David Ownby, "Am I Being Played?"

Am I Being Played? 

David Ownby
 
Introduction

Every so often I get a message from a casual reader of my site, saying something along the lines of:  “Do you not realize that the stuff you are translating comes from Communist China, where there is no freedom of speech?”  While a small part of me almost admires the hubris of these messages, most of me wishes the authors would spend an hour or two reading some of my translations before chiding me for being naïve.  My project is based on the premise that Chinese establishment intellectuals have interesting things to say and the relative freedom to say some of them, and there are hundreds if not thousands of pages of material on my site attesting to that. 

That said, China is, if not totalitarian, surely authoritarian, and I readily admit that I do not fully understand the relationship between the Chinese state and the intellectuals I study.  It is obvious that their published work is not a perfect reflection of their private thoughts, which surely means that many times they cannot say what they really think, but what trade offs they make and how they make their calculations remain obscure.  While I prefer to believe that what they publish is a fair if perhaps partial reflection of what they think, many people do not, and I admit that now and again I wonder if I’m being played.  Last week, in the course of my research work, I happened onto a way to look into the question more closely.    
 
An Unexpected Wrinkle
 
Here’s what happened.  I had chosen as one of my texts to translate a talk that Tsinghua political scientist Ren Jiantao 任剑涛 (b. 1962) gave to a Beijing Foundation in January 2021.  The talk was on the question of Chinese values, a topic of much interest to Chinese intellectuals, and was the right length and “degree of difficulty” for my site.  Ren Jiantao was already on my radar as a colleague of Gao Quanxi 高全喜 (b. 1962) and Xu Zhangrun 许章润 (b. 1962); all three are “conservative liberals” with a somewhat positive view of traditional Confucian culture.  Gao, whom I know well, had once suggested that I translate a volume that the three friends had put together, and since I have already translated texts by both Gao and Xu (whom I met once), I assumed that Ren would have a similar point of view.  Nonetheless, before writing my introduction and posting my translation online, I did Internet “due diligence” to learn what I could about Ren Jiantao. 

In the process of doing this, I found the following on the Chinese-language Wikipedia page devoted to Ren:  “In 2012, Ren Jiantao gave a public talk at a Crédit Suisse China investment seminar… [in which he stated that] the Chinese economy would collapse without warning in 30 years, that powerful groups were holding the country hostage, and that adjustments in state policy were now the result of compromises between these interest groups, all of which made the expected institutional reforms impossible. The talk was subsequently blocked by mainland Chinese websites.”  As proof, Wikipedia linked to a page on a Chinese-language website known as Aboluowang 阿波罗网, a “tabloid” site which caters to Chinese readers outside of China (or in China, I suppose, if they have access to a VPN); Ren’s talk can also be found on bannedbooks.org, which claims to offer “CCP banned news that must be seen over the wall, banned books, banned movie downloads, banned news, mainland news, China news interpretation commentary, banned news…” 

I had never heard of either of these sites, but the Aboluowang page has a link to what surely appears to be an authentic video of Ren giving his talk, in his thick Sichuan accent, together with a helpful transcription (strangely enough, bannedbooks.org will translate—using machine translation—Ren’s talk, or any text appearing on their site, into English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Russian, and Italian, in addition to providing the original Chinese text).

This gave me pause, because it is not the kind of thing that usually turns up when I do my due diligence.  Of course, as we all know, Chinese intellectuals do get in trouble with the government, but if they are dissidents or in trouble I usually know about it before I start my research, and this was the first time I had happened onto information like this.  Of course, this may happen all the time and I’m just not aware of it.  Even Chinese intellectuals to whom I am close tend not to talk openly and often about their run-ins with authorities.  My impression is that they are somewhat embarrassed that their country does such things (and here I think the expression 内外有别—“there’s a difference between Chinese and foreigners”—takes on meaning).  In addition, one Chinese colleague explained to me that Chinese intellectuals do everything they can to avoid even the appearance of “dissent,” because once you are branded a dissenter, invitations dry up and people shy away from you. 

I quickly skimmed the transcript of Ren’s talk to confirm that the passages cited on the Wikipedia page did indeed exist, which left me with what might be a conflicting image of Ren Jiantao, on the one hand a Confucian liberal political scientist at a prestigious university (Renmin at the time, Tsinghua now), and on the other, a fire-brand and rabble-rouser whose speeches are banned from China’s cyberspace.   Of course, this does not have to be a contradiction, but there was enough of a possibility to make me question my perhaps naïve faith that what I read online can be taken at some version of face value. 

