MCLC: Xu Youyu lecture

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Xu Youyu lecture
***********************************************************

Source: China Change (5/24/14):
http://chinachange.org/2014/05/24/intellectual-discourses-in-post-mao-china
-and-today/

 
Dear Editor,

In late 2012, on behalf of the Louis Green Lecture committee of Monash
University, I invited Professor Xu Youyu, who I had never met before, to
fly to Australia to deliver a public lecture. My recommendation of Prof Xu
to the Committee was simply out of profound admiration for his outstanding
scholarship as well as his moral integrity.

In early this month, together with several other highly respectable
intellectuals, Prof Xu was “criminally detained” by the Chinese
authorities for holding a  private workshop in the memory of the Tiananmen
Tragedy that took place 25 years ago.

It is sadly ironic that Prof Xu was arrested virtually on the same day as
President Xi Jinping’s celebration of the 95th anniversary of the May
Fourth Movement at Peking University, for Prof Xu and his detained
colleagues are the very embodiment of the May Fourth spirit. They are the
conscience and cream of Chinese intellectuals.

In light of Prof Xu’s disturbing ordeal, we wish to register our serious
concern and moral support by publishing here (online for the first time)
Prof Xu’s lecture, entitled “Intellectual Discourses in post-Mao China and
Today”.

Sincerely yours,

Warren Sun, for the L. Green Lecture committee of Monash University,
Australia:
Professor David Garrioch, School of Philosophical, Historical and
International Studies
Professor Constant Mews, President, Australian and New Zealand Association
for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, Ukrainian Studies, School of Languages,
Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics
Professor Wallace Kirsop, Adjunct Professor in the School of Languages,
Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics

===================

Intellectual Discourses in Post-Mao China and Today
By Xu Youyu


I AM a philosopher, but I am not going to talk about philosophy this
evening. As a Chinese public intellectual, I should like to say something
about my country. China has attracted worldwide attention in recent years
because of the rapid growth of its economy. This growth has given rise to
much discussion, and many wonder whether China’s tremendous economic and
military capabilities spell good or bad fortune for its neighbouring
countries, for the Pacific region and for the world. I do not want to
dwell on this problem. In my opinion it is more important to know what the
Chinese people themselves are thinking. The economy and its material goods
belong to the people, and it is essential to understand what this new
prosperity means to its consumers. I shall focus on the points of view of
Chinese intellectuals concerning their country and its future itinerary,
noting that these opinions were formed and expressed only after the death
of Mao Zedong.

Thirty-six years have passed since the death of Mao Zedong, the leader of
mainland China, on 9 September 1976. Mao was one of those rare figures in
the history of mankind to have made a deep impression on his country,
either by causing the population to live in glory and happiness or by
bringing it suffering and pain. In ancient China there was a tyrant called
Jie (桀) who provoked people to  call: “We would rather perish together
with you!” At the time of Mao’s death TV news reports and documentary
films showed ordinary people crying and wailing loudly. It was as if their
grief was so great that they wished they too had died,  much as was seen
after the deaths of the North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and  Kim Jong Il.
What was not reported was that some Chinese rejoiced at Mao’s death and at
the possibility of the restoration of normal life. On 9 September 1976 I
belonged to the latter group. I had an optimistic premonition that there
was hope for my life and for my motherland.

Mao’s death led to the end of the Cultural Revolution and to China’s
transformation towards a market economy. Among Chinese intellectuals and
philosophers there was a renewal of independent thought and intellectual
discourses on history, society and culture. This latter development has
made very slow progress, however. I wish I could say that there has been a
great change in the history of the People’s Republic of China, but I must
remember what one writer told me: Eight hundred million Chinese people had
only one head during the Cultural Revolution; that meant that only Mao
Zedong was allowed to think, and everyone else had to obey. As a result,
anything Mao Zedong approved of was said to be right, and anything he
disapproved of was said to be wrong. After Mao died, everybody realized he
had a head on his shoulders and could think for himself. People also
remember what Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s assistant and successor, said during
the Cultural Revolution: “Every sentence Chairman Mao says is truth, and
one sentence of Chairman Mao works as ten thousand sentences.” Tens of
thousands of Chinese were declared guilty, even sentenced to death, for
questioning or disagreeing with what Mao said.

