Have We Been Noticed Yet?

—Intellectual Contestation and the Chinese Web

Geremie R. Barmé and Gloria Davies

The growth of a Chinese intellectual web-culture has proceeded apace since the late 1990s. Webzine editors, writers, activists and default-censors include some of the most prominent established ‘independent’ and ‘critical intellectuals’ active since the 1980s or the 1990s.[i] Many participate in the webculture that they also critique and play a key role in mediating and shaping. Some have extended into cyberspace an intellectual stance and self-imposed role that has evolved in the complex arena of ‘reformist-era’ media (publishing, editing and writing, in particular, in the 1990s).[ii] Many of its producers are guided by the notion that using cyberspace to discuss problems and issues in Chinese intellectual praxis will nurture a virtual civil society into being, one that they assume will see enlightened public opinion winning out in the end over ill-informed ideas and misconceptions. That this parallels a cluster of views within international cyber-discourse which sees the net as creating an open community of netizens who will obviate socio-political and historical boundaries is, perhaps, no coincidence. It goes without saying that this notion is akin to a guiding principle to which most producers of cybertexts subscribe, wherever they are physically located and whichever language they use.

An unprecedented openness and frankness seems to be apparent when one surveys the debates generated on websites like Shiji Zhongguo (Century China); Sixiang de jingjie (The Realm of Ideas); Wenhua Zhongguo (Cultural China); and Sixiang pinglun (Critical inquiry). In the last eighteen months alone, much electronic text has appeared on diverse topics like the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, intellectual plagiarism, the awarding of the Nobel Literature Prize to the French-based writer Gao Xingjian, the U.S. presidential election and the U.S. spy-plane fiasco, to name but a few of these topics. The ‘discussions’ that have taken place around such current affairs issues are textually uneven. Some authors publish under their own names while others assume pseudonyms, or both; some provide essay-length accounts, others script paragraph-length critiques, while others yet contribute no more than a sentence or two, or lend support to or show disapproval of any one declared position through an appropriately worded subject heading. The unsolicited text-bite, as opposed to the media-massaged sound-bites generated by ordained experts, gives a currency to the kind of utterances previously sequestered in narrow specialist cultural journals while making public the private discussions of the culturally concerned.

In engaging with this new technologically-enabled and enhanced mode of discourse, it is arguable that the mode of production (that is, cyberspace publishing via internet technology) can and does determine (although we must also be wary of technological determinism) the contents of the resulting discourse significantly more than print technology did for what we now regard as conventional print texts. The speed at which an electronic text can be composed and posted to draw almost immediate responses, composed and published in like manner in mere minutes, appears at first glance to alter in a radical way the nature and function of discourse as it has operated within a conventional print medium. The proliferation of critical themes and targets in supraborder Chinese intellectual cyberspace offers its readers, among other things, the novel experience of observing and participating in spectacles of disagreement that reflect existing rivalries between individuals and intellectual ‘factions’ and in the range of current opinions circulating in Chinese intellectual cultural circles. There is a crucial difference between the economies that govern the production of conventional print and electronic publications, and the regulative controls to which these are subjected by publishers, the media authorities and the marketplace.

Newspaper and journal editorial boards deliberate on what is suitable for publication, mindful of the often vague but sometimes quite pointed and specific guidelines that issue through the party-state chain of command, and what ‘sells’ (or in the case of academic journals, what is ‘relevant’ to the field’s concerns, or indeed what can create a potentially rich new sub-area of inquiry) within the physical limits imposed by the available page space, in accordance with publication deadlines and printing schedules that can be met only through reliance on a sizeable number of support staff.[iii] The webmaster, web editorial team or list owner, however, skims through postings, forced by the sheer quantities and types of responses received to reach quick decisions on what to post. In the context of cyberspace ‘freedom’ from the spatial constraints of the printed page, electronic textual arbiters would seem to be generally inclined towards favoring an inclusiveness as comprehensive as their websites are able to accommodate, while observing rudimentary protocols of discursive interaction derived from existing conventions that guide embodied exchanges in the seminar room or textual encounters in the pages of journals and newspapers.

But does the greatly accelerated rate of publication and access, increased space for plural commentaries and the transformed nature of what can be acknowledged as intellectual or critical discourse lead, as it were, naturally, to the emergence of an unprecedented degree of intellectual freedom and greater accountability? In this paper, we argue that the hyper-efficiency of the electronic publishing apparatus, and the concomitant serial causes-célèbres that it is generating, or rather that feed the growth of Chinese web-forums, do not necessarily signal the arrival of a new instrument of social and cultural critique with increased powers to voice and make visible real problems and concerns in lived experience and practice. On the contrary, increased access to textual production and consumption and a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of electronic publications on numerous themes and topics, might end up doing little more than shift existing modes of intellectual discourse and well-established structures of intellectual authority (along with the mechanisms of production, distribution and validation established in the marketplaces of ideas and publication) into a new virtual realm of expanded combative interaction. In saying this, we do not deny the significant social benefits that web-forums have provided by greatly improving public access to information on a range of important issues. One obvious example would be the way in which local media and internet coverage of the tragic deaths of 38 schoolchildren and four teachers in the Chinese town of Fanglin (Jiangxi province) in March 2001, in an accidental explosion at a cash-strapped school that was used for fireworks assembly (with the children conscripted as workers), outpaced the government’s attempts at covering up the incident. That the government felt sufficiently threatened by the power of public opinion to close down the chatroom at the highly popular mainland-based website <Sina.com>, which had hosted the publication of much public anger about the government’s handling of the tragedy, provides ample evidence of the internet’s social and political significance.[iv] In relation to online publication of Chinese intellectual debates, however, the internet’s social and political significance is more complex and less immediately apparent, owing to the much smaller readership that such debates attract, and the entrenched professional and elite cultural interests they represent.

For the China academic (that is, the ethnic or non-ethnic scholar of Chinese studies,[v]) the net provides the novel experience of seeing a virtual assemblage akin to all-that-can-be-said on a given topic of interest displayed as a long list of subject headings that tempt, along with those filed under the hot-buttons ‘next’ and ‘previous,’ with the seductive promise of new important ‘findings’ only a cursor-click away, supposedly providing immediate full-immersion into ‘Chinese’ opinion on a given topic or controversy. Indeed it will not be surprising to see prominent academic careers being forged in the coming years on the basis of interpretive mastery of issues debated on Chinese web forums. Perhaps a new research industry awaits us, one that harnesses techniques of empirical scholarship and textual analysis to the enterprise of charting an emergent virtual Chinese ‘public sphere’ whose perceived salient features could be variously represented and distilled as these are from the ongoing accrual of textual riches deposited at different sites, providing a republic of opinion in the guise of equal and equitable exchange with which to gauge the state of ‘Chineseness,’ or at least to plumb the depths of concern and interest of the Chinese ‘internal audience’ of intellectual practitioners, at any given moment. For the Chinese cybertext reader and producer, the novelty of this particular form of low-risk but circumvented public participation in debates that were hitherto largely the exclusive province of select groups of elite intellectuals is tempered by considerations of the consequences (both positive and negative) that attend such participation.

In this context, we need also to remind ourselves that protocols of cooperative censorship have long been internalised by Chinese webmasters and editors who maintain the legality and viability of their sites by policing opinion and being as assiduous with the control+delete keys as more traditional print-fixated watchdogs are with the red pen. For instance, should one write in one’s own name or write pseudonymously and how would this affect the readership’s view of the authorial persona that one assumes (and its perceived consistency, not to mention authority)? What real-world consequences might be at stake that lead a producer of cyber textual polemic to declare his/her position on any given matter? How do the multiple personae of a new Sino-netizen claim a valency when authority still rests with publication in print texts as anything from individually-authored articles to inclusion in anthologised books?

These musings on the relation between cyber textual production and its interpreters and producers cannot be broached as if they were questions for which answers can readily be found. This is not to say that attempts at determining the significance and the impact of cybertexts do not exist or are irrelevant, for there is already a substantial body of critically engaged literature on the implications of cyber-democracy and new modes of social interaction, self-representation and subjectivity as mediated through the internet.[vi] In focussing on the relation between cyber textual production and its interpreters and producers, we seek less to chart that relation in any definitive way (for there are many different ways to chart it) than to explore its complexity through one particular internet debate, namely the controversy surrounding the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards 長江讀書獎 that unfolded between June and August 2000.

The title of our paper, “Have we been noticed yet?,” suggests that attention-grabbing authors of Chinese cyber polemics are primarily interested in how they appear to their readers. This generalized category of ‘readers’ itself requires some elaboration since such readers include coevals, combatants, ‘people who matter’ and so forth; there exists a veritable hierarchy of observer-participants that places the non-activist passive ‘general reader’ at the bottom of the scale. In posing this somewhat provocative question, we seek to foreground the representation of real-world events and actors in cyberspace as an extension of the lived social complex in which intellectual rivals contest with each other through the shared use of a discourse that tends towards various forms of magisterial assertion or categorical declamation within a particular political and market environment. The art of stating that one knows better than most or that one’s opinion constitutes the only proper or true view on any given issue draws on a repertoire of rhetorical and textual devices acquired as part of academic training in the reproduction of what Pierre Bourdieu has evocatively termed ‘professorial certitudo sui.’ According to Bourdieu:

In secondary and higher education, it is taken for granted that the language of ideas elaborated by the academic and scientific tradition and also the second-order language of allusions and cultural complicities are second nature to intelligent and gifted individuals; or better, that the ability to understand and manipulate these learned languages—artificial languages par excellence—where we see the natural language of human intelligence at work immediately distinguishes intelligent students from all the rest. It is thanks to this ideology of a profession that academics can vouch for professorial judgements as strictly equitable. But in reality they consecrate cultural privilege. Language is the most active and elusive part of the cultural heritage which each individual owes to this background… As syntax, it provides us with a system of transposable mental dispositions. These go hand in hand with values which dominate the whole of our experience and, in particular, with a vision of society and of culture (Bourdieu et.al.1994: 8).

