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"Veg, Sebastian"
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Minjian : the rise of China's grassroots intellectuals
\"Veg argues that a new type of intellectual appeared in post-Tiananmen China. Breaking with the universalist, enlightenment paradigm of the 1980s, as well as with the older, traditional figure of the advising and dissenting literati, intellectuals who came of age in the 1990s no longer indulged as frequently in sweeping discourses about culture, the nation, or democracy. Their legitimacy derived from their work with \"vulnerable groups,\" and their shared experience with marginal realms of society. These \"grassroots intellectuals\" are not simply activists, however. They engage in a public discourse that relies on their specific knowledge, relying on the embryonic and always endangered public sphere that has appeared in China during this time. Moreover, they define themselves as separate both from the state and from the market, positing instead a third sector of activity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Rise of “Localism” and Civic Identity in Post-handover Hong Kong: Questioning the Chinese Nation-state
While it was traditionally accepted that Hongkongers shared a form of pan-Chinese cultural identification that did not contradict their local distinctiveness, over the last decade Hong Kong has seen the rise of new types of local identity 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 traditional “Hong Kong identity” that appeared in the 1970s? The present study takes a two-dimensional approach to study these discourses, examining not only their framework of identification (local versus pan-Chinese) but also their mode of identification (ethno-cultural versus civic). Using three case studies, the June Fourth vigil, the 2012 anti-National Education protest and the 2014 Umbrella movement, it distinguishes between groups advocating civic identification with the local community (Scholarism, HKFS) and others highlighting ethnic identification (Chin Wan). It argues that while local and national identification were traditionally not incompatible, the civic-based identification with a local democratic community, as advocated by most participants in recent movements, is becoming increasingly incompatible with the ethnic and cultural definition of the Chinese nation that is now being promoted by the Beijing government. 根据一般理解, 香港虽然有自己的地方特点, 但同样认同大中华文化。可是, 近十年, 香港出现了新类型的香港身份认同话语。最近 “本土” 论述经常出现, 甚至 “自决” 需求都浮出水面。那么, 这种论述与 1970 年代的传统 “香港人” 论有多大差别? 本文试图从两重角度探索本土身份认同论, 不仅探讨它的认同框架 (地方/大中华), 又分析它的认同方式 (文化–族裔认同/公民认同)。通过三个个案——六四纪念会、2012 年的反国民教育运动、2014 年的雨伞运动——, 本文区分本土认同的两种类型: 基于政治与公民 (civic) 的身份认同 (例如学民思潮, 学联的论述), 和基于族裔与文化 (ethno-cultural) 的身份认同(如陈云等人论述)。如果在过去地方与国家层次的身份认同不矛盾, 那么最近的冲突来自哪里? 本文提出这样的问题: 除了中港 (框架) 矛盾之外, 存在于本地公民的民主群体与北京当局促成的族裔文化民族群体之间的冲突, 是否更加重要?
Journal Article
The Rise of China’s Statist Intellectuals
Beginning in the 1990s, a number of elite Chinese intellectuals developed new critiques of liberalism. Within the orbit of Marxism, a group often called the “new left” mainly concentrated on economic liberalism and inequalities of wealth. Some of them also showed an affinity with the views of intellectuals referred to as statists. The statists’ three main ideas can be summarized as the superiority of political sovereignty over the rule of law, a critique of the “judicialization” of politics and the need to “repoliticize” the state, and a critique of universalism and an assertion of Chinese exceptionalism. Some of the legal scholars who developed these ideas are directly influenced by Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), an authoritarian German legal scholar and political theorist. Important texts by the current Chinese group of statist thinkers provide an intellectual background to the recent evolution in Party ideology.
Journal Article
Creating Public Opinion, Advancing Knowledge, Engaging in Politics: The Local Public Sphere in Chengdu, 1898–1921
Situated far from coastal cities and foreign concessions, Chengdu yields insights into the role of the local press and its specific publics in the political evolution of the late Qing and early Republic. Despite its remote location, Chengdu developed its own modern press in the late Qing, relying on print entrepreneurs and modern journalists recruited from the ranks of the local literati and traditional sociability, in particular teahouses. They all played a role in forming a modern reading public which came to understand itself as a distinct local political community in dynamic interaction with national politics and transnational networks. The local press evinced three successive but intertwined ideals of publicness: as a link between the state and the people and a vector of enlightenment, as a professional forum for public opinion and as a tool for political mobilization. In solidifying public opinion around the local community, the press served as a forum and catalyst for political activism in the 1911 Railroad Protection movement and the 1919 May Fourth movement, events which were shaped as much by local dynamics as they were by national developments.
Journal Article
Creating a Textual Public Space: Slogans and Texts from Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement
Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement (September–December 2014) represented a watershed in Hong Kong's political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of claims, which are oriented towards an assertion of agency, articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode (“democracy”), in relation with a political community (Hong Kong autonomy and decolonization), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time, slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large, it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kong's younger generation.
Journal Article
Propaganda and Pastiche
The two Mao films of 2009 and 2011 set a new standard in the confluence of commercial and propaganda productions in terms of sheer scale. While they are not fundamentally new in repackaging propaganda as entertainment, or even in co-opting parodic elements within official discourse, this essay argues that, viewed against the background of recent policy speeches, they contribute to defining the new \"mainstream socialist culture\" set out as a cultural policy goal by Hu Jintao. By the same thrust, they redefine the figure of Mao and the role of the CCP in an attempt to stake out a popular consensus on the contemporary Chinese polity.
Journal Article
Resisting Enchantment, Questioning Aestheticism
If indeed aestheticization and enchantment are perennial traits of state discourses and practices in China, it is perhaps unsurprising that a countertradition in modern literature should emphasize disenchantment. Cultural productions that originate from outside the sphere of the state have often questioned its authority. Where the state seeks to enchant, literature has sometimes sought to kindle doubt, to arouse debate. Although such debates have often been curtailed or suppressed, it is worth reexamining the connections between literary production and political debates in different historical contexts throughout twentieth-century China. Drawing on theories that stress the intentionality of literature and the speech act value of the literary text, the present essay attempts to characterize the communicational dynamics both within the text and in the context of its reception. In this perspective, it revisits some of the literary debates that took place in China in the May Fourth and Republican periods (represented by Lu Xun), the early postwar years and the ROC—PRC transition (Lao She), in certain works written during the Cultural Revolution (Jin Fan/Liu Qingfeng), as well as post-1979 literature on the mainland (Yan Lianke). It does so by selecting texts that seem to have been produced with the intention of challenging the aesthetics of enchantment, using literary devices to interrupt readers’ enjoyment and thus open a space for public discussion of both aesthetics and politics.
Journal Article
Recollection: Élisabeth Allès (1952-2012)
Élisabeth was a long-time friend of the CEFC, where she spent two years as a CNRS researcher from 2002 to 2004, and of China Perspectives, as a regular contributor and member of its editorial board.
Journal Article
Red capital and the ideology of stability: the view from Beijing
In his book Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty discusses the rise of inequalities in China, the role of the State in the economy and the regime’s critique of the political model of electoral democracy. The present essay highlights the significant inequalities of status that coexisted with the relative equalization of income in the Mao era and that continue to operate today through the distinction between rural and urban residents. For this reason, the state’s implication in the economy does not translate into better social protection but rather into increased political repression against the claims of rural migrants and other groups excluded from the economic miracle.
Journal Article