My first thought was to translate Ren’s banned talk, as it certainly looked like a “scoop,” but my second thought was to slow down and see if I could put my scoop in context.  What follows are the results of my research.
 
The Political  Context
 
First, a few words about the particular moment when Ren gave his speech.  Although no information is given on the video or on the websites that discuss Ren’s talk, he probably gave it at Crédit Suisse’s 15th Annual Asian Investment Conference held in Hong Kong between March 19 and 23, 2012; the original Youtube video, which is where Aboluowang presumably found it (I doubt that the site has reporters; it appears to be an aggregator) is dated July 30, 2012, and the story came out on Aboluowang on August 14 and on bannedbook.org on August 19—but the “discovery” of Ren’s video—which surely few people were looking for—could easily have taken weeks or months.  The person who introduces Ren is Chinese (Mr. Chen, or Chin), but speaks English, which would fit the idea that the venue was Hong Kong.  The fact that Ren was speaking outside of China is surely important;  another manifestation of 内外有别 in that different rules apply in terms of the degree of openness that is permitted, or that intellectuals permit themselves.

As important as the venue was the political moment.  2012 was a very fraught year in China.  The Hong Kong conference at which Ren gave his talk was devoted to the topic of “Political Succession in China,” something of great concern to investment bankers and to political scientists. The Hu Jiantao-Wen Jiabao era was coming to an end and the months preceding the holding of the 18th National Party Congress, when the new leadership team would be confirmed, were marked by tensions, rumors, and jockeying for position among elite Chinese politicians. 

Notably, Bo Xilai 薄熙来 (b. 1949), a major rival of Xi Jinping and champion of what came to be known as the “Chongqing model,” was dismissed from his post as Mayor of Chongqing on March 15, 2012 (i.e., the week before Ren’s talk) for complicated reasons having to do with corruption, wire-tapping, and the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood (1970-2011).  On April 10, Bo was suspended from the Central Committee and hence from his seat on the Politburo.  On September 28, he was expelled from the Party.  A year later, in September 2013, he was tried and convicted of various charges of corruption and abuse of power, and ultimately sentenced to life in prison. 

These events were closely followed in China, as Bo had many fans and detractors.  In addition, political succession in China has always been tense.  The Hu-Jia team had been committed to “collective leadership” and was, in accordance with newly mandated “regulations,” stepping down at the end of its mandate, seemingly without putting up a fight.  The Bo Xilai affair enflamed public interest in the politics of the CCP leadership and the possibilities that the succession would not be peaceful; for the period that Bo was in the news, China was in a state of high tension much like that experienced in the United States between Joe Biden’s election in November 2020 and his inauguration in January 2021.  China’s leadership tried to control the media and the Internet, but did not completely succeed.  Everybody was talking about Bo Xilai.
 
Ren Jiantao’s Scholarly Production in 2012
 
Another context we need to know something about to judge the importance of Ren’s talk is what else he was saying at the time.  Happily, there is a fairly efficient way to find out without doing months of research:  Ren’s Aisixiang page contains 12 essays Ren published in 2012, which, if surely not everything Ren wrote during that period should be enough to clue us into what he was thinking about (I imagine he had an online presence as well, but I have been able to locate it, and he surely gave any number of formal and informal talks) .  These essays include:

1.   “The Periodicity of Reform 以周期论改革,” posted to Aisixiang on January 7, 2012, originally published in the journal China Reform 中国改革, also in January, 2012.

In this opinion piece, Ren argues that China’s market reforms have stagnated and that the bill is coming due.  He develops the idea of the “periodicity” of economic and political reform trajectories in a number complex ways, suggesting that a perfect storm is appearing on the horizon unless China carries out thoroughgoing property reforms and cleans house so that the cabals currently bilking the people and hijacking the state-owned economy disappear.  In sum, a thoroughly negative, very frank piece by a conservative liberal who equates market reforms with property reforms.

2.  ‘Hiding Values and Distorting Knowledge: The Rejection of Democracy by Chinese Political Scientists Who Earned their Ph.Ds. in the United States 价值隐匿与知识扭曲：留美政治学博士对民主的拒斥,” posted to Aisixiang on March 30, 2012, originally published in Strategy and Management 战略与管理 in the first issue of 2012. 

