Shi Zhan, Preface to New Edition of The Hub

Shi Zhan, “Preface to a New Edition of The Hub:  How Writing Historical Philosophy is Becoming Possible Today”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Shi Zhan (b. 1977) is a professor of history at the Shanghai International Studies University and a researcher at the Center for Global Civilizational History.  Translations of several of his works feature on this site. 

Five years about, Shi published The Hub:  Three Thousand Years of China, a 700-page tome that has sold more than 400,000 copies in China, prompting the author and the editors to issue a new edition, containing a new preface and a new final chapter.  The text translated here is the preface, and I hope to get to the new final chapter over the coming summer.
 
Thanks to Nancy Yu’s excellent review, “A Different Read on China,” we now know that The Hub is meant to be both an antidote to the traditional “Central Plains” approach to Chinese history and civilization—Shi stresses China’s long history of complex relations to a wide variety of what have been often considered “peripheral peoples”--and an effort to write a liberal history of China’s coming to be part of the greater world.  This liberal history is built on Hegelian foundations; just as interactions and contradictions between the Central Plains and China’s peripheries shaped China’s - and the region’s - history over the centuries, so did China’s interactions and contradictions with the modern West produce the China has currently become.  “Tradition” and “modernity” are thus no more or less real in China than elsewhere.
 
Shi makes it clear, moreover, that his book is not just another way to tell the story of China’s return to great power status.  As he says in his new preface:    
   
“The history of modern China’s transformation has been extremely tumultuous, with enormous costs incurred both externally and internally.
 
Externally, it was the pressure and impact of the outside world that initiated China's process of transformation. This is also the process through which traditional China, which had always viewed itself as the center of the world, gradually gained a sense of the boundary that distinguished itself from others, and its self-awareness was gradually generated through interaction with the world. It is worth noting that this was not a one-way, passive process of China’s being influenced by the West. China’s size meant that as the West exerted its impact on China, this would, in turn, cause changes in the Western world. The result has been a process of continuous mutual stimulation, generation, and coevolution of self-awareness between the West and China.
 
Hegel's dialectical approach to the master-slave relationship, as discussed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, can provide a broad perspective and framework that has powerful integrative capabilities for such a process. It does not overly focus on the expression of abstract values, thereby avoiding a certain rejection of some aspects of history. In our past historical narratives, China's modern history is often expressed as a history of humiliation. However, in Hegelian dialectics, it is precisely this period of history that provides the foundation for the continuous enrichment of China's self-awareness. Such an integrative approach not only transcends the narrative of China's history of humiliation at the level of specific historical facts, but also transcends it at the philosophical level.
 
If the narrative of humiliation cannot be overcome, then China can only achieve its own greatness by confronting the world in an absolute sense, which will directly lead to a narrow nationalism that pits China against the world. However, it was precisely after joining the global order that China achieved rapid development, from which it continues to benefit today. Narrow nationalism is undoubtedly contrary to China's interests. Using the framework of Hegelian dialectics, a narrative of Chinese history can directly confront the antagonistic relationship between China and the world, and discover more constructive meaning from it, which is of great significance at the present moment.”
 
I don’t know if Hegel can repair Sino-American relations, given the depths to which they have sunk, but Shi Zhan is always worth reading.
 
Translation
 
It has been more than five years since the first edition of my book, The Hub:  Three Thousand Years of China, came out, and it generated a fair bit of controversy.  In one sense, this was what I hoped for, because the point of the book was to break through received wisdom and prompt people to rethink and redefine certain issues and paradigms, so it is no surprise that this effort wound up sparking debates. In another sense, however, I didn’t get everything I hoped, because despite all the controversy, there was much less paradigmatic exploration than I expected.
 
In addition, right after my book came out, the world seemed to go into overdrive, entering a period of extremely rapid change.  Many conflicts intensified seemingly overnight, which meant that within a few short years, much of what we thought we knew no longer made sense. Since the second half of The Hub talks a lot about current affairs, the fact that the world had changed so much came to be a challenge to certain arguments in the book.
 
For this reason, I have added a new concluding chapter to the new edition that integrates and summarizes my thoughts over the past few years. In this preface, I would like to briefly discuss once again my intention in writing the book. In fact, paradigm shifts and the rapidly changing state of the world are two sides of the same coin. Let's start with the rapidly changing state of the world.
 
The Rapidly Changing World
 
With the US-China trade war in 2018, the pandemic in 2020, and the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, the world has been sucked into an increasingly powerful vortex, and we can feel it in our bones that there is no going back.
 
