Where Lies the New Moment?: Wang Hui and the Retreat From Class

Matthew Strupp traces and critiques the intellectual trajectory of Chinese ‘New Left’ philosopher Wang Hui. 

Introduction

Wang Hui is one of the most widely discussed contemporary Chinese intellectuals in the West and a leading member of a group of Chinese thinkers known as the New Left, who are critical of the market-oriented reform process China has been engaged in since the late 1970s. In 2008, his name appeared on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals. He is one of five Chinese thinkers on the list and one of only a handful of thinkers associated with the political Left or the socialist movement, others being the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the American linguist Noam Chomsky.¹ This makes Wang a leading voice for the Left on China during a period of increasing debate in the socialist movement on the nature of the Chinese social formation, its ruling party, and its role in the world-system as it rises economically and challenges the geopolitical hegemony of the United States. Thus, an engagement with Wang Hui’s work is essential for participation in this debate.

Before directly exploring the work of Wang Hui, some reflections on Western academic approaches to Chinese intellectual culture are in order. Western scholars writing on the contemporary Chinese intellectual scene tend to conclude their surveys by pointing to some element or trend in Western thought that they find missing from the existing Chinese discourse, whose introduction would improve the debate. In her work on the Chinese thought of the 1980s, High Culture Fever, Jing Wang posits the missing elements to be Sartrean existentialism and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory.² In Worrying About China, Gloria Davies laments the absence of a Derridean self-reflexive posture on the part of Chinese intellectuals engaged in fierce debates that all have the Chinese nation as their common point of reference.³ In China Since Tiananmen, Joseph Fewsmith regrets that a hostile posture from the United States and the extreme “shock therapy” marketization applied to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have driven Chinese intellectuals away from the liberal idealism of the New Enlightenment movement of the 1980s and into a new nationalism and postmodernism.⁴ He considers the New Left part of this trend. In his “Schematic Overview of Chinese Political Spectrum” at the beginning of the book, he even puts Wang Hui and Cui Zhiyuan at the top of a column of “Postmodernists” within a larger bracket called the New Left that also includes New Nationalists and Neo-Statists.⁵ This collapses important differences between the New Left and these other trends simply because they are all critics of Western liberalism, totally missing Wang’s critique of “post-ism,” the New Nationalism, and Neo-Statism as being perfectly compatible with the dominant ideology of neoliberalism.⁶ Wang argues that when these thinkers pose the repressive state apparatus against the process of rapid marketization or argue for a Chinese essence that transcends the market, they are actually supporting the tools that the pro-market state elite rely on to repress mass politics and ideologically blunt popular discontent. 

In spite of the ambivalence that Wang and others have expressed towards the term because of the negative connotations of “left deviationism” in Chinese political culture, I think that for those outside China, the term “New Left” does actually express something true about the group of thinkers it describes. This truth is that they make up a political Left in a way that is comparable to socialists in the rest of the world because they seek and advocate for a democratic and egalitarian alternative to capitalism. That is not the case for the New Nationalists, Neo-Statists, and others who are disillusioned with liberal idealism in other ways.

Theodore Huters and Viren Murthy have both written on Wang Hui as a figure of the Left and have attempted to assimilate his insights for socialist politics. Huters is the author of the introduction to China’s New Order, the first book of Wang’s writings published in English. Writing in 2003, Huters describes the importance of Wang’s project as providing a Chinese angle to the global critique of “unabashed enthusiasm for an economic order anchored by what had seemed an ever-rising stock market” and draws parallels between Wang Hui’s description of the origins of the 1989 social movement and the 1999 Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization.⁷ Viren Murthy points to Wang Hui as a source of hope within a general “leftist melancholy” following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 because he describes the process of politicization of class as a category and the opening for a politics of revolution against capitalism and imperialism in the 20th century.⁸ However, neither Huters nor Murthy have attempted a wholesale critical examination of Wang’s project in light of the changes that have occurred in Chinese society and politics following Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, which have put Wang in a position of less resolute opposition to official policy than he previously occupied. What such an examination offers is a big picture view of the trajectory of Wang’s project, allowing readers of Wang Hui to understand where he fits into wider debates on contemporary China.

The purpose of this engagement with the work of Wang Hui is to determine the usefulness and limitations of his project for understanding and charting a path forward for Chinese society, in the context of wider debates on Chinese society occurring within the international socialist movement. I examine Wang Hui’s work in the 1990s and early 2000s alongside his more recent writing on China’s 20th century, as well as material from an interview I conducted with him in November 2021 for the purpose of writing this essay, in light of the changes in the tack of Chinese policy and intellectual culture since Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012. I argue that Wang Hui’s critique of China’s reform process was characteristic of the 1990s in that it focused on the extreme neoliberal ideology that had gained purchase among sections of the state elite and the way that other ideological trends acted to reinforce the agenda of privatization, marketization, and attacks on China’s working class, which the neoliberals championed. I characterize Wang as being afflicted by the “retreat from class” described by Ellen Meiskins Wood, in which the decline of mass working class socialist politics has led to attempts to refound left-wing politics on the basis of various ethical doctrines, non-class social movements, and voluntaristic political categories.⁹ These problems have come to light because, since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, the Chinese state has made a partial retreat from neoliberalism, not least on the plane of ideology. This move has defanged the ability of Wang’s critique to appear as radical as it did in the 1990s and 2000s. Although Wang would like to deepen the poverty alleviation campaign beyond its current extent and more decisively orient China’s foreign policy toward the Third World than the present leadership, he is stuck in a position of putting a Left gloss on official policy.

From New Enlightenment to New Left

Before engaging directly with the work of Wang Hui, I will detail the emergence of the Chinese New Left as an intellectual trend in order to provide necessary context for the later discussion. The immediate background for the emergence of the New Left in the 1990s is the trajectory of the New Enlightenment movement of the 1980s. The word “enlightenment” in the name of this movement refers not only to the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, but also to the May Fourth Enlightenment movement in China, which started in 1919. The May Fourth movement had “science and democracy” as its watchwords and wished to revolutionize Chinese culture to make it a modern society capable of escaping Western domination. Although the May Fourth movement supported Western-style learning and wished to overhaul traditional Chinese culture, it also had an anti-imperialist thrust because the original mass student and worker demonstrations that sparked the movement were in opposition to the Treaty of Versailles handing the German imperialist concessions in Shandong province, over to Japan, one of the allies of the Entente powers during the war. The Chinese Communist Party traces its origins to the revolutionary thinking and youth radicalism of this period.¹⁰

The New Enlightenment intellectual movement of the 1980s emerged alongside the “reform and opening” policies of Deng Xiaoping. Deng came to power in 1978, following Mao’s death in September 1976, the arrest of the Gang of Four, who wanted to revive the Cultural Revolution, a month later, and the brief rule of Hua Guofeng. The Gang of Four represented the extreme left of the top ranks of the Communist Party, and Hua Guofeng carried on Mao’s policy of charting a middle course between the left and the right. This was reflected in his promise to “support whatever policy decisions were made by Chairman Mao,” and “unswervingly follow whatever instructions were given by Chairman Mao.” Deng Xiaoping had long been identified as a rightist within the party and rejected the “Whateverist” attitude of Hua Guofeng and his supporters.¹¹

When Deng came to power, he initiated the “reform and opening” policy meant to open China up to foreign investment and expand the role of the market relative to economic planning in the economy. This move was driven by China’s economic isolation following the Sino-Soviet split and followed a turn in foreign policy already made by Mao in 1972 towards collaboration with US imperialism in order to counter the Soviet Union’s influence. The reform and opening policy began with an initial attempt to establish more autonomy for urban enterprises and an attack on the power and benefits (known as the “iron rice bowl”) of urban workers in the state-owned enterprises. However, the significant power that urban workers held in the Chinese economy at this time, and their collective resistance, frustrated the assault on their wages and living standards and the reform was unable to proceed very far. After the initial frustration of urban reform, the Chinese leadership turned to rural reform. This took the form of smashing the rural People’s Communes which had organized collective farming, as well as the provision of healthcare and education and the construction of infrastructure, and their substitution with private farming under the Household Responsibility System. This was accomplished between 1980 and 1984, and the resulting decrease in social stability in the countryside created a pool of precarious workers whose desire for urban jobs put pressure on the existing urban workers, finally allowing the “iron rice bowl” to be smashed and urban reform to proceed.¹²

The turn away from the planned economy, the renunciation of class struggle, and the attempt to make China into a strong capitalist country were accompanied by shifts in ideology and the social role and self-perception of the intellectuals. In the preceding Cultural Revolution period, intellectuals, though still functionally important for the operation of society, had been culturally relegated to the status of “stinking old nine” at the bottom of the list of the “nine black categories,” because they were seen as hoarding knowledge and expertise and as a source of anti-revolutionary ideas.¹³ When the reform period opened, intellectuals saw an opportunity to regain their status as a leading element of society. This was the role that “scholar officials” had enjoyed in Imperial China, but they also echoed the May Fourth Enlightenment spirit of acting as a rejuvenating element in society, one that combated feudal backwardness (now projected onto the Mao period) and led the drive for modernization. Thus, the intellectuals’ renewed elite consciousness was tied to an oppositional posture towards what they saw as conservative elements in the Communist Party that were holding the reform process back, but was aligned to the overall policy of the party, which was to pursue market reform. 

