中国智囊 王沪宁 支持“美国精神终结”

王沪宁支持“美国精神终结”

王沪宁为未来豪赌 但不会赢

2022-10-25 22:20:45  大纪元 

 

美国政治圈的神秘学者N. S. Lyons（简称里昂）近日撰文说，习近平出人意料地让王沪宁继续连任，是因为他们在打赌未来十年世界的走向。　

2022年10月23日，王沪宁与新一届中国共产党政治局常委和中外记者一起参加新闻活动。

　　里昂表示，中国共产党的新政治局常委名单揭晓基本上是中国的政治超级碗，每五年举行一次，每次都伴随着更多的党内清洗。

　　很多媒体报道二十大上都集中在，习近平如何赢得全面胜利，消除他所有的派别对手，并建立他对中国的完全控制，还有作为习近平完全统治地位的一个浓缩象征，在宣布人事之前将前任领导人胡锦涛毫不客气地从座位上架起来，请出大会堂。

　　但他二十大上主要的一件事，就是王沪宁——控制中共意识形态的幕后策划者的走势。

　　里昂说，这几个月来，许多有经验的中国观察家都表示，王沪宁要卸任、退休，他已经失去了影响力，而习近平也希望王沪宁离开，以任命一个新的、更年轻的人；王沪宁标志性的“共同富裕”理念已经失信并被排挤等等。

　　但到中共二十大新常委露面后，外界才发现，许多预想会获得升迁的官员都落榜了，但王沪宁却还在，他的“共同富裕”理念也跟着回来了。

　　王沪宁是中共七常委之一，也是中共最顶尖的意识形态理论家。习近平每个标志性的政治概念都是他提出来的，包括“中国梦”、反腐运动、“一带一路”倡议、战狼外交，甚至“习近平思想”。

　　里昂表示，在王沪宁继续留在中共最高领导机构之后，了解王沪宁的思想将对外界了解今天中国的方向至关重要。

　　“这一点不仅因王沪宁通过了政治（清洗）存活而得以加强，还有通过习近平在党代会上发表的讲话（或者可以说是王沪宁的工作报告）得到了强调，其中充满了王沪宁的个人色彩，例如经常鼓吹将马克思主义的所谓‘真理’与中国传统文化相结合，为中国文明创造一个新的思想基础。”他写道。

　　里昂表示，更广泛地说，习近平的讲话说出了一个对全世界都很重要的事实——习近平和王沪宁眼中的当今世界存在的威胁，与西方眼中的威胁完全不同。

　　“对他们来说，‘自由国际秩序’不是秩序或繁荣的来源，而是关系到生存。他们非常不希望中国变得像西方一样。”里昂说，“现在，他们愿意不惜一切代价，甚至牺牲持续的经济增长，努力将中国和他们的（中共）政权与这种影响的力量隔离开来，确保其（眼中所谓的）安全。”

　　“这是一个可能不会得到回报的赌注，但他们死心塌地地要打这个赌——它将决定未来十年的世界走向。”他补充说。

　　里昂解释说，为何这个赌注不会赢。“因为在今天的世界上，美国化的新自由主义的影响伴随着每一桶进口石油、每一个流行的数据字节，以及可能每一个呼吸的空气分子……甚至中国人珍视的血液都不可能是安全的！”（意思是不受影响）

　　里昂于2021年10月在“钯金杂志”（Palladium Magazine）发表了一篇研究王沪宁的长篇文章，该文在美国政界流传，因此受到关注。外界只知道，他是人在华盛顿特区的学者，但不知道其真实姓名。他的文章发表在Substack内容平台上。

　　因为领导人的主要助手与领导人一样重要，而且往往这些助手会在事件发生前，数月或数年就制定路线。

　　根据里昂的观察，如果仔细观察习近平在重要行程或重要会议上的任何照片，人们很可能会在背景中发现王沪宁，他从来没有离开领导人太远。王沪宁同样是习近平的前任——江泽民“三个代表”以及胡锦涛“和谐社会”的幕后推手。

　　王沪宁在1989年从美国访问半年回国后，逐渐成为抵制全球自由主义的主要人物。

　　他赞同“美国精神终结”的论断，并希望创造新的中共核心价值观，抵抗西方自由主义。

　　里昂说，王沪宁现在似乎已经说服了习近平，他们别无选择，只能采取严厉的行动来阻止西式经济和文化自由资本主义。

　　于是习近平在2021年1月发动了“共同富裕”运动。

　　不过，自始自终，里昂都认为，王沪宁的思想运动终会破产。他表示，历史上所谓的“灵魂工程师”大多都失败了，相比之下，王沪宁设计和创造的所谓新社会价值观赌注的成功概率几乎为零。

