The Call is Coming From Inside The House: Chinese Classical Liberalism Eats Its Own Tail
Soon after then term-limited, now life-tenured Xi Jinping ascended to the Chinese presidency, the Central Committee General Office circulated Document No. 9 amongst the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership. The communique outlined “seven perils” that pose existential risks to the CCP, including “Western constitutional democracy,” ““universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and ““nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.” 1 At first glance, the dichotomy drawn by Document No. 9 between Eastern and Western values appears sound. Historically, China has been an imperial state, in which classically liberal concepts were and are alien. However, closer examination of ancient Chinese philosophies reveals a more nuanced reality.
Arguably the first classically liberal thinker anywhere, the sixth century BCE Chinese philosopher Laozi (also known as Lao Tzu) articulated ideas that would only be discovered again in the West more than two thousand years later, during the Scottish Enlightenment. And yet, China did not become a classically liberal society. Although Laozi’s Dao De Jing (sometimes written as Tao Te Ching) embodies a philosophy of humility, restraint, spontaneous order, and equilibrium, its primary contribution to Chinese governance was the basis it provided for Han Feizi’s deeply illiberal Legalism, as reflected in the work Han Feizi. 2 The trajectory of Daoist (also referred to as Taoist) thinking from liberty to authoritarianism, offers a lesson for classical liberals about the potential for classical liberalism to destroy itself.
Classical liberals must heed Daoism’s cautionary tale. Ideological drift has, arguably, twisted modern classical liberalism into a purely economic philosophy. In turn, this inertia may be driving a populist backlash that, like Han Feizi’s Legalism, has the potential to yank classical liberalism from the philosophical soil, root and branch.
