David Ownby, "China's Rise and China's Thought World"

David Ownby, "China’s Rise and China’s Thought World: Gan Yang and the Tongsantong Trope"

 
Introduction

In early 2018, Jiang Shigong, a well-known professor of law at Beijing University, published a lengthy article (some 18,000 words in English translation) in the prestigious journal Kaifang.  Jiang is a prominent member of China’s New Left and a well-known defender of the PRC regime, most notably for his contributions to arguments concerning the PRC’s stance on constitutionalism[1] and on the status of Hong Kong.[2]  Jiang’s Kaifang text, entitled, “Philosophy and History:  Interpreting the ‘Xi Jinping Era’ through Xi’s Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP,’”[3] offers what purports to be an authoritative defense of Xi Jinping Thought, in a tone that may well suggest that Jiang worked in collaboration with Wang Huning or some other fixture of China’s thought world close to Xi (although this is pure speculation on my part).   

​The first line of the abstract preceding Jiang’s text suggests its heft and ambition:  “This text interprets the significance of the ‘Xi Jinping era’ in Party history, the history of the Republic, the history of Chinese civilization, the history of the international Communist movement, and the history of mankind, from the perspective of the internal linkages between philosophy and history.”
 
One might read Jiang’s text as glorified propaganda, a longer, more sophisticated version of pieces that appear in official Chinese newspapers and magazines in the era of Xi Jinping Thought.  At the same time, the piece is intellectually ambitious and creative in a way that “mere” propaganda rarely is, suggesting that Jiang is participating in an innovative construction of a new orthodoxy rather than simply parroting perceived wisdom.  Within the first few paragraphs, Jiang links Xi’s address to the Nineteenth Party Congress (“Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”), to the Confucian thought of China’s axial age and to the Confucian principle of “the unity of knowledge and action.” 

A few paragraphs later, he presents what might be seen as an important contribution to the historiography of modern China (and of the CCP):  “The Chinese people, who have long suffered in the modern age, have now made a great leap, from standing up, to becoming rich, to becoming strong. ‘Standing up’, ‘getting rich’, and ‘becoming strong’ are ways to divide the histories of our Party and our Republic, referring respectively to the Mao Zedong era, the Deng Xiaoping era, and the Xi Jinping era that we are currently entering.”  The text ranges widely, discussing issues as diverse as the Confucian notion of “original intention,” Weberian legal authority and “charismatic power,” America’s “California scholars” (a particular school of Chinese history writing) and the origins of Western philosophical subjectivity, among much else.  In a private email exchange, a prominent Chinese Liberal remarked, with grudging admiration, that not since Zhang Chunqiao had leftist ideas been presented in such complexity and depth.

Zhang Chunqiao was of course the Shanghai ideologue and eventual member of the Gang of Four whose writings helped fuel China’s Cultural Revolution.  Yet whatever pyrotechnics Zhang employed in his rhetorical pursuits, his discourse remained squarely within the world of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, which is not true in the case of Jiang’s text.  Why did Jiang Shigong feel compelled to range so widely and expansively in his reconstruction of a new orthodoxy?  How to explain the particular arguments Jiang employed to build China’s new orthodoxy?

To answer these questions, I will argue that Jiang’s text is addressed not only to those who shape propaganda in Xi Jinping’s China, but also to China’s public intellectuals, who, over the course of the reform and opening period, have assumed an important role in China’s ongoing search for political legitimacy.  More specifically, Jiang is participating in a very particular discourse that emerged with China’s rise in the early part of the twenty-first century.  This discourse, without engaging in anything like “dissent,” sought to rewrite certain foundational myths of the modern Chinese experience, implicitly and explicitly challenging the centrality of Communist Party rule to China’s historical narrative. The breadth and richness of Jiang Shigong’s text is testimony to the power and danger of that challenge.

