Do you think Wang Hui is right to compare the New Left alliance with the neoconservatives? Don’t both support “fantasy projects” like democracy in Iraq using the same (misguided) logic that leads them to conclude that U.S. support of (abusive) trade deals with China will someday create Democracy in China?

NYTIMES-Co-editor of China’s leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang Hui spoke about how market reforms have widened the gap between rich and poor in China.

Many of its local officials, he said, used their arbitrary power to become successful entrepreneurs at the expense of the rural populations they were meant to serve and joined up with real estate speculators to seize collectively owned land from peasants. (According to Chinese officials, 60 percent of land acquisitions are illegal.) The result has been an alliance of elite political and commercial interests, Wang said, that recalls similar alliances in the United States and many East Asian countries.

Despite his invocation of socialist principles, Wang was quick to tell me that he dislikes the New Left label, even though he has used it himself. “Intellectuals reacted against ‘leftism’ in the 80’s, blaming it for all of China’s problems,” he said, “and right-wing radicals use the words ‘New Left’ to discredit us, make us look like remnants from the Maoist days.” Wang also doesn’t care to be identified with the radical intellectuals of the 60’s in America and Europe, to whom the term New Left was originally applied. Many of them, he said, had passion and slogans but very little practical politics, and not surprisingly, more than a few ended up with the neoconservatives, supporting “fantasy projects” like democracy in Iraq.

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Posted by JohnKonop on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 8:52 am | under Uncategorized | |RSS 2.0 feed | Comments and pings closed. |