Thinking China in the Age of Trump and Xi

"Introduction:  Thinking China in the Age of Xi Jingping"  

Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel
 
 
The greatest challenge of the 21st century is the need to come to a new understanding of China and moreover to be able to come to a true understanding of our China in comparative context.

Gan Yang, Unifying the Three Traditions (2005)

The future of China lies in rebuilding a China rich in thought, in restoring the unity of theory and practice and in the development of values that accord with human justice.

Rong Jian, A China Bereft of Thought (2013)
 
 
Gan Yang and Rong Jian, hardly intellectual comrades-in-arms, reflect the challenges facing China and China’s intellectuals in the twenty-first Century. After some forty years of post-Mao reforms, Gan Yang, an inveterate reformer who was seen as Liberal in the 1990s and as some combination of Left and Confucian in the new century, has identified the question of the day: how to understand China’s history and role in the world? Meanwhile, Rong Jian, an outspoken businessman intellectual (and therefore independent of the strictures of Chinese universities) challenges fellow intellectuals to provide serious moral thought for Chinese political life. Gan Yang calls on his readers to “unify the three traditions” of modern China (Confucian, Maoist, and Dengist liberal reform); Rong Jian taunts them for being “bereft of thought” and challenges them to contribute to a “thinking China.” This volume shows that Gan Yang’s and Rong Jian’s hopes have not been in vain with fourteen examples of thinking China. These essays are from some of the best minds in China today thinking about China—where has it come from? what is it today? what should it be in the future?

Chinese scholars, having benefited from China's openness to the world and the relative relaxation of political pressure in China (until recently), have much to say about China and the world that merits our attention. They disagree with each other, and their debates throw light not only on these key questions for understanding China itself, but also its role in the world. It is the disagreements, as well as underlying shared assumptions, of these thoughtful and fractious public intellectuals that provide a rich and complex understanding of China today and its role in our future. We have selected writings that we, the editors, in conjunction with our Chinese colleagues, feel capture the diversity of intelligent opinion about just what is, or should be, the “China Dream.”

The selection of texts translated in this volume reflects our commitment to Chinese voices over our North American concerns or preferences. Over the course of a five-year project we engaged with our Chinese colleagues to find out which writers and texts they feel are important.[1] Scholars and writers in Shanghai and Beijing, of course, hardly constitute the full range of Chinese opinion, but they do include thoughtful and open-minded intellectuals, some of them well-known in the public sphere. They responded with diligence and grace—and arguments amongst themselves and with the non-Chinese members of our project—to the challenge of representing as wide a range of intellectual perspectives as we could, especially including standpoints with which they personally disagreed. The first result has been a series of five collaboratively drafted mappings of the intellectual public sphere in China today published in 2018 in China Information.[2] This book, and other translations from our project, are the next result of this collaboration.

These translations are voices from China’s century and offer the careful reader an opportunity to enter the world of intellectual debate inside China today on fundamental questions of politics and society. For Western readers, the selections from liberal voices will likely be most familiar, though for those with progressive commitments some of the left voices will resonate. However, several of these texts may surprise readers, at least at first inspection. How, for example is a eulogy for a disillusioned party intellectual (Xu Jilin’s essay on Wang Yuanhua) a worthwhile contribution to public debate? Or, Qian Liqun’s very personal “introduction” to a course (and now a two-volume book) on the Mao period? Do people really read the dense prose of Sun Ge’s post-colonial theorizing? Aside from our assurance that our Chinese colleagues made the case for each of these authors, these diverse texts reflect the variety of literary forms adopted by Chinese intellectuals writing under party supervision in the early twenty-first century. Xu Jilin’s contemporary literati elegy is one style of expression used by China’s public intellectuals—here to evoke the historical experience of the older intellectuals active in these debates. Similarly, the personal style of Qian Liqun’s lecture encodes a stinging analysis of the Mao period and call to arms to face the historical tragedies of “Mao culture” within the form of “a letter to my father and introduction to a generation who don’t know this history.”

Several of the essays included in this volume look more academic with authors flaunting different sorts of “expertise”—Liu Qing gives a nuanced philosophical reading heavy with citations to philosophers like Charles Taylor, Wang Shaoguang offers a robust political-economy analysis along with charts and tables, Chen Lai peppers his history with arcane characters and terms from Confucianism’s long history, Cai Xia provides a robust defense of constitutional democracy entirely on the basis of the Marxist-Leninist cannon, and Sun Ge reflects the engagement of some in the Sinophone left with international post-colonial theory that has an audience in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as much as inside China. We also include notable public lectures re-posted on internet fora (Rong Jian), thoughtful posts on Weibo and Weixin (Guo Yuhua and Cai Xia), and focused conversations between like-minded intellectuals, also made widely available over the internet (Chen Ming et al).

The vast majority of public intellectuals in China—and particularly public intellectuals who publish in high-profile venues—are men.    We may deplore this, but at present it appears to be a sociological fact, even if the reasons for the imbalance are not immediately clear.  David Ownby and Tim Cheek met with the outspoken Sociologist,  Guo Yuhua, at Tsinghua in early December of 2018, and when we asked her to explain the male domination of China’s public intellectual world, she replied with a wry smile that “systems are gendered, too.”[3]  As we the editors have consulted more widely, others have quickly emerged, and we include the commentaries Guo Yuhua and Cai Xia at the Central Party School to reflect more of women’s contributions to thinking China. Individual introductions to each text provide specific information on the context and key points of that text, as well as addressing any salient issues of translation or terminology.

This general introduction introduces the three main “voices” that Chinese intellectuals themselves recognize: liberal, left, and new Confucian and offers a survey of the historical context, political system, and intellectual worlds that have shaped these intellectuals and their analysis of contemporary China. We explore the key themes and issues which we, the editors, see emerging from these debates and their significance for our understanding of China, China’s role in the world, and what China’s intellectuals might have to offer us from a newly powerful China in a time of profound challenges to the liberal global order.
 
Mapping the Intellectual Public Sphere

Our volume begins with Gan Yang’s 2005 lecture at Tsinghua University. He appears as “the challenge” because we feel his characterization of contemporary China as shaped by three traditions from the twentieth century—Confucianism, Maoism, and liberal reform under Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997)—has been broadly embraced by most intellectuals who currently debate China’s political reforms in the People’s Republic of China today. As well, Gan’s challenge aptly identifies the questions and reflects the categories that animate all the thinkers and writers we have surveyed: how to identify and integrate the best of China’s traditional, socialist, and liberal heritages and the focus on thought, culture, and moral discourse.  

To present the range of answers to the challenge Gan Yang articulates, we adopt the widely accepted Chinese division of the world of public intellectuals into three ‘streams of thought’ (sichao):  the Liberals, the New Left, and the New Confucians.[4] The Liberals are in many ways the most familiar to Western observers.  Liu Xiaobo, who died in summer 2016 and was 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner and prisoner of conscience, represents the world of Chinese dissidents who continue to struggle for the causes of democracy and human rights in China and who are willing to confront Party authority directly.  However, there are many public intellectuals in China who are liberal in a less confrontational fashion and who labor in their books and on their websites to achieve liberal goals in less revolutionary ways by working within the system, by exploring forgotten liberal traditions in China, by criticizing illiberal practices in contemporary Chinese society, and by engaging Left and New Confucian authors in debate.  These Chinese Liberals seek to make China truly “modern” in the face of repressive traditions (both traditional Chinese and revolutionary) by salvaging the heritage of Western liberalism—individual freedoms, rule of law—even as they struggle with the post-modern readings of China’s rise.

