Li Zehou And The Marxist Reconstruction Of Confucianism

Although no other critic in post-Mao China could compete with Li Zehou's influence on China's elite culture throughout the 1980s, Li's place in the Cultural Discussion was an ambiguous one. Pledging no

public allegiance to any of the schools mentioned above, he scandalized neo-Confucianists with his famous proposition of xiti zhongyong (Western substance, Chinese application) and incensed young radicals with his repudiation of their total rejection of Confucianism. In fact, at the 1993 American convention of the Association for Asian Studies, Li spoke critically of the modern neo-Confucianists' attempt to inherit the Song-Ming tradition of moral metaphysics.^[104] And yet his consistent espousal of such Confucian principles as "practical rationality" (shiyong lixing ) and the unity of Heaven and (hu)man helps restore, in a self-contradictory fashion, the image of a Confucianist with whom Tu Weiming can claim alliance, and at whom an advocate of total westernization like Liu Xiaobo lashes out in righteous anger.

To further complicate his ideological makeup, Li Zehou presents himself as an orthodox Marxist who approaches Kant on two conflicting epistemological grounds. On the one hand, he recognizes that Kant is the true philosophical predecessor of Marx, for Kantianism prefigures the materialist thesis of the irreducibility of being to thought; and yet on the other hand, Li Zehou is eager to foreground the idealist framework of Kantian epistemology (to examine the "subjective psychological structure of human subjectivity" in terms of the Kantian triple inquiry into epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics) as a priori for the rejuvenation of Chinese Marxism.^[105]

Li Zehou's double call for "constructing two civilizations" (the material and spiritual civilization) is symptomatic of his accommodative streak that always seeks to merge materialism and idealism in a continuum reminiscent of middle-of-the-road Confucian eclectism.^[106] Therefore, instead of valorizing Li Zehou's philosophy as a site of contestation, I suggest that we examine it as a site of conciliation where an ongoing process of ideological negotiation among historical materialism, idealism, and Confucian rationalism takes shape. Bearing in mind his penchant for the philosophy of the unity of Heaven and (hu)man, we should anticipate that Li Zehou's theoretical practice faithfully enacts the Confucianist instinct for reconciliation. The meeting of classical Marxist with reformist Confucian ideology thus sets the moral tenor of his philosophy of modernity.

The ideological double identity underlying Li Zehou's vision for Chinese modernity betrays moments of awkwardness and uncertainty whenever he fails to articulate which of the two ideologies, Confucianism or Marxism, orchestrates the process of appropriation and prescribes its final results. The making of such an ideological choice is bound to be

difficult for those who subscribe to the double identity in question. Li Zehou's agenda, however, is always marked by his concern to enlist neo-Confucianism's service to modernization without compromising his deep commitment to Marxism.

It is the pursuit of this agenda that leads Li Zehou to propagate many radical propositions central to the classical heritage of historical materialism. My use of "radical" here calls for explanation, since Li Zehou's subscription to Marxism has earned him the diametrically opposite title of "conservative" among the circle of young iconoclasts. In the anti-Marxist climate of post-Mao China, anyone bold enough to keep talking about how toolmaking, and by implication, how the mode of production rather than an abstract human nature, determines the course of history, inevitably invites the stigmatic label of conservatism. Little do Li's critics comprehend that because unreconstructed humanism now prevails in Deng's China as the new religion, it is those who dare to swim against the sentimental tide of humanism who truly deserve to be called radical. Whatever eulogies or criticisms should accompany our reading of Li Zehou, it is quite refreshing to see one human being challenge the humanist dogma of entitlements. It is a profound irony, especially for those of us who study China from a distance, to witness how Chinese intellectuals who suffered under the tyranny of the majority during the long revolutionary years fail to appreciate the ritualistic meaning of Li Zehou's defying the norm of the day.

A thorough review of Li Zehou's philosophy falls outside the main configuration of this chapter. What interests me here is how Li Zehou appropriates Confucianism as a Marxist and how ideological cooptation takes place in both directions. More often than not, tracing the ambivalent career of Li Zehou's Marxian Confucianism (or should I say, Confucian Marxism?) leads to the unraveling of the inner contradictions of such a project. For orthodox Confucianists, Li's revisit of their favorite conceptual categories such as Chinese substance and Western means, the unity of Heaven and (hu)man, and practical rationality signifies nothing less than an act of irreverence, inasmuch as he reactivates those categories for the purpose of serving the agenda of modernity rather than the declining indigenous tradition.

On the surface, Li Zehou's mission is no different from that of Chinese neo-Confucianists, since both parties are engaged in the task of reviving Confucian tradition for modernity's sake. The difference, however, lies in the mode of ideological retooling that takes place concomitantly with the act of reinterpreting the Confucian canon. Whereas

neo-Confucianists revert to the Song-Ming lixue with its emphasis on moral cultivation as the locus of salvation to combat modernity's excess of instrumental reason, Li Zehou departs from such idealist babble about "sagehood" and "inner nature" by revalorizing the materialistic principle of the economic laws of historical development. It is his focus on dialectics, not metaphysics, on base structure, not superstructure, and on Engels' historical materialism, not the Frankfurt School Marxism, that distinctly differentiates his system of thought from any idealist school—neo-Confucianism included. It is hardly surprising that Li's materialist reinvention of Chinese categories should incorporate a trajectory of Marxian principles: the final instance of economic determination in xiti zhongyong , humanized nature in renhua ziran , and the concept of practice in shiyong lixing .

Xiti Zhongyong: Western Learning as Substance, Chinese Learning as Means

Today, we have to come up with a clear definition when we use the two categories ti (substance) and yong (application). I used the term "substance" differently from other people. It includes material and spiritual production. I emphasize time and again that the ontology of society is one and the same as the [material] being of society. If we interpret "substance" in terms of the [material] being of society, then it includes not only ideology, not simply some "isms," but also the mode of production of a society and the daily life [of its people]. Seen from the viewpoint of historical materialism, this is the real substance—the [concrete] mode of existence of human beings. What we meant by modernization is first and foremost the transformation of this "substance." In the process of this transformation, science and technology play a very important role. Science and technology are the cornerstones of the being of society because the development of the force of production that they trigger serves to motivate the changes of social reality and people's daily life.^[107]

