Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism

300 Pages·2023·1.914 MB·English

by  Shadi Bartsch

plato goes to china

Plato Goes to China
the greek classics and
chinese nationalism
shadi bartsch
prince ton university press
princet on & oxford
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Jacket images from top to bottom: Bust of Xi Jinping by GeeGuit /
TurboSquid. Classic statue of Plato by vangelis aragiannis / Shutterstock
images. Socrates, marble, first century, Eric Gaba / Wikimedia Commons.
Statue of Confucius at Confucian Temple in Shanghai, Phillip Lange /
Shutterstock images.
This book has been composed in Arno
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother, Lila Sepehri Bartsch
Isfahan, Iran 1939– Reston, Virginia 2021
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω
she saw the cities of many and knew their minds

contents
Preface ix
Editions and Translations xv
Introduction: The Ancient Greeks in
Modern China 1
I. Why the Ancient Greeks? 1
II. What’s in It for the West? 8
III. From “Master Li” to Chairman Xi 10
1 Jesuits and Visionaries 17
I. Missionaries with Greek Characteristics 18
II. Aristotle and a New Nation 29
III. To Tian anmen Square, But Not Back 42
2 Classics after the Crackdown 50
I. Thucydides Warns the West 54
II. China’s Model Democracy 63
III. A Dissident Echoes the Past 79
3 Thinking with Plato’s “Noble Lie” 83
I. Justice, Big and Small 85
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viii Contents
II. A Not So Noble Lie 87
III. Hierarchy for the People 93
4 Rationality and Its Discontents 105
I. The Soul- less West 107
II. Ren Stakes a Place 118
III. A Farewell to Binaries 119
5 A Straussian Interlude 127
I. The Prophets of Strauss 128
II. An Esoteric Paradox 140
6 Harmony for the World 146
I. Harmony Contains Multitudes 148
II. The Uses of Confucius 158
III. Whose Republic Will It Be? 168
7 Thoughts for the Pre sent 175
I. Classics 178
II. Cultures 180
III. Myths 181
Notes 189
Bibliography 233
Index 273
preface
this book represents a revision and expansion of the four
Martin Lectures I delivered at Oberlin College in 2018. Long
before that, however, I had had the idea of trying to see the texts
of my field— the Greek and Latin texts of classical antiquity—
from a perspective outside, not inside, the main cultures of
Western Eu rope and the United States. The impetus for the
study was to learn in what ways the Chinese and their culture
are dif ere nt readers of t hese foundational texts that lie b ehind
western concepts of individuals, citizens, politics, rationality,
and even morality. B ecause t hese norms w ere s haped in part by
the ideals of classical antiquity (especially via its impact on the
Re nais sance and the Enlightenment), they had always made
“made sense” to me as categories for thought, even when I dis-
agreed with their contents. I wanted to break out of this hall of
mirrors, to see how the categories and assumptions of this tradi-
tion were not universal. What would an entirely dif er ent civili-
zation with its own traditions— namely, China— make of the
Greek classics?
Immediately, I ran into my first prob lem: what the Chinese
wrote about western antiquity, they largely wrote (at least in
those days, about a de cade ago) in Chinese. The prolegomenon
to the proj ect was therefore learning Mandarin, a language I
found incredibly difficult despite my experience with Indo-
European languages. On top of that challenge, at the time I
ix
x Preface
started the proj ect, the Mandarin words for figures like
Socrates had not yet fully crystallized into one par tic u lar set of
characters (hanzi), making research still more difficult. More-
over, my period of investigation (roughly 1890 to 2020) con-
tained a dazzling array of major Chinese thinkers about the
classical tradition whose opinions not only changed with their
par tic u lar times, but sometimes even within a lifetime. I had
taken on a Herculean task that in no way would I be able to fully
complete.1
All the same, several amazing findings awaited me. The first
was just how impor tant the Greek classics have been in China,
where they are often read as directly relevant to the Chinese
politics, government, culture, and ethics of the pre sent day. The
second was that many Chinese thinkers have relied on these
ancient texts to support broad generalizations about an imagi-
nary “West.” The last revelation was that from 1989 onwards
( after the “incident” at Tian anmen Square), a conceptual revo-
lution took place among a group of Chinese intellectuals, public
thinkers, and even government officials as to how they read
these classical texts. In other words, t here was a before and an
after to the study I had undertaken, not just a series of minor
alterations. This about- face in reception (it did not include the
dissidents in exile and mainland scholars not interested in po-
liti cal statements) was remarkably decisive in that its core
mission—t he application of these texts to support Chinese so-
cialist and Confucian ideals— has been going on in much the
same vein over the past thirty years. Let me be clear: I am not
criticizing what some westerners might see as an “appropriation”
of Greek po liti cal and philosophical thought, but rather, con-
templating, sometimes with surprise, the vari ous Chinese read-
ings of antiquity I have come across in doing research for this
book. A critique is not the right response: we must understand