Abstract
This chapter offers an intellectual political account of the rise and fall, yet persistence and transformation, of Chinese liberalism during and after the Maoist era. The ‘case’ of China helps illustrate a global point: the weakening and degradation of liberalism, the rise of economism and de-politicized politics in place of an actual or socialistic left. But this global condition is also in itself co-produced, determined by the fate of Chinese politics during and after the revolution. In short what we ultimately have to attend to is not just a ‘Chinese’ problem or failure (as if de-politicization and economism were not global ills) but the state of the political right now. More specifically I will eventually argue that a certain ‘liberalism’—defined with the Maoists as an economism that seeks de-politicization and ‘stability’ or peace—informs the developmentalist Party-state today, and forms an evil twin alongside Chinese liberalism proper. The latter shares the official concern with economic and even political reform with many in the Party establishment, but it is also an anti-state intellectual movement that should be familiar to observers of libertarianism and neo-liberalism elsewhere. Taken together, both sides—sometimes in direct conflict, as with the dissidents, and sometimes in a more or less happy marriage, as in the ardently pro-market establishment liberals—speak to the global conjuncture as one dominated by forces and discourses that would like to put an end to politics altogether in favor of rule by markets (and by the ruling class of those markets).
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- 1.
Jonathan Fenby, ‘Chinese Democracy: The Silencing of Song’ (History Today 63.3 2013). http://www.historytoday.com/jonathan-fenby/chinese-democracy-silencing-song. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
- 2.
‘The death of a revolutionary: The song of Song.’ The Economist. December 22, 2012. https://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568587-shot-killed-song-jiaoren-was-not-heard-around-world-it-might-have-changed. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
- 3.
There is a minor tradition of ‘China Watching’ that wants to point to each new Central Committee as harboring a secret Gorbachev, which is to say a secret political reformer who will finish off the process of China becoming-the-same politically. But even the Party liberals, for example former Premier Wen Jiabao types, do no such thing.
- 4.
As noted and quoted in The Economist May 26, 2011. ‘Boundlessly loyal to the Great Monster.’ Just to make the teams and cheerleaders clear, The Economist frames the reports with ‘Liberalism under attack in China, but at least the liberals are fighting back.’ Presumably via their fat investment portfolios. http://www.economist.com/node/18744533?story_id=18744533. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
- 5.
Just to clarify the provenance of Chinese liberalism of at least this major, dominant type, and how it better fits American libertarianism and global neo-liberalism, one must note that Mao Yushi recently received a US $250,000 cash reward (‘the Milton Friedman Prize’) from The Cato Institute in the USA. See Foreign Policy May 4, 2012. http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/05/04/economist-mao-yushi-on-why-the-chinese-government-is-not-evil/. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017. Likewise, as noted elsewhere, the vaguely dissident aura attached to long-time Xinhua journalist and famine-chronicler-populizer Yang Jisheng contains no hint of his avowed Hayekian influence, or that he too won a prize—the 2012 Hayek Prize of the Manhattan Institute—for his neo-liberal free-market views. See The Economist, May 31, 2013. https://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2013/05/hayek-prize. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
- 6.
The best current, thoughtful biography of Mao, though far from the most popular alas, is clearly Lee Feigon’s Mao: A Re-interpretation (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), a book that also reflects some recent New Left views and the work of important scholars such as Gao Mobo, Wang Zheng, and Han Dongping. Oddly, no other foreign biography to date reflects Chinese leftist views on the leftist leader of the revolution.
- 7.
Again one has to acknowledge that this lack is no doubt due in part to censorship within the educational, media, and other apparatuses. But this is just to say that the Party-state system enjoys a hard-won hegemony. I’m neither celebrating nor condemning liberalism’s lack of appeal here, though will address the consequences of this limit later.
- 8.
See note 21 below, but for an example and discussion of such essentially individualist and art for art’s sake art—which I will code as liberal here—see the work of Wang Aihe, for example ‘Wuming: An Underground Art Group during the Cultural Revolution’ (Journal of Modern Chinese History 3.2 2009: 183–199). The early work of the Misty Poets (what became that ‘school’) such as Bei Dao is the paradigmatic case in point. This is not to disparage such art as art but to frame and situate its politics within a larger field and to connect it to a global liberalism.
- 9.
See Mao Zedong, ‘Combat Liberalism.’ Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Vol. 2 [1937]. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm. For the notion of ‘within the true,’ see Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, and especially the Appendix (Trans A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972). The essential point for our purposes is that there is no Truth—certainly not in the human sciences—but only truths embedded within discourses, that is regimes of truth, rules for speaking, and so on. Neither Truth nor truths exist outside of discourses.
- 10.
For the more Stalinist or paternalist view, see Liu Shaoqi, How to Be a Good Communist, originally published in 1939. Online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch01.htm. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017. This can as always be contrasted with Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics, written on the eve of the Great Leap Forward (Trans. Moss Roberts. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 11.
William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 [1966]).
- 12.
See Rebecca E. Karl, The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2017). I should note that Karl’s book is also concerned with ‘the economic’ in the long decade of the 1930s as well as the 1980s, and skips over the Mao period in this study. Also the work of Wang Anan whom she studies here is of a more heterodox Marxism than what I am calling the ‘Soviet’ or ‘Stalinist’ type of economic-political thought found in Liu and Deng. My own sense of economism as opposed to the economic is similar but flows out of the work of Schmitt, Mao, Marx, and a more Grundrisse-inspired reading of Capital.
- 13.
Mao Zedong, ‘Combat Liberalism.’
- 14.
This (Deng’s spearheading of the 1957 anti-intellectual struggle) has long been the case made by historians and scholars such as Maurice Meisner and Gao Mobo.
- 15.
For the agitprop film of 1975, directed by Li Wenhua, see, for example, https://archive.org/details/Breaking_With_Old_Ideas. For Red Guard documents, see Michael Schoenhals, Ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–69: Not a Dinner Party (East Gate Reader) (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996) as well as Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter (1995).
- 16.
Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–1969,’ The Cambridge History of China Volume 15: The People’s Republic (Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 105–217).
- 17.
Harding, 214.
- 18.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition (Trans. George Schwab. Chicago University Press, 2007).
- 19.
T. W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002). Of course, these co-authors were familiar with the work of Schmitt, even if they occupied the opposite end of the spectrum from the famous/infamous former jurist of the Third Reich!
- 20.
For an overview, see Prof. Flora Sapio, ‘Carl Schmitt in China,’ published by the Australian Centre on China in the World (https://www.thechinastory.org/cot/carl-schmitt-in-china/). Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.
- 21.
Wang Hui, ‘Depoliticized Politics, From East to West.’ (New Left Review 41 2006: 29–45).
- 22.
This point—that such a shift from revolution to Dengism/capitalism was not only of huge existential import (and tragedy) but would necessarily color many individuals’ views of the Cultural Revolution, is a point made often in the work of Gao Mobo, among others, on the historiography of the period, especially in memoirs.
- 23.
My comments on the cultural revolution here, as with those earlier on Maoist discourse, means that I would part ground from any liberal analytical framing of Chinese (or other) politics in general, and certainly of the post-war period through the 1970s. For a liberal Hong Kong view opposite to my own, see Pang Laikwan, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production during China’s Cultural Revolution (London: Verso, 2017).
- 24.
See Goodman’s valuable Beijing Street Voices: The Poetry and Politics of China’s Democracy Movement (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981), which deals mainly with the 1978–1979 movement or protests and the ‘spirit’ or milieu of those involved. As with the ‘Misty Poets’ movement it is, however, hard to say what is ‘democratic’ in such work (the poetry), as opposed to its anti-state or anti-official or anti-Gang of Four element, and an implied individualism. All of this, or a reaction against the Cultural Revolution, are not by definition ‘democratic.’
- 25.
For the key text of Li Yi Zhe, see Benton and Hunter, Prairie Fire, op cit.
- 26.
On the ultras, see Wu Yiching, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2014) and the classic essay by Wang Shaoguang, ‘“New Trends of Thought” on the Cultural Revolution,’ (Journal of Contemporary China, 8.21 1999: 197–217).
- 27.