Indeed, once we look closer, it becomes clear that the various calamities that have occurred recently are closely intertwined with numerous imbalances that have surfaced in recent times. Chapter 7 of The Hub proposes the concept of the "dual cycle global economic and commercial complex 全球经贸双循环", which explains how the structure of these cycles contributes to an increasingly pronounced decoupling between the global political sphere and the global economic sphere. This decoupling, in turn, gives rise to a number of imbalances. 
 
In the 1990s, more than 70 percent of global trade was in manufactured goods and less than 30 percent in intermediate goods, with most products were produced within a single country; in 2018, more than 70 percent of global trade was in intermediate goods and less than 30 percent in manufactured goods, with most products produced across multiple countries. The "double-cycle" structure of global trade is one of the manifestations of this change. Trade wars are conducted through tariffs, but tariffs can only achieve the desired effect if the political and economic spaces are broadly aligned; if the two spaces are no longer aligned, economic activity has various ways to circumvent tariff controls.
 
The decoupling of political and economic space carries risks. With many countries highly interconnected economically, the domestic politics of one country can have a significant impact on the domestic politics of other countries through economic impacts. Economic activities themselves can also result in numerous political spillover effects. In the absence of a supranational political arrangement that can provide the necessary buffer for these spillover effects and offer institutional safeguards, the risk of social unrest is a tangible and worrisome possibility.
 
In Chapter 7 of The Hub, I cited the Indian economist Raghuram Govind Rajan (b. 1963) to the effect that “In the 1920s, Weimar Germany took on significant foreign borrowing to sustain a domestic consumer boom and to address the underlying social tensions that plagued the country. Without the United States' financial support to keep Germany economically viable, the country's political and social instability could have created significant problems and threatened all of Europe. However, the political foundation for the financial relationship between the United States and Germany was fragile, as neither country was prepared for the potential political consequences of these capital flows. The United States was unwilling to offer an open market for German goods, which was the means by which Germany hoped to repay its debts. Meanwhile, the United States government did not implement policies to ease Germany's economic struggles, and Germany was unwilling and unable to make the necessary sacrifices to repay its debts."
 
Several major international economic organizations were created after World War II to respond to this problem and to provide a political basis for economic relations among nations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO, formerly known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT). These organizations were designed on the premise that the political and economic realms would be roughly aligned, and the organizations functioned quite effectively at the time.  Today, however, reality has eroded the foundations undergirding these organizations, and risks have emerged as economic relations between countries have reverted to a situation where a political foundation is lacking. This is one of the deeper reasons behind the various international conflicts of recent years.
 
The discussion of the international governance order in Chapter 7 of The Hub, taking the WTO as an example, may need some changes, given my reflections over the past few years, but the underlying methodology still holds, so I have not changed the content in the main text, but have instead discussed these issues this preface and in the added chapter.
 
When economics and politics are not aligned in international affairs, the welfare function consigned to the domestic political space runs into challenges because welfare spending depends on the economy; if political regimes cannot fulfill their responsibilities in terms of welfare, such issues can reverberate in democracies, creating populism. Domestic issues spill over into issues of foreign affairs, and domestic difficulties such as border disputes can also be used as leverage in diplomatic negotiations.
 
It is clear from these brief discussions that the world today is suffering from a systemic imbalance. The imbalance consists of two aspects, one being the imbalance between norms and reality, and the other the imbalance between paradigms and problems; the former is relatively easy to understand, while the latter needs a brief re-explanation.
 
When we look at the world, “problems” do not emerge automatically, but are instead understood through a theoretical paradigm.  For example, faced with the same astronomical data, the problems raised by geocentric and heliocentric paradigms would be completely different; each paradigm has had its own usefulness, but once that usefulness expires, the questions raised by the paradigm are no longer valid or true.  Thus when we talk about the "imbalance between paradigm and problem," we really mean the imbalance between the paradigm and reality in the wake of profound changes. 
 
Once we reach this state of imbalance, a "meta-question" emerges, meaning that reflection on the paradigm itself is required.  If there is a systemic imbalance, then a systemic vision will be needed in order to ask the right questions; a partial vision only makes the world more difficult to grasp. The paradigm is what defines what is “systemic,” and reflecting on paradigms naturally requires a systemic vision, which is extremely important for the world and for China today.
 
Paradigm Reflection and Historical-Philosophical Writing
 
Strictly speaking, The Hub is not historical but rather historical-philosophical in nature. In the course of my research, I did not unearth any new historical facts, and those I used were all the fruits of the research of scholars that came before me.

Once a good argumentative framework is found to string these different research results together, not only will the value of each be fully expressed, but also because they enter into a structural-conceptual order, the meaning of each specific result may undergo profound changes. This structural-conceptual order is the philosophy of history.
 
