48 The New York Review
that copied Western civilization.
It’s the report card of a seriously
unrounded student.What China hasn’t grasped, Xu
writes, is the distinction between civili-
zation and culture. The new world civi-
lization, he argues, embraces common
values for all of humanity. Culture, by
contrast, is specific, but need not come
into conflict with those common val-
ues—the concept of rights, for exam-
ple, can be found in Chinese tradition.
Xu holds that China’s behavior re-
sembles that of nineteenth-century
Germany, which believed that its
Kultur was superior to Anglo-Saxon
Zivilisation, a view that led German
elites to justify their country’s slide
toward militarism and fascism.
Of direct relevance to today’s
events—one thinks immediately of
Xinjiang’s reeducation camps for reli-
gious Uighurs—are Xu’s comments on
ethnic (or Han) Chinese. They make up
92 percent of the population of the Peo-
ple’s Republic, and he argues that they
have imposed their views on China’s
other fifty-five ethnicities. This is be-
cause the Han-dominated state’s vision
fails to offer universal values that would
appeal to the country’s non- Chinese
ethnicities. Xu cautions that pushing
“forced assimilation [will] incite a sort
of cultural backlash. This means that
no religion (including Confucianism,
Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and
Islam) can serve as the national religion
supporting a legal-political system.”The sixteen writers included in Voi c e s
from the Chinese Century represent
China’s academic elite, which in a
country dominated by ethnic Chinese
men means that women’s voices are no-
tably absent: only three of the sixteen
contributors are women; none are mi-
nority writers. The solution is to search
outside China’s ivory towers. There
one finds much more variety, not only
in race and gender but in the kinds of
ideas that circulate.
It is this vibrant circle of non-elite
intellectuals that is the focus of Sebas-
tian Veg’s Minjian: The Rise of China’s
Grassroots Intellectuals. The book
gives us a glimpse into the hidden, pri-
vate, more broadly representative yin
world of Chinese thought, as opposed
to the public, masculine yang world
of the country’s party-dominated aca-
demic establishment.
Veg has provided us the first fully
rounded description of the creation of
this new class of thinkers, artists, and
filmmakers. The people he includes
might have a foot in the official world—
perhaps as marginalized academics who
still tenuously hold posts—but they are
also active outside the party apparatus.
Veg usefully analyzes this development
by drawing on Michel Foucault’s de-
scription of how Western intellectuals
moved from pontificating on universal
themes to focusing on specific areas in
which they possess specialized knowl-
edge. Using this expertise, they could
intervene effectively in public debates,
often on behalf of vulnerable groups.
In China, the digital revolution
supported a similar trend, making it
possible to shoot a film with a handheld
camera or publish a samizdat journal as
a PDF without the help of government-
controlled studios or publishing houses.
Since the late 1990s, writers and think-
ers have produced groundbreakinghistorical journals, important under-
ground documentary films, and articles
in the digital press.
Some of these publications are truly
remarkable, such as the biweekly his-
torical journal Ji Yi (Remembrance),
which continues to be published de-
spite occasional government efforts to
silence its editors. It focuses on the his-
tory of the early Mao years, and even
promoted an effort to encourage the
perpetrators of violence to apologize
for their actions.^4
Other grassroots historians have
made some of the most enduring docu-
mentaries of the Reform Era, such as
the Nanjing-based Hu Jie, whose film
Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul chron-
icles the life and eventual execution of
a Christian activist during the Cultural
Revolution.^5 Also notable is the film-
maker Ai Xiaoming for her work on
the Jia biangou labor camp, where thou-
sands of Mao’s victims were worked
and starved to death. Journalists have
joined this movement, too, including
the journalist Jiang Xue, who writes on
China’s rights lawyers.^6
These are people who, almost ex-
actly following Foucault’s description,
intervene in areas where they have
gained specific expertise, but they
do so with the same intellectual rigor
and wide-ranging knowledge as the
establishment intellectuals. By work-
ing to uncover bits of neglected or lost
history, they also reveal new informa-
tion for others to use. It’s among these
grassroots intellectuals that we can eas-
ily find female voices, such as Lin, Ai,
or Jiang, and minority voices, such as
the now-imprisoned Uighur intellec-
tual Ilham Tohti, who argued that Xin-
jiang should not become independent
but must gain true autonomy in order
for it to feel itself a part of China.^7
The intellectual grandfather of Veg’s
group is the writer Wang Xiaobo, who
argued in his 1996 essay “The Silent
Majority” that the most important
voices in China are not the big-name
thinkers with their grandiose ideas
about China’s future, but an invisible
majority: victims of Mao, homosexuals,
those with HIV, unemployed workers,
rural women, and other disenfran-
chised people—silenced in a country
where the party dominates discourse.^8
Wang died of a heart attack at forty-
four in 1997, a year Veg marks as the
symbolic start of this era of openness.
