Intellectuals, Secret Societies and China Observations: An interview with David Ownby

David Ownby is a Professor of History at the Université de Montréal. Over the course of his career, he has worked on the history of secret societies, the history of religion in modern and contemporary China, and more recently, contemporary intellectual life in China since China’s rise. In 2018, in connection with these more recent interests, Ownby launched a project and a website called Reading the China Dream which explores the complex relations between the growing freedom of expression for intellectuals, the cultural search for an identity that will be both modern and Chinese, and the pressing need for Chinese political authorities to find a new ideological legitimacy.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.

For the past thirty years, I have been Professor of History at the Université de Montréal. Although I grew up in the United States (in Tennessee), I have taught in French, which happily meant that I wound up developing relations with French scholars and spending quite a bit of time there.

I have worked on three quite different topics over the course of my career, spending roughly a decade on each. I started out on the history of secret societies, their origins as informal self-help brotherhoods in the eighteenth century. I then migrated to the topic of popular religion, both in modern history and in contemporary China—I wrote a book about the Falun Gong, for example. About ten years ago I moved to the topic I currently work on, which is intellectual life in contemporary China, where I focus not on dissidents but on “establishment” or “public” intellectuals. Neither of these terms quite fits, but I am working on those intellectuals who publish in Chinese and in China (mostly), but who are neither propagandists nor dissenters, and instead discuss the issues of the day, to the extent they can, in the hope of influencing public opinion and perhaps even the government.

My current project started in an airplane. I was coming back to Montreal from Vancouver, where I had attended an academic conference, the subject of which I no longer remember. A famous Chinese historian and public intellectual, Xu Jilin (许纪霖), was also at the conference, and he gave me a copy of his latest book, in Chinese, of course, which was on the history of the May Fourth/New Culture Movement in China in the 1920s. I started reading it on the flight home, I suppose because I had nothing else to read; reading books in Chinese remains a chore because of the difficulty of the language. To my surprise, however, Xu’s book was an excellent read, not a “good book with Chinese characteristics” but the kind of book that makes you want to read it (we all know this feeling when a book just grabs us and will not let go). It struck me that this was the first time I had ever encountered this kind of good book in Chinese, and that I had not even known that “good books” in Chinese existed, a strange thing to discover for someone who spent much of his life reading Chinese books. In any event, this made me think that there might be an entire world of Chinese intellectual life that we knew nothing about, and that someone should look into it. By the time I got home, I decided that I should do it, and I eventually did.

Many scholars plough pretty much the same furrow throughout their lives, the idea being to go ever deeper. I am just not cut out for that. I eventually lose patience with a subject and move on. I am retiring on July 1 and moving to Switzerland (Lausanne, French-speaking). I see my life over the next 15 to 20 years as a mixture of purposeful travel and work. I can do my translation work anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, so I will visit my son in Bogatá (he is a journalist for El País), and then travel around Latin America for two or three weeks, working in the morning, and sightseeing in the afternoon. I’ll give a talk in Taiwan and then travel around China or Southeast Asia, doing the same thing. Europe will be an additional playground. I learned Portuguese over the past few years, and plan lengthy stays in Coimbra, Porto, and in the mountains.

Q2. The website you created, Reading the China Dream, is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in understanding intellectual life in China. Please share a bit about how this project came about and what you have personally learned or discovered through this journey.

I talked about the project’s “origin story” already. The first leg of the project involved working with Xu Jilin, the scholar whose book sparked my interest. Xu is both an historian who works on modern Chinese intellectual history, as well as a public intellectual who writes about ideas and intellectuals in China now. In the 2000s, he was writing about intellectual trends in China that disturbed him, the emergence of certain ideas that resembled what happened intellectually in Germany and Japan before World War Two—in essence he was warning his peers that China might well be heading toward fascism, although he was rarely quite that direct. I translated a number of essays exploring these themes in a book called Rethinking China’s Rise which came out in 2018, so I was on my way.

Step two involved basically going through Xu Jilin’s footnotes and reading and translating everything that looked interesting. Remember, this world was completely new to me. I had no idea that there were interesting thinkers and intellectual debates ongoing in China, so I had a lot to learn. Luckily, Xu Jilin was a great teacher, a moderate liberal who reads widely and tries hard to understand the viewpoint even of people with whom he disagrees.

