Second Intellectual Liberation Theory in China
- 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.
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Excerpted from Xudong Zhang:
"What Cui means by “the second intellectual liberation” is a dialectical transcendence of traditional binary opposites such as private ownership and state ownership, market economy and planned economy, Chinese substance-Western function versus wholesale Westernization, and reformism and conservatism, all of which emerged during the “first intellectual liberation” waged in the late 1970s against the dogmatic adherence to Maoism. This action paved the way for the socialist economic reform of the 1980s. Emphasis on the second intellectual liberation is no longer “the negation of [socialist] conservatism, but the expansion of a new space for institutional innovation; instead of sticking with an either/or division, it searches for new opportunities for institutional innovation under the guiding principle of economic and political democracy.”
Based on a dynamic practice of dialectical thinking, which is simultaneously deconstructive and constructive, Cui examines a whole range of historical or contemporary cases from the writings of Rousseau and J. S. Mill to post-Fordist production, and from Chinese village elections to Russian “shock therapy.” His critique of institutional and intellectual fetishism, to be sure, points toward the prevailing ideology of the free market and an increasingly homogeneous system of capitalism’s intensified dominance of the entire world. Yet, in the particular Chinese context, Cui’s analysis of contemporary capitalism as an ongoing historical dynamic calls for a continuing effort at understanding the historical complexity and the sociopolitical contradictions of capitalism in order to capture—and appropriate—the historically democratic, liberating elements that move it forward, yet are constrained, repressed, and distorted by its reified institutions and ideologies.
Such a stance against the totalizing power and temporal frame of world capitalism sets the tone for a critical intellectual voice in China today, a voice based on a commitment to democracy and freedom as institutional arrangements and an intellectual utopia beyond the political horizon of the status quo or the reifications of capitalism and socialism."