Multiple Ways to Democracy in Contemporary China
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ABSTRACT
Chinese democracy is discussed here from the perspective of intercultural dialog and the need for a global conversation and cultural understandings to build a new democratic global political order. Democracy in China is a controversial issue. But democracy is today problematic and full of paradoxes and contradictions everywhere. We indeed face a paradoxical situation: Western liberal democracy can no longer be considered the unique and universal model of democracy, yet we cannot surrender to a relativistic perspective on democracy. In this article, I first deal with some presuppositions and questions that constitute the “common sense” about Chinese politics: Is Chinese political culture compatible with democracy? Does democracy exist in China? Is talking about democracy in China a Western imposition? Even more: Is democracy necessary? All these questions are intertwined and drive us to ask which democracy we are talking about. Second, we focus on some of the main debates on Chinese democracy: transition to democracy, gradualism, the New Left, deliberative theories and present visions of democracy linked to the new era, the Chinese Dream and the Chinese concept of “Tianxia” (all under heaven) for a new model of international relations.
1. Introduction
I developed my previous work as a political philosopher in the area of Latin American debates on democracy and their dialog with European and North American theories. This dialog has been characterized, on the Latin American side, by some recurrent oscillation between looking at European and North American ideas as models to be adopted or rejected, and the need to go back to ourselves, in a dramatic bicentennial search of our own true identity. To overcome these difficulties and frustrations it is necessary to widen the scope of our “significant” others, and China is the perfect partner, not only because it has turned out to be a superpower but also because of its appealing mix of tradition, modernity and innovation. Furthermore, this is an excellent opportunity to resume an intercultural dialog beyond the limits of area studies that reinforce the international division of knowledge between producers of theory and case studies, according to which Latin American studies, as well as Chinese, African and/or Asian studies in general, are conceived as mere fields of application.
This is not about knowing “the others” as if they were objects of study; this is about talking to them and with them, learning through and with them in order to enlarge perspectives, and developing together new ways of thinking—in other words, to work with China and not on China. It is about engaging in a global conversation about ideas that matter to all of us in order to build a shared common destiny.
2. Chinese Democracy, Which Democracy?
Chinese democracy is a controversial topic, particularly outside China. But democracy is today problematic and full of paradoxes and contradictions everywhere.1 Not only are its practices increasingly criticized and the object of uneasiness and disappointment but also its very principles are not exempt from criticism. We are far from Fukuyama’s (1989) prognosis about the end of history, which included the success of liberal democracy everywhere and for everybody.
Different types of democracy (liberal, participatory, representative, whole process, populist, deliberative) are organized along different principles that compete and cooperate, as they are not mutually exclusive. Therefore, it should not sound strange when it is said that, for the moment, Western democracy doesn't have more capacity of self-correction than the Chinese system (Bell 2006, 156) and that perhaps there is more room for political experimentation in China than in countries with long-established constitutional systems (Bergrueen and Gardels 2013, 42). To these remarks it must be added that Chinese democracy is not only a Chinese concern but a crucial concern for the international community (Zhao 2000), as to think democracy in China and to think a democratic world society are one and the same thing (Wang 2009b). As for China’s internal democracy, there is a wide range of perspectives, from those who maintain there is no democracy in China to those for whom China is (or is going to be) democratic “in its own specific way,” given the uniqueness of its experience.
In any case, Western and non-Western inquiries on Chinese democracy have led repeatedly to some of these questions:
Are Chinese people suited for democracy? Is Chinese political culture compatible with democracy? Does democracy exist in China?
Is talking about democracy in China a Western imposition?
Is democracy necessary? And which democracy are we talking about?
2.1. Political Culture
Questioning the Chinese aptitude for democracy comes mainly from the stereotypes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalism, particularly from the idea of oriental despotism, which had great influence in shaping the image of China—and the same mentality also inspired many travelers, writers and politicians to characterize South American institutions in the nineteenth century. Curiously, Western political culture has been never questioned in that way, even though it has not been a model of democracy all along its history. What for some countries is considered an essential cultural deficit is for others an accident. This vision of oriental despotism has been very much criticized by historians, philosophers and political scientists. Among them are Joseph Needham, Amartya Sen, and many supporters of deliberative democracy. There is enough evidence of consultative, deliberative and remonstrative institutions in the history of China and in other Asian countries to reject the hypothesis of the idiosyncratic inclination to despotism or authoritarianism.
But democracy is not the only thing whose existence or possibility of existence has been questioned in China. Chinese philosophy, the Chinese legal system and Chinese scientific revolution, amongst other things, have also been questioned in relation to their existence or legitimacy. But China is not alone, as similar questionings are found in other parts of the underdeveloped world, due to Eurocentric patterns of thought. In short, these democratic practices (seeds of democracy?) throughout Asian history deny the European claim to be the exclusive origin of democracy, which legitimated its supposed superiority and right to universality.
2.2. Democracy and Western Thought
Democracy and modernity have been systematically debated in China since the end of the nineteenth century, and it would be a great misunderstanding to say that this was a result of Western imposition. This is not to deny ideological and cultural colonialism, but at the bottom of these endless discussions we find again the effect of essentialism, which maintains that “foreign” concepts are not “adequate” to give accounts of native problems. Concepts never “mirror” reality: the problem with them is not their origin, but the way in which they are redefined in new contextual and historical constellations. Thus, Chinese eclecticism and pragmatism have been very useful to partly avoid these widespread concerns about Western thought.
Whatever the case, from 1911 to 1949 there has been an important debate around traditional (Chinese) and modern (Western) thought, and the need to find the Chinese way to democracy. In particular, the very important New Culture Movement gave place to a cultural fever around the need to renew tradition without giving up radical Western thought. A national cosmopolitism based on science and democracy was proposed, trying to combine the best of both worlds in a new way.
2.3. “Democracy with Chinese Characteristics”
During Chairman Mao’s era, democracy was redefined as popular democracy with the tools of Marxism–Leninism. President Xi Jinping argued for a democracy with Chinese characteristics, and in November 2019 in Shanghai, he defined democracy for the first time as a “whole-process people’s democracy,” for the second time during the celebration of the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s centennial, and very recently at the People’s Congress, held in Beijing on 13–14 October 2021. On this last occasion, Xi stated that “Democracy, a shared value of humanity, is a key tenet unswervingly upheld by the CPC and the Chinese people” (quoted in Cao 2021), which is defined not only in terms of voting but also in terms of a whole and wide participation in public affairs, as it includes democratic elections, political consultation, decision-making and oversight. Thus, it includes the right to vote and the right to broad participation. It includes political procedures as well as the system of law and their implementation (see China’s State Council Information Office 2021).
This discourse could be considered both an answer to the US attempts to relaunch a new ideological “Cold War” based on the very old antinomy of “democracy vs. authoritarianism” and an opportunity to make explicit Chinese ideas on democracy. Also, it could be considered an invitation to the West not to take for granted the established ideas about this sensitive topic. China’s answer to the North American challenge should be a reminder for Westerners: European and North American views are not the only ideas in the world, and Eurocentrism should be definitively abandoned. Every player in the global arena has the right and the duty to be reflexive about his own values, practices and ideas if he is honestly engaged in the search for equality and global peace. Democracy is not a Western monopoly and both East and West have a lot to say about it, as it affects people’s lives everywhere.
2.4. The Need for Democracy
We have already discussed that it is unsustainable to deny the need for democracy in China on cultural grounds. But to deny or to put civil and political concerns behind economic and social well-being is at least equally controversial. Two arguments usually back up the priority of economic and social needs: one refers to demographic and geographic reasons based on scale, particularly in the case of China, and the other raises the main question: If democracy does not improve people’s lives, why is it needed?
However, there are other counterarguments that challenge the question of scales and priorities, as they assume that rights are indivisible, and the priority of economy has been frequently used to legitimate non-democratic regimes all over the world, as happened with twentieth-century theories of modernization for underdeveloped countries.
Then, in what sense is democracy needed? Above all it opens the possibility to have a say in the public sphere. To be asked and to be heard. To express needs, preferences and interests and make them compatible with those of others in the case of pluralism of values or conflict of interests. Right procedures and practices to build consensus are needed, and they must be based on equal respect and consideration for all participants. This is the endeavor of deliberation upon which electoral and other forms of participative democracy should be developed in order to broaden them and improve their quality.
