Wang Hui, Markets, and the State in Chinese Social Democracy

Today, the main promoter of Communist Pan-Asianism is Wang Hui, an outstanding Chinese thinker who, while faithful to Maoist legacy, is a Social Democrat in regard to the economy. Wang insists that what we are witnessing today is not a result of the market but of its distortion: “Resistance against monopolization and domineering market tyranny cannot be simply equaled with the struggle ‘against’ the market, because such social resistance itself includes the efforts striving for fair competition in the market and for economic democracy.” Recall Habermas’s notion of distorted communication (distorted because of extra-linguistic power relations of oppression and domination). Wang seems to imply the notion of distorted market competition and exchange—distorted due to the external pressures of political, cultural, and social conditions:

The movement of economy is always embedded in politics, culture, and other social conditions, so to strive for the conditions of fair market competition does not equal getting rid of [the] state political system, social customs, and any regulating mechanism. On the contrary, the perfection of market conditions aims to reform, limit, and expand these systems in order to create social conditions for fair interaction. In this sense, the struggle for social justice and fair market competition cannot be equaled with the opposition to state intervention. It rather requires Socialist Democracy, namely, to prevent the state from becoming the protector of domestic monopoly and multinational monopoly through the society’s democratic control of the state.

Here, one should remain a shamelessly orthodox Marxist. Wang underestimates the immanent logic of market relations, which subverts its own “fairness” and tends toward exploitation and destabilizing excesses. Wang thus seems to be fighting a straw man: Who is seriously claiming that the movement of economy is not embedded in politics, culture, etc.? Even Margaret Thatcher, the founding figure of “neoliberalism,” was fully aware of this when she insisted that the economic measures imposed by her were just the first step in changing the entire sociopolitical question, up to our perception of human nature: “Economic problems never start with economics. They have deeper roots—in human nature and in politics. They don’t finish at economics either.” This is why Thatcher explicitly grounded her politics in philosophy: “The philosophical reason for which we are against nationalization and for private enterprise is because we believe that economic progress comes from the inventiveness, ability, determination, and the pioneering spirit of extraordinary men and women.” Consequently, Thatcher praised small and mid-level companies against big corporate monopolies. She also believed her responsibility was to “prevent the state from becoming the protector of domestic monopoly and multinational monopoly.” And even Jinping would have agreed with this: His new round of reforms is not anti–Deng Xiaoping; his target is the new big corporate monopolies.

However, when Wang claims that we should “prevent the state from becoming the protector of domestic monopoly and multinational monopoly through the society’s democratic control of the state,” we should add that if this is Socialist Democracy, then it never really existed. Can we seriously claim that in today’s China society has democratic control of the state? We can, but on one condition: that we assume that there is equality between society and the (Communist) Party. In this sense, we can say that the Party controls the state on behalf of the people, but what we for certain do not have in today’s China is society’s democratic control of the Party.

This isn’t necessarily a negative feature: There are good arguments for the claim that China avoided the chaotic disintegration of the USSR in the early 1990s because Xiaoping’s economic liberalization did not succumb to the temptation to abandon the Communist Party and pass power over to a Western-style multiparty democracy. Wang advocated for social democracy with the caveat that it should be grounded in the Asian civilizational traditions and function as a social order with strong participation of the people. Along these lines, Wang rejected the claim that Mao and Deng pursued opposed political options, and that Jinping simply stands for a (limited) return to the Maoist hardline. Instead, he argues that they are all part of a continuous emancipatory process that began with Sun Yat-sen and led up to the Chinese intervention in the Korean war, and more recently, Chinese attempts to unite with Taiwan. The narrow Western view misses this key point, seeing only a struggle between “Western liberal democracy” and Communist “totalitarianism” in this process.