'Not to Oppose but to Rethink' The New Left Discourse on the Chinese Reforms

Abstract

During the last 30 years, China has been experiencing rapid economic and social transforma-tions. The reform introduced in 1978 was based on the rejection of Mao Zedong’s concept of ‘the class struggle as a major principle,’ and applying the new concept of the ‘building econ-omy as a center’ instead. The four modernizations and open-up policy have changed China’s political and economic faces. On the one hand, Chinese social economy has scored tremen-dous achievements such as GDP growth and FDI inflows; on the other hand, various kinds of contradictions have gradually accumulated and become ever more conspicuous. China’s intellectuals have not looked on these problems unconcerned. In fact, newly formed groups, the Liberals (ziyou pai) and the New Left (xin zuopai), have been engaging in debates. Paradoxically, since the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, discussions on China’s re-form have been brought to the light. The Liberals have argued that it is only through democ-racy and direct and open elections that China could overcome its problems with corruption and distributive inefficiency. In contrast, the New Left have advocated ‘a healthy socialist development’ and building a social welfare state. In the 1990s, the Communist Party of China turned into a very large and complex organi-zation, incapable of speaking on core ideological issues with a unified voice. Indeed, there has been considerable debate among Party theorists and intellectuals about the nature of re-forms and China’s future development. In this study, which has been based mainly on Chinese primary sources such as books, ar-ticles and commentaries published both in paper form and on the Internet, the author focuses on the discourse analysis.