Haiyan Lee
Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature
Institution: Stanford University
Haiyan Lee is the Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (Stanford, 2007), winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford, 2014), and A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (Chicago, 2023).
Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”
“Civilization” in its latest incarnation in mainland Chinese discourse is an ideological construct that orders the world in distinct civilizations and provides historical depth and purpose to Han-majoritarian and populist agendas and neo-imperialist ambitions. It is not a rejection of universalism per se, but a rejection of the liberal world order and U.S. dominance, and a drive to substitute China’s own visions and values as the basis of a new universalism.
There are two overlapping civilizational discourses in contemporary China: the tianxia 天下discourse led by Zhao Tingyang et al, and the China model discourse led by Zhang Weiwei et al. The former proposes a hierarchical world order presided over by a benevolent Chinese state that values peace, order, reciprocity, and harmony and deprioritizes freedom, equality, and competition. The latter envisions a bipolar world order in which China will be on par with the West in both material wealth, technological advancement, and cultural prestige.
In both discourses, China is an amalgamation of nation-state and civilization-state that combines the strengths of both. As a nation-state, China accepts the principle of sovereign equality and human rights, abjuring the tribute or “Eastphalian” system of imperial China and drawing a line at racial capitalism which powers capitalist democracy. As a civilization-state, China’s political culture of familism and state paternalism (家国同构) will hierarchically guarantee stability, meritocracy, moral and performance legitimacy (民心向背), state-society continuity, and common prosperity. All of which can be summed up in the official foreign policy shibboleth: “Community of common destiny for mankind”(人类命运共同体).
Civilization is not a word that appears often in my work, but nationalism is. My research and teaching interest in nationalism and all its mutations, including its dialectical relationship with universalist ideologies, is probably where my work intersects most directly with new civilizationism. It is commonly repeated that China is a civilization pretending to be a nation (initially formulated by political theorist Lucian Pye, most recently parroted by Xi Jinping). Perhaps for that reason, Chinese nationalism has always had a strong civilizational bent, whereby the state is seen as more of the guardian of an ancient, unbroken civilization than of a nation or ethnos whose identity/continuity has been less than certain.
As a literary scholar, I don’t usually write about nationalism or any political ideology directly. Instead, my work has been driven by a desire to understand China’s painful transition from empire to nation-state and the consolidation of one-party authoritarianism at the level of value, structure of feeling, and identity. My work intersects with intellectual history and political philosophy to the extent that I’m centrally preoccupied with the ideology of statist nationalism and the related problems of hierarchy and equality, inclusion and exclusion. I’ve also done some work on the external ambitions of Chinese nationalism, or its worlding discourse. I plan to extend this line of work as my contribution to the new civilizationism project.