WILLIAM A. CALLAHAN
On August 8, 2008 the world’s gaze focused on China for the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games. Just before 8:08 p.m. the ceremony began with 2,008 drummers banging 2,008 drums, while chanting a line from the Confucian Analects: “It is glorious to receive friends from afar.” Fireworks lit up the skies of China’s capital, tracing gigantic footsteps along the sacred north–south axis from the ancient Forbidden City to the futuristic Olympic stadium. Fifty-six children, who represented China’s fifty-six official ethnic groups (though many if not all turned out to be members of the major Han ethnicity dressed in the clothing associated with minority groups), then accompanied the national flag and an honor guard of the People’s Liberation Army across the stadium floor. As they did this, a darling little girl sang the “Ode to the Motherland”—or, rather, appeared to do so, as it later emerged that the voice of another, supposedly less photogenic girl with better musical skills, was dubbed in. As soldiers raised the flag, the hometown crowd sang China’s national anthem “March of the Volunteers.”
After more spectacular fireworks, a seventy-five minute show narrated the glories of China’s much vaunted “5,000 years of civilization,” presenting achievements ranging from classical calligraphy to Beijing Opera to China’s four great inventions: paper, printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. The Tang dynasty (618–907), which many Chinese see as the apex of their civilization, was celebrated with hundreds of women dancing in elaborate costumes. This cosmopolitan empire was open to the world, spreading both silk and Chinese values across the globe. The message was clear: open doors lead to prosperity, and the inner harmony of Confucian values leads to the external peace of mutually beneficial foreign relations; now that China is once again open and harmonious, nothing can stop its “peaceful rise.”
While Chinese athletes won the gold medal tally, the main Olympic victory went to China’s party-state, which took credit for a successful Olympic Games that impressed audiences around the world. As a young woman in Beijing explained to the New York Times, “For a lot of foreigners, the only image of China comes from old movies that make us look poor and pathetic. Now look at us. We showed the world we can build new subways and beautiful modern buildings. The Olympics will redefine the way people see us.”
The confidence, pride, and optimism showcased in the Beijing Games was indicative of China’s national mood in the first decade of the twenty-first century. While in the West this period was a time of decline, depression, and pessimism due to the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, and the Global Financial Crisis, many Chinese people were optimistic that the future was theirs: the twenty-first century, they believed, would be the “Chinese Century.” Not all residents of the PRC shared this sense of hopefulness, of course, and pessimism could be found among not just many non-Han residents of frontier areas but also those left behind by economic tides in some rural areas and cities in China’s rustbelt. Still, a great many people felt they were living in much better times than those of their parents or grandparents.
This general if not universal optimism was a huge change from China’s experience in the previous decade. As the last chapter showed, that had been bookended by domestic protest and then harsh repression in 1989 and the NATO bombing of the PRC’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The 1990s were characterized by diplomatic isolation after 1989, which contributed to the popular hyper-nationalism of 1999. By contrast, many in China experienced a millennial optimism in the 2000s, due above all to economic trends. By the end of the decade, China boasted the second largest economy in the world, with 300 million of its people recently risen out of poverty. It was en route to being home to the world’s largest middle class and had multinational corporations with global reach.
China thus shifted from being an outsider to being a key insider in the international community not only economically, but also politically and culturally. China’s new engagement with the world could be seen in July 2001 in the reaction of crowds in Beijing when they heard that the PRC had won the right to host the 2008 Olympics: they spontaneously started singing “La Marseillaise,” which is both a French national song and an anthem of internationalism.
By the end of the decade, however, the mood had shifted again—but to a newly confident nationalism rather than back to the wounded nationalism of the 1990s. While Beijing converged with the West in terms of technical and social norms, there was a hunger for indigenous Chinese political and cultural models that were different from those that originated in Europe and America. After the Olympics, a Chinese think-tank scholar declared in the China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, that
The Games proved not only the existence of the China model, but also its success.…At the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, athletes, volunteers, the audience and even local residents all sent one clear message that the Chinese people act according to their own mode of conduct and will not succumb to any allegedly superior Western values.
That the Global Financial Crisis started in New York less than one month after the Olympics confirmed for many that China could be successful on its own terms, especially in comparison with the United States.
Hence by the end of the 2000s, the idea of a distinct “China model” of economics, politics, and culture was popular. This nativist sensibility was manifest in the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 2009: while the Olympics showed the world that China had soft power, the National Day military parade reminded everyone that China also had hard power. A more assertive foreign policy emerged that renewed long-dormant territorial disputes with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. China thus shifted from “joining the world” in the early 2000s to demanding that the world pay attention by 2010.
Most analyses of economic, political and social change in China understand it in terms of the grand teleological narratives of modernization and progress. This chapter, however, understands this decade’s quiet revolution in terms of a series of shifts, illustrating how China’s social space is elastic, both continually opening and closing. It looks at how China (and specific Chinese groups) have experienced a complex and sometimes contradictory process of moving from the margin to the mainstream, moving from the mainstream to the margin, as well as moving from the mainstream to the center. It also examines Chinese nationalism in terms of moving from wounded nationalism in the 1990s, to internationalism in the mid-2000s, to confident nationalism after 2008.
Economy and society
It is hard to overstate the impact of China winning the right to host the 2008 Olympics in 2001. To many, it fulfilled what they called China’s “century-long dream” to host the Games. More importantly, it signalled that China was finally accepted as part of the world community. To understand this feeling, we have to go back to 1993, when Beijing lost the competition to host the 2000 Olympics to Sydney. There were many reasons why Sydney won; but in China, people blamed the West for blocking China’s bid as a punishment for the June 4th massacre. This rejection was used by the party-state to rally Chinese public opinion against the West, and was an important source of the virulent nationalism that mushroomed in the mid-to-late 1990s. The International Olympic Committee’s award of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing thus was seen as redemption of not just the party-state, but of China and internationalism more generally.
This Olympic victory was part of a trend, where China progressively joined international organizations and even created its own regional organizations. In 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization and banded with its Central Asian neighbors to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. By 2003, China had become part of nearly all of the major international and regional organizations, prompting Harvard political scientist Alastair Iain Johnston to declare that the PRC was a “status quo power,” rather than a revisionist or revolutionary one. This was all part of China’s new “going global strategy” to gain both hard and soft power through diplomacy, international commerce, and global cultural promotion. The PRC thus became the factory of the world: the country’s plants made roughly 90 percent of the world’s personal computers and mobile phones, 80 percent of its air conditioners, 70 percent of its solar panels, and 65 percent of its shoes.
China also gained international status by hosting global mega-events; in addition to the 2008 Olympics, in 2002 the PRC won the right to host the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. In hosting first an Olympics and then an Expo—a genre of event that remains symbolically significant in countries that did not have a chance to hold a World’s Fair in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when those events were even more important than the Summer Games—China repeated a two-step of lavish spectacles that Japan had carried out during its own rise to economic centrality after World War II. These were repeatedly trumpeted in the press as China’s “coming out party” on the world stage. But the Olympics and the Expo were not simply cultural events. Like in other countries, political leaders used these splashy undertakings to change Beijing and Shanghai, rebooting their status as modern metropolises, and in doing so to move forward the process of modernizing China as a whole and making it seem again a central site of “civilized” modes of life.
To support this rapid industrialization and urbanization, China engaged in massive infrastructure projects in the 2000s. Beijing’s new airport terminal, built for the 2008 Olympics, made it one of the largest airports in the world. This was not a one-off, but part of a massive airport building scheme that resulted in the growth from 121 civilian airports in 2000 to 175 in 2010—including Shanghai’s Pudong International airport—not to mention the expansion and relocation of 100 existing airports, such as Guangdong’s Baiyun International Airport. China’s expressway and high-speed train networks likewise expanded dramatically starting in the 2000s. The total expressway length more than quintupled from 12,000 km in 2000 to 65,000 km in 2010. China introduced high-speed rail travel in 2007, and now has the largest high-speed rail network in the world.
Major cities also developed their infrastructure: Beijing’s development can be traced by the progressive construction of ring roads: the fourth ring road was completed in 2001; the fifth in 2003; and the sixth in 2010. The fifth ring road was particularly symbolic as it enclosed the Summer Palace, which used to be on the far outskirts of the capital. The most important infrastructural enhancement, however, took place underground: as part of the modernization of Beijing for the Olympics, starting in 2002 the subway network expanded from two lines (built during the Cultural Revolution and soon after) to seven lines by 2010. Shanghai’s metro expansion, as part of the Shanghai Expo 2010 spirit, is even more dramatic: the first line opened in 1993, the second in 1999, and by 2010 it had eleven lines.
The Internet also exploded in the 2000s, going from having 820,000 users in 1998 to 253 million in 2008. More importantly, starting in 2000 users could register anonymously, while the party-state’s “Great Firewall” that controls the Internet also went online. The number of college graduates surged from one million in 1998 to 7.5 million in 2012. There was an explosion in research-and-development investment: in 1993, China accounted for just 2.2 percent of the world’s R&D spending; by 2009, the figure was 12.8 percent, which was well ahead of most European countries.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the scale of these statistics, and experiencing China’s rapid growth in the 2000s also impressed many people at the personal level. As Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh described his first trip to China in 2006:
My first impression, like everybody who goes to China, especially every Indian who goes to China, was one of astonishment. I went there from New York.…We think of New York as the sort of big city, the big tall city. And you suddenly arrive [in Guangdong] and you realize that this place can accommodate a hundred New Yorks. For about 50 miles you drive through skyscraper after skyscraper, these amazing freeways and motorways. So it was just a sense of astonishment, that even though one had read so much already about all that’s happened in China in terms of infrastructure, the actual reality of it doesn’t strike you until you’ve actually seen it close up.
Although China’s rapid growth comes from an export-oriented economic model, one of the other developments of the 2000s was the appearance of a new social phenomenon: the Chinese middle class, which by the end of the decade was the largest middle class in the world. The expanding secondary and higher education sector facilitated much social mobility, and subsequently the rise of a consumer culture. People were no longer just concerned with the material issues of food and housing, but also the symbolic experience of purchasing a lifestyle. In 1999, for example, Starbucks opened its first coffee shop in Beijing (there would be more than 400 in the country a decade later). Since China is a tea-drinking nation, Starbucks’ commercial success was made possible by the expanding middle class that could afford to pay $4 for a latte. In 2009 China became the world’s largest car market, with private car ownership quadrupling since 2000. At the same time, urban individuals and families began to purchase private property, in the form of houses and apartments, not just for habitation but as an investment.
To get a sense of the new consumer lifestyle it is helpful to go to the movies. The blockbuster film Du Lala’s Promotion Diary (English name: “Go Lala Go!,” 2010), which is based on an eponymous novel published in 2007, tells the story of a young woman pursuing her dream job in a company known simply as “DB,” which is portrayed as an American Fortune 500 corporation trying to penetrate the Chinese market. The first half of the film charts Lala’s advancement in DB as a metaphor for China shifting from national economic plans to enter the global market economy after it joined the WTO in 2001. Here the private-sector corporate world is a new environment of boundless possibilities and risks. Even the task of finding a job is relatively novel in China: until the end of the 1990s the party-state assigned jobs to most college graduates. So the details of applying for a job, interviewing, and job training that appear ordinary to Western viewers were still extraordinary to the Chinese audience. The film charts Lala’s climb up the corporate ladder not simply through listing her new title and salary. Lala’s meteoric rise is also reflected in her wardrobe. Her new colleagues not only teach Lala about office politics, but also give her advice on how to shop and what to wear. As Lala climbs the corporate ladder she not only gains self-confidence, but also gets more fashionable clothes, her first car, and her first apartment. Although it may not be remarkable to a Western audience, buying your first car and using a credit card were still exotic and exciting experiences for China’s new middle class in the 2000s.
Du Lala’s Promotion Diary is a successful example of the new genre of “workplace novels” that took China by storm. Some people read workplace novels for fun as “chick lit,” but most saw Du Lala’s Promotion Diary as a “reference book” of strategies for getting ahead in the corporate world and for how to be a global consumer. The film and the novel thus both tell people how to be modern: how to work, live—and succeed—in the ruthless global market economy that knits together Chinese and American individuals, rules, aspirations, and values.
China’s economic growth in the 2000s was part of a continuous trend that began with Deng’s new Reform and Opening policy in 1978. While this growth primarily benefited Chinese workers and consumers in the 1980s and 1990s, in the 2000s it shifted to benefit the global economy as well. One aspect of this is the expansion of the luxury goods market within China; famous European fashion shops have branches in China’s major cities. It also works through international travel, as Chinese tourists travel to Europe, Japan, and the United States. These tourists not only take in the sights, but like Du Lala, spend much of their time shopping. What separates Chinese shopping tourists from earlier generations of Americans going to Europe and Japanese going to the West is the sheer scale of the PRC’s middle class.
While the American consumer was the main engine of the world economy in the twentieth century, after 2008 China became the main engine of global economic growth, shifting the country from the margin of international society to the center of the world, economically at least.
Politics and foreign affairs
In the 2000s, however, not all news was good. China’s rapid economic growth had a huge impact on society and the natural environment: growing corruption, pollution, inequality, regional polarization, a graying population, a housing bubble, a floating population of 100s of millions of workers, and a widespread sense of moral crisis. According to democratization theorists, we should expect China’s new middle class to demand a greater say in political decision-making. The spread of free speech on the Internet was also seen as a harbinger of democratic change. Indeed, by the end of the novel, even Du Lala decides that material comfort is not enough: her fundamental goal changes to “be free to live life on her own terms.” Even China’s leaders were uneasy with the PRC’s direction: in 2007 Premier Wen Jiabao warned that China’s economic growth was “unstable, imbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable.”
In his 2001 book, American commentator Gordon G. Chang thus predicted The Coming Collapse of China, which would lead to a democratic revolution. On the other hand, the best-selling hyper-nationalist book China’s Road under the Shadow of Globalization, published in 1999, described an international conspiracy to “Westernize and divide up China,” predicting that the West was working to split up the PRC into a clutch of independent states including Tibet, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Taiwan.
China’s Communist Party leadership took such predictions very seriously. We should remember that 1989 witnessed two important events: the June 4th massacre in China, and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that eventually led to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union by 1992. To forestall the downfall of the PRC, the CCP engaged in a serious long-term study of the reasons for the Soviet Union’s ideological and geopolitical collapse. The findings were that the CCP needed to embrace current global trends in economic and social affairs, while preserving its monopoly on political and coercive power. Indeed, by the end of the decade the trend among Western analysts was to describe the “authoritarian resilience” of the party-state.
In 2000, Jiang Zemin was coming to the end of his thirteen-year reign as Chinese leader. To cement his ideological legacy, he presented the idea of “The Three Represents”: “Our Party must always represent the requirements for developing China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of China’s advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people.” Although much mocked—on the Internet “Three Represents-daibiao” became the homophone “Three Wrist Watches-daibiao” to criticize official corruption—Jiang’s new slogan actually signaled a new flexibility in the CCP. By representing the majority of the people—rather than just the revolutionary proletarian class—Jiang shifted the CCP from being a revolutionary party to being a ruling party that could recruit members of China’s new middle class, which used to be demonized as the class enemy. As a normal ruling party, Jiang suggested, the CCP needed to govern the country through the rule of law. This would involve a greater institutionalization of the CCP, and the expansion of political participation through “inner-party democracy.”
“The Three Represents” was a response to the ideological gap created by the erosion of the legitimacy of socialism during the Reform Era. Although Jiang’s goal was probably to forestall the development of liberal democracy, the vague flexibility of “The Three Represents” allowed space for officials and intellectuals to use it for economic and social reform projects, including the expansion of the scope of the rule of law and civil rights. Indeed, while political space was still quite narrow in the 2000s, there was a flowering of social and cultural life.
“The Three Represents” was enshrined in the CCP constitution at the Sixteenth Party Conference in 2002, which also witnessed the relatively smooth handover of power from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, the successor who had been hand-picked by Deng Xiaoping in 1992. This was important because succession processes were always vexed in earlier periods of PRC history, as first Mao (with Lin Biao) and then later Deng (with Hu Yaobang, whose death helped trigger the 1989 protests, and Zhao Ziyang, who was placed under house arrest for being too soft on those demonstrations) had presumptive heirs who were purged before they had a chance to assume power.
The handover in 2002, however, was not complete. While Jiang yielded his political power as the General Secretary of the CCP and his state power as the President of the PRC, he held onto his military power as the chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). This led to jokes about the weakness of the new leadership of President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao: the Hu-Wen (i.e. Who? When?) regime.
By 2004, Hu had hit his stride as leader, taking over the chairmanship of the CMC and developing his own strategy through three slogans: “Scientific Development Perspective,” “Harmonious Society,” and “Harmonious World.” Scientific Development Perspective describes the development strategy that resulted in the fantastic economic growth described above. Hu and Wen were both engineers; this generation of technocratic rulers measured their achievements in terms of “big things,” the large projects of the party-state: the Three Gorges Dam, the Olympics and the World Expo, and the high-speed rail network. The Scientific Development Perspective also was developed to deal with the fall-out from rapid economic development and social change: it promoted sustainable development, social welfare and a more humanistic society. The 2008 Summer Games, for example, was billed as the “Green Olympics, the High-tech Olympics and the People’s Olympics,” and the slogan for the Shanghai World Expo 2010 was “Better City, Better Life.”
The Scientific Development Perspective here overlaps with “Harmonious Society,” which describes a set of government policies that sought to rebalance China’s economic and social polarization. New funds were made available, for example, to provide free public education and subsidized health care to the people that had been left behind in the economic boom, especially those in rural areas. Harmonious Society’s detailed set of policies, which look to the party-state to solve China’s economic and social problems, appeal to a particular blend of socialist modernity and Chinese tradition. While English-language descriptions of the policy stress its Confucian roots, in Chinese it is called “Harmonious Socialist Society.”
To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in September 2005, Hu Jintao introduced “Harmonious World” as a new way of thinking about global politics. He explained to the UN General Assembly that his goal was to “build a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity.” In this new world order, different civilizations would coexist in the global community, making “humanity more harmonious and our world more colorful.” At the CCP’s Seventieth Party Conference in 2007, Hu stressed that building a harmonious world was necessary because of the “ever closer interconnection between China’s future and destiny and those of the world.…The Chinese people will continue to work tirelessly with the people of other countries to bring about a better future for humanity.” Hu stressed that China’s goal was to build a more democratic and egalitarian harmonious world because “We maintain that all countries, big and small, strong and weak, rich and poor, are equal.”
When we remember what was going on in 2005—the US–UK war in Iraq was spiraling into insurgency and civil war—it is easy to see why global opinion may well have welcomed Hu’s new concept. Hence, to a world weary of American unilateralism and incensed at the Bush Doctrine of regime change, Hu’s policy of world harmony was compelling. Beijing had been trying to change China’s global image for years; Hu was finally successful because he was able to draw a clear distinction between a bellicose America and a peace-loving China.
As Hu was formulating his Harmonious World strategy, his main intellectual adviser Zheng Bijian floated the idea of “Peaceful Rise” to explain why China’s rise was not a threat, but an opportunity to people around the world. This was a development of Deng Xiaoping’s “Peace and Development” foreign policy announced in the 1980s, which prioritized economic over political goals, reasoning that China’s development required a peaceful global environment to facilitate the international trade and investment necessary for economic growth. After the June 4th Massacre in 1989, Deng supplemented this Peace and Development policy with instructions that China should lay low diplomatically, bide its time, and hide its capabilities.
Once the PRC became a global player in the 2000s, many of its Asian neighbors and the United States were concerned that China was becoming a threat simply because of its rapidly expanding economy and military. China’s double-digit economic growth was accompanied by double-digit growth in its defense budget. Many also were shocked at the virulence of 2005’s anti-Japanese protests throughout urban China (which were sparked by Tokyo’s quest to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which Beijing vetoed). It was in this context that Zheng reassured the international community that China was a status quo power. The gist of Peaceful Rise is that China would concentrate on its own economic development in ways that would also benefit other countries, rather than pursue a military expansion that would challenge the international system. China, after all, is the main beneficiary of economic globalization.
Although the official name of the policy quickly changed to “Peaceful Development,” the policy itself was quite successful. US–China relations were relatively stable, and focused primarily on economic issues such as how China’s undervalued currency was harming the US economy. In East and Southeast Asia, Beijing’s clout increased in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. While the International Monetary Fund and the West were criticized for using the crisis to force unpopular neoliberal policies on South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia, China was credited for not devaluing its currency (which would have undermined the economic recovery of its neighbors). The result of the 1997 economic crisis was a regional agreement signed in 2000, which became the Chiang Mai Initiative in 2010, where Asian countries agreed to support each other’s currencies in future financial crises. China and the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also signed a treaty in 2002 to create the China–ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2010; once again, Beijing was credited with being generous in its terms. China likewise was an active member of the ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN Plus Three, and was a founding member of the East Asia Summit in 2005. China thus was welcomed into the regional system in Southeast Asia and East Asia. Such multilateral diplomatic actions were taken as evidence of China’s peaceful rise, and its goal of building a harmonious world.
Things changed quite dramatically in 2009, however. China went from being very popular around Asia and the world, to being seen as a new threat. After the successful Olympics and the global financial crisis occurred in swift succession in 2008, policy-makers and opinion-makers in Beijing were convinced that they had entered a new era not just of the rise of China, but also of the decline of the United States and the West. Whereas Peaceful Rise and Harmonious World are “win-win” positive sum policies, Chinese hawks, who formulate international politics in terms of the zero-sum geopolitical game of winners and losers, gained influence. It was no longer enough to be accepted into the mainstream of the international community; from 2008 China wanted to be recognized as a new center of global power, and ultimately as the new center of the world.
China’s global popularity, however, peaked in 2008. The world stood in awe at the Summer Olympic Games, which showcased China as the top gold medal winner and Beijing as the new center of global prosperity and order. This grand shift from west to east worked itself out in new foreign policy agendas in Asia and the United States. In 2009, Tokyo’s newly elected Democratic Party of Japan government decided to rebalance its ties towards a growing China, and away from what it saw as a declining United States. In Washington, the newly elected Obama administration likewise extended a hand of friendship to Beijing in hopes of building more positive and productive bilateral relations.
But rather than following the Peaceful Rise policy that stressed mutual respect, Beijing saw these expressions of friendship as signs of weakness. Now that China was strong, it was time to settle scores. In a mad rush to surpass the United States and become the world’s number one power, in 2009 Beijing shifted its policy to seek aggrandizement in military, economic, and diplomatic power. In so doing, Beijing revived long-dormant territorial disputes with South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India.
While in 2007 President Hu declared that “all countries, big and small, strong and weak, rich and poor, are equal,” in 2010 Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi told his Southeast Asian counterparts that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.” An editorial in Beijing’s semi-official newspaper, the Global Times, fleshed this out when it warned “small countries”—South Korea and the Philippines—to stop challenging China in the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea: “If these countries don’t want to change their ways with China, they will need to prepare for the sounds of cannons.”
In two short years China shifted from being admired for its peaceful rise to be the main regional threat that convinced many Asian governments—including Vietnam—to seek diplomatic and military support from the United States, which in turn led to Obama’s Asian pivot in 2011.
While Hu Jintao was in power, he was seen as largely successful, presiding over China’s emergence from the margins, first to the mainstream, and finally into the center of world attention. He responded quite well to the global financial crisis in 2008, instituting a massive US$586 billion stimulus package that kept China’s economy chugging along at an enviable annual GDP growth rate of over 7 percent. During the 2000s, Hu presided over China’s political and economic shift from the margins to the mainstream of the international community, and laid the groundwork for China’s emergence as an alternative center of the world.
After he left power in 2012, however, critics were not so generous. Surprisingly, it was not for his move to a more aggressive foreign policy in 2008–09. The criticism, rather, focused on his domestic policies. Many described Hu’s rule as a series of missed opportunities for economic, social, and even political reform. The Hu-Wen regime was essentially a caretaker government that witnessed no major scandals in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet problems were festering just below the surface: the Bo Xilai scandal of murder, official corruption, and the abuse of power, which erupted in 2012, providing the greatest challenge to the CCP’s legitimacy since 1989, was brewing in Chongqing.
Society and culture
The first decade of the twenty-first century was also a time of optimism for China’s growing civil society. Whereas before 2000, it was easy to divide intellectuals into two groups—establishment intellectuals who represented official culture and disestablished intellectuals who criticized the party-state as dissidents—in the new century a cadre of intellectuals emerged who operated between officialdom and dissent. This new group of “citizen intellectuals” emerged as an unintended consequence of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up policy. While Deng’s goal was economic reform, the “opening up policy” has gone far beyond liberalizing markets to create a wide variety of cultural opportunities, ranging from elite literature to the popular culture of China’s American Idol-like show Go! Oriental Angel.
Yet the optimism sparked in this new social and cultural space often took pessimistic forms, in what I have elsewhere called China’s “pessoptimist” identity politics. After three decades of economic reform, many intellectuals felt that China was facing a moral crisis. In other words, China’s New Left, traditionalists, and liberals are all worried about the “values crisis” presented by what they called the PRC’s new “money-worship” society. For such people, Du Lala’s materialist lifestyle symbolized China’s moral problem: she is the epitome of an individual consumer who lacks Chinese values (for traditionalists), socialist values (for China’s New Left), the martial spirit (for military intellectuals), and democratic values (for liberals). For different reasons, these citizen intellectuals all felt that Lala’s “money-worship” lifestyle offered a ruinous scenario for the PRC’s future.
Intellectuals from across the political spectrum thus were engaged in what Chinese call “patriotic worrying”; they felt that it was their job to ponder the fate of the nation, and to find the correct formula to solve China’s problems. During the 2000s, many citizen intellectuals moved from relative obscurity on the margins to be at the center of mainstream debate in China. Yet, as we will see, prominent liberals also were pushed from the mainstream debate into the marginal existence of a dissident. Thematically, the main shift was very much like that in economic and political affairs: Chinese discussions generally shifted from universal ideals (e.g. socialism or democracy) to a new brand of Chinese exceptionalism that promoted socialism and Confucianism as Chinese traditions.
Among liberal citizen intellectuals, two people stand out: Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei. Liu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, is a well-known government critic who was imprisoned on-and-off by the party-state, starting after his activism at Tiananmen Square in May–June 1989. During the 2000s, Liu was a well-known essayist. He emerged from the margins to the mainstream with his co-authored manifesto, “Charter 08,” which was published on the Internet on December 10, 2008—i.e. Human Rights Day. Charter 08 asks the central question that vexed China’s citizen intellectuals: “Where is China headed in the twenty-first century? Will it continue with ‘modernization’ under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system?” Charter 08 then set down the principles necessary to achieve the goal of a liberal democratic China, where people have political, civil, and economic rights and are entrusted with the responsibility to govern themselves.
This manifesto, which recalls Czechoslovakia’s famous “Charter 77” declaration, was signed by hundreds—and eventually more than 10,000—Chinese intellectuals and activists. For drafting Charter 08, Liu was sentenced in 2009 to eleven years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power.” The party-state thought that it had banished Liu to the margins by imprisoning him; but when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China,” Liu was thrust into the center of world attention.
Ai Weiwei is an artist who became an activist in the 2000s. Like Liu, he is a liberal who sees China’s authoritarian state as the problem. As Ai wrote in The Guardian, “every day in China, we put the state on trial.” He stressed that China can only be saved if the government respects freedom of expression and the rule of law. Yet Ai’s style and tactics are quite different from Liu’s. Liu is a quintessential twentieth-century dissident. He drafts manifestos demanding radical change, and acts in rationally earnest ways. Charter 08 reads like a Five-Year Plan for the fifth modernization: democracy.
Ai, however, takes a twenty-first-century approach to dissent that blurs art, life, politics, and activism. Rather than writing earnest essays that demand rational governance, Ai appeals to people’s outrage, mocks the government, and works primarily through the Internet. The year 2008 was a pivotal one for Ai. While he had always been political, his responses to the Olympics and the earthquake that year in Sichuan shifted his image from the political margins to the center of attention. Ai was the artistic consultant for Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest stadium; but in 2008 he refused to attend the Olympic opening ceremony because he was disgusted at how the stadium was being deployed by the party-state as China’s “fake smile”—i.e. as part of an international propaganda campaign. He later Tweeted that “No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy” (March 10, 2010).
Like many citizen intellectuals, Ai was critical of the official response to the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008. Noticing that public schools often suffered more damage than surrounding buildings, many people concluded that the schools collapsed due to substandard construction stemming from official corruption. After the party-state refused to investigate, Ai enlisted hundreds of volunteers in what he called a “Citizens’ Investigation,” which compiled and published a list of the names of the 5,212 children who were killed in the earthquake. Ai and his team eventually shamed the government into releasing its own list of 5,335 names.
Throughout the 2000s, Ai played cat-and-mouse with the party-state. His blog was hugely popular—until it was shut down in 2009 as a result of his posts on the Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake. Like with Liu Xiaobo, the party-state tried to control Ai by imprisoning him for eighty-one days in 2011; but this only served to thrust Ai onto the global stage where he was declared the most powerful artist in the world. Still, back in China, Liu’s and Ai’s political space was severely restricted: Liu was in jail and Ai’s Internet posts were censored by China’s Great Firewall.
Like Liu and Ai, filmmaker Jia Zhangke is worried about the lack of social justice in China, and argues that the PRC needs to have more freedom of speech and freedom of expression. But Jia’s career trajectory gives an alternative example of how to be a citizen intellectual in China. He was well known in the 1990s for his “underground films” about people who were marginalized in China’s transition to a market economy. Since his films could not be shown in the PRC, his main audience was the international film festival circuit, where he was very successful.
In 2004, however, Jia decided to work within China’s propaganda system because he wanted a large Chinese audience for his films. He thus submitted his fourth feature film, The World, to the PRC’s censors, who approved it for distribution in China. Unlike dissident directors who produce “packaged dissent” with an elite and often foreign audience in mind, Jia’s target audience is the Chinese public because, as he told the New Yorker, he “believes his social critique is strongest not as a protestor on the sidelines but as a legal—and marketable—filmmaker.” In this way, Jia hopes to raise public consciousness about the problems facing China’s underclass. The result was a decade full of creatively critical films, that were popular in China and abroad, such as Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008), and I Wish I Knew (2010).
Jia argues that the reason that his films now pass the censors is not because he has changed; rather, China’s propaganda system itself has loosened up. As he later told the New York Times, after 2004
there was more discussion in the censorship process. In the past, no one came to talk to us. They would just say “yes” or “no”…No one talked to the director about why they made the film or why they dealt with the subject in this manner. After 2004, directors began to have the opportunity to discuss and express their own views.
In the interview, Jia concluded that “I’ve always believed that we must encourage progress in China’s system. If China makes progress, then we must recognize it. The censorship process has slowly become more relaxed.” And Jia has been quite successful: his films, which still examine the underside of modernization and globalization in China, are now screened on the mainland, and they continue to win awards both in the PRC and in international film festivals. (Unfortunately, Jia’s work was caught up in new General Secretary Xi Jinping’s crackdown against critical views of China. His 2013 film, A Touch of Sin, was never released in the PRC.)
Still, it would be a mistake to conclude that China’s citizen intellectuals are all liberal critics; this new trend also includes conservative voices. Colonel Liu Mingfu’s The China Dream (2009) of building up the PRC’s military power to challenge America was written as a personal commentary rather than an official statement from the People’s Liberation Army. Peking University’s Pan Wei even uses his position as a citizen intellectual to argue against civil society in China.
Liu’s The China Dream is interesting because it is a direct critique of Deng Xiaoping’s policy that prioritized the economy above all else, which was elaborated in Hu’s Harmonious World and Zheng Bijian’s Peaceful Rise. Liu warned that being an economic superpower like Japan is insufficient; as a trading state, China risked being gobbled up like a “plump lamb” by stronger military powers. To be a strong nation, Liu argued, a wealthy country needs to convert its economic success into military power. Rather than follow Deng’s “Peace and Development” policy to beat swords into ploughshares, he tells us that China needed to “turn some ‘money bags’ into ‘ammunition belts’.” In this way, Liu refocuses China’s ambitions from economic growth back to political-military power. Liu’s goal is to “sprint to the finish” to beat the United States, and become the world’s next superpower. His book was very influential, forming one of the key sources for Xi Jinping’s catchphrase, “The China Dream,” which emerged in 2012.
While military intellectuals like Col. Liu were worried about the growing power of economic liberalism, New Left intellectuals were worried about political liberalism. While for most the China model could be summarized as “authoritarian state + free market capitalism,” Pan Wei was dissatisfied with this description. His 2009 edited volume, The China Model, was an influential attack on capitalism, liberal democracy, the West, and universal values. While at first the China model referred to the PRC’s economic development strategy, with the rise of confidence in 2008–09 due to the successful Olympics and the PRC’s sixtieth birthday celebration, it took on new life to describe a whole “Chinese system” of politics, economics, and society that is unique. Pan argued that for China to achieve its full potential it needed to jettison the “western model.” Only then could China rediscover its own indigenous values, and craft a unique development model based on Chinese history and culture. Pan thus sees the China model less in terms of a set of policy prescriptions than as the sign of China’s “cultural rejuvenation.”
This was a shift for Pan. In the early 2000s, he was well known for his advocacy of political reform that promoted the rule of law and a neutral judiciary, although not necessarily liberal democracy. However, in the mid-2000s, as part of a broader trend among Chinese intellectuals, Pan started to draw on cultural arguments to explain Beijing’s economic success. Looking to China’s indigenous ideas to describe the China model, Pan argued that the PRC’s strength is built on China’s historical and cultural continuity. While many people criticize the Cultural Revolution as the “lost decade,” Pan rehabilitated the Maoist period (1949–78) to praise the PRC’s sixty years of success.
Alongside reaffirming the value of socialism, Pan also appealed to traditional Chinese village life to explain his organic social model. Here Chinese society is based on a “family theory” that values responsibility—unlike Western society that is based on individual rights—where the Party loves the people like a caring father, and the masses are loyal, grateful, and respectful, like well-behaved children. In Pan’s view, China is neither a democracy nor an autocracy because the PRC is a “meritocracy.” It has the rule of law and an independent judiciary, he claims, but little room for open debate in “civil society,” which Pan sees as a battleground of special interests that divides the organic whole.
One of the main goals of China model discourse is to affirm and support Beijing’s current system of governance that is dominated by the CCP. The China model involves tight state control of politics, economy, and society to promote the key values of stability, unity, and statism. It sees Chinese political-economic-cultural trends diverging from Western experience, and pits the China model against the “Western model,” promoting Chinese exceptionalism against so-called “universal values.”
This curious combination of egalitarian socialism and hierarchical tradition was popular among philosophers, social scientists, and international relations scholars in China. While Hu Jintao’s Harmonious Society and Harmonious World appealed to socialist values, the invocation of “harmony” created opportunities for citizen intellectuals to explore how China’s traditional values could be applied in the twenty-first century. Zhao Tingyang, a philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), wrote a series of influential books that revived China’s imperial model of hierarchical governance as a model for global politics during the Chinese Century.
Historically, Chinese identity was defined according to cultural factors: civilization versus barbarism. Chinese civilization was seen as uniquely superior to everything else. As Pan’s and Zhao’s books show, the idea of exceptionalism re-emerged in postsocialist China as a response to the values crisis. Chinese exceptionalism looks to 5,000 years of uniquely continuous history to see China as the world’s first ancient civilization, which is “inherently peaceful.” They thus see their country as a peaceful and harmonious alternative to “American hegemony.” This alternative is not merely different from the West; it provides a fundamentalist view of Chinese civilization that is organic, self-contained, and in a struggle with other civilizations. In his seminal 2003 essay “Chinese Exceptionalism,” social philosopher Kang Xiaoguang argues that to be a true alternative, Chinese values have to be the “opposite of western individualism and a rejection of western culture,” and grow out of a “resentment of American values and norms.”
