第二章 耶路撒冷与天安门何干？王怡对超越价值的追寻

Footnotes

1. “Constitutionalism is concerned first with whether individual freedom is viewed as a fundamental prior constraint on the political and legal system in terms of its value and institutional arrangement.” Wang Yi, Xianzheng zhuyi: Guannian yu zhidu de zhuanlie 宪政主义：观念与制度的转捩 [Constitutionalism: The Turning Point of Ideas and Institutions] (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 2006), 7. trademark of Wang. Like many of his conservative allies, Wang regards limiting the power of the government as the core concern of his political theory. The conception of Zaixian yueshu encompasses different aspects of the “priority” of the Constitution. The first is institutional. As Wang writes: Not to recognise the prior constraint that prior to the state and the legislator is to succumb to “voluntarism” and to accept the positivist position that the Constitution and the law are the “will of the ruler.” Under this position, the power of the state is inherently unbridled and should not be subject to any limitations beyond the will of the sovereign.2 The voluntarist political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is Wang’s main opponent. He claims that Rousseau’s championing of popular sovereignty and the accompanying idea of direct democracy had a strong “populist and nationalist tendency,”3 ultimately leading to “revolution and the guillotine.”4 Furthermore, in response to Rousseau’s proposal to “position the government as the executive body of the will (general will) of the sovereign,”5 Wang points out two serious implication of such a voluntarist model. “One is to deny the checks and balances of power and allow the sovereignty to directly interfere with the exercise of power.”6 And the other one is “to place the ‘general will’ in the transcendent position of being always right and supreme, while at the same time directly and frequently putting the people in situations where they may ‘do wrong.’”7 When popular sovereignty is given the supreme status in this way, it in reality demands that concrete people tolerate and bear with the mistakes ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

3. Ibid., 58. ↩

4. Ibid., 49. ↩

5. Ibid., 61. ↩

6. Ibid. ↩

7. Ibid. it invariably makes.8 This line of thinking is “very prone to jump directly from the grandiose and inappropriate concept of the ‘people’ to a fascination with dictators or oligarchic systems.”9 Wang’s worry is particularly relevant to the “Schmitt-Strauss Fever” prominent in contemporary China.10 Since the bankruptcy of Marxism was exposed in the reform and opening up, the CCP urgently needed a political theory to counter the rise of neoliberalism and its calls for liberal political reform in China. Schmitt’s political theory, especially his critique of western liberalism’s neglect of “the political,” provided a language for the CCP and its supporters to defend the existing system.11 For example, the new leftist Zhang Xudong’s interpretation of Schmitt argues that: If there is a unified will of all the people in China, then you must be able to do this legally, because you represent the people. The Communist Party, the Chinese revolution, succeeded because it said very strongly that I represent the people, and this was actually accepted by both the people and the intellectuals, and even by the enemies of the Communist Party. … This is the public will, and the public will creates democracy, and democracy can create despotism.12 ↩

8. “Therefore a people cannot offer any resistance to the legislative head of a state that would be consistent with right, since a rightful condition is possible only by submission to its general legislative will. … The reason a people has a duty to put up with even what is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its resistance to the highest legislation can never be regarded as other than contrary to law.” Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131. Wang asserts that Kant’s view in this aspect reflects the influence of Rousseau and its totalitarian consequence. Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 61. ↩

9. Ibid. ↩

10. Wang once remarked that Schmitt’s constitutional theory “went almost to the opposite side of constitutionalism.” Ibid., 107. ↩

11. Carl K. Y. Shaw, “Toward a Radical Critique of Liberalism: Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in Contemporary Chinese Discourses,” in Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World: Reorienting the Political, eds. Kai Marchal and Carl K. Y. Shaw (London: Lexington Books, 2017), 37-38, 40-41. ↩

12. Zhang Xudong, Quanqiuhua shidai de wenhua rentong: Xifang pupain zhuyi huayu de lishi pipan 全球化时 代的文化认同：西方普遍主义话语的历史批判 [Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization: A Historical Rethinking of Western Discourses on Universalism] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2005), 252. A perceptive reader may already be able to imagine how this idea might resonate with the idea in the Book of Rites mentioned in the previous chapter that the king’s music produces social harmony by enabling the people to be responsible to their social roles, their real “selves.” See Chapter 1, Section 2-1. Here we see clearly how Schmitt’s accounts of the dependency of the constitutional order on the political order and the fundamentality of the people’s decision to the grounding of the political order can easily be used to justify China’s despotism. Through the equation of the will of the people and the CCP, Schmitt’s political decisionism and nationalism have become important sources for the Communist Party and the New Left to use constitutionalist and democratic reasons to delay the fulfilment of the constitutional promises of the People’s Republic of China.13 In addition to “the Marxist appropriation of Schmittian ideas,”14 Schmittian ideas have also contributed to the resurgence of Confucianism in mainland China. This is largely due to the lofty status that Schmitt gave to the friend/enemy distinction as the basis for the political.15 In the post-Mao era, the transition from a planned economy to a market economy rendered the old dichotomy between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie ineffective in sustaining the friend/enemy distinction the CCP relies on.16 On the other hand, the Hua-Yi (Chinese- Barbarian) distinction, which has long underpinned the entire political imagination of the Chinese celestial empire, has still subtly occupied a central place in the nation’s tianxia worldview.17 The strong modern character of Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy does not entirely mesh with the recovery of Confucian traditional resources. Because his ↩

13. Zheng Qi in “Carl Schmitt in China” reviews Chinese liberals’ condemnation of the intimate connection between Schmitt’s and Mao’s political theories, in Telos no. 160 (Fall 2012), 29-56. Although Zheng then loosens this connection with a more detailed analysis of the substantial content of them and helps Schmitt evade charges of totalitarian politics, it does not deny Chinese communist politicians’ and left-wing scholars’ partial, and distorted, utilisation of his theory. ↩

14. Shaw, “Toward a Radical Critique of Liberalism,” 47. ↩

15. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Exp. ed., trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26. ↩

16. For an analysis of the similarity between Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and Mao’s, see Xu Ben, “Zhongguo bu xuyao zheyang de ‘zhengzhi’ he ‘zhuquanzhe jueduan’: ‘Shimite re’ he guojia zhuyi” [China Does Not Need of Such Politics and Sovereign Decision: Schmitt Fever and Nationalism], Ai sixiang 爱思想, 16 July 2008. http://www.aisixiang.com/data/9568.html. ↩

17. See Chapter 1, Section 2-1. depiction of national constitutionalism is modelled on the French Revolution,18 it has a limited capacity to return to the pre-modern Confucian tradition to produce the political identity desired by the New Left. The Chinese Straussians took the key step. There has also been a Strauss fever since the twenty-first century that followed the Schmitt fever. There is continuity between the two impulses, which is evident in the case of the cultural Christian Liu Xiaofeng. As one of the most representative Chinese Straussians, “Liu admits that he turned to Strauss’s political philosophy after studying Schmitt’s theory.”19 Leo Strauss agrees with Schmitt’s critique of liberalism’s neglect of the priority of the political but also finds that the latter’s “unliberal tendency is restrained by the still unvanquished ‘systematics of liberal thought.’”20 To be more specific, in Strauss’s view, Schmitt’s reliance on Hobbes’s political concepts makes his critique of liberalism “not radical enough to overcome the limitation of liberal horizon and its metaphysical presuppositions.”21 Therefore, Strauss revised Schmitt’s political theory by returning to the classics in order to go beyond the liberal horizon. This “Schmittian- Straussian” theoretical process seems to Chinese Straussians an opportunity for the revival of Confucianism in China. As Liu suggests, Strauss’s political doctrine “allows us to escape from the habitual position of measuring the classical Chinese way by the modern Western way.”22 On the other hand, another important Chinese Straussian, Gan Yang, attempted to establish a peculiar Chinese national political orthodoxy by integrating the Confucian tradition, Mao ↩

