"Comparative Epistemologies for Thinking China,"
The Research & Educational Center for China Studies and
Cross-Taiwan Strait Relations, Department of Political Science,
National Taiwan University
Interview Brantly Womack
April 19, 2014
Interview conducted by Chih-yun Chang
Transcribed by Raoul Bunskoek (羅子歡).
Chang: Shall I start with the first most popular question there. Shall we talk about
your background and your childhood schooling and college life, maybe postgraduate
experience?
Womack: Sure. I am from Texas, I was born in Galveston raised in Fort Worth. And
Texas is a very provincial place even by American standards. The United States can
be very provincial too, so, but my family was unusual, because my mother organized
a lecture series, called the Christian culture lecture series when I was a child, and in
the lecture series there were people who were missionaries in Africa, missionaries in
Asia, there were people who had been imprisoned in China and one of them was a
bishop who wrote the book called Four Years in a Red Hell and one of the family
friends who developed a friendship with our family from the lecture series was a
medical missionary in Vietnam and Laos. So when I was growing up the rest of the
world was real to me, and then I went to college, at the University of Dallas, which
was, I had an unusual experience in two respects. One, a third of the faculty at the
University of Dallas was Hungarians who would come out from Hungary in the
1950’s, and they were the part of the faculty that I had the greatest contact with. They
taught the philosophy courses, the theology courses( it is a Catholic university) and all
of the language courses. And my best teachers were Hungarians, rather than
Americans. The philosophy department was continental philosophy rather than
English philosophy, which was interesting background for me. My favorite
philosopher is still Hegel. Another interesting aspect was that when I went to college I
requested a foreign roommate and my roommate was from Shanghai. His family had
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emigrated to Hong Kong a year before, this is before the Cultural Revolution, and he
was my roommate for two years at college. So I had some day-to-day experience with
Chinese culture. My studies at the university were almost exclusively western, and
philosophy and political theory especially. Also languages, German and Russian. And
of the two languages primarily German. Then I received a Fulbright for the University
of Munich, in Germany, in philosophy, and I studied Hegel, on my Fulbright.
However, this was 1969-70 and one of the people I met in Germany had taught
German in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. And he was a collector of
Chinese art. A very interesting person in his own right. Also I had come to the
conclusion before I went to Germany that I had to study someplace other than the
west. Some non-western culture or civilization, political system, because my
background was all western. My background was western from earliest times. PreSocratic philosophy, Mesopotamian even, all the way to the present but still staying in
the European-American tradition. Primarily European tradition. And I thought if I am
going to be serious about philosophy, if I am going to be serious about universals, I
have to get outside of the framework that I am familiar with and study some other
place as well, and China was obviously one of the options. And talking to my friend
in Germany and talking about the autonomy of Chinese culture as well as the very
interesting things happening in China, my choice was to study China. I started
studying Chinese while I was at the University of Munich and continued at the
University of Chicago for graduate school. I have never regretted the decision. China
remains a constant challenge to the western concepts and philosophical modes of
thinking that I have, and a fruitful challenge I think, so that ideas like democracy,
justice, etcetera seem…to stretch these ideas outside the western framework and to
include China, especially if you are including China not as a category, a box to be
filled in, yes or no based on whether western values are used. How does the power of
the people, the demo kratia, the basic idea of democracy, how does that relate to what
happens in China? Traditionally or in modern times? Those have been fascinating
questions to me ever since. I am keeping up with philosophy. On my computer over
there I have Hegel’s lectures on history, which I was reading when I was in Singapore,
in German, because the translations of Hegel are a lot more difficult to read than the
original, if you read German. So I don’t give up on the philosophy aspects, but
challenge has been ever since to look at China theoretically and to look at theory from
a broader perspective than only the Western. This was very much helped by graduate
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school at the University of Chicago because Professor Tsou Tang (Zou Dang) taught
there. He remains the primary influence on my view of China. His father ou Lu was a
leading scholar on the right wing side of theGuomindang, in the 1920’s-1930’s, one
of the founding fathers of Zhongshan Daxue in Guangzhou, and author of the History
of the Guomindang. Tsou himself, I see him as perhaps the most thoughtful member
that I know from a tragic generation of Chinese scholars who went through the
Second World War(he was a student at Lianda in Kunming) then faced in Tsou’s case
in graduate school in the United States, a civil war, and questions of which side and
what happened and then watching developments in China afterwards. So during that
experience he remained empathetically committed to understanding of what was
happening in China, rather than maintaining a cold and critical distance, like many
American scholars. And that notion, that fundamental assumption, a kind of
empathetic, not necessarily uncritical, but not starting from a presumption, and
assuming that the dynamic of what is being studied is internal and is adjusting to its
own crisis and challenges. That is something that I think that is essential to what he
did and essential to his effect on his students. And among his students Lowell Dittmer,
Marc Blecher, Joe Fewsmith would be good examples.
So I studied with Tsou, I took his course on Chinese Politics. The first paper I
wrote for the first course I took was on theory and practice and the thought of Mao
Zedong. He liked it. A revised version became my Master’s paper and my first
publication. My dissertation was on development of Mao Zedong’s thought from the
beginning to the Long March, especially the origins of, well, basically, the
foundations of Mao Zedong’s political thought, but one of the most important things,
historically the most important thing of the period was the origins of rural revolution
and the theory of rural revolution in a Marxist framework.
