Sphinx

Who owns the classical tradition, and who has the right to develop new interpretations of its significance for the present? As you might expect from someone who spent twenty years in Bristol, chanting “Meaning is realised at the point of reception!” and holding aloft my copy of the Little Red-and-Black Book*, my habitual answers are everyone and anyone. Yes, we can and should argue furiously about individual interpretations and appropriations, on political or moral or aesthetic or historical grounds, but what we can’t do is argue that certain people(s) have a special right or privilege, to the exclusion of others.

I’m thinking about this at the moment because the Tacitus Trap, China’s great contribution to the storehouse of snappy classical memes, is back in the news, with a scandal around alleged child abuse in a private kindergarten in Beijing and a possible cover-up, and hence visits to this blog post are up, plus an exchange of emails with some Chinese correspondents (for which I am as ever enormously grateful, given my inability to follow any of this directly).

Once again, the idea of Tacitus Trap as an “intellectual forgery” was raised. As I wrote before, I don’t think that’s a reasonable judgement at all: the concept is a decent enough paraphrase of what Tacitus says, and it serves a useful purpose – indeed, there’s a good case to be made that British political commentators need to adopt it forthwith to characterise our shambolic government. What’s interesting is *why* it should be considered inauthentic: Because Tacitus didn’t use these exact words? (Maybe reflecting a different attitude to classical authority in China?). Because no one in the West uses it? (Implying that the West has a special claim to the classical tradition?).

Or, that the phrase damned by association, especially since its adoption as officially sanctioned language (now part of what every state official should know, after Premier Xi used it in a speech)? The intended implication of using a classical Western phrase might be that this credibility crisis is originally a Western problem, or at least not solely a Chinese problem – in other words (and regardless of whether or not it’s actually true about the West) the introduction of the phrase represents the use of rhetoric to manipulate the public, by acknowledging the existence of a problem and simultaneously diminishing its significance by suggesting that it’s a more general phenomenon.

Which is to say, the idea of the Tacitus Trap is actually a key example of what it describes, the inability of a government to break out of its credibility crisis or convince people of its sincerity once a certain tipping point is reached…

*C.A. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception (Cambridge, 1993)

Update, 11/12/17: I’ve been exchanging emails with Yuran Zhou, who has the advantage in knowing what he’s talking about and being able to read the original discussions, so it makes best sense simply to quote some of his comments here, with permission and much gratitude, as a clarification, critique and expansion of my discussion above:

Since the very first day when the term entered the political discourse, it has been presented, knowingly or unknowingly, as an established theory from modern Western political science. It’s neither Western nor political science if it is attributed to Pan Zhichang’s book.

It is one thing that most people, as well as most careless Chinese media, would have understandably made an assumption based on the name of Tacitus or the similarly titled Thucydides Trap, but it is another when the official narrative, following Xi’s reference, joined the popular misattribution. The official propaganda in the catechism titled “What are the Three Traps Xi Jinping Mentioned?”  (http://cpc.people.com.cn/xuexi/n1/2016/0518/c385474-28359130.html), introduced the Tacitus Trap as a “famous law of political science.” This question stem from the civil service exam (http://www.buzhi.com/gwy/tkzt/18143.html)  also claims it “became one of the laws in Western political science.”

It makes me think of a bag designed in China, made in China, sold in China but labeled as “made in Italy.” And now, the official watchdog comes out to endorse the bags are really designer bags. One’s instinct is not the watchdog made a blunder in their identification, just like I tend not to believe the writing staff for Xi or for the civil service exam would have committed such a mistake.

The notion, not about Tacitus’ original general description of some emperor’s unpopularity, but about the subtly adjusted, specific vacuum of governmental credibility, is so ripe for being taken advantage of. The Tacitus Trap as a “Western experience” not only finds the government a good company, but also starts to muddying the waters quickly: the cause of such trap is distracted from “media blackout,” what the authorities do, to “deprivation of credibility,” what the people do.

Claiming the popularization of the term is orchestrated by an officially planned campaign might be something too conspiracy theory. But I think the term as a matter of fact does do more good than harm to the establishment. Of course I might have also overthought about this. Maybe the writers for propaganda organ and civil service exam just made some careless mistake, without much further implication. I know that many a fabricated Chinese saying was also quoted by Westerners (for example, Joseph Chamberlain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times). Maybe some writers, whether they are from East or West, just don’t do as much textual criticism as I think.

As to the acceptance, or say filtering, of Western thoughts in China, I think the Ministry of Truth concerns more of the specific source individual than the broad-brush “Western” label. After all, Marx is also “Western,” isn’t he? And as to the individual, it concerns more of their political positions than anything else. A telltale case is Jack London. Though he is often accused of being an anti-Chinese racist, his work goes into the national Chinese textbook, because he is a Communist. Similarly, when I was in middle school, George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck and their ilk are much more lauded than their Western contemporaries. Their political position was never mentioned; I didn’t realize this shared quality of many high-profile names in my textbooks until college.

But this background check mostly applies to modern names, so Tacitus is cool. As someone from almost two thousand years ago, his name carries few politicized, cold war-like “Western” connotations, so he can be readily accepted and appropriated without much ideological ado.