china fate of an enlightenment

The Rise of“Localism”and Civic Identityin Post-handover Hong Kong: Questioningthe Chinese Nation-stateSebastian Veg*AbstractWhile it was traditionally accepted that Hongkongers shared a form of pan-Chinese cultural identification that did not contradict their local distinctive-ness, over the last decade Hong Kong has seen the rise of new types of localidentity discourses. Most recently,“localists”have been a vocal presence.Hong Kong has–quite unexpectedly–developed a strong claim for self-determination. But how new is“localism”with respect to the more trad-itional“Hong Kong identity”that appeared in the 1970s? The presentstudy takes a two-dimensional approach to study these discourses, examin-ing not only their framework of identification (local versus pan-Chinese) butalso their mode of identification (ethno-cultural versus civic). Using threecase studies, the June Fourth vigil, the 2012 anti-National Education protestand the 2014 Umbrella movement, it distinguishes between groups advocat-ing civic identification with the local community (Scholarism, HKFS) andothers highlighting ethnic identification (Chin Wan). It argues that whilelocal and national identification were traditionally not incompatible, thecivic-based identification with a local democratic community, as advocatedby most participants in recent movements, is becoming increasingly incom-patible with the ethnic and cultural definition of the Chinese nation that isnow being promoted by the Beijing government. The history of the Chinese intellectual sphere that spans the two decades from1978 to 1998 is one that is intimately bound up with the changes wrought by theCommunist Party’s reformist-era modernization policies. Generally speaking,those policies initiated and instituted a reform from the top downwards. Overthe years this reform evolved as a process of expansion that, starting at the heartof the Party-state system, gradually encompassed the fringes of the establish-ment and eventually the spaces outside it. In keeping and in tandem with thiscomplex process of transformation, the intellectual world of China experiencedconstant splits and realignments.I would argue that, in terms of intellectual history, the most noteworthy devel-opment on mainland China over the past two decades was the appearance ofwhat is known as the “New Enlightenment movement” (xin qimeng yundong) duringthe late 1980s. This New Enlightenment was itself an outgrowth of an earlierperiod of intellectual contestation that unfolded in the late 1970s known as the“Movement to Liberate Thinking” (sixiang jiefang yundong). In the following, I willtrace the history of these movements and comment on their importance andimpact on the 1990s. I will also argue that in some ways the New Enlightenmentwas another “May Fourth” (wusi), but of course a contemporary one which, likeits predecessor that developed over the decade 1917–27, also came to be knownas the “Chinese Enlightenment.” Furthermore, I believe that we can trace theorigins of the ructions, alliances and changes that have appeared in China’sintellectual world in the 1990s back to the New Enlightenment of the 1980s.At one level, the “newness” of the post-1978 era is still very much a part ofthe present-day, and the following attempt to map a history that has yet tobecome properly “historical” is clearly not a wise move. This is because an obser-vation that is within proximity of the events is likely to betray the observer’s ownblind-spots, incurred as a result of his own evaluative bias and the vantage-pointthat he occupies. Thus, I am unable to provide a thoroughgoing investigation ofthe complex depths of this particular history at this juncture. But given that thisis the case, I hope that by consciously adopting a “value-neutral” stance, I am1837THE FATE OF ANENLIGHTENMENTTwe n t y ye a r s i n t h e C h i n e s e i n t e l l e c t u a l s p h e re(1978–98)1Xu Jilin (translated by Geremie R. Barmé and Gloria Davies) none the less able to provide a relatively objective survey of developments andchanges in the Chinese intellectual world of the last twenty years.The origins of the New EnlightenmentThe Chinese authorities speak of the advent of the reform policies initiated inlate 1978 as the beginning of a “new era” (xin shiqi). Put simply, the new eradenotes a period during which the Chinese Communist Party initiated andguided the Party-state through a systemic transition that saw the abandonment ofthe Utopian totalism (quannengzhuyi)2of the Maoist Cultural Revolution past infavour of a series of modernizing policies aimed at creating a system focused on amarket economy. If one takes the social and political reform of contemporaryChina as dating from the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress of the ChineseCommunist Party, then we can locate the “pre-history” of the NewEnlightenment movement in the ideological debates that prefigured that congress,and which are known as the Movement to Liberate Thinking. The centralelement of that movement, which consisted of both internal and public delibera-tions, was concerned with the idea that “practice is the sole criterion of truth”(shijian shi jianyan zhenlide weiyi biaozhun) (see Shen 1997; Wu 1995: sections 5–10).That is to say, it was now argued that social reality and economic necessityshould be the standard by which government and Party policies should be judged,as opposed to the Maoist-era belief that ideology could determine social reality.As we have said, the reform era was initiated from the centre of power withinthe Party-state system, and as such it came about partly from the recognizedneed within the Communist Party itself that, without reform, their hold onpower would be endangered. That is not to say that those Party leaders wholaunched the reforms had been dissidents during the Mao era; indeed they were,generally speaking, the selfsame people who had instituted the disastrous utopianpolicies of that time. It was only during the later phases of high state socialism,in particular during the Cultural Revolution, when they personally suffered theconsequences of those wrong-headed policies and came to realize that they wereimpracticable, that these leaders began to make a concerted effort to move awayfrom the idealism of utopian socialism. The way they managed this was to allowa form of secular socialism that emphasized economic modernization above allto come into being. The evolution of what I like to call “secular socialism”(shisuhua shehuizhuyi) was actually evident from as early as 1975 when, at theFourth Session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, the ChinesePremier Zhou Enlai made the symbolic declaration that “within the twentiethcentury we will achieve the thoroughgoing modernization of agriculture,industry, national defence and science and technology” (these were the so-called“four modernizations,” sige xiandaihua). At the same time, Deng Xiaoping, whowas then vice-premier, launched what was known as a “complete revamping”(quanmian zhengdun) of state policies in all areas of endeavour as part of an earlyattempt to initiate the four modernizations. Mao Zedong soon frustrated theseXU JILIN184 efforts, and Deng Xiaoping was purged for supposedly “capitulating to capi-talism.” It was only following the death of Mao that Deng Xiaoping and hiscohorts engineered a return to power and took the opportunity to pursue theirreformist policies.After Deng’s reinstatement in 1977, the reformists encouraged debate on theissue of whether “practice is the sole criterion of truth.” It was part of a processinitiated by the Communist Party that marked the abandonment of the traditionof Utopian socialism as well as providing a theoretical justification for the poli-cies of secular socialism. The so-called “Movement to Liberate Thinking” wasactually a public and internal Party educational process that was aimed atfreeing people’s thinking from the socialist dogmas of Mao Zedong and Stalin.In a sense you could see it as a Lutheran-style rebellion within the orthodoxMarxist–Leninist world.It is relevant to note that the ideas propounded during the Movement toLiberate Thinking contained a strong undercurrent of scientism (kexuezhuyi), thatis, the kind of materialist scientism that had been repressed during the ascen-dancy of the political/moral didacticism of Maoism. This scientism claimed thatthe sole criterion for measuring social development is the strength of productiveforces and that science and technology are the pre-eminent productive forces inmodern society. There is no doubt that the impact of this part of the debate inthe late 1970s was profound, even revolutionary, in so far as scientism contra-dicted the ossified dogmatism of the past and placed material wellbeing overideological purity, by privileging knowledge over politics and politically-inflectedmorality.3However, in the realm of mainstream ideology, this strain of scientismsoon became entrenched as a form of secular utilitarianism. In practical terms,the Chinese leaders used this form of scientism as an ideology to justify theirpursuit of economic change on the one hand, while stifling political change onthe other hand. Thus, for numerous complex reasons and in light of the prac-tical limitations of the time, Party leaders decided to launch a range of reformisteconomic strategies instead of taking the path towards political and social reformthat was subsequently enacted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union duringthe 1980