When China began opening its doors to foreign ideas and trade in the 1980s, the Party leader Deng Xiaoping set out the country’s undertaking in vague but abiding terms. “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” as he called it, was less of a ruling doctrine than a promise that China’s modernization would remain distinctive and hold true to Marxist precepts. Decades later, as state firms shuttered, inequality soared and capitalism prospered, many suspected the slogan to be doublespeak. This was, after all, the era when the entrepreneur Jack Ma bestrode the economy and the real estate mogul Xu Jiayin rocked Hermes belts in the Chinese legislature. Still, officials never wavered. In 2012, as outgoing president Hu Jintao handed the nation’s keys to his successor Xi Jinping, he reiterated Deng’s formula very succinctly: “Never copy a Western political system.”

There’s little doubt that the Chinese Communist Party today thinks it has fulfilled Deng’s promise. From Orwellian levels of surveillance to strangleholds on private firms, few of the West’s time-honored practices hold court in Beijing. The hoary gospel of GDP has been supplanted by Xi’s “new development model” of heavy industry and technology self-mastery. The once high-flying Ma is in hiding, and the high-rolling Xu is in detention. To live in Xi’s second decade of rule is to witness a fusillade of unexplained disappearances and diktats drowned out by the ambient soundtrack of Xi Jinping Thought: uphold the “China Dream,” heed the Chinese system’s “remarkable advantages,” and remain “confident in China’s chosen path.”

How did China’s leaders get so confident? Popular explanations range from China’s material power to the crisis of liberal democracies. But a lesser-known story took place after the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. The Party’s immediate challenge, back then, was to chart a course between the democratic reforms it had violently rejected, and the Maoism it had partially repudiated a decade earlier. In the following years, a band of Chinese intellectuals, pundits and apparatchiks rode the wave of nationalist fervor to help legitimize the Chinese state. Rebuking the 1990s notion of the “end of history,” these intellectual courtiers attempted to forge a new moral vernacular, one that allowed China to stand on equal or superior terms with the West. To do so, they enlisted the help of not only their spiritual ancestors — Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu — but Western philosophers, all the way back to Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides.

In the 1990s, these intellectual courtiers attempted to forge a new moral vernacular, one that allowed China to stand on equal or superior terms with the West.

Shadi Bartsch, a classicist at the University of Chicago, calls this intellectual sleight of hand a “conceptual revolution” in her book Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2023). The work is a witty and dexterous portrait of this renewed interest among post-Tiananmen intellectuals in her own field of Greco-Roman classics. Most of the scholars who appear in Bartsch’s book appear to treat the Western classical texts like moral clay in a ceramics studio — to be molded into a vessel for the state’s agenda — and share a similar hermeneutics, working backward from their conclusions.

That Chinese nationalist scholars chose Western classical texts as a foil for legitimacy isn’t so outlandish in light of Chinese history. Scholarly engagement with Greek antiquity dates back centuries to the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries. The works of Aristotle, among others, blossomed at the turn of the 20th century as liberal-minded reformers of the late Qing dynasty plundered the philosopher’s works for ideas about citizenship and democracy to revivify a sclerotic imperial system. These ideas coalesced into the Republican era (1912-1949), but soon cratered as China descended into warlordism and civil war. By the time the Communists took over, in 1949, Mao Zedong was excoriating intellectuals who “cited the Greeks whenever they spoke.” Western philosophy didn’t disappear under Mao, but he traded the ancients for modern revolutionaries like Marx and Lenin.

The reformist approach to Western classics returned briefly in the 1980s, but the violent end to the democracy protests in 1989 realigned the intellectual landscape. The post-Tiananmen years saw the rise of what scholars Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek have termed “establishment intellectuals” — academics and writers aligned both socially and motivationally with the Party-state. Compared to the reformers, these thinkers tended to prefer autochthonous cultural traditions that came out of China. They did not abandon Western philosophy, but repurposed it to harden and bolster the new reality of a powerful, prosperous China. Their purpose, as late president Jiang Zemin bluntly put it, was to become “theoretical weapons” (思想理论武器) in the service of Chinese socialism.

This is the interpretive “turn,” in Barsch’s words, at the heart of Plato Goes to China. If Chinese writers in the early 20th century saw Western antiquity as a storehouse of inspiration, those in the 21st century see a house built on sand. “History does not bode well for the American way,” wrote the venture capitalist Eric X. Li in a New York Times op-ed in 2012, observing how ancient Athens, the first experimental democracy, was felled by demagogues. Pan Yue, a scholar at the Central Institute of Socialism, notes that the philosophical system of Aristotle, with its defense of slavery, prefigured Western colonialism. And the conservative writer He Xin has argued that the Greco-Roman traditions are a total sham, as Renaissance scholars forged Western antiquity from the cultures of Asia Minor. This conspiracy, known as the “Western Pseudo-History Theory” (西方伪史论), has become disturbingly popular in the past two years. One video discussing it on the video website Bilibili reached 600,000 hits; even the blogger himself said he was surprised to find that “the entire Chinese-speaking community is familiar with it.”

