A Critique of Chinese Conservatism in the 1990s

Translated by The trajectory of intellectual thought in China during the 1990s begins Xudong Zhang with the critique of so-called radicalism at the end of the 1980s and advances steadily into conservatism, even ultraconservatism. This conservatism pretends to advocate liberalism by emphasizing negative freedom at the cost of democracy.1 To put it differently, it attempts to establish a kind of liberalization without democratization. From this starting point, a new, rather comprehensive ideology has developed, ready with the answers to all problems. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Chinese intellectuals have already begun to establish a systematic discourse of conservatism that clearly has wide appeal. On the one hand, this system has as its core the theoretical discourse of conservatism; on the other hand, it is also expressed concretely in historical, cultural, political, and economic discourses. We might summarize these broader fields of discourse in the following way: