society governed by the rule of law and regulated by a fair and reasonable institutions, it is undeniable that behind these surface contradictions lies a deep-seated fundamental contradiction of human existence: the contradiction between a large population and limited resources. All of these issues cannot be considered in the context of a simple policy or system, but must be considered in the context of modernity.
 
In fact, modern liberalism provides us with a basic perspective for thinking about these issues: namely, utility maximization through the market allocation of resources. This means that in the era of globalization, the problem of excess labor can be resolved through the free movement of people, and resource scarcities can naturally be addressed through global markets. However, this ideal liberal way thinking runs up against an external reality. In the current Western-dominated global economic system, capital and material can move freely around the world, but labor cannot. This means that our large working population remains trapped in this resource-starved land, and our economic policy can only seek to bring in foreign investment, but not export labor. 
 
No matter what reasons Western economists invent, they cannot fool the common sense of an ordinary person that the Chinese people's right to pursue happiness is restricted by China’s poor living environment, and when Chinese people, nourishing the ideal of pursuing freedom, try to leave the harsh living environment in poor rural villages and join the world, the fate that awaits them may be that of "stowaways." Some people may complain that China's population is too large, but a large population is not a sin, everyone has the right to survive and live a happy life, and China's large population is not a reason to lose their rights in the face of this unreasonable international economic order. 
　　 
Although certain Western economic theories insist that the free movement of labor can be replaced by the movement of resources, yet when we want to buy Russian oil, we meet with Japanese obstruction; when we want to buy Central Asian oil, American power is brought to bear on those countries; when we want to import oil from Africa, the aircraft carriers that appear at any point along the long transportation route make free trade a moot point. Free trade must be guaranteed by law, but whose law can guarantee such free trade? Hayek argued that "freedom is the absence of coercion," so what kind of coercive force is restricting the free movement of people and resources around the globe? The typical example we see is that if a country does not comply with the political arrangements of the Western world, it faces the economic sanctions of the Western world, which is the use of the coercive force of the state to suppress free trade. 
 
Here is where liberalism runs up again a cold, modern reality, which is the sovereign force that constitutes the international order. Liberals do not like sovereignty because they know that everyone's right to choose to live and create freely is subject to the coercion of the sovereign power of the state in the form of embassy visa offices, immigration and customs officials, and the courts, prisons, and military institutions, etc. that are behind them. If states and sovereignty cannot be completely eliminated on a global scale, and if we cannot establish an "open society" or a "unified world" in which everyone can move freely on a global scale, then the individual freedom preached by liberalism can only be downgraded to a "citizen’s freedom," that is, a citizen’s freedom that presupposes a political community or a state. Therefore, the true liberal never puts his head in the sand and pretends to hate sovereignty, but instead confronts sovereignty head on and tries to lead it. Hobbes, the originator of liberalism, conceived of the free individual as existing within the powerful sovereignty of a Leviathan, and employed sovereignty to oppose sovereignty, which constitutes the basic principle of modern international law. 
 
Today, the Chinese people's right to pursue freedom is subject not only to various internal constraints but also to external coercion, which often exacerbates internal contradictions within China. One can imagine the situation Chinese people would face in their pursuit of freedom if the energy and markets needed for China's economic development were unreasonably restricted by other sovereign states. In fact, the move toward a planned economy and even the path of collectivization in the post-1949 economic policy were both inextricably linked to the total blockade of China by the Western world. The prerequisite for being a free people is strong national sovereignty, which can blunt the hegemony of other sovereigns, establish a fair and reasonable international order, and ensure economic growth, thus providing a favorable external environment for resolving internal conflicts. 
　　 
State sovereignty is not a force imposed from outside, but is the very product of individual freedom, the fruit of the desire and will of each individual to pursue freedom, and it is the legal expression of a people's sovereignty. State sovereignty is merely a tool facilitating the realization of the freedom of each individual, and the extension of state sovereignty is also the extension of civil liberties, and civil liberties and state sovereignty constitute the two wings of modernity. In an age of globalization, state sovereignty is so important because everyone urgently needs to realize their freedom through state sovereignty.
 
The true dilemma of Chinese modernity is that even while civil liberties have been created, the state is powerless to satisfy them. Today, our products are sold all over the world, and the raw materials we depend on similarly come from all over the world. The closer our relation to the world becomes, the more we need national sovereignty to protect the supply chains that support free trade throughout the world. In the age of globalization, the concept of national security has expanded beyond its traditional scope, and it is in this sense that the Taiwan problem is closely linked to the fate of a free China. 

China's Geographical Environment and National Security
 
National security is, first and foremost, the state's protection of its citizens’ basic human rights to life, property, and the pursuit of happiness, ensuring that these not be taken away by other countries; hence, a strong state is a necessary condition for ensuring civil liberties. There are many contingent factors that make a state strong, among which geography is quite important. Montesquieu linked a country’s political regime to its geography, and Tocqueville's exploration of American democracy began with a look at its unique geography.
　　 
The birth and maturation of Chinese civilization were closely related to its unique geographical environment. The oceans to the east and south and the mountains in the west served as security barriers for the development of civilization on the East Asian continent, while the open plains in the north were a weak point. National divisions and the fall of dynasties were often provoked by invasions from the north, and the Great Wall thus became the final protective screen and a symbol of national security.
 