Inevitably, these interpretative stretches lead to amusing contradictions. In his exalted 4th century B.C. treatise The Republic, Socrates hinges the success of an ideal city-state on a “Noble Lie”: a generation-spanning myth that inculcates a voluntary subordination among non-ruling factions of the city. Some Chinese scholars see the Chinese state, where the selection of leaders is sometimes characterized as more meritocratic compared to democracies, as the inheritors of Platonic statecraft. “Lies,” Chen Yan writes, “are sometimes more useful and beneficial to the city and its people than the truth.” But Li Yongcheng, a professor at Peking University, reads the “Noble Lie” differently. For Li, the lie is not a shibboleth of Chinese rule, but a narcotic lulling Americans into a misplaced faith in democracy. The only consistency in both readings is their upshot. “No matter which route” the writers take through these ancient texts, Bartsch writes, “they emerge safely on the other side with their ideologies and perspectives about China intact.”

To be sure, other intellectual trends in China run counter to this reassessment of Western philosophy from a source of admiration to crass denigration. Bartsch could have written about the surprising fascination among Republican-era writers, such as Lu Xun and Liang Qichao, toward Sparta. As Almut-Barbara Renger notes in Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia (Brill, 2018), Liang once referred to the Greek city-state’s ethic of militarism as the “best remedy” for a weakened China under the yoke of Western powers. If so, she may have found some continuity in the Xi era, with its incessant odes to patriotic fervor and martial spirit. And many Chinese academics working on Western classics have told me they disavow this instrumental approach to textual analysis, which often subordinates Western philosophy into the project of Chinese nation-building. But these moderate voices have all been silenced in Xi Jinping’s China.

Plato Goes to China mainly features Chinese interpretations of the Greek classics — though Kant and Weber make brief cameos. But the book arguably prompts us to think less about hermeneutics and more about the cognitive psychology of individuals within a system, specifically those that incentivize a deference to power over truth. Ultimately, these academic texts, Bartsch observes, are “not scholarly essays striving to make a dean’s summa cum laude list.” Rather, they “exist to support broad knowledge-claims about humans, hierarchies, histories, nations, and ethics.” In brief, they teach us more about the authors than their subjects.

The centerpieces of Bartsch’s case study are Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang, two professors of literature and philosophy, respectively, who rose to prominence in the 2000s for their writings on and translations of the German-American theorist Leo Strauss. Strauss differentiated the intellectual project of Western philosophers such as Plato from post-Enlightenment writers like Michel Foucault, which enabled Liu to enlist Western classics as allies in his civilization-building cause. The most noteworthy detail of Liu and Gan’s work, Bartsch observers, is that both betrayed liberal leanings in the 1980s, but have since embraced the state, a similar maneuver observed among Chinese leftists. In 2010, Liu founded the Chinese Journal of Classical Studies, which sought to “restore the traditional civilization of China.” Gan, for his part, wrote a book melding the traditions of Confucianism, Maoism, and Dengist reforms into a bedrock for Chinese socialism. What explains their change of heart? Are their shifting allegiances a sign of naked opportunism, or something else?

Today, it is in vogue again to bring China’s ancient lessons to bear on the present. Xi Jinping is resuscitating tradition to suit his authoritarian project.

One way of reading Liu and Gan is part of a storied intellectual tradition in China, where knowledge is valuable insofar as it meets the needs of an enlightened officialdom. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, scholars practiced a kind of theoretical bricolage that “applies classical teachings to practical matters” (经世致用). The practice reemerged in inglorious form under Mao, who equated scholars to “hair” that must be fastened to the “skin” of the proletariat revolution. In the 1980s, scholars adopted more eclectic influences to suit a leadership who were open to reform again, and used Western sources to criticize China’s backward traditions.

Today, it is in vogue again to bring China’s ancient lessons to bear on the present. Xi Jinping is resuscitating tradition to suit his authoritarian project, and encouraging academics to carry out the requisite thought work in his third term. Last February, Xi Jinping wrote a letter to a university in Athens calling for the establishment of a joint center on the study of Chinese and Greek classics, praising how the two civilizations have both offered “groundbreaking contributions” to mankind. That letter, one Chinese classicist told me, led directly to the World Classics Conference in Beijing last week, which brought together over 400 experts around the world for conversations about how Greek and Chinese civilization can help “solve the problems of the times.” His recent campaigns, such as the “Global Civilization Initiative” and “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture,” offer vague, flexible slogans that urge Chinese society, especially theoreticians, to convert ancient profundity into cultural prestige and political legitimacy.

Yet it wasn’t always this way. Across the last century of sweeping political change in China, there have always been intellectuals willing to speak truth to power. The liberal reformist Liang Qichao was exiled to Japan and nearly sentenced to death. The purged intellectuals of the Yan’an Rectification Campaign of 1942-45, the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-59 and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, including Liu Xiaobo — these people were following an altogether distinct, but arguably no less Chinese, tradition. Today’s establishment intellectuals “may well conform with an ancient lineage of servitude,” the sinologist Geremie Barmé wrote in 2021, “but they also knowingly betray the promise and sacrifices of their more independent-minded forebears.” The recent trend in China to study the Greek classics is not only a shift in conclusions, it is an abnegation of courage.

As China’s economic miracle draws to a close, the old narrative of economic ascendency has been replaced by intensifying homages to antiquity and the superiority of “Chinese civilization.” Just as they did for Deng’s promissory slogan of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” intellectuals such as those Bartsch profiles will play a serious role going forward. Their new challenge is using ancient precedent, whether Chinese or Western, to convince a well-educated, expectant citizenry, acclimated to decades of relative openness and prosperity, to retreat back into the Plato’s cave of Xi Jinping Thought. ∎

Header: Statues of Socrates and Confucius, standing side by side, in the ancient agora of Athens, 2023. The supposed encounter is fictional: Confucius likely died before Socrates was born. (Martin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty)

---