The late 1980s were a lively time of intellectual debate in China about the new possibilities that had opened up for the future of society and culture. Involved in the debate were Party and non-Party intellectuals; university professors and researchers at government think tanks; journalists and writers; veterans of earlier struggles and a new generation of students. The debate came abruptly to an end on June 4, 1989, when the soldiers and tanks moved into Tiananmen Square. In the fifteen years since, the debate has slowly resumed, but little of it has appeared in English except for books and essays written by Chinese intellectuals who have moved to the West. Within China, there have been repeated calls for a reassessment of Tiananmen events, but little sustained analysis and critique of the ideas and forces that led up to June 4th.

This new book by Wang Hui changes all of that. It is the best comprehensive analysis of intellectual developments in China in the period of ‘reform and openness,’ picking up where the earlier debates left off. He writes in an incisive and sometimes strident style, offering a brilliant analysis of the democratic move-ment and the direction that political and social discussion has moved since that time. Wang argues that little progress has been made toward democracy after 1989 since the connection between the social movement and institutional reform was severed. This has prevented Chinese intellectuals from forging a link between theory and practice, history and social change, freedom and justice.

Wang Hui is dealing with crucial con-temporary issues, so this is a book about much more than recent intellectual devel-opments in China. ‘China’s New Order’ offers a unique Chinese perspective on the discussion of globalisation and neo-liber-alism, and should be read by all who are interested in development issues and social change in this new millennium.

The author participated in the 1989 democracy movement in Beijing, and after it was crushed, he spent the better part of 1990 living among poor peasants in the remote Qingling mountains of central China. This experience led him to realize ‘how far life in Beijing was from this other world.’ He learned first hand about continuing peasant poverty, despite the reforms. The 1989 student movement had been urban based, and did not involve the rural sector in any significant way. Students themselves never addressed the issues of rural China, and they did not take peasant concerns into account.

This book, therefore, is in part a self-critique of the democratic movement, based upon what the author sees as a need ‘to reconstruct the historical relationship between intellectuals and the other world outside of it.’ Wang Hui is supportive of reform, but his experiences in 1990 revealed to him the fundamental social justice problems with present policies. Before the Deng Xiaoping era, rural China was seen as both the problem and the possibility of the ‘Maoist’ revolution. At least in its rhetoric, the government saw rural China as the foundation of the country. The rural reforms initiated in the late 1970s attempted to address the needs of peasants. But when the reform process turned to the modernisation of the cities, the gap between urban and rural China widened once more. Since that time, the crux of China’s rural policy is ‘different systems of urban and rural governance; one country, two policies.’

Wang Hui is a well-known intellectual and co-editor of Du Shu (‘Reading’, the Chinese equivalent of The New York Review of Books.) In the book under review, he casts his net very wide, and discusses not only society, politics and economy, but also culture, history and literature. Most Western analyses of China are set in the context of literature about China pub-lished in the West. Wang situates his analysis in the ongoing discussion among Chinese intellectuals themselves, with only a passing reference to the literature in the West that we are more familiar with. This is part of the reason that it deserves a careful reading.

The two essays in China’s New Order are elegantly translated by Rebecca Karl and Theodore Huters. Both have appeared in different Chinese versions elsewhere. ‘The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Roots of China’s Neo-liberal-ism’ was first written in 2001; although widely circulated in China and overseas, it has never been published on the mainland. The final section of this essay, ‘Alternative Globalisations and the Question of the Modern’, was written for this book. The much shorter second essay, ‘Contemp-orary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, was published in Tianya (‘Frontiers’) in 1997, and subsequently translated or republished in journals in several other countries. Wang Hui con-tributes a preface to this book, and Theodore Huters provides a thoughtful introduction to the recent history of China.

In the first essay, Wang Hui describes the 1989 democratic movement as both an egalitarian reaction against corruption and privilege and a democratic reaction against repressive state policies, ‘a farewell to the old era and at the same time a protest against the inherent social contradictions of the new.’ He poses three questions as his point of departure: Why did the student movement sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang bring about such broad participation on a national scale? What was the nature of the appeals of the student movement and of those from other sectors? Why were there critiques of the reform process itself even on the part of those who supported reforms?

His response to each of these questions may be succinctly summarised. The student demands for social security, equality and fairness were also concerns in other sectors of society. After more than a decade of reform, there had been positive changes in people’s living standards, but the market reforms had introduced new problems as well -- inflation, loss of job security, an increase in the gap between rich and poor. Such problems would have been tolerated had they not been accompanied by wide-spread stories of government corruption, profiteering and official peculation. When the students began to voice their concerns, their stories were quickly picked up by the media, and others added their voices to calls for reform. But the interests of the student movement differed from other social sectors. The students thought the answer was greater freedom and demo-cracy, but the workers wanted social equality and justice, and the vast government workforce wanted to feel secure in their jobs.

