Lu Nanfeng and Wu Jing on the Industrial Party

Lu Nanfeng and Wu Jing, “Historical Transformation and Grand Narrative: A Political Analysis of the ‘Industrial Party,’ an Online Intellectual Trend”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The “Industrial Party 工业党” discussed in the text translated here is not a “party” per se; the word for party in Chinese—党 dang—can refer to a political party or a faction or any group with which people identify.  The term is often pejorative, and I don’t know if the Industrial Party has reappropriated the term in an ironic gesture.  In any event, the Industrial Party refers to a loosely affiliated online opinion group that argues that industrialization is the key to social development, and should take priority over politics or other kinds of economic growth, such as financial capitalism or platform capitalism.   

The Industrial Party emerged out of the same milieu as many other Chinese intellectuals translated on this site, inspired by China’s rise to seek out new foundational myths and historical narratives to explain China’s experience and the meaning of this experience to the world.  Unlike most of the intellectuals dealt with on my blog, however, the Industrial Party is not made up of top-tier intellectuals and university professors, who are condemned by the Industrial Party as belonging to what they call the “Touchy-Feely Parties,” but instead young men (and presumably some women, but the group is very masculine) born in the 1980s and maturing in the 1990s who specialize in science and technology.  Their vision of the world is largely technocratic and almost apolitical, which is something of a strange stance in China:  the Industrial Party endorses the state as the best vehicle for realizing the benefits of industrialization, but, unlike the New Left, much of which is quite statist, they do not care much about "socialism" as a set of ideals beyond state-owned enterprises and five year plans. 

The authors of this piece, Lu Nanfeng and Wu Jing, are both attached to the Peking University Institute of New Media and Communications 北大新闻与传播学院, Wu Jing as a professor and Lu Nanfeng as M.A. candidate.  This institute is known to have a favorable view of the ideology of the Industrial Party, and I read this text as a work of advocacy, in which Wu and Lu are attempting to shape the ideas of the Industrial Party into a coherent discourse, particularly on the important question of whether the “second thirty years” of the experience of the People’s Republic, i.e., reform and opening, should be viewed as continuous with the “first thirty years,” or if the discontinuities between the two eras are more important.

The question matters, because if we decide that discontinuity outweighs continuity, then market reforms, market forces, and capital are the wave of China’s future, while if we emphasize continuity, there remains a place for Maoist initiatives like central planning and state-owned enterprises.  The Industrial Party is on the side of continuity, presumably because they don’t want to see China’s industrial base hollowed out by the logic of global capitalism, and the authors of this text do their best to sharpen the arguments of the Industrial Party on this front, hoping that they can become the leading expression of online nationalism and move from the margins of public opinion to the center. 

The text is interesting because it reflects youth opinion in China to a certain degree.  It has been clear to me for some time that many Chinese young people are bored with the liberal pronouncements of scholars like Qin Hui and Xu Jilin who embrace universal values and hence, in the eyes of the Industrial Party, are not nationalistic or patriotic enough.  The authors of this text attempt to present industrialism itself as a universal value, again illustrating that they are attempting to shape arguments that will compete in China’s intellectual marketplace. 

At the same time, the Industrial Party sees Maoists and Marxists as belonging to the “Touchy-Feely Parties,” and seems to have no vision of politics whatsoever other than that of China’s greatness—which I suppose would be international politics but not domestic.  Indeed, the goal of any technocratic or “administrative” state is to dispense with politics in favor of intelligent management which basically takes care of the citizenry.  The authors suggest at the end of the piece that the Industrial Party has embraced “repoliticization” in recent years, but it is not clear to me what they mean by that. 
   
In sum, this piece is interesting for what it reveals about the fashioning of ideology in contemporary China.  In this case, online opinion—most of which is basically reactive—sparks debates, attacks, position statements, at which point scholars come in to try to lend coherence to the process, in the hopes that the resulting ideology will be more competitive.  The ultimate goal seems to be to salvage something from the Maoist era, although why one need to shackle industrialism to Maoism—or even why the Industrial Party, as a technocratic elite, cares about historiography, remains unclear to me.  In any event, it is glimpse into China’s online intellectual world, whose dynamics remain quite obscure to me. 

Indeed, I must admit that this piece is less coherent than most that I work on, because most of these texts are the product of a single mind working out their ideas, reacting to the world around them.  By contrast, as already noted, this is a piece of advocacy in which university professors, who are generally spurned for their "touchy-feely" qualities by the Industrial Party, are attempting to mold Industrial Party discourse into something that will have an impact on...other intellectuals, as far as I can tell.  Nonetheless, if one reads this with an open mind, I suspect it reflects something of the vibrancy of online life in China at this moment.

In fact, the piece struck me as a prospectus for an interesting Master’s Thesis, and for this reason, I left the Chinese footnotes in the piece, in case someone would like to look at the interaction of nationalism, online culture, and ideology in China’s current generation.   See here for the translation of another text dealing with the Industrial Party.

Favorite Quotes

"A provisional definition of the Industrial Party might be the following: although it has no formal organization, the Industrial Party is a loosely connected intellectual group and a heterogeneous body of political thought appearing on the Chinese Internet at the beginning of the 21st century. It is characterized by its advocacy of the use of a knowledge system grounded in the relationship between the level of industrialization and social transformation to manage issues of national development and social governance. 

The Industrial Party believes in the idea of the supremacy of the state and the supremacy of industrialization, and it has renewed the historical narrative of socialist construction by emphasizing the themes of industrialization and technological improvement; it has opposed liberal online discourse from an explicit nationalist stance and created a large-scale online fan community and subculture. In a broader sense, the ideas of the Industrial Party  also refer to a variety of ideologies favorable to 'technocratic rule' and industrialism, as well as to the technical engineers, political parties, and political forces that support and carry out industrialization in various countries. 

The growth of the intellectual trends associated with the Industrial Party largely overlaps with the history of the social use of new media in China, providing a window into the impact of new media technologies on the public discourse space. The opinion leaders behind this trend are mostly male intellectual elites born in the 1970s and 1980s who were trained in science and technology, and the life experiences of these two generations mirror the dramatic changes in the macro social structure of China in the 1980s and 1990s.

In this sense, the Industrial Party is one key to understanding the historical thinking and political imagination of contemporary Chinese youth, as well as an entry point into the spectrum of contemporary Chinese online ideologies and the dynamics of how the public sphere functions in practice. By focusing on the political ideas of the Industrial Party and the methods, media platforms, and forms of interaction through which they express these political ideas, we hope to gain an insight into the dynamics of China's public political sphere and the shaping of agency among China's political groups, as well as the historical and social connotations attached thereto."

