China’s Reformists: From Liberalism to the ‘Third Way’

Gloria Davies is senior lecturer in Chinese at Monash University, Australia.

The informed reading public outside China is served a daily fare of news reports about the current situation in the country that often generates a certain unease. This is hardly surprising given the scale of social and environmental problems that have accompanied the rapid growth of China’s market economy. Much of this foreign unease stems from the authoritarian nature of Communist Party rule in China. Thus, there is a frequently voiced perception abroad that prosperity achieved under authoritarian rule will have detrimental effects not only on China’s economic development but on regional and, indeed, global politics in the coming decades. Within China itself, this unease or anxiety touches informed readers who are perhaps even more concerned than outside observers about the adverse consequences of China’s swift economic rise since their own wellbeing is at stake. Indeed, because Chinese citizens live in a society where the government regularly arrests and jails its critics, their sense of unease is all the more acute.

 

Numerous commentaries posted on the Chinese Internet indicate that their authors are keenly aware of the multitude of problems currently besetting the People’s Republic, ranging from environmental pollution and official corruption to inadequate social protection, a failing health system, growing civil unrest, and low consumer spending that reflects a general anxiety about the economic future. Any comparison of foreign news reports with those that appear in the state-controlled Chinese press will show that, in the latter, such problems are either under-reported or altogether ignored. Moreover, Chinese individuals who seek to publicise or address these problems directly do so at great personal risk, for the party-state can and does readily prosecute people it views as “subverting” the so-called national interest.

 

As to whether the further development of China’s market economy will lead to the eventual collapse of party-state rule and the concomitant rise of a multi-party democracy, that is a question Chinese intellectuals cannot discuss openly. Nonetheless, it is often indirectly posed by the reforms different intellectuals recommend. Thus, although mainstream economists (especially those employed by the state bureaucracy) generally emphasise the importance of gradual macroeconomic restructuring towards a free-trade system, they carefully elide the issue of authoritarian rule. The implicit claims within such arguments are that economic prosperity will benefit the nation as a whole and that the rights of citizens will ultimately be protected by recourse to a comprehensive set of commercial, property and labour laws, regardless of the political restrictions of one-party rule.

 

Conversely, critical Chinese intellectuals have focused on the bleak prospects for social justice under authoritarian rule, claiming that a situation of entrenched corruption will invariably protect the interests of local power elites against those of workers and peasants. They argue that the rights of ordinary citizens can always be arbitrarily revoked, retarding institution-building and delaying the rule of law they see as essential for the nation’s future wellbeing. These critical intellectuals are themselves divided and their various stances are commonly labelled “liberal”, “new left”, and “third way”.

 

These labels are highly reductive, but their currency in mainland Chinese public discourse—especially on the Internet—reflects the broad diversity of positions on China’s future. Before we examine the variety of arguments subsumed under these somewhat imprecise headings, we need to situate them within the context of both one-party rule and the Communist Party’s ongoing renovation of its public image.

Free Speech—within Limits

Liu Junning, the Beijing-based liberal political scientist, argues that market mechanisms in China

 

promote not only greater economic freedom but other freedoms as well, such as freedom of speech. Ever since the Chinese government stopped giving subsidies to most newspapers, magazines, and TV stations after the introduction of market-oriented reforms, the media have been publishing things to keep the interest of their readers.¹

 

As consumers, ordinary Chinese citizens do exercise some influence on the programming and editorial decisions of media organisations and publishers, despite the party-state’s continued attempts to censor independent commentary. Through its growing appetite for articles and books that expose official corruption and other social ills, the burgeoning xiaokang or middle class has created a commercial demand for independent inquiry in China’s still nascent cultural marketplace. Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s best-selling book, A Survey of Chinese Peasants, is a case in point. Based on three years of field research, its 460 pages tell of how unscrupulous local officials were causing acute hardship for peasants across China and how some peasants were resisting political oppression and injustice. The book was banned in March 2004, just two months after its publication, on the eve of the National People’s Congress meeting that year. After it was banned, its reputation soared. According to a January 2005 Asia Times report, more than seven million pirated copies were sold, with some bookshops continuing to sell it under the counter.²

 