I continued my work in philosophy in Chicago, with Paul Ricœur, a French
philosopher, and also work in political theory in general. But gradually working on
language, working on Chinese politics, and beginning to study Chinese history, China
became my primary preoccupation in graduate school. I went to the University of
California, Berkeley for a postdoc; I worked with Frederic Wakeman, basically
working on my dissertation which became my first book, The Foundations of Mao
Zedong’s political thought. And then in 1975 I started teaching. As the reform era,
well, let’s see, with the death of Mao and the beginning of a transition in Chinese
politics I was particularly interested in how the intellectual or ideological transition
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would be created to a new era. Both Tsou and I were convinced that there would be a
transition, the transition would be very serious, it wouldn’t simply be Mao followed
by neo-Maoism etcetera. Tsou expected as soon as, in 1976 before Mao died, Tsou
and I had a conversation in the spring of 1976, and, we agreed that the whole Gang of
Four and leftism would be replaced, the question would be whether the replacement,
the transition would be violent, but it would be replaced by some fundamentally
different post-Mao direction. I was in Hong Kong in 1978, and wrote an article based
on phases of Chinese modernization, inwhich I argued that a new phase had started,
this was first presented before the third plenum of the 11th Party Congreess.. And then
I did several papers on the transformation of the Chinese political economy and
eventually studies on modernization and democracy in China, and revisions of the
Chinese political system. So basically my interest in Chinese politics, tended to
transition along with Chinese politics itself, from ideology per se to an attempt at a
comprehensive understanding of what was going on in actual terms, which involved
paying more attention to economic development, the relationship of ideology, politics
and economics etcetera and let to a diversity of publications and three specific
research interests. Then James Townsend asked me to co-author the third edition of
his Politics in China, it must have been in 1983. Politics in China was the textbook on
Chinese politics in the US, used all the way from Harvard on down, and the
interesting thing about that was that it fit my tendency to look at things
comprehensively. It was a 500-page book on all of Chinese politics. And I had to
develop my background on things that I hadn’t paid attention to. That was also an
important experience.
Chang: All right. Many thanks for a lot of very interesting details. I always like to
understand everyone’s history and try to dig out something more. And I do have quite
a lot of interesting notes, so I just…
Womack: Let me expand on one more thing before we close thistopic. I have kept up
with my interest on political structural reform and political structural developments in
China, to the present. I have given talks at various universities and research institutes
including 中 央 黨 校 and 中 央 編 譯 局 . But in the meantime, which I haven’t
mentioned yet, that from the mid-1980’s, I also started doing work comparing China
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and Vietnam. I started researching Vietnam on my own, because I wanted to have a
comparison to China, and go beyond China as simply the only place I understood, and
so from 1985 I had the opportunity to visit Vietnam and this began a whole series of
research comparing China and Vietnam, but also of Sino-Vietnamese relationship.
And that got me into international relations. My primary background had been
philosophy and comparative politics, but then I developed this whole strand of
international relations and the book that I just finished was a general theory of
asymmetric international relations, the third book in the series that originated from the
China-Vietnam work that I did in the 1980’s. I wanted to get that in the record
because it is a whole different branch of research, and now in the United States that
probably is better known than my work in comparative politics.
Chang: So I think what I’m going to do is to ask you some questions about what you
just shared with us. The first thing is that I can tell from your description about your
experience in your life before college you had a pretty interesting international
syllables, especially in your experience with Hungarian nationals and then thinks that
the best teacher you have ever met is one of the Hungarian nationals, that is
interesting. And then the most important thing is that it seems to me that you have
changed your studies quite dramatically from western philosophy to China, and then
from China it is about, and you tried to analyze China from this kind of philosophical
aspect, and there from this sort of philosophical ideology, or theoretical understanding
towards a more comprehensive, a more pragmatic, a more practical aspect like
politics, economics, these kind of things. So how would you recommend junior
scholars like us to go along your course of studies in China because I myself, my
Bachelor is Chinese literature. And then in contemporary Chinese studies I studied as
Master, I studied under Fleming Christianson who is fascinated by postmodernist eras,
and then I changed to British political history. So I do find it somehow difficult to be
consistent in some sense, but I also agree that it would broaden my understanding of
either subject, so what is your?
Womack: Well I would certainly hesitate to recommend what I did anyone else, not
that I would do it any other way myself but that it wouldn’t be as easy for anyone else
to follow, and I was lucky to have survived doing things the way I did. And I was
totally innocent concerning the risk I was taking by thinking broadly and pursuing
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broad interests rather than nailing things down, and I was somewhat lucky with early
publications. Not as lucky as you!
Chang: Yes, she is lucky with four papers.
Womack: But I have been a very impractical person as far as survival goes, just lucky,
and I have pursued my interests from the time I was in high school. They have more
broadened and shifted their current focus than they have shifted entirely. My favorite
philosopher before Hegel was Plato, and I still enjoy him, and I think that what I
learned in high school and college is still vivid in my own way of thinking, even
though I’m thinking about China rather than Texas or the US or Germany, or Greece.
Chang: So you mention that you started to study Chinese history during your Ph.D.?
Womack: Yes I started studying Chinese history while I was at Chicago, and Philip
Kuhn was the main person that I was with, but I didn’t have much time., I started
language again, I only had a semester of Chinese in Germany, so I started again in
Chicago with an intensive program. And I was doing my political science program, so
I didn't have a whole lot of time to take classes, I audited some classes but actually
Kuhn’s way of teaching was very student oriented and I wasn't a regular history
student, I was just a volunteer student, so I wasn’t as good as I could’ve been. But I
was very interested in Chinese history and I continued to read on that, and I very
much like Chinese philosophy, so I continued to read Chinese philosophy as well. I
do what interests and so far I have escaped with that. And I feel very lucky.
Chang: I have to say “Yes, it’s difficult”, I cannot recommend any of my students to
do what you have done, it would be very dangerous, may I ask you with all due
respect, if you had chosen another subject instead of China or let me say the UK, US,
these kind of more well researched subjects, would you have been as lucky as you
were?
Womack: Oh I don’t think there would have been any particular problem because in
the United States at that time there were very few opportunities to be a specialist on
Chinese politics. In the 1970’s when I went on the job market there was not a single
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job, not a single tenure track job on Chinese politics. I took a job at the University of
Texas, Dallas, a new campus, because they didn’t know what they wanted. And I
have to say that my naiveté about survival was encouraged by the reception that I got
from the teachers and scholarships. Besides the Fulbright I was given a graduate price
scholarship to Harvard before I graduated and I turned it down to take the Fulbright
and I got a nice fellowship to Chicago. My teachers all liked me. And so I was
encouraged. But I could have been encouraged in the wrong direction.
