David Ownby, Tips

How to Get the Most out of Reading the China Dream

David Ownby
 
A couple of things to know to get started.  First, this site is not about Chinese dissidents, although in the West, it is largely true that the only Chinese intellectuals anyone knows about, including many China specialists, are dissidents.  Two things happen to any “successful” dissident in China:  they wind up in prison or in exile, largely losing their influence in China, and their writings are translated into Western languages.  I hope the dissidents win, and I am glad that their writings are translated.  I do not avoid intellectuals with the potential to become dissidents (see here, here, here, and here for examples of texts that look to me a lot like dissent, or whose authors have come perilously close to being branded as dissenters), but the point of my research is not to seek out future dissenters.  Many Western scholars and journalists are focused on these people, and they do not require additional attention from me.

Journalists quite naturally focus on plane crashes; I look at the airplanes that arrive safely.  In other words, I am more interested in what can be said in China than in what cannot be said, even if the frontier between the two is constantly shifting.    Hence I work on establishment intellectuals, who manage to publish their work in China, despite the pressures of the directed public sphere and the dangers of censorship.  The heritage of the Cold War has taught us that everything that is not dissent in a Communist country is propaganda.  In the case of China since the era of reform and opening, this is simply and manifestly wrong.  There is of course lots of propaganda in China, much of which is translated into English by the regime itself, which means that it is not particularly difficult to keep up with the major themes of Chinese propaganda.  But what establishment intellectuals write is not propaganda (in our sense of the term), although some of them naturally support the regime.

I happened onto the world of establishment intellectuals largely by accident about a decade ago; if you’re interested in the Indiana Jones-esque tale of this discovery, you can listen here to a (relatively short) talk I gave about it at the Hoover Institute, or read about it here.  I will not belabor what is fascinating about this world overmuch at this point; that’s what the website is for.  Suffice it to say that China’s rise, together with the West’s apparent decline, has convinced many Chinese establishment intellectuals that they—and we—are living in an era of fundamental historical change, the equivalent to when monarchies gave way to democracies or the United States inherited world leadership from Great Britain.  This in turn has prompted these intellectuals to rethink the founding myths of their understanding of China’s—and the world’s—past, present, and future.  This is what I mean by the China Dream.

If you want to have an overview of what the project entails and what I have found, you might start by reading my unpublished essay on China’s rise and China’s thought world.  Or you might start by visiting the project pages, where you will find a virtual book on China Dream Chasers, the component parts of two published volumes, Voices from the Chinese Century and Rethinking China’s Rise, as well as an ongoing project on China and the Post-Pandemic World.  Other projects are in development.

If you are a researcher or a journalist or a student looking for a particular intellectual, you might go directly to the People page, which simply lists all intellectuals whose work is translated in alphabetical order.   

I have regrouped most texts by theme under the Theme menu.

If you are looking for a particular term (constitution, tianxia, Mao Zedong, Kang Youwei), the search box located directly below the main image on the web site searches the entire site.

If you are looking to understand the organization of the world of Chinese establishment intellectuals, look at the Map menu, where you will find pages devoted to Liberals, the New Left, the New Confucians, and Others.  These are not well-defined categories and they tell us relatively little about the intellectuals who have been “assigned” to these groups, but to the extent that this site is a reference tool, this crude division is functional. 

If you want to sign up for my fortnightly newsletter, there’s a form at the bottom of each page (including this one) where you can insert your email.  Unsubscribing is easy.

A few weeks ago, I started to add “Favorite Quotes” sections to each translation, because many of these texts are very long and people are busy, as well as “Links to other texts on this site,” to suggest to readers what else they might read if a particular translation piqued their interest.  It is a lot of work to retrofit all of the translations on the site in this way, although I might get to the texts that have been shared most frequently.