Gan Yang, "The Modernity Critique of the 1980s"

Gan Yang, “The Modernity Critique of the 1980s and the Transformation of the 1990s”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by Matthew Dean
 
Introduction
 
Gan Yang (b. 1953) is a major figure in contemporary Chinese intellectual life, a commanding (or sinister, depending on your perspective) presence since the beginning of the reform and opening era.  In the 1980s, Gan championed and ran one of two major translation projects—“Culture:  China and the World”—responsible for bringing China back into touch with Western thought and ideas after the relative isolation of the Maoist period.  Although this openness to the West  might lead one to see Gan as a liberal, the text translated here suggests the complexity of his thought and the path he has followed.  As this text clearly reveals, Gan had doubts about modernity from the outset, and indeed is best known for his proposal that China should “unify the three traditions”—Confucian personalism, Maoist pursuit of social justice, and Dengist market efficiency, in its pursuit of a uniquely Chinese modernity.
 
My name is Matthew Dean and I am very happy to be a guest translator on Reading the China Dream.  I came to Gan Yang through St. John’s College in Annapolis. After graduating from college in Boston, I moved to China to teach English. In my third year there, I watched Gan’s lecture “The Emergence of Liberal Education and Classical Studies in China” which he delivered on the 50th anniversary of St. John’s Santa Fe campus. After returning to America and receiving an MA degree from St. John’s, I decided to translate the first chapter in a collection of Gan’s writings entitled 古今中西之争, which I now present below. While translating in my spare time, I have spent the last four years teaching foreign languages and English literature to high school and college students in Annapolis and Washington, D.C., where I currently reside.
 
From Gan’s perspective, the economic and social changes of the 1980s have not made for human flourishing in 21st century China. In his words: “It seems people nowadays are all pretty astute and good at planning, but live unhappy lives.” Although more repressive and economically depressed in many ways, the 1980s allowed for more interesting thinking. Gan insists that the 1980s produced far more interesting intellectual and artistic work because of the urgency of the “search for meaning” that characterized the new China. Although frequently identified with the “New Left,” he’s clearly ambivalent about his membership in the category. As he puts it, “a lot of people wonder if I’m not New Left, and I don’t know what I am, I’m just Chinese.”
 
Gan’s critique of modernity begins in the West, but comes full circle, returning to China.  He cites T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, and Franz Kafka—all major critics of modernity who pointed out what is lost in the process—in his arguments. If the West’s inner ambivalence toward modernity can be made clear, then China can take up a more honest project of cultural rejuvenation.
 
Gan puts all of the pieces of the modernity puzzle on the table. Each current of modern thought is laid there to be examined and questioned: “The path of Confucianism, is that viable? The path of Daoism? How about the path of Confucian Daoism? Likewise, is the strain of thinking from Nietzsche to Derrida, the ‘nihilism’ of post-structuralism, viable? Are ‘hermeneutics’ from Dilthey to Gadamer useful? Again, how about the field of ‘critical theory’ from the early Frankfurt School to Habermas? And what about the path of ‘cultural conservatism’ from [Matthew] Arnold to [Daniel] Bell? All these questions ultimately reveal and compose the value problem of the entire society.” 

Gan insists that it is only by getting a “firm grip on Western culture’s understanding of the so-called question of ‘modernity’” that China can begin to pull itself out from modernity’s worst excesses: vulgarity, materialism, philistinism, and so on.   Modernity is a leveling force common across nations and cultures. It functions to level distinctions, to desecrate the environs leading to the “downfall of spiritual life”.
 
Authored by one of China’s foremost Straussians, this text will be of interest to those wishing to investigate the reception of Leo Strauss in China. “Straussian” is a term used to describe thinkers who, among other things, take classical political philosophy seriously as the best way to escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of historical relativism and scientific positivism. Gan was inspired by Strauss and his followers after becoming a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought in 1989.

Drawing inspiration also from Robert Hutchins, Gan has gone the farthest in China to champion the cause of liberal education through great books. It seems that anywhere he goes he creates, or helps to create, a great books liberal arts program. He founded the first liberal arts college in China at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, called Boya College [中山大学博雅学院]. He then helped to set up the Chongqing University Boya College [重庆大学博雅学院], modeled on the first. Most recently, he has settled in Beijing at Tsinghua University where in 2014 he founded Xinya College [清华大学新雅书院], Beijing’s first residential liberal arts college.
 
His commitment to the problems wrought by modernity is not merely theoretical, it is also theologico-political. By the establishment of institutions committed to the rediscovery of classical political philosophy East and West, and by nesting them within China’s elite universities, Gan is now hoping to shape the intellectual character of China’s ruling class.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“I mean, a huge difference between the 1980s and the 1990s is that we did what we liked to do according to personal inclinations, hobbies, or interests. We didn’t use grand rationalizations to make ourselves do what we didn’t want to do.  This was unlike the craze of the 1990s and later, when everyone began asking, ‘What are the prospects for employment? What is the market like? What are the odds of an international opening?’ This is not a matter of personal interest. It seems people nowadays are all pretty astute and good at planning, but live unhappy lives. I taught this year at a Mainland college and discovered that students now are all miserable. Already at a very young age, they are jaded, full of anxiety, overplanned, and confused while taking many courses.

Few ask themselves what they are even interested in or what they would like to do. Many students tell me that they fundamentally dislike their major. That includes those that apply to overseas universities. They don’t think about what they like either. Instead they care about applications that are likely to succeed. The life of a college student nowadays is pretty exhausting. Though it outwardly appears to be self-ruling, in truth it is precisely a ‘self’ that it lacks, and everything seems to be decided by outside circumstances.” 
 
“Westerners have a much deeper perspective on modernity than we do. They absolutely do not believe modernity and modernization are completely good, but rather that modern society has many internal problems, and since it is a society whose problems are ever compounding, they must continually criticize modern society. But we Chinese up to now have held a rather superficial view toward modernity, insofar as Chinese are often given to simply affirming modernity as absolutely good (or if there is a problem, it’s that there isn’t enough modernity) but they cannot recognize that modern society itself is a society with many problems.

