China’s Past, America’s Present: Revisiting Wang Hui
Late last October, we were in the basement of an obscure academic building in Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Dahlem, a group of twenty or thirty people assembled to hear Wang Hui talk about nationalism; my friends at the Berggruen Institute Europe had organized a residency in Venice and Berlin for him, to engage with European thought before the Trump victory that everybody saw coming. A few decades ago, Wang was at odds with the Chinese intellectual consensus; he was part of a group called the “New Left,” less a formal grouping of friends than a label for those dissenting from the end-of-history approach. Called the New Left for their advocacy of the state, this group was also conservative, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of standing “athwart history yelling Stop” at a time when the changes were being driven by neoliberal American capitalists and their Chinese friends (in the leftist argot, “compradors,” like those Chinese merchants who helped imperialists sell opium in the nineteenth century).
Wang always rejected the New Left label and has never been anti-American as such; he was getting profiled in the New York Times and visiting friends in the West at the time. Today, he regularly bounces between Beijing, Princeton, Heidelberg, and other havens of the Western intelligentsia. Much as some Americans might say that they oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but like the Chinese people, Wang never hated Americans, he just didn’t want China to accept globalist capitalism. He is now watching the unraveling of that regime with the same curiosity and schadenfreude as the rest of us.
Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market. To the extent that, within modern Chinese history, “Right” means to be aligned with the interests of capital (and the Kuomintang), and “Left” means to be aligned with the interests of labor (and the CCP), Hu Jintao–era critics of the direction China was going were considered voices from the Left.
Such figures ranged from Cui Zhiyuan, the Chicago PhD and one-time MIT professor who worked on land reforms in Bo Xilai’s Chongqing; to Gan Yang, whose essay on “three traditions” sought to integrate socialism, Confucianism, and Dengist reforms into a holistic blend; to Wen Tiejun, whose fiery advocacy of rural Chinese made him persona non grata in some Beijing circles. For these thinkers, it felt like the interests of rich, out-of-touch Westernized types from coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou were drowning out everybody else.
Wang critiqued liberalism as a tool of global capitalism, arguing that China’s post-1978 reforms had led to inequality, depoliticization, and elite dominance. He advocated for a return to socialist ideals, with greater political participation, state intervention, and resistance to Western ideological hegemony. In his 2008 tract, “Depoliticized Politics” (去政治化的政治), he argued that liberal intellectuals had aligned with market elites, promoting a vision of democracy that ultimately served capital rather than the people. In 2009’s “The End of the Revolution,” Wang argued that China’s problem wasn’t an oppressive government, but its integration into globalist capitalism. In those years, he jousted with the liberals, like Xu Jilin, and those advocating social democracy and an accountable state, like Qin Hui; his leftism was partly borne of an emotional allegiance to the journey China had been on and to the collective experiences of Chinese people, and partly a localized version of the same backlash to globalization that we’ve experienced in the United States, Russia, western Europe, and, indeed, everywhere else. Wang just got there first.
I have known Wang for several years; I have never had a sense that he is mouthing an official line. Rather, Wang’s intellectual explorations have given heft and weight to a party line in search of itself in a world where China continues to achieve more than it could ever have imagined. His sentiments might better be distilled as “My party, right or wrong.” As the country has lately turned left, rejecting free market capitalism and insisting on a unique “Chinese path” in politics (in practice, that means continued CCP leadership), his ideas now feel more comfortably at home, more so than those of his erstwhile fellow travelers Cui and Gan, who have fallen into obscurity. He has also moved on from questions of theory to the problems of practice.
Wang curates a tradition of Chinese indigenous theorists of modernity, essentially an alternate narrative to that of a modern West colliding with a primitive China: in developing this historical understanding, he has given valuable intellectual ammunition to Chinese leaders in search of a positive story to tell about China’s rise. He has helped to rehabilitate Maoist thought, in parallel with Xi’s government, while his emphasis on finding a Chinese genealogy of thought has dovetailed with a rejection of American political structures and economic frameworks; without ever joining the government, many of his arguments have been adopted by a Chinese regime that needs to explain itself.