But it was also the constant invasions from the north that stimulated the growth of civilization. This relatively secure geographic environment produced the historical cycle of division and unity and promoted the integration of peoples and cultures, making Chinese civilization open to other peoples and cultures. Classical Chinese politics has always pursued the universalism of "taking the world as one's own responsibility," viewing everything from the perspective of  "the world 天下" and "civilization," rejecting narrow national or ethnic views, leading the political scientist Lucian W. Pye (1921-2008) to say that "China is a civilization pretending to be a state.”
　　 
The invasion of the Western world beginning in the nineteenth century has meant that China's ancient concept of security has been challenged across the board. This is because the development of modern technology has made geographical barriers less important to national security. The southeast coast, once a security barrier, became the least secure of open doors, and China's frontiers faced a full-blown crisis. The old adage about division giving way to unity and vice-versa[2] also fell by the wayside, as China faced not only a crisis in terms of state governance, but a crisis of civilizational destruction and racial annihilation as well.  In the West, the “nation-state” came to win out over the “civilizational state,” which meant that China had to carry out the same painful transition as well. 
　　 
It was in the face of the invasion of the Western powers that the Chinese started an internal revolution to resist this foreign invasion. The Chinese people's external struggle for state power naturally turned into an internal struggle for human rights. From the very outset, human rights and state power, individual freedom and national sovereignty have been intertwined. The history of the Chinese people's construction of the "nation-state" is also the history of their attempts to rebuild the international political order. "The country must be independent and the people must be liberated”—the  history of the republic built by Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, and others, is also the history of the Chinese people's struggle against foreign oppression and their pursuit of civil liberties.
 
The May Fourth generation saw "intellectual enlightenment" as being part of "national salvation," because national independence is the guarantee of individual freedom and individual freedom is the driving force behind national independence. Civil liberties and the construction of the nation-state were thus closely linked, and the Republic was founded on the basis of civil liberties and popular sovereignty. In this historical process, the destinies of Taiwan and the mainland were closely linked, and even after 1949, cross-strait relations remained in a state of "civil war" under international law, the final resolution of the problem to be decided by the political situation on both sides of the Taiwan Straits.
　　 
The construction of the Chinese nation-state was from the beginning a political effort in response to the international order, and therefore the establishment and development of the People's Republic, as well as the Taiwan issue, can only be understood in the context of the international political order. After the founding of New China, national security was consistently threatened by the Soviet Union in the north and the U.S.-Japan alliance in the east. In the context of the Soviet-American fight for hegemony, our alliance with the Soviet Union in the early 1950s also included considerations of our security in the north, although China’s choice inevitably led the United States to regard China as an enemy. When the Korean War broke out, the U.S. made the strategic choice to blockade China, and included Taiwan as part of its "chain of encirclement" to the east of China. In this type of international security environment, the external environment for China's free economy was restricted, and the planned economy model gradually became a historical necessity in order to ensure the supply of capital and raw materials required for modernization.
　　 
The Sino-Soviet alliance did not mean that China was to become a vassal state of the Soviet Union, and when the Soviet Union tried to incorporate China into its sphere of influence, our first generation of leaders flatly rejected this demand, even to the point of risking armed struggle. China's national security has ever since been in a situation of being attacked from all sides. When Chen Yi[3] 陈毅 (1901-1972) said, "I want the atomic bomb even if it costs me my pants," this spoke to the pursuit of freedom of a certain generation of Chinese people. 
 
To achieve this freedom from foreign domination, a generation of Chinese people paid a terrible price for the benefit of their children and grandchildren; the Great Leap Forward, the people's communes, and the Cultural Revolution were all closely related to the national strategy which prioritized developing heavy industry, the military, and the Third Front[4] under conditions of total blockade by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Without understanding this harsh external environment, it is impossible to understand the root causes of the conflict of priorities within China. Such a security strategy undoubtedly came at a great cost, but it also laid the foundation for decades of peaceful economic development.
　　 
To counter the global hegemony of the Soviet Union, the United States established diplomatic relations with China in 1972, and the United States recognized Taiwan as a part of China. The blockade on China's eastern coast began to be lifted, and China's economic construction began in the southeast. China's economic development strategy came to rely on foreign capital and exports, and China and Taiwan entered a phase of benign interaction and sustained economic and trade growth.
 
However, while the collapse of the Soviet Union enhanced the security of China's northern border, the ensuing U.S. global hegemony not only expanded American power into Central Asia and threatened China's northwestern frontier, but also refocused on Taiwan as a crucial element in its efforts contain to China's rise and to strengthen its military alliance with Japan. While U.S. global strategy is still in flux, Taiwan has undoubtedly become the strategic focus of American China policy. 
 
Taiwan in the International Order and in Chinese Politics　
 
As a part of Chinese territory, Taiwan did not occupy an important place in traditional national security strategy and for this reason was not a major focus of state attention during the Ming-Qing period.[5] With the rise of modern capitalism in China, the rest of the world became an essential component of economic development.  China's concept of national security grew to include not only China but the world as a whole, which meant that Taiwan's strategic position as part of Chinese territory became increasingly important, both as a vital barrier protecting the free trade of China's energy and products a global scale, and as an important strategic point allowing the United States to contain China's rise.
　　 
Ross Terrill (b. 1938), a sinologist active in American politics, points out that once Taiwan ceases to exist as an independent entity, the balance of power in East Asia will also shift, with Japan relying less on U.S. security assurances and the Philippines and Vietnam reconsidering their views of China. Of course, his policy advice to the U.S. government has been to dismember China and support Taiwan's independence. And Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) even hypothesized in The Clash of Civilizations that a war in the Taiwan Straits would lead to an Asian war that would eventually destroy China.
　　 
American strategists have already drawn us a map that could not be clearer. On the surface, the international political struggle is ostensibly a struggle for political leadership among different states, but in reality it is a struggle for discursive leadership and ultimately for civilizational dominance. In a clash of civilizations, each civilization needs a core state in order to maintain the power of that civilization. In the Confucian civilizational tradition, China is the undisputed core state, but in the modern transformation of Confucian civilization, Japan became a world power by "leaving Asia and joining Europe," in the words of Fukuzawa Yukichi[6] (1835-1901), and now exerts considerable influence in East and Southeast Asia. If China and Japan were to form an alliance, America would of course lose its domination of East and Southeast Asia, but based on the historical contradictions and current conflicts of interest between China and Japan, unless China gains a decisive advantage, Japan is bound to continue to "rely on the support of foreigners" and ally with the U.S. to oppose China. 
 
