For more than thirty years, Ci Jiwei has been following the fortunes of China with a keen, philosophical eye. Originally from the mainland and thoroughly familiar with its changing circumstances, he has used his freedom as a professor at the University of Hong Kong to subject China’s society and politics since Mao to sustained philosophical scrutiny. In its course, he has identified a devastating crisis in the country’s condition and a painful deficit. His term for the first has been “nihilism” and for the second “democracy.” That calls for explanation, given the notorious ambiguity of both terms. But when we set out to explore Ci’s use of them, we come face to face with some gaps in his account. The most puzzling among them concerns the relation between China’s crisis and its deficit, that is, between nihilism and democracy.
This lacuna becomes apparent when we confront Ci’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution of 1994 and his subsequent examination of Moral China in the Age of Reform of 2014 with his recent book on Democracy in China.[1] The three volumes form, in essence, a trilogy that takes us from the end of the Maoist revolution to the democratic prospects of today’s China. The volumes are united not only by their concern with recent Chinese history but also by a continuity of style in that they seek to draw philosophical and political lessons from a close diagnosis of the present.[2] In Ci’s words: “I am actually taking China as I find it, and in thus approaching China, I want to form a disciplined view of the range of possibilities or potentialities given the structure and dynamic of present-day reality, and … to see what good things we have reasons to hope for and what bad things we have reasons to fear.” (MCAR, p, 213) But that methodological unity of Ci’s trilogy goes along with a significant discontinuity in its narrative in that the earlier two volumes speak of Chinese society as caught in a nihilistic crisis, while the third focuses on a supposed democratic deficit, bypassing the question of nihilism. We want to ask: How is that discontinuity to be explained? And how is the resulting gap in Ci’s account to be filled?
Ci’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution conceived the history of communist China initially as a simple “movement from utopianism to nihilism.” (DCR, p. 2) In this picture, Maoism with its promise of a communist post-revolutionary society represented the utopianism while the disillusionment with what Maoism actually delivered engendered the nihilism. Ci’s model for this account was, indubitably, Nietzsche’s account of the rise of European nihilism. According to that story, Europe has been for almost two millennia in the grip of Judeo-Christian morality, but nihilism, that “uncanniest guest,” is now knocking at the door. Europe’s highest values are becoming devalued. The disintegration has come from inside the Christian tradition itself, so Nietzsche tells us. The central Christian value of truthfulness – “God is truth” – has undermined Christianity by confronting it with its own historical roots and a newly disillusioned view of the universe.[3]
For Ci there seemed, to begin with, an inviting parallel between the history of Europe and that of China. But he could not avoid the question how far that extended. Maoism had, after all, never possessed the same all-encompassing significance that Christianity had for Europe; its historical course has been so much shorter and the resources of China’s traditional culture have proved more resistant. It is, moreover, far from evident that Maoism disintegrated from inside in the way that Christianity has done. In Europe, the lessons of Christianity had come to be questioned in the name of Christian values. But had Maoism come to be undermined by attachment to its own values? It had been brought down rather by the blatant economic failures of the Maoist policy makers, the indubitable successes of Western capitalism, the reluctance of all kinds of Chinese people to pay more than lip-service to the doctrines of Mao, and the continuing power of the Confucian past. Ci saw himself forced to adapt Nietzsche’s account of nihilism to make it fit the special conditions of China. He came to separate thus a nihilism with Chinese characteristics from the European variety. In China, he said, there had taken place a more complex historical movement which had led “from utopianism to hedonism, with hedonism both as an essential, though sublimated, component of utopianism and, in an overt form, as a sequel of nihilism.” (DCR, p. 3)
Nietzsche, too, had spoken of a link between hedonism and nihilism. Both hedonism and its opposite, a predominance of suffering over pleasure, he had argued, were, in fact, signposts of nihilism. In both cases, he said, “no ultimate meaning is posed except the appearance of pleasure or displeasure… For any healthier kind of man the value of life is certainly not measured by the standard of these trifles.”[4] For Nietzsche, hedonism was, however, just one possible outcome of European nihilism and, perhaps, not the most prominent one. On Nietzsche’s view, European nihilism also manifested itself in the form of socialism, liberalism, and democracy, as a destructive “will to nothingness” and in an anomic inability to make any considered choices. All of those characteristics were showing themselves in European society. Hedonism played a somewhat different role in Ci’s story. It was, he wrote, “an essential, though sublimated, component” of Maoist utopianism which became overt and active with the collapse of the Maoist project when “the whole Chinese nation threw itself into an unprecedented pursuit of wealth and pleasure.” (DCR, p. 3) The outcome was “a moral crisis with no end in sight,” which found China caught “between the lingering idealism of a moribund socialism and the ascendant materialism of a brave new quasi-capitalist world,” as Ci put it twenty years later. (MCAR, p. 24)
Ci and Nietzsche agree that nihilism is a transitional phenomenon not a steady state. It represents, in Ci’s words, “a disoriented condition of existence” and is “the product of a way of life … having come to grief.” (DCR, p. 5) In Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution Ci described this as a process of “desublimation” – appropriating thus a psychoanalytic term to supplement Nietzsche’s vocabulary. To speak of the nihilistic turn as a process of desublimation can mean simply that in it a higher set of values is replaced by a lower or less sublime one – the high values of Maoism by the lower ones of hedonistic consumerism. But In Ci’s use, the term “desublimation” was also meant to indicate that the hedonism as already embedded in yh Maoist ideology, though in a covert and inactive form, and that it became apparent and active only qith the nihilistic destruction of the Maoist ideology. In Moral China Ci went on to identify three aspects of the process of desublimation: a loss of belief in an action-guiding system of ideals, a relaxation of previously maintained prescriptions, and a reordering of desires from other-directed to self-directed ones. (MCAR, p. 28) The nihilistic turn, he argued, leaves “a moral vacuum” which can be filled in various ways. In the case of China, it has generated a distinctively hedonistic outcome because of the inherent characteristics of the Maoism from which it emerged. But what kind of hedonism is this? Ci identifies hedonism with Chinese characteristics as predominantly consumerist in character, rather than aesthetic or sexual or philosophical in nature; as preoccupied, in particular, with the acquisition and consumption of technological goods and the sense of excitement, frustration, and disillusionment that inevitably accompanies them. Among its symptoms were “loss of idealism, relaxation of ideological austerity, cynicism or apathy, and even sheer bad temper.” (DCR, p. 6)
Here we encounter a first lacuna in Ci’s story in that it does not fully elucidate the supposed relation between nihilism and hedonism. Are we to assume that hedonism is inherently nihilistic? Nietzsche suggests as much in the passage just quoted when he says that hedonism fails to posit an ultimate meaning, that it is concerned with mere trifles, and thus not a sign of “health.” But pleasure is surely not inherently nihilistic, nor is its pursuit. A newborn sucking on its mother’s breast is not an incipient nihilist. Is Epicureanism inherently nihilistic? One might argue, of course, that the pursuit of pleasure is inherently nihilistic when it is all-consuming and thus prevents the formation and pursuit of other, more demanding values. But that account conflicts with Ci’s thought that Chinese hedonism is nihilistic because it is the outcome of a specific social transformation: the loss of faith in the Maoist system of values.
If we hold that nihilistic character of hedonism must be understood in terms of its etiology, we need an account of how Chinese hedonism has come about through the collapse of the Maoist ideology. But Ci describes that process only in very broad terms and it is not easy to say what a full account of it would look like. How did “the whole Chinese nation” turn away from Maoism? In what steps? Who led the way? How did the disillusionment spread? And to whom and with what effect? In Ci’s telling, China has, in effect, undergone two nihilistic turns in the course to its present state of crisis. The first occurred when the Chinese lost faith in their own ancient system of cultural values. The result was a turmoil that began in the mid-nineteen hundreds and that lasted for a century. At its end, the Maoists promoted a new system of values which initially seemed to give Chinese society a fresh moral impetus, but then failed them with the result of a second nihilistic wave. The earlier and original nihilism re-enforced moreover the latter, secondary one in that it made a simple return to the ancient tradition impossible.[5] The Confucian tradition contains at the same time elements, Ci hopes, that may eventually help to resolve the post-Maoist condition of nihilism.
Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution advanced what was essentially a historical diagnosis of this condition, not a political one in that it did not consider any remedies for what it perceived to be flawed. The most Ci allowed himself was an expression of hope. “If an atmosphere of futility and sadness envelops the story,” he wrote in its Introduction, “I am also telling it with the hope that understanding this history may provide some of the resources necessary for facing and overcoming it.” (DCR, 23) The hope was the slim one that a sense of the past might suggest what is “likely or improbable in the foreseeable future.” (DCR, 244) It will take a quarter of a century for Ci’s turn from historical to political diagnosis to find its completion in his book on Democracy in China.
Moral China in the Age of Reform, published in 2014, signaled, however, a move in that direction. The book continued to speak of the condition of China as nihilistic. “China did not experience European nihilism,” we read, but “post-communist China fully partakes of the general ethos and fallout of nihilism.” (MCAR, 207) Ci has, however, now begun to address the question how that condition might be overcome. “China’s best hope lies in developing a new primacy of the good for the modern world,” he wrote, but with “an epistemic modesty made necessary by the nihilism of the modern world.” (MCAR, 222) That modesty consists in a willingness to maintain “a bracing dialectic between liberty and the good” which, if successful may turn out to be decisive for “the moral future of China and the world.” (MCAR, 22 and 223)
Ci tackled this issue with the help of a greatly expanded and refined analysis of nihilism. The concluding chapter of Moral China in the Age of Reform advanced a richly articulated account of the modern age and the role of the ideas of freedom and equality in it, of the plasticity of human nature and the formation of the modern subject, of social domination, and the variety and stages of nihilism, and it applied all those notions in attempting to identify “the space of moral possibilities” in which China’s history is now unfolding. The resulting insights are of wide philosophical interest. While Ci’s eyes remain firmly directed towards China, his diagnosis is, in fact, meant to prove illuminating for the state of modern society anywhere.
The modern world, Ci writes in Moral China, has brought about “the irrevocable loss of any basis – cosmocentric , theocentric, or anthropocentric – for openly imposing a unilaterally chosen set of values on human plasticity.” This loss has become “a constraint upon all further struggles” for domination (MCAR, 198) and it will inevitably affect the struggles for domination in China. The pursuit of democracy in China will thus have to proceed under the conditions of an irrevocable nihilism. In order to assess that situation, we must, however, distinguish between three kinds of nihilism. There is, first of all, an “original nihilism,” to be distinguished from the European nihilism that mainly concerned Nietzsche, and then a postmodern, post-Nietzschean variety.
Ci offers us not much of an explanation of what he means by “original “ and “psychologically innocent” nihilism, but the term plays, in any case, no major role in his story. Of crucial importance is for him, on the other hand, the distinction between European and postmodern nihilism. European nihilism, he writes, questioned the existence of a highest value but retained the assumption of there being higher and lower values. It was followed by a postmodern nihilism which denied any distinction between higher ad lower values. Postmodern nihilism is, thus, characterized by “skeptical and ironic epistemic and moral tendencies;” freedom becomes for it “freedom from the good” and equality turns into the right of individuals to seek nothing but their own personal satisfaction.
