Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China

Abstract

This book analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. How do mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks? To what extent is China paradoxically intertwined with a liberal economism? How can one understand its general refusal of liberalism, as well as its frequent, direct responses to electoral democracy, universalism, Western media, and other normative forces? Vukovich argues that the Party-state poses a challenge to our understandings of politics, globalization, and even progress. To be illiberal is not necessarily to be reactionary and vulgar but, more interestingly, to be anti-liberal and to seek alternatives to a degraded liberalism. In this way Chinese politics illuminate the global conjuncture, and may have lessons in otherwise bleak times.

Full text

THE IDEOLOGICAL CHALLENGE OF
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
DANIEL F. VUKOVICH
ILLIBERAL CHINA

“Illiberal China, from its punning title forwards, reveals how China is the
objectied “other” of the West, but is also an actually existing subject with its
own intrinsic logic full of paradoxes and tensions. It examines the political-
economic and cultural narratives surrounding the different representations of
China, as well as their logical boundaries and interrelationships. The book
intertwines external and internal, global and domestic perspectives. At the same
time, Vukovich tries to reects critically on Western liberalism by presenting
“China as a problem.” Vukovich deals frankly with many complex and sensitive
topics, although this style is not an end in itself but serves to open up a new
discursive space. He believes China challenges previous theoretical and historical
narratives, especially those attached to political theory and concepts such as
liberalism or democracy. This is a powerful, subtle book that challenges Chinese
research from a different paradigm and theoretical system. It deserves serious
attention indeed.”
—Lu Xinyu, East China Normal University
China in Transformation
Series Editors
LinChun
London School of Economics
Department of Government
London,UK
CarlRiskin
Queens College
City University of NewYork
Flushing,NY,USA
RebeccaKarl
East Asian Studies Department
New York University
USA

China in Transformation publishes outstanding works of original research
on, as well as translations and analyses of, the debates about China today.
Critical and interdisciplinary in its outlook, the series seeks to situate
China in its historical, regional, and international contexts, and to locate
global trends with reference to China. As a exible endeavor to identify
longer-term problems and issues, the series is not constrained by discipline,
perspective, or method. It launches a new perspective on China and the
world in transformation that contributes to a growing and multifaceted
scholarship.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14890

DanielF.Vukovich
Illiberal China
The Ideological Challenge of the People’s
Republic of China

China in Transformation
ISBN 978-981-13-0540-5 ISBN 978-981-13-0541-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2
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189721, Singapore
DanielF.Vukovich
Department of Comparative Literature
Hong Kong University
Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong

To Ella, Soa, and Vicky

vii
Preface
This book may be read as a follow-up to my previous one, China and
Orientalism, which had the good fortune to be reviewed often and favor-
ably, if also critically, in the good, constructive sense. I’m grateful to those
reviewers and indeed to all the book’sreaders, and hope that the present
volume will also be of interest and, moreover, of use in the larger effort to
re-orient the analysis of China away from colonial and ill-tting liberal anti-
communist templates. Illiberal China no doubt resonates with the earlier
book, but it is also a different animal. It is in many ways the fruit of my
undergraduate government major at Lehigh University many years ago, an
education that I continue to be grateful for. I have been obsessed with ques-
tions of politics and political theory ever since, albeit from outside political
‘science,’ and the present volume reects this as much as my cultural studies
backgroundand mywork in andon China and its representation.
Illiberal China begins after Tiananmen and in the decidedly post-1980s
era of China’s rise, a rise I take to be a real thing, definitive and even epochal,
not something that is going to blow away as so much hype. We can love it
or hate it or feel both things at once or with sentiments in- between. But the
People’s Republic of China has ‘happened’ and ‘arrived’ and isn’t going to
collapse or shut up or snap out of it. Frankly this stability—as opposed to
regime-collapse or some Russian-esque abdication of the party-elite—is a
good thing. I do not understand why so many people—primarily outside of
China, it must be said—desire an end to the Party-state when this does not
seem at all to be a major desire, let alone movement, within its own bor-
ders. Also good, in the analysis here, is the speaking back to the arrogance
or presumptuousness of supposedly universal norms and political forms.

viii PREFACE
My desire here is to understand and think through China’s ‘illiberalism’ as
well as to offer a more cogent critique where needed, especially in terms of
China’s political economy and paradoxical commitment to liberal free-
market economics, or what I will later call economism, that is the subjection
of politics and society to the dictates of the market. I have never pretended
to be an economist, unlike some of my academic Marxist comrades,
but there is no doubt that ‘the political’ and politics (and ideology and so
on) must be read economically as well, as a venerable and subtle base/
superstructure dialectic without end.
Illiberal China does not seek to dene or even adequately illustrate
China, or even all of Chinese politics. At the outset allow me to signify a
non-monolithic and hence pluralistic, even liberal-relativistic notion of
China: that it contains multitudes and there are several, perhaps even a lot
of Chinas. The ones I am focusing on here might t under a general
rubric: political China. The China of the state and of Chinese politics, not
just between states, as in China versus the West, but within and against the
Chinese state. So, in sum,at least these Chinas:socialist China, in the form
of the new left in particular; liberal China in the form of the liberal intel-
ligentsia as well as the state’s own, liberal-Dengist commitment to free
trade and markets and prot-motives; and the ‘Western’ or occidentalist/
orientalist China from the outside, and paradoxically including Hong
Kong: the China Watcher’s China or the ‘common sense’ that China lacks
liberalism (or ‘democracy’ if you prefer), and thatif it had it, it’d become
normal andfree. At the same time I do think the China I am talking about
here actually exists, and I trust what follows will not be taken as some type
of Derridean or ‘comp lit’ approach to matters of representation and dis-
course. Thinking through politics is too important to leave to the ‘scien-
tists,’ or to the humanists who would replace the political with the ethical
and individual.
Illiberal China attempts instead to think through the meaning and dis-
courses of Chinese politics since the 1990s and the rise of the new left as
well as, more consequentially, the stability and even the perceived legiti-
macy of the Party-state. What are the consequences for politics or ‘the
political?’ How might we think differently about Chinese politics and
political discourses in particular? Can we take post-Mao politics seriously?
What are Chinese (or global) politics in a bleak age of (attempted) de-
politicization? What if liberalism was the problem, not the solution? In
sum, how to interpret Chinese politics and what we think we know? This
is precisely where a humanist aka textualist can make a contribution.

ixPREFACE
‘Taking China seriously’ has been one of my signature phrases for some
years now, and the present book also follows suit to the earlier one. I owe
that specific phrase—and the attitude behind it—to a bunch of other people,
not least William Hinton, Edward Said, Richard Rorty (albeit writing
on Habermas and Lyotard on post-modernity), Wendy Larson, Gao
Mobo, and Liu Kang (who along with Tang Xiaobing and others kick-started
the bringing of theory, representation, and critical comparativism
into ‘cultural studies’ of the PRC). But of course it is also something that,
for me, flows out of my encounters not just with thinking through the
PRC ‘after’ Sinological orientalism, but with being in real as well as virtual
or even imagined dialogue with mainland scholars of various stripes and
locales, from Beijing and Shanghai to Wuhan and Anhui and Guangdong.
Most specifically this book’s unique question is this: Is China illiberal?
This would seem the general popular consensus from outside of the PRC,
including some ‘expert’ opinion on the matter, certainly from Washington
or New York to Taipei and Hong Kong and back to London. But what
does this mean when ‘we’ also know that China is radically different than,
say, North Korea or Iran or Russia or whoever else is on the list of states
‘we’ don’t like? What do ‘we’—that is, foreign experts or liberals or erstwhile
liberals inside China and its Special Administrative Regions (SARs)—
mean by the Party-state being illiberal?
My very general, slightly tongue-in-cheek, yet hopefully clear answer to
the charge of Chinese illiberalism is yes and no. In some ways China is
clearly illiberal in the bad ways: repressive of dissent, for example, to the
point of it being done on principle(!), and policing ‘free’ speech too much
for its own or for anyone’s good. But in other ways—for example, in its
commitment to a ‘strong’ or effective state or state capacity (which it must
now reclaim from the market and capitalists), in its refusal of political liber-
alism, that is of the latter’s total commodication of politics by money and
capital and ‘interest groups,’ in its ‘statist’ commitment to livelihood and
raising living standards as opposed to prot for its own sake, and in an anti-
imperialist critique or refusal of Western universalisms—this is an interest-
ing, rational, and arguably useful and welcome refusal of liberalism.
Likewise it does not seem to me at all useful (and I am bracketing it off
from analysis in any case) to make comparisons toward some global tide of
illiberalism (Russia, Hungary, North Korea, Iran, Poland, etc.) that China
is a part of. This would be reication. Though it is also clear that the
dominant force of liberalism or neo-liberalism, the degradation of a ‘good’
liberalism from the immediate post-war period, is reaching its limits and

x PREFACE
has lost whatever legitimacy it had outside of the bankers and rentiers and
the rich. The blowback (Trumpism, Brexit) or pushback (protest) is real
and understanding this is an urgent matter for cultural and global studies.
Responses to this failure of liberalism will necessarily evolve (or devolve)
on their own foundations. In this the PRC and its so-called statism have
perhaps more resources of hope than, say, its former enclave Hong Kong.
As I try to argue later, ‘illiberalism’ means, in the end, not- or anti-
liberal. Of course there is a difference between ‘not-‘ and ‘anti-,’ which I
must leave to others to parse in future work. The essential point here is the
refusal as well as the examination of what, at an admittedly theoretical
level, China does have in place of liberalism. This is all the more important
when we face up to the fact that liberalism as ‘we’ have known it—again,
we non-Chinese residents—is dead. Or rather has been degraded and
‘commodied,’ made utterly economistic and formalistic to the point that
it simply fails to command belief (excluding perhaps certain civics lessons
curricula or purveyors of same). And viewed historically, institutionally,
and from beyond Euro-America, liberalism has, as Dominico Lusordo
among others has reminded us, always been rooted in exclusion, hierarchy,
and indeed imperialism.
To call or assume or think of China as being ‘illiberal’ necessarily carries
with it a clear normative charge, beyond the recognition that all states
have a monopoly on violence, and that all states are, or can be at will,
completely authoritarian. Were China to simply be referred to as authori-
tarian would be, in my view, entirely different than what I am seeking to
examine and refute and read against the grain here.
Orientalism and colonial discourse: these termsappear far less in the
present book, butI do not take back my insistence that these things mat-
ter for the analysis of China and any representation of China. To say that
China is illiberal is to speak to its unfortunate difference from a certain
norm that just so happens to be ‘Western’ (or European or whatever other
term you prefer: it lacks that). But this is also to say that China should be
liberal. It should become like us in this—quite important, very political—
sense. This to me still seems to be an important interpretive, ‘politics of
knowledge’ issue that calls out for more recognition and debate.
Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong DanielF.Vukovich

xi
I thank the following publishers for allowing me to reproduce parts of a
few previously published articles and chapters. Each of these older pieces
has, however, been extensively revised and rewritten, to the point of
becomingnew creatures altogether. Once upon a time I envisioned just
lightly revising these, but this isnotan option when dealing with contem-
porary phenomena.
Parts of Chap. 2 appeared as “The Battle for Chinese Discourse and the
Rise of the Chinese New Left: Towards a Post-colonial Politics of
Knowledge.” China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural
Interventions. Ban Wang and Lu Jie, eds. Rowman and Littleeld
Publishers, 2012.
A few paragraphs of Chap. 2 also hail from “Postcolonialism,
Globalization, and the ‘Asia Question’.” Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial
Studies. Ed. Graham Huggan. Oxford UP, 2013. 587–606.
Parts of Chap. 3 appeared rst as “From Charting The Revolution to
Charter 2008: Discourse, Liberalism, Imperialism” in Culture and Social
Transformation: Theoretical Frameworks and the Chinese Context, Eds.
Cao Tianyu, Ban Wang, and Zhong Xueping, Brill Press, 2014.
Parts of Chaps. 4 and 5 are taken from “Illiberal China and Global
Convergence: Thinking through Wukan and Hong Kong,” Third World
Quarterly, 36.11 (2015): 2130–2147.
I am grateful to a number of colleagues and friends who have offered
me feedback or discussion on the ideas and topics in this book, at confer-
ences in China or abroad, in other publication projects, or in their sojourns
through this fair southern city. Just asimportant, they have offered needed
acknowledgments

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
conversation and dialogue on other matters. Thank you Gao Mobo,
Zhong Xueping, Ban Wang, Cao Tianyu, Zhao Yuezhi, Jan Nederveen
Pieterse, Graham Huggan, Wendy Larson, Ted Huters, Greg Mahoney,
Brian Tsui, Liu Kang, Pheng Cheah, Allen Chun, Liu Shih-Ding, and
Alessandro Russo. I owe a special debt to Lin Chun for her work and sup-
port. Her China and Global Capitalism is an important text for the pres-
ent one, beyond the citations that do show up.
I also wish to thank other folks in China, Hong Kong, and elsewhere
for their work, and for being helpful to me as I pursue myown: Cai Xiang,
He Xuefeng, Sun Jingxian, Mao Jian, Wang Hui, Shi-xu, Liu Xi, Yu
Xuying, Daniel Bell, Wang Ning, Wang Shaoguang, Yan Hairong, Barry
Sautman, Brian Tsui, Donald Gasper, citizen Takami, Lui Tai-lok, and Pan
Lu. In Germany, I was honored to keynote at the ‘Postcolonialism and
China?’ conference. The occasion also helped me sort out some thoughts
for this book’s conclusion, as did a keynote invitation in Singapore at a
more corporate cultural studies event. Deep thanks to Marius Meinhoff
for the invite to Germany and for his work on temporality and colonialism.
Thanks as well to Felix Wemheuer, an excellent interlocutor.
I note that all errors, overly risky claims, infelicities, jump cuts, debat-
able loyalties, and quixotic moments are mine alone.
A number of fellow employees at the agship deserve my thanks for
their various forms of support, professional and practical and personal.
Thanks to Song Geng, Ang Sze Wei, Aaron Mangan-Park, Joe Tang,
Timothy O’Leary, Giorgio Bancorosso, Edward Shen, Julia Khuen, and
Ci Jiwei, as well as Alexandra Choi, Vivian Chu, and Ying Chan. Along
with some people who I won’t name, Ying has helped me think through
Hong Kong more than she realizes. Mohammed Al Sudari has kept me
going with the occasional coffee and sharp conversation, a friend from afar
almost immediately. Kam Louie and Louise Edwards returned down
underbut rsthelped me endure a bad simulation of McCarthyism several
years ago.
At Palgrave, Jacob Dreyer has been a very helpful, patient, and, best of
all, sharp and well-informed commissioning editor and interlocutor. I am
most fortunate to have an editor who not only knows contemporary China
as well as anyone (and who lives and works there, which truly matters) but
also is an active writer and intellectual in his own right. I know that many
academic book editors aspire to just such a condition, but Jacob is one of
the real ones. My editorial assistant Anu Weerakoon has been most help-
ful, efcient, and pleasant to work with. My book series editors, Lin Chun,

xiiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Rebecca Karl, and Carl Riskin, have been terric all the way through. I
thank them for the extensive feedback and comments on early drafts of the
whole book. Though, again, the nal text that follows is my own
responsibility.
Finally, and most importantly, I owe more than I can say to my family
for their love and patience while I disappeared to work, even if it was often
just down the hallway in a Hong Kong sized box, albeitone with a view.
(And for their extra patience while I drag myself to the gym to stave off
the grave and play lumbar roulette with the barbells.) The best moments
were when they would come knocking to greet me, to tell me (tearfully or
happily) what was happening in the house, or just to get Legos or books
or nothing in particular. Being an intellectual, ora gainfully employed
academic, is a privilege. But the long, slow, and difcult grind of writing a
book takes one away from the esh and blood people you love the most.
That time away can’t be replaced, especially with young Ella, whose rst
20 months were in competition with this book, time-wise. I hope that
they will all know that I know this, and that they forgive me as needed.
Soa remained my bestie throughout, and Ella my up and coming one.
My partner and my wifeVicky makes possiblethe best parts of all of our
lives. Thankyou three for sharing your lives with meand making the team
work.

xv
contents
1 On Illiberalism andSeeing Like anOther State 1
2 The New Left andtheOld Politics ofKnowledge:
ABattle forChinese Political Discourse 43
3 From Making Revolution toMaking Charters: Liberalism
andEconomism intheLate Cold War 89
4 No Country, No System: Liberalism, Autonomy, and
De-politicization inHongKong 129
5 Wukan!: Democracy, Illiberalism, andTheir Vicissitudes 167
6 The Ills ofLiberalism: Thinking Through thePRC
andthePolitical 199
Bibliography 241
Index 247

1© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_1
CHAPTER 1
On Illiberalism andSeeing
Like anOther State
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), ‘China’ as a political entity, state,
and intellectual political culture, is a problem. It infuriates and fascinates,
perplexes and amazes. On that the CommunistParty and its liberal critics
inside and abroad (where they are far more numerous) might well agree.
And yet what an odd thing to proclaim, this problem, when, as both sides
might again nod—in obeisance to the hegemony of the market and prot
motive—that same Party-state has lifted several hundred millions of peo-
ple out of poverty. The latter is demonstrably true when one credits the
Mao era foundations, let alone the life expectancies on the eve of the 1949
revolution. The PRC—which is to say the Communist Party-state, before
and after Mao—has clearly returned China to the forefront of global rec-
ognition and power since the 1980s. The rise of China may be a cliché
partially belied by its problems and iniquities, and by its per capita gross
national product (GNP; China’s ranks 80th in the world as of 2014).1 But
clichés nonetheless exist in a certain, signicant relationship with truth
and social reality. China has ‘arrived’ and is more like a bank that is too big
to fail than a teetering state on the brink of collapse. Of course that same
Party-state system has also plunged its people into a highly polluted and
unequal modern society—a society rife with authoritarianism, excessive
policing of speech, and heavy-handed, if ultimately failing, censorship. A
society with little ‘soft power’ and approval in the Western metropoles of
the former colonial world, in part due to old fashioned Cold War oriental-
ism,and increasing disapproval in its southeast Asian periphery, thanks

2
tothe Party-state’s own short-sighted geo-politicalbullying and itsfear of
American basesaround the Pacic.
Yet the Party-state continues to enjoy an obvious, if relative, legitimacy
and stability at home. Far from ushering in the end of the party and the rise
of liberal democracy, as often predicted through the 1980s, 1990s, and
beyond, the capitalist reforms after Mao, what some of the old left in China
have indeed called a counter-revolution, have hardly ushered in the end of
one-party rule. Instead media and scholarship are obsessed with the conse-
quences, causes, and unintended side effects of a new mantra—‘the rise of
China.’ So we have a China that, for some enthusiastic observers, seems all
but ready to ‘rule the world.’2 For other, antagonisticviewers committed
from afar or by profession to symbolically battle the perceived, illiberal tyr-
anny of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it is the same thing but differ-
ent: a coming collapse of China, or at least an over-hyped ‘China boom’
going bust any day now.3 Between the Sinophilic and Sinophobic poles, there
is an obvious center with a closer approximation to accuracy and semantic
richness. The PRC’s stability—itself an ofcial, propagandized keyword since
1989 along with ‘harmonious society’ and others—no doubt has to do with
the oft-remarked rise of Chinese nationalisms and patriotisms (including
long-distance ones) that accompany its rise. But the perceived legitimacy and
stability as well as the more material achievements must also have to do with
the political culture and system of the PRC itself. The thousands of protests,
strikes, ‘mass incidents,’ and individual acts of resistance or rebellion do not
belie this so much as prove, for better and for worse, its resilience and adapt-
ability, its very reality as a type of system and political culture that is far from
weak or fake. From the legacy of the Maoist ‘right to rebel’ to what has been
termed the long tradition of ‘rightful resistance’ dating back to the Qing
dynasty, political protest and intellectual contention are simply as much a part
of the PRC as its various cuisines and transport systems.4
As Kerry Brown has recently argued, drawing on an essay by Wang Hui,
every major clash of the last three decades has involved some (ofcially but
poorly hidden) fundamental policy difference, or in other words a struggle
over actual ideas.5 Admittedly these are not radical ideas or ideological
struggles and major differences (as in the Mao era over ‘lines’); in that
sense, the ideas are wonkish, relatively non-political, and set within certain
limits and parameters of what is acceptable. (Maoist economics are not.)
This is very similar to that in the USA and elsewhere; though the compari-
son may actually work in the PRC’s favor, where actual national plans are
worked out (albeit behind tightly closed doors). But ‘our’ endless and
speculative focuson, say, Xi Jinping’s personal struggles against enemies, or
D. F. VUKOVICH

3
on Bo Xilai’s quest for national power (where there may have been actual
ideological differences at stake), quite effectively and unfortunately hides
the wonkish ideas and policies at stake. The PRC takes the power of ideas,
policies, and ideologies far more seriously than other ‘normal’ or ‘free’
societies, where, for example, you can have any number of radical political
magazines or websites, some of them very rich indeed in their content
orsymbolic signicance. But that matter notat all in terms of poweror
inuence on national politics.6 Or at least the, say, American leftist and
‘ultra-leftist’ texts andideas matter far less than those of therightists, which
can directly inform the conservative parties (to the extent that the two-
system even speaks to two political sides). In the PRC, the perceived impor-
tance and inuence of ideas is what leads to the problem of censorship and
the policing of speech. This difference—the higher valuation, yet fear, of
the ideational—is, arguably, explained by the PRC’s Marxist and Leninist-
Maoist roots. Though it must also be said that it was Mao who counte-
nanced ‘blooming and contending’ far more than the current Party.
All told, and notwithstanding its repudiation of Maoist economics and
domestic politics (i.e. class struggle), the PRC has been remarkably adapt-
able, a la the guerrilla warfare strategy of the 1930s and 1940s. This has
led some scholars to aptly refer to it as being guided not by Adam Smith’s
but by Mao’s invisible hand.7 This includes its embrace of uncertainty, as
Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry well note, and a willingness to
take risks, especially, but not only, economically. This may sometimes
result in the empty ghost towns of recent vintage, such as Ordos on the
one hand, but can also result in the booming, massive, melting pot capital-
ist city of Shenzhen as well as the more ancient metropole of Guangzhou,
now with its own little Africa or ‘chocolate city.’ This experimentation
applies far less to the party system itself, as such behavior is highly discour-
aged, especially after the ‘scandal’ of the murder and betrayal and the
apparent corruption in Bo Xilai’s Chongqing. And yet this embrace of risk
also applied to the state’s great openness to domestic and even foreign
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at work in the mainland’s pub-
lic sphere or civil society. That too has been cut back and curtailed signi-
cantly under the more watchful, illiberal eye of Xi Jinping’s rule. But even
this crackdown or self-correction has to be counted as within the ‘guer-
rilla’ or experimental mode of change and adaptation.
Put another way, the power of the Chinese political system and political
culture not only stems from top-down repressive measures but also operates
in more productive, positive, and capillary ways, as every Foucauldian
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

4
knows. Note, for example, that the so-called Great Firewall—as real as it
is—hardly succeeds in banishing anti-communist and other unattering
information about China coming into the country through the Internet or
other avenues. Anti-Maoist and anti-CCP views or knowledges are a case in
point, as are foreign scholarship and texts, from the works of von Hayek to
Roderick MacFarquhar. And yet these same ‘subversive’ information
ows—chiey Western or Chinese language media from, say, Hong Kong
and Taiwan—often succeed only in stoking the res of Chinese nationalism
and indignation over ‘biased,’ ‘anti-China’ perspectives. From the ‘Free
Tibet’ camp’s attempts to snuff out the world tour of the Olympic torch,
circa 2008, to the creation of an ‘anti-CNN’ social media platform in the
mainland, to Ai Wei Wei’s relative unpopularity in China, to the more
recent Hague court ruling against mainland claims to (vast amounts of) the
South China Sea, orto protests on American campuses against the Dalai
Lama speaking: there is no doubt that a newly, visibly assertive China is
talking back. Of coursethis is just one, albeit strong reaction-formation to
such ows of ‘liberal’ information and views, and there is no doubt that
Hong Kong’s liberal media and publications have informed and enabled
other,more liberal or contrary views in the mainland. It is always worth
noting that, contra a certain orientalist stereotype, the Chinese people have
never spoken with just one voice or within just one identity.
The catch with many such acts of resistance and political protest in
China (‘mass incidents’), which can be as substantial and serious as a vio-
lent strike or a militant occupation of space, is that they rarely take the
forms and paths ‘we’ think they should, if the goal is the end of the one-
Party- state, authoritarian governance, and, in sum, the subversion of the
general reality of the post-1949 system. A system that itself needs to be
sharply periodized as post-Mao and post-revolutionary, since at least the
ascension of Deng Xiaoping andthe advent of commodication in 1979.
This failure, so to speak, of the Chinese state and system to take the right,
normative forms presents a major challenge for liberal or indeed other
analyses.
A case in point is a recent article by Elizabeth Perry, always a usefuland
lucid scholar, aptly titled ‘The Illiberal Challenge of Authoritarian China.’8
It resonates with a consistent theme of her prodigious research: that the
Chinese political order is neither fragile nor vacuous but has a logic of its
own, and one that does not t easily within theconventional wisdom or
discourse ofWestern Chinese studies. (Many historians and assorted China
experts would admit the latter, of course, but few would take the next step:
D. F. VUKOVICH

5
making the comparison in a substantial or attentive way, and taking the dif-
ferences and rationalities seriously.) Perry notes a central paradox of Chinese
rule: that China’s undeniably vibrant civil society and active, not passive,
public may actually undergird and perpetuate the Chinese state (‘the author-
itarian regime’), and not democratize it into a liberal system of political
representation.9 The supposed link between civil society and democratiza-
tion on which so much cultural studies, not just political science, depend,
may not be a link at all. This happens precisely because the state is ‘attentive’
to such protests and voices, and not only responds repressively but often
incorporates such criticisms or problems, or otherwise responds pro-actively
or positively, albeit only because of the civic/public actions in the rst place.
It can even repress and address the issue, as may well be the current case of
Wukan, discussed in a later chapter. Perry concludes with two notable points.
One, the rise of protests and public voice (to adopt A. O. Hirschman’s
phrase) reects not a movement toward ‘rights consciousness’ and hence
‘democratization,’ but toward ‘rules consciousness’ and—in my own words
here—toward making the state respond and work in its own terms. And yet
it must also be said in response to this still liberal framework that the distinc-
tion between rules and rights is an unstable and arguably a practically negli-
gible one, unless one believes in natural rights, a la the early modern political
philosophers. Atany rate, in regard to what happens on the ground in China,
and leaving aside the normative liberal frame, Perry’s observations about the
state and protest seem characteristically accurate. They resonate with what
we will later discuss as the ‘righteous resistance’ mode of protest in Wukan,
but not in Hong Kong. Two, Perry claims that this is precisely the ‘illiberal
challenge of Chinese authoritarianism’: that a robust civil society in this case
only ‘strengthens and sustains’ the regime. Note that the argument is not
that it gets more repressive but only that it responds, perhaps begrudgingly,
but consistently. And yet this does not entail any movement toward a liberal
democratic regime, which is to say that it does not take the normative form
according to political science and other liberal discourses. Clearly this implies
a problem and a challenge to such understandings of politics, change, devel-
opment, ‘democratization,’ and so on. The problem is that the latter, con-
ventional theories (or normative assumptions) are rather useless to explain
how Chinese politics works and has developed over the years. Or, put
another way, the theories can only point to what is lacking, and can only
repeat that whatever the Communist Party does it does just to stay in power.
If we can tease out the logic here, the further assumption to the liberal
‘demonization’ of the PRC seems to be that if the Party-state did not do all
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

6
these things just to stay in power—including acting democratically or
responsively to protests and the ‘general will’—then China would, more or
less spontaneously, or at least quickly and inevitably, become the same as the
rest of the countries in the liberal world order. Perry’s article thus helps us
see the limits of such logics and approaches to the PRC.And, in general,
with the persistence, if not rise, of other alleged illiberal regimes, sometimes
called illiberal democracies, such as Russia and others of the former Soviet
empire, as well as, say, Thailand, the faith in such convergences is clearly fad-
ing. But the crucial point for the present study is that the PRC nonetheless
should become like a ‘real’ or ‘good’ liberal democratic regime, and that its
clear refusal to do so is a challenge to our received political wisdom and
theories more than to China itself.
The obvious contradiction here—namely, that the Chinese political
system and culture in this sense actually work yet still must change to t
the liberal concepts—does not go addressed. (We will return to this in
regard to the Wukan Uprising later.) This raises two immediate questions:
illiberal to who and according to who? One suspects that the answer to
both is often ‘the foreign experts.’ The charge of illiberalism—more often
an academic assumption than a journalist’s explicit charge—tells us more
about the liberal West, and globalization as cultural imperialism, than it
does about the PRC as a political system and intellectual political culture.
This book picks up from where my earlier China and Orientalism
(2012) left off—after 1989, and with the rise of a Sinological form of ori-
entalism that mandates that China is slowly, necessarily becoming the same
as ‘us’; that is, it must become a normal and free political entity and space.
This reverses the ‘classic’ orientalist view about the Chinese difference
being essential to the place and people, and an allegedly insurmountable
barrier to normality/modernity/freedom (or for the Sinophilic minority,
the reason for its superiority to a degraded Occident). If not in the near
future, then certainly in the longer one the (Western-universal) script is
set. Insofar as it is abnormal and lacks freedom, this difference has not to
do with race or ‘essence’ (as in the old orientalist view) but with the anach-
ronistic legacy of the single Party-state and Mao, which is to say, with
China’s unfortunate, communist political revolution and with the PRC as
such. Race and ‘essence’ are no bars. What China still lacks, but what it is
slowly forming (or must do so), is a recognizable intellectual political cul-
ture, one essentially turning on liberalism, a ‘proper’ civil society and pub-
lic sphere, and an attendant procedural, multi-party democracy.
D. F. VUKOVICH

7
The PRC—modern China as a political entity and rising power—is thus
maddeningly illiberal from the standpoint of the Western or global intellec-
tual political culture. The latter I take to be, in short, a form of ‘general’ or
generic liberalism (as opposed to ‘neo’). Liberalism is, of course, notoriously
wide-ranging and hard to dene, as bets a discourse or thing which forms
the dominant ideology of all dominant ideologies since the rise of modern,
global capitalism.10 What one can do however is at least dene one’s own
terms. I take it to be a discourse that turns upon three further points, beyond
the already notedinsistence on multi-party electoral democracy: the primary
value of individualism and attendant negative ‘freedoms from’ (the state
especially); a normative universalism (explicit or implicit); and, crucially, the
structure of ‘free’ markets alongside private property. This is an ideal-type
denition and does not imply that it corresponds to the actual, social reality
of a particular Western nation. It is better seen as its self-image or self-under-
standing, as in traditional, modern, political theory since Locke. But at the
same time, such imaginings (not unlike nationalism as an imagined commu-
nity) or discursive constructions (like orientalism)can have an undeniable
material or actual reality effect on their institutional embodiments.
‘It,’ an illiberal China, refuses to change. Not in the ways it ought to
within the terms of Sinological-orientalist, liberal discourse and market/
capitalist/modernization theory. The PRC as a strong or would-be strong
state (its capacity is in question by the Chinese new left), and the related
Chinese intellectual political culture, thus pose an ideological or discursive
challenge. The challenge of the PRC lies in the obstinate ‘refusal’ as well
as in its frequent, more direct responses to political, economic, and other
forms of liberalism. China—its government—has insisted on developing
and maintaining its ‘own’ system and intellectual political culture, one that
stems—if in a non-linear, perhaps rhizomatic way—from Confucian and
other traditions, including, of course, the socialist or Marxist-Leninist-
Maoist one. Yuri Pines, for example, has recently argued at length that the
Chinese political culture has long turned in part on the belief in a central-
ized state.11 This is admittedly something of a truism or ‘Chinese platitude’
(which does not mean it is false), but Pines resurrects this theme from an
older Sinology or orientalism without simply ascribing it to the Chinese
mind or race. And it does not imply some monolithic invariance within the
long, modern, political history of China and the PRC.Clearly such a belief
has been part of statecraft for a long time, in China’s transition from an
empire to a nation-state.12 It certainly may not last forever, and still more
certainly it does not imply a popular, blind faith in authoritarianism or
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

8
despotism. But it, this belief in the validity if not necessity of a single,
strong, centralized state, has weathered not only 1989 but subsequent
waves of cultural-ideological and economic globalization. Of course the
devil is in the details—criticism, even contempt for the Party is also very
real in China as elsewhere—and in some ways this belief is only remarkable
or exceptional in comparison with the Western neo-liberal anti-statism.
Even Maoist China—to take a key example of variance within this intel-
lectual political social tradition—can be seen as a fascinating, perhaps failed
perhaps successful, but certainly an ambiguous attempt at creating a state
and political culture that placed people into new relationships with one
another and the ruling government (revolutionary proletarian culture,
mass participation within the state) as well as ‘against’ or in a struggle to
overcome the self, understood by Mao etal. as akin to ‘selshness’ and
thus, in the sense of the word at the time, to ‘liberalism.’ It was, in other
words, Marxist-modern, but also, in comparison to liberal democracy and
individualism, far closer to a Confucian or traditional way of understand-
ing the self and society, or self and community/other. Rather than know-
ing and discovering and being authentic to your true self, the point was to
focus on relationships, social relations, as these—and not that of individual
monad—lie at the origin of what it means to be alive, human, in-the-
world.13 Perhaps the famous/infamous rustication movement of the later
Cultural Revolution, with its own roots in the Yan’an spirit of the 1930s
to live among and assimilate into the peasants, is the chief example of this
ethic. But it is omnipresent in the propaganda of the radical period (and is
the existential core of Maoism and the relation to the masses). Even now,
in a non-radical and de-politicized or degraded form, it lives on in Party-
state efforts to get individuals cathected to the nation and ‘Chinese civili-
zation’ as against the individualism and market freedoms offered by
Chinese capitalism.
Beijing-based political theorist Daniel Bell has, in several books and many
editorial pages, argued forcefully for the applicability and even desirability of
neo-Confucian political and social ideas in China, such as ‘meritocracy’
within the Party-state versus Western-national-electoral style democracy.14
Bell is not without his detractors (predictably many from the liberal-univer-
salist political science eld) and as a ‘pure’ analytical philosopher, he certainly
runs the risk of too easily typifying-idealizing the workings of the Party-state
through an inadequately contextualized form of logical positivism. That is a
risk in the name of clarity and lucidity of his own arguments and ideas (and
of the Chinese colleagues he synthesizes), and it is effective. His argument
D. F. VUKOVICH

9
that China’s political culture and system will inevitably reect its own power-
ful traditions and heritage (Confucianism, for Bell) is fairly unassailable and
something that liberals and politics scholars in particular should attend to.
They usually do not. Regardless, the only room for argument here can in the
end be what aspects and foundations from actually existing Chinese political
history will prevail, and which ones should, in some type of inevitable mix
with global/Western political forms and forces? Can there be room, even in
a ‘becoming-capitalist’ or ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ PRC, for
the Maoist-egalitarian or socialist residua of the 1970s or earlier? Can the
state feminism and rural-centered egalitarianism of Maoism be returned to
or re-recognized as the purported bases of the Party-state? Can the current
class character of the Party-state shift or be reformed by disempowering
private capital and capitalists? Certainly that leftist era and tradition is not
without its indirect inuences, let alone its creation of the one-party
(Leninist) state itself. As I suggest later this can even be seen in the anti-
imperialism implicit to ‘illiberalism.’ Liberalism as a political worldview, for
its own part, is much more than a minor tradition, one highly unlikely to
overtake ‘socialism,’ let alone neo-Confucianism or a more vague but real
notion of ‘Chinese tradition.’ It is the communist revolution as well as ‘tra-
dition’ that grants the Party-state its legitimacy at an admittedly abstractbut
still substantial and effective level. Therevolution and the Party-stateare not
under threat by liberalism in the political sense, but may well be endangered
by the economic market liberalism or economism of the state. Indeed politi-
cal liberalism’s only future in China, other than waiting for some mystical
convergence or implosion of the Party-state, would have to be within the
single Party-state system, a la notions of a liberal socialism or Confucian
liberalism and so on.15 But political liberalism as a discourse of rights and
new future laws to come is still in play within China,16 and of course globally,
where it forms the general intellectual political culture despite the triumph
of clearly reactionary forms of neo- or contemporary liberalism.
In sum, it is highly unlikely that China will in the foreseeable future
complete some as-of-now imaginary transition to becoming a ‘normal’
multi-party, liberal democracy and society a la Taiwan, Japan, or India, let
alone the USA.The historical conditions are not there; there seems no
desire for such a thing. The economy and Party-state are certainly beset by
problems, but neither seems remotely close to what some liberals or
Marxists think of as crisis. What is more, and as Lin Chun has argued pow-
erfully and at length, China cannot follow the model of the US-West pre-
cisely because those regimes rose to preeminence by virtue of slavery and
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

10
modern colonialism under capitalist expansion.17 Such options are not
available today. Even if one wants to see China as fully capitalist, or even as
an expanding if not imperialistic power (China extracting resources from
Africa, bullying the Philippines and others in the Pacic ocean), this would
still not be akin to the way the UK, France, and the USA were from the
eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Its imperial ambitions
ala the old modern empires would be doomed, if it had them. That it
doesn’t have them—that its business in Africa is primarily business, that its
unfortunate, bullying muscle exing in the Pacic is really about American
bases all over Asia—seems likely. And in any case the PRC is far too weak
and the world far too much changed and de-colonized for a return to that.
While the growing and thus expanding Chinese economy certainly impacts
many people in some undeniably negative ways (and of course most of all
its own legal subjects), such exploitation is not the same thing as imperial-
ism, let alone slavery and colonialism. Part of ‘our’ problem in coming to
terms with the rise of China is the prison house of liberalism: it is hard to
read contemporary China politically without falling back into familiar his-
tories and conceptual shibboleths about what freedom, individuality,
human rights, and so on are. And of course there are cottage industries,
popular and academic, dedicated to fear and ressentiment-mongering.
The Party-state’s main economic contradiction is not to source free/
super exploited labor and natural resources (though it needs the latter),
but, as is by now frequently proclaimed by the CCP itself, to shift from a
high growth, export-led economy to a still-growing but domestic-
oriented, more sustainable economy. It will have to become more social,
democratic, and Keynesian, that is it should invest internally and increase
consumer demand as well as redistribute wealth. This will actually entail a
break with its heretofore Dengist liberal economism, letting the market act
as the god who sorts everything out. (We will return to this later.) China’s
rise through capitalism is due to many factors, not the least of which is the
human capital and infrastructure, and complete lack of foreign debt, dur-
ing the Maoist era; this base was then relentlessly plundered and capital-
ized in the post-Mao period. China’s rise—via massive privatization and
exploitation of labor—has entailed all of the predictable environmental
costs, inequalities, and even anti-feminist backlashes. But it has not had to
do with slavery or transfers of wealth from the colonies, nor with plunder-
ing poorer nations. It has been far better able to negotiate terms with the
former empires/multinational capitals. In the end, like its failures or lim-
its, its successes too cannot be divorced from its political state-form as if it
D. F. VUKOVICH

11
were an irrelevant detail to the magic of markets and global capitalism.
And yet the difference of China in this respect is more or less dismissed or
elided in the rush to position it as either irredeemably illiberal or stuck in
the waiting room of history until the liberal zeitgeist sweeps in and pro-
duces the transition to normality/liberality/freedom.
In sum China is not a transitional society or totality because it cannot be
one.18 Surely it is blessed (or cursed, if you prefer) with a great, rapid deal of
change, as, for example, in its urbanization and construction or its cultural
shift toward consumerism, its tourism and travel, its academic expansion,
and its horrifying air pollution. But there is an enormous, if unremarked,
amount of baggage caught up in the very idea of transition, especially in the
liberal notions of modernization and democratization. As if we know where
it must end up at the end of such alleged transitions. What it is moving
toward (or away from) is itself contingent. This means that its illiberalism
could in the end become more or less progressive, its alleged socialism more
or less substantive, its repressive authoritarianism more or less pronounced.
This is why developments such as the new left or other voices critical of
‘reforms’ since Mao, and moreover large protests such as those in Wukan
and even Hong Kong (despite their self-defeating anti-communism and
anti-‘mainlandization’ planks), are important. Contra the waves of de-polit-
icization and economism (let the market and ‘growth’ sort everything out),
the political is alive, if not exactly ‘well,’ in the PRC.Or to put it another
way, for all its rapid change and contingencies under globalization, the rhet-
oric of inevitable transitions and convergences—teleologies of one stripe or
another, be it from liberal thought or the party echelons—is of very little
use. It is the normative assumptions that must be challenged, be they
directed toward liberal convergence or Chinese socialist/Confucian excep-
tionalism. Convergence is a sociological keyword for the present study
because it is a keyword of actual or ‘real’ globalization and what I keep refer-
ring to as (mainstream) intellectual political culture and discourse.19 It is
meant to denote just what it says: a growing sameness or becoming same-
ness in cultural and political terms. Whether one thinks this is animated by
global mixing and global clashes that will be won one way or another, or it
is ‘the good lord’s work’ (as some in Hong Kong political circles seem to
believe) or the zeitgeist, the notion remains one of coming together and, in
this case, a convergence into liberalism and ‘properly’ as opposed to PRC
representative democracy. Convergence in the present, secular study is noth-
ing but a powerful discourse that can and does have real effects on some
people and places. In the analysis of Chinese politics (vis-à-vis its state in
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

12
particular), it operates along revised orientalist lines that I tried to suss out
in a previous book as China ‘becoming the-same’ rather than it being stuck
in the past and doomed by its essential difference from the occident.20
Despite or rather because of the oft-noted rise of China, this liberal politi-
cal orientalism (in Engin Isin’s apt phrase) and the forces, texts, and institu-
tions behind it continue to circulate in and animate the West as well as
China itself.21 (It is not that there are multiple types of orientalism—it is a
structure or discursive formation itself—but that it can take a more or less
political inection, depending on the context.) In the case of China the holy
trinity of orientalism remains: Chinese women, the Chinese economy, and
Chinese politics aka despotism. (Food and the language are in this account
secondary.) Our focus here is on the latter. The eld of politics, in the man-
ner of most social science, usually barricades itself against post-colonial cri-
tique in the name of objectivity and empiricism. Even the academic world of
the Western intellectual left(if this can be distinguished from liberalism)—
for example, Verso Press and its journals—has mostly contempt for the cri-
tique of imperialism and difference stemming from post-colonial studies or
non- or anti-universalist theory.22 As if politics—including the proper, true
forms of government, ofcitizenship, of class,and the state—were universal.
Hence the usefulness of Isin’s phrase. From the persistence of Chinese lib-
eralism (e.g. the Charter 2008 movement discussed later) to ofcial and
non-ofcial responses to ‘Western’ knowledge/power (soft power, free
speech policing, new left and heterodox intellectual movements, ‘patriotic’
protests), it is clear that orientalism, liberalism, illiberalism, ‘statism,’ and the
politics of knowledge between East and West, in large part, dene the con-
temporary global intellectual ‘scene’ within China as well as abroad.
The PRC has long been engaged in a running argument with liberalism
and (at least) political orientalism, as a corollary to its post-dynastic and
post-colonial trajectory as a modern, unied nation-state. Liberalism and
illiberalism—as with ‘socialism’—are ‘oating signiers’ for a type of socio-
economic system as well as politics, and they are produced and contested
inside and outside of the PRC as well as Hong Kong. Though the latter
lacks a socialist/leftist (i.e. non-liberal) political history or culture to speak
of, it is a historically and contemporarily important source of liberalism
(and of capital ight) as well as of anti-communist education and propa-
ganda.23 Indeed the clash over pro- and anti-mainland views (and voting
blocs) in Hong Kong, grafted onto questions of ‘democracy’ versus ‘com-
munism’ despite being constituted in reality by capitalist classes and
interests, is in large part what local politics in the harbor city is about, a clash
D. F. VUKOVICH

13
between two types of education and intellectual formations: colonial liberal-
ism and mainland/communist/Chinese ‘collectivism’ or nationalism. Put
another way, the current intellectual political cultures of China and the West
(and with all due allowances for the striations of these spaces) are very much
in contention internally and globally. Politics today, as Stuart Hall put it
long ago in a classic re-interpretation of hegemony, is largely a battle over
discursive terrain, for the legitimation and de-legitimation of discourse as
much as money and power. It is these last two dimensions—protests (or
politics) and a contentious, ‘illiberal’ intellectual political culture—which
occupy much of the present study.
LiberaLism andits Vicissitudes
Illiberal China seeks to understand these two aspects of China in their
‘own’ terms or self-understanding (as seen by the author, and as opposed
to merely debunking them). It moreover seeks to contrast these with their
coding by contemporary liberalism, that is, by what I take to be essentially
liberal political theory and scholarship. As I will explain later, this is a
degraded (Western) liberalism that in a sense forms the dialectical twin of
(Chinese) illiberalism, itself a somewhat degraded or de-politicized version
of revolutionary anti-imperialism and Leninism-Maoism. It should be dis-
tinguished from an earlier, post-war, culturally relativistic, pre-1980s era:
the American time of, say J.K. Galbraith, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and a
more humane, relativistic ‘belly’ liberalism akin to European social democ-
racy. By degraded I mean especially the anti-state dimension, as a key part
of it now as its more widely remarked free-market principle. I take this new
liberalism to be a diffuse but powerful intellectual political discourse, one
incorporating not only ‘straight’ self-professedly liberal theory (e.g. con-
ventional political science and area studies) but also much ‘post- modern’
and ‘post-colonial’ theory that stems from a French post- structuralism that
broke with the intellectual hegemony of Marxist and ‘statist’ thought in
post-war France.24 This is what has deeply inuenced the Western academy
in the so-called linguistic, theoretical, and ‘cultural studies’ turns. That this
has been an effect of how such a theory was marketed and institutionalized
in American universities, as opposed to something arising immanently
from the—selectively—translated texts and debates themselves, matters
little in this case. The ‘post’ discourse certainly shares the anti-state orien-
tation with ‘neo’ liberalism, from the initial polemics against Hegel to, say,
Lyotard’s inuential, Cold War-esque denunciations of ‘totality’ as
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

14
‘totalitarianism’ or Foucault’s or Deleuze’s anarchistic/libertarian
moments. At any rate the claim here is that contemporary theory, be it
liberal or allegedly more radical, is often anti-state apparently on principle,
as an a priori, a la libertarianism or anarchism. It is furthermore situated
against what Timothy Brennan has usefully called the ‘organizational
imaginary’—an inability to pose let alone think through ‘what is to be
done?’—and represents a break with anything smacking of Marxist-Leninist
or even full-on social democratic aka ‘statist’ planning, ‘manipulation,’
social engineering, and the like. This is also the terrain upon which Jodi
Dean has intervened recently, in her welcome political theory provoca-
tions, The Communist Horizon and Crowds and Party.25 Of course if it is a
strong state and rhetoric thereof, as well as a tradition of collectivism and
intensive organization that liberalism seeks to oppose, then the still nomi-
nally Leninist-Maoist PRC is seemingly the perfect target.26
This can be called a neo-liberalism if that ‘neo’ is taken tomostly signify
‘new’ or contemporary, as opposed to the more directly economic and
ground-breaking work of David Harvey. It is not that Harvey is wrong in his
diagnoses and genealogies (from the Chicago School and Chile to Beijing and
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms). Indeed his chapter on China under Deng is sound,
cautious, and telling in showing the resonances between Pinochet and the
Chicago School and Deng and, say, the smashing of the ‘iron rice bowl’ of
Maoist welfare aka therestructuring of the planned economy.(Harvey does
not claim the Chinese economy is fully neo- liberal). But in China as well as in
(chiey) foreignscholarship about the place, liberalism of a more classical,
laissez-faire, philosophical formis also pronounced and palpable. It spends
less timeexplicitly cheerleading for entrepreneurs and competition and indi-
vidualist self-fashioning than invoking liberty and freedom as such. Though in
some cases, as with the late Liu Xiaobo and the Charter 2008 ‘movement’
discussed in a later chapter, the Enlightenment-esque rhetoricis yoked to a
neo-liberal, privatization project).27 Though it is still intimately related to the
attemptedDengistcommodication of everything after the Maoist attempt at
a communist transition, it would be hard to argue that this ‘new’ and degraded
liberalism is only or even primarilyan outcome of economic reforms/prac-
tices in either the West or Chinaover the last three or four decades. It simply
ows from a much longer history of orientalism and liberalism, though these
too have their owneconomic roots in the global expansion of capitalism after
‘feudalism’ and various ancient regimes. The question of liberalism in/and
China, then, is exceedingly complex. Onehas to deal not only with the cur-
rent anti-state neo- liberalism discourse, as well as the Party-state’s own efforts
D. F. VUKOVICH

15
to deploy the market principle to formerly public enterprises and public
goods, but also with an older universalist-humanist one that sounds more
like, say, Montesquieu or Voltaire than von Hayek or Milton Friedman. Both
are in play in ways that would not be the case with, say, area studies and media
discourse about India. To better see how and to what extent the PRC is ‘illib-
eral,’ both types—‘classic’ and ‘neo’—need to be accounted for analytically.
Each variation is still at work in the world and in China, and both may be seen
as the target, for better and worse, of the Party-state’s illiberalism. Despite the
rise of neo-liberalism as a catch-all category of critique, the distinction may be
hard to uphold in the case of China. In what follows I will mostly just use
‘liberalism’ (again keeping in mind the anti- statism) except when referring
more clearly to the ‘market über alles’ mentality.
For whom, then, is the PRC a problem? Perhaps not those millions up
from poverty, even if that leaves plenty of others, not least the exploited
working classes (and migrants) of China and those dying early from air pol-
lution. And what is the root problem? Is it chiey political (the Party- state,
that bane of liberalism) or socio-economic aka political economy (the view of
new and older leftists)? Much of the scholarship on China, especially but not
only in the dominant language of English, is about China’s problems and
failures, and often about the lack of something—for example, the right type
of political system or development, a complete modernization a la the West,
a natural progression toward freedom and individualism interrupted by revo-
lution, nationalism, the post-1949 state, and the state. So too the cry for
reform, often alongside shouts for ‘revolution,’ has indeed animated, even
dominated, Chinese political culture as a whole from the early twentieth
century. Political change and reform is not resisted so much as insisted upon,
but with the important caveat that liberal political reform—that is, a recog-
nizably Western system of multiple parties and separation of powers—has not
been on the agenda since the triumphal rise of the revolution and nationalism
in the l930s. In this current period especially, change has had to come from
within Chinese society as opposed to abroad, and from within the parameters
of the Party-state system at that. Lest this seem too ‘ofcial’ or too much the
state’s view on the present author’s part (heaven forfend), it is also the clear
conclusion to Jonathan Spence’s classic history of Western advisers in China
since Matteo Ricci in the sixteenth century, To Change China.28
Illiberal China offers two answers, by no means exhaustive, to these
questions: that China is a problem—that is a challenge, perhaps even an
opportunity—for ‘our’ received political wisdom, our doxa stemming
from, again, chiey liberal perspectives; and that the ultimate root problem
is the intellectual political culture of contemporary (liberal) capitalism and
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

16
that global economic system that China is fully part of. Despite its antago-
nism (and agony) toward the West and liberalism, the contemporary, illib-
eral PRC is nonetheless caught up in shared problems of globalization:
sustainability and legitimacy under global capitalism on the one hand, and
approval or recognition by the imperial West on the other. De-linking may
yet be the order of the day.
As I hope to have already indicated, and as heuristically useful as the
phrase ‘China and the West’ remains, the terrain here is global. Both
places—the PRC and the West—comprise overlapping territories and imag-
ined geographies. But as Edward Said always insisted, it would be a mistake
to see this ‘social construction’ as fake or weak, when it is powerfully insti-
tutionalized and materialized. One should recall that China Studies is
something that by definition mostly excludes mainland Chinese
scholars. This may sound arch, but my point is a fairly basic and obvious
one. The China field is about them and their place and history (and
traditionally, their language above all). They may now—thanks to
globalization after the fall of communism and the putative end of the
Cold War—be brought into the conversation about China and the PRC,
a recent development of, at the most, the past two decades. But China
Studies still comes or hails from the outside. It is fashionable in some
quarters to dismiss the China/West split as ‘history’ in the pejorative,
dustbin sense: we are all connected now, the East is in the West and vice
versa, capital is borderless, everyone eats Chinese food, everyone knows
about the Cultural Revolution, and so on. To be sure, the Party-state
and right- minded liberal intellectuals the world over all condemn the late
Maoist period. Flows of people and money into and out of China are
massive and remaking all kinds of terrains.But this ignores not only the genesis of the eld or institutions of China
and Asian studies, but also the genesis and provenance and unspoken rules
and exclusions of our discourses or intellectual political culture. Or put
another way, a rural sociologist at Beijing University is not doing ‘China
Studies.’ He or she is a rural sociologist, perhaps part of the Chinese
Academy, or just a professor at, say, East China Normal University. A new
leftist intellectual has to be extremely erudite and uent in English, and
diplomatic and suave, to get an audience abroad. Or put in another way, it
is entirely possible to hold conferences, even in the special administrative
region called Hong Kong, on the ‘culture’ of the PRC from 1966 through
the present, without any mainland scholars attending or being invited. This
is not an odd occurrence but a standard practice. The PRC is mostly still an
object, not a subject.29 While none of this may seem like a substantial
D. F. VUKOVICH

17
problem from a liberal universalist or even social science standpoint, it is
still striking from at least the standpoint of the present book.
The PRC is a problem, then, not only for the Chinese people them-
selves (as all states/‘systems’ are, in part) but also for Western or global
political theory and understandings of politics. It is a problem for ‘our’
intellectual political culture, how we understand politics, and thus the
world. It is, put in another way, an ideological as well as analytical/aca-
demic challenge to us. Can we take the PRC as political entity seriously, as
something to be learned from or at least understood in terms other than
dismissal and debunking? By ‘us’ I mean once again our own dominant
ideology since the rise of modern (global, colonial) capitalism in the West:
liberalism in the general sense, its normative doxa about free markets and
individuals and ‘democracy’ and how these are correlatives of freedom;
and its form of (its insistence on) universality or what Etienne Balibar has
aptly called ‘Western, modern, Judeo-Christian universality.’30
In sum what the challenge of the PRC has to tell us is that liberalism is
not only fully ‘particular’ as opposed to universal (thus reecting the
salience of Marxist and post-colonial critiques), but that it also appears to
be in marked, if not fatal, decline as it becomes transformed into neo-
liberalism. It is weak in explanatory as well as in political power vis-à-vis
the PRC; it understands the PRC badly and despite its occasionally obvi-
ous pretensions, it cannot change China. Chinese liberalism on the other
hand, as either an intellectual tradition or an unofcial ‘movement’ (or in
the form of Hong Kong’s ‘pan-democrats’ who see themselves as leading
the way for the mainland), lacks ‘legs’ and a chance of success. Thus what
liberalism reveals is less the truth of China and more its own degradation.
The state of politics today is a pernicious anti-‘statism’ among the intelli-
gentsia as much as within, say, the US party system and abroad; it is also
the utter impasse of our global conjuncture, of virtually all of us, from
‘mass democratic’ or equality-based form of critical thinking and politics.
The battle against liberalism has been made perfectly clear—even esca-
lated—in the current era of President Xi Jinping. While nominal cam-
paigns against ‘bourgeois liberalization’ under Deng Xiaoping (a strident
pragmatist yet deep nationalist) were widely noted in the 1980s, such
explicit anti- or illiberal rhetoric was more rare in the later Jiang Zemin
and Hu Jintao eras. Once those ‘occidental’ and liberal-cultural fevers
were either crushed or dissipated in the wake of Tiananmen, 1989, and
once further marketization or commodication disempowered intellectu-
als and critical ideologies more generally, there has been less perceived
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18
need for such campaigns. With a China now greatly transformed, thanks
to Deng’s capitalist and anti-Maoist ‘reforms,’ that is by global capitalism,
Xi has brought in his wake a remarkably concerted (and sorely needed)
anti-corruption drive and—more importantly for our purposes—an esca-
lated policing of acceptable speech. ‘Document 9,’ a CCP communiqué
from late 2013, specically targets seven ‘threats’ to be ‘guarded against’
in ‘the ideological sphere,’ especially universities and secondary schools.31
It has not escaped the Western media’s attention that these are clearly,
consciously aimed at them and, in a word, at liberalism. Named items
include ‘Western constitutionalism,’ ‘universal values,’ the ‘West’s idea of
journalism,’ ‘civil society,’ and economic ‘neo-liberalism.’32 So the battle
for and against liberalism and Chinese communism/difference is a real
thing, a struggle over discursive hegemony, and not just a matter of ‘mere’
rhetoric and the hopes and dreams of Western-trained or Occident-
identied intellectuals. Illiberalism, that is an illiberal China, rather than
the triumph of Maoist communism or egalitarianism, is one such result of
this struggle. The purpose of the present study is to map out the existence
and some of the substance of this illiberalism.33
I will eventually argue that China’s ‘illiberalism’ should also be seen, in
no small part, as a result of its long revolution and especially its Maoist or
‘red’ decades that, while over and in many ways over-turned, are nonethe-
less crucial for understanding the PRC political culture or society. In a sense
the liberal China studies experts are correct that China’s illiberalism stems
from the Maoist past, that is the Leninist Party-state (though this avoids
the dynastic/empire state connections). But their interpretation of this
remains stuck at outrage or analytical impasse; once you note that it is—
alas—not liberal, and even opposed to that ideology, there is not much
more to say other than ‘authoritarianism.’ (Which is correct but banal.) But
the argument here is that Chinese illiberalism has its positive and ‘interest-
ing,’ complex and ambivalent, aspects, including an undeniable anti-impe-
rialism. That anti-imperialism is not today about supporting Third World
revolution or national liberations (which in any case are not in the ofng or
have already happened). It is instead one that seeks to not only preserve
national sovereignty but also assert and preserve Chinese ‘difference’ or
particularity as against not only Western geo-political hostilities and linger-
ing Cold War containment desires, but also foreign interpretations as
opposed to interventions. China is caught up in a game of hegemony or
discursive struggle with the West and the Rest, and what is remarkable
about this is that it can be and can even make inroads and exercise its voice
D. F. VUKOVICH

19
in a way that few, if any other, non-Western power can. Chinese illiberalism
must in any case be taken seriously. Beyond the unitary Party-state, it may
be, for better or worse, the last vestige of the Maoist revolution, which is
also to say the struggle against opium-era imperialism and the attempt to
preserve its past traditions and ways of seeing and living.34 We have to read
it in its positivity and not merely as something to be debunked or dis-
missed. It resists the drive to sameness in at least political terms; this is more
profound than a mere attempt by the CCP to keep itself in power.
But I hasten to add that the PRC’s challenge to liberalism is far from a
wholly good thing. By drawing on the privatizing/neo-liberal economics
while eschewing the ethics or ‘philosophic’ aspects of liberalism—which it
was supposed to supersede and not simply reject as capitalist and iniqui-
tous—the PRC after Mao has abandoned not only the egalitarian ideals of
the revolution but even the capacity and stability of the state and arguably
its very legitimacy as a result of marketization/private capital. To abandon
the Maoist insistence on class equality and ‘making revolution,’ that is
mass participation through a ‘preceptorial system’35; to offer little in its
place beyond patriotism and nationalism, or perhaps neo-Confucianism at
best, and an ineffable external enemy (or ‘frenemy’) called liberalism or
the West; to stave off redistribution and discontent with the promise of
continued economic growth and ‘getting rich rst’ consumerism; this is all
to endanger the future, not just of the Party-state but of the achievements
of the long Chinese revolution from the earlier period of great game impe-
rialism and opium wars. While the illiberal state has so far ‘successfully’
resisted transformation or co-optation by Western/global liberalism and
governance, it is also a potentially pyrrhic victory in that the Party-state
not only faces major challenges in its own right but may be losing its
capacity to govern (a co-optation via economic neo-liberalism).
iLLiberaLism: baLefuL enhancement oftheconcept
Having briey established in broad terms the meaning and function of
‘liberalism’—to be eshed out in subsequent chapters—we need to now
turn to its antagonist and ip side: not just China but the phenomenon of
illiberalism, said by some to be sweeping the world political stage in recent
years. Fukuyama’s wishful essay on the end of history after communism
having failed to pan out, there is a return to, if not history then to the spec-
ter of illiberalism haunting Europe. After the end of the Cold War how
does one refer to, for example, Putin’s Russia, Iran, and so on? Let alone to
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20
the far more obviously ‘successful’ example of China, already the world’s
second largest economy and a clear ‘dictatorship’? Samuel Huntington’s
thesis on the clash of civilizations is likewise of little use, even if it is still, in
orientalist fashion, invoked in regard to Islam. But let us start with the ever-
useful, voluminous Oxford English Dictionary and the term’s primary
denition:
Not betting or of the nature of a free man; not pertaining to or acquainted
with the liberal arts (see liberal), without liberal culture, unscholarly; ill-
bred, ungentlemanly, unrened; base, mean, vulgar, rude, sordid.36
Thus the real beginning of illiberalism is not, say, regime or authoritarian-
ism but liberalism or liberal. Illiberalism is not a natural category of politi-
cal ‘science’ but derives from its root. Liberal, as Raymond Williams notes
in Keywords, has a more interesting, older meaning than its clear, modern
political one about parties and ideologies. Liberal was from the beginning
(circa sixteenth century) a social distinction, specically in reference to
labor, but also a term of cultural capital and, in sum, of class. Turning in
particular upon free versus mechanical, intellectual versus manual labor,
liberal rst signied the above, that is a social distinction turning upon
types of work and hence ‘freedom.’ Before we had ‘liberal arts’ or ‘liberal
generosity,’ there was a distinction between types of work (intellectual vs.
manual) and types of people, though the former ows naturally enough
from relative class privilege. Thus in Christopher Marlowe’s Faust (1604),
we have ‘This study ts a mercenary drudge. … Too servile and illiberal
for me’; and in his The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trafques and
Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) Richard Hakluyt will refer to
‘Mechanical & illiberal crafts.’ At the other end of the rise of British (lib-
eral) capitalism, Ruskin will in 1853 object to such sentiments with ‘There
should not be a trenchant distinction of employment, as between men of
liberal and illiberal professions.’37 Only later, in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, did liberalism take on its party-political sense and its
association with the then-and-now powerful ‘liberty’ (itself often conated
with ‘freedom’) and only later still until it becomes a ‘philosophy’ in its
own right.
As with everything else in Williams’ great, radical dictionary, it is hard
not to see a certain historical sweep, the transition from feudalism to capital-
ism, in a single keyword having rst to do with non-capitalist, non- manual
labor and (aristocratic?) freedoms and leisure versus the sorry conditions of
D. F. VUKOVICH

21
the great unwashed; these then later have to do with liberty, education,
tolerance, and all the virtues associated with liberalism and the freedoms of
the other, new elite class, the bourgeoisie. Given a more antagonistic class
content or connotation, illiberalism thence becomes not mechanical labor
but vulgarity, ignobility, intolerance, and—still—servility and a lack of lib-
erty among the new ‘great unwashed’ of the modern working class.
Liberalism becomes moreover a political ideology or philosophy (about
individuals and rights and private markets) that should be embodied in the
new bourgeois states, built in the image of the ideal liberal, bourgeois self.
Illiberalism can then index not just ugly people and classes but ugly, unfree,
non-liberal regimes and nations.
Liberalism and illiberalism are, in sum, chauvinistic class terms, or if you
prefer, terms of social distinction rooted in cultural and economic capital.
In other words the possibility of the conservative and leftist critiques of
liberalism as elitist or condescending is in a sense given, rhetorically, at the
beginning: the distinction in favor of the free and liberal, educated and
skilled labors and laborers/people, versus the servile, the ill-bred, the
ignorant manual labors and laborers. Of course when that rst liberal/
illiberal distinction later gets articulated to political ideologies and regimes,
much changes. Even with illiberal China, for example, no one thinks of
the actual type of labor predominantly done in China (very mechanical
indeed) but only, at the very best, the general (and presumed) unfreedom
of the workers there. But the normative distinction obtains when we speak
of the illiberal Chinese regime and leaders, as does—it may be felt—the
condescension and chauvinism not only toward those institutions but to
the demographics who happen to believe in them as legitimate things.
Liberal condescension is a real thing too. And one has to further attend to
the added ‘bonus’ of distinctions rooted in, in the case of China, histories
and discourses of orientalism, of Eurocentrism (Western exceptionalism or
‘leadership’), and of ‘race.’ These would, one assumes, also be germane to
representations of, say, Iran or even Russia (always ambiguously ‘Eurasian’
or Other.)
Our interest here in etymology is, to summarize, the transition from a
class/social distinction to the more familiar discourse of political liberal-
ism and thus of illiberalism, not so much as a political ideology (a la com-
munism) but as a type of regime dened by being not-liberal. (This in
addition to ‘illiberalism’ merely being an insult, a pejorative applied to
vulgar and intolerant people or regimes whom one simply does not like.)
From unfree and ‘base’ men to unfree regimes that equally offend us for
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

22
their lack of liberal virtues such as multi-party electoral voting systems. In
fact that passage from individual subjects to alien regimes may itself be
seen as a part of what makes liberalism liberalism—how it constitutes itself
by moving rhetorically and anthropomorphically from the individual at
the origin of history and humanity, and thence to society or structure. It
is that move itself which is problematic. That liberal/illiberal distinction
then is not innocent and natural, but one that always contains a normative
hierarchy and checkered history of elitism if nothing else.
But how then is illiberal understood by the purveyors of the term? One
denition comes from a recent ‘Illiberal Governance’ conference at Central
European University, dedicated to how ‘authoritarian regimes exploit
elections, religion, the media, business, and foreign policy in different
ways to cement power and ensure their appeal to the majority.’38 Note
here that we are talking about ‘regimes’ that employ quite standard, non-
violent means (elections, attempted media control, religion, foreign pol-
icy) to stay in power and to appeal to or rather produce majorities. This is
fairly standard practice of all contemporary regimes, from Central to
Western Europe to Asia and beyond. Perhaps the keyword to dene illib-
eral is simply regime. One does not speak, academically, of the American
regime, unless perhaps you are on the receiving end of it in an occupied
territory. But in any case ‘illiberal’ is an un-interrogated ‘concept’ dened
as not-liberal or not-me. To illustrate further, and in a moment of political
theorizing that will resonate later with our analyses of Wukan and Hong
Kong, here is an argument from a (ironically) state-funded, French think
tank in Hong Kong and its associated China journal:
Illiberal regimes do not endure only thanks to their capacity of repression
but rather also thanks to their ability to allow some space for organized
contention and citizens’ participation within the framework they have
chosen. Authoritarian governments set the rules of the game, which are—
consciously or not—accepted by activists who are not aiming at radical
regime change anymore (as was the case for example for Chinese partici-
pants in the 1989 democratic movement or Russian human rights organisa-
tions that helped bring down the USSR by supporting Boris Yeltsin against
Mikhaıl Gorbachev at the end of the 1980s) but are eager to act effectively
within the constraints of these regimes.39
Nothing fails like success. Clearly illiberal ‘regimes’ cannot win in such
formulations: even in their moments where they allow protest or other
forms of participation, they merely do so to keep themselves in power, to
D. F. VUKOVICH

23
preserve stability, gain legitimacy, and so on. Indeed that is one of the key
suppositions of political orientalism vis-à-vis the PRC: every single step of
what might otherwise be called progress, decent state practice, or simply
‘normal’ politics—making concessions in response to protests and rebel-
lions, acting howsoever belatedly on environmental problems, tackling
epidemic corruption, incrementally ‘reforming’ the national economy,
and so on—is ‘negated’ or undercut by the statement that said efforts are
nonetheless about the Communist Party-state keeping itself in power. Or
that they nonetheless stop well short of liberal democratic transformation,
which indeed they do. In a later chapter we will see that this is a theme, an
interpretation, of the Wukan uprising of 2011, which ushered in fresh
elections and removed corrupt ofcials. As in the above formulation there
is an implicit but clear criticism or attribution of false consciousness to the
protesters themselves—‘consciously or not’ they are ‘eager to act within’
illiberal regimes’ constraints. Clearly their behavior is off, or at the very
least not optimal from the liberal standpoint.
It is perfectly accurate to say that the current Party-state in China is
authoritarian and repressive of liberal freedoms and whatever human
rights are beyond these same liberal freedoms. One suspects they are
ultimately synony-mous. But all states are by definition authoritarian
(with a ‘monopoly on violence’ as Weber famously put it), if unevenly
so; they all have ‘rules of the game’ that institutionalize politics and
participation. While China is a serial abuser of rights and of the ‘right’ to
be a dissident (which does not exist except as a free speech right),40 it is
hardly uniquely grotesque in this way. The point is that China’s—and
anyone’s—abuses and injustices should be specified and named more
clearly, and thus, one hopes, more powerfully and effectively. Religious
persecution, political persecution, and so on, or if one rather—specific
violations of liberal or other constitutional rights—such as the right to
strike, to express free speech, and so on. What are being abused are specific
rights, regardless of whether one sees rights as natural or socially
constructed. The problem with human rights groups like Amnesty
International, say, is that they reify what it means to be human and
effectively de-politicize many such abuses; Israel and Palestine become
‘equal’ offenders. As will be discussed in a later chapter, liberal invocations
of ‘the rule of law’ often function in the same way. The state itself seems
to have sussed out the limits of such abstractions when they, too, accuse
their enemies or opponents as violating/lacking the ‘rule of law’ that is,
after all, on the books. Relatedly, this is also the recent tactic vis-à-vis
Hong Kong and its ‘Basic Law’: the state has its own interpretative claim
on it and can
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24
brandish it accordingly. Liberals, in other words, do not own the last word
on ‘law’ and ‘rights’ in general but just imagine that their opponents (the
Party-state) have no idea what ‘law’ and ‘rights’ mean.
And yet, my point here is not one of moral or political equivalence. The
logic of equivalence is in many ways the problem—that China has to (and
can) become like us, that all commodities are exchangeable and compara-
ble on the basis of money, and that this is the way of the world, zeitgeist or
no. For example, no state represses its dissidents as systematically as the
PRC.The recent case of Uighur academic Ilham Tohti would be a case in
point: jailed for life under the spurious charge of ‘inciting separatism,’ the
middle-aged Uighur economics professor appears to have been nothing
but an actual academic who also wrote popularly and set up a website to
discuss Han/Uighur and other ethnic issues in China.41 Tohti has merely
argued for increased autonomy and equal rights for (Muslim) Uighurs,
neither of which is illegal nor properly controversial. But the tense situation
in Xinjiang (where there are actual voices for separatism and anti-Han sen-
timent) appears to have mandated Tohti’s sentence. This is obviously illib-
eral in the pejorative sense, and it is also bad strategy for the Party- state. It
is far more likely to engender actual separatism (or the desire for it) and
long-term discontent; this can be far more fateful than the short- term,
fearful compliance or de-politicization that such a sentence seeks. Whatever
reservations one might well have with some of the gadies of Chinese dis-
sidence, from wealthy artists to those using it as a type of celebrity- status
abroad to the Christian missionary types, the sentencing of Tohti is appall-
ing. For that matter, the policing of dissent in a non- revolutionary Party-
state, an only residual Cold War context, is especially egregious. Once the
Marxist-Leninist justications are gone (class leveling, dictatorship of the
proletariat, Cold War encirclements), what is left is plain authoritarianism
and awkward legal invocations of counter- revolutionary activities con-
ducted by fairly trivial intellectuals (the dissidents, the human rights law-
yers, etc.). If anything, the state in such instances ‘solves’ one problem by
creating two in its place: it goals the now-martyr-esque and real dissident,
even producing one where one did not exist before (as in Tohti), and then
has an international scandal or ‘data point’ for a monolithically repressive
and illiberal regime. Of course some such dissidents do indeed receive vari-
ous forms of funds and support from abroad (especially the USA and its
own propaganda/soft power wings like the National Endowment for
Democracy), but this neither justies the means nor the ends of such
imprisonment; it is still bad strategy in addition to being morally
D. F. VUKOVICH

