Snapshots of Intellectual Life in Contemporary PR China (An International Journal of Literature and Culture)

Introduction Arif Dirlik The idea of putting together another special issue of boundary 2 on China had three sources. T...

Author: Arif Dirlik

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Introduction

Arif Dirlik The idea of putting together another special issue of boundary 2 on China had three sources. The most important (and serious) reason has to do with changes in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the last fifteen years and the intellectual retrospection they have provoked among Chinese intellectuals. While what is offered in the following pages is only a small sampling of contemporary discussions, they hopefully impart some sense of the range of inquiry that characterizes the Chinese intellectual scene. They also indicate, I hope, how much intellectual issues have changed since the boundary 2 special issue “Postmodernism and China” was published ten years ago (vol. 24, no. 3 [Fall 1997]). I will return to this question below. The celebrations of an abstract modernity in the 1980s in response to the loosening of the existing socialist structure are now tempered with an anxiety about modernity’s consequences that has come with success in the capitalist world economy. Enthusiastic participation in global capitalism has brought unprecedented wealth and power but also all the contradictions of a capitalism superimposed upon the ruins of a revolutionboundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-001 © 2008 by Duke University Press

boundary 2 / Summer 2008

ary past that is increasingly a distant memory—and not even that to new generations brought up on a flourishing urban consumer society. But the anxieties have once again raised the issue of socialism as an integral part of the search for a Chinese modernity. The Chinese contributors to this volume represent important voices in these discussions, while the contributors from outside of China (or outside of the involvement in day-to-day debates over these issues) document some of the activity toward overcoming the problems occasioned by China’s incorporation in a global capitalist economy. These discussions are not always welcome to the authorities, who claim monopoly over the understanding of socialism, which in their case daily becomes indistinguishable from capitalism. Still, there is sufficient experimentation with economic and political forms to keep alive the idea of socialism and claims to an alternative modernity, partly cultural and partly organizational. How these changes have been received in the United States provides the other two reasons for the volume in the provocation they have offered. Anyone with any degree of familiarity with China and studies of China in North America and Europe will be aware of the role fantasies of one kind or another have played in the appreciation of that country. Even those who have devoted lifetimes to the study of that country are not immune to fantasizing or peddling their fantasies to the public at large, and there are always Chinese witnesses who, for reasons of their own, are anxious to authenticate such fantasies. Still, it is difficult not to be appalled by the simplification, to the point of simplemindedness, of Chinese com. This is commonplace in clichés concerning the longevity and the homogeneity of Chinese society, and even of the idea of China. It has been well documented in such studies of historical stereotyping of China and Chinese as Harold R. Isaacs, Images of Asia: American Views of China and India (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); and Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). As these works, and similar ones by Colin Mackerras and Jonathan Spence, demonstrate, such stereotyping may be positive or negative, often the one slipping effortlessly into the other, as recent swings between China adoration and China bashing testify. For some recent works noteworthy for their levels of viciousness and obfuscation, see Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2004); and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). While politics is important in the representations of China, the Chinese Revolution, and Mao in these works (Terrill used to be quite an admirer of Mao and the revolution in his time), marketing considerations in the selling of books at a time of the so-called China threat should not be ignored.

Dirlik / Introduction

plexities. A reductionism that lends itself to policy making, or even everyday public comprehension of what is foreign, may be understandable in terms of an effort to make manageable what may otherwise escape comprehension, but it is not, therefore, to be encouraged. The reduction of complexity makes for neither good understanding nor good policy. Instead, it opens up explanation to the intrusion of prejudice, wishful thinking, and, at the extreme, the substitution of one’s own concerns for the realities of others. The price to be paid for the distortion that inevitably results from reductionism is not merely the wasted effort of generations of scholars studying China. The latter also have to face the fact in the end that the complexities to the uncovering of which they have devoted their lives are of little intellectual and political consequence against the urge to make the foreign—in this case, China—manageable. The price is misjudgment with fatal human consequences, “ours” or “theirs.” What makes it even more appalling is the part intellectuals of distinction play in this kind of reductionism when confronted with the “alien” Chinese and their “five-thousand-year-old civilization.” Two instances of such reductionism were important in providing the provocation for this volume. One was the notorious “Declaration” two years ago by W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of the prestigious cultural studies journal Critical Inquiry, and Wang Ning, a professor of foreign literature at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and one of the more successful academic entrepreneurs in contemporary China. According to this declaration, theory may be dead or dying in the United States with the right-wing capture of U.S. politics and culture, but it is alive and well in the PRC. In the utopic phrasing of the two authors, “As for the fate of critical theory in Beijing, one would never guess that it was dead or dying. Something called theory (whether of culture, of the arts and media, of literature, of language, of history or politics) has established itself as the lingua franca of international conversations about every imaginable topic: from the minutiae of everyday life in local situations to the unimaginably complex phenomenon known as globalization.” It is not very puzzling why Wang Ning would promote such a portrayal of the state of theory in the PRC, or at least in Beijing and Shanghai, . W. J. T. Mitchell and Wang Ning, “The Ends of Theory: The Beijing Symposium on Critical Theory,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 265–70. This essay is not only full of clichés about Chinese culture and politics, it even raises the clichéd juxtaposition of oldest/newest empire that has been part of U.S. discourse on China. For a critique, see Steven J. Venturino, “Inquiring After Theory in Beijing,” boundary 2 33, no. 2 (2006): 91–113. . Mitchell and Wang, “The Ends of Theory,” 266.


which conjures images of Chinese housewives talking theory while buying chickens or doing the laundry, as in some Monty Python skit. As the article by Shaobo Xie and Fengzhen Wang in this volume suggests, Chinese academia these days is very much in the business of business, academic or otherwise, and entrepreneurship is one of the criteria for a successful career. Globalization and theory are two precious commodities in this business, even more so than in the United States. While an academic such as Wang Ning has done valuable service in bringing these commodities into the Chinese academic market, what he says about that market needs to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism. The puzzle is why a distinguished American intellectual should not display any such skepticism, but lend his precious name to what is but an obvious distortion of issues of theory and politics in the contemporary PRC. Mitchell’s apparent suspension of critical judgment is unfortunate but not unusual when it comes to distinguished American intellectuals confronting their persuasive counterparts in the PRC. It may be the hospitality, expressed among other things in endless banquets and a bottomless supply of “white lightning” (otherwise known as baijiu) that endows even present-day Beijing, perpetually shrouded in clouds of pollution, with magic, and fairy tales with reality. It may be unspoken hopes of a visiting appointment in the “middle kingdom” of legend, or an honorary degree from the children of Confucius and the Yellow Emperor. More likely it is an unspoken desire to convert the Chinese to one’s way of doing things—a secular version of the missionary thing—that ironically seeks to pave the way to conversion of the Chinese by compliance in their self-representations, even when they push against the limits of credulity. Whatever may be the temptation, it finds nourishment in the benefit to careers on all sides when intellectual activity is being “globalized,” same as capital and commodities. It does not take a China specialist to figure out that perhaps people in China do not talk theory all the time, like some others talk story. Nor does it take either much knowledge of China or a great deal of political astuteness to question whether or not the center of gravity for critical thinking might indeed be shifting to the PRC. There are complex reasons why theory is dead or dying in the United States—if that is indeed the case—which may not be laid at the door of the right wing and its imperial misadventures; we might recall that theory flourished four decades ago in the midst of another U.S. misadventure. The misadventure then provoked opposition to the right wing in the United States and globally. The many social movements it generated not only inspired critical theory and scholarship but also bred con-


stituencies for it. Three decades later, a misadventure equally cruel and odious is met with whimpering in the United States and a complicitous silence on the part of so-called world leaders, including the leaders of the PRC, who are at one in labeling as “terrorism” all challenges to the existing order. Difficult times may undermine theory; they may also serve as inspiration for it, which presents interesting historical problems that are not to be evaded by simpleminded references to right-wing victories. On the other hand, politically speaking, the PRC hardly offers a haven for theory, as the recent Dushu affair demonstrates once again. I will discuss this affair at length below. Suffice it to say here that Dushu has been a foremost forum for theoretical discussion for nearly three decades and has been particularly prominent as a forum for discussions of modernity over the last decade under the joint editorship of Wang Hui and Huang Ping. The two editors were dismissed earlier this year by the publisher, Sanlian Book Company, on the grounds that sales of the journal suffered from the political turn it had taken under their editorship. The dismissal was probably motivated by political factors, although marketing considerations should not be dismissed lightly in an environment where the unbridled pursuit of profit has taken an urgency that may not be matched in existing capitalist societies. The affair casts a cruel irony upon the claims of Wang Ning, uncritically endorsed by Mitchell. The theory that Wang Ning and others like him promote is theory that is politically obscure and irrelevant, that is more often than not lost in clichés about “Chinese characteristics.” Serious theory— theory with social and political consequences—is hardly safe even when it comes to Marxism. The other instance of provocation is the opposite of this one, although the two are bound together by a cultural logic which, at the risk of sounding unkind, if not crude, may best be described as the search for a white man’s Chinaman that will fulfill our own desires about China, what it may be, and what it should be. In this case, it involves Wang Hui, a truly outstanding intellectual, a contributor to this volume, and the central figure in a political/cultural drama that is playing out even as I write these lines. Wang Hui has been rendered into an object of foreign adoration, by, among . Pankaj Mishra, “China’s New Leftist,” October 15, 2006, available at http://www.nytimes .com/2006/10/15/magazine/15leftist.html. I do not know if I am being unfair to Mr. Mishra in the comments that follow. Formally, at least, he recognizes the complexity of the socalled New Left. But the article concentrates solely on Wang Hui, and what he has to say becomes the unified voice of the “New Left” in the title of the article.


others, the New York Times, which has played an important part in spreading his reputation as China’s “Mr. New Left.” Wang Hui and Wang Ning are very different intellectuals. But they have one thing in common: fulfillment of the fantasies of China and Chinese common among foreign scholars, the one because he is very good at working the relationship, the other because he has a keen sense of what are not only Chinese but global cultural and political problems. But the appropriation of Wang Hui in the liberal media is no less appalling than rendering Wang Ning into the promise of critical theory. Wang Hui has distinguished himself through his scholarship as an intellectual of true theoretical originality and an outstanding commentator on Chinese modernity, whose critique of modernity directly feeds into a contemporary global reevaluation of modernity. And yet, in many ways, it is foreign commentary that has made him into Mr. Chinese New Left, which not only does injustice to the “New Left” in China, such as it is, but also does him great disservice by foregrounding his politics over his theoretical contributions. What Wang may have to say about modernity is lost (and perhaps discredited) in his rendering into an iconic white liberal, albeit of a leftist bent, much the same as someone such as Wang Ning is rendered into a spokesperson for Chinese critical liberalism because of his compradorial promise of China to the gods of theory. There is little that surprises about the response of Mitchell who, unfamiliar with the territory, is driven by a sense of cosmopolitanism—and maybe the lure of the Chinese intellectual market (if not the noblesse oblige of the guest)—to agree to the relocation of theory to Beijing, or of the Wang Hui fans who find in his writings congenial themes that also endear the author to his Euro-American readers. These are long-standing responses to China among Americans, including American intellectuals. The goal of the present collection, however, is not to “correct” these responses, which would seem like a futile, and unnecessary, job, but to simply display that Chinese intellectual life is much richer than narcissistic American questions might suggest. What is crucial to grasp, the collection here suggests, is that the PRC, empowered by a past dedicated to socialist revolution, is in search of an alternative modernity. But what is an “alternative modernity”? Beyond an insistence on doing things “the Chinese way,” it is not quite clear what this alternative modernity might be. Modernity as concept has lost much of its coherence with proliferating historical claims on it, and the universalization of the desire for the Modern is complicated by claims that the Modern itself appears in many guises that are not to be contained


in the forms and practices of an originary European modernity. Being Chinese itself is in the process of radical transformation, as populations of Chinese origin overflow the boundaries of the PRC (not to speak of the many internal divisions and differences). Perhaps we could describe the insistence on an “alternative modernity” as “a will to difference.” Whether the issue is economics, politics, or social practices, tagging “Chinese characteristics” on practices of modernity has almost become habitual with Chinese intellectuals—even when those practices are marked by sameness rather than difference, and their future very much in question. Much the same may be said on the question of socialism, which is open to experimentation (except for a revival of Maoist days) and represents overlapping but different things to the Party and intellectuals. On one issue, however, there is a reasonable degree of clarity. Much of the talk on “alternative modernity” in China and abroad is premised on differences in history and culture, which is seemingly reasonable, but also ignores that these alternatives, such as they are, are severely limited by their entrapment within a global capitalist economy, which bears upon it all the hallmarks of its origins in Europe and North America. There is, however, a different way of grasping “alternative,” in terms of a socialist alternative to capitalism, which understood “alternative” not in terms of different pasts but in terms of different futures: alternative economic, political, and social forms to those prevailing under capitalism. This was, of course, the way Chinese revolutionaries conceived of alternatives in their pursuit and justification of revolution. It is calls for reconsideration of this revolutionary past by the so-called New Left (in my reading, inside and outside the Party) that have motivated the suppression of at least some of the dissident voices in China. It is a situation that should benefit from an extended dialogue. This, unfortunately, is open to arbitrary silencing of some views over others in the Party’s insistence on being the arbiter of what may or may not be socialism—even when it is openly acknowledged that neoliberals hold sway over the policies of the Party and the government. The silencing, needless to say, also sweeps aside the deepening of problems in Chinese society even as the new elites (Party and non-Party) celebrate their acceptance and inclusion in global capitalism. These issues are visible in the recent “Dushu affair,” the dismissal of Wang Hui and Huang Ping as editors of the prestigious Dushu magazine, . I have discussed these problems at length in Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).


which, during their tenure, opened up discussions that to some became hallmarks of the “New Left.” Dushu has served as a critical voice in Chinese intellectual life for nearly three decades. The voice has changed over the years, dropping old tones and adding new tones in response to changes in the internal and external circumstances of Chinese society—which is a tribute to the journal’s dynamism. Over the last decade when Wang and Huang served as coeditors, Dushu became an important publication organ in the critique of modernity and of China’s modernization. It has assumed the characteristics of a public institution in its own right in serving as a voice for the sense of “maldevelopment” that has become pervasive in recent years among many in China, and not just among “New Left” intellectuals. When the Sanlian Book Company dismissed Wang and Huang as editors, the explanation given was that the journal had been losing readership under their editorial policies, becoming more obscure and politically one-sided— an interesting reason in a bureaucratic Party-state that will not allow for serious dissent. The politics of the affair is still obscure. Nevertheless, to some, it was always astonishing that a journal published by an official publisher (Sanlian) could usurp the role of a public voice when the Party-state has made a strenuous effort to monopolize the notion of the public. If such is the case, the affair represents the state’s reappropriation of this role. A closer look at the Dushu affair may provide insights into the changing circumstances of Chinese society that are the subject of the essays in this volume. Does the recent dismissal of Wang Hui and Huang Ping as the journal’s editors point to just another shift in the journal’s history in response to the changing circumstances of Chinese society, as the official reasoning of the publisher would suggest? If so, does the shift imply that the concerns of the last decade are no longer relevant to the present generation of readership—and do not sell? What marks off the journal’s voiceover this past decade during the editorship of Wang Hui and Huang Ping? What were the circumstances that the journal responded to during those years? Are those circumstances no longer relevant? Or is a new generation oblivious to the concerns that they represent? Has the journal’s appeal suffered, therefore, raising marketing concerns, or is it the uncomfortable . Wang Hui, perhaps the one intellectual best known to foreigners, for reasons already mentioned, is also a professor of Chinese studies at Tsinghua University. Huang Ping, a well-known sociologist, has held high positions in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, most recently as the director of its new American studies program. . I am grateful to my student Guannan Li for this insight.


questions it has raised concerning China’s development, raising political and cultural concerns? This last question draws the greatest interest and is no doubt of fundamental significance from the perspective of rights discourse. Whether the change in editorship was politically or economically motivated is a normative distinction in liberal capitalist society that also structures rights discourse, which condemns political but not economic abridgement of human rights. The distinction may not be the most consequential aspect of the Dushu affair. The suspicion that neoliberal unhappiness with Dushu’s “New Left” orientation had something to do with the dismissal is plausible, even though there may have been no direct neoliberal machination. Wang Hui’s reminder that the journal’s subscriptions have remained at about the same level also seems to confirm the suspicion that the dismissal was solely economic. That remains to be seen. So does the future orientation of the journal under a new editor. The new editor may well decide to continue the orientations of his/her predecessors. In that case, the dismissal of Wang and Huang may be due to personal reasons. But if it is to enforce a shift in policy away from what they represented, the consequences are far more serious: the silencing of a critical voice of vital significance for society and the country at large. It is the silencing that is the issue here, not whether it is economic or political, which makes little difference where the voices are concerned. Censorship is more or less severe depending on the country, but it seems to be active globally at the present at all levels of society, from governments to corporations to the press and even to educational institutions—more often than not in the form of self-censorship. The collusion at different levels of power makes it difficult to determine where the censorship originates. But it seems that the market is as important a consideration in such selfcensorship as its political and legal consequences. We should, therefore, not dismiss lightly the company claim that the dismissal of the two editors was for economic reasons. They are silenced all the same. Let us hope that their legacy is not suspended, for what they have had to say—and, we hope, continue to say—has not lost its relevance; indeed, it is likely to acquire greater urgency in coming years. Not the least important aspect of the Wang/Huang editorship was to bring together . See the interview with Wang Hui in Nandu zhoukan [Southern metropolis weekly], no. 140 (July 27, 2007): 24–29. I am grateful to Alex Day for bringing this interview to my attention.

10 boundary 2 / Summer 2008

humanities/social science perspectives from the disciplinary backgrounds of the two editors. If the social sciences are crucial in the study of modern societies of which they are the products, they serve human interests best when placed within the context of long-standing human aspirations to justice, truth, and beauty, which in the modern division of labor have been placed in the realm of the humanities. In bringing these concerns together, Dushu, under the Wang/Huang editorship, achieved a place in the forefront of cultural studies publications, not just in China but globally. Bringing together issues of subjectivity and belief in the material conditions of existence is not merely an academic matter of transdisciplinarity; it is also the point of departure for any serious critical analysis of culture, society, and politics. The Wang/Huang tenure at Dushu coincided with the appearance of modernity as a problem in Chinese thinking, which itself was intimately linked to the rapid advance of economic modernization, which also produced new problems in Chinese society. Wang and Huang were well equipped to address this problem, the one as a cultural analyst deeply familiar with Chinese intellectual legacies as well as contemporary theoretical issues, the other a sociologist trained in issues of social theory and modernization, not just modernization as material progress but modernization also as a problem. Under their leadership, Dushu was distinguished for raising and keeping alive critical evaluation of modernization efforts in Chinese society not just as an economic but also as a social, political, and cultural problem. In her recent study of socialism in contemporary China, Lin Chun argues that during the last decade, China has entered a new phase of reform, that of retrospection and revaluation, especially with socialist goals in mind. This is not just an academic question, but a question that is crucial to the creation of an alternative modernity to that of capitalist societies which, it seems to me, is the professed goal of the leadership in China, as well as the inspiration for the so-called “New Left” positions of Wang Hui and Huang Ping. The problems that beset China’s modernization—from regional, urban-rural, class, and gender inequalities to pollution—are also readily acknowledged by the leadership and are subject to examination. Neoliberals committed to full incorporation in global capitalism may find the revival of revolutionary memories unpleasant and obstructive. It is also possible that a new generation of intellectual youth, reared on the values . Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

Dirlik / Introduction 11

of the consumer society that began to flourish in the 1990s, finds tedious the kind of political and cultural issues raised in Dushu, especially when those issues are couched in the languages of postmodernism and poststructuralism that Chinese intellectuals have shared with their counterparts elsewhere since the late 1980s. The term New Left made some sense when it emerged in Europe and North America in the 1950s and 1960s in distinguishing a new generation of Marxists parting ways with Stalinism. It makes little sense within the context of a socialist society. Its use in contemporary China is one indication of unease that, in the pursuit of national wealth and power as it appears through the lens of private interests, the country has strayed from the socialist goals of justice and equality, and national goals of autonomous development. The “New Left” in this case refers to those who would remember and reevaluate the legacies of the revolution—not to turn their backs on the Old Left, in other words, but to critically examine postrevolutionary developments in light of the now abandoned goals of a revolutionary past. The term seemingly encompasses all those who have raised questions about post-1992 development and its social and environmental consequences. Some also believe that there may be answers, if only as inspiration, in earlier revolutionary experiences, and invoke them in criticism of present-day problems, if not out of a political desire for their revival, then at least out of a recognition that they are indispensable to grasping critically problems of modernization in contemporary China. This recognition that the revolution was not an act of madness but had on its side a historical logic goes against the grain these days—not just of the leaders of the Communist Party, but of China scholars inside and outside the PRC. The essays collected in this volume do not convey a single message, nor do they conform to some structural whole. The diversity would have been considerably enhanced had some intellectuals of different political and aesthetic disposition responded to our request for contributions. Even with those absences here, what we observe is a wide array of interest, concerns, and involvements. As editor of the volume, I did not suggest any kind of theme for the volume. Rather, I encouraged authors to contribute something on a subject that preoccupied them at the time. Some of the contributors—Yu Keping, Wang Hui, Han Shaogong, Fengzhen Wang— are active as Party members or public intellectuals in the promotion of the issues they discuss. Others, such as Wang Shaoguang, Shaobo Xie, Pun Ngai, Chu Yiu-Wai, Alex Day, and I are concerned analysts of Chinese society, wishful of the success of some form of democratic socialism before


the present course of development leads at gathering speed to social and ecological disaster. What is at stake here is not just the fate of China and Chinese society, but a common human fate globally that is threatened by an unbridled capitalism which has shed its inhibitions at a very moment of crisis in global political organization and ecology. It is out of such concerns that there have been calls within and outside the Party for a reevaluation of the developmental path that the country has followed over the last decade.10 How successful these calls will be remains to be seen, as already there is a powerful group that has benefited from “economic globalization.” But even this group is not entirely homogeneous. The Party/non-Party distinction is significant, but each camp has its own internal differences. There are reformers within and without the Party who even collaborate on occasion in evaluating the prospects of Chinese society. These individuals, too, have benefited from the changes of the last decade, but they also have displayed a keen appreciation of the underside of incorporation in global capitalism. The revolutionary legacy is still available to Chinese intellectuals as a reservoir of thinking about these issues. Attitudes toward that legacy are also of crucial importance in dividing intellectuals inside and outside of the Party. It may be no exaggeration to say that China is at a crossroads— as we all are. The concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a small minority that is increasingly transnational in composition is a problem globally, including China, where a new bourgeois elite has joined the old Party elite, producing a socialist version of a transnational capitalist class. Like elites elsewhere, this elite finds in neoliberalism and globalization the expression of its vision—if through the agency of a state corporatism. While large numbers of people in China have benefited from the “Reforms” of the last three decades, spatial and social division, as well as ecological destruction, have made significant headway—visible not only in polluted cities but also in the gradual destruction of rural China. Few in China would want a return to the days of Mao Zedong, which would make no sense under present circumstances. But the revolution is among the significant legacies of Chinese society. It brings into relief the consequences of capitalism in a “global factory.” It is a resource in the critique of contem10. I am referring here to calls for closer attention to the plight of the countryside (discussed in this issue by Alex Day), the call for a new “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming), and, above all, to the new effort to revitalize Marxism through a “Marxism project” (Makesi zhuyi gongcheng) that was initiated at the highest levels of the Communist Party.

Dirlik / Introduction 13

porary society. And it continues to inspire confidence in the possibility of a different kind of society. It is this legacy that continues to fuel serious criticism in China. Theory may be one of its beneficiaries. But this is a politically loaded theory, not an academic theory, and if it is flourishing in China today, it is not because of the enlarged freedoms but because of new forms of repression. This is what gives contemporary theory its local coloring, against an elitist reification of theory in slogans of globalization and the like. The groundedness of theory in this instance is groundedness within Chinese society, and not in some abstract cultural characteristic attributed to China. It is, for this reason, activist theory.

The Great Transformation: The Double Movement in China

Wang Shaoguang Translated by Guannan Li and Min Chen

Both the title and the subtitle of this essay are adopted from Karl Polanyi, who published his famous book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time in 1944. More than six decades have passed since its publication, but, as Joseph E. Stiglitz states in the preface of the recent new reprint, “the issues and perspectives Polanyi raises have not lost their salience . . . it often seems as if Polanyi is speaking directly to present-day issues.” Although Polanyi’s analysis is elaborate and abstruse, his point of view is concise and straightforward. In short, he argues that “the idea of a self-regulating market implied a stark utopianism. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would physically destroy man and transform his surUnless otherwise indicated, all data presented in this essay come from the author’s research. . See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). . Polanyi, The Great Transformation, vii. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-002 © 2008 by Duke University Press


roundings into a wilderness.” According to Polanyi, the market has always existed throughout the history of mankind, but it is rare to see a market economy. If a market economy has existed, it has not been a fully functioning one. Until the nineteenth century, the economy had always been embedded in society. We should call such an economy a “moral economy,” because the economic activities were subordinated to political, religious, and social relations. However, the classical economists of the nineteenth century attempted to create a disembedded and fully self-regulating market economy that subordinated society to the market. This disembedded market economy led to the destruction of society. Therefore, human society since the nineteenth century has witnessed a double movement—the expansion of the market triggered the protective countermovement to protect human beings, nature, and productive organizations; the protective legislation and other interventions are the characteristics of this countermovement. From a Moral Economy to a Market Society Polanyi’s analytical framework is helpful in understanding the great transformation China has experienced in the past decades. The Chinese economy in traditional society was a moral economy. As Liang Shuming, a philosopher and reformer of the 1930s, observed, In a moral society, the property of husband and wife, father and son was indivisible. If parents were still alive, the property of sons was indivisible. If grandparents were still alive, then the property of three generations was indivisible. Since property was supposed to be shared, the division of property was regarded as unreasonable (in ancient times the division of property was sometimes even forbidden). However, the relations among family members were not all the same, with some being closer than others, and separate living indeed made life easier. Therefore, property could not always be shared. Then the new moral value of property division appeared among brothers and close relatives. Property was first divided among them when they chose to live separately. Then there might be further redistribution from rich relatives to poor ones. Among relatives, friends, and neighbors, property could be redistributed. Those who benefited from redistribution were supposed to repay, but it all depended on circumstances. It was common to give prop. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 3. . Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 136.

Wang Shaoguang / The Great Transformation 17

erty away to those who were in great need. Under certain situations, giving property as charity was actually an obligation, and it was one of the most general moral values. In short, people were expected to care for one another economically. Failure to meet this obligation was viewed as immoral. Additionally, ritual land, charity houses, and charity schools were all properties shared by the clans. The community grain storehouse, charity grain storehouse, and school land were all prosperities shared by the same village community. All these prosperities were used for helping the poor and subsidizing education. This institutional arrangement originated from the moral value of obligation and was very similar to collective living. In short, economic relations were subject to kinship relations and ethical norms. The old saying “giving property away to others is more important than keeping it to yourself” refers to this kind of ethical relation. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, social values radically changed. Collective and national interests replaced familial relations as the most important of social values. Nevertheless, although the connotation of ethics changed, the subordination of economic relations to social ethics remained the same. While the new regime did pursue economic development, efficiency and economic growth were taken only as secondary concerns, and the market did not play a great role in the overall arrangement of the economic system. Under the planned (moral) economy, two mechanisms—“soft budget constraint” and “iron bowl” (tie fanwan)—helped embed economic relations into social and political relations. “Soft budget constraint” means that the activities of an economic organization (either a corporation or a low-level government) are not constrained by its own resources. When revenue does not meet expenses, and a deficit ensues, the corporation or low-level government can expect help from an outside organization (for example, an upper-level government). The principle of “survival of the fittest” does not apply to this system. “Iron bowl” means lifelong guaranteed employment, no matter how one performs on the job. “Soft budget constraint” and “iron bowl” obviously are not conducive to competition and maximum efficiency, but they became the two pillars of the planned economic system because it gave priority to human subsistence and equality at the expense of efficiency. Under the planned (moral) economy, communes (she) and brigades (dui ) in rural areas and units (danwei ) in cities were not only economic . Liang Shuming, Zhongguo wenhua yao yi [The key principles of Chinese culture] (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 2005), chap. 5.


institutions but were also social and political institutions. They provided not only job opportunities and salaries (or work points) to their members but also social welfare services (daycare, kindergarten, school, medical care, assistance, old-age insurance, burial and funeral services) to them and their family members. In other words, the communes and brigades in rural areas and units in cities, rather than the government, provided welfare for individuals. There was no need for the state to provide for these social policies directly. This situation continued until the early phase of economic reform in the 1980s. After the Chinese government launched its economic reform, their guiding ideology changed. Policy makers abandoned the search for basic welfare and equality, and focused on “development as priority” (fazhan shi ying daoli ), exclusively pursuing economic growth. Although policy makers insisted that “efficiency was first but fairness needs to be considered” (xiaolu youxian, jiangu gongping), they actually deemed fairness less important. In order to achieve maximum efficiency and rapid overall economic development, they deferred all other concerns, such as equality, employment, employees’ rights and interests, health care, the environment, and national defense. At that time, the leaders at all levels accepted the theory of the “trickle-down effect” advocated by neoliberal economists, who suggested that if the “pie” continued to grow, all other problems would eventually be solved. Along with the changing ideology, the Chinese moral economy was transformed into a market society in three stages. In the first stage (1979– 1984), the sporadic market of consumer goods emerged, which played a very limited role in the whole economy. Interference from the government was still strong, and the nonmarket system and relationship still took precedence. In the second stage (1985–1992), a set of interconnected market systems, such as the commodity market, labor market, capital market, foreign currency market, and land market, emerged. In this stage, market principles, such as equivalent exchange, the law of supply and demand, and competition, started to play a role in the economy, but those principles did not yet influence noneconomic fields. In the third stage (1993–1999), the market society emerged as the dominating factor. Market principles also influenced noneconomic arenas and threatened to become the dominant mechanism integrating all of society (and even political life). This three-stage transformation ruined the foundation of the moral economy. The financial relationship between the governments at different levels changed from “everyone eating from the same big pot” (chi da


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Figure 1. State Retreat from Health Care guofan) to “everyone eating in separate kitchens” (fen zhao chifan). The relationship between governmental finance and state-owned enterprises changed from “soft budget constraint” to “hard budget constraint.” In rural areas, peasants were granted the freedom of production. With the disintegration of the commune system and the introduction of the “all-around responsibility system” (da baogan), villages no longer took responsibility for individuals. In cities, the reform of the employment system smashed the “iron bowl” of urban workers. Because rural communities and urban units were deprived of social functions and turned into purely economic institutions, farmers and workers were forced to get by with reduced entitlement to assistance and security. Consequently, the welfare of individuals came to depend almost entirely on the cash nexus. The magnitude of the market’s reach can be measured by the extent of commodification, or by the range of goods subject to commercial traffic. Figure 1 shows how the health care field was commercialized step by step. Before economic reform, individual payments accounted for less than 20 percent of total health expenses, while the government’s fiscal allocation and social insurance accounted for more than 80 percent. Therefore, at that time, although people had difficulty finding a good doctor, they did not have any problem paying their medical bills.


In the early phase of economic reform, social expenses (the portion of health expenses covered by social insurance) dropped slowly. However, the government’s allocation was still increasing and reached nearly 40 percent. The turning point was in the mid-1980s, when both the government’s allocation and social expenses dropped dramatically and almost reached the nadir at the beginning of the new century. By 2001, the government’s allocation toward total health expenses had decreased to 15.9 percent; the portion of social insurance had decreased to 24.1 percent. Their combined share was barely 40 percent. As a result, people had to pay more of their own health care expenses. In 1980, Chinese people paid for 21 percent of their health expenses, but from 2000 to 2002, they were responsible for paying nearly 60 percent. By that time, China’s health care system had become a system funded mainly by private sources, while the public sources filled in the blanks only here and there. This transformation fundamentally shifted the responsibility for health care from the government/ society to the individual. At the turn of the century, generally speaking, in developed countries, out-of-pocket expenses account for 27 percent of total health care expenses; in transitional countries (zhuanxing guojia), 30 percent; in least developed countries, 40.7 percent, and in other developing countries, 42.8 percent. Thus, compared to other countries, China’s health care system has become probably one of the most commercialized in the world. The problem is that the market serves only the consumers who can pay the bill. This is why many rural and urban residents complain that it is too expensive to see a doctor (kanbinggui ). Health care is not the only noneconomic field which has been invaded by market forces. Other noneconomic fields, such as education, were also influenced by market forces. Following Polanyi, as the economy has been disembedded from society and become a controlling force, China has been effectively transformed into a market society. From a historical perspective, China has experienced an unprecedented transformation from a moral economy to a market society. The Emergence of the Protective Countermovement Polanyi argues that a disembedding and self-adjusting market is destructive. When the market attempts to turn human beings and the natural environment into pure commodities, it will inevitably destroy society and . Wang Shaoguang, “China’s Health System: From Crisis to Opportunity,” Yale-China Health Journal 3 (Autumn 2004): 5–49.


the natural environment. Although the Chinese economy experienced a high rate of growth in the past quarter century, the pursuit of a high GDP growth rate brought with it many serious problems. These problems were not obvious in the early years of reform, but they became more noticeable as time went on. By the end of the 1990s, some of these problems had become very obvious, including the deteriorating environment and the increasing social polarization between rich and poor (e.g., regional disparities, urban/rural divide, inequality within urban China, and inequality within the countryside). People started to realize that economic growth did not necessarily mean social progress. More importantly, within a market society, the quality of people’s lives depended almost entirely on the market, which served only those who were able to pay. Therefore, social protections and relief ordinary people like peasants and workers could take advantage of declined. Layoffs on a large scale, difficulties in getting into school or seeing a doctor, and numerous serious workplace accidents threatened the economic and social security of millions of people. From their perspective, the market society was making unbearable demands on ordinary people. In this situation, the golden tablet ( jinzi zhaopan) of market reform toppled, shattering the seeming consensus on the efficacy of market forces. Those who got hurt in the early stages of economic reform, or who barely benefited from it, stopped showing unconditional support for marketoriented reform and began to question any reform with the label “market” attached to it. They were hostile to corrupt officials, who abused their power and embezzled government funds; they were hostile to the nouveau riche, who made their fortune overnight; they disdained the arrogant scholars whose success came about as a result of reform. They felt that Chinese economic reform had gone astray, and they longed for harmony between the economy and society. This initiated the protective countermovement to re-embed the economy into the society. As more things went wrong, policy makers started to seriously consider Deng Xiaoping’s warning, “If there is polarization (between rich and poor) . . . then disparity between nationalities, regions, classes, and central and local government will grow, then things will go wrong.” “The purpose of socialism is to make all people rich instead of [creating] polarization. If our policy leads to polarization, we will fail.” In order to reduce social disparity, . Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi [Party Literature Research Center of the CPC Central Committee], ed., Deng Xiaoping sixiang nianpu [The chronicle of Deng Xiaoping’s thoughts] (Beijing: Central Document Press, 1998), 453. . Deng Xiaoping sixiang nianpu, 311.


the Chinese government began to focus on security and equality. If, in the past, they paid only lip service to “fairness” ( jiangu), they were now making a concerted effort to re-embed the economy within social relations through decommercialization. Decommercialization means treating the human subsistence–related services (such as health care, education, retirement, etc.) as basic human rights rather than as commercial commodities. The purpose of decommercialization is to allow people to maintain “a livelihood without reliance on the market.” When a planned economy and collective system disintegrates, a redistribution system must be established to achieve decommercialization. On the one hand, people have to pay taxes according to their income levels; on the other hand, people receive benefits from the state redistribution (social assistance, social insurance, and public service) according to their needs. There is no relation between the taxes an individual pays and the benefit he or she receives. By using state power, the redistribution breaks the market chain and reconnects everyone. These are the changes China has been experiencing recently. From 1978 to the mid-1990s, then, China had only economic policies and no social policies. Starting from around the turn of the century, social policies began to emerge in the country. Table 1 shows various social policies introduced in recent years. Before the new century, only the Go West policy (xibu dakanfa) in 1999 could be considered a social policy. Most social policies were introduced after Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took office in 2002. In the next two sections, I will explain how these policies were carried out and how they brought dramatic changes to China. To simplify my analysis, I will divide these social policies into two large categories: those that aim to reduce inequality; and those that provide social security. Reducing Inequality There are different kinds of income disparities: intra-urban/intra-rural disparity, urban/rural disparity, and regional disparity. Research shows that most serious income disparities in China are regional and urban/rural.10 . Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 21–22. 10. Li Shi and Zhao Renwei, “Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zai yanjiu” [The reexamination of income distribution of Chinese residents], available at http://www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/ wk_wzdetails.asp?id=597; Development Bureau of the UN, Zhongguo renlei fazhan baogao 2005: zhuiqiu gongping de renlei fazhan [The human development report of 2005: Pursuing the equal development of the human being], available at http://ch.undp.org.cn/ downloads/nhdr2005/c_NHDR2005_complete.pdf.


Table 1. New Social Policies, 1999–2007 Year

New Social Policies

1999 2002 2003

Go West policy Urban minimum income guarantee program Rural fee–tax reform; reestablishment of rural Cooperative Medical Systems (CMS) Reduction in agricultural taxes; introduction of 3 types of rural subsidies Partial abolishment of agricultural taxes Abolishment of all agricultural taxes; introduction of comprehensive rural subsidies, free compulsory education in western and central rural areas, public housing for urban poor Free compulsory education in all rural areas; basic health insurance for all urban residents; CMS for over 80 percent of rural population; promotion of rural minimum income guarantee program, pensions for migrant workers, public housing for urban poor

2004 2005 2006

2007

To reduce overall income disparity, China must first deal with regional and urban/rural disparity. Reducing Regional Disparity The most important measure taken to reduce regional income disparity was to increase the central government’s “fiscal transfer” (caizheng zhuanyi zhifu) to the provinces, especially to the least economically developed provinces in central and western China. Before 1993, China’s fiscal system was one of “eating in separate kitchens.” This system was beneficial to the developed coastal provinces because they had more fiscal resources and did not have to share tax revenue with other provinces. The provinces in central and western China whose fiscal resources were limited could not, without the outside fiscal transfer, provide similar public services to their people, not to mention invest in new infrastructure or new industries. After the mid-1980s, regional disparity continued to expand; one of the main reasons was excessive fiscal decentralization.11 11. Wang Shaoguang and Hu Angang, Zhongguo: bupingheng fazhan de zhengzhi jingjixue [China: The political economy of unequal development] (Beijing: China Plan Press, 1999).


1,800 1,600 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200 0 1994

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Figure 2. Fiscal Transfers from the National to Provincial Governments (in Billion Yuan) In 1994, the Chinese government overhauled its fiscal system. This major reform eventually stopped “two ratios” from further decreasing after fifteen years of continuous decline.12 More importantly, the reform enhanced the central government’s ability to extract fiscal resources and thus established a foundation for increasing fiscal transfers. Figure 2 clearly shows that since 1994, the total amount of the central government’s fiscal transfer has increased steadily. Especially after 1999, the amount increased every year, and reached 1,600 billion yuan in 2007, which was eight times the amount transferred in 1994. The turning point appeared in 1999, when the Chinese central government introduced its Go West policy. According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Finance, during the period of 1994–2005, 10 percent of the central government’s fiscal transfers went to eastern provinces, 44 percent went to central provinces, and 46 percent went to western provinces.13 Central government fiscal transfers have 12. “Two ratios” means the ratio of government revenue to the GDP, and the ratio of central government revenue to total government revenue. 13. Jin Renqing, “Wanshan cujin jiben gonggong fuwu jundenghua de gonggong cai-


helped reduce both vertical and horizontal fiscal imbalance and thereby regional inequalities. Before the 1994 fiscal reform, the GDP growth rates in the eastern, central, western, and northeastern areas were very different, ranging from 12 percent to 19.5 percent. After 1994, growth rates began to converge. In 2005, growth rates in the eastern, central, western, and northeastern areas were 13.13 percent, 12.54 percent, 12.81 percent, and 12.01 percent, respectively. The differences in growth rate became quite small.14 The convergence of economic growth rates in different regions has been helpful in preventing regional disparity from growing, and may even reduce it. For some time after 1983, the Gini coefficient of provincial per capita GDP continued to increase. In the 1990s, the regional difference quickly expanded, but it leveled off after 2000. In 2004, the expansion tendency was reversed for the first time since 1990. By 2005, regional disparity was further reduced. The Fiscal Transfer System was seen as a miracle, one that brought about effective changes within a short period of time.15 Reducing Urban/Rural Disparity In comparison with other developing countries, China’s national income disparity is not the highest in the world. It is lower than that of some countries in Latin America and Africa in terms of the overall Gini coefficient. Still, the urban/rural divide in China is among the greatest in the world and is a telling characteristic of China’s income distribution.16 In order to reduce urban/rural income disparity, the Chinese government in recent years has adopted a two-prong strategy: “taking less” from rural areas (shaoqu), on the one hand, and “giving more” to rural areas (duoyu) on the other. One way of taking less was to abolish agricultural taxes. The agricultural tax was one of the oldest taxes in China, going back thousands of years. After economic reform, the share of agriculture in the national economy decreased consistently, from 31 percent in 1979 zheng zhidu” [Enhance and improve the public finance system in equalizing the basic public service], available at http://www.zgdjyj.com/Default.aspx?tabid=99&ArticleId=721. 14. Feng Jie and Xuan Xiaowei, “Woguo quyu zengzhang geju he diqu chaju de bianhua yu yuanyin fenxi” [An analysis on the current situation and causes of unbalanced regional development in China], Working Paper No. 138 (2006), Development Research Center of the State Council, PRC. 15. Feng Jie and Xuan Xiaowei, “Woguo quyu zengzhang geju he diqu chaju de bianhua yu yuanyin fenxi.” 16. Development Bureau of the UN, Zhongguo renlei fazhan baogao 2005: zhuiqiu gongping de renlei fazhan.


to 12.6 percent in 2005. However, from 1986 to 1996, various agricultural taxes (including the agricultural tax, the tax on special farm produce, the husbandry tax, the land occupancy tax, and the deed tax) increased proportionally the overall fiscal revenue, from 2.1 percent to 5.2 percent. After 1996, agricultural taxes were comprising less of the national fiscal revenue. But in 2005, these taxes still amounted to 93.64 billion yuan and were still proportionally higher than the level in 1985. In the Second Session of the 10th National People’s Congress in 2004, Premier Wen Jiabao announced that the government would “eliminate the tax on special agricultural produce, except tobacco crops, and eliminate the agricultural tax entirely within five years.” That year, eight provinces were exempted altogether from the agricultural taxes; twelve provinces had their agricultural taxes reduced by 3 percent, and eleven provinces had theirs reduced by 1 percent. By 2005, most provinces had their agricultural taxes cut or eliminated. By 2006, the agricultural taxes were eliminated entirely, a goal that the central government did not actually expect to meet until 2008. Approximately 900 million peasants in China were exempted from around 100 billion yuan in agricultural taxes, or about 100 yuan per person.17 In the mid-1980s, peasants in rural areas were also subject to arbitrary quotas, surcharges, and fines, in addition to the formal agricultural taxes. Since the early 1990s, the central government issued several documents requiring such illegal levies on peasants to be limited to less than 5 percent of their total income, but this provision did not do much to relieve the peasants’ burden. In many places, especially in the rural areas in central China, the situation went from bad to worse. The central government had to bear the blame, because when it assigned new responsibilities to local governments (e.g., the Nine-Year Compulsory Education), the latter had to pay the bill, a classic “unfunded mandate.” Local governments often found they had no choice but to impose new surcharges. In 2000, Anhui Province began to experiment with the Fee-to-Tax Reform (feigaishui ), which eliminated illegal levies and converted all legal surcharges into formal agricultural taxes. At the beginning of the experiment, the central government showed no intention of using fiscal transfers to support the experimental province; rather, it hoped that the local government could resolve its revenue shortage problem on its own. However, the ensuing fiscal shortage in the experimental province soon disrupted the normal operation of rural 17. Su Ming, “Jinnan zhongyang canzheng zhinong xinzhengce” [This year’s new central finance policies of supporting peasants], available at http://www.crifs.org.cn, March 31, 2006.


organizations and of rural compulsory education. The central government finally acknowledged the problem, and, in 2002, the State Council extended the rural tax reform to sixteen provinces. As a supplementary measure, the Ministry of Finance introduced the Central Fiscal Transfer Payment for Supporting Rural Tax Reform and transferred 24.5 billion yuan to the experimental provinces. In 2003, when rural tax reform was fully launched all over the country, the central government further increased the amount of fiscal transfer to support rural tax reform. This move greatly relieved the peasants’ burden. In 2006, the special transfer amounted to 80 billion yuan, about 100 yuan per rural resident. The central government’s strategy of “giving more” has been even more pronounced. In 1997, it invested merely 70 billion yuan in the Three Rural Issues (sannong) Fund, which included an agricultural subsidiary, an expenditure for elementary and secondary schools in rural areas, and an expenditure for rural health care, and twelve other main categories. In 2001, the Three Rural Issues Fund surged to 190 billion yuan. Over the next two years, the amount did not increase, but in 2004, the central government invested 262.6 billion yuan in the fund, which was 70 billion yuan more than what it had invested in 2003. After that, the annual increase was around 50 billion yuan. In 2007, the Ministry of Finance’s budget for the Three Rural Issues Fund was 391.7 billion yuan, which was more than five times the amount invested in 1997. As Figure 3 shows, the per capita urban/rural income disparity has somewhat stabilized after a sharp increase in the mid-1990s as a result of the take less/give more strategy. The disparity in the per capita expense in health care and education has begun to drop. When, as the central government pledges, public revenue takes over the responsibility for education and basic health care in the coming years, it expects the urban and rural disparity to be further controlled and even reduced. Increasing Social Security In modern society, people support themselves with their income. However, some people cannot work due to advanced age or illness or physical disability. Some people have jobs but do not earn enough to support themselves and their families (because they have too many children or have lost a spouse). Some people get injured on the job and lose their ability to work. Some people want to work but cannot find a job. Some families have limited living space, which hinders normal family life. Modern


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Figure 3. Urban/Rural Divide (Rural as 1.00) society is full of risks, and everyone is vulnerable to misfortune. Although family and nonprofit organizations can help to offset hardships, they cannot completely protect people from all risks.18 Before economic reform, rural communes and urban units provided help to people. After the collapse of communes and units, the society was supposed to take responsibility and provide basic economic protection for people. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese government ignored its responsibility.19 This situation has been reversed in recent years. The charts in the following subsections show new developments in the minimum income security system, and in health care, old-age, work-related injury, and unemployment insurance.

18. Wang Shaoguang, “Xindan guojia zhidu zhong de zaifenpei jizhi” [The redistribution mechanism in the modern state system], in Dierci zhuanxin: guojia zhidu jianshe [The second transformation: The construction of the state system], ed. Hu Angang, Wang Shaoguang, and Zhou Jianming (Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2003), 275–311. 19. According to an evaluation of economic security conducted by the International Labor Organization in 2004, China was among the lowest of four levels. See International Labor Organization, Economic Security for a Better World (Geneva: International Labor Office, 2004).