18. See Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, ed. and trans. Jeffery Seitzer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 100-102. ↩

19. Zheng Qi, “Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Issue of Political Legitimacy in China,” American Foreign Policy Interests 35/5 (October 2013), 258. ↩

20. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 119. ↩

21. Shaw, “Toward a Radical Critique of Liberalism,” 41. ↩

22. Liu Xiaofeng, “Shitelaosi yu Zhongguo: Gudian xinxing de xiangfeng” 施特劳斯与中国：古典心性的相逢 [Strauss and China: A Meeting of the Classical Mentality], Ai sixiang, 19 April 2009. http://www.aisixiang.com/data/26462.html. It is easy to see how this statement may contribute to the re- appropriation of the Hua (Chinese)-Yi (Western) distinction. Zedong’s communist political thought, and Deng Xiaoping’s political reforms through Straussian political theory, laying a solid foundation for the political legitimacy of the CCP government.23 This context explains why Wang’s “Zaixian yueshu” targeted sovereign decisionism as its main enemy. In China, the contractarianism that appeals to the will of people, mediated by nationalist Chinese exceptionalism of democracy, can immediately be utilised to defend the communist totalitarian rule with a decolonising moral high ground. Wang, therefore, believes that though the contractarianism derived from Rousseau’s over-exaltation of the general will, exemplified in the political theory of John Rawls, has made contributions to democracy, it also opens the door to state power unchecked by the prior principles and real individuals.24 As a response, Wang’s prioritisation of “Zaixian yueshu” is offered in a metaphysical register. It bestows religious divinity and inviolable priority on the Constitution. Wang quotes from the classical Chinese history book Zuo Zhuan (左传), which states that “the most important matters of the state lie in the rituals and the military” (guo zhi dashi, zai si yu rong 国之大事，在祀与戎), to explain the relationship between the constitutional system and the ruling power.25 Here, the rituals represent religious authority and the military represents the ruler’s. Wang suggests that even though the unity of religion and state characterised Chinese history, the two authorities were in fact “separate for most of ancient China.”26 Such tension was dynamic, and the boundary was never clear. “Although the emperor appointed himself as the son of Heaven and presided over the rituals himself, the emperor’s power did not usurp the sacred orthodoxy of Dao held by the Confucian professional group at the time in terms of political philosophy.”27 Here the traditional Chinese Confucian structure of zhengtong (政统 ↩

23. Gan Yang, Tong san tong 通三统 [Integrating Three Traditions] (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2007). ↩

24. Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 107. ↩

25. Ibid., 15. ↩

26. Ibid. ↩

27. Ibid., 16. political orthodoxy) and daotong (道统 orthodoxy of Dao) is interpreted as the Chinese prototype of checks and balances between the judicial and the ruling power. Wang adopts a clear empiricist position on the question of how Dao or natural law can be concretised in political reality. Concrete constitutional governance depends on “the accumulation of empiricist constraints in the historical evolution of the constitutional order.”28 Of course, Wang does not overlook the particularity and non-portability of the empiricist constitutionalism modelled on British common law. He believes that although the British approach is the best, in order to make the prior constraint feasible elsewhere, the intermediary of a contract theory that differs from Rousseau’s is still necessary. Locke’s view of natural rights is advocated as a form of “empirical contracting under transcendental values.”29 And Wang offers the following reasons to explain why Locke’s contract theory can avoid the problem with Rousseau’s. Firstly, the will of the people is realised in Locke’s hands as parliamentary sovereignty. It is “limited and relative,” not only subject to the systematic checks and balances but also “subject to higher laws (natural law) and principles.”30 The second reason why Locke’s contract theory is to be preferred is the respect for empirical history in the British common law tradition. He argues that “the contract theory of empirical history has at least two major sources of experience: the tradition of ‘divine covenant’ in the Christian context and the tradition of covenant inherent in the feudal system.”31 The latter became an important basis for the birth of the Magna Carta because the feudal system embodied the spirit of local autonomy, which prompted the later British aristocracy to resist the centralisation of power. For this reason, British constitutionalism is based not on the ↩

28. Ibid., 109. ↩

29. Ibid., 90. For Locke’s contractarian theory and its historical justifications, see John Locke, The Second Treaties of Government, §95-122, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). ↩

30. Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 58. ↩

31. Ibid., 91. immediate decisions and preferences of the people’s will, but on a steady, forward-moving accumulation of experience with historical depth. To demonstrate the difference, he introduces the debate between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on intergenerational responsibility. Invoking David Hume and Edmund Burke’s criticism of the so-called “same generation,” he denies Jefferson’s idea that only the living generation has the right to bind itself.32 He points out that “there is a division of labour and an equal share of benefits between generations,” which makes the experience and customs of earlier generations binding on later generations.33 The binding force of the dead on those who are alive and governing is an important aspect of the constitutional order that Rousseau’s popular sovereignty theory ignores. 1.2. Lockean Constitutionalism and Its Colonialist Suspicion Wang bestows Zaixian yueshu with both metaphysical and practical significance. This demonstrates how the religious concern of the liberals is embodied in their constitutional theories. Its search for transcendental value resonates with Liu Xiaobo’s religious approach, which followed the cultural Christian’s liberal theological basic tone.34 However, taking this Lockean route also make his theory unable to circumvent many of the challenges Western conservatism faces, including the oppression of human nature by an ungoverned market system and the violence and colonialist undertones of Locke’s account of the origin of property ↩

32. Ibid., 110. Cf. Thomas Jefferson, “To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 6 September 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0248. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 12, 2 March 1789 – 20 January 1790 and supplement 24 October 1775 – 24 January 1789, eds. Charles F. Hobson and Robert A. Rutland. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979, 382–388]; and James Madison, “From James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 4 February 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-13-02-0020. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 13, 20 January 1790 – 31 March 1791, eds. Charles F. Hobson and Robert A. Rutland. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981, 18–26]. ↩

33. Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 110. ↩

34. See Gerda Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 89-150. rights.35 This latter question is particularly pressing for China’s liberal dissidents today as official Chinese scholars are trying to promote the tianxia worldview to a moral high point on the grounds of decolonisation.36 The concern about colonialism frequently troubles these conservative dissidents, some of whom even openly welcome colonisation. In 1988, Liu uttered to the Hong Kong media one of his most controversial statements: China would need to become “a colony for three hundred years” if it were to be successfully reformed.37 In 2006, although he explained that it was an extreme formulation of his beliefs, he refused to retract the remark. Yu Jie recalled that when he first heard that statement, it “was like a bolt of lightning illuminating the path ahead.”38 Therefore, he maintains that “the tragedy of modern China is not being bullied and divided up by the great powers, but being under-colonised. China did not have the courage and determination of Japan to abandon Confucian tradition and enter the modern world.”39 Compared to these opinions of his rightist allies, Wang maintaining a relatively negative view. Although he claimed that he would rather live under British colonial rule than under Mao ↩

35. On the colonialist roots of Locke’s theory of property rights, see Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and James Tully, “Aboriginal Property and Western Theory: Recovering a Middle Ground,” Social Philosophy & Policy 11/2 (July 1994), 153-180. ↩

36. See, for example, Zhao Tingyang, All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order, trans. Joseph E. Harroff (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2021), 210-217. ↩

