Carl Schmitt and China’s geopolitical rise
China's engagement with the political theory of the Nazi party's "crown jurist"
Western media has a classic “gotcha” that it has wielded against China’s political road in recent years: the reception of German jurist Carl Schmitt. As a member of the Nazi Party, Schmitt wrote much of the early legal justifications for the Third Reich’s early exercises of power. The story tends to go like this: Carl Schmitt was a Nazi, so he did Nazi things. The Communist Party of China likes Carl Schmitt. Therefore, by association, Chinese Communism must have the same dangerous authoritarian trappings of National Socialism.
Western analysis tends to highlight Schmitt’s earlier work on constitutional law and power relations, where Schmitt is used to analyze the role of sovereignty within a particular territorial boundary.
But few Western publications intended for mainstream consumption have engaged with the more direct citation of Schmitt among Chinese political thinkers in recent years. It’s the geopolitical turn of Schmitt’s later work that many Chinese authors are drawing on as they seek to define China’s place in a shifting global order dominated by U.S. hegemony. As China attempts to paint its image of human rights and democratic norms in opposition to the “false universals” of Western liberalism, understanding these nuances in China’s reception of Schmitt can help us better understand the way Chinese academics theorize the country’s development.
Schmitt’s historical arc
Though much of the Western discourse on Schmitt centers around his time as a eminent legal scholar with influence in the Nazi party, a fuller understanding of his historical arc can help highlight how his work is deployed within Chinese political thought. His influence within China especially revolves around his international legal theory, which came into sharper focus in his later career, as his influence within the Nazi party diminished.
In “Carl Schmitt's International Thought: Order and Orientation”, William Hooker outlines an arc for Schmitt’s development: as a critic of liberal order in pre-Weimar Germany, a major theoretical force in the Nazi ascent to power, and as a waning voice within the Reich and afterwards as their 12 years of power came to an end.
In his early work of the 1920s, Schmitt wrote largely about the inherent instability of liberal constitutionalism. For Schmitt, any exercise of power by an executive function without a formal parliamentary process of decision making may be considered “dictatorial,” which means that the effectiveness and efficiency of a decision of political governance must inherently be in tension with its legitimacy as the will of the governed. A core issue of liberalism for Schmitt was its tendency to create false universals, to assert its own moral laws as universal while ignoring the particularities of culture and power.
As he wrote about this tension in constitutional democracy, the battle for the resolution of this contradiction in liberalism waged throughout Germany. As street fights between the National Socialist party and the various communist, socialist, and liberal opponents grew, Schmitt began to apply his theorizing towards a formal justification for the Nazi ascent to power. For Schmitt, Hooker writes, “Nazism appeared to hold out the promise of closing the formalist liberal gap between political authority and the law.” The volkisch ideology also seemed to Schmitt as a promising opportunity to reclaim the cultural particularity that liberal constitutionalism tends to dissolve.
Most notably, Schmitt authored a legal opinion to defend the Enabling Act, keeping the Nazis in power. Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and began judiciously contributing to the Nazis’ purges of Jewish and other “anti-German” influence in media. Schmitt was placed in many prominent positions within the German legal apparatus, including as president of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists.
Schmitt eventually turned his eye towards international politics, developing the theory of what he called Großraum, or “large-space” theories of state power. Rather than powers aiming to be global hegemons, Schmitt foresaw a global order that would be divided non-hegemonically with different powers operating within particularized spheres of influence. The idea of course, being that the Third Reich would be the major power operating within the European Großraum.
In 1936, the SS launched a reprisal against his status in the party, calling him an opportunist and citing his earlier critiques of Nazi racial ideology as proof that he was a Fairweather Nazi. As Schmitt’s status within the Reich waned, Hooker argues, so too did his belief that the Nazi party was actually capable of escaping the trend toward universalism that he had critiqued in liberalism. From Hooker: “Far from recapturing particularity, territoriality and a specific German way of life, Schmitt saw Germany as having been sucked into the kind of global conflict of ideas he so feared.”
After the fall of the Nazi regime, Schmitt saw what he believed to be yet another conflict between competing universalisms, with the rising powers of the Soviet Union and the United States entering the Cold War. Schmitt refused attempts at denazification and though his avenues for scholarship diminished, he continued producing work with a focus on this question of Großraum that the Nazi Party had not actually achieved and that the Cold War seemed unlikely to create. In his 1950 work, The Nomos Of The Earth, Schmitt revived the idea of his preferred outcome to the conflict: ‘a combination of several independent Großräume or blocs could constitute a balance, and thereby could precipitate a new order of the earth.’
