[Reader-list] [Announcements] Public Spaces and Intellectual Debates in Contemporary China: Wang Hui

[aarti at sarai.net]

"Public Spaces and Intellectual Debates in Contemporary China"


Date: Friday, 9 February 2007
Time: 3 pm
Venue: Conference Room, CSDS New Building



A Brief Introduction


WANG HUI is one of contemporary China’s foremost intellectuals and
scholars, and has emerged as a critical voice in the tradition of the
great twentieth-century revolutionary social critic Lu Xun, on whom he has
written extensively. Professor of History at Qinghua [Tsinghua] University
in Beijing and the author and editor of many books, Wang Hui is also
editor of Dushu (Reading), China’s premier journal of ideas and critical
thought. This journal has a readership of something between 100, 000 to
120, 000 and is also read by members of the Chinese Communist Party.
The English-language translation of his book of essays China’s New Order:
Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Harvard, 2003 and 2006)
brought his work to a wider audience, and established his reputation
outside of China as a significant analyst and critic of contemporary
capitalism in China.
In 2004, Wang Hui’s four-volume Zhongguo xiandai sixiangde xingqi (The
Rise of Modern Chinese Thought) was published in Beijing. It is a major
reinterpretation of the history of Chinese thought from pre-imperial times
through the present, and has had an enormous influence on contemporary
discussions of national identity, politics, and the nature of state,
region, and empire.
Although China’s New Order contains important reflections on the Tianammen
movement of 1989 and its aftermath, it would be inaccurate to describe
Wang Hui as a dissident. The current Chinese leadership, through a range
of social initiatives aimed at China’s growing inequality, has registered
the force and truth of Wang Hui’s – and the New Left’s – critiques,
although the regime’s capacity to address these problems remains
uncertain. Indeed, it is to the character of contemporary politics, and of
political possibility in the present, that Wang Hui has devoted recent
attention.

Extract from Pankaj Mishra's profile of Wang Hui in the New York Times
magazine:
China’s New Leftist

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.





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