Looking back thousands of years to create politics for the future
- By Wan Lixin
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, May 15, 2015
From a very early age, some Chinese learn to develop a degree of cynicism towards politics, especially as a subject taught at school.
And political practice in a few areas does not afford us much cause for celebration either.
For well over two decades, during China’s heady growth, some had extolled money-making to such an extent that some officials came to view development as the overriding priority. When growth counts toward merits for promotion, some officials became too busy wooing investment to care about politics.
There was a price to pay, though.
A senior leader admitted recently that “once the political ecology has been polluted, it costs a lot to clean it up.”
In our singled-minded pursuit of prosperity, we grew estranged from the fountain of politics. In Chinese, politics — zhengzhi — simply means “correct governance,” stressing such qualities as loyalty, responsibility and honesty.
In the West, politics too used to be a living source of inspiration conceived of such principles as justice and virtue. Sadly, much of the politics practiced there today also suggests that it has long lost touch with its origins.
As written at the beginning of Melissa Lane’s “The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter,” politics is a spectrum of the possibilities of power, which defines relations among humans and the purposes they pursue. At one end of the spectrum is the sheer exploitative domination.
Political involvement
Our estrangement from the origins of politics began long ago.
Rousseau issued a warning to the citizens of Geneva in 1764 that “Ancient peoples are no longer a model for modern ones; they are too alien to them in every respects ... Leave aside these great names that do not suit you.”
He explained further that “You are merchants, artisans, bourgeois, always occupied with their [sic] private interests, people for whom even liberty is only a means for acquiring without obstacle and for possessing in safety.”
He was suggesting that the kind of political involvement possible for Greek and Roman citizens entailed a degree of leisure denied to most of Geneva’s citizens at that time.
That does not imply that public policies should be dictated by bureaucrats or by specialized state apparatus.
Greeks and Romans did not conceive of politics as something esoteric, but rather as a pervasive and abiding concern for matters common to the whole community.
In Greece, citizens addressed what they called “ta politika” — matters of concern to a certain community — primarily in a “polis,” a particular kind of territory and settlement, combining an urban core, often walled, with a region of agricultural hinterland. It was a space in which the collective well-being could be defined, pursued and shared.
Thus, the book, in tracing politics to its origins, “can reveal a range of ancient and modern preoccupations, so that common ground can be traced and light shed on those areas where they differ.”
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