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rasoulallahbinbadisassalacerhso  wefaqdev iktab
السبت, 18 شباط/فبراير 2023 09:47

Chinese thinkers debate their country’s future

كتبه  by David Ownby
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As the recent 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) illustrated, President Xi Jinping aspires to equal, if not surpass, the status of Mao Zedong. To some commentators, he’s ‘the new Stalin’ (1). At a time of growing Sino-Western tensions, the West continues to view China through the lens of the cold war, with China in the role the Soviet Union once occupied: the main adversary and pre-eminent representative of autocratic forces in the world.

This view casts Chinese thinkers as the equivalent of Russian dissidents and refuseniks who risked being sent to the gulag simply for owning forbidden books; it makes China out to be a place with no real intellectual life outside the private sphere, or prisons. As a result, although it has become the world’s second most powerful country, the only Chinese intellectuals known in the West are dissidents such as the artist Ai Weiwei or the law professor Xu Zhangrun.

In reality, China today is less like Stalin’s Russia than Japan in the Meiji era (1868-1912), when Japan embarked on its own rise to power, just as China has done since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s. There are intellectual similarities too, as both countries, when opening up to the world, embraced Western ideas in their own way and set aside ‘tradition’, which was feudal in Japan’s case, Maoist in China’s. In both nations, this created a vibrant and even pluralistic intellectual scene — within limits.

In China, this pluralism was remarkable in the years before Xi came to power (March 2013); so remarkable that it probably made him want to tighten the party-state’s ideological control. However, despite all his efforts, he has not wholly succeeded, as the intellectual world has retained a degree of independence, albeit relative.

A Republic of Letters

For the past ten years, I’ve been conducting a research project focused on Chinese public intellectuals — those who publish in China and in Chinese, who respect the rules of the game as defined by Xi and the party-state, yet without being defenders or propagandists of the regime (2). There is a kind of Republic of Letters, which mostly goes unnoticed, drowned out by the deafening noise of the regime; especially as exchanges take place in Chinese, which hardly helps matters. Yet, since the country’s rise, this diverse, plural community has been marked by frequent and spirited debate. A China that thinks and speaks a language different from that of its regime does exist, whatever Xi and his circle say through official channels.

Since 2000, the key debates have centred around three fundamental, interrelated questions: Is China unique, and if so, how? What’s its role in the world, or what should it be? And how can its story best be told (which entails first knowing what that story is)?

Two major events have made an impression on Chinese thought: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent decline of the West — particularly the United States — since the 2008 crisis. As China has continued to rise, while its great rivals have failed or flailed, the idea that China is — and always has been — unique has gained acceptance almost as a matter of course. And thereafter, its historical sense of superiority has resurfaced after a century of humiliation and several decades of revolution.

Zhang Weiwei, an official interpreter turned academic, is a proud defender of this theory. He has devoted a trilogy to it: China Touches the World (2008), The China Wave: The Rise of a Civilisational State (2012) and The China Horizon: Glory and Dream of a Civilisational State (2016) (3). These books are a mixture of (often useful) comparative data on the country’s progress; perceptive explanations of national practices that may or may not be unique (China’s highly centralised government allows for local experimentation on important economic issues); and somewhat tautological assertions, such as that China’s population is ‘unique of its kind’ and ‘its language is unique’...

The appeal of Zhang’s writings lies in the idea of the ‘civilisational state’ highlighted in the subtitle of two volumes of his trilogy. He believes other countries to be mere nation states forged in the crucible of modern experience, whereas China is both a civilisation and a nation state, which accounts for its uniqueness. Zhang’s work is popular with the CCP and his books are bestsellers, largely due to sales to party members and government cadres, who are encouraged to buy them. He doesn’t enjoy the same popularity with other intellectuals for two reasons: in China he is preaching to the converted, and his two most recent books draw heavily on When China Rules the World (2009) byBritish journalist Martin Jacques, which developed the idea of China as a civilisational state. A book about China’s uniqueness that copies a foreign book on the same subject inevitably raises suspicions.

