Two
High Culture Fever
The Cultural Discussion in the Mid-1980s and the Politics of Methodologies

If the Marxist intellectuals' theoretical inquiries into the issue of alienation in the early 1980s struck an ambivalent note toward the unfolding decade, then the mid-1980s witnessed a symphony of unmitigated optimism. As the state's modernization program steered the country into imagined prosperity, the intellectuals not only collaborated with the Party in its reconstruction of the socialist utopia, but busily proliferated their own discourse on thought enlightenment. All this seemed to point to the consummation of a utopian vision, which the 1989 crackdown suddenly aborted.

However, the reversal of the utopian vision dramatized in June 1989 did not take place overnight. As much as the mid-1980s were moving toward a visionary perfection of the twin projects of modernization and enlightenment, they also witnessed a continual sequence of sociocultural and economic spectacles that cast shadows over the social psychology of a people dreaming of an attainable utopian future. In 1987, signs of setback were already obvious. What was at stake was not only the elite's agenda of enlightenment, but also the vision of a yet to be consummated project of socialist modernization. Contrary to the public's great expectations, the Thirteenth Party Congress held in October delivered an official statement that China was still lingering at the "primary stage of socialism." Premier Zhao Ziyang's anticlimactic declaration at the Party Congress not only sharpened the sense of crisis that a failing urban reform had already engendered, but also demoralized the nation's utopian dreamers and plunged them into an inverse dystopian mood.

In the realm of cultural production, what accompanied the onslaught of various "fevers" in writers, artists, and intellectuals (the fever about One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1984, the fever for root-searching and new methodologies in 1985, Culture Fever in 1986)—in sum, post-revolutionary fevers about knowledge (zhishi re ) and enlightenment—was the rise of new anticultural heroes such as the rock star Cui Jian and the post-Bei Dao generation of young poets who sneered at the myth of humanism and the politics of resistance that he once sang for.^[1] The emergence in the mid-1980s of the new myth of qigong (the art of material energy) in the name of pseudoscientism further prompted critics' periodic denunciation of the 1980s as "a chaotic period." As one disillusioned intellectual put it, this was not a period in which heroes were given birth. This was, on the contrary, an era in which miracles and superstition triumphed over rational forces, an era in which "our nation is seeking inspiration from the symbols of ancient civilization, i.e., the Great Wall and the dragon. Individuals on the other hand are searching for formulas of longevity from qigong ."^[2] This seems, in short, an apocalypse, an eternal erosion of utopia.

Yet I argue that the dystopian mood toward the latter half of the 1980s should not be seen as diametrically opposed to the utopian ecstasy of a history on the verge of fulfilling its promises. The reverberation of such a tempered mood by no means deserves emotionally charged dismissal as "a chaotic period." On the contrary, the existence of such a mood enables us to accommodate the other possibility of interpretation: we may transcend a locked-in either-or binary perspective—utopianism or dystopianism—by situating the conflicting Chinese discourse of modern consciousness (xiandai yishi ) at the intersection where conditions of possibility proliferated, which constituted, on the symbolic level at least, a locale as rapturous as unadulterated utopianism.

Indeed, contrary to conventional expectations, the hermeneutic circle of "modern consciousness" was not made up of overarching terms denoting rationality and optimism alone (see chapter four, this volume). The term's semantic boundary was continually overshadowed by emerging ambivalent categories such as "crisis consciousness" that conjured up specters of unreason and nihilism right at the threshold of the epoch's promising entrance into the age of reason. The fissures in the totalizing discourse of utopian rationality were conspicuous enough to cast into doubt the very metaphor of consummation. I want to suggest that a euphoria that seemed eternal at several memorable junctures of the mid-1980s experienced its own moment of uncertainty when it grew in-

creasingly conscious of the potential splitting of social mores into conflicting critical responses to the making of the Chinese modern. It was exactly due to the diversity of such responses from the elite that the Cultural Discussion (wenhua taolun ) came into being as a forum for open debates of what modernity meant to a postrevolutionary society in transition. In its heyday, the Discussion was a great intellectual fair that provoked little intervention from the Party. Ideas poured forth as the cultural elite searched for paradigms that would steer China into a tantalizing future. Needless to say, participants in the Cultural Discussion were self-conscious of their privileged position as the architects of Chinese modernity. Underlying their innocuous discussions about methodologies, the issue of cultural politics loomed large.

For a short span of approximately two years between 1984 and 1986, the panoramic display of "one hundred schools" was an eyeful. Each school had its own prescription for a polymorphous modernity that extended from the sociocultural to the aesthetic. In classifying the different trends of thought that emerged during the Cultural Discussion, most critics focus on debates over sociocultural modernity and treat aesthetic modernity as a separate issue. A single chapter, of course, hardly allows me to do justice to the twin foci of modernity. But the fact that I cannot map out aesthetic modernity thoroughly until chapter four and chapter five does not suggest that it is irrelevant to the focus of the present chapter, the Cultural Discussion. On the contrary, as I emphasized in the introduction, aesthetics and the sociocultural are so closely intertwined that it is inadequate to examine the Chinese definition of modernity solely from the perspectives of cultural philosophers. Inasmuch as the Cultural Discussion grew out of the intellectuals' acute consciousness of the cultural agenda of modernization, the writers affiliated with the root-searching (xungen ) school played a role as important as that of the cultural philosophers in their reflection on the collision of the ideological horizon of modernity with that of tradition.

Thus whereas modernity meant the propagation of scientific rationality (kexue lixing ) for Jin Guantao on the one hand, it meant something completely different for the root-searching school on the other: making and maintaining a productive liaison with cultural traditions and substantive reason.^[3] Aesthetic modernity's multiple interactions with the Cultural Discussion did not simply give rise to different schools of creative writing. They also led to the emergence of language fever that in turn triggered a growing awareness among literary critics of the intimate relationship between language and the ideological formation

of Maoism.^[4] All of those literary events were actually part and parcel of the cultural critiques that flourished in the mid-1980s. Taken together with the various contesting expressions in the realm of social thought, they formed the ensemble of the Cultural Discussion.

Most Chinese critics such as Chen Kuide and Chen Lai identified the main orientations underlying the Cultural Discussion in categorical terms of scientism versus culturalism.^[5] The group of "Marching toward the Future" headed by Jin Guantao bore the brunt of criticism because of its narrow and exclusive focus on the scientific approach to modernity. The technocratic vision posed a threat to the traditional elite in more than one way. Not the least intimidating was the message that modernization depends upon the establishment of a new power center built no longer on the soft culture of thought enlightenment but rather on the hegemony of scientific and technical knowledge. Many critics who questioned Jin Guantao's project thus welcomed the counterproposals advocated by cultural philosophers such as Li Zehou, Gan Yang, the qimeng (enlightenment) school, and the neo-Confucianists, all of whom went beyond scientism by returning to the issues of cultural politics induced by the confrontation between tradition and modernity. Gan Yang's hermeneutic critique (manifested in the editorial principle of Culture: China and the World ),^[6] the qimeng philosophers' search for the indigenous source of critical thinking, and the neo-Confucian focus of the Academy of Chinese Culture (Zhongguo shuyuan ) all represented efforts to problematize and delegitimize instrumental reason.

Whether modernity signified the material substance (ti ) of scientific methodologies or some ethereal substance waiting to be defined, all the preceding schools of thought subscribed to a utopian vision. The modern, in other words, was not confined within the here and now. Paradoxically, it evoked a future-oriented stance. What was undesirable for intellectuals of a different ideological bent—for example, Gan Yang and Chen Lai on the one hand, Bao Zunxin and Jin Guantao on the other—was surely a modernity that brought no promise of evolutionary progress.

It is this focus on the future, rather than on the present, that characterized the discourse of Chinese modernity of the 1980s as profoundly utopian. Although the discursive project of the cultural elite was instrumental to the state's programs of modernization in many cases (in particular, Jin Guantao's contribution to and involvement in Zhao Ziyang's reform think tank), theirs was a discourse that not only staked everything on the notion of a theoretical leap from the present to the future, but which took as its point of departure a top-down intellectual per-

spective that constrained a genuine dialogue with those forces that operate at the grassroots level in the shaping of "on-going and emerging [local] institutions."^[7] The reform agenda conceptualized as such could not but privilege the discursive over the experiential, superstructure over infrastructure, the central over the local, theory over practice, product over process, and by implication, the elitist discourse of culture (which included theorizing about a single feasible economic paradigm) over the diversified quotidian experiments of China's rural and local economic sectors with alternative modes of production that could not be neatly categorized by either state socialism or free-market capitalism.

Many have speculated about the influence of Western futurology on post-Mao China's obsession with evolutionism. Listed as one of the thirty-three books that changed post-Mao China, Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave , whose Chinese translation appeared in 1983, told intellectuals both within and outside the Party apparatus a story of "tremendous hope and prospect."^[8] It was Toffler's critique of the pessimism underlying The Limits of Growth that instilled in the Chinese intellectual leadership a renewed sense of "urgency and responsibility"—the urgency to start a new technological revolution depicted in The Third Wave and the responsibility to achieve "socialist modernization" and to march toward the "world and the future."^[9] Eventually some even credited Toffler for the Party's Great Awakening to the importance of knowledge and intellectuals in the new era. Thus although Bill Brugger and David Kelly detect a "dystopian aspect" of the Chinese futurological research, the future that Chinese intellectuals faced in 1985 was nonetheless unambivalently bright and triumphant.^[10]

The syndrome of leaping toward the future was so strong that modernization in the 1980s emerged as a utopian discourse rather than as a material practice. How this utopianism could claim its difference from Mao's is a pregnant question not raised by those who decried Mao's voluntarism with such vehemence. It is no small irony that although the epoch of the 1980s prided itself for discoursing against Maoism, its spokespeople continued to practice Mao Zedong's faith in changing China from the top, believing that the power of ideas determines and shapes socioeconomic reality. We can argue that the Maoist voluntarist principle, "the subjective can create the objective," was no less prevalent in the culturalist discourse of the mid-1980s than in Mao's promotion of the Marxist-Leninist theory of permanent revolution.^[11] Underlying the Cultural Discussion is the proposition that correct methodology is the first and essential prerequisite for effective

modernization. Modernization now replaced revolutionary action as the end result, and methodological retooling replaced ideological remolding as the means to determine the course of history. In the final analysis, the discourse of the 1980s was as heavily imbued with voluntarism as Mao's revolutionary discourse.

Variations Of The Aesthetic Modern

Perhaps it was only in the realm of the arts and literature that the challenge of modernity to post-Mao China could trigger a radical process of demythologizing the rational, utilitarian imperatives and all the other trappings of human consciousness promoted by a hypertrophic sociocultural modernity. The relationship of aesthetic modernity with modernization was almost always a troubled one. In China, as everywhere else in the world, so-called modernism is not an aesthetic complement of social modernity, but rather a vehicle of intervention in the "progress" syndrome of modernization. Thus the aesthetic modernity of the 1980s neither necessarily reflected nor simply chimed in with the evolutionist ethos of China's social and cultural modernity. On the contrary, as the 1980s progressed into their second half, more and more writers and artists began to revel in fragmentary images of the irrational and the subliminal. Paradoxically, they created an aesthetic utopia out of the imaginary bankruptcy of social utopia: it was in dystopian imagery that utopianism of the highest order could be articulated. Even the root-searching school that engaged in the most intimate historical dialogue with the agenda of cultural modernity came to ground its utopian vision not in the realizable future, but in the past.

The aesthetic modernity of the 1980s generated inquiries no less unsettling than those raised by social modernity. The central problematic concerned the issues of authenticity and cultural subjectivity. How could one distinguish—a question addressed by critics and tacitly seconded by Party ideologues—art and literary texts that represented "genuine" epochal responses to modernity from those that simply exhibited a "spurious" aesthetic modernity as the latest in intellectual fashion? Given the clamor against a "pseudomodernism," any writings that celebrated the themes of schizophrenia, angst, the libido, and the absurd—themes that echoed Western influence—were suspect. This sporadic burgeoning of the irrational that emerged in the high culture during the 1980s was ominous enough to precipitate the forming of the united front of the diverse spokespeople for rationality, whether instrumental rationality (the Party)

or substantive rationality (neo-Confucianists and realist writers). The exclamation made by one spectator at an avant-garde art exhibition—"This is sheer neurosis!"—was symptomatic of the indictment of Chinese "modern" art and literature in general.^[12] Yet amid all the hustle and bustle to inauthenticate the irrational, the prosecutors of Chinese "modernism" and avant-garde art forgot to ask whether so-called Chinese rationality (in whose name their verdict on the "modernists" was voiced) could be exempted from the charge of emulating Occidental modernity. After all, there is no guarantee that the category "reason" existed in China prior to the arrival of the Enlightenment modernity in the twentieth century. Reason, especially the kind that is invested with such confidence in deconstructing mythologies, may not be more indigenous, and therefore may not be more "authentic," than its alleged opposite, unreason.

Regardless of the competition among the cultural and literary elite for the right to name the Chinese modern, its various interpreters were acutely aware that the norms that Chinese modernity had to create out of itself were traversed by contradictory motifs. These numerous "rational-izing" and "irrational" responses to the Chinese modern ran the gamut from the emulative measures of, to interventionary measures against, reproducing the Enlightenment formula of instrumental reason. Not surprisingly, and yet not without a twist of irony, the most enthusiastic endorsement of instrumental rationality came from the central organ of the CCP, which took upon itself the historical task of modernizing China. The Party's well-timed announcements of successive five-year plans and, in contrast, its ever changing commitment to legal, political, and thought reform demonstrated that modernity meant for the Party nothing more than the efficacious implementation of functional imperatives of economy and administration (which is usually known as "social modernity"). Modernity understood in those terms is based on the technocratic notion that the process of modernization is guided by material constraints that follow the dictates of instrumental rationality alone. Equally appreciative and emulative of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and yet critical of the Party's orthodox interpretation of reason, were those intellectuals (such as scientists Fang Lizhi and Jin Guantao) whose call for the reconstruction of the pure reason of science was undoubtedly a reaction against the domination of the irrational during the Cultural Revolution. For them a genuine endorsement of modern rationality must start with the veiled critique of the inherent irrationality of the instrumental reason on which orthodox Marxism was founded.

Such conflicting receptions of "reason" among its various initiates were indicative of the tortuous journey that the notion was to travel throughout the 1980s. In China's cultural sector, the initial fascination with the primacy of cognitive-instrumental rationalization declined fast toward the latter half of the 1980s as more and more writers and cultural theorists resisted the subjugation of the aesthetic-cognitive to technical rationality. In their ideological struggle against instrumental reason, aesthetic modernity's most radical practitioners sometimes empathized, oddly enough, with those who tried to revive neo-Confucianism.

