Li Tuo, "The Riddle of the 21st Century"

Li Tuo, “The Riddle of the Twenty-First Century:  Interview on the Coronavirus Crisis and Contemporary Capitalism”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Li Tuo (b. 1939) is a well-known novelist, film writer, and literary critic in China, although he was not on my radar until I ran across this essay.  Li is somewhat unusual among Chinese establishment intellectuals in that he belongs to the Daur ethnicity (found mostly in Mongolia and Heilongjiang), came from a working-class family (his original name was Meng Kejin 孟克勤), and his formal education stopped after middle school (an excellent school in Beijing), after which he himself worked in a factory for some years before eventually making his name as a writer in the late 1970s.  In the trajectory of his career, he began with fiction before later gravitating toward film scripts, and finally to film and literary criticism.  Beginning in 1989, he spent some five years in the United States, with stints at Chicago, Berkeley, Duke, Michigan, and Columbia, with which he maintains an association today.  He writes as a member of the New Left, and part of his text reflects his time spent among American literary critics.
 
Li’s essay on “The Riddle of the 21st Century” is the featured article of the August 2020 edition of Beijing Cultural Review 文化纵横, a thematic issue largely devoted to the topic of the effect of the coronavirus on China and the world (representative titles include “The Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis and the Task of China’s Intellectuals,” “The Decentralizing World:  The Crisis of Hegemony and an Uncertain Future,” and “Covid-19 and China’s Reforms”).  Although it is an interesting piece which raises several provocative points, I confess that I chose to translate it largely because the editors of Beijing Cultural Review chose to highlight it in their treatment of this important theme.

Li’s text is a highly structured “interview” with relatively little give and take between the review and the author, which means that Li can expound on his points at length without having to develop the formal structure of an essay.  He begins with fairly conventional reflections on the economic dynamism of East Asia in recent years and particularly since the pandemic, suggesting that China, Japan, and South Korea appear to be heading toward some kind of league or association, which would create a gravitational pull drawing in Africa and perhaps Latin America.  He then muses about Europe’s reaction to such a turn of events, which brings him closer to themes that seem to interest him more, such as the fate of Eurocentrism and the East-West binary in a world where East Asia becomes the dominant region (he pointedly avoids mentioning the United States in this section).

Li then moves on to a wide-ranging ontological discussion of “how we know what we know” in which he treats a variety of topics.  One major theme is that despite the evolution of 21st century capitalism (which he never quite defines), we continue to see it through 20th century eyes.  One example of this is Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which created a huge stir in the West without, in Li’s view, offering much in the way of innovation (the liberal historian Qin Hui shares this view).  Li argues that this resulted in part from looking at new problems with old eyes, as already suggested, and in part from the new system of knowledge production and diffusion created by the internet and social media, which has largely called into question “authority” of any kind, creating a situation of intellectual anarchy rather than creative freedom.  Li similarly cites several phenomena observed since the coronavirus pandemic—from the worldwide criticism of China’s handling of the virus to the incredible chaos of Trump’s America—to suggest that the world in general may be facing “cognitive problems.”

Although the title of Li’s essay suggests that his focus will be contemporary capitalism, I found his treatment of it rather oblique.  He stands with Samir Amin, one of the founders of dependency theory, and emphasizes the worldwide web of exploitation undergirding capitalism.  More interestingly, he argues that the history of capitalism as written in the West is partial and blinkered, omitting the history of socialism with which it has developed in tandem.  He bemoans the fact that the Western left seems to have a blind spot on China, but this strikes me as bad faith (or fear of the censors):  it would be easier for the Western left to celebrate the triumph of socialism with Chinese characteristics if China did not reeducate Uighurs and Tibetans and muzzle critical intellectuals and the free press.  It’s a bit much for a Chinese writer to ask a Western theorist to piece together that narrative.  
 
