DISSIDENCE AND DIVERGENCE:
On the Rebellious Discourses of Post-Mao China
by
Qing Liu
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School , Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
Milwaukee , Wisconsin
August , 1994 i
PREFACE
When I was in China, my social life involved two different circles. One was in their 30s or early 40s, a group of intellectuals--scholars, professors, authors, and directors who had been "Red Guards" in the Cultural
Revolution. Another was younger, around twenty years old, a group of college students, experimental poets and rock musicians. A question has puzzled me for a long time. Why are these two groups so different that they have difficulties of communicating each other or even finding a common topic? In 1986, I published a research proposal on contemporary Chinese youth in Shanghai, which raised questions about the difference between the two generations.
This thesis is to explore the differences between these two different generations of Chinese youth.
The theoretical theme of this thesis is to interpret how Marxist-Leninist ideology and its crisis influence on conflicts and divergence among different social discourses in post-Mao China . It is based on my studies of Leninist regimes and modernity which were undertaken during through my graduate study courses, especially independent studies under instruction of Professor Barrett McCormick.
The greatest thanks are due to Professor McCormick who carefully supervised this thesis and patiently read and commented on various drafts . As my academic adviser , he guides me through the very beginning of my study in
-, ii
Marquette University to the last day of completing this
thesis. While he was on leave in two years, we kept
communication each other via e-mail almost weekly. It has
substantially contributed to many points of this thesis and,
generally, my intellectual growth. I am also very grateful
to Professor Michael Fleet and Professor James Rhodes for
their reading this thesis and giving constructive criticism.
I would like to give special thanks to Mr. Michael Sullivan,
a Ph. D candidate of political science in University of
Wisconsin-Madison, for his helpful comments and careful proofreading the thesis. I has also learned a lot from many discussions with him during last three years. At last, I want to thank my wife, Wang Yan, for her unwavering support
and encouragement. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE i
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1 1. Uncovering Divergence among Dissidence 2 2. Failed Leninist Modernity and Alternatives 4 3. From the Thinking Generation to the Playful Generation 7 CHAPTER II LENINIST MODERNITY AND ITS CRISIS 11 1. The Modernity of Marxist Discourse 11 2. The Modernity of Leninist State Power 17 3. The Crisis of Leninist Modernity 27 CHAPTER III THE THINKING GENERATION AND ANTI-IDEOLOGY 37 1. The Rise of The Thinking Generation 38 2. Rebuilding Ideals in the Ruin of Communist Belief 40 3. Social Conscience and Political Participation 43 4. Searching for Alternative Modernity Based on Intellectualism 46 5. A Turn: the End of the Thinking Generation 51
CHAPTER IV THE PLAYFUL GENERATION AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM 59 1. The Landscape of the Playful Generation 59 2. The Advent of the Nihilistic Rebels 62 3. Anti-intellectualism in the Era of Mass Culture 65 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION: THREE TYPES OF DISCOURSES AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-MAO CHINA 70 1 . Toward Discourse Perspective 70 2. Rational-critical Response to Leninist Modernity 72 3 . Deconstructive Response to Leninist Modernity 76 4. Divergence between Two Rebellious Discourses 81 5 . Rebellious Discourse and Democracy 85
APPENDIX 88 1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The crisis of Marxist-Leninist ideology in China has
been deepened by post-Mao political and economic reforms.
The decline of the ideology has created new opportunities
for non-Marxist-Leninist ideas to rapidly spring up to rebel
against the party-state ideology. This thesis studies the
rebellious discourses of Chinese youth from the late 1970s
to early 1990s and attempts to make three major
contributions to understanding late-Leninist China and to
. broader studies of post-communist societies. First, through
examining the evolution of Chinese youth discourses, I will
demonstrate that, while they all challenge or reject
communist ideology, there are increasing divergences among
non-Marxist-Leninist discourses. Second, this study will
use a theoretical framework that understands Marxism
Leninism as a specific version of modernity--"Leninist
modernity" and then interpret the non-Marxist-Leninist
discourses as critical responses to the Leninist modernity.
Third, focusing on the relationship between democracy and
the public sphere, I will inquire whether non-Marxist
Leninist discourses will be able to establish a rational
critical public sphere , which is a necessary condition of
developing a liberal democratic system, after the end of
communist ideology . 2
1. Uncovering Divergence among Dissidence
It is evident that the emergence and growth of non
Marxist-Leninist ideas had a serious impact on Leninist regimes. By challenging the hegemony of party-state ideology and exposing the legitimacy crisis, non-Marxist
Leninist discourses have become the basic ground of civil societies and played a very important role in the struggle of "citizens against states" in Leninist states. Their political and social significance was demonstrated in
Hungary of 1956, in Czechoslovakia of 1968 and in Poland of
1980, and was especially significant in the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests in China, and in the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union. This issue, as a central topic in studies of communist politics, has been widely studied. However, by concentrating on the unity and consensus of non-Marxist
Leninist forces in the struggle against the Leninist state power, most scholars of Chinese politics have overlooked important conflicts and disagreements among non-Marxist
Leninist discourses.
Conducted in the framework provided by "civil society" perspectives , mainstream theories tend to emphasize the vertical relationship between states and societies . These theories , based on the assumption that the primary contradiction of Leninist regimes is the state ' s domination 3
of society, plausibly categorize public discourses into two
. broad patterns--state ideological discourse and anti-state
discourse, and focus merely on the dimension of the conflict
between the both . Insofar as there is a broad pattern of
c onflict between state and society, all non-Marxist-Leninist
discourses are treated as one broad anti-state category
since they share the fundamental character as dissidence
against the Leninist party-state. However, we must notice
that there are profound and significant divergences among
anti-communist dissidents, which have remained basically
unprobed for a long time. In fact, non-Marxist-Leninist
ideas have divergent pedigrees that encompasses different
discourses from traditional religiosity to egotistical
hedonism, from nonviolent pacifism to radical ethno
nationalism, from liberal democracy to radical
egalitarianism, and from intellectual rationalism to
irrational nihilism. In brief, anti-state dissidence is not
unitary or integrative but divergent from each other in
terms of their political and cultural ideas , values and
p r eferences .
Now, the questi on is: Does it matter? Is it important
to understand the divergences within dissidence? The answer
could be "no" if what concerns us is only the demise of
c ommunist regi mes . In the Cold War era , i t seemed
unnecessary to be concerned with the difference between
Sakharov who advocated Westernization and Solzheni tsyn, a 4
traditional Slavophile nationalist who believed that a
. return to Russia's Slavic roots would cure ills of
communism. It does not matter, and, from the Cold War view,
it is enough to know that they both were anti-communist
dissidents and strongly rejected Marxist-Leninist ideology.
But if we are really concerned not only with how to end the
communist dictatorship, but also how to transform post
communist systems into democratic systems, we cannot
disregard the divergences among non-Marxist-Leninist
discourses. The emergence of debates, conflicts, battles
and even wars among former anti-communist forces in post
communist Russia and Eastern Europe has become a prominent
problem in their post-communist transformation. Its
significance has been clearly reflected by the split of
former anti-communist allies, such as Lech Walesa and Adam
Michnik, and regional ethnic conflicts, notably, in the
former Yugoslavia . It is the time to pay serious attention
to the divergence among non-Marxist-Leninist discourses and
to assess its potential effects on post-communist and late
Leninist transformations.
2. Failed Leninist Modernity and Alternatives
Why were anti-communist discourses so different and
even contradictory from each other? How could the
controversies among non-Marxist-Leninist ideas influence 5
democratization in former socialist countries? In a
. theoretical framework developed from history of ideas,
sociology of knowledge and critical theory, this thesis
attempts to find an effective approach which will be
presented in detail in Chapter II and Chapter V to these
questions. This approach rests on the following assumptions
and propositions.
First of all, Leninism, as an ideology and a structure
of power is a distinctively modern phenomena that we define
as "Leninist modernity." Marxist-Leninist ideology stems
from fundamental modern beliefs in human reason, science and
historical progress that are rooted in the French
Enlightenment. Marxism-Leninism is a type of modern
knowledge discourse that includes a system of principles and
laws of history, society and human being and takes in the
form of science. By claiming to be truth, Marxist-Leninist
ideology legitimated the Leninist regimes and produced the
state power.
Second, there is a profound tension between the
function and the structure of Marxist-Leninist ideology. On
the one hand, for creating and legitimating highly
centralized state power, the ideological discourse must
refuse self-inquiry and repress criticism, and hence tend to
truth absolutism . But on the other hand, such absolutism
undermines the scientific shape of the ideology since modern
science is required to be open to rational criticism. 6
Eventually, Marxist-Leninist ideology became a "self-
. enclosed" and "unfalsifiable" form of discourse that tends
to be anti-scientific or pseudo-scientific. The appearance
of scientific truth with an anti-scientific essence produced
the internal contradiction of Marxist-Leninist ideology and
thus the absolute truth of the ideology is perceived as lie.
It weakens the legitimation and power of the ideology, which
is one of crucial reasons for the collapse of Leninist
states. In this sense, the crisis of Leninism reflects a
crisis of modern knowledge discourse, and the collapse of
Leninist regimes can be understood as the failure of a
specific model of modernity that relies on a modern
knowledge discourse to perform power.
Third, in the face of failed Leninist modernity, many
different critical responses are possible. In other words,
non-Marxist-Leninist ideas could be based upon diverse
cultural resources and legacies including traditional,
modern, and postmodern ones to develop different kinds of
anti-communist discourses. While all reject or subvert the
ideological discourse of "Leninist modernity" , there are
controversies and conflicts among them .
Fourth, the divergence among non-Marxist-Leninist
discourses could not be regarded as a counterpart of
pluralism in Western societies , which is shaped by
liberalist tradition and democratic institutions. Being
unable to achieve social integration by rational-critical 7
arguments, this divergence would not necessarily have a
. positive influence on democratization in post-communist and
late-Leninist societies. In this regarding, I will argue,
democratization in China will depend on not only the end of
the communist ideology but also the establishment of a
rational-critical public sphere that allows for different
discourses to effectively communicate, compete, compromise
and cooperate.
3. From the Thinking Generation to the Playful Generation
The Chinese Communist Party rose in the context of the
proceeding regimes' political and national crises that grew
from the 1860s onward. Because the traditional Chinese
social structure and cultural values were incapable of
resolving the crises posed by domestic and foreign
challenges, and since Marxist-Leninist discourse provided a
unique model of modernization for undeveloped countries, it
appealed to many Chinese intellectuals of "the May Fourth
generation." However , in the last several decades in China
as well as in other socialist states, the Leninist model of
modernization brought more and more serious political and
economic crises . In response , the Chinese Communist Party
launched the post-Mao reform project to cope with the crisis
of Leninist modernity . Limited by official interests, the
reform project cannot totally abandon Marxism-Leninism for 8 maintaining legitimacy of the communist party and state power and therefore failed to resolve the crisis from the root. Society found three alternative ways to respond to the failed Leninist modernity. The first appeared in the effort to reconstruct traditional culture proposed by the
"Neo- Confucian school," but this effort was limited only to academic circles and had no significant social influence. 1
The following two chapters will discuss two other kinds of critical reactions to Leninist modernity that are respectively reflected in the rebellious discourses of two generations of Chinese youth--the thinking generation and the playful generation.
The word "dai" in Chinese is equivalent of "generation" in English. It means "a single stage or degree in the succession of natural descent" in biological sense. It can also mean, sociologically, "a group of such people with same experience , belief, attitude, etc. in ,common. ,,2 At least from the late 1950s, this word has appeared in Chinese official media, such as "the old generation of proletarian revolutionaries" or "new generation of successors of the proletarian revolutionary cause." But the rhetoric of this
lAfter the influence of seventy-year anti-traditional current since the May Forth movement and forty-year radical anti-traditional education of the c ommunist party, Chinese traditional culture, consisting of the trinity of etho s , status group, and modal personality represented by Confucianism, the gentry, and the pater familias, has been seriously destroyed and would be hard to revive .
2see Weberster's New World Dictionary, 3rd college Edition, (New York : Prentic Hall , 1989), p. 562 . 9
sort did not acknowledge that the values/ beliefs and
attitudes of different generations were different. Because
the official ideology assumes that all people in socialist
China/ with exception of a few class enemies/ hold (and must
hold) the same world view--the communist beliefs. The term
"generation gap" first appeared in a debate in 1980/ and
became frequent used in public discourse. Ostensibly/ it
referred to dissimilarity of ideas between an old generation
and young generation. But the "generation gap" in fact
revealed that the Chinese youth had begun to reject ossified
ideological rhetoric.
Chapter III and Chapter IV will examine the emergence
and growth of rebellious discourses of Chinese youth from
the 1976 to 1994. It will describe how movements of
rebellious youth have experienced gradual/ subtle but
substantial/ changes/ such that we can distinguish between
two generations in terms of their values/ beliefs/
attitudes/ ways of life/ and knowledge types of discourse.
