China News Agency, Beijing, November 17. Question: How to understand China's road from the perspective of "civilization-country"?
——Interview with Zhang Guangsheng, professor of Renmin University of China and director of the Institute of Chinese and Foreign Politics, Thought and Culture
Author Xu Huangguan Liu Yueqing
The Communist Party of China led the people to walk out of the Chinese-style modernization road and created a new form of human civilization. It is meaningful to explain the formation and development of the Chinese road from the perspective of civilization.
Why is contemporary China not an ordinary "nation-state" but a "civilization-state"?
What is the height and breadth of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the path of Chinese-style modernization in the sense of civilization?
China News Agency "West Questions" recently exclusively interviewed Zhang Guangsheng, a professor at the School of International Relations at Renmin University of China and director of the Institute of Chinese and Foreign Political Thought and Culture.
The interview transcript is summarized as follows:
China News Agency reporter: You proposed that China is not a "nation-state" in the general sense but a "civilization-state". What does this mean?
Zhang Guangsheng:
Civilization-State is not only a modern translation and interpretation of the term Tianxia-State in the traditional Chinese sense, but also a conceptual outline of the characteristics of modern China that are different from European nation-states.
The concept of a typical nation-state, or nation-state, was invented in modern Europe to get rid of the political-religious dilemma of the Christian political system.
The nation-state takes sovereignty as its core connotation. Sovereignty overrides religious and social conflicts and builds a country for the people within a certain territory. Such a country only provides the society with the "bottom line security" of "freedom where there is no law". promise.
The core connotation of "civilization-state" is based on security, aiming to build a more noble upward good and a more in-depth harmonious state.
Compared with the European nation-states, China is not only a community of national destiny, but also a community of Chinese wisdom and civilization. This community is different from the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It disintegrated under the impact of the wave of construction, and modern China has continued the traditional Chinese world-state unified political civilization in twists and turns.
The dance drama "Five Stars Out of the East" was staged at the Shenzhen Grand Theater.
Chen Wenshe
China News Agency reporter: What characteristics of traditional Chinese civilization are highlighted by the concept of "civilization-country" or "world-country"?
Zhang Guangsheng:
Here I want to use the concept of civilization-country to emphasize an overall characteristic, that is, values such as benevolence, righteousness, and propriety are practiced in the framework of China-Tianxia civilization.
The characteristic of this framework is that "China", as the pivotal organization for the cohesion of ruling power, maintains an organic relationship with the civilization of "Tianxia".
What does "take the country and the world" mean?
There is a sentence in "Poetry Daya King Wen" related to "the change of Yin and Zhou", saying that "although Zhou is an old state, its life is restored", which means that "Zhou" was promoted from Fang State under the leadership of the central state "Shang". It is the new central country that leads the other countries in the world under the destiny.
The word "tianxia" is not only a noun to express the space in which people live in the world, but more importantly, it indicates what "Yi Ben" said, "Look at astronomy to observe time changes; observe humanities to transform into the world. The connotation of "civilization" creation and dissemination.
Wang Guowei, a famous modern Chinese scholar, believes that Zhou’s system of ritual rule shaped the whole of China into an ethical community that respects heaven, honors rituals, respects morality, and protects the people.
If the "feudal unification" ritual system of the Western Zhou Dynasty is the origin of China's "politics and religion" order of "combining the country with the world", then after Qin merged with the six countries and changed feudalism into prefectures and counties, the Han inherited the Qin system and aided Confucianism Incorporated into the law, opened up the "big unification" political civilization of the cooperation between Confucianism and Legalism in China.
In such a state-religious order, in terms of external structural principles, the combination of the hereditary system of the monarchy and the selection of officials from the common people made the principle of concentration of ruling responsibilities of the "family under heaven", that is, the principle of "taking responsibility for the country", completely different from that of The principle of "government by the worthy" of "the public world" is matched.
As far as the internal spirit of order is concerned, under the spiritual principle of "there is a world" established in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the "mandate of heaven-people-based", the "always not easy" teaching of "repair, order, governance, and peace" advocated by Confucian classics The teaching of "changing with time" that governs the "law, technique, and power" emphasized by the Legalists.
The traditional Chinese civilization commented on the pros and cons of a generation of dynasties, mainly to see whether it can allow more talented people to unite around the "responsible for the country", from protecting the country to protecting the world, and jointly fulfilling the morality of governing the country, respecting the sky and protecting the people and political responsibility.
Since modern times, the "Tianxia" order centered on China has been challenged by the aggressive West in terms of both material and technological capabilities and cultural and educational radiation capabilities. The goal, for China, requires continuous theoretical thinking and strategic responses.
In Zhang Zhidong's "Encouraging Learning", the theoretical context of "protecting the species", "protecting the education", and "protecting the country" is "concentric", which is the context of Chinese civilization-the state.
In the tradition of the Chinese world-country, Huazhong is not a simple concept of physical anthropology, but refers to the ethnic group transformed by Chinese wisdom and civilization, so it is said that "preserving the species must first protect the education"; the core of the Huaxia religion is China The sages discovered out of their outstanding natural rationality, the human relationship teaching of kissing, respecting, and sages. China refers to the "central country" that can protect and promote the wisdom and civilization of China. ".
China has a profound tianxia-state tradition.
