Grand Strategy - V The Catalyst

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

(In Progress)

The Ghost of the Great Ideological Struggle of the Cold War Lingers: Will it be Resurrected in the Case of the China Problem? Or, Does Huntingtonianism Hold Sway Perpetually?

Ideology
-Global Age has commenced long ago;
-Deideologization of Chinese Communism in Post-Mao China;

Intellectuals
-Information Age;
-Gradualistic liberalism among the intelligentsia;

Sociology
-The middle class and its mythology;
-The media and its mythology;

Culture
-Popular "reactionary" fetishism;
-Cultural realignment with the West;

Politics
-Intra-Party conflicts;
-Sheer incompetence among the leadership;

Movement
-Intensification of social control and socio-political conflicts;
-Large scale regional unrests and sectarianism;

Let us be candid with ourselves before we commence the thesis of this chapter: that is, China's affairs have always been a peripheral issue in terms of Global Affair, or World History since the Modern Age. Such case holds sway for the past hundred years, and it is not an insensible thing to say that it is still very much true today. When the last imperial dynasty, the Qing court was toppled by the republican forces, the world powers only gave a disingenuous applause for the end of the Ancien Régime, and looking suspiciously onto the unfolding events while continue to stubbornly hold on to their privileges and unequal rights in China. If it wasn't for the establishment of the Soviet Russia in 1917, and to almost anyone's surprises, grew into a menacing communist machinery that is threatening to buck the Old World Order, no one really cares that Sun Yat-sen enlisted the aid of Comintern and launched his Northern Expedition to subvert the nascent official republican government in Beijing so long as their privileges and rights not be infringed upon. If it wasn't for the Japanese militarists' preemptive sneak attack on the U.S. Pearl Harbor in 1941, and their aggressive behaviors toward other Western powers in China in the titanic struggle for hegemony over Asia, the international community only paid lip-services toward the Japanese invaders while looking lukewarmly at the Chinese misery suffered from the Japanese aggression, which has started since the Mukden Incident in 1931 when they have, de facto taken over the whole of Manchuria. Since the commencement of the Cold War, when the whole world suffered from the Post Traumatic Syndrome of WWII while continue to cope with the heavy-handed bullies from the Soviet Union, no one have the energy, nor the interest for the Maoist diabolical tyranny over Red China which wreak havocs across the country resulting in tens of millions of mortality. It isn't until Nixon and Kissinger's shrewd Machiavellian maneuverer in 1972 to play off the Soviet Russia and Communist China against each other that the world, just recovered from the devastation of WWII with the boomers fully fledged in the wing, that started to raise all its curiosity toward the exotic land of China; confer Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo, Cina (1972). All in all, while the world can only be the onlookers, or at best, the cheering supporters, the affairs of China are solely the businesses of the Chinese boys themselves, that is the case.

Having stated the premise, we can be fairly certain that the catalyst for a democratic transition will be laid primarily within the domain of the affairs of China per se. The events of international turbulence, the War on Terror, global financial instability, and territorial disputes with neighboring countries will all be no more than a sideshow, or a mere small denominator of the entire historical dynamism of China. This has always been the case throughout the whole span of Chinese history if one is to scrutinize beyond the facade of textbook rhetorics. In every turn of a historic transition, it is always the rapid internal degeneration that causes the old regime's collapse and a new one which supplants it. The Tartar invasions of the Mongols and Manchus are all due to the centuries-old irrevocable internal decaying and corruption which ultimately lead to their demise in both Southern Song dynasty and Ming dynasty respectively. Same is true for the last imperial dynasty of Qing, whose Waterloo was not inflicted by the so-called "invasion of imperialism", a mantra trumped up by the communist propaganda machinery up to this day, but its coup de grace was really the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), which finally brought the mighty imperial Manchu dynasty to its knees. If there is something singularly true regarding the affairs of China, it could be summarily stated as the following: that nothing is static, and that everything is transforming according to the Will of the Chinese. And this, is already happening all around us if one is to pay a closer attention.

I would like to raise one indicator as an overture of the central thesis for this chapter. Namely, the Falong Gong (FLG) campaign against the CCP since 1999 is a sound and substantial evidence indicating the impending downfall of the PRC establishment, albeit the seemingly inertia today as the darkness before dawn which might take decades to overcome. However, bare in mind that the Chinese people is a superstitious race, as I have mentioned in the previous chapter, and the enterprise and propaganda machinery of the FLG is almost completely immersed in this phenomenon, which corresponds to every episode of historic transition in China if one is keen in discerning those omens throughout Chinese history. They faithfully churn out rumors, supernatural phenomena, providential slogans, true and false CCP exploitations and abuses, pamphlets (Nine Commentaries on the CCP), fliers, and rhyming doggerels much like their revolutionary predecessors, including the CCP, to relentlessly sound the death knell of the demise of an epoch. Although the campaign is largely based on irrationality, quasi-religious zeal, and voodoo infatuation in the agnostics, it nevertheless touches a sensitive nerve on the Chinese populace, and have found an army of loyal followers. Its campaign of Three Renouncements ( that is, renouncing membership in the Communist Party, Youth League, and Young Pioneers due to totalitarian policy of the socialist system in the PRC, which requires everyone to join one of the party organs some point in people's life starting from elementary school;) which boasted tens of millions of petitions only testified that a considerable portion of the Chinese has already been fed up and disenchanted with the whole CCP enterprise, and this proselytism, is always the initial step for any historical revolution. Despite my reservation for the FLG movement and skepticism that it will singlehandedly topple the CCP regime, it nevertheless serves as a substantial weight signaling the beginning of an end, much like the Yellow Ribbon Rebellion gives way to the end of the Han dynasty and leads to the era of the Three Kingdom, or the Taiping Rebellion leading to the downfall of the Qing dynasty and heralding the new republican era half century after, all of which were founded fundamentally in the belief of the supernatural and a messianic deliverance.

The above recount has placed us in a fairly credulous disposition to be convinced at least of the two following reckonings in light of the essential question to be addressed in this chapter: one is that the Chinese will be the sole arbiter to resolve their own problems, and two is that they have commenced this great Quest not only in the innumerable activities of the secular realm (which I will exposit in details in later sections of this chapter), but more importantly, in the spiritual realm such as the aforementioned case of the FLG, which manifests as an evidence of a categorical dissension in Chinese people's hearts, much akin to the schism between the Catholics and the Protestants of the Reformation era; if one is to place the two considerations in order of a logical inference, it is not unwise to conclude a sound proposition that the catalyst for a historical transition has already been underway. One only needs to examine its multi-faceted details for further substantiation.

Let us first begin with our consideration in the sphere of ideology. As we know, the great ideology rift has actually been initiated since the moment of global encounter, when Europeans started their mighty quest in their world exploration and conquest, and discovered numerous indigenous people all over the different continents whose world views were quite at odds with that of the Westerners. Needless to say, what happened next is the so-called shameful and humiliating age of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and the nail-biting process of westernization. Without digging into the details of that nasty and treacherous time of complicated political maneuvers, it has nevertheless, laid out the blueprint of the world as such that we still occupy today, not only within the domain of geopolitical formation, but also ideological divide. The former much shaped by colonization of the Western imperial powers and its subsequent liberation and independence, and the latter much contested by the occidental philosophy of liberalization and individuality against the oriental dogmas of authoritarianism and collectivism. Even though it has been prophesied that History will eventually end in the post-Cold War era by Fukuyama and like-minded meliorists with every denizen of planet earth toeing the line of liberal democracy and live happily ever after as the Last Man and Woman, we are still constantly being reminded that rogue states going against the grain just won't fall in, or simply are not in the interest of singing along the chorus, thus obliges everyone of us nolens volens to be perpetually engaged in this Sysiphusian purgatory. Today's China, is one of those states. Although I am not in the position of forecasting a Manichean showdown between Freedom and Slavery, I certainly am more than convinced that the contemporary world is adamantly pitched in the awkward if not combustible state of modus vivendi between the two great ideologies. The Cold War is our ultimate paradigm of such titanic struggle. Even though the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union disintegrated, we are continued to be troubled by an obstreperous Russian autocracy, Islamo-fascism, and oriental authoritarianism of the Communist Far East; all of which give much substance to the recognition that we are still very much in the game, that is, history is to be continually unfolding, and that the contention and struggle between the Free and Just against Repression and Despotism is still very crucial.