Taiwan is undoubtedly a key element in the competition between China and Japan in East Asia. Should China achieve reunification, occupy the strategic geopolitical high ground in East Asia, maintain economic growth and political stability, and form a stable strategic partnership with ASEAN, North Korea, and South Korea, Japan’s most informed choice would be to "leave Europe and rejoin Asia," thus restoring the tradition of Confucian civilization throughout East and Southeast Asia.  If American power declines in East Asia, American hegemony over South Asia and the Persian Gulf will in turn be weakened, and Confucian civilization will thus have enough space to effect a complete revival, after which the world may evolve toward a situation of joint rule involving groups based in North America, Europe, Russian Central Asia, East Asia and South Asia. From the opposite perspective, if the United States or Japan controls Taiwan, China will be as powerless as a caged lion despite its rise, and the revival of Confucian civilization will be no more than words on a page.
 
Therefore, if China wants to revive its traditional civilization, it must achieve political leadership in East Asia, and if it is to achieve political leadership in East Asia, it must achieve reunification with Taiwan.  From another perspective, if China wants to achieve reunification with Taiwan, it must establish political leadership in East Asia, and to establish political leadership in East Asia, it must rebuild the influence of its traditional civilization in East Asia. The Taiwan issue thus involves a contest between two civilizational forces in Asia, the outcome of which will affect the future of human civilization.
　　 
In terms of international law, Taiwan is undoubtedly part of China's territory, although achieving reunification with Taiwan must also be considered in the context of China's internal affairs. The Taiwan problem began in 1945 as a civil war between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang over who would rule China, a civil war that continues to this day, in fact representing two different choices about the path to modernity China will follow in its transition from a “civilizational state” to a “nation-state.”
 
Since the 1980s, the differences between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits on the road to modernity have gradually narrowed, as the mainland has abandoned more and more aspects of socialism. Taiwan's economic transformation and political democratization were once cited as successful models for China's future, given that achieving a stable modern political transformation has been a challenge for the Chinese people in their transition to a nation-state, and Taiwan's achievements were seen as a source of pride for the Chinese nation and traditional civilization.
 
Unfortunately, the authorities on Taiwan turned the push for political democratization into a struggle for unification or Taiwan’s independence between native-born Taiwanese and those who had come from the mainland. This in turn became a force for national division, so that the possibilities of  peaceful reunification are slipping away, the danger of war is getting closer, and historical opportunities are disappearing.
 
Destiny smiles on great politicians, but has no time for political clowns.[7] In the clumsy performance of Taiwan's political clowns, democratization has revealed its weakest points, as well as the darkest aspect of modernity:  in other words, democratization is being used to stir up regional, ethnic, class and cultural conflicts, and as a justification for the division of the country and the nation.  Taiwan's separatist forces are using cultural means to transform the minds of Taiwanese people and to make Taiwan a separate place in the hearts and minds of the people in order to achieve complete political division. National sovereignty and cultural unity are in crisis.
　　 
At this critical moment, mainland China must take up the heavy obligation of national reunification with utmost tenacity and will, viewing it as a fateful test of "heaven's investiture of responsibility,"[8] achieving national reunification with the political ambition of civilizational renewal and superior political wisdom. The Taiwan issue should be considered from the perspective of both international and domestic politics. While preventing secession, it is necessary to adopt new thinking and explore fresh paths toward reunification.
 
War and Peace: The Enduring Civilizational War　
 
Throughout history, the rise of a great power has often required one or two landmark victories in war to achieve self-identity and world recognition, and at the same time there have been great powers who collapsed even in the course of their rise because of war. The peaceful rise of a great power requires historical opportunities, in addition to the superior political wisdom of its political leaders. Behind success and failure, virtue and destiny, we can often see the inevitability of the rise and fall of civilizations.
 
Therefore, as a great power takes shape, war must be taken seriously.  War must be controlled and tightly grasped, and it must be the subject of deep reflection, because the idea is both to avoid the path where war leads to collapse, and also to seize the opportunity to use war to rise rapidly, and above all, to navigate a peaceful rise by winning without recourse to war. In the process of making such decisions, not only must there be a clear-headed understanding of whose interests lie where on the international scene, but also a clear-headed grasp of differences in national power.  Not only must we be clear about the goals, nature, impact, and consequences of war, but also make full use of the economic, political, and cultural means at our disposal  to achieve our war goals.
 
In any event, we must recognize that war is politics by other means, and a dangerous means, to be used only as a last resort, and that if war is necessary, it must be inevitable, a necessary requirement to serve a stated strategic goal. If a country does not have an overall strategy for its rise to power and the patience to achieve its strategic goals, any reckless consideration of war is dangerous. 
　　 
In today's situation, we must think of war as a necessary component in achieving Taiwan's reunification, and think of war as a necessary means and possible path in political terms. Such a consideration is a necessary component of our overall national grand strategy, which is the rise of the Chinese nation. Without the reunification of Taiwan, this grand strategy cannot be realized, and in order to realize this overall strategy, the current strategy calls for us to seize a twenty-year window of strategic opportunity at the beginning of the 21st century, during which we persist in using economic means as our central strategy, attempting as much as possible to avoid war. 
 
Thus, both the nation's grand strategy and the strategic steps to achieve it must take war into account. This includes both adequate preparation for war and avoiding it to the greatest extent possible. Only by taking war seriously and genuinely preparing for it will it be possible to avoid war and create peace, or to establish lasting peace through a limited war. This dialectic of war and peace is rooted in our unchangeable human nature, for ambition can be only be thwarted by ambition, which is the only way in which political balance can be maintained.　　 

What makes the current situation in the Taiwan Straits so dangerous is that the political power in East Asia as a whole is in a state of unbalanced confrontation. The U.S.-Japan alliance in is trying to use its overwhelming advantage to contain China's rise, and Taiwan is merely a bargaining chip to achieve these hegemonic ambitions. If containment leads to war, it will not only be a painful civil war, but a worrisome regional international conflict that, if not effectively managed, might well turn into a worldwide conflict. Should we lose this conflict, the result would be not only a divided country and a collapsed political system, but extinction of  our dreams to revive our nation and civilization. This war is so critical and important that we must be very clear as to who our enemies are and what the consequences of war would be. The more serious the danger of Taiwan independence, the more urgent the task of achieving Taiwan’s reunification, and the greater the possibility and danger of war; the more serious the consequences of war, the more seriously we must take the prospect of a real war, do our best to prevent Taiwan independence, and avoid war. 
 
