BOOK REVIEWS

The Search for Modernity, by Min Lin and Maria Galikowski

“The intellectual is supposed to be heard from, and

in practice ought to be stirring up debate and if possible controversy”.

If we accept this definition of Edward Said’s, quoted on page 141 of the

book, Lin Min and Maria Galikowski are without any doubt intellectuals because

this book will spark debate, controversy and indeed, some serious exchanges of

invective in what Tu Wei-ming describes as “cultural China” (wenhua

Zhongguo).

Any attempt to present the different currents of thought

that have appeared on a given intellectual scene can in fact only trigger serious

conflicts. When the scene in question is dominated by a political party that is

founded on ideological hegemony, and the thinkers are able to express themselves

only after having crossed an intellectual desert for almost twenty years, passions

are bound to be all the stronger. Moreover—and the authors have not stressed

enough that point—the protagonists in these debates are spread around the

world and often express their thoughts through journals that are outlawed in China

(unless they support the powers that be). For all these reasons, the courage of

these authors has to be congratulated. Perhaps the fact that they live far from

the great capitals of the world (in New Zealand) has helped.

Noting, like many before them, that the 1980s and the 1990s

saw a true renaissance of intellectual debate in China, the writers have divided

the ideas that appeared into five currents, of which they have chosen to present

the leaders. This classification is arguable— and discuss it we shall—but

it is not an outrageous.

One shall regret however, that Lin Min and Maria Galikowski

did not include an introductory chapter giving the reader a brief history of the

appearance of these currents of thought and placing them in the course of the

country’s development. This would have made for a better understanding of

the process of emancipation that intellectual as against political debate has

undergone (and of the numerous ties that still bind them). Had they showed the

importance of the 1989 events, and reminded us that controversies often take place

outside of China, they could have made the reader aware of just how difficult

it is for intellectuals to escape the pressures of power.

The absence of this chapter is not unintentional however:

it seems to me that the decision to omit it corresponds with the “post-modernist”

positions of our authors who do not mould their critiques with regard to the “neo-rationalists”

— the first of the currents that they describe — who are blinded by

an outdated universalism and only dream of going back to the May 4th tradition

according to which the intellectuals’ task is, before anything, to bring

Enlightenment to China. Yet is Lin Min pretending not to know that without rationalists

such as these the post-modernism debate could never have taken place in his native

land? It is sometimes regrettable that those who present themselves as historians

of ideas pay so little attention to history.

What can be said in their favour however, is that the authors

do not try to cover up their own position. Their book could be entitled: “the

long march of the Chinese intelligentsia towards the radiant banks of post-modernity”.

In fact they do not hesitate to maintain that: “The deconstruction of the

sacred myth of a unified world is an important step in the search by Chinese intellectuals

for a multidimensional understanding of the world and reality” (p. 191).

The poets Bei Dao and Yang Lian (both of whom have been living overseas for more

than a decade), and the novelists of the absurd Liu Suola and Xu Xing who, are

in their eyes the nec plus ultra of the contemporary Chinese intelligentsia.

Lin Min and Maria Galikowski hammer it home to us that China’s intellectuals

have deconstructed the monist visions of the truth and blind belief in reason

etc., thus rejecting deeply-rooted Chinese tradition. Thus, it is the “privatisation

of belief” rather than the “universalisation of knowledge and faith”

that now marks out the contemporary Chinese intellectual (p. 192). They are beginning

to stop reasoning according to Western-Chinese type binomials, even to the concept

of “good-bad” (p. 196), and in this sense the authors of this book do

not hesitate to refer to the critique of orientalism as offered by Edward Said:

“Questioning the universality of Western theory, critically

reflecting on their own cultural tradition, and looking to ordinary people and

the Third World for new inspiration, signifies the epistemological liberation

of Chinese intellectuals” (p. 201).

Yet the return to purely academic studies that is so characteristic

of the 1990s, no longer means a rejection of things social (p. 208-9). The intellectuals

of the 1990s focused on the study of problems of modernity rather than on great

ideological controversies. It sounds like the victory of Hu Shi, who stressed

the importance of problems (wenti), over Chen Duxiu, who insisted on the

importance of ideas (zhuyi). What the authors do not say is that the day

after the massacre of June 4th 1989, ideological debate was banned in the Chinese

public space.

