“Political Parties Are the Supreme Mentors of the Nation:” Justifications for Parties and Partisanship in China, 1900-1916

In the past twenty years, political theorists in the Anglophone world have made the normative study of political parties and partisanship one of the central topics in democratic theory. In this new literature (most notably Rosenblum 2009 and Ypi & White 2016), a dominant narrative of Western history holds that despite the paramount role political parties have been playing in democratic politics, anti-partyism has always been the mainstream of Western political thought. Political parties have been accused of being factional, corrupt, oligarchic, and—in a word—anti-democratic. According to this narrative, systematic normative justifications for parties and partisanship did not appear in Western history until in the twenty-first century, when some political theorists have started to appreciate party politics and defend it as a (if not the) desirable way of organizing democratic life in a modern state. This paper aims to revise this historical narrative by introducing a comparative perspective to the normative study of parties and partisanship. I argue that a systematic normative justification for party politics and partisanship exists before the twenty-first century, but it emerged in an unlikely place—China. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, despite the Confucian emphasis on harmony and its denunciation of factional politics, greatest political thinkers in China almost unanimously defended the establishment of competing parliamentary parties as the best way to improve Chinese politics. The normative reasons they offered for introducing party politics foreshadowed almost all aspects of contemporary theories of parties and partisanship. This enthusiasm in “partyism” runs counter to the intellectual tide in fin de siècle Western world, in which anti-partyism occupied the center of political debate. This paper seeks to explain this unusual historical phenomenon. I argue that party politics became attractive to Chinese thinkers because the elitist structure of parties, which many anti-partyists in the West hated, were regarded by Chinese partyists as an indispensable vehicle for transforming China from a “backward” despotism to a “civilized” constitutional state. In particular, they envisioned that parties could serve irreplaceable educational functions. On the one hand, parties can become the very platform for political elites to cultivate the virtues necessary for a healthy constitutional politics, including the devotion to public interests, disagreement with respect, the willingness to compromise and tolerate, and loyal opposition. On the other hand, parties were praised as the best school for political elites to teach ordinary people how to become rational, responsible, and participatory citizens suitable for modern political life. The idea that parties are “the supreme mentors of the nation” echoes with the Confucian conception of political hierarchy, in which the intellectually and morally superior few are entitled to cultivate the inferior many. The elitist drawbacks of political parties in the eyes of Western anti-partyists, therefore, were transformed into a blessing by Chinese partyists.