The government’s slowness to address corruption and unfair treatment had significant adverse ramifications for China’s market economy by the mid-1990s, including a sharp fall in average personal-income growth; the exacerbation of hardships suffered by the rural and urban poor; drastic reductions in state-funded social insurance, health care and education; a decline in consumer spending; and growing social unrest. Discussing these problems in her pathbreaking book Zhongguo de xianjing (China’s pitfall), published in Hong Kong in 1997, the economist He Qinglian described China’s economic reforms as tantamount to “the marketisation of power”. He Qinglian enjoyed a brief period in the limelight when the government allowed a less controversial version of her work to be republished in the mainland in 1998. In their analysis of the unusual tolerance shown by the party-state towards He’s dissenting view, Liu Binyan and Perry Link explain that her book appeared at a time when the ruling elite, in its belated attempt to “calm popular unrest”, needed to appear sympathetic to criticism of the reform process.³

 

By 2000, however, He’s criticisms had become unwelcome and she was subjected to constant pressure and scrutiny that led her to resettle in the United States to continue her work without fear of punishment. He Qinglian’s rise and fall demonstrates the sophistication of authoritarian rule in post-Mao China: criticism is allowed only when it suits the interests of the party-state and, more importantly, does not challenge its authority. Through official directives and the examples made of those who publish dissenting views, ordinary citizens are thus regularly cautioned about the need to keep their criticisms of prevailing conditions strictly private. The stark rise in what the party-state calls “public order disturbances”—which increased by 50 per cent from fifty-three thousand incidents in 1987 to eighty-seven thousand in 2005⁴—reflects the extent to which the populace has been driven to express its anger and despair, despite the risk of punishment.

 

As expressions of public outrage, these “disturbances” also demonstrate that with the further development of China’s market economy since the late 1990s people have come to expect and demand transparency in governance and commercial transactions, together with fair treatment for all under the rule of law. The grievances that fuel these “disturbances” are mainly the result of victimisation and acute suffering caused by the illicit or exploitative practices of local power elites. The rhetoric of the protestors, in their demands for redress and justice, reflects their awareness of the rights that citizens should be accorded under Chinese law. Thus, despite the status quo of one-party rule that is a legacy of the Mao era, the present-day party leadership is aware that the clamorous demands of Chinese citizens for the protection of their rights cannot be suppressed by draconian means alone. To attempt to do so would only further exacerbate the swell of popular anger to pose an even greater threat to the party’s already eroded political authority. As the French historian Michel de Certeau observed:

 

Whatever is credible has “authority”; whatever is imposed has power. Powers that today are increasingly strong but less and less credible are thus struck at their weak point when their authority is called into question, since they cannot function without general support … For the police and the military themselves need to believe, or at least to believe that they believe, in the meaning (order, nation, etc.) of the repression that they exercise on behalf of a power.⁵

 

The vacillations of state censorship in recent years reflect the ruling elite’s anxiety about growing popular disaffection and the widespread perception that party membership is merely an opportunity for business networking and career advancement. In this regard, President Hu Jintao’s much publicised concept of “the harmonious society” (hexie shehui) projects an ideal of communal belonging breathtakingly at odds with the violence that local police and officials, motivated by greed and self-interest, regularly inflict on the protesting masses. In the state-controlled media, the consistent emphasis given to the necessity of respecting “the rights of social groups”, together with regular affirmations of “the harmonious society” as one featuring, in President Hu’s formulation, “democracy, the rule of law, equity, justice, sincerity, amity and vitality”, bespeaks the government’s anxiety to heal the gulf between rich and poor through the use of lofty moral rhetoric. In brief, “the harmonious society” is an appeal to Chinese citizens to trust that the party can deliver mutual accord to a society rendered highly discordant by the inequalities that now exist.

 

It is in the context of the party leadership’s growing interest in finding the right words to placate a restive populace that intellectual debates have come to play a role in the public discourse of social and not just economic reform. But substantive reform towards greater political freedom remains elusive. While the government regularly silences or imprisons the small minority of intellectuals who organise petitions and protests or who openly challenge one-party rule, it has also permitted most intellectuals (in their capacity as academics, journalists, film-makers, writers or artists) to publish on a diverse range of contemporary social problems and themes, so long as these publications do not directly challenge party authority and the official version of things.

 

The art of oblique criticism is a key feature of intellectual debates in China and the means by which informed individuals (mostly professional academics) generate public opinion, but with a low risk of punishment. Provided these debates are confined to the promotion of abstract public goods and cultural values as vital remedies for the ills that beset present-day China, they can occur quite freely in intellectual circles. This is especially true of those debates that feature in scholarly journals and academic Web forums, for they interest only a small sector of the further-educated urban elite and are unlikely to attract widespread public attention. But when intellectuals publish on known instances of corruption and injustice or attack the arbitrariness of one-party rule, censorship and the absence of political reform, they risk being silenced and sacked.

