Kaiser Kuo — At the end of March, in Beijing, I attended the meeting between Adam Tooze and Wang Hui. I felt as if two traditions that hold immense importance in my intellectual life were converging. These two thinkers develop ways of looking at the world that are markedly different from one another, they do not share the same references or the same argumentative style. Yet they took to one another instantly, and the rapport between them only grew as the exchange unfolded. I could never have imagined I would be privileged to witness something like this.
European readers already know Adam Tooze. A historian of the economy, he is one of today’s most fascinating public intellectuals. He has just finished a manuscript for a book on the energy transition, in which China occupies a central place. For several years, he has also been seriously learning Chinese, and I can attest to real progress. What makes his vantage on China so stimulating is that he does not belong to the circle of specialists. This distance, added to his formidable authority as a comparativist, allows him to state plainly what some specialists know to be true but do not dare articulate aloud.
Wang Hui is less widely known. A professor at Tsinghua University, he once directed the journal Dushu, which for a long time set the tone of intellectual debate in China. He is, rightly, the most recognizable figure of what is called China’s “New Left.” The term emerged in the 1990s. Chinese liberals welcomed the market’s rise, while Wang Hui argued that its social costs deserved careful examination rather than celebration. His books and essays, though diverse, revolve around one main question: what does it mean to be modern outside the Western world? In the conversation that follows, Tooze and he speak of Hobsbawm’s short XXth century, the Fukuyama moment, Carl Schmitt—an equally brilliant and dangerous thinker—, the Maoist concept of “people’s war,” and finally, in the most moving passage, Lu Xun, the thinker of failure who steadfastly refused despair.
Adam Tooze — Like many of your readers, I love how your work keeps returning to your own personal journey. You agree to ask yourself how your ideas, like those of all of us, are shaped by the political context and by the historical moment in which we come of age. Following your example, I’d like to begin by saying in a few words how my own intellectual relationship with China has been marked by my biography and by the era in which I came of age.
I completed my studies in West Berlin in the summer of 1989. What happened that summer was obviously spectacular and eye-opening. But on the whole, at the end of the Cold War, German culture, and more broadly European culture, had become rather provincial and inward-looking. Perhaps that is why it took me so long to take a serious interest in China. My gaze remained very European well into the 2000s. It was then that I began to scrutinize global capitalism more closely, working as part of an academic team at Cambridge University charged with training executives for the British oil company BP.
It was only with my third book, The Deluge (2014), that I challenged myself to write directly about China. The book examines in detail the May Fourth Movement. At the outset, it was a student protest against the Chinese government, which had accepted the Treaty of Versailles while it ceded a substantial portion of Chinese territory to Japan. Many German historians view this episode as the foundational political crisis of the twentieth century.
Upon discovering your work, I felt our research started from the same point. We both concentrate on the upheavals of the early twentieth century, and on how they have been interpreted. In his great poem “The Century,” Ossip Mandelstam speaks of this rupture when he writes about living in a century with a “broken spine.”
What Eric Hobsbawm called “the short twentieth century” was meant to end the nineteenth-century double logic of industrialization and democracy, driving both toward their ultimate culmination through revolution. This did not quite happen, and certainly not in China, as you have shown in several essays. By the end of the twentieth century, revolutionary energies seemed to have faded almost everywhere, as if we were returning to the nineteenth century. You expressed it with the striking formula: “the return of the nineteenth century.”
Wang Hui— The situation is paradoxical. On the one hand, the Anthropocene is unlike anything that came before it. Ecologically, we are entering uncharted territory. But on the other hand, on the political stage, the actors are the same and are replaying a nineteenth-century play we know all too well: war and imperialism resurging (especially under the influence of the United States), and there is passionate debate about the meaning of industrialization, or rather of reindustrialization. Our present therefore has two faces. Perhaps we should conceive of this “return” not as simple repetition, but as something new that arises from an insistence on remaking the old.
