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中国的新左派 (China’s New Leftist)-批评的知识分子

15/10/2006 |Pankaj Mishra | New York Times |21/10/2006|翻译/略特 |人文与社会
今年早前的一天,我在北京的清华大学附近的醒客咖啡和汪晖见面,他在清华教书。他是个不高、结实的男子,头发有了几缕灰色,神情愉悦,看起来总是很愿意微笑,他来的时候骑着辆老式的自行车,这以后我们见面他也都是这么来的。他穿着深色的灯芯绒裤子,磨沙的外套,黑色的套头衫,在美国的校园里这么穿也不会错。

作为中国的重要知识分子刊物《读书》的主编之一,四卷本中国思想研究的作者,汪晖才四十多岁,他被认为是“新左派”(一群作家和学者的集合)的一个中心人物。新左派知识分子提倡新自由主义市场经济以外的“中国它选”(Chinese alternative),以求能够保证被最近的改革抛在后面的中国8亿农民的福利。他和中国大部分执不同政见者不同,这部分人大多是人权和主张民主的活动者,汪晖和新左派认为党的领导是一个可能变化的力量。最近的事件--上个月末通过反腐败处理党内的领导以及一贯的限制市场过度的发展--显示,这种观点并不是乌托邦的,也不是矛盾的。虽然新左派从来没有直接指导过政府政策,他们所关注的问题正越来越受到中央领导的重视

在过去几年中,汪晖有说服力地、而且经常地分析一个外人认为是当代中国的一个关键矛盾:一个独裁的国家培养自由市场经济,同时又拥护社会主义。我们见面的第一个下午,汪晖基本没有闲聊,就开始分析这个国家的问题。他描述了共产党已经向富有的商人开放入党渠道,虽然官方还是致力于平等主义。他说,很多党的地方官员,利用他们专断的权力牺牲了他们应该为之服务的农村人口而成为成功的企业家,他们和房地产投机商合伙从农民那里夺取集体所有的土地。(根据中国官员们所说,60%的土地获得是非法的。)其结果就是政治精英和商业利益的联合,汪晖说,这让人想起美国和其他东亚国家中相似的联合。

当他谈到市场改革是如何扩大了贫富差距,城乡差距的时候,穿着漂亮的学生在浏览一些深奥的书籍(里欧.斯特劳斯、哈贝马斯),查阅电子邮件,抿着摩咖。在私有的醒客咖啡馆和连着的万圣书园,汪晖看来很有名。学生们很尊敬地问候他,服务生非常地周到。然而汪晖还是属于一个少数群体很多中国知识分子对过度的毛主义和计划经济的失败敬而远之,即使是那些跟国家毫无关系的知识分子,都认为市场经济对中国的现代化和复兴是不可缺的朱学勤,上海大学的一个历史教授,中国最有名的自由主义者之一,告诉我他想要更多,而不是更少,市场改革。对他来说,中国现在的不稳定不是由经济力量造成的,而是由政治压制的体制造成的,这种体制阻碍了间接民主和宪政政府的出现。

汪晖很愿意承认中国的经济改革努力并不是没有带来巨大的好处。他赞扬了改革的第一阶段,也就是从1978到1985年,这个阶段提高了农业产量和农村生存条件。他说,是中央政府最近在城市创造财富的执着--以及它把政治权力交给地方上的党老板(这些人经常公开忽视中央政府的指导方针)的决定--导致了中国的高度不平等。不仅在中国也在美国和其他发达国家中,接受新自由主义市场经济带来的是福利系统的分崩离析,贫富差距的加大,日益严重的环境问题。对汪晖来说,提醒国家它以前对工人和农民作出的、没有实现的承诺是知识分子的责任。

虽然他援引了社会主义原则,但是汪晖很快告诉我他不喜欢新左派这个标签,虽然他自己也用过这个词。汪晖说,“80年代中,知识分子反感‘左’的思想,认为它引起了中国所有的问题,右翼的激进分子用‘新左派’这个词来打击我们,想让我们看起来像是毛时代的残余。”汪晖也不愿意被等同于60年代欧美的激进知识分子,新左派其实最早是用来描述这群人的。他说,他们中的很多人有过激情和口号,但是却只有很少政治实践,他们中的不少人最后变成了新保守主义者,支持像伊拉克民主那样的“幻想项目”,这没什么可吃惊的。

汪晖更倾向用“批评的知识分子”(critical intellectual)来描绘他自己和执类似想法的同事,他们中的有些人也是新生的中国乡村运动的一部分,他们试图减轻农村贫穷和环境破坏。虽然宽泛地说是左翼的,《读书》发表的文章来自意识形态的整个领域。汪晖本人的写作也广泛地利用西方思想者的作品,从法国历史学家布罗戴尔到全球化的理论家华勒斯坦。汪晖说,“我觉得知识质量(intellectual quality)是重要的,我不希望只要是左翼的就拿来用。”汪晖说,《读书》曾经进行过抽象的关于后殖民理论的讨论,也有在中国关于政府以城市为中心的改革是怎样破坏了农村社会的最有意思的分析。当然《读书》能够发表的文章也是有所限制的,汪晖对这一点很坦白。跟中国大陆所有的知识分子刊物的编辑一样,《读书》的作者和编辑必须行使某种程度的“自我审阅”。文章中不能直接批评领导班子,也不能在政府最为敏感的话题上跟官方论调偏离的太过分--比如说台湾或者新疆西藏的难以控制的穆斯林和佛教少数民族问题。

