We know that the days when China’s Communist rulers quoted Lenin, Marx and Mao are long gone. If anything, those former Communist saints are something of an embarrassment to today’s capitalist-mandarin coalition. After all, it governs what has become arguably the most successful state capitalist country on earth.
But who would have thought that many of them are gravitating towards a long-dead German philosopher who admired Adolf Hitler? On second thought, maybe it’s not that surprising. Remember, China has now been accused of genocide in dealing with its Uighur minority.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has markedly shifted the ideological center of gravity within the Communist Party. The limited tolerance China had toward dissent has all but dissipated, so a new group of scholars have started defending the party’s hardening policies. Only with a heavy hand, they believe, can a nation secure the stability required to protect prosperity.
China’s new statists have come to admire the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. He joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and, though he was only a Nazi Party member for three years, his anti-liberal jurisprudence had a lasting impact, helping to justify Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of Jews and political opponents.
Why has a Nazi thinker garnered such a lively reception in China? Schmitt gives pro-Beijing scholars an opportunity to anchor the party’s legitimacy on nationalism and external enemies rather than the notion of class struggle.
Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.”
Xu Jilin, Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang are three of the most prominent Chinese political philosophers who have actively introduced Schmitt to China. Schmitt, they maintain, provides the Chinese with new theoretical resources with which to consider the issue of political legitimacy in China.
Their ideas have energized the political science, philosophy, and law departments of China’s universities. Chen Duanhong, a law professor at Peking University, called Schmitt “the most successful theorist” to have brought political concepts into his discipline. “His constitutional doctrine is what we revere,” Chen wrote in 2012.
The German jurist, he argued, distinguishes between state and constitutional norms. “When the state is in dire peril,” Chen wrote, citing Schmitt, state leaders have the right to suspend constitutional norms, “especially provisions for civil rights.” This was Schmitt’s notorious doctrine known as the “state of exception.”
Chen’s argument is a straight-forward Schmittian defence of China’s decision to impose a national security law on Hong Kong last June. In a keynote address at the “2020 Constitution Day Seminar,” held there on Dec. 4, Chen argued that the state is a security system, necessary to guarantee the safety of the individual and the group. The sovereign protects the state; this is the “law of national self-preservation.”
Chen illustrated the importance of sovereignty, national security, constitutional rule, and the state of exception by citing U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s actions leading up to the Civil War, when he overrode legal niceties and Supreme Court objections to oppose the secession of the Southern states, only after which, Chen insists, did the United States truly “become a nation.”
Jiang Shigong, Chen’s colleague, has made a similar case. Jiang, who worked as a researcher in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2008, used Schmitt’s ideas extensively in his 2010 volume, China’s Hong Kong: A Political and Cultural Perspective, to resolve tensions between sovereignty and the rule of law in favour of the Communist Party.
Chen and Jiang are “the most concrete expression” thus far of China’s turn to Schmittian ideas, Ryan Mitchell, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in a paper last year. They are the vanguard of the statist movement, which supplies the rationale for the authoritarian impulses of China’s leaders.
The perceived threat of invasion, or at a minimum suspicion of outsiders, continues to inform contemporary politics in China. Such anxiety lends credence to the anti-liberal theories of Carl Schmitt, for whom all politics came down to a distinction between friends and enemies.
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