Mistake of Western solutions

Better scholars have been attracted by the same idea, such as Jiang Qing (4) and Chen Ming (5), who associate their country’s unique character with Confucianism. This can produce controversial conclusions: Chen, for example, believes that the Republican Revolution of 1911 (which led to the abdication of the last emperor and the establishment of the republic) was an unnecessary mistake, as China was already well on the way to establishing a constitutional monarchy, and that much of the 20th century was a tragic mistake because Beijing constantly sought Western solutions to Chinese problems. Yet, no matter how artfully these new Confucians compare the CCP to the ‘benevolent monarchs’ of the past, communists inevitably pick up on their condemnation of Marxism as alien — and that touches a highly sensitive nerve.

The New Left, which at the turn of the millennium advocated regulating capitalism, tackling inequality and defining a different type of democracy, has also played the exceptionalism card. Figures such as Wang Hui (6) and Wang Shaoguang (7) see China’s rise to power as a demonstration that the West’s so-called ‘universal values’ aren’t so universal after all. The country has succeeded through innovating in significant ways, such as creating a ‘responsive democracy’ (in which the party responds to the needs of the people) that is superior to the West’s ‘representative democracy’ (paralysed by cronyism and identity politics), and by developing the role of the state.

This ‘responsive democracy’ is curiously similar to Mao’s ‘mass line’ (8), say liberals who, like historian Xu Jinlin, warn that pre-war Japan and Germany developed similar cults of the state, which ended in war and defeat. Nevertheless, they agree that China needs to create its own vision of modernity and thereby contribute to the diversity of universal values: ‘China’s civilisational tradition was not nationalistic, but rather ... universal and humanistic’, Xu writes (9).

A second, and related, source of debate concerns the country’s international role; having regained its great power status, some intellectuals argue, China should resume its historical position ‘at the centre of the world’. The philosopher Zhao Tingyang has revived the concept of tianxia, often translated as ‘all-under-heaven’, a Chinese conception of ‘universalism’ from before the emergence of the modern West (10). According to this principle, China was the centre of civilisation, and civilisation’s strength diminished the further one was from China; nonetheless, the ‘barbarians’ on the periphery could become civilised by learning to ‘be Chinese’. But tianxia evolved into the tribute system (11), a diplomatic order with its own hierarchy and abuses. Zhao therefore advocates ‘returning to the roots to seek renewal’ and building a moral world order, not one based on interest and power.

Different versions of a multipolar world

While intellectuals who engage with foreign policy often repeat the regime’s slogans of ‘community of destiny’ and ‘win-win agreements’, many are exploring different versions of what a multipolar world might look like. Jiang Shigong (12), a New Left academic, takes up the idea of a Chinese empire made up of regions ‘united’ by the One Belt One Road initiative. However, most are more preoccupied with condemning the various manifestations of US hegemony than talking about Beijing’s current attitude to the world order.

Some Chinese intellectuals believe the world was better off when China played second fiddle and the US called the tune; when China kept a ‘low profile’. These thinkers were much more comfortable when Beijing and Washington behaved like an old married couple whose occasional arguments did not threaten a fundamentally sound relationship.

Several of them question the widespread idea that high growth rates alone will enable China to overtake American power. Sociologist Sun Liping (13) even finds the idea dangerous: ‘In terms of China’s development, at present we are genuinely facing a choice: do we continue to stay the course and improve the people’s livelihood, or do we shoot the moon? In the past we have lived through one period in which we tried really hard and things didn’t work out, and one in which things worked out well although we didn’t try all that hard. We need to understand that we are facing extremely difficult livelihood issues.’

He’s not alone in issuing this warning. The liberal thinker Shi Zhan wrote a whole book (14) on the dangers of succumbing to ‘populist nationalism’, and suggests leaders must recognise that China will never rule the waves because too many of its neighbours oppose it. In any case, Shi insists, the very nature of power is changing: the digital platforms and artificial intelligence that will shape the economy of the future are largely beyond state control.

Telling China’s story

Finally, another subject addressed by the intellectuals is how to properly tell China’s story. The party-state encourages them to do this, but even without such encouragement, many are obsessed with the question, not so much for its propaganda value — the CCP’s fixation — as in the hope of achieving a good understanding of what their country is and will become, both for the Chinese and the world. For despite all the cultural pride and nationalist bluster, the issue remains unresolved and hotly debated.