Yet even aesthetic modernity, which served in its various ideological guises as a means of resistance to Maoist-Marxist ideology on some occasions and scientism on others, was less unified than what the debates over Chinese modernism (1984) and pseudomodernism (1988) might convey. Within the aesthetic, one can perceive scattered subcults, each singing a different tune of the ideology of resistance and each pulling ever deeper into their own unreason. One of these subcults was consumed by unrelieved self-mockery, another by exhausting ingenuousness. I refer here to the cohort of young Chinese "modernists" (xiandai pai ) in the first case and the school of middle-aged root-searching writers in the second. Their respective inspiration from J. D. Salinger's Holden and Garcia Marquez's magic realism was symptomatic of an ever widening generation gap, as one side fiddled with sacrilegious sentiments and the other burned with passion for roots of all kinds.

The high-minded experiments of young xiandai pai such as Liu Suola and Xu Xing with the concept of ennui (whether Salingerian or post-revolutionary) predictably collapsed during the late 1980s into the secular version of a playful boredom in Wang Shuo's "hooligan" (pizi ) literature, a new form of writing that dallied with the cult of wanr (play). Yet one should refrain from dismissing the "degeneration" of the high modernist culture of boredom into the fiction of mindless playfulness as a happening whose repercussions are confined within literary circles. The very notion of "play," the latest aesthetic fad, is no more and no less a byproduct of the modernity of commodity economy, which has given rise in urban centers of all sizes to roughnecks who cash in on the new socioeconomic order with a mirthful abandon. They make a livelihood by cheating, tricking, and accumulating money that comes and goes without much ado.^[13] This newly emerged, resourceful underclass that dwells on the margin of law is portrayed in the literature of "play" and in current best-sellers, soap operas, and commercial films. Thanks to the speedy reproduction by the media of the "Wang Shuo phenomenon,"

the notion of play has been quickly assimilated into the facetious rhetoric of "gamesomeness" that the urban public has adopted to capture the post-Tian'anmen ethos that plays fast and loose with almost every conceivable facet of human life.

In contrast, the emergence of xungen literature in 1985—a timely response to Garcia Marquez's mythologizing impulse—foregrounded a utopian, albeit self-consuming, fever for the aestheticization of the cultural and the political. In chapter five I discuss the intricate relationship of the xungen aesthetics with the zhiqing (reeducated youth) phenomenon. I argue that the utopian discourse of the root-searching writers cannot be fully comprehended unless one keeps in mind their earlier Red Guard background. The confessional excess of the school will appear in a new light once we provide the missing link between its aesthetic vision and the particular process of individuation to which its writers were subjected in their formative years—a period that coincided with the Cultural Revolution and with its utopian politics of thought reform.

The simultaneous emergence of the concepts of "ennui" and "root-searching"—the individualistic turn coexisting with the collective return—is but one example of the many contradictions that marked the aesthetic experience of the mid-1980s. The splitting of aesthetic modernity into opposite directions—the cynic survivalism of xiandai pai and the evangelistic dream for a better future and culture of xungen literature—is more than part and parcel of a much touted stylistic revolution of Chinese postrevolutionary writers. The split is an example of how works of art came to respond formally, if not to correspond, to the changing forms of individuation and socialization.

The battles over style are battles over the social. The emergence of the "Wang Shuo phenomenon" drove home poignantly once more the message that in post-Mao China, the sensational impact (hongdong xiaoying ) of the aesthetic on the social may have outlived the much deplored "literary depression" of 1987. If one goes by Max Weber's definition of modernization as a process constituted, among other things, by the differentiation of various value spheres (such as the aesthetic, the moral, the legal, the socioeconomic) in accord with their own logics, then the continual liaison between the aesthetic and the social in post-Mao China could be seen either as an intractable remnant of China's premodernity or as a telling sign of one of the specificities that came to define the Chinese modern.

The difficulties with initiating, feeding, and sustaining the differentiation in question—a particular experience of the Chinese modern—will

emerge as an undercurrent throughout this chapter. They serve as the reminders of the futility of mapping Chinese aesthetic modernity as a unified landscape internally, or as an autonomous regime externally. Thus the discourse of "Chinese modernism" further multiplied itself as the continual complicity of the aesthetic with social modernity spelled out the impossibility of treating the former in its own terms. Any investigation of aesthetic modernity during the 1980s, to which chapter four is devoted, will inevitably cross-reference the practices and discourses of sociocultural modernity.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough the seamless intertwining of aesthetic modernity with the cultural discourse. All the problematics that emerged from Chinese aesthetic modernity—the ideological content of the so-called modern consciousness, the applicability of the system and control theory to literary criticism, the social efficacy of aesthetic intervention, the debates over Chinese modernism and postmodernism—helped multiply both the infinite possibilities and the risks of the Chinese modern to overtake its own epochal logic.

Both the possibilities and risks in question rested on one dilemma: the aesthetic modern's instinct of coming to terms with modernity's raison d'être was continually distracted by its equally powerful capacity to generate contradictory discourses that could not be contained within the prescribed project of global modernity. How are we to define the characteristics of the Chinese aesthetic modern? Did the so-called Yuppie xiandai pai earn the right to name those characteristics? Or was it the root-searching school that could make claims to the title of Chinese modernist? What about disparate elements like Mo Yan and Wang Meng whose voices were part of the chorus of the modern? And finally, was experimental fiction "residual modern" or the precursor of "Chinese postmodernism"?^[14]

The Chinese anxieties about naming the Chinese modern (both in social and aesthetic terms) persisted throughout the decade of the eighties. Perhaps we can ask instead: why should anyone (anyone but the elite) care if Chinese social modernity is designated capitalist or socialist, or if Chinese art and literature are labeled modernist, pseudomodernist, or even postmodernist? What is truly at stake, I ask, if the ritual of naming loses its significance in an age of as-yet unfulfilled possibilities?

The very awareness of the ambiguity of the unnamable—a Chinese modernity on the threshold—prompted Gan Yang to posit the risky proposal of "the alternative modern" as uniquely Chinese.^[15] This strategy, which highlighted the primacy of the indigenous condition, formed a

sharp contrast to an opposite and perhaps even more perilous position held by avant-garde critics who urged China into the globalization of culture. Pandering to the West's latest cultural logic, that small group of postmodernist critics turned Gan's threshold proposition into the hazardous venture of collapsing the epochal marker of modernity into that of postmodernity.

But this is after all what adventures are all about: a journey fraught with promising possibilities and hidden risks. Such was the winding course of China's cultural modernity in the mid-1980s, whose epochal cause célèbre was undoubtedly the Cultural Discussion.

As a series of gradually unfolding responses to the reform fever that seized the first half of the 1980s, the Discussion should not be seen as a cataclysmic event, because there was no beginning or end to speak of. It can only be understood as an increasingly self-conscious epochal sentience. This was a zeitgeist that expressed its own anxiety over two conflicting historical burdens: a modernity short of models and a modernity saturated with models. The shifts in discursive practices during the Discussion characterized the radical notion of a zeitgeist that imagined that it could have it all. It was an epochal sensibility that wanted to look forward to the future, remember the past, and seize the authentic moment of an innovative present. In the end, it was the historical consciousness of Chinese modernity's dual dependence upon the past and future that endowed the Cultural Discussion with an encyclopedic plenitude beyond the reach of any local determination provided by the early twentieth-century debates known as the May Fourth Movement.

Thus although each of the major themes of the Cultural Discussion—the dominant voice of instrumental rationality and scientism, the revival of Confucianism and the qimeng school, and the marginal practice of hermeneutics—might conjure up shadow images of the May Fourth debates, the Discussion did not recycle old historical imagination in the simplistic sense. Conflicting as they were, those themes have to be examined in an ensemble fashion so that the complexity of the polymorphous modern can manifest itself. Furthermore, each theme (with its temporal anchor cast in the future, past, and the present respectively) can only derive its ultimate meaning from the context of a zeitgeist that was not merely conscious of, but also increasingly confident in its own capability to go beyond the present. It was no longer the terms of crisis (which confined the May Fourth discourse to the perpetual present), but those of thought emancipation (a post-Maoist imaginary into which all three temporal orders were merged) that determined the spirit of Chinese modernity in the

1980s and distinguished the new era from the May Fourth period. For the same reason, whereas May Fourth intellectuals could only conceive of and emulate the single model of Eurocentric modernity, postcolonial global geopolitics has turned the notion of pluralism into a reality.^[16] Today, the Chinese intelligentsia at home and abroad has no difficulty imagining and sometimes even vaunting an alternative modern—whether it is identified as the East Asian model of neo-Confucianism or the hybrid Chinese socialist paradigm still in the making.

It is in the context of the well-assorted modern that I shall address the central concern of this chapter: the intellectuals' discourse on cultural modernity. The Culture Fever and the accompanying Discussion will eventually find its way into the textbook of contemporary Chinese history. Meanwhile, its participants will slide further and further into irrelevance as the future brings them in the 1990s not the ever faster accumulation of intellectual capital, but a consumer culture that seems to have reserved no niche for them.

Culture Fever

The elite's reversal of fortune in the 1990s must have come as a surprise to those who were historical witnesses of the Cultural Discussion in the mid-1980s. In the eighties it was undoubtedly the knowing subject that seemed to gain the upper hand over the consuming and producing subject. In short, intellectuals rather than average citizens appeared to be the unequivocal spokespeople for the Chinese modern.

Academy and research institutes naturally emerged as the locales where the Cultural Discussion took place. It is important to note that although the media attention to Culture Fever peaked in 1985, a few occasional feverish hot spots were already manifest in the early 1980s. In order to trace the career of each cultural agenda that the Discussion addressed throughout the first half of the 1980s, I enumerate in brief the sequence of events that fed the heat into flame.

• In October and November of 1981, the Editorial Division on China's Problems at the United Nations participated in a global project titled "The History of Science and Culture of Humankind" under the jurisdiction of the UN's Education/Science/Culture Commission. The division's contribution to the project consisted of a study of the conflicts of cultural trends between China and the West and between tradition and

modernity. The focal point of discussion was how contemporary China could modernize ancient Chinese civilization.

• In June and December of 1982, two symposia on "The Study of Cultural History" were held in Shanghai. The main participants included history faculty from Fudan University, fellows from the research institutes of history and modern history at the Beijing Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, and Chinese editors and specialists involved in the UN project such as Zhou Gucheng, Tan Qixiang, and Cai Shangsi. The symposia produced a journal Zhongguo wenhua (Chinese culture) and the "Chinese Culture Series." In October of the same year, Jin Guantao and those associated with Ziran bianzheng fa tongxun (Newsletter of the dialectics of nature) held a workshop in Chengdu of Sichuan Province on "Why Modern Chinese Science Lagged Behind." The conference volume Kexue chuantong yu wenhua (Scientific tradition and culture) was published subsequently by the Science and Technology Publishers of Shannxi Province.

• In March and November of 1983, two conferences were convened by Hong Kong University on the theme of "Modernization and Chinese Culture." Among the attendants were renowned scholars Fei Xiaotong and Zhao Fusan and established social scientists and anthropologists from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. The conference introduced several topics: the influence of modernization on Chinese society, the continuity of traditional culture, and the sinification of the social sciences.

• In fall 1984, a symposium sponsored by Zhonghua Bookstore and the history department of Beijing Normal University was held in Zhengzhou of Henan Province. As a result of the symposium, Zhonghua Bookstore was commissioned to publish a series of studies on modern Chinese cultural history.

• In the latter half of 1984, the first symposium on the "Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Culture" was held in Shanghai. In its wake, a research center for the "Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Culture was formally established in Shanghai.

• In 1985, the major players of the Cultural Discussion entered the arena officially. The Planning Committee of the Academy of Chinese Culture obtained blessings from the Central Party Secretary and was formed under the aegis of the Party. The committee could challenge with confidence any competitor to outdo its team, which included

Confucian celebrities such as Feng Youlan, Liang Shuming, and Ji Xianlin. In March 1985 and June 1986, the committee held large lecture sessions in Beijing on Chinese culture and comparative culture studies of China and the West. The content of those sessions varied. Although specific topics on culture such as Confucianism and modernization, the characteristics of Chinese philosophy, and the values and future of traditional Chinese culture formed the central foci of those lecture sessions, the Academy of Chinese Culture by no means pursued a monolithic path of inquiry. Occasionally, topics on science and futurology were also addressed. The comprehensive scientist and culturalist approach should surprise no one if we remind ourselves that a great majority of the members affiliated with the academy were well-trained Marxists. Those invited to deliver the lecture series were all renowned culture specialists: Liang and Feng, Ren Jiyu, Li Zehou, Chen Guying, and scholars from Australia, Hong Kong, France, and America (such as Tu Weiming and Cheng Chung-ying).

• Several other significant events took place during 1985. The Chinese Research Institute on Confucius was established in Beijing. (This institute and the Chinese Foundation of Confucius established in Qufu in 1984 formed the two major centers of Confucian studies in China.) The "Salon on Culture Studies" was established in Wuhan. And various organizations of culture studies mushroomed in Shanghai, Xi'an, and Guangzhou.

• Echoing the efforts made by the Academy of Chinese Culture, Wuhan University held a workshop in December of 1985 on "Modernization and Traditional Chinese Culture." Lecturers included Xiao Jiefu, Tang Yijie, and overseas Chinese scholars such as Cheng Chung-ying and Tu Weiming.

• Between January 1985 and June 1986, newspapers across the nation published approximately two hundred essays on the subject of Chinese culture. Special columns were created in major papers to facilitate the voicing of views on such issues as whether China was experiencing a genuine cultural renaissance.

• In 1986, Gan Yang's Culture: China and the World Editorial Committee was established in Beijing. The committee was made up of young and middle-aged cultural elite whose mission was to introduce, through massive translation projects, Western masterworks of the humanities and the social sciences. The two translation series that the committee edited and published exercised considerable influence on university students and reform-minded elite.

• It is worth noting that throughout 1986, semiofficial symposia on "Strategies of Cultural Development" took place one after another in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other big cities under the aegis of Party reformers. Topics for discussion predictably focused on ideological issues such as the relationship between Marxist and non-Marxist theories, the link between economic reform and cultural reform, the development of Marxism, and the reform of socialist systems in other parts of the world.

• In January 1986, an international conference on Chinese culture was convened at Fudan University in Shanghai. The major themes of the conference were the reevaluation of traditional Chinese culture and the relationship between Chinese and Western culture. In March 1986, a conference on "Traditional Culture and Modernization" was sponsored by the Propaganda Department of the CCP's Municipal District of Shanghai, Wenhui bao (Wenhui news ), and Jiefang riba (Liberation daily). In April, the Chinese Foundation of Confucius and the journal Kongzi yanjiu (Studies of Confucius) held a joint meeting in Qufu, Confucius' birthplace, to examine the relationship between socialism and Confucian traditionalism. Also in April, graduate students of Central Party Academy, Beijing University, People's University, Beijing Normal University, and the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences gathered to discuss problems of Marxism and the cultural conflicts between China and the West. Research centers were founded at various academic institutions: the Center of East-West Comparative Cultural Studies at the Shanghai Academy of the Social Sciences and at Beijing Normal University; the Center of Philosophy and Culture at Qinghua University; and the Center of Chinese Classical Studies and the Center of Comparative Literature at Shenzhen University.