The need for democracy is both a practical and a normative issue, as it is the way to legitimate a political regime in the absence of an emperor or of religious faith. Certainly, economic growth and increasing well-being could be a substitute, but what will happen if the rate of growth descends and inequality increases? At the root of these questions the causal relationship between economic development and democracy is at stake, and they have been very much discussed among liberals and New Leftists in the 1990s in China. This is one of the points made by Sen (2005), who claims that economy goes better when there are collective procedures to discuss different interests and needs and to arrive at solutions based on general interests and common good. A “whole-process democracy” centered on people is undoubtedly more apt to be successful in economic and social issues, as the political decision-making process will be based on people’s needs.
In short, Chinese political culture is apt for democracy; democracy is not a Western invention; Chinese debates on democracy are neither Western impositions nor mere copies; democratic practices can be found both in the past and in the present of China; and there is no proof that the economy could run better without democracy. Democracy is as necessary in China as it is elsewhere.
But if we want to continue the discussion about democracy, we have to move to the question of which democracy we are talking about. It is not that this conceptual move will eliminate theoretical and practical problems; rather, it will situate them within a different perspective that will challenge us with new questions.
3. Chinese Democracy in Contemporary Chinese Debates
3.1. Reform and Opening Up
Debates on democracy have increased since the 1980s in both academic and political spaces, and in this renewed interest, the presence of Western philosophers in China has been of the greatest importance. Chinese academia began to be internationalized, and Chinese intellectuals, together with their European and North American colleagues, began to develop the new field of Chinese political science.
While, at the beginning of the 1980s, the reform and opening-up created space for reformist Western ideas, critiques of Marxism (a “new Enlightenment”) and challenges to conservative ideas, at the end of the 1980s, there were important debates among liberals and the New Left about modernization and democracy. Meanwhile, a new Confucianism emerged, fostering debates on continuities and discontinuities between tradition and modernity.
Since then, many different approaches to democracy have been developed within the Chinese intellectual realm: theories of transition to democracy, liberalism, gradualism, the New Left, deliberative democracy, representative democracy, and Confucian deliberative democracy. In the new century, ideas about global democratic governance and consultative mass democracy have occupied the center of the debates, and recently President Xi’s proposal of “whole-process democracy” has synthesized Chinese ideas and experiences on democracy, which certainly will lead to future significant debates.
3.1.1. Theories of “Transition to Democracy”
Among Westernized approaches to democracy, theories of transition to democracy, which arose in the 1980s in post-Franco Spain and were applied in Latin America and East Europe, finally landed in China. In all cases, the goal was to explain the political processes that lead from authoritarian regimes to democracy. For these theories, nationalism—not democracy—was the main political value in China and the driving force of Chinese modernization in the 1990s.
According to these theories—very popular in the 1980s—Diamond (2002) and Zhao (2000) concluded at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after two decades of following Chinese politics, that there had been a significant liberalization of the state and an increasing pluralism in China but not the kind of democratization that was expected (which certainly was the Western liberal model of democracy). However, these theories failed everywhere, as democratization has been in recession in the last democratization wave. And as disappointments had to do with the failures of the political systems as well as with some of the presuppositions of the theory, its teleological perspective had to be abandoned and replaced by a more humble and neutral conceptual space of “hybrid democracy” (Diamond 2002). Assuming that there is no consensus about democracy, the theories of transition to democracy have adopted a wide classification of political regimes which, while it is still based on the criterion of elections, abandons a strict normative perspective and avoids a strict correlation between elections and democracy. But the results have been more classificatory than conceptual and the big questions remain: Can the broadened classification solve the problem of which practices are to be called democratic? Or has the theory simply surrendered to the claims of the “politically correct”? And, finally, what is democracy if not a normative concept?
However, from a broader perspective, some outstanding researchers recognize that China has developed quasi-constitutional mechanisms to improve the quality of its political life. In this direction, Inglehart and Welzel’s (2005) study on democratization proves that (1) although there is little formal (electoral) democracy in China, effective democracy is much more developed in relation to what is expected in the former; and (2) the high level of Chinese development (not only of economic growth) and demands for democracy are predictors of democratization in the next few decades.2
Trust in and satisfaction with public institutions are other important topics. In reference to the former, Pippa Norris’s studies on “critical citizens” in the World Values Survey (1981–2007) show that the correlation between trust and authoritarianism is far from being conclusively proved. By the same token, Ma and Wang’s survey shows that direct elections, an important ingredient of democracy, are sometimes more important than consultative proceedings in improving trust in the government (Ma and Wang 2014). In reference to democratic satisfaction with a regime, the World Values Survey shows that in China there is 67.4% satisfaction with democratic government. Summarizing the Global Barometer evidence, Norris (2011) says that belief in democracy as the best system of government is universal: China has 95% approval, while the preference for democracy as a rejection of autocracy drops to 67%.