In this very long and exhaustively (or at least exhaustingly) argued piece, Ren attempts to answer the question “Why do US-trained Chinese political scientists reject democracy?” using as his chief examples Qian Duansheng 钱端升(1900-1990), the Harvard trained political scientist who argued that the Guomindang should be more, not less authoritarian, and Wang Shaoguang 王绍光 (b. 1954), the Cornell-trained political scientists and prominent New Left intellectual who has argued that China’s “representational/responsive democracy” is superior to Western “representative democracy.”  Ren’s argument is that both Qian and Duan emphasize outcomes (such as state capacity) over structures and processes, and engage in theoretical legerdemain to justify their proposals, all of which is abetted by an American field of political science which refuses to take values seriously.  

3.  “Is the Petition System Adapted to Today’s Trends? 信访制度是否适应时代潮流?” posted to Aisixiang on April 2, 2012, originally published in Exploration and Debate 探索与争鸣 in the first issue of 2012. 

The “petition system” is part of the system by which the Chinese people can express their grievances toward the treatment they receive at the hands of officialdom, chiefly by putting their complaints in writing and presenting them in the form of petitions or letters to higher-level officials.  In periods when there have been large numbers of local disturbances, particularly in China’s rural areas, petitions have been a frequent recourse, and discussion of the system in policy and intellectual circles has been at times quite lively.  In this policy briefing, Ren argues that, no, the petition system is not adopted to today’s trends.  The abstract of the text hits the high points of his argument: 

“The governance of a modern, large, and complex state is a systemic project. Among these projects, the state management of the transmission of information bureaucratically and from the center to the regions is an important resource for state governance.  When the Chinese state’s basic institutional arrangements are distorted, the letter and petition system must be distorted as well.  The fundamental solution to the shortcomings of the letter and petition system lies in the construction of a sound constitutional democratic system, thus ensuring the smooth transmission of information on state governance and providing a real starting point for good governance in the country.”

4.  “Revolutionary Nation-Building and the Politics of Popular Sovereignty 革命建国与民权政治,” posted to Aisixiang on April 8, 2012, originally published in History Monthly 史学月刊 in the first issue of 2012. 

This is a historical text, Ren’s reading of the importance of China’s Republican Revolution of 1911-12, a topic much discussed in China at the time in the context of the revolution’s hundred-year anniversary.  Notably, cultural conservatives and New Confucians argued that the revolution had been a mistake:  the Qing had been well on the way to establishing a constitutional monarchy, a political form more in accord with China’s “national characteristics,” and the subsequent shift toward revolution opened a window to a century of useless violence and repeated disruption.  Without naming names or engaging in polemics, Ren pushes back against this reading by insisting that the Revolution of 1911 was about both nation-building and popular sovereignty, but that the difficulties in the nation-building process, and poor choices made in the face of those difficulties, led to the frequent postponement, and eventually, the near disappearance of the goal of popular sovereignty. 

As Ren puts it, “In the perspective of modern world history, social revolutions are easy to start and hard to finish; political revolutions are hard to start and easy to finish.”  By this he means that the social revolution continues in contemporary China, and this is a good thing.  This piece signals that while Ren may be sympathetic to Confucianism, he is not a Mainland New Confucian.

5. “Reaffirming Popular Sovereignty: The Structural Reform of State Power 重申人民主权：国家权力的结构改革,” posted to Aisixiang on May 4, 2012, originally published in the Journal of the Jiangsu Institute of Administration江苏行政学院学报 in the second issue of 2012.  

This piece can be read as a follow-up to or an update of the previous text, as Ren extends his analysis to the People’s Republic, and goes back to classical Western thinkers on monarchical and popular sovereignty to search for a solution to the problem of China’s stalled social revolution.  A quote from the text sums up the essence of Ren’s argument: 
 
“Undoubtedly, the Chinese found their starting point for the construction of their modern state in Rousseau's principle of popular sovereignty. Guided by this principle, the system of government chosen by China is undoubtedly a ‘people's democratic dictatorship’ that seeks to embody the principle of popular sovereignty. The People's Republic of China is a modern sovereign state constructed by the Chinese nation (the Chinese people) through a national democratic revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party. On the one hand, the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, the fundamental law of the country, clearly stipulates that ‘all power in the People's Republic of China belongs to the people,’ thus making it clear that the ultimate vesting of state power belongs to the Chinese people. This is the basic concept of the fundamental law of the state, which is fully in line with the principle of people's sovereignty in modern state construction. However, since state construction was carried out by a political party that was founded prior to state-formation but with that precise purpose, the Chinese nation (the Chinese people), the subject of state building and the master of the state, was transformed into the Chinese Communist Party (the Chinese people) leading the Chinese nation (the Chinese people) to build a state (nation-state) of its own. Thus, modern China, which should have emerged as a nation-state, was instead constructed as a party-state.”  Again, popular sovereignty has yet to be achieved, and the revolution is unfinished. 
 
