Schmittian Fascist Moments 4
Last week I met a Marxist who claimed that it was when he visited China in the early 1970's that he became a Marxist philosopher. This was a striking thing to say. Most Marxists I know tend to distance themselves from the Soviet and Maoist regimes, saying that these are at best distortions of Marxism, at worst nothing to do with Marx at all. Reading serious Marx scholars like Brian Leiter and Jamie Edwards makes it clear that this is the position of many who continue to urge us to take Marx seriously in our post Cold War context, particularly much of Marx's critique of capitalism and his theory of ideology. The fact that this philosophy guy found late Maoist China more appealing than Western liberal state capitalism surprised me. (Another interesting feature of his thinking was that he made much of the Hegelian dialectic in Marxism too, another feature serious Marx scholars tend to eschew these days if the recent Leiter/Edwards scholarship is indicative of good contemporary readings.) The discussion that followed his surprising admission led to speculations regarding China then and now. As always seems to happen when I challenge theological Marxists, I found myself having to defend myself from accusations of being a right-wing defender of state capitalism. My push-back was that Marxism wasn't the only game in town when it came to left oriented politics and an attack on a particular Marxist position wasn't a de facto endorsement of capitalism. Of course such an argument is never convincing to the faithful who continue to see you in terms of false consciousness, rather like my evangelical Christians see me via the lens of sin! But that wasn't what interested me so much as the fact that people so much smarter than me could find ways to support what to me looked like an unsupportable regime via a theological ie faith based ideology. I guess faith's one of the key components that characterises all theocratic regimes because by the end of the evening I left feeling that I'd been talking to representatives of the Marxist faith community. In light of all this I wrote this brief note to myself for further reflections later applying a Schmittian lens to China in an attempt to say why I don't find the China of Mao nor Xi attractive.
China in the 1970s and China today represent two distinct instantiations of Schmittian political logic, both centered around sovereign decision and ideological unity, but differing markedly in structure, rhetoric, and practice. In terms of Carl Schmitt’s framework—where sovereignty is defined by the power to decide on the exception, and political order is grounded in a concrete friend–enemy distinction—the China of the 1970s may in fact be seen as a more extreme and unmediated realization of Schmitt’s political theology, whereas contemporary China offers a more institutionally stabilized and globally responsive version of the same principles.
In the 1970s, China was in the late stages of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a period of radical ideological purging, intense personalist rule under Mao Zedong, and the near-total subsumption of law and culture under politics. The state was in a permanent state of exception: all bureaucratic institutions, including legal mechanisms, were subordinate to the political will of the Chairman. Law, in any institutional sense, was virtually nonexistent. The friend–enemy distinction was violently direct: class enemies, intellectuals, landlords, and those accused of harboring “bourgeois” tendencies were publicly denounced, imprisoned, or killed. Even Party officials themselves were subject to purges. Sovereignty was not institutional—it resided entirely in Mao as a charismatic leader, embodying what Schmitt called the "personal decision" that overrides proceduralism. As such, 1970s China was a raw Schmittian state: politics was theology, and enemies were existential.
Culturally, the Schmittian logic was deployed in the extreme. All cultural production was treated as political weaponry. The “Eight Model Operas” dominated the arts, and all literature, film, and education had to glorify the revolution and vilify class enemies. Culture was not just subordinated to politics—it was politics. The space for pluralism, ambiguity, or neutrality was utterly closed. This perfectly enacts Schmitt’s belief that the liberal notion of culture as autonomous is a fiction: in Maoist China, culture was absorbed entirely into the sovereign decision about what kind of community the people should become.
In contrast, today’s China under Xi Jinping still follows a Schmittian logic—sovereignty above law, ideological unity over pluralism, the priority of decision over norm—but in a more systematically bureaucratized and internationally strategic form. The law exists, but as an arm of sovereign authority. Courts function, but their independence is always conditional on Party directives. There is space for market activity, limited legal redress, and even pockets of intellectual life, as long as they do not cross red lines. The state of exception is invoked selectively rather than continuously: in Xinjiang, in Hong Kong, during COVID-19 lockdowns, or against perceived digital dissent. Culture is controlled, but in subtler ways: censorship and “positive energy” campaigns are used to engineer harmony rather than enforce mass mobilization.
Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction still defines political identity, but enemies are now framed less as “class enemies” and more as foreign saboteurs, separatists, corrupt officials, or “Western ideological infiltrators.” The battle is not against landlords or capitalists (many now thrive under the Party’s patronage), but against forces seen to challenge national unity or Party legitimacy. Xi’s China is more stable, less chaotic, and more globally integrated than Mao’s—but in Schmittian terms, it is not less political. Rather, the political has become more controlled, technocratic, and diffuse—less revolutionary, but still structured by the logic of sovereign decision.
