王滬寧的勝利與恐怖
由 N.S. 裏昂 2021 年 10 月 11 日 文章
https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/
白宮官方照片/王滬寧在多倫多觀察中國國家主席胡錦濤與美國總統奧巴馬的談話
2021年8月的一天，趙薇失蹤了。 對於中國最著名的女演員之一來說，從公眾視野中消失本身就足以引起轟動。 但趙的消失行為要徹底得多：一夜之間，她就從互聯網上被刪除了。 她擁有 8600 萬粉絲的微博社交媒體頁麵以及專門針對她的粉絲網站都已下線。 在流媒體網站上搜索她的許多電影和電視節目沒有返回任何結果。 趙的名字從她參演或執導的項目的片尾字幕中被刪除，取而代之的是一個空白。 網上提及她名字的討論受到審查。 突然之間，這位 45 歲的名人曾經存在過的痕跡就消失殆盡了。
她並不孤單。 隨著中國政府監管機構宣布“加大打擊力度”，旨在消除宣揚淫蕩生活方式的“低俗網紅”，並“解決網絡粉絲文化造成的混亂問題”，其他中國藝人也開始消失。 那些模仿韓國男團明星女性化或雌雄同體美學的人——被形象地稱為“小鮮肉”或“小鮮肉”——接下來將被淘汰，政府誓言“堅決杜絕娘娘腔男人”出現在電視節目中。 中國易受影響的年輕人的銀幕。
趙和她不幸的娛樂業同胞陷入了比他們自己更大的事情中：一波突如其來的新政府政策正在顛覆中國人的生活，官方媒體將其描述為國家的“深刻變革”。 這一轉變被官方稱為中國國家主席習近平的“共同繁榮”運動，它沿著兩條平行線進行：對私營部門經濟進行大規模的監管打壓，以及自上而下重塑中國文化的更廣泛的道德努力。
但為什麽會發生這種“深刻轉變”呢？ 為什麽現在呢？ 大多數分析都集中在一個人身上：習近平和他個人對政治控製的癡迷。 然而，被忽視的答案是，這確實是一個非常有權勢的人數十年思考和規劃的頂峰——但那個人不是習近平。
灰色顯赫
王滬寧更喜歡陰影而不是聚光燈。 這位戴著眼鏡、說話輕聲細語的政治理論家患有失眠症和工作狂，他的前朋友和同事形容他性格內向、極其謹慎。 經過中國前領導人江澤民的一再懇求，這位當時才華橫溢的年輕學者——他滿懷憧憬地表示要走儒家學者的傳統道路，遠離政治——在20世紀90年代初放棄學術界，加入中國共產黨政權。 反而。 當他最終這樣做時，王切斷了與以前的關係的幾乎所有聯係，停止出版和公開演講，並執行了嚴格的政策，根本不與外國人交談。 在這層精心營造的不透明麵紗的背後，西方很少有人了解王，更不用說認識他本人了，這並不奇怪。
然而王滬寧可以說是當今最有影響力的“公共知識分子”。
作為中共七人政治局常委之一，他是中國最高的意識形態理論家，被譽為習近平每一個標誌性政治概念背後的“思想人”，包括“中國夢”、反腐敗運動、 “一帶一路”倡議、更加自信的外交政策，甚至“習近平思想”。 仔細觀察習近平在一次重要旅行或一次重要會議上的任何照片，人們很可能會發現王在背景中，永遠遠離領導人的身邊。
因此，王與中國曆史上的著名人物如諸葛亮和韓非（曆史學家稱後者為“中國的馬基雅維利”）相提並論，他們同樣在皇位背後擔任強大的戰略顧問和軍師——這一職位在中國文學中被稱為“帝士”： “帝師。” 在西方，這樣的人物與特朗布萊、塔列朗、梅特涅、基辛格或弗拉基米爾·普京顧問弗拉迪斯拉夫·蘇爾科夫的傳統中的“灰色顯赫”一樣容易辨認。
但王的非凡之處在於，他成功地擔任了中國前三位最高領導人的宮廷哲學家的角色，包括江澤民標誌性的“三個代表”政策和胡錦濤的“三個代表”政策背後的筆。 和諧社會。”
在中共派係政治殘酷殘酷的世界裏，這是前所未有的壯舉。 王是被江澤民的“上海幫”招入黨的，這是習近平在2012年上台後對這個敵對派係進行了無情清洗的人。 許多知名人士，如前安全部部長周永康和前安全部副部長孫立軍，最終入獄。 與此同時，隨著習派的鞏固控製，胡錦濤的共青團派也被嚴重邊緣化。 但王滬寧依然存在。 這一事實比任何其他事實都更能揭示他無可挑剔的政治狡猾之深。
中國灰色名人在共同繁榮運動中的印記是顯而易見的。 雖然現在很難確定王在他的黑匣子裏到底相信什麽，但他曾經是一位多產的作家，出版了近 20 本書以及大量論文。 這些作品中的思想與當今中國正在發生的事情之間存在著明顯的連續性，這說明了北京如何通過王滬寧的眼睛來看待世界。
文化能力
當其他中國青少年度過文化大革命（1966-76）的動蕩歲月時，“下放農村”挖溝渠、種地，王滬寧卻在家鄉上海附近的一所精英外語培訓學校學習法語。 他每天都在閱讀老師為他保管的違禁外國文學經典。 1955年出生於山東的一個革命家庭，他是一個體弱多病、書生氣十足的青年。 這一點，再加上他家人的關係，似乎讓他免於苦役。