6.  “The Way of Heaven, the Way of the King and the Power of the King :  The Basic Structure of Kingly Politics and Its Function as a Civilizational Corrective 天道、王道与王权——王道政治的基本结构及其文明矫正功能,” posted to Aisixiang on May 10, 2012, originally published in the Scholarly Review of  China Renmin University 中国人民大学学报, in the second issue of 2012.

This long and densely argued text is a defense of traditional Confucian rule as being more than an idealistic exercise in “benevolence.”  Using concepts and arguments honed over the course of a career as a political scientist, Ren attempts to illustrate how the Way of Heaven, the Way of the King, and the Power of the King functioned as a set of norms and checks and balances, suggesting, for the most part implicitly, that China had its own tradition of “constitutionalism.”  The following quote gives the flavor of the argument:

“Although imperial power is a decision-making power and ministerial power is an executive power, the corrective function of executive power with regard to decision-making power is a fact of political history that must be acknowledged. Thus, the limitations on the emperor’s power imposed by the Way of Heaven and the Way of Kings are partially realized by means of this internal tension. In fact, in the case of ancient China, even if imperial power had an institutionalized tendency toward autocracy, its scope and function were inherently limited by the low efficiency of agrarian society, the reduced performance and sluggish mobilization capacity of the bureaucracy, all of which allowed the lower classes to largely escape the sphere of political control. Therefore, to judge the quality of a classical dictatorship on the basis of hatred of modern dictatorship is making the mental error of confusing past and present.  Thus, it is impossible for the operational mechanism of imperial power to deviate completely from the normative design of the Way of Heaven and the Way of Kings.”

It is not immediately clear how this text relates to the rest of Ren’s work in 2012.  He cites no contemporary scholarship—the historian Qian Mu 钱穆 (1895-1990) is his only reference to secondary literature—and makes no reference to contemporary events.  He does mention Mencian “democracy,” which suggests that he has not put aside his frequently expressed concerns about popular sovereignty.  In the context of Ren’s frequently strident criticisms of the contemporary regime, seen in several of the texts discussed here, this piece may well serve the function of “pointing to the mulberry tree while berating the ash指桑骂槐,” i.e., engaging in oblique criticism.  

7.  “Disenchantment, Re-enchantment and the Reconstruction of Social Order 祛魅、复魅与社会秩序的重建,” posted to Aisixiang on May 29, 2012, originally published in Jiangsu Social Science 江苏社会科学 in the second issue of 2012. 

This long article uses the return of religion (“re-enchantment,” in Weberian language) in the second half of the 20th century to argue that reason and rationality have their limits and that religious faith can heal society and even shore up the sagging political legitimacy of governments.  The piece makes no mention of China, and ends with a rousing condemnation of Soviet atheism as the worst possible way to deal with religion.  The text might be read as a companion piece to the above text on Confucianism, but Ren makes no such connection.  I confess that if I had read a translation of this text without knowing the identity of the author, it would never have occurred to me that the author was Chinese.  It reads like something out of a liberal Christian publication in America or Western Europe.  Perhaps Ren is Christian, in addition to being a Hayekian Confucian? 

8.  “Political Order and Social Rules from the Perspective of State-Society Relations 政治秩序与社会规则——基于国家—社会关系的视角,” posted to Aisixiang on June 21, 2012, originally published in People’s Forum/Academic Frontiers 人民论坛·学术前沿 in June of 2012. 

This article is a straightforward defense of civil society as a necessary component of any modern nation.  Most of the text is cast in abstract terms, but the author does discuss China directly in some passages:

“Chinese society has been unable to organize itself under the long-standing dominant role of state power in society. In traditional China, the mechanism of gentry control maintained an effective self-regulating civil society. Traditions, customs, and local practices were once the binding forces for the orderly continuation of Chinese grassroots society. And the family system was an even more natural organizational guarantee for a significant degree of governance in rural society. But the subsequent political and social revolutions overturned the long-standing state-society relationship in China. On the one hand, the state power that emerged from the revolution became a highly monopolistic power. In this imposing political-social revolution, the state coercively changed the people's way of life through the logic of pure power, and people had to accept the social way of life determined by the state under the domination of this logic. On the other hand, the mode of social life reshaped by the revolution was an absolutely public mode of life, in which individual privacy is not respected, and organizations of interest and public welfare among citizens were combined into state-subordinated organizations, becoming subordinate to state power. Social autonomy, self-government, and self-discipline became unnecessary. Social logic became the logic of acceptance of the power of the state, and the logic of the state became the path of action to which society must commit itself.  In such a structure, it appears that state power strongly organizes society, and society seems to exist and continue in accordance with the will of state power. But in fact, when state power absolutely dominates society, the organization of society becomes impossible to guarantee.”  This situation must be corrected if China is to have a healthy social order.
 
9.  “The Dulling of Ideas : The British Orientation of Modern Chinese Political Ideas 思想的钝化 : 中国现代政治理念的英国导向,” posted to Aisixiang on July 27, 2012, originally published in The History of Political Thought 政治思想史, in the second issue of 2012. 

This long, complex piece might be read together with Ren’s article on Chinese political scientists trained in the United States.  Here, Ren looks at Chinese who studied in England—chiefly Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921) and the Republican-period journalist Chu Anping 储安平 (1909-1966?)—with an eye toward understanding what they got wrong about England and thus why the nation-building models they developed for China did not work.  Ren’s personal view is that England has been going downhill since the occurrence of what he calls the “Mill reversal,” i.e., the moment when Mill sought to square the circle by endorsing both individual liberty and utilitarianism.  Ren understands the uniqueness of England’s development experience as an organic evolution toward contracts, markets, limitations on power, and moderation that occurred over centuries.  This organic evolution, which produced the first modern economy and polity in the world, cannot be replicated in late developing countries.

Neither Yan Fu nor Chu Anping grasped this fundamental point.  Yan, who translated Smith and Locke, and hence perhaps had an intellectual understanding of the foundations of the British experience, was nonetheless in the thrall of Social Darwinist thinking, and, as Benjamin Schwartz pointed out, sought to harness British virtues into a program of state-building.  Chu Anping knew only the Britain that endlessly sought compromises between liberalism and socialism, a “Third Way” which could not be applied to China because China lacked the foundational experience and thus the solidity that made such experimentation possible.

10.  “Beyond the Secular - The Cognitive and Practical Value of ‘Spiritual China’ 在世俗之上——“信仰中国”的认知与实践价值,” posted to Aisixiang on August 10, 2012, originally published in Academic Monthly 学术月刊, in the fifth issue of 2012. 

This piece can be read together with the piece on “Disenchantment” discussed above.  Ren’s argument is that, just as the post-Mao state took its distance from the economy in the reform and opening period, now it must take its distance from the spiritual world.  The challenge to religion was necessary during the revolutionary period as part of the destruction required to pave the way for the transition to a modern nation-state, but now that that transition is basically accomplished, top down revolutionary ideology needs to give way to bottom up spirituality.

11.  “The Construction of the Modern Chinese State in the Perspective of "State-Society" Theory,” posted to Aisixiang on October 10, 2012, originally published in Tianjin Social Science 天津社会科学 in the fourth issue of 2012. 

This long text, tightly argued and rich in political theory, is of a piece with many other pieces Ren published over the course of the year, and insists that China must advance toward constitutional rule so that “society” can take up its rightful role in limiting the power of the state, which is now excessive.  Only then can the “social contract” that undergirds any healthy regime function as it should.  Ren’s concluding paragraph sums up the entire text: 
 
“Only in such a state of positive state-society interaction can the healthy development of constitutional China be maintained. Today, China is at a critical moment in its national development, and the ability of the ruling party to leave its revolutionary position and truly settle into its position as the ruling party depends on whether the constitutional structure can provide the needed impetus. The legislature's ability to more effectively uphold the principle of popular sovereignty and to provide laws that facilitate the government's administration in accordance with the law, the government's ability to truly draw resources from public finance and become a rule-of-law government that is both frugal and service-oriented, and the judiciary's ability to make judicial decisions in full compliance with the law, all have significant implications.”
 
12.  “The Fate of Reform in Socialist Countries 社会主义国家改革的宿命,” posted to Aisixiang on November 2, 2012, originally published online on the Consensus 共识网 website (no date given). 

