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Home , Critical theory, Cui Zhiyuan, Frankfurt School, Gan Yang, Jiang Shigong, Wang Hui (intellectual)

The

The vs. Liberal Debate in : How Shapes the Perception of

By

Yu-Hsuan Sun

July 2021

A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Arts Degree in the Masters of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS)

Faculty Advisor: Marco Garrido Preceptor: Wen Xie Abstract:

The tragic June 4th Crackdown on the Tiananmen Student Movement dealt a devastating blow to the hope of China’s democratization. In the 1980s, the majority of young Chinese students expressed overwhelming support for the democracy movement and the New Enlightenment thought trend which preceded the 1989 protests. The homogeneity of the 80s intellectual sphere, however, is a stark contrast to the intense debate between the “New Left” and “Liberal” camps in China which began in the late 1990s. My paper seeks to answer the question: “Why did China’s intellectual homogeneity dissolve so quickly in the 90s?” And more importantly, “What is at stake in those debates between intellectual camps?” To answer these questions, I argue that ideological differences among Chinese intellectuals fundamentally change their perception of China’s post-1989 reality. After the Tiananmen Movement, intensified China’s economic reforms as an answer to both the internal and external crises to his political power after June 4th.

While this new wave of reforms brought about unprecedented economic growth and commerce in

China, it also created looming social problems such as inequality and corruption. However, these social issues generated polarizing responses from Chinese intellectuals who offered contradicting explanations to these social and economic issues. Scholars of the New Left, who argues that still has a future, blamed the influx of foreign investments and global as the primary cause. The Liberals, on the hand, identify the dictatorship of the Leninist party- to be the cause of China’s mushrooming social ills. The paper then concludes with a reflection on the debate with respect to recent political developments in China, particularly the rise of President

Xi Jinping and his Great Rejuvenation of China campaign. Introduction

This paper is about the debate between the Liberal camp in China and the Chinese New Left since 1997, which is hailed by some as the greatest intellectual debate in China since the death of

Mao Zedong. The debate started around 1997 when Hui, who is considered to be the leading intellectual of the New Left camp, published the article Contemporary Chinese Thought and the

Question of . Drawing intellectual sources from the school and the Anglo-

American New Left, wrote about the perils of Western global capitalism and the need for

China to formulate its own modernity—a developmental model faithful to the Chinese cultural heritage that could sidestep the problems of Western global capitalism. Wang Hui’s article had profound impacts on the Chinese intellectual landscape, most notably reintroducing the concept of modernity to Chinese political thought, which was largely ignored by Chinese scholars at the time.

(1998 [1997]) Furthermore, it the tone for the Liberals and the New Leftists to become

“discursive enemies” in the following decades. The political implication of the paper sparked intense backlash from the Chinese Liberals, who uphold Western liberal democracy as the ideal developmental path for China. For liberal intellectuals such as Li Shenzhi, , and Zhu

Xueqin, liberalism embodies the legacy of the 1919 and its core values: democracy, science, and freedom. For example, Li Shenzhi (1998) argues that liberalism represents the best and most universal , identifying it as the defining feature of modern . The liberals believe China is poised to join the ranks of other liberal democracies in the West on their paths toward modernization. They took the market reforms instigated by Deng Xiaoping to the first step towards liberalism, and now the second step is to launch a new wave of political reforms to catch up with the economic reforms.

In direct response to Wang Hui’s paper, Xu Youyu (2000) argued that there is no significant change to China’s social context after 1989. According to Xu, Wang Hui’s of modernity was built upon the misconception that China has become a genuine global capitalist state. Xu and other Liberal intellectuals believed that capitalism depends on the idea of property rights, which are not protected in China's constitution. Furthermore, Xu suggested that the fundamental problem of

China, i.e. the dictatorship of the Chinese (CCP), remained the same since 1989.

In Xu’s own words: “although the situations are new, the problems are old.” (Xu Youyu 2003) The

“old problems” Xu mentioned not only include the totalitarian rule of the Leninist Party-State, but also the unfinished Enlightenment enterprise that could be traced all the way back to the May

Fourth Movement. Liberals attacked the New Left not only for their point of view, but for their lack of intellectual independence, including the accusation that “the deficiency of ‘New Left’ thinking is its disengagement from reality,” (Wu Guanjun 2014) The accusation extended to the evaluation of the moral quality of New Left scholars, and Xu Youyu (2003) told a joke mocking Wang Hui to make his point:

“In the era of Cold War, an American citizen argues with a USSR citizen about whose country is more democratic. The American man says: “We can yell in public ‘Reagan, go to hell!’ Can you do the same in your country?” He gets his answer very quickly: “Who said we can’t? Of course we can yell in public ‘Reagan, go to hell!’ … Is there any between condemning American imperialism in and yelling in public ‘Reagan, go to hell!’ in Moscow? Is this the so-called ‘critical spirit of intellectuals’?” (277)

From the acrimonious tone of Xu Youyu, it is perhaps not a surprise that the New Left vs. Liberal debate took a sour turn in the early 2000s and became a “spitting war.” The debate involved a complicated web of personal aspirations, intellectual politics, and academic jargons scholars chose to employ. But at the most fundamental level, the debate was about the right way to view China’s and the proper explanations for China’s social problems following the acceleration of the economic reforms after 1898.

The paper argues that the two camps have fundamentally different perceptions of China’s reality after 1989. Although both parties acknowledged similar social issues in China such as social and corruption, the explanations for these issues are contradictory to each other. The Liberals argue that corruption and inequality are the results of the long-time problem of the Leninist party- state. Conversely, the New Left took the recent introduction of global capitalism to be the primary cause. These differences result in two completely opposite solutions for China’s pressing challenges: the New Left advocated for more state capacity while the Liberals wanted less. The two distinct perceptions of China’s reality ultimately lead to two competing outlooks for the nation’s future. Therefore, the debate is not only about the empirical status of Chinese society, but what

China ought to be. To use the words of Joseph Fewsmith (2001), “The rationale for looking at the intellectual community is to ‘take a temperature’ of Chinese Society in the 90s.”

Intellectual politics also played a pivotal role in facilitating the debate. The century-long question of Chinese vs. Western values took on a new form in the late 90s as the New Left vs.

Liberal debate, thanks in large to the large influx of ideas from contemporary Western academia such as ’s Critical and Francis Fukuyama’s End of Thesis. The

Frankfurt school originated from a group of scholars in critiquing the negative social impacts of capitalism based on a humanist reading of . The End of History Thesis, which predicted that Western Liberal Democracy would become the final form of human government, became extremely popular shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The New Left was infuriated by Fukuyama’s piece and argued that China still possesses the cultural heritage of socialism. Conversely, Chinese liberals embraced the idea of globalization, anticipating that it brings China closer to Western liberal democracy. Furthermore, intellectual politics influenced the

New Left vs. Liberal debate on the level of use. The import of contemporary western writings implicitly informed how key analytical categories such as “democracy,” “freedom,” and

“modernity” were interpreted and theorized. For example, while the majority of New Left intellectuals promoted “democracy” in cultural terms, they avoided talking about democracy as an institutional arrangement. In the first section, I attempt to provide a historical outline of important intellectual debates in China since the 20th century. I divide these debates into four distinct time periods, and each period has a central theme represented by an analytical dichotomy. The first period, the May Fourth

Period since 1919, was characterized by the China vs. West dichotomy and the rhetoric that affects national strength. The primary debate of the period was whether adopting could lead to the strengthening of the Chinese civilization. The second period, the New

Enlightenment Movement (NEM), which was prevalent in the 1980s, served as a continuation of the

Enlightenment in the May Fourth Movement. The hot topic of the era among intellectuals was modernization, which was a byproduct of Deng Xiaoping’s official modernization in the economic reforms. NEM is also characterized by an unprecedented homogeneity among intellectuals, who all held the same goal of orientating China’s modernization through culture. The third period, the New Left vs. Liberal debate since the 1990s, is the main focus of the paper. The fourth and final period, the era, is marked by China’s departure of Deng Xiaoping’s of “keeping a low profile.” The rise of President Xi marked the statist turn of Chinese political thought and many establishment intellectuals embraced , China’s new official state ideology, and its Great Rejuvenation of China discourse. The first section focuses on the first two periods, providing the historical background to assess the New Left vs.

Liberal debate. The section be followed up by a short interlude on the economic developments after the 1989 Tiananmen Movement, focusing on Deng Xiaoping’s attempt to save the reforms from both internal and external after the bloody crackdown.

