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.
Loving Hong Kong: Unity and Solidarity in the Politics of Belonging
Chih-yu Shih
Introduction
This paper employs Confucianism to illustrate a kind of differential or benevolent love, which people give in accordance with their relations and roles. In this sense, Confucian benevolent love is more of a duty to create mutual belonging than an emotion of solidarity.[1] This benevolent love contrasts with the universal love of liberalism and the resultant solidarity that those who express this form of love feel for one another—these people often being the distant and unacquainted—whose presence would puzzle Confucian leaders in terms of their roles and duties. Confucian roles are, in comparison, contextual, evolving, and reciprocal in order to cope with encountered strangeness. The liberal belief in everyone being ontologically equal and free de-emphasizes the relevance of experiencing the other’s strangeness. As a result of this, a Confucian’s and liberal’s love for one another may ironically cause, in both, a moral outrage qua deprived belonging.[2]
My case will be the institution of “One Country, Two Systems” (OCTS), on which Beijing has relied to arrange Hong Kong’s return and belonging to China. This case has become one of the focal points in the U.S.–China rivalry in the 2020s and is an illustration of how benevolent love and universal love have yet to be reconciled. In Hong Kong, the quest for the direct election of the chief executive and political autonomy led to two mass demonstrations in 2015 and 2019, accompanied by months of bloodshed on its streets. Although these demonstrations were suppressed by the Hong Kong police with support from the central authorities in Beijing, this suppression was followed by a series of welfare programs aimed at improving social, as opposed to political, justice. My discussion will show how Confucian benevolent love is philosophically illuminative in such policy thinking while also committing a seeming assault on universal love.
During and after the second rally, the U.S. Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (2019) and the Hong Kong Autonomy Act (2020). These two laws reveal in what terms intervention is a laudable and correct narrative in the liberal discourse of the endorsing U.S. congressmen, despite the fact that they likely have incongruent motives that are relevant as well as irrelevant to the liberal democracy of Hong Kong. These laws presumably inspire people—and therefore reflect a prior (at times tacit) consensual solidarity—to join forces to resist Beijing’s conceived suppression of Hong Kong through its imposition of its political will in the form of claiming love for it.
The paper will begin by problematizing universal love and then introduce benevolent love. Given the Anglosphere’s unfamiliarity with the latter, the paper invokes the notion of natural contracts and unity to elaborate on benevolent love’s contrast with the liberal ideas of social contract and solidarity. The paper will then present the policy thinking and practices of OCTS, as informed by their Confucian underpinnings. Based on an understanding of the two philosophies of love, the conclusion will interrogate the sense of mutual belonging under the OCTS circumstances.
1. Problematizing Love as Emancipation?
The dominance, exploitation, and division of colonies did not prompt any critical self-reflection amongst European colonizers: the ways in which colonized populations belonged to their communities were of little concern. As the horrors of the Holocaust came to light following World War II, political culture and psychology became almost exclusively concerned with studying the totalitarian personality, which loathes, dehumanizes, and seeks to annihilate certain “others.” Issues of colonialism and colonial division, by contrast, sank into oblivion. How and why democracy had failed during Nazi rule was the main puzzle, and questions about how to prevent a similar horror from happening in the future took center stage. Ironically, such quests to understand the totalitarian personality leave contemporary critical thinkers unprepared to make sense of communities that do not share those same sensibilities, including countries that Europe formerly colonized. Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (1941), Power and Personality by Harold Lasswell (1948), and The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al. (1950) offer the most prominent theories regarding the spread of societal as well as personal disorder. During and after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Western psychoanalysts offered similar theories to explain the psychology of Mao Zedong and his followers. These can be found in The Spirit of Chinese Politics by Lucian Pye (1968), Revolutionary Immortality by Robert Lifton (1968), Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture by Richard Solomon (1971), and The Revolutionary Aesthetic by Bruce Mazlish (1976).
The disintegration of communities, as indicated by the slaughter of humans, challenges readers to ask how a person can determine whether or not someone is entitled to belong to a certain community, and execute their exclusion accordingly. In response to this, Erich Fromm offers a diagnosis, arguing that modern capitalism engendered alienation.[3] He then offers a romantic therapy informed by a rational kind of love that would overcome the individualization of society under capitalism.[4] Expressing this form of love would enable individuals to achieve emancipation by relating to one another, so that they would not seek a therapeutic reliance on a totalitarianism that sanctions exclusionary binaries.
Half a century after the end of World War II, amidst acts of genocide in Rwanda, the Balkans, and East Timor, political theorists and psychologists continued to ask the same questions. One notable example of this is James Glass,[5] who revisits the Holocaust but instead asks how and why someone can feel fragmented and come to dread the im/possibility of belonging to a community. Glass expresses his disapproval of the critical scholarship of his predecessors half a century before him, as well as the postmodern deconstruction of his time.[6] He proceeds to detect in the postmodern personality a schizophrenic split that was also present in the Nazi psychology. In contrast to his predecessors, Glass prescribes a liberal “illusion” for these schizophrenic patients.[7] His solution lies in restoring the integrity of the democratic community, which is composed of members who are secure in their own “illusionary” boundary, undergirded by liberalism. Together, these members are ready to embrace and calm those suffering the horror of self-disintegration and can thus rescue democracy from the instinct of annihilation. Glass believes that the survival of the community relies on strong personalities who can hold others, especially those suffering fragmentation, to enable them to regain (the liberal illusion of) an integral self.[8] Regarding this notion of “holding,” Glass relies on the metaphor of a mother holding a hysterical infant to denote a democratic environment that caters to the patient’s aggression until they learn to cope with it independently.
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1. On love as an emotion of communitarian solidarity, see Simon Koschut, “Communitarian Emotions in IR: Constructing Emotional Worlds,” in Methodology and Emotion in International Relations: Parsing the Passions, ed. Eric Van Rythoven and Mira Sucharov (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 79–96; Kathleen Lynch and Manolis Kalaitzake, “Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The Impact of Individualism and Neo-liberal Capitalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 2 (2018): 238–57; Simon Koschut, “No Sympathy for the Devil: Emotions and the Social Construction of the Democratic Peace,” Cooperation and Conflict 53, no. 3 (2018): 320–38.
2. Nadine Knab and Melanie C. Steffens, “Emotions for Solidarity: The Relations of Moral Outrage and Sympathy with Hierarchy-challenging and Prosocial Hierarchy-maintaining Action Intentions in Support of Refugees,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 27, no. 4 (2021): 568–75; Francesco Tava, “Justice, Emotions, and Solidarity,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2023): 39–55.
3. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).
4. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Thorsons, 1957).
5. James Glass, Private Terror/Public Life: Psychosis and the Politics of Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989); Glass, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personalities in a Postmodern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993); Glass, Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995).
6. Glass, Shattered Selves.
7. Glass, Psychosis and Power.
8. Ibid.
