Gan Yang, "Liberalism"

Gan Yang, Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?

甘阳, “自由主义: 贵族的还是平民的?”, 读书 [Reading] 1 (1999), pp.85-94.
 
N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

Translated by William Sima and Tang Xiaobing 唐小兵
​
Translators’ Introduction
 
Gan Yang 甘阳 (b.1952) is one of China’s leading experts on Western philosophy and intellectual history, and a prominent educator and publisher in this field. Since the mid-1990s he has been identified as a leading member of the New Left (新左派) in China. Gan was a voracious reader of Western philosophy during his childhood in Hangzhou and as an “educated youth” (知识青年) sent to work at the oilfields near Daqing, Heilongjiang province, between 1970 to 1978. In a 2005 interview Gan credited his ability to recite from memory passages of The Social Contract, by the French revolutionary thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Rousseau features prominently in the present text — to a formative encounter with the work at age fourteen. In 1973 Gan was tasked with teaching philosophy to workers and peasants at Daqing, and recalls Georg Hegel and Immanuel Kant as being influential to his thinking during the final years of the Cultural Revolution.
 
In 1978 Gan entered the University of Heilongjiang, graduating with a general bachelor's degree in 1982. In 1985 he earned a masters in Western philosophy at Peking University, and soon thereafter attained national renown in the “culture craze” (文化热) of the 1980s, as the lead editor of the influential book series, 文化: 中国与世界 (Culture: China in the World). The series was noted as being the first systematic project to translate Western thought in the PRC since 1949, and had grown to include more than one hundred titles after its first year alone.
 
Forced to leave the country following the June 1989 Tiananmen Incident, Gan undertook further research at the University of Chicago, before moving to the University of Hong Kong in 1999. The present essay, “Liberalism: for the aristocrats or for the people?”, was published in the influential journal, 读书 (Reading) in the same year. A culmination of Gan’s engagement with liberal intellectual history — as the author self-consciously notes, his 1989 essays on Isaiah Berlin were the first to introduce key aspects of liberal theory to readers in the PRC — it was highly influential in the polemics between the New Left and Liberals (自由派) that began in the second half of the 1990s. In 2000 it was reprinted in 知识分子立场 (Intellectual Positions), a book series covering these debates. In the following translation we present the essay as it first appeared for mainland Chinese readers, and endeavour to preserve something of Gan Yang's grandiloquent, and at times haughty writing style.
 
Gan begins the essay with the charge that liberal discourse in China evinces a pervading concern, born of a kind of intellectual conservatism (保守主义), for promoting freedom for intellectual elites and the upper classes at the expense of democracy and equality for the masses. Stating the need to “reject using liberalism to negate democracy; reject evoking the English Revolution to discredit the French Revolution; reject citing [Edmund] Burke to discredit Rousseau; and reject using all of them to negate twentieth century Chinese revolutionary history”, Gan guides the reader through the work of a broad array of Western thinkers. His aim is to demonstrate that tension between elitist and mass forms of liberalism — which he dubs the “Tocqueville problem”, in reference to the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville — has been evident all throughout the Western liberal tradition, and to a greater extent than contemporary proponents of liberalism and market reform in China are perhaps willing to acknowledge.
           
While Gan's earlier 1989 essays, noted above, along with the present work, have led many to associate his name with the liberal revival in 1990s China, Gan has rejected this association. While influential to a revival in discussions of liberalism, he has been critical of the philosophy and its influence in China and steadfast in his defence of mass democracy and nationalism. Gan later defended the “creative destruction” of the Maoist period as a necessary precursor for reform, and anti-Western protests during the Beijing 2008 Olympic year as a “voluntarily organised” celebration of five thousand years of Chinese civilisation, one hundred years of resisting foreign imperialism between the Opium Wars and the founding of the PRC, and sixty years of national self-strengthening since 1949. Gan has also been a vocal proponent of Carl Schmitt, an anti-liberal German philosopher of the Nazi period who has been popular among Chinese nationalists since the mid-2000s. 
 
In a rebuttal to an earlier version of this essay, the historian Lei Yi 雷颐 charges that the term “conservative” in Chinese discourse refers not to new trends in liberal thought in China, as Gan implies in his opening lines, but rather to those at this time who continued to uphold the Cultural Revolution, oppose market reforms, and advocate for returning to a planned economy. For Gan to neglect this discursive context and to apply Euro-American concepts of conservatism as a “standard for China”, is, for Lei Yi, “misleading”, and “misses the point”. Lei also accuses Gan of being overgeneralizing in his criticisms of the “intellectual landscape of 1990s China”, all the while ignoring or distorting recent scholarship on the very ideas he critiques.
 