25
objectionable. At the same time there is no use in denying the imperial
context, past and present, underlying such liberalism. We will return to this
subject later, in a discussion of the late Liu Xiaobo and Chinese liberalism.
But even here the case of the PRC, as big a polity as the EU and USA
combined, is instructive in terms of how we might understand politics
now. Note that the USA or France, for example, has no dissidents to speak
of. As De Gaulle allegedly said of Jean Paul Sartre, one does not arrest
Voltaire. That liberal commitment is part of it. But why else are there no
dissidents in the USA, for example? Clearly The NewYork Times will not
even review a book by Noam Chomsky, let alone give him editorial space;
this may be understood as their indifference or even their censorship, but
Chomsky is no American dissident in any case. And sufce it to mention
the institutionalized racism, the politics of immigration and xenophobia in
the West, to say nothing of the truly world-historical and horrifying remak-
ing of the Middle East into a war zone and space of reactionary fundamen-
talism. Whatever China’s crimes are (the state’s), they pale in comparison
to the USA’s, are arguably less rife with human rights abuses than, say,
democratic India, and are overwhelmingly conducted within their own
borders and not abroad.
And yet to speak of an American, or French, or British dissident would
be a category mistake. Edward Snowden, to take a famous example, is not
hailed as a dissident by anyone, even outside the USA.He’s an individual,
like all of ‘us.’ It is not that there are no activists, even of the law-breaking
kind, and certainly there is no lack of injustice or unfreedom in China. As
the philosopher Ci Jiwei has argued, freedom—let us bracket its denition
here—is clearly a de facto value in China, just not yet an ofcial or explicit
state one.42 The former point should put paid to orientalist notions of an
achieved despotism in China, where the people are somehow less than fully
human or made to live that way. People are certainly free, though not all,
and for this statement to be more than a platitudinous discussion of ‘free-
dom in China,’ not only would difcult terms need to be dened (as Ci
indeed does) but a great deal of specic empirical research into freedom
and power would need to be carried out. In what sense are ‘the’ Chinese
unfree? The view of this book, a key assumption, is that they are free (aside
from prisoners and victims of persecution and to an extent the working
poor). They are as generally free as, for example, Americans and Hong
Kongers, and this entire mode of discussion—a prominent one that turns
on ‘them’ lacking freedom in general and therefore needing a normal lib-
eral government and economy—is or should be seen as fairly ridiculous.
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26
In the core countries of the West, power operates far more subtly, liber-
ally as opposed to vulgarly, but operate it does. The answer to this riddle
of why there are no dissidents outside of illiberal regimes, then, lies in the
perfection of power within the over-developed West. Individuals pose no
threat, and in fact most Western polities are spaces of great conformity and
de-politicized politics. Occupy Wall Street can happen, and the entire gov-
ernment, including the American Democratic Party, can simply ignore it
entirely. In fact much the same could and should be said of the PRC; but
there is at least the perception or theoretical fear that dissent not only poses
a risk (which it can) but also contains within it a threat to state power or
an act of social not merely individual signicance. In China, ironically, the
written or otherwise performed word is taken far more seriously as a
meaningful act, if also as a potential subversion and an alleged social/
moral pathology. The CCP cannot be accused of, say, liberal indifference
in regard to speech and ‘culture’ or ideology. This is in some ways a good
thing; ideas and ideologies should matter. It is not irrational, from the lat-
ter standpoint that takes rebellion and ideology seriously, for the state
itself to feel that its control of free speech, its censorship, and its propa-
ganda are justiable, even necessary in a world still perceived to be subject
to a form of ‘liberal imperialism.’ And yet the Maoists are far removed
from power, so one must always keep in mind the post-Mao break from
radical equality.
Rather than positing an equivalence between regimes, in a critical anal-
ysis of illiberalism, the point then is this: the PRC both is and is not an
illiberal regime and society. At the risk of sounding cliché, it is true, to
begin with, that seemingly all societies have their fair share (or more) of
narrow-mindedness and nastiness, or simply some measure of intoler-
ance.43 Though intolerance in itself is no problem. Clearly there are some
things and practices, even some people, whom we should be (and often
are) intolerant of. Perhaps there can be no politics—fundamentally dyadic,
fundamentally about us/them, right/wrong, friends/enemies, and so
on—without this. In an age of de-politicization this critique of tolerance,
a crucial part of critical theory since at least Marcuse’s classic essay, is in
peril, as with other dyadic/antagonistic forms of politics. (Recall that this
notion of the political is to be contrasted with what the Frankfurt School
early on called politics as ‘administration’ or what Marx and Engels
famously referred to as the state’s role as manager of the affairs of the
bourgeoisie.) As noted earlier, the PRC is indeed authoritarian, perhaps
D. F. VUKOVICH

27
increasingly so in the Xi Jinping era, an authoritarianism with the thinnest
of justications. It is objectionably intolerant of dissent when that dissent
positions itself as either anti-regime quite explicitly (‘subversive’ of the
state) or as in cahoots with ‘Western’ hostile forces and elements. Given
the prevalence of US government funding of various ‘global civil society’
NGOs and groups in China and abroad, as well as its own checkered his-
tory of supporting ‘regime-change,’ the latter charge is often all too easily
levied. All of this might reasonably be called ‘vulgar’ as well, certainly in
comparison to smoother, slicker forms of social control, say, in Europe.
And yet, as I have suggested earlier, all of these qualities can be found
in varying degrees in all countries and regimes—social control and power,
as parts of the political, are universal. Rather than wishing power and
social antagonisms and control to more or less go away (or at least to be
rendered unimportant)—which seems a clear and fair assumption within
liberalism, naïve understandings of the withering away of the state within
‘ultra-leftism’ and, according to Schmitt, with ‘parliamentarism,’ it would
be better for our philosophical and political-analytical hygiene to focus on
interpretation and contextualization (i.e. the cultural studies ‘method’).
What makes China illiberal can be all of this: the social control, the repres-
sion of dissent or anti-regime opposition, bureaucratic machinery uncon-
cerned with the fates of individuals, a monopoly of power on the part of a
ruling class that ‘owns’ the government, and so on. But again it would not
be hard to tick the same boxes of illiberal regime-hood for many Western
and other nations of a certain status or developmental level (e.g. South
Korea and Japan). Call it the era of neo-liberalism, perhaps.
What therefore makes China truly ‘illiberal’ is not repression and conser-
vatism or the like but its very positioning, its self-positioning and self-
understanding, as being anti-liberal on principle; it sees liberalism as an
enemy and this is what in the end makes it illiberal. In this the PRC as a
political entity indeed stands out. It is of course a radically different con-
text than, say, Maoist anti-liberalism (from Yan’an through the Cultural
Revolution). But it is still there, in a fairly conscious and obvious way, even
if one unremarked by most political studies of China. And in this it actu-
ally mirrors the USA and, indeed, much of area studies, political science,
and various pundits and journalists; with the obvious proviso that the
demonized sides are reversed. Liberalism rules the day, either as hero or as
villain. What then explains this opposition, even outright hostility to liber-
alism within China? It is this to which we must now briey turn.
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

28
iLLiberaLism andimperiaLism:
differenceandreVoLution
The content and valence of Chinese illiberalism gets further complicated
when we recall that the PRC, as a state, is also dened by an actually exist-
ing, anti-Western imperialism, which is to say by the historical experience of
colonialism and imperialism. These are as constitutive of the PRC as much
as its well-known, longer-standing, so-called statist political-cultural tradi-
tion (a subject central to the next chapter on the Chinese new left). It is still
nominally opposed to imperialism and committed to a strong and unied
state; these form part of its—and the intellectual political culture’s—self-
understanding. The PRC even today sees itself, sincerely if you will, as dif-
ferent from liberal imperialist regimes old and new. Hence its success in
Africa, capitalist-exploitative as it is, is nonetheless conducted in terms of fair
trade, that is, unlike the USA or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it
does not impose structural adjustments and domestic African reforms in
order to do business there. It well remembers the gunboat diplomacy of the
Foreign Powers, imperialism conducted under a rhetoric of free trade and
markets. As Domenico Losurdo, Uday Mehta, and others have demon-
strated at length in reference to other, crucial, and world-making historical
contexts than China (the British Empire in South Asia, American slavery,
and French radicalism), to speak of liberalism is to speak of colonialism and
imperialism.44 The strong, historical connections between liberalism—as
political philosophy and social or cultural ‘theory’ about individuals—are by
now so well established (not simply by Losurdo and Mehta but many oth-
ers45) that the absence of this critique within the China eld—within liberal
analyses of China, or work on contemporary Chinese liberalism—is striking.
This may be that such scholars do not think China has any meaningful or
historical connection to the long history of ‘liberal imperialism.’ If dened
as an area, as opposed to something one just ‘does’ or talks about within a
‘normal’ or traditional discipline such as sociology or literature or politics,
then ‘China’ can become hermetically sealed. While the study of China is
certainly expanding and simply becoming part of the Western or global
academy in general, China studies has traditionally been cut off from the
theoretical and other intellectual movements that have changed many other
disciplines within the academy (e.g. post-colonial studies).
Or it may be that the possible links to China and the historical record of
liberalism and imperialism in other places would simply pose too difcult
questions about the universality or universal good of liberalism for China,
even in today’s context. For all its rhetoric of liberty and freedom, liberalism
D. F. VUKOVICH

29
has been dened by two rather paradoxical but historically undeniable actu-
alities: the logic of exclusion (to exclude what we can call the illiberal or
unt) and the practice of colonialism and imperialism. Just as, to take
another example, Marx argued that despite the universalization of wage
labor and ‘free’ laborers liberated from feudalism, which is to say despite
formal equality, bourgeois civil society nonetheless excluded the working
class from any meaningful participation, it couldn’t be its vehicle to eman-
cipation. In other words class was a clear, exclusionary divide. This practice
of exclusion within historical liberalism (also in the form of race and empire,
most notoriously) makes up much of Losurdo’s magisterial Liberalism: A
Counter-History. But this type of ‘logic’ or structure cannot be divorced
from a more material and vulgar form of liberal imperialism either. And as
Erik Ringmar notes in Liberal Barbarism, the destruction of the emperor’s
palace Yuanmingyuan in 1860 was not only a ‘shock and awe’ moment of
war but it—that is British liberal imperialism—also effected a virtually per-
manent shift within international relations and the inter-state system.46 That
is, it dened a principal contradiction for the victorious West: their contra-
diction between civilization and barbarism, which as in the case with the
Middle East today still animates the world geo-political system. This gov-
erning contradiction illustrates a powerful, even inherent connection
between barbarism and liberalism. Others have likewise shown how China
and imperialism is in fact central to the making of the modern world in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite it being only ‘semi’ colonial or
never having lost complete sovereignty.47
But if the eld of China studies has been insufciently attuned to the
problem of Western, modern imperialism, the same cannot be said for the
mainland government and its intellectual political culture. This will be
discussed at more length in subsequent chapters. Sufce it to mention that
the exclusionary, structural logic of liberalism as well as the degradations
of imperialism is fairly well established in the PRC (though ironically not
in Hong Kong), even if a certain, afrmative, liberal, Occidentalism is also
well established in other quarters. It is often taught in secondary schools,
for example, and is simply part of the identity and legitimacy of the state
as something that had to be nationally liberated from the Western and
Japanese imperialists. While the post-Cold War context may seem and is
quite different, the rivalry between the USA and the PRC as well as tradi-
tional European airs of universality, means that this anti-imperialist dis-
course, no matter how contradicted by the PRC’s own behaviors, in, say,
Tibet, Xinjiang, or the South Pacic Ocean, will simply not go away.
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

30
It even resurfaced in a rude way against what would otherwise seem to be
a very calm, mild-mannered, hard-working, and politically ‘neutral’ group of
foreign academics known as the ‘New Qing Historians.’ Their ambit is to do
for China what many historians have done for other places of the old and new
worlds—to break apart or at least complicate ofcial, long-standing, and not
very rigorous narratives about national culture and other myths. In the case
at hand this is about the alleged Sinicization of the Manchus (non-Han
Chinese) when they ruled China during the last dynasty. In short ‘we’ Han
acculturated and assimilated them (the classic Chinese melting pot idea, but
with the Han on top), and not the other way around. This has always, argu-
ably, suggested a certain Ah Q-esque ‘victory in defeat’ kind of sentiment,
though it must be admitted that the Manchu people were naturally also
shaped by the Han and adopted many of its ways. At any rate, the de facto
assimilation of the Manchu into a greater or long-standing tradition of China
(and its boundaries) is a key plank of contemporary nationalist sentiment and
official or mainstream history (or myth). All of this is beyond our scope here,
but there is an additional subtext related to imperialism worth noting.
TheNew Qing writers are making the case for a strong Manchu identity in
the past even while ruling China;moreover they arguethat the Qing
dynasty, thelast real, unified government before 1949,was not ‘China’ in
the way that everyone else, including in the mainland, has assumed over the
last cen-tury. It was its own thing and saw its empire differently than how
we, and official discourse in China, have framed it.48 This is clearly an
affront, a seem-ingly deliberate one, to Chinese nationalism, itself a
historical product of a massive and violent anti-imperialist effort against
Western and Japanese desires to conquer and break up China. Hencethe
angry responses from a group of mainland scholars denouncing the New
Qing movement—and speaking in clear and angry Maoist or old leftist
terms. Li Zhiting among other mainland scholars wrote of the foreign
group as doing the ‘new impe-rial history,’ of posing political dangers to
China’s unity, and so on. My point to this long example, then, is that this
not only shows thatthe anti-imperialist impulse (not simply nationalism) is
alive and well in some quarters but that there is a point to it. Thereis
indeed a huge discourse of political orientalism thatanalytically and
symbolicallyand rhetorically seeks—in its normative views and
frameworks—to break up the P.R.C. and tore- model it along the lines
of Europe or the USA, to deconstruct its myths for the natives(sav-ing
them from the communists and from propaganda), to militate against the
dreaded one-party state form, and so on. Of course this is always more
evident and explicit in media texts as opposed to ‘disinterested’ scholarship.
The problem—even if we can assume that the foreign, New Qing historical
D. F. VUKOVICH

31
narrative is the better one(which it may be)—is that no one in China has
asked them to do this. And that it has its own views and knowledges.And
that until recently, historically speaking, there have been very few occasions
where the ‘other’ could respond. Hackles will be raised, and politics invoked
and made visible.49 Inevitably this minor media event triggered borderline
hysterical responses not from the mainland (or not only there) but from lib-
erals indignant about Chinese illiberalism still banging on about ‘the West.’
Like China’s commitment to the strong or ‘paternalistic’ state princi-
ple, once upon a time a thing approved by old-fashioned social democratic
liberals from the USA like J. K. Galbraith and Charles Lindblom,50 its
belief in anti-imperialism, in its own anti-imperialism or ‘writing back to
the empire,’ is hard for many Western commentators to fathom. (It is also
a hard thing for mainstream Chinese political intellectual culture to hear
coming from Southeast Asia or its own borderlands.) A recent case in
point would be from Orville Schell, the longtime China/Asia journalist
and quasi-academic, writing in the New York Review of Books about a
recent return visit to China by former President Jimmy Carter. The latter
was alongside Schell and other well-connected China Hands of decades
gone by (‘China Strikes Back!’ is the revealing title) in what was probably
his last trip to the Middle Kingdom. According to Schell, Carter et al.
were given a somewhat cold reception, and in this the columnist detects
an anti-Western sentiment aimed at humiliating us. While this may be con-
sidered a peculiar if unsurprising interpretation, it is worth quoting at
length as a useful insight into the limitations of liberal views of China, and
how much they presume:
As we ate amid a sea of half-empty tables, a Chinese professor whispered to
me that President Xi just days earlier had met with Zimbabwean president
and international pariah Robert Mugabe. … He went on to say that Xi was
actually in the Great Hall of the People toasting Malaysian Supreme Head
of State Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah at the very moment of our dinner.
But Xi didn’t stop by the Carter dinner to say a word. None of the six
Chinese newspapers I thumbed through the next day ran stories about the
banquet or the visit. … Fortunately, the next night there was a very pleasant
dinner sponsored by Caijing Magazine [edit: a noted liberal media empire
in China] and also Deng’s daughter, Deng Rong.
The overall effect of the visit—and it is an ‘effect’ that has been sealed at
a good many other meetings between Americans and Chinese—was to make
the visitors feel the impossibility of making real contact. In fact, at one point
I heard from sources close to him that Carter was upset enough to consider
just packing up and going home.
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

32
What made the dinner in the Great Hall all the more unsettling was the
feeling that a whiff of ‘humiliation’—chiru—hovered over it. The Party has
for many years emphasized China’s history of being humiliated and exploited
by foreign powers. To feel a gust of Chinese reaction now coming back the
other way left me wanting to leave early that night.
As I walked with another American China scholar out of the Great Hall
into Tiananmen Square, all lit up as if for Christmas, we agreed that it was
dismaying not just that Carter was being kept at ofcial arm’s length and
had been personally offended, but that this entire episode was like so many
others with which we had both recently been involved. What is more, it
struck us as somehow emblematic of the suspicious, secretive, peremptory,
punitive way in which ofcial China now so often deports itself in the world,
especially toward democracies, which it tends to view as especially seditious,
even hostile.51
What is striking in this remarkable account is that it lacks evidence of an
intended humiliation or even of an actual slight. Rather, it betrays the
anxiety of a declining empire and the declining status of ‘foreign experts’—
of their leadership or privileged status—in the PRC academic or intellec-
tual spheres. (There is less perceived need of that in China since the
post-Tiananmen 1990s.) That Carter (whose presidency ended over three
decades prior to this dinner) might not be nearly as important as Mugabe
or Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah, actual heads of state, is simply an impos-
sible thing to think, as is the track record of ‘democracies’ acting hostile
toward China and other ‘illiberal’ places. China’s grievances and sense of
being besieged by Cold War liberal democracies, let alone by an allegedly
nished imperialism (also waged by liberal democracies) during the bad
old days of opium and Boxers and so on, really can’t be taken seriously.
What is there is just hostility and nastiness to the liberal democracies and
their innocents. What is more, even if the perceived hatred—assuming
that is what it was—had a ring of truth to it, would it not be justiable?
When China’s foreign minister Wang Yi rudely lashed out at Canadian
reporters in Ottawa during a high-level diplomatic visit, for asking arro-
gant and ‘irresponsible’ questions about human rights abuses when China
had lifted 600 million people out of poverty, he not only had a good bit of
righteousness on his side but a fair point, which was no doubt lost on
those China experts who nd Schell’s own patronizing account too soft.52
But what if China were ‘striking back’ at American arrogance or superi-
ority, as the headline puts it? Would that be a bad thing, unjustiably rude
and illiberal, or would it be fair play? For Schell as for others, this would
D. F. VUKOVICH

33
be an unfair ‘reaction’ as imperialism in China is very much a thing of the
nineteenth century, or maybe World War II at best, and has nothing to do
with the well-intentioned USA or the post-war, neo-imperial era. One
suspects the perceived slight of Carter and Schell is really more on the
perception side of things. But what strikes one is the illegitimacy of anti-
imperialism in the eyes of the banquet-goer. Or that Mugabe and Shah
have more standing and face. Imperialism past and present, in political
history and also as an intellectual ‘thing’ to think through and against,
remains a blind spot of contemporary neo-liberalism. But it is not so for
the Chinese intellectual political culture, parts of which see liberalism itself
as historically part of the problem. Put another way, liberalism is chal-
lenged by the difference of the PRC in this respect.53 It typically responds
with paternalism or sheer contempt for the PRC as a political and histori-
cal entity, and often by speaking for some cryptic silent majority of victims
and sufferers and a silent majority that lacks ‘freedom.’ At its best, liberal
critiques of the PRC are specic in speaking for and representing clear,
actual victims or sufferers of, for example, police and state repression. In
this sense the outright advocates for the end of the Party-state system, a la
the Charter 2008 supporters abroad (or at home for that matter), and
liberal scholar-critics of ‘the regime’ are far more honest and lucid than
those who share the same essential views and historiography (the total
failure of Maoism) but who want nonetheless to say they take the PRC
seriously as an object and subject of knowledge. But the rub with the
straightforward, anti-regime critics is that they thereby reveal themselves
to be at clear odds with the self-understanding of many, if not most,
Chinese on the one hand, and with how knowledge is produced or under-
stood in the PRC itself on the other hand.
Illiberal China seeks to illustrate these and other challenges to—and
refusals of—liberal thinking in separate chapters dedicated to the rise of
the Chinese new left as an intellectual movement caught up in a post-
colonial and counter-hegemonic struggle over discourse (knowledge-
power) in the PRC, which is also necessarily a struggle against a global
liberalism and the demonization of the revolution, socialism, and the
state; the rise and fall, yet persistence of liberalism in China during the
Mao era and well after Tiananmen 1989, which includes the liberal econo-
mism and market-mentality of the party as well as the post-Mao liberal
intellectuals and their own discursive efforts since that watershed year; the
Wukan uprising of 2011 (in Lufeng, Guangdong), a democratic if short-
lived protest and electoral victory that illustrates an illiberal movement
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

34
(pro- Party- state) and the limits of ‘electoral’ or democratic politics with-
out economics (i.e. without a front against the commodication of every-
thing); and Hong Kong’s liberal democratic Occupy/Umbrella Movement
of 2014, as well as the ‘pan-democratic’ opposition more generally, both
of which rigorously follow the normative, procedural liberal script and yet
fail to produce any political-democratic gains. It is to these that we may
now turn. A nal chapter then attempts to think through some of the
political consequences and implications of illiberalism and liberalism today.
notes
1. See the International Monetary Fund report on selected countries, October
2014. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/02/weodata/
weorept.aspx. Accessed Dec. 6, 2017.
2. See Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western
World and the Birth of a New Global Order. NewYork: Penguin Books,
2012. But to be fair to Jacques—as China’s self-professed enemies as well
as Western leftists are not wont to do—the overstatement in his book lies
chiey in its unfortunate title. China has been nothing if not consistent in
refusing any desire to ‘rule the world’ in the American or former imperial
ways of old Europe. The reset of his book reects, accessibly, the main-
stream or conventional ‘optimistic’ or ‘pro’ views about China from within
China itself, in addition to a fairly brave attempt to get people to think
through China’s economic rise as epochal and ‘game-changing.’ Of course,
this all just represents one enthusiastic view of that rise, and it must be said
that he indeed glosses over the gross amounts of exploitation, the degrada-
tion of the socialist revolution, and so on. But it is also that even Jacques
sees as dangerous in some ways (e.g. Chinese racism or ethnocentrism).
For the conventional Western leftist view, see Perry Anderson’s review of
Jacques in ‘Sinomania,’ in The London Review of Books, 32.2, 2010:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/perry-anderson/sinomania
3. For the by now laughable ‘collapse views’ see Gordon Chang’s The Coming
Collapse of China (London, Cornerstone Digital: 2010) and Prof. David
Shambaugh’s ‘The Coming Chinese Crackup,’ The Wall Street Journal,
March 6, 2015: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-chinese-
crack-up-1425659198.
4. See to begin with Kevin O’Brien and Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in
Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2006). This has been a deserv-
edly and profoundly inuential book, but it must also be said that the study
D. F. VUKOVICH

35
of Chinese protest would occupy an entire library. My work on Wukan and
Hong Kong that follows is meant to join in to the study of protest, albeit
from a more general or theoretical and interpretive angle along cultural
studies lines. This is by no means meant as a rebuke of this valuable, more
sociological eld. See also Cai Yongshun, Collective Resistance in China:
Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail (Stanford University Press, 2010), and
for the working class or labor movement specically, see Ching Kwan Lee
Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University
of California Press, 2007). Elizabeth Perry’s work in this eld is also worth
noting.
5. See Professor Kerry Brown, July 2017, ‘The Curious Case of Ideas in
Modern Chinese Politics.’ http://thediplomat.com/2017/07/the-curi-
ous-case-of-ideas-in-modern-chinese-politics/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
6. This was also frequently said of the former Soviet Union, for those who
recall that entity. My point is not to endorse the censorship, of course, and
least of all in the decidedly non-revolutionary context of today, but to note
one of its roots, and that it is not irrational.
7. See Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J.Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand:
The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).
8. See Elizabeth J.Perry, ‘The Illiberal Challenge of Authoritarian China,’
(Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 2012, 8.2: 3–15).
9. Perry, Ibid., 3.
10. This is at least one, traditional way of reading much of the sources of criti-
cal theory, and not just Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: by which I mean
Marx, Nietzsche, even Freud, and certainly Max Weber, the Frankfurt
School, and beyond (arguably including Foucault).
11. Yuri Pines, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China
and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2012).
12. On this see in particular Wang Hui’s work on the concept of China as an
empire state, China from Empire to Nation-State (Trans. Michael Gibbs
Hill, Harvard University Press, 2014).
13. My remarks here are inspired by Michael Puett’s work in particular. For a
quick accessible introduction, see his June 5, 2016, interview with Olivia
Goldhill at: https://qz.com/699741/a-harvard-philosophers-argument-
for-not-loving-yourself-just-as-you-are/. And his co-authored book with
Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us
About the Good Life (Simon and Schuster, 2016).
14. See most recently his The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits
of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2015), as well as a recent article,
‘Comparing Political Values in China and the West: What Can Be Learned
and Why It Matters’ (The Annual Review of Political Science, 2017).
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

36
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051215-
031821. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
15. For more on these terms, see Chaps. 2 and 3 and especially He Li, 2015.
16. The Caixin Media Company in China is a key example of this, as would be
the work of at least some human rights lawyers in China.
17. See Lin Chun’s China and Global Capitalism: Reections on Marxism,
History, and Contemporary Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), passim,
but Chaps. 2 and 3 especially.
18. Ibid., but especially Chaps. 5 and 6 in Lin Chun.
19. See Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s work on globalization and culture and devel-
opment, including his inuential Globalization and Culture: Global
Mélange, 3rd edition (New York Rowan and Littleeld, 2015).
20. Vukovich, China and Orientalism (Routledge, 2012).
21. See, most recently, Engin Isin, ed., Citizenship after Orientalism:
Transforming Political Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). In my view,
political orientalism can be dened as a subset of ‘regular’ orientalism or a
Foucauldian/Saidian discourse about the Eastern or Asian Other that
arguably dates back to antiquity or at least early modernity. In the case of
China, the question of politics is arguably at the forefront of Western intel-
lectual fascination/repulsion, alongside Chinese women and more cultur-
alist obsessions like the language or food. I nd Isin’s term useful because
it allows for some specicity and focus on the political while retaining the
critique of universalism.
22. The decision to not only publish but also strongly promote and hail Vivek
Chibber’s polemic against the Indian Subaltern historians—wrongly con-
ated with post-colonial studies as a eld and historical movement—is
acase in point. See Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
(London: Verso, 2013). Perry Anderson’s evasive review of Martin Jacques
(‘Sinomania’ in the 28January 2010 London Review of Books) would be
another case (oddly seeing Jacques’ admiring synthesis of mainstream
mainland views as misplaced radical desire). But what is also at stake,
beyond the residual Trotskyism of Britain, is the profound universal-
humanism of Western leftist as much as liberaldiscourse(e.g. the generic
universal ‘modernity’ for Anderson). This is in my view at odds not only
with a Fanon or Cesaire but with a Lenin or Maoand arguably Marx and
social, historicalreality. Universalism is discourse.
23. Of course, I am here omitting the brief period of ferment in the Cultural
Revolution in Hong Kong, as well as the militant seamen’s strike of 1922
or the later more corporate labor movement. While signicant in their own
right, I think my point—that today there is no left in the socialist or Marxist
or radical sense—will nonetheless be readily admitted by Hong Kong
scholars who recognize the difference between liberal and leftist (perhaps a
diminishing demographic globally). As for its liberal democratic move-
ment, I return to this subject in a later chapter on the Occupy-to-Umbrella
D. F. VUKOVICH

37
movement. Not for nothing was Hong Kong a crucial base of (Western)
China studies during the Cold War era, and it remains a vehemently anti-
communist space, perhaps more than in the colonial era. But it must also be
said that Hong Kong’s intellectual sphere has it pockets and bubbles of
more heterodox political thought and scholarship. That this stems from
colonial liberalism is undeniable and an irony not lost on the present author.
24. This was after all the key, if somewhat oblique thread running through
much of Fredric Jameson’s work on post-modernism through the 1990s.
See, of course, his Postmodernism (Duke University Press, 1991) as well as
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1989) for the 1990s critiques. Neither much engaged the post-
colonial eld. For a more recent and more thorough and immanent cri-
tique of the theory and politics of post-structuralism/post-modernism (as
in many ways conservative or merely liberal politics), see Timothy Brennan,
Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia
University Press, 2007).
25. See Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (New York: Verso, 2012) and
Crowds and Party (New York: Verso, 2016).
26. An unfortunate case in point is the recent book of the erstwhile heterodox
scholar, James C. Scott, which includes a chapter on the Great Leap
Forward, but betrays no actual attention to the debates, even in English, on
the subject. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1999). Scott’s difference
from an avowed neo-liberal like Hayek is negligible in this book at least.
27. ‘Neo-liberalism’ may usefully capture the economic forces and structures
at work, but the degradation is larger still. The ‘neo’ prex obscures as
much as it helps, and there can be no doubt that when it comes to China,
the liberalism is very much of a classical (markets vs. the regime) kind, or a
simulation thereof, from the New Enlightenment of the 1980s (qinmen)
to those symbolic warriors aiming their expertise and academic tracts at the
Party-state. Accounts of a rationalist/entrepreneurial/competitive ‘neo’
rationality in the culture and society at large, as in the work of Pierre
Dardot and Christian Laval’s The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal
Society (Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2014) do not adequately
t the phenomenon of liberalism in China or among its intellectual critics
inside or out. For these are driven by political and identitarian passions but
also by the politics of knowledge and the dynamics of orientalism and
Occidentalism, that is of the modern colonial era. Neo-liberalism as a polit-
ical rationality that transforms liberal democracy into an economic ratio-
nality—as in Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth
Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015)—certainly ts the bill (particu-
larly for the party elite and liberal intellectuals) but with the important
proviso that what it is transforming is socialism and Maoism or even tradi-
tional discourses of well-being and livelihood.
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

38
28. See Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China (New York:
Penguin Books, 1980).
29. See alsoFabio Lanza on this, in his ingratiating intellectual history of—
some of—the former AmericanCommittee of Concerned Asian Scholars
(he glosses overthose who turned to the right as well aspost-1970s area
studies): The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). The P.R.C. being objectied by
academic and broader discourse, and being tightly bound up in the politics
of knowledge, is of course a consistent theme of my own as well as others’
work, includingthose of us who work on ‘actually existing’ Maoism. Thisis
alsoa basic insightof post-colonial studies after Edward Said’s Orientalism
(New York: Vintage, 1978). But it is always a good and welcome time
forChinahistoriansto join the ‘movement.’What is striking now is that, as
China becomesa clear ‘subject of history’ alongside other major powers, it
is only with great difculty that it can be seen as a subject in some way other
than anuglyempire in the making (or merely a gross capitalist space)whose
government willor shouldcollapse.Thinking differently about theP.R.C. is
not an easy task, of course, and one thatprobablybelongs moreto non-
historians(or non-archivist versions of that discipline).
30. Etienne Balibar, ‘Difference, Otherness, Exclusion.’ Parallax 11.1 (2005):
19–34.
31. For an English translation of the leaked document from 2013, see
‘Document 9,’ at http://www.chinale.com/document-9-chinale-trans-
lation.TranslationandcommentarybyChinaFile/AsiaSocietyFoundation.
Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
32. Ibid.
33. I essay contemporary Chinese politics, then, as a way into better appre-
hending the global political conjuncture, a complex mixture of neo-liber-
alism and illiberalism where the stakes are nothing less than the legitimacy
of the state—any state, the state as such in intellectual political discourse.
The degradation of liberalism into a neo-liberalism, and yet its persistence
in regard to an increasingly assertive and successful, if authoritarian, main-
land politics are the cases in point.
34. I leave to one side here the question of whether or not the state will, or
needs to, radically redistribute wealth to be ‘socialist,’ as well as the impor-
tant if small percentage of party intellectuals and others who think the
Maoist revolution is and was important and should not be forgotten.
35. I take this formulation from noted liberal political scientist Charles
E.Lindblom, who, in the late 1970s and before the dominance of neo-
liberalism, memorably pointed to the PRC and Cuba not as totalitarian-
isms or Soviet-like regimes but as preceptorial systems rooted in
propaganda, of course, but also trying to govern culturally or ideologically
by creating the new man/new woman.
D. F. VUKOVICH

39
36. (OED, illiberalism). Online version.
37. All quotations here are form the online version of the complete Oxford
English Dictionary at http://www.oed.com/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
38. https://www.ceu.edu/article/2016-02-23/
illiberal-regimes-employ-range-anti-democratic-tactics-cement-power-
panelists-say.
39. See Chloe Froissart’s 2014 article, ‘The Ambiguities between Contention
and Political Participation: A Study of Civil Society Development in
Authoritarian Regimes’ (Journal of Civil Society, 10:3, 219–222), 220.
This assumes that the students of 1989 were in search of radical regime-
change, as opposed to greater free speech and inclusion for them. For
more on Tiananmen and ways to read it, see Vukovich, China and
Orientalism (London: Routledge, 2012).
40. One may note that I do not use the phrase ‘serial abuser of human rights.’
This is because, with Gilles Delueze, I nd the concept of human rights to
be a reication and which do not exist—laws and power and life do. See
extracts from Deleuze’s L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet
(Vidéo Éd. Montparnasse, 1996) at http://www.generation-online.
org/p/fpdeleuze10.htm. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017. Of course this is a his-
torical argument but readers may demand an authorial sanction.
41. See Jonathan Kaiman in The Guardian in 2014: https://www.theguard-
ian.com/world/2014/sep/23/xinjiang-china-court-ilham-tohti-muslim-
uighur-life-in-prison. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
42. Ci Jiwei, Moral China in the Age of Reform (Cambridge University Press,
2014).
43. I leave to one side the other sense of illiberal, vulgar, crude, stingy, ‘peas-
anty,’ and so on, as this is simply and clearly old-fashioned orientalism and
elitism when applied cart blanche to ‘the Chinese,’ or as some say in Hong
Kong, to the ‘mainlanders.’
44. Domenic Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Trans. Gregory Elliott.
NewYork: Verso, 2011). Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in
Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago University Press,
1999). See also Charles W.Mills, ‘Racial liberalism’ (PMLA. 123.5 (2008):
1380–1397).
45. To take just two recent examples, see Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism,
Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-century Visions of
a Greater Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Duncan Bell,
Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton
University Press, 2016). Matthew P Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in
Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (Princeton
University Press, 2008).
46. Eric Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

40
47. I have written on this at length elsewhere in terms of post-colonial theory.
See for example Vukovich, ‘Postcolonialism, Globalization, and the “Asia
Question”,’ in Graham Huggan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial
Studies (Oxford University Press, 2013) or more recently, ‘Re-orienting
All the Fields’ (Inter-Disciplines: Journal of History and Sociology, 8.1,
2017, 145–164). But for more ‘proper’ historical studies, see also the work
of James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in
Nineteenth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2003) and The
Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-building in
Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Lin Chun, (2017)
‘Discipline and power: knowledge of China in political science’ (Critical
Asian Studies, 49.4, 2017, 501–522).
48. In this section I am drawing on a 2017 interview with the prolic historian
Richard J.Smith, by Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, ‘New and Old Histories
of the Qing Dynasty’ at the Los Angeles Review of Books: http://blog.lare-
viewofbooks.org/chinablog/new-old-histories-qing-dynasty-interview-
richard-j-smith/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
49. For characteristically snide commentary on the mainland ‘outburst,’ see a
‘China Media Project blog’ here, ‘New Qing History targeted,’ https://u.
osu.edu/mclc/2015/04/25/new-qing-history-targeted/. (Accessed
Nov. 1, 2017). And also ‘Chinese Academy of Social Sciences throwing
shade at The New Qing History’ here: http://granitestudio.
org/2015/04/23/chinese-academy-of-social-sciences-throwing-shade-
at-the-new-qing-history/. (Accessed Nov. 1, 2017). It is precisely the
arrogance of such foreign-based comments and responses to Chinese anger
and politics that reproduces the problem of ‘rudeness’ and keeps the
China/West divergence going. Which in the end, or in itself, is perhaps not
a bad thing at all. As is obvious I am not taking sides on Manchu versus
Han but, while an outsider, I am more interested in the PRC versus its
enemies, real and imagined.
50. See J.K. Galbraith’s brief but charming travel memoir, A China Passage
(Houghton Mifin Company, 1973), and Charles E.Lindblom’s Politics
and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic
Books, 1977) for the discussion of the ‘preceptorial system.’
51. Orville Schell, ‘China Strikes Back!,’ Oct. 23, 2014, New York Review of
Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/23/china-strikes-
back/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
52. See the Guardian report by Ashifa Kassam and Tom Phillips for details of
the Wang explosion. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/jun/02/
chinese-foreign-minister-canada-angry-human-rights-question. Accessed
Nov. 1, 2017. For a self-revealing comment that Schell is too soft on
China’s fear and political insecurity, see Perry Link’s response, ‘“China
D. F. VUKOVICH

41
Strikes Back”: An Exchange,’ in the Nov. 20, 2014, issue. http://www.
nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/china-strikes-back-exchange/.
Accessed Nov. 1, 2017.
53. For more on liberalism’s inability to handle/understand difference well,
see Charles Larmore, himself a distinguished liberal political theorist but
fully appreciative of this issue: ‘Political Liberalism: Its Motivations and
Goals’ in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 1, Eds. David Sobel,
Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall, pp. 63–88 (Oxford University Press,
2015). His nal lines are worth quoting at length: ‘I suspect that similarly
conceptions of global justice, whatever their moral merits, have a chance of
being implemented only if states, liberal states, nd themselves moved to
put them into practice. Yet, how likely is that in the present age? The dis-
tinctive problems of our world are not among the problems for which lib-
eralism was devised, and they threaten its very viability. Its prospects, I am
sad to say, are accordingly uncertain.’
ON ILLIBERALISM ANDSEEING LIKE ANOTHER STATE

43© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_2
CHAPTER 2
The New Left andtheOld Politics
ofKnowledge: ABattle forChinese
Political Discourse
In the world of China after Tiananmen, 1989, after that violent and, what
is more, that un-necessary crackdown in response to a large, mostly peace-
ful and ‘loyal’ if disorganized protest and shutdown of Beijing, most
Western observers still expected—perhaps still expect—an eventual return
of mass protests and demands for ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ or political
and ideological ‘liberalization.’1 What was called the ‘cultural fever’ of the
1980s before that event was precisely such a ferment, the wide-ranging
embrace of ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’ (as signiers, as translated texts,
in various fora) of seemingly all things ‘Western’ (from global capitalism
to popular culture).2 This was perhaps best represented, before the stu-
dent protesters themselves (as opposed to the striking workers), by the
controversial yet state-funded and thus state-sanctioned documentary
series He Shang, a paean to ‘the rise of the West’ and the decline of ancient,
‘yellow,’ Confucian, ‘feudal’ China (also represented by Mao in the lm).
If it pathologized peasants for lacking entrepreneurial and modern spirit,
and idealized the rise of the modern, capitalist West, it nonetheless
expressed genuine, widely felt enthusiasm for the new era; in its conclud-
ing minutes He Shang even trumpeted political reform (which led to its
still-current ban after 1989).With the image of the murky Yellow River
emptying into the Pacic, it offered a vision and ‘China dream’ of endless
development, progress, and possibility, a new order of bright sunny days
stemming from globalization and capitalist expansion. As if it were subli-
mating and not simply (not only) rejecting political, equalitarian, Maoist

44
revolution. Clearly the China of the 1980s and the Western ‘end of his-
tory’ sentiment (Fukuyama) must have indexed something big happening.
After the awful interruption of progress on the morning of June 4, 1989,
surely the zeitgeist, China’s convergence with political normalcy and ‘mod-
ern’ democratic forms would return, alongside its burgeoning and increas-
ingly privatized economy and all those millions lifted out of poverty. The
velvet, or jasmine, or Tahir Square moment awaits.
And yet, it never arrives. Nothing of the sort has happened, even if liberal-
ism still exists as a real, if not terribly inuential type ofpolitical intellectual
formation in (state) universities and elsewhere, such as the corporate media
group, Caixin.3 The classic philosophical and methodological problem of
the ‘is/ought distinction’plagues conventional expertise, Chinese language
prociencies notwithstanding. What has happened has been the rise of a
Chinese new left after 1989, as an intellectual or discursive ‘movement’ also
in universities and other fora, aligned with yet separate from the remnants
and new adherents of what we might call the ‘old left’(some remaining party
elders and other, less academic voices; not neo- but ‘full-on’ Maoists that in
fact run a greater risk of repression). This is a movement—even if its partici-
pants often eschew the left label, since ‘Leftist’ was such an accusatory,
demonized term in the 1980s, and since the state itself wishes to control
politicization—that turns upon three or four things: a defense of the revolu-
tionary, socialist past as meaningful and not fake or merely propaganda; a
qualied but denite critique of the effects of capitalist marketization and, in
a word, of the commodication of Chinese society and workers and peasants
in particular; and—in traditional leftist fashion—a root concern with social
equality, which is to say with systemic inequality and exploitation as well
(arguably, the meaning of ‘class’ as the fundament of Marxist theory).4
Gan Yang, an inuential intellectual who—admirably, it may be felt—
runs the gamut from liberal to leftist to neo-Confucian or traditionalist,
denes the Maoist legacy as ‘a striving for equality and justice’ that ows
out of thousands of years of Chinese civilization. It is an ethic of equality
and also a praxis of political participation, and it forms one of China’s three
pillars or traditions that can, and must, be integrated into one holistic one.
Maoism would thus work alongside Confucianism and May 4th- era
inspired liberalism or rights-based political reasoning.5 Gan’s (and others’)
turn toward Confucianism is not without controversy and paradox, given
that it was precisely that tradition and keyword that was attacked from the
1920s through the late Mao era. But it must also be said that the object of
critique in these instances was less the writings of the sage himself or his
D. F. VUKOVICH

45
pre-modern acolytes and more the institutionalized educational, political,
and ideological apparatuses summed up by his proper name (or ‘feudal-
ism’); even the famous/infamous ‘Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius’
campaign and texts were as much about Mao’s thought (trying to extend
his style of thinking to ancient periods) and contemporary power struggles
between the ‘Gang of Four’ and their enemies as about the ins and outs of
Confucian thought.6 So too one must note that at a very general yet
important level, Maoism and Chinese communism share some concerns or
values with Confucian and other forms of traditional thought (e.g.
Legalism in particular), namely, in this case, the value of the ‘common
wealth’ or people’s livelihood. So too it musQuery solved t be said that
Mao, for example, may have been anti-Confucius yet was famously steeped
in the classics, just as the communist movement itself embraced other tra-
ditional, often local folk cultures. In this the Chinese leftism or socialism
nds a more natural or ready-made ally in its own traditions than in liberal-
ism. This—once again—came to China and to much of Asia via gunboat,
artillery shells, and forcibly opened ‘free markets.’
But the proper context here is the post-Tiananmen one, the time of full-
on globalization and hence a greater threat to ‘difference’ through homog-
enization and cultural imperialism and to all things traditional and stable.
This is very much a properly leftist or ‘democratic’ concern, especially in
the former colonized or Third World. So the opposition between tradition
and communism, as with tradition versus modernity, is indeed a false one,
and this is one lesson from the Chinese left, new and old. Maoist commu-
nism, developmentalist yet radically egalitarian and anti-market, an anti-
modern modernism as Wang Hui puts it, was one attempt to synthesize or
Sinify Marxism and the inherited civilization.7 How can one understand
Chinese civilization (ranging from imperial history to everyday life prac-
tices) alongside but analytically separate from historical Western concepts
and discourses? And beyond this, and assuming one wants to explore it,
how would this lead us to rethink or re-envision the limits and possibilities
of Western ‘civilization’ and liberalism in particular? This is a massive, per-
haps even—given the hegemony of Western liberal intellectual political
culture in the academy and in mainstream media—an ultimately impossible
task. But it is one being taken up by the new left and other intellectuals in
China, and it is remarkably ambitious and post-colonial if nothing else.
At any rate what is to be emphasized here with Gan Yang is precisely the
socialist or equalitarian basis to the re-appropriation of Confucianism. If
the liberal ‘reform era’ represents some type of market freedom or rights,
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

46
and Mao justice and equality and participation, Confucius stands in for
something like traditional daily life and ‘heritage.’8 Thus this is clearly not
a call for a restoration of feudalism but a concern for cultural preservation
and even simply an insistence on Chinese difference and specicity in
terms of the categories we use to understand the place in all its variety and
complexity and people. This type of more critical and political neo-
Confucianism or traditionalism should be distinguished from the apoliti-
cal or baldly essentialist forms, including the ‘national learning’ or guoxue
phenomenon.9 As for Gan’s liberalism—articulated through the example
of Deng Xiaoping—this seems largely a nod to the importance of markets
(liberal economics) and to the ‘immovable object’ of the ideological and
institutional shift after Mao (the Party’s de-Maoication) than to any
political liberalism or rootedness in liberty or rights as the basis of the
political.10 Gan Yang seeks to integrate these three streams into some type
of consensus for the new, post-Deng or post-Tiananmen era of reforms or
progress. (He like others on the left has therefore been accused by liberal
critics of wanting the crown’s ear.) This resonates with a certain traditional
or Confucian role of intellectuals in relation to the state, and also with the
Maoist or Marxist one: to serve the people in this way, and to try and
change the world as opposed to merely interpret it. ‘Serve the people’ may
be the single most effective and popular of all the Maoist slogans, precisely
because it overlaps with traditional values and upbringings. Butthere is
also no denying its specically leftist or political connotations in the
Chinese context. Of course it must also be said that the Maoist vision of
intellectual work (also articulated by Qu Qiubai most famously) was to
rst produce new organic intellectuals from inside the working class and
peasantry, and Mao had no love for ‘independent’ intellectuals.11
To be certain, not all new left texts articulate all of these concerns (i.e.
the red past, the baleful effects of marketization and globalization, social
or substantive equality), and not simultaneously in any given essay or
instance. But the general direction is clear and by now widely noted: equal-
ity (and this criticism of ‘reform’ and globalization), the revolutionary
problem or history, the role and necessity of the state. Any list of names of
representative thinkers will be incomplete and open to dispute, and would
have to include a few foreign and expatriate, but actively involved, writers
and scholars.12 More generally, the new left is unthinkable except as a
response to the iniquities and social problems of capitalist or neo-liberal
reformin China, which is also to say as a response toglobalization. So too
it is worth recalling the traditional Marxist and socialist designation of left
D. F. VUKOVICH

47
versus right: it was about one’s position on capitalism and the market,
particularly in terms of production, and on the comparative importance of
the economic and social class. In a word, it was about socialism or equality
within the ‘base’ as opposed to the superstructure. This too has strong
resonance within the new left of China, even if that may not be at all obvi-
ous in a discussion of, say, modernity. (Just as the writings of, say, the lib-
eral dissident Liu Xiaobo do not all index his advocacy of privatization and
colonization.) This is contrary to the classical, liberal, and conservative
thought that either ignored the economic and social class issues altogether
or focused merely on consumption/distribution (the market) and not
production. In China, the liberal side of the spectrum is by comparison
concerned primarily with rights-based or formal and legal equality as indi-
viduals, as well as with privatization of the state-based economy. For all the
frequent invocations of how left and right have little, or only confused, or
perhaps opposite meanings in China as compared to the rest of the world—
and this has become a knee-jerk reaction in expert commentary—the new
left is clearly on a conventional leftist side as dened earlier, whereas the
liberals are on the right (scal conservatives, as the Americans say). Indeed
that confusion (far more prevalent among foreigners, it must be said) has
more to do with the resolute anti- statism of contemporary post-1970s
Western intellectual political culture, especially under the American inu-
ence and the rise of neo-liberalism. It has also to do with the Western
identication of the ‘oriental’ Chinese state as exceptionally despotic, and
so represents a perfect storm: orientalism, Cold War educational legacies
and scholarship in addition to general ignorance of all things mainland,
neo-liberal as well as ‘radical’ anti-state theories and sentiments, and then
obvious propaganda and repressive apparatuses on the mainland side.
Given this, it is not hard to see how and why mainland Chinese leftism has
such a tough row to hoe in the global intellectual scene.
The latter is not only liberal but more and more specically neo-liberal
or gung-ho marketization, especially in the case of China; mix this with
good old-fashioned anti-communism and orientalist notions about Chinese
despotism and domination, passivity, and lack of freedom, and you have a
perfect storm of either hostility or, more fatefully, incomprehension. There
could be no better example than journalist Jonathan Fenby’s response, in
a letter to the London Review of Books, to Wang Hui’s article on the fate of
the populist Chongqing experiment after the fall of Bo Xilai (about which
more later). Fenby misreads Wang Hui as simply being in denial that what
China needs is exactly those neo-liberal reforms that Bo and the left are
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

48
against.13 This also assumes Bo was genuinely leftist himself, which is not
Wang’s point. His point rather is that when Bo and his populist policies
were under attack it was immediately in the form of denouncing—by no
less than former Premier Wen Jiabao—his Cultural Revolution-like ten-
dencies and behaviors; this is nothing but an attempt to de-politicize that
populism and Bo’s undeniably charismatic authority.
Of course just as you can have liberal and/or heterodox Confucians in
China but not in France, the new left has its own characteristics as well, and
it would be a mistake to simply map the Chinese positions onto modular
Western ones. Even allowing for a traditional if not universal left standard
of substantive equality and ‘pro’ state thinking, not all lefts are the same or
exist in the same hemisphere. (We will attend to the question of ‘Chinese
revolutionary discourse’ later.) Indeed if there is such a thing as a ‘Western
left,’ it seems far closer to Chinese liberalism than to the new or old Chinese
left. With roots, however distant, in a classical Marxist (and Leninist-
Maoist) tradition, the new left deliberately de-emphasizes or even drops
standard categories like ‘the individual’ and typical liberal focuses on the
formal, institutional-legal dimensions of society. Or more simply: the lib-
eral voices in China—a la conventional China studies and political sci-
ence—see the Party-state as the clear, simple, overwhelming ‘main enemy,’
to a degree that recalls American libertarianism more than, say, European
liberalism. The new left, closer to Marxist and traditional Chinese political
culture (in its mainstream), simply does not see the state this way. For
them, this strongly Cold War–inected view is too simple and, as Wang Hui
among others has argued, it is probably more accurate to see the Party-
state as having been captured by neo-liberalism and global capital (and a
corrupt bureaucracy) than as either Nietzsche’s State (the ‘coldest of all
cold monsters’) or a version of oriental despotism.14 If liberals see the left
as ‘complicit’ with the state and therefore bad, the new left sees the state as
being complicit with capital and capitalists and at risk of being wholly
incorporated into national and global capitalism via the logic of liberal mar-
ketization. This view of economic power is indexed by Han Yuhai.
A prolic literature professor and public intellectual, author of recent
‘young reader’ books on Karl Marx and Mao Zedong, Han has been
referred to by Geremie Barmé as ‘splenetic’ and ‘extremist’ for expressing
sharp criticisms of liberalism and market fetishism within China; he argues
forcefully that Chinese history, including the party purges of the 1950s, be
rewritten from a leftist perspective.15 Here is Han in one such instance,
writing less than ten years after Tiananmen: ‘liberalism has enjoyed ascen-
D. F. VUKOVICH

49
dancy because it proffers a theoretical framework that allows right-wing
politics to overcome its legitimacy crisis’ (cited in Barmé 304). ‘Liberalism’
in this usage may seem like a straw man to outside observers, or perhaps a
mere cover for pro-regime apologetics. Isn’t liberalism lacking there, or is
at least very marginal? But Han is objecting to ‘liberal’ commitments to
the market and social stability in the name of continued economic growth,
which is to say to the waves of economistic de-politicization that charac-
terize the post-Mao or, if you want to be kind to Deng Xiaoping, to at
least the post-Tiananmen Party-state. In one type of liberal, moderniza-
tionist argument—shared by the discourse of Sinological orientalism, as
noted earlier—this slowly gathering tidal wave will eventually lead to soci-
etal transformation and democratization. In fact this is about the only way
you can legitimize accumulation by dispossession: the taking away of
resources and benets in a promise of what is to come (riches, presum-
ably). This is standard capitalist apologetics, but it takes on a liberal politi-
cal conceit in the case of illiberal regimes with a strong or more public,
non-private capacity. Free the market and the polity will follow. Han Yuhai
sees this type of liberalism, far and away the dominant if unspoken type in
China and abroad, as an apologia for the status quo and, as Barmé notes,
Han further argues that this only entrenches the elite and discourages
political participation. Of course Han is not claiming to be objective or
‘balanced’ here. But it is hard to say what is ‘extreme’ about this, as Barmé
also suggests, unless it is the very idea of such a staunch, if standard, leftist
(Marxist) view. Recall Rousseau on the origins of civil society in property
(i.e. theft), or Marx on the universalization of labor supplanting slavery
but dooming civil society to the bourgeoisie.
In another instance of alleged ‘virulence,’ Han writes: ‘On the path to
slavery, the liberalisation of capital reinforces the privileges of the class that
is already privileged, allowing slavery to grow and not democracy.’16
Virulent for whom, or from what standpoint? I would submit that the
liberal reaction to such a critique of markets and class domination in
China—for Han, in the name of mass- and economic democracy—is the
most telling here. Han’s political position is Maoist in some basic sense,
which is also to say Marxist, which is also to say the ‘common sense’ of
Chinese leftism,17 including in the passion expressed in diction like ‘slav-
ery’ and in equating liberalism to selshness and the ‘right wing.’ Put
another way, Han is also speaking from within Maoist discourse, which we
will attend to later in a separate section. Part of that entails a dyadic way of
thinking—and intensely, affectively living—politics, what Carl Schmitt
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

50
famously/infamously framed as friend/enemy schemes, but what in the
Marxist tradition was framed as class struggle (e.g. bourgeois/proletarian)
and, with Mao, as the rst thing for communists to ask: ‘Who are our
enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the rst importance for
the revolution.’18 Liberalism can thus appear as an enemy, not a friend.
This may sound extreme, and perhaps it is, and is certainly illiberal. But
this perspective could also be placed on a continuum that includes Lu Xun
(arguably not a liberal individualist but a deep nationalist concerned with
the collective Chinese character), the Frankfurt School, Rousseau, and so
on, in addition to various revolutionary ‘isms’ of the twentieth century.
What has shifted, in other words, is the liberal/Western/global political
spectrum and intellectual culture, certainly to the right (in favor of,
unbothered by class/social inequality) but also toward de-politicization.
The new left has resisted this by holding on to a loosely Marxist or Maoist
politics of commitment and to core socialist values like socio-economic
equality and class analysis, as well as to an intense, dyadic understanding of
politics and geopolitics. Although ‘merely’ academics or intellectuals and
sometimes disparaged as nationalists, dupes of the Party-state, and so on,
they are in fact far more political than most of their critics and far more
involved in the politics of discourse.19 I will return to this latter, political-
theoretical point momentarily when we discuss Maoist discourse.
But to speak as Han does of a right-wing legitimacy crisis after
Tiananmen—itself more a liberal than left-wing type of ‘democracy move-
ment,’ as many have argued—also shows us something of the complexity of
new left positioning. It implies—and alas must only imply—that, rst of all,
the deadly violence of 1989 was, indeed, an unjustied crackdown and not
something to be defended. They thus part ground from bad ‘patriotic’
responses to 1989in the mainland, whether from ‘netizens’ (sometimes paid
to be such) or from younger generations who have ‘learned’ it was nothing
important or was rightfully stopped in the name of ‘progress.’20 The year
1989 indeed represented a serious crisis, at least in its denouement. The
problem of legitimacy—the state’s difculty in securing this, after saying
‘farewell’ to revolution and equality and after the iniquities of ‘reform’—is in
fact ongoing, even if it is also clearly winning that battle in so far as maintain-
ing one-party rule is concerned. But Han suggests as well that liberalism is
part of the problem (the status quo) and not the answer, thus departing from
the Tiananmen generation, and also implicitly frames the state in class terms
as right wing, or at least in danger of being entirely so. Han assumes that link
between liberalism and capital, that individual freedom and power and rights
D. F. VUKOVICH

51
are free for everyone with enough money and capital to exercise them. This
may be ‘polemical’—to use a much disparaged word—but it is also a valid
and long-standing perspective on liberalism as seen from the left perspective.
Han’s Marxism/Maoism is worth quoting at length here, to illustrate it and
also to show that the new left critique of neo-liberalism and neo-authoritari-
anism is meant to go hand in hand:
Democracy … does not require abolishing the state, but rather expanding
its democratic functioning. This is because economic activity is always
embedded within social conditions, because independent economic forms
divorced from social relations and conditions do not actually exist. So even
if one strives for economic freedom, this cannot be simplistically understood
as the casting off of a political structure or other constraints. It is a question,
rather, of how these structures are transformed, limited, or expanded. … It
was precisely by failing to recognise or apply this knowledge [of embedded-
ness] that the Chinese state, in its 1989 price reforms [which escalated run-
away ination], lost its chance to unite with the masses, lost its opportunity
to bypass many of the reform’s social costs, and instead gave the green light
to neoauthoritarian and neoliberal elements, leading in the end to a serious
social crisis.21
This lays out the so-called statist view very clearly, and in addition sug-
gests an economic basis—spiraling ination in the 1980s before and after
the specic price reform/deregulation of 1989—that helped lead to the
authoritarian crackdown on those protests. Han then goes on to argue
that ‘the neo-authoritarian equation of people’s democracy with mob pol-
itics and the neoliberal call for a “retreat of the state” are inseparable from
the ideology of “getting on track” with the world capitalist market.’22 It
would be hard to nd a more concise and properly classical Marxist
account of state, economy, power, and politics than this.
Feeling global, Feeling China: outFlanking
PolitiCal orientalism
But there is yet another dimension to the rise of the new left that we must
attend to, and that is its relation to global discourse about China. With due
allowance for all representation being misrepresentation, we can nonetheless
say thatthe new left knows this Western territory well, either through study
abroad (especially the USA) or through learning and experience at home.
More to the point, they arecognizantof thelong history of others reading
China, as well as the shorter history of the ways that the Mao and post-
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

52
Maoeras havebeenframed abroad. For obvious technological and historical
reasons, it also knows this particular intellectual and ideological terrain of the
Westfar better than previous generations of Chinese leftists, including the
iconoclasts of the May 4 era, or the earliest communists. This is to say that we
must examine the new left’srelation to Sinological-orientalist codings of the
PRC, and by extension its relation to the imperial/capitalist past and present
not only within China but also from outside. There is, in short, an anti- or
counter-colonial dimension to the rise of the new left when it is seen in the
context of the long-standing problemof orientalism or colonial discourse, as
well as the context of the (past?) revolution against capitalist imperialism. As
a concomitant part of its implied or explicit critiques of ‘reform and opening
up’ to global capitalism since Mao, the new left is also unthinkable except as
a response to the threat posed to China’s relative autonomy and ‘difference’
posed by globalization, including the production and circulation of knowl-
edge or discourse. In what follows I analyze the movement as a specically
post- colonial or anti-orientalist intellectual movement engaged in a discur-
sive, hegemonic battle with both indigenous and foreign (chiey American)
neo-liberalism for the meaning of Chinese politics. In a nominally Leninist
Party-state that takes ideology very seriously indeed, this otherwise merely
‘academic’ phenomenon has a signicance, beyond the usual, sequestered,
small-circle polemics and discussions of most national academies. To be sure
it is also the specter of repression and censorship, the illiberal terrain, which
adds to the drama but hopefully also to the importance of the struggle.
It is in this discursive sense—the politics of knowledge—that the new left
is a signicant moment in Chinese intellectual (and perhaps political) history.
It is a clear rupture with the Western/global/liberal fevers of the 1980s
when critiques of the reforms—as reforms, as a new socio-politico- economic
order—came only through workers themselves in their protests. It will gen-
erally be admitted that other political responses to the new reform era by
intellectuals, chiey stemming from campuses and in select magazines and
journals, were largely liberal and loyal to a fault, calling primarily for further
reform along the same lines of ‘liberalization’; even the students of 1989
were keen to distinguish their protests from those of the Cultural Revolution
and to have them acknowledged as non- subversive. But the new left is not
only areaction against the occidentalism and the perceived naiveté ofthe late
1970s and 1980s. To this negation it also addsa positive, proactive move in
the development of a leftist discourse after this became unspeakable in the
later 1970s and 1980s. Additionally, the new left is apparently also read and
used by the state itself in various, small but actual ways; to an extent it may
even inuence government policy. Muchof their work is empirical and in the
D. F. VUKOVICH

53
social sciences, so lends itself to that. Two notable examples would be
Tsinghua-based professors Cui Zhiyuan, who worked briey for the
Chongqing municipal government, and Hu Angang, an inuential political
economist based in Beijing. Hu has for years argued for the successes and
necessity of state-owned enterprises, for the importance of a strong state,
and for better redistribution of the wealth of the reform era toward the rural
poor and working class. He has more recently argued against population
control (which has indeed been relaxed) and for the PRC to become a global
leader in energy efciency.23 But it is Hu’s writings on the successes of the
PRC political system that attract the most attention abroad.
New left intellectuals—to the chagrin of some outside observers—have
no qualms in being useful to their government, and no desire to be dissi-
dents. This despite the fact that they too, like their liberal and neo-
Confucian counterparts, must navigate the never-absent specter of
censorship. In this they depart as well from the anti-statism (and anti-
communism) of, say, much of the Western or specically American leftist
intellectuals, as well as much of China studies that tend instead to either
latch on to liberal intellectuals (ironically, also employed by public univer-
sities) or to the so-called civil society gures like the artist Ai Wei Wei,
emigre novelists, bloggers, and so on. Its so-called statism or commitment
to the state as the main vehicle with which to effect social change, its ‘loyal
opposition’ mode of address to the Party on behalf of the revolution’s ide-
als of equality, its often perceptible patriotism and nationalism suggest that
the Chinese new left is in fact much closer to the American/Chinese/
global ‘old’ left, that is the radical, socialist left between the world wars, or
to European social democrats and ‘Eurocommunists,’ than to the hippy,
anarchist, or ‘counter-culture’ scenes of the American 1960s (with their
fantasies of total opposition to the USA and global systems) or, say,
Occupy Wall Street, let alone to the dissident movements of the former
Eastern bloc in Europe. They are also closer to the post-1949 Mao or the
Yan’an era Mao than to the more pure, blameless Mao who had not done
anything bad or all that complicated yet, other than of course rescuing and
preserving the communist movement against great odds. It is the Maoism
that achieved power and then had to build a state and govern, rather than
the one of, say, Third Worldism and national liberation.
The recent collection of essays by Wang Hui, the most well known of
new left gures and a powerful and remarkably erudite if also subtle
thinker, makes the social democratic vision—with ‘Chinese characteris-
tics,’ as the saying goes—explicit:
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

54
A young social democrat told me that after the Cold War, the idea of social-
ism can no longer be mentioned. But if not toward socialism, then in what
direction is social democracy aimed? [There are] two problematic tenden-
cies: The rst is to equate socialism and communism with the practices of
state socialism in the past; the second is to treat the socialist practices of the
past as a single entity and refuse to engage in a real political and historical
analysis of these practices. In the European context [note: not the Chinese
mainland context], socialism is immediately equated with despotism and
violent totalitarian rule. The whole tenor is negative. But socialism’s legacy
is rich and complex, and we must carry out a critical summation of it. The
legacy of Mao Zedong’s thought is both the object of our thinking and also
a method we can use to reect on his own political practices. It ought to be
from this perspective that we revive his legacy.24
The point of social democracy, then, is the socialism. What else could be
its basis, or where else could it be going? There is also, of course, the ques-
tion of where socialism is going, if not to communism. But in the current
conjuncture this remains a very theoretical, though not unimportant, con-
sideration. (The horizon has to be equality, even full equality and the fate
of the commons or common wealth; the only real word for this is ‘com-
munism.’) The point of rethinking the past—the actual Chinese past in its
variety and complexities, not the Orwellian one envisioned for them by
well-meaning ‘comrades’ abroad—is to learn from it, the failures as well as
the achievements in, for example, human welfare and empowerment.
Wang goes on to argue that social democracy institutionalized some of
socialism’s goals, and thus can be seen as ‘a type of capitalism beyond capi-
talism’—one moving toward socialism. This is no doubt what he and oth-
ers have in mind for the Chinese state, if it can be articulated in such a
direction and if it has the capacity to do so after so much ‘reform’ and
commodication. This also assumes, with no less than Mao, that the PRC
was never communist—though this was clearly the distant horizon—but
on a trajectory or attempted transition toward not just modernity but
socialism (and more grandly toward ‘futurity’ and ‘continuing the revolu-
tion’). Here the goal has to be social democracy rst, or even as socialism
in the contemporary Chinese and global context. Why does one need to
‘defend the revolution’ and still read and respect Mao if one is a ‘new left-
ist social democrat’? Because the reference is China and not the USA or
Europe. Wang is, again, pointedly ambiguous here; what he is not saying
must also be heard—those loud silences, unmistakable to the trained ear,
are telling for his and others’ ‘politics of knowledge’ in regard to Sinological
D. F. VUKOVICH

55
orientalism. Note that the call is not for an end to the one Party-state sys-
tem, and there is no trace of a denunciation of the Cultural Revolution,
for example. Elsewhere, Wang Hui—implicitly drawing on the work of
people like Gao Mobo and Wang Shaoguang as well as his own experi-
ences and observations about 1966–1976—has said that while no one can
defend the entire Cultural Revolution period as good, so too no one can
dismiss or condemn the entire period as bad either; those that do, speak to
it from a decidedly elite point of view that ignore, for example, the broad-
ening of social experience that happened when students and other youth
lived and worked among the workers and peasants.25 In regard to the
current state, the new left emphasis is on better governance and social
equality, which means taking on—yet not overthrowing—capital and the
effects and realities of the rst 30 years of ‘reform.’
In this sense the new left is not a return to Mao—which will give their
Western liberal readers some relief, though perhaps for different reasons.
Mao and the PRC already happened, and the point is to take it forward
under new conditions rather than, say, overthrowing the Party-state and
starting from scratch or with multi-party liberal-capitalist democracy. Put
another way, even if the new left is attached to the revolutionary past and
the vision of class equality, public land rights, anti-capitalism and anti-
imperialism, and so on, it must also be said that this is a reformist rather
than revolutionary or purely oppositional movement. Indeed, this is one of
the standard criticisms coming from predictable, and sectarian ‘leftist’
websitesand screeds onlinein the US-West. And yet something of the new
left’s signicance is also given by the fact that it too, despite this allegedly
‘quietist’ nature, must tread carefully. Leftist websites are routinely shut
down (including the once famous Utopia and Redag ones), emails
watched, conference funding denied, writings censored, and so on. They
occupy the same illiberal terrain and must negotiate accordingly.
But the real signicance of the new left must be understood globally and
even academically or intellectually; it lies in a challenge to knowledge pro-
duction about China, a discursive battle for a critical, political Chinese dis-
course that runs counter to state de-politicization and liberal knowledges of
the PRC as lacking political normalcy and development. This is to say that
it represents a post-colonial or post-orientalist approach to understanding
modern Chinese politics, one that takes the past revolution and Chinese
Marxism (or Maoism) seriously and that therefore challenges, more or less
directly, Cold War, Sinological orientalism. It challenges, howsoever sym-
bolically or discursively, the de-politicized, conservative, pro-market, and
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

56
thorough economism of the Chinese Party-state (what Wang Hui prefers to
call the state-Party in contrast to the radical era of Mao); arguably, more
importantly, it challenges conventional, liberal discourse about the PRC
and its formation and future. It represents as well a battle to claim a speci-
cally Chinese or PRC political discourse, in contestation with liberal as well
as ofcial, de-politicized or ‘conservative’ views. In all of this what the new
left movement does, differently than, say, the neo-Confucians or tradition-
alists, is to preserve and think through China’s difference from an assumed
liberal universality. Liberal universalism is the default mode of modern
higher education and the market principle, or in other words is a massive a
priori of intellectual political culture and not alien to even the CCP elite
who certainly believe in the market. Hence we may also see the new left as
an anti- or even illiberal intellectual movement in the best possible sense. It
sees liberalism as either an explicit problem, or at the very least as a non-
solution to the inequalities and inequities brought on by over three decades
of commodifying ‘reform’ since the death of Mao. At the risk of cliché, this
is where the empire (of China studies, of China knowledge, of global aca-
deme in the former Third World) writes back, where its knowledge nally
gets contested by the natives themselves, where PRC intellectuals actualize
their permission to narrate. Gone are the times when foreign academics and
intellectuals could so easily nd their own preconceptions about political
China and the revolution mirrored in their mainland counterparts, that is,
the liberal intellectuals and universities of the de-Maoication 1980s. Such
folks certainly still exist, and remain as popular as ever among foreign jour-
nalists, but they are far from the majority now. As previously noted the
failure of Tiananmen, the obvious ill effects of hyper-marketization, and a
receding tide of ‘Western cultural fevers’ are widely recognized precondi-
tions for the rise of the Chinese new left. But one must note as well the
long- standing knowledge politics between China and the West as well as,
crucially, the expansion of higher education and academic scholarship in
China. Moreover, the terms of engagement between foreign scholars (and
indeed foreign intellectuals and politicians of whatever type) and China (as
with foreign politicians and media) have radically changed. This is what, as
noted in the Introduction, seems to trouble analyses of the new, illiberal
China by Orville Schell and David Shambaugh.26 Paradoxically, then, the
criticism of the new left as merely an academic and intellectual phenome-
non leads us to its global signicance.
In an indispensable essay on academic collaboration with the mainland,
Gregory Mahoney, professor of politics at the prestigious East China Normal
D. F. VUKOVICH

