How China's Imperial Ideas Shape Modern Western Thought: Martin Powers

The Role of Art in Understanding Chinese Society and Government

Martin Powers, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, is a renowned art historian and sinologist specialising in the history of social justice in China. He is the author of four books (including two that won the Levenson Prize for best book in premodern Chinese studies) and numerous articles. His recent work, China and England: The Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image, explores visual and verbal evidence of the English Enlightenment response to imperial China's institutions.

Why would you examine Chinese society and government through art? What are the unique strengths of that approach?

Like most in my field, I think of myself as a historian who studies history using texts, but in addition, we make use of visual evidence. When you look at a historical text, you do not always know whether the view expressed was normative. But if we see an image, especially a public one, we can usually assume that the work already had an audience, some community that understood its message. That is valuable for social history.

Let me give you an example. In China after the 12th century, in many different media, we find references to a story about a Han dynasty prime minister who was on tour in the country. He passes through an area where a riot is taking place, but he does not do anything, and explains: "I have no jurisdiction here. This is up to the city and county officials. My job is national policy." This story shows up on vases, ink pots, pillows and paintings all the way into the 20th century. So, this is a concept that we can see was pretty well understood in China. If we did not have the art, we wouldn't know that this understanding was so widespread.

Political Speech and the Arts

To what extent do you believe that political speech can be reflected through the arts?

It's probably not "reflected"; instead, works of art "participate" in political debate. Art is a medium like newspapers for conveying ideas about society and politics. Any time you have a picture that includes members of two or more different groups, like rich and poor, the artist has to determine how that relationship was understood by his or her audience, so the pictures can tell you a lot about how intergroup relations were imagined.

In aristocracies, one of the most common images of authority is that of a dominant figure standing over a subordinate figure, often with the hand raised in the air about to strike. The subordinate figure is always shown as completely helpless. The victim is entirely at the mercy of the victor's whim, and that is the point. This situation comes close to what [the French political philosopher Baron] Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws called "honour", because honour gives you the privilege to do whatever you wish, on nothing more than a whim. This concept is important in any aristocracy, East or West. It's not just domination; it's arbitrary privilege.

In China, there are some images like that in Buddhist sites where guardian figures are seen crushing a non-Buddhist demon, but these images became rare in mainstream culture from Song [dynasty] times onwards because the political system was no longer aristocratic.

In early modern Europe, it was still common to find sculptures or paintings of a hero dominating an enemy who was a member of a different group - Samson vs the Philistines, or Greek gods vs satyrs. Vestiges of this ancient attitude survive even now. The England-based artist Banksy has a mural outside the justice building in London, and the Post reported that the British authorities took the mural down. In the mural, it shows a judge using his hammer to beat a protester cowering on the ground. It's much the same image we find throughout European history, but I suspect that, for Banksy, it does not signify nobility.

Confucianism and Modern Governance

Your research has explored how political ideas and values informed Chinese art during the Han and Song dynasties. Recently, the Chinese leadership has looked back to the Confucian tradition for new ideas. Which aspects of ancient governance philosophy do you think are being emphasised today, and which are being overlooked or set aside?

I'm not an expert on contemporary Chinese policy, but the official press in China often notes that President Xi Jinping has cited Confucian texts, including the Mumin chapter of the Guanzi, a 4th century BC text, which states that government could succeed only by following the people's will.

I happen to be familiar with that chapter and its core arguments echo the Confucian thinker Mencius. What Mencius meant by the people's will is that just about everyone wants to have a roof over their head, a decent income and safety for their family. As Mencius put it, the government should see to it that "the people may live in happiness and with full bellies until the end of their days". He explained that government could ensure the people's happiness by promoting prosperity, providing for education, good infrastructure, managing resources rationally and so on.

These were core principles of governance in Song China also. After scores of Song period policy essays were translated into French and English, Europeans like Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith expressed admiration for what today we would call imperial China's social policy.

Having lived mainly in China the past three years, it's difficult to deny that the government here attends to many of these same goals. I've been travelling in China on and off for 40 years, and the infrastructure today is excellent, and the air is much cleaner than a few years back. Young people can compete for whichever college they like and pay tuition with low-cost loans; healthcare is better and more easily accessible than before, and so on.

Another progressive policy in imperial China which is echoed in China today is the grievance offices, or deng wen jian yuan. In Song, Ming or Qing China, all taxpayers - men and women - could blow the whistle on corruption, complain about policy or make suggestions through these channels. I gather that similar institutions exist in China today, such as the offices for xinfang, or "letters and visits".

In imperial China, as in China today, these institutions would have been informed by two basic premises: first, the people's tax dollars should be spent for the people's benefit. A slogan to that effect can be seen in tax offices today. Second, the government is fallible; otherwise, there would be no reason for improvement. This is extremely important. Aristocratic governments generally do not admit advice from commoners. But Chinese governments during the Han, Song and Ming dynasties all assumed that government was fallible, and that is why people had channels for complaint.

This principle is also rooted in Confucian thought because, for Mencius, a government becomes legitimate only when it wins the hearts and minds of the people. You can't do that without feedback, so the other term associated with the people's will was gonglun, or public discourse. The 12th century statesman Zhen Dexiu regarded it as the lifeblood of the nation, and the 18th century revolutionary Abbe Raynal thought it distinctive of China's social system. Unlike food, shelter or prosperity, this term referred to public issues subject to disagreement, like the breadth of public discourse itself. I haven't seen references to this term in official comments on China's past, but then I haven't researched the matter either.

Imperial China's bureaucracy also distinguished between office and officer, court and state, public and private, so passages on conflict of interest occurred often in policy documents that were translated in the 18th century from the Chinese. Thomas Jefferson's friend Francois Quesnay was among those who introduced these ideas to European readers. In China today, this principle remains central to governance. Witness the many officers who have been charged with corruption and sentenced when found culpable.

Influence of Chinese Thought on Western Enlightenment

One of your core ideas is that imperial Chinese ideas historically influenced Western Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who developed the modern understanding of "rights", "equality", "free speech" and "checks on power" in dialogue with Chinese precursors. How did that come about?

In the past 10 or 15 years, there's been a lot of new research on China and the Enlightenment; these studies show that European thinkers were in dialogue with Chinese thought via translated texts from China. One of the first things that European thinkers noticed in China's social system was assigning office based on demonstrated performance rather than birth.

Scholars like Dave Wang and Alfred Hornung have documented the admiration of America's founding fathers for China's merit-based social system in some detail, but the idea was introduced to Europeans centuries earlier.

As early as 1588, [the Spanish bishop and sinologist] Gonzales Juan de Mendoza described China's examination system and rigorous expectations of public officers. This information was reinforced in 1615 by [the Italian Jesuit priest] Matteo Ricci's descriptions of China's government.

Soon thereafter, in 1621, Robert Burton, a member of the British gentry, wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy that nobility should be assigned to office only if qualified and should be dismissed if they are incompetent. He mentioned the Chinese literati several times as a model for how this could be accomplished.

Many others picked up on this theme. By the 1730s, England's free thinkers, including Samuel Johnson, were citing translations of Chinese texts to support merit-based reforms, but these were rejected because England's government, of course, was aristocratic.

Also during the 1730s, in his Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin published large portions of a book called the Morals of Confucius. The book consisted of translations of passages from the Confucian Analects and other texts. Many of these stressed that the government exists for the benefit of the people.

According to the catalogue of Thomas Jefferson's library, he owned Jean-Baptiste Du Halde's Description of the Empire of China, which contained more than 100 translated Chinese policy documents by China's most brilliant politicians. Many of these declare that only talented men dedicated to the public interest should be qualified for office because the purpose of governance is the people's welfare.

You can find echoes of these sentiments in Jefferson's writing. For instance, contrary to popular belief, the policies Jefferson promoted often echoed those already practised in China, such as establishing a progressive tax system. He thought all candidates for office should possess talent and virtue. At the time, these were the two standard translations for the Chinese term cai de. In translated Chinese essays, this term appears as the qualities requisite for Chinese officials.

