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China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality

By Wang Hui

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An examination of the shifts in politics and revolution in China over the last century

What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and in China’s Twentieth Century the country’s leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China’s more recent liberalization, to arrive at the crossroads of the present day. Examining the emergence of new class divisions between ethnic groups in the context of Tibet and Xinjiang, alongside the resurgence of neoliberalism through the lens of the Chongqing Incident, Wang Hui argues for a revival of social democracy as the only just path for China’s future.
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PUBLISHER:
Verso
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Feb 1, 2016
ISBN:
9781781689073
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An examination of the shifts in politics and revolution in China over the last century

What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and in China’s Twentieth Century the country’s leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China’s more recent liberalization, to arrive at the crossroads of the present day. Examining the emergence of new class divisions between ethnic groups in the context of Tibet and Xinjiang, alongside the resurgence of neoliberalism through the lens of the Chongqing Incident, Wang Hui argues for a revival of social democracy as the only just path for China’s future.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Mobilizing lessons from a non-Western context to unpack the contested meanings of socialism and democracy … Wang reminds us that China’s socialist legacy, much like its long-standing participation in anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South, is not to be forgotten. Instead, it should be rigorously analyzed and critically re-appropriated as a means to reshape the contours of global justice.”

—Fan Yang, Socialism and Democracy

“Wang’s intervention into both Chinese- and English-language histories of China is both politically charged and theoretically rich, exploring the possibilities for equality and justice that were created and then suppressed during this period in China’s recent past.”

—Zach Smith, Education About Asia

Praise for Wang Hui:

“A central figure among a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left.”

—New York Times Magazine

“One of China’s leading historians and most interesting and influential public intellectuals.” —Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Wang Hui is a Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he currently lives. He studied at Yangzhou University, Nanjing University, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has also been a visiting professor at NYU and other universities in the US. In 1989, he participated in the Tiananmen Square protests and was subsequently sent to a poor inland province for compulsory “reeducation” as punishment for his participation. He developed a leftist critique of government policy and came to be one of the leading proponents of the Chinese New Left in the 1990s, though Wang Hui did not choose this term. Wang was named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in 2008 by Foreign Policy. He is the author of The End of the Revolution, China’s New Order, The Politics of Imagining Asia, and China’s Twentieth Century.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso (February 16, 2016)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1781689067

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1781689066

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.9 ounces

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,714,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#2,879 in Democracy (Books)

#3,451 in Chinese History (Books)

#3,585 in Asian Politics

Customer Reviews: 4.9 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

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Top review from the United States

Qaisar Rashid, Dr

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book to understand China

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2017

China carries its own understanding of society and the politico-economic system. This is the central idea of the book.

Whereas nowhere in the book does Hui give the meaning of Asia, he gives a boundary of Asia on page 8: “The Russian Revolution of 1905, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-7, the Turkish Revolution of 1908-9, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 were central to the ‘awakening of Asia’.” This description reflects Chinese understanding of Asia in the twentieth century.

Hui affirms that the concept of individual’s sovereignty and inalienable rights were bequeathed by the West, as he writes on page 92: “The spread of the concept of individual rights in the eighteenth century resulted in American Independence [1775-1783] and the French Revolution [1789-1799] …This surge of ideas travelled from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to East Asia, reached our country and resulted in the 1911 Revolution [i.e. the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911), and established the Republic of China]. Our nation’s war of ideas has its root in this phenomenon.” Further, Hui writes on page 9: “The ‘awakening of Asia’ [expressed through the string of revolutions] and the outbreak of the First World War [in 1914] signified the age of the collapse of empires.” In this way, Hui acknowledges two points. First, the inspirational pedigree of Asia’s awakening, including the Chinese (Xinhai) Revolution, was not local but foreign. Secondly, Asia was not immune to the changes affecting the West: China captured and treasured zeitgeist.

Within the context of Asia, Hui claims that it was the Chinese revolution which inspired Russians to borrow something from it, as he writes on page 10: “The October Revolution of Russia [in 1917, by revolutionaries of the left led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin who launched a bloodless coup with the help of the working class against the provisional government] was a product of European wars, but it echoed the Asian revolutions, and particularly the 1911 Chinese Revolution, in its combining of national revolution with a socialist economic program and state-building project.” Later on, in 1922, the Bolsheviks (or Reds) founded the Soviet Union. This point reflects the existence of a historic learning process between Chinese and Russians from the experience of each other; certainly, 1991 was no exception.

