Abstract
As we might all agree, China is clearly not-liberal and therefore in a sense “illiberal” on semantic or etymological grounds alone (see the discussion in Chap. 1). The present study has offered an examination of an ‘illiberal’ China, of the PRC as an allegedly illiberal political regime. This turn of phrase is common enough in the media and ‘respectable’ journalism. But it is also invoked in, and still more often assumed by academic writing as well—as when the PRC is framed as illiberal because it is authoritarian (which like all states, it is) and (which like all states, it is). But is this merely a matter of degree, i.e., that it is more of these bad things than, say, the United States or India and it is this that makes it illiberal? Or is there more to this story about regimes and discourses and comparisons? China represents a threat or at least a challenge to liberal or liberal-democratic ideology. Elizabeth Perry aptly diagnosed this ‘challenge’ as early as 2012 in the academic literature, by framing the PRC as an attentive authoritarian regime: its contentious civil society and protest culture actually enhance Party-state rule, in part because the state attends to protest and problems and chooses to act or not act on them. (See the Introduction for further discussion. I should perhaps note that it is I, and not Perry, who presents this as a specifically ideological challenge.) This can be said to compare favorably to ‘real’ democratic regimes where even massive anti-war protests or ‘occupy’ movements (e.g. Wall Street) are duly and entirely ignored. This illiberalness aka ‘attentive authoritarianism’ is, however, seen as a bad thing, even if a not-so hidden admiration can also be discerned in such framings of China as, for example, a ‘perfect dictatorship.’ (My emphasis here. The book in question is Stein Ringen’s, The Perfect Dictatorship (Hong Kong University Press, 2016). One can detect a similar almost-admiring or appreciative sentiment within another, more academic and area studies text on the successes and systematicity of the post-Mao propaganda system. See Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).) It is framed as illiberal despite it having an undeniably active civil society and public sphere, a long history and culture of contentious and serious, if also subtle and non-European style, political protests. It is framed as politically illiberal even though it has never particularly aspired to political liberalism for the last century, and even though its skyrocketing numbers of ‘mass incidents’—brought about by a liberalization of the economy, it must be recalled—have at times won concessions from the state or forced it to address its failures. The argument in the present text is that the PRC’s ‘illiberalism’ is fundamentally ambiguous, and neither simply negative and objectionable nor merely ripe for a perennial liberal debunking by China watchers and self-professed experts.
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Notes
- 1.
See the Introduction for further discussion. I should perhaps note that it is I and not Perry who presents this as a specifically ideological challenge.
- 2.
My emphasis here. The book in question is Stein Ringen’s, The Perfect Dictatorship (Hong Kong University Press, 2016). One can detect a similar almost-admiring or appreciative sentiment within another, more academic and area studies text on the successes and systematicity of the post-Mao propaganda system. See Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
- 3.
John Gray ‘The strange death of liberal politics’ New Statesman July 5, 2016, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/strange-death-liberal-politics. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017.
- 4.
Nazneen Barma and Ely Ratner, ‘China’s Illiberal Challenge: The real threat posed by China isn’t economic or military it’s ideological’ (Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 2, Fall 2006). https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/2/chinas-illiberal-challenge/. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017.
- 5.
See William Callahan China Dreams: 20 Vision of the Future (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Arif Dirlik, Complicities (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2017).
- 6.
J.S. Nye. Soft power: The means to success in world politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
- 7.
These can even be described as ‘liberal’ virtues or techniques (wealth and markets and globalization), but this does not negate the other, ideological struggle against Western liberalism as an ideology or terrain of neo- or post-imperial struggle.
- 8.
A good example of the liberal and occidentalist reception (which ranges from pathologization to plain misrecognition) can be found via Hong Kong (as well various places on the internet of course), as in Ip Iam-chong’s. ‘Agony over National-Imperial Identity: Interpreting the Coloniality of the Chinese New Lef.’(Cultural Dynamics 27.2 2015: 241–252).
- 9.
The Internet site called ‘Libcom’—short for the oxymoronic ‘libertarian communist’—that hosts ‘activist’ discussion forums and an archive of obscure writers and texts, chiefly anarchist, is in my view a case in point https://libcom.org/
- 10.
