Rong Jian, "A China Bereft of Thought"

Rong Jian, "A China Bereft of Thought" 

荣剑，“没有细想的中国,” originally published in 2013 on the website www.21.ccom.net, which has since been shut down.  A pdf of the Chinese text is available here.

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).

Introduction and translation by Gloria Davies

Introduction

It takes some nerve to title one’s essay ‘A China Bereft of Thought’ for this is, surely, an extravagant claim. Yet, as we will discover in Rong Jian’s essay of this title below, he is utterly dogged in his ambition to make the claim stick. He knows he is being deliberately polemical and as he points out early on, the title is likely to trigger a reaction in people before they have even started on the essay. The reaction, in turn, begs the question as to what the author means by ‘thought’ sixiang 思想.

In mainland China, sixiang refers to two quite different modes of thinking. As part of the term ‘Chinese thought’ 中国 思想 (Zhongguo sixiang), sixiang refers to key ideas and arguments constitutive of what we might best describe as ‘intellectual inquiry’ as it has been practised in the Chinese-speaking world. Hence, ‘modern Chinese thought’ or ‘contemporary Chinese thought’ would include ‘philosophy’, ‘theory’ and other varieties of conceptual thinking as these have developed in the Sinophone humanities and social sciences. However, as ‘Party thinking’ 党的思想 (dangde sixiang) and ‘thought work’ 思想工作 (sixiang gongzuo), sixiang is synonymous with ‘ideology’, specifically the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. Because China’s Party leaders are accustomed to presenting their ideas as the nation’s ‘guiding thought’ 指导思想 (zhidao sixiang), they also pretend to occupy the forefront of ‘Chinese thought’ as its vanguard. Doing so allows them, among other things, to justify censorship in terms of protecting the nation from the harm of dangerous and subversive ideas that are at odds with their own.

Rong does not distinguish between these divergent senses of sixiang in his essay, preferring instead to highlight the interdependence of intellectual inquiry and Party thinking. His attention-grabbing title serves as an answer of sorts for the big question he tacitly poses and around which his entire essay revolves: namely, ‘What has Chinese Communist Party rule done for Chinese thought?’ He argues that the CCP’s authoritarian power and the makeshift ideas it calls ‘Party thinking’ have so handicapped China’s capacity for independent inquiry as to render the country ‘bereft of thought’.

The question as to how authoritarian power has affected scholarship and inquiry in China is seldom openly discussed but the effects of authoritarian power are everywhere evident, among other things, in the exercise of self-censorship and the resulting characteristically oblique nature of mainland intellectual discourse.  If the need to not attract unwanted state attention is particularly important for those who write and publish for their living, Rong’s unusual candour perhaps reflects his independence from both the university sector and academic publishing in mainland China. Censorship of his sixiang would not deprive him of his main source of income.

In the 1980s, he attracted favourable notice in Marxist scholarship. However, the purge on 4 June 1989 of the student-led democracy movement at Tiananmen Square and the prolonged crackdown that followed stymied his academic career. In the 1990s, he chose to work instead in China’s burgeoning art business, establishing a successful career as a collector and curator of contemporary Chinese abstract oil paintings. Rong owns and runs the well-known art gallery Beijing Jindu Art Centre 北京锦都艺术中心 in the Chinese capital’s 798 Art District.
The timing of Rong’s essay is interesting. He first presented it at a seminar in January 2013 at the Unirule Institute of Economics 天则经济研究所 in Beijing. It was then published on Consensus 共识网 on 26 March 2013 and has since appeared on many other websites hosted in and outside China. The first half of 2013 was a time of intense speculation in mainland intellectual circles about the newly incumbent Party General Secretary, Xi Jinping, who had taken up this top leadership role in November 2012. Many had hoped that the plain-spoken Xi, unlike his ineloquent predecessor Hu Jintao (who spoke mostly in Party slogans), would implement reforms that would make the party-state system not only more accountable but also more hospitable to constructive criticism. It was in this generally positive ambience that Rong presented his seminar at the Unirule Institute.

However, all such expectations of greater intellectual freedoms would be dashed by mid- to late 2013. Xi revealed his determination to control and shape public culture to be stronger than Hu’s in August 2013 when his administration introduced new harsh penalties for ‘rumour mongering’.  The arrest and televised humiliation of self-styled ‘liberal’ social commentators whose observations about quotidian injustices had offended the party-state, and whom it now identified as ‘rumour mongers’ soon followed. From then on and up to the present, mainland universities have been subjected to increasing political restrictions and outlets for independent inquiry have been shut down. Consensus, which published Rong’s essay and on which he kept a blog, was arguably the last leading online forum for intellectual debate standing by mid-2016. (The bold and influential magazine Yanhuang chunqiu 炎黄春秋 was silenced in July 2016 via the ousting of its editorial board). By October, Consensus too had ceased to operate.