The Xi era has posed a question to would-be leftists, those who sought to rehabilitate Mao’s era: what would you do if China really did become communist? Wang is cautiously supportive of the moves China has made in the past decade. His work bridges the gap between Chinese nationalism, the idea of communism (and its Chinese form), and Western philosophy and discourse. You could say that he is a friendly, or palatable, face for these ideas, capable of articulating China’s historical—and perhaps future—trajectory. In other words, he’s still in the game.
Forging the New China
What creates a nation? For Wang, above all, it is an artificial—man-made—experience of shared struggle in one direction or another. China’s diverse population underwent such an experience, in which everybody suffered, during the 1930s and 1940s. What came out was a new sort of person, a new sort of community. Hu Feng composed an optimistic song, “Time has Begun,” that ran in the People’s Daily in 1949. What had really begun was the history of modern China, which was a figment of some intellectuals’ imaginations until it became flesh. It was as if a frozen world had melted, and statues came to life. The dithering of the ancien régime, the bribes and treachery and pardoning of one’s children—that was all over. It was time to get moving. Those persons you saw in the street had become comrades; this street you’ve always walked down had become the homeland. That solidarity allowed China to start the process of capital formation, building human capital—the only capital that it had—in places like Daqing and Dazhao, slowly seeing life expectancy, literacy rates, and internal organization go up during the Maoist years, even as the country remained desperately poor. When the time was right, and Mao’s death gave way to a new era, every element was in place for an economic takeoff.
In the China of today, however, the memories of shared struggle are almost lost; propaganda billboards and kitschy TV shows say “don’t forget the struggle.” Red Tourism is the CCP’s stations of the cross: historic sites like Zunyi in Guizhou, Shaoshan in Hunan, and, of course, Yan’an in Shaanxi, attract tour groups. Wang remembers, and cherishes, this struggle, along with the CCP, the vehicle of the radical change: from the total fragmentation and failure of the late Qing dynasty, to the search for a way out, to the creation of a new collective consciousness, to the creation of a new physical structure—the oil company, the train station, the factory, the research lab—that became what the CCP calls “New China.” In the process of change, how did China stay true to itself? What even is China as a historical constant? What’s the thing that keeps repeating?
For Wang, Chinese Communism manages to stay Chinese, even though communist theory is universal, similar to how America proclaims universal human rights but is still a specific set of places, experiences, universities, types of food. In Wang’s discourse, China is sort of the axle of contemporary history, where the tide finally turned: the largest population group declared fealty to the state, not the market, as an organizational system. Shortly afterwards, at the Bandung Conference of 1955, they signaled that they were on the side of the downtrodden “Third World.” But the Chinese nation, as we understand it now, is still an artificial creation, contingent upon historical coincidences.
If things had gone slightly differently, present-day Mongolia, Korea, or Vietnam could have all been provinces; some borderland places which are now part of China might not have not been. When Mao Zedong said, “The Chinese People have stood up,” in 1949’s Tiananmen Square, he was creating a collective, where previously there had only been a loose group of peasants—peasants who, in reality, were sharing the same experience, but who had no language to describe it. The principle was most eloquently expressed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the great nationalist revolutionary, whose legacy is revered by the CCP and Kuomintang alike:
What do foreigners mean when they say that China is a sheet of loose sand? Simply that every person does as he pleases and has let his individual liberty extend to all phases of life; hence China is but a lot of separate sand particles. Take up a handful of sand; no matter how much there is, the particles will slip about without any tendency to cohere—that is loose sand. But if we add cement to the loose sand, it will harden into a firm body like a rock, in which the sand, however, has no freedom. When we compare sand and rock, we clearly see that rock was originally composed of particles of sand; but in the firm body of the rock the sand has lost its power to move about freely. Liberty, to put it simply, means the freedom to move about as one wishes within an organized group.
For Wang, the CCP is the cement that made the sand into a rock. And that rock was hoisted by the Chinese nation to bash wide open the structures and hierarchies of global capitalism—itself heir to the British Empire that forced China open, integrating it into history. From a certain perspective, “capitalism” is just a euphemism for the latest dynastic evolution of a process much older, which has previously been called empire. Fighting it, for Wang, is a noble struggle: in fact, it is a struggle for which one might temporarily give up personal liberty, in order to gain collective freedom from a great oppression. Truly, a task to unite “the People.”
How do we know who the people are? Quite simply, those who fight in the people’s war are the people. In any populist movement, intellectuals discover what JD Vance called “the enemy within,” and which some Chinese leftists describe as “the Kuomintang tendency.” These are the bureaucrats and the elites, the profiteers and those collecting rent from the pain of the working classes.
