Jacob Dreyer in American Affairs:
Late last October, we were in the basement of an obscure academic building in Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Dahlem, a group of twenty or thirty people assembled to hear Wang Hui talk about nationalism; my friends at the Berggruen Institute Europe had organized a residency in Venice and Berlin for him, to engage with European thought before the Trump victory that everybody saw coming. A few decades ago, Wang was at odds with the Chinese intellectual consensus; he was part of a group called the “New Left,” less a formal grouping of friends than a label for those dissenting from the end-of-history approach. Called the New Left for their advocacy of the state, this group was also conservative, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of standing “athwart history yelling Stop” at a time when the changes were being driven by neoliberal American capitalists and their Chinese friends (in the leftist argot, “compradors,” like those Chinese merchants who helped imperialists sell opium in the nineteenth century).
Wang always rejected the New Left label and has never been anti-American as such; he was getting profiled in the New York Times and visiting friends in the West at the time. Today, he regularly bounces between Beijing, Princeton, Heidelberg, and other havens of the Western intelligentsia. Much as some Americans might say that they oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but like the Chinese people, Wang never hated Americans, he just didn’t want China to accept globalist capitalism. He is now watching the unraveling of that regime with the same curiosity and schadenfreude as the rest of us.
Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market.
More here.
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