An important element in all this was the criticism of the reform process voiced by reformers themselves. In the 1980s, intellectuals were all part of what was then termed a ‘New Enlightenment Move-ment.’ But they did not all have the same stake in reform. There were different interest groups in the Party and in state organisations, some of which were power holders; others benefited from the reform process, but also saw the injustices of the system. The Party controlled the state and maintained social stability, not only through coercive means, but because int-ellectuals were needed for the reforms. By co-opting intellectuals into reform orien-ted professions and institutions, and increasing their stake in the government program, the historical relationship between intellectuals and workers and peasants was severed. In the 1989 demo-cratic movement, reformist intellectuals rose to the occasion and spoke up for the cause of justice and democracy.

In the 1980s, there were contradict-ions in the reforms which many people saw, but which they could do little about. In the area of commodity pricing, for example, ‘the simultaneous existence of planned pricing and market pricing provided perfect conditions for corruption and official peculation.’ Politics was supp-osedly separated from economic decision-making in state enterprises, but what was in fact separated was ownership and management. In the process, a significant share of state property was legally and illegally transferred to the personal econ-omic advantage of a small number of government and Party officials. They, in turn, used their power to manoeuvre products out of the planned system, where prices were artificially fixed, and into the floating market system, where prices were on the rise. This led to increasing inflation and unequal social allocation. Wang con-tends that ‘the crisis of the traditional planned economy became a crisis of newly monopolised market relations.’ Such structural contradictions came to a head in the calls for reform in 1989.

In the aftermath of the 1989 demo-cracy movement, Wang Hui identifies three successive stages of intellectual development. The summing up of the movement in the early 1990s was basically a critique of student radicalism. This period was also a time of increasing social stratification, the growing involvement of intellectuals in money making and an avoidance of intellectual discussion about politics and social change.

The second stage was characterised by a debate over the ideology of the market and the program of privatisation. The political importance of the market was reasserted with Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Southern Tour’ (nan xun) in early 1992, but it was severely challenged by the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Culturally, there was a growth of commercial culture; increasing privatisation in all areas of society; ‘taking the jump’ (xia hai) into commercial ventures; and the spread of rural enter-prises. All of this contributed to the debate over civil society, and the idea that democracy would develop not through radical change, as the students had thought in 1989, but through radical marketisation. As in 1989, the civil society debate left out rural society.

A debate about humanism and post-modernism also began in the mid-1990s. For some, this also involved a critique of the market mentality. But intellectuals were by no means of one mind on relationship of the market to the freedom of human spirit. Post-modernist thinkers in China were optimistic about the market reforms; they embraced consumerism and rejected humanism as an elitist discourse. Others were involved in discussions about post-colonialism, nationalism and globalis-ation.

These discussions evolved into the third stage of intellectual reflection, which continues to the present: the increasing debate over neo-liberalism, including discussion of the historical experiences of capitalism. This debate, beginning in the late 1990s, is founded on the ‘new critical space’ which has been made possible by globalisation, as scholars and intellectuals from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the US participate by publishing their essays and translations in Chinese periodicals. An international perspective on China is thus emerging. Globalisation is not something outside of Chinese society, but a problem internal to it, a fact especially evident in the discussion over China’s entry into the WTO in 1999.

The whole period since 1989 repre-sents the beginnings of an historical process that the government has called ‘transitional’. Wang Hui observes that ‘transitional’ refers to an historical process and a government-inspired historical ‘myth.’ It is a myth to say that China’s transition from socialism is a natural and spontaneous historical development brought on through the introduction of market mechanisms. Wang argues that terms like ‘free trade’ and ‘unregulated’ are ideological constructs masking coercive government actions that favour particular groups and classes. Those who control capital, whether in China or in any other part of the world, are also those who wield political power. The ‘transitional’ period in China may more accurately be described as a time of ‘violent state intervention.’ There can be no ‘natural’ transition from economic to political reform, because the process is driven by certain power-dynamics and social forces foreshadowing a new era of state-capitalism and neo-liberal economics in which both the means of production and political power will be controlled by a few.

