The Nazi Inspiring China’s Communists
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
When Hong Kong erupted into protest this summer against a national-security law imposed by Beijing, the fact that Chinese scholars leaped to the Communist Party’s defense was perhaps predictable. How they argued in favor of it, however, was not.
“Since Hong Kong’s handover,” Wang Zhenmin, a law professor at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions, wrote in People’s Daily , “numerous incidents have posed serious threats to Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.” The city, Wang was effectively arguing, was in no position to discuss civil liberties when its basic survival was on the line. Qi Pengfei, a specialist on Hong Kong at Renmin University, echoed those sentiments, insisting that the security law was meant to protect the island from the “infiltration of foreign forces.” In articles, interviews, and news conferences throughout the summer, scores of academics made a similar case.
Though Chinese academics are often circumscribed in what they can and cannot say, they nevertheless do disagree in public . At times, they even offer limited, and careful, critiques of China’s leadership. This time, however, the sheer volume of pieces that Chinese scholars produced, as well as the nature of those arguments—consistent, coordinated, and often couched in sophisticated legal jargon —suggested a new level of cohesion in Beijing on the acceptable scope of the state’s power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has markedly shifted the ideological center of gravity within the Communist Party. The limited tolerance China had toward dissent has all but dissipated, while ostensibly autonomous regions (geographically as well as culturally), including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong, have seen their freedoms curtailed. All the while, a new group of scholars has been in ascendance . Known as “ statists ,” these academics subscribe to an expansive view of state authority, one even broader than their establishment counterparts. Only with a heavy hand, they believe, can a nation secure the stability required to protect liberty and prosperity. As a 2012 article in Utopia , a Chinese online forum for statist ideas, once put it, “Stability overrides all else.”
Prioritizing order to this degree is anathema to much of the West, yet perspectives such as these are not unprecedented in Western history. In fact, China’s new statists have much in common with a faction that swept through Germany in the early 20th century.
That affinity is no accident.
China has in recent years witnessed a surge of interest in the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Known as Hitler’s “ Crown Jurist ,” Schmitt joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and, though he was only officially a Nazi Party member for three years, his anti-liberal jurisprudence had a lasting impact—at the time, by helping to justify Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of Jews and political opponents, and then long afterward. Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.” Such a hamstrung state, according to Schmitt , could not protect its own citizens from external enemies.
China’s fascination with Schmitt took off in the early 2000s when the philosopher Liu Xiaofeng translated the German thinker’s major works into Chinese. Dubbed “ Schmitt fever ,” his ideas energized the political science, philosophy, and law departments of China’s universities. Chen Duanhong, a law professor at Peking University, called Schmitt “the most successful theorist” to have brought political concepts into his discipline. “His constitutional doctrine is what we revere,” Chen wrote in 2012, before adding, of his Nazi membership, “That’s his personal choice.” An alum of Peking University’s philosophy program, who asked not to be identified speaking on sensitive issues, told me that Schmitt’s work was among “the common language, a part of the academic establishment” at the university.
Schmitt’s influence is most evident when it comes to Beijing’s policy toward Hong Kong. Since its handover to China from Britain in 1997, the city has ostensibly been ruled under a “one country, two systems” framework, whereby it would be part of China, but its freedoms, independent judiciary, and other forms of autonomy would be preserved for 50 years. Over time, these freedoms have been eroded as the CCP has sought greater control, and more recently have been undermined completely with the national-security law.
Chen, who has written extensively on Hong Kong policy since 2014 and, according to The New York Times , is a former adviser to Beijing on the issue, cited Schmitt directly in defense of the concept of a national-security law back in 2018. “The German jurist Carl Schmitt,” he argued in an article , distinguishes between state norms and constitutional norms. “When the state is in dire peril,” Chen wrote, citing Schmitt, state leaders have the right to suspend constitutional norms, “especially provisions for civil rights.” Jiang Shigong, also a law professor at Peking University, has made a similar case. Jiang, who worked as a researcher in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2008, employs Schmitt’s ideas extensively in his 2017 book , China’s Hong Kong , to resolve tensions between sovereignty and the rule of law in favor of the Communist Party.
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“Since Xi Jinping became China’s top leader,” Flora Sapio, a sinologist at the University of Naples, wrote , “Carl Schmitt’s philosophy has found even wider applications in China, in both ‘Party theory’ and academic life.” This shift is significant: It marks a move from what had been an illiberal government in Beijing—one that flouts liberal norms as a matter of convenience—to an anti-liberal government—one that repudiates liberal norms as a matter of principle.
Like in Hong Kong before their 50 years are up? Now we know that there are leaked documents there showing that they knew more about covid 19 sooner than they have confessed to up to this point per CNN of all places.
The borrowing from the Nazi regime isn't restricted to the legal regime. Xenophobia permeates the regime to the point where the regime's stooges blame all cases of coronavirus in China on "outsiders." And of course, Goebbels style lying about all aspects of the regime is par for the course, from lies about the economy to lying about the Coronavirus. Just this week CNN reported on leaked documents showing massive governmental lies about the number of infections in China.
The current system China is using is very much a fascist system of mixing market reform the a strong military and no or real personal freedom or religious liberty. They are today’s evil empire.
Wasn't McCarthyism sort of similar as well? Seems to me that especially among conservatives and Trump supporters McCarthyism has been a growing phenominom in the USA, although Trump's days of being POTUS coming to an end might temper that somewhat.
I LOVE reading the opinions about China posted by people who have never been there. What right does America have to dictate to other nations what their respective government domestic policies must be - IMO America has not exactly been setting the best example of itself, especially over the past 4 years and even more so more recently.