It only seemed natural that the discussion of traditional and modern culture should precipitate a small handful of workshops on the comparative methodology of culture studies. In April 1985, the first coordination session on the "Research Planning for Chinese and Comparative Culture Studies" was held in Shenzhen, China's showcase economic zone. During the session, a detailed blueprint was mapped out to guide scholars of each participating city in developing their own research plans. Special attention was paid to the history and geographical significance of each city so that the research agenda assigned to each local cluster was geopolitically and culturally specific. For instance, scholars from Xian, the old capital of Han and Tang, were to focus on the study of Han-Tang

culture; those from Guangzhou would emphasize the study of contemporary Lingnan (the area south of the Five Ridges) mercantile culture; and academics based in Shanghai and Beijing, the two cradles of modern and contemporary cultural and literary revolutions, were expected to emphasize theoretical and methodological issues—comparative studies of Chinese and Western culture on the one hand, and the problematics of tradition and modernity on the other.

Toward 1986, the increasingly deepening consciousness of culture studies as a new discipline unmistakably defined the later phase of the Cultural Discussion in terms of an intensified methodology fever. The Hangzhou conference held in May 1986, a sequel to the Shenzhen planning session, was much more articulate in this regard. It foregrounded the macroperspective (hongguan ) of culture studies in its search for analytical models. Theoretical questions about cultural typology, structure, and function were raised. The abstraction of the vocabulary deployed during the discussion at the conference could be seen as a sign that Culture Fever was taking an introverted turn. Certainly, the other items that appeared on the conference agenda (for instance, the problematic lessons taught by the sinification syndrome) reinforced the impression that a more thoughtful review of the Cultural Discussion had finally begun. No less importantly, the conference was self-conscious of the current Culture Fever as a historically specific happening. Given this awareness, the conference participants had to confront the embarrassing question: how different was the Cultural Discussion from that which took place seventy years ago? The raising of the question itself was significant because it brought to the fore a hitherto neglected topic, the haunting relationship between contemporary Chinese "cultural renaissance" and the May Fourth Movement in 1919.

Gan Yang and other Chinese intellectuals at home would fain believe that their revisiting of certain familiar May Fourth themes (anti-traditionalism, modernity, China versus the West, scientism, the reformist trilogy of technology, politics, and culture) did not simply reproduce the earlier intellectual and cultural platform. Some proclaimed that the contemporary Cultural Discussion illustrated "a return" to May Fourth problematics on "a higher [theoretical] level."^[17] Others such as Su Xiaokang and Chen Kuide emphasized that the Culture Fever of the 1980s was distinctly different from the May Fourth Movement because the former grew out of "internal cultural conflicts" and the latter was triggered by external crises of national survival.^[18]

Those were arguments made by the actual participants in the Cultural Discussion, whose partiality for the movement of their own making was more or less predictable. Precisely because they had invested such a high stake in the historical evaluation of the Culture Fever, their own word on the issue could by no means be taken as final. Some China specialists in the West were hardly convinced that the question about the relationship between the culture movement of the 1980s and that of the 1920s could be so easily settled. The image that came to them of the Cultural Discussion of post-Mao China is certainly not the imaginary spiral movement that allegedly characterized the new epoch's qualitative break from 1919, but rather the dubious spectacle of Chinese intellectuals going through the revolving door of history without ever making a new entry.

The speculations about the historical continuity or discontinuity between the May Fourth period and post-Mao China surfaced at a time when the Cultural Discussion had evolved beyond the stage of initial frenzy. But right at the moment when a critical space was opened for rigorous self-reflection, there seemed little time left for genuine introspection. Once again, political intervention halted the burgeoning self-critical momentum that the Cultural Discussion had finally gathered toward the latter half of 1986. What ensued foreshadowed the abortive ending of the once promising decade of the 1980s.

In late 1986, with Hu Yaobang's ouster, Culture Fever suffered a dramatic setback. The subsequent campaign against bourgeois liberalism succeeded in all but arresting the blooming of one hundred schools that the Cultural Discussion stood for. The long list of censored works not only included newspapers such as Shehui bao (Society newspaper) in Shanghai, literary journals such as Nanfeng chuang (Window to southern winds) in Guangzhou, and books such as Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao's Wenge shinian shi (Ten years' history of the Cultural Revolution), but also film productions such as Furong zhen (Hibiscus town), Huang tudi (Yellow earth), Yeshan (Wild mountain), Heipao shijian (The incident of black canon), and Yige he bage (One and eight).^[19] In February 1986, the Party initiated the twenty-fourth anniversary memorial of "Learning from Lei Feng the Revolutionary Model." Another thought reform campaign loomed on the horizon. It was not until summer 1988 that the Culture Fever would be kindled anew with the outbreak of controversy over the popular TV documentary series Heshang (Yellow river elegy) (1988)—the subject of my next chapter.

Heshang asks many hard questions about modern as well as imperial Chinese history. The documentary raises the May Fourth question

as an intriguing metaphor for the unfulfilled radical moment of historical discontinuity that could, but failed to, deliver Chinese society from the tyrannical cycle of "ultrastability"—a theory propagated by Jin Guantao and the production team of Heshang . Su Xiaokang, the chief scriptwriter of the series, was planning a sequel named "The May Fourth" when the political tempest of June Fourth finally brought down the curtain on the Cultural Discussion together with all its attendant happenings and epiphanies.

In retrospect, the second coming of the Culture Fever in 1988 had a far greater sensational impact on the national psyche than that created by its tortuous earlier career. The accessibility of television brought home the tangible imagery of various cultural issues raised in the TV series. Such a wide popular appeal, however, only helped revive the Cultural Discussion for a fleeting moment. I doubt if the Discussion could have regained its earlier momentum even without the intervention of the Tian'anmen Square crackdown. Heshang , and the fervent cultural debate that it triggered, was doomed to defeat its own purpose because the reformist agenda that the series' production team promoted was deeply implicated in Zhao Ziyang's reform program and in his struggle against the old-timers. Once its complicity with Party politics took its own course, the Cultural Discussion could not but compromise its original enlightenment agenda. The discourse that the cultural elite constructed laboriously between 1985 and 1986 lost much of its critical edge and fell into the hands of interested parties as an ideological instrument for power struggle. The unfortunate political liaison unsurprisingly paved the way for the later official condemnation of Heshang as the most pernicious "poisonous weed" that fed the "innocent minds" of young students who swarmed the Tian'anmen Square in the long portentous summer of 1989. And yet even before its eventful closure, the Culture Fever and its accompanying utopian optimism were already expiring. "Cultural depression" and "crisis consciousness" circulated in 1987 among cultural and political circles to offset slogans like "renaissance" and "looking toward the future." Although Chinese intellectuals still believed that they alone could dictate the agenda and determine the success or failure of China's modernization, after 1988, the participants in the Great Cultural Discussion cherished far less confidence in their vanguard role and encountered greater difficulties in posing as disinterested intellectuals than they did at the height of Culture Fever.

The preceding account of the facts and dates about the Cultural Discussion, dull as they may sound, should convey the picture of a simul-

taneously agitating and aspiring decade that staked everything on the immediate completion of the project of modernity—on the discursive level at least. Although Culture Fever could certainly speak of its own evolution as a culturally motivated phenomenon monitored and fed by academics at large, it was hardly innocent of the making of a well calculated, albeit camouflaged, political discourse that ascribed the country's pressing socioeconomic problems to an aging traditional culture at bay—an imaginary antagonist—rather than to Chinese socialism itself. It is worth noting that the Fever did not gather momentum until 1985, when economic reform began to encounter major barriers as it made its perilous journey from the countryside to urban centers. First and foremost, I therefore interpret the intensification of the Fever as a critical response that the entire cultural arena made to two major external catalysts: a modernization that fell short of realizing its economic promises, and the political censorship that banned any discourse that placed the burden of a thwarted reform on Deng Xiaoping's "Four Basic Principles." If the relentless critique of the socialist system was considered taboo, then the incrimination of culture was conceivably an alternative outlet. The pan-culturalism that the Discussion promoted therefore had a hidden agenda, which, as the TV series Heshang illustrates so poignantly with its blanket condemnation of traditional Chinese culture, renders any genuine cultural introspection everlastingly elusive.^[20]

Herein lies the major paradox of the Cultural Discussion: on the one hand, its impetus was derived from real socioeconomic forces, and yet on the other hand, it gradually and inevitably evolved into a metaphysical discourse that failed to represent, but which grew to resist instead, the ongoing material process of modernization that eclipsed all the abstract cultural formulations that the Discussion generated. The modernity that the Cultural Discussion prescribed was in the end a modernity on paper, not in reality. Throughout the Discussion, intellectuals (most of whom considered themselves the think tank of the new era) took for granted that their interpretation of the modern—various utopian prescriptions to revitalize Chinese culture—did a tremendous service to the program of modernization. Little did they realize that this kind of "cultural commotions of utopian style" had unconsciously "withstood the actual unfolding of the [necessary] un-utopian process of modernization."^[21] Nor could they ever imagine that the winding and complex course of modernization, involving experimentation with an uneven mode of production that is neither market dominated nor collectivized, could not be corrected or

sped up by the mere concoction of an idealistic movement from above like the May Fourth enlightenment or the Great Cultural Discussion. Modern and contemporary Chinese history revealed time and again that it was the intellectuals themselves, their utopian faith, and their rushing of an unrealistic agenda of revolutionizing the nation overnight that invited intervention from above and jeopardized the radical space that they themselves helped create.

Although the autocracy of the regime can never shoulder enough blame, neither can those intellectuals directly involved in the sequence of events that led to the June Fourth crackdown. They cannot be acquitted of the responsibility of forcing a bootless revolution while a peaceful transformation of the system was already well under way. In this context, I applaud the appearance of the slogan "let go of utopia" that Chinese intellectuals such as Yan Bofei began to advocate. Let us keep this slogan in mind as I undertake the following analysis of the various utopian strategies adopted by different groups of participants in the Cultural Discussion.

Modernity And Scientific Rationality: Jin Guantao, System Theory, And The Premodern Myth Of Totality

Jin Guantao, the Director of the Philosophy of Science in the Research Institute of the Academy of Natural Sciences, would agree with Max Weber that the transition to modernity could only be achieved through increasing rationalization. For Jin, the typical modern is incarnated in its desire for unity and system, in other words, for the pure form. Where can this formal rationality be sought? It certainly cannot be found in substantive rationality manifested in the traditional mode of zhiguan thinking (intuitive thinking)—for instance, in the theory of tianren ganying , the sympathetic unity of Heaven and (hu)man. Nor can formal rationality be derived from the modern Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, which stipulates the law of dialectic inversion as immutable and predictable and thus, according to Jin, fell into the trap of metaphysics that it claims to subvert from the very start.

Jin Guantao's struggle with dialectics is a subject that should be treated elsewhere. It suffices to say that in 1968, he underwent a methodological crisis at the discovery that the law of change that Hegelian dialectics wrote into itself is prescriptive at large.^[22] A dialectics that foretells the negation of the negation reenacts nothing but the determinate mode of thinking that it critiques and condemns. Even as early as the

late 1960s, the paradox of the determinacy of the indeterminate—a motif that would later mature into his controversial theory of ultrastability—plagued the young scientist who reveled in the odyssey into the mind, oblivious to the violence that the Cultural Revolution incurred.

Jin's rejection of both traditional and Marxist modes of rationality led him on a long pilgrimage into the natural sciences. He emerged at the end of his journey an evangelist of scientific rationality (kexue lixing ). But what distinguished him from other advocates of crude scientism (the renowned physicist Fang Lizhi comes to mind) is his ideal of constructing a dialogue between science and ethics, between natural sciences and social sciences, and between instrumental and substantive reason. Eventually, even his critics have to respect his genuine belief that the challenge of natural sciences to philosophy and the social sciences could revolutionize all three fields simultaneously. Hence the establishment of lixing zhexue (the philosophy of reason), a new system of values and methodologies, became his primary concern. Inasmuch as Jin Guantao aimed to redress the separation of formal process from content, albeit on the theoretical level, we have to give him credit for being well aware that the balance must be maintained between cognitive-instrumental and moral-practical-expressive rationality.

For Jin Guantao's generation, who experienced the traumatic disruption and destruction that the Revolution brought to China, the call for the reconstruction of rationality transcends mere academic interest. His preoccupation with "systematic totality," one of Jin's favorite critical categories, neutral as it may sound, signals an ideological as well as scientific activism because it serves as a reminder and critique of the catastrophic disorder during the revolutionary years. His aversion to the rise of the irrational toward the latter half of the 1980s can thus be put in perspective.^[23] It is totality and order, not rupture and anarchy, that make up the analytic vocabulary of Jin Guantao's refurbished system theory. What can better tame the phenomenon of disorder than undertaking a rigorous examination of its birth as a predictable and recurrent anomaly that never fails to be reappropriated into an ultrastable system? The triumph of totality is complete. Yet how different is this closure—the indeterminate always risks the co-optation by the determinate—from the one engendered by Hegelian dialectics, which Jin Guantao claims to have discarded or transcended?

It appears that although Jin Guantao speaks of the developmental logic of indeterminacy that actually forms the first part of his "philosophy of reason," his fascination with systems, control, and information

theory leads him eventually to the making of a so-called audacious premise characteristic of Hegelian dialectics at large: "Within each system of a given organization (including any given social structure), the growth of disorganizational elements is a regular rule."^[24] To the extent that Jin Guantao did not (or would not) kiss a complete farewell to the master narrative of Hegelian dialectics, both Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars were justified to designate him, despite his futile protest, as a Marxist, Hegelian Marxist, of some sort.^[25]

Although remaining mired in Marxian dialectics, Jin Guantao is unsuccessful in "preserving the Marxist concept of praxis," which presupposes a human agency that can break loose from a closed system of formulaic feedback and control mechanisms.^[26] What then is his specific mode of analysis that pledges alliance with a totalizing scientific rationality, a rationality that allegedly enables and liberates the mind but at the same time encloses real human beings and human history within a superstable macrostructure? This brings us to Jin's theory of ultrastability, the development of a model of Chinese feudal society as a cybernetic system.

Drawing on organization theory, Jin postulates the existence of a regulating mechanism that enables different parts of a given system to achieve a functional equilibrium, which in turn guarantees the stability, hence the survival, of the system in any chaotic environment. He eschews the mechanistic division of the base from superstructure and abandons not only economic determinism, the central organizing category of Marxism, but also the logic of mechanical causality that has been outmoded by the indeterminacy principle of modern physics. What he proposes instead is a restructuring of the traditional Marxist concept of levels similar to that Althusser proposed for his model of "structural causality." An ultrastable structure is made up of successfully regulated relationships and circulations of functional input and output among three interacting subsystems (zi xitong ): the economic, political, and cultural. Whenever antagonistic or "disorganizational" elements emerge to threaten the stability of a given system, four patterns of structural change may occur: total stasis, structural replacement, ultrastable structure resulting from periodic purgation, and total extinction of civilization.^[27] The persistent capacity of Chinese society to dissolve subversive forces gives rise to the proposition of ultrastability.

