Mission Statement

Establishment Intellectuals and the China Dream

David Ownby

The concept of “establishment intellectuals” can be understood in any number of ways.  Our focus is on academic intellectuals, generally university professors, who in addition to their professional publications for their scholarly fields also write as “public intellectuals” in an attempt to influence government policy and public opinion.  Establishment intellectuals in China accept the rules of the political game as defined by Chinese authorities, or ignore these rules at their peril, the first being loss of influence.  This does not mean that they parrot the propaganda of the Party-state; genuine debate, knock-down drag-out take-no-prisoners debate, occurs constantly in China, and the intellectual world is not as “harmonious” as Chinese authorities would prefer, nor as totalitarian as Western media sometimes suggests.  But establishment intellectuals are not dissidents, which for Chinese authorities means someone dedicated to regime change.  Establishment intellectuals must find ways to signal to authorities that they remain loyal to the basic project of the Party-state, which at present is the achievement of the China Dream.

From a Cold War perspective, establishment intellectuals in Communist regimes are lesser figures than truculent, heroic dissidents.   For those who preach the “end of history,” establishment intellectuals are gray men (and some women, but mostly men) who compromise their intellectual and personal integrity for purposes of career advancement and personal safety.  Yet in the case of contemporary China, an argument can be made that establishment intellectuals, particularly in their public role, are more important than dissidents, both for China and for our attempts to understand China.        

Intellectuals, and ideas, are important because China has been searching for a new source of political legitimacy since the death of Mao Zedong and his embrace of “continuous revolution.” Deng Xiaoping set China’s sights on material progress, reform and opening, and China’s stunning economic development since the 1980s is testimony to the essential wisdom of that vision.  Yet despite the hundreds of millions of Chinese who have escaped poverty over the past few decades, despite the utter transformation of China’s urban landscape, nagging doubts have remained as to China’s identity and China’s future.  When China eventually beats the West at the West’s own game, becoming the world’s dominant superpower, what will remain of “China” and “Chinese civilization?”  Establishment intellectuals have played an important role in trying to work through these questions.

In the 1980s, despite important differences of opinion across the intellectual and political spectrum, most intellectuals expected that China would become some sort of democracy.  Perhaps not a liberal democracy, perhaps not a one-person-one-vote democracy, but something quite different from the authoritarian/totalitarian model that had come to characterize Chinese politics since the 1949 revolution.  The Tiananmen massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union challenged this belief in the inevitability of democracy, as both suggested the possibility that greater freedom and democratization might lead to genuine chaos.  The Party-state responded to this challenge with a series of measures that sought both to deepen market reform and global competitiveness, and to reinforce authoritarian rule.  These decisions destroyed the weak "liberal" consensus that had characterized the 1980s, and opened up a space for serious debate in the community of establishment intellectuals.

The “liberals” who had dominated discussions in the 1980s now split into competing groups.  Some argued that that market reform would not only enliven the economy, but would also wear away the vestiges of China’s feudal (and Maoist) autocracy, both at political and social levels.  Other liberals worried that market forces were creating a new crony capitalism that enriched the state and the capitalist bosses at the expense of the people.  Similar concerns gave rise to the “New Left,” a group of non-liberal intellectuals dedicated to the renewal of socialism through a creative rereading of socialist—and Maoist—traditions, combined with an embrace of Western post-modernism and critical theory.  On the right, a group of culturally conservative intellectuals known as the New Confucians denounced both the liberals and the New Left, insisting that China’s tradition, properly reinvented, provided all the resources China needed to find a stable path toward future development.  These groups engaged in ferocious debates throughout the 1990s, debates which continue today.

By the early 21st century, China’s reform and opening had produced “China’s rise,” the idea that China’s return to great power status was a world historical event.  China’s burgeoning confidence was further bolstered by the apparent decline of Western liberal democracy:  gridlock in the United States Congress, the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 (the result of the failure of US government to regulate the financial industry), Brexit and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the election of Donald Trump.  This was the context in which Chinese president Xi Jinping, at the beginning of his mandate in 2012, announced the China Dream, the revival of the great Chinese people/nation, as his goal.

The China Dream is a political slogan, but not an empty political slogan.  On the one hand, it is meant to challenge the American dream, and to suggest that China’s rise will propel China past the United States, returning her to her rightful place as the world’s greatest power.  Given China’s spectacular material progress over the past few decades, the achievement of the China Dream seems possible.  On the other hand, Xi Jinping means for the China Dream to be uniquely Chinese (even as it is be a model for the world).  As Xi has consolidated his power, he has called for a return to ideology which will discipline the party and motivate the people.  This ideology is to fuse the Communist spirit with the richness of traditional Confucian civilization.

China’s establishment intellectuals have responded enthusiastically to China’s rise and (with some exceptions) to the China Dream.  The possibility that China might return to great power status without having fully Westernized is, for many, an electrifying idea, rich with potential to rethink the basic premises of modernity.  The suspicion, born of China’s “century of humiliation,” that China might actually be inferior to the West, is fading, giving rise to the hope that the legitimacy for which China has been searching since the reform and opening era is at hand.  Consequently, and despite Xi Jinping’s crackdown on ideological diversity, Chinese intellectual life since China’s rise has been particularly vibrant, as thinkers vie to provide content for Xi Jinping’s China Dream.

Once China becomes a great power, Chinese ideas will matter, regardless of their intrinsic quality.  This web site is dedicated to helping the West to understand those ideas.