Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry 9780674030237

Citation preview

Worrying about China

Worrying about China



THE LANGUAGE OF CHINESE C R I T I C A L I N Q U I RY

G L O R I A D AV I E S

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2009. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davies, Gloria, 1958– Worrying about China : the language of Chinese critical inquiry / Gloria Davies. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-02621-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-674-03225-5 (pbk.) 1. Philosophy, Chinese—20th century. I. Title. B5232.D38 2007 951.06—dc22 2007008167 Thrailkill, Jane F., 1963– Affecting fictions: mind, body, and emotion in American literary realism / Jane F. Thrailkill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02512-7 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-674-02512-1 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Body, Human, in literature. 3. Emotions in literature. 4. Realism in literature. 5. Mind and body in literature. 6. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 7. United States—Intellectual life—19th century. 8. United States—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title. PS374.B64T48 2007 813'.409353—dc22

2007007007

To M, my beloved

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

1

1

Worrying about China

2

Divided over China

3

Theory and Taxonomy: A Post-Maoist Pursuit of Cultural Integrity

4

Reasoning after Mao

5

A Poetics of Inquiry Notes

245

Glossary Index

285

293

15

58

146 189

106

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a decade-long engagement with contemporary Chinese thought. It was William Blake who wrote “opposition is true friendship” and this has been the guiding notion of my inquiry, especially when I have found myself in argument with the writings of academics and intellectuals who have honored me with their friendship. I owe an immense debt to M, partner and soulmate and my main interlocutor throughout the writing process, whose wit, perspicacity, and critiques of my work have helped refine my conversation with Chinese critical discourse in ways that I could not have achieved on my own. Grateful thanks are owed to my dear friend Geremie Barmé, who also read and commented (and always without complaint) on the lengthier original manuscript. Sincere thanks also to my editor, Lindsay Waters, for his enthusiastic encouragement, advice, and support. In hindsight, the original manuscript seemed possessed by the ghost of Ireneo Funes in its obsession with detail. Lindsay ensured that the book can now be read in a finite amount of time. I thank also the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions as well as Timothy Cheek, Kevin Hart, David Kelly, and Brian Nelson for reading and commenting on various parts of this work. I will always remain grateful to my dear mother, Huang Phay-Ching, for having first exposed me to the youhuan rhetoric of her generation, and also to my former teachers Liu Ts’un-yan and Pierre Ryckmans for teaching me how to read and think as a sinologist. For research assistance and engaging conversations, my thanks to Wu Guanjun. Gratitude

x

•

Acknowledgments

is owed to my son, John Davies, for his patience and technical assistance as well as to my family for their loving encouragement, most especially my sister, Vivienne Wee. My gratitude also to my rakhi brothers, Amjad Ali, Geoffrey Spooner, and Rohan Waldie for their constant moral support, and my thanks to YoungA Cho, InJung Cho, Denise Cuthbert, Maryanne Dever, Pauline Kang-Fiennes, Mark Harrison, Hong Lijian, Megan McLaughlin, Bernice Tang, and Warren Sun for their friendship and support. I also thank Warren for his help with locating several references. I am grateful to Phoebe Kosman at Harvard University Press for her assistance with the production of this book and her ever prompt responses to my queries. Study leave in 2004 (under the auspices of the Outside Study Program, Faculty of Arts, Monash University) enabled me to write the first version of this work. Part of the research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP0208747).

Worrying about China

Introduction

Worrying about the problems that prevent China from attaining perfection, not only as a nation but also as an enduring civilization, is the kind of patriotic sentiment one commonly encounters in the essays of Chinese intellectuals. In recent decades, this hoary anxiety of cultural and national self-reflection has come to be worded in new and differing vocabularies imported from EuroAmerican scholarship. Patriotic worrying or youhuan is a call to duty that belongs to an established, older vocabulary from which Chinese intellectuals have traditionally drawn in their critical inquiry. Although the importation of EuroAmerican vocabularies has allowed Sinophone critical engagement with traditional and modern Chinese thought to evolve new ways of sense-making, it has not diminished the moral imperative inherent in youhuan. Youhuan, therefore, as a national praxis constitutes a normal discourse1 that renders all contributions to contemporary Chinese thought (Zhongguo dangdai sixiang)2 commensurable despite the different vocabularies in use and the divisions that have arisen and deepened among intellectuals as to the question of the best way forward for China.3 Accordingly, Worrying about China is an exploration of the post-Maoist sensibilities that have since shaped critical inquiry in China. Worrying about China is also a conversation with the language of that inquiry, a language that reflects not only the constraints of prolonged, ongoing state censorship but also a poetics of anxiety constitutive of the very discourse that seeks to articulate it. Let us begin by noting that there is still a lingering smell of cordite

2

•

Worrying about China

about contemporary Chinese critical inquiry, for this is a discourse that has, as its general concern, the eradication of ideas that could be yet again instrumentalized to assist the production of political power from the barrel of a gun. This concern is articulated in the argument that the Shanghai-based historian Zhu Xueqin offered in a widely-read 1995 essay and is echoed in the writings of other intellectuals.4 It is not surprising that contemporary Chinese critical inquiry should display this heightened vigilance against the dangers posed by revolutionary or radical ideas. After all, the post-Maoist producers of this inquiry are only too aware that, under Mao, such ideas were once elevated to the conceit of a propellant, with the effect of firing as many rifle shots as they did imaginations. More generally, Chinese critical inquiry of the 1990s and since can be figured as a cry for change, for improvement, for national perfection, and the eventual arrival of a fully fledged Chinese democracy. It is a discourse that is also wary of cries that had previously brought tens of thousands onto the streets (most especially in 1989)—cries that many now deem to have been flawed or too hastily voiced, without proper consideration of the substantive institutional reforms that national perfection and democracy would require. For these reasons, Chinese critical inquiry is also an interrogation of authoritarian rule, albeit an interrogation (mostly) obliquely formulated in the language of scholarly disquisition so as to avoid the unwanted scrutiny of an unelected, oneparty state anxious to retain its monopoly on power. Chinese critical inquiry is produced largely by academics and graduate students based at mainland Chinese universities and research institutions. Its contributors also include mainland-born academics and students living overseas, as well as journalists, writers, and talented amateurs. These individuals share a common hope that their often furtive but nonetheless voluble and voluminous critiques of the past, and recommendations for the present and future, might edify the mainland reading public about their unhappy national status quo. Chinese critical inquiry, then, is unlike EuroAmerican critical inquiry inasmuch as it is intimately bound with both the historical and more immediate social consequences of political violence (of both protest movements and their state-authorized purges). In this sense it differs from its EuroAmerican counterpart of an institutionally sanctioned and funded inquiry quite removed from the very idea of a battlefield. For example, several of the texts cited in this book would not qualify as “re-

Introduction

•

3

search quantum” at mainland Chinese universities for the simple reason that they were not (and could not have been) published in state-approved journals. Moreover, a small minority of intellectuals such as Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie, who are prepared to risk official censure and discipline by directly offering bold criticisms, have been banned in China and are forced to publish overseas.5 Despite the sinister shadow of state intervention that dogs the production of critical inquiry in China, contributors to this inquiry generally regard their project in terms of a retreat from and sometimes an outright negation of revolution, even while their language remains partially indebted to the rhetoric and form of the Mao-inspired discourse of revolution from whence it came. While EuroAmerican critical inquiry may have had a Parisian moment of passion in 1968 and undergone its own verbal battles (almost invariably from behind Marxist barricades), it has never been a battlefield per se. On the contrary, Chinese critical inquiry, from its very inception in the modern vernacular of the late 1910s and early 1920s, or the May Fourth era, was and remains a battlefield whose participants cannot fail to be aware of the heavy consequences attendant on entering that field, in which the publication of one’s ideas runs the risk of not only exacerbating existing rifts within the Chinese intellectual world but attracting censorship or more severe penalties. Thus while the term “Chinese critical inquiry” may chime with the luxury of armchair reflection, one’s increasing familiarity with the activity in question unsettles any sense of luxury to elicit instead a feeling of a battle-scarred and volatile terrain that in the sum total of its scope, reach, and consequence is a discourse that is ignored only at one’s peril (as China’s state censors are well aware). This precise point can be illustrated through a comparison of two scenarios of academic judgment. In discussing the circumstances in which he received a failed grade for his agrégation paper on Husserl in 1955, Jacques Derrida recalled that he had earlier showed the paper to Louis Althusser and was told: “It’s too difficult, too obscure for the agrégation. It might be very dangerous. But since I don’t feel I can evaluate it, I’ll ask Foucault’s opinion.” After reading the paper, Michel Foucault told Derrida: “Well, it’s either an F or an A-plus.” In using this anecdote to illustrate his own relationship to academic authority, Derrida explained: “It was a period when in certain circles (even Marxist ones), people began taking a keen interest in Husserl—I mean a different type of interest, different from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s ways of approaching Husserl. As

4

•

Worrying about China

for the university and the agrégation committee, Husserl was still poorly known and poorly received.”6 The constraints imposed by academic arbiters on one’s intellectual autonomy, as illustrated by Derrida, are also present in mainland China, but always with the additional threat of punitive consequences attendant on giving offense. Zhu Xueqin recalls that he was suspended for a year from his doctoral candidature at Fudan University shortly after 1989 when he was labeled a “radical, suspected of heterodoxy.” As someone who had been an enthusiastic adolescent participant in the political radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, Zhu had sought in the late 1980s to compare the violence of the French Revolution to that of China’s Cultural Revolution, as a way to interrogate the latter’s long-term adverse consequences.7 When he finally submitted his doctoral dissertation on the origins of French political culture in 1992, a politically sensitive time during which the Party-state closely monitored the activities of critically engaged intellectuals, Zhu commented: “Some professors refused to participate in the oral defense, characterizing my opinions as ‘bourgeois right-wing, conservative historiography.’ ” Zhu noted that the prominent liberal historian Wang Yuanhua provided him with crucial support at this time by agreeing to serve as the chair of his committee.8 Such systemic political pressure has produced the pervasive practice of selfcensorship among Chinese intellectuals. As Perry Link observes of the “official language game,” one of its most useful features (from the Party-state’s perspective) is its “vagueness in the definition of misbehavior and in the punishments for it . . . If most Chinese can’t know where the border lies between safety and punishment, at least they know that the farther they are from it, the safer they will be.”9 Accordingly, Chinese critical inquiry is a discourse that attempts to detect where the border between safety and punishment is at any given moment. It represents what one might call the coalface or working edge that regulates, motivates, and in a sense dictates, or at least foreshadows, the possibilities of that insistent singularity “China” against the Party-state’s assessment of “what China needs.” How we listen to and converse with that discourse is another question. Much of this book is taken up with close readings in dense contexts that may be new to the non-Sinologist. However, more general problems of text, reading, closure—in brief, the elements of contemporary critical theory in an Anglophone academic setting—are also themes of my Sinophonecentered inquiry.

Introduction

•

5

To address the varied and various trajectories of critical thinking in present-day Sinophone scholarship, this book was conceived and written as a consciously hybrid text that attempts to weave translated Sinophone formulations into the fabric of Anglophone academic prose. In this fashion and through the chapters that follow, I explore how conceptual terms—such as academic norms, freedom, reason and rationality, postmodernism, social justice, liberalism, the New Left, New Confucianism, and “the humanistic spirit”—have been articulated and discussed in Sinophone critical discourse since the late 1980s. By figuring this discourse as acts of worrying about China, I seek to draw attention to the diverse ways in which the enduring notion of youhuan yishi, or “crisis mentality,” is now being articulated. The term “Sinophone” (as I use it throughout this book) is, first and foremost, a reference to the standard but ever-evolving written language in which Chinese critical inquiry is published—a language derived from the modern Chinese vernacular institutionalized as the medium of education in the early 1920s, following the establishment in 1913 of guoyu, or “the national language,” modeled on the Beijing dialect. Before the twentieth century, the Beijing-centered spoken language of officialdom (guanhua, or spoken Mandarin) and the classical written language (the centuries-old wenyan of scholar-officials and literati derived from the guwen10 of the Confucian canon and other ancient classics) served as the premodern corollaries of a standard language that enabled educated Chinese to communicate with one another regardless of the sheer diversity (and in some cases, mutual unintelligibility) of the Chinese dialects and subdialects that were their earliest spoken “mother tongues.” In this regard, we must not forget that minority non-Han languages (such as Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan) continue to be spoken and written in the present-day People’s Republic, or that Mongolian and Manchu were languages of political significance during the non-Han reigns respectively of the Yuan (1279–1368) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. As the lingua franca of the Confucian imperium, the classical script was a standard language that “unified” the Chinese-speaking world to a remarkable degree down the ages, despite the evident heterogeneity of tongues. Historically, it was the language that provided the non-Han rulers of the Yuan and Qing dynasties with the Confucian legitimacy required to preside over a predominantly Han Chinese population. In brief, regardless of the dialect or language a person spoke, the classical written script prevailed as the embodiment of Han Chinese civilization.

6

•

Worrying about China

Accordingly, the establishment of guoyu as the national language in early Republican China was an attempt to consolidate and extend the “unifying” effects of the classical legacy in a distinctly modern way: not only through the further standardization of the written language but through standardization of speech and pronunciation on a national scale. To this day, however, most people educated in standard spoken and written Chinese remain at least conversant, if not fluent, in their native dialect, with many having an ability to speak several other dialects as well. Thus despite the imposition of the northern or Beijing standard of pronunciation throughout the twentieth century, actual spoken Chinese remains quite varied in pronunciation, thanks to the abiding influence of regional and local dialects. With this historical context in mind, when I refer to Sinophone critical discourse, I am gesturing toward the unifying and even transcendent effects of the written language in enabling an author to command authority in prose regardless of his or her ability to speak standard Chinese. I am reminded in this instance of the prominent late Qing early Republican scholar Liang Qichao (1873–1929) who, despite his poor spoken Mandarin, nonetheless exercised an enormous influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations of intellectuals through his writings. Indeed, it was only on rare occasions, such as when Liang had his first audience in 1898 with the reform-minded Guangxu Emperor (1871–1908), that his native Cantonese accent became a barrier to communication, which possibly influenced the emperor’s impression of Liang. At the time, guanhua or spoken Mandarin was essential for spoken communication among the officials based in Beijing. One of Liang’s contemporaries wrote that most people had expected Liang to be showered with honors after that imperial audience, given the “shining reputation” he already commanded through his writings. Contrary to such expectations, Liang received the lowly sixth rank and it was rumored that because “the two could not understand each other, the emperor ended the audience with displeasure.”11 Whether that rumor was true or not, it is clear that Liang’s poor spoken Mandarin proved no hindrance to the enormous influence he subsequently exercised on public culture through his prolific writings about China’s problems and the types of social, political, and cultural reforms those problems demanded. Indeed, Liang’s acts of worrying in print— together with his literary attempts at modernizing the classical wenyan script—commanded such authority as to shape the rhetoric of Sino-

Introduction

•

7

phone intellectual discourse in the early twentieth century. As Saito¯ Mareshi puts it: “In Liang Qichao’s case, Cantonese connected him to his birthplace, and wenyan connected him to China.”12 In brief, it was Liang’s demonstrated mastery of the written language that made him an exemplary “Chinese” and enabled his writings to acquire public relevance as a “tool” or “vehicle” for the nation-building cause. As we shall see in the course of this book, to this day Sinophone critical discourse continues to affirm the civilizational and/or national representativeness of written Chinese, particularly with reference to the prose of an acknowledged exemplar. Moreover, critical inquiry itself continues to be habitually instrumentalized as a tool or vehicle for social and cultural reform. As a praxis, worrying about China carries the moral obligation of first identifying and then solving perceived Chinese problems (Zhongguo wenti), whether social, political, cultural, historical, or economic, in relation to the unified public cause of achieving China’s national perfection.13 This moral obligation resonates powerfully in the writings of many Chinese intellectuals, and it is strikingly discordant with the decidedly nonnationalistic tenor of self-reflexive EuroAmerican critical inquiry. But this moral obligation, which was and remains vulnerable to the enormous pressures an authoritarian state can exert on critical inquiry, is now further complicated by the sheer motility of Chinese intellectual life itself, which has experienced a rapid change of habitus and attendant demands from the 1990s to the present. Whereas intellectuals had been able to claim in the 1980s that their sole interest was to “liberate thinking,”14 progressive professionalization since the 1990s has made the “publish or perish” imperative increasingly onerous, to the extent that now intellectual rivals can easily accuse one another of harboring selfish motivations in the publication of ostensibly selfless concerns. The marketability of one’s writings—in addition to considerations of political appropriateness—has now become an important requirement of Chinese critical inquiry in ways that resemble the highly rationalized economy in which much of EuroAmerican critical inquiry is institutionally located. Despite this complication, Chinese critical inquiry has burgeoned on the Internet to become a global praxis that is best engaged with as a textual explosion rather than imagined as a finite corpus. As such, it is pointless and indeed impossible to enumerate the plenitude of changing themes and issues that are featured daily on the range of Sinophone web

8

•

Worrying about China

sites and that provide intellectuals with a platform for voicing their critical concerns. These web sites store vast numbers of essays (either transferred from existing print publications or written specifically for online publication), along with enormous quantities of pithy commentaries and one-line responses to any given number of issues of topical relevance. This cyberspace discourse provides Chinese intellectual life with a new kind of conversational buzz that extends well beyond the geopolitical borders of mainland China, since the web sites and their authors could be based anywhere in the world. Most Chinese intellectuals (as well as Anglophone commentators on contemporary China) regard the Internet as a definite gain for freedom of speech insofar as it allows far greater scope for individuals and groups to read and publish texts that express views contrary to those of the Party-state. The growth of online critical publications has been unrelenting, even though substantive studies of the Party-state’s monitoring and restriction of public access to the Internet indicate that mainland Chinese Internet users encounter a very high degree of censorship.15 This has had the effect of expanding the scope of intellectual autonomy in China, even though such expansion is always accompanied by the risk of state intervention or the forced closure of highly popular web sites. For instance, Yannan.cn was a Beijing-based enterprise that provided a leading forum for critical inquiry before it was summarily shut down on September 30, 2005, for “reorganization and rectification.”16 Thus despite the evident futility of attempting to “master” an inexhaustible textuality, significant features of Chinese critical inquiry, such as the problems posed by the pervasive threat of censorship and certain abiding concerns constitutive of Sinophone habits of writing, can always be productively explored. A key concern that this book addresses is the habitual appropriation of Western theory in the instrumentalist sense of its value to Chinese thought. Indeed, when that value (whether as principle, paradigm, notion, method, and so on) is translated and transmuted and then incorporated as somehow intact (or perhaps improved upon) within Sinophone discourse, the relationship between Sinophone and Anglophone discursivities becomes an interesting and problematized relationship that is productive of ramifications far further afield than mere academic exchange. The eminent literary historian C. T. Hsia once wrote with ambivalence about what he called the modern Chinese writer’s “obsession

Introduction

•

9

with China.” According to Hsia, while this was a noble obsession that shared “a spiritual affinity with the most significant modern Western literature,” it was nonetheless handicapped by “a certain patriotic provinciality and a naiveté of faith with regard to better conditions elsewhere.” That obsession, Hsia claims, prevented the modern Chinese writer from identifying “the sick state of his country with the state of man in the modern world,” and produced an undesirable tendency to identify “the conditions of China as peculiarly Chinese.” Numerous traces of that earlier obsession with China can be detected in present-day critical discourse but with a distinct reversal of intention: whereas the predicament (kunjing) of modern China had previously been explained through depictions of China as a “land of darkness”17 over which the oppressive forces of Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture held sway, those depictions are now regarded as seriously flawed and a cause of the “predicament” itself. Conversely, the preoccupation of many present-day intellectuals is with recovering China’s cultural integrity or even civilizational grandeur. Cautions are now regularly issued against indiscriminate or inappropriate uses of Western ideas, even as these intellectuals continue (habitually) to distill from a greatly expanded diversity of EuroAmerican scholarship the types of formulations they deem proper and of value for their Sino-centered inquiry. The ramifications of this recent nativist orientation in Chinese critical inquiry are discussed in Chapter One, which opens with an examination of the nationalistic tenor of worrying about China and the ambivalence Chinese intellectuals now often express toward foreign or imported ideas. The moral connotations of worrying are elaborated in Chapter Two, which examines, in this context, two key disagreements that have arisen in recent years over suitable ways to worry: namely, between liberals and the New Left and between humanists and postmodernists (or “postists”). This discussion of intellectual pluralism and factionalism is followed in Chapter Three by a critical review of theory as it is understood in mainland China, together with the three “discursive realms” (yujing) in which theory is perceived to circulate: namely, the realms of thought or inquiry (sixiang), scholarship (xueshu), and Party theory (dangde sixiang lilun). A discussion of the importance that Chinese intellectuals generally accord to taxonomy is then developed out of the preceding to indicate that, as a legacy of Confucian scholarship, classification and naming can often function as a form of moral

10

•

Worrying about China

evaluation, since names can always be endowed with positive or negative qualities through the descriptions provided of them. The positive connotations that the term conservatism (baoshouzhuyi) has acquired, along with the rise of New Confucianism, are then explored in relation to a growing desire among intellectuals to regain cultural integrity in their discourse. The relationship between Party theory and critical inquiry is examined in Chapter Four, with an emphasis on the conceptual authority the dialectic continues to command in both discourses. The discursive ramifications of conceptualizing thought as a process of dialectical progression are then reviewed in relation to the new vocabularies being used to describe this process. The various issues discussed in these first four chapters are recast in Chapter Five as examples of a poetics of inquiry, a poetics that affirms moral emotions in acts of reasoning and judgment toward, as it were, a melding of the “heart” and the “mind” (xin) into a single tool of higher perspicacity.18 In this context, the rhetorical or performative powers of Chinese critical prose are examined as presentday articulations of an abiding centuries-old legacy of self-cultivation that continue, in turn, to facilitate the elevation of intellectual inquiry into a spiritual force. Linguistic play has long been a staple of Sinophone critical discourse. For instance, when Lu Xun criticized his Marxist detractors in the late 1920s for failing to indict him successfully, he observed with sarcasm, “Today we cannot avoid dissecting and devouring our enemies but if we had books on anatomy and cookery and were guided by them, we should produce something tastier.”19 The vituperative nature of Chinese intellectual debates to which Lu Xun alerts us remains a feature of presentday critical discourse, even though this very vituperativeness (which became further entrenched in the accusations and counteraccusations of the Maoist years) is now regarded by most intellectuals as destructive and highly undesirable. The historical figure of Lu Xun makes several cameo appearances in this book, for he remains the unrivalled critical exemplar across the contemporary intellectual spectrum. Accordingly, Chinese intellectuals often quote Lu Xun to endow their own formulations with the magisterial authority he has come to occupy in both official and intellectual discourses.20 But Lu Xun and other prominent May Fourth intellectuals are also now viewed with ambivalence as individuals whose cultural radicalism brought about the demise of traditional scholarship and im-

Introduction

•

11

poverished the Chinese language. This fact is introduced in Chapter One and given further elaboration in subsequent chapters. This ambivalence toward May Fourth is reflected in the notable attempt among present-day intellectuals to “return to tradition.”21 This return is typically conceived as part of a larger project of establishing academic norms (xueshu guifan). The modern notion of guifan as norms is a close cognate of guiju (rules or established practice), which was given its canonical definition in the Mencius as follows: “In teaching others archery, Yi naturally aims at drawing the bow to the full, and the student naturally also aims at drawing the bow to the full. In teaching others, the master carpenter naturally does so by means of compasses and square [ guiju] and the student naturally also learns by means of compasses and square.”22 The significance accorded to correct measurement and evaluation in this Mencius excerpt shaped Confucian scholarship cum statecraft across the centuries. The expectation of attaining moral clarity through the proper assessment of others and oneself has persisted to this day, not least in the advocacy of academic norms as the foundational basis for measuring the relative merits of ideas.23 From the discussion thus far, it is not difficult to discern that habits of writing that evolved out of worrying about China have resulted in a discourse dominated by formulations that are aimed at evaluating the pros and cons of particular sets of ideas in the common higher interest of improving Chinese society and culture. Because Chinese critical inquiry is predominantly undertaken in the general interest of advancing the national culture, it tends characteristically to include a moral evaluation as well as an inspection of utility or functionality, with a view to determining whether an idea or a theory will benefit China. This is particularly striking in the writings of many prominent intellectuals discussed in this book, who contend fiercely with one another over the issue of what kinds of ideas would provide the best tools (qi) for the positive transformation of the status quo.24 What I can describe only as linguistic certitude, in my readings at least, pervades this Sinophone mode of inquiry, certainly insofar as ideas are so easily reified as tools unproblematically—a discursive inheritance of Sinophone writings published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as if the words that one enlists for the description of things and feelings, or indeed “reality,” carry an inherent truth that must be restored against the adverse influence of the “wrong” kinds of ideas. In different places throughout the book, this instrumentalist and

12

•

Worrying about China

moral conception of the critical task is contrasted with self-reflexive EuroAmerican styles of critical engagement. At this juncture, I must note with unease the way in which my participation in the discourse of Chinese studies leads me to abstract and to reduce an enormous variety of texts to fit under these two highly imprecise rubrics of the Chinese and the EuroAmerican.25 But there is no way around this problem of reduction and generalization, since an act of writing is always situated in a particular economy of sense-making that requires one to gesture, however imprecisely, to the Chinese and the EuroAmerican or Western to signify a difference in formal terms. In this regard, it should also be noted that when one is attentive to the rules or conventions of Sinophone discourse, as well as the political constraints under which much of it is produced, one becomes aware that the nuances of a text when read in Chinese are always at risk of becoming lost in translation to English. How one might make sense of the textual difference encountered—for instance, as evidence of something uniquely Chinese that fits an existing narrative of Chinese intellectual history—is an issue that is inescapably bound up with ethics as responsibility to the other via an act of interpretation. Gayatri Spivak provides a poignant articulation of this problematic when she writes: “But how can I be certain? And what is it to know, or to be sure that a knowing has been learned? To theorize the political, to politicize the theoretical are such vast aggregative asymmetrical undertakings; the hardest lesson is the impossible intimacy of the ethical.”26 Theorizings of the political and politicizations of the theoretical also occupy the attention of Chinese intellectuals as they craft their moral and ethical concerns in a language with which they are intimately familiar but from which they now also seek to acquire a new critical distance. Their critical engagement can be described as an attempt to explore how the language in which they were brought up has become, in some ways, an “other” that fails to deliver the “sense” they now wish it to make—or, as the Beijing-based economist Wang Dingding phrases it evocatively with a certain Daoist lilt: “ ‘The names that can be sonamed’ are not the ones that we want to speak.”27 However the notion of the “other” is understood—whether as “the West” from a Sinophone perspective or as “China” from an Anglophone perspective, or in the sense described above of language experienced as other—it remains a sign that always gestures toward an incalculable and unknown surplus beyond the certainty of cognitive

Introduction

•

13

closure that is implied by the term “knowledge.” In this sense, the “other” continually eludes our grasp when we apply a method or theory to our reading of a text, to claim that “It means . . .” or “It tells us . . .” Insofar as each encounter with a text (in whichever given language) is also a relation to the “other”—a gap that emerges when one remains troubled by the question, “What is it to know?” even as one proceeds to make ready sense of the text in accordance with one or another theory—there is an “impossible intimacy of the ethical” at work. This impossible intimacy is the sense of the incalculable that one experiences, for instance, as the private anxiety of not getting it right, since one can never fully know what “getting it right” means without recourse to a given set of rules. In this regard, I am aware that different readers will undoubtedly apply different rules to their reading of this book. Those who prefer inquiry to take a highly disciplined form may, for instance, regard this book as not having adequately located itself in any of the established divisions of knowledge in Chinese studies, whether of literature, history, philosophy, political science, or sociology. In response to such readers, I can offer only a defense in the traditional (and multi- or transdisciplinary) name of Sinology as a complete discipline within itself, but more specifically a defense energized by the idea of New Sinology that Geremie Barmé describes as scholarship “engaged also in constant and equitable conversations with the Sinophone world.”28 I would also argue that, in the era of Internet publishing, critical inquiry (however it is named and cataloged) has clearly entered a postdisciplinary setting that will continue to unsettle those who wish to insist that textuality must always be disciplined to conform to the orderly process of institutionally based knowledge production. There are many themes that I would have liked to include beyond the ones I have selected, but their inclusion would have made this book intolerably long and ultimately unreadable. Thus I have favored those themes that have played a role in shaping Sinophone critical discourse because of the attention they have received and the prominence of the intellectuals who have contributed to their elaboration. But despite a certain focus on the published permanence of texts that have acquired an authority through their inclusion in anthologies of contemporary Chinese thought, I have also included numerous instances of publications that have appeared only on the Internet, or that were further disseminated on the Internet after their brief appearance in conventional print.29

14

•

Worrying about China

Throughout the book, I will be referring to “Chinese intellectuals” for the simple reason that this is a category which has remained significant in Sinophone writings from the 1920s on, produced by authors who, in fact, call themselves “Chinese intellectuals.” Moreover, the pervasiveness of this category in both Sinophone scholarship and its Anglophone commentary is the legacy of Chinese intellectuals representing themselves as a presumed collectivity of interests in both these discourses. The numerous self-definitions and typologies of Chinese intellectuals that have been produced in Sinophone scholarship since the normalization of intellectual life began in the late 1970s, relying on and rehearsing earlier formulations of the shidaifu (Confucian scholarofficial), zhishifenzi (intellectuals), and dushuren (scholars), have further enhanced the category’s contemporary (but also transhistorical) relevance.30 In recent years, these related discourses of Anglophone and Sinophone scholarship on Chinese intellectuals have drawn considerably on conceptual terms and theoretical formulations derived from the writings of influential EuroAmerican academics, with Pierre Bourdieu as a notable example.31 In conclusion, it should also be noted that capacious terms like “theory” and “critical inquiry” are invariably open to interpretation and contestation, and there is ultimately no stable and determinate way of adjudging what kinds of phrases and formulations should properly count as theoretical and critical without also implicitly ushering in the values and beliefs that constitute one’s selection criteria. Setting aside these minor academic concerns, Worrying about China will, I hope, provide an engagement with Chinese intellectual discourse as both inquiry (sixiang) and scholarship (xueshu), empowered by theory (lilun or xueli), self-reflection (fansi), and critique (pipan) toward the redemptive goal of improving Chinese society and culture. I hope to communicate some of the excitement and unpredictability that has attended the production of this contemporary discourse and its ongoing self-exorcism of the Hegelian-Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ghosts that continue to haunt the very fabric of its ever-expanding textuality.



chapter one

Worrying about China

Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, the moral connotations of the phrase youhuan yishi have guided the production of Chinese critical inquiry. Youhuan yishi is often translated as “crisis mentality” or, as Perry Link renders it, “the worrying mentality.” In explaining this phrase, Link writes that it is “first of all, related to patriotism in the sense that China, one way or another, is always the main object of worry.” Writing of intellectual praxis in mainland China of the 1980s, Link observes, “The entire mentality is couched in the big question, ‘What can we do about China?’—a question that often takes on a despairing tone. In its pessimism and self-doubt, youhuan yishi stands apart from the chauvinistic or jingoistic varieties of patriotism.”1 After the student-led protest movement of 1989 ended with the massacre of Chinese workers, students, and innocent bystanders in Beijing on “June Fourth” (“liu si,” a temporal term that signals the watershed significance of that fatal moment), this norm of worrying began to be couched in much more oblique ways. In the heady months before the massacre, the volume of plainspeak among intellectuals and students agitating for political reforms reached a peak. Some student representatives even performed a traditional style of pleading with the authorities to demonstrate their integrity as loyal Chinese subjects. As the former student leader Wu’er Kaixi recalled: “At first we made direct appeals [ jianzheng], then we pleaded with tears [leijian] and on bended knee [ guijian] . . . like subjects petitioning the emperor. We had to beg them to come out and talk to us. But then again, it is fair to say that the gov-

16

•

Worrying about China

ernment virtually crumbled under the weight of our knees.”2 This, together with the hunger strikes that ensued and growing public support for the students’ cause, triggered a state reaction that marked the end of any legitimacy for unfettered opinion. After June Fourth, the Party-state seized control of public discourse. Critical plainspeak became barely audible in mainland China in the remaining months of 1989 as the government moved to ban it outright, arresting and jailing those who had spoken against the authoritarian regime either too volubly or too persuasively. In the decade that followed, the acceleration of economic reforms and the advent of the Internet transformed Chinese intellectual life in ways that most mainland-based critical thinkers view with a mixture of disappointment and hope. On the one hand, Chinese intellectuals remain constrained to publish within the ever-fluctuating, state-imposed parameters of permissible speech. Wary of the ever-present threat of official censure and even heavier penalties for expressly giving offense, intellectuals have mostly resorted to oblique, by which I mean theoretically inflected or historicist ways of worrying about China.3 On the other hand, the professionalization of intellectual life and the emergence of a flourishing academic marketplace in China have helped to catapult an astonishing diversity of such worries into print and on to the Internet. But this growing pluralism in intellectual praxis has also produced deepening divisions among Chinese intellectuals as to what one should do about China. These divisions, as I will argue in Chapter Two, have much to do with the exemplarity they elevate to the very act of worrying about China insofar as such exemplarity turns on the assumption that one’s preferred ideas constitute the correct way ahead. Thus to better appreciate the language of Chinese critical inquiry, one must begin by noting that the paradigm of patriotic worrying provides all Chinese intellectuals with the claim to a moral and spiritual significance for their work insofar as youhuan not only connotes but also confers a sense of personal responsibility about the nation’s well-being. It is neither cynical cant nor a matter of mere form, but rather an autochthonous ethos that is habitually embraced in the widest and most inclusive scope as to warrant being marked as perhaps the most important general principle for Anglophone readers to grasp if they wish to engage with the complexities peculiar to Chinese critical inquiry. As a term, youhuan frequently appeared in the writings of Confucian literati. Its moral connotations resonate in the much-quoted axiom

Worrying about China

•

17

coined by the Song-era scholar-official Fan Zhongyan (989–1052), “Be the first to worry about the worries of the world, the last to take pleasure in its pleasures” (xian tianxiazhi you er you, hou tianxiazhi le er le). Fan’s statement draws on a well-known passage in the Mencius which extols youhuan as perseverance in the face of hardship to conclude: “Thus we know that life springs from worrying about things and death from the pursuit of ease and pleasure” (sheng yu youhuan si yu anle).4 But whereas in earlier centuries youhuan was recommended and understood as moral exemplarity (that is, as selfless concern for the problems of one’s time), after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s, youhuan was sharpened into a defense of the Confucian imperium. Against the grim prospect of the empire’s collapse (wangguo) in a modern world of technologically superior and aggressive foreign nations, youhuan acquired a modern patriotic inflection that imbues the term to this day.5 Granting that critical inquiry is always an act of worrying about some or other aspect of received knowledge or the status quo (no matter the language or culture in which it finds expression), what differentiates Chinese critical discourse is its characteristic elevation of youhuan to the status of a justifiable moral concern over the nation’s well-being, complexly enmeshed with a pedagogical resolve to improve the cultural quality (wenhua suzhi) of the Chinese people.6 EuroAmerican critical discourse, in contrast, is generally focused on refining existing knowledge paradigms, interrogating their limitations or probing relations between the academy and politics. In this regard, the nation-centered discourse that dominates Chinese critical inquiry is often at odds with the nonnationalistic diction of EuroAmerican critical inquiry. Framing critical inquiry in this manner enables us to read Chinese critical inquiry as being largely oriented toward detecting merits and flaws within the national culture on the assumption that the intellectual, as producer of sixiang (thought) and xueshu (knowledge), is fit to judge how the quality of Chinese culture and “the people” should be improved. Writing critically of the preoccupation among Chinese officials and intellectuals with the “low quality” of the Chinese people, Ann Anagnost argues that “the issue of low quality has come to signify the root cause of China’s ‘historic failure of the nation to come to its own.’ ” She notes that such identifications of low-quality people project “an elite subject” who “somehow becomes detached from the mass to view the ‘inappropriate other’ critically, as from a distance.”7

18

•

Worrying about China

Accordingly, to worry about China is to assume that intellectual praxis itself has the power to guide and transform society by finding solutions for the worries that an author has identified. This in turn requires that one already knows or is in the process of gaining mastery over the kind of knowledge that one has determined to be socially useful and morally correct in improving the national status quo (whether of scholarship in particular or culture and society in general).8 In conceiving of their writings as contributions toward the improvement of the nation’s Thought, intellectuals are also constrained to portray their own work in the diagnostic and prescriptive terms of finding and defending those correct ideas that they imagine will solve existing problems, and they do so by the provision of intellectual work perceived to be effective against the counterinfluence of flawed and dangerous ideas. Thus this diagnostic and prescriptive approach to intellectual inquiry encourages the production of polemics insofar as it tends to exclude or negate outright those formulations that do not agree with the particular solution or way an author proposes, or the set of worries he (and it is generally a man) has identified. With this in mind, let us explore the significance of worrying about China as a general Sinophone preoccupation with the summum bonum of national and cultural perfection, first by marking its difference from the generally nonnationalistic nature of EuroAmerican critical engagement; second, by examining how this preoccupation has animated the production of Chinese critical inquiry in recent years in response to “foreign ideas”; and third, by reflecting on the enabling and disabling aspects of critical inquiry framed within the uniquely Sinophone exemplarity of “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven” (yi tianxia wei jiren).

Worrying about China’s Perfection Arguments produced to determine the best way forward for China are so abundant as to constitute a tacit requirement of critical thinking in the discourse of Chinese intellectuals. In defending this requirement, the Beijing-based philosopher Chen Lai argues that there is ample historical evidence to demonstrate that Confucian axioms attributed to Mencius (ca. 327–289 bce), such as “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven” and “assuming personal responsibility for the rights and wrongs of all teachings under Heaven” (yi tianxia fengjiao wei jiren),

Worrying about China

•

19

have never ceased to shape the production of Chinese thought. He cites as exemplars of this attitude the Ming dynasty Donglin scholar Gu Xiancheng (1550–1612) and the posthumously celebrated Communist establishment intellectual Deng Tuo (1912–1966).9 Chen explains that this responsibility of bearing the burden of the empire or the nation (as tianxia) has exercised a palpable spiritual influence (jingshende yingxiang) on the work of modern Chinese intellectuals, to the extent that it makes it “very difficult for them to neglect their concern for public matters in the interests of pursuing their own professional development or to regard the embodiment of this spirit as confined solely to intellectuals within the academy.”10 We must also note that because tianxia refers to the geopolitical sphere of China, writings in aid of this sphere since the early 1900s have invariably been couched in the modern sense of “the national interest.” Chen’s characterization of this ethos is echoed in many other instances from the plenitude of formulations in contemporary Chinese critical discourse that share the common desire for improving the quality of the nation’s Thought and Life. It is possible to demonstrate that the Confucian ideality of assuming responsibility for the well-being of all continues to exercise a significant rhetorical influence on the writings of contemporary Chinese intellectuals; however, the spiritual influence to which Chen refers is a matter of personal belief rather than a demonstrable fact. Whether and to what extent different authors agree or disagree with Chen Lai’s argument that Confucian values should ground the moral sensibilities of present-day Chinese intellectual praxis is a question that can be approached only by the offering of one or another opinion. What is clearly evident is that most authors who continue to self-identify as intellectuals would not question Chen’s moral definition of critical inquiry as the voicing of specifically public concerns. Thus Chinese intellectuals continue to uphold the Confucian-derived mandate to think and write in the service of China, even those who do so in an ostensibly non-Confucian postmodern idiom.11 Indeed, this Confucian-derived mandate haunts all Sinophone intellectual rhetoric, effecting an elevation of any authorial observation to the representative status of a declared political position (whether liberal, New Left, New Confucian, or something else). The voicing of public concerns serves, in turn, to distinguish proper from improper concerns. Typically then, hostility toward a rival proposal is inflected through the general (if not indeed formal) moral burden mandated on

20

•

Worrying about China

spokesmanship in Chinese critical inquiry, because it demands of its representatives that they write as if they are representing the collective interests of the Chinese people rather than defending their own informed preferences. The generalization I offer here may be countered with the objection that whereas some forms of contemporary Chinese critical inquiry evince an unhealthy stridency, others are more productively and reflectively concerned with the well-being of individuals within the nation, rather than the nation as such. Admittedly, there are many varieties of youhuan (as this book will show) but however subtly one variety might be distinguished from another, it is clear that they are all invariably centered in some way on achieving benefits (whether social, political, cultural, or economic) for China. Moreover, even though the majority of contending Chinese intellectuals nowadays share the common objective of strengthening and expanding the rights of citizens, their ostensible claims of inclusiveness have led, contrarily, to deepening divisions among themselves. These divisions frequently arise from disagreements among Chinese intellectuals as to which kinds of foreign ideas should be enlisted for the purposes of improving Chinese intellectual discourse. For instance, when Yang Fan12 was asked in a 2004 interview why he was critical of the liberal position held by many leading Chinese intellectuals, this oft-labeled New Left Beijing-based economist defended his critique by asserting on behalf of all that “we have patriotism, nationalism, and traditional Chinese culture in our very bones. This is unlike the kind of individualism that liberalism advances which, in taking American culture as ‘universal culture,’ neglects the people’s livelihood [minsheng] and blindly seeks to join rails with the international community.”13 In criticizing liberalism for what he perceives to be its cultural inappropriateness for China, Yang Fan presupposes the existence of an essential Chinese culture—China imagined as something that is constitutive of the self as well as being the “home” that one seeks through language to renovate, reconstruct, or strengthen in any number of ways. This metaphysical presupposition is one that many Chinese intellectuals imbibe when they describe their inquiry in terms of fulfilling an obligation to their nation or their culture or China, as if these terms constitute a spiritual “presence” dependent on the toil of intellectuals for its ongoing maintenance and ultimate perfection: a presence imagined as the eventual return to civilizational grandeur. For instance, even though historians Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng had resettled in Hong Kong in the

Worrying about China

•

21

1990s after their heyday as leading “Cultural Fever” activists in 1980s Beijing, they continued nonetheless to describe their intellectual projects as activities intended to effect such a return: “For our generation, the backwardness of the Chinese nation was like a gray sky covering our youth, our lives, our thinking. From that time on, we realized that we existed for the future fate of the Chinese nation.”14 Indeed, these emotive formulations of a collective national quest of redemption are so habitually embedded in the language of Chinese critical inquiry as to make it prohibitively difficult, if not unthinkable, to speak against patriotism and “the Chinese nation” within the density of this language.15 In this Sinophone affirmation of national and cultural perfection, language is assumed to be a tool for articulating plans, methods, and theories that could, with the cooperative participation of one’s Sinophone readers, be actualized as China’s cultural or civilizational renaissance, along with the arrival of Chinese democracy.16 Whether patriotism is enunciated in terms of existing for “the future fate of the Chinese nation” or, less hyperbolically, as a series of specific concerns over the “quality” or socioeconomic well-being of citizens, or the state of Chinese culture, or scholarship (as different aspects of the nation), the rhetoric of “loving the nation” (aiguo) remains integral to Sinophone critical discourse and serves as its implicit raison d’être. What that rhetoric of patriotic worrying also produces is the metaphysical image of China as one’s very own “dream home.” Jacques Derrida’s evocative figuration of a “so-called mother tongue” as “home” is instructive in this context, especially when he interrogates this figure as follows: Doesn’t it [language conceived of as mother tongue] figure the home that never leaves us? The proper or property, at least the fantasy of property that, as close as could be to our bodies, and we always come back there, would give place to the most inalienable place, to a sort of mobile habitat, a garment or a tent? Wouldn’t this mother tongue be a sort of second skin you wear on yourself, a mobile home? But also an immobile home since it moves about with us?17

I do not cite Derrida here as representative of “Western critical discourse,” for his mode of inquiry is merely one among many that have acquired academic authority since the 1980s. Rather, I cite him here (and in several places throughout this book) for contrastive effect, as an example of a highly self-reflexive style whose influence remains negligible in Sinophone critical discourse, even though Derrida himself was enthusiastically received when he visited China in 2001. In this context,

22

•

Worrying about China

we should note that, in Chinese, deconstruction is commonly referred to as deconstructionism (jiegouzhuyi), on the (erroneous) presumption that it constitutes a “system” of thinking replete with its own set of propositional truths. In the numerous references to jiegou in Sinophone discourse, the term signifies something akin to the “dismantling” of an existing truth-claim with the anticipation of arriving at a better and more rational alternative. This is clearly at odds with Derrida’s refusal to liken deconstruction to a system, methodology, or even theory.18 Instead, “deconstructionism” as jiegouzhuyi is itself symptomatic of Sinophone confidence in the transparency (hence certainty) of language in communicating a truth (whether cosmic or human, metaphysical or empirical), and thus incommensurable with deconstruction properly understood as an interrogation and an undoing of the “metaphysics of presence,” which Derrida identifies as “white mythology.”19 For instance, when writing about jiegouzhuyi, the prominent Beijing-based literary academic and poet Zheng Min departs quite radically from Derrida’s writings to suggest that deconstructionism is akin to a constant principle of change. She describes jiegouzhuyi somewhat elliptically as “a historical perspective that is genuinely present and ineradicable as it undergoes an unceasing process of deconstruction.” Quite contrary to Derrida’s interrogation of presence as the myth that allows us to imagine that our acts of interpretation will eventually end in Truth (on the assumption that Truth is a presence that merely awaits our discovery), Zheng reads “deconstructionism” as if it were a method or process for discovering that Truth is “genuinely present and ineradicable” but always undergoing change. Indeed, her language reinforces (rather than undermines) presence when she explains that “deconstructionism does not eliminate anything which is already present. Rather it proceeds only to rub away at old concepts, like the way one uses an eraser to rub something out, which nonetheless retains the traces of what has been rubbed out. For instance, when the concept of ‘Spirit’ becomes a rubbed-out version of ‘Spirit,’ it continues to have a faintly visible presence.” Zheng claims on this basis that deconstructionism most closely accords with the “universal law” of human existence.20 “Deconstructionism” in Zheng’s hands becomes a redemptive practice that holds the promise of freeing Sinophone scholarship from the constraints of adherence to any one imposed “order, system, authority,

Worrying about China

•

23

and center.” By invoking jiegouzhuyi as a truly universal law, Zheng was undoubtedly engaged in an oblique critique of the presumed science of Marxism-Leninism and its arbitrarily imposed “law.” Because she claims that this universal law is self-evident, her jiegouzhuyi acquires the form of a propositional truth that is quite discordant with the self-reflexive orientation of EuroAmerican deconstruction. Thus Zheng completely elides the experience of language that deconstruction offers—the experience of how language exposes the ruse of insight rather than insight as such, that the declared certainty of insight remains blind to the uncertain effects of its own literariness. Indeed, the assumption that language is a transparent and reliable tool of communication is so well entrenched in Sinophone critical discourse as to discourage productive readings of deconstruction. Situated within a largely positivistic Sinophone discourse that constantly refers to the need for better methods and theories to capture true insight (if not Truth itself), deconstruction (not surprisingly) is commonly disparaged as “a sophistic theory full of inconsistencies” from which one should “take up only the finer points and discard the dross.”21 More generally, in contemporary Sinophone critical discourse, the metaphysics of “being Chinese” conjures up China as a powerful metaphysical presence—the object of inquiry and perfection—which is then tacitly assigned the status of a transcendental signified (like History, Being, Truth, or God). Phrases such as “China’s search for modernity” are accordingly endowed with the solemnity of a properly redemptive pursuit. For instance, the Beijing-based historian Wang Hui deliberately uses the phrase22 (despite his own critical astuteness) as if it were a sign for a self-evident entity that, once endowed with the proper set of meanings, would “glow finally in the luminosity of its presence,” to borrow Derrida’s words.23 Throughout the twentieth century, protocols and habits of sensemaking in the discourse of Chinese thought have undergone a series of changes: first there was the semiclassical idiom in which late Qing and early Republican projects of reform and revolution were articulated. Then came the Europeanized vernacular of New Culture during the May Fourth era, followed by the turn toward a Marxist revolutionary vocabulary in the 1930s that later culminated in the imposed language of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought from the 1940s to the 1970s.24 But despite the rapid growth of intellectual diversity from the

24

•

Worrying about China

post-Maoist 1980s to this day, Sinophone critical discourse still resonates with the abiding insistence on national empowerment and modernization goals that characterized the discourses of earlier eras.25 In the prose of Chinese intellectuals, little if any attention is given to interrogating how the rhetorical power of “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven” has shaped critical inquiry. Rather, this phrase is discussed as if it were indeed a second skin that Confucian scholars traditionally wore and a “spirit” or “presence” that continues to demand of contemporary intellectuals that they focus their sights on perfecting China and Chinese thought. Present-day valorizations of Confucianism also constitute, in this regard, an implicit rejection of the linguistic certitude based in “scientific Marxism” that prevailed during the Maoist era. But even though that Maoist idiom of revolutionary rhetoric, blended with a Marxist vocabulary of scientific objectivism, has been significantly eradicated, linguistic certitude remains nonetheless a defining feature of post-Maoist discourse, albeit a certitude now informed by a diverse range of indigenous and imported vocabularies. Sinophone critical discourse thus remains largely indifferent to selfreflexive notions of writing such as bricolage since it seldom interrogates its figurations as chains of words, fashioned from the threads of diverse modern, classical, and foreign texts in translation, stitched together to produce a patchwork tapestry of China as “dream home.”26 On the contrary, most authors of Sinophone critical discourse tend to assume that their writings will eventually secure a proper or genuine foundation for Chinese scholarship or supplement an existing lack within the status quo (construed as a flawed present), as is evident in the frequent invocations of the neologism “appropriatism” (nalaizhuyi), coined in 1934 by China’s most prominent modern writer Lu Xun (1881–1936).27 In a time of political turbulence, Lu Xun deployed the term “appropriatism” (as part of his youhuan rhetoric) to exhort his readers to exercise intellectual rigor in adopting foreign ideas, and to choose only those ideas that were suitable for the national interest. Sixty years later, as China underwent rapid social and economic change in a time of political stability, the prominent Beijing-based intellectual Li Shenzhi,28 among others, revived Lu Xun’s appropriatism to recommend it as the correct method to acquire Western knowledge.29 Li states that “national cultures” comprise discrete “sets of existing values” that had evolved out of “specific strategies in languages used for the purposes of

Worrying about China

•

25

cognition and communication.” Drawing on the philosopher Liang Shuming’s critique of traditional Chinese thought as a premature philosophy, Li figures modern Chinese thought for a homunculus, a premature person (zaoshude ren) that had inherited the deficiencies of its premature traditional ancestor. As he puts it, reviving the trope of heredity first popularized in intellectual discourse of the 1910s and 1920s: “Just as the congenital deficiencies of a premature person can be mended by subsequent nourishment and exercise, the deficiencies of a premature philosophy and culture can be mended through ‘appropriatism’ and diligence.”30 Thus Li argues that China’s civilization could be restored through appropriatism (the art, as it were, of knowing which foreign ideas are appropriate for mending China’s “premature philosophy and culture”). Li begins his essay by claiming the synonymity of China and the East on the simple syllogism that all East Asian cultures share a common origin in the Confucian tradition and the Chinese script through which this tradition was transmitted, along with their inheritance of the Chinese custom of eating with chopsticks. Having rendered China synonymous with the East, Li then proceeds to figure the world as a stage for the interplay of two civilizational forces, namely the East (as China) and the West. In this regard, he offers the reductionism that whereas China privileges “unity of heaven and humanity” (tian ren heyi), the West valorizes “division of heaven and humanity” (tian ren xiangfen), ergo Chinese thought is synthetic and Western thought is analytic.31 In using a series of quasi-axiomatic formulations32 such as the above to offer complementarity between East and West as the solution to the essential differences he has determined for both, Li situates his argument in the well-established Sinophone tradition of defending China’s spiritual superiority against the technological or scientific powers of the West, a formula first proposed by reform-minded scholar-officials of the mid-nineteenth century.33 According to Li, it is because “clashes and mergers between all kinds of nationalities and cultures” have proliferated with “the ever-increasing scope and pace of flows of personnel, goods and capital, capacities, and information within the contemporary global context” that the time was ripe for concerted efforts at fusing or reconciling (ronghe) these two civilizational forces. The following summary indicates what Li means by reconciliation: He argues that while the language of self-cultivation was dominant in traditional Chinese thought, it offered “a way of seeing the whole universe

26

•

Worrying about China

as an organic entity, which enables one, in turn, to see one’s life as occurring within macrocosmic flows and within the flow of life as a process of continuous regeneration.” But he claims that this attentiveness to the goal of spiritual oneness, encapsulated in the Confucian axiom, “the unity of heaven and human,” produced a concomitant lack of those qualities in which Western thought excelled, namely, its “processes of meticulous verification and inferential reasoning.” He goes on to argue that precisely because of this analytical bent, Western thought proved deficient in the synthetic qualities that Chinese thought had acquired through its language of “meditation [mingxiang], contemplative understanding [canwu], and direct experience [qinzheng].”34 Li further cautions that unless Western thought learned how to synthesize “heaven and humanity” from Chinese thought, it too would remain spiritually undernourished in its “externally oriented inquiry” (xiangwai tansuo). The context of impending war and national crisis in which Lu Xun coined appropriatism in 1934 is clearly absent in Li’s revival of this term in 1994. Rather, Li draws on Lu Xun’s powerful figuration of a principled approach (reflected in the zhuyi of nalaizhuyi) to the appropriation (nalai) of foreign ideas to advance an entirely different nationalistic vision: that of a world in which Chinese thought and culture, having mended its “congenital deficiencies,” would assume a position of global authority equal to and perhaps even exceeding its Western counterpart.35 Li is not unaware here that his argument is starkly reductive36 but his predilection for encapsulating China and the West through the use of quasi-axiomatic formulations is aimed at distilling an essence or spirit in order to project demiurgic forces at work, not just in language but very much “out there” in the “real” world. As a typical instance of the poetics of Chinese critical discourse, Li’s prose is indicative of broader rhetorical differences between Sinophone and Anglophone modes of critical inquiry. These differences are best described in terms of a general Sinophone preference for certitude in the use of language (demonstrable, among other things, in the frequent recourse to axiomatic statements), which lies at odds with the contemporary Anglophone emphasis on linguistic contingency (or the ways in which statements relate to other statements rather than to meanings, truth or a reality “out there”). Since certitude is an effect of assuming that one “knows what the words mean” and relies on the presupposed correspondence of word to thing, the problems

Worrying about China

•

27

inherent in attempts to distil a truth presumed to exist beyond language are generally elided in the interest of achieving textual closure. In this regard, the divisions that have emerged in Sinophone critical inquiry can be read as a consequence of contending narratives about what is really going on in China that each offer: a set of formulations (whether defined as xueli, method or theory, or more generally as sixiang, ideas) that an author has deemed to be of foundational significance. In this regard, different varieties of Chinese intellectual discourse tend to affirm the knowability of causal patterns and to conceive of society as an “organic whole,” as Thomas Metzger puts it, “a system with clear causal relations between all its parts.” Metzger characterizes this Chinese intellectual orientation as a “leaning toward epistemological optimism,” to which he opposes the Western tendency toward “epistemological pessimism.”37 Although Metzger bases his argument on the contrastive premises he has identified for Chinese and Western political theories, the distinction he makes between optimism and pessimism can be extended to less specifically political modes of inquiry. Of the eleven contrastive features Metzger identifies for optimism versus pessimism, the following are of particular relevance in illustrating the Sinophone preference for linguistic certitude as opposed to the Anglophone emphasis on linguistic contingency: First, whereas Chinese political discourse manifests a confidence in deriving universal truths from “not only logic and empirical evidence but also ideas such as ‘rational intuition,’ ‘dialectical reasoning,’ ‘the understanding of the virtue inherent in one’s own nature,’ and ‘feelings stemming from the ultimate nature of the cosmos,’ ” its Western counterpart discourse is far less optimistic, allowing only formulations that are demonstrably logical and for which there exists ample empirical evidence to be considered in the first place as candidates for the status of universal truth. Second, whereas Chinese discourse tends toward “objectivism,” to conceive of “reason as an algorismic code (based on or illustrated by the writings of, say, Marx, Karl Popper, Weber, or the analytical philosophers) that can be promulgated as the basis of public life,” Western discourse tends toward “relativism or some version of the ‘middle ground’ between relativism and objectivism.” This difference also suggests that whereas Chinese discourse presumes that one “can know what alter feels and tell whether he or she is sincere,” Western discourse tends toward the opposite view that “alter’s feelings [are] fully known only to alter.” Third, whereas “ought” formulations are handled in Chinese discourse as if

28

•

Worrying about China

they were already “grounded in ‘is,’ ‘was,’ or ‘about to be’ (whether in the cosmos, in science, in history, in universal conditions of human existence),” together with the presumption that “the goal of life has determinate, specific features (e.g., ‘modernization’),” Western discourse leans contrarily toward the view that “ ‘Ought’ cannot be grounded except in human decisions, and human goals are not determinate ends that one should necessarily prefer over other possible ends.”38 Some may judge Metzger’s comparisons to be overly reductive and argue that earlier forms of Marxism, as one mode of Western political discourse, offered precisely the kind of epistemological optimism that appealed to Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the postmodern Marxism that Frederic Jameson offers could also be regarded as largely optimistic in outlook. Metzger’s comparisons are nonetheless useful because they are derived from an extensive survey of twentieth-century Chinese and English texts. The difference he identifies between the propensity (in modern Chinese discourse) to endow reason with the capacity “to grasp ontological and moral truths,” and the opposing tendency (in its Western counterpart) to limit the “scope of knowledge that could be scientifically or rationally derived from experience,” is largely borne out in my readings across different varieties of critical writings in Chinese and English.39 But because the terms “optimism” and “pessimism” refer to affective dispositions, they are also open to interpretation and contestation. Perhaps, the differences that Metzger has identified could be less contentiously stated: whereas there remains a general anticipation of textual closure in Sinophone inquiry, Anglophone inquiry of recent decades has tended contrarily to shift the possibility of traditional textual closure (and the foundationalism implicit in such closure) further from rather than closer to our grasp. As Wlad Godzich succinctly notes of the self-reflexive orientation in some contemporary EuroAmerican forms of theorizing, “It opposes the opacity of writing to the enlightenment of transparent expression.”40 EuroAmerican privileging of the opacity of writing is most evident in the praxis of deconstruction, and its apogee was arguably crystallized in the 1970s when Derrida demonstrated that writing (écriture) exceeds the author and any writerly intent. Thus within any discursive economy, no signifier could actually refer to a referent that was “outside the text” (il n’y a pas de hors texte).41 This, in turn, destabilized and rendered contingent any presumed correspondence of word to thing.42 Rather, the performative powers of language that project a metaphysics of pres-

Worrying about China

•

29

ence in Western philosophy became the focus of interest, and this interrogation of the thing-like effect (or truth-effect) conjured up by language led to what is generally known as the linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences. But it was not deconstruction alone that was attuned to the opacity of writing. Other less radically self-reflexive forms of EuroAmerican critical thinking, including those of a more pragmatic or analytical bent, were becoming increasingly engaged with interrogating the dangers and limitations of presumed transparent expression. A general trend toward problematizing propositional truths in Western philosophy emerged and the act of problematization became an ethical pursuit in its own right. For instance, plainspeaking philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Jeffrey Stout are as adamant as Derrida in urging us to relinquish the assumption that there could be a truth outside or beyond language and by extension the phantasm of an ur-language that would magically bind everyone to the one universal truth if only people could be taught to recognize it. The following from Rorty is illustrative of this selfreflexive orientation: “To say the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.”43 Similarly, Stout urges us to abandon “the optimistic modernist’s hopes for an ultimate language of rational commensuration,” the presumption of an ur-language prior to all others, and to turn our attention instead to creating what Rorty calls “new vocabularies.” In this regard, Stout further cautions that the creation of new vocabularies must be understood as always occurring within some prevailing vocabulary or other, in the context of existing linguistic patterns and “governed by entrenched standards and assumptions, as well as the perceived needs of the moment.”44 What then emerges as yet another important difference between the languages of Sinophone and Anglophone inquiry is the former’s preoccupation with discovering or forging new vocabularies with the specific aim of distilling an essential truth about China and/or foundational principles, as opposed to the latter’s preference for decidedly nonessentialist, nonfoundationalist, and nonnationalistic formulations. We should note in this context that although Sinophone inquiry now abounds with

30

•

Worrying about China

statements that directly disavow essentialism and metaphysics, the argumentation offered in the interest of promoting an antiessentialist, antimetaphysical mode of reasoning reflects nonetheless an optimism about discerning and establishing an incontrovertible truth. Read from within the kind of Anglophone purview described here, much of Sinophone critical discourse cannot help but appear reductionist, magisterial, and even somewhat arbitrarily prescriptive. But to reduce Chinese critical inquiry merely to this would be to ignore its distinctive conception of scholarship as a form of moral responsibility, and the difficulty of working in such a domain without certitude in the use of language. In its emphasis on finding the correct way forward, Sinophone critical discourse generally conflates the ethical and the moral. If the ethical is generally restricted to a code of conduct within a particular profession, a mode of inquiry or a network of “thick relations,” the moral pertains to the whole of society and is concerned with regulating “thin relations,” that is, relations among people who do not necessarily know one another, who are not related by virtue of their membership in a family, a profession, or a community. To assume personal responsibility for “all under Heaven” is thus to adopt a moral position, since this assumption includes both thick and thin relations.45 The preoccupation since the 1990s with establishing academic norms in Chinese scholarship is clearly ethical rather than moral in scope insofar as it is concerned with establishing a set of rules and a code of conduct in relation to intellectual inquiry. But because it also carries the moral assumption that norms of inquiry will effect in the long run a transformation of society, an assumption that is implicit in any given act of worrying about China, ethics and morality are intertwined once more. As we will see in the course of this book, distinguishing between good and bad or between merits and flaws is a constitutive feature of Sinophone critical discourse, and Chinese intellectuals are wont to sharpen such distinctions either by reinforcing an existing final vocabulary or by offering a new vocabulary (to recall Rorty’s terms), but in either case, with characteristic indifference to the metaphysics inherent in anticipating a truth to be “discovered” about China. The formulation of these distinctions draws in part from the ancient moral paradigm of knowing “what to adopt” (qu) and “what to discard” (she) first proposed in the Mencius as a means to cultivate the discernment necessary for privileging justice or righteousness (yi) over life itself (sheng).46 In this context, we must be especially attentive to the different EuroAmerican vocabu-

Worrying about China

•

31

laries that have been absorbed into the language of Chinese intellectuals since the Party-state sponsored economic reforms began in the late 1970s. Often, these vocabularies (whether of liberalism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, social justice, etc.) project a superficial resemblance to EuroAmerican critical discourse that masks the goal of national and cultural perfection for which they have been enlisted in Chinese (a goal that is often inimical to the EuroAmerican sources cited). This is not to say that Chinese intellectuals are naive advocates of national and cultural essentialism. Indeed, what is most complicated about Chinese critical inquiry is that it abounds, on the one hand, with statements (appropriated or nalai from EuroAmerican critical discourse) that warn against the dangers of reductionism and essentialism; it also manifests, on the other hand, a powerful desire to produce a new or originary truth about China that betrays a metaphysical longing for future perfection. This inherent contradiction is an important feature of Chinese critical inquiry that will be reprised throughout this book.

Worrying about the Foreign Let me make clear that I am not saying that Sinophone critical discourse is inferior to its Anglophone counterpart. Rather, the problem needs to be read in terms of a linguistic predicament resulting from the reluctance of Chinese intellectuals to sever critical inquiry from the would-be redemptive goal of national and cultural perfection. In this regard, we should also note that the current emphasis on contingency in EuroAmerican critical inquiry is itself a problematization of the Cartesian quest for certainty and thus an undoing of the linguistic certitude evinced in earlier forms of inquiry. But unlike this shift from certainty to contingency in EuroAmerican critical inquiry, Chinese critical inquiry remains largely a quest for certainty, a quest envisaged in terms of the acquisition of better, more rational, and theoretically refined knowledge. Let us begin by noting that Chinese intellectuals are accustomed to anticipating the attainment of (decidedly uppercase) Knowledge as the result of their labors, a sort of Knowledge destined unquestionably for a decidedly un-Rortyan final vocabulary, that is, one that determines or fixes things. In this regard, we should remind ourselves that when Anglophone academics query Reason and Being, they generally do so from the position of authority invested in themselves as latter-day scions of an internationally authoritative (or Western) Modernity, roaming

32

•

Worrying about China

unhindered through the home of Reason and the house of Being, suggesting ways of demolishing or renovating the existing edifices with impunity.47 Within the North American context, thinkers like Rorty may even be figured as philosophical latter-day Johnny Appleseeds of a liberal pragmatic free-thinking naturalism, roaming where fancy takes them in the wide unfettered fashion that, theoretically at least, is afforded to all by an often (and increasingly) sacralized national constitution. In this regard, the frontiersman effect and popular appeal of Rorty’s writings attests to the ideological power of valorizing personal autonomy in the “discursive realm” (yujing) of the North American academy, and it differs significantly from the equally powerful ideology within mainland China of affirming autonomy in terms that include both national selfhood and “being Chinese.” To elaborate on this difference, one should first note that the nonnationalistic character of Anglophone (and more broadly EuroAmerican) critical perspectives is refracted by the material comforts of the successful academic life presently possible in first-world democracies, a social sphere where beliefs are still choices constitutionally open for individuals to exercise and decide for themselves (no matter how ill-informed). Such critical perspectives are also produced in discourses that are not generally concerned with articulating a relation between critical concerns and national well-being. On the contrary, the work of Chinese intellectuals is continually subjected to the restrictions imposed and keenly policed by authoritarian Party-state rule in mainland China. Moreover, Chinese intellectuals are acutely aware that unlike the ease with which their Western counterparts can inhabit a transculturally significant Modernity, whose language of Being and Reason traverses the world and dominates scholarship everywhere in translation, they are faced instead with the elusiveness of a specifically Chinese modernity (Zhongguo xiandaixing), a concept about which meaningful exchanges are largely restricted to academic and intellectual discourses that are focused, in some way, on China. This evident lack of parity between Chinese thought and Western thought is an issue that many Chinese intellectuals regard with ambivalence. Comments such as the following from the Beijing-based literary scholar Chen Pingyuan reflect a certain antipathy toward the marginal or secondary status of Chinese scholarship internationally: “Although as a research subject China is now at-

Worrying about China

•

33

tracting more and more scholars, we should not deceive ourselves: outside China, Sinology is a peripheral field.”48 When they ponder the marginal status of Chinese scholarship, most Chinese intellectuals also imply an ambition to restore Chinese scholarship to a state of health49 sufficient to make it globally relevant. Thus they find themselves quite unable to speak or write in the casual and sanguine manner of an American Rorty, that is, of merely optional and novel ways of sense-making, teleologically free of any prescribed orientation toward Reason, Being, or, indeed, any given creed or truth, let alone national well-being.50 Conversely, Chinese intellectuals tend to articulate the goal of their inquiry in terms of providing Chinese modernity with its own home of Reason, its own house of Being. But what further complicates this picture is that although the Partystate effectively circumscribes the writings of Chinese intellectuals, the Party-state also validates those individuals with a distinguished academic pedigree (including the majority of intellectuals discussed in this book) as leading representatives of the Chinese university system. Thus the perspectives of prominent Chinese intellectuals, like those of their Anglophone counterparts, are equally refracted by the material comforts that successful and widely traveled academics in the People’s Republic presently enjoy, with the crucial difference that they are constantly reminded that these comforts are contingent on not offending the Party-state in print. Indeed, Li Shenzhi’s otherwise distinguished career was twice curtailed, first in 1957 when he was labeled a “Rightist” and kept out of office for more than two decades before he was “rehabilitated” in 1979 to resume a position of authority and influence in the 1980s. But Li offended the Party-state again in the last years of his life and died out of office. According to Liu Junning, Li contracted pneumonia “brought on by repeated colds caused by the lack of heat in his home,” and was a casualty of the Beijing government’s policy of halting central heating on March 15 every year, regardless of actual weather conditions.51 State censorship and an abiding sense of cultural subjugation impose powerful limitations on mainland Sinophone scholarship.52 State censure and banning of individuals such as Li Shenzhi who advocate intellectual autonomy in plainspeak have led most Chinese intellectuals to promote intellectual autonomy more cautiously in one or another theoretical idiom, on the assumption that informed readers will still interpret their

34

•

Worrying about China

writings nonetheless as tacit criticisms of the status quo in China. Thus propositions that are tactically (and tactfully) phrased in abstract, universalist, or historicist terms, with the stated interest of enhancing intellectual autonomy, also function as coded references to the absence of such autonomy. But when Chinese intellectuals affirm cultural autonomy, they are referring to a different kind of subjugation, namely the perceived inferiority of Chinese culture within a Western-dominated world, and their forthrightness on this issue should be read not only in terms of patriotism per se but also in relation to their being afforded an opportunity for relatively unconstrained expression on an issue that attracts far fewer risks of state censure and intervention. In the 1994 essay by Li Shenzhi discussed earlier, he writes that the prospect of “the twenty-first century being an Asian century” is one that makes “Asians like us . . . feel a rush of blood to our heads, bringing a glow to our faces.”53 Li’s call for East–West cultural complementarity in this essay is undeniably nationalistic insofar as he argues for civilizational parity between China and the West in order to claim that, just as China should appropriate the analytical strengths of the West, the West should humble itself to and learn from China’s spiritual superiority. Li could also be read as offering an ameliorative approach to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, which was widely discussed in Chinese intellectual circles in the 1990s.54 Although Li proposed a “reconciliation” as opposed to the “clash” that Huntington predicted, both writers nonetheless figured civilizations for demiurgic forces with “homes” on geopolitical terrain whose borders must be protected. Since Huntington’s phrase belongs to the same genre of abstract truth-formulations that have found much favor in Sinophone intellectual discourse, it is not surprising that that phrase (as wenmingde chongtu) has now acquired a would-be axiomatic status in that discourse. But Huntington’s phrase is equally dominant in the contemporary public discourses of English-speaking societies. Its popularity attests to the captivity of our imagination to the still-powerful assumption that language represents “what is really happening out there,” as opposed to the self-reflexive notion that language constructs powerful but multiple narratives of “what is really happening out there” through its effects of figuration. Peter Gries observes that in a subsequent 1997 essay, Li diagnosed Huntington’s thesis as symptomatic of “fears about the decline of the West.” Using culinary metaphors, Li disparaged the “U.S. melting pot”

Worrying about China

•

35

as having “too many ingredients, too little old sauce, and not enough heat.” He then delivers the epicurean judgment that the West (as the United States) is in decline because “the pot is also too small and unable to melt down the increasingly diverse ingredients.”55 Li’s judgment tellingly indicates that he regards cultural assimilation (rather than open-ended pluralism) as an unequivocal good, which provides further indication of the civilizing ambition inherent in his defense of an ostensibly neutral process of reconciliation. Younger Chinese intellectuals well versed in EuroAmerican critical thinking (many of whom are in their thirties) now tend to dismiss Li Shenzhi’s ideas as simplistic and naive but continue nonetheless to admire him for his commitment to the pursuit of China’s national and cultural perfection.56 Older intellectuals in their forties and fifties are generally more reverent toward the late Li, even though they too have become wary of the pitfalls of well-meaning but ill-considered plainspeak (dabaihua) of the kind that Li both practiced and advocated. The linguistic predicament of Chinese intellectuals torn between a profound desire to perfect China, on the one hand, and an ambition to “catch up with” (ganshang) or “join rails with” (jiegui) the West, on the other hand, is evocatively expressed in the writings of the Shanghai-based historian Xu Jilin. When Li Shenzhi died in 2003, Xu penned a meditative essay in which he recalled Li’s admiration for Vaclav Havel’s Living in Truth. He writes that, like Havel and Li, he affirms “speaking the truth” because it constitutes “the politics that the powerless have within an authoritarian society for asserting their own power and resisting the state.” Xu then relates that Li once wrote to him stating that speaking the truth, through the accessibility of dabaihua, was “not only a moral practice based in an individual’s conscience [liangzhi] but an important strategy for critiquing reality.” Xu notes that unlike Havel’s notion of speaking the truth, which refers to “the common actions of citizens,” Li’s notion of speaking the truth “rested on his faith in the effects of exemplarity [biaoshuai zuoyong] on the part of elite intellectuals.” Recalling Li’s preferred selfappellation as “China’s last scholar-official” (Zhongguo zuihou yige shidaifu), Xu commends Li’s willingness to assume the role of exemplar in the spirit of the scholar-official tradition, and laments the decline of this Confucian ideal in contemporary Chinese intellectual life.57 The lyricism of Xu’s comments derives from their appearance in a text intended to mourn Li but the comments themselves indicate that, in Sinophone critical discourse, the idea that one can speak the truth (with

36

•

Worrying about China

truth imagined as a singular immutable presence, something “out there” that would resonate with the same moral significance for everyone) remains largely unexamined, along with the ideality of the notion that the intellectual is someone who speaks the truth on everyone’s behalf. Xu is led to lament that “when an era of violent [political] campaigns has brought the kind of choral splendor attained by the scholar-official spirit working in unison with moral idealism to its final curtain call, all that we have left to support our sense of conviction is, perhaps, reason [lixing]: a form of self-reflective58 reason that is both an inheritance and a transcendence of [May Fourth] Enlightenment.”59 In valorizing Reason, Xu also declares his allegiance to the hope invested in the name of modern Chinese Enlightenment while acknowledging the historical limitations of writings produced under this rubric. In a text written later that same year, Xu problematizes the very same premise that he valorized in his essay on Li. He begins with an intention to instruct others as to what should constitute the present-day needs of Chinese critical inquiry: This era is an age of reason. If you want to persuade others to accept your point of view, you must have a set of theoretical formulations [yitao lishu] that are clearly expressed . . . My thinking has been improved through reason, and I often focus on making my argument clear. Even though there may be contradictions in the course of my reflections, I hope nonetheless to express my own predicament in the clearest terms. I am not like those who use literary language or rhetorical tactics to elide the need for clarity that logical argumentation requires, or who dispose of logic by such means.

Describing himself as someone whose thinking had benefited from reading the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu, Xu relates that what he had learned from these Western thinkers liberated him from his previous captivity to “an empiricist or individual mode of inquiry,” the inherent contradictions of which he remained unaware until his ability to reason was improved as a consequence of acquiring theoretical awareness (lilun zijue). But Xu then registers a worrying concern about this newly acquired theoretical awareness: My essays no longer read as well as they used to. Perhaps only specialist readers will have an interest in them since they will only make the lay reader feel dizzy. Because I now reflect in depth on the problem at hand before writing about it, I feel that I now lack the kind of intensity which used to inform my writing. That soaring intensity has gone, and all that I have left is ice-cold reason [lengbingbingde lixing].60

Worrying about China

•

37

Xu’s suspicion of the “ice-cold reason” of EuroAmerican scholarship provides us with a useful trope for expressing the ambivalence of many Chinese intellectuals to the global authority and relevance of Western ideas or Western theory. Since the 1980s, the discourse of mainland intellectuals has been significantly shaped by the enormous variety of EuroAmerican formulations that now circulate as Sinophone coinages. Whether as avant-garde postmodernists (“postists”) or arriere-garde defenders of traditional culture, many Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s and since have either criticized Western intellectual hegemony or sought to promote a sense of cultural parity between China and the West; in either case they have done so with the aid of these domesticated “foreign” coinages. Their ambivalence over their reliance on Western ideas is rendered all the more acute when they note the absence of any substantive reliance on Chinese ideas in the work of Western academics. For instance, when criticizing what he perceived as a general lack of empathy among Western sinologists for the objects of their inquiry, the Shanghai-based historian Wang Xi quotes the Indian poet R. Banerjee to claim that: If certain American scholars had the opportunity to live in “hell” (even for a day), they would be able to experience personally what it means for those who live in hell to get a taste of “heaven” . . . Empathy is an in-depth feeling in the heart but unfortunately not many American scholars in the postFairbank era have this kind of feeling. (Paul Cohen and Michael Hunt are probably the few exceptions among American scholars in this generation.) Such empathy makes a big difference, both in formulating questions and in proposing answers.61

Similarly, in commenting on the influence of Max Weber on contemporary interpretations of Chinese history, grounded in the Weberian assumption that China lacks the modernizing spirit of the West, the Beijing-based philosopher Liu Dong writes: We must recognize that the Weberian mode of interpreting China utilized by numerous Western sinologists and our fellow Chinese intellectuals shows no sign of decline . . . And it will continue to thrive as long as we fail to produce a more effective theoretical approach of our own to address Chinese problems. For instance, we could start by questioning the basic flaw in the distinction that Weber makes between value rationality and instrumental rationality. We could counter Weber’s distinction with the elucidation of an alternative instrumental rationality that operated within premodern Chinese society, one that accorded with the criteria of Confucian values.62

38

•

Worrying about China

Alternatively, according to the Beijing-based literary scholar Li Tuo, “the highly rigorous critical attitude” of “poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist” modes of inquiry constitutes a transcultural and ethical attitude that is useful for criticizing “the problem of difference” (chayixing wenti) as a Eurocentric theme. Li argues that such an attitude allows one to see that the Eurocentric preoccupation with difference does not produce cultural parity but leads instead to a classification of “others” on the basis of how they “differ” from one or another set of implied Western norms. In this context, he argues that Western scholarship is generally inattentive to how “difference” is the historical reality of Western cultural dominance as experienced by non-Western peoples. Li claims that “the infatuation with highly abstract and metaphysical modes of inquiry” within Western philosophy has led Western scholars to treat “difference” as if it were a “category,” rather than to deal with the “specific contexts and specific historical conditions” that are constitutive of cultural difference everywhere in the world. He avers that the problem of the “progressive standardization of the various cultures of the world,” according to “the norm of European modernity,” has not been adequately addressed in the international discourse of globalization. He mentions, in particular, “the prospect of a global ‘cultural unity’ [wenhua datong]” based in Eurocentric assumptions as a problem that demands interrogation.63 When Li Tuo claims that “difference” is an irreducibly hierarchical concept that remains largely confined within a privileged Western discourse, he provides a persuasive critique of, as it were, the Eurocentric vocabulary this discourse demands and imposes on non-Western intellectuals. He contends that, as a consequence of historical colonialism, the West has been able to impose the universality of its ideas and theories, leading EuroAmerican scholars to celebrate “difference” but without interrogating the concept for its subjugation of the non-West to the norms of the West. In this context, he writes: So how did modernity come to assume such a universal tenor? . . . This kind of inquiry requires in-depth engagement with the history of Western thought and the inner workings of Western society. Although several Western theorists have published widely and contributed significant findings on these inner workings, nonetheless, these accounts and findings should not be directly and simply adopted by intellectuals in non-Western countries as the basis of their discussions.64

Worrying about China

•

39

A common desire for mainland Chinese scholarship to achieve its own cultural uniqueness and an internationally authoritative status informs both Li Shenzhi’s optimistic account of Chinese-Western cultural complementarity and the various critiques of Western intellectual dominance quoted above from Wang Xi, Liu Dong, and Li Tuo. This desire is most evident when Chinese intellectuals affirm Sino-centered ways of knowing as a means of intellectual and cultural liberation from the norms of EuroAmerican scholarship. In these writings, there is the expectation that if Chinese scholars were sufficiently empathetic to the history of China’s civilizational decline, they would be able to liberate themselves from both Eurocentric assumptions and Sinophone (Party) doctrinalism alike to (re)gain genuine knowledge or an essential truth about China. As Li Tuo puts it in a theoretically inflected register, “If one discusses the problem of modernization by relying on [ Western] theories of modernization, one is simply unable to produce a genuine historicization [zhenzhengde lishihua].”65 What we must note here is that in promoting a genuinely Chinese mode of historicization, Li is also offering a clearly foundationalist premise for Sinophone scholarship. Thus despite his stated preference for poststructuralism, he places himself quite at odds with the demands of self-reflexivity inherent in poststructuralism’s characteristic suspicion of all foundationalist premises. Interestingly, Li does not explain why poststructuralism should be regarded as constitutive of a “highly rigorous critical attitude,” even though its vocabulary is just as Eurocentric as the Western discourses he critiques. As a critical praxis, Anglophone self-reflexive inquiry disavows mastery in favor of openness to alterity or difference as the Other (which is not a given or named culture, but the sign of an untotalizable heterogeneity or difference that no language can capture, no matter how comprehensive or refined the formulations used). In the new vocabulary of self-reflexive inquiry, the presumed givenness of culture and cultural identity is problematized and rendered less than self-evident: in brief, identity is understood as originary only insofar as it is constructed in and through language. Thus any claim to an incontrovertible origin, such as Yang Fan’s reference to Chinese identity as something “in our very bones,” is never outside the text of Sinophone rhetoricity. This does not mean that the textuality that has produced and named an enterprise such as “modern China” or identified the essence of “Chinese

40

•

Worrying about China

thought” is not powerful: it does render certain ways of speaking and writing habitual, and even dogmatic and, by dogmatic fiat, self-evident. Self-reflexive inquiry interrogates meaning precisely because entrenched habits of speaking and writing effect meanings that inform and direct human actions in powerful ways. To claim the relevance of one particular determination of Chinese identity as genuine is to assume an authority for this determination against others. This is because any assertion of what is genuinely Chinese is ultimately defended by recourse to a presence outside language, as if it were “in our very bones.” A truth is thus claimed and projected, whether by habit, persuasion, or coercion. The common presumption in Sinophone critical discourse that there is a genuine China that awaits discovery or rediscovery renders authors such as Li Tuo indifferent to the antifoundationalism of self-reflexive inquiry, even though they may feature slogans and phrases from the vocabulary of this inquiry in approving ways. When a foundation is presumed or claimed for Chinese thought and culture, the gap between language and reality is elided. In the foundationalist approach commonly adopted in Sinophone discourse, language as the “realm” or “terrain” of discourse is imagined as corresponding to “reality.” What this reality will inevitably exclude is the untotalizable heterogeneity of lived experience. What the articulation of a particular set of “Chinese problems” provides is an ordering of reality within the framework of these problems, rather than an omniscient revelation of reality as such.66 But this gap between language and reality is often sutured through the presumption that reality, whether in part or whole, can be encapsulated in a given form of words. In this context, if the constructed and contingent nature of the genuine remains unacknowledged in Sino-centered acts of “genuine historicization,” to recall Li Tuo’s phrase, the risk of asserting an ur-language arises, together with the problems and politics of linguistic determinism. An ur-language imagined to bind everyone to the one true cause, the cause of China—as if people could be taught to distinguish the real China from its counterfeit versions—is always a dangerous assumption for it sharpens distinctions between true and false, as did the language of Maoism. This danger of projecting an ur-language lurks in present-day Sinophone affirmations of cultural integrity. When Chinese intellectuals imply that authentic representations of the Chinese past and present can be produced only by people who have an innate empathy for their ob-

Worrying about China

•

41

ject of inquiry (namely Chinese intellectuals), they invariably encounter this danger. In this view, they are true spokespersons for China and bear the responsibility for voicing concerns on their nation’s behalf and for “appropriating” Western ideas in ways that would suit China’s nationalcultural development specifically.67 A particular version of Chinese culture is proffered, by authorial fiat, as the true account, regardless of the infinite heterogeneity of lived experience in mainland China, whether historical or contemporary. Cultural and linguistic hybridity are gathered up, distilled, and essentialized to conform to the bifurcated vista of China and the West. But this act of generalizing and abstracting differences between China and the West is also unavoidable insofar as these two highly imprecise geo-political rubrics constitute an important formal distinction in both Anglophone and Sinophone economies of sensemaking. To mark and re-mark their imprecision is a necessary safeguard against their coalescence into unexamined (and allegedly extra-mental) “entities.” Similarly, to claim “history” or “genuine historicization” as the foundationalist premise for Chinese culture is to imply that the particular version of history one prefers is self-evident and beyond question. It is to claim that one’s preferred account has genuine or true history on its side, and that rival versions of history are distorted or else guided by non-Chinese interests. Contending accounts in Sinophone discourse about what properly constitutes Chinese reality, Chinese culture, or Chinese thought can be seen to trace competing foundationalisms. The preoccupation with establishing a proper foundation of Chinese thought, whether phrased as the Confucian spirit of “unity between heaven and humanity,” or the more cosmopolitan Confucian-derived “humanistic spirit,” or the heterogeneous postist authenticity of “Chineseness,” all tilt the discourse of Chinese critical inquiry toward a positivism and linguistic certitude, insofar as the prevailing assumption that there is a genuine foundation of Chinese thought to be discovered presupposes, in turn, that formulations that are properly based in this foundation will allow us to “see” China for what it was or is or might become. This assumption acquires an interesting form in Li Tuo’s recounting of his first troubled encounter with Western scholars at a 1990 conference in the United States. He observes that his Western interlocutors on that occasion were uninterested in the issue of Mao-speak, which was the critical focus of his presentation on “a new lease of life for the Chinese language,” and chose instead to pursue the following questions:

42

•

Worrying about China

“Why are you opposed to Europeanization? Is this a form of nationalism? Why can’t humanity share the same world? Why do you emphasize the construction of different worlds by different cultures and languages?” Li reflects in retrospect, with an emphasis on the racial difference of his interlocutors: Since I knew little about postcolonial theory at the time, I found the experience of engaging with those blue-eyed, blond-haired critics quite taxing. In retrospect, however, I believe that those questions arose within a particular discursive terrain and that the wariness these people showed toward “isms” is valid in their context. But I would like to counter with the following question: “If an English person raises the issue of defending the integrity of the English language, would he be criticized for his nationalism?68

A self-reflexive response to Li’s question would be a resounding “yes,” on the grounds that nationalism is the kind of thing that one ought to discourage in the interest of affirming an ethics of open-ended and difference-oriented inquiry. Derrida’s observation—“Of course, we need unity, some gathering, some configuration” on the proviso that we recognize that “identity is not the self-identity of a thing”—provides a useful intervention here. In affirming the ethics of distancing one’s formulations away from habitual conformity to a given definition of identity, culture, language, or person, Derrida remarks: “The identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself; a culture is different from itself; language is different from itself; the person is different from itself. Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity. And this prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, egocentrism, and so on.”69 For the time being, this attentiveness to an “inner and other difference” at work in the identity of a culture, a language, a person, and so on, is not something that interests most Chinese intellectuals. They are conversely preoccupied with the stark asymmetry between the enormous influence of Western thought on Chinese scholarship, on the one hand, and the limited visibility (let alone influence) of Chinese thought in EuroAmerican scholarship, on the other hand. Sinophone frustration with the status quo of scholarship in both the Anglophone and the Sinophone humanities and social sciences, where Western norms and methods of inquiry do indeed prevail, largely informs the prevailing rhetoric in Sinophone critical discourse of defending China’s cultural integrity.

