Historian Provocateur
In the last decade of the 20th century, the historian Prasenjit Duara observed: “If the next century is going to be the Pacific century, then the Pacific region will also write the history of the world.” As the “Pacific century” dawns and the world awakens to the prospect of a rising China eclipsing the United States, Wang Hui, Professor of Chinese at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is the most prominent scholar undertaking to rewrite world history from a Chinese perspective.
Contrary to any mental image which the title of ‘Professor of Chinese’ may conjure, Wang is no ivory tower academic and his writing does not pursue history as an end in itself. A leading figure in China’s ‘New Left’, Wang’s scholarship seeks to find alternatives to a Eurocentric world history with a neoliberal world order as its telos. Wang does not conceive of himself as an objective observer but rather as an historical agent in his own right, and indeed, concerns raised by Wang and the ‘New Left’ as early as the 1990s have increasingly been taken up by the current Chinese leadership under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. For Wang, writing history is an exercise in politics, and his take on world history from the point of view of Asia should give us in the West pause for thought.
Wang Hui and the ‘New Left’
Named by Foreign Policy magazine in 2008 as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, Wang Hui became an international cause célèbre in the late 1990s for his essay entitled ‘Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, in which he targeted global capitalism, China’s market reforms and the complicity of Chinese ‘liberals’ in the authoritarian program of the party-state. According to Shanghai-based intellectual historian Xu Jilin, it was this essay that really ignited the debate between liberals and the emergent ‘New Left’ over the direction of China’s reforms – a debate that has continued unabated into the 21st century.
Originally a scholar of Chinese literature, Wang’s own political views were heavily influenced by his participation in the 1989 protest movement and his subsequent ‘re-education’ in rural Shaanxi. In Wang’s account, the protesters that flocked to Tiananmen Square were the first to identify the problems caused by the rapid but uneven development of China’s market reforms. Wang himself was among the last to leave the square, under threat of fire, in the early hours of June 4. But it was his period in exile in China’s inhospitable north-west that made him realise the importance of a welfare system and co-operative network for hundreds of millions of people across China.
Wang’s career has continued to be controversial. In 2007, Wang was dismissed as editor of the prestigious journal Dushu, without any satisfactory explanation by the journal’s government-owned publisher. In 2010, accusations of plagiarism in his PhD thesis, first published in 1990, were refuted by 80 international scholars who signed an open letter in his defence. Despite such setbacks, Wang has continued to speak out on sensitive issues including the plight of factory workers in his hometown of Yangzhou, and ethnic conflict in Xinjiang and Tibet.
Perhaps the most serious criticism levelled at Wang and the ‘New Left’ is the same criticism he levelled at ‘liberals’ a decade earlier: that they are too cosy with the one-party state. As Gloria Davies has noted, where ‘New Left’ was once a pejorative label given to Wang by his critics for “its resonance with the ‘Leftism’ of the Cultural Revolution”, under the ‘humanist’ administration of Hu and Wen, the term has since acquired the kind of cultural cachet which 10 years earlier had been the exclusive preserve of ‘liberalism’. Despite this, Wang himself dislikes the label, preferring the term ‘critical intellectual’, which he feels better reflects his independence vis-à-vis the Government.
Yet in a country where universities, media and academic publications are all under the watchful eye of the party-state, the “independence” of intellectuals is under constant negotiation – a fact exemplified by Wang’s tenure at Dushu. And while Wang rejects suggestions that the ‘New Left’ is in any way directing government policies, scholars identified with the movement have had their papers circulated at the top levels of government and have even attended “brainstorming sessions” with the Chinese leadership.
Whilst they continue to advocate for democratic reform, it is apparent that Wang and the ‘New Left’ see the current Communist leadership as a vehicle for social change. Unsurprisingly, the administration’s renewed focus on social welfare and improving conditions in rural areas has been welcomed by Wang. As he told the New York Times in 2006, “It’s a huge achievement that the Premier should openly admit that health care and education is a failure. It has never happened before.”
