I really enjoyed this essay and learned a lot about the chinese perspective on US China relations.. thought yall would like it too. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more from Jiang Shigong.
In this new developmental model, “communism” is no longer grounded in “class struggle”—which no longer fits the needs of China’s middle-class society—but is instead a kind of “search for perfection” that resonates with Confucianism and the Chinese tradition.
Bruh if this is true then Xi Jinping Thought is fucking bullshit.
That would be pretty :cringe:
Would need to read more on that
Edit: what is this website
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
Jiang Shigong (b. 1967) is Professor of Law at Peking University, an important spokesman for China’s New Left, and a major apologist for the Xi Jinping regime. Elsewhere on this site is a translation of his 2018 essay, “Philosophy and History: Interpreting the ‘Xi Jinping Era’ through Xi’s Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP,” a weighty explanation and defense of Xi Jinping Thought and an attack on the intellectual pluralism that had developed in China before Xi came to power. Jiang has been similarly outspoken on issues such as China’s constitution and Hong Kong, both before and since the recent passage of the new National Security Law.
I do not know to what extent Jiang takes his marching orders from the Central Committee and to what extent he speaks for himself, but in either case, his audience is other Chinese intellectuals. He is neither a propagandist nor a populist, but instead a public intellectual, part of the vibrant Chinese intellectual world that emerged during the period of reform and opening, even if he preaches against globalization, liberalization, and the pluralism of which he is a part, hoping to convince other Chinese intellectuals to join him.
From here. It is an interesting website as far as documenting Chinese intellectual opinion goes. The author is certainly not socialist but the website collects/translates a variety of pro-China articles (which means there are a lot of pro-Chinese socialism articles).
A couple of things to know to get started. First, this site is not about Chinese dissidents, although in the West, it is largely true that the only Chinese intellectuals anyone knows about, including many China specialists, are dissidents Two things happen to any “successful” dissident in China: they wind up in prison or in exile, largely losing their influence in China, and their writings are translated into Western languages. I hope the dissidents win, and I am glad that their writings are translated. I do not avoid intellectuals with the potential to become dissidents (see here, here, here, and here for examples of texts that look to me a lot like dissent, or whose authors have come perilously close to being branded as dissenters), but the point of my research is not to seek out future dissenters. Many Western scholars and journalists are focused on these people, and they do not require additional attention from me.
Journalists quite naturally focus on plane crashes; I look at the airplanes that arrive safely. In other words, I am more interested in what can be said in China than in what cannot be said even if the frontier between the two is constantly shifting. Hence I work on establishment intellectuals, who manage to publish their work in China, despite the pressures of the directed public sphere and the dangers of censorship. The heritage of the Cold War has taught us that everything that is not dissent in a Communist country is propaganda. In the case of China since the era of reform and opening, this is simply and manifestly wrong. There is of course lots of propaganda in China, much of which is translated into English by the regime itself, which means that it is not particularly difficult to keep up with the major themes of Chinese propaganda. But what establishment intellectuals write is not propaganda (in our sense of the term), although some of them naturally support the regime.
I happened onto the world of establishment intellectuals largely by accident about a decade ago; if you’re interested in the Indiana Jones-esque tale of this discovery, you can listen here to a (relatively short) talk I gave about it at the Hoover Institute, or read about it here. I will not belabor what is fascinating about this world overmuch at this point; that’s what the website is for. Suffice it to say that China’s rise, together with the West’s apparent decline, has convinced many Chinese establishment intellectuals that they—and we—are living in an era of fundamental historical change, the equivalent to when monarchies gave way to democracies or the United States inherited world leadership from Great Britain. This in turn has prompted these intellectuals to rethink the founding myths of their understanding of China’s—and the world’s—past, present, and future. This is what I mean by the China Dream.
