Since his inauguration, President Xi Jinping has launched a cultural war in China by reinvigorating two seemingly rivalrous autocratic traditions, Maoism and Confucianism. His revisionist apology for the Cultural Revolution —“the historical period after the reform and opening up cannot be used to negate the historical period before the reform and opening up”—was an opening salvo to enlarge his authority at the expense of the Politburo’s collective leadership. Meanwhile, he has attended high-profile commemorations of Confucius, the prime target of the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards, and frequently referenced Confucianism to explain his policy agenda. Despite the contradiction, this development was no surprise for Carl Schmitt’s Chinese disciples, a group of scholars with political aspirations and close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who had predicted and championed this development for years. Their prominence and inflammatory rhetoric inspired by the Third Reich’s totalitarianism and aggression drew international alarm and led to speculation that they would lead China down the same dangerous path.
Although Schmitt (1888–1985), a German jurist disgraced for advising and assisting the Nazi Party to reorder the German legal system, remains obscure in North American academia, he has received an exceedingly warm reception in China for nearly two decades. His adherents have taken up positions in prestigious Chinese universities and research institutions. Deeply dissatisfied with Weimar Germany’s internal instability and the external pressures on it, Schmitt staunchly opposed parliamentary democracy, liberalism, internationalism, and the dominant Anglo-American order—an orientation shared by his Chinese disciples and the CCP. Since his theory argues that conflict is inevitable and has existential consequences for the nation, the friend-enemy distinction is the fundamental criterion for political decision-making, which supersedes all other criteria including economic profit and ethical considerations. Liberal-democratic institutions, with their reliance on deliberation and rule of law, would be paralyzed in a state of exception—a crisis such as civil war, invasion, or other catastrophes that can threaten the existence of the state and render normal legal mechanisms inadequate. Intense political antagonism is often the justification for its declaration, though not necessarily the only cause. Schmitt thus defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” (p. 5–6).He argued that an individual leader, embodying the sovereign, must identify the enemy and decide on a course of action based on a concrete situation, restrained by neither law nor ethical principles. Schmitt decried democracy and pluralism for enabling division and thus undermining national survival, and liberal internationalism for ignoring the adversarial nature of politics and serving as a façade for national self-interest. In the 1930s, he briefly found his political ideal: a state capable of imposing unity across divides, representing the people as a whole through rituals and sacrifices, embodied in the Nazi regime—before he was condemned by the SS as an opportunist and lost his political posts.
His foreign policy framework—history as a civilizational struggle between maritime and terrestrial powers—has struck a chord with contemporary intellectuals who seek to legitimize China’s regional ambitions. Schmitt posited that an essential difference in fundamental order (nomoi) between maritime and terrestrial states arises from their distinct relationship with their geography. Under Anglo-American hegemony, the nomos of the sea (universal international law and free trade) undermines the nomos of the earth (sovereignty, territorial integrity, and fixed borders). Since imposing the universal liberal system is bound to instigate catastrophic conflict between people with different nomoi, a sphere-of-interest system (Großraum: literally “great room”) dominated by regional powers is more conducive to peace. Although Xi Jinping aspires to weaken U.S. hegemony and strengthen China’s strategic position in the Indo-Pacific at the expense of its neighbors, he remains rhetorically committed to an “international system with the United Nations at its core” and explicitly rejects “spheres of influence and cliques.” Chinese Schmittians, however, refuse to take his idealistic rhetoric at face value. Instead, they interpret and support his multipolar vision more cynically—believing that zero-sum confrontation and the imposition of China’s will on other states are necessary for achieving great power status. This unorthodox approach sets them apart from ordinary propagandists who either believe in or merely echo the government’s stated commitment to peace and coexistence.
Chinese intellectuals with an affinity for Carl Schmitt and other conservative thinkers are members of the “Chinese New Left,” rivals to the liberal faction in Chinese academia, which has no relation with the Western New Left, a countercultural movement active during the 1960s and 1970s. The liberal faction emerged from the post-Cold War end-of-history euphoria envisioned a democratized China with a free market and an American-style constitution. Culturally, many supported wholesale Westernization, urging the Chinese to shed their “Yellow River heritage” and embrace the “blue-ocean civilization,” exemplified by the US. The Chinese New Left is a coalition of intellectuals who were initially concerned with inequality, socio-cultural degradation, and the loss of national identity under aggressive market reform. The New Left became increasingly pro-establishment after the government tightened its control over the market in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis—a measure they viewed as necessary to address the socio-economic dysfunctions of the Reform Era. As a result, they gradually abandoned radical class-struggle discourse, instead embracing the state as the solution to class conflict and workers’ woes.