Avoiding a lost war requires as much extraordinary political foresight as waging a victorious one. While at the end of the 19th century, the Qing government recklessly launched a doomed Sino-Japanese naval war that led directly to the collapse of the empire, New China's victory in the Korean War in 1951 established its right to speak in international politics. Both wars were focused on the Korean peninsula, and both were fought against powerful countries, and behind the defeat in the first effort and the victory in the second, we find not only differences in the international situation and China’s overall strength, but also differences in the political wisdom of the politicians and the political will of the people. If a politician does not take these three things into consideration, he should not speak carelessly about war. 
 
On the issue of war, we must oppose both naive pacifism and timid capitulationism, as well as a purely economic viewpoint, the argument that war will put an end to economic development, which fails to see that national security is the cornerstone of economic development.  We must also oppose an adventurism that disregards issues of national power and rash actions that pay no attention to timing, so as to prevent war from becoming an end in itself and a reckless gamble that ignores possible consequences.
 
Both tendencies are childish manifestations of a nation's political immaturity, the former lacking political will and the latter lacking political rationality. A truly mature politician must strike a constant a balance between strong political will and sure political instincts one the one hand, and cool-headed political restraint and thoughtful political calculation on the other.  He must rationally choose appropriate and feasible tools to achieve his noble political principles, must realize that war is but one of these possible tools, and that war must be subordinated to the grand strategy of the nation.　　 

The situation in the Taiwan Strait today does not seem to have developed to the crisis point of the two wars in Korea, but the situation is already one where "making war is difficult yet making peace is not easy 战难和亦不易."[9] This will become our long-term dilemma, and our thinking will still be to "trade space for time," as we continue to insist on "protracted war." Of course, the "protracted war" mentioned here is not just a military war, but a political, economic, and cultural war in the face of the invasion of Western civilization in modern times, which is a protracted "civilizational war." 
 
Deng Xiaoping's strategy of focusing on economic construction, hiding our light under a bushel, never taking the lead, and never engaging in an arms race is still in fact the strategic idea of "trading space for time," i.e., giving up political and military space and immersing ourselves in economic construction in exchange for precious time during this moment of strategic opportunity. The Taiwan problem must be considered in the context of this idea of "protracted war."  If we can maintain a posture of "no Taiwan independence and no mainland military moves," while continuing economic and cultural exchange between the two, we will win valuable time to build our national strength. Although we are currently in a weak position, we survived the perils of the colonial wars of the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th, passing through the strategic defensive stage of the later Qing period, establishing a firm footing, and entering the state of a strategic stalemate. This means that we have to start "making a difference," both internationally and at home, both politically and militarily, economically and culturally, by going actively and steadily on the offensive, using such offensives in certain regions to hold our own, actively expanding our base areas, building up small victories into large ones, and creating conditions for national unification.
　　 
Military war is undoubtedly the most dangerous part of this comprehensive "protracted civilizational war," especially considering the danger of "going to war despite being unprepared, and losing the country as a result,"[10] because the people are always easily agitated by empty rhetoric, while politicians must consider the consequences of war and must always keep in mind that reunification is not our only goal, and that the rejuvenation of our civilization is our true objective. During the period of strategic opportunity, if the forces of Taiwan independence, with the support of the United States and Japan, blatantly declare independence and force China into a dead end, do we opt for war or peace? Even this still would require a calm, global assessment of the situation at the time, the strength of the country and the consequences of war.  We cannot allow an impulsive public opinion to lead us by the nose, nor can we indulge in fantasies and treat war as an irresponsible gamble. If this war is unavoidable, there must be a strong will to not fear personal losses, for only a determination to engage in a life-and-death struggle will serve to prevent the war, or to win the war. 
 
If we are talking about a war that will cost us the country, then it is a war to be avoided at all costs, and we will have to look for other paths toward reunification.  Therefore, whether we opt for war or peace, we need prudent decisions made by committed politicians, in line with the grand strategy of national rise and civilizational rejuvenation.　　 

National Strategies in Phase of the Strategic Stalemate
 
 Thinking from the perspective of a "civilizational war," China’s rise means merely that we have entered a period of stalemate, and only the revival of Chinese civilization will allow us to launch a strategic counterattack. The strategic opportunity period represented by the first two decades of the 21st century is the key period when China begins to enter the phase of strategic stalemate, which will determine the future and destiny of China and will change the future and destiny of the world. 
 
Optimists have argued that with sustained economic growth and political stability, China will be far more economically powerful than Japan and closer to the United States by the 2020s, and its military power will be greatly enhanced. To avoid a catastrophic conflict, the United States may withdraw its influence from East Asia, recognize and encourage China's political leadership in Asia, and establish a lasting international partnership with China that would lay the political foundation for national unification and civilizational renewal.
 
By contrast, pessimists believe that in order to contain China's rise, the U.S.-Japan alliance, together with the European Union, will launch a comprehensive strategy to dismember China in which they will promote Taiwan's independence.  Sino-U.S. relations will completely fall apart, China's economy will experience a recession, domestic social conflicts will intensify, and in a situation of internal dilemmas and external conflict, an all-out war may wind up destroying Taiwan, severely damaging Japan, dismembering China and dragging down the United States, while Europe, Russia, and India experience a revival. If we compare the two future scenarios, then China's development strategy has a clear goal and blueprint, i.e., to strive for the bright future offered by the optimists and avoid the tragic fate described by the pessimists.  We must work hard to develop a complete set of national strategies during the phase of strategic stalemate with the end goal of achieving a "China with a bright future."
　　 
First, we must exercise strategic restraint. In part, this means strategic restraint in politics, including avoiding direct conflicts with the United States and even Japan, avoiding direct challenges to U.S. hegemony, and supporting U.S. dominance in other international issues in exchange for U.S. recognition and support of China's great power status in East Asia.  In terms of exercising restraint in economic strategy, this means taking the path of new-style industrialization, developing high-tech industries, and gradually reducing the proportion of high-energy-consuming, low value-added industries. This will not only be beneficial to China's long-term economic development, but will also avoid a violent conflict of economic interests with the Western world due to tensions over energy and commodity sales.
 
