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Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture
[ Feature Book Review ]
Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture - Vol. 33, No. 0, pp.181-194
ISSN: 1598-267X (Print) 2734-1356 (Online)
Print publication date 28 Feb 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22916/jcpc.2020..33.181

A History of Chinese Political Thought

Jiyan Qiao*
*Jiyan Qiao is a PhD candidate at Leiden University. She works on eleventh century Chinese political thought from a global perspective as well as intellectual history methodology. j.qiao@hum.leidenuniv.nl


© Institute of Confucian Philosophy and Culture, 2020

A History of Chinese Political Thought, by Youngmin Kim. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2018, x + 273 pages. $26.95. Paperback. ISBN 9780745652474.

Befitting the author’s global background, a Korean trained in the US writing on China, this introductory book not only makes an important first step in approaching Chinese political thought historically, but also contributes to ongoing methodological discussions in the discipline of intellectual history at a moment when it is reconfiguring itself while turning global.1 Benefitting from what has been addressed by previous reviewers, this review focuses on the methodological choices Professor Youngmin Kim made when tackling the formidable task of writing a history of Chinese political thought from Confucius to the present while remaining faithful to historicity. I first discuss where his approach figures in the two scholarly communities that are coming closer than ever but are yet to be joined together—sinologists with an interest in political thought and Western2 intellectual historians with an interest in China—and then propose a few ways in which we can build on Kim’s work and move forward.

Since the early twentieth century, there have been many histories of Chinese political thought, if few in English.3 Compared with them, this slim book is neither comprehensive in topical coverage nor indepth on any period. Not every reader will necessarily agree with Kim’s interpretation of selective texts or the main theme he chose for each dynastic cycle, either. The new ground Kim broke lies in having discarded two prevailing assumptions that have been driving such histories to date: nationalism and the idea that Chinese political thought can be reduced to a few essential features that persist throughout Chinese history. In Kim’s account, Chinese political thought does not have such essences, nor is there one “China.” Rather, Chinese identity—one of the five threads holding the book together—is shown to be constantly contested and in continual negotiation. Moreover, authoritarianism by no means defines Chinese political thought, which Kim shows to be a rich source from which interesting thinking resources can be drawn, like the metaphysical republic discussed in Chapter 6. Perhaps most importantly, while Kim makes it clear from the opening lines in the Preface that in writing this book, he is responding to rising interest in China among nonsinologists, he does not write in the language of John Rawls or under any other Western conceptual framework.4 Different from the vast and rapidly growing literature on Confucian political theory, like the voluminous works on Confucian democracy or Confucian perfectionism, Kim treats Chinese political thought on its own terms.

These make the book a starting point in a new approach to Chinese political thought that promises to make the subject more interesting to sinologists5 and more capable of standing up to rigorous scholarly scrutiny among historians of political thought globally speaking. Of course, the downside of challenging the reader’s expectations is that it may not immediately resonate with them. The patient reader with an open mind, however, shall be rewarded by gaining a sense of the internal dynamism and diversity of Chinese political thought, the main goal Kim aimed for in this preliminary step.

Other than helping to get the nonsinologist reader off to a good start, this book also made a timely contribution to the discipline of intellectual history, which in some circles consists mainly of history of political thought.6 Since especially 2010, partly in response to the crisis of humanities in a neoliberal world,7 two trends have been on the rise unabatedly: the return of the history of ideas (McMahon 2014) and global intellectual history (Moyn and Sartori 2013). Two sides of the same coin, both stem from a desire to free ideas from being contained (Gordon 2014, 35) by their historical worlds, the former in time, the latter in space.8 This made the contextual method most influentially articulated by Quentin Skinner (1969) and practiced, with variations under a family resemblance,9 by a number of historians of political thought affiliated to Cambridge University at one point or another, inconvenient. As a result, concerted criticism was launched on this commonly agreed methodology in the historical study of past intellectual life,10 while new approaches were being proposed and the very identity of intellectual history became open to redefinition.11 By now, as Antony Black (2019, 2) implied in his review of Kim’s book for Global Intellectual History, a journal debuting in 2016 amidst these developments, the discipline has entered a “post-Skinner, post-Pocock age.”12

