David Ownby Discusses China's Evolving Intellectual Landscape

Can you tell readers who aren’t familiar with your work about your upcoming book on Chinese intellectuals?

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The book is based on my website Reading the China Dream, which I’ve been working on for the better part of a decade. The point of the website is to engage with contemporary Chinese intellectuals. These are people who are writing in China and respecting the strictures imposed by the Party-state, so they’re neither dissidents nor propagandists. They’re part of a sort of mini-civil society that was an unexpected consequence of Reform and Opening. The way I think about them is that they’re trying to help define what socialism with Chinese characteristics might actually mean as an ongoing process. Some of them are more critical, some of them are more supportive, but they all see themselves as at least semi-autonomous. They don’t repeat propaganda points, but they also try very hard not to fall off the edge of the earth by becoming dissidents. Once you’re labeled as a dissident in China, your world falls apart.

 

There are people who look at these strictures and say, China is not a real intellectual place. They’re right in some ways. There are many things Chinese intellectuals can’t talk about, from Xinjiang to Tibet, the Falun Gong, the Tiananmen massacre, most of Chinese foreign policy, and important figures in the Party-State. Nonetheless, my reading, translating, and curating over the last 10 years or so illustrates that there’s something going on there. China has an intellectual life that’s worth reading. I think that work did some good in the world, and it generated a certain amount of pushback on the notion that Chinese can’t say anything except what the Party-state says.  

 

The framing of the book has been the biggest challenge. The title will be something like “Passing Ships,” the notion that we missed an opportunity, with a subtitle like, “A China That We Might Have Talked To?” In the period between about 2000 and 2013 especially, if you look at how Chinese intellectuals were talking and what they were talking about, the way they framed issues, the references they used, and the sources they employed, they were all extremely Western, and largely American. We tend to think of China as the exotic other, but Reform and Opening had made these Chinese intellectuals into global citizens who were talking about the same things that we do in pretty much the same way. 

 

Each chapter is sort of a pastiche of my own making. They’re juxtapositions of ideas and figures. If they were together in a room, I’m convinced they would talk this way, but mostly these are not debates that occurred. 

 

It’s not a pro-China book at all. In the introduction, I have to say something like, I detest the regime too, so don’t yell at me for this. But in France these days– the last time I was there I gave a talk and was attacked by someone who said that these can’t be public intellectuals because there’s no public space, so they’re all complicit, and you’re complicit too. I just find that to be poor reasoning, frankly. That’s just a refusal to complicate your worldview. But if you want to see it that way, you can see it that way. I don’t attack them.

 

Can you talk about how this public sphere in China has changed over time? Is there much of it left anymore, compared to 10 years ago? 

 

The whole world of print media still exists in China, but everyone now lives online like we do everywhere else. That means a lot of images and videos and platforms and comment sections, and all that has done a lot to change how people think. And then Xi Jinping tried to shut this down. China became intellectually pluralistic starting in the 1990s. Most intellectuals embraced it over the course of that time, but the state never did, and now Xi is trying to dial it back down and impose discipline. I don’t think it will work, but China is now far more boring than it was 10 years ago for people like me.  

 

Young people coming along now have less space to be open and daring. I’ve had a hard time finding younger people. If you’re 30 years old, starting your career as a public intellectual, I think you want to think carefully about what you want to write. In the mid-2000s or early 2010s, you could say really radical things in major journal articles. As far as I can tell, there were no consequences whatsoever. People said things like, Communism is cool, but it’s outlived its usefulness; look at the Soviet Union. I don’t think you can say that now. 

 

If you’re at the top, you can still say certain things. Yao Yang, who was head of the business school at Beida and also a public intellectual, could come out and say that we need Confucianism because both liberal democracy and autocracy are foundering. I guess he gets away with it because it doesn’t matter: China’s not going to become Confucian. But it’s still an audacious thing to say, and he said it quite recently.

 

I think a lot of the discourse is moving outside of China. The pressure is just too great. But they keep writing, and because of VPNs and because the world is still wired despite the Great Firewall, it gets back in.

