Two notes on Chinese establishment intellectuals’ ever tighter embrace of the theories of the key supporter of the Nazis, the law professor Carl Schmitt, infamous for enthusiastically making up legal arguments to defend Hitler’s extra-judicial killings of political opponents.
- Jackson T. Reinhardt writes about “Totalitarian Friendship: Carl Schmitt in Contemporary China,” Inquiries, 2020, Vol. 12 No. 07.
Reinhardt highlights the literary scholar Zhang Xudong as one of the leading Chinese proponents of Schmitt, the authoritarian theorist of state power — and of the people as unanimously submitting to its self-appointed “Leadership,” the Communist Party:
” … literary theorist Zhang Xudong […] believes that it is impossible for China to construct an organic and particular cultural politics for China in “a [political] space delimited by Western universal values such as science, democracy, and liberty,” because Chinese cultural identity “often appears as an inferior mode [in Western discourse].” Zhang’s Chinese cultural politics is the reaffirmation of “Chinese subjectivity” which is “self-sufficient and not delimited by Western modernity.” The main content of this cultural politic is Schmittian homogeneity. To Zhang, Western values of market and political liberalism make “the genuine ideal of social equality in China… [impossible to] be realized.” This social equality occurs by aligning establishing and aligning a homogeneous character of the citizens in relation towards the state. Zhang concludes that only with the governing leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is China able to foster this egalitarian vision.” (Zhang is a Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU. His involvement in a censorship incident in a journal he edited, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, was discussed on MCLC in late April 2019, in a thread on “Censorship in Chinese Studies.” The censorship, and Zhang’s defense of it, later led to Brill’s termination of publishing the journal). Continue reading