Introduction: Put Politics in Command Christopher Connery

Introduction: Put Politics in Command

Christopher Connery

In a converted warehouse in the Putuo District of Shanghai, Liu Debao, former Red Guard and active in the “Sent Down Youth” alumni organizations in Shanghai,1 maintains a warehouse of pre-1978 memorabilia, mostly from the fifties and sixties, comprising everyday-life objects, com- plete issues of newspapers and unofficial publications, and, most impor- tantly, over three thousand reels of film, largely uncatalogued. A photog- rapher by profession and an insatiable collector by nature, he had noticed

1. This refers to movements that sent millions of young people who volunteered or were, more often, assigned by the authorities to terms in the countryside during the sixties and into the seventies, some to nearby communes and some to the edges of the country, in Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, and Yunnan. The groups coalesce around a variety of affective relationships to this time of their youth: some organize around social assistance to their former villages; some petition, protest, and pursue legal remedies for the services and benefits denied to them by the Shanghai municipal government; some gather in parks and other public places to talk, sing, and dance. For a history of the movement, see Bonnin 2013. A recent nine-hour documentary by Gao Zipeng and Wu Meng, Shanghai- ren (Shanghainese [2014]), documents the protest movement of Shanghainese returnees from Xinjiang over the course of the last few years.

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that as the economic reforms were gathering strength, the culture depart- ments of various municipalities and counties were throwing out archived film footage of documentaries, instructional films, feature films, and news- reels from the pre-1976 era and began to collect them, traveling great distances to buy reels of film, even when he did not know their contents. His collection is probably the largest of its kind. Beginning around fifteen years ago, the warehouse became a sort of museum, and he would occasion- ally screen reels from the collection to a curious assortment of people: neighbors, film history buffs from the young Shanghainese culturati, leftists of various ages and stripes, former Sent Down Youth, and occasion- ally foreign students or academics. He usually began the screenings, using one of the several film projectors he had salvaged from the era, with silent reels of Red Guard processions in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Begin- ning with the first Red Guard rally on August 18, 1966, Mao “received” over 12,000,000 Red Guards on eight occasions as they marched through the square, dressed largely in khaki uniforms, with red flags and red books raised high. The reels consisted largely of long takes of the marching masses with occasional close-ups, and in the dim space of the warehouse, crowded with bric-a-brac dense with nostalgia for a different age, the sea of khaki and red on the screen produced a mesmerizing reverie, accentuated by the lack of soundtrack. That was appropriate, because Mao himself was largely silent on these occasions, standing on the dais at the gate of the old imperial city and waving slowly to the sea of enthusiasm that emanated from below. There were no speeches, for it was the body of Mao that mat- tered. On one occasion, as reported in the November 18, 1966, edition of the Peking Review, he turned to other leaders assembled on the dais and uttered his famous line, to be reproduced in big-character posters and ban- ners throughout the country over the next few years, “You should put politics in command, go to the masses and be one of them, and carry out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution even better” (nimen yao gao zheng- zhi guashuai, dao qunzhongzhong qu, ba wuchanjiejiwenhuadageming jin- xing dao di). Put politics in command! It of course has a strange ring today. At one screening, a young art student in the room considerably less mes- merized than some others voiced what I knew was a not uncommon senti- ment among her coevals, and said to Liu Debao, “I’m curious. When I look at those films what I see is a mass of brainwashed lunatics. It’s completely alien to me and I can’t understand it.” Liu Debao answered her, “Thanks for asking that, and I know that many young people think like you do. But you should understand that at that time we were young students—junior high