And more specifically/ we discover discrepancies and
conflicts between early rebels/ what we call "the thinking
generation/" and later rebels/ whom we refer to as "the
playful generation." The thinking generation was closely
allied with liberal Chinese intellectuals who advocated an
alternative anti-ideological modernity--economic liberalism
and political democracy- -to replace the failed Leninist
modernity . Because it challenged the Marxist-Leninist 10 ideology and upheld rational criticism, we define the rebellious discourse of the thinking generation as "Anti ideology." Since the anti-ideological discourse of the thinking generation appeared in many unsolved problems, the playful generation came forth with a new rebellious discourse. It not only subverted the communist ideology, but also disputed elitist intellectual discourses of the thinking generation. Because it rejects Enlightenment beliefs and instead promotes populist mass culture, we term the rebellious discourse of the playful generation as "Anti intellectualism." The playful generation in 1990s is generally inclined to deconstruct modernist ideas and take the way of life with postmodern features, which contributes another response to failed Leninist modernity. 11
CHAPTER II
LENINIST MODERNITY AND ITS CRISIS
This chapter will examine the origin, structure and function of Marxist-Leninist discourse in a theoretical framework developed from history of ideas and critical theory. We will interpret Leninism as an embodiment of modernity, then suggest that the collapse of Leninist states reflects a crisis of modernity . This framework will provide an effective approach to understanding Chinese youth rebellions by viewing them as critical responses to failed
Leninist modernity.
1. The Modernity of Marxist Discourse
In the history of ideas , Marxism, the ideological origin of Leninism, can be seen as a modern knowledge discourse that is characterized in its universal truth- claims and rational, logocentric structure. A crucial point connecting Marxism with modernity is that Marxist discourse stemmed from a fundamental modern concept--"enlightenment . "
As Jurgen Habermas has suggested, the Enlightenment divided history into traditional and modern periods by re-orienting human reason in the world . 3 Under the e x amination of what
3 s ee Jurge n Habermas , "Mode rnity--An Incomplete Project , " Interpretive Social Science, ed . Paul Rabinow and Wi lliam M. Sullivan (University of Cal ifornia Pre ss , 1987) , pp . 142 - 156 . 12
Immanuel Kant called the "critical spirit of reason," an
• enchanted cosmos where nature was God's text filled with
divine signs, intrinsic meaning, and intelligible order,
came to an end. The Enlightenment sought to demystify old
sacred beliefs and rediscover human meaning and value in a
disenchanted world. By defining the Enlightenment as "man's
release from his self-incurred tutelage," Kant pointed out,
Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from others. Have courage to use your own reason--that is the motto of Enlightenment. 4
It was a turning point in history that the Enlightenment led
to the so-called "Copernican-pattern" value transition,
moving from a God-centered vision of the world to a
human-centered vision.
In a new epoch without a Supreme Being, however, there
were competing attitudes regarding human reason: one,
cautious and skeptical and the other, confident and
conceited. This differentiation was reflected in the
conflicts and distinctions of Scottish and French versions
of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment Scots, notably Adam
Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson, were hostile to the
idea of a rational justification for right action. The
function of reason, they thought, is to identify what action
we cannot take, rather than tell us what action we should
4 Cited from Edward L . Mowatt, "Marx, Marxism and alienation in history," Reason and History: or only a History of Reason , ed . Philip Windsor (Leicester and London : Leicester University Press , 1990) , p. 43 . 13
take . This version of Enlightenment had a great influence
. on the Western model of modernity. In contrast, the French
version of Enlightenment had greater faith in the infinite
power of human reason, modern science and historical
progress. It was the more attractive idea to Marx and
socialists.
The central position of reason in the French
Enlightenment was seldom questioned. The Encyclopedists put
it bluntly: reason is "the taste that reigns the most
universally ... i we must follow it in everything.,,5 From
Voltaire and Diderot, human reason was frequently praised. 6
The power of human reason was also regarded as a new and
exciting positive force: "reason became the medium through
which human beings could and should deliberately distance
themselves from superstition, obscurantism, and a whole
litany of imperfect or malignant beliefs, practices, and
institutions across the ages and throughout the world."?
5"SOCIETE ... (Morale)," Encyclopedie, vol. 15 p . 254 .
6Vo ltaire' s "universal reason" is linked to social, moral , and even practical mechanical instincts. In the article "Encyclopedia , " Diderot finds " r ight reason" linked with the "heart of man, " both of them " the same i n all ages . " Furthermore , reason was linked with universal human nature . Ernst Ca ssire r wrote , the reason of the Enlightenment i s ,
. . . the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs, and all cultures. From the change ability of religious creeds , o f moral maxims and convictions , of theoretical opinions and judgments, a firm and lasting element can be extracted which is permanent in itself , and which in this identity and permanence expresses the real essence of reason.
See Er nst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , tr . Fritz C. A . Ka elIn and James P . Pettegrove (Boston : Beacon Press , 1955) , p. 3 .
?Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cul tural Diversi ty, and The French Enlightenment (New York : Oxford University Press , 1989) , p. 205. 14
Similarly, the Galileo-Descartes model of science
• triumphed over the world since the 17th century. The
mathematical physics of the seventeenth-century Scientific
Revolution clearly served as the inspiration of the thought
of the Enlightenment. If so much could be done to
understand the physical world, what might be done to solve
perplexing human problems? It seemed a sound principle that
"science might become a social and political power, a
solvent of hardened customs and traditions and a means of
organizing happier human arrangements. " 8 The scientific,
industrial, and political revolutions within the age of
Enlightenment have been thought of as evidence that
humankind is awakening from its dogmatic slumber and rolling
back the forces of ignorance and superstition.
Furthermore, Hegel's ideas about the progressive
character of revolutionary movements clearly resonates with
certainty regarding our leading beliefs about progress and
modernization. The ancient Greek concepts of revolution as
part of an endless cycle of nature was abandoned for the
belief that we are capable of breaking out of this cycle and
creating something new and better by revolution . The
Enlightenment, especially in its radical wing , the
Encyclopedists , had expected redemption from reason in the
sense of a natural , essentially immutable endowment of man .
8Ch a rles Frankel , The Fai th of Reason (New York: Octagon Books , 1969 ) , p . 7. 15
The idea of progress was implied in this belief that
. advances in our rationality and knowledge can bring about a
"better world."
Inspired by the ideas of reason, science and progress
of the French Enlightenment and encouraged by the great
achievements of the industrial revolution and modern
science, Marxists have been very keen on finding the law of
the historical development and human emancipation. In
Marx's grand works about dialectical materialism, historical
materialism and scientific socialism, he believed that the
general principle of the progressive forward march of
humanity had been discovered for the first time in
history.9 Marxism is the more convinced that there must
and will be, of scientific necessity, harmony in the future
because man is rational. But who can understand scientific
necessity and master the law of the development of history?
And further, who can apply this law to push revolution,
since the point is "to change the world" rather than "to
interpret the world? ,,10 The answer was the proletariat.
As one scholar put it, "Marxism promises the final harmony
90ccasionally, both Marx and Engels played with the idea that the dialectic is merely a working hypothesis which implies no absolute and final conclusion, but this was perhaps a mark of deference to Kant that was hard to avoid in Germany in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. See , George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 4th edition, (The Dryden Press , 1973) , p . 703 . Nevertheless, they generally did regard their findings as universal truths . If the dialectic were seen only as a working hypothesis , Marx would hardly have written in the preface to Capital of "tendencies which work out with an iron necessity toward an inevitable goal , " and would not have warranted the assertion that the proletarian revolution is "inevitable . "
lO See , Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach 16
in the future as a result of rational action which rational
• proletarians, victims of the irrational bourgeois order,
will take to revolutionize it and erect a truly rational
structure. ,,11
In the class perspective, an ideology reflecting a
specific class' interests will fashion people's "world
view. " In general, Marx understood by "ideology" the "false
consciousness" or the false image that a social class has of
its own situation and of society as a whole. The problem
with Marx's view is that if every class has a partial and
partisan way of thinking, there is no longer any such thing
as finding and mastering truth. In fact, one tendency of
Marxist thought is to show that among ideologies, there is
one that is superior to the others because there is one
class capable of conceiving the world as the world as it
really is. Marx tried to prove why in the capitalist world
it is the proletariat, and only the proletariat, that
conceives the truth about the world, because it is only the
proletariat that conceives the future beyond the revolution.
Lukacs, a distinguished Marxist philosopher, attempted to
prove in History and Class Consciousness, that class
ideologies are not identical and that the ideology of the
proletarian class is true because , in the situation imposed
on it by capitalism, only the proletariat is capable of
llEdward He immann , Reason and Faith in Modern Society (Wesleyan University Press, 1961) , p . 99 . 17
conceiving society in its development, in its evolution
• toward the revolution, and hence in its reality .
On the basis of Enlightenment ideas of reason , science
and progress, Marxism arose and developed into a specific
kind of modern knowledge discourse. This discourse, in its
contents, includes a system of universal truth-claims.
Marxist dialectical materialism, historical materialism and
scientific socialism claim to be systematic, objective,
universal laws and principles of history, society and human
being. In its structure, Marxist discourse is constructed
in rationalist methodology, logocentric narratives, and
scientific formation. Moreover, Marxism is beyond
epistemological function of a human science and tends to be
a "philosophy of action." By demonstrating inevitable
historical progress toward communist society and the
priority of class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxism
appeals to change the world, not just to interpret it, by
proletariat revolution . This point encompasses a potential
tendency toward ideology and power.
2. The Modernity of Leninist State Power
A conceited belief in reason, science and progress led
via communist ideology to soci alist "utopian engineering"-
the project of Leninist modernity. As part of building
Soviet-style regimes , Lenin and Lenini st parties developed 18 Marxist discourse into Marxist-Leninist ideology.12 This
' ideological discourse has supplied the most important
resource to legitimate the Leninist regimes and produce the
state power.
Our interpretation of the modernity of Leninist states
will be based on demonstrating the modernity of Leninist
state power. Because focusing on power is one of most
effective ways to characterize a state or a sorts of states,
Barrett McCormick has pointed out, "the critical currency
for states is power, and how this is generated and exercised
is different in different states, even states that have some
outward similarities. "13 By discussing the difference
between power in modern and traditional states, we will
illustrate the modern quality of Leninist state power.
Then, focusing on the intrinsic connection between power and
ideology, we will attempt to develop an approach to
understanding how the modernity of Marxist discourse has
contributed the modernity of Leninist state.
The development of a strict and systematic concept of
power has been a major task of the social sciences for many
years. One of the most widely quoted definitions of power
is that developed by Robert Dahl which has been set in the
12There are many plausible arguments about the differences between Marxism and Lenini sm , nevertheless, it is little doubtful that the Leninist ideo logy is deeply rooted in Marxist discourse . See, George H. Sabine , A History of Political Theory, 4th edition, (The Dryden Press , 1973) , p . 703.
13Barrett McCormick, "Parliament and the Public Sphere , " (unpublished paper) p . 22 .
., 19 behavioralist way in which one person or group can be said to "affect" another in a significant manner. This concept of power is clearly related to the idea of punishment or coercion. 14 It neglects the meaningful distinctions between traditional and modern modes of power. That is, while it focuses on the direct, concentrative and apparent aspect of power--punishment and repression, it does not pay enough attention to the indirect, dispersive and invisible aspect of power- -discipline15 and seduction .16
Max Weber is a prominent scholar of the modern state.
However, Weber is not consistent when he discusses the power of modern states. On the one hand, Weber insisted on defining power as violence and characterizing the modern state as an instrument of violence by saying that
"ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it ... namely, the use of physical force. ,,17 On the other hand, Weber suggests that domination in modern regimes relies more on
14Robert Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (New Jersey: Princeton-Hall, 1973), p. 84 . A similar expression defined by Lasswell and Kaplan, "It is the threat of sanctions which differentiates power from influence in general. Power is a special case of the exercise of influence: it is the process of affecting policies of others with the help of (actual or threatened) severe deprivations for nonconformity with the policies intended." See Lasswell & Kaplan Power and Society (1950), p . 76 .
15See , Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Alan Sheridan, trans , (New York : Vintage Books , 1975) .
16See , Arthur Kroder and Marilouise ed., Ideology and Power in the Age o f Lenin in Ruins (New York : St. Martin' s Press , 1991) , Part II .
17Max Weber , Economy and Society, ed . Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, (New York : Bedminster Press, 1968) , p . 911 . 20 voluntary compliance than on coercion. He apparently assumes that regimes cannot last long by coercion alone, but require some substantial m~asure of legitimacy. For Weber , domination means that commands are complied with "as if the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim of their conduct of its very own sake."u He makes it very clear that a positive commitment on the part of the subordinate to the authority they obey is a cardinal feature of domination.
"The merely external fact of the order being obeyed is not sufficient to signify domination in our sense; we cannot overlook the meaning of the fact that the command is accepted as a 'valid' norm.,,19 This is puzzling, but it indicates that Weber might not have fully developed his ideas about the relationship between coercion and consensus in modern states in his thinking of "legitimate authority."
Micheal Foucault has argued that the extension of the operations of power in modern time can be seen in the change from punishment to discipline. 2o He argues that in traditional despotism, power was exercised from above and in violence. People were often punished by cruel torture when they incurred the displeasure of the monarch. But in modern bourgeois society people have come to believe in truths that
18rbid., p . 946.
19 rbid., p . 946 .
