New York Times article about Wang Hui (long, very long)
yolanda
----
October 15, 2006
China's New Leftist
By PANKAJ MISHRA
One day earlier this year I met Wang Hui at the Thinker's Cafe near
Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he teaches. A small, compact man
with streaks of gray in his short hair and a pleasant face that always
seems ready to break into a smile, he arrived, as he would to all our
subsequent meetings, on an old-fashioned bicycle, dressed in dark
corduroys, a suede jacket and a black turtleneck that would not be
amiss on an American campus.
Co-editor of China's leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading),
and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang, still
in his mid-40's, has emerged as a central figure among a group of
writers and academics known collectively as the New Left. New Left
intellectuals advocate a "Chinese alternative" to the neoliberal
market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the country's
800 million peasants left behind by recent reforms. And unlike much of
China's dissident class, which grew out of the protests in Tiananmen
Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and pro-democracy
activists, Wang and the New Left view the Communist leadership as a
likely force for change. Recent events - the purge of party leaders
on anticorruption charges late last month and continuing efforts to
curb market excesses - suggest that this view is neither utopian nor
paradoxical. Though New Leftists have never directed government policy,
their concerns are increasingly amplified by the central leadership.
In the last few years, Wang has reflected eloquently and often on what
outsiders see as the central paradox of contemporary China: an
authoritarian state fostering a free-market economy while espousing
socialism. On this first afternoon, he barely paused for small talk
before embarking on an analysis of the country's problems. He
described how the Communist Party, though officially dedicated to
egalitarianism, had opened its membership to rich businessmen. Many of
its local officials, he said, used their arbitrary power to become
successful entrepreneurs at the expense of the rural populations they
were meant to serve and joined up with real estate speculators to seize
collectively owned land from peasants. (According to Chinese officials,
60 percent of land acquisitions are illegal.) The result has been an
alliance of elite political and commercial interests, Wang said, that
recalls similar alliances in the United States and many East Asian
countries.
As he spoke about how market reforms have widened the gap between rich
and poor, between rural and urban areas, smartly dressed students
browsed through a highbrow collection (Leo Strauss, Jürgen Habermas),
checked their e-mail and sipped their mochas. At the privately owned
Thinker's Cafe and the adjoining All Sages bookshop, Wang seemed to
be famous. Students greeted him reverentially; the staff was extra
attentive. Yet Wang still belongs to a minority. Recoiling from the
excesses of Maoism and the failures of the old planned economy, most
Chinese intellectuals, even those with no connection to the state, see
the market economy as indispensable to China's modernization and
revival. Zhu Xueqin, a history professor at Shanghai University who is
one of China's best-known liberal intellectuals, told me that he
wants more, not fewer, market reforms. For him, China's present
instability is caused not by economic forces but by a politically
repressive regime that has prevented the emergence of a representative
democracy and a constitutional government.
Wang readily acknowledges that China's efforts at economic reform
have not been without great benefits. He applauds the first phase,
which lasted from 1978 to 1985, for improving agricultural output and
the rural standard of living. It is the central government's more
recent obsession with creating wealth in urban areas - and its
decision to hand over political authority to local party bosses, who
often explicitly disregard central government directives - that has
led, he said, to deep inequalities within China. The embrace of a
neoliberal market economy has meant the dismantling of welfare systems,
a widening income gap between rich and poor and deepening environmental
crises not only in China but in the United States and other developed
countries. For Wang, it is the task of intellectuals to remind the
state of its old, unfulfilled obligations to peasants and workers.
Despite his invocation of socialist principles, Wang was quick to tell
me that he dislikes the New Left label, even though he has used it
himself. "Intellectuals reacted against 'leftism' in the 80's,
blaming it for all of China's problems," he said, "and right-wing
radicals use the words 'New Left' to discredit us, make us look
like remnants from the Maoist days." Wang also doesn't care to be
identified with the radical intellectuals of the 60's in America and
Europe, to whom the term New Left was originally applied. Many of them,
he said, had passion and slogans but very little practical politics,
and not surprisingly, more than a few ended up with the
neoconservatives, supporting "fantasy projects" like democracy in
Iraq.
Wang prefers the term "critical intellectual" for himself and
like-minded colleagues, some of whom are also part of China's nascent
activist movement in the countryside, working to alleviate rural
poverty and environmental damage. Though broadly left wing, Dushu
publishes writing from across the ideological spectrum. Wang's own
work draws on a broad range of Western thinkers, from the French
historian Fernand Braudel to the globalization theorist Immanuel
Wallerstein. "Intellectual quality is important to me," Wang said.