I call opinions on China’s modernization and future and social criticisms
by Chinese intellectuals Chinese contemporary social thought —that is,
non-governmental thought. The Party has monopolized theory, and thinking
has been the privilege of the top leaders, for a very long time. Strictly
speaking, Chinese contemporary social thought emerged in the 1990s, but
our story should be narrated from the 1980s on. Although Chinese
intellectual discourses or social thought did not come into being in the
1980s, they originated or bred in this period.

For Chinese intellectuals the 1980s are worth recalling. When that time is
talked about we use terms like “culture fever” and “culture craze” to
describe the variety and excitement of cultural activities in that decade.
In my understanding “culture fever” indicates the tremendous enthusiasm
demonstrated by Chinese citizens, especially university students. It may
sound rather exaggerated to designate enthusiasm or interest as a “fever”
or “craze”, but it is not unreasonable. For example, people lined up
throughout the night outside the doors of bookstores for literary
masterpieces such as Anna Karenina or Shakespeare’s works. Almost every
university student loved poetry, and almost everyone wanted to be a poet
in China at that time. Almost every publishing house tried its best to
produce “hot” items—surprisingly enough Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
and Heidegger’s Being and Time. These two books reached record sales
figures of over 100,000 copies within several months.

The nature or character of the cultural activities of the 1980s was
nongovernmental. None of them was organized by the Party or the
government. It was the first time in the history of the People’s Republic
of China that all books were chosen and edited by scholars, then given to
official publishing houses to be printed. Scholars and activists formally
established non-governmental organizations usually called editorial
boards. The five most influential ones were as follows. Firstly, the
Towards the Future Editorial Board, whose core was composed of research
fellows of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, young scholars good at the
natural sciences who devoted their major efforts to recommending the
methodology and world outlook brought about by recent scientific
developments and who tried to investigate history and to predict the
future with a new conception of that discipline. Secondly, the Academy of
Chinese Culture, which was headed by the grand old scholars studying
Chinese traditional culture. They regarded reviving this field and
recommending contemporary Confucianism as their duty. Thirdly, the
magazine New Enlightenment, which was edited by a group of open-minded
Marxist theorists advocating an explanation of Marx based on
humanitarianism. Fourthly, the Culture: China and the World Editorial
Committee, whose main task was the recommendation of twentieth-century
Western humanities. I was a member of this group. Finally, the 20th
Century Book Editorial Board, which was engaged in translating and
recommending Western social sciences such as sociology, science of law,
economics, political science etc. Each group co-operated closely with
certain publishing houses, helping them choose, organize, edit and publish
many good books that would not have been possible otherwise.
It should be noted that people talked a lot about culture in the 1980s,
but politics constituted the starting point and purpose. Everybody knew
that the most important and pressing task was political, not cultural, but
they had to advance by the roundabout cultural route because politics was
a forbidden zone. So translation is needed in order to understand
intellectual discourses in the 1980s. For example, when we criticized
China’s feudalism, what we were actually referring to was the autocracy of
contemporary China.

Some so-called rebellious and frightening opinions that the Party launched
a campaign to criticize were in fact common sense. For example, Li Honglin
(李洪林) maintained that there should be no “forbidden zone” in reading and
that political problems could be discussed(i) People were surprised at
such daredevil slogans, and the newspapers and magazines publishing what
he said were waiting for punishment. Perhaps we are astonished that such
common sense was worth discussing. However, when we think about some of
the events of the past, we know that it can be life-threatening to espouse
common sense in China. One example is Yu Luoke (遇罗克), who was sentenced
to 
death as a thought criminal during the Cultural Revolution for insisting
that the future of a young person should be determined by his or her
performance, not by family background.

That those scholars, so-called teachers of youth or cultural heroes in the
1980s, were rather limited in their outlook and philosophy can be seen
from an example. Liu Zaifu (刘再复), a respectful and enlightened teacher,
was condemned as an advocate of bourgeois liberalization by the Chinese
authorities in the 1980s. When he visited Claude Monet’s garden in France,
he said excitedly: “Look, we failed to train and bring up any great
painter like Monet under Chinese cultural policies.” He thought that he
was criticizing the Chinese educational and cultural system, but at heart
he was the same as the government officials. All of them thought that an
Impressionist master like Monet could be trained and brought up under a
certain system or policy.

The culture fever in the 1980s could also be called aesthetic fever, for
the most important discipline at that time was aesthetics or literature.
The most  influential theorist was Li Zehou (李泽厚), an aesthete, and
another influential theorist was Liu Zaifu (刘再复), a literary critic.
People were concerned with politics in general, but they read and thought
about problems of aesthetics, literature and ethics. The reason for this
can be sought in Chinese traditional culture. The most interesting problem
for the Chinese from ancient times to the present has been the so-called
issue of ultimate concern—that is, how to be a gentle and noble person.
There has been very little attention in the Chinese cultural tradition to
the principles guiding social and political institutions. It can be said
that Chinese intellectuals were not prepared for any social movement or
social transformation in the 1980s. They failed to give any practical
advice or suggestions to students apart from expressions of moral support
when the latter took to the streets and appealed to the authorities for
democracy.

In the 1980s the basic political conflict in China was between those who
favoured reform and an open-door policy and those who opposed them. The
situation was not the same in the 1990s. The conservative bureaucrats who
had resisted reform at first soon discovered that reforms did not threaten
their positions or reduce their benefits. On the contrary, reform
increased their opportunities, and these bureaucrats found they could
pursue policies beneficial to themselves by flaunting the banner of
reform. There is a Chinese saying, “a waterside pavilion is the first to
get the moonlight”. It means that a person in a favourable position gains
special advantages, and Chinese bureaucrats have been in such a position.
So whereas the basic dividing line in the 1980s was “reform or no reform”,
in the 1990s it changed to “Which reform do you prefer?”

There was a change in values among Chinese intellectuals at the beginning
of the 1990s. In the 1980s they had generally been in favour of science,
freedom, democracy, rule of law, enlightenment, rationality and so on. In
the 1990s, however, some young scholars began to advocate postmodernism.
They argued that the ideas mentioned above belonged to the ideology of
modernity and embodied Western cultural hegemony and Eurocentrism, and
that their acceptance by Chinese intellectuals was a consequence of
colonization by the West. To be frank, I do not know what role
postmodernism plays in its place of origin, Western society, but I am sure
that it does not apply to China at present. In my debates with Chinese
postmodernists I have pointed out that modernity or modernization does not
need to be suppressed in China; on the contrary, it is a movement still to
be accomplished.

The argument in my favour in the debate was that Western postmodernist
masters, when they knew that their works had been translated into Chinese,
wrote special prefaces for them, warning Chinese readers that
postmodernism could not be imitated and that it belonged to a very
complicated and special tradition. Douwe Fokkema, the co-editor of
Approaching Postmodernism, wrote that postmodernist discourses had
definite geographical and social limitations. Further, that the
postmodernist experiment was based on the luxurious lives led by
distinguished Western cultural personages, and postmodernism had nothing
to do with people who were living in hungry and poor conditions. He added
that there was no living condition related to postmodernism, hence it was
beyond imagination to accept postmodernism in the People’s Republic of
China.(ii)

Chinese postmodernists often found fault with the modernists for their
lack of critical spirit and for yielding to the Western hegemony of the
discourse of modernity. I despised them for noisily criticizing American
imperialism and for not talking about human rights in Beijing. I often
tell the following story in my lectures and papers. An American delegation
of congressmen visited the Soviet Union and criticized the country for its
lack of freedom of speech. They asked their hosts: “We can shout out the
slogan ‘Down with Reagan!’ Do you dare to do the same?” A Russian replied
without any hesitation, “Why not? Of course we dare to shout out ‘Down
with Reagan!’ ” I tell my audience that the Chinese postmodernists
displayed their courage and critical spirit by shouting out the slogan
“Down with Reagan!” in Beijing.

The debates between liberalism and the New Left, which broke out in the
middle of the 1990s, are phenomena that had rarely been seen among
mainland Chinese intellectuals since 1949. They are large-scale,
spontaneous debates without official manipulation or ideological
constraint. First of all, I should point out that the meanings of
“liberalism” and “New Left” in China are not the same as they are in the
West, just as “liberalism” and “conservatism” have different meanings in
the United Kingdom and the United States. On almost every important
political, social and cultural question in contemporary China, liberals
and new Leftists hold opposite positions. Their disputes, however, can be
seen to focus on the following issues.

The first issue concerns the market economy as the cause of social
injustice. China is now in a period of social transition in which
startling problems of consumption and social injustice have greatly
concerned intellectuals. Both sides agree that the social malady is
serious, but make different diagnoses of the cause. The New Leftists hold
that the problems come from the market economy itself and that it should
therefore be criticized and boycotted. The liberals maintain that the
injustice arises because the market in China has not broken free from the
control of the old power system and is not mature and appropriately
regulated. For them the way out is to regulate and consummate the market
economy.

The second issue concerns globalization and China’s entry into the World
Trade Organization. New Leftists oppose China’s positive attitude towards
globalization and the WTO and maintain that these developments will bring
China into an unjust capitalist world system. They hold that the Western
capitalist countries developed their economy by exploiting and enslaving
other countries from the very beginning and that they now dominate the
whole world just as they did in colonial times. One New Leftist has said
that the development of the Third World in present historical conditions
can only be an unjust, even suicidal development, for development means
only the transference of environmental pollution from Western industrial
countries to developing ones. This author concluded that the only task for
developing countries was to launch a worldwide battle against capitalism.
In refutation, I said: “This claim is ridiculous and dangerous.
Underdeveloped countries, if they believe this, will indulge in the
illusion and fantasy of ‘world revolution’ and be backward forever. As a
result, the gap between rich and poor countries will grow wider and wider.”

The third issue concerns the analysis of the internal condition of China.
Some representatives of the New Left have attempted to prove that Chinese
society in the 1990s was a capitalist or market society and a part of the
capitalist world system. Therefore, “China’s problems should be seen at
the same time as problems of the capitalist world market. Our diagnosis of
issues regarding China should be part of a critical diagnosis of the
issues of an increasingly globalized capitalism.” Liberals responded to
this thesis by holding that it originated not from the reality of China,
but from misplaced theory: “Chinese New Leftists distort and excise the
conditions of China in order to apply the fashionable theories of the West
to China.”

The fourth issue concerns the evaluation of the Great Leap Forward, the
People’s Communes and the Cultural Revolution. These political campaigns
brought about tremendous disasters and pain for the Chinese; for example,
the People’s Communes resulted in over 30 million people dying of hunger.
These campaigns were criticized to a certain extent in the 1980s. The New
Leftists were unhappy with the criticism, however, saying that the
campaigns were a bold vision for an ideal society, and that the Chinese
should not rashly abandon such a valuable socialist heritage. One of them
appealed for China to have a Cultural Revolution every seven or eight
years just as Mao Zedong had advocated. This point of view was totally
rejected by liberals, who argued that praise and advocacy of the Great
Leap Forward, the People’s Communes and the Cultural Revolution were based
on ignorance of China’s past and its real history, confusing disasters
with socialist innovations.

The fifth issue concerns the evaluation of the Mind Liberation Movement in
the 1980s and the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Some New Leftists
attempted to negate and belittle these two enlightenment movements, which,
in their opinion, demonstrated the unconditional subordination of Chinese
intellectuals to Western discourses. One of them stated: “The May Fourth
culture movement only copied European enlightenment discourse. The
scholars of the May Fourth generation accepted colonial discourse while
accepting enlightenment discourse; their minds and outlook were
semi-colonized.” Liberals defended the enlightenment, the Mind Liberation
Movement in the 1980s and the May Fourth New Culture Movement. They argued
that in the two movements Chinese progressive intellectuals did not
mechanically follow Western discourse, but pushed forward mental
liberation based on Chinese reality in order to solve China’s practical
problems.

The sixth issue concerns international relations and radical nationalism.
The Chinese New Left often supported the Chinese government in condemning
hegemony when issues arose between China and Western countries, especially
the United States. In this area, the typical opposition between liberals
and the New Left concerned the relationship between human rights and state
sovereignty. The New Left shared the view of the official media in
charging NATO with hegemony masked by the excuse of human rights when it
intervened in Kosovo. After the September 11 terrorist attack, the New
Left argued that the origin of the emergence and spread of terrorism was
American hegemony and its diplomatic policy in the Middle East. In
contrast, liberals emphasized the importance of human rights and the need
to be on guard against radical nationalism. They held that the violation
of human rights by a despotic government could not be defended by excuses
of state sovereignty.

After the terrorist attack of September 11, many students, graduate
students, lecturers and professors in Chinese universities and colleges
were exhilarated by the incident. They bought alcohol and drank madly, let
off firecrackers, wrote and put up posters, even organized demonstrations
on campuses, rejoicing in the extreme suffering of hundreds of people in
America. Why were they so happy? The main reason was that they thought
America had bombed China’s embassy in Yugoslavia and that an American
warplane had shot down a Chinese fighter plane. China had been threatened
and humiliated by the USA, but China was not powerful enough to confront
America. For them the terrorist attack meant that braver fighters had
avenged China, so they were pleased and excited.
Liberal intellectuals had a totally different position and attitude. They
published a letter in the middle of September entitled “An open letter to
President George W. Bush and the American people” over the names of Bao
Zhunxin (包遵信) and Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), both of whom had been jailed for
supporting the student prodemocratic movement in 1989. In this letter they
condemned the terrorist attack and supported the American government and
people. They said that the attack on America was a price the American
people paid when they set up a global order of freedom. The letter ended
with the sentence: “This evening we are American.” The number of
signatories of the letter reached over 1000 within two weeks.

The letter was attacked indignantly by many people. Their attack focused
on the last sentence “This evening we are American.” For them, to want to
be American meant to not want to be Chinese. The liberals were accused of
being traitors or “running dogs” of America. What their attackers did not
realize was that the sentence was an allusion to what American President
John F. Kennedy said in the period of the Cold War when he visited West
Berlin and faced the Berlin Wall. Kennedy said, in German: “Heute ich bin
ein Berliner,” that is, “Today I am a Berliner.” Obviously, President
Kennedy did not mean that he wanted to be a German. The angry Chinese did
not understand that it did not mean any change or choice of nationality,
but that it was an expression of moral support. Nationalism rose abruptly
in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century and became a
remarkable social trend of thought. However, the emergence of nationalism
can be traced to as early as the beginning of the 1990s when some scholars
who were politically sensitive and willing to serve the party and the
government suggested that patriotism and nationalism should be the main
courses for the education of university students and government officials.
Indeed a lesson had been drawn from the June Fourth event that political
education in universities had been unsuccessful and that it was not enough
just to instil Marxism into students.

The book China Can Say No published in 1996 manifested the fanaticism and
irrationality of nationalist emotion. The book defines contemporary
Chinese nationalism in such a way as to equate patriotism with opposition
to America. The book and chapter titles reveal that the authors were
expressing their anti- American feelings, for example “We don’t want
most-favoured-nation treatment, and will never give it to you” and “We
will never take a Boeing 777.” One of the basic points of view of the book
is that American people are not only evil, but stupid. The authors assert
that most Chinese high-school pupils have much more knowledge of American
history and culture than American university students. That the American
younger generation is on the road to degeneration and has been abandoned
by human civilization is proved by their preoccupation with drugs, sex and
electronic games.

The book The Chinese Road in the Shadow of Globalization, published in
1999, presented itself as an updated version of China Can Say No in
response to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia by NATO.
After praising the demonstration against the USA held on 8 May, the book
says: “At last, on May 8, 1999, we saw the life impulse of our nation and
heard the shout from the soul of our nation.” Readers may find sentences
like this one: “China has tried to be a good boy for many years in
international affairs, so the USA and other countries which only
understand and recognize power have forgotten China’s actual strength.”
The authors of the book suggested that China should become a naughty boy
paying no attention to its international image.