Within the modern Chinese intellectual tradition, this ‘professorial certitudo sui‘ derives from not only the cultural privilege enjoyed by those fortunate enough to be admitted into the narrow patrician elite intellectual circles of Beijing and Shanghai, but also a particular history and intellectual lineage that goes back to the appearance of what we might call the ‘Kang-Liang’ public persona that emerged at the turn of the last century. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao had a seminal impact on the new-style intellectual through their canniness in maximising promotional opportunities for their polemical views on reform and modernisation in the emergent media environment of late-Qing, early-Republican China.[vii] In the controversy that developed in cyberspace over the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, professorial certitudo sui came to occupy center stage as prominent Chinese intellectuals, publishing under their own names, sought to defend themselves or criticise others or both, against a clamorous chorus of cheers and jeers from mostly anonymous participants in the ensuing debate. The latter, authors of provocative, defensive or accusatory short comments and email subject headings, however, played a marginal role in the debate waged among prominent intellectuals. Yet, like Elias Canetti’s characterisation of the crowd, they constituted a powerful formation in their accrued effects to lend a certain gladiatorial glow to the debate, charging it with the electricity of a public spectacle whose development was dictated to a certain extent by the spectators’ own appetite for more spectacle. In this regard, the technology of the internet has facilitated the textual simulation of a certain conversational buzz that would normally only be heard as part of lived social experience.

THE PUBLICITY OF INTELLECTUALITY

To an extent the spectacles of contestation discussed here, and which are now a feature of Chinese cyberculture (itself a medium that both demands the constant production of new issues and problems 問題, clashes 交鋒, and controversies 爭論, and feeds the voracious appetite of users for info-bites) are crucially about the small but highly visible group of active writers on intellectual and cultural issues in China. Some years ago, a leading editor remarked that despite the information and magazine boom of the early to mid 1990s, there were roughly 1000 writers actively engaged in this public activity.[viii] This number may well have increased, but it is not as large as may be suggested by a casual review of postings on the net.

As Stanley Fish has commented on the subject of intellectuals going public and the publicity of intellectual matters, albeit in regard to the somewhat different media environment of the United States, “marginality is a public role”:

A public intellectual is not someone who takes as his or her subject matters of public concern—every law professor does that; a public intellectual is someone who takes as his or her subject matters of public concern, and has the public’s attention. (Fish 1999: 118)

Fish does not count the ‘cameo’ intellectuals or ‘intellectuals for a day’ within this category; that is the evanescent stars who vie for issue-related media attention, the onscreen nabobs who provide the timely quote or authoritative and typecast comment in the role of token thinker on the topic of the moment. Rather he speaks of the

public’s intellectual; that is, he or she… to whom the public regularly looks for illumination on any number of (indeed all) issues and, as things stand now, the public does not look to academics for this general wisdom, in part because (as is often complained) academics are not trained to speak on everything, only on particular things, but more importantly because academics do not have a stage or pulpit from which their pronouncements, should they be inclined to make them, could be broadcast. (Fish 1999: 119)

Increasingly, many Chinese intellectuals claim that a public sphere now exists in the Chinese media and foresee that it will expand rapidly on the net. It is worth noting in this context that those who also assume the role of the intellectual conscience of the nation or the putative ‘public’s intellectuals’ (including even prolific and outspoken writers like Yu Jie), have as yet little or nothing to say on subjects about which the informed Chinese public (and presumably the general media-consuming masses) may well be concerned: be it the recent events in Philippine politics, the threat of the disintegration of Indonesia, or the jailing of Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, just to name a few obvious but uncommented on topics, let alone issues farther afield. To some extent, this reflects the general disinterest of the state-controlled media and the mainland Chinese public culture that it dominates and orchestrates in problems unrelated to either China or Great Power (that is, former Imperial Power) politics, no matter what their global or broader human significance, with the striking exception of issues about the United States, whose ‘leading nation’ status and global economic power remain a source of both fascination and resentment for many Chinese cultural producers, both state-appointed and ‘independent.’[ix]

Intellectual polemics within the English-speaking world involve a politics of critical engagement which is generally understood to be and remains largely confined to professional academic constituencies and their disciplinary or inter-disciplinary affiliations. Those engaged pursue a brief of training critical minds, mentoring promising scholars to find publishing outlets and employment and generally contributing to the ‘field’ as a worthwhile intellectual enterprise in and of itself. Chinese intellectual polemics, while issuing mainly from authors based at publicly-funded universities, are staged in such ways as to assume that the politics of academically-acquired power is quasi-independent of complex and ambiguous relationships with the actual power-holders in government. While the participants in polemics may pursue specialist concerns (and this ‘return to the study’ has been an egregious feature of post-‘culture fever’ campus life since the early 1990s), they also claim a public relevance in the broader intellectual world and a purchase on the ‘public sphere’ (the problematic nature of which is one of the main themes of the present essay).

In this regard, although several authors of recent Chinese intellectual controversies have adapted Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere to discuss the post-Deng social environment, they have shown, on the whole, less interest in reflecting on the difficulties posed by the importation of this notion into a very different socio-political environment than in critiquing their opponents’ formulations for being wrong-headed. It is perhaps too easy to read a better and more inclusive mode of public engagement into recent Chinese intellectual cyber-controversies since there appears to be an unprecedented diversity of participants in such debates. The celebration of such public engagement is, we argue, premature since the evanescent postings of no-name participants remain marginal, and while providing witty interventions from time to time, they are quickly obscured and filtered out in authoritative accounts of these controversies (for instance in the form of overviews, reports, articles and books that acquire a significance in public culture, thereby becoming the record of the historical evolution of China’s ‘public sphere’) published subsequent to their occurrence. As we discuss later in this paper, this is borne out in the case of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, the controversy over which was quickly anthologized to feature only ‘significant’ contributions in book form by the web-forum Chinese Reader shortly after it had peaked in August 2000.

THE MARKET FOR DISAGREEMENT AND THE KONG-TAI PRESENCE

Over the years, much attention has been paid to the cultural events and the high-profile protagonists engaged in intellectual debate in mainland Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Kunming, to name but a few. It was not until recently, however, that the impact of what we have called elsewhere the Kong-Tai cultural sphere—part of what has been variously dubbed the ‘Chinese commonwealth’ or ‘cultural China’[x], has been accorded more adequate recognition.

The public flow of information (initially pop cultural, latterly intellectual) between the urban nodes of the mainland and Kong-Tai has been underway for over two decades, and the actual flow of money and influence has been crucial in creating the material as well as the notional space for the webzines that have now come to play such a formidable and precipitous role in Chinese intellectual debate today.

The influx of capital and the cultural imperatives related to it[xi] has been crucial to the formulation and priorities of mainland culture, sometimes overtly, and just as commonly by undersigned stealth. The start-up capital for internet magazines and the cultural technologies discussed in this paper has complex origins far beyond the scope of our discussion, and wherewithal, to investigate. It is, however, important to note that there are dimensions of material culture and capital investment that are perhaps impossible to map in their fullness but of which an appreciation would bring further light to bear on the complex skein of ideologies surrounding the generation of webzines and their accessibility. In many ways, these webzines extend the ‘independent’ space inaugurated by journals like Scholars 學人, The Orient 東方 and Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly 中國社會科學季刊, all of which were established in the early 1990s with offshore 海外 financial support. In so doing, they also extend the alternative intellectual authority and prestige enjoyed by the editors of and regular contributors to their conventional print counterparts (especially since the same ‘personalities’ have tended to dominate in both realms) within Chinese public culture.

It is also important to recall that from the late 1970s, the Hong Kong media, in particular journals like The Seventies, Ming Pao Monthly, Pai-hsing Bi-monthly and Cheng Ming, had provided a ready outlet for cultural controversy on the mainland. As the regimen of erratic state censorship and flaccid authoritarianism evolved through the 1980s, writers and intellectuals, be they underground poets or disaffected journalists, or for that matter canny, self-promoting novelists, used the Hong Kong media as consciously as it welcomed them to create sensational stories of their repression, banning or struggles with the party bureaucracy. Careers in some cases flourished, and colorful reports in the Hong Kong (and often Taiwan, Japanese and eventually Western media) often led to contracts being signed for book deals or, in the case of the nascent rock’n’roll scene led by the Beijing musician Cui Jian from 1986, lucrative recording contracts.

As the publishing market on the mainland underwent a market transformation from the mid 1980s, authors became finely attuned to the ban-and-boom possibilities of controversy. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan (港台 or Kong-Tai as it is put in the heading of this section) newspaper and magazine publishers were particularly active in contracting mainland writers and editors from the early 1990s, offering what was then a considerable enticement by paying for contributions, be they essays, reports or edited series of articles, in hard currency, either US or HK dollars. The appearance of the influential, and relatively ecumenical Hong Kong-based journal Twenty-first Century 二十一世紀 in 1990 had an exemplary influence on both print journals generated by mainland editors/scholars and eventually on the style and approach of the webzines under discussion themselves. From the inauguration of the journal Liu Qingfeng and Jin Guantao, the editors of Twenty-first Century, who were both formerly active in mainland intellectual debate and politics prior to 4 June 1989, solicited articles on thematically important topics which they edited to conform to the word limit and style of their journal. Then they organised responses 回應 to these pieces and occasionally staged a virtual round-table ‘discussion’ as a means for focussing in on issues.[xii]

But it was not, perhaps, until the controversy surrounding the novelist Jia Pingwa’s 1992 Abandoned Capital 廢都 that the true potential for media hype and political controversy in post-June Fourth China was first realized: the controversy helped to sell tens of thousands of books and led to money-spinning reprints in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the furore on the mainland was widely reported. Publishers began to realize, as other similarly engineered controversies appeared, that major debates in the elite Chinese intellectual scene could also elicit popular interest, lead to an escalation of hostilities and, naturally, to increased sales of magazines and anthologized collections of essays. The first post-1989 causes-célèbres of this caliber was the debate concerning the ‘humanistic spirit’ 人文精神 in 1993-94.[xiii] It is therefore salutary to remind ourselves that while the novelty of the net-controversies of the late 1990s and early 21st century still lingers, too much emphasis on the technological and formal newness of such controversies risks obscuring the entrenched forms of intellectual contestation that are being reproduced, not to mention the protocols, both ideological and market-inflected, that preceded them throughout the decade of the 1990s. In our survey of the issues related to the rise of cyber-intellectuality, the politics of intellectual publicity and the place of capital, controversy and culture in the nascent realm of online China, we have identified the fracas surrounding the 2000 Cheung Kong-Reading Awards as both our point of entry and departure.