The quote illustrates how Li Zehou arrives at the radical conclusion that ti is the mode of production of society and the material condition of human life rather than a purely conceptual mode, political system, or the Confucian ethical hierarchy of three bonds and five relationships (san'gang wulun ), interpretations derived from the idealist logic embedded in Zhang Zhidong's original concoction of zhongti xiyong (Chinese substance and Western means). Modernization understood in this new context means revolutionizing the premodern, feudal mode of production, characterized by Li as land-centered small peasants' economy, and replacing it with commodity-oriented economic production. Based on the assumption that scientific and technological revolution originated in

the West, Li Zehou comes unexpectedly to the same conclusion espoused by advocates of total westernization: "Modernization means nothing other than westernization."^[108] The radical implications of Li Zehou's reiteration of such an overquoted formula can hardly be appreciated if we identify his agenda for "westernization" as the same as that trumpeted by proponents of total westernization who embrace the liberalist vision. It is not the ideas of democracy and individualism, but the production of large modern industries that defines Li Zehou's conception of what the West stands for. By emphasizing the importance of modernizing China from the bottom up, Li reiterates the theoretical premise of orthodox Marxism—namely, the "ultimately determining instance" of base structure.

Li Zehou's materialist conception of history rang particularly true in the post-1989 era. The aborted utopianism at Tian'anmen Square taught one relentless lesson: that the course of history could not be changed by ideas alone. In the 1990s, it becomes more and more obvious that it is the economic rather than the ideological, political, or cultural that delimits the Chinese social imaginary. With the cultural elite pushed into the background and their project of enlightenment once more revoked by the Party hardliners, China has finally come down to earth in its pursuit of real, not symbolic capital. The decade of the 1980s that celebrated the conventional wisdom that "knowledge is wealth" is gone forever. The agenda of getting rich does not distinguish commoners from the elite but, on the contrary, privileges the former over the latter in the jungle where only the fittest survive. Thus since the late 1980s, even before the new decade dawned on the desecrated Tian'anmen Square, the search for alternative socioeconomic models in rural China has replaced the intangible cause of cultural renaissance as the problematic central to any discussion of Chinese modernity. Both at home and abroad, it is the emerging local socioeconomic roots rather than a uniform national policy, concrete models of rural enterprise rather than abstract economic paradigms, that form the central locus of any serious inquiry about the future of China's modernization. Now that economists and sociologists have reoriented their research and sought new models for rural and township economy by undertaking one case study after another (the Daqiuzhuang in Hebei, Fuyang in Anhui, and the Jinhua in Zhejiang model), it becomes clear that Gan Yang's formulation of xiangtu Zhongguo (Rural China) emerges as a more viable platform for Chinese social modernity than Tu Weiming's wenhua Zhongguo (Cultural China).^[109] In the mid-1990s, Li Zehou's proposal of revolutionizing China's premodern mode of production sounds more timely, wholesome, and realizable than ever.

And yet as I mentioned earlier, Li Zehou is too much an advocate of fusion to be locked in a strictly materialist position for long. Although he subscribes to the vulgar Marxist theory of levels and gives more weight to the infrastructure in his proposition of Western substance and Chinese means, he cannot resist making sporadic references to Western "superstructure" (identified as "self-consciousness" or "ontological consciousness") and specifying it as an indispensable part of the "Western substance" that needs to be transplanted to China simultaneously with means of technological and material production.^[110] The integration of such an idealist perspective into an otherwise materialist framework reveals apparent imprints of eclecticism. At times, it is difficult to tell if one doctrine really gains the upper hand over the other in this seemingly harmonious picture of ideological conjugation. A close examination of Li Zehou's works reveals, however, that he foregrounds the fundamental Marxist tenet of mechanistic causality even while he attempts to introduce the idealist problematics of human consciousness into the picture. Such a causal logic dictates that superstructure corresponds and responds to base structure and that the formal transformation of the latter would inevitably trigger a concurrent or subsequent transfiguration of the former.

Li Zehou's subscription to the fundamentally materialist law of cause and effect manifests itself in many ways. It is revealed in his definition of xiti as the sum total of both spiritual (ontological consciousness) and material (science and technology) production, with the former understood as a superstructural system that mirrors and reproduces the latter. It is still social being that determines consciousness rather than the other way around. The same mechanical causality is at work when Li concludes that "only after commodity economy has prospered, [can we] then gain the consciousness of liberalism and secure the foundation within which 'Western learning' could truly take root and develop."^[111] Finally, it is this naive orthodox Marxist faith in the one-to-one correspondence between base and superstructure that enables Li Zehou to envision the potential change of the "cultural-psychological formation" of historical Chinese culture.

Relying upon the logic of mechanical causality, Li Zehou coined the term "cultural-psychological formation" (wenhua xinli jiegou ) to account for the superstructural stability that seemed to survive each dynastic and revolutionary change that took place throughout imperial and modern Chinese history. Such a superstructural stability, Li argues, is built upon the relative infrastructural stability perpetuated by the eco-

nomic system based on the agricultural mode of production. As long as such an economic system remains intact, the corresponding cultural-psychological formation—specified by Li Zehou in one instance as the clan-centered familial and social order and in another instance as the particular Chinese dialectics of bipolar complementarity—will recycle itself in the continual reproduction of a cultural logic that emphasizes ethics at the expense of ontology and epistemology and privileges functional harmony over resistance and agency.^[112] One can almost conclude, following Li Zehou's argument, that it is the "sedimentation" (jidian ) of the cultural unconscious that constitutes the bottleneck of Chinese modernity.

But Li Zehou's attitude toward the ultrastable superstructure of Chinese society is by no means as unambiguous as Jin Guantao's. Adopting Li's premise about the potential stagnation embedded in China's cultural-psychological formation, Jin Guantao forges a theory of ultrastability that condemns unambiguously the immutability of such a historical formation. A closer look at Li Zehou's treatise on the concept betrays no such blanket condemnation. As a matter of fact, Li always leaves room for further concessions in theorizing the notion of cultural-psychological formation. And in so doing, he allows himself to return later to revalorize the concept whenever the occasion for such a compromise may arise.