The most dangerous topic covered by the fanatical nationalists is that of
Taiwan. The authors of China Can Say No advocated attacking Taiwan with
military force immediately, saying that “an ordinary attack is not as good
as a general offensive, and a late attack is not as good as an early
offensive”. Talking about the “liberation” of Taiwan, Professor Chen Ming
(陈明), a representative of contemporary Confucianism in mainland China,
said: “What is important is not military ability, but will and
determination. If we fail the first time we can launch offensives for the
second and third times. We call this fighting to the last drop of our
blood.”
I call the nationalism held by some Chinese scholars and intellectuals
cultural nationalism. Its basic idea is that Western civilization has been
in crisis and that only Chinese culture can free the West from this
crisis, so the twenty-first century will belong to Chinese culture. The
most important advocate of this idea was Ji Xianlin (季羡林), an old and
famous scholar. According to Ji, every civilization is doomed to undergo a
process of rise and decline. The time when Chinese culture will take a
dominant position is coming now, since Western culture has been the
guiding ideology in the world for several centuries. His argument for the
above thesis is as follows. The essence of Chinese philosophy is the idea
that heaven and men are one. The Chinese believe that men and nature are
one entity. In contrast, the core of Western thought is contained in the
maxim of Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power”, meaning that mankind should
conquer nature by means of knowledge. The environmental and ecological
crises in modern times come from the failure to balance the relationship
between men and nature. Ji Xianlin concluded that mankind could be saved
only by Chinese ethics and Chinese philosophy.

I do not agree with Professor Ji, but it is unnecessary at this moment to
say what is wrong with his thesis in detail. I would like to point out
only that Ji distorted the meaning of the doctrine of “heaven and earth
are one”, which was a political philosophy serving imperial power and
autocracy in ancient times, not a modern ecological philosophy at all.
China has very serious environmental and ecological problems. China has
set a bad, not a good, example for the world in this regard.

Cultural conservatism is a doctrine similar to cultural nationalism, whose
concentrated expression is the so-called “Chinese national culture fever”
advocating that reading and studying the classics of Confucius and Mencius
should be put in the first place in education and ordinary life. This
assertion was so influential in 2004 that the year was called the Chinese
Cultural Conservative Year. The following important events took place at
that time.

First, Jiang Qing (蒋庆), a non-governmental scholar, put forward a slogan
for “reading classics” about which a heated argument broke out. The book
Basic Readings of the Chinese Cultural Classics in twelve volumes edited
by Jiang Qing was published in this year. It was reported that children in
five million families and over sixty cities had joined the ranks of
reading Confucian classics. Second, some well-known cultural conservatives
held a conference entitled “The Contemporary Destiny of Confucianism” in
Guiyang in the summer of 2004. The meeting was also called the “Summit of
Cultural Conservatives.” The participants wanted to apply the doctrines of
Confucius and Mencius to the present Chinese political system and to
political life. They hoped that the Chinese government would accept their
suggestion.

Third, “The Cultural Summit Forum of 2004” was held in Beijing, and “A
Cultural Manifesto of 2004” was published. This was sponsored by
distinguished scholars such as Xu Jialu (许嘉璐), Deputy President of the
National Congress, Yang Zhengning (杨振宁), winner of a Nobel physics prize,
and Wang Meng (王蒙), ex-Minister of Culture. The manifesto made the appeals
that cultural tradition should be re-evaluated and re-constructed and that
the kernel of value of Chinese traditional culture should be carried
forward.

I support the attempt and effort to rejuvenate Chinese traditional
culture. In my opinion, traditional culture should play a more important
role in education, ethics and other fields in today’s China. My
disagreement with the cultural conservatives, however, is as follows.
First, they think that the decline of traditional culture in modern times
is due to the attack from the May Fourth New Culture Movement, but I
maintain that criticism from scholars is unlikely to destroy Chinese
culture. Only policies from government can trample upon culture. It is not
the fault of liberal intellectuals that traditional culture has been
regarded as a feudal prison and eliminated completely since 1949. Second,
I believe that traditional culture can play a positive role only in
cultural and personal ethical aspects, not in the political system. But
some conservatives maintain that the political system should be arranged
in accordance with the old doctrine and that the modern democratic
political principle, such as equal political and legal rights for
everyone, is not acceptable. Jiang Qing asked: “Why should an unemployed
young man have the same right to vote as a professor?”

