David Ownby, "What Has Xi Jinping Wrought?"

What Has Xi Jinping Wrought?

David Ownby
 
This essay is a companion piece to my “Am I Being Played?,” published two weeks ago, in which I sought to shed light on the question of the degree to which Chinese establishment intellectuals say what they think in print, by looking at the particular case of Ren Jiantao in 2012.  My conclusion was that Ren said in his published articles pretty much the same incendiary things he said in a talk given in Hong Kong, the video of which was subsequently banned in China.  Of course, more research would be required to know whether this conclusion is generalizable, and everything will clearly vary according to the intellectual in question and the political climate at the particular time.

Having summarized Ren Jiantao’s intellectual output in 2012, it occurred to me that I could use his case to try to answer another question:  how has Xi Jinping’s imposition of ideological discipline affected China’s establishment intellectuals?  On the one hand, this seems like a silly question.  We know that the crackdown has been pervasive, and examples appear in Western news reports on a regular basis (to the point that providing links seems superfluous).  At the same time, China’s establishment intellectuals—or a significant percentage of them—continue to publish seemingly much as they did before, or at least that is my impression. 

How do we square this circle?  Have Chinese establishment intellectuals changed their tune or “put water in their wine,” as the French say (i.e., softened their message)?  I am frequently surprised by the critical things these intellectuals continue to say, but of course there is no way to know what they would have said in the absence of Xi’s crackdown.  Thus as an experiment, I decided to read the 11 texts published on Ren Jiantao’s 2020 Aisixiang page, and compare them with the 12 I perused for the previous exercise.  My summary of these texts appears at the end of this essay.  Here is a synthesis of what I found.

At first glance, the change in Ren’s tone between 2012 and 2020 is striking.  As I noted last time, Ren was relentlessly critical in 2012, a conservative liberal who hammered China’s government (in abstract, generally academic language) for not promoting property rights reform, the only way to ensure a healthy economic—and ultimately political—development.  He also predicted the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy, because Soviet-style socialist regimes are destined to fail due to the nature of the revolutionary party that leads them, a party that monopolizes control, stifles innovation, and resists reform.

This message is almost completely absent in Ren’s 2020 writings.  There are hints of it here and there, particularly in a lecture he gave on Confucianism, transcendence, and power, where he complains about “crony capitalism” and the economic “domination by a small number of powerful families,” but I found no mention of property rights (although at one point he does mention the need to avoid the perils of a “bad market economy”) and no direct—or even indirect, I would say—condemnation of Soviet-style socialism.  Indeed, in an essay on China’s moral diplomacy, we find Ren singing the praises of Chinese-style socialism as the wave of the future, although we might read this as pro forma.  A reasonable inference is that Ren is indeed watching what he says, as full-throated defenses of property rights and fiery denunciations of socialism are more problematic now than they were in 2012, which may well mean that, in contrast with 2012, Ren Jiantao is saying less of what he thinks in publication.

At the same time, the point of Ren's work in 2020 is not primarily to sing the praises of China or of Xi Jinping (whose name does not appear).  Ren’s chief preoccupation in 2020 is artificial intelligence and the effects AI-driven technology will have on social control, the centrality of human beings to politics, and good governance.  The three lengthy essays Ren devoted to these subjects are highly abstract, both because Ren uses political theory to discuss the topic, and because many of his concerns are about future AI effects which are by definition abstract, because they have not yet occurred.  The texts are also quite neutral, which befits a discussion of abstractions (all of these texts are summarized below; click here for a full translation for Ren’s article on good governance).

At the same time, behind the abstractions and neutrality, Ren pushes for fuller and better democracy as the only real solution to the risks AI-driven technologies represent.  He sees humanity’s common future as one in which the implications of quantum mechanics call into question the feasibility of the cost-benefit/efficiency calculations, based on Newtonian physics and thus on certainty, by which governments arrive at their decisions.  In other words, in addition to the risks of governments either over-employing new technologies (for convenience’s sake), or under-employing new technologies (out of laziness or complacency), together of course with the risks represented by the technologies themselves, the fundamental danger is that the entire calculus of decision-making loses its footing and its relevance.