1978年，隨著毛澤東的繼任者鄧小平開始“改革開放”，中國關閉的大學重新開放，王是第一批參加恢複的全國高考的人之一，與數百萬人競爭重返高等教育的機會。 他的考試成績如此出色，以至於中國頂尖學府之一的上海複旦大學錄取了他進入著名的國際政治碩士項目，盡管他從未完成過學士學位。
他在複旦完成的論文，也就是他的第一本書，追溯了西方國家主權概念從古代到今天的發展，包括從吉爾伽美什到蘇格拉底、亞裏士多德、奧古斯丁、馬基雅維利、霍布斯、盧梭、孟德斯鳩、 黑格爾和馬克思——並將其與中國的觀念進行了對比。 這部著作將成為他未來許多民族國家和國際關係理論的基礎。
但王也開始拾起他一生工作的另一條核心線索：文化、傳統和價值結構對政治穩定的必要中心地位。
王在 1988 年的一篇文章《中國不斷變化的政治文化的結構》中詳細闡述了這些觀點，這篇文章後來成為他被引用最多的著作之一。 他在文中指出，中共必須緊急考慮社會的“軟件”（文化、價值觀、態度）與其“硬件”（經濟、係統、製度）一樣塑造政治命運。 雖然看似一個簡單的想法，但這顯然是對正統馬克思主義唯物主義的大膽突破。
在鄧小平迅速向世界開放的過程中審視中國，王認為中國正處於“轉型狀態”，從“生產經濟向消費經濟”轉變，同時“從精神文化向物質文化發展” ”和“從集體主義文化到個人主義文化”。
同時，他認為“中國特色社會主義”的現代化實際上使中國根本沒有任何真正的文化方向。 “中國最新的結構中沒有核心價值觀，”他警告說。 這隻會瓦解社會和政治凝聚力。
他說，這是站不住腳的。 警告說，“文化大革命塑造的政治文化的組成部分已經脫離了這種文化誕生的根源，也脫離了社會需求、社會價值觀和社會關係”——因此“ 對馬克思主義的接受並不總是積極的”——他認為，“1949年以來，我們對古典和現代結構的核心價值觀進行了批判，但對塑造我們自己的核心價值觀不夠重視。” 因此：“我們必須創造核心價值觀”。 他總結說，理想情況下，“我們必須將[中國]傳統價值觀的靈活性與[西方和馬克思主義]的現代精神結合起來。”
但在這一點上，就像改革開放那些令人興奮的歲月中的許多人一樣，他仍然對自由主義能夠在中國發揮積極作用抱有希望，並寫道，他的建議可以允許“體現現代民主精神的現代結構的組成部分和 人文主義找到他們紮根和成長所需的支持。”
這種情況很快就會改變。
黑暗的願景
同樣在 1988 年，30 歲的王以前所未有的速度成為複旦大學最年輕的正教授，並獲得了令人垂涎的獎學金（由美國政治學協會資助），以訪問學者的身份在美國度過了六個月。 出於對美國的強烈好奇，王充分利用了這一點，像近代中國的托克維爾一樣遊曆美國，訪問了30多個城市和近20所大學。
他的發現深深地困擾了他，永久地改變了他對西方及其思想後果的看法。
王將他的觀察記錄在一本回憶錄中，這本回憶錄後來成為他最著名的作品：1991 年出版的《美國對抗美國》一書。 在書中，他驚歎於華盛頓特區街頭的無家可歸者營地、紐約和舊金山貧困黑人社區失控的毒品犯罪，以及似乎已經融入並接管政府職責的公司。 最終，他得出的結論是，美國麵臨著由其社會矛盾所產生的“不可阻擋的危機暗流”，這些社會矛盾包括貧富之間、白人與黑人之間、民主與寡頭權力之間、平等主義與階級特權之間、個人權利與集體責任之間、文化傳統與社會矛盾之間。 液體現代性的溶劑。
但他說，雖然美國人可以意識到他們麵臨著“複雜的社會和文化問題”，但他們“傾向於將這些問題視為需要單獨解決的科學和技術問題”。 他認為，這對他們毫無幫助，因為他們的問題實際上都是密不可分的，並且具有相同的根本原因：現代美國自由主義核心的激進、虛無主義的個人主義。
“美國社會的真正細胞是個人，”他發現。 之所以如此，是因為（按照亞裏士多德的說法）社會最基礎的細胞“家庭，已經解體”。 與此同時，在美國體係中，“一切事物都具有雙重性，高度商品化的魅力無處不在。 人肉、性、知識、政治、權力、法律都可以成為商品化的對象。” 這種“商品化在很多方麵腐蝕了社會並導致了許多嚴重的社會問題。” 最終，“美國經濟體係創造了人類的孤獨”作為其最重要的產物，同時還造成了嚴重的不平等。 結果，“虛無主義成為美國方式，這對文化發展和美國精神是致命的衝擊”。
此外，他表示，“美國精神正麵臨著來自新理念競爭對手的嚴峻挑戰”。 在回顧他訪問過的大學時，他讚賞地引用了艾倫·布魯姆（Allan Bloom）的《美國思想的封閉》（The Closing of the American Mind），他指出啟蒙運動自由理性主義與“對西方傳統價值觀一無所知的年輕一代”之間日益緊張的關係，並積極拒絕其文化遺產。 “如果價值體係崩潰了，”他想知道，“社會體係如何維持？”
他認為，歸根結底，當麵對吸毒成癮等關鍵社會問題時，美國這個原子化的、被消滅的、萎靡不振的社會發現自己麵臨著“一個無法克服的問題”，因為它不再有任何連貫的概念基礎來發起任何抵抗。