However, we must clearly understand that strategic restraint never means strategic concessions.  Strategic restraint instead consists of a set of positive, restrained, realistic, and conditional offensive measures, a small-step progressive strategy of accumulating small victories so that they become big victories, a strategy of consolidating and strengthening forces by actively establishing base areas. In the civil war between the CCP and the Kuomintang, the Communist Party's strategy of ceding Jiangnan while attacking the Northeast, and in the Northeast, ceding the main roads while occupying the surrounding areas, are typical examples of strategic restraint. Today, we must apply this strategic tactic to international politics.
　　 
Second, we must actively participate in the establishment of the international order, consciously establish our own base areas in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, consolidate our position in East Asia, and establish cooperative institutional mechanisms conducive to national security. On the one hand, we should make full use of the United Nations and its traditional advantages in the Third World to establish our own strategic bases in the Third World and play the role of a major power in global affairs, all of which will necessarily constrain the U.S.  On the other hand, we should adopt a policy of good-neighborliness and friendship, selectively develop strategic alliances with certain neighboring countries, and build a buffer zone for conflict prevention through various institutional mechanisms, such as:  making full use of the "six-nation mechanism" to positively promote peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula; using the “ASEAN plus three mechanism”[11] to coordinate and maintain the stability and prosperity of ASEAN; enhancing political cooperation with Central Asian countries through the "Shanghai Organization;" using our traditional friendship with Pakistan to promote reconciliation between India and Pakistan.  In sum, we should become the de facto core of Asia while maintaining a low profile, forcing the United States to respect China's political leadership in Asia.
 
Third, we must make full use of our economic advantages and be adept at transforming them into political advantages, and eventually into cultural and ideological advantages, developing China’s "soft power." China's greatest advantage in Asia and the world is its economic advantage, while its greatest disadvantage is its ideological disadvantage, not only because communist ideology has lost its appeal since the end of the Cold War, but also because the Western world holds the reins of modern discourse. 
 
The key to overcoming this disadvantage, in addition to absorbing Western culture and renewing Marxist ideology, is to revive our traditional cultural ideology with the goal of the revival of our civilization, thus consciously returning to traditional cultural values and exerting the influence of traditional Chinese culture in Asia to diminish the attractiveness of Western civilization. On the one hand, we should use traditional Chinese culture to promote the common identity of Asian countries in terms of value, culture, and personal identity, strengthen the political identity of Asian countries so that “Asians handle Asian affairs,” encourage and support Japan to "leave Europe and return to Asia," and reintegrate Japan into the Asian world; on the other hand, while actively absorbing Western culture, we should, through political democratization, spread cultural and ideological goodwill throughout Western civilization, thus removing the doubts of some Westerners' doubts about path Chinese civilization is taking, and continue China’s rise with the posture of as someone who cooperates in building the world order.
　　 
Fourth, our entire external strategy must be firmly grounded in an internal strategy, and the two must be consistent and mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory.  At a basic level, national security can be achieved externally only through healthy and stable development of the country internally. Economically, we must follow the most up to date industrialization path, carry out intellectual property innovation in accordance with the national economic and military strategy, and at the same time, balance regional development differences between urban and rural areas and narrow class contradictions caused by the income gap; politically, the country must proactively respond to the challenges of modern democratization, explore the ruling party's norms of governance under a democratic system, improve its governing capacity, establish a modern administrative system, improve the rule of law, and explore the path toward democracy 2.0 [新型民主化, lit. “a new type of democratization”].   In culture, we must establish the agency of Chinese culture, restore the cultural self-esteem and self-confidence of the Chinese people, so as to unite people's hearts and minds, take Marxist thought and Western liberal thought as organic components of Chinese civilization, and revive and rebuild Chinese civilization on the basis of modernity.
　　 
Fifth, we must fully understand the cultural and people-to-people divide caused by the cross-straits isolation and the resulting complexity, meaning that is will be necessary to apply new thinking to the Taiwan problem and take the path of gradual reunification. The Anti-Secession Law establishes the bottom line for Taiwan's reunification, but on the issue of how to carry it out there is still a great deal of room for imagination, and we need to activate our political creativity.
 
On this basis, China must on the one hand truly treat Taiwan as an issue of regional domestic politics, actively influence Taiwan's politics and exert influence in Taiwan's elections, and on the other follow the idea of gradual unification through bold imaginativeness and institutional innovation. In this regard, the "one country, two systems" solution to the return of Hong Kong and Macao is an example of institutional innovation.
　　 
If we can adopt an international strategy of strategic restraint, cooperative institution-building, and cultural unification, and a domestic strategy of coordinated development and gradual unification, then the future of China's peaceful rise is at hand, and the renaissance China’s civilization will follow. Therefore, it is important to realize that "we are engaged in a great undertaking unprecedented in human history," about which we should be fully confident yet willing to dispassionately discuss, but we must also be clear about the difficulties we face, prepare for the pitfalls ahead, look toward the long term, and yet not relax in the slightest.　 

The Challenge of Taiwan Issue for the Mainland Intellectual Community
 
For all Chinese people, the Taiwan issue is painful. The fact that Taiwan is under separate rule, and that there are secessionist tendencies, constitutes not only a damage to China’s national security and interests, but more importantly, it injures the dignity of the Chinese people and the meaning of what it is to be Chinese.  For the Chinese people, Taiwan is painful because of the memory of civilizational humiliation, because what makes a human being different from an animal is that human life is not empty, but has civilizational meaning.
 
