How a Book About America’s History Foretold China’s Future
In 1989, a young Chinese academic spent six months
travelling in the United States. His insights are now central to Xi Jinping’s
cultural crackdown.
By Chang Che
The New Yorker March 21, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-a-book-about-americas-history-foretold-chinas-future
In unprecedented times, much can be gleaned from the
books we read. After the 2016 election, Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” went out of stock on Amazon
as Americans tried to place their sense of doom within the arc of Western
history. After the U.S. Capitol
Hill riots, last year, a similar meaning-making unfolded in China. On
January 12, 2021, Wang Wen, a columnist for Guancha, a nationalist
news Web site based in Shanghai, noticed that an out-of-print book had shot up
more than three thousand times its original price. On Kongfuzi, an online
secondhand bookstore, used copies of “America Against America,” a 1991 travelogue by the
political theorist Wang Huning, at one point cost twenty-nine hundred dollars.
In the following days, scanned pages began circulating around the Web, and,
throughout the course of the year, China’s online forums and comment sections
teemed with discussion of the book’s observations on American cultural decline.
Wang Huning, a member of the Politburo Standing
Committee, a seven-person entourage of the highest-ranking officials in the Chinese
Communist Party, is a household name in China. Chinese netizens call him guoshi
(literally, “teacher of the state”), an honorific bestowed upon powerful state
councillors in China’s imperial past. A former academic, he is the only member
of the Standing Committee who has never run a province or city, but he makes up
for his inexperience with vision and craft. In the nineteen-eighties, Wang
helped devise what became known as the theory of “neo-authoritarianism”, the
idea that developing countries like China needed a heavy-handed state to guide
their market reforms. In a 1986 report that set off a cascade of debate inside
the upper echelons of the Party, Wang argued for a “necessary concentration” of
central authority to carry out market reforms. He helped pen the main slogans
of three Chinese Presidents: Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents,” Hu Jintao’s
“Scientific Outlook on Development,” and, most recently, Xi Jinping’s “new era”
of global ascendency. In the international press, Wang has a somewhat
theatrical, villainous reputation: he is a modern-day Machiavelli, a “dream
weaver” of the Communist state, or a Rasputin-like figure ruling China from
behind a veil. A Vulcan of ideology, the pen as his forge, Wang smelts Marxist
vernacular into Xi Jinping Thought.
In August, 1988, under the pall of the Cold War, Wang,
then a professor of international politics at Fudan University, was invited by
the American Political Science Association for a six-month academic visit. He
toured dozens of cities and enterprises, from Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill
delivered his fabled Iron Curtain speech, to the Coca-Cola headquarters, in
Atlanta. He observed the Presidential race between George H. W. Bush and
Michael Dukakis and pondered the meaning of America’s libraries, museums, space
program, and even the Amish community (whom he mistakenly refers to as
“Armenians”). Though he was struck by the gadgetry of American modernity—its
architecture, highways, monuments, and skyscrapers—he detected, beneath it, an
“undercurrent of crisis.” More than hundred and fifty years after Alexis
de Tocqueville’s visit, Wang believed that America had traded its soul—the
connective tissues of community, tradition, and family—for the glory of
national wealth and power. Strong but weak-spirited, individualistic but
lonely, rich but decadent, America was, as the title suggested, a paradox
headed for disaster.
Wang writes his chapters as if he had been in
conversation with some of the West’s most prominent thinkers. On equality and
individualism, he wrestled with Tocqueville, concluding that the unrealized
dreams of women, Blacks, and Native Americans belied what the French aristocrat
called America’s “equality of condition.” Meanwhile, the defiant individualism
of Tocqueville’s sketches had become “an overwhelming presence” in American life.
Apparently drawing insights from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965
report on the Black family, Wang wrote that “the family was being hollowed
out,” leading to loneliness, hedonism, broken families, and “stray teens.”
Citing the high percentage of single mothers and the gap in educational
attainment in the report, he asked, “Can overly loose-knit families be
conducive to social progress?”
Wang looked askance at American democracy, regarding
its promise of popular representation as elusive, if not illusory. Choices for
President were scant, government agencies hoarded public power, and well-funded
interest groups could easily “determine the fate of another group.” As he
witnessed the pageantry of the Bush-Dukakis Presidential race—the bloated promises,
the staged deference to the voter, and the flashy debates that prized spectacle
over substance—his initial wonder congealed into disillusionment. Political
parties are simply “hawking a commodity—the candidates—on the market,” he
wrote. Voters are just “shopping among the available commodities.”
If Tocqueville located the virtues of America in its
democratic culture, Wang now attributed America’s success to its “spirit of
eccentricity,” which he saw as the basis for its technological innovation. He wrote
glowingly of the space program and admired how the same ethos had touched the
mundane: there were “machines for opening envelopes and cans” and “electronic
pencil sharpeners.” Yet Wang also concluded that Americans had come to rely too
much on technology. He pointed to the American approach to disabilities:
technical stopgaps such as “electric wheelchairs, adjustable beds, and
assistive glasses for the blind.” “People with disabilities are free to move
about,” he wrote. “But as human beings their problems are not solved.” In
America, Wang wrote, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the
technology that masters the people.” This had lessons for geopolitics: “If you
want to overwhelm the Americans, you must do one thing: surpass them in science
and technology.”