Translation

Who are the Industrial Party? 

When the United States imposed sanctions on ZTE[2] in 2018, the incident dramatically brought the "shortage of semiconductor chips" crisis of the "Made in China" world to the attention the general public and the intellectual community in China.   Netizens either criticized Chinese companies for creating this dilemma by not abiding by international rules, reflected on the lagging development of China's core technology and its dependence on imports, warned that the logic of Cold War confrontation could dominate the world yet again, or celebrated the U.S. wake up call that pushed China toward independent research and development. In the midst of this complex discussion, a new online discourse came to the fore to guide public discussion of the issue, a discourse that combined a knowledge of industry, certain scientific concepts, and nationalism.  

As reflected in recent discussions in the public domain, people are largely done with the punditry of political scientists, who seem to know what they are talking about but constantly contradict themselves, as well as with the equally useless interventions from the realm of economic theory.  Since the core issue here has to do with chips and technology, even if it involves complicated issues in Sino-US relations, we can still use science to understand and try to solve the problem.[3]  
The new online discourse is sometimes referred to online as the Industrial Party. Based on our research to date, this name was first used in Wang Xiaodong's 王小东 2011 article "China's Industrialization Will Determine the Fate of China and the World: A Discussion of the Industrial Party Versus the Touchy-Feely Parties 情怀党.” 

In this article, the Industrial Party is described as a group and intellectual trend distinct from the Touchy-Feely Parties.  The thinking of the Industrial Party reflects that of scientists and engineers, while the thinking of the Touchy-Feely Parties is like that of the literati of China’s agricultural civilization.  Wang’s article argues that both the left and right in China’s current mainstream discourse belong to the Touchy-Feely Parties.  The Industrial Party believes in the supremacy of productivity and technology, and sees the value of industrialization as transcending that of political parties, regime change, political systems, and ephemeral cultural trends. 

However, the Industrial Party—as position, logic, or discursive strategy—did not come out of nowhere in the past two years, but instead has been developing for more than a decade.  As a trend, it emerged roughly at the beginning of the 21st century via online discussions of military history and current politics, when a group of cyber-nationalists with scientific and technical backgrounds gathered under the banner of anti-liberalism. However, the composition of this group of online nationalists is quite diverse, and apart from a basic consensus on patriotism, "there is no real ideological basis,"[4] and thus an absence of common intellectual principles and action goals. In this state of "incoherence," the fledgling ideological system of the Industrial Party began to emerge, the core goal of which was to transform so-called "liberal arts" knowledge using the scientific spirit and the engineering thinking of science and technology in order to bring the discussion of the historical narrative of the People's Republic in line with its path of national development.

The landmark event in the emergence of the Industrial Party was a lengthy online debate on the proper path of China's industrialization between opinion leaders Zhong Qing 钟庆 (b. 1970)and Chen Jing 陈经 in late 2004 and early 2005. Later on, people who agreed with Zhong Qing's side made the debate into a book--Should You Wash Dishes or Study? 刷盘子，还是读书?—which was published in 2005, and stands as an important early statement of the stance of the Industrial Party.  This group of "young grassroots scholars" thus gathered on the fringes of cyberspace to express their views on politics and economics, and in their exchanges reached a basic consensus on the history of the PRC and its path of national development, at the same time organizing their initial membership and audience. 

Another element that was crucial to the emergence of the Industrial Party was online novels. At the time, most of the major military history and current affairs discussion boards had comment or discussion sections where netizens could give rein to their political and military imagination, in an effort to make up for shortcomings in China’s development history.  The most famous Industrial Party novel, Ascending to Venus 临高启明, began with a discussion in the military section of the Sonic Forum 音速论坛[5] in 2006. Compared to the usual “cool” tone of male-oriented novels, Industrial Party novels emphasize technical and engineering details, and take great pains to argue for the genuine applicability of what they are discussing, showing the concrete steps required to carry a large industrial project from scratch. Ascending to Venus is known as a “super instruction manual" because of its practicality. 

There was a surge of online nationalism beginning in 2008.  Around April 2008, the anti-CNN website, later renamed April.com, was established as a popular site to counter the distorted reporting of the Western media.[6] But April.com also faced the problem of "incoherence," and its early popularity dwindled as Western media coverage returned to normal, and the site faced serious internal operational problems that eventually led to a split.[7]  In 2012, the Observer.com site was established, dedicated to creating a conceptual autonomy where April.com had been defined by dependence on Western media; capital and management collaborated in an effort to create a nationalistic and modern "China stance" capable of explaining the China model.

When people identified with the Industrial Party—like Ma Qianzhu 马前卒 (b. 1981)[8]—joined the Observer, then in the eyes of the Industrial Party, the Observer became " the first online propaganda organ clearly based on the ideas of the Industrial Party, having a great, even irreplaceable, influence on the dissemination of the name and ideas of the Industrial Party.” It should be noted, of course, that the Industrial Party is merely an ideological trend and not a physical organization, and the Observer is not merely the "home base" of the Industry Party. The discourse of the Industrial Party is only a "partnership between ideas and capital." 

The book The Great Goal: Civilization and Political Negotiation in our World 大目标：文明与这个世界的政治协商, co-authored by four people of the 1980s generation, including Ma Qianzhu, was also published in 2012.  While Ma later stated on the question and answer site Zhihu that “I am not part of the Industrial Party,” the book is nonetheless still seen as the "manifesto" of the post-1980s Industrial Party, whose core proposition is "to treat the development of industrial society as an engineering problem.” With the rise of online social networks, in 2011, online nationalist groups followed the trend; nationalist groups like the “self-financed fifty-centers 自干五”[9] appeared on Weibo and the disparagement of public intellectuals began.[10] Representative figures from the Industrial Party gradually became celebrities on social networks like microblogs and Zhihu, constantly sharing ideas.

It is worth noting that Zhihu did not develop a clear Industrial Party identity, as did The Observer website, but the influence of the Industrial Party on Zhihu is still clear, visible in the strong Chinese identity expressed by cosmopolitan intellectual elites, their immunity to the Western mainstream media and liberal discourse, their appreciation of China's experience of industrialization and pragmatic governance, and their attitudes toward ethnic and religious issues.[11]  The similarity of these basic positions has prepared the ground for the spread of the Industrial Party mentality on Zhihu.