57
University in Shanghai, surveys the changes in Sino-foreign academic coop-
eration, the decline of liberalism, and the heretofore assumed Western supe-
riority/leadership, as well as the rise of a Sinied Chinese academy with its
own styles of discourse. His essay is worth quoting at some length:
Some Chinese researchers have become increasingly critical of what might
be described as ‘Orientalist’ tendencies among foreign researchers studying
China, and therefore less likely to cooperate with them now; or at least less
likely to be involved in research projects in which such problems are per-
ceived to exist. This is also true of projects that might be seen as self-
orientalising. Until the early 2000s, Chinese academic discourse was being
driven substantially by its attempts to assimilate and debate Western liberal
and leftist positions, and struggling to do so under the Party’s gaze. In other
words, Chinese scholars on the left and right were convinced that a better
form of government was possible, and many looked overseas for models and
inspiration. Liberals were dissatised with lagging political reforms, while
leftists were unhappy with decreased political activism among the masses
and growing inequality. Today there is a growing belief that such alterna-
tives are perhaps more distant, if not difcult to nd. After 1999, 9/11,
Iraq, the Global Financial Crisis and the US’s pivot towards China,
Western—particularly American—liberalism no longer enjoys the same
cachet it once had, even among Chinese liberals.27
Since the 1980s and early 1990s there has been a massive expansion and
transformation of the Chinese academy (with the state still acting as over-
seer and funder). While there has been a small expansion of private institu-
tions, the great majority of these have been public, and it of course compares
favorably to the decline of public higher education elsewhere in the world.
While the rise of the Chinese Internet has been given scholarly attention,
the rise of Chinese academe has received less, even though it is indispens-
able for the rise of the new left as well as of other voices, and indeed for the
politics of knowledge generally. It also enabled a search among intellectuals—
and perhaps ofcials—for alternative ways of thinking of and writing about
China academically, substantively, a root-seeking mission to debate, for
example, the existence or not of an alternative (non- Western, non neo-
liberal) ‘China model’ for development and modernization. Does China
have one, and shouldn’t it nd out? ‘Model’—as opposed to historical
experience or something far more policy-specic—may not be an effective
word here. But at any rate the model is not actually meant for export,as
some type of blueprint orarchitectural miniature. Which is also not to say
THE NEW LEFT ANDTHEOLD POLITICS OFKNOWLEDGE: ABATTLE…

58
that the Chinese experience or methods ofdevelopment, or some more
specic policy or technique of governance cannot be learned from or
adopted and adapted. Clearly such lessons and copyings and borrowings
are what drive globalization as well as culture, and always have for better
and worse. Butthe point of emphasishere is simplythe search or reec-
tionsin themselves, and thedistancing from not just some abstract ‘West’
but from a couple-three decades of ‘reform.’ (This again shows the break
with the 1980s era.)28 There may or may not be such a model for China,
and in reality‘the’ model—as in Daniel Bell’s analysis of ‘politicalmeritoc-
racy’—would always have to be an ideal-type, at best.But again what is
perhaps most signicant is the very idea of a China model, which at least
speaks to some sense of self-examination, and can, in theory,lend itself to
constructive criticism as much as to celebration or patriotic gore. Such
debates are less specic to the new left in any case, though it is worth men-
tioning here thatmany new left gures argue that Maoism was an alterna-
tive, non-capitalist modernity, even if it reached its own end in time, and
that this too needs remembered as the P.R.C. goes forward. Other initia-
tives speaking to the new terrain of knowledgeproductionwould simply be
new cultural and intellectual histories of the modern (or earlier) periods,
but not told from the liberal and arguably Western viewpoint.
Wang Hui’s work on the problem of Tibet as well as his volumes on
Chinese modernity is particularly salient here. Wang argues that Western
fascination with Tibet and freeing Tibet from China is powerfully rooted in
orientalism, a claim that is surprisingly controversial or hard to fathom from
within the eld of Sinology.29 Moreover, the resolution of the crisis—and it
is one, for Tibetans and China alike—would be better approached not
through independence and modern (and Western) nation- state borders for
Tibet, which in the illusory ideal of autonomy and logic of purity creates as
many problems as it solves, but through the Mao-Zhou Enlai formulations
(form the 1950s) of relative autonomy under a more traditional, empire-
era form of suzerainty. Wang’s views here are not uncommon within China,
though they are sure to enrage others who would, in turn, speak for
Tibetans in Tibet and also want to gift them a sovereign, modern nation-
state of their own. But Wang’s focus on empire and suzerainty is nonethe-
less a challenge to what is undeniably a modern and Eurocentric view of the
necessity of discrete borders and nation-states; what if the latter, in this case
at any rate, creates more problems than solve? As for modernity, or perhaps
proto-modernity, Wang locates it in the Song dynasty (960–1279).30 But
more to our purposes here, he also posits Maoism as ‘an anti-modern
modernity’—part of the global or world- historical movement away from
D. F. VUKOVICH

59
ancient regimes but also against a universalizing capitalism and against the
erasure of China’s own specicities and differences; this was the Maoist
break with Stalinism after all, even if Stalin had to remain a proper name of
the pantheon.
Another recent example is Cai Xiang’s recently translated volume,
Revolution and its Narratives, a weighty, inuential volume after its
Chinese publication in 2010.31 Cai focuses on numerous socialist novels
and other Red texts (e.g. classics about land reform and collectivization
like Liu Qing’s The Builders, Zhao Shuli’s ‘The Marriage of Young
Blacky’), but his aims are multiple. In addition to redeeming these writ-
ings (their aesthetic value and complexity) and their authors from the lib-
eral backlash against them in the 1980s and beyond (what I have elsewhere
called the ‘liberal revenge’ of the 1980s in China and abroad), Cai’s real
object is what he frames as a ‘productive crisis of socialism.’ This crisis is
precisely what Mao thought of as the necessity or mandate to ‘continue
the revolution’ after the 1949 victory (not least by attempting to bring it
down to the all-important level of everyday life); and of course this is also
what all of these socialist intellectuals and artists were themselves con-
cerned with. Among the many, and genuinely massive challenges within
this that Cai explores are developing a ‘new’ language for and of the
masses while also attending to tradition and local dialects; the value of
labor (and laborers) but also the power of collective labor (the ‘true’ lib-
eration of the working class); how to have mass participation yet also an
inevitably large bureaucracy; alienation; class struggle; and so on. Thus,
while ‘admitting’ that socialism was immediately in crisis after 1949, Cai
illuminates the productivity of this same crisis: the profound nature of the
problems and issues and challenges that constituted it and that were fully
recognized and wrestled with and imaginatively worked out by various
writers and intellectuals and not just by the chairman at the top. Rather
than dismiss Mao-era literature as merely propaganda or simply insigni-
cant as ‘real’ art, his work grants it and the revolution itself a legitimacy it
largely does not have outside of China. Cai goes further in attempting to
theorize an organic or substantive connection, albeit a fraught, conicted
one, between the rst 30 radical years and the subsequent three decades of
capitalist/Dengist transformation. (This, as opposed to seeing them as a
complete and decisive break for all time.) The point here is that the delib-
erate refusal in the 1980s of a return to traditional socialism (i.e. socialism
before the cultural revolution, which for Cai also contains valuable insights
and texts like those of Li Yizhe in the early 1970s) has not negated or
resolved the crises of socialism but only exacerbated some of them, such as
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60
the dispossession of the working class and the production not of alienation
so much as a great apathy in public affairs in place of mass participation’s
contradiction with bureaucracy,32 in other words, Dengist or post-Mao
style de-politicization.
At any rate what one has to deal with in Cai’s work is an argument for
the modern Chinese, socialist revolution—an independent or heterodox
socialism as opposed to a mimicking of the West—as still being the chief
problem of China’s intellectual, political, and artistic culture and, indeed,
its overall development and trajectory. Cai’s departure from conventional
Chinese or comparative literature studies in the West, currently xated on
the diaspora and a somehow inherently subversive, anti-mainland
‘Sinophone’ literature, could not be more clear. Other new left literary
and lm scholars, such as Dai Jinhua or Mao Jian, focus on contemporary
or post-Mao China, writing criticism that engages the politics of represen-
tation in high and mass culture, from representations of migrant workers
to gender backlashes and anti-feminism to the ideological effects of con-
sumerism and globalization.
Mahoney further notes that ‘Chinese scholars today demand greater
mutual respect and understanding than before.’ And that ‘many people
are abandoning Western styles of writing and are employing a new type of
academic [written vernacular] (白话), partly in an effort to attract a
broader readership and secure their positions as public intellectuals while
shucking off the old associations that left them feeling like the academic
equivalent of second-class colonial subjects.’ From the various neo-
Confucianisms to neo-Maoism to outright believers in ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics’ still being on the CCP agenda, these can only
appear as illiberal within the discourse of Sinological orientalism. As noted
elsewhere in his essay, while Sino-foreign academic cooperation is clearly
growing in quantitative terms, it is now on more Chinese—which is to say
equal or fair—terms. The expansion of Chinese higher education is
immense, and with it naturally comes ‘indigenous’ viewpoints and con-
cerns that now part ground with the Western fever decade of the 1980 and
that—with continued US efforts at ‘containing’ China, wars in the Middle
East, and so on—also include anti-American or anti-imperialist views. The
‘blue’ or foreign luster of the He Shang days is gone. There is also simply
less need, from the Chinese side, for scholar-to-scholar cooperation and
for imitating Western models of scholarship. China can claim its own style
and type of academy, warts and all, just as foreign universities, which do
set up shop in the mainland, have to follow ‘indigenous’ rules. This cer-
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61
tainly entails some censorship or boundaries, among other problems with
the curious capitalist idea of ‘the global university.’ But it is also about
China being powerful enough, and rich enough, to ‘write back’ against
would-be universalist or missionary-style approaches from the West.
Foreign governments and companies, and now foreign intellectuals, are
now answerable to the Chinese system and its interlocutors. While China
has never quite been powerless, even at its lowest, it is now at the head of
its own, rosewood negotiating table.
The upshot of Mahoney’s powerful diagnostic essay is this: it reveals
the post-1989 conditions of possibility for the new left and other thought
to challenge Sino-orientalism on the one hand, and for liberalism to be
dispensed with, or at least politely ignored on the other hand. The illib-
eral—the anti- or at least non-liberal—genie is out of the bottle and
unlikely to want to go back in on its own volition. For China to become
the same—liberal politically, and intellectually or ‘discursively’—is increas-
ingly less likely, but for very specic reasons: liberalism is not universal to
begin with; the conditions for its triumph in intellectual political culture,
seemingly ‘in the air’ after Mao and through the 1980s, have largely disap-
peared; ‘new left’ conditions have instead arisen, materially and otherwise,
including not just the painfully obvious effects of rampant, unregulated
capitalism and environmental destruction, but also a certain ‘cultural
awakening’ against Occidentalism. Naturally enough for a state and intel-
lectual political culture founded upon socialist principles, that is founded
upon Marxism—howsoever nominally in the current phase—there is as
well a desire to rethink or re-envision Chinese socialism. In a sense that
never disappeared, as the saccharine ‘Marxist humanism’ that ourished
briey in the 1980s’ Western cultural fevers gave way to its critique by the
new left. From the 1990s standpoint, after Deng Xiaoping’s famous
‘Southern tour’ wherein he initiated a second wave of pro-market/capital-
ist reforms after the debacle of Tiananmen, the rapidly developing com-
modication of society, including the corrosion of any special, quasi-sacred
status of intellectuals, independent or otherwise, necessitated a critical
response to the new era.
There is in other words a new global theater. The Chinese new left
project (like all such movements, liberal and otherwise) engages not some
universal zeitgeist and ‘end of history’ (as per the liberal-humanist dis-
course of convergence) but a protracted politics of knowledge in China
and abroad. It cannot be otherwise. In short, what is going on in China
with the new left and its confrontations with liberalism and Party-state
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62
efforts at de-politicization is nothing less than what Stuart Hall argued has
been the fundamental mode of politics since at least the 1980s Thatcher-
Reagan era, and the rise of what we now call neo-liberalism: the hege-
monic struggle over the legitimation or de-legitimation of discourse.33
This includes not only the content of discourse or what gets said (its state-
ments and beliefs) but also certain ‘rules’: who gets to speak and who does
not; in what acceptable forms; what topics, attitudes, valuations, affects
get to count; and so on. This discursive struggle, in other words, is politics
(hegemony) and not a mere supplement to it. In this case the meaning of
the new left means a battle of sorts for China’s past, present, and future at
the level of discourse or knowledge. It therefore behooves us to under-
stand the ‘post-colonial’ and other political implications of the new left
phenomenon in itself at the level of discourse. Taken as a whole, the new
left returns us to, and in part reactivates not Maoism per se (as an insur-
rectionary, guerilla politics) but Maoist or revolutionary, Chinese Marxist
discourse. What this ‘return’ to taking the Chinese revolution seriously
further entails, as a necessary part of this discursive battle, is simultane-
ously a ‘writing back’ on the part of some Chinese intellectuals against
decades of a Cold War, colonial discourse that framed China as lacking
normal, ‘free’ liberal politics.
maoist DisCourse: thePast inthePresent
To better understand new left discourse we need rst to understand Maoist
discourse, or the received inheritance from a past era that then gets modi-
ed and re-articulated after 1989. The ‘thought’ or dominant, governing
discourse of that long era (from the mid-1930s through the late 1970s) is
not typically seen as a discourse in the complex, productive Foucauldian
sense. For the latter, discourse does not stand in an antagonistic relation
to the truth, whereby it distorts or alienates something natural or essential
to ‘normal’ freedom and political life, individuality, and so on. Rather it
constitutes what counts as the truth, and sets limits on as well as enables
what people are able to see and think and do—how they use knowledge
(or knowledge-power).This includes the self-understanding as individual
subjects—how they see themselves and their world, a factor that must be
incorporated into any historical or philosophical anthropology. In short, if
you write from a Foucauldian or structuralist/post-structuralist perspec-
tive, you cannot have Orwell’s 1984 transposed onto Maoist China (‘total-
itarianism’ or brainwashing). That essentially Cold War, liberal-humanist
theory of repression and a ruined autonomous subject is at odds not only
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63
with Foucault but with the complexities of that Chinese history, with the
agency of hundreds of millions of people, and with, for example, the nos-
talgia and fondness so many feel for a long past era. To see the Chinese
Revolution not as an assault upon liberalism and human rights, we need to
put it back into context as a powerfully affective and rational way of think-
ing, a framework and a ‘common sense’ for acting and being-in-the-world.
This existence of rationality is also one of the early, signal achievements of
Wang Shaoguang’s studies of the ultra-left and of the Cultural Revolution
in Wuhan.34 Despite the obvious contradictions of the era, such as the
violence and excessive factionalism despite Mao’s clear proclamations
against these, Wang shows the rational self-interested behavior of the par-
ticipants, not despite but contra Max Weber, because of the charismatic
authority of the chairman. Given the ambiguity—perhaps deliberate, per-
haps stylistic, perhaps unintentional—of his sayings and directives and
quotations, as well as the relative freedom and autonomy of the local as
opposed to the national or party centers, red guards and rebels and activ-
ists could and did act both fervently in belief of revolution and yet accord-
ing to their own interests. The bottom line here for our purposes is that
Maoist discourse (and the era) was—and today is—indeed rational and not
the madness or stupidity that it is often taken to be.
On the other side of Maoist discourse there is not reality or the truth of
an era, but yet more discourse and knowledge-power relations as well as the
realm of the non-discursive. Liberal notions of human rights and the sacro-
sanct individual were simply not in circulation during the highly politicized
and revolutionary context of the recent Chinese past. Hence, it is at best an
anachronism to deploy them to sum up the entire era (Maoism) or even to
apply them cart blanche to contemporary China (which indeed did see a
return to liberal notions from the late 1970s onward). So too the limits and
non-universality of liberal individualism have long been exposed by the
emphases on collective or communal belonging and responsibilities in tradi-
tional Chinese culture (or ‘Confucianism’) and by the collectivist politics of
the long Chinese Revolution (i.e. even before the rise of Mao and the Party).
Perhaps the best general description of the perspective I am driving at
here is to be found at the end of Wang Zheng’s essay on growing up as a
proto-feminist, Maoist youth in the late Cultural Revolution. After dis-
cussing how her own memories are entirely at odds with elite accounts of
victimization (and it must be said that there was a great deal of elite perse-
cution and counter-violence and chaos), Wang characterizes that period as
an attempt:
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64
to situate citizens in new kinds of social relationships, to pull both women
and men out of the web of Confucian kinship obligations and to redirect
their ethical duties from their kin to the party and the nation. Scholars may
call this statist scheme manipulation or domination, but few have noticed
that the enforcement of this scheme disrupted conventional gender norms
and created new discursive spaces that allowed a cohort of young women to
grow up without being always conscious of their gender.35
Rather than have us dismiss the allegedly ‘heavy-handed’ promulgation
and enforcement of gender and other egalitarianisms as an assault on lib-
eralism and individuality, Wang asks us to see the achievement and com-
plexity of such state-feminist schemes. Her chief example here is ‘gender
neutrality,’ or the simple but profound Enlightenment notion that men
and women are not just formally equal in political terms but can do the
same things and have the same type of lives and powers and roles. It is not
about being ‘gender-blind’ but neutral, a subtly but signicantly different
thing that departs, it may be argued, from simplistic liberal rhetorics of
‘blindness’ and individual perceptions. Of course, in the current intellec-
tual political climate a positive or nuanced understanding of the state is
alien indeed. This is the case in liberal intellectual circles within China, as
it is in the aftermath of the ‘French’ post-structuralist theory explosion.
But it is just such an understanding of the state—as something that any
social justice democrat cannot not want—that is at stake in Wang Zheng’s
work as well as within the new left more broadly. At stake too is the under-
standing of the radical heritage. With Wang and others, the radical past
and Maoist discourse become something that is at the very least rational
and positive—positive in some of their effects (e.g. the promulgation of
gender-neutrality) and in the sense of having a certain weight and serious-
ness and reality, as something to be taken seriously and re-examined anew,
not merely ‘debunked’ or dismissed as a nightmare or fake.36
Maoist discourse was more than the writings of Mao and other revolu-
tionaries and the apparatuses (propaganda, educational, governmental,
economic) of power and subject formation. It was a rational-practical
framework that people used to make sense of their lives and the world
around them, in an extreme age of revolution, nationalism, and war, cer-
tainly, but also one of massive, socialist construction of the new China (the
embrace of ‘futurity’) and of new individual lives after the traditional or
feudal order in the inchoate Republican period. As Gao has put it, Maoist
discourse at its peak was the ‘common-sense knowledge and socially
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65
shared values, beliefs, practices, administrative measures, disciplinary tech-
nology, education, and so on’ that ‘provided a framework and standard for
the Chinese to relate to in their thinking and behaviour and to make sense
of their lives.’ It spoke to everyday life, from food and clothing supply to
your meetings with the neighborhood committee, your new jobs in the
elds or factories, your school, your leisure activities, and so on.
Of course Maoist rhetoric about class struggle, making revolution,
serving the people, and so on were involved (what Li Tuo famously called
‘Mao speak’ and that impacted the language considerably). But what we
must emphasize is that Maoism was also a powerfully affective way of
being-in-the-world. Wang Ban, for example, has usefully framed Maoist
discourse as akin to the experience of the sublime. Once one sheds its
conservative Burkean or anti-Jacobin connotations, the word ‘sublime’
can replace ‘totalitarianism’ as a less insulting and more ambiguous notion
that nonetheless captures the collective and/or transcendent experience
of, say, attending a mass rally or carrying out a massive irrigation project.
The T-word, if you will, is at this point the hoariest of Cold War terms for
assaulting political cultures of belief in Maoist or contemporary China and
denying agency, rationality, and basic dignity to the millions of ‘victim-
ized’ citizens of the PRC.It speaks to an essentially liberal notion of power
as being solely repressive and negative, never productive and diffuse and
inciting. To see power as akin to the sublime, or, more generally, to take
Maoist discourse, the revolution, and their weight in the world seriously,
is precisely our challenge today when we look back on that relatively brief
(by Chinese standards) but crucial period. This is what Alain Badiou does
when he characterizes the twentieth century as being in part determined
by passion of and for the real.37 Incorporating this insightful, contextual
point from Badiou helps us to understand the Mao period as more than
collectivist, seless, and utopian. Badiou indexes a conviction, palpable in
the PRC and even residually so today, that it is possible to intervene and
change history and society (reality). This idea was part of the ruling dis-
course or regime of truth, just as much as the emphasis on ‘two-line strug-
gle’ and the dyadic form of politics: friends and enemies, revolution and
revisionism, feudalism and the future, communism and capitalism, radicals
and capitalist roaders, and so on. Dyadic and intense, dangerous but incit-
ing and meaningful, Maoist discourse positions commitment politics and
revolution as a whole way of life and a whole way of struggle. If Marx,
Lenin, Mao, and—it must be admitted—Carl Schmitt were correct about
the denition or essence of politics (dyadic, reductive, antagonistic) as well
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66
as the realities of class (excluding Schmitt here of course), then Maoist,
revolutionary China was the most political and the most Marxist space on
earth. (This can be for better and for worse.) To describe all of this as
totalitarian is to de-politicize it and to ignore the self-understanding of the
actual people involved. From this theoretical standpoint, then, the Chinese
revolution under Mao has a certain positivity and seriousness. How else
can one explain the mass mobilizations and legitimacy of the new regime
in China (notwithstanding the setbacks and violence)?
It is this legitimacy and positivity to the era, embedded in and produced
by Maoist discourse, that also helps explain the new left and old left as well
as other voices and intellectuals in China today that—against the wishes of
virtually every foreign expert and ‘progressive’ Western analogue—seek to
redeem or reactivate the Chinese revolution not as the PRC nightmare or
problem but as its fundamental social reality—or as what Louis Althusser
referred to as a problematic. (Not the only one, but an inescapable one.)
The long, socialist or radical (as opposed to merely modern or bourgeois-
democratic) revolution is the discursive and institutional ‘thing’ that must
be thought through and dealt with practically as much as intellectually.
The revolution exerts pressures and sets limits upon what can be done.
My understanding of discourse—and of politics, the state, and so
on—that I am presentingherestands in contrast with recent work, other-
wise very welcome, that describes Maoist discourse in its heyday. While
this latterwork does turn to ‘theoretical’ diction like discourse and ‘power,’
its actual method is one of debunking and exposing manipulation and
domination. The ‘real reality’ beneath such things as mobilization cam-
paigns, speaking bitterness, criticism and self-criticism sessions, the pro-
duction of sublime, ‘transcendent’ experiences, and so on is one of terror
and violations of individual freedom. Which—again—categorically misses
the point from Foucault et al., that there is no non-discursive or ‘real’
space beneath the discourse and its actualizations or practices, just as it
also violates or elides Mao-era subject’s own self-understandings. The ear-
lier work of Tony Saich and David Apter, Revolutionar y Discourse in Mao’s
Republic, was the rst of such studies and remains the only book-length
treatment.38 There the thick descriptions and interviews with former
Yan’an participants (of course, done many years after the actual events) are
undercut by the liberal notion of power, that is by a top-down model or
what Foucault famously called the repressive hypothesis. Ironically the
authors cite Foucault too, but the Nietzchean epistemological challenge
he lays down—that there are only ‘regimes of truth’ and discourse not
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67
Truth, no ‘outside’ of knowledge-power—is elided. That is, discourse
here still amounts to manipulation of what should be an autonomous
subject/individual and to fairly direct, top-down control. In this study, as
well as in a more recent article by Yu Liu that dabbles in the projected
psyches of the 1930s, the point of detailing Maoist discourse is to all the
better condemn and other it as brainwashing and totalitarian, that is, as
psychologically distorting and controlling; this is still orientalism in the
form of ‘social science.’39 The Cold War notion of totalitarianism, as poor
as that concept was, remains un-interrogated.40 In the end everything is
yoked back to that liberal notion of power, thought-control, and individ-
ual freedom being violated (the utter lack of freedom from or negative
liberty). It is, I would argue, precisely this notion of power that is being
challenged by the rise of the Chinese new left, broadly dened. On the
contrary this ‘movement’ sees not only the single Party-state form and its
radical history as legitimate and complex but also power likewise, as pro-
ductive and not merely repressive.
maoist DisCourse: aFterlives anDre-artiCulation
inChongqing, nanjieCun, anDtheFamine Debates
Revolutionary discourse still lives on in fragmented or partial ways and
forms a reservoir of potential meanings, values, rhetoric, and symbols of
current Chinese political cultures. This can be readily seen in various pro-
tests in China, be they economic or otherwise—the Maoist iconography,
the slogans, arguably the class-consciousness, and demand for social justice
if not equality. Much of this was present in 1989, alongside more ‘liberal’
denunciations of the Cultural Revolution, calls for ‘democracy’ (vaguely
dened but essentially proceduralist), and even the famous/infamous
defacing of the Mao portrait in the Square. Since then it is the Maoist red
signiers that live on to a greater degree, particularly in labor or livelihood
protests, as well as in the online world and other writings or voices from
what one recent text refers to as China’s new Maoists.41 But there is more
to the afterlife of Maoism, and hence Maoist discourse, than this.
Take for example the scandalous yet ongoing ‘Chongqing experiment,’
also known as the Chongqing Model, which has apparently weathered the
rise and fall of the now disgraced leader Bo Xilai. Chongqing is a province-
like municipality in Sichuan, with a population of 30 million, of which 18
million are rural; as one of four such ‘cities,’ it has a certain national
importance akin to Beijing and Shanghai. What happens there matters in
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68
terms of national planning and governance strategies, as it may serve as a
model or rough guide for other parts of the country and looming national
crises. Even before the global media event that was Bo’s fall, involving a
disloyal deputy eeing to the US embassy (only to be turned away), the
murder and botched cover-up of a British businessman by Bo’s wife Gu
Kailai, and Bo’s later televised trial for corruption, he was already a famous,
celebrity-like ofcial in China. He clearly stood out as charismatic, in a CP
culture of business suit merito-technocratic atness. Yet Bo was deeply
unpopular among foreign China Watchers as well as liberals inside the
PRC because of his putative Maoism. For some reason his detractors
seemed particularly xated on his ‘Red Songs’ campaigns, which amounted
to organized, public music and dance gatherings for the older generations
and whomever else wished to attend. This was also part of a larger ‘propa-
ganda’ campaign drawing on red rhetoric and iconography from the Mao
era. Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, was a part of Mao’s generation, though he was
‘persecuted’ during the Cultural Revolution. The latter was less about
class struggle than signifying the revolution (the actual one, not Bo’s
own), serving and joining the people, the Party, the revolution, the
nation/imagined community, and so on. This might seem trivial: who
cares what music people sing and dance to? Isn’t ‘Mao speak’ still a real
part of vernacular Chinese? But ideology and culture, or culture as ideol-
ogy, is a hallmark of Chinese political culture as much as Maoist discourse,
at least on the left and more traditional sides of it.
Thus, this bit of culturalist ‘Maoism’ rankled liberals and the elite, as
must have Bo’s charismatic authority and ability to mobilize affect. To be
sure Bo’s ‘Striking Black’ campaign against corruption and white collar
crime, some of this involving allegedly extra judicial and other heavy-
handed means, also won him no friends in the foreign media and liberal
elite circles, not to mention among the wealthy. (Since his own imprison-
ment via a show trial, on charges unrelated to this, some of the conscated
‘black’ money has been returned though no one has been freed from
prison or forced labor.42) Bo may or may not have been a sincere Maoist
(whatever this means after Mao), but there is little doubt that his ‘Striking
Black’ and his populism make him an illiberal, as does his ‘statist’ and
populist economics. This is why, for example, liberal human rights lawyers
and middlebrow venues like The Atlantic magazine found him so danger-
ous, even celebrating his own, pre-ordained show trial months after his fall
(irony, but not hypocrisy, apparently being in short supply).43
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69
If all this seems supercially Maoist (which it might if you understand
that to be only insurrection) or supercial whining, the real substance to
Chongqing—vis-à-vis leftist and social democratic concerns—has been its
alternative urban, and rural-to-urban development schemes, as well as its
attempts to redress the bad relationship between the Party and its people,
that is between ofcials and the working class, laobaixing, or ordinary
masses. Part of the latter involved sending (forcing?) cadres to work, live,
and even eat with peasants, a la the Mao years. Bo also moderated a tele-
vised meeting between striking taxi drivers and their company. The culture
front also included huge investments in public media, removing advertis-
ing from the Chongqing satellite network. Still more substantially in liveli-
hood terms, the experiment involved massive expenditures on public
housing and—crucially—re-registering peasants and migrant workers as
urban residents. The latter was an attempt to relieve the de facto caste
system in China whereby urban residents get far better benets than rural
ones (schooling, health access, etc.). The later problem of household reg-
istration (the hukou problem) and caste is an unfortunate, complicated
hangover from the Mao era, where there were not the massive amounts of
exploited migrant workers or a caste-like, Third World process of urban-
ization. Resident status would help this in an obvious way, but so would
using that ‘freed’ land for farming or industrial development, as opposed
to Hong Kong/Guangdong style free-market speculation (which is what
seems to have resulted in the Wukan Uprising).
The Chongqing model has by now generated a fairly extensive body of
research and reporting, but the basic economic strategy is in a sense not
new—using (selling and buying) land to produce growth, as in Wukan and
many other places where agriculture is in decline compared to the decades,
not to mention centuries beforehand. (China is in fact dependent on the
global food market now, outside of grain.) This may well not be sustainable
in the long run, given land scarcity, if it were to be relied upon as a sole
means of growth. But Chongqing quite consciously ran large decits
through infrastructure spending, investing in rural industries, focusing on
domestic consumption rather than export (something the entire country is
trying to do now), and so on. FDI was still encouraged, and corporate
income taxes were cut. Decits notwithstanding, Chongqing posted tre-
mendous growth rates and seems to have just assumed that some state
investments would fail but would be worth doing anyway as an experi-
ment, and could later be sold if the Party-state has the will to do so44;
capitalist efciency was to take a backseat to ‘Red GDP’ and what used to
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70
be called ‘market socialism’ or a combination of private and public capital.
But what was and remains remarkable about Chongqing was the pursuit of
what Philip Huang calls ‘equitable development’ in which public benet
and state-owned enterprises still take precedence. Again it is the commit-
ment to equality—relative equality to be sure, rather than the strict Maoist,
zero tolerance of inequality—that stands out here. It stands out in com-
parison to, again, Guangdong or Hong Kong, but resonates with what
used to be called social democracy. It is illiberal, to be sure, and calls out
for analysis and reection, even appreciation, for this very reason. If Bo and
his ilk abused power and even proted from it nancially, for which he was
convicted of, then this certainly deserves condemnation and even impris-
onment within China’s own terms. But his ‘illiberal’ grass roots authori-
tarianism, ala Mao’s, may also be justied by its ends. It also stands in
favorable contrast to the elite as well as the ecumenical, non- denominational,
‘de-politicized’ authoritarianism of normal, everyday Party-state business
which has only graspingly tried to tackle the problems of inequality and
‘caste.’ Tellingly, many of Bo’s social and economic programs—popular—
have remained in place or have been developed.45 The Red culture front
(the songs and the rhetoric), however, seems by all accounts to have been
dropped, again showing the Party-state’s appreciation, if not fear, of the
power of ideas and culture-as-ideology. Much remains to be seen. But for
our purposes here what stands out is the re- articulation of Maoist dis-
course, how it lives on despite liberal and foreign media/expertise’s antipa-
thy, how it produces political and ideological solutions and innovations. It
is no accident that populist and social democratic politics and programs
and Party-efforts necessarily take a Maoist, illiberal form.
The rationality and positivity of the revolutionary past, a loosely Maoist
way of seeing what modern China is, is a fundamental theme of various
new left writings. From this standpoint, the radical past, its massive social
experiments and mobilizations, its protracted struggles for revolution and
progress in equality—which equally indisputably ended tragically or in
failure (the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution)—can appear quite dif-
ferent than the madness or bizarre oriental aberrations so often assumed
today. We noted earlier Wang Hui’s views on the socialist past and the
Maoist ‘anti-modern modernity’ (which he extends back in time much
further). That latter phrase claries when we recall some of Maoism’s gov-
erning dualities: Chinese yet Marxist; communist yet rural; anti-capitalist
yet developmental; anti-Russian (after 1957) yet equally anti-American;
Sinied yet proletarian and laobaixing; vanguardist yet populist; liberatory
yet anti-individualist, statist yet anti-statist (the ‘right to rebel’).
D. F. VUKOVICH

71
A large part of that Maoist legacy is of course the critique of markets
and capitalism, and the development of cooperative economics and
national self-reliance, in part through state-owned enterprises. The politi-
cal economist Han Deqiang often signies this past in his critiques of
globalization and neo-liberalism within China and the dominance of neo-
classical theory within the eld. A co-founder of the left-wing bookstore
and salon Utopia, and perhaps as much an ‘old’ as a ‘new’ leftist, Han rst
came to prominence internationally as a bold critic of China’s entry to the
World Trade Organization (WTO), against globalization from the stand-
point of left nationalism and equality, and speaking to the precarious status
of new Chinese industries on the one hand and growing inequality and
environmental hazards on the other. An economics professor in Beijing,
Han has also helped launch a small organic farm in Hebei (‘Righteous
Path Farm’), run along Maoist communal lines. This includes communal
dining (on their own grown food), self-study sessions, and ‘practicing
Mao Zedong Thought’ less in the directly political sense than in the form
of serving one another (‘the people’) and exercising the freedom to drop
out of the consumer/careerist rat race of the dominant culture and soci-
ety.46 While derided by liberals for being an ardent nationalist (which also
ts Chinese political discourse in general since the 1920s at least), the
more notable characteristic of Han is his work as a socialist economist, a
la Hu Angang and others, arguing for the successes and necessities of the
planned economy and public/state ownership.47Technical and ideological
debates over state-owned enterprises are at the heart of the new left versus
liberal camps, and indeed at the heart of the Party-state. Since multi-party
democracy itself is off the table—and not especially desired—this state-
owned versus private capital debate is arguably the most important terrain
of all political debates in China, since it directly addresses peoples’ liveli-
hood and better as opposed to worse jobs for workers.48 Similarly, follow-
ing the SARS crisis, Wang Shaoguang argued for China’s past, salutary
legacy of people’s health (one of the Mao era’s most-noted achievements)
to be returned to. He argues further that this is already under way in a
national, on-the-ground countermovement away from 30 years of an alleg-
edly self-regulating free market in medical care.49 This too is a Marxian/
Polanyian argument that is of a piece with past leftist discourse in China
against liberal/neo-classical economics and the myth of the self-regulating
market. As Wang argues, the aim of the state in this and other matters
is—or should be—a return to the ethics or mode of the planned economy.
Economics after all is supposed to be submitted to a ‘moral economy,’
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72
which is to say to a national or collective interest and not merely individual
interest (as in liberalism).50
A still stronger economic example of returns to Maoist economic prac-
tice and discourse can be found in the dogged existence and success of
Nanjiecun village in southern Henan. Nanjiecun is famous/infamous for
being the most ‘Maoist,’ or more accurately, neo-Maoist collective and
space left in China, with a strong ‘iron rice bowl’ of welfare benets, free
housing, free food coupons, and so on in addition to use of avowedly
revolutionary and ‘serve-the-people’ slogans, statues, and public culture.
Its center square contains large paintings not just of Marx, Engels, and
Mao but even of Lenin and Stalin. Although it does employ migrant work-
ers, the wage and benet differences between them and regular worker-
residents are small, and quite unheard of for the other millions of migrant
(and regular) laborers in the country. There are about twice as many
migrant workers as resident workers. The migrant workers are eligible to
apply to become ofcial residents and to change their hukou/residency
permit, but this can take years. (On a research trip in 2007 I was told it
took ve.) It is easy to tear down or to romanticize Nanjiecun, but its
signicance will always lie in the middle. True, its dominant Maoist mes-
sage in propaganda and so forth is ‘serve the people.’ This may be insuf-
ciently radical for some observers, just as most mainstream reporting of
the place is decidedly condescending and mocking. But Nanjiecun the
place is composed of 12,000 or more ‘actually existing’ residents who are
much better off than most of their working-class compatriots across the
country.
The village re-collectivized of its own accord after it was forced to dis-
band in the mid-1980s, and by the mid-1990s it became an object of
national attention, including an academic study published by Cui Zhiyuan,
Deng Yingtao, and Miao Zhuang.51 Cui is perhaps best known for his
initial theorizations of ‘liberal socialism’—Roberto Mangabeira Unger
was a formative inuence—and his call for a second, socialistic ‘liberation
of thought’ following the high tide of free-market liberalism and
Occidentalism in the 1980s. The book on Nanjiecun is less about political
theory than hardcore economic and empirical analysis. Nanjiecun had
resisted privatization under Deng, and it took a great deal of struggle for
it to reform as a cooperative. Clearly the idea is that if a communal co-op
were successful in one place, perhaps it could be replicated elsewhere,
albeit in new contexts. This has not happened, though there are other
cooperatives in China, ranging from for-prot to more left/communitar-
D. F. VUKOVICH

73
ian to the non-ideological. A history of the village is offered, including its
propaganda efforts and ideological struggles aimed at ‘destroying the pri-
vate and constructing the public’—a concerted effort launched against the
reform dogma from above but also directly in line with Cultural
Revolution-era politics and ideology. ‘Fight self, combat revisionism’
would be a comparable older slogan.
But the heart of the study is an analysis of how Nanjiecun has overcome
one of the great obstacles of a cooperative economy—the free-rider prob-
lem, or how in a collective economy ‘loafers’ get the same benets as hard
workers. This is also the famous incentive problem supposedly endemic to
state socialism (as opposed to the prot motive/greed/self-interest prob-
lem of a liberal market system). Not surprisingly, the antidote turns out to
be the cultivation of non-prot/immaterial incentives: instilling an ethic
of teamwork, common will, and cooperation (including team ‘punish-
ments’ for failing to complete a task). Collective success also depends on
having very capable team leaders and cadres within the village who can
create and sustain the appropriate culture and adapt and innovate it while
also working with capital and FDI from Japan and elsewhere.
Of course this FDI already suggests just how much Nanjiecun departs
from the Maoism of the Mao era itself; it is still a for-prot collective com-
peting within a capitalist world—if not national—system, albeit one with
far, far better distribution and benets within; it actually relies in part on
migrant workers who do not have the same legal, residential status as reg-
ular villagers (though they may become ofcial residents eventually); it has
also relied heavily on loans for decades, opening Nanjiecun up to the
charge of being faked and propped up from above (though it keeps repay-
ing and getting more, it must be said); it relies as well on ‘Red tourism’ for
people who want a glimpse of Maoism in practice or patriotic education;
and while there are indeed political education classes offered at night
(including Marxist political economy), Nanjiecun is not engaged in class
struggle actions within the village, let alone across China. None of this
makes Nanjiecun fake, as some of its critics allege, but it does make it a
contemporary phenomenon of this China.52
What the collective must deal with, nonetheless, are a lot of overlapping
problems from the collective era: work incentives and productivity as well
as leadership and culture problems that Maoism was always and appropri-
ately obsessed with. Indeed, it is the lack of such leadership, and the lack
of continuity with and experience of Mao-era production within the party
and populace, that makes the Nanjiecun experiment so difcult to repro-
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74
duce across China. Students of Maoism will recognize these problems of
incentive and leadership and can see them discussed in numerous texts
from the Mao years, such as the famous ‘Shanghai textbook’ dating from
the late Cultural Revolution, originally entitled Fundamentals of Political
Economy.53 What should interest us here beyond Nanjiecun itselfis pre-
cisely this continuitywith the past at the level of knowledge production,
this serious concernfor at least the idea of a socialist, egalitarian, state-
based, or planned economy with (or without)Maoist characteristicssuch
as work points, free supply of necessities, moral-political education (‘pro-
paganda’), and so on. China is clearly one of the few places on earth that
has such debates over state ownership, and even if that discussion may
seem wonkish and technical there isare clear issues of social justice and
sovereignty in play. Whatever the ‘China Dream’ is now for Xi Jinping
etal.—and from outside it seems likeanother, modern, consumer society
dream, plus national pride—there is no question that there was and to an
extent still is a dream of equality and even socialistic economy among at
least some intellectuals and workers.54 Nanjiecun’s signicance—in addi-
tion to its material existence and good working conditions—lies here,
rather than it being something that, in its specics of organization and
production, could easily be expanded to other parts of rural China.
The tone of Cui etal.’s Nanjie Village of course departs from the late
Cultural Revolution Shanghai textbook: the Maoist text being radically
impassioned and polemical about capitalist roaders and new eras of human
history, fully a part of classical Maoist, friend/enemy discourse; the latter
volume by Cui etal. was more properly academic. But these economic
problems (incentives, free riders) are classic, perennial problems of theo-
retical and real-world, empirical analysis in China. The rationality and—
indeed—the actual existence of a planned, cooperative economy, or a
debate about a greater or lesser role for one, is on the table as a matter of
debate and investigation. The recent 19th National Party Congress staged
this clearly, if indirectly, enough by Xi Jinping’s call for enhancing and
developing both state and private sectors. It can all be, and in these cases
is, taken seriously. Nanjiecun is thus not a throwback or nostalgic hang-
over, but an actually existing part of China. Impure, not utopia but a real
place, yet fair and just compared to so much else. The older discourse of
cooperative agriculture, people’s welfare and health, the selshness of the
private, and so on are still parts of the political culture. Residual perhaps,
but miraculously still present. Even the red tourism of Nanjiecun, of sec-
ondary importance to its agricultural businesses (chiey food products
D. F. VUKOVICH

75
and beer), is worth taking seriously as a mode not just of economy but as
a form of political education, of at least keeping the memory of revolution
alive and the ideals it tried to embody.
Maoist economic strategy, as well as its historical record prior to the last
30 years of reform, is thus seen very differently within the PRC and among
the new left in particular (as in the work of Hu Angang noted earlier).
Their generally positive perspective is increasingly shared by a range of
economics scholars outside of China, from Chris Bramall’s work on Maoist
planning to more conservative/conventional economics scholars like Y.Y.
Kueh.55 This counters the dominant, highly negative, Western and liberal
knowledge of the Chinese economy during the Mao period.56 Far from
being a failure, and with due allowance for a more mixed, poorer rural
record, the Mao-era economy was remarkably successful in industrial,
developmental, and ‘human capital’ terms; much of the post-Mao ‘mira-
cle’ is unthinkable without it, a point made by Cui Zhiyuan among many
others within the left movement and without. It advanced remarkably in
comparison to India, for example, as Amartya Sen has always argued, and
it did so in egalitarian terms. China had the lowest Gini coefcient (i.e. the
lowest inequality) on earth in 1976, and the countryside was nally expe-
riencing faster industrialization and better growth at that point. It was still
poor overall, and unevenly developed, but that equality also made it rich
in a profound way. It is no wonder, then, that Maoist economics remains
an intellectually and discursively viable ‘thing’ in China, even if—or rather
because of—its glaringly unequal and accumulation-intensive mode of
development now.
What explains this afterlife are not only certain ‘actually existing’ facts
and events from the socialist past, open to re-interpretation and contesta-
tion, but again the afterlives of the revolutionary discourse itself. Another
example of how it enables (‘produces’) one to see and frame certain prob-
lems differently is the current debate around the famine demography
attached to the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961.57 Sun Jingxian,
a retired mathematics professor but active scholar, revisits the by-now
common understanding of 30 million famine victims by re-examining key,
ofcial statistical surveys from 1983 (retrospective population estimates)
as well as household registration data prior to and during the Leap and its
aftermath. His argument is highly empirical and marked by equations that
we need not rehearse here. The gist for our purposes is that the household
registration or early hukou system offers, in Sun’s analysis, a more reliable
and complete set of data for population totals than much later censuses
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76
and statistical yearbooks.58 The data show three striking anomalies before,
during, and after the Leap period, including a large increase prior to the
Leap, a large decrease during that re-collectivization, and a large increase
again afterward (the years 1956–1959, 1960–1964, and 1968–1979).
What explains these anomalies, according to Sun, is internal migration
within China (for labor mobilization and rural industrialization), from
country to city, and later, after the Leap, back from city to country. Many
(millions) of these rural migrants simply registered in both places and kept
these registrations even after they moved back (or even if they did not
move back). This in effect produces more people in later records and cen-
suses. There was a huge, but false, increase in population before the actual
famine hit in 1960 and 1961. As Sun argues, the registration or hukou
system was in its infancy then, especially in the villages where they were
not needed as much anyway; as is not hard to believe, the new registration
system was messy. (And still must be.) What this means, according to Sun,
is double-counting people, or in other words people being counted as
missing and therefore prematurely, suddenly dead from famine in later
retrospective censuses and projected population totals.
It is these movements and statistics that plausibly explain why so many
people went missing during the Leap campaign of labor mobilizations, yet
also suddenly reappeared—that is dramatic overall population increases
again—in the immediate years afterward. (They were not dead from famine
but simply elsewhere.) Similarly, researchers looking into China’s 30 mil-
lion ‘missing girls’ under the Dengist one-child policy—long thought to be
missing due to infanticide or selective abortions of girls—have perhaps
found them by simply revealing that local ofcials, in cooperation with fel-
low villagers, simply did not register the girls’ births. While technically ille-
gal or ‘corrupt,’ this is also a very likely common practice, the researchers
argue.59 This is known colloquially as a ‘black hukou’ (as in ‘black market’
or ‘black taxi’) system, and itshould surprise noone that it exists and has
likely always existed to some degree since 1949 (or since 1979 specically
for so-called ‘black children’ under the now-defunct One Child Policy).
Sun still clearly claims that there was a sizable famine resulting in about
four million deaths due to hunger and famine-induced illnesses. This is no
small number—others have used Sun’s work to argue more along the lines
of 17 million. But it gives the lie to charges in The NewYork Times and
elsewhere that Sun etal. are denying there was a famine at all.60 It does just
as obviously depart from other gures of anywhere from 10 to over 30
million, let alone the gure of 45 or more proffered by journalists for not
D. F. VUKOVICH

77
very good reasons. My point here is not that Sun is denitive, and he him-
self claims that ‘this gure [of 4 million] cannot be treated as exact and
conclusive, but is nonetheless a logical conclusion from examining anoma-
lous population change data for the three periods.’61 His argument is plau-
sible, and certainly original; whether it is ultimately persuasive or not there
is no question that it is fully academic and professional social science and
hardly a supercial hack job carried out under orders from Beijing.62 It also
assumes the basic rationality of the Leap and of collective agriculture, as
well as the socialist and humane political and economic intent of the Leap
and period as a whole. This last—along with his and others’ work on rural
China during and after collectivization—is what makes it part of the new
left movement. If the Leap were simply a disaster and an orgy of state vio-
lence and sadism, and an instance of great idiocy that insults the economic
truth as prophesied by Friedrich von Hayek (collectivism as the road to
serfdom), then work such as Sun’s would be pointless at best. Rather what
is at stake is the historical record of China’s socialism and of the PRC’s
foundations. The Leap is indeed the biggest failure of the Mao era and a
matter of historical import, so the knowledge about it matters to China—
how many died, and why, what went wrong, and even what worked even-
tually when communes and rural industrialization did take off in the later
1960s, 1970s, and beyond. Clearly the fewer that died the better the case
for collective or socialist agriculture, and vice versa. This may seem callous,
in either direction, but it can also be seen as realpolitik at the level of
knowledge. We also have to attend to the contemporary context and
debates that form the subtext of such work on the rural Mao period, that
is that lie beneath all of this hardcore social science and claims about the
real history under Mao: once again the conict between liberalism and the
left in China today, which is also to say over the role and place of private
property and the state and the value of capitalism and the prot motive.63
Within not Maoist but Sinological-orientalist discourse this context and
debate is either ignored or just speaks of such leftists as dupes and agents of
the state. Two cases in point, one from an Australian demographic historian
and one from a French literary critic, both of whom reduce Sun’s work to
state propaganda (and him to ‘stooge’ or ‘dupe’ status) since it allegedly
resonates with ofcial, President Xi Jinping’s, proclamations to pursue a
‘Mass Line Education and Practice Movement’ in the Party- state’s ideologi-
cal work (dating from a 2013 convention). Of course such proclamations are
common in China—as in the ‘Document 9’ about liberalism mentioned in
our introductory chapter. But Sun has been researching rural China and the
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78
Leap since well before this, as have many others such as Yong Songlin.
Powerful critiques of the 30-million gure were made by Utsa Patnaik in the
1990s. If Sun etal. disagree and depart from, say, orientalist screeds about
mass death or from journalistic ‘exposes’ based in allegedly secret archival
documents that no one can see, are these by denition signs of state co-
optation? Or is it the other way around, that it is the journalists and academ-
ics who are in cahoots with right-wing ideology and discourse, more
concerned with scoring points against ‘the regime’ than with having some-
thing substantialor accurateto say? The latter claim is at least as valid as the
former. Butthe real point here is the struggle over discourse or knowledge-
power,and theincommensurability ofsome political discourses, like Maoism
or communism versusliberalism. This is all cerainly a political and discursive
event. But not in the simpleliberal way of pitting ‘truth-telling’ against ‘the
state,’ and in a way that elidesgeographicor geo-political difference.Anthony
Garnaut’s reaction to Sun—and his clear, seemingly personal preference for
the journalist Yang Jisheng’s work—is especially telling in this regard. He
refers to Yang having been attacked repeatedly by Sun and others at a confer-
ence in Wuhan. The present author also participated, so will speak to it.
Some exchanges were heated, as is often the case at important conferences
and workshops, but there were—in my own view and those other attendees
I spoke with—no ‘attacks’ in the sense of ad hominem criticisms, denounce-
ments, overt condescension or hectoring, or even shouting. Yang’s and Sun’s
presentations were clear and reasonable, and if the exchanges in discussion
were direct and sharp and apparently deeply felt, the stakes of the debate
warrant this. One can see far worse in American academe over far less.
In fact the only real heat came from audience members responding
harshly to Garnaut’s ad hominem depiction of Sun as a complicit stooge of
the Party-state—something he was free to say in his paper, but also free to
be criticized for, Chinese academia being relatively liberated territory these
days. As one participant observed, what if ‘we’ accused you of working for
M1 or the CIA? At both this Wuhan conference and an earlier incarnation
the previous year (on rural development since 1949), Yang Jisheng as well
as other liberal critics such as the liberal historian Cao Shuji were invited and
in dialogue with those from more left or ‘statist’ orientations. Which is to
say there was an actual conference composed of those against collective agri-
culture and state planning or control of the economy, and those for these
things including a split along these lines of how one evaluates the Maoist/
socialist period in general. One might note an actual intellectual event in the
making in such lineups, with actual and important, even emotional and
intense, differences being staged. If there is a scandal here, it is not that there
D. F. VUKOVICH

79
is revisionist scholarship on the famine and collective agriculture and histori-
cal Maoism. It is that that the existence of such so-called statist views, and
the existence of a Maoist or Chinese leftist intellectual discourse—which is
what new and old left knowledges and statements amount to—would be so
easily dismissed by foreign Sinologists eager to combat signs of ‘statism’ and
Chinese intellectuals’ complicity (their lack of independence), like Cold War
Don Quixotes. Garnaut accuses Sun and others as being supported by the
state (the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and doing the bidding of President
Xi. He counterposes this with the retired journalist Yang Jisheng—pre-
sented as a simple hero speaking Truth to Power—whose mass market book
on the famine (Mubei aka Tombstone), full of anecdotes of death and banned
in China (yet widely known), in some ways triggered the recent famine
debates. Yang’s book is important enough and not fake, pointing to actual
and horrifying instances of famine and hardship. Of these there is no doubt,
for Sun as for the present author. But it is plainly not scholarly (nor does it
claim to be), nor capable of arguing strongly for a death total, or explaining
the causes of the famine. Yang guesses it is about 36 million based on his
conversations with academics in China (in particular Cao Shuji). It must also
be said that the former Xinhua news agency reporter is a much beloved
gure of the Western media in China, has won right- wing book prizes for
his one and only publication (e.g. the Hayek prize in 2013), and ts t he
prole of an anti-communist dissident. (As imagined from outside China at
any rate.) While he is certainly anti-Mao and pro- Hayek by his own admis-
sion, he’s not as vulnerable or as impoverished as one might assume but an
established and respected individual, far from a beleaguered dissident. Yang
is in fact better known, especially abroad, than Sun or the leftist/revisionist
scholars. Yet the latter are the senior scholars and in fact have personal
expe-rience with growing up in rural China. They spoke in Wuhan, for
example, about how there is certainly a better, richer diet in general since
the Mao era (and autarky). But for Garnaut or one liberal anti-communist
literary critic, the mathematician Sun can only be a stooge, and one of the
organizers (Cao Tianyu, professor of philosophy in the USA) can for
Garnaut only be a ‘Marxist lay preacher.’
My point here, other than pointing to typically liberal ways of seeing
Chinese politics, history, and intellectuals, is to show what it means to be
inside or outside Maoist/revolutionary discourse. Garnaut or those who
repeat his account verbatim (a la Sebastian Veg) simply speak as political
liberals opposed to the—for them, as foreign nationals—illegitimate Party-
state. Perhaps they are also opposed to collective agriculture and ‘statism’
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80
on principle, and they are certainly still ghting Mao and communism.
Like Yang Jisheng, they may be adherents of the free market and Friedrich
Von Hayek. They speak up for the Chinese dead without knowing how
many there are(or were), and why. Andwithout being asked to. They are,
in sum, empowered by a certain liberal discourse with ‘Chinese character-
istics,’ as will be discussed in the following chapter. It is rather different for
the actual mainland Chinese intellectuals, especially those on the left or
heterodox. The logic of complicity around the state—the state approves
workshops like these, publishes journals, and funds professors—is also
rather striking coming from similarly state-funded university-based intel-
lectuals in France (via allegedly post-colonial Hong Kong) and Australia.
But for the new left, there is no contradiction here between being state-
funded (if one is in fact lucky enough to get such jobs or funds) and being
an intellectual. If that is illiberal in the current conjuncture, the problem
must be with the liberal discourse which cannot abide the other side’s
speech. This incident also tells us about the afterlife of the Maoist dis-
course—Sun’s work, for example, is quite dry and ‘scientic’ in form, a far
cry from impassioned political discourse. But to take the Leap and even the
famine seriously, rather than relying on liberal orientalist shibboleths or
very partial scholarship, one has to speak from within it, close to it. Then
you can see even the famine in another way, and go on to still contemplate
a more collective and egalitarian agricultural and national economy.
Or put another way, the discourses produce or help determine the anal-
yses. What is intelligible in one is not necessarily so in the other, which is
the charitable way of describing the reaction to Sun etal. by the liberal
partisans. Sun Jingxian, as much as Wang Hui on Tibet, Han Yuhai on
market slavery, and so on, can only appear as illiberal to them. In this sense
new left discourse is a challenge to their universalist and anti-Maoist poli-
tics and thought. It may not actually be taken up by liberal intellectuals,
least of all outside of China, where there are major obstacles ranging from
Cold War and orientalist discourses signifying anti-communism, a too
strong state, and Maoism-as-despotism, to a lack of translations and—it
must be said—a lack of free speech and mobility (i.e. to speak abroad) for
mainland intellectuals. This is unfortunate since debate, in whatever form,
always animates discourse and moves it along. There is also a concerted
effort, especially under the current CCP system, to suppress or make peo-
ple forget about the political. But at the same time, the ‘illiberal’ revolu-
tionary legacy gives the state not only a certain legitimacy but also a
critique of liberalism and (Western) universality.
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81
And yet the new left in the broad sense I am presenting it here has
already happened and already occupies institutional and discursive space;
it is unlikely to go or be repressed away, and in any case it and other het-
erodox yet grounded Chinese knowledge production are bound to
develop in the future.
Put another way, there are two sides, at least in ‘illiberal’ China. The
‘outside’ of liberal scholarship or intellectual politics in the USA, for
example, is if anything smaller. Conservatism is always a bad t for the
academy, at least in its overt form. But also more marginal in the lands of
freedom and individuality are the left-wing or Marxian variants of illiberal-
ism, that is actual and radical critics of liberalism speaking from a clearly, if
general, socialist or communistic standpoint.
It is too soon to tell if such a reactivation of leftist critique and scholar-
ship in China will change the uneven production and distribution of
knowledge in the world, or even in China. The left is still marginalized
much more than it should be in a People’s Republic, and in this sense it is
still Deng’s China. But it is already clear that China is producing and send-
ing abroad more than commodities and wealthy migrants and students. A
new yet nonetheless ‘red connected’ left discourse and an older, persistent
refusal of liberalism are also at work in the world.
notes
1. While I (2012) and many others have written at length on 1989, the best
place to begin is with some of the collections of documents from the era,
for example: Mok Chiu Yu et al., Eds., Voices from Tiananmen Square
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990); Suzanne Ogden etal., Eds., China’s
Search for Democracy: The Student and Mass Movement of 1989 (New York:
M.E. Sharpe, 1992); and Lu, Ping etal., Eds., A Moment of Truth: Workers’
Participation in China’s 1989 Democracy Movement, and the Emergence of
Independent Unions. (Trans. Gus Mok etal. Hong Kong: HK Trade Union
Education Centre, 1990). By ‘loyal’ here I mean that the sentiments of the
student demands were largely patriotic and a demand for inclusion of—it
must be said—their own class fraction. By unnecessary I simply mean that
the students and most protesters—even the striking workers who repre-
sented the greatest potential power and ‘threat’ were fully in retreat by
June 3. The use of violence—death—was simply terror; even in its own
terms of stability and so forth, the state could well have resolved the ‘crisis’
by means other than that, and the later neo-liberalization of the economy.
But it was Deng’s Party at this point, and his politics.
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2. Three notable studies of the 1980s era and culture fever remain: Jing Wang,
High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), Zhang Xudong, Chinese
Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and
the New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), and Kalpana Mishra,
From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Ofcial Ideology in
Deng’s China (New York: Routledge, 1998). See also Chen Xiaomei,
Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-discourse in Post-Mao China. 2nd ed.
Foreword by Dai Jinhua. (New York: Rowman and Littleeld, 2002).
3. This expectation of the PRC eventually becoming the same as the rest of
the world—or that it should at any rate—is the essence of the ‘new’ if quint-
essentially ‘modernizationist’ orientalism, as I have argued elsewhere.
(This is also a missionary logic.) But this assumption and discourse has also
been noted by others of a decidedly different political and intellectual pur-
view than my own, often to the tune of an argument for a harder line
against China since it obstinately refuses to change. See, for instance, the
journalist James Mann’s The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain
Away Chinese Repression (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
4. See as well on the new left—and indeed the entire landscape of intellectual
politics—He Li’s excellent Political Thought and China’s Transformation:
Ideas Shaping Reform in Post-Mao China (New York: Palgrave, 2015). See
also Ban Wang and Lu Jie, Eds., China and New Left Visions (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2012).
5. Gan’s inuential essay has been republished in various forms but can be
found partly translated into English as ‘The Grand Three Traditions in the
New Era’ in Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (London: Fourth
Estate, 2008). See as well the brief discussions of Gan’s position in Timothy
Cheek, ed., A Critical Introduction to Mao (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010) and by Daniel Bell in China’s New Confucianism:
Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2008). Gan’s original version was published in Dushu
(2007): 1–6.
6. The most striking Mao-era example would of course have to be the later
‘Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius’ campaign after the former’s death
by shot-down airplane. These veritably academic debates and propaganda
screeds from the ultra-left were always aimed at their actual enemies and
the struggle for control even as they attempted a Maoist analysis of ancient
Chinese history.
7. This is a common theme or phrasing in much of Wang Hui’s work from
the 1990s onward, and the rst part of this sentence gives my own gloss on
it. See his most recent work China from Empire to Nation State (Trans.
Michael Gibbs Hill. Harvard University Press, 2014).
8. See the discussion of Gan and neo-Confucianism in He Li, op cit.
D. F. VUKOVICH

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9. On this phenomenon see especially the article by Xie Shaobo, ‘Guoxue Re
and the Ambiguity of Chinese Modernity’ (China Perspectives 2011.1
39–45), as well as other pieces in that special issue on the topic. Of course
not all ‘national learning’ projects are politically regressive or essentialist, as
they depend on the contexts of the work and who reads them where.
10. On Gan’s work, and this inuential essay in particular, see the chapter by
Zhou Lian, ‘The Debates in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought,’ in
Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang, eds., Contemporary Chinese Political
Thought: Debates and Perspectives (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
11. For discussion of Qiu Qiubai see Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism
(Durham: Duke UP, 2000). Classic pieces from Qiu are available at
http://criticalasianstudies.org/assets/les/bcas/v08n01.pdf. Accessed
Nov. 8, 2017.
12. Wang Hui, Cui Zhiyuan, Dai Jinhua, and Wang Shaoguang (in Hong
Kong) may be the most well-known abroad, in addition to outside scholars
with deep roots in the mainland (often due to having been born and raised
there), such as Lin Chun, Cao Tianyu, Li Minqi, and Gao Mobo. Other
notable and widely read scholars include Gan Yang, Cai Xiang, Han
Deqiang, Lu Xinyu, Han Yuhai, Luo Gang, Xi-Shu, Mao Jian, Hu Angang,
and many more. In this chapter I cannot do justice to them all, since their
range is co-extensive with that of the Chinese academy and intellectual
sphere itself. The new left does not dominate, far from it, but it is ensconced;
many of its scholars are also leading scholars in their disciplines and sub-
elds. The next chapter will attend to liberalism. My intent is to character-
ize the movements as a whole, indicating their general logic and signicances,
rather than explicating or doing justice to individual thinkers.
13. For the Wang Hui article in question as well as Fenby’s response, see ‘The
Rumour Machine: Wang Hui on the dismissal of Bo Xilai’ (London Review
of Books 34. May 9, 2012). https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/-wanghui/
the-rumour-machine. Accessed Nov. 3, 2017. Fenby is an investment con-
sultant, journalist, author, former editor in colonial Hong Kong, and
recipient of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. This is indeed
quite a resume and arguably only possible in the China eld. But that eld
is dened by anti-communism and as such has certain limits on what can
be thought or said while remaining in the fold. The reception of the new
left is the case in point.
14. See Wang Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in
Transition, trans. Theodore Huters and Rebecca Karl (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
15. Barmé, ‘The Revolution of Resistance,’ in Chinese Society: Change, Conict
and Resistance, ed. Mark Selden and Elizabeth Perry, 3rd ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 304–305. The Han Yuhai piece in question was pub-
lished as ‘Zai “Ziyouzhuyi” zitaide beihou,’ Tianya (1998).
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16. As cited in Chen Lichuan, para. 15, in the online edition, ‘The Debate
Between Liberalism and Neo-Leftism at the Turn of the Century,’ China
Perspectives 55 (2004), http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/417. (accessed
Aug. 21, 2010). Han’s piece, ‘Ziben dengyu ziyouhua ma?’ (Does capital
equal liberalization?), was published in Kexue shibao, January 3, 1999.
17. I leave to one side here the anarchist, neo-Trotskyist or otherwise statisti-
cally irrelevant left self-positioning in China. It would be a mistake to
imagine there will be some renaissance of such a ‘left’ in China. The
Marxist humanism of the 1980s will be discussed in passing later, though
it too seems to have been largely displaced by new left, liberal and neo-
traditional ways of thinking.
18. The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1, ‘Analysis of the Classes in
Chinese Society’ (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965). Michael
Dutton notes that this line expresses the ‘quintessence of politics’: ‘If you
want to understand the concept of the political, turn to the rst line of the
rst page of the rst volume of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works,’ Policing
Chinese Politics: A History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 3.
19. I refer here to sectarian Western leftist screeds, chiey Internet and social
media epiphenomena and familiar enough yet slight enough to obviate the
need for full citations. The charge of nationalism is perhaps best answered
generally by the work of the late, great Benedict Anderson, who once said
that he had only ever met two or three non-nationalist cosmopolitans in his
entire life.
20. I must say that I have heard such views many times in teaching in Hong
Kong, from mainland and even ‘local’ students. I would not say this is the
dominant view, however. Perhaps the main point is simply that 1989 has
not been forgotten or erased—it could not be—but a new ‘regime of truth’
surrounds it, or rather two regimes, very much reecting an inside/outside
dichotomy.
21. See Han Yuhai, ‘Assessing China’s Reforms,’ in the June 3, 2006, Economic
and Political Weekly of India (pp.2206–2212) (Translated by Matthew
Allen Hale.). http://www.epw.in/journal/2006/22/perspectives/assess-
ing-chinas-reforms.html. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017. One should note that
this point about the economic basis of 1989 (often elided by analysts and
the students and liberal intellectuals themselves), and the clear if implicit
defense of the right to protest, is also a theme in Wang Hui’s work.
22. Han, Ibid., 2212.
23. See the useful articles on Hu and others at The China Story website of
Australia (various authors, not always signed). https://www.thechinastory.
org/key-intellectual/hu-angang. Accessed Nov. 6, 2011.
24. This interview with the mainland Foreign Theoretical Trends journal is
included within Wang’s recent volume of essays China’s Twentieth Century:
Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality (Saul Thomas, ed., Verso,
D. F. VUKOVICH

85
2016). Online at https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2555-contradic-
tion-systemic-crisis-and-the-direction-for-change-an-interview-with-
wang-hui. Accessed Nov. 6, 2011.
25. See the interview with Wang done by En Liang Khong, ‘After the party: an
interview with Wang Hui.’ January 13, 2014. https://www.opendemoc-
racy.net/wang-hui-en-liang-khong/after-party-interview-with-wang-hui.
Accessed Nov. 10, 2017. Wang is worth quoting at length to avoid confu-
sion: ‘Nobody can defend the Cultural Revolution as a whole, and also you
cannot simply say that any period in history was just completely wrong,’
Wang continues. ‘We talk about the Cultural Revolution mainly from the
point of view of elites. But very few talk about it from the perspective of
workers, peasants, and their different generations.’
26. See the notes and discussion in Chap. 1.
27. Josef Gregory Mahoney, ‘Changes in International Research Cooperation
in China: Positive Perspectives’ (Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 43, 2,
47–64), 61.
28. The China model has been argued for most forcibly by Pan Wei, a Beijing
University professor and trenchant critic of liberalism though ambiguously
situated in relation to new leftists and certainly not an old leftist in the
Maoist sense. See his 2007 article ‘The Chinese Model of Development’ at
http://www.ids-uva.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/10_
Pan.pdf. Accessed Nov. 6, 2017.
29. See, for example, Sebastian Veg’s review essay in France’s think-tank jour-
nal based in Hong Kong, ‘Tibet, Nationalism, and the ‘West’: Questioning
Economic and Political Modernity.’ (China Perspectives 2009.3) http://
chinaperspectives.revues.org/4859. Accessed Nov. 7, 2017.
30. For an excellent overview of Wang Hui’s work on this, see Zhang Yongle’s
‘The Future of the Past: On Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought’
(New Left Review 62 March–April 2010). Wang’s case for China being
modern so early has to do with ‘signs’ such as capitalist commodity
exchange, a sense of ruptured time, and so on. I remain agnostic on this
question, though it is clearly better than notions of oriental stagnation and
despotism, stages of history, and so on. The twentieth-century context is
the key one at any rate.
31. Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and
Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966 (Duke University Press, 2016).
Translated by Zhong Xueping and Rebecca Karl.
32. For the Li Yizhe writings on socialist democracy, including law, see the
anthology, Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: China’s Road to Democracy, Yan’an to
Tian’anmen, 1942–1989, edited by Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter
(Princeton University Press, 1995).
33. See Hall at his most Gramscian: ‘The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism
Among the Theorists,’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
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86
Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988).
34. See Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in
Wuhan (Oxford University Press, 1995).
35. Wang, Zheng. ‘Call Me Qingnian but Not Funu: A Maoist Youth in
Retrospect’ (Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. Eds.
Zhong Xueping, Wang Zheng, and Bai Di. 27–52).
36. Wang Zheng, like many other participants or fellow travelers of the new
left and intellectual politics in China (e.g. Gao Mobo), resides and works
outside of China but also publishes and works in the mainland. The new
left has to be understood as mainland-based but it—like other mainland
Chinese intellectual ‘circles’—is also part of a global conversation, just an
indirect one. My specic point in using Wang and Gao Mobo is that they
provide excellent, clear, provocative descriptions of Maoist discourse.
37. See Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
38. Tony Saich and David Apter, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic
(Harvard University Press, 1998).
39. See Yu Liu, Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in
Revolutionary China (Modern China 36.3 2010: 329–362).
40. As I have written at length elsewhere on Maoist discourse as well as the
critique of the Cold War notion of totalitarianism, I will not re-rehearse
these arguments here. Again the essential point is that one does not see
serious intellectual historians or cultural critics, let alone someone like
Foucault or, say, Isaac Deutscher, assume and write about what is a Cold
War-inspired notion of ‘brainwashing’ by any other name. Discourse does
not stand outside of something called Truth. Maoist discourse, whether we
like it or not, is by any denition opposed to and seeks to exclude liberal-
ism, and even humanism. For more, see China and Orientalism. The pio-
neering essay on Maoist discourse is Gao Mobo’s ‘Maoist Discourse and a
Critique of the Present Assessments of the Cultural Revolution’ Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars, July (1994): 13–31.
41. Kerry Brown and Simone Van Nieuwenhuizen, China and the New Maoists
(London: Zed Books, 2016).
42. See the November 18, 2013, report by Malcolm Moore in The Telegraph.
Moore was the preeminent and most reliable reporter during the entire
Bo/Chongqing affair. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/
asia/china/10457357/China-pays-back-millions-of-pounds-to-Bo-Xilais-
victims-but-keeps-them-in-jail.html. Accessed Nov. 8, 2017.
43. See Rebecca Liao’s 2013 report in The Atlantic at http://www.theatlantic.
com/china/archive/2013/08/why-bo-xilais-trial-is-a-victory-for-the-
rule-of-law-in-china/278448/ and lawyer Ben Self’s analysis in Global
Studies Law Review, ‘The Bo Xilai Trial and China’s Struggle With the Rule
of Law’ (14.1 2015) http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.
cgi?article=1520&context=law_globalstudies. Accessed Nov. 7, 2017.
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44. This seems to be the case as of 2016, according to no less an ‘anti-statist’
journal than Foreign Policy. See Dinny McMahon, ‘The Terrible
Amusement Park That Explains Chongqing’s Economic Miracle.’ See also
the praise for Mayor Huang for helping prevent any property bubble
despite all the subsidized housing and development of farmland. http://
foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/29/chongqing-economic-miracle-locajoy-
debt-sales-state-owned-enterprises/. Accessed Nov. 8, 2017.
45. See for example a 2013 report by Zachary Keck, ‘With Bo Xilai on Trial,
China Adopts Chongqing Model’ at The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.
com/2013/08/with-bo-xilai-on-trial-china-adopts-chongqing-
model/?allpages=yes. Accessed Nov. 8, 2017. See also two (anonymous)
reports more recently ‘Chongqing blazes economic trail as Bo scandal
recedes’ (http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/
chongqing-blazes-economic-trail-as-bo-scandal-recedes) and ‘As Beijing
investigates his successor, support for jailed Bo Xilai endures in Chongqing’
(https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/31/asia-pacic/poli-
tics-diplomacy-asia-pacic/beijing-investigates-successor-support-jailed-
bo-xilai-endures-chongqing/). Accessed Nov. 8, 2011.
46. See the report by Malcolm Moore: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/asia/china/10785505/Young-Chinese-Maoists-set-up-
hippy-commune.html
47. See Han, ‘The Social Costs of Neoliberalism in China: Interview with
Stephen Philion,’ Dollars and Sense (July/August 2007): 22–34.
48. As a general rule of thumb, it has long been the companies run by foreign
capital—for example Taiwan’s infamous Foxconn—that abuse and exploit
workers the most. Obviously this isn’t to say exploitation is rare in state-
owned enterprises.
49. See his ‘China’s Double-Movement in Health Care,’ Morbid Symptoms:
Health Under Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
50. This is a Polanyian argument that runs throughout several of Wang’s
essays. See, for example, ‘The Changing Role of Government in China.’
In Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China? (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001).
51. Zhiyuan Cui, Deng Yingtao, and Miao Zhuang, Nanjie Village (Beijing:
Modern China Press, 1996). See also Cui’s ‘Liberal Socialism and the
Future of China: A Petty Bourgeoisie Manifesto,’ in The Chinese Model of
Modern Development, ed. Tian Yu Cao (New York: Routledge, 2005).
52. See Shizheng Feng and Yang Su, ‘The making of Maoist model in post-
Mao era: The myth of Nanjie village’ (Communist and Post-Communist
Studies 46.1 2013: 39–51).
53. This has been published in English as Maoist Economics and the
Revolutionary Road to Communism, ed. Raymond Lotta (Chicago: Banner
Press, 1994).
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88
54. There is a large literature on such organizations and the countermovement,
small as it may be nationally speaking, toward a more social economy. See,
for starters, Social Economy in China and the World, eds. Ngai Pun, Ben
Hok-bun Ku, Hairong Yan, and Anita Koo (Oxon: Routledge, 2016).
55. See Bramall, In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and
Economic Development in Sichuan Since 1931 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993). and Kueh, China’s New Industrialization Strategy: Was Chairman
Mao Really Necessary? (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2008).
56. On the Chinese economy, see also Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and
After: A History of the People’s Republic, rev. and expanded ed. (New York:
The Free Press, 1986); Jack Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions: China from
the 1880s to 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and the sources
discussed in Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural
Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2008). Current economic work on this
period is closer to what was said by the US government and World Bank
toward the end of the Mao period. See US Congress, The Chinese Economy
Post-Mao: A Compendium of Papers, Joint Economic Committee, 95th
Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington: Government Printing Ofce, 1978).
57. The more popular or Internet debates around the famine can be found here,
albeit from the leftist side: http://www.wyzxwk.com/s/sqwhy/. Accessed
Aug. 21, 2010. See also the discussion in Gao Mobo, The Battle for China’s
Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2008).
58. See Sun Jingxian, ‘Population Change during China’s “Three Years of
Hardship” (1959–1961)’ (Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and
Strategic Relations: An International Journal 2.1 2016: 453–500).
59. See Simon Denyer, ‘Researchers may have ‘found’ many of China’s 30 mil-
lion missing girls’ (November 30, 2016, The Washington Post). https://
www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/30/
researchers-may-have-found-many-of-chinas-30-million-missing-
girls/?utm_term=.e002864366c2. Accessed Nov. 11, 2017.
60. See the discussion of Sun and others in Gao Mobo’s forthcoming book,
Constructing China: Clashing Views of the People’s Republic (London: Pluto
Books, 2018).
61. Sun Jingxian, Ibid., 495.
62. Readers can judge for themselves since the journal is open access, though
clearly background information about the PRC in the Mao era and about
Chinese demography or the lack thereof would be helpful for the entire
debate. http://icaps.nsysu.edu.tw/ezles/122/1122/img/2375/
CCPS2(1)-Sun.pdf. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.
63. I have attempted to address these issues in a chapter of my previous mono-
graph. See Vukovich, China and Orientalism, Ibid.
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89© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_3
CHAPTER 3
From Making Revolution toMaking
Charters: Liberalism andEconomism
intheLate Cold War
This chapter offers an intellectual political account of the rise and fall, yet
persistence and transformation, of Chinese liberalism during and after the
Maoist era. The ‘case’ of China helps illustrate a global point: the weaken-
ing and degradation of liberalism, the rise of economism and de-politicized
politics in place of an actual or socialistic left. But this global condition is
also in itself co-produced, determined by the fate of Chinese politics dur-
ing and after the revolution. In short what we ultimately have to attend to
is not just a ‘Chinese’ problem or failure (as if de-politicization and econo-
mism were not global ills) but the state of the political right now. More
specically I will eventually argue that a certain ‘liberalism’—dened with
the Maoists as an economism that seeks de-politicization and ‘stability’ or
peace—informs the developmentalist Party-state today, and forms an evil
twin alongside Chinese liberalism proper. The latter shares the ofcial
concern with economic and even political reform with many in the Party
establishment, but it is also an anti-state intellectual movement that should
be familiar to observers of libertarianism and neo-liberalism elsewhere.
Taken together, both sides—sometimes in direct conict, as with the dis-
sidents, and sometimes in a more or less happy marriage, as in the ardently
pro-market establishment liberals—speak to the global conjuncture as one
dominated by forces and discourses that would like to put an end to poli-
tics altogether in favor of rule by markets (and by the ruling class of those
markets).