Since the 1990s, for example, Chinese society has rapidly become a modern society. The problems wrought by the mass market, like the problem of the rapid expansion of wealth and poverty, the problem of an increasingly vulgar culture, are all classic problems that capitalism necessarily brings with it. Yet we are often not willing to face these problems of modern society, and rather believe that all problems are problems of an old structure, not problems of capitalism and modernity. This greatly impedes our ability to deepen our understanding of modernity, and instead we make the mistake of believing that once we’ve suddenly modernized, then all problems simply won’t exist.”
 
“In fact, all-out Westernization was of course more pronounced in the 1990s than in the 1980s, because in the 1990s everything had to be international and everyone had to speak English.  We have the incorrect impression that as long as we study China and not the West, then we have come back to China and to our tradition.  This is not at all the case, because the way we read about and study China may be completely copied from the West (even if the copying was half-assed). 

One thing that was abundantly clear in the 1990s was that the influence of Western sinology and American studies of China on our research on China was very strong.   One of the traps of the global cultural production system is that you think things are divided up so that the Chinese are working on China, when in fact the work you are doing on China is quite likely following the marching orders from the West.  You should not think that we have gotten rid of the global cultural production system just because we are researching China.  This is a pure illusion.”
 
Translation
 
The 1980s: Criticising Modernity in a Time When Modernization was Urgently Needed
 
Q: Memories of the 1980s seem popular nowadays. Sanlian Press published Zha Jianying’s The 1980s, drawing widespread interest. Recently, Shanghai Century Publications republished your book Cultural Awareness in the 1980s. Why are people looking back at the 1980s now? What is the value?
 
A: I’m not sure—what do you think? Maybe people find things more boring now, whereas the 1980s were pretty interesting.
 
As for what value it might have, I think this retrospective on the 1980s probably suggests a reflection on the 1990s and on today. Personally, I think society since the 1990s has been relatively monotonous and too focused on making money. Our entire society has had one simple criterion of judgment: whether or not something fits with economic reform, whether or not it fits with market results.

This one criterion has erased all others. In the 1980s by comparison, everywhere you looked, society was still working things out. Thinking was rather lively. Society still embraced multiple values and, and despite all the differences, there was also more tolerance. It wasn’t as narrow-minded as today, nor as utilitarian. I think people are wondering whether our society can have a little more taste and culture, and a little less commercialization and tackiness. I think this could explain the reflections on the 1980s. 
 
Q: In the preface of the second edition of your Cultural Awareness in the 1980s you say that starting in the 1990s China entered “the age of the economist” and that “the 1980s was the last age of the intellectual”. Do you think the age of intellectuals will return?
 
A: I don’t know, probably not. But there are lots of Chinese. There will always be some intellectuals, great masters focused solely on cultivation, spurning profit, “knowing it’s no use but continuing to do it”.[2]
 
Q: As one of the three representative collections of the “culture fever” of the 1980s, your editorship of the series on the West and its intellectual development from ancient to modern times, entitled “Culture: China and the World”,  focused on the translation and introduction of German and French phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, religion, the Frankfurt School, and various kinds of irrationalism. There are scholars who believe that this series is filled with worry about culture; it criticizes humanism for stealing our nature, values, and meaning over the course of modernization. When China was desperate for modernization, you brought several critiques against modernity. What was the thinking behind this?
 
A: It wasn’t that modernity called for criticism from the get-go. The origin of the critique was very simple; it was just the desire to read the books we wanted to read. Nobody questioned whether this book advanced or opposed modernization. If Chen Danqing liked to paint, he simply liked to paint. [Chen Danqing, Chinese-American painter who rose to prominence for his paintings of Tibetans in the 1980s.] He didn’t have to give a reason for it. He wouldn’t first ask whether the painting had any use for China’s modernization. If it didn’t have any bearing on modernization, he still wished to paint.

Ah Cheng wanted to read and write novels, and he wouldn’t start by wondering whether this novel benefits the modernization of China. The same went for reading philosophy. You simply read the books you liked reading. This desire did not have some sophisticated rationality: what you liked is what you liked, what you didn’t you didn’t.

For example, say we were to walk into the Peking University philosophy department. Everybody has to take an analytic philosophy class. I find all the analytic philosophy professors very good, but I do not like analytic philosophy. If somebody were to say to me that analytic philosophy’s discussion of logic attaches importance to science and therefore it benefits China’s modernization, I would consider him an absolute fool. Philosophy should not be read this way.
 
I mean, a huge difference between the 1980s and the 1990s is that we did what we liked to do according to personal inclinations, hobbies, or interests. We didn’t use grand rationalizations to make ourselves do what we didn’t want to do.  This was unlike the craze of the 1990s and later, when everyone began asking, “What are the prospects for employment? What is the market like? What are the odds of an international opening?”

This is not a matter of personal interest. It seems people nowadays are all pretty astute and good at planning, but live unhappy lives. I taught this year at a Mainland college and discovered that students now are all miserable. Already at a very young age, they are jaded, full of anxiety, overplanned, and confused while taking many courses.

Few ask themselves what they are even interested in or what they would like to do. Many students tell me that they fundamentally dislike their major. That includes those that apply to overseas universities. They don’t think about what they like either. Instead they care about applications that are likely to succeed. The life of a college student nowadays is pretty exhausting. Though it outwardly appears to be self-ruling,[3] in truth it is precisely a “self” that it lacks, and everything seems to be decided by outside circumstances. 
 
The great benefit that the 1980s gave to us might be that we didn’t study this or that because of external necessity or the market economy. Rather, it was on the basis of inner conviction that we chose the things we wanted to do. It’s not like we did not have job pressure then either. Many classmates “jumped ship”, went into business, but that didn’t affect us. Why we were interested in continental philosophy was not because this was good for finding a job in academia. All these things at that time were very simple. It was just interest and enjoyment. So the primary concern was an individual’s disposition and nature.
 
As for what we translated and introduced afterwards, it was naturally what we were interested in, or what we thought was important. Today people translate books not because they like them, but because they like money.
 