20See , Michel Foucault , Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan, trans , (New York : Vintage Books , 1975) . 21
cause them to discipline themselves, i.e., their notion of
. morality, crime, sexuality, et cetera, are established not
by the sword of the law, but by intellectuals and
professionals in schools, clinics, institutes, et cetera.
Instead of being controlled by violence of authority,
bourgeois society disciplines itself .
Power in modern societies thereby is not exclusively
negative, but produces pleasure and meaning as well as more
coercive dimensions. "Power would be a fragile thing if its
only function were to repress , if it worked only through the
mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression, in
the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a
negative way. "21 with this consideration, Foucault
emphasizes "discipline" as feature of modern power. "The
powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis
of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a
public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary
mechanism. "22 Power can thus work from the "bottom up",
and Foucault uses the notion of the "capillary" to describe
the operations of power at a micro level .
Foucault's theory of power derived from analyzing the
genealogy of power in the modern capitalist West.
Nevertheless , we have good reason to think that this modern
21 Foucault , POWER / KNOWLEDGE: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York : Pantheon, 1980) , p . 59 .
22 Ibid., p . 106 . 22
feature of power is also valid, if not more fitting, for
• Leninist states. First of all, the establishment of
"typical" Leninist regimes (such as the Soviet Union and
China) resulted from revolutions with broad popular support.
The early period of Leninist rulership relied largely on the
charisma of revolutionary leaders and persuasive ideological
discourse but not solely "Red Terror"--coercive violence of
state apparatus. Secondly, even in later stage, power in
Leninist states is not merely punishment that was
characterized in term of "force, repression, and terror,
relying on such institutions as the police, labor camps, and
concentration camps" as the totalitarian model suggested or
George Orwell's allegory portrayed. 23 As Leszek Kolakowski
points out,
It is simply untrue to say that communist rule, from the very beginning, had nothing at its disposal except pistols, prisons, and concentration camps or that ideology was nothing but a necessary though inert decoration. 24
Third, power in Leninist states is not simply a system of
control from above but penetrates and diffuses into society.
As one scholar has argued, Leninist state power is quite
different from traditional despotism whose power is external
23 In China , mass study, self-criticism, and thought reform were more or l ess voluntary during 1950 ' s and the early 1960's. See Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989) .
24 Leszek Kolakowski , "Mind and Body: Ideology and Economy in the Co llapse of Communism," Constructing Capi talism: The Reemergence of Civil Society and Liberal Economy in the Post-Communist, ed. Klazimierz z. Poznanski (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1992) , p . 12 . 23 and transcendent vis-a-vis society. In Leninist regimes,
"the dividing line between state and civil society blurs , state is fused with society. "25 The state power, by
"concentrating in itself all the force of society," become social power. 26 This power does not simply come from above, but is manufactured by the whole of society. In a large range and wide sense, the power excises through
"polymorphous disciplinary mechanism" and produces identity, pleasure and meaning.
Here, we must make it clear that what we call modern state power means neither states rarely use violence, punishment and terror nor that power does not rely on the state apparatus. 27 Power, modern or traditional , is always in some ways and in some degrees related to violence. But our point is to understand how the violence of all forms-- language, physical and spiritual--generated by state apparatus of all descriptions--the propaganda system, the
25Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, "The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order," Cultural Anthropology 3 (4) (November): 408-27 . A distinctive example is China's Cultural Revolution, "it was mainly the people themselves who terrorized society, as well as the state and its officials." Yang , p . 4 09 .
26 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms o f Mode rn Society, ed. J . Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press , 1986) , pp. 284 -5 .
27 Foucault tried to make it clear. " I don't claim at all that the State a ppa ratus i s unimport ant , but i t seems t o me that among all the conditions f o r avoiding a repetition of the Soviet experience and prev enting the revolutionary process from running into the ground, one of the first t hings t h a t has t o be understood is that power isn' t localized in the State a pparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside , below and alongside the State apparatuses , on a mu ch more minute an everyday level , are not also changed . " See , Foucault , POWER / KNOWLEDGE: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, p . 6 0 . 24
secret police, and labor camps in modern states can be
. "accepted" and obeyed "as if" without conscious coercion in
individual and collective psychologies. While we by no
means deny that "naked power"--direct, pure, exposed and
coercive violence indeed existed, we will focus on the
indirect, dispersive and invisible aspect of power because
this was the regular and widespread way in which power is
exercised in Leninist regimes.
With this understanding, we can further investigate the
issue of how to understand the modern features of power in
Leninist states. Drawing on Micheal Foucault's idea of
power/knowledge, we suggest that the modernity of Leninist
states lies in the intrinsic connection between ideological
discourse and power, which makes power have a sense of
reason and can be accepted by society with minimal coercion.
This distinguishes Leninist regimes from both traditional
despotism and others kind of authoritarian rulership.
By joining the concepts of knowledge and power,
particularly in his graphic expression "knowledge/power, "
Foucault demonstrates that asymmetries of power tend to
exist in the structure of knowledge itself. Power produces
truth and truth induces the effects of power. The dictum
"knowledge is power" is true in the most literal sense . 25
Here, we can find a provocative clue given by Foucault to
. connect power with ideological discourse. 28
Ideological discourse plays a key role in production of
power . Power that is an asymmetric relation between social
actors does not exist "objectively" and "automatically."
It, particularly on a "micro level," relies on a specific
formation and re-formation of shared structures of common
meaning. Ideological discourse does not simply provide
people with a belief system through which they orient
themselves to the world, but instead "it plays a much more
fundamental role in the process by which social actors
create the reality of the world in which they live. "29
Through and within ideological discourse, social actors
develop shared meaning structures that endow to shape a
sense of their own subjectivity and place in society.
Ideological discourse, then, is as it functions to produce,
maintain, and reproduce certain formations of the reality in
which power just become available, persuasive, seduceable
and then powerful.
Power and ideology, then, are inseparable. Power
operates ideologically when a certain meaning formations of
reality have been generated by ideological discourse . For
28Foucault would not prefer to use the notion of ideology mainly since he holds a postmodern attitude to truth . In his view the term ideology "always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth . " See, Ibid., p . 118 .
29 0ennis K. Mumby, Communication and Power in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology, and Domination (Norwood, NJ : Ablex Publi shing Corporation, 1988) , p . 71 . 26
Leninist states, power is extraordinarily reliant on
• ideological discourse, which enable individuals to obtain a
positive identity to be mobilized and to devote their
energies to create "the marvel of industrialization" that
was ever achieved in early stage of the Soviet Union and the
socialist China. As Vaclav Havel suggests, it is ideology
that created a bridge of excuses between the system and the
individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system
and the aims of life . It gives individuals "the illusion of
an identity, of dignity and of morality while making it
easier for them to part with them," enabling them "to
deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and
their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from
themselves." "It pretends that the requirements of the
system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world
of appearances trying to pass for reality. " 30
When people step on this bridge, they and the bridge
together have become a component of the system. So
"ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important
component of power, a pillar providing it with both
excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. "31 This
inevitably leads to a paradoxical result: rather than
ideology serving power, power begins to serve ideology, as
30Vaclav Havel , "The Power of the Powerless," The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe ed John Keane (London: Palach Press, 1985), p . 30 .
31 Ibid., p . 32. 27
though it had become dictator itself. "It then appears that
. theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes
decisions that affect people, and not the other way
around. "32
In the picture drawn by Havel, the grand structure of
Leninist regimes is bound by ideology. Ideological
discourse as an incredible "bonding agent" adheres and fuses
the whole system--regime and individual, legitimacy and
identity, victim and supporter, reality and illusion, and
ritual and power. If Havel is right, we can assume that
whenever this bonding agent loss its efficacy, whole system
will inevitably collapse.
3. The Crisis of Leninist Modernity
All modernist knowledge discourses, in the view of
critical theory, more or less , embrace a tension between the
absoluteness and relativeness of truth . On the one hand,
since modern knowledge that aims at finding and expressing
truth must maintain conceptions, terms, structures and
paradigms in certain stability, it would be impossible to
totally prevent discourse from self-confirmation, monopoly
and hierarchy. On the other hand, the need for knowledge
development and accumulation requires discourse to be open
to inquiry, criticism and correction. Radical postmodern
3 2 Ibid . , p. 33. 28 theorists contend that this tension within modernist
• discourse cannot be resolved. It is rooted in fundamental
modern beliefs--transcendent reason, logocentrism, objective
truth and progressive knowledge, and must therefore lead to
the crisis of modernity.
Nevertheless, if we do not take the stance of radical
postmodernism, it is unnecessary to conclude that all kinds
of modernist discourses will inevitably fall into the
crisis. We can assume that, for modern knowledge, it is
still possible to build a dynamic balance between stability
and openness. This point would be supported by the fact
that academic Marxism (from classic Marxism to the Frankfurt
School and neo-Marxism) is still intellectually productive
and widely influential. But, Marxist-Leninist ideology, as
a special kind of modernist knowledge discourse, can not
establish the dynamic balance between truth claims and
critical openness because it is required to produce and
maintain the exclusive power--Leninist state power.
Marxist discourse provides a modern knowledge
discourse. Like other modernist discourses, it provides
universal truth-claims and adopts the form of modern
science. By such means, Leninists are able to develop the
Marxist-Leninist ideology so that it can provide absolutist
truth that functions to produce Leninist state power . To
produce and operate a totalizing or totalitarian state
power, Leninism has extraordinarily strengthened the 29
ideological dimension within Marxist discourse and become an
. exclusive, elitist, hierarchical and disciplinarian
discourse. The power-orientated essence of Marxist-Leninist
ideology increases and extends the tension of modern
knowledge discourse between truth claims and critical
openness. The scientific formation of Marxist-Leninist
discourse has been conflicting with its ideological-power
function. As we will see, this contradiction finally leads
to the crisis of Leninist modernity. To understand this
point, we need examine the relationship between modern
science and ideology.
It is important to notice the simultaneous popularity
of scientific discourse and the rise of modern ideologies.
The birth of modern science and technology, the impacts of
the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment have
effectively undermined orthodox transcendent beliefs and the
plausibility of religious-ontological definitions of
reality. To fill the emptiness left by the metaphysical
"loss of home" caused by modern secularization, ideologies
come to replace religion by offering answers to two basic
questions that are asked by every life- and world- view:
what is the origin of all the different aspects or ordering
spheres of life and how are the mutual relations and unity
among them to be understood? For doing so, ideologies must
perform in form of and in the name of science. Because , in
modern time the dominant belief is that only human reason 30
has a powerful capability to understand, explain and change
• the world and science is regarded as the most developed form
of human reason.
Leszek Kolakowski brilliantly illustrates the
connection between ideology and scientific discourse. 33 He
thinks that ideological and religious belief systems are
both immune to empirical falsifications in the Popperian
meaning. "They both purport to impose an a prior meaning on
all aspects of human life and on all contingent events, and
that they are both built in such a way that no imaginable ,
let alone real, facts could refute the established
doctrine."M After referring to the identical features of
ideologies and religions, Kolakowski points out,
Religious beliefs do not normally need to present themselves as rational hypotheses carrying explanatory value for empirical facts, as is required for scientific hypotheses ... , [but ideologies] want the facts to confirm them in the same way that scientific hypotheses are confirmed, being thereby compelled to distort and conceal unfavorable facts. They are supposed to possess absolute truth and to be testable at the same time. 35
From this view, we can find that ideologies have taken a
great advantage of science. The power of ideologies just
relies on the power of modern science, which is where an
ideology differs from an religion and why ideology is a
33s ee Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 231-9 .
34 Ibid . , p . 234 .
35 Ibid . 31
modernist discourse. In this sense, Kolakowski further
. argues "ideologies are not beyond science ; they are
positivelyantiscientific.,,36
Nevertheless, whether or not ideology can be regarded
as science is a question that should be more carefully
inquired. The distinction between ideology and science
would be obscure since both of them entail a common point:
the claim of truth in logic or rational discourse. This
similarity would help ideology to confuse with science,
especially before what science itself is began to be more
carefully examined. Could we just simply say that science
reflects objective facts but ideology only creates an
illusion that distorts the reality? This involves very
intricate questions of epistemology. For Foucault, one of
three reasons why the notion of ideology seems to him "to be
difficult to make use of" is that he doesn't think we can
draw a line between "the category of scientificity or truth"
and some other category. 37 Habermas even claims that
science and technology are an ideology. 38 At very least,
until the rise of post-atomic science that discredited the
ambition of finding the ultimate, objective truth of the
world, this distinction remained clouded.
36 rbid .