This crisis threatens China as well as the rest of the world.  For China,

“State governance…today is under tremendous pressure to undergo a double transition: one is the transition from pre-modern/non-modern to modern, and the other is the transition from modern to post-modern or whatever the alternative may be. China is at a critical moment in the transition from pre-modern/non-modern to modern. This means that the task of state governance based on classical science, that is, the modernization of the state governance system and governance capacity, remains the primary task to improve the current state of governance in China. But this should not limit our efforts to imagine the great changes in state governance the technological revolution will require, and if we focus solely on the immediate tasks of state governance this will indeed limit our imagination.
 
One result of this would be that people might under-imagine the mature modern era and therefore limit their imagination of state governance to visions of how China can successfully move to the threshold of modernity. A second result it that they might fail to imagine alternatives to the present, and thus linger in a perpetual state of exuberance about replacing Western solutions with Chinese ones. Third, there is a basic lack of imagination about the great changes in state governance brought about by the technological revolution, and not much interest in focusing on the challenges of the great changes in state governance and the strategies necessary to deal with them. This is naturally detrimental to China's long-term development. In order to ensure the long-term, sustainable, and healthy development of the country, we need to focus on the modernization of the state governance system and governance capacity in the present and the future, and at the same time pay serious attention to the big question of how to deal with national governance at the critical moment of the advent of the technological revolution and humanity’s Second Axial Age.”
 
For the world at large:

“The political form of the public-private divide needs to be revisited, the idea of political equilibrium needs to be rethought, the political participation of citizens needs to be expanded, and the relationship between politics and non-politics needs to be redefined. In general, ‘the political decision-making process can no longer be understood as consisting of a few wise men or leaders, whose rationality goes unquestioned, even if it is necessary to suppress the wishes and ‘irrational resistance’ of those affiliated institutions, interest groups, and citizen groups, which is the imposition or enforcement of some pre-determined model. The articulation of procedures and decision-making processes, and the implementation of these decisions, must be understood as a process of collective action, and this implies collective learning and collective creation even in the best of cases.
 
However, this means that the official decision-making authority of the political system will be necessarily decentralized. The political-administrative system can no longer be the sole and central site of political practice. With democratization, networks of agreement and participation, negotiation, reinterpretation, and possible resistance are formed across formal horizontal and vertical structures of authoritativeness and competence.’ This is an overview of the changing political dynamics in risk societies, where centralized models of governance need to give way to democratic models of governance…
 
For a decentralized body politic, the key to this adjustment is to further strengthen the governance objectives of respecting human values, protecting human freedom, defending human creativity, and enhancing human development. For a centralized body politic, the key is to shift from using technology as a means to control people to using technology for the benefit of the people and promoting human values. Therefore, the purely efficient orientation of national governance needs to be corrected; the mechanisms of freedom, democracy, rule of law, and justice in national governance must be established.”
 
From this perspective, Ren’s focus on artificial intelligence permits him to call on China (and the world) to make thorough-going reforms to their political practices to save and strengthen democracy and social justice throughout the world (indeed, if Ren’s concerns about AI are sincere—and why should we doubt him?—China’s lack of property rights seems like small beer).  In this light, it is possible that Ren’s change in tone, and tune, between 2012 and 2020 is a result of the natural evolution of his intellectual concerns, and not self-censure due to Xi Jinping’s reimposition of ideological discipline.  Or it could be a combination of the two.  One thing that struck me in reading Ren’s work from 2012 was the very high level of abstraction, which can be a way to remain above the fray.  His work in 2020 is even more abstract, focused as it is on the as yet nonexistent real world effects of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the exercise of public policy.
 