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school or senior high school—and we were struggling against power in our schools and in our cities, and it was a difficult struggle. So to be in Tianan- men Square with a million comrades, and to know that Chairman Mao himself was with us, gave us a lot of strength for the work that we were doing.” In a politicized era, tropes such as “manipulation”—the consensus view of the Cultural Revolution today is that the young activists were mobi- lized and controlled by forces at the center—cannot capture the dynamic all-pervasiveness of the political. And political time has a spatial dimension as well. Squares, homes, schools, workplaces, and formerly intersti- tial spaces are repurposed for struggle, discussion, communication, and excess. The sparks of mobilization find ready fuel in institutional and social combustibility; latent fissures become glaringly real. Mobilization was a central component of political life in China in the revolutionary period, and while it was in many cases the modality of state authority, the dynamics of mobilization commonly exceeded its explicit linguistic or programmatic content, providing points of reference and a discursive field within which movement struggles were articulated in a variety of ways. Yiching Wu’s recent book, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis, shows how mobilizational programs articulated at the center—struggle against the bourgeoisie, antibureaucracy, antirevisionism—not only served the state mobilizational function but engendered a host of unintended and sometimes unwelcome consequences among the diverse revolutionary movements. Elizabeth Perry and collaborators have documented the various ways in which the dynamic of mobilization traversed the pre- and post- reform periods, retaining, to some extent, formal efficacy even in recent times when it would seem to most that it is the economic and not the political that is most firmly in command (Heilman and Perry 2011). In her discussion of mobilization in the reform period, Perry’s work refers primarily to mobilizational efficacy in the differential implementation of central state development-oriented programs in various localities rather than to scenes of political struggle as such. But the point was that reform-era economic reorganization frequently needed the quickening of “Mao’s invisible hand.” For much of PRC history, mobilizational goals had a dual character, expressed in the ubiquitous two-part slogan “Carry out the revolution and grasp production.” During the reform period, and intensifying after the early 1900s and beyond, the constriction of this energy into the field of the economic represented a developmentalist hegemony that consolidated the dual character of earlier mobilization discourse into the sphere of production alone, even though this could take the quasi-political discursive form of

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“national development.” The discrepant and contradictory elements of the earlier doubled character had come to the fore in the decade between 1958 and 1968, the period from the Great Leap Forward through the early years of the Cultural Revolution—a period of both economic and political crisis. This consolidation—from production/revolution into production alone—was facilitated at the onset of the reform period by the party-state’s repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, whose excesses and degeneration made it easy for the state to enlist popular support for this turn away from the political as it had been actualized in the earlier period. (See Yiching Wu’s essay in this issue.) Wang Hui identifies the discursive field in which mobilizational language operates today as “depoliticized politics,” a condition typifying parlia- mentary democracies as well as nominally socialist China:

Contemporary China’s depoliticization process is yet another kind of “political exchange” process: the old political elites’ efforts to transform themselves into representatives of special-interest groups while still holding on to political power. Thus, special interest groups and transnational capital must pass through a “depoliticizing” exchange process in order to get the support of the power apparatus. Because marketization reform is a process promoted by the state, multiple aspects of the state power apparatus are, in the name of modernization and reform, collapsed into the economic sphere. (In a state-party system, this must include the political party apparatus as well.) Thus the “political exchange” becomes a “depoliticized power exchange.” Its primary form has been the “reform of property rights,” which has led to large-scale interest-motivated reorganization. (Wang 2006: 694)

A context for much of the work presented in this issue is the ambigu- ous and contradictory state of the political in China today, for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is simultaneously a party of depoliticization, as in Wang Hui’s sense above, and the operator of the master discourse of the political, thus placing Chinese citizens’ engagement with the political squarely within the terrain of its prior negation or deferral. Its depoliticized character allows the party to function as the neutralization of the discursive and social energies that it historically, structurally, and ideologically exists to enable. Where this negative interpellation is the strongest—in the educational system, for example—the neutralization effects are the greatest, so it is no surprise that university students in China today are, in my experi- ence and in the analyses of most observers, far more depoliticized than

