反政治的政治

Before the modernization, there had been two kinds of political institutions in China, one of which was the splendid and successful all-under-heaven system invented by Zhou dynasty about 3,000 years ago, the second of which was the bureaucratic autocracy established by Qin and Han dynasties about 2,000 years ago. This paper argues that Chinese bureaucratic autocracy was a political failure in its reduction of politics to ruling. It was a refusal to the rethinking of political justification, common interests of all peoples, social choice and even the national interest. The distorted politics was guilty for Chinese imperial failure in international politics when the ideal of all-under-heaven was weakened, the lost of public support when the corrupted bureaucracy spoiled the society, and the national intellectual decline when the ever repeated ideology deadened the minds and souls. So it is argued that the reduction of politics to rule is the worst politics in terms of anti-politics.