The five Liberals included in the first section of this volume offer five ways these issues are addressed in public in China today: as careful scholarly analyses applied to burning problems, as public lectures, as snappy and direct blogposts, as analyses cast in orthodox Party language, and as heart-felt literary examples to inspire. In text 2, Liu Qing, a professor of political science in Shanghai, speaks from within the academy but to a broader audience in 2004 through the well-known intellectual journal Open Times (Kaifang shidai) published in Guangzhou. Liu Qing gives a rigorously theoretical account of the issues confronting China and defends liberalism, drawing particularly from the communitarian liberalism of the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor.

Liu’s goal is to identify and apply useful categories of analysis to construct his liberal vision of China’s problems and solutions. He also invokes the “three traditions” of China’s twentieth century, signalling that he has joined the conversation launched by Gan Yang. Yet Liu searches for historical continuity in different ways, arguing that whatever one might think of liberalism in an abstract sense, the liberal mindset has become part of Chinese culture over the course of the past century. 

Text 3, Rong Jian’s lecture, delivered in Beijing in 2013, is a trenchant critique of Party rule and ideology as it applies to critical thought. It is the most politically direct and penetrating of all our essays (no doubt reflecting his independent status as a “businessman intellectual”). He gives a liberal “history” of China’s developments and considerable detail on the conditions of intellectual public life. Rong ends with a call for a “market place of ideas” in China which, in miniature, this Voices volume reflects. Using a modified question-and-answer format, Guo Yuhua provides a ferocious critique of “Communist civilization” in text 4 by basically undercutting all the shibboleths of Maoist and post-Mao Leftist writers, in a Chinese version of Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—she takes few prisoners.

Finally, Xu Jilin, among the most noted of Liberal voices in China,[5] is represented here with a moving eulogy of one establishment intellectual: Wang Yuanhua (1920-2008). In text 5, Cai Xia offers a strong a defense of democratic politics as Liu Qing and as harsh an assessment of Communist rule as Guo Yuhua but does so entirely on the basis of the Marxist-Leninist canon in the rhetoric of what Geremie Barmé calls Mao Speak. Xu Jilin, in text 6, offers a concrete, historical, and personal account of the emergence of Chinese liberal thought in the 1990s through the example of Wang Yuanhua, a disillusioned Party intellectual. Wang’s life reflects the experiences that have shaped the elder generation arguing in this volume (and parallels Qian Liqun’s reminiscences of his life under Mao in text 7). 

We have chosen thematic rather than chronological order in our presentation of these texts, but it is worth noting the chronology here: liberal thought was relatively ascendant in the early 2000s, but has been eclipsed since 2012 and especially since the rise of Xi Jinping. Rong Jian’s 2013 critique is among the last forceful expressions of Chinese liberal thought that we have seen. Guo’s more recent blog post was, in fact, quickly taken down.

The New Left includes figures that avow socialist goals of egalitarianism and social justice.  Many New Left intellectuals are more accepting of China's revolutionary and Maoist heritage than are the Liberals, and engage in both political and scholarly activism as a means to address the inequalities and corruption that have been by-products of China's rapid economic growth.  They are universally critical of the Euro-American ‘neo-liberal’ economic order and some criticize the Chinese government for not being leftist enough. At the same time, these intellectuals embrace the current Party-State in ways Liberals do not. Some of these figures were attracted to the ‘Chongqing model’ (that endures despite the purge and sentencing in 2012 of Bo Xilai, the model’s advocate.[6] That model seeks to combine state economic intervention, police crackdown on criminality and corruption, and nostalgic Maoist populism to better the lives of Chinese workers and peasants, many who have not benefited from China’s ‘market socialism.’  One way or another, the New Left intellectuals seek to make China a truly revolutionary alternative to a neo-liberal world.

The New Left voices in the second section of this volume include five diverse intellectuals. We begin in text 7 with Qian Liqun, a respected elder academic and intellectual activist. He offers a profound assessment of Mao, Maoism, and intellectuals’ involvement with Mao and the consequences of this history for himself, for intellectuals, and for China. Qian identifies himself, as did Mao, with the people, or in today’s lingo, minjian (among the people, grassroots). A professor of literature at Peking University, Qian embodies, in the tension between his elite status and populist identity, the challenge that confronts most of the New Left intellectuals in China today. Qian faces this challenge and the tormented history of socialism squarely, particularly Mao’s abuses of power and intellectuals’ complicity in his rule. His answers are not simple, but they are compelling. He concludes with the call for a “thorough clearing up” (qingli) of Mao Zedong thought and culture” before China can truly absorb and digest its twentieth-century history and move forward. 

Xiao Gongqin, a professor at Shanghai Normal University, published his short essay in 2012 in the Shanghai newspaper Oriental Morning Post (Dongfang zaobao). In text 8, Xiao, considered a Leftist but also as a representative of neo-authoritarian thought, offers another, more orthodox reading of history that justifies the reformist Leninism of Deng Xiaoping. Xiao addresses the question of democracy—a topic that runs through most of our texts—and comes down squarely on the authoritarian populist model known, since the days of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), as “political tutelage.” That is, the authoritarian state will teach the people of China the civic values necessary for a future constitutional system. Where Qian invokes the self-critical tradition in Chinese leftism, Xiao shows just what is worth keeping from China’s century of socialism, but really offers an instrumentalist defense of authoritarianism as the best road to civil society and democracy. 

Gan Yang returns in text 9 with a global political history of democracy that makes the case for what Wang Shaoguang in text 10 will call “representational democracy.” Both intellectuals offer a spirited critique of liberal democracy as it is practiced in Western nations today. This is not the stuff of partisan name-calling, but thoughtful and challenging historical and political science analyses of the foibles of electoral democracy. This essay by Gan Yang was published in 1999 and Liu Qing’s liberal text from 2004 may be seen as a rejoinder. Gan’s theme is the inherent elitism of liberal thought and its irrelevance to the practical needs of ordinary Chinese. In making his case, Gan reflects a deep understanding of Western political theory (his academic specialty), from Edmund Burke to Rousseau to Tocqueville to Constant and Isaiah Berlin.

Wang Shaoguang, professor emeritus at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and currently a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, on the other hand, deploys the tools of academic political science—tables, charts, surveys—to make his case for “representational” (or “responsive”) democracy as better than Western representative democracy. His goal in this 2014 essay, also published in Guangzhou’s Open Times, is to make the case why China under Xi Jinping should not be called “authoritarian” but is, in fact, more truly democratic than America. Finally, Sun Ge in text 11 offers a post-modern critical reading of Okinawan history as a window into the challenges for leftist thought in China today in a 2017 essay. Sun is a specialist on Japan and a professor of literature at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. She is actively engaged with the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies group of East Asian intellectuals who seek to draw from subaltern theory to build an independent (non-Western) Asian theory. While a minority voice (as a woman) in Chinese intellectual circles today, Sun also shows that New Left thought need not be limited to domestic concerns.

New Confucians are convinced that China's and ultimately the world's future lies in the revival (or reinvention) of China's Confucian past.  These figures argue that China's twentieth-century pursuit of Western knowledge was wrong-headed because neither liberalism nor Marxism will ever be sufficiently Chinese.  Grounding themselves in notions of cultural exceptionalism (‘China is different’), these intellectuals are convinced that the Confucian tradition of ‘benevolent rule’ can be updated to provide a new and much-needed legitimacy to China's authoritarian polity.  They imagine a moral meritocracy that will function as a genuinely benevolent dictatorship and thereby will outperform liberal democratic regimes, corrupted by lobbying and private interests.  Moreover, such a stance grows organically out of China's glorious past and restores the traditional personal relations—China's Confucian hierarchy—destroyed by a century of Western-inspired revolution.  These intellectuals seek to make China truly Chinese in a modern world dominated by Western culture.