年輕的王曾對美國抱有理想主義的態度，1989年初回到中國，並晉升為複旦大學國際政治係主任，成為自由化的主要反對者。
他開始主張中國必須抵製全球自由主義的影響，成為一個文化統一、自信的國家，由一個強大的、集權的黨國統治。 他將這些想法發展為後來被稱為中國的“新威權主義”運動——盡管王從未使用過這個詞，將自己等同於中國的“新保守派”。 這反映了他希望將馬克思主義社會主義與中國傳統儒家價值觀、法家政治思想、西方國家主權和權力的最高主義思想以及民族主義相融合，以合成不受西方自由主義影響的長期穩定和增長的新基礎。
“他最關心的是如何管理中國的問題，”一位前複旦學生回憶道。 “他建議，一個強大的、集權的國家對於維持這個社會是必要的。 他每天晚上都在辦公室裏度過，沒有做任何其他事情。”
王的時機再好不過了。 他回國僅幾個月後，中國自身新出現的矛盾就以天安門廣場學生抗議的形式爆發出來。 在解放軍坦克粉碎了中國萌芽的自由民主夢想後，中共領導層開始拚命尋找新的政治模式來確保政權安全。 他們很快把目光投向了王滬寧。
1993年，當王帶領大學辯論隊在新加坡國際比賽中獲勝而贏得全國讚譽時，他引起了天安門事件後成為中共領導人的江澤民的注意。 王以人性本惡的論點擊敗了台大，預示著“西方現代文明雖然可以帶來物質繁榮，但並不一定能帶來品格的改善”。 江澤民把他從大學挖了出來，40歲時，他被任命為中共秘密的中央政策研究室的領導職務，使他進入了最高權力梯隊。
王滬寧的噩夢
從現在中國互聯網上數以百萬計的自鳴得意的觀點來看，王對美國解體的黑暗願景無異於預言。 當他們把目光投向美國時，他們不再將自由民主的燈塔視為更美好未來的令人欽佩的象征。 這就是那些創造了著名的“民主女神”的人的印象，她的紙漿火把高舉在天安門前。
相反，他們看到的是王的美國：去工業化、農村衰敗、過度金融化、資產價格失控以及自我延續的食利精英的出現； 強大的科技壟斷企業能夠粉碎任何在政府範圍之外有效運作的新貴競爭對手； 巨大的經濟不平等、長期失業、毒癮、無家可歸和犯罪； 文化混亂、曆史虛無主義、家庭破裂和生育率下降； 社會絕望、精神萎靡、社會孤立以及心理健康問題發病率飆升； 麵對頹廢和幾乎不掩飾的自我厭惡，民族團結和目標喪失； 巨大的內部分歧、種族緊張、騷亂、政治暴力，以及一個似乎越來越接近分裂的國家。
隨著2020年美國政治的動蕩，中國人開始向王的《美國對抗美國》尋求答案。 2021 年 1 月 6 日，當一群暴徒衝進美國國會大廈時，這本書被搶購一空。 絕版書在中國電子商務網站上的售價開始高達 2,500 美元。
但王不太可能享受這種讚譽，因為他最擔心的事情已經成為現實：他在美國發現的“不可阻擋的危機暗流”似乎已經成功地跨越了太平洋。 盡管他和習近平在嚴厲鎮壓政治自由主義方麵取得了成功，但隨著中國逐步接受更加新自由主義的資本主義經濟模式，王在美國觀察到的許多同樣的問題在過去十年中仍然出現並肆虐中國。
“中國特色社會主義”已迅速將中國轉變為地球上經濟最不平等的社會之一。 目前，官方公布的基尼係數約為 0.47，低於美國的 0.41。 最富有的 1% 人口目前擁有全國約 31% 的財富（與美國的 35% 相差不遠）。 但大多數中國人仍然相對貧困：約有 6 億人的月收入仍然不足 1000 元（155 美元）。
與此同時，中國科技巨頭已經建立了比美國同行更強大的壟斷地位，市場份額往往接近 90%。 企業招聘通常采用令人筋疲力盡的“996”時間表（上午 9 點至晚上 9 點，每周 6 天）。 另一些人則在龐大的現代契約奴役體係（即中國的“零工經濟”）中苦苦掙紮，受困於預付債務。 阿裏巴巴表示，預計到 2036 年，多達 4 億中國人將擺脫這種“個體經營”。
中國不斷擴大的大學畢業生群體的就業市場競爭如此激烈，以至於“畢業等於失業”成為一個社會模因（這兩個詞有一個共同的漢字）。 隨著年輕人湧入大都市尋找就業機會，農村地區已被耗盡並陷入腐朽，而幾個世紀以來的公共大家庭生活在一代人的時間裏被顛覆，使得老年人隻能依賴國家提供邊緣護理。 在城市，年輕人因炙手可熱的資產泡沫而被擠出房地產市場。
與此同時，與西方對中國固有的公共文化的陳詞濫調的假設相反，中國的原子化感和低社會信任度已經變得如此尖銳，以至於在受傷的個人被奇怪地經常性地傷害之後，導致了社會周期性的痛苦反省。 路人習慣性地懷疑自己被騙了，把他們丟在街上等死。
中國年輕人在無情的消費主義社會中感到孤獨，無法出人頭地，越來越多地描述自己處於一種虛無主義的絕望狀態，這種狀態被網絡俚語“內卷”所概括，它描述了個人和社會因 一種普遍的感覺，即陷入一場令人筋疲力盡的激烈競爭，每個人都不可避免地會失敗。 這種絕望表現在一場被稱為“躺平”的運動中，人們試圖通過做生活所需的絕對最低限度的工作來逃避這場激烈的競爭，成為現代的苦行僧。