Chang: So another question is like, of course I think a lot of people have already
asked you, why Vietnam?
Womack: Why Vietnam? Well, that is a very good question and it was considerably
more accidental than the Chinadirection. I was assigned to teach “An Introduction to
Comparative Politics”, and I decided that the course would have to deal in depth with
someplace that I was familiar with because it seemed to be that the main problem for
Americans in studying comparative politics wasn’t that they didn’t know what a
parliamentary system was or an authoritarian system was or whatever, not these type
of categories, but the lack of a vivid appreciation that politics could be different.
American society is parochial because it’s so big and because it’s a superpower. The
first obligation in a course about how different governments could be was how
different it could be to live somewhere else, in this context what does it mean to be
Chinese, Vietnamese, German, or whatever. And that of course would have been
more real to me because I had lived in Germany and studied China.
There was a book that was written in 1972, Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the
Lake, and, reading that book transformed my view of Vietnam, because until I read
that book, actually until I read the prepublication, condensed version of the book in
the New Yorker magazine, I never thought of how the American war in Vietnam
might look from a Vietnamese perspective. I started to read that, and it was a
revelation to me, because of course the Vietnam War was a big topic, while I was in
Germany I switched from being a supporter of the war to oppose it, but I never
thought of Vietnam as more than the war, I never thought of it from a Vietnamese
perspective. And Frances Fitzgerald’s book was written from a Vietnamese
perspective. She’s not Vietnamese, but that was her approach.. Here I am, I’d been to
demonstrations about this war, and I never thought about Vietnam as a country, I
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never thought or tried to think about it, and once I started to think about it from a
perspective of Vietnam, it all made sense.
So I decided when I was teaching my class on comparative politics I would
put in that experience and I used Frances Fitzgerald--it was a big thick book--for the
first six weeks of my course, for the next six years or so. There were no courses on
Vietnam, no courses on Southeast Asia at the University of Chicago, so , as I taught
the course, I would read more and more on Vietnam so that I would be better
informed. So that was one accidental start of my interest in Vietnam.
The second part was I started teaching at Northern Illinois University which
has one of the best Southeast Asian programs in the US, but the missing element in
their program was Vietnam, because Northern Illinois University and Southern
Illinois University had federal grants to study Vietnam. So just like South America
was split between the Portuguese and the Spanish by the pope, you remember that,
well Illinois was split between Indo-China and the rest of Southeast Asia, so that
Northern Illinois had great experts on Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, but nobody on
Vietnam. Well I came there, I was the China expert, that’s why they hired me. I was
interested in Vietnam and I knew a fair amount about it, so I became their Vietnam
person. And then when the first American teachers delegation went to Vietnam in
1985 the University sponsored my participation in the trip, so I went to Vietnam in
1985 and then arranged several trips after that, Luce Foundation funded the trip of
senior China, people like Frederic Wakeman, John Pollack, some other people, I
organized that, and I also organized a visit by a top linguist in Vietnam to teach
Vietnamese at Northern Illinois University one summer and I took Vietnamese there.
And from my first visit to Vietnam I thought “Wow, this is really an interesting place
for somebody who’s interested in China!” Because the similarities, they are more than
just similarities, there’s a kind of shimmering relationship between the China aspects
of Vietnam and the Vietnamese aspects of Vietnam, you can’t even separate them, in
Hanoi at least. And there were two people who knew something about China that first
trip and we were both said “Waow, this is an amazing place!” And so we organized
the senior China specialists trip, and the senior china specialists were all “Wow, this
is an amazing place!” And then because of the hostility between the two, I would fly
from US to Bangkok to Vietnam, to Bangkok, to Beijing, and then in Vietnam I
would talk to the China experts and in Beijing I would talk to the Vietnam experts and
that became the basis of my interest in international relations.
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Chang: And you have studied under quite a few very famous scholars, and they are all
specialized in different disciplines, the first question is how did you adapt yourself to
their expertise and how and to what extent did they inspire or train you as a very
comprehensive scholar in China?
Womack: Well, my three absolute top teachers, one was one you’ve never heard of
before, David Balas, he’s a person at the University of Dallas, it’s this Hungarian
Cistercian, and Tsou and Ricœur, those were absolutely the top scholars that I dealt
with. And the interesting thing about all three of them is that they were so good and
so intellectually involved in their areas that they were beyond their disciplines. Paul
Ricœur was a lot more than just a philosopher, and Tsou was much more than just a
China specialist, certainly much more than the literature of China. And he read
everything these other people were writing. But his focus was on how do I understand
what is going on in China. Not, Stuart Schram says this, Andy Nathan says that, what
I can I say in between and get published? You know. Like that passage in Zhuangzi
where he talks about the Phoenix flying over and the owl preserving the rat, there’s a
lot of owls that preserve rats in academia, these three teachers were phoenixes. I got
along quite well with all of them, I didn’t have a rat, and I learned quite a bit from
each of them, but not how to tunnel into a discipline, but rather how to make the
subject of their interest part of my interest.
Chang: And according to my understanding towards your research, you…for instance
both you and professor Chih-yu Shih and you are interested in theories about, but of
course you focus much more on philosophical theories, and Chih-yu’s theories are
more based on social science theories. So is it possible that you can tell us a bit more
about the difference between analyzing China from a philosophical theories and
political theories.
Womack: Well I have to say that my approach is not philosophical in the sense of the
way of the average member of the philosophy department would do it, but rather
philosophical in the sense that, you know, when you read philosophical classics, what
they do is that they try to find out what the underlying consistencies are and what
everybody accepts. When Descartes starts his method on discourse and ethics he says
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that the really irritating thing about being a philosopher is that you are working on
fundamentals, and you write it down, and then there’s someone who says “I knew
that!” And yeah, but they didn’t think it before you wrote it down. My approach and
the basic philosophical approach is to try to make sense of comprehensive pictures,
it’s holistic in that way, it’s not necessarily assuming that everything is going to be
interacting in a system but you don’t leave out parts. You might say that the opposite
approach would be a lawyer’s approach. Look, here is a whole bunch of realities, I
take a line, and I look for every part that fits and discard every part that doesn’t fit.