China has been spared the postmodern variety of nihilism, Ci goes on to argue. The need of the Communist Party to preserve its credentials has led to a nihilism kept incomplete for political reasons. And there persists, in addition, a yearning of ordinary people for the good, for a meaningful liberty and social justice – a yearning rooted in the Confucian tradition – that has contributed to an ethically incomplete nihilism. “For better or worse, this politically and ethically incomplete nihilism is the soil from which all that is good [in China] must grow.” (MCAR, 210) The incomplete nihilism, unlike the complete postmodern nihilism of the West, still retains a place for high values, if not a highest value. And in this “structure of possibilities,” lies the chance of China. “What we may find here is a still vital legacy of the Confucian tradition and indeed of a strand of Maoism.” (MCAR, 216) The highest value of the pre-modern world was the good, while the sovereign value of the modern world is freedom. China can’t and won’t reject modernity but it may be able to offer its own way of maintaining the dialectic of liberty and the good. If it succeeds in that, it will be making a valuable contribution to the world and widen the space of the moral and political imagination for all human life.
What I have summarized all too quickly from Moral China in the Age of Reform is surely a grand vision. But it is precisely this that causes my puzzlement over Democracy in China, the third volume in his trilogy, for none of this vision seems to have carried over from the two earlier volumes of his trilogy into the third. Nihilism makes hardly an appearance in that work; the dialectic of liberty and the good is no longer defined in its terms. The project of the establishment of democratic rule in China is not framed as a struggle over how to contain the nihilism that is an ineradicable feature of modernity and, according to Ci’s earlier account, also of post-Maoist China.
This should not make one conclude that Ci has quietly abandoned what was an integral part of his earlier diagnosis. But it indicates that his trilogy has subtly changed course from being a work of historical analysis to a political discourse. With this redirection, Ci appears to have found it necessary to bracket his concern with nihilism. His immediate reason for this may have been that “historical nihilism” has become a pervasive term of abuse in Xi Jinping’s China.[6] An influential directive – known as “Document 9” and apparently drafted by Xi himself in 2013 – declares that “the goal of historical nihilism, in the guise of reassessing history, is to distort Party history and the history of New China” and it “seeks to fundamentally undermine the CCP’s historical purpose, which is tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance”[7] Ci may well have feared that his book would be dismissed as an exemplar of historical nihilism, if he continued to speak of a nihilism with Chinese characteristics as caused by the Maoist revolution and its failure.
The deeper reason for Ci’s omission may, however, have been an uncertainty over the relation of nihilism to democracy. If Chinese society is characterized by a post-Maoist nihilism, as the first two volumes of his trilogy argue, and if that society is also, as Democracy in China emphasizes, increasingly ready for democracy, we need to know how the apparently divergent elements of nihilism and democracy are to be reconciled. Ci bypasses that question, however, and limits himself in Democracy in China, instead, to his central message that China must become democratic, if it is to avoid a chaotic turn in the not-too-distant future. He thereby avoids the question to what the extent that potential chaos might be a consequence of the nihilism that he still quietly assumes to be part of China’s social condition. That leaves the reader with the demanding task of aligning the steps of Ci’s overall diagnosis. We find ourselves asking whether Chinese nihilism should be considered an obstacle to the turn to democracy or, alternatively, the precondition of its appearance.
According to Ci, China has a democratic deficit which it still needs to overcome. What is worse, he writes in Democracy in China, is that “there is now barely a murmur to hear in or from China supporting democratic transformation.” (DC, 3-4) All we hear are “occasional vague references to undefined ‘democracy’.” (DC, 8) He notes repeatedly “how difficult it has recently become to make a case for democracy in China.” And he concludes that there exists “a set of forces denying democracy’s relevance and suitability for China.” (DC, 1)
That assessment contrasts sharply to another one, advanced by some Chinese scholars and reflected also in some statements coming from Beijing, according to which the country has already achieved a functioning democratic order and one that is, in fact, superior to the Western model. Thus, Wang Shuoguang, a representative of China’s New Left, has argued that the Western style “is a gilded-cage democracy, which should not be, nor can be, the only form of democracy” and that China is practicing an alternative, “representational” form of democracy which “has tremendous untapped potential, signifying that another form of democracy is possible.”[8]
A similar view has found its way into a White Paper published by the State Council in Beijing in December 2021.[9] It bears the remarkable title China. Democracy that Works. “Democracy is a common value of humanity,” the document says, “and an idea that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China.” (WP, 1) Despite its Greek name, democracy is, in fact, an ancient Chinese creation and not of Western origin. (WP, 4) Centuries of feudal autocracy have, however, obscured that fact. But since 1949, the Communist Party has come to develop a new form of democracy which “integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state. It is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works.” (WP, 1) The document goes on to describe in some detail a setup of people’s congresses, of political parties united in a broad patriotic front, regional ethnic autonomy, community-level self-government, multi-candidate elections, and universal suffrage. Democratic consultation operates at many different levels, we read. Government decision-making is transparent. Democratic oversight and judicial supervision are functioning. “Freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration, and religious belief” are guaranteed; human rights are fully protected. (WP, 36)