The Party’s New Self-Image

The much vaunted “harmonious society” is the party-state’s own abstract promise of a better future that it claims will eventually arrive with the slew of new reform policies it has introduced since 2004, aimed at protecting property rights and the rights of workers as well as alleviating rural poverty and delivering other forms of social welfare and benefits. As to whether the central government can successfully implement these commendable policies across the provinces is open to question. What is clear, however, is that the party-state has furnished its own swiftly evolving discourse of responsible governance with rhetoric drawn from opposing sides in intellectual debates. It presents itself as a government capable of delivering the public goods and implied rights raised in these debates.

 

The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Epstein observed of the “ideolanguage” (ideological language) of Soviet rule that because it was designed to reflect constant vigilance against deviations to the “right” and the “left”, it accommodated both and thus appeared simultaneously “right” and “left” in its pronouncements.⁶ The ideolanguage of China’s party-state is just as motile in its capacity to occupy positions on the “left” and the “right” simultaneously. Indeed, in recent years, that ideolanguage has acquired a hybrid rhetoric drawn from “liberal”, “new left” and “third way” intellectual writings.

 

The ideolanguage of the Mao era enjoyed widespread authority because sufficiently large numbers of people believed in Mao Zedong’s utopian vision. In the post-Mao era, as that ideolanguage became increasingly burdened by the need to represent market reforms as integral to “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, the party-state has been forced to remake its political identity into an elusive hybrid creature distinctly at odds with its earlier, dogmatic Maoist incarnation, yet parasitic on that legacy for its “right” to authoritarian rule. The content of the intellectual debates that have ensued since the 1990s is often remote from the ideolanguage of the party-state. The majority of published contributions to such debates consists of critical commentary on topical issues in political, economic, social and cultural theory.

 

Interestingly, in its quest for sensationalist news to boost sales, the popular (and state-controlled) press has resorted to publishing gossip about prominent intellectuals, particularly when scandals and lawsuits are involved. Some intellectuals have also chosen to become media personalities, regularly appearing on or hosting their own radio and television talk-shows or publishing feature columns in newspapers. This form of publicity has produced the phenomenon of “public intellectuals”—a topic that enlivened Internet discussions in 2004 after Southern Weekly, a journal of the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend newspaper that enjoys a strong reputation for independent investigative journalism, published a list of China’s “Fifty Leading Public Intellectuals” in September that year. Most of those named were already publicly identified with liberalism.

 

In late November 2004, the party-state attacked the concept of “public intellectuals” in its own newspapers, the Liberation Daily and the People’s Daily, calling it an “imported term” and accusing those who claimed that role of “estranging” the relationship between “the party and intellectuals” and “the masses and intellectuals”. Despite this official attack on the term, “public intellectuals” have continued to test the limits of official tolerance by criticising the status quo, resorting to publication overseas or on the Internet when they are denied it within China. The ruling elite’s anxiety about “public intellectuals” is understandable, since these are people who command attention not just because of their writings but because they have become newsworthy in themselves. But newsworthiness is double-edged: it enables those who enjoy this status to have their arguments widely disseminated, but it can also goad them into seeing their views as the “correct” ones and into attacking differing opinions with polemical ferocity.

China’s Divided Liberals

“Liberalism” is one of the most popular terms in contemporary Chinese intellectual discourse but divergent uses have made it highly open to interpretation. In the 1990s, mainstream economists such as the Harvard-educated Fan Gang, an important government adviser, were identified as liberals even though they avoided issues of political reform. For instance, Fan stressed the importance of long-term, incremental reforms for China and argued that corruption, although undesirable, “seems to be an unavoidable part of the process of moving towards the market”.⁷ Although Fan cautioned against the negative outcomes of unchecked corruption, he nonetheless claimed that “transitional corruption” helped to facilitate economic restructuring because corrupt officials often left their positions after having set up businesses with embezzled state funds; their departure from the old state system had the net effect of consolidating the new market system.

 

Fan’s preference for minimising the “political costs” of system reform (costs he described as “the economic resources wasted because of political conflicts”)⁸ is strikingly at odds with He Qinglian’s damning critique of China’s market economy as the “marketisation of power”. It is not surprising that after the publication of He’s book in 1998, Fan chose to respond with the article “ ‘Amoral’ Economics”, published in the widely read scholarly journal Dushu (Reading), in which he dismissed He as a moralist who failed to consider the practical realities of China’s massive economic restructuring.

