Culture and Social Transformations Ideas, History, and Modern China

Edited by Ban Wang, Stanford University Wang Hui, Tsinghua University

Volume 7

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ihmc Culture and Social Transformations

Theoretical Framework and Chinese Context

Edited by Cao Tianyu Zhong Xueping Liao Kebin Ban Wang

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2014 Some of the articles were translated into English from Chinese with financial support from the Confucius Institute at Stanford University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Culture and social transformations : theoretical framework and Chinese context / edited by Cao Tianyu, Zhong Xueping, Liao Kebin, Wang Ban. pages cm. — (Ideas, history, and modern China, ISSN 1875-9394 ; volume 7) “This is the second collection of essays based on the third conference of the “Culture and Social Transformations in Reform era China” project. Conceived in 2003, the project has been carried out by the editors of this volume in collaboration with Lin Chun of The London School of Economics. The third conference was held in 2009 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.” Introduction. Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-26050-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26051-1 (e-book) 1. China— Civilization—1976–2002—Congresses. 2. Social change—China—History—20th century— Congresses. 3. China—Social conditions—1976–2000—Congresses. 4. China—Politics and government—1976–2002—Congresses. I. Cao, Tian Yu, 1941– editor of compilation. II. Zhong, Xueping, 1956– editor of compilation. III. Liao, Kebin, 1961– editor of compilation. IV. Wang, Ban, 1957– editor of compilation.

DS779.23.C868 2013 951.05’7—dc23 2013028343

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Acknowledgments ...... vii List of Contributors ...... ix

Introduction The Social and Cultural Roots of the Reforms ...... 1 Cao Tianyu and Zhong Xueping*

Part ONE

1 Modernism, Modernity, and Individualism ...... 21 Nan Fan*

2 Subaltern Literature: Theory and Practice (2004–2009) ...... 51 Li Yunlei*

3 The “Crime” of Lu Xun, Anti-Enlightenment, and Chinese Modernity: A Critique of Liu Xiaofeng’s “Christian Theology” ..... 71 Lu Xinyu*

4 From Charting the Revolution to Charter 2008: Discourse, liberalism, De-Politicization ...... 95 Daniel F. Vukovich

5 The Transformation of Chinese University Culture: History, Present, and Path ...... 117 Liao Kebin*

Part TWO

6 Academic Discourse, Official Ideology, and Institutional Metamorphoses: Reflections on Contemporary Chinese Legal Discourses and Reality ...... 153 Yu Xingzhong

* Contributions marked with * were translated by Adrien Thieret. vi contents

7 The Flight to Rights: 1990s China and Beyond ...... 167 Rebecca E. Karl

8 Human Rights, Revolutionary Legacy, and Politics in China ...... 185 Ban Wang

9 Democracy: Lyric Poem and Construction Blueprint ...... 215 Han Shaogong*

Part Three

10 Rereading “Commemorating the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Fall of the Ming” ...... 229 Han Yuhai*

11 The Crisis of Socialism and Efforts to Overcome It ...... 241 Cai Xiang*

12 Post-Socialism Revisited: Reflections on “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” Its Past, Present, and Future ...... 263 Arif Dirlik

13 Reinterpreting “Capitalist Restoration” in China: Toward a Historical Critique of “Actually Existing Market Socialism” ...... 293 Yiching Wu

14 The Western Slump and Global Reorganization ...... 315 Robert Wade

15 An Argument for “Participatory Socialism” ...... 333 Lin Chun*

Index ...... 355 Acknowledgments

This is the second collection of essays based on the third conference of the “Culture and Social Transformations in Reform-Era China” project. Con- ceived in 2003, the project has been carried out by the editors of this volume in collaboration with Lin Chun of The London School of Economics. The third conference was held in 2009 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. We would like to thank the Li Hensheng Center for Culture and Economics Studies of Zhejiang University and Mr. Xu Ziwang for supporting the conference. Without their financial support, the conference would not have been held. We would also like to thank the conference organizers and all the participants. Thanks also go to the translator and to the Confucius Institute at Stanford University for funding the translations. We are especially grateful to Dr. Qin Higley at Brill for her faith in the significance of this project, for her strong support during the translation process, and for her impeccable professionalism in working with the editors of this volume.

Cao Tianyu, Zhong Xueping, Liao Kebin, and Ban Wang April 2013

List of Contributors

Arif Dirlik Independent scholar, Eugene, OR Cai, Xiang Shanghai University Cao, Tianyu Boston University Han, Shaogong Writer, Hainan Province Han, Yuhai Peking University Rebecca E. Karl New York University Li, Yunlei Chinese Art Research Institute Liao, Kebin Peking University Lin, Chun london School of Economics Lu, Xinyu Fudan University Nan, Fan Academy of Social Sciences of Fujian Province Daniel F. Vukovich university of Hong Kong Robert Wade london School of Economics Wang, Ban Stanford University Wu, Yiching university of Toronto Yu, Xingzhong Cornell University Zhong, Xueping Tufts University

Introduction

The Social and Cultural Roots of the Reforms

Cao Tianyu and Zhong Xueping Translated by Adrian Thieret

This is the second collection of essays associated with a multi-year project on “culture and social transformations in reform-era China.” We first offer a conceptual discussion of the social and cultural roots of the reforms, viewed against the backdrop of changes in social life and meaning production near the start of the reforms. Our purpose is to identify central links between culture and social transformations and to provide a better understanding of the nature of the reforms. We then highlight the major arguments put forward by the contributors who, in their own ways, engage with and explore a range of key issues related to the central argument of this book.

I. Culture and Society

Before we explore the social and cultural roots of the reforms, we need to first establish a set of concepts and explain our definitions of “social life,” “culture,” and “meaning.” In this collection, “social life” refers to all individual activities under the restrictions of institutional structures and cultural norms. These restrictions include external laws, rules, regulations, public opinion, and norms, as well as internal drives including ideals, beliefs, values, and hopes. Each specific social life is defined by a meaning structure that corresponds to the way an individual grasps those external constraints and acquires internal drive. Put differently, social life is the specific “meaning structure” constructed by active individuals. Secondly, “culture,” as the sum total of humanity’s awareness of and response to the present and anticipations of the future, is a community of meanings—an objectivized subjectivity transcending both the subjective and the objective. There are three basic conceptions of culture. First, culture equates to humanity and is defined in terms of its contrast with nature, and thus is universal, absolute, and hierarchical. Next, culture originates from specific conditions of life, and thus is pluralistic in nature. The relationship between different cultures can be conquering, subordinate, or assimilated. Finally, culture is understood in terms of social practice. 2 cao tianyu and zhong xueping

Because every culture arises from particular life conditions, culture manifests a kind of particularity. Within this community of meanings, the common root of culture lies in “practice.” As a social activity that aims to assimilate nature, structure the environment, and organize society, the practice of culture is only possible under the inspiration of internalized meanings and values. Any external factors or constraints can only influence individual practice after their meaning is internalized. Finally, “meaning” is a term with wide range. It refers to the intentions, values, norms, and expectations—rational or otherwise—that make life understandable and worthwhile. One’s understanding of meaning is conditioned by the past, and thus involves cultural resources. This is the foundation for cultural continuity. But culture is mainly a response to and a reflection of the present situation, based on available cultural resources of course. In its essence, culture is a basis or foundation for the future, for taking actions, and thus serves the function of directing one’s social life. It can take the form of defending the status quo or (in the case of showing dissatisfaction with an unfulfilled promise) it can appear as an internal critique of the status quo; external critique is possible when there is an invasion of external culture.1 But any cultural critique of the status quo will quickly disappear if it is not associated with protesting social forces. An interesting consequence of the critical nature of culture is that the present understanding of the past, under the sway of the current cultural atmosphere, is always different from previous understandings of the past. This shift is a result of the difference between promises and the reality of their non- fulfillment. The immanence of the cultural critique underlies the continuity of culture, but its criticality implies and prepares for a breaking with the past and the creation of new meaning and new culture. As a result of the critical nature of culture, there is always more than one culture in a society. That is, by its very nature, culture in any society can never be monolithic. Multiple and conflicting practices guided by different cultural conceptions about the present and future are normal, rather than exceptional. In this sense, we can say that the main social function of cultural conceptions is to provide a base for legitimating or justifying certain social conditions. In other words, culture by nature offers many

1 For a discussion of the internal and external critique, see Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). introduction 3 possibilities for social life. This is the fundamental reason why discourse struggles are extremely important. If the order and structure of society appears through the mediation of various rules, then the interpretations that determine the meanings of rules form the basis of practice and are of decisive significance in understanding cultural transformations. All rules arising from open-ended human practices have an open structure and can be interpreted in different ways. Actually, in human rule-following activities, rules are always being interpreted and reinterpreted. Autonomous individuals’ interpretations of rules are a kind of reflective self-guidance and constant restructuring (of both rules and the social structure built through them). China’s thirty years of reform and opening have been a process of ceaseless reinterpretation of Marxism and socialism. Similarly, modern Western history may be seen as a bumpy process of repeatedly reinterpreting liberalism. The restructuring of rules cannot be detached from the existing rules and their common interpretations, which are the starting points and thus the only intellectual resources for any reinterpretation. This is historicism. The indeterminacy that characterizes human social history is, however, rooted in the openness of the structure of expectations within which the autonomous individual confronts reality. It is precisely the practice driven by this structure of expectations that creates history and moves social life ahead. There is no determinism in which the past alone determines the future, nor is there any teleology or destiny in which the past and present are merely preparations for the future. To the contrary, within the temporal structure of human history the past conditions the present, while many possibilities of the future simultaneously arise from the present. When discussing types of societies, people often focus on the decisive social forces that form the dominant structures of a society, such as elite parties or market forces, and they see culture as merely an accompanying expressive phenomenon. When observing social transformations, people often focus on the social forces and social groups that impel change, such as workers, peasants, intellectuals, bureaucrats, or the wealthy classes. But in fact, a social force requires the structure of meaning provided by culture as intermediary in order to mobilize and organize itself, have a clear expression of goals, and acquire public legitimacy for its expectations, ideals, and guiding principles. Through these actions, a group can transform a society or open a new era. It is worth noting that without the participation (or at least the approval) of the majority, no social transformation can succeed. Yet during periods 4 cao tianyu and zhong xueping of transition, the demands and expectations of various groups are always different. In the time of the Democratic Revolution, peasants wanted land, political parties wanted to control the government, and capitalists wanted to get wealthier. The rebel faction of the Cultural Revolution, the reform faction that followed, and the liberals and their critics at present, all had or have different demands and expectations. To achieve social transformation, it is crucial to integrate these demands and expectations into a single program or platform. The success of socialism and, for that matter, modernization, in mobilizing the masses has proven this point. The fact is that culture (both in terms of responses to reality and expectations about reality) always precedes actions. Two implications of this fact are worth noting: first, the importance of discursive struggles for each significant social action (revolutions or reforms). It also demonstrates the priority of practical rationality over instrumental rationality; people begin to calculate plans for change only when goals are filtered by expectations. In short, cultural expression in the form of a hegemonic discourse is a prerequisite for social and political activities. Without this expression, transformations would be impossible. To understand China’s social transformations, therefore, we must pay close attention to the formation and evolution of the hegemonic discourse in the reform period of China.

A. The Social Roots of the Reforms The direct cause of the reforms in China was the Cultural Revolution. Although the CR was a very complex phenomenon, its fundamental theme is clear and unmistakable: to counter and guard against revisionism, or, put differently, to continue under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its main targets were the “capitalist roaders” within the party, but the movement also sought to sweep away all feudal, capitalist, and revisionist thought, culture, customs, and habits. Its main form was rebellion, in this case a storm-like mass movement. On the positive side, the Cultural Revolution definitively pointed out the existence of class contradictions and struggles within a socialist society, and the reality of a privileged stratum within the party. The principle “to rebel is justified” (造反有理 zaofan youli) opened up a space for mass participation in politics, turning that participation into an important mechanism for preventing the powerful elite within the party from evolving into a new oppressive and exploitative group. As for its negative side, because of a miscalculation of the circumstances and exaggeration of the enemy’s situation, numerous political differences within the party and ideological differences within the society, which were mainly internal introduction 5 contradictions among the people, were treated violently rather than through debates and compromises without people’s basic rights properly protected and democratic procedures properly followed. Groups of people were unduly labeled as capitalist roaders and as class enemies and were dealt with as enemies through large-scale mass and state violence. Eventually, after too many injuries were incurred, an initially reasonable and insightful political program lost its support and legitimacy. The Cultural Revolution, an example of the most radical form of massive political campaigning, caused severe damage to the social order and injured all social classes to varying extents. As a result, “political movements” (政治运动 zhengzhi yundong), the most effective social control mechanism for maintaining the post-revolutionary social order, lost the support of the people. The smashing of the “Gang of Four” and the end of the Cultural Revolution was welcomed by the masses, which indicated that people’s minds had changed: they wanted to extricate themselves from political campaigns and restart a normal social life. This was the internal logic of political development in China at the time, and one reason why the early reforms—which emphasized economic construction and the abandonment of “class struggle as guiding principle)” (以阶级斗争为纲 yi jieji douzheng wei gang)—received widespread support in the society. However, the real target of the reforms was Mao Zedong’s theories and practices, especially the socialist political, economic, and social system constructed after 1949. It is worth noting that the system itself had deep internal contradictions. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) represented by Mao Zedong relied on workers and peasants who were taken to be masters of society. The party fought wholeheartedly to realize a socialism that, in their minds, was characterized by a public-ownership system, planned economy, and distribution according to labor. On the other hand, the elite party, which was not subject to democratic control, monopolized power and controlled all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. As such, it formed a huge administrative bureaucratic group that loomed over society and removed institutional safeguards in the name of the socialist nature of the relationship between the party cadre and the masses. In actuality, the relationship between the cadre and the people was to a great extent contingent on the individuals in the cadre. Conse- quently, Chinese society contained a range of social contradictions and possibilities for social conflict, the most explosive of which were exploitation (in the form of special privileges) and oppression (in the form of people being wantonly vilified through political campaigns). 6 cao tianyu and zhong xueping

In economic life, actual control over production and the distribution of benefits was concentrated in the hands of party bureaucrats; the nominal public ownership system did not actually eliminate the possibility of economic inequality. At the same time, a wholesale rejection of the market and the lack of division between government and enterprise led to various economic drawbacks, as a command economy relies heavily on the push of external forces from political power and movements without enough internal dynamics. Economic life lacked both the vitality of a market economy and the order and balance of a Soviet-style planned economy, resulting in frequent mistakes and a great waste of resources. In addition, pressure from the West compelled policy makers to devote all of their attention to the defense industry and the heavy industries serving it. The nation’s desire to jump ahead led to the disastrous Great Leap Forward and perennial high-level accumulation. Hence the proclaimed goal of meeting the constantly increasing material and cultural needs of the workers did not truly materialize. What resulted instead was a crude and inefficient version of developmentalism. Culturally, class analysis was vulgar and dogmatized; all thoughts, opinions, and tastes that differed from the official line were rejected and condemned. In a society where class had mostly disappeared, issues of class were now elevated to the level of class struggle, leading to a rigid and enclosed cultural life. It was within this context that people desired change. As soon as the Cultural Revolution ended, reform began. The major motivating force of the reform came from the “old cadres keen on reform” (锐意改革的老干部 ruiyi gaige de laoganbu), commonly known as the Deng faction. Its slogan was “self-improvement of the socialist system” (社会主义的自我完善 shehui zhuyi de ziwo wanshan) but from the actual steps it adopted we can see that its motives were self- protection and power expansion. The first step of the reform was a thorough re-adjustment of the political relations within the party, primarily through a large-scale reversion and rehabilitation of many false and wrong cases of persecution and their victims. Following this came the amendment to the constitution, elimination of mass movements and of the “Four Greats” (大鸣、大放、大辩论、大字报 daming, dafang, dabbiananlun, and dazibao),2 and enactment of the Rule of Law, which was meant to replace mass movements

2 Meaning: to speak out freely, air one’s views fully, hold great debates, and write big- character posters. introduction 7 with law—a safer and more effective method of controlling social life and preventing the masses from interfering and causing trouble. As soon as the old cadre ensured their own safety and power, the next move was to rapidly re-adjust social relations, awarding power to intellectuals who had suffered in multiple political campaigns and rehabilitating their political standings. These intellectuals immediately became important allies of and advisors for the Deng faction in the reforms. From the elimination of the Four Greats to enacting the Rule of Law, protection of the old cadre and the party’s elite is the thread that runs through all steps and measures of the political reforms; it is both the starting point and ending point. The main line of the economic reform policies was to delegate power to cadres at all levels. Whether establishing a dual-track system (双轨制 shuanggui zhi), restructuring through transfer of ownership (转制 zhuanzhi), or creating a contracting system in the name of mobilizing enthusiasm, each action was geared toward expanding the economic power and wealth of cadres. National interests that were originally kept in the name of all people and centrally controlled were gradually regionalized, put into sectors, and ultimately privatized. To sum up, contemporary Chinese reforms, which were led and built by an alliance of party elites and intellectuals, enjoyed widespread support from society at the outset. This support could be traced to the two great internal drawbacks of the traditional socialist system. One issue, as mentioned earlier, was that too many political campaigns targeted individual groups and caused suffering; the system failed to deal well with “internal contradictions among the people” (人民内部矛盾 renmin neibu maodun). The other was the lack of an incentive system that sustained people’s enthusiasm for their jobs. Even though the interests of the ordinary masses and certain cadres who were loyal to socialism differed from those of the aforementioned elite alliance, their collective dissatisfaction with the traditional socialist system made it possible for the elite alliance to politically mobilize and lead the reforms. To turn this possibility into reality required the aforementioned cultural integration and expressions, namely the formation of a hegemonic discourse. This brings us to the cultural roots of the reforms.

B. Cultural Roots of the Reforms The most direct cultural root of the reforms was the thought liberation movement (思想解放运动 sixiang jiefang yundong). Led by the Deng faction in 1978, this movement’s aim was a total rejection of Mao Zedong’s 8 cao tianyu and zhong xueping

theory and practice, especially the “class struggle as guiding principle” theory (以阶级斗争为纲 yi jieji douzheng weigang) and the Cultural Revo- lution. The condemnation of these practices was really a rejection of the concept of “capitalist roaders,” who created a possibility that the party elite could transmute into an exploitative and oppressive social stratum. All of this constituted the theoretical foundations for the rejection of continuous revolution (继续革命 jixu geming), the amendment of the constitution, and the elimination of the Four Greats. Speaking more broadly, this time period involves a different interpretation of Marxism, mainly the blunting and ultimate removal of Marxist class analysis, struggle, and liberation theories, which were simplified into two main ideas: a theory about the force of production and an extremely reductive theory of stages in historical development. According to the latter, the development of productive forces is taken to be the only yardstick of success within socialism. This interpretation of Marxism—incarnated in the theory of the so-called “primary stage” of socialism—enabled and legitimized Deng’s reforms, which objectively led to the development of capitalist economic relations. By making the economic reforms ideologically acceptable it provided a programmatic articulation (纲领性表达 gangling xing biaoda) that integrated different kinds of demands for reform, first within the party and throughout society afterward. With such an articulation, the Maoist principle of countering and guarding against revisionism (反修防修 fanxiu fangxiu) was soon replaced by a modernization project imported from the West. To sum up, marginalizing and then replacing Marxism with imported modernization projects was the main cultural root of China’s contemporary reforms. Around the time the Soviet Union and the Eastern block were collapsing in the early 1990s, socialists and leftists in China and around the world began to reorient their values and objectives. The content of these changes was the struggle for discursive hegemony between Marxism and liberalism. The focal point of this struggle was how to understand capitalist modernity. Marxism stipulates that the large-scale industrial revolution that led to the development of capitalism was a gigantic advancement in human history and provides the precondition for human liberation. However, capitalism exploits workers and alienates labor, which inevitably gener- ates contradictions and conflicts. Only through revolution, according to this philosophy, can capitalism be replaced by socialism and communism, and can true human emancipation be realized. Most Marxists do not blindly deny capitalist modernity (as characterized fundamentally by introduction 9 the belief’s orientation toward the future, rational grounding, and the pursuit of liberation), they only think that capitalist modernity must be tran- scended and replaced by a higher form of modernity—socialist modernity. Socialism too is oriented toward the future, grounded in rationality, and pursues liberation. The difference is that in socialist modernity, collective liberation (class liberation, national liberation, and humanity’s emancipation realized through workers’ struggles, anti-colonization efforts, socialist construction, and worldwide revolution) replaces individual liberation, and individual and instrumental rationality must serve the objectives determined by collective and value rationality. Within the discourse on modernization theory, the structural contradictions of capitalism are made invisible. What remains are notions like productive power, individual rationality (in the private interest), and individual liberties that expand in a linear fashion. Within this logic, the assumption is that revolution and socialism, owing to their “irrational” restrictions on individual (property) freedom, are either (1) deviations from the normal course of modernization, and sooner or later must return to modernization—the supposed mainstream civilization of humanity— or (2) useful instruments for realizing one stage of the modernization process (such as completing national integration and constructing the nation-state needed for the development of capitalism) that must be discarded once that stage is completed and the objective reached. For example, they may be used temporarily for backward countries still in the primitive stage of capital accumulation. The drastic changes in Eastern Europe seem to have vindicated this assertion. But what exactly is modernization, besides a shift from socialism and revolution? Simply put, it is Americanization. In the 1950s, modernization referred to a market economy, representative democracy, and a welfare society in the style of the New Deal. After the Cold War ended, New Deal neoliberalism came to be replaced by a different neoliberalism oriented around market fundamentalism. The welfare-society program was replaced by complete privatization in all realms of social, economic, and cultural life. This was the so-called “the end of history” manifested concretely in the form of globalization. It encompassed all and nothing could escape it. The aforementioned modernization theory was established as the actual dominant discourse within the CCP. Its orienting function in the evolution of the CCP’s ideas about understanding history, directing the current reforms, and planning for the future should not be underestimated. Through political and social mobilization, the Deng faction successfully made it appear that the reform and opening (modernization with 10 cao tianyu and zhong xueping the objective of economic growth) represented the interests of all people (“make the pie larger and everyone will benefit” 把饼做大 ba bing zuo da). This appearance in turn has functioned as the baseline for redefining political and social identities. The enemy-self division between capitalist roaders and rebels, present during the Cultural Revolution, was replaced by one of conservatives and reformers. Consequently, any opposition or resistance to the Deng faction’s reforms would not only be politically impossible, it would also lose social and moral legitimacy. It was precisely under the mobilization, organization, and promotion of Deng’s “reform- modernization” hegemonic discourse that China entered a new era of great change in the late 1970s.

C. Two Points of Further Explanation First, in the above discussion of Mao’s continuous revolution and Deng’s reforms, we do not wish to place emphasis on either official pronouncements or the subjective wishes and motivations of those leaders. Rather, it is the latent possibilities contained within actual conditions and actions that this analysis examines. Mao Zedong clearly saw in his later years that the system he had created contained the potential for alienation and deviation. He tried to resolve the problems but failed. Objec- tively, it was impossible for Mao to separate himself from the party elite with whom he sought to do battle. This explains why he wavered between sections for and against the Cultural Revolution, thereby losing his opportunity, and why in the end the problems he desperately wanted to prevent became reality under the Deng reforms. We do not think that Deng Xiaoping wanted to create the situation we see today. However, his guiding principle and his actions objectively created the conditions for such changes in Chinese society. As a result, after his death the situation worsened at the hands of an alliance of officials, scholars, entrepreneurs, and the media. Secondly, the Deng reforms’ political mobilization in the early period (and their economic success more recently) cannot cover up their incom- patibility with democracy and socialism. The establishment of a legal system and rapid economic growth neither increased the democratic rights of the workers and peasants nor reduced the exploitation that they suffer. Rather, these changes have reduced their social position from the masters (at least nominally) of society to a “vulnerable group,” and have largely driven them to the periphery of active social life and turned them into targets of exploitation and control, or objects of pity at best. introduction 11

What resulted from the reforms—a post-socialist society characterized by nepotism, the rapid penetration of capital in officialdom, and a total loss of rights among the wage slaves—had already latently existed in the social and cultural roots of the reforms.

II. Summary of Contributions

One of the contributors to this volume, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics and Political Science, focuses his discussion on the financial crisis that began in 2008. His critical exploration of the international reorganization after the Great Recession offers a sobering reminder of the global backdrop for the acute social contradictions China faces today. Crucially, he notes that even though the international financial system suffered a crisis, the existing system rejects true reform and, after superficial attempts, will continue to operate according to its original ideas and logic. Given the current international division of labor and institutional arrangement, this lack of economic “rebirth” will be fundamentally unfavorable to developing countries, including China which is already part of the existing international division of labor and institutional arrangement. Wade analyzes the continuous cycle of prosperity and decline that developing countries have suffered under the current model. During the Great Recession, this cycle manifested in China in the rapid loss of jobs for tens of millions of migrant workers, and in the intensification of all kinds of social contradictions and corresponding cultural, ideological, and moral crises. Even though foreign and domestic mainstream media declare that China has already escaped this round of economic crisis, the surface prosperity by no means indicates that the fundamental reasons for the crisis have been resolved; in fact precisely the opposite may well be the case. It is against this backdrop that the contributors to this collection, through diverse perspectives and standpoints, provide critical reflections on issues related to the rapid social transformations during the reform era, many aiming to break the hegemonic discourse that domi- nates China today. The debates here concentrate on several aspects of that discourse, including (1) critical reflections on ideological discursive struggles in various cultural domains, (2) critical analyses of such popular notions as modernization, enlightenment, rights, democracy, and nation, which are aimed at challenging the existing framework of debate, and (3) proactive re-considerations of modern China’s historical experience, particularly that of China’s revolutionary history and socialist transformation. 12 cao tianyu and zhong xueping

We have organized the articles into three parts. Part I features debates on a few recurrent concepts from cultural domains including literature, scholarly writing, and the university setting. The ideas in question include modernity, individuality, subaltern literature, liberalism, and a liberal arts education—notions whose meanings have been subject to constant debate throughout modern Chinese history and that have acquired new tensions and layers of implications during the last three decades of the reform era. Part II focuses on the most ideologically contentious issues in today’s China, including the rule of law, constitutional democracy, legalism, and human rights. Part III highlights against the larger global capitalist context in which the reform-era transformations have taken place, another hotly-debated set of issues regarding the nature of the Chinese state and China’s socialist and post-socialist transformations. Part I begins with Nan Fan’s article, in which the author combs through key words widely circulated in the literary discourse of the last thirty years, including modernism, modernity, and individualism, and interrogates their meaning-production role in literature and the “thought liberation” of the 1980s. After a contextually-informed discussion of these notions, Nan Fan concludes that “[m]odernism definitely is not the ideal answer to the question of resistance. Modernism informs us of the universal existence of a repressed ‘ego,’ and in that purpose it succeeds, but it tries also to narrate the essential nature of the ‘ego,’ and in this plan it fails.”3 Nan Fan’s study of the relationship between modernist literature and the celebration of the individual can be best appreciated in conjunction with the preceding discussion on the cultural roots of the economic reforms. In addition to echoing Nan Fan’s critical re-examination of the ideological implications of the avant-garde or modernist literature of the 1980s, Li Yunlei’s analytical summation of what he terms the “subaltern literature” of twenty-first-century China reveals the inverted status of laborers and capital in Chinese society today—and the power relations between the two. In an article that resonates with the central argument laid out above, Li demonstrates the extent to which subaltern literature manifests the issues that Robert Wade discusses, namely the political and economic logic of global capitalism informed by neoliberal economics. He also raises the idea that a “neoliberal” economic system is fully antagonistic to a true people’s democracy. Additionally, Li’s careful discussion of the subaltern literature phenomenon helps rekindle the perennial Chinese debate about

3 Nan Fan, “Modernism, Modernity, and Individualism.” introduction 13 what constitutes “good” literature and, more importantly, reveals the ideological implications that continue to foreground such a debate. Two authors in Part I offer critical discussions of liberalism in reform- era public discourse. Lu Xinyu’s discussion of Liu Xiaofeng’s highly influential—at least within some university campuses—Christian theology (文化基督 wenhua jidu) critically analyzes its anti-enlightenment essence and challenges Liu’s rather extreme anti-historical view of modern Chinese history. Specifically, she questions and criticizes his double negation of the revolutionary modernity pursued by modern Chinese intellectuals like Lu Xun. Daniel Vokovich’s article is a clear and direct criticism of “neo-liberalism with Chinese characteristics.”4 In response to the common, erroneous equating of liberalism with democracy, Vukovich draws on Roberto Esposito, Dominic Lusordo, and the example of recent Chinese politics. He reminds us that for all its universalistic and humane pretensions, liberalism has historically been, if not the very opposite of democracy (understood as mass rule and participation under the general will), then something quite different. The historical articulations between liberalism and colonialism/imperialism, not to mention an economic “freedom” that obfuscates exploitation and class division, should give us pause. Against the clear preference of many, Vukovich argues that there is no reason this reservation should not apply to Chinese politics as well. Moreover, the rise of liberal and conservative discourse about China’s recent past reveals not a truth finally coming to light but a political and discursive shift in how we frame the world, a shift that stems from the intellectual and political culture of the modern colonial/imperial era. The last article in Part I turns its criticism directly on one of the most influential (and also most problematic) meaning-production institutions, the bunker of the intellectual transformation, as it were: universities. Liao Kebin writes with deep concern about reform in higher education, and he delivers his assessment in a radical reformist fashion. The negative consequences of the wrong-headed reform, according to Liao, are as follows: the centralized management system, pragmatically focused operating concepts and material facilities, and a vulgarization of campus activities. Even though his critical assessment tends to premise on a somewhat simplistic dichotomy between China and the West and on an idealized and monolithic view of Western university culture, his criticism does reveal that

4 Daniel Vukovich, “From Charting the Revolution to Charter 2008: Discourse, Libera- tion, De-Politicization.” 14 cao tianyu and zhong xueping higher-education reform has largely been hijacked by the bureaucratic class and an elite class of scholars driven by their own self-interest. The different stances from which the authors raise their arguments in Part I are equally palpable in Part II, in which notions of rule of law, rights, and democracy are addressed. In his discussion of the relationship between academic legal discourse and official ideology, Yu Xingzhong points out the fundamental difference between state legalism and the rule of law. According to Yu, the former is particular to China, where rule of law, rights, judicial independence, and other related practices are all subject to those in power. Yu questions this state legalism and argues against equating it with the rule of law. Coming from a different angle, Wang Ban’s and Rebecca Karl’s discussions place the notion of “rights” in specific historical contexts and reflect upon its seemingly abstract and universal connotations. Karl puts China in a global context and argues: If we take culture as a praxis and social life as a totality, yet if cultural values are socially and politically delimited to an ideal of state-defined legality (‘the rule of/by law’), the limits imposed on the imagination of futurity from the position of the present are vastly impoverished. (And politics, after all, is always about an imagination of futurity.) Hence, while common sense dictates that legality is a social good, the uncommon sense I wish to put forth here is that legality as such poses an absolute limit to the pursuit of politics by containing social relations to contractual practice and by construing social and global relations as a state-regulatory principle. In short, I want to state unequivocally that legality is inadequate to an imaginative rethinking of the relation between culture, social life, and politics.5 Ban Wang echoes Karl’s consideration of human rights. His thoughts on the relationship between individual rights and the power of the people, and the relationship between human rights and “the living history of struggles to achieve human dignity and equality both in the East and the West” are important within a discourse of China’s history. The invocation of human rights . . . often proceeds on a biased divide that pits liberal democracy against authoritarianism that represses individual liberty. This divide is more pronounced when viewed cross-culturally. Human rights, incarnate in the notion of the abstract individual as world citizen, are set up in contrast to oriental collectivism, familial priorities, and Asian values. The use of human rights as a dividing line between “us and them,” (cultures with no sense of rights and those embedded in rights) is further associated with an evaluative hierarchy of civilizations. Those people

5 Rebecca Karl, “The Flight to Rights: 1990s China and Beyond.” introduction 15

deprived of human rights are considered subhuman and hence uncivilized, and those endowed with rights are an advanced species. Thus a discourse that sets out to show the universal rights of humanity is left starkly polarized between a superior liberal democratic order and a barbaric authoritarianism. This view has serious analytical and political consequences. In upholding human rights as a hallmark of civilized uniqueness against presumed tyranny, critics often forget the political struggle for rights and the living history of this struggle to achieve human dignity and equality, both in the East and the West.6 Investigation of democracy corresponds with discourse on the discussion of rights. Han Shaogong emphasizes, in a seemingly mocking tone, that it is dangerous to romanticize democracy like a lyric poem without a sufficient understanding of the complex aspects of the concept and practice. Without seeing it as a “construction blueprint,” he argues, little will become of it, regardless of how much people shout out for democracy as a beautiful slogan. In Part III, issues of the state and of socialist and post-socialist transformations within the global capitalist context are addressed. Through his rereading of Commemorating the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Fall of the Ming by Guo Moruo (郭沫若), Han Yuhai reflects on the political and economic logic of the fall of the Ming dynasty in the context of early modern world history, emphasizing the importance of understanding the relationship between state power and capitalist market economics. Cai Xiang’s article discusses the cultural legacy of socialism and how to understand it in a contemporary Chinese context. Far from negating the revolution, the author instead supports the fundamental legitimacy of the Chinese revolution and the quest for and practice of socialism. But he also explores the difficult task of dealing with the problems, mistakes, and biases that comprise the root cause of what he refers to as the crisis of socialism (the failure of “historical socialism”). After analyzing the intellectual transformation of the 1980s, he further notes that the exit of socialism from the stage signified the elimination of the most important balancing power in this “modern era.” Once the logic of capitalism became the primary force controlling us, it was able to cause a different crisis to erupt in Chinese society. Thirty years later, we already can feel this crisis acutely.7

6 Ban Wang, “Human Rights, Revolutionary Legacy, and Politics in China.” 7 Cai Xiang, “The Crisis of Socialism and Efforts to Overcome It.” 16 cao tianyu and zhong xueping

While Cai Xiang explores the crisis of China’s historical socialism in relation to the present condition, Arif Dirlik rethinks “postsocialism,” concentrating on the fact that socialist history, practice, and ideas have not been abandoned in the reform era. On this basis he analyzes the dual nature of postsocialist China. He points out that, “[s]ocialism as it was understood earlier, even in the ambivalent days of Deng Xiaoping, may be over, but it would be a mistake to assume that its legacies are no longer alive.” The revolutionary legacy persists in people’s values and ways of thinking. Dirlik believes that its existence on these two levels can help China avoid falling completely into the mire of capitalism. After a focused analysis of Mao Zedong’s view on contradictions as it appears in Mao’s essays “On Contradiction” and “On Practice,” Dirlik analyzes the relationship between the revolutionary legacy and the main contradictions in Chinese society today. What distinguishes China from other societies with comparable problems— and justifies the perspective afforded by the concept of “postsocialism”— is the continued willingness in Chinese politics and intellectual debate to entertain the necessity of social and political transformation in the resolution of these contradictions. There may be no agreement on what such transformations may entail, the possibilities under consideration may have proliferated with opening up to the world and to the past, but the consideration is itself significant in revealing the persistence of the legacies of the socialist revolution.8 Yiching Wu’s reading of the post-socialist reform era offers a highly challenging historical critique. In the author’s words: . . . market socialism—or “socialist market reforms” as in the official Chinese parlance—is at best a contradiction in terms, an unstable formation awaiting collapse. Chinese reforms have resulted in increased poverty and have intensified exploitation, integral components of capitalist marketization. The vital issue of class antagonism is not to be glossed over by the neoliberal myth of “transition.”9 Yiching Wu’s criticism echoes the central argument offered in the first section of this introduction: the “cultural root” of the economic reforms was premised on the negation of the Marxist analysis of class and the concept of class struggle.

8 Arif Dirlik, “Post-Socialism Revisited: Reflections on ‘Socialism with Chinese Charac teristics,’ Its Past, Present, and Future.” 9 Yiching Wu, “Reinterpreting Capitalist Restoration in China: Toward a Historical Cri tique of “Actually Existing Market Socialism.” introduction 17

Lin Chun’s focus on “participatory socialism” offers a theoretical discussion aiming to break through the existing hegemonic discourse and imagine it differently. She argues that if there can be a normative Chinese model, it must be measured by the meeting of basic human needs, not making profits; and by ensuring collective as well as individual freedom and prosperity. China will have to change its growth pattern, one that has long been trapped in developmentalist predicaments. In order to do so, the author elaborates, China will need to seek locally viable development alternatives to the standardized modern markers of industrialism, urban- ism, and consumerism. This new direction implies a rejection of “cheap labor” while promoting surplus retention and unalienated labor in the long run. These goals, no more utopian than either market superstition or the replication of old colonial trajectories, are determined by not only the moral imperative of socialism but also the harsh realities of China’s internal conditions and ecological constraints. Lin Chun’s sobering discussion takes on additional meaning when viewed next to Wade’s warnings that the existing international system rejects true reform and will continue to operate according to its original ideas and logic. According to the current international division of labor and institutional arrangement, this kind of economic “rebirth” will be fundamentally unfavorable to developing countries. What is China’s role in all of this? Will it join the hunter (as in Wade’s mention of an African saying) and continue to strive to write the hunter’s history? Or assume the lion’s perspective and write a different story?

PART One

Chapter One

Modernism, Modernity, and Individualism

Nan Fan Translated by Adrian Thieret

What is modernism? Though countless writings have already addressed the topic, there is no end to the various interpretations. This shows the lasting shock of modernism on Western culture. Modernism willfully trod all over tradition, disrespected the classics and masters, and sought to build upon those cultural ruins with grotesque written products. Even today, many people have not recovered their wits, and the monstrosity of modernism began as early as 1880, though some say it started in 1900, 1910 or 1915.1 What are the characteristics of this cultural form? Into how many strands can the modernist movement be divided, and how do they interact with modern society? Has modernism been abandoned by the masses, or has it unexpectedly become a classic like those it once scorned? Clearly, these questions are highly complicated and the answers are constantly undergoing revisions. As perspectives change and historical materials accumulate, perhaps some new and entirely unexpected clues will be uncovered. Obviously, investigation into these questions must be directed toward Western culture, the source of modernism. However, even though origins are normally used as the basis for interpreting present circumstances, there is no reason to abandon a different avenue of inquiry: investigation of the development of modernism, i.e., its movement, transplantation, and growth in other locales. If we cast aside the delusion of origins and instead consider modernism as a cultural seed, then the stories of culture migrating across the sea are equally intriguing. How did modernism enter other continents from Europe, and how did it grow into a sort of familiar cultural flora in these other places?

1 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1978), 19–56. 22 nan fan

First, we must affirm that modernism is adept at international cultural exchange. A considerable portion of literary terms and concepts exist only in local culture and are not commensurable with other discourses. For example, terms from classical Chinese literary theory such as dao (道), qi (气), shenyun (神韵), and fenggu (风骨) are difficult to interpose with Western culture and not easily discussed alongside the concepts of epic, tragedy, romanticism, and structuralism. In contrast, modernism is seemingly a global citizen. In a short time the theory of modernism traveled across multiple continents and founded multiple versions of modernist literature. Generally, the journey of a theory tends to end in a strange sort of synthesis. Modernism carries unique cultural genes—aesthetic styles, subjects, linguistic forms, cultural and artistic concepts, cultural codes, and so forth. As it enters a different cultural circle, organizes a different set of life experiences, and successfully registers itself in the domain of literature, modernism is unavoidably subjected to various complicated connections by the discourse of the new culture that adopts it. Consequently, if modernism smoothly finds itself a home in a new locale, this usually means that it, though an unfamiliar concept, has been invited and has won the approval of the culture. History has seen moments when, while approach- ing a critical crossroads, traditional images are displaced on a large scale, the existing ideology loses its ability to explain, and the ossified system of social discourse is subjected to thorough cleansing. This cleansing often creates an empty space in the heart of the discourse, which urgently calls for a new set of heavy-duty concepts to take on the mission of interpretation. This may basically explain how modernism enters a culture: by filling that empty space, even if the circumstances provided by history are partly chance. When modernism succeeds in entering culture rather than being excluded, this shows that the concept has found a theoretical junction at which it connects with a different discourse. Of course, passing through this theoretical junction is like passing through customs—some of the elements of European modernism are seized, or at least briefly detained. At the same time, other elements receive special attention and may be enlarged or extended. The description above provides a basic theoretical path for how modernism arrived in Chinese cultural territory. However, this description may invite great disagreement, especially with the current popularity of postcolonial theory. Many people point out one important oversight: why does the relationship between European modernism, imperialism, and cultural expansionism disappear outside the realm of theory? The enthusiasm and silent acceptance with which modernism is supported eliminates any opposition to cultural hegemony. Today, critics modernism, modernity, and individualism 23 have discovered that modernism’s various formal experiments conceal the fear that local peoples will struggle against imperialism; that modernism is saturated with fascists, male chauvinists, and racists; and that modernism usually enters a country on the heels of economic pillaging, its aesthetic exoticism serving as a smoke grenade to conceal the invasion. Critics further note that modernism misappropriates Chinese cultural materials, as if the “China” they refer to is merely a reflection of the imagination, treated as a fragmentary existence. In sum, “many Chinese writers valo- rized Western modernism as the signifier for the modern and the tool to delegitimize traditional Chinese culture, binding modernism to a kind of masochistic denial.”2 People fell into the trap of Western culture, ignorant and blind to the imperialist structure that lay within modernism, sucking dry its ideological content; they did not notice the centrality of the concept in the power structure, or the presuppositions of male chauvinism. “Enlightenment was heavily coded as antifeudal and pro-Western . . . for the enlightenment thinker, the urgency of criticizing feudalism and for- warding Westernization often displaced the immediate need to confront and criticize colonial domination.”3 This perspective comes as a severe blow to those who worship Western culture. Postcolonial theory revived “nation” as an analytical category and began to incisively analyze the bonds of oppression concealed within the global cultural exchange. It revealed that enthusiastic cultural ambassa- dors held ulterior motives, and it explored how the cultural stage of the supposedly open world is actually subordinate to an unequal structure. However, as critical history has pointed out again and again, insight and blindness are often two sides of the same coin. If “nation” is the only category by which cultural exchange is evaluated, then only enmity and opposition remain between national cultures. All cultural exchanges between nations are stamped with the imprint of colonialism, and all cultural differences ultimately end in oppression or resistance. Can this really be the extent of the relationship between cultural achievements? I think that it is a depressing and inaccurate picture. Even if imperialism once commonly interfered in cultural exchange, even if many superficially equal cultural exchanges concealed the workings of cultural hegemony, we nonetheless have reason to believe that cultural interactions of aesthetics and art have

2 Shih Shu-Mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917– 1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 14. 3 Ibid., 35–36. 24 nan fan the ability to shake off imperialist control. Those who do not perceive the art’s innate ability to resist power underestimate the significance of culture. Frankly, the traumatic experience of semi-colonialism certainly adds some theoretical weight to the concept of “nation.” However, cutting off all interaction with Western culture would not be a good way to protect the nation, nor would it stir, much less break down, the existing arrangement of cultural power. On the other hand, to consider nation [or nationality] (民族 minzu) the only criterion for evaluating cultural intercourse requires implicit acknowledgement that a nation is a solid, unified whole. The entire nation is opposed to the entire outside, and thus oppression and opposition within the nation disappear, as do the various complex relationships outside the nation. This is a nationalistic compression of theoretical perspective, and the leaders of the May Fourth and the New Culture Movement would obviously not agree with this evaluation of history. They were not ignorant of the resonance between Western cultural expansion and imperial encroachment. On the contrary, the leaders of the May Fourth Move- ment thought it crucial to break open the fetters of national culture. Hence they threw themselves without hesitation into internal reform and sought to use to their advantage certain aspects of the Western cultural assault. “Lu Xun and the other cultural leaders cited Western cultural resources, opposed Western cultural colonialism, broke with tradition, and identified with the nation-state.”4 Even though this means risking everything and fighting with our back up against a wall, we cannot deny that Western culture has already become part of the new national consciousness. Euro- pean modernism is certainly seen as a Western cultural resource. Even if postcolonial theory reveals a colonialist bloodline behind modernism, “nation” remains a valuable concept. A nation normally has mechanisms for identifying, selecting, blocking, and remaking foreign culture. Sealing off the country is nothing but a form of passive avoidance. One effective strategy for allaying colonialism is to assimilate modernism and subordinate it to the structure of Chinese culture. Investigation into modernism and the ways that it enters various dialogues within the nation is one way to truly destroy imperialist cultural hegemony. “Only by casting off Western historical structure and embracing a unique native organization

4 Nan Fan 南帆, Wu zhong xingxiang 五种形象 [Five Images] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2007), 137. modernism, modernity, and individualism 25 of experience can we demonstrate the birth of a Chinese version of modernism and the bankruptcy of cultural colonialism.”5

Western modernism has visited China en masse twice. The first time was in the 1920s and ‘30s, when Mao Dun called it “new romanticism” (新浪漫主义 xin langman zhuyi).6 At the time, modernism might as well have been a cultural ambassador of the West. Modernism, romanticism, and realism together formed a cultural team that began a vicious attack on the feudal culture represented by the classical Chinese language. When it first arrived, at least, modernism was not simply an attempt to break the domination of realism or express the decadent aspects of life. The relatively large internal contradictions of long-stagnant classical literature, native-soil literature, realism, symbolism, and new-sensation literature had not yet been fully revealed. Modernism broke out of its shell and then laid low; classical Chinese literature had already fallen by the time it arrived. The May Fourth Movement then turned the page and began a new chapter in China’s history. However, the ideals of “science” and “democracy” did not arrive as anticipated. To the contrary, problems arose one after another, demonstrating that the birth of modernity was accompanied by intense labor pains. Enlightenment and revolution, intellectuals and the masses, elite and subaltern, individual and nation state, political party and independent spirit, science and humanism, aesthetics and politics, city and countryside, women’s rights and male chauvinism— all of these contradictions, entangled and struggling together, formed a gigantic discursive arena. Ultimately, when the dust settled, revolutionary discourse stood on the high ground of history. Once “revolution” defined the struggle between classes, modernism was forced to exit the competition. In Chinese cultural domain, realism was placed in charge of literature within the revolutionary discourse. Realism began to severely and thoroughly inscribe standards for the literary realm, for everything from narratives of literary history and programs for the Writers’ Association to enact, to sources of literary imagination, such as the interpretation of

5 Ibid., 44. 6 Mao Dun 茅盾, “Wei xin wenxue yanjiuzhe jin yi jie 为新文学研究者进一解 [Advancing an Explanation for Researchers of New Literature],” in Mao Dun quanji 茅盾全集 [Complete Works of Mao Dun], Vol. 18 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989). 26 nan fan form, aesthetic style, or literary characters. Of course, old realism could not keep up with the raging circumstances of the revolution, and thus required supplementary cleansing and reform. The newly rectified realism was often prefixed with “revolutionary,” and revolutionary realism both became the decisive category within revolutionary discourse and coor- dinated the effective operation of literary terms. At the same time, modernism gradually distanced itself from revolutionary discourse, ultimately disappearing behind the labels “bourgeois” and “decadent.” For the next half century, modernism meant nothing more within Chinese literature than a strange concept of uncertain meaning. Modernism came to China for the second time in the 1980s. The lifting of the ban on Western culture, the international exchange and global perspective of literature, the flourishing of translations, the re- acknowledgment of literary classics in academia, and the unstoppable creativity of writers were all conditions for the return of modernism to Chinese cultural scene. Many existing literary histories have already recorded these events. I am more interested in investigating how the shift in the social discourse system reinvigorated modernism in the literary realm. Certainly, by then modernism in Western culture had already become a museum artifact, and postmodernism was clearly in center stage. Therefore, modernism must have answered a mighty summons to arrive so late to the culture of 1980s China. Under historical tremors, revolutionary discourse began to crack and in some places even collapse, and a disparate discourse was silently creeping in to patch the holes. Amidst this intricate changing of the theoretical guard, modernism suddenly found its place. Thus, the concept broke its half century of reticence, and many critical issues that had long been ignored reappeared in the new cultural atmosphere. Modernism did not become a model for a different discourse system; however, the many important propositions of modernism did take a solid, unavoidable hold. A detailed reiteration of the historical tremors of the 1980s is surely unnecessary. When investigating the social discourse system, I prefer to offer three key words to illustrate that span of history: revolution, enlightenment, and market economy. No matter how the meaning of “revolution” has evolved, people retain a clear memory of the half century of revolutionary discourse. Revolution is clearly characterized by the rebellious spirit of the individual; this is especially true in the minds of most intellectuals. They imagine revolution as a romantic movement, an adventure that breaks through the tedium of everyday life. However, when revolution is not attained in a single stride—when it enters a prolonged modernism, modernity, and individualism 27 stalemate—history proves those childish illusions to be ridiculous. The span of revolution is usually bloody, cruel, horrifying, extremely harsh, and filled with violence and sacrifice. Once revolution turns into a mor- tal struggle between classes and factions, individual freedom shrinks to nearly nothing. Without the coalescence of many individuals into a strong group of united will, revolutionaries feel that opposition to the ruling class and the state apparatus they control is merely a dream. The rise of collectivism is necessary for revolution. A great revolution breaks the impasse of history and brings immense progress, but the progress does not fall equally upon every individual. Some may fully enjoy the fruits of revolution, while others pay a great price or even lose their lives. Either way, the standard by which success of a revolution is measured lies not with the individual but with the collective: the political faction, nation, state, or society. These collective bodies bear all the gains and losses of a revolution, while individual experiences can only be evaluated by considering historical background. Therefore, subordination of the individual to the collective is a seemingly unshakable iron rule in revolution. Even after a revolution succeeds, this rule continues to be reasserted by the new political authority in the name of the system. This helps to explain why revolutionary discourse usually contains two contradictory impulses: rebellion and submission. In China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolu- tion of the 1960s and 1970s, both of these impulses were exercised to an extraordinary degree, even though most of the revolutionary leaders had already come to embody the collective of the “proletariat.” Many intellectuals describe the thought liberation movement that began in the 1980s as an enlightenment. In contrast with submission, enlightenment means the freedom to openly exercise one’s own reason in all things. With repeated references to Kant, the significance of the individual received increasing acknowledgement. The individual is a famous node in intellectual history, a concept around which various theoretical strains collect to debate. However, in Chinese cultural domain, the concept turned and entered the economic realm before making too many ripples in literary and philosophical theory. “Economic individualism” means the maximization of individual benefit, in other words, free trade, competition, and a system of private ownership.7 In a market economy, the individual is the engine driving economic growth. A rational agent

7 See Steven Lukes, “Economic Individualism,” in Individualism (London: Blackwell, 1973). 28 nan fan of classical economics, when considering the various plans for reform of today’s system, would undoubtedly take into account the individual, especially individual interest. Even though the collectivism that originated in revolutionary discourse still commands great prestige, the majority of people in China today are already accustomed to dealing with economic matters in terms of the individual. We can predict that the fissure between individualism and collectivism will eventually grow apparent. The replacement of revolution with enlightenment, and then with market economy, parallels the changes of the social discourse system. Many important events help to explain these changes. Relatively speaking, the reemergence of modernism is inconsequential. Moreover, many people recognize only the threat that modernism poses to realism and consider a local debate of literary criticism not worthy of being connected to changes in social discourse. However, we must at least consider that modernism’s intention to discard realism does not end with experimental literary forms. Rather, modernism seeks to discard the history that realism respects—the history that is characterized by social relations represented through “typical characters” (典型性格 dianxing xingge). Because of its unique concern with rescuing the individual out of the convoluted landscape of history, modernism occupies a startling position in the midst of the changing social discourse. Is literature now opening Solomon’s bottle (所罗门的瓶子 suoluomen de pingzi)? Modernism released the long-sealed concept of individualism. The literary movement has, in a strange way, inserted the individual into revolutionary discourse, thus stubbornly revealing the existence of a blind spot. Modernism’s magnification of internal consciousness has produced its first theoretical shock: proof that the individual cannot be reduced.

III

Revolution comes like an intense earthquake to society, politics, and culture. The entire traditional order changes greatly in a short time. The historical effects of revolution receive continual attention from many thinkers. There are theoretical questions behind violent and non-violent regime change, economic systems and political rights, political parties and social classes, different types of revolution, radical protection, cowardly avoidance, and conservative opposition against all kinds of instability.8

8 See the section on “Revolution,” in Great Books of the Western World Vol. 3, ed. Adler et al. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952). modernism, modernity, and individualism 29

The history of the twentieth-century Chinese revolution was not only engraved into the memory of the nation, it also gradually formed its own revolutionary discourse. Encompassing every aspect of the revolution— from motivation, subject position, form, and strategy, to political objectives, mechanisms of mobilization, military forces, and organizational disciplines—revolutionary discourse as a system took shape and was able to “settle accounts” with a series of traditional concepts, including individualism. That the revolutionary discourse rejected and severely constrained the paradigm of individualism should not be surprising. The dignified emergence of the revolutionary discourse shows that some concepts that had once played an active role in history have since faded—the Confucian ideal of the unity of “inner cultivation and enlightened governance” (内圣外王 neisheng waiwang), for example. In both self-cultivation and governance of the family, the state, and tianxia (天下), moral appeals based on noble characters and personal behavior effectively linked the individual to [traditional] public society. This inner/outer model relates to another model: extended (达 da) /limited (穷 qiong). “Limited” means bettering only the self, while “extended” means bettering both the self and tianxia. Of course, to better the self does not mean standing completely aloof from the rest of the world and reclaiming a free spiritual life. To the contrary, idling at home is better described as a state of waiting, e.g., waiting to be summoned by the imperial court to service. Education and individual ambitions can only be converted to purposes beyond the self by the court. However, in the final dynastic period, this model could not be maintained. The image of the gentleman promoted by Confucian- ism and the fallen feudal dynasties were both buried in the cultural ruins. The revolutionary discourse that sprung up relied on a different set of social-historical categories. Marxism eclipsed Confucian doctrine. Arif Dirlik writes that under Confucianism, history was conceived: As a realm where individual behavior manifested the success or failure of morality, [this conception] obviated the need to search for historical explanation within the inner workings of history. . . . The Marxist conception of history departed radically from this view. The premise that the dynamics of historical development could be discovered only in the interaction of forces immanent in the socioeconomic structure altered the scope of historical inquiry and expressed a new awareness of the complexity of historical explanation.9

9 Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 8–9. 30 nan fan

This turn from a supra-historical conception of morality was a turn toward recognition of the whole society. Liang Qichao’s understanding of the "new person” and group governance, and Lu Xun's reform of the national character, sought to rescue spiritual culture, but Marxism pointed from afar at political and economic systems. Certainly, many people cannot forget the interlude between Confucian doctrine and Marxism. From Zhang Taiyan to Lu Xun, from Chen Duxiu to Li Dazhao, from the sentimental, autobio- graphical novels of Yu Dafu and the Creation Society to Ding Ling’s Miss Sophia’s Diary—individualism blossomed briefly in the past. Mao Dun once declared: “Human discovery, i.e. development of character, i.e. individualism, is the main objective of the May Fourth Literature Movement.”10 Nevertheless, history did not give individualism enough space to develop. The dynamic revolution took the lead role and the individual quickly retreated, disappearing among the indistinct faces of the group. Small-scale revolutionary movements are often spontaneous in nature. A group of students or workers, for example, finds a reason to rise up and explodes into radical and transgressive talk and behavior. Usually these groups are temporary, motley masses under the control of a strong sentiment, as opposed to a secret core organization. Indignation, frustra- tion, the impulse to rebel, longing for romantic adventure, adolescent restlessness—these various fuels can all be quickly exhausted. Therefore, small-scale revolutions often flare up for a brief moment only to quickly flicker out. Comprehensive social revolution requires the deep and careful formulation of a methodical strategy. Once the mechanisms of revolution are set in motion, each part combines to form a quickly moving machine. Revolution is the huge campaign of one class to overthrow another. The Communist Manifesto declares that all of society has already split into two camps, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In other words, sufficient potential for social revolution has already accumulated; the oppression and opposition between classes is an unlimited source of energy. At this time, the significance of the class collective greatly surpasses that of the individual. The intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement did not champion the intractable image of the individual. To the contrary, they were willing to submit themselves to class structures. This was the first step toward ensuring that they were not kicked out of the revolutionary ranks.

10 Mao Dun 茅盾, “Guanyu ‘Chuangzuo’ 关于‘创作’ [On ‘Creation’],” in Mao Dun wenyi zalun ji 茅盾文艺杂论集 [Collection of Miscellaneous Writings of Mao Dun on Literature and Art] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenji chubanshe, 1981), 298. modernism, modernity, and individualism 31

In comparison to political science, economics, legal study, and sociol- ogy, literature is rather fond of individualism. Unique aesthetic style, individuality of characters, clear understanding of inner secrets, unadorned and everlasting desires, and frightening vaccinations against fear all carry theoretical components of the individual. Nevertheless, the powerful revolutionary discourse of the late 1920s prevented literature from blindly pursuing individualism. During the promotion of “revolutionary literature,” individualism was immediately singled out for attack. Guo Moruo ridiculed it with hyperbole: “Individualist art is already gone, but the most obscene individualists, the most obscene individualist cries, continue to dominate the art market.”11 Jiang Guangci’s “On Revolutionary Literature” spent a significant amount of space describing the decline of individualism and the resonance of revolutionary literature with collectivism: The center of our lives has gradually turned from individualism toward collectivism. Individualism, in the capitalist society of today, has already developed to the maximum, yet at the same time collectivism has begun to sprout. . . . The trend of the current revolution is to smash the social system centered on individualism and create a social system comparatively bright, equal, and centered on the collective. This is the direction of the revolution, yet in the intellectual world also the theory of individualism has clearly declined. . . . Revolutionary literature ought to be anti-individualist literature. Its protagonist ought to be the masses, not the individual. It ought to incline toward collectivism, not individualism.12 At the time, Yu Dafu, Cheng Fangwu, Li Dazhao, and others were already quite adept at using the concepts of petty bourgeoisie, capitalism, ideology, materialist dialectics, and historical mission of proletarian literature. Class, party, and society became their theoretical axis. The individual was portrayed as a sick, fragile, deceptive, or eccentric social outcast. Once literature became part of the revolutionary discourse, the voice of individualism was in perpetual disorder. “Our literature is all for the masses. First it is for the workers, peasants, and soldiers: created for the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and used for the workers, peasants, and soldiers.”13 “What has been called ‘modern literature’ since the May Fourth is actually

11 Mai Keang 麦克昂 (Guo Moruo 郭沫若), “Yingxiong shu 英雄树 [Hero Tree],” in ‘Geming wenxue’ lunzheng ziliao xuanbian ‘革命文学’论争资料选编 [Selected Materials on the ‘Revolutionary Literature’ Debate], vol. 1 (Beijing: Remin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 76. 12 Jiang Guangci 蒋光慈, “Guanyu geming wenxue 关于革命文学 [On Revolutionary Literature], in ‘Geming wenxue’ lunzheng ziliao xuanbian, 143–144. 13 Mao Zedong 毛泽东, “Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jiang hua 在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话 [Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art],” in Mao Zedong 32 nan fan a kind of nation-state literature.”14 Both the famous words of the revolutionary leader and the new evaluation of literary history ascribe the enthusiasm and loyalty toward literature to a collective. Individualism is never given a chance to prove itself. It is implied that individualism does not equal the individual. Characteristics—such as interests, personality, fashion and aesthetic taste, food and drink preferences—differentiate the individual from individualism. This is also true in literature. Even when harshly criticizing capitalist individualism, Lenin admitted: There is no question that literature is least of all subject to mechanical adjustment or leveling, to the rule of the majority over the minority. There is no question, either, that in this field greater scope must undoubtedly be allowed for personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content.15 Nevertheless, the theoretical differentiation between the individual and individualism is usually ignored. The two are seemingly only one pace apart. Collective atmosphere exists everywhere, and all words and behaviors that differ from the collective thought are unable to cast off the “petty bourgeois” label. Mao Zedong, in his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Litera- ture and Art,” spoke of individualism together with the petty bourgeoisie. The two ideas combined with intellectuals to form almost as one. Fantasy, sentimentality, inner weaknesses, the protection of private space, distinctive clothing, and the pursuit of niche lifestyles can all be swept into the realm of the petty bourgeoisie. Petty bourgeoisie is an ambiguous yet shameful label, and thus leaves few people willing to fight for anything on behalf of the individual. For a considerable time, the concept of the individual and its meaning was completely silenced. Slogans promoting selflessness such as selflessness (大公无私 dagongwusi), fight selflessness and repudiate revisionism (斗私批修 dousi pixiu), and resolutely guard against selfish thought (狠抓私字一闪念 henzhua sizi yi shannian) kept constant watch over the stirrings of individualism. Even though the foremost goal of the revolution was liberation of the individual, a considerable number of its practices went in the opposite direction. The Great Proletarian

quanji 毛泽东全集 [Complete Works of Mao Zedong] vol. 3 (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 1991), 863. 14 Liu He 刘禾 [Lydia Liu], “Wenben, piping yu minzu guojia wenxue 文本，批评与民族国家文学 [Text, Criticism, and Nation-State Literature],” in Yuji shuxie 语际书写 [Writing Between Languages] (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 1999), 192. 15 Vladimir Lenin, “Party Organisation and Party Literature,” accessed June 12, 2012. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/13.htm. modernism, modernity, and individualism 33

Cultural Revolution not only created a scarcity of material goods, it also greatly limited individual spiritual space (个人的精神空间 geren de jingshen kongjian). “We have both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both united conviction and carefree and lively individual sentiment.”16 The political situation described did not arrive as anticipated. Because the issue of the individual was unable to enter the theoretical domain, it disappeared until the 1980s.

The changing of the social discourse system meant a great migration in the symbolic realm. As I see it, an enumeration of the historical events of the last thirty years cannot replace an inventory check of the changes in discourse. If we were to input all thirty years of newspapers electronically and conduct a statistical analysis of the language, we could clearly trace the change in social discourse. As the vocabulary of one tribe weakens and dies, terms from another tribe roll in. In some aspects the two groups may compromise, in other aspects the conflict may continue through today. Even though revolutionary discourse was softened at the start of the reform era, it still refused to lift its ban on individualism. Instead, literature’s constant reminders of the issue brought individualism to the surface. At the end of the 1970s, Liu Xinwu’s stories “Class Supervisor” (班主任 Banzhuren) and “I Love Every Single Green Leaf” (我爱每一片绿叶 Wo ai mei yipian lüye) began to touch upon so-called individuality, but the frivolous atmosphere and wavering focus of awareness were only able to scratch the surface. Actually, it was not mentioned again until the interference of modernism; modernism in a roundabout way triggered a certain desire which had lain latent within Chinese culture. The literature of the time realized that the long-repressed issue had never been truly resolved. European modernism was an umbrella term containing many complex literary schools or factions. Of these, for reasons worth pondering, “stream of consciousness” became the first to enter the Chinese cultural landscape. Noting that William James taught “the conception of thought as a stream

16 Mao Zedong 毛泽东, “Zai kuoda de zhongyang gongzuo huiyi shang de jianghua 在扩大的中央工作会议上的讲话 [Talk at the Expanded Central Work Meeting],” in Mao Zedong quanji 毛泽东全集 [Complete Works of Mao Zedong] vol. 8 (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 1999), 293. 34 nan fan and the idea of the ‘compounding of consciousness,’ ” Melvin Friedman argues that “a stream of consciousness novel should be regarded as one which has as its essential concern the exploitation of a wide area of consciousness, generally the entire area, of one or more characters.”17 Such clear formulations were quite rare at the time, thus the “self-taught” state of some authors and their intrinsic agreement with the definition seems to show that there was some kind of resonance between those West- ern theorists and Chinese writers. Wang Meng is usually credited with instigating stream of consciousness writing in 1980s China. His stories “Eyes of Night” (夜的眼 Ye de yan), “Sound of Spring” (春之声 Chun zhi sheng), “Bolshevik Salute” (布礼 Bu li), “Butterfly” (蝴蝶 Hudie), and “Kite Streamers” (风筝飘带 Fengzheng piaodai) all show a tentative interest in stream of consciousness narration. As the product of a transitory stage, Wang Meng’s stream of consciousness narration still thirsted for the protection of the revolutionary discourse. He repeatedly declared that he would have nothing to do with pathological, perverted, or lonely mysti- cism or irrationalism. As he saw it, true revolutionary discourse had to enter into the subconscious. He compared the instantaneous feeling to the first sound of a little hammer knocking at the heart: If the writer is an intelligent, thoughtful, experienced person, if revolutionary theory and a progressive world view are to him not labels and mantras, nor paste stuck to his face or bottom, but have already become his flesh and blood, his nerves, his five senses, and his spirit, then even this first sound will definitely not be frivolous and completely chaotic or shattered.18 Obviously this idea differs somewhat from the original meaning of stream of consciousness. Frederick R. Karl writes, “By stream of consciousness, I mean that area of expression which blurs boundaries between rational and irrational, logical and illogical, intuitive and mechanical.”19 After expounding on the fundamentals of stream of consciousness and touch- ing on irrationality, intuition, free association, unconscious, and interior monologue, Karl points out that the core of stream of consciousness is divided into two selves: “a conventional ego (the social, outward-turning ego) and a fundamental self (something uniquely individual).”20 Here is a

17 Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 2–3. 18 Wang Meng, “Guanyu ‘yishi liu’ de tongxin 关于‘意识流’的通信 [Letter on ‘Stream of Consciousness’], Yalu Jiang 鸭绿江 [Yalu River] 2 (1980). 19 Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 232. 20 Ibid., 237. modernism, modernity, and individualism 35 pure ego not connected to society; moreover, Karl believed that this ego is the source of the world—a hypothesis that draws largely from Freud and Bergson. To capture the content of this “interiority” or “life itself,” Karl places his hopes in pure memory: [P]ure memory is intensive and powerless, beyond movement and beyond sensation. It allows penetration into spirit, in some perceptive, intuitive way. . . . The stream could not have existed without the stress on self which we have identified throughout as so essential to the development of Mod- ernism. The pressures of modern life which could lead to loss of self or dehumanization of self, in Ortega’s phrase, resulted in the protest of self. This meant not its annihilation, but expressiveness, of which the stream is perhaps the purest.21 Even though modernism quickly became fashionable, such naked individualism still frightened people in the early 1980s. In my view, the proposal of the problem of the “subject” (主体问题 zhuti wenti) offered an eclectic approach to this issue. Liu Zaifu’s popular notion of the subject describes the inner self as a “second universe” and repeatedly asserts the inner life of the individual, the unfathomable depths of the individual’s personality, and the depth of one’s spirit or soul. In Liu Zaifu’s eyes, one’s soul houses some kind of deeper self.22 His ideas even stirred a brief flourishing of psychology. Of course, at the time the popular conception was fairly far- removed from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather, “psyche” was adopted to carve out an independent space from which to resist the outside world. Relative to expectations, stream of consciousness novels contained nothing of merit. Ulysses-style masterpieces never appeared. Perhaps Li Tuo’s “Grandma Qi” (七奶奶 Qi nainai) was a small breakthrough, for it showed that complex psychology is not the sole property of the petty bourgeois intellectual. An ordinary city resident (a trifling, conservative old woman) has a boiling inner mind. Somewhat regrettably, critics did not promptly raise or emphasize the acute question hidden in “Grandma Qi”—is there truly an independent, self-confirmable spirit floating outside the network of social relations? No matter how jumbled the content of European modernism may be, individualism is an unavoidable theme. The appearance of stream of consciousness literature proves that modernism was contracting with that theme to enter Chinese cultural territory; this shows a shared point of

21 Ibid., 239. 22 See Liu Zaifu, Xingge zuhe lun 性格组合论 [Theory of Character Composition] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1986), particularly the introduction. 36 nan fan interest between the two. The movement in literature seemed to indicate that the time had come for social discourse to again face the individual.

Reading through the theoretical writings of the 1980s, one notices that individualism had not yet become a focal point of debate. The names of Hobbes, Hayek, and other theorists of individualism crop up later, in the 1990s. The connotations of popular individualism—that the individual is the source and ultimate value of society, and that society and country exist to ensure the rights and interests of the individual—were not popularly known until the intense debate between the New Left and neo-liberals in the late 1990s. Although 1980s literature did not formally discuss individualism, the individual tried stubbornly to rise to the surface through the aftershocks of modernism. Various portents of individualism appeared in literary form and aesthetic style. Because of this, I interpret the inclination toward interesting literary forms and aesthetic styles as a symbolic expression of individualism—but only symbolic, of course. Most critics acknowledge that modernism, when it came to China for the second time, first occupied the kingdom of poetry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a set of abstruse poetry consisting mainly of symbols and images, which was descriptively titled by the bookshops “Misty Poetry” (朦胧诗 menglong shi), gained wide popularity. The term “new aesthetic principle” was coined by critics to summarize the new poetry. The new poets “distain to be a bugle for the spirit of the times, and distain to express heroic deeds lying outside the emotional world of the self;” they only “seek the secrets of life dissolved in the spirit.”23 Clearly, such individualized content must fit within a different literary form. Formal experiments probed mental stirrings, the unconscious, and emotional fluctuations through symbol, metaphor, perspective, distortion, synesthe- sia, lively rhythm, and a brand new melody, all seeking to focus on the individual. The poets handled external events and history as vague background material. In the early 1980s all of the various explorations into narration of the novel revolved around breaking the restraints of plot and increasing the inner mental component. This state of affairs led to the appearance of Ma Yuan and similar writers.

23 Sun Shaozhen 孙绍振, “Xin de meixue yuanze zai jueqi 新的美学原则在崛起 [A New Aesthetic Principle Is Arising],” Shikan 诗刊 3 (1981). modernism, modernity, and individualism 37

As experiments in literary form flourished in the 1980s, many critics realized that language is not a passive tool, but the creator of fluctuations in a veritable Rubik’s cube of expression and diction. However, many critics never realized that at the time, interest in language came from two conflicting sources. One was the concept at the core of structuralism: the subject does not exist prior to language and cannot freely control language. In fact, the subject is the product of language, a tiny element constrained by language structure. The second theory of expression was that all of the various combinations of language arise from the strange inner mind. The following imagination of a progressive relationship between the mind and literary language is representative: “Language sense is the innate internal ability of the creator of literature. It manifests outwardly in the base structure of the work’s form—literary language. Yet literary language also follows certain conventions (the grammar of literary language), which transform into the surface structure of the work’s form— the work’s literary language system.”24 Obviously most critics supported an expressionist view of language, having not understood or even heard the details of structuralism. The idea that language change has its roots in the mysterious inner mind was seemingly self-evident. Formal experimentation in literature was at the vanguard. The mind, unconscious, and subject coalesced with experiments of form under the title of “pure literature” (纯文学 chun wenxue). “Pure literature” was an enchanting concept. Can Xue’s image of it carries the sincerity of a believer: “ ‘Pure’ literature uses unflinching inward pen strokes to illustrate layer after layer of the mind, dragging people’s feelings into that exquisite structure and forever advancing toward that primeval core of the human character.”25 The scientific ideal of removing all extraneous elements to distill a pure literature held great appeal, especially after the disturbances and frights of a long period of political upheaval. Some people placed their hopes in a perfect crystal of language appearing in the test tube, while others hoped to excavate inner reaches of the mind or unconscious that had not yet been touched by the pollution on the surface. The expressionist language view ultimately managed to combine the two goals. The unity of language,

24 Li Jie 李劼, “Shi lun wenxue xingshi de benti yiwei 试论文学形式的本体意味 [Provisional discussion of the basic meaning of literary forms],” in Gexing, ziwo, chuangzao 个性，自我，创造 [Individuality, Ego, Creation] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1989), 371. 25 Can Xue 残雪, “Jiujing shenme shi chun wenxue 究竟什么是纯文学 [What Really is Pure Literature], Dajia 大家 [Everyone] 4 (2002). 38 nan fan the inner mind, and “pure literature” were clearly one “symbolic incident” (象征事件 xiangzheng shijian) manufactured by individualism in the literary realm. “Pure literature” is sometimes called “elegant literature” (雅文学 ya wenxue), in contrast to various types of vulgar or popular literature (通俗文学 tongsu wenxue). Experimental language and inner thoughts are individualized, leaving behind typical stories and unified narration. With an elegant attitude, this form of literature strikes back at ordinary people’s complaints of incomprehensibility. Insults such as “You don’t understand? Your grandsons can understand this!” reveal the authors’ and readers’ obvious arrogance. The distinction between “elegant” and “vulgar” originates deep in literary history. However, this aesthetic fork has increasingly gained political significance as “elegant” has gradually evolved into a convoluted aesthetic tribute to individualism. The classical distinction between elegance and vulgarity arose from the split between the systems of the common folk and the literati. The myths, legends, and songs of the common folk were simple, clear, unrestrained, and bold. The books, poems, and songs composed by the literati were refined, elegant, gentle, and sincere. Folk origins and literati craftsmanship interacted to form a positive development in literary history. How- ever, in the first half of the twentieth century “vulgar” and “elegant” were both swept up into numerous other concepts. Even though group psychology (集体心理学 jiti xinli) warned of the irrational madness latent in the masses, cultural democracy (文化民主 wenhua minzhu) remained the overwhelming trend in modern society. In this sense, the category of “elegant” contained many cultural orientations. For example, there were subtle differences between folk literature (民间文学 minjian wenxue), commoners’ literature (平民文学 pingmin wenxue), vernacular literature (白话文学 baihua wenxue), and popular literature (通俗文学 tongsu wenxue) during the May Fourth period. Each emphasized a different aspect: scope of transmission, readership demographic, language characteristics, and market success, respectively. At the same time, the category of “elegant” had already transferred from ancient literati to modern intellectuals, i.e., people enlightened in contrast to the masses. If individualism was part of the enlightenment of May Fourth intellectuals, then it was also a cause for revolutionary discourse that criticized intellectuals. In the latter sense, “elegant” had already, intentionally or not, been given a negative connotation. “Elegant” did not show that intellectuals were profound, rather it showed the distance between the intellectuals and the masses. The individualism contained in the “elegant” aesthetic style of literature modernism, modernity, and individualism 39 carried the concealed danger of disintegrating the mobilization mechanism of the revolution. Mao Zedong called literature an effective weapon for mobilizing the masses, and said that literature carries “the responsibility to unite the people, educate the people, strike the enemy, and destroy the enemy.” Therefore, “all revolutionary writers and artists must connect with the masses, express the masses, and make themselves sincere representatives of the masses, for their work to have meaning.”26 The conceited “elegant” intellectuals did the opposite, immersing themselves in the fantasy of individualism, so what could they contribute to the revolution? For a long time, the devaluation of formalism and the inner kingdom of the petty bourgeois intellectual had much to do with individualism. When modernism appeared in full regalia it presented a symbolic signal: the ban on individualism had begun to unravel. But interestingly enough, this trend did not make a great impact. People suddenly noticed that economic reforms had moved to the forefront; distributed group egalitarianism was abandoned and replaced by an interest unit centered on the individual. However, literary modernism never appreciated the individual in the economic realm. To the contrary, modernism expressed radical objection to economic individualism, for it was far from total liberation. How deeply is the category of “individual” entwined in various conflicts with modernity? This question presages the second theoretical shock brought by modernism.

Modernity is one of the core issues of enlightenment discourse. Some people describe the revolution as a failed experiment, others think the revolution is currently re-amassing energy, but one conclusion will not broker argument: enlightenment discourse has returned and, moreover, the question of modernity posed by enlightenment discourse is currently expanding through the realms of theory and practice. Modernity contains incredibly diverse content—from secularization, rationality, and liberal economics, to the linear conception of time, emphasis of the present over the past, and the nation state, the theoretic formulations of Western thinkers continue to increase even today. Clearly, the populace is unable to join in the various specialized debates; what they receive is usually a layman’s

26 Mao Zedong, “Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jiang hua,” in Mao Zedong xuanji vol. 3 (1991), 864. 40 nan fan edition rendered in their native language. In Chinese culture, the envisaging of science and democracy during the May Fourth period and during the “Four Modernizations” of the 1960s (agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology), together with the market economy of the 1990s, indicate a somewhat sequential understanding of modernity. Sturdy ships and lethal cannons, electrified sounds and lights, nuclear warhead stockpiles, the gross national product, house size, the spread of secondary education, and the ownership rate of household electrical appliances are all nothing but footnotes to the above understanding. Literature once tipped its hat to modernity in the name of “modernism.” A few Chinese writers excitedly took modernism to be a product of modernization (现代化的产物 xiandai hua de chanwu). When the objective of modernization was restarted in the 1980s, they enthusiastically picked up and waved the banner of modernism.27 Wang Furen opened up a broad theoretical horizon; his “Theory of Chinese Modernism” sought to bring twentieth-century enlightenment discourse and modernity into light. Wang Furen did not focus on the European origins of modernism but instead clearly delineated a new stage of literature according to Chi- na’s native modernity: “Chinese modernism” is a literary concept raised in contrast with “Chinese classicism.” . . . [I]t is literature that raises Chinese literature to a high degree of modernity, it is literature that manifests Chinese literary authors’ understanding of modernity, it is a literature that expresses Chinese intellectuals’ experiences and feelings in the modern world. . . . China’s modernist literature [in contrast to Western modernist literature] was born out of the one- time quest for literary modernity; it is a new literary whole formed of various different literary schools.28 In Wang Furen’s eyes, even though Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, Dai Wangshu, He Feng, Shen Congwen, Lao She, and Eileen Chang had their

27 See Xu Chi 徐迟, “Xiandaihua yu xiandaipai 现代化与现代派 [Modernization and the Modernist School],” Waiguo wenxue yuanjiu 外国文学研究 [Foreign Literature Research] 1 (1982); Ye Junjian 叶君健, “Preface,” in Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan 现代小说技巧初探 [Preliminary Investigation into Techniques of the Modern Novel] (Guang zhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1981), 5; Feng Yicai 冯骥才, “Zhongguo wen xue xuyao ‘xiandaipai’!—gei Li Tuo de xin 中国需要‘现代派’- 给李陀的信 [China Needs the Modernist School!—Letter to Li Tuo],” Shanghai wenxue 上海文学 [Shanghai Literature] 2 (1982). 28 Wang Furen 王富仁, “Zhongguo xiandaizhuyi lun 中国现代主义论 [Theory of Chi nese Modernism],” in Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue shilun 二十世纪中国文学史论 [On the History of 20th Century Chinese Literature] vol. 1, eds. Wang Xiaoming et al. (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2003), 258, 269. modernism, modernity, and individualism 41 talents, they all possessed a modern temperament different from the classical literati. Relative to faded classical literature, modern literature was an exciting integrated whole. When this concept reentered the social discourse after many years of silence (in the early part of the reform era), it became the core of people’s expectations. At that time, enlightenment, modernity, and market economics were jumbled together; modernity had not yet been dissembled, its internal contradictions, tensions, and intense conflicts were yet to be revealed. After classical literature departed, modernity took over and began to gradually reveal its internal differences. The individual liberation championed by the May Fourth Movement was multidirectional, but beginning in the 1980s, enlightenment discourse pressed literature to concentrate on economic individualism, particularly on how the first stages of material prosperity can allay slavish spiritual bonds. “On the Town Field” (乡场上 Xiang chang shang) by He Shiguang, “Heiwa’s Photo” (黑娃照相 Heiwa zhangxiang) by Zhang Yigong, “Wife in Charge” (内当家 Nei dang jia) by Wang Runzi, “Xiaoxi Jiudao Wan” (小溪九道弯) by Ye Wenling, and the Chen Huansheng (陈奂生) stories by Gao Xiaosheng all deal, openly or not, with one theme: individuality, respect, and freedom are not purely spiritual categories. Without basic material support, the freedom and rights of the individual amount to nothing more than empty words. According to Lydia Liu’s research, the early twentieth-century debate on individualism was mostly focused on theoretical issues of the individual and nation-state, and the “big self” (大我 dawo) and “little self” (小我 xiaowo).29 When enlightenment discourse arose for the second time, only then did individualism move from abstract theorization into everyday life, from the sentimental and ethical realm at which literature excels to the scrupulous world of finance and budgeting. The economic reforms of the 1980s meant that the economically active individual ascended to the social stage. An individual’s abilities, achievements, capital, and personal earnings are directly proportional in the basic framework of the market economy. Of course, in a functioning market economy, the various interactions and the property won by the individual must rely on a stable system of guarantees. Legal backup is indispensable. The legal status of the individual was clarified in China through the constitutional affirmation of

29 Lydia Liu, “The Discourse of Individualism” in Translingual Practice (Stanford: Stan ford University Press, 1995), 77–99. 42 nan fan personal property and detailed property rights laws.30 These representations became in part a theoretical portrait of liberalism, an issue which awaits further debate. I merely wish to point out that it was this economic and legal environment that created space for individualism. Alan Macfar- lane defines English individualists as “highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically ‘rational’, market oriented and acquisitive, ego centered in kinship and social life.”31 Although the social discourse system had not yet given such clear expression to the above characteristics, people noticed a palpable new kind of individualism produced under the conditions of the market economy. It would be difficult to overstate the liberating significance of the market economy on the individual in China. The stifling atmosphere of the previous era finally ended and all levels of society were thoroughly shaken. Even in materialism and consumerism, which burst forth as if from a broken dam, the people perceived a certain vitality. Today’s literature can produce much evidence of this theme. However, the record certainly does not end there. Other significant literary trends provide particularly unsettling clues. For example, what happened in the twenty-odd years between Jiang Zilong’s momentous “Manager Qiao Assumes Office” (乔厂长上任记 Qiao changzhang shangren ji) and Tan Ge’s dreary “Big Factory” (大厂 Da chang) and the indignant “There” (那儿 Na’er) by Cao Zhenglu? What does the development from Ke Yunlu’s positively spirited New Star (新星 Xinxing) to today’s numerous stories of bureaucratic malfeasance show? The market has certainly imbued the individual with various rights and freedoms, but the anticipated equality and liberty were not truly realized. The individual fell into another trap. This was a regrettable reversal of the enlightenment discourse, and potentially even part of the “enlightenment dialectic.” It is at this moment that modernism reentered the field. As a rebel against capitalist culture, modernism set itself strictly apart from the market, liberal economics, and all forms of philistinism. To the social order intently maintained by the bourgeois, the decadence, discontent, gloom, and cynicism of modernism appeared to be a kind of wanton obscenity. It was rejection under the guise of literature. At the time, people vaguely

30 The 2004 constitutional amendments added to the articles: “the legal personal prop erty of citizens may not be infringed upon.” The “Property Rights Law 物权法” was passed in 2007. 31 Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 163. modernism, modernity, and individualism 43 recognized that the modernist “individual” possessed intense aesthetic destructiveness—an alternative image that diverged wildly from economic individualism. Of course, very few writers remained enamored of modernism as a form. In most writers’ eyes the concept was already past its time. From the middle of the 1980s, “avant-garde” became a more popular appella- tion. Even though the avant-garde novel undoubtedly contains formal gifts from modernism, its ability to shock and offend had weakened. For writers after Ma Yuan who loved narrative traps, Latin-American magical realism was another literary resource. At least in style, Borges’s elegance to a considerable degree subdued the wildness and ridicule of modernism, as wisdom soothed the discontent. As for poetry, after the generation of poets including Bei Dao, Jiang He, Shu Ting, and Shi Zhi gained fame, the sadness and indignation of modernism gradually quieted. The numerous small poetry cliques that were to follow carried a clearly postmodern sentiment. They calmly acknowledged everyday life and sometimes turned meetings gathered under the pretext of poetry into wild behavioral art. The “individualized writing” or “private writing” of the mid-1990s had some deep source in modernism, however, due to its wandering, vague content, this term exited the stage early, never entering the purview of theory. Peo- ple say instead that the rebelliousness of modernism reemerged alongside modernity. Often modernity appears to be a large and chaotic theoretical field. Situated among a vast array of concepts, the critics’ interest and acumen surpasses that of writers. Inside Chinese cultural landscape, even though writers have not reassembled a modernist trend, critics continue to confront the challenge of modernism in their theoretical structures. Undoubtedly, one reason that the topic of modernity heated up so rapidly was a reflection on the successes, failures, gains, and losses of modern society. In the West, postmodernism spurred the self-reflection of modernity; in Chinese cultural territory, the evaluation of modernity has gone so far as to directly influence current public policy. Up to today, many heavyweight thinkers who have considered the issue of modernity agree that there are two opposing modes of modernity. One originates in enlightenment discourse and is characterized by secularization, instrumental rationality, scientism, the Industrial Revolution, the establishment of nation-states, bureaucracy, the market economy, and globalization. The second form of modernity is aesthetic and cultural, and its primary characteristic is intense criticism of the first modernity. Matei Calinescu calls the first modernity “capitalist modernity.” Theories of progress, reliance on science and technology for prosperity, exact measurement of 44 nan fan time, worship of reason, and abstract ideals of freedom were the distinguished tradition of this early period in the history of the modern. Cali- escu writes: By contrast, the other modernity, the one that was to bring into being the avant-gardes, was from its beginnings inclined toward radical antibour- geois attitudes. It was disgusted with the middle-class scale of values and expressed its disgust through the most diverse means, ranging from rebellion, anarchy, and apocalypticism to aristocratic self-exile. So, more than its positive aspirations (which often have very little in common), what defines cultural modernity is its outright rejection of capitalist modernity, its consuming negative passion.32 Clearly modernism belongs to the second type of modernity. Through the insect in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the cold face in Camus’s The Stranger, and the satire of Catch-22, modernism has refused to cooperate with capitalist modernity. Charles Taylor writes, “We find the modernist writers and artists in protest against a world dominated by technology, standardization, the decay of community, mass society, and vulgarization.”33 In other words, modernist writers are in protest against the ugly world of instrumental rationality. Capitalist modernity forms a system of repression, including repression of the individual. This was an unforeseen consequence. The constraint of individualism to the economic realm clearly makes for an insipid modernity, one that reeks of money and constantly pursues myriad legal regulations. According to Steven Lukes, individualism is rich in content. Aside from economic individualism, individualism can be political, religious, ethical, epistemological, and methodological. Human dignity, internal values, autonomy, privacy, and ego development are all important layers of individualism.34 When capitalist modernity brutally smothered the many dimensions of the individual with material wealth, the extravagant illusion proved unable to quiet the stirrings of literature. Thus modernism began to express the individual with offensive heterodoxy. Gloom, wanton desire, confusion, deformity, explosive hysteria, and helplessness, together with scornful sarcasm, make up the exaggerated posture with

32 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Ithaca: Duke University Press, 1987), 42. 33 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 456. 34 See Lukes, Individualism. modernism, modernity, and individualism 45 which the modernist individual counterattacks the rigidity and dullness of modern society. Modernism swept impressively across the globe. However, was its opposition and criticism effective? It is clear that the aesthetic shock- waves did deeply unsettle the bourgeoisie. The decadent image of the individual brought forth by modernism was just too different from the magnates, managers, and directors who gallop around the market. Nevertheless, circumstances quickly changed. Modernist literature was gradually classicized, and then elevated to a place of honor in academic forums. The perfective mechanism of capitalist modernity smoothly digested the arrogance and impulsiveness of modernism and turned it into a pricy commodity. Many critics express vast disappointment with the fate of modernism in Western culture; seemingly the time has come to discover the imaginative possibilities of postmodernism.