If these institutional arrangements were actually functioning in the way they are decribed, one would have to concede that a democratic form of government was, indeed, securely in place in China. But the daily news from Tibet, Xinyang, and Hong Kong and, indeed, from the Chinese mainland tell a different story. And the White Paper reveals why that should be so. It argues, plausibly enough that “it is of vital importance for China to choose a path to democracy suited to a vast country with a large population.” (WP, 47) But it goes on to assert, more controversially, that the country must therefore have “a robust and centralized leadership.” And it concludes, still more questionably, that the Communist Party is the one and only guarantee for whole-process people’s democracy. (WP, 8) That a Chinese democracy would have to fit the country’s unique conditions, goes without saying. But the size and diversity of the population suggests that only a federal system with strongly autonomous regional governments could be genuinely democratic. Such a devolution of power is, however, inconceivable for the ruling party. The White paper describes thus how the potentially democratic institutions and processes are to be controlled by the CCP which, in turn, despite certain democratic aspirations, is governed by a small self-selecting group of leaders on which there are, once more, very few democratic constraints. What looks initially like the blueprint for a democratic system turns thus out to be, in effect, the description of a centralized, strongly authoritarian party state. As Xu Jilin has noted: “In this seemingly enlightened ‘responsive authoritarianism,’ political initiative remains always in the hands of the government: its response to and adoption of the popular will is an expression of the enlightened nature of the rulers; if they do not respond or adopt, there is nothing to be done, as there are absolutely no systemic constraints.”[10]
We need to distinguish at this point between two very different ways of thinking about democracy. One conceives it as a certain kind of institutional arrangement, the other understands it as a political ethos. The democratic ethos consists in the belief in a strong, self-reliant, and independence-minded citizenry that is cognizant of its political condition and both willing to engage with it and capable of doing so. Democracy as an institutional system consists, on the other hand, in a governmental machinery that binds rulers and ruled together. The decisive fact is that a “democratic” regime does not necessarily exemplify both. The machinery of a democratic state may be running smoothly even when it serves undemocratic masters and purposes. Whatever aspirations to a democratic form of government there may be in China’s ruling class, there is nothing indicating a readiness to foster a democratic ethos. Those who argue that China has already achieved a fully functioning democratic order, base their claim on the institutional conception of democracy, whereas Ci’s critical take on the state of Chinese politics, derives from an ethical view-point.
Karl Marx once proclaimed democracy to be the secret of all government and there certainly exists a democratic strain in Marxist thinking. But in the Marxist tradition, the idea of democracy has become largely subservient to that of good government – that is, government defined and justified in terms of its ability to satisfy practical human needs. But democracy and good government are by no means the same. The aim of democracy is surely to govern well but there are different ways in which we can seek to govern and democracy is just one of them. We can be sure that the goal of the CCP has been to establish good government in China. We can even say that the CCP has been seeking to establish its legitimacy by providing such government. But what does this show about democracy? We can either declare the pursuit of good government to be inherently democratic or treat democracy as irrelevant to the more important project of good government. Both lines of thought are to be found in Chinese debates about democracy. “While Wang Shuogiuang, with his origins in the New Left, refuses to abandon the flag of democracy, other statists straightforwardly propose replacing the irritations of democracy with good governance or an able government.”[11] What they advocate is, in fact, a rationalized authoritarianism that is preoccupied with “concrete policy objectives” but is, from an ethical perspective, “nihilistic and technocratic.”[12]
It is, of course, a mistake, to think of contemporary China as speaking with one voice. Authors like Wang Shuoguang and even the 2021 White Paper provide evidence that there exists a genuine concern with democracy; but there are also other voices that deny the suitability of democracy for China. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the Party has, moreover, become increasingly Leninist and authoritarian even as it continues to pay lip service to the democratic nature of communism.[13] The pleas for more democracy have, in any case, come to be quieted down. A revivalist Confucian paternalism is also rejecting the democratic way of thinking. And there is finally an influx of ideas from the West, extending from the statism of Hobbes and Carl Schmitt to anti-statist neoliberalism and libertarianism, that are hostile to the striving for a democratic order in China.