The political radicalism of such a theory has evaded many of Jin Guantao's critics, and perhaps even the author himself. For if Chinese society

is locked into this cyclical pattern of perpetual renewal, nothing short of a total revolution can break the cycle and bail China out of the stagnation of ultrastability. Here Jin has to disconnect the dialectics of progress from the perspective of a peaceful transformation of society. The liberated society can no longer be conceived of as the natural or logical result of the gradual unfolding of each subsystem toward reason; its realization has rather to be thought of as a catastrophic break from the bad continuum of stability.

The ideological implications of Jin's theory led to a stance that amounts to a total negation of cultural traditions he himself is not prepared to confront. According to his model, it is the Confucian zongfa (clan-centered) system that consolidates the integrative capacity (yitihua ) of the empire-state.^[28] Thus it is the complicity of the subsystems of the cultural with the political that prevents China from struggling free of the backward ideology characteristic of the small peasants' mode of production. Jin Guantao's veiled attack on Confucian ethics probably explains why anticommunist cultural conservatives in Taiwan such as Yan Yuanshu could join without qualms the CCP's condemnation of the Heshang series, which introduced Jin's theory of ultrastability to the national television screen in 1987.

Jin Guantao himself, however, seems ambivalent about the underlying agenda of his philosophy of reason. Does he merely want to provide a scientific analysis of history? Or should scientific rationality be seen as a means of ideological critique rather than as an end in itself? I propose that it is impossible to leave aside the issue of ideology and deal with the problems of his analytical approach on its own terms.

Much can be said about the fissures in Jin Guantao's theoretical framework. Although I am less concerned with the validity of his theory in its own right than with how it can be positioned ideologically in the larger discourse of Chinese modernity, a closer look at the gaps of Jin's theories often brings us closer to the latter inquiry. These gaps foreground the issue of ideology in their manifestation of Jin Guantao's peculiar interpretation of modernity, which is unconsciously split into three conflicting discourses—Weberian modernist, Marxist, and Confucianist—all at the same time.

I have already shown how Jin Guantao's methodological discourse is situated on the border of Marxist dialectics. The Confucian affiliation that I find Jin guilty of should surprise his readers even more, for he was identified during the years of Culture Fever as an indomitable warrior

fighting for the cause of science against everything that the Confucian school stood for. How can we map out the ideological field of a man who seems to be everywhere and everyone's collaborator?

First of all, the three-tier diagram of subsystems, each of which seems to enjoy its own semiautonomy, is indicative of Weber's theory that the process of modernization is inevitably accompanied by the differentiation of value spheres. Yet Jin's insistence on the functional integration (gongneng ouhe ) arising spontaneously among those subsystems also points to the presence of a holistic impulse that conjures up characteristically intuitive and premodern Chinese logic. This logic presupposes and privileges the concept of undifferentiated continuum, whose ultimate crystallization can be found in the theory of the unity of Heaven and (hu)man (tianren heyi )—a mode of thinking he took such pains to refute.

To note such discrepancies is to raise the question: Did Jin Guantao clarify the contradictory relationship between his Weberian modernist vision of a mediated relation among the subsystems and his unconscious recourse to the largely discredited Confucian idealism that prescribes the perfectly harmonious and substantive rationality? That he has not reached a heightened awareness of this problem is demonstrated by the fact that whereas thinkers like Tu Weiming congratulated him for still dreaming the Confucian dream (Tu considers Jin a Confucianized Marxist), others attacked him precisely for having abandoned it.^[29] To complicate the picture, there were still others, anti-Confucianists and various brands of iconoclasts, who faulted him for not abandoning it thoroughly enough.

Because of such shifting ideological vocabulary, the efficacy of Jin Guantao's theories as an ideological critique is weakened to a great extent. His subtext for raising the banner of scientific rationality is the critique of the inadequacy of Confucian culture to meet the challenge of modernity. He attempts, therefore, to construct a modern system of epistemology in which the privileged position of Confucianism will be dissolved into nothing more than one of the many competing elements of that system. Implicit in Jin's theory of ultrastability is a deep-seated pessimism about the capacity of the old system to rejuvenate itself. All the scientific analyses of China's feudal structure seem to lead to a single question: How can self-critique and enlightenment arise from such a self-enclosed system? The proposal for a thorough reconstruction (chedi chongjian ) of Chinese culture should thus emerge as the only logical and viable alternative.

But which part of traditional culture can best answer the epochal call for modernization? Can one map a reconstructed relationship between Confucianism and the new system sanctified by the culture of modern science and technology? Jin's answer to this question seems twice veiled. In numerous articles published jointly with Liu Qingfeng, his intellectual partner and spouse, on the project "Why Did China Fail to Give Rise to Modern Science?" he identifies the archculprit unambiguously as the "ethical centeredness" (lunli zhongxin ) of Confucianism.^[30] This traditional ideology of ethical centeredness "inevitably ascribed the judgment of ethical values to the explanation of natural phenomena. Once ethical norms were imposed upon natural phenomena, it was expected that one would sink into the quagmire of mysticism and superstition."^[31] As for those scientific discoveries into which premodern China stumbled by pure chance, Jin Guantao proclaimed that they were made not for the sake of cognitive interests and curiosity, but predominantly for utilitarian purposes. The pragmatic mentality that Confucian ethics promoted was thus held responsible, in his view, for the deterioration of creative scientific reason into stagnant technological reason in traditional China.

Given Jin Guantao's account of the pernicious influence of Confucianism on the development of science in premodern China, one might conclude that it is the other schools of philosophy (religious Daoism, Moism, and the Yin-Yang Naturalist school, to name a few) rather than Confucianism whose relationship with scientific rationality needs to be reconstructed and remapped. But such is not the case. It is Confucianism, and Confucianism alone, that occupies a central place in Jin Guantao's system of thought. In fact, Jin's ideological stance could be much more easily configurated if he had stopped at the simple condemnation of Confucian ethics. But he goes on to caution those to whom he has preached the virtue of scientism to be aware of its pitfalls. It is, I should add, certainly impressive that a fervent scientist like Jin Guantao could conceive of such a preemptive critique of instrumental reason, applying the notion of the Enlightenment becoming totalitarian with its own tools—a dilemma of Western modernity—to an as-yet unachieved, theoretically postulated Chinese enlightenment. However, although Jin Guantao's resistance to the blind faith in scientific rationality is highly admirable, his conclusion unveils an irony: The modernist's lingering faith in traditionalism dies hard.

Humankind needs a wisdom that can reign over science and technology on a deeper level. . . . At this moment, our look back at Chinese culture is highly significant. [As early as] two thousand years ago, Chinese philosophers had struggled free from the bondage of theology. They took as the basis of

their thinking the behavioral norm and ethical foundation of human beings themselves and had thus developed their unique culture. Regardless of why this ideology of ethical centeredness stood in the way of the progress of modern Chinese science and technology, the remarkable thing is the undaunted and tenacious spirit that the Chinese race exhibited in the creation of its own culture. We can imagine, once the Chinese race recognizes the cultural value of modern science, and once they incorporate this scientific spirit into her cultural quest for unity and harmony , then undoubtedly, a new culture that will represent the future of humankind will dawn on the horizon.^[32]

The specter of Liang Qichao has risen anew from the ashes of history. What else but the harmonious spiritual culture of traditional China returns to greet us in a hypothetical new triumph? What Jin Guantao alludes to in these concluding remarks about the global prospect of scientific culture sounds akin to Liang Qichao's fin-de-siècle sermon that it was Chinese civilization that would bring ultimate salvation to a reified materialist culture of the West. The allure of return seems as tantalizing as ever for Chinese intellectuals—whether they label themselves as Marxists, neo-Confucianists, modern scientists, or all of the above. Is it possible that not even a scientist is immune to the compensatory logic of spiritual victory (jingshen shengli )? The lesson that Jin Guantao can learn from his own words is this: He should continue to cultivate the critical power of scientific reason and leave the messianic mission of "salvaging" the West from scientism to humanist academics in the Western ivory tower. It is the pursuit of the critical power of rationality alone that can bail Jin's project out of mere methodological utilitarianism. The philosopher has yet to discover the "specific theoretical dynamic" of reason that "continually pushes the sciences, and even the self-reflection of the sciences, beyond merely engendering technically useful knowledge" or beyond merely providing a scientific analysis of historical data.^[33]

Given Jin Guantao's overriding interest in the methodological rather than the critical content of instrumental reason, it seems predictable that the term "enlightenment" is not a privileged one in his theories. However, he is still in many ways an heir of the Enlightenment tradition for which history appears as a progress toward reason. And because Jin seems to imply that China's ethically centered ideology can protect the Chinese enlightenment from ravages of reification, the rationalization of Chinese society, in Jin's view, could succeed in yielding the harvest of a utopianism unaccompanied by shadows of objectification. In this, ironically but not surprisingly, Jin Guantao's ideal of utopia echoes in spirit the one carved by reformists within the CCP. The Party reformers' pro-

motion of the socialist "spiritual civilization" (jingshen wenming ) is partly meant to remedy their earlier excessive emphasis on the material progress that the Four Modernizations Program calls for.^[34] Both the Party and Jin Guantao have recognized, at one peculiar moment of ideological collusion, that social modernity goes hand in hand with a cultural modernity that stresses the modernization of humanity defined in terms of the collective and the regulated—whether such project is designated a socialist or Confucianist one.

Thus paradoxically Jin Guantao's interest to find a place for humanity in his scientific project—an effort materialized in Rende zhexue (The philosophy of human beings) (1988), the culminating volume of his trilogy for the philosophy of reason—leads him to a blatantly traditionalist perspective that his scientism is supposed to resist.^[35] For Jin Guantao the humanist, the development of evolutionary dynamism of social modernity apart from a viable cultural modernity is undesirable. He, as well as many Party loyalists and neo-Confucianists, could well appreciate the braking effect of tradition (whether socialist or Confucianist), without which, contemporary beings would be delivered over without any protection to the functional imperatives of economy and administration. Jin Guantao's deep-seated faith in the compensatory role of tradition to a social modernity gone astray renders any clear-cut classification of his ideology almost impossible. His unintentionally complicitous bonding with the Party and neo-Confucianists is further strengthened in that he is no less vehement in his attack on the emergence of the irrational than his alleged Confucian and Marxist rivals. Li Zehou's insightful comment applies to the deep structural correspondence between Jin Guantao's scientific rationality and the Chinese rationality of which Confucianism is characteristic: "The pragmatic rationality of Chinese tradition not only does not contradict it [the vigorous Western logical analysis and its seamless mode of reasoning and thinking], but it can help promulgate it."^[36]

Is Li Zehou asserting another instance of the powerful mechanism of the sinification syndrome? Or is there really such a thing as a sinicized form of scientific rationality? Jin Guantao himself has taken pains to remove the stigma of Eurocentrism that is attached to scientific reason and reached the conclusion that the national, Western hegemony of scientific culture is an outmoded idea in today's situation of multinationals. He claims that scientific reason is not Occidental. It is quite possible that China could reinvent its own indigenous version of scientific rationality that may yet supplement, or even replace, Western scientism and serve

as the global paradigm to come. The ideology of the alternative modern resurfaces. Amid the presence of a resuscitated sinocentrism in defiance of a rampant Eurocentrism, the question as to whether Jin Guantao is a traditionalist or antitraditionalist, Marxian scientist or Confucian humanist may be ultimately meaningless.

Confucian Revivalism

Jin Guantao's agenda of scientism forms but one of many responses that Chinese intellectuals made to the quest of the new era for a modern ideology that can replace the defunct unifying power that Maoism-Marxism once provided. But in post-Mao China, the advocacy of scientific rationality always risks the danger of being compromised by its opposite—substantive reason embedded in traditional ethics and xuanxue (metaphysics). I have shown how Jin Guantao's future-oriented time-consciousness paradoxically provided him privileged access to the premodern myth of totality and harmony. At the same moment that he propagated instrumental reason with the deepest conviction, his future-oriented gaze became ambiguously, albeit involuntarily, entangled in the imaginative reconstruction of an ethical totality borrowed from the idealized past of communal canons. The qigong phenomenon exemplifies the same paradox at work. Although its supreme masters such as Yan Xin never ceased to emphasize the scientific foundation for the art on lecture tours in the West, the quick spread of the "art of material energy" among every social stratum throughout the 1980s was hardly the result of the blossoming of a nationwide interest in scientific knowledge. On the contrary, the Yan Xin cult owed its popular appeal to the superstitious belief that common folk invested in the magic healing potency of qigong and to their remembrance of a past populated by legends of Haideng the High Priest, ancient swordsmen and boxers, and various other miracle workers and Daoist shamans.^[37]

The danger of a relapse into the backward gaze reflects the epochal (un)consciousness of the historical bondage of tradition within which even the most revolutionary feats of modernity are embedded. It also serves to indicate that it is probably cultural ideology, rather than modern science, that stands a better chance of filling in the ideological gaps left by Maoism-Marxism. Surely toward the end of 1986, the term "culture" replaced that of "science" as the password for the Cultural Discussion. The revival of neo-Confucianism (ruxue fuxing ) can thus be taken as a response that the CCP and cultural conservatives made to the

epochal demands of Deng's China for a substitute utopian vision in the face of Marxist ideological disintegration. Proudly presented in competition with the technocratic notion of rationality was this historicist view of substantive reason incarnated in traditional ethics.

Although Jin Guantao and the neo-Confucianists never carried on a nominal debate over the efficacy of scientific rationality versus substantive reason in their respective confrontation of the challenge posed by Chinese modernity, the oppositional agenda between the two parties evokes the ghost of the May Fourth debate of "science versus metaphysics" (kexue yu xuanxue ) in 1923.^[38] Nonetheless, most intellectuals such as Gan Yang and Su Xiaokang insisted that the major themes of the Cultural Discussion revealed a qualitative departure from, rather than a simple rehash of, the old May Fourth problematics.^[39] One such qualitative difference can be detected in the neo-Confucianists' heightened awareness that the new cultural renaissance that they called for should not be defined as a simplistic revivalism, but rather as a dual, simultaneous movement of modernity's critique of tradition and tradition's critique of modernity.

However, the theoretical proposal about modernity's critique of tradition—which amounts to a self-critique of tradition—should not be taken at face value. Advocates of the "neo-Confucianism of the third stage" were obviously more concerned with the capacity of tradition to withstand the furious pace of modernity and all the problems that would accompany it.^[40] Although Tu Weiming insisted that a neo-Confucian renaissance is based on the concept of "creative transformation" rather than equated with a conservative return to the Great Learning, the neo-Confucianists did not adequately address the intriguing theoretical question of how one can critique but at the same time inherit tradition.^[41] On the other hand, tradition's critique of modernity cannot be genuinely executed either. With the rise of the myth of "Four Asian Dragons," the 1980s saw the possibility of collaboration rather than confrontation between the two seemingly antithetical terms of tradition and modernity. Overseas neo-Confucian scholars like Tu Weiming and Yu Yingshi played an important role in driving home the dramatic message. Their ideological interventions from abroad strengthened the belief that Confucian tradition not only does not jeopardize, but on the contrary, facilitates the modernization process. Tu cited examples of Taiwan, Singapore, and other prosperous East Asian countries, and Yu traced the positive influence of Confucian culture on mercantilism back to the Ming and Qing period.^[42] The timely entry into the Cultural Discussion of

overseas discourses on neo-Confucianism helped shape the central thesis of the Chinese debate over traditional culture and modernization. The thesis that both Tu and Yu foregrounded derived its ultimate reference from Max Weber's theoretical framework laid out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Can Confucianism be creatively transformed into a new ethos and ethics that could serve as the ideological foundation for Chinese modernization?

The implicit reference to Weber was well taken in China because it corresponded to the series of Weberian inquiries that Chinese intellectuals themselves had undertaken even before the "Weber fever" reached its peak toward the second half of 1986 with the appearance of the Chinese translation of The Protestant Ethic . If, as Weber implied, modern Western capitalism is supported by the spiritual culture of Protestantism (characterized as a model of rationality based on a synthetic vision of "other-worldly" quest and "inner-worldly asceticism"), then did not the successful experiment of East Asian countries with capitalism indicate that neo-Confucianism can serve East Asia as Protestantism served the modern West? The Tu-Yu proposition about the compatibility of Confucian culture with an East Asian modernity provided neo-Confucian advocates at home enough ammunition to combat the school of total westernization (quanpan xihua ), whose message was powerfully delivered in the iconoclastic voice of Heshang .

Mainland Chinese cultural critics were indeed fascinated with the prospect of cultural self-positioning that neo-Confucianism promised. It is exactly this "articulation of native culture into a capitalist narrative," as Arif Dirlik argues, that made the East-Asian Confucian revival at home possible in the first place.^[43] Such a pan-East-Asianism ("Confucian thought is the symbol of Eastern culture") gave rise to speculations that "Confucius not only belongs to China, he also belongs to the entire world."^[44] The possibility that Confucian thinking may transcend temporal, spatial, ethnic, and geographical boundaries invigorated many Chinese Marxists who were willing to talk about the "complementality" as well as contradition between socialist modernization and Confucian ideology.^[45]

Although Chinese Marxists talked much about how the positive elements of Confucian ethics—especially its emphasis on patriotic values and intellectuals' youhuan yishi (anxiety and crisis consciousness)—can benefit the socialist campaign of the reconstruction of spiritual civilization, they were much more engrossed in exploring the collaborative, or complicitous, relationship between the Master's philosophy and the

mode of production, capitalist or socialist. It is the vision marked by the profitable co-optation of tradition by modernity—Confucianism serving the interests of socialism and capitalism—that characterized the contemporary Confucian renaissance first and foremost as a movement traversed by materialist motifs that placed high stakes on the solidarity between tradition and modernity. The constellation of the past in relation to the present during the 1980s has thus undergone a specific change from the May Fourth period, whose historical experience was confined within the antagonistic configuration between these two terms.

The task of mapping out the strategic position of Confucianism in the discourse of Chinese modernity subverts the bipolar oppositional formulae prevalent during the May Fourth period: zhongxi zhi zheng (China versus the West) and tradition versus modernity. On the one hand, arguing against what Weber proclaimed in The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism , Chinese Confucianists were eager to demonstrate that just like Western Protestantism, "neo-Confucianism could not only adapt but also pander to the spirit of capitalism."^[46] From this view, Confucianism is no less susceptible to instrumental reason and materialistic motivation on which capitalism is based than capitalism itself. And yet on the other hand, Confucian tradition was originally evoked as an antidote to the Western model of modernity. Whether Confucianism liberates or colludes with modernity is an issue that none of its advocates or even its opponents are ready to confront. Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, and all those genuine defenders of Confucianism in the early twentieth century would certainly toss and turn in their graves if they suspected that the so-called modernization of Confucianism (ruxue xiandai hua ) might lead to its ideological alliance with materialism and a modernity that gains ascendancy over the utopian past appropriated for the pure interests of the present.

Although the validity of the East Asian model remains to be seen, the theoretical possibility for the alliance between Confucianism and capitalism, or in Weberian terms, the potential collapse of substantive reason into instrumental reason, emerged as a phenomenon no less scandalous than the (reverse) co-optation of science by Confucian ethics in Jin Guantao's system of thought.

The internal drive for self-negation within the ideological realms of scientism and neo-Confucianism does not simply tell us about the contradiction of the zeitgeist of the 1980s. It also indicates that those who made claims to the purity of either position failed to capture the essentially ambiguous makeup of contemporary Chinese culture and society.

The internal development of science and morality, of efficacy and truth value, bears effects of domination as well as of emancipation. It is precisely the recognition of the ambiguity of the modernization process—progressive and atavistic at the same time—rather than the identification of a single unambiguous model, that needs to be foregrounded in our discussion of the agenda of Chinese modernity.

If such ambiguity escaped the advocates of neo-Confucian revivalism, the CCP was even less equipped to deal with it. This is not to suggest that the Party was short of ambivalence in its reevaluation of Confucianism. The long process of the rehabilitation of Confucius in post-Mao China could be traced back to 1978 when the first symposium on the studies of Confucianism was held at Shandong University. A consensus was reached among Marxist ideologues in the succeeding years that the era of Confucius-bashing (fan Kong ) was as passé as the eras that turned Confucianism into a cult (zun Kong ).^[47] During the first half of the 1980s, it indeed looked as if the Party was interested in nothing but a serious academic reappraisal of Confucianism, for whom the issue of critique was as crucial as that of heritage. However, the ambiguous tone of the reappraisal underwent a subtle change as the indigenous project slowly evolved into an international one from 1987 onward.^[48] All of a sudden, China's participation in the multinational agenda of the "Greater East Asia" overtook the simple local program of the cultural critique of traditionalism. The Party's agenda to endorse and to a certain extent initiate the reevaluations of neo-Confucianism during the Cultural Discussion was undoubtedly in part accounted for by its unambivalent sinocentric position, which showed little reluctance to sanctify an indigenous ideology as the single most efficacious model against the infiltration of foreign symbols (the list of which includes science, materialism, irrationality, and individualism à la mode).

What I wish to problematize, however, is not the Janus face of the postcolonial formula of East Asian Confucianized capitalism—its underlying impulse for self-empowerment and domination coexisting with an emancipatory capacity that frees the local from the hegemony of Western modernity. What I wish to lay bare is China's internal cultural politics that accompanied neo-Confucian revivalism, a politics that, unlike what the pan-East-Asian collaborative project implies, is unambiguously domineering without much liberatory potential. From beneath the camouflage of a seemingly innocuous cultural program (indigenous versus Western values) emerged a powerful hidden agenda only a politically disenfranchised Party apparatus would embrace with enthusiasm. What the

Confucian revival reinscribed was the hierarchy of social structure consolidated first by the absolute subjugation of the subjects to the Emperor, which reinforced the Party's mandate. The reinvention of the truth value of the collective (this time not a politically defined collective, but an ethical one) served as the regime's preemptive attack on the "poisonous blossoms" unfolded in the name of the individual.

The official support for neo-Confucianism should surprise no one. In October 1986, a national meeting on the future development of Chinese philosophy was convened by the official organ that laid out China's Seven Five-Year Plans for the disciplinary promotion of philosophy and the social sciences. Resolutions passed during the seven-day conference focused on the launching of a national project on the "Studies on Modern Neo-Confucian Thoughts." The two principal investigators of the project, Fang Keli, a professor in the philosophy department of Nankai University, and Li Jinquan, a professor at Zhongshan University, announced that the project would involve the collaboration of forty-seven specialists from sixteen research institutes over a period of ten years. In a follow-up meeting held at Xuanzhou of Anhui Province in September 1987, the research team decided to focus their studies on ten neo-Confucian masters: Xiong Shili, Liang Shuming, Feng Zhiyou, He Lin, Zhang Junli (the first generation); and Qian Mu, Fang Dongmei, Tang Junyi, Xu Fuguan, and Mou Zongsan (the second generation).^[49] Although it is still too early to predict whether the mega-project will succeed in building a theoretical bridge between Marxism and neo-Confucianism, the official search for the dialogue between these two rival ideologies is certainly much more ominous than Tu Weiming is willing to admit. That the CCP "could better cherish the challenge posed by neo-Confucianism than by the advocates of Westernization" was not merely due, as Tu claims, to the fact that orthodox Marxist-Leninists were more sensitive to issues of ideology and moral values.^[50] What was truly at stake was the self-interest of the Party in the face of the challenge of bourgeois liberalism. The complex issue of the legitimation crisis of Maoism-Marxism-Leninism that Tu mentioned but bypassed immediately should be subject to more rigorous examination if one is to fully comprehend the CCP's political motivation for endorsing the neo-Confucian revival.

Such an inquiry may in fact require more than mere critical insight, with which Tu Weiming is equipped aplenty. Perhaps it was mainland intellectuals' personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution that enabled them to suspect what Tu could not: The historical continuity of

Confucianism to Chinese Marxism. It was none other than memories of the ideological collusion between the two that prompted mainland critic Yang Binzhang to retort both to overseas Chinese scholars' complacent promotion of neo-Confucianism in mainland China and to the Party's suspicious involvement in Confucian revivalism.^[51]

As outlined earlier in this chapter, the Party's collaboration with traditionalists took various guises. It endorsed the establishment of the Academy of Chinese Culture—the bulwark of neo-Confucianists—and supported the series of workshops that the academy sponsored. The presidency of the Association of Confucian Studies was given to Gu Mu, the vice-premier of the State Department. And the various discussion sessions entitled "Strategies of Cultural Development" held in Shanghai and Guangzhou throughout 1986 were all activities administered by the reformers' quarter within the Party.

The CCP's alliance with neo-Confucianism appears even more problematic if one recalls that the CCP was the main organ that stipulated and carried out various modernization programs. The contradictory strategies that the Party adopted—that it could declare allegiance with tradition (the site for substantive reason) and modernity (the site for instrumental reason) simultaneously—reveal not only the nature of the expedient measures required for its political survival, but more importantly, suggest that tradition is by no means immune to the regimen of instrumental reason whenever it plays into the hands of political authorities. That is to say, if Confucianism itself is susceptible to instrumental rationality, the Party should experience little ideological inconsistency in courting its partnership.

As the other party of this pragmatic union, neo-Confucianists had less to gain. The potential and actual co-optation of Confucianism by Marxism only accelerated the process of the delegitimization of the former. Those who vowed against Marxism inevitably found Confucianism guilty as well. The intense aversion to tradition voiced in Heshang should not simply be seen as a scapegoating attempt by its scriptwriters to deflect attention from the real target, the communist system. On the contrary, tradition was condemned precisely because Su Xiaokang unconsciously recognized its collusion with the system itself, despite the fact that his later self-critique told us a different story.

On the whole, Chinese Marxist critics made no secret that they undertook the reevaluation of neo-Confucianism not on its own terms but from the Marxian perspective. Whereas they had no qualms in discussing the interrelationship between Confucian ethics and modernization, they

rejected the notion of Confucianized capitalism as a typical idealist mode of thinking. All good orthodox Marxists would insist that it is base structure rather than superstructure that should be taken as the last instance of determination. Furthermore, as their own project of co-opting Confucianism is well under way, Chinese Marxist scholars are not oblivious to the hidden agenda of neo-Confucianism (especially its overseas advocates), whose primary goal, they proclaim, is to "assimilate and dissolve" Marxism.^[52] The optimistic talk between Marxists and neo-Confucianists about the search for common ground can therefore only deceive those who imagine that idealism can wed materialism and live happily ever after.

The complex relationship between Marxism and Confucianism in the 1980s taught us that the unpopularity of Confucianism among the younger generation of mainland intellectual circles was a phenomenon that did not always have anything to do with the vice and virtue of Confucian culture. Unless we examine the shifting relationships between tradition, modernization, and Chinese Marxism—their immanent antagonisms, compromising impulses, mutual attractions, and contingent accommodations—we will be unable to glimpse the complicity of power with knowledge in the seemingly antihegemonic discourse of the Cultural Discussion. Although 1985 was consecrated as the "methodology year," it was after all not a decade cleansed of ideology. The ebb and flow of methodological fever was hardly politically innocent. Nor could one assume that all the discourses produced during the Discussion were "unofficial" or even "antiofficial." The Party might not be the most eye-catching player in Culture Fever. And yet it certainly participated actively in unleashing certain discourses (such as the discourse of modern consciousness that I discuss in chapter four) while co-authoring others (such as neo-Confucianism).

In calling for a more honest reassessment of the role that the Party played in the Cultural Discussion, I wish to caution those (post-June Fourth exiles in particular) who blew out of proportion the antiestablishment mentality and the utopian character of the Discussion. In their view, the mid-1980s witnessed the confrontation and struggle between two diametrically opposed discourses: The "new civilian culture [minjian wenhua ] oriented toward human rights, democracy, pluralism, and open-mindedness" and the "old official culture [guanfang wenhua ] oriented toward authoritarianism, closed-mindedness, conservatism, and inhumanness."^[53] In this imaginary map of bipolar opposition, Culture Fever emerged as the contemporary counterpart of the May Fourth

Movement. It was seen as a dramatic trigger that opened up an iconoclastic space for anti-Marxist critics to generate discourses outside the power structure of the Party.^[54] The thought that the Party could have taken part in a movement that prized itself for emancipating the mind was probably too sacrilegious for an elite who had always envisioned themselves as an uncompromising oppositional force in modern and contemporary China.

Confucianism and Rationality

Having configured the intricate relationship between power and knowledge to which Confucian revivalism inevitably gave rise, I now turn to the content issue: which aspects of neo-Confucianism are considered dregs (zaopo ) that obstruct the project of modernity, and which aspect is identified as its quintessence (jinghua ) that comes to modernity's rescue?^[55]

It is important to note, first of all, that both the advocates and critics of the neo-Confucian school welcomed, and sometimes even solicited, the constructive criticism that exposed the retrogressive elements inherent in neo-Confucianism. The primary target of such relentless critiques is the philosophy's infamous liaison with an instrumental rationality that consolidated authoritarian regimes throughout imperial Chinese history. Given that an ultrastable political culture in premodern China was a casualty of the domination of Confucian statecraft, many scholars claimed that the repercussions of such a cultural heritage led to the malfunctioning of modern society as well. Nobody, especially the Party reformers, failed to notice—in the fine print at least—how the seamless structure of feudal bureaucracy obstructed the progress of China's modernization. The extension of the hierarchical familial and social structure to the workplace resulted in low efficiency and the continuation of the relations of production based on clan-centered consciousness—two nemeses holding in check the utilitarian functionalism on which the Western definition of social modernity is based.

