An American reads 'America against America'

It’s possible to look at some of the choices that China has made since the 90s and trace them directly back to a particular interpretation of Wang Huning's book.

President Obama talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao following their meeting at the G20 Summit, June 26, 2010 while Wang Huning looks on in the background. {Photo Credit: The White House]

Wang Huning 王沪宁 is one of, if not the single most important éminences grises of the modern Communist Party of China—an advisor to three successive generations of Chinese political leadership: from Jiang Zemin through Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping. A native of Shanghai whose family suffered under official persecution during the Cultural Revolution, and a scholar of Western law and philosophy with a particular fondness for the French Christian personalist Jacques Maritain, one would not easily conclude from reading Wang’s early biography that he’d be the stuff of movers and shakers in a Marxist-Leninist party such as the one governing the People’s Republic. Yet China is a large, dynamic and complex country, and Chinese politics in its grand sweep is in fact made of precisely such reversals of fortune.

Similar observations about the contrasts, dynamism and complexity of America seem to be the dominant theme of Wang Huning’s account of his visit here: America against America. Wang’s visit to this country took place during the Reagan-Bush handoff, between 1988 and 1989. (Indeed, Bush Senior’s inauguration is an event which Wang discusses in some detail in this book.) Wang Huning’s travelogue of the United States, far from being a novelty, actually fits into a well-defined genre of ‘tales and lessons from America’ in Chinese cultural and political literature. The seminal and definitive work in this genre is perhaps the memoir, My Life in China and America, of the Yale scholar and Chinese-American diplomat Rong Hong 容闳 (1828 – 1912), better known in the United States by his native Cantonese name Yung Wing.

Other authors who have contributed to this respectable genre in Chinese letters include Rong Hong’s fellow-Cantonese senior, colleague and archconservative political rival Chen Lanbin 陈兰彬 (1816 – 1895); the Cantonese Confucian philologist and utopian social reformer Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858 – 1927) as well as his protégé, the progressive activist and journalist Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873 – 1929). There are too many others to name, but among the more important, I would include as well: the Jiangsu-born scholar-official and revolutionary Huang Yanpei 黄炎培 (1878 – 1965) and the Shanghainese diplomat and liberal political theorist Hu Shi 胡适 (1891 – 1962). All the above wrote about their travels to America and were widely read in China.

The social focus and ideological orientation of these past travelogues varies widely. Some, like Hu Shi, were liberal individualists. Others, such as Kang Youwei, were Classical scholars who held up their own society to prophetic critique. (In his own time, sadly, Kang was sidelined, exiled, and ultimately abandoned by his own students.) And still others, like Huang Yanpei were culturally-conservative, but economically-left Chinese popular-democrats (as were Huang Yanpei, Wen Yiduo, Li Gongpu and Fei Xiaotong). Wang Huning’s observations in America against America do mirror in some important ways the economic-left, cultural-conservative perspective of Huang Yanpei and his populist-minded fellows. But for most of the work, he keeps his ideological ‘cards’ close to his chest – occasionally showing a Marxist facet here, or a neo-traditionalist facet there.

We should therefore read Wang Huning’s 1991 travelogue America against America, not as a novelty, but instead as a noteworthy entry in a time-honored tradition in Chinese literature. Wang does not approach America from a position of naïveté; to the contrary, he is a scholar well trained in his subject matter. He evinces familiarity with cultural commentary on American society from a broad variety of observers: Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Steele Commager, Theodore J. Lowi, C. Kenneth Prewitt, Samuel P. Huntington, Herbert Marcuse and Allan Bloom, to name just a few. Wang Huning’s journeys take him far afield throughout the country: from the UN building in Manhattan and New York’s Chinatown, to an Amish village in Iowa and a small town hall meeting in Belmont, Massachusetts. He visits many national monuments. He spends time at the University of California in San Diego.

Although his thoughts are well-organized and well-trained on certain topics of interest, Wang Huning’s authorial style in this volume occasionally veers close to stream-of-consciousness. One gets the impression that we are looking at his notes as he is writing them – though this may be an idiosyncrasy of the translation rather than of the original. But Wang is quick to grasp the underlying rationale or spirit behind a particular place, event or practice that he observes. He is also quick to note the contradictions that he observes in the American cultural constitution, and is curious to see how or why Americans can make such contradictions work.

Reading this travelogue, it becomes clear that Wang’s book is by no means a caricatured view of American society nor is it an anti-American diatribe. On the contrary, America against America depicts a deeply-textured and well-informed panorama drawing on direct observations and, as mentioned above, a broad array of authoritative sociological works both past and present. In the conclusions he draws from these observations, however, we begin to see the impetus for some of the choices that China’s government has made in the recent past.

