VOLUME IV, PART 4
Where This Work Stands
The first three Parts set firmly the three root structures of political institutions, enfeoffment, the examination, and centralized authority. Reading this far, you will have a fair question. These claims, how do they differ from what the famous political thinkers of the last five hundred years already said? Are they new, or old? If everyone has said them already, this book is only copying, and better left unwritten. If they differ, where? This Part answers that question honestly, setting the book inside the coordinate frame of five hundred years of human political thought, and letting the reader see for themselves where it stands.
To that deep company of thinkers of the last five hundred years, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, Weber, this Part gives honorifics and credit throughout, taking their work as this book's starting point and reference. And it also notes honestly that across five hundred years, the confident predictions and visions of their day have mostly not come fully to pass, behind which lie several structural limits: a range of sight centered on Europe and America, a standard set by their own age, a stance and leaning of their own, and a confinement to the domain of politics alone. This is not to say they were wrong. It is to say that any thinker unavoidably has limits of their own, and that later researchers can make a new synthesis on the ground the earlier ones prepared.
The deepest single difference in this Part is the range of sight. The range of the last five hundred years was mainly five hundred years plus a European and American center. The range this book attempts is four thousand years, rooted in China's twenty-two-hundred-year tradition. Widen the range, and the picture changes. Down at the level of concrete claims, this book sets firm seven core claims: that the institutions of enfeoffment are the political institutions, that the examination is a merit-selection law running right now, that centralized authority is a cross-domain life-level law, that expansion is the ultimate goal, that failure follows five common laws, that enfeoffment plus the examination plus centralized authority are the three structures, and one heaviest iron law, that the manner of enfeoffment does not matter, that survival hangs only on the will of the people, that leave the people and you perish, an iron law that carries on from Guanzi, Mencius, and Xunzi, carrying the ancestors forward. And this book puts forward, on its own, one highest vision: output greater than need, and no torment, a threshold lower than any ultimate human goal before it, a reachable dream you can begin from yourself and expand outward step by step.
This Part has three chapters. Chapter Twelve enters through the difference in range of sight, sets out the abundance and the limits of five hundred years of thought, speaks of the four-thousand-against-five-hundred span, and lays the three claims of enfeoffment, the examination, and centralized authority against that company. Chapter Thirteen finishes the last four claims, opens out the highest vision of output greater than need and no torment, and puts democracy back inside the frame of enfeoffment, returning it from a verdict of value to an analysis of structure, democracy being, at bottom, voter enfeoffment. Chapter Fourteen closes the whole volume: giving China's institutions an objective account and clearing away five simplifications of mainstream Western discourse, making clear the tool of cross-domain centralized authority and the posture of laying out both sides, and saying at last where this book actually stands, that it is not a continuation of the Western Enlightenment and not a development of Marxism, but a carrying-forward of what ancestors said twenty-two hundred years ago, written by a real person, born in Guangzhou in nineteen sixty-two, a gift that is free forever, closing with a few words to the reader five hundred years from now.
Through this Part you will see one thing. This is not a contest with the great thinkers. It is an honest standing on the shoulders of those who came before, setting out from the root of China's twenty-two-hundred-year tradition to make a new synthesis, and handing the verdict, at the end, to the reader. Finish this Part and you have finished the whole of Volume Four. Turn then to Volume Five, Legal Institutions, and read on.
Chapters in this Part
Chapter Twelve. Against five hundred years, the difference in range of sight
Chapter Thirteen. Against five hundred years, claims and the vision
Chapter Fourteen. Where this book stands
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.