China's new left

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, October 15, 2006
China?s New Leftist
By PANKAJ MISHRA

One day earlier this year I met Wang Hui at the 
Thinker?s Cafe near Tsinghua University in 
Bejing, 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 that would not be amiss on an American campus.

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-40?s, 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 reforms. 
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 barely paused for small talk before 
embarking on an analysis of the country?s 
problems. He described how the Communist Party, 
though officially dedicated to egalitarianism, 
had opened its membership to rich businessmen. 
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 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.

As he spoke about how market reforms have widened 
the gap between rich and poor, between rural and 
urban areas, smartly dressed students browsed 
through a highbrow collection (Leo Strauss, 
Jürgen Habermas), checked their e-mail and sipped 
their mochas. At the privately owned Thinker?s 
Cafe and the adjoining All Sages bookshop, Wang 
seemed to be famous. Students greeted him 
reverentially; the staff was extra attentive. Yet 
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. Zhu Xueqin, a history 
professor at Shanghai University who is one of 
China?s best-known liberal intellectuals, told me 
that he wants more, not fewer, market reforms. 
For him, China?s present instability is caused 
not by economic forces but by a politically 
repressive regime that has prevented the 
emergence of a representative democracy and a constitutional government.

Wang readily acknowledges that China?s efforts at 
economic reform 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 tell me that he dislikes the 
New Left label, even though he has used it 
himself. ?Intellectuals reacted against ?leftism? 
in the 80?s, blaming it for all of China?s 
problems,? he said, ?and right-wing radicals use 
the words ?New Left? to discredit us, make us 
look like remnants from the Maoist days.? Wang 
also doesn?t care to be identified with the 
radical intellectuals of the 60?s in America and 
Europe, to whom the term New Left was originally 
applied. Many of them, he said, had passion and 
slogans but very little practical politics, and 
not surprisingly, more than a few ended up with 
the neoconservatives, supporting ?fantasy projects? like democracy in Iraq.

Wang 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. 
?Intellectual quality is important to me,? Wang 
said. ?I don?t want to run just any left-wing 
garbage.? The magazine has carried abstract 
debates on postcolonial theory as well as, he 
claims, some of the most interesting analyses in 
China of how the government?s urban-oriented 
reforms have damaged rural society. 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.

?I get asked in Western countries, ?How do you 
define your position??? Wang said. ??Are you a 
dissident?? I say no. What is a dissident? It is 
a cold-war category. And it has no meaning now. 
Many of the Chinese dissidents in America can 
return to China. But they don?t want to. They are 
doing well in the U.S. To people who ask me if we 
are dissidents, I say, we are critical 
intellectuals. Some government policies we 
support. Others, we oppose. It really depends on the content of the policy.?

Born in Yangzhou in the southeast province of 
Jiangsu, Wang was just 7 and entering primary 
school when the Cultural Revolution began in 
1966. The decade-long chaos, which traumatized 
older generations, seems to have left benign 
memories for Wang. He remembers being taken by 
his school to work in the villages for a week or 
two during the school year. ?My generation of 
urban intellectuals,? he said, with a hint of 
pride, ?is the last to have firsthand experience 
of conditions in the countryside.?

He counts the 20 months he spent working in 
factories around Yangzhou after middle school as 
a valuable experience. In 1977, he took the first 
university entrance exams to be held after the 
Cultural Revolution, during which many 
universities were either shut or would admit only 
peasants, workers and soldiers. ?Thousands of 
aspiring students,? he reminisced, ?were competing for a single place.?

When he moved from Yangzhou to Beijing to begin 
his doctoral studies in the mid-80?s, Wang found 
himself part of an even more privileged class. 
?Intellectuals,? he said, ?had been targeted 
during Mao?s time; now, post-Mao, they were the 
elite again.? And by then, Wang said, they all 
agreed on what needed to be done: China had to 
abandon its ?feudal? and socialist traditions and 
catch up with the capitalist West. Scarred by the 
Cultural Revolution, intellectuals saw socialism 
in China as a failure. Consequently, they had, 
Wang argues, no real debate on whether a 
Western-style consumerist society could be 
successfully recreated or was environmentally 
sustainable in China. The West, especially the United States, was idealized.