As the early polemics of the Industrial Party suggest, there are different factions within the party, which we will divide roughly into three categories for the sake of narrative convenience:  there is the "Basic Industrial Party" which emphasizes independence and self-reliance in building basic industries, the "Economic Industrial Party," which supports the reform and opening of the economic system and vigorously promotes the process of industrialization, and the "Military Industrial Party" that supports the development of large-scale industries because of its obsession with military technology and equipment.  It should be noted that this classification is not something the Industrial Party itself recognizes, nor are the distinctions among the three groups clear-cut.  The point here is merely to note the tension between the different narratives within the Industrial Party and to outline the group’s general composition. 

The Industrial Party is not a group with clear boundaries, and there are many internal tensions and uncertainties in their ideological system, but they nonetheless share certain common characteristics: they support China's industrialization, advocate a strong industrial and technological state, and have a distinctive nationalistic stance. To take the "Basic Industrial Party," represented by works such as Should You Wash Dishes or Study? and The Great Goal as an example, we can summarize their baseline ideological propositions as follows: they firmly believe that the level of technological and industrial systems determines the development of society, and they also believe in the supremacy of the state and of industrialization.

In terms of the economy, they advocate the priority of heavy industry, state-ownership, the planned economy, an independent and autonomous technology system, and they oppose financial capitalism and criticize the free market.  In terms of politics, their preference is for a system that is centralized and efficient, and they argue that politics should serve productivity.  In terms of culture, they emphasize the scientific spirit and an engineering mindset, disparage agricultural civilization and the small-peasant mentality, and oppose the “Touchy-Feely Parties” and anything “artsy” 文艺腔.  In terms of the international order, they are firmly against imperialism, look forward to a future in which China will lead the world, and advocate the export of Chinese industries to the Third World rather than export of manufactured goods.

If we look beyond contemporary online phenomena, we find that the term Industrial Party has an even broader meaning. Industrialization is a fundamental premise of modern social theory, and industrialism and the idea that technocrats should rule the country have been powerful social trends since the early days of industrial society, and both of these ideas appear prominently in the Industrial Party discourse. As early as the 19th century, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) began his irregular publication of the magazine Industry, which led to the popularization of the term "industrialism" and the suggestion that future society would be governed by engineers and entrepreneurs.  This doctrine can be regarded as the origin of technocratic theory.

At a practical level, the famous "Schacht case" and the "industrial faction incident," both of which occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, aimed to do away with the technocratic thinking that was popular in the Soviet industrial sector at that time.[12] In the 1960s, Khrushchev carried out a major reorganization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dividing the party into an industrial party and an agricultural party, with the aim of making the Communist Party of the Soviet Union more efficient in developing both industry and agriculture, a specialization that would overcome entrenched bureaucratism, although the result was that the reform caused even more problems for production and life in general in the Soviet Union.[13]

These historical events all stand in some relationship to the ideas of China’s Industrial Party. In the thinking of this Industrial Party, Yan Xishan[14] 阎锡山 (1883-1960), who built railroads and opened factories, and the Tanzanian government in East Africa, which accepts industrialized exports, can be categorized as belonging to the “semi-Industrial Party." The thought trend of the Industrial Party serves as an example that can help us understand the popular expression of modern social theory that combines nationalism and industrialism. 

So in summary, a provisional definition of the Industrial Party might be the following: although it has no formal organization, the Industrial Party is a loosely connected intellectual group and a heterogeneous body of political thought appearing on the Chinese Internet at the beginning of the 21st century. It is characterized by its advocacy of the use of a knowledge system grounded in the relationship between the level of industrialization and social transformation to manage issues of national development and social governance. 

The Industrial Party believes in the idea of the supremacy of the state and the supremacy of industrialization, and it has renewed the historical narrative of socialist construction by emphasizing the themes of industrialization and technological improvement; it has opposed liberal online discourse from an explicit nationalist stance and created a large-scale online fan community and subculture. In a broader sense, the ideas of the Industrial Party  also refer to a variety of ideologies favorable to “technocratic rule" and industrialism, as well as to the technical engineers, political parties, and political forces that support and carry out industrialization in various countries. 

The growth of the intellectual trends associated with the Industrial Party largely overlaps with the history of the social use of new media in China, providing a window into the impact of new media technologies on the public discourse space. The opinion leaders behind this trend are mostly male intellectual elites born in the 1970s and 1980s who were trained in science and technology, and the life experiences of these two generations mirror the dramatic changes in the macro social structure of China in the 1980s and 1990s.

In this sense, the Industrial Party is one key to understanding the historical thinking and political imagination of contemporary Chinese youth, as well as an entry point into the spectrum of contemporary Chinese online ideologies and the dynamics of how the public sphere functions in practice. By focusing on the political ideas of the Industrial Party and the methods, media platforms, and forms of interaction through which they express these political ideas, we hope to gain an insight into the dynamics of China's public political sphere and the shaping of agency among China's political groups, as well as the historical and social connotations attached thereto. 

The Industrial Party in Historical Transition 

Around the time that the representative figures of the Industrial Party were born, the People’s Republic experienced its greatest historical transition:  that of reform and opening. The question of the continuity and discontinuity between the Mao Zedong era and the Deng Xiaoping era has become one of the core concerns of Chinese social and political thinking at the present moment.[15] The Mao era, which became part of the reality of the life of the Industrial Party through the intermediary of the Deng Xiaoping era, has become the soil from which its theories, experiences, and blueprints continue to emerge. Most of those identifying with the Industrial Party grew up and received their education in between the 1990s and the early 21st century, and Ma Qianzhu sees those born in the 1980s as "the first generation of Chinese born in the industrial age." He believes that "the characteristics of this era have a very important influence on our personal views.[16]

The macro level social-structural changes of the 1980s and 1990s were the realities molding the cognitive structure of the Industrial Party generation, and these same realities constitute the main source of the problems that concern the Industrial Party. For this reason, we need to “articulate” (in Stuart Hall’s[17] terms) the life experiences, emotional structures, and thought systems of the members of the Industrial Party with their broader social existence and social consciousness, and ultimately construct a social history and a history of social ideas, beginning with the life history of individuals. 

The “Culture Craze” and the Humanization of Knowledge 

Most of the representatives of the Industrial Party were born in the 1970s and 1980s, and their "elders" in the sense of conceptual history are what we call the "people of the 1980s." In China, the 1980s are often considered the "age of culture." Following the implementation of economic reforms, thought restrictions were also liberalized, and a discourse system different that of official ideology began to take shape in the new discursive space created by the decentralization of society. What the Industrial Party later came to denigrate as the “Touchy-Feely Parties”—or humanistic intellectuals—gradually arose during this period. 

