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China and New Left Visions China and New Left Visions China and New Left Visions Political and Cultural Interventions Edited by Ban Wang and Jie Lu LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data China and new left visions : political and cultural interventions / edited by Ban Wang and Jie Lu. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7391-6516-4 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-6518-8 (electronic) Socialism in literature. 3. China--Politics and government--2002- 4. China--Politics and government- -1976-2002. I. Wang, Ban, 1957- II. Lu, Jie, 1958- DS779.46.C428 2012 951.06'1--dc23 2012017616 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: China and New Left Critique ix Ban Wang and Jie Lu I: Geopolitics and New Left Perspectives 1 Back to the Future: Contemporary China in the Perspective of Its Past, Circa 1980 3 Arif Dirlik 2 The Geopolitics of the New Left in China 43 Lisa Rofel 3 The Battle for Chinese Discourse and the Rise of the Chinese New Left: Toward a Postcolonial Politics of Knowledge 61 Daniel Vukovich 4 What Is Political Theater?: A Critique of Performance Studies 81 Ban Wang II: New Left Literature in China 5 Internationale as Specter: Na’er, “Subaltern Literature,” and Contemporary China’s “Left Bank” 101 Xueping Zhong 6 Constructing Agency: Challenges and Possibilities in Chinese New Left Literature 121 Jie Lu v vi Contents 7 Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the “Poetry of Migrant Workers” as Ecopoetry 139 Haomin Gong 8 The Rise of the Short-short Genre 159 Aili Mu III: Rethinking Socialism and Market Reform 9 The Road to Revival: A “Red” Classic or a “Black” Revisionist Epic in Praise of a Postsocialist China 183 Xiaomei Chen 10 A New Narrative of Development in Chinese Television Media Representations of Africa 205 Megan M. Ferry 11 Redistribution of the Sensible in Neoliberal China: Real Estate, Cinema, and Aesthetics 225 Hai Ren Index 247 List of Contributors 253 Acknowledgments In preparing this volume we benefited and received support from many peo- ple and organizations. We express our gratitude to Justin Race of Lexington Press for getting us started on this project. We acknowledge the generous support from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Confucius Institute at Stanford University. Arif Dirlik’s paper “Back to the Future” was published in boundary 2 38.1 (spring 2011), and Duke Univer- sity Press kindly gave us permission to reprint his paper. The editing of these papers also benefited greatly from the editorial expertise of Leslie Kriesel. vii Introduction: China and New Left Critique Ban Wang and Jie Lu China’s economic reforms toward globalization have wrought fundamental economic and social transformations over the last three decades. For all its remarkable achievements, this rapid development has also given rise to so- cial contradictions, economic injustice, and social polarization. If the eco- nomic reforms of the 1980s allowed wealth to be transferred from the state to society and the peasants, the 1990s, with deepening marketization and privat- ization, can be characterized by an increasing accumulation of wealth in private hands.1 In the absence of a dominant middle class, China has been evolving toward a polarized society of extreme wealth and poverty. The Chinese state wields mighty economic power and promotes a developmental agenda and economic policy resulting in the exploitation of millions of in- dustrial workers and rural laborers. Unemployment, poverty, and human suf- fering are becoming part of the daily routine. These disturbing phenomena capture the paradox of contemporary China’s economic progress and repre- sent historical incongruity and ambiguity in the transformation of Chinese society. Against these dire socioeconomic consequences of China’s fast- paced development, a new intellectual force under the banner of “New Left” has come on the scene since the mid 1990s. Contemporary China’s New Left emerged from the intellectual debate that took place from the mid to late 1990s over the issue of balanced and sustainable development. Against the neoliberal advocates of a free market, Western liberal democracy, and political reform, New Left critics stepped forward and launched a critique of the current capitalist development in hopes of seeking an alternative to global capitalism. The name “New Left” was first used in an article in Beijing Youth on July 21, 1994, by Yang Ping, ix x Introduction: China and New Left Critique responding to Cui Zhiyuan’s article, “New Evolution Theory, Analytical Marxism, Critical Legal Studies, and Chinese Reality.” Yang contends that New Left intellectuals’ criticism of the unequal distribution of wealth in China is also a critique of the unjust and uneven global capitalist order. Although the term was controversial among the people it was being used to describe at the time,2 it has been used since to refer to intellectuals who embrace different leftist theories, ideals, and traditions ranging from Marx- ism to socialism, the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other schools of thought critical of liberalism. In spite of their different theoretical frameworks and approaches, New Leftists share an intellectual consensus based on their fundamental concerns with social inequality, jus- tice, and China’s neoliberal model of developmentalism. They take a critical stance against global capitalism and search for a Chinese model of develop- ment. The publication of “Reading Notes: On Liberalism” by Wang Binbin in Frontier probably marked the beginning of this turn-of-the-century debate, and Wang Hui’s “Condition of Contemporary Chinese Thinking and the Issue of Modernity” represents the first landmark argument for New Left thinking.3 Since the 1990s, the continuing economic reform and transition to privat- ization and the market have made the Chinese state and society more com- plex. The coexistence of socialist practices and capitalist institutions calls for more nuanced approaches and solutions to political and economic problems beyond any clear-cut left or right, socialist or capitalist paradigm. This ambi- guity of Chinese society had splintered the Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s who had been unified under the banner of Enlightenment. The split is charac- terized by different diagnoses of China’s problems as well as different vi- sions for China’s future.4 This fin-de-siècle intellectual divide both reflected a historical reality and echoed the question of “whither China” that appeared at a moment of profound historical transformation. The New Left–neoliberal debate includes a wide range of macro and micro political, economic, and social issues. These generally fall under four major themes: social justice, capital and power, democracy, and modernity.5 The New Left’s stands on these issues are based on its interpretation of the nature of Chinese society. According to Wang Hui, the decades of economic reform have already formed a “market society” or “capitalized society”; the political, socioeconomic, and sociocultural processes are very much under the sway of market mechanisms. Moreover, economic reform has also inte- grated China into the world system, rendering China’s problems an insepara- ble part of global capitalism.6 The overall New Leftist critique of contempo- rary Chinese reality thus focuses on global capitalism and its dire conse- quences. The neoliberals, however, are interested in reforming the current political system, as they contend with an imagined state socialism and a Introduction: China and New Left Critique xi discredited political ideology persisting in post-reform China. This funda- mental point of departure between the two camps determines their views of and approaches to China’s problems. The issue of social justice constitutes the core of New Leftist thinking. The New Left sees worsening social inequality and injustice as resulting from capitalist practices and the unregulated market. Its critique targets the illusory efficiency and promise of the neoliberal model of development as ruinous to social justice and democracy. The New Leftist economic thinkers seek to eliminate social inequality by maintaining public ownership of the means of production and by advocating a greater role for the state in reining in the market and redistributing wealth. In contrast, the neoliberals, harping on the authoritarian state system, complain that far from offering private freedom in a Western-style market economy, China’s market economy is still constrained by interventionist state power. The neoliberals thus recommend establishing a fully privatized market and related property system and reduc- ing the political power of the state. While both sides regard economic devel- opment as key to achieving social justice, the New Left attaches more impor- tance to justice and equality by critiquing the market-oriented freedom of rights. It calls for more equitable social distribution of wealth while neoliber- als stress growth, privatization, and legal procedure. Both New Leftists and neoliberals have noticed a new collaboration between power and capital produced by marketization, but they have different interpretations. In the New Leftist view, political power has been capitalized by global capitalism (ziben quanli); in the neoliberal perspective, it is political power that controls capital (quanli ziben).
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