"I don't want to run just any left-wing garbage." The magazine
has carried abstract debates on postcolonial theory as well as, he
claims, some of the most interesting analyses in China of how the
government's urban-oriented reforms have damaged rural society. There
are restrictions on what Dushu can publish, of course, and Wang is
frank about them. As with all intellectual journals in mainland China,
authors and editors at Dushu have to exercise a degree of
self-censorship. Articles cannot directly criticize the leadership or
deviate much from the official line on subjects that the Chinese
government considers most sensitive - Taiwan or restive Muslim and
Buddhist minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet.
"I get asked in Western countries, 'How do you define your
position?"' Wang said. "'Are you a dissident?' I say no. What
is a dissident? It is a cold-war category. And it has no meaning now.
Many of the Chinese dissidents in America can return to China. But they
don't want to. They are doing well in the U.S. To people who ask me
if we are dissidents, I say, we are critical intellectuals. Some
government policies we support. Others, we oppose. It really depends on
the content of the policy."
Born in Yangzhou in the southeast province of Jiangsu, Wang was just 7
and entering primary school when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966.
The decade-long chaos, which traumatized older generations, seems to
have left benign memories for Wang. He remembers being taken by his
school to work in the villages for a week or two during the school
year. "My generation of urban intellectuals," he said, with a hint
of pride, "is the last to have firsthand experience of conditions in
the countryside."
He counts the 20 months he spent working in factories around Yangzhou
after middle school as a valuable experience. In 1977, he took the
first university entrance exams to be held after the Cultural
Revolution, during which many universities were either shut or would
admit only peasants, workers and soldiers. "Thousands of aspiring
students," he reminisced, "were competing for a single place."
When he moved from Yangzhou to Beijing to begin his doctoral studies in
the mid-80's, Wang found himself part of an even more privileged
class. "Intellectuals," he said, "had been targeted during
Mao's time; now, post-Mao, they were the elite again." And by then,
Wang said, they all agreed on what needed to be done: China had to
abandon its "feudal" and socialist traditions and catch up with the
capitalist West. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals saw
socialism in China as a failure. Consequently, they had, Wang argues,
no real debate on whether a Western-style consumerist society could be
successfully recreated or was environmentally sustainable in China. The
West, especially the United States, was idealized.
Wang first began to develop his own views on contemporary China while
working on a dissertation about one of the most admired of modern
Chinese writers, Lu Xun (1881 1936). Lu Xun, Wang explained to me, was
a writer of the left, but he was very critical of left-wing writers and
activists. He criticized Chinese tradition, but was also an excellent
classical scholar. He welcomed the Western idea of progress, but was
also skeptical of it. The paradoxes in Lu Xun helped Wang to see that
Chinese modernity could not be a simple matter of abandoning the old
and embracing the new - as it had been for both Maoists and
free-market capitalists.
For Wang, the problems associated with China's uneven development
were first identified by the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Wang himself was one of the last protesters to leave the square on the
morning of June 4, 1989, as the tanks of the People's Liberation Army
closed in. Normally rather brisk and matter-of-fact, he grew animated
as he described in fluent, if occasionally idiosyncratic, English how a
"broad social movement" began to grow out of the distress caused by
the shock therapy of market reforms. The students demanding freedom of
speech and assembly were certainly the most visible. But there were, he
said, many more Chinese in the cities - workers, government officials
and small businessmen - demanding that the government control
corruption and inflation, which had shot up to 30 percent after price
controls on basic commodities were lifted.
In the spring of 1989, Wang was a fellow at the prestigious Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences. Wang told me that he saw "democratic
potential" in the protests and felt obliged to participate even
though he had reservations about the students' lack of "theoretical
or methodological coherence." For Wang, the student leaders recalled
the Chinese intellectuals of the early 20th century, who were never
more united than when they radically rejected everything in the past.
Nevertheless, after the government sought to crush dissent by declaring
martial law on May 20, 1989, Wang was drawn deeper into the movement.
On the night of June 3, when the tanks and armored cars charged through
Beijing, killing hundreds of unarmed resisters and injuring thousands
more, Wang was among those assembled in the center of Tiananmen Square.
He could hear the gunfire, but some of the more radical among the
students still refused to leave.
Wang decided to stay and to try to persuade the students not to
sacrifice their lives. "I knew," he said, "that if the result was
violence, it would be disastrous for the whole country." Wang said
that his fears were proved right: violence shrank the space for
political debate, and the Chinese government used the period of
intellectual silence that followed to begin dismantling more aspects of
the welfare state, like the state-owned enterprises, that had long
offered cradle-to-grave benefits to workers.
