View source for New Left in China

=Source=

* Book: Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. By Xudong Zhang (Editor). Duke University Press, 2001

URL = https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/539/chapter-abstract/123995/The-Making-of-the-Post-Tiananmen-Intellectual?redirectedFrom=fulltext

'''* Article / Book Chapter: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview. Xudong Zhang.'''


=Text=

Excerpted from Xudong Zhang:

"The position of the so-called “New Left” (xinzuopai), at least as it is defined in the social-ideological space of position-taking, seems a symmetrical opposite of that of the “liberals” (ziyouzhuyi zhe). Limited to a way
of thinking in post-Tiananmen academia, the Chinese “New Left,” if one
is to take that dubious label as a meaningful signifier, combines resistance to and a critique of capitalist globalization in China, on the one hand, and a conscious association with an international critical discourse, embodied by critical theoretical discourses in Western academia, on the other.

Here a distinction between the academic “New Left” and populist sentiments against ongoing marketization in the Chinese economy and eroding working-class rights is important, as the “New Leftists” and liberals have
little in common except for their moral self-righteousness and their lack of
an intellectual and political platform. The two groups form a dynamic only
in the larger social context when they are joined by state discourse and the
discourse of consumerism and mass culture. What complicates the picture of this “New Left” is not so muchits crossover with labor advocates or the inspiration of the teachings of Mao; rather, its complexity is shaped
by internally heterogeneous intellectual components, above all its formulations made in Western academia by overseas Chinesescholars and those devised by its domestic contingent, which came into being after 1997.

The first among those who have been labeled “New Left” intellectuals
are overseas Chinese students who studied social sciences and humanities in the West, primarily in the United States. Some of them have returned to China; the rest have gone on to teach in American universities.
Most of them publish regularly in both English and Chinese. list of
some of the usual suspects—Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Shaoguang, Gan Yang,
Huang Ping, KangLiu, Lydia Liu, etc.—raises the question of what intellectual criteria encompass such politically loaded label. The background of these “New Leftists” is diverse. Gan Yang was trained within the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, by no means a bastion of radical leftist intellectuals. Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Shaoguang
are political scientists trained at Chicago and Cornell, respectively; both
schools offer mainstream, if “cutting edge,” academic training in, say,
rational choice and game theories. Huang Ping, a student of Anthony Giddens, may qualify as “New Left,” but only in a Western sense of the word whose Blairean implications may be offensive and only to those who identify with the international right-wing ideology. The twoliterary scholars, Kang Liu and Lydia Liu, work along Marxist and feminist/postcolonial
lines respectively, which, although commonplace in literary and cultural
studies in U.S. academia, may seem to be the most “radical” and “leftist” to post-Mao Chinese intellectual conventions. But that negative reception only reveals a hidden assumption that underscores the invention
of the “New Left” label—namely, the corruption of the Chinese intellectual mind by the privileged and frivolous Western academia. Wang Hui, who rose in recent years as a major voice for the supposedly “New Left”
camp, was considered by his former “liberal” colleagues to be an acceptable
scholar of Lu Xun and Chinese intellectual history until his return from a
year-long visit at Harvard and the University of California, after which he
seemed to have slipped irredeemably into the decadent discourse of Western left intellectuals who neither know nor care about China. Such profound suspicion and ignorance of Western academic life manifests itself
in a fervent and indiscriminate attack on Western Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, Cultural Studies, critical legal studies — anything that is perceived by such “liberal” Chinese
intellectuals as Xu Youyu and Lei Yi as not compatible with an imagined,
uniform, and homogeneous doctrine of modernity as a Western-centered
universal truth. Through a critique of the Chinese “New Left,” “liberal”
intellectuals completed a short-circuit that collapses the Chinese Cultural
Revolution and the political events and causes of the 1960s in the West.

Such a convenient equation demonstrates, more than an intellectual and
historical reductionism, an ideological presumption of a post-historical age
of capitalist globalization.

Like many other labels in modern Chinese intellectual and cultural
history, “New Left” was attached to a fuzzy and diverse phenomenon by
its critics with an intent to stereotype and stigmatize. Such an intention,
however, unwittingly reveals the Chinese social-political overdetermination that gives rise to this phenomenon in specific and radically contemporary context; this overdetermination runs contrary to the suggestion
that the Chinese “New Left” is un-Chinese. Unlike contemporary Chinese
nationalism, which circulates as a social sentiment without any political theoretical elaboration, the “New Left” stands for a number of distinct but related intellectual positions and theoretical discourses corresponding to the sociopolitical context of the Chinese 1990s. 

