Youngmin Kim - A History of Chinese Political Thought

For Paulina

Copyright Youngmin Kim 2018

The right of Youngmin Kim to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5246-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5247-4 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kim, Youngmin, author.

Title: A history of Chinese political thought / Youngmin Kim.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015315 (print) | LCCN 2017041433 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509523177 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509523184 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745652467 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745652474 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Political scienceChinaHistory. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy.

Classification: LCC JA84.C6 (ebook) | LCC JA84.C6 K48 2017 (print) | DDC 320.0951dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015315

Subjects: LCSH: Political scienceChinaHistory. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy.

Classification: LCC JA84.C6 (ebook) | LCC JA84.C6 K48 2017 (print) | DDC 320.0951dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015315

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Pinyin is used for all transliterations except personal names of those scholars who write in English and who use different transliterations (e.g. Hsiao Kung-chuan, not Xiao Gongquan). I have converted direct quotations from English-language secondary sources whose authors employed the WadeGiles system of romanization into the pinyin system.

1. The Western Zhou (eleventh century771 bc )
2. The Eastern Zhou (770221 bc )
3. The Spring and Autumn period (770476 bc )
4. The Warring States period (453221 bc )
5. Qin (221206 bc )
6. Han (206 bc ad 220)
7. The Six Dynasties period (220589)
8. Sui (581618)
9. Tang (618907)
10. The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (90760)
11. Northern Song (9601127)
12. Southern Song (11271279)
13. Liao (9071125)
14. Jin (11131234)
15. Yuan (12711368)
16. Ming (13681644)
17. Qing (16361912)
18. The People's Republic of China (PRC) (1949present)

Today, many social scientists and theorists particularly those who question the dominance of European models are attempting to address China's place anew in the worldwide history of political formations and ideas, hoping that we may better cope with the ever-globalizing political challenges of our own time. The nascent but rapidly developing field of comparative or global political theory is part of such an effort. Scholars in the field are primarily interested in understanding the patterns of Chinese political thought for the sake of comparison and as a source of inspiration for their own theoretical agendas. And yet inquiries are still overwhelmingly dominated by ahistorical and nationalist perspectives. I think that the time is ripe to redirect this trend, taking into account Chinese political thought in its full historical complexity. The present volume is but a preliminary contribution to this end.

The overarching aim of this book is to provide an interpretive inquiry into Chinese political thinkers engagement with their historical world and intellectual resources from antiquity to the present while considering its relevance to topics of political theory broadly construed, building on my earlier works as well as my English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean academic research. In other words, what I hope to offer is neither a highly stylized social scientific account of Chinese political thought nor a detailed account of one representative system of Chinese political thought, but a theoretically informed long-term historical narrative. Why do we need such a historical narrative? Because the best way to understand certain things is by tracing their history without losing sight of theoretical concerns.

Given the increasing significance of China in our globalizing world, one may feel tempted to seek the essence of Chinese political thought, which presumably underpins Chinese politics. However, highly stylized or packaged accounts of Chinese political thought, which might serve the operationalization of social sciences, may be misleading. There is no such thing as the essence of Chinese political thought. Even when certain common features seem to recur across Chinese history, what matters is not fashioning the stylized account, but how we arrive at it. There is no set of essential features that are optimally valid throughout the historical development of Chinese political thought. Sometimes, it is through a long stretch of history that the fuller significance of any of its elements is best brought to light. The whole is meant to be more than the sum of its parts. Thus the following chapters seek to demonstrate the dynamic variety of Chinese political thought. That variety should caution us not to take today's political imagination for granted and not to close our eyes to the array of alternatives. In a similar vein, as I am generally skeptical of the possibility that one can gain ground by approaching ideas in the abstract, the following chapters invite the reader to examine the historical contexts that informed Chinese political thought. Identifying different configurations of seemingly similar ideas in shifting historical contexts may help us to see Chinese political thought in its greater complexity. This very complexity gives rise to a broader perspective, which allows us to see beyond the narrow bounds of our political imagination.

Apart from the benefit of a broader perspective, what exactly can we learn from Chinese political thought? One might feel tempted to ask: what straightforward lessons does it teach us about today's problems or the nature of good governance? Some might want to go so far as to say that Chinese political thought, suitably reimagined and updated, holds out a promising ideal of political order for us today. My hope is far more modest. Chinese political thought is of interest in itself. It is not that a history of Chinese political thought would teach us definite answers regarding the nature of good governance, but that it offers another rich resource on which one can draw in reflecting on political matters for oneself. This is one of the reasons why we should not lose sight of the relationship between ideas and historical realities, as a way to throw light on the political experience of the time. We want to know, among other things, how the Chinese constructed normative images of their political order, how the images and order took the precise forms they did, and how well they matched Chinese practice and behavior. Only then can the new arsenal of political thought give us a richer language with which to attempt to think for ourselves. With any luck, this volume may provide some readers with a few important steps toward the goal. Providing a more fully historical and more sophisticated analysis would require more systematic further studies on a number of questions that are only cursorily dealt with in the present volume. My hope is to make this still-narrow path a little easier for those who engage with non-Western political thought to reflect on the politics of an interconnected and increasingly crowded planet.