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even their counterparts in Europe and the Americas. This is a consequence both of the state’s efforts to forestall the emergence of independent political activism, as well as, on the students’ part, a general weariness with the slogans, the admonitions, and the deliberately thought-deadening content of compulsory political education classes. On the surface, China’s “million mutinies” might suggest a very different scene. Workers with workplace grievances, peasant villagers angry at dispossession, and citizens who have felt victimized either by urban redevelopment and its dislocations or by the environmental consequences of industrial development in their vicinity, all of whom comprise those who participate in the thousands of incidents of unrest that occur every year, exhibit considerably more restiveness. But as many have pointed out, these incidents to date have largely remained iso- lated and unarticulated, and thus have little impact on the broader scene of the political, even though, as Kathy LeMons Walker has demonstrated in the case of peasant uprisings, they can frequently involve direct attacks on officials, occupations of state facilities, and other features we could asso- ciate with classic peasant uprisings elsewhere in the world (Walker 2006, 2008). As Ching Kwan Lee and many others have pointed out, participants in these struggles often use the language of central party–state socialism in their struggles with local officialdom and commonly evince the faith that it is the corruption of the party-state’s line by local officialdom, rather than the line itself, that causes their problems (Lee 2007). In a recent study of what he terms “contentious authoritarianism,” Chen Xi suggests that the more contentious forms of collective protests are in certain respects facilitated by the state (although he cautions, as Lee and many other scholars also have, against viewing the state in monolithic terms) as a means of articu- lating governance and grievance in a historical period—post-1990—when

the linkages between ordinary people and the Party-state have shifted from the unit system model to the government citizen model; and second, divisions and functional differentiations between state agencies have substantially increased. . . . [T]hese two changes have pushed the state to develop a new strategic repertoire, which combines preventive repression, practical persuasion, and procras- tination. (Chen 2012: 24)2

Chen’s study is largely descriptive, and ideological/political orientation is not a primary concern, but it suggests a party-state increasingly able to

2. The “unit system” refers to the work unit, an organization of labor wherein all citizens were part of “work-units,” which combined productive, social, and political functions.

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confine the political within the sphere of the administrative, which is a common mode of depoliticization, and to articulate within its communicative rationality actions which would on the surface appear to be the most dis- ruptive challenges to its authority. Given the state’s multiple forms of containment of the scene of the political, do its socialist traditions open alternate forms of articulation? Later in the essay quoted above, Wang Hui suggests that the CCP’s invo- cation of its socialist values, despite the overall historical logic of depoliticization, remains a resource for repoliticization: “Every time the state-party system made a major policy decision or policy shift, it had to be done in dialogue with this tradition. At minimum, it had to couch the announcement in a particular language designed to harmonize the policy transformation and the tradition. Secondly, the socialist tradition gave workers, peasants and other social collectivities a legitimate means to contest or negotiate over the state’s unreasonableness or unfair marketization of privatization procedures” (Wang 2006: 699). This is the context in which we must con- sider the fact that in China today, most critical intellectuals on the left today who remain concerned with economic inequality, environmental degrada- tion, the deterioration of social values, ethnic tensions, and the quality of public participation in political life continue to place some degree of hope in the CCP’s leadership, holding that the party-state retains the capacity and the potential ideological will to make policy conform to the party’s stated core values. In recent years, however, successive political leaders’ central slogans—from Jiang Zemin’s notion of the “three represents” that explic- itly welcomed capitalists into the party, through the “harmonious society” and “scientific development” of the Hu-Wen regime, culminating in the “Chinese Dream” today, about which more below—seem fairly well inocu- lated from the politicizing repurposing possible in either general appeals to socialist values or during earlier political campaigns. Although few critical intellectuals take these slogans seriously, the current situation—a gen- eralized depoliticization, with little intellectual innovation on offer from the party itself—thus presents some predicaments for critical intellectual practice. To the extent that the party-state is perceived as a sphere of potential political possibility, despite the intellectual weakness of party ideologues, it is rare for left critique to rise to the level of ruthlessness and systema- ticity, of structural critique, that is common to the anticapitalist politics of the Left elsewhere in the world. But the Chinese state’s relentless self- presentation of its unique political-economic character, of its existence as a kind of alternative or countermodernity, its refusal to accept neoliberal