90
There are multiple contexts to navigate here, but as suggested earlier
the key moments are post-Mao and post-Tiananmen China (the
displacement of the 1980s ‘Western’ cultural fevers), the rise of a global
neo- liberalism since the 1970s, and an ongoing clash or ‘unhappy mar-
riage’ (to invoke a usefully normative metaphor) between liberalism/the
West and communism/the PRC.In short, the ‘classic’ and iconoclastic
liberalism of the May 4th movement, despite it being crucial to the liberal
imaginary in China and especially within much China studies, is in my
view of minor importance to the meaning and politics of contemporary
liberalism (which is powerfully shaped by neo-liberal, Austrian ‘theorist’
F.A. von Hayek, e.g.) or even less to Chinese politics proper. It is not that
either pole, the West and the PRC, is genuinely or authentically liberal or
communist, but that these terms and this opposition mark a certain, dis-
cursive yet crucial terrain of political conict and struggle. As with the new
left then, the question of liberalism—the battle for that within China, and
for that as doxa or the consensus ‘interpretation’ of the PRC—immedi-
ately calls forth the politics of knowledge, East and West. One has to begin
with the phenomenon of political orientalism, or how what counts as the
West, in all its authority to speak and write China, sees the question of
China and its missing or unfullled liberalism. We have to start there, in
this case, because of its inuence in knowledge production and its inu-
ence, or conuence, with ‘native’ Chinese voices, either in sympathy or in
disagreement. The Western view is a long one, situated in the modern but
pre-communist past and dreaming of a non-communist, liberal future
where there is no Party-state.
A recent Economist article on the assassination of nationalist politician
Song Jiaoren in 1913 illustrates the degraded historicism involved. Founder
of the Nationalist Party and a brilliantly successful young politician, Song
helped organized his party’s victories in the 1912 elections of the early
edgling Republic of China and he stood a good chance of becoming the
prime minister. Though given the small circle of actual voters and the state
of the ‘Republic,’ this begs the question of what he would have been the
ruler of. Song also—and this is the heart of the matter—held classic liberal
views on electoral democracy and even on limiting the powers of the presi-
dent. He was shot dead in 1913 by the dictator Yuan Shikai’s gangsters;
the alleged movement toward electoral multi-party democracy soon fol-
lowed suit, as a ‘luxury’ that a civil-war-torn and invaded China could
hardly afford, and that neither of the leading movements, the communists
and nationalists, seemed to want. Song became a footnote, but this hasn’t
D. F. VUKOVICH

91
stopped historians from pointing to him (and a putatively ‘liberal’
Guomindang before the Generalissimo Chiang Kai- shek) as the ‘road not
taken’ by China, and that having made all the difference.1 But the great
thing about Robert Frost’s poem is that it is not about the importance of
individuality and liberal, autonomous selves; it is instead a testament to the
human capacity for self-deception. In that sense it may be the ideal poem
for the dream of ‘liberalism in China’ after all. The roads in that poem, it
may be recalled, are explicitly depicted as ‘the same’ and ‘as just as fair’ as
one another. In other words, the Economists’ type of ‘what if?’ history
experiment about paths not taken is best left to salons, bars, and quirky
grandparents holding forth to children, and is inevitably a deceit. History
moves according to a logic of material and social necessity that we may—at
best—only perceive in its aftermath.
The taking of simple-minded moral positions on something so vast and
complex, or treating it as something fungible and arbitrary as opposed to
path-setting and empowered (world-making), is of little use in under-
standing the present. All the more so with a remarkably long and tortuous
path to revolution and modernity that resulted in 1949, an epochal event
and victory won at great costs and through remarkable concerted effort by
generations of participants from the communists and nationalists to others
in between—but not by liberal intellectuals or economists or lawyers. It is
rich, then, that The Economist magazine—to this day a great simulation of
the type of liberal, free-market ideology that came to China in the form of
colonialism, gunboats, and opium wars—should present Song to the PRC
(or to its Western readers) as that proverbial road: had Song lived then the
revolution could well have been avoided. China could have followed
Taiwan’s path to liberalization and democratization (presumably without
the R.O.C.’s de facto Marshall Plan, which The Economist should certainly
reject as ‘statist’).2
While liberalism was very much part of the elite intellectual environ-
ment through the May 4th movement and the 1920s, it was sidelined by
the rise of nationalism and communism, genuinely massive, mass move-
ments, which is also to say by civil war and foreign imperialism. After
1949, and for all due allowances for individuals and even individuality
existing after the revolution (of course!), political liberalism or Western
liberalism as a discourse of individual rights and freedom, multi-party elec-
tions, the sacrosanct individual who exists ‘before’ society disappeared.
Despite its inuence as an interpretive frame for the PRC as seen from
outside (liberal humanism being the default mode of discourse for the
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92
modern academy in general), that liberalism’s rise and fall before its re-
articulation in the 1980s is one of the shortest stories about the revolution
that we can, or should, tell. Never deeply rooted outside of urban metropo-
les like Beijing and Shanghai, it was mostly irrelevant as an indigenous
intellectual and political movement, much like, say, an even smaller
Chinese Trotskyism. Given the fact that Maoism, as a Sinied Marxism-
Leninism and like most actually existing revolutionary movements, was
dened against liberalism quite specically, then this absence should come
as no surprise. Recall that during the Maoist era, from Yan’anonwards,
liberalism, like humanism, was a demonized term equated with being a
rightist or at least a non- or bad revolutionary in need of rectication.
Inthe cultural revolution in particular it came to signify selshness and
self-interest. Even today in a comparatively capitalist and certainly very
consumerist, globalizing China, one must not overstate the case for the
relevance and return (or necessity) of liberalism. Leaving aside—for the
moment only, as we will discuss this later—the specically economic or
free trade, ‘market’ liberalism of many in the Party-state itself (arguably
including former Premier Wen Jiabao) and the intelligentsia, political lib-
eralism as some type of oppositional or counter-cultural, iconoclastic
force, like the charming screeds of a young Chen Duxiu writing in the rst
decades of the twentieth century, is weak tea. It is in fact only called for
and demanded by dissidents like Liu Xiaobo (and to an extent lawyers and
legal activists). Other, mainstream liberals are far more muted in regard to
political reform, and tend to call for economic reform (privatization) as the
political reform, with very specic, politically liberal criticisms (e.g. rights
violations) coming more piecemeal and not only by liberal intellectuals
(new left and others do this as well). This relative absence of a ‘ery’ or,
say, Voltaire-eque style of classic Enlightenment liberalism was the case
even before the rise of Xi Jinping, though it has increased since the latter’s
rise. It really began with the repression—and also the failure—of the
Tiananmen protests, thence to lead to the new leftand other more Sinied
voices and discourses. Prominent dissidents like Ai Wei Wei (arguably an
arch liberal individualist and not a mere narcissist) and Liu Xiaobo (about
whom, more later) are much less representative and popular than readers
of The NewYork Times might reasonably infer. And it would seem faintly
ridiculous to expect the liberals in the Party to either legislate theParty
system out of existence or inadvertently foment a middle-class transforma-
tion in the manner of our received wisdom about Europe’s transition from
feudalism.3
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93
And yet with the end of Maoism, liberalism has returned anew— trans-
formed and re-articulated—as a relatively minor, yet real and complex part
of Chinese intellectual political culture. It awkwardly and doggedly per-
sists. Awkwardly when President Xi Jinping extolls the virtues of globaliza-
tion and free trade at Davos among the world’s (chiey Western)
economic-political elite, in a speech hot on the heels of such illiberal
Western developments as Brexit and Trumpism. The CCP’s belief in ‘free
and fair, rule-bound trade’—abroad—is unmistakable, even as it tries to
control or mediate the ows of ideas and ideologies to its own people and
retain a role for state planning and state ownership. It is very much in its
own interests to do both things, given its comparative advantage in labor
productivity and human capital and manufacture infrastructure (all of this
in part due to Mao era socialism) and its ‘illiberal’ or Party-state mode of
governance. But the Party-state or system, including its elite and other
classes, believes genuinely in such economic ideas. (And in wealth and
development as almost wholly good things in themselves.) These beliefs
and ‘memes’ are as central as ‘making revolution’ and the communist
horizon were to the revolutionary era. Notwithstanding the concomitant
commitment to state-owned enterprises and property (which also exist in,
e.g., Europe), the CCP and hence the PRC are genuinely liberal, even
Smithian in economics (Arrighi). Today this is abundantly clear in their
trade with Africa, and as compared to the International Monetary Fund’s
and the West’s past practice of ‘structural adjustment’ and colonization.
But this Smithian or liberal-capitalist China sits awkwardly, to the for-
eign observer at any rate, with the PRC’s nominally socialist/communist
forms, from the single-party state itself to the media and propaganda
enterprises. The PRC is equally committed to policing some types of polit-
ically liberal or ‘oppositional’ forms of thought and speech. Vanilla blog-
gers or ‘public intellectuals’ like Han Han (a race car driver and popular
writer, but very much a Chinese Internet celebrity more than anything
else) are somehow ‘liberal’ and ‘rebellious’ but are not considered worth
policing. Far less popular and signicant anti-Maoist critics such as the
prominent liberal economist Mao Yushi are, however, a different story.
Mao is an ardent pro-business neo-liberal who came up the hard way dur-
ing the Mao era (branded as a rightist repeatedly) but went on to a suc-
cessful career as an economist. Very much part of the establishment now,
he nonetheless ran afoul of the authorities and, rst, neo-Maoist readers
for writing a long screed in the business magazine Caixin about the evil
rule of Chairman Mao (‘the backstage boss who wrecked the country and
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94
ruined the people’4) and clearly implying that his portrait in Tiananmen
Square should be taken down (and presumably his corpse buried). Similar
things have happened within the media sphere, including to state TV
hosts. Mao Yushi’s case is notable because of his pedigree and elite status,
his claims to intellectual stature as an economist, and the fact that some in
the Party, and many more outside of it in the upper classes, no doubt share
his economic views and seek further privatization and free markets in the
name of ‘wealth creation.’5 The issue is not just one of the state needing
Mao as heroic founding father. Indeed the discourse on Mao’s biography
has been so poisoned as a tale of evil or gross misrule, not least by his
biographers in English academe and journalism (cultural imperialism
again), that Mao Yushi’s views are far from unknown.6 They are more like
a liberal common sense or doxa, just as they are in America and Hong
Kong (though such mainland liberals are a smaller demographic to be
sure). No, the scandal here is that the Party-state (some of it at least) and
others in society have a different view and different discourse on Mao and
the revolution—that he was indeed the inevitably awed but great, if now
underappreciated, and greatly principled communist revolutionary and
egalitarian. His image in rural China, where he is squarely represented and
popularly understood as one of ‘them’ (despite the Leap famine), has been
oft remarked, and Maoist or revolutionary discourse still exists in China
from the new left to ‘neo-Maoists’ to older generations (who lived it), and
so on. The point here is that, willy-nilly, Mao and the revolution represent
an anti- or even illiberal communist or ‘other’ vision of China than that
constructed by Dengist or ‘rightist’ or liberal-capitalist China. The harass-
ment of Mao Yushi and others when they ‘slander’ Mao Zedong is there
to remind us that not only does the CCP polices speech, it also has differ-
ent discourse on the subject than what one typically hears in English or,
for that matter, in foreign Chinese newspapers. (See as well the earlier
discussion of ‘Document 9.’)
But as the case of octogenarian Mao Yushi or the post-1980s liberals is
there to show as well, Chinese liberalism, born in the New Culture and
May Fourth moments of early twentieth-century China, is nonetheless
back, if it ever really went away. But back in different, arguably
degraded or re- articulated form, specifically to an anti-state and free-
market ideology that for all its seeming resonance with, say, a Voltaire or
classic Enlightenment liberal pleading against tyranny is far closer to an
economically and politi-cally reactionary position, and a strident
economism, that we usually call neo-liberalism. And given the inordinate
influence of American or Western
D. F. VUKOVICH

95
intellectual ows and discourses in the world (which underpin ‘modernity’
as much as ‘globalization’), liberalism in China is unlikely to go away for
good. But this does not amount to the re-emergence of a road not taken
in the zeitgeist, convergent sense invoked by The Economist or as waited
upon by the Hong Kong ‘democrats.’ The rise and fall, yet re-articulated
return, must be further analyzed. It has much to tell us about globaliza-
tion and the nature of the political today, after the eras of colonialism and
revolution in their twentieth century forms.
LiberaLism andde-poLiticization: thepresence
ofthepast
Beyond the inuence of Western discourse, we must ask why this persis-
tence obtains, despite its lack of popularity among the masses, among
protesters and strikers (by and large single-issue), and even, contra the
standard Western narrative/expectation, lacking appeal among the bour-
geoning middle class and the rich.7 A crucial reason is that it never quite
went away, or in other words, liberalism of a sort persists because ‘it’ was
always an absent presence if not an explicit enemy of or threat to the
Maoists or leftists within the revolution. It reects as well the desire,
among some, for ‘normalcy’ and the status quo, of stability, under the
onslaught of global modernity. Or in the Chinese case, a certain revolu-
tion or massive transformation away from a ‘feudal’ or non-Western, ‘tra-
ditional’ society. It may seem odd to say in the context of a communist
movement or a single-party state, but liberalism—what counted as liberal-
ism, and was frequently called that name (often pejoratively)—was at the
heart of the discursive struggle for hegemony. As the ‘enemy’ or de facto
opposition to Maoism, and in a sense ranging from the Liu-Deng types to
the ‘subversive’ non-political or anti-political art existing at the margins of
the late cultural revolution, this liberalism was always implicit to the strug-
gles over the practical direction as well as the ‘soul’ of the revolution,
within the red decades of the PRC.8 Thus, rather than seeing contempo-
rary neo-liberalism and conservatism as a return to the 1920s (whereby
the 1980s stand as the second ‘Chinese enlightenment,’ as their partisans
put it), our reference should be instead to the radical years, starting with
the rise of Maoism after 1927 and including the struggles over ‘revision-
ism’ and the ‘capitalist road’ after 1949 and up to the Dengist hegemony
in the 1980s.
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96
Take the 1937 polemical essay by Mao, later to be part of the Little Red
Book, on one of the main tasks on the ‘ideological front’: ‘Combat
Liberalism.’ In the midst of war and imperialism, Mao stops to talk about no
less than 11 types of liberalism (saying there could be more), all of them
turning upon behavior and attitude more than the liberalism found in the
works of, say, J.S. Mill or Alfred Marshall or even a Hu Shi on the Chinese
1920s. But liberalism it was. To be ‘within the true’ of Maoist discourse—
especially in its denitive, seemingly ‘extreme’ moments like Yan’an and the
Cultural Revolution—meant seeing liberalism as equivalent to ‘petty-bour-
geois selshness’ and opportunism, as well as ‘smallness of mind.’9 ‘A
Communist should have largeness of mind.’ What emerges from Mao’s arti-
cle, an exhortation to revolutionary passion and unity as against liberal nar-
cissism and complacency, is the sheer, stark opposition (revolutionary/
liberal) in the Chinese context. It is as if liberalism had at some point been
hegemonic or potentially so, even after the early 1920s and the rise of revolu-
tion and nationalism, or the Party and the Guomindang (it had not actually
been). It is striking to see it rst framed as essentially a behavioral ‘attitude
problem.’ It may seem like a simple polemic against wavering or non-com-
mitted liberals who only reluctantly joined the CCP, or perhaps against those
from elite backgrounds. But the essay is deeper than it appears because it is
aimed at the meaning of the revolution and not just fealty to the Party and
proper, strict discipline (which slavishness is precisely the message of Liu
Shaoqi’s famous How to Be A Good Communist): the point is to politicize that
everyday life is a spirit of empathic selessness, that politics (revolution) is
permanent, and that this is a good thing, not a bad thing.10 This is the essence
of Maoism, born out of its guerilla tactics and wartime forms, its mass line
ethos and practice of rustication, and the long and tortuous struggle for land
reform documented by William Hinton among others.11 Politics and the
revolution were to be part of everyday life and continuous. As if revolution
or fanshen were an end in itself. It is also in this sense that liberalism is indeed
connected to the economic: Mao does not talk about markets and the prot
motive or private household farming in this piece, but what he does mean is
in large part class struggle and continuing the revolution, which is to say his
referent is also economic power or socio-economic politics. Mao’s concerns,
as always, were class struggle and ‘fanshen’ or social transformation as
opposed to others’ emphases on the primacy of the productive forces, that is,
on development as a ‘scientic’ or objective and ultimately non-political affair,
a la the Soviet Union or, indeed, capitalist economics. As historian Rebecca
Karl has recently argued, ‘the economic’ re-emerged in the 1980s as ‘a
D. F. VUKOVICH

97
magical concept,’ a reied, transhistorical construct that glosses over or
explains away the great variety of social realities and practices in the name of
a settled truth about the economic as such.12 It is my argument here that
such a ‘magical’ notion of the economic was very much in play during the
Mao period, or in other words that the Maoists were able to suppress or at
least disrupt this de-politicizing magical thinking in favor of ‘putting politics
in command’ and being ‘red and expert’ (to invoke two famous statements
from within Maoist discourse). The ‘liberal’ idea of the economy being
autonomous from class struggle and revolutionary politics, even after the
victory of 1949 and land reform, was the terrain of the line split or in other
words the friend-enemy, dyadic form of politics.
It is from this standpoint that Mao will say: ‘Liberalism rejects ideologi-
cal struggle and stands for unprincipled peace.’13 Liberalism—what counts
as liberalism for Mao and thus for the PRC under him—is against the
fanshen-spirit of revolution and/as full politicization. It does not always
‘admit’ this. Some cadres ‘approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to
practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their
liberalism by Marxism. … They apply Marxism to others but liberalism to
themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and nd a use for
each.’ One may well note the market or business language used briey
here—keeping goods and stocks in order. Two decades before the Cultural
Revolution, then, the question of politicization—keeping the revolution
alive, continuous—and the questions of splits or ‘line struggles’ within the
Party are very much at the forefront of the communist movement. I am
arguing then that this is precisely what ‘liberalism’—or a later cognate
term like ‘revisionism’ or the ubiquitous ‘Rightist’—signied after 1949:
from the perspective of the Maoist or left-wing line, a complacency or
‘unprincipled peace’ that was, ipso facto, also committed to economism
(the emphasis on ‘private’ markets or the prot motive and household
agriculture) and to the end of the class struggle by the 1950s. And even
within an entirely communist movement, lled only by avowed Marxists
and communists and patriots, and note as well the clearly illiberal
Guomindang, liberalism is specically named as an enemy or problem on
the ideological front. An ‘absent’ presence indeed!
The notion of line struggle or a fundamental ideological split within the
Party has gone in and out of favor within China studies, where there is a
tendency to dismiss it as unscholarly since it reects the demonized
Cultural Revolution’s rhetoric, and Mao’s own views, who remains anath-
ema to the left and right alike, outside of China. But the argument here is
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98
that the notion of just such a ‘line struggle’ that only occasionally but
always massively erupted when it did, is nonetheless indispensable for sev-
eral reasons. Chief among these is that—notwithstanding the perceived
chaos and contradictions of the revolutions and mobilizations after 1949—
the line struggle or problem was and is (for the old left and some of the
new) a crucial plank of the self-understanding of the participants at the
time, and not simply of Mao and his warriors. When one does not engage
in the self-understanding of political actors—how they understood their
actions, the meanings or affect they attached to things and events—then
one risks a positivism or historicism that views the past from very contem-
porary, unmediated frames and faux-universal theories and concepts.
There is indeed a difference between discourse and self-understanding
on the one hand, and action or practice or ‘material’ realities on the other.
Both dimensions of social reality would need to be brought on board in
any mediated, properly complex analysis of the era as a whole. But even
here we must note that the belief in and discourse about a political line
struggle had undeniable material and institutional effects within Maoist
history, just as the discourse of growth and globalization, and of China’s
rise ‘back’ to globalprominence have today. Two key areas here are the
existence or non-existence of ‘class struggle’ after the revolution, and the
proper place, or non-place, of markets and prot motives in the mutually
agreed upon mandate to develop China and its national economy. While
people could and did overlap or change (and Mao himself occupied the
middle, later in life, between the ‘Gang of Four’ and the ‘rightists’), on the
opposite side of Mao and his ilk could be found Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping
(most of the time), and others. More to the point here, it may be said that
the right/liberals/revisionists—as the left would call them—were in favor
of what was called an ‘unprincipled peace’ or ‘complacency’ in ‘Combat
Liberalism’: class struggle was nished and the sacrosanct Party-state
should get on with development and the pragmatics of socialist or modern
construction, chiey in the urban centers and key national industries.
The latter is an economism, as opposed to a politicization, which
becomes all the more clear when we recall that it is the Liu-Deng line, not
the Maoists, who were out front in the quashing of dissent, seeing it as
mere sabotage or bad, disloyal behavior and not properly political, let
alone justied. It is always worth recalling that it was Deng Xiaoping who
carried out the anti-rightist movement and turned it into a genuine,
quota-based purge, though admittedly with Mao’s eventual acquies-
cence.14 Debates and struggles over household farming (before and after
D. F. VUKOVICH

99
the Great Leap) were also conducted according to two lines (for and
against). The late Cultural Revolution lm Breaking With Old Ideas (决裂)
stages this two-line struggle and split over for-prot enterprise and private
markets memorably and in ‘Gang of Four’ or model opera style, but criti-
cisms of the same type of economic behavior can be found in numerous
Red Guard documents, for example.15 In the relatively less important
world of art and aesthetics, there were related, two-line struggles or
debates over socialist realism, humanism, and in lm the two camps of
‘Yan’an versus Shanghai.’
Again what is at stake here is not just policy and beliefs about markets
and economics versus politics—though in a state-planning system these
are, or were hugely consequential topics—but the heart and soul of the
revolution, the direction, vision, and meaning of socialism or commu-
nism. Is the point to make revolution and strive toward a real equality or
to have peace? Is unbridled growth and inequality (in nancial or symbolic
capital) acceptable if not good, or must equality and politics be in com-
mand? What is a fake or unprincipled peace, and can revolution be an end
in itself as the Maoists certainly seemed to believe? Does the state and thus
the socio-economic plan favor the forces or the relations of production? If
‘who are our friends and who are our enemies?’ was the rst question of
the revolutionary movement for Mao in the 1920s, then these other, more
difcult questions became the key ones for the PRC itself, immediately
following October 1, 1949. They were also constituent parts of the line
struggles. The Maoists were the winners more often than not in Mao’s
own time, and so bequeath to us the clearly loaded language of capitalist
roaders, the mass line, and so on. But this should not prevent us from
understanding the political and ideological stakes involved, including the
relative value of, say, ‘peace’ or a ‘normal, everyday life’ versus that of
making revolution to the end. There were, and are, real debates and real
different understandings of socialism and politics involved. Or in other
words a rational basis to the lines and the struggles and a ght over ideas
and values and not simply ‘power’ in the liberal, personal, and top-down
repressive sense.
In the event, however, it was not the Maoist side but the other one—liberal,
economistic, geared toward stability or ‘unprincipled peace,’ wanting to keep
politics let alone class struggle at bay—that has prevailed. Or perhaps not
merely prevailed so much as triumphed and over-turned almost the entire
Maoist/leftist/communist project, aside from national unity, sovereignty,
and a certain strength of development (which it must be said were also the
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100
Guomindang’ s ostensible goals). It is a cliché, but there is indeed something
world-historical to the Chinese ‘miracle’ of massive growth that has brought
rising living standards and purchasing power to so many, if also great wealth
to a few and massive pollution for all. But the return of China to a global
preeminence and presence, coupled with the relative decline of the USA, is
here to stay for at least several generations. If the Chinese revolution was, for
many on the left in Asia and the former Third World, the biggest global politi-
cal event of the twentieth century, the rise of China under capitalism has
already made it seem like the current century, for better or worse, ‘belongs’ to
the PRC. Both of these revolutions came and come at enormous costs.
Perhaps the most problematic one has been the change in the political, or in
other words the great tides not of smog and sea-borne plastic but of de-
politicization. Even if one does not subscribe to liberal democracy as the
panacea, let alone to neo-liberalism in the David Harvey sense, this is indeed
a baleful enhancement of the current conjuncture. It is to this that we must
now turn to.
But to understand de-politicization and the triumph of a certain type of
liberalism, we have to attend to the Cultural Revolution as well. Let us
turn to no less conventional a source than one of the volumes of the
Cambridge History of China. There Harr y Harding usefully speaks to the
‘crisis of the state’ during the entire period from the early 1960s (post-
Leap) through Deng Xiaoping’s ascendance as a debate and struggle
between liberals represented by the Liu-Deng line and the radicals.16
When Mao passes from the scene, and precisely because this struggle was
never resolved during the Cultural Revolution and in the end only frag-
mented the Party and society, the senior/elite cadres get back to business,
purge the left, and start shoring up the ‘weak political institutions.’17 From
a certain liberal perspective, this is precisely what one does in crisis: you
maintain the machines of governance, neutralize all conicts peacefully or,
if need be, forcibly. Harding frames the right (non-radicals) as liberal by
default (as the opposite of left), but we may esh this out further. They are
liberal not because of their political-economic views or denial of class
struggle after 1949 (though both arguments could be and were made by
their opponents) or even because they called themselves this (of course,
Liu and Deng would not), but because they wanted to put the pieces of
the Party, the bureaucracy, the status quo, and elite back together again.
For Harding, their liberality also seems to lie in them being more ‘open’
(vaguely dened) and less radical, less insistent on class struggle and trans-
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formation, and more insistent on the preservation of the post-1949 status
quo. In other words, ‘complacent’ in the Maoist sense mentioned earlier.
What Harding’s analysis already, indirectly suggests as well is that de-
politicization—the getting back to business and ‘peace,’ as it were—was
the direct, rst consequence of the end of the cultural revolution, and was
implicit to the line struggle or revolutionary discourse all along. This is
about de-politicization in that it wants to place—as the Maoists would put
it—not politics but economics, development, and expertise ‘in command.’
Not that these were mutually exclusive terms. All sides wanted develop-
ment, for example, and unity within the Party-state, but the struggle was,
again, over policy as well as the meaning of socialism, the state of Chinese
equality, and the relative primacy of radical politics versus economics. The
demonized Liu-Deng or ‘establishment’ line was, then, not only against
the necessity (or even existence) of class struggle but by extension against
the political, that is, against antagonistic or dyadic politics and mass par-
ticipation and supervision of the Party (the mass line). It was a movement
toward politics-as-administration of affairs, not world making or continu-
ing any revolution much further beyond 1949. This resonates strongly
with Carl Schmitt’s analysis of neutralization and de-politicization through
liberalism.18 For Schmitt, once liberalism becomes incorporated into the
state it threatens the unity and effectiveness of that state (read: capture by
interest groups in competition with one another). It also threatens the
proper autonomy of the political (dened as a dyadic logic of ‘friend versus
enemy’ and rooted in, even presupposing, the supremely important entity
of the state) by substituting economics and ethics for politics. This also
dovetails with a classic but otherwise far-removed critique of modernity, of
culture-as-administration, and of the impasses of liberal-democratic poli-
tics: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.19 These were
the stakes in the PRC too, and it must be said that Maoism was as much a
part of this global struggle under—within and against—the capitalist
world system as any other place, only more so.
De-politicization, and the resonance of Carl Schmitt’s work on liberal-
ism and the state, has been a strong theme within the Chinese new left and
other intellectuals. This often upsets the overly historicist and literal-
minded observers or antagonists of the new (or old) left, as if Schmitt were
the only, deeply reactionary individual who happened to have produced
interesting and potentially—or demonstrably—illuminating writings on
one topic or another.20 Wang Hui, a la my reading of Harding and others,
has dated the origin of de-politicized politics back to the Cultural
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102
Revolution as well.21 Wang argues that the failure of the Cultural
Revolution lies precisely in this result, or more specically in the explosion
of factionalism (politics trumped by personal loyalties and vengeances,
bloodline notions of class, and so on), and then in the re- bureaucratization
of the state. It is certainly apt to see the existence of merely personal or
vengeful struggles and persecutions as non- or even anti-political, as well
as the restoration of the Party-bureaucracy (its complete rule) in the end.
To this extent Wang is correct about de-politicization within the de facto
logic or development of the Cultural Revolution. But his analysis—per-
haps because it must be truncated due to censorship pressures—also can-
not account for the positive, leftist aspects of the decade, and it may only
be its denouement, the squashing of the revolution, that ts the Schmittian
de-politicization model. Clearly the period was also marked by a veritable
explosion of dyadic and antagonistic ‘friend-enemy’ struggles and political
conicts, and clearly the status quo or politics-as-administration was the
target of the radicals and those who responded to ‘making revolution’ as
opposed to those who sought to, in effect, defend their class position as
the children of the elite within the Party system. Perhaps then the Cultural
Revolution suffered not from a de-politicizing tendency but from an over-
politicization of everything, from haircuts and public signage to the far
more serious matters of rural health and education, worker management
in factories, and so on. Additionally the failure of the Cultural Revolution
with the death of Mao and the short-lived Hua Guofeng era—in the
important sense of proximate cause—should be placed less on Maoist or
rightist or any ideology so much as the failure to adequately institutional-
ize leftist goals and achievements even within the Party-state system, such
as the barefoot doctor rural health program, gender neutrality (i.e. equal-
ity) within education and the Party and workplace, a de facto afrmative
action for people from good, that is poor and working-class backgrounds,
the right to strike and rebel, and so on. It is in this sense that Maoism
failed. Had the Cultural Revolution continued, with better institutional
bulwarks and with a big enough bloc of people in power who beneted
from late Maoism, the great reversal after Mao’s death may have at least
been considerably more difcult. And yet, as noted, ‘what ifs’ are of little
consolation and use for those who must make a massive life transition
from communism and the struggle for socialism and equality to an equally
strident, differently competitive, individualistic, ‘meritocratic,’ and expen-
sive capitalism.22
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But the memory of the Cultural Revolution—as grievance (especially
for the former persecuted elite and others), but also as radical inspiration
as well as nostalgia, for leftists and many former participants—remains.
The ideals, memories, and actual experiences of that era are certainly
mixed and range from actual social gains and ‘the big freedoms’ in that era
(e.g. to speak freely, write posters, and debate politics), to unjust persecu-
tions and even deaths; as such they simply cannot be contained and
negated by a de-politicizing Party, by liberal intellectuals, by the salacious
English language memoir industry, or by the discourse of political orien-
talism. It remains a painful memory for some and a sign of thwarted
chances under Dengist capitalism, but also the last, major period of mass
democracy, mobilization, and class struggles. It represents unsettled scores
and very different codings of the rural versus the urban that exist today.
While critical liberal intellectuals do indeed point to it as proof of the need
for liberal democracy and its attendant values of individualism and nega-
tive liberties, the Cultural Revolution is not dangerous to the Party-state
because it suppresses the memory of its allegedly fundamental injustice
and thus of ofcial culpability. Given that many of the present Party elders
suffered during the period as well, as children of the elite, the moral high
ground is already occupied. The period is dangerous, to an extent, because
it signies an era of mass participation, and full, even total politicization
toward something other than patriotic consumerist modernity or liberal
democracy, namely, toward radical, even absolute, equality and social jus-
tice. For all its failure in achieving that ‘cultural’ revolution (as if this were
actually possible), the period also represents this, and has its own leftist if
violent morality in the social imaginary. If the Party-state and liberals now
share a condemnation of the era, if not of virtually all Maoism after the
early 1950s, then the heterodox or leftist perspective on it—that some of
it was just, that it is right to rebel, that equality is fundamental—suggests
a radical, eminently rational kernel within new left illiberalism in China.23
The difcult part of this for non-mainlanders to appreciate is that almost
none of this can be published within China, in scholarly or otherwise intel-
lectual or serious fashion. One simply has to know mainland intellectuals
or others who feel these and speak of it in person, in conferences or work-
shops for example, or over meals, and so forth. This is, of course, a great
limit on acceptable speech placed by an illiberal, quintessentially post- or
anti-Maoist party. The Chinese Internet is about the only visible textual
source of such leftist as opposed to liberal views, and has been documented
in this regard by Gao Mobo in The Battle for China’s Past. (Liberal ‘scar’
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104
writings and condemnations of the period have always been allowed but
are also decidedly old hat by now.) If there are to be alternatives to liberal-
ism and de-politicized, illiberal ‘statism,’ then resources for that will have
to be found in part within Maoism and Mao’s last revolution from 1966
to 1976, warts and all. For now, however, de-politicization remains the
order of the day, arguably more so now under Xi Jinping than ever before.
For all the efforts at cultural or social revolution or fanshen, and the
struggle over ‘lines,’ the Cultural Revolution failed because it was put an
end to by the elite within the Hua-Deng era. And in fact there is indeed at
least textual evidence of a turn toward or desire for something like liberal-
ism or normalcy by the mid-1970s. This can be seen as the meaning of the
mourning for Zhou Enlai upon his death (seen by many as a mediating,
ameliorating gure for the excesses of the era), shortly before Mao’s own.
One can also see signs of exhaustion and de-politicization in the mid-
1970s posters and poems collected in David S. G. Goodman’s Beijing
Street Voices anthology.24 And the ‘Misty Poets’ of the same period, such as
Bei Dao, can clearly be seen not just as subversive of socialist realist or
revolutionary romantic aesthetics but as expressing a desire to turn away
from the political and to embrace ‘classic’ romantic/lyrical concerns such
as the inner life and nature. Of course the Misty Poets or Zhou’s Beijing
mourners are a highly selective and elite demographic, and given the rela-
tive ban on research into the period, it is hard to say how many such de-
politicizing voices there were during the late Mao era. There were also, in
contrast, the Li Yi Zhe trio from Guangdong, very much still Maoists,
however, who in 1974 criticized the failures of the Cultural Revolution
and called for ‘socialist democracy.’25 (Even earlier there were ‘ultra-leftist’
calls for all but an overthrow of the Party, as well as the direct democracy
of the so-called Shanghai Commune of January 1967.)26 Nonetheless it
does seem that some, even many, other people were either tired of making
revolution or moreover at a loss—given the twists and turns at the top of
the Party—to make sense of the supposed revolutionary process. (This is
also what Li Yi Zhe was trying to do.) And yet this in itself—a turning
against the political or politicization—underscores the relevance and
salience of the Chinese, Maoist versus ‘establishment’ line-struggle tem-
plate—again, not a conspiracy but a dyadic or Schmittian understandings
of politics—as well as the movement toward de-politicization in the name
of an ‘unprincipled peace.’
This is to say, then, that one side won, a very political outcome indeed.
For Chinese liberalism of the critical but non-dissident variety the ascen-
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sion of Deng Xiaoping and his policies was nothing less than the start of a
‘New Chinese Enlightenment.’ As Shanghai-based liberal academic Xu
Jilin puts it:
After Deng’s reinstatement in 1977, the reformists encouraged debate on
the issue of whether ‘practice is the sole criterion of truth.’ It was part of a
process initiated by the Communist Party that marked the abandonment of
the tradition of Utopian socialism [Maoism] as well as providing a theoretical
justication for the policies of secular socialism. The so-called ‘Movement to
Liberate Thinking’ was actually a public and internal party educational pro-
cess that was aimed at freeing people’s thinking from the socialist dogmas of
Mao Zedong and Stalin. In a sense you could see it as a Lutheran- style
rebellion within the orthodox Marxist-Leninist world.27
To be sure this is dismissive of Maoism (as utopian and somehow not
concerned with practice) and the price that workers and peasants and the
environment have paid for the ‘new era.’ The Lutheran/Protestant anal-
ogy is nonetheless an interesting one, and perhaps apt for the economistic
imaginary, given the Weberian analysis of religion as the switchman of
capitalist history. Xu also notes, with apparent approval, that this move-
ment was from the top-down (the ‘center’ of the Party machine in his
view). In sum, among the 1980s intellectuals, a new ‘mainstream language
of the Western Enlightenment’ was quickly adopted and a basic liberal
consensus emerged.28 This was then disrupted by the rise of the new left
as much as by Tiananmen 1989. While the public sphere and intellectual
debate carry on, sometimes in the language of the 1980s ‘Enlightenment,’
there is no longer a consensus nor a unied sphere. More to the point, Xu
notes the crucial impact on the 1980s (and beyond) of two best sellers
from the right-wing side of the Cold War (also victorious in their own
struggle, eventually): F. A. von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and The
Constitution of Liberty.29
While Xu passes over this, it is crucial to recall that Hayek was arguably
the preeminent intellectual of the Cold War on the Western world’s side,
and so extreme as to vilify Keynesianism and the welfare state as much, if not
more than ‘actually existing socialism.’ He is also famous as a fount of neo-
liberal and Austrian economics. His anti ‘statism’ (note that word/pejora-
tive, purveyed in the mainland by Xu Jilin among others, hails from Hayek
and his milieu) and his belief that the free market = liberty have been mas-
sively inuential in China, as well as in Western or Latin American neo-lib-
eralism.30 Yet in the PRC these are called liberals, whereas neo- liberal is an
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106
increasingly stigmatized term abroad. Whereas one can argue that Carl
Schmitt’s work—to pick an arguably even more reactionary intellectual—
can be partially appropriated along Marxist or other lines (e.g. as with
Heidegger) due to his intellectual depth and ambiguous style, it is hard to
see how von Hayek can be or has been used for anything other than waging
a Cold War against the state, or deploying neo-liberalism against the public
good and commons. Even Yang Jisheng, the former Xinhua journalist who
has written a famous/infamous expose of the Great Leap famine (Mubei or
Tombstone), is a self-professed Hayekian, which is something that should
have given some of his progressive and Western liberal (as opposed to neo-
liberal) celebrants pause. At any rate it is clear that the 1980s turn—the
triumph of the economistic and comparatively ‘liberal’ line—has been
decisive.
In other words the post-49, de facto war against liberalism, and for
politicization or continuous revolution, ends with a bang and a whimper:
the Chairman dies, the Gang of Four is immediately arrested (the ultra-
leftists within the CCP elite, suddenly vulnerable), and a broader, subtler
but ultimately more powerful movement toward de-politicization pro-
ceeds apace. (And that now includes Dengist cadres and liberal voices and
interests.) After Mao, as Wang Hui puts it, what China has today is a
Party-state with de-politicized politics:
‘no longer an organization with specic political values, but a mechanism of
power. Even within the party it is not easy to carry on real debate; divisions
are cast as technical differences on the path to modernization, so they can
only be resolved within the power structures.’31
The party has no distinctive ‘standpoint or social goals,’ only a ‘struc-
tural functionalist relationship to the [repressive] state apparatus.’32 In
addition, the primary functions of the Party-state now, as is often remarked,
are the preservation of stability and the facilitation of economic growth,
that is, prot. It is indeed successful at these. This end point was perhaps
always implicit to the line struggles of the late 1930s and beyond. Certainly
Yao Wenyuan, later known as the infamous chief writer of the Gang of
Four, thought so. In a polemic from as late as 1975 entitled, ‘On the
Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique,’ and perhaps fearing the
defeat of the (cultural) revolution, Yao offered what seems in retrospect
like a scathing but compelling image of contemporary inequality and
corruption:
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If we do not follow this course [socialist distribution according to work],
but call instead for the consolidation, extension and strengthening of bour-
geois right and that part of inequality it entails, the inevitable result will be
polarization, i.e., a small number of people will in the course of distribution
acquire increasing amounts of commodities and money through certain
legal channels and numerous illegal ones; capitalist ideas of amassing for-
tunes and craving for personal fame and gain, stimulated by such ‘material
incentives,’ will spread unchecked; such phenomena as turning public prop-
erty into private property, speculation, graft and corruption, theft and brib-
ery will rise; the capitalist principle of the exchange of commodities will
make its way into political life send even into Party life, undermine the
socialist planned economy and give rise to such acts of capitalist exploitation
as the conversion of commodities and money into capital and labour power
into a commodity; and there will be a change in the nature of the system of
ownership in certain departments and units which follow the revisionist line;
and instances of oppression and exploitation of the labouring people will
once again occur. As a result, a small number of new bourgeois elements …
will emerge from among Party members, workers, well-to-do peasants and
personnel in state organs.33
Such were the intensities and discourse of the time among the intel-
lectuals and cadres. Of course this may seem too conspiratorial or reduc-
tive today (an open question), and Yao and the Gang were quickly
dispatched to prison after Mao’s death. The Cultural Revolution ended
with a whimper and not a bang, due in large part to elite antipathy
against it and the maneuvering of Deng Xiaoping (we will return to this
question in the nal chapter), as well as the Chairman’s death. But from
a more ‘theoretical’ or cultural Marxist standpoint, one that believes in a
‘culture’ of capitalism and in its powerful de-politicizing tendencies
(economism, capture of the state by ‘interest’ groups, etc.), it certainly
seems well-nigh pre-ordained in Deng Xiaoping’s second (counter-) rev-
olutionary career after the death of Mao. Whatever else Yao Wenyuan
got wrong in his life, his diagnosis of 1975 was not one such thing. The
clear-headed and rational, if ‘extreme,’ Marxism—the anti-capitalism—
within Maoism has had a second, if minor, lease on life since the 1990s.
The movement toward de- politicization—to say farewell to continuous
revolution and mass mobilization; to ‘actively forget,’ that is void the
desire to participate politically at all, aside from individually joining the
Party; to de-legitimate the very idea of class struggle or class conscious-
ness after 1949; to frame the polity as a market; to see the state and the
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108
people as a business to manage technocratically—were Deng Xiaoping’s
‘pragmatic’ program from the beginning of his rise in the late 1970s.
One could argue it stems from his (and Liu Shaoqi’s), as opposed to
Mao’s, Marxist-Stalinist intellectual formation in Russia, or more gener-
ously one can accept at face value his (or his followers) self-professed
belief in market ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ One can make a
valid case for each. But in either case, having abandoned any strong idea
of state planning, they let the market- and capital genies out of the bottle
and now struggle to get them back in. That may not be possible in the
long run, which may well be the long game of Chinese liberalism. But
even if the economic changes eventually necessitate a new superstructure
or political system, there seems little reason to presuppose today that this
will take the form of liberal democracy.
But in any case Deng’s economism—a blind faith in ‘the market’ as
much as in the productive forces—is unmistakable, as is his political quiet-
ism or authoritarianism. This was all skillfully summed up in his slogans:
‘to get rich is glorious’; ‘some must get rich rst’; ‘it doesn’t matter if the
cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.’ To Mao’s rural-proletarian
internationalism, Deng was always the adamant pragmatic nationalist,
whose Marxism was connected to China’s stability and wealth, its recovery
from feudal and imperial depredations to a position of national strength
and unity. His deep and emphatic, even ethnic, nationalism was never on
more display than in his resolution of the Hong Kong crisis/handover,
where he and thus the CCP not only famously cursed the inexecrable
Margaret Thatcher in Sichuanese, but simply assumed smooth sailing in
the handover precisely because they recruited ‘patriotic’ Chinese tycoons
to their Sino-British plan of ‘one country, two systems.’ Business was
booming, so what could go wrong? And of course all Chinese would just
get along and be happy to unite and do business together. Just as with
Hong Kong, Deng assumed that capitalism or the pursuit of wealth and
‘normalcy’ would heal all wounds and suture the deep ssures of inequal-
ity. If it worked in a brutal sense for the peasantry and the urban/rural
divide in China—just move them into the cities as super exploited but
suddenly transformed ‘migrant workers’—it has failed miserably in Hong
Kong, and sowed the seeds for the ‘Umbrella revolution’ and a disappear-
ing middle class south of Shenzhen. Finally, as one last attempt to dene
economism in the sense we are, let us turn to Deng Xiaoping being quoted
and expounded upon by the current Number 3 man on the Standing
D. F. VUKOVICH

109
Committee (Zhang Dejiang), speaking to an unhappy Hong Kong in the
wake of the city’s general decline:
Quoting Deng Xiaoping’s warning that ‘development is the only hard
truth,’ Zhang said: ‘Only when the economy continues to thrive will liveli-
hoods improve. Everything else is empty talk. Like a boat sailing against the
current, it will be swept downstream if it does not forge ahead.’ Without
elaborating, he said ‘deep-rooted conicts in economic development’ had
begun to emerge in the city.34
There is in act a point here, even from a certain Marxist perspective:
that the economy is all-important. But the liberal or economistic point
being made is that political conicts and inequalities are actually unim-
portant and to be rendered toothless if ‘development’ is ‘done.’ What’s
good for business is good for Hong Kong and China, in sum.
from charting therevoLution toWaiting forgeist
The rise of this peaceful ‘liberalism’/economism/de-politicization/
unprincipled peace has also entailed a change in the political within China
ever since, a sea-change that has certainly swept up much of the West and
the rest of the world as well, in the rise of neo-liberalism as against post-
war Keynesianism or social democracy. If Maoism encouraged, even mobi-
lized mass participation and action within the (connes and powers of the)
state-system, the post-Mao, Dengist PRC is marked by the same abstract,
absolute limits and connes. But on a decidedly different class-basis (the
capitalist class having been ofcially welcomed into the Party in the Jian
Zemin era), with greater powers of surveillance and other technologies of
power, and by consciously pursuing de-politicization through pushing
consumerism and nationalism as well as ofcial views of the past and pres-
ent social realities. As noted earlier much of today’s de-politicization and
liberalism are very much post-Tiananmen (1989) developments. During
those 1980s there seemed—to the students and intellectuals at any rate—
to be a happy marriage between the Party’s ofcial gung-ho economic
liberalism and the political parts of traditional/Western/global liberalism,
that is by the promise and beginnings of certain reforms in that realm as
well. Certainly the leftists were all but gone, purged or persuaded to jump
ships after the end of the Gang and the Cultural Revolution. The CCTV
multi-part documentary He Shang remains the purest representation of
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110
this strange but earnest mix of economism and the promise of political
reform or ‘democracy.’
While this is not the place to once again rehearse the prior events and
aftermath of June 3, 1989, sufce it to mention that after the repression
in the Square that June morning in 1989, de-politicization (via repression,
censorship, propaganda, de-legitimation of protest) and liberalism-as-
economism-and-‘peace’ were the order of the day. And of the next decades.
For all the differences between, say, the Jiang Zemin versus the Hu Jintao
versus the Xi Jinping leadership ‘eras’ (and there are some), they have all
maintained attempts to de-politicize Chinese society and culture, promul-
gating nationalism or patriotism as well as development and growth but in
de-politicized and often ham-sted ways (such as the current ‘China
Dream’ rhetoric of Xi Jinping times). This is, again, the one way in which
the now-disgraced but charismatic and at least quasi-leftist Bo Xilai’s lead-
ership style stood out. So too for the ruling Party’s gestures toward tradi-
tion (e.g. Hu’s ‘harmonious society’ rhetoric) or to ‘socialism with Chinese
characteristics’: without any type of ‘statist’ redistribution of wealth and
power to the poor and working classes, this is a type of ‘socialism’ or
communitarian-Confucianism that offends belief (but which should not
be equated with more intellectual and/or scholarly efforts at rethinking
tradition and socialism). This certainly contrasts with Mao-era repression,
censorship, propaganda, and so on: the grass roots and egalitarian authori-
tarianism of the Mao era were not about de-politicization but politiciza-
tion and re-politicization, if to arguably self-defeating extremes. Ironically,
the various liberal intellectual diatribes and screeds and assorted writings
against Maoism and the Cultural Revolution from the late 1970s onward
only helped the Party-state de-legitimize the left and any ‘illiberal’ or not-
liberal, radical critique.
Deng’s ‘Southern tour’ of 1992, where the degrees of commodica-
tion and marketization were exponentially increased as a response to 1989,
is in many ways a greater turning point for Chinese politics than 1989
itself. Deng ‘opened’ the economy even further in what may have been
either a desperate decision to ‘let slip the dogs of war’ on the socialist
dimensions of the economy and society in the hopes of magically resolving
the contradictions between pursuing capitalist growth while holding down
a communist Party-state. As a result of his speeches and politicking, plans
to privilege the urban, coastal areas to further open up or develop Shanghai
and Shenzhen, for example, set China’s path toward global capitalism in
concrete. Deng also spoke against leftism at this point, pointing to it as a
D. F. VUKOVICH

111
greater threat to stability than rightism, an obvious gesture toward de-
politicization (but that did not prevent the rise of a new left later). The
year 1992 thus stands as, in many ways, a more important or fateful date
than 1989.
And yet if the post-Mao state represents and promulgates a certain ‘lib-
eralism’ it is also the case that the same Party-state has its own internal
liberal critics, who either desire political reform outright (to make China
fall in line with ‘universal’ Western models, to change the Chinese state)
or who advocate even greater privatization or marketization to make that
political liberalization (as it is always called) a fait accompli and to nally
dispense with the vestiges of Mao/socialism/statism. As the cliché goes,
the freer the market, the freer the people. In fact these positions are more
and more melded: Chinese liberalism—of the oppositional or unofcial
type—can only be practically dened by both of these things: an actually
shared economism or commitment to free markets and trade and global-
ization (only disagreeing, if at all, with those who wish to retain state
ownerships), but also an anti-state or ‘anti-statist’ position that can either
be explicitly anti-Maoist (who after all represent the state principle) and
anti-leftist (new and old lefts), or if more circumspect liberalism can sim-
ply, if vaguely, be for ‘reform’ or ‘rule of law’ or other code words for
political liberalism. In either case the watchers within the Party-state are
not wrong to suss out an enemy/antagonist here: even if liberals steer
clear of being explicitly anti-Communist Party (which would make them
dissidents if caught out), their views certainly represent a disempowering
and ‘downsizing’ of the state and of state capacity in favor of a free-market
system. It is the latter anti-statism (and to a lesser extent anti-Maoism)
that makes liberalism potentially dangerous. One has to hide the intended
rebuke of the Party-state’s legitimacy or success, especially, but not only,
its revolutionary communist or Maoist roots. But it is the former econo-
mistic position which gives liberalism whatever intellectual and even
‘scholarly’ weight it has. This is in many ways a deeply conservative and
even perfectly neo-liberal position in the familiar, pejorative sense drawn
out by David Harvey, among others: privatization and accumulation by
dispossession (of state assets and state jobs and state functions) combined
with an elusive but powerful appeals to ‘freedom’ and individual/entre-
preneurial energies and desires.
Perhaps the clearest, and certainly the most explicitly anti-regime and
to that extent genuinely courageous expression of Chinese liberalism is the
Charter 2008 document co-authored by the late Liu Xiaobo, himself a
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112
famous and inuential liberal dissident/critic from the 1989 protests.35
Even if one holds fast to the idea that Tiananmen, 1989—misleadingly
dened by the students and participating intellectuals—was genuinely
democratic and oriented toward mass/popular democracy as opposed to
the sectoral interests of those two demographics, Liu’s fate and ideological
transformation (if he had any) toward full-blown neo-liberalism is instruc-
tive. Lest the charge of neo-liberalism in the 1989 air seems misplaced,
one must note that the economist Li Minqi, himself a former 1989 leader
who did jail time for his participation, explicitly describes his erstwhile self
and his then-cohort as neo-liberal in political, economic, and ‘occidental’
fashion.36 Li’s views and later work, despite his obvious ‘authenticity’ as a
former political prisoner himself, have unsurprisingly been ignored by
‘democratic’ analysts since 1989.37 Far more attractive for them—and Liu
always refused to leave, it must be said—is the Charter author. From hun-
ger striker (albeit briey) to imprisoned dissident to re-imprisoned dissi-
dent, to his death from liver cancer in 2017, his would seem only an
inspiring story of human perseverance and humanist consistency, as well as
the universal truth and goodness of free speech. Liu’s courage of convic-
tion was genuinely remarkable and must be respected. One should also
note that his imprisonment—clearly political in the pejorative sense—was
not only grossly unfair, it was also entirely unnecessary even from the
state’s own standpoint of ‘stability’ above all else. Unnecessary because
Liu’s views were simply not popular, and the Party-state is not so imper-
iled and weak as to be brought down by neo-liberal thought with an
Enlightenment edge or rhetorical air. Though imprisoning such people
indeed makes it seem so, to some. As with the jailing of Ilham Totti men-
tioned earlier, if not in fact more so (Totti can at least be—unfairly—imag-
ined as somehow connected to the realities of separatism in other places),
Liu’s last imprisonment reeked of paranoia and illustrates Chinese post-
Mao repressive illiberalism all too well—an ardent liberal treated brutally
for being a clear, rhetorical ‘enemy’ of the state (one with foreign connec-
tions and funds). If Maoist (and earlier) revolutionary repression could be
justied by genuinely left-wing class politics and by a palpable danger of
foreign (Cold War) and perhaps domestic subversion, this is hard to swal-
low in a context where the internal reactionaries and the imperialists
abroad are far less of a threat. The USA has entirely over-extended itself in
the Middle East, for example, and is even struggling to hold on to its neo-
imperial control there. Its anti-regime monies and efforts in the mainland
and Hong Kong are small moldy potatoes. One needs to be clear about
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this, even if Liu’s own political views and advocacies were eminently objec-
tionable if not downright reactionary.
Put another way, that his fate was unjust is certainly true; but this does
not, alas, prevent the knowledges and ideologies and politics of his work,
and the Charter specically, from being objectionable in their own terms.
The Charter is rife with generic human rights rhetoric and a call for a
multi-party liberal-capitalist democracy. Moreover, the ‘manifesto’ clearly
contains a specic economic program of privatization and the removal of
the state from economic and political or social life. The state’s only role is
to enforce the ‘rule of law’ and hold elections, not to govern in any pro-
active or social democratic way. Liu claims that the lack of (liberal- capitalist)
democracy ‘constricts China’s own development [and also limits] the
progress of all of human civilization.’38 If liberal democracy is what
Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian Congress Party took from the British
and used it to ‘free’ themselves, then Liu sees its absence in China as inhib-
iting both China and humanity’s further development. (Liu also wrote
infamously in defense of Western colonialism and the recent American
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.)
But the rst thing one notices about the Charter is that it is specically
anti-Maoist and anti-Party-state. For it the communist (or even national-
ist) revolution counts as nothing: it begins with the rst Constitution of
1908, quickly glosses over the republican period, and offers a clichéd ver-
sion of Maoist ‘totalitarianism’ and mass death (‘Tens of millions have lost
their lives, and several generations have seen their freedom, their happi-
ness, and their human dignity cruelly trampled’). China has simply been
held back by the Party-state from becoming the same as the normative
US-West. Come the twenty-rst century, will China ‘embrace universal
human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a demo-
cratic system?’ But quickly the Charter gets down to business and deals
with the alleged mechanism for all of this democracy and progress: private
property, and hence individual rights. ‘As the ruling elite itself moved
toward private ownership and the market economy, it began to shift from
an outright rejection of “rights” to a partial acknowledgment of them.’
From here it naturally follows that the cure is simply more private prop-
erty and less state. Two major planks are under the ‘What We Advocate’
section or devoted to sections of the ‘Protection of private property’ and
‘Financial and tax reform.’ These and much of the Charter’s passages read
much like an introductory textbook, rehearsing civics lessons and market
logic: the ‘true value of private property [must] be adequately reected in
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114
the market,’ taxes should be simplied and their ‘burden’ be shared more
fairly (which, while vague, in context suggests a tax-cut for the rich),
and—weirdly—there should in general be ‘greater competition among
market participants.’ This would then seem to be in line with the market
and entrepreneur model of neo-liberalism, its human rights rhetoric and
claims for ‘universal truths’ notwithstanding (or rather, being precisely
required to make the egregious class politics of this more palatable and to
retain some semblance of, say, Vaclav Havel or ‘freedom’). In fact liberal-
ism and universalism have always been underpinned by logics and practices
of exclusion and commodication. One will, in sum, not nd in Charter
2008 any redistributionist sentiment or traditional social democratic claims
for people’s livelihood. There is no sense of a social contract that at least
implicitly recognizes substantive as opposed to formal/legalistic equality.
So too the Charter, in its image of the Maoist, contemporary, and even
pre-modern eras, illustrates the presence of Western ‘China expertise’ and
Cold War discourse; it assumes that narrative of Maoism as oriental despo-
tism.39 That is a narrative shared in many ways (the errors of the leftist
past, the necessity of free markets and globalization) by the current CCP
and liberal intellectuals in general. But Liu also hated the post-Mao regime
(and in fact only knew this one intimately) and perhaps most of all the
Chinese intelligentsia and academics that followed in Deng’s wake.
Of course Liu had—on paper—a right to his views, and his imprison-
ment for them is, again, illiberal in the worst sense. His ofcial crime was
inciting ‘subversion of state power,’ though it was clearly his views and his
Western support (including nancial) t hat m attered m ore t han h is a ctual
activities as a writer and public intellectual. (That he seemingly antagonized
all of his mainland intellectual and writer peers when not in prison no doubt
did not help matters.) And that the CCP does indeed see itself as in a war
with Cold War liberalism and perhaps a certain spirit of history (conver-
gence) that it fears or thinks it must actively contend with. It is in this sense
that Liu Xiaobo receiving funds from the American government (via the
Endowment for Democracy) becomes a big deal, a bit of ‘hard’ evidence
for sinister imperial intent and foreign collusion (even though this was
all apparently legal by Chinese law).40 My point here is not that there was
an actual Central Intelligence Agency plot from America to overthrow
the Party-state via Liu and/or other neo-liberal ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’
groups. (Nor was this the case in Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella
Revolution,’ which will be discussed in a later chapter.) Espionage and
the like are a real part of the geo-political system. But the National
Endowment
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115
for Democracy (N.E.D.) deals in American soft power abroad, and such
funding efforts and such groups need to be seen as a ‘normal’ part of the
battle for hegemony or discourse that subtends the entire political universe
and a still imperial, if in many ways a less violent and invasive modern age
(in regard to Asia, Latin America, and Africa at any rate). One cannot real-
istically fault the PRC or any government from being defensive or perhaps
even vigilant about what some political scientists have called ‘ideological
and cultural security.’ But one can indeed point to paranoiac overreaction,
stupidly political persecution, and the ultimate impossibility of actually
controlling ows of information and changing—by force, and by specic,
wonkish laws and policies—the ways that people think about politics or life,
outside of an actually coherent and inspiring or motivating discourse and
state. In so far as Maoism was successful in changing the culture or creating
new identities and discourses, it did this via a comparatively much more
profound, systematic, and enabling regime of power-knowledge than the
patriotic gore offered in the post-Mao period.41
Ironically for the imprisoning state and Liu both, Liu’s desires for more
privatization and economic ‘reform’ (too weak a word for the changes he
proposes) as well as for a Western/universal liberal democracy are very far
from mainstream in the mainland. It is hard to say what his actual as
opposed to his perceived threat to ‘stability’ is. He is, to an extent, known
to the general public, thanks especially to his Nobel Prize award after his
imprisonment, and he can be in part read on the Chinese Internet. But
there is in fact no good reason to think that his Charter or other views
would nd much of an audience outside of Western political scientists (or
conventional, avowed liberals), the foreign mainstream media, and, say,
Hong Kong’s democrats. This is, arguably, not a major demographic and
not a terribly important one for the mainland, even if at times it acts like
they are a real, international liberal threat. And the signatories from within
China appear to have reached all of 8000 or 10,000 people, though admit-
tedly some of them more ordinary this time and not only intellectuals and
self-described dissidents.42
At the risk of piling on, one has to point to the other problems with Liu’s
politics and ideologies. It is simply undeniable that he—or his organizations
more specically—has received large sums from the US N.E.D., funded by
Congress: the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, Inc., and Minzhu
Zhongguo (‘Democratic China, Inc.’), where Liu Xiaobo was the president
and founder, respectively.43 He has also notoriously insisted that the main-
land could still use a 300-year period of Western colonization to catch up
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116
with Hong Kong.44 The latter would not play well in a powerfully national-
istic or ‘awakened’ China. Qin Hui, one of the most renowned liberal intel-
lectuals in China, refused to sign the Charter. For him this refusal was
justied, not on anti-imperialist or pro-state grounds, but due to China
needing more ‘debate and enlightenment’ as well as economic growth.45
(We will turn to Qin in more detailbelow.) None of the problems in Liu’s
thinking justies his imprisonment. Regardless of the content of the
Charter, it is unjust as well as unwise—and for that matter, un-Maoist—to
just lock up the reactionaries. But in jail, Liu Xiaobo sits, a victim—perhaps
in part a self-victimizing gure—of the fear of political liberalism. As if Liu’s
and others’ belief in a global zeitgeist/convergence toward ‘liberal democ-
racy’ was a real enough thing. As if there was a real specter of a ‘color revo-
lution’ against the CCP, organized from abroad. Put another way, Liu was
in many ways his own worst enemy, along with the ‘international commu-
nity’—a certain elite within the West and academia—that puts him on a
pedestal as ‘the right dissident’ and even endows him with a Nobel Prize.46
Unless one thinks there really is that zeitgeist toward liberalism and univer-
sal truths, then there is a very bitter irony here in the global production of
a dissident: a historical gure produced by the Occidentalism of the Chinese
1980s on the one hand, and by a political or Sinological orientalism on the
other. That Liu Xiaobo was very much a sign for the Western and anti-
Beijing, anti-communist imaginary (as the Saidian analysis of orientalism
would suggest) was revealed clearly in ‘expert commentary’ published right
after his death: ‘Remembering Liu Xiaobo: The West’s Responsibility in
Upholding His Legacy,’ ‘Remembering Liu Xiaobo—And What the
U.S.Can Do,’ and ‘West mourns Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, criticizes
Beijing’ were headlines that were just waiting for his demise.47
But Liu and other Chinese liberals are also important for what they tell
us about the transformation or degradation of politics not just in China
but globally. The Charter speaks to a mode of politics that relies on pro-
nouncement, a sort of politics by proxy-statement, a de-politicized poli-
tics. Philosophically or intellectually, there is little ‘content’ to the Charter
indeed and no real call to action: ‘we dare to put civic spirit into practice
by announcing Charter 08.’48 It is perhaps not meant to be read so much
as announced, posted on the Internet, and signed. And then, aside from
whatever discussions it engenders, one waits for the convergence to hap-
pen (and for the international human rights ‘community’ to kick in). The
project or strategy of the Charter 2008—aside from staging a global media
event and a cause célèbre—lies ostensibly in the original Declaration of
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117
Charter 77 by Vaclav Havel and others in the former Czechoslovak
Socialist Republic.49 Havel’s own comments on the Chinese case under-
scored the importance of ‘international solidarity’ and the impossibility of
predicting when things might change, a friendly gesture—in the present
reading—to the great unlikelihood of Liu’s Charter working.50 Presumably
the idea is for history to repeat itself, even if it takes the requisite 16 years
(in the Czech case) or most likely much longer for China’s transforma-
tion/revolution. Again, convergence, teleology, and blind faith in some
universal Geist of history as well as in those very specically free markets
and private properties. (This is in many ways the exact same recipe of the
Hong Kong liberal opposition or democratic movement against mainland
sovereignty, the subject of a later chapter; but in this case there is a long-
standing and committed movement behind the faith in convergence
toward ‘normality.’) This is then a de-politicized liberalism that is even
reected in its tone (the textbook or legal style). So too the Charter’s
emphasis on the law, its pronouncement on the correct types of laws and
constitution is a sign of de-politicization in that it reects a thoroughly
proceduralist notion of democracy. ‘We will vote like this; we will have
these laws and these rights; and so we will be democratic/free.’ To equate
democracy not with equality and mass participation (rule) and well-being
or peoples’ livelihood, but with procedure is in the end a neutralizing,
administrative mode of politics, a legal fetishism where laws are equated
with justice and embody universal truth. Even Jacques Derrida, the great
liberal ethicist, argued that while it is just that there is law, law is not jus-
tice.51 Law and procedure ultimately trump people and politics in this
model, and the actually existing Chinese legal and political systems are
assumed to be mere masks for ‘statist’ power.
By comparison, Charter 77 used stronger language, was less specic
and legalistic (though still focused on Czech and international laws), and
did not mention privatization at all, let alone tax breaks and market com-
petition. Whatever Havel became after his success, he was not a Western,
American style neo-liberal in the 1970s, and the Charter 77 (‘a free, infor-
mal, and open associations of people with different convictions’) is notable
not just for its appeals to human and civil rights but also to a shared sense
of responsibility and even unity within difference: ‘everyone bears his
share of responsibility for the conditions that prevail and accordingly also
for the observance of legally enshrined agreements, binding upon all indi-
viduals as well as upon governments.’ The document proposed no new
laws or massive changes, but only adherence to what was on the books
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118
(note that Liu sees the PRC constitution as essentially fake) and in a spirit
of cooperation and solidarity: ‘Charter 77 does not want to lay down its
own programmes of political and social reforms or changes but to engage
in the spheres of its activity in constructive dialogue with political and state
power.’52 A comparatively democratic or popular form of liberalism there
focused primarily on laws and rights already on the books, so to speak, and
in effect asking the regime to live up to its ideals. This has historically
always been the better, more effective tactic within modern societies and
nation-states. Liu’s document, in contrast, rejects all of modern China and
the PRC except for those of 1980s and privatization. There is no feigned,
let alone sincere, gesture toward ‘constructive dialogue with political and
state power.’ This rejection of the past or political tradition and culture is
a common enough gesture in much of Chinese liberalism, vis-à-vis the
radical era, though the May 4th urban intellectuals and youth are also
ordinarily valorized by liberals and, alternatively, even by the state itself (as
precursors to the rise of the revolution and Party).
While Liu famously wrote ‘I have no enemies’ for his Nobel lecture in
absentia, it is clear that he does. He is so consumed by them (the Party-
state and all its institutions and paths) and so convinced that they are
entirely wrong if not evil that he can only reject them and refuse dialogue.
(Of course his repression makes that refusal a fait accompli.) The disavowal
of antagonistic politics does not and arguably cannot work—and this
should not be surprising because of the very dyadic nature of the political,
and that as Schmitt also argues, de-politicization can never actually suc-
ceed. Bringing forth social and political change through pronounce-
ments—announcing a Charter that will change history—is simply not a
political act. It lacks a social movement or ‘front’ behind it, and by and
large the Chinese middle class seems solidly behind the current state, cor-
rectly diagnosing its class character for the past two or three decades. Note
too that China does have a public sphere and civil society (albeit in Sinied
forms), so the argument that it lacks one and that when it gets one all will
fall into place is by this point—over 30 years into market-driven ‘reform’—
not to be taken very seriously. It is time for liberals to face the fact that
their desired outcome and ‘mainstream Western Enlightenment lan-
guage’—even more so than the neworold left’s so-called Maospeak—is
simply by and large falling on deaf ears, those ears being far more suscep-
tible to consumerism, patriotism, even ‘statist’ de-politicizing propaganda
like Xi’s ‘China dream.’ The Chinese are, in sum, not subalterns who
cannot speak, but in fact have a long tradition of protests and strikes and
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so on, and a very lively, sometimes virulent, Internet/virtual and other
public spheres. It is simply not a liberal government or polity. Theoretically
speaking, it may become one someday. But if so, this will more likely hap-
pen either through a mass movement wanting and demanding that and
getting it in some form or fashion, and/or a CCP elite that, as with the
case of late Soviet Russia, desires to abandon its own system for an even
more protable one, in some type of revolution from above.53 Mutatis
mutandis, so too for the new left movement hoping to bend the Party-
state in the other direction.
The claim to have no enemies is further notable in light of Schmitt’s
claim that this is what liberalism seeks to do—to neutralize the friend-
enemy dyad or antagonism and to de-politicize politics by putting eco-
nomics (or ethics) in its place. Such economism, ironically, ts the current
Party-state that likewise wants to let a perpetually rising economy lift all
boats—aside from its recourse to sheer repression and censorship, of
course. If Liu Xiaobo seems too much the dissident outlier and thus a
special case of liberalism (and in his courage he no doubt is), it is worth
briey discussing Qin Hui’s work, a leading liberal intellectual and eco-
nomic historian based in Beijing who is arguably the most scholarly intel-
lectual of the liberal movement. Qin’s work is diverse and explicitly
concerned enough with social justice (for peasants, especially) to win
endorsement from the New Left Review, the agship, erstwhile leftist
organ of the British (‘international’) and Trotskyist-identied left that
has always been close to Anglo-liberalism. Like Xu Jilin and others, he
writes critically of the new left and, true to the 1980s of He Shang, sees
the Maoist and radical era as akin to an oppressive feudalism (an exten-
sion of it). For my purposes it is his political-economic theory that is the
most germane, given its connection to what I have been calling the econ-
omism of the liberal line of the past and of the current, more familiar
liberalism of today.
Qin’s work has offered nothing less than an alternative, pro-market, and
anti-state economic history of agrarian development in China from the pre-
modern through the Mao era to the present. (He has also worked extensively
and comparatively on Russian agrarian history.)54 Alexander Day has recently
and fairly discussed his work in detail, and I will only rehearse the basics of it
here. Qin argues that Chinese peasants have always been in a relation of
dependency to the Chinese state, from antiquity through Mao (his bête noire)
to the present. Like other Chinese liberals—including Hong Kong’s—he sees
the present economy as not a true market system at all. In fact he has recently
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120
tried to argue in a recent seminar at Tsinghua University—and with no
alleged ‘value judgment’—that contemporary China is far closer to Germany’s
‘National Socialism’ (circa the 1930s) than to the Soviet Union (also con-
ated with Maoism) or a real market economy and society.55 Instead of this
they should be transformed, through private enterprise, into citizens.
Presumably this puts them in cities and with their old cultures left behind;
hence Day’s argument for the ‘end of the peasant’ in this case. China will
ultimately need (it urgently needs) a liberal political democracy to carry this
out. This fairly conventional liberal view is substantiated further by his notion
that the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital from the feudal-Maoist-present
eras is unjust; even reform era injustices are not capitalist but still ‘statist’ and
crypto- feudal. For ‘real’ capitalist, market-based accumulation is fair since it
is not based on extra-economic force but rather reects market relations, civil
society, and formal equality. (This is then very far from a Marxist understand-
ing of capitalism and primitive accumulation; the latter would be easy to map
on to de-Maoication and the crushing of social welfare or the iron rice
bowl.) Put another way, some social inequalities (classes) based in accumula-
tion are just and some are not. As Day sums it up, ‘Capitalist accumulation,
operating through the market mechanism, would signal a formal equality in
terms of its process, although substantive inequality might result; primitive
accumulation was unjust both formally and substantively. By its very premise,
therefore, this argument dened state intervention as unjust and the market
economy as just.’56 The emphasis on formal as opposed to substantive equal-
ity is a clear sign of the essentially liberal orientation of Qin Hui’s work.
Qin Hui’s argument will sound very familiar to readers of Robert Nozick,
the inuential American conservative/libertarian philosopher in the tradi-
tion of Locke and von Hayek (Hayek too is a direct inuence on Qin).
Shades of cultural imperialism indeed. Qin is aware that Nozick is a conser-
vative, but frames this as only true in the Western world, and not in China.
One wonders where this leaves the alleged universalism of liberalism and
liberal values and economics, as also assumed by the anti-statist von Hayek.
Whatever one makes of such an argument about a China-West difference—
and it is almost to be expected in the face of a perceived despotic state—it
certainly gives lie to a liberal or political universality. It seems that the China
difference is always there, in terms of its political tradition. One can try to
work with it (and the centralized, unifying state) or try to bring in Western
theory to upend it. But in this case it is a very specically neo-liberal or
economistic theory that is more an affront to democracy than an agent of it.
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Or, if one prefers, simply note the hegemony of a very specically
American intellectual formation, even upon intellectuals who work pri-
marily in Chinese and are very much rooted in the mainland as opposed to
the ‘foreign scholar’ circuits. To say that all of this is a deep economism
rooted in the market as a kind of magical (just) order (what Hayek called
‘catallaxy’) should, one hopes, be obvious. It is not charting a socialist
revolution (or trying to), but also not even a political liberalization or
transformation so much as waiting for that to emerge once the state is
removed from the economy and a ‘real’ market and ‘real’ civil society—
whatever these might be, even in an idealized (yet statist?) Western Europe
or America—are somehow instituted by the communist leaders them-
selves. Again the Chinese middle class and rich, as scholars such as David
Goodman have observed and as a solid two decades of observation might
further verify, are also not a natural or likely constituency for the liberal
camp. Without an agency or subject to carry out such reforms—other
than the private market-Geist—this is very much a de-politicized politics
that is animated less by universal truth than animosity toward the old
(Maoist) and new left and the—illiberal—Party-state.
What is envisioned in such liberalism is more than just thinking capi-
talism/free markets are a superior or a potentially just economic system
because it can at least create vast wealth that can then be redistributed
and have its ill effects alleviated. That bit of conventional, social demo-
cratic or Keynesian liberalism, for whatever it is worth, is in fact much
closer to someone like Wang Hui of the new left. In fact Qin’s theory
here, as with Liu’s and others’ market-idealism and anti-statism, actually
allows no such ground for this, no ground for substantive state interven-
tion and indeed no need for it. Even a strong labor movement, let alone
a more explicit class struggle politics or economic populism, is simply
unthinkable from such a standpoint. One has to wonder, as ever with
libertarians or neo- liberals, what difference the reasoning around formal
versus substantive inequalities makes to those in the dispossessed,
exploited, or simply worse off classes and class fractions. There is no
doubt a class question here as well, in that—we may assume—it is better
to be ‘dependent’ on the state if that means better livelihood and welfare
than being ‘free’ of it and ‘free’ to sell one’s labor to prot-maximizing
capitalists. The dismal science, as Keynes called economics, is rarely
attuned to such experiential, subjective, and existential questions. And
even less so with the question of class. So too for an economistic liberal-
ism today. If capitalist economics, and at least the thinking or discourse
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around it, is a modern and Western thing in its genesis, then one must
also say that the impact of the former on contemporary China has never
been greater, economic liberalism and ‘oppositional’ liberalism alike.
While this is clearly not an instance of Western colonialism or imperialism
of the classic, directly imposed, and extractive variety, a more exible,
overlapping or ‘hybrid’ form of cultural and ideological imperialism is no
doubt in play. It is up to the ‘illiberal’—anti- liberal—elements of the
Chinese intellectual political culture to challenge the economistic and
elite hegemony (or would-be hegemony) of contemporary Chinese lib-
eralism and market-economism.
notes
1. Jonathan Fenby, ‘Chinese Democracy: The Silencing of Song’ (History
Today 63.3 2013). http://www.historytoday.com/jonathan-fenby/chi-
nese-democracy-silencing-song. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
2. ‘The death of a revolutionary: The song of Song.’ The Economist. December
22, 2012. https://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568587-
shot-killed-song-jiaoren-was-not-heard-around-world-it-might-have-
changed. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
3. There is a minor tradition of ‘China Watching’ that wants to point to each
new Central Committee as harboring a secret Gorbachev, which is to say a
secret political reformer who will nish off the process of China becoming-
the-same politically. But even the Party liberals, for example former Premier
Wen Jiabao types, do no such thing.
4. As noted and quoted in The Economist May 26, 2011. ‘Boundlessly loyal to
the Great Monster.’ Just to make the teams and cheerleaders clear, The
Economist frames the reports with ‘Liberalism under attack in China, but at
least the liberals are ghting back.’ Presumably via their fat investment
portfolios. http://www.economist.com/node/18744533?story_
id=18744533. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
5. Just to clarify the provenance of Chinese liberalism of at least this major,
dominant type, and how it better ts American libertarianism and global
neo-liberalism, one must note that Mao Yushi recently received a US
$250,000 cash reward (‘the Milton Friedman Prize’) from The Cato
Institute in the USA.See Foreign Policy May 4, 2012. http://foreignpol-
icy.com/2012/05/04/economist-mao-yushi-on-why-the-chinese-gov-
ernment-is-not-evil/. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017. Likewise, as noted
elsewhere, the vaguely dissident aura attached to long-time Xinhua jour-
nalist and famine-chronicler-populizer Yang Jisheng contains no hint of his
avowed Hayekian inuence, or that he too won a prize—the 2012 Hayek
Prize of the Manhattan Institute—for his neo-liberal free-market views.
D. F. VUKOVICH