汪晖说,“在西方人们问我,‘你怎么定义你的位置 ?'‘你是不是个执不同政见者?’我说:‘不是。’什么是执不同政见者?这是个冷战时期的范畴。现在它已经没有任何意义了。很多在美国的中国执不同政见者可以回到中国。但是他们不愿意回来。他们在美国过得不错。对那些问我是不是执不同政见者的人,我告诉他们我们是批评的知识分子。我们支持某些政府政策,某些我们反对。这都要根据政策的内容来决定。”

汪晖出生在东南部的江苏省扬州市,文化大革命开始的时候汪晖才7岁,刚进小学。十年动乱给老一代带来了创伤,但是对汪晖来说留下的是温和的记忆。他回忆起每年学农,被学校带到乡村去干一两个礼拜活。“我们这一代城市的知识分子,”他说,“是最后一代还有乡村生活的第一手经验的。”

他把他中学毕业以后在扬州的工厂工作的20个月作为一份可贵的经验。1977年他参加了文革后恢复的第一次高考,文革期间很多大学要么关门了要么只招收工农兵学员。“数千名学生竞争着一个入学名额,”他回忆到。

当他在1980年代中期从扬州去北京开始博士学习的时候,汪晖发现他成了一个拥有更多特权的阶级的一部分。“知识分子,”他说,“在毛时代成为攻击对象;现在,在毛以后的时代,他们又成了精英。”汪晖说,到那时,知识分子都同意应该做什么:中国必须抛弃它的“封建”和社会主义的传统,追上资本主义的西方。十年的伤痕使得知识分子把社会主义看成是一个失败。汪晖认为,结果他们没有进行任何真正关于西方模式的消费社会可能在中国被重新建构,或者这种消费社会在中国对环境来说是否是可持续发展的。西方,尤其是美国,被理想化了。

汪晖最初开始发展他自己的关于当代中国的想法是在他写博士论文的时候,论文题目是中国最受尊敬的现代作家之一,鲁迅(1881-1936)。汪晖解释说,鲁迅是一个左翼作家,但是他对左翼作家们和活动家们非常地批评。他批判中国的传统,但也是个优秀的古典学者。他欢迎西方关于进步的概念,但是也对它很怀疑。鲁迅内在的矛盾帮助汪晖看到中国的现代性不可能只是一个简单的弃旧扬新的问题--毛主义者和自由市场资本家们却都是执这种观点的。

------【略】------ 

汪晖把他的“真正的教育”看成是从陕西(中国最穷的一个地区)开始的。他看到享受着改革开放成果的沿海城市与内陆省份的明显差距,非常震惊。他也对自己和自己的同事的无知感到震惊。“我们[这以前]根本不知道中国农村大部分地区的旧秩序都深陷危机。”

陕西的公社制度瓦解了,土地被重新分配了。但是这个地区并不出产任何有价值的农产品,甚至都不能生产足够的口粮。由于贫穷的加深,犯罪和社会问题急剧增加,有争夺土地的暴力殴斗,男人们赌博,打老婆和女儿,甚至卖掉她们。汪晖住在一个低地的村庄,晚上睡着宿舍就有洪水淹进来了。他每天的工作就是写宣传手册,警告农民们不要赌博不要犯罪。他也帮助重建一所洪水破坏的小学。“就在那一年,”汪晖说,“我意识到福利系统和合作网络对中国的很多人来说还是多么重要。”这不是个社会主义的概念。即使是过去统治中国的皇朝也通过赋税和救济来平衡中国富裕和穷困的地区。

人们把中国的经验局限为共产主义独裁和计划经济的失败,认为市场会做一切事情。他们没有看到在过去很多事情是怎样成功运作的,普通人又是多么欢迎这些方式,比如说农村医疗保险的合作制,农民组织起来互相帮助。那在今天也许是有用的经验,既然国家不再对农村医疗进行投资了。”

汪晖在陕西遇到的很多穷人把他看成是来自北京的受过教育的人,回去会让中央政府的干部们给他们送来些帮助。汪晖说,“这个角色很沉重,我没有办法告诉他们我根本无法做任何事情。”汪晖告诉我,他十个月以后回北京的时候,怀着一种对知识分子的世界和普通人的世界差距之大的深刻感觉。

他在陕西的时候,很有影响的《文学评论》杂志发表文章说他的鲁迅研究是“资产阶级自由化”的一个例子。然而汪晖没有遇到什么问题就回到了学术生活。

汪晖不太喜欢谈1989。他抱怨了西方媒体中提到这个事件就想到的关于中国的“过分公式化的形象”。然而,我们的谈话是不同寻常的。我在中国城市旅行的时候,我发现很难让人们谈论这个话题。邓小平在1992年试图通过号召快速的市场改革来埋葬幽灵,他也许当时就考虑到了个人财富以及能够买到西方的名牌商品对许多最新变得富有的人们来说足以弥补政治民主的缺乏。如果是这样的话,他看起来已经被证明是正确的。事件以后最大的公众骚乱发生在1992年8月,那时几万中国人想在刚刚开张的深圳股票交易所购买股票。

通过出口为主的工业来在城市中创造财富的努力--这是邓小平让一部分人先富起来的政策的一部分,他的后任也都肯定这一政策--使得中国经济以10%的平均速度增长,也使得中国经济成了世界第四大。然而中国仍是世界上最穷的国家之一。一亿五千万人以上每天的生活费不到一美元。大概二亿农村人口拥进了城镇寻找低收入的工作。四百多万人参加了2005年记录的87000次抗议,这个数字并不一定完全反映生活在这个世界上收入差距最悬殊国家之一,医疗系统和教育系统都在衰退,地方党干部强加的费用和税收的环境中的人们真实的愤怒和不满。汪晖说,这一切中的很多问题都可以归罪于“激进的右翼分子”,或者说那些引用着米尔顿.弗里德曼和弗里德里希.海耶克(他们鼓吹不加控制的市场,在80年代对里根和撒切尔政府都有很大影响)、要求中国融合进全球经济却不考虑大规模私有化的社会代价的新自由主义经济学者。汪晖又提到,正是他们一直得到统治精英的青睐而且支配着国家管理的媒体

