The Peopleâs Republic of China (PRC), âChinaâ as a political entity, state, and intellectual political culture, is a problem. It infuriates and fascinates, perplexes and amazes. On that the Communist Party and its liberal critics inside and abroad (where they are far more numerous) might well agree. And yet what an odd thing to proclaim, this problem, when, as both sides might again nodâin obeisance to the hegemony of the market and profit motiveâthat same Party-state has lifted several hundred millions of people out of poverty. The latter is demonstrably true when one credits the Mao era foundations, let alone the life expectancies on the eve of the 1949 revolution. The PRCâwhich is to say the Communist Party-state, before and after Maoâhas clearly returned China to the forefront of global recognition and power since the 1980s. The rise of China may be a clichĂ© partially belied by its problems and iniquities, and by its per capita gross national product (GNP; Chinaâs ranks 80th in the world as of 2014).1 But clichĂ©s nonetheless exist in a certain, significant relationship with truth and social reality. China has âarrivedâ and is more like a bank that is too big to fail than a teetering state on the brink of collapse. Of course that same Party-state system has also plunged its people into a highly polluted and unequal modern societyâa society rife with authoritarianism, excessive policing of speech, and heavy-handed, if ultimately failing, censorship. A society with little âsoft powerâ and approval in the Western metropoles of the former colonial world, in part due to old fashioned Cold War orientalism, and increasing disapproval in its southeast Asian periphery, thanks to the Party-stateâs own short-sighted geo-political bullying and its fear of American bases around the Pacific.
Yet the Party-state continues to enjoy an obvious, if relative, legitimacy and stability at home. Far from ushering in the end of the party and the rise of liberal democracy, as often predicted through the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, the capitalist reforms after Mao, what some of the old left in China have indeed called a counter-revolution, have hardly ushered in the end of one-party rule. Instead media and scholarship are obsessed with the consequences, causes, and unintended side effects of a new mantraââthe rise of China.â So we have a China that, for some enthusiastic observers, seems all but ready to ârule the world.â2 For other, antagonistic viewers committed from afar or by profession to symbolically battle the perceived, illiberal tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it is the same thing but different: a coming collapse of China, or at least an over-hyped âChina boomâ going bust any day now.3 Between the Sinophilic and Sinophobic poles, there is an obvious center with a closer approximation to accuracy and semantic richness. The PRCâs stabilityâitself an official, propagandized keyword since 1989 along with âharmonious societyâ and othersâno doubt has to do with the oft-remarked rise of Chinese nationalisms and patriotisms (including long-distance ones) that accompany its rise. But the perceived legitimacy and stability as well as the more material achievements must also have to do with the political culture and system of the PRC itself. The thousands of protests, strikes, âmass incidents,â and individual acts of resistance or rebellion do not belie this so much as prove, for better and for worse, its resilience and adaptability, its very reality as a type of system and political culture that is far from weak or fake. From the legacy of the Maoist âright to rebelâ to what has been termed the long tradition of ârightful resistanceâ dating back to the Qing dynasty, political protest and intellectual contention are simply as much a part of the PRC as its various cuisines and transport systems.4
As Kerry Brown has recently argued, drawing on an essay by Wang Hui, every major clash of the last three decades has involved some (officially but poorly hidden) fundamental policy difference, or in other words a struggle over actual ideas.5 Admittedly these are not radical ideas or ideological struggles and major differences (as in the Mao era over âlinesâ); in that sense, the ideas are wonkish, relatively non-political, and set within certain limits and parameters of what is acceptable. (Maoist economics are not.) This is very similar to that in the USA and elsewhere; though the comparison may actually work in the PRCâs favor, where actual national plans are worked out (albeit behind tightly closed doors). But âourâ endless and speculative focus on, say, Xi Jinpingâs personal struggles against enemies, or on Bo Xilaiâs quest for national power (where there may have been actual ideological differences at stake), quite effectively and unfortunately hides the wonkish ideas and policies at stake. The PRC takes the power of ideas, policies, and ideologies far more seriously than other ânormalâ or âfreeâ societies, where, for example, you can have any number of radical political magazines or websites, some of them very rich indeed in their content or symbolic significance. But that matter not at all in terms of power or influence on national politics.6 Or at least the, say, American leftist and âultra-leftistâ texts and ideas matter far less than those of the rightists, which can directly inform the conservative parties (to the extent that the two-system even speaks to two political sides). In the PRC, the perceived importance and influence of ideas is what leads to the problem of censorship and the policing of speech. This differenceâthe higher valuation, yet fear, of the ideationalâis, arguably, explained by the PRCâs Marxist and Leninist-Maoist roots. Though it must also be said that it was Mao who countenanced âblooming and contendingâ far more than the current Party.