China’s Thought World and China’s Rise

The general contours of the evolution of China’s thought world in the period of reform and opening are well known, in particular thanks to the final chapters of Timothy Cheek’s The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History.[4]  As China moved away from ideology and revolution and toward pragmatism and economic development, the status of China’s establishment intellectuals changed from that of “priests” who served the orthodox “church” of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought to “professionals,” engaged, like intellectuals elsewhere in the world, in their chosen field of endeavor.  For much of the post-Mao period, Chinese public intellectuals (i.e., those hoping through their research and writing to influence public opinion and political policy), could take advantage of a number of new possibilities:  China’s embrace of globalization encouraged intellectual and institutional exchanges between China and the West, bringing Chinese scholars up to date on current worldwide trends in knowledge production; massive investments in Chinese higher education provided Chinese intellectuals in the best universities with the time and funding necessary to engage in serious research and writing; the rapid development of the Internet, together with a relative relaxation of censorship in the Chinese publishing world, meant that Chinese intellectuals had access to a multitude of venues to publish their work. 

The result was an explosion of intellectual activity, at least on a par in terms of volume and quality, with China’s experience during the Republican period.  The 1980s are often characterized as China’s “Second Enlightenment” (the first associated with the May Fourth/New Culture movement), and the debates between and among China’s Liberals, New Left, and New Confucians are well-known and well-documented.

Jiang Shigong’s essay is of course part of this Chinese thought world, but his text addresses more directly a more recent (largely twenty-first century) wave of discourse that is the particular product of China’s rise.  Beginning in the early twenty-first century, and fueled by the financial and political crises of the Western world from 2008 onward, the heretofore heartfelt wish that China might, at some future date, resume its rightful place at the center of the world after a century of humiliation and revolution, began to seem like a genuine possibility. 

The excitement this possibility generated within the Chinese thought world was also accompanied by a certain anxiety:  the “brave new world” had arrived too soon, in the sense that the inner logic of the “China model,” which cheerleaders like Zhang Weiwei were already touting, remained to be defined.  Chinese authorities continued to promote “socialism with Chinese characteristics” without rigorously defining either “socialism” or “Chinese characteristics.”  China’s Liberals were on the defensive because China seemed to be succeeded even while ignoring “universal values” concerning human rights and rule of law.  New Confucians were breaking with their diaspora elders and charting a new political course that would be called “Mainland New Confucianism,” but the project was still in its early days.  The New Left was awkwardly negotiating a new embrace of state authority after a decade of denouncing neoliberalism in China and in the world at large.  In other words, China seemed to be on the brink of a major breakthrough, the achievement of wealth and power on a global scale, but without a convincing narrative of how China got there and where China was ultimately going. 

This supposed “misfit” between the juggernaut of the Chinese political economy and the lack of a convincing narrative is of course normal:  a “model” is invariably either a post-facto construction or a political statement (or both).  But for China’s intellectuals, who had been fighting tooth and nail over just such issues since the 1980s, the stunning changes of the 2000s opened a new chapter in the contemporary history of the Chinese thought world.         

Gan Yang and the Tongsantong Trope

There are surely many ways to write this chapter, which may still be unfolding (Xi Jinping would certainly like to close it).  My choice is to tell the story through the lens of the tongsantong trope, which traces its origins to an oral presentation by Gan Yang at Tsinghua University in 2005, and which subsequently inspired innumerable debates and imitations.  I should add that my presentation is far from complete; in the context of today’s talk, I can only offer snapshots of the views of Gan and those of some his fellow intellectuals.  But even these snapshots, taken together, help to explain the how and why of Jiang Shigong’s 2018 essay.

Gan Yang (b. 1952) is something of an intellectual gadfly, as well as a patient institution-builder.  He first came to prominence during the “culture fever” movement of the 1980s as the chief editor of the influential book series “Culture:  China in the World,” which made available hundreds of volumes of translations of Western thought and philosophy to Chinese readers.  Gan himself studied Western philosophy, first at Beijing University and subsequently at the University of Chicago.  Despite what look like “liberal” origins, Gan also embraced ideas—like radical or mass democracy—identified with the New Left,[5] as well as other ideas associated with the Mainland New Confucians (such as the revival of the “cult” of Kang Youwei[6]).  His proposal to “unify the three traditions (tongsansong)” in fact explains such seeming contradictions.

The notion of “unifying the three traditions” is not new with Gan, but draws on Confucian discourse concerning the evolution of China’s classical civilization:  the “unification” of the varied historical experiences of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties over the course of the three millennia before China’s first political unification under Qinshihuang (259-210 BC).  The argument, first advanced by Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BC) in the Western Han period, is that despite important differences in terms of culture and institutions, and in spite of the violence that marked dynastic transitions, rulers of the successive dynasties sought out continuities linking one regime to another, which the Zhou kings crystallized into an institutional and ritual order that laid the framework for centuries of enduring, stable Confucian rule.