That said, even if abstraction is in some sense a refuge, a protection, and even if Ren Jiantao largely abandoned the defense of property rights and criticism of Soviet-style socialism that characterized his corpus of writings in 2012, the overall tone and content of his writings in 2020 do not suggest anything like the abandonment of Ren’s independent voice.  He indeed may have put a bit of water in his wine, but he nonetheless remains an engaged public intellectual committed to giving his opinions on the important issues facing China and the world, without singing the praises of Xi Jinping or Xi Jinping thought, from a perspective that is more often than not critical, if still professional and academic.
 
Interested readers are welcome to peruse the 37 additional essays on Ren’s Aisixiang page covering the years between 2012 and 2020, to try to tease out the natural evolution of Ren’s thought over time, but I confess to needing a temporary break from the dubious pleasures of reading social science research in Chinese. 
 
Summary of Ren Jiantao’s Writings in 2020

Ren Jiantao, “Artificial Intelligence and Social Control 人工智能与社会控制,” posted to Aisixiang on February 23, 2020, originally published in Humanities Magazine  人文杂志 in the first issue of 2020.

In this long text, Ren essentially argues that while artificial intelligence can help to achieve the aims of social control, it is not a panacea and indeed can be counterproductive if not guided by human intelligence and proper values.  Somewhat ironically, Ren argues, artificial intelligence enhances social control mainly when a society has already achieved a basic balance; in societies where state power is viewed by citizens as excessive or intrusive, artificial intelligence often increases suspicions, and in societies where disorder reigns, artificial intelligence is rarely helpful (it may indeed help those engaged in disruption, as during the Color Revolutions in the Middle East).  And since societies always cycle between states of relative order and disorder, requiring frequent adjustments in state social control strategy, over-reliance on artificial intelligence—a clear temptation, and not only for authoritarian regimes—must be resisted.  Ren’s final paragraph offers a helpful summary of his argument:

“A well-ordered society is one that is based on fairness and justice. ‘A society is well-ordered when it not only aims to advance the interests of its members, but is also effectively regulated by a communal view of justice…[In such societies] although people may make excessive demands on each other, they nonetheless share a common point of view, and their demands can be adjudicated accordingly. While people's attachment to their own interests makes them necessarily wary of one another, their common sense of justice still makes solid cooperation possible...We can think of a communal vision of justice as constituting the basic charter of a well-ordered human association.’ In short, a well-ordered society is a real social form, much to be desired, founded on differential cooperation, stabilized on the cornerstone of a common vision of justice, and strongly sustained by the bonds of civic friendship. Such a society is obviously not one that can be directly designed and effectively maintained by the programs of artificial intelligence. Such a society can only be constructed and sustained by human intelligence. But AI provides certain technological supports that can greatly optimize human control in practical matters of social control in specific areas…In this regard, the integration of human intelligence and artificial intelligence for the purpose of constructing a well-ordered society is a good solution to problems of higher-order social control.”
 
Ren’s tone throughout the text is more neutral—if not necessarily optimistic—than I would expect many Western authors to be when writing on the dangers of the use of artificial intelligence in social control.   Of course there is a broad range of “Western” opinion, and this is not a topic on which I claim to be well-read; that said, Western commentary on the use of AI for social control in China is almost uniformly critical.   Ren does, nonetheless, cite Chinese critics, such as the criminologist Lao Dongyuan, on these dangers, but does not mention Xinjiang, the current focus of Western concerns concerning China’s use of artificial intelligence for social control.
 
Ren Jiantao, “Moral Idealism:  The Political Logic of Chinese Diplomacy 道义理想主义：中国外交的政治逻辑,” posted to Aisixiang on March 25, 2020, originally published in Studies of Party and Government 党政研究, in the second issue of 2020.