Q: People take different approaches to the 1980s. You were interviewed by Zha Jianying as one of the representative figures of the 1980s “culture fever”. In the interview, you referred several times to your thinking during the 1980s as a kind of “poetic critique toward modernity”. So is this your view looking back now? Or is this an old idea you had formed in the 1980s?
 
A: I was already very conscious of the critique of modernization by the late 1980s. The clearest formulation is in the preface of my 1988 book Cultural Awareness in Modern China, first published by Hong Kong’s Sanlian Press in 1989. This preface is clearer than the interview with Zha Jianying.  I might as well use the original words from 1988 here:
 
“Toward traditional culture, we not only have a negation, a critical aspect, but also an affirmation, a nostalgic aspect. In the same way, toward ‘modern society’ we not only have an inclination, a thirsting aspect, at the same time we also have a sort of deep doubt and uncanny feeling. I believe this sort of confusing, ineffable, and contradictory experience will perplex us for a long time, and will pressure us modern scholars--or at least some of us--to hold a ‘two-front war’ attitude: not only continuing to criticize traditional culture, but also continuing to scrutinize modern society with a critical eye. How to deal with the relationship between these two aspects, in my opinion, is now the central task of reflection on culture. From now on, the development of Chinese culture will mostly locate itself in this confused jigsaw puzzle.”
 
Q: How did you already hold this view in 1988? How did this doubt and uncertainty toward modern society arise? How did you ultimately view “modern society” at that time?
 
A: My 1988 preface already gives you an answer. This preface directly addresses the modernity question.
 
“The modernity question will become a central question for intellectuals now thinking about China’s road to modernization, because it means that the progress of modernization is not the triumphant fulfillment of a set of positive values, rather one that simultaneously carries with it great negative values. And the most perplexing thing is that, at least in the West, these obverse and reverse values are not something that can be cut apart into two, but on the contrary share a deep inner connection.

To simplify a bit, freedom, democracy, law, all fundamentally good values, can only freely take root within commodifying societies. However, the commodification of everything, because it shatters traditional society, inevitably creates a sort of ‘extinction’ of any appreciation for the divine. Hence, commodification almost inevitably leads to a person’s (especially a susceptible intellectual’s) rootlessness and boredom.

Commodifying society’s almost inescapable phenomena of material worship and materialization, and awareness of these phenomena as well as the flood of mass culture, lead an intellectual to witness the downfall of spiritual life in modern society and the collapse of the grounding of its values. This is the greatest dilemma that a human being in a modern society faces. In my view, since modern times, especially since the beginning of this century, the central concerns of all great Western thinkers have in fact focused on this fundamental problem. Therefore we must get a firm grip on Western culture’s understanding of the so-called question of ‘modernity’, the essential problem facing all humanity.”
 
This is how I conceived of the problem of modernity at that time.
 
Q: Reading your 1988 preface is a little shocking, since your work on alerting people to this problem back then seems better fit to voice the concerns of people today. Is your present view of this problem continuous with your view in 1988?
 
A: My view now is the same as it was in the 1988 preface, where I said,
 
“In terms of China’s present situation, the complexity of the problem lies in the fact that, on the one hand, modern society’s positive values (freedom, democracy, law) still have not been truly implemented, but on the other hand, modern society’s negative values (materialism and mass culture) are felt more strongly every day. And in the sliver of space between these two an intellectual ekes out an existence, and knows all between heaven and earth cannot escape.[4]

Modern Chinese intellectuals are forced to carry out a ‘two-front war’ for the very same reason. Hence begins the second part of the ‘modernity’ question: intellectuals act as the primary creators of culture and values, as their porters. But on what should the ultimate values of a self be founded? In other words, what thinking and values should characterize the intellectual? The path of Confucianism, is that viable? The path of Daoism? How about the path of Confucian Daoism?

Likewise, is the strain of thinking from Nietzsche to Derrida, the ‘nihilism’ of post-structuralism, viable? Are ‘hermeneutics’ from Dilthey to Gadamer useful? Again, how about the field of ‘critical theory’ from the early Frankfurt School to Habermas? And what about the path of ‘cultural conservatism’ from [Matthew] Arnold to [Daniel] Bell? All these questions ultimately reveal and compose the value problem of the entire society.

This is also to say that, in terms of old convictions, after the intellectual pursuits of old have already been proven fruitless, which was the despair of the Red Guards and Sent-Down Youth, would we or could we be the founders of new, authentic convictions and intellectual pursuits? This isn’t just an important issue for China after the Cultural Revolution, but also for the West. Since modern times, and especially in the last few decades, it has been a massive problem affecting people. Thinking deeply about this problem will doubtless be an extremely long and difficult path.”
 
I still believe we must face the problem of deriving value and ideals in culture. At the same time, the things propagated by the contemporary West require us to do a deep, critical examination, otherwise we’re just blindly following the wind.
 
Q: Might we put it this way: you began reading Heidegger in the 1980s, encountering the tradition of Western criticism of modernity, which directly influences your focus today? 
 
A: The tradition of Western criticism of modernity is not only a Heideggerian question, but is rather the common intellectual problem of several centuries of Western intellectuals. Not very many of today’s youth have read the poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot was generally acknowledged to be the Anglo-American world’s cultural spokesman in the first half of the twentieth century. His well-known poem “The Wasteland” and Heidegger’s most famous work, Being and Time, both came out around the same time. Not to read Eliot’s “Wasteland” is not to be able to understand the fundamental state of cultural thought in Western modernity.

The meaning of this title “The Wasteland” is that modernity has taken hold of Western culture and transformed it into a “wasteland”. Modernity has transformed the West into a spiritual wasteland, a cultural wasteland. The first line of the poem is quite shocking, “April is the cruellest month”. What does this mean? April should be the return of spring to the world. It is the most flourishing month; but after Western modernity, the world in the month of April is a tract of barren land without water, life, or spirit, only abounding in the unabashed lusts of modern men.
 
