Voices from the Chinese Century

Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China

Joshua Fogel, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231551250
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

China's increasing prominence on the global stage has caused consternation and controversy among Western thinkers, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. But what do Chinese intellectuals themselves have to say about their country's newfound influence and power? Voices from the Chinese Century brings together a selection of essays from representative leading thinkers that open a window into public debate in China today on fundamental questions of China and the world—past, present, and future.

The voices in this volume include figures from each of China's main intellectual clusters: liberals, the New Left, and New Confucians. In genres from scholarly analyses to social media posts, often using Party-approved language that hides indirect criticism, these essayists offer a wide range of perspectives on how to understand China's history and its place in the twenty-first-century world. They explore questions such as the relationship of political and economic reforms; the distinctiveness of China's history and what to take from its traditions; what can or should be learned from the West; and how China fits into today's eruption of populist anger and challenges to the global order. The fifteen original translations in this volume not only offer insight into contemporary China but also prompt us to ask what Chinese intellectuals might have to teach Europe and North America about the world's most pressing problems.

PART I

THE CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 1

“UNIFYING THE THREE TRADITIONS” IN THE NEW ERA1

GAN YANG

TRANSLATION BY DAVID OWNBY

Translator’s Introduction

Although Gan Yang (b. 1952) has published sparingly compared to figures such as Wang Hui (b. 1959) and Xu Jilin (b. 1957), he is a major figure in the thought world of contemporary China, known both for the ideas he has espoused and for his efforts at institution building. He first came to prominence during the “culture fever” (wenhua re) of the 1980s as the chief editor of the influential book series Wenhua: Zhongguo yu shijie (Culture: China in the World), which made available hundreds of volumes of translations of Western thought and philosophy to Chinese readers.2 Gan himself studied Western philosophy, first at Peking University and subsequently at the University of Chicago. He is currently dean of the Boya Institute at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou and holds concurrent positions at Tsinghua University and other institutions.

Gan’s intellectual orientation has evolved over the years. His engagement with the China in the World series gives the impression that he was a westernizing Liberal in the 1980s, but as he explains in the text translated here, he sees the West not as a model to be followed or imported, but as a body of historical experiences and institutional experiments that China should learn from but only selectively copy, if at all. Gan also identifies with many of the stances of China’s New Left, as illustrated by William Sima and Tang Xiaobing’s translation of his essay “Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?” in chapter 10, in which Gan’s preference for mass democracy is clear. Gan also embraces a certain cultural conservatism, as illustrated by his discussion of “unifying the three traditions” in the text translated here, which on occasion positions him close to China’s New Confucians. In the preface to the volume from which this translation is drawn, Gan includes a long discussion of Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Kang’s efforts to imagine a future world where Confucian civilization would be part of a new universal modernity. Studies of Kang have subsequently become a staple of the mainland New Confucian repertoire, insisting that Kang, rather than Sun Yat-sen or Mao Zedong, should be seen as the architect of modern China.3

Compared with the bombastic tone of many authors touting the “China model” today, the tone of Gan’s text recalls an era when Chinese were more modest about their accomplishments and their heritage. Yet despite its simplicity and its lack of scholarly flourish, this text on “unifying the three traditions” has had an immense impact on the evolution of much of the Chinese thought world in the period since China’s rise. Gan argues that the task before China is to effect the merging of the “three traditions” that undergird China’s modern experience: the Confucian tradition (elitism, affective personal and local relationships), the Maoist tradition (equality and justice), and the Dengist tradition (markets and competition). Gan’s argument is essentially conservative in the sense that he believes that China needs to find a new equilibrium after a century of revolution. Appropriately, his idea of merging the three traditions draws on Confucian discourse concerning the evolution of China’s classical civilization: the “unification” of the varied historical experiences of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties over the course of the three millennia before China’s first political unification under Qin Shihuang (259–210 BCE). The argument, first advanced by the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE) in the Western Han period, is that despite important differences in terms of culture and institutions and in spite of the violence that marked dynastic transitions, rulers of the successive dynasties sought out continuities linking one regime to another, which the Zhou kings crystallized into an institutional and ritual order that laid the framework for centuries of enduring, stable Confucian rule.