In the mid-1980s, intellectuals gradually abandoned the framework of Scar Literature, the aim of which was to criticize the Cultural Revolution, and began a series of discussions around core issues such as cultural comparisons between China and the West, the relationship between culture and modernization, and the conflict between tradition and modernity, which Gan Yang 甘阳 (b. 1952) dubbed as "the debate over East and West, past and present."  At the time, Gan’s viewpoint was:  "The regional cultural differences between Chinese and Western culture were often afforded unlimited attention, which in turn obscured the more substantial and fundamental issue of the cultural differences between traditional and modern Chinese culture, and the transition that had to be accomplished from traditional to modern."[18]

In other words, Gan Yang argued that differences between China and the West had been exaggerated, while differences between past and present were fundamental.   In Li Zehou’s 李泽厚 (1930-2021) view, the popular movements of the time—humanism, thought emancipation, the Enlightenment—inherited and creatively transformed the May Fourth tradition[19]  The intellectuals of the 1980s were eager to modernize, and in this context, the core meaning of the May Fourth Movement became the question of modernization. The May Fourth Movement also took place at a moment when the idea of the "complete Westernization" of China was taking hold. 

The 1980s intellectuals took the comparison of Chinese and Western cultures as the intellectual path toward modernization; for the newly opened China, Sino-Soviet relations had not yet been normalized, the Soviet Union was in terrible shape, and to a large extent the West had become the model for modernization. Given the backdrop of the “culture craze,” the Chinese people inevitably developed a tendency to "worship the West."

During the same period, China also underwent the transition from the "literary era" to the "television era,"[20] and elites connected to the culture craze also began to use this medium to "enlighten" the masses.  One of the high points of such efforts to "Westernize" China was “River Elegy 河殇,” a political program aired on CCTV in 1988, which, with its radical posture and poetic language, dissected and criticized traditional Chinese social organization and the cultural and psychological make-up of the Chinese people, calling for Western-style democracy and the rule of law.  This caused a national sensation and ultimately heralded the end of the culture craze in the 1980s. 

Humanistic intellectuals during this period produced vast amounts of complicated discourse, and indeed, according to He Guimei 贺桂梅[21] (b. 1970), one of the prominent features of the 1980s intellectual scene was a "surplus of signifiers."[22] At the time, intellectuals formed any number of groups, the most influential being:  the Chinese Culture Academy, led by Li Zehou and Tang Yijie 汤一介 (1927-2014), which brought the elites of national studies and aimed to revive traditional Chinese culture; husband and wife Jin Guantao 金观涛(b. 1947) and Liu Qingfeng 刘青峰 edited the "Toward the Future” series, which carried out historical comparisons between East and West from the perspectives of cybernetics, information theory, and systems theory; and Gan Yang’s “Culture:  China and the World,” which translated and published examples of mainstream Western 20th century thought. 

It is noteworthy that the "Toward the Future Series" presented its "three theories", which were originally systems and engineering knowledge, as humanistic knowledge for historical comparative research, which vividly demonstrates the humanistic orientation of knowledge at the time.  The same humanistic trends were also visible in the fields of literature, art, and film. These discourses were later considered ineffective or even useless by the Industrial Party.

The 1980s were the era of the “elders” of the Industrial Party, and if we understand Freud's "patricide" complex in a vulgar way, we might say that the complex humanistic discourses and the worship of the West of the 1980s were to become the object of criticism, dismantling, and reconstruction for the next generation of young people. 

The Great Wave of Marketization and the Eclipse of Macronarratives 

As the "cultural 1980s" faded, intellectuals welcomed in the "age of the market" and faced challenges very different from those of the 1980s. In Xu Jilin's 许纪霖 (b. 1957) view, intellectuals in this period faced three challenges. The first was the loss of their public status, as intellectuals entered the intellectual system of the modern academy and became technical experts without humanistic concerns, dominated by utilitarian and instrumental rationality; the second was the re-marginalization of intellectuals, following the emergence of a market society, which produced changes in increasingly diverse social classes, dominated by the vested interests of the new system and the celebrities of media and show business; finally, intellectuals also faced the fatal theoretical challenge of postmodernism, which destroyed macronarratives and announced the death of traditional intellectuals in a theoretical sense.[23]

Public intellectuals temporarily left the scene, although they would return online in the 21st century, and the 1990s became a stage for technical specialists and de-ideologized instrumental rationality, as knowledge began a process of “ridding itself of the humanities.”  At the same time, the cultural capital of intellectuals that conformed to the logic of the markets rapidly gained in value, and many intellectuals dived into the market to make money from business.  Economic specialists began to replace humanistic intellectuals on center stage.  As “economics” became the central issue in the intellectual world, instrumental rationalism also became extremely important in terms of social concepts, meaning that the ideology, morality, and ideals that had played a leading role under Mao Zedong and in the 1980s now began to fade.  The Industrial Party largely took aim at the Touchy-Feely Parties, who were basically the descendants of the 1980s humanists. 

The Industrial Party absorbed the spiritual features of the 1990s, the era when they grew up, and thoroughly abandoned the complicated humanistic themes of the 1980s, emphasizing instead specialization:  “If two people are debating high speed rail service, and one knows the standard gauge and can distinguish between passenger-dedicated tracks and freight tracks, while the other cannot, then the first one wins hands down.” The 1990s marked the beginning of the trend of instrumental rationality admired by the Industrial Party and the denigration of humanistic knowledge. 

As the 1990s unfolded, comprehensive market reforms accompanied the personal growth histories of members of the Industrial Party, along with major trends and changes such as the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, the rise of financial capital, the rise of consumerism, and the increasing differentiation of social classes.  The Industrial Party was able to identify certain problems caused by following the West in the economic field, such as the oligarchy appearing in Russia after "shock therapy" and the decay and serious social disorder in some cities in northern China following the radical restructuring of state-owned enterprises.  Instrumental rationality that lacks attention to strategy cannot satisfy the aspirations of the Industrial Party generation for an ideal world.

For this reason, and unlike the experts who abandoned the public domain for the academic world in the 1990s, the Industrial Party carried forward the grand narrative of the 1980s and remained concerned about the direction of state and society for those who remained lost in the “wilderness.”  In the early 21st century, the Industrial Party succeeded in addressing the problems of both the 1980s and 1990s at the same time, combining the grand narrative of the 1980s with the instrumental rationality of the 1990s. 

The Divergence of Two Industrial Models 

In late 2004 and early 2005, as the Industrial Party was taking form, a lengthy debate broke out between military history BBS opinion leaders Zhong Qing and Chen Jing on the choice of China's industrialization path. They shared a basic consensus that industrial strength is the basis of national strength and the industrialization is the goal of national development, but made different choices concerning the correct path of industrialization. To generalize, Zhong Qing preferred the heavy industry-first industrialization model of the Mao era, in which the state and enterprises endured great hardships to construct basic industries and technologies through the planned economy. while Zhong Qing strongly criticized the "theory of comparative advantage" that was prevalent at the time of their debate, arguing that reform and opening had introduced foreign capital and labor-intensive industries, dismantling the country's relatively immature system of heavy industry and technological power.