Whether this evolution is “better” or “worse” depends on the criteria one uses. From a Schmittian perspective, Maoist China may be more “pure”: politics as the absolute ground of all order, law as suspended, and the friend–enemy distinction existential and total. Today’s China is more pragmatic, institutionalized, and strategic—but arguably still Schmittian in structure. It demonstrates that Schmittian politics does not require the chaos of permanent revolution; it can operate in modern, post-revolutionary regimes where sovereign decision is bureaucratized and cloaked in the language of stability, prosperity, and national rejuvenation.
From a liberal or humanist perspective, the current system may appear less brutal, but its mechanisms of control—digital surveillance, ideological education, censorship, and targeted repression—remain deeply illiberal. It is a less violent but more durable form of the same political theology: one in which the political decision precedes the legal order, and the meaning of culture is derived from the sovereign’s conception of unity. Thus, China today is not a post-Schmittian state—it is a more refined Schmittian one.
Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty—“he who decides on the exception”—maps closely onto the political function of the CCP. In China, law is explicitly subordinated to the political authority of the Party. The Constitution enshrines the leadership of the CCP, not as one branch among others, but as the condition of legality itself. Courts do not act independently; they interpret and apply the law in line with Party policy. In this way, legality is not a self-standing order of norms, but an instrument of the Party’s decisions. This is not a distortion or corruption of the system; it is the system. The Party does not merely rule through the law—it rules above it, revealing the Schmittian truth that law depends on a prior decision about who rules and under what conditions.
This is most evident in the political logic of the “state of exception.” Schmitt argued that the exception is where the real power of the sovereign emerges, unbound by law in order to preserve order. In China, the response to perceived threats—be it the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, or domestic dissent—has involved precisely such exceptions. The mass internment of Uyghurs under the guise of “re-education,” the National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong, and the routine disappearance or silencing of dissenting intellectuals or activists, all bypass ordinary legal procedures. These are not failures of the rule of law—they are manifestations of the Schmittian principle that law can be suspended by the sovereign in defense of the political order. The Chinese state does not hide this logic; it asserts it as necessary for unity and “stability.”
Schmitt also emphasized the friend–enemy distinction as the foundation of the political. The Chinese state has increasingly relied on this distinction both domestically and internationally. Internally, political dissent is not treated as a matter of pluralism or competing interests, but as evidence of enmity—of a failure to align with the Party’s conception of national identity. Xi Jinping’s cultural policy promotes “socialist core values” and the “Sinicization” of religion, marginalizing any ideology or practice that does not affirm the Party’s role as the embodiment of national unity. Dissent becomes not just disagreement, but disloyalty.
Externally, China frames its global position increasingly in oppositional terms—against “Western hegemony,” “hostile foreign forces,” and what it calls the moral hypocrisy of liberal democracies. This mirrors Schmitt’s understanding of politics as rooted in existential conflict and the need for a sovereign actor to define the identity of the political community through such distinctions.In terms of culture, Schmitt was suspicious of liberal culture’s attempt to universalize aesthetic or moral values and separate them from political order. He saw culture as ultimately dependent on a concrete political decision about the values a community affirms. Chinese cultural policy reflects this: cultural production, education, and media are expected to serve political ends. The arts, literature, and internet culture are mobilized to promote “positive energy,” a term Xi uses to signal content that supports Party values, national pride, and social harmony. Censorship is not framed merely as a legal or moral matter, but as a political act in the service of cultural unity. The regime does not pretend to neutrality—it insists that culture must serve the people, and “the people” are defined by the Party.
In this way, Schmitt’s idea that liberal neutrality is a fiction—and that every order is founded on a concrete political decision—finds a real-world embodiment in Chinese cultural governance.Moreover, the recent abolition of term limits and the concentration of power in Xi Jinping echoes Schmitt’s critique of liberal proceduralism. Schmitt believed that the liberal state’s attempt to separate law from politics led to paralysis, especially in times of crisis. In contrast, he admired strong decisionist regimes that could assert sovereign unity. Xi’s leadership follows this decisionist model. The centralization of authority is justified not by legalism or democratic legitimacy, but by the necessity of a unified political will to ensure China’s rejuvenation. The Party positions Xi as both the guardian of historical continuity and the agent of national destiny—echoing Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign as the one who can decide and give form to the political community.
The philosopher I met did not seem at all uncomfortable with this state of affairs when asked. That much of the left has been captured by this theological Marxism (in contrast to the non-Marxist left AND non-theological Marxist left) has always struck me as weird even though most of the ones I know personally are in most other respects decent, smart and reasonable people.
Religion sure is strange!