汪晖说,只是在最近十年,新左派的知识分子才开始挑战市场经济必然导致民主和繁荣的观念。回到北京以后,汪晖于1991年合作建立了《学人》杂志,他有一个很好的观察这些知识分子的角度。当他们与西方学术界和学者的联系越来越多,他们不仅对欧美国家的问题更加敏感,也对后社会主义的国家试图把它们的计划经济模式向新自由主义靠近的过程中产生的问题更加敏感。中国加入世贸组织的试图(2001年中国已经加入WTO)在学者中引起了意料之外的激烈争论。就像汪晖描述的那样,争论的方向已经变化了:“很多人那时已经知道全球化不是个用来描述一个中性过程的中性词汇。它是西方资本主义从殖民主义和帝国主义时代成长的一部分。”这当然不是说新左派拥护一种随便的反全球化姿态;新左派对最近城市中产阶级中爆发的反日和反美潮是执批评态度的--汪晖把这种爆发归为“消费民族主义”。汪晖说,这种消费民族主义其实正与美国推行的全球化是同一种全球化:“这其实是一种伪民族主义,也是为什么美国的经济利益受到伤害的时候,你就会听到有人在谈论对中国增加税收和罚款。”

汪晖停顿了一下,又加了几句:“很多人都认识到在1997年的亚洲金融风暴中中国经济没有像其他亚洲经济那样崩溃,是因为民族国家有能力保护中国经济。现在,中国的出口垄断的经济当然要比印度更加倚赖西方世界的秩序,尤其是美国经济。”

今年一月,汪晖发表了一篇长文,揭露他的家乡扬州的一个工厂的工人的困境,扬州是个百万人口的城市。据汪晖说,2004年当地政府把这家赢利的国有工厂卖给深圳的一家房地产发展商。工人股份以实际价值的三分之一出卖,工厂管理不良导致亏损以后一千多工人下岗。2004年7月,工人罢工。汪晖称这是扬州历史上从未有过的激荡,工人们堵住了一条主要高速公路,拦住公共交通,冲击了市府办公楼。


汪晖告诉我,他正在帮助工人们起诉当地政府。他上大学以前曾经在附近的工厂工作过,这使他感到和这些工人们有一种特殊的联系。他记得他的工资非常低,大概不到2美元一个月(这是按照现在的牌价折算的),但关键问题是,他认识的工人们都对自己的工作感到很安全。“有些人宣称市场会自动迫使国家变得更加民主,”他说,“但这是毫无根据的。我们只要想想在私有化过程中形成的精英联盟。国家只有在受到一个强大的社会力量--比如说工人和农民--的压力时才会改变。”


汪晖关于扬州的故事并不独特。有很多叙述提到控制公共财产的地方政府官员通过私有化国有财产聚集了大量财富。根据刘小波最近的报告,中国最富有的2万人中,90%都跟高级政府或者党的官员有联系。


对汪晖来说,民主不仅仅是一个简单的扩大中产阶级的政治自由或者为一小拨已经在市场改革中获得力量的人创造法律和宪法权利。他说,民主在中国必须是基于大多数人的积极同意,也动员大多数人,必须能够保证大多数人得到社会和经济公正


然而对某些新左派的知识分子来说,比如说崔之元,汪晖的一个亲密朋友和合作者,他在清华大学教政治学,他就认为在资本主义和社会主义的碰撞中存在着一些机会。“中国有更多的空间发展新想法,”他描述他为什么在美国呆了很多年以后回到中国时对我说,在西方,资本主义系统已经固定了,但是在中国和印度这样的地方,很多东西还在变化中我们有一个历史的机遇来建构一个比西方更加公正的社会。”对崔之元来说,重要的是首先要澄清概念。他说,”把社会主义和资本主义看成是对立的和分裂的并没有什么帮助。两者在20世纪中共同行进。不仅是欧洲的福利国家,就是美国的资本主义也有社会主义的成分,这是与工会联盟达成谅解以后形成的。


最近几年,崔之元在一个与中国社会主义国家的根基相关的问题上找到了愿意聆听而且掌握权力的听众,这个问题就是集体所有的财产。中国的自由主义经济学者称在市场经济中,私有财产是神圣的、不可侵犯的,这个观念在中国是个激进的观点。崔之元在一篇2004年发表于《读书》的文章中挑战了这个观点,他强调了财产所有权本质上的社群性。他引用了托马斯.杰弗逊在《独立宣言》中把约翰.洛克的“生命、自由、财产”权改成了“生命、自由、和快乐”这个例子。


“杰弗逊认识到,”他说,“财产权是从社会而不是从自然生发出来的。那就是为什么美国宪法没有关于财产权的具体条款,这个问题是后来在第五条修正案才提出来的。”崔之元继续说,差不多带着点欢欣,2004年他的文章在很多人大的立法委员中广泛传阅。他说这篇文章引起了一场辩论,导致人大采取了一种折衷的宪法修正案,在措辞上有点像美国的第五条宪法修正案,只是简单地陈述没有人可以“不经过正常的法律程序就被剥夺生命、自由、或者财产。”