Each new situation, and even the mere prospect of a new situation, changes how we understand history and how we tell it. One thing is certain: the grand narratives of the past, whether of progress or of revolution, have collapsed. We must find a new way to think about the present, and also about the past.
An historical example might help illustrate what I mean. In 1900, Liang Qichao wrote a long poem titled “Chant of the Pacific in the XX Century.” In it he used two fully new notions to describe China’s situation. One related to time—the twentieth century. The other related to space—the Pacific. In two thousand years of Chinese civilization, no one had yet contemplated the world on the scale of the Pacific. In this sense, Liang forged a new way of imagining geopolitics.
The novelty on the temporal axis was even more striking. The Chinese twentieth century stands apart. It marks a radical rupture: first because it ends the long era of imperial dynasties, and second because it gives rise to a powerful sense of living at the same pace as the rest of the world. Perhaps for the first time, it becomes impossible to find in China’s past the answers to questions about its present. All other nations enter China’s past, and world history becomes our history. This is a new conception of history that emerges. One might even say that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China were invented by twentieth-century China. We may be experiencing something similar today, and the Anthropocene could well alter our view of the past.
You mentioned Eric Hobsbawm. In The Age of Extremes, the fourth volume of his grand tetralogy on the birth of the modern world, he judged the twentieth century harshly. In his view, that century produced few meaningful ideas, while the nineteenth gave democracy, the market economy, and revolution. I understand why he saw things this way from a European vantage, but the argument does not carry over to China. The May Fourth Movement, Mao’s “people’s war,” and many other events infused our society with immense political energy, energy that can still be felt during periods of reform.
In the 1990s, when I was writing the essays you refer to, this heritage seemed to be running out. Chinese society had become deeply depoliticized as neoliberal ideas gained ground. When I spoke of a “return to the nineteenth century,” I was addressing this depoliticization. It is a phenomenon we must overcome. Yet it is also one that can prove harmful to us.
Adam Tooze — Your idea of a “present with two faces” strikes me as very fruitful. It helps, for example, to make sense of President Trump and his inner circle. It almost seems as if they believe they can replay the nineteenth century without peril: dressing as William McKinley, reviving the Monroe Doctrine, seizing Cuba, pursuing gunboat diplomacy, etc. This is extraordinarily dangerous, and the consequences are already dire, precisely because we inhabit a very different world—the twenty-first century. Today’s Iran is not Persia in 1907. We cannot expect imperial aggression to succeed, much less unfold smoothly.
Perhaps this reveals a broader failure, or at least a limit, of our historical imagination. Western Europeans, and the West in general, entered the twentieth century with what they believed was a solid and well-established philosophy of history. In 1939 and 1940, this vision collapsed catastrophically, as is evidenced by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Fascism is not the sole culprit. Stalin, for example, also steered European notions of progress in a rather particular direction.
Chinese thinkers, by contrast, did not bear the burden of nineteenth-century conceptions of history. That allowed them to imagine forms of revolutionary action that were genuinely radical. Europe began to notice this in the 1960s, when Maoism became an international phenomenon.
Thus the question: what place does Chinese thought grant to events like the Shoah, which shatter European conceptions of history?
Wang Hui — As I said, it is in the twentieth century that China began to think about its history at the same pace as the rest of the world. When we read Chinese thinkers from the early decades of the century, we see that they were already posing questions that Benjamin or Adorno would address later. Lu Xun, for instance, described defeat as the condition of the honest observer, someone who sees the ruins left by history but refuses to console himself with progress narratives. There was also sharp debate about the different trajectories followed by Germany, Russia, and the United States.
As for the Shoah, it holds a central place in Chinese historiography, just as does antifascist resistance to Nazism. In Europe, it is often treated as a rupture in the course of history, something that defies comprehension. Perhaps this is not the case in China. Seen from China, one might wonder: isn’t the Nanjing Massacre itself a historical rupture? Why has it never attracted as much attention, theoretical reflection, or political stakes?