Hui asserts that, before 1905, China was inclined toward Japan under the rubric of pan-Asianism, the mainstay of which was the yellow race, as he writes on page 70: “After 1905, the pan-Asianism that centered on the yellow race and was predicated on a Sino-Japanese alliance receded. In its place came an expansionist strategy by autocratic countries, including Japan, which modeled itself after the Western imperialists [to construct Japanese pan-Asianism]. Along this trajectory it was only natural that a political nationalism based on the defense of national interests would follow suit”. Here, Hui makes three points. First, Japanese imperialism undermined the unity of the yellow race. Secondly, Japanese imperialism pushed China toward political nationalism. Thirdly, Chinese abhorred imperialism coming from whichever quarters.

Hui justifies Chinese aversion to Japanese imperialism, as he writes on page 72: “Japanese ‘pan-Asianism’ was ‘greater Japanism’ derived from an Asian form of the Monroe Doctrine; its nature was ‘not pacifism but aggression; not national self-determination, but imperialism that conquers the weak, not Asian democracy, but Japanese militarism, not an institution that adapts to world institutions, but one which subverts international institutions’.” That is, Chinese valued pacifism, national self-determination, Asian democracy and amenability to international institutions.

Hui has not mentioned his understanding of Asian democracy but a clue can be obtained from what he writes about an Asian society on page 73: “The influence of religion on Western civilization is minimal, but religion forms the basis of all Asian civilization. As a result, the pragmatic white men use economic concerns [i.e. the accumulation of wealth] as a foundation while the colored men set the foundation on morality. In my opinion, white men do not understand contentment... In terms of filial relations, colored people have stronger filial relations than the irresponsible white men. Consequently the sense of society is more acute in Asia and individuals suffer less.” This point may broach a debate especially when seen against Hui’s earlier acknowledging the flow of ideas and changes coming from the West. It seems that Hui bifurcates China into a political half receptive to western political ideals and a social half resistant to western social models. Nevertheless, within the former half, China sees individual’s sovereignty and inalienable rights strictly in the socialist context.

Hui says that China also cherished to see itself in the context of a civilizational nation, as he writes on page 87: “[D]istinct from the competition among the European nation-states, the competition between China and the West was one between civilizational nations…[T]he nation-state was not the universal form of statehood, but a product of a particular civilization … [‘P]olitics’ must be founded on a unique national civilization and its way of life.” This point also introduces a debate especially when seen against Hui’s earlier admitting China’s embrace of political nationalism. Nevertheless, the difference may lie in the context (i.e. Japan or the West) in which China is equated.

Hui promotes social democracy, as he writes on page 222, 229 and 234 respectively: “[T]he end of the Cold War gave the capitalist side a discursive monopoly over ‘democracy,’ rendering other conceptions of democracy hostile to it… Understood as a political system, democracy embraces such concepts as the franchise, protection of individual rights, freedom of expression and pluralism, whereas the core meaning of democracy at the level of society is equality, embodied in social security, the availability of public goods to all of society, redistribution and so forth. Together, these two levels constitute what we mean by social democracy…Distributive justice and equality [of opportunity and outcome] are part of the heritage of socialist movement.” Here, Hui makes two point. First, social democracy is essentially a post-1991 concept. Secondly, China prefers to find solutions for its modern problems strictly within the socialist context.

In short, China’s experiment with socialism in the twentieth century has allowed it to enter the twenty first century with elegance.

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MVila

5.0 out of 5 stars Long and boring, but a must read

Reviewed in Spain on July 19, 2020

Verified Purchase

Wang Hui is maybe one of the most obscure writers in China - even writing in Chinese - the book sometimes is repetitive, and unnecessarily long, but it is a must-read, especially because of the 1920's authors he quotes that are a bit difficult to find in English

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China's Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality

Wang Hui

3.50

42 ratings10 reviews

An examination of the shifts in politics and revolution in China over the last century

China

History

Nonfiction

Politics

Philosophy

International Relations

368 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2015

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About the author

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Wang Hui

24 books28 followers

Wang Hui (Chinese: 汪晖; pinyin: Wāng Huī; born 1959) is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor (with Huang Ping) of the influential magazine Dushu (读书, Reading) from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. Wang Hui is the recipient of many awards for his scholarship, and has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna (Italy), Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, among others. In March 2010, he appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual meeting for the Association of Asian Scholars.

