I am delighted to pass along the announcement of the publication of Telos 214 (Spring 2026): China Keywords II Traditions and Transformations in Modern China.
Today we released Telos 214, our second special issue on China Keywords. Based on papers presented at the 2025 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference in New York, the issue brings together authors from China, Taiwan, the United States, Australia, and Europe to assess recent developments of cultural and political conceptions in China and Taiwan, including notions of empire, tianxia, Confucianism, and democracy. The discussions continue a debate about the nature of the Chinese government from our previous issue, in particular the question of whether it can be characterized as authoritarian or totalitarian. Finally, we remember longtime Telos editor, David Gross, whose passing we mourn and whose voice we will miss dearly.
The Introduction to the issue by Eric Hendricks and David Pan follows below along wit the Table of Contents with links.
Telos 214 (Spring 2026): China Keywords II is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
Modern China emerged through the struggle with the customs and traditions of imperial China. This struggle continues in present-day attempts to think through how earlier customs, on the one hand, remain active in Chinese culture and, on the other, have been transformed by China’s modernization. And then there are the customs that have been cut off by modernity; to what extent and in which ways can or should they be revived?
The central challenge is that China has undergone spectacular political and social transformations over the past century, meaning that older ideas and customs must now operate within an entirely new sociopolitical context. Consider how different the political imagination was in imperial (neo-)Confucian China, which placed the imperial court at the center of the cosmos. Before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China saw itself as Zhongguo (中国) or Zhonghua (中华), meaning the “Middle Kingdom” and the “central civilization,” respectively. Thus, far from conceiving itself as merely one country among others, it imagined itself as the morality-carrying center of the tianxia (天下), “all under heaven,” which could only be harmoniously ordered if its Chinese center itself was properly ordered.
Tony Spanakos traces the shift from this China-centric perspective to a recognition of China as one nation among others in the transformation of the meaning of “empire” (帝国) in Asia in the decade around 1900. In this period, the old neo-Confucian worldview, with its cosmic centering in the imperial court, gave way to an international landscape of sovereign states, progressive ideas of historical development, nationalism, and globalization. Spanakos shows how the concept of empire in East Asia moved from denoting a cosmologically grounded authority centered on the Chinese emperor to a more flexible status claim within a world of competing sovereign states and great powers. Focusing on the reign of Korea’s king-turned-emperor Gojong, Spanakos shows how the imperial title became an instrument of diplomatic recognition and geopolitics in the international system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “[O]nce a concept de facto applicable only to China and tied up with an elaborate tribute system, [the meaning of empire] shifted so significantly that it could be used by the Korean king as part of an effort to gain sovereignty in a system governed by trade with multiple empires and states, wherein great powers competed but there was no center.”
Much of that (neo-)Confucian-imperial world is forever lost in time, overwritten by modernity’s political, scientific, and epistemic revolutions. However, in modern and contemporary Chinese political thought, one finds a variety of attempts to salvage some of these older elements. One of these movements in contemporary Chinese political philosophy is the New Tianxia School (新天下主义). It seeks to heal our globalized yet politically fragmented world of the twenty-first century by reinserting something of the universalist spirit of the old tianxia imagination. The school’s proponents reject any explicit Sinocentrism, aware that in the present there can be no neo-Confucian court presided over by an emperor who symbolically connects heaven and earth. Yet the thinkers of the New Tianxia School nonetheless claim that something of the old tianxia spirit, detached from its original imperial centrism, is a prerequisite for today’s nations, cultures, and political systems to coexist harmoniously in diversity.
But what about religion? Religion is a crucial component of social and cultural diversity. As William Xing suggests in his article, if the new tianxia thinking were indeed exceptionally well suited to managing diversity, it would have to be particularly sensitive to religious diversity. To be clear, Xing does not present his own theory for renewing the tianxia imagination; he is not himself a proponent of the New Tianxia School. Instead, he critically analyzes the ways in which three theorists of tianxia—Wang Hui (汪晖), Karatani Kōjin (柄谷行人), and Zhao Tingyang (赵汀阳)—relate to religion. It turns out each of these theorists, in his own way, denies religion any independent cultural meaning. Wang Hui seeks to acknowledge religion only in a sanitized version that has been cleansed of any independent basis for meaning. Karatani Kōjin turns the imperial order into a universal and messianic replacement for religion. Zhao Tingyang treats religion as an irrational element that upsets the order of tianxia and must be excluded. Each of these figures provides an example of how the new tianxia framework is fundamentally incapable of allowing a place for religion.
Another contemporary attempt to retrieve past models is known as New Confucianism. This movement, emerging in the twentieth century, recognizes the impossibility of restoring the political and cosmological order of the (neo-)Confucian empire in its entirety. Yet it nevertheless seeks to retrieve valuable ideas and sociopolitical fragments and reintroduce them in updated forms.
In her article, Pei Yu brings this New Confucian sensibility to the study of shun (順), a classical Confucian virtue that may, under certain conditions, hold value for contemporary politics. It should not be understood simply as obedience or submission but rather as a form of morally grounded political legitimacy in which authority arises from the people’s continuing recognition of a ruler’s virtue. “Shun operates as a responsive political evaluation,” with the people monitoring whether rulers demonstrate the desired competence, which is an “epistemic” type of “democratic participation.” The key to this monitoring of rulers is ritual, which constrains rulers and ruled alike based on customs and might be considered as the Confucian form for the rule of law. However, Pei realizes that all this may sound rather lofty, if not fanciful. In true New Confucian fashion, she reflects on the pitfalls. She warns, for example, that a mode of political legitimization based on moral recognition risks degenerating into ideological conformity when rulers attempt to manufacture the appearance of voluntary alignment.
