Over the past two decades, something unexpected has begun to stir within classical studies: a growing interest in comparing ancient Greece with China. While this comparative approach is not without precedent—Montesquieu and Hegel both reached eastward in their philosophies of history—its recent revival reflects broader shifts in classical scholarship. As they give way to the lamentable fashion of wrestling with their formerly self-evident identity and purpose, Western scholars have increasingly sought to place ancient Greek political ideas within a global context. The result is a reconfiguration of how we understand the polis, democracy, ethnicity, and political theory.

What I find interesting, even so, in these efforts is that the comparison with China may be intended to undermine the perceived uniqueness of Greek achievement, but their effect is the opposite: the more Greek politics is compared with other civilisational forms, the more extraordinary it begins to appear. Greece was not one civilisation among many in the ancient world. The more we try to relativise them, the clearer it becomes that the Greeks were the exceptional people of ancient history—and perhaps of all history.

In his 2009 book Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice, Paul Cartledge characterises the central problems of Greek political history in three broad categories: the relationship between theory and political activity, the role of class and status, and the rise and fall of democracy (Cartledge 2009). He argues that political ideas were often reactive, formed in response to historical trauma. The anti-democratic views of Plato and Aristotle, for instance, arise not in abstraction but as responses to the perceived disorder of Athenian democracy. In this sense, political theory follows political experience. Cartledge also makes a more radical point: the politics of ancient Greece cannot be easily assimilated to modern liberal models. Ancient democracy was not a mechanism for the protection of individual rights, but a totalising form of collective participation—what Cartledge calls “a total social phenomenon” (Cartledge 2009, 29).

This emphasis on difference has become a theme in modern scholarship. Martin Ostwald, whose collected papers were republished the same year as Cartledge’s book, focuses on key concepts such as isokratia, nomos, and the agraphos nomos (unwritten law), arguing that they reflected fundamentally different assumptions about law and citizenship and the nature of the good life (Ostwald 2009). Ostwald also stresses that democratic ideology was not always the driving force in Athenian politics, and that many institutions labelled as “democratic” served more pragmatic ends.

Such revisions are part of a larger effort to escape the teleological tendency of classical scholarship—that is, the habit of treating Greece as the origin point of Western liberalism. It is in this intellectual climate that comparisons with China have gained traction. The goal is not merely to find parallels, but to understand Greece through contrast.

Jeremy Tanner has noted that the rise of comparative Sino-Hellenic studies is partly due to the growing prominence of China in global affairs and the expansion of classical studies beyond traditional boundaries. Hyun Jin Kim’s Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China (2009) is perhaps the most thorough example to date. Kim argues that the Greek-barbarian distinction and the Chinese division between Hua Xia and non-Hua Xia peoples emerged under similar conditions: a rising imperial or civic consciousness in times of geopolitical tension. For the Greeks, this was the Ionian revolt and the Persian Wars; for the Chinese, the Warring States period.

Yet crucial differences remain. Greek ethnicity tended to be viewed as an inherent quality, sometimes bordering on the genetic. In contrast, Chinese views of the barbarian were more flexible, emphasising education, custom, and acculturation over birth (Kim 2009). This point, though often overlooked, has important implications for how we understand political identity. The Greek polis was exclusive, rooted in a shared descent myth and the tight interlinking of political and religious life. The Chinese state, while often autocratic, was in principle more universalist.

Kim goes further, comparing Herodotus and Sima Qian, two historians often treated as national equivalents. He notes that Herodotus, writing from a world of cultural rivalry and commercial exchange, was capable of cultural relativism. Sima Qian, whose civilisation faced no serious rival, was more culturally insular. Nonetheless, both portray nomadic peoples with ambivalence—the Skythians for Herodotus, the Xiongnu for Sima Qian—and both societies wrestled with the question of how to define the foreign. These comparisons are not curiosities. They help illuminate what was and was not distinctive about the Greek political experience.

It is easy to be cynical about comparative studies. They often arise in a climate of academic insecurity, as disciplines try to justify themselves to external critics. And indeed, one suspects that the appeal of comparing Greece with China lies partly in the prestige of both cultures—each with an ancient language and elite philosophical tradition, and a foundational role in the self-understanding of a modern nation-state. Yet there is more to the comparison than vanity. It forces a kind of intellectual humility.

Much has been made, for instance, of the Greek invention of political theory. It is true that Plato and Aristotle created a distinct genre of abstract political reasoning. But they did so in response to lived realities—the trial of Socrates, the decline of the polis, the Peloponnesian War. Chinese thinkers of the same period were no less engaged with political order: Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi each grappled with the moral foundations of rule and the dangers of chaos. The difference lies not in the presence or absence of thought, but in form: Chinese political ideas were embedded in ethical and cosmological discourse, rather than separated into a distinct discipline.

This is one reason why Western scholars have been slow to admit the full depth of Chinese political philosophy. It does not look like Aristotle, so it is dismissed as non-political. The new comparative trend resists this. It insists on reading both traditions on their own terms.

The value of this approach is not only that it expands our horizons, but that it sharpens our understanding of Greece itself. By seeing how other civilisations managed hierarchy, participation, authority, and ethnicity, we can better assess the unique structure of the polis. Greek democracy, far from being the natural endpoint of political evolution, emerges as a specific and fragile experiment. Its dependence on slave labour, its exclusion of women and foreigners, and its intense localisation all point to limits as well as strengths.

Cartledge’s observation that monarchy was never normative in Greek thought, yet returned as a philosophical preoccupation in the fourth century, also gains new clarity in this light. The Chinese experience of long-standing monarchy, with a rotating cycle of dynastic legitimacy, provides a contrasting model of continuity and adaptation. The Greeks rejected monarchy not because it was alien to them, but because it threatened the solidarity of the citizen body. That rejection, however, proved difficult to sustain under imperial pressure.

The comparison also helps illuminate Greek ideas of fate, order, and justice. Where the Greeks imagined cosmic balance through moira and the caprice of the gods, the Chinese developed notions of harmony (he) and the Mandate of Heaven (tianming). In both cases, political order mirrored cosmological order—but the mapping of one onto the other followed very different lines.

It would be wrong to conclude from these studies that Greece was merely one civilisation among many, or that its political ideas are of no special value. On the contrary, the act of comparison, if done honestly, reveals both the limitations and the brilliance of Greek thought. It shows how political theory can emerge from democratic crisis; how a small community can invent the language of law, responsibility, and dissent. But it also warns against easy universalism. The polis was not a blueprint for global democracy. It was a contingent, fragile, and remarkable phenomenon—like China’s early bureaucratic empire, an outlier that later centuries struggled to repeat.

In an academic world that too often seeks to explain away European achievement, the comparative study of Greece and China offers a better model: one that contextualises without diminishing, that appreciates without mythologising. We need not choose between hubris and self-abasement. A clear-eyed comparison lets us see both Greece and China not as mirrors of ourselves, but as alternative answers to the question of how political life might be ordered.

Bibliography

Cartledge, Paul. Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Kim, Hyun Jin. Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China. London: Duckworth, 2009.

Ostwald, Martin. Language and History in Ancient Greek Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Tanner, Jeremy. “Is Comparative History Possible? Sino-Hellenic Parallels and the Boundaries of Classical Studies.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 129 (2009): 89–109.