(from Wikipedia)

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Carlos Martinez

314 reviews

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August 8, 2022

Collection of essays by Chinese 'New Leftist' Wang Hui. The second essay, "From people's war to the war of international alliance (1949-53): the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea from the perspective of twentieth-century Chinese history", is utterly brilliant, and the book is worth reading for that alone.

Most of the other essays were rather academic and basically pretty missable in my opinion. His sorta neo-Maoist critique of modern China is interesting enough, but he misses some key factors: the inherent problems and dangers of building socialism in a hostile world dominated by a US imperialism that's hell-bent on rolling back any socialist process; the inherent problems of maintaining a revolutionary process over multiple generations (what the author seems to want is a sort of permanent People's War, but I very much doubt he'd get a consensus for that); the fact that, in spite of vast inequality and enormous contradictions, the vast majority (like pretty much everyone) in China have experienced a significant improvement in their conditions of life since the start of the reform process.

Overall my recommendation would be to read the Korean War chapter and skim the rest.

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Gayla Bassham

1,237 reviews

31 followers

November 26, 2018

Hui makes some good points and seems to have a lot to say, but his arguments would have been better served if the book were better written. (I honestly never understand why academics don't make more of an effort to write in a clear and engaging manner.) At any rate, what particularly piqued my interest was the discussion of the divide between rural and urban China. I did learn quite a bit but I found myself frustrated by the dry, dense academic style.

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Profile Image for W.

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March 20, 2021

Honestly unreadable. Dense ass theory that requires a very firm grasp of the history, which I do not have. I thought this book WAS a history, it is not. Could be great at what it’s doing, but I can’t tell.

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Jessica Zu

1,040 reviews

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October 3, 2018

well researched, convincingly argued.

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Joseph Spuckler

1,500 reviews

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October 9, 2020

China's Twentieth Century by Wang Hui is a study of 20th century China in societal and political manner. Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor (with Huang Ping) of the influential magazine Dushu from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008.

This is a complicated book that had me struggling for the first half of the 20th century. This is mostly because of my lack of familiarity of internal Chinese history outside of the Boxer Rebellion before Mao. The early 20th century does play an important role in understanding China's path through the twentieth century. The book skips periods that I would see as important from my studies but did introduce me to a different thinking about China's role in the Korean War and it hot and cold relationship with the Soviet Union. It also described China's view of WWI. Both of these views are not typical of Western thinking of education.

Hui isn't hesitant about breaking out political philosophers. Although frequently turning to Marx, he does bring in Hegel and others. This book is heavy on philosophy and internal Chinese sociology. The view from inside China is interesting and unique and will give readers a different perspective of China and the troubles and progress. Society is far less monolithic than many believe and there is a growing division in classes. The peasants and the farmers are not the ones who are making the progress and have been left behind in their revolution.

Although a very complex read, the view of a respected Chinese scholar inside of China offers insight that into the culture and workings of society. A detailed account of what Hui calls the short century and the long revolution.

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Ashwin Ravikumar

52 reviews

1 follower

July 13, 2020

I read this book immediately after Rebecca E. Karl's China's Revolutions in the Modern World. I'm glad I did, because Karl provides a much more digestible overview of the basic facts of recent Chinese history, from the Taiping Rebellion through liberalization. I reviewed that book here

This book was much more dense and academic. I got a few things out of it, but getting through much of it was drudgery. To be fair, this book was translated from Chinese, and each chapter seems to have a different translator.

The main lesson I took away from this book is that Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries, since the May Fourth Movement in the late 1910s/1920s, have navigated how to contest politics on the terrain of culture versus the terrain of political economy. Wang argues that China has seen, since liberalization, a sustained "de-politicization" of the Communist party as it has lost its organic connection to the working class, which has itself been dramatically restructured over the past 30 years or so.

As a United Statesian, a Leftist, and a political ecologist, I read this book with a perhaps inappropriate bias towards finding parallels between China and the United States, and with an eye towards clarifying my thinking about global ecological crises.

For example, Wang describes an alliance between certain media outlets and the Communist party, in a way that reminded me an awful lot of the Democratic party and MSNBC.

