Liu Kang Duke University and Shanghai Jiaotong University

1

Dinner Party of Discourse Owners ----Chinas
Intellectual Scene Today

• Liu KangDuke University and Shanghai Jiaotong
  University

2
Chinas Revolutionary Legacy

• Revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an
  essay, or painting a picture, or doing
  embroidery it cannot be so refined, so leisurely
  and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous,
  restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an
  insurrection, an act of violence by which one
  class overthrows another. ------Mao Zedong , 1927

3
Post-Revolutionary China Today

• Maintaining stability vs revolution
• Chinas soft power, discourse power and dinner
  parties
• The banner of Mao ----ambiguous and ambivalent
  icon since the gaige kaifang (reform)
• Still a legitimating rhetoric, but increasingly a
  liability for China now
• Maos ideology of egalitarianism and idealism is
  utterly at odds with Chinas social reality and
  the policies of post-Mao leadership
• Crisis of ideological legitimation and values

4
Chinese Intellectuals as Discourse Owners

• Mao army of guns vs army of pens
• Deng vanguard of reform (emancipation of the
  mind) and conscience of society (Cultural Fever
  of the 1980s and Tiananmen 1989)
• Since the 1990s from homo culture to homo
  economicus
• Rise of technocrats, engineers, and professionals
• Shifting identities of the intellectuals (zhishi
  fenzi, shi, intelligentsia, literati or gentry)

5
Crisis of ideological legitimation and core
values

• Current ruling ideologies economic
  developmentalism or the GDP fetish
• A get-rich mentality of the insatiable desire
  for individual material wealth
• Recent upsurges of nationalism
• The party-state cultural version of
  nationalism--- synergy of Confucian values of
  harmony and socialism with Chinese
  characteristics

6
Chinese Values vs Universalism

• How can the Chinese values reconcile with, if not
  congruent to, universal values of modernity?
• multi-party political democracy free market
  economy individual freedom and middle class
  cultural diversity and pluralism
• Will Marxism and socialism, let alone communism,
  still a viable alternative?
• What is the Chinese model, if there is such a
  thing, different from the existing or
  non-existent systems or models in the modern
  world, from the Western democracy to East Asian
  autocracy and other kinds of capitalism?

7
Chinese Discourse Owners Responses or
Non-responses

• Response---Carnivalesque Dinner parties
• Sketches of four groups
• The State Strategists
• The Politically Scandalous
• The Professionals
• The Weibo Opinion Leaders

8
The State Strategists (I)

• Hu Angang and his Qinghua think tank of Guoqing
  yanjiu zhongxin (literally the center for the
  study of state conditions, or known in English as
  the Center for China Studies)
• Quantitative, empirical studies, American style
  futurology (Toffler)
• Hu Angangs 2011 book, China 2030 Towards
  Commonwealth of Prosperity Chinas GDP with
  outnumber that of the U.S. by 2.2 times, and the
  world under the leadership of China then will be
  a commonwealth of prosperity, or a datong world
  (common of unified world). As Hu Angang puts it,
  Americans have their values, and (therefore) we
  need our discourse power, our values, and I
  translate our values in English as datong world.
• In 2004, in the paper The Empirical Study of the
  Rapid Rise of Chinese Media, Hu Angang states
  that Chinese media power by 2004 already
  surpassed Japan and other major western
  countries, and rapidly narrowed its gap with the
  U.S.
• In 2009, CCP Central Committees Propaganda
  Department decided to allocate 45 billion RMB or
  6.6 billion US dollar to build Chinese versions
  of CNN and Al Jazeera

9
The State Strategists (II)

• Zhang Weiwei and China Shocks (Zhongguo zhenhan,
  2011)---the China Model
• Chinese exceptionalism---a civalizational state
  with immense size and length
• 8 features of China model---practical reason,
  strong government, prioritizing stability,
  emphasizing peoples livelihood, incremental
  reform, differential steps (of reform), mixed
  economy, and opening up to the world
• Francis Fukuyama vs Zhang Weiwei What China
  didnt develop is the other two political
  institutions rule of law and formal institutions
  of political accountability.