All told, and notwithstanding its repudiation of Maoist economics and domestic politics (i.e. class struggle), the PRC has been remarkably adaptable, a la the guerrilla warfare strategy of the 1930s and 1940s. This has led some scholars to aptly refer to it as being guided not by Adam Smithâs but by Maoâs invisible hand.7 This includes its embrace of uncertainty, as Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry well note, and a willingness to take risks, especially, but not only, economically. This may sometimes result in the empty ghost towns of recent vintage, such as Ordos on the one hand, but can also result in the booming, massive, melting pot capitalist city of Shenzhen as well as the more ancient metropole of Guangzhou, now with its own little Africa or âchocolate city.â This experimentation applies far less to the party system itself, as such behavior is highly discouraged, especially after the âscandalâ of the murder and betrayal and the apparent corruption in Bo Xilaiâs Chongqing. And yet this embrace of risk also applied to the stateâs great openness to domestic and even foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at work in the mainlandâs public sphere or civil society. That too has been cut back and curtailed significantly under the more watchful, illiberal eye of Xi Jinpingâs rule. But even this crackdown or self-correction has to be counted as within the âguerrillaâ or experimental mode of change and adaptation.
Put another way, the power of the Chinese political system and political culture not only stems from top-down repressive measures but also operates in more productive, positive, and capillary ways, as every Foucauldian knows. Note, for example, that the so-called Great Firewallâas real as it isâhardly succeeds in banishing anti-communist and other unflattering information about China coming into the country through the Internet or other avenues. Anti-Maoist and anti-CCP views or knowledges are a case in point, as are foreign scholarship and texts, from the works of von Hayek to Roderick MacFarquhar. And yet these same âsubversiveâ information flowsâchiefly Western or Chinese language media from, say, Hong Kong and Taiwanâoften succeed only in stoking the fires of Chinese nationalism and indignation over âbiased,â âanti-Chinaâ perspectives. From the âFree Tibetâ campâs attempts to snuff out the world tour of the Olympic torch, circa 2008, to the creation of an âanti-CNNâ social media platform in the mainland, to Ai Wei Weiâs relative unpopularity in China, to the more recent Hague court ruling against mainland claims to (vast amounts of) the South China Sea, or to protests on American campuses against the Dalai Lama speaking: there is no doubt that a newly, visibly assertive China is talking back. Of course this is just one, albeit strong reaction-formation to such flows of âliberalâ information and views, and there is no doubt that Hong Kongâs liberal media and publications have informed and enabled other, more liberal or contrary views in the mainland. It is always worth noting that, contra a certain orientalist stereotype, the Chinese people have never spoken with just one voice or within just one identity.
The catch with many such acts of resistance and political protest in China (âmass incidentsâ), which can be as substantial and serious as a violent strike or a militant occupation of space, is that they rarely take the forms and paths âweâ think they should, if the goal is the end of the one-Party-state, authoritarian governance, and, in sum, the subversion of the general reality of the post-1949 system. A system that itself needs to be sharply periodized as post-Mao and post-revolutionary, since at least the ascension of Deng Xiaoping and the advent of commodification in 1979. This failure, so to speak, of the Chinese state and system to take the right, normative forms presents a major challenge for liberal or indeed other analyses.