This New Enlightenment trend began with the debate on Humanist Marxism launched by the deputy editor of People’s Daily, Wang Ruoshui, in 1980. Drawing on Polish, Yugoslav, and other Eastern European reappraisals of the young Marx’s humanism which had recently been published in China, Wang argued that Marx’s concept of alienation applied not only to capitalist society, but also to socialism. He justified this position with Mao’s argument that class struggles and contradictions continued under the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Mao, this was an argument for mass mobilization and a political assault on the party leadership in the Cultural Revolution to combat the remaining elements of class society in China, but using the concept of alienation Wang turned this argument against the Cultural Revolution and the political pressure by which the intellectuals felt oppressed. Wang held that the main source of alienation in socialist society was the “fetishism of politics” that reduced human nature to class nature and forced people to adhere strictly to particular political lines in all areas of intellectual life. This theory resonated with many intellectuals who resented their lack of independence and became a popular avenue for dissent. At a speech on the centenary of Marx’s death in 1983, literary theorist Zhou Yang repeated Wang’s arguments on socialist alienation, which ruffled feathers in the party bureaucracy, triggering the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of October 1983 to spring 1984. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign targeted Humanist Marxism alongside pornography as vices causing mental corruption. This campaign ended the main phase of the debate on Humanist Marxism. Though Wang Ruoshui continued to exchange polemics with Hu Qiaomu, the champion of the orthodox philosophical position, he was clearly on the defensive and losing ground. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign ironically had the effect of encouraging disgruntled intellectuals to abandon Marxism as the terrain on which to fight bureaucratism, and led them to adopt ideas more directly from the West.¹⁴

After the debate on Humanist Marxism and the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, the New Enlightenment movement moved further in the direction of a pro-Western liberalizing trend with increasingly radical horizons for opposition to the Communist Party. When the student demonstrations of 1989 broke out, the New Enlightenment intellectuals saw it as their chance to finally get the decisive modernization in the image of the West that they had so long desired, and they wholeheartedly supported the movement. At the time, Wang Hui was one of these New Enlightenment intellectuals, a research fellow at Tsinghua University, the institution at which he is now a professor in humanities and social studies affiliated with the Chinese Language and Literature department, and he participated in the movement. After the movement was suppressed on June 4, 1989, Wang went into exile in the poor and remote countryside of Shaanxi province in the northwest of China. This experience gave Wang an appreciation of the plight of China’s urban and especially rural poor and the way the new order that had come about since the initiation of the market reform process had failed them, and greatly influenced the direction of his later thinking.¹⁵

In a later essay on the 1989 social movement, Wang Hui claims that the Enlightenment liberalism of the New Enlightenment intellectuals blinded them to the nature and potentials of the 1989 social movement. Where they saw the movement as one that opposed the state but supported a deepening of the market reform process, Wang points to the social roots of the movement in the inequalities and insecurity caused by the market reform process itself. He writes that the outbreak of the movement was inextricably linked to the fruits of the urban reform process: the loss of benefits for urban workers, inflation caused by price reform in both the two-track system under which planned prices existed alongside market prices and to an even greater extent during the failed attempt to switch to market prices only in 1988, and the enrichment of a small group of capitalists who abused the two track price system and control (but not ownership) of state enterprises.¹⁶ Thus the 1989 social movement was “not only a legitimacy crisis in regard to the state that continued to maintain a number of features of economic planning, but a legitimacy crisis in regard to the state that was in transition to a market society.”¹⁷ Wang further asserts, scandalously for both liberal supporters of the movement and establishment opponents of it, that the movement had a socialist character and potential, because it was a reaction of the broad masses (mostly workers and students) to both the bureaucratic domination of the “socialist” state and the process of anti-socialist market reform that this state was pursuing, in defense of their own interests.¹⁸

The 1989 movement and its suppression caused some consternation within the state bureaucracy about the reform process and the speed at which it was proceeding. Those who already had qualms about the reform process saw Tiananmen as the inevitable result of the course the party leadership had taken. The softness General Secretary Zhao Ziyang had shown towards the movement and his discreditation in official circles gave them space to air their disagreements publicly. Deng Xiaoping saw these as attacks not only on Zhao Ziyang, who he replaced with Shanghai Party Secretary Jiang Zemin, but also on himself and the direction in which he had taken the party. Deng struggled with these critics for the next few years but eventually came out on top, consolidating support for his leadership and policies and announcing a new deepening of the reform process on his famous “Southern Tour” of the Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen and Zhuhai in early 1992.¹⁹

Wang Hui regards the suppression of the 1989 social movement and the launch of the Southern Tour as an interconnected sequence that reveals the relationship between neoliberalism and the repressive state. In his view, neoliberalism requires a state to secure property rights and structure the rules under which market competition proceeds, and it requires the making of policy that benefits a small segment of society at the expense of the vast majority. Therefore, when a state has reconciled itself to fulfilling these requirements and a movement emerges which delegitimizes this state, its suppression is compatible with the neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism also promotes the depoliticization of society because it prefers decisions to be made either by private actors or by undemocratic state and inter-state bodies rather than through mass politics, where the material interests of the majority may come into conflict with its doctrine of private accumulation. Thus, by demobilizing and depoliticizing society, the suppression of the 1989 social movement opened up space for Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour. By restricting the debate on China’s future to a narrow circle of party and state elites who would not themselves be negatively affected by reform and who had already reconciled themselves to it earlier, the violence employed on demonstrators ensured the further liberalization of Chinese society.²⁰

The aftermath of 1989 fractured the Chinese intellectual community and turned most of its members away from the New Enlightenment spirit of the 1980s. This development proceeded in stages, with different schools of thought emerging that processed the experience of the recent past in different ways.²¹ The first stage, from 1989 to 1993, was a turn towards conservatism, a rethinking of the radicalism of the 1980s which had taken as its models the revolutionary energies of May Fourth and the French Enlightenment. The new ideal of the intellectuals was no longer Rousseau but Burke. Key to this embrace of Anglo liberal-conservativism was a narrative about what had gone wrong in the 1989 movement and in the fall of the USSR and its allied governments in Eastern Europe. The new conservatism maintained the modernization paradigm of the New Enlightenment, in which the planned economy and socialist system were seen as backward, but it rejected radical or immediate programs of modernization as reflecting an immature intellectual consciousness that could be traced back to the French Revolution and held that such radicalism only ever resulted in social chaos and disruption.²²

Though this implied a less rushed economic transition, the ideological break with Marxism was more significant than in the New Enlightenment. Marx had been a radical democrat whose class politics were derived from his understanding of the proletariat as the only consistently revolutionary class that could carry out the democratic revolution in Permanenz and bring republican liberty into economic life through the cooperative organization of production.²³ Marxism in China had historically arisen in the radical student movement of 1919-1921. Despite its heterodoxy, this new outlook complemented the agenda of the party leadership, which was to contain the oppositional impulses of the intellectuals while continuing the market reform process.

The second stage, from 1993-1997, was marked by the opening of new debates on a variety of questions that led to further fragmentation of the intellectual scene and the proliferation of new political alignments, while opening the space that the New Left would soon come to occupy. Much of this discussion was driven by the further commercialization of Chinese society after Deng’s Southern Tour and the pressures intellectuals felt to market themselves to this commercial society. In “The Three Stages of Thought in the 1990s and Their Major Problems,” Wang Hui lists four debates from this period which he regards as the most consequential. These four debates were: 1.) discussion on the role of markets and civil society, 2.) discussion on institutional and theoretical innovation and state capacity, 3.) discussion on postmodernism and the humanistic spirit, and 4.) discussion on postcolonialism, nationalism and globalization. All of these debates opened up space for a critical left-wing perspective on the challenges facing Chinese society that was not simply the outlook of the conservative elements of the state bureaucracy. In their search for answers to these questions, critical intellectuals began reading and deploying the arguments and research of critical and left-wing scholars in the West. Many of the interventions in the debate occurred in the pages of the journal Dushu (Reading), edited by Wang Hui.²⁴ 

It was in the period after 1997 that the New Left, those thinkers who held a critical outlook on the neoliberal market reform and a desire for a democratic and egalitarian social order that was qualitatively different from the project of capitalist modernity, came into their own as a trend.²⁵ The triggers for the consolidation of this perspective are described by Wang Hui as including the East Asian financial crisis, which showed the fragility of the economic models of South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and the bombing of the Chinese embassy there, which raised consciousness of the destructive role of US imperialism on the world stage, the dispute over the terms of China’s entry into the WTO, and increasing unemployment, layoffs, and corruption. At the same time, many of the major texts of neoliberalism, such as the works of Friedrich Hayek, were being translated into Chinese and proponents of market reform were consolidating their neoliberal dogmatism and free market fundamentalism. 