VII

Although circumstances have changed and modernism gradually has become a relic, the theoretical framework explaining modernism continues to bring many theorists inspiration, especially when trying to untangle the complex relationships between multiple modernities. The proposal of the “antimodern theory of modernity” is one example. Capitalist modernity and aesthetic modernity exist in mutual opposition—antimodern modernity proves that the types of modernity in this space will continue to increase. The paradoxical concept comes from Wang Hui’s weighty essay “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity.” In his view, Chinese thought since the late Qing dynasty has been characterized by a suspicion of capitalist modernity and the quest for a Chinese modernity. His perspective certainly invites dispute: “Mao Zedong’s socialism is a type of modern anti-capitalist modernization theory.” It is no exaggeration to say that this viewpoint was the fuse that set off the debate between the New Left and Liberal factions in China in the 1990s.35 Summarizing the intellectual situation of contemporary China, Wang Hui investigates “three versions of Marxism as an ideology of modernization:” Mao Zedong’s socialist thought, contemporary reform socialism, and humanistic Marxism. Although all three support the objective

35 Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” trans. Rebecca Karl, Social Text 55 (1998), 14. 46 nan fan of modernization, they differ on how to achieve it. Wang Hui thinks that humanistic Marxism is “an important part of contemporary Chinese New Enlightenment thinking.” However, he is upset that the critical edge of New Enlightenment thought has dulled. Oriented around the notion of “modernity crisis,” such Enlightenment discourse is unable to offer sustained criticism of the capitalist market, reveal the formation of global monopolies, and seriously evaluate “antimodernity modernity” and the original intent of the Chinese revolution.36 The debate has raged on unceasingly because of the open historical horizon, the number of issues involved, and the intensity of viewpoints. Wang Hui repeatedly stresses that we must abandon the vertical/linear historical map of tradition versus modernity, and must analyze the conflicts of modernity in a horizontal framework. Consequently, he explicitly opposes describing the authoritarianism that derived from within “antimodern modernity” as “the historical legacies of tradition and feudalism.”37 That metaphor obviously places revolution outside of the structure of modernity, describing it as a final burst of vitality from fallen feudalism. But no revolution blindly opposing capitalism from within the contracted and brittle shell of feudalism could have progressed so far. Actually, China’s revolution once thoroughly wiped out the market system and its ideology. The revolution reflected an avant-garde consciousness that evolved out of modernity; sooner or later, the increasingly severe inequality of capitalist modernity was and is bound to produce its own gravedigger. Opinions will diverge on this point. Marxist theory ultimately became the guiding line of the communist party and determined the modernity of the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. Peasants in feudal society could not have criticized the platforms of capitalism. Nevertheless, many people still firmly believe that the ideas, mobilization, and organization of the peasant revolution inspired the most recent revolution. Post-success slogans, rituals, distribution of government authority, modern supersti- tions (现代迷信 xiandai mixin), and leader worship during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution are all considered legacies of feudalism. If these feudal elements constitute a significant part of the revolution, its modern character comes into question. However, this is only one side of the debate. I am more concerned with whether antimodern modernity may contain even greater blind spots, even if it is within the framework

36 Ibid., 13–17. 37 Ibid., 17. modernism, modernity, and individualism 47 of modernity. Wang Hui has touched on many problems that arise in the practice of antimodernity: “contempt for the formalization of legal structures, an emphasis on absolute egalitarianism,” the confiscation of individual political autonomy, and others, although he does not expound on the deep causes of these problems nor the severity of their consequences.38 In any case, these problems are not merely technical errors. Returning to the realm of literature, when antimodern modernity becomes the main resource and lens for contemporary Chinese literary history, these problems will be inevitably exposed as they become concrete. Today, Tang Xiaobing and Li Yang can be seen as representatives of this narrative mode of literary history, along with a few others who share the same critical position. The postscript in which Li Yang relates the reasons for his book The Struggle against Fate is titled “The ‘Modern’ Significance of ‘Antimodern.’ ”39 Tang Xiaobing, in his introduction to Reinterpretation, titled “How We Imagine History,” describes the mass literature and art of Yan’an as an “antimodern modern avant-garde culture movement.”40 Tang Xiaobing’s definition of modernity simultaneously contains popular literature, modernist literature, and mass literature. The antimodern character of mass literature lies in its dismissal of the market logic of popular literature and the individualized politics of modernist literature. This image provides another fulcrum for interpretation and explanation. Some works that had been denigrated in the “rewriting of literary history” of the enlightenment discourse recovered their reputations through the affirmation of this proposition: for example, “Xiao Erhei Gets Mar- ried” (小二黑结婚 Xiao erhei jiehun), “Li Youcai’s Rhymes” (李有才板话 Li youcai banhua), Song of Youth (青春之歌 Qinchun zhi ge), Sea of Trees and Plains of Snow (林海雪原 Linhai xueyuan), Storm (暴风骤雨 Baofeng zhouyu), A Pioneers’ History (创业史 Chuanye shi), and even the revolutionary modern Peking operas of the 1960s and 1970s. However, many people worried that this style of textual interpretation might depart from the circumstances of textual production, and in particular conceal the power structure of the cultural system on which the texts relied. Tang Xiaobing references a description from poet Yan Chen to demonstrate that in the

38 Ibid., 15. 39 Li Yang 李杨, Kangzheng summing zhi lu 抗争宿命之路 [The Struggle Against Fate] (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1993). 40 Tang Xiaobing 唐小兵, “Women zenyang xiangxiang lishi 我们怎样想象历史 [How We Imagine History],” in Zaijiedu 再解读 [Reinterpretation], (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2007), 6. 48 nan fan contemporary atmosphere of Yan’an, works straying from the revolutionary masses would receive severe censure.41 Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, hastily conceived revolutionary model operas could bring about one’s death—how does “The ‘Modern’ Significance of ‘Antimodern’ ” evaluate this unusual view of literary history? I will avoid that thorny debate and lighten the topic a little: to what extent would this proposition, were it not sanctioned by the mechanisms of power, be able to secure for the aforementioned works the place they stubbornly occupy on the list of classics? Some might argue that the works are, perhaps, a bit too simple for the praise they receive, especially since modernism has already revealed to us the complexity of the inner self. In raising the topic of modernity, my intention is certainly not to uphold it as completely perfect. As many critics have realized, modernist literature often lacks a political and economic dimension. The expanded feeling, loneliness and suspicion, helplessness and ridiculousness, many layers of impression, and essentialization of psychology greatly weaken a thorough analysis of society. We find no mention of class, nation, social institution, or history. This is the weakness of modernism. It is difficult to imagine how those hysterical emotions can oppose a sturdy bureaucratic system. Relatively speaking, politics and economics are the talent of realists—Engels repeatedly commended realism for this reason. However, to stuff the individual into a class, nation, or a mold made by the social system, is to purposely distort realism. “Antimodern modern avant-garde” is seemingly an attempt to do just that. Tang Xiaobing cites Zhou Yang’s to express that mass literature is happy to abandon the “description of complex character psychology and description of minute details.”42 In short, “antimodern modern avant-garde” means revolution, collective thinking, and transparent form. Revolution is between class and social systems, the individual is unimportant. Rather than saying that it scorns experience and circumstance, it would be more appropriate to say it scorns uniqueness. Consequently, Jameson’s insight is not strange: third-world intellectuals have only “we” and not “I.” Everything is so-called national allegory.43 This means another disappearance of the individual—a disappearance of the individual in literature. Is this a price that revolution must pay? Perhaps the facts show another side to the issue. According to Nathalie

41 Ibid., 10. 42 Ibid., 11. 43 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986), 65–88. modernism, modernity, and individualism 49

Sarraute, modernist characters have “sticky” psychologies (“稠液” 般的心理 chouye ban de xinli). People are startled to find in them that the great system of repression has densely knitted itself into daily life and settled on the tips of feeling. Thought it may be an extreme exaggeration of economic determinism, an undisputed fact is that not all repression originates in production. Therefore, true liberation is not limited to the political and economic domain. Production mode and social systems are merely the start of the revolution, not the end. As to whether liberation reaches all parts of the whole, the individual is an extremely important unit of measure. This is when the significance of individualism is finally taken into the revolutionary purview. Even in an unequal system, certain partial resistance, or embedded resistance, from the individual is still effective. Modernism is not the ideal answer to the question of resistance. Mod- ernism informs us of the universal existence of a repressed ego, and in that purpose succeeds, but it tries also to narrate the essential nature of the ego, and in this plan it fails. The greatest significance of modernism lies in its involvement with the structural framework of modernity, primarily through capitalist modernity, aesthetic modernity, and antimodern modernity. Even today, although each concept has its own theoretical pedigree, I suspect that the “left” and “right” binary opposition remains. I prefer to hope that the complex dialogue will produce some new possibilities. Can the social discourse system reorganize all the best elements, and simultaneously begin some kind of “wide-spectrum” criticism? If theory has the right to fantasize, then perhaps now is just the time.

Chapter Two

Subaltern Literature: Theory and Practice (2004–2009)

Li Yunlei Translated by Adrian Thieret

I. What is Subaltern Literature?

Since 2004, “subaltern literature” (底层文学 diceng wenxue) has gradually become a focal point of the Chinese literature and art world. Its preva- lence is closely related to the changes in China’s social reality, intellectual world, and cultural domains. It reflects a development of China’s literature and art under changed social circumstances, as well as the creation of “people’s art” in the new age. Subaltern literature primarily takes excluded and disempowered social groups as its subject. It is different from the three other main categories of Chinese literature: pure (纯 chun), main-melody (主旋律 zhuxuanlü), and popular (通俗 tongsu) or commercial (商业 shangye). Specifically, pure literature tends not to be interested in real social life, or it mainly depicts the lives of the elite classes. Popular literature is formulaic, caters to the tastes and fantasies of the masses, and has an escapist tendency. Main- melody literature tends to either gloss over social injustices or rationalize them. In contrast, subaltern literature demonstrates a reflective and critical attitude toward reality by focusing on the lives of lower class people, raising questions, and generating critical awareness in the hopes of helping the masses understand their social and economic circumstances. As with other cultural domains, today’s literary realm is controlled by mainstream ideology, the market, and the elite. In comparison, subaltern literature occupies a marginal position in the literary realm. However, subaltern literature is more than simply literature about the so-called “vulnerable group” (弱势群体 ruoshi qunti). Despite the fact that as individuals they may be powerless, as a group the subalterns may fundamentally determine China’s future. “People, only the people, are the forces that create history.”1 This belies the understanding of some elite: that subalterns

1 Mao Zedong “Lun lianhe zhengfu” (On coalition government), Mao Zedong Xuanji (Selected Works of Mao Zedong) vol. 3, 1031. 52 li yunlei are a hindrance to social development, an element that can be sacrificed, abandoned, and ignored. The role of subaltern literary narration is to tell their stories and give them voices. One point that should be made clear at the outset is the relationship between subaltern literature and migrant literature (打工文学 dagong wenxue). One major difference between the two concerns the authors. Subaltern literature is created by intellectuals and professional writers, such as Cao Zhenglu, Wang Xiangfu, Liu Jiming, Cheng Yingsong, Hu Xue- wen, and Luo Weizhang. They are generally either university professors or authors working within the Writers’ Association. In contrast, the representative authors of the migrant literature are migrant workers themselves. They include Zheng Xiaoqiong, Lang Taosha, Wang Shiyue, Yu Huaian, Xu Dong, and Ye Er. This form of literature received widespread attention in 2004, around the same time that subaltern literature gained popularity. We can consider these two literary phenomena to be new trends of the twenty-first century, or perhaps we can say that they are two aspects of a single literary trend that concerns the disempowered. I feel that subaltern literature, in a broad sense, should encompass all works in which an author directs their attention to and depicts the lives of the subalterns. In this sense, it should include migrant literature. Only in a narrow sense does it refer to the subset of works created mainly by intellectuals and professional writers. Subaltern literature and migrant literature are mutually complementary and, together, they constitute a new form of literature in reform-era China. Subaltern literature is not an isolated cultural phenomenon. Concerns for subalterns have also manifested in other artistic realms, for example, in cinema. The start of the New Green Movement and the transition to the sixth generation of filmmakers, some of whose movies focus on the hardships of the real lives of laborers, marked a change in Chinese film. Examples include documentaries such as Teixi District (铁西区 Xi tiequ) by Wang Bing and Along the Railroad (铁路沿线 Tielu yanxian) by Du Haibin; and such feature films as Still Life (三峡好人 Sanxia haoren) by Jia Zhangke and Blind Shaft (盲井 Mang jin) by Li Yang. On stage, plays like Huang Jisu’s Che Guevara《切•格瓦拉》and We Walk the Big Road (我们走在大路上 Women zouzai dalu shang) broke through the boundaries of small theater, generating strong responses and active debates in artistic and intellectual circless. On television, the drama Migrants (民工 Mingong) was popular, and Sparks (星火 Xinghuo) had the highest viewership rating for CCTV over the last decade, reaching 12.9 percent. In popular music, musical subaltern literature: theory and practice 53

experimentation has been created and performed by so-called migrant youth art troupes. In short, concern for the subalterns is a comprehensive phenomenon of literature and art. As such, this pattern is worthy of serious critical attention and in-depth scholarly research and investigation. It goes without saying that the appearance of subaltern literature was first and foremost a result of the recent changes in China. The thirty years of Reform and Opening have brought huge vitality to China’s development, but have also brought new problems, especially an increasing disparity of wealth, higher corruption, and various social problems. Pro- fessor Sun Liping points out that in today’s China, the basic consensus for reform has fallen apart and its driving mechanisms have come to be controlled by the interests of certain business, elite sectors, local groups, and even wealthy individuals. Rebuilding the reform consensus requires ordinary people to come together to identify with and support it. From debates of the “three rural problems” (三农问题 sannong wenti) to the “Lang Xianping storm” phenomenon, the question of the kind of reform China actually needs has continued to confront us. Should it rely on a minority of elite or on the majority subaltern masses? Should it connect us to the capitalist world system or adhere to China’s reality? Should it be a path of dependence or of independence? Subaltern literature emerged along with these questions. Since the initial 1998 debate between the New Left and the Liberals, fierce debates have raged over which path China should take. Marked by the “national learning craze” (国学热 guoxue re) of the last few years, cultural conservatism has experienced a resurgence. Various intellectual debates, along with various cultural phenomena, complicate our critical understanding of contemporary Chinese society. One key issue is how to treat the subalterns who form the vast majority of China’s population. We may see them as a burden to social development and cast them aside, or leave them on the margins to benefit from the “trickle-down-economy.” Or should we treat them as a fundamental force of social development? Liberalism in today’s China has practically become the common sense and the unconscious of the intellectual world, but the liberals represent mainly the interests of a certain class; for this reason the “freedom” and “democracy” they advocate must be critically reexamined. The New Left, in contrast, confront contemporary problems by reflecting on the lessons of history and by exploring new theoretical resources in conjunction with Chinese reality. The fact that they make conscious efforts to connect their ideas with the fate of the subalterns is worth affirming. 54 li yunlei

Turning to literature specifically, we can identify a few major developments. Starting in the mid-1980s, “pure literature” occupied the literary mainstream. As an elite-oriented literary form, it was mainly characterized by an emphasis on innovations in form and narrative technique, avoidance of a direct depiction of social realities, and the expression of the abstract feelings and experiences of the individual. By and large, it focused on emulating Western modernism. Pure literature had the historical function of correcting the drawbacks of Mao-era literature, and it contributed to the enrichment and artistic quality of literature as a whole. But as pure literature developed, certain problems came to light, especially when formal experiments became nothing more than an avant- garde stance that served primarily as a rigid imitation and blind worship of the West. In 2001, the literary world began to critically reflect on pure literature, emphasizing that while artistic quality is important, literature should reestablish connections with the real world and exert influence in society. This critical reconsideration of pure literature remains a hot topic in literary research and theoretical thinking today. The rise of subaltern literature is a concrete expression and logical development of that critical reflection. I argue that, since the turn of the twenty-first century, the best works in Chinese literature have all been about the subalterns. Subaltern literature has created influential works, and its representative authors have also intentionally turned from “pure literature” artistic styles to tell their stories. In doing so, quite a number of the authors demonstrate a new achievement in Chinese writing: proving that literature can have both artistic quality and social influence. Since its emergence, subaltern literature has been in a constant transformation. In the early period, most subaltern works were “problem fiction,” (问题小说 wenti xiaoshuo) or stories about social problems; in the last few years subaltern literature has broken out of that mold. Two particular trends are worth noting. One is that many authors not only pay attention to the social problems that subalterns encounter, they now describe the inner world and the spiritual state of the subalterns. From this change in direction came a number of superb works. The second trend is a rise in full-length novels about a range of subaltern issues. Previously all notable works of subaltern literature were novellas and short stories. The appearance of full-length novels shows that authors are not concerned with just one specific social issue, but are instead striving to present a comprehensive view of the subalterns and the historical or temporal context in which they exist. subaltern literature: theory and practice 55

II. Representative Authors and Their Works

Representative authors of subaltern literature include Cao Zhenglu, Wang Xiangfu, Liu Jiming, Chen Yingsong, Hu Xuewen, and Luo Weizhang. Below, I will briefly mention and summarize their ideas, main works, and artistic styles. Cao Zhenglu’s most notable works are the novellas “There” (那儿 Na’er), “Neon” (霓虹 Nihong), and “The Bean Selection Affair” (豆选事件 Dou xuan shijian), and the novel Asking the Vastness (问苍茫 Wen cangmang). “There” depicts an upstanding man, the former chairman of the workers’ union of the factory where he has worked for years, who struggles to stop the sale of his factory and prevent the loss of state-owned capital. He fails and in the end commits suicide. This protagonist is a lonely image of a workers’ leader. He is surrounded by contradictions. As a factory worker, he opposes privatization, has conflicts with the factory leaders and the potential buyers, and repeatedly lodges official complaints. However, he has been the chairman of the factory’s workers’ union, a “provincial- level model worker and a county-level leader,” and in this sense, he is not an ordinary worker. As a result, he finds himself having difficulties representing the workers. Meanwhile, his family tries to prevent him from resisting, which shows his difference from and conflict with the self- interest–oriented attitude of the urban middle class. In the bitter conflict between his desire to resist and his inability to prevent privatization from happening, he becomes mentally and physically exhausted and can only choose suicide. The novella was not only one of the most important works published in Dangdai (当代) in 2004, it was also the most representative work of realism of this period. Besides tackling a significant and serious problem, its narrative is also artistically forceful and intense. “Neon” is the sister work to “There.” It narrates the sorrows and hope- lessness of a lower‑class prostitute, while also demonstrating the strength within her struggle. “The Bean Selection Affair” touches on the political life of contemporary rural villages, revealing in its depiction of an election the jockeying of various forces. The novella expresses a sense of new hope amidst difficulties. Asking the Vastness focuses on a Shenzhen village and a Taiwanese enterprise, its narrative unfolding through labor disputes and strikes. It covers multiple social levels, represents different kinds of people, and through an entangled web of events and social relations expresses the author’s complex sense of the social reality. It brings to light the difficult existence of lower-class laborers, and the author’s thoughts about China’s path to modernization. 56 li yunlei

In short, Cao Zhenglu’s novels excel at discovering the real-life power relations that ordinary folks are too ingrained in to notice. His works also exhibit deep sympathy for the oppressed and have profound power to move people. In his most successful stories, “There” and “Neon,” Cao Zhenglu is able to capture the class consciousness of the main characters and use it as an ideological weapon against the unequal social order. This approach gives Cao’s works a kind of idealistic solemnity, setting him apart from authors who write exclusively of hardships. Hu Xuewen’s novellas “Homicide Case” (命案高悬 Mingan gaoxuan) and “Wet Wings” (淋湿的翅膀 Linshi de chibang) are also excellent works of subaltern literature. “Homicide Case” tells an unusual story. A peasant woman named Yin Xiaomei (尹小梅) is dragged to the township government over a small matter and suddenly dies inexplicably. Her family members calmly accept this fact and the 80,000 RMB compensation, but the village hooligan, Wu Xiang (吴响) goes by himself to search for the truth about her death. He once lusted after Yin Xiaomei and now feels guilty, having been partly responsible for her arrest. As it follows Wu Xiang’s search for the truth, the novel shows the complex cultural and political ecology of rural society. In “Wet Wings” we see a rural story unfolding around the character of Ai Ye (艾叶), shown through her relationship with her two “boyfriends,” her relationship with her mother, the story of her friend Xiaoru, and the stories of the village head, Mo Si. Each person and their story stands alone as a unit, but through Ai Ye they are connected together. Through a web of seemingly new social relations, the story depicts Ai Ye’s existence, illustrating the inner world of this peasant girl and the internal logic of changing relationships. The story in effect sketches the complexity and richness of contemporary rural China. In Hu Xuewen’s stories, the subaltern world is by no means simple. Rather, it tends to appear jumbled and complex. It has its own internal logic—subtleties that people outside their world may not be able to readily comprehend. Hu Xuewen’s grasp of the intricacies of this world demonstrates his keen prowess of observation and critical thinking. His protagonists are all “nobodies,” but they have an obstinate and tenacious spirit, a kind of dogged determination in pursuit of their objectives. These ordinary people who belong to the subaltern class have scant political, economic, and cultural resources; they are the insulted and the injured, but because of their spirit, they live with dignity. Wang Xiangfu’s stories, such as “Traffic Jam” (堵车 Du che) and “Preg- nant Woman” (孕妇 Yunfu), express the beauty of the human spirit and of human feeling in subaltern life. His “Above” (上边 Shangbian) and “Five subaltern literature: theory and practice 57

Ploughs” (五张犁 Wu zhang li) offer a profound and detailed investigation and representation of the inner world of subaltern people. In his recent works, Wang Xiangfu has examined the spiritual condition of contemporary society—this attention is mainly expressed as concern for the fragility of morality. In “Drive to East Beidou Road” (驶向北斗东路 Shi xiang beidou dong lu), a taxi driver who finds 100,000 RMB cannot decide whether to return it to its owner or keep it for himself. Through his inner conflict and complicated social relations, the novel takes one dramatic turn after another to show us the moral condition of contemporary society. In “No Way to Die” (寻死无门 Xunsi wumen), a laid-off worker with liver cancer racks his brain to find a way of making some money, so that he can leave something for his wife and son. First he considers selling his kidney, then he plan to be hit by a car so as to receive a large compensation. Through his struggle between these suicidal impulses and his survival instinct, the protagonist exemplifies the spiritually and morally impoverished state of subalterns who have suffered extreme exploitation. The author shows helplessness of the poor husband and wife, for whom “all things are nothing but sadness” (贫贱夫妻百事哀 pinjian fuqi bai shi ai). The story “I Am Basically Good” (我本善良 Wo ben shanliang) is also about the morality of ordinary people. At the heart of the story is the question of whether or not to save a life. Wang Xiangfu is remarkable here in his grasp of the core issues, his in-depth reflection, and his representation of the complex moral quandary facing contemporary Chi- nese society. He does so through ukiyo-e style illustration of the world and through dramatic propulsion of plot.2 In sum, Wang Xiangfu merges consideration of the subaltern, an agile and natural narrative, and exquisite illustrations of the details of everyday life to form a vibrant artistic style. He continues the tradition of the classical Chinese “worldly affairs novel” (世情小说 shiqing xiaoshuo) represented by Dream of the Red Chamber. “The Masiling Case” (马嘶岭血案 Masiling xue’an) by Chen Yingsong was a widely influential work of 2004 and arguably a representative work of subaltern literature. It delves into the topic of class conflict with a forceful artistic effect. The story meticulously portrays a tense relationship between a scientific survey team and two porters. The survey team has come to Masiling to prospect for gold that would make the area rich. However, the gold they find will most likely be seized by a few powerful people, and ordinary people (such as character Jiucai Shu) will receive

2 “ukiyo-e” is a genre of Japanese woodcuts and paintings. 58 li yunlei nothing for their hard labor. In the eyes of Masiling’s people, those who will actually receive the gold are nothing but far-removed, lofty employers. The survey team’s rude attitude toward the porters, and their rich lifestyle, steadily incites in the porters a desire for more money, thus leading to the final tragedy: the porters kill the survey team. This story touches upon three layers of conflict. One is class conflict, the disparity of wealth and difference of lifestyle that ultimately leads to murder. Another is the conflict between urban and rural, the different positions and perspectives of the urban survey team and rural peasants. Yet another layer alludes to the failure of “enlightenment,” manifested in the wall between intellectuals and the masses that prevents mutual understanding. The intersection of these three layers of conflict gives the tragic story its ability to stir people’s hearts. Moreover, the reappearance of the issue of class conflict undoubtedly has real significance in today’s China. “The Dog Taiping” (太平狗 Taiping gou), another novella by Chen Yingsong, follows the tragedies that befall migrant worker Cheng Dazhong and his dog, Taiping, in the city. It reveals the lives of the urban classes, and although it concentrates much effort on depicting difficulties, it does vividly express the miserable experiences of the subalterns in today’s urban world. Chen Yingsong’s choice to insert elements of romanticism or symbolism into realism is an important artistic characteristic of his work. Liu Jiming was originally best known for writing works of a distinctly avant-garde and experimental style. Yet after his essay “How Do We Nar- rate the Subaltern?” and other such theoretical reflections, his stories began to turn toward depicting real society.3 His deep concern for the subaltern not only changed his writing style, it also widened and deepened his thinking. Liu Jiming’s notable stories include “Sing with Gusto” (放声歌唱 Fangsheng gechang), “Between Us Husband and Wife” (我们夫妇之间 Women fufu zhijian), and “Two Short Stories: Tea Eggs” (短篇二题: 茶叶蛋 Duanpian er ti: cha ye dan). “Sing with Gusto,” while depicting the hard circumstances of migrant peasants who go to cities looking for work, also focuses on the decline of the tiaosanggu (跳丧鼓) folk dance. Thus the story expresses that peasants have lost political, economic, and cultural agency, but the depiction of the waning tradition creates a deeper level of discovery. “Between Us Husband and Wife” narrates the difficult living situation of a husband and wife who have lost their jobs. The story

3 Liu Jiming, “Women zenyang xushu dicing? 我们怎样叙述底层? [How Do We Narrate the Subaltern?],” Tianya 5 (2005), 34–40. subaltern literature: theory and practice 59 reveals in detail the collapse of normal ethics under the pressure of life. Ultimately the wife becomes a prostitute and the husband becomes her pimp. Even though the style of story is not out of the ordinary, it reflects one angle of the social and ethical changes within Chinese society over the last ten years. It shocks us as it painstakingly unfolds, step by step, the process of change. Focusing on ordinary people’s lives, Liu excavates deep meaning from thoughtful reflection and historical connections. Despite the fact that sometimes he has difficulty driving his narratives, the conclusions of his stories are often a wake-up call to his readers. Luo Weizhang’s representative works include “About Face” (变脸 Bian lian), “Who Can We Save” (我们能够拯救谁 Women nenggou zhengjiu shui), “Story of the Elder Sister-in-Law” (大嫂谣 Dasao yao), “Our Road” (我们的路 Women de lu), and “Our Growing Up” (我们的成长 Women de chengzhang). These stories tell of the subaltern and hardship, but their characters do not fall into simple binary oppositions like urban/ rural or rich/poor. Rather, Luo Weizhang attempts to grasp the richness of reality from a more complex perspective. In “About Face,” Chen Taixue (陈太学) is a part-time labor contractor. He acts obsequiously toward and sends gifts to the larger contractors of the city, but he skims the wages and delays or avoids paying those like him who have come from the villages to work. The story does not offer a simple value judgment on Chen’s behavior; rather it shows the complexities of his life and the split in his inner mind. This split is a portrait of the small contractor’s embarrassing state of being caught between the city and the countryside, and it sym- bolizes the spiritual disease of the times. “Our Road” reveals the fate of two young migrant workers, showing how they belong neither in town nor in country: they have no way of making a comfortable life in the city, but they cannot return to their rural home. They can only flee back and forth between the two. The narrators of most of Luo Weizhang’s stories are fringe intellectuals who have left the countryside yet cannot fit into mainstream urban life. From their perspective we see a different city. This kind of narration both participates in the story and continuously reflects on it, giving a unique perspective. His writing, and the other authors and works mentioned here, all evidence the vitality and extensive artistic pal- ette of subaltern literature.4

4 For more examples of subaltern literature see: “Divine Wood” (神木 Shen mu) and “Spy” (卧底 Wodi) by Liu Qingbang; Happy (高兴 Gaoxing) by Jia Pingwa; “Gadfly Spring” (牛虻子的春天 Niumangzi de chuntian) and “Dance” (起舞 Qi wu) by Chi Zijian; “Father Is Still in Yuyin Street” (父亲还在渔隐街 Fuqin hai zai yuyin jie) by Fan Xiaoqing; “Record 60 li yunlei

III. Three Critical Perspectives toward Subaltern Literature

In the debates about subaltern literature, several critical questions arise: whether or not intellectuals can speak for the subalterns; whether or not subaltern literature tends to take a position of moral high ground; and whether or not subaltern literature is heavy on sociological implications and light on literary or artistic quality. The ability of intellectual writers to speak for the subalterns is much debated. Let us first explore the idea of “speaking for” someone. Strictly speaking, no one can speak for someone else; indeed most people may not even be able to speak clearly for themselves, because people tend to speak differently on different occasions about the same issue. In this sense, “I” as the subject is not always together, transparent, or complete, but full of cracks. On the other hand, as a social individual, a person can be relatively together and different from another person, meaning that to a certain extent, “I” can be representative. Furthermore, individuals are social beings, informed by their social relationships and their specific background. One’s words therefore consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously bear the traces of one’s class, race, country, and gender—this is what allows us the possibility of “speaking for.” Can writers and intellectuals speak for the subalterns then? I think we can propose the following: first, intellectuals cannot fully represent the subalterns, because there are too many differences between the two groups, as many people have already said. Secondly, even if that is the case, writers’ and intellectuals’ concern for and expression of the hardships of the subaltern is worthy of respect; it is better than being indifferent or contemptuous. Of course, ide- ally, the subalterns would speak directly, but even their own speech can be problematic. For example, they might only pay attention to their own individual, immediate, and superficial interests, unable to notice the integrated, long-term, and fundamental interests of the subalterns as a group. The “transcendental” nature of writers and intellectuals, in contrast, may allow them the possibility of accomplishing just that. In this sense, I

of Li Sheng” (李生记 Li Sheng ji) by Wei Wei; “Zhu Daqin, Please Contact This Station” (朱大琴，请与本台联系 Zhu Daqin, qing yu bentai lianxi) by Ma Qiufen; Past Affairs of the World (江湖往事 Jianghu wangshi) by Zhou Changyi; Serene Scenery (太平风物 Tai ping fengwu) by Li Rui; Chinaberry Tree (苦楝树 Kulian shu) and Factory Meeting (工厂工会 Gongchang gonghui) by Chu He; the “Xiema Village” (歇马山庄 Xiema shanzhuang) series by Sun Huifen; and the works of Zhang Chu, Ge Liang, Lu Min, Chen Jiyi, Gui Jin, Hai Fei, and Li Tie. subaltern literature: theory and practice 61 argue that the best scenario is one in which intellectuals and subalterns “speak” together; they both give unique voices to the subalterns. The second issue of debate is essentially a question of morality. For the purposes of this discussion, the relationship between subaltern literature and morality can be divided into several points. The first question is whether or not writers make demands of others according to their own rigid moral ideals, and if so, whether this damages the artistic richness and complexity of their writing. If this is the case, then we should obviously oppose this method of writing. Secondly, can moral life serve as literary subject material? This undoubtedly occurs; moral life is part of human life—why should it be unable to be expressed? Finally, does a writer’s concern for the subaltern indicate his or her morality? Concern for hardships does not necessarily indicate a writer’s own moral nobility. If a writer has true sympathy and intense emotion, that is worthy of esteem. Right now what merits contemplation is that in China, writers with a sense of morality are actually discriminated against in the literary world. That “morality” became an issue had to do with a general moralizing tendency in Chinese literature historically. Pure literature has somewhat corrected this trend; perhaps most influential was Milan Kundera’s idea of the indefinite postponement of moral judgment. In Testaments Betrayed, he writes: Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most perni- cious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel.5 Since the 1980s, Chinese literature, influenced by the “suspension of moral judgment,” has avoided concern for moral issues, as if literature should not concern itself with morality. In popular view, the less moral a work, the more literary it is. Morality even became a prohibited subject, turning the issue upside-down from a liberating mode of thought to a mechanism of oppression. In the nineteenth century we see the collapse of absolute moral values, as symbolized by Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead.” The

5 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 7. 62 li yunlei works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are struggles with this spiritual predicament. The twentieth century produced the movies of Bergman, Ozu, and other masters, which explored the painful choice between old morality and new morality. Yet in China we went from the “three cardinal guides and five constant virtues” (三纲五常 sangang wuchang) to having no guiding order in sight. In just a hundred-odd years, China’s moral standards changed at a pace unprecedented in five thousand years of history. Today’s moral chaos is similarly unique, but these changes have not yet received sufficient attention from writers, and seemingly very few people feel pained by them, which is quite regrettable. However, it must be emphasized that what we need today, instead of rigid moral standards, is concern for and consideration of history and the current condition, and we need to rebuild the structure of moral life on that foundation. This is a crucial issue for China and Chinese literature both. We must begin from the smallest possibilities, the most fundamental consensus, for only if we begin there do we have a chance to rebuild our moral standards and core value system. During this process, literature, which tasks itself with concern for the human spirit, ought to make use of its unique ability to lead the vanguard. It ought to at least confront and show concern for morality, not simply avoid it. The social significance and literary value of subaltern literature is related to the question of how “literary character” is understood. What is literature—and what is not? The issue has never been resolved, and perhaps it requires a historical understanding rather than an essentialist one. Changes in the understanding of literature always bring revolutionary changes to the nature of literature. For example, before Liang Qichao, novels and plays were considered inferior literature, if literature at all. Before Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, vernacular writing was only the language of common people. In the view of avant-garde writers, realist writing is not literature or pure literature. Reportage and documentary literature were the most influential writing forms in the 1980s, but they are not considered literature either. Thus one important function of subaltern literature is the expansion of our understanding of literature and literary character. This is its liberating purpose. It has broken through the existing boundaries of our fixed understanding of literature and reinserted some content and methods back into the purview of literature. This is in itself a revolutionary change. Just as no pure theory of art exists, there is no pure theory of instrumental- ism. When evaluating any work, we must begin from the dual perspectives of aesthetics and history. If either is cast aside, the evaluation will be biased. subaltern literature: theory and practice 63

Certainly we do not think that all subaltern narratives are necessarily good works, nor do we think that other types of literature are necessarily bad. From this perspective, we oppose the idea that subject material determines the work, and likewise the idea that all subjects are the same. Rather, we hope that an author of subaltern literature can bring a unique perspective to the secrets of life, express them in an artistic way, and in the process naturally manifest concern and care for the subaltern. We highly appraise works such as Chen Yingsong’s “The Masiling Case,” Hu Xuewen’s “Homi- cide Case,” and Luo Weizhang’s “Story of the Wife” because they not only write about the subaltern, they achieve a certain level of artistry, and thus we affirm them both aesthetically and historically. Subaltern literature is important not only for its concern for reality and social problems, but also as a unique artistic creation. However, there are also problems with subaltern literature. These problems greatly restrict its development and thus merit our concern and consideration. Three issues most affect subaltern literature, the first being a lack of conceptual resources. Many works are based on a simple humanist sympathy that, although worthy of respect, is not enough. If limited to merely compassion, the writer’s potential depth of thought is crippled. The next problem is an overly intense “elite consciousness.” Many authors write of the subaltern and their hardships but stand and represent them from a superior position. They depict the subaltern as ignorant and backward, without fully comprehending their latent strength. Finally, the anticipated readers of subaltern works are still intellectuals, critics, and the market. The works cannot be read or truly appreciated by the subaltern, and thus cannot have an effect in their lives.

IV. The Leftwing Literary Tradition and Related Theoretical Issues

Subaltern literature can be viewed as both a product of the failure of leftwing literature (左翼文学 zuoyi wenxue) and a sign of its rebirth. Leftist literature can also be called “revolutionary literature,” “socialist literature,” or “people’s literature.” It is characterized by the quest for social equality, resistance against class oppression, emphasis on the people, and criticism of reality. In a broad sense, the leftwing literary trend began with the debated revolutionary literature in the 1920s and continued through the leftist literature of the 1930s, the liberated area literature of the 1940s, and then seventeen-year literature (十七年文学 shiqinian wenxue) from 1949–66 and cultural revolution literature. After the 1980s, 64 li yunlei with the constant marginalization of traditional Marxist thought and Mao Zedong’s philosophies, leftwing literature came to be abandoned. The rise of subaltern literature is closely related to the immense changes in Chinese society in the 1990s, but it was also driven by the debates in the intellectual and literary worlds, hastened by said social change, over the New Left/Liberalism and pure literature. Because subaltern literature has much in common with the goals of the original leftwing literature, it enables us to reconsider the tradition of leftwing literature and its lessons. We can then draw on that knowledge to benefit the healthy, long-term development of subaltern literature. If we are unable to squarely face the rise and fall of leftwing literature, then subaltern literature will not have much of a future. Before the end of the Cultural Revolution, a unified leftwing literary theory enveloped all literary creation, rendering it impossible to judge leftwing literature in an objective manner. The following years told a different story: In the 1980s, at the time all we heard and saw were denunciations and negations of leftwing literature, especially the liberated-area literature of the Yan’an period and the literature of the 1950s and 1960s after the establishment of the PRC. This literature was declared by many theorists to have been a regression, and it was thrown wholesale onto the already infamous pile of extreme leftist political policy trash. Evaluations of some writers were completely reversed. This of course is related to the 1980s thought liberation movement, the “awakening” of the people, and the call for literary subjectivity.6 For the last twenty years we have been passively absorbing the lessons of leftwing literature, but we have not sufficiently researched the legacies it has left us. Actually, leftwing literature produced a lot that is worth exploring, for example, a quest for a national form and “populariza- tion,” and its spirit in directly confronting reality. These are relevant to our understanding of the subaltern. The key question is whether we can treat leftwing literature without ideological prejudice, draw on its experiences, and learn from its failings when showing concern for the subaltern, because otherwise we will just repeat the same cycle. This is the challenge faced by current writers and theorists.

6 Liu Jiming 刘继明 and Kuang Xinnian 旷新年, “Xin zuoyi wenxue yu dangxia sixiang jingkuang 新左翼文学与当下思想境况 [New Leftist Literature and the State of Con temporary Thought],” Duowei xinwen 多维新闻, June 16, 2006, accessed June 20, 2012. http://global.dwnews.com/news/2006-06-16/2324010-2.html. subaltern literature: theory and practice 65

As I see it, the largest problem in subaltern literature is a shortage of theory. We can understand the “subaltern” of “subaltern literature” as a prescription of subject material, or as a humanitarian tendency to care for the bottom rung of society. But we lack a stronger, more solid support. Even the concept of the subaltern is ambiguous. Cai Xiang, Nan Fan, Liu Jiming, and a few other scholars have already done some research in this area, but it warrants further examination. One might say that the proposal of the subaltern as a concept is an expression of a leftist predicament, although it also indicates new possibilities. Today, people no longer identify with the “proletariat” and “the people”—these concepts can no longer gather the force needed for social change. Precisely for this reason we must integrate new theories and resources from the real world around us. Hardt and Negri in Empire introduce the concept of “multitude” (to take the place of “people”) as the future revolutionary subject, making one step in that direction.7 “Subaltern” is a structural concept; in any society or theoretical resource the subaltern can be found. The term can integrate various theoretical resources, but it is relatively vague, not as vivid or clearly defined as the concept of class. Yet this may well demonstrate the ambiguous nature of how people deal with class issues in contemporary society. In terms of theory, modern leftwing literature in China is rife with achievements. Lu Xun, Qu Qiubai, Mao Zedong, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Hu Feng, Zhou Yang, Feng Xuefeng, Ding Ling, and others all raised new issues and offered their own answers. Their writings provide ideas for contemporary authors of subaltern literature to draw on. Additionally, the Chinese adaption of Marxist art theory provides a methodological foundation for how subaltern literature can absorb and incorporate the various strands of thought that have arisen in the post-Mao era. The greatest mistake of leftwing literature, one which we must avoid, is the way it merged with mainstream ideology and became a dogmatic tool for propaganda and control. Leftwing literature gradually lost sight of its original pursuit; it stopped criticizing social injustice and opposing class oppression, and finally became an inversion of its original self. Today, subaltern literature must remain vigilant about the new dominant ideology and maintain a critical distance while continuing to develop.

7 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 66 li yunlei

The development of subaltern literature also involves a few specific theoretical issues, among them realism, national form, human nature, and class. The realist mode of writing is dominant in subaltern literature, and many critics advocate it. But the use of realism also presents a series of questions. What is reality and what is truth? How do we understand reality? Do the characters have the ability to understand reality? These questions are proposed not with the intention of abandoning realism, but rather to raise new issues and new possibilities. Modernism and postmodernism were born in response to the above questions, and in a certain sense they too are a kind of realism. This is why Lukács in the end recognized Kafka as a realist, and why Garaudy considered the works of Picasso realism. If realism cannot confront challenges and only persists in its old understanding, it will be unable to face down the spiritual predicament of humanity in the modern world. It is in this sense that I argue that some of the explorations of pure literature provide us with resources to draw upon. If subaltern literature cannot learn from this particular literary legacy, it will be unable to do more than repeat it at a subpar level. However, we ought to recognize that some critics, such as Li Jianjun, advocate a realism with a direct interest in real-world issues, particularly in works of critical realism. The literary works of recent years tend to fall into one of two orientations. The first is “main-melody” literature, whose works generally sugarcoat reality. These authors use all sorts of artistic methods to argue that reality is rational and to legitimate the dominant ideology. The other form is pure literature. Works of pure literature are mostly limited to exploring the inner world of the individual, formal experimentation, and the opening of imaginative space. Neither of these two types of literature directly confronts Chinese reality and its ongoing changes, and thus they have lost touch with readers. In the current situation, advocating realism in literature is undoubtedly an effort toward directly confronting reality, and is worth affirming. However, as mentioned above, realism is not unproblematic itself. The whole set of worldviews and epistemology connected with realism has changed. If we cannot consider issues in light of a changed and changing context, then we will have no way to face the complexities of reality and write truly excellent works. Therefore, while we advocate confronting reality we should simultaneously broaden the general understanding of realism. We should merge realism with ideas from modernism and postmodernism, and in new literary creations we should develop new narrative art. If our understanding is limited to nineteenth-century critical realists, then at best we will only be able to write subaltern literature: theory and practice 67 second-rate imitations of the works of those great masters. This point should arouse our concern. When we merge realism with elements of modernism and postmodernism, however, they should not be appended as a suffix or simply merged in. The combination is a necessary step toward confronting reality, and it should be a process of deepening contemplation. The merge ought to increase our understanding and recognition of reality, not complicate or lessen it. Chen Xiaoming keenly notes that some works that illustrate hardships and the subaltern have a problem of “aesthetic disengagement,” meaning that rather than profoundly reflecting the issues, they use aesthetics to cloak, conceal, and overturn reality and its narratives, and with imaginative resolutions weaken the acuteness of the issue. This method of writing is not worth adopting. When confronting reality, writing should be sharper, deeper, and stronger. As Kuang Xinnian (旷新年) has boldly stated, “Subaltern literature should be whipped on forcefully” (底层文学要用鞭子狠抽 diceng wenxue yao yong bianzi henchou). “National form” is an important topic, one which is tightly linked to content. True national form ought to be able to express the nation’s character, the psychological structure of the nation, and the spirit of the nation. Chi- nese writers must work toward creating a new national form. The “new aesthetic principle” proposed in the 1980s was merely a set of Western modernist, elitist, and aesthetic criterion meant to prescribe norms for Chinese literature; today’s subaltern literature contains the potential for a new aesthetic principle, and this principle is Chinese not Western, of the people and not the elite, and accepting of all kinds of writing modes, not just the modernist form. In the 1940s the question of national form received great attention, but there were disagreements. Some critics advocated drawing from the classical and folk traditions; some championed national content with a modern (Western) form; and yet others wanted to develop a new national form out of attention to reality. The issue of national form remains significant today. Truly excellent literary works are necessarily both national and international, but only by planting roots in the soil of national life can we create this kind of superior literature. As to the beauty of human nature and human feelings, in Chinese literature and art there were once two extremes. On one side, party and class concerns eclipsed human nature. For a time this was the dominant trend in the literary world, causing our literature to only depict people’s political lives and hence neglect the richer and broader parts of life. Of course, from a historical perspective, this was a kind of progress in comparison to writing only about human nature, yet its deficiencies are clear. In this 68 li yunlei form of literature characters have only the single aspect of class, and as a result they all become class symbols. This led directly to literature becoming formulaic and excessively conceptualized. Class is one part of human nature within class societies, certainly, but it is not the entirety of the person. On the other extreme, since the 1980s we have excessively emphasized human nature, negating class. This has led to our literature neglecting the social and political aspects of its characters. Literature went from being about the “beauty of human nature” to the “evil of human nature,” and depicted only the biological nature of humans. Desire replaced class as the driving force. This second extreme is more or less the defect of our literature at present, however, the appearance of subaltern literature allows us reevaluate literary traditions and spur deeper discussions of related theoretical issues.

V. The Importance and Future of Subaltern Literature

I argue that there are three main reasons why we should advocate subaltern literature. First, subaltern literature is a kind of contemporary avant- garde literature. In the past we had a fixed conceptual view of avant-garde literature, thinking that it referred only to formal exploration, and we were taught to consider anything written in a different or original way to be avant-garde. The truth of the matter is that while the avant-garde literature of the mid 1980s was limited to the exploration of form and the inner mind, subaltern literature is a form that touches on content and issues that avant-garde literature did not acknowledge, such as explorations of the world outside the mind, and ways to connect the two together. The thirty years of Reform and Opening have brought China great vitality, but some changes have garnered widespread debate since the turn of the century, especially in 2006, the year of “reflecting on revolution.” One positive aspect of the subaltern form is that it is able to, through its own literature, enter society and participate in intellectual debates. Since the conflict between the New Left and Liberals in 1998, there has been a fierce debate over the question of which path China should take. One key issue is how to deal with the subaltern who make up the majority of China’s population. One growing attitude is completely different from the belief that the subaltern can be ignored and cast side. Members of this camp consider the subaltern to be the de-facto principle body of Chinese society, and feel that only with the development of this group can China as a whole develop. Subaltern literature has joined the debate on this level. subaltern literature: theory and practice 69

Its search for the subjectivity of the subaltern, its emphasis of their function in social development, and its description of their real life hardships provide much food for thought. Speaking solely from a literary perspective, subaltern literature is a new trend. Starting in the 1980s, pure literature occupied the mainstream literary world, but since the turn of the century it has been reconsidered by many, in the hopes that literature can reestablish relations with reality and subaltern society. Scholars of literary research continue to reflect on the issue today. The appearance of subaltern literature can be considered a creative reflection on the previous trend. In this sense, subaltern literature is avant-garde in the true meaning of the term. The second reason we should advocate subaltern literature is that it is the successor to May Fourth New Literature, a kind of “New Culture” (in the 21st century). Beginning in the 1980s, we gradually bid farewell to the May Fourth era of literature. The May Fourth literary trend as understood here contains three parts: leftwing literature, liberalist literature, and art-for-art’s-sake literature. However, after the mid-1980s, the leftwing literary form was basically kicked out of the narrative of literary history. The liberal writers’ contingent continued to strengthen, and avant-garde literature and pure literature, which we can call “art for art’s sake,” also flourished for a time. But by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the influence of liberalism and avant-garde literature shrunk to only a small circle who maintained the superiority of pure literature. This was a result of the development of the market economy and mass media. The function required of literature changed from enlightenment and redemption to consumption and entertainment. After this, popular literature steadily entered our field of vision and occupied more and more space within it. We all know the importance of May Fourth Thought and New Culture. In a certain sense we can say that if not for the May Fourth New Culture, we would not have New China and our present situation. Yet since the late 1990s, and especially today, the entire literary establishment has already deviated from the direction of May Fourth New Literature. Therefore, the appearance of subaltern literature seems especially important. It seeks to represent the interests of the subaltern, and moreover it supports the direction of May Fourth New Cul- ture. Before May Fourth, the state of literature was comparatively chaotic. Literature was dominated by exposé novels, wuxia (martial-arts) novels, officialdom novels, courtesan novels, the “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” school, and so on. Today’s literary establishment has come full circle; it too is dominated by these types of popular novel. 70 li yunlei

During the May Fourth period, Lu Xun and Mao Dun both offered forceful criticism of this literary style. Writers like Zhang Henshui (张恨水) were especially influential at the time. Lu Xun’s mother, who did not know that her son was an author, most loved to read Zhang Henshui’s works. Laughter and Tears (啼笑姻缘 Tixiao yanyuan) and The Noble Family (金粉世家 Jinfen shijia) by Zhang Henshui in fact have an effect that can almost be compared to that of opium. They cause people to, amidst the pleasure of reading, subconsciously lose clear recognition and judgment. However, New Literature is different. Writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun take parts of reality and write them for people to read. They do this not to make the reader comfortable, but to make people re-recognize themselves and the world, and to make people act on this recognition. Lu Xun said he wrote to turn attention toward saving people, and to reform the unreasonable and unequal social order. New Literature and New Cul- ture worked to cause people to confront and change reality, not to escape from it into fantasy. Subaltern literature is just that kind of literary form. Looking at it now, we can see that it is an integration of the leftist and liberal traditions of May Fourth New Literature and Culture. The third reason that subaltern literature is critical to China is its social function. Whether we call the important function of subaltern literature an ideological struggle or a struggle for cultural leadership, we can summarize it as a matter of fanxin (翻心): upturning the mind. Our term fan shen (翻身 upturning the body), refers to one’s emancipation from slave to master, but how one changes from slave to master is actually a process of awakening. Subaltern literature should have this effect. When done correctly, it causes people to expand their minds, allowing them to recognize the unjust aspects of society and thereby raising the possibility of changing the status quo. This is the function of the awakening process. Fanxin, in my opinion, has two functions. One is the awakening process; the other occurs later, after awakening and after emancipation. If the society remains cannibalistic, adhering to survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle, then all the emancipation has accomplished is turning the formerly oppressed into the new oppressors. Following the initial emancipation, subaltern literature ought to be effective in “upturning the mind,” that is, changing people’s minds so they have a critical understanding of popular social ideology. Thus they will create a new culture and new relations between people. Only through this process can subaltern literature merge into the evolving face of China and the world, and contribute its strengths toward making society fairer and more just. Chapter Three

The “Crime” of Lu Xun, Anti-Enlightenment, and Chinese Modernity: A CRITIQUE of Liu Xiaofeng’s “Christian Theology”1

Lu Xinyu Translated by Adrian Thieret

After the 1980s, a sharp division appeared in Lu Xun (鲁迅) studies in China. This division between those who upheld and those denigrated the importance of Lu Xun was itself a mark of the division in China’s New Enlightenment group of intellectuals. Actually, however, Chinese postmodernist critics were not the first to wholly condemn Lu Xun. Liu Xiaofeng’s 1988 book Deliverance and Dalliance (拯救与逍遥 Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao), serves as a representative exposition.2 In this sense, the evo lution of “postmodernism,” which evolved into a wholesale negation of the May Fourth movement and deconstruction of Chinese Enlightenment thought, did not arise out of a void. It too was a spiritual legacy of 1980s China. In his book, Liu Xiaofeng is concerned with the question of how to confront the value nihilism (价值虚无主义 jiazhi xuwu zhuyi) of the twentieth century. In the process of unpacking the question, he compares Chinese and Western culture throughout history, emphasizing Chinese historical figures such as Qu Yuan (屈原), Ji Kang (季康), Tao Yuanming (陶渊明), Cao Xueqin (曹雪芹), and Lu Xun. Although these historical figures have different backgrounds and stories, Liu Xiaofeng reaches the same conclusion for all of them. That is, he essentially negates wholesale Chinese culture and Chinese intellectuals who as a group are the bearers of culture. This train of thought is not so strange when placed within the body of 1980s Enlightenment thought; at the time the Chinese/Western binary was the dominant paradigm for research in the intellectual world.

1 This article was first published in Tianya 天涯 3 (2009). 2 Liu Xiaofeng 刘小枫, Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao: Zhongxifang shiren dui shijie de butong taidu 拯救与逍遥：中西方诗人对世界的不同态度 [Deliverance and Dalliance: The Different Attitudes toward the World of Chinese and Western Poets] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chu banshe, 1988, revised edition published by Sanlian shudian, 2001). 72 lu xinyu

The dichotomized juxtaposition of foreign and mainland Chinese culture in River Elegy (河殇 Heshang)3 vividly demonstrates this characteristic.4 However, Liu Xiaofeng disagrees with the traditional Chinese/Western dichotomy. As he sees it, there is not much difference between China and the West, although one needs to examine his later work for a bet ter understanding of this idea of general similarity. From Liu’s stance, rejecting the binary dichotomy is actually a twofold criticism: negation of traditional Chinese culture and criticism of both Chinese and Western Enlightenment thought. This twofold criticism opens, for Liu, the road to God; Christian metaphysics is the only road to deliverance.

I. The Twofold “Crime” of Lu Xun

Let us first examine Liu Xiaofeng’s study of Lu Xun. His condemnation of Lu Xun grew stronger from the first publication of Deliverance and Dalliance in 1988 to the revised edition of 2001. His criticism cites two resources: The cultural tradition in which Lu Xun is from never gave him a conviction in the power of love and prayer, and so it is almost understandable that he never had the sentiments and temperament of Dostoyevsky. But it is said that Lu Xun is well-versed in Western learning. Indeed, through his study of the West, Lu Xun did in fact know of Jesus Christ who “was torn apart by masses of Jews,” and knew of the Christian convictions deep within the Western spirit. What is more, he also knew that the Chinese national char acter “lacked sincerity and love the most.” The problem is, Lu Xun did not believe in claiming Christ’s conviction; rather, he believed that the evil had more force.5 As Liu sees it, Lu Xun’s “greatness” lay in “cold, awake eyes” that only proved his Western dalliance; furthermore, the fact that Lu Xun became

3 He Shang (River elegy) is a six-episode commentary documentary organized accord ing to themes. It was aired in 1988 by Chinese Central Television Station. 4 Reading Deliverance and Dalliance in comparison with Qin Hui and Su Wen’s Tianyu anshi yu Kuangxiangqu: Guanzhong moshi yu qianjindai shehui de zai renshi 田园诗与狂想曲：关中模式与前近代社会的再认识 [Pastoral Poetry and Rhapsody: The Guan zhong Mode and Re-understanding Premodern Society], the 1980s paradigm becomes com paratively clear. The latter book was published in 1996 by Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, but it was written in the 1980s. See my review of the book in Dushu 4 (2004), “Nongmin, xiangcun shehui yu minzu guojia de xiandaihua zhi lu 农民，乡村社会与民族国家的现代化之路 [Peasants, Rural Society, and the Modernization Road of the Nation-State].” 5 Liu Xiaofeng, Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao (2001), 329. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 73 a fellow traveler of Western modern nihilism was the result of his own re- evocation of the arrogant aloofness, wildness, and absurdness of the Wei and Jin culture, and the heartlessness of Cao Xueqin’s stone (曹雪芹的石头之无情 Cao Xueqin de shitou zhi wuqing). Thus Liu Xiaofeng succeeds in pinning two separate crimes on Lu Xun. The first is Lu Xun’s negation/rejection of China’s “feudal” nature from the perspective of Western Enlightenment, namely “the darkness of the soul” that Lu Xun himself repeatedly evoked: But I am troubled by the old spirits/ghosts I bear; I cannot shake them off and always feel a heaviness suffocating me.6 [Hence] awakened people, they must each liberate their own children. They must themselves bear the heavy burden and hold up the gates of dark ness, allowing their children to enter into the broad, bright place, and there after pass the days in happiness and be reasonable people.7 These expressions, in Liu Xiaofeng’s opinion, demonstrate that “the dark ness of the soul that results from shouldering the gates of darkness is already part of Lu Xun: the dark gates are shouldered by a dark heart.”8 Liu’s assumption is that if the soul that props up the gates of darkness is not dark, but is instead sensitive to evil, then shouldering those gates will not cause the soul to meld with the darkness. Dostoyevsky and Kafka are examples of this. Will the hero who props up the stone be warped by its pressure, or become a stone himself, and be swallowed by the nature of the stone? If the price of the hero shouldering the stone is that he must become a stone, for oth erwise he will not have the strength to bear it, then will the people who crawl beneath him also be turned into stone? Even if the hero shoulders the stone, the new land into which the people enter will still have stones as road markers. So, is the new world to which he directs people to enter still one made of stones? Will his sacrifice contribute to bringing people a new quality of life?9 To Liu Xiaofeng, the answer to the last question is of course no. So in order for Lu Xun to shoulder the dark gates, “his soul inevitably grew more and

6 Lu Xun, “Xie zai Fen houmian 写在《坟》后面 (Postscript to the Grave),” in Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005), 301. 7 Lu Xun, “Women xianzai zenyang zuo fuqin 我们现在怎样做父亲 (How Do We Be Fathers Now),” Lu Xun quanji vol. 1, 135. 8 Liu Xiaofeng, Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao, 338. 9 Ibid., 322. 74 lu xinyu more sinister” (越来越阴毒 yuelai yue yindu), culminating into a kind of resentment (怨恨 yuanhen): Lu Xun’s soul matured early amidst resentment. Once the poison of resent ment eats all of the good things in the human soul, other than self-castigation, mockery, and satirizing, will an empty soul aspire to and seek any noble spirits?10 This idea culminated in and was summarized by Liu Xiaofeng’s famous thesis: Lu Xun became the national soul by criticizing the national character. Is this national soul not precisely that national character which he criticized? If we do not push aside the “dark gates” of Lu Xun’s spirit, can the Chinese spirit hope for a bright future?11 Lu Xun embodies the feudal darkness that Liu criticizes; this is Lu Xun’s first crime. The second layer of crime is that Lu Xun never introduced new forces or blocked the old. Liu Xiaofeng argues this point in an effort to condemn the Enlightenment thought represented by Lu Xun. “It is not that Lu Xun did not want to awaken the masses. Rather, it is that he knew the masses could not be awakened. It is two entirely different issues to (1) think that enlightenment itself is ultimately a disaster for human life, and (2) think that enlightenment itself is absolutely not possible.”12 Saying that enlightenment itself is disaster is Liu Xiaofeng’s way of identifying with the so-called post-Enlightenment profundity. For Liu, such identification is in direct conflict with Lu Xun’s ideas, because “Lu Xun fundamentally thought there was nothing wrong with Enlightenment ideas,” and because “Lu Xun never gave up hope for the future, which contrasts sharply with Kafka’s despair and refusal to speak of hope.” This is exactly why Lu Xun must be criticized: he used the evil of enlightenment to oppose the evil of feudalism. “What Lu Xun changed was merely the excuse given for eat ing people; he submitted to the fact of eating people. Is this not the true meaning of ‘shouldering the gates of darkness?’ ” Liu goes further: Dostoyevsky’s insight was that Enlightenment rationality does not eliminate the tense relationship between God and humanity; he maintained a desper ate belief in God. Lu Xun’s insight was that since evil is a fact of the living world, we must and should praise evil rather than believe in or pray to godly

10 Ibid., 339. 11 Ibid., 341. 12 Ibid., 335. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 75

things; aside from humans’ right to life, all other values are fake and help the evil of history to suffocate life.13 In Liu Xiaofeng’s view, Christianity is greater than enlightenment human ism, because the fire of enlightenment that Lu Xun stole from the West is unable to solve the problem of human nihilism. Since this humanist enlightenment results in nihilism—and Western nihilism has already been pointed out by Heidegger to have roots in the Western metaphysi cal tradition—Lu Xun’s “borrowed doctrine” of enlightenment is therefore nothing more than a marriage between Western and Chinese nihilism. Liu Xiaofeng declares that Chinese nihilism arises from the tradition of Confucian faith, with Zhuangzi and Zen thought as one proof, and “mod ern Chinese nihilism” as another. He cites this longevity in the following argument: “China and the West both have nihilistic convictions and senti ments, but Chinese nihilism has much deeper origins and longer history than Western nihilism. On the other hand, Chinese and Western nihilism, in the radical advancement of the modern century, have both brought forth colossal historical disasters.”14 It is clear that Liu Xiaofeng’s criticism of Lu Xun’s dark side is also a criticism of Chinese feudal culture (封建文化 fengjian wenhua). On this point he actually borrows from the enlightened perspective of Lu Xun’s own self-criticism. But he then puts Lu Xun into the camp of “Western nihilism,” thereby making his criticism of Lu Xun also a criticism of mod ern Western Enlightenment thought. There Liu borrows from Western “anti-enlightenment” conservatism, and consequently his road of deliver ance would also be based in Western thought. The theology of “cultural Christianity” (文化基督教神学 wenhua jidujiao shenxue) is the solution that he tirelessly advocates, one with which he wants to replace the blood of Chinese culture. No one can say his ambition is not lofty! This is why he single-mindedly seeks to break Lu Xun as the “spine” of China, so Chinese people may kneel and pray for God’s grace: “With Lu Xun as the national soul, the Chinese spirit will never deign to break this ‘spine,’ nor as a result will it ever deign to pray for the grace of God.”15 This is truly an astonishing thesis. According to Liu Xiaofeng, rejection of Lu Xun signifies a double negation: negation of traditional Chinese cul ture and negation of the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. He wants

13 Ibid., 328. 14 Liu Xiaofeng, Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao (1988), 533. 15 Liu Xiaofeng, Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao (2001), 352. 76 lu xinyu

Lu Xun to bear responsibility for the failures of modern Chinese history and wants post–May Fourth Chinese Enlightenment intellectuals to bear responsibility for the Chinese revolution and violence. Perceived sepa rately, these two negations are not anything new. Liu Xiaofeng’s distinc tion is that, in order to clear a path for Christian theology, he wants to completely eradicate one—by way of double negation—and establish the other (大破大立 da po da li). From this standpoint, Liu Xiaofeng’s negation of Lu Xun is already pre determined. In his subsequent writings, Liu continues to apply his theory of “resentment” to explain the Chinese revolution and the Great Cultural Revolution, the two most important events of twentieth-century Chinese history; there, his conclusions are also already predetermined.

II. Resentment, Equality, and Chinese Modernity

Liu Xiaofeng cites Scheler’s viewpoint that resentment is the original driver of religious reform, and that it pushed the arrival of the capital ist spirit. Since in Marxist theory the birth of the proletariat was a direct result of a capitalist economic and cultural system, resentment is then somewhat connected with socialism. This resentment, according to Liu’s summary of Scheler, is an emotion of ethics of existence. It involves injury, forbearance, and feelings of impotence related to existence. It manifests a co-existential relationship between the injurer and the injured, a kind of socialized psychological structure in which the self and the “other” are compared. From Marx and Nietzsche to Freud and today’s postmodernists, criticisms of ideology and of the power of knowledge are all expressions of resentment. This resentment, Liu’s summary continues, usually can be traced to one of two causes, the first being shifts in contemporary socio political power and economic resources. The other is the appearance of a cultural institution that upholds the innate human right to social equality; as a result of this belief, a sense of equal rights and the theory of equality become the mechanism for accumulation of social resentment. Compared to a society of social hierarchy, a class society arouses resentment, which consequently promotes the ethics of capitalism. From the thirteenth century on, the bourgeois class has repeatedly rushed to the forefront of history. In Revolutionary France, resentment was one of the reasons the Third Estate sought liberty and revolution. Political democracy and vari ous other movements in modern society are thus all partly a function of resentment. As Liu wrote, “Enlightenment thought is, essentially speaking, “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 77 a product of resentment. Its consequence is the overturning of values or a preference for abnormal values.”16 On the level of cultural order, this means the judgment of the masses squashing the ideals of the elite. After thus expounding on Scheler, Liu Xiaofeng establishes his own task, which is closely tied to socialism: “After the spirit of capitalism was disrupted in the socialization of modernizing Chinese society, it became mainly an oppositional force to the idea of socialist spirit and socialist practices. As a result, when discussing the China issue, we must investigate the connec tion between resentment and modernity in relation to socialist spirit.” In this way, when the enlightenment-inspired appeal for equality is replaced with the notion of resentment, the foundation of justice is removed from under the enlightenment. When resentment is set as the only relationship between the self and the “other,” the other and the self are then actually set to be the same, with resentment as the driving force of both. In this theory, there is no place for the true and absolute “other,” nor can the other be the starting point of justice. As Levinas once cri tiqued, since the “other” is set as a yet-to-complete self, this theory already contains intrinsic elements of autocracy. Liu’s promotion of Scheler’s theories comes down to this point: social ism’s right to become the preferred value system in China was due to its inherent sense of equality, which functioned both as the force for the con struction of the nation-state and also as the force that stoked the resent ment that led to social revolution. The goal of socialist revolution in China is seen by Liu as a nationalistic pursuit, in which resentment was stirred by comparing the nation to the competitive worldwide cultural order. The Great Cultural Revolution was a social movement of moderniza tion; it was a concentrated and extreme expression of the issue of moder nity in China. Consequently, Liu Xiaofeng does not agree with those who see it as a return to feudalism: “The ideal of a socialist democratic nation- state arises from the French Enlightenment movement and is likewise a modern concept. China’s construction of socialism was a modernity pro gram, and the Great Cultural Revolution arose within the social practice of this construction program. Therefore, the Great Cultural Revolution was a modernization event. Obviously, we cannot consider the liberal capital ism of England and American to be the only form of modernization.”17

16 Liu Xiaofeng, Xiandaixing shehui lilun xulun 现代性社会理论绪论 [Introduction to Modern Social Theory] (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 377. 17 Ibid., 388. 78 lu xinyu

On this point, Liu Xiaofeng actually sees more clearly than many neo- liberals in China. He thinks that those who argue that the so-called salva tion overwhelmed enlightenment ideals (救亡压倒启蒙 jiuwang yadao qimeng) fail to see that the enlightenment views of modern liberal democ racy and people’s democracy share the same genealogical spectrum. The socialist style of enlightenment was never “overcome” (压倒 yadao), in Liu’s opinion, and the Cultural Revolution was its apogee. According to Liu, the Chinese revolution appeared to be a socialist revolution, but in essence it was the nation-state establishing itself. Marxism and Leninism provided strong theoretical defenses and symbols for China’s opposition to the West. To surpass capitalism would result in the Western powers bowing their heads in obeisance to China; that, according to Liu, was the essence of Mao Zedong Thought. Despite its adoption of the narrative structure and rhetoric of Marxism, Mao Zedong Thought’s basic pursuit was cultural nationalism. The essence of Maoism, Liu continues, is not socialism but a certain nationalist resentment, “a kind of pure resentment that manifested in such radical socialist ideas as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which were all dominated by a nationalist resentment sentiment.”18 Liu Xiaofeng answers why cultural nationalism and Marxist notions of human liberation were integrated in the Chinese Communist Party’s political ideas: socialism was a card played against the West by the bearers of Chinese nationalism; it was a use of Western ideas to counter the West. Feelings of national impotence and historical pride combined to originate resentment. Why did other injured nations not develop a similar combination of nationalism and Marxist/Leninist socialism? Because, according to Liu, the idea of great unity (大同主义 datong zhuyi) from traditional Chinese Confucianism merged with the universality of Marxism and Leninism. Therefore, the Great Leap For ward and the Cultural Revolution were motivated not by utopian ide als, but by nationalist resentment, because perfecting socialism meant becoming better than the West. Thus the Red Guard Movement was sim ply a modern rebellion that arose under the ideological control of this resentment-based motivation structure (动机结构 dongji jiegou). Today, the resentment arising from inequalities caused by the economic reforms is a post-Cultural Revolution issue of modernity, in Liu’s formulation. All appeals to social justice—ranging from the May Fourth movement

18 Ibid., 424. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 79 through today—lose their legitimacy and become footnotes to the larger scheme of “resentment.” It is not the task of this essay to detail the narrative of Chinese history offered by Liu Xiaofang’s theological philosophy. Here I mainly wish to show the reader how the logic that runs through Liu’s criticism of Lu Xun becomes the foundation of his criticism of the Chinese revolution and the Great Cultural Revolution, and how in his discussion a psychological con cept developed in Western Christian theology manages to sweep through Chinese and world history. His logic is apparently stronger than that of the Red Guards that he criticizes, because his is in the name of God.

III. Hegel’s “Spirit,” Nation-State, and Christian Theology

Liu Xiaofeng obtains a theologically-based supra-historical vision, and from it gains the high moral ground, from which he begins to righteously demand that Lu Xun bear responsibility for the Chinese revolution and that Chinese tradition bear responsibility for Chinese modernity. This is the core of his “philosophy of history” (历史哲学 lishi zhexue). Strangely, this philosophy of history never expects Christianity to bear responsibil ity for Western colonialism. Why? Because only this way can Christian theology be washed clean of the grime and blood of global history and made universally acceptable again. In this sense, Liu Xiaofeng’s theol ogy is anti-history—despite that he treats what is Chinese and what is not differently. Based on his beliefs, Liu Xiaofeng feels his task is to tease out from European thought the “metaphysical theology” (形而上学的神学 xing’er shangxue de shenxue) and “phenomenological theology” (现象学神学 xianxiangxue shenxue). Evils of history and of the present belong to meta physics, while phenomenological theology atones on the former’s behalf, becoming the “absolute” and “pure” spirit (绝对和纯粹之精神 juedui he chuncui zhi jingshen) that transcends opposition between China and the West: Phenomenological hermeneutics and Christian thought provide for me an understanding that transcends the binary opposition between Chinese/ Western thought, a competitive consciousness, and provides me with an ability to examine China and the West purely on the level of spirit. More over, the Christian standpoint I take is far from orthodox, rather, it is the phenomenological theology (Scheler and Heidegger) that rejects metaphysi cal theology. I have already involuntarily fallen into the internal conflicts of Western thought and can no longer merely assume the standpoint of 80 lu xinyu

Chinese traditional thought and collect scraps from modern thinkers. That is, I must either use Western learning to explain Chinese learning, or claim how Chinese learning is “superior” to Western learning; I will not bask in Western learning indiscriminately and strive for what is new and novel only for the purpose of finding some momentarily suitable explanations.19 Liu therefore begins a great journey toward the “absolute spirit.” In this he must confront Hegel. Why does Hegel say that everything belonging to the realm of the spirit is far from the Chinese people? In Liu Xiaofeng’s view, it is because Hegel’s spirit is in fact the Christian spirit. On this point we should actually agree with Liu Xiaofeng’s description—his own philoso phy of history is purely Western centrism/universalism that, by extension, constitutes the relationship between Christianity and China as an issue of modern philosophy. The problem is that by the time Protestantism expanded into China, along with the colonialism of Western nation-states, the capitalist spirit had already become the mightiest political force of modern Western nation-state. Scientific rationality and nation-state ethics suffocated Hegel’s Christian spirit: “the Christian spirit is turning into the capitalist spirit that becomes a problem of philosophy of history.”20 Yet Chinese intellectuals only consider Europe from the standpoint of science and reason, and only consider modern history from within the semantic structure of the Chinese cultural tradition. Both of these approaches are misguided, and lead them further and further away from Hegel’s spirit. However, Liu Xiaofeng does not even discuss that science, rationality, and the idea of the nation-state may be a development of Hegel’s spirit. In his explanation, he tries to protect Hegel’s spirit from these notions, just as he wants to save theology from Western history. He states that, “Sino-Christian theology is not a Sinicized theology, rather it is a Chris tian theology born within the existential circumstances and language of Chinese—theology in essence does not differ between China and the West.”21 By his account, the main sources of Europe’s internal conflicts were the rational spirit, the poetic spirit, and the spirit of revelation, which respectively accord with the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet. On this foundation, Liu Xiaofeng redefines Hegel’s spirit as neither the

19 Liu Xiaofeng, Zhengjiu yu xiaoyao (2001), 8. 20 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi 圣灵降临的叙事 [Account of the Coming of the Holy Spirit] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2003), 13. 21 Liu Xiaofeng, “ ‘Wenhua’ jidujiao xianxiang de shehuixue pingzhu ‘文化’基督教现象的社会学评注 [Sociological Comments on the Phenomenon of ‘Cultural’ Christian ity]”, in Jianjin hanzhi 拣尽寒枝 [Picking Up Cold Branches] (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2007), 180. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 81 rational spirit nor purely the spirit of revelation, but as a combination of the two (the poetic spirit is omitted completely). As such, the spirit is also political, and takes the form of phenomenological theology. Liu Xiaofeng believes that the sovereign and political pursuits of the newly formed European nation-states, and the appearance of Protestant ism, were strong factors in European internal tensions. The Chinese, he argues, fail to understand this connection and erroneously assume the scienticism (科学主义 kexue zhuyi) that allowed Europe to gain worldwide cultural and political power to be the real European spirit: Because, since the late Qing, the basic problem bothering Chinese intellec tuals has been the growth of China as a nation-state and China’s conflicted relationship with Western nation-states, the modern task of Sino-Christian theology (hanyu shenxue 汉语神学) is not only to work toward [construct ing] a spirit of its own, and clear up the roots of its conflict with Western culture—this will inevitably lead to a modern transformation of “China’s Great Logic” (中国之大理 zhongguo zhi dali) and to transformation of the character of individual belief. We must also consider the issue of modern philosophy of history in China, namely, modern changes of political sys tems. Consequently, we need not only explanatory theology (释义神学 shiyi shenxue) in order to understand that “spirit” in order to become that “spirit” (以便成为那个“精神”yibian chengwei nage “jingshen”), we also need political theology (政治神学 zhengzhi shenxue) in order to confront the same issues of philosophy of history that plague European thought.22 This argument necessitates that Liu Xiaofeng first clarify what the Euro pean spirit actually is. In his view, scienticism is protected by deism, and the establishment of Protestantism as the state religion of England formed a nation-state type of Christianity, leading to modern divisions and conflicts among European political forms. America waged its secular revolution in the name of this same god of deism and established its own nation-state form of state religion (建立了美国的民族国家式的国教 jianli le meiguo de minzu guojia shi de guojiao). The French Revolution signified the splintering of the collective European spirit of Christianity. Though everyone fought under the name of God, the gods in question appeared to be different and in conflict. The various European nations, all in conflict for their national interests, no longer enjoyed shared spiritual ideas, legal systems, and political systems. Hence arose the question of who had the power to define the spirit of the world, or at least the continent. Meanwhile, scientific Enlightenment was constantly under attack by the

22 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi, 17. 82 lu xinyu traditions of ancient Greek theology and the imperial theology of Chris tian Rome. In this sense, the Christian spirit was never the spirit of Europe, especially not after the start of the modern age. The pre-Christian spirit of Europe (i.e., Greek rationality and myth), and the modern spirit of Europe (i.e., science), do not necessarily equate or even relate to Hegel’s spirit. After the French Revolution, the nationalistic state ethic became the true political ethic of modern nation-state, and debates concerning liberalism, social democracy, and conservatism, which were originally related to the universal question of how people should live their lives, were turned into national value choices. However, are liberalism, social democracy, and conservatism really that distinct from one another? Did the concept of the nation-state itself not depend on these doctrines for its realization? Hegel’s theory of course has Christian origins, but it was to a great extent meant to explain the rise of the nation-state. Otherwise, why would he want to say that Christianity—the Germanic world to be exact—is the end of world his tory? The German scholar Löwith, whom Liu Xiaofeng reveres, states: For Hegel the so-called secularization of original Christianity—its spirit and its freedom—by no means signifies a reprehensible apostasy from its origi nal meaning. On the contrary: it signifies the true explication of this origin through positive realization.23 Therefore, the fundamental idea of Hegel’s ontology is determined by two sources: Grecian and Christian discourse. Liu Xiaofeng conveniently acknowledges only one and denies the other, as a result of the “politi cal correctness” of his Christian theology. In order to ultimately bring the world to the grace of Christ, he does not mind trimming historical fact to fit his purposes, cutting off “nationalism” to be a scapegoat for all the “evil” in Western history and whereby washing all crimes from the blend of liberalism and conservatism that is his theology. Such cleansing is natu rally suspicious. Liu Xiaofeng says that the gospel of Christianity inevitably conflicts with original national religions, which has been the case in both Europe and China. However, he continues, in modern Chinese history the Sino- Christian theological world has also sought to stand with the Enlighten ment spirit and Confucian culture, rendering it unable to find its own problem consciousness (问题意识 wenti yishi) and position.

23 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, trans. David Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 35. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 83

The mission of Sino-Christian theology—which is also its difficulty— is to cause the preaching tradition (教化 jiaohua) of Christianity to break through the domination that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism hold over the Chinese language, making Chinese-language thought able to enter into the bottom level of issues of modern philosophy of history. Even after the May Fourth New Culture Movement, the world of Chinese-language thought fundamentally still remains outside the issues of modern philoso phy of history. Chinese-language academia is still remembering the affair of enlightenment and does not understand that the issues in the 20th century thought are no longer post-Enlightenment but post-romanticism; no longer post-Kant but post-Nietzsche.24 Through Liu Xiaofeng, we see that the ideal form of Christian theology is expressed as world history led by theology: from (the historical form of) Greek theology to Latin theology to the theologies of the various national languages of Europe and then to Sino (Chinese) theology. The mission of Sino theology, in Liu’s view, is that it “must enter this history.” “The intellectual history of Western and Eastern Christian theology is the pre-history of the intellectual history of Sino-Christian theology itself.” Is it unjust to call this theory of so‑called cultural Christianity a kind of Western centrism appearing in the guise of universalism? No wonder Liu Xiaofeng wants to oppose “anti-Western centrism.” His self-description is alarming: Acceptance of Sino-Christian thought is certainly to destroy the national “Way,” so that that spirit which is said to be “distant” (很远 henyuan) from the Chinese people may enter—quod petis, hic est (what you are looking for is right here), “He who practices Western religion in China is a traitor to the way.” I am that ‘traitor to the Way’ (道之贼 dao zhi ze).25 After the birth and expansion of the nation-state, Christian thought trans formed. Christian theology expanded to more national languages, and the words of the Holy Spirit “conquered” many pre-Christian national linguis tic orders. Unfortunately, the conquest by these words was premised on conquests by guns. On this point, the words an American missionary in China spoke to his young daughter, Pearl Buck, are perhaps instructive: Never forget that missionaries were not invited by the Chinese people. We merely came here out of our own sense of responsibility. Therefore, the Chi nese people owe us nothing. We do many things for them, but it is only to exhaust our own duties . . . our country has no concession in China, but

24 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi, 72. 25 Ibid., 107. 84 lu xinyu

when other countries established concessions, we said nothing. Moreover, we also certainly benefitted from the unequal treaties. I do not think we can escape from the ultimate reckoning.26 However, to say that Liu Xiaofeng overlooked the explicit point made above would be to underestimate his theory. His criticism of national ism is intended precisely to escape this historical predicament of “reckon ing.” Therefore he emphasizes repeatedly that “the spirit that Hegel said is distant from the Chinese people was in fact in those European nations, but they just happened to be the enemies of China.”27 Therefore, he pro poses separating the political conflict between Western nation-states and China from the cultural conflict between Christianity and China for the purposes of discussion. But this separation is possible only in the imagi nation. His point can be compared with Yuan Weishi’s (袁伟时) conten tious article “Modernization and History Textbooks.”28 Judging by their shared evaluation that “those who conform to [globalization] will flour ish and those who resist it will run into (顺之者昌，逆之者困 shun zhi zhe chang, ni zhi zhe kun) the two share the same “philosophy of history.” However, Liu and Yuan differ in that the former acknowledges the inevi tability of conflicts and rupture, while the latter thinks that such problems merely indicate insufficient conformity. Yuan argues that the Qing Empire brought destruction upon itself by “trampling over international law,” and that if not for the death of the French missionary that acted as a fuse, the burning of the Old Summer Palace by the Eight-Nation Alliance could have been avoided. But the Old Summer Palace was razed after all— should this in the end be considered a cultural event (文化事件 wenhua shijian) or a political conflict? Of course we wish it were only a cultural conflict (just intellectuals wielding their pens at one another), but behind culture followed strong boats and cannons and thus it was no longer a war of the pen but a true war of iron and fire, a destruction of people and culture. As a matter of fact, the Old Summer Palace was a monument to the late-Qing Empire’s acceptance of Western culture; the buildings were European in style, and the cultural artifacts collected there represented the most advanced European machines and industries. But all this did

26 See Xue Yiwei 薛忆沩, “You qifu you qinü 有其夫有其女 [As Father As Daughter],” Nanfang Zhoukan 南方周刊, May 17, 2007. 27 Liu Xiaofeng, Shenling jianglin de xushi, 104. 28 Yuan Weishi 袁伟时, “Xiandaihua yu lishi jiaokeshu 现代化与历史教科书 [Mod ernization and History Textbooks],” Zhongguo qingnian bao 中国青年报, January 11, 2006. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 85 not in any way protect the Old Summer Palace from being burned by the countries of Western Christian civilization. Cultural issues can never be discussed only in terms of culture. From the May Fourth New Culture Movement to the Great Cultural Revolution, from the Humanist Spirit Debate (人文精神大讨论 renwen jingshen da taolun) to Liu Xiaofeng’s “Cultural Christian” phenomenon (文化基督徒现象 wenhua jidutu xianxiang), cultural movements have always effected political change. Thus the real question is why do political issues appear in the guise of culture? And in what sort of cultural guises do they appear? Liu Xiaofeng says: I refuse to adopt existing systems of national thought to understand and interpret the Christ event ( jidu shijian 基督事件). Instead, I break through the systems of national thought and religious tradition, and directly express my belief in the Christ event via living language (shengcun yuyan 生存语言).29 Criticizing nationalism from the standpoint of theology conveniently con ceals Christian theology’s historical complicity in Western colonialism. Are not Western colonialism and nationalism two sides of the same coin? If this key point is not clarified, it is difficult to believe that the meaning of Christian theology is merely, as Liu Xiaofeng would go on to explain, cultural “individual salvation.”

