46 The New York Review
The Flowers Blooming in the Dark
Ian Johnson
Voices from the Chinese Century:
Public Intellectual Debate
from Contemporary China
edited by Timothy Cheek, David
Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel.
Columbia University Press,
388 pp., $90.00; $30.00 (paper)
Rethinking China’s Rise:
A Liberal Critique
by Xu Jilin, translated from the
Chinese and edited by David Ownby.
Cambridge University Press,
218 pp., $99.99
Minjian: The Rise of China’s
Grassroots Intellectuals
by Sebastian Veg.
Columbia University Press,
352 pp., $65.00
Ever since the founding of the People’s
Republic in 1949, Chinese people have
sought to give voice to how they would
like their country to be run. In 1956,
Mao Zedong announced a brief flour-
ishing of free speech called the “Hun-
dred Flowers Campaign,” referring to
a vibrant era in antiquity that gave rise
to Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism,
and other ideas that went on to domi-
nate Chinese thought for thousands
of years. Of course, Mao didn’t really
want such an atmosphere to take hold;
it was a trap, and people who spoke out
in favor of political reform or against
government abuses were quickly
snapped up by the security apparatus.
China entered a twenty-year period
of brutal policies that only ended with
Mao’s death and the purging of his al-
lies in the late 1970s.
In 1978 Deng Xiaoping began to
relax government control over the
economy and society, allowing a free-
wheeling decade of spirited discussion
in which the country’s future seemed
up for grabs. It ended with the 1989
Tiananmen massacre, setting China
on what many people now take to be
its inevitable course: that of a develop-
ment dictatorship, in which economic
growth is guided by a repressive state
that brooks little opposition.
And yet it’s possible to identify an-
other period that might surpass the
1980s as China’s most open: a ten-year
stretch beginning around the turn
of this century, when a rich debate
erupted over what lay ahead. As in the
past, many of those speaking out were
establishment intellectuals who were
careful not to challenge too directly
the Communist Party’s right to rule
but took advantage of the relatively
relaxed social policies championed by
Deng’s successors, Jiang Zemin and
Hu Jintao, to launch a sophisticated
discussion about how China should be
run and its place in the world.
Even more remarkably, this period
brought the rise of grassroots think-
ers and dissidents who took advantage
of new, harder-to-control forms of ex-
pression, such as blogs, independent
documentary films, underground art
movements, and social media. Taken
together, these (often angrily opposed)
groups of people created what is argu-
ably the most coherent discussion of
China’s future since the founding of the
People’s Republic—indeed, perhaps
since the epochal May 4th Movement
of 1919, when writers and thinkers
overturned tradition and set China’s
course for the next century.The competing academic voices fall
into three schools of thought: liberals,
leftists, and new Confucians. That’s the
framework adopted by Timothy Cheek,
David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel,
three Canada-based aca-
demics, in Voi c e s f rom t h e
Chinese Century: Public
Intellectual Debate from
Contemporary China. This
ambitious effort to bring to
an English-reading audi-
ence many of China’s most
important contemporary
scholars builds on work
that originally appeared
on the website Reading
the China Dream, a guide
to the intellectual life of
early-twenty-first-century
China.
Almost all of the con-
tributors to the collection
are university professors;
they are tizhinei, or “in-
side the system”—not dis-
sidents, artists, bloggers,
or social activists. These
academics are respond-
ing in the long tradition of
Confucian scholars who
see it as their duty to you-
guo youmin, or “worry
about one’s nation and
one’s people,” a practice
that continued after the
Communist takeover of1949.^1 The opening essay,
“‘Unifying the Three Tra-
ditions’ in the New Era,” is
by the leftist scholar Gan
Yang, who calls on his fel-
low citizens to go beyond
the debates that have riven
China since the May 4th
Movement: whether to
follow some sort of Western model of
classical economic and rights-based lib-
eralism (the liberals); to offer a revolu-
tionary alternative, even if this involves
embracing an authoritarian state (the
leftists); or to return to some form of
modernized Confucianism, with its call
for moral responsibilities and duties.
Of these schools of thought, the lib-
eral voices have by far the hardest time
today, because they have been system-
atically silenced by the government.