A CAUSUS BELLICOSITY: THE CHEUNG KONG –READING AWARDS

Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong based billionaire who is arguably the most powerful overseas Chinese individual active in contemporary mainland China by virtue of the range and depth of his commercial investments there, has also become a highly influential benefactor of Chinese higher education and research since the late 1990s. Among other things, Li initiated ‘The Cheung Kong Scholars Program’ in August 1998 with a donation of HK$60 million to the Chinese Ministry of Education to fund research development in a diverse range of fields as well as to provide achievement awards for prominent scholars. In early 2000, this program donated 990,000 yuan towards the inaugural Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, jointly organized with the monthly journal Reading 讀書 and its Beijing-based publisher, Joint Publishers, as a means of recognizing the work of leading mainland authors in the humanities and social sciences. Once the names of award recipients were leaked to the public in May-June 2000, reports of a looming controversy over the selection process and commentaries critical of the ‘Awards’ began to appear in the Chinese media. One of the earliest reports, published in the Southern Weekend 南方週末 on 9 June 2000, noted that:

These awards, which represent the largest prize monies ever put up for academic works, became a talking point as soon as the results were announced. Discussion revolved around the question: Has Reading lowered its standards to pursue fame and fortune or has it sought to provide the Chinese intellectual world with awards that properly reflect public opinion? Divergent views have been expressed in relation to this question (reprinted in Zhong 2000: 443).

Most of these ‘divergent views’ were critical of the selection process for the awards and came to be focussed in particular on what some perceived to be the questionable nature of the editor of Reading, Wang Hui’s nomination for and subsequent acceptance of one of the book awards. Zhong Xiaoyong, a journalist with the Southern Weekend who wrote the above-cited report, also related that Reading claimed to have asked for a further reduction of the prize money for each book award from the 300,000 yuan that was finally agreed upon, in the hope that more authors could receive awards. The journal explained that the Awards’ financial sponsor, the Cheung Kong Group, had insisted on 300,000 yuan as the lowest prize amount in order to maintain the prestige of both the sponsor and the awards, as well as to properly acknowledge the achievements of the recipients (Zhong 2000: 444). In the end, the selection panels opted to name several recipients for each of the book and essay awards.

Wang Hui’s selection for one of the book awards became contentious as soon as this information was made public, ostensibly because of the leading role that he has played as Reading’s joint-editor-in-chief since 1996. Even though he was overseas for the entire duration of the selection process, he remained, nominally, an executive member of the Reading team and was perceived, by association, to be intimately connected with the organization of the awards and the convening of the selection process (Wang 2000: 14). As we will see shortly, the accusations levelled at Wang were informed by more complex motivations than that of exposing procedural irregularities, although the latter provided a convenient excuse for many to engage in Wang Hui-bashing on the grounds of demanding ‘accountability’ 負責任 from a leading light in the Chinese intellectual scene. Controversy ensued as well over the nominations of the Peking University literary historian Qian Liqun and the economist Wang Dingding, both prominent intellectuals with a longstanding association with Reading, for awards for outstanding essays. Qian Liqun and Wang Dingding were also members of the selection panel for the awards, a role from which they did not withdraw until their nominations were confirmed on 23 April 2000. There was also debate over the selection of the veteran sociologist Fei Xiaotong’s collected works for a special prize since he was an invited honorary chairman of Reading. By the time Zhong Xiaoyong interviewed staff at Reading and several of the award recipients in early June, rumours about nepotism and the lack of fairness in the selection process had begun to circulate and were rapidly multiplying within mainland Chinese intellectual circles.[xiv]

Dai Qing, the Beijing-based journalist and environmental activist, was among the first prominent Chinese intellectuals to criticise the Reading editorial team in print, even before the controversy over the awards erupted in cyberspace in late-June 2000.[xv] In a summary article published in AsiaWeek 亞洲週刊 on 4 June 2000, Dai was reported as having stated that she had become so disappointed with what she regarded as Reading’s obsequious submission to the will of the Chinese government that, being no ‘tool of the government’ herself, she was unwilling to renew her subscription to the journal. Gan Yang, the Hong Kong-based philosopher who first rose to prominence in mainland China during the ‘culture fever’ of the mid to late 1980s and enjoyed a close association with Reading as one of its influential contributors, immediately and publicly accused Dai of dealing in ‘thoroughly malicious slander.’ Confined to its representation within the Chinese print media of newspapers, journals and magazines, this kind of verbal stoush remained an ‘event’ whose development could be and was, to a large extent, controlled by editorial committees who distilled, as they saw fit, the ‘essence’ of the disagreement for public reception. But to some degree, it was also controlled by the authors of the contending views themselves whose prominence and thus newsworthiness ensured publicity for their declared positions, with the result that these positions then acquired a certain monopolistic representativeness as ‘public opinion.’[xvi] It is worth noting that Gan Yang and Dai Qing, both well-known intellectual personalities, had staked out different positions on the spectrum of Chinese intellectual and cultural debate long before this contretemps, although only few readers with an insight into the history of intellectual disputations in China since the 1980s were aware of the hoary origins of the Dai-Gan fracas.

It was not, however, until the ‘opening of a new frontier,’ as the Chinese Reading Net 中華讀書網 editorial team proudly describe their website’s inauguration in cyberspace on 18 June 2000 (Zhonghua dushu wang 2000: 1), that the buzz of rumour and gossip about the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, then gaining volume within Chinese intellectual circles while remaining largely invisible in the print media, was transported and transformed into cybertext. Other websites like Century China 世紀中國 were established around this time, notably with major financial backing from Hong Kong, and further expanded the debate through posting the responses and interventions of their readers to already published texts, many of which latter were forwarded to and re-posted at different sites after their first web appearance.

Selection panels for the book and essay awards had chosen their recipients by 22 April and 23 April 2000 respectively, but the official results were not published until over a month later in the June issue of Reading (no.6, 2000). Awards were received by the following individuals:

Ji Xianlin for Wenhua jiaoliude guiji: Zhonghua zhetang shi (The trail of cultural exchange: a history of cane sugar in China); Zhao Yuan for Ming Qing zhi ji shidaifu yanjiu (A study of scholar-officials during the Ming-Qing transition). Both Ji and Zhao shared one book award between them.
Wang Hui for Wang Hui zixuan ji (Selected works of Wang Hui); Yan Buke for Shidaifu zhengzhi yansheng shigao (A draft history of the political evolution of scholar-officials); Ge Zhaoguang for Qi shiji qian Zhongguode zhishi, sixiang yu xinyang shijie (Knowledge, thought and belief in China before the seventh century A.D.). Wang, Yan and Ge shared the remaining book award.
Fei Xiaotong received a special award for his lifetime achievements in his field, as represented by the 1999 publication of Fei Xiaotong wenji (The Collected Works of Fei Xiaotong) in sixteen volumes.
Essay awards were received by Wen Tiejun for his ‘San nong wenti: shijimode fansi’ (Three rural problems: fin-de-siècle reflections) and Qian Liqun for ‘Xiangqi 76 nian qiande jinian’ (On commemorations of the time before 1976). One remaining essay award was shared between Qian Yongxiang for ‘Wo zongshi huo zai biaocengshang’ (I’m always living on the surface) and Su Li for ‘”Fa” de gushi’ (The story of ‘law’).

According to the Chinese Reading Net editorial team, almost seventy essays critical of the awards were posted at their site between 27 June 2000 (when the first one appeared) and 13 August 2000 when they decided to make a selection of these for publication in book form, an act that extended the textual life span of the controversy. What is interesting about this resultant anthology, with its telling title of Intellectual authority and democracy: a record of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, is that it only included essay-length texts authored by prominent participants in the debate, thus through editorial sleight of hand filtering out the many shorter and pithier contributions from mainly pseudonymous spectator-participants that had lent a striking originality and ‘newsworthiness’ to the development of the controversy as an ongoing ‘live’ cyber-event (Zhonghua dushu wang 2000: 1-2). The editing or recasting of the cyber controversy as a textual event whose salient features can be mapped through supposedly ‘key’ textual moments—determined through the assignation of a particular significance and hard-copy published permanence to some texts over others—recuperates the controversy as an object of analysis, conveniently bound between covers for shelving as part of a university’s library holdings, along with accounts of other controversies according to the categorical logic of librarianship. It is clear that the book version of the controversy will ultimately be accorded a value and legitimacy far exceeding that of the unruly cybertextual clamor that is (or rather now was) the controversy (which has since been unevenly archived at the various net-zines and web-forums where these texts first appeared).

There are obvious reasons for this: first, texts bearing the name of prominent individuals will always have a cachet that commands a certain market value (and publishers are generally interested only in producing those books that they think will ‘sell’); secondly, the clutter of texts that constitute the cyber-controversy has yet to be ordered and arranged at the sites where they are stored (or were originally archived, not that they will remain in this voyeuristic limbo permanently, control+delete being the ultimate fate of all non-essential or ‘a-canonical’ materials)—in the style of a book—as a discrete set of texts that readers can easily access through a hyperlink named for the ‘event.’ At present, these are simply filed by date along with the vast range of contemporaneous postings on other topics, which requires a considerable degree of patience and time on the part of the web-reader to sift through, download and print. The precarious state of these materials is added to by the fact that the life-span of individual cybertexts is unpredicatable, for they can be removed at any time by website editors and list owners for reasons of space or censorship.

It is not surprising that the increasing rancor with which the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards was debated in cyberspace between late June and mid-August 2000 led the Cheung Kong Group to underplay their own sizeable financial investment in the awards and the ‘good’ publicity that they had undoubtedly expected the awards to have generated in their inaugural year. To date, no mention is made of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards on the Group’s homepage.[xvii] The complexity of the controversy—which ranged from serious engagement with issues of accountability and a widely perceived split between ‘the new left’ and ‘neo liberal’ camps in the elite intellectual circles of Shanghai and Beijing,[xviii] to the ballyhoo resulting from the daily proliferating text-bite fare featured on different web-forums of exposed wrongdoings, nepotism, and intellectual thuggery, further spiced up with frivolous ‘Awards’-related gossip—defies decisive evaluation of the kind that several prominent authors, including Wang Hui himself, sought to deliver in their textual contributions in the hope of bringing the controversy to a quick end.[xix]

The complexity of the controversy can be traced, in some respects, to its origins in the early 1990s, if not the period of ‘culture fever’ in the mid to late 1980s. The earnest rhetoric deployed by the authors of essay-length texts in critiquing the inadequacies of the selection process and calling for greater accountability on the part of the awards’ convenors, is one well-seasoned by years of practiced ‘objectivity’ that reflects the passion and vigor of early post-Cultural Revolution debates. However, it also obscures a certain sense of unease shared by Chinese knowledge producers about the significance and purpose of their labors since the late 1980s. As the ‘value’ of one’s labors became increasingly determined by one’s visibility as a representative Chinese scholar, thinker or critic within an assumed ‘global’ intellectual imperium whose topography reflects the dominance of certain select universities and publishing concerns based mainly in the United States, the access of any one individual to resources and international attention via visiting fellowships, translation, participation in prestigious projects and conferences and so forth, became a crucial determinant of his or her intellectual influence.

Wang Hui’s relatively meteoric rise to international prominence in the mid to late 1990s, through translations of several of his essays published in a range of prestigious refereed journals in the English language and through his own participation in several international conferences and workshops in critical theory and cultural studies, saw his progressive metamorphosis into a if not the leading representative Chinese critical thinker within EuroAmerican and antipodean critical Chinese Studies circles. (His representativeness took the form of, as it were, the indigenous commentator-cum-thinker of choice among editors for general and specialist journals with a China-interest like New Left Review and positions). Thenceforth, his work also acquired, willy-nilly, a certain authoritative tone by means of the frequency of its appearance in a range of Chinese publications, with his publishability ensured by his reputation (which further bolstered his publishability) in much the same way that editors of journals and imprints would be loathe to reject manuscripts from luminaries like Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish or Edward Said. As he rose in intellectual prominence, Wang progressively turned his attention away from issues in modern Chinese literary and intellectual history per se towards providing holistic analyses of questions of scientism, the public sphere, globalization and its consequences, liberalism, the politics of recognition and so forth, as his familiarity with EuroAmerican critical thought, in particular the varieties favored and practiced in U.S. scholarship, deepened through his various overseas sojourns of the late 1990s.[xx] Wang was widely acknowledged to have encouraged a new critical vocabulary and editorial style to Reading, the most long-lived, and one of the most important, monthly forums for countervailing cultural comment and intellectual debate on the mainland, founded in the late 1970s by the ‘liberal’ party publisher Fan Yong. In this context, Dai Qing’s public disavowal of the journal, which we referred to earlier, was particularly damning, and was tantamount to calling a fraud what was up to that point in time commonly regarded as the authoritative journal of still nascent contemporary Chinese critical inquiry and liberal non-party opinion.

Given the circumstances outlined so far, when Wang Hui’s highly critical review of the ‘state’ of contemporary Chinese thought in relation to the question of modernity appeared in the September 1997 issue of Frontiers(no.5),[xxi] it would have very likely offended many who prided themselves for having achieved a substantial degree of intellectual autonomy through their work, and for having contributed to the liberalization of intellectual or even broader social activities since the 1980s.[xxii] Wang Hui’s article was, in this sense, a not-so-heavily coded indictment of the state of intellectual independence and participation in 1990s China, cast within a historicist narrative framework that purported to relate events in even-handed retrospect.

Wang’s piece itself is a fascinating source for the study of rhetorical moves in contemporary Chinese intellectual debate. Although his account of ’Chinese modernization,’ one heavily reliant on phrases and concepts drawn from contemporary EuroAmerican critical theoretical discourse, results in a text that is at times perilously obscure,[xxiii] it also reflects a level of candor and genuine concern that elicited respect from many Chinese readers in tandem with a sense of despair that the author was publishing an obscurantist j’accuse. Among other things, Wang cautions against a too ready acceptance of ‘the market’ and ‘society’ as a ‘”natural” deterrent to state power.’ As he puts it, ‘the fact that economic and cultural democracy are inseparable from political democracy … also demonstrates that the hope that the market will somehow automatically lead to equity, justice and democracy—whether internationally or domestically—is just another kind of utopianism’ (Wang 1997: 33). The ambivalence in the text—which shifts between affirming the necessity of market reforms and critiquing its effects—reflects the complex trajectories of Wang’s own thinking, and indeed the thinking of many socially concerned but politically wary intellectuals active during the 1990s, not to mention the imbricated relationship of contemporary Chinese intellectuals generally with both indigenous and EuroAmerican metropoles.[xxiv]

The edited and fluent English version of the article elides a number of key rhetorical registers that in the original Chinese have powerful resonances of authorial assertion. Transposed into English, Wang’s language appears to echo well-rehearsed arguments that have convenient theoretical underpinnings laid out by a range of authoritative EuroAmerican authors and texts. In Chinese, however, Wang’s discourse partakes of what one might call the politicized ‘translationese’ of EuroAmerican scholarly idioms (an ungainly yet culturally authoritative vehicle for expression in that language since the time of the first appearance of cumbersome translations of Marx and others in the early Republic). As a mode of discourse, ’translationese’ developed complexly coded moral-evaluative vocabularies that changed and were extended over the course of the twentieth century, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, in which one passed judgement on one’s discursive opponents from the moral high ground of one or another chosen set of Western-inspired theoretical arguments. That is to say, Wang Hui’s text bears a narrative message in Chinese readily identifiable to Chinese readers that had a far more significant and disturbing set of meanings than the genteel form of theoretical disquisition that the same text communicates in English. While it surveyed the scene from the kind of critically-informed moral high ground readily taken by the theoretically sensitive left-leaning academics in Anglophone scholarship, it also passed judgement on intellectuals and their activities in general with a series of prescriptive remarks and moral-evaluative statements that are ‘invisible’ to the English reader. As a result the impact it had in the Chinese intellectual scene is read very differently by (Anglophone) outside observers and (Sinophone) insider-participants.

Those who disagreed with Wang’s analysis and who possibly saw their own work being targeted in his critique quickly countered with the view that Wang’s work was part of a larger push by what were soon to be dubbed the ‘new left wing’ or ‘leftist’ writers.[xxv] Indeed, by the time the controversy over the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards erupted, a battle-line had already been conveniently drawn between the so-called ‘new left wing’ and the ‘neo-liberals,’ with both camps, in particular the former, eschewing the sobriquet that it had been assigned by the rival camp. Detractors of the ‘new left wing’ were generally those like Liu Junning and Xu Youyu, who championed the liberal values of free speech, independent thinking and democratic reform as the ‘givens’ of economic and cultural globalization, and who were clearly unhappy about their ideas being either labeled as ‘utopic’ or represented as a form of Hayekian caricature (Xu 2000: 184-185).[xxvi] These ‘liberals’ thus countered by characterizing the ‘new left wing’ (新左翼, a term in currency only since 1999; a more loaded expression, ‘new leftist’, 新左派, has been in circulation since the mid 1990s) as indiscriminate followers of avant-garde EuroAmerican theories since much of their writing was larded with glosses and quotations taken from contemporary doyens of critical thinking ranging from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on the one hand to Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Pierre Bourdieu on the other. Authors labeled as belonging to the ‘new left wing’ were further disparaged for having employed a complex intellectual strategy to disassociate themselves from contemporary Chinese reality and activist politics, engaging instead in an elaborate politics of quotational contestation in which the Sinified constructs of au courant EuroAmerican thinkers were used as the yardstick by which to judge the viability and (post-) modernity of any given writer’s worth. Similarly, while interrogating the credentials of so-called liberal thinkers (simplistically labeled ‘neo-liberals’ by the ‘new left’ with all the Thatcher-Reaganite venom that the term implies) as independent intellectuals, the ‘new leftists’ embraced a critique of globalization that echoed EuroAmerican concerns but reshaped these as indigenous patriotic concerns that they claimed were lacking in the declamations of their ‘neo-liberal’ counterparts.

The labels themselves have had multifaceted political connotations in mainland Chinese public discourse of the 1990s and since. As Xu Jilin has pointed out, ‘The word “liberalism” itself had achieved a cultural cachet previously enjoyed by such terms as democracy and science, even a certain inviolability’ while the term ‘new left’ is one that ‘because of obvious historical and ideological associations has, unfortunately, accrued a negative inflection in popular discourse in China; an odium that is not shared by the expression “liberals” ’ (Xu 2000: 185). That the term the ‘new left’ resonates unavoidably with entrenched namings of, as it were, the ‘failed’ left of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist past within mainland Chinese discourse, not to mention the residual Maoism of stalwarts within the party old guard, became something that so-called ‘neo-liberals’ seized upon as rumors about the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards grew in June 2000.

POLEMICAL RHETORIC AND ITS ‘MESSAGES’

To appreciate the political and cultural complexity of the combative discursive tactics used in Chinese intellectual debates, it is important to emphasize the nexus between Wang Hui’s article of 1997 and his international prominence on the one hand and the ferocity of the attack on his personal character and his work during the controversy over the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards on the other. The resort to branding Wang Hui a leading member of the ‘new left’ became, for his detractors, an effective means to vent their collective resentment against one of their own whom they perceived as having ‘betrayed’ what they regarded as the proper cause of Chinese critical inquiry, whose properness they now elaborated with considerable relish in terms of the perceived flaws of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards.

One of the more noted critiques of Wang in relation to the awards was posted on the internet on 3 August 2000 by Wu Jiaxiang and was entitled “The New Left: Corpses Reanimated”. Wu Jiaxiang, noted for his meteoric rise and precipitous fall as a proponent of ‘neo-authoritarianism’ in the late 1980s, lambasted Wang Hui and his coevals by imitating the ruthless style made famous by Lu Xun in his 1930s essays. A paragon for writers on all points on the intellectual spectrum, Lu Xun is a particular favorite of Wang Hui, and as Wang has openly acknowledged in his earlier writings, he has drawn much inspiration, and has sought to emulate the affective tenor and prose style of the long-dead and oft-misunderstood hero of Chinese letters. Wu’s Lu-Xunesque critique of Wang was, in this sense, an implicit attempt at contrasting his own affinity with, as it were, the ‘true’ aims of Chinese critical discourse as exemplified by Lu Xun against what he perceived to be Wang’s superficial mimicry of the dead master. Wu, who endured years of jail, criticism and political harassment for his ideas, which, for a time, fed into a strategy to turn the erstwhile Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang into an ‘enlightened authoritarian’ who would oversee China’s transition to democracy, declaimed that given a political environment like that of China in which there is freedom neither of the press nor of association, it seems hardly reasonable for the new left to be so hasty in making their critique of these so-called Western ‘neo-liberal’ idealities that, as Wu sees them, are integral to the fostering of democratic values within Chinese society. As he puts it:

To hold forth on the challenge communitarianism poses to liberalism without according at least equal space to discussing the lack of the freedom of association in China is the same as debating the virtues of sexual abstinence and birth control with infants. Or one could also say that it is the equivalent of giving condoms and contraceptives to babies. (Wu, 3 August 2000)

Wu concluded his piece by chiding Wang Hui directly and mocking the title of his collection of essays, Rekindling the Dead Fire 死灰復燃, which he suggested that Wang re-name ‘Corpses Reanimated’ 僵屍還魂. With explicit reference to Wang’s acceptance of one of the Cheung Kong-Reading book awards, Wu queries:

Isn’t Wang Hui known for his enigmatic protestations against international capitalism? So why has he accepted a portion of the largesse from international capital’s tureen? It would appear that he’s only opposed to the international capital from which he can’t get a cut. Aren’t the new left all about equitable distribution? Then how come they’re getting a little slice of the cake this time around; and why do they want to grab it all for their own dessert plates? It would appear that the only fair distribution is one that favors them. If you reread their works mindful of this you don’t feel anguish as much as disgust. (Wu, 3 August 2000)

Wu Jiaxiang’s scathing comments about Wang Hui and the ‘new leftists’ are indicative of the depth of resentment many mainland Chinese intellectuals felt about Wang’s international success and the success of his alleged fellow ‘new leftists’ like the M.I.T.-based political economist Cui Zhiyuan and Gan Yang at the time of the awards—a revulsion that found a ready outlet in the new cybersphere.

In many ways, this resentment towards Wang Hui and the ‘new leftists’ would be no different to the rancor felt towards certain prominent left-leaning critical theorists based at leading universities in the U.S. on the part of their less successful colleagues within an academic marketplace with finite albeit ample resources, where the contrast between those who have ‘made it’ (prodigious salaries and homes, frequent and first-class travel and so forth) and those who haven’t is significant. By early July 2000, there were already several messages posted by anonymous cyber-scribes critical of what they regarded as the duplicitous nature of the debate being waged by the intellectual goliaths in their midst. In the best tradition of the late-1920s and 1930s mosquito press, the digital feuilleton that appeared during the Cheung Kong-Reading controversy provide some of the more amusing and insightful moments into the art and artifice of intellectual contestation in China today. As we have noted in the above, however, it was just these dimensions of the ‘synoptical spectacle’ of the controversy that have been elided in the published record of the controversy and roundly decried for their ‘irrelevance’ and ‘irreverence’ by the offended ‘celebrity’ participants.

The series of exchanges that appeared in Century Salon on 26 July 2000 typify this mode of brief provocative intervention. At 9:42, an author using the pseudonym ‘Recluse of Ginger Pond’ 蘅塘退士 posted the following comments under the subject heading, ‘How much intellectual content can we find in the saliva being spat by both camps?’:

From the outset, the ‘matter’ was never going to be that simple. It goes without saying that intellectual disagreement is something that everyone finds highly entertaining but in the so-called ‘Reading incident,’ how much intellectual content can we find in the saliva being spat by both camps? My fellow-scribe who signs him/herself ‘[Always] A Marginal Person’ has given me much to think about. It would seem that he/she is saying to those eminent and widely celebrated scholars, ‘You don’t have to concern yourselves with other people’s or the world’s dark side; just look after the darkness in your own hearts.’[xxvii]

At 22:52 on the same day, another pseudonymous and prolific author, “Sweeping up the leaves and boiling the tea” 掃葉煮茶 offered the following intervention:

This isn’t a case of analysing the composition of ‘saliva’ but rather one of carefully differentiating between different motives for spitting ‘saliva’ and the relevant social context. This is the crux of the problem.

These comments, richly suggestive in their elliptical references to ‘the relevant social context’ and the ‘darkness’ in the hearts of the successful and famous, locate the controversy over the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards in the growing socio-economic disparity between prominent jet-setting academic stars and their lesser-known sedentary counterparts within what has become a highly uneven contemporary mainland Chinese intellectual ‘world’. Furthermore, it hints at the stark contrast between elite metropolitan Chinese universities and research institutions on the one hand and their lesser-known and poorly-funded provincial counterparts on the other; employees of which, it is important to note, could now, via the net, participate in and comment on the predominantly Beijing-Shanghai-generated debate with unprecedented facility and impunity. The former represents in this context those institutional sites of knowledge production in mainland China that provide crucial access to international visibility for the ambitious mainland Chinese academic or graduate student through their established links with both prestigious universities and academics overseas.

In his critical review of the controversy, poignantly entitled, ‘The plight of reading folk,’ the Beijing-based scholar Zhao Chunming opined that the depth of interest and emotion invested in the controversy by its participants and cyber-onlookers provides a clear indication that the Chinese humanities and social sciences are in crisis, anxiety and unhappiness over which has, as he explained, further exacerbated critical perception of the awards as a wholly exclusive and elitist affair (Zhao 2000: 191-193). For Zhao, the prize monies for the awards, ‘several times or indeed well over ten times the amount intellectuals normally receive as annual salary,’ contributed significantly to the intensity of the controversy. He further observed that ‘had the prizes been small, no more than a few hundred or even a few thousand yuan, or had the salaries of reading folk been much higher than what they were,’ the controversy would have been far less acute. Zhao then remarked that his intention was to draw attention to the economic plight of most intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences. Quoting official statistics, he noted that intellectuals, despite their considerable training, had seen their relative salary range drop throughout the century from a figure between 28.6 and 47.6 times that of technicians in 1936 to a figure between 6.8 and 9.7 times in 1956 and an even lower figure of between 2.7 and 4.6 times the salary range for technicians in 1993. He acknowledged that the last few years had seen an improvement in the social standing of intellectuals, ‘as a result of the trend towards “promoting science and education for national development” and the impetus of the “knowledge economy” ,’ but he hastened to add that the benefits from these had accrued mainly to those intellectuals working in various fields of science and technology. The growing socio-economic gulf between intellectuals in science and technology on the one hand and those in the humanities and social sciences on the other, with the latter group being increasingly forced to compete among themselves for very limited resources was, as he put it in this somewhat economic determinist critique, the ‘underlying cause of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards controversy, from its very inception to the selection of award recipients’ (Zhao 2000: 191-193).

Zhao, however, avoided any reference to the magnitude of the rift between so-called ‘new leftists’ and ‘neo-liberals’ in his otherwise insightful comments and thus failed to note that the controversy was being generated mainly by prominent academics who belonged to the elite metropolitan intellectual circles of Beijing and Shanghai. The complicated nature of the resentment and unhappiness directed at both Wang Hui and Reading within these circles can be traced in part to what Wu Jiaxiang described with caustic flair as Wang’s acceptance of ‘a portion of the largesse from international capital’s tureen’ despite his critical stance against multi-national corporate expansionism. Interestingly, in countering this form of criticism, Wang Hui and others who were disparaged for being ‘new-leftists’ did not then point to the ways in which global capitalist expansion had become quite complicated. An increasing attentiveness on the part of multi-national corporations to strategies for ‘sustainable growth’ and the fostering of complementary relations between trade and social development had facilitated their participation as funding organizations for a range of local and international projects and activities aimed at countering the adverse consequences of commercial expansionism. That the Cheung Kong Group’s establishment of a ‘community’ profile by means of making donations to research and educational activities in mainland China provides an example of this active ‘humanization’ of trans-national corporate praxis. It should have been highly pertinent to the issues being debated during the awards controversy but did not rate even a mention.

Indeed, that rival sides in the controversy posed and counterposed questions of due process, equity and the complex workings of global capital almost entirely in terms of condemning what they mutually perceived to be unethical behaviour and ambitious self-promotion on the part of their opponents, provides a telling clue to the personal interests that fed the controversy, especially on the part of its more prominent participants. The significance of this personal dimension was not lost on those who contributed to the controversy even though most chose to read the contretemps in moral-evaluative terms as ‘flaws’ in the character of their opponents. Xiao Wei, a researcher based at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, posted a perceptive commentary on the personal nature of the controversy (Xiao 2000: 184-190) that traced contemporary factional labels like ‘new leftists’ and ’neo-liberals’ to historically remote rhetorical precedents in the intellectual debates of the Northern Song and late-Ming era. As Xiao wrote in reflecting on the observation, offered by Xie Yong, that the controversy had led to the decay of intellectual friendships:

Scholars need friendship whether they ‘grind and polish their way to erudition’ [如切如磋，如琢如磨] or ‘echo each other in the spirit of a common quest’ [同聲相應，同氣相求]. But when this turns into a case of ‘sectarian controversies’ [黨同伐異] that draw all into taking sides, then we’re talking about something else altogether. The debates of the Northern Song and late Ming are examples of disputes based on personal interests and cabalistic intrigues. Naturally, at the present time, there are innumerable debates of this kind. A feature of these debates is the pinning of labels (or ‘hats’) on others. The role-calls of ‘partisans’ from famous historical disputes like ‘the Yuan You partisans’ [元祐黨人碑][xxviii] and ‘the Donglin Censors’ [東林點將錄][xxix] were assembled by their opponents after their downfall. Just add a dash of politics and it becomes easy to fix someone by putting him in a tight spot or even a deathtrap (Xiao 2000:187).

