MA Thesis Yu-Hsuan

The University of Chicago The New Left vs. Liberal Debate in China: How Ideology Shapes the Perception of Reality 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, Deng Xiaoping 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 socialism still has a future, blamed the influx of foreign investments and global capitalism as the primary cause. The Liberals, on the other hand, identify the dictatorship of the Leninist party-state 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 Wang Hui, who is considered to be the leading intellectual of the New Left camp, published the article Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity. Drawing intellectual sources from the Frankfurt school and the Anglo- American New Left, Wang Hui 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 set 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, Xu Youyu, and Zhu Xueqin, liberalism embodies the legacy of the 1919 May Fourth Movement and its core values: democracy, science, and freedom. For example, Li Shenzhi (1998) argues that liberalism represents the best and most universal value, identifying it as the defining feature of modern society. 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 critique 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 Communist Party (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 difference between condemning American imperialism in Beijing 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 social reality 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 justice 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 Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory and Francis Fukuyama’s End of History Thesis. The Frankfurt school originated from a group of scholars in Germany critiquing the negative social impacts of capitalism based on a humanist reading of Marxism. 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 language 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 culture affects national strength. The primary debate of the period was whether adopting Western culture 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 discourse 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.

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