Minimum Income Security The Chinese government has recently been paying more attention to economic security, which can be seen from its policy on minimum income security. The problem of urban poverty did not draw much attention until the late 1990s, before which most people thought poverty a rural phenomenon. However, as unemployment became rampant in the mid-1990s, people realized that urban areas could suffer from serious poverty as well. In 1993, the city of Shanghai established the first urban minimum income security system. In 1997, at the same time that the central government introduced the policy of Downsizing Staff and Improving Efficiency, Laying-off Workers, and Repositioning Personnel ( jianyuan zengxiao, xiagang fenliu), the State Council published the Notice of Launching the Program of Minimum Income Security for the Urban Population (guanyu zai quanguo jianli chengshi jumin zuidi shenghuo baozhang zhidu de tongzhi ) and began to practice the minimum income security system in urban China. However, the program was not carried out effectively until the second half of 2001, when the central government required this program to cover more poor workers in mid- and large-sized state-owned enterprises. As a result, the number of people covered doubled within six months, reaching 11.7 million at the end of 2001. In the next year, the central government mobilized thousands of people who were working in the national civil affairs system to search for urban poor people and tried its best to “cover everyone who needed to be covered” (yingbao jinbao). All local governments acted quickly, and the number of people covered steadily increased every month. At the end of 2002, the total number of people covered increased to 20.54 million. In the following years, coverage fluctuated to around 22 million people (Figure 4). Today, almost all eligible urban poor people are covered by the minimum income security system. In the first several years, coverage expansion happened much faster than fiscal allocation. For several years, as the number of people covered grew, the average subsidy actually declined. After Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took their positions, the government, at all levels, increased its fiscal support for the minimum income security system. After 2001, the average minimum income subsidiary increased every year and reached 1,000 yuan in 2006, which was more than double the 2001 level (Figure 4). Although urban poverty is a big problem, rural poverty is even more acute. By the end of 2006, the rural population living in extreme poverty (annual income under 683 yuan) numbered 21.48 million, and the population living in poverty (annual income under 882 yuan) was 85.17 mil-


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Figure 4. Urban Minimum Income Program lion. If the UN standard (US$1 per day) were to be adopted, there would be perhaps more than 100 million people in Chinese rural areas living in poverty.20 Since 1997, some fiscally sound provinces have established the rural minimum income security system. Some economically developed provinces, such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, issued the Measures on Rural Minimum Income Security (nongcun zuidi shenghuo baozhang banfa), which provided peasants with social security by law. Before the Fee-toTax Reform, in most rural areas, the relief funds came from “the village’s collective undertakings and the township’s public undertakings” (cun tiliu he xiang tongchou). Therefore, at that time, it was impossible to establish a normative minimum income security system in rural areas. Only after rural tax reform made certain progress could the minimum income security system be supported with local public money. The success of rural tax reform led to the central government issuing the No. 1 Central Document (zhongyang yihao wenjian) in 2004, which required local governments with 20. Wang Lifang, “Woguo gaige kaifang yilai nongcun pingkun renkou shuliang jianshao 2.28 yi” [The number of rural residents living in poverty is reduced to 228 million since 1978], Xinhua News Net, May 26, 2007, available at http://news3.xinhuanet.com/ fortune/2007–05/26/content_6156519.htm.


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Figure 5. Rural Minimum Income Program (Per Million Persons) the financial capacity to experiment with the rural minimum income security system. Consequently, at the end of 2005, fourteen provinces established the rural minimum income security system. At the end of 2006, the number of experimental provinces increased to twenty-two. Overall, 15 million peasants in China were covered by this system. Additionally, more than 12 million peasants were eligible for social relief in China and received a regular allowance. The total number of these two groups was 27.23 million, which was slightly higher than the population who lived under the subsistence level, but did not include all low-income people (Figure 5). In 2007, the Central Party Committee and the State Council issued the Views on Promoting the Construction of a New Socialist Countryside (guanyu jiji fazhan xiandai nongye zhashi tuijin shehuizhuyi xinnongcun jianshe de ruogan yijian), which required the establishment of the rural minimum income security system throughout the country. Poor peasants who are eligible for this system, especially the elderly, the disabled, and those who cannot work, are all covered and will receive the minimum living allowance by the end of the year.21 With this initiative, the poorest 21. The local government will be mainly responsible for establishing the rural minimum life security system. The management of this system is locally based. The central government will subsidize any local government that has financial difficulties.


rural people, for the first time, are included in the social security system supported with public money. This is a historic change for rural China.22 Although the amount of minimum-living allowance is still small, as the state invests more into this system, the rural minimum income security system will gradually improve. Medical Insurance In Mao’s period, China placed great emphasis on egalitarian principles. From 1950 through 1979, the government went to great lengths to establish a health care system that could provide all citizens with access to basic health care services at an affordable price. In urban areas, the health care finance system consisted of two schemes: (1) the Government Insurance Scheme (GIS), for all governmental employees (including retirees), disabled veterans, college teachers and students, and employees in nonprofit organizations; and (2) the Labor Insurance Scheme (LIS), for employees (including retirees) of all state-owned enterprises (SOE) and some collective enterprises. In rural areas, there was a cooperative medical system serving rural residents. Thus, on the eve of economic reform, even though the quality of medical services was not very high at the time, this health care system provided inexpensive and equally accessible medical care for virtually all urban residents and for 90 percent of rural residents.23 After economic reform, policy makers turned their attention to health care reform. Consequently, both the GIS and the LIS began to decline in the 1990s. In 1999, the two systems were replaced by the Basic Medical Insurance System for Urban Employees.24 The new system developed quickly. Within seven years, the number of employees who joined the system increased several times, from 18 million in 1999 to 157 million in 2006. It is noteworthy that the basic medical insurance system also covered retirees, so those people who tended to have a fragile constitution could also receive benefits from this system. By the end of 2006, more than three-quarters of retirees 22. In November 2006, the average monthly subsidy of the minimum income security system was 79.5 yuan in cities and 22.3 yuan in the countryside. 23. World Bank, Financing Health Care: Issues and Options for China (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1997). 24. It is important to point out that the transition to the new system is not yet complete. Therefore, the free medical care system and labor protection medical care system are still effective in some places and at some state-run enterprises. In addition, the government also provides medical care to special groups, including disabled veterans and the urban poor population, who meet the criteria for needing social assistance.


80 % of urban population insured % of active employees insured % of retirees insured

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Figure 6. The Basic Medical Insurance System for Urban Employees were covered under the basic medical insurance system. The proportion of those covered was much higher among retirees than among younger, active employees (Figure 6). The new system was different from the free GIS and LIS in that it did not cover family members of employees. It also did not cover the selfemployed, employees in the informal sectors (that is, economic activities that are neither taxed nor monitored by the government, as opposed to the formal sector), or migrant workers. The new system developed very fast, but it covered only one-fourth of urban employees by 2006 (Figure 6). This rate of coverage would be even smaller if migrant workers were included in these statistics. In recent years, some cities have experimented with providing medical care to urban nonemployees. As a result, an additional 10 million people in one hundred cities in China joined the medical care insurance system. In order to cover as many urban residents as possible, in April 2006 the State Council decided to choose one or two cities in provinces that had the financial capacity to introduce an urban medical care program for protecting against catastrophic illness. This system covered those people who were not eligible for the Basic Medical Insurance System for Urban Employees, such as children and nonemployees. The State Council will expand this


experiment to more cities in 2008 and reach 80 percent of cities in China by 2009. By 2010, this medical insurance system will be established in all cities in China.25 Medical insurance for migrant workers is more complicated, because migrant workers are young, mobile, and unwilling to pay for insurance. Moreover, their employers are not willing to pay for medical insurance for them. Early in September 2002, the city of Shanghai issued the Temporary Methods of Comprehensive Insurance for Migrant Laborers in Shanghai (Shanghaishi wailai congye renyuan zonghe shehui baoxian zhanying banfa) to establish the comprehensive social insurance system exclusively for migrant workers. In March 2003, the city of Chengdu issued the Temporary Methods of Comprehensive Insurance for Nonurban Resident Workers in Chengdu (Chengdushi feichengzhen huji congye renyuan zonghe shehui baoxian zhanxing banfa), a system designed to provide comprehensive social insurance to nonurban resident workers (migrant workers from rural areas). The Ministry of Labor and Social Security in 2003 and 2004 issued the Guiding Opinions on Participation in Basic Medical Insurance by Nonpermanent Employees in Cities and Towns (guanyu chengzhen linhuo jiuye renyuan canjia jiben yiliao baoxian de zhidao yijian) and the Opinion on Employees of Organizations of Mixed Ownership and Nonstate-owned Enterprises to Participate in Medical Insurance (guanyu duijin hunhe suoyouzhi qiye he feigongyouzhi jingji zuzhi congye renyuan canjia yiliao baoxian de yijian), respectively, which required local offices of labor and security to cover all migrant workers from rural areas who have already formed stable working relationships with employers in cities and towns. For those migrant workers who are self-employed in urban areas, the opinion required them to join the insurance system as nonpermanent employees. In 2004, Beijing and some cities in Shandong Province began to offer different kinds of medical insurance for migrant workers, but progress in the nation as a whole was rather slow. According to statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, of the 120 million migrant workers in China, only about 12 million, or 10 percent of migrant workers, participated in the medical insurance system. In March 2006, the State Council issued the Views on Resolving 25. Meng Xiang, “Disanzhangwang: quanguo chengzhen jumin yibao shidian jijiang qitong” [The third net: The experiment on the nationwide medical insurance of urban residents will be launched], Ershiyi shiji jingji baodao [The economic report of the twenty-first century], July 1, 2007, available at http://finance.sina.com.cn/g/20070701/04443742157 .shtml.


Rural Worker Problems (guanyu jiejue nongmingong wenti de ruogan yijian), which emphasized “the importance of resolving the problem of high medical expenses for migrant workers.” After that, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security issued the Opinions of the Implementation (shishi yijian). In May, the ministry issued the Notice on Special Expansion of Medical Insurance for Migrant Workers (guanyu kanzhan nongmingong canjia yiliao baoxian zhuanxiang kuoda xingdong de tongzhi ), which aimed to cover more than 20 million migrant workers under the medical insurance system by the end of 2006, and to cover with basic medical insurance all migrant workers who have established long-term working relations with employers in cities and towns by the end of 2008. This indicated that medical insurance for migrant workers had been put on the agenda of the central government. Consequently, many local governments promptly issued opinions, methods, and measures in an effort to solve the medical insurance problem for migrant workers. By the end of 2006, 23.67 million migrant workers had participated in the medical insurance system, and this number increased to 24.1 million by March 2007.26 China was once known for its rural cooperative medical system. However, after the Chinese government launched the System of Contracted Responsibility Linking Remuneration to Output (lianchan chengbao zeren zhi ) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, farm households replaced rural collectives as the basic productive units in rural areas. Meanwhile, the government took a laissez-faire attitude toward the cooperative medical system. Without support from the collective economy, which had been in a decline, the rural cooperative medical system quickly collapsed. According to research conducted in 1985, two years after the abolishment of the People’s Communes (renmin gongshe), the number of villages still practicing cooperative medicine decreased from 90 percent in 1979 to 5 percent then. In 1989, the number decreased further to 4.8 percent.27 In the early 1990s, the Chinese government promised the World Health Organization that China would improve health care in rural areas,28 and it called for 26. Bai Tianliang, “Chengzhen jumin yibao shidian jiang quanmian qitong, feicongye jumin ke canjia” [The experiment of urban resident medical insurance will be launched in full scale, non-employee residents will be covered], Xinhua Net, April 27, 2007, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/health/2007–04/27/content_6029436.htm. 27. Cited from Wang Yanzhong, “Shilun guojia zai nongcun yiliao weisheng baozhang zhong de zuoyong” [My preliminary observations on the state role in rural medical insurance coverage], available at http://www.cc.org.cn/wencui/020603200/0206032015.htm. 28. Ministry of Health, “Guyu woguo nongcun shixian 2000 nian renren xiangyou wei-


“resuming and rebuilding” the rural cooperative medical system. The government, however, had no intention at that time of funding the rural medical system. Instead, it insisted that “the premiums [be] paid mainly by individuals themselves, supplemented by collectively pooled subsidies and supported by government policies,” which sounded practical but actually did not benefit the peasants. As a result, after ten years, the rural cooperative medical system still was not restored as expected. The number of people covered was always lower than 10 percent.29 In early 2003, the Chinese government changed its approach to the rural cooperative medical system. The State Council forwarded the Notice on Establishing a New Rural Cooperative Medical Service System (guanyu jianli xinxing nongcun hezuo yiliao zhidu yijian de tongzhi ), issued by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Agriculture. The notice required provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities to select at least two or three counties to try this new system, and then to expand the system to cover more rural residents. The goal of the notice was to establish the new cooperative medical system across the country by 2010. The difference between the new system and the previous model lay in the support it received from public funds. Besides the contributions from the beneficiaries, the local governments subsidized those peasants who participated in the new system. The central government also subsidized the peasants in rural areas in central and western China with public funds.30 It is very clear from Figure 7 that the addition of public funds greatly helped to promote the development of the new system. In 2003, when the Ministry of Health conducted the Third National Survey on Health Service, the rural cooperative medical system covered only 9.5 percent of the rural population. Four years later, by June 30, 2007, the new system had been sheng baojian de guihua mubiao” [The planned goal of medical care coverage for everyone in the countryside in 2000], March 15, 1990, available at http://www.chinaeh.com/ zhengcefagui/yizheng/yizheng3.htm. 29. Zhang Wenkang, lecture delivered at the Strategic Renovation Forum (zhuangxin zhanliu luntan), China Science Academy (zhongguo kexueyuan), January 31, 2002, http://www.cas.ac.cn/html/Dir/2002/01/31/5616.htm. 30. In 2003, the central government and local government each allocated 10 yuan per person to subsidize the peasants who participated in the new rural cooperative medical care program. Ban Jianfeng, “Woguo tuixing xinxing nongcun hezuo yiliao zhidu” [Our country is launching the new rural cooperative medical care system], Renmin ribao [People’s daily], column 11, January 24, 2003, available at http://www.people.com.cn/GB/ shizheng/3586/20030124/913612.html.


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Figure 7. Rural Cooperative Medical System Coverage carried out in 2,429 counties, with 720 million participants, which accounts for 82.83 percent of the rural residents in China.31 On March 21, 2007, the Executive Meetings of the State Council discussed and passed the Outline of the 11th Five-Year (2006–2010) Plan for Health Development (weisheng shiyi fazhan “shiyiwu” guihua gangyao), which required an overhaul of China’s medical care system to provide basic health care to all urban and rural residents by 2006–2010. With an emphasis on building four medical care schemes (e.g., Basic Medical Insurance System for Urban Employees, Basic Medical Insurance System for Urban Residents, Basic Medical Insurance System for Migrant Workers, and New Rural Cooperative Medical System), China is now working toward its goal of providing public health and basic medical care for everyone. Insurance for Work-Related Injury An employee who suffers a work-related injury, illness, or disability, or death, is entitled to receive economic and material compensation. The 31. Chen Weisong, “Zhongguo 7.2 yi ren canjia hezuo yiliao” [Our country has 720 million peasants who have participated in the new rural cooperative medical insurance program], September 5, 2007, available at http://www.china.com.cn/news/2007–09/05/ content_8805092.htm.


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Figure 8. Industrial Injury Insurance Coverage guiding principle of work-related injury insurance is one of “no-fault compensation” (wugongchang bushi ). Article 73 of the Labor Law of the People’s Republic of China, revealed in 1995, states that “an employee who suffers injuries or occupational diseases on the job is eligible for the social insurance.” To implement the Labor Law, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security issued the Trial Procedures for Industrial Injury Insurance for Enterprise Employees (qiye zhigong gongshang baoxian shixing banfa) in 1996, which stated that the industrial injury insurance system applied equally to all employees in all industrial enterprises in China including private economic organizations. Over the next seven years, the industrial injury insurance system did not make much progress, but the situation changed in 2004, when the State Council announced the Regulations on Industrial Injury Insurance (gongshang baoxian tiaoli ). Consequently, more than 15 million additional employees joined the insurance program each year over the next three years. The number more than doubled within three years, growing from 45.75 million in 2003 to 102.68 million in 2006 (Figure 8). Figure 8 shows that, although the industrial injury insurance system developed quickly, only one-third of urban employees were covered by the program, mainly because it was difficult to include migrant workers in the system. By the end of 2005, only 12.52 million migrant workers participated


in the industrial injury insurance system.32 In May 2006, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security issued the Three-Year Program on Encouraging Migrant Workers to Participate in the Industrial Injury Insurance System (tuijin nongmingong canjia gongshang baoxian sannian xingtong jihua), also known as the Wellness Program (ping’an jihua). The goal was to cover all migrants working in highly dangerous industries (e.g., the coal mining and the construction industries) over the next three years. By the end of 2006, all migrant workers in medium- and large-sized state-owned coal mines were expected to participate in the insurance program; by the end of 2007, more than half of the migrant workers working in small coal mines, noncoal mines, and the construction industry were expected to participate; and by the end of 2008, almost all migrant workers in legal coal mines and noncoal mines and most rural workers in the construction industry are expected to participate. The Wellness Program effectively extended the industrial injury insurance system to migrant workers. By the end of 2006, almost all migrant workers at medium- and large-sized coal mines joined the program in some coal-producing provinces. The total number of covered migrant workers increased to 33 million by the end of August 2007, which almost tripled the number of workers covered in 2005.33 The Ministry of Labor and Social Security will likely have no problem reaching its planned target for 2007, namely, covering 36 million migrant workers by the end of the year.34 Old-Age Insurance Before economic reform, the Chinese government provided old-age insurance via work units to the employees of government agencies, public institutions, urban state-owned enterprises, and some collective enterprises. The disintegration of the unit system and the diversification of the 32. Liu Sheng, “Canjia yibao he gongshang baoxian de nongmingong renshu jun tupo qianwan” [The number of migrant workers who have participated in both medical insurance and work-related injury insurance is breaking 10 million], available at http://nc.people .com.cn/GB/61154/4653823.html. 33. Li Erqing, “Woguo nongmingong canjia gongshang baoxian renshu tupo 3300 wan” [The number of migrant workers covered by industrial injury insurance reached 33 million], CCTV, September 17, 2007, available at http://news.cctv.com/society/20070917/104359 .shtml. 34. Feng Lei, “2007 nian canjia kongshang baoxian nongmingong renshu jiang da 3600 wan” [The work accident insurance will cover 36 million peasant workers in 2007], Xinhua Net, April 2, 2007, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2007–04/02/content_ 5921922.htm.


ownership structure pushed China to search for a new format of old-age insurance. In 1991, the State Council announced the Decisions on Reforming the Old-Age Insurance System for Enterprise Employees (guanyu qiye zhigong yanglao baoxian zhidu gaige de jueding) and brought out a new framework for the old-age insurance system. In 1997, the State Council issued the Decisions on Establishing a Uniform Basic Old-Age Insurance System for Enterprise Employees (guanyu jianli tongyi de qiye zhigong jiben yanglao baoxian zhidu de jueding) to establish an old-age insurance system in urban areas nationwide. This system extended the coverage to urban employees in non-state-owned enterprises and to those who were self-employed. Expanding the coverage was always the focus of old-age insurance reform. In the past decade, old-age insurance coverage for urban employees gradually expanded. From 1989 to 2006, the number of covered urban employees increased from 48.17 million to 141.31 million. The proportion of covered employees in the formal sector increased from 35 percent to 126.6 percent, which meant that many employees from the informal sector have also received coverage.35 It is worth noting that during the same period (1989–2006), the number of covered urban retirees increased from 8.93 million to 46.35 million, accounting for 41 percent and 86.6 percent of the retirees, respectively (Figure 9), so most people who retired from the formal sector now have old-age insurance. The goal of urban old-age insurance is to cover the entire urban working population ( jiuye renyuan).36 From this perspective, the challenge of complete coverage is still formidable. By the end of 2006, 49.9 percent of the urban working population had old-age insurance (Figure 9), which meant that a large segment of the working population in the informal sectors, especially migrant workers, did not yet have old-age insurance. For instance, only 14.17 million migrant workers were covered by the end of 2006. The biggest obstacle facing migrant workers is that their old-age insurance account could only be managed locally. If they move from one 35. In the Chinese statistic system, employees in the formal sector refer to those persons working in, and receiving payment from, units of state ownership, collective ownership, joint ownership, shareholding ownership, foreign ownership, and ownership by entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, and other types of ownership and their affiliated units. 36. In the Chinese statistic system, the term working population ( jiuye renyuan) refers to people who are over sixteen years of age and earn their income from their labor or from managing their business.


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Figure 9. Urban Basic Old-Age Insurance Coverage place to another, they may lose the money in their account. On June 29, 2007, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress issued Labor Contract Law (laodong hetong fa), which prescribed that “the government will take measures to gradually make the old-age insurance account portable throughout the whole country.” This means that, in the future, when China enacts its Law of Social Insurance (shehui baoxian fa), old-age insurance will be managed nationally. Presently, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security is designing an insurance system for migrant workers that aims to resolve these problems and will include a cross-region subsequent transfer system.37 It is more challenging to expand the old-age insurance system in rural areas. In China today, 64 percent of the 140 million elderly people live in rural areas. As early as 1986, China was searching for a way to provide old-age insurance to those in rural areas. Based on experiments conducted in dozens of counties, on January 3, 1992, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued the Basic Social Old-Age Insurance Plan for Villagers (xianji nongcun she37. Wang Wenlong and Xiao Ling, “Laodong he shehui baozhangbu niding nongmingong yanglao baoxian banfa” [The Ministry of Labor and Social Security has drafted a method for migrant workers to participate in old-age insurance), Sina Net, June 10, 2007, available at http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007–06–10/175013196219.shtml.


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Figure 10. Rural Old-Age Insurance Coverage hui yanglao baoxian jiben fang’an). The basic plan’s premiums were paid for mainly by the beneficiaries themselves, supplemented by communitypooled funds and supported by government policies. After 1992, the oldage insurance program was carried out all over the country and the number of rural residents covered steadily increased. By the end of 1997, 82 million rural residents participated in the old-age insurance system. After 1998, however, reforms to the rural old-age insurance system stalled, partly because the institutional reform of 1998 reassigned the managerial responsibility for the rural old-age insurance system from the Ministry of Civil Affairs to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. But, more importantly, Chinese leaders started to question the feasibility of such an insurance system. In July 1999, the State Council pointed out that not all rural areas were ready just yet for old-age insurance. For this reason, it suggested that rural areas with the financial capacity to do so gradually switch to commercial insurance. The change of the policy prompted a sharp decline in coverage in the following five years (Figure 10). The dramatic decline in rural old-age insurance coverage soon drew the attention of the National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Conference. Consequently, suggestions and proposals regarding the rural social insurance system proliferated, and debate about


the necessity and feasibility of the rural old-age insurance became more intense.38 Rural old-age insurance coverage has stagnated for around 54 million people since 2002. The Report of the 16th Party Congress pointed out that “China should develop social insurance and social welfare in urban as well as rural areas. Places with the financial capacity should experiment with the systems of rural old-age insurance, medical care, and minimum income security.” The 3rd Plenary Session of the 16th Party Congress further stated that “the rural old-age insurance system is a system in which the premiums are to be paid mainly by households, supplemented by community-pooled funds and government subsidies.” In the No. 1 Central Document of 2007, the Suggestions on Accelerating the Development of Modern Agriculture and Solidly Advance the New Rural Construction of Socialism (zhonggong zhongyang guwuyuan guanyu jiji fazhan xiandai nongye zhashi tuijin shehuizhuyi xinnongcun jianshe de ruogan yijian), a new expression came to light: “search for various formats of rural old-age insurance.” Therefore, some local governments gradually resumed efforts to search for an appropriate social insurance for the rural population. In these new efforts, the most important change was that the insurance was funded by individuals, the collective, and the government, rather than “paid mainly by the beneficiaries themselves, supplemented community-pooled funds and supported by government policies.” The support from government fiscal subsidies had a significant effect on old-age insurance.39 Currently, Shandong, Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Sichuan, and Xinjiang have already launched this new insurance system based on public subsidies. Among those provinces, Shandong has made the greatest progress. By July 2007, 10.67 million peasants in the province were participating in the rural old-age insurance system.40 38. Regarding the transformation of the rural old-age insurance policy, please see the article by Zhao Dianguo, deputy-head of Rural Social Insurance Department of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, “Nongcun yanglao baoxian gongzuo huigu yu tansuo” [Review of the rural old-age insurance], Renkou yu jihua shengyu [Population and onechild policy], No. 5 (2002), available at http://www.fjlss.gov.cn/ShowInfo.asp?InfoId=425. 39. “Woguo jinnian wenbu tuijin xinxing nongcun shehui yanglao baoxian zhidu” [Our country is gradually improving the new rural social old-age insurance system], CCTV Xinwen lianbo [News], January 10, 2006, available at http://cctv.sina.com.cn/news/2006– 01–10/9058.html. 40. Zhao Xiaoju and Zhao Yongde, “Wosheng nongcun yanglao baoxian canbao renshu quankuo jushou” [Our province has the highest coverage of rural old-age insurance in China], Dazhong ribao [Mass daily], July 5, 2007, available at http://www.shandong.gov .cn/art/2007/07/05/art_5460_369745.html.


Unemployment Insurance In 1986, in order to implement the Labor Contract System and the Bankruptcy Law (bochanfa), the State Council issued the Provisional Regulations on Unemployment Insurance for Employees of State-Owned Enterprises (guoying qiye zhigong daiye baoxian zhanxing guiding), which established unemployment insurance in China. In 1993, in order to implement the Regulations on Transforming the Management of State-Owned Enterprises, the State Council issued the Regulations on Unemployment Insurance for Employees of State-Owned Enterprises (guoying qiye zhigong daiye baoxian guiding). However, both regulations applied only to state-owned enterprises. After the mid-1990s, as a number of state-owned and collective enterprises went bankrupt, or were reorganized, millions of “iron bowl” employees (those guaranteed lifelong employment) were laid off. Because the expanding non-state-owned enterprises did not provide “iron bowl” to begin with, the unemployment issue became more acute. In early 1999, the State Council issued the Regulations on Unemployment Insurance to extend the insurance from the state-owned enterprises to all sorts of enterprises, including collective, private, and foreign-invested enterprises.41 These regulations helped increase the number of employees who participated in the insurance system from 79.28 million in 1998 to 104.08 million in 2000. The regulations had a strong impact in the formal sectors. In 1998, the coverage in formal sectors accounted for only 64.3 percent of the formal-sector employees, and the proportion increased to 92 percent by 2000 (Figure 11). However, at the end of 2006, only 111.87 million individuals had unemployment insurance. In comparison to the year 2000, only 7.79 million were added to the insurance system over the course of those seven years. The coverage rate actually declined in recent years, falling from 45 percent in 2000 to 39.5 percent in 2006 (Figure 11). The four different types of insurance—medical insurance, old-age insurance, and insurance for work-related injury—face similar difficulties in expanding into the informal sector. Why does unemployment insurance in the informal sector have much lower participation than the other kinds of insurance? There are two reasons. On the one hand, employees in the informal sector are not highly motivated, because, according to the Regulations on Unemployment Insurance, compensation from unemployment 41. It is up to provincial governments to decide whether social organizations and their staff, nonprofit service providers and their employees, private commercial and industrial corporations and their employees are required to participate in unemployment insurance.


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Figure 11. Unemployment Insurance Coverage insurance is merely about 20 to 30 percent of the local average salary, which is just slightly higher than the minimum income security system, but much lower than the minimum salary standard. Moreover, the compensation period is no more than twenty-four months. After the minimum income security system accomplished the goal of “covering whoever is eligible for the insurance” (yingbao jinbao) in 2002, unemployment insurance paled in its significance in terms of guaranteeing the minimum income. On the other hand, the government does not have a strong incentive to promote unemployment insurance. In recent years, unemployment insurance has been the subject of debate in China’s policy circle. Although expressed ideas vary, the consensus is to abandon the unemployment insurance system altogether, while strengthening the minimum income security system. This explains why the government has not done much in the area of unemployment insurance. Conclusion China is experiencing “a transformation unprecedented in thousands of years” (qiannian weiyou zhi da bianju). More than one hundred years ago, the Qing official Li Hongzhang used these words to describe the era


he was living in. Two decades later, the May Fourth generation had a similar take on their time, too. However, in terms of the economic foundation and the speed, depth, and scope of the social structure’s transformation, no other era can be compared to the last two decades or so. During the SelfStrengthening Movement (1860–1890), “the Western influence spreading from the East” (xixue dongjian) started on the east coast; the countryside in the central and western regions was not touched. In the early twentieth century, the Western economy invaded China. It destroyed the craft industry along the coast area, but the traditional agricultural economy and the village structure—clans—were not greatly affected. After the establishment of the People’s Republic, public ownership replaced private ownership, and the planned economy replaced the market. But almost all people in urban areas were attached to their work units for life, and the majority of peasants in rural areas depended on their collectives and families. There were limited rural markets, but they were just the necessary supplement to a largely self-sufficient economy. Such a lifestyle was not very different from the earlier one that had been based on close family and local ties. In the early 1980s, China started its transformation toward a market economy. In the beginning, market forces had only marginal influence on the Chinese economy, but very soon they started to erode the planned and public economy. In the end, the market forces went beyond the economy and engulfed the whole society. Within two decades, market forces grew so powerful that they overwhelmed all areas, enterprise, families, and individuals. These changes were unprecedented and the most dramatic in Chinese history. The market has magic powers. It turns stone into gold. In a market economy, great social wealth is created. Chinese people who had suffered from a shortage of material goods quickly experienced a period of surplus. People experienced changes they had never dreamed of. Nevertheless, the market mechanism was not only the accelerator of the economy but a double-edged sword. It relentlessly cut the moral linkage between individuals and various social groups and transformed people into creatures who pursued maximum interests in the market. When market forces turned the society into a market society, people who had previously depended on the collective, unit, and family were forced to start living on their own income. Paradoxically, however, modern society is full of risks, which makes it difficult for individuals (especially those who live in a substrate of society) to take care of themselves. When the fast transformation toward the market broke the traditional social safety net, it threatened to destroy the whole


society. Many people in China felt that, while the economy was prospering, all sorts of uncertainties were surfacing, and that the country was facing one crisis after another. Amid this background, protective countermovements against the market emerged. More people, including top policy makers, gradually realized that the market was not the ultimate goal, but at best the means to improve people’s social welfare. The market is necessary, but the market has to be embedded in society. The government has to play an active role in the market economy to prevent a disembedded and self-regulated market economy. As Polanyi states, the expansion of the market triggers the countermovement to protect human beings, nature, and productive organizations; protective legislation and other interventions are the characteristics of this countermovement. I have offered a great deal of data to show that a countermovement already started in China after its brief encounter with a “market society” in the 1990s. A social market is emerging in China. In the social market, the market is still the principal mechanism for resource allocation. However, through redistribution, the government will strive to re-embed the market into social and ethical relations. More specifically, the government will take effective measures to decommercialize the fields that are closely connected with human rights, and allow all social groups to enjoy the benefits of market operations while shouldering the costs of market operations. The recent policy changes show that the Chinese government has the political willingness and fiscal capacity to nurture a social market, even though both political willingness and fiscal capacity need to be further strengthened. Despite the fact that China still faces many serious problems, the eventual emergence of social policies marks a historic turning point, the significance of which can never be overemphasized.

The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China

Alexander Day “The peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis.” So said Li Changping, a rural cadre from central China’s Hubei Province, in an open letter to Premier Zhu Rongji in early 2000. The letter’s publication in a national newspaper helped spark a debate concerning the causes of and solution to the problems of rural China, reformulating the way intellectuals and government officials talk about the rural and leading to major changes in government policy. Alarm over the crisis I would like to thank Gail Hershatter, Chris Connery, Arif Dirlik, Ana Candela, Angelina Chin, Matthew Hale, Charles Hayford, Wenqing Kang, and Xiaoping Sun for their comments on drafts of this essay. Errors and infelicities are, of course, my own. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. . The letter, written by Li Changping in early 2000, was sent to Premier Zhu Rongji and later published in Southern Weekend in the issue dated August 24, 2000. See Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua [I spoke the truth to the premier] (Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 2002), 20. . In 2004, the state refocused its attention on rural issues after decades of neglect. The state began by looking for ways to increase rural incomes, with the abolition of the agricultural tax and grain production price supports as its primary methods. By late 2005, the state called for a major new program that called for the “building of a socialist new boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-003 © 2008 by Duke University Press


of Chinese rural society has led to official and unofficial efforts in recent years to address the problems of rural China. It is the unofficial efforts, led by concerned intellectuals, that are the subject of the discussion here. In the 1980s, the main people expressing discontent were urban, and the reform of rural China was largely judged a success. While throughout the 1990s rural unrest intensified markedly, it was not until the publication of Li’s letter that this crystallized into a new recognition within the public sphere that rural China was in a crisis. This anxiety has given rise in recent years to a diverse set of rural activities, experiments, and research that have coalesced into a rural social and cooperative movement, the socalled New Rural Reconstruction Movement (Xin xiangcun jianshe yundong, hereafter NRRM). This major intervention by intellectuals and rural activists, who argue that this rural crisis cannot be understood simply as a problem of rural economics and agricultural production but as a social crisis that calls for the reconstruction of rural social life, is best grasped as a Polanyian social protective movement in reaction to the marketization of society and perceived lack of an urban solution. As a critique of developmentalism and the economic mode of analysis, it turns to culture and cooperative relations as vital to the reorganization of rural social life. The contemporary rural social and cooperative movement is marked by diversity and complexity, as had been its antecedents in the 1930s, to which many of the activists look for inspiration. This essay focuses on the politics and practices of one effort at transforming rural society, led by the influential intellectual Wen Tiejun, who has played a seminal role in articulating problems of rural China and in promoting the NRRM. My underlying premise here is that contemporary China’s rural problems need to be viewed in a global perspective. These problems have much to do with China’s plunge into globalization over the last decade and a half, and the marginalization of the Chinese peasantry is part of a global trend. Within the next few years, half the world’s population will be urban—a world historical milestone. This global urbanization process has been uneven, however, and has provoked powerful, sometimes violent, resistance. This resistance belies the teleological necessity often assumed by ideologues of globalization. Home to the world’s largest rural population, China is a countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun). It is as yet unclear what this will mean for the countryside, but the state is now investing heavily in rural education and infrastructure development. . Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 1.

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key site to investigate this transformation and how people react to and understand it. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the NRRM has strong resonances with non-Chinese rural social movements of the 1990s that came to prominence in the antiglobalization movement, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil. Activists seeking to resolve problems of rural China are part of this global effort to find an alternative to the future envisaged by champions of globalization. Wen Tiejun and the Intellectual Foundations of the NRRM Most of the intellectual and rural activists of the NRRM are not state officials, but they have an entangled relationship with the state, and, as they seek both to shape government policy and open a political space for experimentation, intentionally so. In other words, this movement is not one of intellectual dissidence against a unified state but is a powerful critique that operates across a diverse array of actors with varying relationships to the state. New rural reconstruction, taking its name from a rural Chinese populist movement of the 1930s, stems from a reflection on the history of Chinese development and a recognition that the present is a turning point that offers an opportunity for a new direction for rural society. It is at once a critique of capitalist market economics and a budding practice of rural experimentation that looks for solutions to rural problems by transforming rural society and the rural-urban relationship. It is an attempt to reconstruct the social, economic, and cultural relations of rural society, relations that were repeatedly in crisis across the twentieth century. The NRRM grew out of a shift in the debate on rural problems—from the promotion of rural and agricultural economics to a focus on the peasantry—that began in the late 1990s. Wen Tiejun, an agricultural economist and perhaps the most important intellectual activist promoting new rural reconstruction, was a key figure in producing this discursive shift. In the . See, for example, Nora McKeon, Michael Watts, and Wendy Wolford, “Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice,” Civil Society and Social Movements, programme paper, no. 8 (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2004). . Wen has been the dean of the School of Agricultural and Rural Development at Renmin University of China—now a center of rural reconstruction activity—since its founding in 2004; before that he was the chief editor of a key journal of the movement, Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban) [China reform (rural edition)], until it stopped publication and Wen moved to Renmin University. Earlier he was a researcher at the Agriculture Ministry’s


late 1990s, Wen used the media to promote the formulation sannong wenti (sannong is nongmin, nongcun, nongye—“peasants,” “rural society,” and “agriculture”; wenti means “problems”), which he first devised in the late 1980s while conducting rural experiments for the state. He now argued that surplus rural labor and the well-being of the peasantry, not agricultural production, were the key to understanding the long-term development strategy of China as well as its current problems. In this formulation, the three aspects of sannong wenti must be treated holistically and systematically. Wen rejects viewing rural issues as a problem of rural economic and agricultural development, as most state policy discussion on agriculture in the 1990s did. At the same time, he rejects separating a discussion of the peasant population from one on agricultural and rural social issues, as many intellectual discussions on urbanization have. Underlying the state’s rural reform strategy is the economic rationale that giving land to households to manage under a market economy would increase economic incentives and, in turn, production. From decollectivization in the 1980s until the eruption of the debate on rural China at the end of the century, this atomization and marketization strategy has not changed dramatically, and for most of that time, rural China receded into the background as discussion focused on urban reforms. Wen’s formulation and Li’s public letter brought the peasant back to the foreground. In the first years of the twenty-first century, the sannong wenti formulation became shorthand for all rural problems, largely replacing the categories of agricultural economics (nongye jingji ) and rural development (nongcun fazhan). Now, whenever state officials, intellectuals, or the media discuss rural issues, sannong wenti is the category they use. Its newfound discursive dominance means that it is much harder to consider rural problems as simply a matter of agricultural technical development or urbanization. This formulation was not simply a quick political intervention but was built on a reflection on the last two hundred years of Chinese history and its relationship to the rest of the world. The anxiety of the late 1990s concerning rural crisis drove scholars such as Wen Tiejun and Cao Jinqing, an influential writer on rural issues, Rural Reform Experimental District Office; he left because of differences in the direction of rural experimentation. . Li Changping adopted the sannong wenti formulation from Wen Tiejun. The quote at the beginning of this article is a modification of sannong wenti. After Li’s letter was published in the Southern Weekend, Li joined Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban) at the invitation of Wen. Personal interview with Li Changping, Guizhou, January 24–25, 2005. . Cao Jinqing is a professor of sociology at East China University of Science and Tech-


to reconsider the long history of Chinese development. Their historicization of the condition of rural China is founded upon the limits global capitalism placed on China’s industrialization process and the attendant necessity of delinking from that world system for development to take place. Cao Jinqing places current rural problems in the long-term context of China’s industrialization and the uneven development of the capitalist world system. State-driven internal accumulation of capital meant that agriculture bore the burden of the industrialization process, and this created the tense relationship between the peasantry and the local government, responsible as it was for the extraction of agricultural surplus. Wen’s reflections on Chinese history at the end of the twentieth century focus on the attempt to industrialize the Chinese economy from the late Qing dynasty on, an attempt which was continually thwarted.10 The main problem China faced, according to Wen, was that it could not plunder foreign resources through colonialism as the West had done in order to begin the industrialization process; it had to accumulate primary capital internally, in the form of agricultural surplus, through a process Wen calls “State Capitalist Primitive Accumulation.” It was the necessary process of primitive accumulation during the Maoist period that determined the structural relation between the countryside and urban China and the institutions needed to organize the transfer of surplus to begin industrialization. These included the commune system, state-controlled purchasing and marketing, nology in Shanghai. He is the author of Huanghe bian de Zhongguo (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2000), translated as China Along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). Cao is not an activist in or vocal advocate of the rural reconstruction movement per se, but he is supportive of the general project, and his positions are close to those associated with rural reconstruction. . For many of those of whom we could loosely say are on the left in China, such as Cao and Wen, this reflection on modern Chinese history has been brought into conversation with world-systems analysis, which has become an increasingly popular weapon in the critique of Chinese liberal ideology as an abstract universalism. The Maoist influence on world-systems analysis concerning delinking should be noted as well. Along with the influence of world-systems theory, the New Left in China is also deeply Polanyian. This is the subject of the fourth chapter of my dissertation, “The Return of the Peasant: History, Politics, and the Peasantry in Postsocialist China” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2007). . Personal interview with Cao Jinqing, Shanghai, June 24, 2004. 10. This discussion comes from Wen’s important article “‘Sannong wenti:’ shiji mo de fansi” [End-of-century reflections on sannong wenti ], Dushu [Readings], no. 12 (December 1999): 3–11; translated as “Centenary Reflections on the ‘Three Dimensional Problem’ of Rural China,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (August 2001): 287–95.


the rationing of grain and urban welfare, and the dual household registration system, which kept rural residents firmly in the countryside, all of which were instituted in the 1950s. These institutions reduced the cost and increased the efficiency of transferring rural surplus into the industrialization process, thus bringing about the industrialization of China and producing “the property owned by the whole people”—which Wen critically notes is now being redistributed with people making various claims to it.11 This process allowed China to accomplish the primitive accumulation necessary to the foundation of industrial society; nevertheless, according to Wen and others, China is still not in the position to shift to the American path of development.12 This is because of the intertwining of the contradictions produced by the process of delinking from global capitalism as well as conditions particular to China’s internal development (both world-structural and national difference). These conditions form the raison d’être for new rural reconstruction. I will isolate four key issues here: first, the sheer size of the population, the ratio between it and arable land, and surplus rural labor; second, the character of land use, in which farmland is used as a means of subsistence more than as a factor in production; third, the binary separation of the urban and rural populations put into effect in the 1950s and the attendant inequality in income (now above 3 to 1);13 and fourth, the destruction of rural culture and social structure during the twentieth century. First, according to Wen Tiejun, relying on urban migration to solve issues of surplus rural population would mean the Latin Americanization of China—the creation of urban slums to warehouse poor rural migrants.14 He Xuefeng15 points out that the most optimistic estimates of the urbanization rate would mean that in fifty years the urban population would roughly double to 800 million people. With population growth, however, this would not reduce the rural population, which would remain between 800 and 900 11. Wen, “‘Sannong wenti:’ shiji mo de fansi,” 9–10. 12. Wen, “‘Sannong wenti:’ shiji mo de fansi,” 10. 13. In 1985, it was about 1.8 to 1. 14. Wen, “‘Sannong wenti:’ shiji mo de fansi,” 11. Also see Wen Tiejun, “Jiegou xiandaihua” [Deconstructing modernization], in Jiegou xiandaihua—Wen Tiejun yanjiang lu [Deconstructing modernization—the speeches of Wen Tiejun] (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2004), 10. An English translation of this article is available as Wen Tiejun, “Deconstructing Modernization,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 39, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 10–25. 15. He Xuefeng is a professor at China Central Technology University’s China Rural Administration Research Center and editor of Sannong Zhongguo [Sannong China], one of the most important journals linked to the NRRM.


million.16 In addition, rural labor-power, when viewed from an economic standpoint as a commodity, is in surplus.17 Chinese agriculture, according to Wen, could operate with around 100 million people, while the rural laboring population is about 600 million. At least 100 million of that population are working in the cities at any one time and another 200 million in rural secondary and tertiary industries; that still leaves a huge surplus population.18 With such a large surplus in the countryside, is it possible to treat labor-power as a commodity? And if not, how is the rural population to sustain itself within a market economy? If the urban employment market cannot absorb the rural unemployed, then who will support them? At this juncture, Wen points out, a social security system for rural residents would be too expensive for the Chinese state. Second, as Wen Tiejun argues, in a society with a high population and a small amount of arable land, land becomes a “subsistence resource” (shengcun ziliao), not just a “production resource” (shengchan ziliao).19 This distinction, in addition to Wen’s argument about surplus rural labor, echoes Karl Polanyi’s discussion of “fictitious commodities.” For Polanyi, land, labor, and money could not be full commodities, and treating them in such a utopian manner would lead to the destruction of both society and nature, engendering a social protective movement in which society reacts against the market to maintain its existence.20 This issue becomes a centerpiece for Wen’s policy argument about China’s development strategy. Chinese peasants need to survive somehow, and if privatization of agricultural land pushes them off the land, what are their alternatives? If land is primarily a “subsistence resource,” and not a profit-making resource, then it must be distributed equally among villagers; economic efficiency becomes 16. He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo [New rural China] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2003), 245. This argument is also made by other scholars of rural China: see, for example, Huang Ping, “Bu pingheng fazhan geju xia de nongcun kunjing” [The predicament of rural China under uneven development], Shijie 9 (2002): 29–52; Wen Tiejun, “Di er bu nongcun gaige mianlin de liang ge jiben maodun” [The two basic contradictions that the second step of rural reform faces], Zhanlue yu guanli 3 (1996): 111. This article was one of the first in which Wen promoted the concept of sannong wenti. 17. Much of the economic literature on rural China speaks of peasants as “surplus agricultural labor-power” (nongye shengyu laodongli ). 18. See He Xuefeng, Xiangcun yanjiu de guoqing yishi [Rural research and national conditions consciousness] (Wuhan: Hubei Renmin Chubanshe, 2004), 81. 19. Wen, “‘Sannong wenti:’ shiji mo de fansi,” 8. 20. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 75–77.


second to equality under these structural conditions. These arguments form the foundation for the NRRM as a movement to protect rural society from its utopian marketization. Third, the Maoist industrialization strategy of delinking China from global capitalism, while necessary, left the country with a binary system that places the city and the countryside in an “antagonistic contradiction” with each other, producing the present sannong wenti.21 As Wen argues, the rural sector was made to sacrifice for the development of the nation, and, in part because of this, it is not in a position to be able to compete within the global capitalist market. Cao Jinqing points out that China’s small family farms brought about with decollectivization in the rural reforms early in the 1980s have no chance of operating efficiently within the national and international market system, but rural households also rely on those markets for agricultural inputs and sales. This central sannong contradiction means that land privatization would lead to rural poverty, unrest, and growing inequality, not agricultural efficiency and smooth urbanization.22 Cao Jinqing sees peasant organization as a key to overcoming the contradiction between “the small peasant household and the big market.”23 Yet the project of peasant organization is fraught with difficulties: Cao, for example, believes that a peasantry with production based on small households does not have the ability to organize on its own.24 Overcoming this weakness within the national economy and within political society thus requires outside intervention. Fourth, rural reconstruction also means the rebuilding of rural social life and the organization of the peasantry. Here, the influence of the 1930s rural reconstruction movement, and in particular of Liang Shuming, an active leader and theorist of the earlier movement, is clear. Liang argued that to surmount the rural crisis of the 1930s, which he largely blamed on foreign influence, rural social relations would have to be reconstructed and developed to a new level of collective responsibility through education and training under the guidance of enlightened intellectuals.25 Cao Jinqing, an 21. Wen, “‘Sannong wenti:’ shiji mo de fansi,” 10. 22. Cao Jinqing, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti” [Sannong wenti during the process of social transition], Sannong Zhongguo, no. 5 (Spring 2005): 13 and 19. 23. Cao, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti,” 17–18. 24. Cao, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti,” 15–16. 25. Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).


admirer of Liang, argues that the land reform movement at the time of liberation in 1949 and the state-run collectivization process destroyed the old rural society—one that had been in crisis, both economic and social, for some time. Commune-based rural society, in turn, was similarly disrupted by the decollectivization that began the reform period. Collective farming was replaced by individual household farming, but rural public society was not rebuilt.26 As many on the left in China put it, after the new household farming system increased agricultural production, the state largely divested itself of rural public works and social welfare: collectively owned irrigation, public medical care,27 and schooling fell into disrepair, and often the local government took on a predatory relationship to the rural population.28 For those connected to the movement, to reconstruct rural culture and social relationships primarily means to build cooperative and community social relations that transcend the interests of individual household productive units and their mediation by the market. It is these relationships that will allow rural villages to protect themselves against the predatory behavior of state actors or market forces. Li Changping, for example, argues that even if individual households were given formal property rights over the land they till—one argument put forward by advocates of land privatization—acting as individual households, they would still not have the power to resist land seizures. The best way for them to protect themselves, he says, is collectively, but this would take the reconstruction of collective social relations, a major project of the NRRM.29 Sannong wenti, therefore, is a condition particular to the reform period in which China once again has been opened to global capitalism, 26. Personal interview with Cao Jinqing, Shanghai, June 24, 2004. 27. Many argue that the SARS epidemic was made worse by the lack of state attention to rural public health care since the reform period began. See, for example, Wang Shaoguang, “Renmin de jiankang ye shi ying daoli,” Dushu, no. 6 (June 2003): 16–24; translated by the China Study Group as “People’s Health Matters Too,” available at http://www .chinastudygroup.org/index.php?action=front2&type=view&id=37. This article was one of the most controversial published in Dushu in recent years. Also see Arif Dirlik, “Global Modernity, Spatial Reconfigurations, and Global Health: Perspectives from the People’s Republic of China,” boundary 2 33, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 99–122. 28. Even after the period of heavy “primitive accumulation,” to use Wen’s phrase, the rural local government often used high taxation and fees as a form of rent seeking. This predatory relationship, particularly egregious during the 1990s, is clearly rendered in Li Changping’s “The Crisis in the Countryside,” in One China, Many Paths, ed. Chaohua Wang (London: Verso, 2003), 198–218. 29. Personal interview with Li Changping, Guizhou, January 24–25, 2005.