IV. Individualist Theology, Politics, and Liberalism

To fully understand Liu Xiaofeng’s theology, further explanation of his theory of “Cultural Christianity” is required. To dissociate himself from the blood and grime of Western Christianity, which appears in history in the guise of nationalism and colonialism, Liu Xiaofeng advocates an individualist Chris tianity. In his view, the religious ethics of Christianity are fundamentally concerned with salvation of individual lives, not with the moral order, social justice, or social equality. Christianity can provide nothing more than abso lute personal values and a concept of God arranging the natural order of the world. Once Christianity mixes with political ethics, according to Liu, it inevitably seeks to merge with conflicting secular principles—this can cause historical disasters. Consequently, Christianity must be applied in conjunction with the political ethic of liberalism, which will limit the will of

29 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi, 104. 86 lu xinyu the state via the principle of individual freedom. However, individualist lib eralism can in reality come into conflict and contradiction with the divine authority/state authority of Christianity. The Christian ethic at its roots is also close to the conservative political ethic, because as it demands obedi ence to the authority of doctrines, it also demands obedience to the domi nant order of the secular world, with the state as the protector of humanity’s morality.30 Liu Xiaofeng does not provide enough support to demonstrate how his individualist theology realizes justice in reality, thus rendering his entire theoretical system weak and self-contradictory. His “theory” is antithetical to all political ethics, to all “national clans,” and even more so to the normal Christian church and its organizations—church in this sense is merely the outer clothing of belief. Liu Xiaofeng emphasizes that cultural Christians (文化基督徒 wenhua jidutu) are Christians of the intel lectual class: “their social status, level of cultural cultivation, and sense of ethical responsibility (伦理担当 lunli dandang) determine the purpose of their belief. Because these Christians engage in academic research or artistic creation, their beliefs are expressed not only in their intellectual life, but also in a cultured way (文人式的 wenren shi de).”31 In this sense of “nobility” (贵族 guizu), his idea is conservative. When intellectuals replaced profes sional ministers, it alludes to the fact that, since the age of Enlightenment, “the commonality of humanistic knowledge has replaced the commonality of church knowledge.” Here Liu seems to have forgotten his own criticism of modern intel lectuals by way of Weber and states that “one should not play a prophet in dark times devoid of prophecy, and especially not play a prophet in academic armor.”32 Actually, as far as he is aware, he only criticizes mod ern intellectuals because they act as prophets of doctrines (“主义” 的先知 zhuyi de xianzhi), not true prophets of God—a task that only cul tural Christians can take on. This explains why there is no mention in his theoretical writings of the fact that Christianity and Catholicism have been rapidly expanding in rural China in recent years, even though the expansion of church organizations has become a sensitive political topic in today’s China. None of this is worth the attention of cultural Chris tians, because they oppose the church organization. Cultural Christian ity “is not a phenomenon of organized religion and not even of a social

30 Ibid., 53–54. 31 Ibid., 81. 32 Liu Xiaofeng, Xiandaixing shehui lilun xulun, 233. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 87 phenomenon of religion; rather it is an intellectual and cultural inclina tion, a movement in the realm of intellect and culture.”33 Liu resolutely writes off the significance of Christianity since it first entered China; as far as he is concerned, since its entry Christian churches of various denomi nations have all failed at their historical mission to completely rupture China’s national “way.” It is worth noting Liu Xiaofeng’s attitude toward political theology, revolutionary theology, and liberation theology. When responding to the political theology of J.B. Metz, Liu Xiaofeng emphasizes the importance of “justice” to Christian belief, because justice concerns the historically injured and sacrificed, and therefore restoring the practice of theology is the first priority. On this point, Metz actually follows Marx. Political theology “is a clear indication of theology having entered modernity and arrived in postmodern society, and striving to participate in the promo tion of a kind of democratic rationalized society.”34 Metz thinks that, since the modern era, one great mistake that Christian theology has made is the privatization of belief: making God and redemption private issues and connecting them only to individual existence. This leads to callous ness toward unjust and evil political realities. He believes this is severely damaging to divine justice and divine love, which are the foundations of Christian belief, and is a direct abandonment of the enterprise of God’s global deliverance. People cannot possibly privatize God’s promises of free dom, peace, and justice; they can only be realized in the realm of public existence. As a result, the eschatological promise requires people to take on social responsibility. The establishment of political theology is built on dismantling the privatization of belief. Liu Xiaofeng uses political theol ogy to defend the just nature of his own Christian theology, but in his theory, he moves away from the core beliefs of political theology: Even though political theology or revolutionary theology has good reason to emphasize the social nature of the gospel, I personally think that political theology or liberation theology in its constructiveness has insufficient justi fication and goes too far. I agree with Scheler’s understanding that ‘the love of Christian brothers originally is not a biological, political, or even social principle. It is directed toward, or it is first directed toward, the spiritual core of the person, the individuality of the individual itself. Only in the king dom of God can the individual directly enjoy this position of individuality.

33 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi, 87. 34 Liu Xiaofeng, Zou xiang shizijia shang de zhen 走向十字架上的真 [Toward the Truth on the Cross] (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 1994), 229–234. 88 lu xinyu

Therefore, Christ is quite far from those constructions of new state orders or new systems of distribution of economic wealth based supposedly on the decree of [Christ’s] love.’35 This is precisely the paradox of Liu Xiaofeng’s theory: a conflict between individual religious freedom and political promises. While he cannot help but acknowledge the social reasons for political theology, he does not have sufficient theoretical capability to respond to the serious challenges from it; emphasizing privatization of belief is in effect an avoidance of addressing issues of social justice. Of course, such contradictions and par adoxes are not only the predicament of Liu Xiaofeng’s liberal theological theory—they are faced by the political theory of global liberalism today. Liu Xiaofeng’s work merely replays this debate in the realm of Christian theology. The following passage is Liu Xiaofeng’s description of new-Confucianism (新儒家 xin rujia). However, we can easily replace its subject with “cul tural Christianity:” The mainstream thought of modern Confucianism emphasizes xinxue (心学) neo-Confucianism and looks down upon lixue (理学) neo-Confucianism. This tendency gears toward negating the traditional group ethics of the lite rati and bureaucracy and toward better coordinating itself with the values of modern liberal democracy. Even if we set aside the difficulties of liberal ethics for now, the more that modern new xinxue champions “conscious ness and character,” the more it loses its socializing function and becomes the individualized principle of an extreme few Confucians. Unless modern neo-xinxue again merges with the political party and the state, and restores ritual Confucian ethics (which might bring about a re-legitimization of lixue and Confucianism), it is highly doubtful that the “consciousness and charac ter” upheld by modern Confucianism will provide a legitimate resource for social ethics in the fragmented structure of modern society.36 Although Liu Xiaofeng stresses that Christianity surpasses Chinese Con fucianism in its binary opposition between mind and matter, this world and the other world, and rationality and experience, I can hardly see any difference between his cultural Christianity and the neo-xinxue that he criticizes. “Cultural Christianity” holds a negative attitude toward enlighten ment, and sees Kantian philosophy as a disaster for humanity. However, Liu Xiaofeng’s idea of individual deliverance happens to be premised on

35 Ibid., 247–248. 36 Liu Xiaofeng, Xiandaixing shehui lilun xulun, 173. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 89 enlightenment thought. This is an interesting paradox and also a key issue in his theory. Although he does not discuss the relationship between colonialism and Christianity, instead only talking about internal issues of Europe such as the challenge of the Auschwitz concentration camp to Christian theology, he clearly must deal with the relationship between Christian ity and politics. He repudiates political theology and revolutionary the ology and instead turns to individual theology—the so-called cultural theology formed by the combination of liberalism and Christian theol ogy. The problem is that liberal theological theory is in effect a modernist theory. If not for the historical complicity and expansion of Christianity and Western-centrism, where would be the motive for today’s Christian theology to create new paths into individual liberalism? Liu Xiaofeng says that Christianity has an apolitical character (“individual Christian belief is quite political: it is a politics that ignores political authority”),37 because no political justice can offer redemption to the individual. Therefore, indi vidual theology stands in opposition to all political theories; or, to put it differently, political theories are a precondition for the existence of Liu Xiaofeng’s individual theology. His individual theology is extremely “mod ern,” which is in and of itself not difficult to understand, but why does this highly modern theological thought insist on being the arbiter of the entire human history? Liu Xiaofeng says, “The road that the resurrected Christ walks together with ordinary people is the world history. In this history, ordinary people—even those of his church—do not recognize him. Past history was like this; the situation in our current era is also like this.”38 Therefore, in Liu’s view, we must reestablish individual relations with Jesus in terms of “Jesus and I.” The Christianities of various nations throughout history (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestant ism) are nothing but mosaic fragments symbolizing Jesus. In this sense, the Christian theology’s philosophy of history, with its three stages—the Holy Father beginning to save the world; the Holy Son continuing to save the world; and the Holy Spirit completing the final salvation—greatly resem bles the spiritual development of Hegel’s dialectic. It is linear, progressive, and eschatological, and the final kingdom opens to infinite love. And yet, “the meaning of ‘future’ is not a historical one.”39

37 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushu, 249. 38 Ibid., 182. 39 Ibid., 218. 90 lu xinyu

Liu Xiaofeng’s entire goal is to disinfect, bleach, and carve out the rot from Western Christian theology in such a way as to “depoliticize,” “de- Westernize,” and “de-historicize” it, thereby making the Christian escha tology a universal one and the only deliverance. This is a Western-centric stance, one that Derrida, even as a Western thinker, has criticized and wor ried about. This is precisely why Liu Xiaofeng’s theological thought has no place for Derrida’s compatriot Levinas, nor has it directly addressed Der rida except for some indirect repudiation littered throughout his works: Postmodern thought, which considers itself the true successor to Nietzsche—even Derrida who tries to explain the classical tradition—in reality has already run in the opposite direction from Nietzsche’s painstak ing efforts.40 Postmodern criticism of modernity is radical; Christian criticism of modernity is conservative. How can they be spoken of in the same day?41 If Liu Xiaofeng’s criticism is not distortion, it is at least deliberate misinter pretation. To Levinas and Derrida, the question was never about the need for deliverance, rather it was why Christianity is the only deliverance. This autocracy of belief is what Levinas and Derrida warned against and tried to eliminate; it is also the core of their critique of Western centrism. It is under precisely the theory of this sole deliverance that we see (online) that Liu Xiaofeng’s cultural theory is dubbed as “using God as its dagger” (以上帝为匕首 yi shangdi wei bishou), to “kill whomever it encounters” (遇人杀人 yu ren sha ren), to “kill off ancestors” (遇祖杀祖 yu zu sha zu), and to “kill off the Buddha” (遇佛杀佛 yu fo sha fo). Is this the price or objective of deliverance? It seems amazing that this extremely radical cultural nihilism takes countering nihilism to be its mission, but this is precisely the internal logic of Western centrism. In fact, conservatism and radicalism are not always antithetical; in some cases they can be easily transposed. A theory that strives to break the Chinese “way” yet contains such obvious revolutionary and violent elements inevitably causes peo ple to think of the violent events experienced in the recent shattering of China’s “way.” Although Liu Xiaofeng argues that it is not the true Chris tian spirit, it is not self-evident how “true” cultural Christianity can give a non-violent baptism to Chinese culture. Christian theology itself, when

40 Liu Xiaofeng, “ ‘Qiangshang de shuxie’ bianxu《墙上的书写》编序 (Introduction to ‘Writing on the Wall’)” in Jianjin hanzhi, 127. 41 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi, 9. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 91 combined with liberalism, cannot offer a clear promise, because the birth of liberalism was accompanied by revolution and violence. Liu Xiaofeng’s theological thought shows us that criticism of Western centrism does not only belong to Westerners; it should become part of our own self-criticism—especially self-criticism of the New Enlightenment “thought liberation” trend since the 1980s.

V. The Antichrist (敌基督 di jidu), Revolution, and Eschatology

Derrida argues that all theologies and eschatologies are intimately linked to political issues. This explains why Liu Xiaofeng’s Christian theology always looks forward and never looks behind, because behind belongs to darkness and shadow, to evil and the so-called antichrist—“autocratic governments, state churches, and national morality are the temptations of the antichrist.”42 According to Merezhkovsky, the modern secular divine revolutions are all the result of Calvinist Puritanism. Calvin was Luther’s teacher, Luther was the teacher of Robespierre, and Robespierre was the teacher of Lenin. Here, what Liu Xiaofeng silently implies is that Lenin was Mao’s teacher. Modern civilization, as a product of religious reformation, left the principles of the Christian gospels and fell into the religious void of the antichrist. Therefore the road to redemption lies in using liberal theology to replace “modern divine right” (现代式神权 xian dai shi shenquan) i.e., the modern nation-state, and using the divinity of the “individual” to replace the dictatorship of the “people’s” sovereignty (人民主权的专制 renmin zhuquan de zhuanzhi). To liberals in China, Liu Xiaofeng’s theory is seemingly a reductio ad absurdum. Before finding delight in the shared anti-revolutionary prem ise, they too quickly discover that Liu Xiaofeng has taken it too far, to conclusions beyond the line of what they can accept. Liu Xiaofeng attri butes “practiced” liberalism, social democracy, and anarchy to the dicta torship of people’s sovereignty, and argues that “people” are merely devils in disguise—he uses this extreme anti-democratic theory to open the way for the coming of the “Kingdom of the Holy Spirit.” Neither does the innate universality of individual belief belong to the “public culture” of this world, because that public culture still entrusts its deliverance to real politi cal ideals and moral rules, which in his diagnosis are all specters of the

42 Ibid., 176. 92 lu xinyu antichrist. Thus Liu Xiaofeng steals the heart of liberalism and castrates its democratic significance, for there is naturally no place for “democracy” in God. Consequently, his theory cares not for injustice in reality—making it the opposite of the philosophies of Derrida and Levinas. It is premised on this acknowledgment: Because there never has been and we can imagine that in the future too there never will be any system of absolute [equal] distribution of wealth, it is impossible to completely eliminate injury, exploitation, and injustice on the individual level. Transcendent religion, through the vision of the other shore, provides a place where the worries of humanity in this world can be put to rest, and through the prosperity obtained through transcendent status fills in the deficits of status in reality. The ethics arising from this can not only alleviate and smooth social contradictions to an extent; it can also lessen the extent of forced cooperation in the order of public life.43 Therefore, Christian theology is a historiology of the future; it is the com ing of the kingdom of the Holy Spirit, which will shine sunlight across the world, making it never again night. As a result, the identity of the West is no longer one of (rational) ontology, but rather an identity of eschatology, said to be the only hope for humanity: If hope depends on the propositions of humans or of history, then it is not called hope. From this kind of already existing-not yet existing (yizai- shangwei cunzai 已在-尚未存在) ontic identity no true hope can arise. Only from already existing-resurrected (yizai-fuhuo 已在-复活) eschatolog ical identity can elements called hope be produced, because it is very clear that in the former kind of identity there does not exist any true substantial difference. . . . The differences of death and resurrection, old and new cannot be found in ontology or historiology; they can only be found in eschatology. Consequently, hope ultimately can only be established on belief in resur rection at the end of the world. Otherwise, hope is only repeated despair, and humanity will have no chance of breaking out of the vicious cycle of hope-despair.44 Looking at it this way, Benjamin’s angel must belong to a different faith, because his angel always faces and confronts the history made of corpses piled up in God’s name. Are not the historical philosophies, or historical theologies, of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Solovyov all a kind of future history (历史未来 lishi weilai), which these thinkers rush toward armed with human ideas about crime,

43 Liu Xiaofeng, Xiandaixing shehui lilun xulun, 527. 44 Liu Xiaofeng, Zou xiang shizijia shang de zhen, 449. “crime” of lu xun, anti-enlightenment, and chinese modernity 93

justice, and God’s judgment that they believe capable of solving humanity’s problems?45 Liu Xiaofeng is speaking here of Merezhkovsky. He seemingly forgets his iron resolution made while speaking of “Sino-Christian Theology and Philosophy of History” in the same book: that Hegel’s spirit is the Chris tian spirit: Belief that the Holy Spirit will complete the deliverance of the world does not mean that this belief can resolve all real world problems such as state prosperity and strength, national renaissance, equality of wealth, political freedom. Rather, it is the understanding that life is incredibly difficult and complex, and that one cannot “ignore the conscience and seek answers through rationality alone.” And especially, the understanding that to believe the various modern “theories” (isms) can solve all real world problems and can realize ultimate peace and happiness for humanity is the temptation of the devil.46 With this assertion, Liu’s theory finally lays it cards out on the table. The devil, as the “antichrist,” together with Christ forms the basic spiritual state of the current world. Liu Xiaofeng borrows Merezhkovsky’s words to say that revolution is a conflict between the Holy Spirit and this world. In this sense, his theory is still a product of twentieth-century revolution, because it shows us the real existence of revolution in a negative light. Although Liu Xiaofeng’s theories all seemingly seek to destroy the secular revolution of the twentieth century, he takes a different kind of revolu tion as his premise: a “holy” revolution, premised on the existence of the antichrist. But since he thinks that today’s revolutionary spirit is nothing more than the historical expression of the epochal conflict between Christ and the antichrist, then is not revolution itself the necessary road to the “kingdom of the Holy Spirit?” Liu Xiaofeng tries to criticize the historical rationality of teleology that defends historical evil, but he engages in this defense from the direction of divine eschatology. In this sense, he indeed is close to Hegel’s “spirit.”

45 Liu Xiaofeng, Shengling jianglin de xushi, 171. 46 Ibid., 189.

Chapter Four

From Charting The RevolutioN to Charter 2008: Discourse, Liberalism, De-politicization

Daniel F. Vukovich

With a few important exceptions, most work on modern China produced today either ignores the Mao era or demonizes it as a long series of economic disasters, national trauma, and power-obsessed politics—in sum, as the very epitome of totalitarianism, if not oriental despotism. Think for example of Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, a book that even the Western China studies establishment (itself a Cold War institution locked into a symbolic battle with the PRC regime) took umbrage with. Or take a somewhat more academic study like Frank Dikotter’s The Age of Openness: China before Mao. This makes a similar, if implicit, argument about Maoism and the revolution by presenting the “semi-colonial” era of the middle class (and Chiang Kai-shek) in urban centers like Shanghai as a space of cosmopolitanism, wealth, and freedom—or at least freedom as understood in a Hayekian, Cold War libertarian sense. Beyond even Isaiah Berlin’s insistence on negative liberty as the highest good (“freedom from” as opposed to “freedom to”), this liberalism is directed against a centralized or “strong” state on principle and in regard to anything resembling economic planning let alone so-called ‘social engineering’ or what used to be more usefully called a perceptoral system. China was remarkably “open” before communism, nationalism, and revolution, on its way to becoming generally equivalent to the normative United States/West. The People’s Republic of China still needs to go back and complete this teleology, though without the “Peoples” (or party-state) part. Far from the comparatively sane, humane, and culturally relativist streak found in other liberalisms, this form of liberalism is meant to define a universal truth about economics, individuals, and politics. In China this takes the form of charges of against so-called statism.1 Whereas before the later

1 See Shanghai-based professor Xu Jilin’s, “Does China Need a Leviathan? Critique of Stat ist Trends in China. Part II” (Trans. David Kelly. 2011. China Policy Research and Consulting Group) for a representative liberal analysis of the current intellectual scene in China. I thank 96 daniel f. vukovich

1990s liberals or pro-reform intellectuals could attack their opponents by calling them “new leftists,” the more recent pejorative for more or less the same crowd (those critical of the reforms in political, economic, and historiographic terms) is “statists.” The problem with this is not that “statists” like Wang Hui or Wang Shaoguang defend the state and its capacity to help people, foster development, or ameliorate capital’s failures and ‘externalities’; this is indeed what many new leftists argue, and it is eminently social democratic and a basic front against neo-liberalism. So too there is no good reason to be scandalized by the new leftist argument that what China needs is more state, not less.2 The problem is that for many Chinese liberals and foreign reporters and experts, this is somehow a bad thing, as if social democracy were authoritarian, or worse, incipiently crypto-fascist or ‘Maoist’ (essentially the same thing for many working in this vein). In their opinion the main enemy is the state, or party-state; the hero and solution is the market.3 A recent Economist article on the assas- sination of Nationalist politician Song Jiaoren in 1913 argued that, had he only lived, then Sun Yat Sen would have stayed a reformist supporter of democratic procedural voting, and the revolutionary trajectory—and Mao—could well have been avoided. China could have followed Taiwan’s path (presumably without the de facto Marshall Plan).4 Such texts present themselves as “subversive” exposés when in fact they confirm what many Western, foreign, and diasporic Chinese readers have always believed and wanted to hear: Mao was a monster and the PRC was built on a mountain of human or individual rights abuses. This would confirm the necessity of the post-Cold War occidental turn toward not just free markets but total “liberalization” and “democracy.” The “end of history” argument was re‑launched at the end of the Cold War (i.e., of the Soviet bloc), and surprisingly still obtains in political studies of China and the formerly or nominally communist parts of the world. The rationality, ideals, and passion of twentieth-century communism and socialism in Asia often seem a thing of the past; this is especially the case in

David Kelley for alerting me to this article and sharing his translation. Full version in Chinese at: http://www.21ccom.net/articles/sxpl/sx/article_2011070638745.html. 2 See Wang Shaoguang and Hu Angang, The Chinese Economy in Crisis: State Capacity and Tax Reform. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001. 3 See Xu Jilin, “The Fate of an Enlightenment—Twenty Years in the Chinese Intellec tual Sphere (1978–98).” (trans. Geremie R. Barme with Gloria Davies. East Asian History 20 (Dec. 2000): 169–186.) for a subtextual yet heroic narrative about “the market” being responsible for the intellectual ferment of the 1980s and 1990s. 4 “The death of a revolutionary: The song of Song.” The Economist. 22 December 2012. http://f5web1.economist.com/news/christmas/21568587-shot-killed-song-jiaoren-was-not- heard-around-world-it-might-have-changed. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 97 foreign or Western scholarship. But even within the region there is enormous pressure to forget, sanitize, or de‑politicize the radical past since the current “developmentalist” neo-liberal mandate is to eschew all fears of class conflict and systemic inequalities. Perhaps the best example of this discursive pressure is the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2008. A lavish and elaborate ceremony, hell-bent on impressing the world (especially the West, it must be said), it presented everything notable about China—except its long revolution, Mao, or communism. Aside from obligatory, patriotic-nationalist references to the founding-father, there is seemingly some consensus even within China that Mao and the red era were in the end a brief, bizarre aberration that is best not mentioned in polite, international company. I am painting in broad strokes here. And for all the influence of the liberal wings of the CCP (arguably including former Premier Wen Jiabao) and the intelligentsia, it would seem presumptuous to expect them to either legislate the party system out of existence or to foment a middle class revolt.5 Prominent dissidents like Ai Wei Wei (if he can be construed as “liberal”) and Liu Xiaobo are much less representative and popular than readers of the New York Times might reasonably infer. There is also a bur- geoning if minor field of theoretically informed, critical Chinese studies that exists—in volumes like this—in dialogue with mainland-based intellectuals and challenges the negation of the revolution; it sees it instead as something to continue or re-invent, certainly to rethink. In sum, apart from the all-important economic dimension, liberalism, though significant, is not hegemonic in the People’s Republic. What then is liberalism in China today? Many qualifications would have to be made but it does relate to global trends and forces (the imperial core), not least because liberalism has always been a creature of modern capitalism and imperialism. In the long, powerfully American Twentieth century, that ‘Chinese’ liberalism will take new forms and reflect the hegemony of intellectual political culture there, particularly libertarian, anti-state economics and Cold War area studies knowledge. Especially after the post-Mao turn towards so-called ‘reform and opening up.’ This resonates with what David Harvey has to say in his account of neo-liberalism as a strategy of capital accumulation (and dispossession of people and social wealth). While he carefully avoids labeling China as neo-liberal tout court, he discusses privatization and the smashing of the iron rice bowl (welfare, state regulation) as well as more globally the

5 There is a minor tradition of “China Watching” that wants to point to each new Cen tral Committee as harboring a secret Gorbachev. 98 daniel f. vukovich power—what we can call the incitement, in a Foucaultian sense—of entrepreneurial and market freedoms and individual liberties that help legitimate the class war on workers and the public.6 Harvey does not pursue the cultural-ideological aspects of neo-liberalism much. But anyone who studies contemporary China, or observes the thousands of expats and immigrants working there, can see the resonances of such freedoms in the desires, dreams, and energies of individuals. After all, negative liberty (freedom from) is never enough to animate people. The desire (or freedom) to get rich or richer than your neighbor has always been the secret sharer of capitalist liberalism’s obsession with freedoms ‘from.’ The economic-cum-ideological appeal of the bourgeois individual/hero resonates with Deng Xiaoping’s “inspiring” slogans about black and white cats and the gloriousness of getting rich (first!). All of this has to be kept in play when imagining Chinese liberalism as a broad discourse. But there are other crucial elements: not just the “new” idea of the individual (arguably a foreign re-imposition articulated to consumer culture), but the point- blank, vulgar universality of liberalism defined as “individual-freedom-in- markets,” a negative utopia set against any determinate community or collectivity. This is the new global environment. China, conversely, is (or at least was) a place under Cold War/neo-imperial restrictions and long situated as “different” and “Other” (not least by the long traditions of Chi- nese exceptionalism and ethnocentrism, as well as several hundred years of orientalism). The desire to wage symbolic war against the old, “despotic” state and to “open up” and join the world by homogenizing and normalizing is irresistible to some, including within China itself. Thus the drive to demonize China’s red past and promote liberalism as an intellectual political discourse is about more than the ‘universal’ truth of politics and economy. To understand the Chinese transformations of the past thirty years, then, we have to deal with a rightward shift not only in political economy but in the politics of knowledge. The global politics of knowledge. The discursive shift is inseparable from the other changes. How did we get here over the past thirty years of China’s “rise”? What are the analytical consequences for understanding politics and liberalism today? The rest of this essay is an attempt to help answer these questions: to in part map out the shift within China and globally to neo-liberal politics and discourse from more radical, heterodox, and socialist ones; and to interrogate this shift in terms of its limits. It will examine the shift’s connection with an older

6 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), espe cially chapters 1 and 5. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 99 colonial liberalism in the first era of “free trade” as well as the epoch of “reform and opening up.” The rise of neo-liberalism in China and abroad has much less to do with the exposure of the errors, failures, and crimes of the red decades (and few would deny the existence of some of these, even on the left) and far more with the politics of knowledge under global capitalism. It is not just that the former “capitalist roaders” took over and that “red engineers” and princelings now run China, competing and collabo- rating with agents of capital abroad.7 All of this is true, but incomplete; it leaves the ideological force of new liberalism unexplored.

I. Sounding the Sea Change: Discourse and Politics of Knowledge

The demonization of the Mao era and the PRC is hardly surprising. Aside from a few brief periods (e.g., the World War II/Allied era) and some particular demographic factions (e.g., radical intellectuals and revolutionaries in the global South) the discourse on political China has largely been hostile. Well before 1949 the orientalist cards were stacked against the P.R.C, against taking it seriously as a political entity with its own systems, symbols, histories and narratives. The imperial age of opium wars, can- tonments, and the spread of missionaries was not exactly conducive to cosmopolitanism.8 Just as the rise of global English language mass media is not. Foreign views of China have almost always been driven by domestic politics and geo-political competition and conflict. This doesn’t mean they are all the same. They can take different, and left or right, forms. Informed work such as William Hinton’s from the land reform through the 1990s, for example, or that of the former Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars group (to take just two American cases) did make some difference, outside of China, in terms of making available a way of seeing the PRC as having a certain complexity and legitimacy, not least in terms of its pursuit of socialism, its anti-imperialism, its difference from the Soviet Union, and its gender politics. The impact of the Cultural Revolution has long been noted in this regard, though too often merely in terms of French intellectual life.9 Recall

7 For the rise of the elite after 1949 and thence the Cultural Revolution, see Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class. Stan ford: Stanford UP, 2009. But this is implicit to the Hinton tradition as well. 8 For the uninitiated, Colin Mackerras’s anthology Sinophiles and Sinophobes: Western views of China. (Oxford: OUP, 2000) is a good place to begin. 9 See Richard Wolin most recently. More helpfully, see Andrew Ross, “Mao Zedong’s Impact on Cultural Politics in the West.” Cultural Politics (2005) 1(1): 5–22. 100 daniel f. vukovich that “Red China” was understood as part of the Third Worldist movement for decolonization, national liberation, and racial/social justice by many, including people actually living in those places. As Robin D.G. Kelly and Betsy Esch put it, for many who happened to not be white, Mao was “black like us.”10 But leftist or otherwise heterodox approaches to political China have never been dominant and are clearly in decline. Even within Chi- na—despite liberal protestations to the contrary—this is a minority affair, though one that is perhaps on the rise with the new left movement that insists on taking the past seriously, be it Maoist or “neo-Confucian,” and facing up to the problems of inequality and hyper-development. It is in this sense that the discourse on China has shifted to the right— because the world and China have. Terms like de-Maoification, de-politicization, the revolution betrayed, state capitalism, neo-liberalism, and proletarianization should be in the mix of any political analysis of post- Mao or post-Tiananmen China. But the production of knowledge about China abroad was never predicated on taking the revolution seriously in the first place, and the initial wave of oppositional intellectual work from before and during the Vietnam War has long since petered out. With a few honorable exceptions, Chinese Marxism was reduced to Stalin, the peasant mentality, or “mere” nationalism. Chinese violence was always cruel or despotic, never political or about class struggle. In Hong Kong, for example, 1949 is still often referred to as “the communist take-over” (as opposed to liberation, revolution, or unification), as if all those dusty soldiers from Shandong, Shaanxi, and elsewhere were not indigenous Chi- nese but foreign invaders or traitors.11 So the shift—most notably in the study of Chinese politics—has been “back to the future”: back to liberal scholarship that betrays its Cold War roots. Unlike the social-democratic liberalism of, say, J.K. Galbraith, this Hayekian liberalism is vulgarly modernizing and anti-communist. Here the focus is on freeing souls, markets, and polities from the backwardness and malevolence of the state, with no concern for any epistemological obstacles about how “we” know what “they” think about or want from their state. Or more charitably, the dominant liberal political discourse on China is about human and other natural, individual rights, understood technically or legalistically and that the Chinese state, monster that it is, deprives them of. This can include constitutionalism and “rule of law”

10 Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch. “Black like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution.” Souls 1.4 (1999): 6–41. 11 See Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930– 1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999). My point here is not patriotic but epistemological. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 101 rhetoric. But the key point uniting the various forms of liberalism is that China lacks “it” and needs it to reform, progress, and fully become modern and “the same.” The bottom line is that the party-state (and/or the red past that haunts the present) is an abomination that must be opposed and overcome, either through more privatization or through a legal overhaul along the lines of the West. How did we get to this form of liberalism? In some ways we never left it. An anti- or Othering discourse merely took on anti-communist garb. Moreover, as countless writings on the impact of Westernization and occidentalism have attested, Chinese intellectuals and politicians have often been quick to take up the liberal-reform mantle with little to no recognition of the critiques of liberalism in the rest of the world, not least among the formerly colonized and enslaved.12 In a sense, the love affair with an un-reflexive liberalism in some sectors of the Chinese intelligentsia—and the “official” occidentalism of the party as bigger pro- ponents of “development” and “modernization” than the over-developed, post-modern West)—indexes the impact of modern imperialism or capitalist modernity more than anything else.

II. Maoist Discourse and Its Elision: A Theoretical Sketch

Another way to put all of this is that the past thirty years have been a massive, if incomplete, de-Maoification. We have to note that the eclipse of Maoist discourse—its defeat in the discursive battle for hegemony within Chinese society—is one of the conditions for the rise/return of liberalism in China and abroad. There is an important issue of causality here, though this is not easily mapped. The gist is that the defeat of this revolutionary discourse is not the mere after‑effect of larger economic, political, and social changes, still less some great awakening or revelation on the basis of an ultimate truth. Rather, the de-legitimation of discourse prepares the ground for these changes and is the very terrain of the political battle over privatization of state assets, the rise of a capitalist elite “new” class, and so forth. This is especially the case in the PRC, where political values and ideologies were taken far more seriously than other “non-communist” regimes (for better or worse this is a distinct product of

12 This lack of interrogation can be seen in the Chinese writers examined by Chen Xiaomei in her Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 102 daniel f. vukovich actually existing socialism), and where there is no open electoral or political jockeying for control. What then was Maoist discourse? This is too broad of an issue for one essay, but we can at least characterize it briefly, painting its contours. As a number of people have theorized it, Maoist discourse was more than the writings of Mao and other revolutionaries and the apparatuses (propaganda, educational, political, economic, and others) of governance and subject formation in the red decades. It was a rational-practical framework that people used to make sense of their lives and the world around them, in an extreme age of revolution, nationalism, and war, certainly, but also one of massive socialist construction, of the new China (the embrace of “futurity”), and of new individual lives after the traditional or “feudal” order in the inchoate Republican period. As Gao has put it, Maoist discourse at its peak was the “common-sense knowledge and socially shared values, beliefs, practices, administrative measures, disciplinary technology, education, and so on” that “provided a framework and standard for the Chinese to relate to in their thinking and behaviour and to make sense of their lives.”13 It spoke to everyday life, from food and clothing supply to your neighborhood committee. But Maoism was also a powerfully affective way of being-in-the-world. Wang Ban, for example, has usefully framed Maoist discourse as akin to the experience of the sublime. Once one sheds its conservative Burkean or anti-Jacobin connotations, the word “sublime” can replace “totalitarianism” as a less insulting and more ambiguous notion. The T-word, if you will, is at this point the hoariest of Cold War terms for assaulting political cultures of belief in Maoist or contemporary China and denying agency, rationality, and basic dignity to the millions of ‘victimized’ citizens of the PRC.14 It speaks to an essentially liberal notion of power as being solely repressive and negative, never productive and diffuse and inciting. To see power instead as akin to the sublime, or more generally, to take Mao- ist discourse, the revolution, and their weight in the world seriously, is precisely our challenge today when we look back on that relatively brief (by Chinese standards) but crucial period. This is what Alain Badiou does when he characterizes the twentieth century as being in part determined by passion of and for the real.15 Incorporate this contextualization helps

13 Mobo Gao, “Maoist Discourse and a Critique of Present Assessments of the Cultural Revolution.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 26.3 (1994): 13–31. 14 I have discussed this at more length in China and Orientalism (Routledge Press, 2012). 15 See chapter 5 of Alain Badiou, The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Polity Press, 2007). from charting the revolution to charter 2008 103 us to understand the Mao period as more than collectivist, selfless, and utopian. Badiou’s theme indexes a conviction, palpable in the PRC and arguably even residually so today, that it is possible to intervene and change history and society (reality), both in the new China and globally. This idea was part of the ruling discourse or regime of truth, just as much as the emphasis on “two-line struggle” and the dyadic form of politics: friends and enemies, revolution and revisionism, feudalism and the future, communism and capitalism, radicals and capitalist roaders, and so on. Dyadic and intense, dangerous but inciting and meaningful, Mao- ist discourse positions commitment politics and revolution as a whole way of life and a whole way of struggle. If Schmitt, Marx, and later Mao were correct about the definition or essence of politics (dyadic, reductive, antagonistic) as well as the realities of class, then Maoist, revolutionary China was the most political and most Marxist space on Earth, for better and for worse. To describe all of this as totalitarian is to depoliticize it and to ignore the self-understanding of the actual people involved. From this theoretical standpoint, then, the Chinese revolution under Mao has a certain positivity and seriousness. How else can one explain the mass mobilizations and legitimacy of the new regime in China (notwithstanding the setbacks and violence)? The short, easy answer is to take the liberal approach to Maoist discourse. This approach, despite the putatively “theoretical” nature of the term, still unknowingly re-invents the much more vulgar and reductive notion of totalitarianism. The earlier work of Tony Saich and David Apter on discourse in Mao’s China set the stage.16 There the thick descriptions and interviews with former Yan’an participants are vitiated by the liberal notion of power that Michel Foucault (whom the authors often cite) tirelessly wrote against from the 1950s through the History of Sexuality volumes. That is, discourse here still amounts to manipulation and fairly direct, top-down control. In this study, as well as in a more recent article by Yu Liu, the point of detailing Maoist discourse is to all the better condemn and other it as brainwashing, totalitarian.17 Actually existing Maoism’s cleverness and emotional appeals, the detailed texts, practices (e.g. ‘speaking bitterness’), and statements that made up its governing discourse are all yoked back to an un-interrogated and simplistic framework of thought-control and unfreedom (the lack of freedom from, too).

16 David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 17 See Yu Liu, “Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China.” Modern China 36.3 (May 2010): 329–362. 104 daniel f. vukovich

To be sure the amount of empirical detail in such conventional, liberal approaches to ‘Maoist discourse’ is welcome. Such area studies work stops short of even considering the legitimacy of Maoist discourse (and the self- understandings of the participants themselves). It also misses the essential point from Foucault and related theory: there is no underlying reality that this discourse perverts or distorts. Just as the distinction between discursive and non-discursive events makes little sense for Foucault we simply cannot fall back on to a notion of what the ‘real’ and objective’ realities of Yan’an (or any other period) were or are today. To smuggle in contempt for mass mobilizations and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is to miss the point of discourse analysis in the first place. In sum, and notwithstanding its later eclipse and disaggregation in post-Mao or post-Tiananmen China, we need to recognize that Maoist discourse was all powerful because it was true. A produced and politically interested truth, yes, but that is what truth and discourse are. That this same Maoist discourse no longer holds sway does not mean we should fail to take the revolution seriously as one of China’s chief problematics, its inheritance and tradition of socialist (or alternative’) modernity. Nor should we fail to acknowledge the very different, affirmative, or positive understandings of that trajectory on the part of various Chi- nese intellectuals and artists. Maoist or revolutionary discourse still lives on in fragmented or partial ways and forms a reservoir of potential meanings, values, rhetoric, and symbols of current Chinese political cultures. This is evidenced by the very existence of “new left” versus liberal and conservative political debates in China, and the circulation of red classics and iconography along with newer forms of leftist literature and cultural texts.18 It is worth noting that the heated debates over privatization and state‑owned enterprises include the few but significant and actually existing co-operative enterprises scattered across the country. It is this same discourse, albeit in a different and arguably watered-down form, that helped animate the Chongqing experiment and make Bo Xilai an enemy of the liberal intellectual set well before his eventual downfall and disgrace in 2012. So, too, the brute fact of inequality after the Mao period—which is also to say of the memory of the promise of equality, the summum bonum of the revolution alongside its utopian and future‑ oriented aspects—virtually guarantees the existence of this reservoir for some years to come. This is the “People’s” part of the PRC moniker and

18 See for example Wang Ban and Lu Jie, eds. China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). from charting the revolution to charter 2008 105 not something to dismiss as nostalgia or naivety, even if the current party- state left it out of the Olympic fanfare.

III. Liberalism: The Presence of the Past

Liberalism—or what counted as liberalism, and was frequently called by that name (often pejoratively)—was at the heart of the discursive struggle for hegemony, the practical direction as well as the “soul” of the revolution, within the red decades of the PRC. Thus rather than seeing contemporary neo-liberalism and conservatism as a return to the 1920s (whereby the 1980s stand as the second “Chinese enlightenment,” as the partisans put it), our reference should be instead to the radical years and the struggles over “revisionism” after 1949. Take the 1937 essay by Mao, later to be part of the Little Red Book in the cultural revolution: “Combat Liberalism.” In the midst of war and would-be imperialism, Mao stops to talk about eleven types of liberalism, all of them turning upon behavior and attitude more than the liberalism found in the works of J.S. Mill or Alfred Marshall. To be ‘within the true’ of Maoist discourse—as during the cultural revolution—meant seeing liberalism as akin to selfishness and opportunism, self-interested behavior and “smallness of mind.”19 Of course, liberalism also meant more than this. This conflict formed one part of the line struggle in later years, particularly the emphasis on “private” markets or profit motive and the insistence—by Deng, Liu Shaoqi, and others in their camp—that the class struggle was more or less over and the Chinese party-state should get on with development and the pragmatics of socialist or modern construction, chiefly in the urban centers and key national industries. These liberal thinkers recommended that the state quash dissent whenever it popped up, since it was clearly mere sabotage or bad behavior and not properly political, let alone justified. In fact the “right” (as opposed to the Maoist left, and with all due allowances for how these overlapped) was in this sense a force of de‑politicization and movement away from antagonistic or dyadic politics toward politics as the administration of affairs. This resonates strongly with Carl Schmitt’s analysis of neutralization and de-politicization through liberalism (as well as parliamentarism, though this was less an issue in China, where

19 See Mao Zedong, “Combat Liberalism.” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Vol. 2 [1937]. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03 .htm. For the notion of “within the true,” see Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, and especially the Appendix, Trans A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 106 daniel f. vukovich we might substitute economism).20 It also dovetails with a classic but otherwise far‑removed and inapposite critique of modernity, culture-as- administration, and the impasses of liberal democratic politics: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.21 These were the stakes in the PRC too, albeit with Chinese characteristics. Again, I am speaking in broad terms here, but few could deny that there was a split within the party and Chinese society, and this had to do with discursive and hegemonic struggles over revolutionary consensus (as opposed to Cold War/colonial notions of brainwashing and the pursuit of total personal power) but also with liberalism. This is worth remembering; it helps explain the intensity of intellectual politics of the past thirty-plus years. In other words, it has always been about the struggle over the soul of the revolution, and has always included deeply ambivalent relations to liberalism. No less established and credentialed a source than a volume of the Cambridge History of China can help us recall this. Writing about the “crisis of the state” during the cultural revolution—a useful way to frame the last decade of the Mao era and the present as well—Harry Harding presents the entire period from the early 1960s onwards as a debate and struggle between liberals represented by the Liu-Deng line and radicals.22 When Mao passes from the scene, and because this ‘debate’ was never won or resolved during the Cultural Revolution and in the end only fragmented the Party and society, the senior/elite cadres get back to business, purge the left, and start shoring up the “weak political institutions.”23 Harding seems to frame the right as liberal by default. They are liberal not because of their political-economic views or class origins (though both arguments could be and were made) or even because they called themselves this (they would have refused the label), but rather because they were more “open” and less radical, less insistent on class struggle and transformation in the post-revolutionary economy and society. More insistent on the preservation of the post-1949 status quo. Again, these are not neo-liberals like Hayek or Liu Xiaobo, but they count as liberals within the red decades. They were called such, or conservative, revisionist and so on; and such epithets and names were also reversible depending on who

20 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition. Trans. George Schwab. (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007). 21 T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002). 22 Harry Harding, “Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–1969,” The Cambridge History of China Volume 15: The People’s Republic. Eds. Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank. (Oxford: Cambridge UP, 1991), 105–217. 23 See Harding, 214. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 107 was speaking. In the Dengist 1980s there were many a “campaign” against “bourgeois liberalism” for example. My point here is simply that “liberal” was a key part of political discourse and for better or worse was seen as the antithesis of Maoist or genuinely revolutionary. This is also to say that the chief failure of the Cultural Revolution—its structural tragedy alongside individual stories of unjust persecutions— was the inability of the left or even the Chinese state to institutionalize its gains in equality, mass participation, bureaucratic reduction, elimination of new class power, pursuit of gender neutrality, rural education and health, and so on. Revisions of the constitution were simply not enough. The comparatively peaceful status quo “liberals” won out. Alongside the final and profound outbursts of the Li Yizhe rebels, one can see early signs of exhaustion and depoliticization in the mid-1970s posters and poems collected in David S.G. Goodman’s Beijing Street Voices anthology.24 As to the import of all of this, Wang Hui has usefully dated the origin of de-politicized politics back to this same period.25 The failure of the Cul- tural Revolution, which Wang places in the explosion of factionalism and the re-bureaucratization of the state, marked the state’s own (to-date) final attempt at a popular, mass democratic politicization. Indeed these two roots of the failure—along with the lack of adequate institutionalization—were simultaneously the key factors of depoliticization. In the end—and it is worth recalling the purges and show trials for both the official left (the so-called “Gang of Four”) and the radicals and rebels on the ground— this de-politicization trumped the undeniably egalitarian and democratic dimensions of late Maoism: the open debates, extra-state activisms, the adamant if not extreme ‘right to rebel,’ the class-based ‘affirmative action’ and ‘going down to the countryside’ policies, the changes within communal and factory supervision and governance or mass supervision. In sum, and with no intent to whitewash the unjust violence and persecutions of the era, but with the intent to recall its often tragic and unwise factionalism, the problem was not too much politicization but too little. When we see the Mao era as overly politicized and “going too far,” we unnecessarily repro- duce the “regime of truth” from the post-Mao, neo-liberal era. Even otherwise heterodox or illiberal thinkers like Slavoj Zizek continuously repeat

24 Beijing Street Voices: The Poetry and Politics of China’s Democracy Movement (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981). As with the “Misty Poets” movement it is hard to say what is “democratic” in such work, aside from its anti-state or anti-official or anti-Gang of Four elements. But this is not democratic in any meaningful sense. 25 Wang Hui. “Depoliticized Politics, From East to West.” New Left Review 41 (Sept. 2006): 29–45. 108 daniel f. vukovich this meme.26 Whatever the limits of “family background” and other popularized notions of class-struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, the proper solution was not de-politicization but re-politicization and re-institutionalization in a new or better form of the state. What we have now is a party-state with de-politicized politics (because it is still politically interested at another level): “no longer an organization with specific political values, but a mechanism of power. Even within the party it is not easy to carry on real debate; divisions are cast as technical differences on the path to modernization, so they can only be resolved within the power structures.”27 The party has no distinctive “standpoint or social goals,” only a “structural functionalist relationship to the [repressive] state apparatus.”28 In addition, the primary functions, as is often remarked, are the preservation of stability and the facilitation of economic growth, i.e., profit. This much is familiar, but how is this shift related to liberalism’s rise? I have already suggested that the initial triumph of Deng and others was a triumph of a type of liberalism within the Chinese context—that it was a movement of de-politicization and neutralization of antagonisms that represented politics-by-administration and economic modernization, liberalization, and marketization. But what neither Wang nor others sufficiently acknowledge is that depoliticization in China (and elsewhere) has much to do with the resurgence of not just economic liberalism and class interest, but the category of “the individual”—the properly autonomous (possessing freedoms from), naturally rights-bearing (in the sense of negative liberties) subject. This relates to the minor tradition of “charter politics” to which we will soon turn. The long-standing problem here (of both political theory and modernity) is that political liberalism and its individualist basis are in fact opposed to any sense of a collective, Rous- seauian, egalitarian, or mass/Maoist sense of democracy. Roberto Esposito puts it somewhat more charitably, but the point is the same: The ideology of liberalism, in its logic, presuppositions, and conceptual language (antiegalitarian, particularist, and at times also naturalistic) if not opposed to the ideology of democracy is quite different; the latter tends to be universalist and egalitarian.29

26 See his comments about economism in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Inter ventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. New York: Verso, 2001. 27 Wang Hui, 32. 28 Wang Hui, 35. 29 Roberto Esposito, “Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Inter pretation of the Twentieth Century.” Trans. Timothy Campbell. Critical Inquiry 34 (Sum mer 2008): 642. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 109

Moreover, democracy—before the current neo-liberal era, before the ruin of European social democracy—was the quest for an identity between the government and the governed, an expression of popular will. This flies in the face of current anti-state, liberal doxa in China and the world. This is not to dismiss the relative importance of individually-based rights and liberties, but to indeed point to their relativity in a social order and global economy based on mass dispossession of wealth and freedoms to, as well as public and collective rights, goods, and spaces. To be wealthy or even middle class in China or elsewhere is to have standing and at least the potential to realize many of one’s rights and desires. But for how many is this meaningful? This objection lies at the heart of the critique of liberalism today. Promulgating atomized individualism and legal or merely formal equality; transforming political enemies into debate adversaries or economic competitors; reducing the political sphere to that of economics or the merely juridical or ethical: this is how liberalism depoliticizes, and this is what has been happening globally as much as in China.

IV. Chartered Politics: De-Politicized Liberalism

In short, the rise of liberalism within China today cannot be explained only by domestic or direct political-economic/class factors, though these are important. Indeed one simply must read the post-Mao turn and especially the long decade of the 1980s as a certain ‘return of the repressed’ among the post-1949 and would-be independent and ‘liberal’ intelligentsia. Not only was the rehabilitation of former officials and established intellectuals key to the new regime’s legitimacy after the purge/coup but the cultural-occidental learning ‘fevers,’ the humanist spirit debates, and so on were all genuine and society-wide phenomena that speaks to the power of the appeals of liberal discourse, as well as “China’s”—or the intelligentsia’s and elite student youth’s-powerful desire to become-the- same and join the normative, modern, US-Western intellectual-political culture. Again a domestic or ‘traditional’ return to the would-be power or status of the intellectuals (leaders and consciences of the nation or civilization-state) but also a global phenomenon through and through. And for others, to get rich and release your entrepreneurial energies can seem glorious indeed. This is a very old story and appeal but it can take on new impetus when it is seen as yet another way to enter the real of global history and the new ‘new China.’ In the event—the aftermath of the repression at Tiananmen; the petering-out of occidental-cultural fevers; the commodification of if not all then far too many things and 110 daniel f. vukovich social relations; the rise of the new left and heterodox yet more China- centered thinking as well as of official and unofficial nationalisms— liberalism is finally put more on the defensive in recent years. Though one would not know this from the English language media nor most area studies, which keeps waiting for the next Tiananmen and liberal/velvet/ Eastern European/whatever forces to sweep the Party-state aside. None of this is intended to mock these liberal desires within China, or even that class fraction of the intelligentsia, who by-and-large have little actual power aside from their standing within the English-language media outlets and scholarly community. The massive and contradictory term “liberalism” must be approached as a powerful real-world philosophy in its deepest sense, and as a global (and therefore colonial/imperial) force that can do its work even after the formal end of colonialism and the Cold War. It thrives in the absence of a left opposition and intellectual- political culture. There is certainly a liberal wing in the party (arguably represented by the former Premier Wen Jiabao) that shares the intellectuals’ views (faith in privatization and free markets, the non-relevance of class and thus mass inequality). And there is nothing wrong in principle with intellectuals having a space in the state. The fantasy of independence, like that of the universal intellectual, seems past its expiration date—unless, of course, you believe that the Chinese party-state is an abomination that must be implacably and resolutely opposed whatever it does, short of dissolving itself. But this production of neo-liberal subjectivity and discourse is nonetheless worth interrogating conceptually, historically, and globally. The short version of this is simply to acknowledge the copiously doc- umented and elaborately theorized filiations between liberalism and imperialism, slavery, and racism. For example, while a defender of representative democracy and women’s equality, J.S. Mill was unambiguously a spokesperson for British imperialism and an apologist for the “white man’s burden.” He famously consigned the darker, colonized races to “the imaginary waiting room of history” until such time as they were civilized enough for self-rule (as memorably put by Dipesh Chakrabarty).30 The larger point here is that modern liberalism is historically articulated to the practice of colonialism and imperialism, as well as its governing and

30 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif ference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 8. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 111 orientalist discourses. Liberalism is not conceptually guilty (though one can easily find plenty of objectionable and embarrassing moments in the texts) but historically so. Dominic Lusordo’s magisterial Liberalism: A Counter-History could not make this history more clear or damning.31 The genuine promise of liberation for “the individual” always came with exceptions and exclusions that proved the rule of imperial and racial difference.32 Modern colonialism was an era of global capitalism similar to ours in many ways, and there is no reason to think that now, at last, liberalism (under an equally brutal, unchecked form of capitalism) will work for the actual majority of disempowered or dispossessed people who live in the PRC. This is even less likely in consideration of the standard and powerful Marxist critique that “bourgeois liberalism” is predicated upon the universalization of wage labor, i.e., upon the modern class system and proletarianization. Still more concretely, recall Chinese liberal views about backward, still-feudal peasants and the horrors of having them vote. In short, the skin-deep cosmopolitanism and universality of modern liberalism is signified not only by Mill or von Hayek (who saw communist societies as akin to primitive tribes) but by a post-Mao classic like the infamous He Shang/River Elegy series.33 The upshot of this ‘post-colonial’ critique of liberalism is simply that its professed universalism (through the generic, autonomous individual rights bearer free from others) and its transcendent faith in ‘natural’ rights and freedom are very much the particular and specific statements that various critics have said they are, from Marx and Aime Cesaire up to the present. And including one notable middle peasant from Hunan. The desire to use China, or the abomination of that ‘artificial’ Party-state, to prove the Truth of the universality of liberalism and democracy is one instance of a longer history originating from the Jesuit and Christian missionary projects in China. But in an age of post-colonial, global modernity it is something that can just as easily be done from within China, by Chinese subjects. Perhaps on a first glance the idea of Chinese people internalizing such an objectionable and

31 Dominic Losordo, Liberalism: A Counter-History. Trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2011). See also Uday Mehta Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999); and Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberal ism.” PMLA. 123.5 (2008): 1380–1397. 32 We owe the phrase ‘rule of colonial difference’ to Partha Chatterjee. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993). 33 See Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang. Deathsong of the River. A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang. Trans. Richard W. Bodman and Pin P. Wan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor nell UP 1991). 112 daniel f. vukovich foreign liberal discourse (about the Chinese past, peasants, free markets, and so on) somehow challenges post-colonial studies’ alleged focus on “binaries” and dualistic notions of power. But the very notions of occidentalism and the comprador class already belie this. There is no good reason to assume that somehow—in the case of China—the demonstrably false and misleading universals of liberalism will somehow fit, and its promise of individual liberation for all will finally pay off. A perfectly emblematic text in this regard is the “human rights and democracy” Charter 2008 document principally authored by Liu Xiaobo.34 One is not sure how much this is actually meant to be read and debated so much as admired and “posted” in various fora. But re-reading it there is something inspiring and seductive about the classical liberal language of the Charter, which calls for freedom of speech and asserts the legitimacy of protest in the context of the current party-state. It certainly demonstrates Liu’s great courage of conviction. But the Charter, not unlike He Shang, works from an anti- Maoist and anti-communist position that argues for the removal of the state from the economy, for an end to state-owned enterprises (which protect key industries and are usually the best jobs for the working class), and for a reduction of state involvement in favor of the market and individual entrepreneurs and consumers. The Charter draws on neoclassical economic ideology, arguing emphatically for the privatization of land and for the natural right to private property. It clearly evidences the presence of Western “China experts” and Cold War discourse and assumes that narrative—ironically one shared at points by the current party—about the post-1949 Mao decades. Liu has received large sums from the US National Endowment for Democracy, funded by Congress. He has also notoriously insisted that the mainland could still use a three-hundred-year period of Western colonization to catch up with Hong Kong.35 Now none of this justifies Liu’s imprisonment. Regardless of the content of the Charter it seems remarkably ill-considered and unjust—and for that matter, un-Maoist—to just lock up the reactionaries. In a supremely ironic twist, many of these views, especially the substantively neo-liberal economic ideas, are shared by leading functionaries within the party. At least one noted and heterodox liberal intellectual in China, Professor Qin Hui, refused to sign the Charter. But

34 See Liu et al. (2008). “Charter 08: a blueprint for China,” trans. Perry Link. Online source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/chinas-charter-08, accessed March 2012. 35 See Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong (2011). ‘ “The Right Dissident”: Liu Xiaobo and the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize,” positions, 19. 2: 581–613. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 113 this was obscurely justified, not on social-democratic or anti-imperialist grounds, but due to China needing more “debate and enlightenment” as well as economic growth.36 The Charter and Liu’s subsequent imprisonment by the post-Mao regime comprise a complex confluence of political, ideological, and historical streams. But one way to parse this is to point to the return of colonial liberalism. We should examine the limits and lacunae of self-orientalization, Westernization, and a neo-imperial realpolitik (as evidenced in Liu’s controversial Nobel Prize award) on the one hand, and repressive, de-politicized politics on the other, when considering a PRC that has not yet found an adequate form of state and mode of governance. Liu seems to have been locked up not so much on the basis of what he said or did, but because of who he associates himself with (foreign “enemies” and anti-communist intellectuals) and perhaps because of his funding from the United States. (Obviously the official verdict and charges are not illuminating here.) Philosophically or intellectually, there is little to his views. In point of fact his work is little known, and neither substantial nor especially incendiary; his “unpatriotic” economic views are not well placed to win masses over to his side. But what the Charter does instruct us about is how deeply de-politicized Chinese liberalism and dissidence is. The project of the Charter— aside from allying with foreign powers, knowledge, and media in making a cause célèbre—must lie in the original Declaration of CHARTER 77 by Vaclav Havel and others in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.37 Presum- ably the idea is for history to repeat itself, even if it takes the requisite sixteen years (in the Czech case) or longer for China’s velvet revolution, for the civil society and zeitgeist to develop properly. This is a teleological, even flippant historicism that is less messianic than quietist, or at least desper- ate in its reaching out to the international ‘community’ for help or support. (And in a strongly nationalist and patriotic China, these appeals abroad are almost doomed to fail from the start.) The 2008 Charter’s emphasis covers

36 Qin, H. (2009). “Critique of Charter 08: Democratic Debate and Renewed Enlight enment is More Necessary for China,” trans. David Kelly, Boxun News. Online source: http://www.boxun.us/news/publish/china_comment/Qin_Hui_s_Critique_of_Charter_08_ Democratic_Debate_and_Renewed_Enlightenment_is_More_Necessary_for_China. shtml, accessed January 2012. For a full report in Chinese, see http://rwjch.blogbus.com/ logs/39445413.html. 37 An English translation of Charter 77, authored by dissident and later Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, can be found at http://libpro.cts.cuni.cz/charta/docs/declaration_ of_charter_77.pdf. 114 daniel f. vukovich so-called progressive topics like legal reform (including the privatization front) and constitutionalism; its first point is to call for a new, American- style constitution, and the document itself reads like one, though without the loftiness.

This is a highly de-politicized mode of politics and struggle that cannot have much chance of succeeding within China due to the power of the state, but also to the lack of a constituency for the liberal intellectuals. Moreover, one cannot simply issue a proclamation and expect it to change anything in itself due to its profound truth, universality, or harmony with the movement of history. But this is what it attempts to do: “we dare to put civic spirit into practice by announcing Charter 08. We hope that our fellow citizens who feel a similar sense of crisis, responsibility, and mission, whether they are inside the government or not, and regardless of their social status, will set aside small differences to embrace the broad goals of this citizens’ movement. Together we can work for major changes in Chinese society and for the rapid establishment of a free, democratic, and constitutional country.”38 Without an actually existing social movement in China (like there were in the old Eastern bloc), even in one confined to its civil society and not including labor, such a pronouncement amounts to little more than a media event. As compared to manifestos and radical documents of days gone by, the language of the Charter strives to be neutral and legalistic, even if the enemy implied is fairly obvious (the party-state)—and even if that enemy did reply in kind through the police and courts. By comparison, even Charter 77 used stronger language, was less specific and legalistic (though still focused on Czech and international laws), and did not mention privatization at all. It proposed no new laws or massive changes but only adherence to what was on the books and in a spirit of co-operation and solidarity (however radical and subversive it was at another level, of course): “Charter 77 does not want to lay down its own programmes of political and social reforms or changes but to engage in the spheres of its activity in constructive dialogue with political and state power . . .”39 A comparatively democratic form of liberalism there, focused primarily on free expression and freedom from a police state. Nor did it buy into a developmentalist narrative in the manner of Charter

38 See the final paragraph of the online English version at: http://www.opendemocracy .net/article/chinas-charter-08. 39 See page three of the original English language Charter, http://libpro.cts.cuni.cz/ charta/docs/declaration_of_charter_77.pdf. from charting the revolution to charter 2008 115

2008: for example Liu claims that the lack of (liberal capitalist) democracy “constricts China’s own development [and also limits] the progress of all of human civilization.”40 If liberal democracy is what Nehru and the Indian Congress Party took from the British and used to “free” themselves, then Liu sees its absence in China as inhibiting both China and humanity’s further development. In the context of the West this type of thinking—especially given how yoked it is to privatization—would be seen as a right-wing and faintly ridiculous way of seeing the post– Cold War world of globalization and neo-imperialism. The only reason it could possibly be considered progressive and prize-worthy in China is if the current party-state is viewed as a total abomination. The disavowal of antagonistic politics does not work here—and this should not be surprising because of the very dyadic nature of the political. But arguably the Charter 2008 text and the state response still speak to de- politicization. Sheer repression is not politics, in a political-theory sense, so much as domination and control. Bringing forth social and political change through pronouncements is simply not to be taken seriously, nor is waiting for the zeitgeist and next stage of history (the post-Mao Marx- ists have their own version of this with the “development of productive forces” line). An emphasis on legal change, on producing—even defining—democracy through the law, and then upholding the law and constitution in perpetuity is far more concrete, a variation within the theme of proceduralist democracy (we will vote like this; we will have these laws and these rights; and so we will be democratic/free). But this is in the end a managerial and administrative mode of politics, a legal fetishism where laws are equated with justice and embody universal truth. Even Jacques Derrida, the great liberal ethicist, argued that while it is just that there is law, law is not justice.41 Law and procedure ultimately trump people and politics in this model, and the actually existing Chinese legal and political systems are assumed to be mere masks for ‘statist’ power. Finally, it must be said that the unspoken subtext of the Charter promotes an alliance of liberals within and outside of China, to either help push for reform or to wait for it to all come crashing down and then step into the breach. The great irony here is, again, that there are many liberal and conservative voices in the party and establishment who share Liu’s

40 Charter 08, online version. 41 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” trans. Mary Quaintance, Deconstruction and the Pos sibility of Justice, eds., Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 116 daniel f. vukovich economic views and apparent faith in developmentalism/economism. But it is hard to imagine them becoming keen on dissolving the system that they embody. Would even a liberal-capitalist CCP dissolve itself, along the lines of the abdication of the old elite in the former Soviet Russia?42 It seems unlikely because there is already an advantageous system in place for this demographic. Liu’s natural constituency then—neo-liberal, solidly middle-class yet anti-party-state, a new ‘new class’ lying in wait—must be rather tiny. The final problem with this mode of “Charter politics” is that economic neo-liberalism, the field of forces represented by state-sanctioned and private capital, is ultimately the motor force of the economy and the pursuit of growth and wealth above all else. It is also the base cause of all the social dislocations, environmental crises, and injustices in the PRC and indeed the region. It is impossible to see how some type of American or Western-style liberal democracy—the silent partner of all the universalist talk—would address this, especially when the contradictions of capitalism are not even in their analysis of what ails China. De-politicization, then, is very bad indeed. It exists across the board, from the state and its critics to its indifferent and consumption-oriented subjects. It blocks the analysis and identification of China’s biggest problems and obstacles, as well as any redress. Few would deny that China needs political as well as other reform; this has been a constant refrain since the middle of the nineteenth century, and within the Communist Party since its beginnings. But increasingly these reforms are all about managing, administering, and dispelling-through-growth the contradictions among the people, as they used to be called. This is a problem of vision and law, but also one of knowledge and class power, a problem that is thus in part about the hegemonic politics of discourse. If we can agree that the forms and understandings of politics are not universal and modular (such that all China needs to do is import liberalism and democracy or make everyone rich and thus glorious in a capitalist environment), then it becomes clear that something like a return to Maoist and revolutionary discourse is necessary. Only then can we re-politicize the present and make the mass democratic and egalitarian past useful.

42 This is how at least one powerfully argued analysis of the former Soviet Union goes. See David Kotz and Fred Weir. Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997). Chapter Five

The Transformation of Chinese University Culture: History, Present, and Path

Liao Kebin Translated by Adrian Thieret

People today invest and place their hopes in universities, because university is where the next generation is cultivated, and it represents the future of every country and region. To China, a country in the process of great change and rapid development, the university has an even more special significance. What this country eagerly anticipates is not an ordinary successor, but a new generation—one both revolutionary and creative in its character, thought, and abilities. Only such a new generation can uphold the mission of the country to realize fundamental reform and progress. Consequently, Chinese society shows a level of concern for universities and everything related to them rarely seen across the world or across history. Do Chinese universities meet the high expectations of the Chinese people? Regrettably, not only is society’s appraisal of universities low, even within universities there is plenty of dissatisfaction and criticism. People who defend universities for various reasons naturally offer as evidence university expansion, dormitory and facilities construction, excellent accomplishments of certain researchers, increases in the number of doctorates, establishment of important disciplines, or even the number of grants that were won. However, first of all, it is hard to say whether these statistics are truly significant; many titles and numerical figures are nothing but froth artificially concocted for self-amusement. Second, one cannot discount the possibility of finding bright spots even in the worst case scenario. There are indeed some teachers who, holding the good conscience of a scholar, continue to work diligently in universities and make excellent achievements. But we cannot use these bright spots to conceal the truly awful state of the environment on the whole. If we do not try too hard to conceal the truth, it is easy to see that the overall state of universities in China today is worrisome. Universities increasingly grow vulgar, pursue profit, lack independent character and critical spirit, and are unable to construct a moral high ground and spiritual 118 liao kebin benchmark for society. Universities brim with administrative bureaucracy and lack an atmosphere of equality, freedom, and tolerance. The people within them either pursue power or submit to power; an atmosphere of formalism, artifice, and sycophancy flourishes. The image of university leaders lining up en masse to wait upon a young female secretary from the “undergraduate teaching evaluation team” of the Ministry of Education is a realistic portrait of the increasingly administrative and bureaucratic nature of Chinese universities today. Worse, there exist innumerable similar or even more intolerable situations that have not been exposed. Mired in the temptations of the market economy and administrative management, university teachers are volatile and confused, cannot comfortably engage in teaching and research, and lack the interest to deeply explore academic problems. Crude work and even plagiarism are not unusual. Universities do not emphasize teaching and do not take responsibility for their students. Students do not receive spiritual guidance and are in want of reading, thought, and discussion. In universities, students do not learn how to discover, think about, or resolve new questions—and the knowledge they do gain is relatively limited. Influenced by a bad campus atmosphere, they do not cultivate a noble spirit and wholesome character; they are instead polluted by numerous vulgar habits. At present, those outside the university, although they may have many criticisms of it, still hold some traditional illusions toward the university. Relatively speaking, those inside better understand the true situation and hence feel the pain more acutely. From the management and teachers to the students, nearly everyone is seriously dissatisfied with the present situation, but feels unable to do anything. University campuses are saturated in this kind of mood, which is without a doubt extremely harmful to universities’ noble purpose as places meant for cultivation of human talent and academic research. Before he passed away, Qian Xuesen repeatedly asked why our universities did not foster top-class creative talent—this is a serious query regarding contemporary Chinese universities. Simply speaking, the Chinese people place strong hopes in universities, and invest more and more resources in them, but our universities produce pitifully few high-quality research achievements and cultivate human talent that is far from satisfactory; moreover they have no function or contribution to society worth mentioning. Universities have let down the hopes of the country and society. Precisely because the problems of Chinese universities are so severe, we constantly hear criticism of the universities today. People were originally more concerned with the issue of insufficient national and social the transformation of chinese university culture 119 investment in universities. Today, however, although China’s per capita GDP has reached only one-third of the world average, and one-tenth or one-twentieth the average of developed countries, the annual operating budget of many of our so-called key universities has risen to nearly that of many world-famous universities. The buildings and laboratories of these Chinese universities are luxurious, meeting or surpassing the equivalent facilities of universities in developed countries. Professors in popular disciplines such as engineering, medicine, economics, management, and law, have actual earnings that have already met or surpassed those of the same professions in developed countries. China should certainly still increase investment in universities, but the main issues now are how to guarantee the equality and effectiveness of that investment. Some education research experts think, conversely, that the fundamental problem of the Chinese university is a problem of the conception of education. Education, especially higher education, ought to be focused on producing talent, but universities today are driven by profit and biased toward research and social service, which is opposite to what it should be. Universities ought first to be concerned with cultivating healthy minds and independent character in their students, but instead they emphasize knowledge and skills training. Still more critics point their spears at the current system of university management. Power is extremely concentrated in the Ministry of Educa- tion and local education bureaus, which hold the power to appoint and dismiss university officials, allocate university budgets, approve or veto all academic activities (such as student enrollment, professional facilities, class arrangement, determination of important disciplines, evaluation of teachers, and so on), and evaluate how well universities are running. Uni- versities cannot but act in accordance with either the Ministry of Edu- cation or local education bureaus. These government entities purport to want to let the universities run autonomously but, enjoying the pleasures and benefits of power, in actuality they wield more and more influence. This is expressed through their establishment of various new titles, retention of a large portion of the budget for so-called special program funds, and requirement for schools to constantly report (and beg) to them. With the environment outside universities like this, the interior institution of universities quickly grew similar. Under strong control of their corresponding governmental authorities, universities have established various structures and institutions to match, and constantly busy themselves making reports, filing forms, holding meetings, inspecting, evaluating, employing artifice and trickery, enacting ceremonies, and so forth. They have no 120 liao kebin time to think about their own development, and even if they do think about it they cannot truly realize it. In this kind of system, all universities now look the same, and each school’s unique character has disappeared. The administrative system is seemingly the most important part of the school, and many of the school’s interests are controlled by the administrative system. The administration thus naturally holds the power to redistribute resources and benefits, and consequently is smug and arrogant. All the trivial and boring tasks of formalism ultimately land on teachers’ shoulders, and consequently all teachers are ordered back and forth until they grow dizzy, tired of dealing with it all. In sum, governmental authorities in charge of education order universities around, universities order teachers around, and all China’s universities thus crazily spin at high speed with no actual purpose, consuming themselves until only a shell is left. People are increasingly inclined to think that the present problem of Chinese universities is not just financial investment, nor the conception of education, nor the way universities are run, but rather a collection of all these problems. From the university spirit (大学精神 daxue jingshen) and conception of education (办学理念 banxue linian) to the way the system works and material facilities—in all these ways universities have lost standards and order. Small fixes, like “treating the head when the head aches or treating the foot when the foot hurts,” will not solve the problem. We are now accustomed to referring to the entire way of human existence as “culture,” calling a certain aspect of human existence a certain kind of culture. In China’s universities, then, it is the entire university culture that is problematic. While numerous universities have some ideas, institutions, materials, and activities generally associated with university culture, it is difficult to say that they have formed their own university culture. Only when they have their own particular characteristics, which moreover remain somewhat stable, are they able to form that tradition. In other words, university culture covers all aspects that constitute a university and all linkages that collectively make the operation of a university possible, and it determines whether the university succeeds or fails. Another reason university culture currently attracts critical attention is because it has a particular status within the entire social culture (社会文化 shehui wenhua). University culture represents cultural ideals in pursuit of perfected character (完善人格 wanshan renge), knowledge, and truth. It is tasked with the social mission of cultivating new citizens (新公民 xin gongmin); it shoulders hopes for society as a whole. In this sense, university culture represents the highest level of the entire social the transformation of chinese university culture 121 culture. University culture, together with religious, legal, and media culture, etc., forms the essential value line of the social culture. In China, a country with a deep tradition of placing importance on education and literature, the university has always held a special place in people’s hearts. If the quality of university, religious, legal, and media culture are all in decline, the impact on society would be extraordinary. The present worsening of Chinese university culture has already had a significant impact on the entire social culture. For this reason, investigating and reflecting on the issue of Chinese university culture is particularly important. Because it holds such great significance for university development and even society, we must comprehensively investigate and reflect on Chinese university culture. Since culture is hereditary, a result of accumulated history, as we investigate the issue of Chinese university culture today, we must begin by looking for causes in the historical culture of China, especially the tradition of Chinese higher education. The main reason for the worsening of contemporary Chinese university culture is the current institutional environment and social customs, but traditional Chinese culture is undoubtedly an important element. Only by starting with an investigation of historical university culture can we understand the root of the problem and possibly find a cure. One aim of this article is to conduct a simple comparison of the historical tradition of Chinese higher education culture with the historical tradition of Western higher education culture, to see what particular characteristics the former has, to see what its mutual relationship is to the entirety of traditional Chinese culture, and to see what its influence is on contemporary Chinese university culture. In addition to that, after clarifying the circumstances behind the worsening of the current Chinese university culture, this article explores what strategies we should adopt to fix the drawbacks of current Chinese university culture and realize a beneficial interaction between the transformation of university culture and the transformation of the social culture as a whole.

I. The Historical Tradition of Higher Education Culture in Ancient China

The characteristics of a particular nation’s university culture are conditioned by the characteristics of that nation’s cultural traditions. To a certain degree, the composition and development of a particular country’s university culture can be seen as a window into and barometer of that country’s cultural form and the historical development thereof. 122 liao kebin

The Evolution of Educational Thought by famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim, for example, begins with an analysis of the formation and evolution of educational thought and institutions, from there exploring the historical changes of the entire French society. Halbwachs, in his introduction to the 1938 French edition of the book, writes: “the organs of education are in every age closely related to other social institutions, customs and beliefs, as well as to major intellectual movements.”1 Durkheim argues: There is no institution which gives better expression to the mediaeval mind. The university was not just a school in which a certain number of disciplines were taught. The university, perhaps even more than the Church and the feudal system, was the institution which most faithfully and representatively reflected this period. Never was the intellectual life of the European peoples equipped with an organ so accurate, so universally recognized, in short so well adapted to its function. Thus the influence of the universities was far greater than political historians lead us to suspect.2 Here he stresses the influence of university culture on the entire social culture, but in fact the influence goes both ways, and the influence of social culture is more significant. For a long period in ancient Chinese society, the leading production form and corresponding lifestyle was that of the self-sufficient small farmer (小农式的自给自足 xiaonong shi de ziji zizu). As a result, Chinese society for a long period was fundamentally secular. Pragmatism was the leading mode of thought, and a unified central authority of autocratic monarchy was the dominant political system. These basic characteristics of historical Chinese culture profoundly restricted the higher education culture of ancient China (古代中国的高等教育文化 gudai zhongguo de gaodeng jiaoyu wenhua), and still exert profound influence on contemporary Chinese university culture. Higher education in ancient China had two systems: national learning academies (国学 guoxue) and academies of classical learning (书院 shuyuan). Legends maintain that the national learning tradition began as early as the times of Yu Shun with the establishment of yang (庠) schools. Then the Xia established xu (序) schools, the Shang established the guzong (瞽宗), and the Zhou established the piyong (辟雍)—these were all national academies. In the five-year yuanshuo (元朔) period of Emperor Wu of Han (124 BCE), the taixue (太学) academy was formally

1 Maurice Halbwachs, “Introduction by Maurice Halbwachs to the French Edition of 1938,” in Emile Durkheim, Selected Writings on Education: Volume 2 The Evolution of Edu cational Thought (London: Routledge, 2006), xii. 2 Ibid., 75–6. the transformation of chinese university culture 123 established, along with the positions of “doctors,” or scholars, of the five classics (五经博士 wujing boshi). In the Sui dynasty this became known as the guozijian (国子监) imperial college. The Tang dynasty established the Seven Schools (七学 qixue) of guozi (国子), taixue (太学), guangwen (广文), simen (四门), lü (律), shu (书), and suan (算), all belonging to the guozijian. The Song dynasty had both the guozi and the taixue, while the Ming and Qing dynasties only had the guozijian. National academies were the principle organ of higher education in ancient China. These national academies were run by the imperial courts, subordinate to the ruler’s power, and part of the state political system. Officials of national academies were all court officials, and national academies functioned entirely according to the rules of the government. China’s shuyuan (书院) academies arose during the Song dynasty. At the time the most famous were Bailu (白鹿), Yingtian (应天), Yuelu (岳麓), and Shigu (石鼓), though some say Songyang is the fourth. Shuyuan academies flourished during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing, some established by the government and other established privately. Even privately established academies often received financial support from sitting and retired government officials. Teachers at those renowned schools were usually hired by local government officials and the establishment of shuyuan normally had to be reported to and approved by the court. Shuyuan development flourished during the Qing dynasty, which was also when the relationship between shuyuan, the court, and local governments was closest. Many shuyuan prided themselves on having received the emperor’s decree. As for the main objective of these schools, the Shi huo zhi (食货志) of the Book of Han (汉书 Han Shu) describes the educational system of the Western Zhou this way: The child enters elementary school at age eight and learns the six combinations, the five directions, and writing, and begins to understand the divisions between young and old within family. At fifteen the child enters university, learns the rites and music of the sages as well as the rites of the ruler and ministers of the court.3 Clearly early Chinese education emphasized practicality, first letting students grasp the common knowledge and skills of everyday life and then acclimating them to the ethical relations and political system of society.

3 Ban Gu 班固, Han Shu: Shi huo zhi di si shang《汉书.食货志第四上》(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 1122. 124 liao kebin

Historically, national learning academies had a very clear purpose: to educate and foster bureaucrats. Under the civil service examination system started in the Sui and Tang, students of national academies were usually unable to directly enter the official ranks. As a result, national academies changed to serve the civil service examination system. Shuyuan academies that arose from the Song dynasty were established to prepare students for the civil service examinations. While a few well- known shuyuan sought to cultivate moral character in their students and conducted some academic research, these pursuits did not change the essential function of shuyuan, namely, to serve the civil service examination system whose main function, in turn, was to select government bureaucrats. China has accumulated many words in praise of school and education, such as the famous saying “among myriad base things, only reading books is noble” (万般皆下品, 唯有读书高 wanban jie xiapin, weiyou dushu gao). People therefore often say that China has a tradition of respecting teachers and emphasizing learning. This is not necessarily incorrect, but one must qualify it by making clear that the reason Chinese people value education is not belief in God, pursuit of truth, or pursuit of knowledge; rather, they value education for pragmatic purposes, such as to become an official or to gain wealth. Numerous folk sayings have exerted great influence on the way the Chinese think and life choices they make, both in the past and to this day. Many of them accurately reflect the Chinese view of education. Examples include: “study for ten years under a cold window unknown to all, become one day a name known to all under heaven;” or “in books there are a thousand measures of grain, in books there are houses of gold, in books there are faces as of jade,” and more. Simply put, most Chinese value not education itself, but the benefits that education can bring. To sum up, the two fundamental characteristics of higher education culture in ancient China were subservience to the autocratic imperial court and thorough pragmatism. These determined a series of other characteristics, such as the centralization of education management, tendency toward administrative bureaucracy within the educational structure, didactic tendencies in teaching style, orthodox and pragmatic nature of teaching materials, decorative and extravagant appearance of teaching facilities, and formulaic style of school activities. One can say that all of these determined the basic direction taken by future Chinese higher education culture. the transformation of chinese university culture 125

The modern university originated in Europe, beginning from the various grammar schools attached to the church. Later, the teachers of these grammar schools organized themselves into professional guilds, which gradually became independent from the church and formed the prototype of the modern university. The original was the University of Bologna in Italy. On September 18, 1988, on the eve of its the nine hundredth anniversary, presidents of 430 European universities met in the University of Bologna square and signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, which formally declared the University of Bologna to be the Alma Mater Studiorum, the mother school, of all European universities. Beginning in 1088, scholars of grammar, rhetoric, and logic known as “glossators” gathered in Bologna to comment on and annotate the codi- ces of ancient Roman law. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, after listen- ing to the suggestions of four students of Irnerio, issued a special license to the University of Bologna in 1158 granting that the university would not be subject to any influence of power and would enjoy independence as a research institution, thereby establishing the basic characteristic of the university. In short, European universities became autonomous entities run by teachers. Universities were neither established nor were they managed by the government, and what is more, the government formally acknowledged their independence and autonomy. During the Middle Ages power in the West was concentrated in the church, but with the rise in power of civilians (in the form of merchant guilds) and kings, the layout of society’s power structure began to split. Universities meanwhile remained independent, not belonging to any one power. In fact, universities were able to make use of this situation in which the church, monarch, and civilians limited each other, by maneuvering among these powers in search for more freedom and benefit for themselves. For example, after the birth of the University of Paris in the twelfth century, university presidents wielded against the monarch the special power given them by the pope to protect their interests, and at the same time also wielded against the pope the special power given to them by the monarch to keep their universities independent.4 In England, the pope and monarch competed with each other to give out special permissions recognizing the independent and autonomous status of universities:

4 See Emile Durkheim, Selected Writings on Education: Volume 2 The Evolution of Edu cational Thought (Routledge, 2005). 126 liao kebin

As early as 1233 the existence of a stadium at Cambridge had received papal recognition in an indult, or decree, of Gregory IX of 14 June awarding to the chancellor and universitas of scholars the ius non trahi extra, that is, the right not to be sued in courts outside the diocese of Ely . . . For practical purposes, however, it was not to the church but to the crown that the university most often looked for protection and for privileges. . . . In 1231 Henry III issued three writs, designed to promote the security and the privileges of scholars vis-à-vis the town. At least one of these writs clearly regarded the chancellor and masters of Cambridge as having the power to act as a legal corporation. It was on their recognition as such that the status of Oxford and Cambridge uniquely rested, and from the time of Henry III each successive king or queen was on accession routinely solicited for a charter confirming all rights granted in earlier reigns.5 American universities got their start relatively late, but they inherited the cultural traditions of European universities, firmly grasping the fundamental autonomy of university operation. Of course, Americans made some innovations based on their particular situation. Modeling on the success of the market economy, they implemented a form of trust in the running of universities, organizing boards of trustees that leave the management of the university to an administrative system and to the autonomy of the faculty. This strengthens the ability of the university’s founders to supervise the operation of the university, without interfering with the tasks of the school itself, guaranteeing the autonomy of the administration and faculty. After the Second World War, American universities under this management model developed rapidly and became highly competitive. As for the content of university-level teaching and research, early Euro- pean universities took grammar, rhetoric, logic, and music as their main subjects, mainly in the service of teaching students to read and interpret Christian classics and principles. Universities did not look to widen social reality and humanist knowledge—as a result they had certain limits. How- ever, this nevertheless established the mission of university as emphasizing “human character cultivation” (人的培养 ren de peiyang) and exploring knowledge that transcends the immediate needs of daily life. The Chris- tian character in all of this had both positive and negative influences on the formation of university spirit. After the Renaissance, the pursuit of knowledge and truth first seen in ancient Greek culture flourished and expanded, merging together with the spirit of human character cultivation

5 Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4–6. the transformation of chinese university culture 127 and transcendent knowledge exploration that were already present in the university. The Christian yearning for heaven and worshiping of a mystical God informed the drive to explore the secrets of the universe. Combined, all of these helped form the modern university that emphasizes liberal arts education and free exploration. The two great traditions of university autonomy and freedom in teaching and research are closely connected. Only when a university is independent and autonomous can faculty and students freely conduct teaching and research according to their own interests and understanding. If a school is run by the government, then it necessarily will be placed into the entire system of government operation and tightly controlled through governmental means of hiring and firing, university budgets, administrative approvals, and others. The government would make many demands on the university, put various prohibitions on it, and regulate what it can and cannot research and communicate, and how it can do so. Generally speaking, governments out of their own interests do not wish for universities to research or transmit information that threatens their authority. At the same time, they demand universities to offer solutions for practical problems that require quick fixes. So, without independence and autonomy, the university cannot freely conduct research and teaching, and will be made to tend toward pragmatism. A university’s independence and autonomy are also related to whether or not it stresses the importance of human character cultivation. If an independent university is able to freely teach and research, then it will be able to pursue this mission relatively well. But in a situation of autocratic government interference, a university will inevitably take practical benefit as its objective and not be concerned with character cultivation. Even if it talks of such cultivation, it will more be inclined to train people in practical skills than advocate independent character, thinking ability, and sentiment—traits that dig the grave of autocracy. Because independence and autonomy are the lifeblood of the university, the principle of university autonomy has received universal respect or acknowledgement: Since the 1960s, the main objective of the three French higher education reforms was to adjust the relationship between the universities and the government and expand university autonomy. . . . In October 1988 UNESCO held a meeting on world-wide higher education in Paris and released the “World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century: Vision and Action.” It notes that school autonomy ought to be seen as a principle answering the main challenge faced by higher education around the rapidly changing world. It points out that establishing good relations with 128 liao kebin

the country and society on the basis of the principle of university autonomy is one condition for the successful operation and management of higher education institutions, and it maintains that the principle of autonomy is a predetermining condition that ensures the normal operation and successful reform of universities.6 Essentially, independent and autonomous operation, free research and teaching, and emphasis on human character cultivation are the basic characteristics of the modern university system originating from Europe. They are intimately related to Europe’s Christian cultural tradition, its long- standing system of city-states, and its civil society. In comparison, Chi- nese society for a long period of time operated under a system of imperial autocracy with unified, centralized power, in which “everything under the sky is the ruler’s land; everyone within the four seas is the ruler’s subject.” Institutions of higher education in ancient China were just one part of this tightly closed system of governance and had almost no independence or autonomy. Higher education in ancient China was focused on real-world applications, putting relative emphasis on government, economy, ethics, and so forth, and thereby forming its own system and independent tradition, one quite different from that of the modern university that originated in Europe. Today many people call the taixue and a few well- known academies of ancient China “the oldest universities.” This of course adds to national pride and motivates some universities to trace their origins to these ancient institutions of higher education, but one should not confuse two fundamentally different things. Doing so only obscures the basic characteristics of the modern university and prevents people from recognizing and understanding modern university culture.