In this third section of this volume, New Confucian voices are represented by three texts: a roundtable discussion published in a movement-oriented journal but more broadly accessed over the internet, a historical survey in a university journal, and an interview published online. Indeed, the predominance of internet material among China’s New Confucians reflects their popular orientation and ambivalent relationship with standard scholarship (and academic intellectuals such as Xu Jilin and Ge Zhaoguang are very critical of the scholarly bona fides of these advocates).[7]

In text 12 Chen Ming heads up a spirited debate among New Confucians in June 2014 that gives a vivid sense of the intellectual energy, even humor, of this community. The discussions also present a startling narrative that simply sidelines Chinese socialism and the Chinese Communist Party, essentially framing the Communist Party as a twentieth century artefact that has fulfilled its historical mission and now needs to get out of the way of China’s true revival—Confucian civilization. The shared focus in this debate is the figure of Kang Youwei (1858-1927), the radical Confucian reformer.

In text 13 Chen Lai, a noted professor of philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offers his version of China’s modern history, focusing, understandably, on the role and fate of Confucian thought. Readers can contrast the Liberal version of this history given by Rong Jian and the leftist histories offered by Qian Liqun or Xiao Gongqin. Chen Lai answers Gan Yang’s challenge to integrate China’s history and present by placing Confucian thought and social practice (Chen speaks in terms of the “subconscious” aspect of Confucianism in society) at the center of his narrative. Our final text, an interview with Jiang Qing, the noted Confucian activist and advocate for a Confucian constitution and state religion, returns to a major theme of China’s modern history: the May Fourth Movement. Although the title of this 2015 interview available on the Chinese internet addresses the place of modern women, in fact, Jiang Qing does not do that topic justice but focuses on the failure of this signature movement in China’s modern and socialist history. If our volume begins with a predictable critique of Party rule by Liberals on behalf of modern values, it ends with a somewhat surprising conservative criticism of the Party by Confucians against both.
 
The Diverse Worlds of Thinking China

It is well to keep in mind the social place or position of our speakers. They all address the same challenges facing China today, but they do so from different social spaces and with varying identities and organizational homes. They are representatives of thinking China but cannot represent all Chinese. We will see a range of public intellectuals—academic and independent. The voices represented here draw from humanist intellectuals who speak from their university perches but to a public intellectual audience—such as Xu Jilin, Liu Qing, and Xiao Gongqin in Shanghai, Sun Ge, Qian Liqun, Cai Xia, Guo Yuhua, Wang Shaoguang and Chen Lai in Beijing.

They give a sense of this vibrant world dominated by intellectual stand offs between New Left and Liberal camps, and the rising confidence of New Confucians. Cai Xia is fully in the establishment at her post in the Central Party School. Gan Yang, Rong Jian, and Jiang Qing—each broadly associated with one of the three notable sichao—are our entryway into the world of independent public intellectuals where commerce, religious and local associations, including a range of New Confucian organizations, and the internet intersect. Between and beyond these roles for public intellectuals live the lonely souls who choose open dissent, from Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, the performance art enfant terrible of the establishment, to a host of less well known activists, lawyers, and muckrakers.[8] These voices are not included here, but are increasingly available in recent studies and translations.[9]

Although we use modern China’s “three traditions” or sichao to organize the voices in this volume, these identities are not hard and fast. These clusters define ideal types; not all intellectuals identify as either Liberal, New Left, or New Confucian. For example, among intellectuals translated in this volume, Liu Qing identifies as a left Liberal, Gan Yang has moved from a liberal position to a left Confucian stand, and while many New Left intellectuals have come in recent years to embrace the Chinese state, Sun Ge seeks to find a critical community of interests in the Sinophone left inside and outside the PRC.  Initial consultations with Chinese colleagues have emphasized two other trends of thought (sichao): neo-authoritarianism (or new conservatism), as in Xiao Gongqin (b. 1946) who appears in this volume and Wang Huning (b. 1955) who is the ghost-writer for the CCP leadership, and democratic socialism, such as in Xie Tao (1922-2010).[10] In all, the three thought streams are handy for an initial orientation to China’s diverse and dynamic intellectual world, but we should be wary of reifying any one intellectual as embodying this or that stream.

It may be more helpful to think in terms of an intellectual’s orientation and approach, what we are calling “voices.” Intellectuals identifying as New Confucian are looking for Chinese solutions and drawing from indigenous Chinese thinkers. Chinese Liberals are looking for ways China can embrace and develop universal or global norms and draw from Western liberal thinkers. And many Left intellectuals are looking for Asian solutions, as well as socialist traditions, that engage but are not limited to either Chinese or Western/universal norms; they often draw from Asian thinkers in the global south. These are distinctly different concerns which contribute to a certain amount of “talking past each other” between and among intellectuals identified with one or none of the three sichao.

Moreover, many of the ideas defended by various public intellectuals are paired with larger political, social, and intellectual projects:  New Confucians build academies and launch NGOs; New Left intellectuals serve in the brain trusts of politicians whose ideas they respect; Liberals seek out partnerships with Western universities and academics to use that cultural capital for influence and protection in China’s still fragile civil society. 

Our speakers are academic public intellectuals — scholars who have chosen to use their specialized knowledge and status to engage with the public conversation on China’s challenges. Most are currently employed in Chinese universities, but the independent intellectuals, such as Rong Jian, also adopt scholarly personae. The historians among them are re-examining China’s past to uncover themes, practices, forgotten traditions, and missed opportunities that might fill the void at the core of China’s current political/cultural identity and help to create China’s future. The sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers seek to find models and mine traditions to offer solutions to current problems. These debates are subtle, varied, and wide-ranging, and they suggest a breadth and sophistication rarely hinted at in media discussions of China’s intellectual world. These qualities have impelled us to translate these texts in full so that English readers can engage themselves with the details of their arguments and analysis. We think they have important things to say.

Academic public intellectuals, as significant as their work is to Chinese political contention, hardly describe the entire population of China’s lively, if not free, public sphere. There are important actors and issues not included in this corner of China’s intellectual public sphere, which is itself a subset of the raucous and generally commercial broader public sphere. For example, the use of China’s vibrant social media is mostly taken up with shopping, gossiping, and the equivalent of watching cat videos; a scant 10% of Chinese social media is used for political or social discussion.[11] China’s intellectual public sphere includes journalists, business leaders speaking on social and political issues, some artists, local NGOs, lawyers, and other social activists. These are all important and covered, at least in part, in recent studies, but these actors generally focus on specific issues, particular communities, and individual cases. These public intellectuals address issues of feminism, leisure, futurism, and animal rights along with a host of other important social and local political issues.[12] Academic public intellectuals address their attention to the discursive sinews of power in the CCP’s China—ideology and ‘China’s story.’