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See The Economist, May 31, 2013. https://www.economist.com/blogs/
analects/2013/05/hayek-prize. Accessed Nov. 10, 2017.
6. The best current, thoughtful biography of Mao, though far from the most
popular alas, is clearly Lee Feigon’s Mao: A Re-interpretation (Chicago:
Ivan R.Dee, 2002), a book that also reects some recent New Left views
and the work of important scholars such as Gao Mobo, Wang Zheng, and
Han Dongping. Oddly, no other foreign biography to date reects Chinese
leftist views on the leftist leader of the revolution.
7. Again one has to acknowledge that this lack is no doubt due in part to
censorship within the educational, media, and other apparatuses. But this
is just to say that the Party-state system enjoys a hard-won hegemony. I’m
neither celebrating nor condemning liberalism’s lack of appeal here,
though will address the consequences of this limit later.
8. See note 21 below, but for an example and discussion of such essentially
individualist and art for art’s sake art—which I will code as liberal here—
see the work of Wang Aihe, for example ‘Wuming: An Underground Art
Group during the Cultural Revolution’ (Journal of Modern Chinese History
3.2 2009: 183–199). The early work of the Misty Poets (what became that
‘school’) such as Bei Dao is the paradigmatic case in point. This is not to
disparage such art as art but to frame and situate its politics within a larger
eld and to connect it to a global liberalism.
9. See Mao Zedong, ‘Combat Liberalism.’ Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung.
Vol. 2 [1937]. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/
selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm. For the notion of ‘within the
true,’ see Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, and especially the
Appendix (Trans A.M.Sheridan Smith. NewYork: Pantheon, 1972). The
essential point for our purposes is that there is no Truth—certainly not in
the human sciences—but only truths embedded within discourses, that is
regimes of truth, rules for speaking, and so on. Neither Truth nor truths
exist outside of discourses.
10. For the more Stalinist or paternalist view, see Liu Shaoqi, How to Be a Good
Communist, originally published in 1939. Online at: https://www.marx-
ists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch01.htm.
Accessed Nov. 14, 2017. This can as always be contrasted with Mao’s
Critique of Soviet Economics, written on the eve of the Great Leap Forward
(Trans. Moss Roberts. NewYork: Monthly Review Press, 1977). http://
www.marx2mao.com/Mao/CSE58.html. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
11. William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese
Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 [1966]).
12. See Rebecca E.Karl, The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in
Twentieth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2017). I should note
that Karl’s book is also concerned with ‘the economic’ in the long decade
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124
of the 1930s as well as the 1980s, and skips over the Mao period in this
study. Also the work of Wang Anan whom she studies here is of a more
heterodox Marxism than what I am calling the ‘Soviet’ or ‘Stalinist’ type of
economic-political thought found in Liu and Deng. My own sense of
economism as opposed to the economic is similar but ows out of the work
of Schmitt, Mao, Marx, and a more Grundrisse-inspired reading of Capital.
13. Mao Zedong, ‘Combat Liberalism.’
14. This (Deng’s spearheading of the 1957 anti-intellectual struggle) has long
been the case made by historians and scholars such as Maurice Meisner and
Gao Mobo.
15. For the agitprop lm of 1975, directed by Li Wenhua, see, for example,
https://archive.org/details/Breaking_With_Old_Ideas. For Red Guard
documents, see Michael Schoenhals, Ed., China’s Cultural Revolution,
1966–69: Not a Dinner Party (East Gate Reader) (New York: M.E.Sharpe,
1996) as well as Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter (1995).
16. Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–1969,’ The Cambridge
History of China Volume 15: The People’s Republic (Roderick MacFarquhar
and John K.Fairbank, eds., Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
105–217).
17. Harding, 214.
18. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition (Trans. George
Schwab. Chicago University Press, 2007).
19. T. W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Trans.
Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002). Of course, these co-
authors were familiar with the work of Schmitt, even if they occupied the
opposite end of the spectrum from the famous/infamous former jurist of
the Third Reich!
20. For an overview, see Prof. Flora Sapio, ‘Carl Schmitt in China,’ published
by the Australian Centre on China in the World (https://www.thechinas-
tory.org/cot/carl-schmitt-in-china/). Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.
21. Wang Hui, ‘Depoliticized Politics, From East to West.’ (New Left Review
41 2006: 29–45).
22. This point—that such a shift from revolution to Dengism/capitalism was
not only of huge existential import (and tragedy) but would necessarily
color many individuals’ views of the Cultural Revolution, is a point made
often in the work of Gao Mobo, among others, on the historiography of
the period, especially in memoirs.
23. My comments on the cultural revolution here, as with those earlier on
Maoist discourse, means that I would part ground from any liberal analyti-
cal framing of Chinese (or other) politics in general, and certainly of the
post-war period through the 1970s. For a liberal Hong Kong view oppo-
D. F. VUKOVICH

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site to my own, see Pang Laikwan, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production
during China’s Cultural Revolution (London: Verso, 2017).
24. See Goodman’s valuable Beijing Street Voices: The Poetry and Politics of
China’s Democracy Movement (London and Boston: Marion Boyars,
1981), which deals mainly with the 1978–1979 movement or protests and
the ‘spirit’ or milieu of those involved. As with the ‘Misty Poets’ move-
ment it is, however, hard to say what is ‘democratic’ in such work (the
poetry), as opposed to its anti-state or anti-ofcial or anti-Gang of Four
element, and an implied individualism. All of this, or a reaction against the
Cultural Revolution, are not by denition ‘democratic.’
25. For the key text of Li Yi Zhe, see Benton and Hunter, Prairie Fire, op cit.
26. On the ultras, see Wu Yiching, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins:
Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2014) and the classic
essay by Wang Shaoguang, ‘“New Trends of Thought” on the Cultural
Revolution,’ (Journal of Contemporary China, 8.21 1999: 197–217).
27. Xu Jilin, ‘The Fate of an Enlightenment: Twenty Years in the Chinese
Intellectual Sphere,’ (Trans. Geremie Barmé. East Asian History Dec. 20,
2000: 169–186), 71.
28. As with the new left, any attempt at listing liberal intellectuals will invari-
ably leave many out or make debatable inclusions. Even the distinction
between liberal and neo-liberal or clear ‘rightists’ such as Mao Yushi can be
fuzzy. But in addition to Xu Jilin, who is an avowed ‘centrist’ or third way
type of liberal (anti-’extremes’), others frequently cited or referred to as
liberal partisans include Qin Hui, Xu Youyu, Zhu Xeuqin, and Liu Junning
(also a signatory of Charter 2008). Liu Xiaobo was not an academic but a
dissident of course, though still considered by liberals as an intellectual of
note and merit. As for what unites the ‘movement’ it seems to me to be
based on two things: reactively, an anti-leftism, of at least Maoism and
Chinese Marxism; and a pro-market or pro-private property baseline,
which is to say an anti-state position vis-à-vis the economy and social plan-
ning. It is no coincidence that many liberals are economists (or most econ-
omists or liberals), deeply inuenced by classical or neo-liberal economics.
The ones named earlier and discussed here are, however, also more explic-
itly political liberals and identied as such. The economists are sometimes
just shy of speaking to the political beyond the drive for reform/privatiza-
tion. Of course there are many other competing distinctions, such as
understandings of liberty versus freedom versus rights, social versus indi-
vidual justice, the state as such, and so on. But such terms, important as
they are, are also mineelds of reications and misreadings of one another.
Better, in my view, to stick to classical Marxist notions of politics, that is
the question of the economic base and production which is also, in the
end, a class position and a side-taking.
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126
29. See Xu Jilin, 184.
30. Rebecca Karl has agooddiscussion of the rise and use of Hayek in contem-
porary China. See chapter 3 of The Magic of Concepts.
31. Wang Hui, ‘Depoliticized Politics,’ 32.
32. Wang Hui, ‘Depoliticized Politics,’ 35.
33. For the whole text, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/yao-
wenyuan/1975/0001.htm. Yao’s prophecy is worth quoting at length and
has been bandied about in recent years more often than one might think.
Kalpana Mishra was way ahead of the curve, however, in pointing us to this
text and offering useful glosses in her From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism.
See as well the discussion in Frederick C Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End
of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural
Revolution, 1972–1976 (New York: Routledge, 2008).
34. See Joshua But, ‘Hong Kong losing its competitive edge, Beijing warns:
Top ofcial hopes city will forge ahead, but is accused of trying to divert
attention from reform,’ South China Morning Post April 28, 2013. http://
www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1224953/hong-kong-losing-
its-competitive-edge-beijing-warns. Accessed Nov. 16, 2017. The econo-
mism could not be more clear than in Zhang’s words: ‘Only when the
economy continues to thrive will livelihoods improve. Everything else is
empty talk. Like a boat sailing against the current, it will be swept down-
stream if it does not forge ahead.’ … Without elaborating, he said ‘“deep-
rooted conicts in economic development” had begun to emerge in the
city.’ That there is a point here, and perhaps some substance to this illiber-
alism other than it being anti-liberal politics/voting, is a subject of the nal
chapter.
35. See Liu Xiaobo etal., ‘Charter 08: a blueprint for China,’ (Trans. Perry
Link. 2008) http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/chinas-charter-08.
Accessed March 2012.
36. See, for example, Li Minqi, Wang Dan, and Wang Chaohua, ‘A Dialogue
on the Future of China’ (New Left Review 235 (1999): 62–106).
37. Li Minqi, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
38. Charter 08, Ibid.
39. Liu has long had his champions in Western academia, including noted
Sinologists Perry Link in the USA and Geremie Barmé in Australia. For
Barme’s remarkable tribute essay after his friend Liu’s death, one that reveals
their great, shared antipathy to virtually all other mainland intellectualsand
academics, see his ‘Mourning’ essay at The China Heritage website and jour-
nal dated June 30, 2017 (http://chinaheritage.net/journal/mourning/).
Accessed Nov. 15, 2017. It should go without saying that my own point is
not ‘guilt by association’ for anyone involved—we all have our friends and
D. F. VUKOVICH

127
‘comrades’ and representatives in China. Though not enough foreigners
everadmit thisin print. The point instead is that Liu’s connection to anti-
communist critics and scholars abroad, let alone to funds ultimately autho-
rized by the US government (i.e. The National Endowment for Democracy),
clearly antagonized the Chinese state and was a most fateful decision for all
involved.
40. See the links to the N.E.D.’s nancial disclosures at this blog: https://
blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2017/07/13/liu-xiaobo-rip-but-we-should-
never-forget-the-14-million-yuan-from-ned/. For example, Liu served as
president of the Chinese chapter of PEN for several years. PEN received
almost US $900,000 during Liu’s ve years there. For example, 2010:
$170,000; http://www.ned.org/region/asia/china-2010/. Again all of
this was apparently fully legal, and my point here, again, is that this fateful
decision becomes a dangerous pretext and tells us something about what
motivates such repression. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
41. The degree of change or effect under Maoism is an open but profound
question. Clearly the state was able to undo Maoism fairly quickly, espe-
cially in regard to many of its institutions and the economy, and not least
due to the veritable coup d’état after Mao’s death. At the same time, as the
previous discussion of Maoist discourse suggests, Maoism not only worked
practically but also worked subjectively or culturally in some ways. The
work of Gao Mobo and Wang Zheng illustrates the latter, for example.
Gan Yang’s essays on the three great pillars—situating Maoism as the chief
indigenous tradition of social justice and political participation—is another
case in point. See Chap. 2 for more on Maoist discourse.
42. See, for example, Harrison Jacobs, ‘Here’s the manifesto that landed the
2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in Chinese prison’ (February 5, 2015,
Business Insider) http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-landed-liu-
xiaobo-in-chinese-prison-2015-2. Accessed Nov. 16, 2017.
43. See note 35, above.
44. See Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, ‘“The Right Dissident”: Liu Xiaobo
and the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize’ (positions 19.2 2011: 581–613).
45. See Qin Hui, ‘Critique of Charter 08: Democratic Debate and Renewed
Enlightenment is More Necessary for China’ (Trans. David Kelly, Boxun
News). http://www.boxun.us/news/publish/china_comment/Qin_
Hui_s_Critique_of_Charter_08_Democratic_Debate_and_Renewed_
Enlightenment_is_More_Necessary_for_China.shtml. Accessed Jan. 2012.
46. See Sautman and Yan for the full argument.
47. See, respectively, Andrew Nathan at Foreign Affairs July 13, 2017
(https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-07-13/remem-
bering-liu-xiaobo); Yang Jianli (a Tiananmen 1989 exile) writing in China
Change, a website/GONGO funded in part by the same N.E.D. (https://
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128
chinachange.org/2017/07/22/remembering-liu-xiaobo-and-what-the-
u-s-can-do/); and ‘Reuters staff ’ at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-
china-rights-reaction-idUSKBN19Y2DC?il=0. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
48. See the nal paragraph of the English version: http://www.opendemoc-
racy.net/article/chinas-charter-08.
49. An English translation of the ‘Declaration of Charter 77,’ authored by dis-
sident and later Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, can be found at
https://www.les.ethz.ch/isn/125521/8003_Charter_77.pdf. Accessed
Nov. 17, 2017.
50. See Havel, ‘Remarks by Vaclav Havel and Two Members of China’s
Charter 08 at the Ceremony for the Homo Homini Award’ on April 30,
2009, in the New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/arti-
cles/2009/04/30/remarks-by-vaclav-havel-and-two-members-of-chi-
nas-/. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017.
51. See Derrida, ‘Force of Law’ (Trans. Mary Quaintance. Deconstruction and
the Possibility of Justice. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David
Gray Carlson, eds. NewYork: Routledge, 1992): 3–67.
52. See page three of the original English translation of the Charter ‘77,
https://www.les.ethz.ch/isn/125521/8003_Charter_77.pdf. Accessed
Nov. 17, 2017.
53. For the Soviet interpretation here, see David Kotz and Fred Weir,
Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System. (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
54. See The China Story (Australian National University) for a brief biography
and bibliography of Qin’s work (https://www.thechinastory.org/key-
intellectual/qin-hui-秦晖/) as well as links to online writings. Accessed
Nov. 17, 2017.
55. See Qin Hui, ‘Does the China Solution resemble National Socialism?’
(Trans. David Kelley). https://interactives.lowyinstitute.org/publica-
tions/does-the-china-solution-resemble-national-socialism/. Accessed
Nov. 17, 2017.
56. See Alexander F.Day, The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics,
and Capitalism, (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 64.
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129© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_4
CHAPTER 4
No Country, No System: Liberalism,
Autonomy, andDe-politicization
inHongKong
If any space in the world today illustrates the powers and limits of liberal-
ism, classical (which is to say: colonial), as well as contemporary or neo-, it
is Hong Kong, the would-be city-state and, like Macau, a ‘special admin-
istrative region’ of southern China.1 While tiny by mainland standards at a
mere seven million, and certainly not a major part of the bloody British
Empire in the manner of South Asia, the city has a remarkably large, global
footprint for its size, including within China. It must also be said that it is
often poorly understood across the Lo Wu border on the one hand, and is
ill-served by the academic and English media adulation of the territory’s
‘importance’ for the mainland as a ‘free’ and ‘open’ space on the other.
The exceptional global presence of the city is due to many reasons—its
inuential movie industry, its unique landscapes (the most skyscrapers in
the world by far), its particular culture and language, its food, and so on.
But perhaps the strongest muscle for its footprint, its greatest leverage, has
been its special status as an ‘autonomous’ city even after its handover/
return to the mainland. This is thought to be written into the Basic Law or
mini-constitution of the city as well as the ‘one country, two systems’ prin-
ciple, as worked out by the Deng Xiaoping-led CCP and the local British
and Chinese colonials.2 As we will see that Basic document turns out to be
highly contestable in a battle over interpretations offered by the local dem-
ocratic, that is politically liberal politicians/activists on the one hand, and
who are not powerless given their hegemony in educational and media
institutions, and by the obviously still more powerful sovereign, Beijing on

130
the other hand. More on the law and movement later. But so far what I am
saying points to one thing: Hong Kong’s global footprint and highly
favorable image in at least the English language media and political world
has to do with its difference—a hierarchical, normalized difference—from
the mainland. And this very much stems from its colonial past. It is better,
more free, ‘special,’ and—in a rather condescending but popular phrase
used in Hong Kong—‘not just another mainland city.’ For much of that
media and for the many who claim to want full autonomy or de facto inde-
pendence from the mainland, it as if the SAR stood for Semi-Autonomous
Region and not a Special Administrative Region.
Put another way, Hong Kong’s global presence and therefore its power and
visibility exist and persist because of the Western symbolic power embedded
in it. This may even explain the academic and media attention
afforded to Hong Kong not only frm the West but from the mainland.
This symbolic dimension may in the long run persist even after Hong
Kong fades—if it does fade—as a preeminent hub of global, financial
capital, especially as it flows in and out of China. The latter may itself
depend on how far Xi Jinping etal. will crack down on and restrict the
—heretofore legal—flight of capital out of China but through Hong
Kong, either into its strato-spheric property markets or out further into
the world via ‘business.’ To be sure Hong Kong’s important status also
has to do with it being the most English-language-friendly part of
China.3 In still other words, the former ‘pearl of the Orient’ is
‘exceptional’ because it was a ‘successful’ British colony in general and
because it was and to an extent still is a space of colonial liberalism. On
some accounts, Hong Kong is or was ‘arguably the most important part
of China for 150 years,’ precisely because it was not a part of political
China and was therefore spared of the latter’s trials and tribulations.4
Hong Kong is the one place on Chinese soil where lib-eralism, classical
as well as degraded, is alive and well, even hegemonic in the intellectual
and cultural spheres. But in the current conjuncture, this liberalism is in
direct competition with the power, difference, and politics of the actually
sovereign mainland, which simply isn’t going to concede to the
democrats’ political demands. It is also not going to ‘recognize’ or
acknowledge the rise of a particularistic Hong Kong—as opposed to
‘Chinese’—identity. The clash between ‘Beijing’ and Hong Kong’s
vari-ous democratic parties and groups and individuals thus reveals to
us the specter of mainland illiberalism, and also the limits and real
weakness of the sickly ghost of political liberalism (the democratic
movement) in Hong Kong, dating back to the late colonial era.
D. F. VUKOVICH

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For all the actions and visibility of the opposition, and even despite their
own best efforts, that movement as a whole has largely been de- politicized
and reduced to theatrics or grandstanding as well as libustering legislation
in the city legislature (LegCo). As a staunchly capitalist and competitive city
and society (or lack thereof) with huge revenue surpluses yet very small
government and social welfare or security, Hong Kong is always near the
bottom in opinion surveys purportedly measuring happiness. Further
below the mainland as well as Taiwan and Singapore to name three very
different places. But its current unhappiness and discontent is something
other than this. It speaks rst of all to its economic stagnation, continuously
high inequality, its loss of exceptional status, and its un- governability. But
equally important has been the political morass and stagnation, where nei-
ther the Chief Executive(CE) nor the LegCo nor the mainland can accom-
plish anything (the latter not being allowed to intervene except
exceptionally). This has produced great frustration across the board but
also an increasingly precarious and perhaps unsustainable living situation
for the city as a whole and as a ‘society.’ Over valued yet irresistibly rising
phenomena include property and the hegemony of the rentier class’s inter-
ests and desires (approximately one million mortgage holders); Hong Kong
localism and nativism, from a basic civic pride to xenophobic, anti-immi-
grant, and racist constructions of identity pitted against ‘mainlanders’;
autonomy or even independence as deeply desired if impossible goals; and
nally, pan-democratic political intransigence and continuous opposition to
all legislation and reforms—to governance—clashing with an equally obsti-
nate and more powerful ‘Beijing loyal’ establishment and Chief Executive,
as well as the actual mainland ofcials ambiguously connected to the latter.
(There appears to be a ‘disconnect’ within this last indeed.)5
While post-1997 Hong Kong politics in light of 2014 is more than
worthy of book-length treatment,6 the following analysis of the ‘Occupy
Central with Peace and Love’ movement (which quickly escalated into the
‘Umbrella Revolution’) will attempt to at least show this impasse in more
theoretical detail. And moreover to diagnose it as a conict between com-
peting political discourses: a colonial or Occidentalist liberalism on the
one hand in Hong Kong, and an ‘illiberal’—or is it a liberal economism?
—from the mainland or ‘loyalist’ side on the other hand. In other words
the conict is not in the end based in different cultures and identities, let
alone in an ethnic divide (as many would have it). But it does have to do
with the aftermaths of colonialism and imperialism: liberalism as a divisive
yet politically de-politicizing force that simply ts ill with the mainland
NO COUNTRY, NO SYSTEM: LIBERALISM, AUTONOMY…

132
Party-state system, which hates liberalism in the Schmittian sense even as
it is fully complicit with global capitalism. If Brexit and Trumpism speak
to the failures of what Nancy Fraser has brilliantly called ‘progressive neo-
liberalism’ and the escalation of xenophobia and racism, then the Hong
Kong-China example both resonates with this and departs from it. There
is plenty of xenophobia and a literally reactionary nativism in the city, for
example, the Hong Kong Autonomy Movement and the popularity of the
sensationalist writer Chin Wan, the ‘Civic Passion’ party, and yellow-peril
rhetoric about mainlanders. And its progressives (the various democratic-
liberal parties and individuals) are often neo-liberal or just laissez-faire in
economic terms, when they care about such terms at all. (There is also a
small and dwindling but long-standing ‘league of social democrats’ with a
more left pedigree.) While they have not been defeated to the extent the
American neo-liberal democrats have been, and they remain a relatively
popular and signicant force, the larger point is that they have virtually no
chance, by rule, of winning a majority in the city’s legislature and more-
over are blocked from making it to the city’s mayoral (Chief Executive)
post. The functional constituencies of the legislature (set-aside seats for
various professions) and the rules for CE selection indirectly via Beijing (as
in the Basic Law) preclude them actually taking power. This is why they
are adamant for ‘universal suffrage’ aka ‘civic nomination’ of the CE; it is
a question of freedom as they present it, but it must also be said that it is
also their own will to power, a desire to rule their Hong Kong.
These were the two key, dominant political phrases and demands of the
Umbrella protest, though they have a longer history. We can leave to one
side the fact that even the Western systems of liberal-capitalist democracy
do not have direct nomination but must go through party machines and
so on. It is an impossible demand that Beijing simply will not concede, as
even the most die-hard partisans must know. This is axiomatic. But that
has not stopped anyone, including the recent rise of localist and quasi-
independence parties and voices, from making these same, very specic
demands. This presents us with an interesting, ideological question: why
is this the case? No doubt one can suggest that this is about the heroic
fortitude of the democrats and the great ght for freedom against com-
munist Chinese tyranny or at least illiberalism; or alternatively the will to
power of a local political elite with decidedly abstract and middle-class
values. So too there is a clash of at least political cultures here, turning on
a one-party system versus a multi-party city system that is as fractious as it
is recent or young, and while the mainland clearly understands Hong
D. F. VUKOVICH

133
Kong very little, or does not care to, the city itself is just as ignorant of
Chinese politics as a whole. All of this is in play.
But what the rise and fall of Occupy shows us is that there is still more
to this persistence and impasse. What unies all the pan-democratic and
related oppositional parties (the ‘suffragists’) is a belief in convergence or
liberal convergence more accurately. The mainland will fall next year, or
maybe the year after,or at leastby 2047 when the Basic Law is ofcially
scrapped (if it is to be). If they keep at it, resolutely banging on about vot-
ing for the CE,libustering in the legislature, holding annual anti-CCP
events, and so on, then eventually it will work because sooner or later the
mainland will implode and converge into normalcy and liberal democracy
and so on. The Geist lives, at least in (parts of) this southern Chinese terri-
tory. After convergenceHong Kong will be free. Though curiously this
essentially religious (if secular) faith-based reasoning turns not on some-
thing grand but on the mereprocedure of voting.Afterconvergence and
suffrage ‘happen’Hong Kong willx itself through acts of legislation, pre-
sumably quickly. The naivetéof this should go without saying, not least in
a city utterly dominated by its own, native bourgeoisie andproperty cartels.
But note that the current Party-state—or at least its Hong Kong policy
wings—also shares a belief in convergence, just the other way around: that
it will learn to be part of the nation, will discover its ethnic- nationalist
belonging, or will just have to shut up and adjust, converging with the
irresistible force that is the sovereign mainland and its magicaleconomy.
All of this, both sides, native and mainland, speak to a failure in politics,
a failure of the political. Much of this failure is guaranteed by the Basic Law
mini-constitution itself, which, like the handover itself, promises both that
nothing much will change—that Hong Kong will keep its autonomy and
‘system’—and yet that it will return to and become part of an enormously
larger, in some ways radically different, political and economic entity or
nation-state called the sovereign PRC. All of the documentaries in the
world about student leader Joshua Wong or the wonderfully creative art,
slogans, and visuals of the movement and of the city will not change the
power relations/sovereignty involved, and will apparently not shake the
dubiousbelief in voting as, not merely a procedure, but the skeleton key to
democracy, freedom, and autonomy as well as truth, beauty, light. What
beliefs in convergence do, when put into practice like this, is to make poli-
tics a matter of economics, to substitute that, or ethics (e.g. appeals to vot-
ing rights! Patriotism!), for actual political struggle and contestation
between antagonists to be fought out and negotiated in the political
NO COUNTRY, NO SYSTEM: LIBERALISM, AUTONOMY…

134
realm—at the level of the state or related institutions. To be sure the Sino-
British-Hong Kong Basic Law system or compromise enshrines this impasse
and state of de-politicization. But if Hong Kong is to arrest its decline and
go forward, both those ‘Beijing loyal’ and ‘democratic’ forces will need to
nd a path of engagement beyond waiting for opposite convergences.
Underneath theUmbrella: What’s there?
The long-promised, frequently announced (over two years) ‘Occupy
Central With Peace and Love’ movement nally took place in early October
2014. It may have been delayed even longer had it not been triggered by
a college student-led boycott across the city in mid-September. The imme-
diate cause was a late summer decision by the mainland government to
essentially reiterate its policy on how the city’s Chief Executive (‘mayor’) is
elected—not through direct public nomination and vote but through not-
so secretly pre-screened candidates then chosen by a small nomination
committee, principally representing favored business sectors. Needless to
say this status quo statement was unpopular throughout the city, but it
especially angered the democrats and youth. The students were clearly the
vanguard of the protests. An eminently peaceful and non- violent demon-
stration from its beginnings to its end in late December, it became much
larger and broadly supported by the city at large when the police red tear
gas at ‘occupying’ protesters behind a few barricaded streets downtown.
Hence the photogenic umbrellas—a decent remedy against teargas, but an
even more brilliantly televisual tool for the cameras. Given the presence of
foreign media in Hong Kong, a headquarters of nance capital and English
language in China (though the latter is in decline), the Umbrella moment
quickly become a global media event, and one on ofcially Chinese but
‘freer’ soil. Principally occurring on the main island near the governmental
headquarters in the Admiralty and Causeway Bay districts, but later includ-
ing the more working class Mongkok district as well, at its peak the pro-
tests reached about 100,000 people at any one time. A large number made
to appear even larger on screens by the narrow corridors and dense city-
scapes that are uniquely Hong Kong. But there is no denying the turnout
was large and serious, that it persisted admirably and (mostly) peacefully
for nearly three months, that it was led, in so far as it had a central leader-
ship, by students and young professionals, and was arguably the most sig-
nicant political event—or protest at any rate—in the history of the city/
colony. Much larger than the more violent and radical but brief riots dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution, which augured in a new phase of repression
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and the squashing of dissent, especially of the left or would-be nationalist
and anti-imperialist left of Hong Kong. The repression or legal harassment
of the Occupy leaders or activists has been milder but also, ironicallyand
unlike in Wukan, without the welfaristtype of state- or city-level compen-
sations that subtended Hong Kong’s rise in the 1970sunder the British.
The decision to re teargas was decisive, and galvanizing—of the streets
but also of the public or ‘silent majority’ at large. Prior to the student- strike
in September, and given the frequent delays and re-announcements of
when and how it would start, there was already a good deal of skepticism
about the Occupy plan and what it might actually do. The traditional pan-
democrats (including the chief organizers of Occupy) are long- standing
actors in the Hong Kong polity and civil society. At the same time, as such,
they are somewhat ‘old news’ to younger generations and a known entity—
they are always there, and have solid and consistent, if varying, and never
overwhelming electoral support; they also never quite accomplish anything
in terms of suffrage or the budget and so on. The shift from ‘Occupy’ to
the Umbrella ‘Revolution,’ however, took the event from political business
as usual to a genuinely massive and global media event. The entire mood of
the city quickly shifted to strong support of the protesters, especially of
their right to protest, and against any crackdown on their assembly. In a city
where the police had long been popular moral exemplars, something new
was afoot and it reeked, perhaps unfairly, of Beijing (i.e. there is no evidence
of who ordered the teargas attack, if anyone other than the police). From
the moment the teargas ew and the umbrellas popped open, the original
organizers of Occupy lost control of the movement, even at various times
asking everyone to leave for their own safety. It would not be too much to
say that virtually the entire city, as conservative and alienated and non-
political as it can be, was unied in the early aftermath of the teargas.
By mid-December the movement petered out, as protests eventually do,
with far fewer people staying in the streets and occupying the zones. To be
sure this was also caused by the city’s Chief Executive C.Y. Leung (the de
facto Beijing appointee) insisting on the allegedly ‘illegal’ occupation need-
ing to end. But it is also true that the general public seemed to be losing
interest or growing impatient with the impasse or lack of a resolution or
practical effect (and perhaps the trafc hassles). As if it just wasn’t worth
extending longer, as the message (or messages) and the affect being sent to
Beijing was loud and clear. A non-dramatic ending for a movement that
held the world’s attention far more than even Wukan (an angrier, less tele-
genic event, but one with palpable outcomes), and an event closer, global-
media-event-wise, to say Tahir Square or even Tiananmen, 1989. The latter
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136
was used by the very sympathetic English language media and even by some
China experts.7 A Chinese protest and a subsequent Tiananmen analogy is
as predictable as sunrise and sunset, but in this case it is one clear difference
that stands out: if 1989 students and intellectuals had either a very vague
and non-specic demand for democracy and were not, in fact, demanding
the end of the Party-state system (with some exceptions), Hong Kong’s
2014 movement was entirely specic, even legalistic: the demand was,
again, for universal suffrage and civic nomination, which would be a direct
repudiation of the current Party-designed system and even to the ofcial
mainland interpretation of the Basic Law (about which, more later).
This no doubt speaks to the differences between the two political cultures
and belief systems, be it in 1989 or in 2014. That difference and time span
itself speaks to the deceptive nature of ‘convergence’ understood as a real
thing or force as opposed to an interpretation or ideology. This departure
from the vagueness of 1989 is arguably very much to the credit of Hong
Kong’s liberal democrats and especially its student youth movement.
Howsoever young and ‘naïve’ they may all be, vis-à-vis the mainland’s power
and sovereignty and Hong Kong’s own political system, they are well
informed and on point when they speak of why voting is important (recall
powers, how a legislative process as in the West ideally works, and so on).
They have the liberal and ‘civics textbook’ catechism down. Indeed, it is this
that even gives some weightage to mainland chargers that 2014 reeked of
foreign interference in Hong Kong—it is clear that the Hong Kong students
are learning this from somewhere (albeit in Hong Kong) and this ‘some-
where’ is denitely not a mainland space or political culture. That being said,
there is also no good reason to see the 2014 movement as funded or ani-
mated by anything other than home-grown anti-communism and people like
the loud media tycoon Jimmy Lai. There are certainly small groups and
NGOs in Hong Kong that indirectly get US money, but the same is true of
the mainland. If I may speak anecdotally, some of my own undergraduate
students that same fall term of 2014, none of whom were leaders but merely
participants, would put my former American students to shame in this regard,
as the others of us heard rst- hand in class discussion. Such youths’ learning
and knowledge is genuinely impressive in its own right. But the contrast
between the two Occupys, Central and Wall Street, also reects the difference
between living under an actual liberal-capitalist democratic regime like the
USA and the far more seductive idea of living in the ideal or textbook one.
And yet perhaps because of that very specic demand in 2014, after it
was made repeatedly, and knowing that an immediate yes was not forth-
coming (in 2014 or likely ever), the movement did lose steam by
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December, as least as an eminently political protest directed against the
actual government and electoral process. Or put another way, by the sec-
ond month of the protest it became a less political event and more of a
social activist and even ‘cultural’ ‘happening.’ This is not a criticism of that
development in itself; it was no doubt meaningful for the individuals
involved, as well as the police and observers and the city as a whole. This
dimension—the creativity and virtuality of it—has also been the main area
of academic or intellectual inquiry to date. The art and visuals, the slogans
and complex use of Chinese/Cantonese, the claiming of public space, and
the purported experiences or existential aspects of the Umbrella Revolution
have been fairly well documented. More articles and lms are no doubt
forthcoming. Perhaps most signicant within this was the ‘salon’ or dis-
cussion circles or groupings that sprung up among the protesters, and
more generally the conversations that must have taken place in the newly
created, temporary public space of the occupied street areas.
This is all intrinsically interesting and of value for Hong Kong studies
(among other things).8 My own view is that if one wants to call this—
the ‘culture’ or imaginary of the event, the event as a virtual republic—
the actually democratic and ‘radical’ aspect of the protest event, then
this is a reication.9 There is simply—to date—no proof or data or evi-
dence of the Umbrella movement being secretly and unconsciously
anti-neo-liberal or substantively democratic (e.g. around the economic
or class, or even ‘social power’), let alone anti-capitalist or leftist.10 To
make the argument that it was ‘radical’ or genuinely ‘subversive’ in
some way, one has to rely on pure semiotics or symbolic signications
(occupying shared space, seizing the highways, boycotting classes, hold-
ing salons, eating free sausages from sympathetic hedge funders). One
has to then and necessarily argue that this was all happening uncon-
sciously, since there were no such political demands staked out in the
public sphere or civil society or by movement leaders in so far as they
existed cohesively or purposefully. Ideologically, the protest at its height
and most coherent was chiey liberal, in a very explicit and obvious way:
conict o ver t he m eaning o f a l egal d ocument or quasi-constitution,
perceived violations of rights, the repugnance of the mainland ‘com-
munist’ regime, and so on.11
It is important to note at the outset that those protests and the democ-
racy movement from the 1980s onward have not been based in social or
substantive equality. This is not the central or even a major demand of any
of the parties or of the protesters (whom were eventually quite diverse in
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138
other ways). Hong Kong’s political culture, inchoate as it may be, does
not include a discourse of social democracy to be found in parts of Europe,
let alone any rhetoric of equality, workers’ centrality to the nation, the
right to rebel, and so on that may be found in some protests across the
northern border. Missing as well is the essential populism and economic
critique powerfully captured by Occupy Wall Street’s ‘the 98% versus the
2%.’ Hong Kong does have a vibrant and active civil society or public
sphere (albeit with little public space)—this has not been repressed since
1997 or 2014. It is unlikely for that to happen given both the difculties
of any such planned repression and, moreover, the lack of power civil soci-
ety has in Hong Kong as well as elsewhere. As Michael Hardt and Toni
Negri once put it, civil society has generally ‘withered away’ and been
subsumed by the state; it can largely be ignored by the latter.12 Protest can
still have effects, clearly, and is often the only means to help produce or
even stop political and social change. But such effects are not guaranteed
and in any case do not amount to a robust civil society that stands autono-
mously from and can contend with the state, as in basic Hegelian and
bourgeois historiography of the rise of capitalism and liberal democracy.
Hardt and Negri’s essential point here is that modern, global societies
have now evolved new, subtler forms of power and control than this model
will allow.
To be sure specic examples of economic and other inequalities are
reported on and discussed in Hong Kong’s various media, as they are
everywhere else. But this too is not the same as having a democratic or
other political culture that turns on equality and, for example, what used
to be called even by classic liberal political theorists, economic democracy.
For Hong Kong, as will be discussed later, the dominant, perhaps even the
sole understanding of ‘democracy’ is procedural and liberal more gener-
ally. As student leader Joshua Wong said it in an interview, ‘our goal is to
make Hong Kong more liberal, and then more equal.’ Wong, no doubt a
future politician within the Hong Kong democratic establishment, at least
posits equality here, and so offers hope for a more egalitarian political
culture to come, but as something that comes after ‘liberalization.’ This
will sound dubious to most seasoned students and theorists of politics. But
in any case the lack of a discourse of social equality is striking. When the
2014 Chief Executive, C.Y. Leung, pronounced that ‘Democracy would
see poorer people dominate the Hong Kong vote,’ he not only revealed
himself as the arch-capitalist authoritarian (vetted by the People’s
Republic!) but in effect exposed the liberal democracy movement for their
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maniacal focus on electoral rules and Western parliamentarism while hav-
ing little to say to the poor or working classes.
While narrow in scope—the legal and procedural debate or battle over
elections—the 2014 event was political in the sense of being about a polit-
ical process and two antagonistic demands or sides. We can perhaps leave
to one side the Schmittian point about liberalism neutralizing politics and
making it a matter of administration, since the political liberals have never
had command of the government and they do very much seek power.
There was certainly a friend/enemy split in the streets of 2014. Hong
Kong is in this sense a political ght over how to administer the society
and for whom, curiously turning on pro- or anti-‘Beijing,’ though at no
point do ‘the masses’ or the six million without property holdings have an
adequately representative party. In that sense one can also speak of Hong
Kong’s politics as still being de-politicized, despite the massive increase in
protests since 1997.
But to return to 2014: the protest movement shifted, to what I have
called a social as opposed to a political event, or to a substantive democ-
racy movement. ‘Democracy,’ if it has any meaning at all today outside of
the proceduralist and legalistic denition it has been reduced to, is mean-
ingless unless it turns on a rhetoric and politics of real or social as opposed
to formal equality, redistributionist or revolutionary, and the general will.
Politics has to be dyadic and antagonistic and a struggle over fundamental
yet conicting interests—a contestation of the state and how it is used or
not. And if equality and power are to be taken seriously, then the eco-
nomic realm and class divisions of Hong Kong society have to be at the
forefront. As Jodi Dean is fond of reminding us, Goldman Sachs doesn’t
care if you raise chickens in your back yard, or, if we transpose, HSBC and
Big Property don’t care if you occupy their freeway for a while. Both
Occupy movements, East and West, were welcome outbursts in that they
expressed discontent, gave the lie to a ‘happy’ status quo or non-political
‘silent’ majority, and exercised free speech. But Hong Kong’s fell short of
being political, beyond the articulation of a demand for full and direct
nomination. That is, again, not to deny the seriousness of the Umbrella
moment or the existential or other signicances. In a de-politicized con-
juncture, and a generally traditional ‘Chinese’ or conservative society such
as Hong Kong, such outbursts are welcome on principle. If nothing else it
was a very real outburst of free speech and right to assembly, such rights
really only existing in their practice.
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My focus here is, as has been obvious, on something other than the
creativity or imaginary of the movement: the politics proper of the event,
on the meaning of the demands and antagonism between ‘Hong Kong’
(its opposition, especially) and ‘Beijing,’ and what this means for under-
standing politics or the political in the city and more globally. Along these
lines, it must also be noted that Hong Kong’s Occupy did share one thing
with the Occupy movement of Wall Street, USA, and in fact of much
recent American social and political movements since the 1960s: a certain
‘tyranny of structurelessness,’ as feminist intellectual Jo Freeman famously
put it. Or more simply, a lack of unied leadership or coherent, articulated
organization and exit strategy for the protest leaders and participants. At
any rate, end it did after three months.13
The immediate aftermath of the movement in this ‘politics proper’
sense has been, or was, a counter-proposal from Beijing about how to re-
constitute that CEselection process. The composition of the 1200- member
committee that nominates candidates would have, unfortunately, remained
the same. But the threshold/votes needed for getting nominated would
be lowered and the number of candidates increased. There would then be
a second round of committee voting, and then two or three candidates
would be put to a vote by the city in a one-woman one vote, rst past the
post system. This was put forward to the legislature and was—predict-
ably—rmly rejected by the pan-dem representatives. It is indeed far from
a direct nomination system (which, again, actually exists nowhere), and
still makes it difcult if not impossible for any oppositional democrat to
get elected/nominated by that selection committee. But it was a conces-
sion from above the border with Guangdong, and there would have been
no good reason not to accept it and nonetheless keep right on protesting
and demanding for more. But of further note is the small debacle of the
so-called loyalist or establishment parties, who had planned a walk-out to
prevent a quorum and hence an actual vote/rejection of the compromise
measure taking place. This too was botched on their own part (miscom-
munications), in a sign of just how dysfunctional even the so-called loyalist
establishment can be. In fact it must be remembered that there is plenty of
blame for bad governance to go around the—quite narrow—Hong Kong
political spectrum. Including the benign—but effectively malign—neglect
from the mainland.
There was considerable pressure city-wide to accept the electoral reform
proposal as a small yet practical step toward better ‘suffrage.’ But the pan-
democratic movement (the parties and their real and virtual supporters) has
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never been given to compromise, given their essentially faith-based belief in
convergence and/or CCP collapse, about which more later. But without
this reform entering into law, such as it was, the Occupy/Umbrella move-
ment can be said to have achieved nothing tangible or practicable, much
like the Wall Street one. Nothing has improved politically since then, except
arguably for the worse: continued political stagnation and even decline in
peoples’ livelihood (welfare), further economic integration which chiey
benets the rich and property holding rentier class, and in fact some con-
solidation of power within the establishment (further controlling university
governing councils, legally harassing occupy activists, and so on). Their
failure to achieve, arguably even to try to achieve anything practical or
measurable, also did not necessarily hurt the pan- democratic movement.
Their own view is that it did not; and indeed electorally, the pan-democrats
have more or less stayed even in the following legislature elections. The real
post-Occupy event was the election of three younger, more stridently
‘localist’ or even independence- proclaiming candidates. Each of these vic-
tors ended up being disbarred for refusing to take their oaths properly and
instead mocking them. The two ‘Youngspiration’ party candidates may
fairly be called xenophobic if not franklyracist and right-wing, albeit in a
juvenile way. The third candidate from ‘Demosisto,’ the oddly named new
party/grouplet composed of former student leaders, may be fairly called a
de facto independence party, given theirgoal of complete autonomy and
‘self-determination’for Hong Kong. Strange fruit—the nativists or ‘local-
ists’ in particular—of a by now ‘legendary’ Occupy movement. But also
one that is entirely predictable given the rise of xenophobic anti-immigrant
and general anti-‘communist’ sentiment in the SAR, before and after that
protest, just as much as thehierarchical and exclusionary nature of liberal-
ism. It all pointsto a deep and, alas, very practical or real impasse, the stakes
of which are nothing less than the political future of Hong Kong.
Had that reform proposal been accepted it might have changed the
recent, post-occupy CE election and therefore Hong Kong’s political sys-
tem and political culture. David Zweig, a Hong Kong-based political sci-
entist of long-standing, has recently argued that even as constrained as
Beijing’s proposed new system was, it would have meant that after being
approved/screened by the selection committee, those two or three candi-
dates would have had to actually campaign in the city in a far more sub-
stantial and interesting way.14 With somewhere between 40% and 60% of
the electorate on average, the democracy-desiring voters would have had
to have been addressed, whereas the roughly 30% of the electorate who
are ‘Beijing-friendly’ or pro-government are big enough to command
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142
attention as well. What is more, the two or three candidates would have
had to compete for votes from the populace, and not just the elite 1200 of
that committee.
What Hong Kong had instead, as with the previous two CE elections,
was a largely contentless parade of inanity before the obvious choice all
along was elected by a wider margin (current CE Carrie Lam). To be sure,
both candidates were unsurprisingly and clearly neo-liberal in their eco-
nomic orientation (runner up John Tsang is the former nancial secretary
of the city, and adamantly against government spending and, e.g., social
housing). Thus, if what Zweig argues is correct (and his numbers do seem
to add up), even on proceduralist democratic grounds, the pan- democratic
and anti-Beijing forces achieved nothing so much as de-politicization and
a perpetuation of the status quo that they allegedly hate as their political
enemy. Or are they too not part of the same structure and problem, as if a
recording playing on an endless loop. Like the neo-liberal progressives of
the USA and Britain, their movement also does nothing to stem the tide
of a rising xenophobia and hatred against the mainland and its political
system or sovereignty, a reactionary development within the city that can
only end badly for tiny Hong Kong.
There is no reason to think that Beijing will offer another counter-
proposal for electoral reform, and in fact the new CE, Carrie Lam, has
already said that that is off the table for the next ve-year election cycle.
This speaks to Beijing’s as well as Hong Kong’s growing impatience not
simply and intolerantly of protest, but of the perceived narcissism of the
traditional pan-democrats and suffrage-opposition ‘movement’ in general.
Indeed the aftermath of Occupy and the umbrellas as of 2018 and the
LegCo system, is that the traditional pan-democratic movement has been
somewhat sidelined electorally and lost its veto power.15 Short of ‘Beijing’
falling apart entirely in that half decade, the cause of ‘civic nomination
with universal suffrage’—while pleasing to the ear of a Western-educated
viewer—is pretty much the political zombie it always has been in Hong
Kong (more on this via the Basic Law later).
If the failure of the opposition in Occupy, in terms of its effect and
aftermath, is easy enough to see, how to explain the intransigence of the
(liberal) democracy movement in general as a sort of continuous libuster-
ing opposition and, relatedly, a demonstrated, if unprofessed, faith in con-
vergence? This is a question that extends beyond Occupy and traces back
to the Hong Kong democracy movement’s origins in the colonial era of
the 1980s. To understand this is to understand the limits of contemporary
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liberalism or neo-liberalism as a ‘democratic’ or worthy political ideology
and movement. I must note here another, contributing explanation or
cause for this faith in convergence: Christian faith itself, with its undeni-
able belief in some form of teleology and Messianism attached to human
mortality and a higher being or order. It is no accident that two of the
three founding ‘fathers’ of the Occupy Central movement (law professor
Benny Tai and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming) are deeply religious individuals
who make much of their faith. Such faith may arguably be the ur-force
within all convergence thinking, at least in the West or in colonial moder-
nity around the globe. It is worth recalling that religion is more than a
mere ideology or belief-system and assorted dogma that is either true or
false. It is something akin to a Foucauldian or structural discourse: an
apparatus with a long institutional and material history, well before mod-
ern notions of progress and political normalcy and development, and that
is so fundamental that it speaks to us and helps shape and limit what we
can and cannot think. The force of its rhetoric lies precisely in its sublime
or moral dimensions and aspirations, a would-be transcendence of even
the specically political world of social forces and antagonisms; convergence
thinking is powerful because it speaks to moral duty (and superiority and
will to power) and also to transcendence in the face of misery and death.
Even Marx meant something like this when he spoke of the ‘opium of the
masses,’ but the point here is that this can and does also inform the alleg-
edly secular world of liberal-democratic protest. Christianity also has a
prominent place within Hong Kong and its civil society, just as it had a
signicant role in the 2014 event.16 Much of Hong Kong’s moral educa-
tion has long taken this form—that is a religious education in formal
(church) and informal terms, in primary and secondary schooling (public
and private) as well as in family or private life. Indeed the local, public
system of schooling in Hong Kong is dominated by Christian schools.
This has to be counted as one of the failures of de-colonization.
This all derives from the colonial era, where traditional Chinese moral
education was weak and where the mainland’s revolutionary path and
developments were mostly forbidden subjects or invoked only as night-
mares across the border. Two of the four Occupy leaders (one a reverend)
are explicit about the Church or ‘faith’ being a large part of what inspires
their activism, and another founder, while not religious, describes it as also
being about spiritual values.17 This rise is a familiar phenomenon in Asia
and elsewhere, not least because religion can, as ever, provide resources of
hope, existential meaning, and belonging in societies such as Hong Kong
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144
and, increasingly, China, that have little or weak ‘moral education’ (to
adopt a phrase used in Hong Kong) but with real needs for such meaning-
fulness. There is an obvious homology to be made between faith and con-
vergence, at the level of fantasy and desire and ‘righteousness,’ in regard
to the rise of Christianity in Hong Kong or, for that matter, to mainland
Chinese nationalism or patriotism. But the larger question here is not one
of faith and morality alone, nor one of the individual leaders’ or the par-
ticipants’ individual biographies. Beyond ‘faith’ feeding into and repro-
ducing ‘convergence’ thinking, we have to attend to other aspects of
Hong Kong’s political quagmire, its state of de-politicized politics. Much
of this is hard-wired into the SAR’s constitution but others aspects have
also to do with the legacy of colonial liberalism.
the basic laW: One cOUntry, tWO systems, nO
POlitics
The genesis of Hong Kong’s stagnation dates from the Sino-British Joint
Declaration of 1985, the mini-constitution or ‘Basic Law,’ and the general
principle of ‘one country, two systems’ as generally laid out by Deng
Xiaoping. That Basic Law document says this:
The socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of
life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.
This is a tall order, even if China were not capitalist and thus given to the
forces of homogenization and assimilation characteristic of that and
‘globalization.’
Which is to say the root of Hong Kong’s political and even economic
ills are rooted in that historical juncture and in that decision or rather,
that non-decision to let the god-like forces of the market and ethnic iden-
tication, inside and outside of Hong Kong, sort it all out. This is as
opposed to politics or the process of the political (the state). Outside of
any actual, explicit planning or more detailed, unambiguous policy mak-
ing before and after the handover—something forbidden by the promise
of autonomy or two systems—then what the Declaration and Basic Law
turn upon is nothing less than a dual and even mutually exclusive ‘theory’
of convergence: economism and ethnic belonging for the mainland, and
D. F. VUKOVICH