Table 1: Key intellectual binaries based on time periods

Dichotomy / Time Period

East vs. West Spacial dichotomy May Fourth~

Traditional vs. Modern Temporal dichotomy 1980s (NEM) Dichotomy / Time Period

Left vs. Liberals (Right) Left-Right dichotomy 1997~

Statist vs. Anti-Statist Rise of China dichotomy 2012~

In the second section, I focus on how intellectuals after 1989 reflect on the problem of modernization. The disagreement between Liberals and the New Left on whether China is modernized or not hinges on their conception of “modernization.” While New Left intellectuals

(and a few other scholars who draw on post-) emphasize that China’s cultural and economic conditions are already modernized, Liberals thought otherwise as they were defending the

“modernization” discourse in the NEM movement. The New Left dismissed the modernization discourse in the 80s for its linear view of development and confounding “modernization” with

“Westernization.” New Left intellectuals (especially Wang Hui) evoke the term “modernity” to critique China’s social reality after the market reforms. The main target of Wang Hui and other New

Left intellectuals was , an economic ideology which encouraged privatization, deregulation, globalization, and government downsizing. The political agenda behind the New Left, therefore, is to create a “Chinese Modernity” distinct from the “Western (capitalist) modernity” with which the New Left identified China’s post-1989 social problems. This section also deals with the intellectual politics between China and the West in the 90s and 2000s. The era of the New Left vs.

Liberal debate is characterized by a large influx of Western academic vocabularies, The New Left appealed to many left-leaning intellectuals in the West mainly because the latter saw China as providing an alternative model to neoliberalism. The latter half of the section deals with the intellectual politics surrounding the debate.

The third section focuses on how New Left intellectuals discuss democracy. The New Left wields an understanding of democracy peculiar to the common sense in the West. Inspired by

Tocqueville and Neo-Marxist scholarship on democracy in the West, the New Left interpreted democracy in cultural terms and avoided talking about it in institutional terms. , for example, questioned whether Western (such as the two-party rule of the U.S.) lived up to the value of democracy. This had lead to New Left intellectuals identifying China as a democratic society, and even argued that China’s “representational” democracy is more genuine than Western “representative” democracy. Because of the New Left's in Chinese democracy and the Marxist vocabularies they implemented to justify their claims, Chinese Liberals accused the New Left of flattering CCP's dictatorship. The section concludes with the assessment of the New Left’s perception of China’s reality, arguing that the camp wrongfully projected the vital, democratic of Chinese society onto the Communist party, which is an far from democratic.

Finally, the paper concludes with a reflection on the Chinese intellectual landscape since the zenith of the New Left vs. Liberal debate. The rise of Xi Jinping and his governing philosophy to take an active role in international politics shook up the original balance between the Left and

Right. As the CCP is now seeing itself as a direct competitor against the United States for the leader of the world order, the rift between intellectuals is now marked by the difference between “statists” who embraced Xi Jinping Thought and the “anti-statists” who oppose it. While the majority of New

Left and Liberal scholars became statists and anti-statists respectively, the divide between the two camps is no longer at the forefront of Chinese intellectual inquiry. The section also describes how different intellectuals reacted to Xi’s rise and the metamorphosis of the Chinese intellectual sphere into the Xi era.

Table 2: Brief Summary of Key New Left and Liberal Intellectuals

Intellectual / Camp New Left Liberal

Notable Intellectuals Wang Hui, , Cui Zhiyuan, Xu Youyu, , , Qin Wang Shaoguang, , Hui, He Qinglian, Yu Jie, Liu Zhang Xudong. Junning, Sun Liping. Major Tenet Socialism still has a future in China. Individual is the fundamental Semi-defending Mao and the cultural value. Continuation of Enlightenment . and Modernization as Westernization. Intellectual / Camp New Left Liberal

Opinion on State Power “State capacity” should be stronger to State power is too strong, creating fend off local corruption, global systematic corruption and a culture of capitalism, and instability. “stability overriding everything.” Stance on Democracy Cultural accounts. (esp. equality of Institutional accounts (universal conditions) that Chinese suffrage) involving democratic “society” is already democratic. processes. And human rights. Interpretation of CCP Vigorous debates within the party on Dictatorship, , policies and strategies. depriving liberty and human rights. Conservative Variation Gan Yang’s encounter with Schmitt Liu Junning’s vision is to find the and Strauss. Theorizing Strauss to cultural heritage of liberalism advocate a return to Chinese classics. through Chinese classics. Schmitt offers a challenging critique ( and Daoism) of liberalism (such as its distinction Yu Jie, Sun Liping, etc. against between “state” and “society”) and is baizuo (White Left) and identity a solid philosophical foundation to politics. build a statist theory on. Beaconism and Yu's fervent support of Trump. Accusation of the Opposing Camp Neoliberal Flattery and defending dictatorship.

Attitude towards the West Critical to neoliberalism/Western Openly embracing Westernization modernity, but open to Western left- leaning and post-modernism

Table 3: The transition from Deng Xiaoping Theory to Xi Jinping Thought

Phenomenon/ Official Ideology Deng Xiaoping Xi Jinping

Symbolic Southern Tour (1992) Speech at the 19th National Party Congress (2017) Philosophy “Keeping a low profile,” “the great rejuvenation of China”

Diplomacy Joining established international orgs Establish China-centered such as WTO international orgs. (One belt one road, AIIB) “Wolf Warrior” Thought Trend (Rift) New Left vs. Liberal Staist vs. Anti-statist

Liberal Intellectuals Promoting China’s Democratization. Split on modern issues regarding Upholds liberty. Faithful to the NEM “identity politics,” “MeToo,” and modernization discourse. (and thus “.” Many relatively homogeneous) Embracing “neoliberal” and the West. conservative. Many endorse Trump. New Left Intellectuals Replacing “modernization” with Converging with statism and “modernity.” Asserting the in terms of theorizing uniqueness of the Chinese socio- the China model. Providing political condition. Arguing for the theoretical contributions to state- future of socialism. building under the guidance of Xi Jinping thought. I. Framing the debate: Chinese Thought Trends From the 1900s to 1989

In the introduction, I have laid out a genealogical framework of intellectual debates in China based on the key analytic dichotomy of each era. This section aims to briefly summarize the first two time periods of the framework: The May Fourth Period and the New Enlightenment Era. Both movements emphasize the importance of strengthening the nation through what NEM intellectuals called “cultural modernization.” In the May Fourth Period, intellectuals contested that industrial or military reforms alone were insufficient to strengthen the nation. Prior to 1919, reforms in China were largely following the philosophy of “Chinese thought as body, Western thought as use.” This ti-yong (body-use) model insists that China is still superior to the West in terms of culture, and

China simply needed to catch up on industrialization and modernizing its military. The ti-yong model dominated the Chinese intellectual discourse in the latter half of the 19th century. While there were attempts for more sweeping reforms such as the Hundred Days Reform in 1898, they were nevertheless overthrown by the conservatives forces within the Qing empire. The belief in the

“ti-yong” model eventually collapsed after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. Besides the territorial disputes that lead up to the war, both belligerents had something to prove dignity- wise. The war was also a competition between two East Asian powers to demonstrate who has passed the “rite of passage” of modernization. Chinese intellectuals took Japan’s victory to be the direct consequence of Japan embracing full Westernization in its Meiji reforms. In their eyes,

Japan’s reforms were an all-out reform that also embraced institutional and cultural reforms, and the sentiment became a catalyst for Qing Empire’s collapse and eventually lead to the May Fourth

Movement.

On May 4, 1919, a in Peking was about to change China’s intellectual landscape forever. The Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 decided to hand over Shantung

Province to Japan, a Chinese territory previously occupied by Germany. China’s “victory” as a minor participant in World War I thus only resulted in national humiliation. Lead by zealous young students and guided by their teachers who received Western academic training, the protest quickly ignited an intellectual revolution which sought to build China through social and intellectual reforms. (Chow Tse-tung 1960) This series of events is later dubbed the May Fourth Movement.

The May Fourth Movement eventually evolved to become an all-out attack on Chinese traditions.

Intellectuals and students have come to the conclusion that the Middle Kingdom’s antiquated culture and from its imperial past were at the root of its decadency, and adopting Western alone would not defend the country from Japan and Western colonial powers.

“Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science” became an important political tenet of the movement, suggesting that the antiquated ways of Confucianism and imperialism were ought to be replaced democracy and science—two values May Fourth intellectuals took to be the secret formula behind the prosperity of the Western civilization.1 The appeal to is why Vera Schwarcz (1986) labeled the May Fourth movement as China’s Enlightenment.