37. Jin Zhong, “Wentan ‘heima’ Liu Xiaobo” 文坛「黑马」刘晓波 [Liu Xiaobo, the ‘Dark Horse’ in the Literary World], Jiefang yuebao 解 放 月 报 [Liberation Monthly] (Hong Kong), December 1988, https://www.open.com.hk/old_version/1011p68.html. In 2006, he said that although that statement had been an extreme expression of his beliefs, he still refused to retract it. Liu Xiaobo,“Wo yu Kaifang jieyuan shijiu nian” 我与《开放》结缘十九年 [I Have Been with Open Magazine for Nineteen Years], Kaifang zazhi 开放杂志 [Open Magazine] (Hong Kong), 19 December 2006, http://www.open.com.hk/0701p26.html. ↩

38. Yu Jie, “Yi Liu Xiaobo ‘sanbai nian zhimindi’ zhi shuo pochu dayitong de diguo moshi he yishi xingtai” 以刘 晓波「三百年殖民地」之说 破除大一统的帝国模式和意识形态 [Using Liu Xiaobo’s “Three Hundred Years of Colony” to Dismantle the Imperial Model and Ideology of Chinese Uniformity], Minbao 民报 [Taiwan People News] (Taiwan), 28 May 2018, https://www.peoplemedia.tw/news/93d81fc1-08bf-4480-ad27-08221e22f888. For other defences of Liu’s colonist statement, see Jin Zhong, “‘Sanbai nian zhimindi’ xishuo congtou” 「三百年殖 民地」细说从头 [Explaining ‘Three Hundred Years of Colony’ in Detail from the Beginning], Kaifang zazhi, November 2011, http://www.open.com.hk/old_version/1011p44.html; and Dong Cheng, “Bei zhimin sanbai nian zhijian, Liu Xiaobo shengzhe zhiyong” 被殖民三百年之见，刘晓波圣哲之勇 [The View of Three Hundred Years of Colonialism, Liu Xiaobo’s Wisdom of the Sages], Beijing zhichun 北京之春 [Beijing Spring], 16 September 2017, http://beijingspring.com/bj2/2010/220/916201753719.htm. ↩

39. Yu, “Yi Liu Xiaobo.” Zedong’s communist regime, he made this statement in a realistic tone presented as the lesser of two evils.40 From this perspective, Wang’s separation of ritual authority (the community of scholars) from military authority can also be seen as an attempt to alleviate the tension the colonisation idea attempts to resolve. It offers an alternative to colonialism for the customs and traditions required by the empiricist approach to constitutionalism. However, Wang still holds that tradition of Chinese scholars based on the doctrine of Dao is still too weak to sustain the entire constitutional building, meaning that, the Lockean contract theory remains necessary.41 At the same time, Locke, or the entire tradition of natural law theory centred on property rights that he represents, still casts a shadow of colonialism over these right-wing constitutionalists,42 opening the space to question the authenticity of the Chinese conservative activists’ nonviolent appeals.43 Wang had not truly overcome this problem when he bid Locke farewell around 2011, as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Other obvious questions need to be addressed now. As we have seen, Wang turns to the Confucian scholar-official tradition to find local resources to protect judicial independence. Leaving aside the question of whether Wang’s reinterpretation is faithful to the actual development of Confucianism, one can ask whether this is just a modern legal version of Confucian scholar elitism. If so, doesn’t his ↩

40. See Wang Yi, “Tianfu changyan: Dadao Zhang Dejiang” 天府畅言：打倒张德江 [Open Talk in the Heavenly Land: Down with Zhang Dejiang]. Duli zhongwen bihui 独立中文笔会 [Independent Chinese PEN Center], 01 July, 2016. https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/56493; and Wang Yi, “Wo chengwei minzu zhuyi zhe de natian” 我成为民族主义者的那天 [The Day I Became a Nationalist], in Meide jingdong le zhongyang 美得惊 动了中央 [So Beautiful that the Centre Is Startled] (Self-published, 2004), 230-233. ↩

41. Wang points out that despite the “moderate political idea” contained in the concept of justice based on Dao, “it does not specify the value of individual freedom.” Therefore, it still needs to be “renewed” in order to achieve the constitutional transformation. Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 133, 136. ↩

42. This concern is particularly acute when considering how Locke’s theory of property regards enclosure as the origin of individual rights to land, and how it served British colonial interests in America. See, Hannah Carrese, “Mr Locke’s Enclosure: The Uncommon Law of Property in the Second Treatise,” American Journal of Legal History 64, no. 4 (December 2024), 327–349. ↩

43. Non-violence has long been one of the core advocacies of liberal dissidents. See, for example, Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, eds. Perry Link et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Wang Yi, “Wusi jingshen, he wusi shi shouqiang” 五四精神，和五四式手枪 [The May Fourth Spirit, and Type 54 Pistol], in Meide jingdong le zhongyang, 79-80. inheritance of the scholar-official tradition contradict the strong post-modern nihilist sensibility of the post-June Fourth generation previously emphasised?44 2. Behind Constitutionalism: A Vacancy of Value 2.1. Public Space or the Poet’s Private Playroom? What seems clear is that Wang’s recycling of the scholar-official tradition and modern liberal concepts, such as the emphases on universal human rights, individualism, the free market, and natural law, presumes an optimism about human rationality and moral capacity. His conviction of the promise of human emancipation embodied in the constitutional system was, however, far less certain than it appeared. Liu Xiaobo was one of the few people who were discerning enough to detect the inauthenticity behind Wang’s constitutionalist wordings. Though “surprised” by the talent, the courage to resist, and the beauty revealed in Wang’s writing, he found Wang’s words occasionally and unintentionally revealing an unbecoming performativity, including some “tricks” to “show profundity.”45 At first glance, such an assessment may sound like an uncharitable reading. Liu, who was Wang’s mentor and friend, was more likely concerned with “how” Wang said his words than “what” he said. Just as Wang was disgusted by the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party due to being an aesthetic “clean freak,”46 for Liu, the conservative freedom he pursued was first and foremost concerned with protecting the sincerity of an individual’s humbleness, a necessary component of true respect for human traditions. Attempts to mix this priority with pretentiousness, no matter how ↩

44. See Section 1-2. ↩

45. Liu Xiaobo, “Wang Yi jingdong le wo—‘Wang Yi wenji’ xu” 王怡惊动了我—《王怡文集》序 [Wang Yi Surprised Me—Preface to Wang Yi’s Collected Writings], Jinian Liu Xiaobo, 6 October 2004. http://liuxiaobo.info/blog/archives/6951. ↩

46. “Such brazen aggression (of the Chinese Communist Party) is like a ruffian who has not bathed for years: emboldened merely by donning a set of official robes, he storms into a private home and plunges his reeking, sweat-soaked feet into a bathtub freshly filled with clean water—an act that gravely offends the clean freak sensibilities of the Wang Yis. In doing so, he strips them of their natural rights and profanes their aesthetic taste.” Ibid. Parenthesis added. correct, striking, and beautiful the words are, appear like the inscriptions on a work of art done by Chinese emperors whose very beauty betrays the truths and values the work is supposed to be conveying. In fact, after his conversion to Christianity, Wang’s own reflections on his early writings after his conversion to Christianity confirmed Liu’s insight as accurate. Wang confesses that his political critical writing was “running a ‘self-righteous’ circle,” in which he was “full of contempt and pride for the world.”47 Underneath the impassioned statement of the dignity of universal humanity, there was a kind of self-appreciation, intertwined with self-doubt, one that denies the world and others. Wang’s constitutionalism and literary writing were both aesthetic fetishes, the former being a resistance to “the salty pork hands of politics”48 (xian zhu shou咸 猪手, a term usually used to refer to sexual harassment), and the latter a resistance to the finiteness of mankind. The combination of the two echoes the spiritual state of Chinese intellectuals on the road to modernization. Unlike the West, which had more than two hundred years to develop and adjust between the advent of Enlightenment modernity and post-modernity after the two world wars, China, from the Opium War to the June Fourth Movement, experienced the baptism of modernity and post-modernity in a much shorter period of time. Therefore, among the intellectuals in contemporary China, the three sensibilities of pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity often coexist.49 In the case of the post-June Fourth intellectual Wang Yi, the postmodern nihilist sensibility is normative, presiding over the expression of the other two. His loud cry for constitutionalism and natural human rights may sound the same as the passion of ↩