This is not simply to say that we must oppose modernization from the outset, but rather that after you read a bit more Western literature of this sort, you will very naturally begin thinking, “Why would the greatest Western thinkers and poets have this sort of highly critical attitude toward Western modernity? Why does the West itself have this kind of anti-modernity cultural tradition, a tradition of self-criticism that criticizes modernity? And what is the relationship between these ideas of Western culture and us Chinese people thinking about modernity and modernization?”
 
Q: Could you talk a little bit about what the relationship is between these ideas of Western culture and how we Chinese people are thinking about modernity and modernization now?
 
A: To put it rather simply, Westerners have a much deeper perspective on modernity than we do. They absolutely do not believe modernity and modernization are completely good, but rather that modern society has many internal problems, and since it is a society whose problems are ever compounding, they must continually criticize modern society. But we Chinese up to now have held a rather superficial view toward modernity, insofar as Chinese are often given to simply affirming modernity as absolutely good (or if there is a problem, it’s that there isn’t enough modernity) but they cannot recognize that modern society itself is a society with many problems.

Since the 1990s, for example, Chinese society has rapidly become a modern society. The problems wrought by the mass market, like the problem of the rapid expansion of wealth and poverty, the problem of an increasingly vulgar culture, are all classic problems that capitalism necessarily brings with it. Yet we are often not willing to face these problems of modern society, and rather believe that all problems are problems of an old structure, not problems of capitalism and modernity. This greatly impedes our ability to deepen our understanding of modernity, and instead we make the mistake of believing that once we’ve suddenly modernized, then all problems simply won’t exist. 
 
Again, many people believe that if we first work on the economy, culture will naturally follow. Nothing could be farther from the truth! Hong Kongers used to say that Hong Kong is an economically developed culture desert, and Singapore is a bigger economically developed culture desert. Might we also become an even bigger economically developed culture desert? There is a huge difference between the university students of today and my generation. Students today are generally cultureless, not well read, rather poor in intellectual sensibility, not to mention in their writing. Their writings are the insufferable whinings of the petit bourgeoisie.

I wonder, how did “petit bourgeois” become a positive term in the 1990s? “Petit bourgeois” is low class, low class is philistine, so how did everybody mistake the philistine for the honorable? To the contrary! Many people mount quite the defense for philistinism and say modernity requires vulgarity: no vulgarity, no modernity. This is an extremely shallow viewpoint. The popularity of this viewpoint has caused our society since the 1990s to become more and more insufferably vulgar, where vulgarity is not a humiliation, but an honor. All these problems must be examined from the point of view of modernity.
 
Q: To go back a bit, why were the 1980s able to manifest a “culture fever”? The culture fever of that time seemed not to be only the purview of a few intellectuals, but became a larger social phenomenon. Why was “culture” at that time able to become the key word?
 
A: You could call the 1980s the decade of the search for culture, though really it had several stages. The Cultural Revolution had just finished at the start of the 1980s. Everyone felt strongly that they didn’t have culture. We “Educated Youth” especially felt this way. An Educated Youth was a person without culture. What is referred to as an Educated Youth is not fit to be called an intellectual; he might be literate, but he has no culture. We all  felt very strongly then that not only did we ourselves lack culture, but all of China lacked culture. This feeling was very apparent in the interviews with Ah Cheng and Chen Danqing.

But because culture was lacking, everybody began “searching” for culture. If you weren’t willing to search in this way, culture wouldn’t develop. But everyone’s search method wasn’t the same. For example, Ah Cheng seemed to quickly discover his own source of culture: Chinese Daoism, folk culture, and so on. By the beginning of the 1980s, he seemed to have already completely matured. This is very rare. For most people, the course of this search is relatively long and arduous.

At that time most people focused their search on Western culture because we had been isolated from the West for so long. We could finally read Western books once the Cultural Revolution was over. So the second phase of the 1980s resembled a “Second May 4th”. You also had many people who believed that the reason China wasn’t modernized was because the “Chinese cultural tradition” was problematic. So they used Western culture as the instrument by which to criticize China’s cultural heritage, and this became the main current of the “culture fever” by the mid 1980s. But at the same time, because we were the ones who increasingly discovered the inherent problems of the West from reading Heidegger and others, although fiercely opposed to tradition in some respect, we nevertheless focused even more on trying to understand the inherent problem of Western modernity.

Personally speaking, 1985-1986 was a period that suggested to me that “the strongest method of carrying on tradition is opposing tradition.”[5] But matters had already changed by 1987-1988. My 1987 publication “From a Critique of Reason to a Critique of Culture” pointed out Western culture’s criticism of modernity. Also, 1988’s “Confucianism and Modernity” completely affirmed Confucianism and the Chinese cultural tradition. It was a clear defence of “cultural conservatism”.
           
So the brief “culture fever” of the 1980s was full of twists and turns, and underwent a few stages. The culture fever of the 1980s was precisely not the sort of unanimous rejection of tradition and total Westernization that many people commonly believe. First, in the throes of the “culture fever” many people had already turned toward traditional Chinese culture. The “Xungen (seeking roots) Movement 寻根文学流派” among authors and the Confucian School in academia were already fully formed, although they weren’t in the mainstream discourse at the time.

Second, in reading the West there emerged two possibilities. One was that, in some people’s eyes, Western modernity was wholly a good thing and entirely correct. So they rather simply used this form of “the West” to condemn “China”. The other possible interpretation, which we stood by, was the critique of Heidegger and others against Western modernity. His was a much more complex problem that empowered us to critique Western modernity. But this sort of modernity critique in the 1980s was a “criticism of a view of culture”, so I labeled it the “1980s poetic critique against modernity”.
 
Q: Did the River Elegy incident influence the conclusion of the culture debate?[6]
 
A: Well, River Elegy premiered in 1988, and we didn’t like it very much. But there was a very annoying problem: the government had levelled criticism against it, politicizing it to criticize it, which put us in a difficult spot. If there hadn’t been any official criticism, then there would have certainly been debate, because we did not agree with River Elegy’s point of view. In fact, I had criticized River Elegy directly when I was lecturing in Hong Kong in 1988. River Elegy quite simplistically determines the East-West boundaries in terms of yellow culture and blue culture,[7] which had a very propagandistic effect, and did not deepen but simplified the debate.
 