New studies highlight the importance of these ideological and cultural concerns. Kerry Brown’s new study of Xi Jinping’s revival of Party ideology forcefully argues that the key power issue confronting the CCP today is neither military nor economic, but cultural.[13] Brown sees Xi’s reforms and pronouncements, including his brutal anti-corruption campaign, as efforts to recreate a moral narrative for the CCP, to make the Party legitimate in the hearts of China’s citizens. Christian Sorace’s political ethnography has documented this moral politics in practice at the local level in the case of the Party’s response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.[14]

This battle for legitimacy is now being fought precisely on the level of the ideas and norms that China’s New Confucians, Liberals, and New Left intellectuals have been debating over the past two decades. It is no wonder that the Party is now coming down hard not just on Chinese Liberals but also on New Confucians or New Left intellectuals who impugn the dignity, the idealism, or the ethical legitimacy of the Party. 

At the same time, neither the Party apparatus nor the intellectual elite fully represents the efforts of China’s resilient intellectuals across society. Sebastian Veg provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive study of China’s fearless minjian intellectuals, which he translates as “grassroots intellectuals.”[15] These are educated people, lawyers, activists, and documentary film-makers, who eschew high theory to address concrete social problems and engage with local communities. Like Foucault’s “specific intellectuals” these minjian intellectuals act out their politics. In China this has meant a dangerous dance with the Party, both the central security forces and often corrupt local governments. Perhaps the most important message from Veg’s book is how, collectively, these grassroots intellectuals are changing the society that the Party and China’s fractious academic intellectuals seek to improve.

Xi Jinping has emphasized the need to “tell China’s story well” since his directive given at the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference in August 2013, and he has been promoting his “China Dream” as the main narrative of that story. However, recent research has shown that public opinion, at least among China’s educated urban netizens, is still far more diverse than official propaganda would suggest.[16] Academic public intellectuals are key voices in this struggle to define and tell ‘China’s story.’

These theoretical, sometimes obscure, often philosophical debates are a major forum in which Chinese public policy—at the strategic level—is contested within China’s directed public sphere. New Confucians assert that we must think with indigenous concepts like dao (the Way) and li (rites) and ren (benevolence), for otherwise we are in the thrall of foreign powers. For Chinese Liberals the reasoning and logic of liberalism will save us from stultifying traditionalism and radical despotism. New Left intellectuals find only neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory can open our eyes to the ills of neo-liberalism and the pathway toward social equity. If we doubt their importance, simply recall that the two major outlets in which these sorts of debates have appeared within China—the journal Yanhuang chunqiu (China through the Ages) and the website Gongshi wang (Consensus Net) were shut down by the end of 2016. The Party does not censor what it does not think is significant. 

It is not the case that political and social theorizing is necessarily the preferred voice for China’s academic intellectuals—who also pen lively topical commentaries on daily life and local issues. Rather, the convoluted language of some of these intellectual debates is doubly political in contemporary China. The carrot is the promise of political influence. The Party, especially under Xi Jinping, continues to champion the “guiding role” of thought, and so intellectuals who hope to influence public policy perforce must cast their proposals in ideological language congenial to state actors.[17]

Most of the Chinese writings translated in this volume seek to identify ‘correct thought,’ the right way to think about big issues—be it liberal political theory, neo-Marxism, or some version or other of Confucian thought. Disagreement is rife, and political retribution a constant danger, but all sides appear to accept the primary importance of getting the thought right, even for Liberals, who embrace tolerance as a necessity lacking in current Chinese thought worlds.[18] The second political attribute of these theoretical discussions reflects the stick: the need under China’s repressive political system, as Gloria Davies has shown, to ‘speak obliquely’ to avoid political repression. Academic jargon serves as a screen against political criticism, an indirect avenue of criticism, and a public ‘hidden transcript’ in which the educated reader is expected to connect the dots between Max Weber or John Rawls and current politics in China.[19]  In the process, we discover a great range of opinions can be expressed without openly transgressing Party orthodoxy.
 
Same History, Different Dreams

The essays translated in this volume give three clearly different narratives of the same China over recent decades. These contending narratives buttress their divergent solutions for China’s new century. For the New Confucians the failures of socialism and the depredations of Western “hollowing out of Chinese culture” in the twentieth century cry out for a traditional Chinese solution—Confucianism. There are, of course, different Confucian solutions on offer, from Jiang Qing’s political institutions, to Kang Xiaoguang’s state religion, to Chen Ming’s or Bai Tongdong’s search for a sort of civic religion. According to Deng Jun and Craig Smith, these propositions offer various forms of a Chinese and a de-secularized solution that reunites religion and politics for China today.[20]
             
​The same world according to Chinese Liberals is a history of socialist failure and market reform success now challenged by the lack of political reform. These challenges cry out for the best political solutions human civilizations have produced, and liberalism has the best track record for producing stable, just, and prosperous societies in modern history. Rational and fair-minded, Chinese Liberals acknowledge the limitations of Western liberalism in practice (especially since the global financial crisis of 2008 and populist revolts in the UK and USA in recent years).

They see modern Chinese history as a local variant of universal human history, and thus focus on the challenges of balancing liberty and equality, addressing challenges to civil society, and how to reinvigorate the tradition of Chinese constitutional government. Thoughtful assessments and suggestions are offered by Rong Jian, Xu Jilin, Guo Yuhua, Cai Xia, and Liu Qing in our translations. Among other liberal intellectuals, Qin Hui draws critically on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history; Sun Liping diagnoses a “fractured society”; and Yu Jianrong focuses on how to address social conflict. All these propositions are offered in the context of debates with Left and Confucian intellectuals, while Chinese liberalism has been under considerable attack in recent years.[21] 
              
Recent history, according to New Left intellectuals, shows the need for a revival of the best of state socialism as a defense against global neo-liberalism. Ultimately, for mainland New Left intellectuals only the Chinese state, as a reformed socialist entity, has the wherewithal to withstand the depredations of neo-liberal globalization.[22] Wang Hui is most known in the West for making this case.[23] In our translations, Wang Shaoguang offers a thorough critique of Western politics and economics while making the case for Chinese-style “representational” democracy that, he feels, can succeed where Western representative democracy is now failing. As mainland Chinese New Left intellectuals engage their fellow Left intellectuals in Taiwan and Hong Kong, they confront the disturbing challenge that they as PRC citizens are part of a new colonial power.

Left intellectuals in these three areas have discovered that the same ideas (anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism) have different meanings in each place and the failure to appreciate the different historical experiences in each bedevils their search for a new, emancipatory “Asian perspective.”[24] Chen Kwan-hsing in Taiwan, Sun Ge in mainland China, and Johnson Chang in Hong Kong represent promising efforts to engage these different experiences and build that common Asian perspective. In our translations, Sun Ge takes the example of Japan and Okinawa as a metaphor for the challenges also facing China and the solutions that a critical theory approach can offer.

We also can see some shared assumptions in this Sinophone thought among PRC academic public intellectuals as they debate and criticize each other. First, the West looms large for all sides, particularly since China’s rise has made the race between China and the West all the more exciting. For the New Confucians, Western influence, both power and culture, has been pernicious. It has hollowed out Chinese culture and left a spiritual vacuum. The “West” for New Confucians, however, includes both socialism and liberalism as invasive foreign species in China’s garden. The New Confucians frequently compare their solutions to foreign solutions, reflecting a certain lack of self-confidence.

