March 26, 2020 47
Democracy” (2012), he writes that
democracy is fine and good, but that
China needs to grow into it—unwit-
tingly, perhaps, repeating the ideas of
Sun Yat-sen from more than a century
ago that Chinese people are not ready
for democracy and need “political
tutelage.”
More depressing is the work of Wang
Shaoguang, professor emeritus at Chi-
nese University of Hong Kong and a
professor at Tsinghua University. In
“Representative Democracy and Rep-
resentational Democracy” (2014), he
uses largely Western sources to point
out Western democracy’s problems
(although he seems to conflate the
West with the United States). Instead
of this flawed representative democ-
racy, Wang lauds China’s “representa-
tional” democracy, which he says uses
feedback mechanisms—internal poll-
ing and reports by Party officials—to
channel the people’s wishes up to the
leadership.
As proof that this works, Wang
points to opinion polls that show Chi-
nese people have more trust in their
government than Westerners have in
theirs, although he never explores the
effect of censorship and propaganda
in these results. He also writes, al-
most delusionally, that Mao believed
in feedback mechanisms, ignoring his
paranoid rejection of even loyal dis-
sent during the Great Famine of 1959
to 1961. The essay is larded with charts,
tables, and other accoutrements of
modern academia but lacks a true spirit
of critical inquiry.
Likewise, Sun Ge’s “The Signifi-
cance of Borders” (2017) uses the
modern-sounding vocabulary of post-
colonial theory to argue in support of
the people of Okinawa and their con-
flicts with the American military pres-
ence on their island. It’s not really clear
why this essay was included, because it
has nothing to do with China’s future,
involves no empirical research in Oki-
nawa (the author says she v isited it once
and seems to have only interviewed
a tour guide), and raises the question
of why she wouldn’t, like Guo Yuhua,
write about China’s own disadvantaged
groups—the answer being, of course,
that such work would be unpublish-
able. (Guo’s main works have never
been published in China; her book on
peasants and Communist civilization
was published in Hong Kong, and au-
thorities censored her essay on urban
residents.)
As for the new Confucian voices,
their premise is sympathetic: namely
that China’s century of revolution
needs some sort of closure, which can
perhaps be found in the country’s great
philosophical past. Probably the best
of the chapters is a five-way exchange
among scholars advocating for the
formation of some type of Chinese re-
ligion, which is exactly what the gov-
ernment is slowly creating.^2 The debate
among them is lively, but the idea that
the Communist Party would allow a
full return of Confucianism is fanciful.
As a revolutionary party that came to
power committed to overthrowing the
social norms and values that Confu-
cianism epitomized, the party is at best
comfortable with using Confucian-
ism’s hierarchical political structure
to justify its rule, but not in engaging
with its rich philosophical and ethical
traditions.
Probably the most disappointing
contribution is an interview with the
reclusive intellectual Jiang Qing. He
has previously advocated political re-
form in China along Confucian lines,
but here argues that Confucianism is
the ideology that best protects women’s
interests. Answering a series of soft-
ball questions, he makes largely sopho-
moric points, such as that premodern
societies were better for women be-
cause women could enjoy a clearly de-
fined (and subjugated) role, as opposed
to the legal equality offered by modern
society.One of the stars of Voi c e s f rom t h e
Chinese Century is Xu Jilin, a historian
at East China Normal University in
Shanghai who does not fit neatly into
any of the three categories. He appears
in the book as a liberal, but as Ownby,
his translator, points out, he bridges
a certain gap. Xu argues against slav-
ishly following the West and expresses
sympathy for China’s Confucian past
(although not for most new Confu-
cian intellectuals, whom he sees as
lightweights).
He writes, in an essay from 2008, on
Wang Yuanhua, a Communist Party
member who was persecuted in the
1950s for speaking out against Mao’s
efforts to control culture. Xu sees
Wang as emblematic of how liberalism
has been heavily persecuted in China,
a worthwhile reflection but only a small
slice of Xu’s intellectual range. While
many of the authors in the volume,
especially among the leftists and new
Confucians, have a fairly limited reper-
toire, Xu is a broad thinker with much
to say about China and the world.
In his book Rethinking China’s Rise:
A Liberal Critique, Xu gives a wide-
ranging analysis of China’s recent his-
tory. His main point is that China has
headed down the dangerous path of
historicism—the belief that universal
values do not exist and that everything
is determined by national history. He
argues instead for what he calls “mod-
ern civilization,” which he says is made
up of two elements: the defense of
values and the pursuit of wealth and
power.^3 While China has assiduously
pursued the latter, it has failed to en-
gage with the former, claiming—like
other authoritarian countries around
the world—that universal values don’t
apply to it:Chinese today are like nineteenth-
century Europeans, bursting with
ambition, industrious and thrifty,
full of greed and desire; they be-
lieve that the weak are meat for
the strong and that only the apt
survive—they are vastly differ-
ent from traditional Chinese, who
prized righteousness over profit
and were content with moderation.
What kind of victory is this?...
We’re like Japan in the nine-
teenth century, and what we’re see-
ing is the report card of a student(^2) See my “China’s New Civil Religion,”
The New York Times, December 21,
2019.
(^3) See Orville Schell and John DeLury,
Wealth and Power: China’s Long
March to the Twenty-First Century
(Random House, 2013), which I re-
viewed in these pages, November 21,
2013.
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EDWARD GOREY’S FANTOD PACK
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MALICROIX
Henri Bosco
Translated from the French by
Joyce Zonana
Paperback • $16.95
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“A gothic historical par
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between environment and
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HENRI BOSCO’S MALICROIX
Henri Bosco, like his contemporary Jean Giono,
is one of the regional masters of modern French
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grandeur, beauty, and ferocious unpredictability
of the natural world.
A nice young man, of stolidly unimaginative,
good bourgeois stock, is surprised to inherit a
house from his great-uncle on an island in the
Rhône, in the famously desolate and untamed
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Malicroix, set in the early nineteenth century,
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