In this long text, Ren argues that China needs to rethink its traditional diplomatic logic, which is driven by moral idealism, and arrive at a more realistic posture in which national interests and moral idealism achieve a healthier equilibrium.  The abstract gives the flavor of the text:

“Chinese diplomacy presents a logic of moral idealism. Following the logic of the evolution of China's own political history, we see a trajectory of change from closed-door autarky to open-door development.  Observing the evolution of China’s diplomatic thinking, we see the moral orientation of a weak player forced to accept power politics, as well as a moral logic of strength based on China’s self-identification as a great power on the rise. These are inverse sides of the same logic. The deep priority accorded to moral ideas in Chinese diplomacy makes the development of a skillful diplomacy difficult. This is the result of the moral factors that rigidly dominate China's diplomacy. If Chinese diplomacy is to keep pace with the country's rapid development, it must bid farewell to this politicized stalemate.  Only when we stop applying the logic of domestic politics, and particularly decisions based on ideology, directly to the diplomatic realm, will we arrive at a rational form of diplomatic thought, enabling us to truly present a new diplomatic face that will be artful and intelligent.”

Ren identifies two sources of moral idealism in Chinese diplomacy.  One is the historical Confucian belief in the “Kingly Way” in which virtue trumps all else.  The other is China’s fate in the modern era as a down-trodden victim of Western bullying, which led to moral outrage while China was in a posture of weakness, and has carried over to a posture of benevolence toward the developing world after China “stood up.”  As examples of this benevolence, Ren cites Mao Zedong’s Three Worlds theory, as well as various initiatives undertaken since reform and opening, including One Belt-One Road.  Ren is not arguing that China should adopt the “Way of the Hegemon” in which it seeks to maximize its advantage on every occasion, but rather that China should recalibrate its diplomacy so that domestic politics do not decide diplomatic overtures.

I find Ren’s argument frustratingly abstract.  He provides few concrete examples of China’s moral diplomacy, and says nothing at all about the fact that, in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, China’s diplomacy is hardly characterized by either idealism or morality.  Ren makes no mention of Sino-Australian relations, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, Taiwan, Chinese hacking or United Front activities throughout the world…Of course, Americans like to think of themselves as practicing “moral diplomacy,” a claim that provokes howls of derision throughout much of the rest of the world.  Perhaps Ren’s text is an example of a natural national blindness in matters of diplomacy? 

Ren’s text also stands out for its full-throated endorsement of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which he describes as the wave of the world’s future.  This is in stark contrast with his dismissal of China’s reform experiment in 2012. 

Ren Jiantao, “Constraining Tendencies toward Romanticism in Village Governance 克制乡村治理中的浪漫主义冲动,” posted to Aisixiang on April 2, 2020, originally published in the Scholarly Journal of Hubei Minzu University 湖北民族大学学报, in the first issue of 2020.

This essay addresses China’s “three rural issues:”  agriculture, villages, and farmers.  Ren argues that the modernization of China’s rural governance will be a long, pain-staking process, and that China must resist three forms of “romanticism:”  the romanticization of power, i.e., the idea that the transformation of China’s rural areas will be accomplished by a great “campaign” led from on high; the romanticization of traditional Chinese village life, based on family farming and intense labor inputs; and finally, the romanticization of China’s collectivist posture under Mao, much celebrated for ideological reasons, but less successful in material terms.  Debate of the fate of Chinese rural life is a perennial theme in China, often debated by Chinese intellectuals, although what precisely prompted Ren’s essay is not clear, nor does he offer concrete solutions to the problems China’s villages and villagers face.

Ren Jiantao, et.al., “Reflections on May Fourth:  Rebalancing China and the West, the Present and the Past 反思“五四”:  中西古今关系再平衡,” posted to Aisixiang on May 9, 2020, originally published in Literature, History, and Philosophy 文史哲 in the final issue of 2019, number 20196.