Fear of China and Academic Bias

In your books, you said that in the 17th and 18th centuries, European intellectuals who promoted Chinese political systems faced exile and book bans, reflecting a "defensive" rather than inquisitive attitude towards China, which was deemed an "external threat".

Is there a similar pattern today, where Western scholars who speak positively about China are branded as Chinese mouthpieces or marginalised within academic and policy circles? Could this reflect a broader insecurity about Western institutions or national identity?

This is a great question, and my answer is yes and yes.

The fear of China now is not unlike the fear of China in the 17th and 18th centuries. Back then, China's more egalitarian, post-aristocratic system was a clear threat to European aristocracy, so China was ruthlessly demonised by intellectuals like [the French Catholic archbishop and writer] Francois Fenelon, Baron Montesquieu and [the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel.

China's policy landscape today resembles in some respects that of former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, but it is precisely the Roosevelt legacy that neo-liberals have been dismantling for decades and now have largely abolished. If Americans knew that China's policy shared much with Roosevelt-generation liberals, they could apply China's lessons - both its accomplishments and its mistakes - to design an alternative to neo-liberal inequality.

Cross-Cultural Borrowing and Misconceptions

Throughout the history of intellectual and cultural exchanges, there have been multiple waves of influence flowing from East to West and vice versa, but you noted China's contribution to the liberal tradition has been "whitewashed" by Western historians. Could you name some ideas we consider inherently "Chinese" or "Western" that are actually imported from or influenced by the other side?

If we consider West to East, China's May Fourth intellectuals in 1919 absorbed many of the stereotypes that Western missionaries and intellectuals had attributed to Chinese people, such as Western people have always been individualistic while Chinese people are collectivist.

Likewise, many of the stereotypes promoted during the last Cold War are still embraced by Chinese academics even today, like the idea that Chinese society has always been hierarchical. Yes, hierarchy was important in imperial China, as it is in all societies, and all universities, businesses, corporations, tennis clubs and so on.

What the American historian John King Fairbank implied with that term was that China had always suffered under a rigid hierarchy, but this is misleading. In premodern times, the European hierarchy was based on blood, and so the social hierarchy remained much the same, generation after generation: that strikes me as rigid. The traditional Chinese hierarchy was more like what we find in universities, governments and corporations today: it was a hierarchy of responsibility, not a hierarchy of privilege. Rank was achieved, not inherited, and even high-ranking officers held their position for only a few years. Aristocrats hold their social rank for life.

Most of my friends in China think that systemic checks were invented in the West. Historical documents show clearly that the idea was introduced by free thinkers like the English writer and politician Eustace Budgell as early as 1731, citing Chinese sources. B. Le Stourgeon published a book on Chinese administration in 1732-1738 with a detailed description of checks, and in 1740 James Roberts lampooned the British government for lacking checks such as those Chinese people enjoyed. All this was years before Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws, but when speaking of checks, Western historians erase this history and start with Montesquieu.

In contrast, the history of how China learned principles of maths and science from Europeans is well represented in the textbooks, both East and West. That story should be told, and often is, but the transmission of core Enlightenment concepts from East to West is scarcely known even to those in Chinese studies.

Shifts in Cultural Confidence and Intellectual Exchange

Historically, in the late Qing dynasty, during the May Fourth Movement, and in the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals overlooked and criticised Chinese tradition in favour of Western notions of modernity. What were their underlying causes? Has there been a recent shift towards greater confidence in China's traditional culture and governance models?

Others have written about how the opium war shook the confidence of Chinese intellectuals. I'm in no position to comment on that. What strikes me as crucial here is the adoption of a Western, substance-based conception of worth after the opium war. This understanding of worth comes out of aristocratic societies like ancient Greece where, as Aristotle tells us in his Politics, the victor becomes the master while the defeated becomes the slave. The victory is considered proof of the victor's superior substance. If you accept that model, then if white people won the opium war, that means white people are superior and Chinese people inferior.

