The people most gripped by fear in the age of AI, I don’t know about others, but among my students, the fear is overwhelming. Why? They fear that the articles they write aren’t as good as those written by AI. It’s not just that our jobs will be replaced, they say. It’s that human beings themselves will be replaced.
What’s interesting is that these students of mine are young people who have seriously studied Marxism with me. Yet, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, they all seem to assume that the world they inhabit is the entire world.
And that brings me to the subject of today’s talk: Who shall shape the course of the world? Who gets to interpret the world and understand it? More importantly, who gets to transform it?
Economics can often do enormous harm. That’s because economists genuinely believe, and a large number of other people genuinely believe, that the laws explained by economics are objective laws, and that these objective laws can be used to guide humanity’s efforts to transform the world.
Whenever something happens, people have to ask an economist: Does this conform to the laws of economics?
As a result, economics has a far greater impact on our material world than other academic disciplines. People can dismiss other disciplines by saying, “Aren’t you just playing with words?” But economists can present us with a whole series of data and tell us, “Look, folks, we hold the crystal ball that allows us to understand and transform the world.”
So what’s really going on here? Is economics wrong, or is the world wrong?
I think the problem arises from a reversal of priorities. On the one hand, this reversal has given economics a degree of truth and authority that it should never have possessed. On the other hand, the development of economics has involved a clear process of disembedding: extracting the market from the complex web of human social relations and turning it into an autonomous entity. This reversal, in which what should be secondary is treated as primary, is one of the most important manifestations of idealism.
When Chairman Mao worked on On the Ten Major Relationships, he conducted extensive research. Of course, he didn’t go out and conduct all the research in person. Instead, he had more than forty ministries and commissions come to brief him.
What was his biggest complaint? Which reports made him most uneasy and frustrated? Those from the economic departments. Why? Because the economic departments gave him nothing but data. Their reports made the issues look extremely important, but they had no flesh on their bones. Mao even scolded them: “Have you hidden all the flesh away and kept it for yourselves?”
That’s the problem: research without flesh and blood.
And this problem isn’t confined to economics. In fact, much of today’s social science suffers from the same deficiency. Our research has no flesh and blood. Why? Because it has no human beings in it.
We treat concrete individual cases as mere exceptions. For social scientists, the only way to make our work look sophisticated and authoritative is to describe the world through universal data, laws, principles, and theories that supposedly transcend individual cases.
That is what I call an inversion. This is the inversion Mao was referring to when he spoke of idealism.
And this phenomenon isn’t confined to China. I’ve encountered it in countries across the Global South as well.
The people I’ve argued with most fiercely in the Global South are comprador intellectuals. These are the people I’ve had my fiercest arguments with. Why? Because I went in with a certain expectation. Deep down, I thought we were class comrades. I thought we’d be able to talk freely and openly. I imagined that I wouldn’t have to watch my left, watch my right, and watch my back all at once. I thought I could speak candidly with you.
But that turned out not to be the case. This inversion is widespread across the Global South, particularly in its universities, and especially at its top universities.
Let me give you another example. Just a few days ago, I taught a class for international students at Tongji University. They were also from the Global South, and, as I recall, many of them were from Bangladesh. After class, they eagerly came up to ask me questions. I assumed they were interested in Marxism.
They weren’t. Can you guess what question they asked me most often?
“Professor, how do I apply to Cambridge?”
What attracted them wasn’t my conceptual vocabulary. It wasn’t the Global South. It wasn’t the idea of transforming the world. What really captured their imagination was this: “Look, folks, I’m a Cambridge PhD, and I speak English with a Cambridge accent.”
Faced with this phenomenon of inversion, we have a task before us. As China deepens its engagement with the Global South, I would go so far as to call this a new Yan’an moment.
Why a new Yan’an moment?
Let’s go back to Yan’an in 1942, when Chairman Mao delivered his Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. He was addressing two groups of people.
The first was the ordinary people of Yan’an. The second was the intellectuals who had arrived there, people like Ding Ling. They had been living in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, hadn’t they? They had been living relatively comfortable lives. They had lofty ideals and burning passions, but their material circumstances were rooted in highly urbanized and industrialized environments.