The Politics of Imagining Asia
While most of Wang’s earlier scholarship dealt exclusively with China’s past and the problems caused by its market reforms, more recently he has widened his focus to the Asian region and its place in the world economy and world history. Formulated against the backdrop of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and the upsurge of cultural nationalism that began in the 1990s, this project, which grew out of his four-volume history of Chinese thought, seeks alternatives to a capitalist model of modernity based on European historical experience.
In The Politics of Imagining Asia, Wang asserts that “the idea of Asia is not Asian but, rather, European”, tying the 21st century capitalist world order to a “universal” history which has always defined Asia as backwards and peripheral. For Wang, the origins of contemporary “neoliberal empire” can be found in the Hegelian narrative of history that progresses from its “starting point” in despotic Asia to a state of attainment in the modern West. He argues that theorists from Adam Smith to Francis Fukuyama have deprived Asia of any historical agency which, as Theodore Huters writes, could see it do anything other than follow blindly “in the footsteps of Europe and the United States”.
A consequence of Western imperialism in Asia is the proliferation of what Wang terms “nation-state logic” at the expense of a more complex system of relations exemplified by the East Asian tributary system. He describes how the European-born capitalist logic of the nation-state was integral to the development of the Japanese empire in the late 19th and early 20th century, a process theorised by Japanese intellectuals as “shedding Asia and joining Europe”. According to Huters, Wang’s critique of the Japanese Empire contains an implicit criticism that contemporary China, too, is moving in this same direction.
In Wang’s account, the demise of the tributary system was precipitated by both Japan’s exploitation of “nation-state logic”, and the recent concept of international law to gain control of the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa) and Taiwan in the late 19th century. More controversially, perhaps, he applies the same framework to the “question of Tibet”, asserting that Tibetan claims to independence since the 19th century are the result of British colonial intervention and the politics of the Cold War.
Wang dismisses Western concerns over Tibetan autonomy as the product of an Orientalist obsession, espousing the virtues of both pre-modern suzerain dependence and the philosophy of “unity in diversity” which lay behind Zhou Enlai’s establishment of Ethnic Autonomous Regions in the 1950s. He attributes recent unrest to the “depoliticisation” and “marketisation” of society, which have stripped the disadvantaged of their dignity.
Wang’s analysis of the “Tibetan question” is problematic on several levels. As Sebastian Veg has noted, he fails to acknowledge the role of the PRC government in the ultimate imposition of the “nation-state model” on Tibet, and in dismissing the notion of self-determination, he effectively denies Tibetans the very right to their own modernity which is the major theoretical claim of his oeuvre.
Wang’s Asian project is an attempt to reframe the terms of the debate so that “the issue of Asia is not simply an issue in Asia” but becomes “an issue of ‘world history’”. Yet Wang’s theoretical sophistication appears to gloss some inconsistencies such as those relating to his analysis of Tibet. Similarly, Wang’s call for interaction “on equal terms” seems compromised by the unambiguously unequal relations between China and its “dependencies” and the tributary states from which he draws inspiration.
Can an Historian Change the World?
Perhaps the real irony of Wang’s position is that it is China’s own economic dominance in the capitalist world order that has once again placed Chinese civilisation, and by extension Wang himself, at the centre of world affairs. Whether Wang’s critique of world history will have real-world implications is unclear.
Yet Wang’s ability to influence policy should not be ruled out. His praise for the present administration’s move away from an “obsession” with the United States so as to focus on relations in Asia shows a degree of convergence on issues of foreign policy. And although the Chinese government would vigorously dispute any link to “foreign policy”, Wang’s position on Tibet also reveals a good deal of common ground. A further consideration is that Wang does not only seek to influence a domestic audience but also an international one – for example, a paper on the “Tibetan question” was presented in Adelaide in 2010.
With a change of leadership due in 2012, China’s domestic and foreign policy will be in the hands of a new generation of leaders. Whilst little is known about the politics of the presumptive president, Xi Jinping and Wang Hui do share something in common: Xi spent three years in rural Shaanxi as a ‘sent-down youth’ during the Cultural Revolution. Though his writings may not change the world, Wang is likely to remain a significant player in Chinese politics and intellectual life for years to come.
Joel Wing-Lun is in his final year of a Bachelor of Arts (Languages), majoring in Chinese Studies and Asian Studies. He is currently completing honours in Chinese Studies.