The state was uncomfortable with both of these factions. It did not want to limit its own authority or abandon Communist Party rule, as some liberals advocated, or go so far on the economic front as the disastrous “shock therapy” applied to Russia and Eastern Europe, which was the logical end-point of the free market fundamentalist theory. Neither did it want to reverse the aspects of the reform process that the New Left criticized, such as the erosion of the power of China’s urban workers and rural poor and the destruction of the system of social guarantees and protections, and it was anxious to join the globalized economic order through the WTO, which required further economic concessions to capitalism. The New Left believed that the liberals did not have the interests of China’s vast majority at heart, while the liberals accused the New Left of being servants of the state because they opposed further marketization and advocated socialism as a political goal. The liberals also accused the New Left of neglecting the struggle for political freedom. To this accusation Wang Hui replies that the critical intellectuals have always been strong supporters of free speech and intellectual inquiry precisely because their social criticism ran against the economic and social goals of the state.²⁶

The New Left had theoretically heterogeneous influences and perspectives but were united in their opposition to the reckless marketization and advocacy of a social alternative to capitalism. Wang Hui is a scholar of early 20th century Chinese thinkers Lu Xun and Zhang Taiyan and has written a four-volume study on the Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, which undertakes an investigation of Chinese responses to the problems of modernity dating back to the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD). He is also influenced by Ferdinand Braudel’s longue durée historical analysis and understanding of the market, as well as the world-systems analysts like Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Samir Amin, who developed Braudel’s outlook into a comprehensive account of capitalist imperialism and the origins and functioning of the hierarchical global system.²⁷ Cui Zhiyuan, another leading New Leftist, is particularly influenced by analytical Marxism and critical legal studies in his writings on cooperative production and on property law, specifically the ideas of Brazilian critical legal theorist Roberto Unger, who has co-authored work with Cui.²⁸ Having explained the historical origins and context of the emergence of the Chinese New Left, I will now move to a more detailed appraisal of Wang Hui’s intellectual project, particularly his views on China’s 20th century revolutionary experience and on class and class struggle in contemporary China.

Wang Hui on Class, Revolution, and Socialism

The previous section dealt with the emergence of Wang Hui’s initial critique of neoliberalism and China’s market reform process. In this section, I will begin with an analysis of his more recent writings on China’s 20th century and his failure to theorize a re-emergence of class politics, which will be brought back to a discussion of the weaknesses of the earlier critique itself. One of Wang Hui’s most compelling insights is his writing on the “depoliticized politics” that have infected China since the beginning of the reform process and which it now has in common with the rest of the capitalist world. In his view, the Chinese Communist Party has become a managerial “state-party” comparable to the status quo parties of the capitalist parliamentary regimes. This means “both market and state are gradually neutralized or depoliticized, divisions over questions of development become technical disputes about market-adjustment mechanisms. Political divisions between labor and capital, left and right, are made to disappear.”²⁹ He contrasts this with China’s 20th century revolutionary experience stretching from the Xinhai revolution of 1911 to Mao’s death in 1976, in which the French and Russian revolutions served as political models for the most progressive elements of society. 

In particular, the Cultural Revolution is identified as the peak of this politicization process, with mass mobilization extending furthest and emancipatory possibilities seemingly most open. However, Wang also identifies the Cultural Revolution with the beginning of the process of depoliticization, since the lack of democracy in the party led the struggle over political lines to morph into highly personalized faction fights and the disorganized character of the popular mobilizations led to needless violence and infighting. The category of class lost its emancipatory political connotation and became a static category used to slander opponents for their bad family background.³⁰

Wang has elaborated on the conditions within which the 20th century revolutionary politicization of society was possible in China and the rest of the world, particularly the colonial and semi-colonial countries, in a recent two-part essay titled “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction.”³¹ In the first part of the essay, he traces the trajectory of what he calls the revolutionary “short twentieth century.” He relates this concept to Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century, which describes the cycle of capital accumulation that brought the United States to geopolitical dominance in that century as the latest in a series of cycles of capital accumulation led by a hegemonic dominant state since the “long 16th century,” in which the accumulation cycle was led by the Republic of Genoa.³² However, Wang does not himself employ this sort of extended historical perspective. His “short twentieth century” is an adaptation of Eric Hobsbawm’s use of the concept in The Age of Extremes.³³ 

Hobsbawm divides the short 20th century into three stages. The first stage is the “age of catastrophe” from 1914-1945, in which a 19th century European civilization that had maintained relative continental peace but spread devastation throughout the colonial world turned its destructive powers inward. The second was a “golden age” from 1945-1973, in which the two forces that had destroyed fascism: liberalism and communism, coexisted uncomfortably and created a new form of civilization that provided social stability (in the forms of social democracy in Western Europe and state socialism in Eastern Europe) and opportunities for independence and development in the former colonial world. Finally, in the “age of dissolution” from 1973-1991, the achievements of the golden age were fragmented and thrown to the winds of free market fundamentalism and new forms of irrationalism came to intellectual prominence. The process of dissolution culminated in the collapse of the USSR in 1991. For Hobsbawm “it is not an accident that the history of the Short Twentieth Century… virtually coincides with the lifetime of the state born of the October revolution,”³⁴ but as Wang Hui notes, China is highly peripheral to the narrative.³⁵ Even insofar as the framework is a Eurocentric one, other parts of the non-European world, such as Latin America, are paid closer attention. Hobsbawm’s limited discussion of China is prone to factual inaccuracy, as with his claim that Mao “virtually abolished all higher education” during the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966-1976,³⁶ a gross exaggeration of the fact that the universities were briefly shuttered during the mass mobilization phase of the Cultural Revolution and that higher education entrance exams were abolished in this period because they were seen as restricting higher education to privileged sections of society.³⁷

Wang reframes the short 20th century around China’s revolutionary experience by recounting the process by which the national liberation struggles of the colonial and semi-colonial world were able to be inflected with the goals of socialism as it had developed in the European workers’ movement. He takes up Lenin’s concept of the “weakest link” of the imperialist system and credits Mao with having exemplified the tactical flexibility implied by this concept. Mao’s “Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” “proceeded from the specificity of China.”³⁸ It identified five conditions that allowed the establishment of red political power, i.e. sovereignty, in the red base areas prior to a seizure of power in China as a whole. The first condition was that China was neither an imperialist country nor a colonial country directly ruled by an imperialist power and that there was “war within the White regime,” so the various counter-revolutionary forces were divided and unable to mount a unified offensive against the Communists.³⁹

The implication of this analysis of the revolutionary short 20th century is that the future of revolutionary politics relies on a similar tactical flexibility and openness to the potentials of a given situation. The 20th century exhibited a close bond between theory and practice, with theory illuminating potential openings for revolutionary practice and the experience of revolution opening new theoretical horizons. However, the “decline of the twentieth century is also expressed in the process by which the organic relationship between totalizing theory and concrete practice was gradually dissolved” so one can no longer pick up where the 20th century left off.⁴⁰ This part of the essay ends on the very indeterminate note: “In the final analysis, we are therefore compelled to ask: Where lies the new moment?”⁴¹ The second part of the essay reconsiders China’s 20th century from a temporal rather than spatial angle and does not concern itself with identifying this “new moment.”

