The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

order but not to understand it (民可使由之, 不可使知
之), and his “contribution” to China’s authoritarian
tradition. Suffice it to say that the entire stock of Confucius’s
political thought is about authoritarian order
and rulership. We also know for a fact that China’s
whole history has been under dynastic and authoritarian
rule, especially in the almost 2,000 years when
Confucianism was the official political and ethical
dogma, not to mention the totalitarian dictatorship
under Mao Zedong. (Although Mao and his successors
claim to have broken from China’s dynastic past and
dismissed Confucianism, the CCP has nevertheless
retained most of the Chinese authoritarian tradition
in its rule of China.) Authoritarian rule by design does
not allow political differences. It goes without saying
that “harmony with cultural diversities and political
differences” (和而不同) has never existed in China. On
the contrary, throughout history, Chinese have only
known about “political conformity with disharmony”
(同而不和). Thus when those unqualified claims of
harmony as the mainstay of the Chinese tradition and
the underpinning of the harmonious world construct
come to dominate the promotion of this questionable
call, they are, in essence, observing the authoritarian
rule of political conformity and flattering the Chinese
leaders with a “new dress” that they do not have.
Chinese leaders’ call for cultural diversity and
political difference puts themselves in an awkward
situation: they like to cite Karl Marx’s teaching that a
nation’s foreign policy is an extension of its internal
political, economic, social, and cultural constructs; yet
since there is no harmonious society in China, how
can they promote a harmonious world abroad as a
Chinese foreign policy? The harmonious world call,
under this circumstance, appears to be just another
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