This text is more celebratory than scholarly, as Ren, together with other scholars, reflects on the historical importance of the May Fourth movement on its 101st anniversary.  Ren’s contribution is basically descriptive, but his conclusion is that the May Fourth movement saved the Republic, which had been mired in corrupt party politics and undercurrents of imperial restoration, by “calling on the nation” through its attacks on the cultural tradition.  Ren mentions in passing that his understanding of the May Fourth differs from that of the cultural conservatives who are attempting to say “farewell to revolution” by depicting the May Fourth as an historical mistake, but his text remains more an exercise in civic patriotism than in scholarship or polemics.

Ren Jiantao, “Rethinking the Ideal of Indigenizing the Chinese Social Sciences 重思中国社会科学的本土化理想,” posted on Aisixiang on May 14, 2020, originally published in Guangzhou University Scholarly Journal:  Social Science Edition 广州大学学报：社会科学版 in the 3rd issue of 2020.

In this article, Ren revisits the seemingly timeless dilemma of the indigenization of the Chinese Social Sciences.  Ren lays out the basic terms of the dilemma clearly:  the social sciences came from the West, their methodologies and research objectives shaped by the Western environment, which was quite different from the environment in China.  Thus from the very beginning, the need to adapt, or sinicize, or indigenize, the social sciences made itself felt, and for obvious reasons.  Some changes were relatively basic, although they probably took time to implement:  as one example, during the Republican period, the Tsinghua University Department of Political Science stopped teaching in English and using English-language textbooks.  But a more thorough indigenization proved more difficult.  Using Chinese empirical data was an obvious and necessary step, but these data were not always identical to the Western equivalents, which meant that the conclusions drawn from the data required local readings.  And here, the question social scientists asked themselves was:  are we running social science experiments in China for the benefit of Western social science?  And if so, why? 

Clearly, the goal needs to be to construct a Chinese social science that will correspond to Chinese realities and sociopolitical goals, but that will also be rigorous enough to earn respect from the West and be considered part of “universal social science.”  This is easier said than done, particularly since, with China’s rise, political  pressures are brought to bear on social scientists to sing the praises of China’s model, which undermines claims to scientific universality.  Ren rightly points to the success of Chinese social scientists working in the West as sources of hope and inspiration (because they can, if they wish, more readily escape the China/West binary which hangs heavy in China), but his abstract (which indeed is quite “abstract”) illustrates the difficult China’s social scientists face:

“The social sciences in China are imported goods, brought in by a number of scholars who studied in Europe and the United States, who established values, academic norms and research communities corresponding to the modern changes in Chinese society. The goal of research in the social sciences is to reveal the face of the society in which the researcher lives, and which means that Chinese social science must embark on a long journey in pursuit of indigenization. However, the difficulties of indigenization over the past century have prompted a reflection on the appropriateness of this goal. This article argues that Chinese social science needs to establish two highly interrelated research goals: one is a universal principle stipulating that social science will obey scientific logic, and the second is a falsifiable social science research paradigm based on Chinese experience.   These goals will attempt to navigate between the ideals of the indigenization of the social sciences as a paradigm and indigenization as data collection and description, and on this basis leave behind anxieties about the influence of Western social sciences, pointing Chinese social sciences in the direction of a rigorous social science.”
 
It is not clear what prompted Ren to write this article, which is quite abstract and general, focused mainly on the pioneering Chinese social scientists of the Republican period, and engages little if at all with contemporary Chinese social science or with other thinkers (and there are many) that have dealt with the problem of the indigenization of social sciences of knowledge in China in general.
  
Ren Jiantao, “Looking for Old Books  我的淘书记行,” posted on Aisixiang on May 18, 2020, excerpted from Ren’s book On Books:  Reading Books, Savoring People, Perusing the World 书缘：读书·品人·阅世相 (2020).

This text is a charming description of one of Ren’s hobbies—looking for old books in bookstores in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Taibei.  Its content is not relevant to my concerns in this exercise.