Unfortunately, such occasions abound. Li Zehou frustrates any reader who has little appetite for the Confucian art of expediency. Contradictory descriptions of cultural-psychological formation pepper the pages in various guises. What Li Zehou often resorts to is a double-headed argument. On the one hand, he conceptualizes cultural-psychological formation in ahistorical terms of "relative autonomy" and "self-regulation"; in so doing, he leaves room for the emergence of unpredictable elements that may yet destabilize the structural continuity of the firmly anchored cultural unconscious. On the other hand, his good materialist persona cannot help arguing for the opposite: that the ultimate material base of Chinese "small land-owners' economy" determines the predictability and immobility of superstructure. The word "autonomy" is thus counteracted in the text by "economical constraint," and yet the negative imagery of inertia that "cultural-psychological formation" unmistakably conjures up is at the same time offset by such aggressive qualifiers as "active equilibrium."^[113]

Li Zehou's vacillating rhetoric about cultural sedimentation—that it is a completed circle at one moment and a kinetic motion at the next—indicates that he cannot decide whether superstructure is a mere

epiphenomenon of economy or a semiautonomous force that interacts with and sometimes even overpowers economic constraints. The sight of an orthodox Marxist struggling to break out of his own methodological limitations is always intriguing. The breakthrough, however, never really occurs. And Li Zehou's mechanical application of the Marxist causal logic reinforces the paradox: China's premodern cultural-psychological formation is both static and dynamic. It is static to the extent that the land-centered agricultural mode of production in premodern China produces a superstructure rooted in fixed cultural and social practices. It is dynamic to the extent that the infrastructural change in forces of production prescribed by Li Zehou inevitably presupposes the potential (per)mutability of such a cultural-psychological formation: "[We] have to use the modernized 'Western substance' . . . to reconstruct 'Chinese learning' industriously, to change traditional Chinese cultural-psychological formation, and to transform its sedimentation consciously."^[114]

The necessity of destabilizing the concept of a sedimented cultural-psychological formation is undoubtedly tremendous. What is at stake is the Marxist faith in praxis and change. In his 1993 appearance at the convention of the Asian Studies Association in Los Angeles, Li Zehou made a public effort to emphasize the living processes of the formation in question. He proposes that we change the English term "formation" into "forming," and "sedimentation" into "sedimentating," and thus succeeds in downplaying the ultrastable essence that he ascribed to the concept of "cultural-psychological formation" earlier.^[115]

Tianren Heyi: Retrograde Cultural Unconscious or an Antidote for Modernity in Excess?

Li Zehou's presentation of the Confucian concept of tianren heyi —the unity of Heaven and (hu)man—part and parcel of the cultural-psychological formation of premodern China, reveals the contradictory pull that he always feels whenever he is called upon to reevaluate Chinese tradition from the Marxist vantage point. The perfect equilibrium between human beings and their environment, between internal and external human nature, and between the individual and the collective is endorsed on the one hand as the "active adaptation" of human beings to the "rhythms of nature," but problematized on the other hand as a form of the "passive" human "obedience and worship" of a Heaven that predetermines and dictates the terms of human destiny.^[116]

Li Zehou's critical interpretation of tianren heyi as a quietistic "mental landscape,"^[117] both moralistically and metaphysically defined, contains within itself an implicit critique of the Song-Ming neo-Confucianism that

took root in a highly introverted worldview with its emphasis on the doctrine of neisheng (sageliness within), the rigorous self-cultivation and disciplining of worldly desires. Li Zehou is at his best when he traces and articulates the historical tension between the Confucian twin doctrines of neisheng and waiwang (kingliness without). It seems predictable that a Marxist like Li Zehou should unambiguously endorse the latter strategy—the salvation of society—as a higher form of practical rationality than the salvation of the soul that the former doctrine embodies.

Yet if we interpret Li Zehou's emphasis on the doctrine of "kingliness without" only in terms of his ideological commitment to Marxian praxis, we risk simplifying the ideological subtexts underlying his philosophy of modernity. Li Zehou's effort of accentuating the politics of governing (that is what kingliness is all about) also grows out of the orthodox Confucianist calling to serve. He comes closest to embracing the ideas of the qimeng school when he cites Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and Tang Zhen, the Confucian masters of early Qing dynasty, as the genuine spokesmen for the doctrine of kingliness.^[118] The Qing masters' critique of sovereign rights and their simultaneous advocation of certain embryonic concepts of constitutional equality and democratic representation embody for Li Zehou the spirit of modern enlightenment thought.

Gu Yanwu and the cohort of enlightenment scholars offered Li Zehou a viable alternative to modernize Confucian tradition, namely, the separation of the demands of sageliness from those of kingliness, and to put it without metaphorical flourishes, the potential disengagement of statecraft from ethics and politics from morality. Underlying this separatist logic is a modernist assumption that the old Confucian insistence on zhengjiao heyi (the unity of politics and ethics) was responsible for all the evils that plagued premodern China—the lack of a well-grounded epistemological, liberal democratic, and independent scientific tradition—in theoretical terms, the undifferentiatedness of substantive from instrumental reason.

Here Li Zehou stumbles into another paradox, for his questioning of the unity of politics and ethics contradicts his enthusiastic endorsement of the unity of Heaven and humans. What does tianren heyi symbolize but the interpenetration of the natural and the social, sensibility and rationality, and on a higher theoretical level, the continuum of substantive and instrumental rationality? Such a prescribed continuum may indeed perpetuate itself: It includes the private and the public, sageliness and kingliness, and in quotidian terms, ethics and politics. The contradiction

of Li Zehou's position on the question of continuum seems inexplicable. It illustrates once more the ideological intervention of the utilitarian agenda of modernization. As long as Li is attracted to the practical strategy of enthroning instrumental reason to accelerate China's modernization program, substantive rationality and its various manifestations (sagely virtues among them) have to be disengaged from the former. In extrapolation, ethics and the realm of the private (jiao ) have to be extricated from the political and the public (zheng ). Obviously, Li Zehou's total commitment to the cause of modernization compromises his project of revamping the doctrine of tianren heyi and renders his theoretical reconstruction of continuum inherently paradoxical.

My purpose in pinpointing this contradiction in Li's epistemic system is not to resolve it but rather to highlight the shifting ideological grounds on which Li Zehou's philosophy stands. Such inconsistency emerges at the most unlikely moments. No sooner have we arrived at our conclusion about the pragmatist and modernist persona of the philosopher who practices Weberian separatist reasoning, than we confront another ideological somersault: A now equanimous Li Zehou extolls the philosophy of totalitarian harmony by reconstruing the utopia of tianren heyi .

