By Pankaj Mishra
International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/13/news/left.php
Published: October 13, 2006
BEIJING One day earlier this year I met Wang Hui at the Thinker's Cafe near Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he teaches. A small, compact man with streaks of gray in his short hair and a pleasant face that always seems ready to break into a smile, he arrived, as he would to all our subsequent meetings, on an old- fashioned bicycle, dressed in dark corduroys, a suede jacket and a black turtleneck.
Co-editor of China's leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang, still in his mid- 40s, has emerged as a central figure among a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left.
New Left intellectuals advocate a "Chinese alternative" to the neoliberal market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the country's 800 million peasants left behind by recent changes. And unlike much of China's dissident class, which grew out of the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and pro-democracy activists, Wang and the New Left view the Communist leadership as a likely force for change.
Recent events - the purge of party leaders on anticorruption charges late last month and continuing efforts to curb market excesses - suggest that this view is neither utopian nor paradoxical. Though New Leftists have never directed government policy, their concerns are increasingly amplified by the central leadership.
In the last few years, Wang has reflected eloquently and often on what outsiders see as the central paradox of contemporary China: an authoritarian state fostering a free market economy while espousing socialism. On this first afternoon, he described how the Communist Party, though officially dedicated to egalitarianism, had opened its membership to rich businesspeople.
Many of its local officials, he said, used their arbitrary power to become successful entrepreneurs at the expense of the rural populations they were meant to serve, and had joined up with real estate speculators to seize collectively owned land from peasants. (According to Chinese officials, 60 percent of land acquisitions are illegal.) The result has been an alliance of elite political and commercial interests, Wang said, that recalls similar alliances in the United States and many East Asian countries.
Wang still belongs to a minority. Recoiling from the excesses of Maoism and the failures of the old planned economy, most Chinese intellectuals, even those with no connection to the state, see the market economy as indispensable to China's modernization and revival.
Wang readily acknowledges that China's efforts at economic change have not been without great benefits. He applauds the first phase, which lasted from 1978 to 1985, for improving agricultural output and the rural standard of living. It is the central government's more recent obsession with creating wealth in urban areas - and its decision to hand over political authority to local party bosses, who often explicitly disregard central government directives - that has led, he said, to deep inequalities within China.
The embrace of a neoliberal market economy has meant the dismantling of welfare systems, a widening income gap between rich and poor and deepening environmental crises not only in China but in the United States and other developed countries. For Wang, it is the task of intellectuals to remind the state of its old, unfulfilled obligations to peasants and workers.
Despite his invocation of socialist principles, Wang was quick to say that he disliked the New Left label, even though he has used it himself. He prefers the term "critical intellectual" for himself and like-minded colleagues, some of whom are also part of China's nascent activist movement in the countryside, working to alleviate rural poverty and environmental damage.
Though broadly left wing, Dushu publishes writing from across the ideological spectrum. Wang's own work draws on a broad range of Western thinkers, from the French historian Fernand Braudel to the globalization theorist Immanuel Wallerstein.
There are restrictions on what Dushu can publish, of course, and Wang is frank about them. As with all intellectual journals in mainland China, authors and editors at Dushu have to exercise a degree of self- censorship. Articles cannot directly criticize the leadership or deviate much from the official line on subjects that the Chinese government considers most sensitive - Taiwan or restive Muslim and Buddhist minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet.
For Wang, the problems associated with China's uneven development were first identified by the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He described how a "broad social movement" began to grow out of the distress caused by the shock therapy of market reforms.
The students demanding freedom of speech and assembly were certainly the most visible. But there were, he said, many more Chinese in the cities - workers, government officials and small businessmen - demanding that the government control corruption and inflation, which had shot up to 30 percent after price controls on basic commodities were lifted.
Wang himself was one of the last protesters to leave the square on the morning of June 4, 1989, as the tanks of the People's Liberation Army closed in. He had decided to stay and to try to persuade the students not to sacrifice their lives. "I knew," he said, "that if the result was violence, it would be disastrous for the whole country."
Eventually, the students advocating peaceful retreat prevailed and persuaded the People's Liberation Army to give them safe passage in the southeast corner of the square. Just before dawn, hundreds of students left the square through a narrow corridor, jostled and taunted by hostile soldiers. Within minutes, the students dispersed. Some of them were arrested and sentenced to long prison spells; others fled to Hong Kong and eventually to the West; many others, like Wang, disappeared for a few weeks.