Xu Jilin, ‘The Fate of an Enlightenment: Twenty Years in the Chinese Intellectual Sphere,’ (Trans. Geremie Barmé. East Asian History Dec. 20, 2000: 169–186), 71.
- 28.
As with the new left, any attempt at listing liberal intellectuals will invariably leave many out or make debatable inclusions. Even the distinction between liberal and neo-liberal or clear ‘rightists’ such as Mao Yushi can be fuzzy. But in addition to Xu Jilin, who is an avowed ‘centrist’ or third way type of liberal (anti-’extremes’), others frequently cited or referred to as liberal partisans include Qin Hui, Xu Youyu, Zhu Xeuqin, and Liu Junning (also a signatory of Charter 2008). Liu Xiaobo was not an academic but a dissident of course, though still considered by liberals as an intellectual of note and merit. As for what unites the ‘movement’ it seems to me to be based on two things: reactively, an anti-leftism, of at least Maoism and Chinese Marxism; and a pro-market or pro-private property baseline, which is to say an anti-state position vis-à-vis the economy and social planning. It is no coincidence that many liberals are economists (or most economists or liberals), deeply influenced by classical or neo-liberal economics. The ones named earlier and discussed here are, however, also more explicitly political liberals and identified as such. The economists are sometimes just shy of speaking to the political beyond the drive for reform/privatization. Of course there are many other competing distinctions, such as understandings of liberty versus freedom versus rights, social versus individual justice, the state as such, and so on. But such terms, important as they are, are also minefields of reifications and misreadings of one another. Better, in my view, to stick to classical Marxist notions of politics, that is the question of the economic base and production which is also, in the end, a class position and a side-taking.
- 29.
See Xu Jilin, 184.
- 30.
Rebecca Karl has a good discussion of the rise and use of Hayek in contemporary China. See chapter 3 of The Magic of Concepts.
- 31.
Wang Hui, ‘Depoliticized Politics,’ 32.
- 32.
Wang Hui, ‘Depoliticized Politics,’ 35.
- 33.
For the whole text, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/yao-wenyuan/1975/0001.htm. Yao’s prophecy is worth quoting at length and has been bandied about in recent years more often than one might think. Kalpana Mishra was way ahead of the curve, however, in pointing us to this text and offering useful glosses in her From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism. See as well the discussion in Frederick C Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (New York: Routledge, 2008).
- 34.
See Joshua But, ‘Hong Kong losing its competitive edge, Beijing warns: Top official hopes city will forge ahead, but is accused of trying to divert attention from reform,’ South China Morning Post April 28, 2013. http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1224953/hong-kong-losing-its-competitive-edge-beijing-warns. Accessed Nov. 16, 2017. The economism could not be more clear than in Zhang’s words: ‘Only when the economy continues to thrive will livelihoods improve. Everything else is empty talk. Like a boat sailing against the current, it will be swept downstream if it does not forge ahead.’ … Without elaborating, he said ‘“deep-rooted conflicts in economic development” had begun to emerge in the city.’ That there is a point here, and perhaps some substance to this illiberalism other than it being anti-liberal politics/voting, is a subject of the final chapter.
- 35.
See Liu Xiaobo et al., ‘Charter 08: a blueprint for China,’ (Trans. Perry Link. 2008) http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/chinas-charter-08. Accessed March 2012.
- 36.
See, for example, Li Minqi, Wang Dan, and Wang Chaohua, ‘A Dialogue on the Future of China’ (New Left Review 235 (1999): 62–106).
- 37.
Li Minqi, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
- 38.
Charter 08, Ibid.
- 39.
Liu has long had his champions in Western academia, including noted Sinologists Perry Link in the USA and Geremie Barmé in Australia. For Barme’s remarkable tribute essay after his friend Liu’s death, one that reveals their great, shared antipathy to virtually all other mainland intellectuals and academics, see his ‘Mourning’ essay at The China Heritage website and journal dated June 30, 2017 (http://chinaheritage.net/journal/mourning/). Accessed Nov. 15, 2017. It should go without saying that my own point is not ‘guilt by association’ for anyone involved—we all have our friends and ‘comrades’ and representatives in China. Though not enough foreigners ever admit this in print. The point instead is that Liu’s connection to anti-communist critics and scholars abroad, let alone to funds ultimately authorized by the US government (i.e. The National Endowment for Democracy), clearly antagonized the Chinese state and was a most fateful decision for all involved.
