Hermeneutics and Politics: Going beyond the Book

Abstract

The New Text school Gongyang Commentary on the Confucian classic the Spring and Autumn Annals operates on the principle that the classical text contains deep meanings that lie beyond the literal sense of the words and need to be discovered by reading between the lines. Such a principle of the hermeneutics of suspicion makes it possible for the interpreter to fit the text into any context or framework with political implications, and the Gongyang school commentaries have indeed often been used for a particular political purpose, with the general tendency of establishing the dichotomy of the Chinese and the barbarian in political Confucianism. Although the Gongyang commentaries did not have much influence for a very long time in Chinese history, it was revived during the last imperial dynasty of Qing and by the royalist and reformist Kang Youwei at the end of Qing. Some Chinese scholars have taken a new interest in the Gongyang commentary tradition for expressing their views on contemporary geopolitics, and therefore it is important to review the Gongyang Commentary and its hermeneutic principles to help us better understand the connection of hermeneutics with politics in contemporary scholarship in China.