Any vigorous critique of Confucian hierarchy invites irrevocably a reevaluation of the servile role accorded to the individual in the Confucian worldview. But once the subjugation of individual will and desire to the imperial and familial patriarch was identified as the real site of contestation, the criticism of the functional inefficiency of neo-Confucianism ran the risk of being turned into a defiant challenge to the current regime, and indeed to any regime that gained its legitimacy from the alleged mandate of the collective. The intimation of the tyranny

of the collective was a political land mine on which mainland anti-Confucianists had to dance with extreme trepidation.

Of course, whether neo-Confucian ethics obstructs or facilitates the East Asian narrative of capitalism is an intricate issue not easily resolved by either a wholesale condemnation of Confucianism or the theoretical hypothesis of Confucianized capitalism. A more levelheaded critic of neo-Confucianism in Deng's China aspires to a position between the extremes, recognizing the rational elements of Confucianism but critiquing its proponents' attempt to inflate the role that Confucian cultural philosophy played in modernizing East Asia.^[56]

But whenever the issue of cultural subjectivity is foregrounded, those who hold the middle ground are tempted to give in to the proposition of the alternative modern. Much of my discussion in the previous section illustrates that the postcolonial politics of localism versus Eurocentrism has led prosperous East Asian countries (and their elite representatives) to the making of a contestatatory narrative of modernity. This East Asian discourse on modernity is based on the notion of a collectively oriented entrepreneurship and clan-centered ethics, which, according to its narrators, benefits instead of cripples productive relations in modern society.

Neo-Confucian advocates have repeatedly claimed that their philosophy provides sources of substantive rationality that can combat the adverse effects of a social modernity caught in extreme functionalism and antihumanist efficacy. Advocates of neo-Confucian revival share the Weberian conviction that moral and spiritual values play a constructive role in rectifying the fetishization of Western material culture.

At first sight, the fundamental recipe for the promotion of Confucian substantive rationality seemed to comprise a simple concoction of a plain and wholesome Confucian spiritual diet that was meant to neutralize the pungent flavors that modern Western values left on the palate of a modernizing China. A binary paradigm between two sets of opposing terms—Confucian and Western values—were thus set up. And there was no doubt that the first set of terms was privileged over the second. Thus collective wisdom was pitted against idiosyncratic genius, a harmonious coexistence with Nature against domination over Nature, a mechanism of well-regulated interpersonal relations against egocentric mores, communal rapprochement against alienation, human-centered worldview (renben zhuyi ) against materialism, idealism against functionalism, reason against desire, and middle-of-the-road (zhongyong ) mentality against

extremist positioning. The simplistic structuralist principle at work here needs little explanation or elaborate criticism. Anyone who has overcome the human anxiety of classification and the structuralist impulse of polarization will perceive that those generalizing formulae hardly characterize fully or exhaust either Confucian or Western values.

The picture was further complicated by the potential reversibility of certain terms of substantive rationality into its opposite, instrumental reason. For instance, "collective wisdom" could undergo the process of instrumentalization and be turned into a tool serving an ultrastable sociopolitical and cultural structure. The collective almost always dictates homogeneity, marginalizes the particular, smothers difference, and views creativity with suspicion. The "mechanism of regulated human relationships" never fails to conjure up the image of a traditional extended family preying on its individual members and the modern caricature of Maoist street committees prying into and controlling private lives in the name of harmonizing human relationships. "Human-centeredness" sounds especially suspicious since the term "humanity" is not only historically but also culturally specific. In the West it may mean celebration of individuality, rebellion against anything normative, or a leap to the primordial. In China, however, this breathtaking act of self-delimiting contradicts the true spirit of renben . Confucian human-centered epistemology rarely positions the self as a term in its own right. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the self is hardly aware of its own boundary because it is never differentiated from the whole in the first place. Furthermore, in its emphasis on moral principles, this kind of epistemology collapses into ethics. And when one considers how such ethical constraints contributed to the maintenance of the functional coherence of power both in imperial and modern times, one wonders how it can claim its unequivocal superiority over Western materialism. After all, both renben ethics and materialism can yield deformed human beings, since the former may nurture totalitarian instinct, and the latter, reification. How could one cure the other, or to speak in the diction of instrumental reason, how can the instrument of the Sovereign Patriarch bring salvation to that of Mammon? This seems to be an issue that deserves serious scrutiny.

Finally, the notion of "golden mean" yields an excess of eclecticism that often guarantees the continuation of the status quo at the cost of daring conceptual revolutions. Eclecticism, in fact, predictably summarizes the gist of the main staple of modern and contemporary neo-Confucian revival, that is, the manifesto of fanben kaixin (returning

to the source [Confucian ethics] and opening a new path [science and democracy]). The 1980s were a different time than 1958, when this manifesto was first launched by Mou Zongsan, Zhang Junli, Tang Junyi, and Xu Fuguan.^[57] What appeared in 1958 as a revolutionary proposal of modernizing Confucianism looked in the eighties like just another variation of the clichéd formula of "Chinese substance and Western means" (Zhongti xiyong ). There was no shortage of critiques of the cultural logic of blending from mainland Chinese Marxist critics, to whom the neo-Confucian Way that is "sagely within and kingly without" (neisheng waiwang )—the scenario of a Confucian moral culture wedded to Western pragmatism—is paradoxical at best. Many questioned the inner incentive and capacity of neo-Confucianism to invent a new modern democratic and scientific culture. The minben (for the people) orientation of the Confucian art of governance was demystified by many as characteristically Machiavellian, and the neo-Confucianists' effort to extract cognitive subjectivity from the ethical-moral subject (liangzhi ) proved to be merely self-deceptive from the very beginning.^[58] Bao Zunxin was most articulate in summarizing the representative position of Chinese anti-Confucian critique: "If the value system of tradition is not shattered, then [it] does not signify progress but eclecticism instead; it does not mean the expansion of new frontiers but conservatism, not physics but ethics."^[59] All the criticisms exemplify once more the inner contradiction between the orthodox Marxian scientific worldview and a fundamentally idealist philosophy such as the "Learning of the Principle of Reason" (lixue )—the dominant trend of Song and Ming neo-Confucianism—upon which the contemporary neo-Confucian revival is based.^[60]

Neo-Confucianism and Western Marxism

Disagreement between Marxism and neo-Confucianism may indeed lead us to renounce the hypothesis that the materialist and idealist standpoint can reach a common understanding about how to best define modernity. But the fantasy about the possible union of those two rival ideologies has just begun. In fact, the neo-Confucianists' critique of Western instrumental rationality raises the theoretical possibility of a neo-Confucian revisionism that is no less scandalous than the so-called Confucianized capitalism. If contemporary Confucian proponents had no qualms in forging a liaison with capitalism, one may argue that a diametrically different ideological collusion with Western Marxism is equally a plausible supposition that is worth exploring.

Although mainland scholars like Tang Yijie, Fang Keli, and their Marxist peers are interested in mapping out the conflux between dogmatic Marxism and Confucianism, the possibilities that Western Marxism has a lesson or two to teach both Chinese Confucianists and Chinese Marxists seems to have eclipsed their imagination. When asked why Chinese intellectuals did not seek any inspiration from Western Marxists, the formulaic response is the simple dismissal that "it is not very useful to us."^[61]

Indeed, Herbert Marcuse's critique of the one-dimensional society of capitalism and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's denunciation of the paradox of the European Enlightenment have nearly canceled out every potential influence they could exercise on Chinese intellectuals, whether neo-Confucianists or Marxists. It is understandable that any critique of capitalism, and indeed, of modernity itself, should be unpalatable to a nation in a craze for modernization. In a similar manner, Adorno and Horkheimer's negative appraisal of the Enlightenment fails to appeal to an elite whose lament for the May Fourth Movement as an unfinished project of enlightenment seems to perpetuate itself indefinitely. Interestingly, yet not surprisingly, it was only through Erich Fromm—via Freud—and through the subject of psychoanalysis that the Frankfurt School left its feeble imprints on the psyche of Chinese intellectuals during the 1980s.^[62]

Predictably, research on the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory in post-Mao China remained academically oriented.^[63] Few studies were undertaken on the ideological implications of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Englightenment for the discussions of Chinese modernity. What escaped Chinese intellectuals' attention is not only the authors' critique of Occidental rationalism but also their totalizing criticism of the bondage of instrumental reason and domination, themes that nearly all of China's neo-Confucianists had touched upon in their efforts to promote the ultimate antidote—spiritual culture of the East.

The kindred spirit between Adorno, Horkheimer, and the contemporary neo-Confucian revivalists makes one wonder if the latter—especially neo-Confucianists on mainland China—could benefit from the former's critique of capitalism or learn from the Critical theory's core arguments against instrumental reason something about their own critique of Western scientism and the Occidental mode of modernity. What strengthens the theoretical possibility of such a cross-fertilization between neo-Confucianism and Western Marxism is the close resemblance

of the antidote that each party prescribes in its treatment of the alienating function of instrumental reason.

Horkheimer criticizes the rigid dualisms of spirit and nature, the ideal and the real, and speaks of the "critical spirit" as one that "prepare[s] in the intellectual realm the reconciliation of the two [namely, subjective and objective reason] in reality."^[64] Both Adorno and Horkheimer are aware that substantive reason, although part of bourgeois enlightenment ideology, is nevertheless a humanizing factor. Inasmuch as they depict late capitalist culture as narcissistic—the subjective and the private leaving little space for the objective and the public—both Marxists sound like neo-Confucianists who complain about the banishment of the questions of communal values from the domain of rational thought. And to the extent that they condemn Western history as a process that starts from the self's renunciation of nature and community (everything that is antithetical to it) and concludes with the self's self-renunciation, they seem to yearn for the curative magic of all those good old Confucian dictums such as tianren heyi (the unity of Heaven and [hu]man), liyong housheng (utilizing resources and enriching the lives of the people), and wanwu yiti (myriads of phenomena in One Being).

Speculations about such ideological affinities notwithstanding, a radical critique of reason in Adorno and Horkheimer's fashion risks alienating the neo-Confucianists for one good reason. We only need to follow the history of counter-Enlightenment in the West—from Nietzsche to Derrida via Heidegger and from Nietzsche to Foucault via Bataille—to understand that a radical critique of reason inevitably leads to the critique of the sovereign rational subject and, by extension, to a frontal attack on the whole tradition of humanism itself. What is at stake is the entire value system of the conscious (as opposed to the unconscious), the conceptual (as opposed to the preconceptual or nonconceptual), the rational (as opposed to the irrational), the moral subject (as opposed to the decentered body of desire), and fusion (as opposed to diremption). It is easy to comprehend why Chinese neo-Confucianists and virtually all the Chinese advocates of modernity were not prepared to join forces with the progenitors of Western post- or anti-Englightenment philosophy.

What this entails is that the Chinese ad-lib response to the Frankfurt School, "it is not useful," tells only half of the story. It tells us what Chinese neo-Confucianists chose to negate in Western Marxism: the whole package of antihumanist and anti-enlightenment ideology. By perpetuating the habit of instinctually evaluating the intellectual goods delivered

to their door, Chinese cultural elite neither fully grasp the risks if they purchase the goods nor understand in advance what is at stake if they reject them. Decisions always have to be made in a haste. And the turnovers of ideas are so speedy that the intellectual market of Deng's China in the late 1980s was already buying the fantasies about the "late-capitalist" cultural logic of Chinese postmodernism.

My purpose in undertaking this brief analysis of the possible dialogues between neo-Confucianists and the two representative figures of the Frankfurt School is to pose the question, What is at stake if the former renounces the latter as an unusable commodity? Although in the course of formulating this question, I have already speculated about possible answers, I wish to recapitulate the crux of the problematic: What is at stake is the eventual failure of the neo-Confucianists and their official patron, the CCP, to truly understand the ambiguities of the rationalization and modernization process that China is going through at this historical moment. Their alliance, pronounced in the first case, and unpronounced in the second, with capitalism further deepens the conceptual fallacy that they can pay any price demanded by the economic progress that comes with modernization. The June Fourth tragedy is one dramatic ransom paid in one installment. There are other smaller dues to be collected. Ecological imbalance and environmental problems are certainly on the list, as are a few classic capitalist evils such as sharpened class conflicts, the return of prostitution, and alienation not of the socialist kind, but of a brand that Harper's deemed marketable. Appearing in the magazine were translations of slogans on the "cultural T-shirts" that Chinese urban youths loved to wear before they were banned in June 1991: "Depleted," "There is no tomorrow—get drunk today," "I'm terribly depressed! Keep away from me!" "Life is meaningless," and the climactic narrative, "I don't have the guts to be a smuggler, I don't have the capital to be an entrepreneur, I don't have the cunning to be an official. I mess around, I break my rice bowl, I am nothing."^[65] How neo-Confucianism can bring relief to such social dislocations while planning for a merger with capitalism is both a paradox and an impasse that the neo-Confucianists should examine in their own critical discourse.

At The Margin: The Enlightenment School And The Hermeneutic Experiment

The neo-Confucian revival ushered onto the central stage of the Cultural Discussion a time-consciousness in which the present can no longer

define itself by posing against the past. The neo-Confucianists have reiterated that only through the remembrance of tradition can Chinese modernity be rescued from colonization by the Western model. This is a culturalist position grounded in the perspective of historical continuity rather than in the fantasy of making a leap into the future from a zero-degree present, a position held by radicals like Liu Xiaobo.^[66] Neo-Confucianists were not the only participants in the Cultural Discussion who stressed the inner drive within tradition to perpetuate itself in continuous self-rejuvenation. In this section, we shall take a look at two of the marginal, albeit infinitely suggestive, discourses that explore the theme of the diachronic relationship of tradition to modernity from epistemological standpoints markedly different from neo-Confucianism: the qimeng (enlightenment) philosophy and the hermeneutic school of thought.^[67]

The Qimeng School

The qimeng school, whose advocates included Xiao Shafu, Feng Tianyu, and Shen Shanhong, did not simply present a retrospective show of tradition like the neo-Confucianists. Tradition, in their view, had a serpentine course of its own, untamed and collusive. The qimeng philosophies revisited those historical crossroads where tradition encountered modernity. One such crossroad—the late Ming and early Qing dynasty, from the reign of Shenzong Emperor (1573–1620) of Ming dynasty to Kanxi Emperor (1662–1723) of Qing—was highlighted by Xiao Shafu, Feng Tianyu, and Shen Shanhong as the beginning of the Chinese enlightenment tradition from which they claimed that the May Fourth iconoclastic thinking originated.