47. Wang Yi, “Wo de houlong shi changkai de fenmu” 我的喉咙是敞开的坟墓 [My Throat is an Open Grave], in Yu Shen qinzui 与神亲嘴 [Kissing God] (Chengdu: Early Rain Reformed Church, 2007), 332, 337. ↩

48. Wang Yi, “Yu tianluke tan xinyang (zhi san): Juedui yu kuanrong” 与天路客谈信仰（之三）：绝对与宽容 [Talking about Faith with Pilgrims (Part Three): Absolute and Tolerance], in Yu Shen qinzui, 35. ↩

49. Of course, this does not mean that the three are totally separated in the West, only that the distinction is relatively clear. I call them “sensibilities” here in reference to Gavin Hyman’s use of the term, which to a large extent is intended to leave room for their coexistence. Gavin Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism? (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press), 12. the May Fourth intellectuals who pursued modernisation, regarding it as a duty to the country; however, as Wang later acknowledges, “although I had been writing and pursuing, I knew that my soul was in an abyss.”50 His poems are full of the offending, flippant, and playful qualities found in those who stare into the abyss and are stared at by the abyss, which is the dark shadow that the desperation of the June Fourth Incident still casts over him. Liu sees Wang’s writing as implicitly revealing a traditional Chinese intellectuals’ ambition of “establishing conscience of the Heaven and earth, confirming the life meaning of people, inheriting the best education of ancient sages, and creating peace for the world.”51 But such a sense of responsibility is a performative cover-up, concealing a void of values. Wang once pointed out that “if language is the centre, intellectuals face two problems. One is the distance between us and language. The second is the distance between language and the world. The former is mainly a pre-modern trouble, and the latter is mainly a post-modern emptiness.”52 For him, the dictator stands between the Chinese intellectuals and their language, to which constitutionalism seemed to him at this time the best solution. This is a manifestation of Wang’s modernist sensibility as a political and legal commentator, a side of him that is well known. But behind the political action of reclaiming the language from the dictator, the gap between language and reality, or the value that language seeks to address, still remains unbridged. For this reason, Liu characterises his sentiment in this regard as “arrogance.”53 His conservatism lacks real respect or appreciation for and true confidence in human tradition but was more like ↩

50. Wang Yi, “Meiyou xinyang jiu wufa anran rushui” 没有信仰就无法安然入睡 [Cannot Sleep Peacefully without Faith], in Yu Shen qinzui, 319. ↩

51. Liu, “Wang Yi jingdong le wo.” This statement originally came from Zhang Zai (1020-1077), a great Confucian scholar of the Song Dynasty. Zhang Zai, Zhangzi Yulu 张子语录 [Quotations from Zhangzi], Chinese Text Project 中国哲学书电子化计划. https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=214776&remap=gb. ↩

52. Wang Yi, “Yuyan, zhengzhi he xinyang—‘Rugu shalong’ de zaixian yanjiang” 语言、政治和信仰—“如故沙 龙”的在线演讲 [Language, Politics and Faith—An Online Lecture on “RGForum”], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou 灵魂深处闹自由 [Revolution in the Depth of Soul] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 223. ↩

53. Liu, “Wang Yi jingdong le wo.” a personal touch.54 In contrast to the moral arrogance of traditional scholar-officials, this nihilistic arrogance reveals an extreme desire for the value of life and an extreme distrust of collective life. These dynamics are also reflected in Wang’s constitutional theory. The decisiveness with which he asserts the importance of the transcendental value contrasts sharply with the ambiguity with which he explains the substance of it. He wanders among Martin Luther’s “freedom of a Christian,” medieval natural law, Locke’s “natural human rights,” and the traditional doctrine of Tian Dao in China, unwilling to address the incompatibilities among them and unable to determine the specific content of the origin of freedom.55 His playing with all these terms functions as a pretext, a delaying tactic, which aims to make room for the inarticulate transcendental foundation and delay the footsteps of the state power to intrude into the private sphere. Even though Wang claims to have transcended individualistic aesthetics and embraced the values of human cultural traditions when he turned to political writing and became a conservative,56 this aestheticism frequently reveals its traces through the seams between the vocabularies of his political writing. For a conservative with the aesthetic sensitivies of Liu, one cannot help but suspect that the real purpose of these constitutional vocabularies is to ensure that the poet could keep the door locked when he pleasured himself with the infinite. As to the name of that lock, it was really not necessary to look into the matter. ↩

54. Wang once emphasized that he always ate beef noodles in the same restaurant, citing his eating habit as an example, revealing his conservative personality trait. Wang Yi, “Yige ziyouzhuyizhe de yinshi xiguan” 一个自 由主义者的饮食习惯 [The Dining Habits of a Liberal], in Bufucong de jianghu 不服从的江湖 [The Disobedient Underworld] (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 2003), 106. Liu based on his personal relationship with Wang, unflinchingly blabbed, “Wang Yi claims that he never changes the place where he eats beef noodles, but I also know that he watches DVDs to keep up with the trend, and they are basically Western movies.” Liu, “Wang Yi jingdong le wo.” ↩

55. See Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 7, 15-16. ↩ ↩²

56. “Before my conversion, around 2002-2005, I completed the transition from ‘classical liberalism’ to ‘cultural conservatism’. I began to promote the value of human freedom inherent in traditional Chinese culture.” Wang Yi, “Fuyin de baoshou zhuyi” 福音的保守主义 [The Conservativism of the Gospel], in Lai yici shuling de jiaotan: Wang Yi mushi muhan xuanbian 来一次属灵的交谈：王怡牧师牧函选编 [Let’s Have a Spiritual Conversation: Selected Pastoral Letters of Pastor Wang Yi], ed. Li Yingqiang (Self-published, 2022), 89. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. Or, to put differently, the constitutionalist Wang secures every citizen’s place at the table by restricting the will of the rulers so that no totalitarian could occupy the host seat. At the same time, the poet Wang strives to dismantle this table and driving the noisy crowd out of the room. Writing poetry becomes Wang’s true hope for encountering transcendental values and his attempt to overcome the second problem, the gap between language and the world. 2.2. Respecting Human Tradition or Poetic Playfulness? In an afterword of his self-selected and self-printed collection of poems, Qiutian de wutuobang,57 Wang regards writing poetry as a kind of “naming”, “creation”, and “poet’s self- redemption.”58 He even adopts a Promethean description, comparing writing poetry to the building of the Tower of Babel, a great achievement that God prevented out of fear and vigilance.59 He especially likes to use sex as a metaphor for poetry. For example, he describes that “writing poetry is to make love with all mysterious and infinite things.”60 In another place, Wang also describes it as “spiritual masturbation.”61 However, these two descriptions inadvertently reveal Wang’s uncertainty: the former presupposes the other’s presence, whereas the latter is entirely individual and private. This rupture troubled the poet Wang, who later confessed that he, in fact, had always keenly felt the limitations of human language, the “inability to do anything about beautiful things.” Writing poetry became a cover for this inability.62 Writing poems brought him the pleasure of making love with others, but the ensuing emptiness led Wang to realise that perhaps everything was merely a projection of the self. He recalls that “writing was like opium to me; if I didn’t write for a day, I felt like a slave,” ↩

57. Wang Yi, Qiutian de wutuobang 秋天的乌托邦 [Utopia in Autumn], Rev. ed. (Self-published, 2012). ↩

58. Wang Yi, “Mingming, geren xiezuo ji xiandai shi (fu yi)” 命名、个人写作及现代诗（附一） [Appendix One: Naming, Individual Writing and Modern Poetry], in Qiutian de wutuobang, 323-324. ↩

