profile | Gloria Davies

WANG HUI
The historian as social critic in China

WANG HUI, Professor of Humanities at Tsinghua University in Beijing, is a prominent Chinese historian who is generally better known in the English-speaking academy for his critical engagement with social problems in contemporary China. Wang has sought to inhabit the dual role of historian and social critic since he began his career as a literary historian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the late 1980s. He remained at the Academy throughout the 1990s but travelled extensively. In 2002, he relocated to Tsinghua, one of China’s most prestigious universities. To date, Wang has attended conferences and/or undertaken research in numerous countries including Australia, Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the United States. He is a leading voice in international Chinese intellectual circles and has spent time in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
    In the late 1990s, Wang became a controversial figure in the mainland Chinese intellectual scene. This unsolicited notoriety was the result of a lengthy essay he published in 1997 entitled, ‘The State of Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’. Wang had written this essay four years earlier but was unable to find a journal prepared to risk publishing it until the leading Hainan-based journal Tianya (Frontiers) brought the essay to light in 1997. The essay constitutes Wang’s indictment of the parlous state of Chinese critical inquiry at a time when social inequalities had greatly sharpened as a consequence of China’s market reforms. The authoritarian nature of one-party rule in China places critical intellectuals like Wang Hui at a distinct disadvantage. Despite China’s undeniable economic achievements since the 1980s, critics of the status quo remain nonetheless always at risk of being silenced through the banning of their publications. Depending on the state’s perception of the ‘offence’ an intellectual has committed, the penalties might include loss of employment and institutional affiliation and, in the case of ‘offences’ perceived to pose a threat to the so-called national interest, a prison term as well.
    One might wonder what Wang Hui has to offer to intellectual life in Australia given his unwavering focus on things Chinese, not to mention the political constraints under which he works, constraints which often confine him to offering his social critique in a somewhat oblique theoretical idiom. In my view, what Wang Hui has to say about China is of significance to us for two reasons. Firstly his work provides an opportunity for Australians to become more familiar with complex intellectual debates in China and thus to acquire a more nuanced understanding of the enormous social changes that China has undergone since Deng Xiaoping redirected the party-state to embark on a path to economic reform in the late 1970s. Secondly, Wang’s insistence on socially responsible governance as a fundamental requirement to the success of China’s market economy has a relevance that extends well beyond China. Indeed the question of a state’s role in the provision of public services such as education, health care and pensions has become a crucial topic of debate everywhere.
    Wang is a staunch critic of neoliberalism (but not of the market economy per se). In a substantial analysis (published overseas) of the events that occurred in Beijing in the months leading up to the catastrophic events of 4 June 1989, Wang identifies the post-Maoist state’s turn towards neoliberal economic reform as the prime cause of the socio-economic inequalities that fuelled the protest movement. In his analysis, arguably the most incisive to date on the topic by a mainland Chinese intellectual, Wang describes neoliberalism as “a dominating discursive formation and ideology that has no capacity to describe actual social and economic relations, but neither is it unconnected to actual social and economic relations”. To emphasise the need for resistance to the lures of neoliberal thinking, Wang urges that we view it “as an ideology imbricated with national policy, the practical thought of the intellectuals as well as with the values of the media”. He also reminds us that “it uses concepts concerned with ‘transition’ and ‘development’ to patch up its internal contradictions”. Readers interested in the burgeoning views over the adverse consequences of globalisation will find much to engage their attention in Wang’s writings.
Indeed, wherever we may happen to live, we find ourselves being subjected to neoliberal doctrines of social advancement through market competition on a global scale. Thus the neoliberal argument that economic globalisation delivers the kind of progress that everyone needs is one with which we are all familiar. Yet we constantly grapple with the new uncertainties and inequities that have emerged and are emerging out of this same highly uneven process of globalisation. Disagreements over globalisation (whether anti-globalist or between differing models of globalisation), and the related issue of privatisation of state-owned entities, thrive in Australia’s public culture as they do in democratic countries throughout the world. Participants in public debate and protest such as union officials and members, workers, university students and academics, and members of local communities, regularly express their concerns about the deleterious effects on social equity and communal wellbeing of policies that are too narrowly based on the model of the neoliberal ‘free market’. Meanwhile, the business sector and government continue to advocate the necessity of global competition in facilitating the capacity of the market to constantly adjust and regulate itself towards optimal performance. Since China’s admission into the WTO in 2000, the Australian news media, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Western world, have intensified their focus on economic, social and political developments in China. The increasing focus on China’s high rate of economic growth is an issue chiefly associated with concerns over triggering a ‘race to the bottom’ in the global competition for trade and manufacturing, given the enormous supply of cheap labour available in the world’s most populous country, together with concerns over official corruption and the authoritarian nature of party-state rule. In brief, there is a growing sense of unease among Australians about the unpredictable prospects of a less than transparent China playing an increasingly dominant role in this future global economy.
