Introduction by Kaiser Kuo

To sit in Beijing in late March and watch Adam Tooze and Wang Hui fall into conversation was to feel two major currents of my intellectual life suddenly converge. These are thinkers from very different traditions, with different canons and different habits of argument – and yet there was an immediate and deepening recognition between them. I never imagined I’d have the chance to witness it.

Tooze will be familiar to Equator’s readers: an economic historian and one of the most compelling public intellectuals at work today He has just submitted the manuscript of a book on the energy transition, in which China necessarily occupies the centre. In recent years he has also committed himself seriously to studying Chinese – at which, I can attest, he is making real progress. What has made his intellectual engagement with China so bracing is his perspective: he comes at the subject from outside the guild. That distance, combined with his comparitive authority, allows him to say plainly what those of us closer to the subject know to be true but are reluctant to articulate.

Wang Hui merits a fuller introduction. A Tsinghua University professor and former editor of the agenda-setting journal Dushu, he is – deservedly – the best-known intellectual associated with China’s ‘New Left’. The label emerged in the 1990s, when China’s liberals celebrated the march toward markets and Wang insisted that the social costs demanded a reckoning, not a celebration. His varied books and articles circle around one immense question: what does it mean to be modern outside the West? In the conversation that follows, he and Tooze discuss Hobsbawm’s “short twentieth century”, the “Fukuyama moment”, Carl Schmitt’s toxic brilliance, Mao’s concept of ‘people’s war’, and – most stirringly – Lu Xun as a theorist of failure who refused despair.

Adam Tooze: Like many readers, I deeply appreciate the biographical self-reflexivity that informs all your work. You are willing to question how your thoughts – all our thoughts – are shaped by our political circumstances and situated within history. With your example in mind, I would like to begin by briefly reflecting on how my own intellectual engagement with China has been shaped by my biography, and the period I came of age in.

I graduated college in West Berlin in the summer of 1989. The events of that summer were of course dramatic and eye-opening. But in general, German – and European – culture had grown quite provincial and inward-looking by the end of the Cold War. Perhaps that is why it took me so long to think seriously about China. My vision remained largely Eurocentric until the 2000s, when I began dealing more closely with global capitalism, by way of working as part of a management training team at the University of Cambridge for the British oil company BP.

It was only in my third book, The Deluge (2014), that I challenged myself to directly write about China. That book includes a comprehensive account of the May the Fourth Movement – which began as a student protest against the Chinese government’s acquiesce to the Treaty of Versailles, when it granted considerable parts of the country’s territory to Japan. Of course, many German scholars consider this event to be the foundational political crisis of the twentieth century.

As I became acquainted with your work, I came to feel that our intellectual enquiries shared a similar starting point. Both of us are interested in the dramatic changes that marked the early twentieth century – and how they came to be interpreted. In his great poem “The Age”, Osip Mandelstam alludes to this rupture when he mentions living in a “broken-backed century”.

What Eric Hobsbawm called “the short twentieth century” was supposed to break with the double logic of the nineteenth century – industrialisation and democracy – by consummating both in revolution. This did not quite pan out – certainly not in China, as you have argued in a series of essays. On the contrary, by the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that revolutionary energies had dissipated the world over, and we were going back to the 1800s. You arrestingly describe this development as “a return of the nineteenth century”.

It was a very compelling interpretation to offer in the 1990s – the so-called ‘Fukuyama moment’. How does it strike you today, in the mid-2020s? I ask this, in part, because I recently completed a book about the climate crisis. From the vantage point of the Anthropocene, I wonder whether the notion of “a return of the nineteenth century” might be too harmless. China’s contemporary development model is quite different from what European nations pursued in the nineteenth century; it is a form of development that is transforming the planet in unprecedented ways. Since the 1990s, China has developed at a speed and scale that even Marx could not have envisioned.

Wang Hui: It is a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the Anthropocene is entirely different from anything that came before it. From an ecological perspective, we are in uncharted territory. But on the other hand, the actors in the political arena form a familiar cast, and are performing a familiar nineteenth-century script: we are living through renewed war and imperialism (both mainly driven by the US) as well as heated debates about the meaning of industrialisation, or rather reindustrialisation. Our present has a double face. Perhaps we should think of a “return” not simply as a repetition, but rather as something new that emerges from the attempt to recreate something old.