This text is a stunning indictment of socialism, or to be more precise, a stunning declaration that reform is impossible in socialist systems.  By “socialist systems,” Ren means all of those who followed the model of the Soviet Union, and thus he is not discussing democratic socialist systems such as those found in Northern Europe and elsewhere.  He identifies China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba as belonging to this world, but devotes little or no attention to these regimes, focusing his attention in this text on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where the ultimate and inevitable failure of reform has been fully revealed.

The underlying problem with socialism is that it ignores property rights and the social contract.  A revolutionary party like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union may play an important role in moments of national crisis, concentrating power in the hands of the Party-State and achieving transitions—particularly in terms of rapid industrialization—that otherwise would have been difficult if not impossible.  However, Marx’s vision of how history would evolve has not been borne out by events, and this false, or at least unproven, ideology, together with the structures created by the Party-State, take on lives of their own which outlive their usefulness as tools of mobilization.  Reforms of the system are always piece-meal, and fail when they come into conflict with  the interests of the Party-State and the groups that support it for their own personal interests.  The Party-State cannot permit genuine innovation outside of the Party-State because such innovation calls into the question the legitimacy of the regime, and without innovation, economies suffer and regimes eventually die.  In Ren’s own words:

“Since the self-expectation of the ruling party is to be the most morally selfless and ambitious political organization of unprecedented and unparalleled excellence, all social organizations must accept its leadership or be considered enemies of the state and subject to merciless repression. It can be seen that state power within the socialist state is strongly exclusionary. As a result, the mental state of state rule must be atrophied, and all ideologies that are conducive to state innovation are forced into the state's established ideological framework, making the state system an anti-innovation system. When there was an urgent need for innovative thinking, innovative institutions and innovative results in the period of national reform, ‘innovation’ was stifled by the state power long ago… Under such a situation, when the party-state maintained the idealism of the revolutionary period, the party could lead the development of the country; but after the revolutionary situation changed, when the party itself became purely an interest group, the party became a place for flies and dogs: either people who were completely subservient to the will of the party or the power of the state occupied high positions, or opportunistic people who were only seeking personal interests held power. This is how the party-state system works.”

Ren’s conclusion is stark:  capitalism works, socialism does not.  The fact that he avoids stating directly that “this is China’s fate as well” is not particularly meaningful because he says nothing about why China is an exception to this rule.  In other words, in 2012, Ren’s view appears to be that China is doomed to fail because there is no way to reform a socialist system dominated by a Communist Party.

To attempt a brief summary of Ren Jiantao’s intellectual activity in 2012, as seen from the twelve articles on his Aisixiang page, several points stand out.  The first is the sheer volume of Ren’s productivity.  I cannot recall the last time I published twelve articles in a year, because I never have.  I am not sure what this tells us about Ren or about China in 2012 (or about the process of peer review…).  Some Ren’s texts are shorter and less “scholarly” than others, and there is a certain inevitable repetition, but there are several lengthy texts, complete with footnotes and the rest of the scholarly apparatus expected of serious academics.  My impression is that Ren is an ambitious, extremely capable scholar (he was 50 years old in 2012, teaching at Renmin University) with a great deal to say on a wide variety of topics and considerable personal drive.  As for the world of academic publishing in China, one must conclude that it was fairly open in 2012 in the sense that Ren surely appears to have had no difficulty in finding outlets for his work.  Indeed, several of his pieces appear in quite prestigious journals.

This is all the more impressive, because Ren’s tone is relentlessly critical and negative over the course of the year.  He does not sing the praises of China’s rise or of the West’s decline.  In fact, I cannot recall a single positive comment Ren made about China over the course of these twelve texts, although there must surely be something (perhaps Confucian constitutionalism?).  His tone is not especially confrontational or denunciatory, but he writes as a conservative liberal, and argues straightforwardly that China has chosen the wrong path, that revolutions have their historical utility, but that the Party-State that emerged in the course of China’s revolution is now and will remain an obstacle to the evolution of a flourishing economy and a healthy society.  He further defends the traditional Confucian regime as having possessed its own latent constitutional system, and preaches the benefits of the return of religion, suggesting that the Party needs to step back from society as it has stepped back from the economy to allow the natural spirituality of the people to resume its rightful course.  To some extent, Ren hides behind intellectual abstractions, but in general his meaning is abundantly clear.  Indeed, with some (considerable) stylistic changes, the 2012 version of Ren could write for conservative American think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation.