Eventually, the students advocating peaceful retreat prevailed and
persuaded the People's Liberation Army to give them safe passage in
the southeast corner of the square. Just before dawn, hundreds of
students left the square through a narrow corridor, jostled and taunted
by hostile soldiers. Within minutes, the students dispersed. Some of
them were arrested and sentenced to long prison spells; others fled to
Hong Kong and eventually to the West; many others, like Wang,
disappeared for a few weeks.
When Wang returned to Beijing in late 1989, the authorities were
waiting for him. "That was the most difficult time for me," he
said. He was asked repeatedly: "What was your organization? Who were
your associates?" After interrogations lasting for many months, he
was sent to the northwestern province of Shaanxi, where dozens of other
young scholars from Beijing were already undergoing - in the uniquely
Chinese way - "re-education" by exposure to rural conditions.
In Wang's case, punishment by pedagogy seems to have been more
successful than Chinese authorities could have anticipated. He dates
his "real education" to the time he spent in Shaanxi, one of the
poorest regions of China. He was shocked by the obvious disparity
between the coastal cities, then enjoying the first fruits of economic
reform, and the provinces. He was shocked, too, by his own ignorance
and that of his colleagues in the 1989 social movement. "We had no
idea that the old order in much of rural China was in deep crisis,"
he said.
The commune system in Shaanxi was dismantled as part of Deng
Xiaoping's reforms, and land was redistributed. But the area produced
nothing of much value, not even enough food. Deepening poverty led to a
sharp increase in crime and social problems; violent conflicts broke
out over land; men took to gambling, beating up, even selling, their
wives and daughters. Wang lived in a low-lying village where his
dormitory was frequently flooded while he slept. Much of his daily work
consisted of writing didactic pamphlets warning peasants against
gambling and crime; he also worked on the reconstruction of a primary
school that had been destroyed by floodwaters. "It was during that
year," Wang said, "that I realized how important a welfare system
and cooperative network remained for many people in China. This is not
a socialist idea. Even the imperial dynasties that ruled China kept a
balance between rich and poor areas through taxes and almsgiving.
"People confine China's experience to the Communist dictatorship
and failures of the planned economy and think that the market will now
do everything. They don't see how many things in the past worked and
were popular with ordinary people, like cooperative medical insurance
in rural areas, where people organized themselves to help each other.
That might be useful today, since the state doesn't invest in health
care in rural areas anymore."
Many poor people Wang met during his year in Shaanxi saw him as the
educated man from Beijing who would tell the mandarins of the central
government to send them some help. "I felt burdened by this role,"
Wang said. "I couldn't tell them that I was in no position to do
anything." Wang returned, he told me, from his 10-month exile with a
keen sense of the gap between the worlds of intellectuals and ordinary
people.
During his time in Shaanxi, the influential Journal of Literary Review
denounced his research on Lu Xun as an example of "bourgeois
liberalization." Nevertheless, Wang had no trouble returning to
academic life.
Wang doesn't like to talk much about 1989. He complains about the
"stereotype" of China in the Western media conjured by Tiananmen.
Nonetheless, our conversation about Tiananmen was unusual. While
traveling through Chinese cities, I had found it hard to get people to
talk about it. When Deng Xiaoping sought to bury the ghosts of
Tiananmen for good by calling for speedy market reforms in 1992, he may
well have calculated that the prospect of personal wealth - and
access to Western brand-name goods - would compensate many newly
enriched people for the lack of political democracy. If so, he seems to
have been proved right. The largest public disturbance in China since
Tiananmen occurred in August 1992, when hundreds of thousands of
Chinese tried to buy shares in the newly opened stock exchange of
Shenzen.
The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented
industries - part of the "let some get rich first" policy
announced by Deng Xiaoping and affirmed by his successors - has given
the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it
the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world's
poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a
day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities
and towns in search of low-paying jobs. More than four million Chinese
participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these
statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese
living with one of the world's highest income inequalities and
deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary
fees and taxes imposed by local party officials. Much of this, Wang
said, could be laid at the feet of the "right-wing radicals" or
neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek
(advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher in the 80's) and who argue for China's
integration into the global economy without taking into account the
social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who
have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run
media.
Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left
begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to
democracy and prosperity. Wang, who helped found an academic journal
called Xueren (The Scholar) after returning from exile in 1991, was
well placed to observe those intellectuals. As they came into greater
contact with Western academics and scholars, they became more aware of
problems not just in European and American societies but also in
post-Communist countries that were trying to bring their planned
economies closer to neoliberal models. China's intention to join the
World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly
sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the
debate had changed: "Many people knew by then that globalization is
not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the
growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and
imperialism." Which is not to say that the New Left embraced an easy
antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese
and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese - of
what Wang dubbed "consumer nationalism." That, Wang said, was the
same kind of globalization that America advocates: "It is really a
form of hypernationalism, which is why you hear talk of tariffs and
penalties on China when American economic interests are hurt."