History has never been the notion of time in the way physicists talk about it, but a carrier of cultural meaning, soil for nurturing the consciousness of the subject, the source of all values, ethics and legitimacy. History is never a record of the past, but a witness to the present; history is civilization, the philosophy of eternal existence. To defend history is to defend human existence, which a battle of life and death about whether to be a master or a slave, an instinctual battle for survival, and the purpose of philosophy is to defend this battle at the highest level. The pain of the Taiwan issue it that it constitutes a comprehensive challenge to the existence of the Chinese people, to the philosophical basis of their existence, and to Chinese civilization.
　　 
As everyone knows, the post-1949 Taiwanese intellectual scene was mainly dominated by the liberal discourse of intellectuals like Hu Shi 胡适 (1891-1962) and Yin Haiguang 殷海光 (1919-1969), a discourse that became mainstream due to the democratization movement in Taiwan in the 1980s, an intellectual debate structured around liberalism and authoritarianism, similar to mainstream discourse of the mainland intellectual scene in the 1980s.
 
However, behind the debate over freedom and authoritarianism in mainland intellectual circles loomed the larger background of Enlightenment discourse that originated from the May Fourth Movement: tradition versus modernity, China versus the West. In the 1990s, a philosophical revolution was launched in Taiwanese intellectual circles, and civil society and indigenization became the dominant discourse in the intellectual circles, which also rapidly influenced the intellectual circles of the Mainland, giving rise to theories of Chinese exceptionalism of concerning civil society and "local knowledge."
 
Beginning in the late 1990s, Taiwan's philosophical revolution took a more extreme direction, with indigenization coming to focus on ethic differences between native Taiwanese and those who came from the Mainland, and the issue of ethnicity finally became linked to the idea of "imagined community," serving as a philosophical defense of the Taiwan independence movement. History and civilization, the very basis of the existence of the Chinese people, were torn asunder, and the philosophical foundations of Chinese unity were challenged as never before.
　　 
The close intellectual exchanges between China and Taiwan since the 1980s have finally come to an end because of a cruel political reality:  China is not in fact a fake “imagined community,” nor is it a state machine constructed through legal technology, but is rather a political community built by history and civilization.  The Chinese nation is not a race in the biological sense, nor are the Chinese people citizens in a legal sense.  Instead the Chinese people have a philosophical agency with historical and ethical meaning.
 
In a word, China and the Chinese nation, shaped by history and civilization, are fundamental to all Chinese people in an existential sense; they have civilizational meaning and value, and contain philosophical truths and moral absolutes. By tearing up history and fictionalizing it to justify Taiwan's independence, the forces of Taiwan independence are actually destroying history, destroying civilization, and ultimately destroying the philosophical basis of every Chinese person's existence. Because the fundamental question is: What is the philosophical basis for our existence as Chinese? This is a question for which international law has no answer, and in fact, neither the political consequences of unification and division, nor even war itself, can answer this question.
　　 
In the face of the philosophical challenges of the Taiwan independence movement, the mainland intellectual community and the entire Chinese intellectual community has suddenly fallen into a state of "aphasia" and has lost the ability to respond philosophically.  This is not the first time that Mainland intellectuals have lost their voice in the context of major events involving human history. Indeed, this "aphasia" highlights the basic situation of Mainland intellectuals over the past 20 years.
　　 
First of all, we have to admit that there are quite a few intellectuals who don’t care much about the possibility of Taiwan’s independence, because to their way of thinking, neither the concept of the Chinese people nor that of China itself has any particular meaning, because what they identify with is "global citizenship," which ultimately means identifying with the citizens of the Western world, or American citizens. These people think that as long as they can do what they want to, then they can be citizens anywhere in the world, but these people have not thought seriously about what freedom really is.  These people opposed the reunification of Hong Kong in the 1980s, believed in the idea that "we are all Americans"[12] in the 1990s, and later suggested that it was a historical mistake for the United States not to cross the Yalu River and overthrow New China during the Korean War.
　　 
Second, the increased focus on academic disciplines has led intellectuals to be all the more concerned with their fields of expertise.  The same forces are at work on the Taiwan issue, meaning that it is now a question for Taiwan specialists, which ignores the fact that the Taiwan issue relates to many modern issues China is facing, such as freedom, sovereignty, and civilization.  Among these various specialized fields, the development of political science is undoubtedly the weakest, and it has basically been replaced by administrative science in university departments, meaning that there is little attention to or reflection on political philosophy. Most of our philosophers have become academic professionals, incapable of thinking about the philosophical challenges that the Taiwan question poses to the survival of the Chinese people.
　　 
Finally, given the above background, intellectuals who are genuinely concerned about the Taiwan issue and who fervently defend national unification face theoretical difficulties in mounting a philosophical defense, because liberals have monopolized legitimate modern discourses based on freedom, human rights, and cultural identity, and any other theoretical reflection will be branded as disreputable politics. Whoever advocates a forceful solution to the Taiwan issue is accused of being Machiavellian; whoever emphasizes national unity is accused of nationalism; and whoever talks about the significance of traditional culture is accused of conservatism.
 
In light of this, if we cannot transcend disciplinary boundaries, and if there is no way to think about the discourse of modernity from a theoretical perspective, then it is difficult to establish the agency of Chinese civilization, to justify the meaning of the existence of the Chinese people, and the question of Taiwan reunification can hardly be defended at a sophisticated philosophical level.
 
History and the Reconstruction of Modernity
 
Given the basic situation of China’s mainland intellectual community just described, it is clear that the Chinese have lost the ability to defend the meaning of their own existence. The reason for this is the Mainland intellectual community’s one-sided understanding of modernity and freedom, according to which human freedom is rootless, existing without history and culture, meaning that the state, history, and culture are all seen as traditional authorities that constrain freedom and must be destroyed, after which man is a mere plaything of his desires. 
 
But how can a rootless subjectivity of desire establish a state and submit to the rule of political authority? Such a subjectivity can destroy the state at any time, because the state and political authority possess no authority in and of themselves, and individual autonomy is the supreme authority. Such one-way liberal thinking leads to nihilism and postmodernism.
 
For this reason, the real question for liberalism is:  how can free people become ethical subjects? How can free people establish the authority and stability of a political system? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the master of liberalism, took this question as his central object of reflection, arguing that the desiring subject must become an ethical subject through education and training as a "citizen" before he can establish a government through a social contract, and subsequently rely on a "civil religion" to maintain a political community.
 