Wang shows convincingly that in China, the "peasant-worker alliance" that forms the ostensible political base of the Communist party clearly does not exist in any meaningful way anymore, and it is rather farcical to suggest that it does. Instead, there is a historically gargantuan stratum of migrant workers, who have been recently displaced from rural areas and moved into cities. These workers are materially deprived and politically disenfranchised to varying degrees. Some retain strong connections to their ancestral lands, but many are now 2nd or even 3rd generation urban denizens, and have come to constitute something of an industrial underclass with no meaningful representation in the Chinese political system.

Conversely, another group that Wang dubs "the new poor" have emerged in the urban periphery of China. These are skilled workers who occupy middle class jobs and have a reasonable position in the Chinese economy, but are nevertheless deeply disaffected because they lack the means to consume as much as the emerging consumerist culture demands.

This disaffected group is politically disjointed. How it is or is not organized will, in Wang's assessment, have dramatic consequences for the political and ecological future of China and, therefore, the world.

It reminds me in some ways of the disaffected masses of middle class White men in the United States, who may be downwardly mobile, may be scooped up by the alt-right, or may be brought into Leftist politics. This a group who does not face the same material economic conditions as the migrant working class, but does have at least some overlapping interests. If I understand Wang correctly, China urgently needs a political program that can unite these groups. Advancing such a program is vital for building a better world and for avoiding a catastrophic sharp turn to the Right.

If you want to avoid some of the more theoretical chunks of this book that seem to require some kind of advanced training in political philosophy to understand, you might skip Chapters 1 and 7 (the first and last substantive chapters).

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Patrick Sullivan

12 reviews

August 7, 2020

While I was hoping for a bit more history of twentieth century China in this one it is really more focused on the political theories that undergirded China's various social movements during the time and still today.

Hui's style is decidedly academic which makes parts of the text challenging to get through. However, his analysis of the political history of China the various forces colliding during the 20th century that shaped and led to what we conceptualize as modern China were fascinating, detailed and very well sourced.

The book provides a vision of what was, what is, but most importantly what could be if China could imagine a better political future than the all consuming state capitalism that has defined it's 21st century so far.

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Devin Stevenson

88 reviews

2 followers

October 19, 2020

Essays of Marxist analysis on the modern China and it's challenges politically and it's complex class structure. I feel this book might be a good addendum to another book of recent Chinese history. I read it in an attempt to better understanding but instead found this book presupposes the reader enters the work with a basis of thorough understanding of China's recent century. I found the exploration of Chinese challenges and exploration of definition of equality stimulating but I don't have the expertise in China's recent history to critically analyze the books points

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procz

9 reviews

July 29, 2021

Not quite what I expected or was looking for, I hoped for a more in-depth view of internal politics rather than a more wide look at foreign relations and international ideology. Still really good.

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Brendan

140 reviews

1 follower

October 19, 2019

Well researched (transparent, holistic), detailed with a number of comprehensive and salient points made.

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==

China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Quality, by Wang Hui. New York: Verso, 2016. 361 pp. US$29.95 (Paperback). ISBN: 9781781689066.

It is more than a coincidence, I suppose, that literary criticism and politics make uneasy bedfellows throughout twentieth-century China. Since Lu Xun’ s time, leftist intellectuals have endowed literature with a decisive, even Promethean role as powerful ways of formulating ideologies, inspiring revolutions, and legitimating radical beliefs. Nevertheless, the irreconcilability between acting and writing, nation and narration, contemplative life and political intervention makes this relationship complex, troubled, and estranged. Under Mao’ s rule, literary critics were tempted to embroil their scholarship in the proletarian revolution, but more often they found themselves under the constant scrutiny of politicians, who intermittently use literature to legitimatize their politics but try to silence unruly critics with persecutions. In the wake of the post-Mao era, intellectuals sought to disarticulate literary criticism from this dangerous liaison with Maoist politics. The search of “autonomous criticism” was itself part of the larger project of rethinking Chinese modernity defined by revolution, socialism, and radical politics. Basked in the heat of the New Enlightenment, Wang Hui’ s fame as a literary critic began in the 1980s with a humanistic interpretation on Lu Xun. Nevertheless, Wang took a surprising turn since the early 1990s, as he became the leader of a group of neoleftist critics and scholars who were disillusioned about the advent of capitalism in China. Wang published an extravaganza of essays to expound his critique against neoliberalism and the Chinese market reform, challenging the predominant Chinese intellectual consensus on the necessity of embracing global capitalism. The fusion of literary criticism and politics in Wang’ s undertaking seems to have revitalized the Maoist passion to politicize literature, calling not for the “return of the repressed,” but for a critical understanding of the social function of Chinese intellectual in the market era. Wang Hui’ s revitalization of leftist political intervention bespeaks a strong impulse to provoke a sense of rupture through which lost meanings, suppressed desires, and failed battles of socialism will be fulfilled in an apocalyptic manner.