Black is right to regard Kim’s book as having contributed to historians of Western political thought methodologically, but perhaps in less conspicuous ways. First, while covering a similar temporal span, Kim’s approach is qualitatively different from the neo-Lovejovian (Gordon 2014, 35)13 history of ideas advocated by scholars like Darrin McMahon (2006, 2014) and David Armitage (2012, 2017). Rather, this book was written with the contextual method throughout: Kim opens each chapter with a painstaking reconstruction of the context, sometimes devoting half of the chapter to it (like in Chapters 4, 5, and 6),14 before beginning to discuss the political thought in this period. Instead of tracing the genesis and metamorphosis of an idea over two thousand years, Kim treats a different theme in each chapter. Underlying this is an assumption that as times change, so do the questions. Like R. G. Collingwood, Kim does not think there are perennial questions across time or one idea running through Chinese history. As a matter of fact, Kim did not even take ideas as the subject matter of his book, but rather the “thinking agents” (p. 17).15 It is precisely with this agent-based approach that he was able to steer clear of stereotyping or essentializing Chinese political thought, thereby succeeding in presenting it as a living tradition that changes over time and has great complexity within each period. In so doing, Kim points toward an alternative, albeit perhaps much more demanding, way to do longue durée intellectual history.

Second, while Kim did not state it explicitly, he was also exploring writing global intellectual history—he opens the book by addressing rising interest in China amidst the ongoing global turn across Western academia and closes it by pondering over the larger issues raised by China’s rise as a global power to this globalized world. Moreover, going out of his way to make this book user-friendly to nonsinologists (p. x), he customized it for a global audience. And, with what Lowbna El Amine (2019, 3) called his “ecumenical knowledge,” he freely drew upon or otherwise engaged with Western material where relatable, juxtaposing the Chinese case side by side with the Western one. On the other hand, while foreign relations were given an important role in each period’s political formation and thereby political thought, Kim’s case studies in the nine main chapters were not about the global circulation of ideas or thought on the global but were firmly grounded in the local. In this way, that is, studying the local under a global lens in order for it to have greater global relevance, the book points toward an alternative way to do global intellectual history that adds a much-needed perspective from an arguably non- Western16 scholar working on non-Western material to the discussions on the tension between the local and the global. In its gist, Kim’s approach is strikingly similar to the one J. G. A. Pocock, whose methodological statements Kim invoked a number of times (e.g., pp. 15, 17–18, 186), recently put forward. Against the proposition that “‘the quest for the global’ entails a critique if not an abandonment of the concept of ‘context,’” in an article titled “On the Unglobality of Contexts: Cambridge Methods and the History of Political Thought,” Pocock argued for the necessity to continue studying the local as well as to “retain the use of the methods of preglobal historiography,” on the grounds that different language-worlds will continue to exist actively in a globalized world (Pocock 2019, 1, 7, and 10). While Pocock, an historian of Western political thought, can hardly avoid being suspected of sounding a conservative note with an apparent attempt to justify parochialism, Kim’s contextualized study of mainly premodern Chinese political thought for current global relevance has shown that the same method applies to a different language-world and that the local, if not yet connected to the global, should be studied on its own. On the one hand, the focus on the local does not undermine its global relevance. Rather, it seems to be Kim’s assumption that the deeply local is global, given human communality. On the other, studying the local under a global lens entails no small change: as can be seen from the Preface, it shaped how Kim conceptualized the research from the beginning and guided his decision on how to formulate the results. And, of course, one needs to be globally knowledgeable, as Kim has made the efforts to be so, to be able to juxtapose different local cases side by side.

Another methodological contribution Kim’s book made is on extending the temporal range for global intellectual history. In the Introduction to Global Intellectual History, a programmatic book for this new subdiscipline, the editors Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori kept invoking Joseph Levenson (1920–1969),17 the one and only intellectual historian of China to be found there (Moyn and Sartori 2013, 6). In Kim’s book, however, we find many scholars working on China’s intellectual past, but no Levenson. To a great extent, this discrepancy has something to do with the former’s focus on the “modern” period,18 or more precisely, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When reviewing this edited book, Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2015, 131) has pointed out that this “lack of chronological depth” does not help with redressing the problem of Euro-centrism that practitioners of this new type of intellectual history apparently take issue with. Pushing this one step further, one could say that restricting global intellectual history to the few centuries when Europe dominated global knowledge production risks being essentially an extension of Hegelian universal history. By contrast, except for a few pages in Chapter 10 and the foray in the Epilogue, Kim’s book almost exclusively deals with the centuries before the nineteenth, the supposed time when “globalization” began.19 Like the proponents of the “Global Middle Ages” (Holmes and Standen 2018), Kim, himself a scholar of middle period China,20 takes it as a given that one can study the premodern period from a global perspective.

