David Ownby, Discovery

Chinese Intellectuals:  Who Knew?

David Ownby

Drawn from the preface of a book I am currently writing,  tentatively titled :  
​A China We Can Talk To?

Although I have been studying China all my adult life, I only discovered the world of Chinese establishment intellectuals quite recently, and the discovery was almost pure happenstance.

About a decade ago, I was at a conference in Vancouver, Canada.  I no longer remember what the conference was about, but my friend and colleague Timothy Cheek, who organized the conference, had also invited his friend and colleague Xu Jilin, a well-known Chinese historian and public intellectual who teaches at East China Normal University in Shanghai.  Chinese intellectuals hand out their recent books the way we (used to) hand out business cards, and I left the conference and Vancouver with Xu’s How the Enlightenment was Brought Back to Life:  The Ideological Dilemma of Modern Chinese Intellectuals (in Chinese, of course) in my backpack.  The flight from Vancouver to Montreal, where I live, takes five hours, and at some point I ran out of other things to read and opened Xu’s book.  It was a revelation, because it was a cogently written, stylistically pleasing, independent-minded academic book written in Chinese.

This will take a bit of explanation.  As a scholar of Chinese history, I have spent much of my adult life reading academic books in Chinese, but until that fateful flight, I had never associated reading Chinese academic books with “pleasure” of any kind.  Traditional Chinese historical scholarship, which still exists, consists of piling up quotes from primary sources one after the other, with relatively little intervention on the part of the author.  Such books are basically unreadable unless you are already an expert in the field, in which case which quotes are highlighted and how they are ordered in the text can take on a certain degree of meaning. 

After the Communist revolution of 1949, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party line was added to the mix.  Some scholars continued the older cut-and-paste method, while ordering the quotes according to a Party-line schema, while others stopped cutting and pasting and switched to a cleaner narrative, but still based on the Party line.  In any event, none of the books I had used in my research (on secret societies and popular religion in China, topics I had worked on before discovering Chinese intellectuals) had been written to be read for pleasure.  They could be mined for data or, if one accepted Marxism-Leninism, could further flesh out one’s worldview, and they were necessary part of the research process, but they were not fun.

Despite the weighty title, Xu Jilin’s book reads like the sort of history book you might settle down with for an afternoon or even a weekend.  Several works by Barbara Tuchman come to mind, or maybe Simon Schama, but there are lots of them, and everyone has their favorites.  Xu writes with pace and verve, in flowing sentences and paragraphs, with a judicious use of quotes.  His chapters have introductions and conclusions that guide the reader through his topic, and his writing is utterly free of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist cant that had cluttered the texts I was used to, meaning, among other things, that I was unable to predict the conclusions at which he would arrive. I no longer remember how many pages of Xu’s book I read on the flight—Chinese is a difficult language to read even if you’re having fun—but I recall being eager to get to the next chapter, again a new feeling in my lifetime’s work of plowing through Chinese academic tomes.

This moment of unexpected pleasure at 30,000 feet over the Canadian prairies eventually led to the discovery of a world I hardly knew existed—the world of contemporary Chinese establishment intellectuals.    Actually, thanks again to my friend Timothy Cheek, I probably knew more about Chinese intellectuals than most people, because he has spent his career working on them, but until reading Xu Jilin on the airplane, even if I knew who they were, I had no idea what they talked about.  Like most Americans, the Chinese intellectuals I was most familiar with were dissidents, like Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo, Fang Lizhi—the list is long—who criticized the system and generally wound up in prison or in exile for their pains.  We find dissidents attractive, and for good reason.  We like people who “speak truth to power,” perhaps especially when they are speaking our truth (or something that looks a lot like it) to Chinese power, and the drama of the Chinese dissidents’ lives is an expression of the inexorable logic of freedom that we like to see working itself out in our history and indeed, in history everywhere.  For this reason, the writings of Chinese dissidents are among those that are the mostly likely to be translated into Western languages, together with those of Chinese literary authors, who are often critical of China without necessarily being dissidents.

Xu Jinlin is neither a dissident nor a literary author but instead what is called in China an “establishment intellectual” or a “public intellectual.”  To put it succinctly, establishment intellectuals publish (or do their art—establishment intellectuals are not limited to writers) in China, and in the Chinese language, and play by the Chinese rules established by the Chinese Communist Party without being spokespeople for the Party or the state.  They may be highly critical of particular features of the regime or of specific actions taken by the Chinese Communist Party, but at least in public they navigate the often choppy seas of semi-free speech and a directed public sphere in ways that both keep them out of trouble (usually) and maximize their impact.  After all, they are public intellectuals whose goal, through their writing and through their art, is to have an influence on public opinion and government policy.  Whether they actually have an impact is a separate if important issue. 

