The contemporary Chinese thought world is something of a puzzle. In Western media discussions of China, the shadow of the Cold War looms large, and China is often described as a totalitarian state with no freedom of speech.Footnote ¹ Studies of Chinese propaganda at home and abroad emphasize China's successful message discipline and muscular efforts to shape China's image around the world.Footnote ² Our Chinese colleagues, most of whom are of course liberal intellectuals, complain constantly about political pressures and the difficulties of getting their work published.

At the same time, those of us who work on contemporary Chinese intellectual life generally find it to be rich, varied, and vibrant. One illustration of this point that goes beyond personal impressions is the website Aisixiang (“To Love Thought”)—www.aisixiang.com—which warehouses the online journal articles of China's leading public intellectuals, by which I mean those who publish outside the boundaries of their academic disciplines in the hopes of influencing public opinion and state policy. I invite skeptics to click on the link sixiangku (www.aisixiang.com/thinktank/), which takes them to a page containing several hundred public intellectuals, divided by field (100 for example in economics and management, 82 in political science, 80 in literary studies, 82 in history and anthropology, 78 in philosophy and religious studies). Click on Sun Liping, the well-known liberal sociologist, and you find links to 249 of his articles; click on Qin Hui, the well-known liberal historian, and you find 404. There is surely some repetition here, and surely not all the intellectuals who appear on Aisixiang are as famous and prolific as Sun and Qin. But we are dealing with a lot of thinkers (and a lot of thought). By way of comparison, google “Canadian public intellectuals” and you get a list of five.Footnote ³ An article on American public intellectuals identifies thirty-five.Footnote ⁴ French President Emmanuel Macron met with sixty French intellectuals in March 2018 as part of a “grand débat national.”Footnote ⁵ China's population is roughly four times that of the United States, twenty times that of France, and thirty-seven times that of Canada, but China's mass can't explain everything (otherwise, the NBA would be full of players from the People's Republic).

Nor are we talking about hundreds (or thousands) of articles parroting the Party line or trumpeting the glories of China's rise. Yes, one can achieve a certain measure of wealth and fame by following such a course in China, but my guess is that only a tiny percentage of the texts available on Aisixiang falls into those categories. Instead, most texts display considerable independence and intelligence, even as they try to respect the constantly changing boundaries between what can be said and what can't. The price of intellectual influence in China is avoiding dissidence; speaking truth to power in frank terms is not an available option. But this means that intellectuals’ freedom to speak is not absolute. It does not mean that what they say has no value.

I do not know how to reconcile these opposing images, of a China as a totalitarian state with no freedom of speech (clearly an exaggeration, journalists who have worked in China rarely make such claims) and of a China which, at least in terms of volume, probably produces more “thought” than any country in the world. My suspicion is that we do not fully understand the political and cultural ecosystem in which Chinese thought is produced, circulated, debated, and put to use. Relations between Chinese authorities and Chinese intellectuals are particularly opaque. Some things are of course clear: authorities make generous grants available to intellectuals who will take up the cause of the moment (Xi Jinping Thought, for example), and ruthlessly punish intellectuals who dare to challenge Party control. But for all of their ham-handedness and bluster, Xi Jinping and company would really prefer to be admired by China's intellectuals, and China's intellectuals would like to be able to admire Xi Jinping and company, or at least to be given a chance to contribute. This is how I interpret William A. Callahan's useful notion of “citizen intellectuals,” who use their relatively independent position within China to attempt to move state and public opinion through their intellectual activities.Footnote ⁶ Market changes, academic professionalism, and the rise of the Internet may well eventually condemn Chinese intellectuals to the same voluble irrelevance as their Western counterparts, but they are not yet going gentle into that good night. Indeed, on questions of national import, Chinese intellectuals try mightily to exert their influence, if in different ways, as the three volumes under review here fully demonstrate.