Worrying about China

•

43

The attempts of Chinese intellectuals to defend China’s cultural integrity are inextricable from an abiding concern with the perceived ineradicability of what Liu Dong refers to as “foreign interference” in their own language.70 That they tend to maintain a relatively sharp distinction between the foreign and the Chinese is symptomatic of their frustration with, as it were, history itself, for having rendered China’s former civilizational grandeur into a mere objet d’art divested of cultural authority and for relegating modern Chinese thought to an inferior derivation of its Western counterpart. This national-culturalistic tendency of Chinese critical inquiry is deeply haunted by the rhetoric of awakening to the pain and fear of cultural and spiritual loss that the language of worrying about China has produced since the Opium Wars.71 This Sinophone rhetoric of cultural and spiritual loss resonates well with Anglophone critiques of Eurocentrism, enabling intellectuals such as Li Tuo to invoke the names of poststructuralism and postcolonialism as a way to accuse his Western interlocutors of marginalizing or excluding his discourse as “other” and to affirm the politics of being “the other” when he defends the integrity of the Chinese language. Anglophone selfreflexive critical inquiry cannot easily accommodate the essentializing tendencies of Sinophone critical discourse, and the difficulty of bringing these discursivities into conversation with each other is perhaps best illustrated by the frequent and facile affirmations of pluralism, multiculturalism, and difference that appear in both. Within Anglophone scholarship at least, the essentialist “appropriations” of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism in Sinophone discourse remain largely uncommented on and unexamined, and this neglect can be read as masking a certain EuroAmerican indifference to the alterity of Chinese critical concerns. But because EuroAmerican statements are largely “appropriated” to serve the metaphysics of “being Chinese,” Sinophone discourse also betrays a kindred indifference to the alterity of EuroAmerican critical concerns, such that the Derridean self-reflexivity of heeding an “inner and other difference” at work/play in all identity formations and formulations is elided and ignored. Let us return to Li Shenzhi’s essay on cultural complementarity to discern a typical cultural ambition at work in Sinophone critical discourse. In that essay, Li elevates the “synthetic” spirit of Chinese thought to the status of a global force that ought to have a civilizing influence on all cultures. Since he also equates “national cultures” with the languages in which these “entities” have come to be legitimized, he is suggesting a

44

•

Worrying about China

world in which the Chinese language would rival the English language as a global lingua franca. Similarly, when Li asserts that China is synonymous with East Asia in civilizational terms, he is defending the regional priority of the Chinese language. But Li’s vision of China’s global civilizing influence remains a phantasm unless in-depth studies of the canons of classical and modern Chinese thought and literature, along with substantive Chinese language training, were to become compulsory undergraduate curriculum everywhere, displacing the unchallenged priority of “Western thought.” Although it is unlikely that such a radical transformation of the Anglophone academy’s curriculum will happen any time soon, the typicality of Li’s desire for Chinese thought and culture to acquire a position of global relevance should be accorded serious attention, for it is an ambition shared alike by officials and intellectuals in mainland China. Indeed, in 2005 the establishment of Confucius Institutes in different countries, under the aegis of China’s National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in Beijing, constitutes one such institutional attempt at actualizing this ambition. The institute’s specific aim is to integrate “Chinese language and culture into the world” through the provision of classes for the general public, professional training for Chinese language teachers as well as a range of other educational and cultural activities. The Confucius Institute is part of an official strategy to extend and enhance China’s global influence through the use of what many commentators have described as “soft power.” What should be noted is that the particular versions of Chinese language and culture offered by these Confucius Institutes will clearly have the stamp of Partystate approval. It is also worth noting that although Li Shenzhi was ultimately penalized by the Party-state for his liberal views, the thesis he advanced in his 1994 essay is in clear accord with the stated aims of the Confucius Institute’s manifesto.72 Officials and intellectuals often share a common rhetoric as far as the promotion of China’s civilizational strengths is concerned. Emphasis is placed on the integration of China into a world from which it had been (unjustly) marginalized, with China figured as the benevolent provider of cultural gifts to nourish a world still deprived of its unique resources. The following comment from the prominent Beijing-based philosopher Tang Yijie illustrates this style of reasoning: “We are not only engaged in one-way absorption of Western philosophy. We are also attempting to admit Chinese philosophy into the various Western philosophical schools,

Worrying about China

•

45

in order that we can enrich Western philosophy with certain Chinese philosophical resources, thereby enriching the perspectives of Western philosophy and enabling Chinese philosophy to enter the mainstream of contemporary world philosophy.”73 The determination with which so many Chinese intellectuals are now pursuing projects aimed at recovering China’s cultural integrity, couched in the rhetoric of Chinese munificence, should give us pause for thought as to the outcomes of these ultimately essentialist and Sino-centered visions. But setting aside the condescension of Chinese largesse, we should also note that when Chinese intellectuals like Li Shenzhi and Tang Yijie defend the integrity and global relevance of Chinese culture, they do so largely in contrast to the kind of jingoistic nationalism that became part of mainland public discourse in the 1990s with the appearance of bestselling books like China Can Say No.74 China Can Say No became an instant hit with mainland Chinese readers when it was published in 1996, but many intellectuals who were already concerned with the rise of extreme nationalism in contemporary mainland China read the work as a nationalistic screed written in a language that bore the unmistakable imprint of Maoist rhetoric.75 By stating on the book’s cover that “China does not say no in order to oppose [dialogue] but in order to promote an even more equal dialogue,” the authors claimed to be promoting egalitarianism among nations. Readers were left in no doubt, however, that the book was really targeting one particular nation as an obstacle to such egalitarianism, since the United States was figured throughout the book as a hegemonic intelligence that imposed its will on China through the agency of its institutional, collective, and individual representatives. In the book, inflammatory rhetoric was enlisted to criticize the United States while highly emotive language was used to defend China’s civilizational greatness. The book’s popularity and its evident commercial success soon drew critical responses from many mainland Chinese intellectuals, who regarded this new form of commercially viable cultural chauvinism as a dangerous trend. Their fears were confirmed by the publication of subsequent books on this same theme, such as China Does Not Only Say No and Why China Says No.76 In the 1990s and since, this form of cultural chauvinism has posed obvious dangers of feeding antiforeign, especially anti-U.S., sentiment in a Sinophone public discourse already rife with ready-made formulations of such sentiment. Xu Jilin cleverly drew attention to the histori-

46

•

Worrying about China

cal longevity of such sentiment when he satirized the work as evocative of Boxer Rebellion delusion in the age of the Internet.77 Similarly, the pseudonymous author Shi Jian observed that the book’s inflammatory rhetoric was “full of those huge crosses and exclamation marks so typical of Cultural Revolution big character posters”78 and claimed that this was what made it particularly repugnant. Xu’s and Shi’s comments appear in the book How China Faces the West, an anthology published in Hong Kong in 1997 as a collective critique by leading Chinese intellectuals of the popular appeal of works like China Can Say No. In their critiques of what was then being quickly dubbed as the “say no” (shuo bu) phenomenon, these intellectuals sometimes indicated, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the difficulties that their own habitual recourse to a Sinophone vocabulary of national empowerment posed for them when they sought to use this same vocabulary to speak against the strident nationalism of China Can Say No. For instance, in his contribution to this anthology, the Beijing-based historian Lei Yi criticizes China Can Say No for promoting an isolationist (fengbi), antiforeign (paiwai), and narrow (xiayi) nationalism, but he nonetheless invokes the figure of a “prosperous and wealthy China” as the necessary goal of Chinese critical inquiry. As he writes: Modern history shows us that this kind of [isolationist, antiforeign, and narrow] “nationalism” has, to the contrary, acted as a force of immense obstruction to China’s proper acquisition of wealth and prosperity. In fact, it has gravely endangered our sovereign realm and has caused it great harm [wuguo feiqian, weihai shenlie]. We should recognize this situation clearly and be fully alert to it. In this regard, the few minor achievements of modern China, which have prevented China from perishing altogether, are none other than the work of those Chinese people who proposed, at different times and to different degrees, various ways of “learning from the barbarians” [shi yi]. (Should these include both “seeking truth from the West” and “postcolonialism”?) I suppose this is what is meant by the “dialectics of history.”79

By criticizing jingoistic Chinese nationalism through the use of phrases derived from the late Qing and early Republican scholarly idiom of saving China from perishing (wangguo), Lei implies that the difference between a correct and an incorrect way of articulating national concerns is to be determined in terms of whether one is prudent and willing, as he puts it with provocative irony, to “learn from the barbarians.” Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Lei demonstrates that the im-

Worrying about China

•

47

age of China’s humiliation at the hands of “barbarians” remains a powerfully affective undertow in present-day articulations of national and cultural perfection. In Chapter Two, we will explore the ways in which Chinese intellectuals have come to be divided over the proper way ahead for China’s perfection, given their shared insistence on discovering such a way. For now, suffice it to say that these divisions also share the commonality of grappling with the problematic of how to engage with the foreign and the foreigner, the strange and the stranger. But what the whole idea of the receptions or the rejections, the incorporations or the denunciations of the strange, the stranger, and the estranged reminds us is that, unlike contemporary Western intellectual discourse—which has grown up essentially in the company of itself, a discourse that has evolved, as it were, undisturbed and from within—Chinese intellectual discourse (since the nineteenth century) has never been afforded just such a pristine and uncontaminated historical nursery of intellectual development (as Li Shenzhi, Liu Dong, and others are keen to remind us).80 Instead, in the bid to construct such a nursery (although humidicrib would better capture both the urgency and the risk of contamination), Chinese intellectuals are faced with not just the unknown matched against their wits (in true Cartesian style) but also the foreign. Modern Chinese intellectual discourse then, unlike its EuroAmerican counterpart, has always been forced into the position of having to either acknowledge or deny the preeminence of Western thought, and this necessity of having to cope with both the unknown and foreign invests Western thought, as it appears in the language of Chinese critical inquiry, with an ambience of at least potential inimicality or incommensurability. Yet this Sinophone suspicion of the unknown and dangerous potency of foreign ideas, which has facilitated the production of nationalistic Sinophone formulations, cannot avoid admitting that the very language in which it is given frequent articulation is already indebted to or parasitic on foreign ideas.81 This Sinophone suspicion is also unsurprising inasmuch as foreign ideas, whatever their content, were certainly not composed within the reassurance of worrying about China. The historically antecedent problem of modern Chinese intellectual discourse coming after the West and its modernity might be likened to a second sibling forever envying the once only child.82 Whatever the case, it is the difficulty of achieving that uncontaminated development in the face of so much foreign thought that is clearly not worrying about China that

48

•

Worrying about China

leads to a position of heightened alert and suspicion of the Other, a position that is forever in competition with the other side of the equation and that is, to be in competition with the very hope that the other, the stranger, does indeed have something to offer that is of value to China. The historical injustices of coerced trade concessions and the Treaty of Versailles aside, this in itself is a powerful structure of contemporary Chinese discourse inherited from an older poetics and unanimously persuasive across the political spectrum of contemporary Chinese intellectual positions. For our purpose, this discursive structure is one that raises the problem of precisely how much hospitality should be shown to the foreign and what does it mean when others show “too much”? One can usefully enlist Derrida’s notion of hospitality in this instance to draw attention to implicit exclusions at work in the polemics of contemporary Chinese debates, especially in the ostensible claims of an allinclusive justice that Sinophone proposals of a better future for China universally offer. Drawing on the Greek and Latin origins of hospitality, Derrida explores the notion of hospitality itself as caught between the opposing pulls of inclusion and exclusion: “the foreigner [hostis] welcomed as guest or enemy. Hospitality, hostility, hostpitality.” Derrida’s notion of hospitality—that is, of an attitude or a position in the face of the foreign or the strange—is necessarily internally divided and equivocal (that in welcoming some will invariably exclude others, that the welcoming itself is grounded in a suspicion). In this way, Derrida problematizes the notion of hospitality as involving a necessary and “nondialecticizable” antimony between unconditional inclusion and limited inclusion (which entails limited exclusion). Derrida forces us to engage with the radical indeterminacy inherent in hospitality, that is through his deconstruction of “hospitality” and “hostility” toward the notion of “hostpitality”: a “deranged” inscription that disturbs the obvious difference presupposed between “guest” and “enemy” (and consequentially between “justice” and “injustice”). Derrida deploys this neologism to show that: In principle, the difference is straightforward, but for that you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered have to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction. Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don’t have the benefit of the right to hospitality or the right of asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced “in my home,” in the host’s “at home,” as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest.83

Worrying about China

•

49

This is a law that Western thought as the intellectual development of Modernity did not require, in much the same way as Western expansion and predominance firstly did not need a law until—when it did—it did so by becoming a law unto itself. Hospitality to such a lawless stranger needs to be tempered with caution (and throughout this book we will detect a concern among many Chinese intellectuals to issue such a caution). That caution seeks expression ultimately in a law, and the desire to express that law unequivocally takes the form of implicit discursive exclusions that at bottom are grounded in what Derrida shows to be an unreachable law, an ephemeral and unwritable law. For it is a law of which is demanded the impossible capacity of prescience, but that, of course, is precisely what “worrying about China” or being the “awakened few” is all about. Prescience is what we pray guides the lawmaker. Prescience, some would claim, is the genius of the U.S. Constitution but prescience, while demanded of the future, can be granted only retrospectively. In the present, the law of prescience is only a Law of Suspicion, the justice of which can only be a guess. Broadly speaking, Derrida’s notion of hospitality (as hostpitality) foregrounds the paradoxical nature of a right of inclusion whose very formulation simultaneously imposes an interdiction even as it invokes an unconditional Law of all-inclusiveness. In fact, Derrida proposes, in an open-ended way: “Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female (emphasis in original).”84 The Sinophone notion of appropriatism shares little in common with Derrida’s proposal, for it always already recalls and anticipates an unwelcome foreigner and potentially a threat to the safety of the home it seeks to defend and rebuild.

The Travails of Being Exemplary Contemporary Sinophone expressions of ambivalence toward the foreign are a discursive legacy of the modern Chinese vernacular (baihua) inaugurated by May Fourth intellectuals such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi (1891– 1962) in the late 1910s. Baihua, a standardization of the Beijing dialect based in a hybrid vocabulary and grammar derived from different modern

50

•

Worrying about China

languages while retaining several features of classical Chinese, was introduced for the specific purpose of replacing the elite language of scholar-officials and literati with a language for “the masses.”85 It was conceived of as the tool for creating a modern Chinese culture, or “Chinese modernity,” as most present-day intellectuals now describe that enterprise. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, advocates of baihua relied on a rhetoric of national crisis to endow that emergent and ever-evolving language with a moral purpose.86 Thus evocative denunciations of tradition—such as Lu Xun’s figuration of an “iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation”87—inaugurated baihua and also made it meaningful. When contemporary Chinese intellectuals write of China’s future, claiming their inheritance of Lu Xun’s critical spirit as they so often do, their prose is haunted by these powerful inaugural figurations that constitute a certain heteronomy (or counterautonomy) at work in their language. If we engage with the notion of autonomy discursively, that is, as the capacity of an individual author to interrogate the limits of what can be written in the language of his or her time, then it is evident that such autonomy, the presupposition of an “I” who thinks for him- or herself, is also invariably governed by the heteronomy of existing rules of sensemaking. Writing in 1922 as an awakened or prescient member of the “iron house”—that is to say, as someone who had become estranged from his education in the classical language88—Lu Xun observed that since people who die “in their sleep . . . won’t feel the pain of death,” but “now if you raise a shout to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?” Lu Xun wrote that Qian Xuantong, a fellow advocate of language reform, answered his question in the affirmative, stating, “But if a few wake up, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.”89 In recounting this exchange with Qian to explain why he took up writing modern prose fiction, Lu Xun indicates that he shared Qian’s hope though he remained uncertain as to whether the iron house could be destroyed. Lu Xun’s iron house offers us a powerful metaphor for the heteronomic effects of language. In brief, one’s sense of “self” is, at some level, “imprisoned” by those acquired habits of speaking and writing that constitute the rules of sense-making in a given language, especially a national language conceived of as mother tongue. John Caputo captures

Worrying about China

•

51

well the heteronomic constraints that such a language imposes on any articulation of “selfhood” (and, by implication, conceptions of “autonomy”) when he writes: Language is not a matter of an “I” which expresses its “inner thought” by outer marks. It is rather a behavior which is acquired by picking up the conventions of making marks in the ways adopted by those who “bring me up,” by means of which “I” am slowly brought up or drawn into the higher order operations of thinking and imagining, and get to be a certain sort of “I.” The “I” thus is not the interior, anterior inventor of the language, but of the things produced by it, an “effect” of the game. So the extent to which I will be able to acquire these higher order operations is very much a contingent function of the subtlety, complexity, and nuances of the “vocabulary” (and the grammar) with which I am presented by my birth and education, of the degree to which the differential play to which I am exposed is differentiated enough, of the subtlety of the strategies that have been devised in the game I am taught to play.90

But even though Lu Xun promoted baihua as if it constituted a decisive break from the orthodox Confucian iron house, through offering us the image of a formidable prison without “a single window” and “virtually indestructible,” he also drew attention to the heteronomic power of the classical language. The “indestructibility” of the classical language is perhaps nowhere more evident in Lu Xun’s prose than when he arrogates to himself the exemplarity of an awakened self. Lu Xun’s notion of exemplarity effects a profound resonance with the Buddhistinflected Neo-Confucian prose of awakening or self-realization produced by scholar-officials and literati from the Song dynasty onward. More significantly, the decision to awaken others, even though it may prove futile, is paradigmatic insofar as exemplarity of the highest order is demonstrated through a selfless act undertaken to advance the greater collective good, regardless of any practical consideration or adverse consequence.91 Moreover, to write of being awakened is to locate oneself in the apocalyptic space of “moral time” beyond one’s historical location in a given time and space. When Lu Xun writes of the iron house, he offers just such an apocalyptic space for the act of moral awakening, as it were, to accuse traditional Chinese thought from within its very own poetics of exemplarity. “Awakened” articulations (such as Lu Xun’s) came to be interwoven with the rhetoric of national salvation in the prose of the late Qing and early Republican eras. Thus even though baihua was produced with the

52

•

Worrying about China

specific purpose of first discrediting and then replacing the classical language, it remained under the moral spell of Confucian axioms such as “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven.” The lure of exemplarity implicit in these axioms is both inspiring and dangerous precisely because exemplarity often involves a claim of prescience: one must know the truth in order to awaken others to it, and thereby to shape the future in accordance with this truth. In mainland scholarship, Lu Xun’s prescient rhetoric of awakening others to their captivity in an iron house has long served to exemplify the “revolutionary spirit” of modern Chinese thought. Lu Xun’s revision of this trope in his famous 1923 essay, “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home?” is much less discussed. In this essay, Lu Xun is equivocal about awakening others when he writes that “the most painful thing in life is to wake up from a dream and find no way out.” He concludes, “If we can find no way out, what we need are dreams, but not dreams of the future, just dreams of the present.”92 Figures of exemplarity and prescience derived from the classical language and the modern vernacular have continued to circulate in mainland intellectual discourse of the 1990s and since. The moral connotations that these figures have always evoked are thus reaffirmed but in ways that both echo and differ from the specific meanings they acquired in earlier times. In this context, the writings of May Fourth exemplars, such as Lu Xun, have recently been interrogated as flawed accounts of modernity. Unlike Lu Xun, who sought to usher in modern values along with the modern vernacular, present-day intellectuals such as Zhu Xueqin are focused on the need for Chinese scholars to find “their own language for asking their own questions,”93 and they argue, in this context, that their May Fourth predecessors were overly simplistic in their appropriations of Western ideas. In contemporary inquiry, the alleged radicalism of May Fourth modernity is now commonly criticized not only for having impoverished Chinese scholarship but also for fostering scientism that culminated in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist destruction of China’s cultural integrity. Zheng Min issued what is arguably the most strident J’accuse of the modern Chinese vernacular in her writings of the early 1990s, when she disparaged it as a flawed medium of literary expression. Zheng argued, among other things, that the supposed modernity of the modern vernacular fashioned by May Fourth intellectuals had the long-term effect of “orphaning” subsequent generations of Chinese intellectuals from

Worrying about China

•

53

their cultural tradition.94 Indeed, Zheng even argued that “compared to modern Chinese, classical Chinese is a better ‘vehicle of culture.’ ”95 But it is not without irony that Zheng summarily enlists statements from Saussure, Lacan, and Derrida to legitimate her critique of excessive Europeanization in May Fourth intellectual enterprises, for her critique, in turn, relies on the unquestioned authority she accords to these newer, foreign ideas. It could thus be argued that Lu Xun’s appropriatism is at work in Zheng’s critique of the modern vernacular insofar as she repeats the act of pressing “Western theory” into service for (rather than bringing it into conversation with) Chinese critical inquiry. Moreover, many like Zhu Xueqin regard the acceleration of market reforms that have occurred since the 1990s as posing a further threat to the integrity of Chinese cultural and intellectual pursuits. In naming his quest as one of restoring and strengthening China’s humanistic spirit, Zhu noted that he was particularly concerned about the adverse consequences of academic competition on “a proportion of young and middle-aged scholars” who “in their haste to respond to imported ideas . . . have not been able to raise questions of any genuine depth.” When Zhu then proposes the strengthening of the “humanistic spirit” as a remedy for this perceived flaw in the status quo, he assumes the position of a spokesperson for this spirit, an exemplary “I” who enjoins others to “reconstruct the humanistic spirit” as “a matter of life and death.”96 The persuasiveness of speaking in this register of an exemplary “I” is an index of its continued relevance in Sinophone discourse. What it indicates is that the vocabulary of “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven” remains not only meaningful but morally authoritative within this discourse. The performative effect of this vocabulary is even more strikingly resonant in the following lines by the Beijing-based historian Wang Hui: “I rejoice that I was born in China since what could be more heartbreaking and also more exhilarating than the glorious revival of a decaying civilization of which so many generations of people have dreamed? And what could be more thrilling than to watch and experience the minutiae and process of this collective dream?”97 Although Lu Xun did not elaborate on what he meant by “dreams of the present” in his 1923 essay, it is evident that he used the phrase to caution against the dangers of claiming prescience in the form of “dreams of the future.” The phrase “dreams of the present” serves the moral function of enjoining others to bear witness to “wrongs” in the

54

•

Worrying about China

status quo, even in the absence of “a way out.” Xu Jilin is particularly attentive to these dangers in the Confucian-derived moral aspiration to “assume responsibility for all under Heaven.” In commemorating Li Shenzhi as “China’s last scholar-official,” Xu writes that Li’s “spirit was strikingly expressed through his worrying over the nation’s rise and fall [tianxia xingwangde youhuan yishi],” and he notes that early Republican intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), and Chen Yinque (1890–1969), “despite their Western dress and leather shoes, were all imbued with the spirit of the scholar-official.”98 Although Xu praises the selflessness inherent in “the spirit of the scholar-official” as constitutive of “moral idealism,” he is at pains to note that this idealism translated tragically into revolutionary utopianism and then doctrinalism in the course of China’s twentieth century. He argues that the risk of totalization is a corollary of the scholar-official spirit, and that the will to truth and justice this spirit has nurtured has often mutated, in word and deed, into a contrary will to power and violence. Just as Lu Xun used “dreams of the present” to warn against the prescience demanded of “dreams of the future,” Xu’s commemoration of the “spirit of the scholar-official” cautions against claiming a truth on everyone’s behalf. Both authors, nonetheless, resonate with the vocabulary of Confucian sagehood in their use of the modern vernacular to affirm moral exemplarity, a resonance that has endured from the 1910s to the 2000s. When contemporary Chinese intellectuals seek now to return to tradition (huixiang chuantong)—to establish continuities between traditional and modern Chinese thought, to examine the Eurocentric assumptions and limitations of early modern Chinese ideas, and to establish Sino-centered norms that adhere to international academic standards—their rhetoric is resonant with the moral purpose that their May Fourth predecessors once invested in the promotion of baihua and modern and scientific “norms.” In this context, Børge Bakken’s observation that modern Chinese approaches to pedagogy resemble Emile Durkheim’s conceptualization of social reality as a moral order in which autonomy represents “the element of ‘objectivity’ in morality,” is equally relevant to Chinese critical inquiry. According to Bakken, “The Durkheimian assumption that there is an objective, scientific way to ‘know’ the right morality of a society is shared by Chinese scholars, moral educators and political powerholders alike.” Autonomy, premised on the assumption of an objective, scientific, and correct approach to

Worrying about China

•

55

morality, lends itself to being defined in terms of establishing cohesive norms of intellectual independence. Such a notion of autonomy rests on the expectation that “a scientific approach to morality would liberate mankind from the direct dependence on things, and thereby set us free.”99 In this context, frequent references in contemporary Chinese critical inquiry to one or another centennial (bainian) assessment of modern Chinese thought are also moral appeals for the establishment of norms of objective historical judgment that would “free” scholarship from the errors of previous judgments. Many of these assessments are framed around the dyadic model of “radicalism versus conservatism,” a model proposed by the U.S.-based historian Yu Ying-shih, which became highly influential in 1990s’ mainland Chinese intellectual circles and assisted the “return to tradition.”100 In this regard, the emphasis that many Chinese intellectuals now place on establishing critical distance in their historical studies must be viewed in relation to their implicit goal of identifying and affirming the correct moral temper of the past and the present.101 After all, to produce a “centennial” assessment is to assume that one has the authority to judge the past for its moral flaws and merits from the vantage point of an omniscient observer, with the terms radicalism and conservatism themselves becoming morally charged in this process. Given the pervasive moral burden of worrying about China, it is not surprising that most contemporary Chinese intellectuals remain indifferent or at least ambivalent toward EuroAmerican concerns over the ineluctable duplicity of language, for such concerns, as noted earlier, would pose the danger of undermining the clarity and the certitude required for identifying problems and offering solutions to them. Thus foreign ideas, when utilized, continue largely to serve the function of legitimizing a given argument about China’s present and future needs. This characteristic Sinophone privileging of the ethnicity (over a trans- or intercultural ethics) of critical thinking, of which Li Shenzhi’s invocation of Lu Xun’s appropriatism is an illustrative instance, is best understood as a redemptive pursuit, with redemption imagined as the achievement of national and cultural perfection. This goal of perfection is resonant in Lu Xun’s figure of the iron house, insofar as the point of alerting others to their dismal fate in the iron house is to enjoin them to find a better home for China. When contemporary intellectuals like Zheng Min now criticize the modern vernacular, they share this same longing for a better home, even though

56

•

Worrying about China

they now envisage this home as one that will result from the restoration of the iron house their May Fourth predecessors rejected. In this context, the negatively inflected term “radicalism” is used to judge the May Fourth era as a time when intellectuals accorded “too much” hospitality to foreign ideas at the expense of conserving Chinese ones. But it should be noted that just as Lu Xun found the iron house he inhabited unbearable yet “virtually indestructible,” contemporary critics of the modern vernacular are equally unable to destroy the modern vernacular to effect a return to a language that has long ceased to be their home. For better or for worse they inhabit the modern vernacular, and even though they may no longer regard classical Chinese as an iron house but rather as something closer to a ruined palace—a national heritage that awaits restoration—they remain ineluctably “imprisoned” at some level by the language in which they were educated. In using these tropes of home, house, and ruined palace, I draw on Derrida’s figuration of language as the “fantasy of property that . . . would give place to the most inalienable place”102 as well as the emotionally charged motif of “ruins” that has come to be interwoven into the prose of modern Chinese thought. Geremie Barmé observes of the stone ruins of the Western Palaces (destroyed by an Anglo-French force in 1860) that they are “the most widely commented on and remembered feature of the Yuan Ming Yuan” in Beijing (formerly the imperial gardens created by the Kangxi emperor in about 1709). He writes of these palaces, created by Jesuits in the mid-eighteenth century for the Qianlong emperor and under his aegis, that they “have become the ultimate icon in the Chinese mind of the vandalism of the West, and an abiding totem of national humiliation.”103 In other words, because the Western Palaces reflect a time, as it were, before the Chinese experienced the pain of national humiliation, its ruins constitute a reminder of two profoundly different times: a time when the foreign posed no threat and was “appropriated” for imperial Chinese use, and a time when the foreign destroyed the empire through sheer military might. Similarly, the modern vernacular is now read by some as iconic of the ruination of a language that once was proper to China, a classical language befitting an imperial realm into which foreign ideas (such as the scientia of the Jesuits) were assimilated rather than violently imposed. Ambivalence toward the foreign is always resonant in the modern vernacular insofar as dreams of perfection, whether prescient “dreams

Worrying about China

•

57

of the future” or less prescient “dreams of the present,” are expressions of a desire for redemption in the face of a ruined tradition. Edward Wang’s observation that “tradition (chuantong) in Chinese is a combination of chuan (to hand down) and tong (to rule or unite), which simply refers to ideas, cultures, and institutions bequeathed to new generations,”104 is instructive for it foregrounds the tensions between, on the one hand, the emphasis that modern Chinese intellectuals have characteristically placed on envisaging a collective good to be actualized through the transmission of correct ideas, and, on the other hand, their alertness to the dangers of endorsing the wrong set of foreign ideas. Thus the terms “modern” and “modernity” and their postmodern corollaries circulate in Chinese critical discourse as emblematic of both future perfection and “foreign interference.” They continue not only to attract comparisons with tradition but also to engender ambivalence toward the foreign. But the admirable interest in “awakening” others to problems within the status quo, with the achievement of a collective good imagined as the outcome, is a feature of Chinese critical inquiry that should be reiterated if only because there is little resonance of this moral purpose in the formidable technicity of EuroAmerican critical inquiry. Moreover, the distinction between China and the West that remains quite sharply drawn in the language of Chinese intellectuals should lead Anglophone scholars to ponder why they have never had to concern themselves with having to accord hospitality to “foreign ideas.” Meanwhile, what Xu Jilin calls the “ice-cold reason” of EuroAmerican critical inquiry continues to make inroads into the Sinophone discursive terrain, opening it to alternative vocabularies that all share a suspicion of presumed enlightenment. Since these vocabularies are quite remote from the Sinophone preoccupation with “recovering” or “discovering” a quintessential or genuine way of “being Chinese,” they may in the long run help to encourage a less nationalistic, less partisan approach to intellectual work generally and thereby complicate the pursuit of national and cultural perfection that still remains, for the time being, the raison d’être of Chinese critical inquiry. In any case, because worrying about China remains an act that is intended to and does have ramifications in many other spheres than merely the academic one, it is also clear that Chinese critical inquiry has a social relevance that far exceeds what EuroAmerican critical inquiry (given its academic confines) is ever likely to produce on its general population.



chapter two

Divided over China

In the writings of Chinese intellectuals and officials, the word jia (family or home) is regularly featured as a metaphor for the nation, especially in relation to issues of social and political reform. This is not surprising, since the state (guo) is explicitly figured as family in the modern Chinese term for nation or country (guojia). This semantic overlapping of “nation” and “family,” the legacy of Confucian statecraft, was rendered paradigmatic through axioms such as xiu shen, qi jia, zhi guo, ping tianxia (one must first cultivate oneself morally before proceeding to establish order within the family, the state, and thereafter universally), a formulation distilled out of the Great Learningby the Song-era NeoConfucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130–1200). The frequent citation of this axiom in the twentieth century and since is a sign of its enduring relevance. Indeed, the standard abbreviation of this axiom, xiu qi zhi ping, indicates its normative status in Chinese scholarship and, as Zhidong Hao argues, the axiom itself has always served to invest intellectual inquiry with the moral purpose of establishing an enlightened realm.1 In this chapter, I begin by exploring Sinophone figurations of the nation as “home” in relation to the contemporary idealization of critical inquiry as selfless labor. I do so to highlight the ways in which rapid professionalization and market competition have driven Chinese critical inquiry and its entrenched raison d’être of worrying about China on to various discursive trajectories. An examination of two significant kinds of disagreement among Chinese intellectuals follows: namely, between liberals and the New Left and between advocates of humanism,

Divided over China

•

59

or “the humanistic spirit,” and their postmodern critics. These disagreements are constitutive of how intellectuals are now divided concerning China. They are by no means the only kinds of contestations that have occurred since the 1990s but because both these disagreements attracted the attention of most Chinese intellectuals, involved the participation of numerous prominent intellectuals, and resulted in an enormous number of print and online publications, they provide a useful way to examine how worrying about China often produces intellectual factionalism. Factionalism, in the sense of ideological division produced through the use of different vocabularies in a shared moral language of worrying, has been a feature of contemporary Chinese critical inquiry since the 1990s, as much as pluralism is also the effect of these same diverse vocabularies. Whether one chooses to emphasize the factionalist or the pluralist aspect of this inquiry, what is clear is that both these aspects are engendered out of a general and entrenched anticipation of national and cultural perfection in Chinese intellectual discourse as a whole.

It’s a Family Affair: Chinese Critical Inquiry and Its Troubled Altruism During the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese intellectuals had commonly figured China as a home or a family in crisis. This was writ large in the very title of Ba Jin’s influential 1933 novel, Jia (Family), a social-realist dramatization of the hypocrisy and cruelty of traditional patriarchal norms. The aim was to promote the adoption of Western-derived ideas as integral to the success of China’s modernization. These political figurations of familial crisis acquired meaning chiefly through prose fiction written in the nascent modern vernacular (of which Ba Jin’s work is arguably the most representative). Through melancholic and abject descriptions of dysfunctional Confucian households, writers of the early Republican era offered (by way of positive contrast) modern Western values of individualism and egalitarianism as the solution to the injustices and tragedies they claimed the hierarchical norms of Confucian patriarchy had engendered. Thus the theme of irreconcilable differences between generations of the same family divided over the relevance of “traditional” versus “modern” values acquired an iconic significance from May Fourth and thereafter in modern Chinese literature.2 When the Beijing-based economic historian Qin Hui discussed differ-

60

•

Worrying about China

ent approaches to the question of social justice in the late 1990s, he used a metaphor of familial crisis that recalled the May Fourth rhetoric of opposition to patriarchy. Qin, a firm advocate of liberal principles, implied that as long as the root problem of arbitrary rule remained unresolved, it was pointless to argue over the relative merits of different approaches to social justice.3 Thus in his defense of formal equality and the legislation of property rights, Qin claimed that most Chinese intellectuals had not been able to address the question of just and fair means for distributing “family assets” as individual entitlements, precisely because the patriarchal state had monopolized family assets that rightfully belonged to the people. As he put it: Actually, the differences assigned to “reformist” and “conservative” positions and to “radical” and “gradualist” approaches in present-day China are not all that important. In this regard, the following provides a good analogy: The question of gravest importance for a large family experiencing difficulty in continuing to live together is often not whether the family should break up but how the family property should be divided. This is really none other than the issue of what is “fair and just” [in relation to the division of property]. If this question is simply ignored, the patriarch will be in a position to monopolize all of the family assets unchallenged, and to kick the “junior members” out of the family home. This is a state of affairs that far outweighs in gravity any formulation of a “conservative” policy of not breaking up the family.4

It is not entirely clear as to whom Qin means by the “junior members” of the Chinese national family. This figuration could include both “the poorest of the poor” in demographic terms and “local governments” defending their interests against central government directives. Since censorship has prevented Qin Hui from stating his position more specifically, his analogy remains suggestive and capacious in its implications.5 But what is of interest here is the effectiveness with which Qin can figure the nation as family and the Party-state as a self-claimed patriarch. At this point we should note that Mao Zedong’s unrivaled status as the nation’s patriarch was so fully secured in the first three decades of Party-state rule as to render it impossible for any subsequent leader (whether Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, or Hu Jintao) to claim an equivalent status. Moreover, the catastrophic economic policies of the late 1950s and the political violence of the late 1960s, together with the draconian measures the Party-state took to suppress dissent and punish “Rightists” and other perceived enemies between 1949 and 1976, have further complicated the official discourse, requiring the post-Maoist

Divided over China

•

61

Party-state to distance itself from Mao’s posthumously discredited patriarchy, even as it claims patrimonial descent from it. Thus in the post-Maoist environment of the 1980s and since, as the Party-state implemented economic reforms that facilitated the rapid development of China’s present-day market economy, Qin’s figurations of the nation as a divided family and the Party-state as an unjust and corrupt patriarch serve also as poignant reminders of a Maoist past when the family was not quite so (ideologically) divided and the patriarch’s authority was not only absolute but credible as well.6 The point of all this is that in engaging with the various proposals and criticisms that Chinese intellectuals have offered in the common interest of ushering in a better future, what we should be mindful of is that they write in a language that is already saturated with figurations of the nation as the domestic intimacy of home and family, as well as with oblique references to the constraints imposed by an unreasonable or tyrannical patriarch. Moreover, their dissatisfaction with the status quo of Chinese intellectual inquiry is resonant with the ancient prescriptive responsibility of xiu qi zhi ping that imposes on Chinese writing to this day an ethos of communal or collective responsibility and spokesmanship. This ethos remains largely unquestioned because its authority has endured all temporal political divides over the longer historical spectrum to produce certain modalities of form and rhetoric (such as the ones that Qin Hui utilized) that are most evocative of worrying about China. In Sinophone critical discourse of the 1990s and since, one persistent worry is the weakening of public morality in the context of rampant commercialism and official corruption. Worrying in English, Jiwei Ci observes: We should not be surprised that Mao’s death was followed by the worsening of the moral climate. What had preceded this moral decline, however, was not the flourishing of morality but the success of politics; the subsequent moral paralysis was nothing more than the failure of the political project. The political project was everything; its collapse naturally caused everything, including morality, to collapse with it. When Mao’s successors tell the Chinese people that only the Communist party can give China stability, they are not just making a threat but stating a stark fact—a fact of their own making—about the nature of the Chinese moral and social order since 1949.7

Indeed, the inflexibility of unelected Party-state rule and the high incidence of official corruption, together with the less than credible “flex-

62

•

Worrying about China

ibility” of official interpretations of socialism in the era of the market economy, privatization, and professionalization, are precisely the features of contemporary Chinese society widely regarded by intellectuals as the major cause of moral decrepitude. In this context it is important to reiterate that because Sinophone critical inquiry speaks from an ethos of communal or collective spokesmanship, there is a common moral perception among authors and readers alike that the publication of ideas, or sixiang, should be understood, first and foremost, as selfless labor in the interest of the greater good. Chinese intellectual praxis arrogates to and burdens itself, whether explicitly or implicitly, with the task of restoring morality through scholarship. Chinese intellectuals attempt to do so by identifying flaws in present-day inquiry that they regard as having hindered the production of correct or beneficial ideas. On the issue of post-Maoist intellectual praxis, prominent scholars such as Wang Hui and Xu Jilin have commented on the need to distinguish between the 1980s and the 1990s (and since). In a much-debated 1997 essay, Wang Hui observes that the clarity with which Chinese intellectuals of the 1980s understood their role in society as agents of enlightenment was predicated on their implicit belief in universalist and abstract concepts of the individual (geren) and subjectivity (zhutixing).8 He argues that within the Chinese discursive terrain of the 1980s, frequently quoted Western thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre became “symbols of individualism and opposition to authority” but with their “critical engagement with Western modernity” typically effaced.9 For Wang, Chinese intellectuals of the 1980s affirmed individualism and subjectivity in opposition to the “mass movements of the Maoist era.” He claims that they “put their faith in Western-style modernization” but failed to see that their post-Maoist celebration of intellectual independence was being rapidly assimilated into a developing “framework of modernization as an ideology,” a framework that he and many others have since labeled and criticized as neoliberal. Wang argues that as a consequence of their ill-considered neoliberal conflation of democracy with economic liberalization, the praxis of mainland intellectuals of the 1980s, which had started out as “a richly intense mode of critical thinking,” soon became “transformed into the cultural herald of contemporary Chinese capitalism within a brief historical period.”10 Wang further identifies a certain “partial unanimity of aims” between this (unwittingly neoliberal) Chinese New Enlightenment movement of the 1980s and the Party-state’s agenda for “socialist reform” (since both

Divided over China

•

63

were focused on the architectonics of China’s Western-style modernization). He suggests that “the global proportions of change that occurred in 1989” (an example of an oblique reference to June 4, 1989) led to an unavoidable bifurcation in the New Enlightenment movement, with a conservative branch continuing to produce an ideology of technocratic modernization on behalf of the Party-state and a radical branch moving in the contrary direction of becoming dissenters of Party-state politics, based in their promotion of a human rights movement in China and their advocacy of Western-style democratization.11 Wang reads the various intellectual trends and debates that have emerged since the 1990s as plural responses to the question of the way ahead for China. He argues that the Party-state’s purge of the 1989 protest movement facilitated the emergence of alternative accounts of social reform that rendered untenable the universal model of Westernstyle capitalist modernization intellectuals had promoted in the 1980s. According to Wang, Chinese intellectuals who continued to assume that Western-style capitalist modernization embodied the material benefits of “Enlightenment thinking” faced, in the 1990s, the predicament of inhabiting an unequal and corrupt society where capitalist transformation (including some of its worst effects) was already well under way, albeit in the nominally “socialist” guise of Party-state rule. He argues that as individuals who play “the role of creating values” for society, intellectuals “lament the priority of money, moral corruption, and the loss of social order in a commercialized society” on the one hand, but they “cannot avoid acknowledging that they are situated in this very process of modernization [as commercialization] that was formerly their goal,” on the other hand.12 Writing more nostalgically of the 1980s, Xu Jilin remarks that it was an era when intellectuals were “most fully involved in public culture and public activities.” For Xu, the 1990s and since, by contrast, has been “a time of decline for China’s public culture,” and he likens it to “the situation in Europe and the United States after the 1970s, when the professionalization of the knowledge system and commercialization of cultural production emerged as two great trends.”13 Xu’s analogy is interesting albeit highly reductive, especially since professional “knowledge systems” and commercial culture were well established in Europe and the United States long before the 1970s, not to mention their incommensurableness with the state-controlled nature of the knowledge system and forms of cultural commercialization introduced into China

64

•

Worrying about China

after 1978. However, by comparing the diminished social agency of Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s with the decline of student and intellectual activism in Europe and the United States after the 1970s, Xu also indicates his interest in reading Chinese public culture within the context of global trends. In making this comparison, he implies that the decline of public culture in Europe and the United States some twenty years earlier should serve as a cautionary tale for the present-day decline of public culture in a late-developing China. In their critiques of mainland intellectual praxis since the 1990s, Wang and Xu identify obstacles to “creating values” or voicing public concerns and in so doing affirm critical inquiry as selfless activity insofar as they imply that such inquiry is intended to benefit China or “the people.” But precisely because the discourse of sixiang (as Chinese thought) typically situates scholarship and critical inquiry in the broader nationalistic context of improving the nation and benefiting one’s fellow citizens, the rapid professionalization of intellectual praxis since the 1990s has also produced certain unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) incongruities between the traditional raison d’être of speaking on everyone’s behalf and the newer professional demand of speaking as an academic. Indeed, it is precisely because worrying about China encourages the presumption of moral rectitude (on the part of those who worry) that insinuations of selfish interests masquerading as ostensibly selfless concerns in the work of one’s rivals are common and unremarkable features of Sinophone critical discourse. Since the provision of correct ideas (whether as criticisms of the status quo or as proposals for the future) is still frequently held to be the sine qua non of Chinese critical inquiry, it is not surprising that in the moment of intensified academic market competition, the divided producers of this discourse should accuse their rivals’ articulations of “Chinese problems” for being not only flawed in argumentation but also motivated by selfish interests. The private benefits that some individuals are perceived to have gained from publishing their critical concerns have been used to accuse these same individuals (who are often well placed in the mainland Chinese academic hierarchy) of being less than morally upright, even hypocritical. A telling example of this new intellectual ambivalence can be found in the controversy that raged over the “Cheung Kong-Reading awards” in 2000, an initiative of the community service arm of the Cheung Kong Group founded by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing,

Divided over China

•

65

which provided the largest monetary prizes ever awarded for academic publications in mainland China. The published polemics that constitute this controversy indicate that the divisions which have emerged in the Chinese intellectual world are also a consequence of the growing importance of market rewards for intellectual labor, especially in the context of reduced state funding. Much of this controversy included criticism directed at Wang Hui for failing to decline the prize he was awarded. His critics averred that, as coeditor of the journal Reading, which organized the awards, Wang should have been automatically excluded from consideration, even though he had stated that he was overseas at the time and was not involved in the selection process. Broader questions of procedural fairness were raised in relation to perceived irregularities in the selection process and, as commentaries on this topic multiplied on the Internet, the debate acquired an increasingly vituperative tone. In this regard, while accusations of foul play, nepotism, and hypocrisy were couched in the high-minded terms of defending the interests of fair play and procedural transparency, several of the essays and commentaries in which these accusations appeared included personal attacks on the moral integrity of the award recipients, with the insinuation that their awards were based more on the closeness of their association with the journal Reading and less on academic merit.14 Moreover, as Sinophone critical discourse has become increasingly circumscribed by the translated vocabulary of EuroAmerican scholarship, its language has diversified and become distanced from the relatively homogeneous idiom of worrying about China that prevailed in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, the valorization of academic expertise as the proper way of producing correct or beneficial ideas has led to the preferred self-identification of many as “academics” or “scholars” (xuezhe, xueren) whose primary task, they now claim, is to provide expert knowledge restricted to one’s field of research endeavor, as opposed to the much more prevalent use of the term “intellectual” in the 1980s, a time when the term connoted a quite different radicalized (and unrestricted) intellectual profile.15 This shift has occurred in tandem with the changed circumstances of intellectual life in China that resulted from the expansion of the market economy. As academic salaries began to compare unfavorably with those of entrepreneurs and professionals in the commercial sector, many intellectuals abandoned their academic careers to seek alternative and

66

•

Worrying about China

more financially profitable means of making a living in commerce, a trend dubbed as “plunging into the sea” (xia hai) in the early 1990s.16 Since 1998, the Chinese government’s introduction of the 985 and 211 Projects, aimed at accelerating the development of leading Chinese universities into world-class institutions, has produced a modest rise in academic salaries and competition among academics for appointments at those universities.17 For those who chose to remain in the academy, the rate at which a person produces publications has become crucially linked to his or her career prospects, in ways that increasingly resemble the conditions of academic work in most market economies, and manuscript fees have become a crucial secondary income source.18 With faculty restructuring at Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2003 and 2004, the trend was set for similar policies of restructuring to occur at other universities in China. Since such restructuring involves the application of quantifiable marketposition criteria in assessing the productivity of both individual academics and the institutions where they are located, mainland Chinese universities and research institutions are being brought into the rationalistic domain of what Simon Marginson has evocatively critiqued as the extension of Hayekian “market naturalism” into the university sector. Under “market naturalism,” all will be encouraged to see competition (for publishing contracts, research funds, student enrolments, etc.) as a self-evident good even as the academic marketplace remains highly uneven and skewed toward enhancing the further accomplishments of already successful academics and institutions of prestige,19 and this is an unsurprising consequence that such competitive policies seem invariably to engender. In the practical context of increased competition among intellectuals for the material rewards of the still only nascent Chinese academic marketplace, the prominence of one’s published presence has become a significant determinant of one’s career prospects. In reflecting on the decline of the public intellectual since the 1990s, Xu Jilin writes that rapid professionalization of the mainland intellectual scene has led to “the absence of a common language among scholars based in different disciplines” and to their “changed attitude to writing, facing the academy and turned away from the public, which has sundered the organic relation between intellectuals and their reading public, leading them to form, once again, an exclusivist and self-congratulatory stratum.”20 But what is also interesting is that this “absence of a common lan-

Divided over China

•

67

guage” which Xu regrets has not hindered the proliferation (contrary to Xu’s claim) of publications on “Chinese problems” that now feature a range of EuroAmerican-derived idiolects. In their critical engagement, Chinese intellectuals now commonly focus on assessing the flaws of particular “ideological” trends in academic writing and on academic corruption as an undesirable outcome of market competition, since this kind of inquiry is less likely to attract official censure.21 But although the diversity of sophisticated formulations that now circulate in Chinese critical inquiry are in disagreement over what is to be done, nonetheless they still manifest overall agreement on the need for scholarly rigor and intellectual pluralism, together with increasing criticism of plagiarism. The valorization of autonomy, implicit in widespread affirmations of academic norms and intellectual pluralism, is commonly interpreted as the necessity of maintaining a clear distance from politics. In mainland China, this means that one should steer clear of taking an explicit position for or against the Party-state. Indeed, it is for this reason that the late classicist and historian Chen Yinque (widely claimed to have maintained his distance from the Party-state during the Maoist era) has come to be posthumously revered by many intellectuals as an exemplary pure scholar (chuncui xueren) and a model of intellectual autonomy.22 But unlike the kind of private autonomy that is typically affirmed in Anglophone scholarship as the right of the individual to speak and act as he or she chooses (but in ways that do not adversely affect others or hinder social cooperation),23 the kind of autonomy that is valorized in Sinophone scholarship remains decidedly oriented toward a public goal. Whereas the Western or Anglophone private individual who pursues an alternative way of life may remain neutral, becoming embroiled in politics only as a consequence of encountering opposition or prejudice, the Sinophone advocate of autonomy is constitutively focused on achieving political reform, even as he or she denounces the influence of any form of politics over scholarship and strives to promote pure scholarship. The contemporary Sinophone distinction between politics and scholarship is derived, among other things, from a key moment in Chinese intellectual history alleged to have occurred in 1918 when the eminent May Fourth thinker Hu Shi famously declared that he and his friends had made a pact to disengage from participation in or discussion of politics for twenty years in order to devote their energies to cultural research and pedagogical activities. This distinction between politics and

68

•

Worrying about China

scholarship, rejected outright during the years of Maoist rule and accompanied by a state-sponsored attack on Hu Shi’s “negative” legacy in the 1950s, has acquired renewed significance in Chinese critical inquiry since the 1990s. But there are many who also regard this distinction as equivocal. The political scientist Wu Guoguang argues, for instance, that Hu’s declared avoidance of politics should be understood in relation to the emphasis he placed on the “intellectual-cultural foundation” (sixiang wenhua jichu) of politics at the time of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, a position which constitutes a political attempt on Hu’s part to lay the groundwork for “a systematic and serious critique and reform” of “the extant Chinese civilization” as the necessary first step toward effective political reform.24 Scholarship distinguished from politics in these specific terms of a practice that “disavows” politics, in order to strengthen the possibilities of political reform through the pursuit of scholarly excellence as the foundation of such reform, has little in common with the notion of autonomy as an individual, private matter. When Chinese intellectuals conceive of critical inquiry as a selfless pursuit aimed at achieving a collective good, they encounter in the very language they use unavoidable traces of both the Confucian notion of self-cultivation as an instrument for achieving social unity (implicit in xiu qi zhi ping) and the Maoist reinterpretation of this notion as the cultivation of the revolutionary self, as Jiwei Ci puts it, whose “loyalty to the state must always override loyalty to family and friends.” This characteristically Chinese conflation of public and private concerns can be productively explored in terms of the role that altruism plays in Chinese conceptions of the moral good. Ci writes that what is “crucially symptomatic . . . is the specific meaning that altruism has in Chinese morality, namely, wusi, selflessness or complete altruism.” He observes that during the Maoist era, this mode of selflessness reached an extreme in which everyone was enjoined to “take as one’s sole duty the promotion of the interests of others” that set up “a moral world in which no one has any interest for anyone else to promote.” Ci argues that the burgeoning and general moral decrepitude and cynicism that set in after the death of Mao was a direct and inevitable consequence of the increasing untenability of these inflated ideals of collectivism and altruism—the precise ideals, Ci observes, that had once been so powerful in transforming the masses into virtual “empty vessels” serving the patriarchal will. But he also notes that despite this post-Maoist loss of genuine political belief among mainland Chinese,

Divided over China

•

69

mere “verbal expression of the correct beliefs” came to stand in for “a sufficient and sometimes a necessary condition for the demonstration of belief.”25 In other words, although complete altruism was revealed to be an untenable goal, the rhetoric of altruism remained and continued to function as politically correct speech under authoritarian Party-state rule. Indeed, the rhetoric of altruism remains implicit in President Hu Jintao’s recent 2005 campaign to achieve a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui).26 Thus while the moral authority of such post-Maoist official slogans is slight by comparison with the force that such slogans once commanded as integral elements of a widely shared revolutionary creed, the rhetorical forms remain. Indeed, Ci argues that the authority of the postMaoist Party-state is sustained by brute force alone since it “could no longer serve as a work ethic.” For Ci, the collapse of Mao’s utopian project ushered in a “more pragmatic social order,” but an order that was bereft of powerful moral reasons for encouraging social unity. He writes with passion that “henceforth society could be kept together only by force, by convenience, by cowardice, by habit, and by what little remained of simple humanity. Not a very happy state of affairs for those Chinese who survived Mao. But then the morality was not designed for their benefit in the first place.”27 Ci’s Anglophone critique of the Maoist conflation of political and moral goods echoes a similar concern in Sinophone critical writings, one that is most commonly couched in the abstract terms of assessing the adverse consequences of radicalism or the negative legacy of the May Fourth era. What we must keep in mind then is that even though Sinophone acts of critical inquiry are now turned away from radicalism toward the pursuit of cultural integrity and academic norms, they continue to bear the burden of selflessness that was first institutionalized in Confucian habits of writing. This notion of selflessness became radicalized in the twentieth century, first through the May Fourth valorization of self-sacrifice on the part of the enlightened (or cultivated) self in pursuit of collective redemption, and then through the wholly politicized Maoist notion of wusi as total devotion to the pursuit of Party-prescribed revolutionary goals. When Ci argues that contemporary mainland Chinese culture lacks the kind of limited altruism that emerged in the West as a way to regulate conflicts of interest among individuals “in the context of the simultaneous development of capitalism and individualism,” he echoes the

70

•

Worrying about China

desire of many post-Maoist producers of sixiang to establish and defend new norms of knowing that would help to promote a new kind of social justice in response to China’s transition to a market economy. Ci makes clear his preference for “the Western concept of justice” when he writes that it “requires of members of civic society not benevolence or selfdenial, but fairness, such that one claims for oneself neither more nor less than what is one’s due in a given system of justice.”28 The advocacy of academic norms that has grown out of this desire among mainland intellectuals to promote social justice since the 1990s is aimed, on the one hand, at defending scientific and secular reason (lixing) against the legacy of an erstwhile Maoist utopianism, and, on the other hand, at promoting rationality itself in the moralistic sense of an ideological foundation for social unity forged through consensus. If we return to Qin Hui’s statement that “the question of gravest importance for a large family experiencing difficulty in continuing to live together is often not whether the family should break up but how the family property should be divided,” we can see that he invokes a principle of fairness that reflects Ci’s notion of limited altruism as one that rests on “the value judgment of private interests as morally legitimate objects of pursuit.”29 In the context of China’s rapidly growing market economy and an equally rapid professionalization of intellectual life, producers of sixiang continue to subscribe to an attenuated form of altruism insofar as they cast themselves in prose, as did their May Fourth and revolutionary Communist predecessors, as enlightened members of the national family whose self-arrogated role it is to guide others to a better future, by dint of their insight or prescience. But what is also clear is that this Sinophone orientation toward a selfless or altruistic mode of critical inquiry encourages each producer of sixiang to project his or her ideas as constitutive of true knowledge. Thus if the Maoist era encouraged an extreme form of altruism where expressions of selflessness were circumscribed by what the chairman deemed to be the proper collective interest at any given moment, then the absence of this formidable patriarchal authority in the post-Maoist era has allowed intellectuals to reinterpret selflessness in terms of speaking/ writing on behalf of others, guided only by the authority and exemplarity each has chosen to accord to a particular set of ideas, in an environment where the largely discredited authority of Party theory is maintained through coercion. It is worth noting that because post-Maoist sixiang is habitually cast

Divided over China

•

71

in the elevated role of an ongoing critique of problems in China and, by implication, authoritarian one-party rule, state policing and censorship have served only to enhance rather than to undermine its popular moral authority as critical inquiry. But what is ironic is that intellectuals such as Dai Qing, Liu Xiaobo, and Yu Jie, whose publications have been banned, can no longer participate in the public exchange of sixiang, at least within mainland China.30 Deprived of frank and robust criticisms by individuals who have spoken out at their own personal expense, the mainland Chinese reading public is instead offered a range of far milder and generally oblique criticisms of the status quo that have been rendered “safe” for publication within scholastic confines. This circumscribed inquiry, whose producers and publishers are wary of offending the state censors, is constitutive of a troubling altruism that pervades Chinese intellectual praxis. This is troubling because, on the one hand, it holds critical inquiry to an entrenched ideal of benefiting others through scholarship but, on the other hand, it is a moral attitude that encourages magisterial judgment evocative of the very patriarchal authority it challenges. In other words, because the rhetoric of Sinophone critical inquiry projects the durable image of the exemplary intellectual who toils selflessly to create values for all other members of the national family, it also implies that the intellectual can claim an in-locoparentis role for himself as someone fit to judge others in accordance with the values so determined or “created.” In this context, “Mao’s Thought” is arguably the most grandiose attempt to date by a twentiethcentury Chinese intellectual (indeed, the Supreme Intellectual) to save the national family through his particular set of correct ideas or zhengquede sixiang, a phrase popularized by Mao that remains current in the language of mainland officials and intellectuals. The paternalism implicit in this style of inquiry is not surprising if one considers that the language of present-day Chinese officials and intellectuals is replete with the rhetorical traces of the moral responsibility incumbent on the “cultivated self” as the “father-mother-official” (fumu guan). This term formerly referred to Confucian scholars in their public role as magistrates but has remained in popular use in the twentieth century and beyond. The longevity of phrases, such as fumu guan, and axioms, such as xiu qi zhi ping, has ensured that, at least in its poetics, contemporary Chinese critical inquiry remains a discursive terrain where intellectual or ideological disagreements can readily be couched in the would-be patristic rhetoric of providing the correct path for others to

72

•

Worrying about China

follow. That Chinese critical inquiry remains haunted by the ancient rhetoric of cultivating the self in order ultimately to establish an enlightened universal realm is evident when intellectuals accuse their rivals of producing work that is detrimental to China’s needs, or of pursuing selfish rather than selfless goals. The factionalization of mainland Chinese intellectual praxis that this requisite altruistic disposition has encouraged is further complicated by the radically altered conditions of intellectual labor consequent on professionalization and market demands in recent times, as we shall explore in some detail below.

Rivals of the Way: New Left versus Liberal Proposals Intellectuals who have come to be labeled as the New Left are arguably the most prominent among those who stand accused of producing morally flawed ideas to advance their own careers. In the mid-1990s, those commonly named as belonging to this faction (pai) were mainlandborn academics based overseas or in Hong Kong, such as Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, and Wang Shaoguang. By the late 1990s, when mainlandbased academics such as Wang Hui and Han Yuhai weighed in with their critiques of globalization’s adverse impact on China, the New Left had become a generic label for anyone who was perceived to be using “Western theoretical props” to provide a critique of capitalism, whether they received their training in China or overseas. As Liu Qingfeng observes of this rapid polemical development, critics of the New Left held that these scholars were “promoting ideas even more extreme than those held by these fossilized [Party-state] hardliners, such as calling for a return to the Mao era. Thus mainland-based scholars felt it was clearly scandalous to accord such ideas the status of rational argument.” Among other things, those labeled “New Leftist” in orientation were also criticized for having unrealistic views of contemporary Chinese society. Referring to Cui Zhiyuan, one person told Liu (in the late 1990s) that “when he was living in China he was still in his early twenties and he saw China in passing like someone taking a train ride. Although he returns to China every year he now lives in the United States and has become someone who looks out at China from the window of an airplane. He is incapable of having any real sense of China’s problems.”31 Such accusations are common in private conversations among Chinese intellectuals and imply that the accuser, unlike the accused, is gen-

Divided over China

•

73

uinely concerned about China, as opposed to being motivated, in part or whole, by self-interest or mere professional interest. But what is ironic is that Cui returned to China in late 2004 to take up a professorial appointment at Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management in Beijing, established with funding from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In this new capacity, Cui has become even more influential within China as a leading proponent of the New Left vision of noncapitalist reform, with its emphasis on redressing issues of poverty and Chinese workers’ rights.32 The degree of animosity that Cui generated in the mid- to late 1990s among mainland-based intellectuals who regarded themselves as liberals was largely the result of a series of critiques he produced of their proposals for political and social reform. Cui first published his Marxistinflected views on institutional innovation (zhidu chuangxin) and called in 1994 for a second movement to “liberate thinking” in the influential Hong Kong-based journal Twenty-First Century.33 In essence, he argued that it was necessary to redress flawed thinking that had developed out of the first officially sponsored “Movement to Liberate Thinking” in the heyday of Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He claimed that the indiscriminate celebration of the market economy that resulted from this first movement had produced a “fetishization of institutions” (zhidu baiwujiao) in mainland Chinese intellectual circles. For Cui, and for mainland-based Chinese intellectuals who agreed with him, intellectual activism of the 1980s should be viewed as an object of critical evaluation and the rapid publication of new ideas associated with “Cultural Fever” of the 1980s should accordingly be regarded as an unfortunate trend of embracing Western ideas with neither sufficient attention to the specific contexts in which these ideas had appeared nor the issues they originally addressed. As Cui put it in his 1994 article, this produced a “fetishization of institutions” insofar as “the specific arrangements of a certain institution were equated with an abstract ideal, for instance, by taking American corporations to mean the ‘market economy’ or by taking the two-party system to be the equivalent of ‘democracy.’ ” Cui averred that by drawing on the work of Anglophone scholars in the fields of new evolutionism, analytical Marxism, and critical legal studies, Chinese intellectuals could acquire greater critical acuity in their approach to social, political, and economic problems in mainland China. He regarded indiscriminate valorization of something akin to “the system of developed Western

74

•

Worrying about China

nations” (Xifang fada guojiade zhidu) as the idealization of an abstract misnomer that obscured “the absence of unity among the systems adopted by developed Western nations.” Basing his argument on recent debates in EuroAmerican scholarship and within U.S. public culture relating to the relative merits of different “institutional models” (zhidu yangban), Cui drew a striking contrast between what he saw as the decisive “abandonment of the concept of a unified ‘Western capitalism’ ” in the international academic and policy-making context, on the one hand, and the stagnant adherence to this obsolete chimera among mainland Chinese intellectuals, on the other hand.34 He was especially critical of mainland Chinese advocates of liberalism who were, in his view, blinkered by their abstract idealizations and who repeated what he called the classic liberalist “conflation of the recognition and guarantee of basic human rights with the recognition and guarantee of ‘absolute property rights.’ ” Drawing on the work of Roberto Unger, Cui argued that critical legal studies would provide a welcome correction to this distorted view by enabling one to see that the unexamined conflation of human with property rights was tantamount to placing absolute property rights above that of human life and freedom.35 Cui proposed an alternative way of understanding certain contemporary developments in China as constitutive of a productive form of institutional innovation that was adjusted to suit China’s present-day conditions. He singled out for particular mention rural enterprises based in the “shareholding cooperative system” as providing a viable alternative form of economic organization that reflected “its emergence in the depths of Chinese soil, while also providing an institutional innovation of global relevance.” He claimed that those who viewed the shareholding cooperative system as a hybrid “transitional phase” in China’s shift from a planned to a market economy tended to fetishize a certain “genuine shareholding system” as an abstract market economy ideal. He further criticized such “fetishists” for neglecting the “innovative potential” of the shareholding cooperative system in developing a more equitable form of economic organization based on both the logic of making profits and the communal principles of cooperative labor. In this context, Cui also argued that those who valorized the abstractness of a “genuine shareholding system” failed to see that “it was not an inherent demand of the market economy but a product of compromise reached among various contending social forces within the broader context of capitalism.”36

Divided over China

•

75

From within the purview of Anglophone scholarship, Cui’s critique can be read, quite uncontroversially, as an attempt to disaggregate holistic and capacious accounts of the Chinese market economy in order to affirm specific kinds of locally derived communal and cooperative modes of economic production. Within mainland Sinophone scholarship, however, Cui’s writings were regarded by many as lending theoretical legitimacy to Marxism and thereby giving tacit support to Party-state rule. In the 1990s, the New Left was a pejorative term used by Cui’s critics to disparage his work as compliant with Party theory. Although this was a label that Cui and others who were so-named refused to acknowledge, it became a ready caption for their “style” of scholarship, despite their protestations. Moreover, because “extreme Leftism” was now associated with the Cultural Revolution era, the labeling of any project as “Leftist” in character made it resonant with the qualities of “utopianism” and “doctrinalism” that were being conclusively assigned to this allegedly “aberrant” historical era in post-Maoist official and intellectual discourses. The difficulty here is that critical engagement with Eurocentrism and the adverse consequences of the capitalist global economy is largely based in Marxian-inflected EuroAmerican scholarship and, within the mainland Sinophone context, this language lends itself to being caricaturized and discredited as a return to Maoist politics. Thus even though Cui’s stated aim is to facilitate a second liberation of thought, one that would, as he puts it, be “based in the rich depths of Chinese soil, from which certain sprouts of institutional and theoretical innovations that have already appeared in China might be nurtured and strengthened toward their maturation,” his critics averred that his ideas were not only disingenuous but highly inappropriate within a post-Maoist context.37 Critics of Cui’s ideas were opposed to the way in which he cast certain aspects of the widely condemned Maoist command economy in the positive light of indigenous socialist innovations. Cui had argued that particular economic practices that were undertaken as part of Mao’s socialist experiments of the 1950s and 1960s were of relevance for presentday reforms. In defense of this argument, Cui noted, among other things, that the prominent historian Wu Si had observed that the 1960s’ Dazhai experiment had a “rational element” insofar as it focused attention on issues of “water conservation for cultivated land” and utilized “Chen Yonggui’s ‘method of deep hoeing.’ ”38 This aspect of Cui’s work led his detractors, such as the Beijing-based philosopher Xu Youyu, to

76

•

Worrying about China

aver that Cui had deliberately distorted Wu Si’s work on Chen Yonggui while failing to consider Wu’s argument in its entirety. In accusing Cui, Xu does not mention that Cui had also argued that “formalism and loss of peasant property” adversely affected the Dazhai experiment and were a consequence of Mao’s utopian vision. Rather, Xu chose to repeat the comments of Bian Wu (a pseudonym adopted by Qin Hui), who had earlier criticized Cui for intellectual duplicity in adopting a pro-U.S. attitude in a coauthored essay with Roberto Unger while taking an antiU.S. stance in his own Chinese essay.39 It is important to note that these criticisms of Cui’s work appeared at a time when Chinese scholars who were trained and based overseas had come to be perceived as a specific and significant group in mainland Chinese intellectual discourse. Chinese critical inquiry of the 1990s differed from the 1980s insofar as whether someone was mainland-trained and based, or had received graduate training and/or worked overseas, acquired a new significance in the assessment of that person’s work. This was because overseas-trained academics such as Cui Zhiyuan were gaining prominence as “agents” (dailiren) of particular EuroAmerican theories or perspectives in Sinophone scholarship. By comparison with their largely monolingual mainland-based counterparts, who were able to read foreign works closely only if the works had appeared in Chinese translation, these bi- and even trilingual academics demonstrated a distinct and often formidable familiarity with recent publications in EuroAmerican (and primarily Anglophone) scholarship. Their Sinophone writings referred to the published findings of a large range of international scholars that far exceeded the scope of foreign scholarship in translation available to their mainland-based and monolingual counterparts. In reaction, their scholarship came to be disparaged by their mainland-based critics as an arrogant display of self-claimed mastery over foreign scholarship. Perceived differences of views between academics who had received their graduate training overseas and those who had received their graduate training in China soon became an issue of contention, with the latter typically according greater authenticity to their own mainland-based speaking positions. But while it was easy to mock the overseas-based Cui Zhiyuan for seeing China “from the window of an airplane,” when the Beijing-based Wang Hui argued in his controversial 1997 essay that democracy was not an inevitable outcome of China’s market economy, Cui’s critics could hardly accuse him of lacking actual experience of the lived everyday in China.

Divided over China

•

77

Like Cui, Wang was and remains critical of the ways in which keywords such as “market,” “society,” “modernity,” “democracy,” and “liberalism” circulate in Chinese intellectual discourse as if their meanings were self-evident. Much of his inquiry since the 1990s is focused on examining how political, historical, cultural, and economic forces have shaped the meanings ascribed to these conceptual abstractions, and in this context he often interrogates their unexamined use in contemporary Sinophone critical discourse. For instance, in comparing the 1980s and 1990s, Wang writes: “At this historical juncture, New Enlightenment thought has seemingly become an empty moral gesture (whereas formerly it so vehemently condemned moralism). It is unable to examine critically ubiquitous capitalist activities and actual economic relations; it also has lost its ability to diagnose and criticize the problems of a Chinese modernity that is already part and parcel of a global capitalist system.”40 Wang is especially critical of the Chinese liberal argument that market mechanisms, rendered effective through legislation and policy implementation, would eventually lead to a significant shrinking of the state’s power and usher democracy into China. In the same year (1997) that Wang’s article appeared in the Hainan-based journal Frontiers, the economist and journalist He Qinglian published her celebrated booklength exposé of corruption in the process of China’s market reforms in which she defended the importance of legislating market mechanisms toward an effective separation of powers.41 As she put it: Political power should have been separated from the economy in such a way that government would serve as a rule maker and arbiter, and nothing else. In this sense, there ought to be a fundamental change whereby government is no longer the center of economic life as, institutionally speaking, administrative power is restrained and insulated from economic activities. Of course, this kind of reform can only be carried out via noneconomic-sector reform, something that cannot be avoided if developing countries like China are to continue their march toward modernization.42

Since the late 1990s, Chinese liberals have consistently emphasized the importance of establishing principles of formal equality in policy reform and legislation, and it could be argued that reforms undertaken since Hu Jintao assumed leadership of the Party-state in 2003 reflect, to some extent, the importance of property rights that liberal intellectuals had advocated in the preceding years.43 As part of the liberal advocacy

78

•

Worrying about China

of formal equality, the distinction between “capitalist accumulation” and “primitive accumulation” gained importance in Chinese critical discourse as it provided liberal intellectuals with the means to affirm the former (as the proper way ahead for China) against the latter (as constitutive of official corruption in the guise of market reform). In explaining this distinction, Qin Hui uses the biblical trope “original sin” to claim that, even though “actual inequalities” are unavoidable since greed (as the original sin of capitalism) is part of human nature, nonetheless the implementation of formal equality would provide an effective albeit limited form of constraint against such inequalities.44 The exasperation of so-called New Left intellectuals with this mode of reasoning can easily be detected in statements such as the following by Wang Hui: “Capital is penetrating to every corner of social and political life, and the processes of modernization are plunging all of us into multiple social crises such as the population explosion, environmental degradation, imbalances in the social-distribution system, corruption, and the associated political conditions that are inseparable from these issues. Yet the incredible fact is that the Chinese intellectual world avoids discussion of any of them.”45 As the above excerpts demonstrate, one basic difference between New Left and liberal (or liberal “third way”) proposals for the way ahead is that while the former is critical of the claim that capitalism provides the best model of economic and political development, the latter affirms capitalism in precisely these terms, whether unequivocally or somewhat ambivalently as an “original sin” requiring effective constraints in law. In this regard, because most intellectuals of the New Left persuasion advocate one or another form of Chinese cultural integrity in resistance to the implicit Eurocentrism of modernization theories, indigenization (bentuhua) has also become an issue of contestation since the late 1990s. A striking example of this advocacy of cultural integrity can be found in Wang Hui’s interpretation of Mao’s socialist experiments as constitutive of what he claims to be an ongoing critique in modern Chinese thought of “the many kinds of shortcomings arising out of Western capitalist modernization.”46 By describing Mao’s socialism as “both an ideology of modernization and a critique of EuroAmerican capitalist modernization,” Wang problematizes the idea of modernization as a kind of universal one-size-fits-all model based on EuroAmerican accounts of development.

Divided over China

•

79

He provocatively defends Mao’s socialism as an alternative model of modernization at a time when it had been so widely dismissed as “doctrinal,” “utopian,” and “feudal” in post-Maoist intellectual discourse. Wang argues that “those Western scholars who rely on modernization theory to analyze Chinese history reduce the problem of Chinese modernization to a problem of scientific and technological development, that is, to the transformation of an agrarian economy into an urban industrial one.” He critiques the assumptions inherent in Western conceptions of modernization as privileging only “the process of becoming capitalist” (drawing on “the history of European capitalism and development”) and he sees these assumptions as informing, in turn, the Marxist conception of “modernization as a mode of capitalist production.”47 In contrast, Wang proposes an alternative understanding of the Chinese socialist movement not only as modernization driven in the normative Western reading (focused “primarily on transforming the state, the economy, the military, and science from a condition of backwardness to an advanced condition”) but also as an alternative modernization informed by its “socialist ideological content and values” toward the production of a noncapitalist “teleological historical perspective and worldview.”48 As he puts it: “It is a type of thinking through which one’s social practice is understood as clearing a path to this ultimate goal, a kind of attitude that connects the meaning of one’s existence with the particular era to which one belongs. Because of this, socialist modernization is a concept that not only points to the difference in institutional form between Chinese modernization and capitalist modernization but one that also provides its own set of value-perceptions.”49 By defining Mao Zedong Thought as an “antimodern theory of modernization” and situating it within a historical tradition of “Chinese thought from the late Qing onward,” Wang effectively expands the scope of modernization to include conflicting capitalist and socialist as well as varied cultural senses, resisting the simplistic synonymity commonly assumed between “market” development (since the Party avoids using the word “capitalist”) and “modernization” in mainland Chinese official and intellectual discourses since the 1980s. He goes on to explain that “on the level of values and history, Mao Zedong’s socialism is a type of modern anticapitalist modernization theory” which sought to use “the socialist system of public ownership to establish a prosperous and powerful modern nation-state while at the same time striving to eliminate the ‘three differences’—between workers and peasants,

80

•

Worrying about China

between town and country, and between mental and manual labor.”50 To foreground the sense of historical mission implicit in Mao’s project, Wang pointedly notes that “Mao Zedong often said that his socialist revolutionary project was the heir to and the development of Sun Yatsen’s national revolution; in reality, he saw his revolution as solving the basic problems that arose out of China’s modernization movement over the first half of the twentieth century and as determining the future direction of this modernization movement.”51 By describing Mao’s socialism as “a critique of EuroAmerican capitalist modernization” Wang is able to argue that it “is not a critique of modernization as such. On the contrary, it is a critique produced against the capitalist form [xingshi] or phase [ jieduan] of modernization, based in a revolutionary ideology and a nationalistic position.” He hastens to add that “from its political consequences, one can see that Mao’s social practice of eliminating the three differences also eliminated the possibility of society existing as a category independent of the state, which not only created an unprecedentedly huge and all-encompassing state bureaucracy but also brought all aspects of social life within the organizational scope of the vanguard Party.” Wang points out that he is not arguing in favor of Maoist socialism but rather that he reads it in “the historical context” (lishi yujing) of “China’s search for modernity,” which was shaped by “the historical emergence of imperialist expansion and the crisis of modern capitalist society.”52 In this regard, he notes that in calling Mao’s theory of modernization “antimodern,” he refers not so much to “traditional elements” in Mao’s thinking but to the resistance that Mao displayed against both imperialism and capitalism. When Wang sought to redescribe Mao’s Thought as an alternative form of modernity, he dignified it with the status of theory (a propositional account with its own redemptive truth potential) in ways that his detractors clearly found scandalous. After 1978, Chinese intellectuals had availed themselves of the opportunity provided by the post-Maoist state’s denunciation of “extreme Leftism” surreptitiously to negate state socialism in the politically correct idiom of “Partyspeak.”53 Schooled in the vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism and encountering it daily in the workplace, mainland-based intellectuals are skilled in manipulating the rhetorical effects of Partyspeak. An instance of such manipulation appears in the liberal intellectual Ren Jiantao’s critique of Wang Hui and other New Leftists. Ren utilizes the oft-quoted Hegelian phrase, the “cunning of Reason”

Divided over China

•

81

(lixingde jiaoji, along with its negative connotations in contemporary Sinophone discourse), to accuse the New Left of displaying “a position of affinity with traditional socialism and a fondness for Maoist socialism, an affirmation of direct democracy, the centrality of politics, passionate fervor, and a yearning for a purely idealistic poetic romance.” Ren denigrates their proposals by enlisting evaluative criteria that had first entered the official discourse during the 1980s, as part of the Partystate’s attempts to distance itself from the “traditional socialism” of its Maoist past and the Cultural Revolution.54 Repeated use of these coded allusions has facilitated the normalization of post-Maoist binaries like secular versus utopian socialism; scientific or academic theory versus dogma; realism versus idealism; rational ideas versus subjective opinion—dyadic forms in which each of the first terms is assigned a positive value against the negative value of the second term. Thus when Ren describes the New Left mode of inquiry as constitutive of nostalgia for Maoist socialism, he is deliberately using phrases that would enable him to project a family resemblance between the discourse of the New Left and the much-denigrated discourse of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. This allows him to aver that “their dissatisfaction with the turbulence that has accompanied contemporary Chinese society’s advance toward practicality” is not only impractical but potentially damaging. He argues that the New Left would undermine the practicality (wushi) necessary for “Chinese society’s advance” by wrongly attacking the kind of turbulence that would, as he implies, naturally arise in the course of mainland Chinese society’s shift from the evil of doctrinalism to the unequivocal good of practicality. Indeed, in the very next sentence Ren avers, with magisterial clarity, that “in short, the basis of the ‘New Left’ appeal for ‘regress’ [huigui] is the axial significance [zhouxin yiyi] of democratic participation and the deterministic effect of so-called ‘comprehensive socialism’ [quanmian shehuizhuyi] in our era.”55 In this manner, the very notion of democratic participation (or direct democracy), when rhetorically linked to words and phrases that have clearly been assigned a negative value in contemporary Chinese intellectual discourse (regress versus progress; determinism versus empiricism and science), can be negatively inflected to insinuate the “fact” that the notion itself is an undesirable legacy of the Cultural Revolution. The connection that Ren forges between New Left views and “comprehensive socialism” is particularly interesting since the latter is positively

82

•

Worrying about China

inflected when it appears in present-day official discourse to designate the Party-state’s nation-building efforts of the 1950s and 1960s through the development of its planned economy. As a synonym for Maoist socialism, however, “comprehensive socialism” also has a distinctly negative connotation. Indeed, Ren does not merely use this well-worn phrase casually to denigrate the New Left; he is keen to establish that it appears in the published transcript of an interview with Wang Hui, effectively furnishing further empirical “proof” for the associations that he has already indicted between the New Left, authoritarianism, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution.56 Ren draws here on an established tactic within official discourse—accusation via allusion to historical “facts” that have been judged as negative—to cast doubt over the validity of New Left proposals. In brief, while so-called New Left intellectuals regard the formulations of their liberal detractors as obscuring the manifest “facts” of social unrest introduced by a rampant commercialism, liberal intellectuals counter with the claim that accelerated market growth is necessary for nurturing democracy in China. In this context, many Chinese liberals credit Max Weber and Friedrich von Hayek with having provided them with the critical insight that the lack of individual freedom in China is the outcome of Communist authoritarian rule. For these liberal intellectuals, the Hayekian view of individual happiness as a pursuit dependent on the “spontaneous ordering” of social practice under free-market conditions is nothing short of a true proposition. The use of Hayek’s formulations to describe an ideal market economy, guided by “spontaneously” evolved market movements under the rule of a “rational system of law” and legitimated as the defense of freedom of choice, has provided the contemporary Sinophone discourse of liberalism with its own set of evaluative criteria for distinguishing between, as it were, the positive and the negative “facts” of Chinese “reality.”57 Since the desirability of using a Hayekian idiom to “see” China rests solely on the extent to which its formulations have the appeal of truthstatements to its readers, the factual status accorded to these formulations can be asserted or implied only through an implicit justification of belief as truth. Quoting Alasdair MacIntyre as an alternative authority, Wang Hui observes that because the concept of fact is genealogically bound up with evaluation, it is “only when this concept is separated from the conditions that engendered it that one can establish the separation between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ as a universal philosophical proposi-

Divided over China

•

83

tion.”58 But precisely because Wang Hui and other New Leftists are participants in a critical discourse that abounds with positivistic formulations, they are led to defend their interpretations of Chinese “reality,” which their Hayekian-influenced detractors regard as “distortions” of the same reality viewed through liberal lenses, as if they too were in possession of the proper facts (rather than in possession of a Marxian critical vocabulary). For instance, Wang Hui offers the following evidence to dismiss the liberal argument as flawed but without acknowledging that his diction is distinctly Marxian: “If one regards political freedom as an independent process or considers political reform merely in terms of guaranteeing the fruits of economic reform, thereby neglecting the relations between politics and the economy, then this is actually no different to saying that the economy and the social arrangements to which it gives rise occupy a domain that transcends politics.”59 Similarly, when Xu Youyu describes liberalism as a discourse which “affirms individual freedom, private property, the market economy, a constitutionally guaranteed system (the rule of law, balance of powers),” he does not acknowledge the Hayekian idiom he uses to situate liberalism in opposition to “China’s historical context” and the “mainstream discourse on modernity” under socialism. He declares that the discourse of liberalism has been wrongly “classified as capitalism” and attacked from within China’s “mainstream” socialist discourse. Xu claims that “the facts prove, however, that the kind of socialism with a Stalinist or Maoist trademark has been enormously catastrophic for China.” After listing a series of negative traits typically associated with the Cultural Revolution, he concludes that “even Deng Xiaoping called for a reevaluation of socialism and capitalism.” Xu concludes that liberalism acquired its proper “universal significance” (pubian yiyi) as a result of historically proved “facts,” as if the Hayekian view underpinning these “facts” constitutes the true view. Indeed, he claims that “when the Chinese people reflect on the value of those things that have consistently been wrongly subjected to negation [lilai zaodao fouding]” in the context of “the series of tragic and painful experiences” that they have undergone, they would not be able to deny that liberalism is their path to a better future.60 The common reliance of both liberals and New Leftists on enlisting “facts” to claim the “truth” about China’s situation (rather than to consider the different kinds of vocabulary they utilize) reflects the preva-

84

•

Worrying about China

lence of a positivist as opposed to a self-reflexive style of inquiry in Sinophone scholarship. New Leftists such as Wang Hui and Cui Zhiyuan come closest to a self-reflexive approach in their writings when they scrutinize the connotations of keywords in Chinese intellectual discourse. Their familiarity with contemporary EuroAmerican critical inquiry (the discursive home of self-reflexive praxis) has led them frequently to employ formulations from the EuroAmerican theoretical canon. This, in turn, lends international academic weight to their critiques of the factitious ways in which market growth has come to be discussed in Chinese intellectual discourse. But they are generally not interested in self-reflexivity per se, for instance, as the kind of openended interrogation Derrida undertook of the vocabulary of democracy and justice, toward affirming both the existing scope of what has been achieved in these names and what remains unworded and is yet to come, because our vocabulary remains currently inhospitable to these future events. Rather, Sinophone New Left intellectuals utilize EuroAmerican critical formulations in largely pragmatic and eclectic fashion to defend the importance of socialist values against neoliberal capitalism. Their common concern is that state-engineered positive representations of “market growth” in the discourses of the Party, media, and the academy obscure the range of social, economic, political, and cultural injustices that the reintroduction and rapid expansion of the capitalist mode of production in China has produced. Liberals are equally critical of the disastrous consequences of official corruption that have accompanied China’s economic reform under authoritarian rule.61 Despite consensus on this issue, however, there appears to be general reluctance on the part of those associated with either group to explore possible avenues of intellectual accommodation. Rather, it would appear that the moral agency invested in critical inquiry as sixiang has encouraged a deepening of division. The Internet essayist Wang Zhiquan observes that “[liberals] advocate the establishment of indirect constitutional democracy as a means toward gradual dissolution of social conflict while [New Leftists] promote a radical form of direct democracy as a solution to social injustice. What is interesting is that both regard the other’s proposal as ‘a road to serfdom’ [tongxiang nuyizhi lu].”62 To accuse one’s rival of tempting others toward “serfdom” is to imply that one knows the way to freedom. This is to claim that one possesses the moral authority to distinguish good from bad or true from false, and the assumption of such authority is im-

Divided over China

•

85

plicit in the Sinophone conception of critical inquiry as the provision of correct ideas and the creation of values. The depth of division between liberals and New Leftists reflects the predicament of Chinese intellectuals who are wary, on the one hand, of the Maoist legacy of coercing everyone to subscribe to one singular vision of the good, but who are themselves drawn, on the other hand, to an entrenched ideal of critical inquiry as a selfless act undertaken on behalf of others, which encourages the moral presumption that one’s selflessness is based in a true vision of the good. When the widespread call for establishing academic norms is situated in the context of this altruistic framework, it is not difficult to see that it constitutes a concerted attempt on the part of Chinese intellectuals since the 1990s to give priority to rational discussion and debate in order to discourage the emergence of any intractable vision of the good that ultimately demands conformity from everyone. Liberal and New Leftist arguments over the proper way ahead are, in one sense, equally committed to the establishment of liberal institutions, as can be seen in both the liberal emphasis on legislating formal equality and protecting property rights and the New Leftist advocacy of institutional reform toward greater inclusiveness of sociopolitical participation. This indicates a mutual commitment to social and political reform of the kind that would accommodate different interests and needs against the imposition of a singular vision, especially since the authoritarian Party-state ensures that its own ever-evolving vision remains publicly unchallenged. But because this mutual commitment to defend plural interests and needs has seemingly degenerated into a hardening of competing visions of the good, argued all the way down to the essentially moral criterion of adopting the correct attitude to capitalism, it is a commitment that bears traces of the ancient legacy of “establishing order everywhere” (ping tianxia). After all, this goal’s attainment has traditionally been assumed to require complete agreement on the particular vision of the good being proffered. As a consequence, Chinese intellectuals are more accustomed to write in magisterial fashion about China’s present needs and thereby to assert one particular vision against others, as opposed to exploring, for instance, the good that can come of accommodating as many equally rational preferences as possible, based in different beliefs, without requiring total agreement. But despite the hardening of ideological positions, the liberal versus New Left debate has been productive insofar

86

•

Worrying about China

as it has had the effect of popularizing a certain rational conception of justice under three broad classifications: namely, initial-state justice [qidian gongzheng]; procedural justice [guocheng gongzheng] and end-state or final justice [ jieguo gongzheng].63 In discussing these three classifications, Wang Zhiquan observes that “there is no disagreement between liberal and New Left perspectives on procedural justice (justice defined in terms of process and regulations): they are mainly divided on both end-state and initial-state forms of justice.”64 Attempting a “third way” reconciliation of these divisions, Wang argues that liberal and New Left accounts of justice may be read as complementary. He notes that the liberal insistence on grounding justice in “principles of freedom” provides a rational limit to the New Left privileging of justice as both “initial-state and end-state equality,” preventing equality from assuming the dangerous proportions of a metaphysical and totalizing truth. Wang observes that the New Left focus on equality also and conversely serves to remind liberals of the dangers of overreliance on legislated formal principles of freedom (such as the notion of “equality before the law”), to the extent that “if freedom is emphasized without regard for equality, then the majority of the masses will be ‘free to pursue abject poverty’ [ziyoude yiwu suoyou].”65 Comments such as these indicate that the popularity of taking sides between the named positions of liberalism and the New Left has diminished since 2002, even though the arguments that animated the debate continue to divide the Chinese intellectual scene but in a greater diversity of ways and assisted by quotations or glosses derived from an even greater range of EuroAmerican intellectual “authorities.”66 As mentioned earlier, one adverse aspect of professionalization for Xu Jilin is that it has led intellectuals to be “turned away from the public” in pursuit of academic advancement. The debate between liberals and the New Left is illustrative of the tensions in mainland Chinese intellectual life that professionalization has produced: On the one hand, their writings reflect the enormous influx of (what Zhu Xueqin calls) “imported ideas” that academics and graduate students are now required to master to compete with others in both the Chinese academic marketplace and internationally. On the other hand, because the traditional demand of worrying about China has encouraged intellectuals to press imported ideas into service for the task of proposing correct ideas for China’s perfection, arguments and assertions about a particular vision remain

Divided over China

•

87

dominant, leaving little room for reflection on the contingency of all such visions on the vocabularies in which they happen to be forged.