The Communist Party’s mythology is of a heroic band of intellectuals uniting the people, especially the peasants, the military, and the workers, against that “deep state,” which fled to Taiwan, gold and antiques in hand. As in any revolution, many of the most ardent revolutionaries have class origins from that same bureaucratic elite. They can only prove themselves by their actions, but even then, during the 1960s, being tainted with association with the class enemy was a big problem. The enemy within can be pretty tough to extirpate. The cryptic Chinese propaganda phrase, 人民是江山 江山是人们, “the people are the mountains and rivers; the mountains and rivers are the people,” proposes some sort of unity of land and population, one far from the truth in an uprooted China of internal emigration flows. Figuring out who “the people” really are can be a lot more complicated than one might think.
Now that the revolution has succeeded, and become entrenched—even as one angry young Chinese leftist told me, become a ruling party rather than a revolutionary party—preserving the fighting spirit is tough. Wang’s adversary Qin Hui’s 2015 book 走出帝制》(Breaking Away from Imperial Rule) argued that China had reverted to a nouveau feudalism, which in today’s China might be a more powerful critique than the liberal one. If China’s government system is a powerful tool, it is one that can undo inequality or cement it, root out corrupt elites or entrench them.
If global capitalism is the predator, then China needs a strong state to protect it, but if the state and associated elites are the predator, then maybe capitalism can save them. In this narrative, it can be difficult to disentangle America and its government, liberal world order, and the like from capitalism itself. If China’s comparative advantage is labor and manufacturing, America’s comparative advantage is capital. And yet, some Chinese new leftists, who follow Trump and Vance closely, see the Americans as the biggest victims of the process. How can you say “Yankee, go home” in Boston? Multinational capitalism has no homeland; Manhattan is the mountain; the capitalists are the vultures who have made their nests there. Maybe someday, they will fly somewhere else.
Premonitions of a New America
As Wang continued to speak in Dahlem, my mind turned to the situation in our country. The population of the United States today seems to lack internal unity, but maybe we’re at the start of a reformation around new values, a new pantheon of heroes, a new shared struggle. What is America for? Is it to build democracy in the Middle East? If so, we’re not very good at it. Is it for watching football games on Sunday afternoons? Maybe God or history wants something more from us: that we live up to the promise of our country, that we get a sense of our shared struggles and start working on solving our problems. We’re probably still a few years away from even starting to do that.
On the cab ride home, in the Berlin autumn, you could feel the taste of winter coming—the streets were lit up, the leaves were golden and red—and you could tell that something harsh was on the way. The war with Russia has got to end, an American friend living on Kantstrasse told me. Germans fear being cold more than they fear Russians. As I huddled into myself, I could relate. This was a place where losing yourself in a crowd—or just going into a warm café, to hear the sounds and life of other people—was a tempting proposition. On everybody’s mind, although it seemed vulgar to bring it up, were the red-hatted crowds of people searching for each other back home. Was a new sort of collective being born in America?
Americans of a certain age—old enough to be nostalgic for what was crumbling away during our childhood, young enough to demand some new solid ground to build lives on, and raise our children in—have few collective experiences to unite us. The more talented and ambitious of us are to be found anywhere on the planet: our culture raised us to see the entire world as a suitable realm for our endeavors. To what end are the conversations Americans are having with each other today in Riyadh, in Berlin, in Singapore, and in Virginia? Our collective experience is that of feeling alone. Every single one of us grew up thinking that there was a real life, being lived elsewhere. Only later in life did we realize that it was never true, and that our built environment engendered a world of isolated individuals rarely coming into contact with each other. Today, we want to find our brothers.
Hearing Wang’s description of how scattered individuals in late Qing China found each other, creating a nationalist movement first driven by ideas and then actions, building a bridge toward a new society, where ideas were the cement that turned a million grains of sand into granite, I couldn’t help but wonder: was America, in whatever perverse or unexpected format, molting into something else new? In what sense is the “new China,” in the minds of the intellectuals whom Wang Hui writes about, still China?