“Statism” and early Schmitt in Chinese Thought
An Atlantic Magazine article from 2020 provides the best example of how Western media depicts China’s reception of Schmitt. Here the focus is largely on internal matters of sovereignty pulled from Schmitt’s earlier work, with little attention paid to the reception of Schmitt’s later work on international relations. Titled “The Nazi Inspiring China’s Communists”, the article draws out the parallels between Schmitt’s history as a Nazi jurist and the authoritarian leanings of the Communist Party of China. It does so by arguing Schmitt’s influence on a new consensus developing within China that it calls “statism”:
In fact, China’s new statists have much in common with a faction that swept through Germany in the early 20th century… Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.” Such a hamstrung state, according to Schmitt, could not protect its own citizens from external enemies.
While “statism” as a critique of Marxist ideology goes back to the Marx-Bakunin conflict, this association of “statism” with the mainstream of Chinese political thought originates largely with an essay by Chinese professor Xu Jilin. In his 2011 essay “The Specter of Leviathan: A Critique of Chinese Statism since 2000” (published in 2011 under the title 近十年来中国国家主义思潮之批判), Xu defines “statism,” (国家主义) in opposition to “nationalism” (民族主义), as an ideology which “puts the state front and center, and takes the building of state power and state capacity as the central objectives of modernity. (per translation by David Ownby).” Whereas nationalism requires a nation state to achieve its political project, for “statists,” Xu argues, development of the state is a goal in itself.
These so-called “Schmittian” associations pointing to a “Hobbesian tendency” toward statism tend to be far more specific and relatively uncontroversial to socialists when seen in context. Bear in mind that Xu is considered to be one of China’s most prominent standard bearers for liberalism within Chinese political currents. In digging into these currents in specificity, we see the tension here is really not between “authoritarian, statist” Marxism and a true “democratic” Marxism, but between liberalism and anti-liberalism.
For example, one theorist Xu cites as representing this current of Schmittism (施米特主义) is Jiang Shigong, a legal scholar active in the 21st century and a major translator of Schmitt’s works into Chinese. Xu cites an interview by Jiang where he brings in a line of argumentation that sounds alarming, directly borrowed from Schmitt’s theories on the sovereign:
In 2004, when Ukraine and other countries launched their “color revolutions,” Jiang Shigong was preoccupied by the fact that the government of Ukraine, constrained by its liberal constitutional ideas, and lacking a basic understanding of the nature of politics, missed the opportunity to forcefully suppress the opposing groups, and finally submissively handed over political power. In a Schmitt-like tone, Jiang talked up the lessons that China should draw from this: ‘The crucial questions in politics are not questions of right and wrong, but of obedience and disobedience. If you do not submit to political authority, then ‘If I say you’re wrong, you’re wrong, even if you’re right.’’
While this quote is intended to highlight Schmitt’s elevation of naked authority, the full quotation shows Jiang making a critique of liberal constitutionalism that few American socialists would object to having lived under the 2000 election recount in Florida or Trump’s attempts to “stop the steal” after losing the 2020 election:
Q: Is the “election paradox” you’re talking about because the election in Ukraine has had issues with malpractice? If the election didn’t have these issues, then people wouldn’t be able to deny the election results?
A: Your question can be confusing, because it assumes political questions are principally about “truth.” This might lead you to believe that if there “wasn’t election fraud,” then people would automatically accept the election results. But in fact, this belief clouds our understanding of the true nature of politics.
The heart of politics lies not in right or wrong, but in questions of obedience and disobedience. If you do not submit to my political authority and I have the power in this situation, then when I say you’re wrong, that’s the final word, even if you’re right. Therefore, so-called ‘election fraud’ is often nothing but an excuse or rationalization for disobeying results you disagree with. And the key question is not whether there was or wasn’t election fraud, but whether the results of the election end up sticking.
For example, America’s 2000 presidential elections also had issues with how it was run, but when the Supreme Court gave their final decision, the recount was quickly halted. The Democratic Party quickly accepted the election results, because in the American system the Supreme Court has more political authority than the scientific ‘facts’ of the election process. (translation mine!)
For this strain of thought within China, Schmitt’s critiques are used to point out the vacuousness of the liberal approach to politics, which assumes that our moral values are eternal and not socially constructed on the basis of class relations. When Jiang invokes Schmitt directly in a later part of the interview, we again see him being used to critique Friedrich Hayek, one of the progenitors of neoliberal thought:
Schmitt’s theory actually overcomes the inherent flaws of liberalism. Hayek believed that freedom is the nonexistence of coercion. But this is possible only in idealized conditions, like Newton’s laws, and it is a tautology. The largest question for freedom is indeed how to face coercion. But in order to protect your definition of freedom, you need a force that is strong enough to suppress the forces that seek to coerce against that freedom.
So, as Schmitt said, the first question in politics is how to define your friends and enemies when making those decisions. Between enemies and friends, there are no questions of freedom, only force and subjugation. This is the essence of politics, an essence which liberals are often afraid to confront. (translation again mine)
It's worth noting this citation of Schmitt is hardly a new development for Chinese socialist thought. Mao’s “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among The People” is best known for a formulation that is precisely this friend-enemy distinction, as he lays out “two types of social contradictions” in Chinese society: “those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.”