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norms of universality even as it articulates ever more seamlessly into global capital accumulation and its logistical and productive infrastructures, allows it to function, on the level of spectacle at least, as an outside to late capital’s empire. So the question becomes one of critical space and its relation to the party and to the history of the revolution. Given the global dominance of capital logic, it is not obvious that a wholesale abandonment of the field of the political as it has been constituted within the framework of the history of the Chinese Revolution would give critique a significant form of political efficacy. But the party‑state’s contradictory relationship to that revolution—its capacity to subsume market reform under the general rubric of national development—shapes the nature and space of critique in particular ways. One could generally divide the current intellectual scene in China into three broad orientations: 1. So-called liberals or neoliberals, whose voices are far louder than many in the West might realize, and whose appeals are variously to notions of universal human rights, multiparty democracy, individual property rights, and a rational market-based economy free from crony capitalist state inter- ference and cleansed of corruption. Their numbers include those we would commonly describe as “dissidents” as well as mainstream economists, Christians, and individual rights–based civil libertarians. Unlike many neoliberals in the West, they are often concerned with the plight of the poor and the peasantry and are more likely than their Western counterparts to embrace an “equal-opportunity” perspective in addressing social inequity. 2. Socialists or social-democrats working for ideological hegemony within the context of the CCP, in addition to developing their broader theo- retical and social concerns. These intellectuals, often identified as the New Left, identify with China’s revolutionary history, especially during the years 1949–66, and find in this history important resources that can be reacti- vated and remobilized in attacking current social problems. 3. Nationalists, who believe that the most significant problems China faces comes from Western efforts to contain China’s economic rise and civilizational renewal. This containment is perceived as comprising military, economic, cultural, and ideological components. Nationalists, who would not uncommonly be identified in the popular imagination with “the Left,” stress China’s unique political and economic system, born both of its revolutionary legacy and of its longer history, and diagnose China’s primary problems over the last 150 years as having originated largely from foreign imperialism.

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These are not neat and self-contained units. Neo-Straussians, not insignificant in number, can be found among the neoliberals and the nationalists. The New Left includes communists and “petty-bourgeois” social democrats. “Maoists” are often the most deeply critical of capitalist reforms but remain deeply loyal to the CCP. Nationalists include strong critics of capitalism, proponents of the current economic order as long as it is identified as a distinctively Chinese one, as well as those indifferent to economic structure. The last fifteen years have also witnessed great transformations in the social and institutional character of the “intellectual” sphere, whose numbers include not only academics but journalists, enterprise executives, and those who publish on social media, one effect of which has been the insertion of the logic of media or social media market economic forces into the intellectual field. Many intellectuals across the spectrum share an orientation Gloria Davies has identified in her book Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry:

[T]o worry about China is to assume that intellectual praxis itself has the power to guide and transform society by finding solutions for the worries that an author has identified. This in turn requires that one already knows or is in the process of gaining mastery over the kind of knowledge that one has determined to be socially useful and morally correct in improving the national status quo (whether of scholarship in particular or culture and society in general). In con- ceiving of their writings as contributions toward the improvement of the nation’s Thought, intellectuals are also constrained to portray their own work in the diagnostic and prescriptive terms of finding and defending those correct ideas that they imagine will solve existing problems. (Davies 2009: 18)

Davies’s book is an important analysis of the ways in which the party-state— or some abstracted version of “China”—functions as the ultimate field of reference for critical intellectual work, serving as its primary addressee and thus creating a nationally mediated relationship to “universals.” But by largely ignoring the field of social and political struggle, critical thought in Davies’s book appears to exist in a vacuum. Many critical intellectuals in China today are vitally concerned with the potential for practice, and this is not merely at the level of “imagining” the practical political impact of “correct ideas.” One would not learn, for example, that Wang Hui, discussed at length in Davies’s book, has been centrally involved in concrete labor and

