The Real Roots of Xi Jinping Thought

Key to Xi’s thought is pairing Marxism with Confucianism: in October 2023, he declared that today’s China should consider Marxism its “soul” and “fine traditional Chinese culture as the root.”

In The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, his magnum opus, Wang Hui, a scholar of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University, returns to the late-nineteenth-century thinkers who worked to reshape Chinese philosophy.

Wang analyzes the connections between political theory and more concrete issues of governance over a millennium of Chinese history. But he notes that “explanations of modern China cannot avoid the question of how to interpret” the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912.

In one sense, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought makes Xi’s attempted synthesis of Marxism and Confucianism seem less implausible. It has a history; serious thinkers have tried it before.

But Wang’s analysis also reveals where the CCP is going astray. The party expresses its new ideology in simplistic, brassy terms, drawing on unsubtle readings of classics and disallowing critiques.

Wang argues that the problem that bedeviled the late Qing empire was not just a geopolitical one in which other states had secured material advantages over China. It was a crisis of worldview. Scholars have long asserted that the ways in which Confucianism was applied to nineteenth-century Chinese politics had left the country sclerotic—unable to engage with modern Western ideologies such as capitalism, liberalism, and nationalism.

Chinese thought has always best contributed to China’s flourishing when it has been free and disputatious, not closed and sterile. This is the aspect of Chinese tradition that today’s CCP cannot afford to ignore.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/china-real-roots-xi-jinping-thought

TomBen’s Web Excursions

The Real Roots of Xi Jinping Thought

Key to Xi’s thought is pairing Marxism with Confucianism: in October 2023, he declared that today’s China should consider Marxism its “soul” and “fine traditional Chinese culture as the root.”

In The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, his magnum opus, Wang Hui, a scholar of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University, returns to the late-nineteenth-century thinkers who worked to reshape Chinese philosophy.

Wang analyzes the connections between political theory and more concrete issues of governance over a millennium of Chinese history. But he notes that “explanations of modern China cannot avoid the question of how to interpret” the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912.

In one sense, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought makes Xi’s attempted synthesis of Marxism and Confucianism seem less implausible. It has a history; serious thinkers have tried it before.

But Wang’s analysis also reveals where the CCP is going astray. The party expresses its new ideology in simplistic, brassy terms, drawing on unsubtle readings of classics and disallowing critiques.

Wang argues that the problem that bedeviled the late Qing empire was not just a geopolitical one in which other states had secured material advantages over China. It was a crisis of worldview. Scholars have long asserted that the ways in which Confucianism was applied to nineteenth-century Chinese politics had left the country sclerotic—unable to engage with modern Western ideologies such as capitalism, liberalism, and nationalism.

Chinese thought has always best contributed to China’s flourishing when it has been free and disputatious, not closed and sterile. This is the aspect of Chinese tradition that today’s CCP cannot afford to ignore.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/china-real-roots-xi-jinping-thought

Foreign Affairs

The Real Roots of Xi Jinping Thought

Chinese political philosophers’ long struggle with modernity.

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838 viewsFeb 22 at 13:20