This is a book driven by an astounding personal curiosity. Shadi Bartsch, a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, has delved deeply into Chinese receptions of Classical Greek texts to see how seemingly universal “Western” categories are discussed in an entirely different civilizational context. To this end, she not only employed Chinese-speaking research assistants to translate relevant contributions, but over the course of a decade became proficient in Chinese herself. Her interest is less focused on the writings of Chinese academic specialists, often trained at Western universities, but rather in the broader trends of using Greek classics in public discussions, roughly between 2000 and 2020, though with a brief historical excursion. The book is written for a non-specialist audience and structured into seven thematically arranged chapters. It starts with a concise introduction, in which Bartsch details two differing reception periods in China: while at the end of the Qing Empire Greek classics were used to criticize dynastic rule, they are now often cited in support of the current Chinese political system. The first, rather cursory, chapter traces the reception of Greek thought from Jesuit adaptations of propagating Stoicism as a form of Christianity in China, through Liang Qichao's introduction of the Aristotelian notion of the “citizen” as a political concept, to the celebration of Athens as a “blue”, sea-based power in the famous River Elegy television series of the late 1980s. The following chapters explore how selective readings of Greek antiquity have gained ground among neo-conservative Chinese intellectuals, especially since the early 2000s. These include disputes over the privileged position of supposedly universal concepts and democracy as a model of governance, but also criticism of “instrumental” rationality, which is particularly strong among New Confucian thinkers, who tend to see the craving for Western learning among the protagonists of the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement of 1919 as China's original sin.
Chapters 3 and 5 are particularly relevant since Plato's Republic occupies a special place in Chinese neo-conservative thought. Here a strange marriage between Plato and Confucius becomes obvious, for example in the description of Kallipolis as an ideal city-state, ruled by philosopher-kings on the basis of a “noble lie”, i.e. that people need to be sorted into supposedly natural categories based on their abilities in order to guarantee political stability. Irrespective of competing scholarly interpretations, the example is thus mostly read as supporting traditional Confucian concepts of meritocratic rule and the justification of social hierarchies. The most prominent, and interesting, thinkers are Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang, who in the early 2000s advocated a return to the profound truths of the ancients, based on the interpretations of Leo Strauss, Seth Bernadette, Allen Bloom and others. Besides attempting to overcome the assumed shallowness of modern liberal thought, it is especially the importance of esoteric reading strategies and the impossible position of true political philosophers, who cannot reveal their insights without potentially provoking political turmoil or incurring the lethal wrath of the political leadership that resonated in particular with Liu Xiaofeng. Here Liu, a formerly self-avowed cultural Christian, taps into the complex political positioning of the ancient and modern Chinese shi 士, advisers to political leaders who had to consider questions of personal integrity and the political impactions of their teachings, and who often cloaked their criticisms in historical analogies. While Bartsch does not explore these connections in detail, she does not perceive Liu and others as subtle critics of the current political system, which has strayed far from Marxist egalitarian ideals. In fact, Liu has recently turned his attention to geopolitics and, besides advocating Carl Schmitt's Großraum interpretations, also advanced translations of works by German geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer, who among others coined the concept of Lebensraum.
It is a strange and highly fluid mixture of philosophical and political concepts that Shadi Bartsch traces in her stimulating book. It goes far beyond reductionist discussions of cultural appropriation, pointing instead to the complexities of reinterpreting cultural resources, both domestic and foreign, for contemporary purposes. Whether nationalism is the primary denominator for these adaptations could be debated further. But the book certainly reveals the importance of strategic positioning and political signalling among Chinese (and other) intellectuals, while the argumentative substance of many of the more popular adaptations is by-and-large negligible. And yet, it is precisely these simplistic analogies that gain political traction, while the academic discipline of classics (or sinology for that matter) is becoming increasingly marginalized in the US and elsewhere. The book thus returns several times to the crucial question of whether teaching the complexities of different readings and interpretations of the classics actually leads to irrelevance. Maybe so, but the alternatives seem even less appealing.
