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Gan Yang (born 1952; ) is a Chinese political philosopher, "Confucianism socialist". He is dean of the Liberal Arts College at Sun Yat-sen University, and was formerly professor of political philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In 1989, Gan enrolled as a PhD student under the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, but left Chicago ten years later without a doctorate. He was appointed professor of political philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, then moved to Sun Yat-sen University as dean of the Liberal Arts College (Boya College) in 2009, where he presided over a general reform of liberal arts at the university on Straussianism lines, emphasising Chinese, Latin, and Ancient Greek classics.
Gan was described in 2013 as "one of the most prominent political philosophers of contemporary China".
Gan contends that since the 1970s, American Straussians have used esotericism to replace the liberal-egalitarian elements of the American ideological creed with classical and aristocratic ideals. In Gan's view, the deceptive methods used by the United States to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq came from the doctrines of the Straussian school.
Gan criticizes what he deems as political correctness imposed by "tenured radicals" in American university humanities departments. According to Gan, a trend of hedonistic liberalism had led to the "closing of the American mind".
After moving to Chicago in 1989, Gan became increasingly influenced as a student of Allan Bloom by American conservative philosophy and the thought of Leo Strauss. In a preface to a Chinese translation of Strauss's Natural Right and History in 2003, Gan drew on Strauss's thought to argue that the predominant danger of persecution in philosophy was not the persecution of the philosopher by an unphilosophical wider society, but the persecution of the multitude by the philosopher. Modern philosophy has "gone mad", Gan states, and is promoting the continual remaking of politics according to competing philosophical abstractions; in light of the "politicization of philosophy" and the "philosophization of politics", philosophy has become a disease which must be controlled.
In the 1990s, Gan shortly joined the emerging Chinese New Left.
After 2000 announced his support for the establishment of a "socialist Confucian republic". According to Gan, the ideal of a Confucian socialist republic is already embodied in the official name of the People's Republic of China: the title of "People's Republic" demarcates the country as a socialist republic constituted by workers and peasants and not a capitalist state, while the name "China" itself invokes the Confucian tradition of Chinese civilisation.
Commenting upon China's reform process, Gan has criticised linear models of economic development and suggested that the model of Township and Village Enterprises in the Chinese countryside offers an alternative vision of modernity to the Western capitalist world order. While other scholars such as Qin Hui dismissed the importance of the TVEs, Gan suggested that by avoiding the pronounced urban–rural divide characteristic of Western industrialisation, cooperative forms of industry like the TVEs could effect a more dispersed form of development that would preserve traditional rural industries in China.
Gan has been influenced both by Western postmodernism, such as Michel Foucault, and by Western Marxism, including the thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.
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