This returns us to a deeper question. From a Chinese vantage point, modern history begins, in Mao’s famous formulation, with the study of the Opium War. Germany played a role, but Britain, Russia, and Japan weighed far more heavily.
So I think we do not view history from quite the same standpoint. Of course, the two World Wars are of enormous historical significance, but often other events are left in the shade to focus on those wars.
Adam Tooze — Could this gap be due to the different senses, or the different nuances, with which violence is understood across cultures? When Western historians analyze crimes like the Shoah, they confront a difficulty: such acts seem to elude or surpass the political concepts we inherited. This is evident in Hobsbawm’s tetralogy. The first three volumes follow a classic Marxist logic, where the relations of production explain the ups and downs of the various historical actors. The Age of Extremes, by contrast, is a catastrophic book, not only because it chronicles terrible things, but because its Marxist logic collapses. It cannot account for the violence and madness of Nazism. Hobsbawm presents it as a blind, industrial force, almost autonomous, born from the “shock of modernity” of World War I, without ever linking it to class struggle or to other standard analytic tools. As he notes, torture makes a comeback in the twentieth century.
Chinese thinkers, for their part, more readily wove violence into politics. They emphasized that violence is constitutive of the political: it underpins states and paves the way for revolution, even if often in terrible fashion. The idea of “people’s war” seems central in the Chinese political tradition, at least since Mao. Lenin had used the term as well, so it carries some Soviet heritage. But Mao clearly carried it in a direction entirely new.
Wang Hui — You’re right, the concept of people’s war transformed Chinese politics and society. That is one of the reasons the twentieth century represented such a rupture. The conflicts previously fought on Chinese soil—opium wars, the Sino-Franco war, clashes between the Qing and other empires—did not hinge on the people or mobilize them in the way the twentieth century did. The 1911 revolution, the Northern Expedition, the resistance to the Japanese invasion: these conflicts far surpassed questions of territory. They encompassed social mobilization, revolution, the transformation of land tenure, and more. Their aim was to reconfigure the entire social structure. In this sense, violence is also a creative act. I say this to describe phenomena, not to pass moral judgment. This process culminated, of course, in the civil war.
But as I said, these forms of mobilization and political energy faded in the 1990s, when we returned—in our thinking—to the nineteenth century. That is why it seems timely to revisit the twentieth century with fresh eyes, to rethink what constitutes politics in the present.
Adam Tooze — Your remark about depoliticization is apt. Yet I am not entirely sure the twentieth-century legacy has disappeared. During the pandemic, for instance, the Chinese state conducted a “people’s war” against Covid and claims to have won it.
Wang Hui — I view that more as a rhetorical figure than a genuine return to people’s war. The state’s response to Covid can be interpreted as a three-front war. First, it mobilized doctors, volunteers, and others en masse, much as in wartime. Then, in the initial months, before vaccines existed, the response took on a guerrilla-like character that relied on very simple social measures rather than cutting-edge technology to slow the spread. Finally, once the vaccine became available, the response became institutional and imposed from above, with the massive construction of hospitals and other public health infrastructures.
In this sense, we are closer to the idea of total war as theorized by European thinkers in the early twentieth century, albeit with very different consequences, of course.
Adam Tooze — While reading your recent essays, I was struck by how deeply you have engaged with Carl Schmitt. You revive his notion of “neutralization” to explain what happens when the economy takes precedence and ideology recedes. In your view, this has led in China to a form of pure developmentalism that smothers the political question and discourages political engagement among the populace.
I probably should not have been surprised, given the emphasis you place on depoliticization. In Europe, at least since the 1980s, critics of neoliberalism have attempted to read Schmitt against the grain and to revive his concept of the “political,” forged in the 1920s and 1930s, to resist neoliberal depoliticization. It is hard to imagine a more captivating concept.
But Schmitt was not merely a constitutional or political theorist. He was also a virulent anti-Semite and a card-carrying Nazi, unlike Heidegger, who did not fully act on his convictions in the same way.