Chen Xiaomei’s Occidentalism remains the best place to begin with this term, especially for the first two post-Mao decades.
- 11.
This was precisely the logic of expunging all Red, let alone ‘Maoist,’ images or references in the grand opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
- 12.
See the 2016 post by Chris Connery, ‘The Chinese Left: Contexts and Strategies,’ at a Nottingham, UK policy institute blog, where he notes Wang’s advocacies of welfare, rural education, and so on. https://cpianalysis.org/2016/10/21/the-chinese-left-contexts-and-strategies/. Accessed June 9, 2017.
- 13.
Other prominent intellectuals of the left who have had some success in advising or working with the government include Wang Shaoguang, Hu Angang, and Cui Zhiyuan.
- 14.
It is worth noting again a certain paradox that Chinese liberals are typically those intellectuals who have the least experience outside of China, including the least English language capability, whereas many, though not all, of the new left intellectuals received extensive education in the West or are readers of specifically ‘Western’ intellectual traditions such as Marxism and post-structuralism. This is not meant as a criticism of either camp in itself: the new left embraces cosmopolitanism and internationalism, and Chinese liberals would see certain Western values and texts like von Hayek’s as speaking to universal truths. But it does point to one of Chinese liberalism’s conditions of possibility as a discourse—inadequate experience with, or understanding of, the limits and realities of ‘advanced’ Western societies, or a conscious disavowal of them. Of course, the flows of liberal China experts from abroad into China tend to—or tended, in the past sense—to exacerbate the cathexis of liberalism.
- 15.
See, for example, the voluminous work of Roderick MacFarquhar (e.g. The Origins of the Cultural Revolution series) or Ezra Vogel’s recent, glowing, hagiographic biography, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard UP, 2013).
- 16.
Again this is a question of the state’s capacity, or whether or not it has been captured by capital. The new left’s view, that it can and should reclaim more such capacity to correct the market and the direction of the state in general, is if nothing else the less politically quietest, more practical position as compared to those who call for the state to be entirely subsumed by the market.
- 17.
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (London: Verso, 2009).
- 18.
Andre Gunder Frank. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (University of California Press, 1998).
- 19.
On this see, for example, Guo Changgang, Debin Liu, and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, eds., China’s Contingencies and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2017).
- 20.
This surfaced as recently as later 2017 when the new CE, Carrie Lam, proposed a major increase in the public educational budget, but which the pan-democrats had to ‘debate’ accepting and passing or not, apparently just on the principle that the CE must always be opposed, no matter how good the plan or bill is.
- 21.
See, for example, Hung, Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 196.
- 22.
The present study freely ‘admits’ that the PRC can and does also act as an illiberal state in the unambiguously bad senses of repressive intolerance (of non-hateful speech or actions), the harsh, even inhumane policing of those dissenters or protesters it deems to be enemies, which is to say by those willfully subversive of state power. This latter maldevelopment clearly stems from the revolutionary era, especially Maoism and the Cold War, when there were indeed at least some actual enemies of the people, and a struggle for life and death of the new state, during and even after the revolution. Maoism had offered a classic Bolshevik or Leninist justification for revolutionary violence, and it is always worth recalling that it was Mao who was the most open or tolerant of dissent and ‘contradictions among the people.’ But the Maoist attempt at continuing the revolution nonetheless failed by the time of, or shortly after, his own death, and the problem of dissent, even specifically of the new intellectual class as well as the new political class, was never resolved by the end of the Cultural Revolution.
- 23.
See, for example, Thomas Kellog, ‘Xi’s Davos Speech: Is China the New Champion for the Liberal International Order?’ in the January 24, 2017, The Diplomat, (http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/xis-davos-speech-is-china-the-new-champion-for-the-liberal-international-order/); Emily Rauhala, ‘China’s president—a new kind of ‘Davos man’ for a new, less-liberal, era’ in the January 16, 2017, Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/16/chinas-president-a-new-kind-of-davos-man-for-a-new-less-liberal-era/?utm_term=.c88a2650ef98) as well as D. Bulloch’s ‘Xi Jinping’s Davos Speech Defends Globalization But Does China Really Mean It?’ https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/01/18/xi-jinpings-davos-speech-defends-globalisation-but-does-china-really-mean-it/. All links accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 24.