Finally, as El Amine has noted, Kim did not just study philosophical works, but made ample, and good, use of literary and art pieces as well. For example, in Chapter 5, he used the “Tale of Oriole” to present mid-Tang mainstream thought as a contrast to the new ideas put forward by men like Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824); in Chapter 10, he used paintings to tap into the thinking of the Qing emperors on how to govern a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire. Worth noting also is Kim’s taking classical commentaries as sources of political thought (pp. 21–22, 129, 164ff, 184), an approach shared by some historians of Western political thought, like Sophie Smith (2018) and Anna Becker (2017) in their work on Aristotelian commentaries. Underlying Kim’s use of such diverse forms of material is a conception of the identity of intellectual history that is much broader than history of philosophy.21

Taken as a whole, the methodological choices Kim made in writing this book constitute interventions not just in approaching Chinese political thought more historically, but also in what intellectual history is and how to do it at a critical moment when it is undergoing profound and perhaps irreversible changes. His having produced a historically-grounded interpretation of the diverse sources in Chinese political thought by applying the contextual method onto Chinese material suggests that shared historical method could be a common ground on which trust can be built and comparisons made among scholars working on various local worlds. Having such a common ground helps intellectual history to be reconstituted as truly global in character while retaining some disciplinary unity. To historians of Western political thought, this is not “methodological nationalism”—“global” being a spatial attribute and contextualism a method, the former does not necessarily entail discarding the latter;22 to historians of Chinese political thought, this is not welcoming methodological imperialism—ultimately, what calls the shots is helpfulness in our getting right about the past. As Ian Hunter recently demonstrated, the contextual method has a long history in the West that began centuries before the few figures usually associated with the so-called “Cambridge School.” Even among them, much of Skinner’s methodological writings was but an updated formulation of what Collingwood wrote in The Idea of History (Skinner 2001).23 And, certainly, this is not the only method that helps in studying past intellectual life, as Kim’s application of many other methods in addition to it has shown. Regardless, as Kim admitted in the beginning (p. viii), the contribution this book made was still preliminary. To move forward, more work needs to done, such as in the following directions.

First, fill in temporal lacunae. For practical reasons, coming as we are to an age with such deeply entrenched specialization, it is hardly imaginable for any individual scholar to be able to thoroughly command the literature on such a long temporal span. While Kim deftly drew on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English secondary literature, and certainly the sparse notes and concise bibliography do not reflect all the voracious reading across area and disciplinary boundaries that went into his preparations, still, much of his account has to be built on the historical work that had been done by other scholars. As such, where he takes big leaps, like from the end of Eastern Han to the founding of Tang and from the end of Tang to Southern Song, it gives an indication of where original research is needed. In particular, more work needs to be done on Northern Song political thought. The three passages on Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086) (pp. 119–120) certainly do not do justice to the rich political thinking going on in the long eleventh century, a watershed period in the history of Chinese political thought with no less diversity than the Warring States period.

Second, deepen the analysis and broaden the juxtaposition. For instance, when discussing the notion of the political (pp. 47–48), one would expect to see an engagement with Michael Freeden’s work (especially Freeden 2013), if not Hannah Arendt’s (1958) as well;24 when discussing the existence of a republican vision under a monarchy (p. 114), James Hankins’s work on republicanism being not always exclusively nonmonarchical could help reinforce Kim’s argument (Hankins 2010; 2019, chap. 3). More empirical evidence can be found to support this as well: as my dissertation shows, this monarchical republic actually first emerged in the mid-eleventh century, after Emperor Renzong 仁宗 (r. 1023–1063) fell dysfunctionally ill in 1056 and lasting till the capable Shenzong 神宗 (r. 1067–1085) took the throne in early 1067. The Southern Song one was continuing its spirit, only changing its grounding from the phenomenal world to the metaphysical.