The May Fourth Movement emphasizes the cultural differences between China and the

West. Since the dichotomy between China and the West played such a critical role in shaping the identity of Chinese intellectuals, it also became an epistemological divide between what is culturally or politically “Chinese” or “Western.” The critical divide between the traditionalists and the reformists during the time is whether Western culture is at the root of its economic and military achievements. In the eyes of reformist Chinese intellectuals at the time, the idea of modern was equated to the idea of being Western. Hu Shih (1986), a Chinese intellectual icon trained under star American philosophers Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, wrote famously of the “five ghosts haunting China.” Yan Fu, the most prominent political text translator of the early 20th century,

1 To be more precise, the “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy” slogan represents the New Culture Movement, a related political thought trend promoting the value of democracy and science which began in 1915. This movement is closely related but not synonymous with the May Fourth Movement. See Chow (1960) for a detailed discussion on the relationship between the two movements. believed that the fundamental behind the strength of Western civilization is “liberty.”

According to Yan, the Westerners used “liberty” as their foundation and “democracy” as their tool to govern the world. (Carl K. Y. Shaw 2020) Yan Fu, Hu Shih, , and other intellectuals at the turn of the century all made efforts to made efforts to promote . Unfortunately, their efforts were halted by domestic turmoil and foreign warfare. CCP’s victory in the Chinese civil war and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China effectively silenced liberalism for three decades to come.

The New Enlightenment Movement (NEM) became prevalent in the 1980s as the economic reforms started to take shape. Along with the May Fourth Period, the two eras have a continuous theme of upholding enlightenment values such as democracy, science, and liberalism. Supporters of the NEM saw their project as a continuation of the May Fourth Movement’s unfinished task of modernization. But the NEM was also the product of state ideology during its times. When Deng

Xiaoping came to power, the CCP launched an official modernization program on agriculture, industry, defense and technology. These goals were known to be Four Modernizations. The economic goals of the Four Modernizations program came with the official ideology of Socialist

Modernization. (Zhang Qizhi 2015) Since China is still under the one-party rule of the Chinese

Communist Party, any attempt to pursue capitalism or market economy must in theory or name follow the doctrines of . This leads to the infamous state ideology proposed by Deng known as Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Following Marx's theory of state transition in

Capital, Deng's ideology argues that China needs to engage in economic growth before transitioning into socialism. Whether or not Deng was thinking about an eventual transition into socialism was not an important issue, as long as the program does not threaten the legitimacy of the party-state or induces revolt from political opponents within the party. The project of China’s

(socialist) modernization promised that the nation could be great again following the path of modernization. And thanks to the prevalence of socialism with Chinese characteristics in post-Mao propaganda, modernization became the buzzword of students and intellectuals. This gap between socialist theory and capitalist practice gave room for a relatively free academic sphere during this time. Intellectuals were encouraged by the CCP to pursue “cultural modernization,” a fifth dimension of the modernization discourse. They were tasked with the thought work to bridge a socialist theory which supports a Leninist state and an economic practice that could potentially lead to national prosperity Wu Guanjun (2014) notes that the NEM was an “ambiguous endorsement” of

CCP’s modernization discourse. For example, calls for democratization in this era were often pursued under the banner of “socialist modernization.”

Enlightenment has often been depicted as “seeing clearly” since the May Fourth Period, and this played a crucial role in the political attitudes of the NEM intellectuals. Participating in the

NEM is not only about promoting the enlightenment political values of liberty and democracy, but acquiring an “enlightened” vision that grants intellectuals the capacity to the real about China.

This conception of enlightenment as seeing clearly brought about an unprecedented homogeneity in the Chinese intellectual sphere. The homogeneity which lasts through the 80s NEM thus laid upon the agreement that there exists an ultimate truth about the future of China. The epistemological agreement of an ultimate political truth led to the consensus on “cultural modernization.” While

NEM intellectuals may had varying conception of “the ultimate truth,” they all agreed upon the of such ultimate truth and the imminent need to embark on “cultural modernization.” (Xu

Jilin 2000) But the agreement on “cultural modernization”, however, was about where the similarities between NEM intellectuals end. Intellectuals in the NEM have drastically different conception of “modernization,” and especially its role in relation to “Westernization.” Intellectuals such as Xu Youyu and Jin Guantao saw modernization and Westernization to be two overlapping terms. Jin was well-known for being a consultant for the 1988 TV show River Elegy, a documentary depicting the decline of Chinese Civilization due to conservatism. Conversely, Japan and the West was portrayed in River Elegy as open China ought to learn from. The documentary was a massive success in terms of its , and went on expanding the influence of NEM from simply the academic sphere to the masses. Not all intellectuals during the NEM, however, agreed to

China’s fervent appeal to the West at the time. Gan Yang (1987), for example, frequently criticized early 20th century philosophers for confounding Westernization with modernization. Gan emphasized that just like there is a distinction between the Ancient and Modern West, Chinese intellectuals needed to think about transcribing the ancient Chinese culture into the modern Chinese world. These differences, as we will see, laid the fundamental differences in the Liberal vs. New

Left debate beginning in the 1990s.

Retrospectively, the New Enlightenment Movement and River Elegy were all building up to the 1989 Beijing Democracy Movement. The modernization in the 80s had a profound impact on how the movement took shape. Students protesters demonstrated pro-Western sentiments which were new to Chinese student protests, including the construction of a “Goddess of

Democracy” statue in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Similar to intellectuals who pursued democracy under the banner of socialism, student demonstrators implemented communist mass mobilization tactics such as singing “” during what they take to be tragic or heroic moments. (Zhao 2000) But perhaps the most important and painful lesson intellectuals learned from the 1980s was that the balance between the utopian visions of Enlightenment among intellectuals and CCP’s discourse of socialist modernization is ultimately a fragile one. Remarking on the transition from a utopian to a crisis consciousness in the national psyche, Wang Jing (1996) wrote:

“Heshang was the last milestone in the intellectual history of the 1980s that marked the cultural elite's illusion that their enlightenment project could not only go hand in hand with, but also steer, the state's project of modernization in the right direction.” (2) In the eyes of the Wang Jing, the 1989

Tiananmen Movement was an inevitable collision between these utopian discourses of NEM and the state—students and intellectuals demanded liberty and democracy, but Deng Xiaoping certainly did not. Discursively, the Chinese New Left and Liberals both originated from thought trends in the

1980s, and many members of the two camps were participants of the Tiananmen Student

Movement. The movement is crucial to the formation of the Liberal camp, and Liberals took the

NEM as a direct predecessor of their political project. On the other hand, many leaders of the

Chinese New Left, including Wang Hui and Gan Yang, were also ardent participants of the

Tiananmen Student Movement. Gan Yang fled the country for almost a decade to study at the

University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. However, within a decade they have changed their intellectual position from advocating the overarching ideal of liberalism to one of its most critical opponents.

Interlude: Deng Xiaoping Revives Reforms

June 4th had the peculiar effect of opening up the “Pandora’s Box” of China’s market reform, and post-1989 China saw a massive shift in its marketization patterns, most notably in its acceleration of marketization. After June 4th, Deng Xiaoping was met with harsh from party conservatives who believed in orthodox Marxist-Maoist doctrines. The conservatives believed that the Tiananmen Protests and ’s sympathy towards the students were signs that the market reforms are leading China away from socialism. (Fewsmith

2001) Faced with the internal threat from party conservatives such as Chen Yun, Deng took up the task of reviving the reform. The crisis resulted in Deng's famous “Southern Tour” in 1992, where

Deng traveled to four southern cities Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou, and to reiterate the implementation of market reforms. These four cities are significant to Deng's reform project because marketization initially grew out of regional economic policies in Guangdong province.2

2 Besides Shanghai, all three other cities are located in Guangdong. However, Shanghai’s economic boom beginning in the early 20th century was enough to consolidate itself as a city with symbolic meaning to marketization. Phrases such as “Development is hard truth” or “I don't care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice” were popularized during the tour. The Southern Tour reasserted Deng’s position of pragmatism and that the economic reforms must go on. Ronald Coase, Nobel laureate of , described Deng’s tour as a heroic act that saved the fate of capitalism in China. (Coase and Wang

2012) The Southern Tour was so impactful that some political commentators such as Ma Licheng

(2015) use the term “market reforms” to refer to Deng’s 1992 Southern Tour instead of the initial cycle of reforms in the late 1970s. Despite the terminological differences, it was clear to Chinese intellectuals regardless of their that this new wave of market reforms fundamentally changed China's reality.

