In 1998, the People's Press of Gansu published a three-volume collection of essays edited by Li Dao and entitled Farewell, Utopia (Gaobie wutuobang). The cover of each volume displayed an eloquent image that would have amounted to blasphemy in different times: a portrait of Karl Marx lighting himself a cigar with a flaming dollar bill. This flaunted dismissal of revolution and utopia as ideas that now irredeemably belonged not only to China's but to the world's past represents a product of post-1989 critiques of political and cultural radicalism and their repudiation of intellectual-led movements for the progressive overhaul of society. Els van Dongen's study constitutes an innovative book-length analysis of key debates and texts from this highly consequential, yet often overlooked trend in contemporary intellectual history. The era examined in this book lies between the reformist optimism of the 1980s on the one side, and, on the other, the emergence of Liberalism and the New Left as main political factions starting in the mid-1990s. However, as van Dongen rightly points out, “the ‘utopian’ mood of the 1980s had already suffered vital setbacks” (p. 8) by the late 1980s, both inside and outside the intellectual establishment.
The contribution of Realistic Revolution to the history of contemporary China and to that of global intellectual trends is two-fold. First, it examines key currents of political and cultural conservatism with a focus on the crucial 1989–1995 period. In addition, it contributes to a history of the productive dialogue between Chinese intellectuals based in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States, and those in mainland China (especially chapter four). As the writing of the first group increasingly contributed to defining the issues debated by the second, van Dongen observes, the question of “who had the right to represent China” and set the intellectual agenda rose to prominence; hence, “discussions on radicalism also reflected the impact of transnational forces in the transformation of Chinese intellectual identity” (p. 27).
Van Dongen's study draws its language-centred approach from the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), particularly the way his “conceptual history” treats concepts as contested constructions. Koselleck's definition of “counter-concepts” is applied to the interpretation of the radicalism/conservatism binary (e.g., p. 49). As an example of the complex transnational flows and intellectual genealogies that shape modern Chinese thought and its study, one could note that a thinker who profoundly influenced Koselleck, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), has in turn inspired Chinese critics of liberalism since the late 1990s (see Sebastian Veg, “The Rise of China's Statist Intellectuals: Law, Sovereignty, and ‘Repoliticization’,” The China Journal 82, 2019, 23–45); Schmitt is incorrectly described as an American thinker (p. 73).
Beside interviews with key figures such as Zheng Min, Chen Lai and Zhang Yiwu, sources employed in this study include Chinese-language journal articles, newspapers, collections of essays and monographs published both in and outside mainland China. Van Dongen also engages extensively and meticulously with existing literature on Chinese intellectual history and foreign sources of Chinese conservatism, an endeavour made even more complex by the fact that Anglophone literature on both topics at times influenced the debates examined in this volume.
The work is divided into two main parts: the first, comprising chapters two and three and roughly covering the years 1989–1991, mostly focuses on the neoconservative advocacy of Xiao Gongqin and, in chapter three, provides an in-depth discussion of his conception of history and modernization theory; chapter two also analyses a landmark policy paper commonly attributed to the offspring of high officials, or “princelings,” to contrast its recommendations with Xiao's position. The second part, consisting of chapters four to six and covering the period 1992–95, mainly revolves around literary and historiographical debates on such issues as the May Fourth movement and China's radical tradition, the reappraisal of Confucianism and Chinese cultural identity, vernacular literature and “post-theories.” Overall, these chapters constitute a comprehensive and well-structured analysis of some of most important trends and figures of post-1989 intellectual life. The concluding chapter summarizes the main “sets of tensions” highlighted in the volume and links them with the subsequent evolution of Chinese politics up to the Xi Jinping era.
Van Dongen's analysis persuasively supports the central argument that conservative intellectuals “continued to project change into the future and integrated conservatism into a vision of modernization that was no less linear” than their radical counterpart (p. 13). Contra previous characterizations of Chinese conservatism, the book also convincingly argues that one “cannot simply reduce Chinese advocacies of conservatism during the 1990s to manifestations of cultural nationalism” (p. 199). Thinkers and texts analysed in this volume indeed reveal a conservatism that “was both rational and moral, local and global” and “intended to integrate past wisdom in a forward-looking manner,” even though the anti-radical wave of those years cannot always be described in those terms, as the case of He Xin (p. 45) exemplifies. Finally, the book shows how post-1989 critiques of radicalism “were more than manifestations of self-censorship” (p. 10).
As echoes of post-1989 anti-radicalism still reverberate in the political and cultural discourses of today's China, van Dongen's study represents a most valuable and timely contribution to the study of intellectual trends in reform era China – one that is as illuminating for the specialized reader as it will be rewarding for any student of 20th-century Chinese culture and society. This reader hopes that Realistic Revolution will also come to the attention of intellectual historians, literary scholars and political scientists of other regions who have an interest in the global history of concepts or are simply curious about non-Western modernities.