I’m looking at that whole ball, and I’m thinking how does it fit? Why is this a ball?
And I will try to find out how do the parts fit together, so that’s my approach. I think
Chih-yu works in a somewhat similar way, but he really likes complicated systems.
So his architecture and my architecture are two totally different things.
Chang: Yes, I always tell him how he makes something from a very simple thing,
from a historian’s eyes, into something I totally don’t understand. And I know, I can’t,
he has not totally convinced me that that is the proper way to deal with strategy, I
don’t really know, I like to just construct simple facts.
Womack: There are many different philosophical approaches and Chih-yu’s is one of
them, and mine can be just as confusing, well, I don’t know if it can be just as
confusing but it can be just as hard to understand.
Chang: You started to teach in 1975, just one year before Mao’s death…
Womack: But there is no connection…
Chang: Haha, no of course not! I am so sure of that.
Womack: I hear he was getting old.
Chang: So, because basically from the anti-rightist movement to the end of the
Cultural Revolution, these twenty years were somehow, you were absorbing the
information about China, so I would like to, could you please tell us a bit more about
your perspectives, and your perceptions and your viewpoints on Mao, on Maoism,
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and Mao’s leftism, and of course the debate between nowadays the Xin Zuopai (新左
派), the debates between contemporary Maoists and the liberals in China. So two
different…
Womack: Yeah, very different. Well I was never…what really impressed me about
Mao, in a positive sense, was his early period and his pragmatic populism and how
that got transformed into a rural revolutionary strategy essentially by the time he left
the Jiangxi Soviet. He didn’t really implement it until Yan’an, so that’s the period that
I studied. I was never attracted to leftism, I was not supportive of the Cultural
Revolution. Remember, I had a roommate from Shanghai during the Cultural
Revolution, he was beside himself not knowing what was happening to his relatives
back in Shanghai. I had a vivid vicarious experience of the chaos of the Cultural
Revolution. I was never a leftist never a Marxist. Some people were attracted to
study China because they were leftist, so many of them became disillusioned and
flipped as far their interest in either China or ideology, but for me that wasn’t the big
thing. I was interested in what the Cultural Revolution was attempting to do, I didn’t
think it would work, but it was an interesting sort of edge of history experiment. And
it proved that modern society was more complex than Marxism or the mentality that
the rural revolution had created, and so chaos was created, first in the economy which
broke apart, and then in politics. I think there were some positive effects of the
Cultural Revolution in China in terms of politics, positive by being negative, by…if
there had not been a Cultural Revolution I think the party establishment and the
possibility of a rigid oligarchy, institutionalized authoritarianism--the Cultural
Revolution really shook the base of that. And the reforms of Deng Xiaoping instituted
both in the economy and to some extent in politics too, predictably in policy rather
than in political structure, but with political structures as well. It would probably be
unlikely without some type of shaking of the system.
Chang: So of course you understand that now, nowadays it's the rising of the so-called
Xin Zuopai in Mainland China, it is a very significant and interesting phenomenon I
would say. Then the debate between these Xin Zuopai against the liberals is actually
pretty severe even in universities like Huanan Shifan, Shanghai Jiaoda, or in Beijing
Beida, Qinghua, so to what extent you would like to talk about this?
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Womack: I am not involved enough to talk intelligently about this. My impression is
that what's called, the group called the Maoists, the question is how they relate to Mao.
What now makes them Maoists? Deng Xiaoping 實事求是, he took that from Mao,
yeah, that’s in Mao, and without 實 事 求是 there is no rural revolution, so the
relationship to Mao is problematic. I certainly think that there’s aspects of the
application of liberalism and of general presumptions that modernization with
Chinese characteristics should be all modernization no Chinese characteristics can be
exaggerated, and the alternative of all Chinese characteristics no modernization is also
exaggerated. My solution to both of those…I mean my attitude towards both of those
is why look at modernization as something other than something that would have
characteristics, that would be different in other countries. Why not a Chinese path
that’s already established, how does that relate to other countries? One of the
problems I see in Chinese social science is this tendency tostill to see 現代化 and 西
方化 as the same type of thing, and you either need to be for it or against it. What are
the underlying characteristics of modernity? That gets back to why I started studying
China. In rethinking China’s experiences, what deeper significance of modernity,
plusses and minuses, can we come up with. Not simply take this and scrap this part
that part, and try to create a modernization with Chinese characteristics, or look on
China as defective west.
What is true on the outside is true on the inside too. A lot of my friends in
China see democratization in China as how to make China to be like the rest of the
world. To me democratization in China has to be power to the people. And the
question is how this public authority and the power of the people relate to one another.
How does it relate to the existing system? And what is possible within a party-state
system? And rather than simply saying, well here’s what democracy is, there’s what
China is, get there. Well maybe there is no other option. Look, China tried in the
Cultural Revolution to have a fundamentally different kind of political system,
fundamentally different political stage, it failed. There was a stage that went beyond.
But rural revolution that was something that hadn’t happened before, and it worked.
So it’s not that something innovative can’t be done, it’s just that something innovative
is an experiment.
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Chang: And after you graduated from the University of Chicago you had quite a vast
and interesting experience in different parts of the western academic world. You went
to the UK SOAS as a reader for a while, and then of course in the US, and then you
studied in Munich, so can you talk about the differences between the…because in
China we see that’s the western world, but of course the differentiation, the difference
among, within the western world is significant, so can you tell us your understanding
and tell us the differences between these different parts of the western world and how
they see China and how they see China studies?
Womack: Wow, that is two big questions.
Chang: Well, from your perspective, your own understanding.
Womack: Well, certainly one of the great things about studying in Germany and
working in the UK was experiencing different cultures. The German political system
at the time was in transition, I was there the year after the student revolutions in the
universities which weren’t quite as violent as they were in France but still they were
significant, and it was still a kind of recovery period, but of course when I went to
Berkeley as a postdoc that was also after the Berkeley revolutions so I managed that
sort of quiet after the storm experience in several different places.