II. The Founding of Chinese University Culture in the Modern Era

To strengthen the country and army and to save itself from destruction, China put extraordinary emphasis on the spread of education and culture in the modern era, beginning with the establishment of universities. Chi- na’s modern universities were influenced and restricted by two cultural traditions in the early stage of their development: higher education in ancient China and the Western university. On the whole, Chinese universities underwent a process of striving to continue, to the greatest extent possible, the ancient Chinese tradition of higher education while also

6 Ibid., 2–3. the transformation of chinese university culture 129 thoroughly and systematically introducing Western university culture. In the process, people’s understanding of the nature of the modern university gradually deepened. During the Self-Strengthening Movement (洋务运动 yangwu yundong), many thinkers advocated copying the West and establishing universities with the main aim of cultivating “useful talent” in many specialized areas. China’s earliest modern institution of higher education was Beiyang University, previously the Tianjin Chinese and Western Academy established by Sheng Xuanhuai in 1895. It was also called the Beiyang West- ern Academy. Originally, it hired American Charles Daniel Tenney as head instructor and was divided into lower and upper schools. The lower school was an ordinary middle school in nature. Its course of study was four years, and after graduation a student could advance to the upper school. The upper school had five subjects: engineering, electricity, mining, mechanics, and law, and was a vocational school in nature. After four years a graduate could advance to “specialized study.” The academy ceased to operate in 1900. On September 15, 1902, Yuan Shikai, viceroy of Zhili and minister of Beiyang restored the Tianjin upper and lower schools, and remade them as the Beiyang University. It formally opened in April 1903. The school had courses of study in engineering, mining, metallurgy, etc., and was China’s first engineering university. Strictly speaking, this kind of school was not a true university, but simply a higher vocational academy. Indeed, in the eyes of the Chinese people at the time, a “university” was a place that taught high-level specialized skills. Therefore we can say that modern China from the beginning misunderstood the concept of university or, put differently, did not truly understand the essence of university. This misunderstanding primarily arose from the influence of the struggle for survival that was the particular social reality of the time. It was also related to the pragmatic conception of education deeply rooted in Chinese history. This conceptualization has had a profound influence on the construction and development of universities and university culture in modern China. Even today, many people still understand and treat universities this way. In the late Qing, beset by domestic and foreign pressures, the government enacted educational reform. It established a minister in charge of schools and in 1905 established a ministry of education. Empress Dowager Cixi and the Manchurian government established schools to cultivate pragmatically useful talents and to strengthen the country and the army, however, these were not their primary concerns in these endeavors. Their main objective was to maintain the stability of the Qing government’s 130 liao kebin authority. Accordingly, they worried less about whether or not schools were developing properly, but rather about the possibility that these schools were becoming wellsprings of new learning and camps of reformers. China’s early modern universities were born under the authority of a government that was about to collapse; being based on knowledge and reason, universities would inevitably stand in opposition and overturn this authority. The corrupt government instinctively felt the threat that the universities presented, and consequently treated them with a high level of caution and animosity. The relationship between universities of early modern China and the government was tense from the beginning, unlike the early European university, which generally maintained good relations with the church, the government, and civil society. Compared to this, the modern Chinese university established a relationship of control and anti-control with the government. A group of learned individuals gradually realized that studying Western science and technology would not enable them to truly change the situation in China. They would also have to learn from Western institutions of government, economics, and so on. Thus they believed that Chinese universities needed to offer courses beyond practical technologies to include the social sciences. Zhang Zhidong proposed: Of the methods of the academies, there are six main ones . . . one is called learning both politics and technology. Education, geography, economics, taxes, military, law, labor, and commerce, these are Western politics. Calcu- lation, painting, mining, medicine, sound, light, chemistry, and electricity, these are Western technology. . . . On the whole, in our moment of crisis and for the best method to construct the country, politics are more crucial than technology.7 Zhang Zhidong’s brilliant insight was the importance of politics. But what he called “politics” was basically practical social sciences. He did not speak of sciences that focus on the pursuit of truth and cultivation of national character (such as natural sciences, humanistic sciences, and the arts). Liang Qichao, in his 1896 “Letter to Minister Zhang of Nanpi” written to Zhang Zhidong, clearly criticizes the emphasis on vocational skills and neglect of political institutions and intellectual culture during the Self- Strengthening Movement:

7 Zhang Zhidong, “Quan xue bian xia: She xue di san 劝学篇下·设学第三,” Zhang Zhi dong quanji 张之洞全集 v. 12 (Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2008), 176. the transformation of chinese university culture 131

China’s studying of the West only scrapes the surface and trembles at the prowess of Western technology, while neglecting the basic methods of West- ern government. As a result, in the study of dialects, mathematics, manufacturing, and military facilities China has made some progress, but I have heard of no such advancement in political institutions. I think that Western schools are of more than one kind and their methods are many, but only the political academy is most suited to enacting and most needed in China. What the political study concentrates on is common reason (gongli 公理) (what people use in their mutual interaction is called common reason) and common law (gongfa 公法) (what countries use in their mutual exchanges is called common law, actually it is also common reason). Political study takes common reason and common law, together with the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, as its paradigm, for the purpose of understanding recent politics and events. Those who study politics well can then master the reasons for governing the world (tianxia 天下), the ancients’ methods for doing so, and the ways with which to solve the problems that face the world of today.8 In 1897, Liang Qichao wrote to the Hangzhou prefect Lin Qi (Lin Dichen), again emphasizing the importance of cultivating political talent in universities: I say that schools today should take politics as their main subject of study and art as supplementary. Completion of political study is relatively easy, completion of technology study is relatively difficult; the use of political study is relatively wide, the use of technology study is relatively narrow. If we cause the country to have political talent but no technologic talent, then those administering the government can vigorously develop technology with great ease. Even if it is not thus, we rely on talents from other places, and use foreigners to operate them, and there is nothing impossible about it. If one causes the country to have technology talents and no political talents, then although there may be many with great skills, those administering the government will not know how to use them, and ultimately they will be used by others.9 Liang Qichao clearly points out in his 1902 “Personal Ideas on Education Policy” that “since the nineteenth century, clever politicians have from

8 Liang Qichao 梁启超, Yin bing shi heji《饮冰室合集》vol. 1: Yin bing shi wenji《饮冰室文集》pt. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 105. 9 Liang Qichao, “Yu Lin Dichen taishou lun Zhezhong xuetang kecheng ying tichang shixue shu 与林迪臣太守论浙中学堂课程应提倡实学书 (Letter to Prefect Lin Dichen Advocating Adoption of Practical Learning in the Zhejiang Middle School Academy)” in Yin bing shi wenji pt. 3 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 2. 132 liao kebin the beginning recognized the main purpose of education to be cultivating citizens of the state.”10 It is commonly known that of the early modern Chinese intellectuals, Liang Qichao changed most quickly and most often. He was constantly revising his ideas. The development and change in his thought on Chinese education, especially higher education, is representative of the evolution of the Chinese understanding of the nature of universities at the time. The transition from emphasizing technical skills to emphasizing politics, and then to concerns about “cultivating citizens,” marks the increasing depth of Chinese thought regarding modern education, especially higher education. But the Chinese tradition of pragmatism in education is deeply entrenched; it finds appropriate chances to stubbornly turn the development of the Chinese university onto a path matching its goals. On this issue, the changes in Yan Fu’s thought are somewhat representative. His “Yuan qiang” (原强), written in 1895, notes that “Westerners who examine change and speak of politics all judge the merits of a race by its people’s strength, wisdom, and virtue. . . . Policies crucial today are encompassed in three fronts: number one is encouragement of people’s strength, number two is development of people’s wisdom, number three is renewal of people’s virtue.”11 Here he demonstrates a relatively lofty and broad idea of education. But later, as his political attitude turned conservative, Yan Fu’s idea of education also changed, now inclining toward pragmatism. In his 1902 “Letter to the Owner of Waijiaobao,” he argues: Scholars of today’s China study Western political theory with ease and study Western science with difficulty. Political theory is loud and expressive (freedom, equality, people’s rights, pressure, and revolution are all thus); science tends to be quiet and plain (pumao zhi yi 朴茂之意). Now, if a person does not understand science, then his political theory will be without root, and his information about evolution will be unspeakably miniscule. This might be harmful to the future of our country. Therefore education in China from now onward lies in paying attention to science and immersing the concerns of scholars in empirical causality.12

10 Liang Qichao, “Jiaoyu zhengce siyi 教育政策私议 (Personal Suggestions on Educa tion Policy)” in Yin bing shi wenji pt.9 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 33. 11 Yan Fu 严复, “Yuan qiang 原强,” Yan Fu Ji vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 27. 12 Yan Fu, “Yu Waijiaobao zhuren shu 与〈外交报〉主人书 (Letter to the Proprietor of Waijiaobao),” in Yan Fu Ji Vol. 3, 264–265. the transformation of chinese university culture 133

This view differs widely from the view Liang Qichao presented at nearly the same time, particularly in the emphasis on science. “Science” in a broad sense refers to the exploration of the inner rules of nature and society, within the natural, social, and humanistic sciences, as well as the arts. It is different from “engineering technology,” which emphasizes practicality. Science in the narrow sense refers only to the natural sciences. The relationship of this narrow sense of science to the social sciences, humanistic sciences, and arts is perhaps closer than its relationship to engineering technology. This is why the West usually groups humanities and arts with sciences, and engineering and technology in a separate category. Since ancient times, China has advocated pragmatism, seldom emphasizing observation, experimentation, and synthesis of internal rules of the objective world. Briefly put, China has prioritized technology and neglected science. Modern science was not born in China, and Chinese people lack the true scientific spirit. Yan Fu stresses valuing science and cultivating the scientific spirit, which are undoubtedly important. But then he places “political theory” research, including freedom, equality, and human rights, outside of the realm of science; “science” to him in fact mainly refers to practical engineering technology. Yan Fu, as a transmit- ter of modern Western thought and a founder of modern Chinese culture, became one source of the misunderstanding of science in modern China. After China imported the concept of “science” in the modern era, it conflated and equated it with “engineering technology.” The Chinese used the technical accomplishments of ancient China to prove that China valued science, as valuing technology was now considered valuing science. The cultural foundation of this misinterpretation was the Chinese tradition of pragmatism that valued applied technology over exploration of the intrinsic rules of the objective world. Of course, the Chinese misunderstanding of science in the modern era is also related to China’s particular social environment. One notable characteristic of this social environment is its continued maintenance of political autocracy. All sciences help open people’s eyes and minds, and are therefore naturally opposed to political autocracy. Autocratic rulers thus instinctually see science as the enemy. Engineering technology is different—it poses no threat to autocratic government. To the contrary, autocratic rulers must develop the economy and increase wealth in order to maintain their control and protect their self interests, and engineering technology can be used for these functions. Consequently, autocratic rulers often value engineering technology. They are happy to switch concepts, calling engineering technology “science,” while concealing the 134 liao kebin facts of their under-emphasis, animosity toward, and even suppression of science. The erroneous equation of engineering technology with science had severe consequences. Precisely because China did not value science in its true sense, not only were the natural sciences, social sciences, humanistic sciences and arts long neglected, social development and progress have also been severely constrained. Even engineering technology itself cannot develop properly for lack of scientific foundation, and as a result cannot produce great innovations. The reason we spend so much time addressing this issue is its close relationship to the university culture of modern China. One of the missions of universities is to seek truth and research scientific knowledge, accordingly, if one correctly understands the meaning of science then one can correctly grasp the nature of university. Modern China’s misunderstanding of science has seriously slanted its understanding of the nature of university. In government and society, and the university itself, this fundamental mission of the university has never truly been established. The university has continued to be understood as a place for cultivating highly skilled human talents, an assumption that is deeply mired in the pragmatist tradition of Chinese educational culture. Chen Yinke once offered this incisive analysis: China’s philosophy and arts are far below than that of ancient Greeks’; not just its science is worse than the West. But China’s ancients always were good at politics and practical ethics, most similar to the Romans. In speaking of morals they only valued actual use and did not pursue empty theory. China’s advantages and disadvantages both lie in this. The advantage is in regulating and governing the self, family, and state. The disadvantage is that China is overly acute in observing advantages and disadvantages, benefits and harms, but lacks big-vision thinking. Therefore in the past, literati studied the eight-legged essay to obtain positions and wealth, but those who studied virtue were a tiny minority, and today all students who study abroad study engineering and practical occupations, and they long for wealth and are unwilling to use energy in academic inquiry. They do not understand that science is the foundation of practical occupations. They study the branches without measuring the tree; at the most they can become only low-level craftsmen. And when the environment and theories change a little bit, then their skills will no longer be of use. The so-called most practical then becomes the least practical. But as for the principles of heaven and affairs of men, they are deep and profound, and throughout the many ages and all over the world remain constant, and in any time and any place can be used. To save the country and set it in order, we must particularly take academic understanding of the spirit (called metaphysics) as the foundation. Our country’s students who study abroad do not understand research, the transformation of chinese university culture 135

despise and abandon it, and are unaware that they add to their own ignorance and backwardness, all because we have not changed the old habit of favoring practicality.13 A fundamental change in education theory and the conception of university culture in modern China arose when Cai Yuanpei proposed his ideas on education. After he became head of the Education Ministry for the temporary Nanjing government, he presented “Suggestions on New Educa- tion,” systematically expounding his concept of education and condensing his many years of thinking on the issue. It also incorporated what he had learned during his year of studying and observing education in Germany. He pointed out that people at the time were quite concerned with education and had debated much, but what they debated were merely issues on the operational level. They had hardly explored “education policy,” the basic concept of education. Cai Yuanpei states: There are two great categories in education: that which belongs to politics and that which transcends politics. In an era of autocracy (and the same can be said about when a constitution is established but the government remains autocratic in nature), educators standardize education according to the government’s policy, always obeying the politicians. In the Republican era, educators are able to set standards of education for the people, whereby making it possible for education to transcend politics.14 He believed that things like “military, nation, and citizenry education,” which aimed at saving the country; “pragmatist education,” which aimed at “people’s livelihood,” including developing economy and way of life; and “civic virtue education,” which aimed at transmitting “freedom, equality, and love” and strengthening civic virtue, all subordinated to politics. Only “worldview education” (世界观教育 shijieguan jiaoyu) and “aesthetic education” transcend politics. In Cai Yuanpei’s view, in the particular historical circumstances of China at the time, the subordinate levels of education above were “all things that cannot be neglected or favored at each other’s expense in the education of today.” But in his mind, worldview education and aesthetic education undoubtedly were higher forms of education; indeed, they were the basic tasks of education. This so-called worldview education meant primarily cultivating people’s consciousness,

13 See the December 14, 1919 entry, which contains a dialogue between Chen Yinke and Wu Mi at Harvard University, in Wu Mi riji《吴宓日记》 (Diary of Wu Mi) vol. 2 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian 1998), 100. 14 Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培, “Duiyu xin jiaoyu zhi yijian 对于新教育之意见 (Suggestions on New Education),” in Cai Yuanpei quanji《蔡元培全集》Vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 130–136. 136 liao kebin interest, and ability to explore the secrets and truth of the world; “aesthetic education” mainly cultivated wholesome character and wisdom. Cai Yuanpei here proposed a new concept of education. He believed that education did not merely mean cultivation of practical skills; the more important areas of education were in civic virtue, worldview, and aesthetics. Especially worthy of attention is Cai Yuanpei’s discussion of the relationship between education and politics. He believed that education to a large extent “transcends politics,” i.e., that it must cast off the control of politics as much as possible. In 1917, he clearly delineated the nature of the university in his “Inaugural Address as the President of Peking Uni- versity.” He said that the university is not a place for fostering specialized people who once they “complete their study” can immediately “get to work;” people with this objective should instead go to various vocational schools. The university is also not a place for cultivating bureaucrats, so faculty and students alike ought not to hold the “thoughts of becoming officials and growing wealthy.” He pointed out that “the university is a place of researching profound knowledge.”15 We should not underestimate the importance of Cai Yuanpei’s few simple words, for they actually overturned a thousand years of Chinese higher education tradition, and symbolized a fundamental breakthrough in people’s understanding of the university. Nearly a hundred years have passed since Cai Yuanpei spoke those words, yet few among the masses of Chinese society, including the officials managing education, and even university faculty and students, do not take universities to be places for fostering specialized individuals who can finish their studies and immediately “get to work.” How many people enter university for a purpose besides finding a job or becoming an official and gaining wealth? How many go to university mainly for pursuit of knowledge? In this sense, we cannot but respect Cai Yuanpei’s insight into the inherent problem in traditional China’s culture. We also must realize how deeply ingrained this educational tradition is in China. In 1918, in “Words for the Inauguration of the Peking University Monthly,” Cai went further, noting that “the university is a place of learning that encompasses the great classics and nests many schools of thought.” There- fore it requires “freedom of thought” and must be “all-inclusive.”16 In his

15 Cai Yuanpei, “Jiuren Beijing Daxue xiaozhang zhi yanshuo 就任北京大学校长之演说 Inaugural Address as President of Peking University),” in Cai Yuanpei quanji Vol. 3, 5. 16 Cai Yuanpei, “Beijing Daxue yuekan fakan ci 北京大学月刊发刊词 (Words Inaugu rating the Peking University Monthly),” in Cai Yuanpei quanji vol. 3, 212. the transformation of chinese university culture 137

March 1919 “Letter to ‘Gongyanbao’ and Reply to Mr. Lin Qinnan,” he notes that “as to academic theory,” we should “imitate the precedents of the universities in the world, follow the principle of freedom of thought, and adopt inclusivity.”17 Here, Cai Yuanpei in a fairly systematic way proposed a new conception of Chinese university culture: autonomy, pursuit of science, freedom of teaching and research, and emphasis on character cultivation. Cai Yuanpei is indeed the most important thinker in education in modern China, and a worthy person to be the first university president in modern Chinese history. Through constant observation, reflection, and exploration, by the 1920s the Chinese intellectual world had a relatively accurate understanding of the nature of the university. By then, a number of new-style academies founded in the late nineteenth century were evolving into universities; foreign churches had established universities in China; and a group of intellectuals who had returned from studying abroad became the guiding force among university staff and management. These intellectuals introduced the operational mode of the Western university to China, and helped establish the Chinese university system and culture. At the time the political situation in China was unstable—first from the battle between North and South, then the war between the Nationalists and Communists, then the War of Resistance against Japan, then another war between the Nationalists and Communists. These tremors brought disaster to the country, and also caused extreme damage to the development of Chinese universities. However, in another sense, the political dichotomy and conflicts also provided space for a relatively free development of universities. The authoritarian Nationalist government did not completely control the entire country, nor could it free a hand to manage the universities. Although both the Beiyang government and the Nationalist government tried to penetrate and control the universities, they ran into intense resistance and had limited effect. From the 1920s through the 1940s, a thirty-year period of profound disasters for China on the whole was simultaneously a thirty-year golden age for Chinese university development. A set of famous universities appeared, achieved a degree of research successes (some of which were even influential around the international academic world), and fostered a group of outstanding talents who would later become important both domestically and internationally. Chinese

17 Cai Yuanpei, “Zhi ‘Gongyanbao’ han bing fu da Lin Qinnan jun han 致’公言报’函并附答林琴南君函 (Letter to ‘Gongyanbao’ and reply to Mr. Lin Qinnan),” Cai Yuanpei quanji vol. 3, 271. 138 liao kebin universities at the time developed quickly from nothing, in many respects rapidly closing the gap between themselves and famous Western universities. This is not to say that the country’s instability and rupture was beneficial to university development. As said previously, the unstable social and political circumstances were extremely harmful to the development of China’s universities. However, because the university system and culture had by then been basically established and the universities were able to be relatively autonomous, China’s universities developed rapidly amid disastrous chaos and achieved remarkable success. This shows the importance of the university system and university culture, and how important the relative autonomy of the university is!

III. Recent Changes in Chinese University Culture

After its establishment, the People’s Republic of China enacted a new operating mode for universities, and the previously established university system and culture were thoroughly reformed. Private universities were outlawed, and all universities were brought under government management. All university affairs required approval at various levels. Universities too enacted strict hierarchical management internally, and teaching and research activities were tightly regulated. Students were taught according to certain set standards, mainly cultivating useful technical talent, and at the highest levels there were even suggestions of eliminating all humanities universities, departments, and programs. Although this was done in accordance with new concepts, in essence it was a sweeping return to the centralized management and pragmatism of the ancient Chinese educational tradition. During the Cultural Revolution, universities basically stopped operating, and the legitimacy of the university’s mere existence was doubted and negated. After the Cultural Revolution ended, existing universities reopened and a group of new universities were established. China’s universities entered a second period of rapid development. The emergence of various political slogans calling for respect of knowledge and respect of human talent allowed China’s universities to experience a period of relatively autonomous development. The enthusiasm for teaching and research among long-oppressed intellectuals erupted like a volcano, and youth who once again had opportunities for education began to study knowledge and culture as if they had been starved. But in the latter part of the 1980s, following changes in the social environment and the full unfolding of economic the transformation of chinese university culture 139 reforms, Chinese universities faced a new problem. University culture began a decay that was manifested in the intensification of a centralized management system, a rise in the trend of pragmatism, and a severe vulgarization of institutional construction and individual behavior. China is a country of wide territory, large population, weak economic foundation, and complex national circumstances. Experience tells us that we must always protect the unity and stability of the country. If intense tremors or ruptures occur, internal strive will consume the country, foreign powers will take advantage of the opportunity to interfere, and China will be unable to do anything to stop them. The accomplishments of the Reform and Opening will be destroyed in an instant, and the hope of the Chinese nation to realize a great renaissance will again be in vain. Consequently, maintaining the unity and stability of the country has always been the top priority of the government and the citizenry. In the late 1980s, with the gradual deepening of the Reform and Opening, social interest ideas grew increasingly pluralistic. As a place where youth and intellectuals congre- gate, the university is often a sensitive area and launching pad for all kinds of social conflict, based on historical experience. Therefore universities in China became a target of high concern and tightened government control, and were seen as an outpost of stability maintenance. The government relegated management of universities to the Ministry of Education, local education bureaus, and university authorities. The primary task it gave them was not educating and cultivating talent, nor scientific research, but maintaining stability. In terms of both national interest and the interest of the government itself, it is understandable that the government thought this way. However, this meant that universities were managed too tightly. As said earlier, the basic characteristics of university culture are autonomy, freedom of teaching and research, respect of science, and emphasis of character cultivation. If it loses these basic characteristics, the university cannot develop healthily, produce high quality research, or foster the kind of outstanding creative talent that Qian Xuesen talked about—ultimately, the loss will have a severely detrimental effect on the long-term development of the country. This is the difficult problem presently faced by China’s government, society, and universities. With this problem as the backdrop, in recent years centralized management of Chinese universities has grown increasingly intense. The official education authorities realize control over universities through their powers in personnel hiring and dismissal, financial administration, and operational oversight. Along with such power endowed by the government, various levels of governmental education authorities have also developed 140 liao kebin a system of self-interest. They take advantage of the power given to them by the state to expand their own power and tighten control over the universities. In the thirty years of Reform and Opening, a primary reason for the relatively evident success of China’s economy is the development of the market economy. The establishment of various economies of ownership, cultivation of the subject of the market (市场主体 shichang zhuti), promotion and establishment of modern enterprises, decentraliza- tion of decision making, and promotion of enterprise autonomy—all of these were all achieved through the adjustments to the market. Yet higher education is still organized and conducted centrally. Consequently, many people think that Chinese universities are the last remaining (and stron- gest) bastion of the planned economy. Most universities are still operated by the national government. Inde- pendent academies and locally-operated schools are of low quality, and are in many respects restricted and restrained. These schools have not yet become an influential part of China’s higher education system. Through- out the many years of Chinese higher education reform, the reality that the national government alone manages and operates all the schools has hardly changed. From establishing and upgrading a university to deciding what majors it offers, what degrees it grants, its plan and method of student recruitment, and its teaching curriculum, all must be reported to the Min- istry of Education and local education authorities for approval. University recruitment of teachers also faces various political and legal restrictions, and universities cannot set their own pay standards for faculty. China’s central and provincial governments hold the power to appoint and dismiss those in charge of the universities. University party secretary and presidential appointments are in no way connected to faculty or students; so-called surveys and solicitation of opinions are mere formalities. Since these bureaucrats are appointed by the government, they are only responsible to the government and think only of how to satisfy the bureaucrats above them. Regarding appointments of university officials, four significant steps have been taken that signify this centralization of management. The first is the establishment of the “university administrative ranks,” identifying the positions of party secretary and president at several doz- ens universities as equivalent to the rank of a vice minister. As a result, university bureaucrats now worry about how to protect and raise their rank. The second is that the Ministry of Education appoints its own rank and file to universities as party secretaries, presidents, assistant secretaries, or vice presidents. Provincial education bureaus follow suit, sending their officials to universities and colleges to be secretaries and presidents, the transformation of chinese university culture 141 or assistant secretaries and vice presidents. The third step is the swapping of party secretaries and presidents between universities with absolute no regard for specific university culture. This has turned each university into a governmental entity over which any bureaucrat can preside. The fourth is the reappointment of local government administrators into universities, normally as party secretaries. While this resolved issues of hierarchical adjustment and treatment of certain administrators, it also this strengthened control over universities and made them work in service of the region; universities became another revolving door for bureaucrats. Under the current system of “presidential responsibility under party committee guidance” (党委领导下的校长负责制 dangwei lingdao xia de xiaozhang fuzezhi), many university party secretaries come from local party governments. They are familiar with and used to the system of the local government, and the head secretary of the local party is their absolute commander; thus they consider themselves the first in command of the university. Therefore the system has become, in practice, a system of “presidential responsibility under party secretary guidance” (党委书记领导下的校长负责制 dangwei shuji lingdao xia de xiaozhang fuzezhi). Many of these party secretaries have no personal experience in university teaching or academic research, having never written a single specialized academic paper, and in some cases, having not attended a single university class. If they had the wisdom to realize this, and only oversaw the work of political stability and political ideology, perhaps managing land, finances, and background work, then there would be no harm in it. But instead they insist on exercising all the power they have; they are arrogant, they interfere in teaching and research, and they do as they please. Because the management of Chinese universities is extremely centralized and there is no division of power or system of checks and balances, the person in charge has enormous direct influence over the operation of the university. Thus numerous strange phenomena continually come out of universities, as administrative management goes from bad to worse. The method by which these administrators work is to constantly create new administrative structures, appoint and dismiss groups, and seek the pleasure of exercising power. They incessantly hold meetings and create empty but incomparably prolix reports. Their objective is to gain the approval of their leaders and appear in newspapers and on television. Under the top-down system of administrative leadership, each level within the school reports to the level above it. Thus administrators do not consider the real situation of the school and its departments and various research entities, nor do they pay attention to how to cultivate 142 liao kebin talents and promote academic research. Instead, they are effusive about establishing objectives, building platforms and groups, starting programs, meeting quotas, and producing achievements. Excessive meetings and an obsession with top-level planning has resulted in it becoming “plans made by a few top-level bureaucrats” (顶层官员几个人的设计 dingceng guanyuan jigeren de sheji). Expenses are concentrated in flashy but unrealistic “great programs,” with the hopes that these will in two or three years produce enormous and highly visible achievements. All objectives are in effect an attempt at a new Great Leap Forward. Anyone with a modicum of reason can see the ridiculousness of it all, but in this environment they can only go along with it against their better judgment; otherwise they will be ostracized for their lack of enthusiasm or their complaints. People who seek only wealth, however, follow happily on the heels of their leaders, constantly currying favor, and gain esteem and employment. Inside the university, moral character has severely degener- ated and an ethos of using others for one’s own ends pervades. Government departments keep tight control over the allocation of university funds. Every year the normal allocations from central, provincial, and municipal governments reach nearly one-fifth of total university operating funds, and furthermore the special allocations of these governments can reach another fifth. Nearly two-fifths come from faculty research funds, a considerable portion of which comes, again, from the research funds of the central, provincial, and municipal governments. The remaining one-fifth, or a bit more, comes from tuition, extra classes (办班 ban ban), university businesses, land sales, and income on capital investments. Clearly, the majority of universities’ operation budgets come from the government. In recent years state investment in universities has increased. Basically all of the increase in educational funding has been designated for special projects, and this portion of funding lacks transparency. The state Min- istry of Education and each provincial department of education conduct various comparisons and evaluations. Universities continually work to impress those in charge of each project for fear they might receive less funding, or even none at all. Thus the state, provincial, and municipal organs in charge loom powerfully above; universities acquiesce and bow to them. Each university dances to the tune of the governmental education authority above it, and this has led to all universities looking alike. Currently, there are more than fifty types of appraisals (评比 pingbi), evaluations (评估 pinggu), and inspections (检查 jiancha) related to the transformation of chinese university culture 143 teaching and research.18 In addition, there are numerous evaluations and inspections related to political-thought work, basic facilities construction, safety, and many more. Most of them are annual activities, a few occur once every several years, but they always happen. Before the dust from one iteration of a program has settled, the next iteration of that same program has already begun. As the preparations for some programs are in full swing, notices and forms of new programs float by like snowflakes. Many faculty and staff have grown accustomed to spending all their time working on evaluations and similar programs, hence the expression “day- time in airplanes, nighttime at banquets, but never working at their actual occupation.” The centralized management and administrative operation of Chinese universities today has clearly reached the extreme. There are few comparable examples in the world, and even in China there is no precedent in the history of university development. Since these appraisals and evaluations involve the real interests of the school and individuals within, forgery, unjust recommendations and evaluations, abuse of power for self-interest, bribery, and corruption are practically inevitable. A person already holding a considerable administrative

18 This is a rough list of those appraisals, evaluations, and inspections: the 985 Project for university construction, the 211 Project for university construction, the national labs, national (provincial level) “key” labs, the Chinese National Engineering Research Center, doctorate conferment lists, places authorized to confer doctorates in first-level concen trations, places authorized to confer of doctorates in second-level concentrations, places authorized to confer master’s degrees in first-level concentrations, places authorized to confer master’s degrees in second-level concentrations, bases of scientific research and fostering talent in foundational disciplines, Ministry of Education key research bases in humanities and social sciences, national (and provincial level) bases for philosophical and social sciences innovation, national level innovation teams, national level teaching teams, national level special majors, the national 863 Project, the national 973 Project, the national (provincial level) Important Science and Technology Project, the national (provincial level) Natural Sciences Fund, the national (provincial level) Philosophy and Social Sciences Fund, the Ministry of Education Philosophy and Social Sciences Fund, Min istry of Education important special bids projects, national (and provincial level) scientific achievement awards, Ministry of Education (provincial level) humanities and social sci ences awards, national (and provincial level) teaching achievement awards, the Hundred Outstanding Doctoral Dissertations, Chinese Sciences Academy (and Chinese Engineer ing Academy) Scholars, humanities and social sciences endowed professors, national (and provincial level) noted teachers, national (and provincial level) workers with outstanding achievements, Changjiang Scholars, recipients of National Outstanding Youth fellowships, provincial special-level experts, national “Thousand-Person Plan” talent, the national “hundred\thousand and ten thousand Talented Person Project” (and provincial level tal ent projects), national (and provincial level) “five groups of human talent,” Ministry of Education New Century talent, undergraduate teaching evaluation, graduate teaching evaluation, and so forth. 144 liao kebin position within the university can take advantage of such opportunities to seize further fame and fortune. All of this produces a Matthew effect and worsens the university ethos. One result has been that many faculty members seek official titles and are no longer interested in teaching and research. Because they must produce reportable achievements, schools divide the standards for appraisal at every level; eventually they all land on the shoulders of individual faculty members. Schools require every teacher to annually produce a certain amount of articles and win a certain amount of research funding. They then tie all of these requirements to the faculty’s titles, positions, and income. They do the same to graduate students, requiring them to produce a certain number of articles before they can graduate and obtain degrees. University management operates a piece- rate system, emphasizing evaluation by quantity, which actually reduces the complex work of academic research to the simplest standard of physical labor. The reasoning behind the quantity-based evaluation lies in the unchecked power of university administration. Administrative departments and personnel do not understand specialized academic knowledge and yet must manage and evaluate the university and its teachers; the easiest method for them to do so is to establish standards of quantity and only look at the numbers. Under this system of evaluation university teachers and students grow anxious and jumpy. They have lost their passion for academic research and now merely create junk results to fulfill their quotas. Under heavy pressure, plagiarism has become commonplace. At the same time, the faculty has its lost pride and sense of responsibility attached to teaching. Many of them are unconcerned about students’ progress and development. Relationships between university faculty and students have grown distant and cold; both teaching quality and student talent cultivation have significantly slipped. Since the late 1980s, another important factor in the rapid changes in Chinese university culture has been the deepening of market economy reform. In the middle of the twentieth century, China experienced a short period of crazed idealism. Once this died down, people went from one extreme to another and began to believe in extreme pragmatism. The deep tradition of pragmatism in Chinese culture developed to an unprecedented level. At precisely this time, the market economy reforms fully unfolded and had a severe impact on people’s mindsets. Everything must now be exchangeable and have practical value. Only useful things are good; so it follows, if something is useful, then it must be good. More- over, during the last two decades China’s economy has grown rapidly, the the transformation of chinese university culture 145 wealth of its society has increased rapidly, and the disparity of wealth has expanded quickly. People have to seek wealth maniacally, because if they are an instant late, they will end up comparatively poor. Thus people spend all day thinking about how to make money quickly and abundantly. In these last twenty years, the guiding ideological current of Chinese society has been total pragmatism. Such ideological currents inevitably permeate throughout universities. As a result, the great missions of the university to seek truth and cultivate talent have been largely sidelined, and universities operate mainly to meet pragmatic standards. Schools work for fame, teachers work for quotas, and students work for grades and certificates. Choice of major is guided entirely by the market, and academic work is guided entirely by employment concerns. Having become totally pragmatic, students are unwilling to read books or think over issues. Students do not take tests that do not help their chances of employment, and do not learn things that teachers do not test. Centralized management and pragmatism make a peculiar pair. The fundamental basis for centralized management is maintaining stability on campus. Advocating pursuits of ideals and truth can inspire teachers and students to consider theoretical and practical questions. Guiding teachers to work for fame and fortune, and making students learn only techniques to find work, get rich, and lead a wealthy life, are effective ways of distracting attention. This strategy is effective in the short term. But in long term, it causes the vulgarization of teachers’ and especially students’ values. They lose interest in exploring truth, lose the spirit of “looking up at the stars,” and lose the ability to think and be creative—their quality of character decreases. This is extraordinarily detrimental to the future fate of the entire country. In his introduction to the 1938 French edition of Durkheim’s The Evolu tion of Educational Thought, Halbwachs analyzes the relationship between the physical facilities of the school and the school spirit. He writes: Like all major functions of society, education has its own spirit which is expressed in programmes of study, of subjects taught, teaching methods and a physical body, a material structure which partially expresses this spirit but which also influences it, sometimes leaves its imprint upon it and temporarily serves to confine it.19

19 Halbwachs, “Introduction by Maurice Halbwachs to the French edition of 1938,” in Durkheim, Selected Writings on Education: Volume 2 The Evolution of Educational Thought, xiii. 146 liao kebin

Considering the various situations we have seen in the construction of the “physical structure” of the Chinese university in recent years, we cannot but admire the accuracy of Halbwachs’s declaration. The severe vulgarization in the physical construction and activities of Chinese universities is closely related to pragmatism in thought and the centralization of the management system. One prominent expression of this problem is the creation of university towns everywhere. A university wants to expand because its original campus is too small; the local government wants to expand the university but lacks the money; land developers are eying the university’s original parcel of land, which due to its location in the city center could bring in great profit if developed. Consequently the government, the university, and the land developers work in concert to enact a “land-swap:” the government provides land in the city suburbs to the university at a cheap price to build a new campus, the university sells its land in the city center to land developers and uses the money to build its new campus; and the land developers build on the site of the original campus and profit greatly. Thus the government solves its problem of insufficient funds to support university development and the university expands—this is a “political achievement” (政绩 zhengji). The new luxury high-rises in the city center change the landscape, which is also a political achievement. The suburbs, because the university has been relocated there, begin to flourish and the local GDP greatly increases, yet another political achievement. On the surface, the university’s conditions improve, and the local department of education and those responsible for the university agree that this method is amazing, that they have put on a good show. It is necessary for universities to actually expand their space. The problem is that the government and schools shirk from difficulties and are thus unable to effectively and reasonably arrange the university space. Rather, they adopt these sort of expedient means, which create many new problems: for example, students from the same university are scattered across several campuses, making selecting and attending classes inconve- nient. There is a lack of interaction between graduate and undergraduate students, between students of different class years, and between students of different majors. Teachers travel far to their classes, wasting a lot of time on the commute; after class they rush back home and cannot interact with students. On top of all of this, the operating costs of the school greatly increase. University town construction is representative of the current centralized management and pragmatism of Chinese universities. That many the transformation of chinese university culture 147 universities exist completely within university towns is a manifestation of official authority, which only satisfies the psychological and self-serving needs of the officials. In addition to the logistical difficulties presented, serious consequential problems abound. Firstly, universities have no individual characteristics in outward appearance to speak of, and the cultural ecology the universities ought to have has been neglected and destroyed. This is because in the eyes of those officials, every university is like a workshop; teachers and students are like useful products. Education is seen as a production line, the school is seen as a factory. Secondly, there is a blind lust for expansion within university culture. Universities clamor to build the largest campuses, gates, office buildings, teaching halls, auditoriums, cafeterias, guest hotels, gardens, roads, and so on. University buildings are dull, not different from normal city buildings. Universities also seek to concentrate various schools together, in order to create a grandiose image and satisfy their managers’ desire to show off their authority. Medical schools originally were connected to hospitals, to assist in the training of doctors. Hospitals are usually in the city center for the convenience of patients, thus many other countries’ medical schools are located in the city center, separate from the main university campus. In the same vein, agricultural schools require a large-scale experimental space; as a result they tend to be placed in the suburbs. But many universities in China today, in order to create a grandiose concentrated campus, have moved their medical schools and agricultural schools into the main campus, severely inconveniencing student training and research in medical and agricultural schools, and also creating hidden dangers for the main campus and its environmental safety. Finally, various institutional behaviors have become vulgar. Universities often hold large meetings of hundreds or thousands of people, occupying much of their faculties’ and students’ time. Meetings large and small reek of bureaucracy and are organized according to so-called standards (规格 guige), which essentially means according to officials’ ranks. Additionally, formalism is rampant in all academic and student activities; everywhere on campus there are various empty slogans and posters. A university is a place of carrying on human civilization, investigating deep knowledge, and cultivating outstanding human talent. For this reason, the university environment ought to strive for elegance and serenity, and there should be a ubiquitous respect for truth and academic knowledge. It ought to let scholars immerse themselves in contemplation of academic questions, and temper the character of hot-headed youth. The material environment of Chinese universities today is terribly exaggerated 148 liao kebin and rash, revealing the worship of power and wealth. Such an environment inevitably causes the faculty and students to become irreparably coarse and rash.

IV. The Future Transformation of Chinese University Culture

As stated above, Chinese university culture is one part of the whole Chi- nese culture. The various phenomena appearing in contemporary universities are closely related to the phenomena appearing in contemporary culture. Now the call for a transformation of Chinese university culture echoes in unison with calls for reformation and renewal of all of contemporary Chinese culture. French sociologist Emile Durkheim once pointed out: Educational transformations are always the result and the symptom of the social transformations in terms of which they are to be explained. In order for a people to feel at any particular moment in time the need to change its educational system, it is necessary that new ideas and needs have emerged for which the former system is no longer adequate.20 Thus Chinese universities must take up an important mission in the process of the great renaissance of the Chinese nation. I have outlined five suggestions:

1. rewrite the Basic Education Law, or establish a “University Law,” to clearly establish the primary status of the university and guarantee its power to operate autonomously. Governmental education authorities should mainly be responsible for compiling statistics on the status of education, setting policy, and overseeing the implementation of new regulations and policies. 2. establish a new system for selecting university leaders. Take the responsibility for these kinds of selections away from education bureaus and turn it into a public recruitment process that accepts foreign and domestic nominations. A selection committee should be formed, composed of faculty and student representatives from the university, concerned parties foreign and domestic, and school alumni representatives. It should conduct the selection according to procedure before

20 Durkheim, Selected Writings on Education: Volume 2 The Evolution of Educational Thought, 167. the transformation of chinese university culture 149

nominating its selections for formal appointment by relevant government education authorities. Deputy officials should be nominated by the university president and appointed with the approval of faculty and student representatives. 3. perfect the system of “presidential responsibility under the party committee’s guidance;” make it apparent that the university president is the legal representative of the university and the person responsible for its operation. The party committee’s duty should be oversight and maintenance of the school’s political stability, ideological work, and anti‑corruption responsibilities, and it should not interfere with the president’s administrative and management duties. 4. through the People’s Congress, establish a law guaranteeing the operating costs of the university. National, provincial, and municipal level allocation committees should be established, staffed primarily by noted members of society, plus management representatives from relevant governmental departments. The committees will design and decide “University Allocation Ordinances.” 5. eliminate the majority of the evaluation programs, and let the society evaluate the quality of universities. This plan is based on the experience of the market economy reforms and the successes of foreign universities, For example, should a university want to establish a doctoral program in a certain subject area, it should not require the evaluation and approval of governmental education bureaus. Rather, the school should autonomously hire an intermediary organization to conduct an evaluation, and then decide based on the results whether or not such a doctoral program is merited. If the university or department lacks the conditions to offer the doctorate, or the doctoral graduates it trains are of too low a standard, then naturally society will repudiate it. Establish- ing a doctoral program at that school or department will then actually hurt the school’s reputation, instead of bringing undeserved fame. Under the oversight of society, universities will restrain themselves. At the beginning of this practice, there may perhaps be some disorder, but this disorder will quickly pass and university operation and competition will enter their normal paths. As long as there is resolve among the faculty and administrators, this reform can definitely be accomplished. Through this reform, we can change the present predicament, in which all must be approved by departments of education. The more the power is concentrated in bureaucracy, the more problems there will be. 150 liao kebin

In the end, I argue that the university management system is the key to university culture. If this difficult problem is solved, many others will be easily fixed. Meanwhile, if China pays constructive attention to other aspects of university culture, then there will be hope for establishing a new kind of modern university culture and great prospects for the development of Chinese universities. PART TWO

Chapter Six

Academic Discourse, Official Ideology, and Institutional Metamorphoses: Reflections on Contemporary Chinese Legal Discourses and Reality

Yu Xingzhong1

What is the impact of academic discourse on social transformation? Aca demic discourse could take place covertly without an official or clearly recognized ideology, resulting in a change in people’s mentalities that enables them to be prepared for the forthcoming social transformation. Under the suppression of an explicit official ideology, the impact of aca demic discourse not in line with it would be insignificant.2 However, once supported by the official ideology, academic discourse would transform itself, which is an undesirable but unavoidable end. This article discusses the links between academic discourse and social transformation— primarily through a reflection on Chinese legal discourses and the reality they help to shape—so as to reveal the complexity of the relationships between the two and the difficulties that they face. Certainly, contemporary Chinese legal discourse is basically trans planted from Western legal discourse. Concepts such as the rule of law, human rights, judicial independence, legal professionalization, etc., were all borrowed from the West. They have been embedded in society through more than thirty years of work in the legal field, despite debates on their implications. However, the concept of legal discourse has changed within the special ideological context of China, and these changes might not nec essarily be positive or beneficial.

1 Yu Xingzhong is the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Professor in Chinese Law, at Cor nell Law School. I would like to thank Professors Xueping Zhong, Tianyu Cao and Kebin Liao for inviting me to present my paper at the conference on “Culture and Social Trans formation: Theoretical Considerations and the Case of China” Zhejiang University, Hang zhou, China, July 21–25, 2009. I would also like to thank the conference participants for their comments, as well as Nancy Zhang and Rebecca Quan for their research assistance. 2 There are several basic points of the Chinese ideology: the leading role of the party, the socialist route, and the Chinese style are the most crucial factors among them. 154 yu xingzhong

This article focuses on three types of legal discourse: those on the rule of law, rights, and judicial independence, to examine their fate in con temporary China. Additionally, this article reviews the role of Chinese courts as they interact with academic discourse in order to better under stand the relationship between legal discourse, ideology, and institutional transformation.

I. Ideology and Evolvement of Legal Discourse

A. The Role of Legal Discourse A multitude of studies and reviews about the rule of law present bewilder ing scholarly opinions and many different conceptions. For instance, the rule of law could be conceptualized as natural law jurisprudence, legal positivism, modern liberalism, or even postmodernism. While each school could develop a self-satisfying narrative, all of them instead focus on sev eral long-lasting and familiar propositions. Generally speaking, we view the rule of law from a perspective of devel opment. The concept emerged as a way to restrain human behaviors with established laws in order to avoid arbitrariness. As laws are equally applied to every human being, everyone is obligated to obey them; it is the same for the rulers and the ruled, without exceptions. No one is supposed to cross legal boundaries. From this ideal came the principles of the rule of law, specifically the supremacy of law, equality of law, and the presump tion of innocence, as well as “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege.” The ideal and the principles of the rule of law make its realization feasible; nevertheless, their existence does not mean that the rule of law has been realized. In fact, the ideal and the principles of the rule of law have to be imbedded and represented in social institutions to maintain their liveliness. For instance, to implement the principle of supremacy of law, specialized legislative and judicial institutions must be established to balance and monitor the power-holders. The accomplishment of the rule of law relies primarily on the restriction of dominant authorities such as kings, clergymen, and modern governments who are either accustomed to dictatorship or inclined to dictate. With this in mind, people designed constitutionalism, through which rulers got their legitimacy. From the perspective of the rule of law, the law, instead of the rulers, is the origin of legitimate governance. The latter are merely executors under the power of the former. In other words, the election and the replacement of rulers academic discourse, official ideology 155 rest with the laws, which implies that any political actions are restricted in legal scope. One of the fundamental roles of constitutionalism is to design a basic political framework that monitors and regulates political actions in a country. This framework includes the identification of the supreme authority in the political system; the distribution and limit of its admin istrative, legislative, judicial and others types of power; the election and change of power-holders; and the definition of the rules of conduct and the decision-making process. In short, to obtain and to practice politi cal power under legal restraints is a key feature of the rule of law. Human existence is above all the existence of individuals, and indi viduals are always vulnerable to collective and state power. From time to time, individual rights may be violated by communities or the state. There fore, individual rights have to be addressed to achieve ultimate equality in the whole of society—a goal of the rule of law. Just enforcement of law corresponds to the independence of judges. Nevertheless, a judge might be biased or affected by various factors from the greater social context. To minimize these effects, the rule of law requires as prerequisites the separation of the judicial organs from the legislative and the administrative institutions, along with life tenure and independence for judges. To a large extent, the history of the rule of law is simultaneously the history of the pursuit of judicial independence. Under the influences and restrictions of the official ideology, Chi nese legal discourse has evolved into something different from Anglo- American, German, and French legal discourses, which were the sources borrowed by Chinese legal scholars. Concepts such as “rule of law in Chinese style” and “a socialist rule of law” were created to emphasize the role of the state as an advocator and promoter of the rule of law. We can describe this type of discourse as “state legalism.” State legalism dif fers from the traditional rule of men or the modern rule of law, yet it possesses certain characteristics of both. Under such a situation, law is utilized merely as an instrument for the construction and the control of the state; it is neither independent nor supreme. State legalism is charac terized mainly by the following features: the abstract supremacy of the state, rule centrism, legal pragmatism, cultural relativism, and deductive thinking. It was founded on the theories of the modern state, the modern ization of law, legal positivism, cultural relativism, and formal logic. As state legalism considers the law to be a political and economic instrument to fulfill the state’s needs, it is impossible to restrict state or 156 yu xingzhong governmental institutions with an effective legal mechanism. The main role of the modern legal system is to constrain the dominant authority and to protect individual rights. When the government has almost bound less power, individual rights must be taken seriously; the development of human rights premises on the constraint of state power. In a society characterized by state legalism, the different departments of the legal system do not actually vary much. The courts are similar to any bureaucratic organization without anything special outside a concen tration on disputes. A judge is no more than a civil servant or an admin istrative official. It is hard for the public to distinguish judges from police officers. No matter what differences exist among legislative, administra tive, or judicial positions, they all belong to the government bureaucracy. There are few theoretical differences, and accordingly, few substantial conflicts among these government departments. The fundamental differences between state legalism and the rule of law can be demonstrated in the status of law, the implementation of constitutionalism, the protection of human rights, and the relationship between the courts, administration, and politics. Under the framework of state legalism, law is neither stable nor predictable; policies prevail over, and sometimes even replace, laws. As Chinese laws did not emerge natu rally and were imposed on people by the government, their implementa tion faced considerable resistance. Furthermore, the legislation-centered approach of state legalism puts the judicial and law enforcement institu tions in subordinate positions. Meanwhile, the judicial system is defined as part of the state machine and treated as any other administrative organ, in which the judge is not a neutral adjudicator but a single link in the national chain who carries the same responsibilities as administrators and legislators. As far as constitutionalism is concerned, the constitution is not practi cally enforced in China, even though it has existed for more than fifty years. The Chinese Constitution is not seen as an ultimate authority. Some authoritative documents rank above this so-called basic law, such as the statutes and decisions of the Chinese Communist Party. More- over, the state plays an important role in state legalism; as mentioned earlier, the state is simultaneously the legislator, the adjudicator, and the executor, so it is not bound by the constitution. Instead, the constitution is at its service. For example, the economic reform in 1979 went far beyond constitutional restrictions and was, in fact, unconstitutional. However, it would be a futile effort to discuss the unconstitutionality of the economic reforms since 1978 because constitutionalism has not been practiced in academic discourse, official ideology 157

China. Additionally, the more than thirty constitutional amendments made since 1982 were mostly post-event approvals. This approach might not be normal in developing constitutionalism, but somehow it has found a basis for its existence.

B. Discourse of Rights and Its Alteration The discourse of rights also came from the West. “Law” and “rights” have the same root in many languages. Jus, Droit, and Recht refer to both law and rights, for instance, so it is natural to protect human rights with the law.3 There have been two types of discourse of rights in West ern history: the relativity of rights and duties discussed by G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx and the absolute rights claimed by John Locke, J.S. Mill, and modern liberals such as John Rawls, Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, and Ronald Dworkin. The Western discourse of rights was transmitted to China at the end of the nineteenth century but did not survive long. After the economic reform, scholars such as Zhang Wenxian and Xin Chunying brought post- war Western thinking about “rights” to modern China through the system atic introduction of Dworkin’s work.4 Though once criticized by Professor Glendon for its radical nature, this discourse of rights played an incom parable role in contemporary jurisprudence. It had a positive influence on China in the 1980s—some scholars even thought that it opened a new era of rights.5 However, criticisms turned up simultaneously with the spread of this discourse. Some accused Zhang’s “rights-centered” view of being a manifestation of extreme individualism and claimed that law should be “duty-centered.”6 Stronger challenges came from the discus sion of “right to subsistence.” After receiving criticism from Western coun tries, especially the United States, for its violation of human rights, China started to adopt a self-defense strategy and brought up the supremacy of “right to subsistence” over other types of rights. The dynamics behind Chi na’s human rights problem is the deeply rooted philosophy of collectivism, which is a basis of the official ideology. Despite the abundant translation

3 See Liang Zhiping, “Discussions about Law” (Fa Bian) (Guiyang: Guizhou People’s Press, 1992). 4 Zhang Wenxian, “Linguistic and Content Analysis on ‘Rights-Centered Approaches’,” China Legal Science, 1990(4). 5 Zhang Hengshan, Obligations First (Shandong People’s Press, 1999). 6 Xia Yong, An Era toward Rights, (Ed.) (China University of Political Science and Law Press, 2000). 158 yu xingzhong of works of Western liberals such as Rawls, Hayek, Berlin, Nozick, and Dworkin and even the personal visit and presentation Dworkin made in China, the priority of individual rights, which is the core of the discourse of rights, has yet to be accepted by the official ideology.7 Although China has signed a series of international treaties, the government has not yet ratified the “International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.” State legalism means the state will undoubtedly protect sovereignty over individual rights when there are conflicts between the two. Meanwhile, the protection of human rights is always superficial. Many documents and legal statutes include regulations about human rights protection, but most of them are conditional. In state legalism, human rights protection relies basically on policies. Legal protection is abstract, common, and general, while protection through policies is specific. Therefore, in the system of state legalism, human rights protection may seem sufficient sometimes, but in general, it is in a defective condition.

C. Discourse of Judicial Independence and Its Alternation The concept of judicial independence became an important topic by as early as the eleventh or twelfth century in Great Britain. After multiple conflicts between kings and aristocrats, the church and the crown, the dis course of judicial independence finally got public recognition and evolved from a simple idea to a complex institution. In effect, the tradition of common law corresponds to the tradition of judicial independence. This tradition is developed to its acme in the United States. In Britain, it was immediately challenged by “parliamentary sovereignty” and, to a lesser extent, the administrative state. However, in America, judicial activism by justices helped the Supreme Court grow from the weakest government branch into a balancing power against Congress and the President and finally an authoritative institution with the final say. On October 22, 1982, the “Minimum Standards of Judicial Independence” drafted by the International Bar Association was passed in New Delhi, India. The document clearly defined the relationship between judges and administrative organs. The second article indicates that judicial depart ments should enjoy independence from administrative departments. Moreover, the fifth article exempts the courts from external supervision

7 See Xinhua News, “Human Rights in China,” at http://news.xinhuanet.com/ ziliao/2003-01/22/content_702907.htm. Accessed on March 31, 2013. academic discourse, official ideology 159 by administrative departments. Article 16 emphasizes that leaders from government departments cannot put explicit or implicit pressure on the judges, nor can they make any speeches aimed to affect the independence of the judiciary system. Article 18, Item 11 additionally points out that administrative organs cannot solve judicial disputes in an active or inac tive manner before the judicial system initiates its procedure, and they cannot impede the implementation of the court’s decision.8 Like the discourse of rights, the discourse of judicial independence was brought to China during the end of the Qing Dynasty in the reform period and even experienced temporary and regional implementa tion. However, the tradition of judicial independence established in the Republic of China was not carried to the PRC for historical reasons. Many officials and scholars, such as Shen Jiaben, Wu Tingfang, Liang Qichao, Wang Chonghui, and Wu Jingxiong, discussed the advantages of judicial independence. In fact, the appeal for judicial independence never died, even after the establishment of the PRC. After the economic reform, the theoretical study of judicial independence has been further expanded and enriched. But the ideological limitation again changed the discourse of judicial independence. The original idea of judicial independence refers to the independence of both the judge and the court. However, in the Chinese context, the judge’s independence is still challenged. Judicial independence is interpreted as the independence of the court or that of judgment. Actually, it is even too reckless to assume the independence of the court system, as it is not immune to political power. In concrete institutional design and judicial practice, the courts are not in any position to constrain administrative organs or correct their unlawful actions. On the contrary, courts have to collaborate with the administrative organs and are sometimes even constrained by them. This is especially true in terms of personnel and financial arrangements. As the administrative organs often reflect the political intentions of the rul ing party, collaboration with the administrative organs means collabora tion with the ruling party. Consequently, courts are not able to decide on political questions against the intention of the party.

8 See the “IBA Minimum Standards of Judicial Independence” at http://www.int-bar.org/ images/downloads/Minimum%20Standards%20of%20Judicial%20Independence%20 1982.pdf. Accessed on March 31, 2013. 160 yu xingzhong

II. Academic Discourse, Ideology, and Institutional Transformation

What is the consequence of academic discourse on institutional transfor mation? The analysis in the above sections indicates that legal discourse will impact society once it has been accepted by the official ideology, thereby provoking changes in legal culture. Likewise, the institutional influ ence of academic discourse also rests in the approval of the mainstream ideology. Let us take the changing role of the courts as an example.

A. Background Throughout its long history, China has never nurtured a set of judicial insti tutions independent from the bureaucratic administration. Judicial power was always part of imperial power, working as an important instrument for the monarchy. In China’s judicial system, central and local, there were no specialized courts or professional judges. Local governments (yamen) served as not only the administrative but also the judicial organs. Though some quasi-procuratorial and judicial units such as Yu Shi Tai or Da Li Si functioned similarly to courts, they were still under the control of the emperor and possessed no independence. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, under pressure from Western powers, the government sought to reform the Chinese judicial system and even unsuccessfully tried to establish an independent court. During the period of the Republic of China, professional courts emerged, discussions about the judicial system were initiated, and the idea of judicial independence was brought to Chinese culture. But these initial efforts did not survive subsequent revolutions and upheavals. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, law was defined as an instru ment for the dictatorship of the proletariat, so as to consolidate political power and build the state with military and police force. For instance, on November 21, 1954, in the “Report for the National Police Operation Meeting,” a leader claimed that “the police force, the procuratorates and the courts are the weapons for the dictatorship of the state . . .”9 On April 4, 1956, that same leader pointed out in the speech “People’s Police are People’s Servants” that “the police force, the procuratorates and the courts are the organs for dictatorship and the weapons for the class oppressing. The people’s democratic dictatorship has two dimensions: on one hand, we should exercise dictatorship over the counterrevolutionaries and

9 Peng Zhen, Selected Works of Peng Zhen (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1991). academic discourse, official ideology 161 serious criminals and point at them with our knives; on the other hand, we should exercise democracy among good people. We are their servants and should never oppress them.”10

B. Judicial Reform since 1978: Obstacles to the Construction of Modern Courts During the last thirty years of economic and social reforms, the Chinese government has paid increasing attention to the use of law because it has been persuaded that law is indispensable in a market economy. In reality, however, the recent Chinese experience with economic reform and legal development challenges, rather than proves, the correctness of that view. In other words, law did not play an important role in China’s economic reform, at least not one as important as some scholars and offi cials believed. It is well known that the many innovations and changes that defined the direction of economic reforms emerged among the Chi nese people in local communities, villages, and townships. After years of experiments, new ideas and innovations finally received approval from the government. The government then made policies to spread the new practices nationwide, and found a proper time to make laws to legitimize the policies. However, the enforcement of these laws was not always successful. When facing new situations, the government would design new policies and make amendments to the existing laws. Therefore, it was the policy and not the law that functioned in this process, a process which, however, was natural for a society in transformation because poli cies are more flexible than laws when responding to rapid changes from day to day. Since 1978, the Chinese legal system, including the judicial system, has transformed dramatically. According to statistics from the Supreme People’s Court, the total number of cases heard by all the courts in China in 1978 was 610,000; the number of cases heard nationwide from Janu ary to August 2008 was 6.6 million, over ten times the cases heard thirty years before. In the beginning of the economic reform, there were 60,000 judges in China; by 2007, the number of judges had increased to 190,000. The judges took off their military-style uniforms and put on judicial gowns. High-tech means such as remote filing, electronic signatures, and video trials were adopted. Meanwhile, special courts such as a maritime court, administrative tribunals, and intellectual property tribunals were

10 Ibid. 162 yu xingzhong established, which contributed significantly to the judicial work. The Supreme People’s Court promulgated three “Five-Year Reform Programs” in 1999, 2005, and 2009. The legal culture and institution experienced drastic change. In this process, the role of the courts also transformed immensely. An observation of the relationship between academic dis course and the official ideology may serve as a reference. We can divide this whole process into four stages. At the first stage, the legal discourse preceded the official ideology, and the government maintained a rather conservative attitude. At the second stage, the official ideology started to embrace legal discourse. At the third stage, academic discourse and the official ideology formed an alliance. At the fourth stage, the official ideology abandoned the legal discourse. Below is a simple introduction of each of these four stages. Stage one occurred between 1978 and 1988. It was a time for the recon struction, expansion, and enrichment of the court system. The scope of the courts was mainly criminal cases and limited civil trials. Some crimi nal and civil justice principles were identified during this period, and at times, legal discourse was rather active. The role of law as an instrument of dictatorship and representation of the proletariat would be seriously challenged. Legal studies diversified; legal discourse like “rights-centered” thinking and “private legal culture” was introduced to the field. Especially during the final years of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, mani festations of the spirit of modern legal theory—such as discussions on “rule by man” versus “rule of law,” and the idea that everybody is equal before the law—spread throughout China. Afterward, legal academic dis course was enriched along with the development of jurisprudence studies, and the content of legal theory was constantly renewed. However, the official ideology was still rather conservative during this period, and mainstream ideology did not completely abandon ideas about law held before and during the Cultural Revolution. For example, on October 13, 1979, the leader of the political and legal department empha sized in his speech, “Four Modernizations Need an Active, Lively and Stable Political Environment,” that “the police force, the procuratorates and the courts are the weapons for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the knives of the Party and the People. Their fundamental responsibility is to beat the enemies and to protect the people.”11 On March 2, 1986, he

11 Peng Zhen, Socialist Democratic and Legal Construction in the New Era (Beijing: The Central Literature Publishing House, 1989). academic discourse, official ideology 163 expanded on these views in the “Speech for the National Political and Legal Conference:” [T]he political and legal team controlled the knives. We can arrest, prose cute, sentence and kill people. What a huge power! Our Party and our coun try gave us this power. It is an honorable and arduous responsibility. We should not let down the Party, the country and our people. The Party spirit is the most important factor: a high, pure spirit; a spirit to serve people. We should treat everybody equally and put principles above personal ties. The team must keep pure. We will never include any black sheep.12 As far as institutional changes were concerned, the effects of academic discourse had started to show. Some famous scholars were invited by the government to make laws and give lectures to officials. Their cautious but fresh opinions exerted some influence on the leaders. During stage two (1988–1992), as reform deepened, law was perceived as an important instrument with which to construct the market economy. Therefore, legal development gained official support. Mainstream official ideology started to emphasize the multiple functions of law in civil and economic fields, instead of conceptualizing it as a mere weapon to be used against crimes. During this period, functional departments such as eco nomic, administrative, executive, and people’s court tribunals emerged, which brought the courts into a new era. Legal discourse acted as a catalyst during this period. Law was no lon ger an instrument for dictatorship. The government finally embraced the legal discourse, which then in turn benefited from further development. Nevertheless, this did not mean that legal discourse was finally in line with the official ideology, or that the official ideology approved the spirit of legal discourse. In actuality, the decision-makers realized that the pub lic had to accept the policies of the economic reform, and legal discourse was the perfect media for this purpose. Stage three occurred from 1992 to 2002. In order to reform and estab lish the necessary institutions, the core work of the courts during this period was building the instruments and methods needed for a mod ern court system. Legal leaders such as the chief justices, grand justices, and chief procurators started to appeal to the spirit and main principles of modern legal institutions, including judicial independence and the independence of judgment. During this period, especially after the 14th Congress of the Party, which prioritized the establishment of a socialist

12 Ibid. 164 yu xingzhong democracy and legal system, legislative, judicial, and law enforcement work was put in an important position and experienced major develop ment. The 15th Congress in 1997 ensured the grand goal of “establishing a socialist country under the rule of law.” This progress provided new opportunities for development and drew theoretical attention to the legal discourse. Heated topics such as “governing by law,” “democratic politics,” and “a country under the rule of law” further supported the development of academic discourse. Core ideas of the modern legal system like judicial independence and constitutional review spread gradually. The legal field grew into an independent interest group. This could be seen as the initial stage of the integration of academic discourse into the official ideology. Legal reform deepened during stage four (2002–2008) with the pro fessionalization of judges and further improvement of trial practices and procedures. The standards for qualifying judicial personnel were raised, and the division of case filing, court trial, and enforcement became a very popular topic of legal discourse. Many judges, prosecutors, and legal professionals started to emphasize the necessity of professionalism in judges, and pointed out that the future of the Chinese legal system would depend on professionalization and specialization, which was also in line with international practice. The government affirmed this belief. Every annual report of the Supreme People’s Court stressed the important role of legal professionalization. This stage could be seen as the honeymoon of legal discourse and official ideology. However, this progress suffered a strong setback after March 2009, when members of the central authority and leaders in legal departments made speeches about the “three supremacies” on various occasions: “supremacy of the Party’s cause,” “supremacy of people’s interest,” and “supremacy of the constitution and law.”13 This implied a reinforcement of the party’s leading role in the legal system and the court was again put into a subor dinate position, left to follow the party toward a more “correct” political goal. Legal reforms took a dramatic turn because of this clash between the official ideology and the existing legal discourse. The leadership of the court system started to turn its focus from independent judgment to focus on external monitoring, the direct leadership from upper-level to lower-level courts, and the supervision of the court system by administra tive and other external entities. The “Five-Year Reform Program” created

13 See Jerome Cohen, “Body Blow for the Judiciary,” at http://lawprofessors.typepad .com/china_law_prof_blog/2008/10/jerome-cohen-1.html. Accessed on March 31, 2013. academic discourse, official ideology 165 by the Supreme People’s Court reaffirmed this approach in June 2009. The whole system started to promote the idea of a “judiciary for the people,” and some courts even went back to the Ma Xiwu style of trial used more than half a century ago in Communist‑controlled areas, which encouraged private settlement of disputes. Thus, the courts were forced to change from an adjudicative institution to a mediation agency. This practice may not last long, but we are not able to tell. In general, legal discourse is limited by official ideology. Without coor dination or approval from the official ideology, legal discourse can hardly influence institutional and social transformation. Meanwhile, legal dis course itself may be altered or even distorted when clashing with ideol ogy. The different roles the courts have played since the economic reform indicate that the influence of legal discourse upon social institutions could easily be weakened or canceled. The official ideology, the inertia of traditions, and the emphasis on Chinese characteristics are all important factors that could erase the positive consequences of legal discourse. Yet, it is still worth believing that new and different legal discourses might be developed in this particular social context of China.

Chapter Seven

The Flight to Rights: 1990s China and Beyond1

Rebecca E. Karl2

A recent spate of exposés about Mao Zedong’s China, in English and Chi- nese, announces a finality to the tendency towards the temporal-spatial conflation of twentieth-century Chinese and global history. This sense was confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January 2006 that George W. Bush’s recent bedtime reading had been Jung Chang & Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story,3 or when, later in 2006, according to a column in the British paper, The Guardian, “the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,’ linking them with Nazism. . . .”4 Hence, the temporal- spatial conflation is, on the one hand, of the long history of the Chinese revolution with the ten years of the Cultural Revolution; and, on the other hand, equating Mao Zedong with every one of the most despicable of the twentieth-century’s many tyrants and despots, most clearly with Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. In these conflations, general twentieth-century evil has been reduced to a complicit right-wing/ left-wing madness, while China’s specific century-long history of revolution and crisis has been concentrated into a wholesale condemnation of the ten years of the Cul- tural Revolution, during which the supposed principle of madness operated most fully as revolutionary tyranny. In this way, albeit through the back door, China becomes one central node through which the trends of

1 This chapter originally appeared as “The Flight to Rights: 1990s China and Beyond,” Telos 151 (Summer 2010): 87–104. It is reprinted here with permission from Telos Press Publishing. 2 I would like to thank Zhong Xueping and Lin Chun for inviting me to participate in the summer 2009 conference in Hangzhou for which this paper was prepared. A first draft of the paper was presented at a conference in Michigan, and I am grateful to C.K. Lee for inviting me to that. Stimulating discussions in both forums helped me refine some of the issues and I benefited greatly from critical comments offered at different junctures by Harry Harootunian, Teemu Ruskola, and Yu Xingzhong. 3 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Sometimes a Book Is Indeed Just a Book. But When?” New York Times, January 23, 2006: A15. 4 Seumas Milne, “Communism May Be Dead, but Clearly not Dead Enough,” The Guard ian, February 16, 2006: n.p. available. 168 rebecca e. karl the twentieth century as a global era are channeled and magnified: China is global history by becoming a particular universalizable analytic principle of totalitarianism. Additionally, this universality is brought to its apogee in the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, in a recent publication in Chi- nese (Nanfang zhoumo’s web version of 7 July 2009), Roderick McFarquar, the Harvard professor known for his Cold Warrior sensibilities, has gone one step further, by openly voicing the whispered conviction of many these days: in a full page spread, he lauds 1979 as the year of China’s “liberation,” consigning all that went before to the dustbin of history and affirming the Dengist turn as the only moment that qualifies as real history. On first glance, it would seem that the conflationary principle represents just one more version of an “obsession with China”5 as an autonomous but refracted discipline of inquiry, albeit in ever more rarified forms of self-negation.6 Here, the totality that is presumed to be “twentieth-century China” and its now-unversalized negative principle of madness—“totalitarianism,” Cultural Revolution, socialism, and revolutionary history, tout court—can only be constituted by negating historicity. In another sense, the self-negating principle represents an ideological appropriation of the historicity of the global twentieth century more generally for the inevitability of the triumph of neoliberalism and American-defined normativity, called the triumph of capitalist modernizationist common sense over madness. The comments that follow attempt to resist the overwhelming temptation towards this or any other common sense, lest the significance of the troubled history of China’s and the world’s twentieth century be erased in the triumphalist and compensatory gesture of conflation and consequent dismissal.7 By the same token, my attempt is precisely to situate China globally, albeit not by conflation and thus not through erasure but by differentiation in a historical-philosphical method of reflection. This paper presents a tentative discussion of what I call the flight to rights in China, a flight that bespeaks the desired atomization of the potential totality of social life into a legalistic framework. Indeed, a major

5 Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 25. 6 This phrase is borrowed and adapted from Peter Osborne’s reflections on the state of philosophy in the post-Kantian world. See Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000), 3. 7 The above two paragraphs are adapted from Rebecca E. Karl, “Culture, Revolution, and the Times of History: Mao Zedong and 20th Century China,” China Quarterly 187 (Fall 2006): 693–699. the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 169 turn in China’s developing social order in the 1990s and beyond has been the rise of a pervasive call for what is termed social normalization (even as social order has become more disorderly through the state-led primitive accumulation of capital and the consequent anarchic class stratification).8 One central aspect of this so-called normalization has been the pursuit of legality, in particular the right to privacy and, more generally and abstractly, individual rights. These are promoted as a way to push the state’s purview out of everyday life and as a way to normalize social relations along the lines of legality. There are many problems with these claims. The limits of legality as such, along with the uneven gendered, class, and geographical consequences, and the implementation of specific transformations in the legal system are only the most obvious examples of such problems. However, here I wish to make a different point. If we take culture as a praxis and social life as a totality, yet if cultural values are socially and politically delimited to an ideal of state-defined legality (“the rule of/by law”), the limits imposed on the imagination of futurity from the position of the present are vastly impoverished. (And politics, after all, is always about an imagination of futurity.) Hence, while common sense dictates that legality is a social good, the uncommon sense I wish to put forth here is that legality as such poses an absolute limit to the pursuit of politics by containing social relations to contractual practice and by construing social and global relations as a state-regulatory principle. In short, I want to state unequivocably that legality is inadequate to an imaginative rethinking of the relation between culture, social life, and politics.

I. State Theory and Legality: A Brief Discussion and Resituation

As state theorist Mark Neocleous has argued: [The] “right to privacy” . . . merely confirms the processes of individualiza- tion and commodification. . . . [W]hat “privacy” manifestly fails to do . . . is to imagine any grounds for collective resistance—to either state or capital. . . . In this sense, to insist on privacy is to play into the hands of the political power of the state and the social power of capital, for not only can the state grant the right to privacy while simultaneously infringing it at every turn, but it can do so by dealing with us as private individuals protecting our own rather than as a collective subject aiming to achieve something “more

8 The following is adapted from my paper delivered at the “Turn to Rights” workshop at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in February 2009 entitled “Neoliberalism: Norm or Exception?” 170 rebecca e. karl

permanent than life itself” (in Arendt’s terms): change of a more lasting, world historical importance.9 Neocleous makes clear (and recent disclosures about the systemic infringement in the United States of the right to privacy by the state in the name of national security and the supposedly linked protection of individual rights also demonstrate) the heuristic, legalistic, or juridical separation of the individual into a private and public self precisely facilitates the power of capital and the state, rather than limiting it. As we know, this puta- tive separation is a historically liberal proposition. After all, the separation of public and private spheres has been the idealized norm affirmed and sought by post-French Revolutionary modernist polities and bourgeois social orders the world over during and since the nineteenth century, with political and philosophical roots that reach back further. Indeed, this formation is one culmination of what most theorists of natural law understand to be the extended moment that saw the shift from a discussion of law to a discussion of the natural rights of the individual. For much of the subsequent two centuries, it was this separation and this discussion that enabled a certain form of politics—what Ernst Bloch calls the “freedom to move to the positivum of a new, bourgeois-initiated order of life,”10 an order dominantly characterized by the “freedom of the individual economic subject.”11 While in the nineteenth-century context, this “freedom” might have represented some sort of progressive historical movement as a repudiation of absolutist politics (although, when one counts the concurrent subsumption of labor to capital as integral to this “freedom,” the whole notion must be re-examined, as Marx long ago demonstrated). Yet, in the context of the globalized moment of China since the 1990s, the pursuit of the separation between the public and the private as a desired social norm appears rather patently as the anti-political or, at least, the depoliticized content of the post-socialist structural and systemic triumph of a contemporary form of global capitalism, as it has been adduced to the specific historicity of the Chinese situation. That is, the pursuit of the rejoining of the individual to the economic subject (what used to be condemned as “economism”) and the separation of that individual from the principle

9 Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State (Open University Press, 2003), 71. 10 Ernst Bloch (tr. D. Schmidt), “Aporias and the Heritage of the Tricolor,” Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 155. 11 Bloch, “Aporias,” 163. the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 171 of the public as such (now recontained into the sole figure of the state principle) appears as a repudiation of the socialist totality of new man and his/her reified reappearance as homo aeconomus in the global sphere. The Chinese case, then, represents a particularized or, more accurately, a historicized norm of the global juridical present. Yet, in an idealist fashion rooted in the bounded national-state model, many theorists of the Chinese situation (those so-called “China experts” in China and elsewhere) start from the assumption that the Chinese state and rights regime is an aberration from, or exceptional to, the bourgeois liberal norm of development. While it is clear that China’s legal regime is not a liberal bourgeois regime, my point is that, if placed firmly in a global context—as 1990s China and beyond must be located—such an exceptionalist perspective on the Chinese state and on its rights regime is impossible to maintain. Instead, what comes into view is China’s particular configuration as an example of a contemporary global juridical formation (even while it is not at all an example of a universalizable national legal order).12 That is, historically, China’s current rights/legal regime corresponds thoroughly to the contemporary global juridical order; it is not exceptional, but rather part of an emerging norm. In this sense, the position taken here questions the theoretical turn to exceptionality as it is argued in the national terms of the Chinese regime of rights in the contemporary global capitalist configuration that is called neoliberalism. To be clear: to argue against exceptionality is not to argue that nothing has changed over time; neither is it to argue for linear historical continu- ities from the past nor for the inevitability of the formations we find today; even less is it to argue that there is nothing unique about China. On the contrary, to argue against exceptionality is to assert the hegemonic hold and gravitational pull of the global structural nature of capitalism, even as we acknowledge and analyze the historical specificities of how capitalism has changed as a system, and how it has been shaped by and also has reshaped particular historical economic, social, and political formations in national, sub-national, and supra-national terms. To argue against exceptionality is to argue that the nation-state unit has to be understood as radically insufficient unto itself in this day and age, where nations pro- liferate and states maintain jurisdictional order, but only at the sufferance

12 In his discussion of Carl Schmitt’s “decisionism,” Ernst Bloch makes this important distinction. See “Death and Semblance of Life of a Late-Bourgeois Natural Law,” in Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 150. 172 rebecca e. karl of a global juridical order that attempts to both subsume and sublate those individual orders into itself. Thus, to argue against exceptionality is to argue that the tendential temporal and spatial unity of capitalism is both sought and impossible to achieve. That is, contra Negri, et al., to argue against exceptionality is to argue that formal subsumption rather than real subsumption—of labor, of legal and rights regimes—is the best that capitalism can and, indeed, wishes to accomplish at any available scale of analysis. Thus, to argue against exceptionality is to argue that unevenness, at all scales of analysis, is a permanent and necessary feature of the production and reproduction of the capitalist system. The relationship of any given state to this unevenness needs to be taken as a historical-theoretical problem. In this sense, to argue against exceptionality is to argue that the ongoing production and reproduction of the social remainder (that which remains or exceeds the national and the global) in the never-ending dialectical process between the sought and the impossible presents an appropriate historico-analytical focus. Since I cannot do justice to this topic here, my intervention intends to put some perspectives on the table for discussion and consideration.

II. From Culturalism to the Agamben Gambit

Recent arguments for the exceptionality of the Chinese rights regime do not emanate solely from a modernizationist linearity pointing to the soli- tary uniqueness of China’s particular path (via the supposedly aberrant detour of socialism), but also from a culturalist argument about continuity in the relationship between Chinese Communism and Confucianism. Reviving the often-hidden but always-available old hoary notion of China’s Oriental Despotism reaching from the Qin Dynasty to Mao and beyond, this type of culturalist-continuation argument is spurious. It demonstrates the erasure of politics by culture, of economic specificity by ideology, of historicity by timelessness, among many other faults. I’ll not go further into the problems of such a proposition. I mention it to make the following point: that the current situation in China must be viewed as a product of several temporalities and historicities, none of which necessarily takes analytical priority. That is, under the conditions of the power of global capital and its juridical order, any national rights regime is inherently repressive independently of who is in power—Communists, neoliberals, social democrats, or whomever—and independently of the cultural and national historical forces that shape that regime. This is not to say there the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 173 are no differences resulting from who is in power; nor is it to say that specific rights regimes do not have impacts on specific peoples in very vital ways and that different leaders may ameliorate some of the rapaciousness or some of the consequences of unevenness. It is merely to say that the global context must be kept front and center, such that narrow culturalist arguments cannot be endowed with actual explanatory power. As a contestation to the cruder versions of a culturalist resort, it appears that the operationalization of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” in the specification of the exceptionality of neoliberal rights regimes— particularly in Aihwa Ong’s recent work, but in others as well—is an attempt to connect China to a larger world of global rights regimes, particularly to their real-life deteriorations and hollowing. And yet, as critics of Agamben note, the relationship of his articulation of Schmitt’s “decisionism” to his example of the concentration camps as the paradigmatic historical normalized exception is quite murky, both philosophically and in its political implications. As critic Andrew Norris writes in this regard, “The decision and the exception it concerns are never decisively placed within or without the legal system, as they are precisely the moving border between the two.”13 In this non-determination of the borders of legality, it is unclear whether the concentration camps (“bare life” par excellence) are the ahistorical rule or part of a historical exception, either of which claims would undercut Agamben’s utility in political or historical argument. As Norris notes, “one would have to argue . . . that exceptional cases are clearly defined as such by the rule.”14 If one so argued, the paradigmatic status of the camps as either exception or rule could not be upheld, and one would be thrown back on the entirely unexceptional (Hobbsian) argument, that politics and law are “a matter of communities, interest, conveniences, and so on.”15 (This is precisely the argument from which Agamben is trying to work himself free.) In other words, taking Agamben’s desire for a timeless philosophy of homo sacer, which appropriates aspects of Carl Schmitt’s thought in an entirely philosophical rather than historical manner, and translating that into an operationalized set of observations about the specificity of today’s historical moment bears with it the same problems as the

13 Andrew Norris, “The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giogio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,” Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003), 10. 14 Norris, “Exemplary Exception,” 10. 15 Norris, “Exemplary Exception,” 11. 174 rebecca e. karl ahistorical fixing of Schmitt as a theorist of the political as such rather than as a theorist of a historical form of politics called fascism. This is Agamben’s project. Thus, the subsequent mobilization of Agamben’s notion of the exception (“bare life”)—as description of an analytical object, or as analysis of a particular configuration (both of which require different incommensurabilities)—will have, then, the same difficulty of application as that of Schmitt. This is not because China is Chinese and Agamben is Italian or Schmitt is German; it is because Agamben’s philosophical project and its historical claims, just as Schmitt’s, are internally problematic and thus “applying” them anywhere carries with it those problems. So, even while Agamben’s political point is quite different from Schmitt’s—he wishes to critique rather than condone the exceptional and the consequent reduction of human life to its utter bareness—and we should take very seriously the political issues he reveals; nevertheless, his ahistorical philosophy of politics gets us no closer to an appreciation of particular rights regimes—China’s included—in the current historical moment of global juridical order.

III. Chinese History and Rights

To this point, I have argued that the global aspects of contemporary capitalism have been decisive in shaping the contours of any national legal order, China’s included, as are the particular national histories from which that order emerges. This, of course, does not appear true to those at the grassroots level in the midst of mobilizing certain new rights claims against the state, provincial or local authorities, polluting companies, privatizing factories, and other entities. That is, the argument here does not purport to be explanatory of experience as it is comprehended by those acting on the ground.16 Rather, it is an argument about the overall systemic limits of the flight to rights as a transformative political potentiality in the contemporary moment. Thus, while I do not wish to criticize, malign, or minimize the often heroic efforts of those whose mobilization of rights secures for them a better chance (at life, liberty, prosperity, or whatever),

16 Although, in China, there seems to be better than average awareness of the global pressures producing certain kinds of privatizations and other sorts of property rights issues. See, for instance, Wang Hui, “Restructuring and the Historical Fate of China’s Work ing Class: A Report on an Investigation into the Tongyu Textile Group of Jiangsu,” Critical Asian Studies (2008). the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 175 what I wish to indicate is that contemporary resort to legality is inherently limited by the internal assumptions of a national legal order (as well as, of course, by its implementation, which is always imperfect at best) and by the ways in which that order is incorporated into the global juridical order. Thus, it is inherently limited by its absolute reliance upon the regulatory principle and logic of the state at the national or global level. The global nature of all national legal orders and rights regimes in the current situation should remind us of the ill-fit between liberalism and rights in China from the early twentieth century onward. For, as Lin Chun has argued extensively, the collusion of liberalism with colonialism effectively foreclosed liberal solutions as a plausible path through what became the revolutionary era. Indeed, revolutionary socialism quite consciously and purposively bypassed liberalism altogether.17 In this sense, China’s particular historical passage is absolutely important for a specification of the rights regime as a national legal order, since, for example, citizenship in the PRC up through the most recent changes in the Constitution has been predominantly premised upon a political concept, rather than an ethnic, economic or territorial concept. That is, as we know, the renmin as a revolutionary political topos was the horizon of Chinese citizenship from 1949 onwards. In addition, on the one hand, the renmin was never only Chinese but a globally expansive concept potentially inclusive of all political friends and allies; and on the other hand, the renmin also did not include all Chinese within the territorial boundaries of the nation- state of China. As such, after 1949 Chinese citizenship was never premised upon a bourgeois state ideal at all. Nor has it ever been since. For after Maoism, the liberal stage, as it were, was skipped altogether and a globalized national juridical regime came to be elaborated without the prior instantiation of citizenship in its bourgeois-state form. That means that while both the earlier and the contemporary eras are global, the difference today from the early twentieth century is that China’s legal order and rights regime is completely within the global capitalist juridical order— a fundamentally illiberal order—as an ostensibly “equal partner” rather than within a colonial liberal juridical order as a subordinated entity subjected to unequal treaties and partial state sovereignty. In this regard, the tendential reconfiguration of Chinese citizenship around what Randy Martin calls in a different context the “investor class”

17 Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Duke University Press, 2006), 205–250 passim. 176 rebecca e. karl

(see below) is part of the intensification of the global juridical order and its intertwining with the Chinese national legal order. This, for China, cannot be seen as a departure from universal territorially state-defined citizenship in its bourgeois form (since China never had such an order to begin with), nor is it an “exception” globally. Rather, the national legal regime is a vast departure from the prior renmin idea, which essentially took individuals not as “economic man” but as “political (wo)man.” This departure is intensely national, but it was facilitated and shaped by and through the contemporary encounter of the evolving Chinese legal order with the global juridical order. In this regard, it seems completely ideologically utopian or even blind to maintain that somehow liberalism and democratic rights have some natural affinity to one another, in China or elsewhere at this particular moment, or that liberalism could be the securer of Chinese democracy. Indeed, all the readings of Locke, Hobbes, and so on cannot conceal the fact that, as Lin Chun cogently puts it, liberalism has always constrained democracy rather than otherwise.18 In this vein, it seems that CK Lee’s work on what she calls the sunbelt version of rights claims—which are argued in the narrow contractual sense rather than in the old rustbelt sense of socialist rights—points towards the track upon which intensified state-capital reproductive relations in global context will move in the foreseeable future.19 Contracts, of course, derive from an investor class notion of rights; in this sense, there is no mystery about why the Chinese state wishes to move labor onto a more fully contractual basis. That is, using Hannah Arendt’s distinction, contracts are always about administration/management, not about politics.20 Contracts are about securing individual rights. It is a form that is completely within the ideological purview of both the current Chinese national state regime of legality as well as the current desired contain- ment of the global juridical regime of capital to an anti-social, anti-political remainder. That is, both regimes vigorously pursue the abrogation of any notion of collective rights in favor of the ostensibly depoliticized contractual version of efficient administration and management on the basis of individual rights and privacy.