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for Hong Kong, a ‘free-market’ liberal capitalism, itself always global,
leading to the mainland’s as well as Hong Kong’s reform or transforma-
tion into a normal democratic regime, of both places joining up on what
neo-liberal US President Bill Clinton once informed the Chinese was ‘the
right side of history.’
That handover arrangement in many ways left the colonial system and
era intact (merely switching the embodied races and skins of the leading
politicians and bureaucrats), even if this was done at the time for entirely
pragmatic reasons, with fears of capital ight perhaps chief among them.
The mainland’s gambit, as done by the utterly pragmatic and nationalistic
Deng Xiaoping etal., and as noted in an earlier chapter on liberalism and
economism, was simply to ‘let the party continue’ by maintaining if not
escalating ‘prosperity’ or capital accumulation: Hong Kong can keep
being capitalist and ‘autonomous’ while it somehow still joins the sover-
eign country/power as something other than a mere neighbor. Hong
Kong was to somehow return yet remain untouched and keep its ‘system’
(avague word indeed) pristine and autonomous, for a period of 50 years.
This was in effect, if not by intent, to buy time for the homogenizing
forces of the market to do their work, in China as well as in the enclave
city, and for ‘brotherhood’ or national belonging to kick in. Just as the
Liu-Deng rightist or liberal line in favor of economism and ‘peace’ or sta-
bility stood in opposition, in some crucial instances, to that of the Maoist
line in favor of ‘politics in command,’ the Sino part of the Sino-British
declaration also indexes a faith in development/economism, a simple
pragmatism, and a neutralization of politics and antagonisms. As such the
‘1c, 2s’ principle and much of the Basic Law are actually impossible
because they wish to snuff out politics, not deal with them. The resultant
documents are deliberately vague—pointedly ambiguous as many such
diplomatic or trade texts are—and an act of de-politicization. As if one can
have economic and ‘capitalist’ integration and ‘intercourse’ between the
two places, including rapidly increased immigration from the mainland
(always part of the deal), but not have any effects on the putative auton-
omy of the society or culture. Needless to say, what in Hong Kong is
sometimes called ‘mainlandization’ or even ‘colonization’ by ‘the com-
munists’—all of it easily explicable by the force and centrifugal pull of the
Chinese economy and its continued development or expansion—is some-
thing that was fully implicit and arguably even obvious from the very
beginning of the Sino-British deal-making.
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The immediate issue of 2014 and the electoral process (‘democracy’ as
locally dened) overall has been one particular part of the Basic Law, and
it is worth quoting in full (emphases added):
The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall
be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed
by the Central People’s Government.
The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specied in the
light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
and in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The
ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage
upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accor-
dance with democratic procedures.
Thus the role of the sovereign Party-state up north—to have a real role—is
clear in the rst paragraph, and arguably even in the second’s reference to
a ‘representative committee’ that would inevitably include Beijing-friendly
business and other constituencies. By election or by consultation, the cen-
tral government will appoint. The rub comes with the second part about
universal suffrage and ‘in accordance with democratic procedures.’
Universal suffrage literally just means that all will vote—precisely what
Beijing offered in the counter-Umbrella proposal. And this is what they
have long insisted on—that it is they who are upholding the Basic Law.
From the ‘pro’ Beijing side, it is the opposition who are violating and
endangering it with the civic nomination demand. (The Basic Law invoca-
tion game can be played by numerous sides, which is at once the ‘genius’
and awfulness of the document/agreement.) Needless to say this is entirely
unconvincing to the democrats or like-minded, for whom the only legiti-
mate system would be the ‘universal’ or Western one, that is who insist
that there must be ‘civic nomination’ before the vote. For them, this is
precisely what ‘in accordance with democratic procedures’ means. Indeed
it does in much of the world—again with the caveat that some type of
direct civic nomination without parties or other obstacles does not exist in
any major city or country of the world. Even so, this leaves out the rather
large exception of the sovereign, China, which has never had such a system
and which denes itself as having its own system and tradition of democ-
racy and governance. It is the PRC that in this instance stands up for dif-
ference or particularity, as opposed to the liberal universalism of Hong
Kong’s opposition.
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This debate over the Basic Law is a fascinating battle of interpretations
over an ambiguous document (or Article therein). At the level of the text
itself—a level that does not actually exist but that literary critics sometimes
still like to pretend does—the issue is thoroughly ambiguous and, what is
more, undecidable in any objective or empirical sense. This is precisely
because the document’s language simply is ambiguous on the voting
Article in particular, and ill-conceived as anything other than an exercise in
expedience from the British and Chinese sides, as well as an unspoken
statement of faith in an eventual convergence to come (either Sino or
British/Free). How does one dene what a ‘broadly representative com-
mittee’ is? What ‘accords’ to ‘democratic procedures’? Recalling that
representation signies both picture and proxy, and that it will always
therefore be selective, incomplete, open to contestation and the force-
elds of power and politics, this fundamental ambiguity cannot be wished
or protested away, alas. This cuts both ways—the mainland-identied side
(their interpretation) is also unlikely to persuade anyone who desires direct
civic nomination, or sees that as something of massive symbolic import. In
the tussle over the Article, a far more pressing issue is ignored: the reform
of the ‘functional constituencies’ that favor big business and property
developers to the point of their dominating the city and all its people,
from foreign domestic workers to the lower middle classes. The latter
reform, it is worth saying, would be for more consequential for equality
and a legislative politics of redistribution. The fetish for voting and the
roles called forth—Defenders of Chinese Tradition versus Freedom
Fighters—may be personally gratifying but can also be seen as a sideshow.
Such reform is also something that can be demanded by a vibrant and
active protest or civic culture (which Hong Kong has) or be LegCo mem-
ber, without also demanding the one thing they cannot have (direct nomi-
nation of an anti-communist).
In the end, the battle over Basic Law interpretations is however
decided, and decided by the ‘camp’ with the most power. It is the main-
land and its ‘loyalists’ or local supporters who have the power to make
their interpretation count as the correct or true one. That the current
opposition groups and individuals will never buy into this matters far less
than they, or the mainstream media, would like to admit. To all of the
latter, the Beijing government in general, and the Sino-Hong Kong sys-
tem in particular, lack legitimacy. But this is an instance—to be found in
democratic as well as ‘illiberal’ regimes—where legitimacy matters far less
than power and brute fact. The pan-democrats and their ilk (including the
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148
city’s activist youth) simply lack power outside of the ‘civil society’ and
certain media and educational circles (where it is strong); taken together,
those for ‘suffrage,’ let alone full autonomy, may not even form a statisti-
cal majority in the city, and while many may be said to be prosperous and
secure nancially, they are far removed from the corridors, conversations,
and networks of ruling class power, which in Hong Kong are inevitably
capitalist and cross-border in orientation.18 As is well known in the city,
the majority of working class and poorer voters, living in humble and
cramped but subsidized ats and with at least access to (an admittedly
deteriorating) basic public infrastructure or safety net, regularly vote for
some of the Beijing-friendly parties, such as the DAB (Democratic Alliance
for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong); and the rich go another
way as well (e.g. the Liberal party). Perhaps both demographics are guilty
of a certain ‘economism’—or an honest pragmatism within the working
class—but in the absence of a real economic agenda and program it is
hard to see either bloc moving toward the ‘suffragist’ cause. This leaves
the various democrats now competing for the votes of the lower and
‘average’ middle- class fractions, including the more Western-identied
and liberally educated, as well as the youth vote that is increasingly drawn
to the full-on nativist or quasi-independence groups. This, plus the fact
that the Legislature is stacked to prevent any clear majority of a single
party (only 40 or the 70 total seats are popularly elected) means that the
democratic movement—as it is currently composed—can likely never
govern at the LegCo level, let alone at the CE or mayoral level.
But all of this, it must be said, is not just about interpretation of a legal
document and the power to uphold that interpretation. The other thing
underneath the umbrellas was this: the brute fact that ‘Beijing’ is simply
never going to allow the nomination, let alone the election, of clearly anti-
communist and/or anti-Party-state democrats. The elite or big dollar class
in Hong Kong is not on board with this either (which makes the lack of
social democratic discourse in Hong Kong all the more striking). So too
for the more recent politicians and activists from the genuinely xenophobic
if not clearly racist nativist groups (as opposed to the far more harmless and
acceptable ‘Hong Kong pride’ localists). This is an obvious instance of
illiberal China being authoritarian; but it should not be a surprising or even
scandalous one. At the risk of personication and banality, one can note
that political systems in general tend not to tolerate, let alone dialogue
with, social and political movements aimed at that system’s ruin or radical
transformation. This de facto ban is also given, in so many words, in the
ambiguous design of Article 45. But even that document’s importance, so
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dear to many who came of political age in the later 1980s and 1990s, is
greatly over-stated given the power differences that have always in reality
been rst and foremost. Hong Kong was never going to have an equal seat
at the table with Beijing or the PRC as a whole during its period of transi-
tion or ‘autonomy,’ and nor could it. Hong Kong is still well placed to be
a conduit for foreign capital, given its roughly Western legal system and
English-friendly environment and, in sum, its greater transparency and
‘freer’ environment for capital. It also the largest offshore yuan hub for
mainland money, which may be precisely why the Party-state, too, wants Hong
Kong to remain autonomous. It is there to legally ‘launder’ wealth from the
mainland. For this reason alone Hong Kong democrats or non-conserva-
tives may want to think through their a priori commitments to autonomy.
So too it must be said that ‘autonomy’ is not a value to be found within the
Chinese political culture, let alone the state-systems old and new, be they
understood as Confucian or Leninist or other. And as an ethical ideal, it is
also not particularly compelling in a modern, globalized world. If ‘no man
is an island,’ as John Dunne put it in the seventeenth century, then no port
city is either, be it Dubai or Hong Kong.
It is also no secret, least of all to PRC ofcials in charge of Hong Kong
affairs, that the traditional democracy movement, from its very beginnings
with Martin Lee in the late 1980s up to the present, seeks (wishes) the peace-
ful transformation of the Party-state into a more Westernized (‘universal’)
democracy. That Hong Kong cannot become such a thing without that hap-
pening rst or simultaneously up North, and that tiny but proud Hong Kong
could even lead the way. A nice, even inspiring, liberal universalist sentiment
that—in a very different register—could even resonate with the Communist
Manifesto. To be a Hong Kong democrat, then, is to have a mission, even one
beyond your newly or someday-to-be free city. Note the strong sense of
exceptionalism here, as if Hong Kong were that (American) ‘city on a hill,’
and noteas well as the liberalism bestowed by a colonial/Western educational
formation that continues in at least many of the local, elite universities.
Moreover, note the faith in convergence. Changing China is not an absurd
thing to think for Lee and the original democratic generations, precisely
because of this odd and oddly secular yet religious, liberalyet conservative,
historical yet mythic, faith. This is in many ways a fascinating response to
Hong Kong’s relative powerlessness. It speaks as well to the fact that it never
had a signicant independence movement during its 15 decades of coloniza-
tion. In the face of being weak, tiny, and irrelevant toBritain and to the main-
land, excludingthe bankers and the rentier class, Hong Kongimagines itself
at the leading edge of freedom and the most important place within China.
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150
This does, again, have to do with the Western symbolic power embedded in
the city. Even Shanghai has no such pretension.
This desire to change China is hardly a scandal, and is in fact a modern
Chinese tradition in itself. But for the mainlandit can resonate with the
specter of American attempts to contain and constrain China into becom-
ing ‘normal’ via some type of ‘velvet revolution.’ The latter specter was
indeed invoked during the 2014 protests by the ‘mainlandist’ press in
Hong Kong (e.g. Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao). And it is undeniable that
some groups or entities within Hong Kong’s civil society receive funds
from the American National Endowment for Democracy (via the US
Congressional budget) as well as from, to take a notable example, by Next
Media tabloid-tycoon, and arch anti-Beijing anti-communist Jimmy Lai.19
Even so, however, it would be deeply mistaken to see the protests as some-
thing other than a home-grown Hong Kong movement, or to think that
there is an actual threat of anything dangerously velvety and soft appearing
and encompassing and smothering and transforming the city, let alone the
mainland via the city. It is just that for Hong Kong, ‘home-grown’ is also
always global and crisscrossed by many ows of people, money, and goods,
which is, again, why it being an historical port ‘space’ as much as a colonial
entrepôt means it cannot be autonomous and never has been. This too
cuts both ways: Hong Kong cannot be an autonomously or ‘authentically’
Chinese/mainland city, and is not one now, due not only to its ethnic and
other diversity but to the great majority of its citizens never having lived
under the PRC.
At any rate, as far as having ‘oppositional’ democrats in the fold, in
1984, Deng himself was quite explicit that even Hong Kong ‘leftists’ (and
whatever this meant, he did not like) as well as ‘rightists’ could serve as
elected ‘administrators’ of Hong Kong—the only ‘requirement was they
must be patriots, that is, people who love the motherland and Hong
Kong.’20 Lee and most pan-democrats—such as Albert Ho—have t that
well enough, with the exception of the few virulent anti-communist
rabble- rousers like ‘Long Hair’ Leung Kwok-hung and ‘Mad Dog’ Wong
Yuk-man, or arguably the most colonial-elite party in the city, the ‘Civic
Party’ formerly known as the Barristers’ Party. This was all allowable—and
still is—because of the (perceived) patriotism (or ethnic belonging), which
could encompass colonial (Chinese) liberals as well as the odd leftist or
rightist and of course the tycoons. But, crucially, also because the local,
liberal, democratic faith in convergence was always non-threatening to at
least the Deng era apparatchiks because there was no actual or perceived
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threat to sovereign Chinese power. In fact for all the lively protesting or
‘action’ in civil society occupied by the oppositional parties in the broadly
dened ‘democratic movement’ since the 1980s, this was always at another
level a decidedly non-political or de-politicized movement. There was sim-
ply no way for this civil society movement to actually challenge or take on
‘state’ or city-wide power. Civil society is itself non-threatening even in
‘full’ democracies like the United States and Britain, whose publics, for
example, vehemently opposed the war on Iraq to no effect whatsoever.
What is to be done then? Legislation can be blocked through libustering,
and it usually is by the democrat-dominated LegCo opposition to the CE
(to any CE), who have usually managed to secure enough seats to do so.
But this just leaves an already iniquitous and—for the propertyless lower
middle class or the working class—dire status quo in place. When they li-
buster legislation to death, the democrats no doubt see themselves as lib-
eral freedom-ghting heroes. And the CE or government does present
bills as an all-or-nothing bundle, similar to the US system: one has to
accept the sweet deal for property developers, or mainland business inter-
ests, for example, to get the other good deals in public works or new
subsidized housing. (Or the government will withdraw the whole bill.)
The democrats respond by libustering, apparently on principle (an anti-
government principle if not an anti-state one). But this can also be seen as
negligence or worse; at least from the standpoint of governance—of a city
and populace desperately needing this as well as economic development
and decent jobs—this is at the very least a pyrrhic victory, unless one’s own
property values are unaffected either way (and they rarely are). Then all of
the political theater is just that—performance and ‘culture.’ For the
wealthy of Hong Kong, be they democratic or otherwise—and recalling
that, for this SAR, those with land are the ruling class—democrat, estab-
lishment, nativist, patriotic, what’s the difference? Property is the main
source of capital, savings (social security, patrimony), and power in the
city; it is tightly controlled to stay that way for the rentier class.
FrOm liberalism tOPOst-cOlOnialism tOimPasse:
sOUnd andFUry intheenclave
But the traditional democratic movement has weakened in recent years, even
if the demand for ‘free’ voting and a Western electoral system is still live. In
fact some of the more recent groups, like the democratic youth’s ‘Demosisto’
party, have called for a veritable constitutional convention before 2047
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152
arrives (when the ‘two systems’ bit runs out). The desire for all the liberal,
formal procedures of democracy is there then, though still little about equal-
ity and social democracy. This lack of concern for equality is, again, what
makes us characterize such ‘democratic’ groups and politics as decidedly
liberal, as opposed to left. But for better and for worse this desire for a new
constitution remains sheer fantasy outside of some actual collapse of the
mainland system and—which does not necessarily follow—or convergence
of both the Hong Kong and mainland systems. Well before Occupy, it has
been self-evident that the Party-state in the North is not dissolving or
imploding or becoming a ‘normal’ democracy anytime soon, and likewise is
not coming over to the opposition’s reading of the Basic Law. This impasse
denes Hong Kong politically, and seems irresolvable unless one has faith in
convergence (Sinied or liberal). The so-called establishment or loyalist par-
ties also remain ineffectual, partly due to their lack of organization and
coherence, but also due to them having no actual connection with the main-
land given the latter’s commitment to ‘two systems’ and relative ‘autonomy.’
Ironically, for all the charges of mainlandization and ‘communist take-over’
ung about, and notwithstanding the economic integration of the two places
(e.g. via tourist industry), the allegedly ‘Beijing aligned’ establishment seems
to receive little if any advice or guidance from the mainland. Or if it does (in
some clandestine fashion), then it seems spectacularly inept at carrying that
out or defeating their pan-democratic opponents. The establishment simply
takes a consistent pro-business line, and at times a pro-Beijing line in defend-
ing that one reading of the Basic Law, and consistently opposes the pan-
democrats trying to oppose Beijing on all fronts. The problem is not just this
‘negligence’ from Beijing—which is arguably a major abdication of respon-
sibility—but that the pan-democrats are themselves just as much part of the
establishment.
But while the traditional opposition has always been tolerated, much has
changed in Hong Kong since the rst post-handover decade, and even since
Occupy. It is as if Hong Kong is nally having its anti-colonial moment, after
its return to what Deng Xiaoping—at a great distance from Hong Kong—
referred to as ‘the motherland.’ Just as any rational hope for the PRC’s col-
lapse or convergence has faded, the SAR has also witnessed a marked rise in
a not merely ‘localist’ or ‘proud’ Hong Kong identity—which has long been
around, if also on the rise—but in an exclusivist and xenophobic and ‘anti’
one. The xenophobia is by now well documented academically, if also under-
represented by, say, venues such as The NewYork Times and mostly ignored
by Hong Kong studies.21 Note that by xenophobic here we do not simply
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refer to anti-tourist sentiment or criticisms of the mainland in general, but
rather to, for example, the ‘anti-locust’ media campaign, where mainlanders
were literally depicted as locusts invading Hong Kong. The other salient
example would be the ‘anti- smugglers’ protests against mainlanders crossing
the border to buy goods such as milk powder and then returning to sell it at
a higher rate (‘parallel trading’). The question of Hong Kong’s identity is an
academic cottage industry in itself, second only to the quest to prove that
there is such a thing as a unique and wonderful ‘Hong Kong culture’ that
makes it different from the mainland and, presumably, everywhere else. For
our purposes here, the two salient points to make are that the rise of a, or
any specically, Hong Kong identity has indeed been a major sociological
phenomenon, well before and after the Occupy and Umbrella event. So has
been the rise of a more assertive or condent mainland Chinese identity, as
compared to the somewhat naïve or arguably ‘colonial’ Occidentalism or
‘Western fever’ of the immediate post-Mao period. But two, it is the rise of
a specically separatist or ‘independence’ or full ‘autonomist’ political iden-
tity that is the most signicant aspect—for our purposes—of this more gen-
eral process. By the latter I mean simply one, fairly obvious thing: not only
are there some actual, explicit calls for independence in the city (e.g. by
xenophobic groups like Civic Passion or Youngspiration) but that even the
claim for full legal and legislative let alone a ‘social’ autonomy (which is
clearly also what many desire) is simultaneously a claim for political indepen-
dence. It would be required to realize the autonomy even in narrowly legis-
lative terms.
All of this demands much more space than we have in this concluding
section. The rise of explicit and de facto independence ‘movements’ and
sentiments, in a former British colony that never had them before, is fasci-
nating in itself. While they do not pose a threat to Chinese sovereignty in
any substantive way, they may nonetheless continue for some time given
the—perceived and therefore real—lack of soft power and even legitimacy
of mainland rule. In so far as it can even said to be ruling other than
through tourism, immigration, and skyrocketing property values. The
turn toward independence, in rhetoric if not in reality, has also upped the
ante of what it means to oppose Beijing from Hong Kong. The mainland-
and local elite are unhappy with it, and it certainly raises—for understand-
able yet highly misleading reasons—the specter of national security and
not merely feelings of belonging or not. If the separatist or full, political
autonomy movement speaks of colonialism from up North, the PRC
clearly sees this, in turn, as a question of Western-sponsored (or inspired)
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154
imperialism in itself. At the same time this all reveals once again the impasse
of the political conjuncture and the limits of a now anti-colonial liberalism.
One way to quickly plot this development is through the rise and eclipse
of the ‘Hong Kong Autonomy Movement,’ which refers to a specic
group and social media presence inspired by a local public intellectual,
Horace Chin Kan Wan, circa 2011. Both are still around (Chin recently
lost an electoral bid for LegCo). But the central demand for autonomy—
to a greater degree than the traditional pan-democrats—and the claims for
re-colonization by Beijing have become more popular and dispersed across
the city. There are by now a number of groups, activists, and even politi-
cians who view the mainland as an alien, colonizing power that is hell-bent
on negating Hong Kong’s autonomy, identity, and so on. Local under-
graduates speak and write of it consistently now in their university maga-
zines (much to the consternation of the previous CE, who has tried to
re-exert his power over university governance). While autonomy is noth-
ing if not a liberal (and individualist) conceit, philosophically and other-
wise, their rhetoric is notoriously illiberal if not explicitly xenophobic.
‘Civic Passion’ is the most notable party in this regard, and one of its
members even won a recent LegCo seat, at the expense of one traditional
pan-democratic candidate (Mr. Albert Ho). Two other arch nativists, from
the post-Occupy ‘Youngspiration’ as noted earlier, also won seats; they
then lost them almost immediately by refusing to properly take their
LegCo oaths. They chose to instead curse the mainland and refer to Hong
Kong independence. Other revealing group names include ‘Hong Kong
Indigenous’ and ‘Hong Kong Resurgence Order.’ The rise of indepen-
dence rhetoric is indeed striking since the end of the Occupy movement,
seen as a logical next step for many frustrated by the failure of that event.
The rise of the xenophobia and anti-immigration stances is unfortunate for
all concerned, if also familiar to any student of contemporary globalization
(a better way to see the PRC’s ‘colonization’ of its own territory). From a
still larger perspective, a liberal-democratic, less xenophobic group like
‘Demosisto’ can also be placed within an expanded ‘autonomy movement’
that seeks a de facto independence without necessarily calling it that. Their
proposals to hold referenda on self-determination and draft a new consti-
tution for the city are not only, say, dubious but just as clearly show the
independence-by-any-other-name sentiment.22 In terms of practical poli-
tics, of what is to be done according to their own views, the explicit anti-
colonialism and independence claims of the full-on nativists like ‘Civic
Passion’ are homologous to the newer democratic groups that speak of
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‘self-rule’ for Hong Kong by Hong Kong people (whomever this might all
include). But as any student of post-colonialism would know, these last
two phrases indeed derive from the national liberation, de- colonization
struggles of the last century. The claim for self-rule only makes sense if you
are ruled by foreigners. Such groups stop short of calling for independence
for at least two reasons: it angers Beijing as well as the Hong Kong powers
that be, and so amounts to putting a target on one’s back; but it is also an
unpopular if not laughable opinion in the city at large.
The clamor for ‘real’ Hong Kong autonomy/independence has many
roots, including the phenomenon of what we usually call nationalism, here
transposed to nativism and a city-based (if at times uncivil) imagined com-
munity. This goes beyond mere pride in one’s city or hometown, such as
exists in most places. Hong Kong certainly has that, and moreover has since
the 1970s(in particular) a signicant and specically Hong Kong identity
that is ready-made to be taken up by individuals who have no real, other
option (other generations being more connected to the mainland or the
British Empire). But note that even this 1970s ‘origin’ comes after the crush-
ing of the brief cultural revolutionary period in Hong Kong, or in other
words, a reaction formation against the radicalism, including anti- colonialism,
of the mainland.23 Thus, Hong Kong identity, even or perhaps especially of
the more politically civic (pan-democrat/suffragist) kinds, has to do in this
context with a colonial liberalism. It not only makes a classically liberal politi-
cal demand (‘free’ elections, freedom or autonomy from the other, negative
liberty) but also draws on colonial discourse. The valorisation of Western style
liberal democracies (generally in massive crisis in the actual West) as against
despotic communist rule is already a part of this. That is, itis a part of a Cold
War-colonial intellectual inheritance thatassumes not only the evil of com-
munist ofcials but also the unfreedom and abnormality of the (mainland)
Chinese citizens/victims. Hong Kong, as represented by Chin Wanorbymore
mainstream thinkers, sees itself as free of this unfreedom, as an almost
Western/universalcountry in political terms. But Hong Kong identity—let
us call it the intellectual political identity or ‘culture’—also turns on knowl-
edge about China and Chinese politics as well as about Hong Kong itself and
colonialism. It draws on this and perpetuates it. To see this, we need to briey
unpack Chin Wan’s popular book from 2011, On the Hong Kong City-State.24
Chin constructs Hong Kong not as colonial territory handed back peacefully
and happily but—thanks to a mostly hands-off or elite- collaborative gover-
nance under the British, as well as their promulgation of ‘traditional local
culture’ to ward off mainland patriotism—as a de facto, mostly autonomous
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156
city-state. Whether by intent or by happenstance, Hong Kong was mostly
autonomous under the British, as compared to the far bigger and—until
recently—far more consequential colonialisms in Asia and elsewhere. To be
fair, other work suggests that at least the colonial governors often felt that
way, as London often had far more pressing concerns in its empire—such as
de-colonization movements!—to contend with.25 As for the mainland and
Mao, they were not in any hurry to get Hong Kong back, something they
surely could have done militarily from 1949 onward, and were content to
leave Hong Kong be and with a relatively porous border at that.26 (It was also
a useful source of foreign currency and would have been an additional head-
ache to incorporate; Hong Kong was and is, from the standpoint of state-
level realpolitik, just not as important as Taiwan.) In sum, Hong Kong is a
mini-country, a mostly autonomous and ‘free’ one with its own language,
laws, mini- constitution (including the Basic Law later on), passport, culture,
and so on. It is also vastly superior to modern China, which has destroyed the
traditional culture and been degraded by the communists.
What is more, this de facto autonomy and unique history is somehow
the way forward for Hong Kong now. Insist on your autonomy. Foster,
embrace, proclaim your local, native Hong Kong identity; quit identifying
as Chinese (despite your superior and more authentic Chineseness), and
so cut off any patriotism at the roots. China is China, unfortunately for
them, and Hong Kong is Hong Kong. If you make it in China’s interest
to just leave you alone, insisting on autonomy rather than independence,
those practical ‘communist-colonizers’ will do so. This again speaks to the
non-difference between self-rule or full autonomy and de facto indepen-
dence. But for Chin and many of the general opposition to the mainland,
this is somehow different. Chin also argues elsewhere that Hong Kongers
form their own ethnic group, as distinct from mainlanders, in another par-
adoxical and morbidly fascinating if incoherent response to contemporary
Han or nationalist chauvinism coming from north of the border. Such a
body of public intellectual work as Chin’s (admittedly of more interest
than many mainstream pundits in the city) and the rise of nativism in
general are arguably due to the underdevelopment of the political culture
(and system) of Hong Kong. By this I mean its lack of awareness about
how the mainland system operates and what that intellectual political cul-
ture is, as well as about how such ‘eff you’ messages—the nativists’
inamed rhetoric—might be perceived by the elite and ordinary Chinese
of the north. That too is ultimately a historical condition stemming from
the colonial past and the preaching of Hong Kong exceptionalism.
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This ‘autonomism,’ then, marks a clear break from the pan-democratic
dream of changing China, even if it is equally an exercise in wish- fulllment.
Chin Wan and the youth movements are quite critical of the pan- democratic
establishment, and see them as having accomplished little other than their
own careers. For Chin and the Hong Kong Autonomy Movement, it is
time to wake up and focus even more on Hong Kong’s difference from
China. More recently Chin has eviscerated the holiest of sacred cows in
Hong Kong, at least after the integrity of the Basic Law: the annual June 4
commemoration of the Tiananmen, 1989, repression. The global signi-
cance of that event is said to be that it is the only place ‘on Chinese soil’
where that happens—a rather striking contradiction if Hong Kong is not
really a part of China except by name. (Similarly, Hong Kong is one of the
few places ‘on Chinese soil’ where imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo wasrel-
atively well known and respected.) Chin, as he had done earlier with the
recent death of Li Wangyang while in custody (a former mainland 1989
dissident), simply asks Hong Kong democrats why they care so much and
identify with people who are not their own, and whom they ordinarily do
not seem to like or respect. ‘How close were you to Li?,’ he asks. It is a
good and radical (i.e. root-seeking), if obviously rude question in this con-
text. It is worth recalling that that Beijing event took place well before the
youth of Hong Kong (and China) was conceived. The rejection of June 4
and thus mainland identication have been popular with Hong Kong
youth, though some student groups have also decided to hold their own,
smaller and alternative commemorations on the same date. Chin’s point is
again one of a wake-up call: If Hong Kong is Hong Kong, and not China,
then 1989 and June 4 should matter much less to it. Though ironically the
perceived irrelevance of 1989 is nowhere more obvious than in the main-
land itself! This too is part of the general rejection of the pan-democrat
parties, who have, it must also be said, long used that annual event as their
most important day for fund-raising and for associative meaning purposes.
It may fairly be said that the best-selling Chin Wan certainly and many
other groups like Civic Passion and Youngspiration are part of a rising
illiberalism in the enclave. This will be fairly obvious to any observers of
the anti-locust campaign, the screaming protests against ‘parallel traders’
or ‘smugglers,’ even the resurrection of the British-era ag in some pro-
tests, and so on. But in fact these are largely still liberal political forma-
tions to the extent that they make coherent political demands at all. They
want their rule of law adhered to, including new legislation, and are
essentially rights-based thinkers; it is just that they want to take some
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158
rights away from others (a Hong Kong for Hong Kong people senti-
ment). They are not anti-capitalist but far more likely—in standard liberal
Hong Kong fashion—to point to how crony capitalism distorts real free-
market capitalism, which is a fair and good thing by denition/faith.
The plea for independence—sure to fall on deaf ears more often than
not, even in Hong Kong—can further be read as a rejection of the inher-
ited strain of convergence thinking. China is so awful in general, and the
communists so powerfully entrenched (as if there were a rival party to
begin with!) that neither changing it nor expecting it to converge into
normalcy is feasible. Independence or full autonomy is the only possible
solution, as Hong Kong cannot change China and it shouldn’t even try.
Despite the impossibility of such ‘solution,’ the rejection of the desire to
change the mainland may well be a healthy development for Hong Kong’s
political culture at least in the long run. Leaving aside the undeniable
nativism and even racism of many of the assorted ‘localists’ and/or inde-
pendence seekers, there is in this a much more realistic assessment of the
political balance of forces; of the actual as opposed to the merely ‘Western
symbolic’ power embedded in Hong Kong. Chin Wan and others are
aware that neither the USA nor the UK is going to stand up for Hong
Kong except in the odd speech here and there. (Again, Chin is not for
independence.) Demosisto’s young Joshua Wong, on the other hand, has
followed the Dalai Lama’s lead in befriending even right-wing anti-CCP
politicians in the US government (e.g. Marco Rubio and Nancy Pelosi,
among others).
To be sure the autonomy movement does not point to a hitherto
unknown or otherwise brilliant secret to fending off mainland inuence
on Hong Kong—the growing inuence and mediation of its present and
future social realities and economy. These movements, while poised as the
successors to the pan-democrats of days gone by, are not in a position to
break the political impasse or quagmire of Hong Kong. As noted earlier,
the Basic Law itself—which few want to change, aside from Chin Wan
types of nativists—largely prevents this, and the rejection of China’s con-
cession to the Umbrella protests does not help either. But beyond this,
there is not only the immigration of mainlanders who are used to living
under actual Chinese rule, as well as the mainland-identied elite and the
Hong Kong working class. There is also the brute reality of the economic
base tying the two places together, of which the super-structural aspects of
the law, the electoral system, the cherished identities, and lived experiences
of being authentically or ‘purely’ a Hong Kong person are merely players
D. F. VUKOVICH

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on this larger, basic stage. Hong Kong simply cannot be autonomous in
the ways it has been imagined by the political opposition and culture to
date, and as was perceived to be the meaning of ‘one country, two sys-
tems.’ Its economic autonomy as a small island territory of mostly rock,
one that lost its manufacturing base decades ago to Guangdong proper, is
a foregone conclusion. Hong Kong produces almost nothing aside from
tourist and nancial services and rentier capital. Even its highly ranked
universities are inordinately small and unfortunately held back from
expanding.
But the vision of a political autonomy for Hong Kong fares no better.
The mainland as sovereign power simply will not allow it. As noted, the
PRC even sees itself—perhaps cynically, perhaps genuinely—as already
adhering to the Basic Law and the ‘two systems’ principle in so far as these
things actually matter (which is arguably not very far in general). Cultural
autonomy—if there is such a thing—may actually be feasible, for example,
around the use of Cantonese and traditional characters, protection for the
movie industry, all the traditional festivals, the Christian churches, the
afrmations of Hong Kong identity (even to the point of superiority and
chauvinism), or in sum all manner of ideological permutations short of an
explicit or otherwise obvious declared claim or movement toward political
independence (including the desire to elect anti-communist or anti-PRC
politicians). There is no question that this last unspoken but obvious limi-
tation is illiberal. And one might argue that cultural autonomy can be
tolerated precisely because it doesn’t matter politically or pose any threat
to the rule of capital and capitalists. This is a standard if arch Marxist
response to ‘culturalism’ with more than a grain of truth to it; but it must
also be said that culture—as ideology, as a ‘whole way of life’—matters a
great deal subjectively and existentially. All the more reason, then, to
advocate for this on democratic or other grounds and to wean one’s self
off of the ideology of liberalism, if this is possible.
Even Hong Kong’s one great advantage—freer if also less ideologically
diverse speech than in the mainland, by far—could be and in fact has been
largely protected so far.27 But as for political autonomy: highly unlikely
short of that fantasy of convergence. Thus, that rejection of convergence
thinking as evinced by the independence and full ‘autonomist’ groups
may in the end be an initial step toward a more functional governance for
the SAR, even before 2047. The impossibility of that demand, now made
explicit for the rst time (de facto independence aka full autonomy) and
likely to fade away, may lead to a more realistic assessment, confrontation,
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160
and negotiation with Beijing. Protest and the streets will remain crucial,
as they are in all political societies, to keep the state in check. But so is
realism. If politics is the art of the possible, as the old cliché goes, then
Hong Kong’s political culture may become more fruitfully and actually
politicized. That politicization, ironically enough, began in earnest after
1997 after the seeming or merely nominal end of colonialism. But an
effective politicization, and the development of one or more social move-
ments that make real, not merely performative demands on the state,
awaits. Such a scenario has been held in check by the fantasies of auton-
omy on the Hong Kong side (by its opposition) and those of a peaceful
economism/developmentalism in the mainland sense. But these have
reached their limits.
To be sure this qualied optimism for Hong Kong’s political future—
that it is to have a political future and a more livable and real society—all
presumes that Beijing is actually listening to Hong Kong’s discontent and
unhappiness, and willing to step in and get things done, despite being
hamstrung by the Basic Law and ‘1c, 2s’ themselves. And despite being
deeply invested in the tycoon and elite business classes. This is of course a
large assumption. The liaison ofce has been especially discouraging in
this regard, with one ofcial (before Occupy) even proclaiming that redis-
tribution of wealth in Hong Kong had gone too far and one cannot forget
the rich, capitalist class. As the legal chief of the central government’s
liaison ofce in Hong Kong put it in his (and the C.E.’s) case against
direct nomination: ‘The business community is in reality a very small
group of elites in Hong Kong who control the destiny of the economy in
Hong Kong. If we ignore their interests, Hong Kong capitalism will stop
[working].’28 This statement is, one again, a textbook example of what
economism and market liberalism have become within the Party-state and
its avatars. With knowledge of the real conditions of Hong Kong like this
(it is a decaying city with runaway prices and negligent governance at
best), it is clear that the Party-state needs to clean its own house before it
faces up to the real SAR.
But as is well known, the central government will respond to protest
and looming crises if forced or in effect enabled to (the Wukan protests of
2011, analyzed in the next chapter, are one such example). This means
that Hong Kong will simply have to enter the arena of ‘righteous resis-
tance’ broadly dened and appeal to the Communist Party-state to x its
problems. This includes protesting and speaking out against the authori-
tarian and stridently pro-business ofcials in the Hong Kong-mainland
D. F. VUKOVICH

161
liaison ofce and in the Party in general, and certainly against its own local
political establishment (which includes the pan-democrats and now the
localists).
Rather than seeing this as a left or right step—one wonders if this dis-
tinction is meaningful in a political culture like Hong Kong that lacks a
discourse of social equality and substantive democracy—it makes more
sense to see it as a step northward, and toward the future. The present is
bleak, dictated by the forces of economism and de-politicization. But
there is also no chance of convergence. That Hong Kong will ‘authenti-
cally’ become part of China in 2047 (the ofcial end of ‘one country, two
systems’); that it is already economically, culturally, and socially integrated
in many ways, and for better and worse; that tomorrow it will only be
more so: all of this cannot be denied if we are to retain any semblance of
realism in thinking through Hong Kong politically.29 And thinking politics
without some type of realism, critical or otherwise, is a merely academic
exercise in the pejorative sense. One needs to reckon with the brute facts
that Beijing is not going to cede political autonomy to Hong Kong and
that the city is not going to have an equal seat at the table with the nation.
So too the mainland government’s decisive role in the impasse needs to be
critically analyzed. The Basic Law, colonial liberalism understood as pro-
ceduralist ‘democracy,’ faith in convergence, and economism/market
forces understood as a cure-all politics: these have all reached their limits
and produced only an impasse. To date, ‘Beijing’—which is to say the
power holders and liaison ofce in charge of Hong Kong-China—is con-
tent to let the market or in other words capital and cross-border collusions
hold sway and force a kind of de facto ‘autonomous’ status quo. An
unprincipled peace indeed.
This impasse could very well last for another generation or three, until
such time as 2047 and the technically separate systems are moot. But
sooner or later Hong Kong’s democrats—and others—will have to start
their own long march out of the colonial era’s borrowed time. They too
will have to start a long march into and through the admittedly, currently
‘illiberal’ mainland Chinese institutions and political culture. This would
involve two basic affronts to current, dominant sensibilities: Hong Kong’s
own powerful and sense of exceptionalism, its inherited sense of liberal
superiority to all those ‘other Chinese cities’ on the one hand, but an
actual, political challenge to the mainland’s drive to de-politicize society
through neo-liberal development or economism on the other.30
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162
nOtes
1. Two useful and widely read historical texts on Hong Kong are Steven
Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), and
John M.Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (New York: Rowman
and Littleeld, 2007). An excellent overall study of the SAR’s recent poli-
tics up through 2004 is the collection, Remaking Citizenship in Hong
Kong: Community, nation and the global city, Agnes S.Ku and Ngai Pun,
eds. (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). For the true basis of power and
domination in Hong Kong, namely, by capital and a cartel-like property
market (and it overlaps clearly with mainland capitalists), see Leo
F. Goodstadt, Poverty in the Midst of Afuence: How Hong Kong
Mismanaged its Prosperity (Hong Kong University Press, 2013) and Alice
Poon’s classic, surveying the system from the British onwards, Land And
The Ruling Class In Hong Kong (Second Edition. Hong Kong: Enrich
Publishing, 2011).
2. Chapter 1, Article 5 of the Basic Law text notes that Hong Kong will keep
its ‘capitalist system and way of life unchanged for 50years,’ and China will
not impose its ‘socialist’ one. This is the clearest, explicit legal statement
backing up Deng’s 1c, 2s remark. If China was not fully capitalist in the
1980s—and certainly the breaking up of the commune system in 1983
marks the end of Maoist economics—it is much closer to it now, which
radically undercuts the very idea that there are two systems, in political-
economic terms. The absence of Marxism in Hong Kong’s intellectual
political culture is felt acutely here. See the city government’s website for
The Basic Law full text: http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/
chapter_1.html. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
3. Though this too may be fading, and there are no doubt more English
speakers in, say, Zhejiang or Guangdong province than in Hong Kong. For
fears of English slipping in Hong Kong, see, for example, Victor Fung
Keung, ‘Declining English standard hurts HK,’ in The China Daily.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2012-11/01/con-
tent_15862375.htm. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
4. See John M Carroll’s history of collaborative colonialism, Edge of Empires:
Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong, 6. (Harvard University
Press, 2009).
5. As the noted Hong Kong studies professor Lui Tai-lok aptly asks in the
July 15, 2015, Hong Kong Economic Journal: ‘What is the use of the pro-
establishment camp?.’ http://www.ejinsight.com/20150715-what-is-
use-pro-establishment-camp/. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017. Lui’s work on the
middle class of Hong Kong is also germane here, though as I try to argue
the complicity of the more politically liberal and active voices of the oppo-
D. F. VUKOVICH

163
sition—also overwhelmingly middle class or above—also helps produce the
de-politicized present in Hong Kong. See Lui, ‘Rear-guard Politics: Hong
Kong’s Middle-class’(The Developing Economies, XLI-2 (June 2003):
161–183).
6. I have not yet had a chance to read the promising but forthcoming collec-
tion edited by Wai-man Lam and Luke Cooper, Citizenship, Identity and
Social Movements in the New Hong Kong: Localism after the Umbrella
Movement, which includes an afterword by movement leader and law pro-
fessor Benny Benny Tai Yiu Ting (London: Routledge, 2018).
7. See, for example, the failed attempts to work the Tiananmen 1989 and
May 4, 1919, analogies in America’s liberal magazine, The Nation, in a
notably supercial 2014 piece by historians Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Denise
Ho, ‘What Occupy Can Learn from History.’ https://www.thenation.
com/article/what-hong-kongs-occupy-movement-can-learn-history/.
Accessed Nov. 21, 2017.
8. See in particular the essay by Pang Laikwan, ‘Civil Disobedience and the
Rule of Law: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’ (Verge: Studies in Global
Asias 2.1 2016: 170–192), which analyzes a putative, highly promising
turning point in Hong Kong’s history marked by Occupy, due to the
‘emotive embedding’ and ‘intersubjective factors’ clearly displayed in the
sites of the occupy movement. One can certainly agree with the emotional
importance of the movement for most involved, and with the importance
of emotion and affect in general. But as will be obvious I am here working
with a different understanding of what the political and politics are, and
presumably ‘democracy.’ Imagined communities are important but are not
the same thing as actual, institutionalized communities who can deploy
organized power or act in the political sphere. Similarly, nationalism and
the nation-state are different entities.
9. This is also the place to note that there was a much, much smaller yet long-
lasting Occupy Central movement in 2011, that was clearly anti-capitalist
and more along the lines of the Occupy Wall Street movement. See the
essay by Liu Shih Ding, ‘The new contentious sequence since Tiananmen,’
(Third World Quarterly 36.11 2015: 2148–2166).
10. In my own view that analysis is still all about liberalism and the law, since
democracy on my account (e.g. following Rousseau and Marx) has to be
about mass rule, economic equality, and the general will.
11. See the brief article, ‘Legalistic and Utopian: Hong Kong’s Umbrella
Movement,’ by Sebastian Veg in the erstwhile, self-professed ‘agship jour-
nal of the Western left’ (The New Left Review 92 March–April 2015).
https://newleftreview.org/II/92/sebastian-veg-legalistic-and-utopian.
Accessed Nov. 24, 2017. Rather than being pejoratives, ‘legalistic’ and
‘formal democracy’ are published without comment or counter-balance.
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164
12. See their Labor Of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (University of
Minnesota Press, 1994).
13. Subsequent months and years have seen arrests and jail terms (circa
2017)forsome former protesters and organizers (e.g. Joshua Wong) though
also the convictions of several police who beat one 2014 activist. There have
been several, much smallerprotests since (as there were before), and even a
notable and violent riot, aka the‘Fishball Revolution’ in Mongkok during
the 2016lunar new year.The violence was one way and absorbed by the
police, it must be said. As of 2018 one ‘shball’ rebel and founder of a local
nativist independence party, Edward Leung, has received a seven year jail
sentence for violence.The rise of localism as against the mainland, as noted
earlier, has escalated since the Occupy/Umbrella protests. But nativism and
localism have been unmistakable mainstream features of Hong Kong for
decades, and the more xenophobic outburts have also to do with rapdily
expanding mainland tourism, pressure on local social services, and so on.
There is no question that Hong Kong is suffering under a hyper-capitalist
and poorly managed integration with the mainland, though this is less about
the lack of voting and some vague‘freedom’ than people’s livelihood being
endangered by local as well as mainland and foreignelites, i.e. capital. The
nostalgic romanticization of 2014 is well underway, as if pre-ordained.
14. See his March 24, 2017, article in the South China Post, ‘The chief executive
election Hong Kong could have had.’ http://www.scmp.com/comment/
insight-opinion/article/2081575/chief-executive-election-hong-kong-
could-have-had. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
15. For updates on the 2018 election cycles, see the South China Morning
Post. http://www.scmp.com/topics/legislative-council-election-2018.
Accessed April 1, 2018.
16. See, for example, Chan Shun-hing, ‘The Protestant community and the
Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong’ (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 16.3
2015: 380–395).
17. See the ‘Voice of America’ report to this effect, ‘Hong Kong Protest
Leaders Recall Spiritual Motivation’ http://www.voanews.com/a/hong-
kong-protest-leaders-recall-spiritual-motivation/3027178.html. Accessed
Nov. 21, 2017. See also Theological Reections on the Hong Kong Umbrella
Movement, eds. Justin K.H. Tse and Jonathan Y.Tan (New York Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016).
18. The statistical question here is important and yet I know of no data or polls
that address it in a substantial way. Most surveys done by, for example,
HKU’s ‘public opinion program’ duck this question by dwelling obses-
sively on identity crises around Chineseness or Hong Kongness. Both the
establishment and the opposition may not want to really know, for differ-
ent reasons, how much the majority of people really care about suffrage as
opposed to nancial precarity. Compounding the majority opinion ques-
D. F. VUKOVICH

165
tion are, of course, the British functional constituencies and the absence of
a direct one-person, one-vote system for what is, after all, still just a small
city by Chinese standards.
19. See the NED’s own admission by way of denying a connection to the
Umbrella protests. https://www.ned.org/the-national-endowment-for-
democracy-and-support-for-democracy-in-hong-kong/. Accessed Dec. 1,
2017.
20. Deng’s speeches on Hong Kong are readily available online, and a great
insight into his mentality in general. This one from 1984 is ‘Maintain
Prosperity and Stability in Hong Kong.’ http://en.people.cn/dengxp/
vol3/text/c1250.html
21. For an extremely well detailed analysis, see Barry Sautman and Yan
Hairong, Localists and ‘Locusts’ in Hong Kong: Creating a Yellow-Red Peril
Discourse (Maryland Monograph Series in Contemporary Asian Studies,
no. 2. 2015).
22. See the group’s statement on popular sovereignty and referenda here:
https://www.demosisto.hk/article/details/46. Accessed Nov. 28, 2017.
23. On the riots see Gary Ka-wai Cheung, Hong Kong’s Watershed: the 1967
Riots (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and Robert Bickers and Ray
Yep, May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967 (Hong Kong
University Press, 2009).
24. See his Xianggang Chengbanglun. (City-State Theory of Hong Kong) (Hong
Kong: Enrich Publishing, 2011). For an excellent review of Chin’s ideas,
see Tommy Cheung’s ‘Father of Hong Kong Nationalism? A Critical
Review of Wan Chin’s City-state Theory’ (Asian Education and Development
Studies 4.4 2015: 460–470). Chin Wan works primarily in Chinese, but his
writings are frequently translated in part by his followers, often by Mr.
Chapman Chen, and are readily available on Facebook and other fora on
the Internet. One should also note that Chin’s views seem to be changing
in light of even more extreme nativism, and he insists that he does not call
for Hong Kong independence, just its more or less full/complete auton-
omy. As noted earlier, this is a distinction that makes no difference. But see
Alex Lo’s column in the April 28, 2017, South China Post, ‘Horace Chin,
‘father of localism,’ draws red line against secession.’ http://www.scmp.
com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2091282/horace-chin-father-
localism-draws-red-line-against-secession. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017.
25. See the works by Tsang and Carroll, note 1 above.
26. For an argument that China deliberately stopped the British from granting
Hong Kong independence a la Singapore (and which assumes British
good intentions), see the discussion of recent archival documents by
Gwynn Guilford, ‘The secret history of Hong Kong’s stillborn democracy’
(at the news outlet Quartz, 2014). https://qz.com/279013/the-secret-
history-of-hong-kongs-stillborn-democracy/. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017.
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166
27. This may seem rather counter-intuitive to anyone following the recent
arrests of tabloidesque (and, again, virulently anti-communist) publishers
who were based in Hong Kong. See the South China Post—a Hong Kong
newspaper—for background (http://www.scmp.com/topics/hong-kong-
bookseller-disappearances). But it must also be said that the accused are
accused of violating mainland law on or in the mainland (e.g. selling their
books there, via Hong Kong post). The point here is not that Hong Kong
has free speech in any case (which strictly speaking exists nowhere), but
that it is markedly freer, including on campuses and in political fora online
or in various buildings. One of the most rational fears in the city is that
such relative freedom or autonomy will be squandered by deeply tenden-
tious and implausible calls for independence.
28. See the report and interviews with then-C.E. during the initial weeks of the
Occupy/Umbrella movement, ‘CY Leung: “Democracy would see poorer
people dominate Hong Kong vote.”’ October 21, 2014, South China
Morning Post. The quote here from mainland ofcial and lawyer Wang
Zhemin dates from the weeks prior to the movement. http://www.scmp.
com/news/hong-kong/article/1621103/cy-leung-democracy-would-
see-poor-people-dominate-hong-kong-vote. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.
29. I return to this question of realism and politics in the concluding chapter.
For a contrasting view to mine, one that draws on Vaclav Havel, see Hui
Po-Keung and Lau Kin-Chi, ‘“Living in truth” versus realpolitik: limita-
tions and potentials of the Umbrella Movement’ (Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies, 16.3 2015: 348–366).
30. As this book goes to press I must also note again that in recent by-elections
for the empty seats from those disbarred localist candidates (who won in
the aftermath of the umbrellas), the democratic bloc has lost their veto
power. This may spell the end of the democracy-as-libustering mode of
politics for the liberals/opposition, which in the long run can only be a
good thingas Hong Kong attempts to transition away from being a failed
city-state.
D. F. VUKOVICH

167© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_5
CHAPTER 5
Wukan!: Democracy, Illiberalism, andTheir
Vicissitudes
Hong Kong’s democracy, localist, and nativist movements (and assuming
these are indeed three groups rather than one), before and after their
opening up by the umbrellas, arrived at the same old dead end of political
impasse, which is to say at a status quo victory for the property-owning
class. This may have even been the point: the point is to participate in the
‘civil society’ and demand that which you cannot have, while waiting for
the implosion or liberal-democratic convergence of the mainland, or you
at least wait for the next opportunity to do it all over again.1 The earlier,
2011 ‘Wukan Uprising’ that took place 120 kilometers to the east makes
for an interesting, resonant comparison in the analysis of impasse, and the
limits and failures of liberalism and economism, or in other words the de-
politicization of politics through the market and ‘growth’ as much as by
sheer force or repression. This chapter presents a basic narrative of the rise
and fall of the Guangdong villagers’ protests over land seizures and for
justice and ‘democracy,’ before turning to an attempt to mine their mean-
ing for politics more generally. There are two political bottoms lines right
now, in effecting political change and contesting or bending the govern-
ment in some reformist or otherwise progressive way. But these exist, as in
Hong Kong and as in much of the world, in a context of impasse, or a
political conjuncture dened in no small part by the triumph of
de- politicization and the power or rule of capital and money. But if this

168
is a dark period for politics around the globe, it is—contra liberalism old
and new—in some ways still more, not less, promising in China as com-
pared to other places such as the USA and even Hong Kong.
One, protests have to triangulate the ‘foreign’ liberal and native illiberal
narratives, with the former being an absolutely crucial (if academically
unrecognized) move to make. It is not as if the fourth and fth estates of
the media, old and new, are going away, nor their global presence even
within a strongly policed and thoroughly Chinese-speaking mainland
eld. Needless to say, this contention with liberal, Cold War or otherwise
normative, liberal, Western discourse is only a problem for China and per-
haps other parts of the developing or the former Third World countries.
Westerners do not have this problem. The latter bottom line, the working
with the tradition of ‘rightful resistance’ or expressing a critical loyalty to
the Party-state while pursuing your specic or ‘real’ demands and goals, is
likewise a Chinese problem but can also be seen as a more universal or
global political condition: one has to work within the system in some fash-
ion or other, as opposed to occupying a symbolic or utopian space some-
how outside of one’s real conditions of existence and one’s inherited
situation. On a smaller scale, this can even be seen as what the Bernie
Sanders supporters in the last US presidential election had to do—work
within the existing electoral Party-state system in the hopes of having any
effect at all. A gambit by no means guaranteed to succeed, but at the pres-
ent time the best chance of realizing one’s goals and political aims. What
is clearly more ‘Chinese’ or PRC-specic here—again one must recall that
politics or the political is never universal in their actual, particular manifes-
tations—is not only having to counter Western liberalism but to do so
while inhabiting a currently illiberal Communist Party-state context
dened against the former but also mandating an end to politics in the
name of stability and economism. This is all, in sum, the rst political bot-
tom line.
The second one is simpler if more an immovable object: that political
economy is fundamental, and that without addressing that substantively
and directly both at the local and national levels, all ‘democratic’ or other
protest victories will be hamstrung, limited in scope and in duration. This
is true even if such protests are properly and narrowly focused on, say,
specic land seizures or electoral laws (as in the Hong Kong SAR). This
may sound platitudinous, and there is admittedly no shortage of essays in,
say, cultural or post-colonial studies arguing for a return to some type of
D. F. VUKOVICH

169
Marxism or political economy. But the problem with platitudes is not that
they are false (they are usually correct) but that they are so obvious as to
carry little weight. What we will see in the case of Wukan, however, is
precisely the limits of democratic or other politics in the face of the ram-
pant developmentalism or economism of the current PRC; this is where
the weight of the political-economic claim I am making is, and where the
heavy lifting must take place in the future. Emphatically, economic strug-
gles like those in Wukan and elsewhere in China—around labor exploita-
tion, land seizures, and the like—thus also have far more substantively
democratic potentials than more proceduralist ones like Hong Kong’s in
2014. Additionally, it must also be said that in the analysis of Chinese
politics in particular, with its obsessions with the Chinese Party-state form
and the lack of ‘normal’ democracy and civil society and so on, one nds
little attention at all to the economic base as a kind of structuring frame-
work or force in itself. And as Fredric Jameson has never tired of pointing
out, in contemporary post-modern culture (if one wants to hold on to
this periodization), it is easier for people to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism as a mode of socio-economic production and
way of life. Certainly China has been more optimistic and positively
invested in the future compared to many other places. But as looming
social crises and contradictions pile up, inequality and environmental deg-
radation chief among them, it or the Party-state has likewise been unable
to imagine another mode of economy and life. And yet that imagination
is going to have to re-emerge in China and elsewhere for even ‘local’
problems and conicts like Wukan (or arguably, the integration of an
unhappy Hong Kong). What is going to matter is less the absence of lib-
eralism (‘democracy’) than the absence of a sustainable and humane
‘moderate prosperity’ (to invoke an ofcial goal of the CCP); however,
this is going to be entirely impossible under an economy dictated by the
mad pursuit of prot and growth.
This point about the fundamental importance of political economy, that
the economy is necessarily already political and must serve the people
(rather than the other way around), is, one should add, an essentially ‘new
left’ or post-Tiananmen insight into China just as much as an old- fashioned
Marxist or social democratic one. While most conclusions on the left and
within contemporary political thought are undeniably bleak—and for
good enough reasons2—there may as yet be some resources of hope in
struggles like those of Wukan, which aim or aimed less at achieving political
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170
liberalism or similar goals, and more at livelihood as well as the theft of
common or public goods. Surely this is an advance on the occidentalist
1980s of Beijing, or of the utopian liberalism of Hong Kong’s grail-quest
for autonomy and liberal voting rules.
Contesting illiberalism, liberalism, andtheft
In late 2011, a village of 13,000 people in coastal Guangdong and near
the city of Lufeng captured global media attention in a way that a Chinese
protest had not done since 1989. (Three years later another one, even
more telegenic and open to mass media, would erupt to the south in the
Hong Kong SAR; a comparison to which we later return.) The Wukan
Uprising, as it came to be known (somewhat inaccurately), would not stop
until local elections were held at the expense of the ousted local CP of-
cials in 2012. Several of those same protest leaders themselves came to
power. The Uprising or its aftermath emerged again in 2016, after one of
the newly elected ofcials himself (Lin Zuluan, aged 72) was arrested for
corruption and bribe-taking, once again leading to a series of angry pro-
tests after his televised (and quite possibly forced) confession. These ‘nal’
protests continued until fall 2016, albeit at a much smaller scale and with
less international attention.
Wukan is nonetheless arguably more famous now, or more admired in
a way, than its neighboring city, Lufeng. Far from being known as an
important city today in the way that the ‘model’ ones are (e.g. Guangzhou),
Lufeng is perhaps best known as a hotbed of crime and methamphetamine
production,3 though it also administers Wukan. However, Lufeng, not
unlike thousands of villages during the land reform and revolution, had a
more admirable past in the days of revolution gone by: in 1927, as a result
of communist-led peasant uprisings, Lufeng along with nearby Haifeng
formed the rst Chinese Soviet territory (county-level). From March 2011
until early 2012, and especially for four tense months in the autumn, the
village of Wukan—it was indeed a mass protest—took to the streets to
protest illegal land seizures and corruption. For a while it looked like this
part of Guangdong might reconnect with its radical past in its demand for
justice against a land-robbing gentry class.
At the same time, however, a close look at the video of the protests, or
the well-known documentaries hosted by Al Jazeera TV, reveals to us that
these are not poor, dusty peasant rebels of days gone by but rather more
akin to urban-villagers defending their communal property, to be sure, but
D. F. VUKOVICH

171
also their comparatively bourgeois standards of living compared to the
1920s and the 1930s. Neither the Red past nor the image of democratic
‘velvet revolutions,’ circa 1989 or more recent, is an apt comparison.
Wukan was about land (and the return thereof) rst and foremost, and
then about democracy in the sense of a right to that land and in the need
for new elections and ofcials. Thus, Wukan was called an ‘Uprising’ as
opposed to, say, Hong Kong’s Umbrella ‘revolution,’ though, as noted
earlier, the latter was indeed more a media buzzword and fantasy of some
type of convergence into a pure democracy. Interestingly, Wukan was also
a more militant and even violent confrontation, and yet the one that
resulted in new elections and governmental response, and not any over-
throw of the Party-statesystem.4
What happened in Wukan prior to this is familiar enough. Two local
ofcials had sold hundreds of acres to private contractors for building
roads and housing estates, without consent from or compensation for
those who had thereby lost their land. The local ofcials had offered no
public consultation with the villagers to begin with. Illegal land sales have
skyrocketed in recent years, across rural China. Land and property are key
everywhere in the PRC, as its economy shifts to a later stage of capitalism
and new accumulation crises. But land has not yet been privatized. This
public nature of land is arguably the last substantial legacy and holdover
from the momentous land reform effected, at great costs and with great
difculty, by the rst generation of Chinese communists and radical
peasants. But Wukan has mostly stopped farming (and shing). This fate
is part of the general decline of agriculture in China and Guangdong, as
well as the looming depletions of sh stocks worldwide. With the decline
of its traditional economies and skills, and with no alternative economic
strategy in place for rural development other than rapid urbanization else-
where (the exploitation of the countryside’s surplus laborers-turned-
migrant- workers), you get methamphetamine production and other forms
of crime like land seizures. Land has become an even more valuable and
even more urgently ‘needed’ resource. Not least for the communist of-
cials who must show that they are making prot and ‘growing the econ-
omy’ (a bitter phrase given the agricultural decline), and in this case
through illegally selling public land to property developers.
In addition, prior to the mass protests, a local leader, Xue Jinbo, died
of an apparent heart attack while in police custody. This can only raise
intense suspicion about police brutality, and it fed into long-standing
anger over corruption. An angry protest turned into a militant stand-off
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172
with the police and the Party. The villagers refused to disperse despite the
real threat of police violence. The streets, occupied in a real, militant way,
were shut down. The local state or government was not in control of the
village even after several weeks: a very rare occurrence anywhere, not least
in authoritarian and illiberal or repressive systems like the USA and China,
that do not refrain from using violent policing.
Crucially, and before any denouement, this little village rebellion
quickly became a global media event—a genuine spectacle that compli-
cated what ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ China meant. The foreign media, cru-
cially including Hong Kong and its Cantonese and Chinese abilities,
arrived and gave it the usual spin—looming, deadly violence, a potential
collapse of the state (of at least the local government), perhaps a genuine
democracy movement à la 1989. The protesters were indeed calling for
ofcials to step down. And yet the movement and media were not sup-
pressed by the local police, clearly under direct orders not to do so, most
likely coming from above in Lufeng city or higher. Even the national edi-
torial media like the People’s Daily and Global Times eventually (and rela-
tively quickly) got on board regarding the validity of the villagers’ demands.
The Global Times later announced that the lesson of Wukan was that gov-
ernment at all levels should eliminate the ‘oppositional stance’ in dealing
with protests, as this was not usually needed. This was a remarkable
response from important propaganda outlets precisely because such pro-
tests can indeed go either way: accommodation and/or peaceful resolution,
or violence. Well before this major and national-level media intervention,
Zheng Yanxiong, the local Municipal Party Secretary (Shanwei), had com-
plained loudly about the way the protests in Wukan had spiraled out of
control; he blamed the villagers as well as the foreign media for the chaos.
That will sound familiar to students of Tiananmen: blaming foreign media
and a select ‘bad element’ is ominous, and grounds for legal persecution
and worse.
We must note—crucially—that at the beginning of the protests, the
edgling movement did invoke what the researcher Laurence Dang has
called ‘indirect,’ anti-party, and ‘human rights’ rhetoric in a locally distrib-
uted publication/yer called ‘Voice of the Hometown’ (鄉音).5 Almost
two years before the movement erupted in the streets, some activist villag-
ers also invoked human rights rhetoric on the Internet, specically the
‘International Human Rights Protocol.’6 What was in the air of Wukan, in
other words, was precisely liberal political discourse aimed at transforming
or at least stopping bad, authoritarian, and illiberal regimes. And the lib-
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173
eral convergence narrative dating from the post-Mao 1980s (and from the
Cold War and even the colonial periods years before) was as ever on the
minds of the foreign media, that ‘democracy’ in The NewYork Times sense
has to happen sooner or later, and is the only alternative to one-party
domination and systemic grievances.
To be fair, in Wukan, there were strident demands to remove ofcials
and hold local elections, voiced during a very serious public or ‘civil soci-
ety’ protest. But these same eminently democratic demands are not neces-
sarily alien to the Chinese political system, even if they do contradict
ofcial, de-politicizing propaganda promoting stability, ‘dreams’, har-
mony, and so on, and even if they do risk a nasty response from the police.
It is easy enough to mock or dismiss the ‘socialist’ and ‘democratic’ termi-
nologies and aspects of the current PRC, and not without good reason
given the scale of corruption and inequality alone. But they remain part of
the state’s or system’s own self-understanding, and also a part of at least
some citizens’ own self-understandings or beliefs. The socialist or revolu-
tionary aka social justice basis of the state’s legitimacy, howsoever
contradictory or dated, is not without a certain power and effectiveness.
Rhetoric is never merely rhetoric.
The key shift within the movement from its inchoate start in 2009 and
that rejection of a liberal or human rights stance—arguably the secret of its
eventual success—was how it responded rhetorically to the initial, ofcial
condemnation (e.g. from Secretary Zheng) and to the foreign media in
particular. It is as if the villagers had learned an important lesson from
1989, not only about how to better address the central government but
also the global media spectacle emerging in front of them. They triangu-
lated both narratives and forces: their criticism by local ofcialdom and
media as troublemakers, the foreigners’ presence and implied story about
democracy, and the battle against the Party-state in the name of freedom
in some abstract sense. They appealed, through both media/camps, to the
Party center above the local and provincial levels.7 From this point for-
ward, after the typical illiberal response from the secretary and the ‘viral’
escalation of the protest, what emerges in the media and public sphere is
rhetoric that was anti-local ofcial, anti-corruption, and of course anti-
land seizure, but also explicitly not against the CCP as a whole. In fact,
they spoke positively about the Party as a whole and consciously distanced
themselves from the ‘1989’ or ‘velvet revolution’ type of narrative. They
spoke instead from within the informal and exible but long-standing
Chinese political tradition of loyal or ‘rightful resistance.’ We will turn to
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174
this concept and point later. Here is Chen Jibing on this, quoting Zhu
Mingguo, the deputy to the powerful Guangdong provincial secretary
(and now Vice Premier), Wang Yang:
The villagers said to me that under the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party they had farmed the land without paying taxes and also enjoyed sub-
sidies and free education. ‘We do not oppose the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party is good! What we oppose is the village sell-
ing the land without telling us’, [said Zhu Mingguo]. Zhu Mingguo added:
‘If these demands had been satised earlier, would this matter have built up
to such an extent?’8
That sense of loyal opposition, and the respect for it from someone high up
like Zhu or perhaps even Wang Yang, seems clear here. It is important to
keep in mind that we are talking about the theft of a lot of money (and land)
and a protest that shut down a village in what became a global media event.
One must note as well that the foreign media were allowed to stay, thus
broadcasting to the global ‘Sinophone’ and English language world what
was happening. Rather than seeing this as an example of the all-important
watchdog role of speaking Truth to Power, thanks to the free media, it is
more useful to see the foreign media as being useful, if unsolicited vehi-
cles, for the villagers and the state to communicate with one another. The
presence of the foreign media and thus the discourse of liberalism or lib-
eral convergence became part of the script of the Wukan protestors them-
selves, that is, of their self-positioning against local authorities. Fully aware
of the live national and global coverage of their protest and themselves,
they often invoked how this was a local, Wukan problem, nothing more or
less; that it owed nothing at all to the foreign media or outside forces—
and by implication liberalism—neither in China nor abroad. This is at one
level simply common sense and self-defense. One knows what the police
and state can do when provoked. But there is more to it. There was at least
an implicit awareness within Wukan of the power of the global media spec-
tacle, including of Chinese and foreign voices, just as there was an aware-
ness of the perils of the so-called counter-revolutionary behavior. This was
a much more savvy use of foreign as well as Chinese media than in 1989,
and arguably in Hong Kong a few years later, where the legitimacy of the
PRC state is almost unthinkable. A contemporary report from The
NewYork Times brings this awareness and professed faith in state legiti-
macy home:
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175
The press center was a jumble of warm bodies and laptops and tangled
wires, sprinkled with empty cans of Red Bull. On one wall of the living room
was a portrait of God staring down from the heavens. Below that was a small
wooden cross with a gure of Jesus. And below that, taped to the wall, was
a white sheet of paper with a statement in Chinese and English. It beseeched
reporters not to call the protest an ‘uprising.’ ‘We are not a revolt,’ it said.
‘We support the Communist Party. We love our country.’9
If you watch the original four-part documentary on Wukan broadcast
by the English language Al Jazeera network and website, made by
Singaporeans Lynn Lee and James Leong, you will see a common refrain
from several villagers—that the Central Committee (i.e. the national-level
Party-state) needs to know what happened, what our demands are, and
can x this.10 Aside from the absence of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, this is
virtually the same type of tactic one often sees reected in revolutionary
ction during the land reform era in the countryside and the promulga-
tion of new communist laws (e.g. free marriage) and leadership. One
imagines that the famous rural propaganda writer Zhao Shuli, author of
just such red classics like ‘Meng Xiangying Stands Up’ and ‘The Marriage
of Young Blacky’ (also aimed at feudal and Nationalist corruption), would
approve of the strategy. Of course, this is also an older tradition belonging
to appeals to the emperor and the belief in good, morally exemplary of-
cials. You need to get the good ofcial to come down and take care of
things, to follow the laws and processes that exist on the books or by
precedent. But it may well be a trap to posit some long continuity of the
‘feudal’ or say Qing dynasty to the present; even the Qing were arguably
modern at any rate, and in the present moment there is certainly no sense,
other than an Orientalist one, in seeing Wukan’s rhetoric and tactics as
part of some seamless tradition. In the modern form, rebellion and serious
protest—the other strong political tradition, very much animated by the
radical past—do not contradict or mutually exclude such appeals. While
Wukan was taken up to be—or disparaged as—a form of ‘Chinese democ-
racy,’ the point should be less around liberal democracy as either a
normative or demonized ideal type and instead on the power of recall and
accountability.
The appeals to Beijing ringing out from Wukan were, in any case, not
‘merely’ rhetorical asides or caveats to defend one’s self but clear and
direct signals. Wang Yang, at the time a nationally rising Party ofcial in
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176
competition, it may be felt, with then-superstar ofcial of Chongqing Bo
Xilai,11 sent a work team down to investigate the uprising. Here is the
denouement of that work team and of the Wukan Uprising, via Reuters:
On December 20, after a week of siege, Wukan’s villagers received a text
message from Zhu on their mobile phones: Their demands were reasonable
and were accepted. ‘The majority’s aggressive actions can be understood
and forgiven; we will not pursue any responsibility’, the message said in part.
Wang red Wukan’s village boss, Xue Chang, and Xue’s deputy. Zhuang
Liehong and two other members of the Wukan Hot Blooded Youth League
were freed from jail. The village declared an end to the protests. ‘People’s
democratic awareness is increasing signicantly in this changing society’,
Wang Yang was quoted as saying by the state media a week later. He even
called for a ‘Wukan approach’ to reforming village governance.12
We cannot know whether the appeal to the legitimacy of the Party-state
above the local is or was 100% sincere and ‘authentic.’ How much was
deliberate, perhaps even ironic manipulation of appearances and percep-
tions, to the media and the state and to the Singaporean lm-makers? Was
the use of such appeals simply strategic, a very fortunate, calculated turn
away from the other possible road of ‘human rights’ and liberalism or
some form of anti-statism? Moreover, how much of the uprising was down
to clan and kinship politics in the area (different factions, or even different
beneciaries of the previous sales), as was also rumored at the time? And
how much of the central support from above was really about Wang Yang
vying for promotion and a big success, as a direct response to Bo Xilai and
the upcoming national reshufe of leadership positions? Or are Wang
etal. truly good ofcials doing their moral and political duty with an eye
toward establishing necessary political reforms in Wukan and China? All of
this is plausible and even likely, at least in part. Such is the nature of poli-
tics in an increasingly globalized and complexly layered world.
Nonetheless, the triangulation was an effective tactic and it played with,
or re-articulated certain discourses: Western anti-communism or political
orientalism about China; Dengist de-politicization and the fetish of stabil-
ity and order in the name of patriotism or nationalism; the fear or desire
for convergence in one direction or the other. When the protesters signify
‘The Communist Party is good’ even while virtually shutting down the
village, they are in other words invoking the liberal or foreign ‘model’ of
convergence and transformation of the Party-state, but only to distance
themselves from it in an expression of support for the Party’s right and
D. F. VUKOVICH

177
duty to intervene politically, including to set up new elections. (Again one
must note that the squashing of such a protest in the name of public order
and social stability in a developing nation would ordinarily seem inevita-
ble.) What fascinates is the manipulation of perceptions and appearances—
producing these in a certain dialogue with foreign and national media,
playing off would-be authoritarians from Shanwei, Lufeng, and Wukan (or
above), against foreign reporters and foreign or global liberal perspectives.
The Wukan Uprising, in other words, also had to do with the politics of
knowledge or discourse, just as Hong Kong’s Occupy did (less effectively
or more impractically), and as any real hegemonic struggle must.
Wukan Worked
If politics is the art of the possible and a struggle over interests as well as
for something more effable but arguably even more important—social jus-
tice and equality, say—then Wukan must be measured as both a remark-
able success and a well-nigh tragic failure. (Interestingly, this is one way to
describe Chinese socialism or the long revolution as a whole up to the
present.) The specic demands were not for ‘suffrage’ and non-Party elec-
tions, of course, as in Hong Kong, but for land compensation and new
elections in the actual system that exists. It obviously took a tremendous,
and brave, protest by many impassioned, angry people, but the central
government did intervene. The protest leaders Yang Semao and Lin
Zuluan became elected ofcials (deputy and Part secretary) in the new
village-wide election; the problem of land seizures was at least openly
acknowledged and set on the agenda. The deposed leader was given a
three-year jail sentence for corruption. Others lost their jobs and Party
memberships. According to Xinhua news agency, as of 2014, a total of
330 hectares of stolen land had been returned, and provincial ofcials
have ‘earmarked’ tens of millions of yuan for improving village liveli-
hood.13 A more recent government report puts that gure as 566 hectares
(about 1400 acres), and promises more.14 (However some of the villagers,
including Yang, have claimed that far more was stolen, and this remains
the central problem of later unrest.15) If we want to emphasize the practi-
cal and possible, we can say it was a remarkable victory. As noted Chinese
sociologist Sun Liping argued at the time, Wukan could be seen as herald-
ing a new China model of democratic governance: ‘a model for resolving
social contradictions and contention in rural China, i.e. “realizing people’s
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178
interests while maintaining social stability.”’16 For once the people’s part
(their interests if not their recall power) of the PRC moniker seemed to
bear out, and stability was not used to crush dissent.
The ‘Wukan model of Chinese democracy’ may be too strong a way to
put it. Wukan would have had to been the proverbial spark to a prairie re,
albeit one demanding reform and recompense as opposed to ousting the
Party in general. But mainland intellectuals have a propensity to think and
write in terms of ‘China models’—a refreshing refusal of American aca-
demic nominalism—and this is not meant to imply there is only ever one
such model for the entire nation. So too one could easily argue that Wukan
ts squarely within what Sebastian Heilman and others refer to as the
‘guerrilla style’ of rapidly and continually adaptable government in the
PRC, dating from its Maoist origins during an era of war, imperialism, and
revolution.17 At any rate, at the very least, the initial success of Wukan
gives lie to coding the entirety of political China, or even the Party-state
system as simply draconian and illiberal to the core. Recall power, account-
ability, elections: three benchmarks of what is understood to be democ-
racy. The movement and its initial success, including the lack of repression,
inspired other protests. Two other villages in Guangdong and one in
Zhejiang followed suit, and invoked Wukan as their model or inspiration
specically. (They did not achieve the same dramatic effect.) Despite its
later limitations or failures (to be discussed later), Wukan is still remem-
bered in Chinese media and intellectual circles, far beyond typical mass
incidents. Again one wants to add that its status as a global media event
played a role here, as happenstance as that may have been. Nevertheless, it
is striking for one small village to have produced such a spark, and all the
more so for the land (some of it) to be returned as well as other forms of
compensation. (We will return to the question of amounts later.) This is
more than the ‘occupy’ movements West and East seem to have effected,
though the latter are or were also different animals altogether in their
refusal to demand anything specic (in the case of Wall Street) or to
demand only the impossible (as in Hong Kong). There was no prairie re
engulng the CCP and initiating a velvet/liberal revolution but nor was
that the intention in Wukan, whose villagers seemed to be operating
through a very different self-understanding and political understanding
than that dictated by contemporary or even 1989 liberalism. In sum,
Wukan was indeed hailed by some Chinese and foreign media and intel-
lectuals—notably Sun Liping as noted earlier—as a potential Chinese
model of local or village democracy. And why not?
D. F. VUKOVICH

179
Predictably enough, extant academic commentary on Wukan reads it as
failure, or in other words as more of the same: the lack of liberalism or a
‘proper’ civil society, the lack of a demand or even a capacity for a ‘real’
democracy in China due to its communist system, and so on. Thus, Hung
Ho-Fung, an American sociologist from Hong Kong, writes that Wukan
was too Confucian and failed to genuinely challenge, let alone subvert, the
‘authoritarian status quo,’ because of villagers’ belief in the central
government’s authority and legitimacy; they were ‘submissive’ and ‘beg-
ging for mercy and aid from the highest authorities.’18 This assumes that
such appeals to authority were completely genuine and not tactical or sly.
This is at least an open question. His response frames the citizens’ actions
as merely akin to feudal or traditional social relations: the humble petition
to the emperor, as opposed to a modern or universal political demand for
rights and recognition. In sum, China can’t become a democracy or
‘become-the-same’ until this fealty is sloughed off. Despite Wukan actu-
ally being in large part about voting and recall power, and redistribution
of land, it still fails from this cold war, liberal ‘political science’ conver-
gence perspective. In fact, this is a common refrain of many studies of
protest in China, including the student movement in 1989, which was
seen as too servile at one point, when three student representatives went
on bended knee and delivered a petition to Premier Li Peng at the Great
Hall of the People. What we have is the hoary, interpretive opposition
from classical area studies or orientalism during the Cold War: tradition
versus modernity. It returns us to the limits—or rule of discourse—in
framing political China as monolithically illiberal: it can only fail to meet
the liberal standard. Even when protesters—at some real risk—do succeed
in generating concessions, this is still, in effect, unfortunate and a failure
because it only shores up the legitimacy and power of the authoritarian
single Party-state. For Hung, the villagers were not ‘independent’ enough
and lacked the proper civic mentality, or failed to ask for the right, authen-
tically subversive type of democracy or reform. Another recent, sociologi-
cal study of such protests (albeit not on Wukan specically) along these
lines actually sees such protests as de-politicizing and akin to ‘client-
patron’ relations with the state, and so preserving and propping up the
protesters’ own ‘state domination.’19
Legal scholar Stanley Lubman has remarked that ‘Wukan seems fated to
be remembered, if at all, as a failed attempt to remedy the illegality of village
leaders, with no prospect of being used as a model for reducing well-
known social contradictions in rural China.’20 This is a rather huge task set
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180
for one small village protest, especially for one case of illegal land seizures,
or even for the so-called rule of law that, as the liberal constitutionalists
would have it, needs to be implemented across China. If Wukan could be a
model for village democracy—and note that the processes for removal of
ofcials and new elections were already on the books—it would not quite
be a new model but actually about the government doing what it already
can and should do. As for large-scale ‘social contradictions,’ it is also hard
to see how elections or land returns would in fact solve these—a point
which we will return in the concluding section. Speaking of convergence
models following the normative liberal zeitgeist, famed mainland novelist
Yu Hua chimes in, mocking the ‘Chinese’ belief in the upright ofcial from
above who will set things right.21 Instead China and the mainland Chinese
need to snap out of their false consciousness. For Yu Hua what is needed is
not politics but judicial action and presumably ‘rule of law’ (which invari-
ably implies a Western constitutional system).
In response to such liberal views one must ask: so what if these protests
are historically inuenced by ‘Confucianism’ or ‘tradition’? Why is this a
bad thing if it works? And what if these conventional notions of ‘civil soci-
ety’ and individuated citizenship are not universal and necessary stages on
the great train of history? What is signied through such readings of
Wukan as failure, not victory, is the discourse of liberal universalism and a
residual Cold War intellectual formation. The Party can do no good and
must be opposed analytically at all costs. Any signs of loyalty, nationalism,
or patriotism—in China—are suspect, if not indexes of traditionalism or
even totalitarianism. But, again, why would such tradition or ‘commu-
nism’ be unfortunate other than it not being the correct form of gover-
nance according to current doxa stemming from conventional Western
educational formations? What is most striking here is that the village pro-
testors, in their shift from a generic human rights type of rhetoric to direct
appeals to higher authority (and the state), seem to have learned some-
thing, deliberately toying with and using the liberal convergence narrative
(and foreign media) toward their own ends.
And yet the Wukan victories or concessions, however non- revolutionary
and perhaps ultimately eeting, were indeed judicial and legal, involving
courts, cops, rights, and laws, and including the old Maoist one of it being
right to rebel. It is not that the Chinese have the wrong legal and political
systems and instead need the right (liberal) one, and then things will be
sorted. What such conventional wisdom elides is what Kevin O’Brien and
Li Liangjiang have called the ‘rightful resistance’ technique of Chinese
D. F. VUKOVICH