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environmental struggles, or that Qin Hui, on the liberal side of the spectrum, has been an active participant in debates about rural policy. The claim for the efficacy of thought that Davies usefully identifies, however, can also coexist uneasily and uncomfortably with actual social, political, and economic developments, which, identified as such or not, will lag behind the often more fulsome elaborations in the ideological sphere. I see an illus- tration of this uneasy coexistence in the work of the “Chongqing leftists” I discuss in my longer essay in this issue, where I hold that their political ideological claims exceed the rather modest policy achievements there and that, because they see in the political program an immanent political and ideological coherence, they are unable to find in the gaps between rheto- ric and social reality a basis for a more thorough and systemic critique of the contemporary scene, in Chongqing or in China at large. This peculiar temporality of political efficacy is another register of the uneasy relations between critical thought, the party state, and the political. For many left critical intellectuals, it is the party-state- to-come that will bring forth the political possibilities sometimes evident but for the most part latent within the history of the CCP. This sense of potentiality works in complex ways, however, and can pose constraints on critical work. President Xi Jinping made the Chinese Dream his signature slogan shortly after assuming office in late 2012, and it has been steadily gathering force as a quasi-ideological dominant. Billboards that fill every city in China featuring comforting and not in the least martial or nationalist folk art motifs—the drawings of artist Feng Zikai, motifs from folk paper-cut or New Year’s cards—link the dream with a host of common virtues: care, soli- darity, human-heartedness. The billboards’ prerevolutionary iconography underscores the linkage of the Chinese Dream to a discourse of a national cultural renewal whose historical scope is civilizational. Although it is the topic of seminars and study in the party schools, and although reference to it is ever present, the Chinese Dream clearly is intended more as a structure of feeling than as a distinct mobilizational program. Critical intellectuals generally stay clear of the term, not surprising given its warm vagueness and homiletic cultural essentialism, and some doubtless share the reserva- tions that Lu Xun expressed about dreams when he wrote that “[i]f we can find no way out, what we need are dreams, but not dreams of the future, just dreams of the present” (Lu 1985: 2: 87).3

3. From the essay “Noula zouhou zenmeyang?” [“What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?”], referring to Ibsen’s Nora.

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Probably the strongest case on the “left” made for the political potential of the Chinese Dream is that of Zhang Xudong, professor at New York University and also a faculty member and/or administrator at several Chinese universities. Zhang has been an enthusiastic proponent, on tele- vision and in his Chinese-language writing, especially his essay “The Chi- nese Dream: The Time to Discuss Our Dreams and Aspirations Has Finally Arrived” (Zhang 2013).4 Zhang wants to claim the Chinese Dream discourse for Third Worldism, for an unspecified alternative to Western capitalism, and for the oppressed in China and elsewhere. He acknowledges that the Chinese Dream could prove to be an empty and formulaic discourse, as many in the past have been, but in this essay, he wants to claim it as a space for a kind of Habermasian utopia of communicative possibility:

The Chinese Dream forms a new form of superstructure with a universal significance on the basis of a new mode of production, and it includes institutional culture, values, ideals, and more. It is an axio- logical and cultural prospect, a kind of imagination, and a discursive formulation. The most interesting aspect of the Chinese Dream is that it arises within the context of global debate about paths of social development, better social systems, values and meaning. We could say that its soul lies in debate and analysis, and that this consists of the sublimation of the prosperity and other positive factors charac- terizing today’s China onto a higher and universal discursive level, distilling it into a way and principle of life. (Zhang 2013)

I have no doubt that Zhang is sincere in his hopes for a discursive situation wherein visions and hopes for a different way of life can be the content of democratic discussion, even though limits on that discussion appeared early in 2013 with the controversial censorship of an editorial in the neoliberal-leaning Guangdong-based Southern Weekly entitled “China’s Dream: The Dream of Constitutionalism.”5 In a recent interview, though, Zhang’s remarks apropos of the Chinese Dream illustrate the dangers of an intellectual political programmatic that stays close to power. Near the end of a 2014 interview commemorating the 110th anniversary of Deng Xiao- ping’s birth, a discussion focused mostly on Zhang’s application of Carl Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign to Deng’s rule, the interviewer asked, in

4. The translation of this passage, and of other passages quoted from Chinese-language sources, is my own. 5. For a discussion of the issue of constitutionalism and its political valences, including a review of the most important Chinese-language writing on the topic, see Fewsmith 2013.

