Reading Leo Strauss in China

Around 2004, Heinrich Meier, a German scholar of philosophy at the University of Chicago, welcomed to his home a guest that changed the face of Western classical studies in China. The Chinese professor told him “in excellent German” that in the 1990s he had come across Meier’s book Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. Although he initially read the book because of its treatment of Carl Schmitt, whose work he had been studying, the Chinese professor told Meier that the book drew his attention away from Schmitt toward Strauss’s work. Meier claims that this shift in attention was the intended effect of his book. But the encounter of the Chinese professor with Meier’s book was also the beginning of the reception of Leo Strauss in the Chinese-speaking world. “For after his discovery, the Chinese professor used all resources at his disposal to have the writings of Leo Strauss translated into Chinese. Today, Chinese is the only language in which the oeuvre of the philosopher from Kirchhain and Chicago, including the correspondence so far published, is almost fully accessible,” reports Meier via Christopher Nadon in “Leo Strauss’s Critique of the Political in a Sinophone Context.” Meier had met Liu Xiaofeng, “the first Chinese Straussian.”