The Search for the David Brooks of China

Why the boring, centrist establishment public intellectual is so crucial to our understanding of China

In English-language discourse on China, critical and dissident intellectuals are significantly overrepresented.

Long-time listeners to the Sinica Podcast will have heard me bring up the issue more than once. Still, it’s enough of a problem in American and other “Western” discourse on China that I think it bears repeating. Let me be clear at the outset that there’s nothing wrong with covering critics and dissidents: indeed, it would be absurd to ignore them, and doing so would harm discourse and warp our understanding as much as our current imbalance in their favor does.

If anyone challenges this basic claim — that the critical and dissident intellectuals are much better known in the Anglophone world than their mainstream, more conservative counterparts are — first read on, do the little thought experiment that follows, and then make your comments, by all means.

Enough of you reading are people who pay attention to English-language writing on China that you’ll probably be able to run the experiment that follows by yourselves — and those of you who aren’t steeped in the Anglophone conversation on China will probably get results that confirm my hunch about overrepresentation even more persuasively. Try this: think of Chinese intellectuals, — however you care to define that term — who you can name off the top of your head. Give yourself five minutes and make a list.

I expect many of you will have included the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the late Liu Xiaobo. You might have listed Chen Guangcheng, for all the controversy that has surrounded him since his arrival in the U.S., and Ai Weiwei too, if you count him as an intellectual. Those of you who read a lot of China news, speak and/or read Chinese, and perhaps even focus on China professionally probably have quite a few names on your lists. You might have included Hu Jia, especially if you’ve been focused on Chinese civil society for more than a decade or so — the environment, AIDS,  and human rights. Xu Zhangrun might have made the list for the more academic among you. And for those of you with a legal focus, doubtless, you included Gao Zhisheng, Xu Zhiyong, and Teng Biao. If your involvement with China goes back further still, perhaps you included the late Fang Lizhi, or any of several Tiananmen-era intellectuals, like Wang Dan or Wu’erkaixi. Your definition of intellectual might have embraced the likes of Wei Jingsheng or Han Dongfang, though they might reject the “intellectual” label. If you keep up on Tibet, Tsering Woeser probably has a place of honor, as might her husband Wang Lixiong. You likely thought of the imprisoned Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti if you’re even glancingly familiar with Xinjiang. And If literature or film is more your thing, there’s a good chance your list would include Yu Hua, Liao Yiwu, or Murong Xuecun. A documentary filmmaker like Ai Xiaoming might have come to mind,  especially if you’ve read Ian Johnson’s book Sparks. 

You can probably guess where I’m going with this next. Some might quibble in a few instances, but I imagine most of you would accept the claim that those mentioned so far are (or, in the case of those now deceased or silenced, were) critical or dissident voices. There’s a chance that some of you, having already known what I was aiming to show, deliberately included a few other names: apolitical writers like Liu Cixin; Mo Yan, the Nobel laureate who has been in the news in recent weeks for having been targeted by strident online nationalists; New Left figures like Cui Zhiyuan or Wang Hui; maybe even Party cheerleaders like Zhang Weiwei. 

Unless you start stretching your definition of intellectual, or including figures whose relative obscurity, to Westerners at least, only proves my point, I trust by now you agree with that point: Our familiarity in the English-speaking world with mainstream or establishment intellectual figures from China is dwarfed by our knowledge of and familiarity with dissidents.

Why this is so isn’t hard to guess, and I’m sure you could cite many of the reasons that follow, in no particular order, without having to think too much. The critical and dissident types have a certain narrative appeal, with their stick-to-their-guns principles and their bravery in the face of brutal state coercion. Americans, at least, certainly have a narrative tradition that casts the underdog as the protagonist. The very people who would be introducing these resistance figures to the English reading public are, in most cases, in media — a profession that cherishes liberal values like freedom of conscience, individual liberty, the rights of minorities, and other values they have in common with many of China’s dissidents and critics. Dissidents and critics are also more likely to want to, or to be willing to, talk to reporters or researchers from the West, safe in the knowledge that there are shared values. There’s also confirmation bias at work: audiences in the English-speaking world, for the most part, have preconceptions about authoritarian states and the conditions in those countries, and so accounts by dissidents or by the media outlets writing about them are going to gain notice and attention and align with expectations. They are therefore likely to be remembered and to reinforce those existing preconceptions. 

Is there anything wrong with this? It might strike you as an oddly specific peeve at a time when the American or “Western” understanding of China — and the Chinese understanding of the “West” — is beset by so many other, seemingly more consequential problems. But I would argue that this imbalance in our understanding gives rise to some of the deepest and ultimately most significant problems in the way Americans and others think about China, not only in the general public but even, I would submit, in the way certain academic disciplines “problematize” China.    

If our ideas about China include the belief that the majority of thinking Chinese are actively opposed to the Party-state apparatus that governs China — not an unreasonable belief if you assume the selection of individuals we are exposed to through media coverage to be broadly representative — then we come to some conclusions. 

We might overestimate the role of coercion, surveillance, and censorship in preventing this majority from being heard and heeded. While there’s no doubt that these and other tools are routinely deployed by the Party and its security organs, they aren’t turned up to 11 at all times, and the throttle settings on any given tool tell us much about the Party’s perception of threat at any given time — subtle changes that disappear under the maximalist assumption that comes of a belief that the preponderance of China’s intelligentsia is waiting for its moment to rise up.

In that vein, we might also conclude that the regime is much more brittle or fragile than it appears, or that it wants us to believe, and that affecting regime change wouldn’t take much. (As an aside, this assumption of brittleness or fragility, and the fact that the Party survived 1989 and the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991, gave rise to a whole body of scholarly work around “authoritarian resilience” — an approach built around the assumption that the survival of China’s Party was somehow surprising or defied expectation. A forthcoming episode of Sinica with the brilliant political scientist Iza Ding will explore this issue in some depth).

The impression that most Chinese intellectuals are dissidents might lead us to assume that any survey research showing relatively high levels of regime support — and they all seem to show this — could only show what they purport to do mainly due to “preference falsification.” The debate over how much preference falsification there is in survey research conducted in China is still raging, but until it’s settled, we should refrain from assuming it to be prevalent out of a mistaken belief that dissident attitudes are the actual norm.

We might convince ourselves that buried within every Chinese person is a liberal American wanting to break free. This could lead us to the dangerous conclusion that were the Communist Party indeed to collapse or be driven from power, what would come after would be led by these nascent Americans. We’ve all seen that movie before, and know how, too often, it ends.

Finally, we could and often do conclude that those Chinese people we encounter who don’t take the side of the dissidents lack courage or conviction, and are somehow morally deficient. The flipside of lionizing dissidents, after all, is a kind of contempt for anyone who doesn’t take up the cause. The science fiction writer Liu Cixin, interviewed by Jiayang Fan of The New Yorker in 2019, reiterated the Party line on Xinjiang — one wonders what else he could have done during an interview like that — and brought down all sorts of opprobrium, including calls for Netflix to cancel the adaptation of his Three-Body Problem trilogy. It leads us to believe that, when it comes to China, “intellectual” and “dissident” are or ought to be simply the same thing. It creates a chasm between our expectations of Chinese people and the reality — leading us to ask, as Americans already do so often in some form, “Why don’t you Chinese hate your government as much as I think you should?”¹

Implicit in my claim that critical and dissident intellectuals are overrepresented is the obverse — that intellectuals with a different posture toward the Party-state are underrepresented. I can’t offer you anything remotely empirical to show the rough proportions, but I’d happily wager that were such data available, it would show — without judgment on their importance, mind you — the dissidents to be a small numerical minority. “Critical intellectuals” of course are difficult to define, and fall on either side of a very fuzzy boundary. But I’m confident in saying that should you tally up those who run the gamut from the true believers who earnestly and ardently study Xi Jinping Thought down to those who self-define as part of a “loyal opposition,” willing to be critical of the Party leadership but, when push comes to shove, believe in the fundamental legitimacy of the Party, we’re talking about a very substantial majority. These include the majority of mainstream academics, media elites, analysts in think tanks, and even popular social media figures who might self-identify as 自媒体 zìméitǐ — “self-media” — creators or are referred to by others as 公知 gōngzhī, “public intellectuals.” 

To be sure, some scholars do focus on establishment intellectuals — people like Timothy Cheek at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and David Ownby, whose outstanding website “Reading the China Dream” is a fantastically rich resource for anyone who wants to read a good representative range of writings by Chinese intellectuals in translation. But these are read only by a relatively small community of specialists. Mainstream, establishment intellectuals are not written about much in English because they fail on that same set of explanations I offered for why critical and dissident intellectuals are: They lack narrative appeal, they often embody the very forces that the underdog protagonists are struggling against, their politics are at odds with those of the Anglophone reporters to whom, by the way, they’re not so keen on talking to anyway as there’s so little upside and they’re bound to be viewed unsympathetically. Rather than confirm preexisting notions, they cross-cut them. 

And yet it seems obvious enough to me that if our goal is to understand China better and to spread that understanding with broader audiences in America and other democracies where attitudes translate, at least in theory, into actual policy, then we need a better understanding of why establishment intellectuals believe what they do. It’s not enough to write them and their beliefs off as the product of propaganda, censorship, fearful compromise, and moral cowardice. It comes down, as it so often does, to the need for cognitive empathy. But to exercise that faculty, we need first to know something about these intellectuals.

Several years ago, I raised this issue with my good friend Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and he boiled it down — perhaps with tongue in cheek — to one simple question: Who is the David Brooks of China? Since then, I’ve often thought of who might qualify — someone whose political leanings are conservative in the sense that they’re pro-Party, with considerable overlap and sympathies with reformers but little time for pro-western “radicals,” willing at times to challenge the more strident ideology of Party hardliners, valuing tradition and social harmony, with social sensibilities that are badly perturbed by champions of what he sees as feminist extremism and the new politics of gender and identity, broadly (if grudgingly) admired even by liberals at least closer to the center for his erudition and his prose, but loathed by the more ardent proponents of market and especially political liberalization.

Part of the problem is that while China is teeming with such people, few if any have made any kind of a name for themselves either inside or outside of China. Even within China, it’s not exactly an exciting position to stake out — no matter where you are, mild and milquetoast doesn’t get you a big social media following, I guess. I would love to hear from any readers who can think of Chinese intellectuals who fit the description. Bonus points if they speak good English and would be willing to come on Sinica to chat. 

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Image: OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com

1. I’m indebted to Matthew Stinson for coining this question, which I think really captures American confusion over China.