One can, and we actually do, not share this basically linear

and pre-modern vision of the history of ideas. That being said, the book is interesting

because it presents in a relatively objective way, the emergence of the five currents

of thought that it considers.

Indeed, the authors reject simplism. It is clear that they

have no real sympathy for the neo-rationalists who they reproach for adhering

to a Hegelian-Marxist view of history, and who think that economic progress, democracy

and science will lead society to perfection (p. 11). However, they do not lack

admiration for Li Zehou who, in their eyes, best represents this current of thought.

They go so far as to maintain that: “Li is perhaps one of the most complex

figures on the Chinese intellectual scene. In one sense, the complexity and comprehensiveness

of his theoretical system can be compared to Hegel’s” (p. 64). After

having presented an in-depth philosophical analysis of his writings, they maintain

that this old protégé of Zhou Yang could be a philosopher of Dengism,

the man who, during the controversy about humanism in 1983, criticised the abstract

moralism of humanists such as Wang Ruoshui and his old boss, considering that

“ahistorical assumptions about humanity” could lead to a Maoist-type

idealism” (p. 53). Thus, despite having little sympathy with the spokespersons

for neo-rationalism, they recognise that this current of thought played an important

role in intellectual debate in the early 1980s. Yet never as much as those who

showed an interest in hermeneutics and tried to develop “pluralistic

explorations” and are therefore interested in essential problems.

The best representatives of this current are Gan Yang and Liang Zhiping who denounced

the neo-rationalist approach as a kind of scientism (p. 13). They went beyond

the ideology of the Enlightenment and are aware of the limits of scientific rationality,

which should not be considered as the ultimate criterion. They also have a modern

view of tradition. Tradition should not be considered as a given element, as either

“good” or “bad”; one should understand its constant interaction

with the present and the future. It “is a rich resource to be incorporated

into a cultural construction of modernity”. These philosophers have clearly

seen the dilemmas of modernity, and they have tackled the issue of the reconstruction

of a stable intellectual foundation in order to understand them. They go further

than the neo-rationalists and develop a sort of “critical skepticism”

(p. 17).

The next category, the iconoclasts, is more controversial

as it is difficult to group the “political iconoclasts” such as Fang

Lizhi and the “cultural iconoclasts” such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian together.

The former is almost a scientist while the latter two are more sceptical about

the idea of progress. It is because the members of these two groups refuse all

compromise with those in power that Lin and Galikowsky put them in the same category.

The next current of thought represents the “negative

example” dear to Mao Zedong ; the idealism of Liang Xiaosheng, attached to

the old collective values of the 1950s and 1960s of the Red Guards (lao sanjie):

the merchant South against the virtuous North, and the old charismatic revolutionary

leaders against the pragmatic technocrats (p. 128).

Liang is a nostalgic of the “patriarchal leaders”

such as Mao. Becoming Marxists once again for the needs of causes, Lin and Galikowski

maintain that the debate between Liang and the more interesting intellectuals

“is the contrast between the pre-modern and the modern, or kinship-based

agricultural and individual-based industrial” (p. 135). The frustration of

Liang Xiaosheng is easy to understand: “Facing this new wave of intellectual

skepticism and anti-dogmatism, and the post-modern deconstruction of many key

concepts of traditional discourse, many intellectuals feel frustration at losing

their conventional role as the teachers and judgers (sic) of social values and

morality” (p. 137).

Before denouncing the neo-nationalists, the authors introduce

us to the one towards whom they appear to be the most sympathetic, Liu Xiaofeng,

born in Sichuan in 1956 who studied theology in Switzerland and has since been

living in Hong Kong. It is his reading of the West that fascinates the authors.

For Liu, Christian theology represents the height of human knowledge and it is

by this yardstick that he analyses the current crisis. He (they) reproach(es)

China’s intellectuals their all-consuming interest in scientific rationality,

while the Christian tradition is an important element of Western culture (p. 149).

Liu criticises the lack of a sense of what is sacred, of transcendence in the

Chinese tradition, which he judges to be more serious than the lack of scientific

spirit.

If the reader is aware of the bias of the authors, and

is able to look beyond their jargonning narrative, then The Search for Modernity

is a useful book. Indeed it enables the non-specialist to assess the intellectual

renaissance that has occurred in the Chinese world in the last two decades.

Translated

from French original by Tina Frow