See, for example, ‘US and China serve as economic models for India’ from an undated issue of The National, an Abu Dhabi magazine/paper. https://www.thenational.ae/business/us-and-china-serve-as-economic-models-for-india-1.320264. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 25.
The best concise account of Maoism proper remains the chapter on Yan’an in Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China and After (New York: Free Press, 1999). While the Party was certainly nationalist during this revolutionary era, to great effect in helping defeat Japan and thence the Nationalists, it was also committed to an internationalism that is all too easily forgotten today when the Party primarily pushes a nationalistic patriotism more than anything else.
- 26.
See, for example, Chris Bramall’s massive Chinese Economic Development, which surveys the Chinese political economy form 1940 through 2007 (London: Routledge, 2009).
- 27.
See the official Chinese (extracted) report here: https://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/the-chinese-conception-of-human-rights/. The full transcript is no longer available at the embassy website.
- 28.
For a recent critique of the civil society template—as an under or non-theorized concept—see Taru Salmenkari, Civil Society in China and Taiwan: Agency, Class and Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 2017).
- 29.
Wan Zhiang, ‘On Xi Jinping’s Thought Regarding People’s Livelihood’ (Chinese Studies 4.2015: 50–55). Accessed Nov. 14, 2017, https://file.scirp.org/pdf/ChnStd_2015041715283338.pdf
- 30.
See Wang Hui, ‘The Crisis of Representativeness and Post-Party Politics’ (Modern China 40.2 2014: 214–239).
- 31.
See Mark Blyth, ‘Global Trumpism: Why Trump’s Victory Was 30 Years in the Making and Why It Won’t Stop Here’ in Foreign Affairs, November 15, 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-11-15/global-trumpism. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 32.
A basic point of neo-liberal studies. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism (London: Oxford UP, 2007).
- 33.
See Wang Shaoguang for the notion of counter-movement, as cited in Chap. 2.
- 34.
On this topic, the work of Kenneth Burke still shines forth brightly, not least because it anticipated so much of the later ‘French’ or Foucaultian waves. See, for example, A Rhetoric of Motives (University of California Press, 1969).
- 35.
This is beyond the scope of the present study but is something that calls for more theoretical as well as empirical work. For a critique of the ‘varieties of capitalism’ argument and subfield, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Rethinking modernity and capitalism: Add context and stir’ (Sociopedia.isa 2014 1–11). http://www.sagepub.net/isa/resources/pdf/1st%20Coll%20Rethinking%20Modernity%20and%20Capitalism.pdf. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017.
- 36.
The ‘main enemy’—from this section’s title—was a favorite expression of Frederick Engels and thence into Marxism ever since. But I also use it to signify the salience of the Schmittian analysis of the essence of ‘the political’ as dyadic and antagonistic.
- 37.
Even Edward Said—an avowed humanist—insisted that liberal humanism, from the orientalists to Orwell, was fully a part of orientalism and colonialism. See Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). For the critique of liberalism, see Losurdo. For a self-identified Marxist and universalist case, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York: Verso, 2013).
- 38.
I take this phrase from the political theorist Jodi Dean. See her provocative, sharp book of the same title.
- 39.
See Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, ‘A Supermarket in California.’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47660/a-supermarket-in-california
- 40.
Alessandro Russo, ‘How Did the Cultural Revolution End? The Last Dispute between Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, 1975’ (Modern China 39.3 2013: 239–279).
- 41.
Russo 270.
- 42.
Russo, 271.
- 43.
Johan Lagerkvist, Tiananmen Redux: The Hard Truth about the Expanded Neoliberal World Order (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016).
- 44.
See most recently Goodman and Chen Minglu, Eds., Middle Class China: Identity and Behaviour (London: Edwin Elgar, 2013).
- 45.
Anderson, 32. (2013).
- 46.
The weightless phrase is actually Susan Watkins’, as cited in Anderson 32.
- 47.
Nancy Fraser, ‘The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,’ January 2, 2017. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser. Fraser’s reference is the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA, but the split and commonalities would apply more broadly.
