Qin Hui on Why Condemning Trump Is Not Enough

"I think it is completely wrong for European countries and many others around the world to remain passive in the face of Iran’s waging war on the entire world."

Qin Hui is one of modern China’s foremost public intellectuals, an intellectual historian whose work ranges from the political philosophy of the Qin-Han dynasties to twentieth-century constitutionalism and land reform. His historical scholarship is closely tied to present concerns. The research he undertook on land reform in the Guanzhong region formed part of a broader challenge by some Chinese historians to official revolutionary historiography, while his research on intellectual history underpins his sharp critique of the embrace of authoritarianism by China’s contemporary “New Confucians”.

If a label is needed, Qin is a left-leaning liberal, but his intellectual outlook is shaped above all by a fiercely critical spirit. He does not pull his punches against Western liberals or the left, either. In his account of global imbalances between consumption and labour, he has criticised the parochialism of the Western left’s focus on redistribution as a solution to economic stagnation and …