Chen Jing, on the other hand, did not reject the use of foreign capital to develop technology or the introduction of labor-intensive industries to stimulate the economy by raising the long-suppressed consumption level of the population. He criticized Zhong Qing for his overly nostalgic illusions about the economy prior to reform and opening and for his overly pessimistic predictions about the development of China's current economic policies. Chen Jing’s overall view is that the essence of the industrial problem is an economic problem and that the reform of the economic system has facilitated industrial development.

These differences later evolved into different factions within the Industrial Party, which we can for the moment label the “Backbone Industrial Party” and the “Economic Industrial Party.” The disagreement between the two reflects a basic discontinuity between two eras in the history of the People’s Republic, because while Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping led the same China, the differences between them concerned not only differences in nation-building, but more importantly, differences in value orientations and philosophies of governance. In terms of industrialization, there was a certain continuity between the two eras, and industrialization during reform and opening period depended to a certain extent on the foundation laid by Mao Zedong, especially in terms of the relatively complete industrial system and the high-quality labor force.

During the Cultural Revolution, the "43 plan"[24] had already foreseen the import of Western ready-made industrial technology. In a sense, the industrial construction of the Mao era laid a solid foundation, allowing China to remain independent and autonomous after reform and opening, instead of being subordinated to the global market.

However, in a world of limited resources, choices must be made between the industrial system designed to ensure national defense and the industrial system supplying the civilian economy. Given the main contradictions of the two historical eras, Mao Zedong chose the former, while Deng Xiaoping favored the latter.  This reorientation resulted from a fundamental shift in the judgment of the CCP leaders concerning the basic domestic and international situation. Mao Zedong's extreme emphasis on independence and national defense security was based on the intensity of the Cold War and the continuing advance of the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union.  By contrast, after China normalized relations with the United States and Japan, and Brezhnev's "Tashkent speech" signaled the thaw in Sino-Soviet relations, Deng Xiaoping’s judgement was that "peace and development" had become the theme of the era, and this judgement in turn became the basis for a series of guidelines and policies, and opened an era centered on economic construction. 

When neither the Revolutionary Narrative nor the Modernization Narrative is Sufficient 

Having understood the historical background, we can now attempt a political analysis of the discourse of the Industrial Party.   

In 2015, The Paper 澎湃新闻 published a thought piece which insightfully pointed out the similarities and differences between the Industrial Party and the dominant narrative of modern Chinese history. The article argues that, there are basically two different mainstream narratives of modern China, , namely, the revolutionary narrative and the modernization narrative. The revolutionary narrative is based on the reality of modern China's semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, sees class struggle and revolution as the basic driving force and main line of historical development, and takes as its theoretical basis the Marxist doctrine of social contradictions. The modernization narrative, on the other hand, emerged after reform and opening, and focuses on the modern material, political, and cultural transformation of modern China in the process of learning from the West. 

If we use this framework to analyze the Industrial Party, we find that its discourse is a mixture of several narrative threads. The Industrial Party agrees with the revolutionary narrative’s basic view of the nature of Chinese society, and also agrees that a radical revolution was necessary to completely transform society, and it can accept the price paid for this revolution. The Industrial Party also absorbed the discourse system of the revolutionary narrative, with its emphasis on autonomy, the Third World, and anti-imperialist oppression, etc. However, the Industrial Party narrative differs from the revolutionary narrative in that it downplays the discussion of individual and institutional transformation in the traditional revolutionary narrative, and places more emphasis on the historical impact and transformation wrought by industrialization itself, as changes in the economic base bring about institutional and cultural changes in the superstructure. 

In contrast to the modernization narrative of the 1980s, the Industrial Party emphasizes the differences between China's industrialization path and that of the West, based on the experience of the construction of the early socialist period. China was thus able learn from Western advanced technologies without coming to rely completely on the West, let alone replicating the West's industrialization path of foreign plunder.  The Industrial Party identifies strongly with an industrial path grounded in self-reliance and autonomy, and sees certain aspects of the industrialization-modernization narrative, such as political participation, thought emancipation, and the value of the individual, as occupying more subordinate positions.  They criticize the subjective idealism of intellectuals, arguing that history has its own objective laws of development and cannot evolve according to the subjective expectations of the Touchy-Feely Parties, producing miraculous changes out of thin air.  The Industrial Party emphasizes the tradition in which scientists and engineers build the country through hard work. 

In addition, the Industrial Party accepts the nationalism embedded in the revolutionary narrative, displaying strong nationalist and patriotic feelings, opposing imperialism and especially American hegemony, and advocating a national self-confidence that views the West as equals, or even looks down on the West. In a certain sense, the Industrial Party embeds the two core elements of industrialization and nationalism into the revolutionary narrative. 

The choices made in building this narrative, and especially the nationalist themes, influence the strategies Industrial Party employs in its discursive struggles. The Industrial Party is at some distance from both the narrative of revolution and that of modernization, while at the same time opposing various and sundry Touchy-Feely Parties, including Marxists or Maoists championing the ideals of communism and the workers' state, "public intellectuals" and "mainstream economists" who advocate learning from the West in terms political democracy and economic freedom, as well cultural conservatives who advocate reviving traditional culture.

But Chinese Marxists are inevitably nationalists, so they and the Industrial Party can agree on the broad goals of national revival and industrialization, and the two also believe that only state ownership and the planned economy can achieve these goals, so they often work together to stymie liberals and Westernizers in the political and economic fields. As for the cultural conservatives, they may not agree with the value of industrialization and have a romanticized imagination of traditional culture, but at least they defend the agency of Chinese civilization, so although the Industrial Party does not identify with them, there are no violent disagreements. 

As mentioned earlier, the Industrial Party, whose members came of age in the 1990s as consumerism began to expand, has not abandoned its pursuit of a public role or grand narratives. However, it is not easy to build a grand narrative, and for the young Chinese people that make up the Industrial Party, there are two ready-made narratives they can draw on.  The first requires looking abroad, i.e., toward the political and economic programs of Europe and the United States, meaning a liberal and democratic political system and a free market and globalized economic order. 

The second requires looking toward the past, i.e., the political and economic programs of the Maoist era. Developments in the 1990s allowed the Industrial Party to understand certain problems caused by following the West in terms of economics. Therefore, while their "elders" chose to look abroad, they instead choose to look to the past, turning to the theory and experience of the Mao period. However, they do not accept the Maoist era in its entirety, otherwise they would be Maoists in the Deng Xiaoping era, and not the Industrial Party. 

