Intellectuals and the Chinese Perceptions of the United States during the Years of George H. W. Bush Administration, 1989-1992—A Case Study of CAAS Scholars*
Intellectuals and the Chinese Perceptions of the United States during the Years of George H. W. Bush Administration, 1989-1992—A Case Study of CAAS Scholars
The Chinese Association for American Studies (CAAS) was a national organization of Chinese scholars of American studies. It formally came into being in December 1988 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the normalization of China-U.S. diplomatic relations. The mission of the organization, according to its constitution, is to “develop the Chinese studies of the United States, strengthen Chinese people’s understanding of the United States, promote domestic and international academic exchanges in the research and teaching of American studies, and serve the cause of world peace and progress, as well as China’s modernizations.”[1]
The Association was made up of group/unit members instead of individuals, with its secretariat located at the Institute of American Studies (IAS), which is a part of the Chinese Academia of Social Sciences. The IAS was a scholarly center that specialized in studying various aspects of the United States, including politics, economy, culture, society, foreign relations and military affairs. In addition, the Institute assumed the responsibility to coordinate national activities for the CAAS. There were 57 (group) members at its founding, but the CAAS membership has extended to 100 or more today, including almost every university –based or specialized institutes engaged in teaching of and conducting research on American studies.[2]
As a national multidisciplinary society, the CAAS played a major role in improving the conditions for doing American studies in China. It organized symposiums and workshops on a variety of issues concerning the United States or China-U.S. relations. It initiated many international projects of cooperation and exchange and held commemorative activities on occasions significant to both China and the Untied States. Most noticeably it created a number of publications, including American Studies Quarterly, now the leading journal in the field, The Newsletter of the CAAS and a number of others. With the support of the Ford Foundation, the CAAS also established a special fund that subsidized the Chinese publications on American studies.[3]
The first president of the CAAS was Li Shenzhi 李慎之, originally a senior expert in international studies and former director of the Institute of American Studies. Li had once worked in the Xinhua News Agency where he was charged with the responsibility of preparing daily report of world news for the top leadership. His advocacy for “Greater Democracy” in 1957 led him to be sharply criticized by Mao Zedong as a “rightist” and was not rehabilitated until 1980s. He later commented that he was a true “rightist” by the standard of Mao’s thought. By the time when he assumed the presidency of the CAAS, Li was already a vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and was known for being open-minded and democratic.[4] The financial sources of the CAAS came in part from an annual fund allocated by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and in part from grants given by such sources as the Ford Foundation. The unit-members did pay a membership fee, which was rather small.[5]
Because of the group/unit-membership structure, the CAAS and its activities virtually encompassed all teaching and research institutions of American studies in China or all Chinese intellectuals engaged in American studies or the studies of China-U.S. relations. With its publications, conferences and other activities, scholars involved in the CAAS constantly expressed their opinions and views on issues concerning the United States and Sino-American relations. Their opinions exerted an important influence on China’s policy-making process and shaped the public understanding of the concerned issues as well.
The period between 1989 and early 1993 was a unique and critical period in Sino-American relations and for CAAS scholars. It was a period when George H. W. Bush was the president of the United States and when Sino-American relations experienced grave complications as a result of the “June Fourth Incident” of 1989. The period also witnessed the massive and rapid political transformations in the Soviet Union and East Europe that led to the end of the Cold War. Against the background of such dramatic domestic and international events, CAAS scholars actively responded to the events and their consequences, articulating their opinions especially on the prospect of China-U.S. relations. Their views were quite a mixture, reflecting, on the one hand, the traditional distrust and suspicion of the United States and, on the other hand, the popular desires for a more constructive bilateral relationship, which was deemed indispensable to China’s cause for modernization. The scholarly views, while reflecting to a certain degree both the popular desires and official attitudes, were in fact neither of each. They were produced under the pressure of both but attempted to transcend both. These scholarly views in fact helped reshape both the public perceptions of the United States and influence the policy-making of the government during the period when China-U.S. relationship was overburdened with anxieties and ambiguities. It is therefore a worthy subject for a scholarly inquiry.
