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Getting Wang Huning Right

16/1/2022

 
Happy New Year!  May 2022 be better than 2021!

Fake news on Reading the China Dream!  Over the holidays, I received an email from Ryan Mitchell, Professor of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, informing me that one of the Wang Huning texts we translated and published over the course of the fall of 2021 was a forgery.  We’ll attempt to set things right in this update.  To that end, please find:

The corrected version of Wang’s 1986 article on the Cultural Revolution, with a revised introduction by Matt Johnson;

The forgery, not quite “debunked,” because I have no idea who the author was, but with indications illustrating what part of the text is Wang’s and what parts are the work of others;

The translation of an 2012 online discussion on constitutional rule and inter-Party democracy featuring Cao Siyuan, a Liberal scholar and politician who died in 2014.  Most of the forgery drew directly from an article Cao published in a Taiwan journal in 2012.  I found the online discussion on Cao Siyuan’s Aisixiang page, and translated it because it shows that Cao said the same things in a public forum in China proper.

Reading the three texts together is fascinating, because no one working on Chinese establishment intellectuals now would be tempted to put Wang Huning in the same basket with Cao Siyuan.  As Matt Johnson has persuasively argued, Wang Huning is powerfully connected with the idea that the CCP sees itself as the "engineer of China's soul," while Cao Siyuan is a classical liberal like Gao Quanxi or Ren Jiantao.  At the same time, there are many compatibilities between what Wang Huning said in 1986 and what Cao Siyuan said in 2012, a reminder of possibilities lost and of the complexity of the Chinese thought world.

Personal note:  I am back in the (Zoom) classroom again for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, so I may have less time to devote to translation and curating until the end of term, but I will continue to update the site every two weeks.

​Enjoy!

    About this site

    This web site is devoted to the subject of intellectual life in contemporary China, and more particularly to the writings of establishment intellectuals.  What you will find here are essentially translations of texts my collaborators and I consider important.  Click here for tips on getting the most out of the site. 

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This materials on this website are open-access and are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 Unported licence.  We encourage the widespread circulation of these materials.  All content may be used and copied, provided that you credit the Reading and Writing the China Dream Project and provide a link to readingthechinadream.com.

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  • Blog
  • About
    • Mission statement
  • Maps
    • Liberals
    • New Left
    • New Confucians
    • Others
  • People
  • Projects
    • China and the Post-Pandemic World
    • Chinese Youth Concerns
    • Voices from China's Century
    • Rethinking China's Rise
    • Women's Voices
    • China Dream-Chasers
    • Textos en español
  • Themes
    • Texts related to Black Lives Matter
    • Texts related to the CCP
    • Texts related to Civil Religion
    • Texts related to Confucianism
    • Texts related to Constitutional Rule
    • Texts related to Coronavirus
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    • Texts related to Donald Trump
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    • Texts related to Kang Youwei
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    • Texts related to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
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