In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Chih-yu Shih about his article “Loving Hong Kong: Unity and Solidarity in the Politics of Belonging,” from Telos 202 (Spring 2023). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss why liberalism is based on universal love rather than universal rights; the relationship between a rights-based liberalism and communitarianism in the West; the difference between Western universal love and Confucian benevolent love; solidarity love and role-embedded love; the Confucian critique of universal love; the meaning of “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong; how the idea of benevolent love affects the understanding of “One Country, Two Systems” in comparison with the liberal idea of it; the different interpretations, based on universal love and benevolent love, of the 2014 and 2019 protests in Hong Kong; the links between benevolent love and stability and prosperity and between universal love with autonomy and political rights, and why there is a conflict between these two sets of goals. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 202 are available for purchase in our online store.
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In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Miles Yu about his article “Escape from Civilization’s Predicaments,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the main problems with using the idea of civilization as a way of understanding today’s geopolitical conflicts; the meaning of ideology and its effect on politics; why it is more important to think of ideology than of civilization as a way of understanding politics; how the inability of Americans to see the importance of ideology in the world has affected U.S. foreign policy; what kind of foreign policy would emerge out of the focus on ideology; why Marxism as an ideology has maintained its appeal both for countries such as China and for U.S. intellectuals; and what strategies the United States has in this ideological conflict. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.
Telos 201 (Winter 2022): Civilizational States and Liberal Empire is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
When we consider the way in which power functions on a global level, it will also be crucial to understand how a world order will reflect a particular way of structuring the relationship between values and power. Even the seemingly most egregious use of power can only take place within the framework of an attempt to realize values in the world, and realist accounts of global order must also recognize the importance of some ideology such as nationalism as a means of establishing political values. Accordingly, discussions of balance-of-power dynamics can only begin once great powers emerge as a consequence of the political will of certain peoples to understand themselves in a certain way. Based on such measures as GDP, population, and military spending, Russia does not rank particularly well in relation to countries such as Brazil and India, neither of which pretends to great power status. If Russia can be considered a great power today, it is primarily because of the goals and values that its government embodies. Values form the foundations of global order, and Russia only continues to project its power because it maintains a sense of the global reach of its values for determining order for others. Populism has now arrived in China. As opposed to the 1989 protests driven by students as well as an intra-government political struggle, the current unrest, while including students, has been driven much more clearly by a broader mass of people who have grown frustrated with the bureaucratic overreach of the zero COVID policy. With the largest and most comprehensive system of bureaucratically organized surveillance, management, and domination of the populace in the world, China has certainly been ripe for such populist revolt. While the original theory of the new class was developed by Milovan Djilas in order to explain state socialism in the Soviet Union, the populist reaction to the new class has up to now been associated mainly with liberal democracies whose state bureaucracies are still relatively undeveloped when compared to the Chinese version. The Chinese state receded somewhat during the reform and opening up period, but the rule of Xi Jinping, the growth of the surveillance state, and especially the zero COVID policy have led to new extremes in the level of new class management of the population. Moreover, the lockdowns and their economic effects have highlighted the divide between the new class and the broader populace. As one protester shouted to the police, the police are state functionaries with stable incomes while most of the people are dependent on the flourishing of a market economy that has been throttled by the COVID lockdowns. |
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