Advertisement
Advertisement
US President Joe Biden speaks at a virtual democracy summit. Photo: AFP
Opinion
Martin Powers
Martin Powers

There was a time when China and the US were both liberal

  • The usual assumption is that liberal ideals are uniquely Western; but Enlightenment writers borrowed freely from Asian sources
  • Many liberal ideals can be found in The Morals of Confucius, including the primacy of reason, equality, and openness to opposing views

Liberalism is much in the news these days, but there is little agreement on what the term means.

Joe Biden’s Democracy Summit last December was widely criticised for its double standards, with several of the invited nations embracing some variety of ethno-nationalist populism. Commenting for Al Jazeera on these illiberal invitees, former Barack Obama official Bruce Jentleson worried that the summit might damage, rather than enhance US credibility worldwide.

But democracies aren’t always liberal. Foreign Affairs recently republished Fareed Zakaria’s 1997 essay which showed how elections could install illiberal governments while maintaining the formal trappings of a democracy. Zakaria distinguished between plain democracies – which can be illiberal – and “Constitutional liberalism”, with its institutional checks.

Between the lines he implied another distinction between the Western liberal tradition, which he traced back to the Greeks, and that of non-Europeans.

“In countries not grounded in Constitutional liberalism … diverse groups with incompatible interests gain access to power and press their demands. Political and military leaders … realise that to succeed they must rally the masses behind a national cause. The result is invariably aggressive rhetoric and policies, which often drag countries into confrontation and war.”

West cheers for democracy in Ukraine while ignoring its slow demise at home

Looking back some 20 years later, many Americans would have difficulty deciding if Zakaria’s description applies to some banana republic or to their own nation, where one of two political parties openly promotes far-right populism.

Arguably, much of the confusion around the term “liberal” comes from the assumption that liberal ideals are uniquely Western, but this assumption is wrong. In a South China Morning Post op-ed, as well as in his new book, Chandran Nair finds that White Privilege has distorted our master narratives in business, education, and in history, where key contributions by non-white nations have been erased from the record.

China’s contribution to the liberal tradition is one of those deleted chapters. In the end we will understand liberalism properly only by reinserting China back into history.

Mencius was an itinerant Chinese philosopher and sage, and one of the principal interpreters of Confucianism. Photo: Getty Images

What did “liberal” mean in the beginning?

Up until the late 17th century, “liberal” in England simply meant “generous”. The term did not take on its modern sense until reformers began to push back against the political norms of that period, which were distinctly ungenerous.

The leaders of most European nations then were absolutely convinced that their religion was the only true one. Their political ideals, inherited from the Greeks, were beyond question: the aristocracy should rule, and commoners should keep their place.

The same thinking applied to foreign affairs: inferior nations should be subject to European states, as commoners were subject to the nobility. Non-Christian nations remained a threat until they converted to Christianity.

In that zero-sum world, everything was decided by race, rank, and religion. Compromise was difficult, so wars and repressions were endless. Countless innocents suffered and died. Each nation blamed the other for atrocities, hoping to gain popular support for more wars.

The ‘liberal’ world order is dead. What will replace it?

Your school textbook more than likely told you that this madness inspired reformers to embrace reason, giving rise to toleration, liberal thought and the Enlightenment. What your textbook did not tell you is that John Locke’s first Letter Concerning Toleration acknowledged that the Turks (Muslims), already practised toleration, while Europeans did not.

The sense of liberal as “tolerant” shows up most clearly in the writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Believing that facts and reason could resolve disputes, they preferred diplomacy to war, but that meant listening to your enemy.

In Jefferson’s eyes, Benjamin Franklin was the embodiment of that ideal: “his temper was so amiable and conciliatory, his conduct so rational … that reasonable disposition sensible that advantages are not all to be on one side, yielding what is just and liberal …”

Traditional European thinking supposed that other nations, religions, or ranks were simply wrong. Yet years before Locke wrote his letters on toleration, the idea that people of all backgrounds could be reasonable was clearly stated in a book called the Morals of Confucius. The chapters of that book taught that the purpose of government was to promote the people’s happiness.

When weighing policy, consider all sides of the argument. Everyone has a duty to correct superiors when they are in the wrong

That meant governing with reason by attending to the facts of the case and considering all sides of the argument when weighing policy. The book taught that everyone has a duty to correct superiors when they are in the wrong; reflect carefully on their emotions; even when aroused for a good cause; and consider carefully the consequences of their actions.

All these values can be found in the later writings of leading Enlightenment thinkers, sometimes echoing the words of the Morals.