Since then, Wang’s novels and essays
have grown in importance, and it’s now
no exaggeration to say that “The SilentMajority” is one of the most important
documents in the past half-century of
Chinese intellectual life.^9
At the end of the essay, Wang de-
scribes the process behind his deci-
sion to speak out. It wasn’t to join the
Confucian tradition, with its often-
patronizing concern for the nation
or the people, but for selfish reasons.
“The one I wish to elevate the most is
myself,” he writes. “This is contempt-
ible; it is also selfish; it is also true.”
He shares this impetus with Veg’s
other grassroots intellectuals. They re-
search a specific Maoist campaign, for
example, because they suffered through
it personally: Yang Jisheng watched
his foster father die of starvation dur-
ing the Great Famine and decided that
his life’s work would be documenting
it. This response can be seen as nar-
row or parochial, but it is also how so-
cieties often develop: by people trying
to understand and change their own
lives. What collects these disparate
people into a movement is technol-
ogy. Through the Internet, they share
their articles, films, and work. Veg’s
underground observers have created
a virtual movement of people who are
empowered not by their status in soci-
ety but through the force of their ideas.
At times, all three of these books
downplay a key question: Is this already
a bygone era? Most of the works quoted
are from the 2000s or early 2010s; since
then, all but the most loyalist efforts
have been censored, the documentary
films banned, the voices seemingly si-
lenced. This depressing state of affairs
calls into question whether the twenty-
first century really will be China’s. Can
a country that silences its best minds
dominate the world?
There are reasons for optimism. Per-
haps establishment voices have been
silent—they are loath to lose the perks
of the “velvet prison”: cheap hous-
ing, health care, the freedom to travel,
and so on. But these lures of confor-
mity aren’t available to most of Veg’s
subjects.
And so most of them have kept at it.
Not all—the racecar driver and blog-
ger Han Han disappeared from view
early in the Xi reign, probably as soon
as his sponsorships threatened to dry
up; the editor Hu Shuli took quiet re-
tirement; the celebrity artist Ai Weiwei
left China and now makes headlines
for criticizing liberal democracies like
Germany. But the majority of grass-
roots journalists, documentary film-
makers, and historians carry on. Many
remind me of the East German intel-
lectuals I knew in the 1980s who wrote
books “for the desk drawer,” because
they’d end up there and never be pub-
lished. But Chinese writers continue to
write, and my gut feeling is that one day
their work will matter.
We can see a similar pattern today
with the current coronavirus epidemic.
The climate of fear and self-censorship
that China’s political system creates
made it impossible for whistleblowers
to be heard, thus creating a much wider
crisis. Now, a new generation of citizen
journalists are out in the streets, re-
cording stories and making films. These
works may not be featured in China’s
state-controlled media, but they will
seep into the people’s collective mem-
ory and slowly change the country.^ Q(^4) See, for example, a two-part article I
wrote on Remembrance in these pages,
“China’s Brave Underground Journal,”
December 4 and 18, 2014.
(^5) See my interview with Hu, “China’s
Invisible History,” NYR Daily, May 27,
2015; and my review of a new biogra-
phy of Lin Zhao, Blood Letters by Lian
Xi (Basic Books, 2017), The New York
Review, September 27, 2018.
(^6) See my interview with Ai, “The Peo-
ple in Retreat,” NYR Daily, September
8, 2016; or with Jiang, “‘It’s Hopeless
But You Persist,’” NYR Daily, Febru-
ary 16, 2019.
(^7) See my interview with Chinese think-
ers about Tohti, “‘They Don’t Want
Moderate Uighurs,’” NYR Daily, Sep-
tember 22, 2014.
(^8) See my article in these pages on Wang
and his legacy: “Sexual Life in Modern
China,” October 26, 2017.
(^9) See Eric Abrahamsen’s translation in
the online journal The Paper Republic,
at paper-republic.org.
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