The Covert Sphere: Two Chinese Intellectuals in Search of Esotericism
This article brings Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” thesis to bear on the crisis of independent thinking in modern Chinese intellectual history. It argues that while heterodox Chinese thinkers frequently practiced “writing between the lines” to evade censorship, conformist minds were equally adept at utilizing the charm of the clandestine—deception, fabrication, and self-mythologization—for their own agendas. To illustrate the peculiar tension between conformity and dissent, I focus on two Chinese thinkers who exploited esotericism at crucial junctures of PRC history: Liu Xiaofeng 劉小楓 (1956-), a conservative theologian who spawned a “Chinese Straussian School” to preach anti-liberal doctrines in contemporary China; and Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 (1890-1960), a cultural traditionalist who resisted Marxist doctrines throughout the Mao era. Both Liu and Chen conceived of the public as a hostile and conformist crowd and deliberately developed special techniques of writing that contain multiple levels of significance —Liu named his variant “subtle words with profound meaning” (微言大義) while Chen called his “inner history from the heart” (心史). Though formally similar, these two approaches took Strauss’s thesis in drastically different directions: while Chen deployed a rhetorical smokescreen of obscure references to tease the censor, Chinese Straussians wielded double teaching to conceal the conformism of their politics from the public.