181
protest (not all protests but many), which is also a part of the political
culture and system. This is not some type of ‘ancient’ or transhistoric sys-
tem, but it is an historical tradition as much as a modern form of protest.
The essential idea is that it is rights and law based and assumes the legiti-
macy of the state-system as it currently exists, and even the basic values
thereof; these are variously appealed to when such laws or values are bro-
ken, be they land theft or corruption, pollution, reneging on promises,
and so on. This should seem a familiar if not universal form of protest, and
it certainly resonates with the Wukan Uprising (and is in contrast com-
pletely lacking in the Hong Kong context). But this becomes especially
notable in China because such ‘rights consciousness’ and beliefs in the
legitimacy of the Communist Party-state system are simply not supposed
to exist, at least according to liberal analysts. (Or again the rights-based
thinking is supposed to lead in a fully liberal-democratic direction, not a
‘communist’ one.)
As Steve Hess summarizes O’Brien’s and Li’s work in his article on
Wukan: ‘by positioning themselves against corrupt local cadres who are
violating the center’s policies rather than the regime itself, claimants can
assert moral leverage in interactions with the state, minimize personal risk,
and maximize their likelihood of victory.’22 This better captures the Wukan
dynamics than the liberal critiques noted earlier. But for Wukan—and pre-
sumably for future global media events—one must also factor in the pres-
ence of the foreign media and how they must be used, not just ‘reported
to.’ Wukan and China are global precisely because the foreign media are
there, including social media dissemination that always escapes the so-
called Great Firewall. Again one must allow for the deliberate, distanced
use or tactical deployment of such fealty or professed legitimacy—the pos-
sibility of this, since we cannot get inside the protesters’ heads, and do not
in fact need to. The point is to better understand how protest and politics
work (failures or successes). The rightful resistance concept is useful
because it does not require this, just as it does not require liberalism or
liberal democracy as the normative political values (e.g. there can be dif-
ferent forms of citizenship in the world).
More recently, Johan Lagerkvist has argued that Wukan (among other
protests) shows the work of a ‘shadow civil society’ in China that in effect
makes up for the lack of, or constrained, existence of a ‘real’ civil society
by acting in the same way, which is to say outside the constraints of ofcial
diktat and, say, stability discourse. This is a helpful suggestion indeed, and
to an extent resonates with the arguments and appreciation of Wukan
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182
advanced above in that it tries to suggest that the Wukan citizens were not
mere dupes. At the same time, however, it is hard to separate ofcial and
unofcial or ‘independent’ action and thought, including in China, and
the distinction between the shadow and thing itself can likewise be slip-
pery. Lagerkvist is concerned to find a movement toward democracy in
China, but we should also be concerned with whose and what type of
democracy and state we are talking about, let alone whether or not
there can or even should be such a linear or ‘progressive’ movement.23 In
other words, perhaps the form of the Chinese state is not the problem so
much as its economic neo-liberalism and unjustied authoritarianism or
illiberalism at times. In another reection on Wukan, Luigi Tomba asks us
whether or not every major protest in China has to be coded as part of a
movement toward democracy?24 Clearly the answer is no (as Tomba argues
as well), especially if the latter is to be dened along the lines of a Euro-
American country, or for that matter Japan or India. (The present author
sees this as less of a problem than do Tomba and Lagerkvist.)
The framing of Wukan is also, unsurprisingly, tied to the powerful dis-
course of liberalism and specically to the more or less generic concept of
‘civil society,’ which is probably indispensable to the very idea of political
science (a rule of its discourse), and thus to most studies of political China.
(Excluding more Marxist or other heterodox forms of political theory,
that follow the former’s critique of the concept in Hegel as essentially
bourgeois and marked by fundamental class exclusions.) As part of the
transformation of liberalism to something like a more reactionary neo- or
libertarian form, ‘civil society’ is usually given a specically anti-state gloss,
as opposed to it being a more or less peaceful and useful medium for the
state, the middle class, and for governance to adapt and proceed. And yet
since protest (and the general political intellectualculture) in China is not
anti-state, this concept is often at odds with what actually happens in
China, or with how protesters, intellectuals, and others understand them-
selves and their own political views. As the protests in Wukan were explic-
itly ‘pro’ Party and pro-state or appealed to such values at the upper levels,
they can only seem illiberal or failed to those in the conventional political
science mode. And yet Wukan was also clearly a public sphere or civil
society-like movement (a public or groupment outside the ofcial state
channels), like many others in China and elsewhere. What we can say,
then, and with Johan Lagerkvist of Stockholm University, is that the
Wukan ‘Uprising’ represents a ‘shadow civil society’ movement.25
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183
This is useful indeed and resonates with the rightful resistance concept as
framed above, in that it allows for its dynamics and substance or positivity
as a political event and action, originating outside the purview of the state,
and without framing it as lacking the proper liberal forms and norms and
without reading it as ‘statist’ in some pejorative sense. As he notes, it is
misleading to frame Wukan as an Uprising in so far as that implies an anti-
state politics of transformation.26 While militant and brave to the point of
turning back the riot police, the 2011 protests were not in this mode.
Lagerkvist also tantalizingly adds a new dimension to the analysis of
Wukan: the importance of ‘ancient’ clan power and networks within the
village(s) and protests (clans are essentially familial lineage groups where
people share a surname). This too, if indeed relevant to the protests and
land conicts (property conicts between clans, and between clans and the
state), would challenge the conventional liberal models of civil society and
democratization, and no doubt set off all the feudalism detectors in the
eld. (Clans were, to be sure, demonized as well in the Maoist era, and not
just by current ofcialdom, for fairly obvious and arguably compelling
reasons.) The clan factor may also relate—again in some admittedly
unknown way—to the downfall of the protest leaders and the original
movement for land justice.27 Clans and the state (divided loyalties indeed)
do not quite mix even today, and hostilities can be very mutual indeed.
Wukan failed
But unfortunately one must now also measure the Wukan Uprising as, in
part, a failure, even in its own terms or the terms of at least some of the
main protest leaders: to regain all lost land or compensation thereof, and
presumably to personally lead the village forward as new, good ofcials.
(While some land has been returned, much has been or was in dispute
through 2016.) This acknowledgment of failure will be different from
coding the movement as failed because it did not or could not achieve a
liberal-democratic transition; different also than framing it as a failure
because it did not realize some type of pure emancipation imagined by
anarchistic ultra-leftists in California.28 We will return to the meaning or
implications of this fall momentarily; it will be more instructive to examine
it as an exposure of political and economic limits both within China and
globally. Approximately one year after those new elections ushering in the
new and deposing the old ofcials, Reuters reported in 2013 that:
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184
Three village committee members [said] they believed that [a local business-
man who bought the land for his company] was being protected by higher
authorities to avoid bringing down other ofcials, bank executives and busi-
nessmen who proted from Wukan’s land sales.29
This is entirely plausible. And in any case, even by 2016, not all land
alleged to have been taken has been returned or compensated. The cen-
tral remaining dispute is precisely over how much land was stolen or sold,
with the villagers—and new ofcials—claiming a far higher number.
Moreover, since those new elections there have also been several arrests
(on the grounds of corruption) and resignations. As early as October
2012, former youth protest leader and newly elected ofcial Zhuang
Liehong resigned out of frustration, claiming he was ‘unable to handle
the wishes of the villagers from within the village committee,’ and refer-
ring to irreconcilable differences with the senior leader of the protests Lin
Zuluan (林祖銮).30 It must also be said that his resignation came a mere
seven months after his election. Zhuang subsequently migrated to
America with his wife, leaving their baby behind until a friend brought
him over as well. They are now applying for political asylum in NewYork
City. Zhuang has since returned to human rights rhetoric, in interviews
with ‘Radio Free Asia’ and the like.31 When in Rome do as Romans do, as
the saying goes. But this does cast light on the previous road not taken
before the Uprising—the human rights option and thus some type of
liberal universalism that will only be seen as anti-Party-state in toto and
therefore something to be repressed. The access to visas and air-fares and
diasporic communities in global metropoles also reminds us that this is far
from the old Soviet days of radical democracy and peasant revolution in
Guangdong, as these particular villagers are by and large wealthy and
mobile in comparison.
More serious have been the arrests, new rounds of elections, but with-
out enough perceived progress (according to some, The NewYork Times
reports of villagers’ feelings32), and the outbreak of new protests in 2016.
Yang Semao (杨色茂) was the rst former protest leader-turned-ofcial
arrested, in 2014, accused of taking bribes before standing for re-election.
He was eventually convicted and sentenced to two years.33 According to
one Times report, Yang did acknowledge ‘accepting 20,000 renminbi, or
about $3,200, in bribes but said he immediately donated half to a local
school and returned the remaining amount.’34 The 2016 protests were
triggered by the arrest of Lin Zuluan, the former number one organizer
D. F. VUKOVICH

185
and leader of 2011, and one of the last remaining elected ofcials from the
Uprising. Lin had called for mass protests over the fate of the unreturned
communal lands and was promptly arrested. This triggered the protests
again. These were smaller in scale than 2011, but still estimated at between
2000 and 4000, a signicant amount of a village of 13,000. In the after-
math, a total of nine villagers were arrested and convicted as a result of
these last protests (appeals are pending). It would appear that the right to
rebel had been rescinded this time, perhaps because of the increasing illib-
eralism in the Xi Jinping era. Lin confessed, perhaps by force, to inadver-
tently taking bribes, in one of those televised confessions broadcast by
state television for high-prole cases. He was sentenced to three years.
These arrests (Lin’s and Yang’s as well as another former leader, Hui
Ruichao’s), and those of the protesters in 2016, are the truly dishearten-
ing aspect of the rise and fall of the Uprising. After a momentous success
in securing elections and governmental response/remediation from above,
Wukan witnessed a second round of elections in 2014, and then this
denouement—for now—in 2016.
It is hard to imagine what the villagers could have done, or done better,
by themselves. While these last protests were brief and did not become a
global media event, and therefore remain hard to read from afar, the tactic
of a ‘Long Live the Communist Party!’ chant can be heard in video report-
age, but such moves clearly did not work in this case. The foreign media
were comparatively absent and so less well used by the protesters this time.
Outside reporters were again singled out for criticism and warnings,
including most especially the Hong Kong outlets. The local/state media
seemed ready, and they too may have learned from having been ‘played’ in
2011. This too suggests the inuence of Hong Kong’s Occupy/Umbrella
protests—partially understood in the mainland as a would-be velvet revo-
lution reeking of imperialistic/colonial contempt for the Party-state—and
Hong Kong’s anti-communist, partisan media. Needless to say, this is not
a salutary inuence but rather one that fuels the illiberal drive. The harsh
crackdown on the 2016 protests and perhaps even the arrests of Lin and
others, would also seem to have to do with the Xi Jinping era, as opposed
to the comparatively more relaxed Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao era. (Wukan
erupted rst during Hu’s last year as general secretary, and he further
stepped down from the presidency in 2013, when Xi took over.) Under Xi
concern with stability—the unprincipled peace Mao associated with liber-
alism—has become paramount. Protests, strikes, dissident actions, and the
like are not only tolerated less but are also going to be more hard-pressed
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186
to activate the discourse of righteous resistance. That being said, one is
sure that protests and other public actions will be taken, and that same
discourse remains at least one viable route and a part of the political cul-
ture. In the end, Xi Jinping will pass from the scene before opposition,
political conict, or that tradition fades away. Again one needs to recall
that de-politicization, so successfully carried out by the post-Mao regime
and by post-welfare or neo-liberalisms, nonetheless, has its limits.
But again the fundamental issue, practically speaking, is the land—how
much remains to be compensated or returned. One wants to automatically
side with the villagers/protesters, and for good reason. The problem of
land seizures is well known and undeniable, even by state media itself, just
as Xi’s rise has been all about his anti-corruption drive. And in Wukan,
such seizures were actually, bravely, and to an extent successfully con-
tested. Again it is worth noting that this is not due simply to the ofcial-
dom’s malfeasance and corruption in a moral sense but in the real pressures
placed upon local and regional ofcials to keep making money, that is
showing prot and growth and ‘development.’ For its own part, the state
media now proclaims that Lufeng ‘has made progress on the Wukan prob-
lem’: a seven member committee of representatives from county, city, and
nearby villages, as well as Wukan has been established to arbitrate land
disputes and certify new ownerships; more land has been returned; hous-
ing construction offered for poverty-stricken families; and ‘efforts’ made
to improve social welfare, health, employment, and so on. The same piece
notes that the government disagreed with Lin and other villagers that they
should be compensated about 500,000 yuan for their land being reclaimed
and that Wukan only should decide all land disputes; it also notes that Lin
was guilty of taking bribes made by contractors and kickbacks when buy-
ing ships for the village. If one were to read this report literally, it would
seem a remarkable and largely successful resolution to the crisis and to the
illegal land seizures prior to 2011. From a political stability and livelihood
standpoint, if those improvements to living and working conditions are
actually made in Wukan, it will turn out to have been a very effective pro-
test indeed, despite the remaining injustices. And even if Yang and Lin
were indeed framed. This is not to say that they were a necessary sacrice,
a la Stalin’s remark about needing to break eggs to make omelets. But it
is to mark the complexity of the situation and of Chinese politics in gen-
eral, including the ability of the centralized, ‘illiberal’ state to do other
things than repression.
D. F. VUKOVICH

187
As for corruption, or the newly elected ofcials being guilty of it, it
must be said that this is not something to be automatically dismissed, if
only due to the well-known scale of the phenomenon in China. Not least
at the local and rural levels. One may also note that Zhu Mingguo, the
upper-level cadre instrumental in helping resolve the case for Wang Yang
in 2011, was convicted in 2014 for taking 141 million yuan in bribes and
kickbacks over his career, and for violating the one-child policy. His sen-
tence may be unrelated to his success in Wukan, or it may actually be.
Corruption runs from top to bottom, as does inghting or factionalisms,
and one cannot rule out prosecutions being ‘personal.’ But those jail sen-
tences for the 2016 protesters suggest a different, equally obvious, and
more compelling story: a crackdown on dissent or political conict, even
within the Party or properly elected local governments.35 It is possible that
all of these stories can be true in small or large part. Protest-leaders-
turned-ofcials putting their hands in the till like everyone else; the
amounts of land being in real dispute (two sides as to who owns what) or
simply impossible to return, or simply being hoarded by the Party; a very
hard or conservative, anti-protest turn (of any protests) under Xi Jinping,
and one that may not be turned back: all of this is plausible. But the clear
repression of the 2016 protesters rings the clearest and loudest. It is a clear
instance of illiberalism at its worst in China, the construing of all dissent
and protest as ‘subversive’ and traitorous, in a throwback to the very dif-
ferent times of revolution, post-war construction, and the high Cold War.
If repression of class and state/nation enemies was justiable back then in
classical Marxist or Leninist fashion (and this is at least arguable), it would
seem the enemies now are either avowed, antagonistic liberals or other
anti-Party people, or those (anyone) who would interfere with the smooth
functioning of the economy. If neo-imperialism is more subtle and ambig-
uous in the current conjuncture than in the Mao era, the Party-state’s
reaction to perceived or actual ‘enemies of the people’ is in many ways
harsher than before, and less justied.
it’s thePolitiCal, eConomy
To this extent it may seem that the liberal/convergence narrative may yet
have the last say—that ‘democracy’ means a Western electoral system (and
constitution) and nothing else will actually work until the Chinese state-
system is replaced with this. And yet what does it mean to say that the
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188
Chinese system, here illustrated by the Wukan protests, does not work
because it is the wrong type of democracy or is not democratic at all? As
argued earlier, aside from the multi-party aspect, Wukan would seem to be
the very epitome of democracy and recall power and accountability
through elections (and note again that the guilty parties prior to 2011
have also been jailed). The state actually responded positively to what it
saw as the—just—general will.
But if the liberal dismissal represents one limited interpretation, the
ofcial one—even as portrayed by ofcial media in the end (‘Wukan makes
progress’)—also has its obvious, and telling, limits as well. Unless that
China Daily article saying it has made good progress is more or less factu-
ally correct (which one must admit is possible). But in that case, the arrests
for merely protesting in 2016 would be glaringly contradictory. For then
Wukan would truly be a working and successful model of ‘Chinese democ-
racy through righteous resistance’ that the state itself could unabashedly
uphold and propagandize even to the villagers. But the post-Mao Party-
state does not actually want to politicize and thereby empower the society
of what used to be called the masses. Wukan may, then, also seem to indi-
cate that the ofcial ‘China model’ of stability—the attempts to neutralize
politics and protests via economics/prosperity/money/development—
will hold sway for the foreseeable future, not least because it is buttressed
by the power of the state (and cops and courts) as a certain iron st held
behind the ideological or cultural legitimacy of the state. This is indeed
the likely reality for the near future, barring any sudden changes to Xi
Jinping’s plans as head of state.
And yet there is still more to learn from Wukan, even while acknowl-
edging these limits. Hong Kong’s protesters could in theory, for example,
learn to play the international media better, by triangulating in some fash-
ion the ‘friendly’ English language and local media with the mainland
media. Why not see the mainland as an international media in effect, to be
used for one’s own ends? Aside from the Hong Kong opposition’s com-
plete antipathy to mainland politics and legitimacy, there is no good rea-
son for them not to, and to instead tactically embrace the righteous
resistance mode. (And this contempt or ignorance for all things PRC is
not actually a good reason to begin with, as the professed belief in the
state’s ultimate or ‘last instance’ legitimacy is all that matters.) It is also
worth noting for Hong Kong that the tradition of such righteous resis-
tance or rhetorical-political appeals is also a relatively elite one, as noted by
O’Brien, among others. It isn’t about groveling or weakness (though
D. F. VUKOVICH

189
Hong Kong is indeed weak in a sense) but about achieving recognition
and speaking like one belongs, so to speak. It actually thus ts middle class
and ruling class Hong Kongers’ privilege (e.g. the Civic Party of barris-
ters) compared to other Chinese cities and populations. It is at any rate
high time to drop the fairly hysterical pretense, articulated by some, that
Hong Kong exists in some chain of equivalence with, say, a far more pow-
erfully (and ethnically) dominated region like Tibet.36 Hong Kong’s so-
called independent media—the tabloidesque, anti-communist Apple Daily
in particular—might also take note, and at least rethink what is to be
gained by pursuing only a hostile and antagonistic relationship to all things
‘ofcially’ PRC. To be sure, this would amount to a paradigm shift for
Hong Kong, and one is far more likely to see the status quo and Hong
Kong exceptionalism continue to fester for the foreseeable future.
But there is more meaning to mine here, in thinking through Wukan.
Just as Hong Kong’s politics is not just about the specic and small city on
the periphery of China but about the contemporary fate of liberalism,
namely its degradation and weakening into neo-liberalism, Wukan also
reveals the very real limits imposed by the economism of the Party-state,
and arguably the relative unimportance—the limits—of democracy under-
stood as elections and recall powers and rules of law within a given system
or civil society. It is not that these things are trivial; they clearly are not and
even worked effectively—at the very least worked, had effects—in the case
of Wukan. But just as ‘bourgeois civil society’ has always more or less
excluded the working class and dispossessed, struggles over democratic
procedure and politics in the narrow sense often, if not always, pull one
away from the action and structuring reality of the economic base, under-
stood as not just the base to the superstructure but the basis of social life
and individual aspirations.
Now it may be that the former leaders were all framed, punished for
having won earlier or for asking for too much back. Or it may be that they
succumbed to taking money illegally, inadvertently or not. And it may well
be that all of the land seizures claimed by Wukan protesters were indeed
thefts, never belonged to neighboring villages as now claimed, and so on.
But in the end, the focus on the elections and bureaucratic obstacles, or
on thievery and corruption and specic political persecution, takes us away
from the central problem as seen from a larger and more structural per-
spective than that of the form of democracy of the Party-state at the local
or upper levels. That problem is the current mode of capital accumulation
within China, or in other words with a Chinese variety of capitalism or
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190
developmentalism and an attendant state apparatus that, depending on
one’s perspective, is either fully captured by capital and capitalists or is on
the verge of losing its capacity to do anything but ‘tail’ the spiral of accu-
mulation and its iniquitous effects.
That economy—and not just the Party-state’s drive to de-politicize the
populace while it rides the wave—is the heart of the matter. The principal
contradiction of Wukan divides and expands into many: that the land is
communal yet not farmed; that it belongs to the commons yet is not used
thusly, so much as traded and commodied; that agriculture is in decline
yet nothing has taken its place; that labor has been thoroughly commodi-
ed in a nominally socialist state; that class inequalities and the eviscera-
tion of ‘statist’ welfare likewise subtend this commodication of labor (i.e.
exploitation). In other words, the problem of Wukan is the problem of
China as a whole, and of a now fully global capitalism or neo-liberal regime
of accumulation that must seek ever new means of prot. In the context of
the PRC, which had nationalized and communalized so much, this inevi-
tably takes the form of the theft or privatization of formerly common or
public resources. From an almost fully public economy in 1978, two years
after Mao but before Deng, China’s ‘statist’ economy now stands at about
30% of the whole economy.37
But another way, Wukan’s problems—even specically the land ques-
tion and those original thefts—cannot be resolved, or even adequately
mediated, by ‘democracy’ as a set of electoral procedures and even laws in
the liberal sense of rights, negative liberties, and even human rights. What
if, for example, Wukan could elect not righteous resisters but, say, a ‘cor-
rectly’ liberal Hong Kong-esque anti-communist, or a solid social demo-
crat of the European variety? Would this alleviate poverty in Wukan, such
as it still exists, or bring the land back to those who held it? In other
words, if the Wukan event has ‘failed’ in general terms, this is not a failure
of the siege, of the resultant elections as procedure, or of the state’s other
responses to that siege, such as the re-compensations and other funding to
date. These are all things to afrm and hold forth as effective and impor-
tant as far as they went. And that were betrayed later, if not by the subse-
quent corruption or alleged greed/false claims of some of the original
protesters, then certainly by the arrests and long sentences against the
2016 protesters.
What has failed, beyond this crackdown years down the line from the
original 2011 protests, and despite all the undeniable successes of China’s
economic and global rise after Mao, has been precisely that post-Mao
D. F. VUKOVICH

191
capitalist turn. In other words, the de-Maoication of the economy in the
pursuit of prot and wealth is dened in capitalist and ‘modern’ terms like
automobiles and skyscrapers and an unbalanced, rapid urbanization.
Wukan and the Party must now be protable, and more protable tomor-
row than they are today. This is precisely the problem. Additionally, it is
running out of ways to do so. From a 100% public property share in
national wealth to 30%—there is only so much room left, and the Party
will want to keep some things nationalized (e.g. most of the banks). China
is well aware that it needs to move away from overreliance on all those
factories and export zones alongside the big cities and coasts, but it is yet
unclear as to what will or can take its place. For the countryside, the Party-
state is pursuing urbanization—driven by property values—not any type
of socialistic agricultural development in the countryside or seaside. This,
the decline of agriculture as an economy and the countryside as a site for
its own industry and development are well-known problems. China’s diet
may indeed be richer and more diverse than in the Mao era, but it has also
now returned to a pre-Maoist fear of food security: not just the literal
safety of the food it does grow but an ability to feed itself more or less by
itself. The economy—the politics of it, the shifting from a communist
state to a state tailing capitalism—may thus seem like an insurmountable
problem, short of either collapse or revolution.
And yet it may prove surmountable in the long run, for there will be
more Wukans in the future and more contradictions piling up within
Chinese capitalism, not least around the environment and ever-growing
social inequalities. If one Wukan has failed, then two, three, many Wukans
may not. Much of what I am saying here echoes East China Normal
University professor Lu Xinyu’s comment, one of the prolic and accom-
plished new left professors. She writes:
Wukan’s true problem is the capitalization of rural land; but the media
hyped it as a democracy question and ignored the real issue. The village
committee does not have the ability to solve this problem. The development
of urbanization is the root cause. And that is why such land conicts are so
intensive in Guangdong.38
The point here is not to keep the villagers tied to their villages (or boats)
but instead to others. One, as noted earlier, common or publicly held land
(individual and village allotments) can be and has been illegally ripped off
in classic neo-liberal fashion. Given the same economic pressures on the
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192
Party ofcialdom to accumulate, this is not going away soon, short of a
major policy adjustment by the central committee. Such conicts do not
happen simply because China lacks liberal democracy or such like laws—it
is clearly illegal, and Xi Jinping has been nothing if not an enthusiastic
prosecutor against corruption. More protests and even local elections
would certainly help, as opposed to hurt. But the larger problem is that
the Party is increasingly captured by capital, on the verge of losing its
capacity to regulate its capitalism or mode of accumulation.
The second, related point invoked by Lu Xinyu is that urbanization or
the pushing of surplus rural labor into the ever-expanding cities and export
processing zones is likewise reaching its limits. The chief limit being that
this model of growth does nothing to actually develop the countryside,
that is nothing to develop new towns and new industries (including agri-
cultural) in the countryside. Those urban jobs done by millions of migrants
workers—while far from the image of proto-slavery and destitution as
would be dictated by a Sinophobic orientalism—still do not by and large
pay an adequate wage for the laborers to stay. Even with increased wages
in recent years, many more migrants are returning home. All of this is
compounded by the well-known problem of the hukou or registration sys-
tem, which essentially bestows second-class status and lack of housing,
schooling, and other benets for those same rural-to-urban workers. That
system was rational and arguably fair and smart during the socialist or Mao
period, since the state was then trying to restrict such labor ows and the
creation of ‘third world’ or slum cities, in favor of developing the country-
side more autonomously and locally via the communes and new towns.
This rural vision of democratic developmentis precisely what needs revised
and returnedto. The lack of this isfelt far more deeply and painfully than
the lack of a ‘classic’ civil society as imagined by a European intellectual.
As with the laws against ‘counter-revolutionary subversion’ during the hot
Cold War, the hukou system is now quite broken and ill-tting.
Put another way, at bottom the stakes here, conceptually for us but in
also very real ways for those who live with them, are the political economy
of China today and the class character of the state and all of which are on
the verge of becoming fully capitalist.39 This is precisely Lin Chun’s argu-
ment in her recent, magisterial book on China and global capitalism, and
the fate of the socialist revolution. There she also cites one of the new vil-
lage leaders (Lin Zuluan) to this effect: ‘This [return of stolen land] is the
government responsibility. If the government acts as a mediator its role is
mistaken.’40 What Lin is very perceptively pointing to is that the state acts
D. F. VUKOVICH

193
like some ofcious but pathetic mid-level manager in a corporation, or like
an arbitration attorney working at least in part—in large part—on getting
a good nancial deal for both sides. This is not what a nominally commu-
nist ofcial or state should do, which in the line that runs from Sun Yat-
Sen to Mao to the current CCP is supposed to be obsessed with people’s
livelihood if not social justice. It has clearly failed even in its own terms to
make Wukan (or Lufeng area) prosperous—adequately or broadly pros-
perous—let alone just. Whether as a result of ideology or weakness in
capacity, the Chinese state often abdicates such responsibilities. This is one
reason why the Wukan strategy to reclaim the economic—to frame protest
as being about this—is important, if also doomed to fail at a larger, perma-
nent level, unless there are many more Wukans.
But the nal point we need to register here is that this is indeed a prob-
lem of the political economy of China, and neither the village nor even
county-level political machine is adequate to the task. Electing some other
leaders in place of Lin Zuluan etal. is not likely to help, and what hap-
pened there is already a violation of the people’s republican laws. What is
needed—among other things but prominently among them—is a stronger
state intervention into the economy and Party policies. One can call this a
movement toward economic democracy, if the signier ‘democracy’has not
been entirely spoiled by neo-liberalism.Butit is also a movement against
economism, against the subsumption of politics by economics, as we have
been presenting it here. Growth and development and ever new sources of
money are not the point, but in many ways are the problems. China, like
most wealthy or large countries or even ‘societies’ like Hong Kong, has
enough money, but too much economism. This is, paradoxically enough,
one strange fruit of liberalism and its rise through and persistence after
colonization and empire. The PRC will need to challenge its own power-
ful investment in liberalism, that is in the form of its strident economism
and capitalistic developmentalism via the market principle. The holy words
of growth and ‘the economic’ should appear to the Party- state, one should
hope, as a far greater threat or challenge to people’s livelihood and to state
legitimacy than the comparatively weak powers and seductions of political
liberalism or multi-party voting. The latter played little role in Wukan, just
up the road from the colonial-liberal enclave of Hong Kong. At the same
time we, on the outside, so to speak—and with all due allowances for the
slipperiness of the inside/outside distinction—need necessarily think
through and against the limits of political liberalism. It simply cannot
serve as a useful template to understand phenomena like Wukan and the
political in China and elsewhere.
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194
notes
1. This statement reects my own response to the closing argument of
Prasenjit Duara in his excellent chapter, ‘Hong Kong as a Global Frontier:
Interface of China, Asia, and the World,’ in Hong Kong in the Cold War,
eds. Priscilla Roberts and John M.Carroll (Hong Kong University Press,
2016).
2. The long essays of Perry Anderson in his New Left Review journal are
important for capturing this sense of bleakness. But see as well the critical
but generous review of the ‘ultra’ or ‘libcom’ Internet-based publishing
group, Endnotes by Tim Barker, ‘The Bleak Left’ (N+1 Issue Spring 28,
2017. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/the-bleak-left/). I
discuss this issue of bleakness and political possibility (or its absence) in
more detail in the nal chapter.
3. See, for a recent example, Zi Yang’s report, ‘Rural China and the Asian
Methamphetamine Trade: a Case Study of Lufeng,’ from Japan, via the
November 20, Modern Tokyo Times, via The Jamestown Foundation think
tank in the USA.: http://moderntokyotimes.com/?p=6553. Accessed
Nov. 20, 2017.
4. A basic timeline of the Wukan saga can be found in Hong Kong’s South
China Morning Post http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-poli-
tics/article/2019006/symbol-chinas-rural-democracy-ve-years-strug-
gle-wukan. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
5. I am indebted to Laurence Dang’s excellent M.A. thesis, ‘Wuthering
Wukan: Community Communication and Social Drama in Peasants’ Mass
Incidents in China,’ supervised by Tim Simpson at Macau University for
this and other insights.
6. Dang, ‘Wuthering Wukan,’ 42.
7. For an elaborate discussion, see Steve Hess, ‘Foreign Media Coverage and
Protest Outcomes in China: The case of the 2011 Wukan rebellion’
(Modern Asian Studies 49.1 2015: 177–203).
8. Chen, ‘The Example of Wukan.’ The Chinese original of Chen’s article can
be found online at http://blog.qq.com/qzone/622007996/1327030504.
htm. Accessed Jan. 7, 2015, An English translation by David Bandurski
can be found at the China Media Project of HKU http://chinamediapro-
ject.org/2012/01/30/the-legacy-of-wukan/. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
9. See Edward Wong, ‘Canny Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen China’s Muzzle’
in December 22, 2011, The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/12/23/world/asia/canny-wukan-villagers-grasp-keys-to-
loosen-chinas-muzzle.html. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017. I should note that
this article also makes note of the Wukan media savviness and self-aware-
ness. It is an exceptionally smart report from Hong Kong, though it puts
Hong Kong’s inuence in only positive terms for Guangdong.
D. F. VUKOVICH

195
10. The lm was later expanded into six parts from four, after the most recent
and perhaps nal stage of the protests in 2016. (We’ll broach the latest
developments below). Not surprisingly, the last two parts are far more pes-
simistic but also based largely in the USA and outside of China (their access
was blocked far more and they spoke to fewer villagers in Wukan). http://
www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2017/04/wukan-china-
democracy-experiment-170403074626458.html. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
11. Bo became the leader of Chongqing after Wang Yang’s time there. His
success, including in wiping out maa and white collar crime, could be
read by some as an indictment of Wang, just as the two of them were often
read as being in a competition for the rise to the top (which at one level is
merely common sense or banally true). Needless to say, Wang Yang won
the long game, and is now a member of the Standing Committee of the
Politbureau, thanks in part to Wukan being settled under his watch or
guidance.
12. James Pomfret, ‘Special Report: Freedom zzles out in China’s rebel town
of Wukan’ March 1, 2013, https://in.reuters.com/article/us-china-
wukan/special-report-freedom-zzles-out-in-chinas-rebel-town-of-wu-
kan-idINBRE91R1J020130228. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
13. Xinhua report on March 14, 2014, China Daily, ‘Wukan Village Deputy
Head Detained.’ https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-03/14/
content_17348253.htm. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
14. See China Daily September 12, 2016, ‘Lufeng makes progress on Wukan
problem.’ http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2016-09/12/con-
tent_26772987.htm. Accessed Nov. 17, 2017. There is enough detail in
this particular report to make a persuasive case that the state did redress
some of the injustices and took pains to alleviate the unhappiness in Wukan.
That this was not enough for many of the people in 2016 is also clear.
15. According to one report by Michelle Wines in January 16, 2012, The
NewYork Times, the villagers had claimed 6.8 square miles have been taken
and sold, with Yang Semao claiming ‘far more’ may have been, but he had
no way of knowing. ‘Protester Made a Boss by the Party He Deed’
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/world/asia/protest-leader-
becomes-party-boss-in-chinese-village-that-rebelled.html. Accessed Nov.
19, 2017.
16. As cited in a very useful essay by Johan Lagerkvist, ‘The Wukan Uprising
and Chinese State-Society Relations: Toward “Shadow Civil Society”?,’
346. (International Journal of China Studies 3.3 2012: 345–361.) The last
phrase quoted here is from Prof. Sun, and the former from Prof Lagerkvist.
17. See Heilman and Perry, op cit. chapter 1.
18. See Ho Fung Hung’s blog post on the Columbia University Press website,
‘South China’s Protests Are Not as Subversive as Many Think.’ http://
www.cupblog.org/?p=5224. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
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196
19. See Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang, ‘The Power of Instability:
Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China’
(American Journal of Sociology 118.6 2013: 1475–1508). The functional-
ism or ‘closed circles’ in some such social science research is striking,
though the empirical detail remains valuable.
20. Stanley Lubman, ‘Wukan: New Election, Same Old Story’ (March 27,
2014, Wall Street Journal). https://blogs.wsj.com/chinareal-
time/2014/03/27/wukan-new-election-same-old-story/. Accessed
Nov. 15, 2017.
21. See Yu Hua, ‘In China, the Grievances Keep Coming’ in The New York
Times January 1, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opin-
ion/in-china-the-grievances-keep-coming.html. Accessed Nov. 15,
2017.
22. See Hess, ‘Foreign Media Coverage,’ 6–7.
23. See also Luigi Tomba, ‘What Does Wukan Have to Do With Democracy?’
Made in China: A Quarterly on Chinese Labour, Civil Society, and Rights
(Issue 4, 2016). https://www.chinoiresie.info/what-does-wukan-have-
to-do-with-democracy/. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017. Tomba asks a great
question: does every protest in China have to be about some movement
toward democracy? Clearly the answer is no.
24. See Tomba, Ibid.
25. Lagerkvist, Ibid., 355.
26. Lagerkvist, 357.
27. My point is that one would truly have to be in Wukan and closely associ-
ated with it to venture a condent, warranted analysis along these lines.
Not possible for the present author, and not least due to lack of funding
from the Hong Kong RGC. But the clan factor does indeed seem too
important to leave out here or to banish to a footnote altogether, and the
return to clan relations and clan politics in general has been noted by many
others. I should note that I had one ‘source’ or Guangdong-rooted com-
rade who wanted to argue along these same lines, but for my own part I
was unable to receive a grant from the HK UGC to fund such investiga-
tions/trips.
28. See, for example, the quasi-academic webzine ‘Chuang,’ volume 1, an
American/Californian/West Coast view of ‘the Chinese proletariat.’
http://chuangcn.org/journal/one/. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
29. See James Pomfret, Ibid.
30. See again the always useful China Media Project at Hong Kong University,
translation care of David Bandurski, ‘Wukan ofcial resigns from elected
position.’ http://cmp.hku.hk/2012/10/24/wukan-democracy-leader-
resigns/. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
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31. See ‘Interview: We Called on Trump For Justice in Wukan’ at the Cold
War news agency Radio Free Asia on December 16, 2016: http://www.
rfa.org/english/news/china/wukan-zhuang-12162016161546.html.
Accessed Nov. 20, 2017.
32. See Dan Levin, April 1, 2014, The NewYork Times, ‘Years After Revolt,
Chinese Village Glumly Returns to Polls.’ https://www.nytimes.
com/2014/04/01/world/asia/years-after-revolt-chinese-village-glumly-
returns-to-polls.html. Accessed Nov. 21, 2017.
33. I am unable to nd any evidence of an appeal by Yang Semao.
34. Dan Levin. Ibid.
35. The fate of their appeals is unknown as of the time of writing, but the
repressive tactic is obvious enough.
36. Put another way, what offends in such an equation of Tibet with Hong
Kong (or Xinjiang and even Taiwan) is that Hong Kong is not oppressed
or dominated or subject to Han chauvinism; it is a perpetrator of the latter
more than anything else, and has its own legacies of racism in regards to
South and Southeast Asians living in the city, just as it exists in a position
of great privilege in comparison to other places within China. Not all SARS
are alike, and if Taiwan has been de facto independent for several genera-
tions, the same cannot be said of Hong Kong, which depends on China in
numerous ways. For an example of such false and supercial equivalencies,
see a blog by a couple China experts in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
‘Could Hong Kong become Tibet 2.0?.’ https://blog.lareviewofbooks.
org/chinablog/hong-kong-become-tibet-2-0/. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
37. This gure taken from a recent study on Chinese inequality by Thomas
Piketty, Li Yang, and Gabriel Zucman. They put the 1978 number at 70%.
See their ‘Capital Accumulation, Private Property and Rising Inequality in
China, 1978–2015’ at the National Bureau of Economic Research,
Working Paper No. 23368. June 2017. http://www.nber.org/papers/
w23368. Accessed Nov. 24, 2017.
38. Lu as quoted by Rachel Wang in her 2013 Foreign Policy article on Wukan,
‘Setback for Chinese Democracy: Why Protest Leader Admits He
“Regrets” Taking Charge of Wukan’ (http://www.tealeafnation.
com/2013/02/setback-for-chinese-democracy-why-protest-leader-
admits-he-regrets-taking-charge-of-wukan). See also Prof. Lu Xinyu, at
http://www.weibo.com/2569634794/zjaUnF5UC?type=comment.
Accessed June 2014.
39. Many on the non-Chinese left would argue that China is already capitalist,
just as the right or liberals would argue that alas it is not truly capitalist but
a degraded, crony form of it. But all of this begs the question of what form
or variety of capitalism, how to dene this, and so on. It would generally
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198
be admitted by those who actually study the PRC that if it is capitalist, it is
radically different and novel form of it, for good and for ill. And at any rate,
the PRC—the Party-state and those who take it seriously—sees itself as
being socialist or socialistic. One needs to reckon with this claim and its
truth effects and even validity before simply agreeing or disagreeing with it
on principle.
40. Lin Chun, China and Global Capitalism, 73. See the entire chapter here
for more.
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199© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2_6
CHAPTER 6
The Ills ofLiberalism: Thinking Through
thePRC andthePolitical
As we might all agree, China is clearly not-liberal and therefore in a sense
‘illiberal’ on semantic or etymological grounds alone (see the discussion in
chapter 1). The present study has offered an examination of an ‘illiberal’
China, of the PRC as an allegedly illiberal political regime. This turn of
phrase is common enough in the media and ‘respectable’ journalism. But
it is also invoked in, and still more often assumed by academic writing as
well—as when the PRC is framed as illiberal because it is authoritarian
(which like all states, it is) and repressive(which like all states, it is). But is
this merely a matter of degree, i.e., that it is more of these bad thingsthan,
say, the United States or India andit is this that makes it illiberal? Or is
there more to this story about regimes and discourses and compari-
sons?Chinarepresents a threat or at least a challenge to liberal or liberal-
democratic ideology. Elizabeth Perry aptly diagnosed this ‘challenge’ as
early as 2012in the academic literature, by framing the PRC as an atten-
tive authoritarian regime: its contentious civil society and protest culture
actually enhance Party-state rule, in part because the state attends to pro-
test and problems and chooses to act or not act on them.1 This can be said
to compare favorably to ‘real’ democratic regimes where even massive
anti-war protests or ‘occupy’ movements (e.g. Wall Street) are duly and
entirely ignored. This illiberalness aka ‘attentive authoritarianism’ is, how-
ever, seen as a bad thing, even if a not-so hidden admiration can also be
discerned in such framings of China as, for example, a ‘perfect dictator-
ship.’2 It is framed as illiberal despite it having an undeniably active civil

200
society and public sphere, a long history and culture of contentious and
serious, if also subtle and non-European style, political protests. It is
framed as politically illiberal even though it has never particularly aspired
to political liberalism for the last century, and even though its skyrocketing
numbers of ‘mass incidents’—brought about by a liberalization of the
economy, it must be recalled—have at times won concessions from the
state or forced it to address its failures. The argument in the present text
is that the PRC’s ‘illiberalism’ is fundamentally ambiguous, and neither
simply negative and objectionable nor merely ripe for a perennial liberal
debunking by China watchers and self-professed experts.
This illiberal challenge or threat, as perceived by foreigners, is not sim-
ply about a sentimental or otherwise psychologically motivated liberal
concern for the oppressed or suffering Other, almost always to be found
in the darker, foreign places of the world, so to speak. (Though this is a
familiar enough phenomenon of Euro-American popular culture in its
own right.) This is also not simply another manifestation of fear or war
mongering over, for example, Chinese military and economic expansion
in, say, the South Pacic or in Africa (and some of which certainly warrants
proper concern from within Southeast Asia or Africa). While overtly ori-
entalist statements and discourse, framing China as a formidable enemy to
national security or to ‘humanity,’ have not gone away, these are not out
concern in the present study. If under older, more classically orientalist
conditions of knowledge production during the revolutionary years, the
China threat was chiey of the ‘yellow peril’ or Sinophobic variety, then in
the current conjuncture it is all about the PRC refusing to become the
same as the liberal universalist model or norm.
The specter of illiberal China is much more an ideological ghost, then,
where the stability or rise or persistence of the communist PRC represents
a threat to liberalism and the liberal world order of the last 30 or more
years. At times China is merely lumped in with a more general rise of ‘illib-
eralism,’ as when the eminent British political philosopher John Gray
invokes Xi Jinping and post-Mao China alongside the former Soviet Union,
Brexit, and ‘Romney-style [American] Republicans,’ in a global synopsis of
the ‘dark forces’ leading to the current ‘strange death of liberal politics.’3 At
other points, the PRC is a clear and present danger to ‘free markets and
democratic liberalism,’ as when two political scientists diagnose China’s
‘twin illiberalisms’ of ‘illiberal capitalism’ and ‘illiberal sovereignty’ (the lat-
ter denotes doing business with non-democratic or bad regimes abroad,
and the former is the usual neo-lib speak about free markets).4 The fact that
the PRC does not seek to export either revolution or authoritarianism—the
D. F. VUKOVICH

201
latter being well taken care of in most countries at any rate—does not lessen
the ideological threat here. But it is a threat to the self-identity and veritable
mirror stage of the occidental West more than to anything else.
This is also to say, in so many words, that to see the PRC as illiberal is to
see it as abnormal or unfree and lacking: in comparison to implicitly Western
and free, and ‘advanced’ liberal democracies, such as the United States and
much of Western Europe and Scandinavia, or even to Hong Kong (an
undoubted beneciary of colonial liberalism in this sense). This attribution
of lack and abnormality does, however, bring us back to the essential logic
or force of classical orientalism. If the problems with such a comparison
and framing are not immediately obvious in the current conjuncture, where
Xi Jinping and the Party stand out as exemplars of free trade and globaliza-
tion, and the United States is struck by racial unrest and violence it has not
seen in decades, then it may help to again recall the etymology of the word
‘illiberal’: it has always been an insult more than a concept, a keyword for
the rise of liberalism against its enemies in a political context rooted in the
UK and Europe during the rise of the bourgeoisie.
While no one would deny that the Party-state can act in a baldly author-
itarian and repressive manner, so, too, few well-informed observers would
deny that the PRC has democratic aspects: not just those same protests
and civil/public spheres but even the control of capital by the state, the
punishment of corrupt abusers of capital and the law, and an ability to act,
if belatedly and not always successfully, in the public interest. This is in
addition to a demonstrated—and perceived—ability to make the economy
grow and improve peoples’ livelihood. (We return to the latter dimension
below.) But there is more to the story of liberalism and illiberalism here;
there is something beyond this ‘balance’ or combination of repression,
empowerment, and protest at work, and which this study has tried to sug-
gest. The PRC is in many ways engaged in a protracted resistance to,
indeed, a struggle against liberalism. Even if it—that is, the leading forces
within the Party—is no longer serious about continuing its Maoist/com-
munist revolution or even pursuing any politics of radical equality, it is still
struggling against liberalism and at the very least a perceived foreign impe-
rialism. It attempts to ban liberalism, to a varying but palpable extent,
from universities and social media, for example, and more generally tries
to counter Western rhetoric or knowledge production about itself in other
ways. This is the gist of its efforts to deploy soft power globally (e.g.
through Confucius Institutes and student exchanges abroad, through a
less imperious, more free-trade approach to investment in Africa, and so
on) and to promulgate such patriotic or nationalistic tropes and ideas as
THE ILLS OFLIBERALISM: THINKING THROUGH THEPRC…

202
‘the China dream.’5 Joseph Nye, the pro-genitor of the so-called concept
of ‘soft power’ has always found China to be lacking it (which is to say it
lacks a civil society and political and cultural values attractive to ‘us’ non-
Chinese, non-Russians, etc.).6 But one could argue that China does exert
soft power, certainly at home to its own enormous population and abroad,
and through its economic ‘performance legitimacy’ and free-trade global-
ism.7 The PRC carries out this struggle, an effort by no means guaranteed
to succeed in the long term, even while championing the all-important
economic base of liberalism: of a classical laissez-faire, global free-trade
kind, and an equally if not more fateful deployment of markets, prot, and
‘growth’ within its own borders. This battle within and against market-
and political liberalism is certainly complicated and protracted and a gen-
eral mess. It may even be simply confused and somewhat desperate. While
again, one wonders how long the ‘statist’ state can hold out against those
who want to eliminate state control of the economy and the few decent
jobs left (outside of the multinationals like Foxconn) when there are still
assets and commons to be stripped. But it is also of interest for what it tells
us not just about China and its relation to the West but about the nature
of the political or politics today. It is in this sense that PRC illiberalism is
instructive. If leftist or critical politics is in retreat in an age of neo-
liberalism, can China at least help us understand why, and where liberal-
ism—always the dominant ideology and politics of modernity, now
unchallenged by socialism or communism—has reached its limits?
Taking STock
But we should rst recap and survey the ground we have covered so far,
before we return to the consequences or implications of an ‘illiberal
China’ in an increasingly neo-liberal or politically degraded global con-
juncture (a context posited here in the beginning chapter). The new left,
broadly dened as focused on real as opposed to formal equality and on
the legitimacy—and the reclaiming—of the state (as against the market
principle) can in the current conjuncture only be seen as illiberal and ‘stat-
ist’ in some undened but allegedly beyond-the-pale sense. This in itself—
the new left’s largely hostile reception by Chinese liberals and by foreign
academics8—has much to say about the current intellectual political cul-
ture, globally and in China. For it to be controversial to argue for state
capacity, for it to be ‘statist’ (a Hayekian pejorative) because one desires a
redistributionist and pro-active mode of governance over and above mar-
ket forces and the pursuit of private property, all of this illustrates
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the ‘truth’ of the global rule of liberalism today. That side has won. One
can even include certain ‘radical,’ leftish theoretical versions of anti-stat-
ism, or what Timothy Brennan memorably coined as ‘the anarchist sub-
lime,’ within this global conjuncture or intellectual political culture.9
And yet what the new left suggests to us—in its illiberal ‘statism’ and its
re-articulation and re-signications of the revolution and Maoist dis-
course, in its insistence on the positivity of the radical leftist past as well as
of Chinese difference from ‘Western’ historiography and conceptual fram-
ings—is a counter-discourse to liberalism. It should be seen as an intel-
lectual and discursive phenomenon, a movement away from the
degradations and fetishism of liberalism and full-on globalization (that so
preoccupied the 1980s). It may not last and it is certainly swimming
against the tides in China and the world. But it is also one with—over
time—the potential to make a political difference for China and thus per-
haps elsewhere. While the new left (and old left) desires to speak to the
state and inuence it scandalizes some, the more interesting part of this is
that sometimes the Chinese state listens, or at least tolerates the left voices
critical of globalization and China since the 1980s. The state’s ambiva-
lence here can be seen in allowing leftist professors to exist (which it
almost has to, given the Maoist or Marxist history of the PRC), in the rst
place. This is signicant already at the level of academic or intellectual
‘knowledge production.’ Not only are there, for example, numerous
Chinese intellectuals, professors, and authors working from a varied but
palpable leftist (Marxist, social equality/justice) orientation, but the ter-
rain of academic exchange has shifted. As Gregory Mahoney has noted,
the hegemony of liberalism (a liberal Occidentalism10) and general Western
adulation has been greatly weakened, even as Chinese academe and for-
eign exchanges have radically increased. The return or rebirth of leftist
Chinese intellectuals and academics (again as opposed to more popular
voices) coincides with, and helps drive, a writing back against a Western
liberal universalism. Whether one is talking about the work of Wang Hui
and Cui Zhiyuan, or Lu Xinyu and Cai Xiang, to take just four examples
from across the humanistic and empirical elds, there is now a very sub-
stantial and considered response or body of knowledge from such intel-
lectuals and academics. It is critical not just of capitalism and imperialism
in general terms (and in China), but also of Western historiography and
interpretations of China, and the orientalist ‘mandate’ that China must
become like the US-West to be normal and free and so on. This would be
easy to underestimate or to just dismiss as a by-product of Chinese
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204
nationalism or patriotism (as if that were a singular and monolithic thing)
or of being, as we saw in reference to new work of the Leap famine, a
result of being on the state’s payroll, that is being a willing or duped
stooge. But anyone reading Wang, Cui, Cai Xiang, or others—theirs and
others’ works are increasingly published in English to boot—can tell that
this is real academic, substantial work and cannot be cavalierly dismissed.
The new left’s and other intellectuals’ inuence in terms of knowledge
production and struggles over discourse (knowledge-power or hegemony)
is certainly not major and does not claim to be; but it is still signicant, not
trivial, and can yet have long-term effects in ‘liberating’ knowledge of
China. Certainly, it is responsible for helping keep Maoist or socialist dis-
course alive and re-articulated to the present era. Again the insistence on
Chinese ‘difference’ from liberalism is key here, even if it means getting
framed as illiberal or suspicious by outsiders and liberals everywhere. This
inuence or potential for it is especially true in a Party-state that takes
ideas and ideologies seriously (perhaps too seriously), but applies virtually
everywhere else. It would be foolish to argue that the US academy has had
no role in fomenting and keeping alive a progressive and humane political
discourse in the face of right-wing resurgence and liberal degradations
under Clinton and beyond.
In more popular ‘left’ registers, the Utopia website, for example (more
‘old’ than ‘new’ leftist but these overlap), still exists and is allowed to.
Interestingly, this site and others are sometimes freely available inside
China but blocked for those outside the PRC, as if the state fears its leftist
adherents are not for export, unt for liberal ‘foreign consumption.’11 So
in sum, left views are tolerated if not occasionally saluted by the Party-
state (it shares after all an anti-imperialism and basic nationalism), espe-
cially in comparison to, say, ardent liberal or neo-liberal views. The
appointment of Wang Hui of Tsinghua to the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body that informs the
central government, is an obvious case in point.12 The point here is that
clearly some people in the Party-state, and even the apparatus itself, allow
leftist voices and intellectuals to exist and to still be heard.13 This is no
doubt a minority affair; this may not weather the drive for de-politiciza-
tion, the complete commodication of the state, and the increased polic-
ing of speech under Xi Jinping. This is a weak power for the intellectuals
and for left-of-center, equalitarian or statist political ideology. But it is
something. There is a potential there to not only have the responsibility to
speak to the state, the nation, the state of the world—one version of the
D. F. VUKOVICH

205
intellectual’s vocation—but to have the state listen to or recognize you, or
at least allow you to do your own work as an intellectual and teacher. This
would seem to compare favorably with many other, liberal countries and
academies. Thus, the idea that the new (or ‘old’) left is complicit with the
Party-state, or that it is merely a fantasy among its participants, itself com-
prehensively misses the signicance of the movement after 1989.
The rise and fall and yet persistence of Chinese liberalism after
Tiananmen and the occidental/cultural ‘fever’ of the 1980s can likewise
help illuminate China and the world. I have argued that this is a dark illu-
mination, and that it speaks to the shadow of cultural imperialism and the
global hegemony of ‘Western’ intellectual political culture (as an ideal type
or as the West’s own, Occidentalist self-understanding.)14 But this liberal-
ism is genuinely neo-liberal not only in its anti-communism or anti-
Maoism (which it normally has to euphemize since it implies risk) but also
in its anti-statism and its enthusiastic embrace of free-market ideology, and
of course in its Dengist embrace of capital and ‘reform.’ It is no accident
that von Hayek and his ilk are the points of reference more than, say, J.S.
Mill (who had his own elite limits indeed). It is tempting to conclude that
it is the Chinese liberals—in their silence about the massive exploitation
and proletarianization of Chinese labor, and of the theft of the commons
formerly known as socialism and the iron rice bowl—who represent the
illiberal—the vulgar and the beyond-the-pale—despite the occasional
Voltaire-esque ourishes and Enlightenment postures. But liberalism is as
liberalism does. This is what liberalism is now, despite any nostalgia one
may have for one Enlightenment or another (Chinese, European, etc.).
And what their persistence speaks to is not only the global rise of a certain
mentality and political economy but the re-articulation of an older Cold
War liberal anti-communism and ‘political science’ seeping into Chinese
intellectual culture via the global academy, translations of, say, Sinology
dons like Roderick MacFarquhar or Ezra Vogel, and so on.15 That fateful,
de-Maoifying Dengist turn to the market in the 1980s, a global- or
Western-dominated market at that, also meant that liberalism came in or
‘returned’ from the pre-revolutionary, colonial past; while much weaker
than in the 1980s, it is unlikely to be expunged given the place of liberal-
ism in, or even as Western intellectual political culture. Liberalism, even its
degraded form, somehow comes with the territory of capital and the world
system, even if it is also true that China’s and the CCP’s power and sover-
eignty are no longer at stake. Deng Xiaoping, that utterly pragmatic
Chinese nationalist, would probably care not at all.
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206
Likewise the two most signicant protest movements in China in
recent years, Wukan’s and Hong Kong’s, form a diptych about liberalism,
illiberalism, and democracy. The two protests and sets of protesters differ
greatly, with one being illiberal in the sense of ‘pro-Party-state’ or pro-
Beijing, at least tactically and perhaps genuinely, and the other being stri-
dently liberal, proceduralist, and anti-communist/anti-Beijing to the
point of self- defeat. But combined they show how the allegedly all-pow-
erful Chinese state—even if confronted effectively via triangulating the
media and using smart, rhetorical appeals to power, as in Wukan—seems
to lack the capacity or at least the will to tackle the fundamental sources
of inequality and disempowerment. The state can hold new elections as a
result of popular, local demand, and despite the constant insults from the
opposition, proposed a new version of this even to Hong Kong. And
there is no good reason not to call this a democratic result (with ‘Chinese
characteristics’ or limits). But the Party-state, including its representatives
down in Hong Kong (e.g. the liaison ofce), either cannot or will not
address the power of capital and fundamental class inequality in Wukan or
in the SAR.16 It is heretofore committed to a market-based economism
and ‘growth’ or prot accumulation, perhaps in the mistaken belief that
the Party’s mission and legitimacy depend on a ‘rising tide that lifts all
boats.’ If ‘growth’ rises then the whole populace’s well-being and stan-
dard of living does too. Or at least the hope is that enough of this happens
to preserve stability and offset any demographically signicant class/privi-
lege resentments and politics.
This gambit is thus far closer to Adam Smith than Karl Marx or Mao
Zedong. But if one follows the perspective of Fernand Braudel, that mar-
kets are different than, and exist prior to, capitalism and that it is the latter
which captures them and leads to the worst ill effects, then China may
already be on a non-capitalist path or it at least can be. This argument is
the late Giovanni Arrighi’s, in his Adam Smith in Beijing, that generated
no small amount of controversy among the Western left.17 But then came
the ‘airpocalypse’ in Beijing, and still more rising inequality and the inef-
fectual Hu Jintao—Wen Jiabao decade of leadership. It would be hard to
nd many—particularly in the West or outside of China—who still hold
out hope for Arrighi’s provocative (and strongly argued) optimism for a
non-capitalist world market (or a Chinese one). And there remains the
essential divide between the Braudelian or Smithian view of markets and
those of a more radical, perhaps specically Marxist-Leninist-Maoist per-
suasion. (One can generate a Marx to support either.) At the same
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207
time, the longue durée view of world systems theory also means that the
story of possible non-capitalist markets and global systemic shifts is far
from over. The point (captured for world systems thought by the late
Gunder Frank) about China’s rise, for example, is almost universally
accepted.18
The pro-market ‘non-capitalist’ view may well be what ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics’ amounts to, even if it is not often spelled out this
way (as if it were to too political to say so), or at least is the best positive
spin to the post-Mao Dengist turn. Later, we will further explore this as,
alternatively, a mode of politics-as-economism. But it must be said imme-
diately that it is not stupid and has been remarkably effective. The PRC is
the last standing, at least nominally communist nation-state, and in 1949
was up against seemingly insurmountable odds of poverty, ‘backward-
ness,’ Cold War hostilities, imminent American wars in Asia, and even
great nation chauvinism coming down from the ostensible Russian ally. Its
Dengist economism is even ‘mass democratic’ in its own quasi-populist or
‘people’s livelihood’ way. It at least evinces a consistent if perhaps primar-
ily rhetorical concern with everyone’s standard of living, and in a formerly
poor, Third World country (which China still is in some of its interior and
countryside places), this counts for something important. It is always
worth recalling that while China is indeed the PRC as a modern and uni-
ed, centralized, stable political entity (the reality and positivity of the
PRC system is something many wish to ignore in their political analyses),
the worlds of the major cities and, say, Zhejiang province are not represen-
tative of all of the mainland. Many people are still poor, and there is stark
inequality throughout the country, which may actually give the Party
more, not less, legitimacy as a single and singular entity dedicated to
(future) growth and prosperity.
But this mode of governance is also at least capitalistic if not capitalism,
and produces not only inequalities but certain risks and contingencies
under such conditions of globalization.19 This is not only obvious now in
terms of, say, looming environmental catastrophe and unsafe food. The
mode is also failing because the economics behind it no longer works. This
is also the lesson of Wukan, and even Hong Kong. Property speculation is
no substitute for a real economy, nor is tourism. Chinese growth, while
still strong compared to elsewhere, is markedly down and unsustainable at
its ‘normal’ high rates in the long run, as the CCP is fully aware. Capital
ight, falling protability in the export industries, slack domestic demand,
massive amounts of corruption, failing bank loans and ‘excess’ borrowing,
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208
the admittedly, even deliberately less protable state-owned industries,
and so on, are all familiar to any follower of Chinese economic news.
The point here is that, for Wukan, the decline of agriculture and the
limits of urbanization preclude not only the full redress of land thefts but
also alternative livelihoods for the majority of rural people. Illiberalism or
anti-liberal appeals to the state for redress, and at least getting some rec-
ompense, are more effective democratically speaking (for China at least)
than trying to simulate 1989, Tahir Square (which also ended badly, it
must be said), or Hong Kong’s picturesque umbrellas (which have mostly
had an impact on academic Hong Kong studies). Liberalism only fails
politically in the current conjuncture. This is in part because it has been so
degraded from its social democratic or Keynesian or ‘belly liberalism’
glory days of the 1960s and early 1970s. (There is no good reason, aside
from Hayekian neo-lib and anti-communism, for protesters or commenta-
tors to sneer at the state; one could easily argue that this too is, or was, an
old-fashioned liberal value.) It is no accident that the legalistic and
Hayekian, free-market-uber-alles arguments and professionals win so few
hearts and minds in the mainland compared to the so-called statists. In
sum, Wukan worked, and failed, and the conclusion to draw would be that
the only alternative is for more Wukans and more qualied successes/
failures until there is a proper Chinese national reckoning with its own
mode of development since Mao.
For Hong Kong the basic lesson of politics might in the long run be the
same: Hong Kong’s (and Beijing’s) failure to move on from a tycoon-
appeasing and self-professed ‘capitalism’ (of a very neo-liberal type) in the
SAR.But this is well off into the future and for now the entrenched com-
mitment on both sides to the document called the Basic Law—a non-
enforceable text that unfortunately assumes autonomy is possible, let
alone desirable—means that ‘Beijing’ has won the day. Again, excluding
some sort of convergence/implosion of the mainland government (a reli-
gious belief indeed). Or unless there is some relatively major change of
Party composition and direction, a reclaiming of the commanding heights
of the economy, as they used to be called. But that rising tide isn’t going
to come to Hong Kong either, without that change in Party-state direc-
tion and stewardship of the economy, which is to say from greater, not
lesser ties and connections to the mainland. Liberal economics is precisely
the problem. Hong Kong simply lacks an economic base beyond nance
and tourism (aka consumerism), and is overwhelmingly committed to a
laissez-faire, not a social democratic society. It hoards money as opposed
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209
to spending it, and even then the opposition is dedicated to libustering
virtually all spending initiatives, be they good or bad or something
muddled together.20 Again Beijing seems to have no real, pro-active plan
other than waiting. For all the talk of ‘mainlandization’ and intrusions into
the city’s alleged autonomy, the larger story is that the mainland is very,
even too patient. It awaits the rising tide of the mainland-cantered econ-
omy and for the opposition to die off or give up, all the while slowly pur-
suing neo-liberal policies that primarily benet the tycoon, nance, and
rentier classes. For that to change it will necessarily take protest and social
movements in the streets and elsewhere, but directed at something other
than instituting political liberalism. In this the Wukan villagers up the road
in Guangdong had a more effective tactic, at least in 2011 and 2012.
What these two important protests show in their own way is also that—
howsoever limited and partial—there is always the chance the state will
respond in some fashion. Not just repressively (always a distinct danger
and possibility) but pro-actively or positively. Even in the case of the latter,
harshly illiberal, nal crackdown of the Wukan protesters (i.e. jailing
many), the state also responded with more funding of community initia-
tives. And yet to get a response from the illiberal state along the lines you
would like, means using illiberal means. That is, one has to appeal to those
parts of the Party-state that derive their legitimacy from ‘serving the peo-
ple’ and that can recognize the tradition of ‘righteous resistance’ or more
simply loyal opposition. Now my argument here may be immediately dis-
missed by committed liberals (including friends and colleagues in Hong
Kong) or Occidentalists as either a call for Confucian submission (or a
celebration of it), or for blindness as to the true, evil, or incompetent
nature of the communist regime. But it is the anti-Confucians and liberals
who denigrate such ‘righteous’ Chinese protests and appeals as submis-
sive, as if the Chinese are in general submissive dupes, and their system a
failure because it is abnormal or pre-modern.21 And liberal Hong Kong,
for example, continues its ‘proud’ and ‘autonomous’ decline into becom-
ing a Monaco or capital-sink for connected mainlanders and home-grown
property speculators. Clearly, the mainland and especially Hong Kong
need more state, not less, and a movement or discourse against liberalism
but coming from a leftist or egalitarian direction.
So if a productive response from the state is possible, then it stands as a
clear, superior alternative to, for example, the Hong Kong opposition’s
intractable liberalism and desire for autonomy or freedom—if not in fact a
de facto independence—from the mainland of which it is a part. One can
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210
compare this actuality and capacity of the Chinese state favorably as well
to protests elsewhere, from Occupy Wall Street (which made no demands
and achieved the same amount) to anti-war efforts in London under the
Blair administration, to the systemic failures and idiosyncrasies that led to
the USA electing a deeply unpopular president and the UK leaving the
EU.It is currently an unpopular opinion, but at some point—hopefully
sooner than later, if peoples’ livelihoods actually matter to liberals, demo-
crats, and others—Hong Kong’s politicians, civil society stalwarts, and
citizens will have to start demanding positive freedoms to benet from the
mainland economy and the inseparable mainland political, legal, and social
systems. This means this same demographic will have to let go of its pro-
fessed desire for autonomy in these realms at least. One would think that
Hong Kong could in theory retain nearly all of its cultural and ideological
autonomy, even its mostly concealed contempt for much of the north,
were it to ‘let go’ of at least the political autonomy ideal (which it does not
quite have to begin with).
Much the same can be said for movements across the border just to the
north, though the mainland political culture is clearly less state-phobic
and more full of ‘rightful resistance’ to begin with. To clarify: the right to
protest in any case is essential, regardless of the content or lack thereof.
This applies to, say, the rather eccentric and cultish Falun Gong protesters
in Hong Kong (or even the deeply xenophobic groups), just as much as to
the far more serious protests over land thefts, laws, and quasi- constitutional
documents. It is admittedly and unambiguously just this ‘right’ or all-
important capacity of citizens and political societies that is imperiled by
contemporary mainland illiberalism, and increasingly so under Xi Jinping
to date. But this is not necessarily the fate of Chinese politics today on the
mainland. Wukan’s land thefts were addressed, if imperfectly and not to
the original protest leaders’ extent. Even as it squashes dissent in many
quarters, especially in potentially explosive ‘border’ areas such as Xinjiang
and Tibet, the Party-state takes pro-active actions in others: ‘greening’ the
energy supply, expanding higher education, and so on. Again, if the point
of the political is to satisfy one’s demands and interests and well-being,
including the need to politically participate in itself, then the Hong Kong-
esque ‘neo-liberal’ anti-state or state-phobic politics—something arguably
pioneered by the Americans after Reagan and the 1980s—is clearly a dead
end. Even an illiberal or authoritarian system, if it acts positively in other
ways and in response to protest and criticism and looming social problems,
is better than a non-system or an anti-state or small, weak-state politics
that more or less denes actually existing liberalism today.
D. F. VUKOVICH