 

Fan Gang’s brand of liberalism is quite specifically focused on economic liberalisation: that is, the expansion of regulatory, ownership and fiscal reforms, concomitant with the progressive dismantling of the state-owned sector. Since the late 1990s, many Chinese intellectuals have been critical of this approach, regarding it as technocratic modernisation in service of the party-state, with few benefits for political reform. With his appointment in 2006 to the monetary-policy committee of the People’s Bank of China, Fan will exercise even greater influence on the party-state’s fiscal reforms. He has the attention of an international audience of economists and policymakers and plays a significant role in articulating China’s position on bilateral trade relations with the United States. For this reason, he was voted the eighty-second-most influential “global public intellectual” in a 2005 list of one hundred such individuals compiled by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines, but is conspicuously absent from the aforementioned mainland Chinese list compiled by Southern Weekly.

 

He Qinglian, conversely, enjoys great popular appeal among the Chinese reading public. In 2000, China’s Pitfall (sanitised as Modernisation’s Pitfall in the 1998 mainland Chinese edition) received the prestigious Reading–Cheung Kong academic book award (Cheung Kong is the multinational business company owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Kashing). Numerous prominent intellectuals defended He against the criticisms of Fan Gang and other mainstream economists who dismissed her work as journalistic and unscholarly. He Qinglian identifies herself as a liberal, but she is clearly one of a very different kind from Fan Gang. In this regard, she shares much in common with the highly popular economist Mao Yushi, who appears in the Southern Weekly list of China’s “leading fifty public intellectuals”.

 

Mao Yushi, who was dismissed from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in 2000, had founded an independent economic think tank with several CASS colleagues in 1993. During the 1990s, that think tank, Unirule, established itself as a major forum for public discussions on issues of economic development. Mao Yushi’s activities in Unirule made him one of the most widely read economists in China, together with others such as Wang Dingding, professor of economics at Peking and Zhejiang universities, who also featured in the Southern Weekly list. Both Mao Yushi and Wang are staunch advocates of individual rights and freedom of expression and association. These are intellectuals who played a major part in urging the merits of Western liberal democracy and in disseminating the arguments of influential liberal thinkers such as Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper.

 

Although Mao Yushi has been banned from publishing within China, Wang’s critiques of authoritarian rule are sufficiently oblique to ensure that he has escaped the same fate. These advocates of liberal democracy are subjected to constant scrutiny, but their popular appeal is such that most university-educated Chinese readers regard them as cultural heroes, and their supporters are at pains to note that only people who respect political democracy should properly count as liberals.

 

The enormous numbers of mainland Chinese authors and readers who regard themselves as liberals and who see multiparty representative democracy as their ultimate goal are generally opposed to the views of the so-called “new left”. They argue that leftist ideas, no matter how theoretically nuanced, were the source of countless disasters during the Mao era. Indeed, many accuse the “new left” of providing theoretical support for the authoritarian party-state. Disputes between these two camps turned vitriolic in the late 1990s and early 2000s, producing an unfortunate rift between otherwise critically engaged intellectuals that has proven difficult to repair. The rift led some members of this liberal–democratic cohort, such as Wang Dingding and two highly regarded historians, Qin Hui and Xu Jilin,⁹ to regard themselves as proponents of a “third way” that straddles both the “new left” emphasis on collective wellbeing and the “liberal” emphasis on individual and property rights.

 

These disputes resulted from intellectuals’ attempts to grapple with both the accelerated pace of market reforms and the greatly diminished prospect of political change in the early to mid‑1990s following the quashing of the student-led democracy movement after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 4 June 1989. Liberals concentrated on creating a civil society in China, invoking Hayek to argue that the “spontaneous orders” of the market would accelerate the growth of a middle class that was conscious and protective of its individual rights. They claimed that the development of civic organisations would produce a concomitant reduction of the state’s role in economic life.

 

To this day, most liberals affirm the idea of the minimal state as vital for democracy. With regard to the status quo, the liberal historian Zhu Xueqin suggested evocatively that authoritarian rule had enabled the “foot” of official corruption to trample and leave a “filthy imprint” on the otherwise clean “hand” of China’s market economy. Chinese liberals frequently use the Smithian trope of the “invisible hand” to idealise a future democracy built on the proper functioning of market mechanisms. This fundamental belief in the capacity of the market to deliver a better future is the sole common ground shared by liberals who advocate political democracy and those who propose a much narrower form of economic liberalisation.

