Schmittian Moments 9
Ryan Mitchell at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has argued that the reception of Carl Schmitt’s political and legal thought in contemporary China, within its legal-academic circles (but not with front-line political leaders), reflects a deeper, strategic engagement with the German constitutional tradition—one that resonates with longstanding Chinese concerns about sovereignty, legal order, and executive authority. Mitchell thinks that Schmitt’s thought, especially his critique of liberal democracy and his defense of a sovereign-centered constitutional order, finds fertile ground in a Chinese context that has for over a century grappled with the challenge of building a strong state without succumbing to either foreign-imposed liberalism or unchecked autocracy. What follows is an editorialised summary of Mitchell’s thinking about this.
Historically, the appeal of the German model in China predates Schmitt and stretches back to the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican era, when reformers admired the German Empire’s bureaucratic efficiency, codified legal systems, and disciplined executive power. German Staatslehre, or state theory, offered an alternative to Anglo-American liberalism and French revolutionary ideals—one that emphasized legal order without political chaos, and state authority without the judicial overreach that marked Weimar liberalism. Chinese intellectuals and officials, including Li Hongzhang after his visit to Bismarck in 1896, increasingly saw in the German system a vision for modernity that did not rely on liberal-democratic fragmentation.
This admiration continued into the twentieth century, particularly during moments of constitutional reconstruction when Chinese scholars looked to foreign models to address their own dilemmas of state formation. Carl Schmitt emerges in this longer lineage as both a theorist of crisis and a critic of liberalism. His thought represents a counterpoint to Hans Kelsen’s legal idealism—whereas Kelsen imagined law as a closed system of normativity and reason, Schmitt saw law as rooted in the capacity for political decision and the authority to suspend norms in times of existential threat.
This concept of sovereignty as decision—that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception—resonates strongly in a Chinese legal-political context still focused on maintaining stability, order, and unity in the face of perceived internal and external threats. What distinguishes the Chinese reception of Schmitt from crude authoritarian appropriations is its academic and jurisprudential orientation. Chinese legal scholars such as Jiang Shigong have developed what might be called a "statist constitutionalism" grounded in Schmittian concepts, wherein the constitution is not a limit on power per se but a framework for centralized authority to operate legally.
This approach does not mimic Weimar’s parliamentary model nor the American system of checks and balances, but rather reconstructs a model where the executive—guided by collective political will and historical continuity—acts as the guarantor of national unity and legal meaning. In this vision, Schmitt becomes not merely a “usable reactionary,” but a resource for articulating a Chinese path to constitutional order that emphasizes guójiā zhǔyì (statism), zhǔquán (sovereignty), and xíngzhèng zhǔdǎo (executive leadership) over liberal proceduralism. Schmitt’s influence here dovetails with deeper elements of Chinese legal-political culture.
The appeal of an executive-centred order over a judge-led one, the preference for codified law over precedent, and the long-standing skepticism of adversarial pluralism all suggest why Schmitt’s critique of liberal judicial supremacy has found particular traction. In Schmitt’s view, the fragmentation of authority under the Weimar Constitution—especially the judicial empowerment to interpret the meaning of law—was a fatal error that weakened the state. Instead, he championed a semi-monarchical presidency that could act decisively during times of crisis, as he believed Friedrich Ebert had done against Communist uprisings. Schmitt’s critique was not merely ideological; it was rooted in a desire for continuity, for preserving the cultural and political substance of a constitutional tradition even amid change.
Chinese scholars draw selectively from this legacy, viewing Schmitt less as a Nazi apologist than as a theorist of statehood, sovereignty, and the political decision. While his early opposition to the Nazis and later collaboration with them complicates his moral standing, what persists in Chinese engagement is not the baggage of his political affiliations but the utility of his concepts. The "friend-enemy" distinction in Schmitt’s Concept of the Political provides a stark framework for understanding political legitimacy, where the ultimate question is whether a state can recognize and neutralize existential threats. For a country navigating ideological pressure from the West, internal fragmentation, and the challenges of rapid modernization, Schmitt offers a theory of political unity that does not depend on liberal rights discourse.