and market relationships have developed rapidly. Yet, no matter how bad the situation in the countryside is, new rural reconstruction advocates and other rural scholars recognize the present as an opportunity for rebuilding rural society. For Wen Tiejun, China has entered a period in which primitive accumulation for industrialization has now stopped. Cao Jinqing likewise sees the present as a moment in which agriculture will no longer have to support the state and industrialization.30 For Li Changping, China is now moving into the “post-taxation period” (hou shuifei shidai ), in which primitive accumulation from agriculture ends. Under the formulation “building a socialist new countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun), the CCP itself has recently proposed that it is time for “industry to help agriculture” (gongye fanbu nongye).31 This recent shift in the political economy of China’s development, and in response the shift in government policy, has opened a new opportunity for rural society, and it is here that new rural reconstruction is located.32 The new situation calls for rural experimentation and institutional innovation, the heart of the emerging NRRM. Rural social relations and politics in the post-1949 period were defined by the extraction of surplus from agriculture for industrialization; this has produced a tense relationship between local Party representatives and the peasantry. Li argues that with the end of extraction there is a chance to rebuild the social life of the countryside; in particular, the relationship between the local government and the peasantry could improve, with peasants gaining control over local resources and aid coming from 30. Cao, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti,” 16. 31. Fanbu implies that agriculture has nourished industry, but the situation reverses where industry must now nourish agriculture. This major new government policy on rural China should be seen as a response to a complex series of factors. On the one hand, the CCP is responding to rural unrest that increasingly became visible from the late 1990s on and damaging to the legitimacy of the CCP. On the other hand, the new leadership of the CCP is clearly moving away from the economic policies of the previous regime that relied so heavily on the export economy and infrastructure investment. Rural development is vital for building internal consumer demand, which cannot be sustained by the urban middle class alone. Discussions on sannong wenti by intellectuals such as Wen Tiejun have also played a role in the drafting of these new policies. 32. Recently, those associated with Wen Tiejun have changed the second term in this category from xiangcun to nongcun. Both can be translated as “rural,” although only xiangcun can be translated as “village.” This change brought the terminology more in line with the CCP’s new formulation—as of late 2005—for rural work, jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun (building a socialist new countryside), thus creating more political space for the movement to develop.


the central government. Li sees this as an opening for a third cooperative movement.33 If what we are witnessing now are the initial stages of a third rural cooperative movement, perhaps one way to understand twentieth-century Chinese history is as a history of attempts to develop cooperative social relations in order to protect and transform a rural society in crisis, a crisis always related to global capitalism. As Wen Tiejun has commented, the present cooperative movement has a greater chance of success than that of the 1930s, because in the meantime rural China went through land reform, and China has already successfully industrialized—revolution has made reconstruction possible. Here we could note, following Wen, that it was exactly through collectivization in the 1950s that China was able to industrialize. In other words, it has been rural cooperative relations, whether imposed by the state or not, that have given China some breathing space within global capitalism. Yet the collectivization of the 1950s might be seen as somewhat of an aberration in the history of twentieth-century rural cooperative movements. First, it was largely pushed by the state. Second, it paid little attention to local circumstances. And, third, it was chiefly instituted to facilitate the extraction of surplus to aid the industrialization process. Perhaps the present, as Cao, Li, and Wen, among others, suggest, is the best opportunity for rural cooperative social relations to succeed. The former rural reconstruction movement of the 1930s, like the present one, brought together a wide range of rural reform efforts, which had been building particularly since 1927 in reaction to the Communists’ efforts at rural organization.34 The most important activists of the former movement were Liang Shuming, who promoted a Confucian form of activism in which intellectuals went to the countryside to rebuild rural society and conducted extensive rural experimentation in Shandong Province in the 1930s, and Yan Yangchu,35 whose rural reconstruction ideas developed out of his work in mass education and who experimented with rural reconstruction in Ding County, Hebei Province, in the 1930s.36 Both intellectuals have 33. The first being that of the rural reconstruction movement of the 1930s, and the second that of collectivization during the 1950s. 34. Alitto, The Last Confucian, 228. 35. For more on Yan, see Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 36. Yan’s rural activities were based in Zhaicheng Village, Ding County, the present site of the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute and the Zhaicheng rural cooperative, both founded by locals with the help of Wen Tiejun and development NGOs.


inspired activists in the present-day NRRM, in particular for their populist insistence that intellectuals “go to the people,” and that only out of practice and experimentation would China find a route out of national crisis. Liang Shuming’s vision was the most comprehensive, seeing rural reconstruction as a harmonious Chinese path to development, and his activity the most effective, helping to found hundreds of cooperatives in Shandong Province without foreign support before the experimentation was stopped by the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s. Liang believed that this voluntary development process would lead to collective ownership and the blending of rural and urban society. Rural reconstruction meant cultural revival for Liang, who believed that Chinese culture was superior to Western culture, and that a Chinese cultural awakening, based on village culture, would be of great value to the world in overcoming the problems of Western-style industrialization with it strong rural-urban split. Yan Yangchu was a Christian and thus much less critical of the West, although he still believed that rural industrial development could allow China to bypass the problems of Western industrialization.37 Tying the cooperative movements of the twentieth century so firmly to the rural reconstruction movement of the 1930s has facilitated the operation of a dichotomy between traditional culture and Western modernization within rural reconstruction discourse. Critical of the assumption that modernization equals urbanization, Li Yuanxing,38 for example, characterizes the NRRM as the latest stage of a century of attempts to find an alternative modernization path based on rural China instead of urban China.39 The rural Chinese path (xiangtu Zhongguo de lujing) is native to China and traditional culture, whereas the urban route is a Western import and comes at the price of sacrificing the peasantry as well as the environment. Modernization, according to Li, is a Western theory that takes as its object the non-West and should be understood as “Westernization.” It has gained legitimacy through its linkage to nationalism in a globalizing world of com37. Others involved in agricultural development during the 1920s and 1930s never made a connection between the rural and the native. Many Christian missionaries were also involved in attempts to transform village life and agriculture. See Randall E. Stross, The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 38. Li Yuanxing is a professor of sociology at Anhui University. 39. Li Yuanxing, “Xiangtu Zhongguo vs chengshi Zhongguo—dangdai Zhongguo xiandaihua lujing xuanze chuyi” [Rural China vs. urban China—a modest proposal for contemporary China’s choice of modernization path], Sannong Zhonguo, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 79–85.


petition between nation-states, valuing the strength of the nation before the “people’s livelihood” (minsheng). This point echoes the arguments of Liang Shuming eighty years earlier. At the time, prominent liberals responded to Liang by saying that his rural-centered development plan would mean a weak Chinese nation on the international stage.40 But, as Li Yuanxing points out, just as Liang did earlier, in the end the urban-centered industrialization strategy is unsustainable and destructive. Li sees the rural Chinese path, which, like the urban modernization path, is a response to globalization, as the result of a reflection on the problems of the urban modernization path in relation to “national conditions” (guoqing). This reflection, according to Li, has led to a century of alternative rural modernization experiments, from Yan Yangchu’s rural reconstruction to the NRRM of the present. Li, however, is silent on the Maoist period. This alternative modernization path means putting the people’s livelihood first; here Li explicitly ties the alternative he advocates to the guiding formulation of the development and governance strategy of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, “taking people as the root” (yi ren wei ben). Li’s conscious subsumption of his “modest proposal” within the dominant Hu-Wen formulation is replicated throughout rural reconstruction discourse, an attempt, no doubt, both to create political space for the movement and to influence government policy. Culture itself has become an important category in the theory and practice of new rural reconstruction. Within rural reconstruction discourse, culture is used in a number of senses. First, it is used as a mobilization tool—activists often use cultural troupes (wenyi dui ) in order to build group cohesion before developing larger projects. Second, it is often used to designate rural social relations and organization, which are not reducible to economic categories; this includes productive relations as well as projects such as women’s associations and old people’s associations. He Xuefeng and Li Yuanxing go further, however, using the term culture to argue that the value system of rural China itself must be rebuilt. This value system stands in opposition to that of Western-style development with its focus on economics. Thus He Xuefeng, at odds with some other advocates of rural reconstruction, stresses that rural reconstruction is not primarily a solution to the problems of the rural economy, and that a focus on the rural economy conceals the importance of the social and cultural problems of rural China. He argues that traditional rural social organization was shattered by the revolu40. See Alitto, The Last Confucian, 270.


tion and market reforms, and that “the provision of basic, rural public goods has increasingly become a problem.”41 The central problematic is rural social relations and the public sphere. Thus, while the government decided to significantly increase its rural investment since 2003, He cautions that such investment should not go to individual households but to the building of public goods and the support of rural cultural projects, which have been marginalized by the market economy.42 Rural reconstruction, according to He, can organize public and cooperative projects through which a new culture that values human relationships and the relationship with nature can be established.43 Liu Laoshi, one of the most active organizers of the movement, also stresses that the movement should not raise peasant expectations that it can considerably increase their incomes. Instead, the movement should focus on fostering the culture of cooperation.44 Yet establishing a culture of cooperation is one of the difficulties of building cooperatives, according to many rural activists, who say the household responsibility system, the basis of reform period agriculture, has atomized rural society.45 The New Cooperatives Peasant and intellectual activists have initiated many attempts over the last several years to create peasant cooperatives. Much of this activity initially had little or no connection to the NRRM. But several key experiments that began independently have, as they developed, come under the rubric of the movement, gaining national support and recognition as models of rural development. 41. He Xuefeng, Xiangcun yanjiu de guoqing yishi, 82. 42. He Xuefeng, Xiangcun yanjiu de guoqing yishi, 83. 43. See He Xuefeng, “Xin nongcun jianshe yu Zhongguo daolu” [New rural construction and the Chinese path] (2006), available at http://www.wyzxwyzx.com/Article/ Class19/200608/8853.html (accessed November 2006). An English translation of this article is available as He Xuefeng, “New Rural Construction and the Chinese Path,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 39, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 26–38. 44. It is in part this focus on culture that has led many within the movement to a new appreciation for Liang Shuming. 45. Personal interview, Liu Laoshi, Beijing, July 2006; Liu Laoshi, “Nongcun de jingshen wenhua chongjian” [Rebuilding the rural spirit and culture] (2006), available at http://www .wyzxsx.com (accessed August 10, 2006); and “Xin nongcun jianshe zhong de wenhua chongjian” [Cultural reconstruction in new rural reconstruction] (2006), available at http:// www.snzg.cn/shownews.asp?newsid=14129 (accessed August 10, 2006).


One of the most discussed cooperative models is that of Lishu County in Jilin Province.46 The Lishu cooperatives were developed independently under the guidance of Jiang Bailin, a bank employee. In the mid-1990s, he took part in a major reform in rural banking and a push toward government divestment and privatization. An attempt to make the rural credit cooperatives into peasant-shareholding organizations was not successful, however, as peasants did not buy into the cooperatives, which meant that the government still had to fund them. At the same time, the credit cooperatives did not usually loan money to peasants, as there was little to guarantee repayment and little profit to be made. In 2000, Jiang decided to experiment with peasant-run cooperatives in order to guarantee the loans. Jiang saw peasant-producer cooperatives as the missing institution in the new, post-reform countryside. By 2004, Jiang had helped to establish nine “new cooperatives” (xin hezuoshe), as Jiang calls them, in Lishu County. The Taiping Town cooperative, established in 2001, is one of the most successful and comprehensive. When I visited the cooperative in 2004, it had 36 member families; by October of 2005, member households reached 330.47 It began as a purchasing-marketing cooperative with eight member families who raised and sold pigs. Jiang Bailin arranged for them to receive a loan for pig feed that was collectively guaranteed by the members of the co-op. Buying the feed collectively also meant a significant drop in the price of feed, most of the savings being reinvested in credit union shares. Collectively selling the pigs also helped increase the price, and this profit was kept by the members. As members bought more shares in the credit union, the amount loaned to them increased as well. The pigs, although individually owned, were raised together in a building equipped with a biogas facility that provides energy for member households. The government itself operates a large number of specialized cooperatives both for credit and for purchasing and sales, but these are top-down organizations with no democratic management. Jiang stresses that his cooperatives are different in two senses: they are voluntary, democratically run—organized and managed by peasants themselves—and are 46. I visited the Lishu cooperatives in the summer of 2004 together with Robert Weil. For Weil’s account, see “Conditions of the Working Classes in China,” Monthly Review 58, no. 2 (June 2006): 25–48. 47. Xie Yongmo, “Taiping Baixin Nongmin Hezuoshe gaikuang” [The general situation of the Taiping Commoner Trust Peasant Cooperative], in Xin nongcun jianshe shijian zhanshi [The practical exploration of new rural reconstruction], ed. Wen Tiejun (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2006), 151.


comprehensive. Jiang’s “new cooperatives” attempt to combine credit coops, production co-ops, and purchasing and sales co-ops in one organization. This comprehensiveness makes these cooperatives more of a process than a static form and allows the cooperatives to develop along with the rural community. When I visited the Taiping Town cooperative in 2004, it was building a feed processing plant, since completed, that uses locally grown inputs. The plant was intended to produce pig feed that could supply up to a thousand households. Members would receive cheap feed, and the rest would be sold at market value. The operation of the plant encouraged a rapid growth in cooperative membership. The cooperative planned to hire a manager for the feed plant, with some members giving up farming altogether to work in the plant for a wage. This locally driven industrialization, therefore, is shifting some farm laborers into nonagricultural work, bringing about the transformation of village society and slowly overcoming the rural-urban divide. This development utilizes cooperative social relations to help further integrate local society; the “interaction of industry and agriculture” (gong nong hudong) means that the local need for agricultural inputs drives local industrialization, and that industrialization, in turn, helps to develop local agriculture.48 Unlike the initial establishment of cooperatives in Lishu County, which came to the attention of rural reconstruction activists only after they had been founded, the cooperatives of Lankao County, Henan Province, were always under the supervision of new rural reconstruction activists, in particular He Huili, an assistant professor at the China Agricultural University and a tireless advocate of rural reconstruction.49 One of the strengths of the NRRM has been Wen Tiejun’s ability to incorporate the innovative work of others within the movement. By the time the cooperatives were established in Lankao, Jiang’s Lishu cooperatives had become a model for rural reconstruction activists.50 The Lankao cooperative experiments began 48. Xie, “Taiping Baixin Nongmin Hezuoshe gaikuang,” 152. 49. The information on the Lankao cooperatives comes from discussions with He Huili and other activists as well as from He Huili, “Xin xiangcun jianshe shiyan zai Lankao” [New rural reconstruction experiments in Lankao], in Xin nongcun jianshe shijian zhanshi, 84–102. An English translation of this article is available as He Huili, “Experiments of New Rural Construction in Lankao,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 39, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 50–79. 50. Jiang Bailin led a training session on cooperatives at the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zhaicheng in the spring of 2004, with Zhaicheng peasants founding a cooperative at the time.


when He Huili temporarily worked as a deputy director responsible for agriculture in Lankao County. With the assistance of student and rural reconstruction activists, she guided peasants in six villages to found five cultural troupes, four cooperatives, and two associations for the elderly. In He Huili’s experience, the cultural troupes have been vital in developing cooperative relationships that form the basis for economic cooperatives. Echoing He Xuefeng and others, she sees the culture of cooperation and not just economic cooperatives as crucial to the reconstruction of rural society. In Chenzhai Village in Lankao, for example, a women’s cultural troupe was established first, and its members later formed the core for the establishment of an economic cooperative in Chenzhai in 2004. The cooperative, which by 2005 had thirty-two members, consisted of a vegetable and fruit small group, a financial aid center, and a pig-raising small group, which invested in building a store to market pig feed. Her explanation of co-op building emphasizes its processual character: “Because we cannot coerce people, therefore we need to use guidance and education, first allowing a portion of peasants to freely proceed to economic, social, and cultural cooperation, and hopefully in the end a village with complete cooperation and real self-rule is achieved.”51 A larger cooperative in He Village, also in Lankao, was established after rural reconstruction student activists from Henan University conducted training sessions and set up an information and consultation center. Through their activity they met Wang Dexian, a peasant from the village, and he went to a training session on cooperatives at the Yan Yangchu Institute in Zhaicheng. After he returned, he and a group of rural reconstruction activists held a conference on cooperative economics in He Village, which included the participation of members of a cooperative from Shandong. Shortly afterwards, in September of 2004, the He Village cooperative was formed with fifty households and has since grown to more than eighty-eight households. Its projects include an information center and library, mutual financial aid (helping at least twenty families so far), a planting group, and a breeding group. As a group, they have completed plowing, grown wheat, and purchased fertilizer and other inputs at reduced prices. They have also done public service work, including repair of about three kilometers of village roads. In contrast to the experience of the Chenzhai cooperative, in He Village a cultural group was a spin-off project, not its founding core. While much of this organizing work was done by outside intellectu51. He Huili, “Xin xiangcun jianshe shiyan zai Lankao,” 90.


als and student volunteers, local village Party cadres often were involved. A cooperative in Nanmazhuang Village, Lankao, was established after village members, sent by the village Party secretary, participated in the He Village cooperative conference. With the help of Jiang Bailin, Wen Tiejun, and others, Nanmazhuang’s cooperative has begun raising pigs, growing wheat and rice, offering financial mutual aid, and organizing a dance troupe to spread cooperative culture. The cooperative organized the production of environmentally friendly rice, which was then directly marketed in Beijing with the help of He Huili.52 The lessons of these experiments are spreading, both through the activity of the rural reconstruction activists and their training sessions, and through direct links between peasants themselves. The cooperative movement itself has also created a good deal of media attention and support. It still operates, however, on a very small scale.53 The activists of the NRRM all realize that cooperatives will not develop on their own within the competitive environment of the market economy. Outside support is particularly important at the early stage, in terms both of education and technical information and of investment capital. Jiang and his brothers, for example, have individually invested large sums of money in the Lishu cooperatives. Many activists are hoping that the model will attract the attention of government officials and then government support.54 Jiang sees the “new cooperatives” as the best model for dealing with the sannong wenti. They help peasants increase agricultural (nongye) productivity. They will increase rural (nongcun) purchasing power. And most importantly, they will raise the level of peasant (nongmin) organization. According to advocates of rural reconstruction, without overcoming the atomization produced by the household responsibility system, rural industrialization and development are impossible. This conviction differentiates 52. Li Guangshou, “Ai dami de ren, lianhe qilai: He Huili yu ta de chengxiang hezuo lixiang” [Rice lovers, unite: He Huili and her dream of urban-rural cooperation], Shimin (March 2006): 46–51. 53. Activists give different numbers of rural cooperatives that they consider part of the movement, but the numbers seem to be around sixty or so nationwide. 54. Activists argue that cooperatives should be given tax breaks and loans. At present, the new cooperatives often have to register as companies, if they register at all. There has been a cooperative law in draft for some time, but it is unclear when it will finally become law. In the 1950s, the state used supply and marketing co-ops and credit co-ops to entice peasants into mutual aid teams and agricultural production co-ops. See Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development Towards Socialism, 1949– 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 196–97.


their analysis from mainstream economic approaches to rural problems, which tend to argue for increased marketization of relationships, specialization of production, privatization of land, and the development of rights consciousness—maintaining the household or individual farmer as the basic unit of rural society and reinforcing that unit through the heightened mediation of relations by the market and the institution of private property. According to Jiang, the argument that land privatization and its concentration in the hands of rural capitalists, who would then hire rural surplus labor as wage workers, is the only way to develop rural social organization and the scale of farming in China is abstract and only pays attention to economic factors. Jiang believes that this is neither politically possible for the central government, because of the instability it would provoke, nor acceptable to peasants themselves. Yet he agrees that the issue of scale of production is important. The “new cooperatives” offer another route to rural development: instead of privatization (siyouhua), which would bring economic development, cooperativization (hezuohua) and the interaction of industry and agriculture (gong nong hudong) that it engenders would link economic development and social security. As He Huili says, “We need a new round of rural reconstruction, which would attempt to use certain types of organization and institutions to bring about the association of rural surplus labor and the mobilization of laborers’ enthusiasm, turning it into the social capital of rural reconstruction, and in the end efficiently promoting rural social development.”55 For Jiang, therefore, the “new cooperatives” not only offer a different model of development but are also conceptualized as a form of social protection for “vulnerable social groups” (ruoshi qunti ). Ruoshi qunti is a term that began to be used in the 1990s to name social groups that were weak in economic, educational, and political terms—that is, in terms of economic, cultural, and social capital. It has become a popular term to designate those who have been socially excluded from the reform process. One central concept of the NRRM is that peasants are a weak social group within the market. Peasant organization is a method to strengthen the position of the peasant ruoshi qunti in the face of the market. Cooperatives give peasant members the group strength to get loans for rural industrialization projects and to demand both cheaper prices in purchasing inputs and higher prices in selling products. In addition, mutual aid (huzhu) among cooperative members can strengthen their ability to 55. He Huili, “Xin xiangcun jianshe shiyan zai Lankao,” 90.


withstand market forces. The Taiping cooperative in Lishu County facilitates the spread of technical knowledge and has collectively supplied inoculations for pigs, yet they still get sick and die. Early on in the history of the cooperative, one member (one of the original eight) had all forty of his pigs die, meaning he had no resources to start again. The other members did very well and loaned him enough to restart; he was quickly able to repay the loan and turn a profit. The cooperative movement, therefore, is a form of social protection of vulnerable and atomized social groups against the privatization and marketization of society. Yet Jiang and others stress that the cooperatives are part of a market economy, not its replacement. Jiang argues that the market grew out of rural society in the early 1980s with the household responsibility system. But that market has grown too strong for individual households to operate within it, and many farming families no longer make a profit at farming. Jiang argues that all societies rely on capital and labor: in capitalism, capital is in command; in socialism, labor is in command. But what needs to be worked out is how labor can command capital without smothering it. “New cooperatives” within the context of a market economy are an institution that will allow peasants (as ruoshi qunti ) to bring capital under their command in a democratic fashion. In the long run, this will allow capital to be used more efficiently in the countryside, Jiang argues. Under the ruoshi qunti formulation, exploitation is understood as the result of unfair competition between weak peasant producers and big capital. Jiang extends this concept to argue that global competition is not only between products on the market but also between forms of organization. Competition with big agriculture in the United States brought about by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 is a challenge to Chinese agriculture. But he argues that Chinese agriculture cannot compete if organized through the privatization of land and the development of individual capitalists; only cooperative organization will allow Chinese peasants to survive global competition. In a politically savvy argument, the ruoshi qunti formulation helps to place rural reconstruction within the discourse of market socialism: it is a critique of utopian marketization, not of the economic use of markets per se; it is an attempt to put the market under the command of society in a society in which marketization has gone too far. A further development in the movement is inter-cooperative cooperation. Within both the Lankao and Lishu cooperatives there is some countywide cooperation, but beginning in the spring of 2006 this was taken a step further: seven of the more successful cooperatives, including some


Lankao and Lishu cooperatives, came together to form a mutual aid and marketing cooperative alliance (guoren lüse lianmeng). This alliance aims to organize urban consumer cooperatives to market cooperative–grown agricultural products, in particular environmentally friendly products like Nanmazhuang’s rice, attempting to cut out the marketing middlemen.56 It is only through cooperatives in alliance, promoters suggest, that the atomized peasant producers can enter the “mighty market economy” with any strength.57 Conclusion New rural reconstruction is a response to and critique of much of the discourse of the 1990s, which sought a solution to the problems of the peasant population in urbanization. Yet the phenomenon of urbanization in China is much more complex than this dichotomy at first implies. Its difficulty is compounded by the fact that the rural-urban divide in China is not readily translatable into English: terms like nongmin, chengshihua, and chengzhenhua are often too easily rendered as “peasant” and “urbanization.” Chengzhenhua in Chinese does not necessarily imply the movement of the rural population into preexisting cities; conversely, it can imply the inplace transformation of rural villages and townships, what Gregory Guldin calls “townization.”58 Guldin, following Chinese anthropologists such as Fei Xiaotong and his student Ma Rong,59 convincingly argues that “urbanization” is occurring all along the rural-urban continuum. According to Guldin, “townization” is marked by a process of increasing flows of information, goods, capital, and people between the rural and urban spheres that brings 56. The alliance works out of an office at the recently founded Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Center on the outskirts of Beijing. The center, like the Yan Yangchu Institute in Zhaicheng, operates under the auspices of the Rural Reconstruction Center at the School of Agricultural and Rural Development that Wen Tiejun heads at Renmin University of China. 57. See Bai Jiechun, “Guoren lüse lianmeng: chuanguo nongmin hezuo zuzhi xiang shenceng ci yanshen,” Xinhua she (May 9, 2006), available at http://www.cqagri.gov.cn/ detail.asp?pubID=179793&page=1 (accessed August 2006). 58. Gregory Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do? Village Becoming Town in Southern China (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001). 59. See Fei Xiaotong, Xiaochengzhen Siji [Four articles on small towns] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1985); Ma Rong, “The Development of Small Towns and Their Role in the Modernization of China,” in Urbanizing China, ed. Gregory Guldin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 119–53.


about their blending.60 New rural reconstruction (and the old as well, as Liang Shuming argued) and the new cooperatives, such as the Taiping cooperative, can be seen as a blending of the rural and urban, an alternative form of “townization” that maintains a certain degree of autonomy for rural society from market forces. Unlike the almost evolutionary process that Guldin describes, new rural reconstruction should be seen as an active rural social protection movement against the complete marketization of social life through the building of new social and cultural relations of cooperation in the countryside. The townization put into practice within rural reconstruction might even be seen as a development of earlier Maoist practices of integrating rural industrialization and agriculture, calling into question reified conceptualizations of the break between Maoist and reformist China. Clearly rural crisis cannot be solved through changes solely located in the rural sphere or simply by limiting rural marketization. While critics of rural market utopianism are for the most part well aware of this problem, a politically acceptable solution largely escapes their grasp. On the one hand, a semiautonomous rural sphere constructed upon peasant cooperation and state subsidies, investment, and agricultural price supports61 would certainly ameliorate the poor conditions of the peasantry. On the other hand, since it would still be integrated within the global capitalist market to some extent, the state could use the countryside as a social safety valve, in which urban social and economic problems could be shuffled into the rural sphere, as the dual urban-rural structure has allowed throughout the post-1949 period. At the same time, capital could continue to use a semiautonomous rural population as a source of cheap, underpaid labor. Semiautonomy can be a double-edged sword, and thus rural crisis dictates a more global solution. For Guldin, the increase in urban-rural flows through townization foretells the end of “peasant China.” Several Chinese anthropologists, most prominent among them Li Peilin, have argued that we are presently witnessing the “end of the peasantry” (nongmin de zhongjie) in China.62 New rural reconstruction intellectuals and activists dispute this, however, 60. Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do? 14–16. 61. Such investments and subsidies have been the policy of the Hu-Wen administration since 2004. 62. See Li Peilin, Cunzhuang de zhongjie: yangchengcun de gushi (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2004). Li’s Chinese translation of Henri Mendras’s La fin des paysans [The Vanishing Peasant ] (Paris: Sedeis, 1967) appeared as Nongmin de zhongjie (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1991).


suggesting that the necessity of rural semiautonomy from market forces— without which the peasant would be turned into an urban slum dweller— also means that the peasant will continue to exist for a long time to come in China. The issue is partially a matter of defining the category nongmin (peasant/farmer). Does nongmin designate the practitioners of small, household farming, as the work of Wen Tiejun implies, or is it defined by lack of involvement in the flows between the city and country, as Guldin suggests? It is also an issue of regional focus: the anthropological fieldwork for Li’s study was based in economically well-off coastal regions, as was much of Guldin’s fieldwork; the focus of the rural reconstruction movement, in contrast, has been on inland and central provinces, where rural incomes have stagnated since the late 1990s. On the one hand, village society is becoming more townlike; on the other hand, the income gap between rural and urban China has grown dramatically since the mid-1990s. Alternatively, even if we view the peasantry as a disappearing social class, we need to ask what they are becoming. Perhaps in many cases they are shifting from one form of excluded population—the peasantry—to another—an urban underemployed underclass or a surplus population of slum dwellers. These different positions, although partially based in both definitional and regional focus, lead to different forms of political practice and policy suggestions. Those involved in the NRRM believe that rural society, though it certainly will be transformed, will not disappear; thus, their experimentation is directed toward finding ways to build a vibrant and prosperous rural society and culture. The “new cooperatives” developed by Jiang Bailin in Siping and the comprehensive cooperatives that He Huili has helped to develop in Lankao are attempts at institutionalizing the semiautonomy of rural society through the protection and facilitation of nonmarket and cooperative activities. Such semiautonomy would regulate urban-rural flows by limiting the effectiveness of the market economy to promote the privatization of land and the outflow of people, goods, and capital from the countryside, but it is less clear how the resulting social formation should be characterized. The peasantry as a global, active subject, however, has not disappeared; in fact, if anything, it has recently taken on new significance. Nora McKeon, Michael Watts, and Wendy Wolford’s study of contemporary peasant associations in Senegal and Brazil argues that their organization is a social protective response to the deepening of the self-regulating market during a period of globalization comparable to that of Victorian era capitalism, a response that has pushed them to the front of antiglobalization


struggles in the 1990s.63 I argue that China’s NRRM and current rural social disruption should be seen in a similar context, as a social protective movement responding to the marketization of social relations and exclusion of the “surplus rural population” (nongye shengyu renkou). In China, too, there have been calls for rebuilding peasant associations. Yet most new rural reconstruction activists and intellectuals, possibly out of political caution, usually stop short of calling for actual peasant associations.64 Rebuilding peasant associations would likely be politically untenable at the moment, with the CCP fearful of political organizations outside of the Party. Liu Yuanqi argues that neoliberalism brought on a global rural crisis in the 1990s, leading to rural uprisings and protests. Influenced by the work of Samir Amin and Mike Davis, Liu contends that capitalism is unable to solve the enormous exclusion produced in this crisis and that the EuroAmerican form of agricultural modernization, which relied on colonialism and international migration to avoid internal instability and the proliferation of slums, is untenable for developing countries.65 Lü Xinyu points out that agriculture has not been fully integrated into the capitalist market economy even in Europe and the United States, maintained there as it is by government subsidies.66 When viewed from a global perspective, I argue, China’s 63. McKeon, Watts, and Wolford, “Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice.” Also see Marc Edelman, “Transnational Peasant and Farmer Movements and Networks,” in Global Civil Society, ed. Mary Kaldor, Helmut Anheier, and Marlies Glasius (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 185–220; also available as an electronic document at http://www.lse .ac.uk/Depts/global/Yearbook/outline2003.htm (accessed August 20, 2006). 64. Shortly after the 2004 No. One Document of the State Council called for the organization of the peasantry and during Wen Tiejun’s editorship of Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban), an issue of the magazine focused on peasant organization. The issue contained an interview with Du Runsheng, one of the Party’s top officials responsible for agriculture since the 1950s, in which he called for the establishment of peasant associations (nong xie). Du had called on Deng Xiaoping to set up peasant associations in the 1980s, but after the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the issue was put aside. See Li Guangshou, “Du Runsheng: rang nongmin jianli ziji de zuzhi,” Zongguo gaige (nongcun ban), 239 (April 2004): 12. Also see Yu Jianrong, “Wo weishenme zhuzhang chongjian nongmin xiehui?” [Why do I propose the reestablishment of peasant associations?] (2003), available at http://www.nongyou.org. 65. Liu Yuanqi, “Xinziyouzhuyi yu fazhan zhong guojia de nongye weiji” [Neoliberalism and agricultural crisis in developing countries], Waiguo lilun dongtai [Foreign theoretical trends] (September 2004): 15–19. 66. Lü Xinyu, “‘Mingong chao’ de wenti yishi” [“Migrant tide” problem consciousness], Dushu, no. 10 (November 2003): 52–61. See also Niek Koning, The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA, 1846–1919 (London: Routledge, 1994).


NRRM, like the peasant organizations that sparked much of the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s,67 signals a profound anxiety about whether global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal mode, will benefit the majority of the world’s population or whether the global slums, urban and rural, will simply continue to grow as warehouses of the excluded.68 The reaction against utopian attempts to marketize social life takes the shape of diverse social protective movements similar to those described by Polanyi in The Great Transformation, and within these movements the construction of new social relations of cooperation also point to a world beyond exclusion.

67. The Zapatistas of Mexico, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement discussed in Nora McKeon, Michael Watts, and Wendy Wolford’s study, and the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association were key in the founding of People’s Global Action, one of the most important, early network organizations that initiated the global days of action in the 1990s that came to be known as the antiglobalization movement. 68. See Davis, Planet of Slums.

The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China

Pun Ngai and Chris King–Chi Chan Introduction A worker, bearing no hope of survival, jumped from a dormitory corridor after three years of working in the city. She died without leaving a reason, not even a letter to explain her death. —A story told by a migrant woman who worked in a small town in the Pearl River Delta, July 4, 2004. Five women migrant workers, ranging in age from 14 to 17 years old, were found in the dormitory of their textile factory on the morning of December 23, 2004, apparently dead from inhaling the fumes of charcoal that they had burned in a metal bucket. —A report released by Human Rights in China, March 22, 2005. Stories of death in the dormitories of China’s workers proclaim epochal tidings of the life struggles of a new worker-subject in China, the peasant-worker, or dagongmei/zai in Chinese, whose class subjectivity is Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-004 © 2008 by Duke University Press


yet to be born but who is already severely subdued in today’s China. Death, the ultimate destiny of life, signifies a surrender of its own—the refusal of any attempt at living, not to mention an act of resistance. We are not yet sure if the rural migrant workers have had a chance to go through reincarnation or remain as ren (human beings). The political ideology of neoliberalism currently prevalent in China has given a death sentence to “class analysis,” and hence has refused to recognize the materiality of the formation of a new class while China has been aiming to become the “world’s workshop,” providing more than 120 million rural workers for global production. Screaming and suicide are bodily acts of resistance of the new worker-subject in reaction to the subsumption of class subjects into the grip of power and the forces of domination in the process of incorporating China into the global economy. This essay attempts to unravel a paradox: at a time when China is trying to turn itself into the “world’s workshop,” we see a tendency to emulate a process of class subsumption at the expense of the rise of a new class of dagongmei or dagongzai, who are expropriated to serve global production. We strive to tease out the subtleties of the hegemonic project undertaken by a “quest for globality” driven by neoliberal political ideologies that intend to unmake a new class. This paradoxical process is nevertheless embodied in a historicity of “class and revolution,” a specific Maoist practice of class struggle taken from China’s socialist period. The abrupt denunciation of Mao’s class struggle paved the way for the twisted subsumption of class discourse in the globalizing period. Hence, we observe a double alienation, if not trauma, of class formation in China: first, an articulation of “class” or “class struggle” from above in Maoist China, and, second, an abrupt subsumption of “class” discourse in the reform period. This double alienation is an outcome of political arbitration and a disembodiment of structurality—a negation of the production of relations in the rapidly changing Chinese society. The recent discourse on social stratification and social inequality acts as a negation of the Maoist concept of “class struggle” by further subduing the discourse on class, which, at the same time, echoed . Yan Hairong, “Specialization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (November 2003): 578–96. . The word class in this article is used as a singular noun. Though we do not intend to neglect the complexities and variations of the new working class emerging in different regions of China, rural migrant workers in China nevertheless share many of the same characteristics not only in terms of “mode of production” but also “mode of life.”

Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 77

the Western declaration of the death of class analysis since the 1980s. Weberian analysis seems to be a neutral and logical choice, implying an awareness of “social problems” and “social tensions” inherent in the current political regime, as well as a confirmation of the reformist regime to tackle them. A genuine fear of a return to Chinese socialism, which means “equal poverty, political turmoil, and totalitarianism,” motivates this “natural” reversion from Marxist to Weberian analysis of class and stratification. The new working class, at the moment of its birth, experiences a struggle between life and death, is a specter flowing here and there without a voice, an identity, or a place to locate itself. The Hollowing Out of “Class” If it is the death, and not life, of the factory worker that speaks out against the fact that Chinese workers will be the beneficiaries of the new global economy in its international division of labor, and that compels us to make sense of the formation of a new class and of its struggles in contemporary China, we immediately face an irony: the language of “class” has been paradoxically emptied out; it is a phantom of the past, yearning to be alive even though it is dead. We were perplexed to understand a strange but cruel life experience: the lived experience of class is very acute for Chinese workers; however, the discourse of class is seriously subdued. The discourse of class has not only been displaced by the hegemonic project of neoliberal China, but it is also widely abhorred by the common people, not only the newly emerging urban middle class, but sometimes the working class itself. The self-denunciation of class subjects themselves further suffocates a class discourse, which may work to articulate class identity and collectivity. Here we observe a brief genealogy of class, from Mao’s China to the postsocialist period, contrasting the struggles of peasant workers in urban industrialized areas in order to make sense of the trope of “the unmaking” of the Chinese working class and the struggle of its own making in the global age. We argue that this discursive dyslexia of the language class has a tremendous effect on policy and institutional controls on population and labor issues in China, and it not only constrains labor mobility, work opportunities, and settlement communities but also the formation of the working class itself. The “unfinished” class composed of the new worker-subjects who have been officially and politically identified as peasant workers (mingong) represents a process of proletarianization that could never be com-


pleted in today’s China. We see a new Chinese working class struggling to be born at the very moment when the language of “class” has been silenced. The formation of a new working class in contemporary China has been held in check structurally by these discursive and institutional effects. The process of “proletarianization” in Maoist China was unique in that political forces rather than market forces dictated the whole process. In the first place, Maoism provided a reinterpretation of Marx’s class analysis in Chinese society by highlighting class struggles in rural societies as well as in urban cities. As early as 1926, Mao Zedong, in his famous article “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” argued that the reason for offering an analysis of classes in Chinese society was to identify enemies and friends of the Communist Revolution: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.” Mao stated that “the leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat.” However, in early twentieth-century China, the modern industrial proletariat numbered only about two million, and “these two million industrial workers are mainly employed in five industries—railways, mining, maritime transport, textiles and ship-building—and a great number are enslaved in enterprises owned by foreign capitalists.” Mao understood that the industrial proletariat still comprised a small number in prewar China, even though he had high expectations about the participation of this class in the revolution. The subsequent revolution and the wars against Japan and the Guomingdang actually relied on the vast peasantry in the rural areas, who, nevertheless, were classified by Mao as semi-proletariat and the surest allies of the proletariat. However, after the liberation, it was the urban subjects, not the rural masses, who were proclaimed as the avant-garde of the Chinese proletariat, and thus they were the owners of the new China. One of the revolutionary goals of this new Chinese proletariat was to keep class struggles alive in order to safeguard the socialist revolution. The Chinese working class in the Maoist period, unlike its embryonic form in the 1920s, was formed within a short period; within a few years, it was under a command state econ. Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), 13. . Mao, Selected Works, 1:18–19. . On the controversy between the role of the peasantry and the working class as the leaders of revolution, see Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse Tung (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 236–37.


omy, in contrast to the English or other European working classes, whose formation, dictated by the market economy, took at least half a century. State-owned and collective enterprises were rapidly built, with an emphasis on the construction of heavy industry in order to safeguard China from the West. Not only were jobs allocated to urban workers who held urban hukou (household registry), state-owned and collective enterprises were formulated as “units,” which served as encompassing social institutions to guarantee the new working class employment, housing, education, and medical care. The role of the party-state—omnipotent, as it were—was to intervene in production, reproduction, and consumption, and hence when the planned economy was “accomplished,” the process of “proletarianization” was also complete in Maoist China. The irony here is that when China entered into an era of socialism, which had as its ultimate goal to erase “class,” it had to construct a prior working class to legitimate the political power of the Communist Party, which proclaimed to be the avant-garde of the Chinese proletariat. The party machine was hence trapped in a selfcontradictory practice of making and remaking the working class to constitute a project of socialist construction. Chinese subjects were interpellated with a “class identity,” or “status,” by the Maoist ideology of class. The politics of articulation was so forceful that it had no difficulty producing an obvious “misrecognition” of class-in-itself as class-for-itself. As Wang Hui rightly puts it, the concept of class embodied a double meaning in Mao’s ideology: as a radicalized imagery for reactivating a socialist utopia in a perpetual class struggle, and as a signifier of class status to identify every Chinese subject, which resulted in a process of depoliticization. This political articulation, if not arbitration, of Mao’s class concept led to “an essentialized discourse of class identity, it proved incapable of stimulating political transformation from below. Rather, it became the most oppressive kind of power logic, the basis for the merciless character of subsequent faction fights. The increasing predominance of a class discourse of identitarianism, ‘family origin’ or ‘blood lineage’ was a negation and betrayal of the subjectivist and activist outlook that was the core of the Chinese revolution.” Thus, after the Chinese Liberation in 1949, the whole population was interpellated with a class identity/status according to a classification from preliberation “class” backgrounds: landlords, rich . Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse Tung, 236–37. . See Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics, from East to West,” New Left Review 41 (September–October 2006): 29–45. . Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics,” 37.


peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and farm laborers in the rural areas; and revolutionary cadre, revolutionary military men, professionals, workers, store sales, bourgeoisie, industrial and commercial capitalists, small merchants, handicraft workers, poor people, vagabonds, and so on in urban areas. After the socialist reform in 1955 and 1956, these class categories were radically simplified into two major class identities in the city: cadres and workers. Until the end of the Cultural Revolution, there were two major official categories of class (working class and peasantry class) and one stratum (the intellectuals), with the meaning of class and stratum not clearly defined. For many Chinese subjects, especially the intellectuals who had been classified as “rightists,” it was the “radical” side of the class concept—the perpetual class struggle that germinated into the antirightist movements in 1957 and the subsequent Cultural Revolution in 1966—that unleashed an unimaginable and also unmanageable chaos of merciless faction fights, euphemized as the “class struggle.” The “radical” part of the class struggle originated from a belief in self-transformation living up to the socialist construction project, a subjective foundation for a radical social transformation. The “conservative” side of the class concept further restricted victims of class struggles to a reified class classification that worked along with an identitarianism discourse of birth origin and blood lineage to create a sense of fatalism due to nothing but class. The destructiveness of Maoist class practices was hence not hard to imagine. The double articulation of “class,” whether in the sense of “class struggle” or “class identity,” resulted in a totalized stripping off of the structural textuality of class, that is, the classin-itself became a class-for-itself, a negation of its materiality. “Class” in China became a specter stripping off its own “struggle” but using “politics” as its agent and location. The gap between the signifier and the signified was simply too big. The specter of class, without an embodiment of its own, could not even find its shadow to look at. In reform China, the textuality of “class,” as construed by Mao, was rapidly shattered when Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and open-door policies at the beginning of the 1980s. After the June Fourth Movement, especially after the Southern Tour of Deng Xiaoping to Shenzhen in 1992 to reaffirm his reform policies, Deng openly declared that the party-state . Sun Li Ping, Duanlie: Ershi shiji jiushi niandai yilai de zhongguo shehui [Cleavage: Chinese society since the 1990s of the twentieth century] (Beijing: zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 2004).


had to guard against radicalism from the Left more than from the Right. The Chinese working class, previously made by “politics” and then fed with a structural content by state enterprises or collective enterprises with a job and a class position, was forced to go.10 Together with state bureaucrats, the newly emerging bourgeoisie and urban middle class looked to a neoliberal discourse of modernity to create a “step down” for this working class. The Maoist language of “class struggle” was permanently abandoned and the privileged position of the Chinese working class denounced. The paradox of class history in China is that at this particular moment of denunciation, a new workforce was quickly formed by rural migrant workers who poured into the newly industrialized or development zones. These regions constituted the base for global capital, which wanted to tap into the huge quantities of cheap labor in China. Thus, a new working class comprised of vast numbers of peasant workers from rural China was about to be born. This newly formed Chinese working class, however, met obstacles at the very moment of its birth as a class force. When the class-in-itself was structurally germinating, the hegemonic blocs had no mercy for this working class and attempted to contain it by various techniques of power. The class struggle lay again in the creation of a “class-for-itself.” The Specter of Class If we say that it was Mao’s revolutionary ideas that engendered the “class struggle” and hence “class” in China, then it was Deng’s reforms that announced the death of class by replacing a “modernity” discourse with a promise to allow “a proportion of people to get rich first”—the stratum that was capable of climbing up the social ladder to become rich. “Speaking trauma” in the early 1980s, first as an intellectual project of the victimized “rightists” to disclose the “evils of the Cultural Revolution,” helped denounce Mao and his belief in “class struggle” in making history. A farewell to “Mao,” and thus a farewell to “Marx,” rapidly became the common motto for the political ideology of power and the reconfigured elite. There is no doubt that the postsocialist party machine turned its hegemony upside down by targeting the “class” language when the society itself was undergoing a rapid process of capitalization, and when “class,” no longer an empty signifier, 10. See Andrew Walder, “Factory and Manager in an Era of Reform,” China Quarterly, no. 118 (1989): 242–64; and Sally Sargeson, Reworking China’s Proletariat (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).


was going through a rapid process of making and remaking. The historical paradox is obvious: the Chinese Communist Party, once proclaimed as the avant-garde party of the working class, now turned the sword against its constituency. The party machine now openly and “sincerely” invited capitalists, businessmen, and managers—the new social strata that emerged in the reform period—to become part of the Chinese working class and also to join its membership at the turn of the twenty-first century.11 New hegemonic blocs are forming, self-consciously pitted against the language of “Marx” in general and “class struggle” in particular, that may still shape the popular memory and history of Chinese socialism. At the end of the 1990s, the whole intellectual circle in China was overwhelmed by a displaced class analysis—a study of China’s structure and social strata in its contemporary period. A large research project titled “The Evolution of the Contemporary Social Structure” carried out by a research group at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was tasked with the political duty of fashioning a new social discourse on the social structure. This project openly rejected Marxist class analysis and replaced it with a Weberian analysis of the “structure of social strata” by arguing that “the word ‘class’ ( jie ji ) often refers to the traditional Marxist concept of class, that is, those groups that are divided according to whether or not they own the means of production, the groups that have mutual conflicts in their interests and are related to each other by antagonisms and struggles. The word reminds people of severe social conflicts, turmoil, and fights between men and men, and some scholars and people are hostile to such a word and tend to reject it.”12 The resulting study found that contemporary Chinese society is divided into ten major social strata—state and social managers, managers, private entrepreneurs, professional and technical workers, clerical workers, the self-employed, salespersons and service workers, industrial workers, agricultural laborers, and the unemployed and under-employed. Happily for everyone, a modern social structure was formed, and “unlike the traditional society, the modern structure of social strata is not pyramid-like, but olivelike, in which most members of society belong to the middle and uppermiddle positions, a minority group belongs to the upper or relatively upper positions, and another minority group belongs to the lowest positions.”13 11. People’s Daily, July 2, 2002. 12. Quoted in Li Minqi, “China’s Class Structure in the World System Perspective” (paper presented at the Socialist Scholars Conference, New York City, March 16, 2003). 13. Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, Dangdai Zhongguo she-


Not a single use of the word class appeared in the report. Instead, Chinese society was fetishized as an olive-like wealthy society that is blind to an ever-growing working class created as a result of China being the world’s factory. Co-opted by a neoliberal discourse of modernity, the new hegemonic machine was geared to denouncing “class” as a relevant social discourse and to refuting Maoism, especially its tenet of “perpetuating class struggle” as an obsolete and harmful mode of thought. Not all Chinese sociologists agreed with the statement that Chinese society had already become an olive-like society and hence transformed into a wealthy and harmonious state. Within a framework of stratification, many more argued that China has a pyramid-like society, which was shaped during the course of reforms, and that the vast majority of the middle strata are still missing in today’s China. Social inequality and social tensions are the inevitable result, since there is still no political safety valve called the middle strata to balance the highly stratified society with the newly emerging working class. As Li Qiang, a leading sociologist, puts it, “because of the lack of the middle strata for a long time, the ‘social tensions’ cannot be easily erased within a certain period of time. For this reason, we have to actively nurture the social conditions for the middle strata to grow.”14 Li’s ultimate concern is to create social stability for China’s reforms so that the course of reforms would not be interrupted by any social conflicts, especially class conflicts. When the West met the East again in the late twentieth century, the “death” of class, however, had to occur in duplicate. Western scholarship, preoccupied with a declaration of the death of “class” analysis in the fields of social sciences since the 1980s, quickly and naturally slipped in a Weberian analysis of social stratification. Karl Marx’s class theory had died not only in postsocialist China but simultaneously in postindustrial Western societies, where academics claimed that consumption, leisure, sport, gender, race, and so on should be the new foci of social investigation. A study of class or labor would become obsolete in the academic circles in the United States and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s; whoever insisted on working on the issue could not escape being depicted as a die-hard Marxist, implying an egghead who misunderstood historical progress. A Western society without a critical mass of industrial workers seems to mean a hui jieceng yanjiu baogao [A report on the study of contemporary China’s social strata] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002), 124. 14. Li Qiang, “Dangqian zhongguo shehui jiegou bianhua de xinqueshi” [The new trend on the change of the Chinese social structure],” Jing ji jie [Economic affair] 1: 35–42.


society without class and labor. Class was never the pertinent problem of society. The trends of poststructuralism and postmodernism further shifted the focus from the sphere of the relations of production to the sphere of civil society and consumption, at best, a study of middle class and consumption. It is an obvious misunderstanding that poststructuralist studies could not enhance our understanding of class and labor, especially regarding the issues of agency and subjectivity. The death of “class analysis” was, however, prevalent everywhere in the West.15 Fewer and fewer studies on class and labor were published. Departments of history, sociology, and political science once considered class to be the crucial area of focus, but by the end of the twentieth century, hardly a course on class or labor studies was to be found. It was no use lamenting, of course. Mainstream Chinese scholars instead were happy to discover this “fact” and sought shelter in the declaration of the death of class analysis in the West to affirm the local project of Chinese reformist transformation. Greatly influenced by Western scholarship, the study of social stratification and social inequality in Chinese society was booming after the new millennium, especially among Chinese sociologists. With a legacy of a double death of class from East and West, two terms, social inequality and social strata, were used to replace the concept of “class.” The four representative discourses became Sun Liping’s ruptured society, Lu Xueyi’s middle-class society, Li Qiang and Li Pei Lin’s Chinese society’s fragmentary tendency, and Li Lu Lu’s structuration theory. With the exception of Lu Xueyi’s discourse on middle-class society, which provides conceptual guidance on social harmony and social mobility for a research project titled “The Evolution of the Contemporary Social Structure,” the other three all work to articulate a structural deficiency, a breakdown or fragmentation of the reformed society resulting in an impossible crux of social inequality between the rich and the poor. Surfacing as progressive discourses, these debates center on the market reforms and how they create problems of wealth distribution and social conflicts. However, all of these discourses revert to seeking solutions from above and focus particularly on the role of the state in resolving social conflicts, since the state is still the most powerful and resourceful political mechanism to keep check of the economic mechanism of the market, which, to Chinese scholars, is in need of legal and political regulation. 15. Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).