For my part, I wrestled with Schmitt for a long time, especially in The Deluge, where one might say I presented John Maynard Keynes as the liberal counterpoint to Schmitt. Some left-wing critics would claim that Schmitt prevails over liberalism because liberals are too weak. I disagree. To me, Keynes offers a general theory of the relationship between the political and the economic, in which neutralization is one possible option but not the only one.
In any case, here is my question: what does Schmitt bring to you? Why did you turn to him?
Wang Hui — Schmitt is brilliant, but toxic. It is a sharp intellect, yet reactionary. Reading him is a bit like eating fugu—the deadly pufferfish that becomes absolutely delicious in the hands of a chef who knows how to remove the poison. In 1929, he published an essay titled “The Era of Neutralization and Depoliticization.” In it, he summarized four centuries of European history as a succession of provisional truces, or denials, faced with an eternal opposition: that of the friend and the foe, which, for him, is the sole truly political concept. From his viewpoint, the American revolution and even the Russian revolution were ways of averting this truth.
I do not subscribe uncritically to this idea. Yet I find in Schmitt a useful tool to critique both developmentalism, which is entirely oriented toward growth, and liberalism, which rests on the sanctity of procedure. In my view, these two ideologies have an anti-political effect.
I should clarify that I do not share Schmitt’s starting premise that the relation between friend and foe is a fixed and eternal opposition. This idea is closely tied to his conception of sovereignty, and therefore to the nation-state.
On that point, Mao seems more flexible to me. He is a truly dialectical thinker: he understood that relations between friends and foes are not just unstable, but can also transform—for example, in wartime—when a united front forms. Mao did not regard sovereignty as sacred. His notion of people’s war could even include the Japanese people themselves, and later the Vietnamese people.
Adam Tooze — That brings us back to what we were saying about history and historicity. In the 1920s, many German thinkers, Schmitt included, felt that history, understood as the history of European nation-states, had in fact ended. Today we remember World War I as a lost victory for the Allies. For Germans, it was a much deeper catastrophe. Schmitt feared Europe would no longer be at the forefront in the twentieth century, or perhaps would not even have a proper twentieth century. The powers that would dominate this history were the United States and the Soviet Union. Later, he grew fascinated with the partisan and with guerrillas of the Global South.
In a certain sense, Schmitt and others sensed that Europe would undergo a century of humiliation. Some European historians even entertain the idea—literally—that the continent could be “ottomanized,” reduced to the status of a declining empire. Schmitt studied the Weimar Constitution and concluded that the German state could not enforce its sovereignty, nor draw the line between what it controlled and what escaped it. He believed Europe would eventually fall under a world order dominated by moralizing Anglo-Americans, merchants, and legalists, akin to Woodrow Wilson.
This sense of a general crisis pushed German thinkers of the time toward what one could awkwardly call a multicultural openness. Ernst Troeltsch studied Asia, Max Weber wrote on Hinduism. After World War II, Schmitt himself turned to the peasantry and to people’s war, reinventing himself as a theorist of asymmetric conflicts.
There would still be much to say, but I would like to conclude on a somewhat happier note. Could we speak about Lu Xun, one of the great thinkers of modernity to whom you have dedicated numerous writings?
Wang Hui — For me, Lu Xun is the great thinker of failure. He teaches us to live with the experience of defeat. It is in response to this experience that he develops the idea of permanent revolution. He did not believe that a person or an institution could be progressive by nature or forever, and that is why failure was inevitable. According to him, the true revolutionary always knows he may fail, and that is precisely why he never abandons the struggle. Mao drew on this intuition to construct his conception of people’s war, which seeks to transform failure into victory through a long process.
In some texts by Lu Xun, one sees him fighting despair and refusing to let history’s sense of inexorability overwhelm him. That is part of why his voice still speaks to us today. We face, on a planetary scale, challenges that can seem insurmountable to the point of draining hope, yet we must keep fighting nonetheless.