It was in this phase that I decided to create the website, in order to share what I was doing with my colleagues and with the public in general. Translation is not highly valued in academics, but rather dismissed as a technical skill. By this point in my career, I was a full professor, which meant that I could do whatever I wanted to, because my university would no longer evaluate my work for purposes of promotion. I decided that my translation work was important and forged ahead, taking advantage of my age and stage!

As I continued with my work, I eventually left Xu Jilin behind, although I still read and translate him. Now, I follow my nose, basically on WeChat, which is China’s omnipresent mode of communication—and pretty much everything else as well. By now, I feel like I know the landscape pretty well, so I follow authors and subjects that interest me or that I think will interest my readers. The site has perhaps four thousand subscribers now.

I do not see this as an academic project, although my skills as an academic are central to what I do. But my goal is breadth, not depth. I try to cover the range of ideas in China, and not focus on any particular group. This has been by far the most rewarding work I have ever done, as I feel like I have brought into relative focus an entire world that was largely unknown, like an entomologist who discovered a new ant species that is taking over the Amazon. China is the world’s second largest power, and yet we have almost no idea what Chinese thinkers are thinking about, or even if there are Chinese thinkers—I’ll bet you can’t name a single one. True enough, we (I mean Americans here) don’t know what French thinkers or German thinkers are thinking about either, but we know that they are there, and that we could find out if we wanted to. We do not in general think that about China, but now there is my website, which tells us otherwise and points us in helpful directions.

Q3. To many outside China, there is this notion that public thought and discourse is fully controlled by the Party and that bland uniformity and accepted dogma is part and parcel of this system. What are your thoughts on this?

There is an immense world of blather and propaganda in China, which produces reams and reams of important material that deserves our attention. The Party would also very much like everyone in China to get on board and sing the Party tune.

However, over the four decades of reform and opening, China’s intellectual world has been transformed, just like everything else in China. The motors behind that transformation have been: relative political openness (we notice every time China punishes a dissident—as we should—but do not notice when intellectuals are left alone), decades of extensive intellectual exchange between China and the West (including a huge translation industry in China that translates anything important quickly, if not always well), the spread of the Internet, massive investments in universities (particularly the best universities), and the marketization of the world of ideas (books and journals). Most Chinese intellectuals have been thoroughly Westernized over the course of the past four decades, or at least have been thoroughly exposed to Western ideas, to the extent that Chinese intellectuals largely share our intellectual references and styles of argument, whether they believe in “the West” or not. This is a fundamental change, mirroring the one that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s—but things have gone much further and deeper now than they did in the 1920s and 1930s.

The difference is that the Chinese state is very powerful now—the Chinese state in the 1920s and 1930s was not. This means that there are parallel worlds in China today. There is the China of Xi Jinping and the Party-State, full of slogans and conformity. Then there is the world of most Chinese intellectuals who prize their independence and try to protect it as much as they can.  One of the ways they try to protect their independence, ironically, is by avoiding becoming a dissident, or being labeled as such, because once that label is pinned on you in China, your career is over, and you lose your influence—and you often wind up in prison or in exile. So Chinese intellectuals learn to code-switch. Our focus on dissidents, a heritage of our Cold War experience, means that we miss most of what happens in the Chinese intellectual world, the compromises and bargains they have to make to continue their work.

Q4. It is a big topic but please summarize the key intellectual factions and ideologies that you have observed in China and how they position themselves domestically within the broader debates.

The major groups and labels that we still associate with Chinese intellectuals took shape in the 1990s. First were the liberals. Most intellectuals in China in the 1980s were liberals of some stripe, as they all believed that the Cultural Revolution had been a terrible mistake and that China needed to move toward something more democratic. Then came the Tiananmen Massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The message of Tiananmen was that democracy was not for tomorrow. The message of the fall of the Soviet Union was that China could fall apart, too—the two countries shared a system after all—and probably lose half her territory—Xinjiang and Tibet.

This set the stage for the 1990s, in many ways the most important decade of the reform and opening period. The Party-State, horrified by what happened in the ex-USSR, rapidly embraced globalization and markets, and set about destroying much of what had made China’s economy socialist; this was China’s “neoliberal” decade. For Chinese intellectuals, this was a game-changer. Liberals, who remained in the majority, split into many opposing groups, some of which were free-marketeers (some were even libertarians—these “liberals” would not find a place in the Democratic Party in the US), others were Bernie Sanders-type socialist liberals, and there many variations in between. There were genuine, important debates about what China should do and how China should do it, and the intellectuals were a part of this.