The Weight of Being a Chinese Intellectual: The Humanistic Spirit and “Postisms” In commenting on the debate between liberals and the New Left, the prominent philosopher Li Zehou (based in the United States since the 1990s) claimed that while the quotational frenzy of both camps had allowed many to display their “mastery of knowledge” in relation to Western scholarship and a knack for “penning lengthy essays,” reading their writings was akin to “being surrounded by fog” and being rendered “dizzy and comatose.” He noted that the denseness of their arguments, together with the Europeanization of their discourse, reflects to some extent a significant advance in mainland Chinese expertise on Western scholarship since the 1980s. But he was much more concerned that the proliferation of texts the debate had produced showed few signs of “an organic link [youji jiehe] with Chinese reality or Chinese tradition, nor creativity in producing an opinion or perspective that is truly one’s own.”67 In these comments, Li invokes a much more traditional way of worrying about China than is displayed in the writings of the authors discussed so far. His unequivocal valorization of the intellectual as a prescient creator of values is not one that theoretically informed Sinophone intellectuals would echo without at least some qualification. But his complaint about the cultural loss that has ensued with the Europeanization of Sinophone intellectual discourse is shared by many, including those (such as Wang Hui) whom Li would likely accuse of perpetrating this very Europeanization. Anxiety over cultural loss as a consequence of both commercialism (through which Western-derived popular culture became dominant) and intellectual professionalization (which produced a kindred dominance of EuroAmerican scholarship) was already being expressed in the early to mid-1990s, most notably through the orchestration of a quasicampaign on the part of several Shanghai-based intellectuals to replenish “the humanistic spirit.” As one of the many texts that appeared on this topic, the widely read published transcript of a 1994 discussion on the topic of “The Humanistic Spirit: Is It Possible and How Is It Possible?”

88

•

Worrying about China

conducted by Zhang Rulun, Wang Xiaoming, Zhu Xueqin, and Chen Sihe, provides a collective interpretation of the phrase’s significance. In essence, for these four prominent Shanghai-based intellectuals, the humanistic spirit is the spirit of the Chinese humanities, one that they perceived to be in decline and in need of reinvigoration through the recultivation of values derived from traditional Chinese thought. Implicit in their concern over the perceived loss of the humanistic spirit was the distinctly nationalistic view that if Chinese culture could be so reinvigorated, it would then be able to contribute significantly to the range of universal humanistic values of our time, thereby redressing the imbalances of the global status quo that these intellectuals regard as the unfortunate legacy of a globally dominant Western “instrumentalist reason.”68 All four participants in this discussion emphasized the individual nature of intellectual inquiry, claiming that the humanistic spirit is communicated through an individual’s reflections on both Chinese history and lived everyday experience. They recommended that mainland Chinese scholars should each undertake to read Chinese history with a renewed sense of individual commitment to truth, and thereby to establish and to expand a set of Sino-centered criteria for distinguishing between “good and evil, noble and contemptible, great and trivial” in their own history.69 In emphasizing the urgency of this task, Chen Sihe drew a comparison between the difficulties of discussing the humanistic spirit in present-day China and the ease with which he claimed this topic would have been discussed in premodern times. Chen noted with some ambivalence that Confucius should be more fully acknowledged for laying the foundation for a moral orthodoxy (daotong) that not only provided the framework for dynastic rule as political orthodoxy (zhengtong) but also enabled the “feudal autocracy” of premodern China to become “the cultural autocracy of intellectuals.” According to Chen, because “Chinese intellectuals became the evident masters of their society,” their writings were always addressed in one way or another to the moral orthodoxy of Confucianism. Thus for a traditional scholar, “his knowledge and the uses he made of his knowledge, his exit from or entry into public life, were based on the sole criterion of whether he had performed well or poorly” according to the norms of Confucian orthodoxy. For Chen, contemporary Chinese intellectuals now face the same problem that Chinese intellectuals throughout the twentieth century had encountered with the collapse of the Confucian orthodoxy: “having lost a stable and enduring spiritual tra-

Divided over China

•

89

dition upon which they could base their lives and get on with their work,” modern Chinese intellectuals encounter the question of “how should we proceed [zenyang zuo]?” as opposed to the less problematical issue of “have we performed well [zuode haobuhao]?”70 There was evident nostalgia for the social significance and moral authority enjoyed by Confucian scholar-officials in this four-way conversation, particularly in the use of classical axioms to illustrate a humanistic spirit at work in traditional Chinese thought. This nostalgia, however, was qualified by the common emphasis all four participants placed on the changed nature of Chinese society in the twentieth century, where intellectuals no longer readily occupied the “center of political culture.” Zhang Rulun suggested that the question of how present-day “Chinese scholars in the humanities” should maintain their social relevance should be resituated in the intersubjective (zhutijian) conditions of dialogue on “the loss of the humanistic spirit as a problem that the whole of humanity faces today.”71 According to both Zhang and Wang Xiaoming, this shift toward an intersubjective mode of knowing required Chinese intellectuals to regard their inquiry in terms of making individual contributions to a universal concern, within a global context where no given culture should arrogate to its own preferred set of ideas the status of a universal norm. In prescribing individualism as the basic premise of intellectual inquiry, all four discussants implied that it was only through cumulative individual efforts at defending humanistic values (in culturally specific ways) that a substantive and pluralistic spiritual bulwark could be mounted against the encroachments of commercial mass culture. In short, by dramatizing the humanistic spirit as a moral force of waning power, these four intellectuals also represented themselves as its heroic Chinese defenders, committed to the task of replenishing its culturally pluralistic vigor.72 As a piece published in the influential journal Reading, this discussion was—not without irony—a bid to promote the humanistic spirit as a key topic in the nascent Sinophone marketplace of ideas. The publicity generated by the discussants was strategic, insofar as it enhanced their visibility as intellectual champions of a distinct and noble cause, with positive benefits for their careers at a time of greatly increased academic competition. Although Zhang Rulun opened the discussion with a brief comment on how scholars in the Chinese humanities had “not only fallen into a slump but were trapped in a fundamental crisis,” mention-

90

•

Worrying about China

ing in passing “political and economic factors that had exerted prolonged pressure on humanistic intellectuals,” the discussion that ensued is conspicuous for its absence of the question of how the new rules of market competition, in which individual success was increasingly being determined through indices such as the rate and popularity of one’s publications, had impacted on the quality of scholarship in the Chinese humanities.73 Reflecting on the advocacy of the humanistic spirit some years later in 2003, at a time when the phrase had become authoritative, Xu Jilin states that it signifies an attempt “to reestablish the publicness of the intellectual and to reassert the intellectual’s responsibility for guiding society.” He avers that “no one will publicly oppose the humanistic spirit as such since it is held to be a sacred phrase, but the phrase encounters a great deal of opposition when it is offered as the basis for an intellectual’s self-understanding and his value-stance.” Drawing on critical formulations from Michel Foucault among others, Xu observes that the problem with advocating a phrase such as “the humanistic spirit” is that “there can be no agreement as to what it really means, there can be only multiply divergent views.” He reads in the advocacy of the humanistic spirit a proper concern for the greater good but cautions that the greater good should not be characterized by this phrase alone. In attempting to understand the humanistic spirit better, we can collectively acknowledge that if we were to provide a via negativa definition of the phrase, it clearly does not refer to any one given thing. To define the phrase in positive terms, however, we can say only that it accords with a certain formalized Kantian moral imperative of “man as an end in himself” [ren shi mudi], an imperative that can take on different contents and interpretations in accordance with different cultural values and different historical contexts.74

In the pluralism that flourished in 1990s Chinese intellectual discourse, those who defended the humanistic spirit were arguably affirming intellectual heterogeneity against the “homogeneity of attitude” that was being used as a characterization of 1980s intellectual praxis. But the humanistic spirit is also a phrase that affirms the kind of shared commitment to humanism as an overarching telos which the New Enlightenment discourse of the 1980s had fostered. In the 1990s, this moral imperative came to be phrased in a greater variety of ways, maintaining the implicit Kantian sense of “man as an end in himself,” as Xu Jilin puts it, but oriented much more specifically toward establishing a full-

Divided over China

•

91

fledged Chinese tradition of humanistic thought, the continuities and discontinuities of which could be interpreted in a plurality of Sinocentered ways, as the four Shanghai-based advocates of the humanistic spirit discussed earlier had suggested. When Sinophone advocates of the humanistic spirit identified the related processes of cultural commercialization and academic professionalization as causes that contributed to the decline of this spirit during the 1990s, they were also defending the purity of intellectual inquiry over and against the new temptations of commercial and/or professional success. In claiming that the purity of intellectual discourse could be maintained through individual adherence to the humanistic spirit as a guiding moral imperative, these intellectuals often displayed a nostalgic longing for the intellectual discourse of the 1980s. By the 1990s, the “felt experience” of intellectual discovery which had fueled the textual industry of the 1980s was rendered increasingly problematical by the influx of heterogeneous formulations that could no longer be gathered up into any one ideal way of worrying about China. When Wang Hui described the growth of this discursive heterogeneity as involving “the collapse of the category ‘intellectual,’ ” he implied that it was no longer possible to sustain the metaphysical ideality of a unified discourse in which producers shared a common set of values and objectives.75 Thus intellectuals like Wang Hui who had taken a decidedly linguistic turn in their inquiry tended to regard the invocation of the humanistic spirit as a lost metaphysical cause that failed to consider the altered stakes and “styles” of intellectual discourse as an inevitable consequence of commercialization and professionalization. Whereas the advocates of the humanistic spirit urged their Sinophone readers of the 1990s to uphold an ideal image of intellectual inquiry as selfless work that was free of the taint of specific power interests, whether political, commercial, or professional, their critics were urging in contrast for a form of critical inquiry that would explore the inescapability of such power interests at work in the production of intellectual discourse. But it was intellectuals in pursuit of a “postmodern”76 way of being Chinese who produced the most strident critiques of the advocacy of the humanistic spirit. For instance, the Beijing-based literary scholar Zhang Yiwu writes: Some intellectuals attempt to surmount myriad challenges posed to [Chinese] culture at the present time by means of this kind of fanciful and mystifying language. [Such language] reflects the transempirical, fantastic, and

92

•

Worrying about China

theologically inflected goals that emerged out of the failure of the 1980s discourse that had “enlightenment” and “spokemanship” as its objectives and “the subject” and “innate human force” [rende benzhi liliang] as its premises . . . It stresses that “the loss of the humanistic spirit is a problem common to all of humanity today. Thus by means of dialogue it is not impossible that we can come to a definite common understanding.” This mode of thinking presupposes a space that is qualitatively similar to the West’s in order to transcend the various problems introduced [into China] by the challenge of commercialization.77

When Zhang criticizes the advocates of the humanistic spirit for promoting a form of quasi-mysticism in intellectual guise, he is also arguing in favor of a postmodern and postcolonial approach to intellectual inquiry—an approach that he calls “a new cultural strategy” for China under conditions of market reform. In essence, Zhang argues that such a strategy is necessary for freeing contemporary Chinese culture from its prolonged captivity to a Western-derived notion of “modernity,” in which China was invariably represented as “temporally stagnant.”78 He explains this new form of cultural autonomy as follows: The emergence of China’s marketization together with limitless choice is not an idealization, for it has been constructed out of a pragmatic spirit [shiyongde jingshen]. It no longer takes the modernist pursuit of resolving the “totality” of culture [wenhuade “zhengtixing”] as its goal: rather, it is the result of multiple and complex operations occurring within different spheres. This kind of nonlinear and nonnormative process of development has posed an enormous challenge to the “modernist” designs of “intellectuals.” Moreover, the secularizing process of mass culture and consumer society has already become the most important movement forward for culture.79

Like Wang Hui, Zhang Yiwu regards this process of secularization (that is, the development of market-driven or commercial culture) as involving the loss of an authoritative role for intellectuals in cultural production. He also claims that “self-reflection and interrogation of ‘modernity’ as well as self-reflection and interrogation of ‘intellectuals’ had become the new trend of the 1990s.” This was because “on the one hand, the promise of ‘modernity’ seemed at last imminent, but on the other hand, its arrival did not accord with designs of ‘modernity’ ” that Chinese intellectuals had produced across the twentieth century. On this basis, Zhang avers that the assumption of cultural authority common among intellectuals of the 1980s had become untenable because the

Divided over China

•

93

Western conception of modernity that these intellectuals had formerly championed could no longer be accorded a universally authoritative status. As Zhang puts it, a Chinese intellectual who attempted to invoke the authority of Western modernity had “increasingly become an ‘other’s other’ when he engaged in dialogue and offered his views.” Since modernity had “ended,” the intellectual “can no longer be all-powerful within ‘modernity,’ he can be only a sentinel for the new era.”80 In reading modernity as a myth rendered obsolete by the new knowledges (xinde zhishi) of postmodernism and postcolonialism, Zhang retranscribes modernity (along with related ideas of modernization) as “an outcome of the expansion into the Third World, of a culture that emerged in a particular space in the West,” in order to negate and render illegitimate its conceptual authority in Chinese intellectual discourse. For Zhang, “since Western values have reverted to the West and are now regarded as the outcome of a particular space, the goal of an ideal modernity no longer has the absolute dominance it once did on Third-World cultures.”81 As for how Chinese intellectuals and cultural producers should proceed beyond negating the Eurocentric concept of modernity, Zhang argues that postmodernism and postcolonialism are useful cognitive tools for “ending” modernity and facilitating the advent of Chineseness (Zhonghuaxing).82 Zhang’s valorization of Chineseness is both pluralistic (as he claims that Chineseness can take many different forms) and nationalistic (insofar as cultural authenticity is a priority in his argument).83 Geremie Barmé has written of the television series A Beijing Man in New York, the lyrics of whose theme song Zhang featured approvingly as an epigraph for his essay, “The End of ‘Modernity’—An Unavoidable Topic.” One scene, where the protagonist Wang Qiming hires a “white, blond, and buxom” American prostitute to cry out repeatedly “I love you” while he showers her with dollar bills, was reported to have been particularly popular with mainland Chinese audiences. Barmé observes, “It was also the type of encounter that has a certain paradigmatic significance. It could be argued that by having his way with an American whore while buying her endearments with a shower of greenbacks, Wang Qiming was making an eloquent statement (and inversion) of the century-old Chinese-foreign dilemma.”84 There is also a certain paradigmatic significance in Zhang Yiwu’s linking of the postmodern with the postcolonial insofar as it bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Qing Confucian axiom of national self-

94

•

Worrying about China

strengthening: Zhong xue wei ti, Xi xue wei yong (Chinese knowledge as the foundation, Western knowledge for practical application), transcoded in a “postmodern” Sinophone idiom. In short, when Zhang refers to postmodernism and postcolonialism as new knowledges, he emphasizes their functionality as a theoretical template for freeing Chinese scholarship from Western intellectual hegemony. In the manifesto that he, Zhang Fa, and Wang Yichuan penned in aid of promoting Chineseness as “the core of a new discursive framework” for a culturally pluralist China, postmodernism and postcolonialism are further accorded the status of a launching pad for authentic forms of Chinese intellectual and cultural production in an era of global commerce. As they explain, this is an era where canonicity and modernity can be commingled in myriad ways because “we have now stepped beyond the barrier of History.” Accordingly, “Chineseness possesses a breadth of vision that accommodates all thing . . . In all matters material and spiritual, [Chineseness] does not discriminate between socialism and capitalism, East and West, old and new; it is interested only in whether a thing is of benefit or harm. All beneficial things should be appropriated [nalai] and passed on whereas all harmful things should be put aside and rejected.”85 We should note that although Wang Hui shares Zhang Yiwu’s interest in interrogating Eurocentrism, he is nonetheless quite critical of the postmodern inquiry pioneered by Zhang and others. Wang has described their work as a form of academicism that “conceals their cultural strategy of embracing popular culture (as the defender of neutral desire and the commercialization of culture) to effect a conquest of the cultural center stage.” He claims that this cultural strategy has led their discourse to become ironically resonant with the official discourse’s promotion of “the socialist market with Chinese characteristics,” adding that “some postmodernist critics have effectively participated in the establishment on the Chinese mainland of a unique market ideology.”86 The prevalence of this critical view of Sinophone postmodernism can be attributed in large part to an influential 1995 essay by the Londonbased literary historian Zhao Yiheng (Chao I-heng). In using the somewhat disparaging term “postisms” (houxue) as a generic reference for Sinophone scholarship that enlisted avant-garde theory to support its claims, Zhao argued that such writings were instances of an emergent conservatism in 1990s mainland Chinese intellectual discourse that resembled the official discourse’s contemporaneous valorization of cul-

Divided over China

•

95

tural heritage.87 Zhao also noted that the writings of “postist” scholars, such as Chen Xiaoming, Zhang Yiwu, Dai Jinhua, and Zhu Wei, reflected the same optimistic but ill-considered notion that because there had been a decisive change in the mainland Chinese mode of cultural production and dissemination (in tandem with the accelerated pace of marketization), the gap between “elite culture” and “mass culture” had greatly narrowed, and that this would inevitably provide wider public access to a diverse range of products in China’s emergent cultural marketplace. Zhao observed that of the scholars he named, only Dai Jinhua displayed a proper unease with regard to the desertification (shamohua) of culture that such commercialism produced. Enlisting statements and glossing passages from Anglophone scholars such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Stephen Slemon, Robert Young, Andreas Huyssen, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson, and Homi Bhabha, Zhao presented a defense of elite culture against what he regarded as the mistaken valorization of low-brow or pop culture on the part of China’s “postist” scholars. Thus he implied that these Sinophone “postists” failed to appreciate the cultural specificity of poststructuralist theory as a mode of thinking whose “object of inquiry, for scholars like Foucault or Derrida, was the history of Western culture and thought. Clearly, they did not use it as a method of inquiry in relation to non-Western cultures.”88 Through the elegance of his prose, which juxtaposed succinct glossings of Anglophone theoretical formulations against evocative uses of Chinese aphorisms in an economical, scholarly style of writing that drew on the syntax and vocabulary of both modern vernacular and classical Chinese, Zhao projected a masterly view of the inadequacies of contemporary mainland scholarship in a language that many of his Sinophone readers found rhetorically impressive. Zhao noted that his essay, written in the “reading notes” (zhaji) genre,89 was not intended to provide a comprehensive account of the contemporary Chinese intellectual scene.90 But since Zhao drew his examples from a diverse range of Chinese texts and named individuals based in different cities and institutions, his essay did convey the impression of a totalizing critique, particularly for those whom he targeted. A debate around Zhao’s essay developed in subsequent issues of Twenty-first Century, which featured countercritiques of Zhao by his detractors as well as his responses to their critiques.

96

•

Worrying about China

It is important to remember that during the 1990s, particularly before the Internet became the dominant medium of Chinese critical inquiry, discussions about the prospects of enlarging both the scope of intellectual freedom and the new ways of worrying about China’s presentday circumstances appeared in a range of private or state-funded print journals that were recognized by informed mainland readers as legitimate outlets for relatively independent inquiry. Constrained by state censorship, writings that appeared in these mainland-based print journals could not refer explicitly to the glaring contradiction between claims in the official discourse of the Party-state’s guiding role in “liberating thought” and the Party-state’s tightened control over intellectual praxis after June 4, 1989. In considerable contrast, the Hong Kong-based Twenty-first Century was and remains relatively free of censorship, and its editorial board has comprised, in general, individuals who have either played a significant role in Chinese cultural politics of the 1980s or who were and are prominent in Sinophone scholarship and Anglophone Chinese Studies. Consequently it was arguably one of the most significant outlets for the publication of Chinese critical inquiry in the early to mid-1990s, that is, before the influence of print journals was significantly diluted by the rapid proliferation of Sinophone Internet fora and e-journals. Although Twenty-first Century has never been readily available in mainland China, this did not prevent its articles from being circulated among mainland Chinese intellectuals. Indeed, precisely because the journal is based in Hong Kong, it became, at its height during the 1990s, both an international forum for and a key shaper of Chinese critical inquiry through the different themes featured in the journal’s monthly issues, themes that included political as well as critical commentary of the sort that could not easily appear in mainland-based journals. In any one issue, essays by several prominent Chinese intellectuals (whether based in the mainland or overseas) would be arranged under a list of topics that served as signposts for what the journal’s editorial board had deemed to be matters of contemporary relevance in Chinese critical inquiry. Although some critical commentary on the rise of Chinese scholarship that utilized Western “postmodern” formulations had appeared in mainland-based journals in the early 1990s, it was not until the February 1995 issue of Twenty-first Century featured critical essays by two overseas-based scholars, Zhao Yiheng and Xu Ben, under the heading of “Chinese Literary Criticism in the 1990s,” that the pros and cons of

Divided over China

•

97

adopting a postmodern or postcolonial gaze in Chinese critical inquiry received wider attention. Unlike Wang Hui, Zhao criticized “postisms” explicitly to defend humanism as a core value of elite cultural production in China. Zhao argued that “in China, numerous intellectuals who identified with the European sense of a humanistic spirit had utterly lost their footing and were forced to seek an existence on the margins of the discursive terrain now defined by the three-sided onslaught,” arising out of what he characterized as an ethnocentric and politically “neoconservative” turn toward “national studies,” toward “postisms,” and toward the valorization of low-brow or pop culture. In reading contemporary cultural theory in this manner, namely as one that evinced an “evident tendency toward promoting group interests” (listing, inter alia, “feminism, theories of minorities discourse, and postcolonialism that promoted issues of ‘race, gender, class, and place’ ”), Zhao asserted that while some might see this trend as a politicization of cultural inquiry, he preferred to describe it as manifesting a “tribalist” (buzuhua) attitude. In this context, he claimed that the entry of contemporary EuroAmerican cultural theory into China in the form of “postisms” had produced positive and negative outcomes. On the positive side, it had facilitated an ongoing “division of values that constitute the challenge of [plural] values self-consciously posed to the global triumph of late capitalism,” while on the negative side, “under the slogan of ‘pluralization,’ it had provided explanations in favor of contemporary culture’s decline, which were tantamount to opening a pathway for the aestheticization of pop culture.” In his defense of the guiding role that he believes high-brow or elite Chinese culture should play in imparting to the Chinese people the kind of progressive (“nonconservative”) values he affirms, Zhao appears to be implying that these values are constitutive of a universalizable good but within the specific context of “being Chinese.” In this regard, when he declares his unwavering allegiance to elitism (jingyingzhuyi) and elite culture, he observes that he is actually defending the necessity of elite culture’s “marginal position” since it is only by occupying such a marginal position that elite culture could “determine the boundaries for this mad and aimless era.” Thus what Zhao is also affirming in the name of elite culture is the centrality of the intellectual as both the embodiment and agent of a would-be universal set of humanistic values. As he writes in the concluding section of his essay, “Chinese intellectuals must defi-

98

•

Worrying about China

nitely never abandon their concerns for their country, the nation, and (most important) the fate of humanity.”91 In this regard, Zhao appears to envisage pluralism as the agreeable blend of universal and humanistic values that a range of different “elite cultures” could provide, if only the culturally specific ways in which these values are embodied could acquire sufficient force to undo the deleterious effects everywhere of commercialized pop culture and the “tribalist” tendency of contemporary theorizing that he disavows. What is ironic is that the universal humanism that Zhao affirms in his defense of elite culture is precisely the kind of metaphysics that the international advertising industry has so effectively appropriated to produce “humanistic” images with the commercial intention to generate profit, for instance, in the form of the highly successful campaigns of the “United Colors of Benetton” series. Zhao’s attempt to promote cultural pluralism, as he puts it, as selfconscious opposition to the “global triumph of late capitalism” is doubly ironic in this regard since he is also transposing the essentializing and Eurocentric assumptions of what might best be described as the Leavisite defense of elite culture into the kind of universal culture that he believes all Chinese intellectuals should defend, against both late capitalism and Eurocentrism.92 Zhao’s affirmation of the civilizing function of elite culture chimes with the Leavisite privileging of the “felt experience” of moral values as transmitted through the literary canon into an aesthetic and redemptive truth: the only difference is that Zhao enlists this same argument for the decidedly non-Anglocentric goal of defending the integrity of modern Chinese culture. In countering Zhao Yiheng’s argument, Zhang Yiwu was quick to point out that being based overseas, Zhao had become out of touch with “political, cultural, and economic developments in present-day China.” In refuting Zhao’s critique of the politico-cultural “conservatism” implicit in the use of avant-garde theories in contemporary mainland Chinese scholarship, Zhang claimed that Zhao suffered from an ill-placed pessimism brought about by his physical distance from the mainland, which rendered his critique inappropriate since it was not based in contemporary lived Chinese experience. According to Zhang, overseas-based academics like Zhao Yiheng and Xu Ben failed to recognize that the very society which was their object of inquiry “had totally slipped beyond the mastery of ‘intellectuals’ who once occupied the center of discourse.” He further noted that the complexity of present-day

Divided over China

•

99

mainland society was such that it would always exceed the grasp of those intellectuals who subscribed to “a deterministic mode of discourse or interpretive paradigm,” whether they lived overseas or in mainland China. Zhang averred that those who criticized mainland Chinese intellectuals for using avant-garde theory displayed a symptomatic anxiety that revealed their own declining relevance as interpreters of China, and since their deterministic accounts were no longer capable of explaining the complexities of present-day China, they lacked credibility. As he puts it, “It is as if China has become an ‘other’ that cannot be subjected to any further taming.” He claimed that, under new market conditions, China could no longer be confined to a “ready-made segment of hegemonic Western knowledge production.” He specifically accused Zhao Yiheng and Xu Ben for daring to presume they held the authority of “the intellectually advanced, with the blueprint of history in hand,” when they talked down to “indigenous critics [like himself] in their difficult circumstances.”93 Thus whereas the earliest criticisms of the New Left had come mainly from liberal academics based in China, the most influential critiques to appear in the mid-1990s of “postists” (as New Left affiliates) took the form of essays written by distinctly overseas-based humanists who were, in turn, criticized by mainland-based “postists” of lacking experience of the lived everyday in China. This ready recourse to accusing others of perpetrating fallacies and distortions because they do not live in China reflects the significance accorded to critical inquiry as a form of moral conduct, such that one’s physical location could be utilized to judge the authenticity of one’s critical concerns. But the genuineness of such accusations is questionable, especially when like-minded others who happen to live overseas are somehow exempt from such criticisms. For instance, while Zhang Yiwu accuses Zhao Yiheng and Xu Ben of imposing a hegemonic universalism from afar, it is clear that he does not include other overseas-based academics, such as Liu Kang and Zhang Xudong, whose ideas and values he shares. Indeed, the nationalistic and exclusionary tendency of Zhang’s argumentation has led Haun Saussy to comment that Zhang’s “passiveaggressive style—casting every dialogue or critique as an unequal contest—is in itself such a heavy verdict on Zhang Yiwu’s intellectual self-respect that I marvel at his appetite for controversy.”94 In a similar vein, Zhang Longxi (then a U.S.-based academic) noted that the dis-

100

•

Worrying about China

tinction Zhang Yiwu drew between mainland-based and overseas-based academics was disturbing insofar as “it suggests an intention to excommunicate these two people [i.e., Zhao and Xu] from the church [of Chinese intellectualdom] by refusing to recognize them as having the bearing of legitimate descendants of our great Chinese ancestors.” In this and other formulations, Zhang Longxi mocks Zhang Yiwu’s “postist” vision of a hybrid cultural landscape in mainland China as a nationalistic screed that sought to impose its own arbitrary rules of eligibility for membership of the Chinese intellectual community.95 Zhang Longxi also noted that while Zhang Yiwu began his essay with “the tone of someone who regarded himself as a spokesperson for the whole of China or the entire mainland Chinese critical scene,” he ended by declaring that what he had expressed were “no more than a few ideas of his own” and that he was not attempting “to represent the views of other individuals or groups.”96 These unexplained gaps and contradictions in Zhang Yiwu’s argument highlight the difficulties presented by the prevalence of both magisterial judgment and national essentialism in Chinese critical inquiry. On the one hand, when Zhang Yiwu assumes the position of a representative spokesperson for China and Chinese intellectuals, he implicitly conjures up, as do his detractors, the Confucian-derived raison d’être of worrying about China as the proper attitude to critical inquiry. On the other hand, when he negates notions of intellectual representativeness and authority as obstacles to the development of cultural hybridity in mainland China, he assigns to the postmodern and postcolonial theories he privileges, the metaphysical agency of a liberating Sinocentric truth he presumes will have the capacity to deliver Chinese culture from the otherwise Eurocentric and hegemonic designs of Western thought. In other words, he assumes, as do his humanist rivals, that critical inquiry must be directed, through argumentation, to “uncover” a fundamental truth or to “create values,” and he enlists avant-garde theory as a would-be instrument for mapping Chinese cultural integrity in this context. Despite the obvious differences in theoretical conception and argumentation between humanists and postmodernists (or between liberals and New Leftists), Chinese intellectuals share a general preference for articulations that revolve around the provision of an “accurate” evaluation or an “authentic” account. As noted in the previous chapter, this style of writing presupposes in positivistic fashion that the gap between

Divided over China

•

101

language and reality, or between word and thing, could be progressively narrowed by the use of ever-more precise formulations. In this context, despite new valorizations of academic norms, postmodernism, and so forth, many continue to imagine the task of critical inquiry as intellectual mastery on China’s behalf. The post-Maoist reinterpretation of intellectual mastery as the acquisition of plural ways of knowing, grounded in specific knowledge disciplines and paradigms, is indebted in large part to the popularity that Foucault’s notion of the “specific intellectual” has gained in Chinese intellectual circles since the 1990s. What is also interesting is that while younger Chinese intellectuals in their twenties and thirties are able to affirm the notion of the “specific intellectual” without difficulty, older intellectuals with childhood or adolescent experiences of the Cultural Revolution often express some dissatisfaction with this notion, regarding it as a diminution of the intellectual’s public role. For instance, Xu Jilin claims that “specific intellectuals are merely experts and academics who are concerned with ways of deconstructing the power of the totality from within their specific work domain.” In engaging with Foucault’s notion of the “specific intellectual,” Xu concludes that the delimitation of the intellectual within the scope of an individual’s professional work poses the risk of generating “critique for the sake of critique, and deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction.” He then asks, “Will we be left with nothing but a nihilistic world after such critique and such deconstruction?” Against the adverse consequences of such nihilism, Xu offers the alternative approach of reconciling the strengths of both the “universal intellectual,” who represents for Xu a defender of universal values, and the “specific intellectual,” whom he regards as one who recognizes both the limitations of his professional capacity and the emptiness of abstract universal claims, toward “an ideal type of public intellectual who proceeds from the specific to the universal.” Xu argues that reading Bourdieu has convinced him that “the defense of intellectual autonomy” should be the primary task of intellectuals if they are “to proceed toward public life and to establish foundational sites for political critique.” Xu is also influenced by Habermas’s concept of the ideal speech situation when he argues that autonomy can be defended only after intellectuals “have established standard rules for dialogue within the intellectual community, rules that facilitate equal opportunity among professional peers in undertaking pure and thoroughgoing contestation.”97

102

•

Worrying about China

Since intellectuals labeled as members of the New Left, such as Cui Zhiyuan, have often been represented in Sinophone critical inquiry as acolytes of Foucault—as Ren Jiantao puts it, “they are fond of quoting Foucault’s words to express their own skeptical and dismissive stance toward the discourse of modernity”98—it is not surprising that, together with “postists,” they have come to be regarded as advocates of the “specific intellectual” while their humanistic and liberal counterparts have come to be viewed as defenders of the “universal intellectual.” These forms of labeling, though unhelpful and misleading, are nonetheless reflective of a general orientation toward crystallizing a correct disposition that is part and parcel of the much older notion of the Chinese intellectual. The polemicity of Chinese critical inquiry is indicative of the moral significance that Chinese intellectuals attach to the dissemination of beneficial ideas, and this moral significance is itself a centuries-old Confucian legacy that idealizes intellectual praxis as spiritual and political stewardship. In this regard, critical intellectuals have, to some extent, served as indirect and unacknowledged “advisers” to the Party-state insofar as several of their key phrases have not only been brought into the orbit of the official discourse but have also become quite important. For instance, the term “social justice,” which has been much debated since the 1990s, is now a regular feature of Party rhetoric, thanks in part to the conceptual elaborations provided of the term in recent years by such Party theorists as the sociologist Wu Zhongmin.99 Wu’s wellpublicized attempts at formalizing distinctions between “justice” and “fairness” (several years after liberal and New Left intellectuals first began to use these terms frequently) are indicative of the words’ progressive normalization in mainland public discourse.100 Within intellectual circles, some people, such as the influential Beijing-based economist Yao Yang, have sought to invest the term “social justice” with “Chinese characteristics.” Yao contends that because his “Chinese theory of social justice” constitutes “a natural extension of traditional Chinese morality and socialist practice,” the mainland Chinese public would find it easy to accept.101 Several liberal and New Left arguments have also filtered into the official discourse. Indeed, although those who were dubbed the New Left in the 1990s disavowed the label and sought to distance themselves from its Maoist connotations, recent favorable attention that the Partystate has accorded to their arguments might be read as a case of unin-

Divided over China

•

103

tended “centrism.”102 Under the new leadership of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in the early twenty-first century, the former derogatory term “New Left” became positively inflected in the discourses of both the mainland Chinese academy and the media, no doubt to the immense satisfaction of those who had been so labeled. In a 2005 report, the journalist Jehangir S. Pocha writes that “the degree to which the New Left’s rhetoric confluences with that of the government’s indicates President Hu Jintao and team are tacitly supporting the New Left and using it to attack previous President Jiang Zemin and his Three Represents theory, which is widely blamed for many of the deep inequalities gripping China.” Pocha also quotes Wang Hui as stating in this context that, although the term had been “first used (by proreform groups) to discredit us as old socialists,” he no longer minded this appellation, because “when something new is happening, it’s normal for people to try [to] define it in old terms.” Pocha reminds us in this context that “if Wang’s benevolence toward his would-be labelers seems magnanimous, it is also partly driven by the fact that the Left label has begun to work in favor of the intellectuals.”103 Conversely, the term liberalism has enjoyed a certain inviolability because it became, after 1978, a ready caption for prominent intellectuals of earlier eras—including those who were purged as Rightists under Mao—who were now being championed as the unsung heroes of China’s modernization. But the connotations of liberalism have also broadened in interesting ways to include a negatively inflected neoliberalism as an object of criticism not only in the writings of New Left and some liberal intellectuals but in the discourse of the Party-state as well. On the one hand, the post-Maoist state has consistently relied on the rhetoric of “economic liberalization” to promote the further development of the market economy throughout the 1990s. On the other hand, it continues to defend its political legitimacy in a socialist idiom, in the form of advancing a unique form of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Most important, it remains an authoritarian state intolerant of dissenting voices, and so intellectuals of all persuasions, whether liberal, New Left, or otherwise, will continue to find themselves equally at risk of offending this would-be patriarchal authority. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the predicament of Chinese intellectuals, bound to a habit of writing that encourages them to conflate the authorial “I” or “we” with China “herself,” is that they are led, in their rhetoric, to echo the official discourse when they assign to

104

•

Worrying about China

China the status of the beloved greater Self (da wo) to whom the (lowercase) intellectual self devotes his or her lifetime’s efforts. Just as the Party is figured in the official discourse as standing in for China and “the people,” the intellectual in Sinophone critical discourse is metonymically figured as the crucial spiritual and cultural part that stands for the imagined whole of China. If one brings Sinophone discussions of “Chinese problems” down a notch or two—from the elevated tenor of worrying about the national family to a consideration of how such discourse is produced as part of the mundane everyday work life of mainland Chinese intellectuals—one can begin to appreciate the hidden, private anxieties that haunt the advocacy of the humanistic spirit, or the defense of China’s cultural uniqueness under conditions of economic globalization, or the appeal for genuine empathy (zhenqing shigan) across the political divide. The varied Sinophone formulations encountered in this chapter were produced in response to the new market-defined asymmetries in the ongoing professionalization of Chinese intellectual life. They also reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, anxiety over the once-unquestioned 1980s’ belief that the more effort one expends in acquiring knowledge, the better equipped one would naturally become in guiding China toward a better future. By the 1990s it was clear that those who had received graduate training overseas or who displayed a familiarity with brand-name theories and theorists of the moment produced publications that commanded a far greater degree of attention among younger intellectuals than the publications of those who were less able or unable to validate their “old-fashioned” inquiry in these avant-garde theoretical idioms. Within these altered stakes of Sinophone scholarship, it is not difficult to see that Chinese intellectuals are coping with the challenges (tiaozhan, a favored word in Chinese critical inquiry) posed by the “law” of market naturalism being applied evaluatively to their productivity. These are challenges they share with academics everywhere who have encountered this “law” being institutionally applied to the evaluation of their career achievements. What distinguishes Chinese critical inquiry is its production under ongoing state censorship. In this regard, there burns a distinct and shared desire among mainland-based intellectuals to achieve practical gains for intellectual freedom. Thus when Xu Jilin expresses the concern that intellectuals should not become overly “specific” in their pursuits, he is also tacitly remind-

Divided over China

•

105

ing his mainland readers that the public relevance of intellectual inquiry is crucial for promoting a substantive political freedom they have yet to enjoy. This counsel is implicit in Xu’s figuration of the contemporary mainland Chinese intellectual scene as a hazardous marketplace teeming with aggressive and opportunistic pretenders: “Public space is a domain in which competition prevails. If intellectuals do not intervene into this space, they will be excluded from public discussions and a large group of people such as journalists, technocrats, surveyors of public opinion, and business advisers, will claim the authority of ‘intellectuals’ for themselves and come to dominate public space.”104 Xu’s comments affirm the public relevance of critical inquiry, and they serve equally well to remind Western academics and intellectuals that the public defense of ethical concerns is crucial, particularly in our media-saturated times. But to remind ourselves that Chinese critical inquiry also resonates with a moral imperative to cultivate the self in order ultimately to establish an enlightened realm, it is useful to quote from a controversial 1995 essay by the Beijing-based philosopher Liu Dong. Liu asks, “So why is it that robust new theories willy nilly bear a strong ‘family resemblance’ to propaganda speak? And why do powerful critical theories from the West end up as currency or leverage to be used in multifarious ways in order for one to fly overseas or to gain promotion?” In answering his own question, Liu urges his readers to note that, unlike verbal exchanges among Chinese intellectuals on the state of the nation that ephemerally reflect “the good conscience of ordinary folk,” no matter how biased the views being expressed might be, the commitment of one’s ideas to print also constitutes a bid to secure intellectual authority by providing “answers to China’s problems.” According to Liu, this magisterial tendency in Chinese intellectual discourse has produced a “truly incredible” situation whereby intellectuals believe that they “can so ably and obliquely intervene into any matter.”105 In urging others not to camouflage their personal interests in the rhetoric of saving others, Liu aptly captures the predicament of a discourse whose raison d’être of worrying on everyone’s behalf demands selflessness as a moral requisite while encouraging those who worry to claim insight and perspicacity. When critical inquiry is expected to offer moral guidance and a vision of the way ahead, it remains unavoidably vulnerable to accusations of being selfishly motivated, or flawed in argumentation, or, even worse, morally irresponsible.



chapter three

Theory and Taxonomy: A Post-Maoist Pursuit of Cultural Integrity

A significant feature of present-day Chinese critical inquiry is the frequent appearance of the names of EuroAmerican theorists and quotations from their writings. The names of Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and many others have now become a regular feature of Sinophone critical discourse to function as rubrics for different schools of thought.1 In Chinese as it is in English, the arrival of intellectual authority or fashionability is nowhere more clearly signaled than when an attribute derived from a proper name (such as “Foucauldian,” “Derridean,” or “Habermasian”) becomes legal tender in academic exchanges as have the terms Marxist, Freudian, Nietzschean, Hegelian, or Kantian. Moreover, the fluctuating stocks of these different brand-name theories in the academic marketplace are reflected on the shelves of university and high-end bookshops in urban China in much the same way as they are outside China. We should accordingly begin by noting that the word “theory” has lost some of the novelty it enjoyed during the previous three decades in the Anglophone humanities and social sciences. One might describe it as having become a little shopworn since its dramatic entrance and radical interrogation of the legitimacy of certain hitherto unquestioned and well-established modes of textual analysis. Today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, theory no longer has the buzzword status that it held in the 1980s and early 1990s. As a term that subsumes a disparate textuality (of which many were Francophone in origin), “theory” in

Theory and Taxonomy

•

107

Anglophone scholarship is most commonly associated with deconstruction and other forms of self-reflexive or poststructuralist writings. As a term that has now become embedded in one form or another in the general academic lexicon, theory broadly signifies acts of interpretation that focus on the performative as well as the semantic effects of language, with the consequence that skeptics are wont to disparage it as a fad—a reference to some sort of an up-to-the-minute form of writing lacking in empirical substance. But it is also clear that whatever the term “theory” may have lost as a result of the demise of its earlier novelty, it has since regained in its bona fide establishment within the legitimizing forces of the contemporary Academy. Throughout the process of its institutionalization, theory has become more and more packaged as an established body of knowledge in its own right, to be taught, mastered, and then applied to the object under inquiry. This is not the radical (if not heretical) theory that originally challenged the academy and its assumptions. That theory nouveau urged for open-ended ways of reflecting on the textualities that compete to represent various pasts, presents, and futures. This institutional dilution of the potency of that theory nouveau has, not unpredictably, led to an increasingly quasi-positivistic reception of “theory” that reflects an ongoing process of the taming of theory for uses in different fields and by diverse interest groups (as constituted by scholars who share a common set of social or political goals) within the academy. For instance, the phrase “theoretically informed” is commonly heard these days as a generic positive attribute in peer reviews of Anglophone China scholarship, whereas twenty years ago the phrase would have lacked this valency entirely, and appearances of the phrase itself would have been extremely rare within those very same academic fields in which it has since so abundantly flourished.2 As a term that stands for a position quite adamantly inimical to the likening of knowledge to syntheses, systems, or programs, or indeed any mode of reduction,3 “theory” is resistant to the optimism of textual closure as such, which is the primary source of the heated debates between the advocates of deconstruction and its contemporary opponents from within the ancien régime of traditional philosophy, who continue to insist, in ever more refined ways, that there is something self-evidently true about “knowing what the words mean.” Thus for some theory was exciting and for others theory was anathema. What theory did encourage and effect was the opening of former organizational rules of disciplined

108

•

Worrying about China

knowledge to a certain free-play of cross-disciplinary approaches. This is not surprising since the act of interrogating habits of writing and reading is applicable to all fields of inquiry. Moreover, an unease that to read was a writing in and of itself crept into our ways of knowing and could not be banished despite the very best efforts of pragmatic positivism or analytical philosophy to convince us that adherence to a belief in more refinable formulas to derive an unequivocal mode of propositional analysis would dispel our unease. The textuality associated with this Anglophone notion of theory has also made a significant impact on the discourses and values that compete to constitute the humanities and social sciences in contemporary mainland China. But alongside the importation of new ideas from EuroAmerican scholarship necessary to accord mainland Chinese intellectual discourse a global status, there exists in Sinophone discourse a certain well-entrenched and nationalistic notion of theory as positivistic and pragmatic formulations aimed at securing a better future for China and the Chinese people. This instrumentalization of theory harks back to the May Fourth era of the 1910s and 1920s, when a hitherto unprecedented diversity of texts (first published in Japanese, Russian, English, and other European languages) were translated into the thennascent modern Chinese vernacular and disseminated among the urban intellectual elite. The purpose of this translation industry, as intellectuals of that era made clear, was to help foster ideas deemed essential for the creation of a modern citizenry, and thus a modern Chinese nation. In the Maoist era, this nation-building approach to theory became an instrument of ideological control as theory itself became starkly defined as Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. But since 1978, the influx of non-Marxist foreign ideas has resumed and grown to the extent that, at present, theories of all stripes and persuasions that circulate in the Anglophone academy (whether analytical or self-reflexive, modernist or postmodernist) have become just as visible in the Sinophone academy. The twist here is that in Sinophone scholarship, such theories are often tailored to fulfill, to a greater or lesser extent, the indigenous imperative of using theory to empower China. Increasingly, contemporary Sinophone critical discourse abounds with references to “Western theory” (Xifang lilun), but Xifang lilun cannot escape from being a reference also to all formulations that originated

Theory and Taxonomy

•

109

in European languages, independent of traditional Chinese scholarship. The term resonates ineradicably with a sense of national consciousness insofar as “Western” implies a foreignness that, to recall Derrida, must be “submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction” before one can determine how it is to be received.4 In the Sinophone context, whether an idea is good for China constitutes this basic and limiting jurisdiction. For the government, this jurisdiction might be rephrased as whether an idea is good for securing the continued legitimacy of Party rule, and for the majority of intellectuals, it might be restated as whether an idea enables or disables the proper nurturing of Chinese citizens. This Sinophone instrumentalization of theory cannot but complicate theory as it is understood in the Anglophone academy and we will explore, later in this chapter, how postmodernism has been so complicated through its retranscription as an unproblematical tool for affirming the uniqueness of Chinese culture within globalization. More broadly, the frequent articulation in Sinophone critical discourse of a desire to establish ideas of benefit to China is almost as frequently accompanied by a certain self-serving ambivalence toward the inescapability of Chinese reliance on Western theory. This ambivalence, together with the shift of praxis toward “academic standardization” (xueshu guifanhua) since the 1990s, can be read as signaling both adherence to the teleological goal of national and cultural perfection and attentiveness to the legacy of modern Chinese thought, with particular reference to the negative impact of radicalism embodied in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Critical inquiry in mainland China is bound up with the pursuit of cultural integrity insofar as it is conducted in a language where phrases such as “civilizational renaissance” (wenming fuxing), “greater unity” (da tong), “enabling the nation to forge ahead” (hongyang minzu), or to “become prosperous and powerful” (guojiade fanrong fuqiang) are habitually affirmed. In what follows, the Sinophone conception of theory as the work of three discursive realms is first examined and then elaborated through a discussion of the moral connotations of a Confucianderived taxonomy that accords with the precept of “rectifying names” (zheng ming) in order to reveal a true insight. Accordingly, the ways in which theory and taxonomy are enlisted to affirm cultural integrity, whether as part of a New Confucian or postmodern vision, are then explored.

110

•

Worrying about China

Theory and Discursive Realms The Chinese term yujing is generally understood to be synonymous with “context” but a literal translation would render it as “discursive realm” or “discursive terrain.” Thus the notion of “historical context” as lishi yujing situates history within the realm of language to foreground the legacy of the past as a legacy of words. Lishi yujing problematizes the notion of a historical context, quite literally as a “historically situated discursive realm.” But despite this alertness to the past as a received past, contingent on the inherited meanings embedded in the language of a given time and place, Chinese intellectuals are, on the whole, indifferent to the modes of self-reflexive inquiry generically labeled “poststructuralist” or “deconstructionist,” though these have become highly fashionable labels in the Sinophone academy. Self-reflexive inquiry, in the broadest sense, is constitutively resistant to the temptations of resorting to earlier dialectical or analytical modes of thinking; instead it affirms open-ended inquiry that anticipates neither the arrival of true (thus final) insight into history at work nor textual closure as the outcome of insight. As opposed to this self-reflexive heightened alertness to the blindness of insight, the acquisition of insight into the workings of history is frequently affirmed in Sinophone critical discourse, with the expectation that the resultant perspicacity could then be enlisted to serve the cause of perfecting Chinese culture and, by implication, the Chinese nation. This telos-driven approach, coupled with an emphasis on replenishing and restoring specifically Chinese ways of knowing (conceived of as “discursive realms”), is given elaboration under the three distinct rubrics of sixiang (thought), xueshu (scholarship), and lilun (theory). The advocacy of academic norms since the 1990s can be described, from a Sinophone perspective, as the privileging of the realm of xueshu (the academic) over the realm of sixiang (thought), on the assumption that textual proliferation in the latter had occurred at the former’s expense. Thus when it became common among Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s critically to review the “Cultural Fever” of the 1980s as rich in ideas (sixiang) but poor in scholarship (xueshu),5 1980s sixiang came to acquire the connotations of a hasty and indiscriminate embrace of Western ideas. As we saw in Chapter Two, intellectuals such as Wang Hui have popularized the view that sixiang of the New Enlightenment variety (heralded as part of 1980s “Cultural Fever”) provided unwitting

Theory and Taxonomy

•

111

support for a neoliberal ideology of modernization. For Wang, this was an ideology that served to legitimate the capitalist transformation of China and was not only complicit in widening the gap between rich and poor but also proved ineffective in undermining authoritarian rule as New Enlightenment advocates had predicted. If the advocacy of academic norms in the 1990s marks a renewed zeal on the part of intellectuals (in the aftermath of June Fourth) to improve Chinese scholarship or xueshu as a consequence of the failure of the ideas or sixiang of the 1980s, then the term lilun signifies, in this context, a conception of theory as beneficial knowledge that can reinforce the realms of both xueshu (as academic discourse) and sixiang (as critical inquiry). Lilun, however, is also a term over which the Party-state claims a certain monopoly in the form of Party theory (dangde sixiang lilun). Because some Chinese intellectuals have resorted to using the term xueli (an abbreviation of xueshu lilun or academic theories) to distinguish theory proper (that is, as intellectual inquiry) from Party theory, the term lilun has acquired an ambivalent status in the Chinese language, with overlapping senses of both the academic (as in Xifang lilun [Western theory] or houxiandai lilun [postmodern theory]) and the political (as the Party’s doctrine of the moment). In the discourse of sixiang, one encounters a proliferation of translated citations of EuroAmerican phrases and statements as well as pithy glosses on any number of Western theories. As sixiang is most commonly associated with critical engagement, it is perhaps useful to define Chinese critical inquiry as a discourse that intellectuals most often associate with sixiang insofar as this is a “realm” that includes wideranging issues of topical interest and is not restricted to writings that address the specific interests of an academic discipline (as does the realm of xueshu). Thus in producing sixiang, Chinese intellectuals avail themselves of the liberty to enlist as many different foreign authorities as they see fit in support of a given argument. For instance, when Xu Jilin discusses the need for academic norms to be viewed as both distinct in their disciplinary foundations and capable of facilitating “exchange, dialogue, linkage, and contestation,” he issues summary statements under the names of Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and Rudolf Carnap, among others, to support his argument, all in the space of a short essay.6 Similarly, in an essay with the (unacknowledged) quotational title, “The Storm May Enter, the Rain May Enter but the

112

•

Worrying about China

King Cannot Enter: Property Rights and Human Civilization from the Purview of Political Theory,”7 the Beijing-based political scientist and liberal Liu Junning argues his case for the inviolability of property rights as the basis of all individual rights and freedoms by enlisting supportive statements from writers ranging from the Nobel Prize–winning economists James Buchanan and Friedrich von Hayek, to the controversial author Ayn Rand.8 That Liu describes Rand with no hint of irony as the “female philosopher of objectivism” suggests that he is perhaps unaware or else indifferent to the fact that Rand would not normally be included in the curriculum of Anglophone philosophy, except perhaps as an object of interrogation if not derision, and an example of what is inadequate to philosophy.9 Rather, Rand (along with Buchanan, von Hayek, and others) is used to lend authority to Liu’s assertion that there is only one way to be properly free—to capitalize Autonomy in the economic sense of inviolable property rights as foundational truth. Liu’s essay illustrates a characteristic tactic of the “discursive realm” of sixiang: namely, that the mix of foreign authorities enlisted in the proffering of, as it were, a true insight is highly eclectic, and quite different strands of inquiry can be summarily woven together to furnish “evidence” in support or negation of a given proposition. The most egregious examples of this hybridity appear in the slew of commentaries published posthaste (often pseudonymously) on the Internet. By contrast, the academic realm of xueshu is the category under which one would find, for instance, introductory accounts of a body of writings by an academic author (such as Edward Said) or a group of authors (such as the Frankfurt School), and explanatory accounts that address the standard history, research methods, argumentation, and epistemic structure of the named theory in question (such as postcolonialism).10 These scholarly accounts are mostly unremarkable insofar as they do little more than explicate EuroAmerican scholarship in Chinese translation without adding anything substantially new or engaging critically with the already said. Thus it is only when “theory” is enlisted in versatile ways to defend a person’s reading of a historical or contemporary issue, as part of what constitutes “thought” as sixiang, that one can speak of critical inquiry at work.11 In this regard, it should also be noted that critical inquiry occurs when academic writings (in any language) that provide an innovative reading of a given topic, situation, or event queer the pitch of received wisdom and have the effect of exceed-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

113

ing the field in which they were produced to acquire a critical or theoretical function in other fields of knowing. The distinction between the academic (as xueshu) and the intellectual (as sixiang) should not be read as self-evident, even though it is often treated as such in Sinophone discourse. Rather, as a distinction that was first rendered visible and then progressively validated in the advocacy of academic norms, it has been entirely contingent on the vocabulary and language of mainland Chinese critical inquiry since the 1990s. That is to say, even though xueshu and sixiang can now be used to distinguish between two genres of writing, respectively the research paper and the critical commentary, most writings include formulations that belong to both genres. The distinction itself is reflective of the shift toward intellectual professionalization that gained momentum during the 1990s. As such, it is a distinction that may become further entrenched or else cease to matter, depending on how both genres are incorporated in future forms of Sinophone critical discourse to transform the present-day vocabulary and the current emphasis on scholarly rigor. Those whose labors are situated in the realm of Party theory are perhaps more keenly aware than most that nothing can secure the longevity of the “correct ideas” of a given time and place, no matter how persuasive they might have seemed in any one spell of unchallenged authority. In the post-Maoist era, we encounter within Party theory a slew of new coinages and reworked formulations derived from the Sinophone Marxist-Leninist canon, crafted to resonate with the idiom of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that came to prevail in the 1980s under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping. This is an idiom transplanted on to the former Maoist idiom to produce changes in vocabulary and which has, since the 1980s, undergone further minor changes. It is an idiom best explained by summarizing how theoretical progress is commonly narrated in the discourse of the Party-state. In post-Maoist Party discourse of the present time (2006), MarxismLeninism and Mao Zedong Thought continue to be affirmed as the “guiding thought” that first strengthened the People’s Republic in the Party’s foundational decade of the 1950s, but with the qualification that this beneficial knowledge was subsequently “distorted” at the hands of extreme Leftists from the late 1950s onward. Thus it is claimed that aberrant (yichang), dogmatic (jiaotiao), and idolatrous (geren chongbai) uses of this guiding ideology culminated in “the catastrophic decade” (shinian haojie) of the Cultural Revolution (wenge) in the 1960s and

114

•

Worrying about China

early 1970s, obscuring in this process the true insights of MarxismLeninism and Mao Zedong Thought. Against this “utopianism,” the restoration of rationality (helixing) is then attributed first to the theoretical guidance offered by Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping in the form of the Four Modernizations (sige xiandaihua). Deng Xiaoping is credited with having further developed this rationality through his vision of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” with Deng’s various pronouncements on Party leadership in China’s transition to a market economy now posthumously inducted as Deng Xiaoping Theory. Further rational enhancement is then attributed to Jiang Zemin’s “important concept” of “the Three Represents” (sange daibiao, in 2000) and, more recently (in 2005), to Hu Jintao’s concept of the “harmonious society.”12 Party theory, as its authors are well aware,13 is factitious argumentation precisely worded to reflect the imposed consensus will of the Partystate, and often readily dismissed by the wider intellectual community as a latter-day and egregious version of the traditional “eight-legged essay.” Indeed, early in his career Mao was critical of what he viewed as stereotypical or dogmatic Party writing, which he described as “eight-legged essays” that “fettered” the “minds of the Chinese people” by “formalism of another kind.”14 The highly restrictive grammar of Party theory, together with its recourse to repetitive and sloganistic phrasings, make it an easy source of caricature, as the writings of the Beijing-based novelist Wang Shuo in the late 1980s and early 1990s amply demonstrate.15 But this thankless task of projecting the appearance of Party unity through defending the approved formulations of the Party leadership at any given time, purged of the actual complexity of historical uses of these formulations and their radically altered contemporary connotations, requires particular skills of composition, argumentation, and appropriate quotation. In this specific sense, the production of Party theory does uncannily echo the strict requirements of the “eight-legged essay” in its heyday of the imperial examination system, as a test of skills in the composition of commentary prose, before the term became a derogatory reference to dull and unoriginal writing. The rhetorical skills required for producing Party theory, along with the politically fraught nature of the task, is illustrated in a story the prominent historian Wang Yuanhua recounts of his involvement in early 1983 with a team of writers appointed to script a key speech for China’s former cultural czar, Zhou Yang, then chairman of the China

Theory and Taxonomy

•

115

Federation of the Literary and Art World. Wang had published an article on the analytical mode of cognition in 1981, in which he had criticized the tendency of revolutionary thinking to defend a given monocausal explanation via the tactic of “seizing the vital flaw” (zhua yaohai) in any rival argument. Wang had argued that this argumentative opportunism could produce only “a most shallow and vulgar form of theory.” Zhou Yang, who was then interested in promoting a humanistic Marxism against the “alienation of thought” of the Maoist years, asked for Wang’s critique of this politically driven mode of analysis to be included in the speech that Zhou was to deliver. Wang noted that in subsequent Party criticism of Zhou’s speech, his argument was censured as an attempt “to advocate opposition” (chang duitaixi) that undermined the Party theory of the moment by calling for “a return to Kant.” As Wang remarked in retrospect, at a time when the Party’s direction had shifted sufficiently to render his remarks safe for publication, “I want to ask those critics who wielded such great ideological authority just this one question: Why do you avoid my interpretation of ‘letting the abstract ascend to the specific [you chouxiang shangshengdao juti]? You should understand that without willful demolition of the foundation and proof of my argument, your success could not have been secured.”16 Since the national ideology (guojiade yishixingtai) is modeled on Party theory, this “discursive realm” offers nothing less than the assertion of a singular redemptive truth to which all must submit. Consequently, this is a discursive realm that demands of Party scribes an unwavering attentiveness to the naming and explication of that single context (currently phrased as the “harmonious society” of the “Three Represents”) capable of encompassing and shaping the lives of all Chinese citizens, in which they appear as the collective body of “the People.” Since the Party-state also sets great store by the “scientific” foundation of its theoretical formulations, the redemptive truth it claims—specifically its authority in telling all Chinese citizens precisely what they should make of themselves—is further reinforced as a totalizing “objective truth.” Under authoritarian rule, Party theory prevails as an actively monitored constraint on permissible speech within Chinese public culture as well as on institutionalized intellectual life, providing state agencies (particularly those of the Ministry of Propaganda and the Public Security Bureau) with the means to ban publications or arrest individuals

116

•

Worrying about China

and groups on the grounds of transgressing the proper line of collective progress.17 That is to say, the frequent repetition of capacious and banal phrases in official theory, such as praise for the “all-round advancement of the cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics,”18 allows the Party-state to target its critics as those who perversely (or autonomously) resist the properness of such an “all-round advancement.” Against the constant background noise of this official mode of theorizing, the volume of which is adjusted according to the perceptions of those who happen to control the dial at any given moment, it is not surprising that critical intellectuals often avoid direct references to Party theory in their publications, even though their prose also revolves around the pursuit of national and cultural perfection. As noted in Chapter Two, the advocacy of academic norms—to distinguish what is properly “scholarly” from, as it were, merely subjective musings—is an implicit affirmation of intellectual autonomy removed from “politics” (and by implication, Party theory). The common emphasis placed on “returning to tradition” in the establishment of academic norms is thus a valorization of Chinese civilization or “traditional values” antecedent to communism and, in this regard, an implicit but unmistakable rejection of Party theory. An engaging and Confucian-inflected affirmation of academic norms can be read in the short yet influential essay titled “The History of Thought and the History of Scholarship,” published in 1991 by the Beijing-based classicist and historian Ge Zhaoguang.19 Basing his argument on the etymology provided in the Han dynasty lexicographical classic Shuowen jiezi [Explanations of Chinese Characters] by Xu Shen (d. 147 ce), Ge observes that since the characters for sixiang are both based in xin (heart–mind), the term includes acts of deep reflection (chensi), inquiry (siwei), and imagination (xiangxiang). Conversely, the idea of xueshu is derived from the idea of learning (xue) a method (shu), based in the figurative sense of a path (dao) toward understanding, whether as means (shouduan) or technique (jishu), which Ge further distinguishes from the idea of the Way (dao) as cosmic truth. According to Ge, the relation between sixiang and xueshu should be considered as nonhierarchical and symbiotic. Within this schemata, Ge assigns the transcendent value of “inquiring about the Way” (wen dao) to sixiang while investing the work of xueshu with the circumscribed value of acquiring “specialized skills” (zhuangong), citing the Tang dynasty scholar Han Yu’s (768–824 ce)

Theory and Taxonomy

•

117

formulation: “Just as there is a temporal order within which inquiring about the Way occurs, there are specialized skills in relation to scholarly enterprises” (wen dao you xianhou, shuye you zhuangong). Ge observes that the habit in traditional Chinese thought of emphasizing the Way over the skills required to attain knowledge of the Way is neatly encapsulated in well-worn classical aphorisms such as, “Having caught the fish, one can abandon the trap used” (de yu wang quan). He argues that this has led to an overall bias in Chinese thought (whether traditional or modern) toward anticipating the Way of the universe, society, and humanity at the expense of the methods used to reach this end. As Ge puts it, the verbs “to explore” (tansuo), “to reform” (gaizao), and “to know empirically” (tiyan) have not been accorded the same importance as the nouns—“the universe,” “society,” and “humanity”—to which they are respectively attached. According to Ge, one needs to understand that these verbs are constitutive of xueshu as the (methodological) “trap” necessary for catching the “fish” (of knowledge of the Way), and that the general neglect of such methods and techniques in Chinese thought is an issue that contemporary Chinese scholarship must urgently address. Ge’s use of axiomatic formulations in classical Chinese to explain the “weakness” of modern Chinese scholarship suggests that in present-day intellectual discourse, there remains still an anticipation of transcendence through attainment of Knowledge as dao. In Ge’s account, inquiries into the Way of the universe, society, and humanity are understood as spatio-temporally contingent, with each such contribution to knowledge revealing the historical circumstances of the methodological “path” forged and “the standard of thinking in a given era.” Despite his elaboration of the relation between sixiang and xueshu in a strictly Confucian idiom, Ge’s conception of inquiry is unmistakably Hegelian and dialectical. He harkens to the sense of an ongoing refinement of the Way as the historical progress of Chinese thought, with Thought conceived of in quasi-spiritual terms as a self-evolving entity that, in the contemporary moment of Ge’s account, should become keenly aware of its deficient attention to the methods it had hitherto used in the effort to achieve its end goals. This synthetic and transcendent “insight” is resonant in the question with which Gu’s essay concludes: “Are we able to exceed these obsolete [jiu] normative structures so that research on the history of [Chinese] scholarship itself [benshen] can advance one step further?”20

118

•

Worrying about China

On the one hand, the Hegelian skeleton that frames Ge’s New Confucian idiom illustrates that, as a normative structure, the Hegelian dialectic remains authoritative in Sinophone scholarship. On the other hand, by dressing the dialectic in New Confucian garb, Ge obscures its Hegelian underpinnings and rectifies the dialectic to serve the interest of advancing a Confucian-inflected inquiry (as both xueshu and sixiang) as opposed to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (as the work of the dialectic is supposed to achieve in Party theory). The distinction between xueshu and sixiang that Ge articulates using axiomatic Confucian formulations lends itself to being read as a latterday instance of the ancient Confucian notion of “rectifying names” (zhengming). As Confucius explains in The Analects through Simon Leys’s eloquent translation: “If the names are not correct, language has no object. When language is without an object, no affair can be effected . . . Thereupon, whatever a gentleman conceives of, he must be able to say, and whatever he says, he must be able to do. In the matter of language, a gentleman leaves nothing to chance.”21

The Art of Taxonomy The determination of what might be correct or incorrect in the use of names is the work of taxonomy. The classification of phenomena, whether material or conceptual, physical or metaphysical, is essential to discourse everywhere (in whichever language it is produced) insofar as the definitions provided of these classificatory words determine how we see and know a particular representative pattern in the otherwise untotalizable heterogeneity of lived experience. In this regard, the postMaoist distinction between xueshu and sixiang is an act of classification that, in foregrounding the difference between these terms, reflects a new way of seeing and knowing. Thus when Ge retranscribes sixiang and xueshu using the classical formulations, “inquiring about the Way” (wen Dao) and the acquisition of “specialized skills” (zhuangong), he is also rectifying both these names toward a Confucian-derived way of seeing and knowing, with the implication that because these definitions are part of China’s cultural tradition, they should command a greater authority than do Western-derived alternatives. Interestingly, the significance of taxonomy in Confucian scholarship (consequent on the elevation of the “rectification of names” to an overarching moral precept for scholarship) is a matter about which many in-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

119

tellectuals like Ge Zhaoguang manifest a certain ambivalence. Toward the end of his essay, Ge argues that since the appearance of the former Han dynasty classic, Lun liu jia yaozhi [Salient Features of the Six Schools],22 traditional scholarship has largely produced two kinds of classificatory practices, both of which he views critically as having encouraged an emphasis on the Way as such over the methods or skills (shu) required to attain knowledge of the Way. According to Ge, these two forms of classification have shaped the staples of Confucian scholarship: namely “bibliographies” (mulu) and “records” or “scholarly case studies” (xue’an).23 He argues that, in essence, the first is organized around the determination of “genres of writing” (“shu”de fenlei) while the second is focused on distilling the “salient features” of schools of thought through the naming of their “respective trends.” Ge observes that in both these traditional modes of classification, “xueshu and sixiang are conflated at the expense of distinguishing between the different strategies employed”24 in the texts so classified. But Ge’s critique also implicitly affirms linguistic certitude and an unproblematic positivism. It is resonant with Confucius’s assertion that “in the matter of language, a gentleman leaves nothing to chance,” insofar as he seeks to rectify the “obsolete normative structures” that are a legacy of Confucian scholarship by calling for better and more precise ways of naming the methods and skills (xueshu) utilized in the production of ideas (sixiang). In this regard, Ge’s formulations also recall the emphasis accorded to analysis as “a necessary prelude to determining the principle of anything” in the Qing-era discourse of evidential (kaozheng) scholars such as Dai Zhen (1724–1777).25 By way of contrast, it is useful to note that Ge’s analytical orientation is indifferent to Michel Foucault’s self-reflexive retranscription of “knowledge” as a given “regime of truth” empowered by the institutionally authorized discourses of the Academy of a certain time.26 Whereas Foucault alerts us to the operations of power within expert discourses that also, and far less visibly, produce a countereffect of actually restricting understanding by limiting, proscribing, and prescribing how we should “see” and “know,” Ge Zhaoguang is mainly interested in producing a better and more precise way of “seeing” and “knowing” (constitutive of, as it were, an enlightened regime of truth). That said, the introduction of any new terminology invariably affects the existing ways of representing reality within a given discourse, as Ge is well aware.

120

•

Worrying about China

The function of classification, in this context, is to modify the order of things, for instance, by rendering visible a hitherto undetected property with the aid of new terminology. Whether such classification is factual or conceptual is a moot but important point if we consider the deployment of terms to render visible such entities as “proletariat,” “late capitalism,” or “self-evident truth,” and so on; if nothing else, it reminds us of Heidegger’s suspicion as to there being no difference between epistemology and ontology, and it should also serve to warn us that self-reflexive inquiry is no mere secondary concern. Classification thus necessarily implies a method and a theory since its function is to produce a methodical system of naming and thus of knowing the world (whether of texts, humans, or nature) through the use of terms and phrases that have been assigned the abstractive function of arranging things into classes according to such conceptual principles as hierarchy, similitude, and difference. That we have become so inured in both Anglophone and Sinophone scholarship to the conceptual norms at work in the definitions of such keywords as “the state,” “society,” “politics,” “the market,” “culture,” “history,” or “capitalism,” can easily be demonstrated by the ways in which we use these words, factitiously, as if they named some presence or entity out there in the world. We forget that these keywords are influential in our constructions of the world and that their contingency on interpretation renders them always less than fully determinate. It is also always less than determined, indeed unpredictable, as to which new names or phrases, on entering a given discourse, will become popular or influential. Furthermore, those that do often have the effect of both resonating with and modifying well-worn ways of speaking and writing in that discourse, thereby allowing us to conceive and reconceive the world anew. In Sinophone discourse, the shift away from “revolutionary” ways of “seeing” in both the official and intellectual discourses of mainland China since the late 1970s has led to the introduction and ongoing refinement of classificatory terms in both discourses that typify the postMao era as one that accords with reason or rationality, as opposed to political doctrine or dogmatism. Humanism, for instance, emerged in the intellectual discourse of the early 1980s as an important concept to be subsumed under the rubric of New Enlightenment (and as synonymous with reason) after leading Party members like Wang Ruoshui and Zhou Yang first used the term to encourage the Party leadership to

Theory and Taxonomy

•

121

redefine Marxism-Leninism in the kinder and gentler form of “Marxist humanism” (Makesi rendaozhuyi).27 Although their attempts failed,28 “humanism” became a popular catchcry in Chinese intellectual discourse and acquired a certain factlike status as it was being regularly invoked as the true purpose of intellectual inquiry. Thus when a phrase like “the loss of the humanistic spirit” appeared in Shanghai in 1993, in the context of a discussion among a select group of Chinese intellectuals, it circulated widely through the publications of numerous other Chinese intellectuals precisely because it resonated with the sense of social hope that had accrued to the term “humanism” in the preceding decade. But just as the politically inflected sense of humanism as rendaozhuyi signified a return to reason in the 1980s, in specific contrast to the “inhuman” and “irrational” practices of the Cultural Revolution era, the invocation of “the humanistic spirit” (renwen jingshen) in the 1990s was equally specific in its cultural emphasis on renwen as the positive legacy of traditional Chinese values. Indeed, the popularity of the term renwen is such that it is featured as an official theme of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “a humanistic Olympics” (renwen Aoyunhui), and in the related “humanistic Beijing” and “humanistic China” tourist promotion campaigns.29 The culturally inflected sense of humanism as renwen was directed, in the 1990s, against the range of problems that were perceived to have emerged out of cultural commercialism and Westernization, as a consequence of the accelerated pace of China’s market reform. Since the advocates of the “humanistic spirit” used this phrase in the 1990s to imply that “humanism” should constitute the core value of intellectual and cultural life, they implicitly modified the earlier politically inflected sense of humanism (as rendaozhuyi) to target a different form of “inhumanity,” namely the profit motive that they perceived as having produced a corrosive effect on mainland Chinese culture and scholarship. Since its introduction into Chinese intellectual discourse of the early to mid-1990s, the phrase “humanistic spirit” has also been enlisted as an evaluative criterion for the purpose of critiquing certain textual practices that lack the humanism needed to be dignified as the kind of thought or sixiang that China needs. The political complexity of Sinophone taxonomy, evident in the shifting connotations of humanism from rendaozhuyi to renwen jingshen, is not lost on informed Sinophone readers who can readily distinguish

122

•

Worrying about China

between official and intellectual connotations of renwen as a keyword. As for the intellectual merits of Confucian-derived taxonomy, it is useful to recall the remarks of the Beijing-based literary historian Chen Pingyuan on his involvement in the founding of the independently funded journal Scholars (Xueren) in 1991: Chinese intellectual traditions had a strong taxonomic bent. Their cataloging emphasis had something in common with the history of scholarship at which we aimed. Its principal contribution was not to rank specific scholars or particular works, but rather—by “differentiating sources and distinguishing tributaries”—to let later generations understand the trajectories of their predecessors. Generally speaking, our aim in studying the history of scholarship was to understand tradition, connect with tradition, and reflect on tradition. This would be a bit better than blindly submitting oneself to some “isms.” We also had some doubts about approaches that borrowed from Western theories to interpret Chinese culture. Since no better theoretical framework was available, it seemed preferable to resort to an ancient Chinese technique of scholarship, leaving the question answerless (queyi). I may not understand, but I’m thinking. For me, research like this was a kind of self-discipline. It was a bannerless “banner,” an attempt to reflect on the methods and foundations of earlier forms of scholarship, and then gradually to discover the appropriate path for us to take.30

Thus unlike Ge Zhaoguang who is critical of Confucian taxonomy for its neglect of the specific methods used in argumentation, Chen Pingyuan affirms it as an indigenous classificatory technique that facilitated, through the introduction of new themes and topics, an implicit interrogation of the status quo but without demanding ready answers. For Chen, it would appear that this practice of classification (what he calls “a bannerless ‘banner’ ”) is itself a means of keeping inquiry relatively open-ended insofar as it avoids the danger of offering a premature answer that might encourage blind submission once more to one or another “ism.” But what is also evident is that Confucian taxonomy, as part of centuries-old statecraft, is an evaluative practice that ascribes positive or negative moral qualities to names through the descriptions provided of them. Indeed, the prevalence of this classificatory practice in the twentieth century is most notable in the Maoist “rectification of names” of the 1950s and 1960s that not only institutionalized an avowedly revolutionary and true taxonomy of social classes but also ascribed “good” or “bad” qualities to each class. As Simon Leys remarks: “In one respect . . . the Thoughts of Mao Zedong did present genuine orig-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

123

inality and dared to tread ground where Stalin himself had not ventured. Mao explicitly denounced the concept of a universal humanity; whereas the Soviet tyrant merely practiced inhumanity, Mao gave it a theoretical foundation, expounding the notion—without parallel in the other Communist countries of the world—that the proletariat alone is fully endowed with human nature.”31 In the later radicalized Maoist taxonomy, intellectuals were eventually relegated to the lowest social rank of the “stinking ninth” (chou laojiu), and the common traditional practice of identifying and naming factions or “schools of thought” was rendered less significant as a consequence of their politically abject status. Since the 1980s, however, the restoration of social status to intellectuals has encouraged a resurgence of named factions and schools, along with the identification of theories of the moment as “intellectual trends” (sichao). In the discourse of the 1980s, schools and trends were often subsumed under broader headings like “Cultural Fever,” “intellectual fever,” or “methodology fever” (that is, the valorization of rational method over political dogma).32 In the 1990s, these capaciously abstract and febrile captions became much more specific. Liu Qingfeng (formerly a key participant in the Beijingcentered “Cultural Fever” of the 1980s) observes that the “pluralistic context” of Chinese intellectual praxis in the 1990s facilitated the categorization of contemporary intellectual life in new ways, guided predominantly by the “trends” associated with particular sets of interests that had come to typify the “Cultural Fever.” Liu lists “four schools of thought” in this intellectual typology: scientism (associated with the Toward the Future [Zou xiang weilai] book series and members of its editorial board); traditional culture (associated with intellectuals who ran the Academy of Chinese Culture [Zhongguo wenhua shuyuan]); the modern humanities (linked with the Culture: China and the World [Wenhua: Zhongguo yu shijie] book series and its editorial committee); and “new authoritarianism” (associated with such intellectuals as Dai Qing and Xiao Gongqin, who argued in the 1980s in favor of a temporary period of enlightened dictatorship during China’s transition to a market economy, with the expectation of establishing a democratic system in the long term). Added to these four schools were four complementary descriptive categories of intellectual orientation: “May Fourth traditionalists” [Wu Si chuantong pai] is used to describe a relatively small group who claim that theirs is an Enlightenment project, and they avowedly pursue the spirit of the 1980s movement for ideological

124

•

Worrying about China

liberation. “Academy-based liberals” [xueyuan ziyou pai] are those who see themselves as engaging in pure academic research and who identify with either liberalism or cultural conservatism. A third group, “the trend chasers” [nongchao pai], consists of those who “play” with culture, producing cultural commodities for commercial profit, while a fourth group, known as “the political retinue” [zhengzhi shicong pai] or the “strategists,” is best illustrated by the example of Wang Huning who was called to Beijing from Shanghai by an executive order from [the Party SecretaryGeneral] Jiang Zemin to work for the Party Central Committee’s policy studies think-tank.