这个春天有一点变得明显了:新左派对福利国家的宣扬在党的领导层内部也有共鸣,领导层很担心社会不稳定,也急切地希望巩固自己的权力和合法性。今年三月,我和汪晖见面的前几周,人大在北京开会,出人意料地变成了一个许多年来第一个党内的公开意识形态争论的论坛。立法者们批评政府官员在向市场力量出卖国家利益。反对市场的情绪如此之浓,以至于一项保护私有财产和赋予农民土地所有权的议案这两条一直被外国投资者和中国的商人所游说)根本就没被讨论。温家宝总理在描述农村重大新投资项目的时候,强调了“建设社会主义新农村”是中国共产党当前的“重要历史任务”。他也勾画了平衡经济成长和环境保护的步骤。


一个德国记者告诉我这是他在北京的八年中从一个高级领导人口中听到的最左翼的演说:“即使是美国和欧洲政客也不会去谈建设绿色GDP。”汪晖也同意这个说法。他说他看到胡锦涛主席和温家宝总理关注与亚洲国家的关系也很高兴。“我们在江泽民的时代太执着于美国了,”他说,“我们非常需要改善我们和日本、印度的关系。我们都属于这么古老和辉煌的文明,我们不能只是简单地跟随、模仿美国。”


他又带着微笑加了一句,“国家总理公开承认医疗和教育都是失败,这是非常大的一个成就。以前这样的事情从来没有发生过。”汪晖说他认为政府对于消除农村贫穷是真诚的。但他也还是谨慎的,他说,“中国的去中心化已经严重到把中央政府的政策转化为行动已经不是那么容易了。”上个月,发生了1995年以来的第一次对高级党内干部的清理,中央领导以贪污罪撤除了上海党委领导的职务,这使得人们猜想在中央政府和地方领导之间的关系可能会发生重新整合,也许还会在政策上转向保护社会福利系统和停止污染。汪晖还是有点怀疑,“上海的事件至少是激励人心的,”他在最近的一封电子邮件中说,“我想这个事件会有一些政治结果,但是这些是结果而不是理由。”


对汪晖来说,不去改善大多数人的生活环境的危险是很明显的:“如果我们不改善情况,那就会有更多的独裁。我们已经在俄国看到人们是多么希望有一个强有力的统治者,像普金那样的,因为他们已经受够了贪污、政治混乱、和经济停滞。激进的市场化使得人们失去安全感,对秩序和自上而下的干涉的要求是不可避免的。”


在抨击腐败的地方政府时,新左派往往看起来像是在想建立独裁政客喜欢的老大哥式的政府。中央政府的社会主义修辞和新左派的观点的越来越多的相似性当然会让很多人不安。龙应台,一个知名台湾作家和民主的提倡者,早前曾经告诉我,她对那些看起来在意识形态上跟党体制很近的新左派很小心。刘军宁把这个观点又推进了一步,他是一个流行的自由政治理论者,1999年离开中国,但是后来又回国了,他宣称新左派就是被对西方的仇恨激励着,是党的民主主义旧卫士的一个新名称


虽然这个听起来也许有点像是在夸张:温铁军,原来是个政府官员,现在主持重建农村的项目,也被看成新左派,他和温家宝、胡锦涛一起参加了他称为“脑力激荡”(brainstorming sessions)的会议。共产主义国家的知识分子,比如瓦茨拉夫·哈维尔(Vaclav Havel) 或者亚当·米什尼克 (Adam Michnik),典型地通过批判拥有一切权力的国家来获得道德领袖的地位。新左派是怎么调整他们和国家的关系呢


当我向崔之元提出这个问题的时候,他一时间不再有精神饱满的态度。“这是个重要的问题,”他说,“怎样在道德上还有知识上处理和政府的关系。这对我们是一个很大的挑战。”


崔之元并不把共产党政权看成一个“整体”。他说,在地方和中央的层面上,共产党政权都有很多方面。“几乎每天,”崔之元说,“《纽约时报》都报道农民抗议政府的骚乱,但是如果你听听农民在说什么,他们在告诉中央政府,地方政府侵犯了他们的权利。所以即使是农民都能看到国家的不同方面,谁支持他们,谁不支持他们。”


王晓明,上海大学的文化研究教授,把他自己的位置定位为在汪晖的右侧,但是他说他同情新左派对待共产党政权的实际的态度。“公民社会在中国是非常软弱的,”他说,“既然政府是改变的最积极的代理人,除了推动政府放弃它的一些权力,也不得不推动政府来做它应该做的。”


我和汪晖最后一次见面的时候,他否定了所有关于新左派对政权的影响越来越大的说法。“我们试图去做的是创造一个知识环境,在这里探讨新政策,”他说,“我知道很多领导人都读温铁军的文章,他们也读崔之元关于财产权的文章。《读书》发表的其他文章也同样地很有影响,我感到很高兴。但是我们跟政权没有其他的联系。” 


汪晖看来一点都不焦虑与政权在意识形态上的一致会不会把新左派的知识分子变成支持政府政策的书呆子和雇佣文人,这种现象是给政府提供建议的中国知识分子的一个古老传统。“我们当然是从中国的角度来看问题的,”汪晖说,“西方人问,中国怎么能在独裁国家的条件下发展资本主义?但是这个问题忽略了现代资本主义是怎样在西方发展起来的--是并没有多少民主,在帝国主义和殖民主义的帮助下发展的。你必须问问西方的这种独特的经济模式是否可以不经过浩大的战争和环境破坏而实现。这不是一个抽象的问题。中国已经停止砍伐自己的森林,中国森林的大部分已经消失了,而其他国家还是必须为中国的消费提供木材。”


