Zhou Lian on Samuel Huntington

Zhou Lian,  “Who are America’s Children:  A Critique of Huntington’s Who Are We”[1]
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Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Zhou Lian (b. 1974) is Professor of Philosophy at Renmin University, and a well-known liberal intellectual who calls himself “center-left.”  This is fairly unusual for China, where more liberals seem to identify as center-right or worse (there are many Trump supporters among Chinese liberals).  Zhou himself has tried to understand how this came to be (see here); Zhang Qianfan, a professor of constitutional law at Peking University, offers what strikes me as a better explanation for certain Chinese intellectuals' embrace of Trump and Trumpism here.
 
The brief text translated here is Zhou’s critical review of Samuel P. Huntington’s 2004 volume, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, in which Huntington examined the “clash of civilizations” within U.S. borders.  As is well known, Huntington took particular aim at Mexican immigrants in this volume, arguing that their number, their culture, and their refusal to integrate spelled the end of American uniqueness, which had been constructed on the basis of Anglo-Saxon Protestant values.  Huntington called to “make America great again” by returning to its religious roots as a Christian (Protestant) nation.

Huntington had an enormous influence, even if many condemned him for engaging in polemics under the cover of scholarship (I would tend to agree, although I have never read him carefully and should do so before drawing conclusions).  His influence extended to China in ways that he surely did not foresee.  Wang Huning, the former academic, current Politburo Standing Committee member, and “world’s most dangerous thinker,” took Huntington’s ideas about the importance of culture in the “clash of civilizations” to argue that China needed to protect and nurture her own culture and guard against convergence (see here).  New Left spokesman Jiang Shigong cites Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) to support his case that American interventions (“color revolutions”) to impose democracy in the Third World are not only wrong-headed but counter-productive (see here).  The liberal Xu Jilin sites Who Are We nearly chapter and verse to argue that identity politics will destroy the American political consensus (see here).  Something about Huntington’s hard-headed nationalism and impatience with “eggheads” (today’s “snowflakes”) clearly appeals to many Chinese establish intellectuals.
 
Not Zhou Lian, who has clearly had enough.  His arguments in this text focus mostly on Who Are We and are the obvious ones advanced by most of Huntington’s critics:  Huntington’s depictions of Mexican immigrants are incorrect, he misinterprets American history, he lets his emotions get the better of him, he proposes unworkable solutions (“we have to return to our Christian roots”).  I suspect as well that Zhou is frustrated that so many of his colleagues are unable to separate Huntington’s polemics from his scholarship, and that they are using Huntington to push Chinese liberalism ever further to the right.  Unfortunately, Zhou seems to be fighting a losing battle, at least for the moment.

Translation
 
After 9-11, Samuel Huntington's credibility reached its peak in the United States, and it was said that “When Huntington speaks, mankind listens.” Although such flattery is somewhat vulgar, it nonetheless truly reflects of the new authoritarian's unparalleled academic status. In May 2004, Huntington published a new book, Who Are We, which focuses on the "clash of civilizations" within the United States, as suggested by its subtitle, "Challenges to American National Identity."
 
Huntington warns that while few Americans today are bold enough to predict the breakup of the United States, one could say much the same about the Soviet Union before its collapse.  Consequently, if Americans remain complacent and allow the current situation to continue, then it is highly unlikely that America in 2025 will still be the country we know today, because the problem of immigration poses an unprecedented threat to the American national identity. 
 
The idea of “national identity" obviously presupposes the existence of an "other," but if this “other” is not only an "enemy," but an “inner demon” which has infiltrated one nation while remaining loyal to another,[2] then this is a serious matter which must be addressed.  Huntington did not take aim at all immigrants indiscriminately, but instead focused solely on Hispanics, and especially Mexican immigrants, among the vast tide of immigrants with different skin colors and backgrounds.  His explanation is as follows:  first, the number of Mexican immigrants is huge, reaching eight million in 2000, accounting for 27% of the total number of immigrants; second, Mexican immigrants prefer to live with other Mexicans, concentrated in a few states and cities in the southern United States, in close proximity to their homeland; third, in comparison with past immigrants, Mexican immigrants have no interest in blending into American society, their educational levels remain low, most of them are unwilling to learn English, and their deep-rooted Catholic faith inures them to poverty, so that they eschew the "American dream" and reject the basic beliefs that represent the American national identity and political culture.
 
