— What Does a Perspective of Global China Actually Tell?
This essay will reexamine the discursive binary relations of political spectrums in use today. For decades, social and political scientists have been trying to investigate useful ways to describe political variations and develop their analytical frameworks of the political spectrum, such as Hans Eysenck, Brian Patrick Mitchell, and David Nolan (Haidt, 2012). While this essay endeavours to bring up novel ideas to reflect on binary relations of politics, rather than directly appropriate former models from those theorists, to think about China globally. My aim is not to add any other self-satisfying nomenclature of taxonomy, but to address practical problems by clarifying the daily language of binary relations used in people’s political dialogue, without abandoning them. Departing from the perspective of Chinese international students/scholars, the discussion will interpret the counterpoint of socialism/capitalism and accentuate the dichotomy of the left/right in a bigger picture, so that people can not only see a global China but also have enough transnational exposure through the reflection of China.
Where do I come from, a home or a lost ground?
A wide range of existent scholarship on China’s political positionality in the globe, even those claiming a critical stance of ‘beyond binarism’, disappoints me deeply. I am eager to find a more sophisticated way to approach China, the homeland I always feel ambivalent about. There should be such a better way for us, that would not slide into an EU-US-centrism of no alibi for its tacit agreement on exploitative transnational capitalism, nor would it just fall into another trap of nationalism under some hypocritical tricks of decolonisation. A particular sentiment, splitting but also bound together like an oxymoron, made me reflect on my vision more radically, as it kept questioning where I came from. This very emotion caught me lamenting when I actively introduced what I had learnt in the UK, namely gender studies, to the audience on Chinese online platforms. With heavy reference to queer politics and feminism, I initiated online dissemination of cosmopolitan human rights narratives. My idealistic passion was frustrated when I encountered a long, complex debate on postcolonialism. The humanitarian elites presuppose a universal but exclusive way of progress, with China playing catch-up. This follows the same logic as the modernity proposed by Enlightenment thinkers, which became the self-legitimation of imperialist colonisation in the name of liberation. Therefore, human rights mobilization in this postcolonial time must be able to see the distinctive needs, cultural traditions, and political environments of the indigenous people who are more or less different. Meanwhile, there is always a hijacked post-colonial posture that legitimises local and refined harms. I cannot accept the undertone that ‘we came a long way to repel those colonisers so that we can keep our local tradition of beating women at home’. While I also find it highly dubious to take Western modernity (maybe also Western postmodernism) as the only progressive direction in a single linear conception of history–which is derived from Hegelian legacy. Immersed in the rich literature of brilliant thinkers like Spivak, Sedgwick, Fannon, Chow and so forth, I eventually realised a prerequisite of dialectically moving in between (Chow, 1993; Sedgwick, 1998; Fanon, 2016; Spivak, 2023). That is neither irresponsible relativism nor stubborn one-side extremism, but to see through the distance of two ends of a spectrum and find what it applies to individual cases of a very concrete, contextualised situation. Transcultural politics needs not just a middle ground, but a constant movement beyond the black-or-white arbitrariness. It is not moral relativism, but for no longer retreating to a bipolar stance, and in this moving parallax, we shall find a possibility - that the world should not be mono-centred and history should not be unilinear; at the same time, there is still a common faith within the ‘politics of difference’(Seidman, 1997). This common position, with its persistent motion, transcends the national borders and roots itself in a life’s instinctive resistance to oppression, so that we will not lose the impetus to rebel in socio-political settings of ambiguity, and will not abandon the rights and interests that we have to locally fight for in the face of decolonisation. Expectantly, I was looking for reflection on connections and comparisons of this kind when I explored the readings of Week 6 and Week 7 that respectively analyse China’s political economy from diverse angles. Unfortunately, most works failed to demonstrate such reflexivity, even those subtitled as beyond the dichotomy, e.g. ‘Beyond Socialism and Capitalism’ by Keyu Jin and, Beyond Market and State by Weidong Liu. (Liu, Dunford and Liu, 2022; Jin, 2023). On the other hand, I fully understand that academia is never a nonpartisan, apolitical utopia, so no wonder many of them carry implicit or explicit tendencies and underlying political agendas. Hence, Wang, Liu, and Jin all very naturally wrote for China by asserting the nation-wide economic development steered by the Party-state of political advantages of both determination and flexibility; whilst the American expert Doshi, with certain acknowledgement of China’s economic growth and diplomatic strategy, depicts China as a nothing less than a threat and thus wrote against it in the end (Doshi, 2021; Wang, 2021; Jin, 2023). When reading these various groups of scholarship, I find that either they keep conflating ‘the left’ with ‘the socialist’ as if we were still in the midst of the Cold War, or instead, they generalise ‘the left’ as ‘the liberal’, reducing or even removing other prominent possibilities of the latter one – for example, the notorious neo-liberalism. Popular cliches like ‘the left in China has different meanings from the West’ would begin again, but such relativist ideas never satisfy me, as they indolently stop us from more broadly open dialogue. In a relatively more objective manner, Tobias ten Brink’s book attributes China’s economic prosperity to the paradoxical route of its special capitalism – the variegated State-permeated capitalism (Ten Brink, 2019). But what is at stake is the new terminology one after another overall specialises, and maybe excepts China, to an extent that China’s politics and economy cannot be used to develop overarching, universal theories, because ‘it is too special a kind’. Bearing such confusion and curiosity in mind, I will present my intellectual journey of ‘navigating the binarism’ in the following writing. In this process, the paired terms of, ‘capitalism and socialism’, ‘the left and the right’ and other sets alike will not be simply cast away, but all critically employed for a further step towards clearer conceptualisation and more constructive political practice, by our constantly ‘moving between and thinking beyond’.What do you mean? A China supporter or a rebel?
To see China globally is a good strategy to avoid the taken-for-granted motionless stance and manage transnational politics of difference. The inspirational work Global China as a Method, for instance, has provided a better methodological roadmap, by ‘understanding China not as a discrete unit but as part and parcel of the contemporary global capitalist system’ (Franceschini and Loubere, 2022). Indeed, their criticism did enrich the current discussion on China issues and give enough credit to both global capitalism and China’s political agency, albeit disapprovingly. However, the very innovative and useful critique against whataboutism, as I am concerned the other way around, is also one-dimensional so that it might invalidate all comparisons of downsides between oppositional polities and downgrade many meaningful critiques in a comparative lens. This intuitive caution is derived from my own empirical praxis of public discussion with the identity of Chinese international students. Why is this identity so significant to become the departing point and the anchor of this essay? Before jumping to the easy statement that ‘ Chinese international students/scholars are naturally given a comparative scope and they have to China in a transnational and global vision’, I would like to introduce two cases, to begin with. The first case just happened this year, in London's Brick Lane, a place famous for graffiti art. After one of the street walls was covered by Chinese art students with slogans extolling Chinese Communist Party ideology, namely ‘socialist core values’, a heated dispute among people was sparked and then intensified. The leader of this group called Wang, first said that he did this to decolonize the false freedom of the West with the construction of Chinese socialism, and later when the controversy levelled up, he started describing his ‘art’ as non-intervening and apolitical. Netizens found his Chinese social media ‘Red’, where Wang absurdly writes that he is ‘a spectre of Marxism and a practitioner of neoliberalism’. It bewildered many people, especially those with knowledge of economic or/and political science: how such contradictory identities can be claimed at once? Also, many ironic comments were circulating online on another two contradictions: how Wang mixed nationalist propaganda with his self-proclaimed decolonisation and how he indicated that he was proud of such ‘cultural exports’ while unskillfully asking for arts’ immunity from any political risk as if this creation had performed aestheticism. Drawing from the inconsistency of this grotesque propaganda graffiti, I want to delve deeper, to find the crux of young people’s political thinking behind such chaos of thought. Thereby, I will place a bigger emphasis on the second case. In contrast, it is a more introspective and constructive reflection made by Xiaoyu Lu, a young academic who has studied in a Western developed country as well. He wrote an intellectually sophisticated article called Double Dissidents to narrate and theorize his experience of ‘cognitive dissonance‘ as an overseas Chinese student (Lu, 2018). Years of living in the Western society failed him and many Chinese compatriots abroad (and maybe some other expatriate groups whose homelands fall into the category of illiberal countries) to validate but rather distrust ideologies of the ‘liberal world’. I have great resonance with his feelings in the sense that the ‘liberal’ can be oppressive, too, when we take this word to the postcolonial, transnational capitalist system. Here I will not be grumbling over the anti-imperialist history and neo-colonial forces of culture again – not because they are not important. As mentioned before, I am also afraid to see decolonial efforts being hijacked and weaponised against real human rights resorts, as the latter being scapegoated for neocolonial aggression, or more neutrally termed, for ‘colour revolution’. Instead of repetitively describing such phenomena in detail, I want to identify the root of such conflations. Commonly used connotations of ‘liberal’ like progressive, lefty, and emancipatory, are worth examining. Instead of redefining them as many cultural essentialists do, I plan to reveal how they are used and what they mean in the international political praxis. When Lu tells us that ‘I became a double dissident, both at home and abroad, upholding the scepticism of China’s regime, while the identity as a dissident of liberal democracy came unexpectedly’, the disillusionment about the liberal West should not be seen as solely a by-product of diasporic nostalgia or nationalist remnant from one’s past life, because this alternative emotion to whataboutism comes along with a new thought that is, in fact, very rational. The semantics flip over, as today’s liberal politics is often reduced to ‘neoliberalism’. In this aspect, the liberal entails some other words like meritocracy, self-interest individualism, transnational capitals, environmental unsustainability, and so forth. This way, the term implies a different story that some of us cannot feel comfortable with no less than the authoritarian state control. Otherwise, Lu would not feel so splitting, saying that people like him need to craft a method to express alternative views to Western liberal politics and economy while not being deemed as the proponents of political repression’. This ambivalence might be also an implication on political economy: China is not a praised example of operating beyond socialism and capitalism, instead, it still works between the two of them. Logically, the combination of two things never equates to going beyond their dichotomy. And practically, China’s exploration of bringing into the market and becoming incorporated into global capitalism goes hand in hand with many Western countries developed their state-imposed welfare systems to balance the income disparity with necessary social justice, but the latter are not described as going beyond the state and the market/ socialism and capitalism. Moreover, if this beyondness suggests that China is able to transcend the problems of either mechanism as it gains double edges from both as Jin and Wang were trying to argue, it will lead us to some groundless over-optimistic conclusions where widespread, sharp socio-economic conflicts are neglected or ruled out intentionally. China has not achieved such a perfect suture, neither is it now prioritising economic advancement, as the leaders do accentuate political agendas that, more often than not, direct the decision-making. Yet it is true to some extent, that the CCP has been trying to reform China’s political system so as to adapt to the needs of economic and social development (Liu, Dunford and Liu, 2022). This view, however, is limited for it looks at China within China by default and lacks critical reflections from a transnational vision. Therefore, I realize that when asking ‘what do you mean’, too many people have presupposed an ‘erjiguan (二极管diode)’ mindset. This creative metaphor of erjiguan signifies some people who tend to polarize ideas and disavow the political intersectionality and plural power relations, which features a manner of rejecting those who interrogate one side as belonged with the other side. Noteworthily, it refers to not only Chinese people like this, but also some Western minds. The logic of each counterpart is the same: as Lu remembers, he was asked why he was defending the authoritarian regime because his critiques on the Western economies/polities were readily taken as his home country’s official cliché criticising the Western model. In the middle, such dual critics as Chinese international scholars are indeed living on a difficult page of this dilemma. On the one hand, ‘if you think there are problems in our postcolonial actions and ideological resistance against the hegemonic West, you are absolutely the westernised zhiren (殖人new colonisers) and the national enemy’; on the other hand, ‘how dare you criticize liberal democracy - you must be a pathetic brainwashed nationalist, or you must belong with vested interests and officials in this repressive country’. Here, what can link back to my analysis of Whataboutism is the recurrent phrase about nationalism that different groups of people all like to summon in the contention. I can reason this from a bigger context of today’s international relations of a zero-sum game in light of offensive realism, where China and the US are still in the opposition and competition that produce bipolar discourses. But simultaneously, the more polarised, clear-cut positions people have the more scrappy, blurred boundary between the right and the left, the oppression and the liberation in the dynamic interplay of powers. Only by identifying different frameworks and criteria used behind these big words can we start to navigate the complexities. How can we dislodge political debate from a deeply ingrained erjiguan mentality, when we are still misusing Maoist socialism as Marxism, trading liberation for neoliberalism, talking conservatives in a single form of nationalism, regardless of international struggles in such threads as class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, climate sustainability, animal welfare? How can we generate meaningful conversations that should be built on the basis of a common language, when we still turn to a doorslam-like ‘incommensurability’ of the lefty between China and Western societies? It is time now to make things clear so that double dissidents would not be duplicitous in-betweeners or rigidified whataboutists, but instead, offer constructive critical insights to us. Hence, the following section will clarify the contemporary ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the international political discourses.How to redo Sino-Western Relativism of Left and Right?
The left and right divide is often situated in the ‘political values’, while the latter parallels the Treaty of Lisbon triad, which are: democracy, human rights, and the rule of law(Renouard, 2020). Nonetheless, the political axes I deploy for this binary are from a more specific angle of pragmatics – to put it another way, the daily usage of language in dialectical discourses. In this discursive inspection, there are three axes between the post-cold-war ‘left and right’:Greater Connections of Different Axes Beyond National Binary Systems
Utilising the perspective of international double dissidents (to both China and Western liberal politics), I will return to unpack some real cases with all this new understanding of left and right. My argument is that to go beyond socialism/capitalism or market/state, people need to see specific cases in a global vision so that the binary terms are not simply discussed on a national level. For instance, China’s local labour rights struggles did reveal the dynamics and tensions among multiple interest groups of transnational capitalism, including labour activists, unions, international entrepreneurs, and investors. The revision of Labour Contract Law 2007 exactly went through the process of drastic revision for a compromise between the agendas of different constituencies, in which foreign chambers of commerce in China (e.g., the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai) were actively engaged to support global businesses China while disempowering labours. The sacrifices include that ‘the labour union’s right of veto on the internal regulations was expunged’ and that ‘only on the matter of lay-offs involving at least twenty workers or more than 10 per cent of the workforce do companies need to ask the opinion of the union’. Furthermore, according to scholars and labour activists, the turnaround of 2010 labour activism in the Guangdong Province was due to pressure coming from the entrepreneurial community in Hong Kong. A new regulation that could have increased workers’ capability for collective bargaining with their employer was expected to be implemented, but conversely, was quickly removed from the political agenda (Franceschini and Loubere, 2022). On the one hand, when Chinese labourers in the global labour market being exploited did not successfully improve their rights from the local government, it is not reasonable to overlook the very powerful transnational businesses behind. On the other hand, people need to see how global civil society and international labour unions, in particular the China Labour Bulletin, a prominent labour NGO based in Hong Kong, have been significantly supporting China’s labour rights movement around the 2010s that intended to protect workers’ broader interests (ibid.). Therefore, there is a transgenerational nature of workers’ connection, unification, and solidarity around the world, just as the transnational capitals work together. It is necessary to think about the insufficiency of rights or collective action and support beyond the stage of their local government or national political economy – though it is also important to contextualise people’s struggles and demands. When nationalism is deployed by the state to separate workers apart in a deeply connected global market, all the international support of labour rights will be invalidated by the nation-state for the fear of societal infiltration and co-optation by pervasive agents of hostile foreign forces. Likewise, when global capitalism forces a socialist national and local political economy to harm workers' rights and interests, the socialism here, albeit flawed in practice, cannot be accused of as the root of all the evil. This way, the left and right discussion must be taken beyond China, and so as for the other side, beyond the US (or the UK, etc.) to the international level, so that we no longer say they have different criteria of the left but clarify on which axis we are talking about the left in specific scenarios. In this case of labours’ activism, it is then very clear that not all the Western interveners are right-wing bourgeois: NGOs and the international labour unions that also struggle for labours’ rights with governments and businesses in their own countries/regions were credible examples. It is also plain to see not all actions affiliated with the socialist polity are lefty, when the foreign connections and support of these local activists were scapegoated by Chinese authorities. Another interesting political issue is about sexuality, or more specifically, the transnational queer politics. My fellow researchers and I in the field of Chinese queer studies have noticed that local lesbians who have double-layered political identities of feminists and queers and act politically progressive can also be oppressive when they are doing ‘left-wing politics’ in a neo-colonial, classist manner. The privileged individuals among them have adopted the idea that the Western development of fluidity and non-binary is the progressive direction. Nonetheless, in their localisation and daily practice, this idea starts to be used exclusively to discriminate against people who perform gender binary within the LGBTQ+ community as ‘backwards’ and ‘reproducing traditional gender roles or reproducing heteronormativity’, for example, Butch/Femme lesbian couples. The underlying logic is very exclusive, and often classist, because many people with a disadvantaged background cannot easily have access to the most ‘frontier and stylish’ queer theories (Liu, 2019). Thereby, the prescribed non-dichotomy pursuit in a transnational context might be another oppression of those lesbian individuals of lower socio-economic status, like working-class queers. The alleged progressive narratives presume a linear historical development that must transcend butch/femme binarism and decontextualised the real-life couples lived experiences and exclude diverse expressions and representations of queer subjectivities and desires (Fung, 2021). This kind of elitist knowledge reproduction about sex liberation and gender fluidity can be conservative as well, at least in the economic aspect, when their left-wing statement is hypocritical and put against even more marginalised others. There are many other contemporary political issues for us to rethink about global China, ranging from local struggles of pretariats (precarious proletariats, the gig workers in the platform economy), to China’s role in the international tensions around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This essay is short of the capacity to articulate all of them. Besides, I need to admit that several concepts in use might be controversial: first, the presumed universal, general interests of ‘freedom’ is a grand abstract notion superior to sub-branches of human values; second, ‘the left’ in this essay is used in a more positive sense, and that might be controversial, too. To conclude, insofar as we share the sense to embrace freedom as peace, equity, diversity, inclusion, and mobility, I advocate that scholars of our time see greater connections in different axes of the left and the right that go beyond a clear-cut national boundary of the socialism/capitalism binary. -Please contact me beforehand if you want to use it for academic reference. 2023.11 Hong Kong