In his 1989–92 lecture series On the State Pierre Bourdieu, following Durkheim, proposed a provisional definition of the state as the basis for ‘both the logical and the moral conformity of the social world’. By ‘logical conformity’, Bourdieu meant that the agents of the social world would share the same categories of perception, the same construction of reality; by ‘moral conformity’, their agreement on certain core values. Taking his distance from classical state theory, such as that of Hobbes or Locke—in which the state, occupying a quasi-godlike viewpoint, oversees all and serves the common good—as also from Marxian traditions, from Gramsci to Althusser and beyond, which focus on the function of the state as an apparatus for maintaining public order in the interests of the ruling bloc, Bourdieu emphasized instead the need to grasp the ‘organizational magic’ of the state as a principle of consciousness—its monopoly of legitimate symbolic as well as physical violence. The social theorist therefore needed to be particularly on guard against Durkheimian ‘pre-notions’ or received ideas, against ‘thinking the state with state thinking’. A first step was to conceive the state as what Bourdieu called ‘an almost unthinkable object’.footnote¹

If there is one thinker who has met Bourdieu’s challenge to ‘think the state’ without succumbing to ‘state thinking’, it is the Chinese political philosopher Ci Jiwei. Recently retired from the philosophy department of the University of Hong Kong, Ci has devoted most of the past three decades to analysing the nature and evolution of China’s state and society since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Three of his four books—Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994), Moral China in the Age of Reform (2014) and Democracy in China (2019)—amount to a loose trilogy aiming to clarify the ‘logic’ of the Chinese experience and to track the evolution of the ccp regime since Mao. The collapse of Maoist utopianism and the liberalization of the economy after 1978 have left Chinese society in a ‘fundamentally unsettled’ condition, Ci argues.footnote² Each book in the trilogy addresses a different symptom of this situation: existential or social-psychological malaise in Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, the undermining of moral subjectivity in Moral China and the looming crisis of political legitimacy in Democracy in China. In different ways, they are all concerned with how the Chinese party-state might accommodate itself, for its own and the nation’s good, to citizens’ need to act freely and to understand themselves as free, while at the same time preserving its own stability and that of the country at large.footnote³

On a superficial reading, Ci’s concern with democracy and the state might seem to situate him in the company of conventional liberals, while his emphasis on the Party’s role might appear to class him with loyal defenders of the ccp. Such interpretations would miss both the originality of his political philosophy and the radical-popular character of his proposals, which in his most recent book are frankly democratic socialist. Ci occupies an unusual insider-outsider position, in both East and West: professionally established in the prc, yet situated on its rimland, with only a small section of his oeuvre published in Chinese; deeply informed by Western traditions of critical political philosophy, including Marxist ones, as well as Chinese approaches, yet not in or of the West. What follows will trace the development of Ci’s thought against the backdrop of the prc’s evolution, drawing out some of its key political-philosophical themes and considering some of the objections raised by his critics, with the aim of contributing to an overall evaluation of a strikingly original body of work.

Ci was born in 1955 in Beijing, where his parents were scientists at Peking University. Two years old at the onset of the anti-rightist campaign, eleven at the start of the Cultural Revolution and twenty-three when Deng Xiaoping initiated the Reform Era, he had his fair share of personal experiences, good and bad, of China’s turbulent twentieth century. Living on campus exposed Ci to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and he has written memorably, in general terms, of the experience of that epoch.footnote⁴ His education was disrupted by extended periods of physical labour in the countryside and immersion in peasant life; once it resumed, it was at first scarcely indicative of his personal choices, since training was still subject to a high degree of political administration. This was partly true even when Ci spent time in London (1978–9) and Edinburgh (1979–83) as a state-sponsored, indeed state-managed, student. In London, Ci studied English intensively and experienced daily life, culture and politics in a foreign country for the first time. In Edinburgh, his landlord was a primary-school teacher who happened to be a Marxist; on his shelves, Ci encountered Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. He also came to know the writings of Russell, Freud and Weber, the philosophy of Hume, Wittgenstein and Popper, the moral philosophy of Adam Smith and R. M. Hare, the linguistics of Chomsky and M. A. K. Halliday, the fiction of George Eliot, Henry James and Iris Murdoch, and the literary criticism of Auerbach and Leavis. This wide reading would leave its mark on his reflections on Chinese society and politics.