Q: When Li Tuo[8] talks about the dilemma of the New Enlightenment movement, he says that it was confronting a big intellectual change in the world of the humanities. Major innovations like post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, and feminism started to flourish.  The New Enlightenment mainstream did not pay any attention to this intellectual shift, but rather turned its attention toward the classics (like Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in philosophy; Croce in aesthetics; Weber in social science) and created a schism that naturally led to a certain superficiality. Do you think this makes sense?
 
A: I am not sure what Li Tuo means, but if he believes that the introduction of things like post-colonialism and feminism wasn’t also a schism, then I have no idea what to say. This sort of rhetoric is totally wrong. I believe the great thing about the 1980s lies in the fact that we did not simply follow America, nor did we simply import what was “popular” in the West. It wasn’t “Oh, America is criticizing Heidegger, so we’ll criticize him too.” We just used our own heads to think through questions. Unlike nowadays, when everyone wants to “get on the international track,” the Western works we were reading and the problems we were thinking about were actually related.

After the mid-1980s when Heidegger was beginning to be translated and widely read in China, it was then that Americans began criticizing Heidegger from a political perspective. But we weren’t interested in the way the Americans were criticizing him, and I even now don’t find it deserving of much attention. Those Americanized political criticisms of Heidegger are all third-rate caricatures. They attempted to use politics to erase the depth of Heidegger’s questioning. It’s pretty clumsy thinking.
 
We did not import post-colonialism in the 1980s and, no matter how brilliant it thinks it is, we had no need to import it. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Columbia professor Lydia Liu once asked me whether post-colonial theory made any sense in China. I responded that it made no sense at all in China, but rather only in India, Africa, and those countries whose intellectuals endured long term colonial rule, because they had lost their own culture.

They attended Western universities not knowing who they were. Yet, I have to emphasize, we still must have our own critical viewpoint toward post-colonialism. We can’t just blindly follow what they’re doing in the West. On Western university campuses, the majority of those who do post-colonial studies are known to be a bit of a nuisance and they have virtually nothing to do with the lives of the colonized. They do not warrant our serious consideration.
 
As a real postcolonial problem, by comparison, a profound and classic problem was the “Jewish problem” in the 19th century. The so-called “Jewish problem” was a problem of modernity. It was the problem of the political freedom of the Jews after the French Revolution. This problem emerged for the first time after France gave Jews civil rights, because the price of this sort of political freedom was that Jews had to relinquish their traditional religious identity and become “individuals,” citizens of modern European nations. It was also necessary for Jews to integrate into mainstream Christian society and abandon their own Jewish identity.

The first modern Jews accepted this “cultural levelling”, and craved acceptance and assimilation. But Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” represents the fervent anti-levelling sentiment toward the culture of Jewish intellectuals after the 19th century. The “four impossibilities of writing” proposed by Kafka are the most heartbreaking expression of the loss of one’s own cultural tradition and mother tongue. A whole generation of Jews had already fallen out of touch with Jewish tradition and were unable to use Hebrew to write, expressing themselves only in German.

Kafka suggests that German Jews were facing “four impossibilities of writing”: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently, all of which came together to create the fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing.  Jewish thinkers for an entire generation or two after Kafka, from Benjamin to Levinas and Derrida, all were trapped by this problem of the impossibility of writing. But the popular post-colonial discussion on American campuses today absolutely does not in any sense contain a genuine cultural concern, to say nothing of the genuine pain of 1960s African intellectuals like Fanon. It’s just whiny political correctness, and does not warrant our serious attention. 
 
Q: How did this poetic critique evolve later on?
 
A: After beginning development of the market economy in the 1990s, social life and cultural life quickly became commodified and marketized. Any standpoint which criticized capitalist utilitarianism from a cultural angle, along with any awareness and recognition of a problem, completely disappeared in China. The 1994 debate over the spirit of the humanities[9] was the last attempt to raise this question, but the suggestion was dismissed out of hand and everyone asked, “Why are you blathering on about the spirit of the humanities? What year do you think this is?”

One of the senses you got at that time was that everyone was struck dumb. The marketization of the 1990s was so merciless and ferocious a blow to society, and used few very simplified standards to bowl over and eradicate so much that wherever you looked, our culture was in an aphasic state.

Why debate the spirit of the humanities? Where will that get you? The reason is very simple. Before the marketization began in earnest, everyone thought that if total marketization were completed, then everything would generally be better. In cultural terms, there should be more people reading literature, and there should be more people turning toward a higher life. Nobody thought marketization would bring vulgarization with it. So in the 1990s, for a long time one was unable to criticize the market, since to criticize the market was considered to be counter-revolutionary and anti-modern. This left us without words.
 
Q: What were the circumstances under which people criticized your criticism of modernity? Was that during the debate in 1997?
 
A: Actually these criticisms were not necessarily bad. Several were quite natural and understandable. For example there were some who thought, “What’s the use of these things? We want to modernize. By introducing these criticisms of modernity, you disrupt our goal of modernization. Why don’t you all go do economics?” But we thought this way of thinking was a mistake. The distinctive character of the 1990s was its monotony. For a good period of time, economic reform acted as the blunt and utilitarian standard of judgment on all questions. Everything that did not fit with market criteria had to be destroyed.

The 1990s used a very mechanical metric to imagine society. But this was misguided because only by maintaining a cultural and humane standpoint does our modernization improve. Only then can society have its economic reforms and its open market without resorting to cruelty. Only then will we know that economic profit is not the noblest end and that economic development actually accords with higher goals: the creation of better human beings, distributing wealth more equitably, providing greater opportunities for education, and training better bred people. Insisting on this kind of culture will not only not impede modernization, it is the indispensable factor to healthy modernization.
 