在這種環境下，截至 2020 年，中國的生育率已降至每名婦女生育 1.3 個孩子，低於日本，僅高於全球最低的韓國，使其經濟未來陷入危機。 取消家庭規模限製以及政府試圖說服家庭多生孩子的做法遭到了中國年輕人的懷疑和嘲笑，認為這與經濟和社會現實“完全脫節”。 “他們還不知道大多數年輕人光靠養活自己就已經筋疲力盡了嗎？” 社交媒體上的一篇典型病毒帖子問道。 確實，考慮到中國殘酷的教育體係，養育一個孩子的成本是巨大的：根據地點的不同，估計費用在 30,000 美元（大約是普通公民年薪的七倍）到 115,000 美元之間。
但即使是那些有能力生孩子的中國年輕人也發現他們享受著一種新的生活方式：令人向往的丁克（“雙收入，沒有孩子”）生活，在這種生活中，受過良好教育的年輕夫婦（已婚或未婚）花掉所有額外的現金 在他們自己身上。 正如一位接受了輸精管結紮術、徹底解放的 27 歲男性曾向《紐約時報》解釋的那樣：“對於我們這一代來說，孩子不是必需品……現在我們可以沒有任何負擔地生活。 那麽為什麽不把我們的精神和經濟資源投資到我們自己的生活上呢？”
因此，盡管美國人今天已經放棄了讓中國自由化的舊夢，但他們也許應該看得更近一些。 確實，如果你認為自由主義就是民主選舉、新聞自由和尊重人權，那麽中國從未實現過絲毫自由化。 但許多政治思想家認為，現代自由主義的全麵定義遠不止於此。 相反，他們將自由主義的基本目的視為將個人從地方、傳統、宗教、社團和關係的所有限製性紐帶以及自然的所有物質限製中解放出來，以追求現代“的徹底自主”。 消費者。”
從這個角度來看，中國已經徹底自由化，中國社會正在發生的事情開始看起來更像是王的噩夢，自由主義文化被虛無主義的個人主義和商品化所吞噬。
偉大的實驗
正是在這種背景下，王滬寧似乎贏得了中國體製內一場關於中華人民共和國現在需要什麽才能持續下去的長期辯論。 中國對不受約束的經濟和文化自由主義的寬容時代已經結束。
根據他的一位老朋友泄露的說法，習近平發現自己和王一樣，“對中國社會全方位的商業化感到厭惡，以及隨之而來的暴發戶暴富、官員腐敗、價值觀、尊嚴和自我價值的喪失”。 尊重，以及毒品和賣淫等‘道德罪惡’。” 王現在似乎已經讓習近平相信，他們別無選擇，隻能采取嚴厲行動，以阻止西式經濟和文化自由資本主義對社會秩序產生的生存威脅——這些威脅與困擾美國的威脅幾乎相同。
這種幹預采取了共同富裕運動的形式，習近平在一月份宣布“絕對不能讓貧富差距擴大”，並警告說“實現共同富裕不僅是一個經濟問題， 這也是事關黨的執政基礎的重大政治問題。”
這就是為什麽反壟斷調查對中國頂級科技公司造成了數十億美元的罰款、強製重組和嚴格的新數據規則限製了中國的互聯網和社交媒體公司。 這就是為什麽破紀錄的首次公開募股被擱置，企業被勒令改善勞動條件，“996”加班要求被定為非法，零工工人的工資也提高了。 這就是為什麽政府一夜之間取消了私人補習行業並限製了房產租金的上漲。 這就是為什麽政府宣布要對“過高的收入”進行“調整”。
這就是為什麽像趙薇這樣的名人一直在消失，為什麽中國未成年人被禁止每周玩電子遊戲這種“精神鴉片”超過三個小時，為什麽 LGBT 群體被從互聯網上清除，以及為什麽墮胎限製已經被禁止。 得到了顯著收緊。 正如一篇民族主義文章在全國範圍內推廣
這就是為什麽像趙薇這樣的名人一直在消失，為什麽中國未成年人被禁止每周玩電子遊戲這種“精神鴉片”超過三個小時，為什麽 LGBT 群體被從互聯網上清除，以及為什麽墮胎限製已經被禁止。 得到了顯著收緊。 正如一篇在官方媒體上宣傳的民族主義文章所解釋的那樣，如果允許自由派西方的“乳頭娛樂策略”成功地導致中國“年輕一代失去堅韌和陽剛之氣，那麽我們就會崩潰……就像蘇聯那樣。” 習近平“深刻轉型”的目的是要確保“文化市場不再是娘娘腔明星的樂園，新聞輿論不再處於崇拜西方文化的境地”。
最終，這場運動代表了王滬寧的勝利和恐怖。 這是他三十年來的文化思想在政策上的體現。
一方麵，值得誠實地看待西方目前正在經曆的經濟、技術、文化和政治動蕩的程度，並考慮他是否準確地診斷出了在我們全球化世界中蔓延的共同暗流。 另一方麵，考慮到曆史上其他潛在的“靈魂工程師”的許多失敗，他設計新社會價值觀的策略能否成功似乎令人懷疑。
衡量未來幾年這一努力的最佳簡單指標可能是人口統計數據。 由於尚不完全清楚的原因，世界上許多國家現在麵臨著同樣的挑戰：隨著它們發展成為發達經濟體，生育率已低於更替率。 這種情況在多種政治製度中都發生過，而且幾乎沒有任何緩和的跡象。 除了移民之外，現在還嚐試了多種政策來提高出生率，從增加對兒童保育服務的公共資金到為有孩子的家庭提供“產前”稅收抵免。 沒有一個能夠持續取得成功，這在某些方麵引發了痛苦的爭論：失去生存和繁衍的意願是否隻是現代性的一個基本因素。 但如果有哪個國家能夠成功扭轉這一趨勢，無論需要付出多大的努力，那很可能就是中國。