In an interview in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Wang Shaoguang, a famous political scientist whom Western journalists have called a prominent New Left scholar in China, states: “I call it [the reform] the ‘great transformation.’ In addition to economic policy, for the first time China now has social policies. . . . Economy and society were embedded during socialist times, then became disembedded and now they are becoming reembedded. You see this in health care and education especially.” Wang is happy to see the reintervention of the central government into the social sphere, because “state withdrawal from areas like health care and education during the heady economic reform of the 1980s and 1990s left huge inequities that are now beginning to be filled.”16 The concepts of “society” and “social resistance” are all but missing in these articulations of a “problematic” society germinated from the market economy. Social policy is what the Chinese sociologists and intellectuals have advocated to strike a balance with economic reforms. The voice given to social inequality granted in these discourses created in recent years a so-called public sociology, which, we argue, is an inherent part of the history of Chinese sociology. Public sociology is in fact a characteristic of Chinese sociology that was created when the party-state asked sociologists to take part in the reforms.17 The paradox lies in the fact that it is “public” without a society, just like the “republic” is without its people. In the name of “public,” most Chinese sociologists or intellectuals could only speak about power and hope for good government (not even good governance) in the context of economic reforms and globalization. The concept of “class” is, of course, often subsumed in the practice of public sociology in articulating a discourse on social inequality.18 However, it is against this paradoxical historical moment that the specters of Marx, in Jacques Derrida’s words, are returning. They have to come. As Derrida puts it, “The objection seems irrefutable. But the irrefutable itself supposes that this justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death 16. Leslie Hook, “The Rise of China’s New Left,” Far Eastern Economic Review, March/ April 2007, 8. 17. See Pun Ngai, “Public Sociology in China” (paper presented at a thematic panel organized by Michael Buroway, “Public Sociology on the Global Scale,” International Sociology Association, Durban, South Africa, July 23–29, 2006). 18. Exceptions are Shen Yuan’s article, “Shehui zhuanxing yu gongren jieji de zai xingcheng” [The social transformation and reformation of the Chinese working class], Shehui xue yanjiu [Sociological research] 2 (2006): 13–36.


but toward a living-on.”19 This had the “visor effect: we do not see who looks at us,” but “this spectral someone other looks at us.”20 A new Chinese working class is struggling to be born at the very moment when the language of “class” is curtailed and becomes inarticulate. This spectral other is haunting and gazing at itself, but expecting no one else to see it. A Historical Farce? The Return of Class Discourse in Hu’s Era With the new leadership of Hu and Wen in 2002, the political discourse shifted to create a new hegemony of the “harmonious society” in a now highly polarized China. Plagued by a cacophony of social grievances on the issue of social polarization, and a booming of collective actions in both rural communities and newly developed export-processing zones in the cities, the new leadership was no longer able to rely on a neoliberal discourse to boost its economic development policies that were negligent of social costs. To strike a balance between economic development and social equality has become a political fiat; otherwise, the legitimacy of the party-state will be seriously questioned. Political showbiz, such as paying visits to revolutionary sites, remote villages, and coal mines in recent years, made appealing the return of the party-state, long criticized as elitist and corrupted but now touted as the party that could rebuild the legitimacy of the working class and the rural poor. Building a “harmonious society” hence required a new “imagineering” of urban societies and rural communities, and a reunion of the brokenhearted working class, comprised of retrenched urban workers and rural migrant workers, with the party-state. Social stability, after all, has become the backbone of economic development in China, the only justification for the unruly market and the authoritarian state. It is exactly under this new turn of hegemonic discourse that we have observed recently a return of class discourse. This creates another irony: the party-state proclaimed that the vast number of rural migrant workers was part of the army of production workers and hence for the first time recognized them as part of the working class in the official discourse in 2003 and 2004. At the beginning of 2004, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and the State Council issued a “No. 1 Document,” entitled “Opinions on Policies for Facilitating the Increase of Farmers’ Income,” 19. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), xx. 20. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7.


in which Hu and his regime publicly state that “peasant workers are the important component of production workers” and hence deserve state protection and basic civil rights.21 A harmonious society with recognition of the new working class looks self-contradictory, but the party-state now intends to soothe this long-subdued working class by firmly circumventing it with state protection and a liberal discourse of civil rights.22 A few Chinese scholarly studies on the formation of a new working class, long overdue, ironically coincide with this hegemonic turn. Wu Qingjun’s 2006 article “Theoretical Review on the Formation of the Working Class in the West: A Rethinking of the Chinese Society in Transition”23 first raises a question: Can a transitioning socialist country formulate a new working class similar to the working classes formed in England and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? If a new working class is formed, what will be the long-term impacts on Chinese society? By providing an answer to this question, Shen Yuan offers a macro-discourse on the formation of two modes of working class in today’s China—one was formulated following Polanyi’s thesis on the tyranny of a disembedded market over society and the encompassing process of the commodification of labor, and the other was shaped by Marx’s class theory on capitalism organized through the expropriation of means and relations of production and hence the inevitable result of labor exploitation. The former was construed to understand the labor struggles of state-owned enterprise workers whose life experiences were under serious attack by an increasingly disembedded market and the rapid process of commodification of labor in Chinese society. The latter was used to understand rural migrant workers who were now working in foreigninvested or privately owned companies in the coastal areas of China, forming a Marxist sense of the working class, whose lives were dictated by the new dormitory factory regime and who had nothing but their own labor to be sold to capital. 21. See Central Committee of the CCP and State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2004), Guanyu cujing nongmin zengjia shouru zhengcede yijian (Yihao wenjian) [Opinions on policies for facilitating the increase of farmers’ income (No. 1 Document)]; the full document is available (in Chinese) at http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/pi-c/ 493311.htm. 22. See Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 23. See Wu Qingjun, “Xifang gongren jieji xingcheng lilun shuping li Zhongguo zhuan xingqide sikao” [Theoretical review on the formation of the working class in the West: A rethinking of the Chinese society in transition], Shehuixue yanjiu [Sociological research] 2 (2006): 182–203.


The year of 2006 marked a recurrence of class studies in mainland China. While Wu and Shen are eager to articulate the new rise of a working class in today’s China, others are prone to argue for an unmaking of the newly emerging working class. The most representative work, published in 2006 by Yu Jiangrong, The Plight of China’s Working Class: An Analysis of Anyuan, argues that the Chinese working class, historically and politically formed, is a lost one. Based on a historical and ethnographic study of workers in Anyuan over more than four years, Yu provokingly argues that the collective actions carried out by Anyuan miners were not organized along class lines and hence those workers’ actions could only be characterized as “non-class collective actions.”24 While Yu Jiangrong sympathetically calls for political legitimacy for Chinese workers and urges them to organize themselves legally and to formulate their class consciousness and hence to transform from a classin-itself into a class-for-itself on its own, he basically underestimates the capability of the Chinese working class to make sense of its class positions in relation to capital, state, and its counterparts—in this context, the newly emerging middle class and urban elites. A “lost” class is how Yu’s describes contemporary Chinese society, which he understands as a scientific conclusion from his in-depth empirical studies on Anyuan miners’ struggles. His good intentions of protecting the fruition of the Chinese working class by not being hijacked by some utopian intellectual project have trapped him in a theoretical and empirical cul-de-sac from which he argues that the Chinese working class was ontologically a lost one and that its current struggles are existentially non-class oriented. The unexpected result of this depoliticization process is probably not Yu Jiangrong’s intent, for he is anxious to protect the “authentic” formation of the working class on its own. Two other mainland scholars, Xu Yeping and Shi Xiuying, have overtly suggested that the new Chinese working class can be unmade if its collective actions and labor organizing can be co-opted within the existing political system. They argue: The working class can be formed. It can also not be formed. What determines its formation or not depends on if the society can coopt the workers into the existing system, letting the workers achieve a relative fairness comparable to other strata through a regulative implementation of the existing system. If the workers can’t be co24. See Yu Jiangrong, Zhongguo gongren jieji zhuangkuang: Anyuan shilu [The plight of China’s working class: An analysis of Anyuan] (Hong Kong: Mingjing Publisher, 2006).


opted into the existing system, or if they are only co-opted through formality without substantially achieving what the workers consider as fairness, then the formation of the working class in the Marxist sense is inevitable.25 Appearing to sympathize with workers’ demands and to recognize the right of the workers to organize themselves legally, Xu and Shi’s detour to protect workers’ rights results in a justification of the existing system and the deprivation of the right of the working class to create its own class. Concluding Discussion: A New Class Subject? In this essay, we have observed a few of the historical paradoxes in class politics and class discourse in China. We first witness a dyslexic process in the language of class in the 1980s and the 1990s in mainland China when a new working class was structurally forming. The concept of class was subsumed in local scholarship. It was replaced by the concept of stratification, a concept gaining popularity in the 1990s and in the new millennium, leading to an inevitable process of depoliticization in today’s China. We have also tried to historicize this subsumption of class and to tease out the subtleties of its structure of continuity and rupture rooted in Mao’s period of “class and revolution.” The current practices of Chinese intellectuals and their studies on the issue of social stratification and social inequality further stifle a class discourse and thus cancel out a new understanding of class conflicts that are emerging in the rapidly changing Chinese society. The denouncement of the “class” concept in China coincided with the Western declaration of the death of “class analysis” since the 1970s and hence served the reform ideology. Recent recurrence of the analysis of class, except by a few, also prolongs a depoliticized discourse, erasing a possible critique of China’s transformation into global capitalism. Maoism in socialist China placed great emphasis on human agency and creativity and thus was the antithesis to the orthodox Marxist analysis of class and society. The notion of “class” was no doubt alien to the Chinese peasantry, who formed the base of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and yet the Communist Party persistently proclaimed itself the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat. The arbitrary relationships between political symbol25. Xu Yeping and Shi Xiuyin, “Gongren jieji xincheng: tizhi nei yu tizhi wai de zhuanhuan [The formation of the working class: The transference inside and outside of the existing system],” Xue hai [Academic world] 4: 27–39; our translation.


ism and class subjects were too conspicuous, making the Chinese Communist Revolution look like a “postmodern project” long before postmodernism came into play in the field of social analysis. There was too great a gap between the signified and the signifier, and the discrepancy sustained and yet at the same time defeated the language of “class” as a meaningful signification, while the language persistently and seriously affected the configuration of the Chinese subject status. It is no wonder that the political signification of socialist China required mass mobilization from time to time to cover up this discrepancy. The Chinese subject in terms of “class” identity thus was not understood as a distortion, but the interpellation of subject positions demanded a force if anything was to be greater than the economic or material. The dialectics of class relations, Mao believed, required a cultural revolution. The formation of the new Chinese worker-subjects, dagongmei or dagongzai, with all their struggles, unique color and vibrancy, and multiple locations, can no longer be described or politicized as a mere Maoist “class struggle,” as the subjects experience, make sense, react, and project their life trajectories in contemporary China. This does not mean that class analysis is simply outdated because the language of class is now diluted by the hegemonic discourses of state and capital in the search for a global China. It is not that simple. Restructuring class structures and relationships is a contemporary project for capitalists and the newly emerging elite in Chinese society. And yet the subsumption of class analysis in order to hide class positions and social privileges is the political strategy of the new hegemon. The language of class is subsumed so as to clear the way for a neoliberal economic discourse that emphasizes individualism, professionalism, equal opportunities, and the open market. Thus, the history of “class” in China is doubly displaced, first by the Chinese party-state, and second by the market. The hallucination of class as a “signifier” is very political in the sense that it helps to truncate the signification of the class experience in rapidly shifting contemporary Chinese society. The recurrence of class studies in recent years, still very limited and confined in academic circles, looks like a historical farce, since the term class reappears as part of the hegemonic project of the new leadership of the party-state, whose political aim is to trade off state and legal protections to the new working class in order to gain a “harmonious society,” the new political slogan of the party-state. As a weapon of social struggle, class analysis, if useful, can only be reactivated by rooting it in class experience from below, that is, in the everyday micropolitics of a dormitory labor regime in which the Chinese


workers themselves confront capital and the market.26 The new Chinese dagong subjects have to live out their own class experience as part of their life struggles in concrete, lived spaces. And if the Chinese subject was once traumatically interpellated by an alien language of class from above, then the dagongmei/zai, as the new subjects that have emerged at the intersection of global capitalism and the Chinese modernity project, invoke a desire for a return to “class analysis” at the workers’ shop floors and dormitories, spaces where the workers live out their own complexities and their conflicted life experiences.27 We take care to note that it was not “class analysis” as such that grafted onto the Chinese subject the effects of a hegemonic discourse but instead the very nature of its political arbitrariness from above. If “class analysis” is already a dead language in today’s China, the rearticulation of the new “dagong” subjectivity in postsocialist China is, nevertheless, a timely project. We hope that the workers’ dormitories, which serve as the microspace of domination and resistance, can also create a space of alterity for this new working class.

26. As Elizabeth Perry rightly puts it, “Labor politics begins with the laborers themselves: their geographical origins, gender, popular culture, education attainments, work experiences, and the like” (in Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993], 4–5). 27. See Pun Ngai and Chris Smith, “Putting the Transnational Labour Process in Its Place: The Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China,” Work, Employment and Society 21, no. 1 (2007): 27–46; and Chris Smith and Pun Ngai, “The Dormitory Labor Regime in China as a Site for Control and Resistance,” International Journal of Human Resource Management 17 (August 8, 2006): 1456–70.

Why Did the Cultural Revolution End?

Han Shaogong Translated by Gao Jin

The mainstream of society seems to have reached a consensus on the reasons for the Cultural Revolution. Some refer to the totalitarian tradition in China; some refer to the influence of Stalinism and then trace it back to the merits and failures of the Russian Revolution and of the French Revolution. Most people do not have the patience to go through such a troublesome analysis: they simply attribute the Cultural Revolution to a “power struggle” or a “collective madness of the nation,” a phrase that serves to dismiss the topic. Since we have reflected on its beginning, we cannot evade the question of why the Cultural Revolution ended. Some in the West assert that tyranny does not retreat from the stage of history by itself and that its elimiThis article was written as a preface to Chen Yi’nan’s book Qingchun wuhen—yige gongren de shinian wenge [Traceless youth—A worker’s ten years in the Cultural Revolution], which is published by the Hong Kong Chinese University Press. The editor is grateful to Professor Wang Shaoguang for his help with identifying some of the references in this essay. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-005 © 2008 by Duke University Press


nation requires military force. (This is the U.S. and British logic for starting the Iraq War.) But the Cultural Revolution, which is commonly regarded as tyranny, seems to be beyond this logic. Unlike the Qing dynasty, which collapsed when local uprisings raged through the country, or the Japanese militarist government during World War II, which fell because of foreign occupation, those who crushed the Gang of Four did not fire a single gunshot, and the whole process was quite peaceful. Since the Third Plenum of the 11th Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, which marked the real end of the Cultural Revolution, relied only on a grand discussion of the “criterion of truth” and accomplished the transfer of real power in one or two meetings, some may call the transition smooth. Moreover, the end of the Cultural Revolution came with relatively low operational costs. What was the cause of all this? If the Cultural Revolution was a “power struggle” or a “collective madness of the nation,” why did the struggle and the madness end at that precise moment? If it developed out of “totalitarianism” or “Stalinism,” why did such doctrines lose their potency at that time? What power conquered them and how? Any transition relies on how the general trends of a society take place naturally as causes converge and conditions ripen. Although it is important in history, the role of the individual has a relatively small probability of becoming effective in a massive country. Political policy is also important in history, but it often requires the alignment of many related basic conditions, sometimes even depending on improvements in manufacturing technology. For instance, if there had been no strategic and systematic development of “more effective fertilizers” (da huafei, referring to urea and diammonium phosphate) and “less effective fertilizers” (xiao huafei ) in the latter half of the 1970s, if there had been no popularization of improved varieties of crops—for example, hybrid rice—there would not have been a surplus of agricultural products. In that case, even with the policy of “joint production contract responsibility system” (lianchan chengbao zerengzhi ), the abolishment of meat coupons, textile coupons, and food coupons, one after another, and later the dramatic increase in urban population and the rapid development of the market economy, would have been unimaginable. These important issues should not be ignored. The Birth of New Trends in Thinking The nationwide wave of protests in 1976, represented by the April Fifth Movement, or the Tian’anmen Incident, was not unexpected. It was

Han / Why Did the Cultural Revolution End? 95

prompted by the people’s will, the tip of an iceberg which showed that the Cultural Revolution was bound to fail. Previously, in 1973, Li Yizhe posted a big-character poster (daozibao) in Guangzhou to call for democracy, and in 1974, Zhang Tianmin, among others, “brought before the supreme ruler an accusation” (gao yuzhuang) regarding the movie Pioneer Work (chuangye) and other issues. Such acts of opposition were already commonplace within and outside the state system. According to some newly disclosed materials, at that time there were many communities of so-called heretical thinking that were active in all parts of the country. For instance, there was a literary group organized by Guo Lusheng (pen name: shizhi, meaning “index finger”) and others (see Duoduo’s article) in Beijing; there were also all sorts of underground “reading groups” (dushu xiaozu) in Shanghai (see Song Yongyi’s articles), Hubei (see Wang Shaoguang’s article), Henan (see Zhu Xueqin’s article), Sichuan (see Xu Youyu’s article), and Guizhou (see Qian Liqun’s article) that thought critically about politics and society. Chen Yi’nan’s book A Worker’s Ten Years in the Cultural Revolution also provides vivid and concrete details based on his personal experiences. He records the course of thinking of some members of the worker rebel faction (gongren zaofanpai ), showing their perplexity and eventual awakening. All these demonstrate that the April Fifth Movement was isolated. It was backed up by broad and profound nongovernmental movements to liberate thinking among the common people and fueled by various thinkers who started an intense subterranean fire. . Duoduo, “1970–1980: Bei maizangde Zhongguo shiren” [Buried poets of China: 1970– 1980], Kaituo, no. 3 (1988), available at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/1001742/; Song Yongyi, “Wenhua da geming zhongde dixia dushu yundong” [The underground reading movement during the Great Cultural Revolution], available at http://www.usc .cuhk.edu.hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=1259; Song Yongyi, “Cong Mao Zedongde yonghuzhe dao tade fanduipai—‘wenge’ zhong qingnbian yidai juexingde xinlu lichengde benzhi yu Mao Zedongde jiquan sixiang” [From defenders of Mao to his opponents—The process of awakening of youth during the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong’s centralist thought], available at http://www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=4826; Zhu Xueqin, “Sixiang shi shangde shizongzhe” [Absentees from the history of thought], Dushu [Reading], no. 10 (1995): 55–58, available at http://hi.baidu.com/warringstate/blog/item/ e184bd82a18b03bc6d811955.html; Wang Shaoguang, “Tuozhan wenge yanjiude shiye” [Opening up the horizons of cultural revolution research], Ershiyi shiji [Twenty-first century], no. 10 (1995); Xu Youyu, “Yiqun sixiangzhede fengmao yu zongji” [Styles and traces of a group of thinkers], Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu [Studies of Chinese youth], no. 2 (1996); Qian Liqun, Jujue yiwang [Refusal to forget] (Shantou: Shantou University Press, 1999); and Qian Liqun, Wode jingshen zizhuan [Autobiography of my spirit] (Gueilin: Guangxi shifan chubanshe, 2007).


The new trends in thinking centered on core values, including democracy, freedom, a legal system, humanism, and social justice. The forces they engendered may be understood in terms of three models. The first model is the “opposition model,” which manifests itself as uncompromising resistance to the Cultural Revolution. Because of the totalitarian system and political fanaticism in place during the Cultural Revolution, cases involving unjust, false, and erroneous charges, such as those of Yu Luoke, Zhang Kexin, Lin Zhao, Liu Shaoqi, He Long, and Peng Dehuai, were common, and human rights violations were prevalent, which forced many people to start reflecting on political and social systems. Among them were some high-level public figures within the Chinese Communist Party, who, before the Cultural Revolution, used to believe in and follow every political movement and were accustomed to submit to the baton of power. They began to think about the reality only after they had personally suffered at the hand of such political movements and experienced agonizing pain and stinging humiliation. Two of these high-level officials, Hu Yaobang and Zhou Yang, later became an initiator for “democracy” within the party, and an initiator for “humanism” in the party, respectively. Their change of heart was obviously inseparable from their experience of suffering. The second is the “alienation model,” manifested as flexible resistance to the Cultural Revolution. Many people who did not directly suffer from political persecution still became more alienated from and suspicious of the Cultural Revolution because it interfered with their desires and their individual lives. Typically, such persons had no strong political consciousness and took no direct political action, but they formed a broad constituency and provided a massive centrifugal force away from and against the values of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-1970s, after “reawakening from the revolution” (geming huansu), the “self-study craze,” the “art craze,” and even the “furniture craze”—for example, urbanites feverishly desired the Shanghai-brand watch and bike—appeared among the youth. The famous League of Felicity (xingfu tuan) in Hu’nan was formed by some cadres’ children; they pursued their interests, abandoned responsibilities, listened to jazz, enjoyed ballroom dancing, scuffled with gangs and engaged in gang fights, and even molested women. The writer Wang Shuo describes in his novel Dongwu xiongmeng (Wild animals) a group of children from military or cadre backgrounds, whose mentality verged on individualism, . Translator’s note: Jiang Wen’s 1994 film Yangguang canlan de rizi [In the heat of the sun] is based on Wang Shuo’s novel Dongwu xiongmeng [Wild animals].


decadence, and nihilism. All this shows that even within the camp of those in power, the doctrine of asceticism was breached, and secular interests were returning and gaining popularity, which accelerated the toppling and disintegration of the Cultural Revolution. The third is the “inheritance model,” manifested in the borrowing, adaptation, and utilization of some positive elements of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is an extremely complex historical phenomenon. Generally speaking, it is characterized by the interaction and the gradual ebb and flow of two orientations—the revolutionary ideal and the totalitarian system, whose interactions created ceaseless internal tension and oscillation between liberation and repression, frequently erupting in destructive turbulence. In 1966, Mao Zedong nonetheless started the movement after his archenemies lost power; this fact cannot be explained away by the notion of “power struggle.” He called for the “continuation of revolution” ( jixu geming), for the dissemination of the belief that “rebellion is righteousness” (zaofan youli ), and for “mobilization of the multitude of people to disclose our shady underside.” In the following two years, he even made it possible for the majority of citizens to enjoy a high level of freedom to form associations, freedom of speech, nationwide linkages (chuanlian), and grassroots self-government. What his final goal was still puzzles people and causes much debate, but the radicalness of such democracy is enough to make the people in the West feel backward by comparison. Later, his policies lost direction, became whimsical, and were entrapped as a consequence of totalitarian malpractices. But in spite of some ambivalence, the spirit of rebellion and the desire for equality refused to be extinguished. For instance, symbols of democracy, such as the big-character poster, were protected by law; the spirit of “going against the stream” (fan chaoliu) was encouraged by policies. Such extreme contradictions left the Cultural Revolution open-ended. The April Fifth Movement, which reverberated with “the Internationale” and the “wall of democracy” that was banned later, was but history moving a half step forward and a variation of the slogan “rebellion is in the right.” From this perspective, the Cultural Revolution is not the same as the usual totalitarian “redressing of politics” (zhengsu), since, for example, after the nationwide turmoil was squelched in 1968, heretical thinking continued to flourish and to surge throughout the country, which contrasts sharply with the silence after the “antirightist” movement at the end of the 1950s. Also from this viewpoint, the opposition to the Cultural Revolution does not approximate what is commonly accepted in the West as democracy.


For example, the new waves of thinking were not a copy of what is heard on the BBC or VOA, and they were not supported by the middle class, but were the products of a Chinese history and reality. Famous “heretics,” such as Yu Luoke, Li Yizhe, Yang Xiguang (Yang Xiaokai), and Zhang Zhiyang, belong to both the “opposition model” in their negative attitudes toward the Cultural Revolution and also to the “inheritance model” in what they owed to it as the source of their thinking. Faintly visible in the background of their written works are their identities as red guards or members of the rebel faction, and their theoretical inheritance from Marxism-Leninism is obvious. For this reason, many researchers think there was no democracy, or at least no real democracy, during the Cultural Revolution, because all rebellions were carried out in accordance with the “strategic deployment” of the central government, and even so-called heretical thinking bore a red birthmark. Such arguments are not totally unfounded. But history does not take place in a bubble, nor does democracy follow a standard model. Russia’s enlightenment during Catherine II’s reign was based on the premise of a totalitarian system, as was Napoleon’s reform in France. However, people do not discount history because of its totalitarian distortions, nor do they ignore the results of enlightenment or reform. In ancient Greece, democracy and slavery coexisted in a dichotomous relationship, and evil and suffering were not uncommon, yet we do not say that the Greek democracy was not democracy. Similarly, the Cultural Revolution has the aspect of “respect for the king and submission to decrees” (zunwang fengzhi ), but, on the other hand, the seeming singularity of the revolutionary banner disguised multiple concerns and a plurality of orientations—a historical normality that is very perplexing to some intellectuals—that cannot be ignored. In this latter sense, as the spirit of rebellion and the aim of equality acquired validity, they were solidified into a general psychological trend occurring throughout the whole society. In retrospect, and despite the most arrogant and captious viewpoints of some in the West, we cannot say that the heresies of that time are irrelevant to democracy simply because they bore red birthmarks. Many years after the Cultural Revolution ended, various community movements have surfaced in the process of marketization. Workers or peasants held high Mao Zedong’s portraits, sang songs from the revolutionary era, protested against the social divide between the poor and the rich and the corruption of power in some areas, and missed the days when the income disparity between cadres and the masses was negligible, when they had even the same amount of food coupons and textile coupons. The


phenomenon of “nostalgia,” as a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, has caused wide debate; it cannot be simplistically dismissed with wholesale affirmation or wholesale negation. The plurality of trends in thinking during the post–Cultural Revolution era reflects the plurality of trends in thinking during the Cultural Revolution, to some degree, and allows us to examine history from a rearview mirror. The Comeback of the Old Camp During the Cultural Revolution, some radicals complained that Mao Zedong did not “fully demolish the old state apparatus,” and that his attitude toward the “bureaucratic class” was too feeble and tolerant. In fact, the upper-elite community, formed of party and administration officials and the majority of intellectuals, though having suffered serious setbacks, was not annihilated nor ousted. Just as Chen Yi’nan describes in his book, from 1968 to 1969, when order was being reestablished throughout the country, party and government officials who had been under attack formed the factual leadership during the reformation of power when the “three integrations” (san jiehe, or, the integrating of army leaders, local people, and officials in party and government posts into a new leadership) were carried out on all levels. Not all of these officials were forced out of office. After 1972, even those party and government officials and intellectuals who were ousted gradually returned to their jobs and reentered the state apparatus after a period of working in lower-level positions (xiafang laodong). That these communities, which were charged with political and cultural energy, managed to survive the red hurricane is an important condition for ending the future Cultural Revolution. The twentieth century was an “age of extremes,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s words; politics was characterized by distrust, fanaticism, and bloodshed. During the Great Purge, the Soviet Union executed more than half of the members and candidate members of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee, more than half of Red Army marshals, and more than half of other senior Red Army officers, including thirteen of fifteen army generals, and fifty-seven of eighty-five army corps generals. The Indonesian coup d’etat in the 1960s was supported by the U.S., British, and Australian governments, and nearly one million leftists were killed. The American ambassa. See the 1967 article by Yang Xiaokai, “Zhongguo xiang hechu qu?” [Whither China?], available at http://www.cnd.org/CR/ZK99/zk189.hz8.html#2a.


dor to Indonesia alone provided the names of several thousand persons to be arrested and killed. Public beheadings took place from time to time; the military and Muslim extremist organizations cooperated and in two years killed at least fifteen hundred Communist suspects every day. As part of this bloody century, the Cultural Revolution in China also saw a noticeable decline in population. For a period of time, human life did not seem to be worth a straw. This bleak outlook resulted partly from state violence and from violence exerted by the common people when the state lost control. As a result of long-term ideological inculcation, however, the chaotic violence still presupposed the homogenizing unity of the state system, resulting in a totalitarian aspiration to unity that issued in one of the darkest and bloodiest pages of recent history. But turmoil and bloodshed were not the only reality of that time. The violence and manslaughter by the Red Guards organization—“Linkup and Action” (liandong)—found its counterpart in military persecution of the Red Guards in the name of law and order. In a small number of villages in Guangxi, Hu’nan, and Jiangxi Provinces, the wave of violence and killing was quickly stopped and suppressed by the army. Such accounts are worth mentioning. A large number of people from the upper elite had their good name restored (e.g., Chen Yi) or reclaimed their power (e.g., Deng Xiaoping, Wan Li, Hu Yaobang) before the Cultural Revolution ended. Do these phenomena that differentiate China from the Soviet Union and Indonesia—namely, the large-scale preservation and even the return of effective power—benefit from the traditional policy of “not abusing captives” of the revolutionary period? Or did they perhaps benefit from the gentle cultural traditions of “middle of the road” (zhongyong) and “harmonious coexistence” (hehe) that are deeply embedded in Chinese society? These questions are not trivial ones for historians. “We need ‘struggle-with-words’ and not ‘struggle-with-force,’” “two 95%—uniting with 95% of cadres and 95% of common people,” “kill no one and do not arrest the majority” were well-known official rules made to protect people. Interestingly enough, in mainstream narratives of the Cultural Revolution, many have elaborated on the ineffectiveness of such rules, but few have discussed their general effectiveness. A parallel case is the Red Terror of the Soviet Union and the White Terror of Indonesia: the former is known almost by everyone, while the latter has vanished from public attention, although both took place during the twentieth century. In fact, if in . See a series of reports by Mike Head and archival materials published in July 1999 in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.


China a large number of senior-level officials, like Deng Xiaoping, had been put to death like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, and Pyatakov were in the Soviet Union, the ending of the Cultural Revolution would have been delayed. Upper elites talk more about their “transfer to lower posts” (xiafang) than about any other experience during the Cultural Revolution. At this time, party and government officials and intellectuals were demoted to lower positions or sent directly to work and study in the countryside, in factories, or in May Seventh Cadre Schools. A related arrangement that broadened the scale of xiafang was to send nearly twenty million young students (zhishi qingnian) “up to the mountains and down to the villages” (shangshan xiaxiang) to work and study. A “transfer to lower posts” unquestionably served to punish. The transferred party had a lowered social status and suffered discrimination, humiliation, fear, hardship, separation from family members, and neglect of one’s specialized field. Such experiences most often caused resentment toward the Cultural Revolution and participation in the opposition later. As one might imagine, when these people felt persecuted, they could see only the coldness of the Special Investigations Groups and the peremptoriness of big-character posters. They would not remember their grand aspirations and lofty sentiments to follow the trends and to devote themselves to the “criticism and struggle” (pidou). Furthermore, it was difficult for them to maintain their enthusiasm for such bright spots of the revolution as cooperative medical practice, universal education, sending culture to the countryside, self-reliance, and striving in hardship and with fortitude. The problem here is how a new perspective reshaped and redirected memories. On the other hand, except for a small number of people who were sent back to their hometowns or were arrested, most people who were “transferred to lower posts” retained their official titles and party memberships and continued to receive whole salaries, and even high salaries. This fact is often incidentally revealed in the recollections of the victims of xiafang. While Wangshi bingbu ruyan (The past was not like mist) depicts those “transferred to lower posts” as busying themselves with theatrical entertainment and partying, in fact these people did suffer, even though their suffering was not quite like real punishment. They were no longer the objects of respect, envy, flattery, and even jealousy among the common people. . Zhang Yihe, Wangshi bingbu ruyan [The past was not like mist] (Beijing: People’s Literature Press, 2004).


They still formed the latent social mainstream, but before they regained their power, they were frozen in time and received a short-term education that grounded them. The authorities wanted to adjust the social class structure, to force the upper elites to merge with people of lower classes, and to try out the possibility of the revolutionary May Seventh Cadre School. The Big Leap Forward to democracy may have failed, but the Big Leap Forward to populism restrained the powerful and curbed the rich. The common people felt no obligation to remain grateful for long, however, and they gradually came to be bored and discontented by the evils of totalitarianism; material and cultural desires also conflicted sharply with the asceticism of the strategy to construct a powerful country. The common people did not give those transferred to lower posts a reeducation that was supportive of the Cultural Revolution but rather instilled in them the courage to doubt and to revolt against reality. The experience of xiafang made those who were reassigned more passionate in future struggles. In literature, for instance, writers most often adopted the attitude of “pleading for the people,” and even in their individual expressions, they often echoed the mentality of peasants, workers, and local officials, revealing humanitarian concerns and a wide social perspective. Even when this perspective can sometimes be distorted by the filter of personal emotions, it nonetheless regards the common people as objects of sympathy, gratefulness, respect, and nostalgia, just as the movie The Herdsman (Muma ren [1982]) depicts. This contrasts sharply with the self-pity and apathy that prevailed in literature after the 1990s. The critical trend of the 1990s seems to be continuing and even deepening, but some literary elites, who once released all thoughts and emotions accumulated during xiafang, can only focus on painted faces and sleeping chambers. They can at most look back on ancestry, power, and status, for instance, being fond of topics such as “the last aristocrats,” or producing jokes such as “Xi Er missed her chance to get rich when she married Da Chun”—they cannot help but think the reestablishment of a social hierarchy as a lofty goal, and the abyss between themselves and the common people is forming. Compared with the attitude of those transferred to lower posts, who closely allied themselves with the common people, is the critical attitude of these elites becoming stale and misshapen, or is it even the polar opposite? If the gulf between classes that they long for expands further, and if the result of getting rid of totalitarianism . Translator’s note: In the revolutionary ballet Baimao nu [White-haired girl], Xi Er was in love with Da Chun and escaped to the mountains when a rapacious landlord wanted to take her in as a concubine.


( jiquan zhuyi ) is only to let the lower and middle classes of society fall into the cage of extreme mamonism ( jijin zhuyi ), will an impulsive longing for revolution and for a Cultural Revolution by the common people arrive on the scene in time? During the Cultural Revolution, the authorities not only underestimated the common people’s discontent but also the elites’ discontent behind their apparent obedience. The xiafang movement, unprecedented in Chinese or world history, would accelerate their own defeat. When the elites returned from the people in passels, when their names started to reappear in newspapers and at conferences, they, as opponents of the Cultural Revolution, had been poured out of the crucible and cast into a sword, and they dominated the system, in important posts including politics, economics, culture, science and technology, education, and foreign affairs. At this moment, new trends in thinking had already entered the arena; its newness contained the old. The old camp was reinstalled; its oldness contained the new. All social conditions were undergoing a complex transformation, and the seemingly mighty Cultural Revolution had become a broken cocoon. The effectiveness of the “criticism of Lin Biao and of Confucius” and the “counterattack against the rightist trend to reverse verdicts” after 1974 fell short of expectations; these movements were overtly followed but covertly opposed, which foretold an ending that was already dimly visible. When opportunities arrived, leaders of reform followed and relied on public opinion, called on the people to realize the four modernizations in China, and depended on the April Fifth Movement for support, first playing the card of public opinion and then the card of practice, subsequently creating a massive Marxist moral authority and political offensive. During this process, they did not start from scratch but utilized existing resources and structures of systems. For instance, the arrest of the Gang of Four and the defeat of the Shanghai separatist conspiracy followed the principle of the centralization of power: that “the lower level should obey the higher level.” For example, Hua Guofeng was the supreme leader at that time, so the whole party, the whole army, and the whole country was expected to obey him. Similarly, the procedures of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Chinese Communist Party Central Committee were based on the democratic principle of “the minority obeys the majority.” The “Whatever Group,” although . Translator’s note: The “Whatever Group” refers to the group led by Hua Guofeng, who became the supreme party, political, and military leader in October 1976 after the removal from power of the Gang of Four. Hua supported the slogan that “We should firmly uphold whatever decision Chairman Mao made, and we should unswervingly follow whatever


in charge of almost all the highest positions in the party, the government, and the army, had to respect the majority’s volition in the Third Plenum and turned over the real power to the practical reformists. This so-called democratic centralism is a flexible practice that is at times centralized and at times democratic. It is an open system that lends itself to manipulation as well as adaptation to exigencies. It was used effectively to deal with the conundrums of saving the nation from extinction and of revolution, but it did not prevent disasters from happening during the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, totalitarianism and extremism made it hard for people to dispel their fears and to eliminate concerns. Therefore, after the crisis had been resolved by a change in leadership, the old camp had to face the issue of how to rehabilitate and renovate the system, if it still wanted to move forward and if it wanted to shoulder the new mission of vigorously and fully developing a country with a huge population. This conundrum is left to the future. Conclusion: The Cultural Revolution— Not Incomprehensible to Reason Simplistic narratives of the Cultural Revolution are almost too ingrained by now to be cast aside. Many members of the new generation and many foreigners, after having been brainwashed by “scar” (shanghen) literature, can only gasp and gape while shaking their heads and exclaiming that the Cultural Revolution is “incomprehensible to reason.” This phenomenon demonstrates the failure of current mainstream narratives of the Cultural Revolution. What is comprehension by reason? It means to know. We need natural sciences because they can explain incomprehensible natural phenomena and render them comprehensible. We need humanities and social sciences because they can explicate various incomprehensible human and social phenomena. It should not be the case that the more we talk about the Cultural Revolution, the stranger, the odder, and the more incomprehensible it becomes. This black hole in our understanding is no reason for self-congratulation. Over 10 billion people were witnesses to the ten-year Cultural Revolution. In those ten years, every incident had its special conditions and internal logic and thus a rough probability of happening. As long as we directives of Chairman Mao.” After these “two whatevers” were put forward, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, among others, led a campaign against it, which triggered the grand discussion on the criterion of truth.


have no bias, and as long as our memory is not distorted, the disasters and calamities of a huge, poor country in the process of rapid development is no more incomprehensible than any love or hatred that is happening in our lives, or less understandable than any relatives or neighbors at our side who are basically neither gods nor monsters. These very people participated in and pushed forward the Cultural Revolution, and eventually ended it. Today the Cultural Revolution has been over for thirty years, and it has receded to an adequate distance that allows careful observation. We need more writers from different perspectives and positions to broaden and enrich Cultural Revolution narratives, and to return to the China of the Cultural Revolution, whose true features are not hard to comprehend. In this way, we might increase the difficulty of criticizing the Cultural Revolution, and will make the criticism more accurate and more powerful, thus making it genuine criticism. Total negation of the Cultural Revolution has been the official policy and mainstream conception for many years. It has the advantage of not having to settle old scores and of adjusting overall strategy. Namely, if it is meant to eliminate the totalitarian system and its various evils, this kind of negation may not be out of bounds, however unmodified and absolute it is. It is only natural that the people concerned are emotional. But if the purpose of such absolute negation is only to indulge intellectual indolence and to define forbidden zones for academic research, concentrating only on taboos, bans, and accusations during these ten years, such a polarized narrative of demonization and deification will serve only to cloud our understanding. Thus, things that had little to do with totalitarianism (e.g., the many creative and constructive innovations of the period) and things that abraded, blocked, transmuted, and even overcame totalitarianism (e.g., democracy and revolution as forms of enlightenment) during those ten long years, precious and vital as they are, may perish together with the virus of totalitarianism, whereas the vivid process and the historical significance of how the Cultural Revolution ended will be missing forever. The déjà vu reconstructions of past bigotry are not very helpful. They not only induce a dreamy and exaggerated “red nostalgia” but confuse people, especially when faced with Western cold war ideology, leading to self-silencing, blind pursuit of fads, and loss of the ability as subjects to grasp hold of practice. It is in this sense that if the Cultural Revolution remains impenetrable for a long time, it will become a bulky insulator, disconnected from the past and from the future. This insulator will impede the understanding of revolutions that took place in the fifty years before the Cultural Revolu-


tion, those revolutions which actually led to the Cultural Revolution. Such narrow appreciation will also impede the understanding of the reform and the opening up of China that took place almost thirty years after the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is an unsubstitutable womb for the history that follows it; it continues to give birth to various surprising achievements and sudden crises. China is now becoming a hot topic worldwide, and the Cultural Revolution cannot be bypassed, nor should we allow it to be locked away behind a rusting gate, without the possibility of entering labyrinthine realities, which are the realities of twentieth-century Chinese national history.

