As I’ve remarked on here before, I really wish I had some grasp of Mandarin, in order to be able to get a proper sense of how Thucydides is being discussed in China: do they simply follow the conventional US international relations reading, and especially Allison’s Thucydides’s Trap theory, on the basis that this will help them understand American foreign policy thinking, or are they engaging with this and other classical texts (including Chinese ones) more creatively? A recent report from the Asia News International website (original link from @rogueclassicist) suggests the latter may be more likely, as it reports on an article from the official news agency Xinhua that speaks not of Thucydides but of the hitherto-unremarked Tacitus Trap.
I have to rely on the ANI reporter’s summary of this article, as my web browser issues dire warnings against viewing Xinhua’s site (can anyone tell me if this is justified?). It focuses on the need for members of the Communist Party to serve the people and bring about the rejuvenation of China, and includes a warning against the Tacitus Trap:
The concept of the Tacitus Trap apparently posits that ‘neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome’. It also warns leaders that ‘when a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth or a lie, to do good or bad, will be considered a lie or to do bad’.
For the ANI reporter, this is a real gotcha moment. The Chinese, the report claims, regularly refer to P. Gornelius Tacitus rather than P. Cornelius, because a China Daily article in 2012 misspelled it and they all cite it without checking. And of course no one has ever heard of the Tacitus Trap.
There is, it seems, real innovation taking place in China, perhaps as desired by Supreme Leader Xi Jinping. This involves making up non-existent quotations, from people long dead (nearly 1900 years ago in this case), who are not there to clarify matters. Thankfully, the works of historians like Tacitus have survived in original Roman and English translations. And, these by no stretch of the imagination, seem to even remotely contain concepts attributed to Tacitus.
Hilariously, ANI continues, the alleged quote clearly indicts the Chinese government, which cannot possibly be welcome, and therefore its policies cannot possibly be popular. This is just like the Thucydides Trap, which “is often quoted by Chinese experts to try and explain the ‘insecurities’ developing within the US, stemming from the rise of a confident China” but which respected professors from Yale and Harvard point out is not to be found in the ancient text but can only be linked tenuously to the situation if one focuses on the actions of the stronger established power.
So, the two ‘traps’ again prove the success of Xi Jinping’s policies of bringing innovation into manufacturing. In an innovative manner, the ‘Tacitus Trap’ has been manufactured by Chinese propaganda, and is now being foisted upon an unsuspecting world.
At this point, if not earlier, we might start to question the reliability of ANI’s analysis. Chinese scholars have responded critically to the model of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, which has been energetically promoted by a respected professor from Harvard and widely cited by Western commentators, because they disagree with its claims and implications, rather than inventing it for their own purposes. More interestingly, as Gerald Krieghofer (@krieghofer) pointed out, there is in fact a very obvious source for the idea: Tacitus’ Histories 1.7: “when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him.”
So, a perfectly sound quotation, and a not unreasonable political maxim: once you lose credibility and authority, it doesn’t matter how sound your policies are. This is how the phrase was used by the President of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 2013, for example (see report in the South China Morning Post), and a blogger at the time noted that the disparity of Google hits for the phrase – 1,690 in English, 714,000 Chinese results – made it clear that this was a Chinese invention, sanctioned for use in the media. The most important source, if not the original, is a 2012 article (I’m tempted to call it an editorial, but lack knowledge of the context to know whether this is a meaningful distinction in Chinese media) in the China Daily:
BEIJING – Some local Chinese governments are prone to slip into a credibility crisis in the Internet era in which inadequate information access and poor explanation spur public blame and simmer distrust.
Despite governments’ assertion of approved environmental assessments for several planned chemical projects recently in cities of Dalian, Shifang and Qidong, local residents, nonetheless, did not trust them and turned protests into violence in some extreme cases.
In one of the latest conflicts between a military officer family and a flight attendant as well as a nationwide huntdown of a most wanted serial killer, the public also tended to believe online rumors rather than official statements.
Publius Gornelius Tacitus (56-117 A.D.), a historian and a senator of the Roman Empire, said neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome, which was later called “Tacitus Trap” in political studies.
“Tacitus Trap” warns any leaders in power that when a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth or a lie, to do good or bad, will be considered a lie, or to do bad.
There was a similar political adage in ancient China when Confucius (551-479 B.C.) told his followers that the people’s trust is the top priority among all considerations of governance.
It is not enough for the government to publicize information concerning public interests, which was demanded by the above-mentioned residents in fear of environmental hazards. The public have the right to know at the beginning of the government’s project plans and the right to participate in debating the project’s feasibility.
To establish a sound government-people interaction will help accumulate public trust and make it easier to elaborate a bigger picture of economic and social development to the people.
Therefore, to win or lose public support seriously matters, for not only the better government-people relationship but also government’s public image.
As the Big Lychee blogger noted, it’s interesting that the article cites a similar Confusius quote – to endorse the idea? – but nevertheless wants to adopt the Roman name; it suggests that the reception of classical ideas, and the construction of classical authority, in Chinese contexts is a really interesting topic, and I hope someone with the requisite language skills is studying it (and if anyone out there with the requisite language skills feels like organising a joint research project on this, get in touch!).
On the basis of my own Google searches, it remains the case that references to “Tacitus Trap” appear solely in the context of Chinese discussions or articles reporting on them (and note that according to this report, Xi himself has referred to it), and the number of English-language references remains an order of magnitude smaller than Chinese references (the figure of 1,690 for the former flatters it, as many of these are in Mandarin with just the phrase in English).