37 Foucault, POWER/ KNOWLEDGE : Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, p. 134 .
38 See Jurgen Habermas , Toward a rational society, J. Shapiro , Trans . (Boston : Beacon Press , 1970 ) 32
Now, drawing on the modern philosophy of science, we
. could distinguish science from ideology. The distinction
between science and ideology lies not in whether they
reflect objective truth or not , but that science is self-
critical and self-correcting and ideology is self-protected
and self-satisfied. This idea was primarily developed by
Karl Popper's "falsificationism". According to Popper, a
scientific theory is a "bold conjecture. " 39 The criticism
of science lies in that a theory should be rejected when it
is refuted by a "counter-instance." In the view of Popper,
Marx's original theory of the collapse of capitalism was a
"bold conjecture" and thus scientific. But with the
historical data of the last century, Marxism has been judged
as pseudoscience. Because, while many Marxist conjectures
(predictions) were rejected by social practices, the
followers of Marx, especially, Marxist ideologue and
political leaders, instead of accepting the refutations of
numerous counter-instances, reinterpreted both the theory
and the evidence in order to make them agree. As Lakatos
commented,
Has , for instance , Marxism ever predicted a stunning novel fact successfully? Never! It has some famous unsuccessful predictions. It predicted the absolute impoverishment of the working class . It predicted that the first socialist revolution would take place in the industrially most developed society. It predicted that socialist society would be free of revolutions. It predicted that there will be no
39Kar1 Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Harper and Row , 1968) . 33
conflict of interests between socialist countries. Thus the early predictions of Marxism were bold and stunning but they failed. Marxists explained all their failures: they explained the rising living standards of the working class by devising a theory of imperialism; they even explained why the first socialist revolution occurred in industrially backward Russia. They 'explained' Berlin 1953, Budapest, 1956, Prague 1968. They 'explained' the Russian-Chinese conflict. But their auxiliary hypotheses were all cooked up after the event to protect Marxian theory from the facts. The Newtonian program led to novel facts; the Marxian lagged behind the facts and has been running fast to catch up with them. 40
In order to produce and operate the exclusive power of
Leninist states, Marxist-Leninist ideology has to monopolize truth and unconditionally refuse the "refutations of counter-instances." This is impossible without undermining the scientific self-skepticism or self-criticism. Using more and more excuses to avoid refutations, the ideology is more and more difficult to justify its truth claims. It inevitably becomes a chaotic discourse. A fatal paradox in
Marxist-Leninist ideology is that its power depends on its absolute truth in form of science but the criticism of scientific structure will undermine its truth absolutism and hence weaken its power. In this sense, the deep self- contradiction between the antiscientific truth-absolutism and the scientific formation is a fatal disease of Marxist-
Leninist ideology .
40 I . Lakatos , The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge University Press , 1978) , pp . 5-6 . 34
Leninist parties supply a system of ideological
• discourse that consists of theories of "dialectical
materialism", "historical materialism" , "class struggle",
"revolution", "dictatorship of the proletariat" and so on.
Its nucleus, Marxism-Leninism, is called a "science" and a
"guide to action." Through the grand scope of ideological
education and endless thought reform projects from the Party
leadership to mass organizations (such as youth groups,
women's groups, trade union, and peasant groups), communist
ideology pervasively serves to persuade virtually the entire
population. The ideological discourse is repeated, taught,
and obeyed in form of science. Whereas, because of the
internal contradiction, people gradually become aware that
the ideology they have been professing is contrary to
obvious facts. The power, rather than scientific logic,
hiding behind the knowledge discourse will therefore be
discovered. Then, ideological rhetorics are perceived as
lies. Havel offers a fascinating observation about the
lies .
[G]overnment by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class ; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of 35
democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. 41
Ideological discourse, then, becomes a system of cliche. It is "repetitiously centered on an all- encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling's phrase,
'the language of nonthought' "42
This crisis of such an ideology is also a crisis of power. As we discussed above, power is constituted and reproduced through ideological discourse. Ideology plays a central role in the legitimation and reproduction of organizational meaning structures and functions to secure certain hegemonic configurations by legitimating those meaning structures that favor the powerful. The decayed ideology is unable to produce and reproduce power and hence fails to serve as a bonding agent to effectively adhere and fuse the whole system. Power becomes "naked," i.e., it becomes pure repression, violence and punishment if it loses the efficacy of its truth claim is lost and it then . The dilemma is that when Communist party elites attempt to use more or less naked power to enhance the decayed ideology, the ideological discourse will further exposes its power-
41Vaclav Havel , "The Power of the Powerless , " The Power of the Powerless : Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, p. 30.
42 Li fton , Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, p . 429 . 36
orientated feature, and the persuasion of the ideology would
• be further undermined. It will make power further naked.
Therefore, the decline of the Marxism-Leninism will
definitely undermine the state power and eventually lead to
the crisis of Leninist regimes. 37
CHAPTER III
THE THINKING GENERATION AND ANTI-IDEOLOGY
In Leninist China, Mao and his followers inherited the
Soviet Union's doctrine and developed communist ideology into its Chinese version--Marxism-Leninism and Maoism
( "Mao's thought"). In the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to
1976, Marxist-Leninist ideology claimed it was "absolute revolutionary truth" and was disseminated to an incredibly wide population. It strongly appealed to radical
"revolutionary rhetorics and actions" that made China fall into a terrible political, economic and social chaos. In the history of China, the Cultural Revolution was the most crucial event that exposed the deep contradiction in
Marxist-Leninist ideology and led to the rise of post-Mao anti-ideological discourse.
After experiencing the disaster of the Cultural
Revolution, Chinese youths who were ex- Red Guards suffered from deep disillusionment with Marxism-Leninism and Maoism.
To reestablish the meaning of life and self-identity in the ruins of lost beliefs , young men and women , in their 20s or
30s, committed themselves to "independent and brave thinking" to find truth in polity, society, history, and human affairs. They were known as the "thinking generation." Being skeptical and criticizing the doctrines of communist ideology, their thinking produced the "anti- 38
ideological discourse" which made a great contribution to
. social and political changes in post-Mao China. This
chapter explores this anti-ideological discourse,
highlighting its distinctive features, i.e., oriented toward
idealism, social conscience, political participation and
intellectualism.
1. The Rise of The Thinking Generation
The thinking generation, born in late 1940s or 1950s,
spent its childhood in the "communist idealist" atmosphere
of the Maoist era. This atmosphere was created and
preserved by the absolute hegemony of communist ideology.
The first song this generation learned was "The East is
Red," the first string of characters they learned to write
was "Long live Chairman Mao," and their first great wish was
"to become successors of the proletarian revolutionary
cause." Over and over again, endless communist rhetoric and
revolutionary rituals were repeated. Consequently, they
naively believed that they were living in the greatest time
and place, and what they were doing was a part of the most
glorious undertaking of human society--communism.
The majority of the thinking generation became Red
Guards during the Cultural Revolution . So they are also
called "the generation of the Cultural Revolution" or "the
Red-Guard generation." In response to the Mao's call, many 39 of them joined the movement "to go down to countryside . "
The meaningless struggles of the Cultural Revolution and miserable life they found in the countryside gradually wore down their "revolutionary passion and will." The virtual collapse of Chinese economy and the "September 13th" event43 were so conflicting with the "socialist superiority" that they learned from their political textbooks and made them begin to doubt the doctrines that they had blindly accepted.
The April Fifth Tiananmen protest of 1976 was the first act of urban mass protest in China since 1949. 4 4 The protesters boldly broke the ideological cage by openly expressing their disbelief and dissatisfaction. At that time, 27-years-old Bei Dao, a leading poet of the post-Mao
"new poetry movement" and a famous dissident, wrote his best - known poem "The Answer:"
Baseness is the password of the base Honor is the epitaph of the honorable
I corne into this world Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow, To proclaim before the judgment The voices of the judged:
Let me tell you , world, I--do--not--believe!
430n September 13 , 1971, Lin Biao who was appointed as Mao's successor died following an alleged coup attempt .
440n April 5, 1976 , thousands of people gathered in Tiananmen Square , ostensibly to mourn Zhou Enlai, but in fact to protest against despotic rule o f "the Gang of Four" . Most of them were youth in their late 20s or early 30s . Quite different from previous rebellions in late 1950s and in the Cultural Revolution that were advocated by Mao and the party, the April Fifth p r o test was purely a mass v oluntary protest . 40
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet Count me as number one thousand and one. 45
with the bravery and honor, Bei Dao's roar--"I do not believe" proclaimed the crisis of the communist belief.
This poem was regarded as the manifesto of the thinking generation. Although the protest was quickly crushed by a combination of arrests and executions, it was a starting point for the thinking generation's anti-ideological discourse.
2. Rebuilding Ideals in the Ruin of Communist Belief
The anti-ideological discourse of the thinking generation began by revealing the crisis of their communist ideals. The end of the Cultural Revolution led them into deep disillusionment, since they realized that what they once piously believed in and were selflessly devoted to was nothing more than a terrible disaster--"Ten Years' Chaos."
The "scarred literature" [shangheng wenxue] 46 typically reflected these disillusioned sentiments in the late 1970s.
45 Cited from Geremie Barme and John Minford ed . , Seeds of Fire : Chinese Vo i c ed of Conscience (New York : Hill and Wang, 1988) , p . 236 .
46 0uring 1977-78, a new kind of writing that revealed the suffering c aus ed by the Gang of Four was called the "Scar" literature (after a story called "Sc ar"). The Scar stories, which were published in the state-sponsored literary journals, marked a new phase in Chinese socialist literature . Befo re t his, writers had b een expected to only "extol" achievements of sociali sm . Now, for the first time , they could "expose" the dark side under socialism . The c riticism was, however, only limited to the past--the Cultural Revolution a nd required to express firm confidence in the new regime and a "bright future" under the new party leadership . 41
"Ruin" as a profound metaphor appeared over and over again in many poems and novels of the thinking generation's writers.
Today I come here No language but my heart No road but my heart
Aftermath of shattered dreams--the torch is out; An infinite ruin as far as the eye can see. 47
A similar pessimistic feeling could be also seen in the debate on "Pan Xiao's problem" in 1980. 48 Pan xiao was a
23-year-old factory worker and the daughter of Communist
Party officials. She wrote a letter entitled "Why Is Life's
Road Getting Narrower and Narrower?" to the Beijing magazine
China's Youth. In it, she confessed her loss of faith in the communist ideals that she had believed in her youth.
Over the next few months, about forty thousand young people from allover China responded to that letter, echoing the author's disillusionment. According to Siu and Stern:
From the tremendous response it generated, it is clear that thousands in Pan Xiao's generation have traveled the same road, "from hope to
47yang Lian, (a contributor to Today) "Torch," Cited from Geremie Barme and John Minford ed., Seeds of Fire: Chinese voiced of Conscience, p. 247.
48Helen F. Siu and Zelda Stern inferred that the publication of Pan xiao's letter "was a deliberate attempt on the part of the post-Mao leadership to elicit expressions of discontent," for the fact that China's Yo uth is a party organ. See siu and Stern ed . , MAO'S HARVEST : Voices from China's New Generation (New York: Oxford University Press , 1983) , p . 3 . But later, the CCP leader would be regretful to give this try, because this debate introduced western classic and modern thoughts of humanities and s ocial science such as theori es of Nietzsche , Freud, and Sartre. For the first time , ordinary readers had chance to learn these non-Marxist ideas , a lthough as "erroneous or reactionary views, " from a official pUblication. In October 1983 , in a meeting I attended, Hu Qili , a CCP Politburo member said, " Pan xiao discussion had very bad i nfluences. It deepened and widened ' t he crisi s of belief'." 42
disappointment to despair." The letter's central themes--the arbitrariness of China's political system, the destructive effects of politics on human relationships, the desire for recognition of the individual's worth in a collective society- recur again and again in the New Realism literature. And the larger issues Pan Xiao ponders--the fundamental characteristics of human nature, the ideal relationship between the self and society, the meaning of life. 49
The skepticism and pessimism of anti-ideological discourse continued for a long time and in fact , as a sub- theme of the thinking generation's spirit, contributed to fostering nihilism in the late 1980s. At that time, however, this skeptical and pessimistic emotion could also be viewed as the other side of their idealism that was attempting to rebuild new beliefs and values through criticizing old ideals . In principle, the thinking generation never lost the idealist quality that was shaped in their childhood. They are "painful idealists" who were facing a deep disillusionment, confronted with the ruin of old ideals but unable to bear life without spiritual supports of belief and ideal. As some pointed out , "the generation of the Cultural Revolution is also capable of a form of idealism--often heavily sentimental , but still idealism--founded in concepts like equality, sincerity, and justice recalled from their childhood. "50 When Bei Dao
49See Helen F . siu and zelda Stern MAO 'S HARVEST : Voices from China's New Gen eration, p . 3 .
So Feng Chongyi and Gregor Benton, "Chinese youth today : The Crisis of Be 1 ief , " All Under Heaven , ed . Alan Hunter and Don Rimmington (Kok Kampen: The Netherbmal : 1992 ), p. 85 .
-, 43
declared that "I do not believe!" he still believed that
• baseness and honor can be distinguished and should be blamed
or praised. Historical tragedy could destroy what they
believed in but could not changed their need for beliefs.
This idealist value orientation constructed the basis of the
anti-ideology of the thinking generation--commitment to the
search for truth . Gu Chen's famous poem "The Generation"
with only two sentence accurately portrayed the spirit of
the thinking generation:
The night has given me dark eyes But I use them to look for light51
3. Social Conscience and Political Participation
The anti-ideology of the thinking generation was not
limited to redefining individual values and "self-
accomplishment." More significantly, their idealism was
rooted in a humanism that closely associated individual
freedom with the emancipation of human society. Their
idealism implied an obligation to the whole of society, to
encourage social responsibility and to participate public
affairs. But they understood by personal experience that
there would be no space for "self-accomplishment" without
changes in the structure of the Leninist state and the end
of the monopoly of orthodox Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, and
51C ited from Siu and Stern ed., MAO'S HARVEST: Voices from China's New Generation, p. 16 . 44
hence they called for China's transformation to a liberal
"and democratic society. Their strong social conscience led
them to develop various democratic movements in which they
could express the anti-ideological ideas.