Of the numerous Western writers referenced in his
book, Wang seemed to identify most with the conservative philosopher Allan
Bloom. Drawing on the central thesis of Bloom’s best-selling jeremiad “The Closing of the American Mind,” Wang lampooned a
“generation of youths ignorant of traditional Western values.” “There’s a sense
of moral panic that runs through the book,” Matt Johnson, a visiting fellow at
the Hoover Institution who has written extensively on Wang, told me. “He senses
cultural decay all around him and there’s some strong reactions there.” Wang’s
affinity for Bloom grew out of his own experience. In the sixties, as the
Soviet Union began forsaking Stalinism, and U.S. foreign policy pivoted to the
subversive tactic of “peaceful evolution,” Mao Zedong came to see the greatest
threat against him as insufficient faith in his movement. An entire generation
of Chinese leaders, forged in the crucible of the Cultural Revolution, came to
associate the survival of a political system with the faith that people had in
it, and faith was kept up through traditions—what Wang called the “cultural
gene.” In “America Against America,” Wang asked, “If the value system
collapses, how can the social system be sustained?”
“America Against America” established Wang as a shrewd
analyst of democracies. In 1993, two years after the book’s publication, Wang
was promoted to the chair of his department at Fudan University. Today, Chinese
readers see him as one of the earliest apostates of the church of American exceptionalism,
which spurred many families to immigrate to the United States during the heyday
of market reforms. “Chinese have finally started to see the real America
instead of being blinded by our fantasies,” one reviewer wrote on Douban, a
popular book-discussion platform. “Our guoshi broke that myth long
ago.”
In the United States, Wang’s work has attracted
interest across the political spectrum. In October, a profile of Wang, by a
Washington-based foreign-policy analyst writing under the pseudonym N. S. Lyons,
was published in a “governance futurism” magazine called Palladium.
Wang, Lyons wrote, “appears to have won a long-running debate within the
Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to
endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in
China is over.” The conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt highlighted Lyons’s
profile in a column in the Washington Post, saying that it “ought to
be on the desks of every institution tracking the Chinese Communist Party.” The
Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently called Wang “maybe the most important
intellectual today.” Thirty years ago, “he saw all the deadlocks already that
led to Trump, populism, and social disintegration.” In an e-mail, Lyons told me,
“There is now an acute sense, including in Washington, that liberalism may
currently be imploding.” On both the left and the right, “there is I believe a
growing fear that in at least some ways Wang may have been correct.”
As China marches toward what Xi Jinping calls “the
great rejuvenation,” it has become increasingly plain that Western political
ideas no longer hold any currency within the Party. Wang, who has the ear of
the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao Zedong, holds the revised blueprint. Last
August, the Party unveiled a new slogan. The “Common Prosperity” campaign
purports to redress China’s widening wealth gap. The concept was introduced
after a year-long regulatory assault on the private sector, as well as a cap on
real-estate borrowing that led to the default of one of China’s largest
property developers, China Evergrande. But beneath the program’s economic
emphasis lies a deeply cultural, Wang-esque logic. In his speech outlining his
new campaign, Xi warned against the “tearing of the social fabric” that had
befallen certain unnamed countries. In these countries, he said, the divide
between the rich and poor had degenerated into “political polarization and
rampant populism.” Fang Kecheng, a journalism and communications professor at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told me, “In Xi’s conception of the ‘new
era,’ wealth inequality and the über-rich are important challenges, of course,
but there is something the Party sees as equally necessary: a unified system of
values.” Last fall, education authorities banned the use of foreign textbooks
in Beijing elementary and middle schools, placing the emphasis instead on books
espousing the philosophy of Xi Jinping. In the edition for first and second
graders, one chapter packaged a lesson on conformity into a sartorial tip:
“Cultivating
Across Chinese society, from the classroom to the
living room, the Party is driving a program of cultural conservatism. Educators
have been ordered to hire more gym teachers to “cultivate masculinity” in boys.
Media broadcasters have been forced to pivot from shows that display
“effeminate men” to those that promote “traditional Chinese culture.” Gaming
companies are now only allowed to offer minors a single hour of playtime, from
8 P.M. to 9 P.M., on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. For
Timothy Cheek, an intellectual historian of China at the University of British
Columbia, the latest diktats represent a cultural turn in China’s
modernization, what he calls “Allan Bloom traditionalism with Chinese
characteristics.” “Xi Jinping’s reading—and Wang Huning’s reading, too—of what
killed the Soviet Union was that they made the mistake that Allan Bloom warned
them against,” Cheek told me. “They stopped believing in the verities of their
tradition.” If Wang’s book does not spur Americans toward self-reflection in
quite those terms, it offers a glimpse into how many Chinese see the United
States, and the West writ large, following one of the darkest days in American
history.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Global China" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to global-china-g+unsubscribe@vt.edu.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/vt.edu/d/msgid/global-china-g/5F7FD6D3-889F-4001-834A-01CA1CB27CF8%40vt.edu.
没有评论:
发表评论