The big point that Els van Dongen makes in her Realistic Revolution is fairly easy to summarize: in the early 1990s, many Chinese intellectuals rejected the radicalism they identified with China's turbulent twentieth-century experience and embraced a more conservative vision that emphasized stability and piecemeal progress toward modernization. The context was one of a triple failure: the Cultural Revolution, Tian'anmen, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cultural Revolution of course marked the perceived failure of Mao's Communist revolution, which in the 1980s came to be a cause for celebration as China's intellectuals experienced a “second enlightenment” which was to succeed where the May Fourth had failed sixty year earlier. These hopes were dashed on June 4 (1989) when the PLA opened fire on the students in and around Tian'anmen Square. Had the second enlightenment succeeded, the stunningly rapid collapse of the Soviet Empire might have had a lesser impact, but in the context of the failures of Maoism and liberalism, the eclipse of China's erstwhile Socialist Big Brother served as yet another chilling reminder that things really could fall apart. This genuine fear that China might once again fall into chaos prompted the intellectual/ideological sea change that is the subject of van Dongen's fine volume.

The body of van Dongen's study shows how the sausage was made, as it were. The book is structured around key figures (such as Xiao Gongqin, the former liberal who came to embrace neo-authoritarianism as a surer path toward modernization, or Chen Lai, the academic philosopher who revived Confucianism as a useful form of conservatism) and key debates (concerning the utility of post-modernism, or the meaning of May Fourth), but things were happening too quickly and changing on too many levels for these figures and debates to offer a clear narrative guide for the reader. What stands out to me are the following points.

First, this change was a very big deal, and indeed is still working its way through China's intellectual—and political—world today. The “excesses” of “revolutionary enthusiasm” had of course been criticized from time to time, but the notion that the “radical impulse” was ultimately behind China's failure to modernize goes much further, and threatens to reject revolution or to redefine it as one means to the end of modernization, and perhaps not the best one. If taken seriously, this change calls into question the basic notions and signposts at the heart of the mythology of New China.

Second, in search of new ways to think about China's modern and contemporary history, China's intellectuals turned to sources outside of China. This was not new, of course; a massive and largely uncritical embrace of the West was a part of Chinese intellectual life in the 1980s, to say nothing of the extensive borrowings that occurred throughout much of the twentieth century. Still, it seems important that at this moment of crisis, Chinese intellectuals found few resources within the historical experience of the People's Republic that would serve their purposes. Among the most important outside sources consulted were leading Chinese scholars from the United States and elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora such as Tu Wei-ming, Yu Ying-shih and Lin Yü-sheng, whose ideas about the nature and value of Confucianism or Chinese traditions were useful to Chinese intellectuals seeking to revisit the “tradition–modernity” binary. The result was completely new readings (in China) of the May Fourth and Republican periods emphasizing the constructive nature of conservatism in the process of modernization. But the influence of foreign ideas was not limited to those coming from the Chinese diaspora. Van Dongen illustrates for instance how Chen Lai used Weber's notions of instrumental and value rationality to arrive at his reevaluation of the practical utility of Confucianism.

Third, the discussions and debates engendered during this period took on varied and often convoluted forms in a wide range of disciplines (and one can only admire van Dongen's persistence in working through the verbiage), even while remaining faithful to the notion that modernization (basically understood as the achievement of wealth and power) remained the ultimate goal. Here, van Dongen's findings are similar to those of Gloria Davies, who argued in her Worrying about China (2007) that China's postmodernists embraced this new creed because “decentering the West” made the achievement of China's modernization easier. Both van Dongen and Davies allow themselves mild criticisms of Chinese intellectuals on this front (i.e., being captured by meta-narratives despite themselves), but I cannot help but wonder how many meta-narratives there ultimately are to choose from (and are not postmodernists simply “speaking truth to power” from a newish perspective?).

Fourth, Chinese intellectuals made use of the crisis to assert their utility and professionalism, because getting the ideas right matters in a teleological sense (another continuity) and because without professionalism you cannot get the ideas right. In a recent essay analyzing the reemergence of the discourse of tianxia in contemporary China, the legal historian Liang Zhiping argues that

All of the figure discussed in this volume would have applauded Liang's remarks.

Fifth, state authorities appear in van Dongen's volume, but do not seem to have played a particularly important role. The intellectuals van Dongen focuses on are clearly patriots seeking solutions to pressing Chinese problems. The state intervenes from time to time, through editorials in the People's Daily or Enlightenment Daily, or through back-door channels that are less visible to foreign researchers, but my impression is that both sides envisioned a partnership of some sort or perhaps a division of labor. Van Dongen at one point notes that “Chinese leaders were urged [by intellectuals] to read de Tocqueville because China would not ‘modernize all that smoothly’.” (211). The notion of Chinese intellectuals’ providing reading lists to China's leaders captures much of what I find strange about the relationship between them. In what universe does a sentence like “American intellectuals urged the Senate to read Richard Rorty” make sense?