Ben Franklin published excerpts from the Morals in the Pennsylvania Gazette almost 40 years before the American Revolution. After reading translations of official correspondence, Samuel Johnson judged Imperial China’s tolerance for oppositional views much greater than that in Europe. James Madison had a portrait of Confucius hanging in his home, and Thomas Jefferson had an entire encyclopaedia on China.

These are just a few strokes in what later became a monumental mural, but before long the whole thing got whitewashed by Western historians. If we follow Nair’s advice and reinsert non-white contributions into European history, contemporary claims about liberal and illiberal government take on a different coloration.

A US dollar banknote depicting American founding father Benjamin Franklin and a China yuan banknote with an image of the late Chinese chairman Mao Zedong. Photo: Reuters

Liberalism and ethno-liberalism

Ben Franklin’s Confucian liberalism requires us to review all the facts, so let us consider the tragedy taking place in Ukraine.

In a March 1 online interview Noam Chomsky charged that the “Russian invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime,” but also observed that multiple former US officials were opposed to military escalation, taking into consideration the costs of war and the effects of sanctions on innocent people.

In contrast to those officials, Joe Biden’s administration demands that other nations apply sanctions exactly as America does. China holds that a lasting peace can be brokered only by considering the legitimate security needs of all concerned parties. Which sounds more like Confucius or Ben Franklin?

Along with climate crisis, space debris poses a global threat. China has been consistent in calling for worldwide cooperation around climate change. According to David Dodwell, China also seeks a multilateral solution to the problem of space debris, but the US prefers to sign agreements only with its own kind.

The list could go on, but by Enlightenment standards what we find is mottled shades of grey, not black and white. China has its faults, yet some of its policy positions resonate with Franklin’s Confucian liberalism, while some of America’s actions call to mind the race, rank, and religion standard of pre-Enlightenment Europe.

I am not the first to notice this. In his book Bland Fanatics Pankaj Mishra reviewed several writers who traced the mixing of liberal ideals with illiberal policy over time.

Citing Samuel Moyn on human rights, he wrote that what differentiated the Western model from Asian, African and Latin American rights organisations “was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water.”

What Moyn described is fully consistent with what imperial China regarded as the “people’s happiness”. In fact Western nations first learned about state aid for the vulnerable, progressive tax policies, no-interest loans for in-need farmers, heavy infrastructure spending and other liberal policies from Chinese sources, also during the 1730s.

This Confucian tradition naturally aligns itself with Franklin and Elinor Roosevelt’s New Deal style of liberalism, but the word “liberal” these days more often refers to free market liberalism.

According to Mishra, that brand of liberalism easily slides into populism. During the Thatcher regime for instance, “fresh populist consent had to be mobilised – often through moral panics about immigrants – for the imposition of harsh neo-liberal policies”.

By repeatedly conflating the word ‘liberal’ with the West, the term becomes a dog whistle for ‘white’

That understanding of “liberal” no longer describes an open-minded consideration for the legitimate needs of all concerned parties, much less the people’s happiness. Instead, it has become a virtue-signal for predominantly white nations and their clients.

By repeatedly conflating “liberal” with “The West,” the term “liberal” becomes a dog whistle for “White,” burying the scandal of its roots in the political theories of East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East.

It occurs that an ideology that appeals to race, rank, and religion over the facts might better be labelled “ethno-liberalism” which is, by definition, illiberal.

The odd thing is, there is nothing very American about ethno-liberalism. In his 2020 book Has China Won?, Kishore Mahbubani wrote: “Above all else, America is known to be a rational society, with many competing points of view debated all the time.”

“Yet in Washington, DC, today, it is virtually impossible to make the case that China is not a military threat to America. Any objective future historian will see this reality much more clearly.”

America doesn’t have to be this way. Last year Joshua L Cherniss published his book Liberalism in Dark Times. Tracing liberal thought in Europe and America through the centuries, he described a moral ideal that recalls Jefferson’s description of Franklin:

“Tempered liberalism embraces ethical moderation, seeking to maintain balance between competing demands and opposed extremes. This involves … a practice of ‘trimming’: constant self-correction in response to changing circumstances and resistance to passions that may throw one off balance.”

Whether he knew it or not, ethical moderation and constant self-correction are among the core Confucian values prized by Western thinkers such as William Temple and Benjamin Franklin.

Since liberalism originally preferred diplomacy to war, this shared history offers grounds for negotiation between the two great powers, should they choose to practice liberal norms. Maybe then both the US and China can be liberal again.

Martin Powers has written three books on the history of social justice in China, two of which won the Levenson Prize for best book in pre-1900 Chinese Studies. His recent book, China and England: the preindustrial struggle for justice in word and image, published by Routledge, traces the impact of Chinese political theory and practice on the English Enlightenment. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Michigan

10