Wang Hui has elaborated on the “new moment” in his book China’s Twentieth Century, published by Verso in 2016.⁴² The essay “Two Kinds of New Poor and Their Future: The Decline and Reconfiguration of Class Politics and the Politics of the New Poor” in the book builds on the theme of depoliticization described above, but does so with more attention paid to specific sections of the contemporary Chinese working class and their level of political consciousness. In this essay, Wang discusses the emergence of two distinct social strata, the “new workers,” who spend most of their time living and working in urban areas but technically retain rural household registrations and are not entitled to the same benefits as those who are considered permanent urban residents, and the “new poor” who have some level of education and do not perform manual labor but are not paid very well and generally feel excluded from the trappings of consumer society. The “new workers” sometimes engage in temporary strikes or rebellions but are rarely involved in broader social debates and movements, while the “new poor” are very active on social media and in tune with political trends, but do not engage in the same sort of actions. Due to the decline of socialism and the depoliticization of politics, neither of these strata think of themselves as engaged in class struggle.⁴³

So far, this is an interesting analysis of the social conditions of disparate sections of a politically fragmented and demobilized Chinese working class. However, from this description of the decline of class struggle politics and of these class fractions, Wang Hui does not proceed to outline the conditions under which working class consciousness could re-emerge. Instead, he writes:

“Repoliticizing” is thus a necessary choice, but how and on what foundation? The liberal category of the “end of history” and the radicals’ “empire” and “multitude,” in spite of clearly opposing each other on the dividing line of left versus right, share in their negation of class as a possible foundation for a new politics. Thus the question of today is different from that of the past: In this age of flourishing new social movements, can a new politics be built on the category of class? Here the real challenge is not that of simply replacing the struggle for legal justice with one for political justice or dogmatically reaffirming the leading position of the working class, nor of finding a way to link legal justice and political justice, but of redefining the concept of political justice.⁴⁴

So after the depoliticization of class, repoliticization is necessary, but this repoliticization is not necessarily a repoliticization of class, rather a redefinition of “political justice.” Thus, the attention is quickly shifted from the problems of the class subjectivity of the different strata of China’s working class to a purely intellectual task of redefining political justice. The next two essays in the collection, “Three Concepts of Equality” and “The Equality of All Things and Trans-Systemic Society” deal with this redefinition of the concept of political justice, but they do not relate it back to the problem of class formation. “Three Concepts of Equality” surveys different theorizations of the concept of equality and places special emphasis on forms of workplace democracy.⁴⁵ This seems like it could be related to the problem of class, but crucially these measures are not described as gains that could be conquered by a politicized class in line with the dictum that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,” but as ways to realize a principle of equality abstracted from class struggle.⁴⁶ “The Equality of All Things and Trans-Systemic Society” primarily deals with questions of ethnic politics and international relations and also fails to return to the problems posed in “Two Kinds of New Poor and Their Future: The Decline and Reconfiguration of Class Politics and the Politics of the New Poor.”⁴⁷

Wang Hui’s willingness to abandon class struggle as the key concept for emancipatory politics is perhaps related to his highly subjectivist definition of class and his highly contingent account of its politicization in the first place. As noted above, Wang Hui is critical of the static frame of class utilized to smear opponents in the Cultural Revolution and he emphasizes the politicized nature of class in China’s revolutionary 20th century, in which the class consciousness of the proletariat was something that could be embodied in peasants and intellectuals as easily as in workers. Viren Murthy has commented on this weakness in Wang Hui’s understanding of class: 

There is potentially a danger in Wang’s analysis. Marxism recognizes class struggle as both subjective and objective. It is of course possible for people who are not of the working class to sympathize with and participate in a revolutionary working-class movement. However, this does not imply that class-in-itself disappears based on subjective changes. If it did, one would be left with the question, “what are we struggling for or against?” Subjectivity must be understood as one moment in a larger project to transform the conditions in which class-in-itself and for-itself emerge.⁴⁸

A class-in-itself is a class as it is defined by its relationship to the ownership of the means of production and in the division of social labor. A class-for-itself is a class politically conscious of its own position and pursuing its own interests in the most advanced possible way. For the working class this means going beyond the economic struggle to the political struggle for the seizure of state power, which it uses to introduce socialism and abolish class distinctions generally. I believe the danger Murthy describes is not only potential, but one that has been realized. Class is not important to Wang Hui because it is the dynamic that must necessarily be politicized in order to transcend capitalism. It is only important insofar as it is the dynamic that was politicized in a revolutionary way during the 20th century. In the present, the “new moment” or emancipatory dynamic could be anything else. This leaves his politics unmoored. They are indeed flexible, but they are also open to cooptation. This has important implications for Wang Hui’s orientation towards the Xi Jinping administration and its “passively revolutionary” partial retreat from neoliberalism.

Wang Hui’s subjectivist theory of class is counterposed to the “bloodline” theory of class advanced in the Cultural Revolution, usually by the more conservative Red Guard groups. The bloodline theory is summed up in the phrase “from a revolutionary father a hero, from a reactionary father a bastard.”⁴⁹ This was a static and conservative view of class because the leaders and bureaucrats in the People’s Republic at this time were those who had been revolutionaries in the past and they were often from class backgrounds considered good: workers or poor peasants. This category of class had nothing to do with their position in the new society that had been built after the revolution. The subjectivist theory of class that Wang Hui subscribes to has more in common with that advanced by the more revolutionary Red Guard groups, who referred to class in terms of the “bourgeois” or “proletarian” political line that someone was following. There is good reason to prefer this conception of class, since it encourages conflict to occur over political lines rather than someone’s personal background, which leads to depoliticizing personalized conflict and the targeting of individuals. 

These are not the only options, though. Both the bloodline theory of class and the subjectivist theory of class were turned to in the Cultural Revolution because the competing factions were using the class categories of pre-capitalist and capitalist society in a conflict occurring in a new society that had a different social structure from both. Therefore, the categories of landlord and poor peasant, bourgeois and proletarian, couldn’t refer to any classes actually existing in Chinese society at the time. New categories were not developed for the new situation. However, since the market reform process has reintroduced capitalist class dynamics to Chinese society, it is now possible to base an understanding of class on the relationship of groups in society to ownership of the means of production and their position in the social division of labor, and to justify working class politics on the basis of the interests of this class in capitalist society.

Class politics are necessary because capitalism is a form of class society akin to other class societies such as feudalism or the tributary mode of production, in which a ruling class monopolizes the social surplus and exploits one or more toiling classes, also controlling the state as a means to preserve its position.⁵⁰ Capitalism is a particular form of class society in which members of the ruling class privately own a decisive share of the means of production and employ workers as wage laborers in order to privately accumulate wealth. This dynamic of private accumulation drives the accumulation of capital as seen from the perspective of the system as a whole. The capitalists, then, are defined by their ownership of the means of production, either as individuals or as shareholders on the boards of joint stock companies and other derivative legal forms. The working class, or proletariat, is defined by its dependence of the social wage, either through direct employment as wage laborers, or through systems of social support such as welfare, pensions, and unemployment insurance, or through dependence on the wage earning of another household member, as in the case of housewives and working class children. The various “middle strata” derive the bulk of their means of existence from ownership of petty property or from restrictive skill monopolies, as in the case of professionals such as doctors, lawyers, professors, and high-level state functionaries. Because they fall between the ruling class and the proletariat, these middle strata are torn between the interests of the two main classes. When they attempt to assert their own interests, it always takes the form of an attempt at a reactionary restoration of pre-capitalist society. 

Since it is a subordinate class in capitalism, but “free in the double sense” from both the ownership of any property from which it can derive a living income as well as the bonds of slavery, serfdom, or comparable despotic institutions, the working class has both the opportunity and the need to organize collectively in trade unions, cooperatives, and collectivist political parties to pursue its interests.⁵¹ This collective, voluntary, democratic organization poses the possibility for a reorganization of the whole of society in a cooperative commonwealth along similar lines. Such a reorganization opens up the possibility for complete human emancipation, since the means of production will be owned collectively and the social surplus will be utilized according to a democratic plan. No class in society will be able to monopolize either. Thus “the emancipation of the class of producers is that of all human beings, without distinction of sex or race” because the ideology of the working class movement derived from its forms of collective organizations is one of social equality and democracy, and because championing the struggle against other forms of social oppression: national, racial, gender, etc. allows for the greatest possible unity of the working class in its confrontation with the capitalist class.⁵² The aims of the working class as a class-for-itself are closely tied to its nature as class-in-itself within capitalist society. Its existence provides the real basis for emancipatory politics. Attempts to refound such a politics on any other basis will either collapse into the reactionary utopias of the middle strata or amount to tweaks to the existing system compatible with the continued rule of the capitalist class.⁵³

Wang Hui is not the first socialist who has despaired at the prospects of class struggle and opened themself up to the gamut of possible social forces as agents of socialism. Ellen Meiskins Wood’s 1986 book The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism criticizes those who at that time were abandoning their Marxist commitments to the working class as the leading force for socialism and were attempting to theorize socialist politics on the basis of the “new social movements” or on discursively constructed non-class subjects motivated by radical democracy (surely an essential working class goal, but a class goal). Wood intentionally likens these socialists to the pre-Marxist ‘True Socialists’ who “believe[d] with the philosophers that all real cleavages are caused by conceptual cleavages.”⁵⁴ It is appropriate to compare Wang Hui to the New True Socialists, precisely because they did still frame their project in terms of socialism and socialist politics, though many soon abandoned this pretense after the “end of history” arrived with the fall of the USSR in 1991. Many were adherents to the Eurocommunist trend in the official communist parties or were in some way associated with the British Labour Party. In any case, after decoupling their politics from class, even if initially to pose “Left,” they all inevitably drifted rightwards, as the realities of a politics of ‘discursive construction’ when “[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” caught up to them.⁵⁵ In the case of Paul Hirst, Wood notes with irony his transit “from Maoism to right-wing Labourism.”⁵⁶ Wood’s critique of the New True Socialism shows the vulnerability of a socialist politics not grounded in the interests of a definite social class to be pulled in the direction of whatever is “happening” as long as it can be construed as progressive.