Marchal and Shaw's Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World is a conference volume, the result of a meeting held at Academia Sinica in Taiwan in September 2014. The conference was somewhat unusual in that it was largely the result of collaboration between German sinologists and scholars in Taiwan, a refreshing change in a field still largely dominated by American China-watchers (and someone deserves praise and thanks for the excellent editing of a volume in which only one of the contributors appears to be a native English-speaker). The book is divided into three sections, which neatly identify the objective of the project: Part I: Critique of Liberalism from a Transcultural Perspective, Part II: Carl Schmitt in the Chinese-Speaking World, and Part III: Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World.

As in the case of van Dongen's volume, the main findings of this collection lend themselves to fairly easy summary: both Schmitt and Strauss came to be important figures and sources of ideas in both the worldwide and Chinese interrogation of liberalism that occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Schmitt, “Hitler's crown jurist,” is perhaps best known for his political distinction between friends and enemies, the notion that politics is about winning and victory is often achieved by manipulating ingroup–outgroup distinctions. While at one level this is obvious (Donald Trump did not need to read Carl Schmitt), Schmitt's reflections led him to question received wisdom about authority and legitimacy in ways that challenged conventional understandings of liberalism profoundly. Strauss, for his part, came to reject all of the meta-narratives of modernity as self-limiting, and urged a return to the classics of the ancient Western world as a means to seek alternatives and personal growth.

The Chinese embrace of Schmitt and Strauss occurred some ten years after the period studied by van Dongen (who makes a passing reference to Gan Yang's enthusiasm for Strauss on page 209), and was the product of acrimonious debates between the New Left and Liberals (as well as debates within the Liberal camp) that called into question the value of the liberal project as such. Schmitt's brand of hardball politics was taken up by figures both on the left (such as Wang Hui) and on the liberal right (such as Gao Quanxi). Wang argued for a “repoliticization” of China's political system via class struggle (where friends and enemies are easy to identify), while Gao both chastened his Liberal colleagues for their naïve faith in the teleology of modernity and urged China to complete its constitutional revolution by confronting problems of rights and responsibilities in contemporary Chinese society. Strauss was championed above all by Liu Xiaofeng, an idiosyncratic figure in his own right, and came to inspire a number of Chinese thinkers dissatisfied with modernity, many of whom belong to the Mainland New Confucians.

Marchal and Shaw's volume contains both essays focusing on China and essays focusing more on Schmitt and Strauss as thinkers or in other contexts. While I personally found some of the essays in the latter category a bit difficult to follow, the overall approach is helpful and positive in that it treats the Chinese thought world as part of the larger world of thought, and not as a separate world of discourse or passive recipient of Western thought. Van Dongen's approach is similar, although she has less space to develop her thoughts on this front because the weight of the Chinese materials she needed to plough through. Neither volume attempts to make the case that Chinese thought is making significant contributions to currents in world thought; the Chinese language remains a major barrier on this front. But acknowledging that Chinese thinkers are our equals is important.

Sebastian Veg's Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals focuses on a historical moment—beginning with Wang Xiaobo's rise to prominence in the early 1990s and perhaps ending with Xi Jinping's tightening of ideological discipline since 2013—when certain Chinese intellectuals took advantage of new technological and political possibilities to craft new ways of being an intellectual in Chinese society. Minjian or “grassroots” intellectuals were “new” first in comparison with an older model of elite and elitist intellectuals who defined their role primarily in terms of state service, a model which applies to the intellectuals studied by von Dongen and in the Marchal and Shaw volume. This older model, which was grounded in Confucian idealism, readily carried over into the Communist era, and remains alive and well today among certain establishment intellectuals, if only in the form of nostalgia. Veg's intellectuals are, by contrast, more “woke” and engaged, closer to activists as we understand them in the West.