Shortly following the election, I started asking the Chinese around me if they thought, on balance, that the CCP victory in 1949 had been a good thing. Most thought so, in the end. But most, with the benefit of hindsight, would have left Shanghai for Hong Kong or someplace else in 1949. A revolution is not a dinner party: either it is chaotic and disruptive, or it is not really a revolution at all. Today in the United States, government officials talk about radical transformations to the food that we eat, the technologies structuring our daily lives, the role of the state, the ways that we educate our children. You don’t need to be on board with the revolutionaries to accept the need for change. Whatever the Department of Health and Human Services might be doing, our people aren’t healthy; whatever the Department of Education is doing, our children are receiving poor educations. Change can only be good, right? That’s what Chinese nationalists such as Liang Sicheng thought back in 1949. Tabling whatever doubts they had about Mao, they decided to return. Liang, an architect who was the first Chinese instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, was kicked to death by hooligans during the Cultural Revolution.
As my return flight from Berlin descended over the vast precincts of Shanghai, I thought, this was what the revolution was for: To build these buildings. To create the humans who live in them. To invent this entire world. From 1945 to 2025 is only one lifetime: that might be the natural lifespan of the so-called postwar international order. Today, the United States and China seem poised to carve up the world into two, less like the Cold War than like the imperialists at the conference of Berlin in 1885, when Africa was partitioned among European colonial powers.
Capital and Empire
On the flight to Germany, I’d been seated next to two CATL engineers, one headed to Gothenburg, one to Ulm. These Johnny Appleseeds of the battery industry wander the world, spreading transformative technology where they go.
I asked ChatGPT to use Hobson’s theory of imperialism to analyze contemporary China. For Hobson, writing about the British Empire, an unbalanced sort of capitalism led to overproduction and underconsumption, the accumulation of surplus capital, and a state fattened on export revenues defending its interests overseas. Imperialism, Hobson wrote, is never in the interests of the people; their interests would best be served by redistributing that surplus capital. But for the owners of capital, that wouldn’t get sufficient returns. Imperialism leads to the exploitation of less developed regions, where surplus capital is invested. For Wang, China’s model seems to be a way out for the Global South, but if many Chinese intellectuals claim that China is teaching the poor how to fish, it often seems as though they’re only selling them fish. GPT told me:
China’s Situation: China’s rapid industrialization, particularly since the 1980s, has led to the production of excess goods, particularly in manufacturing and construction. By 2000, China was already a global manufacturing hub, producing vast quantities of cheap goods for export. China’s global infrastructure push (the Belt and Road Initiative) helps divert its overproduction while simultaneously establishing long-term economic dependencies with partner countries. China has accumulated vast reserves of capital, primarily from its trade surpluses and state-directed economic growth model. This surplus capital is channeled into overseas investments, particularly in countries with developing infrastructure, resource extraction, or strategic trade routes.
Recently, I’ve witnessed some scenes that feel like parables for some sort of broader shift in world affairs, although I’m not sure what changes exactly are being signaled. Going through the security scanner into the Pudong Shangri-La on the day of the China International Import Expo—the day before the American election—I felt like I was watching a bloody star blossom in the sky. It’s really happening. Communism is baring its fangs, ready to swallow the world.
On the couches lounged people who could have been from Belarus or Idaho—and what, really, is the difference, to the Chinese? Russia, Iran, Brazil, Germany, whatever: there is one adversary, which isn’t a different group of people, but a different structure of consciousness, a different way of organizing people, places and things. For both China, and its opponents, it seems that there isn’t enough room in this town for the two of us. Time’s pace is quickening, and our blood is pumping faster; finally, it’s time for action.
Decoupling will mean that China needs to build domestic replacements for America’s part of the value chain: frontier tech, capital markets, and consumers. America will have to build a Chinese-style manufacturing system domestically, in the process Sinicizing the heartland, possibly even with Chinese investments and certainly with the insights of Elon Musk. Now that Kissinger is dead, Musk is the American closest to Chinese leadership. To a large degree, the Chinese have already imported an Americanized elite: today, both the mayor and party secretary of Beijing are Harvard men.
In a September 2024 report, then senator Marco Rubio wrote: “China’s evident lead in high-quality research on critical technologies should serve as a wakeup call for U.S. policymakers, who have long consoled themselves that, while the United States has lost manufacturing to Asia (increasingly, China), we retain the world’s best system for basic research. These findings cast doubt even on that consolation. China is capable of high-value research in a variety of fields, related to both production, where it excels, and theoretical fields, where the United States once enjoyed a comfortable lead.”