Yet Schmitt’s thought in the Chinese context does not stand alone. It is reinterpreted through the prism of China’s own legal and political evolution. The emphasis on a concrete order—the idea that law emerges from a historically rooted way of life—is especially congenial to a Chinese audience wary of universal norms. Rather than seeing constitutionalism as a copy-paste product of Western liberalism, Schmittian theory legitimates an organic, state-driven version grounded in China’s particular cultural and historical conditions.
Ultimately, Schmitt’s reception in China highlights an ongoing intellectual effort to construct a legal order capable of withstanding both internal disruption and external critique. This does not imply an uncritical embrace of authoritarianism, but rather a nuanced project to theorize sovereignty, law, and legitimacy outside the liberal paradigm. As such, the Chinese engagement with Schmitt reflects both a continuation of the German legal tradition and a distinct adaptation of its core principles to Chinese conditions.
In doing so, it contributes to a broader global rethinking of constitutionalism in a post-liberal world. Schmitt’s vision of constitutional continuity emphasized maintaining historical traditions in Germany’s political structure, even while acknowledging necessary reforms. Central to this was his advocacy for a strengthened executive authority during the Weimar Republic, where he saw parliamentary fragmentation—caused by an ideologically diverse array of parties—as an obstacle to effective governance. The Weimar parliament, composed of Communists, Nazis, Social Democrats, and Catholic Centre parties, was, in Schmitt’s view, incapable of decisive action.
To overcome this paralysis, he proposed expanding presidential powers, especially through emergency measures under Article 48, effectively creating a quasi-monarchical executive with the authority to bypass legislative gridlock. Schmitt also sought to curtail judicial review, arguing that unelected judges should not hold ultimate interpretative power over law but rather that this authority should rest with the executive, who, he claimed, held a more direct popular mandate. Interestingly, Schmitt supported this executive vision even when the presidency was held by Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat whom Schmitt regarded as a stabilizing force against revolutionary threats from both the far right and left, particularly communism.
However, Schmitt’s theoretical commitment to strong sovereign authority soon intersected with his practical politics in the era of the Nazi regime. Initially hostile to the Nazis—whom he saw as barbaric and destabilizing—Schmitt quickly adapted after they seized power, collaborating with the regime to gain influence as Prussian State Councillor and legal advisor. This alliance was both opportunistic and ideologically consistent, as Schmitt believed that centralized, decisive authority was necessary to maintain order and counter existential threats, notably communism. Yet, this alignment also marked a profound ethical compromise, as Schmitt’s concept of sovereign power effectively legitimized the Nazi totalitarian state.
At the core of Schmitt’s political thought lies the concept of “the political,” defined by the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy. Unlike other forms of social division based on nationality, religion, or ethnicity, this friend-enemy distinction is existential and political: the enemy is a force threatening the very existence of the political community. Thus, politics is inherently antagonistic, with peace and consensus seen as secondary, contingent outcomes rather than foundational principles. This antagonistic realism rejects the idea that politics can be governed by ethics or economics; instead, it revolves around the imperative of survival and existential conflict.
Closely related is Schmitt’s doctrine of decisionism, which holds that legal authority ultimately rests on the act of decision, especially during states of exception when normal legal order is suspended. His famous formulation, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” encapsulates the idea that the executive wields real power by determining when and how to override the law in crises. Popular consent, for Schmitt, is expressed in binary political acts (“yes” or “no”), but it is the sovereign who transforms this consent into effective authority. This notion repositions sovereignty away from legal norms and toward concrete acts of decision.
Schmitt’s theory also stresses that law must be grounded in the concrete historical, cultural, and social context of a people, rather than abstract universal principles. His critique of formalist and positivist legal theories emphasizes that law is an expression of a society’s collective identity and existential order, rooted in territory, tradition, and power. This concrete order thinking parallels natural law traditions but focuses on contingent, particular historical realities rather than eternal moral truths. Legitimacy, then, derives from fidelity to a people’s underlying existential framework rather than procedural rationality.
Furthermore, Schmitt identified multiple, autonomous spheres of value—moral, aesthetic, economic, and political—each governed by its own binary logic (e.g., good vs. evil, beautiful vs. ugly, profit vs. loss, friend vs. enemy). These spheres often conflict; an adversary in the political domain may be morally admirable or economically beneficial, yet still represent an existential threat politically. This underscores the separateness of political logic from other normative domains and highlights Schmitt’s realism about antagonism as foundational.
