In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Eric Hendriks-Kim about his article “The Polemics of China’s Counter Cosmopolitanism,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the impetus behind the current proliferation of Chinese theories of cosmopolitanism; how these new ideas about cosmopolitanism fit into a history of anti-Western forms of universalism in various parts of the world; the idea of tianxia, its meaning and history, and how it is used today; how Jiang Shigong’s idea of socialism with Chinese characteristics differs from the theories based on the idea of tianxia; how Jin Huimin conceives of the relationship between universalism and particularity; the relationship of these Chinese notions of cosmopolitanism to Western notions of cosmopolitanism; and whether any of these conceptions escape from an imperialist perspective. 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.
The Polemics of China’s Counter Cosmopolitanism
Eric Hendriks-Kim
America’s prestige as the bearer of a liberal democratic world order has taken a dent due to both geopolitical power shifts and the debilitating polarization of American democratic culture. Relatedly, symbolic power has been shifting away from liberal ideals and standards of legitimacy globally.[1] It has become ever harder to deny that a variety of non-Western civilizational states, China chief among them, will not conform, nor even try to conform, to the West’s liberal democratic standards. Though these states imported all kinds of Western-style institutions in their earlier phases of modernization, they now seem ever more determined to break free from the West’s gravitational pull.
The American imperial imagination trivializes their ideological diverging as merely disruptive—the scheming of “authoritarian regimes” that place themselves outside the civilized, America-centric world order. It sees their diverging, though dangerous, as trivial intellectually—as departures from the world, from the civilized world order, rather than as potentially consequential attempts to redefine what counts for world order and civilization.
However, these “evil regimes” themselves see things differently. Their political and intellectual supporters do not want to be eternally condemned to the outer orbits of an America-centric system of legitimacy and recognition. They strive for their favored polity to be the center of a new world with its own standard of political goodness, cultural gravity, and sense of cosmopolitanism.
To carve out such a space of intellectual autonomy and place oneself at the center of a world imagination requires, in the first instance, not raw material power but substantial intellectual creation. One must reimagine the world’s political ordering, which one can do either by conceiving civilized orderliness in the plural or by recentering it on a new civilizing imperial center. To this end, thinkers in various world-cultural regions are working on counter designs for world order. Their ranks range from the most marginal scribblers to philosophers at prestigious universities and well-connected political ideologues. They include Russian Eurasianists, Hindu nationalists, Islamists, and proponents of a new Chinese cosmopolitanism. The politically most relevant counter designs are arguably those sprouting up in China, given the People’s Republic’s economic and political power on the international stage and Chinese scholars’ access to the world’s most extensive national university system.
Recent years saw the emergence of a vibrant Chinese field of world philosophizing, propelled by the sense of an imminent “new era” (xīn shídài) in which China would express itself with greater “self-confidence” (zìxìn) on the world stage, to speak in the nomenclature of Xi Jinping Thought. Yet the field does not represent or straightforwardly transmit Party doctrine. Located in academia and intellectual life, its theorists are instead complexly responsive to political officialdom. Signaling intellectual proximity to such officialdom can serve as a heteronomous source of scholarly authority, but theorists also strive to exert influence by (re)interpreting Party doctrines and providing politicians with some polite counseling. For example, the prominent Sino-socialist philosopher Jiang Shigong goes far beyond Party doctrine when championing “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the up-and-coming world model.[2] In contrast, philosopher Jin Huimin seeks to moderate the chauvinistic impulses in Chinese intellectual life. He posits a “Chinese cultural self-confidence” that enters into the universal by celebrating its particularity alongside others’ in an equal intercivilizational dialogue, also making his case in last summer’s edition of Telos.[3] Finally, the Tianxia School, represented by figures such as Zhao Tingyang, Xu Jilin, Xu Zhuoyun, Wang Gungwu, and Liang Zhiping, might be the most remote from the contents of Party doctrine. Yet the school stands in a broader patriotic turn in Chinese academia that counters the hegemony of Western scholarly discourses by drawing instead on Chinese historical sources, marching under the banner of “Using China to Explain China” (Yǐ zhōngguó jiěshì zhōngguó).[4] The Tianxia School theorists draw on the classical Chinese conception of tianxia (all under heaven) to lay out a vision of a more harmonious, or even politically and culturally integrated, twenty-first-century world that can include and cherish all of the world’s cultural and political diversity.
