/lit/ - Literature

>>20118955
>Surprised Carl Schmitt isn't on that list, but I guess he leaves the essential parts of politics up to Wang Huning.
From what I've read about Chinese interest in Schmitt (which is considerable in the academies), it's mostly as a way of exploring Western liberal democratic political systems, as a lot of Schmitt's writings was focused on criticizing the various shortcomings of them. What's fairly unique about Schmitt, unlike a lot of Western theorists writing about liberalism, is that he doesn't try to justify it or by implication criticize illiberal systems, which is obviously attractive to Chinese intellectuals.

And I'm sure you know this already, but for Schmitt, the two most important entities within a democratic state are the state itself and the leader of that state. He argues that protecting the state is the ultimate goal, and this responsibility lies in the sovereign. And the sovereign is the person who decides what he terms "the state of exception" -- the moment at which the sovereign choose to move outside the rule of law in order to protect the state. This is clearly fairly autocratic, but he conceives of this type of autocracy existing within and even superseding a democratic state. Like, if you actually tried to overthrow the U.S. government in a serious way that posed an existential threat to the state, the "rule of law" would be suspended, so what Schmitt is describing is in operation in Western liberal societies.

His other key contribution is "the concept of the political" which broadly describes the idea that "politics" extends to anything in which the friend/enemy distinction exists. That's almost common sense today, but you can generally read it justify the state acting in all realms, because the state has authority over the political, and the political is defined by conflict, not context.

Both these ideas are broadly appealing to China because they promote the idea that protecting the state itself is the most important goal; that a single leader has essentially unlimited authority to accomplish this goal; and the state is justified in using its authority in any aspect in which "politics" can exist, where politics is very broadly defined. So it provides an academic and even logical framework to justify a fairly undemocratic "democratic" state.