Rural Industrial Revolution in China as Expression of an Alternative Modernity
Source
- Book: Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. By Xudong Zhang (Editor). Duke University Press, 2001
* Article / Book Chapter: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview. Xudong Zhang.
Text
From Rural China to Cultural China: Toward a Political Nation
Excerpted from Xudong Zhang:
"Contrary to the widespread assumption that post-Mao Chinese economic development resulted from privatization, many Chinese intellectuals acknowledge that among the most important engines of robust growth over the past two decades are Chinese rural industries.
These are the so-called village and township enterprises, which, since the early 1980s, rose from inconsequence to represent more than one-third of Chinese domestic output in the second half of the 1990s. Gan Yang is a veteran of the Cultural Discussions of the 1980s, a Tiananmen exile, and the general editor of the Shehui yu Sixiang (Society and Thought) book series at Oxford University Press in Hong Kong. For him, the rise of village and township enterprises is both an economic phenomenon and a modern transformation of rural China, the historic beginning of Chinese modernity defined against the Qin-Han model of the Chinese empire and the involutionary mode of pre-industrial production, or what historian Philip Huang calls “growth without development.”
The central concern of Gan’s thinking remains modernity. For him, the historic hint behind the rise of Chinese rural enterprise is a form of development different from the classical model of Western modernity. “The way by which Chinese peasants bid farewell to agrarian society is not to swamp the city as penniless proletarians eradicated from their rural homeland, but rather to create a modern industry in the very rural community where they are rooted, and thus work in the factory without fleeing to the city (li tu bu li xiang, jin chang bu jin cheng). This is indeed a unique mode of development. It results not from the economists’ design, but from a desperate choice under the pressure of survival.” The fate of Chinese rural industry in the face of the capitalist market’s heightened globalism remains uncertain; and the Chinese state’s intensified efforts to engage in social rationalization by “international” standards, i.e., privatization, bode ill for the development of a collectively and communally based economy.
But Gan Yang’s observations remain important, not as a microeconomic assessment, but as a macro-sociocultural vision of an alternative model of Chinese modernity. The profound historical significance of the rise of Chinese rural industry, Gan argues, is that “it provides the Chinese industrial transformation with a dependable foundation of micro-social organization.” In other words, the development of Chinese rural industry is not achieved at the price of weakening, undermining, and eventually destroying rural communities, but, rather, development thrives on the basis of mutual dependence on and close ties to the rural community. Its prosperity reinforces the reconstruction of the communities of rural China. “If such historical experience proves feasible, its meaning to the continuation of a Chinese form of life will be unlimited; and its contribution to the history of civilization invaluable,” he observes.
The dialogue between Gan’s idealistic picture of Chinese rural industry with Wang Shaoguang’s rethinking of the Chinese state and Cui Zhiyuan’s critique of a uniform model of development is manifold. In this light, his concept of “Cultural China” proves to be a notion that refers to modernity as a historical experience of industrialization, not an ahistorical speculation on the revival of Confucianism by means of its invented compatibility with global capitalism. In fact, Gan’s “Cultural China” should be considered a moment in the historical articulation of a socioeconomic transformation before its realization in the “political nation”; on the basis of that transformation, he criticizes the ideology of Chinese nationalism. In other words, “Cultural China” prefigures the yet-to-be-fulfilled sociopolitical content of Chinese modernity, which consists of “new local communities, new social organizations and networks, and new forms of everyday life.”
Reminiscent of his call for a radical hermeneutic stance toward the tradition/modernity, East/West binaries that defined the intellectual landscape of the Chinese 1980s, Gan insists on keeping the historical process of the modern West as the frame of reference for grasping the Chinese problematic.
He writes:
- “All of the Western notions of property relations, structure of rights, citizenship, democratic participation, etc., are historically formed in Western modernity, namely the transformation of Western rural societies into Western industrial societies; all of them evolved and improved as Western modernity unfolded. Thus we have reason to expect that the Chinese notions of property relations, structure of rights, citizenship, and democracy will gradually take shape as Chinese modernity ascends historically.”
This historical framework enables Gan Yang to consider such grand narratives of historical determinism as capitalism overcoming socialism, or “private ownership is the only choice and there is no alternative,” as nothing more than the residue of Cold War ideology that should be transcended in the post-Cold War era. Based on his rejection of the “unfeasibility of Cold War socialism” and the “irrationality of Cold War capitalism,” Gan makes a zigzag intervention into the intellectual debates of the 1990s.
For this reason, he introduced the discourse of liberalism (including Berlin’s idea of negative freedom) at the beginning of the 1990s; yet, at the end of the decade, he used the same intellectual source to attack Chinese intellectuals’ taste for antidemocratic or aristocratic notions of freedom. For Gan, the Chinese “liberal” intelligentsia of the 1990s was characterized by its common emphasis on private property in a state capitalist environment and by its ideological alignment with the global power mainstream by means of the trope of individual freedom. By these means, Gan puts the Chinese liberals’ notion of “freedom” into conflict with the notion of social, political, and economic democracy. Under bureaucratic-capitalist conditions, the liberals’ position stands as a tacit endorsement of the freedom of the privileged over the rights of the deprived and of the unequal distribution of wealth in the name of the market principle.
This stance is also the reason that Gan advocates both the modern democratic idea of “one person, one vote” and a large, united, and strong constitutional republic that keeps provincial oligarchies under control. The fact that Gan Yang is labeled “New Left” by his “liberal” critics only shows the radically conservative dogmatism subscribed to by Chinese neoliberals."