Wang first began to develop his own views on 
contemporary China while working on a 
dissertation about one of the most admired of 
modern Chinese writers, Lu Xun (1881 1936). Lu 
Xun, Wang explained to me, was a writer of the 
left, but he was very critical of left-wing 
writers and activists. He criticized Chinese 
tradition, but was also an excellent classical 
scholar. He welcomed the Western idea of 
progress, but was also skeptical of it. The 
paradoxes in Lu Xun helped Wang to see that 
Chinese modernity could not be a simple matter of 
abandoning the old and embracing the new ? as it 
had been for both Maoists and free-market capitalists.

For Wang, the problems associated with China?s 
uneven development were first identified by the 
demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. 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. 
Normally rather brisk and matter-of-fact, he grew 
animated as he described in fluent, if 
occasionally idiosyncratic, English 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.

In the spring of 1989, Wang was a fellow at the 
prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 
Wang told me that he saw ?democratic potential? 
in the protests and felt obliged to participate 
even though he had reservations about the 
students? lack of ?theoretical or methodological 
coherence.? For Wang, the student leaders 
recalled the Chinese intellectuals of the early 
20th century, who were never more united than 
when they radically rejected everything in the 
past. Nevertheless, after the government sought 
to crush dissent by declaring martial law on May 
20, 1989, Wang was drawn deeper into the 
movement. On the night of June 3, when the tanks 
and armored cars charged through Beijing, killing 
hundreds of unarmed resisters and injuring 
thousands more, Wang was among those assembled in 
the center of Tiananmen Square. He could hear the 
gunfire, but some of the more radical among the 
students still refused to leave.

Wang 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.? Wang 
said that his fears were 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.

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.

When Wang returned to Beijing in late 1989, the 
authorities were waiting for him. ?That was the 
most difficult time for me,? he said. He was 
asked repeatedly: ?What was your organization? 
Who were your associates?? After interrogations 
lasting for many months, he was sent to the 
northwestern 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 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 reform, 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, even 
selling, their wives and daughters. Wang lived in 
a low-lying village where his dormitory was 
frequently flooded while he slept. Much of his 
daily work consisted of writing didactic 
pamphlets warning peasants against gambling and 
crime; he also worked on the reconstruction of a 
primary school that had been destroyed by 
floodwaters. ?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.?

Many poor people Wang met during his year in 
Shaanxi saw him as the educated man from Beijing 
who would tell the mandarins of the central 
government to send them some help. ?I felt 
burdened by this role,? Wang said. ?I couldn?t 
tell them that I was in no position to do 
anything.? Wang returned, he told me, from his 
10-month exile with a keen sense of the gap 
between the worlds of intellectuals and ordinary people.

During his time in Shaanxi, the influential 
Journal of Literary Review denounced his research 
on Lu Xun as an example of ?bourgeois 
liberalization.? Nevertheless, Wang had no trouble returning to academic life.

Wang doesn?t like to talk much about 1989. He 
complains about the ?stereotype? of China in the 
Western media conjured by Tiananmen. Nonetheless, 
our conversation about Tiananmen was unusual. 
While traveling through Chinese cities, I had 
found it hard to get people to talk about it. 
When Deng Xiaoping 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 Shenzen.

The effort to create wealth in urban areas 
through export-oriented industries ? part of the 
?let some get rich first? policy announced by 
Deng Xiaoping 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 80?s) 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. Wang, who helped 
found an academic journal called Xueren (The 
Scholar) after returning from exile in 1991, was 
well placed to observe those intellectuals. As 
they came into greater contact with Western 
academics and scholars, they became more aware of 
problems not just in European and American 
societies but also in post-Communist countries 
that were trying to bring their planned economies 
closer to neoliberal models. 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 
that 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.? That, Wang said, was the 
same kind of globalization that America 
advocates: ?It is really a form of 
hypernationalism, which is why you hear talk of 
tariffs and penalties on China when American economic interests are hurt.?