- 48.
See Michael Allen Meeropool, Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution (University of Michigan Press, 2000).
- 49.
This point is, again, also mine in regard to the later stages of the ‘umbrella movement’ as a distinctly social and cultural event, as opposed to a directly political one that confronts ‘Beijing’ over an issue of law and voting. I should also add that this understanding of the political does not imply that there are therefore no important differences between, say, pro- and anti-Brexit votes, or between candidates and platforms of, say, democrats or republicans in the USA, or between localists versus the ‘establishment,’ or racist versus ‘civic’ localists, and so on. But it is important to retain stronger senses of the political, which is one negative lesson from cultural studies.
- 50.
Harvey, Neo-liberalism; Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006); Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond (Islet Press, 2012. Ebook edition); Monica Prassad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Polities in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Gretta Kippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2012).
- 51.
For the ‘new class’ analysis of red engineers after Mao, see Joel Andreas Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Stanford University Press, 2009).
- 52.
See, for example, the report by Lingling Wei in a recent Wall Street journal report, ‘China’s Xi Approaches a New Term With a Souring Taste for Markets’ https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xi-approaches-a-new-term-with-a-souring-taste-for-markets-1508173889. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 53.
This is, again, Russo’s crucial insight about the transition from Mao to Deng at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
- 54.
This is a point refreshingly made by no less than two former state department academics, Jessica Batke and Oliver Melton, in The ChinaFile website: ‘Why Do We Keep Writing About Chinese Politics As if We Know More Than We Do?’ http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/why-do-we-keep-writing-about-chinese-politics-if-we-know-more-we-do. They note that in the Mao and even Deng eras, it was easy enough to glean major conflicts and interest-group splits within speeches published in, for example, The People’s Daily.
- 55.
Hung, The China Boom (Columbia University Press, 2015), does not quite argue for China’s imminent collapse but does see its post-Mao growth and development as a ‘boom’ in the pejorative Gold Rush-esque sense that definitely could burst soon. For his doomsday scenario making the PRC under Xi akin to North Korea, see the blog at https://punditfromanotherplanet.com/2015/03/14/is-chinas-communist-party-doomed/. Accessed Nov. 22, 2017.
- 56.
If one has taught a number of students from the mainland, for example, one will immediately recognize the general antipathy or distaste for talking about politics. This is by no means a specifically mainland issue, but it is pronounced and striking coming from a former revolutionary and—globally speaking—always politically controversial society. At the same time, the attractions of liberalism and the West and ‘Occidentalism’ are clearly, in my observation, weaker among them since 2006 in my own case.
- 57.
China.org has a complete transcript online at: http://live.china.org.cn/2017/10/17/opening-ceremony-of-the-19th-cpc-national-congress/. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 58.
Xi’s three-hour long Congress speech also foregrounds sovereignty/territory issues (Taiwan, Hong Kong), technology, national rejuvenation, and so on, as is standard fare for post-Mao communist speeches. But he also signifies the need for the state to act environmentally and to ensure people can participate politically and consult, oversee, and so on. See section VI of his 2017 19th National Congress Speech. Again we are dealing with rhetoric here but this is not without importance.
- 59.
As discussed earlier, this is what I take to be the point of Anthony Saich’s work on Chinese citizens’ attitudes toward their own government.
- 60.
See Tom Philips in the perfectly liberal The Guardian newspaper after Xi’s recent Party Congress speech, who cannot resist the dumb Trump comparison, ‘Chairman Xi crushes dissent but poor believe he’s making China great’ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/14/xi-jinping-crushes-dissent-but-making-china-great-again. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
- 61.
See White, Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2010).
- 62.
I should note that my point is not that Xi will or even can follow up on all his promises—he is a mere head of state like others—but that his own rhetoric and analyses are on point.
- 63.
For examples relating to Hong Kong and Liu Xiaobo, see recent pieces in Dissent, an American ‘liberal socialism’ magazine dating from the Cold War left: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/hong-kong-new-normal-joshua-wong-student-leaders-prison
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Vukovich, D.F. (2019). The Ills of Liberalism: Thinking Through the PRC and the Political. In: Illiberal China. China in Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_6
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