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an almost embarrassed tone, about China’s current social problems, spe- cifically inequality, the division between rich and poor, and the lack of social consensus. Zhang replied that excessive focus on Deng Xiaoping’s claim that allowing a few to get rich first would lead to general prosperity later, or Reagan and Thatcher’s claim that neoliberal policies would also, through trickle-down or personal empowerment, benefit society at large, was “a false problem”:

Speaking objectively, the clearly growing intensity of the gap between rich and poor is a worldwide problem, and as China follows the path of a market economy, this has become more serious. The Gini coefficient, measured according to income or to wealth, is huge. I feel that these problems come from the inexperience and the lags in administrative competence that characterized the early reform period. National construction will always lag behind the economic sphere in vitality. If national policies and management could keep up, it would be possible through legislation and taxation to control the inequalities that arise from within the sectors of production and exchange and allow the benefits of economic growth to be shared by the majority and by the whole society. (Zhang 2014)

The tacit assumption is that pressing social problems have already been solved in the virtual realm of ideology and that this ideological “solution” is in no way a mystification, as in Reagan and Thatcher’s world or in the heavenly state Karl Marx described in On the Jewish Question. Rather, the problem is one of an administrative lag, which the state can remedy by the simple matter of settling on correct policy mechanisms and implement- ing them. A similar dynamic is observable in the reception of the Chinese translation of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014).6 In general, Chinese left critics remarked less on the stark fact of inequality in China today, barely mentioned the state’s role in having exac- erbated that inequality, and focused more on enlisting Piketty’s work to support an expanded role for the state enterprises. The preface that Piketty wrote for the Chinese edition of the book avers that the Chinese state, due to the relatively large proportion—between one-third and one-half—of public as opposed to private capital, does indeed have the ability to guar- antee a more equitable distribution of the wealth and economic power gen-

6. The edition includes the translation of the French original and the Chinese translation of Piketty’s specially written preface to the Chinese translation (Piketty 2014: v–xxiv).

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erated by capital growth and thus fashion a genuinely distinctive Chinese path for development. But he adds several important caveats. The greatest growth in inequality occurred between 2000 and 2010, when the state had considerable redistributive capacity that it did not exercise beyond a limited extent, particularly with regard to extension of opportunity and wel- fare protection to the lower income levels. Piketty warns against compla- cency about how much can be achieved through the anticorruption campaign and states emphatically that the only way to achieve a satisfactory measure of equality is through taxation on wealth, financial and real estate income, and inheritances—the same prescription he has for the rest of the world—prerequisites of which would be the willingness of elites to divest themselves of their variously gotten gains, as well as a level of financial and budgetary transparency that in China Piketty judges to be so far a very remote possibility. Piketty further holds that the size of China’s role in the world economy could also allow it to leverage an internationalization of the tax measures he advocates, with penalties for noncompliance. He is skep- tical of neoliberal assertions that political democracy is a precondition for the reforms he advocates, holding that political democracy is meaningful only if accompanied by economic democracy. Given the scope of the party- state’s capacity, though, one would hope for a more thorough analysis of the political factors that led to the massive inequalities that obtained in the last decade and of the political factors that would need to obtain for such a massive change of course. And yet, the central role that China could and would need to play in the social and economic transformation that Piketty envisions as necessary for the world, even given the relatively nar- row political and social scope of Piketty’s vision (see Marrazzi 2014; Kunkel 2014; Jacoby 2014), nevertheless does suggest that critical left intellectuals’ engagement with the party state is not without important stakes. The Xi Jinping regime is commonly described as possessing the most concentrated form of political authority since Deng Xiaoping, and the various forms that this authority takes certainly register more with the popu- lace than do the vague evocations of the Chinese Dream. Most salient has been the anticorruption campaign, which has to date been fairly thorough,7 widely publicized, and has broad public support. Corruption was judged to be a major threat to CCP legitimacy, and if the party is even moderately

7. Although Geremie Barmé (2014) points out that the high officials targeted for corruption inquiries are disproportionately those of “commoners” rather than children of officials or prominent revolutions and that members of the latter groups commonly impugn the “quality” of those who arose from poor origins.

