Complicitous?

ABSTRACT

Taking as its point of departure the late work of Arif Dirlik that was highly critical of the PRC state, this essay traces some of the conundrums and contradictions in the relationship between western left scholars of China, PRC “left” intellectuals, and the Chinese state over the last several decades. It suggests that, especially during the Xi Jinping era, PRC “left” intellectuals’ over-identification with the state limits critical possibilities. Inequality, patriarchy, environmental degradation, oppression of workers, and other phenomena that one would expect to be the targets of left critique receive relatively limited attention. The left focuses more on socialist legacies, and on a kind of “virtual socialism” that could be at one point be realized thanks to massive state capacity. Arif Dirlik’s “liberationist” socialism is a useful corrective to this. Still, the diminution of critical left voices in the PRC is a loss for left critique worldwide.

KEYWORDS:

• Complicity
• critique
• “friends of China”
• “New left”
• nationalism
• Xi Jinping
• “virtual socialism”
• “liberationist socialism”

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 The U.S. Friends of the Soviet Union still exists, “dedicated to the struggle to restore socialism in Eastern Union and the former Soviet Union.” See https://usfriendsofthesovietpeople.org/.

2 For a recent study of the CCAS, see Lanza (2017).

3 For a history of the phrase, see David Bandurski, “Hurting the Feelings of the Zhao Family.” China Media Project, 29 January 2016. https://chinamediaproject.org/2016/01/29/hurting-the-feelings-of-the-zhao-family/.

4 Alain Badiou has written forcefully on the politics of this synthesis: “Taken as a subjective formula, as desire for the One, the maxim of synthesis (two fuse into one) is declared rightist because in the eyes of the Chinese revolutionaries it is entirely premature. The subject of this maxim is yet to fully traverse the Two to its end and does not yet know what a fully victorious class war is. It follows that the One it covets is not even yet thinkable, which means that under the cover of synthesis, this desire is calling for the old One. This interpretation of dialectics is restorative. In order not to be a conservative, in order to be a revolutionary activist in the present, it is instead obligatory to desire division. The question of novelty immediately becomes that of the creative scission within the singularity of the situation” (2007, 60).

5 This essay is one in a special issue devoted to Andreas’s book. My own essay in the issue focuses on depoliticization and defeat. http://prchistory.org/the-prc-history-review-5-2/.

6 See, for example, Amin (2013) or Long, Herrera, and Andréani (2018).

7 In the German original, see Bertolt Brecht, Buch der Wendungen. In Prosa (1965), vol. 5, 137. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Leigh Connery

Christopher Leigh Connery teaches World Literature and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He has a PhD in East Asian Studies, and has published Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China as well as other works about the global 1960s and about oceanic thinking.