1. How did you become interested in studying Chinese and comparative political theory?

The very boring answer about why I became interested in studying Chinese is that I wanted to take Russian my first year as an undergraduate, but it wasn’t being offered. So I took Chinese instead and I guess it stuck! Comparative political theory is a more interesting story, which I think reveals a bit about the history of the field and how it came to prominence. I entered a PhD programme in political science at the University of Chicago in 2000, after a year spent at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, PRC. I foolishly thought my longstanding interest in Chinese political thinkers of the early 20th century—people such as Chen Duxiu and Liang Qichao, who pivotally interpreted a huge range of Euro-American thought for their Chinese audiences—would find an easy place in political theory. I should note that I was an undergraduate economics major, and never took a proper political theory class before entering Chicago, unless you count my class on Mao Zedong thought at Hopkins-Nanjing. So when I started the programme at Chicago, I discovered, to my dismay, that political theory isn’t really about political thought, it is about a very circumscribed canon of texts which—surprise—don’t include any non-‘western’ thinkers. But my supervisors and teachers were extremely supportive of what I was trying to do. The biggest help to me came when Lisa Wedeen, a specialist in the comparative politics of the Middle East, suggested I read Roxanne Euben’s 1999 book Enemy in the Mirror—a study of Islamic fundamentalism which also modeled a new way of engaging political thought, that Euben called “comparative political theory” Having a name for what I was doing was hugely important in explaining and justifying my work to others in the field.

2. What are some important questions in Chinese and comparative political theory that you think are under-addressed and worth further attention in the future?

There are many, and there will always be more emerging as the field expands to include ever more marginalized bodies of thought and practice. But to start, I am very interested at present in how comparative political theory could engage what we might call the ‘noncolonial nonmodern’: those self-reflective bodies of thought emerging from permeable intellectual ecosystems that exist before, or outside, the reach of modern European colonial power, and which may continue to animate intellectual thought in various present-day societies. These days in political theory, we are getting better at addressing marginalization through efforts such as decolonization, but I am not sure we really know quite what to do with non-‘western’ societies that were not always marginal, and which themselves may have served as centers (of intellectual production, of oppression, of self-identity, of political administration) elsewhere. Early modern China, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, would be one such example of a rich and sophisticated intellectual ecosystem existing at the center rather than margins of power, at a time before Euro-American modernity was thinkable. What can we learn from the sufficiency of their intellectual life, even when their terms and categories challenge the value of our existing political commitments to (for example) equality?

3. What literature in your fields do you consider the most important, and which works would you recommend to newcomers to introduce them to these fields?

For general questions of comparative political theory, I always refer students to the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, which I co-edited with Murad Idris and Megan Thomas—not because it is my own work, but because the Handbook contains so many entries on so many diverse things that one realizes comparative political theory is not one project after all, but comprised of many (sometimes contradictory) different approaches and questions, undertaken by many different kinds of scholars. For Chinese thought and history more generally, I say “go read the sources!” If there is one book I think everyone should read, it has to be the Analects of Confucius (in a good English translation—I like Slingerland’s).

4. In the past few decades, there is a growing trend among scholars to bring Confucianism into dialogue with ‘western’ moral and political theories, as seen in the comparative studies between Confucian meritocracy and ‘Western’ liberal democracy, Confucian ethics and feminist care ethics, etc. Some scholars explicitly articulate the aims of their projects as establishing a certain type of hybrid model of political or moral theory. However, in your book, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West, you express some concerns with identifying the processes of Chinese reformers’ learning of Western knowledge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “hybridization.” What are your reservations with this identification, and do you think your concerns apply to recent discussions on comparative Confucian studies as well?

In general I think the entire project of “New Confucianism” or “modernizing” Confucianism that we see in comparative philosophy is based on a wholly ahistorical, and largely reductive and essentialist, notion of what Chinese and East Asian people have thought and said over centuries. I am much more interested in how the actual historical debates and projects from different thinkers across space and time might challenge our own perspectives, or provide new ways of looking at things that might not otherwise be available. One such altered perspective is revealed in my book Changing Referents: the Chinese thinkers I examine there, such as Yan Fu, saw hybridity as insufficiently attentive to the fact that ideas exist within a complex interplay of embodied practices and values that cannot travel elsewhere in piecemeal ways. They therefore argued for a more holistic approach that sought to reproduce (in political and social ways, across generations) the communities of thought and practice that makes those ideas think-able, in their own place and time.      

5. Your experience of finding a name—comparative political theory—for ‘what you were doing’ as helpful and justifying could fit under the dynamic of finding epistemic voice and testimony for your experience. Firstly, how did this help you justify what you were doing to others and do you think having a name should be necessary for this? Secondly, what further dynamics in your areas if specialisation could benefit from finding new names, and/or what other names have you found in your field to have been similarly beneficial in this same way for you or others?

If we accept that knowledge is socially constructed and distributed, we need communities to develop it, generate it, give it meaning and purpose. As the Chinese subjects of my second book, Changing Referents, fully recognized, communities must arise around bodies of knowledge before they can in fact be knowledge at all. Although the term “comparative political theory” is problematic in some ways (many people think it must engage in explicit, one-for-one comparison or juxtaposition of two dissimilar and clearly bounded things, for example, when in fact it simply makes explicit the comparative process inherent in any attempt to claim or understand “new” knowledge) it nevertheless is useful for gathering people around the perception of a shared project. In that way, our understanding of otherwise disparate ideas or bodies of knowledge can expand, and maybe even accumulate. And using a term like comparative political theory to identify what we are doing lets us claim something shared in common with political theory—we can argue that we are speaking to them, as political theorists, rather than to some other audience they can dismiss (such as area studies—an audience which continues to richly inform my work, but which many political theorists unfairly dismiss as outside their interests).

6. How can those raised in colonial societies engage with and come to see the influences of noncolonial nonmodern bodies of thought in a way that transforms and opens their own visions rather than engage in a way that obscures their sight and understanding due to the colonial and modern ways of seeing they bring to the table?

I am not sure we have the answers to these questions yet. In some way, these possibilities can only be realized in concrete practices as we, or others, attempt to respond and work with them. “How” we should transform and open visions of this kind cannot be legislated in advance or performed by a single thinker or writer anyway. I am not convinced that anyone has fully come to grips with what to do with the non-modern that does not involve integrating it into a postcolonial or nationalist or some other modern narrative. But I take comfort in the fact that these projects are not the kind that will ever “get done” or finished anyway—they are inherently open ended, and long may our discussions and disagreements about them continue!   

Interview questions by Sophia Feiyan Gao and Alicehank Winham