In the seven essays and one interview collected and translated in China's Twentieth Century, intellectual historian and prominent public intellectual Wang Hui ranges across topics from the geopolitical-ideological cleavages following the 1911 Xinhai Revolution to the practice of “people's war” at mid-century to the political imaginary of educated but underemployed youth in the present day. Wang's excursive style of inquiry is, however, held together by a coherent periodization of the development of Chinese society across the twentieth century, tracking the rise and fall of a party politics aimed at restructuring every facet of society, followed by the steady “depoliticization” of politics in the reform era after 1978.
Throughout the book, Wang poses a sharp challenge to conventional approaches both inside and outside China, developing an alternative through a sophisticated critique of the positivist framework that has animated yet constrained recent writing on the subject. His intention is to lay a new foundation that not only grounds a different approach to the history but also establishes the preconditions for a new politics.
The key to Wang's approach is his critique of the static, “depoliticized” conceptual categories of mainstream social science and history scholarship, and his development of relational and dynamic categories in their stead. For example, Wang rejects a positivist understanding of “class,” as a merely descriptive categorization by occupation or income, and argues for a return to an intrinsically political concept of class as a collective political subject in the process of becoming. (In Chinese scholarship, this distinction is marked by the positivist “jieceng” against the politicized category of “jieji” that had always been used in Communist Party discourse.)
In the first half of the book, Wang argues that in the context of the Chinese Revolution, only the latter sort of category does justice to the history. Hence a substantive concept of collectives like “the working class” or “the people,” and of phenomena like imperialism and internationalism, is required to explain the upheavals of the era or even to adequately describe them. In chapter 3, for example, Wang contends that Mao Zedong's motivations for entering the Korean War, as well as the enormous domestic social mobilization behind the war that followed, can only be understood with reference to the collective sense of identification and political commitment constituted through the war against Japan and the experience of land reform in the early PRC. Lacking such a concept, contemporary scholars interpret Chinese involvement in Korea as nothing more than a pursuit of national interests, while the political principles animating the two Cold War “camps” colliding in the war are erased.
Wang extends this argument through his critique of liberal interpretations of the Communist Party's authoritarianism. He maintains that the Party's “mass line” was neither an ideological fantasy nor a cynical rhetorical shield for state domination. Instead, it was a genuine expression of the Party's pursuit of equality for the workers and peasants with the ultimate goal of abolishing class itself. The Party was not an external agency but the embodiment of “the process of shaping the masses into a political subject, and a mechanism by which the masses could represent themselves” (p. 170). Wang is not an apologist for the Party, but he insists that a critical stance on the violence involved in Party rule during the Mao era does not require a rejection of its political project or the renunciation of a “politicized” theorization of the history.
Wang argues that the desire to strip our analytic categories of their political content, to divorce them from the subjectivity of the historical actors they claim to conceptually grasp and thereby to make those categories “objective,” is related at a deep level to the depoliticization that has triumphed in both China and the rest of the world since the 1970s. Positivism is the methodological counterpart of the social ontology and political utopia of classical liberalism. Just as positivism pursues a seemingly objective epistemological framework, liberalism's goal is likewise an impersonal framework structuring decisions and standing outside human agency: the market for civil society and some combination of electoral selection and technocratic administration for political society.
The triumph of such a “depoliticized politics”—a politics in which the structure of society has been removed from contention—has generated a “crisis of representation” that Wang specifies as the source of today's political impasses, to which the second half of the book is devoted. Where the Communist Party once reshaped Chinese society in pursuit of equality for those it represented, it has now been absorbed within the imperatives of state administration or captured by special interests that use the state to affirm and regularize inequality. Opposition to these developments has been articulated primarily by liberal intellectuals whose vision of formal rather than substantive democracy would permanently divorce the state from civil society, ratifying the inequalities that genuine politicization would oppose.
While the liberals’ rejection of substantive democracy has limited their popular appeal, Wang also shows how the social landscape of the reform era has stymied an alternative politics by dividing the two most important excluded social groups: the “new workers,” primarily migrant laborers hailing from rural areas, and the “new poor,” educated but low-income employees in the post-manufacturing economy. The new workers are increasingly active but pursue the illusory guarantee of legal rights rather than the properly political goal of changing the relations of production. Meanwhile, among the new poor, the “inability to satisfy their material desires disillusions them, yet they constantly reproduce a logic of action which exactly fits with consumer society” (p. 189). Historically, class politics has arisen through the intermingling of two such social groups, but Wang is pessimistic about the prospect of such a connection in contemporary China.
This is a rich text, theoretically sophisticated but sometimes frustrating in its abstraction. Wang's critique of recent scholarship's one-sided focus on forms of domination in revolutionary politics is welcome, but his own limited use of recent empirical studies of the Mao period leaves him vulnerable to one-sidedness as well. Unlike his investigation of the neoliberal era, Wang's discussion of life within the revolution focuses on ideological articulation rather than concrete, everyday experience. This permits dubious claims such as the idea that the “workers’ state” only became a “dual representative of both labor and capital” after the beginning of market reforms (p. 207). In fact, the conflicted imperatives of raising the status of workers and accelerating capital accumulation were a constant feature of the Mao period, structuring a complex set of social relations and conflicts that were certainly transformed in the reform era but were by no means absent in the earlier period.
Without this dimension in his account, Wang has trouble explaining the movement away from collectivist social forms except with recourse to the influence of corrupting special interests. Yet an untheorized reduction to “interests” is precisely the implicit account of historical motivations lurking behind so many positivist analyses—something that Wang rightly dismisses as profoundly inadequate. To understand the origins of “depoliticization,” scholars must theorize how and why the experience of domination and exclusion stood alongside the experience of empowerment and liberation during the revolutionary era.
Wang himself points in this direction in chapter 7, a philosophical excursus on the meaning of equality that sits uneasily with the theoretical and political orientation guiding the other essays. Here he indicates that modern egalitarianism aims to eradicate difference, making “equality” coterminous with “homogeneity.” The politics of diversity is equally one-sided, Wang maintains, and a deeper break with modern structures would be required to overcome the dichotomy. This important insight suggests the possibility of a systematic perspective capable of critiquing both sides of the persistent antinomies of modernity.