It is indeed difficult to tell whom within the stated “basic trajectory of Chinese thought since the 1990s” Gan intends to direct his attacks. The author uses inverted commas both to emphasize his own ideas and to cite other works, although the distinction between his own rhetoric and quoted text is often unclear (Gan provides no references). In this translation we give footnotes indicating the English-language works, and English translations from the original French and German, that correspond to Gan’s citations.
 
 
Translation
 
The basic trajectory of Chinese thought since the 1990s has, on the whole, evolved from the late 1980s critique of radicalism and moved increasingly towards conservatism and even ultra-conservatism. The basic form of this type of conservatism typically manifests itself by disparaging and denying democratic equality in the name of liberalism, resulting in so-called “liberalism” being understood more as the privilege of the few, rather than as a right possessed by all. In fact, many of the intellectuals who pontificate about liberalism today are talking about liberty for the bosses and liberty for the intellectuals; that is, liberty for the wealthy, liberty for the strong, and liberty for the capable. At the same time, they neglect even to mention that the starting point for the liberal theory of rights is the rights of all, and on this point it must be emphasised that this means particularly those who are unable to protect their own rights: the weak, the unfortunate, the poor, the hired hands and the uneducated. If it is the case that “no error is more egregious than that of confounding freedom with free competition,” as Frank Knight of the Chicago School, who devoted his life to the study of the relationship between the market economy and freedom, sternly warned in his classic, The Ethics of Competition, then it is precisely this great error that has now become the collective faith of the Chinese intelligentsia. That is, they have reduced the idea of freedom to that of freedom of the market, thinking that a free economy will automatically produce the greatest freedom. Within this version of freedom, democracy is an extravagance, equality is even more sinful, and the law of the jungle becomes the first principle of liberalism.
 
I refer to this collective faith as the “shared moral cancer of the Chinese intelligentsia”, because it suggests that the Chinese intelligentsia has already almost lost the most basic sense of morality and justice. At the same time, this collective faith can also be called the “collective feeble-mindedness of the Chinese intelligentsia,” because it reveals their inability to grasp the basic consensus in contemporary scholarship, which is that virtually any inquiry in the humanities and social sciences starts from the ideal of equal liberty, the notion that “each and every person is a free and equal moral individual.” And yet in China, this ideal of liberty is so rare as to have left hardly a trace on the Chinese intelligentsia. On the contrary, what they enthusiastically discuss is actually “unequal freedom.” Especially absurd is that, while the minority frenziedly plunders the assets and increasingly threatens the basic safeguards of the majority, we instead observe many people shaking their heads and wringing their hands about the “tyranny of the majority.” Why not have the guts to do some soul-searching as to whether the Chinese intelligentsia is in fact using its intellectual privileges in support of the minority’s privileges, in upholding the rights of all?
 
The phrase “Chinese intelligentsia” above might not be completely appropriate, because in fact more people nowadays already do not identify with the above-mentioned collective faith. I am only pointing out mainstream tendencies, and not addressing any particular individual.
 
Since the basic discourse of Chinese conservatism in the 1990s was not limited to the ideology of the market economy, but had more to do with debasing democracy and equality in the name of liberalism, this essay will therefore focus once again on the relationship between liberalism and democracy.
 
The relationship or tension between liberalism, democracy and equality is an old problem in liberal theory. Generally speaking, this tension cannot be resolved through one side prevailing over the other; that is, “unequal liberty” and “illiberal equality” are both unacceptable, and for this reason the crux of the matter lies in how best to maintain, in theory and in practice, the appropriate equilibrium in a tension of this kind. Since in past socialist experience, the ideal of liberty has in general been rejected, and the ideal of equality has at least in theory been approved, intellectual circles have accorded a particular priority to liberty. In fact this has been a particular concern of mine in the past. In 1989, I published “The Idea of Liberty” and “The Enemy of Liberty” in Reading, and I was the first in China to introduce Isaiah Berlin’s ideas on the differences between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom”. Not long after going abroad, I published “Discarding ‘Science and Democracy,’ Establishing ‘Liberty and Order’,” (Twenty-First Century, February 1999). I also concentrated on raising the problem of the tension between liberty and democracy in an effort to describe the differences between the Scottish and French Enlightenments, and the dividing line between the English Revolution and the French Revolution, and put forward “Establishing Liberty and Order” as the summary of what was at that time my political philosophy of “Euro-American liberty.” This basic line of thought also ran through the other essays I published at that time, such as “Progress in Constitutional Drafting in Eastern Europe: A Survey,” “A Critique of the Concept of Civil Society,” and so on (both of which have since been published in my Beyond Radicalism and Conservatism).