What’s more, I doubt that Ren Jiantao is particularly exceptional in the context of the time, either in terms of his attitude toward the regime or in the frequency with which he diffused his ideas.  There are many classical liberals like Ren in the Chinese intellectual world (particularly but not exclusively in China’s law schools), and his production in 2012 seems to indicate that, as long as conservative liberals (or presumably, any stripe of intellectual) avoided direct confrontation with or condemnation of the regime, the space existed to say pretty much whatever they wanted to say, in mainstream publications that were widely read, at least by other Chinese intellectuals.

That space has certainly shrunk since Xi Jinping came to power.  We might well remember, nonetheless, that 2012 was not so long ago.   I doubt that Ren Jiantao has changed his mind on fundamental issues, despite Xi’s reimposition of ideological discipline (he published 11 texts on his Aisixiang page in 2020; maybe I’ll do a comparison and see what has changed in 8 years).  My impression is that many Chinese intellectuals are hoping to wait Xi Jinping out.  It might work.
 
Ren Jiantao’s Hong Kong Talk
 
Now let’s return to Ren’s Hong Kong talk, the video of which was banned in China.  None of the sites that highlighted the fact that Ren’s text was banned said anything about the content of the talk beyond two or three sensational remarks.  Let’s take a look.

Ren starts out by saying that he would rather talk about the economy, even if Mr. Chen asked him to speak more about politics, because the economy has been covered by other speakers, and because talking about politics “can be a bit dangerous,” but he promises to do his best.  Nonetheless, he starts with three basic economic observations, all based on the premise that the legitimacy of the PRC has, since 1978, been grounded in economic performance.  His first point is that the economy is now displaying signs of weakness, which he explains by reference to problems with the “three pillars” of the economy—investment, consumption, and foreign trade.  The state cannot invest more without producing inflation.  Consumption follows its own logic and does not respond well to the wishes of the state.  And foreign trade is suffering because of the economic crisis affecting China’s major markets in the United States and Western Europe.  He concludes that while optimistic commentators call this a case of “declining trends,” for him they are avoiding saying the words “stagnation, decline, or even crisis.”

He continues, saying that from a pessimistic viewpoint, “collapse is possible,” citing a recent joint study by the World Bank and China’s State Council which talks about the possibility of economic stagnation and decline “without warning.”  Ren concurs, saying that China’s thirty years of constant growth have already surpassed normal cycles, and continuing such a cycle for longer than 35 years is even harder to sustain.

At this point, Ren turns his attention to the political situation, noting that the form of the regime is not aligned with China’s posture of economic development, a problem that is becoming more acute and more difficult to control.  As evidence he cites the surge in political struggles occurring outside the norms of the system, by which he means Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun 王立军(b. 1959) and Bo Xilai (he mentions Chen Guangcheng 陈光诚[b. 1971] as well, the blind human rights lawyer who escaped house arrest in Shandong in April of 2012 and successfully sought refuge in the United States embassy).  Although the Wang Lijun/Bo Xilai affair was a spontaneous, one-off thing, it nonetheless sheds light on three issues vital to elite politics in China. 

First, it illustrates the not everyone is playing by the rules of political succession, which means that the issue of the legitimate transfer to power within the ruling party remains problematic.  Second, it illustrates that the peaceful transition of power is increasingly difficult.  Third, how the transitions will take place is becoming increasingly unpredictable.  Ren insists that the Wang-Bo affair is both an example of CCP “court politics” as well as a “popularization” of these politics, its face as “entertainment”—a reference to rumors that the famous actress Zhang Ziyi 章子怡(b. 1979) had slept with Bo Xilai.  Deng Xiaoping had imposed a system of orderly transition, but because this was done through court politics and not through a legitimate constitution, it became disorderly and unpredictable.  As Ren puts it, the “special characteristic” of China’s political system is that it is unpredictable. 

What are the sources of this unpredictability?  The first is the economic situation, which no one is on top of.  This is the result of 30 years of distortion of economic data, of a stock market that is neither a bull market, nor a bear market, but instead a “pig market,” by which he means an unreliable, rigged market.  Combined with this is the CCP’s feeling that it must constantly produce an economic miracle (which leads it once again to distort economic indicators, like the rate of inflation).

Here Ren returns to his discussion of the “periodicity” of economic and political change, arguing that the two are poorly aligned in China:  during the period of the planned economy, the five-year plans assured a certain alignment, but ever since, political mandates of five or sometimes ten years, plus the importance accorded to the market, has meant relative chaos.  “In addition,” Ren adds, “our basic political ideology, our institutional arrangements and rules for holding power are also coming to the end of their cycle, which is a very somber way of looking at things.  By this I mean that the ideological leadership of the CCP, based on Marxism, is coming to a turning point,” because Marxism no longer has the appeal necessary to hold society together, and this is true at the level of elite politics as well as among ordinary citizens.  And in any event, this system is already incredibly weak, as demonstrated by Chen Guangcheng’s escape from the multitude of security personnel assigned to keep a watch on him.