Liu continues, “these headings were evolved as descriptive categories for intellectuals in the 1980s and are not particularly appropriate or viable in the context of the 1990s.” She proposes in their stead a way of understanding the significantly expanded scope of Chinese intellectual life since the 1990s in terms of the emergence of two new kinds of intellectual orientation that she names as “fideist” (intellectuals who have rejected or are highly skeptical of their earlier Marxist-Leninist education and who have become “true believers in the original tenets of traditional Chinese culture”) and “New Leftist” (intellectuals who use Western Marxist-influenced theory to analyze Chinese problems and to critique perceived flaws of neoliberal economic globalization as “modernization”). To this, Liu adds two new “fevers” or fads that emerged in the 1990s: “national studies” (referring to the significant emphasis given to studies of traditional Chinese culture and New Confucianism) and “postisms” (linked to the widespread use of Western theoretical formulations that feature “post” as a prefix).33 The usefulness of Liu’s classificatory exercise is that it facilitates the effect of a certain cognitive clarity, allowing a given scene to be projected through the salient features that an informed observer assigns to it. But typologies are necessarily reductive since they impose an order or system of knowledge that marginalize or exclude elements that do not fit the abstract and homogenizing definitions a typology characteristically provides. Thus Liu’s distinction between “fideist” and “New Leftist” tendencies becomes problematical the moment one applies it rigorously to the examination of any given text. Should one classify a text as broadly “fideist” even when it draws on “postist” Western theoretical notions to valorize traditional culture?34 Or, if an author identified as “New Leftist” invokes the enduring authority of traditional

Theory and Taxonomy

•

125

Chinese thought, should one classify that particular passage of his or her text as “fideist”?35 Typologies are often the product of empirical analysis and they tend to organize the world specifically in the terms of reference that a particular typology uses. In Anglophone scholarship, Zhidong Hao has produced an even more impressive typology of contemporary Chinese intellectuals, this time based on the degree of their involvement in Partystate politics and again through the use of four categories of intellectuals. In this schema they become: revolutionary intellectuals in power; organic; critical; and unattached (or professional) intellectuals. Hao deploys these descriptive categories to map continuities and discontinuities in Chinese intellectual praxis over the historical long term. For instance, he describes Confucian literati as “organic intellectuals” to signal their allegiance to the imperial order they served as well as to effect a sense of continuity between these premodern historical individuals and their modern descendants by the transcendent category “organic.” Hence, he situates modern intellectuals such as Guo Moruo and Mao Dun, who served as activists for the Chinese Communist Party in their youth and who became, after 1949, leading Party cadres or “revolutionary intellectuals in power,” within a broader, older, and now more coherent historical continuum.36 That at least is what Hao attempts to effect through his categories. The Sinophone propensity to identify “factions,” “trends,” and “eras,” when read as part of the Confucian legacy of giving language an object through the correct use of names, exceeds the significance of similar Anglophone practices of naming (whether in the discourses of the academy or the media) insofar as Sinophone acts of naming are also associated with the expression of moral rectitude. For instance, when He Qinglian uses the term “intellectual elite” to refer to people who are in “possession of a commanding social position” and who exercise “authority over public opinion,” she utilizes four classifications first proposed by the U.S.-based academic Cheng Xiaonong (and highly popular among mainland liberal intellectuals) to name the present-day “intellectual stratum” as consisting of a “commercial group,” “highbrow group,” “populist group,” and “conservative group.” In doing so, He places emphasis on public leadership as the defining feature of the intellectual elite in order to criticize people who presently belong to this class for lacking the kind of moral responsibility that

126

•

Worrying about China

their status properly demands. Instead, borrowing Bourdieu’s vocabulary, she criticizes “experts” who have been “extremely successful in transforming their previous political capital into social capital . . . in the rent-seeking China of today.” She agrees with Cheng’s analysis that the major shift in the relation between political and intellectual elites since the Maoist era is that the political elite is now disposed toward taking up ideas from the intellectual elite whereas it had formerly viewed “a great ideological gulf” between itself and the intellectual elite.37 She also observes that this shift is facilitated by the trend among China’s contemporary intellectual elite to be “deeply divided into different camps . . . causing an acute ‘think-tank complex’ among some circles.”38 The expectation that clarity and insight would arrive via more precise acts of naming is evident in the Beijing-based academic Wang Sirui’s essay, which offers an extensive political taxonomy of center, right, and left positions for the contemporary mainland Chinese intellectual scene, including classificatory terms such as “liberal democratic”; “social democratic”; “New Marxist”; “neoconservative”; “neoproceduralist”; “nationalist”; “statist”; “cultural conservative”; and so on. Wang argues that his taxonomic endeavor is aimed at revealing the complexity of assigning political positions to contemporary Chinese intellectuals and to show how normative Western definitions of these terms differ from Chinese ones. Among other things, he observes that unlike “developed nations where four divisions will normally suffice (extreme left, left, right, and extreme right or alternatively, left, center-left, centerright, and right),” the Chinese situation requires consideration of “how the word democracy relates to the division between center and right factions.” He argues that this is because “in China, there is a kind of ‘liberalism’ (semiliberalism or economic liberalism) that does not require political democracy,” thereby implying that only those who can be classified as “liberal democratic” are properly liberal.39 Problems resulting from an unexamined insistence on attaching a name to a phenomenon to effect an implicit moral judgment have not gone unnoticed by some intellectuals. For instance, Wang Hui observes: At one time, even though He Qinglian clearly saw herself as a liberal, she ended up being labeled “New Leftist” simply because she had exposed the problems of official corruption. Similarly, even though Qin Hui was intensely critical of Russian populism, still he was made to don the hat of a “populist.” It was not until both these scholars published endless “cri-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

127

tiques” of the “New Leftists” that these perceptions of them began to alter. Actually, He’s and Qin’s attentiveness to the problem of official corruption and the plight of Chinese peasants has several points of commonality with the concerns of the so-called “New Left.” In this regard, the neoliberal accusations leveled against them are not entirely groundless. Naturally, there are important differences between several scholars on questions such as how one should evaluate the onward march of globalization; how one should understand the Western market; or how one should understand democracy. What is most lamentable is that the force of critical inquiry within Chinese society has been unable to provide the basis for constructive dialogue. People are restricted instead to the dyadic form of liberalism and the New Left when they seek to study and to understand various theories and social or political causes. This has also led to an absence of productive debate. This allows us to appreciate the power of discourse, when we see the magnitude of the damage inflicted on the discourse of Chinese intellectuals by the absence of a benign character in our political culture.40

Yet as the writings of Ge Zhaoguang, Chen Pingyuan and others of a New Confucian persuasion illustrate, the Sinophone art of taxonomy (grounded in the “rectification of names”) enjoys such cultural authority as to be imagined as capable ultimately of correcting mainland Chinese culture through precise acts of naming. These present-day writings also reflect a deliberate renewal of the preoccupation of traditional scholarship (from the Song era onward) with distilling principles of classification (gewu zhizhi, literally, “the perfection of knowledge lies in the investigation of things”).41 The distinction between “radicalism” and “conservatism,” which became popular in the 1990s, is perhaps one of the more striking examples of an implicit subscription to the Confucian precept of rectifying names. It is a moral distinction insofar as “radicalism,” having acquired a distinctly negative connotation, allows its opposite, “conservatism,” to suggest a positive return to cultural integrity (whether in the form of a progressive humanism or New Confucianism).

In Pursuit of Cultural Integrity In an attempt to refine Sinophone uses of the term “conservatism,” Tang Yijie distinguishes between what he calls the “cultural” and the “political” connotations of conservatism in order to foreground the humanistic aspect of Confucianism as its enduring spirit and as contrary to the premodern orthodoxy of politically motivated (or ideological)

128

•

Worrying about China

uses of Confucian precepts. Thus Tang contrasts “cultural conservatism” (which he reads favorably as the conservation of traditional Chinese thought) with “political conservatism” (which has the obvious negative connotation of lending support to existing authoritarian rule).42 This distinction is now part of a broader emphasis placed on the difference between the xuetong (the academic tradition) and the zhengtong or daotong (the political-moral or statecraft orthodoxy) of Confucianism, with the former being positively inflected and the latter treated with ambivalence as having exercised a negative influence on twentiethcentury politics, including the Maoist era. We should also note that when Tang distinguishes between political and cultural conservatism, he is implicitly critical of negative evaluations (such as those from Zhao Yiheng) of the “new conservative” trend in mainland Sinophone scholarship. Since Zhao’s essay, along with his negatively inflected use of the term “conservatism,” was widely read in the mid- to late 1990s, Tang had an interest in salvaging a contrarily positive sense of “conservatism” as cultural conservation, in order to defend the continued relevance of Confucian-derived ideas for contemporary Sinophone scholarship. This is not surprising given that, in addition to “postisms,” Zhao also singles out the resurgence of both public and state interest in “national studies” (the institutional stronghold of New Confucianism) as the mark of this politically complicit “new conservatism.” “Conservatism” is thus a highly contentious term that has acquired a range of positive and negative senses in post-Maoist discourse: its positive connotations have developed through, among other things, the popularity of Yu Ying-shih’s account of conservatism as a defense against the radicalism of revolutionary and utopian ideas in modern Chinese thought, while its negative connotations were produced through accounts such as Zhao Yiheng’s, where the term “conservatism” suggests both an unhealthy valorization of ethnocentric nationalism and the absence of critical resistance to authoritarian rule. By defending the conservatism of those who “openly acknowledge that they are culturally conservative” while cautioning against the equation of this position with “neoconservatism in Chinese politics,” Tang sought to invest cultural conservatism with the sense of a novel and progressive form of contemporary critical engagement. For Tang, cultural conservatism assists critical inquiry insofar as it was produced in response to “the ‘new’ traditional concepts that have emerged over the last few decades in main-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

129

land China” and, in this sense, it interrogates “the view that radicalism is the only effective approach to cultural development.”43 By coding the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Maoist era as “ ‘new’ traditional concepts,” Tang also implies that authoritarian post-Maoist rule is a legacy of this “new” tradition. By suggesting that the “cultural conservatism” he affirms might be hijacked by politically driven uses of Confucianism but without providing any specific examples of how this has occurred or might occur, Tang is both practicing and alerting his readers to self-censorship at work in his text. Although this oblique form of critique may be opaque to those who do not read between the lines of Chinese critical inquiry, to informed Sinophone readers it reflects the author’s rhetorical skills in producing criticism of the status quo by indirect means. As we have seen in the previous chapters, the valorization of cultural integrity is common to intellectuals of different persuasions (whether a person is identified or prefers to be identified with liberalism, the New Left, a Third Way, New Confucianism, humanism, or postmodernism). What is of interest here is that “postist” writings that feature EuroAmerican critical formulations in Chinese translation are also typically worded to defend one or another form of cultural integrity against what their authors abjure as the effects of Eurocentrism in their own language. Indeed, the defense of tradition common to “national studies” and “postmodernism” has played a crucial part in enabling critics such as Zhao Yiheng to identify both these discourses as “neoconservative.” As mentioned in Chapter One, Zheng Min’s “postmodern” inquiry included a critical assessment of the modern written vernacular as inadequate to meet the needs of literary and scholarly communication. She claimed that modern Chinese could neither equal the modern European languages and ideas on which it was belatedly modeled nor develop its own uniqueness in any substantive way since it was an invented, hybrid language that, in rejecting much of the lexicon and syntax of classical Chinese, had become highly attenuated from the wealth of traditional thought produced in that effectively discarded classical language.44 In criticizing Zheng’s view, Zhao Yiheng claimed that Zheng was promoting a chimerical “natural attitude” (ziran zhuangtai) in her critique of the modern written vernacular as a flawed and artificially constructed language. Zhao argued that Zheng had reduced the modern vernacular to a caricature when she likened it to nothing more than a form of translationese that incorporated features of the Beijing dialect.

130

•

Worrying about China

He was also critical of Zheng’s reductive claim that the modern vernacular facilitated an “illusory linguistic transparency” that had worked in favor of political oppression in the 1950s, through the promotion of a language whose manipulable “transparency . . . had reached a supernormal degree.” In this regard, Zhao claimed that the general “postist” tendency evident in the writings of Zheng Min and others encouraged an unhealthy negation of the Western-derived modernizing discourse of the May Fourth era while he was of the opposite view that this discourse had previously secured for China a foundational modern humanism that was now at risk of being diminished once more. He regarded this “postist” tendency as showing a startling resemblance to the shift in contemporary official discourse, which he perceived as having abandoned its former unequivocal affirmation of “the greatness of May Fourth” to rally, conversely, around “the practical gains of conservatism.”45 In the aforementioned three “discursive realms” of the 1990s and since, the authority of Confucianism has clearly been reinstated but with quite different intentions in scholarship and critical inquiry, on the one hand, and Party theory, on the other hand. In the former, there is a clear intention to forge a sense of historical continuity between scholarship of the premodern and early modern Chinese past with present-day Sinophone scholarship. To this end, historians like Gao Like and Yan Jiayan have sought to argue in favor of such a continuity between traditional and modern Chinese thought by reading the latter as an implicit continuation of Confucian humanism over and against the former Marxist-Leninist norm of representing modern Chinese thought as the inauguration of a revolutionary (albeit “bourgeoisdemocratic”) break from the Confucian tradition.46 Indeed, the kind of argument that Gao and Yan advance allows them to recast the antiConfucian publications of the May Fourth era as texts that, despite their explicit anti-Confucian intent, nonetheless implicitly adhered to the humanist Confucian ideal of ren (benevolence). In this regard they draw on a new interpretive paradigm that has become academically influential in the present-day Sinophone discourse of national studies, one which reads the May Fourth attack on Confucianism as targeting only the institutionalized social and gender inequalities of Confucianism. The modernity of May Fourth is retranscribed as ostensibly antiConfucian but actually reflective of the “humanistic spirit” of Confucianism as a scholarly tradition. Conversely, the appropriation of Confucian values within official dis-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

131

course in general and Party theory in particular accords with the distinctly different intention of rearticulating national and Party unity in Confucian-inflected terms, to project the necessity of a single sociopolitical milieu with distinctly socialist and Chinese characteristics. Given the post-Maoist Party’s newfound respect for Confucianism, it is not surprising that intellectuals are keen to emphasize the difference between Confucianism as scholarship (xuetong) and Confucianism as political and moral orthodoxy (zhengtong or daotong). Unlike state-sponsored accounts of Confucianism that extol the virtue of filial piety to claim that the obedient citizen reflects the natural morality of the familial bond between a child and its parent, Sinophone scholars of Confucianism and national studies are conversely focused on valorizing ren (or benevolence), yi (righteousness), li (propriety), zhi (wisdom), and xin (trust) as cardinal Confucian virtues that both reflect the integrity of Chinese culture and resonate with Western notions of autonomy and democracy.47 Whereas the Party-state generally limits itself to passing somewhat wooden Confucian judgment on Western democracy (as unruly, corruptible, lacking a solid foundation of reciprocal moral obligations, and so forth), Sinophone scholars are much more interested in exploring how the Confucian-derived notion of ren can be reinterpreted to reflect the humanitas of traditional scholarship and its foundational significance for contemporary Sinophone scholarship48 as well as related concerns over intellectual and cultural autonomy. The range of short-lived appropriations of Western ideas that have shaped both modern Chinese thought and the changing “national ideology” of the authoritarian Party-state is often obliquely critiqued in this context for disabling innovative interpretations of Confucianism that might otherwise have provided the Sinophone humanities with its own culturally distinctive character.49 In their attempts to affirm China’s cultural and even civilizational integrity, but without lending credence to the Party-state’s expedient narrative, Sinophone scholars often propose evaluative criteria for distinguishing between doctrinal appropriations of Confucianism (constitutive of its “regressive” elements) and scholarly inquiry into the humanistic and critical aspects of Confucian thought (constitutive of its “progressive” elements).50 They also argue that it is only through the renewed development of these “progressive” elements that the integrity of Chinese culture could be properly restored. This has led Qin Hui to warn against the use of facile analogies in the

132

•

Worrying about China

bid to promote a progressive Confucianism, such as the claim that the Confucian notion of minben (or placing the people’s welfare first) is analogous to the modern concept of democracy. Qin argues that since minben is a term that evolved out of the hierarchies of the premodern Confucian social structure, there is little basis for comparing it to democracy, which is quite differently located in constitutionally enshrined rights within a modern nation-state. Moreover, Qin notes that the motto of Confucian advocates of minben, “follow the dao rather than the sovereign” (cong dao bucong jun), carries both positive and negative connotations. While the axiom could be read positively as a defense of personal autonomy, it could also signify the converse: namely, it could be used, Qin argues, to legitimize “a regime of virtue” (daode zhuanzheng) in which a given doctrine, asserted as the sole virtuous Way, could be used to banish the rights of the individual and even to sanction “killing people in the name of principle” (yi li sha ren).51 Mainland Chinese valorizations of Confucianism since the 1990s, across both intellectual and official “discursive realms,” is consequent upon the emergence of local and regional interest in Confucianism in the 1980s. In this regard, the work of the nonofficial (and now defunct) Academy of Chinese Culture, established in 1985 by a group of academics (including Tang Yijie) and based at Peking University’s Department of Philosophy, should be singled out for special mention. This academy played an important role in advocating the values and concepts of traditional Chinese thought as the moral foundation of contemporary Chinese culture at a time when most of the activities associated with “Cultural Fever” (of which the academy was an integral part) revolved around the introduction and dissemination of Western thought. Through a series of short courses, the academy offered an eager mainland Chinese public new interpretations of traditional Chinese culture together with a range of contemporary perspectives on how Confucian thought could be deployed to contribute morally and philosophically to the making of a modern, universal culture.52 The courses offered by this academy drew large enrollments in the late 1980s since they featured highly revered scholars in Confucian studies, such as Feng Youlan and Liang Shuming, as well as internationally prominent academics, such as the Harvard-based philosopher Tu Weiming. By 1987, when the academy organized a graduate-level correspondence course to meet growing demands, it registered more than 12,000 students with college qualifications.53 This hefty number of en-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

133

rollments for a fee-paying course offered by an organization not supported by the state and not offering degrees, attests to the extensive interest among China’s educated elite at that time in acquiring traditional Chinese ways of knowing as a remedy to ward off the “aberrant” effects of doctrinal Marxism-Leninism.54 Meanwhile, Confucianism was also being promoted in the Asian media outside China (and with particular zeal by the Singapore government) as a cultural tradition that offered the enduring positive values of thrift, industry, respect for education, and collective interests. These so-called Confucian values were being revived as constitutive elements of the Confucian spirit (now recuperated as the doppelgänger of the capitalist Protestant ethic) that drove Asian economic growth in the “Four Little Dragons.” By the early 1980s, the narrative of “Confucian values” as the key to economic prosperity was already prominent in the public discourses of these same “Four Little Dragons,” most particularly in Singapore where Confucian values were writ large into the national ideology with the invited assistance of such prominent international U.S.-based sinologists as Tu Wei-ming, Yu Ying-shih, and Hsu Cho-yun.55 For the Singapore government, Confucian values provided a convenient legitimation of its antiliberal procedural approach to democracy, long-standing features of which include systemic suppression of the government’s critics, incarceration of individuals without trial under the conveniently unrepealed British colonial Internal Security Act, and “free and fair” elections that have always unerringly returned the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) while prominent opposition figures have been bankrupted through litigation brought by members of the ruling Party-state. In brief, Confucian values provided the official Singaporean discourse with the cultural authority of a handy canon to demand “Confucian” allegiance on the part of the nation’s mainly ethnic Chinese citizens to the self-claimed enlightened mandate of the PAP. It allowed the official discourse to claim legitimacy for the government’s authoritarian rule on the grounds that it reflected the superior moral and cultural authority of Confucian values. It is not surprising then that the Party-state of the early 1990s, led by Deng Xiaoping, should find much that was useful in the Singapore government’s expedient narrative of obedience to the state as both a basic requirement of socially and morally responsible governance and a reflection of the properly Confucian order of things. Like its Singaporean counterpart, the Chinese Party-state began to promote its own affiliation with

134

•

Worrying about China

Confucian values in the 1990s, through funding and sponsoring events related to Confucianism and “national studies” in mainland China, as well as through the publication of textbooks on Confucianism.56 The complications arising out of this seemingly multipurpose Confucianism have not gone unnoticed. For instance, the Beijing-based literary scholar Li Yang, among others, cautions against the ready use of distinctions between “culture” and “politics” or between “the scholarly tradition” (xuetong) and “the moral-political orthodoxy” (daotong) in Confucianism. He regards these recent dyadic forms as having the effect of reducing all situations to fit the conceptual opposition being proposed, at the expense of exploring semantic overlaps between the stated opposites. Against this “moralistic mode of historical inquiry,” Li advocates “the historicization of history” (jiang lishi lishihua, a phrase used often among the theoretically informed) toward “gaining mastery over the spiritual journey undertaken by Chinese intellectuals, within the specific spatio-temporal contexts of both ‘the twentieth century’ and ‘China.’ ”57 Li’s observation, reflective of the “linguistic turn” in Sinophone critical discourse, indicates his interest in interrogating moral assumptions implicit in the use of keywords. On the one hand, he remarks that “whether one refers to ‘scholarship,’ ‘politics,’ the ‘individual,’ or ‘totality,’ these are concepts that are not inherently right or wrong. It is only when they are situated within a specific discourse that they produce meanings.” On the other hand, he is specifically interested in “historicizing history” to provide insights into how May Fourth intellectuals like “Chen Yinque, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Wang Yao . . . have collectively created spiritual resources” (jingshen ziyuan) for contemporary Sinophone scholarship.58 In the latter, Li subscribes, like most Sinophone authors, to the metaphysical notion of “modern Chinese thought,” figured as a grand spiritual landscape in which the ideas of different thinkers and intellectual trends can be imagined to thrive or wither, even as he calls for self-reflective critical interrogation of authoritative or “fixed” concepts in Sinophone scholarship. As for how cultural integrity of this kind might be achieved, Li recommends Chen Yinque’s now much-quoted phrase, “One should first possess understanding of a sympathetic nature before putting pen to paper” (lijie zhi tongqing, fangke xia bi), as an attitude that would enhance Sinophone scholarship.59 Sympathy and empathy are often conflated in contemporary uses of the term tongqing to suggest the necessity of

Theory and Taxonomy

•

135

restoring a humanistic Confucian ethic perceived by most to have been much maligned during the May Fourth era and then virtually destroyed as a consequence of the imposed authority of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. While individuals may differ in their interpretations of how and the extent to which Confucianism became undermined, nonetheless most agree that Sinophone scholarship will acquire neither its own unique character nor its own code of ethics unless intellectuals begin to feel at home in the classical language of Confucian thought. The alternative, as many argue, is to accept unquestioningly the authority of foreign theories and thereby to derive interpretations of culture and society that cannot nurture a sense of sympathy or empathy for what is uniquely Chinese in an object of inquiry. For instance, in lamenting the prevalence among Chinese intellectuals of an unexamined acceptance of Max Weber’s concept of “instrumental rationality,” Liu Dong cautions: “If we should choose this ‘instrumental rationality’— based on the lived historical reality of the West—as the grid upon which to examine Chinese historical sources and, even worse, if we make it the standard by which we judge ‘progress’ in Confucian society, then those criteria for evaluating historical progress that have emerged out of and are innate to Chinese civilization will be voted obsolete and be rendered invisible.”60 Similarly, when Sinophone authors deploy self-reflexive postmodern formulations to support a prescriptive and positivistic approach to inquiry (with the aim of constructing a national culture using the “tools” of postmodernism and postcolonialism), they express frustration over what is best described as critical aphasia resulting from the perceived absence of powerful indigenous theories. For instance, in He Qing’s The Modern and the Postmodern: A Brief History of Western Art Culture, this form of critical aphasia makes a poignant appearance in the form of a staged incommensurability between the book’s two sections: the 439-page explanatory account he first provides of Western modernism and postmodernism (in which he offers very few Chinese examples) and the 31-page critical afterword that follows from this account.61 He writes these two highly asymmetrical sections in two discordant idioms that recall the new emphasis on distinguishing between xueshu and sixiang discussed earlier. In the prior explanatory (or xueshu) account, He provides a documented survey of different aspects of modernism and postmodernism, with numerous examples and quotations drawn from

136

•

Worrying about China

the visual arts, literature, and film, as well as from various philosophical and critical writings of the twentieth century.62 Among other things, He Qing reads postmodernism as paradigmatically and affectively embodied in Gerhard Richter’s oil on canvas artwork, Two Candles (1982). According to He, Two Candles opens up a meditative space “after the dissolution of progressive narratives.” He reads the symbolism of the candles as universally relevant across cultures; “candles burn day and night in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist temples as they do in Western churches.” For He, the religious feeling that Richter’s image of candles evokes in the viewer is crucial to an understanding of the postmodern moment as one that compels us to reflect on the “infinite universe that exceeds both the individual and humanity” in the wake of our irrecoverably lost confidence in modern secular progress.63 Yet despite offering us this powerfully empathetic reading which seems to promote an enabling sense of the human as our common meditation on the loss of modern progress as Truth, He Qing does not explore how his own Sinophone response to Richter’s art might contribute to a productive transcultural conversation about our common dependence on language and the historical contingencies that have shaped the entrenched and divided truths in our languages.64 On the contrary, his diction is mostly unreflectively rationalistic; he even provides in the concluding pages of his account a chart that conveniently lists the “key features” of modernism against those of postmodernism. In his afterword, He writes in an affective critical (or sixiang) idiom strikingly at odds with the detached professional tone he adopts in his first 439 pages. The afterword begins with a lengthy quotation from Lao She’s 1933 satirical novel Cat Country (Mao cheng ji), where Chinese mimicry of Western words is parodied as gibberish. This epigraph sets the scene for He’s pessimistic and scathingly critical commentary on contemporary mainland Chinese intellectual culture. He shifts abruptly from the measured language of his preceding 439-page account to the following emotive sentences that open his afterword, which is titled “Words beyond the Topic” (tiwai hua): At first, I had no intention to quote as much as I did from books written by Westerners [yangren], nor did I think that I would end up mindlessly borrowing [banyong] as many words as I did from Westerners. But the truth is that too many of our fellow citizens [guoren] are wont to dismiss one’s words if they are not those of Westerners. This left me with no choice but

Theory and Taxonomy

•

137

to tell my fellow citizens the things I want to say in a borrowed Western voice.65

He then proceeds to speak in his “Chinese voice” (against his preceding “borrowed Western voice”) of the adverse consequences resulting from twentieth-century Chinese preoccupations with “modernization” as the key to nation-building. Like Zhang Yiwu and Zheng Min, He argues that the “inferiority complex in present-day Chinese culture” is a legacy of ideas that first appeared during the May Fourth era (criticizing, among other things, the May Fourth symbolism of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” as illusory ideals). He claims that these ideas, accompanied by the “totalistic” abandonment of China’s own cultural tradition during the May Fourth era, have produced an entrenched view of modernization-as-Westernization that has consistently failed to recognize “the loss of Chinese culture’s origin.”66 His critique of May Fourth idealizations of science and democracy is poignant insofar as his “Chinese voice” is replete with the polemical and remonstrative cadences of the very May Fourth discursive idiom that he disparages, with the difference that he uses this May Fourthderived voice to defend rather than to negate traditional Chinese culture and thought. He emphatically declares (in several underlined statements of his epilogue) that “the difference between Western and Chinese cultures is of an essential [benzhi] rather than of a temporal [shijian] nature.” He argues that while the alphabetic languages of the West had developed toward embodying the rule of law (fazhi), the written Chinese script had evolved toward embodying the rule of man (renzhi), citing the prominent linguist Wang Li in this context.67 According to He, attentiveness to this fundamental difference in the development of Western and Chinese scripts should alert present-day Chinese intellectuals to the necessity of considering, from a Sinocentered perspective, Chinese political thought in its historical entirety. As he puts it, “ ‘Democracy’ is an empty word while ‘acting on behalf of the people’ [wei min] is real.” He argues that the tradition of Chinese political thought has produced many terms such as “pacifying the people” (an min), “protecting the people” (bao min), “gaining the people’s hearts” (de min), and “cultivating the people” (yang min), that are cognates of the overriding ideality of “acting on the people’s behalf.” He concludes that the entrenched “centralist” (jiquan) view of power within traditional Chinese political thought should be disaggregated into the

138

•

Worrying about China

mutually constraining and beneficial relationships that this mode of thinking has developed between the “sovereign” (jun) and “the people” (min), in which the sovereign is obliged to act on behalf of the people and the people, in turn, are obliged to be loyal to the sovereign. He argues that this dual determination of political power is incommensurable with the tendency in Western political thought to regard power in unilateral terms, best expressed by the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” According to He, this phrase is “not necessarily true” of Chinese culture, although it might be true of Western culture. On the contrary, he argues that “China’s five-thousand-year-old history” has been distorted by this inappropriately Western view of power that renders Chinese history as structurally always despotic, obscuring the “genuine history of a [Confucian] civilization based in rites and music.”68 He’s unqualified praise for the traditional Chinese notion of “acting on the people’s behalf” is illustrative of the trend toward affirming progressive elements within Confucianism. In this regard, he fails to consider the historical connotations of paternalistic authoritarianism associated with the phrase (in the way that Qin Hui does with minben, discussed earlier). On the contrary, he idealizes the “rule of man” as an indigenous source of justice over the foreignness of the “rule of law” without exploring the autocratic implications of the “rule of man” or asking how it could foster the kind of shared communal responsibility that he claims on its behalf. Indeed, his argument teeters on the brink of xenophobia when he describes democracy as “an empty word” because of its foreign origin. The strident tone of He’s “Chinese voice” is all the more striking when compared with his measured “borrowed Western voice”; his critical afterword projects an anger and resentment toward Chinese mimicry of Western norms that is wholly suppressed in his preceding exposition of the postmodern. Nostalgia for Confucian thought, together with interrogations of how the classical language was “tragically” eclipsed in China’s twentieth century, have now come to characterize the “linguistic turn” in Sinophone critical discourse, quite contrary to Anglophone theory, as the redemptive pursuit of a genuine history or Chineseness. As we saw in Chapter Two, Zhang Yiwu recommends postmodernism and postcolonialism as “new knowledges” that, in liberating Chinese thought from the Eurocentrism of modernity, would enable an intellectual to construct his or her own unique form of Chineseness. Zhang’s notion of Chineseness obscures its foundationalist reliance on Anglophone critiques of Eurocentrism in order to secure the vision of Chinese post-

Theory and Taxonomy

•

139

modernism as the availability of many different kinds of choices for mainland Chinese citizens in what he calls their newly “transnational” and “transcultural” habitat. In this regard, when Zhang and others coined the term “post-New Era” (houxin shiqi), they sought to cast a postmodern aura over the expanded scope of intellectual and cultural practices that had flourished in mainland China since the 1990s as a consequence of cultural commercialization.69 Thus when Zhang offers postmodernism as merely one of a number of choices that the new mainland Chinese market environment had made available, he is nonetheless also claiming that postmodernity (as the “post-New Era”) had arrived in China to render the project of modernity irrelevant, along with the postcolonial revelation that this project is inherently Eurocentric in its design. The “New Era” was a term introduced into post-Maoist official discourse to demarcate the Party-state’s new agenda of market reform and modernization from the discredited practices of its Maoist command economy past. By using the prefix “post” to distinguish the 1990s (as the “post-New Era”) from the 1980s (as the “New Era”), Zhang signaled, quite sensibly, that contemporary Chinese culture had in fact entered into postmodernity. Postmodernity, in the sense of being the historical period of a global economy empowered by Internet technology and characterized by the ease of moving people, ideas, goods, and services across national borders, is a useful periodizing concept insofar as it reminds us that critical inquiry, whether produced in China or elsewhere, is a response to the radically altered conditions of our everyday experience, wherever we may happen to live. Postmodernity reminds us that, as Kevin Hart puts it, “we live in perpetual acceleration.”70 But when the term “post-New Era” is used to celebrate the arrival of Chineseness against a Eurocentric modernity, Sinophone postmodernism effects a radical departure from the nonessentializing EuroAmerican postmodernism it otherwise affirms. Unlike the latter’s characteristic rejection of the realist assumption that language can offer true insight into reality (that is, a truth such as “Chineseness”), the Sinophone version of postmodernism is supposed to work as a linguistic and cognitive tool to discover and craft just such a culturally unique truth, in resistance to the Eurocentric distortions of reality that “postists” alleged were a result of intellectual inquiry during the “New Era.” Accordingly, Zhang’s assertion of a culturally unique “post-New Era” led his humanist detractors to satirize the term as a trendy mimicry of Western postmodernism that failed to acknowledge the enormous gains for intellectual autonomy

140

•

Worrying about China

they believed the New Enlightenment discourse of the “New Era” had produced.71 What is clear is that the vocabulary of EuroAmerican postmodern scholarship, along with its suspicion and skepticism about the language of universalistic assumptions commonly associated with an erstwhile modernity, has been transformed to resonate with one or another Sinocentered project in the course of its assimilation into Sinophone critical discourse. Rather than a disparate set of open-ended self-reflexive interrogations of the meanings invested in art and culture, postmodern theory in its Sinophone context is burdened with the added responsibility of revealing flaws in twentieth-century Chinese thought toward achieving the telos of a pluralistic and authentic Chinese culture. For instance, in defining Chinese postmodernism in the sense of both a pluralistic and culturally unique phenomenon, Xudong Zhang explains that it is “the cultural form of the new market and consumer masses nurtured by the state,” and then inflects the term teleologically to signify “a utopian space for reconfigurations of social and class relations, the imagination of community, nation, freedom, and democracy, and a new universal culture of particularities.”72 In referring to “a new universal culture of particularities,” Zhang does not acknowledge Derrida’s notion of “a universalizable culture of singularities,” even though the two phrases are remarkably similar. Derrida offered this particular formulation within the context of a European discussion on religion to indicate that despite the different and conflicting forms that religion takes, faith is universalizable to the extent that it can be conceived of as the “abstract possibility of the impossible translation.” For Derrida, the act of faith or the appeal to faith is something “that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other” and can, as such, be regarded as an inscription of justice that is always “in advance” of its arrival. In this context, Derrida emphasizes the nondialecticizable nature of what he calls “a universalizable culture of singularities.” He draws attention to both the universal anticipation of justice in acts of or appeals to faith and the violence that generally accompanies any attempt to translate justice, presciently and transcendentally, into a foundational truth that demands conformity to its particular formulations. Thus he figures faith nonpresciently and immanently as “this messianicity, stripped of everything . . . this faith without dogma which makes its way through the risks of absolute night,” which “cannot be contained in any traditional opposition.”73

Theory and Taxonomy

•

141

Quite contrary to Derrida’s notion, Zhang’s “new universal culture of particularities” is an appeal to the light of day, to the utopian promise or prescience that the progress of the dialectic will ultimately deliver the truth about “social and class relations” and “community, nation, freedom, and democracy.” The desire for cultural authenticity, whether worded as “Chineseness” or more theoretically as “a new universal culture of particularities,” can be said to have overtaken and obscured the linguistic turn toward self-reflexivity. This desire was arguably given its most refined articulation in Wang Hui’s monumental four-volume work titled The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.74 In this recent work, Wang has sought to provide a detailed history of the institutionalization and subsequent evolution of modern Chinese thought as a process that was shaped, on the one hand, by the social and political contexts in which traditional keywords accrued meaning and authority over the centuries of Confucian scholarship and, on the other hand, by the ways in which the legacy of this scholarly tradition influenced the reception of imported Western ideas into the greatly altered sociopolitical context of Chinese intellectual life since the nineteenth century. He is particularly interested in examining the ideological implications of distinct types of historical narratives of modern China. He argues that it is necessary to examine “China,” “the Chinese empire,” and the “nation-state” as concepts that have appeared in different types of narratives in order to highlight their ideological connotations and to problematize their appearance in contemporary Chinese intellectual discourse as would-be “ ‘natural’ categories” (“zirande” fanchou). As he puts it in one instance, “Any method of examining nationalism and national identity that is divorced from the essential politico-historical connotations [of a given time and place], and which confines itself only to the formal aspects of dialect, print culture, and the written language is invariably crippled.”75 This statement reveals that even though Wang is critically attentive to the ways in which a single conceptual term can be invested with quite dissimilar connotations across different languages, or even in one language over an extended period of time, he is nonetheless keen to determine a singular vision of “essential politico-historical connotations” (shizhixingde zhengzhi-lishi neihan). Thus he implies that there should exist for each era a set of contextual connotations that would then constitute the facts or reality of that era. Wang’s project is illustrative of an architectonic conceptualization of

142

•

Worrying about China

Chinese thought as an expanding intellectual edifice or system built by different generations of Chinese intellectuals, a system that is imagined to become more comprehensive in time as more varieties of ideas are brought within its fold. This is a conceptualization haunted by the dialectical expectation of a perfected system somewhere in the future, and it prevails in Sinophone critical discourse as the dominant mode of reasoning. That this mode of reasoning is now given articulation in a variety of idioms (whether inflected to resonate with New Confucianism, liberalism, humanism, or postmodernism) has enabled intellectuals to celebrate the arrival of intellectual pluralism in mainland China. In this regard, we should note that the Guangzhou-based theologian and philosopher Liu Xiaofeng has been fairly influential in promoting an alternative version of cultural integrity as personal intellectual integrity through his readings of Leo Strauss. Liu regards his project as one of recovering and developing a spiritual and ethical foundation for engagement with history and philosophy. He has attracted a significant following among graduate students and younger intellectuals in mainland China with his blend of Christian and Straussian recommendations for overcoming what he regards as chronic problems caused by Chinese misreadings of Western thought during the twentieth century. Like Wang Hui, Liu offers a substantive critique of modernity but his reading differs quite significantly from Wang’s. Wang’s project is to recover China’s cultural integrity through a structural analysis of traditional Chinese thought as morally centered on natural principle (tianli) and as noncapitalist in orientation, which then enables him to interpret (and redeem) the turn toward socialism in modern Chinese thought as the legacy of that preexisting, noncapitalist intellectual tradition: as both a response to and a critique of twentieth-century global capitalism. Conversely, Liu’s focus is on exploring modernity as a form of spiritual predicament common to both China and the West in order to claim that, in the global context of cultural pluralism and the decline of traditional, spiritual values, people everywhere face the same problem of having to select the elements of their own personal code of ethics.76 In this regard, Liu has sought to foreground the contingencies of place, time, language, and personality in the writings of historical individuals (in explicit resistance to the entrenched Marxist-inflected assumption of history as the necessity of progress), with the aim of promoting what he calls “healthy readings of the West” toward the cultivation of personal integrity in Sinophone scholarship.77

Theory and Taxonomy

•

143

Liu occupies an unusual position in Chinese intellectual circles insofar as he has largely distanced himself from the debates that have animated Sinophone critical discourse (such as those discussed in Chapter Two), even though he commands enormous influence through editing and publishing the works of thinkers such as Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in Chinese. Indeed, many have commented that the translation and publishing activities of “the Liu Xiaofeng academic clique” (Liu Xiaofeng xueshu jituan) have created a “climate” of the clique’s own in mainland intellectual circles, particularly since the late 1990s.78 In the general preface to a recently launched book series titled Sources of Western Learning that Liu coedits with the Hong Kong-based philosopher Gan Yang, both editors claim that “Chinese readings of the West” during the last century reflect the “morbid psychology” of figuring China as an “illness” and the West as a “pharmacy” that could supply the appropriate cure. Indeed, they are at pains to emphasize that, because Western thought was and remains a response to Western “illnesses” rather than Chinese ones, it was imperative for Sinophone readers to acquire specific knowledge of the different types of “illness” that Western thought sought to treat, in order that they might “enter the arteries of the West itself in reading the West,” properly understand “the causes of its merits and flaws, its gains and losses,” and thereby “acquire their own expanded horizon through weighing up for themselves what to adopt and what to discard.”79 In these formulations, Liu and Gan betray a characteristic Sinophone preoccupation with appropriatism—of knowing what to select and reject from the Other in order to benefit the Self—quite at odds with their expressed disavowal of an unhealthy eclecticism in modern Chinese thought. Not surprisingly, critics have lost no time in querying whether Liu’s and Gan’s own readings of the Western philosophical tradition are sufficient to pass the “health” test they prescribe. As one critic puts it: “When Gan and Liu began to read the West, they didn’t even know what the West was like. Thus even though they may think they are pondering the problems of the West, actually their minds remain filled with Chinese problems.”80 In critiquing Liu’s recommendation of Leo Strauss’s claim that the most profound ideas are generally stated in an esoteric manner that demands careful and rigorous interpretation constitutive of “reading between the lines,”81 the Internet essayist Wu Guanjun has commented that Liu’s displacement of truth from the status of something evident or manifest (xianzai) to something hidden

144

•

Worrying about China

(yinzai) remains caught in the very predicament from which Liu seeks to escape. Wu argues (in an idiom that draws from both Foucault and Slavoj Zˇizˇ ek) that in attempting to correct and transcend the falsehoods of a visibly imposed “regime of truth,” Liu has inadvertently imposed his own alternative “esoteric” regime insofar as Liu fails to consider how his own formulations “share the same ideological framework” as the falsehoods he disavows.82 Wu’s interest in interrogating Liu’s invocation of a higher truth for its ideological ramifications indicates that Sinophone critical discourse has now begun to accommodate some problematization of the otherwise prevalent expectation in that discourse of discovering or recovering an ideal architectonic scheme for Chinese thought.83 But since the discovery or recovery of such a scheme remains dominant, the kind of self-reflexive interrogation Wu seeks to promote occupies a fairly marginal position. Indeed, because most Chinese intellectuals continue to reflect the Mencian paradigm of knowing what to adopt and what to discard in their engagement with EuroAmerican theory, their discourse remains largely focused on using that theory selectively to endorse their varied proposals for perfecting thought, with the common aim of achieving an enlightened pluralism of “being Chinese.”84 EuroAmerican self-reflexive theory is limited, as it were, to the task of helping Chinese intellectuals discern what is genuinely Chinese. But what “genuine” (zhenzheng) signifies in the present-day discourse is no longer a simplistic notion of a pristine state of Chinese culture or thought. Rather, it suggests a constructivist salvaging of the positive and humanistic aspects of traditional Chinese thought with the aid of both Chinese and Western methods, toward the goal of strengthening the cultural integrity of Chinese thought. For instance, even though Tang Yijie advocates Confucian studies toward the reinforcement of cultural integrity, he cautions that facile celebrations of “Chinese cultural quintessence” are not only chimerical but also lend themselves to the legitimation of both extreme nationalism and authoritarian rule in the name of such uniqueness.85 Similarly, when Liu Dong affirms the need for a genuine tradition, he concedes nonetheless that “even the scholarly criteria for what we call ‘national studies’ has already been progressively influenced by ‘Western methods.’ ” Accordingly, the crux of the matter is that: In a discursive terrain where there is no longer any clear boundary between “traditional learning” [jiu xue] and “new knowledge” [xin zhi], we need to

Theory and Taxonomy

•

145

reflect awhile on whether it might be true that “our national essence no longer has an essence.” Or at the very least, we should attempt to distinguish the “genuine tradition” that forms part of our natural heritage from the “recycled tradition” that is the outcome of human contrivance by following the lead of the authors [Hobsbawm and Ranger] of The Invention of Tradition.86

There are numerous Sinophone essays in print and on the Internet that echo Liu’s call for the revival of a genuine tradition of Chinese thought, and these essays reflect the emphasis that many Chinese intellectuals place on redressing the perceived historical errors that resulted from radical twentieth-century attempts at inventing a modern Chinese culture. They also typically promote a nuanced approach to the affirmation of humanism in traditional Chinese thought that, as Liu Dong, Tang Yijie, Qin Hui, and others have argued, is neither a chauvinistic celebration of a Chinese quintessence nor a wholesale disavowal of the borrowed vocabulary of EuroAmerican scholarship. Indeed, some view this return to tradition as constitutive of the “reconstruction of Chinese philosophy in its postmodern moment” (houxiandai Zhongguo zhexuede chonggou).87 As the Shanghai-based philosopher Yu Zhiping puts it, “It is only by engaging with the numerous concepts, categories, and perspectives in traditional Chinese philosophy, through an entirely new mode of interpretation that draws on the discourse of modern philosophy, that we can bring about a regeneration of traditional Chinese philosophy that will enable its exuberant life force [wangsheng shengmingli] to reemerge.” In this regard, Yu also makes plain that what he means by this entirely new mode of interpretation, is “not merely a kind of renewed understanding or renewed knowledge but, more importantly, it constitutes a form of historical continuation [yizhong lishi yanxu] or indeed, a form of civilizational creation [yizhong wenming chuangzao].”88 In these theoretically informed attempts to delimit a foundational truth on behalf of Chinese civilization that we have explored, the general absence of reference to Hegel and Marx (together with Lenin, Engels, and other names of canonical status in Sinophone Marxism-Leninism) is indicative of the greatly diminished intellectual authority of these foreign but assimilated ancestral thoughts. In this regard, they are also being implicitly accused of having rendered the home of the modern Chinese Being inferior. Let us now turn to post-Maoist attempts to renovate this home through the reinterpretation of the dialectic as a guiding concept.



chapter four

Reasoning after Mao

The eminent Beijing-based literary historian Qian Liqun remarks of the late 1990s that “Chinese national characteristics were actually altered by Mao. To this day, observers of mainland ways of thinking and behaving, even of orating, notice traces of his legacy.”1 Similarly, in reflecting on the coerced unity of official and everyday language at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the controversial Shanghai-based cultural critic Li Jie makes the passionate albeit hyperbolic claim that “by 1966, the Chinese could only think Mao Zedong Thought, they had suffered a complete stupefaction of their own thought processes.”2 Since Mao’s death, the Party-state has greatly modified but nonetheless retained this unified voice in its pronouncements, with the effect that Chinese intellectuals continue to read official statements symptomatically, searching for repressed traces of factional contestation among leading officials that are otherwise articulated in a seemingly homogeneous discourse.3 Hegel and Marx are not accorded a great deal of space in Sinophone critical discourse these days, even though their writings continue to be taught at universities as part of the compulsory curriculum in Marxism studies (Makesizhuyi xuexi)4 together with required readings of Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Jiang Zemin’s “Important Thought of the ‘Three Represents,’ ” and more recently Hu Jintao’s stillevolving account of the “harmonious society.” Thus although the paucity of engagement with dialectical materialism reflects its greatly diminished status in the discursive realms of xueshu and sixiang, nonetheless

Reasoning after Mao

•

147

dialectical materialism remains the guiding paradigm of Party theory in which university-educated Chinese citizens have been compulsorily schooled and tested for decades. Within Party discourse, the formulaic conception of the dialectic is of a spiraling process of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”5 through which society is imagined to advance toward its inevitable resolution in a perfected socialism.6 As part of the Party’s vocabulary of dialectical materialism, this formulaic conception pervades the range of formal communications conducted as part of everyday work life within universities and other state institutions. Indeed, academics who serve as senior administrators in state institutions are often obliged in their publications to refer to Party concepts of the moment, such as the “Three Represents” or the “harmonious society,” to project an aura of consensus with the Party’s vision of striving for national perfection, imagined as the ongoing sublation (yangqi) of Party theory into an ever more refined state of rational unity.7 In this regard, we should also note that the present-day language of mainland China evolved out of the Maoist language that held sway as “the gold standard of reality” (to borrow Michel de Certeau’s phrase) between 1949 and the late 1970s.8 Prior to its devaluation in the 1980s and since, Maoist discourse was able to dictate the structure of “reality” through its dominance in everyday acts of communication, producing the effect of “collective” and “revolutionary” experience through the prescribed use of its rhetoric in mass mobilization campaigns and the media. Blind adherence to Mao Zedong Thought is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in Lin Biao’s instruction to the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution: “[With regard to] Chairman Mao’s words; those that we understand, we must carry out; those we do not understand, we still carry out.”9 The collapse of the revolutionary paradigm associated with the Maoist era and the rapid eclipse of Mao Zedong Thought following his death were facilitated by political fiat on the part of the Party-state led by Deng Xiaoping, which purported that it was “liberating” Thought from its captivity to the fallen house of Maoist revolutionary Being.10 Occurring in tandem with this political shift was a rapid opening up of the language of the People’s Republic to ways of speaking and writing that had previously been denounced and banned as pernicious bourgeois fare. Nonetheless, because the Chinese language had been disciplined to replicate and resonate with Maoist revolutionary slogans and

148

•

Worrying about China

axioms for three decades, the shift in the 1980s toward nonrevolutionary ways of speaking and writing remained still captive to the powerful effects of the linguistic determinism that the former revolutionary discourse demanded. Mikhail Epstein’s notion of “ideolanguage” (an abbreviation of “ideological language”) provides us with a useful way of capturing the deterministic effects of the post-Maoist state’s Marxist vocabulary. In describing ideolanguage as language harnessed specifically to serve the aims of the former Soviet state ideology, Epstein writes: “Language is the most honest witness of ideological contradictions which, in Soviet Marxism, were painstakingly concealed from popular consciousness in order to mold more successfully the collective subconscious. Ideological language became the decisive tool for the Soviet regime’s systematic construction of such ‘ideal’ phenomena as the ‘Soviet man’ and ‘Soviet mentality.’ ”11 The enforced homogeneity of formulations that any ideolanguage demands is a characteristic feature of Party discourse. It is against this imposed ideological unity that independently minded intellectuals have, as a tacit ethical goal, sought to pluralize (duoyuanhua) the discursive realms of scholarship and critical inquiry. Since the Party’s ideolanguage is one that intellectuals must daily encounter, especially if they are employees of the state or state-funded institutions, it is not surprising that, in the interests of encouraging pluralism, they have largely steered clear of this ideolanguage in their critical writings. But while they now shun the Party’s vocabulary of dialectical materialism, these intellectuals have also generally retained the Hegelian dialectic as a guiding concept. This Hegelian legacy is evident when intellectuals conceive of Chinese thought as a process of dialectical progression (effected through the ongoing resolution or synthesis of contradictions) toward the telos of a perfected knowledge system. This assumption of a dialectical progression toward future perfection (with the telos sometimes named specifically as “the Realm of Freedom”) can be found in the writings of New Leftists, “postists,” liberals, New Confucians, or advocates of a “third way” alike.12 Thus although Sinophone critical discourse clearly differs from the Party’s ideolanguage, it nonetheless retains a distinctly Hegelian tone when alternative vocabularies (derived from a diverse range of Chinese and EuroAmerican writings) are used to project one or another scene of dialectical progression.13 Party theorists have also sought to include elements of these

Reasoning after Mao

•

149

new vocabularies in their own formulations in a bid to render their now largely unheeded ideolanguage theoretically innovative and plausible. In this chapter, I will explore some of these recent developments as constitutive of a “reasoning after Mao” insofar as the dialectic remains conceptually significant in both intellectual and Party writings, despite having been uncoupled from the telos of Communism that the dialectic was intended to serve within (the materialist doctrine of) Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism. In what follows, two texts will be examined for the ways in which they reinterpret the dialectic as the guiding concept: first, a liberalist critique of the Hegelian legacy in China by Shan Shilian, and second, a Party text that extols “seeking truth from facts” (shishi qiu shi) as the Party’s motto. This textual analysis will be followed by a broader discussion of the Party’s ideolanguage and of critical inquiry conducted in the midst of this ideolanguage.

Rectifying the Dialectic In an essay titled “Bidding Farewell to Hegel,” the Guangzhou-based philosopher and historian Shan Shilian argues that because the dialectic was formerly and erroneously directed to impose the inevitability (biranxing) of an “ultimate end” in modern Chinese thought, it should now be corrected to reflect the contingency (ouranxing) of “(the) understanding” (zhixing).14 In explaining his conception of contingency, Shan begins with a critique of the explanation offered by Li Zehou, arguably China’s most influential philosopher of the 1980s, in Li’s celebrated 1979 work, A Critique of Critical Philosophy.15 According to Shan, in that work Li valorizes the “contingent” and the “inevitable” in equal measure, but appears largely oblivious to the contradiction he creates between these two terms in doing so. Shan argues that Li invests his concept of subjectivity (zhutixing, a favored term of the 1980s often used to signal a thinker’s “liberation” from the dogma of the preceding Maoist decades) with the value of contingency when he gives it the dual connotation of “individual sense perception” (geti ganxing) and “social practice” (shehui shijian). Li attempts to bridge this duality through his notion of sedimentation (dianding). “Sedimentation,” as it appears in Li’s work, is aptly summarized by U.S.based academic Ban Wang as referring to the cumulative “deposits” of “social, rational, and historical elements” that endow the fragmentary nature of individual felt experience (“something private, sensuous, and

150

•

Worrying about China

immediate”) with the overarching meaning of human experience as a whole. Ban continues: “Sedimentation functions as a persistent metaphor in Li’s text to define the relationship between the senses and reason, the individual and the social, nature and culture, the particular and the general, always giving the second term the upper hand over the first.”16 The notion of contingency, situated in the context of Li’s theoretical definition of sedimentation, anticipates a destined and ultimate end. According to Shan, despite Li Zehou’s qualification that the subject is none other than “the concrete existence of an individual” (and thus necessarily contingent), Li’s “ontological perspective on the subject as the practice of humanity” shows that he implicitly agrees with “Hegel’s notion of a totalizing necessity” (which is decidedly not contingent). Shan avers that Li merely enlisted the “subject of sense-perceptions,” derived from his readings of Kant, to invest his otherwise totalizing and Hegelian vision of history with a certain aesthetic value, but without allowing the contingency of sense-perceptions (as individual and varied) to contradict the totality of History that he also projects. Shan argues that Li conversely uses various types of binary oppositions—“history and humanity, history and emotions, history and ethics,” and, most significant, “the totality and the individual” (zhengti yu geti)—to defend the totalizing view that “prior to the arrival of Communism in the Realm of Freedom, in the development of the human race (the totality) and in the development of individuals, sharp resistance will often arise and sacrifice of the latter will often be required in the advance forward.”17 Shan observes that Li’s argument accepts unquestioningly the Hegelian “historical process” (lishi xingcheng) as the unfolding of the relations between the greater self (da wo, humanity as a whole) and the lesser self (xiao wo, the individual). He also notes that Li does not demonstrate how or why “the mode of social production and the relations of production” that he claims have a “concrete historical reality, an actual existence” (and which he associates with the greater self) should take precedence over “the needs, feelings, and ‘existence’ of actual people.” Shan avers that Li’s reasoning is decidedly dubious when he claims that “the mode of social production and the relations of production” are commonly and erroneously viewed as abstract, while “the needs, feelings, and ‘existence’ of actual people,” commonly assumed to be actual, are in fact “abstract and nonexistent.” Shan concludes that the crucial contradiction in Li’s argument between his “opposition to Hegel’s neglect of the contingent and the individual,” on the one hand, and his “insistence on

Reasoning after Mao

•

151

inevitability and totality,” on the other hand, was one that his totalizing vision of History prevented him from resolving.18 But one can also read this contradiction as illuminating the kind of redemptive truth that Li defended in his Marxist discourse of the late 1970s, a truth that led him to represent progress as the marshalling of the particularities of human experience into the proper order obtaining within a fully Communist but as yet unattained “Realm of Freedom.”19 But as Shan does not take into consideration the linguistic limitations of this earlier era, he is led instead to judge Li’s argument as simply flawed. He quotes the following excerpt from Li’s work to demonstrate the unfortunate contradiction arising out of Li’s distinction between the contingent and the inevitable: “It is only through knowing the objective rules and total process of human social development, when one actively [zhudong] chooses and determines one’s fate in accordance with this total process, advancing and promoting this process, that one can be said to have gained genuine individual freedom [zhenzhengde gexing ziyou] in a historically specific way.” Shan notes that when Li further qualifies this claim by noting that “enlisting righteous indignation, sorrow, feelings, the evaluation of values or ethical principles will not enable one fully to understand . . . the extremely complex historical process of relations between the totality and the individual,” his argument is decidedly at odds with the “contingency” that he ostensibly affirms.20 Since Li was writing in the late 1970s, he would have had little choice but to refer to the prevailing Marxist-Leninist idiom of the time in any attempt to criticize the violence of the preceding Cultural Revolution years. Li rejected “subjective voluntaristic belief” (by implication, Mao’s personal vision of permanent revolution)21 on the grounds that it was an abuse of Marxism, and he did so to affirm an alternative law of human social development (hence his eclectic use of Marxist and Kantian22 and, in his later writings, Confucian formulations) as the basic premise of individual freedom. Accordingly, emotional judgments have no place in the Kantian-inflected rationalistic (as opposed to revolutionary) Marxism that Li affirms abstractly as the “objective rules and total process of human social development.” Clearly, Li’s idea of autonomy as the individual’s freedom to conform to the power of “objective rules” bears a remarkable structural resemblance to what Mao himself prescribed when he affirmed revolution as the constant principle to which all must adhere.23 But what made Li’s reinscription exciting, novel, and liberating for many Chinese readers of the

152

•

Worrying about China

late 1970s and early 1980s was his negation of the Maoist principle of revolutionary class struggle as “subjective voluntaristic belief ” and his affirmation of “objective rules of human social development.” With the former, Li produced an oblique critique of Maoism (but one that was recognizable to his readers), and with the latter, he sought to offer a rational remedy to the flaws of Maoist thinking. The initial widespread appeal of Li’s text, published shortly after Mao’s death, as a sustained defense of individual autonomy indicates the extent to which it was a novel “self-consuming artifact” of its time, to recall Stanley Fish’s phrase.24 The excitement that greeted the publication of Li’s work as a liberating view of things was due to its capacity to invest the restrictive vocabulary of its time with formulations that made the idea of a nondoctrinal “objective” and “rational” truth attractive to its Marxist-Leninist– educated readers. Just as the credibility of Maoist discourse had shrunk with the accumulated weight of contradictory uses of its formulations over some three decades, Li appeared to his readers as someone who had actually salvaged some kernel of truth from these same corruptions of Sinophone revolutionary discourse. To these readers of the 1970s and 1980s, Li recuperated a Marxism, already doctrinally gray and stale, by painting it in Kantian and Confucian hues in a way that made it possible to see it renewed. Shan’s article, first published in 1998 and then reproduced in an influential 2000 anthology titled Intellectual Positions (and thereafter widely discussed online), also shows how much the vocabulary of Chinese intellectual discourse had altered during the two decades between the publication of Li’s work and Shan’s subsequent critique. Whereas Li Zehou had attempted to salvage (a Kantian- and Hegelian-inflected) autonomy from the language of Marxist orthodoxy, Shan sought contrarily to demonstrate the inhospitality of this language toward autonomy. He observes, for instance, that Li appears oblivious to the sinister aspect of Hegel’s concept of the “cunning of Reason.” According to Shan, the “cunning of Reason” is oppressive since its function is to subjugate human enthusiasm, hope, and sacrifice to a particular cause, enlisting these qualities as mere tools to serve the “totality” claimed in the name of this cause. Shan argues that the “cunning of Reason” excludes humans from assuming the role of “self-aware creators” of their own history, rendering history both a noumenal “thing in itself” (benti, and its Kantian connotation of the inaccessible) and a subject (zhuti) a totality within which “humans can only play a preor-

Reasoning after Mao

•

153

dained role.” For Shan, the complexity of Hegel’s work is that while he advances such a “cunning” thesis of inevitability or necessity, he is “neither politically indifferent nor entirely neglectful of the active and selfaware nature of individual participation in history.” Shan reads Hegel as caught in the contradiction between claiming the necessity of “laws” of progress, on the one hand, and affirming the contingency of individual actions, on the other hand.25 He claims that when Marx attempted to resolve this contradiction, he produced an unfortunate convergence between the determinate nature of “a philosophy of inevitable progress” (which is totalistic) and the contingent nature of “guiding principles of revolutionary actions” (which are always shaped by the specific interests of human actors in a given time and place). Shan avers that when Marx “invested his own will with the meaning of heroic acts that have occurred in the process of history,” he “produced a convergence [jiehe] between his own will and the idea of iron-clad laws of inevitability that control people and history,” implying that there is an inherent contradiction in Marx’s thesis, as there is in Li Zehou’s. Shan further claims that when Marx “converged” the contingent and the inevitable, he did so “without regard for the difficulties and dangers” associated with promoting this idea of “inevitable progress” guided by the presumption of a constantly evolving dialectic of the revolutionary will (that is, as Marx’s “own will”). Shan’s negative assessment of Marx is best considered as an oblique critique of Party theory since he then proceeds to criticize “Chinese Hegelianism” (Zhongguode Heige’erzhuyi) for affirming, as wrongheadedly as Marx, “the reinforcement of inevitability in terms of the ‘self-awareness of subjective will.’ ” Indeed, by adroit recourse to the philosophical abstractness of “Chinese Hegelianism,” Shan is able to criticize MarxismLeninism-Mao Zedong Thought as a flawed theory, but without actually naming it as such: Chinese Hegelianism . . . emphasized that the individual who creates history is the true subject [zhenzheng zhuti] of historical development, the people [renmin] are history’s motive force. Chinese Hegelianism did not engage in negation and reduction [fouren, biandi]. Rather, it elevated and exaggerated the subject’s dynamism and creativity. The problem is that when this kind of creativity and initiative is restrained within the framework of historical inevitability defined in a priori terms, the individual is required not only to identify unconditionally with this framework but duty-bound to sacrifice himself for it.26

154

•

Worrying about China

Quoting George H. Sabine, Shan reads “inevitability” in Chinese Hegelian thinking as a form of “belief in ultimate victory” akin to the Calvinist faith in God’s will but, more important, is critical of it for having misconstrued Hegel’s “ontology of history” (lishi bentilun) as a “theory of subjective will” (zhuguan yizhilun). Shan, however, does not elaborate on this contrast he draws between the ontological and the subjective. He merely states that “negation and reduction” (as one aspect of sublation within the dialectic) places a necessary constraint on the actualization of “subjective initiative and creativity,” and argues further that one should affirm this aspect of Hegelian ontology precisely because it constrains any would-be totalizing vision of necessity and historical inevitability. In brief, Shan implies that the dialectic must be rescued from such false “inevitabilities” with which it had previously been burdened and that Hegel, accordingly, must be recast as a defender of liberal democracy against the role of an idealist precursor of Marxism that he has played in Party theory. In his argument, Shan makes frequent use of a discursive tactic common to both official and intellectual discourses. He provides two opposing sets of connotations for Hegel—positive versus negative—to distance the “good” Hegel, who provided an ontological account of the principles of human social development, from the “bad” Hegel, whose insistence on necessary laws of dialectics Shan claims unwittingly provided theoretical legitimation for totalitarian rule. This distinction is clearly expressed at the end of Shan’s article when he appeals to his readers to “bid a final farewell to the Hegelianism of totalitarian ideology” in order to “more fully understand Hegel’s philosophy” and to produce divergent or plural forms of understanding that are nonetheless unified by the democratic system in which they circulate.27 Shan first locates the dialectic as a key concept in Hegel’s “ontology of history,” an ontology to which Shan accords the status of true or beneficial knowledge when he claims that it has the capacity both to adjudge and to control the workings of “subjective will.”28 He then proceeds to argue that contingency is the foundational principle for such an ontology since any conceptualization of social interaction and human development is invariably the outcome of the understanding (zhixing, the nature of the intellect), which is, in turn, always subject to the specificities and the limitations of knowledge in a given time and place. In elaborating this point, Shan recommends Wang Yuanhua’s reading of Hegel over Li Zehou’s.

Reasoning after Mao

•

155

According to Shan, Wang correctly defined “(the) understanding” when he noted that it must not “exceed the boundary” of “the process of knowing” (renshi guocheng) of which it is a necessary and indispensable (biyaode, buke queshaode) sector (huanjie). In affirming Wang’s distinctly Kantian-inflected statement, Shan fails to note that when Wang recommends that the understanding be confined to the “boundary” of its particular time and place, Wang is also projecting Knowledge as the totality within which he imagines all partial acts of understanding ultimately to be located. Nor does Shan comment on Wang’s prescriptive formulation of the understanding as knowledge that must always be determined as occupying no more than one of the many “necessary sectors” in “the process of knowing” as a whole. Rather, Shan affirms this prescriptive way of defining the understanding when he quotes the following from Wang, to argue that the understanding must conform to the truth that there is a totality but that it is impossible to know such a totality: “The crux of the matter is totality. ‘[The] understanding cannot recognize the totality of the world, it does not know that things are in flux, undergoing continuous transformation and endless generation and degeneration.’ ”29 It is clear that both Wang and Shan are attempting to affirm intellectual pluralism (in an implicitly Kantian sense of the understanding as an activity cognizant of its own contingent and situated nature) in opposition to the determinism of “true knowledge” that “Chinese Hegelianism” asserts. What is interesting is that they prescribe contingency as a norm or rule—that of knowing how to determine and apply limits to the understanding—and this prevents them from interrogating the positivistic style of reasoning on which their own statements are contingent to the point of dependency. The normative sense in which Shan casts contingency is clear when he quotes approvingly from Wang to caution against acts of understanding that fail to acknowledge that knowledge is finite and specific. Such “deviation,” he argues, will lead one’s capacity to understand to “become partial, narrow, and abstract,” and one will be “led to take things as isolated, fixed, rigid, immutable and thus fall into metaphysics.”30 In other words, Shan’s “contingency” is not quite so contingent since he elevates it to the status of a governing principle. When he offers contingency as the conceptual corrective for the range of false inevitabilities that he criticizes Li Zehou, Marx, and Chinese Hegelianism for having produced, he effectively recodes “contingency” as a necessity insofar as

156

•

Worrying about China

he claims that all freely thinking and “self-creating” humans must heed the limitations of their knowledge to ensure that they are contributing to an ultimate totality of Knowledge. Accordingly, Shan hardens “contingency” into a quasi-law of natural development to which he attaches a range of positive characteristics.31 In one instance, he privileges “(the) understanding” over “reason” to emphasize that because knowledge is dependent on the specific ways in which the understanding is produced, contingency governs scientific progress. He argues that reason, by contrast, is a product of knowledge and can, as such, be manipulated to effect an unfortunate “convergence” of different ways of knowing into a totalitarian or at least a totalizing form. As Shan puts it, enlisting Kant as a theoretical authority: If “reason” favors “convergence” (he) and “(the) understanding” leans toward “divergence” (fen), since the scientific spirit is first and foremost a spirit that favors “divergence,” this [latter] can be considered to be the spirit of rigorous analysis and proof. Kant regards “sense perception” and “reason” as conditions produced out of knowledge, while the knowledge obtained is dependent on “[the] understanding.” This accords with modern science.32

In another instance, Shan claims that one can enlist Hegel’s dialectical method to ensure that the understanding is properly situated within the “boundary” of its own time. Formulating this claim in capaciously abstract terms, Shan writes that the dialectical method will help to “overcome the partial and abstract nature of [the] understanding that a given analytical method produces, by synthesizing certain simple stipulations derived from and disaggregated through [the] understanding, which restores [to the understanding] the qualities of abundance and specificity, thus attaining diverse unity [duoyang tongyi].”33 This statement is best read as yet another of Shan’s attempts to prescribe pluralism (or “diverse unity” or simply “diversity”) as the telos to which he believes the Hegelian dialectic should be harnessed. Throughout his essay, Shan enlists terms such as “synthesis,” “abundance,” “specificity,” and “diverse unity” to describe the operations of the dialectic under the good rule of contingency. He opposes to these a set of negatively inflected terms (such as “convergence,” “subjective will,” and “totality”) to reflect the bad rule of inevitability or necessity under which he claims Chinese Hegelianism has imprisoned the dialectic. As noted earlier, although he is strictly opposed to the totality of knowledge offered by Chinese Hegelianism, Shan subscribes nonethe-

Reasoning after Mao

•

157

less to the idea of a totality of Knowledge but he distinguishes it from the former by stating that this totality cannot be grasped. Shan’s essay illustrates the difficulties of affirming plural ways of knowing in a Hegelian idiom that anticipates the future arrival of a fully fledged Realm of Freedom or an “ultimate end” to social contradictions. Shan’s emphasis on unity (worded as “diverse unity”) indicates a distinctly Hegelian conception of sublation toward an ultimate form of rationality.34 Accordingly, “diverse unity” presumes the existence of an exemplary system capable not only of overcoming the negative properties of different strands of knowledge to preserve their distinctiveness, but also of synthesizing them as elements into a higher rational whole. His argument implicitly affirms the model of a university in which the intellectual properties of different faculties can be institutionally organized as elements within the one operating system. This is evident when he seeks to rectify the Hegelian notion of an “ultimate end” by making it resonate with the connotations of what he calls, quoting Charles Taylor, a pursuit of the “highest ethics” as well as with the “spirit of science” that he attributes to the posthumously revered economist Gu Zhun (1915–1974).35 He argues that Taylor was correct to interpret the “ultimate end” in Hegel’s work as a pursuit of the highest ethics because the ultimate end should signify the necessity of “discovering the highest norm in actual things” while “avoiding at all costs the attempt to construct a new society on the basis of an arbitrary blueprint.”36 Shan then proceeds to associate “the highest ethics” with the virtues of “divergence,” “science,” “democracy,” and “empiricism,” to suggest that only those forms of understanding that reflect these virtues can be deemed as true. Accordingly, if these virtues are lacking, then falsehoods would prevail. Shan affirms empiricism in particular and he claims that Gu Zhun’s study of freedom as the ultimate end (zhongji mudi) in Hegel’s philosophy of history constitutes an exemplary work of empiricism. Shan’s valorization of Gu Zhun is worth exploring in some detail because Gu has been frequently cited in Sinophone writings since the 1990s as an indigenous authority on liberalism. For instance, Li Shenzhi wrote that “people have said that China did not produce any independent and creative thinkers in China in the later half of the twentieth century. This is not entirely true for we have Gu Zhun.”37 Li’s comment reflects something of the posthumous esteem in which Gu is now widely held as an exemplar of intellectual autonomy against Maoist dogma. Hence when

158

•

Worrying about China

Shan praises Gu Zhun for his empiricism, he asserts that Gu Zhun’s interpretation of the dialectic (produced during the Maoist era) is scientific and correct, unlike Li Zehou’s Maoist-inflected (albeit post-Maoist) reading, which Shan judges as untrue. According to Shan, Gu Zhun’s empiricist approach is exemplary because he took into account the tragic practical consequences that arose out of Hegel’s discourse on the “ultimate end” (that is, “the ending of the French Revolution in the guillotine, the October Revolution in the gulag, China’s revolution in the Cultural Revolution”). Shan claims that this practical orientation enabled Gu to circumscribe the Hegelian notion of an “ultimate end” as an “ideological force” necessary for effecting large-scale social transformation, one that provides people with a vision of revolutionary change in the interest of achieving a specific outcome. He argues that when Gu conceived of any declared ultimate end as dependent on the objective needs of a given time and place, Gu correctly identified the need for such an ultimate end to be relinquished in the long run, to prevent it from degenerating into an instrument of authoritarian rule. This, he claims, confirms that Gu recognized the contingent nature of understanding, quoting the following excerpt from Gu as proof: “Without the powers of imagination, how would we have engaged in revolution in our youth? We would have been content with being merely mediocre members of the urban petite bourgeoisie.” For Shan, Gu understood the ultimate end as providing people with the means to be inspired by the highest good, facilitating social mobilization and mass participation toward achieving this end. He argues that what made Gu’s affirmation of the highest good correctly empirical and contingent was that Gu also distinguished between the unscientific idealism of projecting an ultimate end as opposed to the scientific use to which such an ultimate end can be put when “banners are flown” in its name, in aid of revolution.38 According to Shan, when Gu defined Hegel’s “ultimate end” in terms of a “great and ultimate foundation” (qiangda yiju, zuihou yiju) of social mobilization, he offered a pragmatic and empiricist account of revolutionary idealism as a necessity that is “neither scientific nor true” but “an indispensable tool for revolution, a tool which is also dangerous.” Shan explains that Gu’s own experience of life under the Maoist Partystate led him subsequently to “bring an end to the ‘ultimate end’ and to liberate the three principles”:

Reasoning after Mao

•

159

First, the spirit of science, . . . the substance of which revolves around [Gu’s] acknowledgment of the idea that knowledge of nature and human society is boundless and that every field of knowledge is always in a state of progress, undergoing development and perfection as it flows from small to great things, from partial to holistic understanding. Second, this scientific spirit is also a way of arguing in favor of philosophical pluralism since it negates absolute truth, the presence of a first cause, and an “ultimate end,” leading to respect for different kinds of propositions as ideas located in different historical phases . . . The third is political democracy, since monistic theories in philosophy tend toward political arbitrariness and authoritarianism while pluralistic theories resonate with democracy and freedom: they allow people to speak and they allow each individual the right to express his/her desire.

Shan claims that Gu Zhun’s notion of progress shows the strength and necessity of scientific empiricism in critical inquiry, which accords with the scientific development of the understanding from “partial” to more “holistic” forms, as opposed to the unscientific metaphysics of an ultimate end and an imposed “ideal of the highest good.” He notes too that “Hegel had sought to substitute the dialectical method for metaphysics but because of his theory of the ‘ultimate end,’ he became instead the greatest metaphysician.”39 Through these observations that assert a set of norms for scholarship (ranging from empiricism to the spirit of science), together with liberal democracy as a necessary political orientation, Shan progressively elevates contingency to the status of, as it were, a true law of the dialectic, to replace the erroneous and false laws of “totalitarian ideology” he has disavowed. Shan’s essay illustrates the range of positive words and phrases commonly featured in Sinophone critical writings that advocate pluralism and democracy in an abstract theoretical register. In this regard, his reading of Gu Zhun is fairly representative of how Gu is now celebrated as the indigenous exemplar of a scientific and liberal outlook on life.40 Moreover, we should note that by distinguishing the good philosophical Hegel, who validated contingency as the true principle of dialectical progression, from the bad ideological Hegel, whose “cunning of Reason” came to serve the interests of totalitarian rule, Shan in effect asserts one true way to read Hegel. This positivistic mode of inquiry is quite unlike Anglophone self-reflexive engagement with Hegel, such as ˇ izˇ ek’s, that distances itself from any assertion of a true way of Slavoj Z reading Hegel to focus instead on how all such assertions display the

160

•

Worrying about China

symptomatic anxiety of an unconscious will to power legitimated as the will to truth.41 On the contrary, Shan’s argument is designed to be defended as a will to truth (for instance, when he furnishes his quasi-law of contingent dialectical progression with the “highest ethics” as its ultimate end). But since this will to truth also takes the form of adjudging all readings of Hegel as flawed unless they agree with Shan’s argument, a will to power is also at work. Thus even though Shan is clearly writing against the determinism of “Chinese Hegalianism,” the positivistic tenor of his own writing leads him to offer an alternative truth rather than to interrogate the language (that is, the Party’s ideolanguage) used to produce an intractable vision of the good. By offering an alternative vision of the good, Shan’s prose reflects the legacy of this ideolanguage, even though he has clearly departed from its ideological contents. In effect, Shan offers in a Hegelian idiom what many Chinese liberals have expressed using a Hayekian vocabulary: a “scientific” vision of freedom as an ideal free market “spontaneously ordered” through (and contingent on) rational, social practice as opposed to a market over which the state exercises significant control. The Hayekian romanticization of competition for economic survival as “spontaneity” is reallegorized by Shan as dialectical progression in accordance with the “contingency” of market demands (which he opposes to the erroneous inevitability of progress toward Communism). Moreover, Shan’s argument resonates with Francis Fukuyama’s neoliberal economic reading of Hegel but in an idiom that also bears clear traces of the argumentative style used in the Party’s ideolanguage.42 What is also clear is that the inevitabilities Shan opposes are no longer a feature of present-day Party theory. Rather, just as Shan’s rectification of the dialectic to serve a liberal telos reflects an enormous change in critical engagement with Hegel since the 1980s, the language of Party theory has also been renovated to offer universal kernels of truth that bear little resemblance to the “Chinese Hegelianism” that Shan decries.

“Seeking Truth from Facts”: A Dialectic with Chinese Characteristics In a 2003 Internet essay titled “Seeking Truth from Facts: The Code of the Chinese Communist Party,” authored by committee members of the Party Organization Department at Guangdong Polytechnic Normal

Reasoning after Mao

•

161

University,43 the phrase “seeking truth from facts” is referred to as the Party’s motto and presented as a universal kernel of truth first “discovered” by the early Mao and further enriched by the “innovative” thinking of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin (with Hua Guofeng’s brief leadership of the Party in the late 1970s erased from the Party’s current narrative of its history of ideas). This text is unremarkable in its own right, being merely one out of an enormous number of similar articles produced daily by the Party to consolidate the normative appearance of its doctrine; however, it is useful for our purposes here to illustrate the discursive tactics typically deployed in the kind of argumentation named as “Party ideological theory” (or Party theory), to detect similarities and differences between intellectual and official styles of writing. In this text, “seeking truth from facts” is accorded nothing less than the status of a constant principle that has ensured the Party’s continued evolution. It is offered, in essence, as the underlying principle (akin to Shan’s quasi-law of contingency) of dialectical progression in the history of the Party. The constancy of “seeking truth from facts” is first defined through describing the phrase as “our Party’s ideological line” (women dangde sixiang luxian) and the Party’s “basic premise,” with the subsequent claim that, “in fact, it has defined our Party’s code of conduct, which has, in turn, enabled our Party to take on a new appearance.” Thus the authors assert that “seeking truth from facts” must be understood as the code or motto (dang xun) on which the Party “relies for its livelihood.” They then rehearse the standard etymology of the phrase, citing its first documented use in a text by the Han-dynasty historian Ban Gu (32–92 ce), and explaining that within classical scholarship, the phrase was confined to connote merely “an effort to secure authentic and original texts.” They argue that if “the phrase originally meant the adoption of a rigorous attitude in learning and doing things,” then “it clearly was not a philosophical proposition.” They also aver that while the phrase “underwent certain shifts of connotation in the history of Chinese thought,” it was not until Mao “excavated this old Chinese phrase” in the course of developing his own ideas that he rendered it “sublime” (shenghua) as a philosophical proposition: specifically, a “thoroughly comprehensive brand-new materialist mode of explanation.”44 The locus classicus of this brand-new Marxist truth is then identified as Mao’s 1941 “Reform Our Learning” (Gaizao womende xuexi), with no hint of that text’s strategic importance in Mao’s launch of the Party

162

•

Worrying about China

Rectification Campaign in Yan’an to consolidate his control over the Party. The authors merely praise Mao for having produced a comprehensive definition of “seeking truth from facts” when he explained that “facts” (shishi) were “things that objectively exist”; “truth” (shi) was “the internal relations between objective[ly existing] things”; and “to seek” (qiu) was “our investigation of these matters.”45 Thus the authors sanitize Mao’s text as purely theoretical disquisition when they erase its actual historical significance as “theorizing” produced in aid of Mao’s purge of “internationalists” from Yan’an.46 They confine their interests to arguing that Mao’s reinterpretation of the phrase transformed it into a principle that confirmed the truth of the dialectical materialist perspective on reality: namely, that the “laws of existence and development” which define the “internal relations between things” are empirical observations insofar as they are “reflected in people’s minds.” Accordingly, the “primary nature” of the “objectively existing world of matter (including nature and society)” should be understood as a reality that is necessarily dependent on the empirical observations of a given time and place, for which the authors claim that evidence was ample in the form of “different answers . . . obtained from the various materialist accounts, past and present, Chinese and foreign.” But when the authors claim that “seeking truth from facts” embodies the empirical nature of dialectical materialism, they implicitly affirm Deng Xiaoping’s use of the phrase in 1977, with the support of the Party elder Chen Yun, to legitimate his own political authority against the then-incumbent leader Hua Guofeng.47 Deng’s use of the phrase in 1977, like Mao’s in 1941, was strategic. Like Mao, Deng relied on the capaciousness of the phrase to offer “facts” for the particular empirical “truth” that he sought to justify: namely, that the development of a market economy was the kind of modernization that China needed. Since the phrase already had the legitimacy of a Mao-sanctioned axiom in Party discourse, it served Deng’s purpose of challenging the equally Mao-inspired but wholly opposite principle of “whateverism”—that is, whatever Chairman Mao said and did was correct48—proposed by the rival Hua Guofeng faction. But none of this is discussed in the essay. Instead, the authors evade altogether the issue of the phrase’s longevity as an authoritative quote enlisted for different political ends in the turbulent history of the Party’s discursive production. This allows them to define the phrase as a foundational principle “discovered” by

Reasoning after Mao

•

163

Mao in 1941, the philosophical soundness of which they claim can be demonstrated by its proximity to the spirit of Frederick Engels’s AntiDühring. They necessarily accord to Anti-Dühring the status of foundational or canonical knowledge when they use the following passage from this work to elaborate on Mao’s definition of “seeking truth from facts”: “The principles are not the starting point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them; it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history.”49 Having “distilled” the theoretical significance of Mao’s 1941 definition in this exegetical fashion, the authors go on to claim that the phrase precisely encapsulates the proper “attitude” of “unifying theory and practice” in Marxist-Leninist thought that “each and every Party member must adopt.” When the authors claim the phrase’s axiomatic status as both a true proposition and a proper code of conduct (an attitude that would secure “success and triumph” for its adherents in “whatever they do”), it is clear that they are engaged in a taxonomic exercise aimed specifically at defending its truth value. The “facts” that purportedly reveal the “truth” presumed to inhere in “seeking truth from facts” turn out to be justifications that wholly elide the conflicting strategic uses Party leaders have made of the phrase in the past. By means of such “purification,” the authors are then able to invoke the phrase as an absolute and constant principle and, from that transcendent order, are able to accuse “Leftist and Rightist deviationists” throughout the Party’s history for having “lacked the attitude of seeking truth from facts.” They go on to note that in “their neglect of Chinese realities and their mechanistic uses of Marxist formulations,” these “deviationists” had subjected “our Party and the Chinese revolution time and time again to serious losses and even desperate situations.” This allows the authors to accuse Mao (through the implied authority of Deng’s interpretation of the phrase) of having erroneously “departed from and violated” the principle of “seeking truth from facts” when he launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It is particularly interesting that in commending Mao for reflecting the spirit of Anti-Dühring through his 1941 definition of “seeking truth from facts,” the authors are at pains to claim that Mao had crystallized the truth of dialectical materialism in a manner that was “strikingly Chinese in character and style.” Thus by rhetorical sleight of hand, they

164

•

Worrying about China

make the past serve the present (gu wei jin yong, a dictum declared by Mao in 1940) when they read into Mao’s 1941 definition a transcendent principle in order precisely to affirm Deng’s distinctly post-Maoist notion of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” We should note here that when Deng used “seeking truth from facts” to legitimize the Party-state’s shift away from its revolutionary Communism and toward the development of China’s market economy, he relied not only on the authoritative status that this handy political axiom had acquired in Party discourse since the Yan’an years but drew also on the moral authority this phrase had accrued across centuries of Confucian scholarship. Indeed, because the phrase was elevated to a maxim by the Song dynasty Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (whom both Mao and Deng admired) and became a motto of evidential scholarship during the Qing dynasty, it possesses ample cultural authority to be pressed into service for demonstrating the cultural integrity (or the “Chineseness”) of Party theory, with the necessary rectification of its connotations to accord with the Party truth of any given moment. Similarly, the use of Engels’s Anti-Dühring to attest to the theoretical soundness of Mao’s 1941 explanation of “seeking truth from facts” is a tactic of legitimation that reflects that other memorable Maoist dictum: “making foreign things serve China” (Yang wei Zhong yong).50 The authors scrupulously avoid the issue of the shift in the Party’s discourse from “revolutionary struggle” to “rational governance,” privileging instead their preoccupation with the theoretical and “dialectical materialist” significance of the phrase. In this context, the passage cited from Engels’s Anti-Dühring plays the role of a Western quotational authority that lends philosophical weight to the phrase as an axiom “abstracted” from “nature and human history,” to recall Engels’s own words. It is only at this point in the essay, after having taken the life out of the phrase by erasing every trace of its historical and political complexity, that the authors introduce “Comrade Deng Xiaoping” as the Party leader responsible for “restoring and enhancing” the “ideological line and attitude of seeking truth from facts as advocated by Mao.” Deng is praised as an innovator who had “raised people’s understanding” of this axiomatic principle to “a new level.” Interestingly, when the authors praise Deng for his interpretation of “seeking truth from facts,” their language shifts abruptly from the theoretical idiom of their preceding paragraphs to a colloquial description of the axiom as a “magic

Reasoning after Mao

•

165

weapon” (fabao) whose “unrivalled commanding force” Deng is alleged to have unleashed. By means of this switch in tactics, the authors invest Deng’s postMaoist redeployment of “seeking truth from facts” with a certain popular and spiritual ambience. They then sum up their unequivocal praise for Deng by staging a spiritual union between the exemplarity of Mao’s 1941 definition and Deng’s 1977 resurrection of the phrase. In this context, they argue that Deng was able to “establish a New Era in socialism” because he adhered to the constant principle of empirical observation from a dialectical materialist vantage point in three interrelated ways: he affirmed “seeking truth from facts as the foundation of the proletarian worldview and Marxist thought”; he recognized that Mao Zedong Thought correctly “adopted seeking truth from facts as its starting point and basis”; and, finally, he wedded the axiom to the “liberation of thought,” thereby providing a “theoretical innovation” that restored the axiom to a “solidly practical foundation” (jianshide xianshi jichu). “Comrade Jiang Zemin” appears in the concluding and arguably most byzantine section of this essay as a leader who “held high the great banners of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory” in his “continued advance along the theoretical path of seeking truth from facts.” Jiang’s “important thought” of the “Three Represents” is described by the authors as representative, in turn, of an “ongoing innovation” of the axiom that helped to “open up a new realm developed out of Marxist theory.” A passage is then cited from Jiang’s “important speech of July 1 [2001],” on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, to demonstrate that Jiang had consistently adhered to Deng Xiaoping’s “theoretical innovation”: namely, that “seeking truth from facts” must be understood primarily in terms of “liberating thinking.” The authors chose to illustrate Jiang’s own “innovative” use of the phrase by quoting a passage from his speech where he called explicitly for “self-aware liberation of one’s own thinking from those anachronistic concepts, practices, and institutions; liberation from erroneous and doctrinal understandings of Marxism; liberation from the fetters of subjectivism and metaphysics.” Indeed, it is only in this one specific instance of quoting from Jiang’s “July 1 speech” that the authors hint ever so obliquely at the political contestations that drive and have always driven the production of the Party’s theory of the moment. Jiang’s

166

•

Worrying about China

speech became an instant media event because Jiang had chosen that occasion to advocate the highly controversial view that the Chinese Communist Party admit private entrepreneurs (or “capitalists,” in the view of veteran Communist stalwarts) into its ranks. Despite voluble opposition from retired Party elders, such as Deng Liqun, to Jiang’s policies and despite their accusations that Jiang’s speech had not followed proper Party procedures, Jiang clearly scored a victory since this speech was quickly and unanimously endorsed by “every member of the Politburo.”51 The irony of using “seeking truth from facts” to legitimate Jiang’s market-derived “important thought” of the “Three Represents” would not have been lost on Sinophone readers familiar with Deng Xiaoping’s and Chen Yun’s famous 1977 invocations of the phrase for the very different cause of defending the constancy of the Party’s founding mission against Hua Guofeng-sponsored “whateverism.” This Party text illustrates how the dialectic, as a guiding concept, can be skillfully exegeted (and I can think of no more appropriate description) from selected passages or statements already situated in an axiomatically “coherent” canon to effect the unanimity of meaning and purpose. Indeed, insofar as the dialectic is asserted as a principle of constant development toward the telos of Knowledge, this text projects a vision that structurally resembles the one Shan Shilian offers. But whereas Shan seeks to rectify the dialectic by turning it toward the liberal telos of a democracy ushered in by a “perfected market economy” and away from the “Chinese Hegelian” insistence on “necessity,” Party theorists have sought, as it were, to recuperate “Chinese Heglianism” by incorporating the “good” Mao of 1941 into an alternative rectification that defends the Party’s constant adherence to “seeking truth from facts” in its pursuit of national perfection.