Gan’s idea is to transpose this “unification” to the twenty-first century and thereby effect a similar harmonization of recent historical experience with a view toward establishing a cultural, mythological basis allowing China to move forward into the future.  His three modern traditions are Confucianism, which he associates with a culture based in ties of personal and place loyalties, Maoism, with its emphasis on social justice, and Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening, which he of course identifies with markets and economic growth.  From one perspective, Gan’s proposal is conservative, in the sense that he is saying that the period of revolution is over and that China needs to institutionalize the successful changes that have brought China to the point of reemergence as a world superpower. 

At another level the project is optimistic, almost utopian, in its confidence that these three traditions can be reduced to discrete pieces which can then be rearranged, lego-like, to produce something new (and yet simultaneously old).  Gan simply ignores the discontinuities and disruptions that have been at the heart of the modern and contemporary Chinese experience, and imagines yet another New China, in which people love their families, care about social justice, and produce wealth in a market economy.     

Exactly where Gan meant to go with his proposal is not clear.  It is not written as a manifesto and is indeed far more modest in tone and in scope than other more chest-thumping texts that tout the superiority of the Chinese model or the Chinese solution.   He is frustratingly vague on questions of political form, for example, nor does he address the age-old problem of the inevitable contradictions between social justice and market efficiency.  His text conveys a sense of “I had an interesting idea the other day” or “wouldn’t it be cool if we could…”  Other Chinese intellectuals have told me that Gan is adept at seeing trends and inventing slogans, leaving the hard conceptual work of choosing and unifying the three traditions to others, and this appears to be what occurred in this instance. 

In fact, it occurred with a vengeance.  A Google Scholar search for tongsantong between 2005 and 2019 yields at least fifteen full web pages of what look like relevant texts, which is probably only the tip of the iceberg.  To my knowledge, no one has as yet carried out a systematic literature review of the topic,[7] and I will certainly not attempt one in the brief time I have today.  Instead, my strategy will be to choose representative and well-known authors from China’s major intellectual groups (Liberals, New Left, New Confucians) to explore the different ways in which Gan’s basic trop of the tongsantong came to be negotiated and construed.

Liberals

As already mentioned, China’s rise has generally left China’s Liberals in a defensive posture, because China’s growing economic, financial, and geopolitical strength can be taken to mean that “China does not need the West.”  And while the Liberal political scientist Liu Qing argues cogently that pluralism is part of China’s modern experience, and that the best defense of this pluralism is liberalism,[8] liberalism continues to struggle.  One reason for this is liberalism’s consistent identification with the West and with “universal values” (which have fallen further out of favor as a result of China’s rise). Another is liberalism’s purportedly thin relationship to culture in general and Chinese culture in particular.  Those who condemn liberalism dismiss it as purely institutional and instrumental—i.e., as a mechanism for the expression of selfish private interests (and easily manipulated by interest groups)—lacking in the kind of “values” China needs to bind its plural society together.  However simplistic, Gan Yang’s defense of the Confucian embrace of family and place touches a sore spot for China’s Liberals, as does the idea that a thoroughgoing Chinese “Enlightenment” will not be sufficient to solve China’s problems.  Yet Chinese liberals responded with their own version of the “three traditions.”

One such liberal response to Gan Yang can be found in the writings of the conservative Liberal Liu Junning (some of which were published prior to Gan’s Unify the Three Traditions).  Among other things, Liu argued that historical Confucianism has been overly identified with Legalism, and hence is not appropriate as a civilizational complement to modernity with its emphasis on freedom and democracy.  For Liu, “freedom” means “limited government,” and he proposed Daoist non-action as an alternative to Confucianism, too compromised by its past.[9]  Thus Liu’s “three traditions” were, for Liu, free markets, liberal institutions (limited government) and Daoist civilization.  A less compelling suggestion than that of Gan Yang, perhaps (not the least because it is unclear how one might operationalize “Daoist civilization” in this context), but a liberal alternative to Gan’s “three traditions” nonetheless.

