China’s illiberalism and liberalism’s ills

Abstract

This is a deeply important book for all scholars of China, and it is a timely one as well. It is timely in a number of ways that in 2019 not even the author (nor any of us) could have foreseen. Since the publication of the book, the Covid-19 pandemic emerged in southern Chinasomething that the author's concern with intensified urbanization in China, the environmental crisis this process causes, and its coming developmental impasse are actually quite relevant to, as I point out below. Since 2019 we have also witnessed the progressive breakdown in the intergovernmental relationship between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United States, in terms of the ongoing trade dispute, but far beyond that in the direction of an xenophobia and nationalism initiated by the ugly racist attacks by the Trump administration and its white supremacist allies on Chinese students, Chinese public health (e.g. "kung-flu"), cultural attacks on Chinese diets, and most recently initiated threatened sanctions against members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their families. These attacks are all driven by the narcissism of a U.S. president hell-bent on his own reelection at any cost. The animosity has become mutual, as Chinese nationalism under Xi Jinping has intensified, with deportations of foreign journalists investigating the PRC government's treatment of Uyghurs and the Hong Kong protests against PRC rule, and the probable suspension of study abroad programs for students from both countries. As Covid-19 continues to spread in the United States, PRC students find the U.S. visa and immigration regime increasingly onerous, and the Chinese government retaliates in kind. One cannot help but sense that scholars of China now find themselves facing a conjunctural tipping point that threatens not only the future of US-China relations in a broad sense, but also the specific futures of the research and cultural collaborations that many of us have built assiduously with Chinese colleagues over the last several decades. And this process of schismogenesis may continue even if Trump is not reelected in November 2020. Much is at stake in the current moment, and much is in play in such a conjunctureprecisely where a good public intellectual intervention like Daniel Vukovich's book and its circulation can make a real difference. It is therefore now not only timely but also important to consider the arguments set out in