Calls for democracy were heard frequent in the decade
after Cultural Revolution. A month after Mao's demise in
the September 1976, the "Gang of Four" was arrested. Deng
Xiaoping replaced Hua Guofeng as paramount leader of post-
Mao China in 1978 and began the so-called "new era." In
order to legitimate the new generation of leadership, he
pushed the party toward de-Maoification and denounced the
Cultural Revolution. In late 1978, the Communist Party
exonerated the April Fifth Tiananmen demonstration and
declared that it "expressed the popular will."
This dramatic reversal of policy provided many of the
April Fifth protesters the opportunity to openly voice their
own demands and hopes. It led to what became known as the
"Beijing Spring" democratic movement. ~ This movement
produced several pioneering political dissidents who called
for democracy, human rights and even western-style legal
52 In the spring of 1979, thousands of posters appeared on a wall near Xidan in central Beijing ("Xidan Democratic Wall") . Unofficial pUblications such as Today and April fifth Forum were produced. Tremendous poems , stories and political manifestoes appealed for justice to victims of the Cultural Revolution, protested sending of young people to the countryside , attacked Mao's leadership, and criticized the privileges of the cadres . They also advocated reforms "ranging from more housing for newlyweds to freedom of speech, democratic elections , and an end to corruption in government . II See Helen F . siu and Zelda Stern, MAO'S HARVEST: Voices from China's New Generation, p. 6. 45 system. Wei Jingsheng, 53 who founded the unofficial magazine Exploration, was one of the most vocal and radical of these democrats. His famous essay "The Fifth
Modernization" argued that CCP's project of "Four modernization" were insufficient, and that China needed a fifth modernization, based on democracy and human rights:
The leaders of our nation must be informed that we want to take our destiny into our own hands. We want no more gods and emperors. No more saviours of any kind. We want to be masters of our own country, not modernized tools for the expansionist ambitions of dictators .... Democracy, freedom and happiness are the only goals of modernization. Without this fifth modernization, the four others are nothing more than a new-fangled lie. 54
The "Beijing Spring" was short-lived55 , but the "seeds of fire" had been sown . China of the 1980s became a burning forest, fueled by anti-ideological rebellions. During the next 10 years, the thinking generation has launched various social movements from the new literature, to civil organizations to intellectual debates and various political protests including 1985 , 1986, 1987 and 1989 student
53Wei Jingsheng was an electrician, from an Anhui cadre family. He was for a time a Red Guard, and spent four months in prison during the Cultural Revolution.
54Cited from Geremie Barme and John Minford ed., Seeds of Fire : Chinese voiced of Conscience, p. 277 .
55Although Deng Xiaoping once said that "Xidan Democratic Wall" was action of "the real people ' s democracy, " he later reversely supported to crush the movement, because "the thing's going to be out of control ," which means that the target the "Beijing Spring" attacked on had been beyond the "Gang of the Four" and the Cultural Revolution. After the movement had successfully legitimated Deng's leadership by showing popular opposing Maoist "ultra-leftism" and the Cultural Revolution, the Party forbade the posters on the wall, banned the unofficial publications and arrested many of the leading pamphleteers including Wei Jingsheng and Liu Qing. 46 demonstrations. All of these have sought to change Maoist political discourse and social structure, which ascertained the great social significance of the thinking generation's anti-ideology.
4. Searching for Alternative Modernity Based on
Intellectualism
The rebellious discourse of the thinking generation dialectically encompassed both destructive and constructive aspects. Its challenge to the dominance of Marxism-Leninism was an attempt not only to reveal the deception and arbitrariness of the ideology but also to find the truth of history, society and human beings. Committed to democracy, science and China's modernization, the thinking generation consciously inherited the theme of the May Fourth movement.
The famous May Fourth movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s has had a great influence on China's modern history. The movement, in its narrower sense, consisted of a series of student demonstrations in 1919 protesting the warlord government's inability to protect China's territorial interests. In a wider sense, the May Fourth movement was a movement of cultural "enlightenment" that included radical criticism of Chinese tradition of
Confucianism and eager experimentation with various foreign 47
ideas, among which the most desirable slogan is "Democracy
and Science. ,, 56
According to official propaganda, the communist party
is the most faithful inheritor of the May Fourth tradition
because "Marxism-Leninism and Maoist thought" is the greatest science and the socialism is the most democratic
system. The party leaders' requirement that youths should
"inherit the May Fourth spirit" is in fact to demand their
loyalty to the regime. In its appeal "return to May
Fourth, " however, the thinking generation implied that the party had deviated from the May Fourth tradition and betrayed the spirit of democracy and science. In a series of debates in the 1980s, thinking generation intellectuals
repeatedly referred to the "legacy" of the May Fourth movement and re-interpreted the meaning of "democracy and
science" in a way that challenged official definition.
Inspired by classic and modern thinkers of the West,
those intellectuals insisted that the spirit of science is
to invite open and critical competition in search for truth.
They contended that any kind of truth-monopolying or
ideological discourse is pseudo- or anti-scientific . Also ,
their understanding of democracy asserted the importance of
560n the May Fourth movement , see Tse-tsung Chow , The May Fourth movement : Intellectual / revolution in Modern China (Stanford : Stanford University Press , 1967) ; Leo Lee , The Romantic Generation of modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1974); and Vera Schwarcz , The Chinese Enlightenment: intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of California Press, 1 986 ) . 48
"the checks against excessive power" and, hence, "socialist
. democracy" was discredited as a fake rhetoric for its lack
of a substantial mechanism for checking the power of the
party-state. "To return to May Fourth" suggested that the
thinking generation who was committed to democracy, science
and enlightenment wanted to find a new road to the
incomplete project of the May Fourth generation--China's
modernization.
The revival of the May Fourth theme in 1980s made it
clear that the rebellion of the thinking generation was an
attempt to find alternative model of modernity to replace
failed Leninist modernity. While this rebellious discourse
endeavored to destruct the Leninist system, it consciously
advocated to achieve, on the social level, the
transformation of China's sociopolitical system and, on
individual level, reconstruction of people's value and
belief systems.
"To return to May Fourth" also reflected a distinct
feature of the thinking generation--intellectualism.
Intellectualism refers to a modernist type of knowledge
orientation that be confident of human reason and to employ
rational inquiry to find truth . One of the most important
branches of the May Fourth was its intellectual movement
that promoted the Enlightenment tradition and
intellectualism. The mainstream of the anti-ideological
discourse was not irrational or emotional rebellion . 49
Rather, this generation deeply respected human intellectual
. achievements. Their thinking, for both criticism and
creation, was based upon understanding of the natural
sciences, philosophy, humanities and social sciences in
whole human history, and particularly influenced by western
classic and modern thoughts including Marx's early
humanistic ideas.
The popularity of emotional "scarred literature" lasted
no more than two years and then faded. The thinking
generation realized that simply exposing the scars was
insufficient and superficial. The more important thing was
to think about how to find a path to establish an
alternative modernity. Along with this thinking, new ideas
and themes such as "the standard of truth," "Marxist
humanism and alienation," market economy, socialist
democracy, crisis of traditional culture and modernization,
the value of individualism, and so forth were raised and
examined from new standpoints. The thinking generation has
vigorously engaged in many important debates and various
other intellectual activities in which a new generation of
writers, artists, theorists, philosophers, social scientist
and thinkers sprang up. They developed into a new
intelligentsia that could challenge the total control of the
party's ideology .
Through universities and publications, liberal
intellectuals disseminated Western political, economic and 50
cultural ideas, especially to urban youth. They created a
. fresh public atmosphere in which "new thinking" was welcome
and cultural, political, economic and psychological theories
become popular topics in people's daily life. Theoretical
works, including the translations of such western academics
as Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre sold out with nearly a
million copies. "Political study" programs that used to
study Mao's work or the CCP's policies were replaced with
speeches by liberal intellectuals. This demonstrated that
people who had been restricted by ossified communist
doctrines for a long time sincerely desired new ideas to
propel social and political reforms. 57 All of these not
only strongly challenged orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology
but also developed anti-ideological discourse into
theoretical criticism. The 1980s of China reached a peak of
intellectual activity not seen since the 1919 May Fourth
movement and was appropriately labelled the "The New
Enlightenment" era.
From simple skepticism to intellectual criticism, the
thinking generation created and developed a profound anti-
ideological discourse . Its deep and direct challenges to
orthodox Marxism-Leninism and Maoism coincided with the
public sphere's reconstruction . It is a milestone of China
57This situation distressed CCP' s conservative leaders and was condemned as a "flood of bourgeois liberalization" by the official media. 51
history, which laid a foundation to sociopolitical
. transformation of Late-Leninist China.
5. A Turn: the End of the Thinking Generation
The beginning and end of the thinking generation was
marked by two events in Tiananmen Square. If the April 5th,
1976 was the prologue to this generation's rebellion, then the
June Fourth massacre of 1989 was the epilogue. Tiananmen
symbolizes both the cradle and grave of the thinking
generation. Could it be said that a Zeitgeist is like a life
with a bloody birth and a bloody death? What is the causality
behind this historical metaphor? To understand this issue, we
must observe the complex relationship between the thinking
generation and the Deng' s regime , between its anti-ideological
discourse and the party's reform discourse.
Anti-ideological discourse as a non-Marxist-Leninist idea
was totally opposed to the existing government. First, since
introduction of the reform project, post-Mao China has been
departing from a typical Leninist system . Deng's reform
discourse , which implicitly promoted a capitalist-style market
economy and abandoned Stalinist-style highly concentrated
state power, also conflicted with orthodox Marxism-Leninism.
In other words, the party's reform project coincided with the
thinking generation's social goals in some dimensions. 52
Secondly, until 1989 , almost no one had proposed a
. revolution to overthrow the existing government. There was no
visible independent political force other than the Communist
Party in mainland China after 1949, and under its strict
control there was no opportunity to develop dissident
political organizations. At least for realistic concerns,
revolution to overthrow the party was not considered feasible.
Therefore, although the thinking generation's ideas were quite
independent from the official system, its strategy for China's
transformation had to be through the system but not from
outside the system.
To transform the Leninist modernity into a promising
western kind of modernity is the ongoing task of all post-
communist societies. This transformation is unprecedented in
human history and expectably confronted with enormous
difficulties. China's search for an alternative modernity to
replace the Leninist modernity also has lots of unsolved
problems. 5 8 At the end of 1970s, when Mao's revolutionary
affair was entirely discredited, the Chinese people were once
evoked and persuaded to place their hope on Deng's "second
revolution"--the reform project. In 1980 Deng even called for
political reforms that gave the impression that he would lead
China toward democracy . At that time, the reform project was
widely supported by liberal intellectuals and the majority of
58The problems include both practical and theoretical aspects . This chapter focuses on the former and we leave the later to chapter V. 53
the thinking generation. More than hundred young scholars and
. professors who were absorbed by official think-tanks and
advisory institutions became directly involved in the reform
policy making.
By the second half of the 1980s, however, people
experienced a "second disillusionment" with this "second
revolution." The campaigns "Anti-spiritual pollution" in late
1983 and "Anti-bourgeois liberalization" in early 1987 made it
clear that Deng's real goal was economic not political reform.
Deng warned that no reform should violate the "four cardinal
principles" (that is, keeping to the socialist road, upholding
the people's democratic dictatorship, leadership by the CCP,
and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought) in order to
maintain socialism in politics while introducing some
capitalism in economic affairs. But this "new authoritarian"
regime59 was not what the thinking generation and liberal
intellectuals had dreamed. It could not lead to a democratic
system that allows ordinary citizens to enjoy their basic
political and economic rights, neither can it avoid the
government's corruption and unfair social distributions.
Dissatisfied with Deng' s reform, liberal intellectuals of
the thinking generation kept on thinking about what had to be
done. Facing various restraints and repressions from the
59The party top leaders Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang considered to lead the reform toward to a "New authoritarian regime" that promote market economy under authoritarian political rule. See Chen Yizi , Zhongguo: shiniangaige yu bajiuminyun [China: Ten Years of Reform and the 1989 Democracy Movement] (Taipei : Lianchingchubansheyegongsi , 1990) , pp . 64-67 . 54
regime, they have disagreed about what the effective
. transformation strategy would be. Since a direct and peaceful
democratization seems hard to achieve under the strict
controls of the Communist Party, which was proved by the 1989
Tiananmen massacre demonstrated, liberal intellectuals are
facing a dilemma. They seem to have to choose either
compromising with the existing government by supporting the
official economic reform, with the risk of confirming party-
state rulership, or launching on a radical revolution to
overthrow the regime, at the risk of social chaos for some
time. This problem led to ardent debates between democrats and "neo-authoritarianists" since 1987. 6 0 Majority of
intellectuals felt it very unrealistic to advocate a "people's
upheaval" to overthrow the China's communist regime. So what
they could do was to insist on reforms but redefine the reform
by stressing politics and culture. In the late 1980s, the
intellectuals of the thinking generation found and used every
chance to address the linkage between political and economic
reforms and call for radical political reform that consists of
the check of the party's power, anti-corruption, freedom of
speech and publication, and so on. But this kind of strategy
was often frustrated, interfered with, repressed and coopted
by political controls imposed by communist officials. The
1989 Tiananmen protest could be the best try to force the
60See Mike Sullivan, "The Impact of Western Political Thought on Chinese Po l i tical Discourse on Transitions from Leninism, 1986-1992 , " World Affairs (Summer 1994 ) . 55
Deng's regime to accept political reform. It ultimately
• proved that the communist party controlled by Deng's
generation of "revolutionary veterans" would not be
compromised on the basic political principles . The tragedy of
the thinking generation was that the existing political
structure never allowed them to develop a necessary
institutional matrix in which they could carry out their own
reform project out of the party system.