The Liberal constitutional scholar Gao Quanxi, a conservative sympathetic to many of Liu Junning’s views, offers a more complex alternative to Gan Yang’s formulation.  First, Gao accepts the criticism of liberalism’s “thin” links to Chinese culture, criticizes Chinese Liberals for over-attention to abuses of state power (which allows Chinese authorities to further demonize liberals), and challenges Liberals to revisit China’s past and discover China’s own “Whig history” of progress toward liberty and democracy.  In other words, Gao counsels less nay-saying from the sidelines, and more genuine political engagement.[10] 

Second, Gao fashions a separate but related argument based on the normative premise that a modern state is necessarily based on constitutional rule.  On this basis he argues that there have been “three and a half modern Chinas”:  the first was the Republic of China established in 1912, the second was the Nationalist Party-State regime established by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek in the 1920s (and ultimately dismantled by Chiang Ching-kuo and others in the 1980s), the third was the People’s Republic formalized in 1949 (although the constitution was not established until 1954), and the “half” is the post-Mao regime of reform and opening, whose vast changes have yet to be consolidated in a stable constitutional rule. 

My impression is that this as yet incomplete “constitutional history of modern and contemporary China” is in fact Gao’s Whig history, that he hopes through his intellectual efforts to breathe life into these fundamental texts that have frequently been treated as afterthoughts by China’s leaders for more than a century.[11]  But in any event, what is important in this context is that Gao seeks to attach the tongsansong trope to China’s constitutional history, even as he makes it clear in other writings that he is completely open to a positive view of Confucian values.

Yet another liberal voice is that of the Shanghai historian Xu Jilin, whose work over the past decade and more stands as a fundamental critique of the statist theories of the New Left (and to some extent of the New Confucians).[12]  Much of Xu’s work aims at questioning the basic assumptions of arguments for statism and against universal values, and he almost ridicules the very notion of “unifying the three traditions” as overly simplistic:

“Because of the complexity and multiplicity within traditional civilization, modern civilization, and socialist civilization, the question is not whether to unify the three traditions, but rather which ‘three traditions’ we might seek to unify?  It’s like a bartender’s competition producing different modern cocktails from different recipes where the tastes differ greatly one from the other.  If we choose ‘rich country and strong army’ from the Legalists, together with the strength and power of capitalism from modern Western civilization and the nationalist despotic tradition of Eastern socialism, then when we unify the three traditions, the monster we create will be a nationalist authoritarian aristocratic capitalism or perhaps a bureaucratic Legalist socialism.”

But finally, even Xu cannot resist putting in his two cents and concludes that “if we select Confucian paternalistic and humanistic traditions, liberalism’s emphasis on freedom, the rule of law, and democracy, as well as the ideals of socialist equality, when we blend them together this unity of the three traditions will bring together the wisdom and essence of all civilizations past and present, Chinese and foreign, and the path will be paved for a new blossoming.”[13]  Xu’s formulation is more “universal” than Gan Yang’s, whose three traditions are largely Chinese, but it is no less utopian.  I might add that Xu, like Gao Quanxi, and like the New Confucian Chen Ming (see below), is also open to the notion of Confucianism’s being recycled in such a way as to become something like China’s “civil religion.”[14]

New Confucians

New Confucians underwent a fundamental change during the period under discussion here, breaking from more traditional diaspora New Confucians in the larger Sinophone world (the mainland group now often refers to itself as “Mainland New Confucians” for this reason), and fashioning an explicitly political discourse that seeks to return Confucian ideology to the center of statecraft concerns.[15]  As in the case of the Liberals, some New Confucians had already turned in the direction eventually taken by Gan Yang early on.  Jiang Qing, perhaps the best known Mainland New Confucian, has invested considerable intellectual energy in the imagination of Confucian institutions that could, theoretically, replace those of the ruling Communist Party (as well as an evolution toward Western constitutional rule). 

Jiang imagines a tricameral government with one body selected by the people (the House of the Commoners), one body made up of a meritocratic, largely Confucian, elite (the House of Confucian Tradition), and one body made up of actual descendants of Confucius himself (The House of National Essence).[16]  Jiang’s aim is to construct a legitimacy that will go beyond the petty, grasping utilitarianism of modern democracies and ground authority is something sacred and traditional.  His “three traditions” are not discrete chronological periods, as in the case of Gan Yang, but his three chambers nonetheless combine quite different traditions:  Chinese Confucian civilization, popular will, and something like noble descent.