Retrospectively, Deng’s answer to the deteriorating confidence towards his economic reforms was ultimately none other than more reforms. In the 1900s, China’s GDP was growing steadily at an annual GDP rate of 5 percent, surprisingly foreign analysts who had low confidence towards China’s political outlook after the Tiananmen Incident. Foreign Trade had also increased from $38 Billion in 1978 to $300 Billion in 1997. (Fewsmith 2001) The rapid pace of marketization, however, was matched asymmetrically by the silence of intellectuals towards political matters. This meant critical issues such as corruption, social injustice, rule of law, and constitutionalization of property rights were largely ignored during this period besides nominal nods in congress speeches. In addition to the lack of electoral democracy and a pluralistic ,

Deng’s preference of pragmatism over ideology lead to the birth of the performance legitimacy regime. Performance Legitimacy is a term used by political scientists to describe the strategy of accomplishing concrete goals such as economic growth, social stability, strengthening national power to retain its legitimacy. (Zhu Yuchao 2011) The strategy originated in Singapore under the leadership of the Lee Kuan Yew family, but was popularized in China after its high reception both domestically and internationally. From an epistemological level, performance legitimacy epitomizes the attempt by social scientists interested in China to explain the sustainability of the CCP party-state without the appeal to popular sovereignty based on electoral democracy and communist ideology. The mushrooming interest in performance legitimacy is a byproduct of prominent American democratization theorists (e.g. Lipset and Huntington) failing to predict the authoritarian resilience of the CCP. Never mind that performance legitimacy as an analytical category is elusive and hardly quantifiable, yet it is by far the closest attempt to explain the stability of a secular regime without democratic institutions.

II. From Modernization to the Question of Modernity

The following decade after Tiananmen Square was a period of somber reflection for Chinese intellectuals, and this period of contemplation came with the arrival of post-modernism and other

“post-isms” in China such as post- and post-colonialism. In the ensuing eight years of political silence after June 4th, post-modernism became increasingly influential in China from the

1990s. Wu Guanjun (2014) describes the rise of post-modernism among Chinese intellectuals as the

“traumatic” encounter to cope with the reality of June 4th. From a psychological perspective, post- modernism was a comforting sedative to the “mental illness" that is NEM’s dream of modernization, a dream that was brutally crushed by the outcome of the Tiananmen Incident. If is the opium of the masses, to use a famous Marxist analogy, then post-modernism is the opium of post-1989 China. Another reason post-modernism became influential in the Chinese intellectual circle has to do with the intellectual politics of the West. While open political discussions within the PRC halted between 1989 and 1997, Western learning continued partially as a result of intellectuals fleeing out of the country. Many intellectuals continued to study under

Western institutions and became acquainted with the Frankfurt School and the works of Foucault,

Derrida, and Rorty. In the 90s, “critical theories” which attacked the capitalist modernity were becoming popular in Western academia. These theories range from the Neo-Marxist theories of Adorno and Horkheimer, which took capitalism to be the culprit of cultural decay, to the post- modernist theories of , which undermined the overarching belief in Enlightenment through his genealogical analysis of power. Post-colonial studies was also introduced to China during this period, and Chinese intellectuals influenced by the discipline attacked the China-West binary for being a construction under colonialism. (Strafella 2016)

But outside of a few “post-ist” scholars like Zhang Yiwu and Wang Ning, post-modernism was not welcomed by Chinese intellectuals. Post-modernism touched a nerve on NEM intellectuals and their fantasy of modernization. If the NEM lauded the ideals of liberty, democracy, and , then the purpose of post-modernism was to deconstruct these overarching beliefs of the good public life. In a 1994 essay titled “The End of Modernity,” Zhang Yiwu (2000 [1994]) declared that the “myth of the modernity has been deconstructed,” and “stepping out of modernity means the emergence of a new cultural strategy.” According to Zhang Yiwu, this new cultural strategy was the thriving consumerism Deng Xiaoping instigated in his 1992 Southern Tour. Zhang believed that the introduction of “consumer culture” in China accelerated the country’s economic growth. Ci Jiwei (1994) gave a philosophical treatment of Deng’s cultural strategy as the paradigm shifts from utopianism to and finally . If the political vitality of the Cultural

Revolution was marked by the prevalence of utopianism, then its failure swept the nation with a nihilistic tenor. It was under the national psyche of nihilism that Deng’s market reforms cast an aura of “hedonism” onto Chinese society. To a certain extent, all Chinese intellectuals regardless of ideological preferences all recognized that an unstoppable wave of “consumer culture” was inundating Chinese society. (Xu and Ownby 2018) The New Left even coined the term “Confucian

Consumerism” to describe the rampant consumerism in the post-Mao era. Bin Zhao (1997) noted that “the rise of a rampant mass consumerism, one of the most obvious, though unintended, consequences of the attempt at modernization through privatization and the .” The notion that the intensification of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms gave rise to a new cultural strategy was first identified by post-modernists in China. The arrival of consumer culture in

China was seen by post-modernists as a symbol of the end of modernity. (Davies 2007) Chen

Xiaoming (2000), for example, argued that “Daily life in China and Chinese is already postmodernized.” However, the relation between consumerism and China’s modernization touched a nerve on NEM intellectuals who were still defending their own visions of modernization.

The view that China has already entered the stage of post-modernism did not fare well with supporters of the NEM. The post-modernists were met with harsh from NEM intellectuals for being harmful to society, especially from liberal intellectuals such as Xu Youyu and Zhu Xueqin.

In the eyes of NEM intellectuals, post-modernism dealt a great blow to the modernization discourse prevalent in the NEM movement and its “humanistic spirit” as well. But as Wang Jing (1996) remarked on the modernization discourse in the 1980s, the Tiananmen Movement was ultimately the result of the clash between the Enlightenment discourse upheld by intellectuals and the

“socialist modernization” discourse of CCP state ideology. The failure of the student movement effectively shut down liberalism and democratization for almost a decade, but it did not stop Deng

Xiaoping from championing his own vision of socialist modernization. When the New Left talked about “Confucian Consumerism,” they were agreeing with the post-modernists that China has already become modernized. As I have briefly touched upon in the introduction, New Left intellectuals in China were mostly familiar with major works in post-modernism, especially those who went abroad to receive Western training in the 90s like Gan Yang and Cui Zhiyuan. They were more familiar and acceptive to post-modernist writings compared to their Liberal enemies. Prior to

1997, some New Left scholars like Wang Hui and Cui Zhiyuan were sometimes labeled as “post- modernists” because of their frequent quotations of post-modernist writings.

Chinese liberals were defending a specific vision of modernization that ultimately deviated from China’s post-1989 reality. The disagreement with the New Left and the “post-ists” not only lied in their identification that CCP’s dictatorship is the fundamental problem of China, but also a categorical conception of modernization which was inspired, for lack of a better word, by a biblical faith to the European Enlightenment. In Xu Youyu's response to Wang Hui’s Contemporary Chinese

Thought, Xu admitted that the fundamental disagreement between the New Left and Liberals camps is whether China is modernized or not. (Xu 2000) Thanks to the advent of consumer culture and the influx of foreign , China went through vast cultural and socio-economic changes in the 90s.

Yet these changes were not sufficient in the eyes of Chinese Liberals to classify China as a

“modernized” nation, especially due to its lack of genuine democracy and protection of individual rights and liberties. (Feng Chongyi 2009)

It was not until Deng Xiaoping’s death in February 1997 that China relaxed its political control temporarily. The decline in state censorship during this period allowed academics to talk about social issues and criticize government policies with relatively more freedom. This presented an opportunity for intellectuals to call for the awareness of social issues such as corruption, , and most iconic of all, democratization. Besides the relaxation of state censorship, the interests of the Liberals largely aligned with the CCP outside their support of democracy. On important economic matters such as globalization, marketization, safeguarding property rights, and joining the World Trade (WTO), the CCP followed the “liberal” principle of opening up. (Ma Licheng 2015) This has lead to the self-understanding of the liberal camp that most people in China are at least semi-liberal. While liberal tendencies were manifested in the policy orientations and the everyday life attitude of the people, the term liberal camp was only given to a relatively few people who understood liberalism systematically and took the protection of individual liberty to be the most important goal. (Feng Chongyi 2009) In addition, the positive image of Weiquan (rights-protection) lawyers in China gave Liberals a moral high ground in the public eye. The stories of morally good standing up against the government for its violation of individual rights dispenses the liberal image that the power of the government is something the people must be ready to stand up against. In these cases, human rights violations were represented as a consequence of corrupt officials taking advantage of China’s excessive state power.

While liberal intellectuals were defending a version of modernization discourse which overlapped with “Westernization,” the New Left intellectuals were beginning to develop a modernization discourse against Westernization. This intellectual project is perhaps best epitomized by Wang Hui’s popularization of the term “modernity.” Prior to Wang Hui’s Contemporary Chinese

Thought, the term modernity was rarely used among Chinese intellectuals besides post-modernists.

