Rupture, Revolution, and Rhetoric in the Disciplinary Formation of Classical Studies in Contemporary China

Abstract

This article probes the various stakes of the rise of classical studies as a discipline in contemporary China, taking as a case in point Liu Xiaofeng’s shifting intellectual and political allegiances in his transition from a scholar of liberalist persuasion during the 1990s to a much decried advocate of the Mao cult over the past two decades. Outlining the reinvention of the “classics” as an inherently comparative new discipline that incorporates both Greek and Roman antiquity and ancient Chinese texts, the article argues that a consistent driving force behind the rise of classical scholarship is an attempt on the intellectuals’ part to amend cultural and intellectual ruptures that had ensued from political turmoil during the twentieth century from the modernizing May Fourth Movement to the Cultural Revolution. This categorical imperative of “making whole,” however, has assumed radically different forms, leading to the seeming discrepancy between Liu’s earlier “liberalist” stance to a more recent willingness to comply with the regime. In particular, through examining Liu Xiaofeng’s esoteric rhetoric in his reading of the Confucian scholar Xiong Shili, the article demonstrates that the will to cultural preservation that underlies Liu’s advocacy of classical scholarship eventually translates into an attempt to depoliticize philosophy and philology and hence a proneness to complicity with state power.