Читать книгу What Does China Think? - Mark Leonard - Страница 16

I met Wang Hui in ‘Thinker’s Café’, a bright and airy retreat with comfy sofas and fresh espressos that sits on top of one of Beijing’s largest bookshops. Within a stone’s throw of three of the country’s most prestigious universities – Tsinghua, Beida and Renmin – it reverberates to the sound of earnest intellectual chatter. Today’s Wang Hui has overcome his despair. He has the guise of an archetypal public intellectual: a thin man with cropped hair, wearing a brown jacket and a black polo-neck sweater. He loves discussing abstract notions like ‘enlightenment’, ‘teleology’ and the meaning of ‘modernity’. Neither his J.-P. Sartre chic nor his trendy theoretical discourse would be out of place on the Left Bank of Paris.

But Wang Hui has not lost his anger about China’s condition. He has managed to stand aloof from the commercial mainstream. Because he has not joined the party, he has no official positions (unlike Zhang Weiying, he is not the director of a university institute or department). For a decade he held an influential post as editor of Dushu – the leading intellectual journal in China – but it was taken away from him with very little notice in advance of the 17th Party Congress in 2007. Although he is a professor at Tsinghua University, Wang Hui has an uncomfortable relationship with the authorities: writing reports exposing local corruption and helping workers organize themselves against illegal privatizations. He often uses the media to put the spotlight on government failings.

Wang Hui is one of the leaders of the ‘New Left’, a loose grouping of intellectuals that is increasingly capturing the public mood, and setting the tone for political debate. They are ‘new’ because unlike the ‘old left’ they support market reforms. They are Left, because unlike the ‘New Right’ they worry about inequality. Many sought exile in the USA in the 1990s, but now they are back to join the debate about China’s future. In an interview, Wang Hui set out their stall: ‘China is caught between the two extremes of misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and suffering from the worst elements of both systems … I am generally in favor of orienting the country toward market reforms, but China’s development must be more equal, more balanced. We must not give total priority to GDP growth to the exclusion of worker’s rights and the environment.’

Their philosophy is a product of China’s relative affluence. Now that the market is driving economic growth, they ask what should be done with the wealth. Should it continue accumulating in the hands of a privileged elite or can China foster a model of development that benefits all its citizens? Thirty years into China’s reform process they are challenging the philosophy of growth as the ultimate goal: instead of hurtling towards nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism, they want to develop a Chinese variant of social democracy. And while, like magpies, they adapt ideas from all over the world to Chinese conditions, they feel that China’s development should be built on Beijing’s terms. As Wang Hui says:

We cannot count on a state on the German or Nordic model. We have such a large country that the state apparatus would have to be vast to provide that kind of welfare. That is why we need institutional innovation. Wang Shaoguang [a political economist] is talking about low-price health-care. Cui Zhiyuan [a political theorist] is talking about socialized capital and reforming property rights to give workers a say over the companies where they work. Hu Angang [an economist] is talking about Green development.

Their goal is to challenge the imported ideas of ‘Pearl River Capitalism’ and replace them with a home-grown philosophy: ‘We have to find an alternate way. This is the great mission of our generation.’ And as the list of problems arising from the market grows almost as long as the many achievements, the senior leadership is taking note of their ideas. They are beginning to feel that their time has come.