One party editorial blamed the West for "hog" the term "democracy," when the world’s largest democracy is actually China. Still others criticized Aristotle’s (misunderstood) doctrine of "natural" slavery and even his calling non-Greeks "barbarians" (following Greek usage)-at a time when the Chinese began imprisoning some million Uyghurs in conditions worse than those of Greek domestic slaves. Others ahistorically blamed Plato and Aristotle for "brainwash" citizens into believing it was their duty to strive for virtue, thus "denying them independent thought" and emphasizing "consensus" at the expense of "individualism" (as if greater intellectual and personal freedom were offered in China!). The series culminated in the ill-fated 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations by students and workers, suppressed by the army at the cost of hundreds or thousands of lives.Īs post-Tiananmen party leaders purged reformers and "disciplined" dissidents, Bartsch recounts how Chinese classicists either turned their study in a purely apolitical direction or else tried to accommodate the regime by representing "the classical past … as supporting its values." Hence they cited Thucydides’ portrait of Athens’s fate in the Peloponnesian War to dismiss the supposedly "universal value of American democracy" (this in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times). In turn, his thought helped inspire the production, "during the period of maximum openness and freedom of the press," of a six-part, government-sponsored TV series titled River Elegy (1988), which called for democracy and (Western) science, along with greater openness to the outside world, and was seen by over 200 million viewers. He "paid dearly" through imprisonment for his heretical suggestion that such Greek institutions as democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law demonstrated the superiority of Western culture and power to that of China.ĭuring the economic liberalization under Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Gu Zhun’s thought achieved wider visibility with the posthumous (1982) publication of his book celebrating the polis. Bartsch cites only one individual who retained interest in ancient Athens under Mao, a "dedicated communist" and economist named Gu Zhun, who looked to the Greek polis and to Aristotle’s political thought to resolve "problems inherent in socialist economics," being appalled by the "famine and cannibalism" generated by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The Maoist triumph cut off any continued study of the Western classics. But both the republican enterprise and the freedom of thought that encouraged it ended with the Japanese occupation of the 1930s, followed by the victory of Mao’s Communist forces. Only after the emperor’s 1912 overthrow did the opportunity arise for China’s "young intellectuals and reformers," many of them foreign-educated, to establish a republican government, led by Sun Yat-sen and influenced by the reading of Western thinkers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Aristotle. At the same time, she initially downplays the transformation that Western influences such as Marxism have already made in "Chinese" ways.)īartsch describes the unsuccessful endeavor of 17th-century Jesuit missionaries to introduce elements of classical thought (blended with Christian theology) to China, which left the Chinese still thinking that their culture was superior. (Oddly for a classicist, Bartsch ignores the self-critical character that typified the Western tradition of philosophy, poetry, and historiography starting in antiquity-as if all its contributors regarded democracy as the best regime or conceived philosophy as essentially deductive rather than empirical and dialectical. Bartsch’s outlook is one of cultural relativism: She refrains from making derogatory comparisons between Chinese and Western cultures-despite the belief of some prominent Chinese scholars that their civilization would benefit from imbibing elements of the Western classical tradition. In Plato Goes to China, Bartsch explains her aim to escape the "hall of mirrors" generated by Westerners taught to believe in the universal validity of such concepts as the superiority of democracy and the notion of individual rights.
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