For the Industrial Party, which set its sites on reconstructing the historical narrative of the People’s Republic, the divergence between the two "thirty years" was another thorny issue. To solve this problem, they creatively transformed Marxism. Both the Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping eras were part of the sinicization of Marxism, and Marxism is the base of China's values, so it is impossible for the Industrial Party to abandon it completely. For Marx, the productive forces and relations of production are the core issues, and although the productive forces determine the relations of production, the relations of production nonetheless occupy a central position in political economy.  The fundamental difference between Mao Zedong's and Deng Xiaoping's styles of governance also relates to the relations of production. 

Although the different factions of the Industrial Party have their own preferences in terms of the history of the People Republic, the Industrial Party as a whole rejects what it sees as the inefficient social ideals of the early PRC period. At the same time, because they do not share the modernization narrative of the 1980s, which includes ideas of political progress and thought emancipation, the Industrial Party does not adopt the "continuous unity of Chinese history and civilization" schema, proposed by Gan Yang and others in the early 21st century—which the Industrial Party sees as a cultural narrative lacking in genuine utility.[25] 

To unite the two eras, they focus on the instrumentalist and engineering-oriented construction programs linked to state ownership, the planned economy, and heavy industry, all of which is formally similar to the Soviet model with its focus on productivity, while downplaying or avoiding political movements which more profoundly transform production relations, the political system, ideology and culture.  They then link the development of the first thirty years with the "liberation and development of productive forces" of the reform and opening period, finally uniting the two in the grand narrative of China's rise.  The Industrial Party both accepts and instrumentally reinterprets relations of production of the two eras, gives pride of place to productive forces, and makes "modernization" and "industrialization" the consistent pursuit of the new China. This reconfigures the path of the grand narrative, thus eliminating or avoiding the divergence between the two "thirty years." 

Discussion: "Repoliticization" in an Age of "Depoliticization”

The Industrial Party and the Little Pinks 

Wang Hongzhe 王洪喆[26] and others broadly divide contemporary Chinese online nationalism into three waves. The first wave was dominated by university students born in the 1970s, who were dissatisfied with China’s performance related to major international events (such as anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998 and NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia in 1999) and used BBSs such as Strong Nation Forum 强国论坛and Iron Blood Group 铁血社区 to intervene in social issues and criticize current policy. The second wave was made up of what were known as “well-informed nationalists 知情的民族主义者,” who, in addition to their strong patriotic feelings, were also Internet savvy and fluent in English.  They had direct access to Western media, as well as a systematic framework for analyzing Chinese history and the international order based in international relations. The Little Pinks 小粉红 have dominated the third wave of online nationalism, a group emerging in a commercial context dominated by new media.[27] 

2016 was a pivotal year for online nationalism. That year saw the "Chinese meme war on Facebook," the "Zhao Wei incident," the "Mack Horton incident at the Rio Olympics," and the "THAAD missile incident in South Korea,” all of which illustrated that online nationalists had considerable power to mobilize popular opinion, and at the same time revealed the transformation of online nationalism.[28]   The Little Pinks, a product the new media commercial culture and China’s rise, entered the public arena, evolving together with the "military fans" and the Industrial Party as "informed nationalists," each in their own way. 

The Little Pinks have become a strange combination of the era of "depoliticization" and the desire for "repoliticization." But the nationalism of the Little Pinks has a distinct form of expression, i.e., the meme wars.  This post-modern form of "drama" gradually developed through the commercialization of fan practices, and its main characteristic is that it lacks a clearly presented, cohesive, and consensual political core. No new narrative is established to replace the discarded meanings ,  and the ability to mobilize public opinion can be used and shaped by any number of forces.

The French philosopher Raymond Aron's (1905-1983) comment on the "May Storm" in France in 1968 might be pertinent here:  "Suddenly there was the chance to escape the tedium of everyday life. In a revolution that was half true and half false, people were play-acting rather than really doing anything, but it nonetheless provoked people’s sympathy or even excited their enthusiasm…and people embraced their misunderstanding, believing that they were experiencing a great historical moment.” 

While the "half-true/half-false" play-acting continues, young people are starting to doubt the discourse of "private resistance," and some of them are beginning to address the greatest puzzle of our time:  how can the revolution of everyday life lead to real social change when the political organizations, political debates, political struggles and social movements of the 20th century have taken leave of history? In the period between 2008 and 2016, many groups began to turn to the historical experience of the 20th century, as the desire for "repoliticization" surged past postmodernism and took on new meaning. The world took a step back from the postmodern performance of resistance and turned back to deal with the unfinished issues of modern politics. 

The Industrial Party, as the “older brothers” of the Little Pinks, was steeped in the instrumental rationality of the 1990s, and kept a certain distance from the new media commercial culture. Their desire for "re-politicization" will not be satisfied with empty forms of expression, but seeks to identify a cohesive core, and to summon and produce grand narratives. How can the Industrial Party engage in constructive social interactions and debates with the Little Pinks? In the era of "tribalization" created by online technology and the market mechanism, will they enter into the "echo chamber" style of self-talk and ego-boosting, or will they be able to continue their cross-media and cross-disciplinary discourse practices, forming a more open and pluralistic public sphere and a stronger social solidarity? This is something we should keep an eye on. 

Summoning back the Grand Narrative 

By 2008, the instrumental rationality and professionalism that emerged in the 1990s had profoundly changed the Chinese intellectual community, leading to a certain lack of historical consciousness and overarching social concerns, which is in line with Xu Jilin's pronouncement on the era, mentioned above, and with Wang Hui's 汪晖 (b. 1959) basic judgment about the "depoliticization" of the 1990s. Wang Hui's "depoliticization" refers to the loss of political organizations, political debates, political struggles, and social movements based on specific values, which implied as well the disappearance of certain public and critical concerns.[29] 

However, between 2008 and 2018, the passion for change seems to have returned. Looking back at 1968 after 50 years, it appears that world situations and social structures that had held for more than two decades after the war were hit by a worldwide wave of rebellion, and a generation of people that had lived through the war "not only did not want to talk about the past, but was also skeptical of political promises and grand ideas.  Their attention was always focused on material pleasure, stability, and respectability, while at the same time feeling slightly uneasy." However, their children, growing up in the post-war era, relocated their political aspirations and grand narratives and launched a global movement of "rebellion," aiming to break down the rigid existing institutions, ossified social structures, and oppressive mainstream culture. 