Wang said that his fears had proved right: violence shrank the space for political debate, and the Chinese government used the period of intellectual silence that followed to begin dismantling more aspects of the welfare state, like the state-owned enterprises that had long offered cradle-to-grave benefits to workers.
When Wang returned to Beijing in late 1989, the authorities were waiting for him. After interrogations lasting for many months, he was sent to the central province of Shaanxi, where dozens of other young scholars from Beijing were already undergoing - in the uniquely Chinese way - "re-education" by exposure to rural conditions.
In Wang's case, punishment by pedagogy seems to have been more successful than the Chinese authorities could have anticipated. He dates his "real education" to the time he spent in Shaanxi, one of the poorest regions of China. He was shocked by the obvious disparity between the coastal cities, then enjoying the first fruits of economic change, and the provinces. He was shocked, too, by his own ignorance and that of his colleagues in the 1989 social movement. "We had no idea that the old order in much of rural China was in deep crisis," he said.
The commune system in Shaanxi was dismantled as part of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, and land was redistributed. But the area produced nothing of much value, not even enough food. Deepening poverty led to a sharp increase in crime and social problems; violent conflicts broke out over land; men took to gambling, beating up and selling their wives and daughters.
"It was during that year," Wang said, "that I realized how important a welfare system and cooperative network remained for many people in China. This is not a socialist idea. Even the imperial dynasties that ruled China kept a balance between rich and poor areas through taxes and almsgiving.
"People confine China's experience to the Communist dictatorship and failures of the planned economy and think that the market will now do everything. They don't see how many things in the past worked and were popular with ordinary people, like cooperative medical insurance in rural areas, where people organized themselves to help each other. That might be useful today, since the state doesn't invest in health care in rural areas anymore."
When Deng sought to bury the ghosts of Tiananmen for good by calling for speedy market reforms in 1992, he may well have calculated that the prospect of personal wealth - and access to Western brand-name goods - would compensate many newly enriched people for the lack of political democracy. If so, he seems to have been proved right. The largest public disturbance in China since Tiananmen occurred in August 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese tried to buy shares in the newly opened stock exchange of the southern city of Shenzhen.
The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented industries - part of the "let some get rich first" policy announced by Deng and affirmed by his successors - has given the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world's poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities and towns in search of low-paying jobs.
More than four million Chinese participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese living with one of the world's highest income inequalities and deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party officials.
Much of this, Wang said, could be laid at the feet of the "right-wing radicals" or neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) and who argue for China's integration into the global economy without taking into account the social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run media.
Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to democracy and prosperity. China's intention to join the World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the debate had changed: "Many people knew by then that globalization is not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and imperialism."
Which is not to say the New Left embraced an easy antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese - of what Wang dubbed "consumer nationalism."
Wang added: "Many people also learned that the reason the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in 1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on the Western world order, especially the American economy, than India."
In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou, a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real estate developer from Shenzhen. Worker-equity shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the factory led to losses.
In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic and attacked the gates of local government buildings.
Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local government. "People claim," he said, "that the market will automatically force the state to become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization. The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large social force, like the workers and peasants."
This spring it began to become clear that the New Left's advocacy of a welfare state is being echoed within the Communist leadership, which is fearful of social instability and eager to consolidate its power and legitimacy. In March, the National People's Congress convened in Beijing and unexpectedly became a forum for the first open ideological debate within the party for years.
Legislators accused government officials of selling out China's interests to market forces. Such was the antimarket mood that a bill to defend private property and grant land titles to farmers - one that both foreign investors in China and Chinese businesspeople had been lobbying for - was not even discussed. Describing major new investments in rural areas, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao emphasized that "building a socialist countryside" was a "major historic task" before the Communist Party. He also outlined steps to balance economic growth with environmental protection.
"It is a huge achievement," Wang said with a smile on his face, "that the premier should openly admit that health care and education is a failure. It has never happened before."
Wang said he thought that the government was sincere about eradicating rural poverty. But he was still cautious.
"There has been so much decentralization in China," he said, "that it is not easy to translate central government policy into action."
Last month, in the first purge of a high-ranking party member since 1995, the central leadership removed the Shanghai party chief on corruption charges, leading to speculation that there would be a reconfiguring of relations between the central government and provincial leaders and perhaps a shift in policy toward shoring up social- welfare systems and stemming pollution.
The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear to Wang: "If we don't improve the situation, there will be more authoritarianism. We have already seen in Russia how people prefer a strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption, political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and intervention from above is inevitable."
Pankaj Mishra's most recent book is "Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."