Confucian Governmentality and Socialist Autocracy in Contemporary China

Front Cover
Confucian Governmentality and Socialist Autocracy in Contemporary China
Copyright information
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Autocracy and Its People
	Reconsidering autocracy and democracy
	Preparing people for belonging to communities
	Solidarity versus unity
	Interrogating the role of the people within autocracy
	Translating democracy in the pluriversal world
	Methodology: a relational approach
	Chapter snapshots
	Advance arguments
1 People’s Hearts as the Regime of Regimes
	Introduction
	Applying governmentality in the Chinese context
	Reconsidering the perspectives of the state and society
		The perspective of state-and-society in general
		‘State-in-society’ and ‘state-as-society’
		State-as-society and autocratic governmentality
	Counter-governmentality
		The people’s hearts (民心)
		Counter-governmentality by induction
			1. Holding an unreliable attitude toward crops
			2. Spreading erratic words that were incompatible with the king’s role
			3. Being unforgiving to the losing subjects
			4. Failing integrity
			5. Committing extravagance and arrogance
			6. Executing those who committed misdemeanours heartlessly
			7. Being indifferent to the people’s hardship
			8. Defecting to rebels
			9. Committing self-involvement
			10. Setting a bad example to the people
		Discussion: cultural continuity in postmodern times
	Conclusion
2 Restoring Normalcy during Involution
	Introduction
	Democratic recession and studies of democracy
	Normative liberalism versus law-like Confucianism
	People not caring versus people not cared for
	The mass line versus deliberative democracy
		The mass line
		Deliberative democracy
		Original sin: in lieu of a solution
	Conclusion
3 Governing Hong Kong by Loving the Nation
	Introduction
	Problematizing love as emancipation
	Confucianism and benevolent love
	‘One Country, Two Systems’ as benevolent love
	‘One Country, Two Systems’ as a system of belonging contested
	Conclusion
4 Pandemic Nationalism from Wuhan to across China
	Introduction
	Surveying the literature on Chinese pandemic nationalism
	Wuhan and pandemic nationalism
	Chinese nationalisms compared and reconsidered
	Relationally embedded nationalism
	A metaphoric prescription for nationalism
5 Xi Jinping’s Quest for Acceptance
	Political ideas not for emancipation
	Xi Jinping’s emergence from the Cultural Revolution
		The mass line idea
		Buddhist thought
		Confucian thought
	Xi’s autocratic governmentality
	Involution and caveat
	Conclusion
6 Relational Democracy of Confucianism
	Relations and governability
	Systemic governability through ‘relations and balances’
	Aborted civic nationalism
	Epistemicide in constitutional democracy
	Self-restraint as relational democracy
	Governability as restraining extremism
	Balance of relationships in relational democracy
7 A Pluriversal Dialogue with Ubuntu
	Introduction
	Joining Ubuntu as unlearning
	A pluriversal approach to relational worlds
	Confucianism and the rights of nature compared
	Ubuntu as the cosmological necessity to nurture
	A common disposition for non-interventionism
	Conclusion
Conclusion: Balancing Dominance and Belonging
Appendix: The Diagrammatic Logic of Counter-governmentality
References
Index