Recently I’ve been mentioning the left and the right quite often, but always rather cautiously, always wanting to add a couple of lines: I don’t like taking sides, I only use labels because I have no choice, and so on. To keep on like that is not really a solution, so I might as well write an article and talk through my understanding of the so-called left and right.
My first acquaintance with the concepts of left and right probably came in middle school political class, where the teacher explained that the left was progressive and reformist, while the right was backward and conservative. We children, brainwashed by China’s rote-learning education, were at first not especially able to understand the existence of the right, because in our view progress was always good—how could anyone be against progress? Of course, very soon I realized my own childishness and began to see that the power of “conservatism” also had its rationality.
But later, some familiarity with Western scholarship (starting with Western Marxism) still made me lean more toward left-wing intellectuals—or rather, it still does to this day, because in the West left-wing intellectuals are often more critical, and their reflections on modernity are more forceful. Now I describe myself as a “right-wing socialist”; in terms of anti-capitalism, I still prefer to listen to what Western left-wing scholars have to say. But on the question of which comes first, equality or freedom, I have to stand on the right.
As for the Western left and right, in my view they are a bit like the dispute in the history of philosophy between empiricism and rationalism. Up close, the two sides seem to be fighting to the death and wholly incompatible; from a distance, they are actually about the same—seen from the standpoint of the ancients or of the East, those modern thinkers were all rationalists, and they were all empiricists too. Rationalists also value experiment; empiricists also value argumentation. The sharper the disagreement becomes, the more that means the public platform on which they stand is also more solid. Compared with people who argue with them on a different platform altogether, they look as if they were all one family.
From a Chinese perspective, the Western contemporary left and right are similar. The public platform on which Western left and right argue with each other has not yet really been erected in China. So in Chinese eyes, the Western left and right are often the same thing—Obama and George W. Bush are not all that different, both talking about democracy and freedom. And when the Chinese left calls the Chinese right “Western lackeys,” it is not saying that the Chinese right are the lackeys of the Western right; in the eyes of the Chinese left, a left-wing Obama or Hillary would not be any more亲切 than George W. Bush.
Clearly, the distinction between left and right in China has no direct relation to the distinction between left and right in the West, though of course it is not wholly unrelated either. After all, left and right are Western concepts, and only after winding their way into China, undergoing evolution and distortion, did they become what they are now.
Before the birth of New China, when the Communist Party and the Kuomintang were confronting each other head-on, to say that Mao was left and Chiang was right was broadly correct, and not very different from the Western division of left and right: the left more strongly emphasized the lower strata, pushed more radical reform, while the right leaned toward elitism and was more conservative in culture and policy.
But subsequent developments quickly warped this boundary—Mao remained left all along, while “right” gradually became its complement: anyone who was not Mao was right.
Some people say, no, that’s not right—left does not necessarily mean Mao either; wasn’t there also Wang Ming’s “Left” opportunist adventurism? But please note that in the official narrative, the left here is always put in quotation marks—Wang Ming’s “left” opportunism, but the right in right opportunism is not put in quotation marks. Even now, the sentence written into the Party constitution: “oppose all erroneous tendencies of ‘left’ and right, beware of the right, but chiefly guard against ‘left’” — although it appears to be opposing the left, this left is still in quotation marks. In other words, the left that is wrong is fake left, while the right is always wrong.
From then on, left became the default standard of political correctness, while right became the common hat worn by all “reactionaries.” Put simply, the left are the supporters, and the right are the critics.
It is not that I want to divide support and criticism into two separate camps. For example, I still consider myself a supporter of my party, but that is not incompatible with a critical stance—indeed, because I support it, I must criticize it. But historically, supporters were merely those who sang praises, while people who offered criticism were inevitably branded as rightists. The first large-scale “anti-rightist” campaign began precisely with the “open conspiracy” of “letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” and the ones who suffered were the intellectuals whose conscience compelled them to criticize.
Even today we have not really repudiated this “anti-rightist” campaign; we only say that it was “severely overextended,” which led to “unfortunate consequences.” But the problem is: if it was explicitly stated that “the speaker is not guilty, the listener must take warning,” why did the result still amount to punishment for speech? No matter how sharp or how absurd the criticism may be, if it is only speech, or even only thought not yet spoken, can it be criminalized on that basis? The error of the anti-rightist campaign was not a matter of whether it was overextended or not; it was wrong from the very beginning, and this wrong has never been settled to this day, so that the shadow of “being punished for speech” still lingers on.
Since being “screwed over” in this way, Chinese intellectuals have from then on lost their political power. In the 1980s there was a slight rebound, but they were mercilessly suppressed again. Only in recent years, with the rise of cyberspace, have intellectuals finally regained some influence over public politics. It is easy for us to understand why the so-called “public intellectuals” are often right-wing, while left-wing people are often unwilling to describe themselves as public intellectuals, even turning public intellectuals into a pejorative. There is nothing strange about this, because “intellectual” in China has always been a pejorative, a “stinky ninth category,” someone who is either currently a rightist or a potential rightist. So long as the intellectuals punished for speech have not truly been rehabilitated, “intellectual” will remain a dirty word. By contrast, today’s “grassroots” are similar to the old “poor and lower-middle peasants”: both are a banner of “political correctness.” The “a priori” reasons used to attack intellectuals are also no different from half a century ago: you lack practice, you do not know the hardships of the working people, your learning is useless, you are all empty talk… By “a priori” reasons I mean that the critic does not need to argue a specific issue; with these reasons alone, they can preemptively pin the intellectuals to the ground, and the intellectuals have no way to complain at all—must they still be sent down to labor for a while before they are entitled to speak? But even if they really are sent down to labor, they still will not have a right to speak. More than fifty years of history have already proved that, according to the “poor and lower-middle peasant” a priori logic, intellectuals will never be allowed a right to speak.
By the way, do opinions have anything to do with one’s family background and whether one is rich or poor? Yes, there is indeed a connection. The question is what kind of connection it is. To give an example: if my family has money, I may have more opportunities to eat grapes, while a child from a poor family has never even tasted grapes. Then I am more likely to say that grapes are delicious, whereas he is less likely to care about this question. So one can say that my judgment about whether grapes are delicious does indeed have some relation to my family’s wealth or poverty. But once I have made that judgment, I still think that whether grapes are sweet or sour is not a proposition with a class character; it is not that grapes taste sweet to the rich and sour to the poor. In this sense, my judgment is again unrelated to my background. The same is true of “freedom”: people from more comfortable backgrounds have more chance to appreciate the importance of freedom, so it is understandable that the rich are more inclined to promote freedom. But we think the benefits of freedom are not limited to the rich. The poor are not very concerned with the question of freedom not because freedom is bad for them, but simply because they lack experience of it.
But someone may say: are there not certain things the poor value that the rich also lack experience of? That is indeed the case. Therefore politics always needs controversy and discussion; it needs different demands to be fully displayed and brought into balance. Wealth and poverty are only one kind of difference in social status. Even if you equalized wealth and poverty, people would still have all kinds of ways of life, and the values experienced under different ways of life are not the same—what is involved here is not a dispute over truth, but a dispute over opinion. Whether instant noodles are edible, whether dumplings are nutritious—these issues can be studied objectively. But whether this evening one should eat instant noodles or dumplings is not a question of truth at all; it is simply a question of opinion. Yet it is also an urgent question on which a decision must be made. And in public affairs, in many cases our disagreements are not at the level of theory but at the level of opinion. Freedom is good, equality is good, students need school buildings, civil servants need office buildings—these are all correct. But in a specific matter, when multiple values or multiple demands are intertwined, which should come first, which is more important, which heavier and which lighter, then a decision-making process is needed. And whether that decision-making process should be one in which a small clique of leaders makes the call unilaterally and coordinates everything, or one that resolves issues through democratic debate, is a question indeed.
Although “speaking for the people” has always been the traditional mission of intellectuals, generally speaking, speaking for the people is not the same as speaking instead of the people. We do not want to replace the masses in expressing opinions; rather, we express our own views while also hoping that the opinions of the masses will have more channels through which to be expressed (for example, rumor is an important channel, and ballots are of course another). In the West, whether left or right, people value freedom of speech; a free public sphere is originally the foothold from which the so-called left-right split unfolds. But in China the situation is somewhat different. Only the right-wingers vigorously advocate freedom of speech, while the left-wingers either pay lip service while acting otherwise, or act otherwise while paying lip service. After all, the right-wing inherits the tradition of those “out of the cave” speakers from fifty years ago, while the left honors the snake-rouser who played the open conspiracy game.
The left-wingers make every effort to defend Mao, and aside from trying to cast him as a myth of “fairness,” the crucial point is that Mao possessed the achievement of “making the Chinese people stand up.” This is also the spiritual essence of left-wing thought—extreme nationalism. As I see it now, the left is populism + (extreme) nationalism, with narrow nationalism forming its source of momentum. Although this nationalism always likes to fly the banner of “patriotism,” it is actually unrelated. Patriotism is a kind of “love,” but nationalism more often expresses hatred. We can note how often, in the contexts where those people promote and emphasize the word “patriotism,” the scenes are warm and affirmative, full of love, and how often they are instead destructive scenes of courageous struggle, brave sacrifice, advancing wave after wave, and perishing together with the enemy? The substance of left-wing nationalism is hatred: hatred of foreigners, hatred of enemies, hatred of the West; it is by no means patriotism. Loving one’s own mother does not mean hating someone else’s mother; loving one’s own homeland and despising your neighbor’s homeland are completely different things. If I try to learn from some experience in my neighbor’s garden and bring it back in order to carefully arrange my own home, is that not loving my own home? How does that make me a traitor to the Han, a Western lackey?
This core of left-wing “hatred-of-the-country-ism” also explains why the left so often turns out to support Chinese traditional culture. In fact, I originally found it hard to imagine how these admirers of Mao could still genuinely long for the ritual and musical education of ancient China. But once we connect this with “hatred-of-the-country-ism,” everything makes sense—it is probably just the mentality of wanting Chinese weeds rather than Western seedlings: in any case, we want independence, we want self-strengthening, and so we must not allow Western cultural aggression.
This is my understanding of China’s distinctive left and right. Of course, speaking in broad terms inevitably risks overgeneralization, but it is enough to express and explain my basic inclination.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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