(Ma Licheng 2015; Shi Anshu et al. 2018) While modernization was a popular term in the NEM discourse, modernity was not a concept that is “useful” to Chinese intellectuals. Analytically, the use of the term modernization relied on the purity of the traditional-modern distinction. This was consistent during the times when the China-West and Traditional-Modern binaries were relatively synonymous. However, once Chinese intellectuals replaced the century-old question of “how to become modern?” With the more sophisticated conundrum of “what it is like to be modern?”

Modernity became a much useful concept in Chinese intellectual inquiry. For Wang Hui, modernity was a convenient analytical category to engage in “modernization” without “Westernization” and challenged the linear narrative of modernization in the NEM. Another intriguing aspect about Wang

Hui's adaption of “modernity” from critical theories of the West. As the previous paragraph on post- modernism in China may have briefly hinted, Chinese and Anglophone post-modernists have used the term modernity a few years before Wang’s popularization of the term. But the main difference between Wang and the post-modernists is that Wang was engaged with positive theorizing of a

Chinese modernity. While Wang’s theorization of modernity was still vague at the time of writing

Contemporary Chinese Thought, he later completed an enormous four-volume project attempting to construct a concrete model of Chinese modernity titled The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.

(Wang 2004; Zhang 2010) So when Wang was publishing Contemporary Chinese Thought, he was in a way appropriating the term modernity to his own intellectual project. At a deeper level than language use, Wang was heavily influenced by critics of Western (capitalist) modernity such as

Foucault and the Frankfurt School. This gave him a plethora of intellectual ammunition to attack the liberals who uphold a Chinese version of Enlightenment. Although Wang Hui has publicly lamented many times about the label of “New Left” and its negative connotations in the Chinese context, the label stayed partially due to their quotation of the Euro-American New Left. These quotations are essential to Wang’s assessment of Western modernity, which Wang Hui took to argue for a Chinese modernity in favor of a Western modernity.

The rise of modernity speaks volumes to the intellectual politics between East and West during the time. With the rare exception of renowned philosopher-sociologist Charles Taylor (2004), most Western scholars were not interested in exploring the possibilities of “multiple modernities.”

Furthermore, the 90s American academic circle was riding on a new wave of post-Cold War scholarship theorizing or predicting the world order after the “death” of communism. Two works stood out to Chinese scholars during this period: Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Birth of the Last Men and Samuel Huntington’s (1993) Clash of Civilizations. Fukuyama claimed in The End of History that Western liberal democracy would become the prevailing form of government. Socialism, according to Fukuyama, is no longer viable against capitalism which provided “free and fair competition” of the market economy and a “free and democratic” form of government. New Left intellectuals fiercely attacked Fukuyama’s book, and its defense of socialism against the End of History thesis could be summarized as arguing for more “state capacity.” The definition of state capacity, according to Wang Shaoguang and Hu Angang (2015), is the “ability of the central government to promote reforms and opening up the country and society, and also its capacity to accelerate the pace of industrialization and modernization.” Wang emphasized the role of the central government to promote modernization, and his avowal for “state capacity” (i.e. more market regulations and stronger state interventions) epitomizes the New Left’s perception of neoliberalism as its biggest enemy. Huntington’s 1993 essay on Clash of Civilizations also stirred intense debate in China, but this time angering NEM intellectuals instead of the New Left. Clash of

Civilizations challenged the NEM modernization discourse which encouraged the cultural fusion between China and the West. Conversely, Huntington’s indicated that the clash between

Chinese and Western culture is inevitable. Wu Guanjun (2015) speculates that the strong opposition against Huntington indicates that the Clash of Civilizations projects a “reality" that Chinese intellectuals found unacceptable. The essay became so controversial in China that an anthology consisting of responses to Huntington titled Civilization and International Politics was published in

1995. (Wang Jisi 1995)

Wang Hui’s theorization of alternative modernities was well-received by Western left- leaning intellectuals. For a long time, Western intellectuals on the left have long sought an alternative to liberal capitalism, a developmental model they believed to be plagued by neoliberalism and imperialism. In essence, the intellectual project of the New Left was to provide a

“China Model” rooted in Marxism that refused to “invoke Western ideas and conceptual schemes to interpret the Chinese .” (Zhou Lian 2012) Many scholars of the Chinese New Left have been exporting their ideas actively to the Anglophone academic circle. One of the earliest “New

Left Writing” I could find in Western academic journals was Zhao Bin’s (1997) article on

“Confucian Capitalism,” which dated all the way back to 1997. Whither China, an anthology of articles written by star New Left intellectuals such as Zhang Xudong, Gan Yang, and Cui Zhiyuan, was published in Duke University Press in 2002. (Zhang et al. 2002) Wang Hui also became an iconic intellectual in the West, evening receiving prestigious scholarship awards such as the Luca

Pacioli Prize, which he shared with giant Jurgen Habermas. When China’s robust economic growth caught the eyes of Western lefties, they were excited by China’s rise since the 90s as a potential challenger to American imperialism or hegemony. Marxist economist

Giovanni Arrighi (2007), for example, believed that China followed a non-predatory developmental model similar to Adam Smith’s vision of market economy. Observing the economic patterns of Ming Dynasty China (1368-1644), Arrighi concluded that China’s economy, unlike the Western capitalist model, does not rely on foreign invasion to stimulate economic growth. A more well- known example of left-leaning intellectual writing on China was Martin Jacques’ When China Rule

The World first published in 2009. Jacques’ thesis was far more ambitious than Arrighi’s analysis, arguing that China will take over the United States as the leader of the new world and fundamentally change how work. One of the core in the book is that China is not a national state, but rather a civilization state which is deeply rooted in the Chinese civilization's self-understanding as the cultural center of the world. Jacques also echoed Wang Hui’s intellectual project of multiple modernities, suggesting that we are moving into a world of contested modernity. When China Rules the World became an international best-seller and attracted the attention of economists and businessmen, an oddity for such a left-leaning book catering to anti- imperialist intellectuals. China’s economic boom was a testament to the Western left that “better alternatives” to Western liberal capitalism existed beyond theory. And who else could be a more suitable representative of the “better alternatives” in the eyes of the Western Left other than the

Chinese New Left intellectuals who knew the ins and outs of their theories and political convictions?

III. Democracy and Dictatorship?

Chinese liberals have long accused the New Left of endorsing CCP’s dictatorship or totalitarian rule. Liberal scholar Zhang Boshu (2015), a political dissident who is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University, called New Left intellectuals “scholars who criticize ‘capitalism' but evade dictatorship.” These accusations from liberal intellectuals for defending the authoritarian regime perhaps render the stance on democracy of the Chinese New Left extremely controversial.

While New Left writers endorse democracy frequently, they constantly avoid talking about democracy as an electoral procedural to select government officials. Their way of talking about term was influenced by Marxist trends in the west to identify democracy as the “embeddedness” of equal political conditions into other economic and social spheres. Wang Shaoguang (1991), for example, argued that “while the political form should be democratic, the state capacity should be strong.” Wang highlighted the role the government played in marketization and opposed the rise of neoliberalism in the West, which upholds privatization and the decrease in state capacity. Similarly,

Cui Zhiyuan (1995) was also supportive of both “liberal democracy” and stronger state capacity.

The New Left insists that the essence of democracy is not about its institutional forms such as the rule of law or electoral democracy, but whether if it reflected the interests of the majority.3 The New

Left saw China’s public interest from a semi-Marxist, semi-Confucian cultural perspective, from which it concluded that subsistence, social justice, and other “base” material conditions are the primary interests of the Chinese people.

The New Left’s Neo-Marxist conception of democracy naturally extended to their critique of liberal democracy in the West. One of the most fierce critics of Western liberal democracy in the

New Left is -based political scientist Wang Shaoguang. Wang is highly critical of democracy in the West and doubt that the Western status quo is even genuine democracy. To illustrate this point, let’s compare two comments on “representative democracy” (of the West) by

Liberal Zhu Xueqin and New Left intellectual Wang Shaoguang.

