An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism

Abstract

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism Han Zhang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Eric Li gives a TED Talk in 2013. (TED/YouTube) [End Page 48] In late 2019, as the first COVID-19 cases were emerging in Wuhan, the Chinese venture capitalist and media figure Eric Li went for lunch with a Financial Times correspondent in Shanghai. Over a $640, eleven-course meal, Li, who is a founder of Guancha, a leading nationalist online media outlet, took the opportunity to proclaim the end of liberalism in China. For decades, people had been “debating what kind of government and society they want,” Li said. “That debate is over.” There were “leftover liberal phrases” and “liberal thoughts” held by academics and other holdouts, but he predicted they would soon change their minds. These kinds of statements are common today in China, where anti-liberal nationalism has become increasingly mainstream. Li is a notable figure in this sphere, in part because of his deep ties to the West. A graduate of Berkeley and Stanford, he is affiliated with the Aspen Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Li’s Western education and experience with elite institutions gives him a unique platform for espousing nationalist opinions outside China; he has contributed to various English-language publications, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and the Economist. In a 2013 TED Talk, he delivered a full-throated defense of China’s one-party system and argued that electoral democracy doesn’t work (a point he punctuated with a photo of former President George W. Bush in front of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner). The talk has attracted over 3 million views. Born in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Li was raised by his grandmother in Shanghai while his academic parents weathered the storm in the capital. He is proud of his roots in the city, which emerged as a center of modern glamor and Western sophistication in the first decades of the twentieth century. When Li moved to the United States for college in the 1980s, he became, according to his TED Talk, a “Berkeley hippie.” (If that was the case, his counterculture days were short-lived; he worked on Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign.) After almost a decade in the United States, he moved back to China. In 1999, Li helped launch Chengwei [End Page 49] Capital, a venture fund that manages about $2 billion and has invested in many companies that are household names in China. The Financial Times compared Li to Steve Bannon, and over the expensive lunch Li himself expressed admiration for Trump’s crusade against “global elites.” Like Bannon, Li wears a flashy erudition on his sleeve. He likes to sprinkle quotes by John Locke, Abraham Lincoln, and Bhikhu Parekh into arguments, to contrarian effect. He has also mastered the vernacular of American liberalism, using terms like “broadening,” “pluralizing,” and “diversity” to promote authoritarianism. From Li’s perspective, if you take a big step back and squint your eyes, “autocracy” can be seen as a form of “democracy.” As he put it in the Economist, he thinks democracy should be measured “not by procedures but by outcomes.” In a conversation in Guancha, Li tried to get Francis Fukuyama to sign on to his idea that informal information collection conducted by the party as an alternative to elections “have been effective.” Fukuyama was unmoved: “It depends on your measure of effectiveness.” Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, nationalist ideas have thrived in China. The government has encouraged a sense of national pride and tightened censorship and regulations over domestic media and the internet, suppressing any news that may reflect badly on the party-state. Xi has also pushed propagandists to publish and broadcast overseas in order to influence arguments outside the country. Li is no doubt seen as an asset in this strategy—a sleek, Western-educated capitalist as a face of the new Chinese nationalism. His success should be seen in the context of a broader effort to cement the transformation of nationalist politics from a grassroots insurgency into a state-supported ideology. From the Angry Youth to the Little Pinks...