18 Lin Chun, Transformation, 223–4. 19 CK Lee, Against the Law (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). 20 Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965). the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 177

IV. A Critique of Exceptionality as the Monstrous Other

This brings me back to the problem of “the exception,” as both a description of the Chinese legal regime and as an analytic about politics in the neoliberal age. The current appeal to “the exception” to depict, describe, or interpret the contemporary Chinese rights regime and the global neoliberal era can be said to be a form of political existentialism, to borrow again from Mark Neocleous. Political existentialism focuses on the “most extreme ‘crisis’: the ‘state of exception,’ ‘the emergency situation,’ or, more broadly, death.”21 Political existentialism is linked to fascism as a political form—a form, as he puts it, that, among other things, appeals to “the monstrous as a political trope.” Indeed, he demonstrates: [The monstrous is] crucial to the political construction of fear and insecurity—two of the most fundamental mechanisms for the constitution of order in bourgeois society. Conservatism and fascism depend for their existence on the construction of “monstrous” figures. . . .22 On this view, not only are conservatism and fascism intensifications of liberal bourgeois society, it is also no coincidence that “the coldest of all monsters”—as Nietzsche labeled the state—has to be hidden; that is, as Ernst Bloch remarked, the state must be “clothed in folklore.”23 In many influential post-Maoist Chinese historical and policy circles— as well as in the common sensical public sphere—the facticity of the cold monstrosity of the state is propped up through the softening folklore of its five-thousand year-long persistence as the unified representative of an identifiable entity called Zhongguo. The prospect of the state’s demise and fear of consequent social disintegration is often-enough cited—by the state itself as well as by intellectuals of varying political persuasions— as a compelling reason to forestall a regime of genuine democracy and genuine rights. In some academic iterations, in fact, the folklore of the state reaches into a revival of such hoary old concepts as the Asiatic Mode of Production. As we know, the AMP was formerly rejected as an unacceptable negativity attached to an aberrantly stagnant Chi- nese state, with no concept of rights because of a collective, enslaving consciousness of state primacy over the economic and the individual.

21 Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (Cardiff: Univer sity of Wales Press, 2005), 99. 22 Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead, 6. 23 Bloch, “Death and Semblance of Life”, 151. 178 rebecca e. karl

However, the AMP was briefly rediscovered and invested with positive cultural significance and value in the 1980s and 1990s, with the Chinese state now appearing as a lauded enduring polity standing as a bulwark of stability amidst an ancient and contemporary world and society in dangerous struggle and flux.24 The AMP as metaphor for unexceptional exceptionalism, historical duration, and continuity has passed into the political unconscious, as it were, and continues to inform analysis on the Chinese state.25 No less than for conservatism or fascism, and indeed in mirror parallel to those, the appeal to the monstrous—named the exception—in ostensible critiques of the contemporary global or Chinese moment merely accepts the linguistic, ideological, and interpretive parameters given by dominating and hegemonic powers (be they political, cultural, or both). The parameters force a version of normality against which the exception or the monstrous is posed and understood. Exceptional rule in the context of the monstrous intrusion is seen as a new mode of political optimiza- tion—as Aihwa Ong puts it—that is “reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality.”26 Whether we are living through a reconfiguration or, as I would argue, an intensification is a subject worthy of further discussion. For the moment, suffice it to note that the ostensibly critical claim for an utterly new situation requiring an utterly new attitude towards the state, sovereignty, governance, and rights—a new attitude and approach towards being in the world—precisely parrots the rhetoric of the state itself in its ongoing collapse into, and conflation with, what Randy Martin calls the “financial logic of risk management” or the securitization of the state.27 Nevertheless, the reality of contemporary crisis is pervasive: the sense of a world in which spaces and times increasingly are occupied or haunted by the zombie-like figures of the living dead—those with human faces

24 For the retrieval of the AMP as a positivity in China, see R. Karl, “The Asiatic Mode of Production: National and Comparative Imperial Formations,” Historein: A Review of the Past (Greece), 2005. This version is also reflected in numerous recent high-octane films and TV series about the Qin Shi Huangdi, by Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others. 25 The concept of a “political unconscious” comes from Frederic Jameson. 26 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 27 Randy Martin, American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Duke Uni versity Press, 2007), 47. the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 179 but not quite human, as in the recently-revealed zombie capitalist shells of the financial detritus that surround us all. Indeed, these zombie-like figures could be seen as the specters of living labor, just as they could be construed as the embodied ghosts of the revenant vanishing. In this sense, is the contemporary crisis a historical conjuncture—thus, is it part of a historical becoming (even if not a historicist one), whose ending is not yet foretold? Are we, as Karl Polanyi theorized in the 1940s, at “the origins of . . . [a] cataclysm . . . [that] lies in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system”?28 Or is the contemporary crisis outside of history as we have known it (as, e.g., Carl Schmitt and his contemporary avatar, Giorgio Agamben, would have it)? That is, is crisis part of a historical process whose outcome is not clear, or is it exceptional, an aberration against a norm? It turns out that this crucial problem in the philosophy of history is sublimated in and by discussions of neoliberalism’s relationship to the contemporary rights regime; it is rarely discussed as a critical topic of significant interpretive importance in its own right. To translate this into a related idiom: this is a problem of viewing the current moment of crisis as a form of human temporality rooted in social production, as that form is currently pitted against the peculiar de-historicalizing temporality of capital or capitalist sociality. This is a struggle—an interpretive just as a real-life activist struggle—that could potentially yield a form of speculative thinking of the unity of an open future (as Peter Osborne has recently put it).29 Is our current moment an invitation to futurity, or is it best understood as a temporality outside of history, as politics defined by and contained within an ahistorical state-form as exceptional sovereign or emergency power with little speculative futurity other than financial derivatives and their attendant political and juridical forms? In my view, how to understand and deal with crisis as a historical philosophical problem should indeed reference the Schmittian path of a natural law theory. But, rather than posit a historically progressive continuum between the state and individual rights, as in much post-French Revolu- tionary liberal socio-economic and political theory, one would instead cast that relationship into a historically-produced absolute antagonism whose futural climax has now apparently arrived. This is not to turn Schmitt into

28 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957), 29. 29 Peter Osborne, “Marx & the Philosophy of Time,” Radical Philosophy 147 (Jan./Feb. 2008), 16. 180 rebecca e. karl a radical critic of politics as such (as some fashionable leftish academics have been doing of late), but to take him as precisely the theorist of historical fascism that he was.30 In other words, this would be an interpretation that takes seriously the illiberal alternative possibilities inherent in liberal natural law thought, rather than pose those alternatives as historical antitheses whose propositions cancel each other out. This would lead to a view of the contemporary moment of crisis as a historical intensification, not a reconfiguration. And, it would lead to a critique of and an attempt to go beyond legality as a definition of human freedom. For, the antagonism between the state and individual rights is, in fact, named by Schmitt the state of emergency or the exception—that exception is an intensified norm intended to overcome liberalism from within the concepts of liberalism itself (democracy and so on), just as the fascism of Schmitt’s time was the intensification of liberal thought in order to transcend the perceived impasse within liberalism itself. As Schmitt makes clear in his Political Theology (1922) and as is often (mis)quoted, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”31 In relating the state/sovereign to God—the “he” who decides—Schmitt posits a secularized theologically-derived omnipotent force outside of and not beholden to history. That is, the exception has no discernibly necessary relationship to crisis, understood as an extended and integrated historical event; it is, for Schmitt, the enduringly ahistorical principle or ontology of sovereignty and thus of the political. It is that which ontologically produces the crisis, rather than that produced by a contingently logical sequence of historical events culminating in crisis. The political as embodied by and embedded in this version of the ahistorical state—and by extension, of all rights derived from or conferred by the concept of politics as an absolute horizon of the antagonism of the state—is the final and only arbiter of all social relations. The state appears as the total state—the stato totalitario, in its original fascist sense—and it is only this total state that can save or even foster “democracy.”32

30 For a trenchant critique of the turn to Schmitt as a theorist of crisis, see Mark Neo cleous, “Friend or enemy? Reading Schmitt politically,” Radical Philosophy 79 (Sept./Oct. 1996), 13–23. 31 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), 5. 32 See Neocleous, “Friend or enemy?” 15. the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 181

Indeed, for Schmitt, democracy is not understood in its historicized liberal legal sense—that is, as the positing of a formal concept of individual equality in face of social heterogeneity (not, then, a problem of individual rights). Rather than a legal order, democracy is understood as a juridical order based upon the abolishment of heterogeneity in favor of the homogeneous. That is, democracy is separated from liberalism, allowing Schmitt to argue “that the constitution could be saved through its democratic—that is, dictatorial—measures.”33 Clearly, in fascist states of the past, homogeneity was understood primarily in terms of race, ethnic- ity, and sexual hetero-normativity. By contrast, today, one could say that that sort of crudeness is at least rhetorically less possible, as multicultural inclusionism now is given all the rhetorical due and vacuous ideological centrality it has pursued (although the recent events in China’s Xinjiang Province could give one pause in this regard).34 Today, the homogeneity sought is not necessarily racial, ethnic, or sexual, but a homogenity of the “investor class” (which, it turns out, is relatively racially and sexually exclusive anyway). According to Randy Martin, the “investor category, while less inclusive than that of citizen or consumer, is a kind of political derivative. . . .”35 To extend Martin’s category to a global concept, the investor class is far larger than a state-based notion of citizenship.36 Saving the investor class as a global juridical and not merely a national legal category now can be said to be the dominant mode of governing and of fashioning rights regimes the world over. In this effort, it is clear that the state governs precisely upon the legal exception which has always been granted to corporations, where in the global as well as in many national legal regimes, the corporate entity is treated legally as an individual. One could say that the “investor class” is a global legal concept that extends the corporate logic to the individual, rather than, as with national legal orders, extending the individual logic to the corporation. It also only pertains to those who

33 Neolocleous, “Friend or enemy?” 16. 34 See, for example, Charles Taylor’s ubiquitously cited text, Multiculturalism: Exam ining the Politics of Recognition, 2nd edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1994). 35 Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007), 37. 36 It is, in a negative sense, what Habermas positively identifies as the possibility for “world citizenship” [Weltbürger] through the mechanism of expanding the European model. See Nectarios Limnatis, “Globalization and modern philosophy,” Radical Philoso phy 119 (May/June 2003), 29. 182 rebecca e. karl invest in the normalized politics of the state as sovereign and the corporation as individual in the context of permanent geopolitical crisis. (As such, terrorists—the ne plus ultra of monstrous others—and marginal workers, as the slum dwellers of Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums or the ubiquitous mingong [migrant workers] and dagongmei [female migrant workers] of today’s urban China, are excluded from the political-economic juridical order. They are not invested, and thus nor are they politically economically vested.) Is this, then, really an exception in the ahistorical sense of a deracinated Schmittian argument, or is this the intensification of the liberal order of the individual as economic subject and of the corporation as individual subject, as might be indicated in a more historicized global contextualization? Is this not a historical moment of crisis that is, as Naomi Klein has recently implied, the newly intensified mode of capitalist-state reproductive relations,37 with neoliberalism as the ideology of these relations, rather than a sui generis political-economic form?38 Can it not be called, as some Latin Americanists labeled their states’ experiments with the free trade and investment policies in the 1980s and 1990s, a sort of “democracy without citizenship”?39 This remains a question it seems quite premature to foreclose.

V. Conclusion

The history of China’s “track joining” ( jiegui) in the past two and a half decades must be taken seriously. On this view, understanding the flight to rights in China (or anywhere) cannot merely be about a national legal order, but rather must integrally incorporate a global one, in which the Chinese order is embedded, to which it responds, and which is itself elaborated in part in response to China’s needs and requirements. The monstrosity that purports to be the exception, then, cannot be said to be China; rather, the monstrosity appears as the ideology of an exception whose norm has always been monstrously concealed. That is, the norm has always rested upon the exception: corporations have had individual status in the global and in many national legal orders since the early

37 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 38 For a critique of Harvey that takes up a similar issue, see Boal & Watts, “The liberal international,” Radical Philosophy 140 (Nov./Dec. 2006), 40–45. 39 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). the flight to rights: 1990s china and beyond 183 twentieth century.40 This logic has merely been intensified today as a mode of capital-state reproduction, whose contours and limits are still unknown. The current financial crisis might have been an occasion when some of these issues could be clarified. We may be witnessing a pivotal moment such as the one that Karl Polanyi wrote of in the 1940s. In his time, it was the breakdown of the international gold standard that provided the impetus for the great transformation he theorized and described. As he noted at the time: Not even when the cataclysm was already upon them did their leaders see that behind the collapse of the international system there stood a long development within the most advanced countries which made that system anachronistic; in other words, the failure of market economy itself still escaped them.41 The failure of financialization is of course staring us in the face and yet it seems to have escaped our leaders; indeed, in the process of the contemporary great transformation in national and global labor regimes (which must count as the actual content of the current crisis), the failure of financialization will pass underground in a patchwork of attempts to conceal the alternative potentials embedded in this particular moment. To return to zombies: it could be that the appearance of things as persons—the classic Marxist version of fetishism—has now intensified into the appearance of things as non-human persons—as in the corporate exception which is the global juridical rule. This process, as Neocleous notes, “achieved via a transformation of company law, has been fundamental to the consolidation of the social power of corporate capital.”42 The rights regimes and the legal or juridical orders associated with the non-human persons are both national and global. Any flight to rights as political potential, then, must take this fact into serious account and must cope with the ubiquitous and proliferating problem of zombies in our midst.

40 See Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State (London: Open University Press, 2003), 78, for a cogent argument about the “personification of capital.” 41 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 20. 42 Neocleous, Imagining the State, 78.

Chapter Eight

Human Rights, Revolutionary Legacy, and Politics in China*

Ban Wang

Observers of China’s human rights situation tend to view the rise of rights as a result of China’s economic liberalization and market reform. They believe the issue of rights is on the agenda because China is getting on track with global standards in trade and markets and is undergoing political and legal reform. The invocation of human rights, however, often proceeds on a biased divide that pits liberal democracy against authoritarianism that represses individual liberty. This divide is more pronounced when viewed cross-culturally. Human rights, incarnate in the notion of the abstract individual as world citizen, are set up in contrast to oriental collectivism, familial priorities, and Asian values. The use of human rights as a dividing line between “us and them” (cultures with no sense of rights and those embedded in rights) is further associated with an evaluative hierarchy of civilizations. Those people deprived of human rights are considered subhuman and hence uncivilized, and those endowed with rights are an advanced species. Thus a discourse that sets out to show the universal rights of humanity is left starkly polarized between a superior liberal democratic order and a barbaric authoritarianism. This view has serious analytical and political consequences. In upholding human rights as a hallmark of civilized uniqueness against presumed tyranny, critics often forget the political struggle for rights and the living history of this struggle to achieve human dignity and equality, both in the East and the West. One symptom of this divide is the controversial translation into Chi- nese and Japanese of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the classic statement of individual rights and liberty.1 For a century, critics have been skeptical about the validity of these translations. Why is a questionable translation so significant? To translate is often to mistranslate and to distort, or to

* A different version of Ban Wang’s chapter was published in Boundary 2, 38.1 (2011). 1 For example, see Yan Fu, Qunji quanjie lun [On the boundaries between community and self] (Shanghai: Shangwu Press, 1935). 186 ban wang hide an ideological subtext; to introduce a liberal idea into Asian culture is to shine a beam of light into a dark house, and distortions will inevitably intrude in the process. Most commentators on Yan Fu’s translation of Mill’s book claim that due to his inadequate understanding of individual liberty, or because of his upbringing in family-centered or state-centered Confucianism, Yan Fu ignored the individual aspects of Mill’s thought and was quick to leap to an implied explanation of human rights as the rights of a group or national community. Even more misleading, some feel, is Liang Qichao’s interpretation of rights, because he directly equated the notion of rights with the rights of the people and the state. The recent invocation of rights in China “discovers” the past misreading once again. In the open, liberal atmosphere of global markets, some believe, the Chinese people, long constrained by the straitjacket of traditional and communist morality, have finally awakened to their rights as individual persons.2 Is the move from individual rights to people’s rights a mistranslation? Douglas Howland, in a perceptive study of translations by Yan Fu and Nakamura Keiu of Mill’s On Liberty, shows that both the Chinese and the Japanese translator were critical of Mill’s endorsement of individual liberty for its failure to provide provisions for the public good.3 Concerned about Mill’s atomistic notion of individualism, these translators stressed the need to depict the individual as a social being embedded in the fabric of community. They “reinterpreted Mill’s individual in the terms of classical Confucian ideals, imposing on each a personal commitment to collective practices of moral self-development that would integrate self and society for mutual good.”4 Although liberalism in Mill offered alternatives that could inform the movement for a national assembly in Japan against the ruling oligarchy, the liberal inspiration was undercut by the push for a national morality. In China, Mill’s ideas seemed to fall on deaf ears in the midst of a national crisis in Yan Fu’s time. In both countries, there was indeed a tendency to shift from individual liberty to the rights of the community and nation. Japanese leaders would privilege the German concept of Rechtsstaat, or the legal state, as the framework for individual rights,

2 A number of scholars have focused and apparently agreed on this “mistranslation.” See Ann Kent, Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993), 37–41; Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); and Huang Kewu, Ziyou de suoyi ran [Freedom’s rationale] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2000). 3 Douglas Howland, Personal Liberty and Public Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 3. 4 Ibid., 5. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 187 while Sun Yat-sen advocated national solidarity against the threat of “the loose sands” of individuals.5 Unlike other critics, however, Howland shows that this slippage from individual rights to the rights of the collectivity is by no means an Asian characteristic, nor an Asian habit of mind, least of all an expression of liberal modernity versus oriental authoritarianism. Delving into the social and intellectual history of Britain, he shows that a similar critique of individual liberty was taking place in Mill’s homeland at the time of the Asian translation. In the 1880s, it became clear to critics in England that personal liberty, buttressed by a libertarian state, was responsible for growing oppression in England and in its colonies. Individual liberty increasingly became the dominant ideology of the entrepreneur class. The ruling bourgeoisie used its wealth and power to keep the masses in dire poverty and servitude. Through economic policies of “low taxation, rights of inheritance, and the tradition of entailed estates,” the state promoted a laissez- faire economy that benefited few at the expense of many.6 Charging that the liberal order had been usurped by liberalism itself, British critic T.H. Greens (and others) reasserted the individual’s public obligation and virtue, launching a political reform. In Asia at that time, liberalism might have appeared as a refreshing concept with which to critique the defunct traditions and promote modern political progress. But the demands of liberal imperial powers for the rights to territorial and economic concessions rendered the talk of liberty and rights suspicious, if not downright threatening. The precious insight here is that the “misreading” or critique of liberalism seen more than a hundred years ago in China and Japan was a global rather than local event. If it does not make much sense to say that the reformist British critics mistranslated Mill’s notion of liberty, it would be equally absurd to claim that Asian translators misinterpreted the idea when they were criticizing it. Another lesson from the translated fate of Mill’s ideals is that the discourse of rights has its own history: a checkered career, one that is deeply involved in social, economic, and political struggles in the West. This history is a significant reference for understanding Chinese views and practices with regard to rights. Below I will trace briefly the conceptual nexus of the individual person and the community-oriented notion of rights in Hegel and Marx. The relation

5 Ibid., 8. 6 Ibid., 10. 188 ban wang between the individual person and things points beyond private property rights to an enlarged notion of rights and ownership in a commonly created life-world. The emancipatory drive to reappropriate what rightfully belongs to creators gives justification to social movements in the world of global capitalism. I contend that the defense of rights is not detached from community, society, and the nation-state. On the contrary, it is implicated in collective movements, nation-building, and the function of the polity. In the last section, a look at rights consciousness and practice in today’s China will show the continued relevance of the revolutionary legacy, which favors socioeconomic rights, the people-oriented state, and closer ties between society and government.

I. Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Idea of Right

The philosophical notion of right originated most clearly in the work of Immanuel Kant. The move from the individual to the community, conversely, finds an elaborate articulation in Hegel’s critique of Kant. Kant advanced the idea of moral law as a law of autonomy that the individual imposes on himself, the idea of independence, and the idea of the thinking subject. He offered an analysis of right from its simple abstract form to the complexities of civil society, state, and cosmopolitan right. To Hegel, however, Kant’s theory of right remains subjective and abstract, and is removed from historical reality. One salient focus is the nexus of the person and things, the individual and property. In Kant, as in John Locke, the right of a person is substantiated by the natural right to own property. Historically, Hegel points out, the definition of a person indeed hinged on the ownership of an estate. Thus a slave, who owned no property, was not a person. In the modern age, in contrast, every human being is considered a person endowed with rights over possessions, and is obliged to associate with other human beings as equals.7 By defining the right of the person as the right to own things and property, Kant revealed his indebtedness to Roman law, which also conceived the right of a person as premised on ownership of property and slavery. Against this, Hegel highlights a different relationship between persons and property. As an independent person, an individual not only owns physical things, such as land, corn, bread, machines, or money, but also

7 See Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 47. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 189 possesses inner intellectual and cultural accomplishments. These internal qualities constitute him or her as a person. As a person, in other words, I possess my life and body the way I own external things. In this sense, all things, including my body and capacity, could be considered be my property. Self-rule and self‑determination come about “through my conferring upon the thing an end.” In self-determination, “I give the living creature, as my property, a soul other than that which it previously had; I give it my soul.”8 Here Hegel shifts the focus from property possession as a hallmark of the human person to the person as free spirit: a person endowed with free will to partake of and modify things, including his own life, body, and labor power. The property definition in Kant is thus extended to include the right of a person to actualize his personality and personal development by shaping his life, body, talent, and capacity. Rather than being based on property, the idea of what is proper is modified to mean the autonomy to form a personality by appropriating cultural resources—a romantic narrative of bildungsroman. Sensitive to the emptiness of equal rights in market exchange, Hegel observes that within the market context the imperative is “I own my property and can dispose of it as I want,” but this does not entail “what and how much I possess.”9 So the abstract equality of a person does not square with the inevitably unequal possession of goods and economic polarization. Given the fact that inequality might occur in a contractual setting, Hegel still believes that the exchange of goods and exercise of choice comes from freely participating parties, with the market entailing due respect to the rights of its participants. Here Hegel glosses over the substantive inequality inherent in commodity exchange by resorting to formal, Kantian equality regarding the notion of contractual right. This is where Marx’s critique comes in, as I will discuss later. Hegel’s most interesting discussion is the subordination of personal right to a higher, communal principle. For Hegel, the right of private property appears to be trivial, a problem of emotionally limited people who are bogged down in their own interests. When it conflicts with the demands of the ethical life of a community, the right of private property should not be absolute. The political community may intervene to protect property rights—or subordinate them to the demands of the

8 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 76. 9 Hegel, Elements, 80. 190 ban wang general good. For example, the individual may be obliged to risk or lose his life and property for the nation during war.10 The organic link between the individual and community creates ethical life, which is distinguished from private morality that is based on personal rights. Comprising the family, school, customs, and community, the ethical life connects individuals as members of a larger framework. Individuals exercise their rights in a continuous space from private to public, and the public realm is by no means a location for emanations of private will or preferences. Thus the ethical life presents the common good of a community, whose demands are “duties which are binding on the will of an individual.”11 Hegel contends that private subjectivity is only a moment in ethical life. Individuals must identify with the ethical demands of the community and may find their “liberation in duty.”12 This suggests a broader scenario of individuals developing their authentic personalities by performing public duties as members of the polity. The individual, by merging with a broad community and performing his or her duties, evolves into a fully developed, liberated person.

II. Alienation as Violation of Rights

While Hegel’s critique of Kant moves beyond the self-interest and possessions of the individual in a market society toward an ethos-charged republican modern state, Marx’s critique of right centers on the capitalistic operation of the right of private property. Hegel thought that by transcending private interest to nurture public virtues and broaden a person’s identification with the public good, the modern individual would be able to thrive in a salutary balance between individual right, public duty, and an ethical ideal. To Marx, this idealistic solution—based on a process of education and formative Bildung—neglects the economic facts derived from the operation of private property. In his works “On the Jewish Ques- tion” and “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Marx critiques private property as a source of degradation of individuals and their human dignity. In capitalist production, the system of private property separates the producers from their own products. The products that workers have

10 Ibid., 362. 11 Ibid., 191. 12 Ibid., 192. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 191 created become a curse, something alien, and a source of misery, degradation, and suffering. This story of alienation reveals the divorce of persons from their things—not just from their private property but also from all the essential components that make human life possible. Profit-driven production privileges abstract labor over concrete work that satisfies basic human needs. Against this distortion of humanity, emancipation arises as a struggle to overcome and transcend the condition of alienation. To emancipate themselves, workers must reappropriate what they have been deprived of. The hope is that workers will regain not only the right to what they are justly due as a result of their labor, but also the right to enjoy material things—a life-world, remade and experienced through their own bodily extensions. This analysis of alienation foreshadows the later discussion in this essay of social and national movements in defense of autonomy writ large as rights of society and people. In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx notes that the great documents of rights, like “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” consistently stress the importance of personal liberty, linking it to the free disposal of private property. However, the freedom of private property is limited and alienating, because it presupposes the egoistic monad in civil society. Seeking self-interest, this individual disposes private property without regard for others and remains aloof from society. Other people only stand in the way of the individual’s egoistic pursuit. The practice of private property, writes Marx, “leads every man to see in other men, not the realization but rather limitation of his own liberty.” The property right is the right “to enjoy and to dispose as one will, one’s goods and revenues, the fruits of one’s work and industry.” This turns a political, public life informed by the common good into a handmaiden of the egoistic man: “The right of liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life,” and becomes only a means to serve the self-interested end of private men in civil society.13 Private interest is as politically debilitating as private property is alienating. The exploitative operation of private property not only isolates an individual from others; it also alienates workers from their own humanity. Production for living is a matter of the worker taking possession of nature and his own “property”—what is inherent in him in his labor power and

13 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), 40, 42. 192 ban wang capacity. In production for profit, however, the laborer’s products confront him as something alien, as a power over and above him. In “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Marx observes that an increase in material wealth quickly devalues the workers’ humanity. In light of the nexus of the person and things: the worker puts his life into things, yet the greater his activity, the more he is deprived from his own objects, and the poorer his life becomes. Moreover, while he gives human purpose to objects, “the life which [he] has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”14 If the right to property is the right to dispose of one’s energy and labor capacity as one likes, then alienated labor, endemic to the capitalistic practice of private property, amounts to a violation of the individual’s right to exercise his power and enjoy his own creation. The property right becomes the privilege of the few and the scourge of the worker. Ironically, property, in Pheng Cheah’s words, “is radically and fundamentally improper to human beings despite its etymological relationship to the proper (eigentlich), what is of one’s own (eigen) or co-belongs with oneself.” Property “is a form of expropriation (Enteignung),” and its exploitative practice violates self-creative, useful, and purposive labor. Marx’s theory of labor implies a narrative of laborers’ autonomous self-creation, which purports to create a sensuous world of aesthetic wholeness. This objective, humanized world in turn corresponds to the self-realization of laborers. Autonomy is manifest in the concrete labor of use-value, which, writes Cheah, is “the process by which the human subject achieves self- propriety and self‑presence,” and in which subjects are able to recognize their humanity as the organic extension of their labor, “affirming the dignity that is proper to every human personality.” This is appropriation, which presupposes the abolition of private property. Revolution is another act of appropriation, which “recalls the link to the proper, especially as instantiated by creative labor’s original appropriative character.”15 Alienation splits workers from their proper creation during the labor process. The divorce from bodily and subjective assets—indeed their total humanity—calls for redress and gives rise to the historical necessity of emancipation.

14 Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 58. 15 Pheng Cheah, “The Future of Nationalist Appropriation,” in Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, ed. Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 46–47. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 193

Emancipation refers to restoring the alienated worker to his full humanity. Marx predicts an aesthetically rich world when a worker is restored to the rightful capacity to own and enjoy one’s own products. To transcend the alienation of private property is not simply to regain the material goods of creaturely needs. Emancipation is gained through “the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life.”16 People’s relation to the world of things is not limited to private ownership but extends to a richly experiential sensuous horizon: the authentic “human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing, wanting, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of this individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object, the appropriation of the human world.”17 It is instructive to note that the word “appropriation” means turning something into one’s own, without egoistic ownership. Marx shifts from a metaphor of the worker regaining his or her sensuously experienced sphere of objects into a broader horizon of the socially appropriated beauty of the world. In the return to human senses and attributes, “human” means the full-blown spiritual and sensuous recovery of what is humanly proper. Rather than an egoistic monad driven by possessive individualism, the human person is now a social, connected being. A political movement for all alienated producers, revolution carries the notion of justice and rights. Collective claims on rights are thus not incompatible with individual autonomy; the right of self-determination and self-creation underlies both. The critique by Hegel and Marx against property-based notions of rights delineates the mutation of “right” from its individualistic closet to communal dimensions, and its consequences in alienated labor. The history of the creative destruction of capitalism has attested to the vicissitude of rights. Later in this essay, I will show that Marx’s thinking about rights and labor has underlined Chinese thinking about the question of rights in relation to revolutionary movements and socialism. For now, let us note that, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, what had been touted as a time of absolute property rights in the West was drastically eroded by monopolies and transnational capitalism.

16 Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 73. 17 Ibid. 194 ban wang

III. The Erosion of Property Rights

Joseph Schumpeter explains the way the evolution of capitalism undermined the bourgeoisie as a class and eroded the notions of free personality, individual will, and the contract system—all crystallized within the classical canon of property rights. The rise of bureaucratic administration of transnational business and monopolized competition ousted venturous entrepreneurs and disabled the middle class. To be sure, the assertion of individual rights was historically progressive and signaled emancipation from the feudal prerogatives of the church and the aristocracy. Western rights discourse was, to a large extent, based on the progressive role of the bourgeois class and underpinned entrepreneurial individualism, self- interest, and market exchange. But giant corporations and the bureaucratic state undermined the sanctity of property rights, as previously outlined in Hegel’s concepts of property and free contract. Schumpeter singled out these two factors as the institutional anchors of early capitalism. In the monopoly age, however, the strong-willed, self-reliant proprietor of classical liberalism faded from the picture. In his stead rose salaried executives and waged employees. These people did not have the opportunity, as the rising bourgeoisie had, to exercise autonomy and develop an entrepreneurial personality. They could not identify with their own “property,” but rather assumed an attitude of indifference to the fruits of their work. Private property became an impersonal, rationalized monolith that even the real owners could only manage and control with large teams of con- sultants and experts.18 The same fate fell on free contracting. A contract supposedly involves free parties and equal exchange by rational human beings, offering a setting for realization of individual rights and achieving equality. But the impersonal, rationalized structure of monopoly capitalism has rendered this process meaningless. The labor contract is perhaps the most striking and familiar example. When a job candidate makes a “contract” with a hiring business, he or she is not a freely choosing agent, even though it may appear so. Making a contract turns on the “take it or leave it” situation. Thus the two most important institutions based on property rights recede into the background. The rising monolith of capitalist structure,

18 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 134, 141. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 195

Schumpeter pronounces, “takes the life out of the idea of property.” He continues: It loosens the grip that once was so strong—the grip in the sense of the legal right and the actual ability to do as one pleases with one’s own; the grip also in the sense that the holder of the title loses the will to fight, economically, physically, politically, for “his” factory and his control over it, to die if necessary on its steps. And this evaporation of what we may term the material substance of property—its visible and touchable reality—affects not only the attitude of holders but also that of the workmen and of the public in general. Dematerialized, defunctionalized, and absentee ownership does not impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did. Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for it—nobody within and nobody without the precincts of the big concerns.19 Earlier we encountered critics who upheld the absolute individual right against state intervention or any collectivity. These critics view individual rights as the hallmark of a market society—as opposed to a moral and political community, presumably shorn of rights and choice—or as a sign of the superiority of a capitalist market economy to a centralized socialist economy. Both intellectual history and the evolution of capitalism, however, have proven that if the vibrant notion of rights did once work in the period of the nascent bourgeoisie, it has been eroded and undermined by the rise of what may be called the military-industrial complex of the bureaucratic state of the twentieth century. In upholding human rights in the guise of Western uniqueness as a normative mirror against deviations of the Asian other, critics either forget or ignore the checkered past of rights in Western societies.

IV. Colonialism, Inherited Rights, and Social Movements of Self-Protection

Do rights exist in cultures that do not identify them with that language? If the conditions for popular revolt, social movements, and revolution include a massive deprivation of rights, it follows that violence done to the integrity of the person and community provokes an acute consciousness of injustice and hence begets a countermovement in defense of injured rights. This view perceives the political struggle of the colonized and downtrodden as an inherent struggle for rights. Whether a movement happens in a culture with a system of rights equipped in its formal

19 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 142. 196 ban wang vocabulary has little to do with this naturally intuited sense of rights. In their investigation of peasants’ understanding of rights, Chinese social sci- entists found that the peasants were unsure how to respond to question- naires about the legal definitions of rights pertaining to their life, work, villages, and families. But when questioned about what cannot be taken away from them, even by the state, everyone knows for sure what these “rights” are: life, family, person, respect, and certain property. True, many peasants polled were illiterate or unaware that human rights may be imperfect (or a device conceived by and for the powerful), yet what could be more human than their apparently uneducated responses?20 This naturally intuited sense of right may reflect an unconscious stratum, structured like an unspoken language in Chinese culture. The Confu- cian tradition does indicate something like the natural right of subsistence, manifest in the Mencian idea of people as the basis of government. The legitimacy of a government is derived from its agenda to look after the general welfare of the population. In contemporary parlance, this can be seen as a recognition of substantive rights. For centuries, when the government failed to care for the welfare of its people—took away resources and the means of their livelihood or oppressed or taxed them excessively— it was the Mandate of the Heaven that granted Chinese peasants the right to revolt against and overthrow the dynastic regime. That peasant revolt undoubtedly stems from an injured sense of rights. In the context of capital expansion into non-capitalist, peripheral areas, this phenomenon has global resonance. Critics have noted an inherent link between rights consciousness and the Chinese Revolution, tracking the notion of rights in contemporary social, feminist, and union activism. Elizabeth Perry seeks to gain from the Anyuan workers’ strike a different path of revolution, one driven not by class struggle but by the quest for human dignity and rights of subsistence and well-being.21 But class formation, struggle, and consciousness-raising are not incompatible with the sense of rights, nor is rights consciousness necessarily nonviolent and civil. The awareness of rights, as I will show later, accounts for the massive mobilization of the peasantry as the most dynamic force of the Chinese Revolution.

20 Xia Yong, “Minben yu minquan” [Substance and rights of people], in Renquan yanjiu [Studies of human rights], ed. Xu Xianming, vol. 4 (Jinan: Shangdong renmin, 2004), 29. 21 Elizabeth Perry, “Reclaiming the Chinese Revolution,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 4 (November 2008): 1147–64. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 197

Global capitalism, driven by imperialism, expropriates the land, property, and natural resources of historical communities. The Chinese Revo- lution arose as a movement to combat its dire consequences in the first half of the twentieth century. The ownership of private property took the form of capital accumulation, which amounts to a violation of the inherited rights of indigenous communities and people. The legal notion of rights, Rosa Luxemburg noted, portrays commodity exchange as a purely economic process, “confined to the exchange of equivalents”—a transaction between capitalist and laborer. At least formally, peace, prosperity, and equality may prevail in the metropolitan centers of capitalist states. It is a different story in colonized nations. It takes keen dialectics of scientific analysis to reveal, in capital expansion into other nations, “how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule.”22 With an eye on neoliberal globalization, David Harvey contends that primitive accumulation is by no means a thing of the past but continues in the form of “accumulation by dispossession.”23 The deprivation of the rights of colonized communities occurs through the “forceful expulsion of peasant populations.” Property rights also existed in historical agrarian communities, like those in England or China, but they were not in the form of private property. Instead, these rights were often rights of use, not of ownership, and they were seen as common, collective rights. The assault on these rights in capitalist colonialism converted property, land, and nature in the communal setting into exclusive property, and abolished the inherited rights of individual producers.24 The capitalist market also converted a rural producer’s labor power into a “free-floating commodity.” In terms of cultural geography, this expropriation demolished the inherited way of life marked by an organic rhythm of production and consumption, turning territories, land, and natural assets into private assets under a new domestic class and imperial power.

22 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 432. 23 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145. 24 E.P. Thompson’s study of the communal rights and use rights of British farmers shows that riots against economic injustice were derived from a sense of customary rights granted by the community. See Thompson, “The Grid of Inheritance,” in The Essential E. P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 2001), 287–315. 198 ban wang

The liberal theory of rights sanctifies property rights as inviolate and inviolable by the group, the collectivity, or the state. But as Schumpeter’s analysis shows, monopoly capitalism has taken the life out of private property. More insidiously, the crony alliance of the state and capital has rendered private property and individual rights meaningless in the age of transnational corporations and monolithic bureaucracy. Ironically, what started as a liberal defense of property rights has turned, in historical practice, into an illiberal, oligarchic fusion of the private rights of big capital and the imperialist state. When liberal critics defend individual rights against the state, they ignore the fact that the state has played a decisive role in defining the legality of private property, simply by promoting colonialist expropriation at the expense of other people’s rights. Modern political and social movements in China must be seen as acts of self-protection against the aggression of the capitalist state, which is driven by colonialism and imperialism. Manifest in populist, national, and socialist endeavors, China’s transformations in the twentieth century belong to the worldwide struggle against the ravages of capital expansion by what Karl Polanyi calls the “self-regulating market.” The market-driven world order emerged and developed in leaps and bounds at the turn of the twentieth century; it “engulfed space and time.” When it reached its peak around 1914, every part of the globe had been brought into its orbit. This system is not only economic but cultural: a “new way of life spread over the planet with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career.”25 According to Polanyi, economic activity was still partially a function of the organic community that had not succumbed to the rule of global markets. Land, nature, and labor were an articulate whole, the essential building blocks of human life and community. Production of goods solely for sale and profit did not govern the community’s cultural and moral fabric. What was new in the liberalization of the market and expansion of capital was the forceful submission of all aspects of human life to the single, whimsical arbiter of the self-regulating market. It allowed “the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings” both in the metropolises and peripheral regions.26 This new market economy brought land, nature, and labor into a scheme whose sole purpose was

25 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 136. 26 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 76. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 199 to achieve the maximum monetary gains. Jolted out of their customary and communal conditions into the orbit of global capital, neither people nor the natural environment could remain in their natural rhythm, and were unable to be reproduced in the cycle of life. But labor, land, and nature, embedded in what E.P. Thompson calls “the grid of inheritance,” were not mere commodities.27 In the market system, “man under the name of labor, nature under the name of land, were made available for sale; the use of labor power could be universally bought and sold at a price called wages, and the use of land could be negotiated for a price called rent.” Yet, leaving “the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them.”28 Thus, the commodity definition of land, nature, and labor was entirely fictitious. It violated the very nature of these essential components of life, community, and culture. Against this destructive tendency, a countermovement began in the seventeenth century in land legislations and socialist movements in emerging European nations. This counteraction aimed at putting the brakes on the runaway market, which was swallowing up resources, labor, and land. Government interventionism, legislation, social movements, land protection, national independence movements, and national sovereignty were manifestations of society’s self-protection.

V. Rights Consciousness in Literature, Arts, and Mao’s Writings

The Chinese Revolution is situated in this global movement of self- protection in defense of people’s inherited rights. The Qing dynasty’s demise in the period of expansive Western powers went together with the erosion of China’s agrarian economy. The introduction of colonial markets disrupted the empire’s self-sustaining tributary commercial network. The Chinese countryside bore the brunt of these ravages. Although the global system operated at a distance, rural China was severely affected by its disintegrative effects. An oppressive regime of gentry, landlords, and warlords taxed and plundered the peasantry. From the turn of the century through 1949, the depletion of rural land, the destruction of the rural handicraft industry, and the breakdown of the community were widespread and devastating.

27 Thompson, The Essential E. P. Thompson, 239. 28 Polanyi, 137. 200 ban wang

In the face of this situation, radical thinkers shifted from a dogmatic faith in the emancipatory capacity of the urban working class to a sharper diagnosis of how global capitalism had destroyed the countryside. In literary writings concerned with the Chinese village, we see penetrating analyses of the rural crisis. Mao Dun, a writer and thinker with a keen sense of political economy, was earlier noted for his depiction of city life. His political-economic insight and understanding of the modern capitalist system in industrial Shanghai enabled him to portray the conditions of the peasantry and the ravages that had taken place in the countryside. Mao Dun’s story “Spring Silkworms” registers the way the world market intrudes into the rural economy and destroys the traditionally integrated whole of land, nature, and labor in an agrarian community. As the story begins, the main character, Dong Bao, is in a state of bewilderment after the recent decline of his family and community. One warm spring day, as he surveys a picturesque landscape of mulberry trees, rice fields, and the river, it becomes apparent to the reader that the bulk of the economy consists in silk production, the pride of the South Yangtze River delta extending back to ancient times. The rural scenes of agrarian landscape are realistic depictions infused with a deep appreciation for the land found only in those who have worked in it. This aesthetic symbiosis of nature, land, and people converges into an integrated symbol of rural China: Before him, the water of the canal was green and shiny. Occasional passing boats broke the mirror-smooth surface into ripples and eddies, turning the reflection of the earthen bank and the long line of mulberry trees flanking it into a dancing gray blur. But not for long! Gradually the trees reappeared, twisting and weaving drunkenly. Another few minutes, and they were again standing still, reflected as clearly as before. On the gnarled fists of the mulberry branches, little fingers of tender green buds were already bursting forth. Crowded close together, the trees along the canal seemed to march endlessly into the distance . . . the mulberry trees reigned supreme here this time of the year! Behind Old Dong Bao’s back was another great stretch of mulberry trees, squat, silent. The little buds seemed to be growing bigger every second in the hot sunlight.29 The mulberry trees, humanized and personalized, are not just a resource of silk production but the symbol of a community-based economy. The

29 Mao Dun, “Spring Silkworms,” trans. Sidney Shapiro, in Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919–1949, ed. Joseph S.M. Lau, Chih-tsing Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 144. I modify the name T’ung Pao into the more com monly used pinyin. Subsequent quotations are also from this translation. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 201 goods produced are for local use and regional exchange. This picturesque homeland leaves old Dong Bao wondering why the rich resources and productive community could not stop his family’s downward slide into poverty. He considers past misdeeds—including the murder of a Long Hairs at the Taiping Uprising and the theft of his gold—as explanations, but the grievances or wrongs have been appeased by many years of prayer and ritual sacrifices. The decline of fortune cannot be attributed to the past. The answer is actually right in front of Dong Bao, who intuitively feels the looming threat of outside forces. Noises from a steamboat jolt him out of his puzzled reverie of the past and present: A small oil-burning river boat came puffing up pompously from beyond the silk filature, tugging three large crafts in its wake. Immediately the peaceful water was agitated with waves rolling towards the banks on both sides of the canal. A peasant, poling a tiny boat, hastened to shore and clutched a clump of reeds growing in the shallows. The waves tossed him and his little craft up and down like a seesaw. The peaceful green countryside was filled with the chugging of the boat engine and the stink of its exhaust.30 Like many peasants who remember the imperialist powers’ oppression of the peasant uprising, Dong Bao feels hatred for the foreign intruders who invade this rustic landscape. On the surface some may see it as xenopho- bia, but with a keen sense of the global market, the author provides a rational explanation for Dong Bao’s bitterness. Foreign businesses have monopolized the silk market: only cocoons spun by the foreign-strain silkworms can be sold at a decent price. This rigged market sets Dong Bao at odds with his daughter-in-law, who wants to keep pace with “free markets.” But the market is not the only corrosive factor. Japanese troops have recently occupied the filature, the trade, and the processing center for cocoons produced by local silk farmers, and the war continues in Shang- hai. The government seems to be in conspiracy with foreigners to exploit and oppress the peasants. The gentry and creditors seize market opportunities to take advantage of the rural crisis: “landlords, creditors, taxes, levies, one after another, had cleaned the peasants out long ago.”31 Confronted with these looming but ill-understood threats, the villagers hold their ground and continue to produce silk in the tradition they know well. They fight heroically and stoically, but theirs is a losing battle.

30 Mao Dun, “Spring Silkworms,” 146. 31 Mao Dun, “Spring Silkworms,” 149. 202 ban wang

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the villagers aim to protect their economic way of life. But there is more to their efforts than simply securing their economic survival. This community of family and kinship relies on inherited habits, beliefs, and rituals, and thus their struggle is also cultural in nature. The villagers do not simply produce cocoons and silk; they also re produce a culture of rituals and possess a value system that is incompatible with market forces. Mao Dun’s story gives a glimpse into the vast depletion of the countryside during the global economic crisis of the 1930s. The decline of the rural economy in China led to an influx of landless, displaced peasants into big cities like Shanghai, which led to exacerbated social conflict as a result of increasing inequality and oppression. This situation forced the revolutionaries to address the question of the peasantry. One of the first to take this issue seriously was Mao Zedong. In his report on the Hunan peasant movement, Mao described and analyzed the peasants’ action as a revolt in defense of deprived rights. As millions of peasants in several southern provinces rose up in arms and participated in aggressive campaigns against the gentry landlords, the leaders of both the Communist and Nationalist Parties criticized their violence and excesses. While he acknowledged that extreme acts did happen, Mao took on a more empirical, personal investigation of the peasant movement by traveling through five counties in just over a month in 1927. Mao’s resulting analysis highlights the question of rights. The peasant movement was not blind rage but a revolution—and a revolution is not a dinner party. The peasant revolution was intended to overthrow the feudal landlords’ rights, privileges, and power, and to establish peasants’ rights and power. But how does one equate this attack on the traditional ruling class with the protection of inherited rights of the rural community? In the beginning of his essay, Mao points to the nature of this peasant revolution: it was against the oppressive and exploitative alliances of imperialism and warlord regimes, whose constituency was the landlord gentry (“the cornerstone” of the imperial and comprador alliance).32 The peasant revolt was thus a continuation of Sun Yat-sen’s popular national revolution. This seizure of power was at once economic, social, and political. Eco- nomically deprived peasants comprised some 70 percent of the rural

32 Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong], vol. 1 (Beijing: Ren min chubanshe, 1969), 15. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 203 population and became the mainstay of the peasant association. Among them were the extremely poor, who were “entirely without occupation, having neither land nor money,” and had lost the means of life.33 They were drafted into the army, went out to work at odd jobs, or became beggars. Oppressed and exploited, the peasants were deprived of economic rights and respect; the rich landlords showed them only contempt: “You have not a single tile above and not a spot big enough to put a needle.”34 It is this complete lack of rights that prompted the poor to join the peasant association. By throwing themselves into campaigns, the peasants turned things around. Socially, they had always been humiliated and shamed by the gentry, with no place and no voice in society. Now they held up their heads and had power: “they held up their rough, blackened hands and lay them on the heads of the gentry.”35 Politically, the peasants knew exactly what was involved in the struggle for their rights. “All rights/power belong to the peasant association,” they announced. They were aware of Sun Yat-sen’s three people’s principles (nation, people’s rights, and people’s livelihoods). In Mao’s view, in fact, their struggle was an enactment of these principles. The enemy was imperialism, warlordism, and the repressive gentry. Mao’s report also shows how the peasants, with political power in hand, attempted to exercise their newly found political rights to achieve personal and property rights. The most immediate result was the ban on the landlords’ price gouging and hoarding of rice. With the price down, the hungry had access to food. Land was redistributed, and the rent and taxation reduced, altering the structure of land ownership. The peasants instituted a public policy that banned exploitative practices and illegal marketing. Emancipated, peasants were also recognized by the rural community as persons free from traditional and modern forms of oppression. Four traditions had justified oppression: the right of the state, the kinship rule, religion, and the right of husbands over wives. These were all overturned or challenged during the peasant movement. The kinship rule (族权 zuquan), for example, prohibited women and the poor from entering ancestor temples, and the penalty for transgression was severe. Now, women and the poor freely entered the temple, and wined and dined as they pleased. By building new schools, the peasant association also spread

33 Ibid., 20. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 18. 204 ban wang new ideas: “Down with imperial powers” (列强 lieqiang), and “freedom, equality, and three people’s principles” from Sun Yat-s en’s writings. They also built the commons, constructed public roads, and dug ponds to facilitate the communal use of land and property.36 The peasantry, in short, displayed an acute awareness of what they were entitled to and what they could claim. This is a consciousness of rights. Through his report, Mao highlighted the close link between rights consciousness and political struggle. Revolutionary art in the socialist era highlighted the peasants’ struggle in taking power, attaining their rightful place in society, and reclaiming the rights of collective ownership. The mainstream of revolutionary history consistently stresses the theme of dispossession and repossession, loss and recovery. One example of the artistic expression of this theme is the ballet White-Haired Girl, created during the Cultural Revolution, which begins with a scene of total dispossession and deprivation for the peasants and, by extension, the makers of a shared world. Under a low- lying, gloomy sky, the struggling laborers moan: 看人间, 往事几千载, 穷苦的人儿啊遭剥削遭迫害. 看人间, 哪一块土地不是我们开? 哪一个山林不是我们栽? 哪一间房屋不是我们盖? 哪一条道路不是我们开? 哪一株庄稼不是我们血汗灌溉?37

Looking around the world of humans, For thousands of years in the past, The poor have suffered exploitation and oppression. Looking around the world of humans, Is there a land that was not opened by us? Is there a grove that was not planted by us? Is there a house that was not built by us? Is there a road that was not opened by us? Is there a crop that was not grown with our sweat and pains?

36 Ibid., 31–34. 37 The Shanghai Dance Academy, The White Haired Girl: A Modern Chinese Ballet (Bei jing: China Broadcast and Video Press, 1992). human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 205

The ballet opera proceeds to show the gentry landlords, together with imperial powers, taking possession of the common land and levying heavy rent and taxes on the poor. The fertile land and property are the creation of the collective effort of laborers, but the laborers have no right to this commonly created world. What they have created becomes alien to them, a source of their own misery and oppression. Another example of this theme can be seen in the opera and dance The East Is Red. Peasants, now newly organized and standing shoulder to shoulder with the urban working class, take power into their own hands. Following the urban workers, who claim to be masters of the commonly created world, the peasants regain their rights. In a folk song style, the chorus sings: 霹雳一声震天地, 打倒土豪和劣绅, 往日穷人矮三寸, 如今是顶天立地的人. 天下农友要翻身, 自己当家做主人. 一切权利归农会, 共产党是我们的领路人.38

A thunderbolt shakes heaven and earth, Down with bad landlords and corrupt gentry, The poor used to be cowed low before the rich, Now they stand tall and touch the sky. The peasant brothers will change their fate, We are masters of our own house. All rights and power belong to the peasant association, The Communists lead our path. The peasant movement was a campaign not just to take back political power but to overturn the situation of rightlessness and dispossession. Socially, the peasants regained their dignity; economically, they became masters of their own house. They were restored to the rightful position of creators.

38 The East Is Red: A Grand Music and Dance Epic (Beijing: China Culture and Video Press, 1995). The authorship of this work is collective and unclear. 206 ban wang

VI. Rights Consciousness and Politics in Contemporary China

The struggle for rights not only informs revolutionary movements but fuels contemporary social movements, labor activism, environmental- ism, and street riots. This understanding questions the tired dichotomy between authoritarian society (based on coercive power) and liberal democracy (anchored in rights). Claude Lefort cautions that to talk about human rights abuse as a special feature of totalitarianism is to reify rights and to disengage them from the political realm. Human rights cannot be upheld without engagement in politics. The view that totalitarianism rejects human rights does not lead to the conclusion that human rights are fully guaranteed and protected in liberal societies. Human rights do not exist like actual legal institutions. The formal features of human rights can be listed, and indeed they may animate institutional structures and political processes, but “rights cannot be disassociated from the awareness of rights.”39 There is ambiguity in the institution of rights and the actual exercise of rights. “Democratic institutions involve,” Lefort notes, “with the development of a body of law and a cast of specialists, the possibility of a concealment of the mechanisms indispensable to the effective exercise of rights by the interested parties.”40 The institutions embodying legal rights may smother the spirit of rights and suppress their genuine exercise; they could also be a device of invested interests for private gains. On the other hand, the awareness of rights—an impulse for repoliticizing the institutions—provides a necessary impetus for the struggle. The invocation of rights is therefore not an actual condition of democracy but a generative principle that keeps alive the ethos of democracy. In this light, the concept of rights has a symbolic dimension that has to be enacted again and again, and is not reducible to mere judicial institutions. Striving for rights projects a regulative value and critical edge to reveal the lapses in the self-styled “human rights culture.” This symbolic dimension transcends cultural and national differences between and among the East and West, and may shed light on universal political struggles for human rights. In the past, it was the symbolic meaning of rights that motivated the Chi- nese peasants to rise up in arms. In contemporary social movements, this symbol of aspiration continues to rally many to political action.

39 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totali tarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 260. 40 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 260. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 207

In the three decades since the beginning of the reform era, the defense of socioeconomic rights has spawned lively debates in China. A rights consciousness has emerged among disadvantaged groups in the socioeconomic order. Critics in the West see in the surge of popular protest a newfound claim to citizenship that challenges state authority. In Merle Goldman’s account, “a growing sense of rights consciousness, particularly of political rights,” among the Chinese population may have the capacity to “produce in China changes as profound as those that occurred earlier in East Europe.”41 Less sanguine about the civic potential of rights struggles, Elizabeth Perry draws attention to the connection between current rights talk and the legitimacy of the Chinese state. In a recent article, Perry delineates a long pedigree of theory and practice concerning socioeconomic rights in the traditional moral economy by tracing the Mencian, Maoist, and revolutionary conceptions of rights. The idea that “people have a just claim to a decent livelihood and that a state’s legitimacy depends upon satisfying these claims” is credited to the lingering Confucian tradition.42 Carrying on Confucian compassion and benevolence, the socialist reform agenda combines claims to subsistence with the imperative of development. Since the reform era, the Chinese government has focused on the idea of substantive rights, taking seriously the welfare of the peasantry and general population while accelerating economic development. From Deng Xiaoping’s economic comfort (小康 xiaokang) to the Hu/Wen administration’s concern with the plight of the struggling peasantry, Perry sees an “enduring emphasis on collective socioeconomic justice.”43 A hallmark of Chinese thought about rights and politics, this emphasis, insists Perry, differs from Anglo-American notions of individual rights: “an abid- ing concern with distributive justice has marked Chinese political thought for more than two millennia.”44 Perry’s conclusion restates the distinction between individual rights and the people’s rights. In debates concerning rights in China during the transition from monarchy to the republic, the term gongmin (citizen) means a “public person,” referring to collective membership in a community. It has little to do with the liberal claim to the individual’s inalienable

41 Merle Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2, 24. 42 Elizabeth Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao—and Now,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (March 2008): 38. 43 Ibid., 38. 44 Ibid., 39. 208 ban wang rights vis-à-vis the state. Chinese rights discourse, she notes with unease, consistently conceptualizes human rights issues within a Confucian or Mencian framework.45 Due to this propensity to turn rights consciousness into collective obligations, the rights discourse in contemporary China does not seem quite accurate; it slips from the liberal norm. The Chi- nese rights discourse—cultural difference again creeps in—functions to consolidate or legitimate rather than question state power. Perry writes, “In a country where rights are seen more as state-authorized channels to enhance national unity and prosperity than as naturally endowed protections against state intrusion, popular demands for the exercise of political rights are perhaps better seen as an affirmation of—rather than an affront to—state power.” Thus there is no reason to expect a liberal-style “rights revolution” in China.46 Perry’s concerns about the shift of individual rights into a Confucian framework mirrors the situation we saw earlier in the Asian translation of Mill. This stance assumes a natural, iconic status of individual rights as the universal norm. But individual rights are not absolute. As we have seen in Hegel and Marx, the notion of individual rights or personal liberty could be considered abnormal in the history of rights discourse in the West. Against constraints from an overweening state, the liberal view is that that government should be neutral toward the moral decisions, religious views, and cultural differences of its citizens. The rival tradition of republicanism, in contrast, attaches more importance to community and self-rule. The republican view that participating in politics allows individuals to choose their own ends is consistent with individual rights. But more importantly, as Michael Sandel observes, participation “means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.” More than the capacity to choose one’s moral ends and to honor others’ rights to do the same, self- government “requires a knowledge of public affairs and a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a bond with the community whose fate is at stake.” To share in self-government requires certain qualities of character. Political liberty “requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires.”47 This sentiment echoes Hegel’s educational program for responsible citizenship.

45 Ibid., 46. 46 Ibid., 46–47. 47 Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5–6. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 209

The acquisition of rights consciousness in Chinese society may be proof of formative politics of citizenship. Yet the linkage of individual rights with people’s rights runs deeper, as a link that bonds individuals with the political community. In this light, the republican view resonates more with certain elements of ideological praxis in modern China’s socialist experiments than with the liberal notion of rights-bearing citizenship or the benevolent strand of Confucianism. But for us the more significant point of Sandel’s analysis is that faith in individual rights, as well as in procedural democracy, is a product of the postwar decades leading up to the mid-1990s. During this time, Sandel notes, the community-oriented aspects of American politics had “largely given way to the liberalism that conceives persons as free and independent selves, unencumbered by moral and civic ties they have not chosen.”48 Drawing on several strands of communitarianism, Rainer Forst also focuses attention on this blind spot of liberalism. By reasserting the necessary link between individuals’ legal rights and their political right to “share society’s resources,” Forst brings back the richer legal and participatory sense of citizenship. Legally, persons “are subjects and addressees” of the law of a political community. But as citizens, they do not just conduct themselves within the confines of the law: “they are at the same time its authors.” By deliberation, citizens come to a consensus “that first creates (and later changes) law and that is the medium within which claims to recognition are discussed.”49 Added to the legal status of persons, in this account, are the dimensions of the political right to participation and the socioeconomic right to share society’s resources. This conception recovers the meaning of political autonomy or self-rule alongside personal liberty. This communitarian line, especially in its emphasis on sharing society’s resources, resonates with the concern for socioeconomic rights in the Chinese socialist tradition. In the case of contemporary China, one may also note varying degrees of political participation and power sharing in the proverbially blurred lines between society and the state. This evokes the mass-line agenda used to mobilize the people during the revolutionary era, and current attempts at delibera- tive democracy.

48 Ibid., 6. 49 Rainer Forst, Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy beyond Liberalism and Commu nitarianism, trans. John M.M. Farrell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 82. 210 ban wang

In Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel contends that the absolute image of individual rights is a corrupt version of liberalism and a radical departure from republicanism. This fate fell on American democracy from the mid- to late twentieth century, which was marked by the expansion of individual rights at the expense of democratic self-rule and the common good. The iconic image of individual liberty has been upheld by the legal system and theorists as a universal standard. Across the clichéd East/ West, liberal/authoritarian divide, can we use this standard, questionable even in its place of provenance, to judge China’s emergent rights discourse and practice? Rights consciousness may or may not be a sign of liberalism’s ascendance in China. On the one hand, social movements and popular protests stem from a consciousness of legal rights. Work- ers and peasants may embrace the state’s legal reform and deploy the state’s legal language to air their grievances. On the other hand, activists may resort to the revolutionary belief that workers are masters of the enterprise and the state, rearticulating a sense of political participation in assuring economic security. In the judicial realm, what Perry calls the Anglo-American “rights revolution” may well be gaining momentum in China, but it often marginalizes lingering socialist and egalitarian concerns of subsistence rights, distributive justice, and necessary political and ideological confrontation. The deepening privatization of the market has led to a premature fetishization of legal rights and private property rights, and an inflated sense of egoism without regard to public interests and economic equality. A rising neoliberal discourse, steeped in legal jar- gon, keeps state intervention and public involvement at bay in the name of individualism, freedom, and growth. The legal reform sets up judicial infrastructures, institutions, and contract systems to support economic growth, protect vested interests, and to “keep on track” with international capital and corporate networks. While the much-touted “rule of law” provides a wide range of rights and entitlements for workers, it may also be a new authoritarian “rule by law.” Local business interests are frequently in league with provincial and local governments, for whom growth and revenue is the top priority. As Ching Kwan Lee notes, local courts often serve the interests of local governments: “Labor bureaus, responsible for enforcing the labor law, are marginalized and play second fiddle to economic and financial interests of the local bureaucracies.”50

50 Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 20. human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 211

Rather than promoting political participation, the fetishization of rights and legal processes may be draining the real potential and energy from struggles for rights—isolating citizens, dispersing riots, and fragmenting individual litigation. This procedural emphasis limits political agency, and the shrinking political scope means that Chinese citizens have fewer opportunities to participate in public affairs and self-government. Ignor- ing the limitations of legal reform, liberal critics also find rights struggles lacking in real democratic value. Perry indicates that rights and benefits are instituted by the government and thus are gifts to workers. The government deploys the legal discourse and institutions only to consolidate its power. Because individual socioeconomic rights are second to maintain the government’s policy to protect these rights, rights struggles in China are insufficient. They reflect a top-d own condescending political ploy or expediency. In short, the invocation of rights rhetoric is paternal- istic, authoritarian, and even manipulative.51 This understanding hinges on a one-sided conception of the Chinese polity and society. With their assumption that the Chinese government is a monolithic “regime” ruling over a conforming or dissenting population, liberals view any initiative by the government as top-d own manipulation to legitimize state power, regardless of any genuine policy to broaden the range of rights and popular participation. Underlying this liberal view is the entrenched opposition between society and state, between people and their government. Perry credits the practices and theories in the Mencian idea of people’s welfare as the foundation of a legitimate government. She rightly emphasizes the pursuit of distributive justice in the revolutionary and socialist legacy. But a closer relationship between people’s self- rule and the government becomes suspect in the liberal perspective of the separation of state and society. To measure how rights struggles can be both political and democratic, one must reject this rigid separation and redefine the character of the Chinese state along the lines of community, representation, and the unity of state and people, rather than simply from the sole vantage of individual rights. To the extent that the state is a management organ for economic growth, its legitimacy will mostly be based on rights consciousness and legal procedures. If the state is concerned with the welfare of the people and implements policy for distributive justice, it in many ways still carries on socialist agendas with echoes from the Confucian tradition. But preoccupation with the welfare of the people and

51 Perry, “Chinese Conception of ‘Rights,’” 46. 212 ban wang concern for their economic equality need not be authoritarian and pater- nalistic. It can also mean performing a service to the people, taking care of people as their representatives ought to do, as in the socialist principle of “serve the people.” Rather than being at odds with the interests of society and people, state power is often used to serve them. When this happens, as exemplified during national crises or new policies of resource redistribution among rural areas, the state may be regarded as the servant of the people, very much in the socialist and Confucian traditions. But how does this moral economy translate into political economy? How much of the state is the people’s state, rather than a small clique of power holders and power grabbers? To what extent is the socialist slogan “The people are the master of the nation” true, and not just an empty slogan? These questions must be asked and explored. However, they can be addressed only when we move from focusing on the liberal divide of the individual versus the state to a reexamination of the socialist egalitarian legacy, distributive justice, power sharing, centralized and decentralized socioeconomic power, as well as the residual Confucian tradition. Instead of keeping the state at bay as an alien entity against individual rights, citizens, especially the disadvantaged strata of Chinese society, must rely on the state—their state—to protect their interests and share society’s resources. The Chinese state may be on the way to legal authoritarianism and partly in the service of the newly emergent capitalist class, but it still remains the most influential institution in assuring the rights of citizens, workers, and peasants in a crisis-ridden global economy. A case from the realm of labor rights will serve as an example. In 2006, a major debate was underway in China concerning proposed government legislation that would grant new rights to workers. When the Chinese government released its Draft Labor Contract Law in April 2006, designed to protect workers’ rights and interests, it opened a thirty-day public comment period, drawing in two hundred thousand comments. Invoking human and workers’ rights, US-based corporations have consistently claimed to be raising the standards of labor rights in overseas factories and businesses. The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong stated that one of its universal principles is to serve as a catalyst for positive social change by promoting the welfare and upholding the dignity of workers, setting high standards for their wages, treatment, health, and safety. China’s Draft Labor Contract Law was written precisely to address these standards. Yet foreign corporations tried very hard to block the legislation. The corporate counteroffensive, led by three major organizations—the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, the human rights, revolutionary legacy, and politics in china 213

US-China Business Council, and the European Union Chamber in China— was in fierce opposition to the proposed law.52 The law’s effects echo the earlier discussion of the conflict between subsistence versus growth. Workers’ rights to work, fair pay, safety, and indeed dignity must be protected, even though the law does not grant workers the right to organize unions. But the protection of workers’ rights weakens the ability of corporations to do business on the back of cheap, exploitable labor markets. It is a well-known fact that transnational corporations’ use of cheap labor in China has lowered wages, exploited workers, and degraded working conditions around the world. This “race to the bottom” pits workers and their communities against each other. Clearly, corporations would rather keep the status quo, trying everything possible to undermine what some members of the US Congress called, in a protest letter to President Bush, “the most basic human rights of Chinese workers.”53 I conclude with this example to challenge several ideological separa- tions: of individual rights claims from the state, of market from politics, of legal rights from power and class struggle, and of people from their government. Workers’ rights may be socioeconomic and personal, yet they are above all a matter to be addressed by state legislation based on popular opinion. Labor legislation must be made by the government on behalf of the workers, not just a ploy to consolidate that government’s own political power or survival. A democratic government must represent the will of workers, peasants, and the majority of the population. The rights struggle of the disadvantaged of Chinese society may be compatible with state power, but it is also compatible with the possibilities of their own empowerment and participation in political movements.

52 Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, “Labor Rights in China,” Foreign Policy in Focus, December 19, 2006, available at www.fpif.org/articles/labor_rights_in_china (accessed September 24, 2010). 53 Brecher, Costello, and Smith, “Labor Rights in China,” 4.

Chapter Nine

Democracy: Lyric Poem and Construction Blueprint

Han Shaogong Translated by Adrian Thieret

“Democracy” is a sensitive word that many people hesitate to use outright—or worse, they use it broadly and incorrectly. People like American President George Bush equate “democratic values” and “democratic allies” and, when discussing this term, say whatever strikes their fancy. This American usage is not surprising. The concept and system of democracy were originally produced by the West, from the pastoral age extending all the way through industrialization and the age of information. In the West democracy for a while came packaged with the ancient practice of slavery, and for a time merged with modern colonialism; its negative side effects are generally dispersed outside of the democratic world, among the powerless classes (such as slaves) and weak nations (such as colonized peoples). Within the democratic world many people do not feel these effects strongly. Even though they have experienced pain, crisis, and resistance, they find that the outer wall of the democratic world is rein- forced as the inner one is damaged, and benefits harvested from the outside can help mitigate internal damage. Generally speaking, people within the democratic world are impressed by honest and talented bureaucrats, freedom of expression, social stability, and economic development, and thus have ample reason to be proud of democracy. I once read a report that stated the ten nation-states with the cleanest governments, nine are democratic. This fact alone is enough to make democracy the ultimate belief, and even cause for war, for many people—indeed, since the swords of the crusaders went into storage, the bombs of the democratic militia have come down in volleys on the outside world. Late-developing countries seem slightly different. Their transplanted democracies lack both the backing of tradition and the use of slavery and colonies as external sources of income to create room to maneuver; when they come into conflict their only options are negotiation or a fight to the death (死磕 sike). If their legal system, moral customs, financial support, educational foundation, and other conditions are not in order, then 216 han shaogong attempts at a great leap forward to democracy will likely serve only to exacerbate conflicts. In these places we often see many small tyrants arising in place of the former tyrant, in addition to continuing massacres of clans, separatist warlord regimes, fierce struggles between political parties, dissolution of the state, and collapse of government management. At present, the vast majority of “democratic transition” states of the twentieth century remain locked in a continuing struggle between democratic elections and military rule, unable to find a compromise between stability and democracy, and their futures remain uncertain. Countries such as Russia and Singapore, who consider themselves democracies, do not meet the legal standards of the Western world. Their elections are repeatedly condemned for not being authentically democratic. The Hamas government of Palestine, elected through direct democracy, is considered ter- rorist (by the American government). China’s democracy from 1911 to 1913 incited a long period of chaos and division; the country regained stability and unity only through many years of bloody wars. The Red Democracy of 1966–68 also caused disaster, and ultimately only thorough military rule and repeated rectifications could fix the situation. Undoubtedly, many people who lived through these periods retain anxieties and secretly har- bor doubts regarding the price/performance ratio of democratization. Although the promoters of democracy are hard in speech and on the platform, they are often at a loss for what actions to actually take. The United States has supported many dictators, including Pinochet (Chile), Suharto (Indonesia), Marcos (the Philippines), Franco (Spain), and Somoza (Nica- ragua). I remember reading a recent International Herald Tribune report that, facing sporadic bombings in Iraq, think tank members of the New York University Center for Global Affairs immediately suggested to the government that it establish a dictator in Iraq. Most of the late-developing countries seem to have been bad students, those held back in the class of democracy. Is it because the autocratic powers in these places are too strong and stubborn? Is it because these places lack sufficient material resources and outstanding democratic leaders? Or is it because, as barbarians, they have never had the cultural heritage or the genetics for democracy? These issues have all been raised before and warrant discussion, but another reason may be the misunderstanding of democracy. This misunderstanding arises from ignorance and too little experience. Many people only gaze toward the dream they see in cinema, newspapers, and textbooks, and are quite isolated from concrete praxis. People thus misunderstanding democracy are the most likely to see democracy as a democracy: lyric poem and construction blueprint 217 lyric poem rather than a construction blueprint. They lack the practical attitude of the builder, who researches carefully, measures precisely, and constantly learns from experience. A builder also thinks creatively about how to mitigate the negatives and enhance the positives of a specific environment. Generally speaking, the lyric poetry approach tends to take place on boulevards and in public squares; it is explosive, enjoyable, and best suited for movie adaptation. But after the emotion cools, all may be as it was before. In contrast, a construction blueprint has little aesthetic value. It does not provide interesting material for the media and does not excite even third-rate actors or small-time reporters. Of course it implies courageous and persistent struggle, but more than that it represents slow and unflagging work. It involves numerous programs and materials, and no detail can be neglected—a slanted bridge beam or an inferior load of cement could cause all previous work to come to naught. Moreover, experienced builders understand that all things have different characteristics and each excels in its own way. They will not use an electric saw to tighten a screw or use concrete as paint, nor will they try to build skyscrapers on the beach. For the purposes of this metaphor, they understand what democracy is supposed to do and what it is able to do. They know its drawbacks and thus are able to use its advantages. In public affairs, existing democracies can have insufficiencies and make mistakes, particularly when dealing with foreign affairs. Governing internal affairs through democracy is fairly effective; people often see its advantages in anti-corruption measures, merit-based selection, and promotion of the people’s views. But when a corporation decides to raise the price of a commodity, democracy usually cannot help customers. If one region decides to build a dam, a democratic government often cannot help with shipping and irrigation in neighboring regions. The democratically elected congresses of each country too often support unjust foreign expansion and wars. The genocide of Native Americans was once imprinted with the stamp of democracy of the invader or mother country. The outbreaks of the two world wars of the twentieth century were tinged on waves of democratic encouragement. Indeed, once either the representatives or the citizens are invested and excited, the interests of that particular country are naturally maximized. Within that context, proposals of appeasement or expansionism are able to easily pass through a democratic process; as the war engines grow increasingly audible, principles of international justice are inevitably weakened. None of this is coincidental—rather than blaming war mongering on a few petty individuals manipulating public opinion, it would be more accurate to call 218 han shaogong it the normal expression of a system defect. Democracy means that the people are masters and that all concerned parties participate equally in the management of public affairs. If this definition is generally correct, then democracy, with industries, regions, nation-states, and others as its units, always betrays this principle in dealing with foreign affairs. That is, external groups and nations are clearly concerned parties, but they do not participate in policy-making and have no right to speak or present their opinions. How is this democracy? We may say that this kind of democracy has a huge intrinsic defect. Even in the best of circumstances, can a half- deaf and half-blind democracy remain internally good while becoming externally evil? A second failing in democracy appears when dealing with long-term issues (涉远事物 sheyuan shiwu). In discussing future affairs the group functions like an individual, seeking to maximize its own interests. This often manifests as a quest to maximize present interests, without necessarily considering or understanding long-term effects. Russia’s shock ther- apy plan and India’s closed economic policy both left wounds inflicted by the short-sighted immediate interests of democracy, a preference for immediate gratification whose regrettable price is revealed only later. The United States refused to sign the UN Kyoto Protocol in 1997 because it assumed that climate disaster was still far away, or at least far away from America. For a long time the United States encouraged a life of high energy consumption, assuming the attitude that the exhaustion of world-wide energy resources was tomorrow’s disaster. Relative to such distant events, the economic prosperity of the here and now seemed more important. For example, when there was strong support for social welfare tax increases, did the government, congress, and mainstream masses of this democratic state think about the United States ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Did they consider their children and grandchildren? The effects of the will of the American people have yet to come to fruition.1 Once again, a huge group of concerned parties (future Americans) is absent but will be left to shoulder the costs of others’ short-term actions. This is another example that democracy and people’s basic interests (民本 minben) are not well aligned. To argue precisely this point, organizers of ecological and environmental protection meetings love to find young children to recite poetry, sing songs, present declarations, and settle decisions. In a certain sense, this symbolic child government heralds the existence of the future

1 This article was written in 2007, before the 2008 financial crisis (translator’s note). democracy: lyric poem and construction blueprint 219 will of the people and warns against the functional defect that comes from democracy’s preference for the near and neglect of the far. A third flaw comes when dealing with issues and affairs that require expertise (涉专事物 she zhuan shiwu). The general populace often has blind spots in identifying or judging their own interests (利益判断盲区 liyi panduan mangqu). Even if elected representatives have high education levels, reading through and fully grasping volumes of government budgets is not an easy task. Truth is often held in the hands of the minority, and those with wisdom and foresight on highly specialized issues tend not to have the advantage at the ballot box. Without a powerful mechanism for popular education and knowledge propagation, democratic policy is inevitably left to be decided by those who have little knowledge but vote on the basis of impression and subjective feelings. The masses in the square deciding the merits and crimes of Socrates, the Soviet representatives deciding whether the czar and landlords should live or die, a parliament deciding whether to build a dam or engage in large-scale development of bio-fuel resources—there is no rationality to speak of in these decisions. They are merely an amplification of the reckless voices of the powerful. Not long ago, a “supergirl” (超女选秀 chaonü xuanxiu) pageant in China caused a sensation, with some foreign observers declaring it a “rehearsal of Chinese democracy” (中国民主的预演 zhongguo minzhu de yuyan) Amusingly, the extent to which the voters (who had to be able and willing to spend money to vote) were representative of the masses was never an issue to these observers. More importantly, practicing a “mass election” (海选 haixuan) in the art world quite possibly lowers a society’s aesthetic standards, confusing or even misdirecting the artistic path toward which civilization strives. Arts, like academics, education, finance, law, irrigation, or energy technologies, is quite specialized. Although it should still be democratic to an extent, the scope and methods of such democracy should be suitable and appropriate to specific circumstances. For important affairs within a specific field (excepting any entertainment or artistic activities organized by ordinary folks for themselves), structural centralization of power seems necessary. It is normal for expert committees, not the masses, to evaluate awards, job positions, and programs. It is necessary for various specialized problems to be dealt with through dialogue and compromise rather than putting it to a vote. Experts should sincerely value mass opinion and accept mechanisms of oversight by the masses, but if they abandon the guidance and education required, people will likely degenerate into the “vulgar masses” (in Lu Xun’s words: 庸众 220 han shaogong yongzhong), and the will of the people will not always be reliable. Other- wise, Confucius would not stand up to the “supergirl,” Dream of the Red Chamber would be overshadowed by “Transformers” (bianxing jingang 变形金刚), and pornography and superstition websites would storm across the world with their negative impact. Perhaps because he had experienced much hardship, Plato always advocated for “government by philosophers” (哲学家治国 zhexuejia zhiguo); when writing Republic he was sure that democracy would bring only mass corruption and eventually there would be “no one of any value left.” In The Analects, Confucius stresses “the wisdom of those at the top (of society) and the ignorance of those down below” (上智下愚 shangzhi xiayu), which is similar to Shang- yang’s saying that “do not give people worries when starting something, but share with them the pleasure when it is done” (民不可与虑始而可与乐成 min buke yu lv shi er key yu le cheng). These philosophers place their hopes in a wise ruler. Their elitist pride and their naïve suppositions may be questionable, but their attitude in acknowledging the weaknesses of democracy contains elements of sincerity. It is at least worth considering in relation to how democracy deals with specialized affairs. During the Cultural Revolution, people questioned letting worker and peasant propaganda teams take over the superstructure; in the age of capitalism, people question allowing the market (with workers, peasants, and soldiers as its consumers) to decide everything, especially deciding the value of humanity and science. According to modern standards, many of the ideas proposed by Plato and Confucius are severely “politically incorrect.” In a more recent example, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore advocated a system in which the elite get five or ten votes to one person. To verbalize these thoughts is politically stupid in this day and age—those who insult the masses only poison their chances at the ballot box. How could a public political figure act so ama- teur? The era of aristocratic rule ended long ago and the standards of safe thought and speech necessarily changed with its passing. Current modern leaders, whether they cry “long live the people” or “long live democracy,” are really just taking the side where there are more people, proving that they are public servants so as to ensure the legitimacy of their power. Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The interests of the masses are an unshakable starting point of universal values, a tether for civilian and political objectives, and the standard by which we condemn evil and violent governments. But nevertheless, we must determine if the people’s interests and the people’s opinions are the same thing. Are mass opinions unleashed by democracy reliable mass opinions? If not, how can democracy: lyric poem and construction blueprint 221 they be made reliable? These are a few fundamental philosophical questions that the builders of democracy cannot sidestep. Former US vice president Al Gore qualifies as an old hand in politics. In The Assault on Reason, Gore points out that the “republic of letters” is being invaded and occupied by the “empire of television,” that electronic media has succeeded in brainwashing the masses, and that the “consent of the governed” has become a commodity that can be bought by the highest bidder.2 When his election team suggested putting out a set of television political ads, they calculated that spending that sum of money would increase support for him by a certain number of percentage points. At first he simply did not believe this calculation, but astonishingly, his assistants were proved correct—with every check they sent out, support for him increased by precisely the predicted amount. People’s reason (民众的理性 minzhong de lixing) appeared to have been bought piece by piece, exactly on schedule. Television has replaced letters written on bam- boo strips and fiber optic cables have replaced the relay stations of horse messengers. As a result, many people’s brains have become mere contain- ers for electronic lights and voices. The original and independent nature of people’s will has been weakened, while its dependence and ability to be manipulated has increased. Often politics is nothing more than media politics and the “people’s will” can be forced on the populace. Indeed, as Gore notes, the media (controlled by power and money) is becoming a huge mechanism for creating public opinions that can change political currents in a matter of weeks. Furthermore, everything requires money: organizing rallies to generate the impression of force, hiring publicists, knocking on every family’s door for votes, hiring and retaining professionals to design slogans or campaign discourse, buying clothing, and more. Each American presidential candidate must be an expert at grabbing money by obtaining support from financial groups, the wealthy and powerful elites, and portions of the middle class. If they cannot raise hundreds of millions of dollars they cannot even enter the threshold of the prima- ries. One corrupt Chinese politician stole millions while living a seemingly destitute life. When arrested, he confessed that his goal was to one day invest the amount in an election (see reports on Qi Huogui 戚火贵 in Hainan Province).3 One can imagine that there must be more than one

2 Al Gore, The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. 3 For a report on Qi Huogui see: 原东方市委书记戚火贵走上刑场的最后时刻 http://news.sohu.com/60/91/news146289160.shtml. 222 han shaogong or two such farsighted politicians in China who see the hard logic that, as long as everyone loves money, democracy can be for sale. In a society where resources are unevenly distributed and where the dictators (专制者 zhuanzhizhe) have nearly all become capitalists, the democratic principle of “one person one vote” had changed into “X dollars one vote.” After religion was separated from the state, money has stepped in to take its place. Voter apathy and the throwing away of votes is the natural result of such developments. Can people not adopt more active resistance? It seems that governments could legislate restrictions on the control of various political, capital, and religious forces over the media. By restricting the share structure and income structure of mainstream media, the people could guarantee their freedom from money and maximize their public and fair nature. If that does not suffice, we could even replace the current election system with the system praised by Aristotle in which decision-makers are chosen by lottery (some districts at the local level in China already use this method to produce representatives who better represent the people’s will). This could perhaps mitigate the drawbacks of low-quality democracy. Regrettably, modern society instead concentrates all its efforts on pro- gressing with the times and improving the management of finance and trade. MBAs fill the streets and legal documents overload trucks, but those wanting to change the democratic system are often bound hand and foot, completely paralyzed from creating innovation within the political system. Referring to an election whose outcome satisfies one’s own desire (结果顺心的民主 jieguo shunxin de minzhu) as “true democracy” while calling one with an unwanted result “fake democracy” has become the laziest and most convenient way to feel morally superior. Those in power are unwilling to open debates on politics and political institutions because that would expose the reality of the existing order and shake their legitimacy of power and control. They much prefer to continue familiar covert games under the soothing notion that the masses are infallible. The masses are not God—they have no innate benevolence, unself- ishness, omniscience, or omnipotence. People’s rational will must be cultivated and protected. The will of the people requires comprehensive systematic guarantees against being misled, concealed, oppressed, or mis- used. Only then can democracy be free of distortion and show its advantage over autocracy: less corruption, a safer society, a stronger economy, and human rights that are protected rather than violently and suddenly tram- pled upon. Especially in regards to foreign, distant, and specialized affairs as described above, the original system of democracy must be patched or democracy: lyric poem and construction blueprint 223 amended. It is not enough for a corporation to have democracy among its board of directors and at shareholders’ meetings. A more adequate corporate democracy would also include: worker (员工 yuangong) democracy through a committee and workers’ representative congress; customer (顾客 guke) democracy through price hearings and an oversight system; and local community (社区 shequ minzhu) democracy, represented by environmental hearings and an oversight system. This abundantly democratic framework must be framed by a reasonable distribution of power and responsibility among the concerned parties, in order to prevent corporations from becoming factories of blood and tears (血汗工厂 xuehan gongchang), tyranny companies (霸王企业 bawang qiye), or poisonous companies (毒魔企业 dumo qiye), all in the name of democracy. Busi- ness law is too flimsy in this respect. A nation-state that merely practices internal democracy is still in danger. The globalization of economics, trade, technology, information, and ecological safety means that a more complete democracy must take the “other” into consideration. It must include systematic strategies to live peacefully with neighbors and benefit others. As in the European Union experiment, powers such as foreign diplomacy, national defense, finance, and monetary policies should all be ceded to a supra-national democratic organization. This organization will oversee and regulate the interests of all parties, eliminating blind spots due to national interests and reducing the potential for conflicts between countries. Although a higher-level democratic framework between the EU and other such unions would face various headaches of religious, cultural, and economic differences, as long as all concerned parties had sufficient sincerity and reason it is not unimaginable. If there is hope for humanity, new experiences in democracy will continue to arise. Everyone, whether at the local level or on a global scale, can look forward to innovative new kinds of democracy characterized by multiple systems, multiple levels of agency, and a combination of centralization and division; this is a kind of composite democracy with more space for participation and increased benefits. China has a deep tradition of centralized autocracy, and over the last one hundred years it has tried to reform or revolutionize its system, moving both forward and back: it has suffered the disaster of ossified autocracy and endured the hardships of infantile democracy. During the latter, China felt most of the drawbacks of democracy and few of its advantages, which ultimately shook people’s trust in democracy and created public pressure for the reinstatement of centralized autocracy. Chinese democracy in 1911–13 and 1966–68 made people yearn for the strength of military leadership. Seen 224 han shaogong from this perspective, the inflexibility of autocracy and the infantilism of democracy are two sides of the same coin. Both have prevented political reform, thus letting various bandits and the paternalist system remain firmly entrenched. Churchill famously said in his speech in the House of Commons on November 11, 1947, that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Although centralized power and even autocracy can bring social stability and support economic development, in the conditions of modern society they are not as prosperous as democracies. Like a shallow-rooted crop, their development cannot last. The complexity of management required in modern society increases day by day, necessitating more flexible and thorough information dissemination and regulatory systems. If a bureaucratic system controlling the national wealth and political resources is not fully supervised and restricted by the masses, it will certainly give rise to self-fattening interest groups, which are like time bombs. These groups are primed to enact economic terrorisms such as mining disaster terrorism (矿难恐怖主义 kuangnan kongbu zhuyi), medicine price terrorism (药价恐怖主义 yaojia kongbu zhuyi), and pollution terrorism (污染恐怖主义 wuran kongbu zhuyi) that would leave people at a loss and overload the system’s internal defenses. In the age of the internet, people’s knowledge and senses reach everywhere. If their corresponding requirements of participation, sharing, and decision-making power are not quickly introduced into a constructive network, dissatisfaction will accumulate like pressure in a boiler, and perhaps give rise to a destructive political storm. History has proven once and again that all rulers constantly face dangers. Romanian president Ceaus- escu, who at the time of his death was doing a decent job of developing the economy and reforming welfare, had just been honored by the Queen of England, and had been lauded as a model by international society, was gunned down by his own countrymen. Churchill’s words must be amended: democracy is not merely the best among bad systems, it can also be made better, updated, and upgraded. We must improve democracy through a dynamic process and realize more diverse forms of democracy in this complex world. As newcomers to democracy, late-developing countries lack the backing of tradition but also lack the burden of tradition. They are fully able to reference and learn from the experience of the universal suffrage, representative, multi-party, and tripartite division of power systems of the West. They can also adopt democracy: lyric poem and construction blueprint 225 local institutional resources, for example in China the shanrang (禅让), jianguan (谏官), jietie (揭帖), and fengbo (封驳) systems from ancient times; the mass line, multi-party deliberation, democratic life meeting, and workers’ representatives congress from the Revolutionary Era; and the proposal councils, public opinion surveys, internet discussion boards, NGO participation, and consumer protections of the reform period. All of these contain elements of democracy to a certain degree, and all have assisted in improving government. Parts of all can be refined for integration and adoption, thereby allowing people to truly open their eyes and minds, cultivate a native system of democracy, and resolve the difficult problem of “the local water and soil not suitable for democracy” (水土不服的难题 shuitu bufu de nanti). At the same time, this will enrich and expand the meaning of democracy, laying forth an innovative path to a democracy with Chinese characteristics that makes a unique contribution to the construction of human civilization and politics. A great country with a revitalized civilization should, on its way to wealth and power, bear this burden; it must have the wisdom for institutional innovation. A few years ago, I attended a talk by a Swiss scholar and EU official. He said that democracy is not merely a political system, it is a way of interacting and a lifestyle. He led me into an old building to observe a training workshop for female handicraft workers, the workers’ reading salon, and an exhibit of local youths’ paintings on environmental protection. All of it, as he explained, is important democracy. A lonely individual “atomic” state is the ideal condition for autocracy. People must frequently interact, participate, and share in a community for democratic awareness and ability to be strengthened. Only then can people’s will form, mature, and be expressed. It can also help minimize /the impact of certain misleading propaganda. In his view, the hopes for an EU democracy do not lie in the political elite on television, but rather in the increasingly bright and confident expressions on the faces of the ordinary people. It is for this that he and those like him struggle for more funding, volunteers, and transnational discussions. Sadly, the few other Chinese with me could not understand his words, had absolutely no interest in handicraft work, and merely looked back and forth while yawning, fidgeting, and wishing to return to the hotel. The interpreter even hesitated when translating “democracy,” as if the old man had rambled off topic, as if the interpreter had wondered what these trivial affairs could have to do with the great ideal of democracy. Perhaps in their eyes only intense demonstrations express the power of democracy. 226 han shaogong

Once I too held slogans and marched through the streets and squares. But I know that democracy is much more than that, much deeper and more complex. In the silence that followed, the man grew a bit depressed, unsure of what he should say. That awkward moment became the impetus for this article. PART THREE

Chapter Ten

Rereading “Commemorating the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the FALL OF THE MING”

Han Yuhai Translated by Adrian Thieret

Farmers produce grain and exchange it for gold; this was a bad policy from the Tang and Song. Merchants take advantage of money and exchange it for grain; this is the harmful middleman method (开中法). Not having and having are turned upside-down, and having is made not-having. Trade moves south and farms move north, people’s hearts roil and reason is reversed.1 —Wang Fuzhi 1944 was the 300th anniversary of the fall of the Ming dynasty. That year, historians Guo Moruo, Liu Yazi, and Jian Bozan each happened to write an article summarizing the historical lessons learned from the fall of the Ming. Although each one took a different perspective, they all unani- mously criticized the simplistic conclusion that was popular at the time, i.e., that the Ming fell due to “roving bandits” (流寇 liukou; referring to Li Zicheng) and “foreign bandits” (外寇 waikou; referring to the Manchus). However, because Qian Mu’s 1940 Outline of National History (国史大纲 guoshi dagang) and especially Chiang Kai-shek’s 1943 China’s Destiny (中国之命运) both took this view, the Kuomintang (KMT) immediately released a severe official reaction against the research of Guo Moruo and the others. KMT theorists such as Tao Xisheng and Ye Qing authored pieces denouncing the researchers. Consequently, the debate regarding how the Ming dynasty fell evolved into one about why the Chinese state weakened and how to prevent future failure of the state, along with a discussion on how to build a new China. This mid-1940s debate opened the curtain for the decisive battle over “the destiny of the two Chinas” that was to subsequently unfold.