Liang Qichao once pointed out that, compared with the West, China's traditional "Ping Tianxia" has the characteristics of "cosmopolitanism", "people-oriented doctrine" and "socialism".
The reason why the self-consciousness of "protecting education" and "promoting education" that explores the new path of moralism and tianxia has been thriving, because China not only wants to revive the national strength, but also revive the glory of civilization, which is why China chooses the road of socialism one of the reasons.
The audience visited in front of the "Sunrise in the East - From Shikumen to Tiananmen" historical group paintings at the First Memorial Hall of the Communist Party of China.
Photo by Yao Jun
China News Agency reporter: Since modern times, in response to external shocks, the Communist Party of China has led the people to criticize and inherit traditional Chinese civilization, and created a new form of human civilization with Chinese-style modernization. How do you understand socialist China as the "inheritance" of civilization-country? With "Qixia"?
Zhang Guangsheng:
The Communist Party of China led the Chinese people to embark on the road of rejuvenation through socialist revolution, construction and reform and opening up. This is a key historical link in China's response to the impact of the West in modern times and its pursuit of building a "new central country".
Since modern times, in the process of responding to the impact of the West, China has initiated self-reform processes such as the Westernization Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, and the Preparatory Constitutional Movement. Republican Revolution.
Today we find that the abolition of the imperial examination system is a major blow to traditional Chinese political civilization.
The key to the political civilization mechanism of Confucian-Legal cooperation is how to combine the family world with the public world.
The establishment of the Great Unification not only relies on the monarchy, but also on the culture, education and scholar selection system. This is the significance of aiding Confucianism and law after the Han Dynasty.
The reform of the Qing Dynasty abolished the imperial examination system, thus destroying the basic structure of Confucian-Legal cooperation combining "public world" and "family world".
The classic educational tradition of "repairing Qi and governing peace" shared by the monarch and the literati lost its institutional support. It was a matter of time before the monarch degenerated into a purely Legalist "new monarch-tyrant" and the literati degenerated into a "new gentleman-oligarch".
The ensuing confrontation between the centralization of power by the monarch and the local autonomy of the gentry and warlords, and the confrontation between the Manchus and the Han people were all directly related to the destruction of the elite cultural consensus brought about by the abolition of the imperial examination system.
The Qing Dynasty died not only from the "false constitution" of building the royal cabinet, but also from the "true revolution" of the imperial examination system, an elite education and selection mechanism that transcended ethnicity.
To evaluate the gains and losses of China's coping strategy, whether to grasp the key points is a key.
The main reason for the failure of self-improvement by learning from the Western representative system during the Republic of China was that the crisis of the traditional "world-country" was not directly faced as a key issue.
The traditional imperial examination system is considered dead, but what mechanism does the country use to educate and select talents for governing the country?
The monarchy is considered illegal, so elections are carried out according to Western law, and the president is elected, or the party that wins the parliamentary election forms the cabinet to assume the responsibility of governing, but the person selected solely by procedural rationality has neither moral authority nor political power. Political authority simply cannot resist the manipulation of money and violence.
China at this stage not only failed to complete the mission of building a unified country to resist external humiliation, but on the contrary, warlords, gentry and politicians also joined in and became the source of division and poverty within the Chinese state.
Fortunately, China has not disintegrated its own "empire" and evolved into a purer "nation-state", because of a critical inheritance of the civilization-state tradition, that is, the revolutionary party.
The lesson Sun Yat-sen summed up from the experience of previous revolutionary failures is that "the revolutionary army cannot rise and the revolutionary party will disappear".
An electoral party with only procedural rationality cannot undertake the responsibility of unifying the country and resisting foreign aggression; a well-organized revolutionary party must be composed of people with lofty ideals who have the mission of "old state and new destiny" to command the revolutionary army, otherwise the revolution The army will degenerate into a warlord.
In the context of the collapse of the traditional Chinese civilization-state system, the advanced organization that is expected to lead China to realize the "old state and new destiny" can only be a new type of revolutionary party.
The result of the actual practice of the Kuomintang is that "there is an army but no party", and it is the Chinese Communist Party that finally played the pivotal role of a vanguard that undertook the historical mission of social revolution and national construction.
In China, the role of the Communist Party in the entire political system is different from that of European and American traditions. Its path to shaping "New China" is to first establish the party, and then rebuild the army and the country through the political party.
On October 1, the National Day National Flag Raising Ceremony was held at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Photo by Han Haidan
Finally, we noticed that General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in his speech at the meeting celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, “After the Opium War in 1840, China gradually became a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. Suffered an unprecedented catastrophe. Since then, realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has become the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation."
The generalization of "the country is humiliated, the people are in trouble, and the civilization is dusty" naturally reminds us of the response strategy of "protecting the country, the species, and the religion" proposed by the insightful people at the beginning of modern times.
Looking back at the tortuous development of China's "world-country" will help us better understand the road to rejuvenation of the Chinese nation led by the Communist Party of China. The rise of contemporary China and the opening up of a Chinese-style modernization path are not European-style nation-states. The rise of China is the revival of Chinese civilization-the country at a new height and breadth.
(Finish)
Respondent profile:
Zhang Guangsheng, Professor of the School of International Relations, Renmin University of China, Senior Researcher of the National Development and Strategy Research Institute of Renmin University of China, CITIC Reform and Development Research Institute, Director of the Institute of Chinese and Foreign Political Thought and Culture of Renmin University of China.