Today we are also more than twenty years since the end of the Cold War, which is precisely the amount of time it takes for a generation to grow up, and we can see the parallels with 1968. The entire world seems to have rekindled its desire for politicization, setting aside post-Cold War trends of instrumental rationality, individualism, and consumerism. 2016 saw the U.S. presidential election and Brexit, the independence referendums in Catalonia and Kurdistan, the post-Arab Spring political turmoil and the war in Syria, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the worldwide wave of political Islam, and the social protest movements in Morocco and Armenia…all of which show that the stable order formed in the 1990s was not sufficient to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of today’s youth, and that the desire to break the existing order was ready to burst forth. The quest for alternative social development solutions began to go beyond the "end of history" and to start anew. 

Symbolized by the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the political and economic power accumulated over 60 years of China's socialist construction and 30 years of reform and opening came to the fore, and along with the process of China's rise, the nationalist consciousness of the young generation soared as well. This generation, born in the 1980s during the "cultural re-enlightenment" and growing up in the 1990s during the comprehensive market reforms, joined the battlefield of public discourse at a time when China's Internet was still in its infancy, trying to find new theories to take the pulse of China's history and reality and to open up the country's future. 

Therefore, in a certain sense, the narrative of the Industrial Party and its "China stance" can be seen as one part of the global political and economic landscape and a reflection of the radical changes in China's social structure. Partisans of the Industrial Party have dismantled the humanistic intellectual discourse of their "father's generation" and remain dissatisfied with the lack of idealistic instrumental rationality of their "elder brother's generation."  At the same time, they cannot discard the totality of their "father's and brother's" cultural heritage, so, in their own manner, they have combined the grand narrative of the 1980s with the instrumental rationality of the 1990s, and creatively transformed the revolutionary narrative of their "grandparents" and the modernization narrative of their "fathers and brothers" to create the industrial narrative of their own generation. This narrative has gradually moved from the margins to the mainstream. 

The flourishing of the Internet in China provided a broader space for the public discourse of the Industrial Party. When the public discourse space of newspapers and television was controlled by mainstream society, the Industrial Party displayed stronger media adaptability than the previous generations as China progressed from the stage of BBS through that of portals and social media, and at the same time, mass media changed how the new generation expressed itself, and the Internet became the main battlefield where they mobilized their friends and engaged with their enemies. They also abandoned the elaborate terminology of the intellectuals of the 1980s and the academics of the 1990s, and began to organize the grand narrative of public discourse in the common language and logic of the media. 

The Political Public Sphere and the Creation of Political Classes 

When discussing how the political agency and identity of new social classes are shaped in the process of the formation of a modern political system or the transformation of a country, Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a must-read. Using the historical process of the formation of the modern republican state in Europe as his empirical foundation, he describes how the bourgeoisie liberated itself from the public sphere controlled by the feudal court, shaped its inner, political character in the literary public sphere created by print capitalism, and then took political action according to the norms of the new public sphere.

This template became the standard narrative for understanding the political transformation of former socialist and traditional countries at the height of the post-Cold War, in which the previous social structure, economic system, and political power relations were transformed through the mechanism of the interaction of civil society organizations, foundations, international organizations, and free media, with European welfare capitalism and its liberal democratic system as universal values. 

However, in the midst of the continuing global financial crisis, the increasing capitalization of traditional and social media, the fracture of traditional political representation, the failure of state transformation, the worsening crisis of governance, and deepening social divisions, we see the weakness of a transformation of the public sphere that relies on power, authority, and  capital in the shaping of cultural values and the construction of social identities. In China, our noisy and flourishing market-oriented media, our active public intellectuals, and the constant clamor of our social media all remain on the surface, and have yet to create a stable, self-aware, autonomous middle class or an intellectual class that identifies with positive values.

The lively media public sphere and the emerging elites not only have failed to create a responsible political class which might assist transitional society to enter a more challenging political public sphere, but technological upgrades, power, individual interests, etc., all heighten the sense of disintegration and turmoil. In an atmosphere where the new class is fearful and unsure of how to deal with the rise of new forces and the new normal in China's socio-political and cultural life, the Industrial Party has been cultivating the public sphere from the margins, gradually bringing together opinions and forces, and putting together a somewhat stable consensus, discourse system, and group recognition in a relatively healthy internal competition and debate. It is a positive example of public sphere construction that deserves researchers' attention. 

But we should also note the flaws of the discourse of the Industry Party. This group emerged as a rebellion against the "universal values" of liberal democracy, and their strategy of confrontation was to introduce a set of industrialized "universal values" as a counterweight to them, and to treat industrialized values as a universal truth. In the debates in which they engage, they have largely rejected the exploration of a pluralistic future society and all non-progressive or non-modern ideas, such as religious beliefs, cultural conservatism, environmentalism, etc., in order, in part, to remove competitors to the industrialized "universal values" they preach. The logic of the Industrial Party does not allow for the existence of "anomalies" that reject industrialization and modernization.

The same attitude can be found in the treatment of ethnic, regional, and gender issues. A high degree of intellectual self-confidence and strong political aspirations are not enough to assure the construction of a pluralistic, tolerant and egalitarian social community, even if coupled with a strong capacity for public opinion mobilization.  Further cultural self-reflection and more dynamic and diverse political debates are indispensable for the construction of a pluralistic, tolerant, and egalitarian social community.

Notes

[1]卢南峰, 吴靖, “历史转折中的宏大叙事：’工业党’网络思潮的政治分析,” published in 东方学刊/Dongfang Review on September 9, 2018.

[2]Translator’s note:  ZTE is a partially state-owned Chinese telecommunications company.

[3]文扬, “也许这是一场及时爆发的技术战争,” 观察者网, April 24, 2018.

[4]Translator’s note:  The authors carried out interviews with a number of people associated with the Industrial Party, and throughout the text, quotations that are not otherwise identified come from these interviews. 

[5]Translator’s note:  As far as I can tell, this is the rough equivalent of Reddit or perhaps a sub-Reddit, whose original focus was on military matters but which has since broadened out to other topics and areas.

[6] Translator’s note:  The Chinese reaction was sparked by alleged CNN bias in reporting on the violent suppression of demonstrations in Tibet in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.  For more information, see here.

[7]曾鸣, “四月的’叛徒’：一家“正面民族主义网站”的成立与分裂.”

[8]Translator’s note:  Ma Qianzhu is one pen name among many employed by Ren Chonghao 任冲昊, who trained as a civil engineer but is now a famous Internet personality and public affairs commentator in China.

