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In Response to Constitutional Crisis: The Latent Carl Schmitt in Zhang Junmai’s Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

Dandan Chen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Politics, and Geography, Farmingdale State College, State University of New York, Farmingdale, NY, USA

Abstract

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. My research shows that Zhang’s 1930 article, “Hugo Preuss (Author of the New German Constitution), His Concept of the State and His Position in the History of German Political Theory” (德國新憲起草者柏呂斯之國家觀念及其在德國政治學說史上之地位) is his Chinese translation of Carl Schmitt’s 1930 article, “Hugo Preuss: His Concept of the State and His Position in German State Theory” (“Hugo Preuss: Sein Staatsbegriff und seine Stellung in der deutschen Staatslehre”). Instead of simply regarding Zhang’s writing as plagiarism, my paper interrogates the gaps between Carl Schmitt’s original text and Zhang’s translation. 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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society

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