我们最后一次见面的时候,汪晖也谈到了崔之元先前向我提起的一个题目:中国和印度的崛起怎样对整个世界提出了新的挑战和可能性,同时也带来了深重的影响。“西方社会在过去的两个世纪中一直居于领先地位,并且通过他们的决定改变了世界,”他说,“中国和印度在新的世纪也会扮演同样关键的角色。但是这样的角色到底是什么呢?我认为对中国和印度的知识分子来说,非常重要的一点是不要只模仿西方他们必须探索西方现代性模式的它选(alternatives)。否则,那些‘消费民族主义者’已经在说了,‘美国曾经最大,现在我们最大。’”


汪晖大笑,然后加了句:“这是很没劲的。”


One day earlier this year I met Wang Hui at the Thinker’s Cafe near Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he teaches. A small, compact man with streaks of gray in his short hair and a pleasant face that always seems ready to break into a smile, he arrived, as he would to all our subsequent meetings, on an old-fashioned bicycle, dressed in dark corduroys, a suede jacket and a black turtleneck that would not be amiss on an American campus.


Co-editor of China’s leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang, still in his mid-40’s, has emerged as a central figure among a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left. New Left intellectuals advocate a “Chinese alternative” to the neoliberal market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the country’s 800 million peasants left behind by recent reforms. And unlike much of China’s dissident class, which grew out of the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and pro-democracy activists, Wang and the New Left view the Communist leadership as a likely force for change. Recent events — the purge of party leaders on anticorruption charges late last month and continuing efforts to curb market excesses — suggest that this view is neither utopian nor paradoxical. Though New Leftists have never directed government policy, their concerns are increasingly amplified by the central leadership.
In the last few years, Wang has reflected eloquently and often on what outsiders see as the central paradox of contemporary China: an authoritarian state fostering a free-market economy while espousing socialism. On this first afternoon, he barely paused for small talk before embarking on an analysis of the country’s problems. He described how the Communist Party, though officially dedicated to egalitarianism, had opened its membership to rich businessmen. Many of its local officials, he said, used their arbitrary power to become successful entrepreneurs at the expense of the rural populations they were meant to serve and joined up with real estate speculators to seize collectively owned land from peasants. (According to Chinese officials, 60 percent of land acquisitions are illegal.) The result has been an alliance of elite political and commercial interests, Wang said, that recalls similar alliances in the United States and many East Asian countries.
As he spoke about how market reforms have widened the gap between rich and poor, between rural and urban areas, smartly dressed students browsed through a highbrow collection (Leo Strauss, Jürgen Habermas), checked their e-mail and sipped their mochas. At the privately owned Thinker’s Cafe and the adjoining All Sages bookshop, Wang seemed to be famous. Students greeted him reverentially; the staff was extra attentive. Yet Wang still belongs to a minority. Recoiling from the excesses of Maoism and the failures of the old planned economy, most Chinese intellectuals, even those with no connection to the state, see the market economy as indispensable to China’s modernization and revival. Zhu Xueqin, a history professor at Shanghai University who is one of China’s best-known liberal intellectuals, told me that he wants more, not fewer, market reforms. For him, China’s present instability is caused not by economic forces but by a politically repressive regime that has prevented the emergence of a representative democracy and a constitutional government.
Wang readily acknowledges that China’s efforts at economic reform have not been without great benefits. He applauds the first phase, which lasted from 1978 to 1985, for improving agricultural output and the rural standard of living. It is the central government’s more recent obsession with creating wealth in urban areas — and its decision to hand over political authority to local party bosses, who often explicitly disregard central government directives — that has led, he said, to deep inequalities within China. The embrace of a neoliberal market economy has meant the dismantling of welfare systems, a widening income gap between rich and poor and deepening environmental crises not only in China but in the United States and other developed countries. For Wang, it is the task of intellectuals to remind the state of its old, unfulfilled obligations to peasants and workers.
Despite his invocation of socialist principles, Wang was quick to tell me that he dislikes the New Left label, even though he has used it himself. “Intellectuals reacted against ‘leftism’ in the 80’s, blaming it for all of China’s problems,” he said, “and right-wing radicals use the words ‘New Left’ to discredit us, make us look like remnants from the Maoist days.” Wang also doesn’t care to be identified with the radical intellectuals of the 60’s in America and Europe, to whom the term New Left was originally applied. Many of them, he said, had passion and slogans but very little practical politics, and not surprisingly, more than a few ended up with the neoconservatives, supporting “fantasy projects” like democracy inIraq.
Wang prefers the term “critical intellectual” for himself and like-minded colleagues, some of whom are also part of China’s nascent activist movement in the countryside, working to alleviate rural poverty and environmental damage. Though broadly left wing, Dushu publishes writing from across the ideological spectrum. Wang’s own work draws on a broad range of Western thinkers, from the French historian Fernand Braudel to the globalization theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. “Intellectual quality is important to me,” Wang said. “I don’t want to run just any left-wing garbage.” The magazine has carried abstract debates on postcolonial theory as well as, he claims, some of the most interesting analyses in China of how the government’s urban-oriented reforms have damaged rural society. There are restrictions on what Dushu can publish, of course, and Wang is frank about them. As with all intellectual journals in mainland China, authors and editors at Dushu have to exercise a degree of self-censorship. Articles cannot directly criticize the leadership or deviate much from the official line on subjects that the Chinese government considers most sensitive — Taiwan or restive Muslim and Buddhist minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet.
“I get asked in Western countries, ‘How do you define your position?”’ Wang said. “‘Are you a dissident?’ I say no. What is a dissident? It is a cold-war category. And it has no meaning now. Many of the Chinese dissidents in America can return to China. But they don’t want to. They are doing well in the U.S. To people who ask me if we are dissidents, I say, we are critical intellectuals. Some government policies we support. Others, we oppose. It really depends on the content of the policy.”
Born in Yangzhou in the southeast province of Jiangsu, Wang was just 7 and entering primary school when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. The decade-long chaos, which traumatized older generations, seems to have left benign memories for Wang. He remembers being taken by his school to work in the villages for a week or two during the school year. “My generation of urban intellectuals,” he said, with a hint of pride, “is the last to have firsthand experience of conditions in the countryside.”