[9]Translator’s note:  Online trolls who support the Chinese government for money are known as  the “fifty-cent party 五毛党”—because they are believed to receive fifty cents for every post.  “Self-financing fifty-centers” literally means “the party that brings its own stock” and refers to people who troll for the government without being paid.  The term was coined by people who dislike these trolls, and the sentiment they are expressing is something like “these guys finance themselves and are too stupid even to take the money that is offered to them.”  Of course, the terms can be reappropriated, in which case, the meaning would be something like “I am a proud self-financing fifty-center.”
[10]Translator’s note:  The “disparagement of intellectuals” refers to an online movement that takes potshots at “public intellectuals gongzhi/公知,” a term, which has roughly the same connotation as “talking head” in English.  See here for more information.

[11]卢南峰 ,许诺 , 吴靖, “辨析“川普粉”现象--唐纳德·特朗普作为中国知识青年议题.”
[12]Authors’ note:  In the 1920s, the Soviet Union's technical professionals played an important role in the construction of socialist industrialization, and calls for raising the political status of engineers rose, to the point that science and technology sometimes received precedence over Communist ideology. The "Schacht incident" of 1928 was characterized as a counter-revolutionary economic event. Further distancing the "Schachtists" from the industrial sector, the "Industrial Party Incident" broke out in 1930, in which eight technical authorities and key members of the economic administration were sentenced to prison. For further information see 樊玉红, 万长松, “20 世纪 20 年代苏联“专家治国运动”研究,” 载《东北大学学报 ( 社会科学版 )》，2014. 4:  343-348, not available online.

[13]Authors’ note:  In November 1962, Khrushchev carried out a major reorganization of the organizational leadership and structure of the Soviet Communist Party by creating two party organizations, the Industrial Party and the Agrarian Party…with the aim of making the Party more effective…However, this reform…caused serious disruptions and many problems and…was abolished in 1964 under Brezhnev's rule. See 俞良早：《东方社会主义行进中：共产党执政与党的建设》，北京：中共中央党校出版社，2006 年版， 150-152 页.

[14]Translator’s note:  Yan Xishan was a militarist during China’s Republican period, known for his efforts to introduce reform and promote industrialization in the region under his control.

[15]Author’s note:  See 甘阳,《通三统》，北京：生活·读书·新知三联书店， 2007年版，第3-49页; 刘小枫：《如何认识百年共和的 历史含义》; 张旭东：《作为“主权者”的邓小平》; 习近平：《在新进中央委员会的委员、候补委员学习贯彻党的十八大精神研讨班上的讲话》.  2013年2月，习近平执政初期就强调：“对改革开放前的历史时期要正确评价，不能用改革开放后的历史时期否定改革开放前的历史时期，也不能用改革开放前的历史时期否定改革开放后的历史时期。”习近平的讲话并非无的放矢，他所要回应的正是讲话中指出的两种思想倾向，即两个“三十年”相互否定。但在改革开放后很长一段时间里，官方媒体保持“不争论”的默契中，回避这一分歧。21世纪后，随着改革进入深水区，暗流涌动的民间舆论开始倒逼执政者处理这一基本问题。在官方表态之前，民间尤其是知识群体已经开始利用政治修辞试图抹平毛泽东与邓小平之间的分歧，尤其是在毛泽东的110周年诞辰（2003）和 120 周年诞辰（2013）、邓小平的 100 周年诞辰（2004）和 110 周年诞辰（2014）几个时间节点上，重新审视和评价毛泽东与邓小平留下的遗产成为知识群体的一大风潮.] In February of 2013, as he was beginning his mandate, Xi Jinping stressed that "The historical period preceding reform and opening should be correctly evaluated, and we must not use the historical period after reform and opening to negate the historical period before reform and opening, nor should the historical period before reform and opening be used to negate the historical period after reform and opening." The point of Xi’s speech was to call attention to the two ideological tendencies he identified, i.e., mutual negation of the two "thirty years." For a long time after reform and opening, the official media avoided this divergence by maintaining a tacit agreement not to argue about it.  In the 21st century, as reform entered deeper waters, the undercurrents of grassroots opinion began to force those in power to address this fundamental issue. Before the official world took a stance on the issue, grassroots opinion, and especially the intellectual community, had already begun to use political rhetoric to try to smooth out the divergent views of Mao and Deng, especially on the celebrations of the 110th (2003) and 120th (2013) birthdays of Mao and the 100th (2004) and 110th (2014) birthdays of Deng, and re-examining and evaluating the legacy of the two became a major trend in the intellectual community.

[16]《工业体系建设决定我们的历史和未来》.

[17]Translator’s note:  Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was a well-known Marxist sociologist and cultural theorist, associated with the Birmingham School.

[18]甘阳：《古今中西之争》，北京：生活·读书·新知三联书店，2006 年版，第 35 页.

[19]李泽厚：《启蒙与救亡的双重变奏》，载许纪霖主编：《二十世纪中国思想史论》，上海：东方出版中心，2000年版，第 100-101 页.  Translator’s note:  Li Zehou was a towering figure in China’s intellectual word, first working in the fields of aesthetic and ethics.  In the 1980s, he was a major figure attempting to revive China’s intellectual life.  For more information, see here.

[20]白惠元：《英雄变格：孙悟空与现代中国的自我超越》，北京：生活·读书·新知三联书店，2017年版，第132页.

[21]Translator’s note:  He Guimei is a professor of Chinese literature at Beijing University. 

[22]贺桂梅,《1980 年代“文化热”的知识谱系与意识形态 (上)》.

[23]许纪霖：《九十年代知识分子的三大挑战--关于知识分子的系列思考之六》.

[24]Translator’s note:  The 43 plan was a project launched in the early 1970s to import 4.3 billion US$ worth of industrial technology from a number of developed countries.

[25]甘阳：《通三统》，北京：生活·读书·新知三联书店，2014年版，第6页.

[26]Translator’s note:  Hong Hongjie is a professor of journalism and communications at Peking University, and publishes on the Maoist website Utopia.

[27]王洪喆 , 李思闽 , 吴靖：《从“迷妹”到“小粉红”：新媒介商业文化环境下的国族身份生产和动员机制研究》.

[28]Translator’s note:  All of these incidents involved young Chinese nationalist attacking various outside “enemies” on the Internet.  The Facebook meme war involved hacking Facebook and flooding pro-Taiwan independence pages with China memes; Zhao Wei is an actress and businesswoman was attacked for wearing clothing that suggested her support of Japan; Australian athlete Mack Horton accused the Chinese swimmer Sun Yang of being a drug cheat; and the possibility of THAAD missiles being installed in South Korea raised the hackles of Chinese nationalists. 
​
[29]汪晖：《去政治化的政治: 短20世纪的终结与90年代》，北京：生活·读书·新知三联书店，2008年版，第 37-40 页.