VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 14
Where This Book Stands
Last chapter laid the seven core claims against the great thinkers and set out the book's highest vision. This chapter closes the Part and the whole volume, answering three of the deepest questions: this book's posture toward concrete issues, this book's distinctive tool, and where this book actually stands. Three sections. The first gives China's institutions an objective account and clears away five simplifications of mainstream Western discourse, the one-party system, authoritarianism, autocracy, state capitalism, and the China-threat thesis, presenting the seven restorations again while speaking honestly of the cost, and making clear that this same posture of restoration applies equally to the study of the United States and of any country. The second gathers the book's two most important things together: cross-domain centralized authority as a tool for seeing the world, and laying out both sides as a posture for writing about the world, the latter carrying on the tradition of Sima Qian, who wrote the record straight. The third is the close of the whole volume, making clear that this book 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, that the one who wrote it is a real person, born in Guangzhou in nineteen sixty-two, that the book is a gift free forever, and closing with a few words to the reader five hundred years from now. This chapter shows one thing: the posture of this book is the same from beginning to end, crediting the ancestors, and handing the verdict to the reader.
Chapter contents
Section One. An objective account of China's institutions, clearing away five simplifications
Section Two. Centralized authority across domains, and the method of laying out both sides
Section Three. What this work is, to the reader five hundred years from now
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.