We tend to think of classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle as the ancestry of Western civilisation. But what happens when their ideas are exposed to a culture with a worldview very distinct from our own? Classicist Shadi Bartsch argues that contemporary Chinese takes on Western classical traditions can tell us as much about our own skewed views as they do about Chinese political culture.

Plato Goes to China is the product of an experiment: take the political and philosophical classics of Greek and Roman antiquity, and see how contemporary Chinese readers react to them. The value of this experiment lies precisely in the fact that tThese are not dead texts, even if they are by dead white men.; Plato, Aristotle, Vergil and others from the ancient world continue to engage withask questions that continue to speak to us in the west, even across time. Tand this is why the Chinese would like to understand them too.

We won’t necessarily approve of the answers they give – it’s that the questions that they raise make sense to us. Using them as a springboard we may ask, for example: are constraints on liberty necessary for the flourishing of the state? Should the moral convictions of one era be overturned by the moral convictions of the next? What can a small face-to-face democracy of men joined by age, status, and citizenship tell us about a scaled-up version marked by mass media and identity politics?

These long-gone worlds and cultures proved influential in the intellectual history of the west, love that fact or hate it as we will. They are one marker in our cultural DNA. Although relatively few people actually sit around delving into Socratic dialogues, you would be surprised at how much of Western culture has been shaped by the assumptions of its philosophical traditions: for example, the assumption that rationality is the highest human achievement; that citizenship is an unmitigated good; that democracy is better than monarchy; that art and music are less real in some sense than mathematics and science; and so on. Do you think logic can be thwarted by emotion? Guess what, you’re quoting a central tenet of much ancient philosophy.

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There have been new and striking reactions to these “classics,” often as a way to hoist the West on its own petard.

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All of this was driven home to me when I started to research reactions to the western classics in modern China – especially reactions in government-sanctioned statements by pro-CCP intellectuals. As much as these texts formed the intellectual context for our thinking about the world, they have been unfamiliar to readers and cultures elsewhere in the world for many centuries.

When we watch others reading them, we can see both our own assumptions – which we might otherwise not notice or reflect on – and the assumptions of the new readers. Such texts illuminate the fundamental differences with which we all approach the world, even those of us most intimately linked, but especially those of us who do not share cultures, ethnicities, and epochs.   

Since the events of June 4^th 1989 and the Chinese cultural turn away from western ideals, there have been new and striking reactions to these “classics,” often as a way to hoist the West on its own petard. For example, Aristotle, father of the idea that man attains his greatest potential in service to the polis, the city-state, is often now excoriated in China on the following grounds: