Although the previous chapter laid out the major differences between postmodernists and liberals, attention was focused primarily on differences in their world views. To that extent, the discussion was fairly abstract, as are many of the writings in this genre. This chapter focuses on more specifically political issues that have arisen parallel to the discussions described in Chapter 4. In particular, we focus on two issues that at first glance appear to be contradictory: the emergence of a body of neostatist thought that has revolved around the issue of “state capacity” on the one hand, and the emergence of populist nationalism on the other. Chapter 3 discussed the nationalism of people like He Xin and the recentralizing impulses of people like Chen Yuan. However, even though He Xin's tone was populist, he was so obviously directing his views upward (toward the leadership) that he never tested the popular basis for his views. Similarly, although Chen Yuan sought ways to combine market economics with a stronger central government, he never developed a systematic conceptual approach. These limitations condemned the neoconservatism of the 1989–92 period to the margins of Chinese intellectual life, even as it expressed a prevalent mood within a segment of the political leadership.

By 1992–93, however, as noted in the previous chapter, the economic and social bases had developed for a broader intellectual acceptance of postmodernist ideas that would have been considered “conservative” only a few years earlier.

Two recent incidents, one receiving extensive international coverage and the other more passing notice, suggest the distance China has traveled over the past decade. The first was the reaction of students and others in the aftermath of the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. What was surprising was the readiness with which students and many intellectuals believed that the bombing was deliberate. Although the best evidence to date upholds the U.S. government's explanation that it was accidental, most Chinese then and now believe that it was only one more (albeit a particularly bold) measure to “contain,” and humiliate, China. Visiting China shortly after the bombing, I asked many people whether – if it had been, for instance, the Japanese Embassy that was struck – the reaction of the Japanese people would have been the same. Everyone I talked to said “no” but saw this apparent contradiction as perfectly logical. The United States was not trying to hold Japan down, but it was trying to contain China. The assumption that the bombing was deliberate rested on a perceived pattern of behavior, and the anger flowed from that perception. The outpouring of anger – and the bricks, ink bottles, and Molotov cocktails thrown at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and its Consulates elsewhere – stood in such striking contrast to the raising of the “goddess of democracy” in Tiananmen Square by Chinese students just ten years earlier that it was difficult to comprehend how this could be the same country.

By late 1990, Deng seemed visibly distraught by China's situation and his own inability to reassert his leadership. There were moments of small progress. For instance, in November he met with Jiang Zemin and Yang Shangkun before their trip to Shenzhen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the SEZs' (Special Enterprise Zones') founding. This meeting no doubt accounts for Jiang's high evaluation of the zones at the meeting late that month. Then, on the eve of the Seventh Plenum in late December, Deng gave a short speech to several leaders emphasizing that planning and markets are not the distinguishing characteristics of socialism and capitalism, respectively. “Don't think that engaging in a little market economy is [taking] the capitalist road; it is not like that,” Deng told his colleagues. He also urged his colleagues to be bolder and to take some risks. These remarks evidently caused Jiang Zemin to revise his speech to the Seventh Plenum to declare that it was necessary to persist unswervingly in reform and opening up. One report indicates that Jiang made the opening remarks to the plenum – but, if so, they have not been publicized; his closing remarks do contain a section called “firmly persist in reform and enlarge the scope of opening up.”

Such verbal reaffirmations of Dengist policy, however, did not amount to a resurrection of Deng's reform line.

Prior to 1993, neoconservatism consisted primarily of the ruminations of a handful of intellectuals. It was a diverse and not very coherent movement, drawing on people with distinctly different attitudes and statuses within the Chinese system. Although well connected with some conservative leaders, there was an unmistakable opportunism in He Xin's xenophobic defenses of the government, which contrasted with Chen Yuan's politically more important efforts to articulate an alternative economic agenda. Wang Huning, who had set off internal arguments about new authoritarianism, wrote nothing about the subject as public debate unfolded in 1989, but he would emerge as a politically important advisor to Jiang Zemin in the mid- and late 1990s. People like Sheng Hong and Xiao Gongqin wrote frequently but were intellectuals with limited policy impact, not to mention a different intellectual agenda from others. Yang Ping and Wang Xiaodong can perhaps be regarded as intellectual entrepreneurs who worked to inject previously marginal ideas into the mainstream, though their connections with parts of the political system should not be underestimated.

The appearance of “Realistic Responses” in 1991 marked a certain coming of age of these ideas, not so much a political manifesto of the “princeling faction” (taizidang) – though that element was present – as an argument that China's future lay in pioneering a “third way,” rejecting both Marxism–Leninism (as traditionally understood) and Western capitalism.

In the decade following the Tiananmen crisis, reform in China continued, however unevenly, to move forward. The inability of conservatives to fashion a viable economic policy during this period meant that the political leadership was forced not only to turn once again to economic reform but also to accelerate its reforms, allowing the private economy to expand rapidly, encouraging state-owned enterprises to issue shares, and attracting unprecedented levels of foreign investment. Deng Xiaoping's trip to the south in 1992 and the passing from the scene of such Party elders as the conservative economic policy specialist Chen Yun and Jiang Zemin's primary political supporter Li Xiannian (also a conservative) provided new room for economic reformers, while the mounting difficulties of the state-owned sector (made more pressing by the prospect of China's entry into the World Trade Organization) increased pressures to take increasingly bold steps in reforming the economy. The result was that the government largely ignored the rising tide of social criticism from the New Left that pointed to growing inter- and intraregional inequalities and that questioned China's commitment to globalization. Even as the government benefited to some extent from increased nationalist sentiment, it ignored calls to say “no” to the United States and to the global economy. In the area of political reform, growing commercialization accelerated the state's retreat from society, while reformers began to redefine the role of the state and to experiment with village elections (which began in 1988 and have now spread, however imperfectly, to most of China's 900,000 villages).

In the years following Tiananmen, new currents of thought began to emerge and play a significant role in social, intellectual, and political circles. Most of these currents had roots in the 1980s, but either they were more peripheral ideas that moved toward the center of intellectual concern or they underwent a significant evolution in the context of post-Tiananmen China, or both. In all cases, they reflect an effort to come to grips intellectually with the political failure of reform in the 1980s, the economic and social problems that emerged (or became more acute) in the 1990s, and the type of political system that might be effective in coping with the problems facing China, both domestically and internationally. As we will see in this and the next two chapters, deep divisions opened up within the intellectual community, even as the place of that community in Chinese society changed significantly. In broad terms, even as the government maintained its own ideological line, a new arena of public discourse developed. Over time, the government took increasing account of this public opinion, sometimes absorbing ideas from it, sometimes engaging it, and sometimes suppressing it. The purpose of Part II is to focus on intellectual developments in the 1990s; in Part III, we will look more closely at the government–intellectual interaction.

One trend that emerged in the 1980s was that of “new authoritarianism,” which re-emerged in the 1990s as “neoconservatism.”

The Introduction addressed the issue of the state and intellectuals in broad terms; we are now in a position to consider the issue more specifically. As we saw in the first two chapters, elite politics in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen was an inside game. This was a period in which a relatively small number of political elites sharply contested the basic issues of the day: the definition (in terms of policy) of reform and opening up, and the relative balance of power between Deng Xiaoping and like-minded reformers on the one hand and Chen Yun and ideological and economic conservatives on the other. Intellectuals had an extremely limited role in this period. Economists could and did advise the government to “increase the weight of reform,” but a fundamental re-evaluation of the importance of the market economy had to wait for Deng Xiaoping's trip to the south in 1992 and the subsequent convocation of the Fourteenth Party Congress.

If intellectuals were excluded from meaningful political participation in this period, they nevertheless began a painful process of re-evaluating the course of reform, what had led to the tragedy of Tiananmen, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary China. As a result, a very different intellectual atmosphere began to emerge in the 1990s. This new intellectual discourse was largely independent of politics, a genuinely societal discourse.