Beyond the European Crisis of Modernity: Constitutional Order and the State in China and Germany in the 1930s

This paper examines two responses to the global constitutional crises in the twentieth century, with a focus on a comparison between Carl Schmitt, a notorious German political theorist and critic of liberal constitutionalism and Zhang Junmai, a constitutionalist in Republican China. After the First World War, both Germany and China experienced constitutional crises, which prompted critical reflections among intellectuals. My paper is the first to discover and examine the latent element of Carl Schmitt in Zhang Junmai’s acceptance of the Weimar Constitution. By examining the intertextual relation between Carl Schmitt and Zhang Junmai, this paper reveals a latent aspect of the spectrum of Constitutionalism in the twentieth century and shows a special dialogue between a German critic of constitutionalism and a Chinese constitutionalist. While Zhang seems to have simultaneously read and accepted parts of the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Schmitt’s liberal rivals, a hidden side in Zhang Junmai’s thought is his acceptance of Schmitt’s critique of liberal understandings of the state and Rechtsstaat. My research is also the first to deeply explore the hidden intellectual impact of Max Weber and Carl Schmitt on Zhang Junmai, especially on several key issues related to the politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the sovereign and sovereignty, the depoliticising bourgeois intellectuals, the rise of economic interests and the decline of politics and state theory, and so on.

Dandan Chen is currently a full professor in the department of History, Politics, and Geography at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York, the coordinator for the Asian Studies Minor, and has taught for the department of Science, Technology, and Society since 2013. She is an Associate in Research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, a Senior Fellow at the Inter-Civilizations Institute of East China Normal University, and the founder of the global scholarly platform “Global Studies Forum”(globalstudiesforum.com) and "International Association for Law & Interdisciplinary Studies”(lawandinterdisciplinarystudies.com) . Dr. Chen’s interdisciplinary areas of research and teaching include global and Asian history, Chinese history, politics, literature and law in a global context. A bilingual writer, her articles have appeared in various journals. Dr. Chen has received awards including the SUNY Chancellor Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities (2022), the SUNY Nuala Drescher Award (2016), and the 2016 Academic Excellence Award from Chinese Historians in the United States. 

* This lecture is co-organized by Oxford Chinese Law Discussion Group and the International Association for Law and Interdisciplinary Studies.