The Germans are efficient. And the Germans like complexity but not Shih’s
type of complexity, they like complexity that works. Like a Mercedes engine. That is
the German agenda, the structure of their political system. I don’t think the United
States could run on that system, the United States needs a system of more power in
fewer parts. Like a GM car rather than a Mercedes. The Germans like that, they feel
comfortable with it, they feel satisfied when it works. Then you had Willy Brandt,
who was very active creating the Ostpolitik when I was there. A very impressive
piece of statesmanship by someone who I very much admire, a politician, because he
was in the business to make a difference.
He wasn’t simply a successful politician. In fact, he was a kind of peculiar
politician. There was a time in Willy Brandt’s career when his advisors tried to make
him look more like Kennedy, because Kennedy had been successful, so he had to
comb his hair like Kennedy and act like him. And after a while Brandt was like, “ah, I
just have to be myself, I’m not kidding, just let me be myself.” I like that. So Willy
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Brandt and the efficiency of the Germans… also I was very impressed, I was a factory
worker in Germany as well, not just a student. I was a Gastarbeiter on the assembly
line in a factory with Turks and Spaniards, and that was an interesting experience.
Chang: Sorry to interrupt you, can you tell us a bit more about your proletarian
experience?
Womack: Yes that’s right, I have been a member of the international proletariat, a
factory worker in Germany and a factory worker in the United States.
Chang: And then you are not attracted by Maoism!
Womack: Still, no.
Chang: But you had that sort of experience…
Womack: I was never attracted by Marx either, I could have been a Marxist, but as a
matter of fact from my factory experience I was not attracted by Marx because Marx
describes alienation in the factory worker, and I’ve been a factory worker, and the
interesting thing about being a factory worker, this is assembly line work, and as you
get good in assembly line work, you’re proud of your skill, and your skill enables you
to transcend the monotony and that’s precisely because what you’re doing is
monotonous, you can develop the skill of doing that job, and then you are on your
own. And Marx had no sense of that, because he was never a proletarian.
Chang: How long were you a factory worker in Germany and the US?
Womack: These are summer jobs, not professional jobs. I have held a variety, I was a
garbage collector in the US, a factory worker, and working on tall buildings, steep
objects, high altitudes. I still enjoy altitude.
Chang: 電力工。We have a break to go to the loo and have some water.
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Female voice: Wow, that was very interesting. I never think about how a worker
thinks about her job, so, but it is a very short time experience.
Womack: Short time. The first experience in a job like that. You go in there and you
do something that means nothing to you, but it’s part of the process. You know I was
running a machine that sticks leads on resistors…you know tjoe tjoe tjoe tjoe
tjoe…you know it’s very hard and slow, and then it gets faster, and as it gets faster it
gets more tense, but there’s a point when you get good at it. And then you don’t have
to think about it, and you can talk to your friends and there’s also a sense of that you
are proud of what you can do, because not everybody can do it. And even though
what you are doing isn’t something that then belongs to you. It's a more complicated
experience than intellectuals looking at factory workers think. Now, I didn’t have to
live on what I made as a factory worker. I could go home, and I could go to university.
So I didn’t have the bad side of being a factory worker. But it was an interesting
experience. Maybe it contributed to my philosophical tendencies.
Chang: We have talked quite a lot about how your research has evolved, and how
your understandings of China have evolved. And now when you were teaching in the
sixties and seventies the relationship between US-China and US-Taiwan has changed
dramatically. So what is your perspective towards these kind of two China’s?
Womack: At the time or now?
Chang: Both both.
Womack: Ok, well at the time Taiwan wasn’t an issue to me in Germany or until I got
to graduate school. Tsou was, needles to say, was invited to Taiwan many times and
he refused. He never did go to Taiwan. He was a visiting professor at Beida a couple
of times in the 1980’s, but he refused to go to Taiwan. And my attitude towards
Taiwan was: weird little place with a sort of leftover government. And I had no
interest on doing research there because my research was on Mao Zedong. Can you
imagine doing Mao Zedong rural revolution in Taiwan? So Taiwan wasn’t a real
place to be for quite a while. My first trip was in ‘87 or so.
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Chang: But after the end of the martial law.
Womack: Oh yeah, right at the end. I remember the barricades from those
demonstrations. And I did, I had friends of course in the late seventies and early
eighties who were either from Taiwan or had connections there, so I wasn’t totally
ignorant about what was going on, but I wasn’t particularly attracted to…certainly
didn't want to study Taiwanese politics and there was no particular attraction of going
there. And then I got invited to the Sino-American conference in Taipei, and it was
really an interesting experience to actually be there.
Chang: In the late eighties.
Womack: In the late eighties. It was still a kind of strange experience to hear very
intelligent people talking about the cross-strait relationship as if they were waiting for
China to surrender.
Laughter from everyone…
Womack: You know, smart people. I hate to tell you this, but they thought they’d won.
The atmosphere, the whole attitude towards cross-strait relations really did change
during the nineties. Much more in a sense of Taiwan is Taiwan rather than the
Guomindang on Taiwan, which was very strange in the fifties but had gotten really
strange in the eighties. And I guess Lee Teng-hui was the transitional person, from
Guomindang to Taiwan. I remember having breakfast with Paris Chang, he was a
professor in Pittsburg or something but he was a top DPP person, advisor to DPP, in
the early nineties. And I remember I said to him, so what is Lee Teng-hui doing that
you would do differently? And he would slap on the table and say “nothing!”. Yeah it
was amazing. He had turned DPP as far as Paris was concerned.
Chang: So I have talked to quite a lot of sinologists in Europe and the US and their
approach to China is through Hong Kong or Taiwan, but your approach is slightly
different, you went directly to the core. Into the core of Chinese politics which is of
course Maoism. So is there a particular reason for you to choose to go along this way
directly?