Having proposed the dichotomy of the two great ideologies, let us now examine its impact upon the modern history of China. As we have come to a relatively convincing recognition from the previous chapters, before the Europeans commenced their engagement with China during the Age of Imperialism, the institution of thought and its practice has been pretty much repeating itself for the last two millennia, with its all encompassing Meso-Confucian ideological mantle combined with the autochthonic customs of patriarchal authoritarianism, the mighty buttress of its establishment and its egregious edifice of Chinese collective consciousness had not been undermined, no matter who's in charge, give it a Chinese, a Tartar, a Mongol, or a Manchu. The Chinese used to be, and still largely are amongst various quarters of contemporary society, very proud of this phenomenon of ultra-stability and its longevity. The system was not being bucked until the 19th century when they suddenly discovered that the Old Way can no longer sustained itself after a series of humiliating defeats by the apathetic waves of imperialism. Their mortifying shocks in the face of this ominous influx of alien elements were nothing short of an apocalyptic revelation, which could be vicariously felt by indigenous people all over the world, thereby forcing the once arrogant nation to wake up from their nostalgic euphoria of the mirage of ancient glory, and learn a thing or two from their equally arrogant foes because the time has simply changed. This, marked the beginning of a new era of globalization, and it has already started over a century ago.

Since then, the clash of ideologies, as well as the clash of civilizations, a coinage popularized by Samuel P. Huntington, have never been stopped, but waged tremendous turmoil and concussions around the global in the formula of the West vs. the Rest. On the one hand, industrialization had already become an inevitable and imperative force like the whirlwinds of tornado, charging through various hemispheres and continents of the globe, remodifying its face for once and all. While on the other, the inconvenient counterpart of this great kineticism was the goddess of Europa in her earthly form—Westernization, which yielded mixed results in various parts of the world. Let us only focus on the events of the Far East in order to see how China acted in this pivotal moment. Since the Opium War (1839-1842) which resulted in the concession of Hongkong to the British Empire and the coerced treaty to open up ports in southern China during its last imperial dynasty, the Great Qing, China had categorically transitioned herself from the classic era to modernity. Even though the process was slow, she could never shut her doors ever in the face of this inundation of Western influx. This initiated a period of dynamic intellectual cross-pollination, with all of the ideas and philosophies coming in from the West along with myriad loads of Western merchandises ready to sell in the Chinese market. From the historicist point of view, the first big wave (1839-1919 which began with the advent of the Opium War until the outbreak of the so-called New Culture Movement 新文化运动 since the May Fourth demonstration) came during the waning season of the Qing dynasty and the early republican era, in which Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment was the predominant zeitgeist, with such ideas as empiricism, industrialization, libertarianism, parliamentary democracy, constitutional monarchy, pragmatic diplomacy, principles of the balance of powers, laissez-faire market economy, social contract, rationalism, humanism, and so on. These alien ideological dynamites had exploded in the still much medieval country with massive proportion and vast ramifications. Events such as the Self-Strengthening Movement, or literally in Chinese, the Oceanic Affairs Movement 洋务运动 sponsored by those loyal Han mandarins of the Qing court such as Li Hongzhang 李鸿章 and Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 and the subsequent initiatives taken by the Qing royalty to replace old educational system with westernized schools and establish constitutional monarchy with parliamentary democracy would not have taken place without the Anglo-Scottish ideological influence. One could argue that because those were the times of Pax Britana, everything was revolving around the Brits, including Japan, who saw herself as the oriental version of the U.K. The early proponents of constitutional monarchy or republicanism such as the Neo-Confucian Kang Youwei 康有为 and the founder of republican China Sun Yat-sen 孙中山 were all initially piously enchanted by her magical sway and sought to emulate her institutional structures and ideological paradigms as the last dosage of panacea to revitalize the dying China.

The second wave (1919-1979 which began in the May Fourth movement and ended in the CCP's Economic Reform policy as the last-ditch resort to resuscitate the dead China.) came when people discovered that the Anglo-Scottish mantle had lost its gravitational power after WWI and especially since the establishment of Soviet Russia in 1917, when a new generation of youngsters were more than eager to boost China into a world power by taking the Federal Express. That fast track lane was the German-Slavic ideological domination which slowly taking its shape and form since the 1920s' until eventually growing into a monstrous beast that was to wreak havocs and disasters in an egregious scale. People were much mesmerized by this Übermensch notion that was to attract an army of zealous adherents. Ideas such as nationalism, socialism, anarchy, progressivism, machtpolitik, Führerprinzip, fascism, material dialectics, and most importantly, Marxist-Leninist Communism and sovietology were the blockbuster mega-sellers, and somehow the former Anglo-Scottish fervor was to be done away with for once and all, and its liberal and humanist principles were to be frown and disdained upon as methods of imperialist subjugation and capitalist exploitation by radical ideologues and their loyal minions. The immediate cause of such proselytism was the unfair treatment of China in the post-WWI Treaty of Versailles in which the European powers singlehandedly transferred the Shangdong concessions from Germany to Japan. This rather arbitrary treatment of China, who was also a member of the Allied Powers, had stirred up a widespread public outcry especially amongst the younger generation, who denounced the weak stance of the Beijing government in its defense of national sovereignty, and for the first time in Chinese history, united everyone in this rather new sentiment called nationalism, and took to the streets in Beijing and exercised this brand new civil practice called demonstration, in order to make the voice of the people heard. Although the dispute was subsequently resolved by 1922 brokered by the U.S. and the sovereignty of Shangdong promptly restored back to China, the whole national consciousness was to take a drastic about face ever since, and this was the beginning of the mighty deluge of the German-Slavic ideological invasion.

Thanks to the additional financial and material subsidies from the newly established Soviet Russia and its agent, the Communist International, who gave life to the CCP and bankrolled the KMT's military machinery, the propagation of Leftist progressivism was in business. Both the KMT and the CCP had toed the Soviet line and emulated the Soviet political structure and institutional formation almost word-for-word, with the CCP went as far as carving out a Chinese Soviet State in the hinterlands of Jiangxi province by 1931. When the KMT discovered that they can no longer coexist with their fratricidal comrades the CCP by 1927, they decided to take a preemptive strike against the CCP in order to make a head start in this two-decades long vendetta which was to claim millions of lives. After the split and the KMT's victory against the warlords in 1928 by taking Nanjing as the new feeble capital of the republic, they were desperate in search of some new ingredients in order to substantiate and invigorate their party's ideological clout over China by sanctifying Sun Yat-sen, who has been dead by now and conveniently apotheosized as the legendary founding father of Republican China, along with his theory of Three People's Principles imbued in a quasi-religious status. For this, they took great pains in their contrivance and by the 1930's thanks to the rise of Mussolini's Fascist Italy and Hitler's Nazi Germany, totalitarianism seemed to be in the vogue and many KMT's devoted comrades endeavored to copycat these latest trends to make the KMT the Chinese fascist party by combining autochthonic patriarchal authoritarianism (many pointing the fingers to Confucianism once again, the omni-culpable ultimate scapegoat for everything;), with invocation of patriotism, nationalism, loyalty, camaraderies, common blood, and so on. All these while the CCP was tucked safe in some remote northwest corner of the country, and kept on finessing and improving the Soviet model, waiting patiently for a chance to make their Second Coming. After WWII, it has already become too clear to many that CCP's Marxism was simply far more sophisticated and powerful than KMT's lukewarm and dubious doctrines of the one-size-fits-all Three People's Principles, which finally gave way to the CCP's victory by 1949 after the final all out civil war(1946-1949). Since the red China's establishment, the CCP was to continue its exercises of the Soviet practices that had been so throughly instilled in the party by now, as to its rechristening was simply a matter of necessity with a more endearing epithet—Maoism—which needless to expound any further, has brought the Chinese nation catastrophic consequences.