The supple content of tianren heyi —the unity of bipolar opposites—invites open-ended inquiries for it is impregnated with all kinds of semantic possibilities and ideological visions. Li Zehou's reinterpretation of the concept was by all means a timely move. The old Confucianist hermeneutics that presupposes the existence of a benevolent Heaven that predicts and observes the passive fusion of bipolar pairs has definitely lost its appeal in the modern age that stakes everything on the agency of human beings and privileges conflicts and difference rather than premeditated harmony and homogeneity. To modernize the concept of tianren heyi , Li unmistakably speaks in the Marxist lingo: "[The transformation of] tianren heyi —how to evolve it from quiet observation to action, how to absorb the sublime and tragic spirit of the West, and how to bestow upon it an inner motivating force that will enable it to break out of silence and to chase [after desires] vigorously—only when [we] build the concept upon the Marxist theoretical basis of 'humanized nature' can we arrive at a fundamental solution [of its transformation]."^[119]

The ideological reinvestment underlying the revamped concept calls for further explanation. Li Zehou starts the process by suggesting the impossible: that we divest the concept of its material underpinning. To achieve this goal, he delivers a working hypothesis that seriously compromises his avowed materialist position: Once we "extricate" from

tianren heyi "those passive elements characteristic of the small-scale agricultural mode of production," the concept will reemerge as a useful category for contemporary philosophy.^[120] Insofar as all true believers of orthodox Marxism take as its most sacred decree the indivisibility of base and superstructure, this is certainly a sacrilegious statement. The unabashed call for the abstraction of the material base from the content of cultural production gives rise to the most flagrant blunder that the Chinese Marxist committed. This is clearly one of the most poignant moments that reveals, without the theorist's own awareness, the cooptation of Marxism by his hidden Confucianist agenda.

This unspoken agenda has been shared by many of Li Zehou's Confucian forebears and his contemporaries who are single-mindedly devoted to the cause of delivering the golden mean from modernity's excessive impulse at all costs. Li Zehou's second step to modernize the concept of tianren heyi is precisely to ensure that the Confucian aesthetics of harmony serve as the most efficacious antidote for the emotional, sensual, and material surplus identified as the notorious second nature of capitalist modernity. It is Li Zehou's recognition of the rupture of culture with nature, a price paid by modern society as it marches through history from primitive communities to capitalism, that prompts him to turn to Marxian metaphors in search of an interpretive framework that would help rehabilitate the unity of Heaven and (hu)mans.

Li Zehou's Marxist rewriting of tianren heyi did not bring redemption to a world torn asunder by the extravagance of human imagination. In fact, the new version exacerbates the anthropocentric view that runs counter to the original spirit of tianren heyi . The marriage of the Marxist view of a tempered nature with the Confucian aesthetics of the happy continuum of the noumenal and the phenomenal promises a rocky relationship from the very start. First of all, the classical Marxist view of "humanized nature" emphasizes the increasing domination of human beings over nature as an indispensable process of the progressive emancipation of human society from the tyranny of natural necessity. The development of the forces of production goes hand in hand with the gradual conquest of nature.

Li Zehou's reinscription of tianren heyi in the Marxian conceptual framework inevitably follows the same humanistic logic of the taming of the wild. The "wilderness" in question not only serves as a metaphor for Nature with a capital "N" but also for the unruly forces residing within human nature itself. Li believes that this double focus on the metaphor of humanization (renhua )—the humanization of Nature and

the arduous "permeation and sedimentation of rationality" into the "inner nature" of human beings—promises the harmonious fusion of reason and sensibility.^[121] Yet it is difficult to take this metaphor of fusion at face value. The picture he provides of the meeting of the senses and reason actually involves the process of the domestication of the one by the other. Regardless of the occasional adjustment he makes to redress the tilted scale (he resorts to terms such as "interpenetration" and "mutual internalization," "the deposits of sensibility in rationality," and "the deposits of Nature in society"), Li Zehou is more susceptible to the reverse logic: "Sexual desire is turned into love, natural relations into human relations, natural organs into aesthetic organs, and the libido into passions for the beautiful."^[122] As the philosopher proudly declares, what emerges from this process of sublimation and humanization is the "ultimate manifestation of subjectivity," an entity that can hardly be associated with any sense of autonomy, since it is conceived first and foremost as an end product of socialization. In Li Zehou's epistemological configuration, the subject (zhuti ) is not a lone signifier freed of prescribed content. It is not defined in terms of "subjective consciousness, emotions, and desires of the individual," but rather in collective terms of "social consciousness" and "cultural-psychological formation."^[123] Eventually, it is the subjugation of the senses to reason, the natural to the sociocultural, the individual to the community, rather than the harmonious coexistence of the two, that constitutes Li Zehou's contemporary recoding of tianren heyi . This is, of course, a far cry from the aesthetic imaginary that the concept originally delimited.

Li Zehou is certainly not oblivious to human beings' changing attitude toward nature in modern, premodern, and postmodern societies. He specifies the potential allegiance between premodernity and postmodernity: Our ancestors lived in the "arms of Nature," whereas contemporary ecological correctness has driven alienated postmoderns to an increasingly urgent call for the return to nature.^[124] What he places in question here is the anthropomorphic view that privileges humanity at all costs. Li's acknowledgment of the pitfalls of modernity's exploitation of nature for the advancement of human welfare makes it even more difficult for us to comprehend why his rewritten version of tianren heyi is firmly grounded in human-centered consciousness. It appears that the classical Marxist heritage of humanized nature is the wrong paradigm to appropriate. Perhaps the ideological alliance the philosopher should forge is one with a Marxism of a different brand.

This speculation returns us once more to Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment , which takes as its point of departure the reconstruction of the harmonious relationship between nature and human beings. What Adorno and Horkheimer subvert is nothing short of the classical Marxist view of humanized nature, instrumental reason, and the Enlightenment notion of progress. This is a Janus-faced view of modern Western history that exposes the dialectics of Enlightenment as none other than the negation of its own inflated agenda. The price of domination over nature, of which human beings themselves are inseparably a part, signifies the enslavement of the psychic by the social, id by ego, substantive by instrumental reason, spontaneous impulses by rationality—all oppressions committed in the name of emancipation. To redeem the fall of nature, Adorno and Horkheimer made a proposal that comes close to the Chinese aesthetics of tianren heyi but which also departs from it in emphasizing the ultimate nonidentity between nature and humanity. Perry Anderson's interpretation of this renewed Marxist vision illuminates the subtle difference between the Western Marxists' vantage point and the Chinese one: "A liberated society . . . its historical goal would be, not domination of nature, but reconciliation with it. This would mean abandonment of the cruel and hopeless attempt to dictate an identity of man and nature, by the subjugation of the latter to the former, for an acknowledgment of both the distinction and relation between them—in other words, their vulnerable affinity ."^[125]

The recognition of the "vulnerable" basis of this "affinity" between "man and nature" would certainly sound heretical to a Chinese Confucianist, for whom a harmony fraught with the seeds of contradiction, or in Anderson's view, with the nonidentity of bipolar opposites, is an uneasy harmony at best. And yet how can we save the aesthetic nirvana of tianren heyi from its complete saturation with inertia but emphasize, instead, the possibilities of change within seamless totality and continual growth after the "reconciliation" in question has come to fruition?

