Assorted Alliterative Ancients’ Aphorisms

As I’ve remarked on here before, I really wish I had some grasp of Mandarin, in order to be able to get a proper sense of how Thucydides is being discussed in China: do they simply follow the conventional US international relations reading, and especially Allison’s Thucydides’s Trap theory, on the basis that this will help them understand American foreign policy thinking, or are they engaging with this and other classical texts (including Chinese ones) more creatively? A recent report from the Asia News International website (original link from @rogueclassicist) suggests the latter may be more likely, as it reports on an article from the official news agency Xinhua that speaks not of Thucydides but of the hitherto-unremarked Tacitus Trap.

I have to rely on the ANI reporter’s summary of this article, as my web browser issues dire warnings against viewing Xinhua’s site (can anyone tell me if this is justified?). It focuses on the need for members of the Communist Party to serve the people and bring about the rejuvenation of China, and includes a warning against the Tacitus Trap:

The concept of the Tacitus Trap apparently posits that ‘neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome’. It also warns leaders that ‘when a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth or a lie, to do good or bad, will be considered a lie or to do bad’.

For the ANI reporter, this is a real gotcha moment. The Chinese, the report claims, regularly refer to P. Gornelius Tacitus rather than P. Cornelius, because a China Daily article in 2012 misspelled it and they all cite it without checking. And of course no one has ever heard of the Tacitus Trap.

There is, it seems, real innovation taking place in China, perhaps as desired by Supreme Leader Xi Jinping. This involves making up non-existent quotations, from people long dead (nearly 1900 years ago in this case), who are not there to clarify matters. Thankfully, the works of historians like Tacitus have survived in original Roman and English translations. And, these by no stretch of the imagination, seem to even remotely contain concepts attributed to Tacitus.

Hilariously, ANI continues, the alleged quote clearly indicts the Chinese government, which cannot possibly be welcome, and therefore its policies cannot possibly be popular. This is just like the Thucydides Trap, which “is often quoted by Chinese experts to try and explain the ‘insecurities’ developing within the US, stemming from the rise of a confident China” but which respected professors from Yale and Harvard point out is not to be found in the ancient text but can only be linked tenuously to the situation if one focuses on the actions of the stronger established power.

So, the two ‘traps’ again prove the success of Xi Jinping’s policies of bringing innovation into manufacturing. In an innovative manner, the ‘Tacitus Trap’ has been manufactured by Chinese propaganda, and is now being foisted upon an unsuspecting world.

At this point, if not earlier, we might start to question the reliability of ANI’s analysis. Chinese scholars have responded critically to the model of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, which has been energetically promoted by a respected professor from Harvard and widely cited by Western commentators, because they disagree with its claims and implications, rather than inventing it for their own purposes. More interestingly, as Gerald Krieghofer (@krieghofer) pointed out, there is in fact a very obvious source for the idea: Tacitus’ Histories 1.7: “when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him.”

So, a perfectly sound quotation, and a not unreasonable political maxim: once you lose credibility and authority, it doesn’t matter how sound your policies are. This is how the phrase was used by the President of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 2013, for example (see report in the South China Morning Post), and a blogger at the time noted that the disparity of Google hits for the phrase – 1,690 in English, 714,000 Chinese results – made it clear that this was a Chinese invention, sanctioned for use in the media. The most important source, if not the original, is a 2012 article (I’m tempted to call it an editorial, but lack knowledge of the context to know whether this is a meaningful distinction in Chinese media) in the China Daily:

BEIJING – Some local Chinese governments are prone to slip into a credibility crisis in the Internet era in which inadequate information access and poor explanation spur public blame and simmer distrust.

Despite governments’ assertion of approved environmental assessments for several planned chemical projects recently in cities of Dalian, Shifang and Qidong, local residents, nonetheless, did not trust them and turned protests into violence in some extreme cases.

In one of the latest conflicts between a military officer family and a flight attendant as well as a nationwide huntdown of a most wanted serial killer, the public also tended to believe online rumors rather than official statements.

Publius Gornelius Tacitus (56-117 A.D.), a historian and a senator of the Roman Empire, said neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome, which was later called “Tacitus Trap” in political studies.

“Tacitus Trap” warns any leaders in power that when a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth or a lie, to do good or bad, will be considered a lie, or to do bad.

There was a similar political adage in ancient China when Confucius (551-479 B.C.) told his followers that the people’s trust is the top priority among all considerations of governance.

It is not enough for the government to publicize information concerning public interests, which was demanded by the above-mentioned residents in fear of environmental hazards. The public have the right to know at the beginning of the government’s project plans and the right to participate in debating the project’s feasibility.

To establish a sound government-people interaction will help accumulate public trust and make it easier to elaborate a bigger picture of economic and social development to the people.

Therefore, to win or lose public support seriously matters, for not only the better government-people relationship but also government’s public image.

As the Big Lychee blogger noted, it’s interesting that the article cites a similar Confusius quote – to endorse the idea? – but nevertheless wants to adopt the Roman name; it suggests that the reception of classical ideas, and the construction of classical authority, in Chinese contexts is a really interesting topic, and I hope someone with the requisite language skills is studying it (and if anyone out there with the requisite language skills feels like organising a joint research project on this, get in touch!).

On the basis of my own Google searches, it remains the case that references to “Tacitus Trap” appear solely in the context of Chinese discussions or articles reporting on them (and note that according to this report, Xi himself has referred to it), and the number of English-language references remains an order of magnitude smaller than Chinese references (the figure of 1,690 for the former flatters it, as many of these are in Mandarin with just the phrase in English).

Final thought: why was the Asia News International report so certain that the “Tacitus Trap” is fake, and so eager to offer this as evidence for Chinese fraud and/or malevolence? The fact that ANI is based in India, and that there have been attempts over the last year to apply the “Thucydides Trap” to China-India relations as well as US-China relations, may be a significant part of the context.