Opinion | Don’t blame China for America’s authoritarian turn

Many Western critics of China seem to suffer from the same fallacy as some police detectives and anti-pornography activists who believe that porn turns people into rapists. You may find porn in the personal collections of some serial rapists and sadistic killers, but that’s because statistically, most men and some women also use porn.

I am more inclined to think that Chinese intellectuals since the late Qing dynasty have always been interested in Western thinkers of all stripes. Inevitably, you will find some who are into Carl Schmitt, a card-carrying Nazi, and Leo Strauss, an arch-conservative who is sometimes credited as the grandaddy of American neoconservatism. That doesn’t make Chinese intellectuals neo-Nazis or neoconservatives.

A new essay in this vein appearing in Foreign Affairs is titled, “Reading Schmitt in Beijing: How China’s Rise Provoked America’s Illiberal Turn”.

The author Benn Steil wrote: “It is notable that China’s intellectual class has, since 2003, experienced what Chinese and Western intellectuals have called ‘Schmitt fever’: surging interest in a Western thinker who had allegedly debunked the notion that American liberal democracy was inherently superior to other forms of political organisation.

“From 1979 until 2003, references to Schmitt in scholarly articles on China’s national published works database were paltry. Since then, however, they have soared virtually every year and are now more than 30 times as high as they were in 2003.”