Wang paused and then 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 the southern city of Shenzen. 
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. He had spent time 
working in a nearby factory before college and 
this, he said, made him feel a particular 
connection to them. He remembered that his pay 
had been low ? less than $2 a month by current 
exchange rates ? but, he said, what was crucial 
was that the workers he knew then felt secure in 
their jobs. ?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.?

Wang?s story about Yangzhou is not unique. There 
are many accounts of how local government 
officials controlling public property have 
amassed fortunes by privatizing state assets. 
According to a recent report by the activist Liu 
Xiaobo, more than 90 percent of the 20,000 
richest people in China are related to senior 
government or Communist Party officials.

For Wang, democracy is not just a simple matter 
of expanding political freedom for the middle 
class or creating legal and constitutional rights 
for a minority already substantially empowered by 
market reforms. Democracy in China, he said, has 
to be based upon the active consent and 
mobilization of the majority of its population, 
and be able to ensure social and economic justice for them.

Yet for some New Left intellectuals, like Cui 
Zhiyuan, a close friend and collaborator of 
Wang?s who teaches political science at Tsinghua 
University, there is opportunity in the collision 
of capitalism and socialism. ?There is more space 
here for new ideas,? Cui told me as he described 
why he had returned to China after many years in 
the United States. ?The capitalist system is 
fixed in the West, but things are still in flux 
in places like China and India. We have a 
historic opportunity to build a better, more just 
society than the West.? For Cui, it is important 
to clarify the concepts first. ?It is not 
helpful,? he said, ?to see socialism and 
capitalism as opposed and separate. Both have 
traveled together in the 20th century. Not just 
European welfare states, even American capitalism 
has a socialist component, which was arrived at 
after compromise with the trade unions.?

In recent years, Cui has found a receptive and 
powerful audience on an issue that lies at the 
very foundation of the Chinese socialist state: 
the collective ownership of property. Liberal 
Chinese economists argue that private property is 
sacred and inviolable in a market economy, a 
radical idea in the Chinese context. In an 
article he published in Dushu in 2004, Cui 
challenged this notion, emphasizing the 
essentially communal nature of property 
ownership. He cited Thomas Jefferson?s decision 
to reword John Locke?s principles of life, 
liberty and property with life, liberty and 
happiness in the Declaration of Independence.

?Jefferson recognized,? he said, ?that property 
rights emanate from society, not from nature. 
That?s why there was no specific article on 
property rights in the U.S. Constitution and it 
had to be brought in later through the Fifth 
Amendment.? Cui went on to relate with something 
close to glee that his article had circulated 
widely among legislators in the National People?s 
Congress, China?s Parliament, in 2004. It had 
helped, he said, to provoke a debate that led the 
Congress to adopt a compromise amendment to the 
constitution, similar in wording to the Fifth 
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which simply 
states that no person ?be deprived of life, 
liberty or property without due process of law.?

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 is keen to 
consolidate its power and legitimacy. In March, a 
few weeks before I met with Wang, 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 businessmen had been lobbying 
for ? was not even discussed. Describing major 
new investments in rural areas, the Chinese 
premier, 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.

A German journalist told me that it was the most 
left-wing speech he had heard from a senior 
Chinese leader during his eight years in Beijing: 
?Even American and European politicians don?t 
talk about achieving a Green G.D.P.? Wang agreed. 
He said that he was also pleased to see President 
Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao focusing on 
relations with Asian countries. ?We were too 
obsessed with the United States during Jiang 
Zemin?s time,? he said. ?We really need to 
improve our relations with Japan and India. We 
belong to such old and distinguished 
civilizations, and we cannot just be simple followers and imitators of America.

?It is a huge achievement,? he added, 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. Wang remained 
skeptical. ?The Shanghai case is encouraging at 
least,? Wang said in a recent e-mail message. ?I 
think there will be some political results from 
it, but they are results rather than reasons.?

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.?