The New Left

In the mid-1990s, liberal intellectuals began to use the term “new left” to disparage the work of academics such as Hu Angang, Wang Shaoguang and Cui Zhiyuan who favoured a strong role for the state in the development of China’s market economy. For instance, Hu and Wang argued that reform of the state structure towards a clear separation of national and local taxes had become an urgent matter because the central government was earning less tax revenue than the provinces. They warned that this would eventually lead to the prevailing of provincial interests over those of the central government, threatening social stability. They argued that market mechanisms alone were insufficient to ensure China’s economic wellbeing and called for the state’s capacity to provide public goods and direct national policy to be strengthened through effective tax reform. The party leadership not only heeded their argument but moved quickly to implement their recommendations for a unified fiscal system. Hu later recalled that after then-president Jiang Zemin read their report in 1994, he asked how old they were and when told that they were in their forties, he exclaimed, “Youngsters—that’s terrific.”¹⁰

 

In Chinese intellectual discourse of the 1990s, references to “the left” were mostly negative. In the post-Mao idiom, “the left” was associated with the political violence of the Cultural Revolution and the economic disasters resulting from Mao Zedong’s directives. Liberal intellectuals utterly opposed the emphasis that Hu and Wang placed on strengthening the party-state’s capacity to regulate the market economy and used the label “new left” to suggest that such proposals bore the taint of the discredited Maoist past. The political scientist Cui Zhiyuan became a particular target of liberal attacks when he criticised liberal intellectuals for their “fetishisation of institutions”. Cui argued that the liberals’ faith in market mechanisms as a cure-all was not only a distortion of Western economic theory but had the unfortunate consequence of privileging property rights over human life itself. He emphasised the importance of “institutional innovation” that would facilitate the participation of ordinary citizens in policymaking and argued that Chinese forms of economic organisation, such as the rural “shareholding co-operative system” that emerged in the 1980s, offered viable alternatives to the capitalist market economy.

 

We should note that pro-democracy liberals are just as concerned as new left intellectuals about the ongoing erosion of public goods that it was formerly the state’s responsibility to provide. But unlike the new left, liberals totally reject enhancing the role of the state. They argue instead for greater reliance on market mechanisms to achieve a fairer distribution of public goods. Liberals also reject new left critiques of globalisation. Whereas new left intellectuals caution against the “hegemony” of transnational corporations within the capitalist system, liberals claim that this form of “hegemony” submits to the rules of the market and pales by comparison with the injustice of authoritarian rule. Thus, in 2000, when new left intellectuals favoured an extended period of public consultation regarding China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, liberals argued the opposite, claiming that the better integrated with the global economy China became, the greater the prospect of substantive political reform. To this day, Chinese intellectuals remain divided on the best way ahead, with many continuing to emphasise individual freedom and others privileging social equality over individual aspirations.

 

Advocates of social equality, new left intellectuals regard the liberals’ faith in market mechanisms as naive and ultimately disastrous for the poor and disadvantaged. Their recommendations that the state play a positive role in providing education, health care, and social security often draw on Western Marxian critiques of global capitalism. Within the Chinese context, such critiques can easily be made to resonate with the socialist rhetoric of the party-state, enabling liberals to accuse the new left of impeding the growth of democracy.

 

In recent years, the party-state’s appropriation of formulations from both sides of these debates reflects its anxiety to present itself as a responsible (albeit unelected) government that heeds the needs of citizens. The amendment of China’s constitution in 2004 to include the protection of private property and human rights echoes liberal arguments in the 1990s about the inviolable nature of these entitlements. There was a significant omission, however: no reference was made to the right of free expression, a vital component of liberal arguments. In one sense, these constitutional amendments were inevitable given the greatly altered nature of the Chinese economy. Legal protection of private property had become necessary for social and political stability, but the implied exclusion of free speech led many critics to regard the amendments as largely rhetorical.