Chinese Education in the Era of Capitalist Globalization

Shaobo Xie and Fengzhen Wang After a long century of revolution and war, the Chinese seem to have totally resigned themselves to the reign of capitalist globalization. Everywhere in China, the idea of globalization is being embraced euphorically as if it were an epochal promise for emancipation and happiness, and as if it had the magical power to remove all sociopolitical problems and all the obstacles to national and individual fulfilment. Indeed, the whole country of China is being captivated by the ideology of globalization engineered by capitalist think tanks in the West and zealously relayed by Chinese neoliberals and neoconservatives, who believe that the marketization of the economy and capitalist globalization will automatically lead to political democracy, equality, and social justice. In the day of global capitalism, with the ideas of socialism, proletarian revolution, Communism, Marxian utopia, and working-class movements, as well as all discussion of strategies of resistance quickly receding from the world’s social and political imaginary, the Chinese, after a number of what is perceived as abortive modernity Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-006 © 2008 by Duke University Press


projects, redefine modernity exclusively in terms of capitalist modernity, whose parameters are set up by the West. Awakening to the existence of a digitalized postmodern West contrastive to their own country, perceived as largely underdeveloped and insufficiently modernized, the Chinese, especially the neoliberals/neoconservatives, zealously urge merging into the global system and reproducing everything that already exists in the West, while at the same time, West-centered transnational capital and capitalists are making big headway into this erstwhile forbidden space of Maoist socialism. Indeed, globalization is becoming China’s national grand narrative today, and to be modernized for the Chinese is to be incorporated into the global system. All of a sudden, “globalization” becomes the watchword across the country, a touchstone of cosmopolitanism, fashion, and taste. Every urban space becomes a landed home for transnational capital; every household in the city has a globalized dream; every college student has a globalized imaginary. To them there is only one orbit of modernity, one path to democracy and emancipation: that is capitalism. However, what goes in the name of globalization is throwing China into unprecedented crisis. Its rapidly developing economy is creating a gaping gap between poor and rich, country and city, and metropolis and periphery, resulting in unprecedented unemployment, the disintegration of health care and social welfare, the severance of a market economy from the principles of equality and social justice, and a massive presence of indigenous capitalists, comprador bureaucrats, and corrupt officialdom colluding with transnational capitalists. The inauguration of capitalist globalization initiates a nationwide redistribution of public property, hence the concentration of societal wealth and political power into the hands of the elite. The tripartite collusion among comprador bureaucrats, indigenous capitalists, and transnational capitalists transforms China’s urban spaces into new citadels of global capitalism, thanks to its supply of cheap labor, cheap resources, and potentially unlimited market space. The massive presence of transnational joint adventures (such as Santana, Passat, Buick, Honda, Bluebird, Nissan, Sonata, Audi, Citron, Motorola, Nokia, and Siemens), the privatization of state enterprises, the transferring of state-owned means of production to private enterprises, and the high technology applied in production, all these conspire to force thousands of factories to close down, throwing millions of workers into unemployment and destitution. The worst happens in the countryside. The peasants have lost the state protection and subsidies they used to enjoy in Mao’s time and have reaped little benefit of the economic reform. The post-Mao regime reverses its predecessor’s policy in prioritiz-

Shaobo Xie and Fengzhen Wang / Chinese Education 109

ing the city over the country in designing and implementing its economic reform, largely leaving the rural population to survive or perish on its own. Consequently there occurs an unprecedented exodus out of the wretched countryside into cities—tens of millions of young men and women have left their home villages in search of wage jobs, metamorphosing into the bulk of the lumpen proletariat in China. They are politically the most deprived and economically the most exploited, as registered by the derogatory collective proper names applied to them: liumin and mingong, which designate a community of faceless, powerless, and placeless visible ghosts or invisible subhumans. One hundred fifty years ago, Marx and Engels described capitalism as taking over the world. We might say the same is true of contemporary China: capitalism “has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bond man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ . . . It has resolved personal worth into exchange value . . . for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Anyone with lived experience in contemporary China or well informed of what is happening there would readily agree that all traditions, all centuries-old customs and relationships, and all inherited or educated structures of attitudes and reference there are disintegrating and evaporating; self-interest and cash payment have become the ultimate motivation and the driving force behind every individual and collective undertaking; use value has been generally superseded by exchange value; serve-the-people social practices have been displaced by “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” The whole country is dominated by the logic of capital, the desire for profit, the commodified structure of consciousness, and forms without content or signifiers without signifieds. While with postmodern literary and cultural critics “signifiers without signifieds” are celebrated to challenge the established symbolic order, to undermine the instituted relationship between sign and reference, history and representation, and individual and society, and to emancipate repressed and violated difference and marginality, in the context of this essay they refer to a ubiquitous discrepancy between name and named, theory and practice, and appearance and reality. Indeed, underwriting all such ironic discrepancies . Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 10–11.


is what Georg Lukács calls “the structure of commodity-relations,” which removes all possibility of self-identity and stability. According to Lukács, a full-fledged capitalist society is where the structure of commodity-relations is no longer the “central problem in economics” but the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects” (HCC, 83). The commodity structure rules all aspects of social life and “remoulds it in its own image” (HCC, 85). In other words, the ultimate goal or consequence of capitalism is to transform all relationships, all forms of culture and nature, all times and spaces, even forms of consciousness itself into commodities. Or, as critics like Fredric Jameson and Wim Wenders have noted in different contexts, capitalism in its global stage colonizes nature and the unconscious or the human psyche. Apparently, China does not quite resemble a full-fledged capitalist society, due to its vast underdeveloped rural areas, where life goes on primarily as it did hundreds of years ago, and a state with memories of socialism. As such, the Lukácsian structure of commodity relations does not seem to fully fit Chinese society. However, a closer look into contemporary social life in China reveals that it is already penetrated in all its aspects by the structure of commodity-relations. It is no exaggeration to say that, due to the ongoing processes of capitalist globalization, cultural spaces and sociopolitical relations and practices prevalent in the centers of capitalism are being quickly reproduced in countries like China. One of the most urgent questions confronting scholars interested in contemporary China is the question posed by Lukács decades ago: “[H]ow far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society?” (HCC, 84). In this essay, we investigate the problem of Chinese education in the day of capitalist globalization, examining its effects in terms of the following aspects: Industrialized and commercialized education, academic corruption, and the marginalization of the rural population. We hope that the critical investigation of Chinese education in the day of capitalist globalization will in itself be an answer to Lukács’s question regarding the extent of influence the structure of commodity relations has over the “total outer and inner life of society.” The structure of commodity relations in China finds . Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), 83. Hereafter, subsequent references are cited parenthetically as HCC. . See Fredric Jameson, Syntax of History, vol. 2 of The Ideology of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 47; Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 98.


most devastating expressions in the domain of education. Over the past four thousand years, education and scholarship have always been valued by the Chinese above everything else, and until recently it has been the last thing they would sell for cash, or commercialize. Moreover, the Chinese search for modernity at every historical moment till recently has always prioritized education over other sectors of social life, setting great store by its power to enlighten the Chinese, to transform them into creative agents of modernization. However, the anxiety for material affluence and the drive for modernity, which is today synonymous with merging into the global order of capitalism, are compelling the Chinese to give up this last sacred social space to market economy, subjecting education to industry or production for profit, reducing disciplinary programs and research, degrees, courses, and publications to commodities. The industrialization and commercialization of education marks one of the first radical changes consequent to China being relinked to the global empire of capital. Driven by desires for capital and profit, the Chinese resort to all times and spaces past and present for commercial resources, transforming everything with potential commercial value into commodities. Education seemingly provides the largest enterprise and market. Over the past few years, some of the leading economists in China, following marketized education theories authored by Western economists such as Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Alan Peacock, and Jack Wiseman, have been pushing hard for industrialization of education. They assert that education undertakings can and should be commercialized to pursue maximum profits. As a nonprofit education service falls severely short of demand in China, they argue, commercial education will play a significant role in bridging the gap. In their assessment, education is the most economically significant investment. The idea of marketized education has a large following among educators and government authorities at different levels. Many leading institutions of higher learning own businesses, and the profits extracted from the enterprises run by the institutions make up 10 percent of their total revenues. The total sales of Beijing University’s software products reportedly amount to approximately half a billion U.S. dollars. In a recent interview on industrialized education, Xu Zhihong, president of Peking University, pointed out that, while the average nation’s outlays for education in the . See online article “Commercialization of Education: Should Education Be Commercialized?” http://www.bjreview.com.cn (December 21, 2006). . David Stern, “Enterprise and Education: A View from China Executive Summary,” http://vocserve.berkeley.edu/CW82/ExecutiveSummary.html (December 21, 2006).


world constituted 10 percent of its GDP, the government-approved expenditure on education in China took only 2.7 percent of its GDP. This was, he went on, the reason behind academic institutions reinventing themselves into businesses and arbitrarily charging tuition fees. Industrialization of education is being used as a legitimate excuse by schools for charging unaffordable tuition fees, and some of the local governments, instead of appropriating funds for education, demand of the schools tax payments and profit turnovers. In many Chinese universities, professors run their own businesses outside campus, investing little time and energy in teaching and research. Apparently, the central government does not approve of industrialized education. In 2004, vice minister of education Zhang Baoqing remarked in an interview that the ministry of education was diametrically opposed to the idea of industrialization of education, because the domain of education was the most important field of social life in which to practice social justice. At the same time, however, he admitted that some of the government leaders and educators were pushing for marketized education. According to Zhang, it was not uncommon for schools and institutions of higher learning randomly to charge tuition fees, degrading education into a profit-making enterprise, and shutting out talented and aspiring but poor students from key or high-echelon universities. One major irony in China today is that many social events and undertakings take place without the government’s explicit approval but are licensed by its acquiescence or ambivalence. There is a pervading discrepancy between the socialist ideology half-heartedly maintained by the present regime and its actual capitalist socioeconomic practice. Such inconsistency owes its existence to the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which is capitalism with Chinese characteristics euphemistically rerun. The ambiguity/equivocality of the term not only registers the Chinese government’s pragmatism but betrays their confusion and lost confidence in socialism and their mas. See online article “Daxue xiaozhang fandui luanshoufei ” [University presidents on random tuition fees], http://news.china.com/zhcn/domestic/945/20060307/13148911.html (December 15, 2006). . See Yang Jinzhi and Xiao Chunfei’s online article, “Jiaoyu keyi chanyehua ma?” [Can education be industrialized?], http://news.xinhuanet.com/focus/2004–11/17/content_2224086 .htm (December 15, 2006). . See online article “Jianjue fandui jiaoyu chanyehua” [Objection to industrializing education], http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2004–09/02/Content1938790.htm (December 21, 2006).


querading capitulation to capitalism. The ironic duplicity of socialism with Chinese characteristics as tacitly understood by the authorities at different levels and in different sectors of social life creates much gray or semilegitimate space for all kinds of social, political, and economic practices including the industrialization of education. It is under such circumstances that schools and institutions of higher learning are openly vying with one another to reinvent themselves as enterprises. The drive for profit, the neoliberalist apology for market economy, and the government’s veiled capitulation to capitalism, all these combine to pave the way for the expedited industrialization and commercialization of education, which finds best expression in random tuition fees charged to students by schools. Four hundred colleges and universities have arbitrarily collected fees in China. In 2004, the unreasonable fees charged students by North China Industrial University, Beijing College of Petrochemistry, the Second Beijing College of Foreign Languages, and Beijing Film Academy totaled 176 million yuan (at current rates, US$1 is roughly equal to Y8). The miscellaneous fees arbitrarily collected from students by the Xi-an Academy of Fine Arts, the South China University of Science and Technology, Nanjing Auditing College, and Henan Normal University amounted to 22.7 million yuan. The illegal fees charged by eighteen colleges and universities affiliated with ministries of the central government reached 868 million yuan in the same year. Within a short span of three years, a socalled key school in Henan Province illegally squeezed 176 million yuan from students under twenty-nine pretexts. As a 2005 research report indicates, 40 percent of the poor population in urban and rural areas became broke because they had children going to school. Four out of ten families had to spend their whole annual incomes on their children’s education. At present, 30 percent of universities in China charge each student 5,000 yuan for annual tuition fees; 45 percent of universities have raised tuition fees to 5,000–9,000 yuan; for 25 percent of universities the average student’s fees amount to over 10,000 yuan. Today, 67 percent of university students complain that the average expenditures for each of them, including tuition fees, total 15,000 yuan per year; for 25 percent of students the expenditures exceed 20,000 yuan. Another survey indicates that 41 percent of those surveyed insist that a university student’s costs take the total income of a family. Education, medical care, and housing are becoming what are called . See online article “Beijing shenji baogao” [Beijing auditing report], http://news3 .xinhuanet.com/edu/2006–07/26/content_4880542.htm (December 20, 2006).


three big mountains on the heads of Chinese today. By 2005, the average student’s tuition fees had gone up twenty times as compared with the year 1994, whereas the per capita national income had grown less than four times.10 Another aspect of industrialized and commercialized education points to rampant college enrollment in diploma mills and fake degrees. Numerous colleges and universities in China have been involved in enrollment and diploma-selling scandals. The past several years have witnessed a “speed upgrading” among academic institutions, that is, colleges metamorphosing into universities overnight, two-year-program institutions of technology turning into four-year, degree-granting colleges, departments reinventing themselves as colleges or faculties, and teaching or research sections expanding into departments. Despite their insufficient teaching and research resources, these hastily upgraded institutions desperately increase their enrollment, so much so that thousands of university graduates cannot find jobs in the fields they have been trained for. In 2006 alone, about 1,240,000 university graduates found themselves left out of the job market mainly due to excessive enrollment. In tandem with random enrollment looms the phenomenon of counterfeit diplomas, which fall into two categories: the forged diplomas acquired from the black market, which are called jiade zhen wenpin (counterfeit real diplomas), and the real diplomas issued by government-registered institutions but not earned through taking courses and writing and defending qualified theses, which are called zhende jia wenpin (real counterfeit diplomas). The latter kind is granted in large numbers to college administrators and government officials, who in turn use their power to help those institutions along in their maneuvers for undeserved gains and profits. At present, tens of thousands of officials hold suspicious MA or PhD degree diplomas across the country. Enrollment at the graduate level constitutes another disheartening aspect of the Chinese university. According to Hao Jicheng, president of Northeast China University, some of the professors each have over fifty doctoral students under their nominal supervision, not counting the MA candidates. In recent years, numerous graduate supervisors, given to seeking instant success and quick profits, and vying with one another to increase the number of graduates supervised, often totally neglect their supervisory responsibilities and instead make their supervisees slave for 10. See online article “Sicheng daxuesheng tuokua jiating jingji ” [Four out of ten university students made their families go broke], http://news.china.com/zh_cn/domestic/ 945/20060228/13131571.html (December 16, 2006).


them as contract wage laborers. Since 1999, the graduate enrollment has increased by 26.9 percent every year. There are only two universities in the United States that issue more than seven hundred doctoral degrees per year, and the maximum number is about seven hundred fifty. Even universities such as Harvard and Stanford grant no more than six hundred PhD’s every year. However, some universities in China issue over one thousand doctoral degrees annually. The total number of doctoral degrees granted in China each year beats by a large margin the number of doctoral degrees issued by colleges and universities in the United States put together, which amount to no more than twenty thousand per year.11 Doctoral defenses in China often are little more than farces or jokes, since examiners are selected from among the supervisors’ guanxi wang (network of connections) and hastily fabricated dissertations grounded on a mere semblance of research are assessed by incompetent or irresponsible examiners. As the month of May in China is the high or only season for graduate thesis defenses, and examiners oftentimes are overwhelmed by several dissertations per week, they often do not have time or do not even care to read the text of the dissertations: they perfunctorily go over the abstracts and the introductions and hastily jot down a few generic questions applicable to any thesis before the defense. Some of the PhD students do not have the faintest idea how to do research at even the undergraduate level. At the root of such devastating devaluation of university degrees is the arbitrary increase of university enrollment at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Academic corruption is another marker of education crisis in China. In a sense, Yeats’s description of the world as he perceived it perfectly fits the situation in contemporary China: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.12 Consequent to the downfall of the Maoist regime, which brought the Chinese overwhelming disillusionment and disenchantment with revolution, the 11. See online article “Zhongguo lanzhao yanjiusheng” [Rampant enrollment of graduate students], http://www.sina.com.cn (November 21, 2006). 12. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in vol. 2 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 1986), 1948.


edifice of socialist ideology and ethics has since fallen apart, throwing the erstwhile socialist stronghold into a general moral and spiritual crisis, and, under the impact of global capitalism, the traditional system of Confucian values has yielded to egocentrism and commercialism. The whole country is filled with centrifugal energy, and everyone is pursuing self-interest and cash profit with “passionate intensity.” Those who refuse to succumb to the logic of capital see no alternative or no reason to resist the present regime of social life, whereas those with no conscience and no moral scruples hold sway everywhere. With a Philistine twist of Nietzschean distrust of any inherited value and truth claim, the Chinese, withdrawing from their dedication to the collective project of socialist revolution to a hugely shrunk horizon of private cares and concerns of existence, are rejecting all centers of thought or action that may curb their speculative pursuits with one exception: the one infallible center governing the country’s centrifugal energy and passion is the specter of capital, which, while haunting the entire country, finds embodiment in every concrete reified or commodified behavior or consciousness. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, people from different walks of life are forming a “holy alliance” with capital, and their highest goal is maximum profit made by things they run or do. All can be baiping (settled) with cash or its substitutes; everything, be it knowledge, education, research, relationships, time, space, natural or cultural resources, is reduced to the status of commodities, and everything becomes dollarized. Academic degrees, professorial titles, and degree-granting authorizations have all become commodities for sale. As the profile of a university is decided mainly by its number of doctoral programs, all forms of bribery are paid to program or project reviewers and assessment committee members in exchange for granting doctoral-degree authorizations. Presses sell ISBN numbers; academic journals sell page space; universities sell degrees: the domains of academic research and intellectual pursuit in China have become (black) markets of commodities.13 13. Institutions pay presses large amounts of money to publish their faculty’s books or articles, which in no way measure up to the standard, the rate being 15,000 yuan for 100,000 words. Individuals also self-publish to get promoted; after their promotion, they start making money and receiving bribes from others who are applying for promotion. Academic journals recruit members for their editorial or advisory boards from different institutions and charge each member 10,000 yuan. This is a disguised way of selling journal space. Many journals demand space fees from those submitting work, at the rate of 100 yuan for one thousand words. University professors in China today have become part of the upper-middle class in China; many professors own two or three apartment suites.


World-famous Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, the winner of the Fields Medal, while criticizing rampant plagiarism in Chinese academia in an interview by a Beijing newspaper, pointed out that “plagiarism is one of the chronic illnesses in Chinese academia,” and that “the papers of some members of China’s Academy of Sciences are not even up to the level of Harvard undergraduates.”14 Indeed, plagiarism and fake research are encountered everywhere in China and are eroding people’s trust in academia.15 A recent Ministry of Science study of one hundred eighty PhD candidates in China reveals that 60 percent of them admitted to plagiarizing, and the same percentage confessed to paying bribes to get their work published. Yang Jingan of Hefei Industry University was reportedly expelled from the Communist Party after he was accused of plagiarizing essays from foreign academic journals; Liu Hui, dean of the medical school at Tsinghua University, was fired after it was disclosed that he falsely claimed to have been the director of medical research at New York University; Yang Jie, dean of the Department of Biology at Tongji University in Shanghai, was dismissed after being charged with using a fabricated résumé.16 At the same time, Chinese academia is plagued by what is called baogongtou xianxiang (boss of contracted laborers). Some of the nationally or internationally renowned scholars, who are oftentimes academicians of sciences in China, are awarded huge grants but have no time to conduct research, so they divide up their projects into component packages and assign them to others. Those who work for these grant holders are called “contract laborers,” and they form an academic community controlled by the grant holder at the center. In some academic fields or disciplines, the research funds are circulated among a handful of well-known scholars who are both grant application assessors and applicants at the They are more concerned with cash profit than with scholarship, and many of their published works are simply reproductions of others’ works instead of original research. 14. See online article “Famous Scientist Slams Academic Corruption in China,” http:// news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005–08/17/content_3367440.htm (December 21, 2006). This article also says that “a Chinese student of [Yao’s] at Harvard plagiarized another professor’s article. Yet when the student went back to China, he became a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was put in charge of a science foundation. His salary became 20 times that of other young researchers though his true expertise was far inferior.” 15. See online article “Plagiarism, Fake Research Plagues Academia,” http://www .chinadaily.com.cn (December 21, 2006). 16. See online article “Research Fraud Rampant in China,” http://www.csmonitor .com/2006/0516/p01s03–woap.html (November 21, 2006).


same time. Junior and less well-known scholars have to slave for them as contract laborers if they want to participate in funded research projects.17 While an industrialized and marketized education fattens the academic elite in the city, it is ruthlessly robbing and marginalizing the rural population, throwing millions of peasant families into unspeakable and unprecedented destitution, distress, and despair. Today, marketized health care, industrialized education, and deficient or nonexistent old-age insurance are becoming three looming threats to the Chinese peasantry’s precarious life. Mao Zedong used to compare feudalism, imperialism, and the landlords and bourgeois to three big mountains on the heads of the Chinese; the Communist Revolution was supposed to remove those oppressive mountains. The fact that the peasantry remains oppressed by three mountains, though changed in reference, bluntly points to the ironic reversal of the Chinese socialist revolution: the revolution engineered to eradicate exploitation and oppression is actually breeding exploitation and oppression. In ancient China, there was a strict societal hierarchy, but it was not a fixed and unchanging hurdle to upward social mobility of the poor; education, which was often the passage from thatched-roofed cottage to imperial court, was provided for the poor as well. Even in the days of wars among the warlords, in the 1920s and 1930s, and during the nationalist reign, normal schools and colleges provided free admission for those with no financial security. Today, however, the industrialized education is simply closing its doors to the poor and the rural people. According to a recent report by Dang Xianzong, a university student spends about 12,000 yuan per year, with four years of college costs adding up to about 50,000 yuan,18 whereas in Heyang County, where Dang conducted the investigation, the peasants’ per capita income ranges between 1,287 and 1,580 yuan. That is to say, a rural family of three, starving, can save every yuan they earn for ten years but still may not earn enough money to pay for a student’s four-year university education, not to speak of the family of three or four children who want to go to college. Some peasants complain that “tuition costs weigh as heavy as mountains and except the earth 17. See Liu Huajie’s online article “Baogongtou xianxiang pubian” [Contract labor prevalent in academia], http://www.sina.com.cn (November 20, 2006). 18. Dang’s statistics stand slightly at odds with those provided on pages 113. China is a large country characterized by uneven development, and different reporters focusing on different regions or provinces may have varying statistics, but they agree with each other in principle: University students’ tuition fees in China are becoming more than unaffordable to the average parents.


and the sky everywhere has been tried for loans.”19 Another report has it that, on average, the rural population aged fifteen or older has less than seven years’ education, almost three years less than the urban population of the same age. Of the rural population between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four, less than 1 percent has had a college education, 13 percent lower than the urban population of the same ages. At present, there are 85 million illiterate or semi-illiterate people in China, and three-quarters of them are living in West China rural areas, minority regions, and state-registered poverty-stricken areas. According to People’s Daily statistics, tuition fees in China have been continuously on the rise, and the costs of education from grade one to grade three annually total 440 yuan; the average high school student’s annual costs amount to about 1,200 yuan; key high schools’ costs reach about 2,000 yuan per student—which take one-fifth of the average rural and urban family income. The costs of a college education are much higher. It takes 4.2 urban incomes and 13.6 rural incomes to support a college student. A college student’s costs for four years total at least 28,000 yuan, which equals thirty-five peasants’ net incomes put together. The biggest problem confronting compulsory education in the country is the shortage of government outlays. After 1995, the government funds for compulsory education in the rural areas fell short by 50 billion yuan every year. In 2000, the fund shortage reached 100 billion. Over the eight years from 1993 to 2000, the central government owed rural education 490.5 billion yuan in total. By July 2002, the overdue wages of school teachers across the country totaled 12.706 billion yuan.20 It goes without saying that the Chinese peasantry is triply abused and exploited. First, it is the main source of cheap labor for foreign and joint adventures. Second, recruiting workers from the rural population makes it possible for those enterprises to exploit the peasants in a double way: employers pay peasants low wages that are unacceptable to urban workers and provide no job security and no benefits (no medical care), and peasant workers can be fired any time. In addition, the cheap labor pool is used to subjugate urban workers: should the urban workers complain or demand wage increases, they can be readily replaced. Besides, tens of millions of peasants-turned-wage-workers are making an unrequited and unacknowl19. See Dang Xianzong, “Buchibuhe zhinianzheng gongbuqi yige daxuesheng” [Ten years’ savings not enough to cover a college student’s four years’ costs], http://www.sina .com.cn (December 15, 2006). 20. See online article “Nongcun diaocha” [Investigations from the country], http://www .xinhuanet.news.cn (December 3, 2006).


edged contribution to the government and society at large, for the support they provide for their families and the money they send back to their home villages helps to enable their people to survive on a minimal basis, and this is one major reason why the government is able to control social instability and crisis.21 All this recalls Wang Hui’s observation that the civil society that is “imagined completely left out the working class and rural society, thus not only according perfectly with state policies that had the effect of drastically increasing the polarization between rich and poor, but also cutting off in principle the links between the ongoing progress of democracy and its true social foundations.”22 Confronted with all the newly emergent social contradictions and problems, such as unprecedented poor/rich and country/city polarities, massive unemployment, official corruption, social instability, inequality and injustice, the neoliberals and neoconservatives as well as the government deploy what is called the “myth of transition and development” to justify the ongoing process of marketization of the economy, to “cover up the urgency of the need for political freedom and social democracy” (CNO, 104). That is, according to the myth of transition, social disorder, inequality, and injustice are regarded as inevitable in a society of sociohistorical transition, and this is how the state and the neoliberals paper over the contradictions and disastrous consequences of the market economy policies, “presuppos[ing] a necessary connection between the process of current inequality and an ultimate ideal” (CNO, 43). Under the myth of transition and the promise of a modernized future through globalization, all behavior is awarded license, and all kinds of social injustice, abuse, violence, corruption, and immorality are granted alibis. There is no doubt that China’s new course of development under the impact of globalization has facilitated an extremely rapid increase of production and total national income. But the wealth created does not trickle down far to the grass roots—the broad masses of ordinary people. The result is a very rich upper stratum consisting of owners of large private enterprises, privileged CEOs of state-owned enterprises, official compradors, movie and TV stars, and a comfortable middle class, including whitecollar workers in joint-venture enterprises as well as professors, medical doctors, and school teachers. As for the rest, the result is poverty, inse21. This is part of a conversation Shaobo Xie had with Han Shaogong during the latter’s residence in Bajingxiang, Hunan, China, in August 2004. 22. Wang Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 88. Hereafter, subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as CNO.


curity, unemployment, and a decline in education and medical care. As divulged by People’s Daily in 2003, a ceaseless widening of the gap in income distribution with the aggravated division of the rich and the poor is occurring; amassed wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated, with the difference between family incomes becoming bigger and bigger.23 Under such a situation, the bureaucratic elite and the privileged groups are colluding, both consciously and unconsciously, to promote an ideology intended to justify and legitimize their practices and privileges that stand at odds with the needs and interests of the broad masses of the people. This ideology is predicated on the assumption that a national economy consists of two parts: consumption and investment. If more is spent on investment, less will be available for consumption. Economic growth hinges upon the increase of investment, which in turn feeds on the increase in labor productivity. But an increase in investment, especially when extremely rapid, will slow down any increase in consumption by the masses. Although consumption as a whole may increase, consumption of the wealthy inevitably occurs at the expense of the poor when there are big differences in power and wealth. To the extent that a section of the population has the ability to spend much more than others, investment as well as production will concentrate on luxury goods and facilities intended for the wealthy. Thus the market seems to produce a consumerist ideology, which influences the media, and through media influences, the people, particularly the younger generation, who, in their greed, see only the fabulous riches being created and piling up there for the taking, blindly embrace profit opportunities and never see the enormous and continuing human costs of the distorted system. All this, one way or the other, contributes to an increasingly corrupt educational system as described above. The shift to the market system in China follows the path dictated by capitalist globalization and is celebrated by “capitalist roaders.” This shift has triggered rising unemployment, economic insecurity, inequality, intensified exploitation, and the collapse of socialized health care and education. Almost everyone in China, except the rich elite, one way or the other, experiences social, financial, and psychological pressures in their daily life. Everyone suffers from an unspeakable gnawing sense of insecurity regarding the future, which accounts for why everyone in China today prioritizes cash income or money above all else, as if one could never save enough to meet their future needs: their children or grandchildren’s education, their 23. People’s Daily Online, June 19, 2003.


own or their family’s medical care, their mortgage, and their life after retirement. In a sense, everyone, particularly the technocrats, bureaucrats, and “academocrats,” while claiming to be victims in varying degrees of the commoditization of culture and social production, nonetheless engages in the service of capital, wavering between compromise and complicity. As mentioned previously, Chinese society has never been so decentralized and recentralized at the same time as it is today. On the one hand, everyone has withdrawn from socialism and the utopian vision of the future it generates, and has rechanneled their energy and imagination into building a selfcentered space of private life and consumerist pleasure and convenience. On the other, everyone is united by one common goal and one shared desire—the goal of getting rich and the desire for profit. Apparently, there is a conflict of interest between the government and corruption perpetrators in various social domains of life, including education. In actuality, the two parties share more commonalities than differences: both have broken with the Maoist past, rejecting the utopian vision of human society; both bow down to the power of the market and money; both believe in the magic of capital; and to both there is no alternative to capitalism. There is indeed more collaboration than contradiction between them. Despite the government’s media-promoted gestures toward eradicating official corruption in all fields and at all levels, a corrupt officialdom in the present political regime’s view is much less dangerous than a community of independent, rebellious, critical thinkers. This perhaps best explains why the widespread corruption in education is tolerated in present China. What is happening in China in the way of marketization and commodification of education is nothing new when considered from a global perspective. The marketized university, the knowledge and information industry, the rule of capital over all domains of social life, the almighty power of capital to buy everything and everyone, including intellectuals and critics of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek notes, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, all these confront us as a global reality instead of some local phenomenon. In Revolution at the Gates, Žižek describes the United States and China as engaged in a symbiotic relationship of Capital and Labor, while the former’s “‘disappearing working class’ is reappearing in China.”24 The implications of what Žižek calls “structural co-dependency” between the “two superpowers” alert us to the fact that there exists a mul24. Slavoj Žižek, The Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), 290.


tiple collusion between the political regimes as well as between the technocrats, bureaucrats, and academocrats of the two countries, and that China is fully incorporated into the global empire of capital and receives the same mandates from its centers. One defining feature of the empire is the proliferation or reproduction of the same: the same commodity structure of relations, the same consumerist culture ideology, and the same logic and rhetoric of capital. Indeed, global capitalism not only disseminates inequality, oppression, alienation, and reification all over the world, it justifies its destructive social processes with the rhetoric of necessity. All this is cruel, but there is no alternative to the world we have: this is what is being advocated and supported by politicians, economists, and political scientists across the world who subscribe to capitalism. It has evolved into a mesmerizing ideology in countries like China. It legitimates social inequality and injustice, seducing the poor and the abused to be thankful for their wretched condition of existence. Efforts must be made to stop the vicious processes of capitalist globalization. Allowing things to go the way they are “means the surrender of the distinctively human activity of conscious perception, and hence the resignation of our task ‘to complete and conceive’ the world.”25 To resist the rule of capital, to rescue education as well as other sectors of social life in China and elsewhere from the destructive processes of globalization, it is urgently necessary to imagine alternatives to the emerging empire of global capitalism. As Vico has taught us in The New Science, the world we understand and interpret and its history are created by ourselves, or, as Roberto Unger has noted, society is artifact, for “it is made and imagined”; it is a human construct “rather than the expression of an underlying natural order”;26 the “current Western system of property and contract is less a reflection of deep logic of social and economic necessity than a contingent outcome of political struggles.”27 In a different context, Arif Dirlik reminds us that “[a]s history ceases to provide a compass for the future, human agency in creating the future acquires greater weight than ever before.”28 Dirlik calls for global or multiple modernities, which reject 25. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 9. 26. See Zhiyuan Cui’s introduction to Roberto Unger, Politics: The Central Texts, ed. Zhiyuan Cui (London: Verso, 1997), http://www.robertounger.com/cui.htm (May 16, 2006). 27. See Zhiyuan Cui’s introduction to Unger, Politics: The Central Texts. 28. See Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 155.


any singular road to the future and any idea of singular history. This notion of multiple modernities recalls what Partha Chatterjee writes in his 1997 essay “Our Modernity”: “Ours is the modernity of the once-colonized. The same historical process that has taught us the value of modernity has also made us the victims of modernity. Our attitude to modernity, therefore, cannot but deeply be ambiguous. . . . But this ambiguity does not stem from any uncertainty about whether to be for or against modernity. Rather, the uncertainty is because we know that to fashion the forms of our modernity, we need to have the courage at times to reject the modernities established by others.”29 No matter what route of alternative or multiple modernities is proposed and pursued, it is first of all resistance to capitalist globalization, and the social formation it promises must be defined by equality and social justice. It values humanity and its emotional, psychological, and moral wellbeing above everything else; it prioritizes cooperation rather than competition; it ensures every citizen equal right to healthy living, health care, education, and work; it places social harmony over efficiency, pro-life over profit, and happiness over wealth.

29. Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Rotterdam/Dakar: SEPHIS and CODESRIA, 1997), 20.

Scientific Worldview, Culture Debates, and the Reclassification of Knowledge in Twentieth-century China

Wang Hui Translated by Hongmei Yu

Scientific Worldview and Modern Society The extensive application of the concept of science is one of the main characteristics of Chinese thought in the twentieth century. Since the late Qing dynasty, science has served as a symbol of and a call for liberation, as well as an objective criterion for all social and cultural reform. As a stand-in for a universalist world outlook, science has provided not only arguments for the necessity of the reforms advocates of a new culture hoped for but also objectives and paradigms for the reform. The power of science lies in the fact that it established an intimate connection between a universalist worldview and a kind of cosmopolitan/nationalist social system, and, through a rationalized classification of knowledge and social division of labor, incorporated in its broad genealogy human life in all its forms and tendencies. The concept of science as an understanding of objective truth endowed the New Culture Movement’s advocates for social historical boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-007 © 2008 by Duke University Press


reform with inevitability, enabling transcendence of the dichotomy of fact and value. The “scientific interests” of mainstream intellectuals of the New Culture Movement, such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Wu Zhihui, Ding Wenjiang, among others—the radical intellectuals of the time—were sparked by their concerns with society, politics, economy, and culture. For example, under the influence of pragmatism, Hu Shi equated science with methodology, but he did not realize that when this method was applied to politics, ethics, and humanities, it already served as an epistemological model. It was much the same with more marginal groups of the New Culture Movement. Intellectual orientations that questioned the absolute dominant position of science were also incorporated into a rationalized knowledge system. Whether challenges to the Western scientific civilization were informed by “cultural differences,” efforts to preserve the independence of the fields of ethics, aesthetics, or affection were all transformed by their incorporation into an institutionalized, rationalized, and scientific framework of knowledge classification and institutional frameworks. The intellectual, educational, and social efforts made by Liang Qichao, Liang Shuming, Zhang Junmai, and the Xueheng School transformed categories such as culture, morality, aesthetics, and feelings into specialized fields at modern educational and research institutions. Science, and the changing view of nature that it has triggered, not only dominates our knowledge of nature but also prescribes our awareness of society and ourselves. From this perspective, the process by which a scientific “worldview based on axiomatic principles” (gongli shijie guan) reformed and replaced the traditional “worldview based on heavenly principles” (Tianli shijie guan) constitutes the basic aspect of the transformation of modern thought. This new worldview paves the way for the division and specialization of knowledge and institutions in modern society. Viewed from the perspective of the relationship between science, its social function, and its role in national construction, the issue of science itself is a social issue, and the process by which axiomatic principles replaced heavenly ones embodies a sea change in social sovereignty. The sovereignty of modern states is a product of the world political system and economic relations. Along with the establishment of the sovereign position of modern states in trade, military affairs, and diplomacy, economic, political, and moral relations within society also have been . Whether the truth of fact and the truth of value can be distinguished clearly is another question that needs further exploration. The generalization of this dichotomy is closely related to the development of modern Western thought.

Wang Hui / Science, Culture, Knowledge 127

transformed. The modern nation-state system has to achieve the following goals. First, it must transform the previous imperial system into a sovereign system based on nation-states and unify the people and the state under the concept of singular sovereignty, which on the one hand dissolves the original multicentric imperialist system, and on the other hand establishes in the form of a singular sovereignty international relations between nationstates and other political entities. Second, it must incorporate sovereignty and the people with a singular will into the frame of nationality, since the power of the empire or of royalty represents a collective in a multicultural relationship, even though nation-states transform this multicultural collective relationship into a unified subject. This is the origin of the concept of “the people of the nation.” The formation of the concept of the people’s sovereignty and the formation of the sovereignty of the nation-state system proceed hand in hand. The conception of the people by modern states is not simply an ideological project; it is also a reconstructive project of the society supported by state sovereignty. Third, the modern nation-state system must abstract or separate individuals from their ethnic, local, and religious relations by law in order to reconstruct them as national citizens with equal rights. The latter will participate in activities of national sovereignty either individually or collectively. This political process accompanies industrial development, urban expansion, increase in the power of money, the formation of guild organizations, the establishment of a market system, and so forth, which have greatly increased the demand for free labor. The fact that the legal system in modern states uses private property as their basis for establishing equal individual rights is the very product of this dual process. In this sense, the principle of blindness to status in the modern legal system embodies the inherent demand of a changing social institution: the sovereignty of nation-states is not compatible with the legal pluralism of the imperialist era, nor can local social networks centered on local gentry and communities adjust to the national and industrial social organizations, since both assume an individual subjectivity defined by the idea of natural rights. Under these circumstances, positivism and an atomistic scientific view provide a new principle for social construction from the perspective of nature, which renders individuals into atoms of society with equal rights, separating individuals from kinship ties, geographical nexus, and other social networks. The idea of self or subjectivity, therefore, deconstructs the intrinsic connection between the worldview of heavenly principles and communities of religion, kinship, and geography on the one hand, and changes the principle of constituting political sovereignty on the other hand. The moral/politi-


cal superiority that scientific ideas have achieved through attacks on religion and the establishment of republics is based on the changing relations of social sovereignty discussed above. The discussion of the relationship between science and the republic in the scientific discursive community is carried out under the same circumstances. Therefore, we can see clearly the inherent connection between the scientific worldview and the legitimacy of the social institution from the relationship between the atomistic scientific idea and the social system: blindness to status in the identification of citizens is a legal abstraction based on atomism, which confirms the legitimacy and rationality of the new moral/ political power through naturalism and social immanence. The construction of modern sovereignty is premised on the liberation of individuals from social networks such as locality and kinship. The core of freedom and liberation lies in the subject without status and with equal rights, who provides the basic category in the construction of the state and the social system. In relations of modern sovereignty, individuals and states are two active polarities: whether under capitalist privatization of property or socialist collectivization or nationalization, these two oppositional social systems nevertheless are at one in legally regarding their citizens as individuals without ascriptive identity. The system of citizenship constitutes a great challenge to contractual relations and moral genealogy based on communities and status affiliation. The scientific worldview provides legitimacy for this new sovereignty. From the late Qing to the early Republic, atomism was at the core of the newly fashionable scientific positivism and dissolved the Confucian worldview that hitherto had provided legitimation for the dynasty’s political, religious, and geographic relations. During the May Fourth era, the scientific worldview justified attacks on the family system and its ethical presuppositions, providing a rationale for the legitimacy of atomistic individualism, marriage, and other social affairs. All these show that the scientific worldview is not only the banner of a cultural movement but the legitimate groundwork for modern states. Its theory of rights and legal basis are premised upon an atomistic idea of abstract individuals. The historical connection between abstract individuals and atomism shows that atomism is not based on positivist principles but on abstract assumption. The conflict between the atomistic view of nature and the Neo-Confucianist worldview was born in the transformation of the moral system and the institutional system: the condition of the discourses on morality was in the transformation from consanguineous and geographical community relations into the abstract legal relations of the modern state.


Changes in sovereignty and the legal basis of the modern state cannot be separated from the production of new knowlege and ideology. Hence reconstituting the educational institutions and system of knowledge is an important aspect of the construction of modern sovereignty. In 1906, with the abolition of the civil service examination system, which had been maintained for thirteen hundred years, a new educational system, and the scientific knowledge to go with it, was legally established. After the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, academic reform was carried out in 1912, 1915, and 1923, modeled, respectively, on the academic systems in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Since then, every national reform has been accompanied by changes in educational institutions and the system of knowledge. Despite varying conditions, European universalism unavoidably became the dominant element of the educational and knowledge systems through the process of institutionalization. The establishment of a new educational system in the late Qing and the early Republic was intimately connected with study-abroad policies, as well as international trips of officials and some men of letters. In 1915, the educational system received direct guidance from Europeans. Like the expansion of the nation-state in the establishment of the modern state, the educational system in modern China included two orientations: through the professional division of labor and a new knowledge classification system, it brought together in one process the national and global educational systems, and at the same time, it provided institutional protection for a new division of labor in society and its mode of social operation. Within this system, the production of knowledge gradually became professionalized. Even those intellectuals who regarded themselves as enlighteners were professional scholars based in colleges or research institutions. The reform of the educational system and the establishment of a scientific community provided the preconditions for a new power of knowledge. It reevaluated “common sense” under the protection of intellectual authority and eliminated unprincipled knowledge, and set new criteria for knowledge classification. In the new knowledge system, the traditional worldview and its epistemology (morality, traditional education, etc.) continued to exist only as elements of the new knowlege education and lost their status as a worldview. From “the controversy on Eastern and Western cultures” to “the debate on science and metaphysics,” the affirmation of the autonomy, special status, and internal values of culture was incorporated into a rationalized classification of knowledge. Defense of the autonomy of ethics, aesthetics, feelings, and culture finally secured their positions in the rationalized knowledge system or the empire of science.


National education and professional education based on a new social division of labor constitute the basic framework of the eductional system. The Crisis of the Scientific Worldview and the Formation of Scientific Institutions Tied in with the reform of the educational system, and supported by the state, specialized scientific research institutions gradually came into being. From the late Qing to the early Republic, this system was modeled on the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and its principles. For a short time in the late 1920s, France provided a model for the newly established Academia Sinica and several other academic institutions. After the mid-twentieth century, new institutions would be modeled after the Academy of Science in the Soviet Union. Since the late twentieth century, there has been a turn once again to Western (mainly U.S.) models. Every institutional reform presupposed the paradigm of universalism. The organizational principle of the scientific community has been analogous to that of the nation-state, and its mode of operation has provided models for the state and its citizens. This is the premise of the homologous relationship between the modern knowledge system, power relations, and the form of modern sovereignty. A scientific research system accelerates the combination of science, industry, and the state, which, on the one hand provides conditions for increasing industrial productivity, and, on the other hand paves the way for states to achieve a privileged position in international competition. For the same reason, the state regards universities and the scientific research system as workshops of knowledge (productivity) and offers certain privileges to these institutions, such as allowing them to follow international standards, to secure some free space for knowledge production under the premise of specialization. In turn, the scientific community seeks a free space for scientific exploration, based on the relationship between truth and national interests. Under stable institutional circumstances, direct interference of states in education and scientific research is limited to those fields that are directly related to sensitive political and social problems, so that a certain degree of autonomy can be guaranteed at universities and in the scientific research system—especially for research in the natural sciences and in technology. But the relationship between the state and the educational and scientific research system is not always stable. In some historical periods, the state and its dominant ideology fully control the direction of education and scientific research, exposing the weak position of cultural autonomy


that is protected by the legal system of the nation-state. The relationship between university intellectuals and the state is different from that of men of letters, who achieved their position through the civil examination and the imperial court, since the former engage in social activities through their specialization but generally do not engage directly in bureaucratic activities. Through the activities of the scientific community and universities, “scientific culture” becomes a peculiar part of social life. The “two cultures” and the line dividing them are one of the characteristics of modern society. The dualistic confrontation between tradition and science constitutes an obvious characteristic of social reform movements launched by modern states, and the process of nation building may be viewed also as a process of reforming tradition. In this sense, the establishment of the scientific worldview and its institutional hegemony occurs simultaneously with the establishment of the hegemony of the state rationality. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the appearance of organizations of scientific research such as the Chinese Society of Science (Zhongguo kexue she, 1914) and other more specialized schools, characteristics of scientific methodology and specialization became visible. But this methodology and its specialized way of research (as distinct from the conduct of daily social life) did not imply the appearance of nonsocial or nonstate forms. On the contrary, there was a close relation between the system of scientific research and state rationality. It is noteworthy that a scientific worldview established its supreme hegemonic status in Chinese society at a time when European countries were involved in two world wars. The two disastrous wars between sovereign states, developments in science and technology that spawned new forms of violence, and public sentiment on science, morality, and civilization—none of these disrupted the hegemony of the scientific worldview. On the contrary, this competitive world scene has reinforced sovereign states’ demands for science and technology, further guaranteeing the development of science and technology, professionalization, state control of science and technology, and the dominant position of the scientific worldview. As a matter of fact, although the two world wars and their catastrophic results provoked some people to reflect on science and technology as well as their modern application, the application of science and technology in industry and the military has not been reduced but has become even more widespread in the postwar years. So it is not surprising that we observe the paradoxical historical phenomenon that when the First World War in Europe encouraged some European intellectuals to reflect critically on science and scientism, China was in the


midst of its first enlightenment movement of the twentieth century, which aimed at establishing the hegemonic status of a scientific worldview. When the high-tech carnage displayed during the Second World War astounded the whole world, Chinese intellectuals were preoccupied with national liberation and showed little interest in reflecting on scientific hegemony and its technological application. The nation-state and its competitive paradigm provide a political reason for the expansion of the hegemony of science and technology. The principle of profit optimization in the capitalist market helps explain the economic dynamics of technological innovation. The latter also helps explain why, even though globalization contributes to the changing status of the nation-state, the hegemonic status of science and technology does not fade away. The social paradigm, with the market principle as its axis, still relies on the nonascriptive identifiable individual rights system and the principle of profit maximization. Dynamics of the state and the market are closely related to the scientific worldview and its technological extension. The history of thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was shadowed by dualities of fact/value, cognition/practice, pure rationality/practical rationality. Numerous scholars contributed to drawing a clear boundary between these alternatives, the motive being to confine the hegemony of the world of “things” by this distinction. Science, however, did not retreat from its universalist claims and its status as a universal knowledge system. On the contrary, the boundary of science was expanded greatly by the retreat of positivist science into the domain of natural science. The positivist, atomistic scientific worldview has had to face challenges from two directions: on the one hand, the domain of science is no longer the domain characterized by classical physics; on the other hand, the domain of scientific knowledge is rationally divided into the knowledge of nature, the knowledge of society, the knowledge of morality, and the knowledge of aesthetics. However, the separation between natural science, social science, and the humanities not only replicates the principles of classification in the system of science but also regulates the professional principles of these fields through a formalized division. In this sense, the challenge to the atomistic and positivist concept of science actually extends rather than limits the hegemony of scientific principles. For example, after the first Chinese revolution and the establishment of the Republic of China, the scientific community, in their own particular way, discussed extensively evolutionist issues in science and morality, science and social politics, philosophy of life, as well as scientific ideas, mapping out a classified knowledge


genealogy in a strict methodological sense. This genealogy of knowledge encapsulated all categories that were related to the old worldview, such as morality, politics, religion, and so forth, but with meanings totally different from the old worldview categories. Now they were appearing as special fields in a scientific system, arranged according to their levels of positivity and practicability, from high to low. During the May Fourth period, this positivist knowledge system was critically challenged, so that critiques from Liang Shuming, Zhang Junmai, and the Xueheng School of the universalist concept of science only resulted in the incorporation of the categories of morality, aesthetics, and feelings into the scientific knowledge system and institution, as rationalized knowledge fields. There were changes inside the knowledge system, but the rationalized principle of classification and its process of institutionalization did not change at all. In this sense, the confinement of the field of natural science and the critique of the monolithic scientific worldview became the very warm-up for the unlimited expansion of the domains of science and scientific rationality. We may best observe how the self-deconstruction of the scientific worldview contributes to the further expansion of scientific rationality and its hegemony from the perspective of internal crises. The first crisis of the scientific worldview is the paradoxical relation between its characteristic as a worldview and its claim of scientific methods. The main instrument that the scientific worldview uses to destroy old values is the positivist method of modern science. According to this methodological principle, all knowledge that cannot be verified by experiment is hyperknowledge and metaphysical superstition. However, the scientific worldview cannot break away from its own metaphysical characteristics and totalism. On the one hand, the scientific worldview needs a narrative of totality to defend the dynamics of reform and the legitimacy of the new system; on the other hand, the positivist methods that the scientific worldview uses to destroy the old system and old ideas also challenge its own idea of totality. The former needs support from cosmology, ontology, and religion, but the latter denies the existence of any ultimate truth and unified principles. In the world of Yan Fu, sociology constitutes the soul of a knowledge system that encapsulates the universe, nature, and human society, because sociology can provide the knowledge system with a teleology (the value of the collective [qun] and the public [gong]). However, the authority of science in sociology is based upon its application of the positivist method, and this method cannot guarantee the moral orientation of the collective and the public. There exists an inherent gap between the characteristics of science as embodied by


sociology and its characteristics as a worldview. If there is no inherent connection between knowledge and moral objectives, then the general knowledge system, the positivist method, the professionalization of learning, and its industrial application are all distinctively different from the teleological knowledge system affirmed by Yan Fu and Liang Qichao. We cannot connect Yan Fu’s cosmology derived from the Book of Changes (yi xue) and its operative mode with the process of production and application of science and technology; neither can we connect Liang Qichao’s practical method that can generate moral meanings with scientific invention and its cognition, creation, and applications. The hegemony of the scientific method is achieved through the denial of the direct relation between science and value (which is the precondition of establishing science as a worldview). The second crisis that the scientific worldview encounters lies in the paradoxical relation it has with the institutional practices of the state. When the effectivity of the positivist method undermines the ultimate truth and the unified principle on which the scientific worldview relies, the knowledge system in the modern state hastens the dissolution of this ultimate truth and the unified principle. What the modern state relies on is specialized, professional, practical, and institutionalized (scientific) knowledge practice. Whether this knowledge is knowledge about nature or society, effectivity and practicality are always the primary criteria that are internalized in the operation of this system. In the context of this system, a serious conflict comes into being between the moral teleology of the early scientific worldview and the scientific system that accepts efficiency and its contribution to the state as the only principle. Scientific journals published before the 1911 revolution—such as Yaquan zazhi (Yaquan magazine, 1900), Kexue shijie (World of science, 1903), and Kexue yiban (A glimpse of science, 1907)—displayed a functionalist scientific worldview, and the significance of science was put into the discursive paradigm of science/politics, science/ civilization, science/epoch. Hence science was naturally endowed with the necessity of morality/function. However, while a knowledge system based on the division of labor and its institutionalized practice helps the advance of disciplinary knowledge, its principle of classification has nothing to do with specific moral concerns. Thus a gap is produced between function and value. Despite the fact that the state attempts to endow this new knowl. The Foreign Affairs Movement (yangwu yundong) led to the establishment of a few Westernized schools. Centered on military business, they were excluded from the civil exam system. In other words, despite the fact that the Qing government had been exposed to Western scientific, technological, and military knowledge during a crisis,


edge and its occupational modes with moral meaning, the morality thus produced merely consists of functional relations regulated by the state. The separation of morality and the institution is not only the main feature of the modern social system, including the educational system, but also the main objective of this system. It is exactly under these circumstances that Liang Qichao questions the morality of those who are able to enter colleges or study abroad with high grades, or those who have achieved positions of authority in specialized fields. Should school be a place for selling knowledge, or a path to intellectual maturity after the models of the “great learning” (daxue) in the three dynasties (Xia, Shang, and Zhou)? Liang Qichao’s questions echoed those of Cheng Yi and other Neo-Confucians of the Song dynasty (960–1275 AD), who examined the relationship between the civil examination system and morality. The case was similar with the establishment of the scientific community. The scientific community (i.e., the Chinese Society of Science) maintains strong interests in society, politics, morality, and ethics, and expands the application of their monistic scientific knowledge from the study of nature to the social field. Its tenet of conducting scientific research by experiments facilitates the technologization of science and its connection with industries. The scientific community, with its belief in the scientific system of natural monism, consolidates dualisms of nature/human being, material/spirit, and physical world/spiritual world, and therefore secures the special position of the scientific community in modern society. Under modern conditions, scientific research has been transformed into an organized research system, so state rationality can quickly extend the results and methods of scientific fields into other social fields. For example, 1915, the year The Youth was the distinction of ti (substance) and yong (function) was further consolidated through the educational system. During the reform movement of 1898, a Guizhou official, Yan Xiu, suggested to Emperor Guangxu that a special civil exam be designed to include economics, in addition to the regular subjects on the bagu examination (eight-legged essays). Furthermore, those who were good at domestic affairs, foreign affairs, finance, military, and engineering, regardless of whether or not they had any official positions, should be recommended by higher officials according to the same routine established for bo xue hong poems (博学鸿词). All recommended persons should be able to take the exam and experience the same treatment as the regular scholars after being enrolled. He also suggested that this kind of exam should be held immediately, and “held every ten years or twenty years by order of the emperor,” but that it should not replace the regular exam. Guangxu accepted this suggestion in February 1898 but was unable to carry it out due to failure of the reform. See Qing dezong shilu [Records of Qing Dezong], vol. 414, 4–5; quoted from Wuxu bianfa [Wuxu reform], vol. 2 (Shenzhou guoguang she), 9.


