Abstract
In contemporary scholarship on Chinese ideological debates, both pro-system Chinese intellectuals and Western-based academics present China’s future as a binary choice between a “China Model” of authoritarian statism and a “Western” vision of democratic liberalism. This article deconstructs this dichotomy by proposing a new heuristic for conceptualizing ideological cleavage. Informed by interviews with twenty-eight leading Chinese intellectuals, the case is made for a two-dimensional spectrum allowing for ideological co-variation, on one axis, between two contending socioeconomic roads of national revival, capitalism and socialism, and on the other axis between paternalism and fraternalism as conflicting ideals for the political system. This model not only resonates with Chinese intellectual history, but also allows us to uncover two crucial ideological tendencies that disappear with the China Model/Western Path dichotomy: (i) the emerging hybrid of Confucian politics and free market economics, and (ii) the tabooed fraternalist-socialist legacy of the 1989 movement.
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Notes
The author conducted 28 non-standardized, semi-structured, exploratory research interviews (duration: 30 min to 2 h), in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong between 26 September and 12 December 2013. Apart from the eighteen interviewees listed in the Appendix and the four presented in section four, I conducted interviews with an additional six intellectuals who prefer to remain anonymous. Five of these are university professors (three in economics, one in law, and one in history), and one is a human rights lawyer.
Apart from putting the conventional wisdom of a China/West-schism to the test, Pan and Xu (2018) also offer an innovative methodological alternative to extant literatures that aim to conceptualize Chinese ideological space. The commonplace approach remains to distinguish between a number of intellectual currents or ‘schools’ (see e.g. Fewsmith 2008a; Ma 2015; Cheek et al. 2018). This typological approach does not involve making assumptions about the dimensional shape of ideological space. In contrast, Callahan (2013) chooses a multi-dimensional, panoramic strategy, which acknowledges the virtually infinite array of competing ‘China Dreams’ articulated by individual voices, but which does not offer a tool for analytical comparison. Christensen (2014), meanwhile, calls for a superimposition of the European left-right political spectrum (from socialism over liberalism to conservatism) on China, thus providing much-needed nuance but ultimately leaving the problem of the juxtaposition of political and economic conflict lines unsolved.
Due to space limitations, this article does not offer a full analysis of China’s “intellectual field” (Bourdieu 1988). In Bourdieusian terms, my argument primarily concerns the plane of substantive ideological disagreement – the variegated position-takings of intellectuals that together constitute an ideological space – and largely abstracts from the institutional context of such debates. To extend this contribution into a field analysis, one could usefully draw on the sizeable extant literatures on the role of Chinese intellectuals in a sociology of knowledge perspective focused on institutional hierarchies, and the changing role of Chinese intellectuals vis-à-vis the state (for introductions, see Goldman 2012; Hao 2012; Marinelli 2012). This would allow for deeper insights into the relationship between social position and ideological position-taking among Chinese intellectuals than can be provided here.
This use of ‘fraternalism’ is inspired by the conceptual history of the civic republican political ideal of ‘fraternity’ contributed by the Spanish philosopher and intellectual historian Antoni Domènech (2004).
In the CCP, the early articulation of a democratic socialism was defeated in the 1920s (see Li 2011), while Chiang Kai-Shek’s quasi-fascist politics as KMT leader after 1925 represented a decisive authoritarian break with the tutelary democratic vision promoted by Party Founder Sun Yat-Sen.
In Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) parlance, we may think of the paternalist pole as dominant, insofar as it reflects the worldview of the state elite, and the fraternalist pole as dominated since it presents, at least latently, a challenge to the political status quo.
The subsequent fate of the two pivotal figures is intriguing. The left-leaning Bo Xilai today serves a life time sentence for corruption, having been expelled from the CCP in 2012. Wang Yang, on the other hand, became member of the seven-man Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo, the highest-ranking body of the Party-state apparatus, in 2017.
In fact, some prominent neo-conservatives like Xiao Gongqin, still embraced Western modernization theory in considering liberal democracy the projected, long-term endpoint (Fewsmith 2008a).
Wang Huning (b. 1955), a Shanghai political scientist, achieved fame in the 1980s and was headhunted to the CCP’s Central Policy Research Office by Jiang Zemin in 1995 (Patapan and Wang 2018). Since then, Wang has served as an ideological mastermind for both the Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping administrations, and has allegedly been instrumental to articulating Xi Jinping’s idea of ‘The Chinese Dream’.
The unexpected popularity of Gong’s intervention was such that the central leadership decided to suspend discussions on the draft for a year, before it was finally passed in a revised form in 2007. According to Fewsmith (2008b:84), ‘this was the first time in China’s legislative history that a proposed law had been derailed by a rising tide of public opinion’.
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Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to all of the interviewees for sharing their analyses and visions. I also thank the Sino-Danish Center in Beijing for hosting me during my stays in China. Moreover, I thank my research assistants Zhou Qi, Zhang Meng, Zheng Yuki, and Ina Mørck for their indispensable help; Nis Grünberg, Ben Rosamond, Lars Bo Kaspersen, and Anker Brink Lund for their intellectual support; and Signe Blaabjerg Christoffersen, Anders Vrangbæk Riis, Tomas Skov Lauridsen, Peter Marcus Kristensen, Andreas Bøje Forsby, Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, Mathias Hein Jessen, and Rune Møller Stahl for valuable advice. Finally, I would like to thank the Theory and Society Senior Editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped me improve the article significantly. All errors are my own.
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Appendix. Interviewees
Appendix. Interviewees
Name | Professional position (at time of interview) |
|---|---|
Bai Tongdong (白彤東) | Professor of Philosophy, Fudan University, Shanghai |
Cheng Guangyun (程广云) | Dean and Professor, Department of Philosophy, Capital Normal University, Beijing |
Fan Jinggang (范景刚) | Manager at the Maoist Utopia bookstore, Beijing |
Gao Feng (高锋) | Former Chinese General Consul in Gothenburg, Sweden; author of books on the Swedish social-democratic model |
Han Dongfang (韩东方) | Leader of the NGO ‘China Labour Bulletin’, Hong Kong |
He Weifang (贺卫方) | Professor of Law, Peking University |
Hu Angang (胡鞍钢) | Director of Center for China Studies, and Professor at the School of Public Policy & Management, Tsinghua University |
Hu Xingdou (胡星斗) | Professor of Economics and China Issues, Beijing Institute of Technology |
Hua Bingxiao (华炳啸) | Director of Political Communications Institute, Northwest University, Xi’an |
Lin, Justin Yifu (林毅夫) | Professor and Founding Director of Chinese Center of Economic Research, Peking University; former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank |
Pan Wei (潘维) | Director of Center for Chinese and Global Affairs, and Professor, School of International Studies, Peking University |
Ren Jiantao (任剑涛) | Professor, Department of Political Science, Renmin University |
Wang Hui (汪晖) | Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Culture, Tsinghua University, Beijing |
Wang Xiaoming (王晓明) | Professor and Chair of Modern Chinese Literature Department, Center for Contemporary Culture Studies, Shanghai University |
Wang Zhanyang (王占阳) | Professor and Director, Research Department of Political Science, Institute of Socialist Studies, Beijing. |
Wen Tiejun (温铁军) | Dean and Professor, School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University |
Zhang Hongliang (张宏良) | Professor, School of Continuing Education, Central University for Nationalities, Beijing |
Zhang Weiying (张维迎) | Professor of Economics, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University |
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Mulvad, A. China’s ideological spectrum: a two-dimensional model of elite intellectuals’ visions. Theor Soc 47, 635–661 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9326-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9326-6