China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Quality by Wang Hui (review)

It is more than a coincidence, I suppose, that literary criticism and politics make uneasy bedfellows throughout twentieth-century China. Since Lu Xun’s time, leftist intellectuals have endowed literature with a decisive, even Promethean role as powerful ways of formulating ideologies, inspiring revolutions, and legitimating radical beliefs. Nevertheless, the irreconcilability between acting and writing, nation and narration, contemplative life and political intervention makes this relationship complex, troubled, and estranged. Under Mao’s rule, literary critics were tempted to embroil their scholarship in the proletarian revolution, but more often they found themselves under the constant scrutiny of politicians, who intermittently use literature to legitimatize their politics but try to silence unruly critics with persecutions. In the wake of the post-Mao era, intellectuals sought to disarticulate literary criticism from this dangerous liaison with Maoist politics. The search of “autonomous criticism” was itself part of the larger project of rethinking Chinese modernity defined by revolution, socialism, and radical politics. Basked in the heat of the New Enlightenment, Wang Hui’s fame as a literary critic began in the 1980s with a humanistic interpretation on Lu Xun. Nevertheless, Wang took a surprising turn since the early 1990s, as he became the leader of a group of neoleftist critics and scholars who were disillusioned about the advent of capitalism in China. Wang published an extravaganza of essays to expound his critique against neoliberalism and the Chinese market reform, challenging the predominant Chinese intellectual consensus on the necessity of embracing global capitalism. The fusion of literary criticism and politics in Wang’s undertaking seems to have revitalized the Maoist passion to politicize literature, calling not for the “return of the repressed,” but for a critical understanding of the social function of Chinese intellectual in the market era. Wang Hui’s revitalization of leftist political intervention bespeaks a strong impulse to provoke a sense of rupture through which lost meanings, suppressed desires, and failed battles of socialism will be fulfilled in an apocalyptic manner.

In this new book, Wang Hui offers a revisionist perspective on the radical politics of twentieth-century China. The central theme is what Wang terms as the “politization twentieth century China” (二十世紀中國的政治化). Wang defines this process from three interrelated perspectives: political integration (政治整合), cultural politics (文化與政治), and the people’s war (人民戰爭). First, China’s transformation from empire into nation-state at the beginning of the twentieth century was best by a conundrum: how to integrate multifarious political forces, different ethnic groups, and divergent cultural beliefs into a coherent modern political entity known as “China.” Wang argues that the attempt to forge a modern Chinese culture during the May Fourth era generated a strong cultural identity. Moreover, the “People’s war”— a succession of revolutions waged by the CCP from the 1920s into the 1950s — is regarded as the intensification of the May Fourth Movement in its effort to empower and consolidate a Chinese nation-state. During this political process, national identity was transformed and redefined by class politics, revolutionary internationalism, and proletarian consciousness. Nevertheless, the reversal of this political process in the post-Mao era generated political problems such as a crisis in political representation, the abandonment of socialist equality, and the immiseration of migrant workers. Wang contends that China’s market turn, termed by him as “depoliticized politics” (去政治化的政治), brought up serious legitimation crisis to the Party-state, which might be solved only by a partial revival of socialist legacies.

In Chapter 2, “The Transformation of Culture and Politics,” Wang intervenes into the question of enlightenment in the 1910s. The contemporary scholarship on the May Fourth Movement has been largely shaped by liberal scholars such as Li Zehou (李澤厚) and Lin Yu-Sheng (林毓生). Both of them repudiate the radicalism of the May Fourth intellectuals. For Li, the dynamic tension between enlightenment and nationalism during the May Fourth Movement was overthrown by the subsequent political struggles. For Lin, the CCP’s radical politics was generated out of the profound antitraditionalism...