Abstract
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), ‘China’ as a political entity, state, and intellectual political culture, is a problem. It infuriates and fascinates, perplexes and amazes. On that the Party and its liberal critics inside and abroad (where they are far more numerous) might well agree. And yet what an odd thing to proclaim, this problem, when as both sides might again nod—in obeisance to the hegemony of the market and profit motive—that same Party-state has lifted several hundred millions of people out of poverty. The latter is demonstrably true when one credits the Mao era foundations, let alone the life expectancies on the eve of the 1949 revolution. The PRC—which is to say the Communist Party-state, before and after Mao—has clearly returned China to the forefront of global recognition and power since the 1980s. The rise of China may be a cliché partially belied by its problems and iniquities, and by its per capita gross national product (GNP; China ranks 80th in the world as of 2014). But clichés nonetheless exist in a certain, significant relationship with truth and social reality. China has ‘arrived’ and is more like a bank that is too big to fail than a teetering state on the brink of collapse. Of course that same Party-state system has also plunged its people into a highly polluted and unequal modern society—a society rife with authoritarianism, excessive policing of speech, and heavy-handed, if ultimately failing, censorship. A society with little ‘soft power’ and approval in the Western metropoles of the former colonial world, and increasing disapproval in its southeast Asian periphery, thanks to its short-sighted governmental bullying and fear of American bases.
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Notes
- 1.
See the International Monetary Fund report on selected countries, October 2014. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/02/weodata/weorept.aspx. Accessed Dec. 6, 2017.
- 2.
See Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. But to be fair to Jacques—as China’s self-professed enemies as well as Western leftists are not wont to do—the overstatement in his book lies chiefly in its unfortunate title. China has been nothing if not consistent in refusing any desire to ‘rule the world’ in the American or former imperial ways of old Europe. The reset of his book reflects, accessibly, the mainstream or conventional ‘optimistic’ or ‘pro’ views about China from within China itself, in addition to a fairly brave attempt to get people to think through China’s economic rise as epochal and ‘game-changing.’ Of course, this all just represents one enthusiastic view of that rise, and it must be said that he indeed glosses over the gross amounts of exploitation, the degradation of the socialist revolution, and so on. But it is also that even Jacques sees as dangerous in some ways (e.g. Chinese racism or ethnocentrism). For the conventional Western leftist view, see Perry Anderson’s review of Jacques in ‘Sinomania,’ in The London Review of Books, 32.2, 2010: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/perry-anderson/sinomania
- 3.
For the by now laughable ‘collapse views’ see Gordon Chang’s The Coming Collapse of China (London, Cornerstone Digital: 2010) and Prof. David Shambaugh’s ‘The Coming Chinese Crackup,’ The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2015: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-chinese-crack-up-1425659198.
- 4.
See to begin with Kevin O’Brien and Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2006). This has been a deservedly and profoundly influential book, but it must also be said that the study of Chinese protest would occupy an entire library. My work on Wukan and Hong Kong that follows is meant to join in to the study of protest, albeit from a more general or theoretical and interpretive angle along cultural studies lines. This is by no means meant as a rebuke of this valuable, more sociological field. See also Cai Yongshun, Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail (Stanford University Press, 2010), and for the working class or labor movement specifically, see Ching Kwan Lee Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). Elizabeth Perry’s work in this field is also worth noting.
- 5.
See Professor Kerry Brown, July 2017, ‘The Curious Case of Ideas in Modern Chinese Politics.’ http://thediplomat.com/2017/07/the-curious-case-of-ideas-in-modern-chinese-politics/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 6.
This was also frequently said of the former Soviet Union, for those who recall that entity. My point is not to endorse the censorship, of course, and least of all in the decidedly non-revolutionary context of today, but to note one of its roots, and that it is not irrational.
- 7.
See Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).
- 8.
See Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘The Illiberal Challenge of Authoritarian China,’ (Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 2012, 8.2: 3–15).
- 9.
Perry, Ibid., 3.
- 10.
This is at least one, traditional way of reading much of the sources of critical theory, and not just Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: by which I mean Marx, Nietzsche, even Freud, and certainly Max Weber, the Frankfurt School, and beyond (arguably including Foucault).