In describing America, Wang recounts his experience of a society in which staid personal morals and religious piety somehow manage to exist alongside the crassest, most clinical forms of sexual commodification and objectification. He explores how an astounding degree of technological interconnectedness and easy social exchange exists alongside a nascent epidemic of loneliness. He wonders at how a society only two hundred years old is so careful to preserve elements of its own cultural and material history with a degree of care entirely outside the scope of the Chinese experience. He narrates how futurism defines the great faith of the American people, but also how islands of premodern and countercultural community can come to exist and survive (some better than others!) in the midst of the great cultural hegemon. He marvels at how a people so vocally jealous of their personal liberties as Americans are, can come to consent to—and even endorse, in the name of progress! – sophisticated technological and political methods of social engineering over themselves. And finally, and most vitally, he begins to question whether it is possible that a society which is actively eroding its own sense of cohesion and continuity can continue to spiritually thrive.

It is of no small interest to read an ideologue of the Communist Party of China – a party which is still officially Marxist-Leninist in its political orientation – discuss problems of the spirit. The last of these reflections are remarkably a propos to our cultural moment in America. The forces of finance-capitalist postmodernity have managed to inculcate systemic doubts about basic scientific realities (particularly, but not exclusively, those around physical sex and its relation to gender), and have placed the idols of identity and perpetual grievance at the center – first of academia, and subsequently of the rest of public life. This is not something that Wang foresaw directly when he visited America 35 years ago, although he hints at some of the roots of this mentality in his book.

In his own context, it’s worth understanding that Wang Huning is coming out of the direct experience of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution… an episode in Chinese history that he is (for very understandable personal reasons) keen to avoid repeating. It’s also worth understanding the proximate context of his visit. The fateful clash of students and their sympathizers in Beijing with the Chinese armed forces on and around Tian’anmen Square took place in June 1989. Wang Huning’s travels in the United States preceded these clashes by less than a year. Given his prominence in Jiang Zemin’s government directly afterward, Wang’s studies of the United States are directly related to the Chinese government’s response. They are also germane to the choices that the Chinese government made subsequently, to transform China into a decidedly illiberal social-market society.

So, to answer the question: are Chinese government leaders reading this book, and using this book to inform both their domestic and foreign policy? I think an honest answer has to be ‘yes’. Its author still occupies a place of significant prestige and authority in ‘official China.’ I think it’s also possible to look at some of the choices that China has made since the 1990s and trace them directly back to a particular interpretation of America against America.

But is the Chinese government’s use of this text hostile or belligerent to Americans? Is China’s government deliberately using Wang Huning’s observations about America’s contradictions to undermine American interests or dissolve our cultural fabric? Those are much harder questions to answer, though that doesn’t prevent people ‘in the know’ here from venturing guesses both informed and otherwise.

The author who was among the first to introduce English-speaking audiences to Wang Huning’s career after Tian’anmen – including in such publications as The American Conservative and who goes under the nom de plume

N.S. Lyons

– seems to answer that question in the affirmative. So does the Hoover Institution’s resident historian Michael R. Auslin (author of Asia’s New Geopolitics). On the other hand, noted Columbia University economist and sustainable-development guru Jeffrey Sachs seems to hold that Wang Huning’s influence is limited to domestic affairs, and that China is willing to continue dealing with the United States on a peer basis as long as circumstances permit it to.

My own view leans closer to Sachs’s, but with caveats. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. China’s focus of attention has historically always been inward, not outward. It has never been China’s ambition to ‘go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,’ or to overthrow faraway governments. And Wang Huning’s intellectual production falls into, as noted above, a genre of China’s ‘learning from the West’ in an effort to free itself from its own ‘century of humiliation.’ On the other hand, as the United States begins to slip into some very troubling sociological ‘ruts’ – a wealth gap whose width is accelerating in magnitude; a fascination with mass surveillance and artificial intelligence; an elite class with an unhealthy fixation on the achievement of clinical immortality – Chinese elites are very much coming to view us as a ‘wounded tiger,’ one all the more dangerous on account of its wounds. As such, it is worth at least listening to and taking seriously the Lyons/Auslin view, even if some of their a priori assumptions about China’s history and path-dependence leave something to be desired.

It is with all this context in mind that I will, in an occasional series for Landmarks, endeavor to further explore Wang Huning’s observations and, if possible, explore as well some of Wang’s predecessors in the art of ‘America-watching’ and what they might have to tell us about today’s China – U.S. relationship.