China's Big Power Ambition Under XI Jinping: Narratives and Driving Forces by Suisheng Zhao

Author:Suisheng Zhao [Zhao, Suisheng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032057217
Google: cMaUzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 58729856
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Neoliberal Affinity: A Coeffect, Not A Cause

Despite the limits of Pan and Xu’s research, they plausibly conclude that being politically liberal is highly correlated with pro-market attitudes in contemporary China applies to Chinese liberal intellectuals as well. Indeed, given the fact that China’s Reform-and-Opening coincided with the Reagan-Thatcher era, when neoliberalism as an ideology rose to dominance across the globe, it is hardly surprising that the latter has had huge influences on the ways in which most Chinese liberal intellectuals would understand the world and approach political issues. Therefore, a seemingly straightforward response to the phenomenon of liberal Trump-idolization in China might be that it is not curious at all.

According to this seemingly straightforward ‘neoliberal affinity’ explanation, contemporary Chinese liberalism is no more than a local variant of Reagan-Thatcherism, whose hegemony in the globalization era is achieved through ‘combining various contradictory agendas within an overarching neo-liberal framework of ideas,’ especially through combining ‘extensive marketisation, the commercialization of public services, de-regulation and privatization’ with ‘other more traditional attachments of the right, notably to patriotism, elitism and a strong commitment to law and order’.21 Neoliberal elites had used those ‘more traditional attachments of the right’ as intellectual and electoral allies against the left and the center-left (e.g. ‘liberals’ in the American sense), but now they could no longer ‘tame’ those elements, which have been fully mobilized, normalized and legitimized through decades of such alliance. In the United States, for example, self-styled ‘libertarians’ and ‘fiscal conservatives’ within the Republic Party have, long before the rise of Trump, gradually succumbed to, and internalized, more and more extreme versions of cultural conservatism and rightwing nationalism.22 By the same token, according to this ‘neoliberal affinity’ explanation, it is more than natural for Chinese ‘liberal’ intellectuals, who truly are Reagan-Thatcherite neoliberals deep down, to be captivated by bursting Trumpism.

There might be some degree of truth to this explanation. After all, a substantial proportion of the Chinese liberal intellectuals who fervently defend Trump and his policies are diehard market fundamentalists, such as Liu Junning, former research fellow at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences expelled for his advocacy of political reform, and Wang Jianxun, associate professor of law at Chinese University of Political Science and Law who received his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University-Bloomington.23

Even those who refuse to call themselves ‘Chuanfen’ because they disdain Trump’s personality or disagree with some of his policy positions have argued that he is a ‘lesser evil’ for American democracy, compared to the, relatively speaking, socioeconomically redistributive and regulatory Democratic Party. For example, during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Liu Yu, a Columbia-educated associate professor of political science at Tsinghua University famed for her best-selling Minzhu de Xijie [Details of Democracy], asked rhetorically: ‘As the public opinion in Europe and the U.S. keeps shifting to the left generation by generation, the diversity of opinions quickly vanishing, will there be any force that could prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming Hugo Chavez?’ According to Liu, implementation of redistributive policies is the prelude to ‘Latin-Americanization’: because the majority of the society, a.

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