The 1990s: An Inevitable Debate
 
Q: Getting to the changes of the intellectual world in the 1990s, nearly everybody seemed to want to take up the divorce of academic disciplines from thinking as such, the divorce of the humanistic spirit from popular attitudes, and the divorce of the New Left from liberalism. On the problem of the first divorce, Li Zehou [李泽厚 a giant of philosophy scholarship who was imprisoned and whose works were banned after the Tiananmen massacre] summarized it as “the distinction of the academics and the extinction of the thinkers.” Can I ask you how you understand this expression?
 
A: Thinking and academics are certainly not antithetical. Nor can it be said that the 1990s lacked any and all thought, or else how could the debate appear between the New Left and the Liberals? What this probably describes is the image of the intellectuals during the early 1990s. I wasn’t in the country at the time so I’m not sure. More strictly speaking, the so-called opposition of disciplines and thinking is a false question. A true academic pursuit definitely expresses some form of thinking, otherwise what is it doing? True thinking will find expression by some form of study, or else it isn’t thinking[10].

It’s hard to say what the situation of China after the 1990s was. It seems like it had two states of affairs. There were those who did not think, therefore they flaunted their academic credentials, although their academic credentials may not have been very good. There were also people who did not study, therefore they flaunted their thinking, although they really had no thoughts, only some common opinions. This sort of problem doesn’t have huge importance, or necessitate debate.
 
Q: In her book The 1980s, Zha Jianying quotes Chen Pingyuan, professor of Chinese Literature at Peking University, on a “classic Gan Yang remark”:  “I dare to converse with first-rate scholars, but dare not discuss questions with second-rate scholars, because first-rate scholars talk about ideas and standpoints, which I already have; second-rate scholars talk about scholarship, which requires reading books that I haven’t read, so I have nothing to say.” What was the context for this? Is it an accurate reflection of the relationship between academic disciplines and thinking in the 1990s?
 
A: I can’t think of what the specific context was, but in the 1980s Chen Pingyuan and I were very close. He may not be reporting my exact words, but rather his general impression. This argument is really not that difficult. Different professions are like different worlds 隔行如隔山, as they say.  What we call first-rate scholars usually do not only limit themselves to their own field. They won’t be satisfied to do little projects. They will understand as best they can the problems in areas of study and interest similar to their own.

But this kind of understanding also has its limits. It can only see the research of the best scholars of disciplines similar to it. It won’t, nor is it even able to, look into too many specific investigations. This doesn’t have a necessary connection to the 1980s and 1990s. This is common to any time period. We were pretty young and arrogant in the 1980s. Everything we said was a bit presumptuous. 
 
Q: Besides the decoupling of thinking and the academic disciplines, were there any other serious turn of events that had an impact on the 1990s?
 
A: At the beginning of the 1990s there were still several serious changes in social thought, one of which was the degradation of intellectuals. This is visible from some of the earliest serialized television shows like Stories from the Editorial Board 编辑部的故事 in 1991 and 1992, which for the first time ridiculed intellectuals and praised the little guy. I was in America then and there was a time when everyone was talking about these endless TV series. There was also one called Thirst 渴望, 1990-1991, which I remember Zha Jianying brought back to Chicago to show everyone, claiming that if we didn’t watch it, we wouldn’t understand China. After everyone watched it, they all said that that was exactly what China was like. Intellectuals all had their head in the clouds, and the bedrock of society was not the intellectuals, but ordinary women, like the lead character Liu Huifang in Thirst.
 
The emergence of these phenomena wasn’t accidental, and were linked to how intellectuals were thinking about themselves. Intellectuals started to reflect on these issues beginning in the 1990s. “The Idea of Freedom: Where the May Fourth Tradition Went Wrong,” which I published in 1989,  is a critical review of the intelligentsia. In it I criticized the absurdness of intellectuals who always make themselves out to be the voice of the people. This article also raised a problem, “The greatest lesson for Chinese intellectuals over the past hundred years might be that they always and everywhere gave priority to society and the people, but they never dared to state clearly that ‘individual freedom’ comes first.”[11]
 
But the problems of the intelligentsia are confusing problems particular to modern society. The relevant problems are not only about the self understanding of intellectuals. The problem with much of the discourse is that, after incorporating a few reflections from the West, it swings from one extreme to another. As a part of the modernity problem, the intelligentsia problem still awaits a new understanding.
 
Q: In your interview with Zha Jiangying in The 1980s you explained the background behind the idea of “two kinds of freedom” that you proposed in 1989. From German Romanticism straight through Kant and Hegel, they all sought freedom in the world of the soul and freedom of the will, but [Isaiah] Berlin objected to this, saying although this form of spiritual freedom is very great, it behooves us more to talk about real individual liberty. Does the article you published on “two kinds of freedom” at the time represent your personal transformation?
 
A: I was also beginning to think about political problems then, trying to figure out  what kind of political society we actually needed.
 
Q: When you think about the later 1997 culture war between the “New Left” and “Liberalism”, what feelings do you have?
 
A: I think this sort of debate was bound to emerge because when any society is transitioning, the defining feature is that large-scale economic reforms create large-scale social disintegration. So this kind of social disintegration naturally accompanies intellectual division and conflict. For example the transition of England was very long, from roughly 1780 to 1880, and the transition of America was from roughly 1870 to 1940. If we compare the history of the two transitions, we will see that market economics necessarily creates social disintegration. The market rips apart the bonds, morality and discipline of any tradition.

The first thing to emerge is the poor and the rich become extremely separated. Then groups also begin to separate and the battle between two points of view, Left and Right, emerges as a matter of course. Naturally, there is a group of people seeking to restrain the market and capital. They are unable to allow capital to be so unrestrained and they want to use the state to put limits on the market. But another group of people will seek more market freedom, more capital freedom, and less national intervention. This problem is a common one. It is not uniquely Chinese. 
 
These kinds of debates also appeared in England and America in the same way. When England and America faced these problems, it was relatively easy to clarify their nature. They understood that they were created by the market economy. Thus they resolved to direct their thinking toward problems wrought by the market economy. But China’s debate got entangled with many other problems. Here we always think the market is a good thing, that the problem lies with the monk, not the scripture.[12] We never believe any problem could possibly be a problem of economics. This makes our society unwilling to confront our problems.