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Womack: Oh absolutely. The reason was, I’d say it was a combined reason, personal
and intellectual was studying with Tsou, who was very much oriented towards China
itself, and secondly, in that first course the reading, we had to read “On Practice”
from the Selected Works volume one and I just come from Germany and I was totally
familiar with Marxist thought from Hegel to Marx to Engels, to Lenin, to Lukács and
Bernstein, you know all the way up to the social democratic split and the socialist
humanism of Yugoslavia, and then here’s Mao, and Mao’s whole approach and praxis
is so much more pragmatic, so much more reality oriented than Lenin, or Marx, and it
really struck me, and I thought, so what’s going on here? What’s the difference
between Mao’s way of thinking, approach to politics, and the Marxism I was familiar
with?
Chang: Before we started this interview we talked about Jack Wills and John Fairbank
and you wanted to say some things and I said we have to leave that to the interview so,
would you like to continue your understanding of Fairbank?
Womack: Well first of all I should say, especially in present company, that I am not a
historian. I am an amateur utilizer of these things and what I appreciated about
Fairbank’s discussion of Chinese external policy, which is my primary reason for
reading Fairbank, kind of late, it was part of my graduate studies. He is a very careful
cataloguer of what he is seeing. I don’t think of Fairbank as a particularly good
systematizer but he is a good cataloguer and a relatively good categorizer. So the
introduction to his big book The Chinese World Order is useful for that. And because
he is a good cataloguer he doesn’t make the simplistic mistakes that a lot of people
utilizing his categories would do. He doesn’t make the kind of derogatory statements
or assumptions about the tribute system that people utilize, or simplifying
assumptions, but he also, I think this is the point of the evolution of the tribute system,
which I think Wang Gungwu does a much better job describing, first of all in the
essay in that book, very convoluted in that essay, and then later in some other writings.
Wang Gungwu in discussing especially the Song dynasty, makes a point that
China had to adjust to being a power incapable of simply forcing its preeminence on
others and therefore had to develop a system where it could pacify without
pacification, pacify without expending force. I see the tribute system, as
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institutionalized in the Ming dynasty, as essentially a trading of between a central
power that is strong and neighboring powers that feel vulnerable to the central power,
but are also interested in the resources of the central power. Where the central power
is recognized as the autonomy of the smaller powers in exchange for the deference of
the smaller powers.
The western image of tribute is booty, something you, if you are powerful
enough, you go someplace, you steal what you’re interested in, you bring it back. You
make something that is similar to the British museum. And the Chinese tribute system
didn’t work that way. The Chinese tribute system was essentially that you showed
respect for the tribute missions. The delegations where deferential, but you showed
them respect, if you didn’t respect them the deference wouldn’t be worth anything,
and then, what’s that acknowledgement of autonomy worth to Vietnam? It’s worth a
tremendous amount, because if Vietnam is recognized as being in charge of its area it
doesn’t have to worry about its border with China. It does have to worry about the
details of the border, but it doesn’t have to worry about China itself. So they can go
conquer Champa, you know, which is what it did, Vietnam was vicious in its
expansion, I don’t like disappointing Vietnam, but Vietnam did the job that China
never did. So this was an important exchange, the essence of a successful tradition of
an asymmetric relationship, not unique to China. I was just reading this morning,
Frederick Barbarossa’s Peace of Constance declaration from the 12th century and he is
making the same deal with the Lombard League that the Chinese and Vietnamese
would make in the tribute system. I’m ok, I’m powerful, I’m giving you this grace of
recognizing your autonomous cities and everything and I’m not going to station
people there, I recognize your autonomy, and meanwhile you have to show deference
to me and you give me a certain amount of money, but not very much money, and
that’s negotiable, it says so in the treaty. So that type of relationship is not missing in
the west, but it became institutionalized in China. Whereas in the west you had
competing powers that could be mortal threats to one another, and so you had to
develop a much more competitive idea of what your international relationships are all
about. So I think Fairbank doesn’t particularly notice that aspect of the tribute system.
For him, it’s diplomatic ritual to cover the economic transactions. Both of those are
there, but I don’t think that’s the essence of the tribute system. But he’s a better
historian.
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Chang: I do believe that, haha. So as an expert of Sino-Vietnam relations, of course
this is a question that I have to ask you: what is your perspective on the war between
China and Vietnam in 1979?
Womack: Aha, well, I have a paper on that.
Chang: Of course, yes.
Womack: I actually have a book on that, so basically the asymmetric relationship
between Vietnam and China was fundamentally reset by the reunification of Vietnam
and its victory in the war. And neither side understood what that meant. Both China
and Vietnam had their illusions of victory. China thought: “Ah, trouble’s over down
south, now we don’t have to give the Vietnamese anything more because the war is
over and the Americans are gone and so, ha! And all the Vietnamese will be so
grateful, because we helped them for so long.” And the Vietnamese thought: “Ha, we
have arrived. Now we don’t have to listen to China anymore, we don’t have to listen
to the Russians either.” because the Vietnamese took a lot of aid from the Russians
from 1975-1978 but they refused to join the Comecon and Warsaw pact until 1978,
until they started feeling threatened. So the Vietnamese attitude was “we’ve arrived!
We are a big power. We have the fourth largest military in the world.” But they
couldn’t afford it, and the economy started falling apart, but you had these two
conflicting illusions about what the end of the war had meant. The interaction
between Deng Xiaoping and Lê Duẩn, the Vietnamese leader, were…they couldn’t
have been more poorly matched. Because Deng Xiaoping, whatever his virtues might
be, he was not a gracious person, or a tolerant person. And Lê Duẩn was a nasty
power guy too. I have never ran into anyone who liked Lê Duẩn. He didn’t even have
the virtues of Deng Xiaoping. And he was used to getting his way, and he had had to
kowtow to China for so long he was very happy not to, so you couldn’t have a worse
meeting of top leaders, and Vietnam thought, we get the aid from Russia, we get aid
from the US, we don’t need China, and stood up to China, hahaha. And China thought,
well, we’ll teach them a lesson.
Chang: To teach them a lesson is the war?
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Womack: Deng Xiaoping actually used that language, it’s not in the official document,
it’s on the records.