1 Wang Fuzhi 王夫之, Chuanshan siwen lu 船山思问录 (Record of Chuanshan’s Thoughts and Inquiries) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 83–84. 230 han yuhai

Guo Moruo’s “Commemorating the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Fall of the Ming” (甲申三百年祭 jiashen sanbainian ji) is a classic document produced during this debate. It points out at least four crucial historical issues. First, the Ming dynasty’s inability to deal with the roving bandits and block the foreign bandits was a result of having lost state power. Second, the state power in question refers not only to the ability of the state to collect taxes, but more importantly the ability of the state to use collected taxes for the people’s livelihood, especially to help the people in times of disaster. The popular saying that “the officials are collecting taxes and levies; the bandits are providing disaster relief and grain” was one clear indication that the Ming state had lost the ability to govern and thus its legitimacy. Third, the combination and contrast of economic prosperity and the decline of state power is the most important phenomenon of the Ming history. Fourth, if the collapse of the Ming was inevitable, then the difficult birth of a new social force to propel historical progress merits greater consideration. In other words, why did Li Zicheng fall alongside the Ming, and why was the subsequent Qing dynasty also unable to avoid its fated fall? Since the 1940s, the question of how to escape the vicious historical cycle symbolized by the fall of the Ming has become an extremely important topic in Chinese intellectual culture. Of course, like all intellectual movements, the historical debate of 1944 arose out of a particular period and naturally had some biases. One important point is that neither side of the debate touched much upon the lifting of the “sea prohibition” and “silver prohibition” in the first year of the Longqing Emperor (1567), an important event with lasting effects on the Ming dynasty and Chinese society. Moreover, the debaters rarely noted that reliance on imported silver was an extremely prominent problem for the Ming and Qing both. However, if we consider that the 1560s and 70s were precisely the era in which bankers dealing in securities appeared in the Mediterranean, and the time of the first peak of silver exportation from the Americas, then investigation of this issue appears especially important. Starting in the mid-sixteenth century, silver was the most important commodity of international trade. The so-called modern world was built up around silver. To a large extent this was because the Ming dynasty established silver as its state currency in 1567. From that time the countries of Western Europe gradually established a leading place in international relations through the control of American silver (primarily produced in today’s Mexico and Bolivia, particularly Potosí). commemorating the 300th anniversary of the fall of the ming 231

However, once silver was no longer merely a medium of exchange but a commodity that fluctuated according to market supply and demand, it lost its character as currency and became a tool for accumulating and plundering the wealth of others. As Karl Polanyi explained, once currency is bought and sold on the market as a commodity, the instability of supply allows traders to benefit but also makes periodic economic crises inevitable.2 Through further investigation, we will be able to understand why the American silver shortage of the 1630s was an important factor in the demise of the Ming dynasty, and why, 200 years later, the shift in the world currency system from the silver to the gold standard ultimately led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty. After the 1570s, silver imports and an outward-oriented economy inarguably advanced the specialization, commercialization, and transnational and transregional development of the Ming dynasty economy, especially in the Jiangnan region (for example the Songjiang area). With the rising domestic and foreign demand for cotton cloth, more and more people changed occupation to work full-time in the knitting and cloth trade. Sociologist Huang Zongzhi (Philip Huang) uses this example to refute the notion that China never had a market economy, observing that the majority of Chinese people at the time wore cotton clothing—this indicates the extent to which the marketization of cotton and cotton cloth production at the time led to a drop in the price of cotton cloth. Actually, just as the law of “comparative advantage” first put forth by David Ricardo describes, expansion of the Ming market caused the cheap, quality goods of China to, through export, occupy more and more of the world market. But it simultaneously led to three major problems, the first being that market and resource competition inevitably caused competition between countries, especially between the two great empires of China and Spain over the Philippines. Once Chinese merchants established their main trading post at Manila, and particularly after large sailboats brought the Chinese market to Mexico, disputes between Chi- nese and Spanish merchants increased. In fact, when Spaniards occupied Luzon in the Philippines in the late sixteenth century there were already tens of thousands of Chinese people from the Fujian and Zhejiang regions living there. In 1602 (the thirtieth year of the Wanli period), Fujian

2 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). 232 han yuhai merchant Yan Yinglong and others reported to the imperial throne that the mountain Heyt Coavite in Luzon had gold and silver mines that produced 100,000 liang of gold and 300,000 liang of silver every year. At the time the Ming court was opening domestic gold and silver mines everywhere; when it heard this news, it ordered the Fujian region to immediately set upon the task and send people to survey Luzon. China’s exploration of the minerals made Spain jealous, and the overseas Chinese were swept up in the dispute that arose between the two sides. The following year the conflict intensified, resulting in the death of 20,000 overseas Chinese and the retreat of Chinese merchants from Manila to Fujian, Macau, and Guang- zhou.3 At the same time, Philip II of Spain decreed that a high tax be lev- ied on Chinese products, heeding the “Chinese economic threat” theory of the time. But the Ming court, having just concluded a naval war with Japan, was unwilling to fight again, especially considering that it needed to guarantee silver imports and thus did not dare to mobilize military force against the country that provided most of its silver. Consequently it merely condemned Spain in word and let the affair pass. The second problem, though it led to some positive changes, was that expansion of foreign trade caused increasing specialization and marketization of domestic production. The excessive marketization of farm products had always carried great risk; in an era when modes of transportation were relatively backward, regionalization and marketization of grain production was more likely to cause and intensify grain crises. Dur- ing the Ming and Qing, China’s southern regions formed its main base of grain production. If those regions did not plant grain, and moreover expected other regions to send them grain to eat, then the risks involved were enormous. In the second half of the Ming reign, the dynasty constantly faced enormous grain crises. The final crisis reached its peak in the 1640s. A natural disaster and the resulting grain shortage meant that the rich regions that had marketized most thoroughly were unable to stop the crisis, and since these region did not produce grain, food grain had to be bought across regions. During this period grain prices rose sharply, and the rich Jiangnan region was hit most severely. According to materials provided by Huang Renyu, in the 1640s the per-jin price of grain in the Suzhou region

3 H.B. Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 47. commemorating the 300th anniversary of the fall of the ming 233 rose to 100 copper cash. While many people were dying of starvation, no one questioned the mansions being sold for low prices.4 This sufficiently demonstrates that though the currency economy and foreign trade promoted the development of marketization and specialized division of labor, when natural disasters hit, the drawbacks of marketization and the currency economy—especially the Single Whip Reform (一条鞭法 yitiao bian fa)—manifested clearly. Because the massive “developed region” expanded its cotton and mulberry planting to meet the demands of the domestic and international market, regions that had once been self-sufficient in grain production now suddenly discovered that their supply depended on trans-regional trade. In 1640, which was even a year of a plentiful harvest, the people of Nanzhikang (the Anhui and southern Jiangsu regions, including the ancestral home of the emperor) and Zhe- jiang had to sell raw silk, raw cotton, cotton thread, and cotton cloth in order to purchase grain. After the Single Whip Reform, taxes, rent, and loans had to be paid in silver, so when crop failures caused fluctuations in the relative prices of silver and grain, and the state was unable to assist, then the enormous disaster of grain being worth more than money was unavoidable. The Ming Single Whip Reform was actually a continuation of a government policy, in place since the implementation of the middleman method, to use currency to control and regulate all resources. In the mid-Ming silver was set as the currency. However, silver was already an imported commodity obtained by exporting resources. As a result, the mining and production of silver naturally fluctuated according to the influence of supply and demand. In the first period of silver importation, a shortage of silver raised prices to many times more than its ordinary value. Not only could great profit be gained from the import and transfer of silver, but with silver expensive and material goods cheap, merchants possessing silver could also become very powerful. However, with the mining, importation, and transfer of large quantities of silver, the shortage gradually disappeared and the price of silver gradually approached its ordinary value. Then there was less and less profit to be had in mining, importing, and transferring silver; furthermore, silver was so plentiful that the price of goods was artificially inflated. At this time even merchants who possessed

4 Frederick Mote and Denis Twitchett, The Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 413. 234 han yuhai silver felt as if they were losing. Consequently, impelled by the market price, silver mining and supply gradually fell, and the subsequent reduction of silver supply again caused a silver shortage, hampering market trans actions. This succession of currency inflation and deflation was the problem that actually plagued the mid– and late-Ming dynasty. From an international perspective, silver mining became unprofitable, and because the quantity of mined silver fell, silver exports also fell greatly, thereby causing a silver shortage. Within the domestic economy, silver increased the price of goods, rapidly inflating prices, and consequently an era beset by the crisis of a silver shortage combined with expensive goods arrived. In the late Ming, Wang Fuzhi and others were already painfully aware of this problem. Wang Fuzhi pointed out the harmful consequence of grain production becoming a currency and being marketized, with the result that “trade moves south and farms move north, people’s hearts roil and reason is reversed.” Ultimately, Wang Fuzhi argued, “not having and having are turned upside-down, and having made not-having.” He thought it would inevitably cause a grain crisis, resulting in a shortage of both money and grain, which is bad for peasants and merchants alike. This was the drawback of the middleman method: The middleman method of salt governance (盐政 yan zheng) has a very beautiful name. Considering it as a whole, implementing it will in the beginning bring benefits but it must not be implemented far. It is not a great method that knows accounting and understanding finance, just like merchants cannot be farmers and farmers cannot be merchants. To make farmers merchants only weakens farmers and impoverishes them as merchants. To make merchants farmers only puts merchants into difficulty and makes them plead that they cannot be farmers. The middleman method, will it cause merchants to themselves plough? Will it not force them to hire others to plough? Because merchants cannot themselves plough, they must hire others to plough. All those who can plough are people who love the land and do not lightly move, so if merchants hand profit in front of them and try to buy them, then the greedy will abandon their family fields to seek long- term profits and the fecund fields of the hinterland will be left to weeds. If it is not thus, then the merchants loaf around in the farms and their produce is weeds to their input. If there are in the world farmers with free time who can be hired, then why not have the government hire them? Must it be del- egated to the merchants? Farmers produce grain and exchange it for gold; this was a bad policy from the Tang and Song. Merchants take advantage of money and exchange it for grain; this is the harmful middleman method. Not having and having are turned upside-down, and having is made not- having. Trade moves south and farms move north, people’s hearts roil and reason is reversed. Thus implementing it for not even one hundred years the Ye and Qi areas will be disturbed by it, and merchants will prefer to commemorating the 300th anniversary of the fall of the ming 235

transport many times the amount of gold to beg off from the hardship of ploughing far-away fields. Ploughing is like eating; it is not something to be persuaded by that which one engages in willingly. Strengthening people through ploughing is almost like strengthening people through eating, how many people vomit without first choking? This is why the middleman method cannot last long.5 During the Hongzhi period, merchants under the middleman method had already changed from grain transportation to silver collection.6 Thus the system that had originally relied on merchants to transport grain dissolved. In this sense, the grain crisis of the 1640s, which ultimately caused the demise of the Ming dynasty, was brought about by both natural disaster and by merchants’ preference to exchange silver for salt tickets because there was no profit to be made transporting grain. This was the negative consequence of handing grain transportation over to the merchants. It also demonstrates an important theory put forth by Amartya Sen (the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics): food crises are created by the excessive marketization of grain. According to Sen, many people starve not merely because of crop failures, but because the market price of grain is too high. Because people cannot afford to buy grain they go hungry, and hence arose the “malady of the times” of inhabitants of rich regions selling mansions to buy rice to eat. This also illustrates that the final collapse of the Ming was not due to incomplete economic marketization reforms, or excessive isolation and self-sufficiency. To the contrary, the debilitating grain crisis in the latter part of the Ming Dynasty was in fact caused by excessive marketization: the complete hand-over of grain production to the market and the loss of the state power in managing the market. Zhang Juzheng’s Single Whip Reform originally promoted this marketization of grain. On the surface it increased state tax revenue, but in practice it worsened the agricultural crisis. If peasants could have, instead of planting grain, obtained more money by planting mulberries or knitting fabric, and used this money to pay their taxes, then why would

5 Wang Fuzhi, Chuanshan siwen lu, 83–84. 6 In the Hongzhi period, because of the influx of silver, the middleman method of transport of grain to the border regions was gradually replaced by silver collection for the Ministry of Revenue, and later by direct transfer of silver to the border regions: the “silver middleman” method. In Hongzhi Year 5 (1492), the Minister of Revenue Ye Qi changed the law from being grain-based to silver-based—this was the change from the middleman method to the zhese system [折色制]. Once silver was plentiful, the base cost of transport ing grain grew higher and higher. 236 han yuhai they still choose to harvest grain in the fields? This is indeed a profound question exposed by the Ming reforms. The third problem is actually related to both of the above problems; the disaster in the late Ming that put the final nail in its coffin was directly caused by the first rapid decline in silver production in the New World. The magnified impact resulted from a “butterfly effect” produced by fluctuations in the world currency market. The great contraction in American silver supply in the 1630s caused a silver shortage, hence leading to severe currency deflation inside China. The Ming relied on imports for its silver, and its currency was completely dependent on the world currency market. The high deflation rates, the border crisis that occurred during the same period, foreign trade disputes, agricultural crop failures, and the negative effects of reform that were not corrected in time—these problems combined to brew the great economic crisis that felled the Ming Empire. The worldwide “General Crisis” that occurred in the 1630s and ’40s set off the collapse of the Ming dynasty. This worldwide economic crisis was closely related to the trade system that the Ming established around silver. To truly understand the severity of the crisis, it is important to trace the roots of China’s silver dependence. Before the early seventeenth-century, world silver constantly flowed into China, which on the one hand promoted great changes in Chinese society, forcing state policy to emphasize merchants rather than farmers and to turn from the domestic market to the international one. On the other hand, it also accelerated social turbulence in the period of transition. Price determines everything—with the development of the market, the price of silver as a foreign trade commodity clearly could not remain static. The gradual slowing of China’s silver importation inevitably caused the price of silver itself to gradually fall toward its production cost. Following the law of diminishing marginal utility, an economic crisis, specifically a “currency crisis,” was bound to happen eventually. The moment finally came in 1630; as Fernand Braudel puts it, “by the middle of the seventeenth century the great age of Ameri- can silver had come to an end.”7 Currency deflation originated from the surplus production of currency in the Americas. Silver production peaked around 1570, and then fell to a valley due to the production surplus in 1630. Adam Smith summarizes the crisis in this way: “Between 1630 and 1640, or about 1636, the effect

7 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 537. commemorating the 300th anniversary of the fall of the ming 237 of the discovery of the mines of America in reducing the value of silver, appears to have been completed, and the value of that metal seems never to have sunk lower in proportion to that of corn that it was about that time.”8 When the crisis arrived, the linked action of the unified world market detonated an intense “price revolution” in Europe. In Spain (and to varying degrees in England, France, and Italy), currency inflation accelerated. In China, because of the great decline in the price of silver, during the Chongzhen period of the late Ming the price ratio of gold to silver equalized with that of Europe, reaching 1:13.9 A currency crisis arose in society, with the result that not only did the state lack silver, grain too was relatively scarce, and the market was depressed. The per-unit fall in the price of silver meant that one had to pay more silver for the same amount of wheat and labor, and this created among the bureaucracy and the people alike an urgent need for more currency. But extraction of silver from the mines of America and Japan was decreasing, and both in China and around the world, silver production and flow was lessening. Consequently, affected by the world economic crisis in which China was intertwined, turbulence in the Ming society increased and various crises erupted collectively. The Ming Empire was “mired in troubles both domestic and foreign” (内外交困 neiwai jiaokun) and by the time it sought again to act, already things were beyond its power. In fact, others living in the Ming dynasty (such as Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu) besides Wang Fuzhi deeply realized the severe social problems set off by the making of silver into currency.10 Their acute descriptions connect the changes in late Ming society with world changes. They note that the total explosion of social crises in Chinese society in the late Ming had inevitable connections to the world currency crisis, and that the demise of the Ming dynasty is intimately connected with the tying of currency to silver imports—regrettably, their arguments never received full attention. As predicted, as the largest importer of silver, China inevitably

8 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations vol. 1 (Forgotten Books, 2008), 150. 9 Gu Yanwu 顾炎武, Ri zhi lu ji shi 日知录集释 (Qingdaoguang sinian kanben 清道光四年刊本). 10 Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, and Wang Fuzhi all understood the risks and issues cre ated by the making of silver into currency. In their writings, each even proposed how to abandon silver. See Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲, “Cai ji 财计,” in Ming yi dai fang lu 明夷待访录 vol. 2 (Zhonghua shuju, 1981); Gu Yanwu, “Yi qian wei fu 以钱为赋” and “Yin 银,” in Ri zhi lu 日知录 vol. 11, and “Qian liang lun 钱粮论” pt. 1 in Ting lin wen ji 亭林文集 vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985); Wang Fuzhi, “Tang taizong 唐太宗,” in Du tong jian lun 读通鉴论 vol. 20 (Beijing: Zhongguo shuju, 1975). 238 han yuhai suffered the most severe impact from the global currency crisis. The Ming court’s reliance on the foreign market for its domestic silver was able to temporarily lesson the domestic “silver drought,” but the government overlooked the latent crisis caused by the silver dependency of national finance. Once the currency crisis exploded, it was functionally impossible to abandon silver, extricate the country from silver imports, and rebuild the credit system of the country. The situation at the time was already beyond the power of any ruler to save. Of course, on the surface, the Ming fell due to the Li Zicheng uprising to the west and border problems to the north. This point has naturally been maintained by the “historians of republican China” and even today’s conventional textbooks. However, the uprising and border crisis, the “foreign bandits” and “roving bandits”—nearly every dynasty had these problems. This raises a simple question: why is it that the Ming, which flourished under its three most “useless” emperors (Jiajing, Longqing, and Wanli), collapsed during the reign of the contentious, politically savvy, and active emperor Chongzhen? Clearly this superficial explanation is unconvincing. We argue that the basic reason for the fall of the Ming, as with other empires, is the collapse of its economy. Furthermore, that economic collapse is due on the one hand to the Ming reliance on international currency, which led to its finances ultimately being restricted by international silver production, and on the other hand to reliance on foreign trade. The excessively outward-oriented economy caused domestic agricultural production to specialize and regionalize, consequently leading to the over-marketization of grain production, with the result that the most marketized regions were unable to respond to crop failure and grain shortage, because they were not self-sufficient in grain supply. This reveals that what felled the Ming was the same factors that had promoted the economic prosperity of the “Reform and Opening” era of Jiajing, Longqing, and Wanli. More precisely, the Ming dynasty fell because those factors were over-implemented. In today’s phrasing, it was because the Ming state relied excessively on the world market and currency imports, leaving everything in the hands of the market and neglecting to construct the state organ and protect society. The Ming especially neglected the safety of its finances and grain production, a classic example of missing the forest for the trees. The crux of the Ming problem was not its closure and conservatism, lack of reform and opening, or lack of market economy, but the “continued decline of the state capability” (国家能力的持续下降 guojia nengli de chixu xiajiang). commemorating the 300th anniversary of the fall of the ming 239

In this sense, Pomeranz views the Ming demise as a classic case of the state being “absent” in finance and economics and leaving those to the market. He sees this as an important vantage point for viewing the next few hundred years of Chinese politics. He notes: The government’s major failures appear to have been in its traditional tasks—maintaining public order and providing water control, famine relief, military defense . . . these failures may have had limited impact on long-term growth rates. Nonetheless, they had great impact on popular welfare and people’s lives. Most likely, they also compromised the government’s legitimacy in the eyes of “ordinary” people far more than its limited successes in modern tasks did. . . . [C]ertainly very few [peasants] wanted more effective conscription . . . in contrast, preventing “natural” disaster was probably much closer to most peasants’ ideas of what government was supposed to do.11 The policy of leaving things to the market created the grain crisis, and the state was unable to prevent the subsequent disaster, thus losing its legitimacy. Pomeranz notes the persistent decline over nearly 500 years of Chi- nese state power, and reminds us to explore the true reasons for this kind of decline—it is undoubtedly an extremely important perspective. The causes for the 500–year decline can be sought in several places: one, Chinese feudal forces intensified—as the saying goes, high-level bureaucrats are not feudal, but low-level clerks are feudal (官无封建 guan wu fengjian, 吏有封建 li you fengjian). Two, Confucianism evolved into neo- Confucianism, and the elite, ignorant of economic and financial policy, were unable to undertake the change from a clan-based state to a modern finance-based state, especially to a nation-state of the people. Three, the rich colluded with newly prosperous merchants of foreign trade; their acquisition of land was unstoppable and their market monopoly repeatedly increased, leading to displacement of producers and normal small- time farmers, and accordingly great decreases in production power. Four, small farmers lost their land, the militia system had no foundation, the state lost labor force, and tax revenue was unreliable in the long term, thus leaving the military unsupported, weak, and unable to withstand attack. Five, as discussed above, finance was entrusted to foreign countries. These five evils hardly changed in the 400 years of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and ultimately caused China to fall at the hands of 7,000

11 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), 21–2. 240 han yuhai invading pirates in the 1840 Opium Wars. Clearly, China’s state power at that time had already weakened to the extreme. The backbone of Li Zicheng’s peasant uprising comprised migrants and small-time farmers who had lost their land. Of course they appealed for egalitarianism, and this appeal meshed in places with the “freedom of conscience” theory upheld by Li Yan and other neo-Confucians. However, the equality sought by the peasant uprising in the end flowed from roving bandit–style consumer communalism, no more than “eating meat and liquor in heaps, distributing gold and silver in bulk.” They did not have the will to reconstruct the state down to its fundamental organization, much less the intellect and knowledge to rescue China from 500 years of weak state power. Thus after entering the capital, they busied themselves extorting gold and silver. Most tragically, though the Ming fell, China did not escape from the “high-level equilibrium trap” of the market or the political cycle of governance and chaos. For the Qing dynasty, at least, it was a matter of those not learning from history being condemned to repeat it. Chapter Eleven

The Crisis of Socialism and Efforts to Overcome It

Cai Xiang Translated by Adrian Thieret

I prefer to consider “crisis” as a productive concept. In a certain sense, any social structure is at the same time a crisis-production mechanism. When a crisis is produced, the problem of how, if at all, society can overcome it is extremely important and must be confronted by all members of society. In this way, dealing with crises often provides the possibility for a revolution. Chinese socialism has produced its own crisis—and the means to overcome the crisis. In this sense, I find that socialism is not the end of revolution, to the contrary, it births a new revolution (of course, the internal structural elements of this new “revolution” are incredibly complicated). However, today “the crisis of socialism” perhaps carries another meaning. The last thirty years, or the so-called post-thirty years (后三十年 hou sanshinian) have produced a new interpretation of the preceding thirty years of socialism. This interpretation consists of two aspects: on the one hand, the concept of socialism has been demonized and vilified; but on the other hand, especially in the last decade with the start of the great debate between the New Left and Liberals, socialism has in a certain sense been idealized and utopianized. And so, if we completely utopianize the thirty years of socialism before the 1980s, how do we explain the 1980s? What is the significance of socialism in the 1980s? Additionally, a more serious problem is that if we idealize that period of history, then how do we explain the failure of the first thirty years of socialism? This idealiza- tion might obscure our understanding of the issue. Therefore, debating the crisis of socialism again in conjunction with these circumstances may help us delve further into the history of Chinese socialism.

I. What is the Crisis of Socialism?

I refer to contemporary China in connection with the concept of revolution—“Revolutionary China”—but this is only a general or meta- phorical way of speaking. If we understand revolution as a large-scale 242 cai xiang mass movement or political practice, especially one characterized by seizing political power through military force, then “revolution” took a vacation after 1949. This is not to say, of course, that the concept of revolution ceased to exist, rather, it continues to function but merely manifests in a different form. Since the 1990s, some scholars have used terms such as “post-revolutionary” or “post-socialist” to indicate that we have entered another historical context. However, I prefer to simply call the period from 1949 to the late 1970s the “After Revolution” (革命之后 geming zhihou) era.1 This After Revolution era has two main characteristics. One is an emphasis on political and economic construction, which differentiates it from previous large-scale revolutionary movements aimed at resistance and overthrow. Thus in discussions of this era, we often evoke Yan’an, because the Yan’an period included some concepts and institutional planning for this post-1949 construction. The other is that the After Revolution emphasized governance. This is to say that it clearly highlighted the importance of the state. The original revolution challenged and overthrew the existing form of the state, but post-1949 society was undergoing (re)construction and required governing; as a result, the concept of “governance” (治理 zhili) became the second main characteristic of the era. Without a state, there can be no governance. These issues are all related to Leninism, especially the idea of “realizing socialism within a single country.” Within the historical context of After Revolution, the concept of revolution inevitably came into conflict with the concepts of construction and governance. At the core of this conflict is the issue of modernity. How can this contradiction be resolved? Do we even have the ability to resolve it? If it cannot be addressed, it may develop into a crisis and produce elements of crisis within Chinese society. Based on this conclusion, I summarize the contradictions of the socialist period, i.e., the After Revolution era, into five categories: (1) the contradiction between egalitarianism and social class differentiation; (2) the contradiction between bureaucratic hierarchy and mass participation; (3) the contradiction between political society and everyday life; (4) the

1 In Chinese, “geming zhihou” (after revolution) refers to the period after the revolution has just succeeded; it places emphasis on “after the success of the revolution. “Hou gem ing” (post-revolution), on the other hand, refers to when “revolution” as political program, practice, and ideology is declared to be over. It is in this sense that the author refers to the first-thirty years of the PRC as “after revolution” and the reform era as “post-revolution” —Editors. the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 243 contradiction between internalization (内在化 neizai hua) and objectification (对象化 duixianghua); and (5) the contradiction between maintaining the status quo and facing the future. Of course there are many other areas of contradiction. But through analysis of only these five categories of contradiction, we can see that when modernity entered the picture, it produced a structural conflict between the ideals of revolution and the historical context of the After Revolution. This structural conflict forms the crisis of socialism.

A. Egalitarianism and Social Class Differentiation The Chinese revolution included a political appeal for egalitarianism. Such an appeal would inevitably lead to a revolutionary change in distribution of wealth and ownership throughout society. But modernity cannot tolerate absolute egalitarianism. As a result, even the supply system of the Yan’an period included a certain amount of difference between ranks; it was criticized by Wang Shiwei at the time as the “peasants are divided into three colors; food is divided into five levels.”2 If there had not been such an egalitarian ideal, the radical “literature youth” of the time would not have harbored such strong resistance against the internal ranking differences of the supply system (供给制 gongji zhi). But the ranking distinction in the supply system served two purposes: to guarantee the working needs of the leading cadre and to entice higher-level, knowledgeable talents. Therefore, the supply system already included two fundamentally modern characteristics of the post- 1949 period: specialization (专业化 zhuanye hua) and division of labor (分工化 fengong hua). These characteristics of modernity inevitably influence the system of wealth distribution in society. The 1950s transition from the supply system to a salary system based on occupational levels actually pre-staged the possibility of re-differentiation of social classes.3 In this sense, “After Revolution socialism” is actually a very complex concept. On the one hand, it emphasizes equality, yet on the other hand,

2 Wang Shiwei, “Ye baihehua 野百合花 (Wild lily),” Wang Shiwei wencun 《王实味文存》(Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 1998), 132. 3 For details, see Yang Kuisong 杨奎松, “Cong gonggei zhi dao zhiwu dengji gongzi zhi: Xin Zhongguo jianli qianhou dangzheng renyuan shouru fenpei zhidu de yanbian 从供给制到职务等级工资制: 新中国建立前后党政人员收入分配制度的演变 (From the provision system to the salary system based on occupational level: changes in the income distribution system of party members around the establishment of New China),” Lishi yanjiu《历史研究》4 (2007). 244 cai xiang it re-differentiates social classes under the conditions of modernity. This differentiation of social classes in fact included three aspects: the distinction between cadre and the masses, the distinction between intellectual labor and manual labor, and the distinction between urban and rural. A society without distinctions cannot exist in reality—socialism is no exception to this. However, if distinctions are expanded limitlessly, then socialism will not only produce a new bureaucratic class, it can also produce a new middle class (新的中产阶级 xin de zhongchanjieji). And that is exactly what happened. In the Chinese literature from the first thirty years of socialism, there existed contradictions between intellectual labor and manual labor, and between urban and rural, but they were not openly or clearly represented. More often than not, literary works covered up or obscured these contradictions by resorting to such notions as individualism or bourgeois thought. We see this in many texts. For example, the criticism of Ding Shaochun in Never Forget (千万不要忘记 Qianwan buyao wangji) overshadows the contradictions. Ding’s desire for a leather jacket and a suit in effect reveals a distinction of status between intellectual and manual labor. But to overcome this distinction the play merely defines it as “individualism” or “bourgeois ideas of fame and profit.” The distinction between urban and rural is sought to be overcome through another kind of narration, as seen in Bright Sunny Day (艳阳天 Yanyangtian). In this novel, there is a recurring theme: “Do not forget the country at the moment of bumper harvest” (丰收不忘国家 fengshou buwang guojia). This emphasis suggests a high degree of identification with the nation, and at the same time ignores the existence of a contradiction between urban and rural. This repressed or concealed contradiction received a sort of “retaliatory” narration in the 1980s. The irony is that the “retaliatory” narratives not only did not stop the trend of social class differentiation, they actually caused such social divisions to gain a legitimate support. However, the division between the cadre and the masses became a particularly strong symbol of the contradiction between egalitarianism and social class differentiation. The widening of social differences and the emergence of a new bureaucratic class would inevitably lead to a challenge of the notion of egalitarianism, which was an important revolutionary ideal. Therefore, during the first thirty years of socialism, Chi- nese literature was strongly “anti-bureaucracy and anti-special privileges.” This narrative theme has stubbornly persisted to this day, despite political interference and regardless of the many changes in how it is expressed. This theme has always enjoyed support from egalitarianism through a sort of internal narrative impetus, as well as an in-depth reflection on reality. the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 245

For example, in the process of land reforms, some cadre used their power to obtain, during resource distribution, more of the fruits of victory than normal peasants, be it land or other property. Today people tend to discuss history based on its results, such as the problems brought about by the formation of cooperatives. But, if cooperatives had not been organized in time, the opportunistic cadre might have quickly turned themselves into a new oppressive class. Zhao Shuli in Evil Does Not Suppress Good (邪不压正 Xie buy a zheng) and Sanliwan (三里湾), Liu Qing in A Pioneer’s History (创业史 Chuangye shi), and others have all touched on this issue. Furthermore, this new class would have been stronger than the previous landlord class in at least one respect: they would simultaneously hold the resources of both political power and wealth. This would be a terrible prospect. That is why, as early as the 1950s, literature was already proac- tively responding to the emergence of such elements of crisis. These were all new problems arising from the process of social wealth redistribution. If the contradictions were not well addressed and dealt with, they would produce a full-scale crisis.

B. Bureaucratic Hierarchy and Mass Participation In the After Revolution socialist context, China had to walk the road of high specialization and division of labor to construct a modern society. In other words, institutionally, China had to implement a hierarchical mode of management. This management mode simultaneously produced the so-called bureaucracy. Wang Meng, in his “Young Newcomer in the Organization Department” (组织部新来的年轻人 Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqingren), discussed this problem relatively early. At the same time, however, the Chinese revolution always emphasized mass participation as one of its key characteristics. So when it comes to the management model of bureaucratic hierarchy, how can the masses still participate? The contradiction between the two—bureaucracy and the masses—led to the appearance of the following issues. First, a modern enterprise must include both a high level of specialization and a large and qualified modern labor force. Socialism was faced with these two issues simultaneously. Mao Zedong described the “ruffian movement” (痞子运动 pizi yundong) in his “Report of the Investigation of the Hunan Peasant Movement” (湖南农民运动考察报告 Hunan nongmin yundong kaocha baogao), but the so-called ruffians have never been positively represented in contemporary Chinese literature. A qualified modern laborer, rather, is always lauded for upholding of the value 246 cai xiang of traditional craftsmanship. That character represents someone with a strong sense of social responsibility, shown through producing good products. Most of the contemporary [read: socialist] literature thus contains the notion of “production.” Even in the slogan “grasp revolution, promote production” (抓革命、促生产 zhua gemin, cu shengchan) the ultimate goal of the revolution is to resolve the problem of production, which is also the problem of modernity. Yet in addressing the issue, contemporary/socialist Chinese literature resorted to many traditional resources. For example, Zhao Shuli would repeatedly use the word “upright (and decent)” (正派 zhengpai) in his articles, saying that cadres and peasants must both be upright and decent. In the literature of the first thirty years of Chinese socialism, there are many old workers and peasants whose representations leave one with an impression of morality. The fact that this traditional resource was adopted in After Revolution socialism is actually related to the needs of modernity (现代性的需要 xiandaixing de xuyao). But if we stop short at this point, we could easily muddle the boundaries between “Revolutionary China” and “Modern China.” Because the real question is: Which sort of society does a high level of specialization aim to construct? Giddens, in The Consequences of Modernity, especially emphasizes the abstract nature of modern society’s concepts, institutions, economics, and so on. However, this highly abstract system necessarily relies on the support of technology (技术 jishu). This explains the important function of “specialization,” and how the modern “expert society” (专家社会 zhuan- jia shehui) is formed. At the same time, a highly abstract society is also one with a high level of risks. To overcome crises that stem from these risks, a system of trust must be established between the individual and society. In a modern society, technical or knowledgeable experts often act as the medium of this trust. In the first thirty years of Chinese socialism, this highly abstract modern system was not necessarily formed by “experts.” That is to say, after 1949, the Chinese revolution was not interested in establishing an expert society specifically. But we cannot say that this new society did not have a high level of abstraction, realized through the party and politics, especially through the personal charisma of the party leader, Mao Zedong. When discussing the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Benjamin Schwartz observes that the situation was chaotic and the party committee actually ceased to function, but Chinese society did not fall into chaos, production did not stop, and the order of life did not completely dissolve. He employs the notion of “reign of virtue” to suggest that what governed the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 247 the Chinese society was more than some kind of superficial institutional system.4 This “reign of virtue” in effect formed the highly abstract Chinese system and produced a high level of trust from members of society. It was not until the 1980s that this trust ran into problems, generating what is now known as the “trust crisis” (信任危机 xinren weiji). We must realize, therefore, that the governing system of After Revolution China was different from that of the Soviet Union, which was largely an expert society, because the Chinese model had to first confront challenges from “mass participation” (群众参与 qunzhong canyu). It goes without saying that if we emphasize “expert society,” the masses of workers and peasants (工农大众 gongnon dazhong) will be seen as nothing more than modern labor forces. Such a perception would be in sharp conflict with revolutionary ideals. What is more, how do we understand the notion of “people”? What does “democracy” really mean? Will it be possible for people to yield their rights to experts? In his lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber already showed a political anxiety toward “expert society.” The most important question, in my view, is how to maintain the subaltern’s sense of “dignity” (底层人民的“尊严”问题 diceng renmin de “zunyan” wenti) in an expert society. In the stages between expert society and mass participation, there are often very difficult challenges and choices, including choices of necessary institutional innovation. The second major issue that arose from conflict between bureaucracy and the masses was that Chinese society, in the process of the revolution, gradually formed its own mobilization structure (动员结构 dongyuan jiejou), which was not institutionalized. Such structure would inevitably come into conflict with expert society. Townsend and Womack in Politics in China discuss in particular the characteristics of “mobilized society” (动员社会 dongyuan shehui), and touch upon its difference from totalitarianism. They argue that totalitarianism is impenetrable, due to the fact that it is formed by (techno)bureaucrats and therefore is a highly specialized expert society. A mobilized society, in contrast, is diverse and constantly changing.5 Indeed, a highly specialized expert society would have a great difficulty tolerating the all-fronts participation of the masses. Another reason China did not immediately establish a highly specialized expert society after 1949 was the lack of “experts” and the low literacy

4 Benjamin Schwartz, “The Reign of Virtue: Some Broad Perspectives on Leader and Party in the Cultural Revolution,” The China Quarterly 35 (September 1968), 1–17. 5 James Townsend and Brantly Womack, Politics in China (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1986). 248 cai xiang rate of the masses. Without enough experts, many issues and problems must be solved through mass participation. From the Yan’an period through the 1950s, there existed a widespread, large-scale literacy movement; another side of “political participation” (政治参与 zhengzhi canyu) is always “knowledge-based participation” (知识参与 zhishi canyu), especially in a modern society. An emphasis on intellectual or knowledge- based participation does not mean that knowledge is concentrated in the hands of a few. Knowledge must be popularized—hence the opening of knowledge and technology to the public and the promotion of “technological innovation” (技术革新 jishu gexin). All of these changes were in effect a challenge to the notion of “intellectual property.” In the literature of the “17 Years,” such as Ai Wu’s Temper a Hundred Times into Steel (百炼成钢 Bailian chenggang), the severest criticism often concerns an individual’s refusal to share his technological knowledge. In this sense, such “mass participation” does seem to have an anti-modernity dimension, but its philosophy emphasizes that the construction of modern Chinese society should not depend on a small number of experts only; it should have universal mass participation, which requires open knowledge and technology. It is in this sense that there existed at the time a conflict between “red” and “expert” (红与专 hong yu zhuan). However, this was quintessentially a modernity issue—it sought to solve, on an institutional level, the tension between bureaucratic hierarchy and democracy, which was essentially an issue of political democratization in the realm of economics. Such intent found an expression in the 1960s through the Anshan Steel Charter (鞍钢宪法 Angang xianfa). Of course, the issue was more complicated than that. For example, in the 1980s the so‑called “work units (单位 danwei) met new analysis and criticism in which many argued that the work units had taken on many social functions that they should not have. Needless to say, such criticism was based on the belief that modernity demanded a high division of labor and specialization. Yet throughout the socialist period, work units bore many social functions, and even many family functions (such as work units’ bathhouses)—the “work unit” model had strong solidarity and appealed to the workers. This quasi-kinship relationship between work units and workers cannot be easily explained away by such notion as division of labor and specialization. Still, we recognize that though the contradiction between bureaucratic hierarchy and mass participation on the one hand made it more difficult for an elite group of experts to emerge, it on the other hand led to politically erroneous policies toward intellectuals. the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 249

C. Political Society and the “Life-world” (生活世界 shenghuo shijie) The April of 1940 (no.6) issue of Communist Party Member (共产党人 Gongchandangren) published “The Actuality of Democratic Politics” (民主政治的实际 Minzhu zhengzhi de shiji) by Xie Juezai. In a section titled “What is the Meaning of Democracy?” Xie Juezai focuses on Lenin’s definition of democracy: Lenin’s definition of the Soviet stipulates that “it (the Soviet)6 is an avant- garde brigade, an organization consisted of the most aware, hard working, and advanced members of the oppressed worker and peasant classes. Because the vast masses of the oppressed classes today remain outside of political life and history, their avant-garde brigade can, through this organization, promote their education, and train and lead them.” Democracy means to cause the masses who have always been “outside of political life and history” to enter into political life and history. Mother Liu in Inspecting Transit Permits (Cha lutiao 查路条) has lived outside of history, but now has taken up political responsibility: “Even when General Commander Zhu passes by, he must have a transit permit!” “Who told you that?” “General Commander Zhu proclaimed it himself.” If we cannot have all people like Mother Liu join political life, then we have not done our work of democracy well. If all people like Mother Liu truly participate in politics, the power thus generated would be immeasurable. That is the effect of democracy.7 In the Yan’an political imagery, the rise of the people’s status (翻身 fan- shen) “not only means going from having nothing to eat and to wear, to having food and clothing, it also means rising from the status of slave to master.”8 In Yan’an period debates on the issue of democracy, Xie Juezai noted with emphasis that “some comrades think that democracy merely means that officials are elected by the people. Of course, this is a main phenomenon of democracy. But if there is nothing else, then do not all those capitalist countries hold elections? Their people nonetheless cannot cast off the rule of the bourgeois dictatorship.”9 Wang Shaoguang has jokingly called the interpretation of democracy as merely an election

6 Brackets in the original. 7 Xie Juezai 谢觉哉, “Minzhu zhengzhi de shiji 民主政治的实际 (The Actuality of Democratic Politics),” in Yan’an minzhu moshi yanjiu ziliao xuanbian 《延安民主模式研究资料选编》(Xian, Xian daxue chubanshe, 2004), 42. 8 Xie Juezai, “Minzhu zhengzhi shi jiu renmin de, fan minzhu zhengzhi shi duansong renmin de 民主政治是救人民的，反民主政治是断送人民的 (Democratic Politics Save the People, to Oppose Democratic Politics is to Kill the People),” in Yan’an minzhu moshi yanjiu ziliao xuanbian, 34. 9 Xie Juezai, “Minzhu zhengzhi de shiji,” 42. 250 cai xiang system “electing a master” (选主 xuan zhu).10 Clearly, the understanding of democracy in Yan’an politics emphasized that “the affairs of all are decided by all, and conducted by all. Under conditions accepted by all (the minority follows the majority, the individual follows the whole, etc.), everyone can express their opinions, and good ideas will definitely be adopted; everyone has the duty and rights to manage [public] affairs. This is the essence of democracy.”11 This is why Mother Liu of Inspect- ing Transit Permits attracted such attention from Xie Juezai (and Yan’an politics in general): she was seen as a literary character highly representative of democracy, with the potential to enable the “masses who have always been ‘outside of political life and history’ to enter into political life and history.” As a result of this entrance, “the affairs of all are decided by all, and conducted by all”—Xie Juezai believed this was “the actuality (实际 shiji) of democratic politics.” The actuality of democracy is politics, and history is the temporal expression of political life. Here we can see how certain ideals of Chinese socialism had already been formulated in the 1940s debates on democracy in Yan’an. The structural form built on these ideals, by way of bringing the masses into “political life and history,” constructed a wide-ranging “political society.” The key to this kind of society lies in how it allows each member of the masses to “through understanding their own experiences, understand that things large and far away are in fact related to them.”12 Therefore, while it is important to establish a utopian vision of the “large and far away” through the party’s political education, this “large and far away” vision must also correspond to the interests of people, namely the matters that concern them the most (切身的事 qieshen de shi). Only in this way can a political society in which everyone participates be established. (Incidentally, this political society obviously does not equate to the concept of “political society” as explained by Chatterjee based on the Indian experience.) This structural form of the political society emphasizes the important function of political parties, and upholds that only through the party’s political life can the masses be brought into political life and history. But on the other hand, we must also note that the formation of this particular political society was closely related to the war environment—the “extraordinary state” (例外状态 liwai zhuangtai)—of the time. The question then is

10 See Wang Shaoguang 王绍光, Minzhu si jiang 《民主四讲》 (Four Lectures on Democracy) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2008). 11 Xie Juezai, “Minzhu zhengzhi de shiji,” 41. 12 Ibid., 42. the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 251 this: in the After Revolution historical context, the “normal state” of Chinese socialism, what is the nature of the relationship between this “political society” and the life-world of the masses (especially the urban masses)? One possibility of this political society is an unlimited expansion of political space, which leads to intense conflicts between it and the life- world. I certainly do not affirm the narrative model that sets up political society and life-world as complete opposites; such a model can only lead to a simplistic historical narration. In this narrative mode, the individual’s life-world cannot tolerate outside encroachment and is absolutely self-sufficient. Its implication is a caution against and rejection of public power. The life-world certainly does have its autonomy, but it also has an intimate relationship to politics. Not only do politics permeate and control the individual’s life-world, one’s life-world can also assert influence on politics. But again, life-world does have dimensions of autonomy; therefore, if political space gets expanded without limit, it can generate annoy- ance and dissatisfaction—especially when it impacts individual benefits, desires, and interests. What is more, even if the life-world is not completely autonomous and self-sufficient, there always exists at least a desire for self-sufficiency, which helps construct a corresponding fantasy. We must confront the importance of this fantasy head on. It contains the potential for opposition, especially in literature. In a certain sense, what literature deals with is precisely this kind of fantasy, including the contradictions and conflicts between this fantasy and life’s practices. In the early 1960s, conflicts between political society and the life- world grew especially intense. One reason for the intensification was the development of urbanization. Personal desires, tastes, and lifestyles were expressed in a variety of ways and poised toward a tendency of dispersion (分散化趋向 fensanhua quxiang). In turn, confronting the city and the issues produced within constituted one of the biggest challenges of the first thirty years of Chinese socialism. In a certain sense, we can say that the Chinese revolution did not handle its relationship with “urban- ites” well. This relationship ultimately headed toward a breakdown, which resulted in (on the level of everyday life) people responding positively to the thought liberation movement of the 1980s.

D. Internalization (内在化 neizai hua) and Objectification (对象化 duixiang hua) In the first thirty years of Chinese socialist practices, “master” (主人 zhuren) was an extremely important concept. The concept of socialism 252 cai xiang contains extraordinarily important politics of respect (尊严政治 zunyan zhengzhi). The system of wealth distribution is not the only thing that matters to a society—the equality and respect of the society’s members is also important. That the concept of “master” produced great political energy and identification with the nation-state needs no further argument. What requires further discussion are the theoretical and practical challenges faced by this concept. In my view, “master” implies an internalization process. For example, machines originally were objectified vis-à-vis the workers. Today, machines and even factories have become part of us (我们 women) and found embodied expressions through us. In 1955, the state formally issued a Letter by the Chinese National Work Committee to All Workers of the Coun- try to Guarantee Completion of and Exceed the First Five-Year Plan of the National Economy (中华全国总工会为保证完成和超额完成国民经济的第一个五年计划告全国职工书). While repeatedly emphasizing the pursuits for “socialist industrialization” of the state, it also stipulated in detail the “labor qualities” that every laborer must possess: We must use fully and effectively every single person, every single machine, every single cent of money, and every single minute of time for the five-year plan! Everyone is responsible for strictly implementing economization! We must economize on raw materials, and lower production costs and costs for commodity circulation. We must raise the quality of products and reduce and even eliminate bad-quality products. We must take good care of machines, tools, and prolong their usable life. We must lower the costs for infrastructure construction, while also guarantee their quality. We must thoroughly follow the policy of “good, fast, economical, safe!” (hao, kuai, sheng, anquan de fangzhen 好、快、省、安全的方针). We must seriously observe all regulations and consciously reinforce work disciplines. Every person must, with the responsible attitude of the master of the country, struggle against all phenomena of wastage.13 Clearly, what upholds this modern craftsman spirit is not just the ideals of modernization. It also includes a Marxist-informed political attitude of being the “master of the country.” In debating socialism, however, it may be more important to delve deep into questions of socialist alienation.

13 “Zhonghua quanguo zonggonghui wei baozheng wancheng he chaoe wancheng quanmin jingji de di yi ge wunian jihua gao quanguo zhigong shu 《中华全国总工会为保证完成和超额完成国民经济的第一个五年计划告全国职工书》Zhonghua Ren min Gongheguo fagui huibian, 1955 nian 7 yue—12 yue《中华人民共和国法规汇编, 1955 年7月-12月》(Compendium of Laws of the People’s Republic of China, July–December 1955) (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 1956), 852. the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 253

Will the problem of alienation disappear as the result of this process of internalization? Can machines, the state, institutions, officials, and so forth, be re-objectified and even alienated themselves? The alienation issue did not receive in-depth theoretical treatment during the first thirty years of Chinese socialism. On the contrary, in the process of internalizing the “master” narrative, the subjective self (主体 zhuti) expanded limitlessly (无限膨胀 wuxian pengzhang). The limitless expansion of the subject in turn generated the following question for narration: in what language/discourse can this limitlessly-expanding subject be expressed? Grand slogans were thus produced! But in another sense, this limitlessly- expanding subject managed to weaken class consciousness. Moreover, the internalization could not have been completely thorough; there were always some people and things that could not be internalized. The process of internalization would inevitably produce remainders, which would in turn be re-objectified. For example, labor competition emphasizes mass participation and stimulates enthusiasm for participation. This enthusiasm is then formalized through a “good reputation” (荣誉 rongyu), but that “good reputation” inevitably differentiates between those who charge ahead and those who fall behind; those who are advanced inevitably produce a sense of repression for those who fall behind. There are varying forms of repression in every society, of course— the key is how to deal with it. Mao Zedong repeatedly emphasized the need to correctly deal with two different kinds of contradictions: the contradiction between the self and the enemy, and the internal contradictions of the people. However, with the expansion of class struggle, not only did the boundaries between these two contradictions at times grow rather unclear, frequent criticism and self-criticism often caused face-to- face confrontation and conflicts. As a result, while socialism produced its own supporters it also produced its own opposition. Once such opposition was given a name, such as “liberal,” it would become an ideology. This constituted the challenge to traditional socialism in the 1980s. Another important issue in Chinese society is how to deal with the master/slave relationship in a class society. It manifested itself in the first thirty years of Chinese socialism as the issue of “class background.” When this issue came into conflict with the ideal of rights equality, it evoked Yu Luoke’s Theory of Family Background (出身论 Chushen lun). Yu Luoke did not prescribe mere acknowledgement of those with bad family backgrounds, rather, he demanded that they also had the right to participate in the revolution. A strong memory of class oppression (阶级压抑 jieji yayi) continues to exist to this day and has functioned as an important factor 254 cai xiang in the last thirty years of economic reforms. This requires careful analysis. Today a certain paradox confronts us: this memory of class oppression continues to exist, but the subjectivity of the working class has gradually disappeared from the concept of “master.”

E. Maintaining Reality (维持现实 weichi xianshi) and Facing the Future Some consider the first thirty years of Chinese socialism to be a historical movement signified by self-negation. This movement produced contradictions and conflicts between maintaining the societal status quo and confronting the future. Once China entered the historical context of the After Revolution—i.e., began to strive to build socialism within a single country—it had to put emphasis on governance, norms, production, and the rectification and establishment of a political order. This “order” was simultaneously moral and ethical. In this sense, it inevitably affirmed reality by emphasizing that this “reality” was the result of the historical movement of the revolution. As a result, the “legacy issue” (继承 jicheng) and “successor issue” (接班人 jiebanren) were both related to aspects of “maintenance of reality.” At the same time, however, revolutionary ideals maintained a foundational attitude regarding the future. This attitude may have two aspects. First, the so-called reality must be in a certain sense the result of compromises. Breaking the situation of compromises (打破这一妥协的局面 dapo zhe yi tuoxie de jumian) was in turn forever central to the question of re-liberating the future. Second, the “future,” or the “envisaging of communism” (共产主义的设想 gongchan zhuyi de shexiang), was the utopian ideal sought by the Chinese revolution, and therefore Chinese socialism could never stop at or be content with the After Revolution historical condition. These two factors could each cause the formation of radical politics or radical cultural ideas. Such radicalism existed in all levels of society; together both high and low society formed a radical anti-system force that was critical of reality. Within such con- frontations and conflicts, the youth were always an important symbol for repeated struggles and re-narration. In the long process of the Chinese revolution, “youth” once was the symbol for “facing the future” (for example, “young China”) and functioned as a production mechanism for affect (一种激情的生产装置 yizhong jiqing de shengchan zhuangzhi). This produced a narrative mode in which “the young educate the old” (青年教育老年 qingnian jiaoyu laonian). Then in the After Revolution context, “youth” came to exist in the narrative mode of “being educated” (被教育 bei jiaoyu). This narrative mode was solidified in the early 1960s. Of course, the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 255 in a more concrete sense, “youth” mainly signified “literary youth.” How- ever, once the Chinese revolution remobilized the “future,” the “literary youth” could immediately be reenlisted as a narrative object. This re- enlistment happened in the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, when youth came to constitute the main anti-system force, extending the ideas of “rebellion” and “conservatism” simultaneously. What must be pointed out here is that this self-negating historical movement caused instability in society that could generate strong discontent among the people. Only when we fully recognize this point can we understand why the 1980s slogan of “stability and unity” had such great resonant force. These aforementioned issues, being the core issues of modernity, constitute the main contradictions and elements of the crisis in socialism. When they could not be overcome, social crisis erupted, compelling socialism to find a different means to overcome the crisis.

II. Efforts to Overcome the Crisis

In the 1950s, these contradictions had not yet manifested very strongly. On the one hand, the transformation of socialism had just begun, and its internal contradictions and crisis had not yet completely unfolded. On the other hand, socialism showed a great deal of self-confidence in its competition with capitalism. Novels of the time had revealing episodes of “calculating accounts.” Zhou Libo’s Great Changes in the Mountain Town (山乡巨变 Shanxiang jubian) describes Liu Yusheng calculating accounts with Sheng Jiaxiu to encourage her to join the cooperative. He confidently shows her the costs and earnings of working alone verses the costs and earnings of working in the cooperative. But this does not mean that literature in the 1950s lacked the courage and strength for self-criticism. For example, Bright Flowers Blossoming Again (重放的鲜花 Chongfang de xianhua), published in 1979, contains twenty short stories that were severely criticized during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement.14 Among them, twelve involve the relationship between cadre and the masses. The subject of “anti-bureaucracy” was a shared topic in all these stories. The 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement was a complex historical event; among the many “rightist groups” there were some who could actually be

14 Bright Flowers Blossoming Again (重放的鲜花 Chongfang de xianhua) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1979). 256 cai xiang called “young leftists” (青年左派 qingnian zuopai). As I have mentioned elsewhere, in the socialist period the boundaries of the so-called resistance politics (抗争性政治 kangzhengxing zhengzhi) are very difficult to define. On the one hand, the system sought to use resistance politics to overcome its own defects, but on the other hand, if the resistance politics exceeded the defined limits, the system would move to suppress mass movements— the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution were both examples. What happened between the Double Hundred Policy (双百方针 (shuangbai fangzhen) and the Anti-Rightist Movement demonstrated the awkward position and tragic fate of resistance politics in China. With the further unfolding of the contradictions and crises within socialism, resistance politics would repeatedly be enlisted, and yet its forms of expression grew increasingly enigmatic. In my view, early 1960s China saw symptoms of a transition from an era of accumulation to an era of consumption. These symptoms further inflamed the elements of crisis within socialism. This crisis was manifested through the dual aspects of distribution and consumption. Issues of distribution led to class opposition after the re-differentiation of social classes. Furthermore, they also created conflicts of interest between rural villages and cities. Consumption led to increasing individual desires, which gradually produced an impulse to separate from state politics. Clearly, the appearance of these elements of crisis led to the “never forget class struggle” (千万不要忘记阶级斗争 qianwan buyao wangji jieji douzheng) idea of that period. Behind the concept of class struggle lies a new differentiation of the “enemy/self” relationship and the desire to overcome elements of crisis within socialism. As such, it is highly politicized. In the effort to overcome crises, there appeared such terms as “bureaucratic bourgeois class” (官僚资产阶级 guanliao zichan jieji) and “special privileges class” (特权阶层 tequan jieceng). These notions constitute one of the most important intellectual legacies of the 1960s. But I wish to point out the problems embedded in the “class struggle” that was intended to overcome the crisis. If we understand “class struggle” as a mode of dealing with the enemy/ self relationship, then trying to use this tool to address every internal contradiction of socialism is overly simplistic. For example, both Bright Sunny Day and Seizing the Seal (夺印 Duo yin) contain the “distribution” contradiction between villages and cities. When this contradiction is fully enveloped within class struggle, it ends up concealing true conflicts of interest. The conflicts in these stories gained a “retaliatory” narrative possibility in the 1980s, when, for example, Zhang Yigong’s The Story of Criminal Li the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 257

Tongzhong (犯人李铜钟的故事 Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi) sought to rewrite this type of work. Merely relying on identification with the nation cannot truly resolve such contradictions. The contradictions and conflicts expressed conceptually clearly cannot be resolved by resorting to the mode of “class struggle” between “enemy/self.” To the contrary, this mode obscures or confuses the distinction between real politics and cultural politics. During the 1960s, class struggle was understood via the model of “internal/external collaboration” (内外勾结 neiwai goujie)—treating the traditional enemy classes (such as landlords or merchant capitalists) as part of the newly arisen “special privileges class” and as the class basis of individuals’ thoughts. The problem with this model is that, in the process of its concrete practice, various interfering forces can easily turn the focus to the “outside” of socialism (社会主义的‘外部’ shenhui zhuyi de waibu), thus attributing the problems to the corrupting and tempting power of external class enemies. As a result, certain elements of crisis within socialism—such as alienation—were passed over. What is more, unconstrained representations of this enemy/self relationship constituted another major factor behind the expansion of class struggle. In a certain sense, the 1960s’ exaggerated narration of the residual power of traditional enemy classes allowed discriminatory violence (especially toward children of “bad” family backgrounds) to exist. This was one social reason for Yu Luoke’s Theory of Family Background. With the expansion of class struggle, the phrase “digging deep” (深挖 shenwa) became one of the most popularly circulated concepts of the Cultural Revolution. The direct consequence of “digging deep” was that everyone felt they were in danger. As this “class struggle” model grew increasingly political—in terms of focusing on people’s political positions and attitudes—it was easier to manipulate through power politics. Consequently, this class struggle not only did not overcome the crisis of socialism, it in fact accelerated the production of oppositional forces within socialism while suppressing genuine anti- system forces and preventing the formation of true resistance politics. I do not mean to fundamentally negate the legitimacy of “class struggle.” On the contrary, I think that the problems of the 1960s stemmed from an overreliance on the traditional mode of class struggle and a lack of formal innovation. What transpired not only concealed the complexity of the issues, it was also crude and violent. The more serious problem was that this violent form generated the retaliatory narration of the 1980s, which often targeted this form of class struggle without, consciously or unconsciously, paying attention to real problems concealed within. 258 cai xiang

III. The Intellectual Transition of the 1980s

Detailed discussion of the 1980s is not my main task here; it is one of my future research projects. If we do not understand the complex evolution of the prior thirty years, we would have no way to truly understand the important narrative realm that is the 1980s. By the same token, if we do not understand the 1980s, then we cannot understand the many- layered knots of logic connecting the historical movements of the earlier thirty years with those of the later thirty. Therefore, the 1980s era was an extremely important transition era; it presaged the gradual entrance of China into the “world system.” The end of the 1980s also signified the end of the theoretical twentieth century, because, in the words of certain theorists, it bade “farewell to revolution.” In its multi-layered narrative perspectives, the 1980s seem muddled and even chaotic, which precisely indicates the richness of the decade. What I must point out here, however, is that the temporality of the 1980s is equally important, from how we interpret the significance of the “first three years” (1976–79) that preceded the decade to historical connections (历史关联 lish guanlian) outside of the 1980s. Some historical materials touch upon the historical origins of the 1980s—origins which obviously are not all based on the same logic. For example, some researchers argue that the mainstream domestic trend in 1975 was thorough rectification (全面整顿 quanmian zhengdun). But in fact, Mao Zedong had earlier already said that “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has already lasted eight years. Now, stability and unity are the best. All the party and all the military must unite.” Some coincidental political occurrences also happened at this time. After the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, US President Ford visited China in 1975 to talk about establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China. It was also in this year that Chiang Kai-shek passed away in Taiwan and Chiang Ching-kuo succeeded him as chairman of the Nationalist Party. These developments in international and domestic affairs led the communist central government to release detained ranking party, government, military, and special personnel of the National- ist Party. Mao Zedong also wrote on the Public Security Bureau’s report “Instructional Report on Dealing with Provincial and Commanding Level Party, Government, Military, and Special Persons” (关于清理省将级党政军特人员的请示报告 guanyu qingli sheng jiang ji dang zheng jun te renyuan de qingshi baogao) that he suggested “releasing them all.” Deng Xiaoping further instructed that the Public Security Bureau act according the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 259 to Mao’s instructions. All prisoners were given citizenship rights, their release papers, a set of winter clothing and underwear, a blanket and hat, shoes and socks, one hundred yuan, along with a few other basic necessi- ties. It was made clear that anyone who wished to return to Taiwan could go and would be offered the means to do so.15 What can these trivial historical materials explain? Perhaps we can see the political origin of “stability and unity” (安定团结 anding tuanjie), one of the most important concepts of the 1980s. Perhaps we can also identify some omens of the thawing of relations between the “two shores” that would happen in the 1980s. This is not insignificant. Even though in the 1980s rectification of order changed into restoration of order, the importance of order was nonetheless repeatedly stressed, and this emphasis necessarily leaned heavily toward the construction of a modern society. Likewise, the political notion of reducing conflicts within the nation gradually turned into a theorized illusion of class harmony. It was precisely this modern illusion of “great harmony” that led to the 1980s pursuit of the so-called universality (humanity, shared aesthetics, etc).16 Obvi- ously, the decade of the 1980s was not without historical origins. Other scholars have also noticed the historical connections to the 1980s in relation to how the youth grew up during the Mao era, in the sense of Bildungstroman. For example, in the editorial notes of the “Special Issue on the 1970s” (七十年代专号 Qishi niandai zhuanhao) of Jintian (今天), Bei Dao and Li Tuo emphasize the significance of the 1970s: “the ‘generation’ that we speak of here is fairly specific, mainly referring to the generation of people who were youth and teenagers in the 1970s. The unique historical environment in which they grew up produced a unique generation of youth, who played a very important and particular role in Chinese history after the Cultural Revolution.”17 These historical connections explain why China did not return to traditional socialism (that of the Seventeen Years between 1949 and 1966) after 1976, even though the desire to return to the Seventeen Years had once been expressed by the mainstream ideology. Historical continuity

15 Yu Zhen 寓真, “Nie Gannu xingshi dangan 聂绀弩刑事档案 (Criminal Case File of Nie Gannu),” Zhongguo zuojia 《中国作家》 2 (2009). 16 See Cai Xiang, Luo Gang 罗岗, and Ni Wenjian 倪文尖, “Wenxue: wuneng de liliang ruhe keneng 文学：无能的力量如何可能 (Literature: How the Power of the Powerless is Possible),” accessed August 10, 2012. http://www.douban.com/group/topic/7075717/. 17 Bei Dao 北岛 and Li Tuo 李陀, “’Qishi niandai zhuanhao’ bianzhe an ‘七十年代专号’编者按 (Editorial Note on the 1970s Special Issue), Jintian《今天》3 (2008), 1. 260 cai xiang also lies in the fact that, after 1976, China inherited the historical process of the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it. We can consider many explanations for the refusal to return to traditional socialism—a refusal that contributed to the intense conflict between the “reform faction” and the “conservative faction.” The logical starting point is none other than the concept of “Reform and Opening.” For instance, “Class Supervisor” (班主任 Banzhuren), a short story written by Liu Xinwu, stresses a kind of opening of knowledge, even though the “opening” is limited to works like The Gadfly. This “opening” necessarily generated an intense demand for book reading. In Li Honglin’s article “Reading Books without Prohibited Areas” (读书无禁区 Dushu wu jingqu), which was published in the inaugural edition of Dushu (读书) in April 1979, “reading books” leads to a demand for political rights of democracy: In the realm of books, the main issues at present are: good books are scarce, the thinking of some comrades is not yet liberated enough, and the masses still lack the democratic right to read books and are not allowed to drift freely. To adjust to the demands of the modernizations, we urgently want to see more and better books. We should dismantle prohibited areas. As long as they nourish us and assist in the realization of the four modernizations, all books, whether Chinese, foreign, ancient, or modern, should be liberated and made available and be tested in practice. The political appeal for “democracy” in the 1980s, especially in the “first three years,” carried that era’s intense demand for reform. In a certain sense, we can see the appeal as an intellectual continuation of Li Yizhe’s 1974 big-character poster (大字报 da zi bao) “On the Democracy and Legal System of Socialism” (关于社会主义的民主与法制 guanyu shehui zhuyi de minzhu yu fazhi). Replacing “rule of men” with “rule of law” and autocracy with democracy was one of the most important goals of the 1980s. “Feudal,” no matter how imprecise the word may be, became nomenclature for the previous thirty years and thus marked the boundary between the two thirty year periods. On the one hand, this distinction impelled intellectual innovation in the 1980s, but on the other hand it also produced a new prohibited area of thought, namely how to discuss the intellectual legacy of socialism. More important still to this era is the understanding of “modernization.” It was in the 1980s that “modernization” became a self-evident meta-discourse and gained its authoritative nature. The problem is that a mere technological understanding of modernity can lead to a different logical development—a development from technology worship to the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it 261

institution worship to ideology worship. The internal force of this logic, no matter how it is theoretically rendered and corrected, makes it very difficult to stop. It moves inevitably in a direction that is geared toward imitating the West—from matters of institutional or structural design to cultural production. Meanwhile, the emotional structure of this society also quietly changed. Through the prevalent narration of scar literature (伤痕文学 shanghen wenxue), everyone from intellectuals to ordinary people became a “vic- tim,” and resentment and fear became the most direct emotional reaction to the previous thirty years of Chinese socialism. Meanwhile, the future was repeatedly brought up—this time clearly defined as Western-style “modernity.” Even though the state ideology continued to resort to its old language, under the direct attack of modernity the state ideology has been torn to pieces. Politics, economics, intellectual and everyday life, and even the unconscious—seemingly everywhere there was a great demand for China to “return to the world,” despite the fact that China once sought to struggle free of this world and create a different one. The changes that took place in the 1980s were profound. The enlistment of new intellectual resources mounted a powerful force for overcoming the crisis of traditional socialism, an overcoming that cannot be called ineffective. This overcoming was also on multiple levels, including a recognition of individual interests and an adjustment of intellectual policy—an adjustment that implied respect for specialization, free space for thought, and so on. But a greater crisis was produced at the same time. The de facto exiling of egalitarianism has since led to the legitimization of social class differentiation and caused a more severe polarization. The emphasis on bureaucratic hierarchy in fact eliminated the possibility of mass participation, which led to the disappearance of the politics of respect to the masses. The legitimatization of the life-world of the individual was simultaneously accompanied by the withering of the public sphere. Additionally, unbridled personal desires—directly produced by the strong forces of commodity capitalism—produced a zeal for one’s own needs and apathy toward public affairs. The concept of being the nation’s “master” had died, leaving the subaltern masses to once again become no more than a “qualified” modern labor force. Labor, once again, entered a state of alienation. The future was lost, and the West has become China’s future. Any kind of innovative thoughts would be labeled as restoration (复辟 fubi) of leftist thought. 262 cai xiang

It goes without saying that the retreat of socialism means the disappearance of the most important counter-balancing power to this kind of “modern” development. Once the logic of capital became the primary force that controlled us, it would lead to the accumulation and explosion of a different kind of crisis. Thirty years later, we can feel this crisis acutely. Of course, I do not mean to blame the current crisis on the 1980s. Even today I still have positive feelings toward that era: it created many historic opportunities and opened us to a wide horizon. The issue is that we must rethink the 1980s. The decade cannot become merely a memorial hall for that generation. Rather it must become a library of history that we can read repeatedly. We must also repeatedly read the first thirty years of Chi- nese socialism, not only to see how its legitimacy produced its irrationality, but also to examine its theoretical limitations. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the changes from the Paris Commune–style radical democracy of the early Cultural Revolution to the later “legal democracy” of Li Yizhe are themselves an important research topic. I think that for any serious thinker, discussing and studying Chinese socialism does not imply that he or she desires to return to that era—that would be too simplistic. But we need this kind of debate and discussion, because we not only need to respond to Chinese socialism as a period of history, but, more importantly, we need to respond to the ideal of that history. In responding to the ideal of revolution, we debate not only its great success but also its failures and lessons (of course “failures” in a relative sense). As long as we still support an ideal that aims at liberating labor and the working class out of the state of alienation, then we must treat our own history seriously, including the literary history of this period. In this sense, history has already become a living library, available for us to read any time and utilize repeatedly. In this library, the fundamental theme remains: how should the world be? The importance of imagination stands out with this question. If we are not satisfied with the arrangement of the current order, then we should confront the same question again: how ought the world to be? As soon as we seek to revisit issues regarding the world order, we will walk toward politics again. In this sense, I believe that behind the literary always lurks the political, or rather, that the political itself already constitutes the literary. Chapter Twelve

Post-Socialism Revisited: Reflections on “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” Its Past, Present, and Future

Arif Dirlik1

On this occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (also the thirtieth anniversary of the “reform and opening”), I would like to reflect on some issues I raised in an essay published two decades ago, “Postsocialism? Reflections on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”2 That essay was written in the midst of uncertainties concerning both socialism and the future of the PRC. The present is also a time of uncertainty, this time concerning the future of the capitalist world- system, as well as of the PRC (now an integral part of that system, but with continued insistence on a commitment to a socialist future). In 1989, socialism appeared as a residue of a fading past. China’s integration into a globalizing capitalist economy over the last two decades has demanded the erasure of the last residues of an earlier revolutionary socialism, making official claims to socialism less convincing than ever before. With “capitalism in ruins,” as a recent newspaper headline put it, those claims need to be reconsidered—especially for the historical experience that continues to inform them, and for the important part these past legacies may have to play in confronting challenges thrown up by the current crisis. Postsocialism offers a fruitful point of departure for such reconsideration.

I. Postsocialism, China, and Global Capitalism

“Postsocialism” was written in response to simplistic (and ideological) readings of reform and opening in the 1980s: predictions of imminent restoration of capitalism, on the one hand, and an unquestioning affirmation

1 I am grateful to Olivia Bina, Ann Huss, Roxann Prazniak, Timothy Summers, QS Tong, and Aihe Wang for taking the time to read and comment on this essay. They are not responsible in any way for the views expressed here. 2 Arif Dirlik, “Postsocialism? Reflections on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” in Marxism and the Chinese Experience, ed. Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1989), 362–84. 264 arif dirlik of socialism on the other hand. Opponents of socialism hailed Deng Xiaoping as a revolutionary leader who was prepared to return China to the capitalist path. Friends of Chinese socialism, ready to follow whatever line the leadership proposed, pretended that despite its repudiation of the revolutionary past, “reform and opening” did not imply any significant retreat from socialism. In my reading at the time, reform and opening signaled the end of the revolution and reopened the question of socialism with regard both to goals and the strategy of achieving them. The years 1956–1978 (from the Eighth Party Congress to the end of the Cultural Revolution) witnessed a failed revolutionary attempt to secure the transition to socialism. In its economic and political policies, “reform and opening” was reminiscent of the policies of New Democracy that had brought the Communist Party to power, and guided the changes of the initial years of the People’s Republic. But those policies acquired a new significance in light of the abandoned hope for a revolutionary transition to socialism, and required reorienta- tion in response to changes in the world situation. In short, they required a rethinking of socialism. The Cultural Revolution had been inspired in part by the rethinking of Soviet-style socialism. This time around, it was the Chinese revolutionary experience with socialism that required rethinking, reopening the whole question of socialism. Any reading of the situation in the 1980s had to take this rethinking as its point of departure. “Postsocialism” represented a conceptual effort at grasping this situation. It was informed by: . . . a historical situation where (a) socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics because of the attenuation of the socialist vision in its historical unfolding; partly because of a perceived need on the part of socialist states to articulate “actually existing socialism” to the demands of a capitalist world order, but also because of the vernacularization of socialism in its absorption into different national contexts; (b) the articulation of socialism to capitalism is conditioned by the structure of “actually existing socialism” in any particular context which is the historical premise of all such articulation; and (c) this premise stands guard over the process of articulation to ensure that it does not result in the restoration of capitalism. Postsocialism is of necessity also postcapitalist, not in the classical Marx- ist sense of socialism as a phase in historical development that is anterior to capitalism, but in the sense of a socialism that represents a response to the experience of capitalism and an attempt to overcome the deficiencies of capitalist development. Its own deficiencies and efforts to correct them by resorting to capitalist methods of development are conditioned by this awareness of the deficiencies of capitalism in history. Hence postsocialism seeks to avoid a return to capitalism, no matter how much it may draw post-socialism revisited 265

upon the latter to improve the performance of “actually existing socialism.” For this reason, and also to legitimize the structure of “actually existing socialism,” it strives to keep alive a vague vision of future socialism as the common goal of humankind while denying to it any immanent role in the determination of present social policy.3 The “post” in the term postsocialist carried two meanings, referring to the ambiguities in the situation: Chinese society today is postsocialist because its claims to a socialist future no longer derive their force from socialism as an immanent idea. On the other hand, it is also postsocialist because socialism, as its structural context, remains as a possible option to which it can return if circumstances so demand (this is what distinguishes it from a capitalist or even a postcapitalist society where such options as collectivization, socially, and a socialist culture, ideologically, are foreclosed).4 To stress the capitalist elements of modern China and assume that China must develop into a capitalist society would be erroneous; “it remains to be seen what the incorporation of socialist systems into the capitalist world order will imply for capitalism itself.”5 Rather than signaling the end of socialism, “postsocialism” offered “the possibility in the midst of a crisis in socialism of rethinking socialism in new, more creative ways. . . . Freed of the commitment to . . . an inexorable future, socialism may be conceived in a new way: as a [re]source for imagining future possibilities that derive their inspiration not from a congealed utopia, which post- pones to the future problems that await resolution today, but from the impulses to liberation that represent present responses to problems of oppression and inequality.”6 Two decades later, there is seemingly greater clarity over the status of socialism in the PRC. The economy has experienced enormous growth. While the PRC has resisted neoliberal policies emanating from the United States, its contribution to the global economy has done much to legitimize those policies. The consequence of integration into the global economy,

3 Ibid., 231. 4 Ibid., 244. 5 Ibid., 246. 6 Ibid., 247. This reconceptualization of socialism bears a close resemblance to a state ment by the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union that “socialism is the determinate name for [the] negation of capitalism’s fundamental sys temic contradictions and cruelties, and the necessity of this negation will remain, regard less of the fate of the Soviet Union as such.” Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 316. 266 arif dirlik development has made China into a major force and advocate of globalization. China has become the strategic center of the “global factory” that produces commodities consumed globally, above all in the centers of capitalism. It has emerged as a major player in the global economy to the point where many look to it to save the global economy from the crisis brought about by irresponsible neoliberal policies. Predictions abound as to its recovering the position once held by imperial China during the Ming Dynasty as the focal point of global economic activity.7 Economic power has brought with it political inclusion in the councils capital. Those who would manage the capitalist world economy can no longer afford to ignore the counsel of Chinese leaders and, reluctantly or not, make room for their voices in any serious consideration of the world’s problems. The globalization of the Chinese economy has also produced significant social changes. Cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing have joined the urban hubs of the global economy. Chinese society has been integrated with societies elsewhere through the motions of its citizens and cultural products, not least through the interactive possibilities offered by the new communications and information technologies. The standard of living of the population as a whole has gone up significantly. Economic development has created a new entrepreneurial class that is active not just in China, but globally. A growing urban middle class has joined its counterparts elsewhere as a major consumer of material and cultural commodities. Significant portions of rural society have risen above official thresholds of poverty as they venture out of agrarian business into other forms of economic activity. Any visitor to China is likely to be impressed by the social vitality and restlessness, against which older centers of capitalism appear as quaint and sleepy—development gone dormant. China is no longer merely a recipient of Euro/American cultural and intellectual products, but a consumer of global exotica, as well as a major exporter of cultural artifacts of its own. As it flexes its newfound political and military power, it seeks also to demonstrate its “soft power” in the global projec- tion of native ideologies and culture, including language. The issue of culture is especially pertinent to the question of socialism. In the midst of economic, cultural, and to some extent social globalization, the last two decades have also witnessed a revival of cultural traditions,

7 I am referring here to such works as Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), and Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (London: Verso, 2007). post-socialism revisited 267 most notably Confucianism, that the Chinese Revolution had sought to sweep into the proverbial “dustbin of history” for nearly a century. The vocabulary of Confucianism has infused the language of socialism; Con- fucianism has been officially sanctioned as a marker of Chinese identity, and it is under the cover of Confucianism, not socialism, that Chinese “soft power” is projected globally (through the Confucius Institutes). Social and cultural globalization, ironically, have been accompanied at the popular level by a turn to things “Chinese” that in their very consumption nourish cultural nativism. The pursuit of proficiency in English as a foreign language, ironically, goes hand in hand with a stubborn insistence on loyalty to a past that the revolution had sought to overcome, if not to erase. Yet, despite this evidence of the economic, social, cultural, and ideological incorporation of global capitalism, or nativistic revivals at the official and the popular level, fundamental ambiguities remain in the Communist self-image, and images of China’s relationship to the world both within and without the PRC. The Communist Party refuses to let go of its socialist commitments, or of the ideological legacy of the revolution, which now includes Deng Xiaoping’s legacy of reform and opening, as enshrined in the slogan “Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory.” This self-image in practice is at least partly responsible for China’s ambivalent relationship with the capitalist world. In spite of the powerful position the PRC holds in the contemporary global economy, it is possible to argue that it is at once inside and outside that economy: inside as a major player within it, outside in its insistence on keeping capitalism at arm’s length (which is reciprocated by continued suspicion of the PRC among major capitalist powers). China holds a similar position with regard to the Global South. The Chinese revolution has all along had a double character as both a socialist revolution and a national liberation struggle of a country suffering from semi-colonial domination, which gave it a sense of kinship with the Third World. This ambiguity persists presently in the status of the PRC as a developing country which nevertheless has come to hold a powerful position vis-à-vis developed capitalist societies. This double identity accounts for both a sense of kinship with the Global South (the earlier Third World) and suspicions of imperialist exploitation of the South’s resources (see below for further discussion). Given these ambiguities, there is much to be gained from thinking of China as a postsocialist, rather than simply a socialist, capitalist, or neo- Confucian society. The leadership’s insistence on its socialism may be dis- missed as political expediency, as the Communist Party ultimately derives its legitimacy from the revolution that brought it to power. However, the 268 arif dirlik government’s readiness to draw upon the legacies of the socialist revolution endows its claims with legitimacy and distinguishes its response to contemporary challenges from leaders elsewhere. Those legacies, moreover, should be understood not as part of a generic or unchanging socialism, but as an idea that needs to be reworked in response to concrete historical circumstances, in this case, the century-long revolutionary process in China, which was informed by a socialist vision but has also repeatedly redefined both the vision and the means for its realization. Socialism as it was previously understood, even in the days of Deng Xiaoping, may be over, but it would be a mistake to assume therefore that its legacies are no longer alive. I am not referring here to the perpetua- tion of a centralized, closely regulated economy; this might distinguish this form of socialism from neoliberal fantasies about unregulated market economies, but is not sufficient to endow it with a vision that transcends the horizon of capitalism. By that measure, moreover, the whole world, including the United States, might be said presently to be on the verge of socialism; in their response to the crisis created by permissive neoliberalism, governments worldwide are in haste to regulate the operations of capital and establish control, if not ownership, over its institutional apparatus. This designation obviously does not make any sense, contrary to the protestations of unreconstructed neoliberal utopians to whom any interference in the market represents a move toward socialism. What is more important is the continued urge to find an alternative to capitalism that has remained alive even as the Chinese economy has been integrated to global capitalism. The persistence of this vision may account for some of the contradictions that puzzle, if not annoy, those who would wish socialism away. It also presents Chinese leaders with challenges as they seek to reconcile the demands of the vision with the practical realities of incorporation in global capitalism.