Third, work out a theoretical formulation for the kind of glocal intellectual history Kim practiced in this book and more actively participate in methodological discussions going on among historians of Western political thought. After the 1960s, sinologists have not shown much interest in this regard and apparently the pressure to turn global is not as great on scholars working on China, given the inherent global nature of working on this area in the West. But as this review has shown, Kim’s methodological choices, some explicitly stated, some implicitly made, are very much part of a global conversation that can be greatly enriched with the addition of perspectives of scholars working on non-Western material.25 It is perhaps high time to bridge the gaps separating these scholarly communities.26

Fourth, explore alternative narrative units. While Kim’s critical choice of the dynastic cycle can be justified—each dynasty was founded on the basis of a different social, institutional, and international structure, which set the contours of political issues for thinkers to respond to—one wonders if the time may be ripe for analyzing long historical cycles across several dynasties, like early China from Western Zhou to Han, or middle period China from Tang to Ming.

Finally, if this book goes into reprint—I hope it will, which was one reason this review was written—a few textual errors can be corrected. For example, on pages 11 and 255, “Nathan Sivin” should be “Benjamin Elman.” For some references, it would perhaps help to give the date of their first editions, like Mark Bevir ([1999] 2002, 17), for easier common reference, especially given that these appear in the main body.

We have Youngmin Kim to thank for having brought back to life, through rigorous contextualization, a dynamic and diverse tradition of Chinese political thinking that can have global relevance while being locally reconstructed on its own terms. With this volume in place, and with the translated texts in the history of Chinese political thought to appear in the globalized Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought under the co-editorship of Kim’s classmate Hilde De Weerdt from 2020,27 there is reason to believe that Chinese political thought will have more to offer scholars working on various areas on this globe as we grapple with political issues the global community faces together.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Hilde De Weerdt for recommending her to contribute this review and Philip J. Ivanhoe for the invitation.