At the same time, a “New Left” arose in China in reaction to this neoliberalism. These were sort of postmodern socialists, heavily influenced by trends in American academia, and determined to keep socialism alive as a possible future for China and the world. They were very open-minded and eclectic intellectually, very sophisticated, and quite cosmopolitan. Wang Hui (汪晖) is the best example of this group, and a lot of his work has been translated, so it is quite easy to find.

New Confucians arose at the same time, in large measure in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union and to Sam Huntington’s book on the clash of civilizations. When they read Huntington, they said, “Oh my God, we don’t have a civilization!” since China had spent the 20^th century destroying Confucianism, which meant they had no ammunition for the coming fight. They headed back to the Confucian tradition, in part in hopes of building a benevolent paternalist government, but more, I think, to find something to make China Chinese.

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, these groups thrived, and did what intellectuals do:  talked, published, and bickered. It was an extremely lively period. China’s rise, which was noticeable from about 2000, slowly changed things. As it became clear that China was now a success story, China’s New Left basically dropped its criticism of Chinese neo-liberalism (it helped that the state had indeed corrected some of the worst excesses of the 1990s) and became champions of China’s “unique” state. If we want to find intellectual continuity here, the New Left has come to see China’s success as the genuine achievement of a socialism for the 21^st century. Liberals have lost ground as China has become powerful, as their message always involved some measure of the adoption of “universal values”—human rights and democracy—which now no longer seem vital to state success. Indeed, many Chinese intellectuals worry that American democracy is falling apart, and Chinese liberals cite Huntington to suggest that America needs to return to “Anglo-Saxon values!” The New Confucians are still hard at work, but are currently losing ground among intellectuals, although Confucianism will always have a certain limited cultural appeal.

Xi Jinping has sort of flattened out the differences among these intellectual groups. The labels still fit, but they seem less relevant in an era when all intellectuals are threatened by an increasingly oppressive state.

Q5. Who are some of the more noteworthy intellectuals that you think are worth highlighting for those interested in understanding important debates and trends within China?

I recently added two lists to my website: the fifteen “most shared” texts and my fifteen personal favorites. They are hard to find if you are on your cell phone, but on the computer version they are on the home page under “About this site” (which is where they are on your phone as well, but you have to click around a little).

My favorites are:

Qin Hui (秦晖), a sort of outrageous liberal, no idea how he has stayed out of trouble (I think he is basically out of China now). He knows everything and writes in a slangy, oral style that is difficult but fun to translate.

Xu Jilin (许纪霖), another liberal, much more elegant and perhaps moderate than Qin Hui, but with great curiosity and intellectual breadth. I like his early writings where he worried about Chinese fascism, as well as more recent writings on Chinese youth issues.

Shi Zhan (施展) is a younger Chinese liberal with a lot of ambition and a lot of ideas. His big book, The Hub, sold 450,000 copies in China, but it is 700 pages long, which is too much to translate. I am working with him to find ways to get his message out in smaller doses.

Jiang Shigong (強世功) is a good example of where the New Left has gone. I don’t agree with Jiang about a lot of things, but I think he is worth reading as a representative example of where a good deal of intellectual energy is going in China.

Chen Ming (陈明) is my favorite New Confucian. I had planned to do a book based on his writings but have a hard time understanding his philosophical vocabulary (a complicated issue, not worth going into here).

Yao Yang (姚洋) is quite interesting. He is trying to craft a “Confucian liberalism” that will cure the ills of both China and the West.

I think feminism is probably a huge deal in China, too. Women have been transformed over the course of reform and opening, just as intellectuals have. People should read Lü Pin (吕频) and Li Sipan (李思磐), both of whom are now in the US, for reasons of personal safety. This means that a lot of Chinese discourse is now, sadly, outside of China. VPNs are widespread in China and Chinese young people are hungry for something new.

You can find all of these people by browsing the “People” menu on my website.

Q6. Where do intellectuals see China’s place in the world? For example, do many envision China as a proselytizing nation exporting its model for others or is it still more of a fundamentally inward-looking culture focused on domestic issues?

This is a very complicated question. Most Chinese liberals want China to join the rest of the world and make her own contribution to “universal values,” because it is not like we in the West have actually achieved the ideals of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” particularly well, and maybe the Chinese could help. So, these people would like to see China stop being so brittle about Chinese sovereignty and Chinese uniqueness and start acting like an equal. For what it is worth (not much, I fear), I very much agree with this view.

