Rejecting Radicalism: The Revaluation of Modern Chinese Intellectual History during the 1990s
Els van Dongen
This research deals with the debate on “Conservatism and Radicalism in Modern Chinese Intellectual History” conducted by Chinese scholars, both in mainland China and abroad, during the 1990s. Spread across several leading academic journals, the debate started as a reflection on the Tiananmen incident of 1989, but soon deplored the “radicalism” of modern Chinese intellectual history tout court. In exploring the different dimensions of the “anti-radicalism” phenomenon in Chinese intellectual circles, I relate it to the political “neo-conservative” climate of the time, as well as to other “neo-conservative” intellectual currents of the 1990s, such as National Studies, New Confucianism, and the debates on postmodernism. I will demonstrate how, beyond the seemingly similar concerns of “anti-radicals” and “neo-conservatives”, and their reference to the same figures in Western political thought, the “conservatism” referred to in the debate on modern intellectual history was a conservatism sui generis.
Furthermore, I analyze the different appropriations of the term “neo-conservatism”, which was used both as an all-inclusive denominator for intellectual currents in general during the 1990s, and as a political term that referred to a new modernization strategy along neo-authoritarian lines. The former appropriation leads to the analysis of the “revisionist” threat perceived by Marxists in these “neo-conservative” intellectual currents, in which, according to them, dialectical materialism is replaced with a “cultural view of history” that denies revolution.