One may question the accuracy of this origin myth. After all, China did not become thoroughly Confucian until the Song dynasty, more than a thousand years after the end of the Zhou period, and thinkers such as Qin Hui (b. 1953) have argued that the basic institutional wiring of China’s classical political order was more Legalist than Confucian.4 But Gan’s argument speaks to a powerful yearning within contemporary Chinese culture to find peace with itself and with its past. He argues, in essence, that Chinese do not have to choose between market efficiency and social justice or between being modern and being Chinese. All they need is the creativity and imagination to rethink China’s recent historical experience in the light of China’s imminent return to great-power status.

It seems obvious that “unifying the three traditions” cannot occur without ignoring the manifest discontinuities that make up modern Chinese history, but Gan’s proposal electrified the Chinese thought world, and Liberals, New Confucians, and New Leftists began to experiment with the basic periodization of modern and contemporary Chinese history in search of a new formulation that would restore continuity to China’s modern experience. In the process, scholars added and subtracted “traditions” as they sought to fill in the details of Gan’s original template and build their arguments for the kind of state and society they would like China to become. The most audacious among them, such as the mainland New Confucian Chen Ming (b. 1962), basically ignored China’s socialist tradition in their pursuit of a “Confucian interpretation of the China dream.”5 The liberal constitutional scholar Gao Quanxi (b. 1962) built his argument around key “constitutional moments” in modern and contemporary Chinese history that are leading to the establishment of a postrevolutionary order.6 Scholarly enthusiasm for recasting the foundational myths of modern and contemporary China over the past decade has ultimately produced a backlash, however. Gan Yang himself has scolded mainland New Confucians for their overly ardent embrace of Kang Youwei,7 and the legal scholar Jiang Shigong (b. 1967), in what looks to be an authoritative essay issued in 2018 and linked to Xi Jinping’s efforts to reimpose ideological uniformity on China’s thought world, brings the three traditions back onto orthodox ground, identifying them as Mao Zedong’s tradition, in which China stood up; Deng Xiaoping’s tradition, in which China got rich; and Xi Jinping’s tradition, in which China is becoming powerful.8

It is too early to tell if Xi Jinping’s attempts to control China’s narrative will succeed or if the efforts by Chinese intellectuals to rethink China’s recent past and future will continue. (One might note that Xi himself has on varying occasions embraced Gan’s three traditions.) In any event, Gan Yang’s essay on “unifying the three traditions” stands as one of the most influential texts shaping intellectual currents in the age of rising China.

“Unifying the Three Traditions” in the New Era: The Merging of Three Chinese Traditions

(Lecture presented at Tsinghua University on May 12, 2005)

The Coexistence of Three Traditions in Contemporary China

At present, we can identify three traditions in China. One is the tradition that has taken shape after twenty-five years of reform. Although this is not a lengthy tradition, many ideas and terms that have grown out of reform and opening are already deeply impressed on the people’s minds and have entered into the daily language of the Chinese people, basically becoming a kind of tradition. This tradition has, for the most part, grown out of the “market” and includes many concepts with which we all are familiar today, such as freedom and rights. Another tradition began with the establishment of the People’s Republic and took form during the Mao Zedong era. This is a tradition characterized particularly by its emphasis on equality and justice. It is clear today that from the mid- to late-1990s the Maoist tradition of equality has been quite powerful, and beginning in the mid-1990s there has been a great deal of discussion of the Mao era. Ten years earlier, this would have seemed impossible, but the Maoist tradition of equality has become a powerful tradition in contemporary China. Finally, of course, there is also the tradition of Chinese civilization, forged over thousands of years. This is what we often call “traditional Chinese culture” or “Confucian culture.” It is often difficult to describe traditional Chinese culture, but in the everyday life of the Chinese people it is basically expressed, to put it simply, in terms of interpersonal relationships and ties of locality. This can be seen very clearly in many current television dramas in today’s China, especially those focusing on the family or on marriage and divorce.