founded, also witnessed the birth of the journal Science Monthly by the Chinese Society of Science. Taking this journal as their organ, scientists began to study scientific concepts even before The Youth and to use a horizontal form of writing, Western-style punctuation (in 1916), and vernacular Chinese. These experiments were recognized by the state and society, then developed into the state-approved institutional practice (for education and mass media). Norms of modern Chinese humanistic discourse and daily language (such as punctuation and horizontal writing) were accepted gradually through the practice of scientific language. So in the early stages of the experiments, it is hard to distinguish the language of science and the language of the humanities. This institutional practice implies a certain understanding of the relationship between the development of science and the evolution of civilization: the development of science serves as a paradigm for the progress of civilization, and scientific rationalization becomes the objective of social development. When all kinds of scientific terms entered into people’s daily lives through the media and textbooks, efforts to explain science and the world with traditional resources quickly lost their impact. A discussion of the social/cultural significance of the knowledge practices of the scientific community needs to take note of the continuous expansion of its boundary. In the description of modern cultural activities, the concept of a “discursive community of science” is more effective than that of the scientific community. While the scientific community is important, it is only part of the discursive community of science. The latter refers to the intellectual community that uses scientific or parascientific language and scientific authority to carry out sociocultural activities, which also includes scientific and technological activities. The intellectual groups New Youth and New Tide may be regarded as part and parcel of the discursive community of science, even though they did not engage directly in research and application in the natural sciences. These intellectuals not only endowed their cultural activities with scientific meaning but also imitated the language of science in their discourse, so that their way of discussing questions and establishing cultural groups emulated the scientific community and its principles. The scientific discursive community used colleges, newspapers, and textbooks extensively to express their preferred ideas as well as their value . On the relation between local dialects, the modern language movement, and nationalism, see my article, “Local Form, Dialects and the Debate on National Form During the Anti-Japanese War” [in Chinese], in Xueren [The scholar], vol. 10 (Nanjing: Jiangsu Weyi Chubanshe, 1999), 271–312.


judgments, and attempted thereby to influence social and state practices. The community of scientists regarded themselves as subjects that are distinguished from general social subjects, as a group of people who engaged in classified and specialized intellectual institutions. They had cognitive objects, used objective methods, specialized training, and conducted professional research. The organization and activities of this special social group could serve as a model for society at large, since, according to scientific monism, fields of morality, belief, feelings, instincts, and so on were all components of the scientific knowledge system, and scientific activity itself included the necessity of morality. In other words, the activity of the scientific community included a double principle of generalization and specialization. Intellectuals and humanistic scholars who claimed to limit the applicational scope of science adopted the basic standpoint of using the principle of division to attack the principle of generalization. They argued that the fields of social life, such as morality, belief, and aesthetics, should be separated from the universal field of scientific knowledge in order to develop their own autonomy. If we take the subjective turn as the birth of modern Chinese humanities, then the so-called humanities is not born from an understanding of human beings or from an understanding that human beings are complicated social beings, but from the definition and distinction of fields that cannot be explained or regulated by categories of economic rules, political rights, and scientific practices. In this sense, the humanities is not the discovery of human beings but rather the discovery of those fields (individual or collective) of morality, aesthetics, and unconsciousness. Modern humanities is the disintegration of the human being instead of a reconstruction of the integrity of the human being, because along with the separation of humanities from science, the concept of the human being is also separated from natural and socioeconomic objectivity. The human being is the subject of morality, a subject that is distinguished from nature. It is the research object of ethics, psychology, literature, and history. This specialized understanding of the human is related to the classification and institutionalization of knowledge: in the genealogy of this knowledge and institution, the actual relations of human beings have to be considered as the principle of classification. . Foucault argues that there is no human being in classical knowledge. What actually exists in the place where we find human beings is the discursive power that can represent the order of things, or the power of words that can represent the order of things. This acute observation is very inspiring for us. See David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 170. . In the late Qing period, the introduction of categories such as community, society,


Culture Debates and the Classification of Knowledge Therefore, the autonomy of the humanities reaffirms the universality of the principle of division on which the scientific community is built. Discussions of the classification of knowledge have been closely related to the division of labor in modern society, especially education and the reorganization of the scientific institution. The rational division of the knowledge system, first of all, is a rationalized project for modern society and, secondly, provides a practical program of modernization. In the debate on “science and metaphysics” in 1923, Zhang Junmai’s attack on the scientific system and his reconstruction of knowledge on the basis of “division” was by no means a purely intellectual activity. His effort to reestablish a knowledge system stressing “life outlook” implicitly echoed the educational reform that took place after the May Fourth Movement, especially the academic reform of the early 1920s. His reconstruction of the “study of the mind” has been widely acknowledged as the very beginning of the modern New Confucianism, but his “study of the mind” broke with Song Confucianism in that it attempted to provide theoretical evidence for the autonomy of morality, aesthetics, and feelings, as well as to reorganize the knowledge system. For Zhang, the function of the “study of the mind” was no different from that of German idealism. In this sense, the prescription for the crisis of modernity from intellectuals of metaphysics became an organic part of the cultural project and the practical outline of modernity. The universalization of science and its system provided a general criterion for different cultural advocacies and created cultural premises for unequal and hierarchical relations, internationally as well as domestically. The contributors were not only those who spread scientific thought and practice but included those who criticized and challenged them. In the context of modern China, nationalism in the mode of civilizational discourse constitutes the first serious challenge and critique of the scientific knowledge system. If we take the debate on science and metaphysics in 1923 and the issue of a “life outlook” as a turning point, which prepared a theoretical basis for the reconstruction of the modern knowledge system, and especially the separation of science, morals, and emotions into different and state led to the redefinition of people—people as national subject. In the 1930s, the understanding of people came to be associated with the concept of class. If the design of the modern system and the understanding of people are closely related to each other, then the moral base of the modern revolution was based upon the reconstruction of the people.


domains, then such differentiation arose not from the framework of epistemology but was conceived and matured through debates on cultural differences between East and West that originated in the late Qing dynasty. Both sides in May Fourth cultural controversies took dualisms, such as China/West, quietistic/dynamic civilization, Chinese/Western learning, and spiritual/material civilization, as the fundamental premises of the debate, and they associated science, knowledge, reason, and utility with Western, dynamic, and material civilization, while identifying morality, spirituality, instincts, and aesthetics with Eastern, Chinese, stable, and spiritual civilization within this framework. Hence, the original dualism of civilization was transformed into a new dualism of epistemology, such as science vs. morals, knowledge vs. emotion, reason vs. instinct, and so forth. In other words, the classification of knowledge greatly relies on the classification of civilization discourse, but in a more objective and neutral way. In the history of modern China, cultural conflict is fundamental to differentiation in the domain of knowledge. Accordingly, the conflicting ideas on knowledge in “the debate on science and metaphysics” cannot hide the fact that it is basically about cultural conflict. The reflection on science and modernity, in the context of China, is also one on the cultural conflicts China has faced since the late Qing and is especially a reflection on the relationship between Western and Chinese cultures. Scholars like Du Yaquan, Liang Shuming, the Xueheng group, and Zhang Junmai created a new system of moral discourse in the 1920s in opposition to mainstream modernist ideology. But the program of modernity and its core philosophical categories also provided their basic premises. Therefore, their antiscientific, morality-centered ideology and cultural theories still included the inherent, essential content of the principles and themes of modernity. The thought current they represented provoked the subjective turn in Chinese thought, but this only resulted in an expansion of a universalist intellectual hegemony. The so-called subjective turn in Western philosophy was represented in critiques and denials of the Hegelian metaphysical system and in the “subject-object” epistemology of the Enlightenment, leading to an exploration of human subjectivity in individuals, personal emotions, moods, and experiences. In modern Chinese thought, such a “subjective turn” is first of all a cultural turn: taking Western modernity as the point of departure to rediscover the values and significance of Chinese culture. Thus, China vs. the West as a cultural and intellectual dualism becomes the axis of the discussion. The formation of this axis is provoked by the search for the uniqueness, difference, or authen-


ticity of the national culture and is much closer to the romantic nationalism developed by Herder. Liang Shuming’s concept of “spiritual desire” and Zhang Junmai’s concept of a “life outlook” are both premised on a national subjectivity. Both are particular in terms of civilization discourse and may be seen as theoretical prerequisites for nationalism. However, a historical paradox is that the differentiation of knowledge derives from the theory of cultural difference, but the form of cultural debate conceals the very cultural implication of such a conflict. Through the stormy debate and the reorganization of the scientific knowledge system, the unequal cultural relationship between China and the West is finally encapsulated in the classification relationships of knowledge domains and is confirmed in the forms of their institutionalization. This shows that the epistemology and the theory of civilization, both focused on difference and separation, do not weaken but reinforce the premise of the universalism. The specialized epistemology plays a minor role in the conflict of modern philosophies, but it is a general principle in the formation of the modern social system. The cultural ethos represented by the philosophers mentioned above shows the main trend of the modern moral movement, and without this moral consideration, it is impossible to completely realize the outline of modernity and the principle of specialization in modern world affairs. This is the very position of modern moralism. The scientific principles of antitraditionalism, the moral/culture-centered antiscientific theory, and the revolutionary theory of Marxism provide the key theoretical links to the modern social order. In this sense, the outline of modernity is accomplished not by a single philosophical group; neither is its principle of specialization created by certain theorists. By contrast, every part of the outline of modernity and its principle of specialization comes into being gradually within conflicting currents of thought. In order to understand the meaning of these currents, we first need to understand the background of their relationships. The Issue of Modernity and the Significance of Late Qing Thinking In the sense discussed above, the rise of modern thought may be described as not only a process in which the scientific worldview achieves its hegemonic position but also a process in which the scientific worldview itself undergoes a metamorphosis. The principles of knowledge classification and institutional specialization gradually eliminate its characteristics as


a worldview. The revolt of the scientific worldview overthrows the outlook of heavenly principles but in turn faces the fate of disintegration. On the one hand, positivist scientific concepts cannot truly distinguish the domain of science from that of metaphysics, so its resort to the positivist method not only disassembles traditional worldviews but also the metaphysical base upon which the scientific worldview is established. On the other hand, scientific principles are strictly based upon models set by the scientific community and the experimental methods in positivism. Due to the absence of an intrinsic connection between the traditional moral community and the process of scientific practice, there is a deep ambiguity in the relationship of scientific principles to the ethical world. The scientific worldview claims that science has internalized moral imperatives, but neither its methodology nor its institutional practice can be transformed into concrete political, ethical, and aesthetic practice. The “disenchantment” with the scientific worldview indicates that the development of science has become a self-legitimizing process. The withdrawal of scientific practice from the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and so on indicates that the scientific institution and its operation no longer need legitimation from the outside. Let us observe this process from the construction, internal conflicts, transformation, and disintegration of the axiomatic world outlook of late Qing. The main feature of late Qing thought is the collapse of the heavenly principles outlook and efforts to construct a new worldview; we can name this era “the era of worldviews.” Late Qing thought approached the question of origin from two directions. One was the return to questions of origin, such as the origin of the universe, the origin of human beings, social principles, and so forth. The other was the return to the great founders and their ideal systems, such as Confucius, Lao Zi, Mencius, Buddha, rituals and music of the Three Dynasties, and the like. In the form of knowledge, these universalist worldviews can be transformed into orthodoxy through teaching. They seek to reach from different directions ultimate truth, unified principles, and the world as an integral entity (of nature and human society). New Text Confucianism, Old Text Confucianism, Xunzi and Mozi teachings, Consciousness-Only Buddhism, Daoism, legalism—all experienced a revival in the late Qing period and suffered vicissitudes along with the historical changes of the period and their respective positions in the social ideology. All these movements sought to construct a comprehensive interpretation of the world, that is, a universalist worldview. To some extent, the revival of worldviews can be regarded as the result of Western impact, but they retained a basis in traditional sources and a kinship to popular customs. In


this unprecedented situation of change, late Qing intellectuals attempted to reconstruct a universalist worldview and to find comprehensive explanations for the operative principles of the universe, the rules of change in the world, the base of politics/morality, and criteria of feelings/aesthetics, and sought a general method to discover the truth. Scientific ideas constituted a worldview at the time because they replaced the heavenly principles worldview through its restructuring. The revival of worldviews implied a complete reorganization of traditional ideas on time and space, and locating the position of the self and its direction of movement in this new time-space dimension. One of the marks of the revival of worldviews is the proliferation of new concepts. Late Qing thought adopted the guise of reviving ancient thought, which makes the new concepts often seem like a recycling of ancient concepts, although both the meanings and the usages of these words have been changed fundamentally. To borrow a concept from Schopenhauer, the social world refers to the world as “will and representation,” so the revival and spread of new concepts and old words marks a reconstruction of the world of representations. The world as will and representation is psychological as well as theatrical and political. The process of constructing the worldview itself is the process in which the social world and its different forces struggle for words—the change in words is the change in the world of representations, therefore changing words is one way to change things. If we can argue that it is words that, to a great extent, create things, then reforming politics essentially is a process of reforming words, therefore political reform and social reform have to begin with the struggle against words. Writers and journalists who have used and spread new words most extensively and most effectively have exerted the biggest influence on modern Chinese thought. New concepts, and their relation to each other, are established in the reconstruction of the representations of modern China, and the establishment of new representations relies on new principles of classification, such as public/collective, nation/race, individual/ society, class/state, nature/society, freedom/dictatorship, government/peo ple, reform/revolution, and all hierarchical structures in social relations. The authority of science is gradually established by the historical circumstances of the constant bombardment of Western modern science and technology, and, as a result, new disciplines are set up in the educational system. Accompanying this process is the process in which new words are used to reconstruct the worldview. From the perspective of evolution and positivism, any effective worldview and its claims on universal laws must be


preconditioned with science and its concepts. The constructive process of the scientific worldview can be generalized as a process of universalizing or axiomizing science, and its mission is to incorporate science into the discourse of the worldview, thus producing a scientific worldview. There is a difference between universalizing science and scientizing universalism. The latter refers to the fact that, with the establishment of the hegemony of science, any universalistic discourse has to be proved as scientific discourse; the legitimacy of the former, however, still requires a universalistic defense. During the late Qing era, since the authority of science was not yet established, categories such as civilization, progress, development, state, and morality were all applied to the confirmation of the significance of science and its values. For the same reason, what was universalized in the process was not simply science but all principles of nature, politics, and morality commonly recognized by the people. The trinity of nature, politics, and morality was the general characteristic that emerged from the struggle between, as well as mutual infiltration of, the scientific worldview and the heavenly principles worldview. In this sense, the scientific worldview may have resulted from the importation to the East of Western ideas but was born in the womb of the Chinese worldview of the heavenly principles. We can find elements of these two worldviews in some crucial themes, such as the collective, the public, the individual, axioms, states, and society, in late Qing thought. Three important projects helped to reform the modern world and China: Yan Fu’s universalistic worldview, which was established upon NeoConfucianism, the Book of Changes, and positivism; Liang Qichao’s worldview, which is supported by the Study of the Mind (Xinxue), New Text Confucianism, and German idealism; and Zhang Taiyan’s anti-universalistic worldview, which combined Consciousness-Only Buddhism and Zhang Zi’s Daoism. The paradoxes and internal deconstruction between them provide a different perspective from which to rethink issues of modernity. In the aforementioned three systems based upon the universalist view, Yan Fu and Liang Qichao represent two mainstream directions in the integration of Neo-Confucianism and a monistic view of nature. Yan Fu’s view emphasizes the internal homogeneity of the world. He believes in the capability of understanding the internal principles of the universe, the world, and human beings through science (gewu zhizhi ) and positivist methods. The Study of the Mind, New Text Confucianism, and dualist philosophy (German idealism, in particular) make up Liang Qichao’s synthesis, which emphasizes the deep gap between the natural world and the moral world. The only


way for communication between these two worlds is through the “unity of thought and action” (zhixing heyi ). Both scientific worldviews mentioned above prearrange the methodological unity between cognitive science and practical morality. Science and the “unity of thought and action” are not just ways of knowing the world but are also moral practices to eliminate the private and uphold the public. What deserves special attention is that as Neo-Confucianism integrated the li/qi dualism in cosmology and subject/ object dualism in epistemology, in late Qing thought, the scientific outlook that took Neo-Confucianism as its point of departure was characterized by monism. By contrast, in the debate between the Study of the Mind and the Study of the Principles (lixue), what is emphasized is the monism of mind and thing; in the genealogy of late Qing thought, however, most theorists who took Wang Yangming as their point of departure adopted the dualism of material/spirit and science/morality. In this sense, it is this theoretical difference discussed above that finally leads to the separation of the two worldviews during the May Fourth era. Yan fu was the first to introduce evolution and the scientific system of knowledge based on sociology. In his monist cosmological framework, evolution and methods of positivist knowledge include moral meaning and telos. Just like the European monist cosmology, this “new cosmology assumes a universe that can extend in time and space endlessly, all the eternal materials inside it move according to the law of eternity and neccessity, infinitely and aimlessly. This endless universe inherits all the essential qualities of the God, but only with this aimlessness, as everything else has been carried away by the disappearing God.” Different from European cosmology, for Yan Fu, the new cosmology remains the fundamental framework of the cosmology of the Book of Changes. Within this framework, as a natural process, the universe unifies the basic principles of heaven, earth, and human beings, and synthesizes the dual logics of linear evolution and circular change. While according to Neo-Confucian cosmology, moral truth is the natural embodiment of the operation of the universe, Yan Fu on the one hand endows the progress of the universe with features of totality and teleology, and on the other hand believes that we should establish science, technology, industry, state, and all kinds of institutions through man’s active efforts, which can internally connect to a higher objective, thus completing the moral objective of the natural progress of the universe. Therefore, . Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 276.


Yan Fu’s cosmology of change is supported by a knowledge system centered on sociology. His cosmology argues that the operation of the universe can transcendentally prearrange the ideal of the public, and the divisions of modern society will finally be incorporated into a rational relationship between Tianyan (heavenly evolution) and Gongli (universal principles). His optimistic belief is based on the logic of knowledge centered on sociology. In this system, the concept of Tianyan cannot be reduced to concepts of evolution or progress, because this concept also includes a circular history and cosmology inspired by the ideas in the Book of Changes. Why should the modern scientific knowledge system be centered on sociology? The appearance of sociology and its knowledge system in China cannot be viewed simply as an activity in translation and the spread of knowledge. Its coincidence with the rise of society is not accidental. The category of society is a new creation. It is first constructed by those with access to Western knowledge and by those who closely observe modern Western society. One way of constructing society is to construct a knowledge system that is suitable to social programming. Thus, knowledge of society becomes an organic and the most crucial part of a universalistic knowledge. In this sense, the separation of society from family, kinship, ethics, and imperial power is more a sudden event or the result of knowledge programming and state intervention than a natural process. The society referred to here is a new order formed by teleological programming rather than by a historical product or an element in the domain of daily life. In the paradigmatic narration of sociology, society is a process of programming that can organize historical elements (such as family, village, and exchange relations) into a new social order. So, the dualism of society and social organizations, such as family, imperial power, and religious law, constitutes an important connotation for the intellectual discourse of enlightenment and modern states. In her discussion of the rise of European society, Hannah Arendt connects the rise of society with the appearance of economics. Her statement is at odds with the issue of the knowledge system of sociology that I have discussed above. According to Arendt, “modern equality is based on the conformism that is internalized in society. The reason for this possibility lies in the substitution of behavior for action as the most important form of human relationship.” This is the same conformism (which assumes that people are conformists and won’t take any action against one another) that paves the way for modern economics. With the rise of society came the birth of economics—armed with its main technological instrument, statistics—and it became a standard social science. Only when


people become social beings, and conform to some given behavior modes, therefore making nonconformity antisocial or abnormal, does economics attain its nature of science. (Until the modern period, economics was only a minor part of ethics and politics. Modern economics is based on the assumption that human beings take the same manner of behavior in the field of economic activities as in other fields.) Political science as a branch of science, as proposed by Adam Smith, is also directly related to the rise of society, because the process creates the beings called “economic man” by liberal economists and “social man” by Marxists. However, in late Qing China, economics and other fields of science all belonged to the scientific knowledge system based on sociology. This difference offers a perspective from which to observe the interaction between the economy and society in the Chinese context: rather than argue that economic changes facilitate social transformation, it is better to say that the establishment of modern economics and its modes of behavior is the result of reconstructing social order. Yan Fu’s emphasis on the moral objective internalized in classified knowledge is closely related to his understanding of the division of labor and professionalization in modern society. During the process of social division and knowledge classification developed day by day, if there is no moral necessity for scholarship, then a moral regulation of scholarship has to be reinforced from the outside, which creates an obstacle for the independence of knowledge. Yan Fu, on the one hand, constructs a new, hierarchical knowledge system by his translation activities, and, on the other hand, attempts to endow this knowledge system with moral meanings in order to connect the natural processes of the universe and scientific research with values such as honesty, publicness, and universal principles. In this sense, the knowledge (as well as social) project accomplished by the system centered on sociology requires not only the development of science but also a given model for human behavior. It regards those who don’t obey these principles and their behavior as antisocial, abnormal, and immoral. The distinction between the normal and abnormal is directly related to the definition of teleological (normal) and nonteleological (abnormal) in the universe and among humans. On this point of using cosmology to uphold the modes of normal and abnormal, Yan Fu’s knowledge system is very similar to the Study of the Principles (lixue) in Neo-Confucianism. The scientific knowl. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man (Garden City, N.J., and New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 38–39.


edge system centered on sociology embodies an internal consistency, and what it expresses is not a natural relation but a political ideal of society and its cosmological environment. According to this ideal, society will be overwhelmed by routinized daily life, and will reach harmony through the scientific outlook that it internalizes. Homogenized programming of the universe had already become one of the main characteristics of modern society, but at the time it also contained a denial of the traditional political regime, a regime in which a certain person or a certain kin group governs society. According to the scientific project, modern society should be the natural operation of a specialized system that is organized by many individuals. Obviously, this process of knowledge reconstruction contains a deconstruction of imperial power and religious society, as well as their legitimacy, and provides the conditions for the birth of mass society. No matter how complicated and even paradoxical Yan Fu’s ideas, the dominant aspect of his social thought is still a comprehensive project of modernity made up by a knowledge system centered on evolution and sociology. It is in this sense that Yan Fu can be regarded as the representative figure in the creation of a project of modernity in Chinese history. The relationship between knowledge and society is also the main concern for Liang Qichao. He facilitated the establishment of modern society through newspapers, communities, and other methods, and provided legitimate defenses for the construction of this society with a program of knowledge. Based on his idea of moral autonomy, Liang Qichao worried that the overexpansion of science would eventually castrate the moral and aesthetic subjectivity of human beings, and he refused to incorporate society and human behavior into a unified, science-controlled model. For this reason, his idea of society and state was deeply rooted in a moral ideal of collectivity—a community with moral coherence that is akin to traditional communities. If we can argue that Yan Fu’s epistemology has characteristics of atomism and positivist physics, then Liang Qichao’s epistemology is deeply imbued with moral concerns, and its social categories place greater significance on community and the adjustment between individuals. For example, his concept of society is very similar to the school in Confucian ideals. Flexible social division, political importance of distinguishing right and wrong, close community relations, and moralism are the fundamental features of this social paradigm. Liang Qichao connected German idealism (especially Kantian dualism) with Wang Yangming’s Study of the Mind and supplemented it with the academic system of the three dynasties and educational designs from the Han and Tang dynasties, in order to relieve


the moral crisis produced by scientific programming. His description of the evolution of the universe is developed with attention to relations between science/individual will, objective universe/cognitive subjectivity, and truth as natural/moral principles, thus drawing a clear line between nature and society, and between pure and practical rationality. As an exponent of modern educational reform, Liang’s knowledge classification is based on the structure of politics, education, and technology, which on the one hand promotes the development of natural science, and on the other hand searches for the establishment of moral autonomy. The social categories of the collectivity and the public, as he conceives them, are reminiscent of communities of ritual (li ) and music (yue) in Confucianism, in the sense that they can connect social behavior organically with the system of moral evaluation. Within this sytem, the scientific cognitive process can even be transformed into a moral practice that eliminates the private, so that knowledge, methods, and institutions which conflict with moral practice can be eliminated from the category of scientific practice. If we compare Liang Qichao’s ideas with Yan Fu’s, the differences lie not in the presumption of universality or the heavenly principles, but in the way they connect human beings and their transcendental essence. Yan Fu thinks that the cognitive relation between human beings and things can be established by way of experiments and arrives at ultimate truth by a set of cognitive programs. Liang Qichao, however, attempts to establish the concept of truth (conscience or heavenly principles) by practice (the unity of thought and action); that is, he binds together human social and moral practice and issues of scientific universality. This also deeply influences his idea on evolution: evolution for him is not a scientific description of the origin of things in the universe and their evolution but a proof of the teleology of the universe, so the competition among things and the final selection made by the heavens has an internal objective. If a certain behavior is harmful to the interest of the majority and to moral objectives, then it is against the natural law of evolution and progress; so the criteria of evolution are criteria for the realization of the collective and the public. During the period of the educational system reform in 1923 and 1924, Liang Qichao repeatedly emphasized the significance for modern education of such theories as Wang Yangming’s “unity of thought and action” and Yan Yuan (Xizhai)’s “practice and achievement.” His goal was to overcome the separation between cognition and model, theory and practice. Compared with Yan Fu’s cosmology of change, Liang Qichao’s idea has a characteristic of interiority; that is, universal principles do not come from the operation


of the universe but are embodied by the internal moral practice of human beings. Therefore, in order to judge if the operation of the universe and the world is following the natural law of evolution or not, we have to establish a set of internal moral criteria. So the key issue here is not whether evolution has an objective but whether it is necessary to establish a social ethics to define the moral meaning of this process. In the world of Liang Qichao, “the collective” is a key concept in the sense that it refers to a society with a high level of autonomy, freedom, and a bottom-up structure, with the moral principles appropriate to this kind of civil society. Here the collective, or society, is not the counterpart of the state or a category in the civil society/state duality but a mode of social construction. The universalization of science partly originates from the legitimate demand of science itself and partly from the moral limits placed on the social consequences of science and technology. However, for Zhang Taiyan, universality is nothing but an oppressive and dominant power, and modern society oppresses individuals in the name of universality to a degree that was unknown in ancient society, where the ethical system centered on the concept of the heavenly principles. Zhang Taiyan uses the concept of the atom in modern physics, too, and applies it to the social field. Like atoms, individuals are the primary elements of the world. All affairs and laws of a collective nature are illusions of the oppressive power that suppresses individuals. The concept of the atom itself is an illusion. Drawing on Consciousness-Only Buddhism and Zhuang Zi’s Qiwu theory, Zhang constructs an oppositional worldview that is squarely against universalism, which I understand as a negative universalism or a self-denying universalism that negates all projects of modernity, including state building, as well as social and individual construction. This negative universalism is intended to be a critical worldview; it has no possibility or desire to provide a project of modernity. The attractive power of this view, which took ConsciousnessOnly Buddhism as its theoretical framework, lies in its opposing Buddhism to Confucianism and Ritualism (lijiao), as the latter came to be viewed as the source of imperial power during the late Qing. Zhang Taiyan incorporates the moral foundation and political agenda of modern revolution into his abstract thinking, which gives the latter a realistic critical edge. He attacks Confucianism, Ritualism, and imperial power by way of negation, also extending this attack to projects of modernity promoted by his antagonists. If the universalistic worldviews of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao legimate the narratives of the modern state and the modern state system, then the denial of universality in negative universalism inevitably contains the nega-


tion of the nation-state and its system. If most intellectuals in the late Qing period stress only the morbidity of a specific government (in this case, the late Qing government), and from there proceed to defend the establishment of a proper state, then Zhang Taiyan attempts to connect the denial of the specific government to the denial of the state paradigm itself. This is a nationalist’s attack on a nationalist project. The paradox itself reveals the features of Zhang Taiyan’s self-denying individualism and nationalism. Zhang Taiyan’s critique of scientific universalism is based on two basic principles. First, he uses the principle of subjective epistemology to distinguish two concepts of nature. The nature in scientific research is not the nature-in-itself but a nature that is limited to the horizon and category of science (that is, the nature that has been constructed by science), so it lacks the essence of real nature (without autonomy) and can be manifested only through the law of causation. Starting from this point of view, he arrives at a series of conclusions. The materialist ideas of things and nature are entirely imaginary. Science as an interpretive system cannot interpret the world itself. Universalism and evolution are not laws of the universe or transcendental principles but ideological constructs of human beings. The process of the construction of universals is not so much a manifestation of the public as a distorted symbol of the private. So, universalism is just another word for control and domination. Secondly, Zhang rescues the operation of nature from teleology and denies the moral meaning of evolution. He therefore negates the connection between individuals and evolutionistic historical teleology, the dependency of individual moral orientation on the operating principles of society in general, and the idea that the individual is an instrument of collective evolution. The individual is neither a citizen of the state and the law, a member of family and society, a subject of history and morality, nor a subject of the relationship between the subject (human being) and the object (nature). In brief, the individual’s significance and status cannot be defined through a relation with other more general entities. The full application of the atomistic idea subverts the concept of society that is based on the positivist scientific view. The historical significance of Zhang Taiyan’s idea of the single subject or individual has to be understood against the background of the constitutive process of modern society. Both Yan Fu and Liang Qichao admit the significance of the individual for social construction. They either begin with liberal politics and economics or with the concept of the private in traditional ideas to search for a legitimate basis for the individual. The fundamental paradigm in European politics since the seventeenth century—


the social model based on individual elements that is developed from the abstract legal form of contracts and exchange—constitutes the core of their respective social views. In this basic formula, modern society (commercial society) is the integration of the contractual relation between isolated legitimate subjects, and the precondition for establishing this contractual relation is the idea of atomism. In Foucault’s words, the individual is an entity produced by the special disciplining power of technology: “At that time there existed a technology that could construct individuals into elements related to power and knowledge. The individual no doubt is an imaginary atom embodied in the ideology on the society.” In other words, when Yan Fu and Liang Qichao used this knowledge system to build society, they simultaneously constructed the atomic individuals that constitute this very society. Because the scientific knowledge system regards the atom (individual) as the natural basic unit, the individual itself is created and produced in the process of creating society. Zhang Taiyan’s concept of the individual is totally contrary to mainstream Chinese thought since the late Qing. He refuses to admit a logical relationship between individuals and other collective categories such as society and the state. He thus takes individuals as his point of departure for exposing the illusions of society and the state, and ends up with the individual itself as the domain for subjective construction. Therefore, his concept of the individual is not only a temporary concept but also a self-denying concept. This cognitive insight provides Zhang Taiyan with a special perspective, in which all things and phenomena are produced in related and interactive connections and conditions, thus they are occasional, relative, and transient. Individuals have priority over universals, evolution, and materiality, as well as government, state, society, and family, but this priority means only that the individual is much more closer to, but not equal with, self-nature. After finishing its mission of deconstruction, individuality, like other things without self-nature, returns to nothingness. In Zhang Taiyan’s negative universalism, the nihilization of the individual does not equal the emptiness of the whole universe and the world. Taking the self-denial of the individual as his point of departure, he develops the concept of “self without self” and the natural view of “the equality of all things.” The so-called self without self refers to the subject or the reality of the world that is independent, unchangeable, selfexistent, and self-determined, such as Zhenru or Alaiye. The phrase “all . Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 194.


things are equal” means that the essential difference in the cosmos is a natural equality. Zhang’s demand for “self-knowledge as general principle” (zishi weizong) and “respect for self-confidence” ( jingyu zixin) seems to emphasize the value of individuals, but within his negative universalism, the so-called self-knowledge and the respect for self-confidence refer not to the self-conscious internal experience of the individual but to a self that transcends the individual. This individualized self that transcends the individual negates all the constructions of the actual world. The concept of “the equality of all things” comes from the same idea. Its special task is to expand the category of individuals to encompass things. Zhang Taiyan uses Zhuangzi’s concept of Qiwu to interpret the meaning of equality, but his equality is not the modern idea of being equal as in Yan Fu’s and Liang Qichao’s idea of universality. It is not equality as an endowment of nature to individuals but as a natural condition—not a condition of human beings but of nature; not a condition of the world but of the cosmos. In brief, universalism demands the establishment of equal relations, but the idea of Qiwu is a negation of all relations. Since relations are always embodied by languages and nomination, so a Qiwu situation that aims at destroying all relations implies the deconstruction of all language and nomination. When the universe breaks away from the limitation of nomination (languages), it is also freed from the differences and relations of self/other, you/me, this/ that, internal/external, big/small, love/hate, good/evil, and becomes a selfsufficient, limitless, omnipresent nature. The autonomy of the universe lies in its negativity. The idea of nature in Qiwu discourse negates the natural ideology of modern science and technology, in which nature is simply another material that cannot be defined in quality, with infinite changes in quantity. In Zhang Taiyan’s view, so long as the quality of world relations remains unchanged, there will be extensive hierarchy and inequality among individuals, social groups, states, and nature, and names and hierarchical relations will serve as instruments of domination. The development of science and social construction is related to the struggle for equal rights among the newly risen classes and oppressed states, and carries implications of liberation. But this liberation does not aim at reforming basic social relations in general, and transformation into an egalitarian society itself becomes a new form of hierarchical oppression. Therefore, Zhang Taiyan sought to achieve equality in the relation between phenomenon and noumenon, and thereby to distinguish social theories that were formed out of individual/ society, society/state, and state/world paradigms. His argument is as fol-


lows: (A) all things in the universe are subjects, so there is a homological structure between things, between human beings/things, and between human beings; (B) since both human beings and things are subjects, so the recovery of the sovereignty of things is the precondition for eliminating relations of domination; (C) since the establishment of human sovereignty is preconditioned by unequal relations between human beings and things, it follows that the contractual relations between individuals in atomism do not imply ontic equality. Zhang Taiyan’s “ontological universalism,” or “the worldview of the equality of things,” is a way of imagining not one or another aspect of the world but its totality. Therefore, when he proposed the new concept of nature, in fact he was proposing a set of principles that were totally different from the projects of modernity advocated by Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Wen, and others. These principles cannot be realized in communities such as states, chambers of commerce, scholarly associations, political parties, village communes, and the like. Rather than principles for reforming existing institutions, his idea represents a negative utopia. The practical significance of this negative utopia is not fully negative. Take the issues of knowlege and education as examples. Based on his idea of equal nature, Zhang Taiyan emphasized the capability of education to break away from state control and argued that modern education is still confined by the imperial court or the state, which necessarily leads to the decay of scholarship. Taking as his point of departure the tradition of stressing private learning and opposing official schooling, he continued the rebelliousness of the private academies of the Ming-Qing transition: the “many waves compete with one another and heretical theories rise,” correct or not, with scholars free to choose, without any criteria set by the state. What embodies his idea on education is a natural spirit of “being outstanding in the world.” Another example of opposition to the modern scientific wave is his promotion of “literary restoration” and the study of “small learning” (xiaoxue). Zhang Taiyan eliminated names. He disagreed with the instrumentalization of language by Kang Youwei and Wu Zhihui, who either degraded languages to a simple instrument (Kang), or debased Chinese as barbarian (Wu). He did not deny the function of languages in general but stressed the natural relation between languages and human beings: “Letters are signs of language, and languages are banners of ideas. Although they are natural words, they did not exist in the universe since the very beginning. They are created by human beings, so they obey human behavior in general. As there are differences in human behaviors, so languages


are different from one another.” His worldview that “all things are equal” denies the distinction between civilized/barbarian and divine/mundane, and refuses to accept the hegemony of any language. Zhang Taiyan’s “world of equal things” and Yan Fu’s “world of names” are two totally different ways of imagining the world. The “world of names” is a world constitution that can be arrived at by rationalizing knowledge. The relationship of names is mainly based upon the functional relationships of things. The “world of equal things” abandons the logical relationship of names. The relationship of things is based upon the denial of functional relationships established by language. By its definition of functional relationships, “world of names” carries out its control over all kinds of relationships in the world and places them into a hierarchical structure. By contrast, refusing to define functional relationships means a denial of all hierarchical structures, hence the denial of the practice of hierarchical structures. In Zhang Taiyan’s view, breaking away from obligation and hierarchy is not the same as establishing modern social theory on the basis of society/state dualism (such as the state not intervening in civil society and the market). What he reveals, rather, is the oppressive nature of state structure and social organizations themselves. As discussed above, Zhang Taiyan was a radical nationalist and a founder of the Republic, and there is a big gap between his theory and his practice. His self-negation, or temporary individualism, and self-negation nationalism enable him to avoid the oppression of the individual by the movement that he was deeply and actively involved in, and to emphasize individual sovereignty while carrying out self-denial. There is an internal connection between the two different points of view and the two differently oriented nation-state theories in the late Qing period. One focused on the idea of the public (gong) and the collective (qun), and the developed theories of the individual, society, and the state on the double foundation of the functional needs of the community (e.g., an international context in which only the fittest survive) and moral necessity. The other focused on the idea of the individual, and from the temporary relationships between the individual and the nation developed a temporary self-negating theory of the individual, society, and the state. Both theories borrowed from atomistic individualism to criticize Neo-Confucianism, but they did not stop with atomism. They both recognized the necessity of the state and society but did not take them, or their relationship, as the ultimate . Zhang Taiyan, Guixin shiji [To regulate the new century], Minbao, no. 24.


goal. The concepts of the public, the collective, and the individual contained their understanding of the “state of nature,” from which they constructed their projects of modernity, but with an accompanying critical reflection on the very same project. This internalized logic of self-negation in the worldview of late Qing is not a product of the modern system of science and its institutional practice; it originated from the discriminating universalisms within the traditional world outlook. At the moment of its denial by social science, this world outlook provided a source of wisdom to reflect critically on modernity and its crisis—especially on the relationship between the modern knowledge system (humanities and social science as reflective sciences) and modernity.

The Developmental Logic of Chinese Culture under Modernization and Globalization

Yu Keping Globalization represents a worldwide transformation of historical significance. Based on worldwide economic integration, globalization is characterized by intrinsic, inseparable, and intensified interrelations across the globe. Although the primary manifestation of globalization is economic integration, economic globalization undoubtedly exerts deep influence on the totality of human social life, including the political and cultural spheres of life. Economic globalization not only has greatly changed production, consumption, and exchange, but it has also altered modes of thinking and behavior, and has had a major impact on national cultures. As far as Chinese culture is concerned, the influence of globalization first became apparent following the “New Culture Movement” of the early twentieth century. Since the 1980s, a fierce turbulence has reemerged in China’s culture that is multidimensional. It includes conflicts over tradition vs. modernity, conservatism vs. radicalism, nationality vs. globalization, and Sinification vs. Westernization. The turbulence was manifested in heated debates among Chinese intellectuals—the so-called culture fever. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-008 © 2008 by Duke University Press


In this essay, I will briefly examine the main issues of these debates and explore the logic of Chinese culture as it unfolds against the background of modernization and globalization. I will also address the current situation of Chinese culture as well as its future development. Cultural Modernization From a historical perspective, the process of Reform and Opening Up since 1978 is essentially a process of modernization. In other words, it marked the beginning of a steady and comprehensive embrace of modernization. Modernization is a process of thorough social transformation. Its economic dimension requires industrial civilization and a market economy, its political dimension calls for democracy, and its cultural dimension upholds such core values as freedom, equality, and the sovereignty of human subjectivity. On the whole, the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of modernization are incompatible with Chinese traditional culture. Hence, Chinese intellectuals’ first response to Reform and Opening Up was how to revamp traditional culture and realize cultural modernization. So-called cultural modernization calls for a thorough revamping of traditional culture in accordance with modern industrialized civilization, management institutions, and democratic politics. It aims at realizing the transformation of traditional culture, importing advanced modern culture, and making Chinese culture compatible with the processes of political modernization and economic modernization. As some scholars have pointed out, cultural modernization is a basic requirement and organic component of social modernization. “Modernized social life, as well as modernized ‘people’ will inevitably accompany modernized culture. Cultural modernization aims to form a new culture, which absorbs the merits of other cultures and is compatible with modern society. The modernization of economy and social life, the modernization of ‘people,’ and the modernization of culture are inseparable components of modernization. They are interrelated, interactive, and irreplaceable.” On the one hand, modernizing Chinese culture means revamping traditional culture, rejecting negative and outdated elements, and critically inheriting its rational components; on the other hand, it means absorbing the merits of other advanced civilizations and incorporating them into a new Chinese culture. To most Chinese intellectuals, both of these elements are . Qi Zhenhai, “Chuantong wenhua yu xiandaihua” [Traditional culture and modernization], Zhexue yanjiu [Philosophical research], no. 6 (1992): 54.

Yu / Developmental Logic of Chinese Culture 159

necessary, and are equally indispensable, to the modernization process. To absorb the merits of Western culture, and to incorporate them into Chinese culture, is crucial to China’s cultural modernization. On the other hand, it is also necessary to review and filter Chinese traditional culture in order to carry forward its positive elements and reject what is negative. “That is to say, although it is necessary to learn from Western culture to construct a modernized new culture, it is also crucial (and probably more important) to rediscover and carry forward national culture and the essence of the national spirit.” Chinese intellectuals have argued over whether to emphasize tradition or Western culture, and fierce debates have resulted. For some intellectuals, criticizing tradition is the first step toward modernizing culture. Without denying the existence of positive elements in traditional culture, they point out nevertheless that traditional culture as a whole is incompatible with modernization and therefore the biggest obstacle in social modernization. This is particularly true of China’s feudal autocratic tradition, which strangled human nature, disregarded freedom and equality, stressed agriculture while despising commerce, viewed men as being superior to women, et cetera—all of which are incompatible with the modern market economy and democratic politics. These critics of tradition argue that only by eliminating such traditions can people be liberated in their thinking; otherwise social modernization will be impossible. In a 1979 article, the famous historian Li Shu presented a complete analysis of the reasons why feudal inheritance, which is incompatible with modernization, could persist in China for such a long time. He stated, “In China, it is extremely difficult to launch an ideological revolution to eliminate feudal influence. It is even harder to make people identify with such a revolution.” Therefore, he argued, “to complete the antifeudal ideological revolution that originated with the May Fourth Movement is an important prerequisite to the accomplishment of modernization, as well as to the victory of socialism in China.” This influential article was the first declaration of the ideological liberation campaign of the late 1970s. Those who criticized tradition argued that social modernization must be built on the basis of science and democracy, which were lacking in traditional culture. The May Fourth Movement was the first attempt at ideo. Min Ze, “Guanyu chuantong wenhua xiandaihua” [On the modernization of traditional culture], Zhexue yanjiu, no. 4 (1989): 20. . Li Shu, “Xiaomie fengjian canyu yingxiang shi Zhongguo xiandaihuade zhongyao tiaojian” [Eliminating the influence of feudal remnants is an important condition of China’s modernization], Lishi yanjiu [Historical research], no. 1 (1979): 20.


logical liberation in modern China, and also the first attempt to modernize tradition. The resounding slogans of the May Fourth Movement had been “Democracy” and “Science.” Pioneers of the May Fourth Movement, such as Lu Xun, Chen Duxiu, and Hushi, were unanimous in asserting that traditional culture was incompatible with science and democracy, which were the basic prerequisites of modernization. They concluded by this logic that the negation and criticism of traditional culture was the precondition of modernization. They believed that China had to construct a new culture with democracy and science as its core values. Such views reemerged after Reform and Opening Up. There were heated debates among Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s over whether or not Chinese traditional culture contained scientific and democratic elements. Li Shenzhi, an influential and well-known scholar, has noted emphatically that “neither democracy nor science existed in Chinese traditional culture.” Li points out that “the year 1999 is the eightieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. To recall the past in the light of the present, we feel ashamed that we have not lived up to the expectations of the pioneers of the May Fourth Movement because we have made little progress in achieving either democracy or science.” When Chinese intellectuals criticized traditional culture after the Reform and Opening Up, they not only called for science and democracy but also advocated the “rule of law,” which distinguished them from their May Fourth predecessors. Chinese traditional culture paid much attention to “rule by law,” but not to “rule of law.” The two concepts, although seemingly similar, are substantially different. Rule by law means to handle events strictly in accordance with the law, which was an important element of traditional culture. Apart from emphasizing strict accordance with the law, however, the essence of rule of law is that no person or group can override the law. The principle of rule of law never appeared in traditional culture and was actually inconsistent with the logic of traditional culture, which was by nature the culture of an absolute monarchy, which presupposed that the emperor was above the law. Hence, to modernize traditional culture required not only democracy and science but also the construction of a modern state premised on the rule of law.

. Li Shenzhi, “Zhongguo chuantong wenhua zhong ji wu minzhu ye wu kexue” [Chinese traditional culture: No democracy, no science], in Jiefang Wenxuan (1978–1998) [Article selection of liberation (1978–1998)] (Beijing: Economic Daily Press, 1998), 1118–24.


Cultural Renaissance If we regard criticism of traditional culture as the first sign of the “culture fever” after the Reform and Opening Up, then the second sign ironically was a “cultural renaissance.” Those who advocated for cultural renaissance also called for the modernization of culture, but they regarded cultural renaissance, not the criticism of tradition, as the best way to achieve that goal. They argued that Chinese traditional culture is not incompatible with modernization. In their view, China lagged behind the West since the nineteenth century not because of the backwardness of tradition but because of the failure to carry forward the meritorious elements of traditional culture. They argued that it was unreasonable to completely deny traditional culture during the modernization process. Carrying forward traditional culture was an important precondition to modernization. The renaissance of tradition and modernization were two sides of the same coin. They even found proof for their argument in reality: the “Asian Four Tigers” (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore) were all heavily influenced by Chinese traditional culture. They were successful in their efforts to modernize because they did not completely deny tradition. Instead, they all made every effort to carry forward the basic values of Chinese traditional culture. The renaissance of Chinese traditional culture after Reform and Opening Up consisted of three parts. First was the reemergence of Confucianism, or New Confucianism. Second was the resurgence of Chinese culture, or cultural revivalism. Third was the renewed interest in national studies. There are correlations as well as differences among the three components. They all have a conservative attitude toward traditional culture: they emphasized the values of traditional culture in the present and insisted that traditional culture should be revamped and reinvigorated, while maintaining its basic values. By so doing, traditional culture would become compatible with, and contribute to, China’s ongoing modernization process. But the three parts also have different emphases. New Confucianism regards Confucianism as the backbone of Chinese traditional culture, and it advocates a rebirth of traditional culture by means of reinvigorating Confucianism. Cultural revivalism pays greater attention to the important role Chinese culture has played in the world and hopes that Chinese culture can play a dominant role in the twenty-first century. National studies emphasizes the epistemological basis of traditional culture and seeks to carry forward Chinese traditional culture by assimilating ancient Chinese knowledge.