Chinese Liberals, of course, look to the best of the West while critically engaging the limitations and failures of liberal democratic practice and attending to the areas where current international liberal norms do not fit China’s situation or require adaptation (as in the avoidance among these academic intellectuals of any substantive discussion on electoral democracy at this stage). They pragmatically focus on the liberal side of liberal democracy—looking for sound ways to implement constraints on the use of power. For New Left intellectuals, the West is both the source of emancipatory theory, though critical theory has been greatly enriched by voices from the global south, and the great enemy and home of neo-liberalism. In all, we cannot understand contemporary Chinese intellectual life absent their profound engagement with the West—ideas from the West, political examples from the West, and examples from Western history—which populate nearly every Chinese essay covered by our mapping. Inevitably, all efforts to create a Chinese identity among these elites come from a critical engagement with the global order that Western nations have shaped and up to now have dominated.
              
Second, as noted, the voices in this volume accept that it is important to get one’s thinking, one’s ideology or sixiang, right. The philosophical idealism (as opposed to materialism) of most of these essays also connects contemporary Chinese thought with a long tradition of twentieth century Chinese political thought. Finally, there is a “shared civility” among these academic public intellectuals for all but a few extremists. Despite their vociferous contention over solutions, so far none of these intellectuals is denouncing any others as “counter-revolutionaries” or for “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.” Sadly, the increasing limitations put on public debate in China in the past few years under Xi Jinping, and the increased demand that intellectuals conform to the ideology of “the leader,” challenges this period of a hundred schools contending in early twenty-first century China.
 
Thinking China in Today’s World

The current ideological moment in China—the question of the day and the remembered recent history of the past decades that shape the world of intellectuals translated in this volume—is part of the global ideological moment, albeit an importantly distinct part. The question all the voices in this volume are addressing in one way or another is how to make China a truly great power—how to be a just society and a positive leader in the world?[25] Thus, while we emphasize the local conditions, domestic concerns, and parochial arguments among these intellectuals, we also see powerful resonances with our own societies in Europe and North America and the challenges we face today, particularly in the rising populist anger in America, the UK, and around the world.

From this global perspective, China’s “new era” (xin shidai) under the increasingly autocratic regime of the CCP under its now “supreme leader” (lingxiu) Xi Jinping is not only a stage and phase in the history of modern China, but also partakes of the global populist reaction to the failings of a neo-liberal order that has produced obscene wealth for the few, has left many in poverty and insecurity, and has gutted the middle classes around the world.[26] We no more see Xi Jinping as “the solution” than we do Trump or Brexit. The point is that the Chinese intellectuals translated in this volume are consciously engaged in the assessment of these global developments. Their essays are both impressively well informed on international conditions (and modern European history) and address problems we all face: the failures of political representation, the rise of social intolerance, the perdurance of economic inequality, and looming environmental crises. Thus, the translations in this volume offer not only insight to conditions and issues of China today, but they also offer specifically Chinese solutions to shared problems of governance we all face.[27]

Naturally enough, China’s intellectuals cast their response to these global challenges not only in terms of local ideas and experiences but also in terms of the impact of these changes on their world—their work, their lives, their society. We suggest that China’s rise, and the West’s simultaneous decline from unchallenged global supremacy, has had an effect on the Chinese intellectual world equivalent to that of the May Fourth period a century ago.  May Fourth marked the moment when much of the intellectual elite in China decided that Confucian civilization was, at best, no longer functional, and at worst, an obstacle to China’s progress.  Lu Xun’s (1881-1936) dark humor and despair reflected the gravity of that recognition, the sense of free fall. 

Others were less sombre and set about the grim tasks of reform or revolution with appropriate energy, but with a few notable exceptions, most of China’s intellectual elite believed that China’s future lay in some version of modernity, be it liberal democratic or socialist.[28]  “With Chinese characteristics” was always there as an asterisk—Deng Xiaoping did not invent the idea—but by 1925 Chinese civilization had become a dinosaur: something fascinating, maybe worthy of study, but also something extinct. Mao may have Sinified Marxism, compared himself to Qin Shihuang, the founding emperor of the Qin Dynasty in 212 BCE, and wrote classical-style poetry, but even when he soured on socialism, his goal was to remake the revolution, not revive “feudal China.”  The dictates of nationalism required modernity, and there was no obvious link between Chinese tradition and modernity. Maoism and state socialism blended the two at mid-century, but by the 1980s most Chinese felt it was no longer working.

China’s rise in the twenty-first century has meant, first and foremost, that China has achieved modernity, in the form of wealth and power.  The global crisis of capitalism beginning in 2008, followed by the election of Donald Trump and the many signs of malaise afflicting the liberal democratic world, have only boosted China’s self-confidence.  Calls like Wei Jingsheng’s (b. 1950) for a “fifth modernization” (i.e., democracy), which may well have nagged at the conscience (or perhaps confidence) of many a reformer of the Deng era (and after), now fall flat.  China’s governance today offers what the world seems to want:  wealth, stability, mobility, promise—to most citizens who keep their noses clean and their mouths shut.  The Chinese state has replaced the US as the world model of efficiency and competence.  Whether we like their chosen direction or not, China’s leaders appear to know where China is going and how to get there. We have entered China’s century.

The effects of this on China’s intellectuals have been astounding.  Reading these texts gives the impression that they inhabit a brave new world where, conceptually, intellectually, anything is possible; the sky’s the limit.  This is a reversal of May Fourth’s anti-traditionalism, because “China’s back, baby, and she’s better than ever.” Lu Xun went into free fall, while a century later Chen Ming and his New Confucian colleagues soar, unmoored.  Of course, this does not match the lived experience of intellectuals in today’s China. As our Liberal friends and colleagues constantly remind us, what Xi Jinping hopes to achieve may well mark the beginning of the end of this period of experimentation.  But many texts, particularly those of the mainland New Confucians and the New Left, seem to reflect the notion that China not only requires, but is on the verge of capturing, an entirely new sixiang, a new story, a new ideology, which, by the way, will be of world-historical significance—as Chinese thought had been in the past.

This is what is behind much of the work of Gan Yang and of the epigram from him at the start of this introduction. Gan insists that China needs a new epistemology, a new historiography, that will bring together the experiences of Confucianism, Socialism, and Reform-era capitalism with Chinese characteristics and make sense of all these in a global, comparative context.  Although at first glance, this reads like a mindless slogan, the idea of “putting the twentieth century behind us,” particularly the political history of the twentieth century, seems to be enormously popular among Chinese intellectuals, who appear to be convinced that conventional historiography, conventional narratives, no longer apply.  Like the image of Chinese tradition during the May Fourth era, the notion of “China’s twentieth century” seems to stand in the way of China’s twenty-first century.

Much of this is of course explained by a general rejection of the narrative of the Enlightenment, a rejection shared by many members of the New Left and of the mainland New Confucians.  For the mainland New Confucians, this rejection is straight-forward and near total.[29] Jiang Qing’s piece on women in this volume hammers this point repeatedly; in fact, the piece spends more time condemning the May Fourth movement than it does talking about women.  May Fourth was, to the mainland New Confucians, a disaster from which China is only now beginning to recover, as was Maoism.  These and other New Confucian critiques indict China’s liberal tradition, the notion that China’s modernization will inevitably lead to Western-style democracy, as well as its socialist heritage, particularly its internationalist aspects, as well as Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. 