Wang paused and then added: "Many people also learned that the reason
the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in
1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of
course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on
the Western world order, especially the American economy, than
India."
In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article
exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou,
a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local
government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real
estate developer from the southern city of Shenzen. Worker-equity
shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more
than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the
factory led to losses. In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In
what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of
Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic
and attacked the gates of local government buildings.
Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local
government. He had spent time working in a nearby factory before
college and this, he said, made him feel a particular connection to
them. He remembered that his pay had been low - less than $2 a month
by current exchange rates - but, he said, what was crucial was that
the workers he knew then felt secure in their jobs. "People claim,"
he said, "that the market will automatically force the state to
become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think
about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization.
The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large
social force, like the workers and peasants."
Wang's story about Yangzhou is not unique. There are many accounts of
how local government officials controlling public property have amassed
fortunes by privatizing state assets. According to a recent report by
the activist Liu Xiaobo, more than 90 percent of the 20,000 richest
people in China are related to senior government or Communist Party
officials.
For Wang, democracy is not just a simple matter of expanding political
freedom for the middle class or creating legal and constitutional
rights for a minority already substantially empowered by market
reforms. Democracy in China, he said, has to be based upon the active
consent and mobilization of the majority of its population, and be able
to ensure social and economic justice for them.
Yet for some New Left intellectuals, like Cui Zhiyuan, a close friend
and collaborator of Wang's who teaches political science at Tsinghua
University, there is opportunity in the collision of capitalism and
socialism. "There is more space here for new ideas," Cui told me as
he described why he had returned to China after many years in the
United States. "The capitalist system is fixed in the West, but
things are still in flux in places like China and India. We have a
historic opportunity to build a better, more just society than the
West." For Cui, it is important to clarify the concepts first. "It
is not helpful," he said, "to see socialism and capitalism as
opposed and separate. Both have traveled together in the 20th century.
Not just European welfare states, even American capitalism has a
socialist component, which was arrived at after compromise with the
trade unions."
In recent years, Cui has found a receptive and powerful audience on an
issue that lies at the very foundation of the Chinese socialist state:
the collective ownership of property. Liberal Chinese economists argue
that private property is sacred and inviolable in a market economy, a
radical idea in the Chinese context. In an article he published in
Dushu in 2004, Cui challenged this notion, emphasizing the essentially
communal nature of property ownership. He cited Thomas Jefferson's
decision to reword John Locke's principles of life, liberty and
property with life, liberty and happiness in the Declaration of
Independence.
"Jefferson recognized," he said, "that property rights emanate
from society, not from nature. That's why there was no specific
article on property rights in the U.S. Constitution and it had to be
brought in later through the Fifth Amendment." Cui went on to relate
with something close to glee that his article had circulated widely
among legislators in the National People's Congress, China's
Parliament, in 2004. It had helped, he said, to provoke a debate that
led the Congress to adopt a compromise amendment to the constitution,
similar in wording to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
which simply states that no person "be deprived of life, liberty or
property without due process of law."
This spring it began to become clear that the New Left's advocacy of
a welfare state is being echoed within the Communist leadership, which
is fearful of social instability and is keen to consolidate its power
and legitimacy. In March, a few weeks before I met with Wang, the
National People's Congress convened in Beijing and unexpectedly
became a forum for the first open ideological debate within the party
for years. Legislators accused government officials of selling out
China's interests to market forces. Such was the antimarket mood that
a bill to defend private property and grant land titles to farmers -
one that both foreign investors in China and Chinese businessmen had
been lobbying for - was not even discussed. Describing major new
investments in rural areas, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, emphasized
that "building a socialist countryside" was a "major historic
task" before the Communist Party. He also outlined steps to balance
economic growth with environmental protection.
A German journalist told me that it was the most left-wing speech he
had heard from a senior Chinese leader during his eight years in
Beijing: "Even American and European politicians don't talk about
achieving a Green G.D.P." Wang agreed. He said that he was also
pleased to see President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao focusing on
relations with Asian countries. "We were too obsessed with the United
States during Jiang Zemin's time," he said. "We really need to
improve our relations with Japan and India. We belong to such old and
distinguished civilizations, and we cannot just be simple followers and
imitators of America.