Every new situation, or even the prospect of a new situation, transforms our ideas about history, and indeed our way of narrating history. One thing is for certain: today, the old historical narratives, both of progress and revolution, have collapsed. We need to find a new way of thinking about the present – and about the past.

Perhaps a historical example will clarify what I mean. In 1900, Liang Qichao wrote a long poem titled “The Song of the Twentieth-Century Pacific”. In it, he used two entirely novel concepts to describe China’s situation. One was temporal: the twentieth century. The other was spatial: the Pacific. Until then, in two millennia of Chinese civilisation, no one had done imaginative work on the “Pacific scale”. In that sense, Liang invented a certain geopolitical sensibility.

The temporal innovation was even more dramatic. The Chinese twentieth century is quite singular – it marks a radical break, both because the long era of royal dynasties is brought to an end, and because a strong sense of global synchronicity emerges. It becomes impossible, perhaps for the first time, to find the answers to China’s present within its own past. All other nations become a part of our past; world history becomes our history. In that sense, a new conception of history emerges. You might even say that the Chinese eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are an invention of the Chinese twentieth century. Perhaps we are living through something similar today. Perhaps the Anthropocene will reshape our understanding of the past.

You mentioned Eric Hobsbawm. In The Age of Extremes, the fourth volume of his great tetralogy about the creation of the modern world, he unfavourably compared the twentieth century, which for him threw up few valuable ideas, with the nineteenth century, which gave us democracy, the market economy, revolution. I can see why he would feel that way in Europe, but the argument does not hold in China. The May the Fourth Movement, Mao’s ‘people’s war’ – these and other developments instilled tremendous political energies in our society, which are still being felt in the Reform Era.

In the 1990s, when I was writing the essays you referred to, it seemed as if this legacy was depleting. Chinese society was dramatically depoliticised, as neoliberal ideas found great favour. So when I spoke of a “return to the nineteenth century”, I was referring to depoliticisation. I see this as a phenomenon we need to overcome. Yet we are sometimes ourselves overcome by it.

Adam Tooze: I find your point about a “two-faced present” to be very generative. It helps us understand, say, President Trump and his inner circle. It is almost as though they think they can safely reenact the nineteenth century: cosplay William McKinley, revive the Monroe Doctrine, seize Cuba, pursue gunboat diplomacy and so forth. This is extraordinarily dangerous, and its consequences have already been horrific, precisely because we live in a very different, twenty-first-century world. Iran today is not Persia circa 1907. You cannot expect imperial aggression to succeed, let alone go down smoothly.

Perhaps this points to a broader failure – or rather, limitation – of the historical imagination. Western Europeans – and the West more generally – entered the twentieth century with what they believed to be a fixed and solid philosophy of history. By 1939 and 1940, with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno among others as our witnesses, this conception catastrophically disintegrated. Of course, it was not just fascism. Even Stalin, for instance, took European notions of progress in a rather peculiar direction.

Chinese thinkers, on the other hand, were largely unencumbered by nineteenth-century conceptions of history. This allowed them to develop really radical notions of revolutionary action – as Europe began to realise by the 1960s, when Maoism became an international phenomenon.

I suppose that then begs the question of how events like the Holocaust, which are paradigm-busting for European conceptions of history, figure in Chinese thought.

Wang Hui: As I said, synchronicity enters the Chinese historical imagination in the twentieth century. When we read the writings of Chinese thinkers from the early decades of the century, we find that they are already wrestling with the issues that Benjamin or Adorno would later address. Lu Xun, for example, wrote about defeat as the permanent condition of the honest observer – someone who sees what the wreckage of history leaves behind but still refuses the consolation of progress narratives. The different trajectories of Germany, Russia and the US were being fiercely debated.

As for the Holocaust, it certainly looms large in Chinese historical writing, along with the anti-fascist resistance to Nazism. In Europe, the Holocaust tends to be understood as a complete rupture in historical development – something that cannot, at its deepest level, be understood. Perhaps the same attitude does not hold in China. From a Chinese perspective, one might ask: isn’t the Nanjing Massacre a historical rupture, too? Why, then, has it never attracted the same amount of attention, theorising and politicisation?