Of course, intellectuals debate almost every important issue (sometimes echoing popular sentiment), such as ‘common prosperity’, which terrifies the rich and entrepreneurs, One Belt One Road (and overseas investment decisions), and more recently Covid-19 policy and lockdowns, which have had their critics.

But questions of history themselves provoke sometimes heated exchanges, which crystallise around an odd issue: should the PRC’s history be treated as two 30-year periods or a single 60-year one? Essentially, this question depends on whether the Mao era is regarded as a mistake that Deng Xiaoping corrected by opening China to market forces. There are still communists who think he was wrong to abandon Maoism, while many liberals believe he did not embrace the market wholeheartedly enough. The majority are somewhere in the middle. The party has, unsurprisingly, decided that the PRC’s history should be seen as a whole, which worries some intellectuals, as Xi seems to be borrowing a little too readily from the Maoist playbook.

Many liberals’ narrative of Chinese history goes like this: the revolution of 1949 was necessary to awaken the country from its millennial hibernation and generate the energy for change. Maoist China made many mistakes, but the planned economy and forced modernisation laid the foundations for the take-off during the period of reform and opening up (from 1979). This policy unleashed entrepreneurial forces. China is now a reasonably rich country in a globalised world, and the message of class struggle preached during the revolution and under Mao is no longer relevant. Many intellectuals — even defenders of the party-state — see the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist language the CCP still speaks as obsolete, even slightly embarrassing, as it has no value outside the country and little traction within. Needless to say, if the property market goes bust as is now feared, Xi’s thinking will not save the day.

Beacon guiding the world?

There are of course exceptions. New Left law professor Jiang Shigong published a long essay in 2019 (15) in which he portrayed the president as the hero who arrived just in time to save the PRC from the same fate as the Soviet Union — chaos, relative poverty and insignificance. Having avoided that, he suggests, China will become a beacon guiding the rest of the world through the perils and pitfalls of American neoliberalism. Jiang’s text is ambitious, as it seeks to answer all the questions that weigh on the current narrative of national history as a way of reversing what has become China’s de facto intellectual pluralism.

More recently, economist Yao Yang has impressively sought to develop a ‘Confucian liberalism’ (16) to solve a number of problems plaguing the country and the world. He argues that Western democratic regimes are dysfunctional, caught between an emphasis on individual values and demands for absolute equality, and are no longer a source of inspiration. In China, market and political reforms are stalled and the risk of ‘leftist’ measures harming entrepreneurs and thus reducing the country’s wealth and power is more present than ever. At the same time, Yao explains, the West refuses to recognise the legitimacy of China’s rise, seeing it only as the ‘yellow peril’ of communism, which only encourages China’s leaders to become even more ‘communist’. The good old days of the post-cold war era are fading.

What to do? Yao Yang proposes Confucian liberalism, which tolerates a degree of social inequality, deemed inevitable, and a certain meritocratic elitism, but which results in a government capable of shaping consensus and thus ‘properly managing the affairs of the people’. For Yao, the state in the West is too weak, undermined by populist currents, whereas in China it is too strong and risks ignoring the needs of the people. His proposal has the virtue of seeing China and the West as part of the same planet.

Yao Yang, aware the Western world is not listening to him, is essentially addressing Chinese liberals who are losing confidence in universal values. And he’s making an impact on society. In July 2021 he published a long article entitled ‘The Challenges Facing the Chinese Communist Party and the Reconstruction of Political Philosophy’ in the prestigious Beijing Cultural Review the day after the CCP’s centenary. Not only did he ignore the major themes that anniversary events had celebrated and insist on the need to ‘sinicise Marxism’ by returning to Confucianism, but he also made no mention of Xi Jinping or Xi Jinping Thought (17). For Yao, as for many public intellectuals, telling China’s story well also means integrating it into that of the rest of the world, for they see themselves as global citizens with the ability and responsibility to engage with their counterparts everywhere.

David Ownby

David Ownby is professor at the Center of East Asian Studies and the history department at the University of Montreal. His research centres on the history of religion in modern and contemporary China and the position of contemporary intellectuals in China. He is co-author (with Timothy Cheek and Joshua A Fogel) of Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China, Columbia University Press, 2019.
Link : https://mondediplo.com/2023/01/09china
قراءة 721 مرات آخر تعديل على الأربعاء, 22 شباط/فبراير 2023 07:19

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