The thinking generation who once enthusiastically
supported and actively participated in the reforms thus lost
faith in "reform from above." Deng's reform project thus
resulted in wide distrust and dissatisfaction in public. As
Helen Siu and Zelda Stern remarked,
The Mao Generation felt doubly cheated--first by Mao and the ultra-radical Gang of Four and now by Deng Xiaoping and the moderate party leadership. Those who looked beyond their own personal grievances saw a society that appeared to have come no closer to the socialist ideal; corruption, inequality, and severe economic problems persisted despite major policy reversals . 51 The thinking generation had strong social consciences and
desires for political participation but could not find
realistic ways to achieve their social goals. Their idealism was again outraged and the skepticism and pessimism revived
and deepened . After the original collapse of faith many of them could find no new supports , nor did they seek any .
51Helen F. Siu and Zelda Stern, MAO'S HARVEST : Voices from China ' s New Generation, p. 7. 56
They even abominated thought itself, and sand into mindless pessimism. 62
After breaking the cage of the "whateverism,,63, the
Chinese people were recaptured by the chains of the "four cardinal principles." There seems to be a closed wall around people and there was no way out. Shu Ting' S64 poem "The
Wall" reflected the feeling of the thinking generation in the late 1980s.
I have no means to resist the wall, Only the will.
At night the wall begins to move Stretching a soft imaginary foot, Squeezes, Twists me, Forces me into a variety of shapes. Terrified, I flee to the street, To find the same nightmare Hanging on every heel, Each cowering gaze An ice-cold wall. 65
As we remarked earlier, the idealism of the thinking generation was not based on individualism but inclined to find a new belief that could combine individual values with social significance. As their social participation was frustrated, their idealist thinking was entering an impasse . They found
62 Feng Chongyi and Gregor Benton, "Chinese youth today: The crisis of belief," All Under Heaven, p. 85.
63"Whateverism" refers to the Hua Guofeng's saying, "For whatever Mao s aid, we must uphold; for whatever Mao instructed, we must follow ."
64Shu Ting i s a young poet and was originally one of the group of poets writing (together with Bei Dao) for the magazine Today .
65Cited from Geremie Barme and John Minford ed., SEEDS OF FIRE: CHINESE VOICES OF CONSCIENCE, p . 19 . 57
it impossible to build any belief system based on pure
. individual concerns that would allow them keep their
idealistic quality.
Indeed, there were attempts to withdraw from social
affairs and return to self-centralism or "extreme
individualism"- _II If we cannot save society and the nation,
then let's try to redeem ourselves." Some "sought solace in
religion and the freeing of the spirit." And others "looked
to sexual love as a refuge and fulfillment . " Without real
religious resources in Chinese cultural tradition, most
efforts of self-redemption attended to western Existentialism
such as ideas of Nietzsche , Sartre and Heidegger . But this
line also led to a bottomless abyss of "void, loneness,
absurdity and tedium. ,, 66
At first some hoped that they might discover something of value in life; finding nothing, they gave up the search. Others thought that the best thing was to give up the tedium of politics and society and retreat instead into family life, but all they found there was more tedium. 67
"Thinking but no answers" and "searching for truth but no
results" portrayed the genre of the thinking generation at the
end of 1980s . After rejecting Marxist-Leninist ideology, the
thi nking generation failed to realize their social goals and experienced the second disillusionment that reached a fatal
66Fe ng Chongy i and Gregor Be nton, "Chine se y outh today: The crisis of bel ief." All Under Heav en, p . 85-87 .
6 7 Ibid . , p. 85 . 58
point at the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Frustration from
. unfulfilled requests for new social practices and the failure
to find new beliefs generated a nihilistic milieu which would
breed a new generation of rebels--"the playful generation."
Consequently, the thinking generation, their intellectual
elites and "The New Enlightenment" ended in the nihilism.
Their intellectualism was replaced by the anti-intellectualist
discourse of the playful generation. 59
CHAPTER IV
THE PLAYFUL GENERATION AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
Since the late 1980s, a new generation of young people whom we call "the playful generation" has been rising while the thinking generation declined. In contrast to the thinking generation's idealism, social participation and intellectualism, this new generation is quite "playful."
Unwilling to pursue ideals, shoulder social responsibility and search for truth, the playful generation tends toward cynicism, egoism and anti-intellectualism. These characteristics of the playful generation have contributed to a change of China's Zeitgeist.
1. The Landscape of the Playful Generation
The playful generation, born in the late-1960s and the early-1970s, grew up entirely in the post-Mao era. The values, ideas and personalities of its members were shaped by the new social atmosphere of "reform and openness. ,, 68
With few if any memories of the Cultural Revolution and other political movements , these youths are not interested in either communist ideology or any other belief system.
68See Feng Chongyi and Gregor Benton, "Chinese youth today: The cn.S~S of belief," All Under Heaven , pp. 80-90, Beverley Hooper, "Chinese Youth: The Nineties Generation," Current History, Vol . 90, No . 557 (September 1991), pp. 264 - 269 , and Sandra Burton, "Living--Time for the 'Me Generation'" Time , 5/1 0/93 . 60
They appear to reject all rules , regulations and authorities. They spurn the way of life advocated by communist ideology. "Serving the people," "learning from
Lei Feng" and "reform world view" seem hundred of years away from them. They adopt an indifferent and slighting attitude toward all serious issues of morality and belief, whether they be traditional values or communist ideology. For instance, premarital sex, while prohibited by officials and taboo in traditional morality, is quite common among today's youths. Cheating on examinations is prevalent on today's campus and has not been viewed as a shameful thing.69
Moral virtues like chastity or honesty make little sense to the playful generation, and they do feel no guilt from these
"iconoclastic actions." For them, life is little more than a game and the key word is "playing" [wan]. While their parents call them "the lost generation," they take pride in regarding themselves "international youth" and reluctant to identify themselves as descendants of the traditional
Chinese or "successors of the socialist cause."
If Bei Dao is the representative figure of the thinking generation, the idol of the playful generation is Wang Shuo , a writer, who has been labelled "the king of the popular novel." Wang once said, "I'm most interested in the social
69According to a survey of 2, 000 students in 20 universities , about 25% of students have had premarital sex and cheating in exams has become prevalent. The survey concludes that "students ' morals have sharply declined" and this tendency is increasing . See "CCP Survey of Student Attitudes , Behavior," in Tangtai (Hong Kong), No 39, 15 Jun 94 pp 14-16 . 61 stratum that enjoys a popular lifestyle... that contains violence, sex, mockery and shamelessness. ,,70 Wang's works, which critics refer to as "pizi wenxue" or "hooligan"
literature, are set in an anti-heroic tone and iconoclastic milieu. His playful, humorous and evocative prose "captures
the crude vitality of the entrepreneur unbound, the loose world of the modern criminal, and the boredom and amorality
that occasionally lead good girls into arms of bad men.,,7l
In his writing, Wang glorifies hooligans, from whom he
thinks that "all of the driving force of openness and reform comes,"
Hooligans do business, hooligans do commerce, hooligans build factories and open shops. Their craziness is what makes the society tick. Those who are really successful --that is, those who have gotten rich--all of them are hooligans. 72
In Wang's eyes, hooligans have replaced heroes to play an important role in current society. "Authority symbols are the butt of many of his sardonic jokes; so are
Government officials, communist Party members,
intellectuals, propaganda, patriotism, idealism, and the communist machine. ,,73 While some accused Wang's writing of
70Cited from Geremie Barme, "Wang Shuo and Liumang ('Hooligan') Culture," The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 28 (July 1992), p . 23 .
7lGermie Barme and Linda Jai van, eds., New Ghosts, Old Dreams (New York : Times Books , 1992), p . 217 .
72Cited from Sheryl WuDunn , "The Word From China's Kerouae : The Communists Are Uneool , " The New York Times Book Review, 1/10/1993 .
73 See , Sheryl WuDunn, "The Word From China ' s Kerouae: The Communists Are Uneool," The New York Times Book Review, 1/10/93 62
describing "the enjoyment of a licentious, treacherous, and
. boorish criminal world, ,,74 His fervent popularity75 among
young people (called the "Wang Shuo phenomenon") marks the
end of the thinking generation's idealist and heroist era
and the onset of cynical nihilism.
2. The Advent of the Nihilistic Rebels
Even early in 1985, nihilistic tendencies began to
appeared in some art and literary works. Xu Xing's short
novel Variations Without a Theme was widely noticed as it
created a new genre of " superfluous people ,, 76 who has lost
the "theme" of life, goals, aspirations and their self-
identity.
Maybe I'm just a loser... Who the hell am I, anyway? I have no expectations... I mean it. I'm not waiting for anything.
If I suddenly dropped dead, would it change anything? It'd probably have the same impact on the world on as the death of an ant. 77
74 Chen Yishui, "A Primer for Sexual Criminals , " New Ghosts, Old Dreams , p . 244.
75Since 1986, Wang has published more than ten novels that totally sold out at least one million copies . He reached a peak of prominence in 1988- -Chinese cinema's "Wang Shuo Year" - -when no less than four films based on his stories and novels were produced . Wang also involved in writing of three most popular TV series .
76 See He Xing, "On Superfluous People," in Dushu [Reading] , November 1985 .
77C ited from Germie Barme and Linda Jaivan, eds ., New Ghosts, Old Dreams, p . 256. 63
The difference between Pan Xiao and Xu Xing is meaningful. Pan Xiao's pessimistic tone about "life's road getting narrower and narrower" came from a unrealized ideal of a bright life. It in fact appealed for a resolution of life's frustration. Xu Xing's "superfluous people," in contrast , have already given up the dream of bright life and do not believe in any resolution. As superfluous people, they are not interested in any effort to change their empty, meaningless life and tend to be cynical about everything.
Official reaction to Xu Xing's novel was: "such a literary trend does not deserve encouragement or support" because "China's youth do not have the right to be cynical. " 78 But what rights do the young people have? How could people find themes for their life with the repeated experience of disillusionment? This nihilistic tendency did not stop but expanded in the following years. The sense of emptiness was more sharply and wildly voiced by Cui Jian, a celebrated rock singer and teenage idol, in his "Nothing to
My Name,"
Why does your hand tremble? Why do your tears flow? Is it because I own nothing that You say you love me?79
78 He Xing, "On Superfluous People . " Quoted from Germie Barme and Li nda Jaiv an, eds . , New Ghosts, Old Dreams , p . 260 . He Xing ' s essay has been r e vised by party i deologue Hu Qiaomu .
79Cited from Geremie Barme and John Mi nford ed ., Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voiced of Conscience , p. 400 . 64
Cui Jian's raucous yowl expressed the sense of despair
. and oppression that the younger generation experienced but
could not resolve.
There are many problems before USi There's no way to resolve them. But the fact that we have never had the chance Is an even greater problem. ao
Cui Jian is a new kind of rebel who wants to expose
problems with rebellious lyrics but not resolve them. Since
there is no way to resolve their problems, more and more
youth were fond of irrational tumult. But Cui Jian's songs
retain some sentiment from the thinking generation. On the
one hand, his vogue marked the state of "homeless spirit" of
the youth. On the other hand, facing to the nihilistic
trend, his tone is quite depressing, bitter and nostalgic.
In this sense, Cui Jian does not entirely belong to the
playful generation, although he is admired by them. Cui
Jian was a turning point from painful idealism to nostalgic
nihilism, where the old rational thinking lost and the new
rebellious discourse appeared.
In contrast with Cui Jian's heavy, nostalgic attitude,
playful generation people are light and playful because they
have no problem accepting the nihilistic era. The
nihilistic trend was labelled as "three crises of belief"
(crisis of faith, crisis of confidence, crisis of trust) at
the beginning of 1980s . But the sense of "crisis" was felt
aO Cited from Beverley Hooper , "Chinese Youth: The Nineties Generation, " Current History, p . 26B. 65
only by those who wanted to believe in something or think
• that life would be meaningless without belief. For most
members of the playful generation, there is no "crisis."
Growing up in the milieu that the belief has already been in
crisis, they are "innate" non-idealists and non-believers.
They know a little bit about Sartre, Freud and Nietzsche
whose ideas on human nature and morality widely influenced
the thinking generation. Unlike their elders, they are not
willing to use "thinking" against the crisis of belief. For
them, a world without ideal and belief does not mean crisis
any more. "God is dead" is not as terrible as an
"earthquake" or "solar eclipse" as in Nietzsche's metaphors.