Reasoning with(in) an Ideolanguage However the dialectic is now figured, whether as guided by contingency (in the Hayekian sense of the “spontaneous ordering” presumed of a market economy) or as embodied in the empirical, scientific, and Chinese spirit of “seeking truth from facts,” its authority as a foundational concept (if not the sole logical Concept) has clearly not diminished. Rather, the authoritative status of the dialectic is maintained through a process of retranscription that produces a new way of “seeing” the dialectic at work (along with a new and magisterial vision of the good).

Reasoning after Mao

•

167

To contrast this mode of inquiry with the radically different orientation of self-reflexive deconstruction, it is useful to recall the distinction Wlad Godzich makes between what he terms “Writing” and “Concept.” In contrasting Writing to Concept, Godzich argues that Writing (as selfreflexive theory) resists the systematization or the grand organization of knowledge within a unified system (that Concept implies), and he affirms Writing as a “strategy of rapid and unforeseeable movement” that “seeks to perturb the operations of Absolute Knowledge”: “for this knowledge is determined by the optical constraints of observable truth, and writing will interfere with the serene exercise of the masterful gaze that this notion of knowledge presupposes. It seeks to bring about a crisis of vision, and indeed of sight.”52 Conversely, Chinese intellectuals remain largely preoccupied with producing the serene exercise of the masterful gaze, and Shan Shilian, for instance, performs this masterful gaze when he declares contingency to be the true principle of dialectical progression. This is opposed, for instance, to engaging with the contingency of all true principles on the credibility of the vocabulary in which they happen to be crafted. The serene exercise of the masterful gaze in Sinophone scholarship is, in part, a legacy of the orthodox Confucian preoccupation with forging one true Way for the empire (and, by implication, on everyone’s behalf). But since the Confucian Way no longer held the authority of orthodoxy in early Republican China, “self-creation” (ziwo chuangzao), particularly among intellectuals of the May Fourth era, came to be phrased and enacted in many diverse ways, but always within the broad traditional telos that these “self-creators” were exercising their minds to foresee a future, perfected China.53 This facilitated the conception of thought (or sixiang) as synonymous with ideology (yishixingtai, a neutral term in Chinese), in the sense of a presumed set of true values constitutive of the national ideology. This conflation of thought and ideology coalesced into Party theory during the Maoist decades. The remarkable speed with which the Party leadership could always mobilize the rank and file to accuse and punish alleged dissenters ensured that the stated Party line at any given moment was seldom challenged. Thus by the 1950s the language of mainland China had become largely an ideolanguage, vocabulary of which the Party controlled quite successfully in subsequent years. It was not until intellectuals were afforded, under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping’s reform regime of the 1980s,

168

•

Worrying about China

relative freedom to depart from the Maoist ideolanguage that alternative vocabularies began to circulate with unprecedented ease not seen since 1949. In this regard, the Party’s current definition of “seeking truth from facts” also reflects the decidedly nonrevolutionary and functional lexicon of modernization and developmentalism that its own theoretical discourse has acquired since the late 1970s. But because the orchestrated “unity” of the Party cannot be fully separated from the language in which it formerly ruled without seriously undermining its own legitimacy, as Deng Xiaoping was well aware, the contemporary official discourse carefully assimilates sufficiently abstract elements from the former Maoist lexicon (such as “seeking truth from facts”) to portray the Party as having maintained a certain rational and practical character even during the Cultural Revolution. In this context, Party leaders of the Maoist era who are now accorded an exemplary status—such as Peng Zhen, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping himself54—are often praised as heroic defenders of the Party’s rational and practical character even as it was being subjected to an “aberrant” radical Leftism. In its characteristic celebration of heroic defenders of truth, concomitant with its denunciation of falsehoods and their villainous perpetrators, present-day Party discourse (despite having undergone significant modifications) still remains very much an ideolanguage. It reproduces the repertoire of discursive tactics developed during the Maoist era even as it rejects the allegedly “deviant” contents of Maoist discourse. To put this in a Hegelian-Marxian idiom, these tactics are enlisted to demonstrate how contradictions may be overcome to effect a sublation—that is, to preserve and elevate an inner truth presumed to inhere in the contradictions themselves through negation of the “deviant” forms in which it has been given expression. Mikhail Epstein’s use of the term ideolanguage to characterize the language of totalitarian thinking under Soviet rule is especially helpful here as it draws our attention to the process of discursive techniques enlisted in producing ideology as opposed to the substantive content of any one ideology. According to Epstein, ideolanguage generally affirms authoritarian rule by naming deviations for the purpose of projecting the particular truth being asserted as all-encompassing in its capacity to resolve these alleged deviations. He observes that each dyadic opposition (in which one ideology is set over another) evolves, in the language of the Party, into a tetradic opposition, which “combines elements of opposing ideologies

Reasoning after Mao

•

169

to maintain [the Party’s] power over the whole society and the various political factions of the ruling group.” He continues: If the Party constantly battled against deviations of both the left and the right, what was its true political identity? The answer is obvious: since it corrected the leftist deviation from the right and corrected the rightist deviation from the left, it was simultaneously a right-wing Party and a leftwing Party . . . Indeed the Party line was as sharp as a razor, one could not stand on it without being bloodied. Only Stalin managed to stand on it firmly with both feet.55

The Party line under Mao became similarly tetradic in its discursive structure and, like Stalin, Mao was possibly the only one in the Party who could stand on it firmly with both feet. The language of the Party under the leadership of Deng, then Jiang, and now Hu Jintao continues to manifest the tetradic structure of resolving all contradictions through the “correctness” of the line that the Party now proffers under its maxims of the moment (such as “seeking truth from facts”).56 The line, however, is no longer quite so razor-sharp as to facilitate persecution, maiming, and killing on the scale of the Cultural Revolution, although it is still regularly deployed in the prosecution of perceived transgressors, whether they be dissidents speaking against the injustice of authoritarian rule or religious groups such as the Falun Gong and Protestant Christian house churches. The “correctness” of the Party line has always been justified on the grounds that it accords with “scientific Marxism.” Hence when contemporary Chinese intellectuals critique the scientism of “liberating thinking” of the late 1970s, they are writing against the linguistic determinism of the official discourse and its tortuous justifications of Party theory as a “science.” For such intellectuals, propositions that purport to be true and that invoke the authority of science without demonstrating their correspondence to known facts, are merely ideological assertions. Xu Jilin observes of the discursive shift in Party theory in the late 1970s that: This scientism claimed that the sole criterion for measuring social development is the strength of productive forces and that science and technology are the preeminent productive forces in modern society. There is no doubt that the impact of this part of the debate in the late 1970s was profound, even revolutionary, insofar as scientism contradicted the ossified dogmatism of the past and placed material well-being over ideological purity, by privileging knowledge over politics and politically infected morality.57

170

•

Worrying about China

It is arguable that because censorship has continued to restrict intellectual inquiry despite the Party’s continued privileging of “knowledge over politics,” scientism offers many mainland Chinese intellectuals a usefully oblique critical term for negating the Party’s truth claims. But in distancing themselves from the inadequacy of scientistic assertions, these intellectuals often imply that there are alternative propositions that do correspond to facts and that are appropriate candidates for the title of scientific reason or truth. In doing so, they fail to challenge the paradigm itself, merely replicating its process toward “true” alternative facts. The resemblance between Sinophone critical inquiry and Party theory is perhaps most striking when science is used as an evaluative criterion. Indeed, throughout Shan Shilian’s essay, he appeals to science as the objective ground of subjective human experience, to render true the dialectic he prefers and to distinguish it from the dialectic he disparages for having served a merely scientistic “Chinese Hegelianism.” For instance, he quotes Wang Yuanhua approvingly for stating that “using the three concepts of sense-perception, understanding, and reason [ganxing, zhixing, lixing] to explain the different qualities of cognition is even more scientific” and Shan himself argues that “although Hegel’s refined dialectical method can reliably be used to clarify [chengqing] the shoddy and confused nature of extreme Leftist thinking, his belittling of the understanding from the perspective of his discriminatory reason has an unscientific aspect.”58 Since the use of science as an evaluative criterion is derived from the very Maoist vocabulary from which accounts such as Wang’s and Shan’s are assumed to have been “liberated,” their use of this criterion to affirm the new telos of “diverse unity” reflects, ironically, their own continued captivity to the Party’s tactics of argumentation. More broadly, positively inflected phrases—such as empirical observation, theoretical innovation, construction of a solid or practical foundation, or the “liberation of thought” from subjectivism and metaphysics—are regularly featured across both intellectual and official discourses. The emphasis on scientific objectivity in this distinctly post-Maoist vocabulary reflects an insistence on discovering or revealing a truth about reality. Accordingly, the invocation of these terms by Party theorists and intellectuals alike projects a correspondence between a set of chosen facts and a supposedly self-evident reality out there.59 What is interesting is that avowedly postmodern Sinophone writings also reflect this same presupposition of a correspondence between lan-

Reasoning after Mao

•

171

guage and reality. In other words, in “postist” discourse, language is similarly conceived of as a tool to be mastered, one that can reveal the truth of a situation external to language through a correct choice of words. Language is accordingly treated as if it were a transparent medium in which words “mean” unambiguously their actual referent, a fully formed preexistent entity, merely named (rather than produced by language).60 One instance of this assumption of linguistic transparency appears in the Beijing-based literary scholar Dai Jinhua’s affirmation of postmodernism as constitutive of a conscious choice made “in the face of the traumatic end of the eighties” by “a contemporary society (including its elite intellectuals)” to affirm a pluralistic conception of popular culture: “We needed more than one parachute to bring people down off the heights where the 1980s hot-air balloon of optimism had taken them and land them safely on the ground level of reality.” When Dai likens postmodernism to considered attempts on the part of Chinese intellectuals and writers toward making socially useful “parachutes” (i.e., tools) that could safely land people on the “ground level of reality,” enabling them to grapple with problems emerging out of China’s new market environment,61 her prose reflects an intention to reveal a truth about reality. After all, to write of “the ground level of reality” is to presume a certain capacity of seeing (transcendentally) beyond mere appearance to the “reality” beneath. Thus despite her affirmation of postmodernism, Dai elides the crucial and central point in postmodernist discourse that all we can ever have are versions of history, never the “reality” or “truth” of history that a dialectically guided critique is supposed to reveal. Quite unlike the Sinophone preference to write of the conservation or quest for the single unified Reality, the praxis of Anglophone postmodern discourse often includes the deliberate deployment of alternative and unconventional formulations that transgress any discursive “reality” projected in more than just a bid to keep the notion of reality always open to new interpretation. Rather, and more formally, it questions the assumption of the very possibility of closure (thus eschewing references to the “ground level of reality”) as well as any unity of social perception and experience that such closure presupposes. In the Sinophone discourse of postmodernism, however, formulations remain largely couched in terms of producing new or better ways of seeing that singular reality, with the aid of, as it were, theoretically empowered facts.

172

•

Worrying about China

This discursive orientation toward uncovering the truth about reality is often accompanied by a determination to provide “correct ideas” that can be enlisted to develop a new system (if not the unified System) of knowing. For instance, when Zhang Xudong defends the work of those who are theoretically informed and Leftist in orientation as scholars who provide “new intellectual paths, new methods. and new worldviews,” he writes with a focus on systemic development that: The essence of “postisms” in contemporary China is actually “new studies” [xin xue]. The circulation of “postist” ideas simply marks a process whereby a series of social and intellectual categories, [the authority of which was] once beyond question, have each in turn become the building blocks of a new habitat and a new cultural world. It merely indicates by conceptual means a fact known to all: namely, that the reality of contemporary China’s economy, society, culture, and ideology has, at a certain level, already entered or been dragged into the global scenario of capitalism’s unrivaled supremacy . . . Thus what has been called “postisms” and “the new left” should be regarded as constituting one segment of the overall transformation and development of Chinese intellectual thought in the 1990s . . . They are all extensions of the constructive element inherent in culture fever, theory fever, comparative [studies] fever, and methodology fever of the 1980s . . . [T]hey constitute the signs [zhenghou] of something emerging within Chinese discourse of the transnational media and intellectual realm that gives us much to reflect on.

Zhang then validates “postisms” and “the new left” as “one segment of the overall transformation and development of Chinese intellectual thought in the 1990s,” he cannot help but imply that these are “signs” of a new and better metanarrative in the making. Despite his declared affiliation with postmodernism, Zhang retains a distinctly modernist conception of progress toward both greater perspicacity and an ever more refined system of knowing. For instance, in defending Fredric Jameson’s work as representative of “the dynamic nature of Western intellectual life and cultural critical theory,” Zhang writes that Jameson’s critique of the cultural logic of late capitalism constitutes both a “vividly engaging” (huoshengsheng) critical practice and an exemplary “system of theoretical inquiry” (lilun sikaode xitong).62 Indeed, it could be argued that Jameson enjoys the status of an exemplary theorist among postmodern Chinese intellectuals because his reading of postmodernism-as-pathology involves a transcendent critique that is interested in uncovering or more often affirming a fundamental cause or organizing principle at work in shaping everyday life.

Reasoning after Mao

•

173

That is to say, Jameson’s Marxian account of postmodernism constitutes an attempt at a specific critique of the rationalistic norms of the heavily nuanced term “Late Capitalism” and its “cultural logic.” Indeed, Jameson’s framing of postmodernism casts it as the symptomology of a doomed political-economic epoch coming to an end through the inevitable consequences of its inherent contradictions. Jameson’s postmodernism then is nuanced as a pathology rather than an epochal moment in Western philosophical development. That Jameson’s transcendent critique relies on the Marxian notion of a dialectically driven History has undoubtedly enhanced the capacity of his prose to converse with Chinese intellectual discourse and its Hegelian and Marxian legacy. Jameson offers a bold but less than substantiated retranscription of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” through his privileging of the Marxist dialectic as both a critical imperative and nothing less than a redemptive truth. As he puts it: Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development [of capitalism] positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human.63

In other words, Jameson urges us to preserve a dialectical reconstruction of History as a guiding concept even though he formulates his argument with de rigeur postmodern attentiveness to History as a truth-effect conjured up by the performative powers of language. We could read Jameson’s theorizings on the postmodern, pace Godzich, as a certain affirmation of the Concept (or the presumed enlightenment of transparent expression) despite Jameson’s acknowledgment of the opacity of Writing.64 It is this implicit longing for clear-sightedness in Jameson’s prose that resonates with the sentiments and ambitions of Sinophone intellectuals to produce perspicacious insights into China. Thus it is not surprising that Jameson’s Anglophone prose has been transposed by his Sinophone interpreters into a new theoretical founda-

174

•

Worrying about China

tion for constructing an alternative Sino-centered History in the interests of building a better national culture.65 After all, in Chinese critical inquiry, there is little talk of the kind of “optional” pluralism that Jameson disparages and a plenitude of disquisitions about why one or another preferred set of formulations is “nonoptional” for addressing “Chinese problems.”66 The consequences of Jameson’s influence on Sinophone and Anglophone studies of Chinese postmodernism include the now very high incidence of Chinese intellectuals who regard this Jameson-inducted postmodernism or “postism” as more or less synonymous with a new Marxian mode of interpretation. Considerable complications arise then when Jameson’s critique is imported into mainland Chinese scholarship, alongside the development of an official discourse that is focused on encouraging market (or corporatist) growth but whose arguments remain couched in the faux-Marxist rhetoric of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” An uncanny effect is produced when the formulations of those who write in Jameson’s Marxian idiom are perceived by their Sinophone critics to resemble official discourse. As Luo Gang observes of the mainland Chinese reception of Jameson’s writings, the difficulty is that “Marxism, or rather socialism, is our reality and it surrounds us at every turn.” Luo notes that when Liu Kang acted as Jameson’s interpreter when Jameson visited Shanghai in 1993, he “attempted to employ a Jamesonian paradigm when discussing the situation in China with rather interesting results. In fact, he ended up sounding like an unreserved apologist for China’s political status quo.”67 It is worth noting at this point that Jameson’s prose is characterized by a continuous series of subtle shifts in discursive register which he undertakes in making his argument, shifts which allow him simultaneously to problematize and to affirm classic Marxist formulations of the collective project, class-consciousness, the mode of production, and the materialist dialectic, as if this double movement (or controlled vacillation between registers and idioms) was the most natural thing to do in the world. Yet it is clear that only a writer who controls his rhetoricity with as much technical precision as Jameson does could segue with apparent ease between a contemporary (postmodern) idiom of self-reflexive theorizing (or immanent critique which allows him to problematize the representational presuppositions of Marxist orthodoxy) and an older idiom of political critique (or transcendent critique in which he affirms his re-

Reasoning after Mao

•

175

transcription of Marxist formulations as essential to the gaining of insight into the postmodern, which he has already preemptively determined as social and spatial confusion). Not surprisingly then, challenges to Jameson’s cautiously qualified doctrine (but a doctrine nonetheless) have come not only from those whom he would identify as conservative or right-leaning but also from areas of scholarship that are generally identified with the politics of the liberal or progressive left.68 In promoting Jameson’s argument, Sinophone advocates of postmodernism have replicated his absolute dependence on the prior necessity of the dialectic as the Concept capable of offering a utopian last instance (however attenuated). Accordingly, there is little postmodern interrogation in this Sinophone context of how all last instances have become suspect in the humanities, and even less engagement with the question of why the majority of present-day invocations of last instances in the languages of our time are religious ones, not secular Marxist ones. Rather, Sinophone “postists” have successfully institutionalized Jameson’s account of postmodernism-as-pathology as an authoritative theory of contemporary Chinese culture, to affirm the choices (xuanze) made by Chinese cultural producers in the opportunities afforded by market reforms while also echoing Jameson’s critique of “late capitalism.” In this regard, while Sinophone “postists” may invoke the authority of Jameson’s account, they tend to be indifferent (or oblivious) to the gap between the writerly effects that Jameson puts to work in his account of postmodernism (through self-reflexive musings over the brackets and historico-ideological baggage that attend the use of concepts), on the one hand, and the conceptual stranglehold in which he places postmodernism by his faith in the materialist dialectic, on the other hand.69 In an environment dominated by the ideolanguage of an authoritarian state, critical discourse is subjected not only to the restrictions of state and self-censorship but also to the naturalized effects of the ideolanguage as part of everyday communication. This at least is one way to interpret Wang Hui’s comment that the “absence of productive debate” in China should take into account the “the magnitude of the damage inflicted on the discourse of Chinese intellectuals by the absence of a benign character in our political culture.” Wang’s attentiveness to the ellipses resulting from factitious argumentation is evident in several of his writings. With reference to scientism, he is critical not only of the scientism that most Chinese intellectuals (such as Shan Shilian) have come to associate with

176

•

Worrying about China

Party theory but also of the unwitting scientism at work in these critiques of scientism. Indeed, he points out that when liberals valorize the Hayekian notion of “spontaneous order,” they move too quickly to forge a direct correspondence between this notion and the “market” and “society” while forgetting that “market” and “society” are categories that have acquired specific valencies, contingent on the vocabulary in which they are given articulation. As he puts it: Actually, if the categories of “market” and “society” can be equated with “spontaneous order,” then there would have been no need for this ambiguous concept in the first place. If “spontaneous order” were to be equated with a specific social pattern, then the idea of the “spontaneous” itself would come into question. This theoretical ambiguity has led to ideological consequences of manifestly debased proportions, namely to the view that the categories of “market” and “society” (as these might refer to actual or historical markets and societies) should be sharply opposed to the category of the “state.” In this context, categories of the free and the spontaneous end up obscuring the actual historical process, whereby the modern “market,” “society,” and the modern “state” undergo simultaneous growth and exist in a state of mutual interaction. Along the lines of this kind of reasoning, the description of scientism becomes confined to an account of the errors of a particular mode of thinking and the consequences of “state” praxis. This account seldom includes analysis of “market” and “social” activities.70

In resistance to the facticity of affirming a fully fledged market as the attainment of freedom, Wang offers the counterargument that “the order of the modern market and social order are not the result of natural evolution but the outcome of deliberate constructions. Modern market society should not be regarded as a self-evident form of spontaneous order. On the contrary, it dictates how ‘spontaneous order’ comes about and it is within this context that the roots of despotism become concealed within the categories of ‘market’ and ‘society.’ ”71 In this context, we should also note that because “despotism” has come to be readily associated with Marxism-Leninism of the Maoist era, it is now easy to insinuate that Marxism, no matter of which variety, is clearly what China does not need. For instance, humanist and liberal intellectuals are generally critical of Jameson’s theoretical authority in Sinophone scholarship. According to the U.S.-based academic Guo Jian, because Jameson’s work affirms the Cultural Revolution in ways that contradict lived experience during the Cultural Revolution, he betrays a lack of genuine empathy for the Chinese people.

Reasoning after Mao

•

177

In this regard, he notes that when Jameson’s influential 1984 essay on postmodernism was translated into Chinese, a section in which Jameson had lavished praise on Mao’s Cultural Revolution—through phrases such as “the immense, unfinished social experiment of New China— unparalleled in world history” and “the freshness of a whole new object world produced by human beings in some new control over their collective destiny”—was excised from the published translation.72 What Guo implies, among other things, is that even the official discourse cannot permit such praise of the Cultural Revolution. In a different essay, Guo urges Chinese scholars of the “postist” persuasion to remember that while China’s Cultural Revolution might well have been “an inspiration to Jameson, we recall it as nothing other than a nightmare.”73 The difficulty here is that, in opposing Jameson’s influence and in registering clear disapproval of Marxism as ideology, Guo replicates unwittingly the tactic in official discourse of asserting a correct position (“genuinely Chinese” experience) through identifying “deviations” from this position. We have seen how Shan Shilian’s essay also replicates this same discursive tactic in his substantive critique of the Party’s ideolanguage. The durability of the Party’s style of argumentation is reflected in these various instances of negating X to affirm Y, even though this tactic is manifestly being deployed in a diverse range of vocabularies. Of these diverse vocabularies, the one associated with Habermas has become arguably even more influential than Jameson’s. In China, Habermas, like Jameson, is most regularly portrayed as a prominent Leftist theorist of cultural pluralism. Unlike Jameson, he is also valorized as a staunch advocate of equal participation in decision making and the legislative process. Accordingly, his influence is not to be found in Marxist theoretical revisions but extends across the intellectual spectrum in many ways as an influence that is not easily characterized as partisan or polemic; instead, Habermas has managed to provide a common repertoire of ideas utilized across that spectrum with very little contention, to the extent that he even features in the discourse of Party theory as a relevant “theoretical resource.” Chinese academics who are well read in Habermas, such as Tong Shijun and Xu Jilin, frequently draw on his concept of “communicative rationality” or “communicative reason” (jiaowang lixing) as a useful theoretical tool for fostering greater accommodation of divergent views in Chinese intellectual discourse. Tong argues, for instance, that Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality resolves the conflict between fact

178

•

Worrying about China

and value much more effectively than other theoretical models that tend either toward subjective privilegings of value or toward positivistic assertions of the fact of “Nature’s great plan” or “historical inevitability.”74 Alternatively, when Xu Jilin urges for a reconciliation of the competing public policies proposed by rival liberal and New Left intellectuals, he argues that such reconciliation could be achieved if the members of both camps could be persuaded to apply Habermas’s proceduralist (chengxuzhuyi) norm of deliberative democracy (shangyi minzhu) in resolving their disputes. Xu argues that this would require the contending recommendations of both camps to be assessed on the common generous basis of “including the other and rational consultation” (baorong tazhe, lixing xieshang).75 Tong Shijun’s and Xu Jilin’s engagement with Habermas’s work manifests a distinctly utilitarian approach inasmuch as they both attempt to derive from Habermas a set of guidelines or protocols for communication in Sinophone scholarship, always with the practical objective of enhancing the prospects for the mutual accommodation of divergent views. Both are keen to promote a Habermasian public sphere as a useful template for constructing a discursive realm that has the dual capacity to constrain the powers of the state and to encourage rational debate in China. According to Tong, China’s political and intellectual traditions pose two major problems for the introduction of discursive norms that would facilitate rational and critically engaged communication, that is, norms that are crucial for the functioning of a democratic public sphere. Tong explains that, first, these Chinese traditions privilege the Confucian “rule of virtue or rule of ‘rite’ to the rule of law.” Second, “the overwhelming influence of Confucian rationalism (compared with voluntarism), and the urgent task of national salvation” have produced a situation whereby leading modern Chinese thinkers “typically subordinated individual freedom to legal orders, moral orders, or something in between.” To this end, he offers Habermas’s account of “the difference between the life-world and the system” as a methodological tool for distinguishing between “the perspective of participants in the life-world and the perspective of observers of system” (that is, the difference between everyday and specialist/expert modes of communication), to enable a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of rationality, one that is able to vary between different kinds of discourse. He explains that the theoretical significance of distinguishing between everyday and

Reasoning after Mao

•

179

expert modes of communication lies in its capacity to foreground the difference “between so-called ‘social integration’ (action coordination through processes of reaching understanding) and ‘system integration’ (action coordination through functional interconnections that are not intended by actors and are usually not even perceived within the horizon of everyday practice).”76 In brief, Tong affirms the abstract Habermasian vision of a life-world that aims to promote social integration in tandem with, but without being overtaken by, the development of “systems of economy and administration” that are always undergoing further differentiation to meet new functional needs. To ensure that social integration is not systemically derailed by system integration, Tong argues that one must give serious attention to Habermas’s critique of the “internal colonization of the life-world by the systems” of both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. In this regard, Tong defends Habermas’s notion of communicative action as specifically socialist and communitarian in character when he reads it as an important corrective to corporate capitalism’s “mediatization of the life-world,” wherein, as he puts it, “the tasks of materially reproducing the life-world are fulfilled via the media of money and power instead of through communicative action.” He further cautions against socially disengaged forms of expert communications that also feed this capitalist system by functioning as its “autonomous subsystems.” He argues that the systemic imperatives of these autonomous subsystems are imposed on the life-world when such specialists become the sole arbiters of “sectors” like “science, morality, and art,” thereby alienating the everyday experience of ordinary citizens through the inhuman logic of system integration.77 Tong avers that Habermas’s notion of communicative action offers an impartial and self-reflective approach to rationality that constitutes “a sort of scientization of politics that does not lead to scientism in politics.” He explains: The most important condition for the mediation between science and democracy is a free and enlightened public sphere, and this in turn presupposes not only an important role played by experts in natural sciences, but, to a larger degree, by experts in fields other than natural sciences, namely, in the humanities. Of course, these fields have to be reconstructed according to the conception of scientific rationality as communicative rationality instead of instrumental rationality in the first place, or at least in the course

180

•

Worrying about China

of its involvement in the development of a free and enlightened public sphere.78

Both Tong Shijun and Xu Jilin are clearly focused on providing normative accounts of how ethical standards, grounded within the overall framework of Habermas’s communicative rationality, might be introduced into Sinophone critical discourse. Indeed, their engagement with Habermas has led them to produce theoretically dense formulations of considerable substance that require at least some familiarity with Habermas’s work on the part of the reader. Since both Tong and Xu regard these theoretical formulations as crucial for redressing the inadequacies of rational communication within Chinese intellectual discourse, in particular, and Chinese public discourse, in general, they also imply a suggestion that their readers should become acquainted with Habermas’s ideas. In urging their readers to “reconstruct” the “conception of scientific rationality as communicative rationality instead of instrumental rationality,” as Tong puts it, it would appear that they are also enlisting Habermasian formulations implicitly to negate the highly instrumental rationality of state censorship. Such readings of Habermas are analogous to Shan Shilian’s conceptualization of the Hegelian “ultimate end” in terms of a will to truth guided by the “highest ethics,” to recall Shan’s wording, in the form of “discovering the highest norm in actual things” while “avoiding at all costs the attempt to construct a new society on the basis of an arbitrary blueprint.” For such advocates of Habermasian communicative rationality as Tong and Xu, this highest ethical norm is to be found in the reflexive form of communicative action itself: it would require all participants engaged in a common act of discussion and deliberation first to acknowledge and identify what they share in common, to derive basic protocols of inclusive communication, or as Habermas puts it, “the fund of formal features of the performatively shared situation of deliberation.”79 Their readings of Habermas can be read as attempts to remedy the adverse influence of the Party’s ideolanguage on the discursive realms (or public sphere) of xueshu and sixiang. In this regard, they apply Habermasian formulations with an intent to derive a set of optimally rational norms in argumentation and problem solving, arguing that such norms would go some distance toward enhancing the prospects of social emancipation, justice, and political accountability even under the

Reasoning after Mao

•

181

status quo of authoritarian rule. In stark contrast to these propositions produced as part of independent critical inquiry, essays that evaluate Habermas’s work in relation to the Party’s theoretical position, published in a range of relatively conservative university-based journals,80 are aimed contrarily at affirming the Chinese Communist Party as the provider of a viable socialist alternative to capitalism. In these pro-Party essays, it is generally claimed that when the Party pursued the development of a “free” (ziyou, as opposed to “capitalist”) market, its policies remained focused on nurturing the collective well-being of the Chinese people against the alienating character of capitalist society. For instance, in an article by Liu Huaiyu, Habermas is credited, among other things, with developing a “philosophy of communicative rationality” that “blended” Marx’s historical perspective with “the philosophy of language, psychology, and sociology.” According to Liu, Habermas offers an important theoretical elaboration of the Marxist proposition that the social essence (shehui benzhi) of the individual must be defended at all costs against what he calls the dead end of “solipsistic subjectivity” that informs (capitalist) existentialism. Liu avers that because Habermas derived his account of the social relations of communication from Marx, he shares several points of commonality with Marx. However, he criticizes Habermas for developing a superficial argument that is “even more abstract than formal reason” insofar as it is “restricted to a discussion of the realities of capitalist society” in the absence of “the basic premise of transforming these realities.” Liu claims that practical reason (shijian lixing) of the kind proposed by Marx is superior to Habermas’s communicative rationality insofar as the latter is too narrowly confined to “acts of language” (yuyan xingwei), resulting in a highly restricted form of reason that “fails to live up to the concrete standard of substantial reason [ jutide shizhi lixing shuiping] set by Marx, and grounded in practice.”81 This tactic of negating X to affirm Y is, as we have noted, a staple feature of the Party’s ideolanguage and one that is put to regular use in confirming the constancy of the Party’s position against the “contradictions” and “deviations” that Party theory is ever alert to detect and negate. Indeed, this tactic has even been used to affirm Deng Xiaoping Theory by recourse to negating perceived inadequacies in Habermas’s work. As one article puts it, Habermas, together with his Frankfurt School mentors, sought to understand “the workings of late capitalist society” but on “insufficient grounds.” This was because they failed to

182

•

Worrying about China

distinguish between capitalist and socialist forms of modernization. Accordingly, their “critique of science and technology” was an “extrapolation” of late capitalism “to include all industrialized societies.” The author then claims: With regard to the relations between science and technology on the one hand and society and politics on the other, Deng Xiaoping is far more clear-sighted. He saw that science and technology were related to social consciousness (ideology) and politics but he also made crucial distinctions between the former and latter. Powerful evidence of this can be seen in his advocacy of “appropriatism” [“nalaizhuyi”] in relation to science and technology as “the wealth held in common by humanity.” Moreover, he has never called for the introduction of contemporary capitalist ideology. Because Comrade Deng Xiaoping has not provided us with a systematic account of his view on this matter, it risks being overlooked in theoretical discussions. This is why we should develop it further.82

From the diverse articulations of dialectical progression discussed in this chapter, it should be clear that the Hegelian-Marxian concept of sublation toward an ever higher form of rational unity remains of structural importance to both intellectual and official modes of argumentation. Indeed, in affirming the necessity of a Jameson-inducted approach to the study of contemporary Chinese culture, Zhang Xudong goes so far as to say that “any self-respecting argument for a Chinese postmodernism necessarily becomes an effort to bridge the opposites [i.e., between China’s “economic reality” and “its image or self-image”] dialectically, to mediate between existing but ultimately distorting frameworks of experience and thinking in order to articulate something qualitatively new out of them.”83 This progression of the dialectic to a guiding concept that now partakes of different idioms (whether to accord with Shan’s valorization of contingency, the Party’s recourse to “seeking truth from facts,” a Jamesonian postmodern dialectic, or a Habermasian communicative rationality) provides ample proof that the dialectic no longer dances to one rhythm alone in the language of mainland China as it once did during the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time when the concept of dialectical progression toward an ever higher state of Communist freedom was given visual embodiment in the balletic and operatic repertoire of the Maoist era through spectacular displays of revolutionary gestures and movements, choreographed to project a uniformity of purpose in the struggle to achieve national perfection.84

Reasoning after Mao

•

183

The diversity of ideas ushered into China since market reforms began more than two decades ago has rendered impossible the prospect of making the dialectic conform once more to a singular and resolutely unified way of “looking toward the future” (xiang qian kan, a muchused phrase in popular parlance). Intellectuals and Party theorists are equally anxious about what they perceive as moral decline in a society that, having been “liberated” from an autocratic revolutionary will to power, is at risk of moving only to the rhythms of commercialism, in the form of “looking to make money” (xiang qian kan, a homophonic phrase frequently used to suggest with irony that the power of money or qian easily trumps “the future,” also pronounced as qian). In their different retranscriptions of the dialectic, Chinese intellectuals seek in particular to enhance the prospects of autonomy by offering one or another conception of rationality that each deems to be constitutive of the “highest ethics.” Their attempts also reflect the legacy of the Party’s ideolanguage whenever they resort to the tactic of negating X to affirm Y. To explore the logic of this tactic further, let us return to the Hegelian phrase, the “cunning of Reason,” which Ren Jiantao enlisted to cast the New Left in a negative light.85 According to Zˇizˇ ek, the “cunning of Reason” provides us with a way to read the otherwise totalizing concept of “Reason in History” in an ironic fashion. Against the common assumption that Hegel imagined the perfection of Reason at the end of History as the telos of dialectical progression, in which the subject’s capacity to reason is continually advanced through ongoing discovery (that is, via “negation,” “sublation,” and “synthesis”) of the limitations of previous modes of reasoning, Zˇizˇ ek recuperates the “cunning of Reason” as a critique of this essentially metaphysical account. Zˇizˇ ek’s Lacanian reading of the “cunning of Reason” situates reasoning within a process of self-reflexive critical inquiry, teleologically uncoupled from the limitations of a presumed process of historical development. In Zˇizˇ eki’s psychoanalytic account, the “cunning of Reason” constitutes the subject’s projection of an external cause for its own unhappiness, for instance, by opposing the capitalist Other through an identification with the name of “the workers,” in order to rationalize its actions as righteous reaction to what the Other has forced upon it. In doing so, however, the subject is also exposed to the identical flaws in its own understanding of the Other. The subject must first negate a situation (for instance, capitalism) on the basis of what it assumes to be

184

•

Worrying about China

true (the freedom that would come of workers being liberated from the suffering that capitalism has imposed). According to Zˇizˇ ek, this act of negation is ultimately paradoxical insofar as the subject would then suffer the always inevitable but never foreseeable knowledge, in a second act of negation, that this prior negation is based in the inadequacy of its own limited knowledge (literally, “that there is no worker without a capitalist organizing the production process”).86 Zˇizˇ ek also uses the tragicomic scenario of “victims” whose “own sneaky features” (or “cunning” neuroses) lead them to be conned by “the proverbial American con artist,” to characterize the relation of the subject (as both willing coconspirator and unsuspecting victim) to Hegelian “Reason in History.” The subject (here figured as a prospective victim) succumbs to Reason (here figured as a “con artist” who tempts the victim with an offer of making a quick fortune by deceiving a fictitious third party, which turns out to be the subject itself). The subject, as the unwitting “victim” of its own crime, reveals at the same time its own “egotistic/deceitful impetus” in its (self-defeating) assent to profit through deception. The unconscious and instrumental contradiction within the subject is exposed when the subject “receives from the swindler his own message in its true/inverted form—that is, he is not the victim of the external dark machinations of the true swindler but, rather, the victim of his own crookedness.”87 Returning to Shan Shilian, when he reads the “cunning of Reason” as the arbitrary imposition of a false “inevitability” that constrained people to “play a preordained role” excluding them from becoming “self-aware creators” of their own history, he, in contrast to Zˇizˇ ek, projects an external cause of unhappiness to claim “self-aware creation” as the solution to this unhappy state. But when he affirms “self-aware creation” in the contingent terms of freely chosen human action of a particular time and place, he enlists Hegel’s “ontology of history” to invest his notion of contingency with the authority of institutionally sanctioned knowledge. In doing so, Shan implies that, unlike the “false” Chinese Hegelian claim of an “inevitable” path of historical development to which all must conform, the truth is that historical development is contingent on the ongoing “negation and reduction” of the status quo, through the actions of “self aware” and “creative” individuals who are no longer “preordained” to play any such given role. Read from within Zˇizˇ ek’s account of the “cunning of Reason” as the pathology of self-deception, Shan’s argument illustrates and typifies the

Reasoning after Mao

•

185

very kind of self-deception that Zˇizˇ ek’s psychoanalytic reading exposes. Shan projects onto Chinese Hegelianism the oppressive cause of human unhappiness and the source of falsehoods masked as “inevitabilities” but in the process fails to note that he too asserts “diverse unity” as a necessary truth. In this specific sense, when Shan argues that liberal democracy should constitute the proper legacy of Hegel, he displays a kindred “cunning” in offering this argument as true and scientific knowledge, by accusing Chinese Hegelianism for its “cunning” in masking false and subjective statements as truth. The problem with all such determinations of good and bad is that they invariably rely on one or another metaphysical assumption of moral authority. In this regard, such determinations reflect the use (and misuse) of moral assessment to serve a political end that Zˇizˇ ek describes as follows: “Those who directly translate the political antagonism in which they participate into moral terms . . . are sooner or later compelled to perform the political instrumentalization of the domain of morals: to subordinate their moral assessments to the actual needs of their political struggle—‘I support X because he is morally good’ imperceptibly drifts into ‘X must be good because I support him.’ ”88 Zˇizˇ ek’s account, which interrogates how subject-centered claims of knowledge fall victim to their own self-deceptive recourse to Reason, foregrounds the contingent nature of Hegelian Reason as the (psychological) projection of an external cause on the part of the subject, by means of which the subject defines and legitimates its own claim to truth. This stands in stark contrast to Shan’s unequivocal affirmation of contingency as if it were a natural and necessary principle of historical development, the knowledge of which would “liberate” the knowing subject from its subjugation to the imposition of any false “inevitability.” However, when Shan states his preference for “(the) understanding” over “reason,” he is also “bidding farewell” to the Hegelian vocabulary of Party theory with the intention of ushering in a new vocabulary that would allow Hegel’s prose to resonate with “the spirit of science” and “political democracy”—a vocabulary that orients Hegel toward conversing with Gu Zhun and Charles Taylor rather than with Marx or Mao. The linguistic renewal Shan undertakes in his essay, “Bidding Farewell to Hegel,” has been and remains a significant aspect of Sinophone critical discourse since the advocacy of academic norms was initiated in the early 1990s. But even as alternative vocabularies continue to expand

186

•

Worrying about China

the scope of critical discourse, greatly diminishing the influence of the Party’s preferred Marxian vocabulary in this process, there remains a tendency among Chinese critical thinkers to sharpen and harden their preferred propositions into an implicit principle or a genuine good, and thereby to instrumentalize what began as a preference into the semblance of a moral imperative. The divisions that have ensued in Sinophone critical discourse (whether between liberals and the New Left, or between humanists and “postists,” or between New Confucians and their detractors) reflect the moralization of intellectual debate through a drift from “I support X because I believe this is morally good” into “X must be good because I support it.” In this context, the legacy of the Party’s ideolanguage as it has impacted on education in mainland China remains formidable. Wlad Godzich provides the useful observation that ideology is “the arrogance of the finite subject who speaks as if he were the ultimate legislator, as if she had been appointed the final judge.”89 Since the language in which present-day Chinese intellectuals were educated remains a language wherein the Party “speaks” in the voice of a self-arrogated ultimate legislator or final judge, it is no surprise that their critical discourse reflects some of these habitual magisterial effects. But it is also clear from a national campaign launched in December 2005 to “modernize” Marxism that Party leaders are greatly concerned over the diminished authority (and hence legitimacy) of Party theory in the midst of growing social unrest.90 A month later, in January 2006, in a speech replete with the robust cadences of phrases such as “to fully embody the newest theoretical achievements in the sinicization of Marxism,” Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee, announced that a massive nationwide project for expanding and consolidating Marxist research and education was already under way.91 In this regard, it is worth noting that the sinicization of Marxism is also reflected in the notable absence of “Marxism-Leninism” from the titles of Party theory web sites, such as Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and the Important Thought of the “Three Represents.”92 In the aftermath of June Fourth 1989, the controversial Beijing-based critic He Xin had lamented that “in China’s mega-society, with such a teeming population, so divided, so complex in ideas and even in language, and which cannot look to any other spiritual faith or religious authority as a substitute: even to demote Marxism from its authority as doctrine of the state to being merely one of a hundred schools of

Reasoning after Mao

•

187

thought (to say nothing of abandoning it completely) must of necessity be the prelude to a great upheaval.”93 What is clear is that since the 1980s, a hundred schools of critical thinking have produced diverse interpretations of the past as well as proposals for the future through the use of alternative vocabularies. Within public culture, these interpretations have effectively marginalized the doctrine of the state. Authoritarian rule, however, has prevailed despite growing social unrest. To keep to a Hegelian theme, we could describe Sinophone critical writings (such as the ones discussed in this book) as acts of “holding one’s time in thought”94 that largely continue to affirm the conceptual necessity of the dialectic but with the effect of making it progress toward a range of differently articulated Realms of Freedom. Since no such Realm, as a posited good, is free of moral judgment, diversity remains subordinated to unity in Sinophone critical discourse (a subordination rendered explicit through phrases such as “diverse unity”). Accordingly, since invocations of unity are always at risk of assuming that everyone should be persuaded to adopt the particular account of unity being proposed as true, the plausibility of competing outlooks is probably the most effective way to weaken this assumption. In this context, it should be acknowledged that we all display a Hegelian cunning when we invoke reason (of whichever trade name, Marxist, Leftist, liberal, Confucian, postmodern, etc.) to pronounce a verdict from the vantage point of an assumed superior knowledge (as referent). As John Caputo puts it, “when one is talking with a Hegelian, the first thing to do is to wring from him a concession that he is after all only a human being, and not absolute science, or the speculative standpoint, or some other fantastic creature.”95 As long as the traditional mandate of worrying about China and the legacy of “scientific Marxism” continue to exercise an influence on Sinophone critical discourse, it is likely that different trajectories of dialectical progression will continue to be plotted. And since these are trajectories that require one or another transcendent perspective on History as the result of the dialectic’s operations, moral distinctions of good and bad (legitimated as scientific distinctions between true and false) will also continue to be drawn. Against this moralizing impulse, the growth of a hefty Habermasian vocabulary in Sinophone critical discourse, harnessed to the practical goal of establishing ethical norms, also reflects a distinct interest among

188

•

Worrying about China

some intellectuals in exploring how competing versions of an enlightened realm can be impartially accommodated within the discursive realms of xueshu and sixiang. The emphasis placed on describing scholarship and critical inquiry as activities occurring within “historically situated discursive realms”96 is as good a sign as any that the mortal finitude of “holding one’s time in thought” is now being accorded serious attention. Thus even though there remains a distinct tendency in Sinophone discourse to moralize a stated preference into an absolute and unquestioned good, nonetheless there is also increasing recognition that any proffered vision of the good is only as good as its capacity to shine in the marketplace of ideas, for a never predictable span of time.



chapter five

A Poetics of Inquiry

Chinese intellectuals often comment on the short-lived luster of different theories that have come and gone in the mainland intellectual environment. Since the 1980s, numerous Western thinkers past and present have enjoyed brief spells of popularity in the Chinese intellectual world when their ideas were seized upon as knowledge that would be of value and benefit to China specifically. Sometimes a particular thinker gains such enormous popularity (as Max Weber did in China of the late 1980s) as to generate a “fever” (re) through the sheer numbers of books, articles and commentaries published about his or her ideas.1 Many intellectuals now regard this febrile eclecticism as not only flawed but also a direct consequence of modern Chinese thought having been cut adrift from its moorings in the classical or Confucian tradition. The pervasive ambivalence of Chinese intellectuals toward imported ideas (as discussed in previous chapters) is tellingly illustrated in the following anecdote by Chen Pingyuan. Chen wrote that a friend had said “half jokingly” to him that “while he dared to engage in dialogue with first-rate foreign academics, he did not dare to argue with second-rate foreign scholars.” Chen reported his friend’s explanation: Since first-rate [Western] scholars express their “thoughts” [sixiang] and “thoughts” are what we also have, we can always hold forth in a few sentences without any problems, leaving aside the question of whether what we say is good or bad, inferior or superior. Conversely, what second-rate [Western] scholars discuss is “knowledge” [xuewen] and since we have neither read as many books nor put in as much effort in probing issues as they

190

•

Worrying about China

have, the minute we open our mouths we make fools of ourselves, and thus we dare not go into battle.

In reflecting on his friend’s words, Chen concluded that “what the Chinese intellectual world most lacks at present are not first-rate scholars who can express their own ideas (leaving aside the question of whether these ideas are true or false) but second-rate scholars who will embark on a conscientious process of reading and substantive training.” Chen’s comments, offered in defense of academic norms, are illustrative of contemporary Chinese intellectual sensibilities at work in youhuan or patriotic worrying. In this context, Chen explains that the main flaw of contemporary Chinese intellectuals is that their scholarship is built on “an ephemeral sense of ‘rootlessness,’ ” and he identifies in particular the “younger generation” (that is, those who were born after the founding of the People’s Republic) as the people who have been most deeply affected by the adverse consequences of radical thinking from the May Fourth to the Maoist era. By way of illustration, Chen points out that when intellectuals of the late 1910s and early 1920s promoted modern learning through the use of slogans such as “Don’t read old books” (budu gu shu)—a slogan often featured in subsequent historicizations of May Fourth intellectual activism—“what most concerned them was that they might not be able to free themselves from the binds of those dark spirits [yin hun] in the old books,” books with which they were intimately familiar, since this pioneering generation of modern Chinese intellectuals “had burrowed their way out of the pile of old books” in which they were schooled in their formative years. Chen also notes that “repeated uses of this slogan over several generations up to the present-day . . . are somewhat farcical” since the remoteness of contemporary Chinese intellectual discourse from the specific features of its May Fourth antecedent is such that “we really don’t have much to worry about, as we simply haven’t read many old books at all.”2 The problems Chen outlines have been given frequent and varied articulation since the 1990s, and these articulations, in turn, are often reflective of a depth of moral emotion invested in the act of critical inquiry itself. Indeed, in Sinophone critical discourse, there is often an implicit privileging of one or another kind of moral emotion (with righteous anger, courage or fortitude, self-restraint, and sympathy being frequently affirmed emotions that will be discussed later in this chapter).

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

191

More broadly, there is a distinct emphasis placed on acquiring a proper intellectual attitude (taidu) or disposition (xintai) that reflects a Confucian-inflected preoccupation with both self-cultivation and moral judgment. These sensibilities also indicate that advocates of a “return to tradition,” such as Chen Pingyuan, regard the present-day modern vernacular as a language that has become all the poorer for being bereft of “those dark spirits in old books” that once haunted their May Fourth predecessors. In Chapter Four, we considered how the ideolanguage of the turbulent Maoist decades has continued to shape official and intellectual discourses through its tactics of argumentation. Accordingly, even though critical inquiry is produced in resistance to authoritarian rule, nonetheless it still shares with the Party-state’s discourse a distinct orientation toward the kind of linguistic certitude that magisterial judgment requires. That linguistic certitude can be attributed in part to the positivism of Chinese official and intellectual discourses since the May Fourth era, in which science became (and remains) habitually affirmed as foundational to inquiry. But that linguistic certitude is also the legacy of a much older poetics of self-cultivation (xiushen) in which the ideas or sixiang of an acknowledged exemplar are elevated to a form of spiritual agency with sufficient moral power to inspire and effect positive social change. When Chen Pingyuan enjoins his readers to be as conscientious as “second-rate” Western scholars and to reflect on the impoverishment of Chinese scholarship as a consequence of modern radicalism, he draws on that older poetics to invoke the early Qing scholar Gu Yanwu (1613–1681) as one such exemplar, claiming that Gu’s words remain “every bit as relevant three hundred years on,” as we shall see later in this chapter. That an ancient poetics of self-cultivation should thrive to this day is not surprising, given its abiding importance in Confucian scholarship down the ages (from early Confucianism to the Buddhist and Daoistinflected Neo-Confucianism of the Song era and thereafter). Indeed, the rejection of Confucianism, traditional values, and the classical language during the May Fourth era could be regarded as an iconoclastic form of self-cultivation: one that transposed the Confucian emphasis on knowing how to speak, act, think, and judge into a praxis aimed at modernizing the self in aid of China’s national empowerment.3 Describing that iconoclasm as “cultural-intellectualistic,” Lin Yü-sheng argues that it is grounded in a deeply held belief in the power of ideas and characteristi-

192

•

Worrying about China

cally elaborated in terms of “first, change of worldview, which would then bring about a basic level, change of the system of symbols, values, and beliefs—this cultural change, in turn, would precipitate other political, social, and economic changes.”4 That approach is amply evident in the writings of the May Fourth era. As we have seen, many now disavow its radicalism and Eurocentrism. But the May Fourth rhetoric of modern self-cultivation is so intricately interwoven into Sinophone notions of “being modern” and “being Chinese” as to make it virtually impossible for an intellectual to write as an intellectual without some recourse to that rhetoric. As noted in Chapter Two, Maoist discourse also promoted its own egregious rhetoric of “self-cultivation” in the form of what Jiwei Ci calls “complete altruism,” which required the ideal revolutionary self to be an “empty vessel” in service of the Party-state. In present-day Sinophone inquiry, the requirement of self-cultivation still resonates in the often posed ancient question of knowing “what to adopt, what to discard” (qushe). The question itself presupposes that only people suitably cultivated to discern the true needs of the age can adjudicate between truth and falsehood to provide the correct answer. The significance of self-cultivation also resonates in evocative phrases such as “spiritual purgatory” (jingshende lianyu) when these are used as titles for scholarly works on the legacy of modern Chinese thought.5 In the Sinophone context, “purgatory” does not imply the expiation of mortal sins. Rather, it resonates with the Mencian notion of youhuan as a lifetime devoted to selfless concerns, as noted in Chapter One. The “grace” to which one ascends, as a consequence of tormenting oneself with the problems of one’s age, is envisaged as a form of spiritual permanence to be cultivated through the publication of one’s ideas. Through such publication, a person’s exemplarity could then be repeatedly emulated to provide spiritual guidance for both his or her contemporaries and future generations.6 The sensibilities sketched here, of present-day concerns about the inferiority of Chinese scholarship interwoven with a traditional penchant for self-cultivation, have shaped what one might call the general character of Sinophone critical discourse. The term “sensibilities,” however, is an elusive and vague notion that should be used with caution.7 One should not, for instance, imagine sensibilities as cognitive-emotive forces or entities at work in the minds of Chinese intellectuals, for that can lead only to a highly dubious project of presuming to know what they

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

193

think. That is not my intention. Rather, I use the term “sensibilities” to refer quite specifically to the display of rhetorical virtuosity apparent in Sinophone critical discourse since the 1990s. This is a poetics that characteristically endows critical discourse with a moral and affective tone, even as the discourse itself aims to promote an otherwise purely analytical or interpretive rigor. As we have seen, although Sinophone critical discourse remains oriented (as thought or sixiang) toward offering solutions for existing problems or the way ahead, it has in this process also assimilated (as scholarship or xueshu) a wide variety of theoretical formulations translated from EuroAmerican scholarship. We have seen how this intertwining of Chinese and EuroAmerican styles of sense making is enlisted to affirm a variety of objectives, whether of “returning to tradition,” in defense of liberalism, or in praise of “being Chinese.” Despite this variety, the importation of Western ideas remains nonetheless an exercise understood in the largely instrumentalist sense of strengthening Sinophone scholarship with new theories while guarding against the influence of undesirable ones (where such undesirability can be specifically identified as radicalism that culminated in Marxism-Leninism or gestured to more broadly as a form of Eurocentrism or idealism unsuitable for China’s needs). Hence in this concluding chapter I extend my discussion of worrying about China toward a meditation on what might be broadly termed a poetics of inquiry that affirms self-cultivation. Since this poetics is especially pronounced in recent critical revaluations of May Fourth radicalism, I will pay particular attention to the emphasis that these revaluations place on moral emotions and on having the proper attitude to learning. Different aspects of the language used in critical writings— including witticisms, ironic formulations, and axiomatic or quasiaxiomatic formulations—will then be explored as rhetorical staples in the crafting of such a poetics.

In Praise of a Nonradical Attitude It is not surprising that writings resonant with a certain youhuan quality published since the late 1980s often revolve around the intellectual legacy of the May Fourth era, with a specific focus on the identification of its limitations or flaws.8 This is because, as Wang Hui puts it, “to Chinese intellectuals, the ‘May Fourth’ era is not only a radiant day-

194

•

Worrying about China

dream but an unforgettable memory. It signifies freedom of thought, the liberation of human nature, the return of reason, and eternal justice, but in the sense that these things arrived belatedly and proved to be shortlived.”9 From Wang’s summation of the affective power invested in the name May Fourth, it is clear that, regardless of how present-day intellectuals now assess the May Fourth intellectual legacy, they remain in thrall to its promises. May Fourth resonates, in this sense, with what Derrida calls “the living legacy of what still remains of what did not remain,”10 inasmuch as the name May Fourth conjures up the affective power of a collective will to prescience (that is, the prescience implicit in knowing or foreseeing the correct path to a better future for China, in the teleological names of “freedom of thought,” “the liberation of human nature,” etc.). Because May Fourth is the sign of an unfulfilled but much anticipated hope of a better future, its affective power is heightened when this hope is now perceived to have been, at best, complicated and, at worst, ruined by the subsequent legacy of Marxism-LeninismMao Zedong Thought that evolved out of May Fourth. As a result, critical reflections on that era are characteristically ambivalent. Since the 1990s, a Sinophone mode of inquiry has emerged that broadly accords with the technical sense of critique (Kritik) as an attempt to delimit the scope of knowledge with precision, using a set of analytical tools. Interestingly, this EuroAmerican-derived sense of critique became influential in China through the translated scholarship of sinologists such as Lin Yü-sheng, the eminent U.S.-based historian.11 Lin’s reading of May Fourth intellectual praxis as “totalistic antitraditionalism” that ironically echoes an uncompromising Neo-Confucian style of moral criticism, first captured the imagination of mainland intellectuals in the late 1980s. For instance, when Wang Hui refers to the “commonality of attitude” (taidude tongyixing) that May Fourth intellectuals evinced in their writings, he draws on Lin’s notion of “totalistic antitraditionalism” to argue that this commonality was the result of their narrow focus on attacking traditional values, coupled with their eclectic but indiscriminate appropriation of Western ideas. Thus Wang claims that when May Fourth intellectuals sought to revitalize Chinese culture by publishing an abundance of new ideas, they tended, nonetheless, to overlook “the difficulties that would arise in making the rational proofs of these new ideas the basis for analyzing and reconstructing Chinese social institutions and conventions, not to

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

195

mention China’s own diverse cultural traditions.” In this context, Wang also describes the commonality of attitude among May Fourth intellectuals as a form of self-induced alienation (shuligan) that emerged as a consequence of their common focus on promoting individual autonomy. Accordingly, he argues that “literary works of the time became increasingly focused on exploring inner thoughts and feelings in an exaggerated fashion,” encouraging “a certain tendency toward unrestrained emotionality.” This, he avers, served only to accentuate the sense of alienation that May Fourth intellectuals experienced in relation to “the structured order of their native soil.” Wang claims that this collective burden of self-induced alienation drove May Fourth intellectuals ultimately to forfeit (sangshi), the intimate bond that their traditional literati predecessors had enjoyed with their “native soil,” making May Fourth intellectuals, in effect, “self-aware exiles of the traditional order” in the course of their conversion to Western ideas. Thus Wang argues that because May Fourth intellectuals confused an attitude in favor of progress and the enlightenment of reason with progress and reason themselves, it is now imperative to uncouple reason from the self-alienating attitude and the baggage of emotional excess it first acquired during the May Fourth era. He proposes a remedy in the form of distancing reason itself from the flaws of May Fourth reasoning, arguing that May Fourth intellectuals who offered “a perceptual force [ganxingde liliang] shrouded in the banner of reason” ultimately destabilized the proper balance between emotion and cognition that he regards as essential for intellectual inquiry. As Wang puts it: Broadly speaking, “attitude” consists of the three interrelated and mutually restricting components of cognition [renzhi], emotion [qinggan], and intention [yitu]. When the cognitive and emotive components are not unanimous, the emotive component will generally occupy a greater importance than its cognitive counterpart. This emotive component has a regulating effect on [one’s] attitude. When the cognitive component becomes rigid and evolves into a kind of direct emotional experience, it will govern people for a long time.12

In Wang’s recommendation of vigilance against immoderate passions, one can detect the ancient traces of a Confucian attitude of disciplining the emotions proposed by scholars such as Lü Liuliang (1629–1653) and Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801).13 More important, however, when Wang defines “attitude” under the three posited categories of cognition,

196

•

Worrying about China

emotion, and intention, he adopts a quasi-scientific style of reasoning that is itself a legacy of May Fourth intellectual discourse. Indeed, the conflation of “attitude” with “reason” that he critiques was an integral part of the scientific rhetoric that came to dominate the discourse of that era. Thus in critiquing the “unbalanced” inquiry of his May Fourth predecessors, Wang’s prose remains dependent to some extent on the scientific rhetoric they inducted into the modern vernacular, even though he clearly distances himself from what he perceives as their erroneous scientism. In critiquing the omniscient authority that May Fourth intellectuals accorded to science, Wang argues that the “critical attitude” (pingpande taidu) that Hu Shi once used in his retrospective description of May Fourth intellectual praxis stood for something quite amorphous: “an innate awareness” of the need “to build a ‘universal worldview’ on the basis of faith in science and the use of scientific method and knowledge.”14 In Wang’s close readings of May Fourth texts to support his thesis about the error of conflating “reason” and “attitude,” he does not pretend to offer an omniscient view. Rather, he examines May Fourth intellectual praxis symptomatically, as the work of a “discursive community” whose unexamined passions alienated them from their own indigenous culture in a variety of ways. In so doing, Wang seeks to dispel the spiritual properties that had accrued and are tantamount to what he calls the mythical aura that enshrouds the name “May Fourth,” but with the concomitant expectation that an attitude based in dispassionate analytical rigor would rectify the flaws implicit in the “commonality of attitude” he critiques. Thus in choosing to focus critically on attitude, Wang reflects the importance he still accords to having the correct attitude or disposition to learning. Frequent reiterations of the need to adopt the right attitude can be found in that most canonical of texts, The Analects, and in the centuries of Confucian orthodoxy that followed, the ideal attitude became aestheticized, among other things, as the display of a person’s exemplarity in skilled and judicious uses of wen (language) to embody the dao (Way).15 Although both the wen and the dao of Confucian orthodoxy were widely attacked during the May Fourth era, the pursuit of an ideal attitude—as an enduring theme in premodern scholarship— continued to shape the inquiry of radical intellectuals such as Wu Zhihui (1865–1953), a prominent philologist and anarchist. Wu averred that science alone could save China and chose to write about spirit and

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

197

consciousness in entirely mechanistic and materialist terms, with the seeming aim of illuminating the dao of science through his wen: Spirit is but a by-product of the formation of matter. With 110 pounds of pure water, 60 pounds of colloidal solution, 4 pounds 3 ounces of protein, 4 pounds 5 ounces of cellulose, and 12 ounces of otein in a suitable combination, the result is an 147-pound “I.” This formation of matter and substance goes under the name of “I,” unwittingly follows the laws of this material world, and plays around for a while . . . This playing around . . . lasts only until the separation of the component parts and substances which formed the “I.” . . . All arbitrary hypotheses and willful constructs of imagination are but reflections of matter; they are nothing but ephemeral falsehoods and errors.16

The stark determinism of this passage is indicative of Wu’s interest in convincing others that the correct attitude requires scientific articulations for every aspect of human experience, including definitions of selfhood or “I” consciousness. As a striking example of the conflation of “attitude” and “reason” that Wang Hui critiques, this passage nonetheless also reflects the novelty of the language of science in Wu’s time, showing the ease with which Wu was able to transpose the traditional emphasis on self-cultivation into a paean to the scientific attitude as the sole correct way of seeing and experiencing the world. Generally speaking, the risk of determinism posed by any avowed science of knowing (such as eugenics) was not a matter of concern for May Fourth intellectuals (or for most of their contemporaries in Europe and the United States). Rather, when many Chinese intellectuals turned to Marxism from the 1920s onward, they perceived it as just the kind of scientific knowledge that could save the Chinese people from both local and foreign oppressors. In this regard, Wang Hui’s critique of the May Fourth era could be extended to the confusion that later ensued between Marxism and a revolutionary attitude. From the late 1920s onward, when the vocabulary of Marxism began rapidly to dominate Chinese intellectual discourse, it served more often to validate and aestheticize a declared revolutionary attitude than to function as critical terminology for the elaboration of specific theoretical and practical concerns. Thus although Wang’s critique is focused specifically on the May Fourth era, he can nonetheless be read as calling for vigilance against the attitudinization of reason in Chinese intellectual discourse as a whole, given that such attitudiniza-

198

•

Worrying about China

tion grew ever more pronounced from the 1920s onward. Moreover, since Wang’s critique is situated in a discourse where “attitude” can readily be aestheticized as the textual embodiment of the Way, it is not surprising that he should choose to articulate his defense of reason in terms of an alternative attitude, one that requires the cultivation of disciplined restraint against the seductive power of passionate articulations. Accordingly, this alternative attitude is one that he “embodies” through the studied soberness of his prose. Wang Hui’s style of inquiry is also oriented toward salvaging and recovering positive aspects of the Chinese intellectual tradition against what he and many of his peers, such as Chen Pingyuan, regard as the indiscriminate destruction of that tradition from the May Fourth era onward. Thus when Wang cautions against the conflation of attitude and reason, he is also proposing a mode of reasoning specifically suited to Chinese needs, grounded in the kind of immanent critique that he calls “a historicist approach to history”:17 that is, the history of Chinese thought examined with a particular focus on how lived historical experience has been reflected and refracted in textual form, together with a vigilance against ideologically motivated constructions of any one given era.18 Throughout his four-volume opus on modern Chinese thought, Wang Hui makes clear that he is utilizing the textual remainders of centuriesold Sinophone scholarship to narrate the evolution of Chinese thought from within, against what he regards as the undesirable Eurocentrism of narratives that dramatize China’s response to the “impact” of the alleged superiority of Western ideas.19 As discussed in Chapter Three, this sensibility toward Chinese cultural integrity is an important feature of contemporary mainland inquiry that emerged in tandem with recent discreditations of May Fourth conceptions of modernization as erroneously Eurocentric. But because the rhetoric of science still commands an unchallenged authority in contemporary discourse, the desire to reveal and redress the “errors” of Eurocentrism continues to be articulated in terms of providing modern Chinese thought with the scientific or rational foundation it is perceived to lack. Accordingly, Sinophone critical discourse remains largely oriented toward Reason (in the sense of a perfected science of knowing) as its telos, but a Reason endowed, as it were, with Chinese characteristics or “Chineseness.” Rhetorically, the frequent appearance of the figuration, “the court of Reason” (lixingde fating), provides a clue as to the magisterial powers with which Reason has come to be endowed in the Chinese language,

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

199

cast in the role of a would-be true instrument of enlightenment. For instance, in his revaluation of May Fourth, Wang Yuanhua claims that his method accords with the practice of “seventeenth- and eighteenth-century [European] pioneers of Enlightenment” who “submitted all issues, whether they be religious, natural, or moral in content, for revaluation [zairenshi] before the court of Reason.” He argues that it is on this basis that a “revaluation” of May Fourth is necessary to eradicate the “numerous fixed concepts in our minds that have, through the years, acquired a certain cumulative force of habit.” Singling out the Marxist definition of pre-1949 Chinese society as “semicolonial and semifeudal” as a case in point, Wang observes that because this definition was integral to the Maoist paradigm of revolution, it was imposed on mainland studies of May Fourth after 1949. He argues that such studies were accordingly led to focus only on those aspects that could be made to conform to the designation of that intellectual era as “anti-imperialist and antifeudal,” with the unfortunate effect of encouraging highly reductive and distorted explanations of May Fourth. In appealing to “the court of Reason,” Wang Yuanhua’s intention is to “carry on with the tasks that ‘May Fourth’ left unfinished” and to “deepen the ideas of ‘May Fourth’ rather than repeat them.”20 The evaluative criteria Wang Yuanhua uses to determine true from false modes of reasoning toward this goal of “deepening” the May Fourth intellectual legacy are quite different from the criteria Wang Hui enlists. Whereas Wang Hui reads the May Fourth advocacy of individualism symptomatically as a form of self-induced alienation and emotional excess, Wang Yuanhua affirms the “liberation of the individual” as a key but short-lived achievement of the May Fourth era. In other words, for Wang Yuanhua, the May Fourth privileging of individualism was a true mode of reasoning that subsequently became distorted by the false reasoning of Marxism-Leninism. According to him, the Marxist turn in Sinophone intellectual praxis transformed the May Fourth advocacy of individualism into “historical satire” and “individuality withered away when it was turned into a political tool and a bolt” in the revolutionary machine. Wang Yuanhua claims that this loss of independence resulted from the words and deeds of historical actors such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi who, in this view, erroneously attacked Confucianism instead of Legalism. He also attributes the eventual marginalization of individualism to the historically entrenched authority of collectivism (jitizhuyi) in early modern Chinese intellectual writings, arguing that

200

•

Worrying about China

collectivism became the dominant theme of reform for progressive Chinese intellectuals between the late Qing and early Republican eras, mainly as a consequence of the profound influence on their thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. Wang argues that this Westernderived concept of collectivism produced a totalizing tendency in the writings of historical individuals that encouraged them to promote the “public will” at the expense of individuality and individual interests.21 In this regard, Wang Yuanhua evinces the same interest as Wang Hui in identifying a flawed attitude to reason. When Wang Yuanhua criticizes the totalizing tendency of May Fourth writings as a species of moral absolutism, he describes it as an “ideologically motivated disposition toward Enlightenment” (yishixingtaihuade qimeng xintai) that inevitably produces distorted views because of its “excessive faith in human strength and the capacity of reason.”22 Thus he implies that a circumspect faith in reason, cognizant of human fallibility and emotional excess, would provide the necessary corrective. Although Wang Yuanhua negates moral absolutism, he offers nonetheless an essentially moral judgment of good versus bad tendencies in May Fourth intellectual praxis. In this regard, even though he is opposed to reductionism, his argument cannot avoid being highly reductive in certain respects. For instance, Wang’s claim that May Fourth intellectuals should have directed their attack toward Legalism rather than Confucianism is problematic insofar as it fails to acknowledge that May Fourth linguistic innovations were aimed at destroying the social hierarchies forged in the centuries-old orthodoxy of state-Confucianism. Legalism, while often acknowledged as a significant influence within state-Confucianism, was evidently not the orthodoxy.23 Similarly, on the issue of collectivism in modern Chinese thought, Wang Hui, among others, has argued that the genealogy of modern Chinese collectivism can be more productively mapped across the autochthonous “discursive realm” of traditional scholarship rather than being seen merely as a derivative of Western thought.24 By contrast, Wang Yuanhua attributes collectivism primarily to the influence of Rousseau’s Social Contract. What is clear, however, is that in criticizing May Fourth intellectuals for failing to attack Legalism, Wang Yuanhua is quite deliberately affirming a Confucian attitude as the good that should be preserved and developed out of the May Fourth legacy. This is evident in his privileging of the work of Du Yaquan (1873–1933)—a writer of popular science, a lexicologist and founding editor of the influential journal Eastern Mis-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

201

cellany (Dongfang), who was often described by his May Fourth peers and later historians as a conservative Confucian.25 In praising Du, Wang writes that Du maintained a “nonintentional” and “nonideological” stance in opposition to the general trend of May Fourth intellectual radicalism. As he puts it: “Ideology commonly rests on a form of intentional ethics [yitu lunli]. Intentional ethics has an enduring history in our country and while many concepts have changed, this one has not . . . In criticizing Jiang Tingfu for promoting emotions and human will as the motive force for his ideas, Du [Yaquan] writes: ‘This is, first of all, to determine what I like and what I want and then to develop an argument to justify these likes and wants.’ ”26 Thus Wang Yuanhua regards Du Yaquan as embodying the virtues of a Confucian tradition from which he perceives himself to have been forcibly and wrongly separated. Indeed, Wang accuses Lu Xun and Hu Shi in this regard for having led him astray. Specifically, Wang laments that his early “baptism” in May Fourth radicalism fostered in him the same “ideologically motivated disposition toward Enlightenment” that he now recognizes as flawed. He is at pains to note that he has relinquished the rationalism of continental Europe (as the precursor of Chinese Marxism-Leninism) to embrace Anglo-American empiricism: an empiricism he claims Du Yaquan exemplified in his Confucian-inspired style of inquiry. In narrating this shift in his attitude, Wang relies on a traditional poetics of self-cultivation insofar as he seeks to explain why his personal experience has led him to adopt (qu) Anglo-American empiricism and to discard (she) continental radicalism. This same poetics resonates in Wang’s representation of Du Yaquan as a spiritual exemplar who has helped to “deepen” his awareness of his former erroneous thinking. In this regard, Wang implies that, by emulating Du’s attitude, people would learn how to restore their “withered” individuality to a robust condition.27 Since self-cultivation, so conceived, presupposes moral certainty in knowing “what to adopt, what to discard,” it is not surprising to find historical individuals ranging from Hegel28 to Du Yaquan being figured as would-be defendants or plaintiffs awaiting judgment before a Supreme Tribunal of enlightened universal consensus.29 The popularity of these jurisprudential tropes enables us to appreciate the extent to which the rhetoric of Sinophone critical inquiry remains eschatologically captive to the anticipation of a final judgment (or an “ultimate end”), especially when the notion of final judgment is deployed, with

202

•

Worrying about China

such poignancy, to disavow the discourse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought that gave the notion such force and magnificence in the first place. This Sinophone inclination is decidedly at odds with the kind of liberalism Richard Rorty affirms when he urges us to dispense with “the idea of a central and universal human component called ‘reason,’ ” since it now inhibits our ability to engage in open-ended inquiry even though, as “a faculty which is the source of our moral obligations,” it was once “very useful in creating modern democratic societies.” Unlike Rorty, Wang Yuanhua clearly defends reason as just such a universal human component highly relevant to the conduct of Sinophone intellectual inquiry. Their opposition is contingent on the different contexts their proposals address. Whereas Rorty’s account turns on his argument that “the democracies are now in a position to throw away some of the ladders used in their own construction,”30 Wang valorizes the “court of Reason” as precisely the kind of central and universal authority to which Chinese intellectual praxis must gain access if it is to construct democracy against the status quo of authoritarian rule. Moreover, the importance Chinese intellectuals accord to knowing “what to adopt, what to discard” renders the process of self-cultivation (as the acquisition of moral rectitude) into an essential ladder for constructing the democracy they have yet to enjoy. In this regard, when intellectuals like Wang Yuanhua project on to modern Chinese thought a spiritual presence that they now seek to revaluate for its good and bad properties, they are also promoting an attitude in defense of the Reason or Enlightenment that they currently endorse. Moreover, the frequent and unremarkable appearance of prescriptive formulations, such as “The present-day Chinese Enlightenment must learn from the lessons of May Fourth,”31 indicates just how important the habit of figuring thought as a moral agent of societal transformation remains in their discourse. Accordingly, since their intention is to crystallize through a process of self-cultivation a truth (that is, the real lessons of May Fourth) that can be used to enhance the prospects of Reason or Enlightenment (against the “bad” legacy of radicalism that produced a “withered” individuality), they inadvertently reflect the influence of the razor-edged ideolanguage of Maoism, insofar as they continue to distinguish true from false toward the promotion of “correct ideas.” These contemporary reflections might best be described as acts of

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

203

mourning May Fourth with the specific purpose of retranscribing its significance in terms that would render this ancestral body of work an aid rather than a hindrance to present-day concerns over the way ahead. While Wang Hui has focused on the self-alienating and scientistic tenor of May Fourth inquiry and Wang Yuanhua has chosen to “discard” its radicalism in favor of those aspects that are reflective of progressive cultural conservation, Zhu Xueqin has opted instead to critique the “cultural determinism” of that era. It is to Zhu’s thesis that I now turn before proceeding to discuss the affirmation of moral emotions as another important aspect of this Sinophone poetics. In publications since the late 1990s, Zhu Xueqin has repeatedly emphasized that “culture is not deterministic; it is institutional selection that is deterministic.” Zhu explains that cultural determinism in modern Chinese thought arose out of a tendency on the part of individual intellectuals to project on to the entire nation their frustrations over the failure of particular projects for institutional reform or innovation.32 Using Liang Qichao as an example, Zhu observes that when Liang was forced to live in exile after the failure of the Hundred Day Reform Movement of 1898, he did not explore the failure of this movement in terms of “certain immature, coercive, and inappropriate tendencies inherent in the policies and politics of the Kang-Liang group33 but sought instead to broaden and to interpret these tendencies as constitutive of the [negative] difference of China’s national temperament.” Zhu notes that while he “remains extremely fond of Liang Qichao’s writings,” he is “highly opposed to Liang’s view on this one issue.” Indeed, Zhu claims that Liang “was the first to use a cultural cause to assess the failure of a specific attempt at institutional innovation, after the failure of the Hundred Day Reform Movement.” Zhu argues that Hu Shi and Lu Xun followed in Liang Qichao’s footsteps when they explained China’s problems in totalizing culturalistic terms. In Zhu’s view, when Hu Shi claimed that “the basis of China’s problems was not institutional but a question of human quality and cultural outlook” on the part of Chinese people, or when Lu Xun regarded “China’s basic problem as one of national character, and sought to change the national character,” they enlisted a form of cultural determinism to address what should have been specifically circumscribed instead as issues of institutional reform, adjustment, and innovation. In this context, Zhu reads the passage from late Qing intellectual activism (such as Liang Qichao’s), through May Fourth and New Culture accounts

204

•

Worrying about China

of reform of the 1910s and 1920s, to the rise thereafter of Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, as an ongoing series of wrongheaded attempts at explaining institutional inadequacies in culturally deterministic terms. Like Wang Yuanhua, Zhu reads the May Fourth movement as marking “a tragic turn” because “it ended the attempts of Chinese intellectuals to emulate an Anglo-American mode of institutional selection in the eighty years that preceded [the May Fourth Movement] while ushering in a form of cultural construction modeled on Soviet Russia.” Zhu argues that because intellectuals were “captivated by the aesthetic radiance of seeing their revolution in terms of constructing culture, and constructing the [national] soul,” they were invariably led to determine a cultural cause for China’s problems, noting in this regard that Mao Zedong’s launching of the Cultural Revolution should be properly recognized as “the ultimate ideal of his lifetime’s pursuit”: namely, “the thoroughgoing reconstruction of the face of Chinese culture.” He observes that post-Maoist negations of the Cultural Revolution will remain ill-placed (meiyou daowei) as long as Chinese intellectuals “fail to excavate the kind of historically entrenched motivation” that has repeatedly produced catastrophic attempts to “surmount the railings of [an existing] cultural spirit and faith” by means of “an induction of the monstrous deluge of political revolution into the cultural domain.” Toward the end of the essay, Zhu makes it quite explicit that he is defending the “cultural spirit and faith” of traditional culture (or Confucianism) against the corrosive effects of modern cultural determinism. Zhu claims that Chinese tradition can coexist with modern politics without the need for a blueprint for the “national Chinese character” or “the face of Chinese culture.” He argues that traditional culture fosters pluralism precisely because it exceeds the determinism of a national blueprint. In other words, he regards traditional culture as the foundation on which Chinese people will spontaneously choose to ground their own sense of an individual identity. He argues that unlike culture, politics is determinate and determinable and should be defined as the democratic selection of the best institutional model from a range of existing models. Interestingly, when he elaborates anecdotally on this distinction between culture and politics, by recounting his experience of having a traditional reunion meal with his relatives in Taiwan when he made his first visit there in 1997, he elevates Confucian familial protocols to the status of an essential cultural disposition, and in so doing invokes a certain metaphysics of “being Chinese.”

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

205

Zhu wrote that before dinner was served, his Taiwanese relatives argued bitterly among themselves about their preferred political candidates while watching television, since his visit coincided with an election year in Taiwan. Drawing on his personal memories of families divided by politics during the Cultural Revolution, he wondered at the time whether anyone would be able to sit down to share a convivial meal after such intense bickering. He noted his amazement when, as soon as dinner was served, all talk of politics was set aside as everyone complied with traditional protocols of seating members of the household according to kinship hierarchy and proceeded happily to drink a toast, first to the most senior member of the household, then to himself as the “guest from the mainland.” The hospitality he was shown, occurring in the context of political disagreement among family members, led Zhu to remark that he could at last see how “there was no need to think of the relation between traditional culture and Western-style democracy in terms of [mutual] destruction, nor any need to extend this destructive notion even further.” Zhu’s highly rhetorical account of familial harmony achieved through the observance of traditional Chinese protocols can be figured for that certain dream home (or enlightened realm) that he envisages for mainland China, along with many of his peers, like Chen Pingyuan, Wang Hui, and Wang Yuanhua. Together they valorize the integrity or genuineness of traditional Chinese culture and Confucian thought as the kind of pluralism that China could offer to a Eurocentric world. But Zhu’s elevation of traditional values to an enduring redemptive truth is particularly striking because he is suggesting that Chinese people will presumably feel the innate truth of, as it were, the Confucian attitude and will conform to its principles to achieve communal harmony. This enables him then to relegate quarrels over politics to a matter of personal belief and rational choice. In this regard, he seems to suggest that, as long as democracy is institutionally guaranteed, traditional Chinese culture (as opposed to the political designs of modern Chinese thought) will find its own way or dao of restoring the integrity of China as Home, in the form of happy Chinese homes everywhere (in mainland China, Taiwan, and elsewhere), in which members cheerfully wear the values and protocols of Confucianism as “a second skin,” to recall Derrida’s metaphor.34 Thus when Zhu concludes that the insight he gained from this traditional reunion meal “surpassed everything [he] had learned from books

206

•

Worrying about China

on cultural matters over the last decade in mainland China,” he implies that the hospitality he experienced in the home of his Taiwanese relatives, as both family member and guest, was a sublime experience of traditional Chinese culture as an inalienable home that mere politics cannot disrupt. What Zhu also implies is that this inalienable sense of “home” requires the institutional protection of democratic rule, since the elections in a newly democratic Taiwan is a crucial subtext in his anecdote. However, what Zhu fails to consider is that there may be people who happen to be ethnically Chinese, who are predisposed neither to conform to traditional protocols nor to wear traditional values as their second skin, and for whom the sense (or metaphysics) of home might resonate with values quite contrary to those that he valorizes. In this regard, although Zhu disavows cultural determinism, he cannot avoid suggesting in somewhat deterministic fashion (in the form of what Derrida calls “the fantasy of property”) that traditional Chinese culture is the kind of home that Chinese people ought to inhabit, if they are to be happy. But whereas Zhu affirms traditional values in a benign and affable manner, the controversial Guizhou-based scholar Jiang Qing has sought to “consolidate” Confucianism as property, by proposing that a tax be levied on “the use of the Confucian heritage.”35 To the extent that Chinese critical inquiry remains a discourse that anticipates perfection however presciently in the form of determining and essentializing which properties of Chinese culture should be “adopted” or “discarded,” it will continue to echo “the spirit of the scholar-official” in knowing what is best for everyone.