Chang: The reason I ask this is because China’s role in Southeast Asia is totally
different now I would say because of the notion of ASEAN and all these kind regional
interpretations of economy and this sort of debate really changed cross-strait relations,
so what’s your, as an aspect on Sino-Vietnam relations, what’s your perspective on
the contemporary relation between China and Southeast Asia?
Womack: Well I would say that the lack of success in the stalemate situation between
China and Vietnam in the 1980’s led both countries to rethink their illusions, Vietnam
thought faster than China and by 1985 it had already adjusted its basic policy, and it
took China a longer period of time, because typically the larger side takes a longer
time to adjust to the situation. China though adjusted by 1990 basically, and in 1991
normalization with Vietnam. In the meantime you had Tiananmen and the shattering
of Chinese illusions about simply becoming a peaceful rise into the elite of the
western world. And you had this, that’s a shock for China, internally a tremendous
shock, but externally too.
Where is China in the world? China had been thinking of itself globally, not as
an Asian power. And this rise was in global steps. And because of that shock China
started thinking let’s pay more attention to the neighborhood. And with the humbler
attitude, not obedient to the west attitude, but the lay low and help out and don’t be
arrogant attitude of Deng Xiaoping in the 1990’s, this made a tremendous difference
in the relationship with Southeast Asia. You had normalization in the relationships
with Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, so already in the early 1990’s
you had the establishment of the foundations of a better relationship with Southeast
Asia. Then 1997, the Asian financial crisis, China first of all dealing with Hong Kong,
makes it possible for Hong Kong to hold value in the Hong Kong dollar. And then 朱
鎔基 extends the promise that the Renminbi and the Hong Kong dollar will be held to
Southeast Asia and by the end of the 1997 that promise is held. Southeast Asia is
really critical of IMF and the World bank, really critical of the United States, really
critical of Japan, and very grateful to China.
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And you have to remember that Southeast Asia tried to control the financial
crisis itself, it failed. So the governor of the bank of Thailand said on something like
July 25, “We will hold the value of the Baht steady.” By the end of the week, the Baht
lost 30% of its value. So with China on their side and able to do it, those two things
together really changed the image of China for Southeast Asia. And then China
became very enthusiastic about the relationship with Southeast Asia. From then to
2002 you have a huge effort in Beijing to figure out, so what we can do, how can we
have a cooperative relationship. What are their concerns and we will take care of
those concerns. We have very generous terms in the China-ASEAN free trade
association for ASEAN, and especially in the early part. You have the signing of the
agreement on peaceful cooperation in the South-China Sea in 2002, you have the,
China becomes the first non-ASEAN signatory to the treaty of amity in 2002.
Oh and I should mention, that when Vietnam joined ASEAN in 1995, China
not only didn’t make any formal protests, but it didn’t make any informal protests
either. It didn’t try to go behind these things. And when you think, here is the country
recently hostile to China, certainly more sensitive to China than any of the other
countries, and they are joining the regional association, any realist strategist in Beijing
would say: “Oh, don’t let it happen. Divide and conquer, keep them separated.” And
China didn’t take that attitude, that was very good. It laid the foundation of this
different relationship with Southeast Asia.
2008 they had a hiccup in the relationship, and it continues to be a problem.
China’s attitude of win-win was fine before 2008, because both China and ASEAN
were facing a larger global situation, which looked stable and powerful. But with that
situation changing, China stayed stable, it keeps on growing at 10%, and so win-win
sounds to Southeast Asia as we are not losing, but proportionally, what am I exposing
myself to? This becomes a question in Southeast Asia. And the Spratly Islands
becomes symbolic, really. That feeling of vulnerability, of increased vulnerability to
China. And what China needs to do to deal with that feeling of vulnerability is to go
back to basic principles of the tribute system. To show respect for autonomy. But the
problem with the Spratly Islands is that when you have disputed sovereignty its
particularly difficult to show respect for autonomy. So that is a real problem. But I
have an article last year in International Affairs called “Beyond win-win”, and the
whole idea is win-win is not enough if you are the big regional power. It has to be, if
you want deference, you have to give autonomy.
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Chang: I think I only have two more questions. The first question is that since we’ve
talked about the changing relationship between China and Southeast Asia, so what’s
your understanding and perspective towards the Chinese leaders after Deng Xiaoping?
Womack: Well, I think pretty much Jiang Zemin stayed with that same basic policy.
In the early 2000’s the increased interest in 大國崛起 started showing, raising his
little head, maybe like here’s our lantern, I can hold it a little higher now, look at the
other people who carried lanterns previously. I’m in that, 大國崛起, so I remember it
well, but I don’t see Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao as being leaders of that type of raising
China’s profile, I really worry about Xi Jinping in that respect because there seems to
be a lot more, a lot less patience and a lot more arrogance, I really worry that the
concentration on a special relationship with the United States is a return to a kind of
global mentality but in a more rival, you know, let’s control the rivalry of us great
powers type of mentality. And that’s not good. And I really worry about people like
Yan Xuetong and other people who are deeply influenced by American international
relations theory, the realists, who are “the devils gift to mankind”, they are the worst
possible advisors as far as what do to with international relations. And Yan Xuetong
emphasizes, he says that China should develop allies. We are moving into a world
where allies are not what you need. We are really living in a world of strategic
partnerships, which are inclusive, not exclusive relationships, that’s what you need in
a globalized world. Alliances of the sort that Yan Xuetong is talking about are
alliances against, and alliances against, the first thing you loose in an alliance against
is your opportunities with whoever you are against.
Chang: I think we have quite a lot. So the final question. You are fascinated with
German philosophy, but what’s your favorite philosopher in China during the 春秋戰
國 period and how’s your ….and because you talk about Zhuangzi, so when you are
researching China, we have quite a 儒家、道家、法家，so what’s your general
perspective, of course if you can talk a bit more about 魏晉玄學 I would be very
thankful.
Womack: I like all of them for different reasons, starting with Guanzi.
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Chang: Guanzi! Guan Zhong.