In addition to the above-mentioned reasons, what most directly stimulated Huntington’s thoughts about Mexican immigrants was when he himself was present at the 1998 Gold Cup soccer match between the United States and Mexico, and witnessed countless Mexicans waving the Mexican flag and booing the Stars and Stripes.  After this, as a “patriot”, Huntington felt that he had every reason to wonder whether the “Mexican morons” waving those flags could really become genuine Americans.  Huntington’s worry was that if ever Mexico made territorial claims on the American Southwest, those Mexican immigrants who had refused to integrate would become a potential "force of resistance behind enemy lines."[3]  With continuing Mexican immigration, the core values and culture of the United States would constantly diminish, and America would ultimately become “a country with two languages, two cultures, and two peoples.”
 
What are the core values and culture of America? Huntington's answer is:  a sincere belief in the tenets of freedom, democracy, and individual rights.  This is not a new idea, but Huntington is different in that he believes that these abstract universal beliefs "truly" come from a specific source, the "Anglo-Saxon Protestant" culture of the United States, by which he means specifically the use of the English language,  the practice of Christianity, the respect for laws and rules, the adherence to individualistic Protestant values and the Protestant work ethic, and the belief that people have the ability and responsibility to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Huntington believed that if America had been originally settled not by English Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics, it would not be today’s United States, but rather Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.
 
The famous author Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书 (1910-1998) once declined a journalist’s request for an interview concerning his most recent book with the remark “if you like the egg, do you really need to know the hen that laid it?”  Huntington’s logic is the exact opposite.  Therefore, to respond properly to the challenge of Mexican immigrants and to rebuild American faith in freedom, democracy and individual rights, it is necessary to "reaffirm America as a religious and above all Christian nation" and to embrace "strong Anglo-Saxon Protestant values, speak English, preserve the European cultural heritage and commit to the principles of the American creed."
 
Huntington's views were so provocative that they received many attacks after the publication of his book.
 
Some people went so far as to count the number of Americans who died in the war in Iraq, noting that as of February, 2004, there were 64 Hispanic names on the list of 525 dead, or 12 percent of the total, which matches with the percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. population, proving that Hispanic immigrants also love America.
 
Some of those who were outraged went on to settle old scores, arguing that Huntington had always been an unabashed racist, as can be seen in black and white not only in the 2004 book Who Are We, but also in The Clash of Civilizations, which appeared 11 years earlier, in The Crisis of Democracy, which appeared 34 years earlier, and in The Warrior and the State, which came out 47 years earlier. 
 
More scholarly criticism pointed to Huntington's lack of basic knowledge of the history of American thought.  First, while Anglo-Saxon Protestants established churches in Massachusetts at the time of the founding of the United States, the major settlers in New York and New Jersey were German Protestants, the dominant force in Maryland was Catholics, and the settlers in Rhode Island were Baptists.   Second, even within Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture there were sharp differences of opinion. This means that the core values and national identity of Americans are by no means shaped by Anglo-Saxon Protestantism alone, and that “lies” are a consistent part of Huntington’s scholarship.
 
These criticisms can be summed up under the label "politically incorrect.” Huntington, though a self-proclaimed veteran Democrat, is on the same side as the neoconservatives on immigration issues.  Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, secretly rejoiced over this, believing that only a scholar of Huntington's caliber could have expressed such views without being completely condemned in the court of public opinion.
 
Leaving aside such hard facts as "political incorrectness" and "factual errors," Huntington does raise a genuine issue that deserves serious consideration, namely, the importance of national identity to the maintenance of national unity and stability. His error is in confusing national identity with cultural identity, and especially in confusing it with a particular religious culture. When a person immigrates and takes on a new nationality, they expressly recognize the authority and constitution of their new nation, and thus assume the corresponding political obligations, but it does not follow that they must recognize the dominant culture of the country or even a particular religion, especially in an immigrant, multicultural country like the United States, as John Rawls's Political Liberalism has thoroughly and convincingly argued.
 
 “Something's wrong when I can't raise the American flag in my own country,” Sammer Paul Stewart of Northridge California said, while being pelted with beer bottles and lemons after the Gold Cup match.  If this is the source of Huntington’s confusion, there is indeed something wrong, although what is wrong is quite likely that Huntington accidentally created the perilous political problem of political incorrectness.
　　
Notes 

[1]周濂, “谁是美国的孩子？——评亨廷顿’我们是谁,’” published on Aisixiang on September 18, 2018. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Zhou uses a lovely Chinese chengyu here:  身在曹营心在汉, “his body is in Cao Cao’s camp, but his heart is with the Han,” which describes the behavior of Guan Yu in the novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

[3]Translator’s note:  Zhou uses the phrase 敌后武工队, which is from China’s War of Resistance against Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.