Even more direct in his borrowing of Gan Yang’s “three traditions” trope is Chen Ming, in his “Transcend Left and Right, Unite the Three Traditions, Renew the Party-State :  A Confucian Interpretation of the China Dream,”[17] although Chen’s approach is in fact quite different.  At least on the surface, Gan proposes the construction of something new out of the merging of his three traditions.  Chen Ming is more concerned with denouncing the traditions of liberalism and socialism as fundamentally wrong-headed, because they were dangerous distractions in the context of China’s national crisis. 

The crisis, beginning in the nineteenth century, was a crisis of nation and community; Confucian political institutions failed in their response to the West, and whatever social cohesion Confucian culture had provided came unraveled in the wake of this failure.  Liberal solutions to this existential dilemma were grounded in individual needs and desires, which, however valid in ordinary circumstances, are secondary considerations in the context of a national emergency.  Socialist solutions to the dilemma were grounded in notions of class, which were ultimately divisive (Chen is quick to cite the example of the Cultural Revolution), despite their utility in political and mobilizational terms.  Both liberalism and socialism also had links to external agendas:  “universal values” in the case of liberalism, the internationalist vision of the Komintern in the case of socialism. Neither was grounded in the lived historical experience of the Chinese people-nation, the point of departure, in Chen’s argument, for any meaningful engagement with the project of national reconstruction.

Chen’s ultimate proposal for a national revival is complex.  On the one hand, it is nakedly political, and this particular text is full of paeans to “Daddy Xi,” and Chen affirmed to me in person that at one level he sees his intellectual work as that of providing content for Xi’s propaganda campaign, the China Dream.  On the other hand, while Chen invests a great deal of faith in the state as an instrument of national revival, he also calls for a “renewal of the Party-State,” a recognition that the KMT and the CCP played structurally similar roles in the evolution of China’s political history and continue to evolve (he has positive things to say about Chiang Ching-kuo’s liberal reforms in the 1980s). 

What Chen seems to envision is a scenario where the state maintains control over society long enough that Confucianism can be re-engineered to serve as China’s “civil religion,” which in turn will provide enough social cohesion that the state can accord more respect to basic individual rights and freedoms.  In any event, what stands out in the snapshots of both Jiang Qing and Chen Ming is that they have imagined institutions (in the case of Jiang) and built historical narratives (in the case of Chen) that completely ignore the conventional historiography of the CCP and the notion that the “New China” which is the product of national salvation is necessarily a good thing.

New Left

Like the New Confucians, the arguments of China’s New Left evolved considerably during the period under discussion.  In general, this evolution was away from their former support for “the people” and their criticism of the neoliberal tendencies of China’s political and economic order under reform and opening, and toward an embrace of the state as an end in itself (at least in the eyes of liberal critics of the New Left).[18]   The New Left defended this evolution by arguing that the Chinese state has succeeded in defending Chinese sovereignty which has been the key to China’s rise and the emergence of the China model, and that the Chinese state has moved away from the neoliberalism of the 1990s and designed specific policies that address poverty and over-concentration of power.[19]  Consequently, New Left intellectuals have in general been less inclined to engage in the “three traditions” competition,  since their “tradition” seems to be in the ascendance.

There are, however, important exceptions.  Wang Shaoguang, long a proponent of state power and capacity, offers a new reading of China’s modern and contemporary history in a 2012 interview for the now suppressed Utopia website.  His “three traditions” include:  the period from 1800 to 1956, the period from 1956 to roughly 1990; and the period from 1990 to the present.  The first period is defined by the idea of “governability,” by which Wang means the loss and subsequent reestablishment of state control (there were pockets of resistance and important inner-Party struggles until 1956).  The second period is ideas of “government,” by which Wang means building the mechanisms and institutions of state power.  The third period is that of “governance,” by which Wang means looking beyond state institutions themselves and evaluating the quality of the services rendered by government to society.[20]

Wang’s larger point, which may seem obscure here, is that China’s contemporary “governance” represents a new “representational” democracy which responds to the true needs of the people in a way that Western “representative” democracy, captive to money and special interests, cannot.[21]  I might note, however, that Wang’s “three traditions,” while supportive of Party rule, offer a narrative different from that of conventional Party historiography.