211
illiberaliSm andlivelihood aSa(de-poliTicized)
poliTicS andrefuSal
The PRC, then, is illiberal in some sense, but in a complex way that
deserves consideration and calls out for analysis, not dismissal and mere
debunking.22 If traditionally the (Maoist) communist revolution resisted
liberalism—seen, rightfully, as complicit with capitalism, imperialism, and
war, and of little use in either saving or re-building China—then in the
post-Mao period, clearly ‘capitalistic’ if we can dispense with putting too
ne a point on it, it is still engaged in this struggle. The opposition to
liberalism (or ‘neo-liberalism’ in recent years) remains. One could argue
that, politically speaking, and from the standpoint of the PRC state, the
liberalism it ghts is roughly similar to the earlier one in terms of its uni-
versalist pretensions, its anti-communism, and its desire to contain or con-
strain China. The West, which is to say the ‘core’ of a global capitalism
centered in the USA and Western Europe, even including Norway and its
Nobel Peace Prize, wants to advance its interests and normative
worldview.
But aside from this one geo-political struggle against a liberal enemy,
the composition of the now de-politicizing Party-state, purged of its origi-
nal left, and even populists like Bo Xilai, as well as its mode of accumulation,
are far different and decidedly un-communist by any measure. There is
something very real yet bitterly ironic about a struggle between what are,
in the end, clearly inegalitarian regimes despite all the socialist and demo-
cratic nomenclatures involved. And all of this exists in a radically different
context than that of the 1970s and late Maoism (if ironically kick- started
globally by that Sino-US rapprochement of 1972). A relative end or weak-
ening, for Asia and China in particular, of Cold War liberal imperialism
stemming from the West: the USA can only attempt, and mostly fail, at
containing China’s rise, and is in any case too close a business partner, and
arguably even a partial ‘friend’ in the Schmittian sense, for any real hostili-
ties to break out. Sanctions and boycotts against China should now seem
like fairly ridiculous threats.
As I have argued earlier one can even say that the Party-state itself, and
the new economy it brought into being in the 1980s, is fully liberal in the
trade or market sense, and in the valorization of prot and wealth as the
supreme good after the end of ‘making revolution.’ In fact the PRC is so
adept at the practice and rhetoric of trade and globalization—the discourse
of economic liberalism, if you will—that Xi Jinping’s speeches at the Davos
World Economic Forum in 2017 raised the very specter that liberals most
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212
fear: that it is China and Xi, in the wake of US President Trump’s shock
victory, that may assume the mantle of liberal avatar for the new political-
economic order.23 That there is even a possibility of this, even as an imagi-
nary, that is the PRC that may lead global free and fair, rule-based trade,
gives the lie to the deep economism at the heart of liberalism: it is the
market and exchange that subtend all the democratic talk of this and that.
What is also exposed here, in the fear of China ‘taking over’ liberal world
order leadership, is the old Western prerogative to lead and decide who can
and should.
And yet, in China, that critique of liberalism and ‘neo-liberalism’ per-
sists, despite its own economic practice, at least in terms of foreign trade.
It persists in Chinese anti-imperialism and nationalism (which is multiple
and varied), but also in the commitment to the state or state principle
(and not only its own monopoly on rule). That state that so far refuses to
privatize land or eliminate all state-owned industries. But there is another
plank to the case for Chinese illiberalism that we must explore here. If in
the previous era revolutionary ‘illiberalism’ spoke to a battle between
socialism (which the Maoists and even the rightists were struggling to
realize) and capitalism, radical and democratic equality and alternative
modernity versus the true, formal freedom and individualism of liberal-
ism, then the current era is about something else. Again one has to recall
that, for the actually existing Marxist-Leninist revolutions, liberalism was
seen as an ‘enemy’ or obstacle to be removed or precluded. In a sense this
antipathy or what we might even call this ‘path dependence’ hasn’t
changed, and forms part of mainstream Chinese political intellectual cul-
ture today. It, and the rise of neo-liberalism, also makes it difcult to
actualize something like ‘liberal socialism’ (in Cui Zhiyuan’s phrase) in
the PRC today.
What is this ‘something else’? I will suggest that, and speaking to or
from the Chinese side at any rate, and in addition to the state and
national/imperial factors, the rational kernel within the Party’s econo-
mism and illiberalism is its concern not simply with ‘performance legiti-
macy’ and ‘abnormally staying in power’ but with livelihood. Illiberal
China or the Party-state system is concerned primarily with this—and not
merely ‘staying in power’—as the meaning or purpose of the state, and
the point of deploying market-based or capitalistic economics. It is a
vaguely communitarian or ‘socialistic’ ethic that clearly harkens back to
the collective era (and Sun Yat-sen beforehand), as well as to a nebulous
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213
but undeniable Confucian tradition. But it is also—and this is where the
Dengist turn parallels the Schmittian analysis of liberal and economistic
neutralization—a de-politicized ethic and mode of governance promul-
gated from above and through the market and consumerconsumption as
a way of life. We will return to the baleful de-politicizing dimension in
the following section. (Abroad, this ‘Chinese socialism’ can have differ-
ent meanings and functions, as when China’s growth, industrial capacity,
and ‘rise’ are often invoked in, say, South Asia and Africa and elsewhere
as something to aspire to.)24 Sufce it to say that it is decidedly
anti-Maoistgiven the Chairman’s penchant for mass mobilization (par-
ticipation) as well as the high inequality within Chinese society due to
that same over-deployment of markets and theprot motive.
But protestations that this isn’t really socialism (often by Western
Marxists who never had time for Maoism anyway)—while understandable
in their own terms—tend to assume an ideal, universal type of that ‘ism’
or thing, and categorically miss the signicance of China’s rise and those
raised living standards. The post-Mao drives toward de-politicization are
indeed ‘baleful enhancements’ of the Communist Party. But even that and
not just the economic rise of China must be reckoned with. It is a so-far
brilliantly effective mode of governance, and is, if nothing else, a major
historical or sociological ‘fact’ of the world today. It can also be seen as an
act of post-colonial resistance or afrmation of ‘difference’ or particularity
against liberalism and—pick your favorite term here—the Western or
modern or global or imperial mandate and propaganda to follow the
Euro-American (‘universal’) path to normalcy. China (the state but also
many of its people), as has not escaped anyone’s attention, is deeply
ambivalent about such a road or such a notion of modern normalcy.
This refusal and alternative mode can indeed be connected in a general
way with the Confucian/traditional heritage, and in terms of any proper
intellectual history this has to be noted. But the danger in this—perhaps
especially, but not exclusively, for those of us writing outside of China—is
not only that it lends itself to orientalist stereotype but that that modern
break is decisive. Today is not Confucius’ Confucianism or even that of the
early 1900s, and even calling it neo-Confucian may cede too much. One
might then better begin with Guomindang founder (and socialist as well
as arch-nationalist) Sun Yat-Sen, who, it may be recalled, put ‘the people’s
livelihood’ (民生主義, Mínsheng Zhuyì) as the third cardinal ‘principle of
the people.’ (The other two are typically translated as nationalism and
democracy.)
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214
This same, fundamentally welfarist principle was radicalized by the
Communists (Sun admired Russia but stopped short of embracing
Marxism or communism), and degraded by the reactionary Chiang Kai-
shek within the Guomindang. By the time of Maoism-in-power, after the
Party’s virtual elimination before the re-groupment in Yan’an, the Marxist
and uniquely Maoist rhetoric and discourse (rural, radically egalitarian,
guerrilla-exible) displace the essentially nationalist or ‘soft’ socialism of
Sun.25 Deng Xiaoping, decades later, then undoes Maoism despite his
‘Seventy percent great, thirty percent bad’ evaluation of the late Chairman.
But even Deng, as has been argued by others, may have seen himself as
something of a socialist who was simply hell-bent on developing the pro-
ductive forces and freeing up capital—unconcerned with inequality but
‘for’ people’s livelihood in the sense of ‘getting rich is glorious.’ And it
would indeed be impossible to argue that China’s standards of living—
from access to consumer goods of all kinds through a better and more
varied diet, as well as an expanding higher education system—have radi-
cally improved since the past three decades. This is not necessarily the
rebuke of the Mao decades as it is often framed to be, as there is no reason
to assume China would not have kept developing under a more Mao-
socialist aligned economy and development strategy. As Chris Bramall,
among others, has argued, Maoist state planning led to an impressive
urban and manufacturing base given where China started, and ‘late
Maoist’ developmental strategies succeeded in raising rural living stan-
dards and education to a remarkable degree.26 The famine subtending the
collapse of the Great Leap Forward and especially the violence of the early
Cultural Revolution have—understandably, if nonetheless unfortunately—
obscured the economic achievements of the collective period. This is also
a common new left argument.
But for our purposes, the point here is that in all of these instances,
from Sun onward, liberalism as a political or other philosophy was rejected,
one can even say ‘resisted’ and fought against given that they were associ-
ated with Western imperialism and war, and the West’s own great inequali-
ties and iniquities of the time, such as racism (World War I through the
Cold War and era of de-colonization). One may note that even in the
current Xi Jinping era, as we have seen with ‘Document 9,’ the demonized
term is liberal or neo-liberalism, not democracy (which China claims it
practices and has in its own way). And of course not nationalism. Livelihood
is a common refrain in the speeches of Xi Jinping in particular, aimed at
domestic and foreign audiences. At the US embassy in Beijing, Xi follows
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past practice in remarking that ‘[Given] China’s huge population, consid-
erable regional diversity, and uneven development, we’re still faced with
many challenges in improving people’s livelihood and advancing human
rights.’27 This has always been an effective retort to American and other
reports condemning China’s ‘human rights’ abuses. Since Nixon and the
early 1970s, engaging and benetting from (and perhaps even partially
taking credit for) the Sino-US rapprochement and Chinese economic
‘miracle’ has also been a Western ‘liberal capitalist’ pastime. It is hard to
hoist the ag of moral superiority and China-as-enemy when one is busy
doing business with the evil empire and buying its cheap commodities.
American and other national human rights abuses don’t hurt the Chinese
case either. The high horse has left the barn.
In perennially unhappy and troubled Hong Kong, Xi douses another
re and makes another case for ‘livelihood’ as the real basis of society: ‘It
is important to put people rst, help them overcome difculties, especially
address prominent economic and livelihood issues that people are con-
cerned with, and truly increase their sense of contentment and happiness.’
Now these are not magical words that can and will ‘x’ Hong Kong or any
other Chinese city in the near future. And neither the city’s establishment
nor its opposition seems overly concerned with livelihood as opposed to
‘suffrage’ and the merely legal. Yet were Hong Kong and other belea-
guered Chinese places to become better off materially (and ‘free’ Hong
Kong compares poorly to the big cities of China in many ways), through
redistribution or some type of needed, useful development (which the
Party-state fails and succeeds at), there is no doubt that discontent would
decrease. This happens in most places in such scenarios; people get on
with their jobs, families, personal aspirations. This may not happen, and it
is becoming harder for China to ‘grow’ and develop its national economy
as it faces new challenges at a global level as well as a looming environmen-
tal crisis of polluted air and poisoned earth.
But this ‘livelihood’ rhetoric nonetheless speaks directly to a deeply
rooted Chinese (but not only Chinese) ethic or value (livelihood/security/
contentment is also that). It will play in Hong Kong. It moreover speaks to
very real, very capitalist problems and fears: that of ‘precarity’ and risk and
uncertainty and scarcity. Again, it is no accident that the working class in
Hong Kong votes strongly for pro-Beijing or pro-future- prosperity parties.
And the PRC has—in admittedly ‘capitalist’ or modernist- consumerist
terms—succeeded brilliantly in generating wealth and in promulgating its
responsibility for that, even as it has also de- politicized politics as best
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216
it can since the death of Mao and the bitter end of the Cultural Revolution.
So the Hong Kong working class, too, is not stupid but knows what it
knows.
It is, in sum, one thing to speak of ‘human rights’ and ‘universal suf-
frage’ and even ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ or ‘rule of law’ as abstract
universals that mean something, or a number of things, to some people. It
is another to not have enough money to have a better, happier, more
empowered life, or to even think about ‘freedom’ outside of class, power,
and money. This difference is tapped into by Xi and Chinese livelihood
rhetoric, which is never ‘mere’ rhetoric masking an underlying reality (of
‘totalitarianism’ or whatnot according to conventional political science
wisdom). All the liberal mainstream media reports and area studies or
political science articles about China’s lack of ‘real’ democracy and ‘free-
dom’ (or an equally interrogated notion of ‘civil society’) are not going to
change this.28 Domestically, Xi’s use of ‘livelihood’ in speeches and other
documents is so ubiquitous as to have become his own ‘theoretical’ con-
tribution to the Party-state. After the recent Party Congress, something
called ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is slated for enshrinement into the state
Constitution, but what specically constitutes this ‘thought’ remains
somewhat ambiguous and will likely remain that way for some time. His
three-hour speech invoked livelihood, green development, national secu-
rity, technology, the state sector alongside free markets, and so on. One
can hope that, in the event, the redistributive elements come to the fore.
At any rate, under Xi there is a clear emphasis on nding some type of
additional ideological legitimacy to the Party-state, even connecting it to
the revolutionary legacy by a more pronounced populism and thus turning
it away from the Dengist embrace of wealth and growth for their own
sake. One Chinese academic enthusiastically refers to Xi’s ‘People’s
Livelihood Thought’ as marking new progress in the PRC’s development
of a ‘moderately prosperous society in all respects’ and that ‘fulls the best
combination of the fundamental interests of the party and the masses of
the people.’29 For this to materialize it will entail nothing less than an
expansion, more than a mere retention, of state control, of capital, and of
capitalists within China.
‘People’s Livelihood Thought’ and the creation of a moderately (as
opposed to wealthily) prosperous society as the summum bonum for the
Party-state certainly imply a social contract between leaders and led, and
arguably a certain reciprocity and accountability. But this ‘thought’ also
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conveys a separation, a difference, between the Party’s interests and those
of the masses; it is referred to as a ‘combination’ after all. This is precisely
the issue at stake today: what Wang Hui calls the failing ‘representative-
ness’ of all the representative parties in the current conjuncture.30 Even
Maoism had to face this problem, although in contrast to the Party after
the Chairman’s death, it, from beginning to end, clearly and desperately
wanted to overcome that separation through a strident egalitarianism and
a grassroots, participatory ‘authoritarianism.’ This gap or separation is the
very heart of the liberal critique of the PRC as a single, illiberal Party-state:
not just that it does bad, repressive things to its own people, but that the
Party does not and cannot represent its people unless it has multi-party,
competitive elections and all that entails. There is no recall power; corrupt
and abusive acts of power can easily go unchecked; the people have no
voice, and so on. All of these drawbacks are to a greater or lesser degree
accurate, and the standard liberal catechism about elections is nothing if
not logical and rational. But that catechism is too simple, and like prayer,
works only in the utterance and on individual souls. The actual, worldly
state of liberal democracy, including the degradation of liberalism into the
‘neo’ or laissez-faire variety as well as the more or less complete capture of
the political system and state by the interests and powers of capital and its
lobbyists, gives the lie to this essentially religious liberal catechism.
All representative parties, be they vanguard or populist or merely bour-
geois in orientation, must assume this same gap between themselves and
the people they must ‘produce’ and represent. And it is the failure of con-
temporary parties to adequately represent ‘the masses’ or their citizens
that has been at issue in the current global conjuncture, from Wukan and
Hong Kong to Tahir Square to the USA and the UK.This has led to what
the political economist Mark Blythe has termed Trumpism, which includes
parallel reactionary strains in the UK (Brexit), and arguably in Hong Kong
(the xenophobic localists) and elsewhere.31 Underpinning all of this has
been the massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle to the
upper echelons and power elite of society.32 This global frame, as opposed
to seeing this as merely a Chinese versus Western phenomenon, is what
makes Wang Hui’s point about a crisis of representativeness particularly
useful. But if all these states exist on a continuum, it may well be the PRC
that has the better claim to actually representing its people in the name of
livelihood: no other state, be it ‘advanced’ or of the former Third World,
has on this score outperformed the PRC since its inception in 1949.
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218
None of this livelihood rhetoric and success may warrant calling China
socialist, even of the ‘soft’ Sun Yat-sen era variety, let alone, say, of Mao or
what were the strong social democracies of Western Europe. (Though to
be fair the latter never had to deal with Third World conditions, but were
more often involved in creating those abroad.) The inequalities are simply
too high and the clawbacks or countermovements away from pure capital
accumulation and from class bifurcation—correcting market failures,
improving welfare for the worst off, and so on—too weak and small scale
to date.33 Socialism—whether or not it was to be seen as a stage before
communism or simply as something decent people and societies should
aspire to—has always turned on equality as its guiding principle, beyond
the control of capital and the necessity of rational state planning.
At the same time, with China as with everything else, we cannot dismiss
such rhetoric as mere rhetoric when we know that there is no non- rhetorical
language. Rhetoric is inseparable from discourse and knowledge-power
and thus has a certain positivity and ‘reality effect’ even if we choose not
to believe.34 Just as we know that, regardless of the human and environ-
mental cost, the Chinese ‘miracle’ has indeed thrust millions of people
into middle- and upper classes and improved a general standard of living
in terms of food and other commodities as well as ‘opportunities’ like
education, travel, and so on. Again, recall that the aggrieved protesters of
Wukan were not poor peasants or workers of even the 1960s and 1970s,
let alone of the pre-PRC era. Put another way, ‘socialism with Chinese
characteristics’ may sometimesseem—for good reason—faintly ridiculous
in an era of Foxconn, gross consumerist materialism, and thick toxic air.
But it must be said that to at least some Chinese—including but not only
Party members—it is not mere rhetoric or sloganeering. Surely there are
those citizens of an untold numberwhoput the emphasis on the charac-
teristics part: that it is, for better or worse, their own version of socialism
or government and not a liberal democracy in the Western sense.
But if ‘China and socialism’ is at best an awkward or uneasy equation,
by the same token it is hard to see how China can be easily called capital-
ist other than its mode of production being aimed at prot. That much
is accurate, but according to the playbook of mainstream political science
(or, in other words, conventional thought), real capitalism is supposed to
be liberal-democratic market capitalism, with at least two or more parties
competing to rule in the name of the people, and which again, according
to the prevailing discourse about markets, is not supposed to have
nationalized, state-owned industries at all, let alone ambitious ve-years
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219
plans and—to the foreigners and liberals—controversial attempts at ‘social
engineering.’ As always, a conventional Marxist account of capitalism,
that is commodity production on the basis of prot and the extraction of
surplus value, promises a much better t. And it is no secret that China
possesses what can easily be called a proletariat and reserve army of labor.
But even this sensible ‘plain Marxism’ leaves out the facts of state plan-
ning and ownership, and that state-owned enterprises are not fully justi-
ed or rationalized by capital accumulation; their losses, when they do
occur, have to an extent been tolerated by the Party-state as a cost of
sovereignty. Moreover, the economic focus tells us little about the social,
cultural, and political spheres of the society (always something of a blind
spot within conventional Marxist theory). None of which, aside perhaps
from ‘bourgeois consumerism,’ would seem to obviously map on to ‘capi-
talist’ in the case of the PRC today. One could go on to have a long discus-
sion of what we mean today by socialism or capitalism—or varieties of the
same—as concepts and social realities.35
economiSm: Themain enemy
And yet, one cannot forget politics and the political, because in the end
these realms of human experience and endeavor never forget us.36 This
production of forgetting, a clear and powerful and in many ways successful
attempt at de-politicization in the name of wealth and stability, is precisely
what the post-Mao ‘regime’ is predicated upon, including within the
alleged ‘people’s livelihood thought’ attributed to the Xi Jinping era,
decades after Deng and Tiananmen, 1989. While Badiou has argued that
politics is universal (or at least the ‘subject of politics’ is), one can admit
this and nonetheless still retain the post-colonial insight that universals like
liberalism are precisely the problem and enemy of left politics in history. If
political-ideological struggle and conict—or simply ‘power’ if one
wishes—are universal, these only manifest in specic forms and contexts.
This is something that liberalism and orientalism, and even some forms of
Marxism, all as forms of universalism, both deny, just as the former have
also been complicit with colonialism.37
As argued earlier in the analysis of the rise and fall and persistence of
latter day Chinese liberalism, there is a way in which both Mao and Carl
Schmitt not only share a Marxist-Leninist notion of the political as fun-
damentally dyadic and inevitably rooted in real social antagonisms, but
also an analysis of liberalism, as well as economism, as the paramount
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220
forces of de-politicization. Indeed what is remarkable about Mao’s short
polemic, ‘Combat Liberalism’ is that he equates it with economism and
in so many words with de-politicization (what might later be called ‘revi-
sionism’ in various Cultural Revolution polemics from the left wing of
the Party). The point here is not just that Mao was a profoundly political
thinker along the lines of Lenin and Schmitt (as the notion of continuous
revolution always suggested) and not the power-mad Stalinist or despot
of stereotype. It is also that the PRC—too—follows a certain logic of the
political, a narrative of de-politicization and Schmittian ‘neutralization’
leading to the present conjuncture of a global ‘neo-liberalism’ and the
decline of viable left-wing and substantively democratic politics.
One can, in short, trace a certain intellectual political history through
the post-1949 regime and the struggles, mobilizations, and conicts dur-
ing that attempted socialist transition. This is in many ways precisely what
the old, late Maoist rhetoric about two-line struggles captured in all its
excessive affect and extremity. One road pointed toward full, perhaps even
total, politicization in the name of equality and the communist
horizon,38and the other led toward stability, the development of produc-
tive forces over politics, and what the late Allen Ginsburg may have termed
‘whole Chinese families shopping luxury goods at night.’39 Alessandro
Russo, a remarkable and original scholar of the Cultural Revolution and
social theory, has made a powerful case for a nal non-debate—a deep
political struggle—between Mao and Deng in 1975.40 This was in effect
settled by Deng, due to Mao’s death soon thereafter, as well as by the
Cultural Revolution’s own ‘failure’ to institutionalize or consolidate its
changes and moreover to win over enough of the remaining Party ofcials
brought back into the fold after so much struggle and chaos.
Mao had sought a debate and overall evaluation (within the Party, for
the state) on what worked or was of value and what failed in the Cultural
Revolution in the pursuit of that communist horizon. Of chief impor-
tance was the relationship between the ‘working class’ and the Party-
state, and how to politicize or ‘proletarianize’ the factories and danwei
(work units).41 In this reading by Russo, the Chairman was well aware of
the problems and failures of the Cultural Revolution, not least its erup-
tion into violence and factionalism, just as he was aware (as admitted in
interviews) that many in the Party were unhappy with the movement.
Despite or perhaps because of this he wanted an evaluation of it so as to
move on. Yet Deng, with time on his side as well as what he must have
known was a sizable number of ofcials (what Russo calls a Thermadorean
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221
coalition), simply refused to engage and respond, seeking to wait it out
and not wanting to selectively but only, totally negate the Cultural
Revolution (including its experiments in greater worker representation
and organization within the state and the factories). Deng wished to sta-
bilize (de-politicize) the state and greatly feared the disorder of the period.
In the event, he succeeds and, as Russo puts it, in effect launches in China
what would become a global neo-liberal movement.42 Russo’s argument
is bold and provocative, against the grain, but also convincing.
With the unleashing of ‘market forces’ by Deng and the evisceration of
the Maoist danwei and ‘workerist’ systems, this two-line struggle, at once
deeply visionary and ideological yet also about the institutions of the
state or the lack thereof, is not simply the victory of the Dengists over the
left. It is also a triumph of de-politicization and, even as we recall that it
was Pinochet’s Chile that can better be said to launch neo-liberalism,
would become a global phenomenon. Johan Lagerkvist has for his part
recently argued that after 1989 it is China that has helped spur neo-liber-
alism globally and helped spread authoritarian politics everywhere (as in
radically increased police surveillance in the USA).43 Lagerkvist may attri-
bute too much to a Chinese-induced spread of the latter, as if foreign
regimes were inuenced in this way by the success of the later, and as if
there aren’t indigenous authoritarian traditions worldwide. But one can
more easily agree with the hypothesis about economic ideology, where
China is indeed assumed to be a spectacularly successful neo-liberal econ-
omy, and not without reason. And after 1989, the economism, that is,
the subsumption of the political to the economic and sheer growth and
prot, indeed escalates. Ironically, however, China has by no means pros-
pered due to actual neo-liberal doctrine: it has, admittedly, robbed and
smashed the Maoist iron rice bowl of social security and welfare, greatly
increased the exploitation of labor, installed the prot motive, and shifted
wealth from the public or commons to a specic capitalist and elite class.
This is all textbook neo-liberalism. But the state retains ‘the plan’ and
‘the commanding heights’ of the economy, including basic state control
of capital, to a far greater degree than what neo-liberal diktat and the
International Monetary Fund require. Add the ‘human capital’ and
industrial infrastructure achieved during the Mao era, as well as the com-
plete lack of debt and China’s independence from the IMF, the US econ-
omy, and so on, and one sees the difference. In this sense, something like
‘state capitalism’ is more apt than ‘neo-liberal’ as a moniker for the
Chinese economy; but as noted earlier, this too begs a lot of questions
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222
about each term. It is arguably enough to say that the PRC is both capi-
talistic and socialistic. Nonetheless, the triumph of the Dengist ‘line’ is
also a triumph of an authoritarianism and state violence, the capacity for
both, without any revolutionary justication; but this is also to say, the
triumph of a ‘normal’ state in the end, albeit of the single Party-state
form. This normality, this stability is precisely the problem. And it may
not prove to be so stable under conditions of globalization and the mar-
ket capturing the Party-state and not just the spirit of the revolution.
The main cost, in short, is a complete, effective de-politicization, in so
far as this is possible. That it is not entirely possible is a different matter
that we need to attend to in conclusion. But is this worth the gift of a mas-
sive accumulation of wealth and a bona de world-historical raising of
living standards? There is no question that this is what the last 30 years of
‘reform’ has amounted to. For Deng it certainly was, even if it required
not only a betrayal or denigration of the actual communist cause (and for
workers) but an outright reactionary, non-revolutionary authoritarianism.
(One must recall that the 1989 crackdown bears his clear, bolded signa-
ture, as does the ascent of decidedly anti-communist dissidents like Liu
Xiaobo.) This gift is what the rise of China poses to political thought today
(and to China’s own citizens). Instant liberal and ‘leftish’ catechisms
aside—all of which assume that ‘democracy’ is sacred and that China
exceptionally lacks freedom—this is in fact not an easy question to answer.
How important, existentially or experientially speaking, is ‘being political’
to people, let alone being ‘radical’ or ‘democratic’? And what does it mean
when this need or desire has greatly shrunk and yet ‘the people’ seem
much better off materially than they were in previous eras? And better off,
it may be said, by the same modern and capitalist standards of the liberal
countries and polities. Note that we are not speaking here of the clear and
tragic victims of neo-liberalism, of an immiserated or degraded populace.
That this does happen in China is undeniable—perhaps most horrically
in the case of the suicides at Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer of
IPhones and similar products, in 2010 and 2011. (The company responded
by placing netting around the base of some of its factories and dorms.)
Such exploitation is not an accident but is inseparable from the same mode
of capital accumulation that has benetted others in China and out (e.g.
cheap consumer goods for the West). But one has to reckon as well with
the somewhat apocryphal but nonetheless real millions who have been
‘lifted out of poverty’ or done even better than that. David Goodman’s
important work on the middle class in China (which he estimates at about
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12% of the population), and how it is unlikely to produce liberal democ-
racy according to Western expectations, is highly pertinent here.44 But it is
also fair to say that many workers and migrant workers are in some sense
better off materially or in terms of purchasing power, diet, and so on than
they were when the reforms began. (Of course, this too presupposes capi-
talist standards that would make no sense in the Maoist free-supply and
work-point system.)
Livelihood and living standards, even measured in the gross materialist
terms as economists are wont to do, are arguably the most fundamental
human need, the veritable ‘base’ to the superstructure of culture and poli-
tics. There are also undeniable pleasures tied to consumption and prosper-
ity, just as these are also social powers in their own right. This is precisely
the dangers of what I am calling economism: it works. Money and the
dream of more money make the world go around, not least because they
are a salve against economic precarity and insecurity. That this is some-
thing of a humanistic cliché does not make it any less true, for Shakespeare
or Buddha or the young Marx, or for us. Whither the political then?
It may be precisely nowhere. Two recent diagnostic essays on the state
of the global politics—which according to this nonetheless valuable genre
begins from the Western left’s standpoint—return us to a bleak, but admi-
rably forthright sense of political possibilities today, which is to say an
impasse from a non-liberal or left perspective. Perry Anderson offers a
recent summation of the current conjuncture in the English language
world at any rate:
The upshot is the unbalanced balance of partisan forces at which commenta-
tors wring their hands today. The neo-liberal order has become a political
no-man’s land, in which no organic formula of rule is now in sight.45
The impasse here is that while the neo-liberal mode of accumulation pro-
ceeds apace—but is in crisis—there have been no electoral sweeps or any
clear politics (forms of rule) since the 1990s. The Third Way regimes of
Blair and Clinton (and Obama) were but weak simulations of the Reagan
and Thatcherite turns of the 1980s (i.e. neo-liberalism) and their rules
were ‘weightless hegemonies’ with little staying power or direction.46 So
the economic—which is to say livelihood—crisis remains, a crisis not sim-
ply of accumulation but of living for those lives and families degraded by
the neo-liberal turn. One might say that this is precisely because the politi-
cal has been subsumed within or by the economic mode of accumulation:
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224
what Schmitt or Mao would call neutralization by economism and liberal-
ism. There is no dyadic, friend/enemy politics at work since all sides agree
on the feed and care of the economic machine or mode.
To adopt Nancy Fraser’s felicitous phrase, what remains is a power and
ideological struggle between a ‘progressive neo-liberalism’ and a more
reactionary neo-liberalism.47 Economically and politically—and as has
been true since Bill Clinton completed the neo-liberal Reagan Revolution
in the 1990s—democratic or humane political prospects are dim indeed.48
While there are indeed important social, ethical (justice-based), and other
differences between these ‘camps,’ there cannot be said to be a major eco-
nomic one, or arguably even a political one in the Schmittian sense.49
Fraser’s reference is the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA
and the 2017 election, but the split yet commonality around the economy
would apply more broadly around the world. What distinguishes China in
this regard is not the single-Party system but the attempt, greatly enhanced
under Xi Jinping, to remove any such splits or ‘factions’ within the Party
elite while retaining state management of at least some capital and overall
control of the rest (and of the capitalists). The anti-corruption campaign
for which Xi is famous, including measures taken against capital ight out
of the country, is of a piece with this.
Tim Barker, in a review essay on the US-UK-based, libertarian-
communist Endnotes collective (who publish volumes of radical ‘theory’),
notes the hopeful return of the term ‘socialism’ to relative acceptability in
American political discourse, in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly
successful run for president in 2016. But at the same time the present
conjecture remains bleak in that, despite the continued existence, if not
expansion, of the working class and theoretically greater connectedness
via globalization, there is simply no foreseeable agency or agents to carry
out a transition away from the awful neo-liberal politics (or, again, the lack
of actual politics) of the last three decades. Barker generously yet persua-
sively dispenses with the glib and dreamy, anarchist-workerist idealizations
of Endnotes that point to a ‘communization’ current implicit to human
society, yet nd it virtually absent in all actually existing leftist history,
including today’s various struggles around the world. But Barker goes
beyond this to ask a question for those of us who think realism (and insti-
tutions, and transitions, and Parties, and centralized states, and so on) has
something to do with politics: Where are our resources of hope, and
where can agency and agents be found? This also returns us to the failure
of ‘representativeness’ of the political parties, the great majority of whom
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may be said to represent capital more than ‘the masses’ or laobaixing.
Whither is the realist yet leftist politics? For the foreseeable future, the
liberal core of the world system may be a bleak house indeed.
When we say that politics is in retreat, or has been neutralized, or is
simply weak, or fails at representativeness, what we mean is not only the
absence of a ‘left’ or socialist movement or force. We mean that liberalism,
too, has in some sense ‘died’ or been degraded to the point of becoming
a neo-liberalism that is in effect just an economism. Given liberalism’s
actually existing, sordid history vis-à-vis the Asian and Southern parts of
the world, and from a Marxist standpoint its deep historical and functional
roots in capitalist development and exploitation, it may be tempting to
some to wish it good riddance. Or one may instead wish to see it return to
its ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ form of, say, Keynesianism and decent, redistri-
butionist welfare regimes, secular cosmopolitan humanism, and a rm
respect for Civil Rights, but now somehow without the imperialist part.
But this type of ‘good’ liberalism also lacks agency and agents. And as with
the case for insurrectionary Maoism (aside perhaps from Nepal in a sense),
Third Worldism, Black Power, and so on, the social and historical condi-
tions for such a return would appear to be lacking. The problem is not just
the degradation of the liberal parties. Repressive and surveillance state
power has increased exponentially; real wages and union strength have
plummeted; civil societies have very little power to effect change (para-
doxically, less so in China); and, alternatively, economism and develop-
mentalism—a certain fetishism of the market in terms of ideology and life
expectations and not just business practice—are the order of the day. This
is all familiar already. The great structure has become a minor, bleak house.
And this is not simply due to a failure of imagination or one ideology
(neo-lib) besting another one.
The neutralization of politics, its capture by the economic, may ulti-
mately have to do not with liberalism’s failures so much as its successes. One
has to recall that, well before the triumph of the ‘neo-,’ liberalism always
stood in opposition to a much more ‘statist’ and economically interven-
tionist politics, namely, that of socialism or even Marxism- Leninism, that is
the actual successful revolutions of the last century. Those politics and
forms of economics are also in retreat, at best. What won hegemony over
them, or kept them out of the West entirely, was liberalism: it was always
markets over states, and therefore polities and politics (you correct ‘market
failures’ only after they have had their full run); labor was to be held in
check via a ‘corporate contract’ between unions and capital; economic
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226
democracy was never on the agenda outside of a few meetings at the
United Nations and the like. What is more, if David Harvey, Robert
Brenner, and many others are correct that the success of Keynesianism
actually led to a crisis of accumulation and protability by the 1970s, lead-
ing to the rise of nance capital and neo-liberalism, then the dream of a
return to this era may indeed be nothing but a failure of the imagination.50
Put yet another way, liberalism led organically to illiberalisms like Trumpism
or Brexit or contemporary Russia, say, and of course to neo-liberalism as a
temporary and ‘spatial’ x of an accumulation crisis. This is not an argu-
ment about societies spending too much on welfare or being ‘statist’ (in
fact, the neo-liberal or libertarian view), but it is to say something more
along the lines of the impossibility of full employment, of class-leveling,
and of actually equal opportunities in the so-called advanced societies,
under the current form of capitalism and the class basis of those states and
parties.
Toward aprogreSSive illiberaliSm? arealiST repriSe?
And yet, and yet. The PRC—in many ways smartly ‘illiberal’ or anti-liberal
in its refusal of total privatization, its wariness of the West, its debunkings
of liberal universality—may in this sense be less far gone. And at any rate,
it is operating under a quantitatively and qualitatively different set of cir-
cumstances and conditions. Its resistance to liberalism may, in short, have
spared it from becoming fully neo-liberal. There is not only an approxi-
mately 20% share of state-owned economy but a rhetoric and legitimacy
dedicated to actual growth and ‘livelihood’ or common prosperity.
Neo-liberals promise money and freedom (of the individual, entrepre-
neurial kind) too. And China, since Deng’s victory, is dedicated to an
economism, an unprincipled peace through markets and materiality and a
suppression of politics: not just through police power and censorship, but
just as importantly through the removal of fundamental political- ideological
disagreements and diversity within the Party-state, especially at the upper
echelons. In so far as dialogue and disagreement are actually important
drivers of smart policy and planning, this is a denite risk and does no one
any favors. It led under Deng and through the 1990s to ‘reform and open-
ing up’ and ‘some must get rich rst’ becoming not just propaganda but a
new, blindly followed religion to replace revolutionary enthusiasm.
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The PRC at the top is run by ‘red engineers’ (in Joel Andreas’ apt
phrase) or, in other words, patriotic and economy-and-nation-building
technocrats.51 This is perhaps best captured by Xi’s directive that one must
not use the last 30 years of reform to negate the rst 30, Maoist years, and
vice versa. This does not leave much room for debate about Chinese poli-
tics, outside of the mandate for stability and ‘China dreams’ and making
or spending money. On the other hand, Xi et al. will necessarily have to
lean one way or the other in terms of managing the economy—either state
control of capital and development, managing and micro-managing the
private and state markets, or letting the market sort it out ‘for themselves’
in true liberal or Hayekian fashion. Through the rst ve years of the Xi
reign, the state sector has if anything been expanded and consolidated.52
In point of fact, it is hard to imagine the Party-state ever abdicating this
managerial role, as it is precisely its main reason for existence and the basis
of its power beyond the capacity for violence. It is also how it inherits the
revolution (and even imperial ‘tradition’) and the legitimacy provided
thereby. This is illiberal, one supposes, but it is socially valid, coherent, and
not irrational. Thus, the PRC may indeed appear confused or wanting to
have and to eat both its liberal (markets and global capital) and ‘statist’
cakes at the same time. It has somehow been pulling this off, and there is
really no longer any real concern about the Party-state actually collapsing
or becoming like North Korea.
But now China faces an inevitably slowing economy, great disparities in
wealth, and grave ecological crises, among other problems. Even the
economism is imperiled, in that the Party-state has been promising since
the Hu Jintao era (2002–2012) to alleviate inequality, redistribute wealth,
improve welfare, and so on: the same mandate that Xi Jinping now pledges
to nally take up effectively in the name of livelihood, common if modest
prosperity, and so on. Will this be done, and can it be done? Can one fur-
ther ‘open’ or ‘liberalize’ the Chinese economy through private capital
and marketization, while also redistributing wealth, reducing the great
inequalities, and so on? Can one engage and cooperate with the liberal
powers as a fellow great nation, and yet resist their modern, normative,
political forms of ‘democracy’ and ‘ows’ of liberalization?
Put another way, despite the Dengist line’s desire to quash the great
disorder of the Cultural Revolution (which was arguably not that great by
the mid-1970s), underneath the surface of unanimity, China is now in a
situation of genuine disorder and great uncertainty alongside—even
explaining—the increased ideological repression or censorship under Xi.53
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228
But as Bertolt Brecht once said, in the contradiction lies the hope.
There is a fundamental contradiction between the need to retain the cen-
tralized, managing state and achieve that ‘socialism’ or ‘modest prosperity’
for all, on the one hand, and to ‘use’ global capitalism and private capital
without being overtaken by them on the other hand. This can in turn be
framed as a contradiction between illiberalism and liberalism, and between
re-politicization (of the Party-state) and de-politicization. The Party-state
remains ‘statist’ and rather than seeing this as the bane of liberalism, it may
be better to see it as containing some resources of hope—for China and by
extension for politics generally.
This presupposes something of a paradigm shift within the Party, and
it being effectively pushed by protest and social movements as much as by
genuine concern for ‘people’s livelihood.’ China has still been growing
enough—producing enough of that Adam Smithian tide, it seems—to
stave off the streets. There is no compelling reason for ‘the masses’ or
some sizable portion thereof to be attracted to, let alone demand, some
type of liberal discourse or political example—such as the USA, Europe,
India, Japan. Maoism as an insurrectionary movement, or as a fully
planned non-prot economy, is likewise unlikely, even though it, unlike
liberalism, retains a certain force within the reservoir of images and rheto-
ric and values within the Chinese political culture. It is high time to see
this stability and actuality or positivity of the Chinese regime as ‘normal’
and not ascribe to this a ‘lack’ that is based in deception, censorship,
totalitarianism, and the absence of ‘freedom.’ The Party’s actual commit-
ment and moreover ability to produce greater ‘livelihood’ in other ways
remain unknown, however. It may end up a failure, a la the Hu Jintao
period’s professed desire to alleviate inequality. So ‘optimism of the will’
has its limits that one needs to be honest about, just as one needs to avoid
a cynical or denitively pessimistic analysis of political presents and
futures. History may or may not follow certain logics of the political and
the economic, but in its occasional ruptures and discontinuities it most
assuredly surprises and exceeds our most condent assumptions and
expectations. Such condence in regard to Chinese politics is especially
misplaced, when the Party-state controls political information quite well
and moreover almost never airs conicts and fundamental disagreements
in its own publications and mouthpieces.54 A shift into what might be
termed a ‘progressive illiberalism’ is, then, by no means bound to happen
but also by no means destined not to happen. There is little question that
the Party wants to achieve not only national rejuvenation but also that
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‘peoples’ livelihood,’ ‘harmonious society,’ and ‘socialism’ that it has
been variously talking about since the millennium, and that it is aware
that it needs to do so.
Despite the neutralization of the political in China due to the well-nigh
world-historical magnitude of its growth, and to the concerted effort by
the state and numerous intellectuals, we must never forget that de-
politicization can never be complete. As Schmitt argues, and as most polit-
ical theorists would agree, the logic of the political always comes back or
re-asserts itself into dyadic, ‘friend/enemy,’ us/them distinctions and
antagonisms. The post-Mao Party-state’s attempt at de-politicization,
even if we prefer to root it in the late Cultural Revolution, has after all
been a politically interested de-politicization of the culture, society, and state.
It has clearly beneted not only a wealthy capitalist class but a certain
power elite within and outside the Party. To an extent one can say—as the
Party has been doing for years—that this de-politicization has beneted
those who have been ‘lifted out of poverty’: the economistic regime has
delivered in some fundamental and ‘modern’ or global capitalist ways.
While invocations of the ‘Chinese miracle’ are clearly full of hype, so too
are the notions that the rise of China is just some type of ‘boom’ that will
inevitably go ‘bust’ even though there is no evidence for it being fake, for
its rise actually being overstated by actual analysts, for it being gravely
imperiled, or for it being a crypto-fascist peril or ‘North Korea Lite.’55
What the political or social scientists cannot fathom, in their strident liber-
alism and empiricism, is that the PRC’s wealth, cities, rich, or least better
off consumers—China’s epochal growth in recent decades—simply aren’t
going away. As for its de-politicized politics, the catastrophe is that it keeps
going on like this (to invoke a phrase from Walter Benjamin).
But at the same time, as Wukan, the new left, and the articulation of
Chinese liberalism to neo-liberal economics all show, there is a dawning
sense that all those ‘reforms’ and the ‘rise’ could and should have been
handled better, should and could have happened without the de-
politicization and silencing of political speech, without smashing the iron
rice bowl, and so on. And that that rise—the Faustian bargain of riches
versus politics—may have reached its limits. There will not be a ‘going
back,’ as if by time machine,to either the late Mao periodor the 1980s.
But there may be a reckoning to come. Deng Xiaoping’s mess must be
cleaned up. This is alreadyone way to understand therapidrise and suc-
cesses of Xi Jinping (who has also removed Deng’s term limits for the
presidency). The rise and fall of the remarkably populist and perhaps
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230
neo- Maoist Bo Xilai, discussed earlier, shows how there is a logic of the
political, of an ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ always already lurking. Some grounds for
a return of the political within the state: while ‘lifting’ the proverbial mil-
lions, the Party-state has also held down or displaced millions, has created
out of its peasantry or ‘rural surplus labor’ a oating army of hundreds of
millions of migrant workers with second-class status. It has taken away the
right or ability to act politically in the old Maoist style of mobilization and
‘mass participation’ in developmental projects (Bo’s populism didn’t reach
this level). Ithas repressed or demonized or pathologized the very act or
idea of thinking politically, in terms of fundamental ideological, class, or
power differences and antagonisms. Of course it also has not and cannot
remove the ‘right to rebel,’ and there are not only numerous protests but
no doubt countless instances of individual rebellion or resistance to various
and sundry injustices and grievances and so on. But the point is, or was,
whether or not any of this is allowed to be named political action or part
of a political movement, whether this can be framed as proper and just, and
whether or not the state or system allows or discourages such acts. Deng’s
gambit was to kill off or at least enfeeble the desire for politics.56
Or at least all of this was the dominant scenario; the rise of nationalism
and what is referred to as ‘cultural self-awakening’ has also been unmistak-
able in recent years. Nationalism itself can easily foment an antagonism
against the Party-state, and some of the old and new left criticisms of state
policy clearly t into this mold, just as they draw on the gure of Mao as
well. And while it may be said to lack class-consciousness as a whole, the
Chinese working class is going to be by denition and size a political spec-
ter for generations.
In sum, then, social and political antagonisms and differences do not
actually go away. The thousands of yearly ‘mass incidents’ reveal this
plainly, even if there is no actual ‘social volcano.’ Nor do peoples’ griev-
ances simply disappear (as they did not in Wukan). Nor does the need to
participate and be involved with communities and something larger than
one’s self and everyday life disappear. The current regime is at least aware
of the latter, and is why it promotes nationalism, patriotism, or simply
pride. The need for something cohesive to replace ‘continuing the revolu-
tion’ and even ‘opening up’ is clear, and even informs the recent, 19th
Party Congress speech by Xi Jinping. There he claims that:
The principal contradiction facing Chinese society in the new era is that
between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-
growing needs for a better life. It stresses the people-centered philosophy of
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development, and well-rounded human development and common prosper-
ity for everyone.57
And in the same speech earlier Xi noted:
China has seen the basic needs of over a billion people met, has basically
made it possible for people to live decent lives, and will soon bring the build-
ing of a moderately prosperous society to a successful completion. The
needs to be met for the people to live a better life are increasingly broad.
Not only have their material and cultural needs grown; their demands for
democracy, rule of law, fairness and justice, security, and a better environ-
ment are increasing.
What is striking in these remarks is the inescapably political nature of
some of the terms: demands for ‘democracy’ (later dened as ‘consulta-
tion’ a la Hong Kong), justice and fairness, and so on. One is tempted to
see an ‘admission’ or indication that the CCP knows it cannot (try to)
de-politicize politics forever, even if it wants to. There is also a strong
sense of a break or transition to a new phase of Party-rule and develop-
ment, a new ‘new China,’ as if the feed and care and growth of the econ-
omy and marketization/liberalization are now less important than the
‘livelihood’ itself.58 This is precisely what the liberals and pundits fear, that
marketization will take the back seat to other concerns. The era of ‘reform
and opening up’ is coming to an end, nally.
Agency is still a question here. Who will foment a progressive illiberal-
ism? Again one does not know if redistribution of all that wealth will hap-
pen, if a new mode of accumulation can develop, if urbanization will work
humanely, if the now seemingly unied Party will allow more political
speech and innovation from within the system a la Chongqing, and so on.
But we do know who or what will try, and whathas the capacity to effect
such change.What China does have is the one thing the liberals correctly
hate as their political-ideological enemy as opposed to their friend. This is
the single Party, or Party-state, not yet entirely captured by capital, with a
massive organizational capacity in comparison to most other nation-states:
to the tune of about 89 million members. To tackle some of its problems
like the environment, the massive inequalities, the second-class status of
migrant workers—to be sure, problems greatly exacerbated by the same
Party-state over the last 30 years of ‘reform’—it will need exactly that type
of capacity and mobilization. It may thus seem—or be—circular reasoning
anda bitter historicalirony to suggest that Party-state is the only means to
such a cure or redress. Be that as it may, the state and the economy are two
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232
(or more) separate things, and it is only neo-liberal dogma or anarchist
claptrap that says the state can do no good unless it is somehow ‘small but
beautiful’ or generated spontaneously by autonomous worker collectives
who enjoy meetings.All of this presupposes the streets—that is, protest
and ‘voice’ in a mass-participatory, populist way that Chinese and other
liberalisms have often been leery of themselves, and a frank acknowledgment,
a nod in the direction of Mao, that politics are not simply chaos and the
political cannot be eliminated entirely.
The fact that the PRC—and arguably the general political culture of
China, not just the Party elite—remains what the liberals call ‘statist’ or
committed to a centralized and unied state as the very site of politics, is
important, indeed necessary, for the redistribution of wealth and expan-
sion of welfare. It is also indispensable for meeting the higher, political
‘needs and demands’ mentioned by Xi Jinping himself on the road to
‘people’s livelihood’ or ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’
My argument here ‘for’ the Party-state, planning, capital controls, and
so on (i.e. against the free-market principle) stems from real politik and a
logic of necessity. But if politics is not practical and concrete, or unmindful
of historical context—if they are not realist—then they tend to be heavy on
the merely performative and the narcissistic (in the case of at least some of
Hong Kong’s democratic players) or merely academic in the pejorative
sense. A historical realism is a necessary beginning. The Party is the only
entity and agency that could conceivably address the very real problems
subtending China’s rise (and even Hong Kong’s decline after colonialism).
It is for this reason, as well as on account of the organizational capacities of
the ‘Leninist’ or one-Party-state form, that one can heretically argue for
more, not less, state in Chinese politics. This is the argument here, and it
is also a common point of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ left in China. It departs from
the anti-state ‘radicalism’ of much of the Western left just as much from
the progressive and regressive neo-liberals running most major parties
there.
It is important to recall that the legitimacy of the Chinese state among
most or at least ‘many’ of its people—a large, sheer number in any case—is
palpable, the point in noting this is that there is no apparent desire for
‘regime-change’ coming from within China itself.59 A recent Guardian arti-
cle notes, to the author’s own chagrin, that Xi Jinping has so far been
proven to be popular, especially among the ordinary (laobaixing) people.60
There is plenty of protest, critique, distance from propaganda, creative use
of media and the Internet, and so on, but all of this just makes the PRC a
normal, modern, awed, horrible, wonderful, contemporary state. One
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does not need to celebrate or congratulate the Chinese state on this achieve-
ment any more than one needs to disparage its people for failing to aspire
to liberal democracy. One needs only recognize the validity in what Martin
King Whyte has referred to as ‘the myth of the social volcano’—that is,
despite the massive inequality in China since the 1980s and the equally mas-
sive amount of protests, the perceptions of injustice have not led the PRC
to the brink of instability.61 If the state can recognize this better, as again Xi
promises to do when he invokes the demand for justice and democracy, it
can also redress them more effectively and approach protest less harshly.62
My point is not that Xi necessarily will, or even can, follow up on his prom-
ises—he is a mere head of state like others—but that his own rhetoric and
analyses are on point. The Chinese Party-state is a lot of things, some of
them draconian and bureaucratic to an extreme, but it is not often stupid.
Dismissing the points here—of legitimacy and not just the lack of but
the disinterest in ‘true’ political liberalism or regime-change—as a result of
sheer authoritarianism or ‘brainwashing’ or the notion of self-censorship,
a la most mainstream framings, is fairly useless.63 Also worth recalling: it
is also liberalism that has been degraded as much as Maoist socialism (Mao
as commodity in mainstream Chinese culture). Global neo-liberalism and
contemporary imperialism in Afghanistan and the Middle East have failed
even more spectacularly. In short, for better and worse, the Party-state is
here to stay and it is worth thinking through this or for its consequences
for politics and theory. It is worth taking not just the old, past Maoist
Chinese revolution seriously—as many of us have been arguing, against
the tide, for years—but also the actuality of the contemporary Chinese
state. One can always go back to rehearsing the liberal catechisms later.
But there is also the argument that the central contradiction facing the
PRC—and perhaps by extension neo-liberal polities everywhere—is that
sooner or later it has to choose between having its liberal free-market
‘growth-is-good’ cake and its statist ‘people’s livelihood’ state. In this the
legions of liberal critics who want the state out of the economic and social
engineering business and those who want it to be more aggressive in tack-
ling inequality agree: there is a choice to be made, and for purely eco-
nomic reasons, the limits of the previous economic liberalization model,
the choice is nigh. It seems clear that the Party-state or at least its current
leader sees the PRC as entering a new era and a new crossroad. If Xi’s
aforementioned notion of the ‘principal contradiction’ above (about
‘imbalanced development and peoples’ needs’) actually corresponds to the
next phase, or to the above point about capital and the state, then there
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234
can be an exit from the bleak house. The path before China, and perhaps
for others, diverges between a leftward and rightward illiberalism. The
liberal road is the utopia or non-place, at best. What is least likely is some
convergence into ‘true’ democratic liberalism via the market, via Party-
state failure or collapse or abdication, or through some magical conver-
gence. A leftward illiberalism will have to acknowledge rather than attempt
to snuff out the political. It will again need to see—to admit—the political
as an inevitable site of antagonisms and conicts and enmity, and it will
need to allow more political participation, even protest or ‘voice’ as forms
of this. The Chairman may or may not have approved.
noTeS
1. See the Introduction for further discussion. I should perhaps note that it is
I and not Perry who presents this as a specically ideological challenge.
2. My emphasis here. The book in question is Stein Ringen’s, The Perfect
Dictatorship (Hong Kong University Press, 2016). One can detect a simi-
lar almost-admiring or appreciative sentiment within another, more aca-
demic and area studies text on the successes and systematicity of the
post-Mao propaganda system. See Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing
Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China
(Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 2008).
3. John Gray ‘The strange death of liberal politics’ New Statesman July 5,
2016, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/strange-
death-liberal-politics. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017.
4. Nazneen Barma and Ely Ratner, ‘China’s Illiberal Challenge: The real
threat posed by China isn’t economic or military it’s ideological’
(Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 2, Fall 2006). https://democracyjournal.
org/magazine/2/chinas-illiberal-challenge/. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017.
5. See William Callahan China Dreams: 20 Vision of the Future (Oxford
University Press, 2015) and Arif Dirlik, Complicities (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2017).
6. J.S.Nye. Soft power: The means to success in world politics (New York: Public
Affairs, 2004).
7. These can even be described as ‘liberal’ virtues or techniques (wealth and
markets and globalization), but this does not negate the other, ideological
struggle against Western liberalism as an ideology or terrain of neo- or
post-imperial struggle.
8. A good example of the liberal and occidentalist reception (which ranges
from pathologization to plain misrecognition) can be found via Hong
Kong (as well various places on the internet of course), as in Ip Iam-
D. F. VUKOVICH

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chong’s. ‘Agony over National-Imperial Identity: Interpreting the
Coloniality of the Chinese New Lef.’(Cultural Dynamics 27.2 2015:
241–252).
9. The Internet site called ‘Libcom’—short for the oxymoronic ‘libertarian
communist’—that hosts ‘activist’ discussion forums and an archive of
obscure writers and texts, chiey anarchist, is in my view a case in point
https://libcom.org/
10. Chen Xiaomei’s Occidentalism remains the best place to begin with this
term, especially for the rst two post-Mao decades.
11. This was precisely the logic of expunging all Red, let alone ‘Maoist,’ images
or references in the grand opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
12. See the 2016 post by Chris Connery, ‘The Chinese Left: Contexts and
Strategies,’ at a Nottingham, UK policy institute blog, where he notes
Wang’s advocacies of welfare, rural education, and so on. https://cpianal-
ysis.org/2016/10/21/the-chinese-left-contexts-and-strategies/.
Accessed June 9, 2017.
13. Other prominent intellectuals of the left who have had some success in
advising or working with the government include Wang Shaoguang, Hu
Angang, and Cui Zhiyuan.
14. It is worth noting again a certain paradox that Chinese liberals are typically
those intellectuals who have the least experience outside of China, includ-
ing the least English language capability, whereas many, though not all, of
the new left intellectuals received extensive education in the West or are
readers of specically ‘Western’ intellectual traditions such as Marxism and
post-structuralism. This is not meant as a criticism of either camp in itself:
the new left embraces cosmopolitanism and internationalism, and Chinese
liberals would see certain Western values and texts like von Hayek’s as
speaking to universal truths. But it does point to one of Chinese liberal-
ism’s conditions of possibility as a discourse—inadequate experience with,
or understanding of, the limits and realities of ‘advanced’ Western societ-
ies, or a conscious disavowal of them. Of course, the ows of liberal China
experts from abroad into China tend to—or tended, in the past sense—to
exacerbate the cathexis of liberalism.
15. See, for example, the voluminous work of Roderick MacFarquhar (e.g. The
Origins of the Cultural Revolution series) or Ezra Vogel’s recent, glowing,
hagiographic biography, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
(Harvard UP, 2013).
16. Again this is a question of the state’s capacity, or whether or not it has been
captured by capital. The new left’s view, that it can and should reclaim more
such capacity to correct the market and the direction of the state in general,
is if nothing else the less politically quietest, more practical position as com-
pared to those who call for the state to be entirely subsumed by the market.
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236
17. Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century
(London: Verso, 2009).
18. Andre Gunder Frank. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(University of California Press, 1998).
19. On this see, for example, Guo Changgang, Debin Liu, and Jan Nederveen
Pieterse, eds., China’s Contingencies and Globalization (London:
Routledge, 2017).
20. This surfaced as recently as later 2017 when the new CE, Carrie Lam,
proposed a major increase in the public educational budget, but which the
pan-democrats had to ‘debate’ accepting and passing or not, apparently
just on the principle that the CE must always be opposed, no matter how
good the plan or bill is.
21. See, for example, Hung, Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations,
Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), 196.
22. The present study freely ‘admits’ that the PRC can and does also act as an
illiberal state in the unambiguously bad senses of repressive intolerance (of
non-hateful speech or actions), the harsh, even inhumane policing of those
dissenters or protesters it deems to be enemies, which is to say by those
willfully subversive of state power. This latter maldevelopment clearly
stems from the revolutionary era, especially Maoism and the Cold War,
when there were indeed at least some actual enemies of the people, and a
struggle for life and death of the new state, during and even after the revo-
lution. Maoism had offered a classic Bolshevik or Leninist justication for
revolutionary violence, and it is always worth recalling that it was Mao who
was the most open or tolerant of dissent and ‘contradictions among the
people.’ But the Maoist attempt at continuing the revolution nonetheless
failed by the time of, or shortly after, his own death, and the problem of
dissent, even specically of the new intellectual class as well as the new
political class, was never resolved by the end of the Cultural Revolution.
23. See, for example, Thomas Kellog, ‘Xi’s Davos Speech: Is China the New
Champion for the Liberal International Order?’ in the January 24, 2017,
The Diplomat, (http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/xis-davos-speech-is-
china-the-new-champion-for-the-liberal-international-order/); Emily
Rauhala, ‘China’s president—a new kind of ‘Davos man’ for a new, less-
liberal, era’ in the January 16, 2017, Washington Post (https://www.wash-
ingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/16/
chinas-president-a-new-kind-of-davos-man-for-a-new-less-liberal-
era/?utm_term=.c88a2650ef98) as well as D. Bulloch’s ‘Xi Jinping’s
Davos Speech Defends Globalization But Does China Really Mean It?’
https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/01/18/xi-jin-
pings-davos-speech-defends-globalisation-but-does-china-really-
mean-it/. All links accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
D. F. VUKOVICH

237
24. See, for example, ‘US and China serve as economic models for India’ from
an undated issue of The National, an Abu Dhabi magazine/paper. https://
www.thenational.ae/business/us-and-china-serve-as-economic-models-
for-india-1.320264. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
25. The best concise account of Maoism proper remains the chapter on Yan’an
in Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China and After (New York: Free Press, 1999).
While the Party was certainly nationalist during this revolutionar y era, to
great effect in helping defeat Japan and thence the Nationalists, it was also
committed to an internationalism that is all too easily forgotten today when
the Party primarily pushes a nationalistic patriotism more than anything else.
26. See, for example, Chris Bramall’s massive Chinese Economic Development,
which surveys the Chinese political economy form 1940 through 2007
(London: Routledge, 2009).
27. See the ofcial Chinese (extracted) report here: https://geopolicraticus.
wordpress.com/2012/07/16/the-chinese-conception-of-human-
rights/. The full transcript is no longer available at the embassy website.
28. For a recent critique of the civil society template—as an under or non-
theorized concept—see Taru Salmenkari, Civil Society in China and
Taiwan: Agency, Class and Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 2017).
29. Wan Zhiang, ‘On Xi Jinping’s Thought Regarding People’s Livelihood’
(Chinese Studies 4.2015: 50–55). Accessed Nov. 14, 2017, https://le.
scirp.org/pdf/ChnStd_2015041715283338.pdf
30. See Wang Hui, ‘The Crisis of Representativeness and Post-Party Politics’
(Modern China 40.2 2014: 214–239).
31. See Mark Blyth, ‘Global Trumpism: Why Trump’s Victory Was 30Years in
the Making and Why It Won’t Stop Here’ in Foreign Affairs, November
15, 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-11-15/global-
trumpism. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
32. A basic point of neo-liberal studies. See David Harvey, A Brief Histor y of
Neo-liberalism (London: Oxford UP, 2007).
33. See Wang Shaoguang for the notion of counter-movement, as cited in
Chap. 2.
34. On this topic, the work of Kenneth Burke still shines forth brightly, not
least because it anticipated so much of the later ‘French’ or Foucaultian
waves. See, for example, A Rhetoric of Motives (University of California
Press, 1969).
35. This is beyond the scope of the present study but is something that calls
for more theoretical as well as empirical work. For a critique of the
‘varieties of capitalism’ argument and subeld, see Jan Nederveen
Pieterse, ‘Rethinking modernity and capitalism: Add context and stir’
(Sociopedia.isa 2014 1–11). http://www.sagepub.net/isa/resources/
pdf/1st%20Coll%20Rethinking%20Modernity%20and%20Capitalism.
pdf. Accessed Nov. 14, 2017.
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238
36. The ‘main enemy’—from this section’s title—was a favorite expression of
Frederick Engels and thence into Marxism ever since. But I also use it to
signify the salience of the Schmittian analysis of the essence of ‘the politi-
cal’ as dyadic and antagonistic.
37. Even Edward Said—an avowed humanist—insisted that liberal humanism,
from the orientalists to Orwell, was fully a part of orientalism and colonial-
ism. See Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). For the critique of liber-
alism, see Losurdo. For a self-identied Marxist and universalist case, see
Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York:
Verso, 2013).
38. I take this phrase from the political theorist Jodi Dean. See her provoca-
tive, sharp book of the same title.
39. See Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, ‘A Supermarket in California.’ https://www.
poetryfoundation.org/poems/47660/a-supermarket-in-california
40. Alessandro Russo, ‘How Did the Cultural Revolution End? The Last
Dispute between Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, 1975’ (Modern China
39.3 2013: 239–279).
41. Russo 270.
42. Russo, 271.
43. Johan Lagerkvist, Tiananmen Redux: The Hard Truth about the Expanded
Neoliberal World Order (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016).
44. See most recently Goodman and Chen Minglu, Eds., Middle Class China:
Identity and Behaviour (London: Edwin Elgar, 2013).
45. Anderson, 32. (2013).
46. The weightless phrase is actually Susan Watkins’, as cited in Anderson 32.
47. Nancy Fraser, ‘The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,’ January 2, 2017.
Accessed Nov. 15, 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_arti-
cles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser. Fraser’s
reference is the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA, but the
split and commonalities would apply more broadly.
48. See Michael Allen Meeropool, Surrender: How the Clinton Administration
Completed the Reagan Revolution (University of Michigan Press, 2000).
49. This point is, again, also mine in regard to the later stages of the ‘umbrella
movement’ as a distinctly social and cultural event, as opposed to a
directly political one that confronts ‘Beijing’ over an issue of law and vot-
ing. I should also add that this understanding of the political does not
imply that there are therefore no important differences between, say, pro-
and anti-Brexit votes, or between candidates and platforms of, say, demo-
crats or republicans in the USA, or between localists versus the
‘establishment,’ or racist versus ‘civic’ localists, and so on. But it is impor-
tant to retain stronger senses of the political, which is one negative lesson
from cultural studies.
D. F. VUKOVICH

239
50. Harvey, Neo-liberalism; Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global
Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long
Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006); Michael Hudson, The
Bubble and Beyond (Islet Press, 2012. Ebook edition); Monica Prassad, The
Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Polities in Britain,
France, Germany, and the United States (University of Chicago Press,
2006); and Gretta Kippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of
the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2012).
51. For the ‘new class’ analysis of red engineers after Mao, see Joel Andreas
Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of
China’s New Class (Stanford University Press, 2009).
52. See, for example, the report by Lingling Wei in a recent Wall Street journal
report, ‘China’s Xi Approaches a New Term With a Souring Taste for
Markets’ https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xi-approaches-a-new-
term-with-a-souring-taste-for-markets-1508173889. Accessed Nov. 15,
2017.
53. This is, again, Russo’s crucial insight about the transition from Mao to
Deng at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
54. This is a point refreshingly made by no less than two former state depart-
ment academics, Jessica Batke and Oliver Melton, in The ChinaFile web-
site: ‘Why Do We Keep Writing About Chinese Politics As if We Know
More Than We Do?’ http://www.chinale.com/reporting-opinion/view-
point/why-do-we-keep-writing-about-chinese-politics-if-we-know-more-
we-do. They note that in the Mao and even Deng eras, it was easy enough
to glean major conicts and interest-group splits within speeches published
in, for example, The People’s Daily.
55. Hung, The China Boom (Columbia University Press, 2015), does not quite
argue for China’s imminent collapse but does see its post-Mao growth and
development as a ‘boom’ in the pejorative Gold Rush-esque sense that
denitely could burst soon. For his doomsday scenario making the PRC
under Xi akin to North Korea, see the blog at https://punditfromanother-
planet.com/2015/03/14/is-chinas-communist-party-doomed/.
Accessed Nov. 22, 2017.
56. If one has taught a number of students from the mainland, for example,
one will immediately recognize the general antipathy or distaste for talking
about politics. This is by no means a specically mainland issue, but it is
pronounced and striking coming from a former revolutionary and—glob-
ally speaking—always politically controversial society. At the same time, the
attractions of liberalism and the West and ‘Occidentalism’ are clearly, in my
observation, weaker among them since 2006in my own case.
57. China.org has a complete transcript online at: http://live.china.org.
cn/2017/10/17/opening-ceremony-of-the-19th-cpc-national-con-
gress/. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
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240
58. Xi’s three-hour long Congress speech also foregrounds sovereignty/terri-
tory issues (Taiwan, Hong Kong), technology, national rejuvenation, and
so on, as is standard fare for post-Maocommunist speeches.But he also
signies the needfor the state to act environmentallyand toensure people
can participate politically and consult, oversee, and so on. See section VI of
his 2017 19thNational Congress Speech. Again we are dealing with rheto-
ric here but this is not withoutimportance.
59. As discussed earlier, this is what I take to be the point of Anthony Saich’s
work on Chinese citizens’ attitudes toward their own government.
60. See Tom Philips in the perfectly liberal The Guardian newspaper after Xi’s
recent Party Congress speech, who cannot resist the dumb Trump com-
parison, ‘Chairman Xi crushes dissent but poor believe he’s making China
great’ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/14/xi-jinping-
crushes-dissent-but-making-china-great-again. Accessed Nov. 15, 2017.
61. See White, Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and
Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press,
2010).
62. I should note that my point is not that Xi will or even can follow up on all
his promises—he is a mere head of state like others—but that his own
rhetoric and analyses are on point.
63. For examples relating to Hong Kong and Liu Xiaobo, see recent pieces in
Dissent, an American ‘liberal socialism’ magazine dating from the Cold War
left: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/hong-kong-new-normal-
joshua-wong-student-leaders-prison
D. F. VUKOVICH

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247© The Author(s) 2019
D. F. Vukovich, Illiberal China, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0541-2
Index1
1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS
1970s, 9, 47, 52, 59, 90, 104, 117,
135, 155, 208, 211, 215,
226–227
Lindblom, Charles E., 38n35
1989 (Tiananmen protest), 6, 8, 17,
39n39, 43–44, 50–52,
81n1, 109–112, 135–136,
157, 170–174, 178–179,
219, 221
A
Arrighi, Giovanni, 93, 206,
236n17
Article 5 (on capitalism), 162n2
Article 45, 147–148
Autonomy, 24, 52, 58, 63, 101,
130–131, 133, 141, 144–145,
148, 149, 152–161, 165n24,
166n27
B
Basic Law of Hong Kong, The,
23, 129, 132–134, 136,
144–147, 152, 156–161,
162n2, 208
Bo Xilai (and Chongqing), 3, 47–48,
67–69, 83n13, 86n42, 86n43,
86n45, 110, 176, 195n11,
211, 230
C
Cai Xiang, 59–60, 83n12, 85n31,
203–204
Charter 77, 117–118, 128n49,
128n50
Charter 2008, 12, 14, 33,
111–118
Chinese liberalism, 12, 17, 25, 28, 48,
57, 89–122, 150, 202, 205, 219,
229, 235n14

248 INDEX
Chinese new left, viii, 7, 11–12, 16,
28, 33, 43–81, 82n12, 90, 92,
94, 101, 103, 105, 111, 119,
121, 123n6, 169, 191, 202–204,
229–230
Chin Wan-kan (Horace), 132,
155–158, 165n24
Chongqing, see Bo Xilai (and
Chongqing)
Christian faith, 17, 24, 133,
143–144, 159
Cold War, 13, 18–19, 24, 29, 32,
37n23, 47–48, 62, 65–66, 80,
86n40, 105–106, 112, 114, 155,
179–180, 187, 192, 194n1, 205,
207, 211, 236n22
Confucianism, 9, 19, 44–46, 60, 63,
110, 149, 179–180, 209, 213
Conjuncture, global, 17, 89, 202,
203, 217
Convergence, 6, 9, 11, 44, 61,
114–117, 133, 134, 136,
141–152, 158–161, 174–180, 234
Cui Zhiyuan, 53, 72–74, 203, 212
Cultural Revolution, 16, 27, 36n23,
52, 55, 59, 63, 67–74, 84n25,
95–97, 101–107, 123n8,
124n22, 124n23, 125n26, 214,
216, 220–221, 227, 229
D
Democracy, 2, 8–9, 49–51, 90, 103,
113, 129–198, 206, 213–232
social democracy, 54
Deng Xiaoping, 10, 14, 46, 49, 81,
95, 100–103, 105–110, 144–145,
165n20, 205, 214, 220–222
De-politicization, 11, 13, 23, 24, 26,
48–50, 55, 56, 60, 62, 89–198,
204, 211–231
Document 9 (CCP communique), 18,
77, 94, 214
E
Economism, viii, 9–11, 33, 56, 89, 94,
97–98, 107–111, 119–122,
124n12, 126n34, 144–145,
160–161, 167–169, 193,
206–207, 212, 219–227
See also Liberalism, market liberalism
F
Famine (Great Leap Forward), 67–79
G
Gan Yang, 44–46, 127n41
H
Han Yuhai, 48–51
I
Illiberalism, ix–x, 6–41, 43–240
dened, 19–27
and imperialism, 28–34
and progressive illiberalism,
226–234
Imperialism, x, 6, 9–13, 19, 26,
28–34, 39n44–47, 45, 52, 91,
96, 120, 122, 131, 154, 178,
201, 203–205, 211, 214, 233
L
Liberalism, viii–x, 6–21, 23–29, 37n27
market liberalism, 9, 72, 92, 145, 160
See also Neo-liberalism
Lin Chun, 9, 40n47, 192
Lin Zuluan, 170, 177, 184, 192
Livelihood, 45, 67, 69, 71, 114, 117,
121, 141, 170, 177, 186, 193,
201, 207, 211–219, 223,
226–229, 231–233

249 INDEX
Liu Xiaobo, 14, 25, 47, 92,
114–116, 119
See also Charter 2008
M
Mahoney, Gregory, 57–58,
60, 203
Maoism, 3, 8, 44, 45, 53, 58,
70, 92, 97–99, 102,
127n41, 214, 217, 225,
228, 236n22
Maoist discourse, 49–50,
62–81
Mao Yushi, 93–94, 122n5
N
Nanjiecun (co-operative), 72–74
Nativism, 131, 132, 155–158,
164n13, 165n24
and Xenophobia, 25, 132, 142,
152, 154, 164n13
Neo-liberalism, 14–19, 27, 33,
37n27, 38n33, 47–48,
51–52, 89–90, 105–106,
112, 114, 132, 143, 182,
186, 189, 193, 202,
211–212, 214, 220–226,
233, 238n50
O
Occidentalism, 6, 12, 17–18,
29, 37n27, 61, 72, 112,
116, 131, 153, 201, 203,
205, 209, 234n8
See also Orientalism
Orientalism, 4, 6, 12, 14, 21,
23, 30, 37n27, 47–49,
51–62, 67, 82n3, 90, 103,
116, 176, 179, 192, 201,
219, 238n37
See also Occidentalism
P
Pan-democratic movement (Hong
Kong), 129–166, 208–210,
215–217
Perry, Elizabeth, 3–6, 199
Q
Qin Hui, 116, 119–122
R
Rightful resistance, 2, 34n4, 168, 173,
180–183, 210
Russo, Allesandro, 220–221
S
Schmitt, Carl, 27, 49–50, 65,
101, 118, 124n20, 219,
220, 224, 229
Socialism, 9, 11–12, 37n27, 45, 47,
54, 59–61, 70, 72, 73, 93, 99,
101–102, 108, 120
‘national socialism,’ 178, 202, 205,
207–214, 218–219, 224,
228–229, 232–233
State, 5, 7–8, 12, 15, 17, 19, 26–27,
38n33, 48–53, 64, 77, 101–102,
107–108, 120, 138, 160,
181–182, 201, 203, 208–209,
212, 221, 227, 231–232
State capacity, ix, 19, 111, 202
Sun Jingxian, 75–78, 80
Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), 193,
212, 213, 218

250 INDEX
T
Tohti, Ilham, 24
Totalitarianism, 14, 54, 62, 65–66,
86n40, 113, 180, 216, 228
Two-line struggle, 89–128
See also Maoist discourse
U
Universalism, viii, 6, 12, 17–18,
27–29, 56, 63, 80, 98, 113–114,
120, 213, 216, 219, 226, 235n14
V
von Hayek, Friedrich, 4, 15,
37n26, 77–80, 90, 105–106,
120–121, 122n5, 126n30,
205, 235n14
W
Wang Hui, 45, 47–48, 53–55, 101,
106, 204, 217
Wang Shaoguang, 55, 63, 71
X
Xi Jinping, 2–3, 17–18, 74, 77, 110,
130, 185–188, 210–232, 240n62
Xu Jilin, 105, 119
Y
Yang Jisheng, 78–79, 106
Yang Semao, 177, 184, 195n15
Z
Zhuang Liehong, 184