The coexistence of these three traditions is a unique feature of Chinese society, particularly on the Chinese mainland. If we make a comparison with Hong Kong society, we note that it has the first tradition (the tradition of markets and freedom) as well as the third tradition (highly developed sensitivity to interpersonal relations and ties of locality), but it lacks the second tradition, a tradition with a strong emphasis on “equality.” For this reason, even if Hong Kong is a highly unequal society, and even if many people are working to relieve this inequality, the problem of inequality has never provoked an intense ideological conflict. From another perspective, if we make a comparison with the United States, it has the first two traditions, with a strong emphasis on both freedom and equality—in fact, we might say that the tension between these two traditions constitutes the basic national character of the United States—but America does not have the third tradition and thus pays less attention to interpersonal relationships and locality ties and especially lacks the cultural traditions and cultural psychology that lie behind China’s third tradition.

Yet we often observe in discussions in contemporary China that these three traditions seem to be placed in a position of mutual opposition. Some people will particularly emphasize one tradition while rejecting the others. Everyone has surely felt that Chinese society since the 1990s has been full of debate and that these debates have come to influence even people’s individual lives. Good friends whose relationships go back for decades suddenly have opposing viewpoints, and when the divergences become important, the friendship is threatened, which leaves everyone hurt. This is because in some of these larger debates, in particular those concerning the Mao era, differences of opinion are significant, and the debates easily become emotional.

The topic of today’s lecture, “the uniting of the three traditions and the revival of Chinese civilization,” is based on an interview published at the end of 2004 in Ershiyi Shiji Jingji Baodao (Economic reporting on the twenty-first century). In that interview, I talked in premature and simplistic terms about my view that today we need a new understanding of the linkages and continuity between the success of reform and opening and the Mao era as well as a new understanding of the foundational role that traditional Chinese history and civilization have played in modern China. The main point of my talk today is to emphasize that the Confucian tradition, the Mao Zedong tradition, and the Deng Xiaoping tradition all belong to a unified continuity in China’s history and civilization. To use the terms of the Gongyang tradition,9 we need to “unify the three traditions” of the new age.

What Is “the Problem of Chinese Culture?”

It seems that most people today can readily accept a positive vision of China’s traditional culture or that even if there are differences of opinion, these differences don’t necessarily lead to fights that hurt people’s feelings. But this is something that has evolved only over the past two or three years, and in the past discussions of traditional Chinese culture often led to violent disagreements.

The reason for this is that behind the problem of Chinese culture in fact lies the problem of the opposition of Chinese and Western culture. What you say about Chinese culture reveals what you think about Western culture and often contains a hidden comparison of China and the West, which speaks to the debate between Chinese and Western culture that has raged incessantly across the entire twentieth century. In the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals were most worked up about the so-called culture fever (wenhua re), which in fact was nothing more than yet another “debate about Chinese and Western culture.” The good thing about the debate in the 1980s was that it led contemporary Chinese intellectuals back to the problem of Chinese tradition that had agonized Chinese intellectuals from late-Qing times onward. This problem reflected “changes unprecedented in three thousand years,”10 the fact that beginning in the late Qing all of Chinese civilization disintegrated, completely fell apart, including not only the political system and the economic system but also the cultural and educational institutions, which meant that beginning in the twentieth century Chinese intellectuals, whether studying China or the West, consistently invoked the West as their authority. They might mention Confucius but would never cite him as an authority. This seems to have started to change over the past few years, and at the end of 2004 Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern weekend) and other mainland periodicals asserted that 2004 was the year of the return of traditional culture.

This year marks the centenary of the abolition of the Confucian examination system. People today have a hard time imagining what the abolition of the exams meant, what kind of attack the abolition was on Chinese intellectuals of the period. By way of comparison, imagine today’s Tsinghua students, who tested into middle school from primary school, from middle school to high school, and from high school into university. What if when you graduated, there was an announcement saying that everything you had studied to that point was useless, that your studies were not going to help you find a job? What would you think? You would surely go crazy, and some would surely think about jumping off a building. The shock would be that great. Can you imagine this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Thinking China in the Age of Xi Jinping
• Part I: The Challenge
• Part II: Liberal Voices
• Part III: Left Voices
• Part IV: New Confucian Voices
• Glossary of Names and Terms
• List of Essays Translated in This Volume, with Original Titles
• Contributors
• Index