The Großraum and Chinese international relations
Though Schmitt has clear influence in theories of state power and sovereignty within Chinese scholarship, his later work on geopolitical themes has picked up more attention in recent years, largely due to a 2017 translation of The Nomos of the Earth.
As Ryan Mitchell writes, “a new consensus seems to be building in some Chinese intellectual circles that Schmitt’s history of international law, and his Großraum concept, are among his most insightful and important contributions.”
If Schmitt’s constitutional work in the 1930s provides a relatively value-neutral analytical framework critiquing liberalism, his later geopolitical work provides a more prescriptive argument for how the world should be organized. Chinese scholars seeking to theorize on questions of hegemony and sovereignty under global U.S. empire have turned to reviving Schmitt’s Großraum idea in attempts to find a model for the world order they are seeking to construct.
In his work Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners, Roland Boer identifies the concept of “false and rooted universals” to explicate the differences between Western and Chinese theories of sovereignty. Whereas a false universal “forgets the conditions of its emergence and asserts that its assumptions apply to all irrespective of context,” a rooted universal “is always conscious of and factors into analysis contextual origins, with their possibilities and limitations.” We can see in Boer’s explanation of the false universal the trappings of universalizing global orders that Schmitt argued against:
False universals most often arise in the context of a hegemonic power, most typically those that were involved in European colonialism from the fifteenth century onward. Through colonial conquest and the imposition of a distinct framework on those colonised (Hou 2014, 121–124), the first steps to a false universal are made. Specific ideas relating to forms of governance, culture, and human nature become assumed norms, promoted as ‘universal’ and ‘abstract’ in a way that entails discarding the context in which they arose.
We can see here why Schmitt’s argumentation might be attractive to Chinese scholars; in detailing an alternative to unipolar hegemony, Schmitt provides a framework for an alternate world order that can resist the false universalism of Western democratic thought, while still operating under the general framework of nation-state relations that China has found itself entering post Reform and Opening Up. This line of argumentation is explicit in the recent work of many Chinese scholars who play a large role influencing Chinese statecraft, including, as Mitchell notes, Jiang Shigong, Fang Xu, Wang Hui, and Liu Xiaofeng. These thinkers range from formal party department leaders as Fang is, to academics like Jiang who often provide argumentation or are suspected to ghostwrite whitepapers that are picked up to become formal party policy.
As China seeks to increase its influence on global development especially in the Global South and formerly colonized countries, its citation of Schmitt’s unrealized Großraum ideology provides a clear metaphor for its goal of positioning itself as a non-hegemonic power with strong influence in its region. From Mitchell:
Beginning early in Xi Jinping’s administration, the Party’s emphasis on developing its own new forms of internationalism had manifested in a number of major platform announcements (particularly the One Belt, One Road infrastructure investment initiative) and concepts such as calling for the creation of a “community of shared destiny for mankind” (renlei mingyun gongtongti 人 类命运共同体). Regional platforms such as the “community of shared destiny” for Asian states, “Asian inter-civilizational dialogue,” development of Asian security cooperation, and a “South-South Human Rights Dialogue,” have also followed suit. New institutions such as China’s Asian International Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Forum add concrete order to these abstract ideas. Meanwhile, China’s disputes over the South China Sea, as well as the ongoing dilemma presented by Taiwan, directly present the problem of attempting to transform China’s surrounding environment into one consistent with the interests of the Party and the state.
Conclusion
Though many Western Scholars cite China’s “Schmitt fever” as proof of the country’s dangerous authoritarian leanings, an analysis of Chinese academic thought shows a few key points of nuance. Schmitt’s work performed during the rise of Nazis is indeed cited on questions of internal sovereignty, but these citations tend to be principally used for their analytical critique of liberalism. Schmitt via Chinese scholars on sovereignty make arguments that few socialists who have lived through Bush v. Gore or the Democratic Party response to Trump should be shocked by.
In the early 20th century, communism and fascism provided two credible alternatives to liberalism’s instability that Schmitt identified in his early career. Schmitt made a political choice to follow the path of the ascendent Reich, and drifted into Nazi sycophanty and political opportunism as a result. It’s the work done as Schmitt’s influence waned in the mainstream of Nazi ideology that Chinese scholars are adopting most directly as China turns towards international politics. Both Schmitt and a rising China have looked at the Cold War between twin universalisms of the United States and the Soviet Union and sought to outline another path explicitly rejecting hegemonism, at least at the world level. Though Schmitt’s foreseen development of a Großraum order never came to pass in his lifetime, it’s this prescription that one can expect to be most influential in Chinese thought as the country comes into contact with U.S. hegemony in the intensifying New Cold War.