Rong’s essay has fared somewhat better. As of 28 January 2017, it remains accessible on several mainland-based blogs, including Rong’s column on the Caijing website. The Unirule Institute which hosted Rong’s seminar is also renowned for its defence of intellectual independence. Founded by three economists Mao Yushi 茅于轼, Sheng Hong 盛洪 and Zhang Shuguang 张曙光 who are widely regarded as leading liberal intellectuals, this think tank has, so far, survived Xi’s continuing crackdown. When I wrote this preface on 21 January, I checked the Unirule website to see if it included Rong’s presentation, the 469th in the Institute’s fortnightly seminar series. It did not and the omission was neither noted nor explained. (The Institute’s 2012 list ended with seminar 468 and the 2013 list began with seminar 470.) On 23 January, however, officials at the Cyberspace Administration of China in Beijing had shut the website down for allegedly breaching Internet regulations.

At a two-day meeting on ‘political and ideological work’ at Chinese universities on 8 December 2016, Xi demanded that mainland educators redouble their efforts in disseminating ‘advanced ideology and culture’ 先进思想文化 so as to instil students with Party thinking. Educators, he said, must show ‘resolute support for the party-state’s governance’ 党执政的坚定支持者.
All of this bodes ill for the already perilously diminished circumstances of independent inquiry in mainland China. In this ominous climate, Rong Jian’s ‘A China Bereft of Thought’ bears re-reading. I have taken the liberty of translating this engaging essay into English to help it reach a wider audience.

Author’s note

The text below forms part of my research on the history of modern Chinese thought. It is my personal perspective on the production and dissemination of thought in China since the Hundred Day Reform of 1898. The essay is thematically rather than chronologically organised and the focus of my analysis is the mind-set of Chinese intellectuals, in different historical periods, toward revolution, reform and scholarly discourse.

At the start of this year (2013), I was invited by the Unirule Institute of Economics to speak at their 469th fortnightly discussion forum and I presented what I had uncovered to date from researching this topic. I would like to thank my host, Professor Zhang Shuguang, and Professors Zheng Yefu 郑也夫, Xu Zhangrun 许章润, Lei Yi 雷颐, Ma Yong 马勇and Fang Deling 房德邻 for their excellent and inspiring comments on that occasion.  — Rong Jian
……………
I would like to thank the Unirule Institute very much for giving me this opportunity to express my views. I have been posting my writings online for a year but have seldom taken part in academic discussions. As Professor Zhang said in his introduction, I ‘took the plunge’ 下海 into business some twenty years earlier. However, an unexpected catalyst last year led me to post a series of articles online. I had no idea that my writings would provoke such a strong response. Consequently, I reconnected with several old friends and made new ones. All of this has prompted me to contemplate things anew. After I ‘took the plunge’, I did not stop reading and writing – in fact, I read a great deal. In 2003, I resolved to find the time to write one long essay each year. The several lengthy essays I have given to the many teachers assembled here were all written in the last year or two. My presentation today draws on these essays.

Section A:  Chinese thought and its evolution before and after the Reform Era

The last one hundred years of Chinese thought has been a topic of abiding interest to me. With the question of Chinese modernity as my starting point, I have examined and contemplated the changes that have occurred in Chinese thought in the period from the 1898 Hundred Day Reform to the 1930s. I have sought to analyse and assess the three major currents of thought in modern China – liberalism 自由主义, Marxism 马克思主义and conservatism 保守主义. When I first completed this essay, my plan was to continue my research into Chinese thought since the founding of the People’s Republic, to provide a general account of this period of history through which we are still living. As luck would have it, the Unirule Institute invited me to speak on this topic, which forced me to quicken the pace of my research. I hope that today’s discussion will allow me to deepen my still incomplete understanding.

The title of my talk ‘A China Bereft of Thought’ is likely to offend many people who may react and ask, ‘Where, then, would you put those scholars who conduct research on Chinese thought?’ The scholars present here are clearly thinkers, so how can China be without thought? Moreover, there is no shortage of thinkers in China who have produced substantial research over the years. In judging China to be ‘bereft of thought’, I mean the overall situation, in the sense of thought as something that the nation as a whole has produced. Of course, I will also evaluate the state of thinking in the Chinese academic world. The subheading for ‘A China bereft of thought’ is ‘the situation of thought in China around the start of the Reform Era’. The outline below is approximately 10,000 words long. The finished work is likely to be four or five times longer. Let me elaborate my views on this topic in five sections.