This kind of historical-philosophical writing also lends itself to two different ways of reading my book. One is to read it from beginning to end, which will be a philosophical approach to history. The other is to skip the highly philosophical introductory chapter and start with Chapter One, "Geography and History," and return to the introductory chapter once the text is read.  This will be a historical approach to philosophy. This second way of reading may be a better experience.
 
Some friends have questioned the value of this kind of historical-philosophical writing, but in my opinion, such an effort is not only possible, but even necessary at the present time, because the underlying essence of paradigm reflection should be a reflection at the historical-philosophical level.  Especially for today’s China, which finds itself in a state of confusion and anxiety about its self-identity, both internally and externally, rebuilding a philosophy of history can provide the necessary preconditions to overcome this anxiety.

As I noted in the introduction to The Hub, "The self-identity of a political community must be constructed on the basis on two theoretical narratives: one is the narrative of political philosophy, which will establish the goals of justice the political body seeks to pursue; the other is the narrative of historical philosophy, which will establish the identity boundaries of the political body, stipulating who belongs and who does not. Only when these two narratives are combined can the spiritual cohesion of the political body be achieved. Relying solely on the value expression of political philosophy will fail to grasp the particular historical situation of the community; focusing solely on the particularity of history makes it impossible to grasp the inherent sameness 内在一致性 of the community and the outside world.
 
In this sense, it can be understood that historical philosophy is a particular form of political philosophy, although it is different from what we usually refer to as political philosophy. The study and writing of politics involve three disciplinary approaches: historical philosophy, political philosophy, and political sociology. I would like to first explain the disciplinary boundaries between the latter two approaches, and then return to the discussion of historical philosophy.
 
The starting point in political sociology is to put aside value judgments and simply state the problem, the idea being to understand the reality before us. Political philosophy, by contrast, provides a narrative logic that channels undefined reality into a kind of normative order, so that all kinds of concrete phenomena take on a uniform and coherent meaning. It is not responsible for providing a true depiction and explanation of reality, but it can endow reality with determinacy, saying what ought to be. If the logic of reality does not match the path of political philosophy, then political philosophy is only an ideal goal, but it cannot solve the problem of how to reach that goal. When this happens, we need the analytical tools of political sociology to connect reality with political philosophy. But since political sociology is only concerned with reality and sets aside value judgments, it may lead to a strong sense of value relativism, so it needs political philosophy to act as an anchor determining its direction.  This anchor, however, itself is not responsible for explaining reality, otherwise the anchor would be unstable.
 
Historical philosophy nonetheless possesses both empirical and normative qualities. It requires a clear account of historical processes at the empirical level, as well as a normative meaning to be assigned to those processes at the normative level, so as to establish the boundaries of a community's identity in a historical narrative. Therefore, in writing The Hub, I attempted to integrate political sociology and political philosophy, using the methods of historical philosophy. I first set aside value judgments and political philosophy, and then from the perspectives of political sociology, historical sociology, and political economy, sought to thoroughly sort out the logical evolution of Chinese history from ancient times to the present. Only then could I begin to understand which narrative logic of political philosophy could potentially “domesticate” this historical logic. There are many narrative logics in political philosophy and various schools of thought, and no single narrative logic can fit all historical situations.
 
However, the difficulty of this style of writing is that the different approaches to empirical and normative thinking that I employ may potentially affect each other's theoretical logic. At the same time, frequently moving back and forth between empirical and normative perspectives can lead people to misread my factual judgments as value judgments, creating misunderstandings. Many of the criticisms of The Hub were related to this type of misunderstanding.
 
The dichotomy between fact judgments and value judgments may give rise to a new question: is it possible to set aside value judgments? My answer is that "setting aside" is hierarchical or positional, and it is entirely possible to set aside value judgments at a certain level, but it is contingent upon not setting them aside at another level; otherwise, it may not even be possible to raise the question. Because in order to raise a question, there must first be an object of inquiry, and the choice of that object already contains a certain value judgment. Within the context of a given object, it is possible to set aside value judgments at this level.
 
The expression of normativity in historical philosophy also raises a question: it seems to be searching for a "historical law," but does such a law really exist? My answer to this is that the writing of historical philosophy is not about discovering historical laws. Its normative expression may take on an aspect like that of an "historical law", but just like political philosophy, it aims to find a spiritual order and integrate various particularities into a normative whole, so as to provide guidance and constraints on values and orientations. The "law" presented in historical philosophy does not refer to something that actually exists, but rather to a normative judgment.
 
Some of my friends have noticed that my writing is a kind of historical-philosophical writing, but they have different opinions about my adoption of a Hegelian philosophical framework. In fact, my choice of this framework is related to my understanding of the history of China's recent transformation.

