Wang Huning

= influential political thinker in contemporary China, member of the Politburo of the CCP anno 2024

Discussion

Slavoj Zizek on Wang Huning

Nathan Gardels:

"To understand what is going on, Žižek advises that we “closely follow the writings of Wang Huning, a current member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee and the director of Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization. Wang is correct in emphasizing the key role of culture, of the domain of symbolic fictions.”

Warming to this topic, the Slovenian philosopher argues that “The true materialist way to oppose the topic of the ‘fiction of reality’ is not to strictly distinguish between fiction and reality but to focus on the reality of fictions. Fictions are not outside reality, they are materialized in our social interactions, in our institutions and customs — as we can see in today’s mess, if we destroy fictions on which our social interactions are based, our social reality itself begins to fall apart.”

Wang, who designates himself as a neo-conservative, grasps the danger.

According to Žižek:

- "Wang sees his task as imposing a new common ethical substance, and we should not dismiss this as an excuse to impose the full control of the Communist Party over social life. He is replying to a real problem.Thirty years ago, he wrote a book, “America against America,” where he perspicuously noted the antagonisms of the American way of life, including its darker sides: social disintegration, lack of solidarity and shared values, nihilist consumerism and individualism. Wang’s fear was that the same disease may spread to China, which is now happening at the popular level of mass culture. Xi’s reforms meant to bolster ‘spiritual civilization’ are a desperate attempt to put a stop to this trend."

Will it work? Žižek is not so sure:

- "It is easy to perceive in the ongoing Chinese campaign a tension between content and form: the content — the establishment of stable values that hold a society together — is enforced in the form of mobilization which is experienced as a kind of emergency state imposed by the governing apparatus. Although the goal is the opposite of the Cultural Revolution, there are similarities with it in the way the campaign is done.The danger is that such tensions can produce cynical disbelief in the population. More generally, the ongoing campaign in China seems all too close to the standard conservative attempts to enjoy the benefits of the capitalist dynamism but to control its destructive aspects through a strong nation-state pushing forward patriotic values."

(https://www.noemamag.com/the-clash-of-civilizations-is-the-politics-of-the-end-of-history/)