Move over Machiavelli
The importance of studying classical Chinese and Indian strategic texts
Dear Global Jigsaw,
My first book, Smoke and Mirrors - a memoir of the seven years I lived in Beijing -was, at root, an India-China comparison. It sought to understand how two ancient civilizations, born of comparable demographic and cultural heft, charted such sharply different trajectories, and with what consequences. In those years, a veritable cottage industry had sprung up around India–China comparisons, frequently featuring a menageries of metaphor: tigers leaping, dragons soaring, elephants lumbering, and peacocks preening.
The “Chindian century” rhetoric has, in recent years, been tempered given the size of the economic chasm that separates the two countries. As I explored in a recent Global Jigsaw conversation with the Chinese academic Mao Keji, in the early 1990s, per capita incomes in India and China were on par. Today, China’s per capita GDP is over five times that of India’s. This divergence informs perceptions of competence, legitimacy, and global ambition.
And yet, beyond the noisy metrics of missiles and market share, there is still important comparative work being done, fueled less by the overheated passion of nationalism and more by the cooler, but open, temper of curiosity. I was reminded of this by a new(ish) collection of essays, Bridging Two Worlds: Comparing Classical Political Thought and Statecraft in India and China, edited by Rajeev Bhargava, Daniel A. Bell, Yan Xuetong, and Amitav Acharya.
Drawing together scholars from both sides of the Himalayas, the book offers a rare intellectual treat by placing Indian and Chinese classical political thought in direct conversation with each other, rather than through the prism of European comparison.
Bridging Two Worlds takes as its starting provocation the need to counter Eurocentricism, arguing that the canon of political theory and international relations has been overwhelmingly Greco-Roman in its self-image and genealogy. Western political thought dialogues seamlessly across the centuries with Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, and then leaps forward to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. “History” is often portrayed as beginning with Herodotus and “politics” with Athens.
But long before the Roman Senate convened or Periclean democracy was theorized, the Sumerians had developed the first system of city-states. The ancient Egyptians and their contemporaries in Hatti, Kassite Babylon, Assyria, and Mitanni forged a diplomatic order - now known as Amarna diplomacy - that predates the Westphalian system[1] by millennia. Ideas of kingship, legitimacy, bureaucratic control, cosmological order, and inter-polity relations were robustly theorized in both India and China, with enduring effects.
And yet, even when talking of non-European figures, comparisons tend to be West-facing. For example, someone like the 3rd century BCE, Chinese legalist philosopher Han Feizi, whose ideas informed the Qin dynasty’s unification of China, is always compared to Machiavelli for his ruthless pragmatism. Ditto for Kautilya, the strategist who served as advisor to Chandragupta Maurya in 4th century BCE India. But rarely are the two Asian thinkers placed side by side, even though both emerged in roughly the same period, and each grappled with the central question of how to maintain political order in times of fragmentation and flux.
In an age of increasing multipolarity, when leaders in Beijing and New Delhi are wont to invoke their ancient pasts as they navigate their contemporary aspirations, there is urgent need to reframe the lenses through which we understand inter-state relations. Just as American presidents look to the Federalist Papers and the example of the Founding Fathers, Chinese and Indian leaders draw selectively from Confucian harmony or Arthashastric realism. These civilizational states are not merely polities with long histories; they are political cultures where the past is a resource, a provocation, and often, a guide.
Broadly speaking, the two main schools of political thought in China are Confucianism and Legalism, which emphasize soft power and hard power respectively. The former, rooted in the teachings of Kongzi /Confucius (551 -479 BCE) conjures up images of a bearded sage spouting aphorisms straight out of a Chinese fortune cookie. But centuries before the memes, the Confucian pole of Chinese statecraft emphasized moral cultivation, ritual propriety (li), benevolent leadership, and the ethical obligations of rulers.
Confucianism stressed that a virtuous ruler, not coercion, was the necessary ingredient of political stability. Education, ceremony, and a deeply hierarchical, but reciprocal, vision of social and political life defined Confucian statecraft. In terms of international relations, this translates into ideas of moral suasion, harmony, and the notion of hierarchical but benevolent regional order.
Echoes of these ideals are a constant in modern Chinese political declarations, but to the untrained ear they have no contextual resonance, so that they are often decoded as hypocritical blah, rather than the allusions to long developed political visions. For example, a staple in the rhetorical canon of Chinese leaders is that civilizational respect needs to be undergird by 和而不同 (harmony not conformity). It comes directly from Book 13 of The Analects, the collection of the discourse of Confucius.
Legalism, by contrast, represents a starkly realist tradition in Chinese political thought. Its most renowned exponent, Han Feizi, was active during a period of the violent political turmoil known as the Warring States period (3rd century BCE). He argued that human nature is fundamentally self-interested and unruly. Strict laws and a centralized authority were therefore required to discipline a society to make it functional.