Ci notes in Democracy in China that even in the Western world we witness “a major downward reassessment of democracy,” and an overturning of “the postwar balance between democracy and capitalism massively in favor of the latter.” (DC, 1) We face, in other words, “little short of a global devaluation of democracy.” (DC, 2) He thus begins his book with words that reverberate in one’s mind: “We live in extraordinarily challenging times for democracy. In China this challenge takes the form not of democracy’s oligarchic capture, as in America and to a lesser degree in Europe, but of democracy’s seeming loss of value or relevance even before its arrival.” (DC, vii) Ci must be right in thinking that democracy is no longer the unquestioned benchmark by which political systems are assessed. We are beyond the point where every regime is determined to characterize itself as democratic.
In the complex, technological societies in which we now live, power can, of course, not be exercised by single rulers acting on their own. There need to be executive organs with agents ready to act in the expected manner. The executive organs need, moreover, to know the conditions on the ground, whether their orders have been executed, and to what extent their policies have been successful. There need to be channels, in other words, for information to flow upwards and instruction to be passed down; but in our highly articulated society those channels are no longer freely available. The larger, the more complex, the more technological advanced a society is, the greater the need for mediating structures. What states call their democratic institutions serve, in many cases just such a mediating function. The institutions in question are not supported by a democratic ethos; they are practical requirements for the functioning of complex social systems. Going back over the pages of the White Paper from 2021, we can see that it describes its “whole-process people’s democracy” with its “robust and centralized leadership” in terms of an effectively functional system of governance and not as the pursuit of a genuinely democratic ethos. It advances, in other words, a technological and nihilistic conception of democracy in place of a democratic ethos.
We are forced to conclude that the relation between nihilism and democracy is complex. Liberal democracy arose in response to the emergence of European nihilism. As this form of nihilism recognized the possibility of different systems of values with diverging notions of the highest values, politics came to be understood as the mediation between different and competing values. Postmodern nihilism has developed a more ambivalent relation to democracy. It can live with democracy, as we know from the West, but it does so while hollowing it out and undermining it from within. In the end, the form of government most germane to postmodern nihilism is one that dispenses with questions of legitimation and accommodates itself to the regime of technological power and governmental efficiency. The autocratic rule of technological experts – economic, financial, and political – corresponds most closely to the logic of postmodern nihilism. There are local reasons for the current system of autocratic rule in China; technological development is likely to perfect that system rather than undermine it. In this form it may even become a model for the rest of the world as we see the ethos of democracy withering away under onslaught of technological forces.
Technological nihilism may favor an autocratic order, but under modern conditions of complexity such an order can no longer be built around a single person or a small group of them. The autocracy will thus need to be enhanced with democratic elements. But where features of an older democratic order persist under the conditions of complete nihilism, they will come to be overlaid with elements of autocracy. We can see the process at work in different ways in China and the West.