Final thought: why was the Asia News International report so certain that the “Tacitus Trap” is fake, and so eager to offer this as evidence for Chinese fraud and/or malevolence? The fact that ANI is based in India, and that there have been attempts over the last year to apply the “Thucydides Trap” to China-India relations as well as US-China relations, may be a significant part of the context.
Update: a couple of additional thoughts. Firstly, on priority: references to the Tacitus Trap start to appear, as far as I can see, in mid-2011, on a pretty small scale – only six months after what, so far as I can see, was Graham Allison’s first mention of the Thucydides Trap (mid-January 2011, in the New York Times). So it seems the best bet that the latter inspired the development of the former, but quite a close-run thing. I still remain intrigued that a Confucian precedent for the idea can be identified but wasn’t adopted; better to associate such failures of government with Rome rather than classical China, or belief that Confucius offers guidance on many different things whereas Tacitus is good for this one thing? Or simply the fact that Confucius doesn’t speak in terms of any sort of trap?
Update: meanwhile, I’d like to flag up my claims as the inventor of the Tibullus Trap, the Theophrastus Trap and the Theocritus Trap, as soon as I’ve figured out what they might be. And of course the Demosthenes Dilemma, an interesting new take on the related phenomena of (i) crying wolf and (ii) being accused of crying wolf because of bribery.
Update: I’ve been exchanging emails with Sven Guenther from Northeast Normal University in Changchun, who, it turns out, has an article forthcoming in Gymnasium on this very topic. The headline news as far as I’m concerned: the first mention of the Tacitus Trap in China is in fact in 2007, in a chapter (in Chinese) by Pan Zhichang, ‘On the Three Kingdoms: Who Are the Real Heroes (Transport)’, in Ibid., ed., Who Hijacked Our Sense of Beauty: Pan’s Discoveries (Shanghai 2007). Long before the Thucydides Trap emerges into popular discourse – even if the idea seems to be widely taken up only some years later.
Update 11/9: I’ve just had an enormously helpful email from Jinyu Liu, now at DePauw, amplifying her findings on the ‘Tacitus Trap’:
There was a point when the Chinese netizens and some scholars were confused about which Tacitus was relevant here. The obscure emperor Claudius Tacitus had a cameo appearance in the discussions. There has also been some confusion about whether it was in the Histories or the Annals that Tacitus said something about public/governmental credulity/trust. Very few people checked Pan Zhicang’s quote. After much energy was spent on identifying and clarifying the context in which Tacitus made the comment, various reactions have followed among the Chinese netizens: 1. Since it was a Chinese invention, the viral circulation of the term, thought to be associated with some famous Western theory, since 2011 is only indicative of the gullibility of the uninformed public. The whole thing is a case of forgery. 2. Pan Zhichang deserves to be credited as the creator of the technical term. It should be considered a very important contribution that he has made to humanities (http://pan2026.blog.hexun.com/111180464_d.html). (His book “Whi hijacked our sense of beauty” is now in its second edition, 2016. Bacon rather than Tacitus might have been his source). Yes, de-and-reterritorialization in action. 3. Do we need all these “traps” at all? Too many, too confusing, too artificial. 4. If the West does not really know or share the term, are “we” and “they” speaking the same language or on the same page?
In any case, despite all this confusion and all the buzz about forgery, the now sanctioned and convenient term 塔西佗陷阱 (Tacitus Trap) has already entered various important tests such as the Civil Service Test, high school exams, PoliSci, academic articles, and so on. It is there to stay, I’m afraid. 🙂
As I’ve suggested above, one of the most interesting aspects of this complex of thought is the persistent theme of forgery or inauthenticity. Yes, this is clearly a case of taking a specific comment in an ancient source and turning it into a broader, more abstract principle, just as in the ‘Thucydides Trap’ – but that is not an automatically invalid procedure, and actually the Tacitus Trap seems to me to be closer to the original intention of Tacitus (offering a self-contained comment on problems of government) than the Thucydides Trap is to the original intention of Thucydides (where the contrast of true and apparent causes, or however you translate the complex terms he uses in a complex sentence, is only one aspect of a multi-layered interpretation of the root causes of the war between Athens and Sparta).
What is most striking is the suggestion that, because the West isn’t using this idea, therefore it must be invalid. Why not a confident assertion that Chinese thinkers are now making more productive use of Greek and Roman classics than the Westerners are? This raises all sorts of questions about the valuation of different kinds of knowledge, and the processes of validation and authorisation, that I’m unfortunately not qualified to investigate in any more depth. Meaning is realised at the point of reception; if this reading of Tacitus offers a useful means of interpreting Chinese political dilemmas, what does it matter that the West has failed to recognise the usefulness of the principle (or has forgotten it, if indeed the original source for this is Bacon or other early modern readers of Tacitus)? The idea of different cultural traditions of reading the classics, with complex interactions and debates, is so much more exciting than the idea of a single worldwide tradition or set of conventions… Long live the Tacitus Trap!
Looks like Xinhua fell subject to the “Gornelian Trap”!
Very interesting read. Thank you
It does seem to fit well with Histories 1.7: “when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him”
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/tacitus/TacitusHistory01.html
The Chinese seem to be adding additional text about lying, but I think the meaning is all mostly there.
I say bravo too to the East inventing ideas from classic Western texts.