Affirming Moral Emotions in Critical Inquiry The formulations and figurations explored in the preceding all reflect a distinct orientation toward cultural conservation (or the “structured order of [one’s] native soil,” to recall Wang Hui’s formulation) as the kind of attitude that Chinese intellectuals must now cultivate. It is important to emphasize here that if one reads this discursive drift as the work of subjective inference, one would do an injustice to Sinophone critical discourse by obscuring its carefully crafted poetics. As discussed in Chapters One and Two, the sense of moral responsibility implicit in ancient Confucian axioms such as xiu shen, qi jia, zhi guo, ping tianxia continues to resonate in Sinophone discourse as a desideratum of critical inquiry. In this regard, when intellectuals critique the May Fourth “spirit”

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

207

as flawed, they are also recommending a process of self-cultivation (as xiushen), with the expectation that the dissemination of the correct ethical formulations will eventually remedy the present state of moral decrepitude they perceive and lament. Their critical focus on the emotionality and unwitting arrogance of May Fourth ideas reflects, in turn, their own implicit faith in the power of moral emotions to redress the flaws of modern Chinese thought. The philosopher Avishai Margalit provides the following useful gloss on moral emotions as “emotions that motivate our ethical or moral conduct”: “The idea is that moral emotions motivate our moral behavior not just, and not even predominantly, through the way the emotions are experienced but through the way they are remembered . . . It is not so much the experience of pleasure and pain that makes us tick but rather the memory of pleasure and pain.”36 The remembrance of things past, understood specifically as the moral revaluation of a past emotion, is implicit in Wang Yuanhua’s recommendation of Du Yaquan as an exemplar for present-day emulation. In doing so, he urges his readers to empathize with and to develop a respect for the moral and intellectual virtues he perceives in Du, in deliberate opposition to the greater authority normally accorded to Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and other radical May Fourth intellectuals. Unlike Wang Yuanhua, Qian Liqun chooses to valorize Lu Xun as an intellectual exemplar but he does so against the grain of standard histories that typically cast Lu Xun in the role of a revolutionary intellectual pioneer. Rather, like Wang, Qian offers his way of reading Lu Xun as a process of self-cultivation aimed at redressing the errors of modern Chinese thought. Specifically, Qian states that immediate feeling (zhiguande ganjue) and reasoned analysis (lixing fenxi) are prerequisites for reading Lu Xun, emphasizing immediate feeling in particular as a crucial remedy for warding off the negative influence of politically motivated and habitually dogmatic readings of Lu Xun that prevailed under Maoist rule. According to Qian, “the direct perception of one’s senses is most likely the foundation” for acts of interpretation: Sometimes reasoned analysis may have the contrary effect of oversimplifying one’s immediate feeling. This is because the vibrancy [fengfu] of immediate feeling is even greater than that of reasoned analysis, which is meant to abstract certain things from a given situation. Those of us in literary studies are fond of reasoned analysis and it is definitely a necessity. The

208

•

Worrying about China

feeling of being moved to understand a situation [nazhong ganwu], however, that kind of hazy sense of grasping the crux of the matter [menglongde bawo] is perhaps even more important.37

Qian is somewhat wary of reasoned analysis because he perceives it as corruptible. In this regard, he is particularly opposed to what he calls “the political science of reading” [yuedu zhengzhixue] that prevailed in the Maoist era: “Many faults have resulted from the prolonged period in which reading was considered to be a political act, and this is why we should now advocate individual acts of reading [geren yuedu]. When individual acts of reading are restored, when one becomes a living individual, then there may be an encounter or collision between your individual life and Lu Xun’s.”38 In using bibing (“faults” or “shortcomings,” literally “malady”) to figure the adverse consequences of politically motivated acts of reading, Qian recalls the tropes of illness that Lu Xun frequently used in his negative representations of traditional Chinese culture. The connotation of illness implicit in bibing enables Qian to suggest that health would be restored through the affirmation of spontaneous emotion in “individual acts of reading”: in other words, he proposes emotional veracity (the “immediate feeling” a text arouses in a reader) as an aesthetic ideal to safeguard reasoned analysis from political interference. Indeed, because Lu Xun was often quoted during the Cultural Revolution—with his phrase “to beat a drowning dog” (da luoshui gou) being used to denounce “class enemies”—the writer Shao Yanxiang has observed that many of those “drowning dogs” who have since been rehabilitated have come to harbor a particular resentment against Lu Xun.39 In this regard, Qian’s intention is to affirm the role of feeling in the process of interpretation—to encourage others to cultivate their own individual memories of pain and pleasure—as mitigation against the adverse effects of a politically abused Lu Xun. As he puts it: “[Lu Xun] wants to enter your mind [neixin] and you want to enter his. When both [these intentions] are entangled, a clash or a harmonization of souls [linghunde chongtu, linghunde gongzhen] will occur.”40 At first glance, Qian’s valorization of immediate feeling might appear at odds with Wang Hui’s recommendation for the restoration of balance between emotion and cognition. But because Qian affirms emotional veracity in deliberate opposition to politically motivated scholarship, he actually proposes something quite similar to Wang Hui. In effect, both Qian and Wang seek to uncouple emotion from the taint of ideological motivations but

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

209

because they do not question the veracity of emotions, they fail to consider the problems inherent in opposing emotion to ideology, reason, or science. After all, emotion is as much “embodied” in language as it is in experience, such that it must be named and explained so that otherwise inchoate sensations can be marshaled into the distinct “entities” of joy, regret, fear, anger, sadness, love, and so on. Accordingly, they do not take into account the linguistic contingency that bedevils any attempt to claim emotional veracity as such. Nonetheless, it is clear that when intellectuals now state an intention either to free emotion from political subjugation or else to discipline emotion against the lures of a flawed political vision, they are also attempting to embody emotion in novel ways in their prose, to mark a distinct departure from the affective, patriotic formulations in which they were formerly schooled. In either case, the aim is to reinforce individualism and cultural integrity as virtues that present-day inquiry should defend. In this regard, it is the memory rather than the experience of pleasure and pain (to recall Margalit) that animates the valorization of moral emotions as part of a contemporary poetics of self-cultivation. Many have sought to rewrite the “pleasure” they previously experienced in affirming May Fourth intellectual radicalism (under the Partystate’s tutelage) as the present “pain” of realizing that that “pleasure” encouraged dogmatism instead of scholarship proper. This valorization of moral emotions was perhaps most evident in the early months of 1989 when the intellectual legacy of the May Fourth era became a topic of frequent debate and discussion. As the student-led movement for democracy gathered momentum, intellectuals began to review in earnest the bleak prospects for individualism and intellectual autonomy under Party-state rule. Liu Xiaobo’s essay “The Tragedy of Enlightenment: A Critique of the May Fourth Movement,” a widely read publication of that year, offered a striking argument in defense of moral emotions that would enable contemporary intellectuals to adopt an attitude of uncompromising adherence to individualism. In the essay, Liu is careful to distinguish the perspicacity he accords to individualism from what he disparages as the highly compromised “individualism” that May Fourth intellectuals advocated.41 He surmises that since individualism is meaningless without the legislated protection of private property, it was inevitable that the May Fourth advocacy of individualism would be undermined in the long run by its indiscriminate promotion of public ownership (gongyou guannian)

210

•

Worrying about China

at the expense of private ownership (siyou guannian). He reads this bias as constitutive of an unwitting disposition toward traditionalism in the Enlightenment project of that era: a disposition that “sought neither to reform the tradition nor to liberate humanity. In particular, it did nothing to liberate each and every Chinese person who lived under authoritarian rule.” Liu argues that the promotion of individualism during May Fourth was short-lived essentially because “it failed to grasp the tremendous importance of private property in relation to the liberation of individual nature.” He warns that without recognizing this crucial relation between the concrete rights of the individual and the abstract ideality of individualism, “all slogans of individualism, democracy, or freedom will prove incapable of protecting the rights of the individual in practice.” The moral emotions that Liu valorizes are closely bound up with notions of righteous anger and courage in opposing an entrenched injustice. In doing so, he also offers humiliation as an incentive for nurturing such anger and courage. This is evident when he uses the scenario of an abused son to illustrate his argument that individualism is an exemplary form of respect and love for oneself. Liu elevates individualism to the moral disposition of rejecting an aberrant and morally abject patriotism that demands unconditional filial love, even for an abusive mother(land). The affective potency of Liu’s maternal trope is amply illustrated in the following lines: When “a mother wrongly beats her son” but demands that the son be magnanimous, this is a simple case of applying the logic of banditry [qiangdao luoji]. The motherland [zuguo] is not everyone’s mother. It is the place where people reside and the motherland has no right to claim a position for itself as [everyone’s] mother. Let’s take this back one step. When a mother has wrongly beaten her son, he should not forgive her, for such forgiveness accommodates her error and is tantamount to [the son] giving his mother tacit approval to continue administering these wrongful beatings.

The intimate sense of justice that Liu seeks to evoke through figuring the authoritarian state as an abusive mother has a certain unfortunate but inerasable resonance with the notion of collective and equal “justice” alive during the Cultural Revolution, a time where children were encouraged to denounce their parents for their “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary” crimes. Transposed into Liu’s post-Maoist advocacy of enlightened individualism, this same affective figure of transgression against filial love is newly enlisted here to promote quite a different

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

211

ideal justice, one that substitutes the demand for homogeneous adherence to the truth of Mao Zedong Thought with Liu’s new demand for unequivocal valorization of one’s own personal sense of self and dignity. Thus when Liu urges his readers, figuratively, to free themselves from the burden of masochistic love that demands a filial son to forgive an abusive mother, he recommends that they place their individual rights above the quasi-filial norm of an imposed national interest. By likening the nationalistic theme that has prevailed in Chinese intellectual discourse since the May Fourth era to a masochistic son who subjects himself to continuous humiliation, Liu advocates individualism as a healthy break from all abject forms of loving. In figuring authoritarianism as maternal abuse, Liu draws on the centuries-old tradition of figuring patriotism as love for one’s mother, insofar as he recalls the moral paradigm in traditional Chinese culture of exemplary mothers instructing their illustrious sons (such as Mencius or Yue Fei) on how they should serve society. By contrast, the father-son relationship has been paradigmatic in defining the proper moral relationship between the ruler and the ruled in Confucian orthodoxy.42 Indeed, because this maternal paradigm has not been routinely formalized as the proper moral relationship between the ruler and the ruled (as has its paternal counterpart), its transgression has greater affective power than decrying the already highly politicized and clichéd father-son bond. Thus intellectuals have long resorted to scripting scenarios of maternal love and abuse in their critical engagement with issues of patriotism.43 What is interesting is that although Liu figures May Fourth individualism as an abject and unhealthy filial love, nonetheless his valorization of individualism as the restoration of moral and emotional well-being is very much a derivative of May Fourth figurations of nation-building as character-building. For instance, Lung-Kee Sun observes that in the writings of May Fourth intellectuals, to conjure up the image of a robust masculinity as the correct disposition the Chinese nation requires, feminization is often rendered synonymous with weakness. Using Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun as examples, Sun writes: Their remedy, namely to reassert one’s aggressive instinct, was meant for the entire nation. Chen Duxiu lamented as he switched from the metaphor of senility to that of feminization: “Let us look at our educated youth: their weak hands lack the energy to tie up a chicken, their hearts do not harbor the virility of a real man; with pallid faces and slim waists, they have the seductiveness of a woman; they recoil from cold and are apprehensive of heat like an ema-

212

•

Worrying about China

ciated sick man.” . . . Lu Xun also remarked sardonically: “In our China, the greatest, most enduring, and most popular art is man cross-dressing as woman.”44

Thus when Liu Xiaobo declared that modern Chinese thought was an Enlightenment project that had not yet begun, his negation of May Fourth was scripted in an idiom of character-building that was itself the discursive legacy of that era. Moreover, Liu’s critique chimes with the masculist rhetoric of Chen Duxiu’s and Lu Xun’s comments when he appears to suggest that, to complete the project of Enlightenment, the son (or the Chinese citizen) must be man enough to reject his unfit mother (the authoritarian state).45 But what is most interesting is that despite Liu’s insistence on defining individual rights as rights derived from property which are devoid of any taint of nationalism and patriotism, nonetheless several of his formulations reflect a nationalistic and patriotic undertow. After all, Liu’s writing is framed in terms of concern for the motherland that he perceives to be at risk of being hijacked once more by abject and masochistic forms of loving. His passion for the motherland is most evident in the concluding section of his essay where he reprises his earlier assertion of individual rights as the sole remedy for authoritarianism. Where he had earlier figured this remedy in terms of breaking free from an abusive mother, Liu now promotes individualism as an act of self-sacrifice: “Thus a Chinese citizen who has resolved to become fully human must pay a great price in terms of the psychological preparation that he must undergo. He should not hope to lead a fully human existence within his own lifetime; otherwise he will risk reenacting the tragedy of May Fourth if things do not go as planned.” Liu’s criticisms are evidently directed at the Party-state’s MarxistLeninist orthodoxy which, after its institutionalization as state ideology from the 1950s onward, legitimized attacks on perceived displays of individualism by equating individualism with a capitalist and morally reprehensible mode of being. But even though Liu is clearly opposed to Marxism-Leninism, his prose bears the distinct imprint of the assertive declamatory style characteristic of Maoist revolutionary discourse. That declamatory style (and its aesthetic appeal) persisted in Chinese intellectual discourse in the 1980s and it was not until the 1990s that its influence noticeably waned with the concomitant rise of scholarly idioms. Indeed, the waning affect of that declamatory style since the 1990s is linked in complex ways to the mourning of May Fourth as the

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

213

loss of a common moral purpose. Although in the late 1980s intellectuals like Liu were already accusing their May Fourth predecessors for their ultimately tragic embrace of the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks, they themselves continued to draw on the persistent rhetorical form of Maoist revolutionary discourse and its affective formulations of a common moral purpose, even as they rejected its ideological contents. Moreover, since the moral responsibility of the intellectual had long been formalized as a willingness to act on behalf of others despite knowing that one might not succeed in saving or liberating oneself, when Liu Xiaobo invokes this moral responsibility and its requisite altruism and heroism, he cannot avoid recalling its paradigmatic modern figuration in the following statement by Lu Xun: “Burdened as a man may be with the weight of tradition, he can yet prop open the gate of darkness with his shoulder to let the children through to the bright, wide-open spaces, to lead happy lives henceforward as rational human beings.”46 Lu Xun’s frequently invoked trope of holding open the gate of darkness has become iconic of what “being a Chinese intellectual” is all about, such that many Chinese intellectuals have indeed learned to acquire “immediate feeling” for Lu Xun (of a respectful and empathetic nature).47 Moreover, Lu Xun’s posthumous authority in Sinophone scholarship is such that he is often written about, hyperbolically, as if he were the May Fourth intellectual who had, with Übermenschlich effort, held open the gate of darkness for future generations of Chinese people to see the light.48 In this context, one should note that while an older generation of intellectuals like Qian Liqun may well revere what they experience as the emotional veracity of Lu Xun’s writings, younger intellectuals like Yu Jie are aware that this felt truth is much more elusive for members of their later generation. As Geremie Barmé observes: Writing some seventy years after Lu Xun, Yu Jie opined that he hoped to continue the tradition of the earlier writer’s cultural criticism by holding open the gate of darkness. However, he wrote, “It’s not that I don’t want to let the children through [the gate]; it’s just that the children don’t want to go anywhere. They claim they’re happy right where they are.” By way of reflecting on the lack of seriousness and commitment among his contemporaries he then tells of a fellow student who asked a girl that he wanted to impress: “What if I held open the gate of darkness for you— what would you do?” She replied, “Tickle you.”49

Chinese intellectuals who regard May Fourth as a living legacy of the Good before it was hijacked by political extremism are likely to disap-

214

•

Worrying about China

prove of the irreverent use of Lu Xun’s lofty trope in the flirtatious exchange that Yu Jie relates. Indeed, it is precisely because May Fourth and Lu Xun occupy such an elevated status in Chinese intellectual discourse that Yu Jie’s anecdote is effective in illustrating how much feelings about Lu Xun have changed, and how easy it is to now banalize this once revered image of the exemplary Chinese intellectual as one who bears the burden of his society. The flirtatious exchange also indicates that the spiritual power Qian attributes to Lu Xun is less enduring than he imagines. Since the 1990s, intellectuals have turned their attention to the establishment of academic norms and the pursuit of scholarly rigor rather than to promote individualism per se, effacing to some extent the kind of moral heroism (or “great price”) that Liu Xiaobo argues is necessary for the cultivation of individualism. But even though it has become much more difficult for intellectuals to claim a given moral disposition by recourse to the simple and even sloganistic terms that Liu Xiaobo was able to so confidently offer in 1989 (that is, put individualism before nationalism, put private ownership before public ownership, etc.), nonetheless the power of moral emotions remains implicit in their articulations. We have seen how the desire for a proper attitude or disposition is variously fleshed out in the prose of intellectuals such as Wang Hui, Wang Yuanhua, Zhu Xueqin, and Qian Liqun. That desire is most evident when their critical revaluations of May Fourth turn not only on the identification of perceived ideological flaws but also on the negation of emotions “wrongly” enlisted to perpetuate those flaws coupled with regret for the loss of emotional veracity in this process. In this regard, within the rapidly expanded commercial but still authoritarian environment of the 1990s and since, many intellectuals have come to regard the enthusiasm (reqing) that had previously animated inquiry of the 1980s (which had fostered the heroic individualism that Liu Xiaobo espoused) as at best an obsolete emotion no longer suitable for dealing with the problems of the postmodern age. If enthusiasm for reform had previously been credible because of the “homogeneity of attitude” prevalent in mainland intellectual discourse, together with common subscription in the 1980s to the “idealized view of the ultimate ends and meaning of Western-style modernization,”50 it was the effect of there being a relatively homogeneous language through which Chinese intellectuals communicated their ideas. Indeed the habit of speaking and writing in a (May Fourth- and Maoist-derived) declamatory

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

215

style made the plural views of 1980s’ Chinese intellectuals still resonant with the overall homogeneous affect of affirming Enlightenment as their common moral purpose. Since the 1990s, however, this affect has been increasingly encroached upon by the different idioms and styles that have gained currency in Chinese intellectual discourse and that have proliferated on the Sinophone Internet. In brief, faced with what Niklas Luhmann calls the increase in “volume, complexity, memory, and pace” of social communications in our time, intellectuals could not but become aware that, in the face of the sheer diversity of causes, the idea of infecting everyone with one’s own enthusiasm for a particular path had become untenable. This is particularly true in the era of the Internet in which the further differentiation and expansion of communication into new genres and subgenres occurs with such rapidity that we perpetually find ourselves in the dilemma that Luhmann describes: of being able not only “to remember more knowledge” but also to render “knowledge more quickly obsolete.”51 In this context, recent Sinophone critiques of enthusiasm for new and radical ideas (in aid of improving the nation’s Thought) reflect the speed with which the ideas of the 1980s were perceived as obsolete by the 1990s.52 In explaining the need for self-restraint against the temptations of such enthusiasm, Chen Pingyuan writes: From the favor shown to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche at the beginning of this century to the valorization of structuralism and postmodernism at its end, Chinese intellectuals seem to have concentrated their affections [qingyou duzhong] on promoting resistance to traditional culture . . . The political process [satirized by Lu Xun] of “revolution, the revolution of the revolution, the revolution of the revolution of the revolution . . .” and this unceasing cultural process of opposing tradition both have their origin in a cultural disposition toward excessive pursuits of the new, of change, and of difference.53

Chen argues that it is because “ ‘rebellion’ [fanpan] and ‘critique’ are far more captivating than ‘tradition’ and ‘conservatism’ ” that a change of attitude is imperative. This is because rebellion and critique are constitutive of “a cultural attitude” that promised “penetrative insights into the opportunistic ways of the world and the treacheries of the human heart” while wrongly presuming to have the “moral ability powerfully to defy a legion prejudices, . . . leading to the scripting of an affective mode of argumentation.” According to Chen, self-restraint is the kind

216

•

Worrying about China

of moral emotion that would enable present-day intellectuals to unlearn the entrenched May Fourth habit of pursuing “the new.” The kind of “painstaking and humble task of cultural construction” he recommends is hence one that requires the recultivation of respect for “the old” with the specific intention of producing “elite cultural creations” that would ideally reflect the integrity of traditional Chinese thought.54 In this regard, when Chen explains the dangers of “an affective mode of argumentation,” he does so in a richly affective language. He writes of a century of enthusiastic, revolutionary pursuits that produced “a dazzling array of cultural debates and countless stirring cultural slogans” but nothing of lasting permanence. He laments “the pale and barren vista of elite cultural creations” that stands as a bleak testament to the repeated attempts of intellectuals “to realize a certain illusory cultural ideal,” and he calls for an end to the chronic amnesia resulting from endlessly reproaching the “I of yesterday” from the position of the “I of today.”55 In brief, Chen’s formulations strain under the paradox caused by his interweaving of poetic sentiment into his argument against the seductions of poetic sentiment. But it is this very paradox that highlights Chen’s preoccupation with commemorating pain and pleasure as an ontological necessity in the act of critical inquiry. His rhetorical ambivalence “performs” the work of moral instruction in two ways: he recommends the virtue of selfrestraint against the passions that animated May Fourth inquiry but also deliberately recalls the rhetorical power of that inquiry to register sympathy (tongqing) for the historical individuals in whom those passions were unleashed. As noted in Chapter Three, Chen Yinque’s statement, “one should first possess understanding of a sympathetic nature before putting pen to paper,” has now become regularly invoked as paradigmatic of the critical task. Critical virtue, whether stated as selfrestraint or sympathy, involves the moral revaluation of past emotions, and the Cultural Revolution is often the unstated object of such revaluation. Any attempt to recover a proper disposition, together with a requisite set of moral emotions, is also an attempt to interrogate and exorcise emotions such as enthusiasm for rebellion and hatred for perceived enemies that were, and continue to be, associated with the Cultural Revolution (under cover of critiquing the May Fourth era and the 1980s). Some intellectuals such as Qin Hui have sought to affirm sympathy as the retrieval of genuine feeling (shigan) against what they perceive as

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

217

the cynicism of the post-Maoist era. According to Qin, the narrative of “elite victimage” (jingying shounan) that gained authority in the postMaoist years had the effect of placing “the emphasis on social celebrities, in particular, on those episodes where ‘those in power’ were persecuted by the mob (or ‘rebels’), with little reflection being given to how ‘those in power’ treated the people.” He argues: This form of “reflection” has already helped to foster a certain kind of “hatred for the people” [chou min] in the bureaucratic mentality. This has led some of the bureaucrats who have this mentality to think that they alone were victims of the Cultural Revolution and in reassuming positions of power, they have lost no time in demanding “compensation” from society, regarding those who have a dissenting view as the dregs of “rebellion.” This dark mentality has served to encourage the incidence of corruption in the New Era.56

Zest and Flavor in Critical Inquiry To appreciate the extent to which present-day intellectuals now experience their own discourse as the legacy of flawed ideas and untempered passions, let us take a brief detour to consider the progressive marginalization since the 1920s of quwei (zest or flavor) in critical discourse, against the prevalence of lofty utterances. As a sensibility, quwei once played a prominent part in the Confucian literati tradition and remained relatively influential in the May Fourth era before it was effectively suppressed by the political dictates of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.57 Although quwei was a term that frequently appeared in traditional and early modern Chinese literary discourse, it was never formalized as an aesthetic concept. Rather, its connotations of zest and flavor were and remain evocative of taste in judgment, enabling the term to function with loose associations to a diverse range of qualities, in particular, to the display of a person’s literary or artistic skills in producing effects of irony, humor, and satire.58 As a sensibility, quwei affirmed the individuality or unique character of a writer’s or artist’s powers of observation and expression. Not surprisingly, it was often disparaged by solemn and humorless Marxists from the May Fourth era onward, for talk of quwei was judged to be a hindrance to the political struggle of liberating the oppressed classes.59 The perceived frivolity of quwei ensured its exclusion in the Maoist decades but it has since reemerged in literary and critical writings to re-

218

•

Worrying about China

flect a renewed privileging of individualism and idiosyncrasy. The following passage by the late Ming poet and critic Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) provides an endearing description of quwei: This zest [qu] for living is more born in us than cultivated. Children have most of it. They have probably never heard of the word “zest,” but they show it everywhere. They find it hard to look solemn, they wink, they grimace, they mumble to themselves, they jump and skip and hop and romp. That is why childhood is the happiest period of a man’s life, and why Mencius spoke of “recovering the heart of a child” and Laozi referred to it as a model of man’s original nature.60

The childlike (and “classless”) zest that Yuan Hongdao extolled became obscured as the modern Chinese vernacular fell under the prolonged spell of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and its ponderous declamatory prose. Equally, since quwei has little to do with the lofty emotions of righteous anger, self-restraint, or courage that mainland intellectuals now tend to affirm when reflecting on the unhappy state of their critical discourse, it appears only in those instances when a writer or artist crafts a humorous or ironic observation with manifest skill and wit. For instance, when Yu Jie reminds us that it is always possible to tickle a person who declares that he is holding open the gate of darkness, he is spicing his prose with the zest of quwei, by putting the performative effect of a wink or a grimace into play against the manifest solemnity of Lu Xun’s sacralized formulation. Quwei is effected when a text or image elicits a congenial response from its audience and Yuan Hongdao clearly performs quwei in the very description he provides for the term itself. Moreover, to valorize quwei is to affirm human fallibility and to celebrate the innocence and spontaneity of children as integral to the idea of a common humanity.61 Within the purview of quwei, bonds of common belonging and friendship become more imaginable through the sympathetic laughter that witty wordplay, irony, or visual puns provoke. Accordingly, quwei is at play in the rhetoric of critical discourse whenever a well-worn formulation is given a new twist, such as can be detected in Chen Pingyuan’s wry observation that the trouble with echoing the aged May Fourth slogan, “Don’t read old books,” is that Chinese intellectuals now “really don’t have much to worry about, as we simply haven’t read many old books at all.” The politically driven marginalization of quwei since the May Fourth era and its subsequent eclipse against the high dudgeon of Maoist rhet-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

219

oric is a striking aspect of modern Chinese radicalism that has so far attracted little comment in contemporary mainland critical discourse. Yet, it is clear that quwei has returned to that discourse and its effects are especially prominent in the online writings of Sinophone bloggers, such as the highly popular Beijing-based journalist Wang Xiaofeng, whose cybermoniker “dai sange biao” (“wearing three watches”) is a parodic anagram of Jiang Zemin’s “important thought” of the “Three Represents” (sange daibiao).62 Quwei is arguably far more effective as an everyday remedy against unthinking acquiescence to political dogma than the gravitas required of adherence to some or other recommended moral disposition of selfrestraint, righteous anger, or courage. In this context, quwei is crucial to the ongoing renewal of the Chinese language and manifests through inventive retranscriptions of the already stated. As the pursuit of zest in human expression, quwei is most easily detected in fragments of speech and writing that tempt us with the promise of a home truth about human fallibility. But since zest is a momentary sensation to be experienced through singular acts of observation, it can never connote a total or unified scene of Truth; rather, it allows truth to be imagined and engaged within diverse ways. Understood as such, quwei inflects the mandate of worrying about China with a certain ironic affability. Zest as qu has its complement in flavor as wei. Flavor directs the sensibility of quwei more specifically toward culinary and gastronomic tropes and is somewhat more restrictive in scope than the manifestly polysemic qu. Like zest, flavor has returned as a rhetorical feature of contemporary critical discourse; unlike zest, the evocative powers of flavor are generally intended to enhance an idea or proposition than to render it ironic. For instance, when the prominent Beijing-based literary scholar Yue Daiyun sought to emphasize the necessity of selecting Western theories to suit Chinese literary sensibilities, she encapsulated the process using the Confucian axiom “compatibility in difference” (he er butong), and then figured the process as a culinary experience, noting, “It is by means of their ‘difference’ that oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar can constitute an art of cooking.” She goes on: “For instance, different ingredients are combined in the creation of a particular dish, and this dish, when combined with others, forms a banquet. Ultimately, none of the differences among these various dishes are erased. To the contrary, these differences are combined to achieve a greater and more replete sense of harmony. The development of culture is analogous to this.”63

220

•

Worrying about China

A sensibility to flavor is also evident in Zhu Xueqin’s prose when he criticizes his New Left rivals using gastronomic tropes to illustrate the enormous gap between EuroAmerican formulations of liberal principles and the present-day Chinese context. As he puts it: “They are standing in the kind of kitchen which allows them the luxury of simply explaining ‘how one stews the fish to make soup,’ while we’re standing in our own kitchen here, faced with the task of ‘trying to retrieve and restore the fish from soup that has been ruined’ before we can even begin to contemplate anything else. Naturally, to retrieve and restore fish from ruined soup is ten times more difficult than to make soup by stewing the fish.”64 Many Chinese essays published in defense of liberalism rely on organic, naturalistic, and familial tropes to accentuate the difference between the normal or “natural” order of things under liberal democratic principles, and the “aberrant” arrangements that prevail under authoritarian rule. Thus intellectuals such as Zhu Xueqin and He Qinglian conjure up a “natural” order of things by recourse to Adam Smith’s trope of “the invisible hand” at work, but not limited to allusions to a social mechanism whereby self-interest results in an unintended communal good. The trope itself has also inspired Zhu to write sardonically of an arbitrary “foot” of authoritarian power that leaves its “filthy imprint” on an otherwise clean “hand,” while He deploys the phrase “the heavy invisible hand of power” to suggest that official corruption has seized the otherwise clean hand of market mechanisms to serve the interests of a power-clutching elite minority.65 Indeed, it could be argued that the popular appeal of liberalism in mainland China has much to do with the zest and flavor that liberal intellectuals have worked with considerable rhetorical skill into their writings. Arch and artful plainspeak is now often commended as a positive feature of Sinophone liberal discourse—not least by liberal intellectuals themselves, especially when they disparage their New Left rivals for writing theoretically dense prose that is sheer torture (zhemo) to read. Wang Hui has been singled out for particular mention in such indictments. For instance, Wu Jiaxiang accuses Wang of mangling the Chinese language when he writes: “As a scholar of Lu Xun’s literary works, how is it that his Chinese seems somewhat rusty . . . Reading foreign works that have been well translated would be a happier task than reading his essays . . . Actually, the one who ought to feel disappointment over this should be his object of inquiry, Lu Xun, not me.”66 While it is

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

221

true that Wang Hui’s writings differ markedly in vocabulary and style from the purposive plainspeak of Sinophone liberals, nonetheless it is also clear that his prose, albeit dense, is not inaccessible. Productive engagement with Wang’s essays, however, does require at least some familiarity with the EuroAmerican theoretical formulations he has transposed into Chinese. However, Wang Hui’s rhetorical skills are by no means inferior to that of liberals like Xu Youyu and Zhu Xueqin. For instance, the very title of his 2000 book, Dead Fire Rekindled, invokes the prose poem “Dead Fire” that Lu Xun penned in 1925, a time when Marxist and anarchist paeans to revolution first kindled hope among numerous intellectuals for liberation from warlord rule in Republican China. In using Lu Xun’s phrase, Wang evokes quwei in the sense of an “aftertaste” (huiwei) to accentuate the affective powers implicit in the remembrance of things past (as both pleasure and pain).67 In his surrealist poem, Lu Xun had written of “dead fire” as a frozen form of black-tipped coral flames that came to life despite being imprisoned in a valley of ice. In the conversation that ensues between the poem’s narrator and the rekindled dead fire, the fire announces that it has chosen to follow the narrator out of the valley of ice, observing that even though this would cause it to burn out, it would nonetheless be a better fate than being frozen to death.68 The evocativeness of this image of dead fire, suffused with the tragic legacy of revolutions in China’s twentieth century,69 enables Wang to suggest that, like Lu Xun, he is attempting to rekindle social hope between the covers of his book. What remains suggestive but unstated is that this is ultimately a hope for freedom from the icy prison of authoritarian rule.

Axioms Reconsidered In Sinophone critical discourse, the sensibility of quwei remains quite marginal by comparison with the gravitas that dominates the prose of worrying about China. That gravitas is most evident in the use of fourcharacter phrases (sizi ju) and other axiomatic formulations in Sinophone critical discourse. These (mostly four-character) axioms structure the appearance of most universal yardsticks of observed life and constitute an untroubled inheritance from the classical language that thrives in modern Chinese prose. They demonstrate that the poetics of moral judgment has a certain paradigmatic syntactic form in the language of

222

•

Worrying about China

Chinese intellectuals. For instance, when Liu Dong defends Sino-centered learning as the correct path for contemporary Chinese thought, he enlists quasi-axiomatic formulations like “drawing the West into China” (yuan Xi ru Zhong) or “drawing Western methods into Chinese scholarship” (yuan Xi fa ru Zhong xue) to strengthen his argument.70 In doing so, he invokes the moral and cultural authority of the classical language (the “vehicle” of Confucianism) in much the same way that the Latin mottoes of schools and universities are designed to endow the work of these institutions with the “aura” of Western civilization. Citations and retranscriptions of axiomatic formulations taken from the classical corpora manifestly draw on this authority of traditional Chinese culture and constitute an important rhetorical tactic in the writings of intellectuals and officials alike. Thus when the official discourse deploys the poetics of a classical axiom popularized by Mao, “Seeking truth from facts” (shishi qiu shi) as the present-day motto of the Chinese Communist Party, it ingeniously recasts the Party as an organization that embodies both traditional Chinese and Communist values. When the mid-nineteenth-century Confucian axiom “Chinese knowledge as the foundation, Western knowledge for practical application” (Zhong xue wei ti, Xi xue wei yong) is retranscribed as “Humanity as the foundation, synthesis for practical application” (renyi wei ti, zonghe wei yong), its formal structure is deliberately reiterated to accentuate its contemporary semantic content. According to Tang Yijie, when Chen Lai retranscribed this durable Confucian axiom71 he produced innovative scholarship that reflected the humanistic and adaptive aspects of Confucian thought. Tang argues that Chen’s retranscription enables us to see that “notions such as ‘foundation’ and ‘practical application’ are inappropriate when applied to Eastern and Western cultures.” He agrees with Chen’s proposition that since the original formulation imposed a hierarchy between Chinese knowledge as primary and Western knowledge as secondary, it should be modified to reflect an alternative principle of cultural complementarity that would be better suited for China’s present-day needs. Thus Tang argues that when Chen retranscribed the axiom he correctly emphasized the synthesis of Chinese and Western modes of knowing as a pluralistic redemptive pursuit that would facilitate the further development of a universal culture for a common humanity.72 Within the same poetics but unlike Chen Lai’s retranscription of an authoritative axiom to demonstrate that new ideas can be articulated,

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

223

as it were, in graphic continuity with the Confucian tradition, Chen Pingyuan utilizes axioms that have come to be associated with Mao Zedong to represent anachronistically the erroneous path of radicalism across China’s twentieth century.73 Since they first appeared in Mao’s 1940 article “On New Democracy,” the phrases “making foreign things serve China” (Yang wei Zhong yong), “making the past serve the present” (gu wei jin yong), and “weeding through the old to bring forth the new” (tui chen chu xin) have led a complex life in the discursivities of Chinese officials and intellectuals alike. They were popular slogans between the 1950s and 1970s and were often invoked as true propositions in argumentation. For instance, Zhou Enlai used them as true propositions in 1970 during the Cultural Revolution when he held a discussion with officials in charge of cultural and publishing activities. On that occasion, Zhou noted that there was a need for both creativity and foundation in the compilation of dictionaries, arguing, among other things, that the New China Dictionary was necessarily based in the precedent set by the former imperial Qing project, the Kangxi Dictionary. Quoting Mao, Zhou queried: “One must make the past serve the present and weed out the old to bring forth the new. What are we to do if the new cannot be brought forth, and the old cannot be made to serve the present?”74 Thus when Chen Pingyuan criticizes Chinese intellectual radicalism using these same two axioms, he implies that they encapsulate and embody that which is false in radicalism. As he puts it: Scholarship should distinguish between neither new and old, nor China and the West. For radical and impetuous Chinese scholars of the twentieth century, however, the temptation of “making foreign things serve China” and “weeding through the old to bring forth the new” has proved too great, to the extent that pursuing novelty and undertaking Western-style reforms [qu xin wu Yang] became a kind of fashion . . . Since the “May Fourth” era, large numbers of research publications on the history of Chinese literature have appeared, and these have come about through heeding the call of this intellectual trend . . . The problem is that this [mode of inquiry] is much too neglectful of the ancients, much too dependent on the importation of theory, and has produced a considerable legacy of abnormalities.75

When Chen negates the two Mao-derived phrases using yet another four-character expression, qu xin wu Yang, he reflects the importance of axioms and slogans as a staple feature of moral and political education

224

•

Worrying about China

in mainland China. Chen’s poetic deployment of qu xin wu Yang in his critique of modern Chinese thought is rhetorically effective because it functions as a kind of summary judgment, like the capping third line (hengpi) of a traditional Chinese couplet.76 In other words, the negativity of “pursuing novelty and undertaking Western-style reforms” is accentuated via the poetics of a prosodic symmetry, generated by the two four-character phrases of Mao (“weeding out the old to bring forth the new” and “making foreign things serve China”) which Chen quotes to typify this falsity or flaw.77 What these various examples illustrate is that the poetics of the fourcharacter expression has an enduring formal authority which makes it an extremely useful rhetorical device in acts of judgment, whether to typify a situation or an attitude or, alternatively, to affirm, negate, or modify an established view. Hence when Zhu Xueqin uses the phrase “unity between politics and doctrine” (zhengjiao heyi) to characterize cultural determinism in modern Chinese thought, he stages an unmistakable rhetorical resonance between this phrase and the Confucian axiom “unity between heaven and humanity” (tianren heyi) to suggest that the notion of an all-encompassing “unity” is structurally entrenched in the Chinese language and has typically served political and doctrinal interests rather than humanistic ones.78

Refiguring Certainty In the broadest terms, the certitude of Sinophone critical discourse bespeaks a determination to express humanistic concerns transparently and unequivocally, in implicit resistance to the dictates of the Party’s ideolanguage. The presumption of transparency reflects an intense longing for an unequivocal truth that is imagined, in turn, as articulable in language. To appreciate the depth of presumed verisimilitude in that discourse, we need look no further than the numerous Chinese translations of “Western theory” in recent years, in which phrases that are specifically marked with a sense of the contingent in the original English are often rendered conclusive through their reformulation in Chinese. For instance, in an essay where Rorty observes that “[Arthur] Fine has become famous for his defense of a thesis whose discussion seems to me central to contemporary philosophy—namely, that we should be neither realists nor antirealists, that the entire realism-antirealism issue should be set aside,” the Chinese translation restates this as “Fine has become

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

225

famous for his defense of a central problem in contemporary philosophy. He believes that we should be neither realists nor antirealists, that the entire realism-antirealism issue should be abolished [quxiao].”79 Similarly, when Rorty writes that “philosophical progress is thus not a matter of problems being solved, but of descriptions being improved,” it is transposed into Chinese as “Thus the mark of philosophical progress is not those problems that have been solved, but the progressive perfection [riyi wanshan] of these descriptions.” Moreover, the term “our fellow humans,” central to Rorty’s call for a pragmatic sense of responsibility that does not rely on “invidious and quasi-metaphysical distinctions between real and less real men,”80 is awkwardly and almost unintelligibly translated as “our companions in humanity” (women renlei tongban), indicating the absence of a readily available sense of one’s “fellow humans” in Chinese. The term tongren, which does have the literal sense of “fellow humans,” has long served the figurative function of signifying one’s “peers” or “colleagues” or “those who share our views” and cannot easily be wrested from these authoritative metonymies to resonate once more with the unfamiliar literal sense of “fellow humans.”81 It is not difficult to acquire from these instances a sense of the limitations imposed by the partisan certitudes of modern written Chinese as this language has evolved in the People’s Republic. We noted earlier that when liberal intellectuals accuse their New Left rivals such as Wang Hui of mangling the Chinese language through an undesirable postmodern style of theorizing, they imply that the kind of plainspeak they themselves practice is the kind of language in which critical inquiry should be conducted. In other words, such intellectuals affirm plainspeak as an ideal linguistic certitude in service of freedom. For instance, writing as an advocate of a liberal “third way” freedom, Wang Dingding declares: I want freedom and the reason for this could not be any simpler. First, because I have a “life” that is palpably mine, it demands to breathe, it needs to pulsate, it wants to explore the world around it, it is not willing to let external forces deprive it of its right to live. Second, my breathing, my [heart’s] pulsations, and my quest enable me to have awareness and thoughts. My thoughts allow me to understand that this breathing, these pulsations, and this quest are all part of “me” and [from these things] I demand to occupy this space. I am not willing to let external forces deprive me of my right to occupy this space. Finally, my breathing, my pulsations, my quest, and my thoughts can be maintained only with energy derived

226

•

Worrying about China

from the external world. Thus I demand an economic right and a cultural space that is appropriate [to my needs]. If these demands can be satisfied, then I will have made the first step toward “freedom.” If any external force should want to deprive me of this small measure of freedom in my possession, no matter how noble or revolutionary the cause it invokes, it will meet with “my” resistance.

Wang’s concept of freedom is the simplistic ontological proposition of a universal and innate need—a proposition he insists is fundamental to understanding an individual as a living being (“with a life-process based in its capacity to breathe, pulsate, inquire, and think”) that is intrinsically opposed to the abstract concept of an individual (which Wang defines critically as “a ‘point’ [dian] that does not take up any actual space”). This universalization of freedom as an integral part of instinctive human behavior invokes a naturalistic scientific truth-claim which Wang likens to something like an inherent “law” of survival. By referring to his text as a “down-to-earth narrative,” what Wang implies is that he is describing the natural attitude of humans, and he even argues that this natural attitude provides crucial guidance for anyone faced with the contemporary situation where “discussions of more than a hundred abstruse varieties of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ lead one to be so confused as to not know what to do.”82 Wang Dingding’s critique is directed specifically at Han Yuhai’s criticisms of the market economy. The Beijing-based New Left historian had penned, among other things, the hyperbole that the “freedom” of the market economy amounts to the “freedom of wanting to be a slave.” But Wang’s text is unmistakably a broader critique of authoritarian rule insofar as he directs his criticism against those who use their power to deprive others of “this small measure of freedom” that should rightfully belong to all. Wang’s argument turns on his conflation of market principles with a form of natural justice that he affirms in opposition to the Marxist-inspired theories he associates with the New Left. What is interesting about Wang’s “down-to-earth” account of freedom is that its apparent naturalness is grounded in unacknowledged textual precedents that range from the writings of Hegel, Marx, and Engels on the relation between necessity and freedom, to the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’s antisocialist reworking of this relation.83 Wang, however, claims that his view arose solely out of “what I understand to be every person’s basic reality.”84 Thus rather than the down-to-earth ground he claims, Wang’s argu-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

227

ment stands on a series of obscured precedents: what he declares to be the truth intuited by his natural “interior” self turns out to be parasitic on the texts that he has read and privileged as meaningful. The frequent occurrence of this kind of unacknowledged citation in Chinese critical inquiry characterizes a significant formal difference from EuroAmerican critical inquiry, which generally conforms to standard academic rules of referencing. Although the texts that make up Chinese critical inquiry are now moving to conform to standard academic referencing, they continue nonetheless to bear a strong resemblance to the sanwen (essay) and zawen (feuilleton) genres which, at least since the modernization of the traditional sanwen prose form in the early twentieth century, significantly feature “hidden citations” (anyin).85 Moreover, there is a striking formal resemblance between the certitude of Wang Dingding’s 1990s eulogy to freedom and Wu Zhihui’s paean to science (cited earlier) in the 1900s. In both texts, a deliberate attempt is being made to project prose or wen as the embodiment of the Way (whether stated as freedom or science). Thus when Wang Dingding writes that “calls for ‘transcending a certain binary division’ (capitalism/ socialism; tradition/modernity; development/backwardness; true/ false; good/evil, etc.)” are generally “ill considered” and are symptomatic of a culture in which “individual feelings [geren ganshou] and our individual capacity for a form of understanding suffused with sympathy [chongman tongqingde lijie]” have long been suppressed,86 he is also deliberately distancing himself from the prose of New Left writers such as Wang Hui that embody a critical attitude toward such binary divisions. Instead, when Wang Dingding insists that his narrative was produced “with [his] feet firmly planted on the ground” (jiaota shidi), he seeks to embody quite a different attitude in his prose: one that resonates (whether wittingly or unwittingly) with a somewhat romantic Rousseauian idea of an earthy emotional authenticity as truth. He implies that freedom is embodied in emotion, and the palpable effects of emotion are such that they will always lead one to attempt to articulate a truth despite the constraints of language.87 As he puts it: But the force of logic is such that no matter how much we may detest “logocentrism,” it wants to have an effect on us. For instance, if we really want to transcend the “binary method” [liangfen fa] of language, then we will fall into a state of aphasia [shi yu]. “The names that can be so-named” [ke ming zhi ming] are not the ones that we want to speak. Thus the courage of true “thought” is expressed through one’s insistence on speak-

228

•

Worrying about China

ing of something in the knowledge that it cannot be spoken of, limiting that which cannot be limited, understanding that which cannot be understood.88

It is in Wang’s affective articulation of “true thought” as the courage to give linguistic form to one’s feelings of conviction, despite the limitations of language, that his inquiry comes closest to the deconstructive sense of what Derrida calls “an explanation with, an experience of the impossible.” But there the resemblance ends, for unlike the openendedness that Derrida’s formulation affirms in inviting us not to engage in “the reduction of reality to language,”89 Wang does impute a “reality” to be discovered in language in the form of an affective transcription of freedom in absolute and universal terms (reminiscent of the “felt experience” of Leavisite literary criticism). As a whole, Wang appears to argue that it is the hope for freedom (grounded in an ontology of freedom as a natural human instinct) that fuels human courage and drives, in turn, “the manifestation of the force of logic in the real world through the ‘process’ of self-development that things undergo.” In this regard, Wang’s essay reduces reality to fit the language of his “down-to-earth narrative.” He also elides the importance that a deconstructive inquiry accords to interrogating binary oppositions as terms caught in contingent relations of difference produced out of the figurative possibilities of language and linguistic convention. Wang has no inclination to explore the ways in which the phantasmic power of a binary opposition (for instance, the assertion that capitalism is superior to socialism) is irreducibly a rhetorical force that rests on certain effects of figuration. Rather, he claims a universal truth of freedom in passages such as: “If you read closely the ‘down-to-earth narrative’ with which I began, you will agree that, as my narrative shows, no one is prepared to put ‘freedom’ second to any other value [such as ‘equality, justice, universal love, feeling . . .’] and I am even prepared to proclaim that for the whole of humanity, ‘freedom’ is something that cannot be transcended.” This assertion is reinforced in the concluding statement of Wang’s essay: “In the process of humanity’s struggle for freedom, what we need is courage in acknowledging that the state [zhuangtai] we are in and the one we are about to enter remains an ‘unfree state,’ with our attention focused all the while on that sublime heavenlike Realm of Freedom [ziyou wangguo].”90 The Hegelian argument that informs Wang’s essay is tacitly acknowl-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

229

edged only in the concluding statement through his unattributed use of Hegel’s famous phrase, “Realm of Freedom.” To Sinophone readers schooled in the Marxist-Leninist version of Hegel, the “Realm of Freedom” is always an ideal space of collective political freedom; of selfdetermined and freely willing individuals acting in the interests of the common good.91 In using this phrase, Wang displaces it from its hackneyed status as the Communist telos of the Party-state’s former MarxistLeninist-Maoist orthodoxy, to elevate it to the kind of transcendent realm of individual/collective freedom advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his teleological account of “liberal democracy” based in technologydriven market principles.92 I have dwelt at some length on Wang Dingding’s prose, for it reflects the authority that this liberalist form of plainspeak (as a certain poetics in itself) now commands in Sinophone critical discourse.93 It also recalls and renews the modern rhetoric of freedom that first appeared in the prose of late Qing and early Republican thinkers such as Liang Qichao. In 1903, after reading Kant via Nakae Cho¯min’s (1886) Japanese translation of Alfred Fouilée’s (1879) Histoire de la philosophie, Liang sought to encapsulate a Kantian-derived truth about the interdependence of “principles of responsibility and freedom” using axiomatic formulations deliberately couched as a syllogism: “Those who cannot be free cannot be considered responsible. The true self has moral responsibility. Hence, the true self is always free.”94 Although Wang Dingding crafts (at century’s end) a much less didactic “down-to-earth” truth about freedom than does Liang, his claim that sympathetic understanding constitutes an innate knowledge of the truth of freedom echoes nonetheless the kind of moral responsibility that Liang affirms for the “true self.” In this regard, Wang’s essay also provides a useful illustration of how the instrumentalization of ideas for moral edification remains an important feature of present-day intellectual discourse. Moreover, we should note that through facile deployment of translated neologisms, phrases, and statements derived from EuroAmerican writings, a text such as Wang Dingding’s produces a would-be “self-reflexive” effect that turns out, on closer reading, to rest on an implicit but unquestioned linguistic certitude (antinomial to selfreflexive inquiry). That certitude, although distinctly at odds with the burlesque certainties of Partyspeak, is the effect of the teleological reverberations of unity or ultimate perfection (da tong) within the skillfully crafted poetics of

230

•

Worrying about China

Sinophone critical discourse. Even for Wang Hui, who subjects his prose to the rigors of immanent critique, there remains nonetheless a longing for a “historical world” that affirms “an East Asian region with China at its center,” a world that “possesses its own unique impetus and locus of modernity.”95 Moreover, since a grand teleological goal must be articulated with certainty, it is not surprising that Chinese intellectuals often resort to axiomatic formulations both to effect a sense of “union” with a time-honored insight and to accord a new importance to their use of such formulations. That reliance on axiomatic formulations is itself a product of the antiquarian longing for truth in Confucian scholarship that traditionally took the form of an exegetical inquiry into what should constitute the enduring dao of the canon prescribed by Confucius.96 As commentary (zhu, zhuan, jieshuo) with a distinctly archeological bent, Confucian exegetical inquiry revolved around the explication and repeated “unearthings” and rediscoveries of an ideal past. The antiquarian orientation of this inquiry, or what might be figured anachronistically as its rear-vision mirror assessment of the known world, was directly linked to imperial statecraft in the form of prescribing good political rule through the correct interpretation of these canonical texts. The longevity of the Confucian tradition, together with its unrivaled authority as state orthodoxy across centuries of dynastic rule, forged a powerful convention of evaluating the present in relation to the past, on the premise that the dao was a universal moral template in which the true pattern could be extracted out of the proper or correct reading of textual precedents. Traces of this convention are at work in Chen Pingyuan’s assessment of Chinese literary history as having produced “abnormalities” through adherence to the wrong set of axiomatic formulations. Similarly, when Xu Youyu writes that present-day intellectuals must continue the May Fourth tradition of those “progressive Chinese intellectuals” who had “made Enlightenment their personal responsibility”(yi qimeng wei jiren), he retranscribes the Confucian dictum of “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven” to suggest that intellectuals must heed this traditional moral obligation but need to renovate it to accord with the modernist pursuit of Enlightenment.97 In exploring this antiquarian orientation toward the pursuit of a redemptive dao/truth, Simon Leys (following the eminent scholar Qian Mu’s reading of a key passage in the Zuo Commentary or Zuo zhuan, circa fourth century bce) observes:

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

231

Well before Confucius, the Chinese evolved the notion that there could only be one form of immortality: the immortality conferred by history. In other words, life-after-life was not to be found in a supernature, nor could it rely upon artifacts: man only survives in man—which means, in practical terms, in the memory of posterity, through the medium of the written word. This brings us back to . . . [Victor] Segalen’s poetical intuition that Chinese everlastingness does not inhabit monuments, but people. Permanence does not negate change, it informs change. Continuity is not ensured by the immobility of inanimate objects, it is achieved through the fluidity of the successive generations.

That premodern Sinophone notion of textual immortality appears to still remain cognitively rewarding for contemporary Chinese intellectuals. Indeed, in their present-day discourse, they continue to echo the authoritative definition of immortality in that ancient excerpt from the canonical Zuo Commentary quoted by Leys: namely, that immortality is embodied “in establishing virtue, in establishing deeds and in establishing words” (li de, li gong, li yan).98 The frequent appearance to this day of this fourth-century-bce statement across different genres of Sinophone discourse bears testament to its longevity. That the statement remains commonly invoked in the abbreviated form of the “three eternal truths” (san buxiu) is further evidence of its axiomatic status as a guiding norm. In reflecting on the significance of this axiom for his own writings during the 1990s, Xu Youyu claims that it expresses “the somber and unavoidable fact that although an individual life comes to an end, it is possible for this life to continue in a spiritual sense. You are fortunate if you value the spiritual aspect of life, and this fortune is bestowed upon people in the form of words.”99 The spiritual conception of history axiomatically embodied in li de, li gong, li yan provides a clue as to why Sinophone critical discourse abounds with varied formulations of emotional veracity and moral rectitude. If the notion of scholarship is habitually invested with the spiritual significance of conferring and attaining immortality through the production of words, then textual interpretation will accordingly be oriented toward the evaluation of the moral legacy of texts. For instance, even though Chen Pingyuan expressly negates the Maoist axiom “weeding through the old to bring forth the new,” nonetheless his own formulations involve inescapably an adjudication of the “old” (that is, of textuality produced in the Republican and Maoist eras) to bring forth the “new” insight that modern radicalism is a deeply flawed legacy.100

232

•

Worrying about China

When critical discourse revels in the new of “liberating thinking” through the adjudication of perceived flaws and merits in textualities past as the old, the heteronomic forces of Confucian, May Fourth, and Maoist discursive norms are at work to facilitate acts of moral judgment. But whereas these norms had encouraged intellectuals to negate traditional thought with certainty for the better part of the twentieth century, since the 1990s they have had the opposite effect of enabling intellectuals to affirm (with equal certainty) the “immortality” of selected aspects of traditional thought against its “rootless” modern counterpart. Accordingly, despite its ever-changing and evolving content, Chinese critical inquiry throughout the twentieth century and today manifests a distinct preference for the certainty of arbitration as opposed to the contingency of interpretation. This is evident when Chen Pingyuan disavows the Maoist dictum of making the past serve the present in order to promote an alternative dictum in the form of “extracting new copper” (cai xin tong).101 “Extracting new copper” first appeared in a famous passage in the text A Record of Daily Acquired Knowledge, by the early Qing scholar Gu Yanwu.102 Chen’s valorization of this premodern commentary text, the very title of which invokes an instruction from The Analects about the manner in which one should pursue knowledge, is another instance of the “new” emphasis that he and many others place on “returning to tradition” in Chinese critical inquiry.103 In this regard, Chen echoes Liang Qichao, who commended Gu’s text a century earlier as an exemplary notation book (zhaji cezi) “that influenced scholars to record their findings with precision and detail.”104 In the passage from Gu Yanwu quoted by Chen, Gu distinguishes between two modes of reading. He likens one mode to “ancients extracting copper from the mountains” (guren cai tong yu shan) and the other to “contemporaries buying old coins” (jinren mai jiu qian). Gu’s fourcharacter phrase, “extracting copper from the mountains” (cai tong yu shan), has long since enjoyed the authority of a basic premise in scholarship, in both the writings of latter-day Confucian as well as modern and contemporary scholars. The phrase prescribes reliance on primary as opposed to secondary texts to suggest that, since meaning or truth is inherent in the primary discourse, delving into the secondary discourse alone will never be adequate to scholarship proper. This premodern Sinophone precept resonates with the analytical criteria of empirical research in our present-day Anglophone and Sino-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

233

phone academic discourses. It shares our present-day presumption of authority as “expertise,” that is, when we regard analysis as the professional work of extracting a kernel of meaning or truth from the primary texts that constitute our objects of inquiry. But as Wlad Godzich cautions, the practice of a secondary discourse that does not examine its own assumption of authority will always result in proposing “to substitute it own product—its text—as the vehicle for transporting the truth” it purports to have discovered in the primary text. As Godzich puts it, “The practice of a secondary discourse is thus founded on the premise that meaning, or the truth, is not ‘at home’ in the language of representation of the primary text, and that further, the secondary discourse can provide such a home.”105 In the passage quoted by Chen, Gu figures the scholarship of his time as the flawed practice of minting used coin (through the purchase of old coins as “scrap copper” or fei tong), as opposed to the authentic practice of ancients who minted new coin out of copper that they had actually extracted from the mountains. As Gu put it in his seventeenth-century prose: “The coins minted in this fashion are not only crude and poor but also result in the crushing and smashing of the treasures that are the legacy of the ancients. Since these treasures will not exist in the future, does this not constitute a double loss?” Chen then comments in his classically inflected late modern prose: Who would have thought that these statements would be every bit as relevant three hundred years on? Our contemporaries [shiren] are still neither accustomed to nor appreciate “extraction of copper from the mountains.” “To extract new copper” [cai xin tong] is much more difficult than “buying old coins” [mai jiu qian]. As for this task, one can only pin one’s hopes on a minority of great scholars. As for the majority of scholars, so long as they manage not to destroy “the treasures that are the legacy of the ancients” while adding a bit of new copper to their old coins, that would already be an achievement. What I am complaining about is not that there isn’t much new copper around but that our contemporaries are not even able to distinguish between new copper and old coins.106

The scene of a ruined civilization resonant in Gu Yanwu’s classical prose is evocatively conjured up in Chen’s invocation of Gu’s words for the purpose of lamenting the inferiority of modern Chinese scholarship. Just as Gu’s secondary discourse assumes the authority of a vehicle for distinguishing between newly mined and scrap copper of its time, predicated on the primary authority of The Analects as its textual foundation, Chen’s secondary discourse derives its vehicular authority from

234

•

Worrying about China

the primary status it accords to Gu’s formerly secondary discourse. In doing so, Chen cannot help but imply that he has extracted the true meaning of Gu’s text, thereby immortalizing it as “pure copper” in the context of Sinophone intellectual discourse of the 1990s. Furthermore, Chen is also suggesting that, without the classical language, one cannot properly appreciate the difference between good and poor scholarship, nor indeed can one make the past riches of the classical language “serve” the impoverished present of the modern written vernacular. Circulating within Chen’s wordplay is a desire for cultural integrity that haunts Sinophone critical writings that now feature numerous quotations from the classical corpora. Throughout this book, when I use the term “cultural integrity,” I refer not to a given property but rather to a specter projected through clever juxtapositions of classical and modern Chinese formulations. As this apparitional force, cultural integrity is none other than the magical effect of the Chinese language conjured up as a magnificent home or a veritable civilizational realm out of the powers of figuration in the Chinese language itself. In this context, Chen’s valorization of Gu Yanwu’s metaphor can be read as the enactment of a certain spiritual “union” between Gu’s prose and his own, a way of enjoining present-day readers to cultivate a sense of being “at home” in the language of the ancients. Chen’s affirmation of cai xin tong can also be productively explored in relation to that “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms” about which Nietzsche wrote in that famous passage in “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” The truth and meaning presumed to inhere in axiomatic expressions are the effects of both rhetorical and grammatical constructions that, to borrow Nietzche’s words, have come to seem “firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people” after long use. Unlike Nietzsche, who figured “truths” expressly as “illusions” to effect the extra-moral ironic sense of “coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins,”107 Chen (following his Qing era mentor Gu Yanwu) evinces the moral conviction that truth can be restored through minting coin made out of pure or newly extracted copper. Nietzsche’s ironic notion of “truths” as linguistic coinage grown old, whose images are well worn, is not one which resonates with either Gu’s seventeenth-century or Chen’s late twentieth-century discourse. Rather, these Chinese authors place the emphasis squarely on distinguishing between pure and impure types of coinage. Their use of axiomatic formu-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

235

lations as true propositions is clearly aimed at making language resonant with the kind of truth that an author recommends as “firm, canonical, and obligatory” for the people of his time, in aid of their collective progress toward a better future. Sinophone formulations produced out of this habit of mind share little in common with the self-reflexive formulations that dominate contemporary EuroAmerican critical inquiry. Unlike these Sinophone formulations, self-reflexive Anglophone formulations are trained, via Nietzsche’s tutelage, to interrogate those very truths that seem so “firm, canonical, and obligatory” as coinages whose figurative powers have been forgotten or greatly effaced, and which have come to matter, pace Gu Yanwu, only as “pure copper.” In this regard, we should also note that Nietzsche did not disavow truth as such. Rather, his interrogation of truth should be situated within what he called the “unconditional will to truth,” an unconditionality worded as adherence to the moral proposition, “I will not deceive, not even myself.” Glossing Nietzsche, Bernard Williams argues that the “unconditional will to truth” means that “we want to understand who we are, to correct error, to avoid deceiving ourselves, to get beyond comfortable falsehood. The value of truthfulness, so understood, cannot lie just in its consequences.” The will to truth, so conceived, shares much in common with the kind of proper attitude or disposition being affirmed (whether tacitly or explicitly) in present-day Chinese critical discourse. But Nietzsche’s will to truth also involves a willingness to submit one’s most cherished metaphysics (however defined, whether as faith in science, democracy, God, or the dao of China’s perfection) to “a process of dissolution”—as he puts it—“not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves.”108 Most important, because this is a process that neither anticipates nor requires the declaration of a new truth, it offers us the will to truth in the open-ended sense of a person’s willingness to interrogate his or her own captivity to acquired habits of speaking and writing, together with exercising vigilance more generally against unexamined assertions and the heteronomic forces at work in institutionalized uses of language. This open-ended Nietzschean will to truth is much more visible in EuroAmerican critical inquiry than in Chinese critical inquiry, and the resulting difference could be stated more generally as follows: whereas the EuroAmerican critical focus on self-reflexivity is oriented toward a linguistic dispersal concomitant with the avoidance of any anticipation

236

•

Worrying about China

of transcendent unity, the Chinese critical focus on evaluating the merits and flaws of ideas remains largely guided by the anticipation of just such a transcendent unity. Moreover, under authoritarian rule, the Chinese language is consistently burdened with the Party-state’s explicit formulations of the nation as a transcendent unity (with the “harmonious society” being the most recent coinage of that order). Given the enormous weight of formulations that purport to reveal a transcendent truth (that constitute the legacies of the Confucian and early modern traditions as well as the continuing influence of Partyspeak), it is not surprising that in Sinophone critical discourse, language remains conceived of, quite unproblematically, as a medium for uncovering the meaning of truth. This is quite at odds with the self-reflexive EuroAmerican notion that there can only be acts of uncovering ad infinitum. Within that selfreflexive orientation, truth is best described as effected through the image-conjuring powers of figurative language or through the specific relations that certain sentences have with other sentences.109 Accordingly, truth (and its meaning) will always be forestalled by a necessary recourse to either further uses of figurative language or further sentential relations. As discussed in Chapter One, this difference between Sinophone and Anglophone modes of inquiry is an important one to bear in mind, particularly if we are to appreciate that Sinophone tactics of rhetorical persuasion are generally aimed at revealing a given “scientific,” “humanistic,” or “spiritual” truth as such. It is worth noting in passing that despite the frequent quotations from Karl Popper that one now finds in Sinophone critical writings, the Popperian distinction between scientific and metaphysical propositions (that is, falsification pertains to the former but not the latter) is generally elided when a set of preferred formulations about “what China needs” are offered as wouldbe true propositions.110 Thus Chinese critical inquiry remains, for the time being, much more hospitable to the vocabulary of reconstruction (chongjian or chonggou) than that of deconstruction (jiegou). When Chinese intellectuals now write of reconstructing and improving Chinese thought via the establishment of academic norms, they invest their inquiry with a distinct moral resolve to instruct others as to the correct types of abstractions to contemplate and, as we have seen, often with the tacit presumption that one must first cultivate the correct attitude or disposition for such acts of contemplation. In this regard, Chinese intellectuals would agree with Al-

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

237

fred North Whitehead’s description of “effective knowledge” as “professionalized knowledge supported by a restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it.” But as Whitehead goes on to say: “This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each profession makes progress but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is paid.”111 Because the normalization of Chinese intellectual life occurred only in late 1977 via the reintroduction of a national university entrance examination, after a decade of irregularities in the functioning of universities caused by the Cultural Revolution, many of China’s leading academics are unabashedly interested in bringing Chinese scholarship up to speed with perceived international best practice. They can be described as working intently to replace the “grooves” destroyed, to consolidate existing “grooves,” and to establish new ones, with general indifference and sometimes antagonism toward self-reflexive strayings from the “grooves” being established or developed. Thus while EuroAmerican self-reflexive thinkers were engaged in problematizing the norms of disciplined knowledge, their Sinophone peers have been contrarily preoccupied with establishing norms to discipline their discursive practice. In this regard, we should note that insofar as Sinophone critical discourse continues to revolve around the idea of perfecting China, it shares something in common with Zygmunt Bauman’s description of Europe as “a mission—something to be made, created, built.” But quite unlike Sinophone attempts to discover or recover China’s cultural integrity via a process of “learning from May Fourth” to know “what to adopt, what to discard,” Bauman figures Europe as “a site of adventure” in which the lessons of human tragedy resulting from former European adventures of war and colonization are now being learned. Thus he argues that the idea of Europe cannot be dissociated from the barbarism of its former division of “the world into the realms of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism.’ ” Furthermore, quoting Étienne Balibar, Bauman writes: Europe’s long involvement with the rest of the human planet, the ubiquitous and obtrusive European presence in virtually every corner of the globe, however distant, has reverberated in a “powerful irreversible process of hybridization and multiculturalism now transforming Europe” that leads “Europe to recognize, albeit with considerable hesitations and setbacks, that the other is a necessary component of its ‘identity.’ ”112

238

•

Worrying about China

The linguistic turn in late twentieth-century EuroAmerican scholarship was effected by individuals who interrogated, in the discourses of different disciplines, the ways in which institutionalized habits of speaking and writing came to shape what we are accustomed and primed to receive and (re)produce as “knowledge.” Through these interrogations, a general critique of Eurocentrism was produced, one that continues to facilitate the recognition of the other as integral to one’s own identity, such that the idea of European “civilization” has now become quite inseparable from the “barbarism” it also inflicted on non-European peoples and their ways of life. Undoubtedly there has been a linguistic turn in Sinophone critical discourse since the 1990s, facilitated by the rapid influx of selfreflexive EuroAmerican formulations. But against that turn, the habitual tendency to referee, judge, and bear moral witness to Chinese history (as a “civilization” ruined first by European and then modern Chinese acts of “barbarism”) remains relatively formidable. This Sinophone orientation toward moral judgment is as evident in eclectic valorizations of postmodernism as it is in criticisms of postmodernism. For instance, when Ye Xiushan describes postmodernism as favoring “a pluralist society” at the expense of a “dominant trend,” a “fashion,” or “an ideology that commands authority,” he is deeply ambivalent about what he regards as postmodernism’s failure to create a “significant climate” (da qihou) for its own time.113 Whereas Bauman would read this “failure” as a gain insofar as it would facilitate inquiry toward diverse concerns on a planetary (rather than national) scale,114 Ye regards postmodern plurality as encouraging an unfortunate intellectual degeneration into “demagogy.” Ye even likens postmodernism to quarrels among the ancient Greek poli, whose turbulence was resolved only “by the emergence of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who thereafter guided the literary excellence of Western philosophy for several thousand years.” Ye’s conviction in our need for spiritual exemplars is evident when he states that “an era ‘without fashion’ and ‘without a significant climate’ is not necessarily a good era. When people feel the misfortune and tragedy of this era, they will also necessarily want to welcome the arrival of their own Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.”115 Similarly, although intellectuals such as Wang Hui, Xu Jilin, Zheng Min, and Zhang Yiwu have extended, each in their own way, a cautious welcome to an alien EuroAmerican critical inquiry that “worries” about the very transparency of expression itself, they have also characteristically translated or indigenized this foreign praxis

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

239

of self-reflexivity to conform to the still valorized and venerated Sinophone praxis of knowing “what to adopt” and “what to discard” in the bid to script “a significant climate” for their era. In this regard, Tao Dongfeng reflects a common view when he argues that the problem with the May Fourth legacy is that it produced “deviations [beili] from China’s own national cultural tradition of several thousand years, [deviations] in the form of nationalization and modernization; nation-building and strengthening; defending and strengthening [national] sovereignty while learning from the West what this ancient civilization encountered as a consequence of Western modernity’s deadly attack [zhiming daji].” Accordingly, Tao observes that, despite its urgency, the task of cultural reconstruction remains fraught with peril because “deviations of this kind have still not been resolved and we are still reiterating the discursive formulations of ‘on the one hand . . . on the other hand’; ‘[we] need both . . . and . . .’; or ‘[we] are neither able to . . . nor . . .’ Thus it would appear that we can only open up a path in this paradoxical mode of discourse for, if we abandon it, we have no other path to take.”116 In lamenting the subjugation of Sinophone critical discourse to a series of correlative conjunctions that reflect the paradoxical or deviant nature of modern nationalism in China, Tao implies that this unhappy status quo is what Chinese intellectuals must address to resolve their ambivalence toward the dominance of imported ideas. Tao’s desire for closure as the eventual return to self-sufficiency is also evident when he contrasts the constancy of “China’s own national cultural tradition of several thousand years” with the deviations he bemoans. Thus despite his attentiveness to the “rules” that constrain Sinophone discourse, Tao’s prose remains happily coupled to an ancient poetics of worrying about obstacles and threats to China’s future perfection. Tao’s words are also resonant with the kind of sympathy now often commended in Sinophone critical discourse insofar as he articulates, albeit with a degree of melancholy, a hope of learning from the Other without destroying the knowledge of the Self (notwithstanding “Western modernity’s deadly attack”). Such sympathy, together with the visible revival of quwei, shows that despite the historical accommodations of unwelcome strangers and the hybrid totalitarianism of MarxismLeninism-Mao Zedong Thought, the language of Chinese critical inquiry continues to reflect an optimistic hospitality to the strange, the stranger, and the estranged. But it is also clear that the inhospitable

240

•

Worrying about China

environment created by five decades of Party-state rule obstructs, for the time being, the capacity of Chinese critical inquiry simply to say “yes” (as Derrida encourages) to whom or what turns up.117 In this regard, if we choose to crystallize the self-reflexivity of EuroAmerican critical inquiry through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion that “We are all others, and we are all ourselves,”118 then the positivity of Chinese critical inquiry could be said to reflect the following contrary claim: “Because we have been othered, we must now learn once more how to be ourselves.” What is also clear is that for all its internecine disagreements, contemporary Chinese critical inquiry as a whole shares a general investment in a notion of translinguistic emotional mediacy that it holds sufficiently stable to serve as a mode of emotional epistemology in tandem with cognitive rationalism. Indeed, cold rationalism without such a tempering is viewed as inherently flawed precisely because it eschews this specificity of emotional human awareness.119 But bringing this seemingly commonsense aspect of being human into the discursive realm has proven a Sisyphean task because its articulation (as opposed to feeling) must take place in language and language is a “medium” that poses as an effortless transparency but regularly effects refraction, reflection, and distortion on any close examination. The Sinophone desire, however, to merge the “heart” and the “mind” (xin) into a single tool of higher perspicacity is not to be dismissed as simply impossible, nor is its soteriology to be scoffed at—but not by forgetting that the rhetorical force of such a faith can take many ugly forms as have already littered the landscape of Maoist China: the Great Leap Forward, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and so on. As a poetics of engagement with the complex legacies of ideas and the violent consequences of their truth-effects, Chinese critical inquiry of our time continues implicitly to affirm the moral act of patriotic worrying (youhuan) but with a distinct wariness toward untempered passions together with a renewed resolve to achieve the Confucian-inspired goal of the perfected meld of cognitive with emotional epistemology. While any self-reflexive Anglophone reader might regard such a project with apprehension, he or she cannot dismiss such a project outright as simply impossible. Moreover, it has to be admitted that despite its philosophical brilliance, the obscure light of EuroAmerican self-reflexive inquiry casts so much in a hue of endemic equivocation such that those who feel

A Poetics of Inquiry

•

241

a dire need of immediate direction are unlikely to regard its vertiginous possibilities as offering anything significant in terms of practical value. There is no “clash of civilizations” at work here but rather an agon between two radically different styles of inquiry. As Chinese critical inquiry continues largely to anticipate a form of transcendent unity (conceived of as the telos of a perfected China enlightened by Reason, Democracy, Science, Chineseness, etc.), its self-reflexive EuroAmerican counterpart now generally distances itself from any such anticipation, preferring instead to interrogate its own civilization for the barbarisms it has perpetrated. Such an agon does not preclude the prospect of productive conversations that are mutually sympathetic to an expanded sense of community, as long as hospitality remains a universal praxis.

Notes Glossary Index

Notes

Introduction 1. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 294. 2. When Chinese intellectuals speak of Zhongguo dangdai sixiang, they often mean the discourse produced since the late 1970s to reflect critically on the historical consequences of modern Chinese thought in general, and the negative impact of “radicalism” embodied in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in particular. 3. The prevalence of questions such as “How should we take a small but proper step forward?” (ruhe zhenzhengde xiang qian kuachu yi xiao bu) and “How should we adopt an even more thoroughgoing means of bidding farewell to the past?” (ruhe yi geng chedide fangshi gaobie guoqu) indicates a general anticipation of progress toward a telos. These particular examples appear in Cui Weiping, “Yongyou lingwai yixie jingnian” [Embrace Alternative Experiences], in Tao Dongfeng, ed., Zhishifenzi yu shehui zhuanxing [Intellectuals and Social Transition] (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2003), 254. 4. Tropes of guns and weapons abound in Zhu Xueqin, “Wu Si sixiang, 80 niandai, 90 niandai” [May Fourth Thought, the 1980s, the 1990s], Xiandai yu chuantong 1 (1995). Available at www.chinaaffairs.org/gb/ detail.asp?id=5252 (accessed January 10, 2005). 5. In addition to intellectuals now banned from publishing because of their open criticism of authoritarian rule, establishment figures such as Lu Yuegang, former deputy director of news and the principal journalist for China Youth Daily, have also been penalized for condemning censorship. 6. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001,

246

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

•

Notes to Pages 4–10 ed. and trans. with an introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 148. See also Gao Yi, “French Revolutionary Studies in Today’s China,” Canadian Journal of History 32, no. 3 (December 1997): 437–446. Zhu Xueqin, “For a Chinese Liberalism,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths, trans. Shengqing Wu and Chaohua Wang (London: Verso, 2003), 92–93. Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing (New York: Norton, 1992), 177–178. The two terms are often used interchangeably but wenyan (or wenyanwen) refers to “literary Chinese”—the prose of traditional Chinese scholarship—while the term guwen highlights the ancient and hallowed prose style of the classics. Quoted in Saito¯, “Liang Qichao’s Consciousness of Language,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, trans. Matthew Fraleigh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2004), 248. Mareshi, “Liang Qichao’s Consciousness of Language,” 261. For a typical “nation-building” account of Chinese critical inquiry, see Hu Xingdou, “Zhongguo wenti xue zhi gouxiang” [An Approach to the Study of Chinese Problems], at www.siwen.org/wenhua/zgwtxzgx.htm (accessed May 20, 2004). In the late 1970s, the Party sponsored a Movement to Liberate Thinking (sixiang jiefang yundong) and the phrase “to liberate thinking” came to serve as ready legitimation for intellectual praxis of the 1980s. See, for instance, Jonathan Zittain and Benjamin Edelman, “Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China,” The Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Research Publication no. 2003–02, 4/2003), at http:// cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/uploads/203/2003–02.pdf (accessed May 20, 2004). On September 30, 2005, a short notice announced the site’s closure for an indefinite period in the Party-state idiom of “reorganization and rectification” (qingli zhengdun), together with a “Happy National Day” greeting for October 1. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), 536. This melding of the “heart” and “mind” has been integral to the emergence and subsequent influence of Neo-Confucianism since the Song dynasty. Lu Xun, “ ‘Hard Translation’ and the ‘Class Character of Literature,’ ” trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, in Selected Works of Lu Xun, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985), 82. For instance, in December 2005 Lu Xun’s 1926 essay, “In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” was posted on the Internet and attracted numerous comments. The essay, written to commemorate the massacre of students under warlord rule, became an oblique indictment of local police who had shot and killed several rural protesters December 6, 2005, in the town of

Notes to Pages 11–13

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

•

247

Dongzhou in Guangdong province on. Despite state suppression of this news, savvy Chinese citizens were at least able to register their disapproval of the Party-state’s conduct by recourse to invoking Lu Xun’s essay. See also Philip Pan, “Chinese Evade Censors to Discuss Police Assault: Sometimes Veiled, News Spread Online,” Washington Post, December 17, 2005, A01. This present-day “return to tradition” recalls similar returns in the history of Confucian scholarship, such as the Tang-dynasty scholar Han Yu’s advocacy of a return to guwen (old texts) and the debate in the 1890s between members of the Old Text school and radical New Text advocates such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Mencius, trans. with an introduction by D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), 170. Børge Bakken’s analysis of the consistent emphasis placed by mainland Chinese educators on measuring moral achievement provides a useful sociocultural context for understanding the earnestness with which Chinese intellectuals have promoted “academic norms” since the 1990s. See Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 213–286. The Confucian-inflected term qi (tool or vessel) is now commonly used to emphasize the need for reliable concepts and methods (as qi) in scholarship, on the assumption that such “academic norms” will secure a proper path (dao) for Chinese thought. See also Ge Zhaoguang, “Shenme keyi chengwei sixiangshi de ziliao?” [What Should Constitute the Materials for Intellectual History?], Kaifang shidai 3 (2003), at www.opentimes.cn/to /200304/2003–04–60.htm. The formulation bian qi bu bian dao (to change the method but not the path) is now commonly used to typify the limitations of early modernizing projects on the part of mid- to late-nineteenth-century Confucian scholar-officials. See, for instance, Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan, “Cong ‘xiandaixing’ dao ‘Zhonghuaxing’: xin zhishixingde tanxun” [From “Modernity” to “Chineseness”: In Search of a New Knowledge Paradigm], in Luo Gang and Ni Wenjian, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan [An Anthology of 1990s Thought], vol. 1 (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2000), 236. Although it is now clearly problematical to conflate “European” and “American” in politics, it remains nonetheless relevant to speak of EuroAmerican critical inquiry. Gayatri C. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), 171. Wang Dingding, “Ziyou—yiduan jiao ta shidide xushuo” [Freedom—A Down-to-Earth Narrative], in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 2, 383. Geremie R. Barmé, “On New Sinology,” in China Heritage Project at http://rspas.anu.edu.au/pah/chinaheritageproject/newsinology (first published May 2005).

248

•

Notes to Pages 13–19

29. In this regard, I have focused in particular on texts first published in the 1990s that have since acquired a certain authority or representativeness, both through the discussions they have generated and through their republication in anthologies of Chinese thought compiled in the early 2000s. 30. The publications of authors such as Xu Jilin and Chen Pingyuan are focused on these issues. The significance of the category “intellectual” is also affirmed in the titles of anthologies such as Zhu Yong, ed., Zhishifenzi yinggai gan shenme [What Should Intellectuals Do?] (Beijing: Shishi chubanshe, 1999), and Li Shitao, ed., Zhishifenzi lichang [Intellectual Positions], vols. 1–3 (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000). 31. Intellectuals such as Deng Zhenglai, Wang Hui, and Xu Jilin have played an important role in disseminating Bourdieu’s work in Chinese, and many of Bourdieu’s writings have now been translated into Chinese. The importance of Bourdieu’s theoretical propositions to Anglophone China scholarship is also evident in works such as Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, eds., Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).

1. Worrying about China 1. Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing (New York: Norton, 1992), 249. 2. Long Bow Group, The Gate of the Heavenly Peace (Hong Kong: Distributed by Unlimited film sensation LTD, 1995), at www.tvsquare.tv/ film/transcript.html. The Chinese terms have been added. 3. Many Chinese academics freely admit to this in conversation and interviews published in the international media. See, for instance, Richard McGregor, “A New Push to Enforce the Unwritten Rules,” Financial Express, September 16, 2005, at www.financialexpress-bd.com/ (accessed October 10, 2005). 4. Both axioms are frequently used in present-day intellectual discourse. The passage appears in 6B:15 of the Mencius. 5. The scholar-official Gong Zizhen’s (1792–1841) poem Fu youhuan [Ode to Worrying] is one of the better-known late Qing literary examples of the pathos and desolation associated with worrying about China (under Manchu rule). After the first Sino-Japanese war in 1895, the term youhuan became indistinguishable from the cause of nation-building. 6. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 78. 7. The phrase in italics is Ranajit Guha’s, as quoted in ibid., 77. 8. On the moral and ideological significance of mainland intellectual praxis, see Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 9. Deng Tuo, editor of People’s Daily before being purged in 1966, deliberately invoked Gu Xiancheng in his 1960s essay, “Shishi guanxin” [Show

Notes to Pages 19–22

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

•

249

Concern for All Things], a text rehabilitated in the post-Maoist era as an example of independent thinking during the Maoist years. Chen Lai, “Rujia sixiang chuantong yu gonggong zhishifenzi” [The Confucian Intellectual Tradition and Public Intellectuals], in Xu Jilin, ed., Gonggongxing yu gonggong zhishifenzi [Publicity and Public Intellectuals] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2003), 17. Timothy Cheek and Carol Hamrin coined the term “establishment intellectual” to describe individuals who were high-ranking cadres and administrators in the Party-state bureaucracy. See Cheek and Hamrin, China’s Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986). Sinophone postmodernism is quite unlike its Anglophone counterpart insofar as it tends to valorize Chinese culture or “Chineseness” as a wouldbe transcendent unity. Although Yang Fan is not often mentioned in conjunction with other prominent intellectuals named as being part of the New Left, such as Wang Hui, Huang Ping, Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, and Wang Shaoguang, I cite him here as he has become quite influential among university students in mainland China as a leading advocate of strident Chinese nationalism. “Yang Fan jiu ‘feizhuliu’ da Ying zhoukan jizhe wen” [Yang Fan on the “Nonmainstream”: An Interview with the Ying zhoukan], May 14, 2004, at http://biz.163.com/2004w05/12552/2004w05_1084507093550 _1.html (accessed January 30, 2005). Quoted in Ye Xiaoqing, “Patriotism versus Intellectual Curiosity: Jin Guantao’s Approach to Chinese History,” in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 188. In 1991, while discussing the question of patriotism with a Chinese friend who received permanent residence in Australia after June 4, 1989, he commented that “loving the motherland” was such an entrenched part of being a mainland Chinese intellectual that he found it liberating to think of his own departure from China as a departure from “being Chinese.” Democracy was undoubtedly the reigning concept that student protesters defended on the streets of Beijing in early 1989. See Craig Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Emphasis in original. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 89. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and trans. with an introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 192. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1982), 209–272. Zheng Min, “Jiegouzhuyi yu wenxue pinglun” [Deconstructionism and Literary Criticism], in Zheng Min, Jiegouzhuyi lunwen liupian [Six Essays

250

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

•

Notes to Pages 23–24 on Deconstructionism] (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue waiyuxi, 1992), 8. See also Zhang Longxi, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics East and West (Durham. N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 31, where Zhang affirms Derrida’s critique of logocentrism but fails to recognize that, as a critical praxis, deconstruction queries and resists the institutional authority of keywords and key concepts. Wang Quan and Zhu Yanyan, “Jiegouzhuyi” [Deconstructionism], at www.culstudies.com/rendanews/displaynews.asp?id=4617 (accessed September 20, 2005). Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti” [The State of Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Problem of Modernity], in Wang Hui, Si huo chongwen [Dead Fire Rekindled] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), 85. I draw on Derrida’s account of the “transcendental signified” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 49–50. When Wang Hui refers to “China’s modernity” or “China’s search for modernity,” he often implies that there is a “truth” beyond language to be revealed about these phrases. Two excellent studies of the modern Chinese vernacular are Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press, 1992). Anagnost, National Past-Times, 122. The 1920s journal Yu Si [Threads of Talk], cofounded by Lu Xun, is a particularly evocative title that gestures toward such a bricolage. It thrives to this day through the popular Sinophone e-journal and academic forum that bears this name. But despite the plenitude of evocative figurations in Chinese intellectual discourse, there is little interest among intellectuals to interrogate (as opposed to merely deploying) their rhetoric of perfection. An English translation of Lu Xun’s essay “Nalaizhuyi” appears as “The Take-Over Policy” in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 4, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985), 51–53. In that text, nalaizhuyi is translated as “take-over policy,” whereas I have chosen to translate it here, for our times, as “appropriatism.” Written with implicit reference to the growing threat posed by Japan’s military forces in China (following Japan’s annexation of Manchuria in 1932) and China’s inferior status in international politics, Lu Xun’s 1934 essay was an appeal to his readers to resist what he called the “give-away policy” or “giveaway-ism” (songquzhuyi) of different Chinese governments since China’s defeat during the Opium Wars. As vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1985–1989), Li Shenzhi occupied a position of considerable influence and authority in Sinophone scholarship. His role as Zhou Enlai’s secretary during the 1950s, before being purged as an anti-Rightist in 1957, further enhanced his po-

Notes to Pages 24–28

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

•

251

litical and moral authority in the post-Mao era. Although a high-ranking Communist Party member, Li’s liberal views led to his coerced retirement after June 4, 1989. His advocacy of liberalism in the late 1990s further enhanced his moral authority. The high esteem in which Li is held in contemporary mainland Chinese intellectual circles is reflected in Liu Junning’s eulogy, “Farewell to a Courageous Thinker: Li Shenzhi,” published when Li died in 2003, in the Asian Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2003, A7. Li Shenzhi, “Bian tongyi, he Dong Xi—Zhongguo wenhua qianjing zhanwang” [Distinguishing Sameness and Difference, Harmonizing East and West—the Future Development of Chinese Culture], in Luo Gang and Ni Wenjian, eds., Jiushi niandai dangdai Zhongguo sixiang wenxuan [An Anthology of 1990s Contemporary Chinese Thought], vol. 2 (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2000), 171–180. First published in Dongfang 3 (1994). Lung-Kee Sun, The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 95. Li Shenzhi, “Bian tongyi, he Dong Xi,” 176, 173–174. Such quasi-axiomatic formulations should not be confused with what Richard Rorty calls “pithy little formulae” or “slogan-length sayings” enlisted for the self-reflexive critical task of making a point in the positivistic language of one’s discursive opponent. See Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 298. The mid-nineteenth-century axiom, Zhongxue weiti Xixue wei yong, “Chinese [moral-ethical] knowledge as the foundation, Western [scientifictechnological] knowledge for practical application,” remains in circulation as a meaningful way to discuss Chinese and Western differences. See, for instance, Ding Weizhi and Chen Song, ZhongXi tiyong zhijian [Between Foundation and Application, China and the West] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995). Li Shenzhi, “Bian tongyi, he Dong Xi,” 179, 176. Li’s formulations resonate with the notion of cosmic reality in Buddhist- and Daoist-inflected Neo-Confucianism. Ibid., 174, 176–177. Ibid., 172. Thomas Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2005), 97–98, 93. Ibid., 93–94. On the documentation Metzger consulted, see ibid., 171–182; quotations from 179. Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26. See also Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136–137. Donald Davidson describes this presumed correspondence as the realist

252

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

•

Notes to Pages 29–37 view in Truth and Predication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 41–42. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. Stout, Ethics after Babel, 264. See Arvishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7–8. The qushe paradigm appears in the Mencius, Book 6 Part A: 10. See also Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific, 187, 340. See also John Caputo’s engaging critique of Rortyan autonomy in “On Not Circumventing the Quasi-Transcendental,” in Alan Malachowski, ed., Richard Rorty, vol. 4 (London: Sage, 2002), 142. Chen Pingyuan, “Scholarship, Ideas and Politics,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths, trans. Chaohua Wang (London: Verso, 2003), 117. Metaphors of illness such as bingzhuang and bibing (faults, shortcomings) are commonly used to characterize the status quo of Chinese scholarship. These are a legacy of late Qing (1890s–1900s) and May Fourth (1910s– 1920s) writings that promoted social Darwinism and eugenics in the interest of rectifying the “national character.” See, for instance, Wang Hui, Zixuan ji [A Personal Anthology] (Nanning: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 1–207. Liu Junning, “Farewell to a Courageous Thinker.” This point is discussed with passion and candor in Yu Jie, Tian’anmen zhi zi [Son of Tiananmen] (Hong Kong: Kaifang zazhi she, 2005), 1–18. Li Shenzhi, “Bian tongyi, he Dong Xi,” 171. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Peter Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 41. I have formed this view through numerous comments published on Chinese web fora and Chinese list discussions. Xu Jilin, “Zuihoude shidaifu” [The Last Scholar-Official], in Ershiyi shiji 82 (June 2004): 11–12. In translating Xu Jilin’s use of fansi as self-reflective (which is not exclusive of certitude), I am contrasting it with the linguistic contingency of selfreflexivity. Xu Jilin, “Zuihoude shidaifu,” 4. Xu Jilin, Zhongguo zhishifenzi shilun [Ten Essays on Chinese Intellectuals] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2003), 17–18. Wang Xi, “Approaches to the Study of Modern Chinese History: External versus Internal Causations,” in Frederic Wakeman and Wang Xi, eds., China’s Quest for Modernization: A Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 20. Liu Dong, “The Weberian View and Confucianism,” trans. Gloria Davies, East Asian History 25–26 (June/December 2003): 215–216.