By 1979 the second cataclysmic wave had finally dissipated with China in complete ruin, state bankrupted, people disenchanted, society paralyzed, civil institutions next-to-dysfunction, domestic production decimated, China was on the verge of a fail-state, and the GDP regressed to the levels of countries such as Somalia. When the high-wire political maneuver that finally launched Deng as the next Alpha male in line, he made a daring eleventh hour bail out which was to be recorded in history as the greatest achievement in his entire political career, namely, the Reform and Open Policy. With such measures of social liberalization, came the the third and presumably the final wave (1979 -present) across the Pacific Ocean. Since by then the Soviet Union was on the brink of extinction and lost all of its flares and attraction as it once did half century earlier, the triumphant world domination became the indisputable winner—the United States—and with all of her material cornucopia and providential ideological prowess, came pouring into China like the Monsoon flooding the land of an enduring drought, and avalanching everything in its way. I wouldn't even try to go into the details since we are still currently living amidst this great historical moment, some might dubbed it as the age of Pax Americana, the fact that its mighty cultural and ideological clout was so redoubtable to the almost anachronistic Chinese in the threshold of a new era since the 1980s', there was simply no way to resist it but prostrate with all faithfulness consciously or unconsciously, overtly or latently, piously or hypocritically, studiously or obsequiously, nolens volens, in the face of this New World Order. From KFC to Nike, from Sex and the City to NFL, from Hollywood to American Idol, from the arts to Post-modernism, from the national mobilization of English learning to the biggest exodus ever in the history of China (with primary destination the United States), you name it and they'll have it, the cultural and ideological realignment was slowly reformulating based on the blueprints of Americana. There is no way to turn it back; it is just a matter of time for the complete fruition to come about.

There is only one critical aspect worth our probing, which will lead to the second half of our consideration with regard to the realm of ideology. Namely, having examined the three major waves of western thoughts and ideas and their tremendous impact for much of the modern history of China, there appeared to be many evidences by now, which indicated to a discerning eye that the once omnipresent and omnipotent iron grip of Chinese Communism is already in its retreat, and this unequivocal manifestation with innumerable instances can only oblige us to make one categorical assertion, to wit, the deideologization of Chinese Communism in Post-Mao China has begun and continued in its development for the past three decades with irrevocable momentum. To the laymen, this rather stilted statement which basically means that China is no longer communist would not have sounded out-of-whack at all and the situation seemed self-evident, for he/she who travels to China today would simply jumped to the conclusion after being submerged in the floods of neon lights and rather bizarre urban high-rises that China is now capitalist and the CCP is nothing but a "name", a ruling entity if at all, and if you don't bother them, they certainly won't come to bother you. This rather banal understanding is definitely not without its merits and its corroborations are ubiquitous, but if we are to dig deeper from its surface values, we are to discover something more profound which contains potentially far more devastating implications.

Ever since the demise of Mao and the ascendancy of Deng by the end of the 1970s' after he staged what was basically a coup against those loyal Maoist acolytes, the Gang of Fours and Mao's official successor, the ultra-left wing-nut Hua Guofeng 华国锋, China was to undergo a transition away from its once totalitarian Maoist system to that of a more liberalized society as Deng himself put it—regardless a white cat or a black cat, as long as it catches a mouse it's a good cat—which was essentially a fiat says anything-goes because by default China was simply going down the drain. The Left calls this egregious act of treason as reactionary revisionist, but Deng could care less what they call him by being simply a pragmatist and a pure opportunist. Nevertheless, this great historic moment was really the impetus to launch China's ideological transformation. People were no longer zealous about Mao and the Little Red Book, anyone who still does was to be amused as the laughing stock. The spell of Chinese Communism was ever since in the process of dissipation until the point today that the communist cadres themselves are to degenerate to nothing more than a cohort of charlatans and plutocracy. The two last resorts they have got are simply the controls of arms by means of State Terror which they will not hesitate in the least to execute, such as the Tiananmen Massacre and the Lhasa Massacre in 1989 and the ongoing persecutions of FLG practitioners and dissidents, plus the continued practice of brainwashing by means of State Propaganda, which controls all of the media in the nation, and enforcing a socialist education based on Leninist school system. Nevertheless, since China today is no longer the Maoist hellhole with its omnipotent iron curtain shrouding all over China, both means of State Control are slowly losing its once powerful effectiveness.