Its alleged problem or weakness is not its lack of theoretical sophistication, but its “unrootedness” in — thus its irrelevance to—an “indigenous experience.” This “absence of roots” makes such discourse guilty of importing “Western theory”
without discrimination or any sense of “what China really needs.” Coined
by neoliberal intellectuals, the “New Left” label issues a warning about a
resurgence of leftist politics after two decades of state-sanctioned developmentalism, depoliticization, and integration with the global mainstream, a context that inevitably places a pejorative significance on anything that
can be, however vaguely, described as “left.” For this reason, most intellectuals labeled “New Left” reject such naming and seem to guard against unintended or deliberate confusions of their positions with other leftist or
revolutionary intellectual and political traditions in modern China.

Neoliberal intellectuals are aware of this rejection; some of them even
note that the “New” before “Left” suggests a different ideological foreground, a different intellectual genealogy, and a different set of social and ideological imperatives from, say, the Maoist orthodoxy. Still, on the whole,
the neoliberal strategy is to collapse the “New Left” into categories that are
clearly and negatively designated in the mental-ideological map of post-Mao China and in the post-Cold War new world order. 


In the last few years of the 1990s, neoliberal critics repeatedly accused “New Left” intellectuals of rejecting 

(1) the idea of the free market; 

(2) the discourse of “classical social sciences”; 

(3) the universality of liberal discourse; and 

(4) the universal values and institutions, 

such as liberal democracy, represented by the West. 


Therefore, in the eyes of Chinese neoliberals, even though the
“New Left” no longer depends on absolute state power, a planned economy,
and the primacy of ideology, it demonstrates “an affinity with traditional
socialism; a nostalgia for Mao’s China; an affirmative attitude toward direct democracy, the centrality of politics, and public passion; a longing for a poetic and romantic idealism; and discontent with a practical-oriented
social transition of contemporary China.”*' If this description were accurate, however, the “New Left” would have posed a more immediate threat to the legitimacy of the Deng- and post-Deng Chinese state than the neoliberals and overseas dissidents thought themselves to have posed. In fact, when the “New Left offensive” is debated, the neoliberal position adopts
the mainstream discourse of the Chinese state on modernization and universal progress. But the neoliberals’ overlap with state ideology goes only so far, since its identification with global ideology necessarily requires it
paradoxically to define the Chinese state also as an anomaly or resistant
to the “universal trend.” As a result, to their neoliberal critics, the “New
Left” intellectuals’ critique of the ideological mainstream of global capital ism is understandable only in the exogenous context of Western academia, which is made available by “New Left” intellectuals to the predominating
power of the domestic totalitarian state. In other words, once “free market” and “liberal democracy” are accepted as definitive characteristics of a more advanced historical paradigm, reflections on its internal complexities and contradictions are declared unnecessary, intellectually counterproductive, and politically reactionary. Such a totalized notion of historicist time, viewed in spatial terms as the enclosed, completed frontier of
modernity, underscores Chinese neoliberals’ conceptual hierarchy and the
ordering of reality. According to this worldview, China is understood by
Chinese neoliberals as an underscored dichotomy between the total state
and a universal civil society. What is left out of this picture, or this neoliberal worldview, is the complex interactions —as coexistence and conflict at once — between the post-socialist state and global capital. This socioeconomic condition marks the possibilities for any critical intellectual discourse and cultural politics in China today.

Whereas the neoliberals may consider any critique of developmentalism self-evidently wrong and politically suicidal in the post-Mao Chinese context — and thus unworthy of attention—they do seem alarmed by the
backing of the New Left “by the theoretical resources gathered by the intellectual Left in the West; borrowing from multiculturalism as a form of intellectual self-assertion; and riding the tide of the national question in
the age of globalization.” ” Instead of engaging the New Left discourse on
its own intellectual and theoretical terms, the neoliberals choose to reduce
the questions raised by New Left intellectuals to a number of ideological political fantasies that can easily be refuted by reality and “commonsense.”