Ci left China on a visit to the us in April 1989—he would spend 1990–91 as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center—and thus by coincidence, like many Chinese scholars and students abroad, he found himself in the vast shadow cast by the events of 4 June, watching from afar. Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution was conceived, as Ci recalls in the book’s introduction, ‘amid the sadness, anger and sense of futility in the wake of the suppression of the democracy movement’. Drafted at Stanford and then at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina (1991–92), it was a way to come to terms with the events, and in particular with what had happened (or failed to happen) in their aftermath. Ci explains, in a rather personal tone that is rare in his work, ‘As the nation’s mood went from shock to despair and then, remarkably soon, from despair to business as usual, I sensed, in a way I had never quite done before, something profoundly wrong with the Chinese spirit, something whose nature and cause had to be sought at the deepest level of the Chinese experience.’ His objective was at once one ‘of understanding myself and of illuminating, with my very limited powers, an entire epoch’.footnote⁵

Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution can be read as a kind of genealogy of this spiritual malaise, set in a deeper comparative and historical framework which allows contrasts between the abandonment of Maoist ideology and the earlier discarding of Confucianism. It is also an attempt, as Ci puts it, to chart ‘the path traversed by Chinese consciousness’ from the optimistic founding of the prc in 1949 and the exalted asceticism under Mao to the still-reverberating consequences of the demise of that ‘utopian experiment’. As Ci writes: ‘Utopian consciousness, once aroused, had a momentum that would not rest content until its original basis, the crisis of the body, was overcome, until its hopes were either fulfilled or dashed.’ The dashing of those hopes resulted in a devastating loss of meaning and of belief in the future—that ‘most precious mental possession’—and ushered in a pervasive spirit of nihilism. The acquisitive individualism encouraged by China’s spectacular rise was a way of numbing or burying this experience of meaninglessness—not merely meaning’s absence, but the anguish of its disappearance. Ci reads the psychological crisis of the Reform Era—the demise of communist utopianism as mass psychological reality—in terms of a crisis of spirit (jingshen weiji) or of belief (xinyang weiji). Consumerist pleasure-seeking was a technique of oblivion: a way for a ‘spiritually exhausted people’ to endure nihilism, ‘without raising it to the level of conscious reflection’.footnote⁶

Ci is concerned here with Chinese culture in the broadest sense: structures of experience and meaning; moral systems; the changing common sense of what China is, in itself and relative to the rest of the world. With the shock of the 1839–42 Opium War, he notes, a culture that had, for 2,000 years, been entirely sure of itself—its impregnable sovereignty, acknowledged superiority to neighbouring states and relative isolation from the rest of the world underpinning its ‘centre mentality’—was obliged to come to terms with the military and technological paramountcy of an industrial Western power. China’s response to this profound cultural crisis was to repurpose an ancient metaphysical distinction between being and doing as a national strategy: zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong—‘Chinese learning as essence (ti), Western learning as technique (yong)’. The ti-yong formula relegated the humiliating need to adopt foreign technologies to the realm of cultural insignificance. Yet the need for such distinctions signalled that the integrity of Chinese culture had already been undermined, Ci argues; it could no longer evolve on its own terms, at its own pace, and so could no longer be the China it had always been; but nor could it be quite like the West. Maoism resolved the disjunction: after 1949, Beijing regained complete sovereignty over the mainland for the first time since the 1840s; the prc acquired a new cosmopolitan identity at the forefront of history, continuous with what Mao described as the ‘good part’ of Chinese tradition and as culturally distinctive as it had ever been. The exhaustion of Maoist utopianism brought new uncertainty about the relation of ti and yong, however; the only faith capable of replacing it would be patriotism, Ci suggested, though that would be a poor substitute except under conditions of war.