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successful in this campaign, it is likely to also succeed in strengthening its legitimacy. The party has expressed a determination to clean up the environment and to ensure food safety and security as well, although the prospects here are less certain, especially given the state’s dependence on coal. Although the increased repressiveness in Tibet and in Xinjiang promises only to exacerbate problems there, the nationalist orientation common across the political spectrum among Han Chinese within China’s borders, excluding Hong Kong, of course—although some diverge from this—strengthens the conviction that these problems derive primarily from outside influence and thus do not reflect either mistaken policy or structural defects. This ascription of the role of outside influence was starkly evident in analyses of the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. Transferring political conflict onto the terrain of geopolitics is a depoliticizing response, but it can also serve to simplify discussion and inoculate the state against critique. The party-state’s adroit and complex manipulation of popular nationalist currents has been an important dimension of political containment (Zhao 2004). As mentioned above, intellectual production now takes place in a variety of venues, and fairly new to China is an ever more commercial- ized media sector. The situation for university faculty—and most intellectuals are employed in universities—is more restrictive. Chinese academics are squeezed financially; their salaries are among the lowest in the world, well below those of academics in Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Mexico, for example (Altbach et al. 2012).8 Adding to their financial burdens is the fact that most Chinese academics, especially at the junior level, often have to pay up to several thousand US dollars per article to publish their research, and these are publications on which their promotions depend. Many pro- fessors have to take more than one job in order to maintain a white-collar standard of living. Over the last few years, many thousands of academics have been required to attend courses on party doctrine and policy, which have also included, according to my informants, the kinds of motivational lectures and team-building exercises that are common at US corporate retreats, in addition to presentations on the Chinese Dream and the mass line. All these effects are most pronounced for younger faculty, and this is a worrisome prospect for future generations of critical work. The cultural scene in China has a degree of autonomy from the state

8. A summary of the findings can be found at https://www.insidehighered.com/news /2012/03/22/new-study-analyzes-how-faculty-pay-compares-worldwide. Accessed Sep- tember 15, 2014.

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that is greater than many outside observers recognize, but market forces, to which cultural production is subject, have proved to be as effective a con- straint on critical work as is the case elsewhere in the world, and the relative absence of even those minor funding streams—foundations, government subsidies, et cetera—available to artists in Europe and North America cre- ate more difficulties for independent critical cultural work in China. Although more than a few artists of international stature—Cai Guoqiang and Zhang Yimou are two prominent examples—are willing to harness their work to state spectacle, the cultural front is for the most part constrained as it is elsewhere in the world within the parameters of consumer society and market logic, or through institutionalization in the arts academies, which are themselves more oriented toward serving the market. When art tackles “political” themes such as environmentalism—currently a very fashionable subject—or rural inequities, this can often seem formulaic and opportunis- tic, and within the trend lines of international art fashion. The global culture market’s appetite for difference and diversity allows contemporary art to proclaim its “Chinese characteristics” as a means of achieving international currency. Overtly dissident artistic work, such as Ai Weiwei’s, is seen by many on the Chinese left as aimed primarily at Western audiences and thus possessing a certain “rootlessness” at best, as Zhao Chuan mentions in his interview in this issue, or at worst an opportunism that trades on the Western market for political dissidence. This is not a judgment with which I concur in every case, but it reflects a dynamic that is important to register. The cultural scene in China is of course not without vitality. Independent film, particularly documentary, continues to flourish, and internet-based forms of distribution and circulation allow for wide viewing. And although the space for a critical artistic practice that distances itself from the market and from the state is small, as it is everywhere in the world, such space exists, as some contributions in this collection demonstrate. The contemporary literary scene is beyond the scope of this issue, but few critical intellectuals find in it a source of critical vitality. The recent folding of the journal Tian nan (English title: Chutzpah), an uneven but important forum for new writing, is symptomatic. Translated work has considerable appeal, and it would be safe to say that the translated work of Roberto Bolaño and Haruki Murakami are more significant imaginative resources for contemporary Chinese readers than work by contemporary Chinese writers. Where, then, is the political, and to what extent does the Chinese context—particularly its ideological superstructure, with its distinctive possibilities and blockages—require different sorts of answers to this question