- 11.
Yuri Pines, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2012).
- 12.
On this see in particular Wang Hui’s work on the concept of China as an empire state, China from Empire to Nation-State (Trans. Michael Gibbs Hill, Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 13.
My remarks here are inspired by Michael Puett’s work in particular. For a quick accessible introduction, see his June 5, 2016, interview with Olivia Goldhill at: https://qz.com/699741/a-harvard-philosophers-argument-for-not-loving-yourself-just-as-you-are/. And his co-authored book with Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon and Schuster, 2016).
- 14.
See most recently his The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2015), as well as a recent article, ‘Comparing Political Values in China and the West: What Can Be Learned and Why It Matters’ (The Annual Review of Political Science, 2017). http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051215-031821. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 15.
- 16.
The Caixin Media Company in China is a key example of this, as would be the work of at least some human rights lawyers in China.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
See Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s work on globalization and culture and development, including his influential Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange, 3rd edition (New York Rowan and Littlefield, 2015).
- 20.
Vukovich, China and Orientalism (Routledge, 2012).
- 21.
See, most recently, Engin Isin, ed., Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). In my view, political orientalism can be defined as a subset of ‘regular’ orientalism or a Foucauldian/Saidian discourse about the Eastern or Asian Other that arguably dates back to antiquity or at least early modernity. In the case of China, the question of politics is arguably at the forefront of Western intellectual fascination/repulsion, alongside Chinese women and more culturalist obsessions like the language or food. I find Isin’s term useful because it allows for some specificity and focus on the political while retaining the critique of universalism.
- 22.
The decision to not only publish but also strongly promote and hail Vivek Chibber’s polemic against the Indian Subaltern historians—wrongly conflated with post-colonial studies as a field and historical movement—is a case in point. See Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). Perry Anderson’s evasive review of Martin Jacques (‘Sinomania’ in the 28 January 2010 London Review of Books) would be another case (oddly seeing Jacques’ admiring synthesis of mainstream mainland views as misplaced radical desire). But what is also at stake, beyond the residual Trotskyism of Britain, is the profound universal-humanism of Western leftist as much as liberal discourse (e.g. the generic universal ‘modernity’ for Anderson). This is in my view at odds not only with a Fanon or Cesaire but with a Lenin or Mao and arguably Marx and social, historical reality. Universalism is discourse.
- 23.
Of course, I am here omitting the brief period of ferment in the Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong, as well as the militant seamen’s strike of 1922 or the later more corporate labor movement. While significant in their own right, I think my point—that today there is no left in the socialist or Marxist or radical sense—will nonetheless be readily admitted by Hong Kong scholars who recognize the difference between liberal and leftist (perhaps a diminishing demographic globally). As for its liberal democratic movement, I return to this subject in a later chapter on the Occupy-to-Umbrella movement. Not for nothing was Hong Kong a crucial base of (Western) China studies during the Cold War era, and it remains a vehemently anti-communist space, perhaps more than in the colonial era. But it must also be said that Hong Kong’s intellectual sphere has it pockets and bubbles of more heterodox political thought and scholarship. That this stems from colonial liberalism is undeniable and an irony not lost on the present author.
- 24.
This was after all the key, if somewhat oblique thread running through much of Fredric Jameson’s work on post-modernism through the 1990s. See, of course, his Postmodernism (Duke University Press, 1991) as well as David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989) for the 1990s critiques. Neither much engaged the post-colonial field. For a more recent and more thorough and immanent critique of the theory and politics of post-structuralism/post-modernism (as in many ways conservative or merely liberal politics), see Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia University Press, 2007).
- 25.
See Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (New York: Verso, 2012) and Crowds and Party (New York: Verso, 2016).
- 26.
An unfortunate case in point is the recent book of the erstwhile heterodox scholar, James C. Scott, which includes a chapter on the Great Leap Forward, but betrays no actual attention to the debates, even in English, on the subject. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1999). Scott’s difference from an avowed neo-liberal like Hayek is negligible in this book at least.
- 27.
‘Neo-liberalism’ may usefully capture the economic forces and structures at work, but the degradation is larger still. The ‘neo’ prefix obscures as much as it helps, and there can be no doubt that when it comes to China, the liberalism is very much of a classical (markets vs. the regime) kind, or a simulation thereof, from the New Enlightenment of the 1980s (qinmen) to those symbolic warriors aiming their expertise and academic tracts at the Party-state. Accounts of a rationalist/entrepreneurial/competitive ‘neo’ rationality in the culture and society at large, as in the work of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2014) do not adequately fit the phenomenon of liberalism in China or among its intellectual critics inside or out. For these are driven by political and identitarian passions but also by the politics of knowledge and the dynamics of orientalism and Occidentalism, that is of the modern colonial era. Neo-liberalism as a political rationality that transforms liberal democracy into an economic rationality—as in Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015)—certainly fits the bill (particularly for the party elite and liberal intellectuals) but with the important proviso that what it is transforming is socialism and Maoism or even traditional discourses of well-being and livelihood.
- 28.
See Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China (New York: Penguin Books, 1980).
- 29.
See also Fabio Lanza on this, in his ingratiating intellectual history of—some of—the former American Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (he glosses over those who turned to the right as well as post-1970s area studies): The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). The P.R.C. being objectified by academic and broader discourse, and being tightly bound up in the politics of knowledge, is of course a consistent theme of my own as well as others’ work, including those of us who work on ‘actually existing’ Maoism. This is also a basic insight of post-colonial studies after Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). But it is always a good and welcome time for China historians to join the ‘movement.’ What is striking now is that, as China becomes a clear ‘subject of history’ alongside other major powers, it is only with great difficulty that it can be seen as a subject in some way other than an ugly empire in the making (or merely a gross capitalist space) whose government will or should collapse. Thinking differently about the P.R.C. is not an easy task, of course, and one that probably belongs more to non-historians (or non-archivist versions of that discipline).
- 30.
Etienne Balibar, ‘Difference, Otherness, Exclusion.’ Parallax 11.1 (2005): 19–34.
- 31.
For an English translation of the leaked document from 2013, see ‘Document 9,’ at http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation.TranslationandcommentarybyChinaFile/AsiaSocietyFoundation. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
I essay contemporary Chinese politics, then, as a way into better apprehending the global political conjuncture, a complex mixture of neo-liberalism and illiberalism where the stakes are nothing less than the legitimacy of the state—any state, the state as such in intellectual political discourse. The degradation of liberalism into a neo-liberalism, and yet its persistence in regard to an increasingly assertive and successful, if authoritarian, mainland politics are the cases in point.
- 34.
I leave to one side here the question of whether or not the state will, or needs to, radically redistribute wealth to be ‘socialist,’ as well as the important if small percentage of party intellectuals and others who think the Maoist revolution is and was important and should not be forgotten.
- 35.
I take this formulation from noted liberal political scientist Charles E. Lindblom, who, in the late 1970s and before the dominance of neo-liberalism, memorably pointed to the PRC and Cuba not as totalitarianisms or Soviet-like regimes but as preceptorial systems rooted in propaganda, of course, but also trying to govern culturally or ideologically by creating the new man/new woman.
- 36.
(OED, illiberalism). Online version.
- 37.
All quotations here are form the online version of the complete Oxford English Dictionary at http://www.oed.com/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 38.
- 39.
See Chloe Froissart’s 2014 article, ‘The Ambiguities between Contention and Political Participation: A Study of Civil Society Development in Authoritarian Regimes’ (Journal of Civil Society, 10:3, 219–222), 220. This assumes that the students of 1989 were in search of radical regime-change, as opposed to greater free speech and inclusion for them. For more on Tiananmen and ways to read it, see Vukovich, China and Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2012).
- 40.
One may note that I do not use the phrase ‘serial abuser of human rights.’ This is because, with Gilles Delueze, I find the concept of human rights to be a reification and which do not exist—laws and power and life do. See extracts from Deleuze’s L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet (Vidéo Éd. Montparnasse, 1996) at http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze10.htm. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017. Of course this is a historical argument but readers may demand an authorial sanction.