Xiao then pointedly asked why it was that the term ‘new leftists’ was matched so precisely with ‘third-wave liberalism’ (or ‘neo-liberalism’) and why there was no faction dubbed ‘old rightists’ or ‘new rightists.’ The existing rhetorical riches of both modern and pre-modern Chinese intellectual polemics to which Xiao refers facilitated the use of a vocabulary of escalation and ready deployment of moral-evaluative terms on the part of both detractors and defenders of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards in their war of words. As we have suggested thus far, the direction taken by this controversy was largely a shift into cyberspace of existing modes of intellectual discourse and structures of intellectual authority, thus making what was being hailed as the dawning of the virtual Chinese ‘public sphere’ into an expanded space of textual contestation. Furthermore, the rhetoric and idiom of the Awards’ critics and defenders, drawn from a range of historical, literary and party sources, were codified in complex ways that registered different tonalities to the informed reader. For instance, the overblown rhetoric of the party-state overculture could be mimicked to signal an assumption of political-moral authority; the diction of mud-raking journalism implied, conversely, that the target of one’s criticism deserved no more than public ridicule in a contemporary vitriolic prose first popularized in the post-May Fourth heyday of public intellectual controversies. In this context, the deployment of punishing satire—諷刺挖苦—perfected by Lu Xun in his essays and the emulation of Lu Xun’s prose style signalled, among other things, the invocation of the moral high ground and linguistic-critical authority identified with the dead master. The exchange of accusations and high-dudgeon also carried the heavy imprint of the mass-media party theoretical style that reached an apogee in the Cultural Revolution era.[xxx]

In his contributions to the controversy, the prominent Beijing-based philosopher Xu Youyu, one of Wang Hui’s most strident critics, employed these different registers to accuse Wang of acting duplicitously in relation to Wang’s own professed ideas of social equity while at the same time cleverly foregrounding Wang’s reliance on these same registers in answering critics of the awards. Xu refers pointedly to Wang’s 1997 essay (discussed above) as a notable instance of Wang’s flawed thinking in relation to ‘the present situation’ 現實 in China which had, as Xu cannily argues, led Wang to ‘diagnose’ 診斷 and ‘criticize’ 批評 the state of contemporary Chinese thinking as if it were already ‘a market society or capitalist society’ (Xu 2000: 8). This relatively explicit reference to magisterial assertion on Wang’s part is, as we have noted earlier, crucial to an understanding of the nuanced reception of Wang’s article in Chinese, within the context of existing intellectual rivalries in metropolitan Beijing and Shanghai. Xu further observed that Wang chose not to answer Xu’s published critical response to Wang’s 1997 article directly but resorted instead to making ‘an arrogant and reckless rejoinder’ 以傲慢和輕率的態度做了回應—that is to say, by sleight of hand—in the preface to Wang’s then recently published collection of essays, Rekindling the Dead Fire. Xu writes that in this preface:

[Wang] disregarded the entire series of arguments I raised and the grounds upon which I made these arguments with the statement that, ‘Those who speak of freedom are entirely intolerant of alternative views and those who claim to be scholars are wholly draconian in passing judgment on others 審問捉拿. That so many of these eminent and learned fellows are inclined to listen to rumour and gossip is, really and truly, nothing new. If one wishes to speak of “the state of the nation” 國情 and “the present reality” 現實, then this phenomenon is one such instance of the state of the nation and the present reality.’ (Xu 2000, 8-9).

Xu then asks cuttingly, after citing this passage from Wang:

How can a scholar be so unreasonable as to adopt the following kind of ridiculous logic: You criticize me for not understanding the state of the nation but what is the state of the nation? Your wilful attack on me is in itself an example of the state of the nation. (Xu 2000: 9)

Xu goes on to lambast Wang for ‘implicitly likening his own situation throughout the preface to that of Lu Xun when the latter was all alone and under attack from all sides’ and, apart from this trans-historical masquerade, further ridicules Wang for using Lu Xun’s statement about ‘not wishing [to subscribe to the golden future anticipated by others], preferring instead to vacillate in nothingness’ 徬徨於無地to describe his own situation.[xxxi] Xu then berates Wang for being:

[…] merely a pseudo Lu Xun; when has he ever had to vacillate in nothingness. In this short text alone [i.e. Wang’s preface], he has already told us about his foreign friends who beat a path to his residence for copies of his manuscript, no matter the inconvenience. He has also told us that his work has been published in various mainland Chinese journals as well as in numerous translated versions, attracting the attention of different foreign readerships. (Xu 2000: 9)

It should be emphasized that in ridiculing Wang for pretending to be a latter-day Lu Xun, Xu Youyu himself (like Wu Jiaxiang, mentioned above) deployed a Lu-Xunesque caustic satirical style—as illustrated by the above-quoted passages—to invoke the same higher moral ground that he accused Wang of falsely occupying. In this context, Xu’s resort to the same range of rhetorical feints within Chinese polemical discourse that Wang Hui uses is neither coincidental nor merely cosmetic. Rather it is crucial to the demonstration of one’s (whether Xu’s or Wang’s) legitimate inheritance of cultural capital (via the implicit claim of having properly understood Lu Xun) in order to pronounce judgement in the modality of professorial certitudo sui.

When defending the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards and the journal Reading itself in a piece posted under the title “Two Points of Clarification in relation to the Current Controversy,” Wang availed himself of the same diction of moral high dudgeon, the rich and ready-made vocabulary of categorical assertion, the colorful prose of denunciation as well as the biting satire of excoriation previously employed by Xu Youyu. What surprised, and in some cases delighted, Wang’s less sympathetic readers was his use of the Communist-style rhetoric that features so significantly in official Chinese discourse. Individuals who were according to him inappropriately critical of the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards selection process had indulged in ‘irregular attacks and calumnies’ 不正常的攻擊誹謗 and were guilty of evincing ‘ill-will’ 不善意, while their criticisms were ‘directed at’ (literally ‘aimed their halberd at’, 矛頭指向) the selection committee itself. These terms, drawn from the vituperative language of the party-controlled media and usually reserved for attacks on those who have the temerity to question the always unimpeachable motives of the Communist Party itself, was not lost on Wang’s detractors. As he puts it with considerable exasperation in this published defence of the awards, written in Seattle on 2 July 2000 where he was then based, physically distant from the voluble clamor surrounding the awards in the intellectual circles of Beijing and Shanghai but with access, if he so wished, to the latest twists and turns in the ensuing dispute via up-to-the-minute cyber reports:[xxxii]

Some individuals [有些人] have [deliberately] distorted the facts [歪曲事實], and have concocted things out of thin air [無中生有]; furthermore, not only have they attacked and libelled without due cause [無端地], they have directed their attacks [矛頭指向] at the selection committee and the other recipients of awards. [We are] startled [讓人震撼] at the extremely calculating fashion [用心至深] in which certain individuals [有些人] have exploited [利用] divisions in the intellectual sphere to confound the issues [混淆視聽]… Some websites and particular [個別] newspapers have acted as the source for such rumour-mongering [… ](Wang 2000: 15)

Later on in the same declaration he stated that he ‘will ignore all of those malicious assaults [蓄意中傷] and groundless attacks [無理的攻擊], while welcoming all appropriate [正常] criticisms and suggestions.’ Having roundly condemned the ‘inappropriate’ controversy surrounding the awards and unnamed ‘certain individuals’ for turning the whole affair into a popular media spectacle both nationally and internationally, Wang Hui then shifts from this assertive moralistic register to one of personal testimony (coupled with a certain pragmatic confidence) when he defends his record as the editor of Reading itself. He notes that the journal was ‘somewhat overly scholastic in tone’ [文人氣重了一些] when he took over the editorship of the monthly, and that in the early phase of his stewardship, it had achieved unprecedented sales and subscription figures and that it had continued to do so despite the general decline in subscriptions to mainland Chinese journals of recent years as a result of market forces.[xxxiii]

That Wang Hui sought to defend Reading in terms of its commercial viability and popularity with the Chinese reading public points, once again, to the significance of increasing competition for financial resources and publishing space within a progressively marketized but finite sphere of Chinese knowledge production. This lends a particular ambivalence to Wang’s comments about ‘the period of historical transition in which Chinese society finds itself’ in the concluding paragraphs of his text. As he goes on to elaborate:

This is an era in which crisis and opportunity co-exist; an era in which serious work and preposterous acts of shamelessness are juxtaposed; an era in urgent need of serious reflection and critical inquiry. (Wang 2000: 19)

Within these entirely proper formulations of ‘the needs’ of the present-day, however, lurked the specter of Wang’s own success and it was precisely because he was widely perceived at the time of the controversy as someone who had obtained significant benefits from the newly ‘globalized’ and ‘marketized’ arrangements of the contemporary mainland intellectual environment that his critics were led to read his words as duplicitous and invested with personal ambition. It is perhaps awareness on Wang’s part that his published defence would do little to change the minds of those who viewed him in a negative light that led him to conclude with the following line, one that is again heavily indebted to the mock-heroic tone of party propaganda:

Those people who believe they can use filth and calumnies [污水和中傷] to prevent [阻止] our intellectual search will not be successful [不會得逞]. (Wang 2000: 19)

In Wang’s earnest and infuriated response to his critics as well as in the writings of many others, we also detect a reflection of what, for want of a better expression, could be called ‘identity ambivalence’ within the Chinese intelligentsia as a whole. The pursuit of the high-brow calling of pure ratiocination and social concern with a canny eye on the marketplace, the marketability of one’s ideas, and the standard for adjudging their success being the volume of issues or books moved, provides an affective undertow to the words and insults exchanged in the course of the controversy over the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards. It is worth stressing that the forms of polemical rhetoric that we have discussed in the above are not thoughtless linguistic performances; rather, they reflect complex and often self-contradictory intellectual cultural stances that are themselves symptomatic of the unease felt within contemporary mainland Chinese elite intellectual circles and which have found ready and instantaneous expression in the still nascent Chinese cyber ‘public sphere.’

CONCLUSION

Since the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards controversy, several other disputes have appeared in the web-forums and web-zines that constitute the Chinese intellectual cybersphere in its current and ever-evolving form, with the exchanges between the fluid factions named for ‘neo-liberals’ and ’new leftists’ over Jürgen Habermas’s China lecture tour of late April 2001 being the most recent of these disputes (at the time of our writing). The acute bitterness and hostility of what came to be regarded as factional contests during the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards controversy—despite the protestations of prominent participants like Wang Hui and Xu Youyu who disavowed the labels that they had been assigned—provided the precedent for the various cyber-disputes that followed in its wake. If one were simply to take the critical and theoretical positions staked out by prominent authors at face value, by delineating ideological divisions according to the labels or ‘hats’ (帽子, to use the pejorative term borrowed from the party’s linguistic arsenal by disputants) that they had assigned to their critics or opponents, much of the practical difficulties and complexities that attend the assumption of an ‘intellectual’ or ‘public intellectual’ persona in present-day China, in the sense of zhishifenzi 知識分子 (and the historically-produced polysemantic web of associations with nation-building, modernization, and social transformation through critical practice carried within that term), would be effaced.

