A report released earlier this year by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, entitled "Analysis of Chinese Social Strata," has prompted heated debate in various circles in China. In particular, the point about "strata" replacing "class" has triggered controversies because it amounted to an abrupt turn in the discourse of the Chinese Communist Party regime regarding its legitimacy.
The French media's recent coverage of the issue enraged the CCP's elite guard of "old leftists," who contend the report amounted to a "public airing of China's dirty laundry." The Academy also held internal discussions to criticize the report's "mistakes." This tug of war between intellectuals on the left and right -- and its connection to politics -- is worthy of our attention.
Ever since China's open-door reforms began in the 1980s, its left and right have been involved in a heated debate over the reforms. The debate reached a climax after former president Deng Xiaoping's (
Intellectuals played an important role in the protracted war of words between the left and right. The word "intellectual" has unique significance in Chinese traditions. Following China's open-door reforms in the 1980s, by availing themselves of both local and Western intellectual resources, the intelligentsia began to replenish the independent character and participation in public affairs that had been missing ever since 1949, in the process giving themselves a newfound sense of worth.
The Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, however, dealt a serious blow to the collective strength of the intelligentsia. With the wholesale shift toward a market economy after 1992, the Chinese government was already moving toward the right wing of the political spectrum. The transformation of society produced by this swing to the right -- including large numbers of laid-off employees, a serious gap between the rich and the poor and a widening dichotomy between city and countryside -- reflected the institutionalization of the academic right and the awkwardness of the left.
Currently, China's right-wing intellectual circles devoutly believe in "developmentalism" as well as the doctrine of Neo-Liberalism. They believe that reforms and getting back on track with global developments are necessary steps for China to become a superpower. Even though China and the West have different political systems, the liberalist notion of "limited government and emphasis on market mechanisms" is still what China's new liberals embrace.
These new liberals mostly appear in the form of economics experts and academics. Under the Chinese government's present policy of "development above all else," many in this group have become defenders of government policy. The "supremacy of the marketplace" has also been elevated from informal discussions to eventually become policy reality, the most typical example of which is the reform of Chinese state-owned enterprises, which are to be gradually put into a market system.
However, this group of scholars and experts seems to only dream of either making China into a superpower via market development mechanisms, or maintaining a 7 percent growth rate. They have ignored the fact that the real crises facing Chinese society cannot be imagined inside academic institutions. In addition, the statistics they rely on to support their conclusions are often inaccurate. The Yazhou Zhoukan magazine (亞洲週刊), for example, pointed out that laid-off workers are not included in the "unemployed" category of China's official statistics. The actual unemployed population in China goes beyond our imagination.
Faced with the institutionalization of liberal scholars, China's left wing finds itself in an awkward position. Although Beijing still raises its banner of "socialism with unique characteristics," the left has already fallen out of socialist China's political mainstream. On several occasions, significant debate has been curbed by an official shift to the right, even to the point that in the past two years, several well-known leftist Web sites have been closed down. Need more be said about the awkwardness of the left?
Despite the fact that the left currently encompasses a variety of differing views, opposition to globalization (including China's accession to the WTO) and concern for disadvantaged groups (such as laid-off workers and "sweat and blood" factory workers) are common interests. Still, the politically non-mainstream left presently lacks a fulcrum point.
Even though liberal intellectuals have tried to cast away the communist party's traditional class theory and replace it with "strata" theory -- and have been rebuked for doing so by old-guard leftists -- intellectuals of the right or the left need not get too excited or lose heart. More importantly, facing China's bipolar development, neither the academic right nor the awkward left can clearly grasp or change the current situation. No wonder the argument between the diametrically opposed viewpoints of "China is flourishing" and "China is collapsing" continue unabated beyond China's borders.
Hsu Tung-ming is a freelance writer based in Beijing.
Translated by Scudder Smith
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