Even though the Party had already resorted to its last-ditch imperative in its declaration of war against the people by launching the PLA's fully armor-plated mechanized divisions into Beijing during the 1989's students demonstration—tanks, Armored Personnel Carriers, AK-47s, helmets, infantries, lock, stock and barrel—marching imperiously into Tiananmen Square as if going to the front, it has nevertheless failed to instill a fear factor into the masses' consciousness, and frankly has tarnished the once benign images of Deng's administration. Since then, riots and clashes between people and their local authorities had only increased and the level of violence intensified; by the turn of the century the exacerbation amounts to thousands of cases per year. To make matter even worse, the outskirts regions where traditionally occupied by native ethnicities such as Tibet and Xinjiang had seen their worst violence since the Qing dynasty. Prominent cases such as the 2008 pre-Beijing Olympic Tibetan unrest and the 2009 Xinjiang riots in its capital Urumqi, where struggle for religious freedom and ethnic tension between locals and Han colonizers had serged in an unprecedented momentum. One could only anticipate that this was only a prelude of something even more cataclysmic in the years to come. In the sphere of propaganda the Party was also on the weakening side, where it used to be a shear preeminence for the Party's effectiveness in its use of control apparatus on clamping down dissidents and cacophony, the game has changed its traditional pattern ever since the rise of electronics and the Internet. Now the chase between cat and mouse is ever more complicated and illusive. As to its antiquated and very much preposterous socialist education, the situation was even more ludicrous. Even though kids since elementary school are mandated to join the Young Pioneers, an apparat of the Party's indoctrination wing, first by wearing the green scarf during the 2nd and 3rd grades, then proceeding to wear the official symbol of the apparat, the red scarf—supposedly with pride but in actuality with much distaste or indifference (as I can personally attest to)—the whole communist ritual for the kids seems like a burlesque. By junior high and high school some are encouraged to join the Youth League (always the academically excelling and ideologically obedient ones), in their preparation for an official membership during their coming of age. However, when they had finally reached their years of college level, the majority of them, that is the normal ones, have resolutely left the baggage that was forced onto them with their socialist public schools, and passionately throwing both arms wide open to embrace the liberty and never-before-experienced freedom that awaits them ahead. Many of them (the more wayward and less academically endowed ones) quite ditched their spoon-fed ideological fodders since junior high and found their endearing havens in the fantastic world of the World Wide Web and immersed themselves indulgently in the smoky dens of Internet cafe that is ubiquitous in China. All in all, if one is to tour around China to have a sample of how the Party's grip on people's mindset goes, it isn't hard for him to conclude that the ideological indoctrination of the once powerful Party function is by now a complete failure. People are to become by-and-large apolitical and purely materialistic, if not outright dismissive or even antagonistic toward the local and central party bosses. On top of their agenda are luxury items, haute couture, haute cuisine, chic, style, cars, houses, gossips, and sex. They can care less which way the wind blows from Zhongnanhan 中南海, what the newest Party directives are, or who got sacked and who got to be the next top dog in what cliques. Thus, the process of deideologization of Chinese Communism is now charging forward in its full locomotion.

