The self-use of talent

Zhang's interventions in the rule-by-man and rule-by-law debate expose the claims of his interlocutors based on these models as dangerously autocratic, yet his interventions do not fully set out the scope or nature of the kind of politics Zhang envisioned. “Self-awareness” models the structure into which individuals can be said to make meaningful, effective interventions in politics, but the concrete manifestations of self-awareness – why and how its cultivation may impact the shared environment – remain unspecified. This chapter begins to address these gaps by looking at what Zhang identifies as another of “the foundations of government” – namely the “self-use of talent” ( ziyong cai ). Zhang's invocation of talent as a political remedy is unusual for a democratic theory whose emphasis on equality tends to ignore or vilify the benefits accruing to expertise and natural ability. Talent is a concept invoked more commonly by late imperial Chinese officials, whose responses to political crisis often turned on the need for superiors to “find the [right] person” ( de qi ren ) with the necessary talents to execute particular tasks. Even in Chinese politics, how ever, talent is an ambiguous value. Sometimes associated with knowledge ( zhi ) but identified with activities as diverse as military strategy, literary composition, entrepreneurial ability, and mechanical craftsmanship, it tended to be seen either as unpredictable and potentially subversive, or as profoundly inefficacious, without proper regulation by virtue ( de ).