Ren Jiantao, “Contemporary Chinese Understanding of ‘International:’  To Be Integrated into the ‘World?’ or to Relaunch ‘Tianxia?’ 当代中国的国际理念：融入 ‘世界’，抑或重启’天下’？” posted on Aisixiang on September 15, 2020, originally published in the Scholarly Journal of Shanxi Normal University:  Social Science Edition山西师大学报（社会科学版）in the 5th issue of 2020.

In yet another lengthy essay (one starts to wonder if Ren is perhaps paid by the page…), Ren returns to the theme of China’s relationship to the world by engaging with the philosopher Zhao Tingyang’s (b. 1961) well-known “tianxia system.”  Zhao argues that the current “world order,” based on sovereign nation-states pursuing their own interests in a dog-eat-dog world, has been a disaster, and suggests that China’s traditional notion of tianxia might serve as an alternative, particularly since contemporary China’s rise to great power status means that China now speaks with a louder voice in international affairs.  Tianxia essentially refers to Chinese “universalism” in the period prior to the arrival of the West.  Zhao Tingyang construes this order as having been essentially moral and hierarchical, and consisting of a number of concentric circles with China at the center, but movement from circle to circle was possible (by acquiring “civilization,” which meant becoming human, or becoming Chinese) and the “borders” separating people were porous.  Zhao’s work is available in English; for those interested in a critical if somewhat sympathetic overview, see Part Three of Liang Zhiping’s “Imagining Tianxia” on this site. 

Consistent with the views he put forth in his piece on China’s moral diplomacy, Ren is basically critical of Zhao, for the same reasons as are most of Zhao’s critics:  there is no proof that anything like the tianxia system every really existed; China does not currently practice the tianxia system in its relations with its “internal others” or its external neighbors, and China’s history is full of violent conflict between China and peoples at her borders; how one might convince the countries of the world to sacrifice their national interests to a hierarchical, moral order governed by Chinese benevolence is at best a riddle.  Ren insists that, at least since the beginning of the period of reform and opening, the current dog-eat-dog international order has served China fairly well, which suggests that investment in that world might be more profitable than championing the diplomatic equivalent of Esperanto (my metaphor, not Ren’s).

Indeed, Ren uses this argument to suggest that China still has much to learn from the West, which allows him to return to the China-critical stance that dominated his scholarly production in 2012: 
 
“The growth of China's hard power is precisely the result of engaging with the real world of existing international society. This is first of all a conclusion based on the established facts of China's development; at the same time, it will also be a crucial pillar in China's further development. Zhao Tingyang’s arguments about the pertinence of tianxia are grounded in China’s development, but the rapid rise of China's economy today is the result of having learned from the modern West. Western countries might see this as a process of China become Westernized, but in China's eyes, it is a process of creative learning…and it is undeniable that this process is still ongoing. In other words, China has not yet fundamentally freed itself from its status as a student of the modern West. In part, China needs to continue to study the West to avoid creating a ‘bad’ market economy. Moreover, in terms of the construction of the rule of law, the political system, and social organization, China's state-building efforts remain far from the construction of a platform of modernity. This is precisely why the Party center has repeatedly called for the modernization of the national governance system and governance capabilities, from the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee….Even if China has blazed a unique path of economic development, its frame of reference will remain the developed Western countries. The idea that China will supplant the West is not as good as the China’s current win-win relationship with the West.”
 
Ren Jiantao, “Bringing the State Back In:  The Triumphant Return of the State to Global Governance 找回国家：全球治理中的国家凯旋,” posted to Aisixiang on September 17, 2020, originally published in Exploration and Debate 探索与争鸣 in the 3rd issue of 2020.

In this long, meandering piece, Ren argues that the state is currently reassuming its role in governance after a half-century in which the institutions of “global governance” have had the upper hand.  To me, this discussion of “global governance” is a straw man; Ren draws on literature like Kenichi Ohmae’s The End of the Nation State, which was published in 1996 and which was discussing the rise regional economies, which in my reading was part of a wave of concern that “global corporations” were taking over the world.  My impression is that this conflates “globalization” with “global governance,” which Ren also does in his text.