A passing comment made by Li Zehou surprisingly coincides with the spirit of "vulnerable affinity." "[Our recognition of] the importance of individual entity and its unique development . . . has rendered the original doctrines of 'sageliness within and kingliness without' and the 'complementality of Confucianism and Daoism' into a kind of impoverished and degraded 'primitive perfection.'"^[126] In acknowledging the potential of "individual entity" to reinvigorate old doctrines of synthesis, Li Zehou comes close to suggesting the concept of nonidentity. Although he

does not pursue the satiric implications that the metaphor of primitive perfection is capable of generating, the Chinese Marxist would agree with Adorno and Horkheimer's view that nonidentity between individual entities precludes "any harmony free of contradiction."^[127] Only genuine discrimination promised by the principle of nonidentity can deliver the philosophy of tianren heyi from its incestuous self-reproduction of perfection. To break out of the autochthonous circle of predetermined harmony, Li Zehou can indeed learn a few lessons from the dialectics of Western Marxism, which, among other things, can instill into the utopian content of tianren heyi an overdue regard for the integrity of individual entities that Li Zehou himself speaks of with such sharpened postmodern epochal consciousness.

But the fruitful exchange between Li Zehou and Western Marxists would probably end right here. The former's condemnation of Western Marxism, and of the Frankfurt School in particular, forecloses at least for the time being any ideological alliance with its practitioners. Perhaps it is Li Zehou's deep revulsion to certain preconceived notions about Western Marxism that in part accounts for his turning away from Adorno and Horkheimer to the orthodox Marxist tradition for inspiration in his rewriting of tianren heyi .

I have little intention to vindicate Western Marxists here, although Li Zehou's understanding of the Critical Theory is problematic. Suffice it to say, his critique of Western Marxism tells more of the historical vision that post-Mao China is experiencing at this particular historical juncture: This is a China that negates the sum total of its Maoist phase; this is also a China that envisions itself entering the threshold of capitalist modernity and whose only agenda is to clear the barriers to implementing the capitalist mode of production. Under these terms, it is almost impossible not to pit Maoism against capitalism. The renunciation of Maoism, for the majority of China's elite, goes hand in hand with the unconditioned acceptance of capitalism. Li Zehou's hostility to Western Marxism thus completes its full cycle as he lashes out at the Critical Theory's "totalizing critique and negation of capitalism."^[128] It is predictable that the conflation of Western Marxism with anticapitalism and anticapitalism with Maoism may pave the way for the final breakdown of discrimination between Western Marxism and Maoism—an ideological undercurrent that Li Zehou's thinking reveals periodically.^[129]

"Practice" and Practical Rationality

Li Zehou's critique of Western Marxism is consistent with his distrust of a priori or nonempirical cate-

gories. Historical materialism, however, cannot claim to be the single source of inspiration for Li's concoction of shiyong lixing (practical rationality) and for the privileging of practice over praxis in his critique of Marcuse and his fellow travelers. In this dispute with the Frankfurt School over the primacy of praxis, it is Kantianism with its insistence on the need for an empirical component in knowledge and its antipathy to speculative metaphysics that comes to reinforce Li Zehou's materialist position.

Li Zehou's objection to the concept of praxis is based on the same logic that leads him to condemn the epistemological turn of the Frankfurt School toward the cultural study of superstructure from that of "labor, material production, and the economic life" of human beings, activities that he perceives as firmly grounded in base structure.^[130] He complains that the term "praxis" in Western Marxism incorporates those human activities (patterns of quotidian life, theoretical inquiries, cultural activities) that have nothing to do with the fundamental core of social existence, namely, material production. In his view, social practice is the sum total of the activities of the actual human engagement in material production, which he defines in specific terms throughout his Pipan zhexue de pipan (Critiquing the critique of philosophy) (1979), a critique on Kant, as "using tools and making tools." In short, Li Zehou insists that because praxis is informed by, and sometimes even subjugated to, theoretical considerations, it cannot be considered as a pure category of practice. Quoting Marx and Kant at the same time, he trumpets with passion such truisms as "liberation is a historical activity, not an activity of the mind" and "it is not the 'a priori subjectivity' of human consciousness, but the historical human practice (rooted in material reality) that constitutes the truly great 'selfhood' of human subjectivity" (200). "Practical" in the Kantian framework points to what is experimental, which is not quite the same as Western Marxists' use of "praxis" as the "identity of theory and practice." Li Zehou, like those American pragmatists who prefer the Kantian experimental meaning without the dialectics, consecrates practice rather than praxis as the fundamental category of Marxist philosophy (363).

There is little space here for me to elaborate the philosophy of praxis in the history of Western Marxism. However, I should pinpoint the voluntarist implications in this concept. Although Marcuse, Horkheimer, and their colleagues understood true praxis as a collective endeavor, they acknowledge the necessity of voluntarism and were fascinated with the built-in orientation of "anthropogenesis," in other words, with

the self-determined and self-generating nature of action and activity in whose terms the concept was originally conceived and articulated in the early writings of the Frankfurt School.^[131] One can well imagine why Marcuse's well-known proclamation—"Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth, not vice versa"—agitates the generation of Chinese intellectuals, Li Zehou among them, who suffered for nearly a decade from the theoretical experiment of the Great Cultural Revolution undertaken in the name of praxis.^[132] Li's passing reference to 1958, the year that marked the inception of the Great Leap Forward, reflects an orthodox Marxist's condemnation of a revolution waged in the name of "subjectivist voluntarist belief" that "runs counter to the laws of history."^[133] "Laws" in this context specify the motions of the forces and modes of material production. Such sporadic and carefully guarded critiques of Mao's legacy of permanent revolution and of the theoretical miscarriages that the Chairman orchestrated in his late revolutionary career serve as a telling sign of how the controversy over practice versus praxis that Li Zehou lays out in his philosophy is, to a great extent, politically motivated and grounded. We should not be surprised if the thinking promoted by the Frankfurt School—that theory serves as a guide to action, or in more radical terms, that theory is "the only form of praxis still open to honest man"—reminds Li Zehou chillingly of the historical lesson that Mao's China learned belatedly: Deviation from historical materialists' emphasis on practice often leads to subjective voluntarism.^[134]

This short excursion illustrates the significant role that Maoism plays in Li Zehou's strategy of highlighting the agonistic relationship between practice and praxis. Once this particular subtext for the contestation of the one against the other is brought to light, we can better understand how the family feud (both practice and praxis are Marxist categories after all) took shape in the first place.

Li Zehou's separation of practice from theory, which owes its theoretical underpinning to historical materialism, follows yet another unlikely model—Kantianism. The separation in question finds its mirror image in Kant's distinction between ethical and pragmatic rules. Ethical rule is seen as following a categorical imperative based on the individual's "inner pure" reason, an a priori and universal consciousness that acknowledges and wills humankind as an end in itself. In contrast, pragmatic rule traces the track of common prudence and subscribes to the technical imperatives or means required to achieve desired ends. Fol-

lowing Kant's example of downgrading the capacity of pure reason to gain insight in the "things in themselves," Li Zehou privileges the principle of pragmatic rule and all the categories housed under its umbrella: objective (as opposed to subjective) considerations, means (as opposed to ends), and social practice (as opposed to pure reason). It is on the Kantian empiricist model that the theoretical construction of shiyong lixing is primarily established.

The so-called practical rationality first and foremost points to a rational spirit or a rational attitude. . . . [For instance], Confucius provided the hermeneutics of "humaneness" to account for "rites." This [tendency] accorded with the general drift of "practical rationality." It is not by having recourse to some mysterious fervor, but by utilizing dispassionate, realistic, and rationalistic attitudes, that one can decode and deal with matters and tradition; it is by means of rationality that one can guide, satisfy, and mitigate desires, not by resorting to asceticism or hedonism to smother or to release them; it is neither through outbound nihilism nor self-bound egocentrism but through one's quest for humanity and for personal integrity that one can achieve equilibrium.^[135]

The Kantian overtones of pragmatic rule are manifest in Li Zehou's insistence that the mind imposes its forms and categories on the sensory manifold. The categorical structure in which the mind decodes and organizes sensory experiences is identified by Li specifically as "practical rationality," a principle that dictates that "reason penetrate feeling, reason intermingle with feeling, and feeling serve reason."^[136] The Kantian influence is palpable in this definition as Li Zehou bestows upon reason an a priori synthesizing capability to order and constrain phenomena.

It is worth noting, however, that it is precisely at this theoretical juncture that Li Zehou departs from Kant significantly. That is, he materializes the formal and formative principle of practical reason in terms of the Confucian rules of equilibrium to be arrived at through the taming of the natural and the sensual. One should ask how Li Zehou can justify the emergence of any equilibrium when the process of merging quoted above represents a colonizing process that subjugates feeling to reason, sensual nature to the human mind. The question that plagues Li's mind is certainly not the same that plagued Kant's: How is knowledge possible? Whereas Kant is concerned about the nature of the restriction of human knowledge, hence the ultimate inadequacy of the human mind to grasp the "things in themselves," Li is preoccupied with the application of human knowledge. A different question is raised: How can we produce knowledge for practical utilization?

To ensure the applicability of human knowledge, the mind has to emerge as the enabling monitor that processes the enormous corpus of sensory data and carefully sorts out the unserviceable from the useful. To arrive at this end, Li Zehou has to tone down the skepticism that characterizes the Kantian epistemology and rescue subjectivism from the Kantian transcendentalism that, by its intrinsic logic, denies human beings access to the external world. The subjectivism thus redeemed reaffirms human beings as the reasoning and thinking subject that owns the exclusive right to shape the phenomenal world in order to serve the anthropocentric project of "saving the world (humanism) and of self-completion."^[137] Although Li Zehou constantly reiterates that the significance of the contemporary revisit of Kant resides in the latter's inquiry into the human "subjective-psychological structure (epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics),"^[138] Li's inheritance of the notion of practical rationality from Kantianism is less articulate on the epistemological front than on that of pragmatics and teleology. In the same pragmatic spirit, he concludes that practical rationality and its ideological cradle, Confucianism, "are not obstacles to modernization."^[139]

Li Zehou's direct linking of practical rationality with Confucianism requires little explanation, since the operating intelligence of the former is already couched in suggestive terms of equilibrium—the cardinal imagery of the Confucian golden mean. What needs to be emphasized is that practical rationality serves as the focal point of convergence where Li's Confucianist and Marxist dual personalities live out their contentious dialogues with each other. The concept of shiyong lixing can be turned into an enabling machine because it presupposes the telos of history as the utopian evolution of human society and insists that to achieve this end, the exercise of practical rationality should be defined in terms of shehui shijian (social practice)—the doctrine of "kingliness without" rings loud here—rather than in those of individual self-discipline (the doctrine of "sageliness within").^[140]

Such a teleological view of history and pious appeal to the metaphor of the collective may have grown out of Li Zehou's deeply ingrained Confucian heritage. But the Marxist influence should by no means be understated here. In fact, the philosopher's Marxist commitment is more evident than ever when he insists that Kant's contribution to classical German idealism consists of his replacement of "individual sensibility" by a kind of "collective rationality," which, according to Li Zehou, should be clearly specified as an abstract version of the "social nature of human beings" that transcends their individual, biological, and ethnic

characteristics. By the same token, the subject that exercises practical rationality is designated "not [as] the thinking 'I,' but the practising 'I,' not [as] any mental and metaphysical 'I,' but the collective 'I' made up of the masses and the social 'I.'^[141] This heavy-handed plebian makeup of practical rationality cannot but subvert the elitist emphasis of Confucian ideology.

The continual wrestling between Li's Confucianist and Marxist personae informs most of his major works, whether he is engaged in reinterpreting Kant, reassessing the cultural psychology of premodern China, or reconstructing such categories as xiti zhongyong, tianren heyi , or shiyong lixing for modernity's sake. Each category conjures up the old familiar binary of tradition versus modernity. Yet Li Zehou's purpose in concocting the three formulae is to exorcise the binary paradigm of its antithetical urge that has precluded each term from forming a continuum with the other. Thus, for a brief moment, we witness the reconstructed doctrine of tianren heyi enact its own mediating principle in bringing together, first of all, the idealist order of the doctrine as the ultimate metaphor for the cultural unconscious, and secondly, the materialist reinterpretation of the doctrine that stresses the continuum between tian and ren as a result of human beings' conscious implementation of the Marxist program of humanized nature. It is this same knack in balancing excesses that accounts for Li Zehou's attentiveness to both the vice and virtue of Confucian concepts whether he is examining tianren heyi or shiyong lixing . Just as he acknowledges that the unity of Heaven and (hu)man, a concrete embodiment of the Chinese cultural-psychological formation, is dynamic and static in turn, so does he emphasize that practical rationality can both rescue China from modernity's superfluity and "stand in the way of the development of science and art."^[142] Harmony and repression go hand in hand. The salvation, Li Zehou seems to suggest, lies in the simultaneous resuscitation of harmony and the release of the repressed. Both tradition and modernity need each other, inasmuch as the former will change and develop in response to the epochal demands of the latter.

The diffusion of hostile impetus between bipolar opposites remains a deeply Confucianist strategy. It can hardly account for the unique place that Li Zehou occupies in China's contemporary cultural scene. What distinguishes him from those neo-Confucianists who are consistently eclectic is the fact that Li's penchant for the concept of continuum suffers recurrent setbacks in the tug of war between his Marxian and Confucian twin ideologies. It seems always the former that emerges at the

right moment to upset the perfect symmetry and frustrate his Confucian persona's compulsion to dissolve every binary.

In his own Marxist incarnation, Li Zehou continues to subscribe to the oppositional logic of materialism versus idealism, objective laws of history versus voluntarism. "Western substance" in xiti zhongyong is clearly defined in terms of the mode of production as opposed to the liberal idealist tradition that ascribes democracy and other superstructural fineries to the semantic core of westernization. In a similar vein, Li Zehou defines the concept of practice as human ventures grounded in and restricted to infrastructural activities. In contrast to praxis, practice is not to be viewed as those occurrences taking place on the political and ideological front (he cites as examples the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the May 1968 student uprisings in Europe) that privilege human consciousness as the dominant motivating force in history. Li's examples indicate that Marxism, and specifically historical materialism, serves as the base structure of his various philosophical inquiries into premodern and modern China.

In this continual struggle between materialism and idealism, between Marxism and Confucianism, Li Zehou's attempt to appropriate tradition and Confucianism into his Marxist materialist framework is a perilous journey in itself. Sometimes, it is Confucianism that gains the upper hand over its rival ideology. When such a moment of danger flashes through the textual space heavily armed with Marxist credos, we learn that cultural constraints—the "cultural-psychological formation," in Li Zehou's own words—supercedes conscious ideological subversion after all.

Li Zehou's case exemplifies once more the symptom of a modern cultural psychology that is by no means unique to the Chinese people: a profound utilitarian principle compels them to reinvent tradition at every turn of their encounter with an intimidating modernity. Of course, no reinterpretation of tradition is ever disinterested, Li Zehou's included. The question I raise is not whether Chinese intellectuals should, or should not, serve the interest of modernity (they do not yet have the luxury of Western Marxists to denounce such an interest and flay capitalism). Instead, I ask whether they are aware of the conflict that exists between the capitalist ideology of modernity and their own avowed cultural politics (whether it is Jin Guantao's scientism, neo-Confucianism, or Li Zehou's Marxism), and no less important, whether they are capable of scrutinizing their own ideological compromises that such a conflict inevitably incurs.

Li Zehou, like the majority of the participants in the Cultural Discussion, took the subtext of modernization for granted. One wonders if

he ever recognized that the infrastructural change of China's mode of production for which he argues in his proposal of xiti zhongyong will necessarily unleash forces from the sociocultural, ideological, and political spheres that will dismantle utopianism of all kinds, Confucianist or socialist. Is he ready to reckon with the cultural logic of capitalism after endorsing the capitalist mode of production wholeheartedly? Does he really believe that the doctrines of continuum propagated in tianren heyi and shiyong lixing can survive the fluctuations of the stock market and the crude awakening of subjectivity and sensuality?

The square at Kaifeng's Temple of the Minister of the State (Xiangguo si ) where the Song emperors used to perform state rituals is turned into a discotheque at nightfall.^[143] The day may not be too far off when the revolutionary holy base Yan'an will sponsor a Mao Zedong impersonators' extravaganza. Could Marxist Li Zehou foresee all this and still celebrate it—the coming of capitalist modernity to China accompanied by all its gaudy gears that shatter culturalism's high hopes for utopia?

The 1980s dawned on China with the promise that zhishi (knowledge) and rencai (talent) would reemerge as the primary capital that drove China's modernization program. Throughout the decade, the popularity of the slogan "Respect knowledge, respect talent" (zunzhong zhishi, zunzhong rencai ) signaled the exit of Maoism and the reentry of intellectuals as the harbingers of modernity. One cannot tell whether it was Culture Fever that set loose the "fever for 'knowledgeable elements'" (zhishi fenzi re ) or if it was the dramatic ascendance of intellectuals that triggered the outbreak of Culture Fever.^[144] In 1985 when Liu Zaifu raised the thesis of zhutixing (subjectivity),^[145] Chinese elite were already well prepared to reassert their own subject-position by launching one project after another that echoed the elitist agenda of linking modernity with the empowerment of knowledge and knowledgeable elements. The hegemonic position of ancient scholar-officials seemed once more within reach for the modern elite.

In the mid-eighties, the climate was ripe for the spontaneous collaboration among various elite circles to turn the 1980s into a decade that celebrated highbrow culture and cerebralism. Academic salons mushroomed in urban centers. The Great Cultural Discussion captured and fanned the fever into a brain storm that monopolized the attention of the press and media for more than half a decade. As a timely response to the rekindled nationwide obsession with the power of knowledge

and the agency of the intellect, volume one of the first history of "Chinese intellectual talents" (Zhongguo rencai sixiang shi ) was published in 1986.^[146]

There was no doubt that the epochal energy of the 1980s was concentrated on the notion of a modern consciousness (xiandai yishi ) that would grow out of the fertile soil of the mind. The emphasis on superstructural transformation as the motivating force for modernization was a theme that reverberated throughout the Cultural Discussion. It was the "change of thinking" and the "modernization of concepts" rather than the transformation of the mode of production (for which Li Zehou was a lone missionary) that primarily defined what modernity meant for the elite establishment.^[147] The fact that Chinese material civilization lags far behind spiritual civilization seemed to reinforce the culture elite's resolution that it was they, the privileged few, who should lead the masses, peasants, and workers (the populace that was engaged in the material social practice) in the nation's leap toward the twenty-first century.

