I recently read Shadi Bartsch‘s Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. The book’s topic is fascinating to me: the ways that modern Chinese intellectuals have taken up classical Greek philosophy. In some ways it made me feel oddly hopeful – that even under the totalitarian régime that has run China since 1989, it turns out that classical learning, even foreign classical learning, gets more respect than it does in the anti-intellectual United States. Unfortunately the book itself takes a highly unhelpful method of dealing with the topic: Bartsch spends a great deal of time telling you what’s wrong with the views of Chinese pro-government intellectuals. A Western audience really doesn’t need that: we’re already predisposed to be suspicious of that way of thinking. I wanted to learn about how the Chinese intellectuals themselves think – something I can’t get for myself, since my Chinese isn’t nearly good enough – and the book gives them very little time to speak in their own worlds.

But there was one thing the book sparked in me, which I don’t think was the author’s intent: an appreciation for the work of Leo Strauss.

Strauss, a German Jew who emigrated to the US in 1937, could reasonably be called a niche or cult thinker: there is a significant number of academics who remain his “Straussian” fans, while he is taken less seriously by most others. This is for a number of reasons, not least that his thought is typically taken to lean in a right-wing direction – perhaps most notoriously by supposed “Straussians” in the George W. Bush administration, like Paul Wolfowitz, who studied with Strauss. It is far from clear that those “Straussians” were being faithful to Strauss’s teaching, though, because – for reasons that should become clear in a moment – it can be very hard to discern what Strauss’s teaching actually is, even though he writes in admirably jargon-free prose. At a minimum, American Straussian interpretation, like 1990s hip-hop, is divided between East and West Coast; the West Coast Straussians seem eager to influence government policy in a way that Strauss himself never was.

What I learned from Bartsch’s book, though, is that Strauss’s thought has become very popular among intellectuals in contemporary China. That makes Strauss a striking figure in cross-cultural philosophy – for it is not just his reception but his influences that are outside the mainstream West. Strauss draws a significant portion of his own ideas from medieval Muslim thinkers, especially al-Fārābī. And in the early 2000s, it turns out, two Chinese professors, named Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang, brought the work of Strauss and his followers to China with a wide array of translations, and inspired a new generation of students.

What piqued my interest in particular was Bartsch’s claim that Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang had once been liberal reformists – until the 1989 crackdown on protest and dissent. Like many Chinese intellectuals who had once critiqued the Party régime, they halted that critique when it became personally dangerous.

But it’s in that context that a turn to Strauss becomes particularly interesting. Strauss’s essay “Persecution and the art of writing” was written in 1941, when fascism and Communism were ascendant around the globe, and notes that in those places where free speech had once been prevalent, “freedom is now suppressed and replaced by a compulsion to coordinate speech with such views as the government believes to be expedient, or holds in all seriousness.” (p22 in the book named after the essay) But he notes that in such cases people can still think independently in private conversations with friends, and even express those views in publicly available works – so long as they conceal those views in plain sight, by “writing between the lines”. Their writing may contain an exoteric view aligning with the officially accepted position, while hiding a very different esoteric view in plain sight, for those who are able to get the message. For example, they might write an essay ostensibly attacking liberal views they themselves held – but explain the views that they were “attacking” in sympathetic terms, while making the actual attack weak.

Gee, I can’t possibly imagine why that approach could be appealing to Chinese intellectuals after 1989!

I don’t know the work of Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang beyond what Bartsch mentions of it (though I’m certainly now intrigued to learn more). So I can’t say whether their work is actually well described by the inference that seems plausible to me: that they maintained something like their pre-1989 liberal views in the following decades, but learned to conceal them amid an outward profession of the publicly acceptable view, in just the way that Strauss describes.

But whether or not that description is true of Liu and Gan, it may start to have lessons for the rest of us. Freedom of speech is very important for a good society – but that says nothing about whether societies actually will protect it. Like it or not, we now appear to be in an era much like Strauss’s, where there is an eagerness to squelch dissenting views. In the past decade we saw that eagerness from left-wingers running major institutions; now we see it from the right-wing US government. But I wouldn’t be so worried if it were just that particular régime, which has shown such repeated incompetence that I find it hard to imagine that régime lasting. (I have no doubt that Donald Trump would like to lock people like me up for our criticisms of him; I also think that, unlike many of his authoritarian peers, he is far too stupid and impulsive to figure out a way to make that happen.) Rather, a right-wing intolerance of dissent has become standard around the world in governments from India to Israel to Turkey to Hungary – and the liberal alliance once led by the United States has been weakened so much, just in the past year, that it seems far less likely to be able to defend freedom against longer-standing autocracies like those of China and Russia.

We are, in short, in a world not unlike the one in which Strauss wrote his essay on persecution. I deeply hope that the liberty to express oneself freely will survive, and come to expand once more. But if it does not, Strauss might come to look like a promising guide for how one might continue to think and share ideas regardless.