In this paper, we have sought to outline some of these practical difficulties and complexities by examining the long-term nexus between commercial and cultural interests, especially those of the Kong-Tai sphere, and the altered and shifting stakes of the mainland Chinese knowledge industry, particularly in the elite intellectual circles of Beijing and Shanghai with the rise of cyberculture. We suggest by this means that the cyber-controversy over the most financially significant awards ever to have been offered for achievements in the Chinese humanities and social sciences facilitated the expression of anxieties, concerns and general unhappiness over contemporary Chinese intellectual life in a virtual medium that allowed for an unprecedented degree of inclusiveness and improvisational spontaneity through the speed and efficiency of web-publication. Yet it is also evident that the evolution of this cyber-controversy (one that we posit may well be paradigmatic) saw the replication of existing forms of intellectual authority and rivalry, including certain protocols of cooperative editorial censorship necessary for maintaining the viability of the various web-sites within the constraints imposed by the one-party state, not to mention in relation to the constraints both overt and covert imposed by funding organizations that were themselves beholden to (or anxious to ingratiate themselves with) the party-state. It constitutes in this sense an extension and even proliferation of rifts that had already appeared in the intellectual circles of Beijing and Shanghai and that had already found approved and commercially-interested representation in print via academic journals, newspapers and ‘current issues’ magazines from the early 1990s. In reviewing the impact of the Kong-Tai presence on the practice of commercialized controversy, we have also noted the manner in which trans-historical perceptions, that is revived and codified memories of earlier intellectual disputations which have become familiar once more through reprinting projects and changes in university curricula since the Cultural Revolution, have grounded new episodes of contestation 爭鳴 and critical warfare 論戰 and influenced the manner in which they have been framed, engaged in and articulated.[xxxiv]

What is also evident in the wake of the controversy is that the actual proliferation of a diverse range of discursive modes in cyberspace, ranging from conventional essay-length commentaries to short cyber text-bites, was reconfigured to feature already prominent voices at the expense of minor and pseudonymous ones, thus reifying existing structures of intellectual authority within the processes of elite mainland knowledge production while at the same time proffering the surface appearance of diversity and equality in the new cybersphere. How, then, should agency be determined in relation to Chinese intellectual contestations in cyberspace?

The privatization of state-resourced (and therefore publicly-funded) academic institutional activities as well as publishing enterprises by coteries of intellectuals who both rely on their traditional socialist economic origins while availing themselves of the market economy, allow intellectual practitioners to claim both a real and notional authority while, as we have suggested, eliding issues related to the politics that underlie that authority. When prominent intellectuals publicly profess their views, particularly in the context of a dispute that turned out to be as vitriolic as the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards, they simultaneously express a clear intention to shape public opinion through their criticisms of events and the judgements that they pronounce on those whom they consider to be rivals or opponents. When this mode of intellectual publicity is transposed from its appearance in conventional print media to the virtual medium of cyber-publication, opposite formulations of events and personalities readily crystallise into conflicting criteria for evaluating the ‘true’ nature of or ‘the truth behind’ the Cheung Kong-Reading Awards.

These criteria are themselves the product of the market effect of both print and virtual media as instruments of cultural reproduction and innovation that are required by the very nature of the economies in which they operate, to deliver ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ in ways that will allow, for instance, a journal to increase its subscription revenues or a webzine to maintain or increase its share and calibre of cyber-estate (via the counting of ‘hits’ or due to calculations of the ‘stickiness’ of the site, that is, the fashion in which a site attracts and holds the attention of the cyber-surfer), against the efforts of competing organisations in the bid to attract more funding. Intellectual or critical agency is thus appropriated and reshaped by this market effect into the cultural capital of competing ‘brands’ of discourse, the most dominant of which effectively acquires normative and modish characteristics that further enhances its market value, guaranteeing further publication and authority in institutional environments, to the extent that it commands acquiescence or at least an outward semblance of conformity from the majority of the reading public by virtue of its commercially-reinforced currency.

That many of Wang Hui’s intellectual contemporaries resented Wang for having disparaged their own work, coupled with the demonstrable currency and academic market value of his views in Chinese studies internationally, is perhaps the outstanding omission in the numerous polemical attacks on Wang Hui published during the controversy. The pseudonymous author, ‘Must Pounce’ 必撲, who posted his/her critique in the form of an inventive satirical multiple choice quiz perhaps came closest to suggesting that what was at issue was Wang’s privileged publicity in the Chinese intellectual world when he/she asked questions like,

‘Reading’s subscription figures have: a. fallen; b. risen; c. remained stagnant; d. are entirely shameless,’ or ‘The current editor-in-chief of Reading is: a. Wang Jingwei [one of modern China’s most reviled national ‘traitors’]; b. Wang Hui; c. Wang Wangwang [with the three characters standing literally for ‘prosperity, reputation, forgetfulness,’ the nom de plume of a well-known graphic artist and web designer]; d. Wang Wang [a repetition of the character for Wang’s surname and a reference to the yelping of a dog].’ (‘Bi Pu’ 21:57; 27 July 2000)

What the quiz demonstrates is the familiarity of the Chinese reading public with the personalities, events and issues connected with Reading (for instance, two of the questions required readers to name the EuroAmerican works and authors most often featured in the journal) and thus, the significant social power of this highly visible state-funded and institutionally authoritative journal. In this context, it is worth recalling Bourdieu’s observation that ‘There are surely few social worlds [i.e. the Parisian academic scene that he analysed] where power depends so strongly on belief, where it is so true that, in the words of Hobbes, “Reputation of power is power”.’ (Bourdieu 1988: 91)

A mere twenty minutes after ‘Must Pounce’ posted his/her quiz at Century Salon, another pseudonymous author, ‘Big Cat,’ posted deliberately provocative answers to the quiz (for instance, identifying Wang Jingwei as the journal’s editor) to attract a quip from yet another pseudonymous author (‘Old Cat’) an hour later that ‘Big Cat’ was ‘a child prodigy’ who should be ‘awarded a piece of dried fish.’[xxxv] (Da Mao 22:17; Lao Mao 23:19; 27 July 2000) These desultory exchanges, taking place alongside the weighty and far lengthier jousts between known intellectual personae, may well have faded into obscurity now that the controversy itself has been edited and repackaged for intellectual transmission with all the seriousness of purpose conveyed by the title of the published anthology, Intellectual Authority and Democracy. Yet while the controversy lasted, these exchanges, which both mocked and reveled in the gladiatorial aura provided by its celebrity participants (in the sense of the Chinese phrase kan renao 看熱鬧, not to mention the frisson of marginal participation as suggested by the expression cou renao 湊熱鬧), allowed their authors to momentarily seize a smidgen of virtual power for themselves, that is, to be noticed via low-risk pseudonymous provocation. That is to say, such participants are allowed the freedom in cyberspace to speak of awarding themselves, metaphorically, at least ‘a piece of dried fish’ even though the Cheung Kong-Reading largesse of 990,000 yuan might be well out of their reach.

It is at this concluding juncture that we thus recall the topic of this paper, ‘Have we been noticed yet?,’ a rhetorical question that underlines the issues of publicity and publicness in the evolving environment of Chinese intellectual life online. Whether the technologies involved in the web will gradually transform or challenge the prevailing authorial orthodoxies in Chinese intellectual life (a question that has been the focus of our discussion as distinct from the more popular trend to speculate on the possible challenge posed by the net to the party-state in China), by means of a case study of the Cheung Kong-Reading Award controversy in July-August 2000, we have attempted to chart the course of recent net-based cultural manifestations and speculate on their historical and intellectual trajectories. As the ecstasy of instant postings and reactive interplay wanes, we recall an earlier period of non-formal publication exuberance: that of the big-character poster culture of the early Cultural Revolution era (1966-67). As posters became for a time the main vehicle for ‘public’ expression, the turn-over rate of postings meant that the near instantaneous effacement of solemn manifestos, declarations, and a plethora of mini-posters created a culture of the moment that has continuing echoes in China’s intellectual life. The sense of urgency, importance and relevance was encoded by the authors of the posters in the most simple and direct plea commonly found along the bottom margin of the paper: the appeal to other reader/writers to ‘please retain this for 5/10/20 minutes’ 請保留 5/10/20 分鐘.[xxxvi] The cyber-debates that have unfolded on the Chinese net over the past year would seem to indicate that most writers can only be assured of 15 minutes of online fame; meanwhile, it is in the realm of traditional print media and the language of international commerce, English, that more permanent reputations are being forged.

Notes

[i] In revising this paper, a number of colleagues have made useful observations and suggestions. We would like to thank the following: Chen Fong-Ching, Timothy Cheek, Feng Chongyi, Merle Goldman, Gu Xin, Elizabeth Perry, Mark Selden, Wang Hui, Xu Jilin and Zhao Yuezhi. The ‘personalities’ involved in defining the issues of online debates can be gleaned from the editorial homepages and list of contributors to influential web-forums such as the ones cited on the first page of this article.

[ii] For more on this environment, see Barmé, In the Red: on contemporary Chinese culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, and Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: contemporary Chinese critical inquiry, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, pp.18-21.

[iii] In referring to the party-state chain of command, we do not imply by any means the existence of a totalitarian propaganda machine capable of policing the ‘ideological’ content of all published materials with formidable efficiency and effectiveness. What we do mean however is that the official notices and directives issued from time to time, that restrict freedom of expression in various ways, with clear penalties for non-compliance, exercise a significant influence on the editorial decision-making process at both state-controlled and independently-funded publishing enterprises.

[iv] See the reports in China News Digest (2001), 15 March, 19 April 2001; Online. Available HTTP: <http://www.cnd.org/CND-Global/CND-Global.01-04-19.html> (accessed 20 April 2001)

[v] It is worth noting that many Chinese scholars who have become professional academics in the United States and elsewhere play the dual and often complex role of both ‘Chinese intellectual’ and ‘Western’ academic commentator on Chinese matters.

[vi] See for instance the articles listed at The Media and Communication Studies Site: Identity and the Internet, Online. Available HTTP: <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Sections/it08.html> (accessed 1 May 2001)

[vii] For a discussion of Liang’s early international fund-raising campaigns, see Gloria Davies, “Liang Qichao in Australia: a sojourn of no significance?” East Asian History 21 (June 2001): 65-110.