Under the heavy influence of the Western paradigm that attributed the birth of critical reason (the Age of the Enlightenment was known as the Age of Reason) to advanced materialist culture, the qimeng school advocates were eager to demonstrate that the material condition of China in the late sixteenth century was already ripe for the rational critique of superstition, transcendental thought, and the ancien régime in whose terms tradition was usually defined. What they presented was a bustling picture of Southeast China under the sway of a burgeoning capitalist mode of production at the turn of the seventeenth century, a picture still contested among social and intellectual historians.^[68] This was the period, Feng Tianyu and Xiao Shafu proclaimed, that Chinese intellectuals first practiced the rationalist critique of the idealism of the Song-Ming neo-Confucianism.^[69] And, thanks to the quick development of printing techniques and other means of disseminating knowledge,

these intellectuals founded the "learning of practice" (shixue ) that stressed "objective investigation over subjective speculation" and "concrete evidence over empty talks."^[70] The origin of Chinese enlightenment and cultural modernity, Feng and Xiao contended, should therefore be pushed back from the May Fourth period (a period intimately connected in the popular memory with foreign imperialism) to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Accompanying this revisionist attempt to relocate the genesis of Chinese modernity, a long list of China's earliest "enlightenment philosophers" was introduced and scrutinized rigorously: Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, Wang Fuzhi, Fang Yizhi, Xu Guangqi, Mei Wending, and Tang Zhen.

The enlightenment school derived its nomenclature from the revalorization of the notion of qimeng . However, in contrast to those who defined the May Fourth Movement as first and foremost an aborted enlightenment movement engendered by the confrontation between Chinese and Western culture, the school formulated a hypothesis that the seeds of enlightenment were already sown within the Chinese virgin soil long before the imperialists' forced entry and that they could trace the historical continuity of the qimeng motif throughout the late imperial history all the way to May Fourth. Modernity was understood as a self-generated, albeit crisis-ridden process already incorporated within a premodern Chinese history that was marked by sudden critical branchings from tradition into unpredictable destinations. For cultural critics, locating such branchings amounts to the sharpening of their consciousness of the moments of "missed decisions and neglected interventions."^[71] A look backward to the treacherous paths of China's past where perilous conditions of possibilities converged and then dissolved by chance presented an alluring invitation to those who were eager to prove that China can make its own modernity on its own terms.

To understand why Xiao Shafu, Feng Tianyu, and their colleagues felt compelled to recover an indigenous discourse of enlightenment, we need to look into the enlightenment complex from which Chinese elite have suffered since the May Fourth period. Underlying this complex is their unquestioned premise that enlightenment serves as the primary catalyst for the making of the modern and their uncomfortable recognition that the qimeng model prevalent during the 1920s was fundamentally an imported conceptual category. That a Western model of enlightenment could yield only a colonial modernity in China was a theoretical predicament from which nationalistic Chinese intellectuals would fain extricate themselves. The long quest into China's historical past for seeds of en-

lightenment was therefore an indispensable task for those whose hidden agenda was to tame the hegemonic Western discourse of enlightenment. Anyone familiar with the cultural politics of localism could predict the ultimate conclusion reached by the qimeng school: Modern China's search for sociocultural modernity was internally motivated and had a history and model of its own.

Paradoxically, the advocates of the qimeng school could only take leave of the Western masters in theory. In practice, it was science and democracy—the two familiar markers of Western Enlightenment—that guided their search for those early landmarks of modernity in premodern Chinese discourse. Thus they claimed to have rediscovered an embryonic democratic consciousness (minzhu zhuyi yishi ) in late Ming and early Qing thinkers as well as a burgeoning scientific spirit illustrated in the two epochal dictums hewu jiuli (investigating materials to look into their principles) and Gu Yanwu's jingshi zhiyong (governing the world for practical purposes).

To compound this dilemma of reinventing Chinese history in Western epistemological terms, the school confronted an even more daunting technical problem in that they tried to regain access to the subversive voices within a history dominated by Confucian orthodoxy. Contemporary qimeng advocates were of course no poststructuralists trained to track down gaps, absences, lapses, and ellipses in a given text. They were unaware of the problem that no matter how hard one tries to extricate the seditious moments from a predominantly hegemonic discourse, the two remain overlapping and curiously interdependent territories. The treasure hunt for moments of enlightenment in the late Ming and early Qing texts ended up privileging certain fleeting phases of modernity spotted in both personal and historical contexts. What was retrieved was a long list of discrete points of connection and correspondence—ranging from Gu Yanwu to Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan—that told us little about the paradoxical landscape of local resistance where nascent antitraditional forces emerged and then receded in cases such as Liang Qichao (1873–1929) or where they coexisted with old cultural canons in cases such as Fang Yizhi (1611–1671), whose half-scientist profile merged into his Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist triple personae.^[72]

Nor did such a list succeed in answering questions about the larger historical processes that assimilated or rationalized subversive discourses. The fact that modern historians had access to those texts suggests that the texts had been co-opted by and incorporated into the canonical tradition at large. Should one not ask whether such discourses underwent a

process of domestication? And to what extent? What was written off and rearticulated during such a process? Was there a built-in mechanism within each discourse that promised its survival and kept it from being outlawed from the historical archive? And what desensitizing measures need to be applied to them so that they serve as models of inspiration for the present-day enlightenment devotees? By the same token, the study of the texts' complicitous relations with that part of tradition that defeated the spirit of modernity would enable us to trace patterns of the historical vicious cycle that delivered visions of liberation only to dissipate them into the abyss.

If the qimeng advocates truly wished to learn from China's own history, they would be more interested in the collaborationist than the antagonist aspect of the early qimeng masters' relationship with tradition. Only then could they begin to understand that it was oftentimes the "enlightenment philosophers" (whether the early Qing or the May Fourth thinkers) who defeated themselves in the end. All were torn between two cultural personalities: one pushing them toward modernity, and the other pulling them right back into the recalcitrant hold of tradition. The dilemma of "fighting against tradition from the standpoint of tradition" characterized all Chinese enlightenment discourses.^[73] The late Ming and early Qing masters were by no means immune. Seen in this context, China's premodern discourse of enlightenment calls for critical appraisal rather than premature applause.

My reservations about the qimeng school's idealization of those early thinkers notwithstanding, certain themes sketched out in the latter's writings are so strikingly innovative that they outstrip their own epochal consciousness and echo contemporary critical impulses. For instance, Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) refuted the puritanical doctrine of Song-Ming neo-Confucianism—"Depositing the Way of Heaven [by] exterminating human desire"—by proclaiming the opposite: "The Way of Heaven and the desire of human beings share the same substance in form, but are [only] different in their content transformation" (tianli renyu tongxing yiqing ).^[74] In 1662, Wang's contemporary Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) published Mingyi daifang lu (Waiting for the dawn: A plan for the prince), a radical text made up of the critiques of authoritarianism and half-baked theories about civil rights.^[75] Huang was also credited for spelling out that both industry (gong ) and commerce (shang ) were fundamental to the governing of the state.^[76] Tang Zhen (1630–1704) went a step further than Huang Zongxi by preaching egalitarianism ("If myriads of things were made equal, then each would be able to find its own

place") and calling all emperors since the Qin dynasty (221–207 B.C. ) "bandits."^[77] And then there were the earliest pioneers of Chinese science—Fang Yizhi, Xu Guangqi (d. 1633), and Mei Wending (d. 1721) whose relationship with xixue (Western learning) was sometimes characterized by total compliance and sometimes by critical selection.^[78]

An indulgent look at this impressive catalogue may convince us that a budding empiricism paired with a slowly evolving civil rights (minquan ) movement steered seventeenth-century China to the threshold of enlightenment. Didn't Liang Qichao compare Huang Zongxi's Waiting for the Dawn to Rousseau's Du Contrat social (1762) and congratulate Huang for anticipating the latter by a hundred years?^[79]

Yet it remains uncertain how contemporary qimeng scholars might make best use of this catalogue to promote their own cause. Was the list construed by them as a discourse of modernity only after they subjugated it to a laborious process that filtered the moments of enlightenment from the premodern and darker moments of history? Or was nothing more than a neo-Confucian discourse disguised by a pseudonym? The first perspective suggests the school's dubious affiliation with the modernists' camp, whereas the latter perspective conjures up the possibility of the qimeng proponents' fruitful collaboration with the neo-Confucian revivalists: the catalogue of the rational minds of the Ming-Qing dynasty might be presented as the testimonials not of modernity, but rather, of neo-Confucian tradition that gave credence to its own capacity to produce progressive and enlightening elements within itself.

Most critics have adopted Guo Qiyong's position by distinguishing the qimeng school from their neo-Confucianist contemporaries. Tu Weiming, on the other hand, had the right instinct in proposing, however subtly, the potential fellowship between the Confucianism of the third stage and the followers of the school. He disagreed with Feng Tianyu and Xiao Shafu's argument that the Ming-Qing philosophers were critical of the negative capacity inherent in the Song-Ming neo-Confucianism in constricting the growth of elements of enlightenment. Instead, Tu insisted that the so-called enlightenment movement that unfolded in the late sixteenth century belonged to the Confucian tradition itself. It was a "categorical error," therefore, to crown the advocates of "the learning of practice" such as Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, and Yan Yuan as anti-Confucian and stand them in an antagonistic relationship to the neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming dynasty.^[80]

Theoretically, both positions—whether we designate the qimeng school fellow travelers with modernists or neo-Confucianists—lead to

problematical hypotheses. I have suggested how the school's attempt to discover what is modern about premodern China risks overglorifying the "enlightened" blossom without recognizing its deep entanglement in dense, poisonous weeds. The coexistence of these two domains (possibilities of enlightenment and lethargic forces within tradition) makes the proposition of separating the one from the other almost impossible. Tu Weiming was right to assert the collaborative aspect of the Ming-Qing philosophers and the Song-Ming neo-Confucianists, although a counterargument can be made that such collaboration should elicit suspicious frowns rather than applause, contrary to Tu's convictions. Thus the deadlock: To promote a model that is inseparable from the counterforces that compromised its efficacy can only deepen the syndrome of schizophrenia that disarmed the May Fourth modern intellectuals. Wasn't the seventeenth century model in this sense a precedent for, rather than a potential relief to, the aborted May Fourth enlightenment? As a result, any effort to retrieve the modernist raison d'être from the qimeng school cannot but sound problematic.

The collaborationist project between neo-Confucianism and the qimeng school invites its participants on a mind journey that is no less crisis-ridden than the separationist-modernist path discussed above. The danger this time is the ideological co-optation already at work in some of the qimeng discourses. Although the anti-imperialist discourse and the propagation of people's rights prevalent in Huang Zongxi's Waiting for the Dawn seems to deliver an image of the champion of modern democracy, the primary principle on which the work is based is derived from Mencius' view of guimin (valuing the people), a view deeply constrained within the overarching terms of monarchism.^[81] This is not a people-centered political philosophy but rather a strategy aimed at ameliorating the contradictions between the ruler and ruled and, eventually, a utilitarian means of improving the efficacy of sovereign power. Huang's other proposals for the reform of the imperial system point to further conceptual limitations as he fails to extricate them from the traditionalist discourse of absolute monarchy. Tang Zhen's theory about yangmin (nurturing the people), a parallel concept to guiming , can also be traced to the influence of Mencius. In voicing his radical critique of dictatorship, he produces a major work on the art of learning and governance, Qianshu (Hidden writings), that includes chapters like "Zun Meng" (Paying homage to Mencius) and "Zong Meng" (Enshrining Mencius) that clearly reveal the Mencian heritage in which the making of a statesmanship for the people means the same as the polity by the people.

It is interesting to note that whereas some intellectual historians point to this ideological bonding between the early Qing masters and neo-Confucianism as an undesirable sign of constrained historical imagination, others such as Yu Yingshi foreground the bonding unapologetically.^[82] A typical neo-Confucianist would argue that any contemporary school's lingering ideological affiliation with the neo-Confucian heritage is in fact an asset rather than a bond to be dissolved. Thus Yu took pains to demonstrate that Huang Zongxi's putative political radicalism reveals the reformist spirit that has always been part and parcel of the politico-pragmatic tradition within neo-Confucianism. The scholar-official's concern with the welfare of the people and with the art of governance is not something outside the Confucian discourse. The Marxist praxis is to revolutionize the world; the Confucian one, Yu reminded us, is to realign an imperfect world order. Following this line of argument, we have to reassess carefully the historical position of the Ming-Qing enlightenment philosophy: what does it mean that Huang Zongxi and his fellow travelers did not deliver a radical perspective of democratic revolution? Did they fail to follow through the enlightenment agenda? Or was their agenda from the very start a neo-Confucianist one—an agenda that never meant to reach beyond the mere task of readjustment and ritualistic censure of the regime? In other words, is their critical impulse a radical one that fell short of realizing itself, or a conventional one that delivers an exquisite performance of the "mainstream Chinese thinking"?^[83]

The preference of the contemporary qimeng school is quite obvious. The catchword for the 1980s is certainly not "mainstream." They would rather accept the limitations that come with the first alternative than be stuck with a label that conveys the sense of a stagnant continuity rather than a turning point for change. In other words, they would like to present the early enlightenment discourses as overlooked interventions rather than as formulaic expressions of the status quo. The difficulty of taking this position, however, resides in the fact that as Xiao and Feng (each with his own ideological agenda) demonstrated, the Ming-Qing thinkers were deeply implicated in the traditionalist discourse. The crux of the matter is not whether one can ignore or rationalize the existence of such an ideological collusion, but how to expose it, and in the course of doing so, how to turn the liability of collusion into a critical instrument with which contemporary descendants of the qimeng philosophy can accomplish the following tasks in sequence: penetrating the paradox of Chinese enlightenment to its core, dissolving the twin poetics of qimeng and utopia, and in their place proposing a new kind of post-topian critical writing.^[84]

The Hermeneutic Experiment: An Epistemological Turn toward Self-Positioning?

Perhaps no one is more persuasive than Gan Yang in demonstrating that the current program of neo-Confucian revival is a "pseudoproposition" and a humiliating gesture of traditionalists' "capitulation" to the demands of modernization.^[85] Although he still has faith in the neo-Confucianists' efforts to recover substantive reason to rescue modernity from self-alienation, he believes it is "off the track" to relocate (or reinvent) instrumental rationality in neo-Confucianism (i.e., seeds of science and democracy) for the purpose of serving modernity.^[86] He shares the Weberian conviction that modern society dictates the differentiation of value spheres. Hence the splitting off of both rationalities in opposite directions is a natural reality that neo-Confucianists simply failed to comprehend. The creative reappropriation of substantive rationality into an instrumentally rationalized society is a utopian perspective, which in his view does not work in modern Chinese society. His proposition is neither sentimental nor cynical: exterminate the link between the Hegelian dialectics of totality and neo-Confucianism, facilitate the bankruptcy of the Hegelian myth of totality (the happy historical fusion of instrumental and substantive reason), and allow the separate realms—the cultural, social, cognitive-instrumental, and aesthetic-moral—to coexist and prosper in their own terms.^[87]

The question still remains: How should neo-Confucianism justify its raison d'être and reposition itself in a modern society? Gan Yang proclaims that the proper niche for neo-Confucianists is in the temple of academy, a pure elitist and idealist domain where they can make a total commitment to Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences) rather than to sociopolitical reform. The reappointment of neo-Confucianists to the guardianship of the humanist tradition is an ideological strategy that Gan Yang designates as wenhua baoshou zhuyi , "the conservationism of culture."^[88] Needless to say, although Gan Yang spells out quite clearly that the "culture" to be "safekept" and "guarded" by neo-Confucianists is renwen chuantong (the heritage of humane studies) as a whole rather than some mainstream Chinese, or more specifically, Confucian culture, his proposition about the "conservationism of culture" suffers various misinterpretations in the hands of both pro- and antitraditionalists. Ironically, a typical critique is to relegate him to the camp of cultural conservatives like the neo-Confucianists he himself has criticized rigorously.^[89] Without investigating its meaning carefully, some of Gan's critics, including Tu Weiming, collapse the term "conservationism" easily into the modern concoction of baoshou , "conservatism."