That leaves the question whether technological nihilism is inexorable. Ci never asks himself how European and postmodern nihilism came about in the West, what forces engendered it. The appearance of nihilism is thus left to look like a free-floating event. Nietzsche sought to explain the emergence of European nihilism with the disintegration of Christianity due to its own inner tensions. But that account is too narrow. It may explain the loss of belief in Christianity, but it cannot account for the devaluation of other value systems. It cannot justify, in particular, the postmodern nihilism for which there are no higher values at all. And it can also not account for the nihilist crisis in China. We are left then with the question what made the rise of European nihilism and then of its postmodern variety possible and possibly even inevitable. The answer may be that our nihilism is the result of a turning away from traditional forms of human culture, not a turning from some particular culture and its values. In this process, the concern with values is replaced by a concern with techniques, culture is replaced with technology.[14] This is not a development within Western culture that has spread to other regions of the world, but a development directed against all value-oriented culture.
It would be a mistake to describe this development as due to the coming to dominance of a technological form of thinking. Techniques are not primarily forms of thinking, they are a particular forms of human practice. Our technological turn has its own momentum. If it was the product of technological thinking, it could be reversed by our learning to think in new ways. It is true that technological thinking drives technological development. But technological development also determines how we think. Marx and Engels perceived that dialectical relation between thought and reality. They also understood how technological development engenders nihilism and nihilism, in turn, promotes technological development, even though they lacked as yet that term. In The Communist Manifesto they wrote famously that with the technological changes of bourgeois society ”all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Looking at China, we are forced to conclude that the more the drive to technology takes hold in that country, the more the nihilism already present in it will come to completion and take on a postmodern character. Postmodern nihilism will not be confined to the West; it will prove just as corrosive in China.
Nihilism has a twofold character, as Nietzsche recognized. It is destructive and terrifying but also liberating and exhilarating. Those who lose a religious belief may experience a profound sense of loss or, alternatively, a giddying sense of a new freedom or they may even feel both, as Nietzsche himself probably did. The relation of nihilism to democracy is equally complex. Nihilism can foster but also obstruct and destroy democracy. Much depends on the circumstances: on who experiences the nihilism and what it consists in. The picture of an entire society or an entire nation or culture in the grip of nihilism and, in addition, of the same kind of nihilism is misleading. Who experiences nihilism and in what that experience consists will vary for the members and strata of a society. A ruling elite in the hold of nihilism faced a population that is still holding on an old system of values is bound to reach undemocratic conclusions. A population in a state of nihilism faced with an elite holding to their values may lose its belief in the authority of their rulers and this may predispose them to a democratic politics. Democracy is an offspring of nihilism; but nihilism also destroys democracy when its ethos is undermined. We will eventually come to see how that lesson plays out in China and elsewhere.
Notes
[1] Ci Jiwei, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford University Press 1995 (DCR), Moral China in the Age of Reform, Cambridge University Press 2014 (MCAR), Democracy in China, The Coming Crisis, Harvard University Press 2019 (DC)
[2] The project is akin to and possibly even indebted to Michel Foucault’s undertaking of a diagnosis of the history of the present. For an attempt to pin down the notion of a diagnostic political philosophy see Hans Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good, Cambridge University Press 2014.
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Random House, New York 1967, 1.
[4] Ibid., 35.
[5] For a discussion of Nietzsche’s distinction between a first, original nihilism and a subsequent European variety see Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, MIT Press, Cambridge/Mass. 1988, pp. 17ff.
[6] Wang Yuhang, “The ‘Past and Present Lives’ of Historical Nihilism” Reading the China Dream, April 2021, translated by David Ownby.
[7] “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (Document 9). English translation, China File, No. 8, 2013
[8] Wang Shuoguang, “Representative and Representational Democracy,” Translated by Mark McConaghy and Shi Anshu, Reading the China Dream,)
[9] China: Democracy that works (WP), https://web.archive.org/web/20230227021458/http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2021-12/04/content_77908921.htm
[10] Xu Jilin, “The Specter of Leviathan: A Critique of Chinese Statism since 2000,” in Xu Jilin, Rethinking China’s Rise. A Liberal Critique, translated by David Ownby, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 2018, p. 33.
[11] Ibid., p. 34.
[12] Ibid., p. 37.
[13] https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/kevin-rudd-xi-jinping-china-and-global-order
[14] Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1965