According to Norris (2011), these exceptionally positive attitudes toward democracy have yet to be explained (an assertion showing once more that Chinese appraisal of democracy is considered an anomaly). However, the author recognizes that the most available explanations come from communication theory, which maintains that the media frame citizens’ perceptions, and rational choice theory, which emphasizes the effect of government delivery of public goods.
3.1.2. Deliberative Democracy
The increasing importance of deliberative democracy in China has been considered an answer to the restrictions of voting or a very serious effort to widen its understanding. During the 1980s and 1990s, a very vibrant discussion about liberalism, communitarianism and deliberative theories of democracy took place in the West. China took active part in these debates, proposing new views of communitarianism and deliberative theories based on the Chinese experience and Confucian tradition. He Baogang,3 a well-known scholar of deliberative democracy in China, said that China is the biggest laboratory of deliberative democracy in the world, that Chinese practices have developed independent of Western models and that Westerners should learn from China, as it has had 2000 years of practice, while Western deliberative theories, although more sophisticated, started only 30 years ago (He 2014).
In The Search for Deliberative Democracy (2006), He affirms that democratization processes do not need to begin with elections and that they could rightfully evolve through participative ways of democratic governance.
He remarks that there is flexibility in political experiments at the local level and that the 18th National Congress of the CPC endorsed the term “deliberative democracy.”4 However, his approach is not free from ambiguity. On the one hand, he maintains that deliberative democracy is not a complement of liberal democracy but a true alternative to it; but, on the other hand, he does not exclude elections from deliberative democracy. In fact, the results of fieldwork reveal that many local deliberative experiments require and strengthen electoral mechanisms,5 and this has to be understood in the sense that China challenges the dichotomy of representative/deliberative democracy (He 2015) and that there are other kinds of representation than political: statistical, family-based, public opinion collected from visiting neighborhoods, and proxy representation, by means of signatures, surveys, submissions, etc., are other forms of representation that are utilized in deliberative procedures (a perspective very close to Wang’s (2014) critique of representative democracy and to his defense of “representative” democracy).
For He, elective representation is good, but the size of community and level of government are also to be taken seriously. While, at the village level, it is possible to vote after discussions, it will probably not be possible at the national level, especially when there is no legislation for it. He proposes a hybrid political model, comprising 30% public opinion, 30% experts’ opinion, and 40% government decision. It is a mix of voting, bargaining, social presence, traditional authority, local government, communal persuasion and deliberation, based on practical considerations and prudence, with a middle-way methodology and a pragmatic philosophy, very far from populist models not suitable in the age of globalization. This hybrid model has a Confucian root and must be differentiated from Western deliberative democracy, as its aim is not empowerment of the people but rather good government (He 2014). It is a political consultation system under the leadership of the Party, which looks for effectiveness, as in the end the government decides. For this model, even if deliberation is good, too much deliberation must be avoided as its objective is political decision-making based in agreement. According to He (2014), the hybrid model is the only one that could creatively produce a new model of democracy adapted to local conditions.
3.1.3. Gradualism
Yu Keping, an influential scholar in China and a strong promoter of political science and political philosophy, made himself widely known with his famous article “Democracy is a Good Thing” (Yu 2009).6 Yu’s starting point is the acknowledgement that many political and cultural elites are afraid of democracy, and in answer to these objections, he argues that (1) democracy is something safe for China, (2) democracy is a solution rather than a problem, and (3) democracy is a good thing.