- 40.
See the links to the N.E.D.’s financial disclosures at this blog: https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2017/07/13/liu-xiaobo-rip-but-we-should-never-forget-the-14-million-yuan-from-ned/. For example, Liu served as president of the Chinese chapter of PEN for several years. PEN received almost US $900,000 during Liu’s five years there. For example, 2010: $170,000; http://www.ned.org/region/asia/china-2010/. Again all of this was apparently fully legal, and my point here, again, is that this fateful decision becomes a dangerous pretext and tells us something about what motivates such repression. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 41.
The degree of change or effect under Maoism is an open but profound question. Clearly the state was able to undo Maoism fairly quickly, especially in regard to many of its institutions and the economy, and not least due to the veritable coup d’état after Mao’s death. At the same time, as the previous discussion of Maoist discourse suggests, Maoism not only worked practically but also worked subjectively or culturally in some ways. The work of Gao Mobo and Wang Zheng illustrates the latter, for example. Gan Yang’s essays on the three great pillars—situating Maoism as the chief indigenous tradition of social justice and political participation—is another case in point. See Chap. 2 for more on Maoist discourse.
- 42.
See, for example, Harrison Jacobs, ‘Here’s the manifesto that landed the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in Chinese prison’ (February 5, 2015, Business Insider) http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-landed-liu-xiaobo-in-chinese-prison-2015-2. Accessed Nov. 16, 2017.
- 43.
See note 35, above.
- 44.
See Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, ‘“The Right Dissident”: Liu Xiaobo and the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize’ (positions 19.2 2011: 581–613).
- 45.
See Qin Hui, ‘Critique of Charter 08: Democratic Debate and Renewed Enlightenment is More Necessary for China’ (Trans. David Kelly, Boxun News). http://www.boxun.us/news/publish/china_comment/Qin_Hui_s_Critique_of_Charter_08_Democratic_Debate_and_Renewed_Enlightenment_is_More_Necessary_for_China.shtml. Accessed Jan. 2012.
- 46.
See Sautman and Yan for the full argument.
- 47.
See, respectively, Andrew Nathan at Foreign Affairs July 13, 2017 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-07-13/remembering-liu-xiaobo); Yang Jianli (a Tiananmen 1989 exile) writing in China Change, a website/GONGO funded in part by the same N.E.D. (https://chinachange.org/2017/07/22/remembering-liu-xiaobo-and-what-the-u-s-can-do/); and ‘Reuters staff’ at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-reaction-idUSKBN19Y2DC?il=0. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 48.
See the final paragraph of the English version: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/chinas-charter-08.
- 49.
An English translation of the ‘Declaration of Charter 77,’ authored by dissident and later Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, can be found at https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125521/8003_Charter_77.pdf. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 50.
See Havel, ‘Remarks by Vaclav Havel and Two Members of China’s Charter 08 at the Ceremony for the Homo Homini Award’ on April 30, 2009, in the New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/04/30/remarks-by-vaclav-havel-and-two-members-of-chinas-/. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 51.
See Derrida, ‘Force of Law’ (Trans. Mary Quaintance. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds. New York: Routledge, 1992): 3–67.
- 52.
See page three of the original English translation of the Charter ‘77, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125521/8003_Charter_77.pdf. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 53.
For the Soviet interpretation here, see David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System. (New York: Routledge, 1997).
- 54.
See The China Story (Australian National University) for a brief biography and bibliography of Qin’s work (https://www.thechinastory.org/key-intellectual/qin-hui-秦晖/) as well as links to online writings. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 55.
See Qin Hui, ‘Does the China Solution resemble National Socialism?’ (Trans. David Kelley). https://interactives.lowyinstitute.org/publications/does-the-china-solution-resemble-national-socialism/. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
- 56.
See Alexander F. Day, The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism, (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 64.
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Vukovich, D.F. (2019). From Making Revolution to Making Charters: Liberalism and Economism in the Late Cold War. In: Illiberal China. China in Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_3
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