王沪宁：胜利背后的担忧

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning

https://theupheaval.substack.com/ 

Oct 11, 2021 By N.S. Lyons, 

大概是外网上一篇写的很好的文章，翻译了一下贴在这里吧（其实是主要依赖有道翻译机翻的 lol，然后人工整理了三四遍，读起来应该没什么问题）。

王沪宁：胜利背后的担忧

2021年8月，赵薇失踪了。中国最著名的女演员，一夜之间从公众视野中消失。但赵薇的“消失”行动要彻底得多：她就从互联网上突然“人间蒸发”了。8600万粉丝的微博主页下线，她的粉丝网站也是如此。在流媒体网站上搜索她的许多电影和电视节目，都没有任何结果。赵薇的名字，被从她出演或执导的电影的演职人员名单中抹去，取而代之的是一个空格。提到她名字的网上讨论也被审查。

突然间，这位45岁的名人在网络上的痕迹几乎荡然无存。

类似的事情无独有偶。随着中国政府监管机构宣布“加大打击力度”，其他中国艺人也开始消失。打击的目的是摒弃“低俗网红”宣扬的低俗生活方式，并“解决网络粉丝文化造成混乱的问题”。紧随其后的是那些模仿韩国男子明星组合的、追求女性化或中性化“美丽”的明星——他们被戏称为“小鲜肉”或“小鲜肉”。政府誓言要“坚决终结娘娘腔男人出现在中国易受影响的年轻人的屏幕上”。

赵薇和她在娱乐圈的不幸同僚们，被卷入了某些更大的事情中：政府突然出台的一系列新政策，正在颠覆中国人的生活——国媒称这是一个“深刻的变革”。这一转变被官方称为中国国家主席习近平的“共同富裕”运动，它沿着两条平行的路线进行：一是针对私营经济的大规模监管和打击；二是从上到下地对中国文化进行大规模重组。

但是，为什么会发生这种“深刻的转变”呢？或者，即使发生了，为什么会是现在？大多数分析都集中在一个人：习近平他看似无穷无尽的政治控制欲。然而，这确实是一个非常有权势的人几十年来思考和计划的顶峰——但这个人不是习近平。

更清晰一点，这个人会是王沪宁。

不为人知的出山

王沪宁更喜欢在暗处思考，而不是在聚光灯下讲话。这位失眠症患者和工作狂，他的前朋友和同事形容这位戴着眼镜、说话温和的政治理论家“性格内向，极其谨慎”。上世纪90年代初，在中国前领导人江泽民的多次恳求下，这位才华横溢、年轻有为的学者放弃了学术研究，转而投身中国共产党的政治事业。但他渴望走儒学学者的传统政治道路，远离舞台上粉墨登场式的交锋政治。当他最终这么做的时候，王几乎切断了与他以前的所有联系，停止了出版和公开讲话，并对自己立下了毒誓：永远不与外国人说话。在这种有意为之的不透明面纱背后，难怪西方很少有人知道王沪宁，更别说私下认识他了。

然而，王沪宁可以说是当今最具影响力的“公知”。

身为中共七人政治局常委的一员，他被据传是中国最高的意识形态理论的“奠基人”——这种身影甚至出现在每一个习近平曾提出的政治概念里。“中国梦”、反腐运动、一带一路计划、更加自信的外交政策、甚至“习思想”——检查任何习近平的照片，每一个重要的出访、每一个关键的会议，你永远会发现可王沪宁在暗处，在永远不会远离领导者的暗处。

因此，王沪宁被比作中国历史上的著名军师，如诸葛亮和韩非(历史学家称韩非为“中国的马基雅维利”)，他们同样是皇位背后强有力的战略顾问和军师——在中国文学中，这个职位被称为“帝师”。在西方，这样的人物就像éminence grise(“灰色的显赫人物”)一样地位显赫，例如特伦布雷、塔列朗、梅特涅、基辛格、弗拉基米尔•普京的顾问苏尔科夫等。

但王沪宁的非凡之处在于，他不仅为一位，而是为三位中国前最高领导人担任“帝师”的角色——这其中包括为江泽民“三个代表”思想和胡锦涛的“和谐社会与科学发展观”起笔。

在中国共产党派系政治的残酷世界里，这是一个前所未有的壮举。王被招募进江泽民的“上海帮”。而作为敌对派系，习近平于2012年取得政权后，无情地清洗了许多知名人士，如前公安部部长周永康和前公安部副部长孙立军，最后都被关进了监狱。与此同时，胡锦涛辐射下的“团派”也被严重边缘化。习的派系已经统一控制了整个朝野，而王沪宁依然健在：这一事实，比其他任何事实都更能揭示出他无懈可击政治手腕的深度。

中国的“灰色精英”在共同繁荣运动中留下的印记是明确无误的。虽然现在很难确定王沪宁到底相信什么，但至少他曾经是一位非常多产的作家，出版了近20本书和大量的文章。这些作品中的思想，与当今中国发生的事情之间的明显连续性和预见性，说明了北京是如何通过王沪宁的眼睛来看待世界的。

文化竞争力

当其他中国青少年在文革(1966-76年)的动荡岁月里“下乡”挖沟种田时，王沪宁在家乡上海附近的一所精英外语培训学校学习法语，他整天阅读被禁止传阅的外国文学名著——这些都是其老师的主意。1955年，他出生于山东一个革命家庭，年轻时体弱多病，爱读书；这一点，再加上他的家庭关系，似乎使他免于苦役。

当中国关闭的大学们于1978年重新开放，王沪宁是为数不多的在最早恢复的全国高考中与数百万人竞争，并最终回到高等学府的人之一。他以惊人的成绩度过了中国顶尖学府之一——上海复旦大学的学习生涯。尽管他从未完成学士学位，但还是被录取为该校久负盛名的国际政治方向的硕士。

他在复旦完成的论文工作——也是他的第一本书——追溯了西方国家主权概念从古至今的发展，包括从吉尔伽美什到苏格拉底、亚里士多德、奥古斯丁、马基雅维利、霍布斯、卢梭、孟德斯鸠、黑格尔、马克思，并将他们的观点同中国的观念作了对比。这项工作将成为他未来关于民族国家和国际关系的许多理论的基础。

而王沪宁也从此开始了他生命中另一项核心工作：探索文化、传统信念和民族价值结构对政治稳定的重要作用。

王沪宁在1988年的一篇文章《中国变化中的政治文化的结构》(The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture)中阐述了这些观点，而这篇文章后来也成为他被引用最多的作品之一。在这篇文章中，他认为共产党必须迫切考虑社会的“软实力”(文化、价值观、态度)和“硬实力”(经济、系统、制度)之间的辩证关系，必须理解两者是如何深刻影响一个政党、一个国家的政治命运。虽然看上去这是一个直截了当的想法，但这明显是对正统马克思主义的大胆突破。

中国在邓小平的领导下，不断地向世界开放。而王沪宁认为一个国家的“转型”要从“生产的经济、消费的经济的转型”过渡到“精神导向的文化、面向物质文化的转型”和“从集体主义文化到独立主义文化的转型”。

同时，他认为“中国特色社会主义”的现代化实际上使中国没有任何真正的文化根基。他警告称:“中国最近的结构中没有核心价值。”，而这只会瓦解社会和政治的凝聚力。

他认为这种状态极其不稳定。他在文章中警告：“现如今我过的政治文化的地位……受到文化大革命的影响，脱离了产生这种文化的根源。从社会需求、社会价值观和社会关系的角度来看，曾在战争中确立的政治文化思想，其地位也在一点点瓦解”。因此，他得出了一个结论：“采用古板教条的马克思主义，其结果并不总是积极的。”

他说,“自1949年以来,我们对我国古典和现代意识形态的核心价值观进行了批判，但对自身核心价值观的塑造却没有给予足够的重视。”因此“我们必须创造核心价值。”他总结道:“如果可以，我们必须将(中国的)传统价值观的灵活性与(西方和马克思主义的)现代精神结合起来。”

但在改革开放的非常时期里，他仍然希望在中国自由主义可以发挥积极作用。他建议可以让“现代民主精神和人文主义扎根和成长到我国的传统文化，扎根到需要它们的地方。”

站在这个角度看，王沪宁可谓是中国现代“开眼看世界”的第一人。但他没有意识到，有些事情可能在不断地发生着改变。

危机暗流的美国社会

同样是在1988年，30 岁的王沪宁以前所未有的速度成为了复旦最年轻的正教授，获得了令人垂涎的奖学金(由美国政治科学协会提供)，在美国做了6个月的访问学者。由于对美国充满好奇，王便充分利用了这次机会，像中国的托克维尔(Alexis de Tocqueville)一样，在美国四处游历并访问了30多个城市和近20所大学。

他的发现深深困扰着他，并永久地改变了他对西方世界及其思潮的看法。

他在1991年出版的America Against America一书中记录了自己的观察——这本回忆录后来成为他最著名的作品。在书中，他惊讶于华盛顿街头营地里无家可归的人，惊讶于纽约和旧金山贫困黑人社区失控的毒品犯罪，以及惊讶于那些似乎已经融入并接管了政府职责的资本和公司。最后他总结道，美国面临着一种“不可阻挡的危机暗流”。这种暗流由社会矛盾产生，包括贫富之间、白人与黑人之间、民主与寡头权力之间、平等主义与阶级特权之间、个人权利与集体责任之间、传统文化和现代文化思潮碰撞以及种种美国社会层出不穷的矛盾。

但他认为，尽管美国人能够意识到他们面临着“复杂的社会和文化问题”，但他们“倾向于把这些问题视为科学和技术问题”，需要分开解决。他认为这种策略不会起任何作用，因为他们的问题实际上都不可避免地互相关联并且有着相同的根源。而这便来自于现代美国自由主义核心中激进的虚无主义和个人主义。

他发现:“组成美国社会的基本单元是个人”。这与亚里士多德所说的“家庭”相违背。与此同时，在美国体系中，“一切事物都具有两重性，高度商品化的魅力无处不在”。人的肉体、性、知识、政治、权力和法律都可能成为商品化的目标。这种商品化，在许多方面腐蚀了社会，并导致了许多严重的社会问题。最后“美国经济体系制造了人类的孤独，同时也带来了巨大的不平等”。因此，“虚无主义已经成为美国的方式，这对文化发展和美国精神是一个致命的冲击。”

此外，他认为面对新兴理念的挑战，美国精神正面临严峻的挑战。回顾他所访问的大学，并结合艾伦•布鲁姆《美国心灵的封闭》一书中的观点，他注意到美国“对传统西方价值观一无所知的年轻一代”并不想深入了解启蒙运动时期的自由理性主义，并积极地拒绝接受其文化遗产。“如果价值体系崩溃了”他想，“社会体系该如何维持下去?”

他认为，当面对像吸毒成瘾这样的重大社会问题时，美国这个个体化、孤立和沮丧的社会会发现自己面临着一个无法克服的问题，因为它不再有任何连贯的政治理念作为基础去进行任何抵抗。

曾经对美国充满幻想的王沪宁，在1989年初回到中国，被提拔为复旦大学国际政治系的系主任，并成为自由主义的主要反对者。

他开始主张中国必须抵制全球化语境下自由主义思潮的影响。中国需要成为一个文化上统一且自信的国家，由一个强大的、中央集权的政党和国家进行治理。他将这些想法发展成众所周知的中国“新威权主义”运动——尽管王从来没有使用过这个词，他认为自己是中国的“新保守主义”。这反映出他希望将马克思主义与中国传统儒家价值观、法家政治思想、西方国家主权和权力的最高限度主义思想以及民族主义相结合，从而为长期稳定和增长奠定新的基础，使国家免受西方自由主义的影响。

“他最关心的问题是如何治理当今社会的中国”，一位复旦大学的校友回忆道，“他认为一个文化思想上坚定且强大的中央集权系统，是维系社会团结的必要条件——他整天晚上都呆在办公室里思考与之相关的问题，除此之外什么也不做。”

而王沪宁这次运气不错。在他回国几个月后，中国自身的矛盾最终以学生在天安门广场抗议的形式爆发。在中国人民解放军的坦克摧毁了自由民主在中国的萌芽之后，中共领导层开始拼命寻找一种新的政治模式，以确保政权的安全。而这让他们很快就转向了王沪宁的理论。

1993年，王沪宁带领大学辩论队在新加坡举行的一场国际比赛中获胜，赢得了全国的赞誉。当时，他引起了天安门事件后成为中共领导人的江泽民的注意。王沪宁以人性本恶的观点击败了国立台湾大学，他预言:“虽然西方现代文明可以带来物质上的繁荣，但并不一定会带来品格上的改善。”江泽民便在王沪宁40岁时，给了他一个非同凡响的任命：在中国共产党的秘密中央政策研究室中担任顾问。这让他瞬间掌握了更大的权利，也走向了更不可捉摸的高度。

王沪宁的噩梦

从现在中国互联网上的数百万人自鸣得意的角度来看，王沪宁关于美国解体的科学推断简直就是一种预言。当人们把目光投向美国时，人们不再一味地把自由民主主义的灯塔视为一个令人钦佩的、更美好更有未来的象征。

相反，人们看到的更多是王沪宁视角下的美国：去工业化、农村衰败、过度金融化、资本操控下的价格失控以及个人主义精英的出现；强大的科技垄断企业，能够击垮任何在政府管辖范围之外的新兴竞争者；巨大的经济不平等、长期失业、吸毒成瘾、无家可归和犯罪；文化混乱、历史虚无主义、家庭破裂和生育率骤降；社会性抑郁、精神疾病、孤独感和精神健康问题的不断涌现；在颓废和几乎不加掩饰的自我厌恶面前，美国民众必将会丧失对国家团结和人生目标的期望。最终剩下的，只能是巨大的内部分裂、紧张的种族局势、骚乱、暴力，以及一个似乎越来越接近分裂的国家。

动荡的2020年，动荡的美国政治。中国人开始从王沪宁的《美国对抗美国》一书中寻求答案。2021年1月6日，当一群暴徒冲进美国国会大厦时，这本书被抢购一空。当时在中国的电子商务网站上，绝版书的售价甚至高达2500美元。

但王沪宁不太可能享受这一赞誉，因为他最担心的事情已经变成了现实：他在美国发现的“不可阻挡的危机暗流”似乎已经成功地跨越了太平洋。尽管他和习近平使用严厉的手段，对政治自由主义等问题进行镇压，但王沪宁在美国发现的许多问题，却不可避免地出现在了中国的过去十年里：国家正在逐步接受新自由主义思潮下的资本主义经济模式。

“中国特色社会主义”使中国迅速成为世界上经济最不平等的社会之一。官方数据显示，中国现在的基尼系数约为0.47，比美国的0.41还要低。那1% 最富有的人口现在拥有美国 31% 的财富(与美国 35% 的财富相差无几)。但中国仍然有大多数人处于相对贫困：约6亿人的月收入仍不足人民币1,000元(155美元)。

与此同时，中国的科技巨头在国内建立了比美国同行更稳固的垄断地位，其市场份额往往接近90%。大公司的招聘经常以令人精疲力尽的“996”(早上9点到晚上9点，一周6天)为特色。另一些人则在中国“零工经济”这个庞大的现代契约奴役体系中，挣扎在被预先债务困住的人海中。据阿里巴巴称，到2036年，预计将有4亿中国人享受到这种“自主创业”的解放。

中国不断扩大的就业市场竞争如此激烈，以至于“毕业等于失业”已经成为一种社会文化基因(这两个词有一个共同的汉字)。随着年轻人涌向大城市寻找工作，农村地区已经枯竭，任由其衰落，而几个世纪以来的公共大家庭生活，在一代人的时间里被瞬间颠覆，使得老年人的生活只能依靠国家提供的边缘政策获得保障。同时，在城市里，炙手可热的资产泡沫也把年轻人无情地挤出了房地产市场。

与西方对中国固有的公共文化的陈腐印象相反，在中国，被孤立和社会信任度低下的感觉已经变得如此尖锐，以至于在经常性发生的一系列社会热点事件背后，总有孤单而失败的灵魂走向死亡的极端——这导致了整个中国社会经常性的、痛苦却又没有回报的社会反思。

在这个无情的消费主义社会里，中国的年轻人感到孤独。走投无路的他们越来越多地用“内卷”这个词来形容自己所处的一种虚无绝望的状态。这个词描述了个人和社会的“内卷”，因为人们普遍觉得自己陷入了一种人人都不可避免地失败的、让人精疲力竭的赛跑中。这种绝望往往表现在一种被称为“躺平”的运动中，人们试图通过做生活所需的最基本的工作来逃离那种激烈的竞争，成为现代的苦行僧。

在这种环境下，截止到2020年，中国的生育率已降至每名妇女仅生育1.3个孩子——这个数据低于日本，仅高于世界最低水平的韩国。这已经为中国未来的经济发展埋下隐患。取消家庭规模限制以及政府试图说服家庭多生孩子的做法，遭到了中国年轻人的怀疑和嘲笑，他们认为这种做法“完全脱离了经济和社会现实”。“难道他们还不知道，大多数年轻人已经为了养活自己而精疲力尽了吗?”许多社交媒体里的帖子都曾这样问道。的确，考虑到中国残酷的教育体制，抚养一个孩子也要花一大笔钱：根据地区的不同，估计在3万美元(大约是普通公民年收入的7倍)到11.5万美元之间。

但即使是那些有能力生孩子的中国年轻人也发现，他们正在享受着一种全新的生活方式：令人垂涎的丁克(“双收入，不生孩子”)生活。在这种生活中，受过良好教育的年轻夫妇(无论结婚与否)把所有多余的钱都花在自己身上。正如一位做过输精管结扎手术、思想彻底解放的27岁男性曾向《纽约时报》解释的那样:“对我们这代人来说，孩子不是必需品……现在我们可以没有任何负担地生活……那么为什么不把我们的精神和经济资源投入到我们自己的生活中呢?”

因此，当美国政客们今天放弃了让中国自由化的旧梦时，他们或许应该再细致观察一下：如果你把自由主义看成是关于民主选举、新闻足有和人权尊严的话，那么中国确实从未实现过西方话语体系下“遥远的自由化”。但许多政治思想家会认为，现代自由主义的全面定义远不止于此。相反，他们认为自由主义的终极目标是将个人从地方、传统、宗教、社团和关系的所有限制关系以及自然的所有物质限制中解放出来，追求现代“消费者”的彻底自治。

从这个角度来看，中国已经彻底自由化了：中国社会正在发生的事情，更像是一场王沪宁的噩梦：寄托在“中国梦”里的新自由主义文化，最终被虚无主义的个人主义和商品化所吞噬。

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning

https://theupheaval.substack.com/

Oct 11, 2021 By N.S. Lyons, an analyst and writer living and working in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Upheaval. - Exploring the shared upheavals of our era, including technological and cultural change, the ideological revolution consuming the West, the rise of China, and the crisis of liberalism.

 Official White House Photo/Wang Huning observes as Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama, Toronto

One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.

She wasn’t alone. Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,” or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to “resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s impressionable youth.

Zhao and her unfortunate compatriots in the entertainment industry were caught up in something far larger than themselves: a sudden wave of new government policies that are currently upending Chinese life in what state media has characterized as a “profound transformation” of the country. Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.

But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.

The Grey Eminence

Wang Huning much prefers the shadows to the limelight. An insomniac and workaholic, former friends and colleagues describe the bespectacled, soft-spoken political theorist as introverted and obsessively discreet. It took former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s repeated entreaties to convince the brilliant then-young academic—who spoke wistfully of following the traditional path of a Confucian scholar, aloof from politics—to give up academia in the early 1990s and join the Chinese Communist Party regime instead. When he finally did so, Wang cut off nearly all contact with his former connections, stopped publishing and speaking publicly, and implemented a strict policy of never speaking to foreigners at all. Behind this veil of carefully cultivated opacity, it’s unsurprising that so few people in the West know of Wang, let alone know him personally.

Yet Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.

A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side.

Wang has thus earned comparisons to famous figures of Chinese history like Zhuge Liang and Han Fei (historians dub the latter “China’s Machiavelli”) who similarly served behind the throne as powerful strategic advisers and consiglieres—a position referred to in Chinese literature as dishi: “Emperor’s Teacher.” Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.

But what is singularly remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court philosopher to not just one, but all three of China’s previous top leaders, including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society.”

In the brutally cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat. Wang was recruited into the party by Jiang’s “Shanghai Gang,” a rival faction that Xi worked to ruthlessly purge after coming to power in 2012; many prominent members, like former security chief Zhou Yongkang and former vice security minister Sun Lijun, have ended up in prison. Meanwhile, Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League Faction has also been heavily marginalized as Xi’s faction has consolidated control. Yet Wang Huning remains. More than any other, it is this fact that reveals the depth of his impeccable political cunning.

And the fingerprints of China’s Grey Eminence on the Common Prosperity campaign are unmistakable. While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along with numerous essays. And the obvious continuity between the thought in those works and what’s happening in China today says something fascinating about how Beijing has come to perceive the world through the eyes of Wang Huning.

Cultural Competence

While other Chinese teenagers spent the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) “sent down to the countryside” to dig ditches and work on farms, Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard labor.

When China’s shuttered universities reopened in 1978, following the commencement of “reform and opening” by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Wang was among the first to take the restored national university entrance exam, competing with millions for a chance to return to higher learning. He passed so spectacularly that Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of China’s top institutions, admitted him into its prestigious international politics master’s program despite having never completed a bachelor’s degree.

The thesis work he completed at Fudan, which would become his first book, traced the development of the Western concept of national sovereignty from antiquity to the present day—including from Gilgamesh through Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx—and contrasted it with Chinese conceptions of the idea. The work would become the foundation for many of his future theories of the nation-state and international relations.

But Wang was also beginning to pick up the strands of what would become another core thread of his life’s work: the necessary centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to political stability.

Wang elaborated on these ideas in a 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” which would become one of his most cited works. In it, he argued that the CCP must urgently consider how society’s “software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). While seemingly a straightforward idea, this was notably a daring break from the materialism of orthodox Marxism.

Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.”

Meanwhile, he believed that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most recent structure,” he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.

That, he said, was untenable. Warning that “the components of the political culture shaped by the Cultural Revolution came to be divorced from the source that gave birth to this culture, as well as from social demands, social values, and social relations”—and thus “the results of the adoption of Marxism were not always positive”—he argued that, “Since 1949, we have criticized the core values of the classical and modern structures, but have not paid enough attention to shaping our own core values.” Therefore: “we must create core values.” Ideally, he concluded, “We must combine the flexibility of [China’s] traditional values with the modern spirit [both Western and Marxist].”

But at this point, like many during those heady years of reform and opening, he remained hopeful that liberalism could play a positive role in China, writing that his recommendations could allow “the components of the modern structure that embody the spirit of modern democracy and humanism [to] find the support they need to take root and grow.”

That would soon change.

A Dark Vision

Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.

What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.

He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s “Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.

“He was most concerned with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong, centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”

Wang’s timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Only months after his return, China’s own emerging contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning.

When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.

Wang Huning’s Nightmare

From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.

As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.

But Wang is unlikely to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.

“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.” Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such “self-employment” by 2036, according to Alibaba.

The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme (the two words share a common Chinese character). And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble.

Meanwhile, contrary to trite Western assumptions of an inherently communal Chinese culture, the sense of atomization and low social trust in China has become so acute that it’s led to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul-searching after oddly regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed.

Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.

In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family size limits and government attempts to persuade families to have more children have been met with incredulity and ridicule by Chinese young people as being “totally out of touch” with economic and social reality. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” asked one typically viral post on social media. It’s true that, given China’s cut-throat education system, raising even one child costs a huge sum: estimates range between $30,000 (about seven times the annual salary of the average citizen) and $115,000, depending on location.

But even those Chinese youth who could afford to have kids have found they enjoy a new lifestyle: the coveted DINK (“Double Income, No Kids”) life, in which well-educated young couples (married or not) spend all that extra cash on themselves. As one thoroughly liberated 27-year-old man with a vasectomy once explained to The New York Times: “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity…Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”

So while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”

From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.

The Grand Experiment

It is in this context that Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over.

According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.

This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”

This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed China’s internet and social media companies. It’s why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government has announced “excessively high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”

And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”

In the end, the campaign represents Wang Huning’s triumph and his terror. It’s thirty years of his thought on culture made manifest in policy.

On one hand, it is worth viewing honestly the level of economic, technological, cultural, and political upheaval the West is currently experiencing and considering whether he may have accurately diagnosed a common undercurrent spreading through our globalized world. On the other, the odds that his gambit to engineer new societal values can succeed seems doubtful, considering the many failures of history’s other would-be “engineers of the soul.”

The best simple proxy to measure this effort in coming years is likely to be demographics. For reasons not entirely clear, many countries around the world now face the same challenge: fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement rate as they’ve developed into advanced economies. This has occurred across a diverse array of political systems, and shows little sign of moderating. Besides immigration, a wide range of policies have now been tried in attempts to raise birth rates, from increased public funding of childcare services to “pro-natal” tax credits for families with children. None have been consistently successful, sparking anguished debate in some quarters on whether losing the will to survive and reproduce is simply a fundamental factor of modernity. But if any country can succeed in reversing this trend, no matter the brute-force effort required, it is likely to be China.

Either way, our world is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape the global future of governance for the century ahead.