A case in point is a recent article by Elizabeth Perry, always a useful and lucid scholar, aptly titled âThe Illiberal Challenge of Authoritarian China.â8 It resonates with a consistent theme of her prodigious research: that the Chinese political order is neither fragile nor vacuous but has a logic of its own, and one that does not fit easily within the conventional wisdom or discourse of Western Chinese studies. (Many historians and assorted China experts would admit the latter, of course, but few would take the next step: making the comparison in a substantial or attentive way, and taking the differences and rationalities seriously.) Perry notes a central paradox of Chinese rule: that Chinaâs undeniably vibrant civil society and active, not passive, public may actually undergird and perpetuate the Chinese state (âthe authoritarian regimeâ), and not democratize it into a liberal system of political representation.9 The supposed link between civil society and democratization on which so much cultural studies, not just political science, depend, may not be a link at all. This happens precisely because the state is âattentiveâ to such protests and voices, and not only responds repressively but often incorporates such criticisms or problems, or otherwise responds pro-actively or positively, albeit only because of the civic/public actions in the first place. It can even repress and address the issue, as may well be the current case of Wukan, discussed in a later chapter. Perry concludes with two notable points. One, the rise of protests and public voice (to adopt A. O. Hirschmanâs phrase) reflects not a movement toward ârights consciousnessâ and hence âdemocratization,â but toward ârules consciousnessâ andâin my own words hereâtoward making the state respond and work in its own terms. And yet it must also be said in response to this still liberal framework that the distinction between rules and rights is an unstable and arguably a practically negligible one, unless one believes in natural rights, a la the early modern political philosophers. At any rate, in regard to what happens on the ground in China, and leaving aside the normative liberal frame, Perryâs observations about the state and protest seem characteristically accurate. They resonate with what we will later discuss as the ârighteous resistanceâ mode of protest in Wukan, but not in Hong Kong. Two, Perry claims that this is precisely the âilliberal challenge of Chinese authoritarianismâ: that a robust civil society in this case only âstrengthens and sustainsâ the regime. Note that the argument is not that it gets more repressive but only that it responds, perhaps begrudgingly, but consistently. And yet this does not entail any movement toward a liberal democratic regime, which is to say that it does not take the normative form according to political science and other liberal discourses. Clearly this implies a problem and a challenge to such understandings of politics, change, development, âdemocratization,â and so on. The problem is that the latter, conventional theories (or normative assumptions) are rather useless to explain how Chinese politics works and has developed over the years. Or, put another way, the theories can only point to what is lacking, and can only repeat that whatever the Communist Party does it does just to stay in power. If we can tease out the logic here, the further assumption to the liberal âdemonizationâ of the PRC seems to be that if the Party-state did not do all these things just to stay in powerâincluding acting democratically or responsively to protests and the âgeneral willââthen China would, more or less spontaneously, or at least quickly and inevitably, become the same as the rest of the countries in the liberal world order. Perryâs article thus helps us see the limits of such logics and approaches to the PRC. And, in general, with the persistence, if not rise, of other alleged illiberal regimes, sometimes called illiberal democracies, such as Russia and others of the former Soviet empire, as well as, say, Thailand, the faith in such convergences is clearly fading. But the crucial point for the present study is that the PRC nonetheless should become like a ârealâ or âgoodâ liberal democratic regime, and that its clear refusal to do so is a challenge to our received political wisdom and theories more than to China itself.
The obvious contradiction hereânamely, that the Chinese political system and culture in this sense actually work yet still must change to fit the liberal conceptsâdoes not go addressed. (We will return to this in regard to the Wukan Uprising later.) This raises two immediate questions: illiberal to who and according to who? One suspects that the answer to both is often âthe foreign experts.â The charge of illiberalismâmore often an academic assumption than a journalistâs explicit chargeâtells us more about the liberal West, and globalization as cultural imperialism, than it does about the PRC as a political system and intellectual political culture.
This book picks up from where my earlier China and Orientalism (2012) left offâafter 1989, and with the rise of a Sinological form of orientalism that mandates that China is slowly, necessarily becoming the same as âusâ; that is, it must become a normal and free political entity and space. This reverses the âclassicâ orientalist view about the Chinese difference being essential to the place and people, and an allegedly insurmountable barrier to normality/modernity/freedom (or for the Sinophilic minority, the reason for its superiority to a degraded Occident). If not in the near future, then certainly in the longer one the (Western-universal) script is set. Insofar as it is abnormal and lacks freedom, this difference has not to do with race or âessenceâ (as in the old orientalist view) but with the anachronistic legacy of the single Party-state and Mao, which is to say, with Chinaâs unfortunate, communist political revo...