In ‘the standard of civilization’, Perry Anderson convincingly demonstrates that the notion of international law commonly appealed to today was developed by the European powers largely to serve their own interests; lacking the legislative and enforcement capabilities necessary to embody true international justice, it has principally served as a tool of imperialist rule in its various forms.footnote¹ If we recognize this, the issue then becomes: how should we take our investigation further? It is a particularly pressing question for Chinese society since, for over a century, China’s path to modernization has primarily involved learning from the West—whether from Europe and America or the Soviet Union. However, even as we’ve continued to follow the West, more and more Chinese thinkers have come to realize that, in several respects, the West is deeply flawed.

In this context, there is a risk that our thinking could swing to the other extreme. We might come to believe that learning from the West was a mistake and that we should return to ‘the East’; that our own system is best after all. We might conclude that notions like international justice and world peace are all nonsense; that the unchanging pattern of world power since ancient times has been the law of the jungle, where the strong prey on the weak. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we strive to become the dominant force in the jungle? And if that means baring our teeth and roaring at weaker neighbours, why should we hesitate? This way of thinking could extend into domestic questions. If international relations are governed by the survival of the fittest, then isn’t it natural for our own society to be rigidly hierarchical, with the winners taking all? If that’s how things have always been, and always will be—just as the sun rises every day in the east—then what reason could there be to criticize it?

No one with any awareness of Chinese public opinion in recent years would say this is overthinking. The rhetoric of ‘self-confidence’, heavily promoted by official media; the stream of aggressively nationalistic online commentary; the relentless expansion of the ‘competition first’ mindset; the near-systemic indifference to vulnerable groups across society—all this suggests that our society has gone a long way down the road of narrow market utilitarianism.footnote² And the common-sense argument, ‘But look, Westerners are like this, too!’, has undoubtedly been a major justification for confidently continuing down this path. When we adopt a vision for society, we instinctively seek a real-world model for it. The Soviet Union in the 1930s, China in the 1950s–70s, the us or the West in the 1980s–2000s, were all seen in many parts of the world as such examples. As each was discredited over time, to varying degrees, it delivered a blow to those pursuing that model of society.

Fortunately, other responses are available to us. I would like here to return to the debates of some of the first Chinese thinkers to grapple with these questions. We can locate their starting point—the onset of modern Chinese thought, in the sense of tackling the problems brought about by the rise of industrial capitalism in the West—in the 1880s and 90s, when external powers wrenched Chinese society away from its previous trajectory, and China’s governing class—the gentry—was obliged to respond. It was widely recognized that China could no longer continue along the old course, and that fundamental changes were necessary if it were to embark on a new path. ‘Modern’ for these thinkers thus meant, first, a comprehensive reimagining of what the new China should look like; and second, the practical plans that were needed to bring this about.

On this definition, their modern age is still in many respects our own. Only when society has re-stabilized on a long-term basis, when both government and people can agree that the direction of the country is no longer an issue, will the modern era come to an end. That day has obviously not yet arrived. China is still changing rapidly, and its people still cannot agree where it should go. Many have begun narrowing the question to, ‘What should China do?’ rather than, ‘What should China be?’. Moreover, China is not the only country that is still in the modern era; the same can be said of Korea, Vietnam and India, as well as most African states. As a global historical period, the modern era has lasted far longer than we thought; the ‘post-modern’ is only a local sensibility.

The arc of modern Chinese thought can be roughly divided into three periods. The first is the sixty-year stretch from the 1880s–90s to the 1940s–50s, the ‘early modern’ stage. During this period—which included the shock of the first Sino-Japanese war and the punitive 1895 Shimonoseki Treaty; the aborted Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, cut short by Court conservatives and the Empress Dowager’s coup; the 1911 Revolution, the civil war and the Japanese invasion—‘socialist’ ideas in the broadest sense sprang up everywhere. They channelled the enormous energy of the struggling social forces towards various reforms and organizations, producing what can justly be called ‘the Chinese revolution’, in the largest sense of that term.

The second period lasted about forty years, from the 1940s to the 1980s. At its start, the Chinese revolution gave birth to a revolutionary party which truly unified China. Using the tremendous power of the state, it began to build a society that was clearly oriented towards communism. However, as this construction got fully underway, various non- and anti-socialist elements began to emerge: large-scale industry, in state-capitalist style; a modern bureaucratic hierarchy; political corruption, in a system with heavily concentrated power; the degeneration of revolutionary ideology. This gigantic project of social transformation gradually became ‘left in form, but right in essence’, deviating from its original intention. New contradictions accumulated and the revolutionary energy that Chinese society had once possessed gradually dissipated. The actual end of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s and the tragic events of the spring of 1989 were two striking manifestations of this. This evolution was not linear; it was blocked in some fields and paused in others. Of course, the effects were also two-way: as non-socialist or anti-socialist factors expanded in the political and economic system, radical elements in culture and politics rose up to confront them. When these in turn went too far, degenerating into the ‘ultra left’, they triggered reverse social impulses, further confusing the camps of ‘left’ and ‘right’.