In Democracy Through the Lens of Chinese Scholars: The Battle of Ideas, He Li surveys a wide range of Chinese intellectual texts to investigate how ideas about democracy have been articulated in the contemporary Chinese public sphere. As in Li’s previous work (Political Thought and China’s Transformation: Ideas Shaping Reform in Post-Mao China, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Chinese intellectuals are grouped by their ideological leanings, constituting each chapter’s thematic focus. Specifically, these are divided into liberals, New Leftists, Confucians, social democrats, neo-authoritarians, and advocates of good governance. In each chapter, Li traces how intellectuals of these ideological camps grapple with the concept of democracy in different ways to address their diagnoses of China’s problems and visions about a better future Chinese society. The liberal voice, analysed in chapter one, remains a thread tying together different camps and serves as the main interlocutor for them.
The strength of Li’s book lies in its scope. The book surveys a significant number of intellectuals active in the public sphere since the beginning of the post-Mao era, ranging from those relatively more familiar to mainstream political theory such as Daniel A. Bell, Bai Tongdong and Wang Hui to those who have largely been neglected, such as Xie Tao. For readers interested in mapping the landscape of contemporary Chinese thought, Democracy Through the Lens of Chinese Scholars can be a useful guide pointing them toward individuals, texts and problematics important for understanding the trajectory of Chinese political thought in the last few decades.
A few questions are worth raising for readers of the book. The first concerns ideological labels. For years, concepts such as “liberals,” the “New Left” and “Confucianism” have been the script for making sense of the Chinese intellectual scene. While some labels are perhaps more useful to describe a somewhat self-containing group with internal differences (such as liberals), others are less so. For example, Li characterizes the New Left by highlighting their sympathy towards the Cultural Revolution. While this view might be valid, it is complicated by, say, Wang Shaoguang’s deep concerns about how the Cultural Revolution showed that even a charismatic leader like Mao was unable to discipline a movement he himself initiated (see Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan, Oxford University Press, 1995). Wang’s concern draws him close to both the liberal view as well as the Communist Party’s self-understanding, even though they propose different solutions. Categorizing such labels might prevent readers from working through how similar experiences can give rise to diverse theoretical paths.
Second, have Chinese intellectuals worked out stimulating arguments for democratization that can contribute to more general scholarship on democracy? The book’s expansive scope could have been deepened by more theoretically engaged discussion. Dialogues with democratic theory remain largely absent aside from a few canonical names such as Schumpeter and Huntington. While thoughts and ideas developed by Chinese intellectuals are surveyed and reported, they are not often rigorously analysed on their own terms. Readers might be left wondering whether Chinese intellectuals have offered theoretical insights about democracy beyond contextually situated answers to the socio-political problems that concern them.
Relatedly, a more sustained engagement with Chinese democratic ideas may also unsettle some of the book’s more sweeping claims. For instance, Li argues that the New Left’s solution to China’s problems is “a second Cultural Revolution, a sweeping political movement that would uproot corruption and return the power to the masses, restoring social justice” (pp. 41–42). While New Leftists tend to draw from Mao-era ideas and practices for inspiration, their proposal for China has hardly come close to a return to the Cultural Revolution. The distance between nostalgic appropriation and a full-fledged proposal of return deserves attention because it helps readers understand important issues within Chinese New Leftism – that they lack a clear theory of power beyond speaking to current powerholders, much like many of their critics.
Third, how does time matter for an intellectual history spanning over five decades? Many intellectuals and ideological camps in contemporary China went through crucial moments of reconsideration and transition to become what they are today. Take liberalism as an example. The idea that the core task of defending liberal progress lies in defending the free market – an idea very much bearing the imprint of modernization theory – was less significant for Chinese liberals in the 1980s than in the 1990s. It was the Tian’anmen massacre that forced them to reconsider their political strategy, through which they largely parted ways with public-oriented mobilization and turned toward the market. Time is of great importance here because it helps understand the sustaining, contestation and fading of revolutionary ideas in the postrevolutionary moment.
A more serious engagement with time also leads to this question: has the role that intellectual politics plays in society changed since the late 1970s? In chapter seven, Li discusses the impact of social media, noting that new media ends the Party’s monopoly and enables intellectuals’ thought to reach a broader audience. This view, however, seems to overlook the fact that the massive production of popular culture has largely marginalized the role intellectuals play in shaping the cultural sphere. One might argue that, today, the individuals who play the roles once occupied by intellectuals are social media influencers. In this sense, perhaps a full grasp of democratic ideas in contemporary China requires taking the structural transformation of the public sphere seriously.
All in all, Democracy Through the Lens of Chinese Scholars invites readers to further pursue these questions by presenting an intellectual landscape harbouring many directions.