The process Wang describes, of China emerging as a coherent unity, is what Hegel called coming to consciousness. China was asleep. We woke them up. Why? To make money. The British started it, but we sealed the deal. When the British emissary Macartney visited the Qing court, he was greeted with a total lack of interest from the Chinese: “I want nothing,” said the Son of Heaven. Today’s China wants something. For how long? As their technological innovations keep on moving, they might get to the point where they can go back to bed in a generation or two.
Two Kinds of Hunter
Mid-December, as Shanghai winter began, I found myself feeling stabs of nostalgia, although I wasn’t sure for what exactly. I had a feeling of loss—that feeling that comes more and more often with age: the world that I am from doesn’t exist anymore.
In his Berlin address, Wang mentioned a wintry metaphor from Carl Schmitt that struck my imagination. For Schmitt, the nineteenth century had two different kinds of hunters who participated in the vast expansion of space. The Russians were continental, the English, maritime. The peoples of the Eurasian continent and beyond all became their prey. The 1689 treaty of Nerchinsk is until now recognized as a sovereign treaty, but it was signed when there were no nation-states, only empires: today’s Russia and China accept it as binding, even though the formalities of statehood have flickered through numerous changes of costume. The nations that have emerged may bear the same names as the empires that preceded them, but their internal organization is different: the peasants have become the People; the banal struggles of their everyday life are glorified; the commonplaces they’ve treaded have become shrines of pilgrimage for Chinese nationalism.
Marx was describing processes inherent in capitalism when he wrote about how “Independent, or loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.” If the CCP is about nothing else, it is about not getting swallowed into this one vortex. This task has never been easy, and it still isn’t. There are a lot of theatrical discussions about old revolutionary roads, but the profound influence of Chinese coastal regions and the slow depopulation of rural China is ongoing. Has capitalism swallowed China, or will China swallow capitalism? In this context, “The People” as a unified group is defined by a specific struggle, a specific opponent. In this way, Trump 1.0 did the CCP a favor by drawing clear lines. China’s biggest danger isn’t losing exports of Christmas tree ornaments, but of dissolving into disunity. What kind of a hunter is China today? What kind of a hunter is the United States?
Today, in both China and the United Staes, there’s a sense that the moon is rising in the sky and everyone is going to turn into a werewolf no matter what. America and China are both empires with origins in anti-imperialist struggles, both seeking the frontiers of geography and of knowledge, without wandering too far from home. The two will continue to compete over what Stalin called “the commanding heights” of the economy, the most sophisticated technologies, like semiconductors, biotech, AI, and new energy: this encompasses the battle for human capital, and to a lesser extent, the battle for hearts and minds across the Global South and even the Global North. For those who believe capitalism will collapse due to its internal contradictions, what’s happening today in America can feel like a prophecy foretold, but nobody, much least Wang, is counting capitalism out just yet.
And yet, capitalism is a brittle foundation for any nation, because it is not linked to the people, nor to the land. Nationalism is the feeling: these people are mine, and this land is mine, they cannot be exchanged for any other. Capitalism, on the other hand, elevates the principles of profit and accumulation above all. As the Sino-American trade war has recommenced in earnest, the abstract ideas about “the people” and struggle that Wang has cultivated will be tested as never before.
In his work, Wang Hui often insists that history is not a linear progression but a contested, recursive field—where forgotten possibilities remain latent, and old categories are revived under new names. In this light, the present U.S.-China rivalry is not merely a clash of superpowers, but a struggle over the very definitions of sovereignty, modernity, and what constitutes the popular will. If both empires are hunting something, it may no longer be territory or markets, but historical legitimacy itself.
Perhaps this is what Wang’s invocation of Schmitt’s hunters is ultimately about: not just who dominates, but who defines the coordinates of domination, who draws the map. Amid rising werewolf moons and Schmittian frontiers, what matters is not just who will win, but what kind of world that victory would create. Will the future be defined by integration or fracture, by planetary entanglement or by a return to spheres of influence? These questions remain unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable.
But as Wang might remind us, to think dialectically is to resist fatalism. The sun has set on the American empire, and under the silvery light of the moon, we are starting to see ourselves and our future in a wholly new way.