"It is a huge achievement," he added, a smile on his face, "that
the premier should openly admit that health care and education is a
failure. It has never happened before." Wang said he thought that the
government was sincere about eradicating rural poverty. But he was
still cautious. "There has been so much decentralization in China,"
he said, "that it is not easy to translate central government policy
into action." Last month, in the first purge of a high-ranking party
member since 1995, the central leadership removed the Shanghai party
chief on corruption charges, leading to speculation that there would be
a reconfiguring of relations between the central government and
provincial leaders and perhaps a shift in policy toward shoring up
social-welfare systems and stemming pollution. Wang remained skeptical.
"The Shanghai case is encouraging at least," Wang said in a recent
e-mail message. "I think there will be some political results from
it, but they are results rather than reasons."
The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear
to Wang: "If we don't improve the situation, there will be more
authoritarianism. We have already seen in Russia how people prefer a
strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption,
political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization
makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and
intervention from above is inevitable."
In attacking corrupt local governments, the New Left often seems to
want to institute big-brotherly government of the kind authoritarian
politicians like. Certainly the growing accord between the central
government's socialist rhetoric and New Left ideas makes many uneasy.
Lung Yingtai, a well-known Taiwanese writer and democracy advocate,
told me earlier this year that she was wary of the New Left
intellectuals, who, she said, appear too close ideologically to the
Communist regime. Taking this view one step further, Liu Junning, a
popular liberal political theorist who left China in 1999 after being
blacklisted by the Chinese government but has since returned, claimed
that the New Left was another name for the nationalistic old guard of
the Communist Party, which was inspired by hatred of the West.
While this seems an exaggeration, Wen Tiejun, a former government
official who runs rural reconstruction projects and is identified as
New Left, had attended what he called "brainstorming sessions" with
Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Typically, intellectuals in Communist
countries (Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik, for example) have gained moral
authority by assuming a critical stance toward the all-powerful state.
How do New Left thinkers in China calibrate their relationship with a
state that has imprisoned many of their colleagues and generally shown
little tolerance for criticism of the party?
When I posed this question to Cui, he momentarily lost his exuberant
manner. "It is a very important question," he said. "How to deal
with the government, both morally and intellectually. This is a big
challenge for us."
Cui does not regard the Communist regime as a "totality." There
were, he said, many different aspects of it, at both the local and
central levels. "Almost every day," Cui said, "The New York Times
carries reports of peasants agitating against the Communist government,
but if you listen to what the peasants are saying, they are telling the
central government that the local government has violated their rights.
So even the peasants can see the different aspects of the state, who
supports them and who doesn't."
Wang Xiaoming, professor of cultural studies at Shanghai University,
positions himself to the right of Wang Hui but says that he sympathizes
with the New Left's pragmatic attitude toward the Communist regime.
"Civil society is very weak in China," he said, "and since the
government is the most active agent of change, we have to push the
government to do what it should do besides pushing the government to
give up some of its powers."
When I met with Wang Hui for the last time, he dismissed any claims
about increased New Left influence over the regime. "What we have
tried to do is create an intellectual situation in which new policies
can be explored," he said. "I know that many leaders read Wen
Tiejun's article; they also read Cui's article on property rights.
There have been other articles in Dushu that have been equally
influential, and I am pleased about this. But we have no other
connection with the regime."
Wang also seems to have no anxiety that ideological convergence with
the regime will turn New Left intellectuals into pro-government policy
wonks and hacks, part of an old Chinese tradition of intellectuals
advising the state. "We look at things from a Chinese perspective
naturally, but we also try to think beyond the framework of the
nation-state," he said. "People ask in the West, How could China
develop capitalism with an authoritarian state? But that's ignoring
how modern capitalism grew in the West, without much democracy and with
the help of imperialism and colonialism. You have to ask whether this
unique economic model of the West can be globalized without great wars
and destruction of the environment. This is not an abstract issue.
China has stopped felling its forests, most of which have disappeared,
but some country still has to produce wood for Chinese consumption."
At our last meeting, Wang also spoke more about a subject Cui had
brought up with me: how the rise of China and India throws up new
challenges and possibilities with profound implications for the world
at large. "Western societies have been on top for the last two
centuries and shaped the world with the decisions they made," he
said. "China and India will now play equally crucial roles in the new
century. But what will they be? I think it is very important for
Chinese and Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the West. They
have to explore alternatives to the Western model of modernity.
Otherwise, the 'consumer nationalists' are already saying,
'America was on top; now we are on top."'
Wang laughed, and added, "This is not interesting."
Pankaj Mishra last wrote for the magazine about Tibetan exiles. His
most recent book is "Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in
India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."