The substance model also presumes that one's inherited substance never changes, so if someone broke the law, even years ago, like getting a speeding ticket, then they're still criminals today, and will always be criminals. China's most famous tyrant, the first emperor of Qin, adopted that view, so guilt by association was accepted as a legal principle in Qin law. But in Han times, that law was abolished because Confucian teaching holds that what you are is determined by your actions, not your blood. It follows that people can always reform themselves. That is why the civil service exams in China were anonymous. They did not need to know about your bloodline; your performance was all that mattered.

Some people today still embrace a substance model, believing that Chinese people are made of an inferior substance, but the younger generation appears to be acquiring some confidence, in part because they are proud of China's accomplishments. According to Harvard studies, most people in China approve of the government because they're so much better off now than they were before.

Lessons for Contemporary Governance

You have urged current US leaders to learn from past leaders who were inspired by "Confucian liberalism". Could you elaborate? What is the significance of cross-cultural borrowing of governance ideas today?

This gets to the heart of basic assumptions about the source of political authority. In imperial China, as in China today, a legitimate government becomes legitimate by improving the lives of the people in concrete ways. How well this is accomplished is a matter of policy, but policies can be learned from anywhere. American founder Benjamin Franklin, like Thomas Paine and James Madison, admired some of China's policies, especially the appointment of officers based on merit. They assumed it was essential to elect men of merit if they were to promote the people's happiness. But they were not partial to China. They adopted useful ideas from indigenous peoples and from the Romans, among other sources. We can call that approach pragmatic.

Sociologist Naomi Zack also sees the core attribute of democracy as service to the people. Zack sees identity politics as polarising and has argued for a return to a more practical approach focusing on policies that improve people's lives. She does not mention China, but the method she recommends is similar to what is being done in China today.

Previously you said that, during the Cold War, American sinologists viewed Confucian culture as rigid and outdated and historically depicted China with stereotypes like "despotism" or "hierarchy". Do you believe these biases have been corrected? What is the current mainstream attitude within the US sinology community towards China?

I was a graduate student during the last Cold War. What I learned then was how even the most impressive accomplishments of imperial China could be made to look bad. During the Song dynasty, all taxpayers - rich and poor - were bian hu qi min, or considered equal in a court of law, but we were told that was just the government's way of tightening its grip on the people. If you assessed a progressive Chinese policy, like progressive taxes the way European historians would assess a similar policy in the West, you were accused of lacking scholarly rigour. And then sometimes they just made things up, like the claim that imperial China lacked civil law or legal precedent. If you read through Song-period legal documents, you'll find soon enough that all those claims are baseless.

In recent years, the media has been saturated with exactly the kind of sophistry we were taught to apply during the last Cold War: the working premise is that China can't do anything good. Whatever it does, no matter how beneficial for the world at large, it is assumed to be part of some secret, malevolent design. Unfortunately, one can't investigate history that way, because a historian is beholden to the facts.

Fostering a Balanced Understanding of China

So how can we change this? What steps are necessary to foster a more balanced and nuanced understanding of China?

Establishing a level playing field between interested parties is always difficult. Even so, people who visit China often see the discrepancy between media hype and what they see with their own eyes. As more people from outside China visit, more balanced assessments of China can be expected. Recently, much has been done to make China easier to visit, which is good, but more could be done.

When I meet with fellow Americans in China who first visited 30 or more years ago, we are naturally astounded at the degree to which people's lives have been improved, but few in the West are aware of this. If people knew how much the medical system has improved over the past 10 years or so, they would likely be impressed as well. Likewise, the air quality used to be horrendous, but now it's improved in many cities, even industrial towns. To admit as much is not to be "pro-China", and to cover it up is not to be patriotic. For a historian, as for an honest judge, reliable information is beneficial, no matter whether it shows the defendant guilty or innocent.