The “transcendence” of China’s liberal and socialist traditions will be based on the “Chinese people/nation” (Zhonghua minzu)—the two are conflated both linguistically and discursively—and their/its concrete needs rather than on abstract ideas based on Enlightenment discourse. This is a Confucian cooptation of the Maoist notion of “practice.”  By “uniting the three traditions,” Gan Yang demands the construction of a new historical narrative that will reunite the experiences of the Qing empire, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic, despite the ruptures that the current historical records have emphasized.  This reflects a goal, shared by Chen Ming and others—and reflected in the roundtable discussion with Gan and Chen in this volume: to create a new cultural continuity based on sixiang, to replace the manifest political discontinuity that has marked China’s experience since the Opium War. The New Left has made similar discursive moves.  Their rejection of the Enlightenment is less obvious, and less complete than in the case of the Mainland New Confucians, but Wang Shaoguang, who has spent his career trying to help China build “state capacity,” has turned his sights in recent years to a criticism of Western democracy. 

To Wang, “electoral democracy” is more “electoral” than “democratic,” and he proposes the Chinese model of “representational democracy” and “good governance,” in which results, rather than process or political form, are what count.  In addition, after years of positioning themselves as “critical intellectuals,” citing post-modern theory to criticize what they saw as the neo-liberal character of China’s reforms during the 1980s and 1990s, the New Left has moved in recent years to embrace the state.  Their intellectual inspiration is likely to be Carl Schmitt or Leo Strauss rather than Roberto Unger or Slavoj Zizk, and they fetishize state power instead of defending the interests of the little people.  This may not be a rejection of the Enlightenment, but it is surely a subversion of it.  The New Left, like the mainland New Confucians, is also engaged in reimagining China’s modern history.  This, of course, is part of Wang Hui’s major, multi-volume work on the history of Chinese thought, which he started long before China’s definitive rise, but Wang Shaoguang also proposes a periodization based on the rise and achievement of state power and capacity rather than on regime change.[30]  Perhaps due to the sensitivity of the subject, the CCP is rarely mentioned as an important actor in the drama of China’s modern and contemporary history, even by members of the New Left—or at least it wasn’t until Xi Jinping came to town.

All of this has left China’s Liberals very much on the defensive.   Xu Jilin has devoted much of his writing over the past ten years not only to a denunciation of the cult of state power, but more importantly to an analysis of its intellectual underpinnings:  the ideas of statism and historicism.  Historicism is the idea that universal values do not exist; meaning and identity are the pure products of local history and culture, embodied in the state.  Hence notions of historicism and statism are mutually supportive and fuel the cultural pride of the mainland New Confucians for whom traditional Chinese civilization is unique and glorious, as well as nationalist pride of those touting the “China model,” including New Left intellectuals like Wang Shaoguang.  Xu has also attempted to fashion a liberal compromise with Chinese tradition, discussing the possibility of Confucianism’s serving as China’s “civil religion” and attempting to craft a new, more cosmopolitan Chinese foreign policy by proposing a “tianxia zhuyi 2.0.”[31]   Likewise, we have seen Liu Qing’s robust defense of liberalism’s ability to address the realities of China’s “social imaginary” today.

As of 2018 these debates were inconclusive in China’s intellectual and political circles. Whatever the intellectual merits of these voices, these three “steams of thought” or sichao, there has been no conclusive signal that one has gained popular traction at the expense of all the others. As Liu Qing and others have noted, China today and therefore thinking among various Chinese is plural. Pluralism is not a widely embraced norm, but a plural public sphere in China is a social fact. However, changes in 2018, particularly the reconfirmation of Xi Jinping’s leadership, the removal of the previous expectation that he would serve at most two terms as national leader, and the increased propaganda on Marxist ideology in general and Xi Thought in particular all suggest that this period of a hundred flowers blooming is about to pass.[32]

This shift is captured, on the one hand, by the shutting down of Yanhuang chunqiu and Gongshi wang, along with continued repression of human rights lawyers and non-Han populations in Xinjiang, and, on the other hand, by a concerted effort to install Xi Thought.  In January 2018 Jiang Shigong’s stunning “Philosophy and History: Interpreting the ‘Xi Jinping Era’ through Xi’s Report at the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP” made an ambitious attempt at a new synthesis which, if successful, might create the new sixiang for which all our authors are searching and thus impose a new orthodoxy.[33]  His version of Gan Yang’s tongsantong is China’s “standing up, getting rich, and getting strong,” and the chief actor in this historical drama is not the Chinese Communist Party, but the Chinese people/nation, which is led of course by the CCP and its remarkable/brilliant leader Xi Jinping. This represents a new synthesis of Soviet socialism and Western capitalism, a dialectical transcendence that will allow China to resume its position as world leader and move humanity forward. Xi Thought, which presumably will function as the new state orthodoxy as well, provides an official answer to Gan Yang’s questions and would shut out most of the voices in this volume. It remains to be seen if the age of new orthodoxy has arrived or not.
 
The Challenges of Listening: Scholarly Literature on China’s Intellectuals

These translations, and the collaborative project that produced many of them, have been undertaken with the belief that it is worth hearing these Chinese voices. It is a worthwhile goal, but, we have discovered, neither a simple nor a straightforward task.  The first challenge is our own assumptions, presumptions, and habits. The second challenge is finding a way to convey what the Chinese texts say in readable, engaging, and sensible English. It turns out that listening takes considerable work.
              
China’s intellectuals have been on the minds of Western academics and general readers at least since the start of the People’s Republic of China. As exemplified by the influential works of Merle Goldman, Chinese intellectuals have often been seen as dissidents, or “Russian refuseniks with Chinese characteristics.” The intellectuals who have most spoken to Western readers were cast as Chinese versions of Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. This may have made sense during the Cold War, but today the “two camps” no longer exist, contact between people inside and outside of China is much greater, and shared experiences of globalized commerce and media have changed the relationship between China and “the West.”

Indeed, with so much Chinese emigration and Chinese presence in most societies around the world, the dichotomy no longer makes simple sense.  Nonetheless, intellectual habits endure well beyond the advent of social change, and the reader is well advised to be prepared for these Chinese intellectuals not to fit what one might expect. The texts in this reader are not dissent in the classical sense, nor are they Party propaganda. They are sincere intellectual interventions shaped by the strictures of China’s directed public sphere, the expectations of Sinophone discourse, and the social experience of the writers themselves.

As academics, we cannot but be influenced by the work of our colleagues in the Western academy who have written extensively on Chinese intellectuals and Chinese public discourse. Since at least the 1950s the scholarly focus has been on the relationship between intellectuals and the state.[34] Scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s focused on the participation of intellectuals in the CCP as establishment intellectuals and their efforts to reform, rather than replace Maoism by working from within the system.[35]  More recent studies have focused on the post-1992 period, emphasizing the modification of this establishment role as a result of the increasing impact of a commercial (yet controlled) media and the emergence of formal academic identities and professional responsibilities outside the state bureaucracy.[36]

Of course, the power and influence of the Party's propaganda and censorship system remain a defining characteristic of Chinese intellectual life. That said, recent research has shown that most intellectuals in today’s China are politically ‘dis-established’ from the Party-State, and are finding unprecedented opportunities as academics and professionals, enjoying study abroad, contacts with foreign scholars and diaspora Chinese, better academic pay, and—for the lucky few—considerable earning potential in China’s flourishing book market.[37]  Scholars engaged in cultural studies have also addressed these issues from a broader cultural and academic Marxist perspective, not least Dai Jinhua and Jing Wang.[38] From our perspective, what is most remarkable about today's public intellectuals in China is that they have found their own voice, which means that their writing is increasingly important for its own sake and on its own terms, as discourse.[39]  In other words, intellectuals are no longer simply stalking-horses for factions within the Party-State, although the political dimension of their work remains significant.