I’m not sure that my “snapshots” of the writings of these intellectuals adequately convey the richness (or in some cases, the strangeness) of their contributions, but in the context of a 30- to 45-minute oral presentation, I can’t do much more.  In any event, the snapshots should go some way toward explaining why Jiang Shigong chose to frame his construction of a new orthodoxy.

Jiang Shigong:  Once More with Sixiang

First, Jiang’s “new narrative”—that China stood up under Mao Zedong, got rich under Deng Xiaoping, and is now becoming powerful under Xi Jinping—is clearly his version of the “three traditions.”  But while other intellectuals range widely in their choice of what traditions to include in their formulae, Jiang deftly brings the narrative back not only to the Party but to Party leaders.  Exactly what outcome we might expect from the merging of Gan Yang’s original three traditions is not clear; Gan seemed to be reaching for some harmonious repackaging of past and present, culture and economy.  By contrast, any recipe combining Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jiping unfailingly yields strong Party leadership under a strong Party leader.

Second, Jiang is not content with a formulaic reassertion of the importance of Party leadership and Party leaders.  Under the rubric of Xi Jinping Thought, he attempts a fundamental “upgrade” of Communist ideology and the idea of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” responding to explicit and implicit challenges raised in the snapshots discussed above. 

Jiang’s text is littered with references to Confucius and Confucianism, such “original intention” which liken the scholar’s commitment to the Way to the Communist’s dedication to revolution.  Communism is presented as the equivalent of the “learning of the heart,” one of the Chinese names by which Neo-Confucianism is known, linking Wang Yangming’s “innate knowledge” to Maoist voluntarism. At first glance, this might be understood as a continuation of the flirtation that has been underway between the CCP and the Mainland New Confucians for some years (the New Confucians are “flirting harder”), but Jiang attempts a synthesis based on a recasting of the meaning of Marxism and communism.  He argues that in a materially rich world, Marx’s nineteenth-century notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” seems out of date and impracticable.  In Jiang’s own words:

“When Xi Jinping emphasizes a return to Communist principles, he is not talking about the ‘communist society’ that was of a piece with scientific socialism but is instead using the idea that ‘those who do not forget their original intention will prevail’, drawn from traditional Chinese culture.  In so doing, he removes communism from the specific social setting of the Western empirical scientific tradition, and astutely transforms it into the Learning of the Heart in Chinese traditional philosophy, which in turn elevates communism to a kind of ideal faith or a spiritual belief.  For this reason, communism will never again be like it was under Mao Zedong—something that was meant to take on a real social form in the here and now—but is instead the Party’s highest ideal and faith.  It has become part of Party education and Party cultivation, the ‘Learning of the Heart’ of the CCP.  Communism is not only a concrete society to be realized in the distant future but is also the highest ideal that will be absorbed into current political practice, a vibrant spiritual state… The understanding of this highest ideal is no longer that of Marx, who thought within the Western theoretical tradition; it is no longer in humanity’s Garden of Eden, ‘unalienated’ by the division of labor within society. Instead it is intimately linked to the ideal of ‘great unity under Heaven’ from the Chinese cultural tradition.” 

New Confucians, as well as Chinese Liberals who are open to the return of Confucianism as core values for Chinese society, may well find this a crass appropriation, but to the uninitiated, Jiang’s reading of Confucianism may sound little different from that of other scholars.  And the assertion of the “victory” of Chinese culture at the end of the historical process is a general crowd pleaser.
Moreover, this synthesis is part of a much-needed recasting of the idea of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that takes into account the success of the Chinese model, and the failure of the Soviet experiment.  To cite Jiang once again:

“The concept first employed by Deng Xiaoping was ‘a socialism with Chinese characteristics’… The report of the Fourteenth Party Congress (1992) changed this to ‘Socialism, with Chinese Characteristics’.  Beginning from the report of the Sixteenth National Congress, this became ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’.  On the face of it, this appears to be nothing but linguistic hair-splitting, but in fact, the changes reflect a profound political importance.  The first two expressions take for granted that a fundamental ‘socialism’ exists, the socialism defined by the works of Marx and Lenin and by the practice of the Soviet Union, and that we had only added a few ‘Chinese characteristics’ to the basic socialist framework.  But the idea of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ means that socialism does not really have a fundamental developmental model, and instead consists of a handful of basic principles and ideas.  These principles and ideas must be continually explored and developed in practice following the advance of time.  ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ is not adding Chinese characteristics to an already defined ‘socialist framework’. Rather, it uses China’s lived experience to explore and define what, in the final analysis, ‘socialism’ is.  For this reason, ‘socialism’ is not ossified dogma, but instead an open concept awaiting exploration and definition.  China is not blindly following socialist ideas and institutions produced by the Western experience of socialism, but rather is charting the socialist developmental path on the basis of a greater self-confidence, taking the project of the modernization of socialist construction to its third phase.”