Notes
1 For a survey of the global turn in the discipline of intellectual history as well as the fields of political theory and middle period China since the beginning of this century in an attempt to bridge these three scholarly communities, see Jiyan Qiao (2020), Introduction. On the need to overcome the customary divide between history of political thought and political theory, see Eric Nelson (2019, xi). I am grateful to Peter Bol for asking me to take the course he taught with David Armitage on methods in intellectual history in 2013 and to Quentin Skinner for helpful exchanges in 2016–2017.
2 Various other words are used to refer to this concept, like “Europe” and “Euro-America,” and scholars do not always agree on what it precisely refers to. However, there seems to be a consensus on what it does not refer to, like China, India, or the Middle East. For this reason, I shall use “Western” as a convenient designation while not taking its content as fixed.
3 Kim (2018, 1-2) reviewed this literature.
4 The profound critiques of Rawlsian political philosophy launched by Forrester Katrina (2019) and Eric Nelson (2019) are changing the configurations of western political philosophy by restoring Rawls to his contexts.
5 Yuri Pines (2009, 6-7; 2012, 1) notes the declining interest in political thought and political culture among China scholars over the past few decades. Part of the reason has to be that past accounts, driven by nationalism and essentialization, were not interestingly written.
6 Especially at Cambridge University. This is less so among sinologists, who as Pines notes have become less interested in things political. In the field of middle period China, intellectual history has long been focused on cultural thought. With scholars like Peter Bol taking up political theory (https://globalinstitute.harvard.edu/political-meritocracy-comparative-historical-perspective), the situation is changing. All websites were last accessed on February 15, 2020.
7 This has led to rising presentism (McMahon 2014, 25) among historians, for which David Armitage (2020) produced a justification.
8 Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2015) points out the latter is in a Marxist vein. Ian Hunter (2019, 187) notes the left-Hegelianist nature of Gordon’s position, which Gordon himself acknowledges (Gordon 2014, 49).
9 Samuel James (2019) problematizes this so-called school.
10 Peter Gordon (2014) and Martin Jay (2011) provided the most theoretical critique.
11 Among them, the one put forward by Peter Gordon (2014) amounts to having intellectual history let go of its grounding in history and become philosophy instead. Eric Nelson (2019, xi), however, recently said crisply: “getting the history right will often enable us to do better philosophy.”
12 See also McMahon and Moyn (2014). By putting “interim” before “intellectual history” in their introduction to a book titled Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, they suggest the existing paradigm is to be discarded, even while a new one is yet to be settled upon. With all the new projects undertaken since then (for more on this, see Qiao [2020, introduction]), by 2019, Black’s perception of the current state of the discipline indicates their goal has been partly attained.
13 Essentializing is a key feature of the Lovejovian approach to intellectual history (e.g., Lovejoy [1941, 266]) that the neo-Lovejovians are carrying forward. In this sense, Kim’s fight against essentialization in this book took on a global relevance.
14 It should be noted that Kim’s is not just linguistic context, but the more wide-ranging social-political contexts that make up the historical world.
15 Kim did not engage such a question like “Can the subaltern speak?” that is current among scholars of post-colonial and global studies, but simply operated on the assumption that everyone has agency in Chinese history. This in effect refutes, with eloquent silence, the premise on which such questions rest.
16 In this age of global citizenship, it is hard to decide whether Kim, trained and having worked full-time in the US, is still non-Western, even though he was born and raised up in East Asia.
17 Despite his great achievements in the immediate postwar decades, through the use of “Confucian China,” Levenson (1958) belongs to those who essentialize China.
18 While critical of Moyn and Sartori’s project, Duncan Bell (2013) nonetheless shares their temporal focus.
19 In recent years, this has been challenged by some medievalists, like Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen (2018) and Carol Symes (2014). From its title, it seems Valerie Hansen (2020) seeks to establish the starting point at 1000.
20 Roughly from Tang to Ming. Not using “medieval” or “middle ages” to call this period implies the European conception of time does not necessarily apply to China.
21 On the relationship between intellectual history and history of philosophy, see Mandelbaum (1965).
22 On the other hand, spatial and/or conceptual parochialism is a real issue to be addressed among them. In this regard, Christopher Goto-Jones (2009) is right to focus his critique of “Cambridge School” on Euro-centrism.
23 That the contextual method is not any individual's patent is seen most clearly in James Hankins (2019). In a profound critique of Skinner's historical scholarship on Renaissance Italy for being anachronistic, Hankins’ guiding methodology is nonetheless still contextualization: by locating the humanist virtue politics he reconstructed in the first seventeen chapters as Machiavelli's context, Hankins convincingly shows that what Machiavelli did was to make virtue irrelevant in politics rather than turning it into vice.
24 Freeden’s is an updated formulation of Arendt’s Aristotelian concept of the political.
25 In addition to Kim, there are many other intellectual historians of premodern China whose work likewise exhibits methodological awareness, like Anthony DeBlasi (2002), Jeffery Moser (2012), and Curie Virág (2017). Peter Bol (2013) has made a preliminary attempt at direct methodological intervention.
26 Through convening conferences as part of their ERC-funded projects, Hilde De Weerdt (http://chinese-empires.eu/events/conferences/) and Curie Virág (http://paixue.shca.ed.ac.uk/conferences) have been bringing scholars working on China face to face to those working on Europe and Byzantium. Under the support of a Harvard Global Initiative grant, Peter Bol is doing the same (https://globalinstitute.harvard.edu/news/political-meritocracy-comparative-historical- perspective-conference). Other than research collaboration, new teaching initiatives are also being undertaken. As early as in the 1980s, Michael Nylan had been co-teaching comparative political theory with her Western political philosophy colleague at Bryn Mawr College (Salkever and Nylan 1994). In the past few years, more and more scholars started to make similar efforts. For instance, in the early 2010s, Peter Bol taught the aforementioned course with David Armitage at Harvard, in several iterations, to train a new generation of intellectual historians who would bring a global perspective to bear on their local work (https://scholar.harvard.edu/armitage/classes/methods-intellectual-history-history-2300). From 2020 spring, he starts teaching a new course with James Hankins (https://history.fas.harvard.edu/classes/history-2114-political-meritocracy-comparative-historical-perspective-seminar) (accessed 20 Feb. 2020).

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