Possessing genuine intellectual dynamism, the incipient Chinese field of world philosophizing revolves around and responds to conceptual tensions that bear on consequential political judgments. In my account, the field’s defining tensions are between cultural particularism and universalism. China’s leading theorists of world order defend China’s civilizational particularity against Western universalist pretensions. They deem these Western faux universalisms imperialistic. However, most of these theorists simultaneously seek to formulate a new universalism. And their universalist theories—with the possible exception of Jin’s, which seems determined to avoid any hints of Chinese exceptionalism—appear to recenter the world on an idealized, mythical China. Some of the new theories have even escalated into imperialist imaginings. Jiang, for example, calls for a China-led “world empire 2.0” to supersede the current “Anglo-American world empire.”[5] And the Tianxia School, though formally devoted to resisting all imperialist imaginings, exhibits, I will argue, a conceptual resemblance to Japanese imperialistic philosophies of the 1940s—and the Kyoto School in particular—because it likewise seeks to develop a universalism out of East Asia’s early twentieth-century Pan-Asian tradition. However, the leading contemporary Chinese tianxia theorists acknowledge neither their Pan-Asian sources nor the resulting accidental resemblance with mid-twentieth-century Japanese political philosophy.[6]
The unresolved contradictions that ensue—between particularism and universalism and between anti-imperialism and imperialist idealizations—are not accidental oversights. Far from being mere errors, they, as I will show, figure as objects of reflection and provide the discourse with a creative polemical impulse. They endow China’s new philosophies of world and worldness with their polemischen Sinn, their polemic meaning, in Carl Schmitt’s wording;[7] that is, their raison d’être as philosophical polemics. I will argue that through conceptualizing particularity, universality, and world order in polemically skewed and, in some instances, even deliberately contradictory ways, China’s world theorists position themselves in domestic and international political contestations. At stake domestically are the status of Chinese nationhood and communist historiography, the cultivation of a Chinese sense of cosmopolitanism, and the question of China’s mission on the world stage. Internationally, China’s world theorists polemicize against powerfully influential conceptions in Western academia, journalism, and politics that center the world on America, the West, and liberal ideology.
Continue reading this article at the Telos Online website. If your library does not yet subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page to let them know how.
1. As political philosopher Raymond Geuss writes, “Liberalism is such an important part of the framework of the Anglo-Saxon countries that the real economic and political decline of the United States and the United Kingdom cannot be expected to be without effect on the fate of liberalism.” Raymond Geuss, Not Thinking like a Liberal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2022), p. xi.
2. Jiang Shigong, “Zhéxué yǔ lìshǐ: cóng dǎng de shíjiǔ dà bàogào jiědú ‘xíjìnpíng shídài,'” Kāifàng shídài 1 (2018), p. 3, http://m.aisixiang.com/data/107999.html.
3. Jin Huimin, “Cultural Self-Confidence and Constellated Community: An Extended Discussion of Some Speeches by Xi Jinping,” Telos 195 (Summer 2021): 100.
4. Jiang Qing, Zài lùn zhèngzhì rúxué (Shanghai: East China Normal Univ. Press, 2011), p. 262. Compare: Liáng Zhìpíng, “Xiǎngxiàng ‘tiānxià’: Dāngdài zhōngguó de yìshí xíngtài jiàngòu,” Sīxiǎng 36 (2018): 71–177.
5. Jiang, “Zhéxué yǔ lìshǐ,” p. 3.
6. For this lack of historical self-contextualization, there are probably sensible political reasons. However, foreign commentators did notice the conceptual commonalities and historical continuities with early and mid-twentieth-century East Asian and Japanese Pan-Asianism. On April 24, 2021, Nakajima Takashiro (“Universalizing Tianxia in East Asian Context”) and Christian Uhl (“Veiling Ideology or Enabling Utopia?”) spoke on this topic at the conference “Alternative Models of Geopolitical Order,” at Tsinghua University, China, organized by the Berggruen Research Center.
7. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien, 8th ed. (1932; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009), p. 29.