Rong Jian, for instance, is a former
doctoral candidate who dropped out
of school after the Tiananmen crack-
down. Now a private entrepreneur, he is
well known for penetrating essays like
“A China Bereft of Thought,” which is
included here. Originally published in
2013, the now-banned essay describes
“what happens to the production and
dissemination of thought under an op-
pressive state power.”
Rong dismisses Confucianism as hav-
ing lost its relevance a century ago with
the collapse of the imperial system that
it underpinned, while he sees Marxism
as something that was only dimly un-
derstood by Communist Party leaders
and never really applied. Instead, he
says, the Chinese revolution was rootedin the search for power, “not weighed
down by moral values and concerns.”
He sees it as completely unsurprising
that Deng, Mao’s successor, abandoned
even the pretense of communism for a
pragmatic policy of “crossing the river
by feeling the stones”—an ideology
that basically means that anything goes
as long as the economy develops and
the party stays in power.
Likewise, Deng’s successor, Jiang,
lacked the principles to follow through
on his own cornerstone idea, which was
that different forces in society should
be represented politically. As for aca-
demics, he says that they have become
professionals who follow party direc-
tives on what can be researched and
published. What China needs is a mar-
ketplace of ideas, he writes, but what it
gets is an overbearing state: “This is a
power structure unlimited in any way
by institutional and legal restraints, let
alone by moral constraints. Indeed, we
would not be able to find an enduring
set of ideas, beliefs, meanings, or val-
ues within this power structure.”
As outspoken as Rong is the Tsing-
hua sociologist Guo Yuhua, who has
spent two decades researching impov-erished mountain villagers in Shaanxi
province. In “Original Intentions Start
with the People,” Guo takes aim at
China’s urban redevelopment, which
she says is undertaken not for local
residents but to reflect the vision of a
megalomaniacal state. The collection
includes an interview with Guo about
her work treating communism as a civi-
lization with its own myths, structures,
and lies. For instance, the government’s
land reform policy in the
1940s and 1950s is still a
foundational myth justify-
ing the party’s usurpation
of power, but she writes
that it “was clearly not
an objective, but rather
a means of mobilizing
people during the war, ex-
panding the military, and
winning over the people.”Among the views in
Voi c e s, these liberal argu-
ments are by far the most
interesting, provocative,
and relevant, while the
arguments from the left-
ists and new Confucians
tend to be unreflective and
self-serving. That does not
make them unimportant—
especially as they repre-
sent mainstream thought
in today’s China—but they
offer few real solutions to
the country’s problems.
One of these problems
is how to deal with the
Communist state’s his-
tory, but the only leftist
here reckoning with the
past is Qian Liqun, a re-
tired Peking University
literature professor. In
“Mao Zedong and His
Era,” first published in
2012, he writes that in
order for China to move
ahead with its socialist
project, it must embark on a “thorough
critique and assessment of Mao Ze-
dong Thought and culture.” This essay
is all the more remarkable because he
implicates himself as an enthusiastic
follower who bears personal respon-
sibility for his generation’s often blind
obedience to Mao and the state. He
takes aim at those who acknowledge
Mao’s errors but say they were worth
the price because Mao restored Chi-
na’s territorial integrity, industrialized
the country, and helped address social
problems, such as the status of women
and illiteracy—an argument Qian calls
“price theory.” “Whenever I hear this
price theory,” he writes, “I get all fired
up; do they really know what price was
paid? The death of millions or even
tens of millions. In my view, the death
of one person is one too many, let alone
tens of millions.”
This sort of moral clarity is missing
in many other leftist writers who gloss
over the past and problems in today’s
political system. Typical is the Shang-
hai Normal University historian Xiao
Gongqing, a defender of China’s new
authoritarianism. In “From Authori-
tarian Government to ConstitutionalThe historian Xu Jilin, Shanghai, 1995Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos(^1) See Gloria Davies, Worrying About
China: The Language of Chinese Criti-
cal Inquiry (Harvard University Press,
2007); or Merle Goldman, China’s In-
tellectuals: Advise and Dissent (Har-
vard University Press, 1981), reviewed
in these pages by Jonathan D. Spence,
August 13, 1981.