Modern Chinese Political Thought
Authors: Jenco Leigh 
Published: February 2014

Although debates abound as to when “modernity” in China began, modern Chinese political thought is here taken to mean thought on politics (broadly conceived) produced after the late 19th century, when Chinese intellectuals began a critical evaluation of their received traditions in light of domestic instability, the success of Japanese modernization, and growing European influence via military, missionary, commercial, and intellectual interaction. These early evaluations had a crucial impact on later republican and communist ideology, because reformers throughout the 20th century continued to wrestle with dilemmas first articulated in the 1890s: What is China’s place in a wider global order, now that it is seen as one among many nation-states rather than as the unifying center for civilization? How might it transform its society and economy, given the increasing pace of globalization, the pressures of industrialization, and the need to sustain a growing population? What role might be played by “traditional” Chinese thought in the modern age, and how should that thought be assessed? As these questions show, Chinese thought during this era was typically holistic, and its inquiry encompasses diverse disciplines such as literature, history, sociology, economics, and philosophy. This article attempts to present “Chinese political thought” not only as an object of historical research but also as a self-reflexive and self-referential body of work that grounds philosophical discussion and political inquiry still meaningful today. My focus therefore will be on primary and secondary work concerned with normative and conceptual questions related to political philosophy; I therefore offer only a selective rather than comprehensive overview of work in modern Chinese intellectual history. Early studies of this period, such as Ssu-yu Teng and John King Fairbank’s China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Teng and Fairbank 1954a, cited under English-Language Anthologies), misleadingly reduced China’s political thought to a response to the “Western impact.” The works of Benjamin Schwartz, Joseph Levenson, Thomas Metzger, Lydia H. Liu, and others have shown the degree to which these questions emerged out of a interaction between existing concerns and categories: Chinese scholars interpreted, with growing sophistication and in novel ways, culturally diverse rather than monolithically “Western” ideas and institutions. Indeed, one striking feature of thought during most of this period is its richness and diversity. Far from parroting official orthodoxy, political thinkers at the turn of both centuries embrace emerging popular media—whether newspapers or the Internet—to express a huge range of critical perspectives. To emphasize this diversity, this article focuses on nonofficial thought, with topics on Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Chinese Communist thought covered elsewhere in this series of Oxford Bibliographies. Finally, although modern Chinese political thought typically refers to thought on politics produced by Chinese people during the modern era, it also includes work by non-Chinese scholars and by Chinese scholars (inside and outside the People’s Republic of China) working in English and other languages, who recognize the worth of Chinese political ideas for modern academic study.