Since the argument that emancipatory politics must necessarily take the form of working class politics bases itself on an analysis of capitalist society and the classes that exist within it, it may be possible to understand why Wang Hui doesn’t see the transformation of the working class into a class-for-itself as the necessary vector of repoliticization by returning to his outlook on the Chinese Revolution and its enduring legacy. When Wang Hui speaks of the necessity of recovering the legacy of the Chinese Revolution, he often invokes its historical legacy and lasting features in Chinese society as resources that can still be drawn upon for progressive purposes in the present. For example, he asks “In what sense must Chinese society, in its struggle for equality, defend and extend the socialist constitution and its system of rights?”⁵⁷ In the interview I conducted with Wang in November 2021, I asked him about the conflict over the legacy of the 20th century in Chinese society and in his answer he said “what I mean is not necessarily a repeat of that 20th century, the violent class struggles and so on, the war — not necessary.”⁵⁸ This approach bears a similarity to that of the late Egyptian Marxist and world-systems analyst Samir Amin as laid out in his paper “China 2013,” the acknowledgements of which credit Wang Hui.⁵⁹

Samir Amin holds that the absence of formal private property in land in China, though it still circulates on a market as a right to use, “absolutely prevents us from characterizing contemporary China (even in 2013) as ‘capitalist’ because the capitalist road is based on the transformation of land into a commodity.”⁶⁰ While, for Amin, China is not capitalist, “the fact that the Chinese project is not capitalist does not mean that it ‘is’ socialist, only that it makes it possible to advance on the long road to socialism. Nevertheless, it is also still threatened with a drift that moves it off that road and ends up with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism.”⁶¹ We can parse further political implications from this. It is possible for every capitalist society to “advance on the long road to socialism,” that is the goal of socialists in every country, but the ruling class in capitalist society is opposed to socialism because it runs counter to its class interests. Thus, for such societies to advance down this “long road” it is necessary for the proletariat, which has an interest in socialism, to take state power and become the ruling class. If there is a difference between China and the capitalist societies in terms of their ability to advance to socialism, then it must be because the working class retains a level of social power through the legacy of the revolution and features like the state ownership of land that makes it unnecessary for it to wage the same sort of class struggle for power that it must in capitalist societies. 

In my interview with him, I asked Wang Hui about this approach of Samir Amin, and he called it “insightful,” and discussed some of the utilities of the continued state ownership of land for the Chinese government and economy. He said that ten years ago he would have expected the reform process to culminate in the full privatization of land, but that now state ownership is seen as essential and any future policy changes will occur within the existing framework.⁵⁸ If the state ownership of land is seen as a key bulwark against capitalism, then it is not one that is immediately threatened at the present time. However, I am skeptical that the state ownership of land is so unambiguously opposed to capitalism. In the United States, the federal government owns 28% of all land and this is in no way opposed to capitalism.⁶² Lenin, in his writings on the agrarian question, characterized land nationalization as a measure that would ensure the freest development of capitalism with the fewest feudal hangovers, and it was what distinguished the “American path” Lenin advocated from the “Prussian path,” a capitalism all the more oppressive to the peasant because it would preserve the power of the landowners. It would also hold back the development of agriculture. Lenin predicted this “Prussian path” would result from the limited Stolypin reforms or from land municipalization. If the “American path” were followed, land nationalization would establish the central government as the collective landlord. A democratic state could be expected to place a less heavy burden on the peasant in the form of taxes than private landlords would in the form of rent, and it would not engage in the same sort of arbitrary petty tyranny.⁶³

If contemporary China’s agrarian policy is fundamentally non-capitalist, what of decollectivization and the dismantling of the rural People’s Communes? For his part, Wang Hui characterizes the early rural reform carried out from 1980 to 1984 as “based on the experience of traditional Chinese land distribution and the principle of equality” which meant “negation of the state monopoly that characterized the commune system in favor of the forms of ‘small farmer socialism.’”⁶⁴ Wang contrasts this relative egalitarianism of the early rural reform to the inequality produced by the urban reform and attributes the later rural crises that led to the emergence of the “floating population” of migrant workers to the initiation of the urban rather than the rural reform.³⁴ In From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty, Zhun Xu criticizes the view that the rural reform was the good reform and that problems only began with the subsequent launch of the urban reform. Xu points out that the provision of healthcare and education and the building of infrastructure in the rural areas were all tied to the People’s Commune system and that decollectivization greatly set back rural China in these spheres.⁶⁵ In The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village, Dongping Han documents the sharp drop in numbers of schools and teachers that accompanied the process.⁶⁶ 

The fact of Wang Hui’s positive attitude towards the early rural reform raises the question of his somewhat ambiguous usage of the concept of socialism. His reference to the principle of equality in the reallocation of land strikes a somewhat distributist tone that matches other instances of his usage of the term. For example, in the essay on the 1989 social movement in China’s New Order, he defines the socialist impulses of the demonstrators as consisting of a “movement for social security that developed out of that system of state monopoly and the expansion of the market system, characterized by its opposition to monopoly and its demands for social democracy.”⁶⁷ In some places, Wang makes positive reference to Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,”⁶⁸ but in others, he calls his positive proposal a “social market” society defined by “a mixed system with the participation of ordinary citizens at its core (that is, a tripartite arrangement among the state, elites, and the common people).”⁶⁹ By contrast with the most extreme neoliberal ideology of the 1990s and 2000s, such a modest proposal could perhaps appear radical, but in a time of global crisis for neoliberalism, in which it faces harsh critics from nearly all corners, and the Chinese government has made a partial retreat from its nostrums, such a low horizon can easily be reached, and with the retreat from class performed, it no longer matters who carries it out. The ground for Wang Hui’s project to be defanged and for his role as purveyor of Left gloss for official policy has been set. I will now move to discuss his political position with respect to the current administration and its policies.

The Critique of Neoliberalism and the Xi Jinping Era

On November 11, 2021 the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted a resolution on “The Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century.” This is the third resolution on its own history that the party has adopted. The first was in 1945 at the end of the War of Resistance Against Japan and the second was in 1981, repudiating the Cultural Revolution and affirming Deng Xiaoping’s reform program. The third historical resolution identifies the period since the 18th Party congress in 2012, when Xi Jinping was identified as the party’s “core” leader, as a “new era.” The identification of this period as a new era is no doubt tied to China’s emergence in this period as a serious challenger to the United States on the world stage, but the resolution also identifies it with changes in domestic development strategy that amount to a notable but not total corrective to the neoliberal direction of policy in the post-reform period. It states: 

The principal contradiction facing Chinese society in the new era is that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life, and the Party must therefore remain committed to a people-centered philosophy of development, develop whole-process people’s democracy, and make more notable and substantive progress toward achieving well-rounded human development and common prosperity for all.⁷⁰

This change in outlook has been followed by new policies such as the targeted poverty alleviation campaign, the anti-corruption campaign, and the Belt and Road Initiative. 

The targeted poverty alleviation campaign was launched in 2013 and in 2015 the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2020 was set, with Xi Jinping claiming victory in early 2021. The poverty alleviation in this campaign is “targeted” because it was aimed at the 98.99 million mostly rural people who fell under the line of extreme, “absolute” poverty.⁷¹ The measure for absolute poverty in China was set at 4,000 yuan a year or $1.69 a day, which falls in a similar range to the United Nations’ $1.25 definition and the World Bank’s $1.90 standard.⁷² In Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, John Smith criticizes these poverty standards as propaganda instruments for global capitalism, since they are set very low and are based on monetary income rather than holistic assessments of standards of living. Therefore, in countries experiencing urbanization and peasant proletarianization, millions of people appear to be “lifted out of poverty,” when they have really only shifted from being peasants to proletarians, with a higher share of their means of consumption taking the form of commodities paid for with money wages. Their standards of living may have improved relatively, but fundamentally they have only shifted from one class of the poor to another.⁷³ The practical measures involved in the targeted poverty reduction campaign included the relocation of remote villages and the provision of improved healthcare and education.⁷⁴ Nearly 1.6 trillion yuan, or $246 billion, were spent in the campaign.⁷⁵

The anti-corruption campaign was launched by Xi Jinping in late 2012 and it has gone much further than previous anti-corruption drives undertaken since the beginning of the reform period, taking down “high-ranking cadres in Party and military such as Zhou Yongkang, Ling Jihua, Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou.”⁷⁶ Recently, it has taken aim at relations between Party officials and the Ant finance group owned by Jack Ma (Ma Yun), the founder and former head of Alibaba and one of China’s wealthiest individuals.⁷⁷ There has been much debate over the nature of the anti-corruption drive as either a cynical move on Xi Jinping’s part to consolidate power or a genuine response to the real problem of corruption.⁷⁸ No doubt, as with most political initiatives, there is a mix of different motivations involved. 