Rather, "God is dead" means "you can do whatever you want to
do" as Dostoyevsky interpreted in his Brothers Karamazov.
In contrast to the thinking generation's nostalgic attitudes
to crisis of belief, the playful generation would rather
cheer and enjoy the coming of nihilism. This attitude made
another important turn of Zeitgeist--from nostalgic nihilism
to enjoyable nihilism .
3. Anti-intellectualism in the Era of Mass Culture
The rebellious discourse of the playful generation is
also inclined to "anti -intellectualism." According to
Hofstadter, anti-intellectualism is "a vari ety of attitudes
and ideas that have many points of convergence." 66
The common strain that binds together the attitude and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly minimize the value of that life. 81
In his analysis of anti-intellectualism in America,
Hofstadter further suggests three analytically distinct types : populist anti-elitism, and unreflective instrumentalism. 82
The anti-intellectualism of the playful generation is mixed up in unreflective hedonism, irrationalism and anti-elitism. The rapid economic and social changes in post-Mao "reform and openness" have created a new atmosphere that is increasingly exposed to the products and ideas of the outside world. It has led China into an age of mass culture that is characterized by the boom of electronic media, and entertainment industries and the spread of pop values and commercialism of consumer culture. Instead of the austerity cult of Maoist China, youths of the playful generation enjoy the Western-style leisure culture with
VCRs, computer games, stereo systems, and imported clothes and shoes, videotapes of Hong Kong or Western films, pop music, Discos , and risque posters.
81Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York : Alfred A. Knopf , 1963) , p . 7 .
82 see Daniel Rigney, "Three kinds of anti-intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter," Sociological Inquiry vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 434-51. 67
The intellectualism of the thinking generation is based on an Enlightenment consciousness that attempts to push historical progress by finding truth and rejecting untruth or falsehood in order to emancipate humankind from alienation and injustice. It implies the primacy of intellectuals in this course as the truth can be found only by rational, intelligent works, although it also emphasizes the principle that all people must be equal in front of the truth. But in the nihilistic discourse of the playful generation, truth is only an illusion and all people are absolutely equal in a truthless world. The discourse of the playful generation, by denying truth claims, invalidates the primacy of intellectuals. In the age of mass culture which stimulates unreflective amusement and promotes populist values, the playful generation tends to reject rationalist reflection, critical pondering and the elitist values of intellectualism.
The irrational aspects of the anti-intellectualism of the playful generation is exemplified by a new genre of poetry called "Not-Not." In their manifesto , they call for a return to a pre-cultural primitive naturalism; they believe that one should rely on intuitive feelings by means of which one can be privy to relations of the spirit.
Not-Not : a blanket term covering the object , form, contents , methodology, process , way and result of the principles of Pre-cultural Thought. After deconstructing the relationship between man and objects to their pre-cultural state , there is nothing in this universe that is not Not-Not . 68
Not-Not is aware that liberation exists in the indefinite. It communicates via intuition and pre-culture, because Not-Not is non-sentient, unalloyed. As a new form of artistic perception, Not-not is a type of revelation, a method. .. The starting point of Not-Not thinking is a profound mistrust of language ... 83
For the playful generation, rationalist "thinking" is useless and worthless as a guide to truth. It is nothing more than a game and a most boring one of that. A popular word "profundity" [shenchenl was used to praise someone who likes to think in early 1980s. The playful generation changed this word to a phrase "playing profundity" [wan shenchenl that means pretending "profundity" to ridicule those who declare their fondness of thinking. The follow dialogue is a typical exchange between teachers and students in 1990s.
"What do you believe in, anyway?" "Nothing but myself?" "Have you ever seriously thought about what you are?" "No, I don't want to seriously think about anything." "Then how could you chose? You have to chose something at least." "I choose everything according to my feeling and only the feeling, that's all." "It's dangerous. You will be cheated by your feeling" "So what? Your generation has been cheated, hurt and confused by your so-called "thinking" ten or hundred times as we are done by our feeling, haven't you? and , at last , can you say you are more happy than us? So, be smart! forget your thinking and following the feeling to go. "84
83Cited from Geremie Barme and John Minford eds . , Seeds of Fire : Chinese Voices of Conscience, p . 405.
84 See Qing Liu, "Chan Dong de Xiang Yia Ta: Dang Da Xue Sheng de Jing Sheng Shi Jie" [The Trembling Ivory Tower: The Mental World of Contemporary Students], Dang Da Qing Nian Yan Jiu [Contemporary Youth Research] (Shanghai) , No. 11 (1988), p . 4. 69
The song "Following the feeling to go" by Taiwan singer
Su Rei was among the favorites of the playful generation.
Their happiness and sadness only follow their feeling of every moment and they make the sense of their life only in
"a rubble of significance." 70
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION:
THREE TYPES OF DISCOURSES AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-MAO CHINA
The post-communist period and late-Leninist transformation is full of various social, political and economic conflicts. For scholars, there are many approaches to examine these conflicts and their origins and consequences. Without denying the usefulness of conventional methods--political, economic or social structural analyses--in mainstream theories, this thesis attempts to find an alternative way to post-communist studies by focusing on social discourse. This effort is also to aim at establishing a framework within which we can abstract theoretical characteristics form specific social and political phenomena and provide a potentiality to compare different post-communist societies in comparable dimensions.
1. Toward Discourse Perspective
Why should we take discourse seriously? What can discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of
Leninist and post-communist phenomena? The answers might lie in that communist ideology and Leninist regime are unique in human history . As Kolakowski suggests, Marxism- 71
Leninism is an "all-embracing ideology" "with universal
. pretensions," which "gives definitive answers to all
religious, philosophical, historical, and political
questions and a practical prescription about how to
live . ,, 85 This all-embracing ideology made Leninist regimes
extend the reach and impact of exclusive power to an
unprecedented degree. This state power created extensive
organization networks penetrating whole society, and
controlled, visibly and invisibly, all of political,
economic, cultural and psychological aspects of social and
private life. In other words, Marxism-Leninism is a unique
"total discourse . " It created Leninist regimes that are
unprecedented "total systems" in which all aspects of life
have been highly mixed and integrated by the omnipresent
power. Therefore, conventional approaches--studying single
dimension of political, economic or social structural
analyses--have difficulties grasping the unique features of
totalized Leninist systems. This is why we are trying to
develop a discourse perspective on Leninist and post-
communist problems .
The term discourse we use in this study refers to "all
that is written and spoken and all that invites dialogue or
85Leszek Kolakowski , "Mind and Body: Ideology and Economy in the Collapse of Communism," in Constructing Capi talism: The Reemergence of Civil Society and Liberal Economy in the Post-Communist , ed. by Klazimierz z . Poznanski. (Boulder, CO: westview Press , 1992). p. 22 . 72 conversation . " 86 In Foucault's theories , a discourse is a
""discursive formation" that is related to distinct or
8 invisible regularities. ? These regularities that encompass values, norms, and attitudes of almost all aspects of life can be finely discovered in discourses, because human is a "communication animal." Accordingly, discourse perspective can facilitate us to understand specialties of
Leninist regimes and post-communist societies.
Based on discussions of previous chapters, we will categorize the three types of discourses--Marxism-Leninism, anti-ideology and anti-intellectualism, and summarize in the table 1 (see Appendix). This categorization is a theoretical conceptualization similar to Weber's ideal types. By doing so, we can examine conflicts (dissidence and divergence) in late-Leninist China by contrasting different types of discourses and their different practical consequences .
2. Rational-critical Response to Leninist Modernity
The conflict between Marxism-Leninism and the anti-
ideology is a confrontation between two types of modernist discourses: hyper-rational absolutist discourse and
86 Rosenau , Post -modernism and the Soci al Sciences: Insights , Inroads, and Intrusi ons , p . x i .
8? See Micheal Barrett , The Politi cs of Truth : From Marx to Foucault (Cambridge : Polity Press , 1991), p . 123 . 73
rational-critical discourse. The tension between these two
. discourses as noted above is rooted in distinctions between
the Scottish and French versions of the Enlightenment.
Their practical (social, political and economic)
consequences could be respectively reflected in Leninist
model of modernity and western (liberal democratic) model of
modernity, and then, in (former) Leninist state, in the
struggle between the party-state that insists to maintain
Leninist modernity and democratic dissidents who want to
search for alternative (western) model of modernity. While
the both versions of modernity share some ideals of
modernity as embodied in the Enlightenment--universal
reason, objective knowledge , autonomous self and progressive
history, they have different understandings of what is
rational and different evaluations of how powerful human
reason is. 88 In brief, Marxism-Leninism conceitedly
believed that absolute truth can be achieved by human reason
88Holmes interprets the Leninist modernity as "quintessential modern" : They went far beyond the average capitalist state in their belief that humanity could conquer nature and that reason can explain and dominate all; their policies on religion, moreover, were compatible with this humanism . They went far beyond the capitalist state in their unquestioning faith in progress and production. They went far beyond the capitalist state in their teleologism. And they went far beyond the capitalist state in their historicist interpretation of social development . And there is no question that, in practice, they firmly adhered to and indeed advocated various divisions and specialization. In all these senses , then, they were the quintessential modern formation . See Leslie Holmes , "On Communism , Post-Communism, Modernity and Post Modernity," unpublished paper , p . 12 . Similarly, Hayek argues that the errors of socialism lie in "the fatal concei t" that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes and the success of capitalism i s precisely the giving up of this hubristic belief . See F . A. Hayek, The Fatal Concei t : the Errors of Socialism (Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1989) . 74
and has an infinite power. So it rejected any criticism and
. tended to be truth monopoly. Consequently, this hyper
rational truth absolutism failed to create an effective
mechanism of self-inquiry and error-correction and led to
the failure of Leninist modernity.
The anti-ideological discourse as a modernist discourse
also has to deal with the tension between truth claims and
critical openness. To seek an alternative modernity, the
thinking generation attempted to create alternative modes of
knowledge discourse that is expected to avoid ideological
tendency or being a new ideology. On the other hand, this
discourse also claimed to be truth in order to produce
social and political power needed by sociopolitical
transformations. The problem is how this discourse balances
its critical openness and its anti-communist power function.
If Leninist modernity's failure lies in its extreme
belief of the Enlightenment ideas, and the crisis of
Marxism-Leninism lies in its hyper-rational conceit, the
alternative modernity of anti-ideology must restrain itself
from radical rationalism and truth absolutism . This
awareness invited a series of intellectual debates since the
late 1980s. Many established scholars began to criticize
the radical tendency in the "New Enlightenment" discourse
and advocated conservative thinking . Some referred to
western thinkers such as Burke , Tocqueville, Popper, Hayek ,
Huntington and Foucault and pointed out the negative 75
influences of universal rationalism of the Enlightenment and
" the radical democracy of the French Revolution. 89 While
these debates have no doubt promoted the academic level of
Chinese intelligentsia, many theoretical problems remain
unsolved. For instance, if liberalism, the core of the
western modernity, stems from, in the term of Hayek,
"spontaneous reason, " one of the most critical problems is
how to create "spontaneous reason" in the ruin of both
traditional culture and communist ideology. To what extent
did the development of liberalism and democracy in the West
rely on the tradition of spontaneous reason?
In the late 1980s, Chinese intelligentsia were full of
disputes, controversies and conflicts. This indicates, on
the one hand, that contemporary Chinese intellectuals have
been aware of the negative side of radical rationalism.
They made sufficient efforts to keep their discourse open to
various inquiries and criticisms in order to prevent the
anti-ideological discourse from being a new truth-monopoly
or new ideology. On the other hand, the theoretical
disorder would lead anti-ideology to be more divergent and
make "the search for alternative modernity" more enigmatic.
Returning to Foucault's theory of knowledge/power could
help to understand the difficulty of the anti-ideological
discourse . In Foucault's view, knowledge can produce power
89See Mike Sullivan, "The Impact of Western Political Thought on Chinese Political Discourse on Transitions from Leninism, 1986-1992 . " 76
because discourse establishes domains in which the practice
' of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent
so that rules and regularities can be perceived and
followed. In other words, some degree of self-confirmation,
monopoly and hierarchy of discourse is necessary for the
production of power. Lacking adequate simplicity,
consensus, consistency and conformity, the anti-ideological
discourse lacks the power to struggle against Marxist
Leninist ideology and establish an alternative modernity,
especially while public space is still controlled by the
state apparatus. This situation decreased the public
influence of intellectuals and also contributed to the rise
of nihilism in late 1980s.
3. Deconstructive Response to Leninist Modernity
With the decline of the thinking generation's
discourse, the playful generation is inclined to respond to
Leninist modernity by rejecting modernism. As we saw in
Chapter IV, with its cynicism, self-centralism and anti
intellectualism, what the playful generation rebels against
is not some specific ideas, opinions or principles but the
whole way of modern thinking and whole system of rationalist
discourse. This rebellious discourse is, I argue, a kind of
postmodern phenomena .
