Chinese thinkers plunder the classical world
PLATO GOES TO CHINA The Greek classics and Chinese nationalism SHADI BARTSCH 304pp. Princeton University Press. £28 (US $33).
BORIS J OHNSON’ SDEVO TION to classical quotations made him an anomaly among twenty-first-century western politicians, although his successor Liz Truss’s Otho-like tenure ended with her quoting Seneca on the steps of 10 Downing Street. Both leaders might find a kindred spirit or two in China. As Shadi Bartsch’s erudite book shows, while the Greek and Roman classics, and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in particular, may have faded in London and Washington, they continue to exert an influence in political circles in Beijing.
Plato Goes to China is a study of Chinese academics and policymakers who draw on interpretations of classical texts. Among Bartsch’s themes are the ways in which Chinese thinkers seek to combine texts such as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics with Confucian ideas of, for example, harmony and benevolence. Those thinkers range from subtle and sophisticated analysts to outright political hacks, but what they have in common is a genuine belief that the worlds of Greece and (to a lesser extent) Rome produced ideas worth drawing on and fighting over, particularly when interpreting the politics of the twenty-first century.
Bartsch makes an important distinction: this book is not about Chinese scholars who are primarily analysts of the classics (classicists who happen to be Chinese, in other words, and who could equally be British or Bulgarian or Brazilian). There aren’t huge numbers of Chinese scholars of the classics, but there is a respectable cohort, and there are centres of research specialization such as Changchun in northeast China, which has become well known for classics, Egyptology and the study of the ancient Near East. Bartsch’s focus is on a rather different group of writers: Chinese scholars and polemicists (sometimes overlapping categories) who draw on particular readings of the Greek and Roman classics to make arguments about political systems in general and the superiority of China’s system over liberal democracy in particular. Bartsch is a distinguished classical scholar based at Chicago, and over the years has been keen to understand how the world beyond the West reads the classics. To do so she dedicated a decade to learning Chinese so that she could read contemporary critiques in the original language. That dual expertise makes this a valuable volume.
Although the book briefly covers the long history of Chinese engagement with classical learning, from the Jesuits onward, it does not dwell on the era before 1989. (A fascinating study of an eighteenthcentury Chinese scholar of Latin, Li Zibiao, The Perils of Interpreting by Henrietta Harrison, was reviewed in the TLS, April 8, 2022.) Bartsch takes the Tiananmen killings as a