Schmitt’s critique of liberal constitutionalism revealed its susceptibility to crisis, emphasizing its dependence on extralegal sources of authority and its vulnerability to fragmentation and paralysis. While his ideas offered a powerful diagnosis of liberalism’s weaknesses, they also laid ideological groundwork for authoritarian legitimation by concentrating power in an executive who claims to embody the unity and will of the people. His concepts, especially the friend-enemy distinction, sovereignty, and the state of exception, have remained influential—and deeply controversial—in contemporary political thought.
After an early period of collaboration with the Nazis, Schmitt’s standing deteriorated by 1936 as he was marginalized due to his personal ties to Jewish colleagues, Catholic background, and loyalty to traditional legal institutions, which conflicted with Nazi racial ideology and radical revolutionary goals. Branded unreliable by hardline Nazi factions such as the SS, he retreated from direct political engagement and began a significant intellectual shift. This reorientation moved away from immediate state theory toward a more metaphysical and geopolitical framework that sought to understand legal order in broader historical and spatial terms.
In his post-1936 writings, Schmitt developed “The Nomos of the Earth,” which presented a theological-political account of international order grounded in the concept of nomos—the foundational spatial division of land that underpins law and authority. He traced the historical development of European legal order through territorial sovereignty, colonialism, and balance of power, emphasizing the spatial dimension of legal and political order.
Relatedly, Schmitt’s “Grossraum” theory introduced the idea of “Greater Spaces,” large geopolitical regions governed by a dominant power, challenging the classical Westphalian notion of sovereign equality among states. This concept has been interpreted both as a critique of liberal internationalism and as a lingering justification for German hegemonic ambitions. Throughout these later works, Schmitt deepened his commitment to concrete order thinking, arguing that law must be understood as embedded in cultural and spiritual traditions rather than abstract legal principles. This approach distanced him from Nazi-specific ideology while preserving his foundational themes of sovereignty, order, and existential conflict.
Despite his role in legitimating Nazi legal doctrines, Schmitt was never prosecuted at Nuremberg, partly due to jurisdictional gaps and his later distancing from active politics. Postwar, he cultivated the image of a tragic intellectual, betrayed by both liberalism and Nazi extremism. Yet, he never renounced the core foundations of his theories, instead refining them, particularly his critique of liberal normativity and his emphasis on friend-enemy politics. This trajectory—from a conservative intellectual who initially allied with the Nazis in hopes of restoring sovereign authority, to his marginalization and later philosophical turn—reveals Schmitt’s enduring anti-liberal political metaphysics: politics is fundamentally about exclusion and existential division; law and order are concrete, historically situated phenomena rooted in power and tradition; and sovereignty ultimately resides in the decisive act that suspends legal norms to preserve the polity. His uneasy accommodation with Nazism exemplifies the peril of this framework, as it can legitimize authoritarianism under the guise of preserving political unity and survival, a legacy that continues to shape contemporary geopolitical formations, most recently in Russia, The USA, Israel, China and India and other authoritarian regimes.
Schmitt’s post-war engagement with international law and geopolitics marked a significant pivot in his thought, expanding his preoccupation with sovereignty from the national to the global scale. His Großraum theory posited that the international order should not be a universalist liberal system but rather composed of distinct “great spaces,” each governed by a regional hegemon. This idea was not merely theoretical but drawn from realpolitik: Schmitt looked at the Monroe Doctrine as a practical example of a power structuring its own regional sphere while excluding external interference. Although he recognized the inherent hypocrisy of the United States proclaiming hemispheric dominance while advocating principles of freedom and sovereignty, he found the doctrine an effective model for regional order. In his vision, Germany’s militaristic ambitions were an effort to carve out a European Großraum, reflecting a multipolar arrangement in which legal and economic integration occurred within civilizational blocks rather than globally uniform law. This sharply contrasted with postwar liberal internationalism, which sought universal institutions and norms.
In his later years, Schmitt developed a fascination with Mao Zedong and China, perceiving Mao as a rare exemplar of authentic sovereignty grounded in the people’s rootedness to their soil, history, and destiny. Schmitt’s admiration was ideological as well as strategic: Mao represented a political figure who defied imperialist influence and embodied a civilizational identity distinct from Western universalism.