不管怎樣，我們的世界正在見證一場正在進行的偉大實驗：中國和西方麵臨著非常相似的社會問題，但在王滬寧的幫助下，現在卻采取了截然不同的方法來解決這些問題。 隨著中國日益挑戰美國的全球地緣政治和意識形態領導地位，這一實驗的結論很可能會塑造未來一個世紀全球治理的未來。
國家統計局 裏昂斯是一位在華盛頓特區生活和工作的分析師和作家。他是《劇變》一書的作者。
PALLADIUM GOVERNANCE FUTURISM
Official White House Photo/Wang Huning observes as Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama, TorontoOne day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China's best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.
She wasn’t alone. Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,” or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to “resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s impressionable youth.
Zhao and her unfortunate compatriots in the entertainment industry were caught up in something far larger than themselves: a sudden wave of new government policies that are currently upending Chinese life in what state media has characterized as a “profound transformation” of the country. Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.
The Grey Eminence
Wang Huning much prefers the shadows to the limelight. An insomniac and workaholic, former friends and colleagues describe the bespectacled, soft-spoken political theorist as introverted and obsessively discreet. It took former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s repeated entreaties to convince the brilliant then-young academic—who spoke wistfully of following the traditional path of a Confucian scholar, aloof from politics—to give up academia in the early 1990s and join the Chinese Communist Party regime instead. When he finally did so, Wang cut off nearly all contact with his former connections, stopped publishing and speaking publicly, and implemented a strict policy of never speaking to foreigners at all. Behind this veil of carefully cultivated opacity, it’s unsurprising that so few people in the West know of Wang, let alone know him personally.