What makes the anti-corruption drive relevant to this discussion is that it represents itself as a break with a phenomenon that has been the regular mode of operation for the party and state elite since the beginning of the reform process. As Wang Hui puts it: “Under the guise of introducing free markets, neoliberalism has engaged in a planned partition of society that has resulted in large-scale corruption and social polarization.”⁷⁹ To state an egregious example, in “Restructuring and the Historical Fate of China’s Working Class: An Investigation Into the Tongyu Textile Group of Jiangsu,” Wang describes the process of the privatization of a textile enterprise in his home town of Yangzhou in Jiangsu province. The enterprise was founded as a locally state-run enterprise in 1958 and converted to collective ownership in 1962. Then in 1999 it was reconverted to a state-owned enterprise. The workers submitted a plan for an employee buyout to return it to collective status, but this was rejected and instead its assets were undervalued and it was sold to private investors, who then profited by selling them off for their actual market value.⁸⁰ This was not an exception, but the modus operandi of neoliberal reform. Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive is an important way he can identify himself as containing and retreating from the excesses of the neoliberal reform process. Regardless of its motivations, an anti-corruption drive does not in itself signal any sort of break with capitalism. Even if there were no cynical motivations, and the goal were simply to establish a normal and smooth functioning system of accumulation after decades of outright expropriation of publicly owned resources, it still would not signal the end or easement of the exploitation of Chinese working people.

The Belt and Road Initiative has defined Chinese foreign policy in the new Xi Jinping era. The project, announced in 2013, is framed around a “renaissance of the ancient trade and cultural exchange systems” in the silk road region of Central and Western Asia and in the regions making up the Indian Ocean trade network in Africa and South and Southeast Asia.⁸¹ The initiative involves the creation of Overseas Economic and Trade Cooperation Zones (OETCZ) in countries in these areas with Chinese financial backing. There are six categories of OETCZs: processing and manufacturing, resources utilization, agricultural development, trade and logistics, and comprehensive industry.⁸² As mentioned, beyond the straightforward economic goals of the Belt and Road Initiative, there is a political and “civilizational” aspect as well. While, since 1978, China has aimed to benefit by integrating itself into a capitalist world-economy dominated by the West, the Belt and Road Initiative represents an attempt by China itself to “go global,” creating and leading its own international trade system. The civilizational aspect involves appeals to the great past of the countries and regions involved in the network and their statuses as the leading lights of civilization at a time when Europe was just a backwater, as well as a long history of economic and cultural intercourse between these civilizations.

Wang Hui sees significant potential in the Belt and Road Initiative and believes it must take on a socialist character to succeed.

“One Belt One Road” is bound to be a long process of reforming the capitalist economic model, and it is necessarily a process of connecting historical civilizations and socialism. The reason for talking about historical civilization is that the four key concepts of this new plan, namely roads, belts, corridors, and bridges, are the bonds of the trans-systemic social systems or historical civilizations of Asia. I say that this project must have socialist characteristics because if it cannot overcome the logic of capitalism’s control of this broad and complicated network, this plan will inevitably lead to failure and retaliation.⁸³

Since Wang doesn’t see the class struggle as the essential “new moment” for politicization and he regards the 20th century revolutionary experience as a resource that can be drawn on by the present government, it can be possible for the same apparatus that was possessed by neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s to carry out a foreign policy premised on “connecting historical civilizations and socialism,” without a significant change in the class that rules the society. Wang Hui regards present Chinese foreign policy as progressive in other ways too. In my interview with him, Wang raised the example of China’s vaccine internationalism, the provision of a significant percentage of its domestically produced Covid-19 vaccines to other countries in the global south through donations and exports, as an example of the enduring legacy of 20th century Third World solidarity as embodied in the 1955 Bandung Conference, in which China participated.⁸⁴

Wang Hui’s recent writing on China’s Covid-19 containment policy is also significant in this respect. In his essay “The Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory: Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday,” Wang draws on Gramsci, Lenin, Mao, Vera Zasulich, Leon Trotsky, Li Dazhao, and Lu Xun to theorize the nature of revolutionary leadership and the “revolutionary personality.” He writes that he does not wish to revive the cult of personality or overemphasize the role of the individual, “but rather to provide inspiration and motivation for political innovation and action.” What is curious in this article is that Wang provides a positive present day reference point for this “inspiration and motivation for political innovation and action” in the Chinese government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the process of fighting against the coronavirus, the Communist Party of China made a striking appeal to this tradition, characterizing the fight against the epidemic as “a people’s war, an total war, a defensive war.”… in the 21st century, when the epidemic prompted full national mobilization, political parties once again resorted to the model of people’s war, creating a new type of vertical and horizontal social mobilization.⁸⁵

Wang qualifies this invocation of the people’s war, writing that the Covid-19 mobilization only had the defeat of the virus as its goal; it did not set out to “generate new political subjects” like the people’s wars of the 20th century.⁴¹ However, the possibility for it to be politicized is posed and it is within the framework of the present day Chinese state with its revolutionary legacy that such a repoliticization is possible.

This essay elicited two harsh online responses from the liberal writer Rong Jian. The first essay, “What Does the ‘Philosophy of Victory’ of the Revolutionary Mean? Criticizing Wang Hui’s ‘Revolutionary Personality’ and ‘Philosophy of Victory’,” accuses Wang of attempting to revive a concept of messianic leadership that people are now too wise for after the tragedies of the 20th century.⁸⁶ The second, “Wang Hui’s ‘Heidegger Moment?’” makes the much more inflammatory claim that Wang Hui’s rapprochement with the Chinese Communist Party’s policy is equivalent to Martin Heidegger’s Nazi Party membership.⁸⁷ These responses grossly misread Wang’s essay and are intended to score cheap political points. They amount to nothing more than the accusation that the liberals have always thrown at the New Left, that they are too close to the state because they advocate socialism. 

However, there is a shift in tone in Wang’s essay that is worth noting. In the 1990s and 2000s, Wang opposed his vision to the neoliberal policy of the state elite and counterposed the positive aspects of the 20th century revolutionary experience to present day depoliticization, inequality, and disempowerment of China’s urban workers and rural poor. The “Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory” essay and Wang‘s writings on the Belt and Road Initiative instead posit the Chinese Communist Party’s present day policy as a vector of mobilization and possible repoliticization on the one hand, and of a global connection between “historical civilizations and socialism” on the other. The ease with which this shift in tone occurred following the partial retreat from neoliberalism detailed above is connected to the nature of Wang’s original critique of neoliberalism. Wang conceived of neoliberalism as a reckless marketizing trend that had come into dominance in state and society and threatened the positive legacies of the Chinese Revolution and the interests of the Chinese masses, but the presence of these legacies as resources always left the possibility that the state leadership could instead embrace the “social market” system with its “tripartite arrangement among the state, elites, and the common people.”

 Since Xi Jinping has made moves that can be interpreted as pointing in the direction of such an arrangement, present policy doesn’t need to be the subject of harsh criticism, only of pushing in the direction of repoliticization. It matters not that it isn’t the Chinese working class driving these developments, since class isn’t the necessary vector of repoliticization, and the present policy can be progressive even when accompanied by harsh repression against labor militancy.⁸⁸ Wang Hui’s critique of the 1980s New Enlightenment movement was that it perceived itself as oppositional and critical, but misrecognized the direction of the times and ended up feeding into the self-serving agenda of the state elite. Three decades after 1989, in a changed world political environment, Wang has wound up in the same position as those he once criticized.

However, if Xi Jinping’s partial retreat from neoliberalism isn’t actually progressive, then how should it be understood? Yueran Zhang suggests that it is in part a response to the Chongqing Model advanced by Bo Xilai, the municipal Communist Party secretary in the southwestern city of Chongqing, from 2007 to 2012. The Chongqing Model was widely hailed by the international Left at the time and involved the prosecution of corrupt officials, very public methods in the collection of unpaid property taxes from wealthy residents, and mass rallies where revolutionary iconography was displayed and “red songs” from the Mao period were sung. Zhang considers much of this performative, meant to enhance the personal prestige of Bo Xilai, but the model did open up some space for genuinely militant independent political action from workers in the city, as with the 2008 taxi drivers strike, which Bo Xilai actively supported and encouraged. The Chongqing Model came crashing down in March 2012, when Bo was sentenced to life imprisonment on corruption charges. 