The Cultural Discussion marked the apex of the elite's decade-long efforts of reinstating the image of the post-Mao intellectual. The icon of a cultural worker (whether he or she advocates scientism, neo-Confucianism, pro-enlightenment movement, hermeneutics, or Marxism) who is engaged in intense mental labor as the spokesperson for the truth of knowledge finds its replica in many familiar fictional characters of the mid-1980s: Lu Wenting in At Middle Age and Zhang Yonglin in Zhang Xianliang's Lühua shu (Mimosa) (1984) and Nanren de yiban shi nüren (Half of a man is a woman) (1985). The representation of the intellectual in all those instances is well trimmed around the edges, free of any blemishes and self-critical impulses. This is a cultural worker whose pursuit of scientific or philosophical knowledge and moral high order is so relentlessly intense that anything that stands in its way has to be dispensed with: Lu Wenting, a superwoman, upright and uncompromising, morally as immaculate as the white doctor's suit she wears daily, sacrifices her private life completely to her medical career and to the welfare of the public; Zhang Yonglin is carved out of a sublimated Hegelian totality within which the conflicting demands of the flesh and the spirit encounter and dissolve each other. Flatteringly portrayed as altruistic and morally characterized as a human being larger than life itself,^[148] the intellectual emerges in the guise of what Liu Xiaobo called "deified superhumanity."^[149] The making of such a formula, as Liu charged in his condemnation of Chinese intellectuals' engagement in self-promotion, is in essence no different from that which produced the cult of proletarian

hero during the revolutionary years.^[150] The same pietistic agenda yields the same extreme logic: The rise of the sacred presupposes its self-conscious demarcation from the profane. Only this time, the bipolar poles are reversed. It is the intellectuals who are now put on the pedestal, and the masses, at their feet once more.

The self-image preying on the mind of Chinese intellectuals in the past and throughout the 1980s is by no means that of a populist but the dignified figure of a solitary spokesperson for society. The deterioration of the elite's sociopolitical consciousness known as youhuan yishi into a deeply rooted disdain for the unlettered was a phenomenon that resurfaced during the 1980s and could be in part accounted for by the elite's long repressed backlash against Maoism. The rise of one social class is usually accomplished at the expense of the other. This was true during the Cultural Revolution when intellectuals were labeled as the "stinking old nine" and sank to the bottom of the social ladder. The 1980s not only revoked Mao's historical verdict on class struggle, it also reversed the power relations between the two historically antagonistic classes. It was now the intellectuals who rode the waves. The peasants were once again blamed for China's submersion in feudal mentality and economic backwardness.

Throughout the decade, the herculean stature of intellectuals formed a stark contrast to the diminished image of peasants. Fang Lizhi, one of the most vocal champions of the cause of intellectuals, considers the elite the only legitimate guardian of China's spiritual civilization. He is repeatedly candid about the need for the self-inflated image making of intelligentsia: "China truly lacked an intellectual consciousness, or one might call it, scientific consciousness. A concrete example of this lack is manifested in the fact that intellectuals do not form a power that can influence society and influence the overall situation [of China]."^[151]

Liu Zaifu goes a step further by proclaiming that the process of Chinese modernization involves not only the reconsolidation of the historical agency of intellectuals but also the carrying out of their mission to "disseminate modern knowledge" and to "bring the enlightenment of modern consciousness to peasants," whose feudalistic cultural psychology, reincarnated in the absurd figure of Ah Q, desperately "needs to be remolded."^[152] The contrast between the suprahuman portrayal of intellectuals and the increasingly degraded description of peasants and those on the lower social strata culminate in Liu Zaifu's most recent coinage of the derogatory term moren (der letzt mensch ), the "trivial man," in diametrical opposition to chaoren , the "superman." Moren includes all

of those who are "ignorant and kind" but who have "no distinct personal integrity and not much character either." Not yet "finishing the evolution of humanity," this underclass shares certain "regressive spiritual elements" and dwells in a "spiritual world that is on the verge of drying up."^[153] Not surprisingly, Ah Q, Xianglin's wife, Sister Silly in Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber), Wu Song's victimized brother Dalang in Shuihu zhuan (Water margins), and even the revolutionary hero Lei Feng—all the illiterates and semi-illiterates—fall neatly into this category. Under the threat of the quick reproduction of such "soulless" species, the mission of Chinese intellectuals is designated by Liu Zaifu as "blocking the mass emergence of moren , and most important, preventing them from turning into the subject of society (shehui zhuti )."^[154] Such blatant discriminatory class consciousness is by no means immune to harsh criticism—Liu Xiaobo's outburst enjoyed its own moment of shocking revelation during the Cultural Discussion. But the dominant voice of the decade chimed in with Fang Lizhi and Liu Zaifu in revalorizing intellectualism and disdaining the populace.

Chinese intellectuals will remember, and consecrate in retrospect, the 1980s as a utopian decade of their own making. At the dramatic consummation of their enlightenment cause at the Tian'anmen Square in June 1989, who could have foretold that the moral and cultural influence of Chinese intellectuals at home would die an uneventful death in the immediate wake of their world-televised celebrity? Who could have predicted in 1989 that it was not communist authoritarianism but capitalist consumer culture that would mark the sudden downward turn of their fortune and announce the demise of high culture fever so quickly? The 1990s dawned in China with the ironic truth: Commercialism could turn yesterday's cutting edge into tomorrow's museum piece.

It is the best of times and the worst of times. The gaps between the haves and have-nots will no doubt widen continually in the 1990s. Commodities, or shall I say, plain old cash, rather than knowledge and a college diploma, have now come to define one's standing in society. The intellectuals are the biggest losers for the time being. The alarming day may yet come when Chinese MTV devours the mind of the young generation with its hypnotic sexuality and usurps the cultural hegemony of the fine print completely. It would be a fascinating sight to witness a five-thousand-year-old empire tap the energy and beat of popular culture and embrace high art and trash with equal zest. Perhaps the best way to commemorate the 1980s is by looking forward to the emergence in Deng's China of a popular culture that will deliver us the masses' responses,

frivolous or contemplative, to the pulse of a rapidly changing society. Let us recognize, if not celebrate thoughtlessly, the self-expressions of common folks who are the biggest players of the 1990s as they fly involuntarily from the iron hold of the double hegemony of the past—the historical rule of the Confucian state and the pure ideology of socialism on the one hand, and the "knowledgeable elements" on the other.