For others, however, the idea that “China is unique” remains very strong. For some, this means that China should lead the world—more through example than through conscious exporting—but the idea is that Chinese socialism has succeeded, and that Africa and Latin America might well accept Chinese investments and start to imitate China. For others, “China is unique” seems more inward-looking.

I think there might be a general agreement among most Chinese intellectuals that China has not done enough internationally, has not established the presence it should. China’s soft power is pretty awful, it seems to me, although I do not know how it is perceived in Africa and Latin America (I would love to know more).

Q7. Related to the previous question, how do Chinese intellectuals view relationships with other countries, specifically the US, Europe and Russia? Is there more interest now in alignment with the Global South?

For Chinese intellectuals who think strategically, I think the idea of a powerful realignment with the Global South is very attractive and might eventually be a way to strengthen ties with Europe, drawing Europe away from the US. At the same time, most Chinese intellectuals still instinctively believe that the outside world remains essentially the United States, for better or for worse. In other words, the US still looms very large in the way most Chinese intellectuals view the world, either as the free democracy China should become, or as the fumbling rival that China will defeat. Most Chinese intellectuals that I know are not that worldly or cosmopolitan, nor are they all that concerned about poor people elsewhere in the world. Chinese young people from China’s big cities may be different.

Q8. In Chinese intellectual history, individuals who opposed the emperor or ruler’s policies often retired to the mountains or were banished. Was there ever a period where intellectuals became activists and openly defied or protested against the ruling figure or prevailing orthodoxy?

This is a stock figure in Chinese novels, the morally “pure” intellectual who escapes into the mountains, and some of the many people who live alone or in small groups on China’s sacred mountains may have been intellectuals with political leanings. But I can’t think of a period of activism before the late 19^th century. Someone who knows China’s imperial history better than I do might have a different answer.

Q9. How do intellectuals better tell the China story to the outside world? Is this of interest to them and how do they propose to do this?

I think most Chinese intellectuals are still stuck on trying to get China’s story straight for China. Many of them do not agree with Xi Jinping’s version of the China story and see their task to be that of reclaiming the China story from the Party-State, or perhaps injecting something new and different—and less authoritarian and illiberal—into that story. There are people like Zhang Weiwei (张维为), whose self-appointed mission is precisely that, to tell China’s story to the world, but he is such a cheerleader for the China story that every intellectual I know despises him for his intellectual shallowness.

Q10. There is this idea of China pursuing a form of Confucian Capitalism or perhaps ‘Confucian Liberalism’ as articulated by the economist Yao Yang who you’ve mentioned previously. What are your thoughts on this and is this really a Chinese idea or perhaps something more akin to what Singapore has pursued for decades?

Yao Yang’s idea is quite different from Confucian capitalism as championed in Singapore. Yao’s vision is self-consciously global: he thinks that Confucianism, properly understood from today’s perspective, can solve problems with American liberalism, for example, by reinjecting ideas of hierarchy and merit, and putting an end to identity politics so that Americans can arrive at a consensus and work together as a society. Similarly, Confucian liberalism can be adopted by the CCP, which is already practicing a version of it without being aware of it. If the leaders of the Party-State took it seriously it would take the hard edge off of China’s authoritarianism, in the sense for example that they would take ideas of morality seriously and treat the Chinese people with the respect they deserve.

So, this is not a defense of China’s current order, although Yao sometimes makes it sound this way when he is singing for his supper. The vision is in fact almost utopian, in the sense that neither Joe Biden nor Bernie Sanders will pick it up and apply it to US politics. My thought is that Yao is perhaps trying to tell Chinese liberals not to completely give up hope, that there is a way to contribute to a better world through these Confucian-inspired ideas. Yao Yang is one of those Chinese intellectuals that very much thinks China needs to get out in the world and do its part. However far-fetched these ideas may seem, that is the very heartfelt and admirable impulse that they grow out of.

Q11. Shifting gears, you’ve done research on secret societies in China. Can you share some of the history of these in China and if you see any relevance in more modern China?

In fact, the history of secret societies as a “thing” in Chinese history is kind of a myth, created around the time of the 1911 revolution by Sun Yat-sen (孫中山), who borrowed ideas from a Japanese scholar suggesting that these groups had always been self-consciously patriotic (pro-Ming, anti-Qing) and would now be on the side of Sun, the great nationalist. I think this is largely nonsense, although many, many Chinese scholars have spent their lives on the myth. To my mind, the only person who really knows what these are about is the great Dutch scholar Barend ter Haar (Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads).

