The End of the Revolution

"Wang Hui is one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals at the moment, in terms of his international exposure. I think the book is interesting because it gives his very ambiguous – or ambivalent from his point of view – take on what’s happening in China today. He is not someone who argues that the Communist revolution and what came after it has failed completely, or that there was no point in having it. That rather disillusioned viewpoint has been heard from Chinese scholars – many of them have, perhaps sensibly, gone into exile in Hong Kong or elsewhere. Wang Hui says that’s not true, there are still things that the Chinese revolution has brought in terms of progress and modernisation that we need to appreciate. At the same time, we need to understand the limitations of what that first set of revolutions was able to bring about and think about what’s realistic. In a sense, he is also quite critical of many of the people who were part of the 1989 generation, simply because he feels that they were naïve about westernisation and what exposure to the Western world could do for China, rather than understanding China’s own social and economic conditions. The book is also interesting because it gives an indication of how wide, and also how narrow, the parameters of this debate are in China today. It’s very clear that 20 years plus after [the] Tiananmen Square [demonstrations], China is still a very authoritarian society. It restricts freedom of speech in a variety of ways that would be unacceptable to almost any Western intellectual. On the other hand, it’s also clear that there is a very real and lively debate going on between a whole variety of different political positions – liberal, conservative, pro-revolution, anti-revolution. Nobody is allowed to publish a book saying it’s time to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party – that’s not going to happen now or anytime soon. But discussions in another sense on the future direction of China are meat and drink for the more intellectual sorts of magazines in China, and figures like Wang Hui play a very important role in that debate. So to get something of the pulse of thinking in modern China a century after the 1911 revolution, Wang Hui is a really good starting point. I think the Chinese state, and more widely Chinese thinkers and people as they’re educated through the system, and doing now what they have been doing over the last century – which is to in some ways rather pragmatically use aspects of the part that are useful. This is not to suggest that pragmatism is separable from genuine conviction or emotion. The Chinese people have felt that they have had, broadly speaking, a very raw deal from the rest of the world for the last 150 years – and there is much to that argument. One can’t dismiss that without having a full understanding of the violent and turbulent nature of Chinese history over the period from the 1840s all the way to the 1980s and beyond – perhaps even to some extent in the present day. Having said that, one of the things that’s very visible is that the Chinese state has always been much more conscious of its history than I think many Western states. I think the current regime does find that the past is a useful tool for what it wants to do in the present and the future, but that direction can often be surprising. For instance, to take China’s World War Two experience, 40 years ago the way in which that experience was portrayed in contemporary Chinese politics under Mao was that it was a time when China had to learn to be self-sufficient. It was being attacked from outside, Western allies did nothing for them and it was a time for China to stand on its own two feet. Now, that wartime experience is used in a rather different way. Instead China is portrayed as having been part of a wartime alliance against fascism, and capable of being a cooperative and useful actor in the world community. Which of course suits China very well at a time when it wants to be seen today as a major player in the UN, as a country that takes part in peacekeeping operations and which has a cooperative rather than a confrontational role in international society. So the same event is taken but a very different reading of it is given to the wider population, and I think that tendency will not change any time soon. Because even though the history – or the part of the history that is emphasised – changes, the attitude that history is a tool that should be used has not changed."