The neoliberals’ critical strategy, therefore, is to show how mechanically
the Chinese New Left adopt the discourse of their Western counterparts,
allegedly without taking into account the profound structural differences
between the socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts of the two
groups. This strategy also marks a way for the neoliberals to neutralize
the intellectual-theoretical “backing” of the Chinese New Left by sophisticated critical-intellectual discourses in Western academia. In so doing, the neoliberals turn to a reified and dogmatic version of classical liberalism and neoliberalism for help, while omitting the progressive, social reform legacies of European social democracy and American liberalism
(e.g., the New Deal). As a result, an intellectual and theoretical imbalance
appears in the current “Liberalism” versus “New Left” debate. As critical
intellectuals in China today embark on a systematic and open-ended questioning of both socialist and capitalist assumptions of universal modernity, partly by participating in critical-theoretical discourses in Western academia, their “liberal” counterparts rely heavily on such “time-honored”
intellectual concepts as positivism, historicism, absolute truth, and negative liberty, while ideologically embracing the continued and unreflected Cold War rhetoric of human rights, the open society, and free market reform—a rhetoric that, shared by conservatives and right-wing liberals in the United States today, still dominates the American media discourse
on China. This observation, however, is not meant to reduce the current
intellectual debate between “liberalism” and the New Left in China as a
“war of proxies” (dailiren de zhanzheng) fighting on behalf of their Western “master-narratives,” as the literary critic Liu Zaifu once complained in a different context.*? Rather, my observation shows that the real intellectual and ideological conflict operates not so much within the discursive space of theory and intellect, but rather that it follows a socio-geological
fault line between the prevailing global ideology and its regional resistance
as well as within the global history of economy, society, politics, and critical thinking. Such an intellectual-ideological engagement falls outside the complex of state and global capital. This point is vindicated by the ambivalent silence about the debate by the Chinese media — neither seamlessly controlled by the state nor completely driven by the market — and by the
government's decision to stay out of it. The government even remained
aloof during the escalating public controversy over the first national book
award organized by Dushu, a magazine allegedly controlled by the New
Left, which accepted considerable financial support from the Hong Kong
business tycoon Lee Kai-hsing. Despite the award’s political sensitivity and
the contending parties’ innuendo overtheir opponents being part of a corrupt regime, the debate seemed outside the immediate concerns and priorities of the technocratic state, whose pragmatic centrism seems equally
guarded against the “Right” and the “Left.”

Despite being shunned by both the state and the mainstream in a
market-dominated everyday world, both “liberal” and “New Left” intellectuals make competing intellectual claims on the Chinese reality and on our perception of the world, and both groups are conscious inheritors of modern Chinese intellectual and political traditions reinterpreted and reinvented in radically different ways. The familiar landmarks along this fault line
include the pronounced tension between economic liberty and political
democracy, individual freedom and social justice, free market and state
intervention, modernity and its critique. The theoretical frameworks used
by the New Left to theorize Chinese reality are often dismissed by neoliberals as a “cunning ofthe reason”(lixing de jiaojie), which seems to be a misuse of Hegel’s concept to mean something cruder — the “trick of the
intellect” or “a mask of ideology.” Unlike cultural intellectuals during the
1980s, Chinese neoliberal intellectuals in the 1990s did not hesitate to attack or dismiss the Western intellectual Left as marginalized and irrelevant in a reality dominated by the free market and its mainstream ideologies;
in similar ways, the New Left attacks and dismisses Hayek or Fukuyama as
deplorable and uninteresting apologists for an unequal system. Thus, for
neoliberal intellectuals, the Frankfurt School is considered no more than
a specific response to the particular situation of interwar Germany, whose
critique of the American-style “culture industry” constitutes a “misplaced”
anti-totalitarianism in a liberal democratic environment. And the “Cultural
Left” from the late 1960s, particularly its “theory” contingent— Foucault,
Althusser, Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Fredric Jameson—is painted as a
unique form of bohemian decadence and utopian fantasy inspired by the
Chinese Cultural Revolution.“

Other theoretical discourses from which the Chinese New Left derives—from Wallerstein’s world system theory and Amin’s dependency
theory to Analytical Marxism and Critical Legal Studies, even communitarianism as a form of “anti-liberalism” — are quickly dismissed as futile and helpless attempts to challenge the “long-term rationality” (changcheng
helixing) of the capitalist system. The fully differentiated and politicized
reality of China in the 1990s certainly penetrated the Chinese intellectual
field, a field where a uniform embrace of any value system or theoretical
discourse is becoming impossible. This situation was certainly a step forward from the collective euphoria of the 1980s, which still attracts nostalgic interest. Oftentimes, the neoliberal attack on the intellectual and
theoretical resources of leftist thinking demonstrates a new dogmatism,
determinism, and intolerance, a new theological adherence to classical liberal economics and politics. Meanwhile, some New Left counterattacks have been pushed to the extreme and threaten to collapse a complex contemporary intellectual-political agenda into a simple and embattled plea for an unmediated return to Mao’s China or an unqualified alliance with
the Western academic left. Whereas neoliberal attacks indicate Chinese
intellectuals’ participation in and identification with the global ideological
mainstream, the New Left counterattacks reflect the increasing frustration
and anxiety of social groups whose economic and political well-being are
undermined, not improved, by radical market reform and the stagnation
of undemocratic political-bureaucratic institutions.