If they have any relevance to modern China, I think it would be to organized crime, which in my view is pretty much everywhere under the surface of the Chinese world, and often exploited by all Chinese regimes for political purposes. See for instance Lynette Ong’s most recent work Outsourcing Suppression.

Q12. Scrolling through your website, there are hundreds of texts, which must mean thousands of pages. How do you translate so much without getting tired of it? Do you have help or is it just you and a keyboard?

I think there are more than 10,000 pages of material on the site by now, and I did probably 98% of that work by myself. To do this, I make use of every bit of technical help I can find. DeepL for example is an excellent translation tool, much more powerful than Google Translate—which is still very useful. What I usually do, once I find something that looks interesting (which is of course half the battle—I can’t explain how I know what is interesting) is generate a first draft with DeepL. You have to go paragraph by paragraph, doing copy and paste (I use the free version of DeepL), which is time consuming, but this is much quicker than trying to skim a complex Chinese document. I have been studying Chinese since 1977 and I think I am a good linguist, but skimming Chinese remains a skill I do not have. Once I have this, I can read it quickly and decide if it is indeed worth translating. This is also quicker than having someone else skim for you, unless you are very lucky in picking your skimmers.

If the text is interesting, I go line by line, fixing the DeepL translation, which of course misses anything culture-specific, or any joke, any hint of irony, the nuances of most arguments. For language questions, I have Pleco on my phone; I don’t think I have opened a dictionary in ten years, and do not miss it! Otherwise, the Internet is an endless help. DeepL and Google Translate do an excellent job translating Chinese references to non-Chinese things (imagine Qin Hui writing about the Russia-Ukraine war, for example—all the place names and personal names would be impossible to track down without these tools), but for Chinese references there is Baidu among a host of other possibilities.

When I get to Baidu, I just copy the key paragraphs and let DeepL translate them, otherwise Chinese wears you out after an hour or two. I have also found that for virtually every question I have, there is a Chinese teenager with the same question, who asks Zhihu (知乎), so I can find the answer there. I know there are Sinologists who think all of this is “impure,” but I’ll bet they haven’t translated 10,000 pages. Not using the tools available is like doing your taxes with a slide rule. I remember trying to translate things when I was at Harvard in the early 1980s, before the Internet existed. Several times a day you would just get to a dead end because there was no answer in any dictionary and no one to ask. This almost never happens now, which is just amazing.

Still, translation is impossible unless you know what the author wants to say. Novices at translation often believe that if you get every word “dictionary right” then the final product must be a good translation. Sadly, this is not the case at all. I have trained myself over the course of the decade in which I’ve been involved in this project to have a good idea of what contemporary intellectuals in China are talking about. So, this is just “local knowledge,” like the sailor who knows where the rocks and reefs are. I’ve seen grad students with good Chinese go away with a text and come back with an embarrassingly bad translation simply because they did not know the author or the argument or the context.

The reason why I don’t get tired of it, however, is because you have to pay close attention to every text. You take the author’s side completely, because your goal is to understand every nuance, to do your utmost to make the author make sense. You can decide once you have finished that the text is nonsense, but the exercise itself is a type of close listening that I frankly find is a wonderful mental and almost spiritual exercise. Most of us never listen closely to anything—just ask your spouse or your kids. I do it on a nearly daily basis and I love it.

Q13. Apart from Reading the China Dream, please share any favorite books, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of Chinese culture, history, current affairs, etc.

For everyday stuff, you definitely need Bill Bishop’s Sinocism and Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk, both of which are excellent and the products of vast amounts of work. I read them on Substack, but both have podcasts as well. My favorite podcasts are Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica and Cindy Yu’s Chinese Whispers, but there are tons of good podcasts out there, too many to listen to. Actually Cindy Yu recently interviewed Kaiser about his experience in China as a rock star, which was fascinating (see here). I confess that since I started this project, I read less of what my colleagues write in English or other Western languages, both because I have less time, but also because a lot of work on China, particularly in the US, is theory-driven in a way that does not interest me. I would rather find another Chinese writer or translate another text, than to try to “expand the theory” of anything. To each his own of course, but to me this kind of attention to theory comes with a huge opportunity cost.

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