Once more on China (in 2025)

An inability to think

I have written publicly a few times specifically on China, without pretending to any great personal expertise. Some of these articles have in fact gained a strange traction among Chinese readers, like ‘Sino-no-futurism’, though in 2025 I find myself fairly embarrassed by most of them and, for better or worse, mostly feel no urgency to elaborate on them directly or make them more publicly available. Nevertheless, it is stunningly obvious in the current conjuncture, and part of what draws me insistently back to writing, that understanding something about China—though not ‘understanding China’, an impossible bit of megalomania—is an absolute necessity for the production of serious (‘philosophical’) thought.

The explanation for this is rather less apparent than the mere fact. It is not simply the geopolitical ‘struggle for mastery of the Earth’ that we are forced to live through (though see my 2020 piece on Jiang Shigong). The Cold War, after all, did not really present any particularly interesting intellectual encounter between either Marxism or Russian philosophy and the liberal tradition. Nor is it simply the fact that China is not derivative of European civilisation, though that is certainly noteworthy and a necessary condition of what is at stake. There is something more fundamental, and frustratingly dimly grasped.

Over the last two years this realisation has driven me further and further down the path of deep study of the history and the living reality of Chinese philosophy, in itself something that is hardly possible to exhaust and which recedes faster than I can attempt to pursue it. In my upcoming book (formerly ‘Aeons Without History’) I aim to explore, not Chinese philosophy in itself, but rather the difficulty that this simulative historical reality poses from the standpoint of Western philosophy—and why, after all, Hegel was driven into neurosis by the ‘problem’ of China.

For my own part, the immediate problem is that to think, let alone to write, about China in the mid-21st century presents peculiar challenges.

There is a personal side to this that is really a reflex of ‘kleine Politik’ which I do not intend to explore in the book but will describe briefly here as an introduction to the new year. During a visit to Guangzhou in June 2024 I was struck by the overwhelming liveliness of the city’s streets at almost all hours of the day and the night in comparison to everywhere I have lived in the West and even to Hong Kong and Singapore. The metro, whenever I travelled it, was jam-packed, and in the vicinity of the Museum of Opera where I was staying it was hard to move for the crowds. By chance, before even leaving the city, I came across the claim on social media, naturally supported with contextless video supposedly from that very time, that Guangzhou’s streets were in fact completely empty because of the Chinese economic downturn. I was much excited to read the debates between Western social media commenters of various schools discussing and explaining this startling fact.

In a more recent stay in Xi’an I found myself curious about the huge number of birds in the city, both in its quite extensive parks and kept as pets outside apartments. I even asked some friends from the city about them. When I had the opportunity to travel around the surrounding countryside of Shaanxi I saw much the same. On returning to London, I was fascinated, once again by chance, to read the claim that there are hardly any birds in mainland China, and furthermore that this is unsurprising since that large country is in fact one enormous ecological disaster.

One particularly interesting bird in Xi’an.

On a day-to-day basis in my work in the energy industry, the dominant technical calibre of Chinese technology in the sector is now a fact of life. Of course, as everyone will no doubt know, in the charmed circle of financial and geopolitical commentary outside the sector this is typically dismissed variously as simply not real, as the mere product of intellectual property theft, or as irrelevant because a consequence of ‘overcapacity’ (though, of course, crises of overproduction are in fact precisely the means by which capital innovates).

The core problem is that, again and again, anyone with direct experience of China is asked to disbelieve the evidence in front of their eyes. Of course, some are happy enough to do this. We know from recent empirical research that many Western scholars of China today are self-admitted liars who dissemble their actual views for patronage. Certainly worse, however, are the unhappy true believers who have sincerely and successfully altered their perception of reality in a spirit of religious fervour. Both of these groups have moved with a startling and sinister agility over the last decade to destroy any grounds on which China can really be understood. We are confronted here with an intersection between noxious material interest and ideology in its most brutal form; in any case the entire domain of China commentary, not to say China studies, has become a vast ruin sodden with mould and rot. As far as contemporary China is concerned specifically, there is very little that is useful to be gained from attempting to traverse it. This is not just because of the obvious bad faith of most of the field’s current intellectual protagonists, but because of methodological errors that have become fixed into the very core of the field. Therefore it is not worth paying much attention to it. (There is still, by contrast, much of interest that is being written on premodern China, though even there in some contexts there has been the same tendency of ideological neurosis making itself felt.)

Behind all of this there lurks the recrudescence of the ‘pagan’ belief in the intrinsic superiority of one human to another, which I previously observed in ‘Language Inhuman’. Towards China this manifests on two political axes. One of these is the openly supremacist core project revealed by the ideological decay of liberalism in the United States and framed in increasingly tiresome detail in the arbitrary policies that emanate from Washington like the thunderbolts of Jupiter: the naked claim to domination, unvarnished, without further justification. Since the writing of ‘Language Inhuman’ the enormous atrocities in Gaza have only brought this ideological declension further into the open.

On the other hand, there is the increasingly embarrassing external alliance to this supremacist project on the part of the mainstream of what is called ‘Chinese liberalism’. In analysing the latter—which typically combines a deep-seated feeling of presumed, if rarely justified, intellectual superiority with an attitude of sneering contempt towards the majority of its fellow-countrymen—we are apt to recall Kojève’s description of the ‘man of tender heart’, l’Homme-au-cœur-tendre, who never attains to the level of the transformation of reality and descends rather into madness from the engulfing contradiction between the society in which they live and their critique of that same edifice. ‘In his isolation, he opposes himself to the entire world, he is “better” than the world: delusions of grandeur. Society, the World, are evil, [he says,] because I am not happy, because I do not find my happiness there.’¹

Though cloaking themselves in the linguistic legacy of liberalism, both of these tendencies are in fact supremely antiliberal and properly speaking regressions from the macrohistorical liberal project, aimed as they are fundamentally at the preservation of non-linguistic essence, an essential claim to superiority. The maelstrom that spread from South Korea at the tail end of 2024 only made this more apparent.

Regardless, it is not my intention to spend the bulk of my time ‘debunking’ what passes for China discourse or writing responses to the various and endlessly curious ideologues who dominate it. Others can do this much better (I particularly recommend the irrepressible Lei Gong), though I also believe that the need to continually debunk and rebut and debate is an overall drag and an enormous intellectual danger for aspiring writers on more serious topics. Beware, beware, the Forest of Sin. None come out, but many go in! For the time being, these observations will, I hope, serve to contextualise my future writing, and to put into written form and purge some relatively petty thoughts that have been welling up in me for many months like a bad case of indigestion. They may or may not be more inflammatory than my current thoughts on LLMs.

1. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 88.