Theorizing Transmission in Chinese Political Thought

Abstract

Most claims to a “Chinese” political theory start and end with Confucianism: whatever else China has to offer political theory and philosophy, surely it relates to the values of filial piety, loyalty to the government, and ritual authority that were laid down by Confucius more than two millennia ago. Typically ignored in this discussion is what Confucius himself actually said about what he was doing. “I transmit but do not create,” 述而不作 Confucius told his students (Analects 7.1). In this talk, I ask: what does the act of transmission itself mean? And in what ways might acts of transmission, so often categorized as merely literary or editorial, also be meaningfully political?

Confucius meant that he did not see himself as an original thinker. He was, instead, a self-styled conduit for perpetuating the ritual practices and splendorous social and literary patterns (wen文) of the declining Zhou 周dynasty. His putative transmission of what are now canonical texts—such as the Record of Rites (Liji 禮記) and the Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經)—was for millennia afterward taken as emblematic of how to confront situations of seemingly intractable civilizational and cultural collapse. Transmission of (largely literary) artifacts took on political significance in the expectation that this was the primary method by which social transformation could be secured and perpetuated, against the repeated failures of state regimes to ensure the right kind of order. For later Chinese thinkers, acts of transmission were constituted mainly by the redaction, editing, and re-publication of classic texts. When the rise of commercial print in early modern China enabled both new voices and new audiences to rise to prominence, transmission began taking on new significance as a mode through which vernacular perspectives—as seen in literature, poetry, or everyday life—could be and were perpetuated through textual and oral means.

Transmission appears conservative, but I argue it is not inherently so. In addressing what I call historical precarity, transmission can also be attuned to the most vulnerable and marginalized experiences in society. Historical precarity is a status of threatened viability for certain ways of life to persist into the future, often but not always through writing that documents their value. The precarity motivating transmission thus suggests that whatever is transmitted stands necessarily in tension with the values and power dynamics of its time. Leveraging this tension, acts of transmission can signal defiance at times of subjugation and shore up identity and community at times of catastrophic loss. Show more