Schmitt even referenced Mao’s poem “Kunlun,” which divided the world into three parts—Europe, America, and China—as an articulation of the very kind of geopolitical pluralism Schmitt championed. The irony that Mao himself revised the poem to replace “China” with “Eastern countries” underscores the complex interplay between nationalist and anti-imperialist readings within Chinese revolutionary thought, revealing a broader anti-hegemonic rather than narrowly national focus.
Despite Schmitt’s contentious past, his concepts have persisted in Western legal and political theory, particularly the ideas of sovereign decisionism and the friend–enemy distinction. German constitutional jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde drew on Schmitt’s work to highlight the necessity of pre-legal ethical-political unity underpinning constitutional order. According to Böckenförde, legal systems cannot self-sustain without foundational values that precede and legitimize law itself, a point that resonates with Schmitt’s critique of liberal legalism’s perceived normative vacuity.
Similarly, Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule revived Schmittian themes to defend “common good constitutionalism,” advocating strong executive discretion and a grounding of constitutional interpretation in foundational values—often religious or moral rather than purely procedural. Vermeule’s argument that administrative law inherently involves Schmittian executive discretion highlights the continuing baleful influence of Schmitt’s analysis of power beyond textual legal formalism.
Early Chinese engagement with Schmitt during the Republican era reflected the ideological contestations of the 1930s and 1940s. Figures like Xu Daling, who studied in Germany and personally interacted with Schmitt, valued his emphasis on societal values over constitutional text but critiqued the authoritarian tendencies implicit in limiting public deliberation. Zhang Junmai adopted a more moderate, analytical approach, influenced by Schmitt’s style rather than his authoritarian politics. Conversely, Yao Fasan, a far-right Kuomintang ideologue, explicitly used Schmitt’s theories to justify dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek, promoting executive supremacy and rejecting separation of powers.
This spectrum of reception reveals how Schmitt’s ideas could be adapted variably—from critical reflection to ideological weaponization—within Chinese political thought. Central to debates over Schmitt’s legacy is the tension between sovereign authority and the legitimacy of value formation. Critics argue that Schmitt’s emphasis on sovereign decisionism risks foreclosing democratic deliberation about the values that should ground political order. Admirers, however, regard him as offering a stark realism about political power, especially in moments of crisis or foundational transformation, where legal order depends on decisive executive authority and clear friend–enemy distinctions.
Schmitt presents a study in intellectual self-contradiction. His Catholicism structured his political theology, with its sharp friend–enemy binaries and sovereign-as-decision-maker logic echoing religious motifs of divine judgement and moral clarity. Yet, he was deeply skeptical of universal moral codes, and his legal realism undercut the very metaphysical certainty his theological imagery seemed to invoke. This tension extended into his personal life. Schmitt maintained friendships and professional relationships with Jewish intellectuals early in his career—such as Leo Strauss and Franz Neumann—yet quickly capitulated to Nazi anti-Semitism when it became politically expedient. This pattern of adaptation suggests not merely ideological flexibility but a deeper anxiety around power, belonging, and betrayal.
His willingness to denounce former allies and reposition himself points to a personality driven by both fear and ambition, a paranoid need for control matched by a chameleonic instinct for survival. Schmitt’s own self-presentation—as a thinker betrayed by liberals, exiled by Nazis, and ignored by post-war democracies—reinforces the image of someone who saw himself perpetually misunderstood, perhaps even martyred.
The "persecution complex" often cited in biographical studies is not incidental to his political theory; rather, it may be constitutive of it. His obsessive emphasis on conflict, enmity, and exceptionality reflects a psychic landscape where stable norms are always on the verge of collapse, and survival depends on identifying and vanquishing the Other.
This psychological structure helps explain the enduring power of Schmitt’s thought in authoritarian contexts. His theory does not merely describe politics; it enacts a worldview of existential threat and embattled sovereignty that resonates with the leaders and systems most invested in defending centralized control. In this sense, Schmitt’s paranoid logic becomes a political weapon—especially potent in regimes, like modern China’s, that view crisis not as anomaly but as condition of governance.