10
The (Politically) Scandalous (I)

• Wang Hui, the standard bearer of Chinas New
  Left and the scandal of plagiarism 2010
• An open letter signed by over 80 western
  supporters for Wang Hui, consisting of worldly
  renowned, mostly American New Left scholars such
  as Gayatri C. Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Arif
  Dirlik, and so on, attesting to Wangs scholarly
  integrity and his importance in international
  Asian studies,
• The case soon escalated into an international
  warfare between the Left and the Right or (the
  liberals in China, labeled usually as the
  right-wingers).
• Countering the New Left defenders, a group of
  famous overseas Chinese scholars in the U.S. with
  mostly educational and political backgrounds from
  Taiwan, such as Lin Yu-sheng and Yu Ying-shih,
  published an open letter demanding a serious
  investigation and severe punishment of the
  academic plagiarism.
• Another open letter signed by more than 60
  Chinese university professors and public
  intellectuals calling for immediate investigation
  on Wang Hui's plagiarism charge.

11
The (Politically) Scandalous (II)

• 2010 Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
  for his long and non-violent struggle for
  fundamental human rights in China
• Lius reputation as a human right activist or
  political dissident high-profile crusade in the
  style of the Cold War, ex-Soviet bloc political
  dissidents, in actions such as public petitions,
  hunger strikes, protests against the CCP
  single-party dictatorship, its violations of the
  press freedom and human rights, and finally
  drafting and signing of the Charter 08, in the
  manner of the Czechoslovak Charter 77.
• When the Nobel was announce, the majority of
  Chinese internet users had little if any idea of
  what Liu Xiaobos political and human rights
  activism really meant to China.
• Mostly the beneficiaries of the prosperity and
  modernization of the last three decades, an
  increasingly nationalistic Chinese young
  generation finds it difficult to understand, let
  alone appreciate, the Cold War political
  confrontations and the continued rejection of
  Chinas human rights conditions by the West.
  Chinese public in general feel once again
  scandalized. Consequently, their suspicion of
  Western conspiracy against China was further
  incinerated rather than abated.

12
The Professionals (I)

• The majority of Chinese academics is preoccupied
  with a much more practical, and much less
  political, issue to survive and thrive in an
  ever competitive yet attractive academic
  profession
• Qin Shaode, the ex-CCP secretary of Fudan
  University and great number cruncher
• the Engineering 211 and Engineering 985 and240
  million yuan grant for liberal arts research
  2003-07
• 146 National Social Sciences Projects, 194
  Ministry of Education Projects, and 236 Shanghai
  Philosophy and Social Sciences Projects.
• 2,200 books, 15,000 papers and 2,300 policy
  research reports published, which received 40 of
  the academic awards of Shanghais higher
  education and research

13
The Professionals (II)

• Chinese higher education and research the last
  bastion of the planned economy
• Corporatization and bureaucratization Chinese
  characteristics
• Zhou Qifeng, Beijing University President U.S.
  education is a complete mess!
• No U.S. president knows how to respect others
  and always imposes his will on others, so from
  this perspective, their education is truly a
  mess!
• Chinas education is a great success, as "our
  country's progress largely depends on the
  personnel cultivated through China's education.

14
The Weibo Opinion Leaders (I)

• A hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, weibo is
  "microblog(ging) with 300 million users
• Mostly recreational and also to spread news and
  rumors
• Weibo opinion leaders mostly stars and
  celebrities in show biz and media
• Serious social commentators such as Yu Jianrong
  Yu Jianrong, named by over 300,000 internet users
  as one of the nine internet leaders in China in
  2010,
• Known for his outspoken criticism and
  commentaries on the conditions of Chinese
  peasants and serious rural-urban disparities and
  other social ills.
• In January 2011 Yu Jiangrong launched in his
  QQ.com and Sina.com weibo accounts an initiative
  to share photos of children around the country
  who are working as street beggars, in order to
  locate abducted children in China and re-connect
  them with their families

15
The Weibo Opinion Leaders (II)

• Hu Xijin, the Chief Editor of Global Times,
  provokes his weibo fans and foes with his
  pro-government, nationalistic, sometimes
  sarcastic political commentaries
• Han Han vs Fang Zhouzi over ghostwriting--- Han
  Hans critical reflections on Chinas social
  values at the most popular blog (550 million
  readers) dissolved by the anti-fraud crusader
  Fang Zhouzis accusation, shifting to a celebrity
  fight of entertainment news

16
The Dinner is Over, then What?

• Fragmentation and partition of Chinese social
  consciousness
• Absence of serious reflections on the ideological
  crisis and reconstruction of social values
• Metamorphosis of Chinese intellectuals identity
• What will happen next?
• Pessimism of the intellect must be supplemented
  by optimism of the will. --Antonio Gramsci