Let us now proceed to some other areas for consideration. As discussed above, since the two most important means of Control for the Party had already become lackluster for the people by the end of 20th century, namely, the arm forces and the propaganda machinery, one can only expect that it is losing ground in every other social aspect, and the erosion of the its ideological fortress is maintaining a steady velocity. During the first phase of the Chinese communist establishment (1931-1979), that is, from the establishment of the Chinese Soviet republic in Jiangxi Province and various other red bases in 1931, to the so-called Yan'an Liberation Zone 延安解放区 since 1935, to the Maoist red China from 1949-1979, the communist methodology of social control is that of a Leninist-Stalinist totalitarianism. There is simply no distinction between privacy and publicity. The sacred Trinity of American founding principle and in essence, the pith of Western civilizations, that is the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not only unheard of, but utterly monopolized by the whims of state policy. The doctrines of proletariat dictatorship and class struggle that the Party held as its fundamental platform rounded up all lives in the hands of Party apparatus and virtually imprisoned the whole country; the so-called Land Reform and People's Communes basically abolished the ideas of private property; and the horrible ideas of continuous revolution even after the communist victory is to rid the people of any moment of reprieve, but engage them in a 24/7 constant struggle with themselves and with each other; as Mao famously put it, fight the Heaven, fight the Earth, fight the men, such bliss is boundless 与天斗，与地斗，与人斗，其乐无穷. While he might have had so much fun tucked safe inside the thick walls of Zhongnanhai with his harems of secretaries and dancers from the PLA performing troupe, exercising all his inalienable rights of the pursuit of happiness, the whole nation was to put under a state-sanctioned slavery system in which everyone is mandated to toil in their sweats, snitch on others who act otherwise, and live an ascetic life, all in the name of building the socialist paradise. Therefore, but the time Deng finally opened the door of China in 1979, the bubble of the previous era of such bombastic communist ideology burst in an instant, and the so-called liberated people of the Communist state felt re-liberated once again with all the relief and salvation, and started chasing for the first time in their life, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with zealous passion and an unyielding Will.

With the reform era came along the Information Age to China. Where it used to be tightly controlled by the Party's Propaganda department, now for the first time an air of liberalism was felt mainly presided by the more moderate leadership of Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦 and Zhao Ziyang 赵紫阳. After decades of an intellectual famine and the persecutions of intellectuals themselves, a younger generations of Chinese who were mainly deprived of a decent education since Junior High due to the horrendous episodes of the Cultural Revolution, were more than eager to absorb any foreign (primarily the West) milk and nutrients that comes in hand. The 80s' was markedly felt by all as a time of unprecedented fervor for mimicking, learning, and investigating all Western intellectual and cultural trends and ideas. So much so that whereas in the West the progression of one style to another in the arts and music usually takes decades to transform, China of the 80s' was able to encapsulate them all in a period of ten years. In the arts, people such as my father who were a bit older than their junior, and by default more radical colleagues, were much more taken by the earlier trends of the West such as impressionism, expressionism, cubism, and abstract-impressionism; on the other hand those younger self-professed avant-gardes, a popular sound bite, were much more passionate in their pursuit of trends such as pop art, conceptual art, performance art, and installation art. In the music such diversity was also phenomenal: whereas the a bit older and more moderate generation preferred the more melodious and euphoric tunes of Hongkong and Taiwan pop, pioneered by Teresa Teng and co. since the late 70s', there were others, the more daredevil ones first experimented with the sex-drugs-Rock&Rolls culture and were able to form their own bands and churn out pop-rock, hard-rock, folk-rock, punk, heavy-metal, death-metal, grunge, electronic and trance all in the matter of ten years. Even though each group and subgroup retain their own hauteur and exclusiveness while mocking the other as being retarded, outdated, or unworthy, a distinct and very human feature, they all neglected the fact that just ten years ago, none of this would've existed, and all would be seen as degenerates and turncoats, and would be resolutely sent to Laogai if not received an outright death sentence. But, time's changed, the Information Age is well underway in China, and there's no way to stop it.

In light of the discussion of this topic, I would like to simply expatiate on a key element which could be said as the paramount yardstick for the impact of the Information Age, namely, the gradual liberalization of the intelligentsia ever since the commencement of the 1980s'. As any learned individual might well concurred, the outlook of the intellectual constitution has always been for the most part, the cynosure of any given historic epoch. Without the Athenian academia and its philosophers there wouldn't have come about the golden age of Hellenistic era; without the ecclesiastic scholasticism and its patron saints there wouldn't have been the Middle Age; without the Renaissance and its polymaths there wouldn't have been a rise of the Modern Age; without the Enlightenment and its revolutionary thinkers there wouldn't have been an American and a French revolution. And likewise, without the aforementioned paleo and meso-Confucians there wouldn't have been a classic China; and without the three-fold invasions of Western ideologies, there wouldn't have been a modern China. Therefore, it is crucial for us to consider what has been taken place in the intellectual and academic milieu since the reform era of China in order to beget a general comprehensive understanding as to what it symbolizes from a historic perspective. To begin with, we have to be aware that since the CCP took power in 1949, there was a thirty-years of intellectual hiatus if not a complete atrophy during the period of Maoist totalitarianism, in which nothing could be said, written, or even thought of other than the ultra-leftist wingnut type of stuff that Mao and his cronies had churned out. But since those high-pitched harangues and bombastic froths were unworthy of any serious intellectual deliberations, and Mao himself, loathed anyone with real intellectual integrity to his guts, the entire population was condemned to obscurantism and ostracized in an intellectual desert. As a result, when the reform era opened the door for everyone, there came an unprecedented craving for learning and thereby reexamining everything previously being taught and accepted as received wisdom. What has come out of this period could be summarily described as largely a trend of revisionism that's been slowly taken form. Albeit my pessimistic lament from the previous chapter on the general impotency of current intellectual rigor in China, there are nevertheless a few glittering sparks in the gloomy night sky that's worth probing into and reflect upon.