What confounded Gan Yang's critics was the seeming contradiction between his radicalism (consider his well-known 1985 manifesto "breaking away from tradition is the best way of inheriting tradition") and his 1988 proposition about conservationism.^[90] Very little has been said about Gan Yang's significant modification of Gadamer's hermeneutic vision in his earlier relentless critique of Confucian traditionalism.^[91] One can well imagine that given his background in hermeneutic philosophy, Gan would be a natural advocate of conservationism from the very start. But in 1985, the persona he projected was characterized by an articulate defiance toward tradition. It was hardly surprising that for the first few years during the Cultural Discussion, those associated with the Committee of Culture: China and the World , of which he was the spiritual leader, were often mistakenly relegated to the school of "total westernization," a label they shared with unredeemed radicals like Liu Xiaobo for quite some time. Did Gan Yang go through an intellectual transfiguration between 1985 and 1988 in his approach to the notion of tradition? Or did his two agendas—radical discontinuity between tradition and modernity on the one hand, and conservationism on the other—merely coexist as two sides of the same coin?

Putting aside the thorny issue of Gan Yang's subtle transformation from an uncompromising radical to a radical conservationist, let us focus on the methodological position of his latter persona. First of all, the hermeneutic roots of Gan's conservationism seem obvious. His position privileges the notion of the fusion of horizons, an unmistakable proposition of hermeneutic epistemology. How to reinvent tradition from the standpoint of contemporaneity—a hermeneutic rewriting of "historical continuity"—carries the main burden of Gan Yang's cultural criticism. At the same time, we should recognize that Gan Yang was increasingly skeptical about the privileged vantage point of modernity. He raised the new strategy of fighting at both battle fronts (liangmian zuozhan ), which dictated the double critique of modernity and tradition as central to the mission of cultural introspection undertaken by contemporary Chinese intellectuals.^[92]

The major contribution Gan Yang made to the Cultural Discussion can be recapitulated as the substitution of a diachronic paradigm for a synchronic one. In discrediting the older terms of debate—zhongxi zhi zheng (China versus the West), a spatial configuration that dominated thought since the late Qing dynasty and drew the current Cultural Discussion deeper and deeper into a deadlock—Gan Yang foregrounded the antagonism between tradition and modernity and redefined the history

of modern China since the late nineteenth century in terms of the battle between substantive and instrumental reason.^[93]

The paradigm gujin zhi zheng (tradition versus modernity) entered the Cultural Discussion as an epistemologically revalorized binary.^[94] To those who cast a suspicious look at the so-called new paradigm and wondered how one could differentiate it from its May Fourth precedent, Gan Yang made no better reply than a vague rejoinder that its contemporary form had collected more depth.^[95] To give Gan Yang the benefit of the doubt, I will demonstrate, in Gan's spirit, the challenge that he posed to the various interpreters of Chinese modernity.

Gan's fundamental strategy is again metonymical. It is not "modern consciousness," he claims, but rather the concept of "tradition," that needs to be subject to a creative reappraisal. An invitation to reinterpret tradition predictably leads to its revalorization. During this adventure into the epistemological field opened up by hermeneutics, Gan Yang accidentally ends up pleasing traditionalists and orthodox Marxists, both of whom have a huge stake in enshrining the past—whether it is seen as a Confucianist or socialist past. His ultra-leftist critics and those traditionalists who claim to have found an ideological ally in him seem not to have noticed that the very notion of reinventing the past—opening a hermeneutical circle—is itself a modern ideology (and more specifically, a modern school of philosophy and literary criticism).

The ideas of Western hermeneutic phenomenology were first introduced to China through academia. In summer 1983, the Institute of Foreign Philosophy of Beijing University sponsored a series of lectures on "Post-Analytic Philosophy," which covered a long list of modern Western philosophers: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Richard Rorty. A conference on "Philosophy and Hermeneutics" was held in Shenzhen in 1987.^[96] Gan Yang himself translated Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretation . Even without his formal acknowledgment of the influence of hermeneutic theory, his writings deliver more than a handful of its imprints:

Tradition is something "that has not yet been prescribed." It is always in the process of making and creating. It forever unfolds to the "future" infinite possibilities or a "world of possibilities." Exactly because of this [nature], "tradition" can never be equated with things that "already existed in the past."^[97]

Facing "tradition," [every generation of us Chinese] should undertake a mission whose burden cannot be carried by the "past." This mission is to create that which was absent in the "past." (57)

Specifically, the "tradition" that we understood is the sum total of the possibilities engendered by the endless encounters, confrontations, conflicts, and appropriations (the new homogenizes the old) that took place between the "past" and the "present." (60)

The hermeneutic dialogue of the present with the past delivers a holistic experience of temporality that does not single out serviceable inheritance and relegate the rest to historical amnesia. Gan Yang would agree with the qimeng school that the past is connected to the present by a chain of continual destiny from the Ming-Qing Confucian gentry all the way to the May Fourth iconoclasts. However, in contrast to the school's selective memory that recognizes only those so-called enlightened moments (the exemplary past) in history, Gan's hermeneutic remembrance of the past takes stock of its entire holdings, unsightly as well as exemplary. This epistemological reorientation is especially significant to the Chinese people whose nostalgia for the golden past coexists with their habit of blocking the bad memories that testify to the guilt and shame of their own history. Nostalgia is only a sham copy of genuine historical consciousness. The solidarity of the present with the past takes the form of onerous introspections rather than nostalgic celebration of the moments of fleeting glories.

The beneficial service of hermeneutics to the Cultural Discussion extends to the neo-Confucianists as well. The paradox of hermeneutic understanding should drive home a message that even the most savvy representatives of neo-Confucianism at present only vaguely perceive. Nearly all neo-Confucianists admit that modernity poses such a challenge to tradition that the latter has to be reinterpreted in order to serve the former better. What they are not prepared to accept is this paradox: The hermeneutic call of reinventing the past leads inevitably to the demythologizing of the past. The "objective" meaning in history can no longer be spoken of, for history cannot be known except through the subjectivity of the historian. Who is to "create that which was absent in the 'past'" but the interpreter who stands on the shifting ground of the here and now?

It is this issue of the subjectivity of the perceiving and interpreting subject that serves as the focal point of reference in the ideological agenda underlying Gan Yang's hermeneutic exercise. I want to emphasize that no intellectual game and no methodological fever in modern and contemporary China can ever claim ideological innocence. In Gan Yang's case, he is immune neither to the trap of the historical "anxiety consciousness" he himself has ridiculed nor to Chinese intellectuals' peren-

nial project of reconstructing the cultural China.^[98] The issue at hand—the cultural subjectivity of China—is unnamed in his critical exercises. His surface text seems clear and simple: an interpretive reorientation that attempts to bail the Chinese discourse out of the old spatial paradigm of the local (zhong ) versus the global (xi ) and replace it with the temporal paradigm of tradition versus modernity. Hermeneutics thus rescues Chinese critics who have been stuck for decades in the pseudo-binary of sinification versus westernization. And with that binary goes the conceptual barrier that China is modernizing itself at the bidding of external aggressors. Once this barrier is passed, the suggestion that China can revolutionize itself from within looms large. What else but the "confrontations and conflicts" between tradition and modernity could trigger the radical change that swept modern China? At this point, Gan Yang only needs to valorize the paradigm of tradition versus modernity as part of his overall hermeneutic project that grew out of the politics of resistance—a project that empowers an indigenous subject to write against the colonial discourse that deprives the colonized of its agency to make its own history. Yet Gan Yang does only half of the job. He foregrounds the temporal paradigm without accompanying it with a parallel discourse that would lay bare his hidden twin agenda of resistance and subject formation.

I shall make an attempt to pick up where Gan Yang left off. To do so, I propose to retrieve the ideological agenda underlying his hermeneutic project in the following terms: Hermeneutics provides a timely epistemological revolution and serves as a methodological tool that could help Chinese theorists rediscover the agency of change from within and redefine the terms of resistance as modernity versus tradition, thus depriving the West of its power to dictate the pace and agenda of China's modernization and moving the entire arena from the global back to the local subject again.

Gan Yang's unarticulated concern about cultural subjectivity finds its various manifestations in several of his later projects, all of which are characterized by his fervent search for an alternative modern, which in the wake of the Tian'anmen crackdown is defined more and more in economic (reformative) rather than in cultural (revolutionary) terms.^[99] Yet whatever topics of inquiry Gan chooses, whether they are possibilities of a "gradualist reform" or the model of "development without privatization,"^[100] he reveals more poignantly than ever one of the unnamed anxieties that plagued the participants of the Cultural Discussion: Does

China still remain a cultural subject of its own integrity after unlatching nearly all of its floodgates to Western methodologies?

The issue of cultural subjectivity is an important one that deserves a chapter of its own. For the moment, I shall pursue the significance of the hermeneutic project only a bit further. The major task of tracing the mutation of the subject throughout the 1980s will be taken up in chapter five, "Romancing the Subject."

What needs to be examined in conjunction with the ideological agenda underlying Gan Yang's temporal paradigm of tradition versus modernity is the thorny issue of subject formation. Although Gan Yang's influence was mainly confined within academia, and more specifically within the Editorial Committee of Culture: China and the World (a group of young scholars from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences and students from Beijing University), his thoughts often reverberated in theoretical discourses that seem to move, however imperceptibly, toward a revitalized sinocentrism that is both antihegemonic and hegemonic at the same time.

One such reverberation occurs in Zhang Xudong's intriguing comment that "it is the natural-historical langue of Chinese society that is determining the cultural parole of any invading discourses [from the West]."^[101] Utilizing the Saussurean paradigm of langue versus parole, Zhang turned the Western langue into the subordinate position of parole—an ingenious reversal of Joseph Levenson's earlier formula that privileges the West in its discursive power relationship with China. According to Zhang, the Chinese intellectuals are simply experimenting with various Western speech acts to articulate the Chinese grammar. China, instead of the West, reemerges as the crowning subject and the host of the linguistic game. We are, in other words, brought back to the supreme logic of the "Chinese experience." And what comes to mind but Mao Zedong's Chinese Marxism and the saga of the Taiping Heavenly (Christian) Kingdom (1850–1864)—two supreme examples of how China borrowed Western vocabulary merely to serve its own agenda and interests?

The emergence of the politics of subject formation is compelling in an era in which global capitalism homogenizes local space with both its material and discursive goods. It is imperative that the crisis of Chinese cultural identity should lead to resistance, and resistance to subject formation. What looks ominous, however, is not the discourse of autonomy that every project of self-formation is bound to emphasize. The moment of danger begins when such a project theorizes and wills its ultimate

subjugation of the Other—the reversion of the once-dominant Western discourse into the subaltern position of mere parole. What this seemingly antihegemonic project manifests is the mere inversion of the Hegelian dialectic: that the slave can be empowered and turned into the image of the master. This is a dilemma that can best be captured in the imagery of a cycle. The politics of resistance dictates the construction of an empowered national and cultural subject, and the subject, once empowered, cannot but initiate another project of hegemony. A new problematic emerges when we simply substitute the imperialist project with an ethnocentric project. Solving the double bind of the discourse of subject formation is a herculean task. And yet, cultivating a sharpened consciousness of this dilemma should be the most important responsibility of every enlightened Chinese critic who writes against Eurocentric hegemony with missionary passion. To identify—and to critique in turn—nostalgia for sinocentrism in one's own discourse is still a viable alternative to a simple reversal of Levenson's Eurocentric logic.

The subscription to nativist romanticization that Zhang Xudong's comment seems to constitute is something that the Chinese hermeneutic school has yet to reckon with. But for a long time, Gan Yan's influence was felt in a quite different realm via the Committee of Culture: China and the World . For many young scholars and students on university campuses, Gan's mentorship was delivered through his editorship of the two major translation series entitled "The Library of Modern Western Academic Learning" and "The Library of New Knowledge" that the committee put forth in quick succession in the mid-1980s. Both series introduce the Occidental tradition in a systematic way. The first series focuses on twentieth-century Western scholarship in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas, Gadamar, Ricoeur, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Nietzsche, Cassier, Jung, Shaklosky, Eco, Todorov, Freud, Benedict, Weber, Mills, de Beauvoir, and Levenson. All contributed to the boom of ideas that led to the crowning of the mid-1980s as the years of methodology fever. To complement the first heavily theoretical series, the second series is made up of lighter fare in three different categories: biographies of masters in Western culture (Freud, Weber, and so on), influential "minor works" by Western writers such as Camus' Le Mythe de Sisyphe and M. Buber's Ich und Du , and foundation series in any branch of knowledge such as the Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy Series.

Such an inventory seems to contradict the very principle that Gan Yang articulates in his hermeneutic project. The Chinese Hermes is preoccu-

pied with Western, rather than indigenous or even East Asian tradition. One wonders how this overemphasis on Western academic learning qualifies, if not undercuts, his own project of subverting the old ideological configuration that privileges the "West" over the "East."

Perhaps Gan's tradition versus modernity paradigm is meant to be nothing more than an academic discourse (such was the fate that he prescribed later to the neo-Confucian discourse) that marginalizes itself knowingly.^[102] Although the epistemological turn that hermeneutics introduced during the Cultural Discussion carries immense possibilities of revolutionizing a Chinese historical consciousness rooted firmly in the temporal past, it seems too much an elitist concoction to compete with other discourses that gained easier access to the public thanks to their idiomatic expression articulated in the common vocabulary of science (Jin Guantao) and ethics (neo-Confucianism). The notion of enlightenment (qimeng ), an indigenous term that underwent a semantic transformation in the late Qing, had just acquired an aura of familiarity and made its way finally into the national psyche.^[103] In this regard, the qimeng school stood a better chance of joining the mainstream culturalist platform than Gan Yang and his colleagues. Jieshixue , the newly coined Chinese equivalent for "hermeneutics," will have to wait longer to find its niche in the heartland of China.

But doesn't this expectation run counter to Gan Yang's own prescription for modern society? He has argued all along for the differentiation of the cultural from the social sphere. Perhaps, then, the most appropriate place for jieshixue is where it belongs now—the ivory tower at the margin of social discourse. Intriguingly, a passionate critic of elitism himself, Gan Yang has actively promoted the making of elitist discourse through his fervent involvement and investment in the Committee of Culture: China and the World . His contributions to the systematic introduction of Western thinking to post-Mao China are invaluable. One cannot help wondering whether the brilliant philosopher will be remembered primarily as a distributor of Western thought or as a practitioner of indigenous cultural politics in the era of "postcoloniality."

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.