MCLC: Rong Jian's 'A China Bereft of Thought' (1)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Rong Jian’s ‘A China Bereft of Thought’ (1)
I have digested the translation of Rong Jian's lengthy essay into 1000 words for the sake of list members who don't have time to follow the link to The China Story. As Professor Davies explained, the piece is more than four years old, but lives on in various parts of the Internet even though the website of the Institute that sponsored it was recently shut down for alleged infractions. Below are my extracts, slightly edited. My thanks to Gloria Davies and her students for making Rong's provocative work available in English.
(Again, the full translated essay can be read here.)
A Revolution bereft of thought
During the CCP’s Yan’an period, the Chinese Communists had a very rudimentary understanding of Marxist theory…. Mao was learning and applying Marxism simultaneously in those days.
However, the CCP’s theoretical inadequacies not only did not hinder the organisation’s robust development but helped to facilitate it. The ideological mobilisation pursued by the CCP in its Yan’an period was based largely on practice alone.
As a ruling political party, the CCP is unique. It has neither a set of guiding ideas nor a value system… In other countries, whether socialist or capitalist, there’s an alignment between theory and practice. What we have in China is a total disconnect between theory and practice.
Mao was an activist. His aim was to achieve the maximum effect of action. He would make use any means to achieve his goal which meant that he followed no creed. He was opportunistic and given to sudden changes.
The success of the Chinese Revolution was advanced by four kinds of discourse which were respectively motivated by realistic, pragmatic, strategic, and opportunistic concerns. There were no clearly defined ideas or theories, instead, the needs and goals of a given moment decided the types of ideas or theories that were proposed.
In consequence, this was a revolution that lacked a clear ethical-moral boundary, where the end justified the means, enabling people to adjust their strategies for survival and develop as they pleased. This was a highly adaptable revolution that was not weighed down by moral values and concerns.
Reform bereft of thought
… during the reforms of the 1980s, theory trailed practice while also constraining practice. The reforms were bereft of theory and were indeed a process of ‘crossing the river by feeling for the stones’. Accordingly, there was nothing to serve as theoretical guidance for a methodical approach to the implementation of the reforms.
I think Deng understood that the Marxism of the party-state was a huge impediment for its own progress. The Party could not abandon the deity of Marxism, and its members were not well-versed in the Marxist classics and even if they were, the Marxist classics were not helpful for the present realities in China, Deng thus chose simply to sidestep Marxism altogether and to insist that there be ‘no debate’.
Genuine reform requires the clarification of one’s guiding ideas, for such clarification would indicate that the mooted reform has a theoretical goal to which one has made a clear commitment.  … One simply cannot afford to be vague or adopt an ambiguous attitude where everything is contingent on the needs of a given moment. We have now reached the terminus of a process of reform that is bereft of thought.
Academic Production Bereft of Thought
Self-reflection on Marxism and the renewed acquisition and interpretation of liberalism were the two main endeavors of the 1980s. The 1990s appeared to be a scene of academic flowering across different disciplines.
By the twenty-first century, debates in mainland intellectual circles had deteriorated into ideological contests. … The opposition between left and right had become irreconcilable.
The state has provided massive subsidies for academic production within its system. . . . The rapid expansion of the state’s financial resources has resulted in an unprecedented level of state control over intellectual and academic endeavour, exceeding what the dynastic regimes of premodern China achieved. Thought and scholarship are constrained to serve the state as its tool.
. . . the market-led process of reform, especially from the 1990s onwards, had opened a new channel for marketable academic products. This development outside the system led to the publication of several good works of intellectual inquiry and scholarship. That said, this market for academic products was and remains unable to fully free itself from state control. … This sector is in a situation of negative growth.
State control over academic production in China has meant that academics must be ever-mindful of the types of products the authorities favour. We may describe the state as well-disposed … to forms of knowledge that serve a functional, methodological, practical or technological need: the kind of knowledge that is devoid of both ultimate concerns and intellectual creativity. Academic publications that have resulted from state-funded research are mostly garbage. These publications … have had the effect of destroying people’s capacity to think and to defend the values they hold dear.
The growing vacuousness in mainland intellectual life is also the result of ideological clashes among academics. These are clashes over the use of Western ideas in China rather than home-grown Chinese theories. 
Academic production that is bereft of thought is cut from the same cloth as revolution and reform pursued without thought. Together, they reflect a China that is bereft of thought. Following the total eclipse of traditional Chinese thought centered on Confucianism, the production and dissemination of Chinese thought has had to draw on the intellectual resources of the West for a century or more. This process occurred alongside the subjection of Chinese thought to systematic state control. Thus, Chinese thought was reduced to a useful tool. It became a loincloth for covering up the state’s imposed ideology. If we reflect on the situation and development of Chinese thought over the last century, we are bound to ask ourselves the question– Can we rebuild a thinking China?
The first thing we must do is to build proper mechanisms for producing thought. These mechanisms require freedom of speech and an independent publishing system, and the abolition of state-imposed standards on intellectual production… We would need to establish a market for ideas . . . a system capable of accommodating a plurality of ideas.
We must establish thought that is anchored in Chinese subjectivity 建立中国主体性思想. … This form of thought must take a Chinese historical perspective as its principal guide … according with Chinese experience past and present.
A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 8, 2017
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20170208/e2682733/attachment.html>