He counts the 20 months he spent working in factories around Yangzhou after middle school as a valuable experience. In 1977, he took the first university entrance exams to be held after the Cultural Revolution, during which many universities were either shut or would admit only peasants, workers and soldiers. “Thousands of aspiring students,” he reminisced, “were competing for a single place.”
When he moved from Yangzhou to Beijing to begin his doctoral studies in the mid-80’s, Wang found himself part of an even more privileged class. “Intellectuals,” he said, “had been targeted during Mao’s time; now, post-Mao, they were the elite again.” And by then, Wang said, they all agreed on what needed to be done: China had to abandon its “feudal” and socialist traditions and catch up with the capitalist West. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals saw socialism in China as a failure. Consequently, they had, Wang argues, no real debate on whether a Western-style consumerist society could be successfully recreated or was environmentally sustainable in China. The West, especially the United States, was idealized.
Wang first began to develop his own views on contemporary China while working on a dissertation about one of the most admired of modern Chinese writers, Lu Xun (1881 1936). Lu Xun, Wang explained to me, was a writer of the left, but he was very critical of left-wing writers and activists. He criticized Chinese tradition, but was also an excellent classical scholar. He welcomed the Western idea of progress, but was also skeptical of it. The paradoxes in Lu Xun helped Wang to see that Chinese modernity could not be a simple matter of abandoning the old and embracing the new — as it had been for both Maoists and free-market capitalists.
For Wang, the problems associated with China’s uneven development were first identified by the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Wang himself was one of the last protesters to leave the square on the morning of June 4, 1989, as the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army closed in. Normally rather brisk and matter-of-fact, he grew animated as he described in fluent, if occasionally idiosyncratic, English how a “broad social movement” began to grow out of the distress caused by the shock therapy of market reforms. The students demanding freedom of speech and assembly were certainly the most visible. But there were, he said, many more Chinese in the cities — workers, government officials and small businessmen — demanding that the government control corruption and inflation, which had shot up to 30 percent after price controls on basic commodities were lifted.
In the spring of 1989, Wang was a fellow at the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Wang told me that he saw “democratic potential” in the protests and felt obliged to participate even though he had reservations about the students’ lack of “theoretical or methodological coherence.” For Wang, the student leaders recalled the Chinese intellectuals of the early 20th century, who were never more united than when they radically rejected everything in the past. Nevertheless, after the government sought to crush dissent by declaring martial law on May 20, 1989, Wang was drawn deeper into the movement. On the night of June 3, when the tanks and armored cars charged through Beijing, killing hundreds of unarmed resisters and injuring thousands more, Wang was among those assembled in the center of Tiananmen Square. He could hear the gunfire, but some of the more radical among the students still refused to leave.
Wang decided to stay and to try to persuade the students not to sacrifice their lives. “I knew,” he said, “that if the result was violence, it would be disastrous for the whole country.” Wang said that his fears were proved right: violence shrank the space for political debate, and the Chinese government used the period of intellectual silence that followed to begin dismantling more aspects of the welfare state, like the state-owned enterprises, that had long offered cradle-to-grave benefits to workers.
Eventually, the students advocating peaceful retreat prevailed and persuaded the People’s Liberation Army to give them safe passage in the southeast corner of the square. Just before dawn, hundreds of students left the square through a narrow corridor, jostled and taunted by hostile soldiers. Within minutes, the students dispersed. Some of them were arrested and sentenced to long prison spells; others fled to Hong Kong and eventually to the West; many others, like Wang, disappeared for a few weeks.
When Wang returned to Beijing in late 1989, the authorities were waiting for him. “That was the most difficult time for me,” he said. He was asked repeatedly: “What was your organization? Who were your associates?” After interrogations lasting for many months, he was sent to the northwestern province of Shaanxi, where dozens of other young scholars from Beijing were already undergoing — in the uniquely Chinese way — “re-education” by exposure to rural conditions.
In Wang’s case, punishment by pedagogy seems to have been more successful than Chinese authorities could have anticipated. He dates his “real education” to the time he spent in Shaanxi, one of the poorest regions of China. He was shocked by the obvious disparity between the coastal cities, then enjoying the first fruits of economic reform, and the provinces. He was shocked, too, by his own ignorance and that of his colleagues in the 1989 social movement. “We had no idea that the old order in much of rural China was in deep crisis,” he said.
The commune system in Shaanxi was dismantled as part of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and land was redistributed. But the area produced nothing of much value, not even enough food. Deepening poverty led to a sharp increase in crime and social problems; violent conflicts broke out over land; men took to gambling, beating up, even selling, their wives and daughters. Wang lived in a low-lying village where his dormitory was frequently flooded while he slept. Much of his daily work consisted of writing didactic pamphlets warning peasants against gambling and crime; he also worked on the reconstruction of a primary school that had been destroyed by floodwaters. “It was during that year,” Wang said, “that I realized how important a welfare system and cooperative network remained for many people in China. This is not a socialist idea. Even the imperial dynasties that ruled China kept a balance between rich and poor areas through taxes and almsgiving.
“People confine China’s experience to the Communist dictatorship and failures of the planned economy and think that the market will now do everything. They don’t see how many things in the past worked and were popular with ordinary people, like cooperative medical insurance in rural areas, where people organized themselves to help each other. That might be useful today, since the state doesn’t invest in health care in rural areas anymore.”
Many poor people Wang met during his year in Shaanxi saw him as the educated man from Beijing who would tell the mandarins of the central government to send them some help. “I felt burdened by this role,” Wang said. “I couldn’t tell them that I was in no position to do anything.” Wang returned, he told me, from his 10-month exile with a keen sense of the gap between the worlds of intellectuals and ordinary people.