Womack: Yeah. Because he is like the Solon of Chinese political thought. He tends to
get neglected, just like Solon does in Greece. And I think that even though there is not
a huge amount of writing by Solon, his accomplishment of setting up a political
community based on negotiation between the rich and the poor was very foundational.
Its emphasis on dike [Δίκη], objective justice was essential to a different spirit of
politics in Greece. Just before Solon got into power, the reason he came into
power …but the challenge that brought him to this level was the introduction of
money into Athens, and money made it possible for there to be rich and poor. Guanzi
had an analogues kind of experience, the leaching away of support for the Zhou
dynasty, and the need to accommodate the princes and regional powers, and it drives
him to some fairly deep thinking, shepherding the people. Then, so I start first with
Guanzi. And then I very much, I like Confucius, though Mencius is more clear to me,
more direct, dealing with some very important problems of political equity and
sources of power and the whole idea of 仁 and…humanity is very attractive.
Zhuangzi appeals too, the poet, Zhuangzi, Laozi, and the Daojia in general, but these
classical writers, they are like Nietzsche only better. It’s not so much the system, it’s
the freedom of thought. And Xunzi is very good, for kind of very, a very closely
reasoned idea of political structure, very different slant but with some of the
orientations. And Han Feizi, he’s a scary guy. I use Han Feizi in classes sometimes,
because he is a lot more scary than Machiavelli. I think of that famous sentence from
Han Feizi where he says “Be empty, still and silent and from your place of darkness
observe the weaknesses of others.” I knew someone like that one time, he was terrible.
Actually this was an academic administrator and when I left that school I gave him a
copy of Han Feizi, he didn’t need it. He was a natural Han Feizi.
Chang: How about 魏晉玄學, because when people talk about, a lot of people say
that in 春秋戰國 these people were not philosophers, it’s just interesting, we call it 思
想 instead of 哲學, and when we talk about 中國哲學 we sometimes focus a bit more
on 魏晉玄學，竹林七賢、and a bunch of people, and 宋明理學, so what’s your
perspective on that?
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Womack: Well, I think there’s certainly a contrast between the Warring State and
Greek philosophy, but I think that they are on a par with Greek philosophy in a
quality of thinking, but they are not cosmological. They are not going after the basic
stuffs of the universe. Is it water, is it fire et cetera. But as far as being an ethic of
engaged existence in society, or an ethic of disengaged existence in the case of
Zhuangzi, it’s absolutely first rate. I’m less familiar with later philosophers but…I
enjoy Wang Yangming and other people that I’ve read, but I haven’t done all the
reading that I should, cause all this was on my own, you know, and you know how
much spare time a professor has.
Chang: Many thanks for your time. Now is two to four. So do you have any questions
that you would like to ask professor Womack?
Female voice: I have one question, it’s about Mao’s philosophy, I want to know what
do you think about Mao’s philosophy, of his thought, because you know he could,
from the traditional philosophy of China and he read a lot of books about the old
Chinese history and philosophies and even in the 1970’s he always read the 資治通鑑
or some other books and he took many notes on his books, and on the other hand he
also was a 馬克思主義者 and so what do you think about the two sides of his thought?
Womack: Well, first of all I guess I would say that there is more sides than that.
Because you have the influence in the earlier period of his father in law and Friedrich
Paulsen and other western thinkers of…John Dewey, and so…I would…typically in
the earlier period, Mao was certainly familiar with his Chinese intellectual historical
cultural environment, but his conscious orientation was for dealing with the new
situation, and that was typical of the period. And so that was what he was pointing
toward was understanding the present and understanding these theories. He had lots of
background that was there, and he was working within a framework that was common
too. When you read his notes on Paulsen, he’s not saying this is like whomever, he’s
dealing with…his relationship to that text, if you look at what he says you can see it
resonates with his Chinese background, his Chinese cultural background. And then
the same thing is true with rural revolution, from 1927 to 1934, not that much
reference, you know, people talk about oh yeah Mao read 三國演義 and Mao read all
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these things and in the end it was so important to his thinking. It is important to his
attitude but it wasn't so much, you don’t find very many explicit references for that.
Of course he would be vulnerable if he started talking about 三國演義 to 李立三 and
the 28 Bolsheviks and all these people but I don’t think that, I think he was dealing
with the reality in front of him, and thinking of that reality resonates but does not
copy previous rural revolutions in China.
When you look at his attitude towards…like how should the Red Army treat
captured prisoners, it is practically straight out of Mencius, treat them well and sent
them back, and if we capture them we treat them well and sent them back again,
because that contradicts the enemy’s propaganda. Well, Mencius said something
similar to that. Well if you treat people well you will attract people, so, there’s those
types of resonances, but you don't find the references. I think after…and that’s a
period where I feel fairly confident, I’ve read what’s available that Mao wrote and
understand the circumstances in which he is working.
When it gets to the 1950’s, Mao seems to be more…I don’t know exactly how
to put it…he did enjoy his authority more and relaxes on… he is making more
impressions on people. In charge, rather than trying to figure out what exactly is
going on. But I haven’t paid enough…well I wrote a paper on “where Mao went
wrong”, about what happened in 1957, but what really would interest me would be
that period from 1949 to 1956, and what his attitudes where, because in 1949-1956
he’s still cautious. Mao made his last adventurous prediction in the Hunan report in
1927. He made his next adventurous prediction in 1957, with the correct handling of
contradictions among the people. In between he was very cautious, even on
transformation, cooperatization. His estimates on how long cooperatization would
take, 12 years whatever, he had critiques of what was happening in the
cooperatization movement but he also paying careful attention to what was happening.
In the Great Leap Forward, no more careful attention. The second he saw one
successful commune he had seen them all. Those are just some random thoughts
relating to the traditional background. I don’t see Mao as being consciously caring for
Chinese political thought, I see him carrying them in his mental backpack, and
dealing more with actual situations. And with a kind of intrinsic populism, which can
be related to Chinese tradition too.
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Chang: Ok, thank you very much. Once small thing. Could you please spell your
conductress name, you said that’s the best one.
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