Yet Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.
A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side.
Wang has thus earned comparisons to famous figures of Chinese history like Zhuge Liang and Han Fei (historians dub the latter “China’s Machiavelli”) who similarly served behind the throne as powerful strategic advisers and consiglieres—a position referred to in Chinese literature as dishi: “Emperor’s Teacher.” Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.
But what is singularly remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court philosopher to not just one, but all three of China’s previous top leaders, including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society.”
In the brutally cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat. Wang was recruited into the party by Jiang’s “Shanghai Gang,” a rival faction that Xi worked to ruthlessly purge after coming to power in 2012; many prominent members, like former security chief Zhou Yongkang and former vice security minister Sun Lijun, have ended up in prison. Meanwhile, Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League Faction has also been heavily marginalized as Xi’s faction has consolidated control. Yet Wang Huning remains. More than any other, it is this fact that reveals the depth of his impeccable political cunning.
And the fingerprints of China’s Grey Eminence on the Common Prosperity campaign are unmistakable. While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along with numerous essays. And the obvious continuity between the thought in those works and what’s happening in China today says something fascinating about how Beijing has come to perceive the world through the eyes of Wang Huning.
Cultural Competence
While other Chinese teenagers spent the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) “sent down to the countryside” to dig ditches and work on farms, Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard labor.