During his time in Shaanxi, the influential Journal of Literary Review denounced his research on Lu Xun as an example of “bourgeois liberalization.” Nevertheless, Wang had no trouble returning to academic life.
Wang doesn’t like to talk much about 1989. He complains about the “stereotype” of China in the Western media conjured by Tiananmen. Nonetheless, our conversation about Tiananmen was unusual. While traveling through Chinese cities, I had found it hard to get people to talk about it. When Deng Xiaoping sought to bury the ghosts of Tiananmen for good by calling for speedy market reforms in 1992, he may well have calculated that the prospect of personal wealth — and access to Western brand-name goods — would compensate many newly enriched people for the lack of political democracy. If so, he seems to have been proved right. The largest public disturbance in China since Tiananmen occurred in August 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese tried to buy shares in the newly opened stock exchange of Shenzen.
The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented industries — part of the “let some get rich first” policy announced by Deng Xiaoping and affirmed by his successors — has given the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world’s poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities and towns in search of low-paying jobs. More than four million Chinese participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese living with one of the world’s highest income inequalities and deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party officials. Much of this, Wang said, could be laid at the feet of the “right-wing radicals” or neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 80’s) and who argue for China’s integration into the global economy without taking into account the social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run media.
Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to democracy and prosperity. Wang, who helped found an academic journal called Xueren (The Scholar) after returning from exile in 1991, was well placed to observe those intellectuals. As they came into greater contact with Western academics and scholars, they became more aware of problems not just in European and American societies but also in post-Communist countries that were trying to bring their planned economies closer to neoliberal models. China’s intention to join the World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the debate had changed: “Many people knew by then that globalization is not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and imperialism.” Which is not to say that the New Left embraced an easy antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese — of what Wang dubbed “consumer nationalism.” That, Wang said, was the same kind of globalization that America advocates: “It is really a form of hypernationalism, which is why you hear talk of tariffs and penalties on China when American economic interests are hurt.”
Wang paused and then added: “Many people also learned that the reason the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in 1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on the Western world order, especially the American economy, than India.”
In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou, a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real estate developer from the southern city of Shenzen. Worker-equity shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the factory led to losses. In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic and attacked the gates of local government buildings.
Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local government. He had spent time working in a nearby factory before college and this, he said, made him feel a particular connection to them. He remembered that his pay had been low — less than $2 a month by current exchange rates — but, he said, what was crucial was that the workers he knew then felt secure in their jobs. “People claim,” he said, “that the market will automatically force the state to become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization. The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large social force, like the workers and peasants.”
Wang’s story about Yangzhou is not unique. There are many accounts of how local government officials controlling public property have amassed fortunes by privatizing state assets. According to a recent report by the activist Liu Xiaobo, more than 90 percent of the 20,000 richest people in China are related to senior government or Communist Party officials.
For Wang, democracy is not just a simple matter of expanding political freedom for the middle class or creating legal and constitutional rights for a minority already substantially empowered by market reforms. Democracy in China, he said, has to be based upon the active consent and mobilization of the majority of its population, and be able to ensure social and economic justice for them.
Yet for some New Left intellectuals, like Cui Zhiyuan, a close friend and collaborator of Wang’s who teaches political science at Tsinghua University, there is opportunity in the collision of capitalism and socialism. “There is more space here for new ideas,” Cui told me as he described why he had returned to China after many years in the United States. “The capitalist system is fixed in the West, but things are still in flux in places like China and India. We have a historic opportunity to build a better, more just society than the West.” For Cui, it is important to clarify the concepts first. “It is not helpful,” he said, “to see socialism and capitalism as opposed and separate. Both have traveled together in the 20th century. Not just European welfare states, even American capitalism has a socialist component, which was arrived at after compromise with the trade unions.”
In recent years, Cui has found a receptive and powerful audience on an issue that lies at the very foundation of the Chinese socialist state: the collective ownership of property. Liberal Chinese economists argue that private property is sacred and inviolable in a market economy, a radical idea in the Chinese context. In an article he published in Dushu in 2004, Cui challenged this notion, emphasizing the essentially communal nature of property ownership. He cited Thomas Jefferson’s decision to reword John Locke’s principles of life, liberty and property with life, liberty and happiness in the Declaration of Independence.
“Jefferson recognized,” he said, “that property rights emanate from society, not from nature. That’s why there was no specific article on property rights in the U.S. Constitution and it had to be brought in later through the Fifth Amendment.” Cui went on to relate with something close to glee that his article had circulated widely among legislators in the National People’s Congress, China’s Parliament, in 2004. It had helped, he said, to provoke a debate that led the Congress to adopt a compromise amendment to the constitution, similar in wording to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which simply states that no person “be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