In any event, Ren approvingly cites Trump’s Make America Great Again and Boris Johnson’s Brexit as examples of reaction to fears of global governance, which they certainly are.  Here and there in the text Ren returns to his familiar theme from 2012 concerning the need for the proper balance between state and society, which global governance perhaps complicates, but beyond this general observation, it is not quite clear why Ren wrote this piece of what his conclusion is.  A piece on global governance and the state, published in the fall of 2020, which makes no mention of the coronavirus, of the WHO, or of China’s (or the US’s) response to the pandemic, is a mystery to me.

Ren Jiantao, “An Ounce of Prevention:  The Technological Revolution and Great Changes to State Governance 曲突徙薪：技术革命与国家治理大变局,” posted to Aisixiang on September 30, 2020, originally published in Jiangsu Social Sciences 江苏社会科学 in the 5th issue of 2020.

This article focuses on how the state needs to respond to the great technological revolution underway, by which Ren means largely AI-driven technologies.  A full translation of the text is available here.

Ren’s argument is that the implications both of Einstein’s theory of relativity as well as more recent, AI-driven technologies, will fundamentally alter the way governments function.  At present, the science of good governance is dominated by practices developed in the world of business, grounded in considerations of efficiency, and calculated on the basis of certainty.  The uncertainty implicit in the newer science and newer technologies will bring new risks to what many already consider to be a “risk society,” calling into question the very basis of how the tasks and finalities of governance are understood.  These risks exist at multiple levels:  in the everyday management of the economy and society, in international competition…Ren is particularly focused on the difficulty states will have in striking a balance between making use of new technologies, wedded as they are to the comforts of a “modernity” they think they master, and avoiding the siren call of the overuse of the technologies, rendering the states dependent and passive.

The solution Ren proposes, consistent with arguments he makes throughout 2020 (and earlier), is a fundamental democratic restructuring of governance and politics:

“From a socio-political perspective, ‘risks depend on decisions. Industries produce risks, and in this sense they are politically reflexive.’ This means that the political form of the public-private divide needs to be revisited, the idea of political equilibrium needs to be rethought, the political participation of citizens needs to be expanded, and the relationship between politics and non-politics needs to be redefined. In general, ‘the political decision-making process can no longer be understood as consisting of a few wise men or leaders, whose rationality is not questioned, even if it is necessary to suppress the wishes and 'irrational resistance' of those affiliated institutions, interest groups, and citizen groups, which is the imposition or enforcement of some pre-determined model. The articulation of procedures and decision-making processes, and the implementation of these decisions, must be understood as a process of collective action, and this implies collective learning and collective creation even in the best of cases.
 
However, this means that the official decision-making authority of the political system will be necessarily decentralized. The political-administrative system can no longer be the sole and central site of political practice. With democratization, networks of agreement and participation, negotiation, reinterpretation, and possible resistance are formed across formal horizontal and vertical structures of authoritativeness and competence.’ This is an overview of the changing political dynamics in risk societies, where centralized models of governance need to give way to democratic models of governance.”
 
Ren Jiantao, “Artificial Intelligence and the Rebirth of the ‘Politics of Man,’ 人工智能与’人的政治’重生,” posted to Aisixiang on October 10, 2020, originally published in Exploration 探索 in the 5th issue of 2020.

This piece should be read together with Ren’s January 2020 text on artificial intelligence and social control, and his September 2020 piece on the technological revolution and changes to national governance.  He is surely writing a book on the subject.

There is inevitably a fair bit of repetition when writing three articles on overlapping subjects, but in this text, Ren’s focus is on the challenge artificial intelligence represents to the centrality of the “politics of man,” which he considers from any number of angles:  the fact that AI can make human beings passive, the fact that robots may attain a status similar to that of human beings, the fact that technology may blend human beings and AI-produced entities, the fact that governments may either overuse AI in pursuit of social control, or themselves be captured by AI and lose sight of the purpose of governance.  Ren insists that the only comprehensive solution to this multi-faceted challenge is democracy, which is the only way to keep politics focused on humanity.