In this new book, Wang Hui offers a revisionist perspective on the radical politics of twentieth-century China. The central theme is what Wang terms as the “politization twentieth century China” (二十世紀中國的政治化). Wang defines this process from three interrelated perspectives:

244 The China Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (October 2016)

political integration (政治整合), cultural politics (文化與政治), and the people’ s war (人民戰爭). First, China’ s transformation from empire into nation-state at the beginning of the twentieth century was best by a conundrum: how to integrate multifarious political forces, different ethnic groups, and divergent cultural beliefs into a coherent modern political entity known as “China.” Wang argues that the attempt to forge a modern Chinese culture during the May Fourth era generated a strong cultural identity. Moreover, the “People’ s war”— a succession of revolutions waged by the CCP from the 1920s into the 1950s— is regarded as the intensification of the May Fourth Movement in its effort to empower and consolidate a Chinese nation-state. During this political process, national identity was transformed and redefined by class politics, revolutionary internationalism, and proletarian consciousness. Nevertheless, the reversal of this political process in the post-Mao era generated political problems such as a crisis in political representation, the abandonment of socialist equality, and the immiseration of migrant workers. Wang contends that China’ s market turn, termed by him as “depoliticized politics” (去政治化的政治), brought up serious legitimation crisis to the Party-state, which might be solved only by a partial revival of socialist legacies.

In Chapter 2, “The Transformation of Culture and Politics,” Wang intervenes into the question of enlightenment in the 1910s. The contemporary scholarship on the May Fourth Movement has been largely shaped by liberal scholars such as Li Zehou (李澤厚) and Lin Yu-Sheng (林毓生). Both of them repudiate the radicalism of the May Fourth intellectuals. For Li, the dynamic tension between enlightenment and nationalism during the May Fourth Movement was overthrown by the subsequent political struggles. For Lin, the CCP’ s radical politics was generated out of the profound antitraditionalism during the May Fourth era. Contrary to this, Wang argues that the radical politics at the time produced a brand-new political culture that was inextricably tied to revolutionary politics. Instead of stressing the discontinuity between the Republican era and the PRC regime, Wang views the Communist Revolution as something that grew organically from the May Fourth enlightenment. More specifically, Wang focuses on several major intellectual debates during the 1910s. In the aftermath of the First World War, Eastern Miscellany (東方雜誌) published a series of articles on the crisis of nineteenth-century Republicanism and the problem of Western civilization. Wang believes that this crucial reflection on the limits of Western modernity fundamentally shook Chinese intellectuals’ belief in liberal democracy. Drawing on the rise of radicalism by examining intellectual ferments in the New Youth magazine (新青年), Wang notices that significant attention was shifted toward revolutionary politics, with the Russian Bolshevik Revolution as a subject of intense enthusiasm. Moreover, Wang believes that this shift from liberalism into leftist discourse paved the way for the rise of Leninist party politics in the 1920s. In other words, the May Fourth Movement culminated in its gradual transformation into proletarian revolutions.

In Chapter 3, “From People’ s War to the War of International Alliance (1949–53),” Wang continues to examine the impact of radical politics after the founding of the PRC. His intervention into the scholarship on the Korean War remains highly controversial. Historians questioned his academic rigor, arguing that Wang merely lumped together archival recourses only to be squeezed into his theoretical paradigms. Nevertheless, Wang claims to provide an “internal perspective” in order to “situate political decisions within their historical circumstances” (p. 112). Wang dismisses the current scholarly view on the Korean War, which he believes is dominated by a dehistoricized emphasis on national interest. Wang draws extensively on Carl Schmitt’ s theory of war, and argues that this “People’ s war” represents the intensification of China’ s revolutionary politics in the international arena. Situating his argument on the Schmittian understanding of the political as an existential distinction between friend and enemy, Wang contends that the CCP’ s decision to enter the Korean War was an expression of authentic political action with the attempt to showcase new political subjectivities. Meanwhile, Wang sees an intertwined relation between domestic policy and international warfare: the “People’ s war” originated from Mao’ s revolutionary tactics to forge a new proletarian nation-state, and the Korean War reflected the CCP’ s resolution to defend this revolutionary sovereignty on the international stage. In this regard, the “People’ s war” was a heterogeneous political process involving a complex interplay between the mass line policy (群眾路線), the untied front (統一戰線), radical cultural politics, and revolutionary cosmopolitanism.

The remaining chapters paint a bleak picture of the retreat of radical politics in the postsocialist era. In “The Crisis of Representation and Post-Party Politics,” Wang argues that the CCP dissolved from a

246 The China Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (October 2016)

“superpolitical party” with a clear political orientation into a managerial administrative apparatus operating based on a neoliberal logic. This “post-party politics” merely prefers regime stability to revolutionary politics in the age of global capitalism, generating a serious breakdown in political representation. In “Two Kinds of New Poor and Their Future,” Wang analyzes the fate of China’ s migrant workers under the neoliberal regime. Wang’ s anxiety stems from his concern that the newly emergent working class is no longer able to form a socialist movement in their struggle for recognition. The nineteenth-century communist movement and the twentieth-century state socialism all failed with the inability to construct the workers’ states. As a result, contemporary workers’ movements are structurally fractured and politically disoriented. Reflecting on several theoretical paradigms such as “civil society,” “multitude,” and the “new poor,” Wang reaffirms the value of class struggle in contemporary contentious politics. In other words, Wang calls for a revitalization of the basic principles of China’ s high socialism — class politics, the united front, and proletarian consciousness — in order to remobilize dispossessed workers.

There is no doubt that Wang Hui’ s intervention, despite of its controversial thesis, represents an increasingly important political position among the contemporary Chinese intelligentsia. This position cannot be defined simply as “neoleft,” but rather represents a long intellectual tradition characterized by an intertwined relationship between literary writing and politics. It is tempting to say that the very existence of such a controversy testifies to the power of Wang’ s literary politics that is able to provoke alternative visions of China’ s future path. Beneath Wang’ s poetic language, theoretical sophistication, and polemical argument, there is always a passionate undertaking: to infuse literary criticism with a political intensity characterized by radical breaks, revolutionary actions, and existential moments of decision. However, while Wang insightfully demonstrates the systematic dispossession of Chinese workers under neoliberal statecraft, his uncritical embrace of state socialism falls into a messianism, calling for a simple solution imposed by the Party-state. Motivated by present anxiety to combat global capitalism, Wang’ s historiography harks back to the Mao era in search of “the people,” but ironically finds “the state” instead. On the one hand, Wang’ s criticism of the status quo seeks to delegitimize global capitalism’ s claim to be the only viable realization of human freedom. On the other hand, however, Wang’ s historiography prefers to preserve the coherence of long periods rather than retrieve the contingencies, uncertainties, and multiple possibilities of every political event throughout twentieth-century China. In other words, Wang’ s broad strokes attempt to enforce a stable, inevitable, and deterministic historical causality that legitimizes the advent of revolutionary politics as irreversible processes. If the politicization of China was so inevitable, what brought about its unexpected demise? If we abide by Wang Hui’ s claim on the continuity of China’ s twentieth century, shouldn’ t we reach the conclusion that the post-Mao era was not a categorical negation of high socialism but a dialectic progression that was fundamentally shaped by the Maoist past? If Wang Hui adheres to his “internal perspective” that historicizes political decision, shouldn’ t he carefully follow all unexpected turns, possibilities, and contingencies as radical politics metamorphosed from the May Fourth enlightenment into Mao’ s revolution? The contradiction within Wang’ s argument largely results from his bifurcated interpretation that denaturalizes neoliberalism’ s claim to the present, on the one hand, but renaturalizes revolution’ s mystification of the past, on the other. Admittedly, Wang’ s political agenda is to remobilize the fragments of socialism as an alternative to China’ s uncritical embrace of global capitalism, but this critique is at the sacrifice of understanding the complex and fluid articulations of heterogeneous political currents that unexpectedly, rather than inevitably, gave rise of Mao’ s revolutionary politics. It remains to be seen whether Wang Hui is able to develop a comprehensive analytic framework that is capable of constructing both a critical inquiry into China’ s past defined by state socialism and a rigorous criticism of China’ s present shaped by neoliberalism.

Hang Tu Harvard University

2022-08-22

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