The fact that Chinese intellectuals are finding their own public voices opens up new comparative possibilities.  New work on knowledge production in Republican China (up to 1950) led by Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh provides one useful baseline, as intellectuals in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were similarly engaged and independent.[40] We embrace this historical-comparative perspective. In addition, a project led by Leigh Jenco looks at Chinese thought for what it can contribute to general social theory, and it provides a vocabulary for comparing Chinese knowledge production with Western examples, particularly in the context of political philosophy.[41] This highlights the role of Chinese thought beyond China itself.

Two new books offer useful surveys of public intellectual debates, one for the benefit of Chinese readers (even though it has recently been partially translated into English) and one for English readers. In early 2012 the Chinese journalist, Ma Licheng, produced a popular account of eight trends of social thought (sichao) in contemporary China.[42] Ma’s focus is on streams of thought, from ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in the 1980s and the ‘old leftism’ of Maoist thought from the Cultural Revolution to the new Left, democratic socialism, liberalism, nationalism, populism, and New Confucian. His scope is wider than our focus on academic public intellectuals and by necessity is more schematic in such a broad survey.[43]

In 2015 He Li, a political scientist teaching in the US, published a valuable survey of political intellectual discourse in China. He, too, surveys the basic three sichao which he translates as ‘schools of thought’—Liberal, New Left, and New Confucian—as well as two others: Neo-Authoritarianism and Democratic Socialism.[44] Finally, some dozen scholars from our research project, “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream,” dig into key issues and notable writers in some detail to see how their arguments build and engage others (“Mapping” 2018 special sections in China Information).

The voices offered in this volume join a notable collection of fine translations (and some reportage) of Chinese intellectuals and citizens, as well as studies focused on their thinking. These include: deBary, et al, Sources of Chinese Tradition (2000), Gloria Davies’ Voicing Concerns (2001), Wang Chaohua’s One China, Many Paths (2003), Sang Ye’s China Candid (2006),[45] Judy Polumbaum’s China Ink (2008) (profiles of Chinese journalists), and Shah’s and Wasserstrom’s Chinese Characters (2012);[46] as well as insightful analyses of contemporary Chinese thinking about public affairs, such as Davies, Worrying About China (2007), Mark Leonard’s What Does China Think? (2008), Yu Hua, China in Ten Words (2010), and William Callahan, China Dreams (2013).[47]  This volume of translations offers a more recent collection of China’s influential thinkers and writers on China’s dream.
 
Collaborative Translation and the Co-Production of Knowledge

​The translations in this volume have, in part, been produced through a process of collaborative translation and a commitment to the co-production of knowledge. Our approach builds upon previous research by giving priority to Chinese voices over Western frameworks and by working with Chinese scholars in collaborative translations and interpretations of these vital contemporary debates over the Chinese dream.  We take as our inspiration the New Sinology, an approach coined by Geremie Barmé, late of the Australian National University, which combines both theory and method.[48] New Sinology is grounded in respect for Sinophone discourse and insists that research on contemporary China be based on a deep knowledge of Chinese sources, both the literary (wenyanwen) and vernacular (baihua) lects.  Classical Sinology focused largely on the formative texts of China's traditional civilization, while the New Sinology extends its focus to modern and contemporary Chinese discourse and their political and social contexts. 

This theoretical/methodological perspective in no way excludes mainstream historical and social science approaches, but requires that scholarship on China be grounded in Chinese-language sources and that today's New Sinologists work ‘with Chinese’ rather than simply ‘on China.’ What this means is that we are engaged in collaborative research with Chinese colleagues, not deciphering the messages hidden in their work, an approach that characterized much earlier scholarship on post-1949 China.

Our core method in this project--collaborative translation—is essentially new to the treatment of works by China's contemporary academic public intellectuals. Our inspiration comes from Gloria Davies' 2001 book, Voicing Concerns, which problematized the process of translation by transforming it into a collaborative endeavour involving Chinese and foreign scholars in conversation. For example, Davies engaged with Beijing scholar, Liu Dong, on clarifications and emendations to his notable essay criticizing 1990s intellectual debate as ‘pidgin scholarship’.[49] We also take inspiration from Gail Hershatter’s collaboration with a Chinese colleague to produce separate books on women's work in post-1949 China.[50] Thus, this introduction is the work of three Western scholars coming out of the collaborations in this project while Chinese colleagues are doing likewise and presenting their versions in Chinese. Five of the translations in this volume are direct products of this collaborative process, as noted by the dual translators (one Anglophone, one Sinophone) for specific texts. However, all the work in this volume from the orientation, selection of texts, and individual translations are shaped by this cooperative and collaborative approach in an international project from which it comes, “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream.”[51]

This approach is fuelled by a particular kind of fieldwork, constructed on the basis of personal and professional relationships between specific Canadian/Western and Chinese scholars, consciously designed to be a sensitive reflection on the production of knowledge in contemporary Chinese intellectual circles, as well as the challenges of the ‘translation’ of this production in terms understandable by a Canadian/Western audience eager to understand ‘what China is thinking.’ We rely in particular on the project collaborators to strengthen this work. By involving our students (from both Chinese and international universities) in our personal and professional networks, we project the process forward to a new generation, consolidate the linkages between Canadian/Western and Chinese scholars and intellectuals, and seek to produce information of use to scholars, policy-makers, and the broader public.
 


[1] This project, “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream,” was funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant 435-2014-0584). See “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream: introducing a project,” at The China Story: Thinking China, January 26, 2016: https://www.thechinastory.org/cot/reading-and-writing-the-chinese-dream-introducing-a-project/ and the project’s webpage, “Reading the China Dream”: https://www.readingthechinadream.com/about.html.  

[2] See the special section, “Mapping the Intellectual Public Sphere in China today” in China Information, vol. 32, no. 1 and no. 2 (2018).

[3] Indeed, the only female voice from the PRC that emerged in the five mappings in China Information (two of which were co-authored by younger women scholars in the PRC) was Sun Ge.

[4] Gan, Yang, Tong san tong (Unifying the Three Traditions). Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2007. See also the special section of China Information in 2018, “Mapping the Intellectual Public Sphere in China Today.” While Liberals and New Confucians generally embrace this nomenclature, Left intellectuals generally bristle at “New Left”. We have maintained the term as it is in current usage and no popular alternative has yet emerged.

[5] See Xu Jilin, Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique, edited and translated by David Ownby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

[6] Andreas Mulvad, “Competitng Hegemonic Projects within China’s Variegated Capitalism: ‘Liberal’ Guangdong vs. ‘Statist’ Chongqing,” New Political Economy, 20:2, 199-227.

[7] See Xu Jilin, “What Body for Confucianism’s Lonely Soul?,” in Xu, Rethinking China’s Rise, pp. 113-26, available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/xu-jilin-what-body-for-confucianism.html . Ge Zhaoguang, “The Political Demands of Mainland New Confucians in Recent Years,” https://www.readingthechinadream.com/ge-zhaoguang-if-horses-had-wings.html.  As of August 2018, we have had difficulty accessing some New Confucian websites, but we have yet to see official notification of closings. 

[8] These intellectual worlds and their histories are sketched in Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

[9] Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; William A. Callahan, “Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman,” Journal of Asian Studies 73:4 (Nov. 2014), pp. 899-920; and Sebastian Veg, Among the Silent Majority: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

[10] See Ma Licheng, Dangdai Zhongguo bazhong shehui sichao (“Eight Social Thoughts in Contemporary China”) [English on the cover of the Chinese edition]. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenyi chubanshe, 2012, of which the first half has been published in English as Licheng Ma, Leading Schools of Thought in Contemporary China. Singapore: World Scientific, 2013. 