New!!  Favorite Quotes (hors d’oeuvres for those who can’t stay for the meal)

“These confused dialogues are reproduced, processed, transformed, and amplified by the networks of new and old media, and subsequently reenter the dialogue as a certain kind of quasi-knowledge. Much of the quasi-knowledge is in fact fake knowledge, and when this fake knowledge enters the dialogue it creates yet another layer of information confusion. This leaves us in an unprecedented predicament when it comes to understanding the world before us:  serious knowledge is confusedly added to or mixed together with media information in which true and false are hard to establish, which produces the following bizarre phenomenon:  the framework for how to go about ‘understanding’ something has been completely confused and is thus unclear, which means that not only ordinary people, but also scholars and thinkers wind up being led around by the nose by the media.  In such a manner, the foundation for ‘reflection’ is neither knowledge as we have understood it in a conventional sense, nor information that accurately reflects reality, but a sort of processed object created by the new and old media, network news, and various self-media.  This in turn gives rise to the eruption of violent conflicts among various ‘ideas’ that were already confused and false, leading to all sorts of unmanageable ‘ruptures.’  At the same time, the ever-present forces of capital and politics capitalize on the fakeness and use various means to impose themselves and manipulate the divisions, filling the originally fairly empty ruptures with strangely real content.”
 
“You may well feel that everything I’ve just said has already been said by other people, that it’s just a platitude.  So let me be a little bit more specific, and talk a little bit about Foucault, or start out with him.  To be honest, in my efforts to comprehend the great wave of academic and theoretical innovation in the second half of the 20th century, driven forward by semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and culminating in the 1970s and 1980s in what many people inaccurately call ‘postmodernism,’ Foucault has had the greatest impact on me.  So much so that when I look at other currents of thought in this wave, I always tend to make judgements and comparisons from his theoretical perspective.  On the one hand, this helps me to find a foothold in understanding these new theories, and on the other, as I came to understand his thought better, I came to believe that of all of those thinkers who, like him, were ‘swimming against the tide,’ his contribution was the most important.  Yet today we have already reached the 21st century, and before we knew it, the new problems brought about by the great rupture between the old and the new century have come to the fore so sharply that we can no longer avoid them, the most pressing of which:  what is the relationship between all the crises just discussed and contemporary capitalism?  Or in the same sense, pushing the question a bit further:  if the mechanisms of form and function of today’s capitalism differ greatly from those of the capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries (the gap between rich and poor in world terms has surpassed that of classical capitalism, yet this is only one of the symptoms of the new problems of contemporary capitalism), then what are the differences?  What is the relationship between these differences and the crises we are facing?  Is all of this inevitable?  Do all of the questions urgently require answers?  What does Foucault tell us about all of this?  Not that much, I’m afraid.”
 
“As a typical capitalist country, Germany can serve as a telling case study [of the relationship between capitalism and socialism].  Why has the Merkel government appeared to so relaxed in its handling of the pandemic, in stark contrast to the U.S. government?  In my view this cannot be adequately explained either by Merkel's competence or by the quality of the German public health system, but rather by reference to history.  The successive workers' movements in Germany at the end of the 19th century, the brief but lasting traces of the Weimar period, not to mention the profound influence of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, with its long history and long experience in power after World War II, have been serious challenges to capitalism and have left deep institutional traces on contemporary German capitalism.  These same traces have also shaped the socialist elements in the country (which have always been shunned or selectively ‘forgotten’) and are elements which play the most important role in today's epidemic, allowing its government to remain calm.  In short, there is no such thing as a pure, independent development of capitalism, not historically and not today; any capitalist system that exists today is what it is due to the constant challenge of socialism, which means that understanding socialism is therefore an absolutely indispensable for understanding the history and reality of today's capitalism.”
 
“The whole world is asking China: Where have you come from? Who are you? Where are you going? Can we not answer? Can we not do our best to give an answer that at least satisfies us?”
 
Thanks to Chris Buckley of the New York Times for pointing me toward this text.
 
Translation
 
The author asked that I remove the transation temporarily because he and the Beijing Cultural Review have arranged for an authorized translation to be published elsewhere.  Once the authorized translation is published, I will restore my translation to the site.  D.O.