This points to a deeper issue. If we look at modern history from a Chinese perspective, as Mao famously argued, it all begins with the study of the First Opium War. Germany certainly played a role in that, but Britain, Russia, and Japan were much more important.

So I think that the perspectives from which we understand history are a little different. Of course the First World War and the Second World War are historically of great importance, but other things are often downplayed in order to focus on them.

Adam Tooze: Do you think this disparity might have something to do with the different meanings – or colourations – that violence has in different cultural contexts? One challenge that Western historians have confronted when analysing crimes like the Holocaust is that these actions seem to defy – they seem out of the bounds of – our inherited political concepts. You can see this trouble, for instance, in Hobsbawm’s great quartet. The first three volumes follow a basic Marxist logic, with relations of production explaining the shifting fortunes of the various historical actors. By contrast, The Age of Extremes is a catastrophic book, not just because it describes terrible things, but also because the Marxist logic has broken down – it cannot fully account for the violence and madness of Nazism, which is presented as indiscriminate, industrialised, a kind of autonomous force, generated out of the ‘ur-shock’ of the First World War, without any reference to class struggle or the other familiar analytical concepts. As Hobsbawm points out, torture made its return in the twentieth century.

Chinese thinkers, on the other hand, have been more willing to integrate violence with politics. They have indeed stressed that violence is constitutive of politics, that it lays the foundation for states, inaugurates revolution – albeit often in terrible ways. The concept of a people’s war seems central to the Chinese political tradition, at least since Mao. Of course, the term was used by Lenin and has some Soviet heritage. But Mao clearly took it in a truly novel direction.

Wang Hui: You are right that the politics and society in China were transformed by the people’s war – another way in which the twentieth century marked such a rupture. If you look at earlier wars fought on Chinese soil – the Opium Wars, the Sino-French War, the battles between the Qing Empire and other imperial empires – they did not have a popular basis or involvement. That changed in the twentieth century. The 1911 Revolution, the Northern Expedition, the resistance against Japanese invasion: these were far more than territorial conflicts. They were multilayered, tied up with notions of social mobilisation, revolution, shifting land relations and so forth. They were about the reconfiguration of the entire social structure. Violence, in this sense, is also a creative act – a claim that should be understood descriptively rather than morally. It is much more than a military endeavour. Of course, this process reaches its apotheosis in the Civil War.

However, as I noted, these political energies dissipated in the 1990s, when we returned to the nineteenth century, intellectual speaking. This is why I feel it is time for a fresh return to the twentieth century, so that we can rethink what constitutes the political.

Adam Tooze: Your point about depoliticisation is well taken. Still, I am not sure the legacy of the twentieth century has entirely gone away. During the pandemic, for instance, the Chinese state waged a “people’s war” – and succeeded, it claims – against Covid.

Wang Hui: I understand that more as a rhetorical gesture than a true return to people’s war. The state’s Covid response can be understood as a war at three levels. First, it involved the mass mobilisation of doctors, volunteers and so forth – as in wartime. Second, during the early months, when there was as yet no vaccine, the state mandated a kind of guerrilla-style response, using very basic social tactics, rather than modern technology, to slow the spread of the virus. Third, especially once the vaccine became available, it was a top-down, institutional response, with massive construction of hospitals and other forms of public health infrastructure.

In that sense, it is closer to the idea of total war, as theorized by European thinkers in the early 20^th century – though of course with very different consequences.

Adam Tooze: Reading your recent essays, I was struck by the depth of your engagement with Carl Schmitt. In particular, you deploy his notion of “neutralisation” to explain what happens when economic matters are foregrounded at the expense of ideology. In China, this has led, you argue, to a form of pure developmentalism, which smothers the political question and dampens mass political involvement.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised, given your concerns with depoliticisation. In Europe, at least since the 1980s, opponents of neoliberalism have tried to read Schmitt against the grain, to recuperate his concept of the “political” – which he developed in the 1920 and 1930s – as a way to overcome neoliberal depoliticisation. It’s hard to think of another concept with similar juju.