This civil religion must also be national, which means that true liberalism must be nationalistic.  Only a sense of civic belonging and identity cultivated by nationalism can lay the foundation for a republic, and the true foundation of free citizenship thus lies in history and culture. It is from Rousseau's standpoint that Tocqueville explores the meaning of modern democracy.
　　 
From this perspective, Chinese liberals have been in a state of paradox ever since the May Fourth Movement.  On the one hand, they have spared no efforts in advocating liberalism, but on the other hand, they have spared no efforts in denying the historical and cultural traditions that support liberalism.   They have gone so far as to deny the ethics of survival 生存伦理 of the Chinese people and turned them into pure rootless subjects of desire, for whom freedom means simply fulfilling those desires while giving no consideration to the ethics of survival, which is the reason Chinese liberal discourse today is monopolized by economic liberalism.
 
Consequently,  the difficulty of modernity facing China lies not only in how to solve the contradiction between population and resources, and how to satisfy the desires of every free person, but also in how to restore traditional culture, give philosophical significance to the survival of the Chinese people, so that Chinese people feel a sense of dignity and pride in their survival.　　 

Today, the wealth of Chinese people is increasing every day while their happiness is decreasing at the same time, because the country lacks a civilized direction and individuals lack the foundation of an ethical life. The ethical foundation and meaning of life provided by traditional culture have been destroyed by the anti-tradition turn since May 4th, and the ethical foundation and meaning of life provided by Communism has once again been destroyed by post-Cold War ideology, so what do we live for today except to serve our never-ending greed? This destruction of the foundation of life is always accomplished through the deconstruction of history and the ethical virtues established by history.
　　 
Therefore, to respond to the philosophical challenge posed by the Taiwan issue, it is necessary to reconstruct the important place of history in modernity, to link history to the meaning of life, to link history to the cultivation of virtue and an ethical life, to understand the issues of liberalism and modernity more fully and completely, to defend the importance of Chinese history and civilization to the free life of the Chinese people, and to provide a philosophical basis for their ethical life.
 
Thus, in the future Chinese intellectual world, the question of history will inevitably re-emerge as a main issue of philosophical reflection, because the beliefs of the Chinese people about life and ethical living are not supplied by any religion, but by our ancestors. When Chinese intellectuals chose to understand history according to the standards of modern Western disciplines, they gave no thought to the advantages or disadvantages of distancing history from life as lived.
　　 
Thinking of history as philosophy, thinking of history as the foundation on which Chinese people order their lives, is not a theoretical reflection cooked up by academics, nor is it one intellectual’s pipedream—instead, it must be firmly rooted in a deep and real foundation. When we intellectuals lose our survival instinct, this instinct continues to exist in a crude fashion among the people, is in the expression “when the rites are lost at the court, you must search for them in the fields 礼失求诸野.”[13]
 
We intellectuals must seek out our will to live from among the people.  The continuous domestication of civilization since the May Fourth Movement has led us intellectuals to fall in love with the idea that we are the “final nobility.”  We have become too civilized, we have lost our simple, innate, God-given nature and our healthy life force.  Today, it is only by returning to the people, to their own historical and cultural traditions, and to the political community, that intellectuals can regain their vitality and provide a philosophical basis for the ethical life of Chinese people.
　　 
Academics and Politics
 
 As an issue that people, politicians, and scholars must seriously confront, the Taiwan issue is not only political but also philosophical. The reunification of Taiwan will not only be conducive to China’s peaceful rise, but also to the revival of Chinese civilization, because the reunification of the country will lay the political foundation for the revival of civilization, which will free Chinese politics from a posture of forced defensiveness and make it confident, open, and relaxed.  This is turn will provide a greater space for China's political development, as well as greater impetus for the revival of civilization, establishing a dominant position for Chinese culture, enabling China to gradually complete the construction of a "nation-state" even as it returns to its tradition as a “civilizational state.”

The fundamental challenge is:  as nations unite and rise, how will China build the international political order?  What kind of ethical virtues are we going to assume for the sake of humanity? What kind of ideology and culture, what kind of way of life, what kind of vision of the future can we offer to the world, outside of our products and markets? China’s rise is meant not only to allow the Chinese people to maximize their freedom and creativity, but also to assume its responsibility to other countries and peoples and to provide an example of a way of life of the rest of humanity.
 
In the final analysis, the reconstruction of our ethical life is the basis for the revival of our civilization. The goal of the revival of our civilization is to provide meaningful and universal answers to the ethical life problems faced by all human beings, and this is clearly the mission bequeathed to the Chinese people by history. The Taiwan issue must be understood both in the political context of the clash of civilizations and in the philosophical context of the revival of our civilization and the reconstruction of our ethical life. If we do not have this ethical impulse to pursue a better life, it will be difficult to ensure long-lasting peace and stability through political unification.
　　 
The renaissance of civilization seems to be the mantra of the Chinese people, and it can easily lead to ultra-conservatism. In fact, the revival of civilization must answer the challenges posed by modernity and must respond to the challenges posed by Western civilization to traditional civilization. As Liang Qichao said many years ago, today’s China has become the world’s China, and the revival of Chinese civilization must integrate diverse elements in culture and thought to create a new modern Chinese civilization, which means that this civilization will be both modern and Chinese.
 
This means that Chinese scholars must look at their past civilizational achievements as well as those of world civilization with an open mind, and must discard all kinds of shackles and dogmas, including "foreign dogmas" and "ancient dogmas," and they must particularly avoid slavish worship of either of these.  Chinese scholars must therefore first establish a self-awareness of the need to create contemporary Chinese civilization and strive to revive our civilization with a high degree of imagination and creativity for the future.
　　 
In terms of the current situation, Chinese scholars on both sides of the straits should first overcome the hostility caused by ideological differences, and must get rid of ideological dogma such as "liberalism versus communism," "democracy versus authoritarianism," and "leftist versus rightist," as well as the narrow mentalities caused by political ideological labels such as "liberal versus conservative," thus breaking the inertia of ideological thinking. The long-term politicization of Chinese scholars has prevented real serious long-term thinking, limited the horizon of reflections on the future of Chinese politics and Chinese civilization, and stifled the creativity of thinking about the history and future fate of humanity.
 