What we are looking for is a way to control the markets so that we don't completely destroy society. To take America as an example, it wasn’t until 1936 that Roosevelt’s New Deal secured the status of unions. Before this election, labor organizations were always illegal, because unions naturally needed to protect labor rights, something obviously useless to capital. Market economics needs the strength of a government and a society to set restrictions. But because China’s population is so large, it makes this problem all the more severe.
 
Q: There are some who say that this debate was more emotional than about theoretical research. Despite the fact that both sides brought up good points on “freedom” and “democracy”, “equality” and “fairness”, and so on, neither made a single practical gain. Rather, the dispute became a regrettable war of words. While we cannot say that both sides lost, there were certainly no winners. Kuang Xinnian once said, not without some remorse, in “The Wind in the Flag: A Reading of the 1990s:” “The New Enlightenment of the 1980s really possessed a selfless, solemn, heroic spirit. The New Enlightenment includes those critical intellectuals who are regarded as ‘the New Left’ by what we call ‘Liberals’ today. Not long ago, these two pursued ‘the same goal’.”[13] 

Given this, surely we cannot say that the division between the two groups is necessary? If, for example, the target of the New Left is the new aristocracy, and the target of Liberalism is the old system, then could it be that they don’t know that these two have a direct, inherited relationship? How do you read this?
 
A: I don’t agree with this view.  This debate was inevitable, and in a modern society with a market economy, the debate will necessarily be prolonged.  Even America is still immersed in this debate.  Of course emotions impacted the debate, and at the same time, the debate itself was extremely hurtful, and broke up a lot of friendships, which is too bad.  When friends break up it is painful, and arguments and mutual attacks make it all the more crazy and particularly cruel.  If you weren’t friends, then it wasn’t so cruel.  And if you had been enemies all along then it was no big deal. 

Looking back at the 1997 dispassionately, a lot of the questions weren’t worth the passion we put into them.  But there was lots of mutual suspicion, and everyone thought that the other side was sucking up to the government, which made everyone want to give his opponent the third degree.  None of it was clear and everyone was trying to expose everyone else’s ulterior motives.  Once it was over, I was okay, I hadn’t been ripped to shreds.  Now a lot of people wonder if I’m not New Left, and I don’t know what I am, I’m just Chinese.

To go back to the battle itself, my viewpoint is rather clear. This wasn’t an avoidable war of words, nor was it a tempest in a teapot, but it was a necessary and fundamental debate. If you understand a little bit about the course of Western history, you know that market economics brings a huge divide between the rich and the poor, almost a necessary one. The only question is whether we can recognize this problem before it is too late to control the market with measures to reduce social disintegration.

I incited a bit of an uproar in 1997 when I wrote “Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?” I said that liberty then was actually for the bosses and intellectuals, but not for poor workers. But at that time people didn’t even want to acknowledge the market’s creation of a huge wealth gap, believing that to raise this question is to deny market reform and the market economy. Now everybody understands this pretty well. If that essay were printed now, virtually nobody would disagree.
 
Modern Society: Culture Cannot Judge According to the Market Standard
 
Q: The 1980s and 1990s have become a memory seemingly overnight, but past events leave their mark. Right now there is a popular view that “the 1980s were a time of Westernization, while in the 1990s we returned to ourselves.” Can I ask how you view this?
 
A: I think this is pure fantasy.  In fact, all-out Westernization was of course more pronounced in the 1990s than in the 1980s, because in the 1990s everything had to be international and everyone had to speak English.  We have the incorrect impression that as long as we study China and not the West, then we have come back to China and to our tradition.  This is not at all the case, because the way we read about and study China may be completely copied from the West (even if the copying was half-assed). 

​One thing that was abundantly clear in the 1990s was that the influence of Western sinology and American studies of China on our research on China was very strong.   One of the traps of the global cultural production system is that you think things are divided up so that the Chinese are working on China, when in fact the work you are doing on China is quite likely following the marching orders from the West.  You should not think that we have gotten rid of the global cultural production system just because we are researching China.  This is a pure illusion.

By the same token, we cannot simply say that because we are studying the West, we are not taking the study of China seriously. In fact, the study of the West is, for Chinese people, the study of China. Because all the concepts and theories we are using come from the West, Chinese people must investigate these concepts and theories through the investigation of themselves. 
 
Q: In the talk that you gave this time in Shanghai, under the title of “Transcending the Western Cultural Left,” you pointed out that over the past thirty years, the Western cultural Left has seen “culture” as representing the rejection of the majority by the machine of the capitalist state, so they are constantly attacking the fortress of culture, but they have ignored culture’s critique of the market, and in dismantling culture in the old sense of the word they have allowed the market to take over the cultural sphere completely.  In the specific case of China, the transition period has led to social inequality and polarization. You have talked about the intervention of state regulation, so what role should culture play?
 
A: This is a very complicated problem, and for the time being it is not easy to say where things are in the media. I am giving a research seminar on this topic this summer. The students are well prepared in terms of scholarly preparation and everybody is well versed in Western studies, so we are ready to discuss what I call “the pseudo-populism of culture”, the idea that the only good things are those that are beloved by the common people.[14] This is wrong. It is not the case that whatever common people like is good. The problem right now is that the media strives hard to beckon and attract the attention of common people, forcing modern mass culture further and further into debauchery.

For instance, there was a debacle recently in Hong Kong when its two most famous radio hosts thought up a new shtick: making the Hong Kong public cast votes to choose “the actress they’d most like to sexually harass.”[15] Naturally, everybody scrambled to cast their vote. In the end, even the government had no choice but to look into it. Even then, they only issued a fine, which had next to no effect. Hong Kong fans of the show got all riled up. “What’s the matter with it?” they thought. But do we seriously agree this sort of thing is okay? It is, of course, extraordinarily awful and vile. The problem is that now we nearly lack the ability to criticize this kind of despicable speech and the atmosphere that makes it possible.
 