At its most generous, the Chinese neoliberal denouncing of the New
Left grants a “reason for existence of those Leftist discourses in the West,
whose utopian idealism and uncompromising critique of reality serve
as a moral motivation for the perfection of social reality in the West.’*
But when such marginal utopian excess in advanced capitalist societies is
 transported to China to critique a “difficult transition into material prosperity and liberal democracy,” it loses both its utopian and practical validity. From the neoliberal perspective, the New Left concern with China,
even if granted good intentions and respectable moral character, constitutes a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” ** The blunt moral and political allegation that underscores the thinly veiled intellectual criticism of the
New Left, however, is its “implicit apology for socialism and aspiration for
socialism to replace capitalism.”*” The impatience, even zealotry, to cut
to the moral-political core of an intellectual debate reflects a triumphant
self-consciousness of the historical condition giving rise to the worldwide
dominance of neoliberalism. Such a condition, put by economist Arthur
McEwan in his 1999 critique of neoliberalism, is underlined by the fact
that the world economy today is “almost entirely capitalist,” and that capitalism, for the first time in its history, has become“truly global; there is no longer any substantial part of the world that is generally outside the
one international economic system.”** The aggressiveness with which Chinese neoliberals attack their New Left opponents also supports McEwan’s
general observation that “while the basic tenets of neo-liberalism operate
in the rich countries, the policy plays its most powerful role in many of
the low-income countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Central and
Eastern Europe.” *° By the same token, this policy also reflects the nation-state’s profound ambivalence toward, and decreasing independence from, capitalist globalization; a powerful and residually socialist national governmentlike China’s is no exception to this ambivalence.

Under these circumstances, the search for an intellectual framework
beyond neoliberal dogma characterizes a loose but conscious alliance of
New Left Chinese intellectuals. This alliance is what makes it simultaneously “new” and “left,” despite its liberal critics’ intent to cause its
collapse by using old—and failed—political, economic, and cultural-intellectual challenges to capitalism. To this extent, the very socioeconomic reality of the world today that gives the neoliberal discourse its
moral and ideological certainty also bestows on its critics a valid and urgent
intellectual and political agenda.° The manifest goal of New Left Chinese
intellectuals is to break the straitjacket of socialism and capitalism, seeing
them as two reified and fetishized social, political, and theoretical institutions. In this light, the New Left is continuing the open-minded explorations and experimentations in Chinese humanities and social sciences of
the late 1980s that centered on the question of modernity. This tendency
is most pronounced and self-conscious in Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, Wang
Hui, and Wang Shaoguang, although their intellectual backgrounds and
discursive enterprises differ. The centrality of the question of modernity,
however, must be qualified with an account of the discontinuity of post-Mao Chinese intellectual and cultural history. These post-Mao discourses are marked by the sweeping changes of the Chinese and world economies,
as well as by politics, culture, ideology, and a heightened critical and analytical consciousness vis-a-vis many unexamined concepts, categories, and assumptions that underscore the New Era’s modernization ideology.

This complicated and problematized notion of socialism and capitalism prompts New Left intellectuals to reject their label, often by arguing that that their position is defined vis-a-vis the neoliberal, not the “liberal,”
discourse. The liberal discourse in this particular post-Mao Chinese political and intellectual context remains anasset and an open horizon, whereas “left” invariably invites popular and intellectual suspicion and triggers unpleasant memories and associations. Some scholars have tried to clarify this “New Left” position by defining its intellectual opponent, the “New
Right” (xin youyi) or the “Far Right” (jiyou pai), not the liberal discourse.

Others have attempted to rename the “New Left” by calling it the “Liberal
Left” (ziyou zuopai) to highlight its link to the liberal social-democratic tradition in the West and its intellectual origin in post-Mao China. But no one has changed the habitual, media-reinforced way of referring to the central intellectual conflict in China in the 1990s as the ongoing debate between Xinzuopai (new left) and Ziyouzhuyi (liberalism). Distorting as it is,
the conventional language unwittingly reveals that, in China as elsewhere,
neoliberal discourse and ideology are framing the intellectual and political environment, to which adherents of other positions are compelled to respond."

[[Category:Movements]]
[[Category:China]]