Wang Xiaobo set the tone for this shift with his assertion that he was part of a “silent majority,” which aligned him with the vulnerable and powerless of society (and largely against the establishment, including establishment intellectuals). Wang did this in ways that questioned the politics of modern and contemporary China, without at the same time proposing another totalistic “fix” that would bring the universe back into harmony. Other minjian intellectuals focused their specific talents and energies on a wide range of discrete cultural and social issues, sometimes seeking concrete solutions, other times seeking only a clearer statement of the nature of the problem, often through new means of communication (video or internet).

In important ways, being minjian meant exploring the politics of the possible in reform-era China, where money, the market, and the internet, among other things, opened up new spaces for intellectuals. Another possible translation of minjian might have been “do-it-yourself,” which suggests the how-to culture of Youtube, where anyone can learn and share anything without paying tuition or tax; this world arrived in China in the 1990s and 2000s with a speed that must have seemed simply giddying in a China heretofore defined by bureaucracy and control. At the same time, no safe space for dissent opened up, and much of the creativity displayed by the intellectuals Veg studied was devoted to the thorny problem of making a difference while staying out of trouble, because once you're labeled a dissenter (which many of Veg's subjects clearly flirted with) all possibilities disappear. For this reason, “grassroots” describes a mindset and a methodology, but not a movement.

Veg's volume traces this mindset across a wide range of intellectual fields of activity. After a bracing chapter on Wang Xiaobo's essays and fiction, Veg devotes a chapter to “Minjian Historians of the Mao Era,” including both professional intellectuals (Shen Zhihua, Gao Hua, Yang Jisheng) and private citizens who sought to document “forgotten” tragedies (prison camps for rightist exiles following the Hundred Flowers, those who died during the Great Leap Forward) and thus to create a history that contests that of the Party-State. Such efforts were carried forward by such journals as China Through the Ages (Yanhuang Chunqiu) and the website Consensus Net (Gongshiwang), both of which have now been suppressed. Next comes a chapter on the “Rise and Fall of Independent Cinema,” which illustrates how Jia Zhangke, Wu Wenguang, and others innovated in terms of both form and content to produce an independent cinema focused on the vulnerable and the marginalized. This is followed by a chapter on “Rights Lawyers, Academics, and Petitioners,” a lovely demonstration of how lawyers like Pu Zhiqiang and academics like Yu Jianrong sought to intervene in specific situations to produce concrete solutions without calling forth the wrath of the state, an approach which worked until it didn't. Veg's final substantive chapter is on “Journalists, Bloggers and a New Public Culture,” which focuses largely on Han Han and Xu Zhiyuan and the difficulties of being edgy, relevant, and apolitical at the same time. Throughout, Veg takes pains to place these intellectuals and their projects in the cultural and political contexts they faced, showing what they were trying to do and how they tried to go about it. It is fascinating once again that the state is a presence but not a major actor in many of these contexts. Under Xi Jinping this has changed; Veg is describing a world that, for the moment at least, is disappearing.

Another great strength of Veg's volume is that he does not attempt to force all minjian intellectuals into the same mold. If they are all hoping to create a space where the individual can work to improve herself and society—through art, journalism, history-writing, rights-protection—outside of state structures and discourses, they work in different ways and have different visions. Some contradict themselves or fall short of what they hoped to achieve; Veg's chapter on China's bloggers is especially insightful on this front.

None of these volumes offers a “theory” meant to revolutionize our view of Chinese intellectual life. Instead, each shines its light on a particular corner or period of the larger whole. Veg's “grassroots intellectuals” will probably be the most appealing to American readers, as they are rebels and progressives, pushing against an authoritarian regime much pilloried in today's media, but there is no reason to think that their impact will be greater or longer lasting (indeed, their moment seems to have passed) than that of more conservative figures examined by Von Dongen or the acolytes of Schmitt and Strauss (who manage to be edgy in their own way, as well as effective institution-builders) depicted in the Marchal and Shaw volume. Together and separately, these volumes demonstrate in different ways the manifest richness of Chinese intellectual life in the post-Mao period, a richness which in fact represents a pluralism rarely discussed in media accounts of China focused on authoritarianism and dissidence. Xi Jinping clearly feels that this pluralism has gone too far and has, for the moment, succeeded in limiting the range of expression available to China's intellectuals. I doubt, however, that he will succeed, in the long run, in reimposing the kind of ideological orthodoxy he associates with his own China Dream. China's intellectuals are patriots, but they are also smart, savvy, and plugged into world trends. They will live to fight—or contribute—another day.