Yeuran Zhang argues that Xi Jinping has borrowed from the mass mobilization techniques pioneered by the Chongqing Model, but without the room for independent militancy as in the 2008 taxi drivers strike.⁸⁹ Therefore, Xi Jinping has carried out a “passive revolution” in Gramsci’s sense. Zhang describes the concept.

…when the political establishment faces a formidable challenge based on grassroots popular mobilisation, those trying to defend the establishment tend to not completely extinguish this challenging force. Instead, they selectively absorb and incorporate some elements of the insurrectionary challenge to make the status quo more resilient, while firmly rejecting those features that are most subversive and threatening.⁹⁰

To return to Wang Hui, Wang seems to have accepted this passive revolution as suitable ground for the re-emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. If this is the case, his project will need to somehow overcome the function of passive revolution in shoring up the authority of the ruling class. Accomplishing this will require promoting the message of class struggle. The degree to which China’s workers exercise meaningful control over their conditions of existence is the irreplaceable standard for socialism. This requires a conception of the class-in-itself, the real social group defined by the economic system whose degree of power one is interested in, as well as the class-for-itself, the politicized form the class takes to accomplish its socialist objectives.

Conclusion

Inquiry into the nature of the Chinese social formation, its ruling party, and its role in the world-system has recently taken on increased significance for the international socialist movement. China is home to the world’s largest nationally organized working class and has a monumental history of revolutionary experience in the 20th century that enjoys a much greater lasting legacy and contemporary social relevance than in other countries that experienced revolutions led by socialists in that century. The Chinese state has also emerged as a major, indeed the main, challenger to the United States on a geopolitical scale. As US global hegemony declines and China, though still far behind in military terms, appears to be the only viable successor who could possibly dominate and set the rules of the international capitalist state system, socialists outside of China have increasingly had to assess the Chinese social formation and determine what the consequences of the rise of present-day China will be for the international working class movement.

Some straightforwardly welcome the rise of China. For them, the strengthening of a country governed by a Communist Party that successfully defeated imperialism’s grip over its society in the post-World War II revolutionary wave couldn’t be anything other than a boon to progressive forces around the world. Alongside the old official communist parties, for many of which an orientation towards China has replaced past allegiance to the Soviet Union, new groups have emerged that take this position, often organized as online media platforms. Among these are Friends of Socialist China, which describes itself as “[a] platform based on supporting the People’s Republic of China and spreading understanding of Chinese socialism” and lists various left-wing intellectuals and leaders of Left groups on its advisory board, and the Qiao Collective, a “diaspora Chinese media collective challenging U.S. aggression on China.”⁹¹

The US-based independent socialist magazine Monthly Review has a long history of sympathy for the Chinese Revolution going back to its origins in 1949, prior to the Sino-Soviet split.⁹² In the 1960s, it championed the rejuvenating force of the Cultural Revolution as against the sclerotic Soviet model of socialism. After Mao’s death and the demonization of the “Cultural Revolution Decade” in China, its press became a leading outlet for critical Marxist perspectives on the new direction of Chinese society. However, it has more recently also been willing to publish outlooks more sympathetic to the present-day Chinese model, especially the new direction of the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Xi Jinping. The July-August 2021 issue of Monthly Review was dedicated to covering the “New Cold War on China.” It included an article from the Qiao Collective titled “Can the Chinese Diaspora Speak?” alongside interesting analyses from Minqi Li and others.⁹³ The editorial declared: “Today, the Chinese Revolution remains in statu nascendi, the period of its birth, its future still to be determined.”⁹⁴

For others, such talk is absurd. The Chinese Revolution is over and contemporary China is a capitalist power not substantially different from the United States. This is the basic stance of the Taiwan-based New Bloom Magazine and the Hong Kong-based Lausan collective. Writing in Made in China Journal and taking a somewhat unique tack, Fabio Lanza disagrees with those who see the Chinese model as an alternative to capitalism, but thinks it can be seen as an alternative to neoliberalism.⁹⁵

In the international socialist movement, the present intense attention to the character of Chinese society has been driven by recent geopolitical developments such as the emergence of a New Cold War mentality in sections of the US ruling class, alongside headline-grabbing developments internal to China, such as Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption and targeted poverty alleviation campaigns. However, inside China there have been left-wing thinkers grappling with the new order that came into being with Deng Xiaoping and his successors’ reform and opening policies (started in the late 1970s) since the mid-1990s. These thinkers are known as the Chinese New Left, a name that originated as an insult intended to associate them with the ultra-leftism of the Cultural Revolution period, but which has come into general use. Unlike other trends in contemporary Chinese thought, the New Left opposes capitalism in favor of a democratic and egalitarian social order, drawing on analytical Marxism, world-systems analysis, and other Western academic trends. Leading thinkers of the New Left include Cui Zhiyuan and, of course, Wang Hui.

Wang’s critique of the “depoliticized politics” of contemporary capitalist society is incredibly useful for understanding not just China, but the political dynamics of the rest of the capitalist world, and his writing on the 1989 social movement, China’s 20th century, and the long Chinese intellectual tradition all brim with profound insights. However, his earlier writings were written at a time when an extreme neoliberal ideology reigned supreme and had few challengers besides a handful of critical intellectual voices, the anti-globalization movements, and the emerging Pink Tide in Latin America. His writings, therefore, criticize neoliberalism as an ideological phenomenon and see China as a society threatened by a reckless marketizing trend, rather than as a state already captured by the capitalist class, but which is forced to maintain limited aspects of the socialist legacy to maintain popular legitimacy. He is also afflicted by the general “retreat from class” that has accompanied the global defeat of the socialist movement in the past few decades. Thus, class struggle does not occupy the central place in his thinking about the path to a democratic and egalitarian future for China and instead more muddled concepts of social struggles and new ways of thinking are substituted. To the degree that he does use the categories of class and class struggle, they are almost entirely subjectivist and do not correspond with the position of any group in the social division of labor and in relation to ownership of the means of production,

In recent years the globalized neoliberal status quo has come under heavier fire from both the nationalist right and a re-emergent Left as its obvious failures and inhumanities have become apparent to all. The Chinese Communist Party has taken part in this rethinking by making a partial retreat from neoliberalism both ideologically and practically. Wang has fallen in line behind this shift, providing a Left gloss for it and seeking to extend it. However, there is no reason to believe that the Chinese working class and rural population are in any more control of their own destiny or any closer to the cooperative commonwealth struggled for by the socialist movement than before.

Socialists around the world must update their politics for the new era. A guerilla struggle against austerity and neoliberalism is no longer sufficient. A clear working class political alternative is needed. Building on the work of Wang Hui and the other thinkers of the Chinese New Left, but armed with a class-struggle orientation, Marxists must investigate the nature of the Chinese social formation, its ruling party, and its role in the world-system, to chart avenues for the formation of the working class, which exists as a class-in-itself, into class-for-itself capable of taking state power from the bourgeoisie and carrying out the socialist transformation of society, in China and the rest of the world.

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.