There has been political continuity plus economic discontinuity in Chinese society since 1989. 1989 was a temporary suspension of market reform, but the market came back: ‘. . .under the continuation of the system of state political power, Chinese society has pushed forward a process of market extremism, and under the guidance of state policy has become an active participant in the world economic system.’ This defines what might be called a ‘neo-liberalism with Chinese characteristics.’ It has been contextualised in different ways in every corner of the globe, but the system itself is hegemonic. In fact, econ-omic liberalisation and continuing political repression are not paradoxical but are characteristic of the new global order as a whole. In China, the two have gone hand-in-hand: market-extremism, radical privat-isation and economic corruption on the one hand, and strict control over politics and policy on the other.

1989 and the debates which followed did not change the fundamental reform pattern of China since the late 1970s, but they did represent a new expression of China’s quest for modernization since the late nineteenth century. Modernity is the subject of the second essay in this volume. Modernization has been seen too much as a ‘neutral technical indicator’ in China, and the concept has enjoyed uncritical acceptance. Wang argues that the cultural crisis of contemporary China can no longer be attributed either to an outmoded Chinese tradition or the legacy of socialism.

The dichotomy of capitalism versus socialism is obsolete, but Wang criticizes China’s embrace of market capitalism and modernization, without a critique of the concept of modernity from which socialism and capitalism emerged. China’s culture and economy have now been completely incorporated into global capitalism, but both socialism and capitalism need to be reconsidered.

Mao’s socialism was both an ideology of modernization and a critique of Euro-American capitalist modernisation, but not a critique of modernisation itself. Like all Chinese thought since the late Qing, it was an ‘anti-modern theory of modernization.’ The end of the Cultural Revolution marked the end of a socialism character-ised by perpetual revolution and a critique of capitalism. Some intellectuals continued to embrace a ‘utopian’ socialism (or what they termed an ‘authentic socialism’), but this was not the mainstream. Up until 1989, there was a basic unity of ind-ependent intellectuals and Party reformers under the banner of the ‘New Enlighten-ment Movement.’

Because the New Enlightenment Movement and the socialist reforms had many points in common, the conservative wing of the movement was absorbed by the reform faction of the state to serve as technocrats or theorists of neo-conserv-atism, the official ideology of modern-isation. The radical wing gradually trans-formed itself into a political opposition, focusing on promoting the liberal idea of human rights and pushing for political reform in the direction of Western democracy. Culturally, the radical faction (here, ‘radical’ indicates a cultural attitude toward tradition) began to be conscious of the possibility that the social goal of modernisation could become (or already could be) a crisis in values.

By the early 1990s, the New Enlight-enment Movement had lost its ability to critique or even diagnose problems in contemporary Chinese society. The radical wing lacked a serious political and econ-omic analysis. Intellectuals were unable to provide a critique of state dictatorship and global capitalism. This was in a large part attributable to their continuing reliance on ‘the West’ and its understanding of modernisation. Thus, Chinese intellectuals understood globalisation from the pers-pective of the USA, Western Europe, Japan, and the little Dragons, and ignored the predicaments of India, the Middle East and Latin America, and especially Africa.

This is a fundamental problem today all over the world. Neo-liberal global-isation maintains that there are no real alternatives, for capitalism and liberal democracy will guarantee prosperity and freedom for all. The policies associated with globalisation were promoted all over the world by one nation state, but at the same time, neo-liberal thinkers want to deny any regulatory function for other states in the new order. Neo-liberalism is promoted by the United States, which, according to Wang Hui, represents ‘a sort of hypernationalism masquerading as globalism’ with a globalised military at the centre. This is even more evident since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wang Hui brings a distinctive Chinese voice to the discussion of globalisation and neo-liberalism. His belief that ‘the two most important events of the end of the twentieth century were the failure of Eastern European socialism and the reorientation of China toward the global market through social reform have led him to consider the discussions in China in light of the debate about globalisation the world over. 1989 was the beginning of economic and political transformation on a global scale. Wang links the concerns of the Tiananmen democracy movement of 1989 with the anti-neo-liberal globalisation movement. They were products of the same contradictions and have, or had, many of the same goals.

Globalisation cannot solve the many social, political and environmental pro-blems that we face. Neo-liberalism blurs the division between economics and politics, and envisions market mechanisms replacing the political and social spheres. But the message of Wang Hui’s book is that political considerations are needed to control the economy and safeguard the interests of the poor. These concerns have historically been associated with socialism. Although he does not advocate a return to failed and repressive systems of socialist planning, he does say that we need to give much more serious attention to the concern for social justice that socialism once stood for.

by Philip L. Wickeri

CHINA’S NEW ORDER: SOCIETY, POLITICS AND ECONOMY IN TRANSITION.
WANG HUI (EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THEODORE HUTERS)
Harvard University Press, 2003
239 pp (cloth). ISBN 0 674 00932 0