Both liberals and the Chinese New Left faced the unsolved question of Chinese modernization: how can China embrace modernity (that is, Western-origin technology and institutions, such as international law and scientific education) while retaining its national identity? What is the role of the CCP in resolving this tension? Chinese liberals equated modernization with Westernization, viewing any contradicting Chinese values and institutions, including Confucianism and the collectivist economy, as mere obstacles. The most radical liberals argued that the CCP, with its Leninist, autocratic forms, was one of the obstacles. The Chinese New Left preferred modernizing economically and technologically to strengthen China while rejecting Western socio-political values. The CCP’s promotion of national pride and economic growth seemed to embody the reconciliation of modernity and Chineseness. Hence, they found in Schmitt, a fierce defender of a multipolar international order and the sovereignty of hegemonic states without external normative intervention, a kindred spirit.
Scholars of Carl Schmitt work in elite universities in China, and aim to shape the next generation of political leaders. Liu Xiaofeng, an early translator of Schmitt, is a professor at Renmin University and director of its Centre for the Study of Classical Civilizations. He condemns liberalism and the Enlightenment as forces of chaos culpable for “turning the entire globe into a ‘free space’ where a pre-state law of the jungle would prevail,” and inciting destruction during the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. He celebrates Mao Zedong for laying the foundation of a Chinese Großraum by fighting the Korean War and pressuring the US “to withdraw from the spaces that were acquired illegitimately.” Like President Xi, Liu promotes Chinese classical studies as a bulwark against the corruption of liberal hegemony.
Zhao Xudong, a New York University East Asian studies professor who remains active in Chinese academia and the public sphere, similarly shares Schmitt’s critique of liberal-democratic values. He seeks to legitimize a “Chinese universality,” self-sufficient and equal to the West, by exposing the contingent and bourgeois origin of Western universal values. Like Liu’s vision, Chinese universality includes ancient history, traditions, and Communist revolutionary legacies. Liu argues that unitary political will, forged through the total identification of the people with the state instead of an electoral system, would help China overcome its socioeconomic divisions. It is an appropriation of Schmitt’s representation-identification dichotomy that distinguishes political systems: either the rulers are personalistic and separate from the people, or they are one and indistinguishable from the people. Zhao argued that China has transcended this dichotomy and embodies both.
The United States holds a central place in Chinese Schmittian polemics. More than a concrete security threat, the American “city-upon-a-hill” appeal represents a philosophical challenge that warrants total societal mobilization, lest its allure invalidate China’s entire political existence and place among civilizations. Carl Schmitt spoke compellingly to the anxiety over liberalism, not for its potential to incite revolutions but for its assimilating and homogenizing capacity. When Marxism-Leninism gave way to marketization, the CCP turned to conservative nationalism to distinguish China from the rest of the neoliberal West and bind the people to the Party. Sensing the change in legitimation strategy, they presciently capitalized upon it.
Although Schmittian scholars have made international headlines for supporting repression in HK and hawkish policy toward the west, their political agency and influence are often overstated. The CCP has three objectives regarding academia: (1) promoting ideological compliance, (2) accelerating economic growth and innovation, and (3) creating world-class universities. Thus, it funnels funds to top institutions and ideologically-appropriate topics at the expense of all others, incentivizing academics to stay in their lane with hyper-competition and rewards for acquiescence. Under this system, there is little room even for pro-establishment academics to impact policy substantially. Some Schmittian scholars have been bestowed with official titles for their political trustworthiness. For example, Wang Hui, a professor at Tsinghua University, sat on the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference in 2012, and Chen Duanhong, a professor at Peking University Law School, has been serving on the Macau Basic Law Committee since 2018. However, these positions carry more honorific weight than political power.
Xi still prioritizes loyalty and long-established personal relationships over ideological alignment or contingent factional alliances, filling the ranks of his close advisors with friends, family members, and colleagues from his formative years. Fearing elite struggle more than domestic dissent or international pressure, Xi has little interest in entertaining outsiders from academia without a track record of personal devotion. Ironically, Schmitt himself was blind to the same reality of fierce internal struggle within an autocratic regime and overestimated the role of acquiescent intellectuals as he dreamt of them “leading the leaders” (p. 39). He conceived of, and even idealized, the state as a monolith that, once centralized sufficiently, could make ruthless decisions while its ruler’s interest was identical to the national interest. It is a perception the CCP would love to maintain. In this sense, Schmitt’s Chinese disciples are not just relegated to the role of propagandists but are actively trapped by the very narratives they produce.
Alison Pang is a prospective graduate student at Carleton University. She is an editorial intern at The National Interest and a summer fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Her research interests include democratization, (il)liberalism in the Chinese context, and Asia-Pacific security.
