Work And Thoughts Of Machiavelli In The Early Modern China

Since1840s, Chinese have absorbed a great many political theories from the west and modified them into somewhat Chinese versions, which deeply changed the course of the politics of modern China and shaped the modern Chinese political mind. Among other great political thinkers, Machiavelli, who was believed to be of vital importance in the issues of modern state and state-building, was introduced into China very early. Having reviewed the course of transmission of Machiavelli’s works and thoughts, in this article, I tried to determine how influential has Machiavelli been in modern China.There are five chapters in this article. In chapter one, I looked back the previous researches on this issue. Then in the second chapter, I sorted out the history of transmission of Machiavelli’s works and thoughts in China, especially the translations of his works and Wu Enyu’s study. There were plenty of books and articles which mentioned, introduced or interpreted Machiavelli and his thoughts. But few of them were impressive and some of them misunderstood Machiavelli. Many intellects noticed that Machiavelli’s thoughts were similar to the Legalists’, while Chen Duxiu compared Machiavelli with Confucius. In chapter three I analyzed these theories of comparison, which were very crude in my opinion. Given the rise of Fascism in1920s-1930s and increasing threat from other nations (mainly Japan), Chinese were urgent to revive their own nation. Thus some Chinese intellects gained inspirations from Machiavelli’s statism and wrote some articles, with which I dealt in chapter four. However the discussion of Machiavelli was never the mainstream at that time. I come to my conclusion in chapter five. I argued that most modern Chinese intellects did not show much interest in Machiavelli and his thought and the image of Machiavelli was stereotype, though many Chinese were very good at "Machiavellianism" indeed, even in the daily life.