    These are concerns shared by mainland Chinese intellectuals such as Wang Hui but unlike their counterparts in Australia who can publish dissenting views without direct official intervention, Chinese intellectuals tend to phrase their critical engagement in subtler terms calculated not to exceed the ever-fluctuating, state-imposed parameters of permissible speech. Despite the deliberately oblique way in which Wang Hui issued his J’accuse of China’s market reforms in his seminal 1997 essay, mainland Chinese readers were left in little doubt that he was calling for resistance to the blandishments of the ‘free market’ rhetoric that had come to dominate official and public discourses in China. Among other things, Wang argues, “the fact that economic and cultural democracy are inseparable from political democracy . . . also demonstrates that the hope that the market will somehow automatically lead to equity, justice and democracy – whether internationally or domestically – is just another kind of utopianism”. Wang’s intention was to alert his readers to the utopianism he perceived in the intellectual activism of the 1980s that had led, on the one hand, to an unquestioned embrace (among officials and intellectuals alike) of Western-derived market principles as the solution to China’s economic backwardness, while fostering, on the other hand, a collective aspiration to democracy on the part of concerned Chinese citizens. This culminated in the student-led protest movement of 1989 before it was so tragically purged on ‘June Fourth’ (or ‘liu si’, a temporal term that renders the event symbolically significant).
    Published eight years after 1989, Wang’s indictment of “the state of contemporary Chinese thought” was welcomed by some and attacked by others. China underwent an accelerated pace of economic reform in the early to mid 1990s, despite the tightened ideological controls exercised by the party-state in the aftermath of 4 June 1989. This was a time of critical reflection for China’s elite intellectuals, many of whom, like Wang Hui, had participated in or supported the 1989 protest movement, and who were now also faced with the problem of redefining a social role for themselves under increased state scrutiny.
    Wang observes that the 1990s was a time of growing division among Chinese intellectuals, which stood in contrast to the “partial unanimity of aims” between officials and intellectuals during the more optimistic 1980s. He argues that whereas a shared desire on the part of officials and intellectuals alike to achieve national prosperity had produced a form of intellectual activism in the 1980s that largely accorded with the party-state’s agenda for economic reforms, by the 1990s, a bifurcation had emerged. There were now, on the one hand, ‘conservative’ intellectuals who continued to produce an ideology of technocratic modernisation on behalf of the party-state, and, on the other hand, ‘radical’ intellectuals who had become dissenters of party-state politics, who promoted a human rights movement in China and called for Western-style democratisation. Reading this division as an outcome of market expansion under ongoing authoritarian rule, Wang draws attention to the need for alternative models of modernisation that could more effectively address the problem of acute socio-economic inequalities in China. He is keen in this regard to explore ways of enhancing the prospects for broader participation in policy-drafting and implementation, constitutive of a form of social democracy that is based in what he calls “the value system of socialism”, which he is at pains to distinguish from the ‘state violence’ of existing socialism.
    Wang’s interest in defending socialist principles of economic democracy, especially in terms of resisting the monopoly power of transnational corporations through the promotion of small-scale local cooperative ventures, supervised and organised on democratic principles, has led him to be labelled as a leading figure of the ‘New Left’ in China. He advocates that the state should play a central role in the provision of social protection, and, in his capacity as joint chief editor (with Huang Ping) of China’s leading academic journal Reading (Dushu), he has sought to disseminate a range of critical views on topics including the implications of China’s further integration into the global economy, and the types of constitutional and political reforms China would require to secure both social wellbeing and sustainable economic growth. In a 2003 interview, Wang commented that, “As early as 1996, Dushu had invited a group of sociologists to discuss rural, peasant, and agricultural problems, understood as an inter-related complex”. When he observes that “awareness of the crisis in the countryside only became an acute public issue around the time when the Sino-American agricultural agreement was signed in 2000”, he implies that state censorship served only to exacerbate this crisis when it silenced those who had sought to criticise the adverse impact on China’s peasantry of ill-considered agricultural policies.
    What is important to note here is that in his numerous publications in Chinese and English, Wang consistently attempts to salvage a thread of commitment to social justice from within the socialist idiom of the party-state’s rhetoric. Despite the constraints of censorship, he continues to publish critical essays (sometimes necessarily outside China) aimed at alerting readers to the neoliberal connotations of the official discourse on economic reform. Indeed, in the interview mentioned above, Wang claims that China “cannot be described as socialist any longer, and the state itself has changed a lot”. He continues:

Today the state is itself a part of the market system. In some ways it functions very well in that capacity – it makes mistakes, of course, but it is now a key factor in the dynamic of marketisation.