59. Ibid. ↩

60. Wang Yi, “Zuowei jiushu de shige shi (fu er)” 作为救赎的诗歌史（附二） [Appendix Two: Poetry History as Redemption], in Qiutian de wutuobang, 328. ↩

61. Wang, “Mingming, geren xiezuo ji xiandai shi,” 326. ↩

62. Wang, “Meiyou xinyang jiu wufa anran rushui,” 319. but in reality, as language still referred only to the self, cut off from a reality where there is an Other present, he found there was “nothing behind the concept.”63 Such a sense of emptiness led Wang to stop writing poetry after 2001 and turn to prose and political commentary. “With an empirical attitude, I believed in the universality of liberal values. Generalising the transcendental context, the practice of freedom outweighed the urgency of introspection. In a twist, I gradually lost my passion for writing poetry and put aside the manuscripts of poems.”64 But this attempt at generalisation, of shouting loudly to embolden an empty mind, was insufficient to support Wang’s political commitment. His growing reputation and responsibilities as a public intellectual began to exhaust him. Suffering the struggles, he finally realised that “outstanding intellectuals all fall in the responsibilities they assume.”65 The sense of powerlessness was partly influenced by external political persecution, but more so by an inner sense of intellectual hypocrisy that haunted him, the very inauthenticity Liu had identified in his conservative political writing. This perspective illuminates the answer to the earlier question: how can we explain the simultaneous presence of Wang’s constitutionalism, with its implicit confidence in human nature and inherited moral traditions, and his post–June Fourth nihilistic sensibility? The answer is that the former constitutes his better-known public persona, whereas the latter is dominant in his real experience of the world. If society itself is made up of lies, Wang, who grew up in a world of lies, has learned to use its language to manipulate this entity. His political theory essentially serves his aesthetic concerns. And the nihilist character of his aestheticism is even more thoroughgoing than that of Liu. Although Liu’s poetry also uses many physical, naked, and sexual images and expletives as a form of resistance, it still ultimately takes the national-social responsibility to heart, ↩

63. Wang, “Wo de houlong shi changkai de fenmu,” 335, 337. ↩

64. Wang, “Zuowei jiushu de shige shi,” 328-329. ↩

65. Wang, “Yuyan, zhengzhi he xinyang,” 229. expressing a genuine hope to make a contribution to the awakening of the masses. For him, the failure of political reform in China is fundamentally due to the people having had the ability to criticise the social system trained out of them under the long-term rule of Confucian political imagination. Although the scholar-official tradition generally emphasises “minben” (民本 people-centred), this cerntering on the good of the people is always framed within the context of a ruling technique.66 The people are essentially conceived as an “animal existence without self-awareness.”67 Their significance is exclusively in “the meaning of a political tool,”68 but “in the sense of the political subject, the people are at the lowest level of society and have no power at all.”69 Therefore, Liu criticises the “people” exalted by traditional Confucianism and the Chinese Communist Party as an abstract concept playing no more than an instrumental role in ruling logic. Both have used “slogans to give the people an abstract and illusory supreme power, while in reality and concrete life they have deprived the people of all power.”70 Under this long-term state of subjugation, the Chinese people have generally been conditioned to a utilitarian and labour-oriented personality. Intellectuals are no exception. 71 Traditional intellectuals took the “official career” as their primary path, and their highest ideal was the position of national teacher by the emperor’s side, which also promoted the instrumental conception of “knowledge serving politics” and the “bureaucratisation of knowledge.”72 Therefore, in Liu’s view, one of the principal obstacles to social and political enlightenment in China is the lack of intellectual independence. The utilitarian orientation of ↩

66. Liu Xiaobo, Zhongguo dangdai zhengzhi yu Zhongguo zhishi fenzi 中国当代政治与中国知识份子 [Contemporary Politics and Intellectuals of China] (Taipei: Tonsan Publications, 1990), 73. ↩

67. Ibid. ↩

68. Ibid. ↩

69. Ibid. ↩

70. Ibid. ↩

71. Although Liu describes this personality that lack of independence as “utilitarian,” the term is not always negative in his usage. For example, he comments positively on the utilitarianism of Anglo-American ethics. In this context, the utilitarian personality of Chinese intellectuals, in order to be more precisely distinguished, is described as “pragmatic.” The essential difference between the two is in their attitudes toward the independence of the individual. See Ibid., 126. ↩

72. Ibid., 108. politics has eliminated the possibility of pursuing “knowledge for knowledge,” “scholarship for scholarship,” “art for art,” and “truth for truth.”73 Facing this predicament, he calls on Chinese intellectuals in a passionate tone to first awaken and achieve self-purification through self-criticism and self-denial. This mission of self-purification is essentially religious, echoing the importance he placed on the religious consciousness of confession.74 In contrast, Wang’s poetic resistance is essentially individualistic, aiming to secure the private pleasure of the individual in relation to the transcendent. From here we can identify the subtle differences between Liu and Wang’s modes of resistance. Although both attack the independence-depriving scholar-official worldview, in a critical sense, Liu’s solution is quite “scholar-official.” Intellectuals are exhorted to the sacred responsibility of leading the awakening and to serve as the orientation and hope for the whole social reformation. This reflects his critical inheritance of the June Fourth generation’s grammar of “intellectuals saving China.” However, the post-June Fourth Wang is more pessimistic about the self-awakening capability of intellectuals. Of course, intellectual pride remains deeply rooted, but it takes on an individualistic form.75 The religious sentiment presented in his poems is completely private and personal, and there is hardly any trace of the kind of ambitious spirit that Liu’s poems reveal, one that is determined to shoulder the future of the nation. ↩

73. Ibid., 113. ↩

74. “Therefore, if intellectuals do not mercilessly cleanse themselves of their ugliness and filth, then they cannot cleanse society of the pollution of knowledge; if intellectuals themselves do not first purify and sanctify themselves, then society will always be ugly and filthy.” Ibid., 103. Emphasis added. ↩

75. In an interview with Yu, Wang recalls that before his conversion to Christianity “I was indeed a very proud intellectual, what the Chinese tradition calls a kuangsheng [狂生 unconventional person]. Once, two friends invited me to dinner because they admired me. One tactfully mentioned my attire, saying that Mr. Wang should dress more decently to match your demeanour. The other retorted that it was people like us, who were busy surviving, who needed to pay attention to our attire. People like Mr. Wang could just wear whatever and go meet the president. This flattery made me feel extremely good. The scholastic mentality of being unique and awake while everyone is drunk was actually deeply ingrained in my bones. On the outside I appeared humble, but on the inside I was arrogant.” Wang Yi, “Jidutu shequ shi zhege shijie de xiwang—Yu Jie Wang Yi fangtan lu” 基督徒 社区是这个世界的希望－余杰王怡访谈录 [Christian Community Is the Hope of This World—An Interview between Yu Jie and Wang Yi], Wang Yi wenku 王怡文库 [Wang Yi Resource Library], 01 July 2011. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. This observation avoids overestimating the importance of the scholar-official tradition in Wang’s thoughts. His recycling of its resources is instrumental in weakening the “foreignness” feature of constitutionalism in China. Close consideration of Wang’s poetry reveals that his conservative embrace of human tradition is hardly unreserved. In Liu’s view, it even carries a kind of inauthenticity, not to mention the Chinese doctrine of heavenly law, which is regarded by Wang as more distanced from the spirit of natural rights and still needs to be “revived, submitted and renewed” 76 according to the wisdom of Western constitutionalism. Paradoxically, Wang, who explicitly endorses the scholar-official idea of revering heaven, is actually more radical in his critique of it. Liu’s critique ultimately implicitly repeats its intellectual elitist language, while Wang’s utilisation of it is finally and decisively marked by deconstructive playfulness. 3. The Conversion and the Christian Worldview 3.1. From Lamentations to Praise hymns: Wang Yi’s Conversion to Christianity Wang’s journey to Christianity was closely linked to the crushing of his intellectual pride. In 2005, Wang already had a group of Christian friends. In April, they established the Early Rain Fellowship and held weekly Bible studies at Wang’s house. Yu was also among the first group of Christians to preach the gospel to Wang. He recalled that when he and his wife Liu Min first tried to evangelise Wang, the latter replied: “If Su Dongpo77 went to hell because he didn’t believe in the Lord, I don’t want to go to heaven either.”78 However, in June 2005, Wang slipped off a ladder on a bookshelf and fell to the ground, bleeding continuously. He describes ↩

76. Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 136. ↩

77. Su Dongpo (1037-1101) was a representative poet of the Song Dynasty in China. ↩

78. Yu Jie, “Tie mo tie, mochu ren lai: Huainian yu Wang Yi zai yiqi de shiguang (xia)” 铁磨铁，磨出刃来：怀 念与王怡在一起的时光（下） [Iron Sharpens Iron, Sharpening the Edge: Remembering the Time with Wang Yi (Second Part)], Chengguang Xuehui 承 光 学 会 [ Inherit Institute], 12 November 2020. https://www.inherit.live/post/paving-the-path-to-a-brighter-future. that event as “a very symbolic experience for me. My huge bookshelf represented intellectual rationality and the arrogance of that rationality. ... I climbed up there full of knowledge and fell down empty-handed to receive the revelation of the Bible above me.”79 At that time, he began praying and singing praise hymns. He was baptised at Christmas that same year. This event played a decisive role in Wang’s conversion story, but many experiences before it foreshadowed this dramatic turn. As a human rights lawyer, Wang had begun to come across cases of Chinese house churches. In March 2005, he invited two persecuted house church members and some Chengdu intellectuals to his home. When listening to their suffering, which included severe torture and even the death of a female member in a detention centre, Wang found that “for the first time I saw the infinite.”80 He recalls that: I saw a kind of holy light on their faces. They were ordinary rural women who had only attended elementary school, which caused a great shock to intellectuals like me. I felt a bright light that I had never come into contact with before, which made me not believe that they were just ordinary rural women. Just as I did not believe that a character like the Apostle Peter was just a fisherman.81 The impact of the house church’s suffering on Wang directly penetrated to the deepest level: poetry. After the conversion, Wang summarised his trajectory from atheism to Christianity as a process from lamentations to praise hymns. For him, lamentation is a sinner’s highest achievement, and Rainer Rilke represents its pinnacle. Between the lines of his poems, Wang sees a poet’s sincere “struggle between aesthetics and faith.”82 While revealing “admiration for the infinite,” they are paradoxically filled with “infatuation with the earthly” and anger ↩

79. Wang Yi, “Wo wei shenme xinyang jidujiao?: aifang zazhi fangtan” 我为什么信仰基督教－开放杂志访谈 [Why do I believe in Christianity?: Interview with Open Magazine], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou, 237-238. ↩

80. Wang, “Zuowei jiushu de shige shi,” 329. ↩

81. Wang Yi, “Wo wei shenme xinyang jidujiao?,” 237. ↩

82. Wang, “Zuowei jiushu de shige shi,” 330. toward the transcendent at the same time; his praise of this world conveys a deep-rooted “emptiness and dissatisfaction.”83 Wang saw the peak of his past poetic writing in Rilke, but also its end. It was a kind of utopia, an attempt to “other-worldlyise” the present world by the poet’s own words, the closest position that sinners “can imitate to the words of Christ.”84 But Wang’s personal experience led him to confess that such an attempt at self-resurrection was just like the Tower of Babel. Poets strived to cobble together their words, thirsting for a taste of the infinite. But even the language itself had long been fragmented. “Lamentations are lamentable because they are full of falls and disobedience, because in it every path is halfway and every song screeches to a halt, and because life has no future in lamentations.”85 This was the end of Wang’s lamentations, which ended with the poet’s loss of words. However, it also created the opportunity for his turn to praise hymns. Ironically, his encounter with the infinite occurred when he abandoned poetry and the aesthetic exploration of the transcendent. These experiences have left profound effects on him. Soteriologically, turning to praise hymns reflects his embrace of the decisiveness and initiative of God’s will and the passivity and responsiveness of human beings. As he emphasises, the central point of the Christian faith in human beings’ relationship to truth is the “self-revelation of truth.”86 In the face of God’s revelation, one cannot try to master it, as he has tried to do in lamentations. Rather, “when one says that we are moving toward truth, toward God, one is saying that we are responding to this revelation, that we are willing to obey.” The finiteness and self-enclosedness of words and their waiting for the arrival of the true language to rescue them have become recurring themes in Wang’s poetry. Words are self-doubting due to the ↩

83. Ibid., 332. ↩

84. Ibid. ↩

85. Ibid., 333. ↩

86. Wang Yi, “Yu tianluke tan xinyang (zhi liu): Ren yu zhenli de guanxi” 与天路客谈信仰（之六）：人与真理 的关系 [Talking about Faith with Pilgrims (Part Six): Humans’ Relationship with Truth], in Yu Shen qinzui, 55. breakdown of the signifier and the signified.87 At the Tower of Babel, God used words to separate people. From then on, words have been deprived of the power of love and can only hurt one another.88 Therefore, the true sentence is precious, meaning the reunion of mutually hostile words. It is an image of resurrection, but totally beyond human power.89 Between self- doubting words and precious sentences is precisely the desire for a real grammar. However, in the post-Babel era, words can only be connected into sentences and have meaning through the mediation of social violence.90 Lamentation is thus an exposure to such violence: Poets are the children who alarm Poets are the enemies of lies91 But how does a poet reach an alarming sentence? As Wang’s writing experience has shown him, it is also based on self-projection. Once the idol of social structural violence has been dismantled, the temptation of self-idolisation follows. Therefore, Poets are against idols God is against poets92 With the sense of emptiness came the poet’s pride shattered, but Wang heard the true poetry in the uneducated disciple of God who had never written poetry. The poet was suffering from his ↩

87. Wang Yi, “Ciyu (Zhi yi)” 词语（之一） [Words (Part one)], in Da jiaotang: Ershi nian shixuan 大教堂： 二十年诗选 [Cathedral: A Poems Selections of Twenty Years] (2014), 51. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 《大教堂：二十年诗选》-2. ↩

88. Wang Yi, “Xiao yaoli zushi: Di 30 wen” 小要理组诗：第30问 [Poem Series for the Shorter Catechism: The Thirtieth Question], in Da jiaotang, 432; and “Ciyu (Zhi er)” 词语（之二） [Words (Part two)], in Da jiaotang, 52. ↩

89. Wang Yi, “Ciyu (Zhi san)” 词语（之三） [Words (Part three)], in Da jiaotang, 53. ↩

90. On Ferdinand de Saussure’s revelation of the social constructiveness of meaning, see Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 36. ↩

91. Wang Yi, “Xiao yaoli zushi: Di sanshi wen” 小要理组诗：第49问 [Poem Series for the Shorter Catechism: The Forty-Ninth Question], in Da jiaotang, 456. ↩