This spring it began to become clear that the New Left’s advocacy of a welfare state is being echoed within the Communist leadership, which is fearful of social instability and is keen to consolidate its power and legitimacy. In March, a few weeks before I met with Wang, the National People’s Congress convened in Beijing and unexpectedly became a forum for the first open ideological debate within the party for years. Legislators accused government officials of selling out China’s interests to market forces. Such was the antimarket mood that a bill to defend private property and grant land titles to farmers — one that both foreign investors in China and Chinese businessmen had been lobbying for — was not even discussed. Describing major new investments in rural areas, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, emphasized that “building a socialist countryside” was a “major historic task” before the Communist Party. He also outlined steps to balance economic growth with environmental protection.
A German journalist told me that it was the most left-wing speech he had heard from a senior Chinese leader during his eight years in Beijing: “Even American and European politicians don’t talk about achieving a Green G.D.P.” Wang agreed. He said that he was also pleased to see President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao focusing on relations with Asian countries. “We were too obsessed with the United States during Jiang Zemin’s time,” he said. “We really need to improve our relations with Japan and India. We belong to such old and distinguished civilizations, and we cannot just be simple followers and imitators of America.
“It is a huge achievement,” he added, a smile on his face, “that the premier should openly admit that health care and education is a failure. It has never happened before.” Wang said he thought that the government was sincere about eradicating rural poverty. But he was still cautious. “There has been so much decentralization in China,” he said, “that it is not easy to translate central government policy into action.” Last month, in the first purge of a high-ranking party member since 1995, the central leadership removed the Shanghai party chief on corruption charges, leading to speculation that there would be a reconfiguring of relations between the central government and provincial leaders and perhaps a shift in policy toward shoring up social-welfare systems and stemming pollution. Wang remained skeptical. “The Shanghai case is encouraging at least,” Wang said in a recent e-mail message. “I think there will be some political results from it, but they are results rather than reasons.”
The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear to Wang: “If we don’t improve the situation, there will be more authoritarianism. We have already seen inRussia how people prefer a strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption, political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and intervention from above is inevitable.”
In attacking corrupt local governments, the New Left often seems to want to institute big-brotherly government of the kind authoritarian politicians like. Certainly the growing accord between the central government’s socialist rhetoric and New Left ideas makes many uneasy. Lung Yingtai, a well-known Taiwanese writer and democracy advocate, told me earlier this year that she was wary of the New Left intellectuals, who, she said, appear too close ideologically to the Communist regime. Taking this view one step further, Liu Junning, a popular liberal political theorist who left China in 1999 after being blacklisted by the Chinese government but has since returned, claimed that the New Left was another name for the nationalistic old guard of the Communist Party, which was inspired by hatred of the West.
While this seems an exaggeration, Wen Tiejun, a former government official who runs rural reconstruction projects and is identified as New Left, had attended what he called “brainstorming sessions” with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Typically, intellectuals in Communist countries (Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik, for example) have gained moral authority by assuming a critical stance toward the all-powerful state. How do New Left thinkers in China calibrate their relationship with a state that has imprisoned many of their colleagues and generally shown little tolerance for criticism of the party?
When I posed this question to Cui, he momentarily lost his exuberant manner. “It is a very important question,” he said. “How to deal with the government, both morally and intellectually. This is a big challenge for us.”
Cui does not regard the Communist regime as a “totality.” There were, he said, many different aspects of it, at both the local and central levels. “Almost every day,” Cui said, “The New York Times carries reports of peasants agitating against the Communist government, but if you listen to what the peasants are saying, they are telling the central government that the local government has violated their rights. So even the peasants can see the different aspects of the state, who supports them and who doesn’t.”
Wang Xiaoming, professor of cultural studies at Shanghai University, positions himself to the right of Wang Hui but says that he sympathizes with the New Left’s pragmatic attitude toward the Communist regime. “Civil society is very weak in China,” he said, “and since the government is the most active agent of change, we have to push the government to do what it should do besides pushing the government to give up some of its powers.”
When I met with Wang Hui for the last time, he dismissed any claims about increased New Left influence over the regime. “What we have tried to do is create an intellectual situation in which new policies can be explored,” he said. “I know that many leaders read Wen Tiejun’s article; they also read Cui’s article on property rights. There have been other articles in Dushu that have been equally influential, and I am pleased about this. But we have no other connection with the regime.”
Wang also seems to have no anxiety that ideological convergence with the regime will turn New Left intellectuals into pro-government policy wonks and hacks, part of an old Chinese tradition of intellectuals advising the state. “We look at things from a Chinese perspective naturally, but we also try to think beyond the framework of the nation-state,” he said. “People ask in the West, How could China develop capitalism with an authoritarian state? But that’s ignoring how modern capitalism grew in the West, without much democracy and with the help of imperialism and colonialism. You have to ask whether this unique economic model of the West can be globalized without great wars and destruction of the environment. This is not an abstract issue. China has stopped felling its forests, most of which have disappeared, but some country still has to produce wood for Chinese consumption.”
At our last meeting, Wang also spoke more about a subject Cui had brought up with me: how the rise of China and India throws up new challenges and possibilities with profound implications for the world at large. “Western societies have been on top for the last two centuries and shaped the world with the decisions they made,” he said. “China and India will now play equally crucial roles in the new century. But what will they be? I think it is very important for Chinese and Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the West. They have to explore alternatives to the Western model of modernity. Otherwise, the ‘consumer nationalists’ are already saying, ‘America was on top; now we are on top.”’
Wang laughed, and added, “This is not interesting.”
Pankaj Mishra last wrote for the magazine about Tibetan exiles. His most recent book is “Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”

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