One of the many things I discovered after happening onto Xu Jilin on my Air Canada flight was that China does indeed have a public sphere not completely unlike our own, where important issues are debated and ideas exchanged, and not just for propaganda purposes or for show. Of course, some topics are taboo, and we do not find discussions of Xinjiang and Tibet, nor criticisms of the government’s handling of Hong Kong (which most mainland Chinese support), nor of the leadership of the CCP.  In other words, China’s public sphere does not allow for discussion of the Chinese issues that interest us most, which to some Western observers means that China’s public sphere is too regulated and thus not very meaningful.  While I understand this reaction, what I have found in the course of my research over the past few years is that China’s public sphere is surprisingly rich, despite its numerous blind spots or “silences.”  Just because Chinese establishment intellectuals cannot say everything they want to does not mean that they cannot say anything they want to.  In fact, I am consistently surprised at what they manage to say, even now, despite the strictures that Xi Jinping has imposed on the world of ideas since coming to power.

Virtually all countries have public intellectuals, although who makes up their ranks and what impact they have varies greatly.  Public intellectuals generally include some mix of journalists, media figures, writers, and professors.  Americans have limited respect for intellectuals in general, so our public intellectuals often wind up being journalists with a flair for media (Ta Nehisi Coates, Masha Gessen, Jia Tolentino), journalists with an important platform (David Brooks of the New York Times, David Frum of the Atlantic), professional writers and independent scholars (Susan Sontag, Malcolm Gladwell, Isabella Wilkerson) with the odd university professor lurking at the margins (Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, David Blight).  Although the automatic respect accorded to Confucian scholars throughout Chinese history has been eroded by the revolutions of the twentieth century, most Chinese people still have a reflexive respect for intellectuals, and in China—like in France, say—university professors have a prominent place among public intellectuals—in part because journalism is more tightly regulated than academics and the culture of celebrity that has come to China with the internet can readily land a popular, critical journalist in hot water.  Professors generally matter less, although some high-profile professors wound up with internet followings of hundreds of thousands of followers when the Chinese blogosphere was at its height.

I make no claim to have discovered the world of Chinese public intellectuals.  My friend Timothy Cheek has spent this career illustrating that establishment intellectuals—even under Mao—existed as a category separate from dissidents on the one hand and government propagandists on the other.  Sociologists such as Eddy U have examined numerous issues regarding the structural position of Chinese establishment intellectuals in Chinese society.  A number of scholars—Joseph Fewsmith and Els van Dongen come to mind—have studied the role played by establishment intellectuals in important national debates over crucial issues or at critical moments in China.  There are any number of excellent studies of the New Confucian movement in China, and many of these New Confucians are certainly public intellectuals.  Certain figures from China’s New Left, such as Wang Hui, have their champions in the Western academy as well.  Sebastian Veg recently published an excellent volume treating “grass roots” intellectuals who exist(ed) on the margins between something approaching dissidence and a discourse that is more respectful of the rules of the game as decided by Chinese authorities.  Certain media studies address issues that touch Chinese public intellectuals.

I have no desire to pick a fight with any of these authors or studies, each of which makes its own excellent contribution in its own way.  What strikes me nonetheless about this body of scholarship as a whole is that, first, most of it remains firmly within the academic world of Chinese studies (and/or political science, sociology, history, etc., the discipline of the scholar in question) and—like most of what we do—has little impact on broader American discussions of China; and second, that Chinese thought or Chinese public intellectuals are rarely treated as independent variables in this work.  There are exceptions, of course.  Studies of New Confucians are focused squarely on thought and thinkers, but the centuries-old Confucian tradition often weighs heavily in such studies, which are highly specialized and somewhat “partisan” in the sense that the Western author often has strong feelings about what Confucianism is or ought to be.  There is nothing wrong with this—today’s New Confucians are in a dialogue with their tradition, after all—but at the same time, such an approach focuses on a particular number of trees in a very large forest and makes it harder to grasp the vitality of the landscape of contemporary Chinese thought as a whole. 

In sum, to the extent that Chinese establishment intellectuals have been the focus of research on contemporary China, the focus has been less on what they have to say as such and more on how what they say functions within the broader evolution of Chinese politics and society.  Of course, public intellectuals everywhere react to contemporary events, which structure the discussions and debates in which the intellectuals participate.  But the history of the Cold War leads us to minimize the importance of Chinese intellectuals and their ideas, or to see them as mere stalking horses for Chinese politicians, in what again is a very Kremlinological way of viewing China.  Another way to say this is that “Chinese thought” is always attached to “China” and rarely seen as having value simply as “thought” in and of itself.  Again, I have no desire to dismiss the importance of context to understanding ideas, but Americans have very little understanding of the context in which Chinese establishment intellectuals work and write.  Particularly between roughly 2000 and 2015, that context was relatively open, and Chinese establishment intellectuals could say much of what they wanted to say.  The premise of this book is that what they had to say is worth listening to.