There has been a problem for Chinese intellectuals in how to deal with the
relationship between rulers and themselves. In Chinese tradition, it is
right and proper for intellectuals to think about and judge everything
from the point of view of the state, but not from their own point of view
or that of the people. For all Confucian scholars, being patriotic is the
same as being loyal to the sovereign. This tradition was questioned and
criticized in the 1980s when an author, Bai Hua (白桦) asked in his play:
“What should be done if you love your country but it doesn’t love you?”
The author and his work were criticized fiercely. Many intellectuals have
changed their attitudes since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
They think that the train of history is going in the direction guided by
the party along with the economic rise of China. They are afraid of
missing this train and losing their future. Some influential intellectuals
make statist discourses. They think that the so-called “Chinese model”
which violates human rights and pays no attention to social justice is the
hope of mankind, for the secret of its success is that the government
controls all political and economic power and can do whatever it wants. In
their opinion the best example is the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Others think that China will make contributions to human civilization with
a new political system whose core is a new type of democracy, according to
which the agreement and the authorization of the people are not necessary
for the legitimacy of government. The key point is that the government 
should take care of the people just as a kindly father does for his 
children. Others again hold that the party may place itself above the 
constitution, this being thought reasonable because of China’s special 
condition. In this view the best institutional arrangement is to make the 
state and the party an integral whole. It can be predicted that the 
statist trend will be developed further among Chinese intellectuals, and I 
am very worried about that.
Fortunately, that is not the whole story for Chinese intellectuals. In my 
opinion, the most important progress made from the 1980s to the present 
day is that we have affirmed constitutional democracy as the objective. 
Perhaps some of you will be surprised at this, since constitutional 
democracy is a self-evident principle of state foundation and governance 
in many countries. Indeed it was put forward by some intellectuals and 
politicians as their political programme about a hundred years ago in 
China. I should like to point out that the civil wars, invasions by 
foreign countries and the communist revolution disrupted these early 
efforts to realize constitutional democracy in my country.

I believe that China can be a decent country, a qualified member in the 
big family of human civilization, only after the accomplishment of 
constitutional democracy. I also believe that the Chinese people will 
enjoy the sympathy and support of peoples all over the world, including in 
Australia, in the process of striving for this goal.

 
Endnotes
* Acknowledgements. I have been in Australia three times, but this is my 
first visit to Melbourne. I feel greatly honoured to be invited to give 
the Louis Green Lecture for 2012. In particular I should like to thank my 
hosts, Dr Warren Sun and Professor Wallace Kirsop, who arranged the 
occasion.
(i) Li Honglin, “读书无禁区[No forbidden zone in reading]”, Dushu 
[Readings], 
1979:1.
(ii) Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens, eds, Approaching Modernism, Amsterdam 
and Philadelphia，John Benjamins, 1986; Chinese edition: Beijing, Peking 
University Press, 1991.

 
“Professor Youyu Xu (徐友渔), once a visiting scholar at Harvard and Oxford 
Universities respectively and who served as the Olaf Palme Visiting 
Professor in Sweden, is a preeminent thinker and one of China’s leading 
spokesmen for constitutional democracy. He is author/editor of over twenty 
books in Chinese, from the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy and 
Bertrand Russell in 1994 to A Study of Contemporary Western Political 
Philosophy in 2008.  He translated, from the original German, 
Wittgenstein’s Remarks On the Foundations of Mathematics. His outspoken 
defence of liberalism, in works such as Discourse of Freedom (1999), 
Facing History (2000), and Unremitting Spiritual Pursuit(2002), has won 
him a wide readership in China.” (from Professor Warren Sun’s original 
introduction)