“[Liberalism] demands representative democracy, constitutional government, and the rule of law in politics, as opposed to mass dictatorship by the majority in the name of “general will” or dictatorship by one man or oligarchy.” (Zhu Xueqin, 1998)

“[Wang Shaoguang] argues that Euro-American ‘representative democracy’ is merely a ‘gilded bird cage democracy’, while ‘the representational democracy practiced by China has great latent power, and means that another form of democracy is possible’. The basic superiority of China’s ‘representational democracy’ lies in its effective response to social

3 Dylan Riley described as an example of a totalitarian democracy. Developing a theory of democracy from Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, Riley argues that the totalitarianism-democracy binary is futile because it assumes that democracy as an institutional arrangement automatically represents the “general will” better than a totalitarian regime. See The Civic Foundation of Fascism. (Riley 2015) needs, which allows it to obtain the recognition of the Chinese people as something closer to a genuine democracy.” (Shi 2018)

Here Wang Shaoguang denounces the hegemony of “Western” representative democracy, arguing that the “representational democracy” in China better responds to the need of the people. While

Wang did not offer an explicit definition of “representational democracy,” it stressed (similarly to leftist works on democracy in the West) the cultural dimension of democracy rather than as an institutional arrangement consisting of universal suffrage. More recently in 2013, Wang also criticized the “mythology” surrounding the term civil society. It is worth noting that Gongmin

Shehui, the most common Chinese translation of the term civil society, literally means “public citizen society.” Critics who oppose its use like Wang are skeptical of the “liberal” connotation of the term, especially in its Chinese iteration. Wang argued that the term civil society, which is found in the works of Tocqueville and Gramsci, was originally meant to describe the realm of private life.

According to Wang, it is only until the 90s that civil society acquired the meaning of a third realm independent from both the government and the private sphere. By rejecting the “public” aspect of civil society, Wang evaded the conception of civil society as a concrete coalition of various interest groups and instead directed the definition of the concept towards the abstract notion of a private sphere. Drawing also primarily on Tocqueville, Gan Yang argued that the antithesis of democracy is neither dictatorship nor any form of polity, but instead aristocracy. Gan (1999) wrote:

“Tocqueville’s great contribution to democratic theory was that, unlike the earlier view of democracy as simply one form of the polity, he saw democracy as a process of profound, far reaching change in all fields — from politics, law and through to thought, the emotions, , cultural and intellectual activity.”

Gan Yang was directly referring to Tocqueville’s famous concept of “equality of conditions,” the idea that “every person demands to be treated as an equal individual.” The title of Gan Yang’s article, Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People? is an obvious that Liberalism was his main target. In essence, Gan argued that liberal discourse in China is in service of the intellectual elites and the upper class at the expense of “democracy” (i.e. equality of conditions) and the equality of the masses.

In their theorization of democracy, New Left intellectuals followed the tendency to reject institutional descriptions of sociological concepts such as democracy and civil society. Instead, they opted to explain these concepts in abstract and often cultural terms, such as Wang's interoperation of democracy as the “effective response to social needs.” In Hong Kong-based journal Twenty-First

Century, Cui Zhiyuan (1994) claimed that Deng Xiaoping’s official modernization discourse has created a “fetishization of institutions” among Mainland Chinese Intellectuals. Delivering a negative retrospection of the 80s modernization discourse, he wrote: “The specific arrangements of a certain institution were equated with an abstract ideal, for instance, by taking American corporations to mean the ‘market economy’ or by taking the two-party system to be the equivalent of ‘democracy.’” (Cui Zhiyuan 1994) Here Cui is implicitly attacking the NEM for devouring

Western ideas without a thorough understanding of neither the contexts they occurred nor the issues they addressed. More specifically he was directing his attacks to the liberal’s promotion of

“institutional innovations” in the 1980s. Cui resorted to talking about the value or cultural aspects of “market economy” and “democracy” over descriptions of existing institutional systems for the epistemological reason of “Western fetishism.” Oddly enough for a following of a materialist thinker like Marx, a peculiar spectre of was haunting the New Left. If the Liberals found democracy or market economy in China to be wanting, then Cui’s reply was that the Liberal's understanding of democracy or market economy which informed their ideals was misled by the institutional arrangements of the West. Furthermore, the New Left’s conception of democracy falls into what Charles Tilly (2007) calls substantive definitions of democracy. While democracy often seeks to promote substantive goals such as liberty, human rights, social equality and human welfare, the epistemological fallacy of the New Left was ultimately to equate democracy with purely substantive judgements on its core values. Cui Zhiyuan’s argument naturally generated a significant amount of animosity among liberal intellectuals who were placing their bets on China reforming out of its one-party dictatorship.

Liberals critics often criticize the New Left for having unrealistic views of Chinese society, a negative identification also due to the fact that major “New Left” intellectuals in the mid-90s such as Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Shaoguang were all Chinese scholars based overseas. For example, a person once told Liu Qingfeng (2001) in a private conversation that: “[Cui Zhiyuan] has become someone who looks out at China from the window of the airplane. He’s incapable of having any real sense of China’s problems.” Xu Youyu then denounces “New Left” thinking for its disengagement from reality by confusing the social reality of China with the United States. Wang Hui, on the other hand, accuses the “Liberals” of choosing to remain silent about the relation between China and global capital, calling them “vulgar liberals.” (Wu Guanjun 2014)

The New Left’s appropriation of Neo-Marxist theorizing of democracy from the West caught the eyes of liberal intellectuals who understood the Western intellectual landscape. This is why, as Gloria Davies observed, that “the New Left has become a generic label for anyone who was perceived to be using ‘Western Theoretical Props’ to provide a critique of capitalism.” (Davies

2006) But the New Left’s appropriation of Neo-Marxism and post-modernism has far deeper consequences in the intellectual . As Gloria Davies further pointed out:

From within the purview of Anglophone scholarship, Cui’s critique can be read, quite uncontroversially, as an attempt to disaggregate holistic and capacious accounts of the Chinese market economy in order to affirm specific kinds of locally derived communal and modes of economic production. Within mainland Sinophone scholarship, however, Cui’s writings were regarded by many as lending theoretical legitimacy to Marxism and thereby giving tacit support to Party-state rule. In the 1990s, the New Left was a pejorative term used by Cui’s critics to disparage his work as compliant with Party theory … The difficulty here is that critical engagement with Eurocentrism and the adverse consequences of the capitalist global economy is largely based in Marxian-inflected EuroAmerican scholarship and, within the mainland Sinophone context, this language lends itself to being caricaturized and discredited as a return to Maoist politics. (Davies 2006, 75) Furthermore, the New Left’s argument that Chinese society is democratic does not automatically translate into the democratic status of the Chinese state. And in its current state, the communist regime is far from democratic. Drawing also on Tocqueville, Ci Jiwei (2019) agreed with the New

Left’s insight that Chinese society has already become democratic. However, Ci argued through

Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses that the political institutions have not caught on to the democratic status of society, and he identified this gap between the democratic conditions in

China's public sphere and the authoritarian institutions of the China state as a recipe for a legitimacy crisis. Believing that Deng’s recipe of performance legitimacy is about to expire as the nation's economic growth is set to stagnate, Ci pleads the CCP to take the initiative to embrace democratization.

Ultimately, the debate between the New Left and the Liberals was about the reality of the

Chinese state and the power it wields. The New Left defended a Chinese mode of political- economic arrangement against what the camp labeled as neoliberalism, hence it advocated stronger

“state capacity” in China to resist the (Western) neoliberal trend of privatization and deregulation.

But in the eye of Chinese Liberals who took the CCP’s dictatorship to be the fundamental problem of China, this is equivalent to arguing that a dictatorship or a totalitarian state is not powerful enough. An example to illustrate their differences is their analysis of corruption in China. Both camps recognized that corruption increased sharply in 1992, right after Deng accelerated the market reforms. While Chinese liberals blamed corruption on the lack of property rights and patron-clients relations associated with the , the New Left took the opening-up policies and the influx of foreign investments to be the main cause of corruption. Pei Minxin (2016), a liberal-leaning political scientist and a student of Samuel Huntington, argued that Deng Xiaoping’s

Southern Tour marked the beginning of China’s systematic corruption. Market reforms effectively decentralized the control on property rights without clarifying the ownership of new assets released.

This created an opportunity for political and economic elites to collude to share the spoils of these new assets. The Economist (2014) defined this systematic collusion among elites in which capitalists gained valuable rents from politicians with the name Crony Capitalism.

To conclude this chapter, let’s return to the thesis of the paper and reassess how the two camps perceive China’s reality, especially the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese

Liberals took the nation’s one-party rule as the main issue, thus their vision of modernization was rooted in the political transformation from an authoritarian to a democratic regime. As the last section has shown, their argument that China is not yet a modernized country is based on a fantasy of “modernization.” Similarly, I want to assess how the “China’s reality” the Chinese New Left perceived holds up to this day. Unlike the Liberals, New Left intellectuals did not take the lack of electoral or representative democracy to a detriment. Instead they argued (primarily through

Marxist vocabularies) that Western institutions do not hold up to the democratic values they uphold.

In turn, however, they lent legitimacy to the CCP by acknowledging the overlap between the

EuroAmerican leftist critiques of capitalism and CCP’s nominal nods to their official ideology.

While affirming the role of CCP’s official Marxist ideology, New Left intellectuals are in a way depicting China (and in turn the CCP) as a nation governed by ideology and policy debates rather than a brute power struggle. As Wang Jing (2011) wrote in a (negative) review of Wang Hui’s The

End of Revolution, a book published by Verso to promote his thoughts on China and modernity systematically to the EuroAmerican left:

The rosy image that Wang [Hui] projected onto the CCP, where the vitality of the party politics was preserved by continued vigorous debates on policies and strategies within the party, is illusionary at best. The foundation of the one-party system is the monopoly of power. In order to maintain the monopoly of power, oppositions have to be suppressed, both within the party and without. The leftist ideology during the Mao era was equally hegemonic. Those who were labeled rightists or capitalist-roaders, such as Deng Xiaoping, were purged and sent to the countryside. Therefore, it is not just under the neoliberalism’s hegemony during the market reform era that ‘‘the possibility of exploring the relationship between the party and democracy’’ has been destroyed. It has never been seriously explored by either side. Perhaps the rise and fall of Chinese statesman were telling of Wang Jing's clairvoyance on Wang Hui’s error. Beginning in the late 2000s, the New Left became ardent proponents of Bo Xilai’s Model. As the party secretary of Chongqing province, Bo implemented invested heavily in social welfare (especially housing for the poor) and promoted policies that improved the quality of life through state investment. The model was lauded by the

New Left for offering a “third path” distinct from Western neoliberalism and Maoist central planning. The Chongqing Model worked while it lasted, and Chongqing’s GDP grew at an average of 15.8 percent annually during Bo’s five years in office compared to the national average of 10.5 percent in the same period. The New Left saw Chongqing as a place to put their ideas into practice, and Cui Zhiyuan even worked under the Chongqing government under Bo between 2009 and 2012. While the social and economic performance of Chongqing made him a rising superstar in the party, his downfall was brought about by none other than his power struggle with Xi Jinping. In the February of 2012, the Wang Lijun incident instigated a domino effect which led to the collapse of his political career. The incident later revealed that Bo Xilai’s wife Gu Kailai and his affiliate

Zhang Xiaojun were involved in the murder of English merchant Neil Heywood. The murder led to a thorough state investigation on Bo Xilai and Bo was eventually charged with life imprisonment for bribery and corruption. Bo’s downfall effectively terminated the New Left’s hope of practicing their ideas outside academia. New left intellectuals initially responded to Bo’s trial with outrage.

Wang Hui, for example, defended the allegations against Bo Xilai in The London Review of Books in an article titled The Rumor Machine. (Wang 2012)

All in all, the debate instigated some intriguing discussions on the state of Chinese reality and critical political concepts such as democracy, freedom, and modernity. However, the real-world influence of the debate may have been lower than the two parties had hoped. Besides the collapse of

Bo, the liberal’s attempt to promote democracy in China, Charter 08, also ended in failure. Many of its supporters faced sentences or self-imposed exile. This is not to say the two camps no longer have any influence on the Chinese state or society, but they are now certainly no longer the two

“frontrunners” of Chinese intellectual discourse.

Conclusion: Towards the Rejuvenation of China

From how intellectuals among the two camps addressed each other, it is perhaps not a surprise that the debate eventually became a “spitting war.” What started from a matter of ideological differences became an attack on the intellectual capacity of their discursive enemies.

Both camps accused their opponents of a false perception of China's reality and the question they raised in response to such perceptions. Analogous to how liberals accuse the New Left of defending

“dictatorship,” the New Left have labeled Chinese liberals as “neoliberals.” (Feng Chongyu 2009;

Zhang Xudong 2002) These comments further intensified into attacks on the moral quality of opponents. Zhu Xueqin (1999), for example, stated that “New Left intellectuals use the phrase

‘critical spirit’ to do nothing more than to pick on a soft and easy target [global market].” In return,

Wang Hui (2000) responded: “I am surprised that those intellectuals who always talk about freedom are entirely intolerant of alternative views, that people who call themselves scholars are full of hypocrisy and malice.” Ultimately, the debate became extremely personal as it developed, and according to Wu Guanjun (2014), “involved how mainland intellectuals coped post-1989 reality.”

The New Left vs. Liberal debate largely died down in 2004, after Hu Jintao took total power from Jiang Zemin. The decay of the debate also seemed natural once the debate took a downward turn from intellectual conversations towards slanderous moral degradations. But perhaps the most important reason the debate has fallen into obscurity is that China's reality has changed drastically since the 90s, rendering many questions posed by the debate obsolete. While the social problems of corruption, social inequality, and the longevity of high economic growth rates continue to challenge the stability and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, media attention to these problems ultimately gave way to the rise of Xi Jinping and his Great Rejuvenation of China rhetoric. Upon his inauguration in 2012, Xi Jinping launched a fierce campaign against corruption in China. This move is seen by analysts as a power tactic against political opponents, as authoritarian leaders may use anticorruption campaigns to target the loyalty network of their political opponents. (Zhu and

Zhang 2016) Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, along with an ideological campaign that utilizes propaganda to gain the support of the public, made him arguably the most popular leader since Mao. (Li 2019) Regarding social issues such as poverty, Xi Jinping's ambitious fupin (poverty alleviation) program aimed to alleviate 70 million people out of poverty between 2015 and 2020.

While critics speculate that Xi’s fupin program offered quick fixes to poverty rather than long-term solutions, the rapid pace of poverty alleviation was an astonishing accomplishment in its own right.

These measures gained Xi Jinping the support from New Left intellectuals who once denounced him for his power struggles with Bo Xilai. During a 2015 speech in Xinjiang, Wang Hui (2015) advocated the One Belt One Road Initiative as a program that is “remaking the civilization.”

The rise of Xi Jinping marked a crucial turn in China’s governing philosophy. Before Xi

Jinping, all Chinese leaders followed Deng Xiaoping’s philosophy to “keep a low profile and bide your time.” Deng Xiaoping suggested that China should not take an active role in international affairs, and “by no means should China take lead.” (Diplomat 2016) Xi Jinping, however, is poised to compete against the United States for the position of the leader of the world order. On October

24, 2017, Xi heralded the dawn of “New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (better known as Xi Jinping Thought) in CCP’s 19th National Party Congress. This new ideology is accompanied by ambitious projects to foster international such as the Asian

Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the One Belt One Road Initiative. These initiatives are interpreted by IR scholars as China directly challenging the dominance/hegemony of the United

States. From an analytical perspective, the left-right binary is becoming less and less relevant as an analytical category to explain Chinese politics post-2012. The in China at the moment is increasingly characterized by the presence of statism. In 2019, Zhao Dinxing (2019) wrote an article on Hong Kong-based magazine Twenty-First Century titled The Greatest Potential

Threat in Present China. The article argues that the left-right political spectrum in China, which resembled a bell-curved normal distribution, has become polarized after 2014. Zhao argued that the ideological spectrum in the Xi era has lost most of its moderate voices and became a U-shaped distribution consisting of a large base of both radical left and radical right. Like many articles appearing in the magazine, it sparked intense debate among intellectuals in the Chinese-speaking world. While respondents acknowledge Zhao’s observation of a polarizing political spectrum, they argued that his use of the left-right binary missed the mark on the reality of China today. Liberal left intellectual Chen Chun (2019) wrote a reply to Zhao on the Initium, arguing that the left-right dichotomy is no longer the fundamental political cleavage in China, and is replaced by the rift between “statists” and “anti-statists” in China. Lin Meng (2019) also wrote a reply on The Initium expressing similar views with Chen Chun. The title of the reply, Putting New Wine in an Old

Bottle? perfectly summarized their critique of Zhao and the relevance of the left-right dichotomy in

China today. With the Chinese intellectual sphere all responding to Xi Jinping’s rejuvenation discourse and the new social reality that was brought about by this new philosophy, analyzing

Chinese statists is likely more fruitful than talking about Chinese leftists in this era. Lin Meng also questioned Zhao’s motives for describing the polarization of the left-right spectrum as “the greatest danger in present China.” Lin Meng argues that the “greatest danger” is instead the isolation and atrophy of Chinese civil society, which is a direct result of Chinese state censorship.4

4 I have a personal anecdote which adds an intriguing dimension to this exchange. During a private conservation I had with Professor Zhao, he remarked that he does not like the word “civil society” because of the “liberal” connotations that carry with the term. Perhaps the decline of the left-right dichotomy with respect to the rise of statism is more evident by the writings of the New Left themselves. At the turn of the millennium, there is a rising interest within the New Left on positive theorizing of Chinese statehood. Beside from Wang Hui’s

The Rise of Chinese Thought, the most notable example is Gan Yan’s tongsantong (unifying the three traditions), which is a arguing the merging of three traditions in China:

Confucianism, , and Deng Xiaoping Thought. (2007 [2005]) What is striking about the project is its inclusivity among lifestyles. In another opinion piece on the Initium, Chen Chun

(2016) commented Gan Yan’s tongsantong:

Although Gan Yang’s tongsantong seems like a modern abuse of the concept of Gongyangshe (an ancient Confucian political literature that resembles political philosophy), in reality it is an ambitious project to mine the national psyche: national dignity, ideological madness, and private desires, he wants it all. No matter if you are a cultural nationalist who wants to fulfill the dream of the Great Rejuvenation of China, or a peasant who wants to return to the Mao era, or a Bourgeois who simply only wants to fulfill selfish desires—you have a reason to strive for this system.

Furthermore, the emergence of Xi Jinping Thought and its constitution lead to a mushrooming intellectual industry on theorizing Xi’s speeches and terms into a concrete political philosophy. Jiang Shigong, one of the most vocal supporters of Xi Jinping from the New Left, wrote an article theorizing Xi Jinping’s Report to the 19th national congress through a Hegelian-Marxist framework of history. (2018) In a 2010 book on Hong Kong, Jiang also developed a theory of One

Country Two Systems through the idea of the ancient imperial Chinese tributary system.

Commenting on Jiang and other New Left intellectuals, Hong Kong-based scholar Chris Li (2020) lambasted “the Chinese ‘New Left’ as statist apologists.” More recently, the concept “Full-Process

Democracy” appeared in a speech delivered by Xi Jinping in 2019. The term provoked a decent amount of skepticism, especially from “liberal media” like BBC News. However, theoretical discussions continued among both state propaganda and the intellectual circle. In March 2021,

Zhang Xianming (2021 [2020]) wrote an article titled “The of the Politics of Responsibility in Full-Process Democracy,” a vague attempt to advance Xi’s terminology into a practical theory.

Although “Full-Process Democracy” is probably simply a trivial anecdote in the grand schemes of

Xi Jinping Thought, it is a quintessence of the relations between party language and academic thought work.

If one conceives the state of China’s intellectual camps at the moment along the spectrum between statists and anti-statists, then the “statists” include the New Left Camp, Maoists (the ), New Confucians (e.g. , who theorized a Confucian constitutional order for modern

China), realists, and even right-wing conservatives (e.g. , who promoted and translated the works of Schmitt and Strauss in China, making them popular among Chinese campuses). These statists embraced Xi Jinping’s rejuvenation discourse and seek to supplement it with a positive theory of Chinese state-building. The endorsement of the Chinese state among “statist intellectuals” is reminiscent of the Warring States period, as they likely have been hoping to sell their ideas to the

Chinese state and hence practice their political ideas in real life. And just like the history of the

Warring States Period has taught us, it is perhaps through political turmoil where the state of political inquiry truly becomes unpredictable and intriguing.

Conversely, the anti-statists are now a rag-tag team of the liberal left, radical left, feminists, conservative liberals, and exiled liberals or libertarians.5 The wide range of ideologies involved in the anti-statist “camp" rendered its cooperation much more difficult than its enemy. (Chen Chun

2019) The anti-statist camp, for example, was divided by the MeToo movement when prominent feminist and activist Zhao Sile accused liberal public intellectual Xiong Peiyun of sexual harassment. While feminists, the liberal left, and the radical left all jump in quickly to support

Zhao’s cause, other liberals were much more ambivalent toward the issue. Liberal intellectual Liu

Yu (2018) responded that the type of accusation recurring in the MeToo movement resembles the

5 It should be noted especially that not all feminists or radical leftists are anti-statists. Some of them actually support the state. This highlights that the “anti-statist” camp is truly a rag-tag team consisting of ideologies that have far more volatile links than the statist camp. “big character poster” in the . The article created an immediate divide between feminists and Liberals, the latter questioning the “cancel culture” present in modern-day activism.

What was striking about the MeToo movement is that it also imported the political culture of

American college campuses, a trend right-wing (in the American sense) Chinese liberals found despicable.6 In 2020, Chinese Political dissident Yu Jie, a human rights activist and fierce of

China’s dictatorship, stirred controversy when he commented on Facebook that “he laughed ecstatically over the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg” and “she was the most vicious enemy of the United States” On a related note, Xu Jilin (2020) recently gave a conservative (in the American sense) and disapproving take on the Black Lives Matter movement, which surprised David Ownby, who operates the blog Making the China Dream and translated much of Xu’s work into English. Xu also regularly evoked the term baizuo (white left/liberal) during the , which is a derogatory term circulating on the Chinese internet against Western activists and political elites championing progressivism and wokeism.7 Yu Jie and Xu Jilin perhaps the older generation of Chinese Liberals who accused American liberals of failing to safeguard the ultimate value of individual liberty in favor of “political correctness,” and Yu Jie’s personal animosity towards RBG was perhaps less directed to the individual per se but on the symbolic capital the American liberals placed on her.

The case against political correctness and identity politics are also a testament to the difficulty in the present era to find common ground among the critics of the CCP, thanks in part to the intellectual politics of modern times. In the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections, Chinese Liberals demonstrated overwhelming support for Trump, taking him as the of democracy. Lin Yao

6 It is worth noting that the term liberal in Chinese is extremely vague to begin with, as it does not distinguish what people call liberalism and in the American context. Or to be more analytical, the term liberalism was not used in Chinese intellectual space with Berlin’s famous distinction between positive and negative freedom in mind.

7 Analogous to the connotations of the term “liberal elite” is used in the U.S. In Hong Kong, a similar term “leftard” is used much more often. The term white liberals also reminded me of Slavoj Zizek’s critique of identity politics he gave at various or lectures circulating on the internet. The synopsis of his argument is that: “while the ‘white liberal’ denounces his identity as a white person, in doing so he is reasserting his position of universality. To proclaim yourself powerless gives you immense power.” See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afy1mRcPh90 (2020) coined the term Beacon Complex to describe “the idealization of ‘the West’, and the United

States in particular, as the political and civilizational ‘beacon of light’ for the rest of the world.” As

Teng Biao (2021) wrote in a recent blog post:

After the 90s, neoliberalism/laissez-faire capitalism was taken to be orthodox of Western liberalism among Chinese Liberals. On one hand, this stemmed from their hostility towards the CCP radical left and socialism. On the other hand, neoliberal tenets such as anti-equality, anti-welfare, and anti-trade union fit CCP's transition from the radical left to crony capitalism regarding its ideology and political interests. China’s right-wing metamorphosis of the Pan- democracy camp, in addition to racism and social Darwinism, all lead to its hatred towards progressivism. Their helplessness and hatred towards CCP in the face of political repression were projected onto Donald Trump, a right-wing conservative statesman.

The Chinese Liberal's present-day hatred of the American left is a byproduct of the alliance between the American left and the Chinese New Left in the 2000s. In a recent interview with

Chinese Liberal IR scholar Xiang Lanxin, Xiang (2020) laid the blame for China’s Wolf Warrior

Diplomacy on Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World. The term “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” is a reference to an action movie series in China which depicted Chinese soldiers as heroes combating U.S. mercenary groups. It has come to symbolize China's increasingly aggressive responses to Western criticisms of human rights violations and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Xiang laments that thrilled Chinese readers particularly because it is written by a

Westerner, and he was horrified by the aura of complacency towards the China model Jacques generated. In 2019, Martin Jacques appeared in an interview for Chinese state television channel

CGTN expressing his views against the democratic demands of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests, stating that the student protestors are “brainwashed” by the West.

The rise of Xi Jinping completely overhauled the intellectual landscape of China. It is astonishing to see that regarding many issues such as gender inequality and identity politics, the distinction between the left and right is completely reversed between China and the United States.

But if the recent intellectual developments in these two countries taught me one thing, it would be that China has become a mirror to the West. This is true not only of the New Left, but also of Liberals whose intense support for Trump caught the eyes of Western scholars. Intellectuals politics between China and the West is no longer the one-way learning it once was before 1989, especially during the heyday of the May Fourth Movement and the New Enlightenment Movement. As a student (over)indulged in the role of intellectuals, this is a true testament to how far China has come. in the past thirty years. References

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