Notes to Pages 38–46

•

253

63. Li Tuo, “Chayixing wenti biji” [Notes on the Problem of Difference], Tianya 4 (1996): 22. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 24. 66. The propensity toward such omniscient revelations is evident in the publications of the U.S.-based e-journal Dangdai Zhongguo Yanjiu [Modern China Studies at www.chinajy.net]. 67. See also Yingjie Guo, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 85. 68. Li Tuo, “Chayixing wenti biji,” 23. 69. In John Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 13–14. 70. Liu Dong, “The Weberian View and Confucianism,” 215–216. 71. See John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Movement (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 72. The official text of the Confucius Institute is available at http://english .hanban.edu.cn/market/HanBanE/412360.htm. Twenty-seven Confucius Institutes were established by 2005 with plans to establish an international network of one hundred such institutes during the next five years. 73. Tang Yijie, “Zouchu ‘Zhong Xi Gu Jin’ zhi zheng” [Exceeding “China/ West, Old/New”], in Yue Daiyun and Li Bixiong, eds., Kua wenhua duihua [Cross-Cultural Dialogues] 14 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2004), 12. 74. Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang, and Qiao Bian, Zhongguo keyi shuobu [China Can Say No] (Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe, 1996). An excellent critique of this work appears in Gries, China’s New Nationalism. 75. Joseph Fewsmith surveys responses to this work in China since Tiananmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–156. 76. Jia Qingguo, Zhongguo bujinjin shuo bu [China Does Not Only Say No] (Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe, 1996); Zhang Xueli, Zhongguo heyi shuo bu [Why China Says No] (Beijing: Hualing chubanshe, 1996). 77. Xu Jilin, “Yige juda er kongdongde fuhao” [A Huge and Empty Sign], in Xiao Pang, ed., Zhongguo ruhe miandui Xifang [How Should China Face the West] (Hong Kong: Minjing chubanshe, 1997), 58–68. 78. Shi Jian, “Ganxing yu lixing: cong Zhongguo keyi shuobu dao Zhongguo ruhe miandui Xifang” [Sensibility and Sense: From China Can Say No to How Should China Face the West], in Xiao, ed., Zhongguo ruhe miandui Xifang, 8. “Shi Jian,” a pseudonym meaning “mirror of the times,” recalls the traditional metaphor of historiography as a mirror of truth that became synonymous with statecraft during the Song dynasty. Shi Jian most likely chose this pseudonym to reflect his authorial persona as one who had, as he writes, previously served as “a voice of the Chinese government for some days.” 79. Lei Yi, “Xiandaide ‘huaxiazhongxin guan’ yu ‘minzuzhuyi’ ” [Modern

254

80.

81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95.

•

Notes to Pages 47–53 “Sinocentrism” and “Nationalism”], in Xiao, ed., Zhongguo ruhe miandui Xifang, 50–51. Li Shenzhi notes that “the salient features of Western culture” is the kind of curriculum taught in the schools of Western nations, built on the continuous evolution of Western ideas and values and culminating in a “West European-North American cultural system.” He claims that, by contrast, “it is difficult to say what Eastern culture is” since China’s cultural system has not enjoyed the same uninterrupted process of institutionalization to secure its own cogent set of salient features for pedagogic transmission (Li, “Bian tongyi, he Dong Xi,” 171–172). An evocative articulation of this problematic is provided by Tao Dongfeng, “Xiandai Zhongguode minzuzhuyi” [Modern Chinese Nationalism], Xueshu yuekan 6 (1994): 6–9. See also Gries, China’s New Nationalism, 31–40. Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 45, 77, 49, 59, 61. In this regard, gender variant individuals provide a striking example of people excluded under the Marriage Act. Ibid., 77. The hybridity of baihua is illustrated in the glossaries of “loan words” in Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity: China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). See Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 39. Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 1, 37. Ibid., vol. 2, 248. Ibid., vol. 1, 37. Caputo, “On Not Circumventing,” 144. Literary historians generally attribute this to the influence of Nietzsche on Lu Xun and other May Fourth intellectuals. Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 2, 87. Zhang Rulun, Wang Xiaoming, Zhu Xueqin, and Chen Sihe, “Renwen jingshen: shifou keneng yu ruhe keneng” [The Humanistic Spirit: Is It and How Can It Be Possible?], in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 1, 318. Zheng Min, “Shijimode huigui: Hanyu yuyan biange yu Zhongguo xinshi chuangzao” [A Fin de Siècle Retrospective: Chinese Language Reform and Modern Chinese Poetry], Wenxue pinglun 3 (1993): 5–20. This essay was widely debated, leading Zheng to publish subsequent rejoinders to her critics in both Wenxue pinglun and Ershiyi shiji from 1994 to 1996. When I discussed this issue with Zheng in late 1993, she spoke of herself as a “cultural orphan” and offered the view that Chinese thought since the May Fourth era had been tragically “orphaned” from its parentage in the classical tradition. Quoted in Michelle Yeh, “Chinese Postmodernism and the Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Poetry,” in Wen-Hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural

Notes to Pages 53–60

96. 97.

98.

99.

100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

•

255

Readings of Chineseness (Berkeley: China Research Monograph 51, University of California, 1999), 105. Zhang Rulun et al., “Renwen jingshen,” 318, 329. Wang Hui, Wu di panghuang: “Wu Si” jiqi huisheng [No Place to Hesitate: “May Fourth” and Its Echo] (Zhejiang: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 21–22. For instance, Xu notes that unlike intellectuals of Li Shenzhi’s generation who joined the Communist Party because they were “filled with lofty sentiments,” young university graduates who are considering whether they should join the Party in the present-day are guided by thoughts of personal profit. As he puts it, “The prospect of the Communist Party being eroded by followers of the profit-motive makes me sigh on its behalf” (Xu, “Zuihoude shidaifu,” 5). Børge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110, 112. Yu Ying-shih’s influence on mainland scholarship began with a lecture he delivered in Hong Kong in 1988, titled “Zhongguo jindai shi zhongde jijinzhuyi” [Radicalism in Modern Chinese History]. This text provided many mainland intellectuals with the basis for critiquing “radicalism” in modern Chinese thought to promote a progressive form of “conservatism.” A bibliography of Yu’s writings appears at http://xiangyata.net /data/articles/d01/211.html (accessed October 20, 2005). See, for instance, Li Zehou, Lishi bentilun, jimao wu shuo [Historical Ontology, Five Essays from 1999] (Shanghai: Joint Publishing Company, 2006). Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 89. Geremie R. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness, A Life in Ruins,” East Asian History 11 (June 1966): 127. Q. Edward Wang, “Modernity inside Tradition: The Transformation of Historical Consciousness in Modern China,” East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China (Winter 1996), at www.indiana.edu/~easc/resources/working_paper/noframe_10c_mod.htm (accessed February 2, 2004).

2. Divided over China 1. Zhidong Hao, Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 26. The axiom is featured in numerous Internet articles in defense of “social justice.” 2. Lu Xun’s short story “My Old Home” also utilizes figures of family, home, and master-servant relations to dramatize the tensions between a failing tradition and a troubled nascent modernity. 3. Although identified as a liberal in the 1990s, Qin now claims a “third way” position.

256

•

Notes to Pages 60–67

4. Qin Hui, “Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin” [Social Justice and Intellectual Conscience], in He Qinglian, Zhongguode xianjing [China’s Pitfall] (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 1997), 25. 5. Qin Hui provides some elaboration in “Dividing the Big Family Assets: On Liberty and Justice,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003), 154–155. 6. The documentary film Morning Sun by the Long Bow Group (San Francisco: NAATA Distribution, 2004) explores the ambivalence of intellectuals toward the powerful experiences they once shared as members of Mao’s revolutionary masses. 7. Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 115. 8. Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti” [The State of Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Problem of Modernity], in Wang Hui, Si huo chongwen [Dead Fire Rekindled] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), 42–94. 9. Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguo sixiang,” 61, 59. 10. Ibid., 58, 60, 61. 11. Ibid., 60. 12. Ibid., 66. 13. Xu Jilin, “Cong teshu zouxiang pubian” [From the Specific to the Universal], in Xu Jilin, ed., Gonggongxing yu gonggong zhishifenzi [Publicity and Public Intellectuals] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2003), 30–31. 14. Geremie R. Barmé and Gloria Davies, “Have We Been Noticed Yet? Intellectual Contestation and the Chinese Web,” in Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, eds., Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market (London: RoutledgeCurzon 2004), 75–108. 15. See also He Baogang, “Chinese Intellectuals Facing the Challenges of the New Century,” in Gu and Goldman, eds., Chinese Intellectuals, 265–266. 16. See Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 281–315. 17. See, for instance, Paul Mooney, “The Long Road Ahead for China’s Universities,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2006, at http:// chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i37/37a04201.htm (accessed May 22, 2006). 18. See also He, “Chinese Intellectuals Facing the Challenges,” 270. 19. Simon Marginson, “They Make a Desolation and They Call It F. A. Hayek: Australian Universities on the Brink of the Nelson Reforms,” in Australian Book Review 260 (April 2004): 28–35. 20. Xu Jilin, “Cong teshu,” 31–32. 21. Academic corruption has received much attention in the mainland Chinese press since 2005, with Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (China Newsweek) featuring as its cover story an article titled “Gaoxiaode feidianxing fubai” [Academic Corruption Is Spreading Like SARS] at www.chinanews .com.cn/news/2006/2006–03–15/8/703471.shtml (accessed March 20, 2006).

Notes to Pages 67–76

•

257

22. One of the more striking representations of Chen Yinque as a paradigm of intellectual autonomy appears in Xia Zhongyi, Jiuye xianzhe shu [Epistles to Nine Great Thinkers] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2000). 23. Richard Rorty is an eloquent advocate of this view. 24. Wu Guoguang, “Fan zhengzhide ziyouzhuyi—cong Hu Shide xianzheng sixiang fanxing xianzhengzhuyi zai Zhongguo de shibai” [Liberalism as Antipolitics: Hu Shi’s Constitutional Ideas and the Failure of Constitutionalism in Modern China], in Si yu wen wangkan, at http://chinese thought.unix-vip.cn4e.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage &pid=462 (posted April 17, 2004; accessed May 30, 2004). On Wu’s political past, see Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing (New York: Norton, 1992), 283–284. 25. Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, 127–131. 26. The characteristics of a harmonious and socialist society are: “the democratic rule of law, equality and justice, sincerity and friendship, vitality, stability and order, a society in which humans coexist harmoniously with nature.” From CCTV, “Hu Jintao qiangdiao: shenke renshi goujian hexieshehuide zhongda yiyi” [Hu Jintao Emphasizes the Importance of Building a Harmonious Society], at www.china.org.cn/chinese/news/789914 .htm (posted February 20, 2005; accessed January 20, 2006.) 27. Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, 132. 28. Ibid., 129. 29. Ibid. 30. For a useful survey of the banning of outspoken intellectuals, see EastSouthWestNorth at www.zonaeuropa.com/20041215_1.htm (accessed January 10, 2005). 31. Liu Qingfeng, “The Topography of Intellectual Culture in 1990s Mainland China,” in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry, trans. Gloria Davies (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 53. 32. See Jehangir S. Pocha, “China’s New Left,” New Perspectives Quarterly 22, no. 2, at www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2005_spring/07_pocha.html (accessed June 20, 2005). 33. Cui Zhiyuan, “Zhidu chuangxin yu di’erci sixiang jiefang” [Institutional Innovation and a Second Thought Liberation], Ershiyi shiji 8 (August 1994): 5–16. See also Chaohua Wang, “Introduction,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003), 23. 34. Cui Zhiyuan, “Zhidu chuangxin,” 6. 35. Ibid., 11. 36. Ibid., 12–14. 37. Ibid., 7. 38. Ibid. 39. See Xu Youyu, “San ping Zhongguo jiushiniandai de xinzuo pai” [Three Critiques of the New Left in 1990s China], at www.usc.cuhk.edu .hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=379 (accessed March 30, 2005). Wu Si’s account of Chen Yonggui was published as a monograph, Chen Yonggui chenfu

258

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

•

Notes to Pages 77–84 Zhongnanhai—gaizao Zhongguode shiyan (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1993). Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” trans. Rebecca E. Karl, Social Text 55 (Summer 1998): 26. First published in Hong Kong with the title Zhongguode xianjing [China’s Pitfall] (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 1997). He Qinglian, “Chapter 1, A Socialist Free Lunch: Scrutinizing Reform of the Share-holding System,” Chinese Economy 33, no. 3 (May–June 2000): 51. Property rights were written into the Constitution of the People’s Republic in 2004. Qin Hui, “Shehui gongzheng,” 16–17. Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought,” 12. Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguo sixiang,” 50. Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought,” 13. Ibid., 13–14. Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguo sixiang,” 49. Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought,” 14. Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhonnguo sixiang,” 49. Ibid., 49–50. For instance, the official discourse limits Mao’s contribution to Party theory to that of an innovative Marxist interpreter of abstract axioms, such as “seeking truth from facts,” while conspicuously eliding the enormous influence of Mao’s “revolutionary struggle” on Chinese students and workers in the 1960s and 1970s, dismissing these as “aberrant” ideas but often without naming Mao as their author. Ren Jiantao, “Jiedu ‘xinzuo’ ” [Reading “the New Left”], Tianya 1 (1999): 36. Ibid. Ibid., 46. There is an extensive range of Chinese publications on Hayek. Wang Dingding’s three-part analysis, “Hayeke ‘kuozhan zhixu’ ” [Hayek’s “Extended Order”], first published in the now-defunct Gonggong luncong (Res Publica), provides a useful survey of the appeal of Hayek’s ideas among Chinese intellectuals. Available at http://sinoliberal.com/hayek/ extendedorder1.htm (accessed February 20, 2005). Wang Hui, “On Scientism and Social Theory in Modern Chinese Thought,” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 141. Wang Hui, Si huo chongwen, 9–10. Xu Youyu, “Ping Zhongguo jiushiniandaide xinzuopai zhi er: Zhongguo de xiandaixing yu pipan” [A Critique of China’s New Left in the 1990s: Part 2], at http://intellectual.members.easyspace.com/xuyy/xuyy16b.htm (accessed December 11, 2004). For an engaging critique of authoritarianism as the legacy of traditional patriarchal society, see Qin Hui, “ ‘Da gongtongti benwei’ yu chuantong Zhongguo shehui: jianlun Zhongguo zouxiang gongmin shehuizhi lu,”

Notes to Pages 84–91

62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

•

259

[“The Standing of the Greater Community” and Traditional Chinese Society: China’s Oath to a Civil Society], at www.confuchina.com/08%20 xiandaihua/gongtongti.htm (accessed December 2, 2005). Wang Zhiquan, “Weixiande lieheng: dangdai Zhongguo xin zuopai yu ziyouzhiyi zai shehui gongzheng wentishang de fenqi shuping” [A Dangerous Rift: A Critical Survey of New Left and Liberal Divisions on the Issue of Social Justice], at www.gongfa.com/weixianliehen.htm (posted December 5, 2002; last accessed September 20, 2006). The immense popularity of Hayek’s phrase is reflected in Wang’s ironic use of it here. Since 2004 these terms have received substantial theoretical elaboration in the writings of scholars familiar with John Rawls’s Theory of Social Justice, such as Yao Yang, “Jianli yige Zhongguode shehui gongzheng lilun” [Constructing a Chinese Theory of Social Justice], at http://philo.ruc .edu.cn/pol04/Article/ethics/e_politics/200409/1144.html (posted September 2004; accessed January 20, 2006). An English translation of Yao’s essay is forthcoming in David Kelly, ed., Social Justice: Emerging Focus of Ideology and Policy in China, trans. David Kelly, a special issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought, 38, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 15–51. Wang Zhiquan “Weixiande lieheng,” www.gongfa.com/weixianliehen.htm. Ibid, www.gongfa.com/weixianliehen.htm In this regard, the immense popularity of Weber and Hayek between the late 1980s and mid-1990s has given way to widespread interest in the work of Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls since the late 1990s, with Robert Nozick receiving interest through Qin Hui’s use of his ideas and Habermas being frequently quoted across the political spectrum. Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Frederic Jameson are among those frequently quoted in the writings of the New Left and “postists.” Others who are equally well known and frequently quoted include Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, Ronald Dworkin, and Alasdair McIntyre. Li Zehou, “Sige ‘re’ chao zhi hou?” [What Comes after the Four Fevers?], at Beixin xinwen wang, at http://news.blcu.edu.cn/detail.asp?id=2670 (posted December 9, 2002; accessed December 10, 2005). Zhang Rulun, Wang Xiaoming, Zhu Xueqin, and Chen Sihe, “Renwen jingshen: shifou keneng yu ruhe keneng” [The Humanistic Spirit: Whys and Wherefores], in Luo Gang and Ni Wenjian, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan [An Anthology of 1990s Thought], vol. 1 (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2000), 321. First published in Dushu 3 (1994). Zhang Rulun et al., “Renwen jingshen,” 329. Ibid., 320. Ibid., 321, 323. Ibid., 323. The term zhutijian became popular through Habermas’s writings. Ibid., 317. Xu Jilin, “Cong teshu,” 37. Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought,” 27. Wang also notes that

260

76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

•

Notes to Pages 91–99 “the ascribing of the changes among intellectuals to a loss of spirit and their silence on the social conditions that lead to stratification can be attributed to the fact that New Enlightenment intellectuals have an extremely contradictory and equivocal attitude toward these social processes.” I place these quotation marks to indicate that Sinophone postmodernism is quite at odds with postmodernism as discussed in Anglophone scholarship. Zhang Yiwu, “Chanshi ‘Zhongguo’ de jiaolü” [The Anxiety of Interpreting “China”], Ershiyi shiji 28 (April 1995): 133. Zhang Yiwu, “ ‘Xiandaixing’ de zhongjie—yige wufa huibide keti” [The End of “Modernity”: An Unavoidable Task], in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 1, 230. First published in Zhanlue yu guanli 4 (1994). Ibid., 229–230. Ibid., 230. Ibid. Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan, “Cong ‘xiandaixing’ dao ‘Zhonghuaxing’—xin zhishi xingde tanqiu” [From “Modernity” to “Chineseness”: In Search of a New Knowledge Paradigm], in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 1, 247, 249–255. First published in Wenyi zhenming 2 (1994). In “Chanshi ‘Zhongguo’ de jiaolü,” 135, Zhang claims that only those intellectuals resident in China could be regarded as contributors to the development of ideas and modes of discourse that are “in step with the complexity of [mainland Chinese] culture as a whole.” Barmé, In the Red, 255. Zhang, Zhang, and Wang, “Cong ‘xiandaixing’ dao ‘Zhonghuaxing,’ ” 235–236, 248–252. Wang Hui, “Contemporary Chinese Thought,” 29. Wang singles out for particular mention the controversially nationalistic account of “Chineseness” authored by Zhang, Zhang, and Wang cited above. Zhao Yiheng, “ ‘Houxue’ yu Zhongguo xinbaoshouzhuyi” [“Postisms” and Chinese New Conservatism], Ershiyi Shiji 2 (1995): 5–6, 9–11. Zhao later published a less polemical English version in New Literary History 28, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 31–44. Zhao Yiheng, “ ‘Houxue,’ ” 7–8, 11. Zhaji refers to erudite jottings that first became influential in Qing era evidential scholarship. Zhao Yiheng, “ ‘Houxue,’ ” 5. Ibid., 11–12, 14. See, for instance, F. R. Leavis, Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 167–183. Zhang Yiwu, “Chanshi ‘Zhongguo’ de jiaolü,” 128–129. Haun Saussy, “Postmodernism in China: A Sketch and Some Queries,” in Wen-Hsin Yeh, ed., Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness (Berkeley: China Research Monograph 51, University of California, 1999), 148.

Notes to Pages 100–112

•

261

95. Zhang Longxi, “Duoyuan shehuizhongde wenhua pipan” [Cultural Critique in a Pluralist Society], Ershiyishiji 33 (1996): 21. 96. Ibid. 97. Xu Jilin, “Cong teshu,” 53–54, 56, 59, 60–61. 98. Ren Jiantao, “Jiedu ‘Xin Zuo pai,’ ” 38. 99. Wu Zhongmin, Shehui gongzheng lun [A Theory of Social Justice] (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 2004). David Kelly offers an engaging survey of the recent critical discourse on social justice in Social Justice, together with translations of key writings on social justice by Liu Guoguang, Qin Hui, Wu Zhongmin, Yao Yang, and Yuan Weishi. 100. Wu Zhongmin, “Gongzheng bi gongping gengjia zhongyao” [ Justice Is Even More Important Than Fairness], Nanfang zhoumo, at http://chinaweek.com/html/01901.htm (posted July 24, 2003; accessed January 20, 2006). 101. Yao Yang, “Jianli yige Zhongguode shehui gongzheng lilun.” 102. The term “centrism” (in the sense of zouxiang yiyuan) is often negatively inflected in Sinophone critical discourse to signal an undesirable acquiescence to authoritarian rule. 103. Pocha, “China’s New Left.” 104. Xu Jilin, “Cong teshu,” 61–62. 105. Liu Dong, “Revisiting the Perils of ‘Designer Pidgin Scholarship,’ ” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 91–92.

3. Theory and Taxonomy 1. The term jia (family, home) also signifies an intellectual genealogy or cohort, as in xin rujia (New Confucianism) or houxuejia (postmodernists). 2. By “fields” I mean China-related research published under categories such as literary studies, feminist studies, cultural studies, social and political studies, and so on. Moreover, there is a clear difference between theory as it is valorized in the humanities and social sciences, which commonly refers to critical engagement with our contemporary ways of knowing, and the far more circumscribed sense of theory in the hard sciences. 3. See, for instance, Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 15–33. 4. As quoted in Chapter One above. 5. The phrase most commonly used is you sixiang wu xueshu. 6. Xu Jilin, “Xueshu guifande zhangli yu xiandu” [Tensions and Limitations of Academic Norms], in Luo Gang and Ni Wenjian, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan [An Anthology of 1990s Thought], vol. 1 (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2000), 29–40. First published in Zhongguo shuping 9 (1995). 7. Liu Junning, “Feng neng jin, yu neng jin, guowang bu neng jin: zhengzhi lilun shiye zhong de caichanquan yu renlei wenming,” in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushiniandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 2, 337–359. First published in the journal edited by Liu Junning, Ziyou yu shequn [Freedom and Commu-

262

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

•

Notes to Pages 112–114 nity] 2 (1998). The quote from William Pitt the Elder (1708–1778) is popular among Chinese liberals. Liu Junning lived briefly in the United States after he was banned from publishing and then purged from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2000. He has since returned to Beijing, where he continues to promote political reform in his current position at the Chinese Cultural Research Institute (Zhongguo wenhua yanjiu suo). Liu, “Feng neng jin,” 340. See, for instance, Ou Litong and Zhang Wei, Falankefu xuepai yanjiu [Studies of the Frankfurt School] (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe 1990); Wang Yuechuan, Houzhiminzhuyi yu xinlishizhuyi wenlun [Theories of Postcolonialism and New Historicism] (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999); and Wang Minan, Fuke de jiexian [Foucault’s Boundaries] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2002). Numerous anthologies of writings by prominent Anglophone scholars have also appeared in Chinese translation. For instance, a handsome four-volume set of Jameson’s collected works (wenji) was published in 2004 by the Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe in Beijing. Describing this mode of inquiry as “thought work” (sixiang gongzuo), Timothy Cheek observes that intellectuals such as Xu Jilin “set out to . . . return intellectuals to their lost central role in public life.” See Cheek, “Xu Jilin and the Thought Work of China’s Public Intellectuals,” China Quarterly 186 (2006): 410. The “Three Represents” was inserted into the national constitution in March 2004. The official English translation of the phrase appears on numerous state-sponsored web sites. Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” has yet to be formally inducted as an “important thought” in Party theory but it is a clear candidate for canonization. I base my synopsis on texts accessed from the following Party theory web sites: Mao Zedong sixiang, Deng Xiaoping lilun yu “Sange daibiao” zhongyao sixiang yanjiu wang [Research into Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and the Important Thought of the “Three Represents”], at www.dxpllyj.net.cn/, and the “theory” homepage of the Renmin wang at http://theory.people.com .cn/ (accessed December 20, 2005). Engaging accounts of how Party scribes distill truth propositions include Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies (Berkeley: China Research Monograph, University of California, 1992); and Rudolf Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Mao Zedong, “Fandui dang bagu” (Oppose Stereotype Party Writing), in Mao Zedong xuanji, vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1975). This was a speech Mao delivered to cadres in Yan’an, February 8, 1942. The official English translation appears at www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics/mao/ sw3/mswv3_07.html (accessed June 15, 2004). See Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 62–98.

Notes to Pages 115–121

•

263

16. Wang Yuanhua, Jiushi niandai fansi lu [Reflections of the 1990s] (Shanghai: Shanghai gujichubanshe, 2000), 223–224. See also Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10–26, 289–290. That Wang Yuanhua was able to voice his criticism quite publicly by 1996 (albeit without naming names) is indicative of the greatly diminished authority of veteran Leftists such as Hu Qiaomu under Jiang Zemin’s economic rationalistic regime. 17. Key state bureaucracies involved in the work of censorship include the General Administration of Press and Publication (Xinwen chuban zongshu), the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (Guangbo dianying dianshi zongju), the Ministry for Information Industry (Xinxi chanye bu), and the State Secrecy Bureau (Guojia baomi ju), all of which are guided by policies issued by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department (Zhonggong zhongyang xuanchuan bu), which has now substituted the less ominous-sounding Publicity Department as its official English title. 18. This widely used phrase is featured in the title of Jiang Zemin’s report to the Fifteenth Chinese Communist Party National Congress (September 12–16, 1997). 19. Ge Zhaoguang, “Sixiang shi yu xueshu shi” [The History of Thought and the History of Scholarship], in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushinaidai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 1, 3–5. First published in Xueren 1 (1991). 20. Ibid., 4–5. 21. Simon Leys, The Analects of Confucius, translated with an introduction (New York: Norton, 1997), 60–61. 22. The author of that work is Sima Tan (d. 110 BCE), the father of the famous historian Sima Qian. The “Six Schools” were: yinyang [the Yinyang School), ru (Confucians), mo (Mohists), ming (Logicians, or the “School of Names”), fa (Legalists), and daode (Daoists, or the “School of the Way and Virtue”). Ge argues that this highly capacious mode of classification led subsequent generations of Confucian scholars typically to confuse different methods and skills (xueshu) of inquiry with ideas and concepts (sixiang). 23. The ambitious imperially funded project A Comprehensive Survey of Texts in the Four Repositories (Siku quanshu), conducted between 1873 and 1882 under an edict from the Qianlong emperor, provides arguably the most striking example of these two modes of scholarship. 24. Ge Zhaoguang, “Sixiang,” 5. 25. See Zhang Dainian, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Edmund Ryden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 41. 26. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 27. In brief, Wang and Zhou opposed “humanism” to the Maoist doctrine of “class struggle.” But we should not forget that for decades prior to this

264

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

•

Notes to Pages 121–127 humanistic turn, Zhou Yang, as a leading Party member, oversaw the persecution of many of his intellectual peers before he too became a target of the Cultural Revolution. See Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, 15, 29. See Yi Jiandong, “2008 Beijing Aoyun hui san da zhutide bianzheng guanxi lungang” [An Outline of the Dialectical Relations between the Three Themes of the 2008 Beijing Olympics], for a tortuous account of the interrelatedness of a “humanistic Olympics,” a “green Olympics,” and a “hi-tech Olympics” at the Humanistic Olympics Studies Center web site, www.beijing-2008.org/77/13/article211621377.shtml. Chen Pingyuan, “Scholarship, Ideas, Politics,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths, trans. Chaohua Wang (London: Verso, 2003), 113. Emphasis in original. Simon Leys, The Angel and the Octopus: Collected Essays, 1983–1998 (Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove, 1999), 49. See Wang, High Culture Fever, 48–56, 113–117, 152–153. Liu Qingfeng, “The Topography of Intellectual Culture,” in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry, trans. Gloria Davies (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) 47–51, 53–55. See, for instance, Yu Zhiping, “Chonggou Zhongguo zhexue: qianjing, keneng yu ziyuan qingli” [Reconstructing Chinese Philosophy: Prospects, Possibilities, and Resources] at www.confucius2000.com/poetry/cgzgzx qjknyzyql.htm (accessed June 30, 2004). See, for instance, Wang Hui, Zixuan ji [A Personal Anthology] (Nanning: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997). Zhidong Hao, Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China’s Knowledge Workers (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 15–23. In this instance, He’s use of the term “intellectual elite” obscures the enormous difference in the status of intellectuals between the Maoist and postMaoist eras. He Qinglian, “A Listing Social Structure,” in Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths, trans. Chaohua Wang, 168–170. Cheng Xiaonong’s widely read article “Dangdai shehui sipai ‘jingyingzhi’ fenshu” [An Analysis of Four Social ‘Elites’ in Contemporary China] is available at www.usc.cuhk .edu.hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=1390 (accessed June 30, 2004). Wang Sirui, “Gongtong dixian yu xianzheng pingtai: jianping Xian Yan de ‘zuo zhong you’ huafen” [A Common Baseline and a Constitutional Platform: A Critique of Xian Yan’s Distinctions of “Left, Center, and Right”], Gaizao yu jianshe, at www.bjsbs.net/news/news/php?intNewsId=155 (posted February 19, 2004; last accessed March 30, 2004). Qin Hui’s notion of a “common baseline” became influential in the discourse of “third way” advocates in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Wang Hui, “1989 shehui yundong yu Zhongguo ‘Xin ziyouzhuyi’ de lishi genyuan: zailun dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti” [The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Roots of

Notes to Pages 127–132

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

•

265

China’s “Neoliberalism”], Zhongguo xiandai wenxue 19 (December 2000): 489. See also Zhang Dainian, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, 451–460. Tang Yijie, “Some Reflections on New Confucianism in Mainland Chinese Culture of the 1990s,” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, trans. Gloria Davies, 124–125. Tang Yijie, “Some Reflections on New Confucianism,” 125. Zheng Min, “Guanyu ‘Ruhe pingjia “Wu Si” baihuawen yundong’ shangque zhi shangque” [Further Discussion on “Evaluating the ‘May Fourth’ Vernacular Movement”], Wenxue pinglun 2 (1994): 118–119. Zhao Yiheng, “ ‘Houxue’ yu Zhongguo xinbaoshouzhuyi” [Postism and Chinese New Conservatism], Ershiyi Shiji 2 (1995): 5–6. See Gao Like, “Wu Si lunli geming yu ruxue dexing chuantong” [The May Fourth Theoretical Revolution and the Confucian Moral Tradition], Ershiyi shiji 53 (June 1999): 46–55; Yan Jiayan, “Ping Wu Si, Wen Ge yu chuantong wenhuade lunzheng” [A Critique of Debates over May Fourth, the Cultural Revolution, and Traditional Culture], Ershiyi shiji 42 (August 1997): 129–136. In Party historiography, the May Fourth Movement is described as “a new stage in the bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism.” Accordingly, there is also a distinct valorization of the Confucian notion of dayitong in the sense of an “ecumenical unification” of a divided world. See also Lung-Kee Sun, The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality (Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 5. For an indepth survey of themes and concepts in New Confucianism, see John Makeham, ed., New Confucianism: A Criticial Examination (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). On the significance of ren, see the transcript of Tang Yijie’s 2002 paper, “Rujia yu shengtai” [Confucianism and Ecology], at www.confuchina .com/08%20xiandaihua/rujia%20shengtai%201.htm (accessed March 20, 2004). See also Yingjie Guo, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 77. See, for instance, Chen Lai, Zhongguo jinshi sixiang shi yanjiu [Studies of the History of Early Modern Chinese Thought] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2003); Liu Dong, Lilun yu xinzhi [Theory and Wisdom] (Jiangsu: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2003); and Qin Hui, Chuantong shi lun [Ten Essays on Tradition] (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2003). Qin Hui, Chuantong shi lun, 220. The Qing-era scholar Dai Zhen coined the phrase yi li sha ren to disavow Zhu Xi’s claim that “heavenly principles” (tianli) exercised a natural moral constraint on human desire. See Chen Fong-Ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Cultural Movement and Political Transformation, 1979–1989 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1997), 153–157.

266

•

Notes to Pages 132–139

53. Chen Fong-Ching, “The Popular Cultural Movement of the 1980s,” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 79. 54. Interest in traditional ideas and values was also reflected in the trend of “seeking one’s roots” (xungen) in literature and film in the 1980s. 55. Gloria Davies, “ ‘Star Wars’ and the Confucian Ethic,” in Mabel Lee and A. D. Syromkomla-Stefanowska, eds., Modernization of the Chinese Past (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1993), 9–10. 56. See Tang Yijie, “Some Reflections on New Confucianism,” 126–127. 57. Li Yang, “ ‘Xueshu’ yu ‘zhengzhi’de eryuan duili jiqi lijie ‘lishi’ fangshi” [The Binary Opposition of “Scholarship” and “Politics” as a Mode of Understanding “History”], Shuwu 9 (2001), at www.housebook.com.cn ./200109/2.htm (accessed May 20, 2004). In brief, Li recommends historicization that sympathizes with the difficulties an individual would have faced, given the politics and trends of his or her time, regarding such historicization as a preventive against arbitrary judgment. 58. Ibid. 59. Chen Yinque was by no means unique in advocating sympathetic scholarship. Rather, Chen’s statement recalls the emphasis that Confucian scholarship has characteristically placed (since the Song-Ming eras) on the necessity of moral feeling in scholarship. 60. Liu Dong, “The Weberian View and Confucianism,” trans. Gloria Davies, East Asian History 25–26 (June/December 2003): 212. 61. He Qing, Xiandai yu houxiandai: Xifang yishu wenhua xiaoshi (Zhejiang: Zhongguo meishu xueyuan chubanshe, 1998). The work was first published in Hong Kong in 1994. 62. He Qing draws on a diverse range of European scholarship in French, German, and English, as well as on prominent Francophone authors such as Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, and Lévinas. He’s focus on the visual arts owes to his training in art history, first in mainland China, followed by graduate studies in Paris in the late 1980s. 63. He Qing, Xiandai yu houxiandai, 287–288. For an alternative reading of this work, see Robert C. Morgan, “Meditation on Two Candles,” NY Arts (May 2002), at http://nyartsmagazine.com/bbs/messages/1932.html (accessed May 20, 2004). 64. On the linguistic contingency of the notion of a common humanity, see Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60. 65. He Qing, Xiandai yu houxiandai, 442. 66. Ibid., 446. 67. Ibid., 465. 68. Ibid., 456–457. 69. See, for instance, Zhang Yiwu, “Houxin shiqi wenxue: xinde wenhua kongjian” [Literature of the Post-New Era: A New Cultural Space]; and Wang Ning, “Jicheng yu duanlie: zouxiang houxin shiqi wenxue” [Inheritance and Rupture: Toward Literature of the Post-New Era], Wenyi zhengming 6 (1992): 9–10, 11–12. See also Xu Ben’s critical review,

Notes to Pages 139–144

70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

•

267

“Shenme shi Zhongguode ‘houxin shiqi’ he ‘houxiandai’? ‘Xiandaixing’ zai dangjin Zhongguode wenhua zhengzhi yiyi” [What Is China’s “PostNew Era” and “Postmodern”? The Cultural and Political Significance of “Modernity” in Contemporary China], at www.culstudies.com/rendanews /displaynews.asp?id=5768 (posted June 6, 2005; accessed July 30, 2005). Kevin Hart, Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 2004), 16. See, for instance, Guo Jian, “Politics of Othering and Postmodernisation of the Cultural Revolution,” Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 215– 217, 222. Xudong Zhang, “Epilogue: Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society— Historicizing the Present,” in Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds., Postmodernism and China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 400. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 18. Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 4 vols. (Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2004). Ibid., vol. 1, 2, 78. Liu Xiaofeng, Xiandaixing shehui lun xulun—xiandaixing yu xiandai Zhongguo [An Introduction to Social Theory on Modernity: Modernity and Modern China] (Shanghai: Joint Publishing Co., 1997). See Gan Yang and Liu Xiaofeng, “Chongxin yuedu Xifang” [Rereading the West], at http://guancha.gmw.cn/show.aspx?id=6181 (posted January 14, 2006; accessed February 20, 2006). See, for instance, Xue Yong, “Gei Gan Yang men kan bing” [Diagnosing Gan Yang and His Ilk], at http://guancha.gmw.cn/show.aspx?id=6766 (posted February 14, 2006). Gan and Liu, “Chongxin yuedu Xifang.” Xue Yong, “Gei Gan Yang men kan bing.” Liu Xiaofeng, “Zhenli weihe yao michuan?” [Why Truth Must Be Transmitted in Secret], at www.platoforum.com/philosophy/072.htm (accessed May 20, 2006). On “reading between the lines,” see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Wu Guanjun, “Yiba cha xiang xinzangde dao—lun yishixingtai pipan zhi (bu) keneng” [A Knife Thrust at the Heart: On the (Im)Possibility of a Critique of Ideology], Kaifang shidai 2 (2006), 39–66. We should recall here the enduring power of the Confucian notion of greater unity (as dayitong and da tong) in contemporary Sinophone discourse. As one pseudonymous commentator (Zhang san yiyan) wrote: “To proceed from centrism to pluralism is progress, to proceed from pluralism to centrism is regress.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/newsid _3670000/newsid_3671400/3671400.stm (posted September 23, 2004; accessed September 30, 2004). Tang Yijie, “Some Reflections on New Confucianism,” 128.

268

•

Notes to Pages 145–147

86. Liu Dong, “Revisiting the Perils of ‘Designer Pidgin Scholarship,’ ” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 95. 87. See Liang Yancheng, Poxiao niandai: houxiandai Zhongguo zhexue de chonggou [The Dawn of a New Era: The Reconstruction of Chinese Philosophy in its Postmodern Moment] (Shanghai: Dongfang chubanshe, 1999). 88. Yu Zhiping, “Chonggou Zhongguo zhexue,” at www.confucius2000.com/ poetry/cgzgzxqjknyzyql.htm (accessed July 20, 2004).

4. Reasoning after Mao 1. Qian Liqun, “Refusing to Forget,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths, trans. Eileen Cheng (London: Verso, 2003), 302. 2. See Geremie R. Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 143. 3. This practice of symptomatic reading is most keenly practiced in the days and months leading up to the formal declaration of a major policy initiative. 4. For an example of a relatively progressive approach to this mandated curriculum, see Introduction to Marxist Philosophy (Makesizhuyi zhexue daolun), taught at Peking University, which includes both Chinese Marxist studies and recent Anglophone scholarship on Marxism, at www.phil .pku.edu.cn/les.php?op=lesdt&=red&id=502 (last accessed November 8, 2005). 5. This handy formula was not proposed by Hegel but has since become a popular characterization of the Hegelian dialectic. The Chinese version is commonly stated as “negation” (fouding) and “sublation” (yangqi), toward “exceeding” (chaoyue) present limitations in order to achieve “synthesis” (zonghe) and “unity” (tongyi). 6. It should be noted that Communism itself has become highly tenuous in Party discourse as a result of modifications to that discourse since the 1980s. See also “CPC General Secretary Calls for Sound Style in PartyBuilding Theory Study,” People’s Daily Online, December 31, 2005, at http://english.people.com.cn/other/archive.html (accessed January 3, 2006). 7. Sublation or Aufheben refers to the dual process of preservation (yang) and negation (qi). See G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1969), 107. The popularization of this concept during the Maoist era has produced a drastic simplification of Hegel’s argument, such that yangqi sublation is often reduced to political and moral judgment. Thus “to preserve” is frequently described as the active development and elevation (fayang) of positive elements, an activity conducted in conjunction with the rejection and discarding (paoqi) of those elements judged as negative. 8. See Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 27.

Notes to Pages 147–152

•

269

9. Quoted in Huang Shaorong, To Rebel Is Justified (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996), 141. 10. Practical problems posed by the dismantling of Mao Thought are discussed in Barmé, Shades of Mao, 6–11. 11. Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 103. 12. See Wang Dingding’s liberalist reading of “the Realm of Freedom” discussed in Chapter Five below. 13. The trend to affirm hitherto unexamined humanistic, liberal, or Confucian elements from the writings of Marxists who lived in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Qu Qiubai, and those who lived during the Maoist era, such as Feng Qi, Feng Youlan, Gu Zhun, and Zhu Guangqian, is evident in anthologies such as Xu Jilin, ed., Ershishiji Zhongguo sixiang shilun [On Twentieth-Century Chinese Thought], 2 vols. (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2000). This Sinophone Hegelian “disposition” has also led to the privileging of EuroAmerican scholarship that affirms the conceptual significance of the dialectic (e.g., the Western Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt School as well as the writings of Jürgen Habermas and Frederic Jameson). 14. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er” [Bidding Farewell to Hegel], in Li Shitao, ed., Zhishifenzi lichang [Intellectual Positions], vol. 1 (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000), 439–474. By “bidding farewell to Hegel,” Shan recalls the title of a controversial 1995 book coauthored by Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu while they were in exile from China, published in Hong Kong, titled Gaobie Geming [Bidding Farewell to the Revolution]. 15. Li Zehou, Pipan zhexuede pipan [A Critique of Critical Philosophy] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1979). 16. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 183, 182. 17. Quoted in Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 445. 18. Ibid., 444–447. 19. Li Zehou, Pipan zhexuede pipan, 350. 20. Quoted in Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 446. 21. See also Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 108. Zhuguan yiyuan (subjective voluntarism) is a term that Li continued to use in the 1990s to critique “radicalism” in modern Chinese thought. 22. Shan claims that Li sought to salvage a highly aesthetic form of subjectivity from the Hegelian-derived “inevitability” in Chinese Marxist thought by “substituting a path that leads from Kant to Schiller to Marx for the path from Kant to Hegel to Marx.” (“Gaobie Heige’er,” 444.) 23. Ban Wang makes this point most cogently in The Sublime Figure of History, 185. 24. That is to say, Li’s thesis ceased to be authoritative in the 1990s as intel-

270

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

•

Notes to Pages 153–157 lectuals like Shan Shilian embarked on different ways of historicizing the Maoist past, with the result that Li’s work came to be viewed critically by many as “scientistic.” Fish’s much quoted phrase appears in the title of his work, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 446. The “cunning of Reason” is explained in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Section 36. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 447. Ibid., 474. Toward the end of “Gaobie Heige’er,” Shan appeals to a “philosophical tribunal” to deliver positive judgment on Hegel’s ontology as a means of rendering “historical reflection . . . more rigorous [shenshen] and comprehensive [zhouyan]” (473). Ibid., 451. There is a distinct difference between Wang’s reading and Kant’s discussion of the understanding in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 143. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 451. It is clear that Shan derives his argument in part from Anglophone analytic philosophy, although he does not provide references to specific texts. But there is a key difference between Shan’s affirmation of contingency as a principle, without substantial analysis of the term itself, and the technical precision with which contingency is examined in terms of predication in Anglophone analytic philosophy. See, for instance, John McDowell’s account of the Kantian representation of empirical knowledge as “the result of a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity, between sensibility and understanding,” in Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4, 67. Shan’s account of “the understanding” accords with the Kantian conception of empirical knowledge but does not explore how conceptual capacities are implicated in the act of understanding. Rather, he formulates the crude rule that the understanding must simply adhere to the principle that it “cannot recognize the totality of the world.” Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 452. The ease with which Shan handles abstract concepts as if these were self-evident “entities” is a feature of Chinese intellectual discourse. Ibid., 451. Wang Yuanhua coined the term “diverse unity.” Since Shan’s argument is one that favors the liberal view that the free market economy constitutes the foundation of democracy, one could describe it, using a monetary metaphor, as affirming the belief that the telos of “diverse unity” will restore to the Hegelian dialectic its status as true coin, thus “liberating” it from the debased coinage of Communist revolution. Gu Zhun was an economist who produced a theory of Western-style taxation in the early 1950s, one that he sought to adapt to China’s socialist economy. He was denounced as a Rightist in 1957 and died in disgrace during the Cultural Revolution. When his manuscripts were published in

Notes to Pages 157–162

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

•

271

one small volume in 1994, the book became a best seller and Gu was elevated to an authoritative liberal thinker and a powerful critic of Maoist socialism. In Chinese critical discourse, Gu Zhun is posthumously revered for his prescience about post-Maoist market reforms and mourned as a talented individual whose ideas would have benefited China, had he not been persecuted and destroyed by the Maoist state. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 470. Li Shenzhi, “Dianran ziji zhao po hei’ande ren” [Setting Oneself Alight to Break the Darkness], in Chen Minzhi and Ding Dong, eds., Gu Zhun xunsi lu [Reflections of Gu Zhun] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1998), 10. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 459, 463. Ibid., 463–465. Gu Zhun’s writings have also been described as naive and simplistic, especially by younger intellectuals. See, for instance, Cheng Gongxia, “Da Luo Yinsheng jun youguan Gu Zhun zhuzuode shuxin” [A Reply to Luo Yinsheng Regarding Gu Zhun’s Writings], Zhongguo wenxue wang, at http:// literature.cass.cn/Article.asp?ID=1808 (accessed October 20, 2005). Thus whereas Zˇizˇ ek is focused on exploring how the subject’s experience of “reality” is structured by unconscious symbolic constructions and thus incurably self-deceptive, Shan is solely interested in curing the ills he has identified, in a reality that he asserts to be true as such. Shan’s discourse is incommensurable with Zˇizˇ ek’s self-reflexive ironic command, “Enjoy your symptom” (as the title of one of his books puts it). Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1993). Zhonggong Guangdong jishu shifan xueyuan weiyuanhui zuzhi bu, “Shishi qiu shi: Zhongguo Gongchan Dang de dangxun” [Seek Truth from Facts: The Code of the Chinese Communist Party], Dangjian shequ [Party Construction Community], at www.gdin.edu.cn/houde/main/d/shownews .asp?newsid=544 (accessed May 20, 2004). All quotes not referenced in this section are from this online article. Shishi qiu shi was a popular slogan for evidential scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Positivistic definitions of this kind first became entrenched during the Maoist era and still prevail in Chinese intellectual discourse. For a persuasive account of truth at odds with such positivism, see Donald Davidson, Truth and Predication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 55–56. See also Chen Fong-Ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Cultural Movement and Political Transformation, 1979–1989 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1997), 38–41. “Seeking truth from facts” served to augment Deng Xiaoping’s contemporaneous dictum of the late 1970s that “social practice is the sole criterion of truth.”

272

•

Notes to Pages 162–172

48. “Whateverism” (fanshizhuyi) was a derisive term used by progressive intellectuals and officials in 1979 to lampoon blind adherents to the words of Mao. 49. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 54. 50. Gu wei jin yong (Making the past serve the present) and Yang wei Zhong yong (Making foreign things serve China) were used by Mao in his 1940 article, “On New Democracy,” in Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), vol. 3, 339–384. 51. See Joseph Fewsmith, “Rethinking the Role of the Party: Explicating Jiang Zemin’s Anniversary Party Speech,” Chinese Monitor 1, part 2 (2001), at www.chinaleadershipmonitor.org/20011b/CLM20011JF.pdf (accessed April 20, 2004). 52. Emphasis added. Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 20. 53. See also Børge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 255. 54. In the Party text discussed earlier, these individuals are either mentioned or implied as true adherents to the motto of “seeking truth from facts.” 55. Epstein, After the Future, 128–129. 56. Accordingly, “tetradic” argumentation relies on the assertion of a true foundation of thought. See, for instance, “Jianshe shehuizhuyi de sixiang luxian” [Establishing the Ideological Line of Socialism], Deng Xiaoping lilun gailun, at www.hftvu.net.cn/newkaif/newnew/jygl/kc/deng/fd002 .htm (accessed April 20, 2006). 57. Xu also characterizes Deng’s “New Era” as one that fostered “the kind of materialist scientism that had been repressed during the ascendancy of the political/moral didacticism of Maoism.” Xu Jilin, “The Fate of an Enlightenment—Twenty Years in the Chinese Intellectual Sphere (1978–1998),” trans. Geremie R. Barmé and Gloria Davies, East Asian History 20 (December 2000): 171. 58. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er,” 451–452. 59. This mode of argumentation renders tautological the relation between a set of facts and the reality these facts are supposed to represent. See also Davidson, Truth and Predication, 41. 60. The assumption of linguistic transparency is thus opposed to the postmodern notion of something called into being by that very naming, a causally preexistent utterance that permits the postexistent effect of any such entity. 61. See Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, ed. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow (London: Verso, 2002), 199–200, 201–203. 62. Zhang Xudong, “Quanqiuhua shidaide fengbi zheng” [The Malaise of Intellectual Isolationism in the Era of Globalization], first published online at Shiji shalong, July 28, 2000, where it initially attracted much commen-

Notes to Pages 173–179

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

•

273

tary. Now available at http://members.lycos.co.uk/chinatown/author/Z/ Zhang XuDong/ZhangXuDong002.txt (accessed April 18, 2006). Emphasis added. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 47. See Jameson, Postmodernism, 47–48. See the citations and uses of Jameson’s work in anthologies such as Jin Yuanpu, ed., Wenhua yanjiu: lilun yu shijian [Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice] (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2003); and Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds., Postmodernism and China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). Jameson implies that his own critique of postmodernism is “nonoptional” in Postmodernism, 397. Xu Jilin et al., “In Search of a Third Way: A Conversation Regarding ‘Liberalism’ and the ‘New Left Wing,’ ” in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry, trans. Geremie R. Barmé (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 205. See, for instance, Martin Jay, “On Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in History and Theory 32, no. 3 (October 1993): 296–304. In examining this aspect of Jameson’s writing, Jay refers to Jameson as “a tightrope artist par excellence,” recalling Jameson’s own description of the theorist as one who “walks a tightrope, the slightest lapse precipitating the sentences in question into the old-fashioned (system, ontology, metaphysics) or sheer opinion.” See Jay, “On Frederic Jameson,” 296. Wang Hui, “1989 shehui yundong yu Zhongguo ‘Xin ziyouzhuyi’ de lishi genyuan: zailun dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti” [The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Roots of China’s “Neoliberalism”], Zhongguo xiandai wenxue 19 (December 2000): 489. Wang Hui, “On Scientism and Social Theory in Modern Chinese Thought,” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, trans. Gloria Davies, 140–141. Guo Jian, “Jiemusun yu wenhua da geming” [Jameson and the Cultural Revolution], Wanxiang [Panorama] 5 (1999): 59–68. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984): 52–92. Guo Jian, “Wen ge sichao yu ‘houxue’ ” [The Cultural Revolution Intellectual Trend and “Postism”], Ershiyi shiji 35 (June 1996): 118. Tong Shijun, “Quanqiuhua shidaizhong rende lishi zeren” [Responsibility to History in the Era of Globalization], Xueshu yuekan 5 (2002): 98. Xu Jilin, “Liang zhong ziyou he minzhu: dui ‘ziyouzhuyi’ yu ‘xin zuo pai’ lunzhande fansi” [Two Kinds of Freedom and Democracy: Reflections on the Debates between “Liberals” and the “New Left”], in Luo Gang, ed., Sixiang wenxuan 2004 (Nanning: Guangxi Nomal University Press, 2004), 346–347. Shijun Tong, “Habermas and the Chinese Discourse of Modernity,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 1, no. 1 (December 2001): 5. Ibid., 7–9.

274

•

Notes to Pages 180–187

78. Ibid., 14–15. 79. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pable De Greiff (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 40–41. 80. “Learned journals” or xue kan attached to universities are generally closely monitored to prevent deviation from the Party-state’s interests. 81. Liu Huaiyu, “Makeside jiaowangshijian guan yu Habeimaside jiaowang lixing guan” [Marx’s Communicative Practice and Habermas’s Communicative Reason], Zhongzhou xuekan 4 (1994): 62–63, 66. 82. Wang Shizong, “Deng Xiaoping yu Habeimasi: liang zhong ‘diyige shengchan li’ lilunde tichuzhe” [Deng Xiaoping and Habermas: Two Theoretical Approaches to the “Primary Productive Force”], Zhejiang Daxue xuebao 10 no. 2 (June 1996): 19. 83. Xudong Zhang, “Epilogue: Postmodernism and Postsocialist Society— Historicizing the Present,” in Dirlik and Zhang, eds., Postmodernism and China, 403. 84. The best-known works of this revolutionary repertoire include The East Is Red, The Red Lantern, On the Docks, and The Red Detachment of Women. 85. See Chapter Two above. 86. Slavoj Zˇizˇ ek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 72. This situation can also be described as the mise-en-abîme effect in acts of interpretation. 87. Ibid., 75. The scenario that Zˇizˇ ek offers is strikingly brought out in the travails of the neurotic protagonist Roy Waller (played by Nicholas Cage) in the 2003 film Matchstick Men. 88. Ibid., 75. 89. Godzich, The Cult of Literacy, 143. 90. See, for instance, Edward Cody, “Campaign to Modernize Marxism,” Washington Post, December 5, 2005. Accessed online. 91. “Li Changchun: tuidong Makesizhuyi lilun yanjiu he jianshe gongcheng” [Li Changchun: Advancing Research on and Construction of Marxist Theory], Xinhua News Service, January 16, 2006, at http://politics .people.com.cn/GB/1024/4032575.html# (accessed April 18, 2006). See also Cary Huang, “Millions Pledged to Revive Marxism,” South China Morning Post, January 20, 2006. Accessed online. 92. Mao Zedong sixiang, Deng Xiaoping lilun yu “Sange daibiao” zhongyao sixiang yanjiu wang, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Important Thought of the “Three Represents” Research Website at www.dxpllyj.net.cn. It is also worth noting that the previous standard reference to “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought” has recently been replaced by “Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought.” It is possible that the replacement of the hyphen with a comma is intended to emphasize the latter’s cultural distinctness from the former. 93. Quoted in David Kelly, “Chinese Marxism since Tiananmen: Between Evaporation and Dismemberment,” in David Goodman and Gerald Segal,

Notes to Pages 187–195

•

275

eds., China in the Nineties. Crisis Management and Beyond (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1991), 28. 94. This is a popular paraphrase of Hegel’s famous statement in the preface to Philosophy of Right, that “philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts.” 95. John Caputo, “The Thought of Being and the Conversation of Mankind,” in Alan Malachowski, ed., Richard Rorty, vol. 4 (London: Sage, 2002), 74. 96. On lishiyujing, see Chapter Three above.

5. A Poetics of Inquiry 1. Liu Dong, “The Weberian View and Confucianism,” trans. Gloria Davies, East Asian History 25–26 (June/December 2003): 191–217. 2. Chen Pingyuan, “Chaoyue guize” [Transcending Norms], in Luo Gang and Ni Wenjian, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan [An Anthology of 1990s Thought], vol. 1 (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2000), 13, 17. 3. On the Confucian emphasis on “know-how,” see Karyn Lai, “Confucian Moral Training: Some Parallels with Musical Training,” in Kim-chong Chong, Sor-hoon Tan, and C. L. Ten, eds., The Moral Circle and the Self: Chinese and Western Approaches (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 111–114. 4. Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 26–27. 5. Xu Jilin (1992) and Qian Liqun (1996) have both used Jingshende lianyu as book titles. 6. Simon Leys, The Angel and the Octopus: Collected Essays, 1983–1998 (Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove, 1999), 3–24. 7. See, for instance, Corey Brady, Virginia Cope, et al., Dictionary of Sensibility, at www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary/intro.html (accessed November 15, 2005). 8. By contrast, the 1980s was a time when many intellectuals regarded ideas of the May Fourth era as a wholly positive legacy (indeed, the beginnings of a Chinese Enlightenment) that they were seeking to restore and further develop in their own post-Maoist context. 9. Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi [The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought], vol. 4 (Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2004), 1206. 10. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and trans. with an introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 274–275. 11. Lin’s The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness was translated into Chinese by Mu Shanpei and published by the Guizhou People’s Press in 1986. 12. Wang Hui, “Zhongguo xiandai lishi zhongde ‘Wu Si’ qimeng yundong” [The May Fourth Enlightenment Movement in Modern Chinese History], in Wang Hui, Zixuan ji [Selected Works] (Nanning: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 309, 318, 317.

276

•

Notes to Pages 195–201

13. W. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 20, 55. 14. Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang, vol. 4, 1206–1208. 15. See David Pollard, A Chinese Look at Literature: The Literary Values of Chou Tso-jen in Relation to the Tradition (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1973), 17–20. 16. Wu Zhihui was dubbed as one who believed in “saving the country with motors” (moto jiuguo). See David Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 41–42. 17. The phrase is lishide duidai lishi. Wang emphasizes the necessity of such historicism as “a form of self-reminder that can perhaps never be overstated” (Wang Hui, “Zhongguo xiandai lishi,” 306). 18. Wang Hui, “Kexuezhuyi yu shehui lilun de jige wenti” [Problems of Scientism and Social Theory], in Wang Hui, Si huo chongwen [Dead Fire Rekindled] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), 156. 19. Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang, vol. 1, 5. Paul Cohen’s critique of John K. Fairbank’s “impact-response” approach to the study of modern China became influential in mainland intellectual circles when it was published in Chinese. The title of Cohen’s book, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past, underwent a slight but important modification on translation into Chinese. As Zai Zhongguo faxian lishi-Zhongguo zhongxinguan zai Meiguode xingqi, trans. Lin Tongqi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), the latter part of the title became, “The Rise of a China-Centered View in America.” 20. Wang Yuanhua, Jiushi niandai fansi lu [Critical Reflections of the 1990s] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 130. 21. Ibid., 134, 136–140. 22. Ibid., 83, 143. 23. For an elegant discussion of the distinctions fa ru (legalistic Confucianism), dao ru (moral Confucianism), and chun ru (pure Confucianism), see Qin Hui, Chuantong shi lun [Ten Essays on Tradition] (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2003), 220–231. 24. See Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, vols. 2 and 3. 25. Wang’s argument evinces the recent trend of valorizing the Confucian spirit of May Fourth ideas, as discussed in relation to Gao Like and Yan Jiayan in Chapter Three above. 26. Wang Yuanhua, Jiushi niandai, 142. 27. Ibid., 142–143. 28. Shan Shilian, “Gaobie Heige’er” [Bidding Farewell to Hegel], in Li Shitao, ed., Zhishifenzi lichang [Intellectual Positions], vol. 1 (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000), 473. When writing in defense of Hegel’s empiricism, Shan Shilian figures Hegel as “not only a defendant but a plaintiff in [our] reflections on the tragedy of modern politics.” 29. This Sinophone orientation remains largely indifferent to the Anglophone emphasis on interrogating the contingency of acts of judgment on different

Notes to Pages 202–211

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

•

277

types of evidence. See, for instance, Pierre Schlag, The Enchantment of Reason (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 5–6. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 194. Liu Xiaobo, “Qimengde beiju: ‘Wu Si’ yundong pipan” [The Tragedy of Enlightenment: A Critique of the May Fourth Movement], Zhongguo zhi chun [China Spring] 1 (1989); web site now defunct. Zhu Xueqin, “Cong wenhua geming dao dai yinhaode ‘wenhua geming,’ ” [From the Cultural Revolution to the “Cultural Revolution”], at http:// boxun.com/hero/zhuxq/16_1.shtml (last accessed August 10, 2006). All subsequent quotations of Zhu are from this text, first presented as a public lecture February 23, 2004. This is a reference to the Protect the Emperor Society (Baohuang hui) founded by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao after the collapse of the Hundred Day Reform Movement in 1898. See Chapter One above. Jiang Qing, “Guanyu chongjian Zhongguo Rujiaode gouxiang” [A Vision for the Reconstruction of Chinese Confucianism], first published in Zhongguo Rujiao yanjiu tongxun 1 (2005), at http://philosophyol.com/ pol04/Article/chinese/c_general/200602/2293.html (accessed January 20, 2006). Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 109. Qian Liqun, Yu Lu Xun xiangyu [Encountering Lu Xun] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2003), 11. Donald Davidson’s argument in Truth and Predication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), that truth ultimately rests on belief and on the affective attitudes, provides a useful philosophical elaboration of Qian’s mode of inquiry. Qian Liqun, Yu Lu Xun xiangyu, 4. Shao Yanxiang, “Chongdu ‘Feizao’ ” [Rereading “Soap”], in Shao Yanxiang, Wode xin zai wuyunde shangmian [My Heart Is Above the Dark Clouds] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2005). Available at http://appbook .qq.com/book/3500/0025.htm (accessed February 15, 2006). Qian Liqun, Yu Lu Xun xiangyu, 5. All quotations from Liu Xiaobo, “Qimengde beiju”; web site now defunct. Perry Link cites an unnamed scholar as noting the “party’s efforts to instill the ‘mother-son’ conception of our relation to them” (Evening Chats in Beijing [New York: Norton, 1992], 269). The conflation of the father-son relationship with the lord-subject relationship appears in The Analects (14.11). For instance, the figuration of patriotism as maternal love is writ large in the title of the 1977 post-Maoist classic film Zuguo ah, muqin [Oh My Country, My Mother], directed by Tang Xiaodan. See also Lung-Kee Sun, “Contemporary Chinese Culture: Structure and Emotionality,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 28 (July 1991): 40.

278

•

Notes to Pages 212–217

44. Lung-Kee Sun, The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 105. 45. In this regard, the subheadings for the different sections of Liu’s essay are pointed and ironical: “an Enlightenment devoid of human liberation”; “a pragmatized Enlightenment in search of its Redeemer”; “an Enlightenment without its own terrain.” 46. Lu Xun, “What Is Required of Us as Fathers Today,” in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 2, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), 57. 47. It is worth noting that the importance of Lu Xun’s trope “the gate of darkness” (hei’ande zhamen) led Geremie Barmé, Carma Hinton, and Richard Gordon to consider it as an alternative title for The Gate of the Heavenly Peace (Hong Kong: Distributed by Unlimited film sensation LTD, 1995), their film about the 1989 student-led movement for democracy. 48. See, for instance, Wang Hui, “Zhongguo xiandai lishi,” 319. 49. Geremie R. Barmé, “Time’s Arrows: Imaginative Pasts and Nostalgic Futures,” in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 235. 50. Xu Jilin, “The Fate of an Enlightenment—Twenty Years in the Chinese Intellectual Sphere (1978–1998),” trans. Geremie R. Barmé and Gloria Davies, East Asian History 20 (December 2000): 177. 51. Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 85. 52. See, for instance, Xu Youyu, “Cong ‘zhuyi´ dao ‘wenti’: Zhongguo xueshu sixiang jin shinian zoushi zongguan [From “Isms” to “Problems”: A Survey of Trends in Chinese Academic Inquiry in the Last Decade], first published in Dongfang 2 (1995), at www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/wk_wzdetails .asp?id=134 (accessed January 20, 2006). 53. Emphasis added. Chen Pingyuan, “Jin bainian Zhongguo jingying wenhua de shiluo” [The Decline of Elite Chinese Culture over the Last One Hundred Years], in Chen, Zixuan ji [Selected Works] (Nanning: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 317. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. The formulations “I of yesterday” and “I of today” first appeared in Liang Qichao’s 1920 work Qingdai xueshue gailun [Intellectual Trends in the Qing Era]. 56. Qin Hui, Wenti yu zhuyi [Issues and Isms] (Beijing: Changchun chubanshe, 1999), 10–11. 57. This is not to say that quwei disappeared entirely. For instance, the artist Huang Yongyu produced in 1964 a bestiary of satirical quips with accompanying pictures that sparkled with quwei in the humorous observations they provided of life under Party rule. See the interview with Huang at www.morningsun.org/smash/worm/intro.htm (accessed March 30, 2005). 58. For an insightful survey of quwei, see Pollard, A Chinese Look at Literature, 72–84. 59. Quwei became an object of criticism in the writings of Marxist intellectuals

Notes to Pages 218–222

60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

•

279

from the late 1920s onward. By the early 1930s, following the formation of the League of Left Wing Writers, attacks on individuals who valorized quwei, such as Feng Zikai, Zhou Zuoren, and Lin Yutang, became frequent. See also Geremie R. Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 121–127. Lin Yutang’s translation, as quoted in Barmé, An Artistic Exile, 125. Lu Xun’s trope of “holding open the gate of darkness” evokes just this sense of a common humanity when he names his goal as one of enabling “the children . . . to lead happy lives henceforward as rational human beings.” As the cyberpersona “dai sange biao,” Wang set up his Massage Milk weblog (anmo ru) to poke fun at the foibles of the mainland Chinese media under state censorship. His clever and irreverent commentaries have made his blog one of the most frequented among Sinophone netizens. See Wang’s blog at http://blog.soufun.com/blog/%B4%F7%C8%FD%B8% F6%B1%ED/ (accessed January 15, 2006). See also China Digital News, “Massage Milk and the Disaster of Journalism in China” (reposted from Danwei), at http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2005/11/massage_milk_and_the _disaster_of_journalism_in_china_da.php (accessed January 15, 2006). Yue Daiyun, “On Western Literary Theory in China,” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 117. Zhu Xueqin, “1998: Ziyouzhuyide yanshuo” [1998: On Liberalism], Huaxia wenzhai, zk0001a1 (January 10, 2000), at www.cnd.org/ HXWZ/ZK00/zk202–1.hz8.html (last accessed January 20, 2002). Gloria Davies, “Anticipating Community, Producing Dissent: The Politics of Recent Chinese Intellectual Praxis,” The China Review 2 no. 2 (Fall 2002): 8–15. Wu Jiaxiang, “Xinzuopai: jiangshi huan hun” [The New Left: Reviving the Corpse], Shiji shalong luntan, August 3, 2000 (web site now defunct). This notion of huiwei is also related to the notion of fengqu (delicacy or subtlety), which draws on the connotations of a cultivated manner implicit in feng (wind) to suggest a fresh perspective that conveys a new twist (qu). Lu Xun, “Si huo” [Dead Fire], in Lu Xun quanji [The Complete Works of Lu Xun], vol. 2 (Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1991), 195–197. We should recall here Chen Pingyuan’s citation of Lu Xun’s satirical comment on the dialectics of revolution (viz “revolution, the revolution of the revolution, the revolution of the revolution of the revolution”). Liu Dong, “Revisiting the Perils of ‘Designer Pidgin Scholarship,’ ” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 91, 94–95, 105. Chen Pingyuan argues that this nineteenth-century axiom remained the guiding theme of educational reform even with the decline of classical studies during the May Fourth era. See Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo daxue shi jiang [Ten Essays on Chinese Universities] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2003), 11–12. Quoted in Tang Yijie, “Some Reflections on New Confucianism,” in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns, 125.

280

•

Notes to Pages 222–227

73. In this context, he implies a similarity between the Europeanized “marvelous formulations” of the May Fourth era (the “enlightened” nature of which most Chinese intellectuals had affirmed without question during the 1980s) and the radical discourse of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (which these same 1980s intellectuals had condemned). Chen Pingyuan, “Chaoyue guize,” 317. 74. Li Ping and Ma Zhisun, eds., Zhou Enlai nianpu (1949–1976) [A Chronological Biography of Zhou Enlai: 1949–1976] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1997), 394–395. 75. Chen Pingyuan, “Chaoyue guize,” 16–17. 76. The traditional couplet (duilian) is generally intended for display as calligraphy on scrolls, wood panels, or stone pillars. The couplet consists of two symmetrical vertical lines of related or contrastive content, which is sometimes capped by a horizontal line (hengpi) that provides a summary judgment of the two vertical ones. 77. In using these axioms, Chen provides an implicit critique of the early Mao that the Party remains anxious to preserve. 78. Zhu Xueqin, “Cong wenhua geming.” In using zhengjiao heyi, Zhu also implies that Chinese Communist rule is akin to a theocracy. 79. All quotations from “Luodi: Dangdai fenxi zhexue zhongde yizhong shiyongzhuyi guandian” [Rorty: A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy], trans. Li Hong, at www.philosophyol.com/pol04/Article/ western/w_as/200407/194.html (last accessed June 20, 2006). Rorty’s essay appears in Mike Sandbothe and William Egginton, eds., The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 131–144. 80. Richard Rorty, “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of Literary Culture,” at www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/decline.htm (accessed February 20, 2005). 81. The notion of tongren as referring to “those who share our views” is most commonly traced to Liang Qichao’s popularization of this term in his Tan Sitong zhuan [A Biography of Tan Sitong], first published in the Qingyi bao, January 22, 1899. 82. Wang Dingding, “Ziyou—yiduan jiao ta shidide xushuo” [Freedom: A Down-to Earth Narrative], in Luo and Ni, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 2, 378–379. 83. Wang’s formulations reflect his familiarity with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx’s Capital, and Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Wang’s formulations are also resonant with Ludwig von Mises’s argument in Epistemological Problems of Economics (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960). 84. Wang Dingding, “Ziyou,” 382. 85. See Chen Pingyuan, “Xiandai Zhongguode shuxue wenti: yi ‘yinjing judian’ wei zhongxin” [The Narrative Style of Modern Chinese Scholarship: On “Quoting the Classics”], Wenxue pinglun 4 (2001): 23–33. Chen provides a critical survey of “hidden citations” as a frequently used rhetorical

Notes to Pages 227–230

86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91.

92.

93.

94.

95.

96. 97.

•

281

strategy within modern Sinophone academic prose that draws on the centuries-old practice of “emulating” a masterful style. Wang Dingding, “Ziyou,” 383. The resemblance of Wang’s formulation to Rousseau’s opening claim in The Social Contract, that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” is evident. The influence of Rousseau’s writings on twentieth-century Chinese thought was and remains significant, as can be seen in the frequent references to Rousseau in Chinese intellectual discourse since the 1980s. Wang Dingding, “Ziyou,” 383. The reference of “The names that can be so-named” is to Wang Bi’s (226–249) famous commentary on the first two lines of the Daoist classic Daode Jing. Derrida, Negotiations, 192, 189. Wang Dingding, “Ziyou,” 383–385. “The realm of freedom” continues to function as an authoritative category (fanchou) in the official discourse. Its significance as required knowledge for all graduate students can be demonstrated through a multiple-choice question, asking for the correct definition of this “category,” in a preparatory test paper for the 2004 National Master’s Course Entrance Examination (2004 quanguo shuoshi yanjiusheng ruxue kaoshi zhengzhi mingti yuce shijuan). The test questions appear at http://kaoyan.cer.net/article/ 20041207/3123686.shtml (accessed February 20, 2005). My thanks to David Cowhig for this information. See, for instance, Francis Fukuyama, “Has History Started Again,” in Policy (Winter 2002), at www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter02/polwin02–1.htm (accessed April 20, 2004). See, for instance, Liang Xiaomin, “Jingjixue sanwende chuntian,” Xueshu piping wang, at www.acritcism.com (posted November 22, 2001; accessed April 20, 2004). Quoted in Huang K’o-wu, “Liang Qichao and Immanuel Kant,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, trans. Minghui Hu and Joshua Fogel (Berkeley: China Research Monograph, University of California, 2004), 130, 136. Wang Hui, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang, vol. 1, 5. In this instance, Wang credits the earlier pan-Asian vision of Japanese scholars like Naito¯ Konan (1866–1934) for facilitating the narration of this “historical worldview” while distinguishing between his own preference for an account of Songera scholarship as constitutive of a noncapitalist protomodernity in Confucian thought and Naito¯’s argument that Song-era scholarship reflects a society in the process of transition to a capitalist mode of production (vol. 1, 66–67). See John Henderson, Scripture, Canon and Commentary (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Xu Youyu, Ziyoude yanshuo [Speaking Freely] (Changchun: Changchun chubanshe, 1999), 365.

282 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

110.

111.

112. 113.

•

Notes to Pages 231–238 Leys, The Angel and the Octopus, 16–17. Xu Youyu, Ziyoude yanshuo, 16. Chen Pingyuan, “Chaoyue guize,” 17. Axioms can also be formulated using three-character expressions. The San zi jing [Three-Character Classic], attributed to Wang Yinglin (1223– 1296), is the prime example of a Confucian pedagogical text composed entirely of three-character phrases to facilitate ease of memorization. Ri zhi lu (the title of Gu’s work) has also been popularized by the blogger Zhu Wei who uses it as the title of his weblog. Gu Yanwu’s Rizhi lu takes its title from The Analects (19.6). Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), 174. Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 152. Chen Pingyuan “Chaoyue guize,” 11. See Walter Kaufman, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 47. Quotes taken from The Gay Science and Williams’s gloss both appear in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 14–15. Whereas Williams reads the passage from Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” as evidence of the immaturity of his earlier writings (16–17), I argue that the passage is not “confused” (as Williams claims) but a polemical formulation that foregrounds the risks inherent in presupposing that language is a straightforward, transparent “medium” of truth. By refiguring truth as “coinage,” Nietzsche offers us the prospect of truth as exchange value, contingent on the authority of the formulations presumed to embody truth. I draw attention here to the very different projects of Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson to indicate that, in its present form, Sinophone critical discourse is as indifferent to Derrida’s deconstruction as it is to the precision of Donaldson’s analytic prose. Donaldson’s account of truth as a consequence of sentential relations is stated with eloquence in his posthumous publication, Truth and Predication. Karl Popper became influential through the mainland Chinese publication of The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1999, under the title Kaifang shehui ji qi diren, ed. Wang Dingding, trans. Lu Heng et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe, 1999). I draw here on Samuel Weber’s discussion of Whitehead (as quoted) in Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 32. Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004), 2–3, 41. Ye Xiushan, “Meiyou shishangde shidai?—lun ‘houxiandai’ sichao” [An Era without Its Own Fashion? On the “Postmodern” Trend], in Luo and

Notes to Pages 238–240

114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

•

283

Ni, eds., Jiushi niandai sixiang wenxuan, vol. 1, 166. First published in Dushu 2 (1994). Bauman, Europe, 42–44. Ye Xiushan, “Meiyou shishangde shidai?” 175. In making this claim, Ye ignores the historical displacement of Athenian democracy by the later period of Greek tyrants. Emphasis added. Tao Dongfeng, “Xiandai Zhongguode minzuzhuyi” [Modern Chinese Nationalism], Xueshu yuekan 6 (1994): 9. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77. As quoted in Bauman, Europe, 7. See also Zhang Dainian, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. Edmund Ryden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 367–387.