In fact, Jiang argues, in a way that resembles the discourse of the New Confucian Chen Ming, that China is leading the world into the future following the failure of both the Soviet and the Western liberal democratic experiences.  “China with socialist characteristics” is thus neither an empty slogan nor an apology for engagement with capitalism, but is a genuine expression of China’s recent historical experience, and a possible model for the world to follow.

Finally (at least in the context of the present talk), Jiang presents his arguments—and, more broadly, Xi Jinping Thought, which he purports to present in his text—as examples of the continuing utility of Marxist thought, based on the dialectic of theory and practice.  As Jiang observes, in a pointed jibe aimed at many of the intellectuals discussed above:

“Since the launching of the policy of Reform and Opening, the negation of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ has naturally entailed a conflict between the philosophy of contradiction and the spirit of struggle.  Trying to adopt the Western model gave rise to a new political discourse led by economics and legal studies, characterized by advocacy of government neutrality and depoliticization.  This discourse gradually erased from memory China’s history and practice, weakened the agency of Chinese politics, and increasingly became a new dogmatism that turned its back on the theory of contradiction and the theory of practice, forgetting the obvious truth that ‘only the foot knows if the shoe fits’.  One might say that over the past thirty years, Chinese academics and thinkers have gradually forgotten the theory of contradiction, the theory of struggle and the theory of practice.  While Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought appear as nouns in mainstream discourse, in practice they do not function as philosophical methods by which we understand, grasp, and solve problems, which has led to Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought becoming empty expressions without vivid meaning in practice.  They are no longer philosophical tools for understanding problems, no longer have any internal connection with the construction of the people’s political life, and thus cannot truly penetrate people’s minds.  As a principled political Party, if the CCP loses the philosophical analytical tools and methods provided by Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, it will lose the theoretical magic weapon pointing out the future direction of development and will necessarily lose the values supporting confidence in ideals and the theoretical weapon to consolidate the people’s hearts, thus opening the door to a politics of convenience.  Once this happens, the market economy’s principles of profit and exchange will penetrate the inner realms of the Party, and various forces will ’stalk’ government officials and form interest groups to seek political power. They will even attempt to seize the highest power of the Party and state and change the nature of the Party. China will face the danger of repeating the collapse of the former Soviet Union.”

Conclusion

My main goal has been to shed light on intellectual trends in China as related to China’s rise over the past few years.  My argument is that China’s rapid rise, together with the seeming crisis of the West, opened a new chapter in Chinese intellectual life in which thinkers from all parts of the intellectual spectrum imagined new pasts and futures for China, inventing narratives and paradigms that largely ignored the CCP and the inconvenient disruptions of the twentieth century.  I read Jiang Shigong’s 2018 essay as an attempt at a definitive response to all of these narratives and paradigms under the aegis of Xi Jinping Thought.
Above and beyond the specifics of the various arguments advanced by the intellectuals examined, it seems to me that Jiang’s text—and again, Xi Jinping Thought in general—should be read as efforts to revive the importance of thought/sixiang itself in Chinese intellectual life.  The importance of proper thought is often cited as an important characteristic of Confucian civilization under the dynasties, to say nothing of its heightened role under Mao.  Embrace of the importance of “thought” is tantamount to a belief in orthodoxy, the notion that correct thought is crucial to proper individual behavior and social order, and improper thought leads to chaos. 