Few of my friends in the West are aware that China's stated policies regarding international relations are similar to what used to be the liberal mainstream: top Chinese officials repeatedly assert that wars can't solve problems; diplomacy should be the first, not the last, resort. Seeing as China has not been in a war in more than 40 years, this can't be dismissed as "propaganda". Top officials likewise promote multilateralism rather than the hegemony of a few.

Again and again, China's diplomats hold that resolutions to disputes should recognise the legitimate interests of all concerned parties. If this sounds reasonable to you, it does not mean you are "pro-China". After all, Benjamin Franklin championed much the same values, and you can find comparable sentiments in The Morals of Confucius that he published.

Cultural Influence and Soft Power

China has been investing heavily in hundreds of museums and civilisation-tracing projects. How do these efforts contribute to enhancing China's cultural influence and soft power?

One thing these projects achieve is to provide wholesome, inexpensive entertainment for millions of families. When I visit such sites in China, I see families with young children everywhere. Instead of watching a violent movie, they're learning about history through artefacts. In America, you can also find programmes about Western history on the public channels almost daily. These can be informative, though some have a more nationalist flavour. In Chinese museums also, you used to see examples of fairly obvious nationalism, but it seems more toned down now. Nationalist bias can happen anywhere and is understandable within limits. The important thing is to stick to the facts and avoid overstating the case.

Not a few Chinese colleagues fear accusations of nationalist bias coming from Western colleagues, but this device can be used to censor legitimate historical facts. I would rather that Chinese museums take credit where credit is due: China established the world's first post, or even anti-aristocratic state in Han times, but museums sometimes identify the Han officials in tomb engravings as aristocrats. In Song China, equality for all taxpayers was written into the law, and religious freedom was standard. When those principles appear in Western documents, Western historians treat it as a major event. Why should it be different for China?

Another accomplishment worth emphasising is full-blown print culture. In the West, not a few historians prefer not to mention that printing was practised widely in China, Korea and Japan long before German inventor Johannes Gutenberg. A leading American university last year had a special panel on print and print culture. They included one Asia scholar, but his or her field was Vietnam. Vietnam did not acquire printing until European colonisers introduced it, so by choosing to not mention China, Korea and Japan, viewers got the impression that printing was a uniquely Western invention.

The damage goes well beyond the moral problem of bias. Promulgating a false narrative is not only unfair to Asian peoples; it hinders our ability to understand the circumstances under which printing can develop, as well as its effects on social and political practice. In any case, I don't think scholars in China should be embarrassed to simply tell the truth.

Global Influence and International Relations

In recent years, China has brought up several proposals, such as the Global Civilisation Initiative. Do you believe these theories and models can be applied to other countries? How effective are they in reshaping global narratives beyond China's borders?

I gather that President Xi has advocated several principles for international relations, including mutual respect irrespective of national might, win-win cooperation, and so on. Most Americans would recognise these as perfectly reasonable, but scarcely anyone has heard of them. All governments make mistakes, of course, sometimes major ones, but I suspect if people were to learn more about China's core policies, both foreign and domestic, at least some open-minded persons would realise that much of it makes sense.

I should add that the themes that get repeated in the official statements from Beijing are very much in line with late imperial attitudes towards international relations. [China's] Foreign Minister Wang Yi repeatedly insists that state-to-state relations must proceed on the basis of equality and mutual respect, with the understanding that both sides should benefit from the relationship. China's official statements recognise the diversity of political systems and customs as legitimate and necessary.

Imperial China likewise did not seek to impose any particular religion onto other nations, much less onto the taxpayers. Policy documents from Song times presume that the government must win the support of the people, as well as acceptance from other nations. They did not imagine that the king's actions, like God's, were beyond dispute, as England's [King] James I did. Instead, it was thought that an emperor needed to convince the people that he deserved their support, a rather democratic idea when you think of it.

Whether you look at China's classical philosophers or today's top officials, authority isn't imagined as a substance that you're born with, as Aristotle claimed. It is a consequence of intelligent policy, rational discourse and careful attention to the needs of others.