New Confucianism aims at inheriting Confucian orthodoxy and reinvigorating the spirit of Confucianism. It originated in the 1920s, with Liang Shuming as its most influential advocate. New Confucianism flourished in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States after 1949. Since the Reform and Opening Up of the 1980s, New Confucianism has seen a resurgence in the mainland as a result of the efforts of several prominent representatives. The New Confucianists in the contemporary mainland have not only insisted on reinvigorating Confucianism but have also attempted to make New Confucianism into the dominant ideology in China’s modernization process. In their view, this is the only way to revive and modernize China. Jiang Qing, one of the most famous advocates of New Confucianism in contemporary China, argues that since the nineteenth century, China has lost both internal cohesion and international position, for which the basic reason is the degeneration of Confucianism. According to Jiang, “In China’s mainland nowadays, Marxism and Leninism, both imported alien cultures, have become the dominant ideology with the help of state authority. However, these alien cultures cannot become the cultural foundation of the Chinese nation to express the national spirit. They mark the climax of a situation, under which the Chinese nation has been culturally rootless for centuries.” In Jiang’s view, the biggest obstacle to the modernization of China is nothing other than “the complete denial of the Confucian tradition” as well as “the complete Westernization taking place in the mainland of China.” He concludes that the most urgent issue in contemporary China’s mainland is the reinvigoration of Confucianism, which should replace Marxism and Leninism to become (as it used to be) the dominant ideology of the Chinese nation. Some New Confucianist extremists have advocated developing Confucianism into a religion. They say, “The government should impose a Confucianism Legacy tax as well as other effective measures in order to change Confucianism into a national religion.” Cultural revivalism has two basic points. First, it assumes that there exists a direct correlation between the flourishing of Chinese culture and . Fang Keli, Xiandai xin ruxue yu Zhongguo xiandaihua [Contemporary New Confucianism and China’s modernization] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1998). . Jiang Qing, “Zhongguo dalu fuxing ruxuede xianshi yiyi ji qi mianlinde wenti” [The real significance of reviving Confucianism in the mainland and its problems], Ehu [Goose lake], no. 170–71, quoted in Fang Keli, Xiandai xin ruxue yu Zhongguo xiandaihua [Contemporary New Confucianism and China’s modernization], 424–25. . Zhu Xueqin, “2005: Zhongguo wenhuazhi xingse” [2005: The configuration of Chinese culture], Zhongguo qingnian bao [China youth daily], January 4, 2005.


the prosperity of the Chinese nation. The Chinese nation once enjoyed great prosperity and glory in history: China had been the strongest nation in ancient times. The Chinese culture is one of the greatest cultures in the world, and this was once acknowledged by neighboring countries. Therefore, cultural revivalists argue from a historical perspective that the revival of Chinese culture is a precondition to China’s modernization. Second, cultural revivalists believe that Chinese culture enjoys an “intrinsic superiority” over its Western counterparts. To them, the failure to make full use of the “intrinsic superiority” of Chinese culture is the reason why China has lagged behind the West. While China has achieved stature since the implementation of Reform and Opening Up, in order to become a really great power, they argue, China must carry forward its own culture throughout the world. Only by doing so can the defects of Western culture be amended by the “intrinsic superiority” of Chinese culture. They conclude that Western culture is leading itself into a cul-de-sac, and its dominance in the world will come to an end, while Chinese culture will be reinvigorated and become the mainstream of global civilization. For example, Liang Qichao and others observed in the last century that “on the other side of the globe, there are hundreds of millions of people who are worrying about the bankruptcy of materialism and desperately calling for help! It is time to give them a hand!” Similarly, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Zhang Dainian, Ji Xianlin and eighty-four other Chinese culture researchers together issued a “Statement of Chinese Cultural Renaissance” (the subtitle is “Striving for the Great Renaissance of the Chinese Nation and World Peace and Development in the Twenty-first Century”). They announced passionately and proudly to the world: “The twenty-first century is a century for Chinese culture! The twenty-first century is the renaissance era of Chinese culture! Nothing can deter the renaissance of Chinese culture!” They argued: In the contemporary world, clashes between different cultures, rampancy of heresy, religious extremism, destruction of ecology, degeneration of humanity, as well as the side effects of science all pose obstacles to social safety and development. Chinese culture will play an irreplaceable role in the settlement of those clashes and issues. . . . The twenty-first century is characterized by cultural confluence between the East and the West, while “dominance of Western culture” will be replaced by “dominance of Eastern culture.” The . Liang Qichao, “Ouzhou xinying lu” [Impressions of Europe], Yinbing shi heji [Collection from an ice drinker’s studio], vol. 23 (Hong Kong: Chung hwa Book Company, 1936), 40.


renaissance of Chinese culture will not engender confrontation with Western culture. It means the creation of a new global culture with Eastern culture’s absorption of its Western counterpart. Generally speaking, the term national studies refers to the knowledge system of Chinese traditional culture. Apart from such traditional ideologies as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, it also includes Chinese traditional literature, military studies, astrology, drama, painting, mathematics, among other disciplines. Therefore, national studies actually means reinvigorating Chinese traditional culture in a broader sense. Compared with cultural revivalists, advocates of national studies are more practical and down to earth about reinvigorating Chinese traditional culture. They focus on the knowledge basis of traditional culture and attempt to reinvigorate Chinese traditional culture through systematically sorting out, exploring, and teaching traditional knowledge. One important method to revive national studies is to establish national studies institutes as well as training programs. The establishment in 2005 of the National Studies Academy at Renmin University of China began with the recruitment of undergraduate students. Ji Baocheng, the president of Renmin University, became the first director of the National Studies Academy. He explained the educational program as follows: “The educational program is still under revision. Apart from some nonmajor courses, for example English, the professional courses in the National Studies Academy are composed of three parts. Now some courses are [still] being drawn up, but the Four Books and Five Confucian Classics are one important component of the educational program. Apart from Confucianism, students will also study Daoism, legalism, military strategies, as well as masterpieces of ancient China. In addition, they will also [take] Western science courses.”10 Furthermore, a “National Studies Club” was established in commercial circles, and Peking University established a “Qianyuan National Studies Class,” which was nicknamed “Bosses’ Class,” for it charged every student an annual tuition of RMB 24,000. Propelled by the “National Studies Fever” in academia, traditional private schools (si shuyuan) have reemerged. The above-mentioned cultural renaissance movement has stirred . Zhang Dainian, Ji Xianlin, et al., “Zhongguo wenhua fuxing xuanyan” [Manifesto of Chinese cultural renaissance], Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan yuanbao [Journal of the China Academy of Social Sciences], no. 1 (2001): 3. 10. Available at http://zgwww.com/html/NEWS/20070317/3836_2.html (accessed February 14, 2008).


up heated debates among Chinese intellectuals. Some support it, while a greater number are critical. Some moderate critics admit that there exist excellent elements in traditional culture that are still valuable. The modernization of China will benefit greatly from carrying forward these traditional values. Hence, they argue, the positive effects of the cultural renaissance movement are undeniable. Nevertheless, in their view, Chinese traditional culture as a whole goes against the modernization objective that China is pursuing. The hope of energizing the Chinese nation by reviving its traditional culture is destined to failure. As one critic of New Confucianism points out, “Confucianism long circumscribed the ideological freedom of Chinese people. In order to make Confucianism dominate Chinese national culture and national spirit, they (New Confucianists) have decorated Confucianism with the discourse of ‘modernization.’ It is totally absurd! It cannot help us accelerate the modernization process. It will become an obstacle instead.”11 Other radical critics are more straightforward. They have labeled the cultural renaissance movement as “cultural conservatism” or “cultural nationalism” and have fiercely attacked it. Like the enlightenment thinkers of the May Fourth Movement, they argue that Chinese traditional culture, as represented by Confucianism, is incompatible with modernization by nature. The economic miracles of the “Asian Four Tigers” are not enough to draw the conclusion that Confucianism will propel the modernization process. The modernization of traditional culture lies neither in reinvigorating traditional culture nor in reviving Confucianism; instead, it hinges on the construction of a new culture by absorbing the meritorious elements of other cultures (particularly Western culture). Some critics point out with irony that cultural revivalists are still dreaming of a Chinese empire, and so they call them “cultural nationalists.” But to view the twenty-first century as a century for Chinese culture is an illusion. Cultural Self-Consciousness The Reform and Opening Up policy aims to advance the political, economic, and societal modernization of China. It guides China’s transformation from traditional to modern culture. Against this background, the goal of “modernization of traditional culture” has once again achieved consensus among Chinese intellectuals for the first time since the May 11. Min Ze, “Guanyu chuantong wenhua xiandaihua” [On the modernization of traditional culture], 16.


Fourth Movement. But then, how to treat Chinese traditional culture? How to view relations between traditional culture and modernization? How to accelerate the transformation process of Chinese traditional culture? And what does “cultural modernization” mean for China? These questions have triggered heated debates among Chinese intellectuals. Since the 1990s, China’s political, economic, and societal spheres have faced ever-greater pressures from globalization, which has completely changed the context of cultural debates. New questions have been added to older ones. What kind of challenges does globalization pose to traditional culture? How does Chinese culture interact with Western culture within the context of globalization? What course will it follow in the future? How to position Chinese culture in the world against the background of globalization? In this context, a new cultural discourse has emerged since the 1990s that has received wide attention and further driven “culture fever” among Chinese intellectuals. This new discourse is “cultural self-consciousness.” It was initiated by the famous sociologist Fei Xiaotong, who first proposed the concept of cultural self-consciousness in 1997 at the Second Senior Seminar on Sociology and Anthropology held at Peking University. Fei argued that “‘cultural self-consciousness’ expresses Chinese intellectuals’ response to economic globalization. It also reflects the anxiety of human beings in general provoked by increased frequency of cultural contact. Social development leads people to think about such questions as the origins of national culture, its formation, essence, and future.” In Fei’s view, the Reform Movement of 1898, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and every political movement after 1949 all promoted the concept of “destroying the old and establishing the new.” They counterposed modernity to tradition and regarded traditional culture as the enemy of modernization. But Fei held, nevertheless, that cultural modernization does not mean simply destroying the old and establishing the new. It also means weeding through the old to bring forth the new as well as learning the new by studying the old. Modernization both destroys and inherits tradition. This is what brings up the question of cultural transformation, which is a common concern of human beings. Fei Xiaotong argued that “the concept of ‘cultural self-consciousness’ has profound connotations. It can be applied to every nation across the world as well as to the analysis of the common concerns of human beings. Its power lies in the fact that people know their own national culture very well. They are aware of the history, formation process, characteristics, as well as tendencies of their own national culture. Self-consciousness can enhance the


nation’s autonomy in the process of cultural transformation, as the nation will be in a position to adapt to a new environment as well as determine their cultural orientation independently.”12 As Fei Xiaotong contended, cultural self-consciousness aims to find the way out for Chinese culture against the background of globalization and modernization. Nevertheless, what is the essence of cultural selfconsciousness? What is its focus? How to enhance it? Faced with such questions, Chinese intellectuals have given different answers from varied perspectives. Some scholars have emphasized culture’s role in social development. In their view, the concept of cultural self-consciousness highlights the significance of culture to modernization. They argue that against the background of globalization, culture plays an increasingly significant role in social modernization. It is not only a critical impetus to social development but also an important constituent of a nation’s competitiveness. This is particularly true of China today. China has already achieved largescale economic development and a preliminary institutional framework. The key to the successful accomplishment of a modern civilization lies with the modernization of its culture. In this view, cultural self-consciousness means we must recognize culture’s significance in social development and must consciously adjust the nation’s strategy of cultural development based on the needs of social development. Those who advocate “cultural self-consciousness” argue: Culture is the essential power of national subsistence and development. Against the background of globalization and the knowledge economy, culture is becoming more and more blended with economy and politics and thus becoming a significant part of overall national strength. Culture is playing a more and more significant role in economic and social development. Competition in the era of globalization is essentially competition between cultural forces. Countries with powerful cultural force export values, science and technology, production standards, as well as management models to the whole world, which countries with poor cultural force have to accept. This is the cultural dilemma facing developing countries in the era of globalization.13 12. Fei Xiaotong, “Guanyu ‘wenhua zijue’ de yixie zibai” [Notes on “cultural selfconsciousness”], Xueshu yanjiu [Academic research], no. 7 (2003): 5–7. 13. Wang Haiguang, “Xiandaihua yujing xiade wenhua zijue” [Cultural self-consciousness in the context of modernization], Wenhui bao [Wenhui daily], September 14, 2004.


In contrast, other scholars emphasize Chinese culture’s significance to world culture. They insist that we should look at Chinese culture from the perspective of world history. Gan Yang, a famous researcher on Chinese culture, has noted that so-called cultural self-consciousness has at least two meanings. First, Chinese people must realize that the rise of the Chinese economy is not only an important event in the history of the world economy; it also has deep implications for the history of world civilization. This makes it totally different from the economic rise of the “Asian Four Tigers.” China’s rise is regarded by the whole world (especially the West) as the most important event of the twenty-first century. The West sees China’s rise as the determining cause of change in a world structured by Western dominance, which has lasted six hundred years. Chinese people must be conscious of China’s position in the contemporary world. They must look on China and the world within the context of world civilization and rediscover China and the world from the grand perspective of world history. Second, the proposal of cultural self-consciousness indicates that Chinese culture does not match China’s current position in the world. With a parochial perspective on culture and history, China’s cultural foundation is pretty narrow. So cultural self-consciousness does not mean cultural egotism; instead, it aims to do some basic and practical work in constructing culture while strongly objecting to “cultural fickleness” and “cultural showmanship.”14 A number of scholars focus on the revival of traditional culture. They argue that cultural self-consciousness means either to discover the merits of traditional culture, and to carry tradition forward, or to push forward the transformation and innovations of traditional culture through examination of the disparity between the claims and realities of traditional culture. Furthermore, some equate cultural self-consciousness with “Confucian self-consciousness” and advocate reforming and reviving Confucianism. They argue that “against the background of globalization, ‘cultural selfconsciousness’ means to extract the essence of Chinese culture, and to make full use of it as well as to spread it to the whole world. Confucianism still has both theoretical significance and practical significance in the new historical context, and what we should do is to combine the consciousness and spirit of Confucianism and modern values. As for the Chinese nation, the first step is to carry forward Confucianism consciously.”15 14. Gan Yang, “Wenhua zijue yu Zhongguo daxuede renwen jiaoyu” [Cultural selfconsciousness and humanities education in Chinese universities], available at http://www .cul-studies.com/community/ganyang/200607/4187.html (accessed February 14, 2008). 15. Zhu Renqiu, “Quanqiuhua Beijing xiade rujia wenhua zijue” [Confucian self-


Some scholars place emphasis on the reanimation of traditional culture. They argue that cultural self-consciousness calls for looking at traditional culture rationally and pushing forward cultural reanimation and development consciously. In their view, the aim of cultural self-consciousness is not to return to traditional culture but to reanimate and develop it. For example, Yue Daiyun, a researcher from Peking University, notes that “‘cultural self-consciousness’ is neither the return of traditional culture nor cultural capitulationism. Its essence lies in adjusting national culture according to new historical conditions. In doing so, traditional culture will be reborn. Here, an important question emerges: how to look on and treat traditional culture? Is there any ‘genuine’ or ‘pure’ element in traditional culture? Actually, traditional culture could be divided into two parts. One is ‘stereotyped relics’ (we call it traditional culture); the other is ‘living reality’ (it’s a new interpretation of tradition and we call it cultural tradition).”16 Therefore, the best way to preserve tradition is to develop it, which is also the most important point of cultural self-consciousness. Li Zonggui, a professor from Sun Yat-sen University, also views the reanimation of national culture as the key to cultural self-consciousness. He argues that “the object of cultural selfconsciousness is national culture, i.e. cultural self-consciousness is also national cultural self-consciousness. Concretely speaking, cultural selfconsciousness is not only comprehension of the origin, formation, evolution, character, and tendency of national culture, but also of the relationship between national and alien cultures. With the accelerating tendency of economic and cultural globalization, the key to cultural self-consciousness lies in cultivating cultural reanimation and national spirit, and comprehending the dialectical unity of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as the inheritability and transcendence of culture.”17 In contrast, other scholars understand cultural self-consciousness from the perspective of constructing a methodology and theoretical system. In their view, cultural self-consciousness means to treat culture as a consciousness against the background of globalization], Fujian shifandaxue xuebao [Journal of Fujian Normal University], no. 5 (2004): 98. 16. Yue Daiyun, “Duoyuan wenhua yu wenhua zijue” [Cultural pluralism and cultural selfconsciousness], speech given at the Central Academy of Music, January 17, 2003, available at http://ccomv1.ccom.edu.cn/news/2003120111843.shtml (accessed February 14, 2008). 17. Li Zonggui, “Wenhua zijue yu wenhua fazhan” [Cultural self-consciousness and cultural development], Zhongshan daxue xuebao [Journal of Zhongshan University], no. 6 (2004): 161.


research subject and then make it into an academic discipline with a theoretical system. Tang Yijie, a professor at Peking University, is an advocate of this perspective. He argues that researchers must be conscious of the theories and methodologies of their research subjects, which is a precondition to any mature academic discipline. This is also true of Chinese culture. In his view, researchers of Chinese culture must really look at Chinese culture as their research subject and carry out their research systematically, creatively, and practically. Only by so doing can they find both the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese culture and then consciously discover its intrinsic values. In this way, it will be possible for Chinese people to absorb and digest the excellent elements of other cultures in order to adapt to the universal tendency of human beings.18 If cultural self-consciousness is a kind of retrospection on tradition as well as the current condition of Chinese culture against the background of modernization and globalization, as most Chinese intellectuals argue, then two opposite arguments emerge: one is cultural globalization and the other is cultural localization. Cultural Globalization The term cultural globalization is so controversial that some scholars oppose its use. Some state directly that, based on economic globalization, cultural globalization is nothing but a synonym meaning “spreading Western culture.”19 Furthermore, “the concept of cultural globalization has met with resistance in the Chinese context.”20 Some argue that cultural globalization is only an illusion. It has no realistic basis and thus is totally impossible. Others reject the notion because they are afraid of the threat of foreign cultures to Chinese culture. Whatever its reality may be, the concept of cultural globalization is finding acceptance among an increasing 18. Tang Yijie, “Guanyu wenhua wentide jidian sikao” [Some thoughts on the question of culture], Xueshu yuekan [Academic monthly], no. 9 (2002): 39. 19. Wang Heyu, “‘Wenhua quanqiuhua’ zhiyi: jingji quanqiuhua de wenhua sikao” [Doubts on “cultural globalization”: Thoughts on the cultural effects of economic globalization], Xinan jiaotong daxue xuebao [Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University], no. 3 (2001): 61–64. 20. Wang Ning, “Quanqiuhua shidaide wenhua lunzheng he wenhua duihua” [Cultural debates and dialogue in the age of globalization], in Quanqiuhua: Xifanghua haishi Zhongguohua [Globalization: Westernization or Sinicization?], ed. Yu Keping (Beijing: Social Science Compilation Press, 2002), 267.


number of scholars who are thinking seriously about it and have already contributed their own insights. The advocates of cultural globalization assert that with the acceleration of economic globalization, cultural globalization has (or will) become reality. Therefore, what is at issue is not a value judgment but reality. First, the free and rapid flow of capital, technology, information, and labor across the globe compels nation-states to conform to international standards and accept international norms or global regulations, which has resulted in the collapse of political, economic, as well as cultural barriers of nationstates, altering their ideologies, social values, and institutional norms. Second, apart from exporting capital, technology, and production to developing countries, these developed countries also impose on the latter their values, ideas, literatures, arts, and even lifestyle. With the invasion of Western culture, national cultures of developing countries are weakened, and many national traditions collapse. Finally, globalization has intensified connections among human beings. Such issues as the environment, terrorism, the depletion of natural resources, overpopulation, infectious diseases, and nuclear proliferation are becoming “globalized.” These global issues threaten the survival of human beings as a whole and call for “global action.” Thus, a “global consciousness” and a “global culture” are urgently needed. Professor Li Shenzhi is one advocate of a global culture. He points out that “we are living in a changing world. Not only has the ‘balance of power’ in the world changed, but global forces and issues have emerged. There really exist global demands that transcend divisions of East and West, or South and North. To cope with these issues is a challenge for all countries in the world, and calls for the emergence of a ‘global culture.’”21 To most of its advocates, cultural globalization is not about the homogenization of national cultures but the inseparable interconnections among different national cultures as well as the increasing consensus about and consciousness of global issues. In their view, cultural globalization is a process rather than a condition. As Li Zonggui has argued, “cultural globalization is essentially a process of cultural integration. Based on economic globalization and information technology, different national cultures have been updated and integrated through intensified interactions. Cultural glob21. Li Shenzhi, “Quanqiuhua yu Zhongguo wenhua” [Globalization and Chinese culture], excerpted from Jiefang Wenxuan (1978–1998) [Article selection of liberation (1978– 1998)], 880.


alization is also such a process, in which consensus on global issues can be reached through beneficial interactions among different national cultures. In this sense, cultural globalization is neither an accomplished reality nor the fatality of disadvantaged nations. It is just a process with certain tendencies.”22 Although “culture” is an overarching concept and its boundary is hard to define, at its core are human values. Following this logic, various scholars have paid a great deal of attention to universal values (or global values) in cultural globalization. In their view, globalization not only makes people realize that they share a common fate, but it also makes them deeply identify with such basic values as freedom, equality, justice, security, welfare, and dignity. Pursuit of such basic values is both the core and ultimate destination of cultural globalization. It is also incumbent on nation-states to pursue such values. For example, Li Shenzhi has argued, “Global values do exist, in such documents as the ‘Declaration of Human Rights,’ ‘Declaration of Environmental Protection,’ ‘Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,’ etc. But these values have not yet been observed by nations voluntarily. Conversely they could even ignite conflicts. As for nations, the biggest glory is to increase their contributions to the formative global values. The future of globalization is the formation and dominance of global values.”23 Cultural interactions in the globalization era have their own characteristics that distinguish them from intercourse among nations in the past. Feng Ziyi has pointed out that cultural globalization has three basic characteristics. First, culture and the economy are becoming “integrated.” Against the background of globalization, culture is increasingly bound to the economy. In other words, economic advantages always bring about cultural advantages, and economic hegemony always results in cultural hegemony. Second, cultural exchanges are degenerating into culture exportation. Based on their economic and technical advantages, the developed countries seek to spread Western culture to the whole world while they spare no effort to curtail cultural heterogeneity. Therefore, cultural exchanges between West and East have degenerated into culture exportation or culture importation. Third, the functions of culture are expanding, exerting more comprehensive 22. Li Zonggui, “Wenhua quanqiuhua yu dangdai Zhongguo wenhua jianshe” [Cultural globalization and the reconstruction of Chinese culture], Nankai daxue xuebao [Nankai University journal], no. 5 (2002): 4. 23. Li Shenzhi, “Quanqiuhua de fazhan qushi jiqi jiazhi rentong” [The tendencies of globalization and the identification of its values], in Quanqiuhuade beilun [Antinomies of globalization], ed. Yu Keping (Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, 1998), 16.


influence on social life. With the rise of the culture industry, culture is exerting influence in many new areas besides education, including consumption, aesthetics, economy, entertainment, and so forth. Culture not only affects the ideology and value systems of human beings; it also exerts deep influence on their lifestyle, consumption style, manufacturing style, and their social psychology.24 In China, debates on cultural globalization are always accompanied by the advocacy of cultural localization. These two arguments, seemingly contradictory, have been bound together with the debates on Chinese culture since Reform and Opening Up. Cultural Localization Cultural localization is a cultural development process that highlights local cultural characteristics. As far as nation-states are concerned, cultural localization refers to cultural nationalization. The aim of cultural localization is to highlight the characteristics of national culture or to endow national culture with its own characteristics. Cultural localization is a natural response to cultural globalization. The two are two sides of the same coin. They supplement each other and constitute a “rational paradox” of cultural development against the background of globalization. Therefore, cultural localization is a concept relative to cultural globalization, and it would be misleading to discuss cultural localization without reference to globalization. The localization of Chinese culture once again became a hot topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 1980s and 1990s, which is quite consistent with the cultural logic that prevailed within the context of globalization. As Gong Qun has pointed out: For some countries or regions, globalization to some extent means the discontinuity of local culture. We must realize that globalization is a process through which Western countries spread their culture to the rest of the world. Therefore, global culture is strongly characterized by the dominance of Western culture. Modernization or globalization has brought about a ‘sense of homelessness,’ which has resulted in a crisis of culture identity. As someone once pointed out, the discourse of Chinese philosophy has been Westernized or colonized totally, and Chinese traditional philosophy suffers from the dis24. Feng Ziyi, “Quanqiuhua yu minzu wenhua” [Globalization and national culture], Zhexue yanjiu, no. 3 (2001): 16.


ease of “aphasia.” Identity crisis and the sense of frustration made people aware of the significance of local culture to national survival. Antiglobalization campaigns erupted under the banner of “return to local culture.” So it is not surprising that “return to local culture” has become a common cry in the globalization era. Globalization really posed many problems for us, and it also refocused our attention on Chinese culture.25 Some may ask how cultural localization or cultural nationalization may be possible against the background of globalization? In the views of some Chinese scholars, it is because in the era of globalization, cultures of different countries are characterized by the existence both of unification and diversification, and universalism and particularism. Cultural globalization does not erase the diversity of national cultures. Instead, it gives prominence to the values of local or national characteristics. Cultural pluralism develops alongside cultural globalization, which is rooted in the diversity of local or national cultures. It is actually a historical law that nothing (not even globalization) can erase the cultural diversity of human beings. Cultural diversity, just like cultural universality, is an intrinsic need for the survival and development of different nations. Cultural diversity is an important precondition to cultural continuity and human development. As Fang Shinan has argued, it is the integration, as well as conflict, of different cultures that pushes forward the cultural development of human beings as a whole: Human beings share some universal modes and lifestyles. In other words, there exist some generalities behind different national cultures and values, which pave the way for the communication, interaction, and even integration of different cultures. On the other hand, there also exist diverse modes and lifestyles in the world. The characteristics of different national cultures are all important components of human culture as a whole, and indicate the nature of human beings through different manners and from different perspectives. Those who cultivated, created, protected, defended, and cherished national cultures have an intrinsic motivation to carry forward national cultures of their own, which is the basic reason why national cultures differ from each other. Just like the world is both composed 25. Gong Qun, “Quanqiu wenhua yu bentu wenhua” [Global culture and indigenous culture], Nankai daxue xuebao, no. 5 (2002): 8.


of diversity and universality, cultural globalization and cultural localization coexist in the world, which is a “rational antinomy.”26 Against the challenges of globalization, localization of Chinese culture refers to sustaining the characteristics and independence of national culture in order to avoid its submergence in the process of globalization. To effectively localize Chinese culture, Chinese scholars have put forward a number of suggestions, which can be summarized in what follows. First, Chinese people must care for national culture more consciously, recognizing that Chinese national culture is facing serious challenges from Western culture in the era of globalization. In other words, Chinese people must be conscious of the crisis and take responsibility for the existence and development of Chinese national culture. The sustenance of national culture is essential to the existence of a nation, which has a strong internal-sustenance mechanism. Chinese culture has lasted for more than five thousand years; no other culture comes close to its deep traditions and robust vitality. Therefore, faced with the challenges of global culture, Chinese culture’s vitality should not be underestimated. If we do not care about Chinese culture consciously, however, it will be seriously threatened by cultural globalization. And if Chinese national culture cannot be sustained, we will lose our cultural foundation as a nation.27 Second, Chinese people should more actively preserve the nationality and independence of Chinese culture. As some advocates of national culture point out, to preserve the nationality of culture does not mean cultural nationalism. The aim is not to refuse the excellent elements of foreign cultures but to consciously sustain the nationality and independence of Chinese culture and carry forward its meritorious traditions and values in the process of cultural globalization: “Faced with cultural globalization, we must place top priority on preserving the nationality of Chinese culture, and to highlight its characteristics. The more national one’s culture is, the more global it will be! To keep the nationality of culture is to push Chinese culture out into the world through absorbing and extending the common values of the whole world. Thus, while maintaining cultural openness and exchanges, we must sustain the national characteristics of Chinese culture and keep 26. Fang Shinan, “Quanqiuhua yu wenhua bentuhuade duoyuan bingcun yu shuangxiang jiegou” [The coexistence and dual structures of globalization and cultural indigenization], Makesi zhuyi yanjiu [Marxism research], no. 4 (2001): 64. 27. Gong Qun, “Quanqiu wenhua yu bentu wenhua” [Global culture and indigenous culture], 8.


independence culturally, which are important tasks that face us in the era of cultural globalization.”28 When discussing how to sustain the nationality and independence of culture, some scholars have transplanted discourses from the realms of politics and economics into the discussion on culture. For example, they put forward such concepts as “cultural security” and “cultural sovereignty.” Feng Ziyi has argued that cultural security will be meaningless without cultural sovereignty, while cultural preservation will be meaningless without cultural security. In his view, Chinese people should pay urgent attention to the protection of cultural sovereignty and cultural security. He also proposed several suggestions on how to protect cultural sovereignty: First, keep cultural consciousness (in other words, absorb positive elements from foreign culture while aiming to develop national culture) in the process of cultural exchanges; second, constitute an appropriate cultural strategy, which can activate the development of national culture as well as withstand the influences of foreign cultures; and third, protect and develop a national culture industry, one that is able to withstand the colonization strategy of the Western culture industry.29 Finally, any culture can only be sustained by carrying forward its good elements. This is also true of Chinese culture. Therefore, in the localization and nationalization of Chinese culture, the most important task is to construct an advanced culture with Chinese characteristics. Generally speaking, a so-called advanced culture with Chinese characteristics includes the national spirit, value system, knowledge system, literature, and arts of China, which are compatible both with China’s socialist market economy and democratic politics, as well as the nation’s reality. Then how to construct an advanced culture with Chinese characteristics? To answer this question, Chinese scholars have offered many suggestions, which can be summed up as follows. First, China must carry forward the adaptable essences of traditional culture. Second, it must keep active the strategy of opening up and engaging in cultural globalization, by learning and absorbing the advanced ideas, values, and knowledge of foreign cultures and integrating them into Chinese culture. Third, China should combine traditional culture with the better elements of Western culture in an attempt to develop and transform its culture. Finally, Chinese cul28. Lu Zhenhe, “Wenhua quanqiuhua yu wenhua fazhan de zhanlue xuanze” [Cultural globalization and the strategic choice of cultural development], Zhongyang dangxiao xiaobao [Journal of the Central Party School] 8, no. 4 (November 2004): 91. 29. Feng Ziyi, “Quanqiuhua yu minzu wenhua” [Globalization and national culture], 17.


ture must “go out into the world” and be integrated with the global culture. By so doing, Chinese culture will become an organic constituent of global culture. Concluding Remarks Chinese intellectuals have participated in heated debates on culture since the 1980s. With an aim to accomplish political, economic, and social modernization of China, the Reform and Opening Up after the 1980s is the resurgence of the Westernization movement of the mid-nineteenth century. However, the historical context of modernization in China since the 1980s has changed greatly: the world has entered an era of globalization, and the Reform and Opening Up of China is essentially a modernization process against the background of globalization. The interaction and overlapping of modernization and globalization is the key to understanding the social transformation of China after Reform and Opening Up. Culture is no exception. To better understand the significance of the cultural debates, we must place them within the context of modernization and globalization. From this perspective, the cultural debates after the 1980s are actually a cultural response of the Chinese nation to modernization and globalization, and they are a logical consequence of the transformation of Chinese traditional culture due to the pressures of modernization and globalization. From the perspective of modernization, the basic task of the cultural debates since the 1980s is to develop a set of values, and a knowledge system, compatible with a modernized politics and economy—that is, to accomplish the transformation of Chinese traditional culture. The focus of the cultural debates is on the relationship between traditional culture and modern culture. Following this logic, the aim of the cultural debates since the 1980s is to accomplish the tasks that the May Fourth Movement failed to do. Therefore, the debates are continuous with the May Fourth Movement. They share a similar logic and arguments, as well as problems, such as tradition vs. modernity, Sinification vs. Westernization, Chinese substance vs. Western function, radical vs. conservative, advanced vs. backward, and so forth.30 From the perspective of globalization, the cultural debates since the 1980s aimed to establish a set of values and a knowledge system com30. Yu Keping, Zengliang minzhu yu shanzhi [Incremental democracy and good governance] (Beijing: Social Science Compilation Press, 2005), 27–56.


patible with universal human values. On the one hand, some universal values will be absorbed into Chinese culture in this process. On the other hand, some elements of Chinese culture will become organic constituents of global culture. What the cultural debates have focused on is the relationship between national culture and global culture. In this sense, we can also say that the cultural debates since the 1980s have a different logic and objectives compared with cultural debates during the May Fourth Movement. For example, new cultural discourses, such as globalization vs. localization, universality vs. diversity, nationality vs. globality, universal culture vs. plural culture, and national identity vs. global identity, emerged in the cultural debates since the 1980s. With the interaction of modernization and globalization, the ongoing cultural debates are extremely complex. Some support the modernization of tradition, while others advocate cultural globalization; some make an appeal for cultural localization, while others criticize it as cultural nationalism; some focus on the innovation of traditional culture, while others seek its revival; some engage in global cultural exchanges, while others plead for the preservation of national culture; some worry about the erosion of national identity, while others are thrilled by global identity; some decry the backwardness of traditional culture, while others proudly announce that the twenty-first century will be a century for Chinese culture. However, if we examine these contradictory cultural phenomena within the macrohistorical context of modern China and the world, interpreting them against the dual background of modernization and globalization, then the logic is both simple and clear. The Westernization movement of the mid-nineteenth century marked the beginning of the modernization process of China. Since then, the nation has set two goals. One is to accomplish modernization in order to remedy China’s backwardness in economic and cultural development. The other is to achieve independence from the condition of “semicolonization” as well as from Western dominance. In other words, modernization and national independence have been the two basic tasks of modern Chinese history.31 These two goals account for the contradictions of modern vs. tradition, progressive vs. conservative, Sinification vs. Westernization, and so forth. Generally speaking, modern civilization mainly refers to industrial civilization, which originated in the West. Modern industries of machinery, 31. Liu Danian, “Zhongguo jindai lishi yundongde zhuti” [Main themes of modern Chinese history], Jindai shi yanjiu [Modern history research]), no. 6 (1996): 4–11.


natural resources, energy, chemistry, medicine, and telecommunication all were first established by the West. If we narrowly define modernization as industrialization, then it will be necessary to learn advanced science, technology, manufacturing, and management from the West in the process of modernization. In this sense, the more contact with the West, and the more learning from the West, the more modernized and progressive a society will be. So it is not surprising that many Chinese scholars equate modernization with Westernization. In contrast, the more unwilling a society is to learn from the West, the more backward it will be. In the particular context of modern China, the West was regarded as the embodiment of advanced culture, while Chinese tradition was the symbol of backwardness. As a result, the struggle and conflict between positive forces and die-hard forces in the modern history of China always took the form of Westernization vs. Sinification, advanced vs. backward, and modern vs. tradition. The die-hard forces were the representatives of vested interest groups. They strongly objected to China’s reform and learning from the West by spreading such exaggerated catchphrases as “the degeneracy of Western culture,” “the incompatibility of Western culture with Chinese specific reality,” “the excellence of Chinese traditional culture,” and the like. These overstatements, the philosopher Ai Siqi has pointed out, are the shared intrigues of all conservative and reactionary forces in the modern history of China. Ignorant of the universal logic of human existence, they seek “closed-door policies inwardly.”32 Apart from accomplishing modernization through learning from the West, the other objective in the modern history of China has been to achieve national independence. These two goals are to some extent contradictory. A question that has haunted Chinese intellectuals and politicians has been how to deal with the relationship between Westernization and Sinification, or, more precisely, how to make a balance between learning from the West and keeping the independence of the Chinese nation. The “semicolonization” of modern China was caused by the West. To achieve independence, the Chinese nation needs to liberate itself from the control and influence of the West. Yet to accomplish modernization, China needs to learn from the West. This dilemma has made Chinese intellectuals and politicians sensitive to learning from the West. They keep a clear mind when learning from 32. Ai Siqi, “Lun Zhongguode teshu xing” [On China’s particularity], in Cong Xihua dao xiandaihua [From Westernization to modernization], ed. Lo Rongqu (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1990), 592–93.


the West in order to avoid total colonization. As a result, they emphasize the necessity of “nationalizing” the Western elements for fear of the “Westernization” of China. Although the politics, economy, and culture of China changed fundamentally from 1949 to the end of the 1970s, China has still lagged far behind Western countries. To accomplish modernization, it is imperative that China learn from the Western capitalist countries. Based on such awareness, the Chinese Communist Party led by Deng Xiaoping carried out bold and resolute reforms on traditional socialism, one of which was to reshape the strategy of modernization. By advocating that “development is the basic principle,” China reopened the door to Western countries, and intense, valuable exchanges of knowledge have taken place. By so doing, China learned the advanced science and technology, as well as management experiences, from the West, absorbed Western investments, and intensified exchanges as well as cooperation with Western countries. Such discourses as “Westernization vs. Sinification,” “Tradition vs. Modern,” and “Advanced vs. Backward” reemerged after China reshaped its modernization strategy. Compared with other Western countries, the United States enjoys superiority both in comprehensive national power and science and technology. It is fair to say that the United States represents the highest developmental level of modern Western culture. As for all developing countries (including China, of course), America undoubtedly exerts more influence than any other Western country. To any open country in the world (even including any other Western country), the influence of America is to some extent irresistible. Not only are developing countries facing the challenge of Americanization, other Western countries find “all things American” tempting, too. Therefore, Sinification vs. Westernization mainly takes the form of Sinification vs. Americanization, while Westernization vs. anti-Westernization correspondingly takes the form of Americanization vs. anti-Americanization. The world has entered the era of globalization since the 1980s and 1990s. As the universal tendency of world history, globalization is becoming an unavoidable reality. As long as a country opens its doors to the outside world, it is drawn into waves of globalization, which is the universal route to social modernization. China is no exception. Although globalization is dominated by Western countries (represented by America), who determine the rules as well as process of globalization, no country (not even America) can control the process of globalization completely. The developing countries, represented by China, will definitely hold more weight in the process


of globalization. Globalization is a double-edged sword for developed as well as developing countries, for both developed and developing countries may benefit as well as suffer from globalization. The modernization and globalization of Chinese culture proceed hand in hand. So does the inevitable anxiety Chinese intellectuals have about the threat of Westernization (of Americanization, in particular) in the process of cultural globalization.33 Globalization is essentially a process with intrinsic contradictions. It incorporates integration and fragmentation, universality and diversity, as well as internationality and locality organically. The primary embodiment of globalization is economic integration. However, economic globalization will inevitably exert profound influence on political, cultural, and social life as well. Deng Xiaoping, the “chief designer” of the modernization strategy of China, incorporated domestic reforms and opening up to the outside world organically. With this farsighted strategy, China engaged in economic globalization actively from the beginning of reform in 1978. Therefore, the transformation of Chinese traditional culture was deeply influenced by the logics of modernization and globalization. The intrinsic antinomy of globalization has unfolded in the process of Chinese cultural transformation directly or indirectly: some have supported cultural globalization, while others have appealed for cultural localization; some have built up cultural uniqueness, while others have called for cultural diversity; some have advocated cultural nationality, while others have appealed for cultural universality; some have emphasized national identity while others have advocated global identity. There are still others advocating both at the same time. Every scholar or politician, as long as he or she cares about the modernization and globalization process of China, will inevitably encounter this challenge and be called upon to give an answer directly or indirectly. Some pay too much attention to the significance of development and globality. In their view, the economy, as well as universal values, is vital to the protection of national dignity, and culture and nationality are basically compatible with globality. There are many positive elements of Western culture that can be shared by humanity as a whole. Those who focus on learning from Western culture expect Chinese people to enjoy the same modern civilization as Westerners. They prefer learning from Western culture and expect cultural globalization to carry forward traditional culture. Others focus on 33. Yu Keping, “Quanqiuhua: Meiguohua/Xifanghua huo Zhongguohua/xiandaihua” [Globalization: Americanization/Westernization or Sinification/modernization?], in Quanqiuhua: Xifanghua haishi Zhongguohua [Globalization: Westernization or Sinicization?], 1–27.


the significance of independence and nationality. In their view, maintaining the purity and independence of national culture has more weight than economic development. They fear that China might lose autonomy in the process of globalization and become subordinate to Western countries. They prefer to carry forward the nationality of Chinese culture rather than submit to cultural globalization and globality. It is easy for the two sides to go to extremes, especially when they cannot communicate with each other. The former label the latter “conservatives,” while the latter label the former “radicals” or “Westernizers.” Taking a whole view on the cultural debates among the Chinese intelligentsia since the 1980s, we can identify several tendencies. First, new discourses such as globalization vs. localization, globality vs. nationality, and global identity vs. national identity are replacing earlier ones such as Sinification vs. Westernization, tradition vs. modernity, and Chinese substance vs. Western function. Second, the cultural transformation that originated with the May Fourth Movement in the 1910s is now coming to an end. Instead, a new kind of Chinese culture has been forming that is neither the simple renaissance of traditional culture nor a copy of Western ones. It has its roots in Chinese tradition and absorbs the merits of other civilizations. It combines tradition and modernity as well as nationality and globality, incorporating the two opposite arguments in the cultural transformation of China to the maximum. Third, as global culture is approaching China, Chinese culture is going out into the world. It is becoming an important constituent of the mainstream global culture, while such global values as freedom, equality, and dignity are being incorporated into Chinese culture. In a word, globalization is the abstraction of modern civilization on the global level. It does not care about whether modern civilization originated from the East or from the West. Just as learning modern Eastern culture does not mean Easternization, learning from the West does not necessarily mean Westernization.

The Importance of Being Chinese: Orientalism Reconfigured in the Age of Global Modernity

Chu Yiu-Wai In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. —Oscar Wilde Introduction In his seminal essay “Orientalism Reconsidered,” first presented at the Europe and Its Others conference held at the University of Essex in 1984, Edward Said reiterates that the Orient was “not Europe’s interlocutor, but its silent Other.” After all these years, particularly in the context of globalization, it seems that the Other no longer remains silent. Asian economies have been developing for the past two decades or so, and it is An earlier version of this essay was presented at the International Conference on “Asia and the Other,” hosted by the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, in June 2007. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Arif Dirlik for his invaluable advice on how to revise the essay. I would also like to thank Nicole Kwoh for her kind assistance. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. . Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker et al., vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 17. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-009 © 2008 by Duke University Press


reasonable to believe that Asia will play an increasingly important role on the international stage in the twenty-first century. Has the Other, with its rising economic force, at long last found its own voice? Has Orientalism disappeared with the swift development of global media? In the new global context, we need to reconfigure our understanding of Asia in general and China in particular. This essay chooses China as an example in reconsidering the topic of Orientalism and tracing where the Other has gone. The May 2006 issue of Newsweek described the twenty-first century as “China’s Century,” featuring China’s emergence and growing influence as a main player on the world stage in politics, economics, and even culture. In this so-called “China’s Century,” the examination of the transformation of Chineseness is crucial to our understanding of the transformation of Orientalism in the age of globalization. In the introduction to his edited volume Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China, Zhang Xudong remarks that a different China emerged in the post-Tiananmen era: “The China produced and packaged in the new cultural market of the 1990s—a China in which state propaganda, the advertising industry, the market-driven popular media, as well as semiautonomous intellectuals all act as competing agents— has created a dazzling collage of images and a cognitive vacuum to be detected by a new critical practice.” In the new millennium, the “produced and packaged” China has undergone an even more significant change. However useful Orientalist critiques once were, they seem less relevant in the face of recent developments. As Arif Dirlik persuasively argues, “We need to recognize that the very language of alternatives and multiplicity is enabled historically by the presupposition of a common modernity shaped by a globalizing capitalism.” It is now necessary for us to recognize Chineseness as a fluid concept and to enact a critical inquiry into its complicity with global modernity. Rereading Orientalism in this specific context . For an analysis of the concept of Asia and its impossible representation in relation to the mechanism of global modernity, see Kwai-Cheung Lo, “There Is No Such Thing as Asia: Racial Particularities in the ‘Asian’ Films of Hong Kong and Japan,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 133–58. . Zhang Xudong, “The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview,” in Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China, ed. Zhang Xudong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 69. . Cited from Arif Dirlik, “Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 3 (2003): 275; see also Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo., and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 62–85.

Chu / Importance of Being Chinese 185

must involve a different understanding of Chineseness which I am going to demonstrate with a reorientation of the new Chinese icon Zhang Ziyi, the actress gracing the cover of Newsweek ’s special issue, “China’s Century.” However, before delving into the controversies surrounding Zhang Ziyi, a brief account of Orientalism and its relations to nationalism and global modernity is in order. (Self-)Orientalism, Nationalism, and Global Modernity In the opening pages of Orientalism, Said states clearly, “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” Not only a place adjacent to Europe, according to Said, the Orient is “also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilization and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” Said’s argument has since inspired many critiques on Western representations of the larger Orient, and China specifically. Colin Mackerras, among others, has offered a lucid account of Western images of China. He concludes in his book Western Images of China that an overwhelming majority of images reflecting feelings of superiority in a sharply “Orientalist” style began to surface in the nineteenth century and remained dominant in the first half of the twentieth century. Though Mackerras believes that the situation changed after 1949, there were still repeated criticisms of Orientalist representations of China in such Hollywood films as Year of the Dragon and The Last Emperor. These Orientalist imaginaries belong to what Said calls “European invention,” that is to say, Western representations of China. An important change Dirlik identifies as “the Orientalism of the Orientals” surfaced in China’s Fifth Generation films. A leading Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou won awards abroad but was rejected at home. . Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 1. . Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989), 266–67. . Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Globalization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 108; hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PA. Dirlik borrows this from Yang Congrong’s essay entitled “Dongfang shehuide dongfanglun” [The Orientalism of Oriental societies], in Dangdai [Contemporary] 64 (August 1991): 38–53. . Here are the international awards won by Zhang Yimou: Red Sorghum (Golden Bear Award, 1987), Ju Dou (Luis Buñuel Special Award, 1990), Raise the Red Lantern (Silver


Many Chinese critics have been pointing their fingers at the “Orientalist” representations of China in the works of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, which are produced not by Western filmmakers but by native Chinese producers. These films are seen by many critics as autoethnographies that aim to fulfill the desirous appetite of Western audiences. This signaled a turn from Orientalism in the West to a kind of “self-Orientalism.” If the imperial West is the implied enemy in Said’s critique of Orientalism, we can say that self-Orientalism has made it more difficult to identify the enemy. And, in fact, self-Orientalism in China stirred up heated debate. Some critics made vehement criticisms of Fifth Generation directors, accusing them of being cultural compradors selling commodified Chineseness in the Western market. This led almost spontaneously to advocating nationalism as a site of resistance to the “demonization” of China in both Hollywood and Fifth Generation films. A collection of Chinese essays entitled Behind the Demonization of China, among other works, is a good example of how Chinese critics responded to different kinds of Orientalisms. If Behind the Demonization of China aims at critical intervention, the highly controversial China Can Say No and its sequels are efforts of inciting nationalist sentiments. Nationalism is a complicated issue in the age of global capitalism. How to reconfigure nationalist discourse as a critical mode of intervention is a problem that continues to haunt us in a seemingly borderless world.10 The success or failure of nationalist discourse is an issue less relevant than the oversimplistic conception of nationalist discourse itself. Thus, it is necessary to have a brief account of nationalism before moving on. Lion Award, 1991), and The Story of Qiu Ju (Golden Lion Award, 1992); Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern were both nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. . Li Xiguang et al., Yaomohua Zhongguo de beihou [Behind the demonization of China] (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 1996). 10. I have written elsewhere on the false belief that nationalism has been completely outmoded in the new global order; Chu Yiu-Wai, “Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 148–56. Bruce Robbins, for instance, claims that in the United States, there arises a kind of nationalism “that does not know itself as such—a nationalism that sees itself as civic rather than ethnic, hence not really nationalism at all.” Cited from Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 13. I would thus rather subscribe to Pheng Cheah’s notion of spectral nationality; see Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).


Frantz Fanon, one of the most influential sources of postcolonial discourse, has placed significant emphasis on nationalist culture. According to Fanon, nationalist culture can act as a site of collective effort to construct one’s own identity and hence inspire a shared experience toward domination.11 In the age of globalization, nationalist discourse can easily be seen as a form of localism to resist the global. Nationalism, however, is not itself unproblematic. Said has clarified that he has no intention of constructing a “real” Orient to speak back against the West, and claims that “to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself.”12 In Tom Nairn’s view, nationalism would lead only to regression when it aims at developing a just and prosperous industrial society by incessantly turning to local resources and allowing past myths and heroes to return to the scene.13 Timothy Brennan has reminded us that natio refers to local community, family, and kinship.14 It can thus ease into a romanticized past, which Rey Chow calls “primitive passion.”15 It is even more unfortunate that nationalism was at times appropriated by the powerful to divert attention away from economic inequality and social injustice.16 Nationalism is both progressive and regressive at once, so to speak. It might also become complicitous with, for instance, racism and colonialism. Etienne Balibar argues in Race, Nation, Class that nationalism and racism are in fact hopelessly intertwined with one another. It is a fallacy that nationalism is proper and racism improper; the latter is in fact a Derridean supplement inherent in the former.17 Although racism might not be the goal of nationalism, it must be an integrated part which is by no means extrinsic to nationalism. It is thus more important, according to Ashis Nandy, to put forward a postnational 11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 105. 12. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), 228. 13. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 348. 14. Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 45. 15. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 22–25. 16. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 262. 17. Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 37–67.


ethic by recognizing “the oppressed or marginalized selves of the First and Second world as civilizational allies in the battle against institutionalized suffering.”18 Moreover, nationalism has an intriguing relationship with postcolonialism and Orientalism. Partha Chatterjee has offered a convincing neoMarxist critique of non-Western nationalism presenting nationalism as a derivative of colonialism and Orientalism. In Chatterjee’s view, Indian nationalism could not but depend upon the realities of colonial power and thus “leads inevitably to an elitism of the intelligentsia, rooted in the vision of a radical regeneration of national culture.”19 In his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Chatterjee questions Indian nationalism and sounds the alarm of the complicity between nationalism and colonialism. When Indian nationalism advocated the local modernization project, according to Chatterjee, it not only challenged the political domination of the colonizer but also produced a kind of discourse that was already politically configured by Western modernity.20 Chatterjee argues through Said’s concept of “Orientalism” that the bi-level nature of nationalist thought “appears to oppose the dominating implications of post-Enlightenment European thought . . . and seems to accept that domination.”21 As nationalism does not question the fundamental difference between the East and the West, it cannot but be a derivative of Orientalism. Apart from being used to instigate nationalist opposition, Said’s Orientalism was at times applied differently by critics in anti-Western discourse. Although Said concludes Orientalism by stressing that his answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism,22 his critique of Orientalism has generated the notion of Occidentalism as a form of oppositional discourse beside nationalist discourse. Wang Ning notes that, “unfortunately, Occidentalism, like a ghost, has already been haunting such Oriental countries as the Arab countries, India, and China.”23 The book China Can Say No and related 18. Ashis Nandy, “Oppression and Human Liberation: Toward a Post-Gandhian Utopia,” in Political Thought in Modern India, ed. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth Deutsch (New Delhi: Sage, 1986), 348. 19. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 79. 20. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 30. 21. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 37. 22. Said, Orientalism, 328. 23. Wang Ning, “Orientalism versus Occidentalism,” New Literary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 63.


efforts can be said to be based on the operational logic of Occidentalism in their attempt to stereotype an imperial West. While Occidentalism may refer to stereotyped views toward the West, it can also be used in a different way. Chen Xiaomei’s Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China is a famous example of using Occidentalism to critique Mainland China’s politics. She argues in her book that Occidentalism in the post-Mao period, such as the stereotyped glamorization of Western society in He Shang (River elegy), serves as a critique of an oppressive Chinese political regime. Chen seeks to develop Said’s thesis by showing that Occidentalism can be a strategy of liberation rather than self-Orientalism.24 Occidentalism and Orientalism can, in a sense, be said to be two sides of the same coin: “Occidentalist discourse has the potential to be liberating for some groups and simultaneously oppressive for others.”25 Dirlik has warned us of the problem of self-Orientalization, which, in the long run, serves to perpetuate, and even to consolidate, existing forms of power: “The part that self-Orientalization may play in the struggle against internal and external hegemony, and its claims to alternative modernities, however, must not be exaggerated” (PA, 120). In Dirlik’s view, Orientalism was a “product of capitalist modernization (and colonialism) in Europe, and, more interestingly, recent cultural nationalisms ‘all share one thing in common: that the unique national culture is a force of modernization, more precisely, capitalist modernization’” (PA, 122–23). Thus, while nationalism “seems to provide an attractive and viable option for the cultural imaginary of postrevolutionary China within the context of globalization,”26 it is also important for us to consider its inherent limitation. Chatterjee argues that “it is not so much the state/civil society opposition but rather the capital/community opposition that seems to me to be the great unsurpassed contradiction in Western social philosophy. Both state and civil society institutions have assigned places within the narrative of capital.”27 In the age of global modernity, according to Dirlik, “national essences are constructed to legitimize incorporation into Global Capitalism” (PA, 156), and thus, “Third-Worldism has abandoned its earlier goals of national liberation . . . to turn into neo-Fascist 24. Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York: Oxford, 1995). 25. Wang Ning, “Orientalism versus Occidentalism,” 63. 26. Liu Kang, “Is There an Alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization? The Debate about Modernity in China,” boundary 2 23, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 198. For a brief account of the genealogy of China’s nationalism within the context of revolution, see 202–9. 27. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 236.


reifications of national cultures and, rather than provide alternatives to the capitalist structuring of the world, not only legitimize capitalism but also contribute to resurgence of Fascism globally” (PA, 157). National essences, in other words, can be used to rationalize the manic logic of global capitalism. Nationalism in China is a source of cultural reification as Orientalism, while Chinese culture is reified into a commodity (PA, 119, 117). Dirlik thus maintains that “it is position in the capitalist structuring of the world that ultimately accounts for the changing relationships between Orientalist discourse (Eurocentric or self-Orientalizing) and power” (PA, 122). The age of global capitalism has thus witnessed the rise of global Orientalization. It should be clear now that the rise of postcolonial discourse was closely related to the advancement of global capitalism in the 1980s and the 1990s. As noted by Dirlik, postcolonialism operates in complicity with global capitalism by rendering it more porous, effectively absorbing different forms of resistance (PA, 75). In this line of thought, the notion of “nationalism” has its own problems. Nationalism in general, and cultural nationalism specifically, might only be new products of discursive production in a global era. In the 1980s, when global capitalism swiftly developed across the globe, Orientalism and postcolonialism became very popular in the academy. In the 1990s, globalization became the dominant discourse; and interestingly enough, Orientalism turned aboveboard into a strategy of cultural commodification. Said’s followers must have been very excited to watch Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The Replacement Killers (1997), because “Orientalist” representations are ubiquitous in both films. Tomorrow Never Dies, albeit highly praised as a breakthrough from the traditional representation of the Bond girl as a sex object, introduces the first ever Chinese Bond girl’s body to the Western gaze. Yeoh’s “Chineseness” is incessantly highlighted, from the production all the way to the packaging of the film, in which one of the most remarkable scenes is when she helps Bond with the Chinese characters on a computer keyboard. In The Replacement Killers, Chinese symbols can also be seen everywhere, from the Chinese character for “death” on the bullet used by Chow Yun Fat, the gloomy backstreets of Chinatown, the exotic Chinese temple, to the mythical use of incense ashes to heal wounds. It is a spectacular exhibition of “Chineseness.” But the exhibition is deliberately superficial; and, in fact, the director Antoine Fuqua is famous for shooting music videos. In short, Orientalism speaks for itself in these films.28 28. For a detailed discussion of the two films and its relation to global Orientalism, see Chu Yiu-Wai, “Who Am I? Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema in the Age of Global Capital-


As the past decade of Chinese studies has shown, there are different ways of being Chinese. In all cases, since the 1990s, (self-)Orientalism, anti-Orientalism, nationalism, and/or Occidentalism have to be articulated in the language of global modernity. It thus follows for us to examine the reconfiguration of Orientalism in the age of global modernity. With hindsight we can say that it is by no means a coincidence that Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi have turned from autoethnographies to cultural commodities. Their self-Orientalism signaled a significant transformation of Chineseness reconfigured in an age of global modernity. Marketing China: Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, and Fifth-Generation Film In June 2006, in an interview entitled “How to Market Chinese Culture” in the Mainland Chinese periodical New Weekly, Zhang Yiwu, a professor at Peking University, made the claim that “a Yao Ming, or a Zhang Ziyi, is more effective than 10,000 copies of Confucian works.”29 This remark, not surprisingly, made its rounds on the Internet and stirred up heated debate on Chinese culture. Interestingly enough, Zhang Yiwu was among the most representative Mainland scholars who borrowed Said’s theory to condemn Fifth Generation directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige back in the 1990s. In an essay entitled “Zhang Yimou in the Context of Globalization,” Zhang Yiwu criticizes Zhang Yimou for selling exotic images of the Orient, in particular depictions of “ancient China” to Western audience in films such as Raise the Red Lantern.30 In his view, these Fifth Generation films are nothing but “national allegories,” to borrow Fredric Jameson’s term,31 which appeal to the fancy of the West by presenting a Chinese spectacle rich with exotic otherness, through which the West can tame the Other. ism,” in Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, ed. Esther Cheung and Chu Yiu-Wai (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004), 39–58. 29. Zhang Yiwu, “How to Market the Chinese Culture,” New Weekly 224 (April 2006); cited from the online edition of New Weekly, available at http://magazine.sina.com/ neweekly/224/2006–04–27/ba8310.shtml (accessed February 25, 2008). 30. Zhang Yiwu, “Quanqiuhua houjimin yujing zhong di zhang yimou” [Zhang Yimou in the context of globalization and postcolonialism], in Houjimin lilun yu wenhua yingtong [Postcolonial criticism and cultural theory], ed. Zhang Jingyuan (Taipei: Rye Field, 1995), 401–20. 31. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88.


I do not intend to dwell upon a further discussion on whether the Fifth Generation directors are selling Orientalist Chineseness to the West. As convincingly noted by Shih Shu-mei, “an anti-Orientalist gesture can slip into a reconfirmation of Orientalism.”32 A more fruitful premise is that from Orientalism of the West to that of the Orientals, the bone of contention has shifted away from Western positional superiority to the interpretation of Chineseness. Critics for and against the Fifth Generation directors are in a sense trying to appropriate a “legitimate” interpretation of Chineseness. Running parallel to the interpretation of Fifth Generation films was the debate centered on the anxiety of interpreting China originating from an essay in Twenty-first Century, a monthly periodical published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The debate began with Zhao Yiheng’s essay entitled “Post-isms and Chinese Neo-conservatism,”33 which denounces Mainland scholars who use “post-isms” to create a kind of neoconservative hostility toward anything Western. Zhang Yiwu, among others, responded by arguing that overseas Chinese critics have simply been anxious of losing their right to interpret “China.” This is exactly the same argument overseas Chinese scholars used to criticize Zhang Yiwu and other Mainland scholars. This essay is not the right place to instill another round of debate, and I would rather use this opportunity to bring forth a point noted by Michelle Yeh, who rounds up her analysis of the issue in “International Theory and the Transnational Critic”: “If contemporary theory has taught us anything, it is that China is not an unchanging, homogeneous entity and that Chineseness is a continuing process of self-constitution. To interpret China is always already to construct China discursively.”34 In short, both the “postisms” debate and Zhang Yiwu’s praise of Zhang Ziyi can be viewed as an issue closely related to the interpretation of Chineseness. While repeated criticisms against the Fifth Generation directors are generated widely both at home and abroad, Rey Chow’s excellent study Primitive Passions offers another insightful reading of their works. Chow 32. Shih Shu-mei, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007), 82–83. 33. Zhao Yiheng (Henry Zhao), “Houxue yu Zhongguo xinbaoshou zhuyi” [Post-isms and Chinese new conservatism], Ershiyi shiji [Twenty-first century] (February 1995): 4–15; for the English version, see Henry Z. H. Zhao, “Post-isms and Chinese New Conservatism,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 31–44. 34. Michelle Yeh, “International Theory and the Transnational Critic,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 214–15; see also Chu Yiu-Wai, “Whose Chineseness? Postcolonial Studies in the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1990s,” Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences 19 (Spring/Summer 2001): 137–40.


concludes her study of Zhang Yimou by commenting that it is “imprecise, though not erroneous, to say that directors such as Zhang are producing a new kind of Orientalism,” and the “self-subalternizing, self-exoticizing visual gestures of the Orientals’ Orientalism is first and foremost a demonstration—a display of a tactic.”35 With such a tactic, the “China” in the films turns its ambivalently victimized image into an asset. The Oriental’s Orientalism can thus be seen as self-Orientalism employing the Orientalist image to look back—it is both the image and the gaze at once. While for Rey Chow it is a tactic of intervention to look back at the Western gaze, it is also possible to see the tactic—in contrast to Hollywood’s strategy—as a marketing tactic that packages and sells Chineseness to the world. Chow pinpoints in Primitive Passions that “the ‘Chineseness’ of Zhang’s films is also the sign of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism, a production of values between cultures.”36 In her view, the images of a contrived Orientalist “China” are consumed and circulated globally as cultural commodities. In the recent films of Zhang Yimou, for example, Chineseness is being exoticized and commodified. It is true that signs of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism in these films made unprecedented achievements in the sense that a temporary “fever of Chinese films has won over the Western world.” Although the fever might not be long-lasting, “cultural studies through cinematic analyses of Chineseness have never been developed so ardently and seriously before.”37 If we agree with Rey Chow’s arguments in Primitive Passions, we can easily understand why and how the Fifth Generation directors’ autoethnographies became high-concept blockbusters. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige recently rode high on the wave of wuxia (martial arts) films generated by the success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in which Western audiences first caught a glimpse of Zhang Ziyi. After this, the young country girl in The Road Home (also known as My Father and Mother ) (1999) grew up to become the most representative Chinese diva in internationally acclaimed Chinese-language films. Later, in Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and other films, Zhang Ziyi won international reputation, paving the way for her success in Hollywood blockbusters such as Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). If Gong Li was once the icon of the autoethnographies of the Fifth 35. Chow, Primitive Passions, 171. 36. Chow, Primitive Passions, 170. 37. Tzu-hsiu Beryl Chiu, “Public Secrets: Geopolitical Aesthetics in Zhang Yimou’s Hero,” E-SPAC: The Electronic Journal of Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast (2005), available at http://mcel.pacificu.edu/easpac/2005/tzuchiu.php3 (accessed February 25, 2008).


Generation films, Zhang Ziyi must be that of “commercialized” Chineseness. Before Zhang Ziyi captured international attention in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she first appeared on the big screen in The Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou. Both so-called Yimou girls, Zhang Ziyi leaped farther than Gong Li to commercial blockbusters, probably because the context of the global mediascape has been changing more rapidly in the age of global modernity. The stage of “autoethnographies,” in other words, was much shorter for Zhang Ziyi than Gong Li. In fact, it did not take long before Gong Li became as commercial as Zhang Ziyi in Hollywood films, such as Miami Vice (2006) and Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask (2006). Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li’s unabashedly “Orientalist” characters have evinced a kind of contrived self-Orientalism tailored for Western audiences. Feng Xiaogang, director of The Banquet, admitted in a recent interview that a sword dance scene was deliberately added to the film in response to investors’ requests on the basis that it would increase box office numbers. Arif Dirlik uses the term localized Orientalism to describe how Chinese decorations are used to give a tint of Chineseness in globalized architecture in China.38 Likewise, the “localized Orientalism” in Chinese wuxia films has conjured up Chineseness, a global face behind a local mask. In short, “it is no longer possible to tell what is identifiably Chinese or identifiably Western” (PA, 123). Zhang Ziyi contra Confucius Zhang Yiwu’s claims that Zhang Ziyi, an arguably “Orientalist” movie icon, is much more important than Confucius mark an interesting shift in paradigm. Zhang Yiwu’s statement is actually not as unreasonable as it sounds. One merely needs to look at Zhang Ziyi’s ability to steal the limelight to be convinced. In a 2006 online poll, Time magazine asked readers to choose the world’s most influential person from a list of ten nominees, in which Zhang Ziyi ranked fourth, with 8 percent of the vote.39 Widely known 38. Arif Dirlik, “Architectures of Global Modernity, Colonialism and Places,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 33–61. 39. Every year, editors of the weekly magazine choose “The Time 100,” the world’s most influential people, from among five categories: Leaders and Revolutionaries, Builders and Titans, Artists and Entertainers, Scientists and Thinkers, and Heroes and Icons. In 2006, for the first time, they asked readers to vote online for whom they considered the most influential. Ang Lee won the poll with 34 percent of the votes (see http://www.china.org .cn/english/features/film/166976.htm [accessed February 25, 2008]). South Korean pop


as China’s most famous actress, Zhang Ziyi also won the title of “World’s Most Influential Chinese in 2006”—jointly sponsored by various media, including Phoenix TV, Baidu.com, and the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper— which honors outstanding Chinese from a variety of fields. The awards were presented at Peking University in Beijing on March 31, 2007.40 The Chinese actress was honored as an Academy Award presenter and as a judge at the Cannes Film Festival. The surprising scene at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival proved further the Chinese star’s global charisma. Marco Müller, director of the film festival, went down on his knees to welcome her for the premiere of The Banquet on September 4, 2006. The photograph capturing Müller as he greeted the glamorous Zhang Ziyi on bended knee made the front page of China Daily and became hotly debated by China’s netizens. Some said it was merely a joke. Be that as it may, this interesting incident, when compared to that of Jackie Chan presenting an Oscar with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1996, must have spoken volumes for the changing role of Chinese actors and actresses in Hollywood. The scripted scene of Jackie Chan jumping like a clown to reach the envelope held high by the seven foot two basketball legend was covered by Hong Kong media as a gag made to symbolically reaffirm the “positional superiority” of the West. Besides her popularity, Zhang Ziyi has also captured the world’s attention by having a close working relationship with distinguished designer Giorgio Armani. The Italian designer, who enthused that he was attracted to Zhang Ziyi as a whole, was behind her appearances at the Golden Globe Awards, the Baftas (awards from the British Academy for Film and Television Arts), and the Academy Awards. Zhang Ziyi also glammed up the opening of an Armani flagship store in her native China. It is unimaginable that the Italian fashion designer would hold a book of Confucius’s Analects in the opening ceremony of his flagship store in Shanghai. Zhang Ziyi is not Nancy Kwan, and the Wanchai streets in the world of Suzie Wong have star Rain has also made the list, together with singer Daddy Yankee, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and actors Clint Eastwood and George Clooney. 40. Here is the full list of the “most influential Chinese of 2006” (a.k.a. “You Bring Charm to the World” Awards): Chen Ning Yang (Chinese American physicist and Nobel Laureate), Yizhi Jane Tao (assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice University), Xia-Chang Zhan (main inventor of the environmentally friendly power source SoftBattery), John Chun Sai So (Lord Mayor of Melbourne), John Liu (New York City councilman), Liu Xiang (world-record holder in the 110-meter hurdles), Ding Junhui (Chinese snooker prodigy), Ang Lee (director and Academy Award winner), Tan Dun (composer and Academy Award winner), Chan Yik Hei (a young Hong Kong amateur scientist after whom the 20780 Chanyikhei asteroid is named), and Zhang Ziyi.


been transformed into a global city. Zhang Ziyi is arguably much more effective than Confucius in marketing Chinese culture. Meanwhile, the world has also come to China in return. Western China Commercial Daily dredged up a descendant of Confucius, Kong Lingqi, for a critique of the Zhangs (Yiwu and Ziyi): “What Zhang Ziyi represents isn’t true Chinese culture—she’s just a symbol of China. I ask you, how much culture does Zhang Ziyi really have? Can she speak for Chinese culture? Foreigners like her because to them she fits more closely with the Westerners’ image of a Chinese woman, but this image twists and misunderstands Chinese culture. In actuality, what Zhang Ziyi offers us is not real Chinese culture or a true sense of China at all. . . .”41 Criticisms against Zhang Ziyi are in fact about Chineseness, national identity, and, above all, authenticity. By national identity I mean how “Chineseness” is built into the construction of identity. Extreme anti-Japanese nationalist critiques that have recently swept China, such as Zhang Ziyi’s role as a Japanese woman in Memoirs of a Geisha, are completely offtrack and not worth discussing here. In regard to Zhang Ziyi’s “inauthentic” Chineseness, one film critic was straightforward: “While Zhang Ziyi is becoming increasingly popular with foreign audiences, she is also becoming increasingly less Chinese. The Chinese qualities in her image are ever fewer.”42 Such a critique is apparently based upon an old myth that Westernization would make China “inauthentic” and “impure.” In this sense, Zhang Yiwu’s comment is closely related to the interpretation of Chineseness. The recent debate about Starbucks in the Forbidden City can shed light on the issue at hand. The Forbidden City, constructed from 1406 to 1420, is China’s best-preserved site of ancient architecture. Starbucks, which opened on September 18, 2000, is situated in the southeastern corner of the Hall of Preserving Harmony (Baohedian), one of the three most impressive buildings on the palace ground. In his blog, Rui Chenggang, a 41. Cited from Joel Martinsen, “Zhang Ziyi—Bigger than Confucius? A Media Debate Pits the Geisha against the Sage,” That’s Beijing, June 12, 2006, available at http://www .thatsbj.com/blog/index.php/2006/06/12/perspectives_zhang_ziyi_bigger_than_conf (accessed February 25, 2008); my emphasis. 42. “I suspect that the professor was simply trying to push against an overly rigid separation between high culture and low culture, a fairly common stance among cultural critics in the West and in China. If he had stopped at the mention of Yao Ming, he may not have run into any trouble. His problem is the invocation of Zhang Ziyi.” Wind Gu, “Professor: I Did Not Compare Confucius to Zhang Ziyi,” Zhongguo Wang [China net], May 16, 2006, available at http://www.china.org.cn/english/2006/May/168519.htm (accessed February 25, 2008).


TV anchorman in Beijing, called for a Web campaign against the outlet that “tramples over Chinese culture.” According to Rui, “The Forbidden City is a symbol of China’s cultural heritage. Starbucks is a symbol of lower-middleclass culture in the West. We need to embrace the world, but we also need to preserve our cultural identity. There is a fine line between globalization and contamination.”43 This triggered an anti-Starbucks wave among Chinese netizens, which gathered momentum when Jiang Hongbin, a delegate of the Heilongjiang Province in the National People’s Congress, submitted a motion to ban the Starbucks in the Forbidden City in March 2007. It is a bit embarrassing to see such an oppositional move in the name of preserving the local at this stage of globalization. The presence of Starbucks in the Forbidden City admittedly marks the Westernization of Chinese culture. But the point is, outside the Forbidden City, Beijing has already evolved into a global city with transnational corporations everywhere. Although Starbucks finally closed its 200-square-foot coffeehouse in the Forbidden City in July 2007, another coffee shop with a Chinese name replaced it, demonstrating that the name has changed but the operational logic has not. The case of Starbucks in the Forbidden City has thus evidenced not the struggle between the global and the local but the longing for a pure past in an impure present. To say that Starbucks tramples over Chinese culture only touches one side of the coin. Starbucks has to undergo a process of commodification affecting not only the Forbidden City but also Starbucks. In an internal corporate memo dated February 14, 2007, titled “The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience,” Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks, laments how the company’s fierce expansion and efficiency measures “have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand.”44 In the name of efficiency, for instance, Starbucks has introduced automatic espresso machines that serve more customers and boost sales, which, according to Schultz, has “removed much of the romance and theater” of the Starbucks experience. Starbucks’s success could be attributed to the pioneering concept of the “Third Space” experience: the place between work and home. Unfortunately, this “Third Space,” which seems to have close affinity to Homi Bhabha’s notion, has strayed from the vision imagined by its founders.45 43. Jonathan Watts, “Online Campaign Aims to Rid Forbidden City of Starbucks,” Guardian, January 19, 2007. 44. Daniel Gross, “Starbucks’ ‘Venti’ Problem: Expanding Too Far Too Fast Can Turn Companies from Offbeat to Bland,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2007, M1. 45. As Dan Neil reports in his “Starbucks Nation”: “And far from being the ‘third place’


Commodification has brought adverse effects upon the authenticity of both the global and the local. When Starbucks grows across borders to forty thousand stores, it has to struggle with its “authentic” brand identity. As Walter Benjamin once said, “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”46 But Benjamin also reminds us that mechanical reproduction of a work of art might represent something new. Benjamin’s lesson is that we should not uncritically enjoy the traditional and criticize with aversion the truly new. Authenticity seems increasingly irrelevant in the context of globalization when cultural translations become ordinary. I allude to Kwai-Cheung Lo’s deconstruction of dichotomy of appearance and reality to underscore why inauthenticity might not be the opposite of authenticity: “Appearance is not the opposite of the underlying reality. Ang Lee’s ‘to be more Chinese you have to be Westernized’ makes sense only when the appearance and reality are no longer opposed. Believing in appearances, we see the cultural other the way he or she effectively is, and we like that person just for those very appearances, not in spite of them. What is at first appearance in the end becomes almost the essence in the cultural exchange operating under the global economy.”47 “To be more Chinese you have to be Westernized” can perfectly account for the case of Zhang Ziyi. Asked whether or not he can make a purely Asian mainstream film, Ang Lee answered, not without a bit of uneasiness: “With Crouching Tiger, for example, the subtext is very purely Chinese. But you have to use Freudian or western techniques to dissect what I think is hidden in a repressed society—the sexual tension, the prohibited feelings. Otherwise you don’t get that deep. Some people appreciate it; others don’t because it twists the genre. It’s not ‘Chinese.’ But to be more Chinese you have to be westernized, in a sense. You’ve got to use that tool to dig in there and get at it.”48 Ang Lee seems to believe that Chinese reality cannot be exposed without Western tools. Ang Lee’s situation is not so far off from Zhang Ziyi’s, and it illuminates our reorienits founders imagined—a place of ease and repose between work and home—Starbucks has become instead study hall for adults, with people clacking away at their laptops and finger-spazzing on their BlackBerrys.” See the Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2007. 46. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. and with intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 221. 47. Kwai-Cheung Lo, Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 188. 48. Quoted from Nisid Hajari, “Erasing the Boundaries,” in “Issues Asia,” special issue, Newsweek, July–September 2001, 79.


tation of Zhang Ziyi in the transnational Chinese cultural imagination. Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon introduced a significant change to the Chinese movie industry in the sense that it generated a new wave of wuxia films. No less important than its pioneering effort is how the film cut across both Chinese communities and the East-West dichotomy. It manifested a change from Chinese cinema as national cinema to “Chineselanguage cinema.”49 In the new mediascape, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon presents a dynamic image across the Greater China. “Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon packages the image of China in a selfOrientalizing way, foregrounding loyalty and martial art as commodities,” remarks Liao Ping-hui.50 Liao uses Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as an example to demonstrate the impossibility of integrating different parts of the so-called cultural China in the context of Chinese diaspora. In this context, I twist the issue a bit to refer to what I would call a deconstruction of the Chinese-Western dichotomy. I agree with Liao’s claim that “while Chinese film locates disjuncture and difference in its global dissemination, many Chinese communities are still insisting on orthodox local consciousness.”51 This so-called orthodoxy is restricted to ethnicity and nationality. In light of the above-mentioned deconstruction of appearance and reality, it should be noted that it is possible “to be westernized in order to be more Chinese.”52 Furthermore, the notion of identity in the age of globalization cannot be restricted to ethnicity and nationality. Néstor García Canclini has reminded us, “The transnationalization of technologies and the commercialization of cultural commodities attenuated traditional forms of identity.” And thus, “Identity today, even among broad sectors of the popular classes, is polyglot, multiethnic, migrant, made from elements that cut across various cultures.”53 More importantly, it is a kind of multimedia spectacle in which ethnicity, nationality, media, and popular culture might carry similar weights. If we accept what Stuart Hall says—that identity is not being but becoming—authenticity would not but be a limit to the development of fluid 49. Sheldon Lu, and Emilie Yeh, eds., “Introduction: Mapping the Field of ChineseLanguage Cinema,” in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 1–24. 50. Liao Ping-hui, “Overseas Chinese Communities in Global Diasporas: Visualizing Political and Cultural Citizenships” [in Chinese], Chung-wai Literary Monthly 32, no. 4 (September 2003): 21. 51. Liao, “Overseas Chinese Communities in Global Diasporas,” 26. 52. Lo, Chinese Face/Off, 180. 53. Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 90, 91.


identities. In this sense, the urge to re-create an authentic China is detrimental to creativity.54 Meanwhile, Rey Chow has convincingly invoked the notion of “Chineseness-es” to highlight that Chineseness should be plural in nature, and that it no longer can be held as “a monolithic given tied to the mythic homeland but must rather be understood as a provisional, ‘open signifier.’”55 It is true that “there is no single way of imagining China, for while there have been dominant ways of representing China, there have also been minority and contestatory ways of doing so.”56 But it is also necessary to note that while the “open” signifier is no longer tied to the mythic homeland, it has to be tied to the West in the age of global modernity. The important question is: Which of the many Chineseness-es is privileged and institutionalized? In the new mediascape of globalization, it is necessary to use a new imaginary to replace the mind-set that holds pure Chineseness in esteem. Authenticity, in other words, has become increasingly irrelevant in the age of global modernity. Shih Shu-mei coins the term Sinophone to “challenge specific ‘regimes of authenticity’ which are themselves but constructs that have exercised various forms of symbolic or physical violence against those who are either problematically included or flagrantly excluded.”57 What is assumed by these “regimes of authenticity”—a phrase borrowed from Prasenjit Duara58—is that to be inauthentic makes sense only when cultures stay within closed borders, but of course they do not. Can Culture Be China’s Next Export? It seems that the most important issue brought forth by the debate is not whether or not Zhang Ziyi is authentically “Chinese” but whether or not 54. Mo Yan, “The New Chineseness: Great Leap Forward or Backward?” International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter 37 (June 22, 2005): 7. In my own study of local Hong Kong identity, I once wrote, “The authentic Hong Kong local imaginary paradoxically evinces its inauthentic locality.” Chu Yiu-Wai, “(In)Authentic Hong Kong: The ‘(G)Local’ Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema,” Post Script 20, no. 2 (June 2001): 160. 55. Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 1–24. 56. Gregory B. Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), vii. 57. Shih Shu-mei, Visuality and Identity, 183. 58. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).


culture can be China’s next export. While China has been famously deemed “the world’s factory,” it must reduce its gross cultural deficit, according to Zhang Yiwu, by exporting Chinese culture through self-Orientalizing spectacles such as Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi. No less controversial than John Lennon’s famous statement that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now,”59 it should not come as a surprise that a statement which seems to compare Zhang Ziyi to Confucius would probably also invite harsh criticism. Zhang Yiwu tried to clarify his stand by maintaining that he did not have the slightest intention of comparing Zhang Ziyi to Confucius, explaining later to China Youth Daily that what he had wanted to stress is the importance of popular culture in the global economy: “It is not enough merely to promote Confucius, who represents the country’s high-end culture. We can’t neglect the importance of Zhang Ziyi and Yao Ming. As representatives of popular Chinese culture, they are familiar to many foreigners and have been accepted as one of the symbols of China. . . . The power of popular culture is immense. Dissemination of the quintessence of traditional culture depends on the export of the popular culture.”60 Paradoxical though it may seem, in order to be more Chinese one has to be Westernized. The word Chinese here does not, of course, refer to identity by descent. When Danny Huppatz analyzes the designer nostalgia in Hong Kong, he interprets Hong Kong designer Alan Chan and the brand-name franchise Shanghai Tang as having “merged two possible functions for nostalgic representations—within a local context they appeal to collective historical memory, but within an international context they appeal to a global imaginary as a pastiche of Chinese exotica invested with the aura of tradition.”61 This offers a perfect explanation to Zhang Ziyi’s role in the global economy. Her sword dance in wuxia films appeals to both “local” and “authentic” imaginations, while within an international context she appeals to a global imagination as a pastiche of Chinese exotica matched perfectly with the global economy. In the famous Visa television commercial that adopts the theme of “West meets East,” Zhang Ziyi works perfectly well with Pierce “Bond” Brosnan. The commercial is full of Orientalist images, 59. On March 4, 1966, a British newspaper, the Evening Standard, published a story on the Beatles, in which John Lennon was quoted as saying: “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” Controversy ensued. Christians burned Beatles albums and demanded an apology, which Lennon provided a couple of months later. 60. Wind Gu, “Professor: I Did Not Compare Confucius to Zhang Ziyi.” 61. Danny Huppatz, “Designer Nostalgia in Hong Kong,” available at http://arts.monash .edu.au/cclcs/research/papers/nostalgia.pdf (accessed February 25, 2008).


turning the crowded Bangkok streets into an exotic spectacle. Visa International’s South Asia country manager, Santanu Mukherjee, explained why they shot such a commercial: “We believe this advertisement will reinforce Visa’s brand image as a leader in India. By combining our international association with the James Bond movie Die Another Day and bringing together international celebrities like Pierce Brosnan and Zhang Ziyi, who have a strong appeal across Asia and India, we hope to provide memorable and entertaining advertising. The advertisement aims at providing extraordinary surprises to ordinary everyday situations like a traffic jam!”62 The carefully designed Orientalist representations in the commercial, which include both the chaotic Bangkok traffic as well as Zhang Ziyi, attest not to national allegories but to marketing. Both the audience and Visa know very well the Bangkok spectacle is Orientalist. However, unlike Orientalism in the past, it is carefully designed to simulate an Orient that sells itself to the world when global corporations cross borders. This view is not limited to transnational corporations. The Chinese government has learned to speak the same language. China has been paying more and more attention to developing its “soft power,” a term popularized by Joseph Nye, who defines it as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.”63 “Attraction” is the key to the “Beijing Consensus,” coined by Joshua Cooper Ramo in 2004.64 In The Beijing Consensus, Ramo distinguishes China’s economic development model from the well-known “Washington Consensus” widely applied by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In short, unlike the “Washington Consensus,” the “Beijing Consensus” does not link economic and financial aid to preconditions such as good governance, democracy, transparency, rule of law, and respect for human rights. China has become increasingly popular among third world countries as it refuses to involve 62. Cited from Indiantelevision.com’s MAM Special Report: Focus on Visa’s TVC featuring Pierce Brosnan and Zhang Ziyi, “Visa’s Joyride with Mr. Bond,” available at http:// www.indiantelevision.com/mam/special/y2k3/visaad.htm (accessed February 25, 2008). 63. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2004), x. 64. Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Beijing Consensus (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2004). Aihwa Ong has also offered an account of the ways East and Southeast Asian states made exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy; see Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2006).


itself in the internal affairs of countries whose leaders benefit from opaque political systems. It is through attraction that China has been able to develop its soft power. Notwithstanding the fact that China has in recent years been able to deepen its influence in African countries through attraction, its soft power still has a long way to go. According to Nye, “China does not have cultural industries like Hollywood, and its universities are far from the equal of America’s. It lacks the many non-governmental organizations that generate much of America’s soft power.”65 Beijing seems to have taken Nye’s advice on this point. China is steadily increasing its support for cultural exchanges by sending doctors and teachers abroad. It has also started to attract students from other nations to study in China and to finance Chinese-language programs abroad. “In 2005, China’s education ministry announced a new initiative to boost Chinese-language teaching in American universities and language institutes around the world. Beijing University, China’s most prestigious, just announced a visiting-scholars fund to encourage foreign PhDs to study in China.”66 Meanwhile, in the eleventh five-year (2006–2010) plan of cultural development, the Chinese government officially expressed its ambition to increase cultural influence, pledging to actively participate in international cultural cooperation and competition, expand cultural trade, and increase its cultural presence. The government has also pledged to adopt favorable policies to promote cultural industries and make use of all resources to promote the influence and competitiveness of Chinese cultural products. If we take Chinese movies as a convenient example, it is clear that the Chinese film industry has made progress in terms of international exposure in the last couple of years: Commercial films also helped the Chinese box office break free from 10 years in the doldrums. Before 2003, home-made movie box office takings sat on a constant one billion yuan (128 million U.S. dollars). In 2004, Chinese films pulled in 1.5 billion yuan (192 million U.S. dollars), rising to two billion yuan (256 million U.S. dollars) in 2005 with 1.6 billion yuan (205 million U.S. dollars) coming from overseas. This year, with eight Chinese films boasting budgets exceeding 100 65. Joseph S. Nye, “The Rise of China’s Soft Power,” Wall Street Journal Asia, December 29, 2005. 66. Esther Pan, “China’s Soft Power Initiative,” Council for Foreign Relations: A Nonpartisan Resource for Information and Analysis, available at http://www.cfr.org/publication/ 10715/ (accessed February 25, 2008).


million yuan (12.8 million U.S. dollars), takings are expected to hit a record 2.6 billion yuan (333 million U.S. dollars).67 Nevertheless, films themselves remain outside the mainstream theaters of the Western market. Zhang Yu, general manager of China Arts and Entertainment Group, attributes this problem to China’s lack of sophisticated plans in developing and marketing its cultural products. In this sense, the marketing strategy represented by Zhang Ziyi is the ideal means to market secular “Chinese” culture to the world. Zhang Yiwu remarks, “How to make the world see China’s vitality and glamour is a challenge faced by the country.”68 Zhang Ziyi marks a paradigm shift in Chinese culture in the sense that she embodies what one can call a Chinese dream: a message to the world that China is more than just the world’s largest factory; it is also a source of cultural software capable of seducing the West. Conclusion: To Be or Not to Be “Chinese”? Rethinking Chineseness in the Context of Globalization In our age of globalization, we need to reconfigure our understanding of China and its larger Asian context. By way of conclusion, let me recall a segment from Ien Ang’s famous essay, “Can One Say ‘No’ to Chineseness?”: “To put it simply, and to draw on a personal example, for me to be or not to be Chinese—or rather, to identify myself as such—is a question of political articulation, not a self-evident, natural matter.”69 After deconstructing Chineseness, Allen Chun also remarks in his controversial “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity” that although ethnicity and culture are often used as metaphorical constructs for identity, “these three concepts are analytically quite distinct”; and thus, the important question is “what kinds of contexts demand that one speak from a position of identity, and what contexts do not?”70 To be or not to be Chinese becomes a question with different answers depending on different contexts. 67. Cited from “Can Culture Be China’s Next Export?” People’s Daily Online, December 29, 2006, available at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200612/29/eng20061229_ 336975.html (accessed February 25, 2008). 68. Cited from “Can Culture Be China’s Next Export?” 69. Ien Ang, “Can One Say ‘No’ to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 242. 70. Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity,” boundary 2 23, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 134–35.


Back to where we started, Orientalism is not about the authenticity of the Orient. As Said reminds us, “There is no real Orient to argue for, only the gifts of people of that region for the struggle to survive.”71 The critique of Orientalism as conceived by Said is to invoke a kind of “decentered consciousness” in a plurality of terrain, and these critiques would become “. . . planes of activity and praxis which are secular, marginal, oppositional with reference to the mainstream, and political and practical in as much as they intend—without necessarily succeeding in implementing—the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge: towards an investigative open models of analysis.”72 With this in mind, we should understand that although the East and West can no longer be clearly distinguished in our global era, the question of Orientalism remains important to theories of interpretation because “investigative open models of analysis” are needed regardless of what transnational cultural images have become. As claimed by Zhang Xudong, our reflections on Orientalism should target an examination of the changing cultural politics of our age.73 It follows that the Chineseness in the works of Zhang Yimou should be seen as marking a new operational logic rather than a false representation of Chineseness. Arif Dirlik sounded the alarm back in the mid-1990s that the rise of postcolonialism is complicit with the advent of global capitalism. From Orientalism to self-Orientalist commodities, it is evident from the analysis of Chineseness above that Dirlik has offered us a precursory glance into the nature of our perception of cultural identity in the age of globalization. Dirlik’s insightful question of why the relationship between postcolonial discourse and globalization is seldom discussed by postcolonial critics in the 1990s has proved vital to our understanding of the new Chineseness. Orientalism discourse became popular in the academy when global capitalism developed swiftly across borders in the 1980s. Not unlike the complicity between postcolonial discourse and global capitalism in Dirlik’s view, the 71. Edward W. Said and Eqbal Ahmad, “Anti-Imperialist Struggles in a Post-Colonial World,” International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Newsletter, December 2003, 37. 72. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 25. 73. Zhang Xudong, “Orientalism and the Politics of Knowledge: Selfhood, Representation, and the Critique in the Age of Globalization” (in Chinese), Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences 13 (Winter 1998): 199. As Chandreyee Niyogi rightly notes, “what Orientalism had succeeded in suggesting, after Foucault, was that for the Orient, as indeed for humanity, being and becoming had always seemed irretrievably discontinuous.” Chandreyee Niyogi, preface to Reorienting Orientalism (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage, 2006), 29.


development from Raise the Red Lantern to Curse of the Golden Flower has evinced the transformation of Chineseness, which, however, cannot but be presented under the operational logic of global modernity. Even with the development of Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi, Chineseness has sacked its “Orientalist” shell, glamorizing a new global Chineseness in this so-called “China’s century.” In the introduction to the memorial issue in honor of Said published by Social Text, Patrick Deer, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat pinpoint the questions Said posed insistently, including “Who speaks?” and “For what and whom?”74 In our case, the silent Other found its own voice. But it is not speaking its own language. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s words in Perhaps Love (2005) tell a sad but true story that can enlighten our understanding of Chineseness in the global era: “I fall in love with someone I despise.” The Zhang Ziyi in real life and the Zhou Xin in Perhaps Love are in a sense the simulacrum of the new Chineseness. It is no wonder that Said lamented the persistence of Orientalism before he passed away. Orientalism has become even more difficult to detect, as the enemy has become an appendage. The epigraph “The East is a career” that introduces Orientalism, cited from Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred, will linger on after the passing away of Edward Said. It has ironically turned into a motto in the handbooks of both the East and the West as they cross borders in the age of global modernity.

74. Patrick Deer, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat, “Introduction: Edward Said; A Memorial Issue,” Social Text 24, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 9.

Books Received Ahmed, Arif. Saul Kripke: Contemporary American Thinkers. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Andermahr, Sonya. Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Balderston, Daniel, and Francine Masiello, eds. Approaches to Teaching Puig’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Approaches to Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2007. Barnstone, Aliki. Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2007. Berry, R. M., and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, eds. Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Bidet, Jacques, and Stathis Kouvelakis. Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. Historical Materialism Book Series (vol. 16). Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, Mass.: Brill, 2008. Birth, Kevin K. Bacchanalian Musical Experiences and Sentiments: Political Counterpoints in Trinidad. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Brooks, Thom, and Fabian Freyenhagen, eds. The Legacy of John Rawls. Continuum Studies in American Philosophy. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Buchanan, Ian, ed. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Bulson, Eric. Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 2007. boundary 2 35:2 (2008) © 2008 by Duke University Press

208 boundary 2 / Summer 2008 Caistor, Nick. Octavio Paz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Castronovo, Russ. Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Chambers, Iain. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Colla, Elliott. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Cook, J. Thomas. Spinoza’s “Ethics.” Reader’s Guides. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Danto, Arthur C. Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Vazira. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. Cultures of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Finnström, Sverker. Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. The Cultures and Practice of Violence Series. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. French, Steven. Science: Key Concepts in Philosophy. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Electronic Mediations, Vol. 21. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2007. Graham, Sarah. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Reader’s Guides. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Hamilton, Ross. Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Posthumanities, vol. 3. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2008. Isaacs, Bruce. Toward a New Film Aesthetic. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2008. Jones, Gavin. American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840– 1945. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Karim, Aisha, and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds. On Violence: A Reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Katz, Daniel. American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Transla-

Books Received 209 tion. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Khanna, Ranjana. Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Kumar, Priya. Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1: Introduction. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 3: From Modernity to Modernism. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2008. Mavor, Carol. Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Meagher, Sharon M., ed. Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Mendoza, Zoila S. Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Norris, Christopher. Fiction, Philosophy and Literary Theory: Will the Real Saul Kripke Please Stand Up? New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Oster, Christian. The Unforeseen: A Novel. Trans. Adriana Hunter. New York: Other Press, 2007. Peeren, Esther. Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pellauer, David. Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Press, Gerald A. Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2008. Price, Richard. Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

210 boundary 2 / Summer 2008 Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Read, Rupert. Philosophy for Life: Applying Philosophy in Politics and Culture. Ed. M. A. Lavery. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Regier, Willis Goth. In Praise of Flattery. Stages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Rice, Laura. Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa. Explorations in Postcolonial Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Roberts, Mary. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Rubenstein, Diane. This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political Imaginary. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Ryder, Pamela. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Said, Edward W. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Sallis, John. The Verge of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Schmitt, Carl. Constitutional Theory. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Shelton, Allen. Dreamworlds of Alabama. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2007. Spanos, William V. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Other Asias. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Stephenson, William. Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Reader’s Guides. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Sutton, Virginia Chase. What Brings You to Del Amo. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2007. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Books Received 211 Tew, Phillip. The Contemporary British Novel, 2nd ed. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Thomson, Alex. Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s “Politics of Friendship.” Continuum Studies in American Philosophy. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Verdaguer, Jacint. Selected Poems of Jacint Verdaguer: A Bilingual Edition. Trans. and ed. Ronald Puppo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Viego, Antonio. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Sic. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. West, Henry R. Mill’s “Utilitarianism.” Reader’s Guides. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007. Žižek, Slavoj. The Universal Exception. Ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2007.

Contributors Chris King–Chi Chan is completing his PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK, where he was awarded a Warwick Postgraduate Research Fellowship. His current research is on labor protests and workplace relations in South China. Previously he worked as a labor organizer in Hong Kong. Min Chen is currently the assistant director of Admissions at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts. She was born and raised in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. She got her BA at Foreign Affairs College, a unit of the PRC Foreign Ministry, in English and international studies, specializing in diplomacy. In December 2005, she received her double Master’s in political science and communications/journalism from the University of Oregon. Her areas of interest are media and public policy. Chu Yiu-Wai is a professor in the Department of Chinese and Program of Humanities at Hong Kong Baptist University. His recent publications include The Local Myth: Discursive Production in the Age of Globalization [in Chinese] (Taipei: Xuesheng, 2002), Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (coedited with Esther Cheung) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004), and The “China” in Contemporary Western Critical Discourse [in Chinese] (Beijing: People’s University Press, 2006). Alexander Day is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He received a PhD in the history of modern East Asia with a research focus on modern China from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2007. His dissertation examines contemporary debates on China’s emerging rural crisis and its relationship to intellectual politics in the reform era (1979 to the present), putting these debates into historical perspective. His research interests include the history of radicalism and populism, the politics of rural society boundary 2 35:2 (2008) © 2008 by Duke University Press

214 boundary 2 / Summer 2008 and the rural-urban relationship, the connection between historical writing and politics, and transnational and anticolonial political movements. Arif Dirlik is Chair Professor of Chinese Studies at the Centre for East Asian Studies, and Professor, by Courtesy, of History, and Religious and Cultural Studies, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Concurrent Professor, Center for Marxist Social Theory Studies, Nanjing University; and Distinguished Visiting Fellow, the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia. His latest book-length publication is Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Gao Jin is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. Her publications include the English translation of two articles by Wang Anyi in One China, Many Paths. Her dissertation is a comparative study of discourses on the relationship between poetry and painting. Han Shaogong is a Chinese writer, the chairman of Hainan Provincial Artist Federation, and the winner of many Chinese literature prizes and the French Cavalier Honor of Literature and Arts. His main publications in English are the novel A Dictionary of Maqiao, and a short novel Pa Pa Pa. Guannan Li is in the PhD program in the Department of History at the University of Oregon. He is working on his dissertation, “Reviving China: The Guomindang’s Cultural Revolution and Colonial Modernity, 1927–1937.” Dr. Pun Ngai is deputy director of Peking University–Hong Kong Polytechnic University China Social Work Research Centre, and an associate professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her representative work is Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press [2005]). She is the winner of the C. Wright Mills Award of 2006. Fengzhen Wang is a distinguished professor at Southwest University of Science and Technology, China. He is author of Encounters, A Garden of American Literature, Reading West, and Cultural Studies; and editor of Twentieth-century Western Literary Theory and Criticism, and Cultural Studies: A Selected Reader. He is currently working on The Studies of World Civilization, a collective multivolume project of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Wang Hui, intellectual historian and literary historian, is a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature and Languages and the Department of History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, Beijing. From 1996 to 2007, he served as the chief editor of Dushu, the most important intellectual journal in China. His publications include Depoliticized Politics: The End of the Short Twentieth Century and the 1990s (2008), The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (four volumes, 2004), China’s New Order (2003) and Resisting Despair: Lu Xun and His Literary World (1990). He taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University

Contributors 215 (2002), the University of Heidelberg (2003), the University of Tokyo (2006), New York University (2007), and received fellowships at the University of Washington (1999–2000), Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000–2001), the University of Bologna (2004), and other institutions. Wang Shaoguang is Professor of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Changjiang Professor in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, and the chief editor of the China Review, an interdisciplinary journal on greater China. He has authored, coauthored, and edited twenty books in Chinese and English. In addition, he has contributed to numerous edited volumes and journals. Shaobo Xie is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary and a guest professor in the College of Foreign Languages at Hunan University, China. He is review editor of ARIEL. He has published on literary theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, globalization, comparative literature, translation, and Chinese modernity. His works include “Cultural Politics of Resistance, Globalization and Indigenous Cultures” (a special issue of ARIEL coedited with Fengzhen Wang), and Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics (coedited with Fengzhen Wang). He is currently working on a book-length research project on postcolonial modernity. Hongmei Yu is a PhD student at the University of Oregon. She is currently completing her dissertation, “The Politics of Images: Chinese Cinema in the Context of Globalization,” which examines the interwoven relationship between cinema and politics in China, from the left-wing film movement in the 1930s to the main melody film productions in postsocialist China. She expects to receive her PhD in the Comparative Literature Program soon. Yu Keping is currently professor and director of the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics (CCCPE), and also professor and director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations, Peking University. His areas of interest include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, and governance and politics in China. Among his many books [in Chinese] are Emancipation of Mind and Political Progress (2008); The Institutional Environment of Civil Society in China (2006); Democracy and Top (2006); Chinese Rural Governance Past and Present (2004); Globalization and Sovereignty (2004); Politics and Political Science (2003); Incremental Democracy and Good Governance in China (2003); Globalization and China’s Political Development (2003); The Emerging Civil Society and Its Significance for Governance (2002); Politics for the Public Good or Politics of Rights (1999); China’s Present Political System (1998).

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