Griffith Asia Institute - China Brief

 

Presented by:  Professor John Kane, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University.

 

Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, has embarked on a program of reform that he hopes will result in a re-founding (following Mao and Deng) of modern China, setting it on a sustainable path to civilizational greatness. The reform trajectory is in two different directions, toward economic liberalization on the one hand and toward more authoritarian social controls on the other. Critics have argued that this political strategy is contradictory, or even that Xi has no real strategy. I argue to the contrary that, taking the problem of maintaining order and stability as fundamental, Xi’s strategy is understandable in terms of the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, and tends toward what I call ‘authoritarian liberalism.’ I outline the severe challenges that contemporary China presents to Xi before relating the essentials of Hobbes’s political theory, including the limit that theory reaches in the realm of foreign policy. I then show how Xi’s strategy closely mirrors the Hobbesian political imperatives of securing internal order through an unchallenged central authority capable of delivering justice and the necessary conditions for individual well-being, but that this strategy runs into a difficult and dangerous conundrum when it encounters the phenomenon of Chinese nationalism.

 

John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University. His doctorate from the London School of Economics was in political theory, and he now teaches and researches in political theory, leadership and foreign policy. He has been three times visiting professor to Yale University and is author of many articles. His books include The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP 2001), Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP 2008), and (with H. Patapan) The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP 2012). His latest book (edited with H. Patapan) is Good Democratic Leadership: On Prudence and Judgment in Modern Democracies (OUP 2014).

 

- Tuesday 16 September 2014

- Level 7, Board Room,  Webb Centre Building, Queensland College of Art, South Bank Campus, Griffith University

- 12:30-2:00pm

       A light lunch will be providedts-gai@griffith.edu.au by 5.00pm Friday 12    

      September 2014.