Ren Jiantao, “Thoughts on Confucianism:  Confucians, Power, Transcendence 儒学反思：儒家·权力·超越,” posted on Aisixiang on November 12, 2020, originally published in Contemporary Confucianism 当代儒学 #18 (2020).

This is the transcription of lectures (or the written notes prepared by the speakers) by two scholars, Huang Yushun 黄玉顺 (b. 1957) a professor at Sichuan University and a major player in China’s Confucian world (at least two of his books have been translated into English—see here and here), and Ren Jiantao, offering their thoughts on Confucianism.  The lectures were presented at a bookstore in a Qingdao art museum, but are nonetheless quite scholarly in their approach and content.

The general starting point of the discussion is the perennial issue of what Max Weber called the lack of “transcendence,” in Confucian thought, which is of course related to his explanation of why Protestantism propelled the breakthrough toward capitalism and modernity while other traditions remained wedded to the past.  More concretely, Huang and Ren are addressing Mou Zongsan and Yu Yingshi’s attempts to defend Confucianism from Weber’s criticisms, and they have many interesting things so say.  That said, this is a huge debate, and has taken many twists and turns with the rise of Asian capitalism (the Four Dragons), which prompted many Chinese (and Western) thinkers to revisit Weber, Confucianism, and the rise of the West and China, as well as the rise of Mainland New Confucians, who is the past few years have consciously broken with their fellow Confucians in the Chinese diaspora (formerly seen as their teachers) in the interests of building a “New Confucianism with political characteristics” in the People’s Republic. 

While I know the general contours of this debate, I have not followed it closely, and am not sure that my appreciation of Huang and Ren’s comments would accurately reflect the nuances of what they are attempting to say.  My sense, however, is that the lectures are not a tired recycling of something the authors have been saying for years, or a mere effort to sell books (capitalism, Confucianism, and creativity can apparently coexist in China), but instead genuine efforts to deal with complex questions.  In other words, specialists in the current state of Confucianism in China might enjoy these lectures.

In terms of my present project, what struck me in reading Ren’s lecture is that, strangely enough perhaps, his discussions of Confucianism and transcendence brought out the cranky, critical side of Ren that was apparent throughout his 2012 writings, but less obvious in 2020.  One example of this are references to “crony capitalism,” a recurring theme in 2012, but which did not appear in any of Ren’s other 2020 writings available on Aisixiang.  He also links Confucianism to a version of Chinese constitutionalism, in that it had its own system of checks and balances, as he did in his 2012 text on Confucianism. 

More broadly however, Ren Jiantao chooses to discuss the theme of “Confucianism and power” (Huang Yushun perhaps having exhausted the theme of “Confucianism and transcendence, although Ren discusses this theme as well), which leads him into interesting territory as he criticizes the “sense of powerlessness in the face of power” that Confucianism’s lack of transcendence has engendered.  In Ren’s view, Confucianism needs a “breakthrough” if it is to shed this sense of powerlessness.  Some Mainland New Confucians think that the breakthrough could come from the transformation of Confucianism into a religion, a proposal that Ren criticizes in ways that recall similar comments by Xu Jilin. 

​He similarly ridicules specific proposals put forth by the very political New Confucian thinker Jiang Qing (b. 1953), who calls for a Confucian tricameral legislature to replace China’s current government bodies.  Ren concludes bluntly that “If Confucians want to launch a successful counter-attack [i.e., succeed where they have been floundering for decades]…three specific emancipations are required as substantive conditions. The first is the liberation of the individual from group-think, the second is the liberation of constitutional democracy from our current domination by a small number of powerful families, and the third is the liberation of the rule of law from arbitrary dictatorship 乾纲独断.”  This is the only kind of “transcendence” that will be meaningful if Confucianism is to have a future.