Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Number 4, 2006

Depoliticized politics, multiple components of hegemony, and the eclipse of the Sixties
WANG Hui (Translated by Christopher CONNERY)
Following the recent trends of globalization and regionalization, the idea of Asia has been revived in political, economic, and cultural fields. This essay examines some of the various uses of this idea in modern East Asian and especially Chinese history. The essay consists of four parts. Part One discusses the derivativeness of the idea of Asia, that is, how this idea developed from modern European history, especially the nineteenth century European narrative of World History, and it points out how the early modern Japanese theory of shedding Asia derived from this narrative. Part Two studies the relationship between the idea of Asia and two forms of Narodism against the background of the Chinese and Russian revolutions one, exemplified by Russian Narodism, attempted to use Asian particularity to challenge modern capitalism; the other, represented by Sun Yat-sen, attempted to construct a nation-state according to a socialist revolutionary program, and to develop agricultural capitalism under the particular social conditions of Asia. Part Three considers the differences and tensions between the Great Asia-ism of Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun and the Japanese idea of Toyo (East Asia), and it discusses the need to overcome the categories of nation-state and international relations in order to understand the question of Asia. Part Four discusses the need to go beyond early modern maritime-centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, and Eurocentrism in re-examining the question of Asia through historical research by focusing on the particular legacies of Asia (such as the tributary system) and the problems of early modernity.

w-hui@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn Inter-Asia 10.1080/14649370600983303 RIAC_A_198231.sgm 1464-9373 Original Taylor 2006 0 4 7 HuiWang 00000December and & Article Francis Cultural (print)/1469-8447 Francis2006 Ltd Studies: Movements (online)

ABSTRACT

China and the end of the Sixties In early August 2005, there was a panel on The Asian Sixties at the Centennial Jubilee Conference of the National University of Singapore. The Chinese Sixties were frequently referenced in discussion by scholars from Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, and America. But aside from myself Id been invited to the panel as a discussant there were no Chinese scholars at this venue who gave papers. In my experience, this has not been uncommon. In 1998, when the entire world Europe, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere held 30thanniversary commemorations of 1960s student and social movements, China, with its particularly close connection to the 1960s, was conspicuously silent. From that time on, I began to consider the reasons for that silence. My first conclusion was that it not only represented a rejection of the radical thought and political practice of the 1960s. And it wasnt confined to a repudiation of the Cultural Revolution the symbol of the Chinese 1960s. It was also a negation of twentieth century China. I refer here to the short twentieth century, from the years of the Republican Revolution in 1911 to the period around 1976 the century of Chinese revolution. The period beginning with the failure of the Hundred-Day Reform in 1898 and ending with the 1911 Wuchang uprising was the centurys prologue, and the 1980s from the late 1970s through to 1989 was its epilogue. During this era, the French and Russian revolutions were the models for Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries, and the various orientations towards these revolutions produced political divisions

KEYWORDS: Cultural Revolution, Chinese Sixties, depoliticization, party-state, stateparty, ideology, hegemony, repoliticization

ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/06/04068318 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649370600983303

The eclipse of the Sixties 684 within the long Chinese revolution. The New Culture movement in the May Fourth period championed the French revolution, and its values of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but the first generation Communist Party members took the Russian Revolution as a model, criticizing the bourgeois character of the French Revolution. In the 1980s, following the crisis of socialism and the rise of reform, the aura of the Russian Revolution diminished considerably and the ideals of the French Revolution reappeared. But following the final curtain-fall on this revolutionary century, the French revolution and the Russian revolution, both viewed as sources of radicalism, had become objects of criticism and negation. The forgetting or rejection of the 1960s is thus not an isolated historical incident, but an organic component of a continuing and totalizing derevolutionary process. During the Asian Sixties, national liberation movements arose and flourished and the colonial era came to an end. Movements in Japan, Korea, Thailand, India, and elsewhere challenged the Cold War, USdominated, capitalist order. In Europe and America, the Sixties saw the rise of the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements and an intense interrogation of post-war capitalisms political institutions. Why, then, does the 1960s seem to be more of a western, rather than an Asian topic? Before reflecting further on this question, the following two points need emphasis. First, although the Asian and Western 1960s were connected, there were also very important differences. In Europe and America, the anti-war and anti-imperialist movements were critical movements within western society. Their manifestations within the cultural sphere constituted a cultural critique of the capitalist world. By contrast, in Southeast Asia (particularly Indochina) and other regions, the struggles of the 1960s had the character of armed revolution and military struggle against western imperialist domination and local social oppression. The Western 1960s targeted the post-war party-state, ruthlessly criticizing its domestic and foreign policies. The Asian Sixties tried to re-establish independent nations and to form new forms of party states through social movements and armed struggle, seeking their own forms of social transformation and economic development, and struggling to achieve their own sovereign space within a hegemonic system of international relations. In todays context, the armed revolutions and militant uprisings of the 1960s seem to have disappeared from memory and thought. At a time when the transnational has come to dominate the imagination of western intellectuals, what significance would they find in the Asian Sixties national independence movements, or partystate construction? Although the Asian left maintains a fond memory of 1960s social movements, this would also be a difficult basis for a new consideration of the 1960s. The second point concerns the particular character of the Chinese Sixties, and Chinas self-negation of its own 1960s. Beginning in the 1950s, China was unfailingly supportive of third world liberation movements and the Non-aligned movement, even to the point of conflict with the worlds greatest military power, the United States, in the Korean peninsula and in Vietnam. When 1960s European radicals made Stalinism and the practices of the Soviet Union a target of criticism, they discovered that China, even earlier, had carried out theoretical and political struggles against the Soviet orthodox line. As Chinas wholly new form of party state was first being established, however, the corrosion of depoliticization threatened revolutionary politics. The most important manifestations of this corrosion were bureaucratization and internal power struggles within the party-state. This led to the abolition of political subjectivity and the right of discursive freedom, and could thus be understood as depoliticizing political struggles. In opposition to this process, throughout the 1950s and 1960s Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party sought a range of tactics to combat these tendencies, yet the result was always that these struggles were continually implicated in the very process described above. Even before 1976, because of the continuous factional struggles and political persecutions

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that had occurred during the period of the Cultural Revolution, the 1960s had lost luster in the eyes of many Chinese people. Popular sentiments of disappointment and doubt, and a thorough-going condemnation of the 1960s Cultural Revolution had led to a fundamental disposition lasting from the mid-1970s through today. In the middle and latter part of the 1970s, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao Zedong, and the restoration to the political stage of those who had earlier lost power, the Chinese state and society undertook a thorough negation of the Cultural Revolution. In the 30 years since, China has transformed itself from a planned economy to a market society, from a center of world revolution to a thriving center of capitalist activity, from a third-world anti-imperialist country to one of imperialisms strategic partners or competitors. When a critical intellectual attempts to analyze one of our current crises the crisis in agricultural society, the widening gap between the rural and urban sectors or between region and city, institutionalized corruption, etc the most powerful counter is the question: So do you want to return to the days of the Cultural Revolution? This attitude of radical negation has diminished the possibility for any real political analysis of current historical trends. I look at the eclipse of the 1960s as one of the products of this process of depoliticization. The 1960s was a decade of prodigious accomplishment, the key components of which were the breaking of the bipolar post-war world order and the impact this had on the two types of party-state structures of the post-war period. Both the multiparty system of the western democratic countries and the single-party system of the socialist countries sank into crisis. This eras politicization, evident in these two mutually connected historical trajectories, merits further analysis. The conclusion of the first and second world wars dismantled the earlier Eurocentric system of international relations. The structure of world power entered the Cold War phase, antagonistically divided between the US and Soviet blocs. From the Bandung conference in the 1950s to the high tide of national liberation movements in the 1960s, the social movements and armed struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America forced an opening in this bipolar world structure. This was the politicization process that broke open the bipolar Cold War structure (although an unavoidable result was the depoliticized structure of power in international relations). Mao Zedongs Three Worlds Theory was a response to this new historical configuration and political antagonism. Additionally, as the national liberation movements broke the unity of western imperialism, the inner collapse of the socialist order that began with the Sino-Soviet split also created a space for renewed consideration, within the eastern bloc, of the future of socialism, and of the spatial character of world hegemonic power. Theoretical and political struggles led to challenges to the structure of power, which had grown ever more ossified (that is to say, depoliticized) within the socialist camp. This too can be viewed as a politicization process within the socialist order. It is impossible to understand the Chinese Sixties if they are divorced from deep suspicion of, and active damage done to, the socialist state and party orders. It is also impossible to understand the end of the Chinese Sixties if it is divorced from the reconstruction and reconsolidation of these orders. However, just as I claimed in the previous brief discussion of factional struggle, political oppression, and the renewed rigidity of the party state, the 1960s also contained a self-contradictory tendency the depoliticizing tendency. How should we explain this situation of mutual entanglement, and its influence on the post-revolutionary period? The fundamental task here is to break through the binary logic of either radical negation or defense of politics, and carry out a historical analysis of the Chinese Sixties, searching both for the real origins of the tragedy, but also for the new historical creation contained within this historical tragedy.

The eclipse of the Sixties 686 The depoliticization of politics and the crisis of the party state Countless scholars have researched the national liberation struggles of the 1960s. I want to begin here with the rubric of depoliticization in order to discuss the question of the Chinese party state system and its transformation. The Italian sociologist Alessandro Russo has carried out a long and extensive study of the Cultural Revolution, and his essay How to Translate Cultural Revolution, (see Russos article in this issue) treats the Cultural Revolution as a period of intense politicization, brought to a close by the factional struggles especially the outbreaks of violent conflict that accompanied the factional struggles at the end of the 1960.1 It was precisely these factional struggles, and their accompanying violence, that led to a crisis in the political culture that had developed in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, which had at its center political debate and multiple forms of political organization. This crisis provided the opening for the re-entry of the party state. In this sense, the final stages of the Cultural Revolution took place within a process of depoliticization. Russos reflections on the crisis in the western democratic system form a backdrop for his political analysis of the Cultural Revolution. According to his analysis, the last 20 or 30 years have witnessed the collapse of the foundations of western democratic states: political parties, and the parliamentary system based thereupon. A multi-party system presupposes that a political party has a specific representative character, and specific political values which, through specific institutional arrangements within a national framework, produce inter-party rivalry. However, as the character and representative nature of the political party become increasingly muddled, real democratic politics disappear. Under these conditions, parliament is transformed from a kind of public sphere into an apparatus for ensuring national stability. This is not only the crisis of the European parliamentary system, but also the crisis of the British and American systems, and the general crisis of democracy in the world today. Therefore, at the heart of the crisis of contemporary democracy is the crisis in party politics, which is the result of the historical process of depoliticization. In the context of a weakened political party system, nation-states become states without politics, or depoliticized states. From this perspective, considering the Chinese political situation and the crisis of western democracy as comprising mutually implicated internal processes, we can observe that in the past 30 years China and the west alike (their structural, internal and historical differences notwithstanding) have been caught within a current of depoliticization. Chinas depoliticization has created conditions where, for reasons of development and social stability, the space for political debate has largely been eliminated. The party is no longer an organization with specific political values, but is a structured organization of power. Even within the party it is not easy to carry out real political debate, Divisions are all cast as technical divisions within the fundamental path of modernization, so that they can only be resolved through the power structure. Since the middle of the 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party has had no public debates about political values or the political line. An outstanding characteristic of twentiethcentury Chinas transformations and revolution, however, had been the continuous and intimate connection between theoretical debate and practice. Here we must re-examine from a political perspective the gradual disappearance of the concept of line struggle after the Cultural Revolution. Although this concept was the terminology for political struggle used by the victors of intra-party struggles, it also illustrated a central phenomenon in the history of the Chinese Communist Party: that every great political struggle was inextricably linked to serious theoretical considerations and policy debate. From the various theoretical summations and political struggles within the party concerning revolutionary defeat following the great

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revolutionary defeat in 1927, through the historical research and theoretical debate in the early 1930s between the left and the right wing, and within fractions of the left wing, concerning the social character of China and the character of the Chinese revolution; from the varied analyses within the Chinese Communist Party of national and international politics in the Central Soviet and Yanan periods to the partys ongoing debates about the nature of contradictions within Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution period, we can see with clarity the various theoretical divisions (this kind of division developed under the combined framework of political values and the analysis of social conditions) and their attendant political developments. In my view, it is precisely these theoretical debates and political struggles within the party that maintain the vitality of party politics. They ensure that it does not become, within the framework of relatively stable power, a depoliticized political organization. Subjecting theory and practice to the line struggle also enables the party to correct its errors the line struggle functions as a corrective mechanism within the party. However, owing to the lack of institutional means of protecting the continued development of these kinds of theoretical and political debates and the use of power ploys to eliminate debate over theory and policy, frequently through violence or coercion debates and divisions often found their resolutions through the form of power struggle. After the Cultural Revolution, many of those who had been harmed through the line struggles came first to detest, and then to a thoroughgoing repudiation of, the line struggle concept. After regaining power, they refused to analyze the conditions and mechanisms whereby an intraparty line struggle became a mere power play characterized by merciless attack. Rather, they sought only suppression or avoidance of this kind of conflict, in order to achieve a unification of the partys will. This resulted in a thorough suppression of the political life of the party, thus losing the internal stimulus for an exploration of the relationship between the party and democracy, and it also provided the foundation for the statification of the party, i.e. for the depoliticization of the party. The Chinese Sixties had its own theoretical characteristics, revolving around: how to understand history and its dynamics; how to understand the market, the market economy, labor, and means of production; how to understand class, class struggle, and bourgeois right; how to understand the nature of Chinese society and the status of world revolution. On all of these questions, different political perspectives and political blocs carried out heated exchanges. The link between theory and political culture epitomized the period. If we place contemporary Chinas depoliticization process in the context of the trajectory described above, the current process contains two key characteristics: one is the de-theorization of the ideological sphere; in which the moment of no debate is the pivot wherein the mutual connection of theory and practice, which had gradually built up over the twentieth century, is transformed into the reformist practice of cautiously crossing the river by feeling for the stones. However, for several reasons, crossing the river by feeling for the stones does not describe the actual process of reform. First, in 19741975, the Chinese Communist Party carried out lively theoretical discussions about the character of Chinese society, the market, labor, compensation for labor, bourgeois right, and other problems, thus touching on nearly all of the fundamental theoretical issues facing the reform process. Without these theoretical discussions, it is difficult to imagine the course of the reform and its attendant development of a commodity and market economy, as well as property rights. Second, beginning at the end of the 1970s, within the CCP and Chinese society as a whole, there were a series of theoretical discussions about the problem of socialism, humanism, and alienation, the market economy, price reform, and the question of ownership. In fact, these two debates constituted a single continuous process.

The eclipse of the Sixties 688 The second characteristic of the current process is the conclusion of the two line struggle, which put economic reform at the center, transforming all party work into construction rather than revolution and construction. These two political choices met with wide popular approval at the end of the 1970s, appearing as a response to the factional struggles and chaotic character of politics during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution, and it must be admitted that this was a reasonable reaction. However, by the time this tactical decision had resulted in a depoliticized political practice, the separation and tension between party and politics whose appearance during the early years of the Cultural Revolution Alessandro Russo has analyzed so well, had been thoroughly eliminated. The unification of politics and the State (the party state system) resulted in the gradual diminishment of the political culture which had been formed under the condition of the nonequivalence of politics and the state. I must emphasize that the concept party-state (and by extension parties-state) system was a derogatory and loaded term applied by the West to China and other socialist countries in the Cold War context. Today all the worlds nations are, without exception, party-states. The transformation of ruling authority from traditional monarchies to modern political parties was a distinctive feature of modern political structure and modern statehood, just as it has been the distinctive political feature of modernity. Although twentieth-century Chinese politics and party politics were closely tied, over a long historical period, party politics hadnt been completely subsumed into the parameters of national politics. Indeed, the creation of a new form of party state system was a fundamental issue in the development of the periods politics. As the political party, through the process of exercising political power, became the subject of state order, it functioned no longer as a kind of stimulant for ideas and practice, but increasingly changed into a conventional form of state power, so that by a certain point it had become an apparatus of depoliticized power or a bureaucratic machine. For this reason, I would characterize the contemporary nation-state system as having been marked by the transformation from a party-state system to a state-party system. (Some Chinese intellectuals advocacy of a fundamental change in the partys character, from a revolutionary to an administrative party, constitutes an establishment of a state-party system). A state-party or state-multiparty system means that the political party no longer accords with past political organizational forms, but is a part of the state apparatus. This process could be called the statification of the political party, and although the process is doubtless also one whereby the party simply becomes the state, I want to emphasize this connection with the transformation of the partys identity. For, by this process, the party no longer has its own distinctive evaluative standpoint or social goals. Rather, it can only have a structural-functionalist relationship with the state apparatus. This is especially evident in the Chinese political system of the partystate, as differentiated from the multi-party state. The State-party system is the product of a crisis transformation of the party-state system, and contemporary Chinas partystate system embodies this tendency toward a state-party system. I regard this tendency as an organic component of the general trend toward a depoliticization of partypolitics worldwide. The kinds of analyses which, avoiding recognition of the generalized crisis in party politics, attempt to comment on the best means of reforming Chinese politics (including setting Western multi-party systems and formal democracy as the goal of Chinese political reform) are only extensions of the depoliticization of politics. The Cultural Revolution was possibly the last stage of the political sequence wherein this system faced a crisis and attempted to carry out self-renewal. The social movements and political debates in its early stages included movements to smash the absolute authority of the political party

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and the state in order to achieve the general goal of, and progress toward, genuine popular sovereignty. The Cultural Revolution was a reaction to the statification of the party at a certain stage, In order to change the course of this statification process, it was necessary to re-examine the partys political values. Under these conditions of the statification of the party, efforts to carry out a social remobilization and to stimulate political spheres and political values outside the state-party context were key (and shortlived) characteristics of the early period of the Cultural Revolution. In these early years, all over China, there appeared factories reorganized according to the pattern of the Paris Commune, and schools and other units engaged in social experimentation. But due to factional struggles and the forceful re-assertion of the party-state system, most of these innovations were short-lived, and these extra-state forms of political activation quickly changed into other forms. And yet, traces of these early Cultural Revolution experiments remained in later state and party reorganization: for example, the policy of admitting worker, peasant, and army representatives into various levels of state and party leadership positions, or the requirement that every level of state and party cadre send their members, on rotation and for a specified time, for practical social work in the rural villages or the factories, etc. These practices, tainted with the character of the bureaucratized state-party system and thus unable to unleash creative energies, became, at the end of the 1970s, primary among the primary targets in the party and governments policy of cleaning the mess and returning to normal. Today, not only in the leadership bodies of party and state, but also in the list of representatives in the National Peoples Congress, workers and peasants have wholly disappeared. In the end, following the failure of the Cultural Revolution and the states development of a market society, a depoliticization process gradually became the main current of the age. At the core was the hyper-stability of the relations between politics and the party state system, and their gradual convergence. As noted above, the depoliticization process cannot be periodized into pre- and post-Cultural Revolution stages: it happened within the historical process of the Cultural Revolution (n.b.: elements and traces of re-politicization can also be found in the late Cultural Revolution period). It must be noted that, in the Chinese context, the consolidation of the state-party system is directly connected to the confusion over and regression on the concept of class. Following the establishment of socialist nations, the question of the representative character of the Communist Party became more and more confused. In a situation where the class concept had become completely muddled, Mao Zedong emphasized the necessity of class struggle. This emphasis was aimed at using the concept of class to stimulate new political struggles, and a new political culture. His target was the 1950s Soviet concept of the party of the whole people, which not only indicated confusion about the representative character of the Communist Party, but marked the depoliticization of the state-party system. The concept of class, particularly the question of class struggle, is a foundation of Marxist theory. Although it would be useful to evaluate the theorys strengths and weaknesses, I cannot do this in detail here. What I think needs emphasis is that in Chinese political practice, the concept of class is not merely a structural concept centered on the nature of property ownership. Rather, it is a political concept of class. The revolutionary party appealed to the class concept for the mobilization of society and for self-renewal. Similarly, within the party, the concept was used to stimulate political debate and struggle, in order to avoid the trajectory of depoliticization under the conditions of the partys administration of political power. The concept concerned more the attitudes and stances of various social or political forces toward revolutionary politics than it concerned the structural situation of social class. Attitude and stance are areas where, based on theoretical investigation and political practice, transformations can

The eclipse of the Sixties 690 occur. This is the opposite of those fossilized and unchanging dualities of the friendenemy contradiction or the contradictions among the people: revolutionary politics encouraged subjective transformation through struggle. In twentieth-century Chinese politics, class analysis and the united front strategy both had a dialectical character, and only from this angle can we correctly understand the key question of revolutionary politics who is our enemy and who is our friend? However, this political concept of class bore internal contradictions and dangers. Once the class concept had been crystallized into a structural, immutable, and essentialist concept (i.e. a depoliticized concept of class), the political dynamism of the concept thoroughly vanishes. Because under socialism the concept of class had lost the dimension of property rights, an essentialized discourse of class identity was incapable of stimulating a politicized form of class struggle. Rather, it became the most oppressive kind of power logic, the presupposition for the cruel and merciless character of factional struggle. The popularity of discourses of identitarianism, family-origin, or blood lineage was a negation and betrayal of the subjective and active political outlook that was at the core of twentiethcentury Chinas revolution. Wasnt the central task of Chinas twentieth century revolutionary politics the deconstruction and destruction of class relations, whose stable character had been formed through a history of violence and unequal property relations? In this respect, we need an optic of political dynamism to understand the significance of the struggles and sacrifices Yu Luoke faced in his opposition to identitarian and blood lineage discourse during the Cultural Revolution. His struggle makes clear that depoliticization wasnt external to the dynamism and trend-lines of twentiethcentury politics, and revolutionary politics, but was intrinsic to its development. The tragedy of the Cultural Revolution was not a product of its politicization signified by political debate, theoretical investigation, autonomous social organizations, political struggles within and outside the party-state system, as well as aspects such as the spontaneity and vitality of political organization and discursive space. The tragedy was a result of depoliticization factional struggles whose binarism eliminated the possibilities for autonomous social spheres, transformed political debate into a means of power struggle, transformed a political class concept into an essentialized identitarian concept of class, etc. The struggle against identitarianism is built on upon a clear value judgment about freedom, class liberation, and the future prospects for society. For this reason, the course of this struggle cannot be interpreted as depoliticization. The only way to overcome the tragedy of this period is through understanding its dimensions of repoliticization. If we take 1989 as the final limit of the end of the Sixties, and the consolidation of a period of depoliticization, this must also imply that it could also have marked the beginning of the long road toward repoliticization. Depoliticized politics and modern society Explaining the phenomenon of depoliticization and its dynamic is a complicated task, and it cannot be analyzed within the confines of China itself. Considered in historical perspective, broad and varied currents of depoliticization arose following almost every political change: following the defeats of the French Revolution and the 1848 European revolutions, following the European and Asian Sixties, and following the social movements of 1989. In the contemporary Chinese context, concepts such as modernization, marketization, globalization, development, growth, a universalized petitbourgeois outlook, and democracy can all be seen as key concepts of a depoliticized or anti-political political ideology, the popularity of which incapacitates the populaces ability to engage in deep political reflection. The politics in the concept of depoliticization do not refer to those ever-present power struggles in national or international life and politics, but indicate, rather, political debates, political struggle, and social activism around

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specific political values and their attendant benefits. Politics, in this sense, is a sphere borne of an active subjectivity, and it can be understood in the following ways: 1. Politics is a subjective sphere, not an objective structure. For example, class has an objective existence, but its objective existence does not necessarily imply the existence of class politics. Only when class gains its own political subjectivity can class politics thrive. 2. Political activity can only exist in a dynamic subjectivity and in that subjectivitys relationality. For example, Machiavelli, in The Prince, describes how the prince, in the formation of a new political subjectivity, must first achieve his own subjectivity and representational character. Gramsci developed this concept by understanding the political party as the modern prince. In order to become a political organization, the party becomes the salient political subjectivity of modern times, with its own values and representative character, and with modes of organization and activism adapted to its time. 3. Any political subjectivity can only be maintained within relations of political subjectivity. Whatever the means by which these relations are eliminated, the result is a negation of political subjectivity. Here, I want to attempt some tentative explanations for the production of depoliticized politics. First, the development of the contemporary market economy was erected on the hypothetical separation of economy and politics. This hypothesis reflects the historical mission of the nascent bourgeoisies ending of the feudal and ruling class monopoly of, rule over, and coercive power over, politics and the economy. Schumpeter has used the concept of political exchange to describe the early bourgeois power structure. Without the substantive protection of some non-bourgeois element, the bourgeoisie would have encountered a political impasse, and would not only have been unable to lead the state, but unable to protect its own class interests. Political exchange implies a certain separation between the political and economic spheres in the capitalist period. Without this separation, there could be no exchange. From this perspective, the separation of politics and economics is not an actually existing phenomenon, but was the product of capitals drive to realize, through the process of the political power exchange, an even greater share of power. Over the long nineteenth century, the bourgeoisies objective was gradually transformed into the national and supranational organizational structuring of the market economy. With the bourgeoisies consolidation of both political and economic power, political arrangements became subordinated to the rule of the market economy itself. Thus, the political sphere became something that was both internal to but seemingly external to the sphere of economic activity. With the formal separation of the political and the economic at its core, contemporary capitalism is attempting to create a kind of self-enclosedmarket economic sphere with a depoliticized order. The historical logic of the bourgeoisies demands was formed through the small and middle entrepreneurial classs control of the state during the mercantilist period, in the transition away from noble and monarchical monopoly. In the era of finance capitalism, however, these demands were transformed into the demands for capital and its representatives, with finance capital in the leading position, to assume control of politics and society. This sort of monopolistic relationship comprised the institutionalization and legalization of the market concept of spontaneous order which had developed within neoclassical economics. It was also the institutionalization of the ideology of depoliticization. Seen from a political perspective, after the bourgeoisie, united with the proletariat and other social levels, had carried out the revolutionary overthrow of the power of the monarchy and the nobility, a kind of depoliticized programmatic national politics replaced the multiple political structures of the revolutionary period. Its content was the

The eclipse of the Sixties 692 product of political exchange through the unification of capitalist and non-capitalist elements in the ruling stratum. Due to this, political debate turned into power disputes. The key link was the birth of the concept of the neutral state, and the mechanisms for its realization. Because this unification was carried out in the capitalist manner, the unification process the political exchange itself was a depoliticizing process (for example, the legitimation, through the constitutional process, of nouveau-riche expropriation of social and national assets). This process was also the development of democracy from political to programmatic democracy, the transformation of the nation from a political space to a conventional power structure, and the gradual transformation of party politics from a representative political chess match into a power distribution mechanism within a stable power structure. In the realm of Marxist theory, the emergence of this particular state form led the classical authors directly to a separation between state power the objective of political class struggle and the sphere of the state apparatuses. So, on the one hand they admitted that the state was a repressive state apparatus, but on the other hand needed to separate the state from the state apparatuses, limiting the objectives of political class struggle to the question of state power. Thus, they made seizure of state power through political class struggle the centerpiece of the political question. However, following the retreat of political class struggle and the appearance of formal democracy as a model for state control, the difference between the state and the state apparatuses became ever more unclear. It became possible to incorporate all kinds of social and oppositional movements into the quotidian operation of the apparatus as though they were players in the national symphony. As Althusser said, In fact, i.e., in their political practice, the Marxist classics treated the state as a more complex reality than the definition given it in the Marxist theory of the State (Althusser 1971: 142). According to him, this definition of the state lacked an objective description of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). (This is differentiated from the Repressive State Apparatus. The ISAs include religion, education, the family, law, labor unions, political parties, broadcasting, the cultural sphere, etc.) He concluded that:
At a first moment, it is clear that while there is one Repressive State Apparatus, there is a plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses. At a second moment, it is clear that whereas the unified (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs in the public domain, much the larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses (in their apparent dispersion) are part, on the contrary, of the private domain. (Althusser 1971: 144)

He adds:
The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its authority. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is above the law: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. (Althusser 1971: 144)

If one were to make a comparison between the pre-capitalist state and the capitalist state, there was one dominant Ideological State Apparatus the Church (Althusser 1971: 151), while in the latter period the dominant shifted to educational ISAs (the School-Family couple). The central ISA system in socialist-era China comprised the Ministry of Propaganda, Ministry of Culture, and Ministry of Education. This system combined the functions of the ISAs and RSA, but the ISA was foremost. In contemporary China, although this apparatus strives to implement the ideological function, it faces obstacles in achieving ideological conditioning. Therefore, to a great extent it has turned into a Repressive State Apparatus its control of media and other ideological spheres is not primarily

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ideological, but rather is based on the deideologized requirement to preserve stability. Because all State Apparatuses had penetrated deeply into the institutions of daily life, the fundamental existential character of the State itself assumed a kind of depoliticized political form. Althussers analysis is built on two assumptions: the separation of the state and government; and the separation of the general state apparatus from the ISAs. According to this separation, political struggle is class struggle for state power, and victory in this struggle depends on engaging in the political class struggle within the sphere of the ISAs. Politics, here, remains within the sphere of the state. In this sense, the concept of the ISAs because church, schools, political parties, and so on, all revert to the sphere of the state is not able to constitute a separation between politics and the state.2 In the history of capitalism, critical thought and critical culture arose in those periods where political culture had been most stimulated: nineteenth-century socialist movements, party politics, political factional splits, twentieth-century national liberation struggles, student movements, intellectual movements, workers movements and revolutionary movements all could be conceived as politicization processes. Their primary goal was the defeat of the natural state of capitalist hegemony. But what is capitalisms natural state? Based on the principle of separation between politics and economics, and disparaging non-capitalist institutions and forms of labor allocation as political interference, neoclassical economics, which has dominated the mainstream since the end of the 1970s, has explained the unlimited expansion of the market economy into the political, cultural, and other spheres as a kind of depoliticized natural, and spontaneous process. There is a point in classical political economy that needs re-emphasis: all productive activity depends on the reproduction of the means of production; otherwise it cant even last a year. In a discussion of the reproduction of the means of production, Althusser wrote:
Here we are entering a domain which is both very familiar (since Capital Volume Two) and uniquely ignored. The tenacious obviousness (ideological obviousness of an empiricist type) of the point of view of production alone, or even of that of mere productive practice (itself abstract in relation to the process of production) are so integrated into our everyday consciousness that it is extremely hard, not to say impossible, to raise oneself to the point of view of reproduction. Nevertheless, everything outside this point of view remains abstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) even at the level of production, and, a fortiori, at that of mere practice (Althusser 1971: 127128).

From the point of view of reproduction, depoliticization removes the production of the conditions of production (reproduction of the means and forces of production) from the process of production, thereby abstracting the production process. For example, in order to preserve the reproduction process in Chinas coastal zones, it was necessary to create a market for cheap labor. This relied on changing the relationship between city and province, including the destruction of rural village social relationships and conditions of rural production, which forced large numbers of peasants to migrate to the coastal cities. But in order to accustom new rural migrant workers to the new conditions of production, it would not only be necessary to allow them to learn techniques of production, but to transform themselves into a model-free labor force adapted to the current character of production. Yet in what ways have the media and experts discussed the peasant migrant worker question? First, in discussions of the development of coastal production and its relation to the process of free movement of labor and the wage question, it seems that rural migrant workers are viewed merely as a natural feature of reproduction, and not a product of the transformation of relations in

The eclipse of the Sixties 694 the whole of society brought on by efforts to adapt to new conditions of reproduction. This mode of analysis is a classic reflection of this sort of depoliticized ideological view of reproduction. Second, if we consider rural migrant workers under the rubric of equal rights of citizens, there are two sides to the demand for equality: one is this demands utility in demolishing the traditional identity-based division between city and countryside; on the other hand, however, it allows, through this very process, for the interpellation of rural dwellers as laboring subjects in accordance with the new conditions of reproduction. Labor is able to be a subject because the laborer, assigned certain conditions (conditions of reproduction) makes his or her choice about becoming part of the low-wage labor force independently. The end result of the abstraction of the process of production (concealing conditions of reproduction) is the consolidation of the dominant role played by developmentalism. From the perspective of twentiethcentury history, the process of depoliticization is contained within two Cold-War era social orders. The socialist movements and the national liberation movements werent purely political movements. Through revolution and the establishment of independent states, they reorganized economic relations and the forms of society. Western party politics, on the other hand, quickly became a means to control the economy. In differing respects, they altered capitalist monopolistic relations as well as the basic shape of the world division of labor under colonialism. This is the age in which developmentalist ideology reached its dominant position. This saw the core elements of twentieth century politics social movements, student movements, party politics, labor movements, peasant movements, and the national organization of the economy as leading in the direction of marketization, nationalism, and globalization. Within the developmentalist tide, national intervention in the economy during the crisis of capitalism, social upheaval, and even revolutionary upheaval were all seen as destructive of the natural course of the market economy. In this sense, the neoclassical economists concept of a spontaneously self-ordering market is not merely a depoliticizing euphemism for monopoly relations, but is an aggressively positivistic, and destructively motivated depoliticized political ideology. Therefore, at the heart of politicization is the destruction of this natural state in theory and in practice, using de-naturalization to combat depoliticization. Contemporary Chinas depoliticization process is yet another kind of political exchange process: the old political elites efforts to transform themselves into representatives of special-interest groups while still holding onto political power. Thus, special interest groups and transnational capital must pass through a depoliticizing exchange process in order to get the support of the power apparatus. Because marketization reform is a process promoted by the state, multiple aspects of the state power apparatus are, in the name of modernization and reform, collapsed into the economic sphere. (In a state-party system, this must include the political party apparatus as well.) Thus the political exchange becomes a depoliticized power exchange. Its primary form has been the reform of property rights, which has led to large-scale interest-motivated reorganization. Corruption is not only a necessary product of this systemic transformation, but in public opinion it also references the critique of the much deeper level of inequality and injustice in the asset transfer process. The corrupt actions carried out in the name of the definition or regulation of property rights can from one perspective be seen as a legitimation of the political exchange process, which use the category of legitimacy to depoliticize the property right transfer process. This new development proceeds from the following preconditions: 1. In the marketization and privatization process, the boundary between the power elite and the bourgeoisie is growing gradually more indistinct. The political party is thus changing from a

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class-based organization to a declassed organization. 2. Under the conditions of globalization, some of the economic administration functions of the nation state are linked to supranational market organizations (WTO), so that a globalized, depoliticized, legal order is consolidated. 3. Because the market and the state gradually become absorbed into the sphere of neutralization,3 divisions within the public sphere over questions of development become technical divisions about market adjustment mechanisms and the rate of State regulation. Thus, political lines between right and left disappear. These developments began at the end of the 1970s, flourished in the 1980s, and were given a historical foundation in the clamor of neoliberal globalization. I consider the contemporary worlds depoliticization process to be a political phenomenon produced in this historical transformation: through new political arrangements that were accomplished under the rubric of depoliticization, new social inequality was naturalized. In this respect, the critique of this unequal societal arrangement must realize a repoliticization and moreover a destruction of the dominant role of depoliticization as its precondition. Three components of hegemony and the political ideology of depoliticization A common concern for contemporary critical intellectuals has been how to break the logic of depoliticization under current historical conditions. When reviewing the political culture of the 1960s, these intellectuals discover that the key concepts animating the political culture of the period progressive and conservative; left and right, etc are now either useless or of ambiguous value. And because of this, many opposition movements in the world either become weak and ineffectual or become co-opted by new styles of hegemonic power. Therefore, to break the logic of depoliticized politics, we must analyze the new formation of contemporary hegemony. According to my analysis, there are three components of hegemony, with a complicated historical relationship to each other. First, as clarified in Gramscis concept of hegemony and Althussers concept of the ISA, hegemony and the sovereign states monopoly of violence are mutually implicated. This theoretical concept of hegemony was produced in the western Marxist tradition as an attack on the capitalist states legitimation practices. Gramsci identified two modes of the operation of hegemony: domination and intellectual/moral leadership. Domination is in the sphere of force, while hegemony refers to the ruling groups strategy of turning deep conflicts into common problems, so that it gains extraordinary powers for itself. According to his explanation in The Prison Notebooks, the state is a particular form of collective structure, whose aim is to create, to the greatest degree, the most advantageous conditions for its continuation. The development and expansion of this special group is seen as, and is actually present as, the motive force for the expansion and development of the states total capability. In his research into Marxs German Ideology, Althusser proposed the question of ideology and the ISAs, which, at the theoretical level, deepened Gramscis approach to the question of hegemony. Western Marxisms analysis of the concept of hegemony exposed the structure of capitalist legitimation and its crises, especially the essential quality of depoliticized programmatic politics in the capitalist countries, and the accompanying crisis of democracy. Second, the concept of hegemony has, from the beginning, been closely connected to inter-state relations. For this reason, my analytical method is not that of many western scholars who want to differentiate Gramscis concept of hegemony from the critique of the international hegemon within Chinese political thought. Rather, it is an attempt to reconstruct the theoretical and historical links that should have originally existed between the two. Mao Zedongs concept of the hegemon

The eclipse of the Sixties 696 was always deployed within the sphere of global relations. Although his description of the USA and the USSR as hegemonic nations was a part of the systemic relations of the three worlds, its main political implication is not limited to positing the third world as subject which, through links and breaks with elements of the second world, would oppose the bipolar hegemons and form a new kind of international relations. It was also, through theoretical investigation, political debate, and moral appeals, to break the ideological power and prestige of the American and Soviet systems. Thus, the practice of counterhegemony implies a contestation of cultural authority. The ancient Chinese classics The Spring and Autumn Annals and Master Zuos Commentary use the concepts of ducal authority and hegemonic authority to differentiate two types of power in the ancient states of Qi, Jin, Chu, Qin, and other states: control by force, and domination through rites and rituals. Although the concept of hegemony in the Chinese-speaking world normally refers to political, economic, or military domination and control, in varying degrees it also involves the question of ideology. As for the legitimation of rule, in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (c. 722 221 BCE), although the establishment of hegemonic authority was a product of a crisis in royal ritual power and the crisis situation itself created the conditions for the legitimation of hegemonic authority the construction of hegemonic power also implied other vassal states recognition of the ruling authority. This understanding of the Spring and Autumn Annals is evident in the work of generations of scholars. For this reason, in the Chinese cultural sphere, the concept of vassal-state hegemony is not unconnected to Gramscis concept of hegemony. In Western political traditions, the concept of hegemony as the legitimate ruling authority is related to hegemony in international politics. In The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi linked Gramscis concept of hegemony with Machiavellis concept of power. Relating the sphere of national ideological hegemony to international political relations, he opened up another way to link these two concepts of hegemony. In Machiavelli, power links consent and force: power implies the use of armed force or the threat of armed force; consent implies moral authority. Just as by virtue of its hegemonic power, the USA has become a model of depoliticization, and likewise a model for modernization, marketization, globalization, development, democracy, etc, so has it also acquired, within the global sphere, a certain degree of intellectual and moral authority. This is what western political scientists refer to as soft power. American hegemony is built, then, on the multiple foundations of a monopoly of violence, economic monopoly, and ideological authority. In the invasions following September 11, Americas absolute military force and unilateralism led it into a crisis of leadership, hastening a turning point in the growing solidarity of a range of global forces united in de-Americanization. In this sense, just as the process of depoliticization has national and international dimensions, the possibility of breaking this depoliticized political settlement also exists within these two dimensions. Thirdly, hegemony not only relates to national or international relations, but is intimately connected to trans-national and supra-national capitalism. Under the conditions of capitalist globalization, just as hegemony must be defined in the national sphere and in the sphere of international relations, we must define a type of hegemony which, while existing within these two spheres, also exists within the sphere of market relations, transcending these two spheres. Contemporary market relations are elements of our daily life worlds, but they cannot be delimited by national borders or national authority. Classical political economists emphasized that the process of reproduction was an inexhaustible and unending chain, a global process, something that has never been more clear than today. At a time when market ideology, dominated by finance capital, constitutes a type of hegemony, many people see market expansion and political domination as a path of historical progress with bene-

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fits for everyone. This renders the political implications of market expansion and domination difficult to analyze. Neoclassical economics is itself a textbook case of globalized ideological hegemony its principles penetrate the rules and regulations of a variety of transnational practices and circulation mechanisms, such as the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), the WTO, and other transnational organizational forms for regulating and synchronizing market integration. All of these function as Ideological Global Apparatuses, although of course they are not only ideological apparatuses, for they have the double power of economic domination and moral domination. The most direct expressions of the market ideological apparatus are the media, advertising, supermarkets, and all other sorts of commercial mechanisms. These mechanisms are not only commercial, but ideological. Their greatest power is in their appeals to the senses and to common sense, appeals to ordinariness and sensory needs which turn people into consumers, willing to voluntarily follow market logic in their daily lives. Market ideology and market ideological apparatuses have a strong character of depoliticization. Within a social process of depoliticization, they have produced a depoliticized political ideology. In the context of globalization, we need to treat the function of hegemony and ideology within the national, international, and global (supra-national and market) spheres. The three components of hegemony discussed above do not lie in distinctive spheres: they are a mutually penetrating, mutually entangled network of power. They are internal to contemporary social mechanisms and networks, internal to human activity and beliefs. Depoliticized politics is structured just like the network of hegemony described above, an essential point for understanding contemporary Chinas intellectual and ideological situation. Contemporary ideological hegemony commonly uses internal contradictions to expand its operationality. For example, Chinas economic policy and its developmental trajectory are in fundamental accord with the historical process of capitalist globalization, and this process has produced countless economic crises, social breakdowns, and unequal conditions. However, capitalist globalization has not been viewed as a factor in the contradictions and conflicts of interest at the national level. Within the development of historical capitalism, conflicts between global power and mercantilist power (state-directed national economies) have been common. For example, in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the conflict between global finance capital and the national economy was particularly salient, strengthening nation-states resolve to reconstitute a national economy or a variant thereof, such as a regional alliance. Thus, under conditions of globalization, conflicts of national interest and contradictions between national elites and economic elites are sometimes intensified. In order to maximize its advantage, global hegemonic power will commonly capitalize on a particular advantage at the national level to challenge political authority. When political authority becomes conscious of the threat posed to it and to other linked social forces, it will immediately appeal to the national interest or some like standard in order to resist this internal challenge. From the 1970s to the 1980s, with the flexibility allowed by the national ruling ideologys new openness, the legitimation of social thought and social positions was closely connected to challenges to the ISAs. At the time, this was an important basis for defining autonomy and liberalization. However, this de-nationalization process within intellectual and social critical positions did not achieve our desired result of repoliticization. Rather, it was reincorporated into a different level of the depoliticization process. This de-nationalization process arose during a period of global historical transformation, when the sovereign authority of the nation state was challenged by forces of globalization, so that the autonomy and legitimation of liberalization captured by the slogan of de-nationalization were simultaneously bound to the consolidation of international ideological hegemony.

The eclipse of the Sixties 698 In fact, de-nationalization refers to the outcome of fierce conflict between two different national power blocs, two political systems, two ideologies. Within this process, the nation to be de-nationalized referred only to a nation the socialist nation as recognized from a particular ideological standpoint. De-nationalization, therefore, is simply the process of identification with a different national hegemonic form. In contemporary China, anti-socialist ideology uses the image of anti-statism to cover up its inner connection to this new national form and its legitimation. But this is not simply an anti-statist State (or Imperial) Ideology. The above analysis of the multiple dimensions of the concept of hegemony demonstrates that this new form of state ideology has a supranational dimension as well, which often expresses itself as an attack on the state from the supra-national position. This de-nationalization process was accompanied by an ideological depoliticization, which was naturally incorporated into the new form of ideological hegemony that privileged modernization, globalization, the market, and development. Because globalization and marketization had the power to destroy traditional social bonds, its alteration of the sovereign relations that had gradually developed over the nineteenth century created an urgent need for national mechanisms for social stability and market functionality. De-statification and anti-statist positions, then, seem, self-contradictorily, to be in accord with legal institutionalization, standardization, and other slogans, all of which are state-building processes formed by the requisites of property rights. Denationalization is equivalent to depoliticization because it presumes a gradual confusion of the distinction between state power and the state apparatuses. As described above, political struggles generally center on the fundamental questions of the control of state power and the direction of state power. Once the distinction between state power and the state apparatuses is erased, the political space for, and urgency of, political struggle is diminished, and political problems are turned into a non-political or depoliticized process of de-nationalization. The retreat of the state championed by neoliberalism and neoclassical economics is a classic depoliticizing political proposition. The above discussion allows us to conclude that the consolidation of autonomy and new forms of hegemonic relations (political, economic, cultural, and ideological hegemony) in relation to the state is a product of the same historical fluctuations, and that there is at least a historical parallel in the dissolution of one level of relation (national) and the adoption of others (national, international, and transnational). The interpenetration of global and state power makes it difficult to determine ones position relative to national or transnational hegemonic power. This is the reason why so many opposition movements are oppositional in name only. For example, during the Iraq war, many people including some socalled leftists, liberals, and opposition movements supported this unjustifiable war of aggression. They may have thought of themselves as the opposition, but consciously or unconsciously became coconspirators of the organs of world hegemony. In another instance, two so-called Chinese dissidents met with President Bush in the White House as Christians, proclaiming their opposition movement under the banner of God and imperial hegemonic power. In fact, many of contemporary societys social movements (including most NGO movements) are themselves carrying out a depoliticization process. Either they are constrained by limited economic objectives or they are absorbed by the state apparatuses, or they are constrained by the demands of the logic of national or international foundations. Not only are they unable to offer different understandings of development, democracy, or popular participation, but they are transformed into cogs in the gears of various national or transnational mechanisms. A pressing issue of our time is thus how to overcome the social movements self-imposed depoliticization, and how to link a critical internationalism with political struggles within the nationstate framework.