For this reason, Chinese scholars must liberate themselves from the Cold War mentality, from any notion of the "end of history," and from the sense of slavery, and sincerely establish a positive sense of the cultural agency of Chinese civilization, thinking about how to rebuild an ethical life in the face of the impact of modernity. Only through this reconstruction of ethical life can Chinese civilization hope to revive, and only through ethical reconstruction will Chinese scholars be able to make real contributions to human civilization.
　　 
In retrospect, the biggest obstacle to solving the Taiwan issue at present is our lack of a body of civilizational forces to exert cultural influence leading to the unification of hearts and minds. Because Chinese civilization is under the pressure of Western civilization, our culture has only been able to absorb Western culture and has yet to develop its own cultural creativity. This situation of cultural stagnation is out of step with our vibrant economic growth.
 
Faced with this situation, Chinese scholars are prone to blame political forces for restricting freedom of thought, while politicians are prone to see "public intellectuals" as traffickers of Western culture or destroyers of the political order, with no real cultural creativity to speak of. This mutual distrust between politics and ideas has become a genuine obstacle to the current political transformation and civilizational renaissance. We must make a conscious effort to break this deadlock and establish a healthy interaction between politics and academia, and between politicians and scholars, which requires a mutual balance between what Weber called the "ethics of conviction" and the "ethics of responsibility," as well as mutual support for each other in facing the future of civilizational revival, as well as a shared confidence in their own history and cultural traditions.
 
With the weight of responsibility upon us, all Chinese scholars must, with profound civilizational concern and painstaking academic efforts, transcend ready-made dogmas and regional and partisan self-interests to provide Chinese people with a picture of the future of civilization; and Chinese politicians must, with a sense of responsibility for their historical mission, transform political power into a civilizing force.
　　 
In the context of the revival of China’s civilization, whether the Taiwan issue can be successfully resolved is not only a severe test for this revival, but also the key to its success or failure. Today's China needs great statesmen who will undertake the mission of civilizational revival, who will make the maintenance of national unity the cornerstone of this revival, and who will make the prosperity of culture and thought the primary task of this revival.
 
Today’s China also needs great scholars who will take up the cause of the revival of China’s civilization, who will consider contemporary Chinese history and world history as part of Chinese civilization, and treat real political forces as the pillars for the future of civilization. Chinese politicians and Chinese scholars must shoulder the arduous destiny of modern China together with an iron will, and devote themselves heart and soul to constant creation.
 
We are convinced that the day that the Taiwan issue is resolved will also be the day when ancient China reemerges as a powerful nation and a great civilization in the world, and will also mark the moment when the Chinese people will once again strive to provide an ethical example for the life of all humanity.
 
Notes

[1]强世功, “大国崛起与文明复兴——‘文明持久战’下的台湾问题,” originally published in 开放时代 in 2005, republished in Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横 on August 6, 2022 under the title “台海变天? 北大教授: 还有一场决定性的暗战要拿下.” 

[2]Translator’s note:  The expression Jiang uses is 分久必合，合久必分, which is part of the first line of the classic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  The standard translation of the entire sentence is "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been."

[3]Translator’s note:  Chen Yi was a military commander and politician.

[4]Translator’s note:  The Third Front was a massive effort, beginning in 1964, to develop industry in China’s interior.  The basic motivation was strategic:  the war in Vietnam as well as increasing difficulties with the Soviet Union led China to feel vulnerable.  Hence the decision to build up China’s industrial base—including military industries—in the Northwest and Southwest.

[5]Translator’s note:  Literally, “it did not become the focus of the painstaking efforts of the Ming and Qing empires 没有成为明清帝国苦心经营的重点.”  The phrase “painstaking efforts 苦心经营” is taken from one of Liang Qichao’s books, and perhaps has a particular connotation of which I am unaware, but it sounds awkward in English if the efforts are not identified.

[6]Translator’s note:  Fukuzawa Yukichi was a well known educator and public intellectual who advocated the modernization and Westernization of Japan in the early Meiji period.  He famously declared that Japan should “leave Asia.”

[7]Translator’s note:  Would that this were true.

[8]Translator’s note:  The quote is from Mencius, and the longer passage from which it comes is “Thus it is that when Tian [heaven] means to place a great burden of responsibility upon a man, it always first steeps the aspirations of his heart in bitterness and labors his muscle and bone.”  See Robert Eno, Mencius, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 122.     

[9]Translator’s note:  This is the title of book published in Taiwan in 2001, which reprinted many of the wartime essays of Hu Lancheng  胡兰成 (1906-1981) who defended Wang Jingwei’s policy of collaborating with Japan.  Like Wang Jingwei, Hu Lancheng is condemned as a traitor by much of mainstream popular opinion in China, a fact of which Jiang Shigong is surely aware.

[10]Translator’s note:  The longer quote from which Jiang draws this phrase is “If we can wage war and do not, and we lose the country as a result, this will be the government’s fault; if we go to war despite being unprepared, and we lose the country as a result, this will be the government’s fault可战而不战，以亡其国，政府之罪也；不可战而战，以亡其国，政府之罪也.”  It comes from a Kuomintang report issued in the days following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on September 18, 1931.  See here for more information.

[11]Translator’s note:  ASEAN plus three refers to the nine members of ASEAN plus China, Japan, and South Korea.

[12]Translator’s note:  The phrase Jiang uses is “一夜美国人,” a variation of “今夜美国人,” meaning something like “tonight we are all Americans.”  My impression is that such sentiments are above all connected with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September of 2001, so Jiang’s chronology may be slightly off.

[13]Translator’s note:  The quote comes from The History of the Former Han, and at least on the surface appears to sound a Mencian theme, suggesting that the legitimacy of a regime ultimately comes from the people.