In attacking corrupt local governments, the New 
Left often seems to want to institute 
big-brotherly government of the kind 
authoritarian politicians like. Certainly the 
growing accord between the central government?s 
socialist rhetoric and New Left ideas makes many 
uneasy. Lung Yingtai, a well-known Taiwanese 
writer and democracy advocate, told me earlier 
this year that she was wary of the New Left 
intellectuals, who, she said, appear too close 
ideologically to the Communist regime. Taking 
this view one step further, Liu Junning, a 
popular liberal political theorist who left China 
in 1999 after being blacklisted by the Chinese 
government but has since returned, claimed that 
the New Left was another name for the 
nationalistic old guard of the Communist Party, 
which was inspired by hatred of the West.

While this seems an exaggeration, Wen Tiejun, a 
former government official who runs rural 
reconstruction projects and is identified as New 
Left, had attended what he called ?brainstorming 
sessions? with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. 
Typically, intellectuals in Communist countries 
(Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik, for example) have 
gained moral authority by assuming a critical 
stance toward the all-powerful state. How do New 
Left thinkers in China calibrate their 
relationship with a state that has imprisoned 
many of their colleagues and generally shown 
little tolerance for criticism of the party?

When I posed this question to Cui, he momentarily 
lost his exuberant manner. ?It is a very 
important question,? he said. ?How to deal with 
the government, both morally and intellectually. 
This is a big challenge for us.?

Cui does not regard the Communist regime as a 
?totality.? There were, he said, many different 
aspects of it, at both the local and central 
levels. ?Almost every day,? Cui said, ?The New 
York Times carries reports of peasants agitating 
against the Communist government, but if you 
listen to what the peasants are saying, they are 
telling the central government that the local 
government has violated their rights. So even the 
peasants can see the different aspects of the 
state, who supports them and who doesn?t.?

Wang Xiaoming, professor of cultural studies at 
Shanghai University, positions himself to the 
right of Wang Hui but says that he sympathizes 
with the New Left?s pragmatic attitude toward the 
Communist regime. ?Civil society is very weak in 
China,? he said, ?and since the government is the 
most active agent of change, we have to push the 
government to do what it should do besides 
pushing the government to give up some of its powers.?

When I met with Wang Hui for the last time, he 
dismissed any claims about increased New Left 
influence over the regime. ?What we have tried to 
do is create an intellectual situation in which 
new policies can be explored,? he said. ?I know 
that many leaders read Wen Tiejun?s article; they 
also read Cui?s article on property rights. There 
have been other articles in Dushu that have been 
equally influential, and I am pleased about this. 
But we have no other connection with the regime.?

Wang also seems to have no anxiety that 
ideological convergence with the regime will turn 
New Left intellectuals into pro-government policy 
wonks and hacks, part of an old Chinese tradition 
of intellectuals advising the state. ?We look at 
things from a Chinese perspective naturally, but 
we also try to think beyond the framework of the 
nation-state,? he said. ?People ask in the West, 
How could China develop capitalism with an 
authoritarian state? But that?s ignoring how 
modern capitalism grew in the West, without much 
democracy and with the help of imperialism and 
colonialism. You have to ask whether this unique 
economic model of the West can be globalized 
without great wars and destruction of the 
environment. This is not an abstract issue. China 
has stopped felling its forests, most of which 
have disappeared, but some country still has to 
produce wood for Chinese consumption.?

At our last meeting, Wang also spoke more about a 
subject Cui had brought up with me: how the rise 
of China and India throws up new challenges and 
possibilities with profound implications for the 
world at large. ?Western societies have been on 
top for the last two centuries and shaped the 
world with the decisions they made,? he said. 
?China and India will now play equally crucial 
roles in the new century. But what will they be? 
I think it is very important for Chinese and 
Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the 
West. They have to explore alternatives to the 
Western model of modernity. Otherwise, the 
?consumer nationalists? are already saying, 
?America was on top; now we are on top.??

Wang laughed, and added, ?This is not interesting.?

Pankaj Mishra last wrote for the magazine about 
Tibetan exiles. His most recent book is 
?Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in 
India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.?