After the dismantlement of the Maoist ideological fortress by the end of the 1970s', there was simply a tacit reckoning that people now would be able to launch an unfettered intellectual pursuit no longer harassed by the the thought police of the State, at least in private, since at the time the official party line espoused by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was even equivocally proclaimed as groping for rocks in order to cross the river 摸着石子过河. There came about a new generation of vibrant thinkers since then whose scholarly calibers were remarkably poignant and surprisingly refreshing for many. If there could be said something uniformly true about this intellectual blossoming, it is that although their works were seething with sparks, in public they have always been watched with an wary eye from the authority if not being quarantined or even censored. As we know, the culmination of this intellectual fervor was to be the world-renowned event of the Tiananmen student demonstration in 1989 and its subsequent brutal suppression of the June 4th Massacre, which was the ultimate sing for the CCP that although it was obliged to tolerate a certain degree of intellectual freedom as the sine qua non for social and market liberalization, it is nevertheless the barrel of the gun that calls the final shot. After that brief surfacing of intellectual mini-explosion during the 1980s', the liberal element of the intelligentsia went largely either underground or self-imposed exile in the face of the following wave of economic mega-explosion of the 1990s'. Their traces on the surface was almost next-to-none-existent by then. However, this was really a case of pragmatism; by no means it is to say that it has completely die out, on the contrary, the legacy of the 80s', that pivotal period of transition, flimsy and immature as it may appear, had only consolidated itself and grew more substantial and comprehensive as it turned out, which produced a far more extensive and sophisticated corpus of works ever since. This new generation of thinkers was almost entirely the coevals of their Western counterpart, the boomers, who grew up during the heinous era of Maoist totalitarian world; witnessed all the atrocious and diabolical events of that period in their teens and youth; reached their early adulthood right at the dawn of the reform era; served largely as the spiritual and intellectual mentors to their junior partners (directly or indirectly), who filled the bulk of the student demonstration in the '89 Tiananmen demonstration; and finally, coined their quintessential signature works in their mature age.

It is arguable that the godfather of this new generation of liberals could be traced to a native Beijing self-taught political actvist named wei Jingsheng 魏京生 (b. 1950). After experienced all of those farcical and yet disastrous Maoist political movements and even personal served as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, he had a change of heart by the 70s' and finally participated in the Xidan Democratic Wall movement in Beijing in 1978. For the first time in the post-Mao era when mass majority of folks were still haunted by the nightmares of the previous traumas, he launched an article titled The Fifth Modernization, which called for institutional democratization, adding to the official line of the Four Modernization promulgated by Deng, which was all based on technology and science. The message at the time of a still much gloomy atmosphere, acted almost as if a Prometheus' Fire to many inquisitive yet still confused minds, thereby jump-started the contemporary age of intellectual liberalization in China. He himself had paid dearly for this piece of article, which was dubbed as treasonous material by the CCP, and charged with the crime of reactionary and sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment. In spite of the consistency of the state’s heavy-handed measures against any public cacophony that is not in line with the official policy, as China opens her up in order to draw in foreign capitals, she inevitably invited in new ideas and concepts that is completely at odds with the CCP's party line, therefore the irrevocable trend of intellectual liberalization was really the byproduct of its own making, and the Party is to take great pain at forever enduring such uneasy dilemma, only with limited success.

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