The history of modern China’s transformation has been extremely tumultuous, with enormous costs incurred both externally and internally.

Externally, it was the pressure and impact of the outside world that initiated China's process of transformation. This is also the process through which traditional China, which had always viewed itself as the center of the world, gradually gained a sense of the boundary that distinguished itself from others, and its self-awareness was gradually generated through interaction with the world. It is worth noting that this was not a one-way, passive process of China’s being influenced by the West. China’s size meant that as the West exerted its impact on China, this would, in turn, cause changes in the Western world. The result has been a process of continuous mutual stimulation, generation, and coevolution of self-awareness between the West and China.

Hegel's dialectical approach to the master-slave relationship, as discussed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, can provide a broad perspective and framework that has powerful integrative capabilities for such a process. It does not overly focus on the expression of abstract values, thereby avoiding a certain rejection of some aspects of history. In our past historical narratives, China's modern history is often expressed as a history of humiliation. However, in Hegelian dialectics, it is precisely this period of history that provides the foundation for the continuous enrichment of China's self-awareness. Such an integrative approach not only transcends the narrative of China's history of humiliation at the level of specific historical facts, but also transcends it at the philosophical level.
 
If the narrative of humiliation cannot be overcome, then China can only achieve its own greatness by confronting the world in an absolute sense, which will directly lead to a narrow nationalism that pits China against the world. However, it was precisely after joining the global order that China achieved rapid development, from which it continues to benefit today. Narrow nationalism is undoubtedly contrary to China's interests. Using the framework of Hegelian dialectics, a narrative of Chinese history can directly confront the antagonistic relationship between China and the world, and discover more constructive meaning from it, which is of great significance at the present moment.

Internally, in the course of her transformation, China has suffered much pain and heartbreak, and the Chinese people experienced many divisions among themselves in the same process.   If the Chinese people are to achieve self-reconciliation, the pain and death of the various camps and factions in the previous process need to be recognized and given meaning. Otherwise, the ruptures will never be healed, and there will always be those who are excluded from the category of the people, either in a historical or even a contemporary sense.  Should this occur, the people will not achieve self-understanding, nor will the process of self-legitimation come to term.

The historical dialectic of Hegelian philosophy can integrate various wars and deaths into a unified historical process in the history of national spiritual rebirth. They can all become milestones in the history of national spiritual regeneration from different perspectives, stimulating the growth of national self-consciousness in different ways, and thus can gain meaning as they are elevated to a kind of sacrifice, providing an important philosophical path for national self-reconciliation. If at any level, macro or micro, whole or partial, the nation has not been integrated, then national spiritual self-awareness will remain incomplete, and may still face some form of internal confrontation within society. However, this internal confrontation is precisely the basis for constantly activating the national self-consciousness at a deeper level.
 
Desirability and Possibility
 
Some friends have questioned the orientation of the political philosophy that I adopted in writing The Hub.  They argue that I have followed Hobbes and talked about power instead of following Locke and talking about rights.   “Since the Hobbesian path can easily bring harm to rights, why not follow Locke?” they say.  Locke is clearly more desirable. 
 
However, "desirable" and "possible" are two different things. The question of which path, the Hobbesian or the Lockean, is possible depends on historical context. The historical contexts of England and the United States are different from those of continental countries such as France and Germany. The former clearly followed the Lockean path, in which natural rights served as the basic premise of the entire theoretical framework. However, Hobbes once asked, in the natural state where "man is a wolf to man,”who will safeguard what we call "rights"? If there is no such safeguard, then rights mean nothing. Therefore, Hobbes's first concern was the very foundation of politics, the basis on which rights can be guaranteed. Once again, human nature being what it is, the starting point for discussing the problem of political foundations can only be power.
 
To explain a bit more, when I talk about the "political" aspect of a political foundation, or about politics in its true sense, the core issue is the construction and healthy continuation of a community. The construction of a community is not only a matter of power, but also a matter of political philosophy. Once this construction is complete, rights will follow. Continental countries like France and Germany followed a broadly Hobbesian path. China's historical situation is more similar to that of France and Germany, so I do not believe that the Lockean path of "desirability" is a "possible" option here.

Having said all this, there remains a more troubling question: how much impact can philosophical or historical writings have on the course of history? At some level, history pushes back against such writing, which can make it appear futile.  Nonetheless, perhaps it is the scholar's duty to engage in this Sisyphean effort, all the while knowing its limitations.
 
Notes

[1]施展，”枢纽再版序：历史哲学写作在今天如何成为可能,” published on Shi Zhan’s WeChat platform on April 7, 2023.