Yu focuses his defense of democracy on the need for political legitimation and stability in the long run. The central concept is good governance, which is about the cooperative management of public life between the state and citizens and the strengthening of civil society, which goes beyond the traditional Chinese idea that politics is especially about order and good government. On the sensitive topic of elections, Yu underlines, on the one hand, that local elections and local government innovations, legal and administrative reforms and deliberative procedures such as public hearings, opinion polls, written requests, group protests, etc., are the most important political innovations in China. On the other hand, there is no democracy in China without intraparty democracy, and each day more institutionalized ways of political decision-making are needed. But this does not mean a multi-party system or division of powers like those in Western countries is necessary. To adapt some Western aspects of democracy (elections, constitutionalism, institutional counterbalances, independence of media, and certain civil freedoms) does not mean to Westernize Chinese democracy. Democracy is a universal value and good for everybody, and one of the benefits of globalization is the awareness that we share a common destiny and common values, such as freedom, equality, justice, rule of law, safety, well-being and dignity. Democracy also has a price, which must be calculated. Its landing must be very soft, according to the criterion of “dynamic stability,” which has to take into account sociopolitical tensions, avoiding both conservatism and promoting different ways of public participation. All of this is based on negotiation.
3.1.4. The New Left
Wang (2009b) is another very well-known Chinese intellectual, both in and outside China.7 He has focused his research on the link between modernity and democracy. To think democracy in China and to think a democratic world society are for Wang one and the same thing. It is not enough to create a system of global juridical institutions, as some Western authors propose; it is necessary to go beyond Western experience and include other experiences, which means the creation of a thick legal net for transnational integration that is based on nation states, includes historical diversity and rescues the experience of socialism. To deepen democracy will take decades and will include the construction of a new welfare state, as European welfare is in crisis.
As far as the crucial issue of free elections is concerned, Wang shares the mainstream Chinese political thought, although his arguments are not those of the New Left or New Confucianism. Democracy cannot be reduced to free elections, but it is not possible to have economic rights without democracy or political rights without economic rights, as they are indivisible. China faces a tension between opposite forces: those of openness and self-confidence and those of authoritarian nationalism and ethnocentrism. How is this tension to be solved given the universal crisis of democracy and the need of a new critical internationalism?
These ideas and debates mostly in the 1980s and 1990s show that there are very different perspectives on democracy in contemporary China and that all these different traditions discuss the same problems within a mainstream of thought that aims to solve national problems and serve the people. These diverse ideas and traditions are not merely an intellectual phenomenon, as their very different strands are present in China’s political experiment, which is the “Chinese Dream.” And they prove that neither the Western myth of homogeneity of ideas nor prejudices about the lack of debates and democratic practices are sustainable in contemporary China.
3.2. The New Era and the Chinese Dream
Certainly, debates among liberals, the New Left and Confucians continue in the twenty-first century. Although today the rise of China as a global power has changed the focus from modernity and democracy to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the core of “the Chinese Dream,” and to international and global issues (global governance, “the Chinese Dream” as the “dream of humankind”), debates on democracy are far from having disappeared.
On the contrary, they have been very active and intense in recent days and have developed within the conceptual framework of the new era—which is, according to some authors, an extraordinary historic and epochal event in which the whole past and present Chinese history meet, announcing a new civilization for all humankind. In the realization of the Chinese Dream, “Tianxia” (literally meaning “all under heaven”) is the core concept.
Will Tianxia be—as Zhao (2016), professor of philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, proposes—a new model of international relations based on peace and harmony, which includes aspects usually disregarded in international relations, such as empathy, family principles and values to unite “all under heaven”? Or is it a cultural, political and public harmonic space where people and government meet? Or will it constitute—as for Jiang (2019), professor of law at Peking University—a new kind of Empire 2.0, given that we have witnessed the end of the Empire 1.0? Will Tianxia become an empire centered not on state but on interregional powers that will lead to new ways of governance beyond the European idea of sovereignty and to new communitarian ways of global civilization (in a similar way to Wang Hui’s proposals)?
For Zhao Tingyang, China is Tianxia and Tianxia is China, and consequently, today, to think China is to think the world and to think the world is to think China. Here again is Chinese “exceptionalism,” a very polemic concept that presupposes the idea of uniqueness based on history and culture and reinforced today by economic and social success and the Chinese political experiment, which synthesizes Chinese and Western traditions, Confucianism, Marxism and Liberalism, old and new.
But exceptionalism is a risky bet, as it could lead to ideas of a superior model to be followed by others, falling in a kind of Orient-centrism or Orientalism in reverse. That is why President Xi prefers to talk about “Chinese wisdom” and a “Chinese solution” and not to refer to uniqueness, superiority or a model to be imposed on others. On the contrary, it is China’s experience offered to the world.