[11] Lotus Yang Ruan and Timothy Cheek, “Social Media in China: What Canadians Need to Know,” Canada-Asia Agenda, 2016, https://www.asiapacific.ca/canada-asia-agenda/social-media-china-what-canadians-need-know, accessed 15 October 2017.

[12] Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

[13] Kerry Brown, China’s Dream: The Culture of Chinese Communism and the Secret Source of Its Power. London: Polity, 2018.

[14] Christian P. Sorace, Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

[15] Sebastian Veg,  Among the Silent Majority.

[16] See Ya-wen Lei, The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media and Authoritarian Rule in China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018; and Kristin Shi-Kupfer, Mareike Ohlberg, Simon Lang, and Bertram Lang, “Ideas and Ideologies Competing for China’s Political Future: How Online Pluralism Challenges Official Orthodoxy,” MERICS Papers on China 5 (Berlin: October 2017) https://www.merics.org/en/papers-on-china/ideas-and-ideologies-competing-chinas-political-future.

[17] See, Joseph Fewsmith, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?—The Party School, Key Think Tanks, and the Intellectuals,” in David M. Finkelstein and Maryanne Kivlehan, eds., China’s Leadership in the 21st Century: The Rise of the Fourth Generation. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003, p. 154. This is the general thesis of Kalpana Misra’s fine study, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China. London: Routledge, 1998.

[18] Timothy Cheek, “Xu Jilin and the Thought Work of China’s Public Intellectuals,” The China Quarterly 186 (2006), 404-05.

[19] Gloria Davies, Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

[20] Jun Deng and Craig A. Smith, “The rise of New Confucianism and the return of spirituality to politics in mainland China,” China Information 33:2 (2018), pp. 294-314.

[21] See Tang Xiaobing and Mark McConaghy, “Liberalism in contemporary China: Questions, strategies, directions,” China Information 32:1 (2018), pp. 121-38; and Lu Hua and Matthew Galway, “Freedom and its limitations: The contemporary mainland China debate over liberalism,” China Information 32:2 (2018), pp. 315-35.

[22] Shi Anshu, François Lachapelle, and Matthew Galway, “The recasting of Chinese socialism: The Chinese New Left since 2000,” China Information 32:1 (2018), pp. 139-59.

[23] See Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London: Verso, 2009; and Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia, trans. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

[24] Li Zhiyu and Morgan Rocks, “The Sinosphere left looks at rising China: Missed dialogues and the search for an ‘Asian perspective’,” China Information 32:2 (2018), pp. 336-57.

[25] Cheek, the Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, p. 266.

[26] John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

[27] Leigh Jenco and colleagues explore efforts to address these global issues through Chinese concepts in Jenco, ed., Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016; and Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

[28] This history is engagingly retold in Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001, and a rich selection of translations from Lu Xun and others from the May Fourth period and after are included in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, second edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; and Eileen J. Cheng and Kirk Denton, eds., Jottings under Lamplight: Lu Xun. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

[29] Ge Zhaoguang makes this clear in his devastating criticism of recent trends in Confucian thought in the PRC. See Ge Zhaoguang’s essay translated in David Ownby, ed., China Dream Chasers, forthcoming, available now at: https://www.readingthechinadream.com/ge-zhaoguang-if-wishes-were-horses.html. 

[30] A detailed introduction to Wang Hui’s four-volume Chinese study is given in Zhang Yongle, “The Future of the Past: On Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought,” New Left Review, 62 (2010), 47-85.

[31] Xu Jilin, Rethinking China’s Rise.  “Tianxia zhuyi” is a difficult term to translate—roughly meaning universalism, but one in which the center of the universe is in China.

[32] Timothy Cheek and David Ownby, “Make China Marxist Again,” Dissent 65:4 (2018): 71-77.

[33] Translated in full under the heading, Jiang Shigong, “Philosophy and History,” by David Ownby at: Reading the China Dream: https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-philosophy-and-history.html.

[34] Merle Goldman, Literary Opposition in Communist China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981; John King Fairbank, The United States and China, 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983; Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. New York: The Free Press, 1999.

[35] Bonnie S. McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature and the Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1976. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek, eds., China’s Establishment Intellectuals. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986; Joshua A. Fogel, Ai Ssu-ch’i's Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Contemporary China Series, 1987; Bill Brugger and David Kelly, Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990; Timothy Cheek, “From Priests to Professionals: Intellectuals and the State under the CCP,” in Jeffery Wasserstrom and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in China. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992; Lyman Miller, Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986; Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; James H. Williams, “Fang Lizhi’s Big Bang: A physicist and the state in China,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30.1 (1999): 49-87.

[36] Misra, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism; Min Lin and Maria Galikowski, The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; Geremie Barmé, “The Revolution of Resistance,” in Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, eds., Chinese Society. London: Routledge, 2000; Davies, Voicing Concerns; Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Zhang, Xudong, ed., Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001; Zhidong Hao, Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003; Chaohua Wang, ed., One China: Many Paths. New York: Verso, 2003; David A. Kelly, “Citizen Movements and China’s Public Intellectuals in the Hu-Wen Era,” Pacific Affairs 79:2 (2006); Gloria Davies, Worrying About China: The Language of Chinese Critical Enquiry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

[37] Miller, Science and Dissent; Misra, From Post-Maoism; Wang, One China; Erika E.S. Evasdottir, Obedient Autonomy: Chinese Intellectuals and the Achievement of Orderly Life. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004; Zhao Yuezhi, Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008; William A. Callahan, China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future. Oxford University Press, 2013.

[38] Tani E. Barlow, ed., New Asian Marxisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

[39] Davies, Worrying About China; David Ownby, “Kang Xiaoguang: Social Science, Civil Society, and Confucian Religion,” China Perspectives, n° 2009/4, 101-11; Callahan, China Dreams; Cheek, The Intellectual.

[40] Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities. Berkeley: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, 2016.

[41] Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents; Michaelle L. Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.

[42] Ma Licheng, Dangdai Zhongguo; Licheng Ma, Leading Schools of Thought.

[43] The Chinese edition of Ma Licheng’s book, but not the English version, also includes a section of scholarly reflections on these eight strains of social thought and a selection of five essays by noted academic public intellectuals, such as Ge Zhaoguang, Xiao Gongqin, Xu Youyu, Wang Di, and Zhao Fusan.

[44] He Li, Political Thought and China’s Transformation: Ideas Shaping Reform in Post-Mao China. New York: Palgrave, 2015.

[45] Sang Ye, China Candid: The People on the People’s Republic, edited by Geremie Barmé, with Mriam Lang (Berkeley: University of Californai Press, 2006).

[46] Judy Polumbaum, with Xiong Lei, China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in ad Fast-Changing Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

[47] Davies, Worrying About China; Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (NY: Public Affairs, 2008); Yu Hua, China in Ten Words, translated by Allan H. Barr (NY: Pantheon Books, 2011); Callahan, China Dreams.

[48] Geremie Barmé, New Sinology http://ciw.anu.edu.au/new_sinology/index.php, 2005 (accessed 15 October 2017); and Geremie Barmé, “Worrying China and New Sinology,” The China Heritage Quarterly 14 (2008), online at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=014_worryingChina.inc&issue=014, (accessed October 15, 2017).

[49] Davies, Voicing Concerns: 87-108.

[50] Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

[51] “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream: introducing a project,” op cit.