1 77
The definitions of postmodernism and postmodernity are
. quite controversial and focus on different features in
dealing with philosophic, historical, sociological,
political, and art issue-areas. While an overall
examination on the definitions is beyond the scope of this
paper, I would briefly depict the basic assumption and
character of postmodernism. Although there is little
agreement about what "post-modern" is, it is possible to
identify two representative versions of postmodernism. One
is a radical opinion that sees postmodern as an "anti-
modern" and the other one is moderate view that regards
postmodern as just "after or beyond modern." The radical
postmodernism attempts to deconstruct the universal ideals
of modernity as embodied in the Enlightenment--transcendent
reason, objective knowledge, autonomous self, progressive
history. The moderate postmodernism tends to rethink and
criticize the problems of modernity but not to entirely
reject the achievements of bourgeois civilization and the
ideals of the Enlightenment.
The critical standpoint of postmodernism is based on
criticism of the modern philosophical pursuit of "Truth,"
whether it be in the transcendental or the empirical sense.
As Baudrillard argues, "the secret of theory is , indeed,
that truth doesn't exist . "90 Truth is an Enlightenment
90J . Baudrillard, "Forgetting Baudrillard, " Social Text , no. 15 (fall 1986) , p . 141. 78
idea that makes reference to order, rules, and values and depends on logic, rationality, and reason, all of which are disputed by the postmodernists. The basic tendency to anti-
Enlightenment would introduce anti-intellectualism, anti-
foundationalism, post-subjectivism, non-centralism, and post-structualism in contrast with modernist
intellectualism, foundationalism, subjectivism, centralism,
and structualism.
I will draw on the conception of "postmodern
individual" developed by Bauman, Corlett, and Lipovetsky to
interpret the playful generation's discourse. The
characteristics of "postmodern individual" are well
summarized by Rosenau,
The post-modern individual calls for the end of certitude, reasoned argument, modern rationality, objective modern science, law grounded on jurisprudence, and art subject to evaluation on the basis of standard criteria... Without any need of universalistic claims or ideological consistency, the post-modern individual seeks freedom (from coercion by others) and liberation (from self-denial) . 91
The postmodern age is the age of "deconstruction" of general rules , comprehensive norms, hegemonic systems of
thought. In the postmodernist view, it is the "Golden Age
of the individual" in which the postmodern individual
relinquishes all normative assumptions and denies any
possibility that one value or moral norm can ever be
91p . M. Rosenau , Post -modernism and the Social Sciences (New Jersey : Princeton University Press , 1992) , pp . 55 . 79 demonstrated to be better than any other. The postmodern individual holds a "be-yourself" stance and less concerned with old loyalties and modern affiliations such as marriage , family, church, and nation, they are more oriented toward their own needs. "S/he is an active human being constituting his/her own social reality, pursuing a personal quest for meaning but making no truth claims for what results. " 92 Being oriented toward feelings and emotions, postmodern individuals are preferring the temporary over the permanent and contented with a "live and let live" (in the present) attitude. In some cases, they tend to excessive cynicism, indifference , narcissism, hedonism, apathy, egotism, and anti-intellectualism. 93
The characters of the postmodern individual exactly fit in with the playful generation who are "following feeling to go" as discussed in the Chapter IV. The anti intellectualism as an post-modern discourse would not be interested in directly political challenge to Marxism
Leninism. However, for individual freedom, the rebellion of the playful generation takes would take numerous apolitical , non-structural , discursive and daily-life ways to demolish the political, centralized, constructive and self-holy ideological discourse . It can be called as "deconstructive rebelli ous d i scourse " as it subverts all of hierarchical
92 I bid . , 53 .
93See Ibid., p . 55 . 80
orders, norms and rules that the Leninist power wants to
• impose without offering any alternative construction.
The playful generation would not be interested in
reading postmodern theories. Just like western pop
musicians and artists do not need to know Derrida, Foucault
or Lyotard to become postmodern, the Chinese playful
generation's postmodern discourse is of course not affected
by latest finding in western academic culture but shaped by
the world of life. Here, what I want to argue is that the
post-Leninist situation in China, maybe as well as in other
former socialist countries, has produced or is producing a
very postmodern condition, under which youth subculture is
unconsciously confirming postmodern critiques of modernism.
If the crisis of western modernity that is invented by
critical theorists and postmodern thinkers is relatively
partial, veiled and moderate, the crisis of Leninist
modernity is more total, apparent and radical. In other
words, the Enlightenment values and modernist subjects-
truth, rationality, reason, liberty, progress and
emancipation are more seriously undermined and threatened in
the post-Leninist condition . In post-communist or Late
Leninist societies, various anti-Enlightenment , anti
intellectual , anti-rational, and anti-normative discourses
have increasingly appeared in not only academic circles but
influenced, overall political, economic, and moral domains.
This is why postmodern debates of Western scholars have been 81 paid so much attention by intellectuals living in China--a undeveloped country. The motive might not be academic interesting concerning with "text" or "structure" but from the pressure of the reality.
4. Divergence between Two Rebellious Discourses
The divergence between the thinking generation's anti ideology and the playful generation's anti-intellectualism lies in the discrepancy between modern rational construction and postmodern irrational deconstruction and between elitist intellectualism and anti-elitist mass culture. This divergence has contributed to conflicts within unofficial discourses of society and made Chinese political configuration more intricate.
As both are rebels against Leninist state power, the thinking generation and the playful generation have some common ground. However, there are discrepancies between them in their motives and attitudes toward political rebellion and other sociopolitical issues . On the one hand, the youths of the playful generation who only pursues individual freedom have been frequently criticized by their elders for their seeking short-term interests , fearing hardships, being selfish, lacking political idealism, and 82
having no responsibility. 94 On the other hand, the younger
. generation seems to disregard these condemnations, to react
with disbelief and or to mock the elder's "ossified ideas."
This conflict results in an intricate political
configuration.
Such discrepancies are revealed through Wang Shuo's
reaction to the "signature event" that preceded the
Tiananmen movement. In early 1989, Bei Dao collected the
signatures of 33 famous intellectuals for a letter that
appealed to Deng Xiaoping to release Wei Jingsheng, China
most eminent political prisoner. 95 This event perturbed
the CCP leadership. This honorable action was satirized by
the playful generation's idol--Wang Shuo, however. In his
novel An Attitude, Wang portrays the person who had come to
a group of hooligan [liumang] authors to solicit signatures
as "a dirty young man," "probably a decadent poet and
masturbator." He was holding a petition for human rights in
China and the paper "looked like someone had pissed on it
and then dried it in a dank room: it stunk." The liumang
authors refuse to sign. Because "we've got more than enough
human rights," one of them blurts out , "any more and we
wouldn't know what to do with 'em." Another breaks in with
the remark : "You're one of that mob who's pushing for 'total
94See Lynn T . White III with Cheng Li , "Diversification Among Mainland Chinese Intellectuals , " Mainland China After the Thirteenth Party Congress, ed . King-yuh Chang (Boulder : Westview Press , 1990) , p . 462 .
95wei Jingsheng was released in September 1993 . 83
westernization,' aren't you? .. well go back and tell your
. bosses ... forget about trying to forge a path for China,
we're not going anywhere!" One of the others ends the
encounter angrily with these words:
Who do you think you are, anyway? Just because you dump on the Communist Party you reckon you're a hero. Let me tell you, things have changed. No matter what happens your lot's not going to be in charge.
The gang of writers send the petitioner off amidst a hail of abuse, remarking to each other:
It's really true [what they say]: when the nation is in crisis all types of evil creatures come out of the woodwork and all manner of fake dragon emperors stalk the land. 96
The protagonist's criticism of the poet for pushing for
"total westernization" or his claim that "we've got more
than enough human rights," should not suggest that Wang Shuo
sides with the Communist party, because most of his works of
Wang Shuo frequently mock official Communist discourse.
Instead, they should be understood as the playful
generation's reaction to the other model of rebellion.
The thinking generation's challenge to the communist
ideology, like Bei Dao's "I do not believe!", is straight
forward and brave , but, it still endures a "conversation"
with official ideology and hence takes a potentially
ideologicalized tact against ideology. Both sides of the
antagonism remain in modernist discourse systems based on
96 Quoted from Geremie Barme , "Wang Shuo and Liumang (Hooligan) Culture , " The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 28 , July 1992. 84
universal truth claim. In contrast, the rebellion of the
. playful generation with no faith in truth has gone beyond
that system by refusing any kind of conversation with
ideological discourse including direct antagonism. Perry
Link describes this characteristic by using the term of
"postcynical nihilism, "
members of the 16-to-24 group... being only toddlers during the Cultural Revolution, absorbed most of their social influences from the "make money, study abroad" ethos of the 1980s. Their attitude toward the party-state has in a sense moved beyond cynicism to a kind of postcynical nihilism that finds official presentations not even worthy of rejection, but simply irrelevant. 97
This is the reason why Wang Shuo replaced Bei Dao and other
intellectual elites to be the new idol of the playful
rebels. As Sheryl WuDunn has pointed out,
Unlike Su Xiaokang and Liu Binyan who are thinkers with a vision of the political system for the entire nation, Wang Shuo is more destructive, poking fun at everything the Communist Party takes seriously without offering any alternative. He romanticizes young, alienated rebels , in much the same way that Jack Kerouac did in the United States . He explores the paradoxes and absurdities of the Chinese society. Instead of directly criticizing the Communists for being politically autocratic , he does what is far more devastating: he mocks them for being uncool. 98
We should understand that this deconstructive
rebellious discourse is not a conscious struggle strategy
97perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (New York : W.W. Norton and Company, 1992 ) , p . 242 .
98See , Sheryl WuDunn, "The Word From China ' s Kerouac : The Communists Are Uncool," The New York Times Book Review 1/10/93 85 but the way of life itself. Its deconstruction of the ideology is a natural consequence of the way of life chosen by the playful generation. Inevitably, it will also subvert all kind of truth-claim discourses including the thinking generation's intellectualism and the party's ideology.
In sum, both of anti-ideology and anti-intellectualism are dissident discourses. They would in different ways undermine Leninist state power and thus contribute to establishment of a relatively autonomous civil society. But their difference in type of knowledge (see table 1) would prevent them from effective communication, which is a unsolved problem Chinese democracy.
5. Rebellious Discourse and Democracy
The impact of the two generation's rebellious discourses and their conflict over post-Leninist transformation, especially over the China's democratization is very important problem. Non-state, relatively autonomous organizations and discourses are necessary, as well as the plurality of actors and opinions is also needed for a meaningful public sphere. But this is not enough. As Craig
Calhoun, drawing on Habermas, argues, the central issue is
"to what extent can the wills or opinions guiding political action be formed on the basis of rational-critical 86
discourse?" 99 He further suggests that a successful
. political public sphere should provide for a discourse about
shared societal concerns that is both rational-critical and
influential and "such a public sphere depends on a favorable
organization of civil society. "100 Here, the ways in which
members of a public sphere relate to each other is
important. A public sphere is successful, when it can make
deliberative exchanges and achieve social integration by
rational-critical arguments. Therefore, "if it is
impossible to communicate seriously about basic differences
among members of a public sphere , then it will be impossible
also to address the differences of communication across
lines of basic difference. " 101
The crucial problem is that the postmodern discourse of
the playful generation basically refuses to accept
"rational-critical" principles. It would seriously impede
efforts to build efficient communication between the two
ge nerations and even among the members of the playful
generation . The playful generation would also perform
political activity but not based on "rational-critical "
p r i nciple. As Rosenau explained,
Despite a general political disaffecti on, the post-modern individual may from time to time
99 Crai g Calhoun, "Civ i l Soc iety and the Public Sphe re , " Public Culture, No . 5, 1993 , p . 269.
100Ibid . , p . 2 74 .
101Ibid . , p . 27 9. 87
affirm struggles against the state and the system. S/he is open to participation and recruitment in diverse and contradictory causes and social movements with fleeting existences. This is not surprising because the post-modern individual is comfortable with mUltiple realities, without requiring coherence. And this makes sense given the post-modern individual's fluctuating, ever changing personal identity. 102
The political features of the postmodern individuals could be dangerous and harmful since they are possibly attracted by any political idea and project including radical nationalism, racism and so forth . Then, can we place the hope of China's democratization on today's youth?
There is no doubt that the rebellious discourse of the playful generation has attained autonomous space much more than the thinking generation did. But, if liberalism and democracy requires even minimal truth and belief, and if the playful generation as postmodern individuals who have
"little affection for a humanist stance, for any belief in the idea of progress, for any need to contribute to society" and "repudiates the responsibility imposed by humanism, ,,103 the social and political significance of this rebellious discourse remains deeply obscure. It might become a new decisive problem to the fate of future China.
102 p . M. Rosenau , Post-modernism and the Social Sciences, p. 54.
103 rbid . 88
APPENDIX
Table. 1 THREE TYPES OF DISCOURSES
Subject The Party-state The Thinking The Playful generation generation Discourse Marxism-Leninism Anti-ideology Anti- intellectualism Type of Hyper- rational Rational-critical Irrational Knowledge truth absolutism construction deconstruction Value Totalism Idealism Nihilism Primary State power Social Changes Individual function Freedom Social Political elitism Intellectual Anti-elitism attitude elitism Political Political Liberal Political Apolitical Orienta- Monopoly Dissidence Dissidence tion Cultural French Scottish Mass culture, Origins Enlightenment Enlightenment Commercialism General Modernity Modernity Post-modernity Property