II. Revolutionary Legacies

The legacy of the Chinese revolution can be understood in two senses. One sense, the more straightforward, is that of revolution as a storehouse of values, aspirations, and policies that are available for inspiration and example in the formulation of present policy. In this sense, the revolutionary past is part of a larger past that also includes the imperial and the pre-imperial periods, as well as non-Chinese histories. In spite of allega- tions of Chinese close-mindedness, Chinese leaders and thinkers since the post-socialism revisited 269

twentieth century have been remarkably open to drawing upon different historical experiences in dealing with problems of the present. This is as true of the present leadership as it was of early leaders such as Mao Zedong. That different leaders or thinkers drew upon different parts of the past is only an indication of different perceptions of contemporary problems and different aspirations for the future. The demotion of revolutionary history to simply one more “past” among others implies a retreat from revolution, to be sure, but it suggests neither the denial of revolution nor a conservative escape to a pre-revolutionary Confucian past, as many ideo- logues of Confucianism in and out of China would like to think. Rather, that period is itself now viewed through the lens of revolutionary history. It represents, on the one hand, an affirmation of the pre-revolutionary past against its Eurocentric denials by Chinese and non-Chinese alike. On the other hand, it places that past in the service of aspirations that are very much products of the revolution itself. The second sense of revolutionary legacy is related to the first but is much more complex; it must remain abstract by its very nature. I refer here to a mode of thinking that was the product of the revolutionary process in China, especially the Communist revolution, as a protracted guerilla struggle. A guerilla struggle almost by definition involves experimentation with revolution. In actuality, one of the most remarkable things about the Communist Revolution in China from the 1930s to the present is its openness to experimentation with policy—from the flexible social and economic policies of the 1930s to the New Democracy of the “long 1940s,” then from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution to “reform and opening” since the 1980s. Mao Zedong, with his openly admitted policies of trial-and-error, and slogans such as “two steps forward, one step backward,” was the “great experimenter,” but he was by no means the only one. Deng Xiaoping was equally committed to trying out policies to see which proved to be workable, and so have been his succes- sors. Indeed, this commitment to experimentation has been visible over the years through the restricted trial of policies in certain locations to test their workability before finally deciding on national policy shifts. It may be plausibly argued that the history of the socialist revolution in China is a history of experimentation with socialism and revolution. Theoretically speaking, such experimentation was not open-ended but limited by the commonly shared goal of creating a socialist society (inextricably entangled with the goal of a strong China). Except during the height of the Cultural Revolution, however, this goal was not allowed to congeal into a rigid utopia. Stated somewhat differently, in contrast to 270 arif dirlik the religious utopianism of the Cultural Revolution (which also endowed Mao with supernatural qualities), the Communist Revolution has primarily featured a secular utopianism, with a future vision as guide, but with the present playing an equally important part in the formulation of what the vision might ultimately contain—so long as it retained the basic commitment to national goals of development and independence—as filtered through socialist aspirations of equality and justice (or the other way around, depending on ideological priorities). The relationship between present activity and future goals is ultimately homologous to the relationship between theory and practice in Chinese Marxism, which would find its most articulate expression in Mao Zedong’s “sinicization” of Marxism, or making Marxism Chinese: integrating “the universal truths of Marxism with the concrete realities of Chinese society.” Regardless of the fate of particular Maoist policies, Mao Zedong Thought remains a central component of Communist ideology. It represented not just Mao’s thought but the collective experience of the party, and more importantly, the integration of Marxism with the Chinese experience. The continued significance of this impulse explains the longevity of Mao Zedong Thought and presents an important theoretical tool for reading post-Mao ideological transformations. Mao articulated the philosophical premises of his version of Marxism in the process—and as an integral part—of the sinicization of Marxism. His essays “On practice” and “On contradiction” were delivered as speeches in July and August 1937 respectively, coinciding with his call for a shift in Communist revolutionary strategy in response to Japan’s full‑scale invasion. At its most fundamental level of vernacularization (translating Marx- ism into a Chinese idiom), the sinicization of Marxism was a product of revolutionary problems (especially the problem of a Marxist revolution in agrarian China, which theory was ill‑prepared to contain); some of the key ingredients of a sinicized Marxism had already been enunciated in response to these problems, which were quite independent of the national problem.8 The national problem and its ramifications for Marxism were

8 Indeed, some of the earliest and most important discussions on the need to translate Marxism into the language of the masses were provided not by Mao, or even Maoists, but by Qu Qiubai, an earlier secretary of the party and a literary theorist. For a discussion of his ideas, see Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch’u Ch’iupai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). A more direct discussion of Qu’s (and the party’s) efforts to accomplish this translation through literary means during the early part of the agrarian revolution is to be found in Ellen Judd, “Revolutionary drama and song in the Jiangxi Soviet,” Modern China 9(1) ( January 1983): 127–60. Early practice is most readily post-socialism revisited 271 also the subject of intensive discussion in Chinese intellectual circles as early as 1936.9 Nevertheless, the project of sinicization was not clearly formulated and realized until 1937–1940; there was a direct line connecting the theoretical formulations of Mao’s philosophy in his 1937 essays and the underlying reasoning for a sinicized Marxist strategy that Mao was to enunciate in “On New Democracy” in 1940. Eminently practical and tactical in intention, the two essays sought to ground the problems of the Chinese Revolution within Marxist theory, in the process offering Mao’s fullest and most comprehensive statement on the philosophical considerations underlying his reformulation of Marxist theory. The concept of contradiction is central to Mao Zedong Thought. Its centrality in Mao’s original presentation was a direct product of the reformulation of Marxism to account for China’s historical situation, which was defined structurally by the contradictoriness of its various moments, and the articulation of this contradictoriness as a contradiction between theory and practice. While the contradiction between national and social revolutionary needs was obvious, within the actual socialist revolution a deeper problem developed that was not anticipated in theory: an agrarian society in which a socialist revolution had to be engineered out of components that theory did not account for; in which the revolutionaries themselves were outsiders to the social situation (and, therefore, in contradiction to it). Beyond the level of the national struggle, it was this social situation that made the sinicization of Marxism into a total theoretical project, and called for the reformulation of theory in terms of the multitude of contradictions that revolution faced at the level of practice. In Mao’s discussion of contradiction, he explains: The law of contradiction in things, that is the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. . . . As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and

(and comprehensively) apparent in a 1982 account of a local investigation Mao conducted in 1930. See Mao Zedong, Report from Xunwu, ed. with an introduction by Roger R. Thomp son (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). This essay has justified some Chinese authors in carrying Mao’s “sinicization” of Marxism past the war years back to 1930. See Shu Riping, “十年来毛泽东哲学思想研究述评” (Shinian lai Mao Zedong zhexue sixiang yanjiu shuping)(A Critique of Research on Mao Zedong’s Philosophical Thought Over the Last Decade), 《毛泽东哲学思想研究》(Mao Zedong zhexue sixiang yanjiu) (Research in Mao Zedong’s Philosophical Thought), No. 5 (1989): 4–10. 9 These discussions were published under the title of Xian jieduande Zhongguo sixi ang yundong (The Chinese Thought Movement of the Present) (Shanghai: Yiban shudian, 1937). 272 arif dirlik

its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self‑movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts with the things around it.10 “On contradiction” depicts a world (and a mode of grasping it) in which not things but relationships are the central data. Such relationships are relationships of mutual opposition as well as transformation, difference as well as identity. These relationships do not coexist haphazardly, moreover, but constitute a totality structured by their many interactions, a totality that is nevertheless in a constant state of transformation itself because the relationship between the whole and the parts that constitute it, no less than the relationships between the parts, is functional yet oppositional. The idea of “contradiction” encompasses both functionality and opposition (a “unity of opposites”); contradiction, as a constitutive principle of the world, produces a totality where everything (the parts no less than the whole) contains everything else, and yet nothing is reducible to anything else. As Mao puts it later in the essay: Since the particular is united with the universal and since the universality as well as the particularity of contradiction is inherent in everything, universality residing in particularity, we should, when studying an object, try to discover both the particular and the universal and their interconnection, to discover both particularity and universality and also their intercon- nections of this object with the many objects outside it.11 As a philosophical essay, “On contradiction” is devoted to an elaboration of the characteristics of contradictions, in which several general ideas are embedded. These may be summarized (using Mao’s own wording) as follows:

1. Contradiction is universal: The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement

10 Mao Zedong, “On contradiction,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1 (Beijing: For eign Languages Press, 1965–1967): 311. Nick Knight has demonstrated that this text is an edited version of the pre‑Liberation text of “On contradiction” (which contained addi tional passages that were edited out after 1949), but has not otherwise questioned what is given in this translation. See Nick Knight, “Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction and On Prac tise: Pre-liberation Texts,” China Quarterly 84 (1980): 641–668. 11 Ibid., 329. post-socialism revisited 273

of opposites exists from beginning to end. . . . There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist.12 2. Contradiction is also particular: Every form of motion contains within itself its own particular contradiction. This particular contradiction constitutes the particular essence which distinguishes one thing from another. . . . Only after man knows the particular essence of many different things can he proceed to generalization and know the common essence of things. When man attains the knowledge of this common essence, he uses it as a guide and proceeds to study various concrete things which have not yet been studied, or studied thoroughly, and to discover the particular essence of each. . . . Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods . . . contradictions [in Chinese society] cannot be treated in the same way since each has its own particularity. . . . We who are engaged in the Chinese revolution should not only understand the particularity of these contradictions in their totality, that is, in their interconnectedness, but should also study the two aspects of each contradiction as the only means of understanding the totality.13 3. Contradictions within progress are defined by a single principal contradiction: There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions. . . . In any contradiction the development of the contradictory aspects is uneven. . . . The nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the aspect which has gained the dominant position. But this situation is not static; the principal and the non‑principal aspects of a contradiction transform themselves into each other and the nature of things changes accordingly.14 4. Contradiction is composed of struggles: Identity, unity, coincidence, interpenetration, interpermeation, interdepen- dence (or mutual dependence for existence), interconnection or mutual cooperation—all these different terms mean the same thing and refer to the following two points: first, the existence of each of the two aspects of a contradiction in the process of development of a thing presupposes the existence of the other aspect, and both aspects coexist in a single entity; second, in given conditions, each of the contradictory aspects transforms itself

12 Ibid., 316. 13 Ibid., 323. 14 Ibid., 333. 274 arif dirlik

into its opposite. . . . How then can one speak of identity or unity? The fact is that no contradictory aspect can exist in isolation. Without its opposite aspect, each loses the condition for its existence . . . the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and relative, while the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute.15 5. Antagonism is a potential manifestation of contradiction: Antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of a struggle of opposites. In human history, antagonism between classes exists as a particular manifestation of the struggle of opposites. . . . Contradiction and struggle are universal and absolute, but the methods of resolving contradictions, that is, the forms of struggle, differ according to the differences in the nature of contradictions. Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not.16 “On contradiction” is a revolutionary hermeneutics (interpretative strategy, in other words) on how to make a revolution. While it reveals that Mao’s a life outlook may include native philosophical elements in addition to Marxism, all these elements are subsumed under, and refracted through, this basic problem. At one level, it is possible to read the essay as an abstract of the specific problems of revolution in Chinese society in 1937. The statements referenced above are interspersed among observations on contemporary developments in China’s historical situation, which are used in illustration of Mao’s various abstractions.17 A fundamental goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical justification for change in revolutionary policy after

15 Ibid., 342. 16 Ibid., 344. 17 Textual analyses have revealed (contrary to earlier opinions) that “On contradiction” and “On practice,” along with “Lecture notes on dialectical materialism,” were composed in 1936–37, and together represented “a single intellectual enterprise.” See Knight, “On contradiction,” and Stuart Scram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Prae ger Publishers, 1971). Mao’s philosophical effort at the time was part of the struggles for leadership within the Communist Party, as an endeavor to demonstrate his qualification for leadership against theoretically much better‑informed opponents. Indeed, Wylie has argued that the “sinicization of Marxism” was a product of organizational struggles against “dogmatists” within the party. See Raymond Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse- tung, Ch’en Po-ta and the Search for Chinese Theory, 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980). While this view has much virtue, it needs to be placed within the broader context of the problem of revolution. I focus on the first two essays, because unlike the “Lecture notes on dialectical materialism,” which was mainly copied from other sources, they represent original contributions by Mao. While these essays were part of an ongoing philosophical effort that preceded Japan’s invasion of China, moreover, they were still rooted in practical considerations, and the texts we have are explicitly devoted to the legitimation of change in political policy in response to the “new situation.” post-socialism revisited 275 the Japanese invasion of China, which shifted the “primary” contradiction from class struggle to national struggle. This explains why the majority of the essay is devoted to discussion of the “particularity” of contradiction (which includes discussion of primary/secondary contradictions, as well as the discussion of its primary/secondary aspects). It is within this process of policy legitimation that Mao articulates the priority of practice over theory. As he put it: The dogmatists . . . do not understand that conditions differ in different kinds of revolution and so do not understand that different methods should be used to resolve different contradictions; on the contrary, they invariably adopt what they imagine to be an unalterable formula and arbitrarily apply it everywhere, which only causes setbacks to the revolution or makes a sorry mess of what was originally well done.18 In spite of the practical nature of Mao’s thinking, however, it would be reductionist to read the essay simply as a discussion of practical questions, and ignore the consequences for theory of Mao’s justification of practice. The French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser grasped the significance of this problem when he wrote of “On Contradiction”: Mao’s essay, inspired by his struggle against dogmatism in the Chinese Party, remains generally descriptive, and in consequence it is in certain respects abstract. Descriptive: his concepts correspond to concrete experiences. In part abstract: the concepts, though new and rich in promise, are represented as specifications of the dialectic in general rather than as necessary implications of the Marxist conception of society and history.19 Althusser tells us that while Mao’s theoretical formulations remain under-theorized, they are nevertheless path-breaking and significant (and are not therefore reducible to descriptive abstractions). The former is evident. While Mao sought in the essay to theorize the particularity of revolutionary practice, he consciously demoted theory: “in the contradiction between theory and practice, practice is the principal aspect.”20 This demotion of theory was also a move toward a restatement of its role; Mao conceived of theory primarily as an abstraction of concrete revolutionary practice, and only secondarily as an abstract formulation of “laws” of social movement. Mao did not repudiate theory, or the necessity of understanding it. In fact, on one occasion, responding to an imaginary

18 Mao, “On contradiction,” 322. 19 Althusser, op. cit., 94n. Italics in original. 20 Mao, “On contradiction,” 335. 276 arif dirlik audience who held that those who were “instinctively” dialectical in their activity did not need to read books to understand theory, he reaffirmed the importance of studying theory—without such study, there was no possibility of synthesizing the multi‑faceted phenomena that the revolutionaries faced.21 “Without revolutionary theory,” he believed with Lenin, “there can be no revolutionary movement.”22 Indeed, given his revolutionary hermeneutics, theory appeared in Mao’s thinking as an essential guide in determining the direction of revolution. The priority that Mao assigned to practice meant that, unlike Althusser, he was only marginally interested in theorizing his abstract formulations. “On contradiction” was possibly “in part abstract” because Mao’s historicism (by which I mean his emphasis on concreteness and particularity) did not allow theorization beyond a certain point. Mao instead produced a hermeneutic. Revolutionary practice was no longer predictable from theory; rather, the latter became a guide to “reading” situations in the activity of making revolution. Mao’s appreciation of theory was itself contradictory in the double meaning he assigned to it: guide in the long‑term direction of revolution, instrument in immediate analysis. Theory, in other words, was part of the very contradictions that it was intended to unravel and to resolve. This was the key to Mao’s restructuring of theory. The world of “On contradiction” is one of ceaseless confrontation and conflict, where unity may be understood only in terms of its contradictory moments and where no entity is a constant because it has no existence outside its contradictions or a place of its own other than in its relationship to other contradictions. It may be that all Marxism is a conflict‑based conceptualization of the world. But however differently Marxists may have structured conflict or organized the structure of society, conflict in most interpretations of Marxism is conceived of in terms of a limited number of social categories (production, relations of production, politics, ideology, etc.), and there has been an urge to hierarchize these categories in terms of their effectivity in the social structure. Mao’s multitude of contradictions resist such hierarchization and, more significantly, any reduction to a limited number of categories. Some contradictions are obviously more significant than others in determining social structure or historical

21 Mao Zedong, “Bianzhengfa weiwulun” (Dialectical materialism), in Mao Zedong ji (Mao Zedong Collection), ed. Takeuchi Minoru, vol. VI (Hong Kong: Bowen Book Co., 1976), pp. 265–305. 22 Mao quotes Lenin in both essays. See Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. I, 304, 336. post-socialism revisited 277

direction, but Mao refuses to deny a role in social dynamics to what seem to be the most trivial contradictions (and therefore dissolve them into broader categories) or to hierarchize them except on a temporary basis, for in their interactions they are in a constant state of flux regarding their place in the structure. What he says of the primary categories of Marxist theory is revealing: For instance, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; in the contradiction between theory and practice, practice is the principal aspect; in the contradiction between the economic base and the superstructure, the economic base is the principal aspect; and there is no change in their respective positions. This is the mechanical materialist concept, not the dialectical materialist conception. True, the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role.23 Causation here is over-determined: social and historical events are products of the conjuncture of multiple contradictions. The role of the revolutionary subject was essential in shaping this idea of contradiction. In the first place, over-determined conjuncture suggests a revolutionary alternative, because such a situation is of its very nature open‑ended and open to interpretation. It is up to the revolutionary to interpret it in accordance with revolutionary goals. This is also where the importance of abstract theory as guide comes in; without the aid of theory, the revolutionary will be at a loss to make choices consistent with long‑term goals. Second, while itself a product of contradictions, revolutionary practice is also part of the structure of contradictions, and is most effective in aligning the contradictions in a manner consistent with revolutionary goals. The role of revolutionary struggle in converting an unfavorable situation to a favorable one was part of Mao’s analysis of contradiction mentioned above; it appears most prominently in his discussions of the military strategy of revolutionary struggle.24 Mao’s epistemological companion essay, “On practice” offers a more direct statement on interpretation as an essential component of revolutionary activity (or, if I may overstate the point, on revolutionary activity as

23 Mao, “On contradiction,” 335–6. 24 See, for instance, “On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. I, 152–254. 278 arif dirlik interpretative activity). On the surface, “On practice” offers an empiricist epistemology. As Mao presents it, cognition begins with perceptual cognition, which is “the stage of sense perceptions and impressions.”25 As sense perceptions are repeated and accumulate, “a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain in the process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are no longer phenomena, the separate aspects and the external relations of things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations of things.”26 (Mao also describes this as “the stage of rational knowledge.”) The knowledge thus acquired is then tested for its validity in actual practice, which leads to further perceptions and conceptual modifications in an ongoing cycle of perception‑conception‑practice‑perception. If Mao’s epistemology is empiricist, however, it is the empiricism of an activist who constructs knowledge in the process of reconstructing the world with revolutionary goals. Mao begins his discussion of cognition at the stage of perception, but this does not imply that the mind is a blank sheet of paper upon which perceptions rewrite themselves into conceptions—the mind already has a conceptual apparatus for organizing perceptions (implicit in the class character of knowledge) and a theoretical apparatus (dialectical materialism) for articulating them. His epistemology furthermore elevates certain activities over others in the acquisition of knowledge, namely the struggle for production and the class struggle, and the knowledge acquired has a clear goal: “making revolution.”27 Most important is the place of practice, which Mao consistently used in the sense of praxis: to activity change the world. The goal of “On Practice” is not to argue for a simplistic empiricism (“seeking truth from facts”), but to assert the priority of practice in cognition, as opposed to a theoretical dogmatism oblivious to concrete circumstances of revolution. Quoting Stalin, Mao observes: ‘Theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice; just as practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory.”28 “On Practice” may be viewed as a call for the revolutionary hermeneutic that Mao would elaborate on a month later in “On contradiction.” Composed as parts of a single project, the two discussions illuminate each other in their intertextuality. Mao’s understanding of knowledge as being

25 Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. I, 297. 26 Ibid., 298. 27 Ibid., 296, 300. 28 Ibid., 305. post-socialism revisited 279 inclusive of, but not limited to, interpretation, is expressed in the following statement: Fully to reflect a thing in its totality, to reflect its essence, to reflect its inherent laws, it is necessary through the exercise of thought to reconstruct the rich data of sense perception discarding the dross and selecting the essential, eliminating the false and retaining the true proceeding from the one to the other and from the outside to the inside, in order to form a system of concepts and theories—it is necessary to make a leap from perceptual to rational knowledge. Such reconstructed knowledge is not more empty or more unreliable [than empiricism]; on the contrary, whatever has been sci- entifically reconstructed in the process of cognition, on the basis of practice, reflects objective reality.29 There is a profound contradiction in Mao’s thinking. As a Marxist materialist, Mao believes that there exists an “objective reality” against which to judge the validity of competing forms of knowledge; hence his repeated references to cognition as a “reflection” of the world in the mind. At the same time, the essay “On contradiction” leaves little doubt that Mao views objective reality or the context of thought itself to be a product of contradictions; which renders it into an object of interpretation and “reconstruction.” His foray into the discussion of truth further reveals this contradiction in its simultaneous assertion of the “relativity” of truth, even of revolutionary truth, and the possibility of an “absolute truth,” as evidenced in his argument below: Marxists recognize that in the absolute and general process of development in the universe, the development of each particular process is relative, and that hence, in the endless flow of absolute truth, man’s knowledge of a particular process at any given stage of development is only relative truth. The sum total of innumerable relative truths constitutes absolute truth. Marxism‑Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice.30 The contradiction between absolute and relative truth can be overcome by turning to practice as “the criterion of truth.” Practice as a world-changing activity is bound up in Mao’s thinking with the notion of contradiction: that is, changing the world is a process of resolving contradictions, which leads to new contradictions, which leads to new practices, and so on. This is problematic, however, because, as the discussion of “contradiction” tells

29 Ibid., 303. 30 Ibid., 307–8. 280 arif dirlik us, practice in and of itself does not provide a direction to history, or any judgment of validity other than “what works, works.” The assumption of an absolute truth, in other words, serves as an ideological closure upon a fluid reality that is hardly objective. Indeed, as the product of human activity, “reality” constructs its understanding of the world in the process of reconstructing the world: The struggle of the proletariat and the revolutiories to change the world comprises the fulfillment of the following tasks: to change the objective world and, at the same time, their own subjective world to change their cognitive ability and change the relations between the subjective and the objective world.31 This representation of the world as undergoing constant revolutionary interpretation and construction is disruptive to the idea of the ideological closure, exposing it as a contradiction between theory and practice (and absolute and relative truth) that, in its open‑endedness, may only be resolved through revolutionary intervention. Mao’s Marxism could in the end restore a direction to history only through revolutionary will— and suppression of alternative interpretations.

III. The Past in the Present

Though it was a powerful instrument of the revolutionary practice that produced it, the rendering of theory into a hermeneutic in Mao Zedong Thought presented two problems of lasting significance. First, any situation, revolutionary or not, could lend itself to more than one interpretation (a so-called reading of contradictions). If the validity of interpretation can be judged only by its results, there is no a priori way of determining the correctness of any one interpretation. In such a case, the clash of interpretations might easily degenerate into endless conflict or forceful suppression of alternatives. Secondly, for the same reason, there is no telling under this system which choice best points to the long-term goal of socialism, especially since that utopian end has been secularized and historicized. The freedom gained by opening up theory to experimentation exacts a price in uncertainties over the meaning of socialism and the way to get there.

31 Ibid., 308. post-socialism revisited 281

The prominent role assigned to contradiction in Mao Zedong Thought suggested a world-view (and even a cosmology) that elevated conflict to a pervasive universal. Ironically, the immediate goal of this philosophy, within its historical context, was to justify putting an end to the conflict with the Guomindang, a class struggle, to establish an alliance against Japanese imperialism. This made the interpretation readily acceptable to most, especially the more orthodox adherents of Marxism in the party who did not approve of tampering with theory. Conflict over interpretations would assume much greater severity in ensuing years, especially after 1956, when the post-revolutionary leadership was faced with making decisions about the most appropriate way to proceed toward socialism. The choice seemed to be either rapid development of the forces of production to establish an economic basis for socialism, or deepening the revolution through further transformation of the relations of production, thus overcoming the contradictions that had been created by the developmental policies of the early years of the PRC. This, it was hoped, would also ultimately contribute to the development of the forces of production. The choice was not between development and revolution, as is sometimes suggested, but between different paths to development: the technological versus the political. Both choices, moreover, were justifiable in terms of theory. The choice to emphasize the political over the technological would dictate policy over the next two decades. Disagreements over this decision were resolved in the end by the elevation of conflict to a metaphysical principle that infused into everyday existence—the utopianization of revolution itself—and the assertion of revolutionary will over the demands of collective wisdom and organizational prudence. This time around, the experiment would take a heavy toll on society, in the process discrediting the interpretation that had informed it. The launch of “reform and opening” after 1978 was justified by the alternative that had been rejected in 1956: rapid development of the forces of production. The choice to reform was accompanied by the repudiation of further social conflict—especially class struggle—as a necessity in progress toward socialism. To put it somewhat crudely, the immediate task appeared to be the completion of the bourgeois revolution that had been aborted by the Cultural Revolution. Within the Chinese context, this meant a return to the New Democracy policies of the early 1950s, with an emphasis on class alliance and the encouragement of private initiative in economic development, which also seemed to require the dismantling of collective institutions established earlier. 282 arif dirlik

Equally radical was “opening,” which meant the repudiation of the autarkic policies pursued during the previous two decades. “Opening” in China coincided with important shifts in economic practices worldwide (especially in Eastern Asia) from import-substitution to export orientation, which by the 1990s would culminate in neoliberal globalization. Effective opening—the need to attract foreign capital—introduced pressures toward further erosion of the collective institutions associated with socialism. By the 1990s, when the hesitant opening of the 1980s gave way to full-scale integration into global capitalism, the “globalization” of the Chinese economy was on its way. Present-day China is the product of these policies, and is largely perceived within and without China as a continuation and fulfillment of the policies initiated in 1978. Nevertheless, as a recent study has suggested, we need a more nuanced understanding of the post-1978 period than the current portrayal of the last three decades as an inevitable progress (or decline, depending on political position) to capitalism and incorporation into the global capitalist economy. In her study, Lin Chun suggests a periodization that proceeds from the ambivalent openings of the 1980s (which the concept of “postsocialism” sought to capture) to the full-scale opening of the 1990s to the twenty-first century return of concerns about the future of socialism.32 These concerns are a product of the ecological and social problems created by the rapid developmental policies of the previous decade which, if unchecked, threaten not only further development but also the socialist claims from which they have derived at least some of their legitimacy. To be sure, development has alleviated poverty for large numbers of people, and brought enormous national prestige and power with it. But it has also created immense social and regional inequalities, wrought havoc on the environment, and nourished a popular culture (similar to those found elsewhere under global capitalism) of consumerism, indifference to public issues, and seemingly endless tolerance of inequality and injustice. This has created an enormous gap between the leadership (which continues to claim revolutionary culture as its own) and the general public, especially the urban public. In 1956, in “On the Ten Great Relationships,” Mao Zedong offered an analysis of the contradictions in Chinese society that he thought obstructed any progress toward socialism.33 The developments of

32 Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 33 The “ten relationships” were between (1) industry and agriculture, and between heavy industry and light industry; (2) industry in the coastal regions and industry in the interior; post-socialism revisited 283 the last three decades have once again brought to the forefront many of these contradictions, albeit with somewhat different characteristics than in the 1950s. As the current leadership is quite ready to admit, the resolution of these contradictions is a major challenge within modern China. Interestingly, however, the interpretation of these contradictions and suggestions for their resolution are still conditioned by the same two alternatives: they are either considered products of backwardness that will go away with further development or products of the development policies that need social and political transformation for their resolution. What distinguishes China from other societies with comparable problems—and justifies the perspective afforded by the concept of “postsocialism”—is the continued willingness in Chinese politics and intellectual debate to entertain the necessity of social and political transformation in the resolution of these contradictions. There may be no agreement on what such transformations may entail, the possibilities under consideration may have proliferated with opening up to the world and to the past, but the consideration is itself significant in revealing the persistence of the legacies of the socialist revolution. Socialism has acquired new dimensions through descriptive terminology that seeks to maintain an idealist commitment to transcending the past and the present without being trapped in the language of orthodoxy, for example: “small-welfare society” (小康社会 xiaokang shehui), “harmonious society” (和谐社会 hexie shehui), and “ecological civilization” (生态文明 shengtai wenming). Innovations at the conceptual level are accompanied by experimentation with new forms of governance. Moreover, the leadership has by no means given up on its theoretical commitments to Marxism, as indicated by renewed efforts to rejuvenate the philosophy by reinterpreting it in response to a changed world situation, efforts supported by President Hu Jintao himself. Contemporary experimentation with political theory is no doubt reformist—and incremental, to cite one of its theorists.34 This presupposes a recognition of socialism not as a utopian beacon but as an uncharted frontier, where what lies ahead is far less certain than what needs to

(3) economic construction and defense construction; (4) the state, the units of produc tion, and the individual producers; (5) the Centre and the regions; (6) the Han nationality and the national minorities; (7) the Communist Party and non-party; (8) revolutionary and counter-revolutionary; (9) right and wrong; and (10) China and other countries. 34 Yu Keping, “Toward an Incremental Democracy and Governance: Chinese Theo ries and Assessment Criteria,” in Yu Keping, Globalization and Changes in China’s Governance(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008), Chapter 9. 284 arif dirlik be overcome at the present, a secular rather than religious utopianism. Analysis of the contradictions of Chinese society presently is even more complicated than in the past, due to the integration with global capitalism, and so are the possibilities of reading contradictions and the predicament of determining what reading may be most consistent with long-term aspirations. One solution to the predicament is to replace the teleology of a distant utopia with a succession of short-term goals toward a desirable future, while taking care to ensure that the solutions to present contin- gencies do not create obstacles to that future’s ultimate realization.

IV. To the Future—If There is One

I will conclude here with a few observations on the contradictions that need to be overcome. I would like to begin with an explanation of the latter half of the title: “if there is one.” The ecological and resource crisis of the present is so serious that it is reasonable to wonder if humanity has a future. To some, this makes it seem pointless to talk about socialism, or any other “-ism,” as political causes appear trivial in the perspective of the far greater problem of the human relationship to nature. On the contrary, I think that very problem makes it more important than ever to speak to political issues, and to develop the kind of political system that may best contribute to human survival and welfare. Over the last sixty years, Chinese socialism has been driven by the related goals of achieving national wealth and security on the one hand, and distributive justice on the other. In the early 1950s, priority was given to building up a heavy industrial base and promoting collectivization in agriculture—both to increase production and to bring greater equality to rural society. The following twenty years witnessed a shift of emphasis to radical egalitarianism, accompanied by encouragement of self-reliance at all levels of society, including the national level, which meant as little interaction as possible with the outside world. The policies pursued were reminiscent of a war economy driven by an excessive concern for security and a puritanical control of consumption, exemplifying self-sacrifice for the greater collective good. Changes in the world situation—both economic and political—beginning in the 1980s made possible the policies of “reform and opening,” which aligned the direction of development with the contemporary changes in the capitalist world economy. The concern for national welfare and security was still paramount, but the quest for equality now placed priority on the alleviation of poverty through the rapid development of production. In the process, there was an attenuation post-socialism revisited 285 of distributive justice, which pushed the achievement of socialism further and further toward an unspecified future. This change in direction created its own contradictions, whose political, social, and cultural dimensions I have already delineated. These are all recognized by the leadership and Chinese intellectuals. One problem that has not received sufficient attention, however, is the idea of “development” itself. The program suggested by “the scientific outlook on development” (科学发展观 kexue fazhan guan) for instance, has noted the importance of making adjustments in development policies to alleviate ecological and social problems and move toward more “sustainable” development, but it does not question the idea of development itself. In other words, the fundamental question that faces China and the world is whether “development” as it has been understood since the nineteenth century, but especially since 1945, is indeed sustainable. This, I think, should be the current point of departure for all discussions, including those on the present and future of socialism. In outlining “the scientific outlook on development,” President Hu stated that “humans (ren) are the point of departure for and the end of development.” This is in many ways what socialism has always been about in theory, if not in practice: establishing a society in which humans can live in welfare, justice, and dignity. But is this what contemporary development pursues? If not, can we ever hope to even come close to a socialist society through developmental programs that negate these goals? Furthermore, how must we approach these goals, having been made painfully aware by natural destruction that there are ecological limits to what we call development? These limits have been there all along. They have become threaten- ingly visible with the globalization of capital, and the spread globally of its productive and consumptive practices. The destruction of nature did not begin with capitalism, but the same technologies that enabled humans to “conquer” nature and expand the material horizon of human development also unleashed forces of unprecedented power in human destructiveness. These forces have been intensified with the globalization of capital, and its promise of limitless material progress. I have argued elsewhere that socialism, beginning with Karl Marx, has shared in the developmentalist assumptions of capitalism.35 Marx was quite aware of the destructiveness of capitalism. He nevertheless was

35 Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). 286 arif dirlik fascinated by the human creativity and productive forces unleashed by capitalism, and saw in them the means to fulfilling human needs that must be the basis for socialism. The rendering of capitalism into the prerequisite for socialism would subsequently justify the argument that the transition to socialism must await the full development of the forces of production—though it remains unclear what constitutes full development, and whether a fully developed capitalist society would lend itself to socialist transformation. It is equally unclear at what point in the development new relations of production would emerge to signal the coming of socialism. Capitalist societies, on the other hand, have been able to sustain the myth of limitless and universal development, as evidenced by the wealth they have created; the promise of the ability of technological creativity to overcome human problems, including the problems created by its own development; and even the fairer distribution of social wealth they had achieved—at least until recently. The myth has drawn additional plausibility from the conscious representation as poverty the condition not only of the hopelessly needy, but also of those who did not have access to the products of capital, and did not need to do so for their survival.36 The expansion of capitalism, in other words, has depended not only on the production of goods to satisfy human needs, but also on the production of the need to make those goods indispensable to human life. In the process, it has concealed inequalities in access to its products through the promise of their availability to all successful players in its operations. Such inequality both within and between nations has contributed to the invisibility of ecological limits to development, limits which have become far more visible as the globalization of capital opens up production and consumption to those formerly excluded from it. Contingent factors notwithstanding, including outright instances of theft and plun- der, it remains to be seen how much of the current crisis of the capitalist world economy is due to overproduction brought about by competition among nations to join the capitalist market. Such competition also has added to pressures on the environment and resources.

36 How development policy was based on arguments of poverty is analyzed in Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). The question of the need to distinguish different kinds and levels of poverty is analyzed in Albert Tevoedjre, Poverty: Wealth of Mankind (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979). post-socialism revisited 287

If these arguments have any plausibility at all, it follows (in answer to the question I posed above) that developmental policies associated with the globalization of capitalism are not sustainable—even with so-called sustainable development, which seeks to bring an ecological dimension to development without addressing the most fundamental questions it raises about poverty and development itself. Reconsideration of these concepts cannot be undertaken on a nation-by-nation basis, as the problems that call it forth are products of globalization. But some nations, by virtue of the part they have played in globalization, are strategically better placed than others to take the lead. The PRC is one such nation. Not just because of its contemporary importance in the global economy, but also because of its experience with efforts to formulate an alternative to the capitalist world system. The idealism that is the legacy of the revolution is still visible in the leadership’s affirmation of humans as the goal of development. No less important is the leadership’s willingness to rename past efforts to accord with new circumstances. Ideals expressed through concepts such as the “harmonious society” or “ecological civilization” draw upon past visions of socialism, among other legacies, but also promise to shed the intellectual and political baggage associated with them. Above all, they offer signs of continued willingness to experiment with alternatives to the present, which provides an interesting contrast to the reluctance of even the most progressive leaders in Europe, North America, and elsewhere to question the fundamental assumptions of capitalist society. It remains to be seen whether or not the idealism that has characterized the current leadership’s programmatic statements will be fulfilled in reality or have lasting power beyond the present. For the time being, China’s ambivalent relationship to global capitalism may facilitate a leadership role in the search for alternatives to the present situation. While the globalization of the economy has had an impact on all parts of Chi- nese society, large sections of the population have not benefited from it, though they have certainly suffered from its consequences. The current leadership is deeply aware of this problem, and has already begun to address it. The global economic crisis, ironically, has provided further stimulus for investment in improving the lives of the Chinese people, especially the rural population in the interior. Stemming the dislocation of the rural population, strengthening rural reconstruction, and distributing internally and evenly the benefits of globalization may go a long way toward overcoming some of the inequalities created by globalization, and toward establishing the basis for an economy that gives priority to the 288 arif dirlik

needs of the population over the demands of a global economy abstracted from daily life. This by no means implies a return to economic isolation. The “off- grounding” of the economy under globalization has come close to realizing basic premises of the capitalist economy: to valorize exchange over local need, separate the consumer from the direct producer, and subject both to the demands of financial accumulation. The wealth thus created has benefited a fraction of the world’s population, while leaving the great majority at the mercy of the motions of capital that has grown ever more vulnerable to unscrupulous manipulation having been liberated from everyday production, consumption, and exchange. The task now is to re- ground the economy by turning to a domestic economy which, while not isolated from the world, gives priority to the needs of the people and the creation of a sustainable future. Of course, the challenge is not just economic, but political and ecological as well. The re-grounding of the economy will also give a closer hearing to the people and their needs, rather than manipulate them with illusory dreams of endless consumption. This must be a necessary point of departure for any kind of democratic governance. The issue of democracy is complex and controversial in China and elsewhere. It is rendered more complex by politicians such as former US president George W. Bush, who advocated it abroad but did not hesitate to curb it at home. Well- intentioned intellectuals in the PRC and elsewhere have raised serious questions about universalizing democratic practices as they evolve in Europe and North America.37 Democratic governance must take different

37 See the discussion by Yu Keping in his collection of essays Minzhu shige hao dongxi 《民主是个好东西》(Democracy is a Good Thing) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chu banshe, 2006), especially the title essay. See also his preface to his recent book,《让民主造福中国》(Rang minzhu zaofu Zhongguo) (Make Democracy Serve China) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban she, 2009). Whether or not the Chinese people are ready for democracy is raised in a recent discussion by the distinguished writer Han Shaogong in “Democracy: Lyrical Poem and Construction Blueprint” [included in this volume—Editors]. This question, in relationship to the possibilities of socialism, is also taken up in an inter view by Barbara Foley with Wang Fengzhen and Xie Shaobo, “Crossroads: China’s Future Under Debate,” published in Science and Society, 73.2 (2009): 193–210. For a thoughtful discussion by Indian intellectual Harbans Mukhia, see “Liberal Democracy for Asia and the World: Problems and Prospects,” Valedictory Speech to the 20th Anniversary Meet ing of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (November 14–17, 2008). For examples of experimentation with local governance, see,《中国地方政府创新》(Zhongguo difang zhengfu chuangxin) (Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance, 2005–2006)(Beijing: China Center for Compara tive Politics and Economics, 2007). post-socialism revisited 289 forms, not only in different societies but even in different locations within a single society. On the other hand, democracy also serves an essential function of opening up channels of communication between governors and the governed, and has an important part to play in curtailing corruption and the arbitrary use of power—which is a major consideration, especially under circumstances of bureaucratic capitalism. Democracy may also be a precondition of any radical transformation in development policy; it has the ability to mobilize the population in favor of such transformation—not as its passive objects but as active participants whose everyday experiences serve as a resource in the formulation of policy. This input must be acknowledged if development policy is to do more than pay lip service to local needs and experience. Giving priority to everyday life over abstract promises also brings into play ecological considerations as a condition of survival, instead of merely an economic calculation. Given its strategic role, any shift in the Chinese economy will have significant repercussions globally. We frequently hear that China has a major part to play in countering the current global recession. The usual implication is that China may help return the global economy to its image before the recession: unsustainable capitalism. We may suggest, to the contrary, that China’s part should be in effecting a change of direction in economic practices globally—in re‑grounding the global economy. China has benefited from globalization (in its emergence as an economic power) and contributed to globalization, both in its service as a “global factory,” as well as by providing the credits that have made possible the continued illusion of endless consumption, not just in advanced capitalist societies but even in the Global South. A significant shift in economic practices in China is likely to force a much-needed rethinking of development in these societies. Especially important in this regard is the leadership role China could play in Africa and Latin America. There has been some ambivalence concerning intensified Chinese activity in the Global South in recent years. We may easily dismiss charges of Chinese colonialism as complaints by representatives of former colonial powers who resent intrusion in their former colonies. But the resentment goes beyond them to include native populations, who justifiably perceive in Chinese activity the colonialism of an emergent world power that is concerned primarily with the extraction of resources without any heed for economic and ecological consequences; the creation of markets for its cheaper and shoddier commodities; and the separation of economic activity from political consequence that enables business with unscrupulous dictators. Overcoming these perceptions requires, among 290 arif dirlik other things, greater control of corporations, some of which seem to be as oblivious to the social and economic damage they inflict on populations elsewhere as they are to the problems within China itself. On the other hand, China is also a developing country, which provides a sense of kinship with societies of the Global South. No less important are shared memories of oppression and exploitation by European colonialism, and an earlier identification as Third World societies. These commonali- ties provide a basis for cooperation and the formulation of alternative development strategies that respond to the particular needs of different societies. Sensitivity to difference has been a hallmark of Chinese development, particularly when compared to the one-size-fits-all philosophy that has guided modernization strategies inspired by capitalism (followed in the past by socialist societies as well).38 The redefinition of development in China and the Global South, however, may have the greatest consequences for the United States and Europe, especially the former. Advanced capitalist societies continue directly and indirectly to consume the greater part of the world’s resources, and make the greatest contribution to the degradation of the environment. The export of production to locations in the Global South, including China and India, has resulted in these societies servicing the consumption needs of advanced capitalist societies and gaining in exchange a share of the resource depletion and environmental degradation. The encroaching capitalist societies have, at the very least, served as models and exporters of unsustainable economic practices. If the world economy is to become sustainable, one of the most difficult things these societies may have to face is the necessity of lowering the living standards to which they have been accustomed. Whether in developed or developing societies, or in international fora, attention in discussions of development is focused almost invariably on raising standards of living— of the poor nationally and of poor nations globally. The Euro-modern faith in development, which has gone global since World War II, makes it challenging to acknowledge the unfortunate truth: it may be physically and socially impossible to raise the living standards of the world’s populations

38 For a discussion of some of these possibilities, see, Edward Friedman, “How Eco nomic Superpower China Could Transform Africa,” Journal of Chinese Political Science, No. 14 (2009): 1–20. For a useful survey of Chinese activities in Africa, with interviews with African leaders, see the series of reports from 2008–2009 by Richard Behar in www .fastcompany.com, an internet publication of the Harvard Business School. As the reports suggest, some of this activity is a direct product of globalization: the search for resources to sustain production in China for consumption in the United States and Europe. post-socialism revisited 291 to the levels of the middle class (not to mention the wealthy) in advanced capitalist societies. Furthermore, middle classes in advanced societies will have to lower their standards of living as pressures on resources intensify globally. There is already some evidence that this is happening; to admit it in development thinking and policy would be to overcome a major ideological hurdle to the rethinking of development. Here, too, China could play a leadership role. As a developing country, it may still be possible to distinguish the alleviation of poverty from the mimicking of middle-class life in advanced capitalist societies. To do so, however, it is necessary to question not only the illusions of globalism, but also legacies of past notions of socialism that mortgaged socialist possibilities against capitalist developmentalism. At this particular juncture in human history, it seems that socialism, while it continues to draw its poetry from the future, as Marx put it, must also turn to the past for clues to help make that future possible.

Chapter Thirteen

Reinterpreting “Capitalist Restoration” in China: Toward A Historical Critique of “Actually Existing Market Socialism”1

Yiching Wu

Over three decades after China ventured down the path of capitalist marketization, it is high time to take a hard look and ask some tough questions. Set against the bleak reality of increasing socioeconomic disparity and misery, the intellectual consensus with regard to the direction and rationality of post-Mao reforms—a rather fragile one from the very beginning—has begun to unravel. Many critics—both Chinese and Western—have argued that the Chinese state’s program of “market reforms,” which was to alleg- edly invigorate socialism, has instead fundamentally subverted Chinese socialism, and led the country on a path of increasingly capitalist development.2 These critics contend that the considerable costs of economic liberalization reflect the inherent antagonisms of the imposed capitalist system. Furthermore, market socialism—or “socialist market reforms,” as in the official Chinese parlance—is, at best a contradiction in terms, an unstable formation awaiting collapse. Chinese reforms have resulted in increased poverty and have intensified exploitation, integral components of capitalist marketization. The vital issue of class antagonism is not to be glossed over by the neoliberal myth of “transition.”

1 An earlier version of this article was published in Monthly Review 57, no. 6 (November 2005), 44–63. The author wishes to thank Judith Farquhar, Saul Thomas, Matthew Hale, Mingyu Zheng, and David Schweickart for helpful discussions and suggestions. 2 For a sample of this growing body of critical literature, see Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press, 2005); Wang Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, Economy in Transition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism ((Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Wang Chaohua, ed., One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003); Zhang Xudong, ed., Whither China?: Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 294 yiching wu

I. Market Socialism: Utopian or Historical?

The problem of post-socialist market transition extends far beyond the example of China. Market socialism has become a major field of interest among sociologists, political theorists, and economists on the left. Its pro- ponents have devised many ways in which socialist values may be combined with market mechanisms, yet critics have expressed doubts as to whether such models can be coherent, and whether they are in fact desirable. In a well-known exchange between Ernest Mandel and Alec Nove, Mandel—a key critic of market socialism—insisted that the debate was centered neither on reform strategies nor on the malfunctions which the market is meant to fix; rather: Our controversy turns only around two questions: whether socialism as conceived by Marx—i.e. a society ruled by freely associated producers, in which commodity production (market economy), social classes, and the state have withered away—is feasible, and whether it is desirable.3 The left generally view the market negatively. Even for those who might sympathize with the promise of market socialism, the market is often viewed with ambivalence, as at best a necessary evil, only to be tolerated if accompanied by very vigilant regulation. Market relations are viewed as contradicting and undermining the ideal of socialism. An unbridgeable gulf exists between socialism and the market—the system of commodity relations upon which capitalism has historically and structurally rested. That brings us back to the question: for reforming and reinvigorating socialism, why the market road after all? According to Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett’s recent book China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle, for example, it was the Chinese government’s policy—and in particular that of Deng Xiaoping, the “Grand Architect” of China’s market reforms—that engineered the ideological reversal that has led the country down the path of what has been essentially a capitalist counter-revolution: The party . . . argued that solving China’s economic problems required raising the country’s productive forces and not further experimentation with new socialist relations of production. And, according to Deng, the best way to enhance these productive forces was through greater use of markets.4

3 Ernest Mandel, “The Myth of Market Socialism,” New Left Review, No. 169 (1988), 108, italics added; also see Alec Nove, “Markets and Socialism,” New Left Review, No. 161 (1987), 98–104. 4 Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, China and Socialism, 2005, 39. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 295

In their forward to Hart-Landsberg and Burkett’s book, Monthly Review editors Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster point out that the post- Mao “U-turn in the ruling ideology” originated in the ideological diver- gence in the earlier phase of Chinese socialism: “What is clear from the Chinese experience is that the basis of the class struggle continues even after nationalization of business institutions. . . . At heart, as Mao pointed out, even some in high Communist Party positions wanted to take the ‘capitalist road.’ ”5 According to this view, shortly after Mao’s death, a small clique of renegade leaders or “capitalist roaders” succeeded in reversing the achievements of the revolution and imposing the capitalist road by governmental fiat. From this perspective, the restoration of capitalism is now almost complete. In a somewhat similar vein, David Harvey writes in his latest book A Brief History of Neoliberalism: Future historians may well look upon the years 1978–80 as a revolutionary turning-point in the world’s social and economic history. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping took the first momentous steps towards the liberalization of a communist-ruled economy in a country that accounted for a fifth of the world’s population. The path that Deng defined was to transform China in two decades from a closed backwater to an open centre of capitalist dynamism with sustained growth rates unparalleled in human history.6 Such views have formed the kernel of a long-standing tradition of radical analysis and criticism with respect to China’s post-Mao transformations. Notwithstanding the admirable efforts to stress the class perspective, some of its basic historical premises need to be scrutinized in order for its critical potential to be more fully realized. Clearly, there is also a methodological orientation at stake here. Eric Hobsbawm noted that the importance of actors in a drama does not necessarily mean that they are also serving as dramatist, producer, or stage- designer. Echoing Hobsbawm’s sentiment, I argue that we can approach the problem of postsocialist market reforms somewhat differently, in a way that is more historically situated and less conceptually dichotomous. The debate concerning “market socialism”—whether it can be a viable or coherent model on the path to socialism—may be fully legitimate and important, in theory at least. However, we must also examine the historical side of the coin—for the processes of history should matter much more, and that is where we should focus our attention—unless our job is merely to design blueprints for institutional utopias in a pristine political

5 Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “Forward,” China and Socialism, 2005, 8. 6 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 1. 296 yiching wu

laboratory. Market measures are usually adopted to combat societies’ difficulties, and they derive their political significance from the specific historical setting in which they are deployed. Therefore, in what way is such an apparently ideological line conditioned by determinate class and political relations? Are market reforms principally a policy matter designed by the leadership? Should we focus on the class conditions of reforms, as well as their class consequences? What is really behind the “market line?”

II. Contradictions of the “Revolutionary State”

A critical assessment of Chinese socialism is much needed in order to understand its contemporary mutations. Instead of merely listing the failings, which has been done by many, we should also consider a stance that may bring the class dimension into sharper focus. How do we characterize the basic class relationships characteristic of post-1949 Chinese society? Where do we begin? There is no doubt that class in Chinese socialism is a thorny issue. This is first and foremost a more general political and theoretical problem. Richard Kraus, the author of perhaps the best book on the subject, wrote that “there still exists no adequate theory of socialist class relationships,”7 and his remark is probably no less true today than it was two decades ago. For decades, Marxists of various strands have been engaged in intense arguments about the class nature of Soviet-style state socialism, and enormous political and theoretical energy has been expended on these debates. Briefly, the controversies have centered on three closely interrelated issues: first, whether there exists a ruling class in state socialism; second, how its class character may be defined, or whether it constitutes a bourgeois or state-capitalist class; and third, how the nature of such societies and polities may be characterized in class-analytic terms. Yet for our purpose of understanding China’s market path, a more flexible approach may suffice for the moment, which may even be more productive in the long run. Our task here is not to categorize whether Chinese society was less or more socialist, or even capitalist. Such an approach only smacks of political pedantry. Rather our present inquiry is to recognize the fundamentally class-divided nature of Chinese socialism, without having to rush to definitive closure with regard to the state’s class

7 Richard Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 190. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 297

character. By providing a class perspective, China’s current transformations can be brought into focus. Any critical reassessment of Chinese socialism must begin with the historical achievements of the Chinese Revolution. Led by a revolutionary party with vast popular support, the protracted struggle remade a dilapi- dated China as a modern nation-state. After 1949, the new state abolished private ownership by expropriating the property-owning elites. However, despite the regime’s broad accomplishments, we should also recognize— as Mao did over half a century ago—that the Communist-led revolution did not succeed in eradicating all significant forms of social and political inequality, although it eliminated many preexisting forms of inequality and profoundly modified the rest. The historical outcome of one of the greatest revolutions in the twentieth century, socialist China nevertheless remained a part of the capitalist world-economy, and was under intense military and economic pressure from the hegemonic powers. In adopting the classic Soviet strategy of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “mercantilist semiwithdrawal from the world-economy”8—a strategic choice necessitated by the structure of global capitalist relationships— centralized economic planning and control of resources by a powerful bureaucracy vastly enhanced the state’s capacity to extract surplus labor and mobilize the population for rapid capital accumulation. This, in turn, enabled the rise of self-interested state-managers and professional experts. In spite of the people’ constitutionally enshrined status as the “master of the state,” the revolution essentially declassed Chinese society by leveling preexisting hierarchies, while new class differences—together with new forms of social conflict—emerged. These facts have great relevance for a critical analysis of the historical trajectory of Chinese socialism in general. In this system, unlike capitalism, as it is conventionally understood, the bureaucratic stratum possessed no private ownership in the means of production. Strictly speaking, however, its “property” was the state. Economic extraction was achieved by the state’s monopoly of coercive power, typically unmediated by market relations. Labor power did not take the form of commodity, but was treated directly as economic resource. Dependent on the state, labor was essentially unfree—it literally was “merged with the means of

8 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays by Immanuel Wallerstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 31. 298 yiching wu production.”9 The result was that “public” ownership existed largely as a legal fiction. Through the concentration of power in the state, the political apparatus once used to dismantle prerevolutionary inequalities had given rise to new forms of domination. “When revolutionaries become rulers, a profound social and ideological as well as political transformation takes place,” as Maurice Meisner cogently observed. “The concept of a ‘revolutionary state,’ at least over an extended period of time, is a contradiction in terms.”10

III. Marketization and Ruling-Class Formation

I want to be clear that my intention here is not to denounce the past failings of socialism, which many have already done. Rather, the point is that any serious attempt to critically examine China’s contemporary transformations from a class-analytic perspective must begin with the sober recognition of the historical limitations of “actually existing socialism,” taking its political and historical implications into very serious consideration. If the market road to socialism has utterly failed in China, how do we understand and interpret this path? Market reforms generally do not occur in a social or political vacuum. “Men make their own history,” argued Marx, “but they do not make it just as they please.” The new market society is not some historical clay that either Beijing’s Grand Architect or Washington’s neoliberal designers can mould at will. Rather, market reforms are necessarily mediated by existing social relations. As a result we must keep in mind the historical conditions under which market measures are being employed, and try to grasp the full political import of such conditions. Granted, capitalist market relations conflict with socialist values, but they must also pass through the Chi- nese polity and its prevalent social and political structure. In doing so, marketization tends to amplify deeply entrenched class privileges and inequalities. In the making of the new historical bloc—the unholy alliance between capital and state power—market-generated disparities are com- pounded by bureaucratic prerogatives, which are not commonly believed

9 Richard Smith, “The Chinese Road to Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 199 (May– June 1993), 71. 10 Maurice Meisner, “The Deradicalization of Chinese Socialism,” in Marxism and the Chinese Experiences: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Socialism, ed. Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 350–51. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 299 to be antagonistic to the market, but rather, coexist with it in a mutually reinforcing way. Hence, if the market leads to “capitalist restoration,” it is in part because it supplies fresh opportunities for certain continuous— and yet previously amorphous—processes of class formation to differentiate, accelerate or even break out. That is, the governing elite are now able to employ their monopolized political power for direct economic gains, and to convert the state-controlled assets to their own private capital. Marketization does not necessarily bring about fundamental changes in the basic structure and organization of class power, but it unquestionably transforms and displaces its field of application, by multiplying the nodes and circuits where ruling-class power can be deployed. Such processes of ruling-class development are indeed structurally conditioned, yet they may also exhibit a certain amorphous or uneven character. This may warrant some additional clarification. The alienation of the state does not necessarily mean that bureaucracy and bureaucrats have already formed a fully developed ruling class or bourgeois class. We need to keep in mind that class structure and class formation are two different levels of analysis. A useful distinction can be maintained between structural positions and developmental potentials or possibilities, with the latter being structurally conditioned but not quite fully determined. I argued earlier that critique of China’s post-socialist transitions may benefit from existing Marxist discussions on state socialism or state capitalism. But I do not believe that should amount to a simplistic adoption of ready- made concepts. As a matter of fact, the problem of capitalist restoration would have been much more easily resolvable if we could simply claim, as Chris Harman has famously argued in the Eastern European context, that the current changes represent neither a historical slide backwards nor a leap forward, but only a step “sideways”—a self-restructuring of capitalism, or in the words of Mike Haynes, “an internal transformation within a mode of production, in this instance a shift in the form of capitalism from one of strong state capitalism to more mixed state and market forms.”11 But that, I think, is too hasty a solution for the particular problem of Chi- nese socialism and its capitalist transformation. Instead, I would argue that our present inquiry would benefit from a re-working of the central arguments in these debates along a more historical line—hitherto based primarily on a synchronic mode of analysis—by

11 Mike Haynes, “Class and Crisis: the Transition in Eastern Europe,” International Socialism 54, 1992 (Spring), 47, italics added; Chris Harman, “The Storm Breaks,” Interna tional Socialism 46, 1990, 3–94. 300 yiching wu adapting them into a more flexible or extended temporal framework. The point is rather simple: the ruling stratum under state socialism (even with its long-standing monopoly of politico-economic powers) might not have already evolved into a fully grown bourgeois class or a ruling class at a given historical point (for example, China on the eve of the Cultural Revo- lution in 1965).12 However, that does not mean that they are not capable of evolving into a fully-blown ruling class when objective conditions become more hospitable. New institutional mechanisms and ideological resources may become available to encourage tendencies that have previously remained in latency. To this end, I argue that some sense of historical indeterminacy may indeed benefit us. The problem of class formation in post-revolutionary China, with regard to the ruling class in particular, may be messier than what the neat formulations of state-capitalist theory can accommodate— at least in some of its stronger versions. Yet class is conventionally defined as a relationship between collectivities whose structurally defined positions and interests in the social division of labor are necessarily antagonistic. Given such a view, I understand I may encounter some theoretical difficulties: for example, can there be dominated and exploited classes without a well-developed or well-defined ruling class? Would it be totally absurd in conceptual terms to talk about a state but not a fully constituted dominant class? Or, can certain class functions be fulfilled, for example the control of means of production, surplus extraction, domination, etc., without full-fledged formation of the subjects that perform such functions? Such “historical unevenness” would be far less troubling if we weren’t so burdened by our conventional analytical schema, and were able to project a more expansive temporal framework. It should not come as a total surprise to us that the experience of history is quite often more complicated than our elegant conceptual frameworks. Throughout history, class subjects and positions form, re-form, and fragment, yet it is highly improbable that all these jigsaw pieces will fall into their proper place all at once. What we have witnessed in China during the past three decades is precisely the blossoming—the phase of acceleration—of the continuous yet uneven process of ruling-class formation. A “cadre-capitalist” class has been developing with astonishingly swift speed; striving to expropriate

12 I will discuss the political and historical significance of the Chinese Cultural Revolu tion in a later section. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 301 public assets by any means necessary. But denouncing these illicit practices as mere corruption tends to grossly trivialize their political and historical significance. It is under the broader rubric of state (re)-formation and capital accumulation that such matters should be discussed. What is happening in China today is nothing short of a great societal transformation—the brutal processes of primitive capital accumulation. But it is occurring with a twist; and this is what is most important for us to keep in mind. Specifically, privatization and capital accumulation have been spearheaded often by a specific class of agents—the bureaucratic power-holders and their networks of well-placed cronies. Such systematic conversion of public assets into private capital constitutes part of a more general process of privatization of political power. The bureaucratic monopoly of economic and political powers is therefore key to our understanding of the historical course of China’s “capitalist restoration.” The issue here is not how this might account for the apparent “primi- tiveness” of “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.”13 Rather, what I am trying to articulate is a sense of the pivotal role played by the bureaucratic class in China’s march toward capitalism. A bureaucratically-dominated socialist state can not be revitalized simply by embellishing or mixing it with the market. A fundamental political transformation is imperative, lest its existing social-class relationships and inequalities inevitably constrain and distort whatever effects such measures may bring about, chan- neling them in a direction that can only further aggravate existing social and political antagonisms.

IV. Marketization and Class Power: The Sweezy-Bettelheim Debate Revisited

There may be another angle from which to approach socialism’s market path from a class-analytic standpoint, namely, marketization as ruling- class strategy. Here it may be useful to revisit some of the ideas from the famous Sweezy-Bettelheim exchange from thirty years ago. Both Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim were outspoken critics of the notion of market socialism, long before it became intellectually fashionable. Suffice it to say that their decade-long discussions revolved around two major issues: first, how to interpret the trend toward capitalist restoration, and

13 For an insightful albeit insufficient discussion of “neoliberalism with Chinese charac teristics,” see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 120–51. 302 yiching wu second, the class nature of socialism. These issues are hardly irrelevant to our concerns today. For Sweezy, the market constitutes “a standing danger to the system and unless strictly hedged in and controlled will lead to degeneration and retrogression.”14 Bettelheim’s sympathetic criticism of Sweezy rests on his state-capitalism thesis, which was developed in his seminal study of early Soviet history.15 According to Bettelheim, market relations are only the secondary fact, or the “indices or results,” that express an anterior political relationship. The decisive factor here is the underlying structure of class power, wherein the “the proletariat . . . has lost its power to a new bourgeoisie, with the result that the revisionist leadership is today the instrument of this new bourgeoisie.”16 This, for Bettelheim, constitutes the class origin of market liberalization—“If . . . the restoration of bourgeois domination is accompanied by an extension of the role of the market, this is evidently because this domination cannot be complete except through the full restoration of market relationships.”17 Sweezy’s important formulation of the “post-revolutionary society” reflects his substantive agreement with Bettelheim with respect to the class-stratified character of actually existing socialism (as it was then called), despite their sharp disagreements over its specific class nature. Sweezy argues in no less strong terms that a “post-revolutionary society” is class-divided, and this is worth quoting at some length: The most important difference between capitalism and post-revolutionary society is that this overwhelming dominance of capital has been broken and replaced by the direct rule of a new ruling class which derives its power . . . from the unmediated control of the state and its multiform apparatuses of coercion. This means that the utilization of society’s surplus product—which . . . is produced by a propertyless working class—is no longer governed by the laws of value and capital accumulation but instead becomes the central focus of a political process and of course of political struggles, including (but not exclusively) class struggles.18

14 Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 26–7. 15 See Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR: The First Period, 1917–1923 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976). 16 Sweezy and Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism 16, 29, emphasis original. 17 Ibid., 20, emphasis original. 18 Paul Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 147, italics added. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 303

But in contrast to Bettelheim’s strong state-capitalist argument, Sweezy also asserts that such societies are neither socialist nor capitalist. For Sweezy, the post-revolutionary society, in spite of its fundamental reality of class division and domination, is still more or less indeterminant or inchoate, or a transitional “two-way street”: Post-revolutionary society contains not only contradictions inherited from millennia of class-riven society, but it produces and reproduces its own contradictions. This revolution provides no final solutions. It only opens the possibility of moving forward in the direction of eliminating classes. But the existence of this as possibility implies its opposite, the possibility of moving backward toward the re-entrenchment of an exploiting class based not on private property in the means of production but on control of an all-encompassing repressive state apparatus.19 In such a society “two forces are in opposition to each other and are necessarily locked in an uninterrupted struggle for dominance;” therefore it is the crucial questions of “the location of state power and its use” that decisively determine whether the society will be able to move forward to socialism or slide backwards toward capitalism.20 The forward movement toward socialism would require a progressive state power and economic policy—“the leadership and guidance of a party deeply rooted in the working class and dedicated to its emancipation.”21 For Sweezy, China and the Soviet Union exemplify the two divergent political and ideological courses in response to socialism’s socioeconomic woes. Whereas Mao- ist China was more successful in revitalizing socialism by carrying out a cultural revolution, the Soviet Union failed utterly in this task and had to rely on capitalist measures of market discipline and incentives. While I am somewhat in agreement with Bettelheim, he posited too direct—and, as a result too deterministic—a link between class structure and class formation. In this regard, Sweezy’s concept of post-revolutionary society has great heuristic value. Sweezy begins with a postulation that appears to be deceptively minimal—that is, the unambiguous recognition of the fundamental fact of class rule. However, in allowing greater scope for historical possibility, Sweezy’s approach is more elastic and potentially more productive in the end if we are willing to pursue its implications further. With the benefit of historical hindsight, Sweezy’s argument is not without its own problems. There seems to be some ambiguity or a lack of

19 Ibid., 95, emphasis original. 20 Sweezy and Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism, 28. 21 Ibid., 28; Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society, 150. 304 yiching wu

theorized connection between his class diagnosis and his view of historicity. Despite Sweezy’s bleak view of the class-dominated character of the post-revolutionary society, his take on its positive evolutionary potentials (in the Chinese case in particular) seems too sanguine. The “two- way street” formula implies that the central issue is a matter of having the correct political and ideological leadership. But instead of pursuing this ambiguity, Sweezy falls back on the oddly quantitative conception of historical determination, comfortably postulating that “the ratio of determinism to voluntarism in historical explanation necessarily varies greatly from one period to another.” He continues: “It is precisely in the transitional societies, or at least in a particular phase . . . that the ‘deter- minist’ elements in historical causation are weakest and the ‘voluntarist’ elements most significant.”22 Such a notion, however, banishes the original ambiguity, only to allow it to resurface later. Circumventing the issue only after raising it, Sweezy seems to have underestimated the gravity of the problem of ruling-class power, thereby falling short of making use of the full critical implications of his own class analysis.

V. Market Reforms, A Passive Strategy of Ruling-Class Transformation?

The key point here is not only in regard to the self-reform possibilities among such transitional societies—Maoist or post-Mao China can serve as a powerful example of how vibrant such energies can be—but also about their political limits. What are the possibilities and limits of re- revolutionizing post-revolutionary societies through a process of radical reforms? What is the likelihood that radical changes in pursuit of genuine democratic and egalitarian aims can proceed within existing class relations? These are difficult, yet very important, questions. I submit that Marxists should have the least difficulty acknowledging this key proposition—that under no ordinary circumstances should the ruling classes be expected to abdicate their ruling power and prerogatives, unless they are compelled by extraordinary forces. Applying this to a post-revolutionary society dominated by bureaucracy, what is the likelihood internally generated reforms could promote unity between the direct producers and the social means of production, through democratic self-management? In other words, what likelihood is there that such

22 Sweezy and Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism, 31–2, 89. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 305 reforms could be used to implement the central premise of the socialist project? It goes without saying that such a path of genuine democratization would have to lead to the radical restructuring of all social and political relations. However, instead of democratically mobilizing and reorganizing society, a depoliticizing, reformist program is much more likely to emerge as the political necessity of the existing class structure and relation of political forces. Such a program is unlikely to volunteer a course of fundamental reforms that would diminish the ruling class’ own power, instead it would do anything possible to help preserve its ruling position. On the other hand, given the fundamental political weaknesses of the subordinate classes, a path of gradual movement may be the most feasible way for tangible changes to be achieved. Fragmented and dependent, they were left with few alternative ideological and organizational resources for active resistance, thereby unable to press for more deep-seated changes with respect to the reorganization of societal power. “A social form,” Antonio Gramsci wrote, “ ‘always’ has marginal possibilities for further development and organizational improvement, and in particular can count on the relative weakness of the rival progressive force as a result of its specific character and way of life. It is necessary for the dominant social form to preserve this weakness.”23 This is the most succinct formulation of one of Gramsci’s most intriguing—and yet least utilized—theoretical concepts: the passive revolution. Gramsci attempts to identify the possibilities of marginal social change within historically and structurally imposed limits. He argued that in situations where a fundamental social group lacks the strength to establish complete class hegemony over the society, it opts for a path in which the demands of a new society would be “satisfied by small doses, legally, in a reformist manner—in such a way that it was possible to preserve the political and economic position of the old ruling classes,” and especially to “avoid the popular masses going through a period of political experience such as occurred in France in the years of Jacobinism.”24 In resorting to passive revolution, such class-political projects attempt to transform the adversary classes into partners (a process which Gramsci refers to as transformism), in order to create the necessary political conditions for the establishment

23 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Pub lishers, 1971), Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed. and trans., 222. 24 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 119. 306 yiching wu of new forms of domination, yet without surmounting the fundamental social and class contradictions. When a full-scale and concentrated “fron- tal assault” is less likely, a passive revolution or a kind of political trench warfare may nonetheless take place—it becomes a historical course of action that is both feasible and often quite necessary. Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution provides a useful viewpoint from which the ideological and political history of post-Mao economic reforms can be examined. A passive revolution attempts a “molecular transformation” of the existing political order. From such a perspective, while a market-based reform program relies largely on market discipline, profit incentive, private consumption, and so on, its political logic is nevertheless easily discernible. It is surely true that market reforms loosen or even weaken the control by the party state, and they create more or less independent spheres of social and economic life, such as leisure and consumption. Yet they pose much less of a threat to the dominant position of the ruling class, by preempting popular upheavals from below that may fundamentally challenge the existing balance of class forces. Therefore, as the case of post-Mao reforms demonstrates, in the absence of very vigorous pressure from below, and given the political weakness of subordinate classes, a typical ruling-class strategy for addressing the socioeconomic woes is first of all to firmly consolidate its monopoly of political power (e.g., “national integration,” “political stability,” “governing capacity”). Market mechanisms are then introduced to bring about some controlled (and controllable) openings in social life, to shield the ruling elite from popular dissatisfactions by depoliticizing socioeconomic decision-making through commodification of large areas of social life, and to buy time in relation to both global capitalist competition and growing domestic discontent (“catching up,” “getting rich first,” “middle-class society,” etc.). From the standpoint of the ruling class, such a strategy neutralizes the subordinate classes and recruits sections of them as potential allies in a partially reorganized system of governance, incorporating the majority as acquiescing participants by interpellating them as “consumers.” Economic reforms are undertaken to appropriate the support of popular classes but keep them out of direct participation in the political process. Thus in the post-Mao era, when mass upheaval during the preceding Cultural Revolu- tion years had seriously threatened the very existence of the party-state, economic reforms as a passive tactic constituted a strategic moment. The ruling class’ attempt to preserve its controlling position was partially articulated with the expression of popular initiatives and demands, which are strictly circumscribed, thereby producing an ostensible “national-popular” reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 307 character. Yet, the essential passivity of such a political moment consists precisely of the reproduction of fundamental class divisions: preexisting class antagonism are re-articulated in new forms, at the same time as substantial changes are being instituted in social life. This is the line of least resistance, so to speak.25 It is a “revolution” which at the same time, and in fundamental ways, is not a revolution. Indeed, such a path of “revolution from above” can yield favorable results insofar as the position of the ruling class is concerned. While market liberalization gives rise to massive opportunities for the ruling elite to convert the public power they are entrusted with into private economic gains, such a milieu is often the unintended consequence of initial reforms. However, the expansion of the money-power nexus and entrenchment of the bureaucratic-capitalist class has emboldened the ruling elite, enabling them to employ the instrument of state policy to achieve their ends more efficiently and systematically; altering existing institutional arrangements or creating new regulatory apparatuses ex nihilo to enhance their interests and positions. Indeed, by the late 1990s, the Chinese government’s rhetorical support for “socialism” no longer posed any threat to the following admission: with the complete interpenetration of the activities of capital and political life, the workings of state power were tightly linked to the market and to capital. As Wang Hui—the leading figure of the new Chinese intellectual left—has observed, what is normally referred to as “neoliberalism” in the Chinese context in fact enjoys a special relationship “with the proliferation of interest groups within the state itself :” The ideology of “neoliberalism” had already begun to germinate [in the late 1980s], with its core content being the intensification of reforms calling for greater devolution of political and economic power and . . . the furtherance of a comprehensive course of spontaneous privatization under the guiding premise of a lack of democratic guarantees . . . Because of this, the principal embodi- ment of neoliberalism lay in the benefits accruing to social groups [formed] through the process of the creation of interest groups within the state structure.26

25 This political logic is certainly not lost on the Chinese advocates of market liberal ization. In the not-so-subtle words of Wu Jinglian (nicknamed “Mr. Market Wu”), a senior advisor to the State Council and one of the chief strategists of China’s market reforms, “the political will of the leadership for economic reform is based on the following central proposition: economic reform is good for economic development, which in turn is good for maintaining the Party’s power.” See Qian Yingyi and Wu Jinglian, “China’s Transition to a Market Economy: How Far across the River?” Working Paper No. 69, Center for Research on Economic Development and Policy Reform, Stanford University, 2000, 8. 26 Wang Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Cam bridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2003), Theodore Huters, ed. and trans., 58–9, ital ics added. 308 yiching wu

Therefore, while the expansion of the market is unquestionably driven by the logic of capitalist production, it derives its fundamental political significance from existing class relations. Market reforms, initially introduced by the ruling stratum as a mostly defensive measure for its own self-preservation, have since been seized upon by the ruling elite as an active instrument not only altering the basic contours of society, but also profoundly transforming it into a more self-conscious, fully-blown ruling class, where money and the power to rule are inseparable. Thus the ruling bureaucracy’s political and ideological maneuvers merge, eventually becoming identical with the passive revolution of capital. The prevalent path of marketization usually begins as the passive tactic of the ruling stratum for self-preservation and political appeasement. Eventually it turns into their end-game or exit strategy—a massive self-transformation from power-holders to capital owners. This is no small leap forward, to say the very least.

VI. The Cultural Revolution: An Incomplete Project

Up until now I have avoided issues of late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. The historical complexity of Chinese socialism, however, is more relevant than ever to our present concerns. Any serious inquiry into the possibilities and limits of socialist reforms must examine the Chinese experience, especially the role of Maoism, and its culmination in the political practices of the Cultural Revolution. There is little doubt that late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution are an “aberration” in the history of world socialism. But it would be politically shortsighted if we limited our view of reforms only to the post-Mao era. What is unique about the historical experience of Chinese socialism is precisely its incessant dynamism and energy for self-reformation. Yet instead of moving down the market path, which would have been far easier as far as preserving ruling-class positions was concerned, Maoist China took an uncharted course of reform that was far more challenging, relying on no blueprints whatsoever. Maoism developed a highly complex view of the processes of post- revolutionary class formation and capitalist restoration, integrating recip- rocal interactions among ideological, political, and economic levels in a single analytical framework. It is a distinctive tenet of Maoism to emphasize that class struggle persists even after the exploiting classes have been overthrown. Thus the degeneration of socialism, in Mao’s view, would not reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 309 necessarily occur through the violent overthrow of the socialist state, but more likely as a result of a peaceful evolution from both inside the ruling party, under the corrosive influence of the existing overthrown classes. The restorative process begins with the acceptance of bourgeois ideas by a degenerate clique of leaders. The usurped party leadership then sets about the transformation of the class character of state power, dismantling the socialist economy and creating a new dominant, exploiting class. This, in turn, demands the development of a more thoroughly bourgeois political system so as to consolidate the ruling class position. An active attempt to revitalize socialism, the Cultural Revolution was deeply rooted in the collective history and popular traditions of revolution. But despite its high aspirations, I would argue that Maoism was seriously flawed, and ultimately ineffectual in terms of its own stated goals. Maoism failed to develop an adequate understanding with respect to the structure and dynamics of social and political inequalities character istic of China’s post-revolutionary society. From the movement’s inception, the Maoist leadership failed to specify its primary objectives and targets. The Cultural Revolution was interpreted in many ways by many different groups, in accordance with their own social interests and political positions. Partly as a result, the politics of class were at once both too narrow and too broad. The targets were often personalized—based upon an essentialized and reified conception of class—and became highly diffused if not confused. In the most violent days of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard movement attacked everything and anything ranging from popular cultural practices and artifacts; arts and literature; former propertied classes; “capitalist roaders” in the Party; bureaucratic privileges and dress and hair styles, and many more. The concepts of “proletarian” and “bourgeois” became hopelessly twisted phrases used (and mis-used) to signify political loyalty, ideological correctness and moral purity. Spectacularly vulgarized, the notion of class was stretched to the point of near-lunacy, often rendering it pointless. As class analysis imploded, various social agents picked up its disparate fragments and deployed them for their own particular uses. Immense tensions and antagonisms percolated through the social fabric, resulting in “hyper-politicization” which strained and distorted the social and political life of the People’s Republic, all in the exalted name of “revolution” and “class struggle.” The excessive political violence during the Cultural Revolution contributed to the pervasive alienation and demoralization of broad segments of the Chinese population. Suffice to say that after Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping’s “pragmatic” policy of “a return to normalcy”—his call 310 yiching wu for economic development and modernization as based upon “stability and unity”—was widely welcomed. Many came to see Deng as one who would lead China out from political turmoil, and the narratives of excessive violence characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. Much less visible was the newly emergent exploitation and oppression rooted more in the complex workings of a normalized political economy, as opposed to the state’s coercive power. In its extreme vigilance against regressive tendencies, late Maoism thus failed to adequately address the problem of class domination and formation in the post-revolutionary state. By focusing on the bureaucrat- ism, revisionist line, and distributional privileges, the Cultural Revolu- tion attacked bureaucrats, their ideological affiliations, and the remnant exploiting classes much more than they did to the very systems of bureaucratic power. Maoist politics was indeed successful in temporarily inter- rupting the closure and consolidation of the incipient ruling class—a major achievement—by attempting to revolutionize culture: to promote a proletarian consciousness, combat bourgeois selfishness, and exhort the cadre-bureaucrats (and everyone else) to serve the people rather than serving themselves. Hence it was no accident that the Cultural Revolution was cultural, and that the “revolution through culture” ipso facto represents Maoism’s highest achievement, and its political limit as well. The more radical political implications of Maoism, I should briefly note, were pressed further by a number of young critics, who audaciously questioned the Cultural Revolution’s inherently conservative, reformist procliv- ity for attacking individual power-holders and remnant ideologies, instead of searching for the class-structural roots of China’s social and political problems. Their radically anti-bureaucratic and democratic impulses were accompanied by a general concern with the nature and organization of state power in the post-revolutionary era, and a deep anxiety that a new bureaucratic class could rise to dominate society. Invoking the historical example of the Paris Commune, they claimed that China’s “new bureaucratic bourgeoisie” and their monopoly of the state machine would have to be destroyed in order to establish a genuine egalitarian and socialist society, in which people could truly participate and self-govern.27

27 Understandably, such heterodox strands have received little attention in post-Mao China. For a new study of these radical currents, see Yiching Wu. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcom ing). For two earlier studies, see Jonathan Unger, “Whither China—Yang Xiguang, Red Capitalists, and the Social Turmoil of the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 17, no. 1 (Jan. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 311

During the later months of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, and in the midst of mass movements from below, a different political logic—and ideological trend—began to emerge, with the potential to break the dogmatic constraints of official Maoism. Unsurprisingly, the political views of these young activists were denounced as too radical; as ultra-democratic, bourgeois-anarchic, anti-Party, or simply counterrevolu- tionary. Their theoretical and political activities were without exception suppressed ruthlessly, very often under direct instructions from the Mao- ist leadership, and all of them vanished in the demobilization of mass movements and purges of the so-called ultra-left that began in late 1967. Cannibalizing its own rebellious children, Maoism quickly exhausted its political energy, and was ultimately unable to transcend its historical limits. Despite its appearance of vibrancy and radicalism, the Cultural Revolution was a rather predictable, if dramatic, mass mobilization that was ostensibly participatory, but nevertheless hierarchically divided. As the intermediary governing structures were weakened, the bureaucratic staff were ritualistically humiliated. Here lies the basic contradiction, as Richard Kraus aptly characterized it, in which Mao was caught during the Cultural Revolution. He was both the “chief cadre” of the bureaucratic regime which he personally embodied, and simultaneously its “leading rebel.”28 As a result, the Cultural Revolution failed as a bold experiment of post-revolutionary reform. It left the basic structural and functional divisions between rulers and ruled virtually untouched. If the political reforms that resulted from the Cultural Revolution mitigated some of the more glaring manifestations of bureaucratic elitism, they did not fundamentally alter the relationships between the political elite and subordinated popular classes.

VII. “Capitalist Restoration”: The Cunning of History?

The Cultural Revolution was conceived as an active attempt to deter “regressive” or “restorative” tendencies in a post-revolutionary society. Invoking the experience of the Chinese Revolution, William Hinton conveyed the “restoration” thesis in the vivid metaphor of revolutionary prairie fire:

1991), 3–37; Wang Shaoguang, “‘New Trends of Thought’ during the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary China, 1999, 8(21): 197–217. 28 Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism, 181. 312 yiching wu

A single spark can start a prairie fire. And so it . . . ignited a prairie fire that carried all before it, bringing more change to China in a few decades than two millennia had previously brought forth. But now the fire has burned itself out, and, as the flames die down, it becomes apparent that change has not been deep. Fire burned the foliage off, but the roots of the old civilization survived and are now sending up vigorous sprouts that push aside and overwhelm, in one sphere after another, all revolutionary innovations.29 Hinton’s colorful metaphor, however, is premised on a particular conception of historical determination, namely, the determination of the present by the residual forces of the past. With some trepidation, I would posit that “capitalist restoration” was mainly a myth, serving an important ideological function. The Maoist claim that without further revolutionary agitation China would inevitably gravitate back toward capitalism was a misleading one at best. Revolution in permanence is indeed the essence of socialism. However, China’s postsocialist history has shown that the perils of subversion should have been thought of as part of a more complex historical problematic—backward or forward, or even “sideways.” Yet greater perils were hidden from view by the terrifying image of “capitalist restoration.” Revolutions certainly do not eliminate the past, they inscribe on top of it. Yet revolutions also produce their own contradictions. The remnants of the past are carried forward into the new society, and are shaped by its newly created antagonisms and contradictions. The dead weight of history can not be easily reverted. Contemporary developments in China suggest that the extraordinary development of capitalism today is fueled by a more powerful logic of social recomposition, aided by far more efficient and expeditious means, and driven more by class forces that operate from above than by remnant elements of the past from below. The ideological significance of “capitalist restoration”—and the Maoist theory of class struggle that formed its nucleus—lay in their function of diversion and mystification. By concentrating on remnants from past traditions, “spontaneous” petty tendencies from below, and insidious “capitalist roaders,” the Maoist discourse of “capitalist restoration” distorted and obscured the central contradiction of post-revolutionary Chinese society. I began this essay with some recent criticisms of China’s market path. Building on their ideas, I have tried to address two general points that are loosely interconnected. First, class analysis should be applied more

29 William Hinton, “What Went Wrong?,” Monthly Review 43 (May 1991), 16. The meta phor itself was derived from Mao’s writings during the early 1930s. reinterpreting “capitalist restoration” in china 313

vigorously and extensively, beyond the entry point of the class consequences of marketization. And second, market socialism or market reforms need to be critically engaged in terms of their concrete socio historical contexts. What are the lessons to be learned from China’s transition toward capitalism? Setting aside the question of whether socialism without market is viable or desirable, at least one lesson seems particularly compelling: socialism without meaningful democracy is not only undesirable but also unfeasible. The problem of socialism and democracy is not at all merely a philosophical task of defining utopia, but speaks to the fundamentally ineluctable logic of history and politics. A genuine democracy is not just what defines the ethical telos of socialism, it also serves as its effective safeguard. Revolutions to accomplish socialist aims, as Rosa Luxemburg admon- ished shortly after the success of the Russian Revolution, cannot rely on some ready-made formula that “lies completely in the pocket of the revolutionary party.”30 Rather, socialism can only prosper through a mass political process in which genuine democracy holds the key. Far from the ultimate solution, the conquest of state power can poison or even destroy a socialist movement, unless alternative forms of democratic organization can be developed to replace the alienated form of state power. The central political problem is how to ensure that revolutions do not transform into their opposite. In the ultimate sense, socialism and democracy must be envisioned as one and the same project. In China and elsewhere, post-socialist transformations offer a valuable opportunity for reflecting on these important issues. The Chinese Revolu- tion has produced historic achievements to its credit as well as failures. My main purpose in stressing the lack of democracy is not just to lament the revolution’s disappointments, but rather to seek a point of view from which the long-term historical effects of such limitations can be comprehended. It is the aim of this essay to demonstrate that a coherent dual critique—a criticism of both capital and state, of economic accumulation and bureaucratic power, and a fuller understanding of their structural and historical connections—is not only imperative but also possible. Our critique of neoliberal-capitalist development in post-socialist contexts calls for a more developed criticism of actually existing socialism—a relentless self-critique so to speak, for the sole purpose of advancing egalitarian and democratic objectives.

30 Peter Hudis and Kevin A. Anderson, eds. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 305–06. 314 yiching wu

Socialism emerged as a political and ethical ideal that offered a potent alternative to capitalism. Yet actually existing socialism produced powerful states which, while non-capitalist or even decisively anti-capitalist, monopolized social and political resources, all in the name of socialism. Nationalized means of production and distribution without the concurrent socialization of political power only creates a legal fiction. For Marx, the abolition of private property was not the end in itself, but a means of achieving the ultimate abolition of alienated labor in particular, and human alienation in general. However, the continued predominance of alienated labor and its political form was to have fateful consequences. With the benefits of hindsight, it can be seen that actually existing socialism ironically prepared some of the key ingredients responsible for its own eventual mutation into capitalism. That is to say, it achieved certain crucial yet incomplete functions of the primitive accumulation needed for the later “restoration of capitalism,” by first reproducing the dominated and appropriated status of the laboring population, and second, by vesting a powerful state apparatus that was not democratically accountable with the control of the social means of production. This evolutionary outcome has to await specific conjuncture of auspicious global and domestic social conditions. With the systematic enclosure of public assets and their conversion en masse into private capital by those who control political power, the immense wealth appropriated and accumulated during the previous decades is being drawn into the circuit of capitalist production and distribution. The path of marketization begins as the passive strategy of the ruling-class for self-preservation and political appeasement. But eventually it becomes their end-game or exit strategy—their massive self-transformation from power-holders to capital owners. History, Lenin once wrote, knows all sorts of metamorphoses. In light of the transformations now under way, was actually existing socialism ever a stop on the shining road to genuine socialism? Would it be entirely preposterous to suggest that socialism as such might indeed have been something else—i.e., a detour or a transitional phase in capitalism’s long history through all its variety and metamorphoses? Should we not ask whether instead of being the heroic gravedigger, actually existing socialism might have served as the midwife of capitalism, or even of an especially unruly kind of capitalism? That would be a huge historical irony, and a stupendous tragedy. But history is very cunning indeed, as nothing is ever finally determined, precisely because of the possibility of political action. Chapter Fourteen

The Western Slump and Global Reorganization

Robert Wade1

Capitalist economies have an inherent tendency towards a deficiency of aggregate demand relative to supply capacity, stemming from the ten dency for wages to lag behind productivity growth and for income distri bution to become more polarized. Any one national economy can counter the tendency by emphasising exports; by redistributing income downwards through the tax and transfer system operated by the state; by incomes poli cies (tying average wage increases to average productivity increases, for example); and—temporarily—by arrangements which enable the large majority to borrow and spend more than disposable income. This tendency for deficient aggregate demand underlies the long west ern slump which began in 2008. It had been countered, especially over the 2000s, by a global and US financial system that enabled US households— and others in parts of Europe—to run up record levels of debt relative to income, and thus keep increasing their consumption out of real incomes which had long been stagnant for the bottom 90% of the US population. Rising domestic debt was financed by rising external debt, as the surplus countries of China, Japan, Germany and the oil exporters supplied the US with goods and services on credit. The slump represents the rupture of this dual mechanism of external currency (dollar) recycling and domestic credit recycling. This essay discusses several measures, mostly requiring multilateral action, by which the tendency towards deficient aggregate demand might be more permanently countered and fuller global employment sustained. If some or all of them were put into effect they would help stabilize the

1 Robert Wade is Professor of political economy, London School of Economics, and win ner of Leontief Prize in Economics 2008. This paper builds on several earlier ones, includ ing “The Global Slump: Deeper Causes and Harder Lessons,” Challenge, September 2009; “The Crisis of 2007–2010 in Global Perspective,” Challenge, May 2008, “Iceland as Icarus,” Challenge, June 2009; “From Global Imbalances to Global Reorganization,” Cambridge J. Economics, July 2009; “Steering Out of Crisis,” Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), special issue on the crisis, March 28, 2009. 316 robert wade system by preventing countries from running external surpluses and deficits without limit (as long as the deficit countries are able to borrow in private markets). The changes would put decisions about the size of imbalances and their modes of adjustment back into the hands of govern ments and multilateral organizations, and take them out of the hands of private bankers, shifting the balance between public and private authority back towards the former. They would substantially reduce the pressure— through markets and through multilateral institutions—for developing countries to move towards the Anglo-American neoliberal model. However, discussion of these measures comes at the end. The paper starts with the current crisis and the politics of reform. It shows, first, how reform momentum has dissipated, while the changes in the US and inter national financial regimes brought about by the crisis make the evolv ing system even more prone to regional or global crises than before. For example, we now have an even more concentrated international bank ing sector; the number of large global banks has fallen from about 15 to about half that number. Hence, even once the current slump is over, the world economy will remain in a more fragile condition than it would have been had it returned to pre-crisis “business as usual,” because more of the international banking sector is now both “too big to fail” and “too big to save.” The paper shows, second, how the national and international public policy response to the East Asian crisis of 1997–99 helped create the con ditions for the present crisis. Yet the High Command of global finance has engineered a response to the current crisis which is a re-run of the response to the East Asian crisis, without significant new constraints being placed on international financial actors. After this discussion of the present situation and how we got to it, the final section returns to the issues raised above, the “big picture” ideas for stabilizing the world economy by changes at the level of the international financial system.