Now Schmitt was not just a legal theorist. He was also a vicious antisemite, a card-carrying Nazi – unlike, say, Heidegger, who did not have the will to match his convictions in this regard.

I myself have struggled with Schmitt, particularly in The Deluge, in which you might say that I presented John Maynard Keynes as a liberal answer to Schmitt. Some leftist critics would argue that Schmitt prevails over liberalism because liberals are too weak. I disagree. In my view, Keynes offers a general theory of the relationship between the political and the economic, which allows for neutralisation as one option, but not the only one.

In any case, my question is, what does Schmitt do for you? Why have you turned to him?

Wang Hui: Schmitt is brilliant, but toxic; an insightful but reactionary figure. Reading him is like eating pufferfish. In 1929, he published an essay titled “The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations”, in which he summarised the last 400 years of European history as a series of temporary respites from, or denials of, an eternal binary – that between friend and foe, which he understands as the only truly political concept. From his perspective, the American Revolution and even the Russian Revolution were attempts to distract from this truth.

Of course, I do not uncritically subscribe to this idea. But I find Schmitt’s writings to be a useful tool to critique both developmentalism (which is entirely focused on economic growth) and liberalism (which rests on the issue of proceduralism). I consider both these ideologies to have a depoliticising effect.

I should say that I disagree with Schmitt’s fundamental premise: that the relationship between friend and foe is an unchanging and eternal binary. Such a belief is tightly bound up with the conception of sovereignty – and thus the nation state.

Mao’s writings on this subject strike me as nimbler. He is a properly dialectical thinker, who understood that relationships between friends and foes are not only unstable, but also can be transformative – for instance, during wartime, when a united front can emerge. Mao did not take sovereignty to be sacrosanct. His notion of people’s war could accommodate the people within Japan, and later, Vietnam.

Adam Tooze: This connects back to our earlier exchange about history and historicity. In the 1920s, many German thinkers, including Schmitt, had come to feel that history, understood as the history of European nation states, had effectively ended. Today, the First World War is remembered as a kind of botched victory for the Allies; but for Germans, it was a far more cataclysmic event. Schmitt worried in his writings that Europe would not lead the way in the twentieth century – or would not even, historically speaking, have a proper twentieth century. The powers that would have such a history were the US and the Soviet Union. Later he would be fascinated by the history of the partisan, and by the insurgent guerrillas of the Global South.

In a sense, Schmitt and others foresaw that a century of humiliation was coming for Europe. Some European historians literally describe scenarios in which the continent might be “Ottomanised” – reduced to the status of a declining empire. Schmitt studies the Weimar Constitution and concludes that the German state is not capable of enforcing its sovereignty, of drawing a line between what it controls and does not. He felt that Europe would effectively be subordinated to a world system that was dominated by moralistic, commercial, legalistic Anglo-American figures such as Woodrow Wilson.

It was this general sense of crisis that led German thinkers of that period to move in what we might call, anachronistically, a multicultural direction. Ernst Troeltsch studied Asia; Max Weber wrote about Hinduism. After the Second World War, Schmitt himself took an interest in the peasantry, in people’s war; he refashioned himself as a theorist of asymmetric struggle.

There is more to be said about this, but I would like to conclude on a happier note. Could we talk about Lu Xun, one of the pivotal thinkers of modernity, who you have extensively written about.

Wang Hui: I think of Lu Xun as the great theorist of failure – as someone who offers us a coming-to-terms with the experience of defeat. It is in response to this situation that he develops the notion of permanent revolution. He did not believe that any individual or institution could be innately or permanently progressive – that is why failure was inevitable. For him, the true revolutionary always recognised the potential of failure, and precisely because of that, never gave up their struggle. Mao drew on this insight when developing his conception of a people’s war, which is about transforming failure into victory – a long process.

In some of Lu Xun’s writings, you can see him struggling against despair, refusing to give in to a sense of historical hopelessness. That is part of why he speaks to us today, when we are faced, on a planetary scale, with challenges that can seem hopelessly insurmountable, but against which we nevertheless have to struggle.