Tianxia may perfectly well include different models, as happens today when China is showing hopes of generating a new order for all humankind, which absorbs and transcends Western civilization. Everybody must be included in this global conversation and the new order should reflect the interests and worries of all the peoples in the world. Despite the fact that Tianxia is an epic narrative, a rhetoric and a utopia, its instrumentation is also the object of intense debate, and the Belt and the Road Initiative (BRI), together with the analogous Initiatives on Peace, Health and the Digital Silk Road, is the concrete answer in this direction. Once again, democracy is at the center of these various initiatives as they involve different and diverse historical and geographic spaces, cultures and peoples, and very different values and ways of living. Agreements on the procedures of decision-making suitable for the participants will be needed and political imagination required. In reference to the initiative, Wang (2018), professor at the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China, says that diplomacy of the people, decentered from the states and elites and based on social, political and cultural actors, could be a better option than counting only on state diplomacy.
4. Some Last Remarks
Whatever the ideas and debates may be, the tension between political forms in the present international system founded on nation states and a new universalism is at stake. In terms of Chinese thought, the tension between “Chinesity” and a new cosmopolitism is renewed and it leads to unavoidable paradoxes: if the Chinese Dream is the realization of Tianxia (whose historical origins can be traced back 3000 years to when the first empire was founded and which has been recreated throughout Chinese history as part of its cultural “genes”) and Tianxia is “all under heaven,” a new kind of universality is born and then “Chinesity” is no longer “Chinesity,” which is another way of saying that on the way to realizing Tianxia, China will be transformed.
The new Tianxia will have to be very creative to solve the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitism, between what is mine and what belongs to others. Even more, if the goal is a common future for humankind based on shared values—or, when this is not possible, shared procedures—new ways of understanding and mutual learnings will be required. As Metzger (2012) pointed out, learning from and with others means to be exposed to gains and losses. Nobody will be left untouched. In these encounters, Chinese intellectuals seem to be in a better condition than their Western colleagues. They know more about the West than the West knows about them, and they assume the risk of asking the big questions that humankind has to solve with trust and assertiveness.
Last but not least, in this intercultural dialog we must be aware, according to Metzger (2012), that two different epistemological paradigms are displayed: the first is the skeptical and critical reflexivity of Western modernity, for which mistrust has turned into an obstacle for constructive attitudes toward reality; the second is the transcultural platform which he calls Chinese innerworld optimism, which trusts the possibility of objective and true knowledge and exhibits a rational and moral logic that sounds somewhat perplexing to postmodern Western intellectuals.
Certainly, these differences do not inhibit agreements and consensus, but they must be taken into account if the global conversation aims to be successful. We already know that cultural understandings are the infrastructure of every possible international exchange and the starting point to build new institutions. If we do not understand each other, we will not be able to achieve agreement. If there are no agreements, there will not be global governance. There will be more disorder, more unrest, and more inequalities. In short, there will be less democracy.
Notes
1 Diamond (2008) suggested that the twenty-first century is an era in which democracy has experienced little further advance (at best), or even the start of a new reverse wave (at worst).
2 According to global studies on democratization, Wang (2009a) predicted that China would be by 2015–2020 a hybrid regime and not a “politically closed system”—which, from his point of view, is a consequence of not taking into consideration that elections are conducted in almost 90% of Chinese counties.
3 He Baogang is the head of the Public Policy and Global Affairs Program at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a professor of the International Studies Program at Deakin University, Australia. He has conducted fieldwork in various Chinese villages and towns.
4 The term adopted in the report of the 18th CPC National Congress was “consultative democracy.”
5 Ma and Wang’s (2014) surveys conclude that direct elections are more important than consultative proceedings in improving trust in the government, which is an important ingredient of democracy.
6 Based on an interview for Dagong Daily of Hong Kong in 2005, the article was republished and ranked as one of the most influential publications across the country in 2006. Yu was nominated by Chinese media in 2008 as one of the 50 most influential people for Chinese development in the last three decades.
7 Former editor of Dushu (Reading), a very influential literary journal, Wang Hui is at present a professor at Tsinghua University, in Beijing. A specialist in Chinese intellectual history and modernity, he has been ranked as one of the 100 most important intellectuals in the world.
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