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than obtain elsewhere? How does critical work about or from China articulate with critical work elsewhere, particularly given the common insistence, in many quarters of the intellectual field, on a unique Chinese path? These are not questions that will find definitive answers, but will set parameters for continuing exploration. Several essays in this issue treat the historical resources for critical work in the present—the legacies of revolution, revolutionary thought, and the social position of intellectuals and their relation to the state. The nature of the possible relationship to these various legacies, and the existence or nonexistence of new forms of articulation, is a question that many critical intellectuals continue to negotiate. Matters are easier for neoliberals in China, who can appeal to humanistic universals at the same time as they advocate market rationality, keep their distance from the state, and function in their own way as national conscience. We should not expect critical or political creativity from that sector. But the question of space for the political is a vital and fraught one. There are, to be sure, inspiring forces of engagement in the contemporary scene. Beyond some of those presented here, there are the young activists and organizers in the New Rural Reconstruction movement, who work with rural villagers to form coopera- tives, community‑based agriculture, and other forms of community aimed to make rural life sustainable and vital. There are the dedicated and tire- less advocates for workers in NGOs in Guangdong and elsewhere, who are committed to the long struggle for dignity and livelihood for workers in the dehumanizing and deadening assembly lines of the world factory. There are radical feminists, who fashion ever more creative modes of protest against everyday sexism and gender-based inequalities. There are those struggling, against an increasingly repressive state, for a better future for the indigenous populations of Xinjiang and Tibet. But given the multifaceted and contradictory character of party-state dominance, coupled with the powerful and depoliticizing forces of consumer society and market logic, the creation and maintenance of critical space is a precarious and often lonely project. As Dai Jinhua’s essay makes clear, counterintuitive though this may seem, even in the Maoist era it was intellectuals and critics on the left who were targeted by the state more commonly than those on the right. There is probably no more important task for contemporary criticism than an engagement with China, and its political, ideological, and class configuration makes this a difficult and complex project. Both Wang Xiao- ming and Arif Dirlik speak eloquently here on the vicissitudes and blockages of China’s and the world’s long revolution, and look for contemporary inspiration in revolutionary historical alternatives to the hegemony of Mao

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and the CCP. Although they do not all speak with one voice, all of the think- ers and artists represented here are committed to the creation of and the expansion of critical space in China and in the world. boundary 2’s commit- ment to this effort is long-standing, and I am grateful to Paul Bové and other members of the editorial collective for their encouragement of this special issue. My thinking on critical space in contemporary China has also been shaped by my involvement in two critical spaces of very different kinds: the Department of Cultural Studies at Shanghai University, founded by Wang Xiaoming, where I have been a visiting professor, and the Grass Stage the- ater troupe, based in Shanghai, where I have worked in various capacities for the last ten years. I give my deepest thanks to both, and to the scholars, artists, and activists who are dedicated to a different kind of future for China, and thus for the world.

Postscript 2018 This introduction, and most of the essays herein, were completed in 2015. As the issue now moves closer to publication, I wanted to comment briefly on the significance of some of the changes since that date. Most salient is the increasing power and authority of Xi Jinping and a greater willingness to crack down on the right and on the left. The neoliberal voices that at the time of first writing had fairly unfettered access to public discussion are now fewer in number, and several once prominent liberal or neoliberal websites, blogs, and think tanks have closed. Although the Xi Jinping regime remains committed to market efficiency, including in the operation of state-owned firms, there are vague and inchoate rumblings of an upcoming reassertion of state control over the economy. Time will tell what this means. Leftist activism, particularly among youth, has also been targeted, through tighter censorship, regulation of media, arrests, and shut- ting down of organizations. This includes workerist and feminist activists. Surveillance of the cultural and educational sectors is widely thought to be far more intense than at any time in the last twenty-five years. In private conversation, many critical intellectuals and artists have hypothesized that, unlike previous periods of tightening, which alternated cyclically between tightening and loosening, there seemed to be little possibility of loosening in the foreseeable future. The space for critical practice has shrunk since these essays were completed. Arif Dirlik, whose essay “The Long Revolution” appears in this collection, passed away in 2017. Arif was a great friend and was an impor-

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tant inspiration to all of us, in every part of the world, who are committed to critical scholarly and political work on and in East Asia. His scholarship illuminated much of China’s diverse and varied revolutionary history, allowing this history to become significant resources for contemporary struggles. Although he was, as were many of us, deeply disheartened by the CCP’s embrace of an authoritarian, environmentally destructive, and anti-egalitarian form of capitalism, his vision of a better world remained ani- mating and unflagging. He is greatly missed, and we would like to dedicate this issue to his memory.

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