[viii] Private conversation with Geremie R. Barmé, December 1998.

[ix] The popularity of the 1996 incendiary bestseller China can say No [Zhongguo keyi shuo bu], not to mention the other works of this ilk that it has inspired since, provides an outstanding example of widespread Chinese preoccupation with the global economic and cultural power of the United States.

[x] The ‘Chinese commonwealth’ was used by John Minford and Barmé in the early 1980s (see Stephen Soong and John Minford, (eds) Trees on the Mountain: An Anthology of New Chinese Writing, Hong Kong: the Chinese University Press, 1986), and Tu Wei-ming formulated the grammatically ungainly term ‘cultural China’ later in the decade.

[xi] These cultural imperatives themselves derive from both commercial acumen and subscription to the idea of aiding in China’s modernization on the part of offshore Chinese investors. The currency of this idea among affluent overseas investors can be traced to the complex history of international Chinese financial support for reform and revolution in mainland China that began in the last years of the nineteenth century with Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen’s various fund-raising campaigns among the overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Macau, Japan, the United States and Canada, South-East Asia, Europe and Australia.

[xii] It is noteworthy in this context that a number of active webzine editors like Xu Jilin have enjoyed stints working as commissioning editors at Twenty-first Century during their period as visiting fellows to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the base for the Liu-Jin operation.

[xiii] See Barmé, In the Red, p.283ff; and for an anthologized product of this newspaper/journal debate, see Wang Xiaoming, (ed) Renwen jingshen xunsi lu, Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 1996.

[xiv] For further information on the planning and implementation of the awards, see Zhong Xiaoyong, “99 wanyuan dajiang ban gei Dushu renwu,” in Zhonghua dushu wang (ed), .Xueshu quanli yu minzhu, Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 2000, p. 443.

[xv] For an overview of Dai’s controversial reputation, see Geremie R. Barmé, ‘Using the Past to Save the Present: Dai Qing’s Historiographical Dissent’, East Asian History, June 1991: 141-81.

[xvi] It is worth noting that when the idea of ’public opinion’ is translated into gonggong/ gongzhong yulun in contemporary mainland Chinese usage, it acquires particular connotations related to ‘inflected’ or manipulated public opinion. Yulun is a term in the party lexicon that generally means a manufactured opinion that, masquerading as a vox populi, will sway the development of events. Mao famously said that both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary classes had first to manufacture or prepare public opinion, zhizao or zhunbei yulun, before their enterprise could be realized. These traditional party connotations are to some extent inescapable when one refers to ’public opinion’ in the mainland Chinese context, although the manufacturing takes place as much if not more for commercial than political reasons as was the case in the highly public and widely commented on Dai-Gan slinging match mentioned here.

[xvii] Consult <http://www.ckh.com.hk/index2.htm> and related pages about the Cheung Kong Group’s contributions to mainland educational institutions via the Cheung Kong Scholars’ Program. (Accessed May – August 2001, January 2002). Information on this website is revised on a regular basis.

[xviii] For details of the genesis and state of this debate from the mid to late 1990s, see Geremie R. Barmé, “The Revolution of Resistance” in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden (eds.) Social Change in Contemporary China:Conflict and Resistance, London: Routledge, 2000, pp.198-220; and “Time’s Arrows” in Davies ed., 2001, pp.231-234.

[xix] It should also be noted that Wang’s somewhat haughty rejection of any hint of wrong doing on his or Reading’s part contained a number of revealing messages about the nature of contemporary mud-raking and high-minded posturing. For more on this, see below.

[xx] In personal communication with Davies (July 2001), Wang Hui observed that his engagement with the issues arising out of EuroAmerican social and critical theory was motivated primarily by his desire to provide a substantial analysis of EuroAmerican concepts that had gained currency in mainland Chinese intellectual circles during the 1990s, such as the “Hayek fever” that ensued for a time. He noted that from his perspective, there had been little or no response from the Western academy to this aspect of his scholarship. Wang further observed that his ongoing work on late Qing and modern Chinese intellectual history constituted the core of his research interests and added, in this context, that the publication of his work in English translation often lagged a few years behind their first appearance in Chinese.

[xxi] It is worth noting that the title of Wang’s original Chinese text, ‘Dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti’, signals an intention to diagnose the ’state’ (zhuangkuang) of contemporary China’s intellectual health and carries within it a certain imperative tone. In the publication of this essay in English translation, that imperative tone has been erased through a slight but crucial modification of the title into the more benign “Contemporary Chinese thought and the question of modernity.” See Wang Hui, ‘Dangdai Zhongguode sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti’ in Tianya 5 (1997): 133-150.

[xxii] For instance, at the height of the controversy, Xu Youyu posted a critique of Wang Hui’s conduct in relation to the awards that included an acerbic note about this article. Xu observed that “although [Wang] criticised and negated all ideas and perspectives [offered by Chinese intellectuals] in the period between the 1980s and 1990s,” he “naturally exempted his own clique” from this “diagnosis and criticism.” See Xu Youyu, ‘Xueshu pingjiang de guize yu xueshu piping de taidu’ in Zhonghua dushu wang (ed) Xueshu quanli, p.8.

[xxiii] Consider for instance Wang’s description of the Chinese socialist movement: “It is a type of thinking through which China’s social praxis is understood as a path to an ontological historical goal, which in turn fosters an attitude that links existential meaning to the historical period in which one finds oneself. As a result, socialist modernization is a concept that not only points to the difference between the socialist and capitalist systems but also implies a whole set of its own values.” Wang Hui, ‘Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, trans. Rebecca E. Karl, in Xudong Zhang (ed.) Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China, a special issue of Social Text 55, vol.16 no. 2 (1998) p.14.

[xxiv] It is a condition and dilemma that we have commented on at length elsewhere. Our reference to ‘indigenous’ metropoles naturally include the important diasporic locations of Hong Kong and Taipei. See, for example, Barmé, In the Red, pp.355-58, and Davies, “The Self-Made Maps of Chinese Intellectuality” in Davies (ed) Voicing Concerns, 2000, pp. 29-31.

[xxv] Although Wang’s manifesto acted as something of a causus bellum, in reality there had been serious frictions among the shifting alliances of the intellectual world for many years.

[xxvi] Xu Jilin, ‘The Fate of an Enlightenment–twenty years in the Chinese intellectual sphere (1978-1998)’, trans. Geremie R. Barmé with Gloria Davies, East Asian History, no. 20 (December 2000): pp.184-5.

[xxvii] These communications all appeared on the discussion lists of Century Salon, Online. Available HTTP: <http://www.csdn618.com.cn/page/china/shalong/> (accessed 22-30 July 2000). The author calling him/herself ‘Always A Marginal Person’ (‘Yongyuande bianyuan ren’) posted several messages as well as re-posting other people’s articles at Century Salon in July 2000. Among other things, he/she posted an article written by ‘Tongue-tied and dumbfounded’ (Chengmu jieshe) at 15:56, 22 July 2000, in which the concerted ‘neo-liberal’ attack on Wang Hui was criticised for indiscriminately disparaging anything and anyone remotely connected to Wang Hui. As the article puts it, this is what constitutes “Wang Hui thought crime” (Wang Hui gainian zui).

[xxviii] This refers to the political factionalism that ensued almost throughout the reign of the Zhezong Emperor (Zhao Xun) of the Northern Song dynasty (1086-1094).

[xxix] This refers to the famous Donglin faction of the late Ming in the reign of the Shenzong Emperor (Zhu Yujun) who advocated, among other things, a return to intellectual conservatism against the popularity of syncretic movements between 1608-1625. They derived their authority from their high positions in the imperial administration but were purged by the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian between 1625-6.

[xxx] One thinks, for instance, of the often-lambasted but theoretically complex texts like the 1966 People’s Daily editorial ‘Sweep Away all Cow Demons and Snake Spirits,’ or Zhang Chunqiao’s mid 1970s “Continuing Revolution Under the Proletarian Dictatorship.”

[xxxi] From Lu Xun’s prose-poem, ‘Yingzide gaobie’ (‘The Shadow’s Farewell’) in his Yecao, collected in Lu Xun quanji, 1991, vol.2, p.165.

[xxxii] In personal communication with Davies (July 2001), Wang observed that while he was aware of the growing controversy, he chose not to follow it too closely as he realised that he would be singled out for criticism in most of the net-postings.

[xxxiii] Wang Hui further pointed out that perspicacious editing had led Reading out of the doldrums that it was in, in particular by organizing a series of discussions in response to the Asian fiscal crisis of 1997 and its ramifications in China that caught the attention of the reading public. Wang, ‘Wo dui muqian zhengyi de liang dian shuoming’ in Zhonghua dushu wang (ed.), Xueshu quanli pp. 17-18.

[xxxiv] At this point it is worth recalling that such seminal commercialized debates in the leftist cultural sphere of the 1930s, like that over ‘national defence literature’ (guofang wenxue), or that concerning ‘dialectical materialism’ (weiwu bianzhengfa) had a profound impact on the personal politics and culture of revolutionary China–the splits and divisions of the 1930s carrying through to the political arena during the Yan’an era and under the People’s Republic. For an incisive reading of the latter debate, see Werner Meissner, Philosophy and Politics in China: The Controversy Over Dialectical Materialism in the 1930s, trans. Richard Mann, 1990.

[xxxv] There were several brief postings of this nature between 20-9 August 2000 at Shiji shalong, Online. Available HTTP: <http://www.csdn618.com.cn/page/china/shalong/> (accessed 27-28 July, 6-10 August 2000)

[xxxvi] That sense of mission, immediacy and engagement welled up again during the Democracy Wall period of 1979-1980. Pleas for social, political and cultural change were put up in the form of big-character posters on a stretch of brick wall at the Xidan-Chang’an intersection in Beijing. That was in the early stages of the reform era when Chinese intellectuals still regarded themselves as a collective agent of change. Some twenty years later, that sense of collective agency has greatly diminished. In this regard, criticisms of the Cheung Kong-Reading awards, which revolved around the question of how individual intellectual achievements should be evaluated and rewarded, indicate the extent to which the logic of the market now shapes knowledge production in mainland China.

***

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Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium

Chapter XXXIV, Part III

眾目睽睽

Have We Been Noticed Yet?

—Intellectual Contestation and the Chinese Web