Wang’s explicit preference for a socialist conception of democracy is the reason that his critics first labelled him a ‘New Left’ thinker in the late 1990s. His critics are generally intellectuals who regard themselves as ‘liberals’, who argue that further expansion of China’s market economy would, in the long term, enhance the prospects of democracy through the emergence and growth of a civil society sufficiently robust to withstand the unwelcome interventions of the state. What we must also note is that in the context of the post-Maoist 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘New Left’ carried a distinctly negative connotation due to its resonance with the ‘Leftism’ of the Cultural Revolution, a period which the party-state itself had officially designated as “a catastrophic decade”. By contrast, the term ‘liberalism’, as the Shanghai-based historian Xu Jilin observes, “had achieved a cultural cachet previously enjoyed by such terms as democracy and science, even a certain inviolability”. This reflects the complexity of Wang’s critical engagement with China’s market reforms: in an authoritarian environment where the party-state now relies on the economic discourse of neoliberalism on the one hand while continuing to defend its political legitimacy in a socialist idiom on the other, ‘liberal’ and ‘New Left’ intellectuals find themselves equally at risk of giving offense to the party-state.
    In this context, it is worth noting that whereas the ‘New Left’ was a negatively inflected term in the late 1990s, more recently under the leadership of President Hu Jintao, it has come to acquire the kind of status that ‘liberalism’ enjoyed (and still enjoys) in the public culture of post-Maoist China. In an effort to demonstrate that state policies are sensitive to the adverse consequences of economic reform, the government has begun publicly to echo the rhetoric of socially responsible governance first popularised by so-called ‘New Left’ intellectuals in the 1990s, and it has arguably been forced to do so by the rising incidence of protests from the rural and urban poor over such issues as unpaid wages and pensions, land seizure, industrial waste dumping and pollution. But so far, this new turn in the party-state’s rhetoric has not produced the kind of policy reform that envisages an inclusive democracy that intellectuals such as Wang Hui have sought to promote. On the contrary, this recent official rhetoric of responsible governance has been accompanied by increased censorship of dissenting views.
    Wang Hui’s willingness to assume the role of society’s conscience is part of an enduring tradition of Chinese scholarship that can be traced back to the centuries-old Confucian dictum of “assuming personal responsibility for all under Heaven” (yi tianxia wei jiren). This ingrained sense of the social relevance of scholarship came to be redefined in terms of nation-building in the early twentieth-century discourse of pioneering modern intellectuals such as Lu Xun (whom Wang regards as his favourite exemplar). Indeed, the very ferocity of present-day debates between ‘liberal’ and ‘New Left’ intellectuals over the proper way ahead for China is indicative of the significance accorded to the public role of intellectuals, but this public intellectual role has now become complicated by a growing perception among the intellectuals themselves that, in the era of market competition, the publication of ‘selfless’ concerns can often mask ‘selfish’ interests of career advancement. Hence because of Wang’s rapid rise to intellectual fame in China and internationally during the 1990s, his ‘liberal’ detractors have been quick to cast suspicion on his motivations. But whether one agrees or disagrees with Wang’s socialist-inspired vision of a diverse global network of local cooperative ventures that would provide a viable non-capitalist alternative to globalisation, it is clear that he makes a significant contribution to Chinese critical inquiry through the emphasis he places on defending the interests of the disadvantaged majority in the turbulent process of China’s economic reform.
    Wang has also consistently sought to link his engagement with contemporary problems to his research on the historical evolution of modern ideas in China. In 2004, he published a four-volume work entitled The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, in which he interprets Chinese modernity as an essentially non-capitalist world-view that evolved over centuries of Confucian scholarship: one that he traces in particular to intellectual developments during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE). Wang argues that this autochthonous world-view fostered the rise of a nationalistic approach to modernisation in twentieth-century China. He claims that this Chinese approach marks a distinct departure from the paradigmatic Western capitalist model insofar as it emphasises the importance of collective wellbeing and social harmony in ways that anticipate and resonate with the communal principles of socialism. In his 1997 essay (mentioned earlier), Wang had already sought to dignify Mao Zedong Thought as constitutive of “an anti-modern theory of modernisation” by showing that Mao’s ideas shared much in common with the writings of an earlier generation of Chinese scholars and activists such as Kang Youwei (1858–1927), Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) and Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925). In the complex environment of mainland Chinese public culture where the Cultural Revolution is often summarily dismissed as an ‘aberration’ but remains a largely prohibited topic of discussion, Wang’s attempt to explore the unrealised critical potential of Mao’s Thought as a form of resistance to capitalist modernisation was both innovative and daring.