In fact, culture originally offered a higher way of life. It surpassed the commodity worship of those constrained by the market economy, such that development included the spiritual potential of individual lives. But over the past twenty or thirty years, this sort of requirement has been discarded. All criticism of higher culture and all uncritical praise of mass culture are in fact only a step on the way to tightening the market’s grip on culture, which leads to the daily erosion of the cultural domain because there is no higher standard, nor any pursuit of positive values.
 
Q: This is a point you’ve been making since the 1994 debate on the spirit of the humanities, when we entered into a period of cultural capitulationism, right? I’d like to know how you view current mass cultural programming like Super Girl and others like it. [Super Girl was a very popular Chinese singing contest program that began airing in 2004.]
 
A:  Super Girl is only a passing fancy and nothing more. It deserves no special opposition, nor any praise. It is just another mode of mass consumption. But now the weird thing is that part of society praises it to the skies, insisting on lumping mass culture together with democracy and other ideas, which is a little off. I am absolutely not opposing mass culture, I am just saying mass culture is merely one aspect of culture, and also that there are higher and lower tastes within mass culture itself.
 
Q: At the end of 2005, you and Liu Xiaofeng proposed a re-reading of the West, and pointed out that over the past century, the way Chinese people have studied the West reflects a pathological psychology, in that it was grounded in the premise that China was sick and the West was the cure, which meant that studying the West was “treating” China’s illness.  Thus a new generation of scholars needs to shed this pathology, and begin a renewed reading of the West. You launched the Sources of Western Studies series at Sanlian Press.[16] What connection does this new series have to the editorial philosophy of “Culture: China and the World,” which introduced Western classics in the 1980s?
 
A: In the 1980s, after having been cut off from the West for many years, we reencountered Western thinking. At that time, what we stressed was introducing modern Western academic work, which was more or less post-World War II Western thought and academics. But now, the time for a simple understanding of the West has already passed. Now, we must penetrate even further in our investigation of the West. What we emphasise now is the search for the roots of things, a reexamination of Western culture’s entire tradition.
 
Q: You have recently devoted your efforts to promoting Liberal Arts in Chinese universities. Is it your hope to pass on the tradition of the Liberal Arts so that you can resume the same efforts to promote culture that were launched in the 1980s?
 
A: Yes, we have to recognize that modern society is not established on the basis of a single unified principle. Many problems need to be dealt with separately. Culture cannot be judged by the standards of the market economy, nor can our colleges function according to those standards.
​
Translator’s Notes

[1] 甘阳 “八十年代的现代性批判与九十年代转型”, published in abridged form in Southern Metropolis Daily 南方都市周刊 on August 1, 2006.  The unabridged interview translated here was later published in Shu Cheng magazine (书城) September, 2006.  The Chinese text is available online here https://www.douban.com/group/topic/1345743/ .

[2] “Zi Lu was staying at Stone Gate. The morning watchman asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ Zi Lu responded, ‘I come from the house of Confucius.’  The watchman replied, ‘Is that the man who knows that it’s impossible, that it’s no use, but yet continues to do it anyway?’” (Confucius, Analects, 14:38).

[3]  The word here is “free” 自由 but because Gan is playing on the similarities, both in sound and meaning, with the word for “self” 自我, I translate it as “self-ruling”.

[4] Zhuangzi 莊子 Harvard-Yenching Zhuangzi Yinde: 10/4/41 https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=2742 .

[5] Quote from Gan’s essay entitled “Quarrels Between the Ancients and the Moderns, the Chinese and the West” (古今中西之爭) in a section called “Speaking of ‘Tradition’” (说 “传统”), composed in the fall of 1985, with a version of the section published in Reading Magazine (读书) in February of 1986.

[6]  River Elegy 河殇 was a six part documentary premiering in June 1988 on CCTV. It portrayed Chinese culture in a negative light and was officially banned by the Communist Party after the ‘89 Tiananmen Square protests.

[7] Yellow signifies the earth and stagnation, and by extension China’s cultural stagnation. Blue signifies the ocean’s boundless freedom and openness, and by extension the openness of the West.

[8] Li Tuo 李陀 is a Chinese writer, critic, and editor essential to the rise of a new generation of Chinese writers during his editorship of Beijing Literature 北京文学 in the 1980s. 新启蒙 or “New Enlightenment” is a term used by Li Tuo and others to describe the effects of reform on Chinese intellectual and cultural life. See
http://www.eastasianhistory.org/sites/default/files/article-content/20/EAH20_06.pdf .

[9] A momentous debate sparked by a June 1993 Shanghai Literature article entitled “Ruins in the Wilderness: The Crisis of Literature and the Spirit of the Humanities”. The debate at times took on a much more profound meaning and could be better translated as “the debate over the soul of our culture”. Here Gan refers to the 1994 publication of six dialogues in Reading (读书), which sparked several years of intense academic debate and media coverage. The debate centered on Chinese culture and its health in the face of modernization. See Wang Xiaoming’s Lecture: http://m.aisixiang.com/data/5368.html .

[10] “To study without thinking is a waste. To think without studying is dangerous.” 「學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。」(Confucius, Analects, 2:15).

[11] 自由的理念：五四传统之厥失面 was published in the 5th issue of Reading (读书) in 1989.

[12] Gan is playing on the adage “Foreign monks are good at chanting 远来的和尚会念经”, which expresses the expectation that the foreign is better than the local. Gan, in this context, alters the expression for those who believe that the problem lies with the practice, not the theory.

[13] 旷新年, “风与旗：九十年代的阅读” published in Oriental Culture 《东方文化》2000 no.3, pgs. 47-55.

[14] Gan may be alluding to the central question of Plato’s Euthyphro “Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?” (Plato, Euthyphro, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 10a.

[15] Commercial Broadcasting Company Limited was fined $140,000 for the promotion of an Internet poll “the Hong Kong female artist whom I most want to indecently assault” in the radio programme “So Fab” (架势堂) broadcast on the CR2 channel of Commercial Radio on June 3, 2006, from midnight to 2am. See https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200606/15/P200606150088.htm .

[16]  Sources of Western Studies (西学源流) is a book series launched in the mid 2000’s under the editorship of Gan Yang and Liu Xiaofeng, two of China’s most prominent Straussians.