Another problem is increasing inequalities between rich and poor, which are the result of the “state being controlled by interest groups.”  “It is an open secret that interest groups monopolize the control of state-owned enterprises, and I don’t need to say much more about it.  But it’s true.  How can 200 families control 200 enterprises?…This open secret makes policy adjustments by the central authorities extremely difficult to carry out.”  This of course means that reform is impossible, no matter what miraculous possibilities might be found on the Internet, again because “interest groups have already hijacked the country…which means that our public policies have no public function.”

“Monolithic interest groups have hijacked the country's political rights, which means that the degree of openness in terms of political rights and economic rights is very low. The situation is completely different from that of 30 years ago, when the Communist Party sought to address its own economic failures to win political legitimacy. Today, we cannot hope that any high-ranking Communist Party official will have a fit, and that his tantrum will easily solve all of our problems. If this is what you are expecting then you are naive.” 

The impossibility of systemic reform is also encouraging blind, disorganized violence at the popular level, which means that “China may become an extremely violent society.”  Nor do things look better on the international front, where the United States has just dispatched 60% of its naval forces to East Asia, and if there is one thing China’s economists and political scientists can agree on, it is that China’s system could not possibly survive a war.

The transcript of Ren’s talk continues on for several more pages, evoking problems such as the absence of security in the cities, the desperate plight of migrant workers, the psychological and political problems of successive generations of Chinese intellectuals, etc.  The talk seems to lose structure toward the end, and there is no real conclusion; perhaps his allotted time ran out.  My overall impression of Ren’s talk is that it falls halfway between a rant and a joke, a sort of febrile venting of the frustrations of a public intellectual already critical of the regime, in a double context that has pushed him toward greater daring and sarcasm—he is in Hong Kong and the Bo Xilai affair had just happened the week before.  At one point he jokes that intellectuals like him can speak a bit more freely at the moment because disciplinary committees are busy chasing down errant Politburo members.
 
Comparison and Conclusion
 
There is no doubt that Ren’s talk is “impolitic” in the Chinese context.  It is frank and funny.  Ren is after all singing for his supper here.  The folks at Crédit Suisse already know the Party line; what they want is the inside scoop, which Ren certainly appears to deliver.  Whether his central message—that without substantial reform, including a fundamental transformation of the nature of the CCP, China faces collapse—is what the investment bankers want to hear is another question.

At the same time, Ren’s “inside scoop” differs only in tone and in detail from what he published in China in 2012 (and in terms of tone, Ren appears to be a fiery speaker even in Chinese venues, as one can see in his talks available on Youtube, such as this one from late 2020, where he is still discussing issues of power and the CCP in what appears to be a classroom setting).   Indeed, my impression is that the basic text for Ren’s speech is his article on “The Periodicity of Reform” that he published in January (a full translation of this text is available here), to which he has added certain new information (a pessimistic World Bank report) and the nervous excitement created by Bo Xilai’s fall from grace.  Even Ren’s most outlandish verbal pronouncements in his Hong Kong talk—that China’s state-owned enterprises are a family affair, that a collusion of wealth and power has hijacked China’s reforms, that the Chinese Communist Party is moribund and obsolete, and has long since outlived its usefulness, and that China’s economy is headed for a collapse—are repeated almost verbatim (if without the dripping sarcasm and the ribald jokes) in his published work, particularly “The Periodicity of Reform,” and “The Fate of Reform in Socialist Countries.”    

​What this means in the context of this little research exercise is that in this specific case, I am not being played.  What Ren Jiantao said in his Crédit Suisse talk, the video of which was banned in China, is almost identical to what he said in his published work, at least in terms of content and intention.  Why, then, does this incident figure—and quite prominently—on Ren’s (admittedly sparse) Chinese-language Wikipedia page?  Because anyone can add material to a Wikipedia page, and someone thought it was interesting or important to note that Ren’s talk had been banned.  There is no reason for an editor to remove this information, which is interesting, as is Ren’s talk.  At the same time, I doubt that the incident was a major moment in Ren’s life, nor that it tells us much about the relationship between establishment intellectuals and the Party that we will not learn by reading the published writings of these intellectuals.