While Du Lala showed how China’s new middle class likes to mix East and West, New Left intellectuals would criticize her as a “traitor to the Han race.” According to Pan, Chinese critics who advocated deeper political reform actually wanted “to demolish the Forbidden City in order to build the White House” in Beijing, so “foreign forces can control China’s military, politics, economy and society.” China thus is at a “crossroads”: “In the next 30 years, what direction will the Chinese nation take? Will it preserve China’s rejuvenation? Or will it have superstitious faith in the Western ‘liberal democracy’ system, and go down the road of decline and enslavement?”
Citizen intellectuals here are “independent voices” not because they stand in opposition to state power, but because they take advantage of China’s new social and economic opportunities to choose when to work with the state and when to work outside state institutions. Tsinghua University economist Hu Angang, for example, works within the system on the committee that draws up China’s five-year economic and social development plans; but he also uses his status as a citizen intellectual to push a “green development model” that is often at odds with the political leadership in Beijing. While it is easy to dismiss people who work so closely with the party-state as establishment intellectuals, China’s new social and economic freedoms mean that we need to take citizen intellectuals—and their new ideas—more seriously. While not political in the sense of always directly criticizing the party-state, public intellectuals are certainly political in the broader sense of probing the boundaries of what it means to be Chinese.
In this way, citizen intellectuals as a group have moved from the margins to the mainstream in China. Still, by end of the decade, cultural politics had moved to the right, from socialism to conservatism, from equality to hierarchy, and from cosmopolitan internationalism to exceptionalist nationalism.
Conclusion
The first decade of the twenty-first century was paradoxical for China. It was a very positive experience for many Chinese, who directly benefited from the PRC’s economic growth and social and cultural flowering. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao took credit for China’s fantastic rise as the PRC moved from the margins of international society first to the mainstream with the Olympics, and then to the center (of Asia at least) with its more aggressive foreign policy in 2008–09. Even so, these new economic, social, and cultural opportunities were accompanied by a tightening of political space.
Hence many Chinese had mixed feelings about the political, social, and environmental fall-out from the PRC’s rapid economic growth. Political corruption and environmental degradation soared to become the main concerns of ordinary Chinese. Citizen intellectuals across the political spectrum were worried about how the market economy was eroding values, and felt that their society was facing a moral crisis. Liberals, militarists, the New Left, and traditionalists all critiqued the PRC’s status quo, and provided detailed plans—depending on taste—for China’s future direction as a liberal democracy, a strong military nation, a new China model, or a global Confucian civilization.
To understand how China’s self-understanding changed in the 2000s, it is helpful to see how it shifted from “the rise of China” early in the decade, to “national rejuvenation” by the end of the decade. The rise of China is a geo-economic and geopolitical narrative that looks to material measures of national development: GDP growth, high-speed trains, Olympic Games, and so on. It is a medium-term measurement of how China joined the world after the isolation of the Cultural Revolution, and pursues the transnational goals of modernization and progress.
The rejuvenation of China, however, is a moral narrative that seeks to correct what is seen as the historical injustice of the century of national humiliation (1840–1949), and return China to its rightful place at the center of the world. It is a long-term narrative that looks back to the heyday of imperial China during the Han, Tang, and early Qing dynasties. According to this moral narrative, the world is a violent and unjust place under Pax Americana’s liberal international system. The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation thus would bring peace and prosperity to the world. National rejuvenation appeals to a fundamentalist view of China and an exceptionalist view of its civilization. Any great power can rise; but in this particular narrative only China can experience “national rejuvenation.” Hence while China can “rise” within the current international system, the narrative of “rejuvenation” generally challenges the system.
By the end of the 2000s, the PRC had emerged as a complex society that faced many challenges. Most Chinese were still optimistic that the twenty-first century would be their century, if only because, with all its problems, the PRC was still doing better than the United States and Europe. The mood at the time could best be described as characterized by a sense of anticipation: people wondered where the fifth generation of leaders, which was scheduled to take power early in the next decade, would take China.
As the following chapter shows, many of the trends of the 2000s came to fruition in the 2010s, when the China Model went global. For example, China’s domestic infrastructure construction success was exported to the world through Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, which includes a globalization of technological standards and governance norms. Interestingly, this normative ambition grows out of China’s reconsideration of the idea of “interdependence.” Rather than see the outside world simply as a set of threats from “hostile foreign forces,” Beijing now thinks that it can benefit from globalization. Instead of the West simply socializing China with liberal values, China can also socialize the Asian region (and beyond) with Chinese values. The Internet is another case in point. Whereas in the 2000s, the Chinese government treated the Internet as a source of Western influence that needed to be restricted, Beijing now promotes its own state-centric Cyber ideas, technologies, and policies around the world, and especially in the Global South.
While China’s global influence expanded in the 2010s, the parameters of debate in civil society narrowed dramatically: Liu Xiaobo died in prison, Ai Weiwei fled into exile, Jia Zhangke’s films were censored again, and Du Lala was repackaged into a television soap opera. As seen in the expanded influence of Liu Mingfu’s militarist China Dream, Zhao Tingyang’s hierarchical Tianxia system, and Pan Wei’s illiberal China Model, a conservative exceptionalist version of Chinese culture and politics has spread from the margins to the mainstream, impacting both the PRC and the world. In many ways, these trends from the 2000s inform Xi Jinping’s China Dream to “bring about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”