Legalism champions the impersonal power of institutions over the personal virtue of rulers. While it was never officially canonized like Confucianism, Legalist principles profoundly shaped the Qin dynasty’s unification of China - and much later, were explicitly valorized during Mao Zedong’s rule, particularly in his emphasis on discipline, surveillance, and the transformative role of the state.
Together, these two traditions form the intellectual backbone of Chinese political philosophy. Even today, the tension between Confucian idealism and Legalist realism animates debates about governance, diplomacy, and power on both domestic and international policy fronts. We see it, for example, in the contradiction between the ideals of “rule by virtue” (德治 ) as embodied in Xi Jinping’s reiterations of the need for “moral self-cultivation” among Party officials, and the idea that society must be “ruled by law.” Legalist philosophy, on the other hand, is manifested in the tools of surveillance and censorship that are very much part of the Chinese governance apparatus.
In foreign policy too, we see this tension between the assertion of hard power in the south China Sea, for example, and Beijing’s simultaneous attempts to highlight non-interference, respect for sovereignty, and peaceful development of all nations.
The book, similarly, demonstrates contradictory but comparable strands in strategic philosophy from India’s traditions, starting from Brahminical Vedic thought with its emphasis on dharma (duty) and eternal cosmic law, to the ideas of Kautilya, the chief advisor and strategist the Mauryan Empire of the 4th century BCE. His best-known work is the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft, economics, military strategy, and political realism. Often likened to Machiavelli, but writing nearly 1,800 years earlier, Kautilya – like Han Feizi- offered a starkly unsentimental vision of power, rooted in realpolitik and self-interest.
The Arthashastra begins with the premise that power, not virtue, is the foundation of a stable polity. For Kautilya, the ruler had to be morally flexible, and at times ruthless, to preserve territorial integrity. His strategic arsenal included espionage, deception, tactical marriages, and assassination. Kautilya was not all about undiluted hard power. His vision of governance was deeply institutional, emphasizing that the ruler himself was not above the law. The king’s legitimacy, according to him, rested on securing material prosperity (artha), upholding order (danda), and maintaining a balance between coercion and consent.
In international relations, Kautilya’s Mandala Theory prescribes how a state should view its neighbors: immediate neighbors are potential adversaries, their neighbors’ potential allies. Diplomacy, war, and alliances are to be wielded tactically, guided by a careful cost-benefit analysis, rather than moral sentiment. He famously warned that peace treaties should be signed with an eye to eventual betrayal.
A core principle in the Arthashastra is svatantra or the imperative for a ruler to maintain independence in decision-making while navigating competing powers through calculated flexibility. In modern times such thinking has underlain India’s espousal of non-alignment, and more recently “strategic autonomy.”
India has deepening ties with the U.S. while simultaneously maintaining strong defense and energy relationships with Russia, and engaging actively with China in multilateral forums like BRICS and the SCO. This balancing act is classic Mandala logic: maximizing advantage through diplomatic equilibrium rather than alliance dependency.
The other source of classical Indian strategic thought that is explored in the book, is one that India and China share in common: Buddhism. In India, Buddhist-inspired state craft was most evident in the latter part of Emperor Ashoka’s reign (268–232 BCE). Ashoka came to exemplify moral pluralism and respect for diversity. Like Confucianism, Buddhist precepts also led those who embraced them to believe that the righteous ruler (dharmaraja) governs through ethical persuasion rather than fear.
Ashoka’s ethos, in particularly his emphasis on nonviolence (ahimsa), moral leadership, and universal welfare, have shaped many normative strands in Indian diplomacy (like Gandhi’s non-violent satyagraha, as well as India’s self-conception as a civilizational soft power.
Bridging Two Worlds opens a compelling space where Indian and Chinese traditions: Confucian, Legalist, Buddhist, Daoist, Brahmanical, and materialist, are explored not as curiosities, but as foundational texts of political modernity. To read Kautilya not as the “Indian Machiavelli” but as a theorist in his own right, with his own categories of thought, is to begin to take seriously the idea of multiple political modernities.
Likewise, to approach Han Feizi or Mencius without Western scaffolding is to recognize that concepts such as virtue, authority, and the state have long histories in Asia, neither inferior to nor derivative of European thought.
Who should rule? With what legitimacy? To what ends? And through what means? The only definitive answer in a multipolar world, is that there isn’t one.
[1] The Westphalian system is an international relations principle according to which each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, free from external interference. It emerged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
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Until next week,
Pallavi
I really enjoyed this, thanks, Pallavi.
Nice article. One emendation. The Vedic system for which you label emphasis on dharma (duty) and eternal cosmic law was actually based on a system of checks and balances between the king and the minister. See the marvelous "The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society by J.C. Heesterman 1985" which goes deep into the question.