What is the relationship of the tongsantong trope to thought?  On the one hand, the very notion that intellectuals (with the eventual help of the state) can stitch together a new China from the individual pieces of past “traditions” might be understood as almost Stalinist, an effort to act as “engineers of the soul.”  At the same time, the impulse behind Gan’s original formulation, followed by the other intellectuals discussed above, was to move past violence, revolution, and disruption and toward some kind of lasting stability.  In this sense, tongsantong suggests compromise, however utopian the project might be.  And what sort of “thought” might characterize Gan’s hybrid order, a healthy “mutt” combining family values, social justice and market efficiency?  In my reading, the tongsantong trope reflects a pluralism based on historical and ideological compromise—whatever its value as a policy proposal—and on the lived reality of life in twenty-first century China.  The challenge before Jiang Shigong, and before Xi Jinping Thought, is to put an end to that pluralism and convince the Chinese people to reembrace thought.     

Notes 

[1] See Larry Catá Backer, “Jiang Shigong on ‘Written and Unwritten Constitutions’ and Their Relevance to Chinese Constitutionalism,” Modern China 40.2 (2013):  119-132.

[2] See Jiang Shigong, China’ Hong Kong :  A Political and Cultural Perspective (Singapore :  Springer, 2017).

[3] Available in translation online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-philosophy-and-history.html .

[4] Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge :  Cambridge University Press, 2015), chs. 5 and 6.

[5] See Gan Yang, “Liberalism:  For the Aristocrats or for the People?” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/gan-yang-liberalism.html .

[6] See the preface to Gan’s Tongsantong.  Gan eventually came to feel that the New Confucians had gone too far in their promotion of Kang and his ideas.  See his contributions to the discussion of “Kang Youwei and Institutional Confucianism,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/kang-youwei-and-institutional-confucianism.html .

[7] Gao Quanxi, “Civilization, Unifying the Three Traditions, and Modern China,” in Gao, Political Constitutions and Future Constitutional Rule.  Hong Kong:  City University of Hong Kong Press, 2016, ch. 13, pp. 385-422, is a step in the right direction.

[8] See Liu Qing, “Liberalism in Contemporary China:  Potential and Predicaments,” available in translation online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/liu-qing-liberalism-in-contemporary-china.html .

[9] See Liu Junning 刘军宁, “保守伯克，自由伯克 [Conservative Burke, Liberal Burke],”Dushu 读书 1995: 3; “新加坡：儒家自由主义的挑战[Singapore:  The Challenge of Confucian Liberalism], Dushu 读书 1993: 2; and “中国，你需要一个文艺复兴 [China, You Need a Renaissance],” Guoxue 国学 6: 2007.

[10] See Gao Quanxi, “The Political Maturity of Chinese Liberalism,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/liu-qing-liberalism-in-contemporary-china.html .

[11] Cai Xia, formerly Professor of Party Building and Educational Research (now retired) at the Central Party School, makes a similar argument from within the Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought tradition.  See her “Advancing Constitutional Democracy Should be the Mission of the Chinese Communist Party—a discussion with Professor Yang Xiaoqing,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/cai-xia-advancing-constitutional-democracy.html .

[12] See Xu Jilin, Rethinking China’s Rise:  A Liberal Critique, ed. and trans. by David Ownby (Cambridge :  Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[13] Ibid., pp. 15-16.

[14] See for example Xu Jilin, “What Body for Confucianism’s Lonely Soul?” in Xu, Rethinking China’s Rise, pp. 113-126.

[15] For a scathing depiction of this evolution see Ge Zhaoguang, “If Horses Had Wings:  The Political Demands of Confucianism in Recent Years,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/ge-zhaoguang-if-horses-had-wings.html .

[16] See Jiang Qing, 政治儒学 [Political Confucianism] (Beijing:  Sanlian shudian, 2003); in English see Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order:  How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape its Political Future, Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan, eds., (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2012).

[17] Translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/chen-ming-transcend-left-and-right.html . 

[18] See for example, Xu Jilin, “The Specter of Leviathan:  A Critique of Chinese Statism since 2000,” and “Universal Civilization, or Chinese Values?  A Critique of Historicist Thought since 2000,” in Xu, Rethinking China’s Rise, pp. 20-94.

[19] See for example, Wang Hui, “The Economy of a Rising China and its Contradictions,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/people.html .

[20] See Wang Shaoguang, “Traditional Moral Politics and Contemporary Concepts of Governance,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-shaoguang-traditional-moral-politics.html .

[21] See Wang Shaoguang, “Representative Democracy and Representational Democracy,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-shaoguang-representative-and-representational-democracy.html .