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Today, any analysis of power must be made in relation to a network of power. Any fashioning of opposition from a unitary perspective is inadequate. If we consider the penetration of the three forms of hegemony into our social structure and they are not seamlessly bound the national or transnational sphere of this concept must be further investigated. To dismantle the totalizing quality of these spheres, to find within them fissures, and new spaces for political struggle, this would be the necessary path towards a dismantling of the fundamental logic of depoliticized politics. For example, Chinese reform is a process of marketization under conditions of separation of state powers: between the central government, regional governments, and various state agencies there are substantial conflicts of interest. There are very complicated patterns of relations between various branches of state apparatuses, the national and international markets, and other social groups. These different patterns of relationships generate both mutually beneficial and conflictual relations, which are manifest in the political gamesmanship and multiple directions of public policy-making. Because of this, we can see in many state actions contradictory orientations, and discern the coexistence of unity and conflict in decisions at multiple organizational levels and in a variety of state organs. In this sense, to take the state as the single unit of analysis is a particularly ideological construct. Contemporary globalization and its institutions encourage the transnationalization of finance, production, and consumption, but at the same time strive to limit immigration to the framework of labor demand and state sovereignty, thus creating separation and competition between laborers in all regions. Faced with the contradictions inherent in the phenomenon of globalization, we must not retreat into a nationalist mode, but must rather redevelop a critical internationalism in order to expose the inner contradictions of globalization. In China, because of the huge conflict between the practice of reform and socialist values, there remain internal contradictions between the reform movement and the ISAs. Due to this contradiction, the ISAs have already or are in the process of mutating into common state apparatuses, relying on force or administrative authority to carry out a system of control. In this respect, the Chinese ISAs do not operate according to specific values or ideologies, but according to a logic of de-ideologization and depoliticization, even though they make their appeal in the language of ideology. And for this very reason, in the face of depoliticization, contemporary Chinas left and right wings are commonly left with their hands tied, strategy-free. The explanation for this is simple: this states operations can no longer be evaluated or assessed in traditional left or right modes. Based primarily on the requirement of legitimization, the Chinese Communist Party in the post Cultural Revolution period, while thoroughly repudiating the Cultural Revolution, did not thoroughly repudiate either the Chinese revolution or socialist values, nor the summation of modern revolutionary tradition Mao Zedong thought. This created a double effect. First, the socialist tradition functioned as an internal restraint on state reforms. Every time the state-party system made a major policy decision or policy shift, it had to be done in dialogue with this tradition. At minimum, it had to couch the announcement in a particular language designed to harmonize the policy transformation and the tradition. Secondly, the socialist tradition gave workers, peasants, and other social collectivities a legitimate means to contest or negotiate over the states unreasonable or unfair marketization or privatization procedures. Thus, within the historical processes of radical negation of the Cultural Revolution and farewell to the revolution, a reactivation of twentieth-century Chinas historical legacy also provides the opening for the development of a future politics. This opening is not a simple doorway back to the twentieth century, but is a starting point in a search of a means to break the totalizing hold of depoliticized political ideology and depoliticized politics in a post-revolutionary period (the era of the end of the revolutionary era).

The eclipse of the Sixties 700 In a situation where all forms of twentieth-century political subjectivity party, class, nation face the crisis of depoliticization, the search for new forms of political subjectivity must be accompanied by a redefinition of the boundaries of politics itself. If we can say that at the heart of depoliticization is the subversion and weakening of political values, then the road to repoliticization must lead through a reconstruction of political values, an activation of our political space and political lives, and the destruction of the order of depoliticized politics and de-ideologized ideology. This is the true significance of revisiting the Sixties today. Notes
1. At the end of 2004, I accepted an invitation from the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Bologna, where I spent three months as a senior researcher. During that time, I had deep and wide-ranging discussions with Professors Alessandro Russo and Claudia Pozzana, who gave me a number of essays, including How to Translate Cultural Revolution for my perusal. Our discussions touched on many problems, but the Cultural Revolution and depoliticization were the central topics. I benefited considerably from these discussions, and this essay is a product of those discussions, and my later reflections on them. I owe Alessandro Russo and Claudia Pozzana my deep thanks, for without meeting and discussing with them, this essay could not have been written. For another view of depoliticization, see Carl Schmitts analysis, which links the depoliticization process to the four-century long history of successive spheres of neutralization in European thought and culture (Schmitt 1993) . Schmitt, for whom the central practical political problem in the 1920s was the containment of the rising power of the working class, sought a new form of relationship between the political and the economic, neither laissez-faire nor social-democratic. The unsystematic interpenetration of the political and the economic during the 1920s was, from this perspective, a mistake and a danger. Schmitts concept of neutralization, although specific to Western intellectual and political history, could have utility in other contexts. See preceding footnote.

References
Althusser, Louis (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation) in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Ben Brewster, trans., Monthly Review Press, 127188. Schmitt, Carl (1993) The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations, (1929) Telos 96, Summer, 130143.

Authors biography WANG Hui is professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsing Hua University, Beijing, where he also heads the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. An executive editor of the monthly journal, Du-Shu, Wang Hui is a leading intellectual in China. His major research areas include Chinese intellectual history and modern Chinese literature. His books include The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought ( ) (2004), Chinas New Order (2003), For a New Asia ( ) (2003). He serves on the board of Positions: East Asian Cultural Critique, Critical Asian Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, The Traces, Twenty Fist Century ( ), Chinas Scholarship ( ). Contact address: Department of Literature and Language, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, Peoples Republic of China Translators biography Christopher Connery, editor of this issue, is Professor of Literature, Cultural Studies, and History at the University of California Santa Cruz, USA, where he also co-directs the Center for Cultural Studies. His published work includes Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China, and numerous articles on capitalist ideologies of space, and the global 1960s. Contact address: 104 Pine Place, Santa Cruz CA, 95060, USA

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