92. Ibid. inability to create or summon meaning, but the meaning intruded into his life in the most unexpected places. In the pouring rain, you are a pure poem with your long skirt falling to the ground. It covers the city’s dreary grammar93 Since then, Wang’s poetry has shifted from self-indulgent masturbation to a cry for and response to the real grammar. I live in a destiny where the ink has dried All foreign lands are the homeland All homelands are foreign lands Please give us grammar So that we have the opportunity to express, understand, refute and agree94 Therefore, Wang’s conversion is fundamentally a matter of philosophy of language. Growing up in lies and the post-June Fourth nihilistic sensibility made him particularly sensitive to the dictator standing between language and meaning, signifier and signified. ↩

93. Wang Yi, “Juda de yu” 巨 大 的 雨 [The Pouring Rain], Wang Yi wenku, 11 October 2014. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. ↩

94. Wang Yi, “buru zhanzhuan fance, buru ba xinchang silie” 不如辗转反侧，不如把心肠撕裂 [Why not Toss and Turn, Why not Rend the Heart], Wang Yi wenku, 4 June 2016. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 反侧-，不如把心肠撕裂. The person who meditates is swimming from one word to another95 The image of swimming corresponds to the insight of deconstructive philosophy that human language cannot transcend the differences between symbols to reach the realm of meaning. Although the thirst for transcendental values prevented the lamenting poet Wang from being satisfied with Derrida’s différence, which abandons the search for meaning beyond the sign,96 he still revealed a similar sense of playfulness in his use of language. The unexpected intervention of the Lord of language, the true grammar, the true poem, revealed the lying nature of the poet’s anti-lying lines and his self-idolatry in anti-idolatry. Having reached the end of the lamentation, the poet’s throat was still an open grave, but Wang encountered in Psalms 23 the true salvific hope of the poem. Since then, he has believed that “the acme of lamentation is the beginning of praise. Praise is the way to salvation for believers. The acme of praise hymns is the Psalms of the Old Testament.”97 His love for the Psalms of the Bible led him to view the redemption of language as a theme completely related to God’s election: They know that only some of the words are chosen to be written in the Bible and regarded by God as never having been defiled. ↩

95. Wang Yi, “Xiao yaoli zushi: Di jiushi wen” 小要理组诗：第90问 [Poem Series for the Shorter Catechism: The Ninetieth Question], in Da jiaotang, 504. ↩

96. See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001). ↩

97. Wang, “Zuowei jiushu de shige shi,” 329-330. As word after word is uttered by Jesus the devil, the devil lost the power of self-expression98 Therefore, the swimming poet who longs for meaning stops and prays: The man who meditates is praying not that he selects the words but that the words select him99 With the intervention of true grammar, human language is freed from a destiny of mutual accusation and restore its original look. It can open up to others and serve as a place for interpersonal communication in love. This motivates Wang to take a step forward from the post-modern sensibility to move beyond the inauthenticity and pride that inhabited the gap between his aesthetics and political theory. The relationship between poetry and the political100 is no longer simply one of opposition or mutual threat. The latter cannot remain just a pretext or delaying tactic to protect the individual savour but must take root in the revelation of meaning that has broken in. At the same time, equally important is preventing this openness to politics from being exploited by the rulers of the world, who cloak themselves in sanctity, to legitimise their intrusions. It was at this point that the Dutch Reformed doctrine of Christian worldview offered ↩

98. Wang, “Ciyu (Zhi yi),” 51. ↩

99. Wang, “Xiao yaoli zushi: Di jiushi wen,” 504. ↩

100. The deliberate use of the term “the political” rather than “politics” here is intended to echo the extensive use of this concept in Western philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, to highlight that Wang’s affirmation of the political here refers to the communicatively based intersubjective activity of human beings as linguistic beings. This retains, and even strengthens, a critical distance from the theorised, institutionalised and technologised state politics. On the development of the uses of this term in Western philosophy, see James Wiley, Politics and the concept of the political: The political imagination (New York: Routledge, 2016). training wheels for Wang’s new start. That doctrine promised to re-integrate the public and private, collective and individual life under God’s complete sovereignty without loosening the restrictions on the governors. Guided by neo-Calvinist ideas, Wang made his first movement towards the reconciliation between aesthetics and the political, but only an initial setting out. 3.2. Constitutionalism and the Christian Worldview The close relationship between intellectual Christian dissidents in urban China and neo- Calvinism is not new.101 Wang’s political-theological approach not surprisingly began along the same lines, especially under the influence of Dutch Reformed theologians Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Til.102 The Christian worldview became the central theme of his post- conversion constitutionalism. In a series of lectures entitled “Xianzheng zhuyi yu jidujiao shijie guan” (宪政主义与基督教世界观 Constitutionalism and the Christian Worldview) in 2007,103 he claimed that “Christianity is a comprehensive worldview,” a “scene” that emerges from “the Bible’s complete view of the universe and life,” in which we find “our locations” and “make sense of everything in it.”104 In this perspective, the Puritan worldview is regarded as paradigmatic. As he puts it: ↩

101. On this topic, see Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China, 135-136; Frederik Fällman, “Calvin, Culture and Christ? Development of Faith Among Chinese Intellectuals,” in Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Francis Khek Gee Lim (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 153–68; and Alexander Chow “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” International Journal of Public Theology 8/2 (2014), 158-175. https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-12341340. ↩

102. On Wang’s inheritance of Kuyperianism, see Chen Mingzhi, “The Church as Organism and Institution: Abraham Kuyper’s Public Ecclesiology for Christian Public-Social Engagement in Contemporary China,” PhD diss. (University of Aberdeen, 2024); and Jarred T. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism: Neo-Calvinist Public Theology in a Context of Persecution with a Focus on Pastor Wang Yi,” PhD diss. (Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023). For the influence of Cornelius Van Til, see Wang Yi, “Du Fan Taier Jidujiao Hujiaoxue” 读范 泰尔《基督教护教学》[Reading Van Til’s Apologetics], in Dasheng de moxiang 大声的默想 [Contemplation Loudly] (Hong Kong: Covenant Publishing Limited, 2017), 105-114. Wang Yi, Fuyin de zhengbian: Zongjiao gaige chensi lu 福音的政变：宗教改革沉思录 [The Gospel Revolt: Meditation of Protestant Reformation] (Hong Kong: Covenant Publishing Limited, 2017), §70, 79-80, 261-262. ↩

103. Wang Yi, “Xianzheng zhuyi yu jidujiao shijie guan” 宪政主义与基督教世界观 [Constitutionalism and the Christian Worldview], in Jidu shi zhu: Lun zhengjiao guanxi 基督是主：论政教关系 [Christ is Lord: On the Relationship between Church and State] (2019), 218-256. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 论政教关系》. ↩

104. Ibid., 221. The Puritan worldview is a monistic one, that is, the world of values and the natural world are one and the same, and the world of souls and the world of matter were one and the same. Time is a stage, a stage of founding and becoming. The One who can connect value and fact, soul and body, and place them in the same stage is God. Without God, these two worlds would be disconnected.105 Dualism is the opposite of the Puritan monistic worldview, and it cuts God’s perfect sovereignty into two halves by emphasising the opposition between the “world of values” and the “world of nature.”106 This distinction served to ground the transcendental concern of his empiricist constitutionalism. Wang presented Kantian idealism and communist materialism as examples of dualism, classifying both as expressions of a fragmented non-Christian worldview. The former was understood as drawing an insurmountable divide between noumena and phenomena; the latter, while excluding the transcendental value dimension, constituted a “raped worldview.”107 A dualistic worldview has no capacity to establish a foundation for rights in reality, and therefore cannot achieve constitutional legitimacy without resorting to the violence of sovereignty. Only the self-existent “I AM WHO I AM” can provide a stable and eternal foundation for rights and values beyond the sovereign’s decisions.108 Wang’s move towards a Christian worldview did not significantly impact the substantial content of his legal and political theory. He described it as a process of “moving backwards from the basic position of liberalism.”109 As Peter S. Heslam points out, despite Kuyper’s fierce attack on liberalism, denouncing it as the antithesis of the Christian worldview, he failed ↩