 

I think if Xi Jinping were to disappear tomorrow, depending on who took his place, intellectual energy would come back. There’s still a huge traditional valorization of scholarship and knowledge. All the intellectuals say that’s gone away, the internet has killed it, the Party has killed it, but they get a lot more love than we do just for being intellectuals. 

 

You’ve talked about how it’s become more difficult in the West to talk about China in a nuanced way. Are you afraid there’s a window closing on books like yours too? In other words, are we getting to a point where anyone who says something nuanced can be chewed out in an almost McCarthyist way, as happened to you in France? 

 

I guess we’ll see when I approach publishers. 

 

When I applied for money, I had to go through a grant application process, and one of the reviewers just dismissed it out of hand. They said, you can’t say anything in China, so you’d just be making things up. That notion exists, and it’s a very strong notion. It’s very hard to fight against that. I think it’s a form of willful blindness, and it’s not doing anybody any good.

 

I feel people feel like they have to take sides, and I just don’t quite get that. Saying whether China is good or bad is kind of like saying whether cheese is bad. There’s good cheese and there’s bad cheese, right? I’m definitely in the minority here, but I just don’t get into activist scholarship. I never call into question what those people do. It’s a noble cause. But I can’t see this having the effect of changing China in any way at all. So if that’s what they think they’re doing, I’m not sure. 

 

My book is not going to change China. I would like people to acknowledge that real Chinese living, breathing people exist. I’m not sure we’re there yet, even in the China field.

 

To me, a lot of the utility of your project is that it lets us catch a glimpse of Chinese people’s opinions, even allowing that the authors you translate only represent a subset of Chinese society. These days, China’s society, not just its government, can look like a black box from the outside. 

 

To me the big question about China’s black box is, what do Communist Party members read? They don’t just read Xi Jinping Thought over and over again. You figure some of them read some of these intellectuals’ writings. They’re not idiots. And you can be a skeptical CCP member, I’m quite sure. Surely some of these people I translate are members. 

 

As Kaiser Kuo puts it, the history of modern China is the history of ideas. Ideas are extremely important. Since Reform and Opening, since the policy of engagement, American ideas have been front and center. Most Chinese liberals are sort of Rockefeller Republicans, in fact. They don’t like all this “woke” stuff, they don’t like identity politics; they’re sort of 1950s, middle-of-the-road kind of people. Even the New Confucians were inspired by Samuel Huntington or Robert Bellah. Francis Fukuyama was the big thorn in the foot of the New Left. I’ve learned so much history of Western political thought by translating all of this.

 

As the world of Chinese intellectuals has constricted under Xi Jinping, has the impact been especially severe for people from one intellectual tradition or another?

 

I think those intellectual divisions– Liberal, New Left, and New Confucian–  are less important because they don’t have as much autonomy as they used to, and because the weight of Xi Jinping on the whole system is more important than the distinctions between them. It’s not that they’re friendly, it’s just that it doesn’t bubble up to the top as often. 

 

The New Left is doing fine, except that it’s lost an edge completely. It’s just become pretty much statist discourse. They don’t talk about the people. No one talks about the people in China. China is ripe for populism. No one, left or right, talks about the people, the laobaixing. 

 

Liberals have lost a lot of ground because China has been succeeding. Up until fairly recently, there was a lot of chest-thumping. It’s still going on a bit, but growth rates have slowed, and most of China realizes that to the extent the US and China pull apart, that’s going to keep China’s growth rates low for longer. This means that Chinese young people are not beating the drums nearly as much as they would have in the past, because they’re having a hard time getting jobs and buying apartments and having kids. So when China’s rise was a real thing, liberals lost ground because there was no point in saying that China needed universal values. China was doing just fine, cruising along, surpassing the Soviet Union, perhaps the United States, so they slipped out of sight when they had to become Trumpists or libertarians or something else. Now, everything’s kind of stuck. Xi Jinping is throwing any number of monkey wrenches in the works so that young people don’t want to bother with this stuff and old guys are kind of tired. 

 

Maybe a final point about the book and its value. These guys who stay and fight within China, respecting the rules, have a better chance of actually influencing the regime than the dissidents who get thrown out. They’re in there trying. At the very least, they’re background noise that the volume is turned up on from time to time. And they’re just in there doing what they can, like everybody else in the world.