1. “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” (Foreign Policy, May 15, 2008), https://foreignpolicy.com/2008/05/15/top-100-public-intellectuals/.
2. Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021).
3. Gloria Davies, Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
4. Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. Ibid. p. xvi.
6. Theodore Huters in Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): p. 37.
7. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, pp. 4-5.
8. Viren Murthy, “Conjuring Hope out of Leftist Melancholy: Thinking through Recent Scholarship on Neoliberalism and the Legacy of Socialism,” Journal of Labor and Society 21, no. 2 (August 2018): pp. 231-253, https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12328.
9. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New True Socialism: With a New Introduction by the Author (London: Verso, 1998).
10. See Maurice Meisner’s discussion of “The May Fourth Movement and the Origins of the Chinese Communist Party” in Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press, 1999). pp. 17-19.
11. Ibid. pp. 427-433.
12. See “The Political Economy of Decollectivization” in Zhun Xu, From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). pp. 57-78.
13. Jing Wang, p. 115.
14. Ibid. pp. 9-36.
15. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, p. 8.
16. Ibid. pp. 52-56.
17. Ibid. p. 56.
18. Ibid. p. 47.
19. Fewsmith, pp. 21-71.
20. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, pp. 41-77.
21. My periodization of these stages of intellectual discourse is borrowed from Wang Hui’s The Three Stages of Thought in the 1990s and Their Major Problems in Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, pp. 78-115. Wang is quite remarkable for writing an intellectual history of the emergence of the intellectual trend he is a part of, and although other accounts of the 1990s intellectual scene contain more details on other disputes, such as Joseph Fewsmith’s China Since Tiananmen, for the purposes of this survey which is concerned with the emergence of the New Left in particular his account is especially useful.
22. Els van Dongen, Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture and Politics after 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
23. Marx famously used this phrase in his 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League and it is often translated as “permanent revolution.” The role of the proletariat in the democratic revolution was the subject of much debate among later Marxists, especially in relation to the Russian Revolution. For one interpretation of the various positions see Lars T. Lih, “Democratic Revolution ‘in Permanenz,’” Science & Society 76, no. 4 (2012): pp. 433-462, https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2012.76.4.433; for more on this aspect of Marx’s thought see William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
24. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, pp. 84-96.
25. As mentioned in the introduction, Wang and others have expressed ambivalence towards the term New Left because of the negative connotations of “left deviationism” in Chinese political culture. Wang prefers to use the term “critical intellectuals.” However, I believe that for those outside China the term New Left does not have the same negative connotations and that it is useful for understanding and characterizing the critical intellectuals it refers to as part of a political Left. Therefore, I use it here.
26. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, pp. 96-115.
27. Wang discusses the importance of Braduel and the world-systems analysts for his understanding of capitalist modernity in “An Interview Concerning Modernity: A Conversation With Ke Kaijun” published in Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 69-104.
28. Davies, pp. 73-76.
29. Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution, p. 13.
30. Ibid. pp. 3-18.
31. Wang Hui, “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 1 the Birth of the Century: The Chinese Revolution and the Logic of Politics,” Modern China 46, no. 1 (October 2019): pp. 3-48, https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700419878849. Wang Hui, “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 2 the Birth of the Century: China and the Conditions of Spatial Revolution,” Modern China 46, no. 2 (October 2019): pp. 115-160, https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700419878851.
32. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1999).
33. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995).
34. Ibid. p. 55.
35. Wang Hui, Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 1, p. 17.
36. Hobsbawm, p. 296.
37. For more on Cultural Revolution educational policy see Dongping Han, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
38. Wang Hui, Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 1, p. 35.
39. Mao Zedong, Selected Works, (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), Volume 1, p. 65.
40. Wang Hui, Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 1, p. 39.
41. Ibid.
42. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Equality (London: Verso Books, 2016).
43. Ibid. pp. 179-221.
44. Ibid. p. 211.
45. Ibid. pp. 222-251.
46. Karl Marx, The Political Writings (London: Verso, 2019), p. 766.
47. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century, pp. 252-283.
48. Murthy, “Conjuring Hope out of Leftist Melancholy,” p. 20.
49. Alessandro Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 156.
50. On the concept of the tributary mode of production, see Samir Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism, 2nd edition, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
51. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, translated by Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976). p. 272.
52. Marx, The Political Writings, p. 1060.
53. The justification for the necessity of class politics provided here is based on arguments made by Mika Macnair in his book Revolutionary Strategy and many of his articles in the Weekly Worker. Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (London: November Publications, 2008).
54. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, quoted in Wood, p. 1.
55. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Students Edition (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974), p. 64.
56. Wood, p. 83.
57. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century, p. 211.
58. Interview conducted November 23, 2021.
59. Samir Amin, “China 2013,” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013): pp. 14-33, https://doi.org/10.14452/mr-064-10-2013-03_3.
60. Ibid. p. 16.
61. Ibid. p. 26.
62. Congressional Research Service, “Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data,” updated February 21, 2020, p. 1.
63. V. I. Lenin, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow, Volume 13, p. 239.
64. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, p. 49.
65. Zhun Xu, p. 12.
66. Dongping Han, pp. 96-98.
67. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, p. 47.
68. Wang Hui, “The Prophecy and Crisis of October: How to Think About Revolution After the Revolution,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 4 (January 2017): pp. 669-706, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-4234950. p. 674.
69. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, p. 64, 89.
70. “Full Text of the Chinese Communist Party’s New Resolution on History,” (Nikkei Asia, November 18, 2021), https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Full-text-of-the-Chinese-Communist-Party-s-new-resolution-on-history.
71. Yuanzhi Guo, Yang Zhou, and Yansui Liu, “Targeted Poverty Alleviation and Its Practices in Rural China: A Case Study of Fuping County, Hebei Province,” Journal of Rural Studies, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.01.007. “Xi Declares ‘Complete Victory’ in Eradicating Absolute Poverty in China,” Xinhua News, February 26, 2021, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-02/26/c_139767705.htm.
72. Lily Kuo, “China Claims to Have Eliminated Poverty, but the Figures Mask Harsh Challenges,” The Washington Post, February 25, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-poverty-economy-growth/2021/02/25/9e92cb18-7722-11eb-9489-8f7dacd51e75_story.html. “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” Resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda.
73. John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), pp. 139-140.
74. See Guo et. al.
75. Xinhua News.
76. Carolin Kautz, “Power Struggle or Strengthening the Party: Perspectives on Xi Jinping’s Anticorruption Campaign,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 25, no. 3 (2020): pp. 501-511, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-020-09665-9. p. 502.
77. “Xi’s Graft-Buster Has Direct Role in Probe of Jack Ma’s Ant” (Bloomberg News, April 13, 2022), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-14/xi-s-graft-buster-takes-a-direct-role-in-probe-of-jack-ma-s-ant?sref=vEQJzSks.
78. See Kautz.
79. Wang Hui and Theodore Huters, p. 99.
80. Wang Hui, “Restructuring and the Historical Fate of China’s Working Class,” Critical Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (May 21, 2008): pp. 163-209, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672710802076622.
81. Zhangxi Cheng, “Building the Belt and Road Initiative? – Practices En Route,” The Pacific Review 33, no. 5 (2019): pp. 788-812, https://doi.org/10.1080/09512748.2019.1589560. p. 788.
82. Ibid. p. 792.
83. Wang Hui, “Ershi shiji yichan yu yidai yilu,” Wenhua zongheng, March 29, 2015, Siyue wang http://www.m4.cn/opinion/2015-02/1263367.shtml. Quoted in English in Viren Murthy, Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution, Chapter 6. Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
84. Interview conducted November 23, 2021. For more on the 20th century Third World project see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).
85. Wang Hui, “‘Revolutionary Personality,’” Reading the China Dream, April 21, 2020, https://www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-hui-revolutionary-personality.html.
86. Rong Jian, “‘What Does Wang Hui Mean?”,” Reading the China Dream, May 29, 2020, https://www.readingthechinadream.com/rong-jian-what-does-wang-hui-mean.html.
87. Rong Jian, “‘Wang Hui’s ‘Heidegger Moment?'”,” Reading the China Dream, June 2020, https://www.readingthechinadream.com/rong-jian-wang-huis-heidegger-moment.html.
88. Yueran Zhang, “Leninists in a Chinese Factory: Reflections on the Jasic Labour Organising Strategy,” Made in China Journal 5, no. 2 (May-August 2020): pp. 82-88, https://doi.org/10.22459/mic.05.02.2020.07.
89. ueran Zhang, “The Chongqing Model One Decade On,” Made in China Journal 5, no. 3 (September-December 2020): pp. 31-39, https://doi.org/10.22459/mic.05.03.2020.03.
90. Ibid. p. 39.
91. Descriptions taken from the “Who we are” of and “About” pages of the websites of Friends of Socialist China and Qiao Collective respectively. Accessed March 3, 2022. https://socialistchina.org/who-we-are/; https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/about.
92. “Often stricken down, the Chinese Communists, like Antaeus in the Greek myth, each time rose up again with redoubled strength to carry the fight to their enemies. The Long March 1934–35, the organization of the countryside behind the Japanese lines, the building up of an army capable of overcoming in three short years the American-equipped and partially American-trained troops of Chiang Kai-shek—these and many other achievements form the elements of an epic which is unique in all the annals of history and will be studied with admiration as long as the human race maintains an interest in its own astonishing potentialities.” Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Atlantic Pact: China and Socialism,” Monthly Review 1, no. 1 (May 1949): p. 5. This passage is also quoted in the editorial for the July-August 2021 issue.
93. Qiao Collective. “Can the Chinese Diaspora Speak?” Monthly Review, July-August 2021, 127–42.
94. Editors. “Notes from the Editors, July-August 2021.” Monthly Review, July-August 2021, 155.
95. Fabio Lanza, “Of Rose-Coloured Glasses, Old and New,” Made in China Journal 6, no. 2 (February 2021): pp. 22-27, https://doi.org/10.22459/mic.06.02.2021.02.