105. Ibid., 222. ↩

106. Ibid., 222-223. ↩

107. Ibid., 223. ↩

108. Ibid., 227-228. ↩

109. Wang Yi, “The Possibility of Political Theology: Christianity and Liberalism,” Chinese Law & Religion Monitor 8/1 (January-June 2012), 96. This is an English translation of an earlier Chinese article in 2005. Wang Yi, “Zhengzhi shenxue de kenengxing: Jidujiao yu ziyou zhuyi” 政治神学的可能性：基督教与自由主义 [The Possibility of Political Theology: Christianity and Liberalism]. Duli zhongwen bihui, 07 September, 2016. https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/61209. to distinguish between “the two broad traditions within liberalism.”110 He wrongly placed Lockean contract theory in the Rousseauan popular sovereignty tradition and lumped it with “the anti-theistic individualism of the French Revolution.”111 It caused Kuyper to ignore “where his own political theory coincided with, and had been influenced by, liberal positions.”112 From this perspective, Wang’s labour in this regard may be construed as a response to this problem. It reconciles Lockean constitutionalism with Calvinist worldview by clarifying the differences between the two major liberal traditions. His journey was thus the ontological inquiry of a constitutionalist, from liberalism back to conservatism, finally landing with the Puritan worldview.113 As Gerda Wielander points out, with the concept of “covenant” at its core, Wang’s search for the sources of Zaixian Yueshu gradually transforms from a hodgepodge of moral transcendental foundations from different religions and philosophies into a more specific Christian political theology.114 Wang used the example of Jesus’ trial before Pilate to illustrate the Christian worldview. When Pilate asked, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” (John 19:10), he was “proclaiming to Jesus the judgmental authority of a secular state.” Jesus’ response, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore, he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin,” (John 19:12) embodied the Christian worldview in two ways. On the one hand, Jesus “did not deny the judgmental authority of the earthly king.” His refusal to answer the question of whether he was the king of the Jews, according to Wang’s opinion as a lawyer, “implied that the accuser should provide evidence himself” and proved that Jesus “followed ↩

110. Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 151. ↩

111. Ibid., 150. ↩

112. Ibid., 151. ↩

113. As Wang claims, “[l]iberalism explains and defends freedom in a relational sense while Christians receive and pursue freedom in an ontological sense.” Ibid., 100. ↩

114. Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China, 133-136. the litigation principles of Roman law to defend himself.” On the other hand, it also showed that this authority was “given from the heaven,” and therefore “still under that higher authority.” In the Christian worldview, the scene of this judgment was actually twofold. One was the visible courtroom with Jesus as the defendant and Pilate as the judge. But at the same time and place, another trial was taking place, with God as the judge, judging those who accused Jesus.115 His next step was to connect this scene with the worldview of conservative constitutionalists. As Wang suggested, “Locke was a Puritan, and his doctrine of state was based on this comprehensive biblical worldview.” This is mainly reflected in Locke’s establishing the legitimacy of the state on the worldly judgmental authority, clearly distinguishing it from God’s eschatological judgment, and subjecting the former to strict limits. This constitutes the liberal principle of the priority of right over good. The state withdraws from the affairs of religion and good, leaving them to God’s judgment on each individual’s conscience.116 In contrast, continental legal theory, under the influence of Rousseau, attempted to have the state take on these matters, which led to an unwarranted expansion of secular jurisdiction. This comparison between the two embodies the opposition between the two worldviews. In this regard, Wang unreservedly asserted: If you compare Locke’s theory of the state with Jesus’ answer to Pilate, you can see that Locke’s picture of the world is the same as Jesus’ when Locke discusses the authority of the secular state. And if you read Rousseau’s The Social Contract, you can also see how similar Rousseau’s picture of the world is to Pontius Pilate’s.117 ↩

115. Ibid. ↩

116. Ibid., 249-250. ↩

117. Ibid., 249. Based on the similarity between the two worldviews, Wang asserts that Locke’s contract theory is an extension of the Reformed covenant theology, which is also Jesus’ worldview. However, the flaws in this link are obvious. Locke’s theory of rights gives people the legitimacy to deny and overthrow the government’s authority when their properties are violated.118 Jesus never invoked any divine right, natural law, or even procedural justice to defend himself and constrain the violence imposed on him by the Roman regime. Instead, he fulfilled God’s will by submitting to an unjust judgment even by worldly standards of justice. It is difficult to know whether Wang was conscious during this period that this whole project was certainly just a political theological attempt immediately after his conversion. The lecture series of “Xianzheng zhuyi yu jidujiao shijie guan” were delivered less than two years after his baptism, and his pastoral career had not even begun. Therefore, the experimental and transitional character of these lectures is important to recognise which many interpreters have missed. We will return to this issue in Chapter 4. Another place that reflects the instability is his account of interreligious relations. As many studies have pointed out, Wang’s move from a post-June Fourth humanistic religious sentiment to a more specific Christian worldview yielded an made him ambiguity or even contradictory position as to whether and how Christians can pursue a democratic civil society and charitable works together with non-believers.119 It is worth noting that Kuyper’s conceptions of sphere sovereignty, of common grace, and of the church as organism in distinction from the church as institution were to a large degree developed in answer to this issue. All occupy a prominent place in Kuyper’s Stone lectures.120 Considering that Wang’s lectures were intended to pay ↩

118. Locke, The Second Treaties of Government, §221-222. ↩

119. See, for example, Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China, 136; and Chloë Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church” Religions 7/12: 142 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120142. ↩

120. See Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1931). tribute to Kuyper’s,121 he could not be unfamiliar with these conceptions. However, he still maintains greater ambiguity than does Kuyper concerning these cental political concepts. I will argue that these details imply Wang even at this early stage had significant reservations about the Kuyperian solution. Certainly, the Dutch Reformed Christian worldview plays an irreplaceable role, especially in the initial stages, in Wang’s attempt to reintegrate his faith (aesthetics) with constitutional theory (the political). The bridge constructed within this framework, however, still reveals seams at the joints. The next chapter proceeds to explore the development of Wang’s theology after becoming a pastor and committing to the mission of publicisation of the house church. In hindsight the profound implications of these early inconsistencies and ambiguities will become obvious. As will be seen, the trickle of the martyrdom tradition of Chinese house churches seeped through the seams in Wang’s construction of Christian worldview theology, transforming his conservative understanding of spontaneous order. Ultimately, it was to cut a deep chasm between the rightist Lockean constitutionalism of the lawyer and public intellectual Wang and the quite different public theology of the pastor Wang. ↩

121. “The whole text is divided into ‘five lectures,’ which is a tribute to the Dutch Reformed theologian, Kuyper, whom I respect. His Lectures on Calvinism (five lectures) at Princeton University was a wonderful, condensed exposition of Reformed theology and a complete Christian worldview.” Wang, “Xianzheng zhuyi yu jidujiao shijie guan,” 218-219. Wang made an obvious mistake here. There are six lectures in Kuyper Lectures on Calvinism. This may be due to the Chinese translation version that Wang referred to. One version widely available on the internet is the translation by Wang Zhaofeng, which only includes the first five lectures. See Abraham Kuyper, “Jiaerwen zhuyi jiangzuo” 加尔文主义讲座 [Lectures on Calvinism], trans. Wang Zhaofeng, Xinyang zhimen 信仰之门 [Goddoor]. https://godoor.net/jidianlinks/kp/kp.htm. The URL cited here is the webpage where this version was published. Although it writes in the translator’s introduction that there are six lectures in Kuyper’s series, if Wang obtained it from other sources, such as someone forwarding the content of each lecture on an online forum, then he may not have read the introduction. ↩