 

As noted above, in the 1990s the party-state implemented the tax reforms recommended by two leading new left intellectuals. Since 2004, its reform policies have reflected other concerns frequently raised in new left writings, such as rural poverty alleviation and social protection for peasants, rural migrants and laid-off workers. Referring to China in 2005 as being “caught between misguided socialism and crony capitalism”, the leading new left historian Wang Hui observed that the “common objective of China’s new left is to create an understanding of the full implications of China’s current policies”. He also noted with satisfaction that unlike Jiang Zemin, who pursued a US style of economic development in the 1990s, the government of President Hu Jintao “is looking much more seriously at the whole world—not just to the U.S. but to Europe, Latin America, India and elsewhere”.¹¹

In Pursuit of a Third Way

The concept of “social justice” (shehui gongzheng) presents a striking instance of convergence in the vocabulary of critical intellectuals and the party-state. Social justice was first discussed and debated among liberal and new left intellectuals in the 1990s. Whereas liberals conceived of justice primarily in terms of a comprehensive legal framework to support liberalisation towards a “pure market economy”, new leftists focused on the reform of trade unions, labour laws, and social security to define social justice as the equitable distribution of wealth, power and public goods.

 

As the wealth gap widens in China and social unrest prevails, many critical intellectuals are reassessing their earlier arguments to offer a variety of “third way” approaches. Qin Hui, an economic historian and peasant-studies expert, maintains that liberal and new left (or “social democratic”) recommendations are equally valid and mutually complementary. He argues that oligarchy and populism pose the greatest threats to sustainable economic development and social stability in China, and that “the values upheld by both liberalism and social democracy” should be promoted against these threats. In this context, Qin observes that “the ‘problematic’ with which we are now faced, compared to the West where an order of freedom is already established, is really closer to that of tsarist Russia prior to the establishment of such an order”.¹²

 

Chinese intellectuals now appear to have grown somewhat weary of the “liberal” and “new left” labels that framed their debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even though they continue to diverge in their recommendations along the lines previously established. To put it in terms commonly used in Chinese intellectual parlance, finding practical solutions for “issues” (wenti) has become much more important than the defence of abstract “isms” (zhuyi). The current popularity of the term “third way” (di santiao daolu) reflects this shift towards the pursuit of theories that could usefully be applied to problem-solving. Critical intellectuals across the political spectrum have lost no time in making use of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of “constitutional democracy”, John Rawls’s concept of “social justice”, and Amartya Sen’s vision of “development as freedom” to affirm effective legislative reform, consultative policymaking, and fairness in wealth distribution.

 

Since these latter three goals are also signature features of the party-state’s present definition of “social harmony”, it could be argued that, at least in its rhetoric, the party leadership is keen to impart a “third way” flavour to its brand of “socialist democracy”. The party-state has also sought to promote “democracy”, with an emphasis on socially responsible governance. This is evident in an essay excerpted from Yu Keping’s 2006 book, Minzhu shi ge hao dongxi (Democracy is a good thing). Yu, an influential government adviser, avers that “the most concrete meaning of democracy is none other than the rule of the people in accordance with the people’s choice”. He hastens to add, however, that because “we are building a socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics … we must not mindlessly imitate foreign political models”. Rather, China’s socialist democracy must be “closely integrated with China’s history, culture, tradition and practical social conditions”.

 

Yu’s statements, although quite remote from the liberals’ multiparty democratic ideal, are nonetheless intended to show the party-state as a caring government. But as long as critics of the status quo remain vulnerable to censorship and heavier penalties, and public access to informed comment remains dismally restricted, the party-state will also show itself as caring more about exercising its power than heeding the public’s concerns.

Endnotes

1. See “The Emergence of Liberalism in Modern China”, Cato Policy Report 21, no. 6 (November–December 1999) [www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n6/libchina.html].

 

2. The book has since been translated into English. See Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

 

3. Liu Binyan and Perry Link, “A Great Leap Backward?”, New York Review of Books, 8 October 1998.

 

4. See Thomas Lunn, “Social Unrest in China”, Congressional Research Service Report, 8 May 2024 [www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33416.pdf].

 

5. Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 87.

 

6. See Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

 

7. Fan Gang, “Incremental Changes and Dual-Track Transition: Understanding the Case of China”, Economic Policy 9, no.19 (December 1994), p. 111.

 

8. Ibid., p. 112 n. 6.

 

9. Both Qin and Xu were also listed as leading public intellectuals in Southern Weekly.

 

10. Hu Angang, “Equity and Efficiency”, in One China, Many Paths, ed. Chaohua Wang (London: Verso, 2003), p. 226.

 

11. Wang Hui, “China’s New Left”, interview by Jehangir Pocha, New Perspectives Quarterly, 7 March 2005.

 

12. Qin Hui, “The Common Baseline of Modern Thought”, Chinese Economy 38, no. 4 (July‑August 2005), p. 19.