A very different kind of revivalism—which moves not through philosophical argument, as do the variegated expressions of the New Tianxia School and New Confucianism, but through educational practice—is the contemporary dujing movement analyzed in Yukun Zeng’s paper. Dujing (读经), which literally means “reading the classics,” has a two-and-a-half-thousand-year history in China, but in its contemporary reenactment, it has been advanced since the 1990s by the Taiwanese educator Professor Wang Caigui and subsequently spread to mainland China in the early 2000s. The dujing movement promotes the intensive memorization and repetitive oral recitation of the Confucian canon, often without interpretation, as a path toward moral formation. Manifesting an ascetic ethos, Professor Wang himself has abandoned conventional educational and career trajectories to devote himself fully to dujing schooling. What makes his dujing movement “radical,” Zeng argues, is that rather than treating Confucianism as an abstract philosophical doctrine, it seeks to rebuild it through rigorous everyday discipline and grassroots experimentation. It is perhaps this grassroots aspect that prompted the Chinese authorities to shut down Wang’s school in 2023.
All these attempts to revive elements of China’s premodern past—from dujing to the New Tianxia School and New Confucianism—can be understood as efforts to partially undo the Mao-era Communist clampdowns on traditional culture, especially the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, which violently targeted intellectual life and traditional customs. In that sense, the present-day revival movements on the mainland are an implicit repudiation of those destructive Mao-era campaigns. Of course, this differs from explicitly confronting history’s darkest chapters through critical historiography and public commemoration.
In Taiwan, by contrast, state and public life have addressed its government’s past crimes with more specificity. The latter is the subject of Chunlin Liu’s article. Focusing on unresolved questions of transitional justice following the end of authoritarian rule in Taiwan, Liu examines its democratization through the lens of the republican concept of liberty as “non-domination” (非宰制). He argues that democratic consolidation demands a politics of historical memory capable of confronting past domination, particularly the legacies of the 1947 February 28 Incident and the White Terror. Because the officially institutionalized memory has emphasized victim rehabilitation over perpetrator accountability, the island’s democracy cannot yet fully draw on collective memory as a civic resource to sustain republican freedom.
Finally, this issue concludes with three notes on the character of China’s regime. Salvatore Babones responds to the introduction of Keywords I, the previous issue of Telos, in which we—the editors David Pan and Eric Hendriks—indicated that we disagreed over whether it is analytically useful to describe China as an “authoritarian regime.” Babones argues that it is overly simplistic to reduce the range of regime types in the world to a spectrum running from democracy to authoritarianism, since many more regime types exist. Moreover, he contends that authoritarianism is too often cast in an unduly negative light. Babones defines authoritarianism as a form of rule legitimized by the authority of established institutions and customs, while he understands democracy as rule by the will of the people, unconstrained by limitations on that will. The problem with contemporary China, Babones argues, is not primarily that it is not a genuine democracy, but that it is not an authoritarian regime either, i.e., a regime “governed under the rule of custom and law.”
Instead, Babones characterizes China as totalitarian because its rule is fundamentally illegitimate, cut off from tradition, and its intellectual life is incapable of producing thought of interest to outsiders. In Babones’s account, the distinction between tradition-based legitimacy and revolutionary illegitimacy replaces democracy-versus-authoritarianism as the primary divide between good and bad governance. Whereas both democracies and authoritarian regimes can foster productive intellectual life, totalitarian regimes such as China cannot.
Eric Hendriks argues in a follow-up note that China’s contemporary regime, pace Babones, is not totalitarian. Hendriks first points to the way mainland Chinese thinkers have contributed to the fora established by Telos and the Telos–Paul Piccone Institute as evidence that contemporary China cannot be totalitarian. If China were totalitarian, he reasons, such contributions on politically sensitive subjects would not have been possible in the first place. Hendriks acknowledges that the PRC has a totalitarian past. Yet while Maoist China was indeed totalitarian, Chinese society has since developed into a new, more open and pluralized constellation. In contrast to the era of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party no longer unleashes millenarian revolution and class warfare but has instead settled into a bureaucratic and hierarchical system. Hendriks contends that the portrayal of contemporary China as totalitarian and illegitimate stems from a Western tendency to stabilize one’s sense of self by delegitimizing the “politico-cultural other.”
In his response to Babones and Hendriks, David Pan argues for making a distinction between two ways of evaluating regime types. On the one hand, regimes can be judged by the degree of rule of law on a scale in which liberalism and authoritarianism are on opposite sides of the spectrum. On the other hand, regimes can also fall into different categorical types based on the structure of rule, including monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. Based on these two ways of viewing regimes, China can be both authoritarian to the extent that it does not adhere to the rule of law and totalitarian to the extent that power has been concentrated in the leader and no other sources of authority are allowed outside of the Chinese Communist Party.
The issue closes with a remembrance of David Gross, a longtime member of the Telos editorial board, who passed away last summer.
Eric Hendriks, a Dutch sociologist and essayist, is Director of the China Initiative of the Telos–Paul Piccone Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute. He studies conceptions of globalization and world order from a cross-cultural perspective, with a particular focus on China’s relationship to the category “world.” He previously held research positions at the University of Bonn and Peking University.
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
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