Confucian Governmentality and Socialist Autocracy in Contemporary China

✍ Scribed by Chih-yu Shih

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 225
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In October 2022, the 20th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded, extending Xi Jinping's leadership indefinitely, which many view as a one-party dictatorship. Exploring Confucian and socialist principles, this book examines the relationship between the citizens and leaders in the Chinese autocracy. By applying a Foucauldian twist to a range of topics – from discussing the politics of love and pandemic nationalism to analysing Xi’s personality – it challenges the binary of authoritarianism and democracy. Interdisciplinary in nature, it will appeal to scholars and students working in the fields of politics, international relations, culture studies and critical theory.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Confucian Governmentality and Socialist Autocracy in Contemporary China
Copyright information
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Autocracy and Its People
Reconsidering autocracy and democracy
Preparing people for belonging to communities
Solidarity versus unity
Interrogating the role of the people within autocracy
Translating democracy in the pluriversal world
Methodology: a relational approach
Chapter snapshots
Advance arguments
1 People’s Hearts as the Regime of Regimes
Introduction
Applying governmentality in the Chinese context
Reconsidering the perspectives of the state and society
The perspective of state-and-society in general
‘State-in-society’ and ‘state-as-society’
State-as-society and autocratic governmentality
Counter-governmentality
The people’s hearts (民心)
Counter-governmentality by induction
1. Holding an unreliable attitude toward crops
2. Spreading erratic words that were incompatible with the king’s role
3. Being unforgiving to the losing subjects
4. Failing integrity
5. Committing extravagance and arrogance
6. Executing those who committed misdemeanours heartlessly
7. Being indifferent to the people’s hardship
8. Defecting to rebels
9. Committing self-involvement
10. Setting a bad example to the people
Discussion: cultural continuity in postmodern times
Conclusion
2 Restoring Normalcy during Involution
Introduction
Democratic recession and studies of democracy
Normative liberalism versus law-like Confucianism
People not caring versus people not cared for
The mass line versus deliberative democracy
The mass line
Deliberative democracy
Original sin: in lieu of a solution
Conclusion
3 Governing Hong Kong by Loving the Nation
Introduction
Problematizing love as emancipation
Confucianism and benevolent love
‘One Country, Two Systems’ as benevolent love
‘One Country, Two Systems’ as a system of belonging contested
Conclusion
4 Pandemic Nationalism from Wuhan to across China
Introduction
Surveying the literature on Chinese pandemic nationalism
Wuhan and pandemic nationalism
Chinese nationalisms compared and reconsidered
Relationally embedded nationalism
A metaphoric prescription for nationalism
5 Xi Jinping’s Quest for Acceptance
Political ideas not for emancipation
Xi Jinping’s emergence from the Cultural Revolution
The mass line idea
Buddhist thought
Confucian thought
Xi’s autocratic governmentality
Involution and caveat
Conclusion
6 Relational Democracy of Confucianism
Relations and governability
Systemic governability through ‘relations and balances’
Aborted civic nationalism
Epistemicide in constitutional democracy
Self-restraint as relational democracy
Governability as restraining extremism
Balance of relationships in relational democracy
7 A Pluriversal Dialogue with Ubuntu
Introduction
Joining Ubuntu as unlearning
A pluriversal approach to relational worlds
Confucianism and the rights of nature compared
Ubuntu as the cosmological necessity to nurture
A common disposition for non-interventionism
Conclusion
Conclusion: Balancing Dominance and Belonging
Appendix: The Diagrammatic Logic of Counter-governmentality
References
Index