When China’s shuttered universities reopened in 1978, following the commencement of “reform and opening” by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Wang was among the first to take the restored national university entrance exam, competing with millions for a chance to return to higher learning. He passed so spectacularly that Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of China’s top institutions, admitted him into its prestigious international politics master’s program despite having never completed a bachelor’s degree.
The thesis work he completed at Fudan, which would become his first book, traced the development of the Western concept of national sovereignty from antiquity to the present day—including from Gilgamesh through Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx—and contrasted it with Chinese conceptions of the idea. The work would become the foundation for many of his future theories of the nation-state and international relations.
But Wang was also beginning to pick up the strands of what would become another core thread of his life’s work: the necessary centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to political stability.
Wang elaborated on these ideas in a 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” which would become one of his most cited works. In it, he argued that the CCP must urgently consider how society’s “software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). While seemingly a straightforward idea, this was notably a daring break from the materialism of orthodox Marxism.
Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.”
Meanwhile, he believed that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most recent structure,” he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.
That, he said, was untenable. Warning that “the components of the political culture shaped by the Cultural Revolution came to be divorced from the source that gave birth to this culture, as well as from social demands, social values, and social relations”—and thus “the results of the adoption of Marxism were not always positive”—he argued that, “Since 1949, we have criticized the core values of the classical and modern structures, but have not paid enough attention to shaping our own core values.” Therefore: “we must create core values.” Ideally, he concluded, “We must combine the flexibility of [China’s] traditional values with the modern spirit [both Western and Marxist].”
But at this point, like many during those heady years of reform and opening, he remained hopeful that liberalism could play a positive role in China, writing that his recommendations could allow “the components of the modern structure that embody the spirit of modern democracy and humanism [to] find the support they need to take root and grow.”
That would soon change.
A Dark Vision
Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.
Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.
He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s “Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.
“He was most concerned with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong, centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”
Wang’s timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Only months after his return, China’s own emerging contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning.
When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.
Wang Huning’s Nightmare
From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.
As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.
But Wang is unlikely to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.
Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.” Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such “self-employment” by 2036, according to Alibaba.
The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme (the two words share a common Chinese character). And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble.
Meanwhile, contrary to trite Western assumptions of an inherently communal Chinese culture, the sense of atomization and low social trust in China has become so acute that it’s led to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul-searching after oddly regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed.
Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.
In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family size limits and government attempts to persuade families to have more children have been met with incredulity and ridicule by Chinese young people as being “totally out of touch” with economic and social reality. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” asked one typically viral post on social media. It’s true that, given China’s cut-throat education system, raising even one child costs a huge sum: estimates range between $30,000 (about seven times the annual salary of the average citizen) and $115,000, depending on location.
But even those Chinese youth who could afford to have kids have found they enjoy a new lifestyle: the coveted DINK (“Double Income, No Kids”) life, in which well-educated young couples (married or not) spend all that extra cash on themselves. As one thoroughly liberated 27-year-old man with a vasectomy once explained to The New York Times: “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity…Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
So while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.
The Grand Experiment
It is in this context that Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over.
According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”
This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed China’s internet and social media companies. It’s why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government has announced “excessively high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”
And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”
In the end, the campaign represents Wang Huning’s triumph and his terror. It’s thirty years of his thought on culture made manifest in policy.
On one hand, it is worth viewing honestly the level of economic, technological, cultural, and political upheaval the West is currently experiencing and considering whether he may have accurately diagnosed a common undercurrent spreading through our globalized world. On the other, the odds that his gambit to engineer new societal values can succeed seems doubtful, considering the many failures of history’s other would-be “engineers of the soul.”
The best simple proxy to measure this effort in coming years is likely to be demographics. For reasons not entirely clear, many countries around the world now face the same challenge: fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement rate as they’ve developed into advanced economies. This has occurred across a diverse array of political systems, and shows little sign of moderating. Besides immigration, a wide range of policies have now been tried in attempts to raise birth rates, from increased public funding of childcare services to “pro-natal” tax credits for families with children. None have been consistently successful, sparking anguished debate in some quarters on whether losing the will to survive and reproduce is simply a fundamental factor of modernity. But if any country can succeed in reversing this trend, no matter the brute-force effort required, it is likely to be China.
Either way, our world is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape the global future of governance for the century ahead.
N.S. Lyons is an analyst and writer living and working in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Upheaval.