I. Financial Sector Pushback

2009 was the first year world output has fallen since the Great Depression. Of the many financial crises around the world since the Second World War, the Western slump is unique in depth, number of countries affected at the same time, and speed of transmission to the real economy through long chains of credit-debt relations. It has hit firms, sectors, and regions the western slump and global reorganization 317 regardless of differences between them in what economists like to call their “fundamentals.” As of early 2012, some 15 million extra people across the Western world are involuntarily unemployed because of the financial crisis, on top of the pre-crisis number. In response, politicians have talked up their commitment not just to steer out of the crisis but also to create a financial system less prone to cri ses. A whole array of crisis-prevention measures have been thrown into the debating ring. They include the requirement that new financial products must be approved by a regulator, to ensure that their risk characteristics can readily be understood by a buyer (the regulator might classify them into (1) investment products, (2) insurance products, and (3) gambling products). Other proposals include public controls over banks’ leverage and risk-weighted capital requirements (including requirements to hold more capital against exposures to specific sectors where a boom could threaten stability); payment of bonuses by a formula based on multi-year profits rather than cash in hand at the end of the current year; use of competition rules to prevent banks growing too big to be allowed to fail; and creation of a “mixed” banking system with both public and privately- owned banks. Then there is an international agenda for crisis prevention, including international coordination of exchange rates, international agreement on the use of restrictions on capital flows, international agree ment on equity/debt ratios and liquidity requirements, etc. But as soon as “green shoots of recovery” appeared, from about May– June 2009, the discussion of (shorter term) crisis resolution and (longer term) crisis prevention generated a parallel development. The newly- confident banks, buoyed up by tax-payer bailouts and by news of the start of recovery, began to push back against attempts to regulate them, in the belief, articulated by a New York lawyer known as an eminence grise of Wall Street, “I am far from convinced there was something inherently wrong with the system.”2 The banks and their lobbyists have been spectacularly successful. For example, both in the US and in Europe, little has been done or looks like will be done to restructure insolvent banks (which generally entails wip ing out existing shareholders, converting bondholders into equity holders, and the government taking a large stake while it seeks new investors).3 The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law does give the US government

2 Paul Krugman, “Stressing the Positive,” International Herald Tribune, 9–10 May 2009. 3 Joeseph Stiglitz, “America’s Socialism for the Rich,” The Economists’ Voice, June 2009. 318 robert wade authority to dissolve big financial organizations and minimize taxpayer bailouts. And the liquidation procedures could work if the problem cen ters on just one bank (with few lines of business and few connections to other banks), but this is a highly unlikely situation. Moreover, the decision to undertake these procedures does not rest, under Dodd-Frank, with the central bank but with the President and the Treasury Secretary—in other words, with politicians. At the multilateral level, the G20 forum of finance ministers and the Basel committee of bank regulators promulgated a tougher set of rules on big banks’ amount and quality of capital, in September 2010, known as Basel III. But translating the rules into national rules has moved at a snail’s pace over the following 18 months (to April 2012). European, UK, and US authorities are accusing one another of watering down the tougher Basel III standards. “Global unity is now noticeable by its com plete absence,” said a UK-based regulatory partner at an international law firm. A senior executive in charge of regulation at one of the world’s big gest banks said, “It’s a bloody nightmare. The regulators have no respect for one another at all. Each country is looking after itself.”4 The UN Commission on the World Financial and Economic Crisis (the Stiglitz Commission) did make some radical proposals. However, the document approved by the special UN conference to consider its report (in June 2009) was rendered anodyne by the determined efforts of the US, EU, and Japan to strip out all of the serious reform measures intro duced by the G77 + China (the loose grouping of developing countries); and above all, to strip out all measures that might have given the UN a role as coordinator of other agencies. The West wanted the response to be left to the Bretton Woods organizations (IMF and World Bank) and WTO, and got its way comprehensively. The main exception was para graph 54 of the outcome document, which calls for the General Assembly to establish “an ad hoc open-ended working group” to follow up on the issues and report to the General Assembly by September 2010.5 The US representative fought tooth and nail against paragraph 54, but eventually gave way, having won on just about everything else. He was a mid-level Treasury official. Indeed, all the G7 states sent mid-level people to the

4 Brooke Masters, “Conflicting Signals,” Financial Times, 2 April 2012, 9. See also Jakob Vestergaard and Robert Wade, “The Governance Response to the Great Recession: the ‘Success’ of the G20”, J. Economic Issues, 46, 2, June 2012, 481–90. 5 United Nations General Assembly, “Outcome of United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development,” 22 June 2009, 4 am. the western slump and global reorganization 319

UN conference, as a deliberate snub to the UN General Assembly. Worse, in deference to Western wishes, even the Secretary-General’s office had opposed the commission and conference; it had been sponsored by the President of the General Assembly instead. Of course, the retreat from serious reform has often been dressed up as the opposite. On June 17, 2009, President Obama presented what he described as “a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.” In fact, thanks to Wall Street’s ability to get its way with the Treasury, the Obama plan was not even close to what Roosevelt accomplished during the Great Depression against strong Wall Street opposition. The New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said: The Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself . . . . Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional reg ulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul . . . . [O]nce the financial crisis is over it will, in all likelihood, be back to busi ness as usual.6

II. The Crisis as Opportunity

However, in all this doom and gloom there is a potential upside—at some point, facts kick. This crisis is big enough—the first contraction of the world economy since the Great Depression, the de facto nationalization of a large part of the US financial system, the collapse of three of the big five investment banks—to throw into widespread doubt, in a way difficult to ignore, some of the key presumptions made by economists and politi cians about the functioning of financial capitalism. These presumptions include, for example, that:

• rising external indebtedness is not a problem provided the correspond ing capital inflows are used productively; • rising domestic indebtedness is not a problem provided the credit is delivered to private agents, because private agents are aware of the need to keep within prudential limits and to honor their debts; • securitization and the “originate to distribute” business model increase the resilience of banking (the IMF declared in 2006 that “[t]here is

6 Joe Nocera, “Not Enough Roosevelt in Obama Plan,” International Herald Tribune, 19 June 2009. 320 robert wade

growing recognition that the dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse group of investors . . . has helped make the banking and overall financial system more resilient”);7 • credit default swaps do the same by allocating risks to those best placed to bear each specific kind of risk; • state-owned banks should always be privatized (justified by the World Bank with the claim that “state ownership tends to stunt financial sec tor development, thereby contributing to slower growth,”8 a claim best understood as right-wing sing-along, for it scarcely survives empirical scrutiny); • financial innovation raises the efficiency and stability of the financial system; • a more sophisticated financial system makes a bigger contribution to social welfare.

Many economists continue to espouse these propositions, albeit with more qualifications. One of Britain’s best known academic economists, and former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, exclaimed with real venom, “Keynes was a disaster. Skidelsky [a promi nent present-day Keynesian, and Keynes’ biographer] should be locked up!”9 However, post-crisis, many academic economists—or so one can hope—would concur with Acemoglu: [W]e were in sync with policymakers . . . lured by ideological notions derived from Ayn Rand novels rather than economic theory. And we let their . . . rhet oric set the agenda for our thinking and . . . for our policy advice.10 Notice his exoneration of economic theory, and compare it with the argu ment of the section which follows. The big question is whether the window-opening opportunity presented by the crisis will be taken and by whom. The opportunity is for rethink ing intellectual models (comprised of both cognitive beliefs about factual propositions and normative beliefs about values, such as the values of acquisitive individualism); and for making radical rather than incremen tal reforms to the structure of finance.

7 IMF, Global Financial Stability Report, 2006, 51. 8 World Bank, Finance for Growth, 2001. 9 Personal communication, November 2011. 10 D. Acemoglu, “The Crisis of 2008: Structural Lessons for and from Economics”, unpublished, MIT, 2008. the western slump and global reorganization 321

III. Ideas and Interests of the Neoliberal Model about the Appropriate Role of the State

To trace the evolution of neoliberal ideas—which legitimized the insti tutional arrangements that generated the incentives that have tipped the world into crisis—we can begin with the debate among academic econo mists in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. Chi cago disciplines of Milton Friedman advanced the ideas of the rational expectations hypothesis (REH) and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) as part of the swelling counter-revolution against Keynesian economics. Both hypotheses were advanced together in order to “prove” that Keynes ian policies could not work, and more generally, that “government inter ventions” in financial, labour and other markets would either not work at all or would work to make things worse. These hypotheses have remarkably little empirical support, but they took the economics profession by storm for two reasons. One was that they easily translated into mathematical models with determinate solutions, a top objective of scientific enquiry in the eyes of economists (aspiring to be the physicists of the social sciences). The second was their support for the ideology of Reagan and Thatcher and the politicians, bankers, and business leaders around them, with its premise that govern ment “intervention” was doomed to fail and that “markets” should be left to work their magic. The magic included redistribution upwards to the point where the top 1% of US households raised their share of disposable income (including capital gains) from a low of 9% in 1980 to 22.5% in 2006, the same as the previous peak—in 1929. During the Bush II presi dency, the top 1% of US households accrued 73% of the growth in total disposable income, up from “only” 45% of the increase during the Clinton presidency. A high proportion of the households in the top 1% derived their remuneration from finance.11 It is important to see that the basic ideas behind the REH and the EMH were derived from pre-Keynesian neoclassical economics of the “margin alist revolution.” They represented not new ideas but a reformatted ver sion of old ideas which already had a long track record of capturing the thinking of those exposed to them and replicating themselves through

11 Gabriel Palma, “The Revenge of the Market on the Rentiers,” Cambridge J. Econom ics, 33, 4, July 2009, 829–869; Robert Wade, “Globalization, Growth, Poverty, Inequality, Resentment and Imperialism”, in John Ravenhill (ed), Global Political Economy, OUP, 2011. 322 robert wade teacher-student power relations and the social sanctions of the econom ics profession. Their resilience to contrary evidence and their power of replication from one generation to the next are caught in George Allen’s account, written in 1975, of how, as a young economic advisor to Lloyd George in the summer of 1930, he interviewed a large number of British economists and senior civil servants about appropriate government policy to restore British economic growth and reduce the already very high level of unemployment.12 Allen related that he encountered virtual unanimity that the British government must:

(a) stick to the Gold Standard; (b) cut wages, the only question being how to do so (the argument was that unemployment was voluntary, in the sense that if only people would take wage cuts they could find work); (c) cut public spending, because it crowded out private spending.

The exception was Mr. Keynes at Cambridge. But it was to be another four years before Keynes published The General Theory, and more years before many economists came to accept its core argument, as the Great Depression ground on and on, worsened by Roosevelt’s abandonment of the proto-Keynesian ideas of the New Deal in 1937 and the return to the ideas articulated by Allen’s interviewees. There is a straight line between the resurrection of these old ideas in the 1970s and 1980s in the new form of the REH and EMH (and the wider corpus of neoliberal ideas) and the much higher frequency of financial crises since 1980 than in the post-Second World War decades. In the post- war decades, Keynesian ideas and the international Bretton Woods archi tecture provided the framework for the economic role of government. Since then, the US financial system—ostensibly the most sophisticated in the world—has had a remarkably bad record: it has managed to decap italize itself and require bailing out by government three times in three decades, or once a decade. First in the early 1980s through its reckless lending to Latin America during the 1970s; second in the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, with the Savings and Loan crisis; and third, most dramatically, today. Developing countries have also experienced a flood of financial crises since the early 1980s, many of them as a result of boom-bust cycles in

12 George Allen, “Advice from economists—forty-five years ago”, Three Banks Review, 106, 1975, 35–50. the western slump and global reorganization 323

capital flows connected to shifts in macroeconomic and financial condi tions in the major industrial economies, whose governments ignored the impact of these conditions on the rest of the world. The US unilateral suspension of the dollar-gold link in 1971 was the first post-war default of international obligations by any country, and it remains the most sig nificant default on a world scale (strange how little attention is given to the US’s record as the biggest post-war defaulter). Also, the US Federal Reserve’s hiking of interest rates in 1979 and the resulting appreciation of the dollar were directly implicated in the Latin American debt-and- development crises of the 1980s. (The Fed undertook virtually no analy sis in 1979 of the likely impacts on the rest of the world of its sharp rise in interest rates.) Shifts in monetary conditions in the US and resulting shifts in industrial country exchange rates were directly implicated in the East Asian/Russian/Latin American crisis of the late 1990s. The boom-bust cycle in US financial markets over the 1990s and 2000s is the single big gest proximate driver of the financial fragility which tipped into the cur rent Western crisis. Yet this empirical record of a global step-up in financial crises since the 1980s and the ascendancy of the neoliberal model has prompted very little reform to rein in finance. Crises have been good for “Nylon” (New York and London).

The Washington Consensus Let us consider how the ideas of the REH and the EMH fed through into Western beliefs about development policy for developing countries, in the form of the ideas that came to be called the Washington Consensus. This was a set of policy prescriptions for developing countries to become mod ern capitalist economies, which crystallized out in the US, UK, and Latin America during the Reagan/Thatcher era, and which the World Bank and the IMF took as their norms for what all borrowing government should do. At its heart was the norm of:

(a) macroeconomic stability, especially very low inflation, and (b) microeconomic liberalization and privatization.

In a phrase, its core injunction was “liberalize the market.” Then over the 1990s, the core Washington Consensus was augmented by more emphasis on strengthening “institutions,” much of it under the rubric of “good gov ernance.” With the addition of the “institutional” component, this could be called the Augmented Washington Consensus. 324 robert wade

The Washington Consensus (augmented or not) said that financial crises were explained by the fact of governments “intervening” too much in the economy—borrowing too much, directing credit too much. The route to financial stability was competition between private financial firms. This was in line with the REH and the EMH and their implication that markets, including financial markets, tend to reach stable equilibria by themselves, and therefore that instabilities must be due to “external” shocks to the economic system, including government “interventions.”

IV. The East Asian/Russian/Brazilian Crisis

Then came the serial crises in East Asia, Russia and much of Latin Amer ica, especially Brazil, starting in 1997. (From now on I drop the knock-on crises in Russia and Brazil and concentrate on East Asia.) It was a serious embarrassment to the champions of the Washington Consensus, because for two decades the East Asian economies had been held up as star pupils of the Washington Consensus and their economic success explained as the happy outcome of compliance to its precepts. A whole generation of economists made the argument, ignoring much evidence to the contrary,13 displaying them as examples of what other developing countries (in Latin America, Africa) could achieve if they pushed ahead with Wash ington Consensus reforms. Yet these same economies with their suppos edly liberalized and privatized markets nevertheless went into deep crisis in 1997. Initially the High Command of world finance talked urgently of the need for a new international financial architecture, abbreviated as NIFA, including an array of new international organizations and new interna tional functions. But the initial outpouring of proposals and demands evaporated as soon as it became clear that the crisis would not ricochet out of the periphery and hit the European and North American core. The “issue-attention” cycle of politics pushed financial reform to the margins as other issues rose in demand for attention. The evaporation of demands for international action was helped by the discovery, by the same economists who had earlier celebrated East Asia as exemplar of the Washington Consensus, that, on second thoughts, these governments had been intervening too much; or worse, that the whole

13 See Robert Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton University Press, 2004). the western slump and global reorganization 325

East Asian type of capitalism—“state-directed capitalism,” Alan Green span called it—was the root cause of the East Asian crisis. This diagnosis not only excused the Anglo-American economies from any responsibility for financial fragility (lending too much), but it also dramatically raised the stakes by implying that the problem was not just a certain set of “inter ventions” in an economy but the entire type of East Asian economy itself. The newly-discovered East Asian “state-directed capitalism” was improper and inherently unstable, which is why it went into crisis and had to be normalized—made to look like Anglo-American capitalism. The Berkeley economist and economic historian Barry Eichengreen provided an academic version of this theory. Accepting the underlying neoclassical premise that rich country investors are continuously scan ning profit opportunities around the world and invest more in countries with “proper” investment regimes and less in countries with “improper” ones (which implies that capital flows to and from a national economy depend mainly on the policy regime of the host country). Eichengreen said in 1999: What emerges from competing models and interpretations is a single synthetic understanding of why crises occur. Crises do not occur randomly. Rather, they afflict countries whose governments set themselves up for the fall.14 Notice how his argument conveniently eclipses the role of industrial country macroeconomic exchange rate and monetary policy in generating boom-bust capital flows, and thereby crises in recipient economies.

V. From “Liberalize” to “Standardize the Economy”

This popular Western diagnosis then justified a much bigger effort than anything made previously to define a set of norms or standards of a “proper” modern economy, and to establish a global compliance mecha nism to move whole economies towards the “proper” model, in the inter ests of protecting each economy and the world economy from repeat crises. Going beyond the Washington Consensus’ injunction to “liberal ize the economy,” the Post Washington Consensus that emerged after the East Asian crisis contained the injunction to “standardize the economy”—

14 Barry Eichengreen, Toward a New International Financial Architecture, Institute of International Economics, Washington DC, 1999, 140, emphasis added. 326 robert wade standardize around norms of “best practice” which were implicitly derived from the norms of the Anglo-American variety of capitalism (and not the Japanese, German, Scandinavian, Chinese, etc.). To the extent successful, this effort would homogenize all national economies around the Anglo- American model. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times gave one expression of this aspira tion when he said in Why Globalization Works (2004): It cannot make sense to fragment the world economy more than it already is [into different kinds of capitalism] but rather to make the world economy work as if it were the United States . . . [meaning that nation states should have no more ability to “intervene” in their economies than do the states of the United States]. Is this impossible? No. Is it undesirable? Again, no. The failure of our world is not that there is too much globalization, but that there is too little. The potential for greater economic integration is barely tapped. We need more global markets, not fewer, if we want to raise the living standards of the poor of the world. Social democrats, classical lib erals and democratic conservatives should unite to preserve and improve the liberal global economy [extending the United States’ model] against the enemies mustering both outside and inside the gates. That is the central message of this book.15 The East Asian crisis was very severe for the crisis-affected countries. Thailand did not regain its 1996 average income for 7 years; Indonesia, 8 years, Malaysia, 4 years. But from the perspective of the High Command of global finance it soon shrank to a minor event. In the end, all the NIFA talk of major reforms melted away to leave:

(a) a new talk shop for rich countries’ finance ministries and central banks, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF); (b) an array of new—voluntary—standards of best practice in banking supervision, corporate governance, data dissemination and the like, in whose formulation developing country governments and firms had virtually no representation; (c) a bigger role for the IMF in regularly surveilling economies to assess the extent of compliance with the standards; but neither the IMF nor other bodies were given more authority to govern finance (e.g. to coordinate exchange rates); (d) compliance by governments and firms was expected to be induced decentrally, by “markets” rewarding economies which complied

15 Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (Yale University Press, 2004), 4. the western slump and global reorganization 327

more (“proper” economies) and punishing those which complied less (“improper” economies).16

I have called this the “standards-surveillance-compliance” (SSC) system.17 It is remarkable how comprehensively the SSC system failed. Argentina, Russia, and Turkey, all operating under IMF adjustment programs (with intense IMF input into economic policy making) all went on to experience serious crises. Through the build up to the present crisis the Fund failed to diagnose bubbles and provide early warning. In its Article IV consulta tions with the US in 2005–2006, it identified inflation as the main chal lenge and reassured the world that “the U.S. financial system has proven exceptionally resilient in recent years.”18 In July 2007, a month before the beginning of the credit crunch, the IMF declared, “The most likely sce nario is a soft landing as growth recovers and inflation falls.”19 Not coinci dentally, this was just what the US Treasury wanted to hear. The Fund got it so wrong, not just because its governance, heav ily weighted towards the G7 and the G1 (the US), does not allow it to talk truth to power (but only to poor borrowers, and then not necessarily truth), but also because its staff are gripped by the neoliberal ideas set out earlier, above all, that imbalances generated by freely contracting private entities are self-correcting, and that price inflation and budget deficits are the main threats to macroeconomic stability (they downplay inflation in asset markets driven by speculation and very loose monetary policy). The implicit hope of those talking up the idea of standardizing econ omies around global standards of best practice is that serious reforms, which impose real constraints on financial actors, can be pushed to the back burner, and the world economy can return to “business as usual,” in which financial firms reap double digit rates of return out of economies growing in the low single digits, while the top 1% of US households con tinue to get 20% or more of national income.

16 Robert Wade, “A New Financial Architecture?” New Left Review, July/Aug. 2007; “Choking the South,” New Left Review, Mar/Apr 2006; “The Post-Asia-Crisis System of Global Financial Regulation and Why Developing Countries Should Be Worried about it”, in Richard Carney (ed.), Lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis (Routledge, 2009). Also Jakob Vestergaard, Discipline in the World Economy: International Finance and the End of Liberalism (Routledge, 2009). 17 Wade, “A New Financial Architecture?” 18 IMF, “United States: staff report for the 2005 Article IV consultation,” June 30, 2005, 31; IMF, “United States: staff report for the 2006 Article IV consultation,” June 30, 2006, 23. 19 IMF, “United States: staff report for the 2007 staff consultation,” July 11, 2007. 328 robert wade

VI. Reducing Global Imbalances

One of the big dangers coming out of the crisis is that even more govern ments than before will put together the East Asian crisis and the present crisis and draw the lesson: we must follow the examples of China and India, maintain an undervalued exchange rate, accumulate bigger current account surpluses and bigger exchange reserves; then we will be safer, and will not be thrown into the arms of the IMF with its pro-cyclical and Washington Consensus conditionalities. But who will run the necessary deficits? The EC, ECB, and Germany are set against deficits; Japan is allergic to them. That only leaves the US of the major world economies. But if the highly indebted US runs up even more debt obligations, the world economy will be even more fragile. So the upshot of many countries trying to run surpluses (which are a form of savings) is persistent reces sionary pressure world-wide and continuing global imbalances and their associated—destabilizing—capital flows. The existing international financial system—the one whose core struc ture was established in the Bretton Woods negotiations of 1944, which has persisted to this day—contains two fundamental sources of problems. One is that the mechanisms of adjustment to external surpluses and defi cits put all the pressure for adjustment on one side only, on the deficit countries (minus the US, because it issues the main international currency and so can pay for its deficits by issuing more of its money). This was the big problem Keynes sought to address during the Bretton Woods process in the first half of the 1940s. The second kind of problem is that, with a national currency doubling as the main international currency, the liquidity for meeting expanding global demand depends on the country issuing the international currency being willing to run expanding deficits, so as to pump net amounts of its currency into the rest of the world; and on surplus countries being will ing to go on accumulating the national currency of the issuer. Eventually there comes a trade-off between enough liquidity in the world economy and a stable value of the international currency. This is the dilemma that Robert Triffin highlighted in 1960. A more stable world economy—less prone to crisis, less prone to the finance tail wagging the real economy dog, less prone to surging income inequality—must ensure that countries have less incentive to accumulate current account surpluses or deficits. Also, it must create more multina tional discipline in money and finance, because the shocks emanating from the macroeconomic and financial and exchange rate conditions of the western slump and global reorganization 329 the major industrial countries are much more damaging to the rest of the world than trade shocks—yet while trade is subject to elaborate multilat eral discipline through the WTO and other agreements, macroeconomic, exchange rate, and monetary policy are not. Here, sovereignty reigns. The Fund has teeth only for its poorer and smaller borrowing countries. The US government famously throws the Fund’s Article IV consultation document straight in the trash, yet the US government has a bigger influence on global instability than any other. Hence, IMF surveillance is every bit as asymmetrical as the Bretton Woods adjustment system (which puts all the adjustment pressure on deficit countries). Several mechanisms might be established to deal with the two basic problems. One is an updated version of Keynes’ proposal at Bretton Woods for a system to persuade creditor countries to cut their surpluses and spend their surplus money back into the economies of the deficit countries, maintaining global demand. When all the pressure to adjust the national economy falls on deficit countries, they contract aggregate demand and imports sending contractionary waves through the world economy. Keynes proposed a global bank, which he named the International Clearing Union.20 It would issue its own currency, which he called ban cor, exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange. The bancor would be the unit of account for international transactions. Each country would have an account at the ICU and an overdraft facility equal to half the average value of its trade over the past five years. The key to putting symmetrical pressure on both surplus and deficit coun tries to reduce their imbalances is that any country racking up either a large deficit or surplus would be charged hefty interest on its deficit or surplus. Also, the deficit country would be obliged to lower the value of its currency (the ICU would mandate the exchange rate adjustment) and to prevent the export of capital. The surplus country would be obliged to raise the value of its currency and to export capital. If at the end of the year the surplus exceeded the value of its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated (said Keynes with a straight face). So the surplus nation would have a strong incentive not to pile up large surpluses, but instead to expand its activity (e.g. expand its imports). Hence, the con traction of activity in the deficit countries (to reduce imports and expand

20 George Monbiot, “Keynes Is Innocent: the Toxic Spawn of Bretton Woods Was No Plan of His,” Guardian, 18 Nov. 2008. 330 robert wade exports) would be balanced by the expansion of activity in the surplus countries (to increase imports and cut exports), sustaining rather than cutting global demand. This mechanism would share the costs of adjustment between deficit and surplus countries, and between capital and labour, and would allow all economies to be run at closer to full employment. When the US negotiators at Bretton Woods heard Keynes proposal they went ballistic and vetoed it (the US, of course, was the big credi tor nation at that time). The US went on to push for what became the World Bank and the IMF—organizations whose modus operandi assumes that all the adjustment to global imbalances will be made by deficit coun tries, and which function as debt collectors for the creditor countries. The US also insisted that it alone had a veto over key decisions of both agen cies, a veto which remains intact today. At present, the idea of an ICU imposing symmetrical adjustment on deficit and surplus countries remains a pipedream. A slightly more fea sible idea, which would also meet the objective of largely eliminating the drive to accumulate more and more foreign exchange reserves, would be an international arrangement to coordinate exchange rate movements. Under the arrangement, some agency (it could be an IMF with a more representative governance structure) would have authority to sanction changes in nominal exchange rates in line with changes in inflation, so as to keep real exchange rates linked to “fundamentals” and not subject to speculation, carry trade, and the like. It would be helpful to establish, at the same time, an international currency based on a basket of major national currencies. But the main objective is to keep real exchange rates stable. Thus, countries would have weaker incentives to build up reserves; and with much lower reserves relative to GDP and trade, and smaller current account surpluses and deficits, the world economy would be more stable. A third idea—which received support from the Stiglitz Commission and from the Central Bank of China—is to substantially expand Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) of the IMF. It is presented as a way of reducing the role of the dollar as the international currency, thereby making the system more stable. The subtext is China’s national worry that as the stock of dol lars in its and others’ reserves rises, governments and central banks may stampede out of the dollar, devaluing the purchasing power of China’s mega holdings. However, the idea of expanding SDRs reflects a common misunder standing that the problem with the system is the particular asset which the western slump and global reorganization 331 serves as the international currency. In fact, the use of the dollar as the main international currency—or any other national currency—is not the main problem. The main problem, as said earlier, is the operation of the adjustment mechanism for dealing with global imbalances, which puts all the adjustment pressure on the deficit countries (excluding the US). The SDR proposal could help by mitigating the pressure on deficit countries to deflate their economies in order to reduce the deficit. A big increase in SDRs to deficit countries (especially deficit developing coun tries) would expand the capacity of deficit countries to borrow hard cur rencies via a public rather than private channel, at low interest rates (relative to private rates), and without subjecting themselves to standard IMF conditionality. Although most of the infrastructure is already in place (SDRs do exist, though small in value), the existing scheme would require substantial modification for it to meet the above objective. At present, the alloca tion formula would give by far the majority of the SDRs to the rich coun tries, in line with their quotas (payments in). The Fund would have to change its constitution to permit a change in the allocation formula so that new SDRs would go largely to developing countries. Would rich coun tries (which do not need SDRs, since they are quite able to use their own currencies in international transactions, as Uganda et al. are not) agree to give their SDRs to developing countries, and against what conditions? Also, there is an issue of allocation over time: to what extent could they be issued counter-cyclically? Who would decide on a country’s “need,” by what principles? In practice the network advantages of using the dollar are still so high that a significant fall in its role will probably be years coming, and the euro or its successor is more likely to become the second major international currency before SDRs. Capital account management by national governments should also be part of the solution. Countries can protect themselves from boom-bust cycles in capital flows emanating from the major industrial economies by using restrictions on capital inflows, and in emergencies, restrictions on capital outflows. Iceland, for example, should have raised the cost of capital inflows or quantitatively restricted them over the 2000s. Capital flowed in seeking to earn the interest differential between Iceland’s 15%+ and Japan and Switzerland’s 3%, and appreciated the krona even though Iceland was running double digit current account deficits (24% of GDP in 2006). But the IMF and the US and UK Treasuries continue to discour age countries from restricting or “artificially” raising the cost of cross- border capital flows, though less emphatically than before 2008. Reformers 332 robert wade should push for a norm change, which legitimizes the use of capital account management techniques as normal instruments of national eco nomic management. Finally, the measure favoured by those who defend the existing system but who are concerned to reduce global imbalances: “the international community” (read the US and its satellite international organizations) should encourage surplus countries (read China) who wish to limit their exposure to credit-based reserve currencies (read dollar) to simply allow their own currencies to appreciate until the inflow of dollars stops. But this prescription presumes that changes in exchange rates work well to smooth payments imbalances, and the crisis should teach us that the magic of the market is often more imagined than real in financial markets (as distinct from markets for many goods and services). With big shifts in global economic and political power under way (away from the current distribution where 15% of the world’s people living in the West plus Japan accrue about 65% of world income) and with urgent investment needs in energy security and climate change, governments and other agents based in developing countries have an opportunity now to push for radical reforms and to push against the efforts of Western govern ments and financiers to maintain momentum to standardize economies around the Anglo-American model. They need to develop new intellectual models of development, rather than just accept what the World Bank and the IMF tell them constitutes best practice. They should bear in mind the Swahili proverb, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” So far, however, as of 2012, there is little sign of such initiatives coming from developing countries. The Western financial sector (whose efforts are described earlier) as well as Western governments are proving remark ably successful at keeping control of the global agenda, including in the G20. The rising economic weight on developing countries in the world economy has so far not been translated into corresponding influence in global governance.21

21 Robert H. Wade, “Emerging World Order? From Multipolarity to Multilateralism in the G20, the World Bank and the IMF,” Politics and Society, 39, 3, 2011, 347–78. Chapter Fifteen

An Argument for “Participatory Socialism”1

Lin Chun Translated by Adrian Thieret

When we discuss workers’ rights, we ignore those who have no job or lost their jobs. What about other unemployed people? What about the old, the young, the sick, and the handicapped? This article investigates institutions outside of the labor market and suggests trial measures in the direction of social security for all members of society, based on universal participation. The principle of every person enjoying a basic guaranteed income is rooted in social recognition and reward of past labor (for the old), future labor (for the young), or latent but temporarily or chronically unrealiz- able labor (for the sick and handicapped). It also includes acknowledgement and compensation for the many other forms of participation and contribution, which can be seen as the necessary extension of labor- based (as opposed to capital-based) “property rights”. Unexploited and unalienated labor, in combination with the basic income, forms the core of participatory socialism’s public policy. This conception is a response to the increasingly severe unemployment crisis faced by China (as by many other countries), yet it is more so an endorsement of active innovation in strategic thinking about the long-term interests of societies. In China, the social objectives of reform demand that we concretely imagine and practice an economy that is fundamentally driven by need rather than profit—a far-sighted vision of an “association of free individuals.”

I. The Unemployment Crisis

China’s general labor surplus, the industrial and technological advance- ments achieved since 1949, the downsizing of state owned enterprises (SOEs) since the 1990s, the acceleration of automation and information technology, and a peak in working-age population (until recently) have all

1 Revised from Lin Chun, “Participation and recognition: the transforming of (un) employment in China,” New Political Science 22, 4 (2000) and “Reorganizing work, social justice and xiaokang socialism,” Dushu 12 (读书), 2004, in Lingdaozhe (领导者), Winter 2008; with statistics updated for this translation. 334 lin chun contributed to unprecedented unemployment. China’s huge population makes even understated official unemployment statistics (4 to 4.3 percent 2008–2012) appear dangerous. Also struggling are the countless rural migrant workers who have already taken roots in cities yet are without stable work contracts. The commodification of labor through “informalization” and “casualization” of employment has been accompanied by lost job security and “iron rice bowl” benefits for workers.2 There are also tens of millions of laborers still moving between the cities and countryside that are considered “excess” hands. Regardless of whether the Chinese economy has reached or is nearing the “Lewis turning point,” the apparent labor shortage in the manufacturing sector since 2005 reflects too low a wage level against the backdrop of improved rural conditions in the inland region.3 This trend of labor shortage cannot halt the continued expansion of the ranks of unemployed workers, existing and latent.4 This is complicated by the aging population (123 million people over age 65 in 2012); extension of the retirement age will immediately intensify already existing employment difficulties, while not extending the retirement age will further overburden the present pension system. Migrant workers without a stable labor contract joined laid-off SOE workers to swell the ranks of about 270 million Chinese “dispatch workers”—or the world’s largest “precariat.”5 Worldwide, with global market integration and China’s accession to WTO, “capital now had access to the whole world’s low-cost labor supplies. To top it all, the collapse of communism, dramatically in the ex-Soviet Bloc and gradually in China, then added some 2 billion people to the global wage labor force.”6 As

2 See Sarosh Kuruvilla, Ching Kwan Lee, and Mary Gallagher, eds. From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in Changing China (Ithaca: Cornell Uni versity Press, 2011). According to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, at the end of 2011, among about 253 million migrant workers, only 80 million had full-time jobs (China Daily 11 Sept. 2012). 3 See Carl Riskin, “Harmony, crisis, and the facing of the Lewis Model in China,” in Amiya K Bagchi and Anthony D’Costa, eds. Transformation and Development: The Political Economy of Transition in India and China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 152–72. 4 Overall, labor shortages have happened in specific age segments and are mostly con fined to the coastal region. The rural labor surplus remains in the range of 80–100 million. See Kam Wing Chan, “Migration and development in China: trends, geography and current issues,” Migration and Development 1:2 (Dec. 2012), 187–205. 5 Eli Friedman and Ching Kwan Lee, “Remaking the world of Chinese labor: a 30-year retrospective,” British Journal of industrial relations 48:3 (Sept. 2010), 510–16. 6 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press (2010), 15–16. an argument for “participatory socialism” 335 a labor-surplus (and land-scarce, resource-poor) economy, China simply cannot absorb its infinite labor supply within the old framework of growth and job creation, which is unsustainable socially and ecologically anyway. Increasingly integrated into the global economy, China feels a real but misguided pressure to keep its “comparative advantage” of cheap labor, a pressure that can be resisted. The nation certainly does not have to play the game of “racing to the bottom” in the global market. Labor shortage is in fact a sign of cheap labor being rejected by workers themselves. High unemployment rates are a world-wide problem. Job shortages can occur within any national economic body with a labor force surplus, especially when laborers are restricted from crossing national borders. Job shortages can also occur within certain centrally planned systems where superficial employment conceals actual unemployment. Finally, they can occur in the process of economic modernization, as traditional industries and occupations are unstoppably replaced or rendered obsolete. The present state of China includes all three of these situations. Unemployment in turn suppresses wage standards, weakens effective demand, and causes “surplus froth.” Although Ricardo’s iron law of wages may not apply to wage/labor relations outside classical capitalism, if the government or its laws do not artificially enact wage standards higher than the “natural” wage, supply and price in the labor market will form an inverse proportion. Recent labor shortage in the coastal regions has been at least in part a reaction to the long-term suppression of wages, leading to marked wage rise—perhaps a partial proof of the laws of capitalist wages. However, brutal competition in an export-dependent growth often forces the squeezing of wages and working conditions to lower costs, and such competition leaves many small business owners going bankrupt. High unemployment in Europe is often blamed on “wage rigidity” and “excessive welfare.” Right or wrong, these are not our problems. China’s difficulties lie in its obsession with growth, its participation in international market competition, and a developmentalist pattern not centered in the domestic market. The result is two extremes: those with no work coexist with those worked to death; unemployment coexists with sweatshops. The trend of rising labor costs and soaring wages in China today is a good thing. What the global capitalist financial crisis brings China is a turn from foreign trade dependence to self-renewal, expansion of internal demand, and upgrading of national industries. Under the conditions of continuing land scarcity, resource shortage and ecological pressure, both traditional and new industries have their 336 lin chun

limitations. The large-scale decline of the “sunset” factories occurred much faster than workers could be trained to transfer to other jobs. In the information and technology sectors, professionals and university students face similar employment troubles. Certain steps, such as advocating vocational education, expanding the service industry, mounting infrastruc- tural projects, developing the new green and knowledge economies, and exporting labor may mitigate but not solve the problem. Development itself is a double-edged sword: while accelerating accumulation of wealth it cuts the number of old job positions. Increased productivity and the turn to capital-and-technology-intensive industries ultimately results in a reduction of the traditional labor-intensive production structure. This is why competition between poor counties that live by manufacturing and exporting raw materials grows increasingly fierce as those countries “steal” jobs from wealthy countries. To prevent enterprises and capital from moving abroad, and to slow the resulting local employment crisis, in 2004 the American AFL-CIO petitioned Congress on the situation of workers in China, demanding economic sanctions based on China’s viola- tions of the 1974 trade law, namely, that it ignored infringement of legal labor protections in foreign and private companies, including minimum wage law and workers’ right to organize unions. Within concrete individual experience, the direct consequences of unemployment are not merely about material survival but often also psychological damage from a broken social contract concerning security and identity. As long as the primary source of value by which we respect our- selves and others—having a job—does not change, laid-off workers and unemployed migrants lose not merely the living wage that they exchange labor for, but is also their work-related personal identity, group belonging, and social position. The results are broken social ties, injured human relations, and lost solidarity. Problems such as the disparity of wealth, moral decay, and “mass incidents” are all more or less related to the issue of chronic, widespread unemployment (and semi-unemployment). Some- times the cultural aspects and impacts are even more important than the direct economic results.

II. How Can This Be Solved?

Recognizing the inflexible restrictions that objective conditions place on job creation, we must acknowledge that full employment in China is unrealistic and cannot serve as a policy objective or be responsibly promised. But along a different line, we should see that China must still have a great an argument for “participatory socialism” 337 potential for employment beyond the traditional forms. Consider how many job opportunities would arise if the legally set forty-hour work week were fully enforced without compromise, minimizing overtime in public and private enterprise and closing sweatshops everywhere? A great number of teachers, medical personnel, and technicians would be needed if we truly universalized nine-year compulsory education and basic medical networks to fringe rural regions. How many job types could arise from the new sectors of renewable energy, pollution treatment, and eco-diversity and technology? These latent potentials, including flexible and autonomous creative working spaces outside of formal employment, are infinite in principle. However, under the current conception of cheap labor and export-oriented development, and the flawed institutional system of wage labor and gainful employment, they cannot come to light. Though the concept of “employment” will someday become a relic of history, paid work is currently seen as a basic public good in economies with surplus labor. According to the utopian socialist conception of Con- dorcet: “all shall work; all shall work less,” should job opportunities be distributed as evenly as possible and shared? The gradually shortening of the work week in developed Western countries is a limited practice of this conception. By the same logic, China’s five-day work week is of great significance, even though it is still largely limited to the public sector and far from applying to all employed people. The new proposals such as the one published in Zhejiang Daily on enacting a nationwide six-hour workday in which shifts are divided by labor type and productive organization (March 19, 2008) is worth being discussed widely, along with other relevant initiatives of basic income and social dividends through the people’s congresses and media. The background of Condorcet’s slogan is material life, social recognition of the individual, and the family being dependent on income from work. As long as this background does not change, his slogan appears just and appealing. However, as a product of a particular history and mode of production, is there anything inevitable about this prerequisite? If the conditions can change or disappear depending on different cultural norms and institutional arrangements, should we not then think inno- vatively about the policy challenges of employment and unemployment? After all, shortening the work day/week to create a relatively just distribution of work resources is mainly a contingency compromise targeting structural unemployment, and is of limited significance in increasing long-term leisure and freedom. Furthermore, as resources grow scarcer, competition grows more intense and administrative control grows more 338 lin chun important, hence creating an extra bureaucratic burden detrimental to individual liberty and democratic autonomy. In many places, people are maintained in completely unnecessary posts merely to give everyone a job. This is not only inefficient, it also hampers technological progress. And, to the people concerned, it is no more than a relatively gentle form of deprivation. Humans by nature seek self-realization and dedicate themselves to activities they like and excel at; they should not crowd together for earnings without interest. Moreover, with its abundant labor supply, how could China not seek to develop its own high-level products, science, and technology just because of the superficial need of a degree of “technological conservatism”? To slow the advance of productivity and technology because of employment pressures is bad policy. A solution that truly resolves the problem can only be sought outside of the conventional, in the ultimate dissolution of the linked relationship between “work” and “wages.” Actually this equation has always been, to a large extent, illusion. The classic example is housework—the women’s liberation movement has already struggled for many years to win global respect and social value for their necessary labor at home. In China, with its large agricultural sector and numerous farmers, paid jobs have never been the most basic living method. Hence so-called work in actuality must include both all kinds of productions, services, and social contributions recognized by common values (even though “common values” are constantly debatable and changing), and all activities creating “use value” that are needed in protecting and promoting human life. Whether in public or private enterprise, group or individual, a salaried or unsalaried position, and whether valued by market or non-market systems, these works should be acknowledged and rewarded. Housework, for example, should be shared by both sexes and associated with their public roles. There is also informal, seasonal, temporary, and casual work; flexible employment, freelance, self-employment, volun- teering, public interest and association liaison activities, and many other types of “working” and contributing to social benefits. Liberated by productive and social progress from toiling all day to make ends meet, people would have more leisure to develop their own interests and talents, more time to care for one another, and more opportunities to discuss national and international affairs and participate in public decisions. A “third realm” or “solidarity economy” different from market domination and bureaucracy has already developed in many places across both the core and peripheries of global capitalism. In such an economy, cooperation, volunteer networks, and many types of exchange labor that do not involve an argument for “participatory socialism” 339

“bureaucracy” or “money” interact with the government, social production, and the national and international market, and cannot be spoken of in the same breath as the closed, backward autarkic community. The key difference here is “participation.” Participation is the antithesis of exclusion, discrimination, exploitation, and “reaping without sowing.” Its definition covers all “socially necessary labor,” including artistic creation and spiritual activities. Through participation, members of society, both as individuals and elements of collectives, enter into the domain of cooperation and exchange. Status as an eligible (or past) participant grants individuals social respect and returns. Participation hence becomes the only path to obtaining the social recognition that is an innate human need. On a policy level, participation must be encouraged, guaranteed, and equal. On the level of law, corresponding rules should be added to the constitution—concrete enough to be used for decisions in the civil courts. In the Labor Contract Law that went into effect in January 2008, for example, there would be much room for revision under this new conceptual framework. All this, of course, requires a revolutionary change in the existing system of employment and its culture. One can imagine the ground-shaking social change involved in going from “full employment” to “full participation.” The transition is marked by the detachment of income from selling labor and the end of market price of labor as a commodity. This significant change consequently must overturn modern society’s complacence, self-consciousness, and institutional path. Here, for the sake of argument, we have hypothesized the positive value of participation, i.e., excluded legally and morally unacceptable activities within the necessary greater backdrop of socialized production and legitimate public space. Participation of each to the fullest extent possible is both a right and a duty; the old, the young, the sick, and the handicapped are fully included according to their past or future participation status (for example, the participation status of a handicapped person can in theory be established based on their potential recovery). Participation is thus linked to recognition and is the basic qualification used to obtain social identity and reward. This vision is obviously only possible with the provision of life guarantees for everybody, a break with the social system led by wage labor and stabilized by privileges. And it can only grow under certain conditions: a foundation of complete social security coverage, a society realizing full participation through unlimited participatory forms and shared channels, and universally recognized corresponding public values advocating freedom and solidarity. In other words, until the day when we are able to abandon employment as the basic path to gaining individual and 340 lin chun family income and status, efforts to oppose unemployment, correct injustice, and eradicate inequality are merely superficial. History and the world rationalize and naturalize tradition, and thus “participation and security” sounds utopian. However, full employment is by comparison even more of a complete illusion.

III. A Minimum Income for Everyone

In fact, full participation is no more difficult than achieving full employment through open or concealed subsidies. For example, China’s economic transformation, while rapidly reducing the weight of old employment methods, created countless new jobs and participatory forms on all levels of social production and life. These new forms presently coexist with the traditional labor system, centered on waged employment. They could gradually replace the old system as the main source of jobs and income, be legitimized within the system of social recognition and values, and become the center of a “participatory democracy” in policy strategy and public discourse. In China today, following the rise and expansion of previously unfamiliar non‑traditional forms of employment, an increasing number of participants in social production and service no longer have occupations and wages in the traditional sense. The “modern” way of life we are used to, which takes urban employment and formal pay as a given and separates going to work “to make a living” from the pursuit of personal interests, is already irrevocably disintegrating. The future of the Chi- nese nation’s labor organization and social structure is more accurately represented by millions of young volunteers assisting in rural and border regions, national mobilization in disaster relief, locally desirable and need-driven projects, and experiments in democratic self-governance. However, it is insufficient to merely confirm the justice and legitimacy of a “social wage:” a basic income and social dividend earned by participation as a citizen.7 Instead, an inquiry into paths and material possibilities for its realization is needed. First we must make clear that basic income, as a universal provision, is distinct from poverty relief, social aid, and demands for a “living wage” to be paid by employers. Conceptually, the basic income provides a necessary guarantee of the basic human

7 G.D.H. Cole discusses John Stuart Mill’s commendation for the Fourierist idea of “a basic income to all” in Socialist Thought: The Forerunners, 1789–1850, London: Macmillan (1956), 310. For the literature, see major works listed in Lin Chun, “Participation and rec ognition,” New Political Science 22, 4 (2000): 545–9. an argument for “participatory socialism” 341 right to life, and is the starting point for citizenship. Its policy objectives should be taken up by the national financial administration, and the level set and periodically adjusted by central and local governments according to prices and other relevant conditions. An equal basic living stipend should be issued to every member of society unconditionally (without means-testing) and supplemented by free, publicly funded medical care and compulsory education. Logically, non-citizen participants should have more of a right to inclusion than citizen non-participants (such as people living abroad who have retained formal citizenship), but to keep this description simple, universal distribution of a basic income is more or less accurate. It is the most radical form of social dividends. The concrete details of implementation await extensive research, consultation, and experiments. Imagine that the central bank sets up a specialized branch to manage the basic income of citizens—individual accounts could be the same as citizen identification numbers. The income would automatically be added to the account every month or every few months (but not at too long an interval, to avoid overdrafting), and withdrawn freely, with the funds left in the account accruing interest at the pace of inflation. People unable to manage their own income could entrust their account to the management of family or others acting as guardians. The budget would be guaranteed by the national treasury and the fund does not enter the volatile stock market. The proposal for the establishment of a “permanent trust fund” for the Chinese people is an example of what a sovereign fund, mainly sourced by state-owned enterprises, can do for national social security.8 A social dividend is the first step toward a citizen income. The bulk of capital in the beginning could be paid by the aggregate of already-existing investments such as retirement funds, employee insurance, unemployment relief, and minimal welfare. Meanwhile, private insurance in the current system may continue existing and developing in addition to the basic income. The proposal and enactment of this policy would be a huge social project, naturally requiring a careful experimental process. Relying on the security of this new provision, people would be able to participate in all sorts of work and activities according to their desires and chances—formal or informal, paid (waged) or unpaid, long-term contractual or uncontracted—and obtain additional income above the cost

8 Cui Zhiyuan is the most influential advocate for the idea of basic income in China and discusses both its theoretical justification and possible institutional schemes. Cf. his personal website at Qinghua University, http://www.cui-zy.cn/. 342 lin chun of basic living. The equal basic income would guarantee income equality at a minimum standard, and would not limit, but to the contrary, would open up and encourage individual development and positive competition, thus fundamentally eliminating popularly conceived differences of status between employment, lack of employment, loss of employment, flexible employment, unstable employment, and work within and outside of the system. This differs from so-called big rice pot egalitarianism in its intention to “guarantee a minimum” without setting an upper limit. Aside from the basic guarantee, compensation according to one’s labor and rewards for outstanding work would be made, allowing for differences in earnings to form due to various factors such as choice, talent, and work ethic. “From each according to her ability, to each according to her need” arises precisely from the recognition of and respect for individual differences. Consequently an open, public, and fair incentive mechanism for social encouragement is important. It would not conflict with guaranteed universal social security—rather it depends on it. For example, some creative works by inventors, thinkers, activists, writers, artists and so on may temporarily or permanently not have commercial value but could still enjoy the support provided by the basic income; the workers involved could be free of market risks and devote themselves to the enterprises that they truly value. Much cross-cultural sociological and anthropological research also shows that welfare guarantees and sharing can promote collective identification and social cohesion, and increase enthusiasm, responsibility, and creativity in work.9 Reducing work hours has already been proven to promote rather than hinder economic development.10 The theory that unconditionally meeting basic needs of the people encourages sloth is nothing but a class prejudice. The reforms of the last twenty years adjusted public finance and coverage categories in an attempt to complete the transformation of social

9 See, for example, Claus Offe, Modernity and the State: East West, Cambridge: Polity, 1996, part III; Ha-Joon Chang, “State owned enterprise reform,” UN Department for Eco nomic and Social Affairs (New York, June 2007), 14–15. 10 According to OECD reports, between 1973 and 1996, a period of general economic growth and surge of productivity, working hours decreased in Germany by more than 16%, to an average of 1560 a year, and in France 13%, to an average of 1645 (Daniel Singer, “The end of the workday—I,” The Nation, Jan. 5, 1998). For an example of increasingly common experiences, see Jason Fried, “Be more productive. Take time off,” in New York Times Sunday Review, Aug. 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/ be-more-productive-shorten-the-workweek.html?_r=0. an argument for “participatory socialism” 343 security from a two-tiered system of the state covering work units and a communal “moral economy” to an urban-rural integrated one. Workers in formal employment mainly rely on government arrangements, with the work unit, individual, and state each paying part of the retirement pensions. Others rely on government-funded social programs as well as commercial insurances and various channels of assistance from family and local organizations. The three-line urban security policy requires guaranteed pensions for retired workers, aid for laid-off workers, and a minimum living stipend for residents in urban poverty. The Ministry of Civil Affairs hopes to develop and extend to remote areas the integrated plans of minimal security.11 Having led 400 million people out of poverty, it does not look more daunting for China to gradually build a unified social protection system for all. To peasants, land is most fundamental, although not a total guarantee of security. The importance of the 2003 revision of the land law into a new “farmland contract law” lies in its reaffirmation of the rights of peasants to land use and the rights of migrant workers to retain their land. Public land ownership has been amply proven to be the basic condition for Chinese development and market reform. The uttermost importance of grain safety or food sovereignty and the social security function of land mean that land privatization must never be adopted. Furthermore, the idea that only urbanization can fundamentally resolve land grabbing and other rural problems overlooks the human and environmental destruc- tions that stem from developmentalism, and the many unsolvable problems of relentless urban expansion. It also misses the significance of “petty production,” which is flourishing and expanding (rather than being gradually buried) in the midst of modern socialized large-scale production. Seeking an open, renewable form of small-scale production, with direct producers at its center, is significant for sustainable development as well as grassroots participation in society and politics. Of course, the linking of land use rights to the basic income, along with the resolution of other technical issues, may require a fairly long transition period. The larger national and international conditions also matter. Grain supply and price

11 In Shanghai and Beijing, minimum guarantees, old age pensions, and cooperative medical care for suburban peasants have already reached millions of people. Shandong and a few other provinces have also improved provision. Chongqing has had successful pilot tests of pension funds jointly financed by local government and participating indi viduals. Cf. Athar Hussain, “Social security in transition”, in Vivienne Shue and Christine Wong, eds. Paying for Progress in China: Public Finance, Human Welfare and Changing Pat terns of Inequality, London: Routledge, 2007: 96–116. 344 lin chun fluctuations in the global market, for example, affect China’s development strategy and social policy choice. A universal basic income is entirely in line with the goals of rural renaissance and urban-rural integrated prosperity in China. But emphasizing this factor does not equate to ignoring difficulties in terms of its operation. How these difficulties are overcome will be decided by the policy line, the institutional design, and popular consensus reached through widespread debate and persuasion. A basic income in which everyone has a stake, as the target model of social security, in principle should have obvious appeal. Its purpose is to provide guaranteed material support for full participation, thus ending the historical phenomenon, concept, and vocabulary of “unemployment,” and resolving problems such that labor-based “property rights” still cannot deal with. The disappearance of destitution would serve as an index of policy success, as this is the most fundamental and effective way to alleviate poverty. Only when people do not have to worry about food, water, shelter, education, or medical care, or in other words are secure in both the positive sense of subsistence and the negative sense of being free from physical harm, can they be liberated from the struggle for survival and obtain basic freedom from fear and want. On the other hand, any society that polarizes rich and poor is not a healthy society, and absolutely not a society that a people’s republic that has endured a great social revolution paid for by the sacrifices of millions can identify with.

IV. Resistance and Feasibility

In a developing country like China, is there ultimately an economic foundation for each person having a basic income? Is it feasible in practice? If similar policy choices in rich countries would end up as unacceptable tax burdens, how could it possibly work in a developing country? For- tunately, China has a formidable income to draw from. Aside from the large foreign reserves, in 2004 the national treasury tax revenue reached 2.6 trillion RMB; in 2006 it was 3.9 trillion, and in 2007 it leapt to 4.9 trillion. In 2008, despite severe damage caused by heavy snows in the South and the Sichuan earthquake, treasury income continued to increase, and by 2011 had reached 10 trillion RMB. Tax revenue as a percentage of the GDP has increased from less than 15 percent in the mid-1990s to over 25 percent today. Of course, yet unknown conditions such as slowed growth or an economic downturn effected by the global economy or financial market must be considered, along with factors of currency an argument for “participatory socialism” 345

appreciation, inflation, watering down of foreign reserves, and so on. But various fundamental measures can be enacted to inject capital into the basic infrastructure for economic, social, and human development: developing the SOEs and using their earnings to sustain public finance; increasing the ratio of state investment in the social security fund, public education, and health care; perfecting the oversight mechanisms to stop corruption or misuse of funds; and utilizing foreign reserves. Since China has already implemented the three-line security guarantees while alleviat- ing urban and rural poverty, realizing the next step of strategic progress and policy renovation toward basic income or universal social security for all should be an entirely achievable matter of politics and persistence. The most direct resistance actually comes from the limitations of our own social and cultural conventions. The problem of “too little money; too many people” is superficial; the real question is how to spend the money we have and realize human capabilities. Many conventional conceptions do not hold up to scrutiny. For instance, an institutional arrangement appropriate for meeting basic needs and an expensive bureaucratic redistribution machine (a classic example being the huge and complex taxation and refunding system in welfare capitalism) are two different things. The former is not predicated on great material abundance, and the latter is by no means the only way to reduce income disparity. There are many means to provide social welfare: inside and outside government, inside and outside the market, centrally and locally, publically and privately, and the space of social organization in between. Some of the most basic needs, such as literacy, public health facilities (especially pre- ventive medicine and epidemic control, success in which greatly reduces medical expenses), affordable housing, and public transportation, were largely met with considerable efficacy during the Mao era, when China was significantly poorer than today. Aside from government investment, the main supporting forces at the time were collective savings and co-ops. Compared to many economically richer countries, China may have more plentiful resources among its people. Some collectivist traditions are difficult to erase, for instance, self-reliance and mutual-support, equal sharing, and care among families and neighborhoods of the sick and elderly. China could perhaps support a modern moral economy or “welfare society” that is far more flexible, cheaper, and more compassionate than those of the capitalist “welfare states.” Sadly, in the discourse of global integration, valuable past experience is lost and rational imagination of the future is lacking. Why can we not retreat a step from dogma and preconceptions, and take a wider view? 346 lin chun

When the definition of welfare is per-capita GDP, instead of the effective use of wealth and the allocation of social resources once production has attained a certain level, then the concept of “poor country” or “rich country” is not necessarily representative of the country’s quality of life. Cuba is poor, but it has always maintained a free national public education and healthcare system and other high-quality free social services (public libraries, recreational centers, workers’ vocational schools, etc.). The United States, which has long imposed sanctions on Cuba, is rich, but according to the US Census Bureau in 2012 16% of its population lived in poverty, including nearly 20% of American children. 47 million Americans rely on food banks and even more are unable to buy medical insurance.12 Authorities on economic history have concluded from many years of research that economic-technological development, having amply surpassed the threshold of general scarcity on a global scale, allows for everyone to escape poverty. A universal social wage across bounded communities (and eventually citizenship as well) is materially within our reach.13 Consequently, natural disasters excepted, any barrier to this promise of a world beyond want is only social and political, not economic. The transition is not about absolute shortage anywhere, but about distribution, entitlement, and domestic and global justice. Generally speaking, then, the root of poverty in our times is class exploitation, unequal distribution, conflict and war, international blockage, or unequal exchange in international trade. This implies that if the large external obstacles can be eliminated or mitigated, any government with resolve (even in developing countries) cannot use limited financial resources as an excuse for not taking on the responsibility of guaranteeing the basic needs of its people. Once again, the key is politics. In China especially, with its rapid growth and socialist self-identity, a long-term policy orientation would have no reason to reject universal security and full participation. Under the recent conditions described

12 “Census: US poverty rate spikes, nearly 50 million Americans affected, CBS news, Nov 15 2012; “The children going hungry in America,” BBC news, Mar. 6, 2013; “Extreme poverty in the US, 1996–2001”, the National Poverty Center (University of Michigan), http://www .npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf. 13 As argued since the utopian socialists and French and American revolutionaries (e.g. Marquis de Condorcet and Tomas Paine), it makes not only moral but also economic sense to end poverty and insecurity (Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty: A Historical Debate, London: Profile Books, 2004). See also, A.E. Wrigley, “Malthus on the prospects for the laboring poor,” in Poverty, Progress and Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). an argument for “participatory socialism” 347 above, in which government revenue increases at twice the speed of the GDP, how could one think that China cannot support its entire population at a subsistence level? Clearly, what causes financial difficulties for the social security system is not economic underdevelopment; rather it is one-sided policy decisions and management deficiencies. The problem is not a lack of money, but financial loss through waste, malfeasance, and corruption. No one can accurately calculate how big the holes are. Thus the answer to the question “Where does the money come from?” would be rather straightforward: from the income of SOEs, from anti-corruption measures (cutting administrative expenses such as luxurious office buildings and private consumption from the public budget), from progressive tax reforms (adding also trading taxes on stock gambling, increasing taxes on luxury goods, gasoline, and so on), and from the designing and upgrading of industries to achieve resource efficiency and energy conservation. All of this also requires public budgeting, government transparency, and democratic policy making. Of course, the details of how to manage the citizens’ income fund must be very carefully discussed. For example, medical expenses must first be reduced. Currently, some families pile up medicines that go unused for years, while many others silently endure illness because they cannot afford medicine; this situation must change. When public investment is sufficiently effective and public services are sufficiently inexpensive, then the national provision of basic income for all will be a realizable policy choice. Here what must be especially emphasized is the importance of a strong national sector with clear objectives and good management. The sector’s decisive contribution to national independence, state capacity, effective public policy, resource allocation beneficial to national development and social justice, and universal welfare, is the fundamental reason to oppose privatization. To be sure, government tax revenues and finances do not only come from SOEs; the collective and private sectors are also an important source—in some cases even larger than the former. However, uniting strategic industries, such as energy, minerals, water, forestry, transportation, and information, under public control, can have several benefits: increase public wealth; stabilize national finances, prices and tax rates; encourage rational and constructive investment; and regulate the finance and capital market. Overreliance on tax income from private enterprises can engender extra transaction costs due to the need to manage conflicting public and private interests. Meanwhile, because of excessively high tax rates resulting from a lack of income from national capital and land, the tax burden on enterprises will unduly increase and negatively impact investment and 348 lin chun production. Over-issuance of public bonds will likewise lead to problems with interest rates and instances of defaulting. Privatization has already greatly weakened the overall strength, scale, and leadership position of China’s state sector, but even so, SOEs in 2011 saw earnings of 2.2 trillion RMB, of which 1.5 trillion was from centrally controlled enterprises. Let- ting the portion of this wealth not needed for further production appreciate is the first step of capital preparation and the institutional foundation for implementing the basic income. Reconsideration and restructuring of China’s development model will of course include reform, improvement, development, and expansion of the state sector, and perhaps also the national buyback of certain privatized enterprises. Ensuring that every citizen receives a common minimum income is at its core not an issue of economic power, but an issue of political conviction and willpower. It is also a way of maintaining national autonomy under pressure from international capital in the open market. Non-market institutional innovation remains possible as long as the weight of profits in our society does not exceed that of needs, capital is still unable to dominate policy decisions, finance is not subordinate to the fluctuating external market, and human values are not measured by money. Moreover, promising and experimenting with a basic income covering all citizens will perhaps encounter less public suspicion or technical difficulties in China than in the capitalist world. While a similar plan in OECD countries means large tax increases, and therefore is opposed by the electorate, it may receive more widespread support in a place that—after several thousand years of imagining a society of “moderate prosperity” and “great harmony”—has experienced the first steps of baptism in socialism, and retains a powerful public economy and shared social consciousness. Moreover, wage labor in China, at least in agriculture, has always been marginal, and many traditional or mixed forms of labor organization continue to this day. Rather than the road of Western industrialization and urbanization, “uneven development” might open another road in China.

V. Participatory Socialism

The transition from full employment to full participation should form the basis of public policy in a participatory socialism. People’s sovereignty, political democracy, and resistance to integration in global capitalism are all missing from the official interpretation of socialism. But, in an important positive change, the government began to address the problem of an argument for “participatory socialism” 349 developmentalism that is blind to environmental and social consequences. We could then establish that no one should lose security of livelihood, and hence individual aspiration and recognition, or the opportunity or conditions for developing their own capabilities. Thus in a society that takes participation as a legitimate principle, all people should have what I call a “rubber rice bowl” of a basic income. This concept of “rubber rice bowl,” because it does not depend on employment, differs greatly from the “iron rice bowl” of state sector work units under traditional socialism. At the same time, it is also fundamentally distinct from the concept of welfare capitalism; its understanding of human freedom and prosperity, and of social justice, is different from each of these other systems. Milton Freidman, for instance, advocated realizing full employment through low wages, small government, and a safety net with negative taxes for the poor as its mechanism.14 The social democratic ruling parties of the European Union focus on redistribution and overlook the subjective position and development potential of people in the production process itself insofar as they believe in welfare capitalism. Neither of these paths of thinking in social policy can transcend the traditional mode of employment. How- ever, a society of full participation with institutional guarantees of material living conditions could respond to the desire of self-realization—and, among the population of citizens able to work, it would not allow for any stigma of “welfare dependents” or discrimination against the poor. When interpreting socialism in the sense of full participation, the following few points are worth special attention. First, growth must turn from the mode of high consumption, high export reliance, and high exploitation to just, safe, and sustainable development; the danger of war from getting swept into future resource competition must be avoided. This change also implies abandoning “cheap labor” and resolving the problem of “surplus retention” that is typical in third world development, instead holding as long-term prospects unalienated labor and a sense of personal satisfaction and benefit from work. Certain production and consumption methods that mirror international trends must also be controlled, for instance the car industry, as a pillar industry, should turn to research and development of renewable energy and green transportation. Once the logic of needs gains priority over the logic of profit, a new economic organization and mode of production will emerge. “Total demand,” “total supply,” and many

14 “The methodology of positive economics,” in Daniel Hausman, ed. The Philosophy of Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984: 145–78. 350 lin chun other familiar concepts would be redefined. The core of the participatory model is the pursuit of a production process that is more humane (i.e., in it, humans are more than mere living parts of the assembly line), more flexible, and more able to utilize the latent creativity of individuals and groups. The post-Ford methods of softening of hierarchy, multiple roles, teamwork, and cooperative competition all serve as useful precedents to promote learning, increase the transmission and improvement of technologies, and encourage people to fully develop themselves individually. Second, alongside its system of centralized power, China has since ancient times had traditions of decentralized power and local autonomy. The positive elements of these, once filtered and refined, can serve as resources for the organization of the participatory society. For example, a great number of occupations in small production, such as those relating to agriculture or services, would help develop the subjectivity and participatory consciousness of direct producers. In some domains, people could enact their own designs, produce and sell things themselves—even consuming a part of their own products—and control non-tax surplus and thus eliminate exploitation. Economic democracy and labor-based “property rights” would be decisive for achieving these goals. Generally speaking, management units with few levels and relatively small sizes are helpful for reducing bureaucracy, enacting direct democracy, and giving stakehold- ers the power to speak and make decisions. Even big conglomerates and enterprises do not face structural conflict with their relatively dispersed and autonomous branches, and they do not eliminate specialized “small” production. “Labor intensive” does not necessarily mean backward. An equal basic income for everyone in family management will also set a hard limit on past patriarchal traditions and help promote gender equality. In short, establishment of a participatory society with direct producers as its subjective body and the realization of human values through united labor as its objective will certainly not be a return to impoverished and sealed-off “agricultural socialism.” Participation and prosperity, because of their connections to socialized production and large markets, carry the implications of modernity and liberation. Furthermore, a participatory society founded on public support and autonomous cooperation would be characterized by low-cost, high- efficiency economization and convenience. Although the government would have obligatory social responsibilities, it could not take on all public welfare alone. Supplementing the government’s work would be organs such as collective networks, co-ops, green banking (e.g. environmental works credited for return of services at a time of need), mutual an argument for “participatory socialism” 351 aid groups, and various non-profit organizations that provide small loans, technological guidance, and public services. Traditional methods could be updated to provide economically optimal services from food, sanita- tion, and repairs to public order and cultural life. The shared enjoyment of both duties and rights by both sexes is best when done willingly, yet some rigid rules produced democratically should also be adopted. The labor therein could have market value, or could be kept out of the market and calculated according to non-monetary exchange and circulation of vouchers, certificates, or credits earned by voluntary work. For instance, on the weekend I may volunteer ten hours at the local retirement home, and these ten hours would be stamped in my “Honor in caring for the old and young” bankbook. If the next month I take a business trip, I can use some of the hours I have saved to request a volunteer worker to take care of my young child. The “green credit” earned from planting trees, shoveling snow, or recycling garbage could be exchanged for fresh fruit and vegetables at the neighborhood organic produce store, which sells direct from the farm. These kinds of exchanges would be regulated and managed by co-ops, neighborhood committees, or local governments, to supplement currency-based markets. Departing from money-fetishist ways of life and consumption is beneficial to physical and mental health and social harmony. It is the necessary road to re-understanding the relationship between nature and society, and to protecting the eco-environment. A warm, simple, plentiful, and colorful life can be enjoyed without endless accumulation and ceaseless changing of products in a process of “creative destruction.” If the old market economy consequently fails, that may not be a bad thing, because new modes of production and life require a new market concept and mechanism. In fact, as history shows, the market itself has great plasticity. In different places and under different political leadership, markets move in different directions with different social outcomes. The point of participation is also to reject the segregation and polarization of rich and poor. Today, advertisements for “elite” mansions for the wealthy openly declare that they have been built with separate elevators for the owners and servants. The call for full participation is intended to change this sort of concept, which is ignorant of equal rights, and the frightening waste of resources. Lastly, the vision of participatory socialism—beyond rights and respect, human capital and social capital, freedom and autonomy—is composed of political struggles decided by public deliberation and policy debate. Those who have vested interests in the current order oppose the participation 352 lin chun movement, but the rise of the commoners, direct producers, and the social forces cannot be stopped; human development demands gradually casting off dirty, tedious, and heavy labor. Moreover, the wish to unite work with individuality and interests is closer to potential realization now, in terms of both theory and technology, than at any previous point in history. The time gained through advancement of productive forces and the support of the basic income are particularly impactful to the quantity and quality of political participation. The question of democracy is essentially also a question of time: a question of more and more people being liberated from working just to make a living and thereafter participating in the management of public affairs. Laborers can only become free, autonomous, and democratic citizens once they are freed from the heavy burden of feeding their families and the fear of lacking basic securities. Consequently, time, through the universal participation of the masses, becomes a source and force of democracy. Ultimately, participation would be simultaneously an obligation and a right on the principle of equality and the rejection of exploitation and domination. There is no chance to win the battle against joblessness until we can transcend formal employment as the primary means of both household income and social recognition.

VI. Cultural Transformations

Unemployment in China, like that in developed countries, is a wide challenge to national policy beyond the category of economics. The existence of a large amount of surplus labor is, first and foremost, evidence that society has attained the material conditions needed to begin to free itself of the social burden of necessary labor. Unfortunately (until the transition to basic income and full participation is complete), because subsistence and respect remain connected to wages, the large unemployed population inevitably is materially and spiritually damaged. In the framework, expectations, and policy of civilization today, the unprecedented freedoms of a society free from dependence on wage labor will be completely misunderstood as purely negative. Death from overwork and sweatshops, destitute and homeless people with no occupation or income, and pointless make-work just to be nominally employed—these three phenomena all contradict human creativity and have become a distortion of values and an anachronism in the rational sense. As a precondition for correcting this error, the social contract founded on the relations of wage labor in modern society must be profoundly altered. an argument for “participatory socialism” 353

Then, the customary thoughts, moral codes, and deep-rooted institutional arrangement of society itself must be challenged. This would directly affect our understanding of production, circulation, and consumption, as well as the experience of labor. People’s views, attitudes, longings, and hopes, and the organization of individual activities and lifestyles, would also change. The length of the work day is not only connected to leisure and quality of life, it is also related to the workers’ right to participate in policy-making, unions, and other social movements. Vacations under market manipulation and consumerism become purely personal and material, but they can also be used to support individual cultivation and development, and can indeed become public holidays. Phrases such as “politics of time,” “politics of space,” and “politics of participation” will become the markers of this unprecedented cultural transformation. When the existing institutional foundation of labor and professions has crumbled, the consciousness of the times will face a crisis. Keynes once foresaw the “general nervous breakdown” that results, although he never guessed that China, which at that time (the Great Depression) was still in a state of chaotic war at the fringes of the world economy, might be the first: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals . . . . All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tre- mendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard . . . . We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well . . . I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate . . . Indeed, it has already begun.15 Both the “future of work” in Europe and “people-centered” or “organic” development in the global South find resonances in the mix of pre-industrial and post-industrial conditions in China. In this sense, participation can be seen as part of a global movement transcending the boundaries of ideology and state. This movement must struggle toward champion- ing direct producers and participants, must seek unalienated labor and

15 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 358–373. 354 lin chun unalienated modes of life, and must achieve harmony between the natural environment and human society. Of course, socialism, as the effort of the Chinese nation to seek a new modern identity, ultimately must be defined by the Chinese people themselves according to local conditions and needs. China, a great civilization of immense diversity and energy, has throughout history produced countless inventions and creative works, and also has experienced an epic social revolution. To further realize its potential “privilege of backwardness,” what matters for China is not its per-capita GDP but rather its determination and ability to resume its socialist ambition and achieve institutional innovation. Index academic discourse 153–154, 160, 196–197, 200, 202, 205, 212, 216, 221, 162–164 242, 244–245, 253–254, 256–257, 259, After Revolution 242–243, 245–247, 251, 261–262, 266, 281, 291, 293, 295–310, 254 312–313, 342, 346 Ai Wei Wei 97 class struggle 5–6, 8, 16, 100, 105–106, Aiwah Ong 173, 178 108, 196, 213, 253, 256–257, 275, 278, alienation 10, 190–193, 252–253, 257, 281, 295, 302, 308–309, 312 261–262, 299, 309, 314 Cold War 96, 100, 106, 110, 112, 115 Asiatic Mode of Production 177, 178 n. 24 collectivism 14, 27–28, 31, 157, 185 colonialism 13, 23–25, 79–80, 85, 89, basic income 333, 337, 340–345, 110–111, 175, 195, 197–198, 215, 289–290 347–350, 352 Condorcet 337 basic needs 342, 345–346 constitutional amendments 42 n. 30, 157 Bettelheim, Charles 301, 302 nn. 14–15 constitutionalism 100, 114, 154–156 Bo Xilai 104 contracts 176, 334 Burkett, Paul 293 n. 2, 294 culture 1–4, 13–14, 21–26, 28, 30, 33, 40, 42, 45, 47, 69, 70–73, 75, 81–87, Cao Zhenglu 42, 52, 55–56 90–91, 97–98, 102, 104, 106, 109–110, 117, capital 9, 11–12, 41, 96–97, 99, 116, 142, 120–122, 124, 126, 128–130, 133–139, 141, 169–170, 172, 176, 179, 183, 196–199, 144, 147–148, 150, 160, 162, 169, 172, 210, 222, 240, 262, 266, 285–286, 288, 185–186, 195–196, 199, 202, 230, 298–299, 301–302, 307–308, 313–314, 265–266, 282, 310, 339 317–319, 323, 325, 328–334, 336, 341, Cultural Revolution 4–6, 8, 10, 27, 33, 345, 347–348, 351, 353 46, 63–64, 76–79, 85, 99, 105–107, 138, capitalism 8–9, 12, 15–16, 31, 46, 48 162, 167–168, 204, 220, 246, 255–259, n. 43, 76–78, 97, 99–100, 103, 111, 116, 262, 264, 269–270, 281, 300, 303, 306, 170–172, 174, 188, 193–195, 197–198, 200, 308–311 220, 255, 261, 263–268, 282, 284–287, 289–290, 294–295, 297, 298 n. 9, 299, democracy 9–15, 25, 33, 38, 40, 53, 76, 301–303, 312–314, 319, 325–326, 334 78, 82, 88, 91–92, 96, 108–112, 115–116, n. 6, 335, 338, 345, 348–349 161, 164, 176–177, 180–182, 185, 206, capitalist economic relations 8 209–210, 215–226, 247–250, 260, 262, capitalist modernity 8–9, 43–46, 101 264, 269, 271, 281, 288–289, 313, 340, capitalist roaders 4–5, 8, 10, 99, 103, 295, 348, 350, 352 309, 312 de-politicization 95, 100, 105, 107–108, Carl Schmitt 105, 106 n. 20, 171 n. 12, 173, 116 179, 180 n. 31 Deng faction 6–7, 9–10 Charter 77 113–114 Deng reforms 10 Charter 2008 13 n. 4, 95, 112, 115 Deng Xiaoping 10, 16, 98, 207, 258, 264, Chen Yingsong 52, 55, 57–58, 63 267–269, 294–295, 309 citizenship 175–176, 181–182, 207–209, dictatorship 4, 91, 104, 154, 160, 162–163, 259, 341, 346 249 CK Lee 176 direct producers 304, 343, 350, 352–353 class 4–6, 8–9, 13–14, 16, 27, 30–31, 48, discourse (politics of knowledge) 3–4, 7, 51, 53, 55–58, 60, 63, 65–68, 76, 86, 9–15, 17, 22, 25–29, 31, 33–34, 36, 38–43, 95, 97–98, 101, 103–104, 106–112, 116, 46–47, 49, 82, 95, 98–105, 107, 109, 119, 141, 146, 160, 169, 176, 181, 187, 194, 110–112, 116, 153–155, 157–160, 162–165, 356 index

185, 187, 194, 208, 210–211, 221, 253, 312, 91–92, 96, 98, 100, 102, 107–108, 111–112, 340, 345 139, 144, 147, 155–156, 158, 169–170, discourse on judicial independence 172, 176–177, 179–182, 185–188, 190–191, 154–155, 158–159, 163–164 193–195, 197–198, 207–213, 218, 225, discursive struggle 246, 250–251, 256, 261, 310, 336–339, hegemonic discourse 4, 7, 10–11, 17 341–343, 349, 353 duty-centered view 157 individualism 12, 17, 27 n. 7, 28–33, Dworkin, Ronald M. 157–158 35–36, 38–39, 41–42, 44, 49, 109, 157, 186, 193–194, 210, 244, 320 Eastern Europe (and Soviet Union) 8–9, 99, 247, 299, 303 judicial independence 14, 153–155, economic reform 7–8, 12, 16, 39, 41, 158–160, 163–164 78, 156–157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 254, 306, judicial reform 161 307 n. 25 judicial system 156, 159–161 emancipation 8–9, 70, 191–194, 303 employment 142, 145, 315, 330, 333 n. 1, Kant, Emmanuel 188 334–340, 342–343, 348–349, 352 Karl Marx 157, 170, 183, 285 Enlightenment 11, 23, 25–28, 38–43, Keynes 320, 322, 328–330, 353 46–47, 58, 69, 71–78, 81–83, 86, 88–89, Keynesian 320–322 91, 105–106, 113 Kraus, Richard 296, 311 Ernst Bloch 170, 171 n. 12, 177 labor 5, 8, 11, 17, 25, 55, 58–59, 111, 114, fascism 174, 177–178, 180 130, 144, 170, 172, 176, 179, 183, 189, Five-Year Reform Program 162, 164 191–194, 197–200, 206, 210, 212–213, food sovereignty 343 233, 237, 239, 243–245, 247–248, Foster, John Bellamy 295 252–253, 261–262, 297, 300, 314, Freidman, Milton 349 333–340, 342, 348–352, 353 Lefort, Claude 206 GDP 119, 146, 330, 344, 346–347, 354 legal discourse 14, 153–155, 160, 162–165, Giorgio Agamben 173, 179 211 global capitalism 12, 99, 111, 170, 188, 197, legality 14, 169, 173, 175–176, 180, 198 200, 267–268, 282, 284, 287, 338, 348 leisure 306, 337–338, 353 Gramsci, Antonio 305 Liang Qichao 30, 62, 130–133, 159, 186 Guo Moruo 15, 31, 40, 65, 229–230 liberalism 3, 8, 12–13, 42, 53, 64, 69, 82, 85–86, 88–89, 91–92, 95, 97–101, Harman, Chris 299 105–114, 116, 154, 168, 175–176, 179–181, Hart-Landsberg, Martin 294–295 186–187, 194, 209–210 Harvey, David 97–98, 197, 293 n. 2, 295, Liu Jiming 52, 55, 58, 65 301 n. 13 Liu Xiaobo 97, 106, 112 Hayek 106 Liu Xinwu 33, 260 Haynes, Mike 299 Liu Zaifu 35 Hegel 80, 82, 84, 89, 92–93, 157, 187–190, Lu Xun 13, 24, 30, 40, 65, 70–76, 79 193–194, 208 Luxemburg, Rosa 197, 313 higher education in ancient China 122–123, 128 Ma Xiwu style of trial 165 Hinton, William 99, 311 Magdoff, Harry 295 Hobsbawm, Eric 295 Mandel, Ernest 294 Hu Xuewen 52, 55 Mao Dun 25, 30, 65, 70, 200, 202 Mao Zedong imperialism 13, 22–23, 97, 101, 105, 110, Mao Zedong thought 78, 267, 182 n. 39, 197–198, 202–203, 281 270–271, 280–281 IMF 318–319, 323, 326–332 Maoism 78, 95, 102–103, 107, 175, individual 1–3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 25–36, 308–311 39, 41–45, 47–49, 54, 60, 66, 81, 85–89, Maoist discourse 13 n. 4, 101–105, 312 index 357 market and marketization 282, 285, 288–290, 301, 308–309, and inequality 265, 293 326–327, 331–333, 337, 344, 353 as ruling-class strategy 305–308 presumption of innocence 154 privatization of political power private property 112, 188–194, 197–198, 300–301 210, 303, 314 Marxism 3, 8, 29–30, 45–46, 78, 100, 263 privatization 9, 55, 87–88, 97, 101, 104, n. 2, 267, 270–271, 274, 276, 280–281, 110, 112, 114–115, 174 n. 16, 210, 301, 307, 283 323, 343, 347–348 meaning community of meanings 1–2 renmin 175–176 meaning structure 1 revolution Meisner, Maurice 298 continuous revolution 8, 10 Mill, John Stuarts 185, 186 n. 3, 340 n. 7 right to subsistence 157 Ming Dynasty 15, 229–231, 234–238, 266 rights modernism 12, 21–26, 28, 33, 35–36, rights-centered view 157 39–40, 42–45, 48–49, 54, 66–67 rubber rice bowl 349 modernization rule of law modernization theory 9, 45 rule of law in Chinese style 155 modernity socialist modernity 9 Sandel, Michael 208–210 moral economy 207, 212, 343, 345 Schumpeter, Joseph 194–195, 198 Silver 230–238, 240 natural law 154, 170, 179–180 Single Whip Reform 233, 235 neoliberalism/neo-liberalism 168, 170, Smith, Richard 298 n. 9 173, 179 social life 1–3, 5, 7, 10, 14, 42, 51, 168–169, Anglo-American neo-liberal model 306–307 326 social security 333, 334 n. 2, 339, neoliberal economic system 12 341–345, 347 New Left 36, 45, 53, 64, 68, 96, 100, 104, social wage 340, 346 110, 241 socialism new leftists 96 actually existing 102–104, 114–115, Nove, Alec 294 264–265, 298, 302, 313–314 and bureaucratic class 14, 244, 301, official ideology 14, 153, 155, 157–158, 310 160, 162–165 and democracy 9–10, 12–15, 25, 33, Orientalism 98 38, 40, 53, 76, 78, 82, 88, 91–92, On Contradictions 16 96, 108–112, 114–116, 161, 164, On Practice 16, 270, 277–278 176–177, 180–182, 185, 206, 209–210, 215–225, 247–250, 260, 262, 264, participation 3–4, 13, 107, 208–211, 213, 269, 281, 288–289, 313, 340, 348, 223–225, 242, 245, 247–248, 253, 261, 350, 352 306, 333, 335, 339–340, 343–344, 346, and market 3, 6, 9, 15–17, 26–28, 31, 38, 348–353 40–43, 45–47, 51, 63, 69, 96, 98, 100, participatory socialism 17, 333, 348, 351 105, 110, 112, 118, 126, 140, 144–145, 149, passive revolution 305–306, 308 161, 163, 179, 183, 185–186, 189–190, Perry, Elizabeth 196, 207–208, 210–211 194–195, 197–202, 210, 213, 220, 231, Polanyi, Karl 179, 183, 198, 231 233–240, 268, 286, 289, 293–299, politics of time 353 301–304, 306–308, 312–313, 316, 321, postsocialism 16, 263–265, 282–283 323–324, 326–327, 332–335, 338–339, practice 1–3, 5, 8, 14–16, 32, 39, 47, 77, 83, 341–345, 347–348, 350–351, 353 87, 91, 102–103, 110, 114, 141, 149, 155–156, class divisions in 307 159, 161, 164–165, 169, 186–188, 191–192, SOEs 333, 345, 347–348 198, 203, 207, 210–211, 215, 223, 235, 242, solidarity economy 338 251, 257, 260, 267, 270–271, 275–280, Spring Silkworms 200–201 358 index state Wallerstein, Immanuel 297 state legalism 14, 155–156, 158 Wang Fuzhi 234, 237 state theory 169 Wang Hui 45–47, 96, 107, 174 n. 16, 307 subaltern literature 12, 51–57, 59–70 Wang Meng 34, 245 Sweezy, Paul 301 Wang Shaoguan 96, 249 Wang Xiangfu 52, 55–57 tax 218, 232, 235, 239, 315, 344, 347–348 Washington consensus 323–325, 328 The East is Red 205 Wen Jiabao 110 The Supreme Peoples’ Court 161–162, Western discourse of rights 157 164–165 White Haired Girl 204 Three Supremacies 164 World Bank 318, 320, 323, 330, 332 totalitarianism 95, 102–103, 168, 206, 247 WTO 318, 329, 334 two-line struggle 103 Wu Jinglian 307 n. 25 unemployment 322, 333–337, 340–341, Xie Juezai 249–250 344, 352 Xu Jilin 95 n. 1 uneven development 348 university culture 13, 117, 120–122, Yan’an 32, 47–48, 64, 103–104, 242–243, 128–129, 134–135, 137–139, 141, 144, 248–250 147–148, 150 Yan Fu 132–133, 186 university spirit 120, 126 Yu Luoke 253, 257 wage labor 111, 334–335, 337, 339, 348, Zhou Libo 255 352 zombies 183