If you want to have an overview of what the project entails and what I have found, you might start by reading my unpublished essay on China’s rise and China’s thought world. This in turn has prompted these intellectuals to rethink the founding myths of their understanding of China’s-and the world’s-past, present, and future. Suffice it to say that China’s rise, together with the West’s apparent decline, has convinced many Chinese establishment intellectuals that they-and we-are living in an era of fundamental historical change, the equivalent to when monarchies gave way to democracies or the United States inherited world leadership from Great Britain. I will not belabor what is fascinating about this world overmuch at this point that’s what the website is for. I happened onto the world of establishment intellectuals largely by accident about a decade ago if you’re interested in the Indiana Jones-esque tale of this discovery, you can listen here to a (relatively short) talk I gave about it at the Hoover Institute, or read about it here. But what establishment intellectuals write is not propaganda (in our sense of the term), although some of them naturally support the regime. There is of course lots of propaganda in China, much of which is translated into English by the regime itself, which means that it is not particularly difficult to keep up with the major themes of Chinese propaganda. In the case of China since the era of reform and opening, this is simply and manifestly wrong. The heritage of the Cold War has taught us that everything that is not dissent in a Communist country is propaganda. Hence I work on establishment intellectuals, who manage to publish their work in China, despite the pressures of the directed public sphere and the dangers of censorship. In other words, I am more interested in what can be said in China than in what cannot be said, even if the frontier between the two is constantly shifting. Journalists quite naturally focus on plane crashes I look at the airplanes that arrive safely. Many Western scholars and journalists are focused on these people, and they do not require additional attention from me. I do not avoid intellectuals with the potential to become dissidents (see here, here, here, and here for examples of texts that look to me a lot like dissent, or whose authors have come perilously close to being branded as dissenters), but the point of my research is not to seek out future dissenters. I hope the dissidents win, and I am glad that their writings are translated. Two things happen to any “successful” dissident in China: they wind up in prison or in exile, largely losing their influence in China, and their writings are translated into Western languages. First, this site is not about Chinese dissidents, although in the West, it is largely true that the only Chinese intellectuals anyone knows about, including many China specialists, are dissidents. How to Get the Most out of Reading the China DreamĪ couple of things to know to get started.
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