Since survey data on public opinion on the China-U.S. relations are unavailable, the author has to rely heavily on published views of the CAAS scholars during this period and does not attempt to discern their private or unpublicized views. Even for the former, it is a challenge. In a society where power is highly centralized, all publications must be kept in tune with the current official “yardsticks” for expressing political opinions. Nevertheless, such inquiry is important and valuable because it would demonstrate how scholars from a defined intellectual community had attempted to voice opinions that were supposed to influence both the public and the government. And in spite of all their differences, which will be shown in the follow pages, these opinions also represented serious efforts of CAAS scholars to play a role in constructing a meaningful and workable relationship between two giant and vastly different and incompatible nations.
Part 1
Between the normalization of China-U.S. relations in 1979 and the inauguration of George Bush’s presidency in 1989 the traditional hostile mentality that had long dominated Chinese views of the United States had already been corrected. In the meantime the “America craze” that over-graced the United States had been cooled.[6] More and more people tended to accept a more balanced view that the United States was a “country full of contradictions,”[7] a country that was neither a heaven nor a hell but a unique country that deserved serious study and exploration.[8]
When George Bush moved into the White House, China was experiencing a most tolerant and vibrant political culture since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese intellectual community enjoyed the unprecedented free space to explore the United States and therefore understandably projected, in a most sincerely way, a healthy development of Sino-American relations. Some went as far as to state that “the foundations of China-U.S. relations have never been more consolidated than now and that the relations between the two countries have entered a much more stable and mature phase.”[9]
The intellectuals’ praise of the United States went lavishly from the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people and the American economic successes to American culture and political system. Some younger scholars frankly pinpointed the strong points of the American political system that China should learn, such as checks-and-balances of power and the reverence for rule of law.[10] Wang Huning 王沪宁, a young political scientist who had spent half a year in the United States as a visiting scholar, published a book in April 1989 that challenged the traditional Chinese view of the United States. He claimed that the old perception that the United States was a country of “bourgeois dictatorship” and “exploitation of surplus value” was prejudiced. The current view that portrayed the United States as a heaven was equally untrue. He commented on the advantages of the division of powers, checks and balances of the American system, but also pointed out the system’s problems. He however chose not to take a clear stand about whether China should adopt or reject the American system. This was understandable since the book was published just after the ending of a political campaign against “peaceful evolution” and “total Westernization.”[11] It is interesting to note that Wang later became a “special assistant” to Jiang Zemin and also a deputy director of the Political Research Office of the CCP Central Committee.
Li Daokui’s American Government and Politics, published in 1990, remains up to now the magnum opus of the Chinese scholarship on American politics. The author, who was a member of the executive council of CAAS, informed his readers that American democracy had expanded from political to social arenas. The American system had its own “progressive aspects” and was both rational and effective, Li wrote, and pluralism was an admired feature of American political life.[12]
It is the author’s view that, had the unexpected events not occurred, China’s political system reforms would have slowly advanced in its explorations of borrowing from the American model though such movement would not have completely avoided some wobbles and setbacks.
Right before President Bush’s inauguration in December 1988 Chinese and American scholars convened in Beijing to review the development of the bilateral relations since the normalization and to project the future of such relations. Optimism was a shroud of the conference. The Chinese participants undertook quite a soul-searching reflection on China’s foreign relations. They acknowledged that China had undergone periods of isolation, “either imposed from outside or self-imposed.” They applauded the government’s declaration that “relations among the nations should transcend ideologies and social systems” and that in the future China would not “let social systems and ideologies” to determine its relations with other countries.[13]
(责任编辑：冷战编辑)
版权、转载等相关信息请阅读本站的“版权声明”
下一篇：程早霞：美国中央情报局与中国西藏