Glossary

aiguo ⠅೑ an min ᅝ⇥ an yin ᱫᓩ Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥 Baihua ⱑ䆱 bainian ⱒᑈ Ban Gu ⧁೎ banyong ᨀ⫼ bao min ֱ⇥ baorong tazhe, lixing xieshang ࣙᆍҪ㗙ˈ⧚ᗻणଚ baoshouzhuyi ֱᅜЏН beili ᙪ⾏ benti ᴀԧ bentuhua ᴀೳ࣪ benzhi ᴀ䋼 Bian Wu लᙳ biandi 䌀Ԣ biaoshuai zuoyong 㸼⥛԰⫼ biranxing ᖙ✊ᗻ biyaode, buke queshaode ᖙ㽕ⱘˈϡৃ㔎ᇥⱘ budu gushu ϡ䇏সк buzuhua 䚼ᮣ࣪ cai tong yu shan 䞛䪰Ѣቅ cai xin tong 䞛ᮄ䪰

canwu খᙳ chang duitaixi ଅᇍৄ៣ chayixing wenti Ꮒᓖᗻ䯂乬 Chen Duxiu 䰜⣀⾔ Chen Lai 䰜㦅 Chen Pingyuan 䰜ᑇॳ Chen Sihe 䰜ᗱ੠ Chen Xiaoming 䰜ᰧᯢ Chen Yinque 䰜ᆙᘾ Chen Yonggui 䰜∌䌉 Chen Yun 䰜ѥ Cheng Xiaonong ⿟ᰧ‫ݰ‬ chengqing ╘⏙ chengxuzhuyi ⿟ᑣЏН chensi ≝ᗱ chonggou 䞡ᵘ chongjian 䞡ᓎ chongman tongqingde lijie ‫ܙ‬⒵ৠᚙⱘ⧚㾷 chou laojiu 㟁㗕б chou min қ⇥ chuncui xueren 㒃㊍ᄺҎ cong dao bucong jun Ң䘧ϡҢ৯ Cui Zhiyuan የП‫ܗ‬ da luoshui gou ᠧ㨑∈⢫ da qihou ໻⇨‫׭‬

286

•

Glossary

da tong ໻ৠ da wo ໻៥ dabaihua ໻ⱑ䆱 Dai Jinhua ᠈䫺ढ Dai Qing ᠈᱈ dai sange biao ᠈ϝϾ㸼 Dai Zhen ᠈䳛 dailiren ҷ⧚Ҏ dang xun ‫ܮ‬䆁 dangde sixiang lilun ‫ⱘܮ‬ᗱᛇ⧚䆎 dao 䘧 dao tong 䘧㒳 daode zhuanzheng 䘧ᖋϧᬓ Dazhai ໻ᆼ de min ᕫ⇥ de yu wang quan ᕫ剐ᖬㄠ Deng Liqun 䙧࡯㕸 Deng Tuo 䙧ᢧ Deng Xiaoping 䙧ᇣᑇ dian ⚍ dianding ༴ᅮ Du Yaquan ᴰѮ⊝ duoyang tongyi ໮ḋ㒳ϔ duoyuanhua ໮‫࣪ܗ‬ dushuren 䇏кҎ fabao ⊩ᅱ Fan Zhongyan 㣗ӆ⏍ fanpan ডয fansi ডᗱ fazhi ⊩⊏ fen ߚ Feng Youlan ‫ރ‬ট݄ fengbi ᇕ䯁 fengfu Єᆠ fouren ৺䅸 fumu guan ⠊↡ᅬ gaizao womende xuexi ᬍ䗴៥Ӏⱘᄺд Gan Yang ⫬䰇 ganshang 䍊Ϟ ganxing ᛳᗻ ganxingde liliang ᛳᗻⱘ࡯䞣 Gao Like 催࡯‫ܟ‬ Ge Zhaoguang 㨯‫ܝܚ‬ geren ϾҎ

geren chongbai ϾҎዛᢰ geren ganshou ϾҎᛳফ geren yuedu ϾҎ䯙䇏 geti ganxing Ͼԧᛳᗻ gewu zhizhi Ḑ⠽㟈ⶹ gongyou guannian ᳝݀㾖ᗉ gu wei jin yong সЎҞ⫼ Gu Xiancheng 乒ᅾ៤ Gu Yanwu 乒♢℺ Gu Zhun 乒‫ޚ‬ guanhua ᅬ䆱 guifan 㾘㣗 guijian 䎾䇣 guiju 㾘ⶽ guo ೑ Guo Jian 䛁ᓎ Guo Moruo 䛁≿㢹 guocheng gongzheng 䖛⿟݀ℷ guojia ೑ᆊ guojiade fanrong fuqiang ೑ᆊⱘ㐕㤷ᆠᔎ guojiade yishixingtai ೑ᆊⱘᛣ䆚ᔶᗕ guoren ೑Ҏ guoxue ೑ᄺ guoyu ೑䇁 guren cai tong yu shan সҎ䞛䪰Ѣቅ guwen স᭛ Han Yu 䶽ᛜ Han Yuhai 䶽↧⍋ he ড় he er butong ੠㗠ϡৠ He Qing ⊇⏙ He Qinglian ԩ⏙⍳ He Xin ԩᮄ helixing ড়⧚ᗻ hengpi ῾ᡍ hexie shehui ੠䇤⼒Ӯ hongyang minzu ᓬᡀ⇥ᮣ houxiandai lilun ৢ⦄ҷ⧚䆎 houxue ৢᄺ Hu Jintao 㚵䫺⍯ Hu Shi 㚵䗖 Hua Guofeng ढ೑䫟

Glossary huanjie ⦃㡖 huigui ಲᔦ huiwei ಲੇ huoshengsheng ⌏⫳⫳ jia ᆊ jiang lishi lishihua ᇚग़৆ग़৆࣪ Jiang Qing 㩟ᑚ Jiang Tingfu 㩟ᓋ哏 Jiang Zemin ∳⋑⇥ jianshide xianshi jichu മᅲⱘ⦄ᅲ෎⸔ jianzheng 䇣䆸 jiao ta shi di 㛮䏣ᅲഄ jiaotiao ᬭᴵ jiaowang lixing Ѹᕔ⧚ᗻ jie gui ᥹䔼 jieduan 䰊↉ jiegouzhuyi 㾷ᵘЏН jieguo gongzheng 㒧ᵰ݀ℷ jiehe 㒧ড় Jin Guantao 䞥㾖⍯ jingshen ziyuan ㊒⼲䌘⑤ jingshende lianyu ㊒⼲ⱘ⚐⣅ jingying shounan ㊒㣅ফ䲒 jingyingzhuyi ㊒㣅ЏН jinren mai jiu qian ҞҎфᮻ䪅 jiquan 䲚ᴗ jishu ᡔᴃ jitizhuyi 䲚ԧЏН jiu xue ᮻᄺ jun ৯ jutide shizhi lixing shuiping ‫݋‬ԧⱘᅲ䋼⧚ᗻ∈ᑇ kaozheng 㗗䆕 ke ming zhi ming ৃৡПৡ kunjing ೄ๗ Lao She 㗕㟡 lei jian ⊾䇣 Lei Yi 䳋乤 lengbingbingde lixing ‫⧚ⱘބބދ‬ᗻ li ⼐ Li Changchun ᴢ䭓᯹ li de, li gong, li yan ゟᖋゟࡳゟ㿔 Li Jie ᴢᵄ Li Shenzhi ᴢᜢП

•

287

Li Tuo ᴢ䰔 Li Yang ᴢᴼ Li Zehou ᴢ⋑८ Liang Qichao ṕਃ䍙 Liang Shuming ṕ┅⑳ liangfen fa ϸߚ⊩ liangzhi 㡃ⶹ lijie zhi tongqing, fangke xia bi ⧚㾷Пৠᚙˈᮍৃϟヨ lilai zaodao fouding ग़ᴹ䙁ࠄ৺ᅮ lilun sikaode xitong ⧚䆎ᗱ㗗ⱘ㋏ lilun zijue ⧚䆎㞾㾝 linghunde chongtu, linghunde gongzhen ♉儖ⱘ‫ކ‬さˈ ♉儖ⱘ݅ᤃ lishi bentilun ग़৆ᴀԧ䆎 lishi xingcheng ग़৆㸠⿟ lishi yujing ग़৆䇁๗ Liu Dong ߬ϰ Liu Huaiyu ߬ᗔ⥝ Liu Junning ߬‫ݯ‬ᅕ Liu Kang ߬ᒋ Liu Qingfeng ߬䴦ዄ liu si ݁ಯ Liu Xiaobo ߬ᰧ⊶ Liu Xiaofeng xueshu jituan ߬ᇣᵿᄺᴃ䲚ಶ lixing fenxi ⧚ᗻߚᵤ lixingde fating ⧚ᗻⱘ⊩ᒁ lixingde jiaoji ⧚ᗻⱘ⢵䅵 Lu Liuliang ৩⬭㡃 Lu Xun 剕䖙 lun liu jia yaozhi 䆎݁ᆊ㽕ᮼ Luo Gang 㔫‫ݜ‬ mai jiu qian фᮻ䪅 Makesi rendaozhuyi 偀‫ܟ‬ᗱҎ䘧ЏН Makesizhuyi xuexi 偀‫ܟ‬ᗱЏНᄺд Mao cheng ji ⣿ජ䆄 Mao Dun ⶯Ⳓ Mao Zedong ↯⋑ϰ meiyou daowei ≵᳝ࠄԡ menglongde bawo ᳺ㚻ⱘᡞᦵ min ⇥ minben ⇥ᴀ

288

•

Glossary

mingxiang ‫ݹ‬ᛇ minsheng ⇥⫳ mulu Ⳃᔩ nalaizhuyi ᣓᴹЏН nazhong ganwu 䙷⾡ᛳᙳ neixin ‫ݙ‬ᖗ nongchao pai ᓘ╂⌒ ouranxing ‫✊ي‬ᗻ pai ⌒ paiwai ᥦ໪ Peng Zhen ᕁⳳ ping tianxia ᑇ໽ϟ pingpande taidu 䆘߸ⱘᗕᑺ pipan ᡍ߸ pubian yiyi ᱂֓ᛣН qi jia 唤ᆊ Qian Liqun 䪅⧚㕸 Qian Mu 䪅〚 Qian Xuantong 䪅⥘ৠ qiangda yiju, zuihou yiju ᔎ໻ձ᥂ˈ᳔ৢձ᥂ qiangdao luoji ᔎⲫ䘏䕥 qidian gongzheng 䍋⚍݀ℷ Qin Hui ⾺ᰪ qinggan ᚙᛳ qingyou duzhong ᚙ᳝⣀䩳 qinzheng ҆䆕 qu xin wu Yang 䍟ᮄࡵ⋟ quanmian shehuizhuyi ܼ䴶⼒ӮЏН queyi 㔎Н qushe প㟡 quwei 䍷ੇ quxiao প⍜ re ⛁ ren ҕ Ren Jiantao ӏࠥ⍯ rendaozhuyi Ҏ䘧ЏН rende benzhi liliang Ҏⱘᴀ䋼࡯䞣 renshi guocheng 䅸䆚䖛⿟ renwen Ҏ᭛ renwen Aoyunhui Ҏ᭛༹䖤Ӯ renwen jingshen Ҏ᭛㊒⼲ renyi wei ti, zonghe wei yong ҕНЎԧˈ㓐ড়Ў⫼

renzhi Ҏ⊏ ronghe 㵡ড় san buxiu ϝϡᴑ sange daibiao ϝϾҷ㸼 sangshi ϻ༅ sanwen ᬷ᭛ shamohua ≭⓴࣪ Shan Shilian ऩϪ㘨 shangyi minzhu ଚ䆂⇥Џ Shao Yanxiang 䚉➩⼹ shehui benzhi ⼒Ӯᴀ䋼 shehui shijian ⼒Ӯᅲ䏉 sheng yu youhuan si yu anle ⫳Ѣᖻᙷ⅏ѢᅝФ shenghua छढ shi ຿ Shi Jian ᯊ䡈 shi yi Ꮬ་ shi yu ༅䇁 shidaifu ຿໻໿ shigan ᅲᛳ shijian ᯊ䯈 shijian lixing ᅲ䏉⧚ᗻ shinian haojie कᑈ⌽ࡿ shiren ϪҎ shishi qiu shi ᅲџ∖ᰃ shiyongde jingshen ᅲ⫼ⱘ㊒⼲ shizhixingde zhengzhilishi neihan ᅲ䋼ᗻⱘᬓ⊏ग़৆‫⎉ݙ‬ shouduan ᠟↉ shu ᴃ Āshuāde fenlei “к” ⱘߚ㉏ shuligan ⭣⾏ᛳ Shuowen jiezi 䇈᭛㾷ᄫ sichao ᗱ╂ sige xiandaihua ಯϾ⦄ҷ࣪ siwei ᗱ㓈 sixiang ᗱᛇ sixiang wenhua jichu ᗱᛇ᭛࣪෎⸔ sizi ju ಯᄫহ taidu ᗕᑺ Tang Yijie ∸ϔҟ tansuo ᥶㋶ Tao Dongfeng 䱊ϰ亢 tian ren heyi ໽Ҏড়ϔ

Glossary tian ren xiangfen ໽ҎⳌߚ tianli ໽⧚ tianxia ໽ϟ tianxia xingwangde youhuan yishi ໽ϟ݈ѵⱘᖻᙷᛣ䆚 tiaozhan ᣥ៬ tiwai hua 乬໪䆱 tiyan ԧ偠 Tong Shijun スϪ֞ tongqing ৠᚙ tongren ৠҎ, ৠҕ tongxiang nuyizhi lu 䗮৥཈ᕍП䏃 tui chen chu xin ᥼䰜ߎᮄ Wang Dingding ∾ϕϕ Wang Hui ∾ᰪ Wang Li ⥟࡯ Wang Ruoshui ⥟㢹∈ Wang Shaoguang ⥟㒡‫ܝ‬ Wang Shuo ⥟᳨ Wang Sirui ⥟ᗱⵓ Wang Xiaofeng ⥟ᰧዄ Wang Xiaoming ⥟ᰧᯢ Wang Yichuan ⥟ϔᎱ Wang Yuanhua ⥟‫࣪ܗ‬ Wang Zhiquan ⥟ᖫ⊝ wangguo ѵ೑ wangsheng shengmingli ᯎⲯ⫳ੑ࡯ wei min Ў⇥ wen ᭛ wen dao 䯏䘧 wen dao you xianhou, shuye you zhuangong 䯏䘧᳝‫ˈৢܜ‬ ᴃϮ᳝ϧᬏ Wen Jiaobao ⏽ᆊᅱ “wenge” ᭛䴽 wenhua datong ᭛࣪໻ৠ wenhua suzhi ᭛࣪㋴䋼 wenhuade Āzhengtixingā ᭛࣪ⱘĀᭈԧᗻā wenming fuxing ᭛ᯢ໡݈ wenmingde chongtu ᭛ᯢⱘ‫ކ‬さ wenyan ᭛㿔 women dangde sixiang luxian ៥Ӏ‫ⱘܮ‬ᗱᛇ䏃㒓

•

289

women renlei tongban ៥ӀҎ㉏ৠԈ Wu Guanjun ਈ‫ݯݴ‬ Wu Guoguang ਈ೑‫ܝ‬ Wu Jiaxiang ਈ【⼹ Wu Si ਈᗱ Wu Si chuantong pai ѨಯӴ㒳⌒ Wu Zhihui ਈ⿮ᰪ Wu Zhongmin ਈᖴ⇥ Wuÿer Kaixi ਒ᇨᓔᏠ wuguo feiqian, weihai shenlie 䇃೑ࣾ⌙ˈॅᆇ⫮⚜ wushi ࡵᅲ wusi ᮴⾕ xia hai ϟ⍋ xian tianxiazhi you er you, hou tianxiazhi le er le ‫ܜ‬໽ϟПᖻ㗠ᖻˈ ৢ໽ϟПФ㗠Ф xiang qian kan ৥ࠡⳟ/৥䪅ⳟ xiangwai tansuo ৥໪᥶㋶ xiangxiang ᛇ䈵 xianzai ᰒ೼ Xiao Gongqin 㧻ࡳ⾺ xiao wo ᇣ៥ xiayi ⣁Н Xifang fada guojiade zhidu 㽓ᮍথ䖒೑ᆊⱘࠊᑺ Xifang lilun 㽓ᮍ⧚䆎 xin ᖗ xin xue ᮄᄺ xin zhi ᮄⶹ xinde zhishi ᮄⱘⶹ䆚 xingshi ᔶᓣ xintai ᖗᗕ xiu qi zhi ping ׂ唤⊏ᑇ xiu shen ׂ䑿 Xu Ben ᕤ䌆 Xu Jilin 䆌㑾䳪 Xu Shen 䆌ᜢ Xu Youyu ᕤট⏨ xuanze 䗝ᢽ xueÿan ᄺḜ xueli ᄺ⧚ xueren ᄺҎ

290

•

Glossary

xueshu ᄺᴃ xueshu guifan ᄺᴃ㾘㣗 xuetong ᄺ㒳 xuewen ᄺ䯂 xueyuan ziyou pai ᄺ䰶㞾⬅⌒ xuezhe ᄺ㗙 Yan Jiayan Ϲᆊ♢ Yang Fan ᴼᏚ yang min ‫⇥ݏ‬ Yang wei Zhong yong ⋟ЎЁ⫼ yangqi ᡀᓗ Yangren ⋟Ҏ Yao Yang ྮ⋟ Ye Xiushan ৊⾔ቅ yi li sha ren ҹ⧚ᴔҎ yi qimeng wei jiren ҹਃ㩭ЎᏅӏ yi tianxia wei jiren ҹ໽ϟЎᏅӏ yichang ᓖᐌ yin hun 䰈儖 yingxiang ᕅડ yinzai 䰈೼ yishixingtaihuade qimeng xintai ᛣ䆚ᔶᗕ࣪ⱘਃ㩭ᖗᗕ yitao lishu ϔ༫⧚䗄 yitu lunli ᛣ೒Ӻ⧚ yizhong lishi yanxu ϔ⾡ग़৆ᓊ㓁 yizhong wenming chuangzao ϔ⾡᭛ᯢ߯䗴 you chouxiang shangshengdao juti ⬅ᢑ䈵Ϟछࠄ‫݋‬ԧ youhuan yishi ᖻᙷᛣ䆚 youji jiehe ᳝ᴎ㒧ড় Yu Jie ԭᵄ Yu Zhiping ԭ⊏ᑇ Yuan Hongdao 㹕ᅣ䘧 Yuan Ming Yuan ೚ᯢು yuan Xi fa ru Zhong xue ᧈ㽓⊩ܹЁᄺ yuan Xi ru Zhong ᧈ㽓ܹЁ Yue Daiyun Ф咯ѥ Yue Fei ኇ亲 yuedu zhengzhixue 䯙䇏ᬓ⊏ᄺ yujing 䇁๗ yuyan xingwei 䇁㿔㸠Ў zairenshi ‫ݡ‬䅸䆚

zaoshude ren ᮽ❳ⱘҎ zawen ᴖ᭛ zenyang zuo ᗢḋ‫خ‬ zhaji ᴁ䆄 zhaji cezi ᴁ䆄‫ݠ‬ᄤ Zhang Fa ᓴ⊩ Zhang Longxi ᓴ䱚⑾ Zhang Rulun ᓴ∱Ӻ Zhang Xudong ᓴᯁϰ Zhang Xuecheng ゴᄺ䆮 Zhang Yiwu ᓴ乤℺ Zhao Yiheng 䍉↙㸵 zhemo ᡬ⺼ Zheng Min 䚥ᬣ zheng ming ℷৡ zheng tong ᬓ㒳 zhenghou ᕕ‫׭‬ zhengjiao heyi ᬓᬭড়ϔ zhengquede sixiang ℷ⹂ⱘᗱᛇ zhengti yu geti ᭈԧϢϾԧ zhengzhi shicong pai ᬓ⊏աҢ⌒ zhenqing shigan ⳳᚙᅲᛳ zhenzheng ⳳℷ zhenzheng zhuti ⳳℷЏԧ zhenzhengde gexing ziyou ⳳℷⱘϾᗻ㞾⬅ zhi guo ⊏೑ zhidu baiwujiao ࠊᑺᢰ⠽ᬭ zhidu chuangxin ࠊᑺ߯ᮄ zhidu yangban ࠊᑺḋᵓ zhiguande ganjue Ⳉ㾖ⱘᛳ㾝 zhiming daji 㟈ੑᠧߏ zhishifenzi ⶹ䆚ߚᄤ zhixing ⶹᗻ Zhong xue wei ti, Xi xue wei yong ЁᄺЎԧ㽓ᄺЎ⫼ Zhongguo dangdai sixiang Ё೑ᔧҷᗱᛇ Zhongguo wenhua shuyuan Ё೑᭛࣪к䰶 Zhongguo wenti Ё೑䯂乬 Zhongguo xiandaixing Ё೑⦄ҷᗻ Zhongguo zuihou yige shidaifu Ё೑᳔ৢϔϾ຿໻໿

Glossary Zhongguode Heigeÿerzhuyi Ё೑ⱘ咥ḐᇨЏН Zhonghuaxing Ёढᗻ zhongji mudi 㒜ᵕⳂⱘ Zhou Enlai ਼ᘽᴹ Zhou Yang ਼ᡀ zhouxin yiyi 䕈ᖗᛣН Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ Zhu Xueqin ᴅᄺࢸ zhu, zhuan, jieshuo ⊼,Ӵ,㾷䇈 zhua yaohai ᡧ㽕ᆇ zhuangong ϧᬏ zhuangtai ⢊ᗕ zhudong Џࡼ

•

291

zhuguan yizhilun Џ㾖ᛣᖫ䆎 zhuti Џԧ zhutijian Џԧ䯈 zhutixing Џԧᗻ zhuyi ЏН ziran zhuangtai 㞾✊⢊ᗕ Āzirandeā fanchou “㞾✊ⱘ” 㣗⭈ ziwo chuangzao 㞾៥߯䗴 ziyou 㞾⬅ ziyou wangguo 㞾⬅⥟೑ ziyoude yiwu suoyou 㞾⬅ᕫϔ᮴᠔᳝ zuguo ⼪೑ zuode haobuhao ‫خ‬ᕫདϡད

Index

Academic marketplace, 16 Academic norms (xueshuguifan), 11, 116, 237 Academics/scholars (xuezhe, xueren), 65, 76; based overseas, 98; mainland-born vs. mainland-based, 72–74, 76 Academic standardization (xueshu guifanhua), 109 Academic/scholarly tradition (xuetong), 128, 131. See also Scholarship Academic writing, 64–65, 112–113 Academy of Chinese Culture, 123, 132–133 Acting on the people’s behalf (wei min), 137, 138; as minben, 132, 138 Agents (dailiren): overseas-trained academics as, 76 Altruism: Chinese critical inquiry and, 59–72; complete (wusi), 68, 192; rhetoric of, 69; in West, 69–70 An min (pacifying the people). See Pacifying the people (an min) Anagnost, Ann, 17 Analects, The (Confucius), 118, 232, 233 Ancients extracting copper from the mountain (guren cai tong yu shan), 232 Anglophone scholarship, 4, 5, 26, 232–233, 235; critiques of Eurocentrism in, 138–139; curriculum of, 44; Hegel and, 159–160; mastery vs. openness in, 39; new vocabularies and, 29–30; nonnationalistic character of, 32; postmodern, 171;; “theory” in,

106–108; translated documents and, 76; worrying about the foreign and, 31–49. See also EuroAmerican critical inquiry; Sinophone scholarship; Western thought Antiforeign (paiwai) sentiment, 45–46 Anyin (hidden citations). See Hidden citations (anyin) Appropriatism (nalaizhuyi), 24–25, 26, 31,49, 55, 94 Argumentation: Chen Pingyuan on, 216; process of, 115. See also specific subjects Attitude (taidu); of intellectuals,191,194; 195-198, 202, 214; Wang Hui on, 197–198 Authoritarianism: Chinese critical inquiry about, 2; vs. democracy, 202; as maternal abuse, 210–211; in 1990s, 214; new authoritarianism, 123; Party theory and, 115–116 Autonomy, 50, 67; Li Zehou and Shan Shilian on, 152; minben and, 132; morality and, 54–55 Axioms, 61, 71, 221–224; on xiu qi zhi ping, 58, 206 Baihua (vernacular). See Vernacular (baihua) Bainian (centennial). See Centennial (bainian) assessment Ba Jin, 59 Bakken, Børge, 54 Balibar, Étienne, 237–238 Banerjee, R., 37

294

•

Index

Bao min (protecting the people). See Protecting the people (bao min) Baoshouzhuyi (conservatism). See Conservatism (baoshouzhuyi) Barmé, Geremie, 13, 56, 93, 213 Bauman, Zygmunt, 237–238 Beijing dialect: guoyu and, 5 Beijing Man in New York, A, 93 Beili (deviations). See Deviations (beili) Being: Anglophones on, 31–32 Benevolence (ren), 131 Benti (thing in itself). See Thing in itself (benti) Bentuhua (indigenization). See Indigenization (bentuhua) Benzhi (essential nature). See Essential nature (benzhi) Bian Wu (pseud. of Qin Hui), 76 Biaoshuai zuoyong (exemplarity). See Exemplarity (biaoshuai zuoyong) Bibing (faults/shortcomings). See Faults/ shortcomings (bibing) Bibliographies (mulu), 119 Binary oppositions, 150 Biranxing (inevitability). See Inevitability (biranxing) Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 36, 106, 126 Burden of empire/nation (tianxia), 19 Cai xin tong (extracting new copper). See Extracting new copper (cai xin tong) Canwu (contemplative understanding). See Contemplative understanding (canwu) Capitalism, 78, 80, 172, 181 Caputo, John, 50–51, 187 Catastrophic decade (shinian haojie), 113 Causal patterns: knowability of, 27 Censorship, 170; of Chinese Internet uses, 8; Sinophone scholarship and, 33–34 Centennial (bainian) assessment, 55 Centralism (jiquan), 137 Certainty: refiguring of, 224–241 Certeau, Michel de, 147 Chen Duxiu, 54, 211–212 Chen Lai, 18–19, 222 Chen Pingyuan, 122, 127, 189–190, 191, 205, 215–217, 218, 223–224, 231–232, 233 Chen Sihe, 87–89 Chen Xiaoming, 95 Chen Yinque, 54, 67, 134, 216 Chen Yonggui, 76 Chen Yun, 162

Cheng Xiaonong, 125 Chensi (reflection). See Reflection (chensi) Chengxuzhuyi (proceduralism). See Proceduralism (chengxuzhuyi) Cheung Kong-Reading awards, 64–65 China: attainment of perfection in, 47; authentic representations of, 40–41; Chinese writer’s obsession with, 8–9; East and, 25; extension of influence through “soft power,” 44; I (we) as, 103–104; perfection of vs. catching up with West, 35; public culture and global trends, 64; versions of culture of, 41; Western intellectual parity with, 34; worrying about perfection of, 18–31 China Can Say No, 45, 46 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 66 Chinese Communist Party: Chinese intellectuals and, 33; Chineseness of Party theory, 164; devotion to goals of, 69; dialectic and, 147, 148–149; on facts and truth, 163; Habermas and, 181; language of, 186; Mao and, 114, 169; “seeking truth from facts” as motto of, 149–188; theory of, 169–170. See also Ideolanguage; entries under Party; Seeking truth from facts (shishi qiu shi) Chinese critical inquiry. See Critical inquiry Chinese Hegelianism (Zhongguode Heige’erzhuyi), 153, 155, 156–157, 160, 166, 170, 184. See also Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Chinese intellectuals, 14, 62. See also Critical inquiry; Intellectual inquiry; specific thinkers Chinese knowledge as foundation, Western knowledge for practical application (Zhong xue wei ti, Xi xue wei yong), 222 “Chinese Literary Criticism in the 1990s” (Zhao Yiheng and Xu Ben), 96–97 Chinese modernity (Zhongguo xiandaixing). See Modernity. Chinese problems (Zhong-guo wenti), 7, 104 Chinese scholarship: present-day needs of, 36; restoration to global relevance, 33. See also Anglophone scholarship; Critical inquiry; Intellectual inquiry; Sinophone scholarship Chinese thought: ethos of communal or collective responsibility in, 61; foundation of, 41; genuine tradition of,

Index 144–145; semiclassical idiom of, 23. See also Chinese scholarship; Critical inquiry; Intellectual inquiry Chongjian or chonggou (reconstruction). See Reconstruction (chongjian or chonggou) Chongman tongqingde lijie (understanding suffused with sympathy). See Understanding suffused with sympathy (chongman tongqingde lijie) Chou laojiu (stinking ninth). See Stinking ninth (chou laojiu) Chuantong (tradition). See Tradition (chuantong) Ci, Jiwei, 61–62, 68, 69, 192 Citizens: expanding rights of, 20 Civilization: Chinese history as, 238; promotion of Chinese, 44–45, 109, 145 “Clash of civilizations” thesis (wenmingde chongtu), 34, 241 Classical Chinese language, 222, 234; culture transmitted by, 52–53; semiclassical idiom, 23; vernacular (baihua) and, 50, 52, 56; guwen as, 5; wenyan as, 5, 6–7 Classification: gewu zhizhi as, 127. See also Taxonomy Cognition: analytical mode of, 115 Cohen, Paul, 37 Collectivism, 61, 200 Command economy: Maoist, 75 Commercialism, 61 Common language: absence of, 66–67 Communicative action: Tong and Habermas on, 179–180 Communicative rationality (jiaowang lixing), 177, 181 Comprehensive socialism (quanmian shehuizhuyi), 81 Conceptual terms, 120; in Sinophone critical discourse, 5 Confucianism, 5, 24, 41; in Asian media, 133; classification, naming, and, 9–10; Ge Zhaoguang and, 116–118; humanist aspect of, 127–128, 130–131; on intellectuals, 102; mandate to think and write in service of China, 19–20; and May Fourth legacy, 200–201; Mencius and, 11, 18; moral authority of, 88–89; nostalgia for, 138; poetics of selfcultivation in, 191; promotion outside mainland China, 133; rule of virtue and rationalism in, 178; as scholarship vs.

•

295

political and moral orthodoxy, 131; in Sinophone scholarship, 71, 206–207; taxonomy in, 118–119, 122–123; in traditional culture, 9; values grounding moral sensibilities, 19; youhuan and, 16–17; Zhu Xueqin on, 204 Confucian scholar-official (shidaifu), 14; Li Shenzhi as, 35 Confucius Institute, 44 Cong dao bucong jun (dao vs. sovereign). See Dao vs. sovereign (cong dao bucong jun) Conscience (liangzhi), 35 Conservatism (baoshouzhuyi), 10, 127; vs. radicalism, 55; Sinophone use of term, 127–129; in use of avant-garde theories, 98 Contemplative understanding (canwu), 26 Contingency (ouranxing), 149, 150, 155–156, 160 Convergence, 156 Cooperatives: shareholding cooperative system and, 74 Correct ideas (zhengquede sixiang), 71 Corruption, 61–62, 77, 84 Country. See Nation and National entries Court of Reason (lixingde fating), 198–199, 202 Crisis mentality (youhuan yishi), 1, 5, 15, 16, 17, 20, 59 Critical attitude (pingpande taidu), 196 Critical discourse: reason in, 198 Critical inquiry, 7; to advance culture, 11; affirming moral emotions in, 206–217; and altruism, 59–72; Chinese compared with EuroAmerican, 2–3, 236–237; Chinese intellectuals on, 68; Chinese obsession with China in, 9; contemporary Chinese, 2; contributors to, 2; on Internet, 7–8; as masterful gaze, 167; moral emotion in, 190–191; 1990s vs. 1980s, 76; and national culture in China, 43; as nonnationalistic EuroAmerican inquiry, 17; Party theory and, 10; post-Maoist, 1; in print journals, 96; redemption and, 21; reflecting line between safety and punishment, 4; as selfless act, 85; Sinophone, 69; use of term, 3, 14; as vehicle for reform, 7; zest and flavor in, 217–221. See also Anglophone scholarship; EuroAmerican critical inquiry; Sinophone scholarship

296

•

Index

Critical legal studies, 73, 74 Criticism: publishing of, 64–65 Critique (Kritik), 194 Critique (pipan), 14, 111 Cui Zhiyuan, 72–76, 102 Cultivating the people (yang min), 137 Cultural authority: in 1980s, 92–93 Cultural autonomy: 34; Zhang Yiwu on, 92 Cultural chauvinism, 45–46 Cultural complementarity, 43–44 Cultural conservation: among Chinese intellectuals, 206–207 Cultural conservatism, 128 Cultural determinism, 206, 224 Cultural Fever, 21, 73, 110, 123, 132 Cultural integrity: advocacy of, 78; in China, 237; search for, 127–145; valorization of, 129 Cultural logic: of Late Capitalism, 173 Cultural loss, 43, 87 Cultural pluralism, 98, 177 Cultural reform: critical inquiry as vehicle for, 7 Cultural Revolution (wenge), 113–114, 163, 204 Cultural unity (wenhua datong), 38 Culture: Chinese critical inquiry and, 11; deviations from Chinese, 239; essential Chinese, 20, 42–43; global trends and, 64; identity of, 42; mass vs. elite, 95; May Fourth movement and, 203–204; as source of China’s problems, 203; traditional vs. Western-style, 204; transmitted by vernacular or classical Chinese, 52–53 Culture: China and the World book series, 123 Cunning of Reason (lixingde jiaoji), 80–81, 152–153, 183–184 Dabaihua (plainspeak). See Plainspeak (dabaihua) Da qihou (significant climate). See Significant climate (da qihou) Da tong (greater unity). See Greater unity (da tong) Da wo (Self). See Greater self (da wo); Self (da wo) Dai Jinhua, 95, 171 Dailiren (agents). See Agents (dailiren) Dai Qing, 71, 123 Dai Zhen, 119

Dangde sixiang lilun (party theory). See Party theory (dangde sixiang lilun) Dang xun (party code or motto). See Party code or motto (dang xun) Dao (way or path). See Way or Path (dao) Daode zhuanzheng (regime of virtue). See Regime of virtue (daode zhuanzheng) Daotong (moral orthodoxy). See Moral orthodoxy (daotong) Dao vs. sovereign (cong dao bucong jun), 132 Dark spirits (yin hun), 190 Dazhai experiment, 76 Dead Fire Rekindled (Wang Hui), 221 Debate: vituperative nature of, 10, 84 Declamatory style, 212–213, 214–215 Deconstruction (jiegou), 236; in Sinophone discourse, 22 Deconstructionism (jiegouzhuyi), 22, 29, 228; as universal law, 23; Zheng Min on, 22 Deliberative democracy (shangyi minzhu): Habermas and, 178 De min (gaining the people’s hearts). see Gaining the people’s hearts (de min) Democracy, 81, 159, 226; vs. authoritarian rule, 202; deliberative, 178; Wang Hui on, 76 Deng Liqun, 166 Deng Tuo, 19 Deng Xiaoping, 73, 113, 114, 147, 161, 164, 168, 169; intellectuals under, 167–168; Singapore and, 133–134 Deng Xiaoping Theory, 146, 186 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 106, 109; academic judgment and, 3–4; on deconstruction, 22, 228; on democracy and justice, 84; on faith, 140–141; on hospitality, 48–49; on identity, 42; on language, 56; self-reflexive style of, 21–22; on writing, 28 Despotism, 176 Determinism, 155, 206 Deviance: in Maoist discourse, 168 Deviations (beili), 239 Devotion to Party goals: as complete altruism (wusi), 69 Dialectic, 146–147, 148–149; as law of human social development, 151; Marxist, 173; reasoning with(in) an ideolanguage and, 166–188; rectifying, 149–160; “Seeking Truth from Facts” as, 160–166

Index Dialectical materialism: “seeking truth from facts” and, 162, 163–164 Dialects, 5; Cantonese, 7 Dianding (sedimentation). See Sedimentation (dianding) Difference, 38 Direct experience (qinzheng), 26 Discursive realm (yujing), 32, 130, 180; as historical context, 80, 110; theory and, 110–118 Disposition (xintai), 191. See also Attitude Diverse unity (duoyang tongyi), 156, 185, 187 Division of heaven and humanity (tian ren xiangfen), 25 Doctrinalism, 75 Dogmatic (jiaotiao), 113 Donglin scholarship, 19 Down-to-earth narrative, 228, 229 Dreams of the present (Lu Xun), 53–54 Duoyang tongyi (diverse unity). See Diverse unity (duoyang tongyi) Duoyuanhua (pluralize). See Pluralize (duoyuanhua) Dushuren (scholars). See Scholars (dushuren) Du Yaquan, 200–201, 207 East: West and, 25 East Asia: Chinese civilization and, 44; common culture of, 25 Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang) (journal), 200–201 East-West cultural complementarity, 34 Economic liberalization, 103 Economy: Maoist, 75 Effective knowledge: Whitehead on, 236–237 Egalitarianism: Western, 59 Elite culture: defense of, 98; vs. mass culture, 95 Elite victimage (jingying shounan), 217 Elitism (jingyingzhuyi): guiding role of, 97–98 Emotion: freeing, 209; moral, in critical inquiry, 206–217; as epistemology, 240 Empathy. See Genuine feeling; Sympathy and empathy Empire: as “all under Heaven” (tianxia) and nation, 18–19; collapse of (wangguo), 17 Empiricism, 157, 158, 181; as knowledge (tiyan), 117

•

297

Enabling the nation to forge ahead (hongyang minzu), 109 End-state [final] justice (jieguo gongzheng), 86 Engels, Frederick, 163, 164 Enlightenment, 202 Enlightenment as personal responsibility (yi qimeng wei jiren), 230 Epstein, Mikhail, 148, 168–169 Equality: in policy reform and legislation, 77 Essay (sanwen), 227 Essential nature (benzhi), 137 Essentialism, 30 Establishing order everywhere (ping tianxia), 85 Establishing virtue, deeds, and words (li de, li gong, li yan), 231 Ethical norms, 187–188 Ethics: 30; highest, 157, 180; intentional, 201 Ethnicity, 55 EuroAmerican critical inquiry: Chinese critical inquiry compared with, 2–3, 9, 12, 17, 31; Chinese self-reflection influenced by, 1; cultural differences and, 38–39; on institutional models, 74; linguistic turn and, 238; Nietzschean will to truth and, 235–236; nonnationalistic character of, 32; overseas-trained academics as agents of, 76; self-reflexive inquiry in, 84, 235–236; Sinophone coinages and, 37; theorists of, 106–109; younger Chinese intellectuals and, 35. See also Anglophone scholarship EuroAmerican theory: Chinese uses of, 144 Eurocentrism, 38, 43, 75; of May Fourth era, 192 Europeanization, 87 Evidential (kaozheng) scholars, 119 Exemplarity (biaoshuai zuoyong), 35 Extracting new copper (cai xin tong), 232, 234 Exuberant life force (wangsheng shengmingli), 145 Fabao (“magic weapon”). See Magic weapon (fabao) Faction (pai), 72 Factionalism, 9; intellectual, 59 Facts (shishi), 162; Party on, 163; reliance on, 83–84

298

•

Index

Fairness (gongping): vs. justice, 102 Faith: Derrida on, 140–141 Family/home (jia): nation and, 20-21, 58, 59, 60, 204-206 Fan Zhongyan, 17 Fansi (self-reflection). See Self-reflection (fansi) Father-mother-official (fumu guan), 71 Faults/shortcomings (bibing), 208 Fazhi (rule of law). See Rule of law (fazhi) Feeling: valorization of, 208–209. See also Emotion; Immediate feeling; Genuine feeling; Sympathy and empathy Fei tong (scrap copper). See Scrap copper (fei tong) Fellow humans (tongren), 225 Felt truth, 213 Feng Youlan, 132 Fengbi (isolationist) sentiment. See Isolationist (fengbi) sentiment Fetishization of institutions (zhidu baiwujiao), 73, 74 Feuilleton (zawen), 227 Feyerabend, Paul, 111 “Fideist” intellectuals, 124–125 Filial love: May Fourth individualism as, 210–211 Fine, Arthur, 224–225 Fish, Stanley, 152 Foreigners: hospitality to, 48 Foreign ideas, 86–87, 189–190; ambivalence toward, 56–57; appropriatism and, 25; Chinese intellectuals on, 9, 42–43, 57; critical inquiry as response to, 18; role in improving Chinese intellectual discourse, 20; Sinophone ambivalence toward, 49–57; Sinophone critical discourse and, 31–49 Foreign works: translations of, 76 Foucault, Michel, 90, 95, 101, 106, 119 Fouilée, Alfred, 229 Four-character phrases (sizi ju), 221, 223–224, 232 “Four Little Dragons,” 133 Four Modernizations (sige xiandaihua), 114 Frankfurt School, 181–182 Freedom: individual, 151–152; justice and, 86; of market economy, 226; third way, 225–226; as ultimate end, 157; universalization of, 226; Wang Dinging on, 228 Frontiers (journal), 77

Fukuyama, Francis, 160, 229 Fumu guan (father-mother-official). See Father-mother-official (fumu guan) Gadamer, Hans-George, 240 Gaining the people’s hearts (de min), 137 Gaizao (reform). See Reform (gaizao) Gan Yang, 72, 143 Ganxing (sense-perception). See Senseperception (ganxing) Ganxingde liliang (perceptual force). See Perceptual force (ganxingde liliang) Gao Like, 130 Gate of darkness: holding open, 213 Ge Zhaoguang, 116–119, 127 Genres of writing (“shu” de fenlei), 119 Gentleman (junzi): in The Analects, 118 Genuine feeling (shigan), 216; (zhenqing shigan), 104 Genuine historicization (zhenzhengde lishihua), 39, 41 Genuine individual freedom (zhenzhengde gexing ziyou), 151 Genuinely Chinese experience, 177 Geren (individual). See Individual (geren) Geren chongbai (idolatry). See Idolatry (geren chongbai) Geren ganshou (individual feelings). See Individual feelings (geren ganshou) Geti ganxing (individual sense perception). See Individual sense perception (geti ganxing) Gewu zhizhi: as classification. See Classification (gewu zhizhi) Globalization: adverse impact on China, 72; cultural unity and, 38; Chinese scholarship and, 33 Godzich, Wlad, 28, 167, 186, 233 Gongyou guannian (public ownership). See Public ownership (gongyou guannian) Greater self (da wo), 150 Greater unity (da tong), 109, 229–230 Great Leap Forward, 163 Great Learning (Zhu Xi on), 58 Gries, Peter, 34–35 Guanhua. See Mandarin (spoken) Guifan (norms). See Norms (guifan) Guiju (rules or established practices). See Rules (guiju) Guo Jian, 176–177 Guo Moruo, 125 Guocheng gongzheng (procedural justice). See Procedural justice (guocheng gongzheng)

Index Guojia (nation/country). See Nation/ country (guojia) Guojiade yishixingtai (national ideology). See National ideology (guojiade yishixingtai) Guoyu (national language). See National language (guoyu) Gu Xiancheng, 19 Gu Yanwu, 191, 232, 233, 234 Gu Zhun, 157–158, 185 Guren cai tong yu shan (ancients extracting copper from the mountain). See Ancients extracting copper from the mountain (guren cai tong yu shan) Gu wei jin yong (making the past serve the present). See Making the past serve the present (gu wei jin yong) Guwen: as classic language, 5 Habermas, Jürgen, 36, 106, 111, 177–182, 187–188 Han Chinese: non-Han languages and, 5 Han Yu, 116–117 Han Yuhai, 72, 226 Hao, Zhidong, 125 Harmonious society (hexie shehui), 69, 114, 115, 146 Hart, Kevin, 139 Havel, Vaclav, 35 Hayek, Friedrich von, 82, 160; “market naturalism” of, 66; spontaneity and, 160, 166 He Qing, 135–138 He Qinglian, 77, 125–126 He Xin, 186–187 Heart/mind (xin), 10, 116, 240 Heaven and humanity: unity of vs. division of, 25 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 80–81, 146, 148, 152–153, 185; judgement of,154; highest ethics and, 157; historical process and, 150; Shan on, 154; ultimate end in, 158; Wang Dinging and, 228–229. See also Dialectic Hegelianism. See Chinese Hegelianism (Zhongguode Heige’erzhuyi); Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin, 120 Helixing (rationality). See Rationality (helixing) Heredity: in premature person, 25 Heteronomy, 51-52, 225, 232, 239 Hexie shehui (harmonious society). See Harmonious society (hexie shehui)

•

299

Hidden citations (anyin), 227 Historical context (lishi yujing), 80, 110 Historical continuation (yizhong lishi yanxu), 145 Historical process (lishi xingcheng), 150 Historicization of history (jiang lishi lishihua), 134 History: of modern Chinese thought, 141; “History of Thought and the History of Scholarship, The” (Ge Zhaoguang), 116; reason in, 183, 184; spiritual conception of, 231; versions vs. truth of, 171. See also Genuine historicization (zhenzhengde lishihua) Homunculus (zaoshude ren), 25 Hongyang minzu (enabling the nation to forge ahead). See Enabling the nation to forge ahead (hongyang minzu) Hospitality: Derrida on, 48–49 Houxiandai lilun (postmodern theory). See Postmodern theory (houxiandai lilun) Houxin shiqi (post-New Era). See PostNew Era (houxin shiqi) Houxue (postisms). See Postisms (houxue) Hsia, C. T., 8–9 Hsu Cho-yun, 133 Hu Shi, 49, 54, 67–68, 134, 196, 199, 207; legacy of, 68; Zhu on, 203 Hu Jintao, 69, 77, 103, 114, 146, 169 Hua Guofeng, 161, 162, 166 Humanism, rendaozhuyi vs. renwen jingshen, 120–122; Confucianist, 127–128, 224 Humanistic Olympics (renwen Aoyunhui), 121 Humanistic spirit (renwen jingshen), 53, 97, 121; “postisms” and, 87–105; Sinophone scholarship on, 89–91 Humanists: vs. postmodernists, 9, 59, 100 Humanities, 123; social relevance of, 89 Humanity as foundation, synthesis for practical application (renyi wei ti, zonghe wei yong), 222 Human rights, 74 Hunt, Michael, 37 Huntington, Samuel, 34–35 Iconoclasm, 191–192 Ideas/inquiry/thought (sixiang), 9, 17, 84, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119, 135, 146, 167, 180, 188, 191, 193 Identity, 42; genuineness of, 40 Ideolanguage, 148–149, 160, 167–169, 191; legacy of, 186

300

•

Index

Ideological positions: New Left debate and, 85–86 Ideological trends: in academic writing, 67 Ideology (yishixingtai), 113, 167; Marxism as, 177 Idolatry (geren chongbai), 113 Imagination (xiangxiang), 116 Immediate feeling (zhiguande ganjue), 207 Immortality: textual, 231, 232 Imperialism: Mao on, 80 Imported ideas. See Foreign ideas Indigenization (bentuhua), 78 Individual (geren), 62 Individual feelings (geren ganshou), 227 Individual felt experience, 149–150 Individual freedom: autonomy and, 151–152 Individualism: of Chinese intellectuals (1980s), 62; heroic, 214; May Fourth advocates of, 209–210; Wang Hui on, 199–200; Western-style, 59 Individuality: of observation and expression, 217–218 Individual sense perception (geti ganxing), 149 Inevitability (biranxing), 149 Initial state-justice (qidian gongzheng), 86 Injustices: historical, 48 Inquiry (siwei), 14, 27, 70–71, 116; imported, 86–87; poetics of, 10, 189–241; positivistic, 159–160; about the Way, 116–117. See also Ideas/ inquiry/thought (sixiang) Institutional innovation (zhidu chuangxin), 73, 74 Institutional models (zhidu yangban), 74 Instrumentalization of theory: in Sinophone scholarship, 109 Instrumental rationality, 135 Intellectual(s) (zhishifenzi), 14; centrality of, 97–98; New Left, 102; Party-state and, 33; as “stinking ninth”, 123; transformation of society by, 18; typology of, 123–125 Intellectual autonomy, 33–34; constraints on, 3–4 Intellectual inquiry: Chinese, 14, 58–59; on foreign or imported ideas, 9; individual nature of, 88; Internet and, 7–8, 16, 215; to liberate thinking, 7; magisterial tendency of (Chinese), 105; May Fourth movement and, 203–204; moral connotations of worrying and, 9; on

return to tradition, 11; on role of foreign ideas, 20; Xu Jilin on, 63–64, 101, 104–105 Intellectual life: normalization of, 237; professionalization of, 16 Intellectual mastery: post-Maoist, 101 Intellectual pluralism, 9, 67, 155 Intellectual trends (sichao), 123 Intentional ethics (yitu lunli), 201 Internet, 215; Chinese critical inquiry on, 7–8, 16; print journals and, 96 Interpretation: Qian Liqun on, 207–208 Intersubjective (zhutijian) mode, 89 Iron house metaphor: of Lu Xun, 50, 51, 55–56 Isolationist (fengbi) sentiment, 46 Jameson, Fredric, 28, 95, 106, 172–175, 176–177 Jia (family/home). See Family/home (jia) Jiang lishi lishihua (historicization of history). See Historicization of history (jiang lishi lishihua) Jiang Qing, 206 Jiang Tingfu, 201 Jiang Zemin, 103, 114, 146, 161, 165–166, 169 Jianshide xianshi jichu (solidly practical foundation). See Solidly practical foundation (jianshide xianshi jichu) Jiaota shidi (with...feet planted firmly on the ground). See With...feet planted firmly on the ground (jiaota shidi) Jiaotiao (dogmatic). See Dogmatic (jiaotiao) Jiaowang lixing (communicative rationality). See Communicative rationality (jiaowang lixing) Jiegou (deconstruction). See Deconstruction (jiegou) Jiegouzhuyi (deconstructionism). See Deconstructionism (jiegouzhuyi) Jieguo gongzheng (end-state [final] justice). See End-state [final] justice (jieguo gongzheng) Jin Guantao, 20–21 Jingshende lianyu (spiritual purgatory). See Spiritual purgatory (jingshende lianyu) Jingshen ziyuan (spiritual resources). See Spiritual resources (jingshen ziyuan) Jingying shounan (elite victimage). See Elite victimage (jingying shounan)

Index Jingyingzhuyi (elitism). See Elitism (jingyingzhuyi) Jiquan (centralism). See Centralism (jiquan) Jun (gentleman or sovereign). See under Gentleman (junzi); Sovereign (jun) June Fourth (liu si), 15, 111, 186 Justice (gongzheng): conceptions of, 86; vs. fairness, 102; Liu Xiaobo on, 210; rational conception of, 86; as righteousness (yi), 30; Kangxi Dictionary, 223 Kant, Immanuel, 155, 156 Kaozheng (evidential) scholars. See Evidential (kaozheng) scholars Knowledge: Chinese, 110; Chinese intellectuals on, 31–32; as “true knowledge” in Chinese Hegelianism, 155; the “other” and, 13; over politics, 170 Knowledge systems, 63–64 Kritik (critique). See Critique (Kritik) Kuhn, Thomas, 111 Kunjing (predicament). See Predicament (kunjing) Language: absence of common, 66–67; acts of language (yuyan xingwei), 181; certitude in use of, 26–27; of Chinese critical inquiry, 1; of Chinese intellectuals, 214–215; of educated Chinese, 5; elite vs. mass, 50; iron house metaphor and, 50–51; reality and, 40, 100–101, 170–171; standardization of, 6; as tool for cultural renaissance, 21, 234; truth beyond, 29; truth communicated through, 22; Wang Hui on, 91; as wen, 196, 227; written, 5. See also Anglophone scholarship; Classical Chinese language; Ideolanguage; entries under Linguistic; Sinophone scholarship Lao She, 136–137 Late Capitalism, 173, 175 Learning (xue), 116; modern vs. old, 190 Leavisite literary criticism, 98, 228 Leftism, 75 Legalism, 200 Lei Yi, 46–47 Lesser self (xiao wo), 150 Leys, Simon, 118, 122–123, 230 Li (propriety). See Propriety (li) Li Changchun, 186

•

301

Li de, li gong, li yan (establishing virtue, deeds, and words). See Establishing virtue, deeds, and words (li de, li gong, li yan) Li Jie, 146 Li Ka-shing, 64–65 Li Shenzhi, 24–26, 33, 34–35, 36, 39, 45, 47; as China’s last scholar-official, 54; on cultural complementarity, 43–44 Li Tuo, 38, 39, 40, 41–42, 43 Li Yang, 134 Li Zehou, 87, 149, 150–151, 152 Liang Qichao, 6–7, 203, 229, 232 Liang Shuming, 25, 132 Liangzhi (conscience). See Conscience (liangzhi) Liberal democracy: Fukuyama on, 229 Liberalism: appeal of, 220; capitalism and, 78; Chinese, 126; cultural inappropriateness of, 20; on equality, 77–78; Rorty vs.Wang Yuanhua, 202; use of term, 103; Xu Youyu on, 83; Yang Fan critique of, 20 Liberals, 148; on corruption, 84; on market growth and democracy in China, 82; vs. New Left, 72–87, 100 Life (sheng), 30 Lijie zhi tongqing, fangke xia bi (possessing understanding of a sympathetic nature before putting pen to paper). See Possessing understanding of a sympathetic nature before putting pen to paper (lijie zhi tongqing, fangke xia bi) Lilai zaodao fouding (wrongly subjected to negation). See Wrongly subjected to negation (lilai zaodao fouding) Lilun (theory). See Theory (lilun, xueli) Lilun sikaode xitong (system of theoretical inquiry). See System of theoretical inquiry (lilun sikaode xitong) Lin Biao, 147 Lin Yü-sheng, 191–192 Linguistic certitude, 11, 191; of Chinese critical inquiry, 1; of Chinese intellectuals, 214–215; gap with reality, 100–101; in use of language; vs. linguistic contingency, 26–27, 224-225. See also Certainty; Classical Chinese language; Contingency; entries under Genuine; Ideolanguage; Language Linguistic play: in Sinophone critical discourse, 10. See also Zest/flavor

302

•

Index

Linguistic turn: in EuroAmerican scholarship, 238; in Chinese scholarship, 238-240 Link, Perry, 4, 15 Lishi bentilun (ontology of history). See Ontology of history (lishi bentilun) Lishi xingcheng (historical process). See Historical process (lishi xingcheng) Lishi yujing (historical context). See Historical context (lishi yujing) Liu Dong, 37, 39, 43, 47, 105, 144–145, 222 Liu Junning, 33, 112 Liu Kang, 174 Liu Qingfeng, 20–21, 72, 123–124 Liu si (June Fourth). See June Fourth (liu si) Liu Xiaobo, 3, 71, 209–213, 214 Liu Xiaofeng, 142–145 Living in Truth (Havel), 35 Lixing (reason). See Reason (lixing) Lixingde fating (court of Reason). See Court of Reason (lixingde fating) Lixingde jiaoji (cunning of reason). See Cunning of Reason (lixingde jiaoji) Lixing fenxi (reasoned analysis). See Reasoned analysis (lixing fenxi) Liu Huaiyu, 181 Looking to make money (xiang qian kan), 183 Looking toward the future (xiang qian kan), 183 Low-quality people, 17 Lü Liuliang, 195 Lu Xun, 10–11, 24, 26, 49, 50, 52, 53–54, 134, 199, 207, 208, 211–212, 213–214, 218, 220–221; iron house metaphor of, 50, 51, 55–56; Zhu on, 203 Luhmann, Niklas, 215 Luo Gang, 174 Lyotard, Jean-François, 106 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 82 Magic weapon (fabao), 165 Mainland-based vs. overseas-based academics, 100, 105 Mainland-born vs. mainland-based academics, 72–74, 76 Mainland China, 139; Confucianism and, 132; critical inquiry in, 109; traditional vs. Western-style culture on, 205–206 Making foreign things serve China (Yang wei Zhong yong), 164, 223

Making the past serve the present (gu wei jin yong), 164, 223 Mandarin (spoken): guanhua as, 5, 6 Mao Dun, 125 Maoism: critique of, 152 Maoist discourse, 24, 147 Maoist era, 129 Maoist taxonomy, 123 Mao-speak, 41–42 Mao Zedong, 161; axioms associated with, 223; comprehensive socialism and, 82; criticism of, 2; legacy of, 71; morality and cynicism after, 68–69; as national patriarch, 60–61; on Party writing, 114; reasoning after, 146–188; relevance to contemporary China, 75–76; socialism of, 78–80. See also Cultural Revolution Mao Zedong Thought, 71, 79, 80, 146, 147, 186 Margalit, Avishai, 30, 207, 209 Marginson, Simon, 66 Market: freedom and, 176; free vs. capitalist, 181 Market demands: contingency of, 160 Market economy, 77; Chinese intellectual life and, 65–66; democracy and, 76; freedom of, 226; socialism and, 62; shift from planned to market economy, 74 Market growth, 84; and democracy in China, 82 Marketization, 95 Market naturalism, 66, 104 Market reforms: Chinese culture and, 53, 183 Marx, Karl, 27, 146, 153 Marxism: analytical, 73; compulsory studies in, 146; demotion of, 186–187; Jameson on, 173–175, 176–177; Liu Huaiyu on, 181; Li Zehou on, 152; optimism in, 28; Party line and, 169; rationalistic vs. revolutionary, 151; as scientific, 24, 169, 187, 197; sinicization of, 186 Marxism-Leninism, 80, 108, 113, 121, 163, 186; despotism and, 176; Liu Xiaobo on, 212–213; Li Zehou and, 151 Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, 23, 109, 135, 153, 194, 239 Marxist humanism, 120 Mass culture: vs. elite culture, 95 Maternal abuse: authoritarian rule as, 210–211

Index May Fourth era, 3, 36, 191; ambivalence toward, 11; Anglo-American thought,and, 203–204; China’s cultural integrity and, 237; Chinese intellectuals on, 193–194; Chinese thought in, 23; Confucianism and, 135; criticisms of, 52–53, 203-204; individualism advocated in, 209–210; inferiority complex during, 137; intellectuals of, 49, 167; legacy of, 239; Liu Xiaobo on, 209–213; Lu Xun and, 10–11; vs. patriarchy, 60; Chinese Enlightenment and, 202; quwei and, 217–218; radicalism of, 191, 192; self-sacrifice in, 69, 213; theory in, 108; Wang Yuanhua on, 199–201; Zhu Xueqin on, 204 Meditation (mingxiang), 26 Mencius, 18, 30; notion of guifan in, 11; on youhuan as perseverance, 17 Metaphysics, 23, 28–29, 30, 165 Method: as academic theory (xueli), 27, 111; as qi, 11; as shu, 116, 119, 120. See also Theory ( lilun, xueli) Metzger, Thomas, 27–28 Min (the people). See People, the (min) Minben. See Acting on the people’s behalf Mind/heart (xin), 10, 116, 240 Mingxiang (meditation). See Meditation (mingxiang) Mises, Ludwig von, 226 Modern China, 39–40 Modernity, 57; Chinese, 32–33; deadly attack by, 239; Liu Xiaofeng on, 142; Mao’s Thought as, 80; universal, 38–39; Wang Hui on, 77-80; in Western thought, 49, 62, 92–93 Modernization, 28, 39, 137, 192; capitalist form or phase of, 80; capitalist vs. socialist, 182; Mao’s socialism and, 78–80; neoliberal ideology of, 111; Western-style in China, 63 Moral absolutism: Wang Yuanhua on, 200 Moral certainty: self-cultivation and, 201–202 Moral conception, 30; vs. self-reflexive style, 12 Moral concern: youhuan as, 17 Moral emotions: in critical inquiry, 206–217 Morality: objectivity in, 54; in governance, 58; weakening of, 61–62 Moral judgment, 221–222; Sinophone, 238

•

303

Moral orthodoxy (daotong), 88, 128, 131 Moral responsibility: to identify and solve Chinese problems, 7–10; scholarship as, 30 Motherland: Liu Xiaobo on, 212 Mother tongue, 21 Movement to Liberate Thinking, 73, 170 Mulu (bibliographies). See Bibliographies (mulu) Nakae Cho¯min, 229 Nalaizhuyi (appropriatism). See Appropriatism (nalaizhuyi) Naming: as taxonomy, 109, 118, 125–127 Nation (guojia), 58; burden of, 19; family and, 58; as home, 58 National culture: Li Shenzhi on, 43–44; merits and flaws in, 17 National ideology (guojiade yishixingtai), 115 Nationalism: criticism of Chinese, 46–47, 128; discouraging, 42; nonnationalistic Anglophone scholarship and, 32; Wang Hui on, 141 National language (guoyu), 5, 6 National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, 44 National self-strengthening, 93–94 National studies (guo xue), 128 Nation-building approach: to theory, 71, 108 Nation-centered discourse: in China, 17 Natural categories (zirande fanchou), 141 Naturalism, 32 Natural principle (tianli), 142 Neoconservatism, 128 Neoliberalism: as ideology of modernization, 111 New authoritarianism, 123 New China Dictionary, 223 New Confucianism, 127, 148; of Ge, 116–118; national studies and, 128 New Culture, 23, 203–204 New Enlightenment movement (1980s), 62–63, 77, 110–111, 120 New Era, 139 New evolutionism, 73 New knowledges (xinde zhishi): postmodernism and postcolonialism as, 93

304

•

Index

New Left: capitalism and, 78; comprehensive socialism and, 81–82; debate over ideology by, 85–86; freedom and, 226; government rhetoric and, 103; on justice, 86; vs. liberals, 9, 58, 72–87; noncapitalist reform and, 73; postists and, 99; Ren Jiantao critique of, 80–82; Sinophone, 84; Wang Hui on, 126–127; Zhang Xudong on, 172 New Leftists, 124–125, 148; vs. liberals, 100 New Sinology, 13 New vocabularies, 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 234 985 Project, 66 Non-Han languages, 5 Nonradical attitude, 193–206 Norms (guifan), 11. See also Ethical norms; Ethics Notation book (zhaji cezi), 232 Objectivism: Chinese tendency toward, 27 Objectivity: in morality, 54; rules of development and (Li Zehou), 151-152; as world of matter, 162 October Revolution, 213 Olympics: in Beijing, 121 “On New Democracy” (Mao), 223 Ontology of history (lishi bentilun), 154, 184 “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (Nietzsche), 234 Opium Wars, 17 Opposition: advocating, 115 Optimism: vs. pessimism, 27–30 Organic link (youji jiehe): with Chinese reality or tradition, 87 Orthodoxy: moral and political, 88, 128, 131 Other: learning from, 239–240; notion of, 12–13, 43; suspicion of, 48 Ouranxing (contingency). See Contingency (ouranxing) Overseas training, 76, 98–99, 100, 104 Ownership: public vs. private, 209–210 Pacifying the people (an min), 137 Pai (faction). See Faction (pai) Paiwai (antiforeign) sentiment. See Antiforeign (paiwai) sentiment Palaces: ruins of Western, 56 Party code or motto (dang xun), 161

Party ideological theory. See Party theory (dangde sixiang lilun) Party Organization Department (Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University), 160–161 Party Rectification Campaign, 161–162 Partyspeak, 80 Party-state, 133–134; Liu Xiaobo criticisms of, 212–213; rule by, 61–63, 75 Party theory (dangde sixiang lilun), 9, 10, 111, 113, 114, 160, 161; vs. Sinophone scholarship, 170 Paternalism (China), 59–60, 71 Patriarch: Mao as, 60–61 Patriotic worrying (youhuan), 190, 192, 193, 240. See also Crisis mentality; Worrying Patriotism, 21; of Chinese writing, 9; as love for mother, 210–211 Peking University, 66 Peng Zhen, 168 People, the (min), 138 People’s Action Party (PAP), 133 Perceptual force (ganxingde liliang), 195 Perfection (riyi wanshan), 225; attainment of Chinese, 47; goal of, 55–56; worrying about, 18–31 Personal names: as attributes, 106 Pessimism: vs. optimism, 27–28. See also Optimism Pingpande taidu (critical attitude). See Critical attitude (pingpande taidu) Ping tianxia (establishing order everywhere). See Establishing order everywhere (ping tianxia) Pipan (critique). See Critique (pipan) Plainspeak (dabaihua): critical, 15, 16 Plunging into the sea (xia hai), 66 Pluralism, 101, 156, 159; intellectual, 67, 93, 155; Zhao Yiheng on, 98 Pluralize (duoyuanhua), 148 Pocha, Jehangir S., 103 Poetics: of inquiry, 189–241; of selfcultivation, 191 Political conservatism, 128 Political orthodoxy (zhengtong), 88, 128, 131 Political power, 137–138 Political pressure: on intellectuals, 4 Political reform, 85 Political science of reading (yuedu zhengzhixue), 208

Index Political theories, 27 Politics: theorizing, 12; vs. scholarship, 67–68 Popper, Karl, 27, 111, 236 Popular culture, 87 Positivism, 84, 100–101, 159–160; 165; since May Fourth era, 191 Possessing understanding of a sympathetic nature before putting pen to paper (lijie zhi tongqing, fangke xia bi), 134 Postcolonialism, 43, 93 Postisms (houxue), 94–95, 129–130, 148; humanistic spirit and, 87–105; language and, 171; Sinophone, 175; Zhang Xudong on, 172; Zhao criticism of, 97. See also Postmodernists/postmodernism Postmodernists/postmodernism, 93, 238; on being Chinese, 91–92; Dai Jinhua on, 171; He Qing on, 136; vs. humanists, 9, 37, 59, 100; Jameson on, 172–175; Sinophone moral judgment and, 238; Sinophone scholars on, 175; Ye Xiushan on, 238; Zhang Yiwu on, 139 Postmodern theory (houxiandai lilun), 111, 129 Postmodernity, 139 Post-New Era (houxin shiqi), 139 Poststructuralism, 43 Power: views of, 137–138, 183-186 Practical reason (shijian lixing), 181 Practice: theory unified with, 163 Predicament (kunjing), 9 Print journals: critical inquiry in, 96 Private ownership (siyou guannian), 210 Problematization, 29, 107 Proceduralism (chengxuzhuyi), 178 Procedural justice (guocheng gongzheng), 86 Process of knowing (renshi guocheng), 155 Professionalization: of intellectual life, 16, 66; Xu Jilin on, 86 Progress: Gu Zhun on, 159 Proletariat, 123 Property rights, 74, 77, 112, 209 Propriety (li), 131 Protecting the people (bao min), 137 Protest: in 1989, 15–16 Pubian yiyi. See Universal significance (pubian yiyi) Public discourse: party-state control of, 16 Public ownership (gongyou guannian), 209–210 Public sphere, 177-180

•

305

Qi (tool or vessel). See Tool or vessel (qi) Qian Liqun, 146, 207–209, 213, 214 Qian Mu, 230 Qian Xuantong, 50 Qidian gongzheng (initial state-justice). See Initial state-justice (qidian gongzheng) Qing dynasty, 5 Qin Hui, 59–60, 61, 76, 78, 131–132, 145, 216–217 Qinzheng (direct experience). See Direct experience (qinzheng) Qu (what to adopt). See What to adopt (qu) Quanmian shehuizhuyi (comprehensive socialism). See Comprehensive socialism (quanmian shehuizhuyi) Qushe (what to adopt, what to discard). See What to adopt, what to discard (qushe) Quwei (zest/flavor). See Zest/flavor (quwei) Qu xin wu Yang. See What to adopt Radicalism, 127; vs. conservatism, 55; flaws in, 231; nonradical attitude and, 193–206; 216 Rand, Ayn, 112 Rationality (helixing), 114, 178 Rational truth, 152 Rawls, John, 36 Reading notes (zhaji) genre, 95. See also Notation book Realism-antirealism, 225 Reality: language and, 40, 100–101, 170–171; truth about, 171–172; Wang Dinging on, 228 Realm of Freedom, 148, 151, 157, 229 Reason (lixing), 170, 202; Anglophones on, 31–32; attitudinization of, 197–198; cunning of, 183–184; in history, 181, 183, 184; vs. understanding, 185; Wang Hui on, 197 Reasoned analysis (lixing fenxi), 207 Reasoning: ideolanguage and, 166–188; after Mao, 146–188 Rebellion, 215 Reconciliation (ronghe): of civilizational forces, 25–26 Reconstruction (chongjian or chonggou), 236 Records, scholarly case studies (xue’an), 119 Rectifying names (zheng ming), 109 Redemption: national quest of, 21

306

•

Index

Reflection (chensi), 116 Reform (gaizao), 117; commitment to, 85; corruption in, 84; under Deng Xiaoping, 73; intellectual and student agitation for (1989), 15–16; relevance of Mao to present-day, 75–76; “Reform Our Learning” (Gaizao womende xuexi) (Mao), 161–162 Regime of virtue (daode zhuanzheng), 132 Relativism, 27–28 Ren (benevolence). See Benevolence (ren) Ren Jiantao, 183; on New Leftists, 80–82 Renshi guocheng (process of knowing). See Process of knowing (renshi guocheng) Renwen Aoyunhui (humanistic Olympics). See Humanistic Olympics (renwen Aoyunhui) Renwen jingshen (humanistic spirit). See Humanistic spirit (renwen jingshen) Renyi wei ti, zonghe wei yong (Humanity as foundation, synthesis for practical application). See Humanity as foundation, synthesis for practical application (renyi wei ti, zonghe wei yong) Renzhi (rule of man). See Rule of man (renzhi) Responsibility: collective, 61; Enlightenment as, 230; for nation’s wellbeing, 16; for rights and wrongs, 18–19 Restructuring: of Chinese universities, 66 Revolution: as principle, 151–152; collapse of Maoist, 147–148 Richter, Gerhard, 136 Righteousness (yi), 131 Rightists, 33, 61 Riyi wanshan (perfection). See Perfection (riyi wanshan) Road to serfdom (tongxiang nuyizhi lu), 84–85 Ronghe (reconciliation). See Reconciliation (ronghe) Rorty, Richard, 29, 31, 32, 106, 111, 202, 224–225 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 200 Rule of law (fazhi), 137 Rule of man (renzhi), 137 Rules (guiju), 11 Rule/unite (tong), 57 Rural enterprises, 74 Sabine, George H., 154 Said, Edward, 95, 106, 112

Saito¯, Mareshi, 7 San buxiu (three eternal truths). See Three eternal truths (san buxiu) Sange daibiao (Three Represents theory). See Three Represents theory (sange daibiao) Sanwen (essay). See Essay (sanwen) Scholarly/academic tradition (xuetong), 128, 131 Scholars (dushuren), 14 Scholars (Xueren) (journal), 122 Scholarship (xueshu), 9, 17, 110, 111, 116, 117, 118, 135, 146, 180, 188, 193; academic realm of, 112–113; Chinese, 33, 36; methods and skills as, 119; as moral responsibility, 30; vs. politics, 67–68. See also entries under Academic; Anglophone scholarship; Sinophone scholarship Science: as evaluative criterion, 170; Sinophone scholarship, Party theory, and, 170 Scientific theories, 115 Scientism, 123, 170, 175–176 Scrap copper (fei tong), 233 Secularization: Zhang Yiwu on, 92–93 Sedimentation (dianding), 149–150 Seeking truth from facts (shishi qiu shi), 149–160; as dialectic with Chinese characteristics, 160–166; reasoning with(in) an ideolanguage and, 166–188 Seizing the vital flaw (zhua yaohai), 115 Self: as da wo and xiao wo, 104; cultivation of, 105; learning from Other and, 239–240; valorization of, 211 Self-censorship: by intellectuals, 4 Self-creation (ziwo chuangzao), 167 Self-cultivation (xiushen), 71, 72, 191, 207; legacy of, 10; in May Fourth era, 192; Wang Yuanhua on, 201–202 Selflessness, 69, 192; critical inquiry as, 85 Self-reflection (fansi), 14 Self-reflexive style of inquiry, 29, 42, 84, 110, 229, 235, 236, 238–239; vs. moral conception, 12 Self-restraint, 215–217 Self-sacrifice, 69, 212-213 Self-strengthening, 93-94 Sense-perception (ganxing), 170 Sensibilities, 192–193 Shangyi minzhu (deliberative democracy). See Deliberative democracy (shangyi minzhu)

Index Shan Shilian, 166, 167, 170, 175–176, 177, 180, 184–185; “Bidding Farewell to Hegel,” 149–160; on cunning of Reason, 184 Shao Yanxiang, 208 Shareholding cooperative system, 74 She (what to discard). See What to discard (she) Shehui benzhi (social essence). See Social essence (shehui benzhi) Shehui shijian (social practice). See Social practice (shehui shijian) Sheng (life). See Life (sheng) Shenghua (sublime). See Sublime (shenghua) Shidaifu (Confucian scholar-official). See Confucian scholar-official (shidaifu) Shigan (genuine feeling). See Genuine feeling (shigan) Shi Jian, 46 Shijian lixing (practical reason). See Practical reason (shijian lixing) Shinian haojie (catastrophic decade). See Catastrophic decade (shinian haojie) Shishi (facts). See Facts (shishi) Shishi qiu shi (seeking truth from facts). See Seeking truth from facts (shishi qiu shi) Shu (method). See Method (shu) “Shu” de fenlei (genres of writing). See Genres of writing (“shu” de fenlei) Shuowen Jiezi, 116 Sichao (intellectual trends). See Intellectual trends (sichao) Sige xiandaihua (Four Modernizations). See Four Modernizations (sige xiandaihua) Significant climate (da qihou), 238 Singapore: Confucianism in, 133 Sinophone scholarship, 4, 5–8; agents of EuroAmerican ideas in, 76; ambivalence toward foreign in, 49–57; on appropriatism, 49; axioms in, 221; “being Chinese” in, 23; by Chinese intellectuals, 14; classification in, 120–127, 125; communicative rationality in, 180; on Confucianism, 131; “conservatism” (term) in, 127–129; critique (Kritik) in, 194; Cui’s critique and, 75; on cultural and spiritual loss, 43; defense of Chinese culture in, 42–43; ethical, moral concerns in, 30; EuroAmerican formulations as, 37;

•

307

EuroAmerican theorists and, 106; goal of, 46; Gu Zhun in, 157–158; Hegel and Marx in, 146–147; humanistic concerns in, 224; humanistic spirit and, 89–91; vs. Rortyan liberalism, 202; linguistic play in, 10, 217-224; Liu Xiaofeng and, 143; Lu Xun in, 213; mandate to think and write in service of China, 19–20; on nation as “home,” 58; on New Left, 102; new vocabularies in, 29–30; Party theory and, 170; patriotism in, 21; pluralism and democracy in, 159; politics vs. scholarship in, 67–68; positivism in, 84; postisms in, 94–95; postmodernism and, 175; privileging of ethnicity, 55; provisions of correct ideas in, 64; self-cultivation in, 192; vs. selfreflexive style of inquiry, 24, 135; sensibilities in, 193; state censorship and, 33–34; textual immortality in, 231, 232; theory in, 109; unifying effects of written language and, 6; Wang Hui on, 198; Web sites for, 7–8; Western theory: in, 108–109; worrying about China as preoccupation of, 18; worrying about the foreign in, 31–49. See also Dialectic Siwei (inquiry). See Inquiry (siwei) Sixiang (ideas/inquiry/thought). See Ideas/ inquiry/thought (sixiang) Siyou guannian (private ownership). See Private ownership (siyou guannian) Sizi ju (four-character phrases). See Fourcharacter phrases (sizi ju) Social essence (shehui benzhi), 181 Social hope: rekindling of, 221 Social integration, 179 Socialism: comprehensive, 81; of Mao (by Wang Hui), 78–80; market economy and, 62; Xu Youyu on, 83 Socialism with Chinese characteristics, 114, 164 Socialist market: with Chinese characteristics, 94 Socialist reform, 62–63 Social justice, 102 Social practice (shehui shijian), 149 Social reform, 85; critical inquiry as vehicle for, 7 Social relations: Habermas and, 181 Social unity, 68 Society: intellectual transformation of, 18; market and, 176; overseas academics’ understanding of, 98–99; state and, 80

308

•

Index

Soft power: to extend Chinese influence, 44 Solidly practical foundation (jianshide xianshi jichu), 165 Sovereign (jun), 138 Specialized skills (zhuangong), 116–117 Specific intellectual: notion of, 101 Specificity, 156 Spirit, 22 Spiritual force, 19; of China, 25–26; intellectual inquiry as, 10; modern Chinese thought as, 202; Ye on, 238 Spiritual loss, 43 Spiritual purgatory (jingshende lianyu), 192 Spiritual resources (jingshen ziyuan), 134 Spivak, Gayatri, 12 Spontaneous order: Hayek and, 160, 166, 176 Standardization: of Chinese language, 6. See also Academic norms State: censorship by, 33–34; Chinese intellectuals and, 33; intervention by, 3; society and, 80; speech permitted by, 16 Stinking ninth (chou laojiu), 123 Stout, Jeffrey, 29 Strauss, Leo, 142 Students: protests by (1989), 15–16 Subject (zhuti), 152 Subjective will (zhuguan yizhi), 154, 156 Subjectivity (zhutixing), 62, 149, 151 Sublation (yangqi), 147 Sublime (shenghua), 161 Sun, Lung-Kee, 211–212 Sympathy and empathy (tongqing), 134–135, 216 Synthesis, 156 System integration, 179 System of developed Western nations (Xifang fada guojiade zhidu), 73–74 System of theoretical inquiry (lilun sikaode xitong), 172 Taidu (attitude). See Attitude (taidu) Tang Yijie, 44–45, 127–128, 132, 144, 145, 222 Tao Dongfeng, 239 Taxonomy, 9, 102, 118–127; Confucian, 122–123; function of, 120; of mainland Chinese intellectuals, 126; Maoist, 123; in Sinophone scholarship, 120–127 Taylor, Charles, 157, 185 Temporal (shijian), 137

Text: reference outside of, 28–29 Textual immortality, 231, 232 Theory (lilun, xueli), 12, 14, 110; in classification, 120; cross-disciplinary approaches and, 108; discursive realms and, 109, 110–118; unifying with practice, 163; use of term, 14, 106–107 Thing in itself (benti), 152 Third way, 86, 148 “Third way” freedom, 225–226 Thought (sixiang). See Ideas/inquiry/ thought (sixiang) Three eternal truths (san buxiu), 231 Three Represents theory (sange daibiao), 103, 114, 115, 166, 186, 219; as “Important Thought” (Jiang Zemin), 146, 186 Tianli (natural principle). See Natural principle (tianli) Tian ren heyi (unity between heaven and humanity). See Unity between heaven and humanity (tian ren heyi) Tian ren xiangfen (division of heaven and humanity). See Division of heaven and humanity (tian ren xiangfen) Tianxia (burden of empire/nation). See Burden of empire/nation (tianxia); Empire Tiyan. See Empiricism (under tiyan) Tong (rule/unite). See Rule/unite (tong) Tongqing (sympathy and empathy). See Sympathy and empathy (tongqing) Tongren (fellow humans). See Fellow humans (tongren) Tong Shijun, 177–180 Tongxiang nuyizhi lu (road to serfdom). See Road to serfdom (tongxiang nuyizhi lu) Tool or vessel (qi), 11. See also Method Totalistic antitraditionalism, 194 Totality, 156 Totality and individual, the (zhengti yu geti), 150 Toward the Future book series, 123 Tradition (chuantong), 54; need for, 144–145; observance of, 205; return to, 11, 55, 193 Traditional culture: influence of, 9 Translation, 22, 112, 224-225; in May Fourth era, 108 Trust (xin), 131 Truth, 22, 23, 35–36,162; beyond language, 29; dao as, 116; vs. falsehood,

Index 192; felt, 213; defenders of, 168; Nietzsche on, 234–235; Party on, 163; about reality, 171–172; Wang Dinging on, 227–228 Tui chen chu xin (weeding through old to bring forth new). See Weeding through old to bring forth new (tui chen chu xin) Tu Weiming, 132, 133 Twenty-first Century (journal), 73, 95, 96 211 Project, 66 Two Candles (Richter), 136 Typologies: of intellectuals, 123–125 Ultimate end (zhongji mudi), 157, 158 Understanding, the (zhixing), 149, 154, 156, 170; contingent nature of, 158; Kantian, 155; vs. reason, 185 Understanding suffused with sympathy (chongman tongquingde lijie), 227 Unger, Roberto, 74, 76 United States: criticism of, 45 Unity between heaven and humanity (tianren heyi), 25, 224 Unity between politics and doctrine (zhengjiao heyi): as theocracy, 224 Universal culture of particularities (Xudong Zhang); vs. universalizable culture of singularities (Derrida), 140, 141 Universal intellectual, 101, 102 Universal significance (pubian yiyi), 83 Universities: in China, 66, 237 Ur-language, 40 Utopianism, 75, 114 Values, 19; creation by intellectuals, 87; critical inquiry and, 85; vs. facts, 82–83; obstacles to, 64; traditional vs. modern, 59 Vernacular (baihua), 49–50, 51–52, 56 Vocabulary: EuroAmerican used by Chinese, 31; “final vocabulary” vs. “new vocabulary,” 29–31 Voice: Chinese vs. Western, 137, 138 Wang, Ban, 149–150 Wang Dingding, 12, 225–227 Wang, Edward, 57 Wang Hui, 23, 53, 62, 63, 64, 65, 72, 76–77, 86, 87, 91, 193–194, 205, 208–209, 214, 220, 221, 227, 230,

•

309

238; on debate in China, 175–176; on evolution of Chinese thought, 141–142; on Mao’s socialism, 78–80; Marxian approach of, 83; May Fourth era and, 193–198; on naming, 126–127; on separation between fact and value, 82–83; on sixiang, 23, 63, 64, 76–77, 91 Wang Ruoshui, 120 Wang Shaoguang, 72 Wang Shuo, 114 Wang Sirui, 126 Wang Xi, 37, 39 Wang Xiaofeng, 219 Wang Xiaoming, 87, 89 Wang Yao, 134 Wang Yichuan, 94 Wang Yuanhua, 4, 114, 170, 199–203, 205, 207, 214; Shan on, 154–155 Wang Zhiquan, 84, 86 Wangguo: empire’s collapse as, 17 Wangsheng shengmingli (exuberant life force). See Exuberant life force (wangsheng shengmingli) Way or Path (dao): 116, 117, 196; of restoring China’s integrity, 18, 205 Weber, Max, 27, 37, 82, 135, 189 Weeding through old to bring forth new (tui chen chu xin), 223 Wei min (acting on the people’s behalf). See Acting on the people’s behalf (wei min) Wen (language). See Language (wen) Wen Jiabao, 103 Wenge (Cultural Revolution). See Cultural Revolution (wenge) Wenhua datong (cultural unity). See Cultural unity (wenhua datong) Wenmingde chongtu (“clash of civilizations”) thesis. See “Clash of civilizations” thesis (wenmingde chongtu) Wenming fuxing (civilizational renaissance). See Civilizational renaissance (wenming fuxing) Wenyan. See Classical Chinese language West: catching up with, 35; Chinese intellectual parity with, 34; East and, 25; Li on decline of, 35; norms of, 38 Western theory (Xifang lilun), 108–109, 111; Chinese views on, 220

310

•

Index

Western thought: appropriatism and, 24–25; Chinese intellectuals’ acquisition of, 87; vs. Chinese patriarchal values, 59–60; Chinese uses of, 8–9; cautions about inappropriate uses of, 9; Li Tuo and, 41–42; on modernization, 79; New Left and, 72; popular views of, 189; relativism in, 27–28; spiritual quality of, 26. See also Modernity “Whateverism,” 166 What to adopt (qu), 30; qu xin wu Yang, 223–224 What to adopt, what to discard (qushe), 192 What to discard (she), 30 Whitehead, Alfred North, 236–237 White mythology (Derrida), 22 Williams, Bernard, 235 Will to truth: of Nietzsche, 235–236; Shan’s argument and, 160 Wisdom (zhi), 131 With . . . feet planted firmly on the ground (jiaota shidi), 227 Words: correspondence to things of, 26–27 Worrying: moral burden of, 55; norm of, 15–16; patriotic, 190, 240; perseverance and, 17; as proper attitude to critical inquiry, 100; responsibility for nation and, 16 Writing: genres of, 119; I (we) as China in, 103–104; by intellectuals, 2; by Liang Qichao, 6–7; xueshu and sixiang in, 113. See also Critical inquiry Writing to Concept (Godzich), 167 Written language: classical Han Chinese, 5; “Sinophone” as reference to, 5, 6, 7; wenyan as, 5 Wu’er Kaixi, 15–16 Wu Guanjun, 143–144 Wu Guoguang, 68 Wu Jiaxiang, 220 Wu Si, 76 Wu Zhihui, 196–197 Wu Zhongmin, 102 Wusi (devotion to Party goals). See under Altruism; Devotion to Party goals (wusi) Xia hai (plunging into the sea). See Plunging into the sea (xia hai) Xiang qian kan (looking to make money). See Looking to make money (xiang qian kan)

Xiang qian kan (looking toward the future). See Looking toward the future (xiang qian kan) Xiangxiang (imagination). See Imagination (xiangxiang) Xiao Gongqin, 123 Xiao wo (lesser self). See Lesser self (xiao wo) Xifang fada guojiade zhidu (system of developed Western nations). See System of developed Western nations (Xifang fada guojiade zhidu) Xifang lilun (Western theory). See Western theory (Xifang lilun) Xin (heart/mind). See Heart: and mind (xin) Xin (trust). See Trust (xin) Xinde zhishi (new knowledges). See New knowledges (xinde zhishi) Xintai (disposition). See Disposition (xintai); Attitude (taidu) Xiu qi zhi ping. See under Axioms Xiushen (self-cultivation). See Selfcultivation (xiushen) Xu Ben, 96–97, 99 Xu Jilin, 35–37, 45–46, 54, 57, 62, 177, 178, 238; on ethical standards, 180; on humanistic spirit, 90; on intellectuals, 63–64, 101, 104–105; on Party theory, 169; on professionalization of intellectual scene, 66–67, 86 Xu Shen, 116 Xu Youyu, 75, 83, 221 Xue (learning). See Learning (xue) Xue’an (records, scholarly case studies). See Records, scholarly case studies (xue’an) Xueli (method/theory). See Method/theory (xueli) Xueshu (scholarship, knowledge). See Scholarship (xueshu) Xueshuguifan (academic norms). See Academic norms (xueshuguifan) Xueshu guifanhua (academic standardization). See Academic standardization (xueshu guifanhua) Xuetong (academic tradition). See Academic/scholarly tradition (xuetong) Xuezhe, xueren (academics/scholars). See Academics/scholars (xuezhe, xueren) Yan’an, 162, 164 Yang Fan, 20, 39

Index Yang min (cultivating the people). See Cultivating the people (yang min) Yangqi (sublation). See Sublation (yangqi) Yang wei Zhong yong (making foreign things serve China). See Making foreign things serve China (Yang wei Zhong yong) Yan Jiayan, 130 Yao Yang, 102 Ye Xiushan, 238 Yannan.cn: closure of, 8 Yi (justice/righteousness). See under Justice; Righteousness (yi) Yin hun (dark spirits). See Dark spirits (yin hun) Yi qimeng wei jiren (Enlightenment as personal responsibility). See Enlightenment as personal responsibility (yi qimeng wei jiren) Yishixingtai (ideology). See Ideology (yishixingtai) Yitu lunli (intentional ethics). See Intentional ethics (yitu lunli) Yizhong lishi yanxu (historical continuation). See Historical continuation (yizhong lishi yanxu) Youhuan (patriotic worrying). See Patriotic worrying (youhuan); Worrying Youhuan yishi (crisis mentality). See Crisis mentality (youhuan yishi); Worrying Youji jiehe (organic link). See Organic link (youji jiehe) Young, Robert, 95 Yu Jie, 3, 71, 213, 214, 218 Yu Ying-shih, 55, 133 Yu Zhiping, 145 Yuan dynasty, 5 Yuan Hongdao, 218 Yue Daiyun, 219 Yuedu zhengzhixue (political science of reading). See Political science of reading (yuedu zhengzhixue) Yujing (discursive realm). See Discursive realm (yujing) Yuyan xingwei (acts of language). See under Language Zaoshude ren (premature person). See Premature person (zaoshude ren) Zawen (feuilleton). See Feuilleton (zawen) Zest/flavor (quwei): in critical inquiry, 217–221 Zhaji cezi. See Notation book (zhaji cezi)

•

311

Zhaji (reading notes) genre. See Reading notes (zhaji) genre Zhang Fa, 94 Zhang Longxi, 99–100 Zhang Rulun, 87, 89–90, 92, 138 Zhang Xudong, 140, 172, 182 Zhang Xuecheng, 195 Zhang Yiwu, 91–92, 93–94, 95, 98–99, 100, 137–139, 238 Zhao Yiheng (Chao I-heng), 94–95, 96, 97–98, 128, 129–130 Zhengjiao heyi (unity between politics and doctrine). See Unity between politics and doctrine (zhengjiao heyi) Zheng Min, 22–23, 52, 53, 55–56, 129–130, 137, 238 Zheng ming (rectifying names). See Rectifying names (zheng ming) Zhengquede sixiang (correct ideas). See Correct ideas (zhengquede sixiang) Zhengti yu geti (totality and individual, the). See Totality and individual, the (zhengti yu geti) Zhengtong (political orthodoxy). See Political orthodoxy (zhengtong) Zhenqing shigan (genuine feeling). See Genuine feeling (zhenqing shigan) Zhenzhengde gexing ziyou (genuine individual freedom). See Genuine individual freedom (zhenzhengde gexing ziyou) Zhenzhengde lishihua (genuine historicization). See Genuine historicization (zhenzhengde lishihua) Zhi (wisdom). See Wisdom (zhi) Zhidu baiwujiao (fetishization of institutions). See Fetishization of institutions (zhidu baiwujiao) Zhidu chuangxin (institutional innovation). See Institutional innovation (zhidu chuangxin) Zhidu yangban (institutional models). See Institutional models (zhidu yangban) Zhiguande ganjue (immediate feeling). See Immediate feeling (zhiguande ganjue) Zhishifenzi (intellectuals). See Intellectual(s) (zhishifenzi) Zhixing (the understanding). See Understanding, the (zhixing) Zhongguode Heige’erzhuyi (Chinese Hegelianism). See Chinese Hegelianism (Zhongguode Heige’erzhuyi)

312

•

Index

Zhongguo wenti (Chinese problems). See Chinese problems (Zhongguo wenti) Zhongguo xiandaixing (Chinese modernity). See Chinese modernity (Zhongguo xiandaixing) Zhongji mudi (ultimate end). See Ultimate end (zhongji mudi) Zhong xue wei ti, Xi xue wei yong (Chinese knowledge as foundation, Western knowledge for practical application). See Chinese knowledge as foundation, Western knowledge for practical application (Zhong xue wei ti, Xi xue wei yong) Zhou Enlai, 114, 168, 223 Zhou Yang, 114–115, 120 Zhu Wei, 95 Zhu Xi, 58, 164 Zhu Xueqin, 2, 4, 53, 86, 87, 203–206, 214, 220, 221, 224

Zhuangong (specialized skills). See Specialized skills (zhuangong) Zhua yaohai (seizing the vital flaw). See Seizing the vital flaw (zhua yaohai) Zhuguan yizhilun (subjective will). See Subjective will (zhuguan yizhilun) Zhuti (subject). See Subject (zhuti) Zhutijian (intersubjective mode). See Intersubjective (zhutijian) mode Zhutixing (subjectivity). See Subjectivity (zhutixing) Zirande fanchou (natural) categories. See Natural categories (zirande fanchou) Ziwo chuangzao (self-creation). See Selfcreation (ziwo chuangzao) Zˇizˇ ek, Slavoj, 144, 159, 183–185 Zuo Commentary (Zuo zhuan), 230, 231