- 41.
See Jonathan Kaiman in The Guardian in 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/23/xinjiang-china-court-ilham-tohti-muslim-uighur-life-in-prison. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 42.
Ci Jiwei, Moral China in the Age of Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 43.
I leave to one side the other sense of illiberal, vulgar, crude, stingy, ‘peasanty,’ and so on, as this is simply and clearly old-fashioned orientalism and elitism when applied cart blanche to ‘the Chinese,’ or as some say in Hong Kong, to the ‘mainlanders.’
- 44.
Domenic Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2011). Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago University Press, 1999). See also Charles W. Mills, ‘Racial liberalism’ (PMLA. 123.5 (2008): 1380–1397).
- 45.
To take just two recent examples, see Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2016). Matthew P Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (Princeton University Press, 2008).
- 46.
Eric Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 47.
I have written on this at length elsewhere in terms of post-colonial theory. See for example Vukovich, ‘Postcolonialism, Globalization, and the “Asia Question”,’ in Graham Huggan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford University Press, 2013) or more recently, ‘Re-orienting All the Fields’ (Inter-Disciplines: Journal of History and Sociology, 8.1, 2017, 145–164). But for more ‘proper’ historical studies, see also the work of James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2003) and The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-building in Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Lin Chun, (2017) ‘Discipline and power: knowledge of China in political science’ (Critical Asian Studies, 49.4, 2017, 501–522).
- 48.
In this section I am drawing on a 2017 interview with the prolific historian Richard J. Smith, by Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, ‘New and Old Histories of the Qing Dynasty’ at the Los Angeles Review of Books: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/new-old-histories-qing-dynasty-interview-richard-j-smith/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 49.
For characteristically snide commentary on the mainland ‘outburst,’ see a ‘China Media Project blog’ here, ‘New Qing History targeted,’ https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2015/04/25/new-qing-history-targeted/. (Accessed Nov. 1, 2017). And also ‘Chinese Academy of Social Sciences throwing shade at The New Qing History’ here: http://granitestudio.org/2015/04/23/chinese-academy-of-social-sciences-throwing-shade-at-the-new-qing-history/. (Accessed Nov. 1, 2017). It is precisely the arrogance of such foreign-based comments and responses to Chinese anger and politics that reproduces the problem of ‘rudeness’ and keeps the China/West divergence going. Which in the end, or in itself, is perhaps not a bad thing at all. As is obvious I am not taking sides on Manchu versus Han but, while an outsider, I am more interested in the PRC versus its enemies, real and imagined.
- 50.
See J. K. Galbraith’s brief but charming travel memoir, A China Passage (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), and Charles E. Lindblom’s Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977) for the discussion of the ‘preceptorial system.’
- 51.
Orville Schell, ‘China Strikes Back!,’ Oct. 23, 2014, New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/23/china-strikes-back/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 52.
See the Guardian report by Ashifa Kassam and Tom Phillips for details of the Wang explosion. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/jun/02/chinese-foreign-minister-canada-angry-human-rights-question. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017. For a self-revealing comment that Schell is too soft on China’s fear and political insecurity, see Perry Link’s response, ‘“China Strikes Back”: An Exchange,’ in the Nov. 20, 2014, issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/china-strikes-back-exchange/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
- 53.
For more on liberalism’s inability to handle/understand difference well, see Charles Larmore, himself a distinguished liberal political theorist but fully appreciative of this issue: ‘Political Liberalism: Its Motivations and Goals’ in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 1, Eds. David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall, pp. 63–88 (Oxford University Press, 2015). His final lines are worth quoting at length: ‘I suspect that similarly conceptions of global justice, whatever their moral merits, have a chance of being implemented only if states, liberal states, find themselves moved to put them into practice. Yet, how likely is that in the present age? The distinctive problems of our world are not among the problems for which liberalism was devised, and they threaten its very viability. Its prospects, I am sad to say, are accordingly uncertain.’
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Vukovich, D.F. (2019). On Illiberalism and Seeing Like an Other State. In: Illiberal China. China in Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_1
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