    Wang is interested in offering an account of Chinese modernity as inclusive of both a process of selective Westernisation as well as an evolving critique of Western imperialism and capitalism (undertaken by Chinese officials and intellectuals since the Opium Wars). In both his scholarship and social critique, Wang consistently disavows the presumed universality of the Western capitalist model of development. He identifies the present-day global dominance of neoliberal thinking with this one-size-fits-all capitalist model of development and offers us his Sino-centred narrative of modern Chinese thought with the stated intention of not only recovering the uniqueness of Chinese scholarship against Eurocentric assumptions about China, but also to promote the possibility of non-capitalist and socially equitable alternatives to modernisation. Thus, he strongly defends the need for critical engagement with ideas of moment in China’s public culture, while emphasising the need for both subtlety and clarity in promoting ideas of reform under authoritarian rule. As he puts it, “the principal task of the progressive forces in contemporary China is to prevent these critiques from developing in a conservative direction (which would include attempts to move back to the old system), and also to push strongly to urge the transformation of these elements into a driving force seeking broader democracy and freedom in both China and the world”.
    Wang is highly influential among the growing numbers of socially engaged intellectuals and students in China who identify with what has come to be called ‘New Left’ thinking. This should come as no surprise since he is regarded by his supporters and critics alike as a contemporary Chinese pioneer of this mode of thinking, with its characteristic emphasis on grassroots social mobilisation towards greater social security and equity in the process of China’s rapid economic transition. In this regard, like many prominent intellectuals in China, Wang frequently advocates the importance of speaking out on behalf of the disadvantaged and the voiceless majority. As a leading historian well versed in traditional and modern Chinese scholarship as well as recent Euro-American critical theory, he is consistently attentive to both the demands of meticulous academic research and the need for practical solutions to contemporary social problems in China. For instance, in a recent visit to his hometown of Yangzhou in the low Yangtze valley of Jiangsu province, a city with a history that extends over some two thousand years, Wang undertook field research on the enormous difficulties faced by the workers of a state-owned textile company currently in the process of ‘transition’ towards privatisation.
    In his academic research, Wang Hui’s insistence on the need for critical rigour in the use of key concepts (whether of ‘democracy’, ‘modernity’, ‘freedom’, ‘the market’, ‘society,’ ‘globalisation’, etc.) has led him to pursue a conversation with the past with the general aim of allowing the words and actions of individuals long dead to ‘speak’ to the present, in the hope that such trans-historical conversations will help us to detect flaws and unexamined assumptions in our present-day habits of mind. This is a laudable project that resonates with the work of contemporary thinkers such as Ashis Nandy who are also committed to the work of reflecting on the past in the hope of producing better ways of imagining the future. As an historian, Wang interrogates the assumptions that shape our understanding of the past. As a social critic, he reminds us that these assumptions are not only ideological but also powerfully entrenched in the discourses of the government, the media and the academy. In Phillip Darby’s essay on Nandy in the winter 2005 issue of Overland, Darby observes that one issue which remains seldom debated in Australia is the unexamined logic of development, a logic that underwrites much of Australia’s approach to Asia, with the result that “development has been evacuated of its political content”. If we wish to put substantive political content back into the discourse of development, then Wang Hui’s writings, like Nandy’s, are undeniably a valuable resource.

Other publications in English by Wang Hui include:

• ‘Fire at the Castle Gate’ in New Left Review 6, Nov–Dec 2000, pp.69–99.
• ‘On Scientism and Social Theory in Modern Chinese Thought’ in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2001, pp.135–156.
• China: Unequal Shares’ in Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2002; ‘Reclaiming Asia from the West: Rethinking Global History’ in Japan Focus at <japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=226>, 2005.

Gloria Davies teaches Chinese Studies at Monash University. She is editor of Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry (2001) and co-editor (with Chris Nyland) of Globalisation in the Asian Region: Impacts and Consequences (2004). She has a forthcoming book entitled Worrying About China.

Overland 182–autumn 2006, p.68

© Gloria Davies

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