Consequently, their thinking and their ways of understanding the world were inevitably shaped by their petty-bourgeois surroundings.
And this influence of the petty-bourgeois environment has continued right up to the present day.
At the beginning of the People’s Republic, Chairman Mao even called for the writing of stories about not being afraid of ghosts. That’s because our minds are full of ghosts. We imagine that there are certain things we cannot resist or challenge, that they are fixed, objective laws that cannot be broken, just like the laws of economics.
But this mindset doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in dramatic confrontations, in struggles to the death. Sometimes, it manifests itself simply as a fear of the future and a sense of uncertainty about the present.
That’s why, in his Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Mao emphasized that while transforming the world, we must also transform ourselves. Intellectuals who went to Yan’an were also transforming themselves.
This gives us a useful starting point for thinking about the question of who shapes the world, or about the project of building an independent system of knowledge.
This project doesn’t necessarily have to be a clearly defined undertaking in which all the leading figures sitting here decide in advance how to build such a system of knowledge and then instruct the world, from the top down, on how the world system should be constructed. It doesn’t have to work that way. That is only one position within a dialectical relationship.
The second point is that, even as we seek to interpret the world and transform it, we are also transforming ourselves.
This brings us back to yesterday’s discussion: What exactly is the Third World? What exactly is the Global South? Does having a particular skin color and speaking Hausa automatically make you part of the Global South? Not necessarily. People can use Hausa to talk about capitalism and its ideals. This is precisely the position that many members of the diaspora intellectual community have been expressing today.
You may be in the United States or Britain. You may come from the Global South, but that doesn’t prevent you from representing the Global South in those countries while telling a story based on Global North theories, or advancing a theoretical framework developed in the Global North.
And even if you are physically located in the Global South, that doesn’t automatically settle the question.
When I visited South Africa, I met someone who told me, “I’m South African, and I’m also a critical intellectual. I have a greater claim than you Chinese do to speak on behalf of the Global South.”
Who is entitled to lead a revolution? Who is more revolutionary?
These are precisely the questions we face today. They are also challenges that we must confront in practice as we build an independent system of knowledge. And these challenges are both external and internal.
We must turn the blade inward as well. We must transform ourselves.
That’s why I once wrote a short essay titled Go to the South, Go to the Grassroots, Go Out into the Wider World.
For intellectuals like us who live in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other major cities, China’s own rural areas and inland regions can also be understood as a kind of Global South.
We may know no more about China’s inland regions than we know about other countries of the Global South.
But when we eventually make our way to the grassroots, when we immerse ourselves in a more complex world, we will discover the significance of China’s position as a major developing country and an integral member of the Global South.
Why?
Because China is an immense, complex, organic space. Through the active efforts of many people, we have brought these different spaces together and continued to work to bridge the material disparities among them.
We have continually tried to improve the lives of those who lack the ability or the means to make their voices heard, those who cannot articulate their needs and cannot lead decent lives. We want them to live better, to find their voices, and to be heard.
Through this process, we have gradually accumulated our own ways of describing and understanding the world.
And that brings me, finally, to the story of the Friendship Bridge, also known as the Bekutia Bridge, in Bangladesh, which was built with Chinese assistance and which I found deeply moving. I found its story deeply moving.
I’ve visited many development assistance projects, in South Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. I’ve seen many of these large-scale projects.
They are important. But why are they important? Their significance goes beyond the material infrastructure they provide.
In 1958, when Chairman Mao was reading Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, he reflected on the situation facing countries like ours in the Global South. What do we have, if not much else? If all you talk about is the material conditions of production and consumption, you’re missing the point. We started out poor, with virtually nothing. So what did we have?
We have the capacity to organize people. And that capacity matters. Once people are organized and mobilized, we can transform the basic social conditions of production and reshape society.
Of course, the people who were organized back then had more than just the spirit to challenge heaven and earth and overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. They also had Soviet assistance. The aid provided by the Soviet Union in the 1950s gave China a certain material foundation on which to organize people.
The same applies to China’s assistance today. Those enormous engineering projects, those bridges, really do matter.
When I visited one of these projects, a Bangladeshi counterpart told me how long it had originally taken to travel from Point A to Point B. Now, with the bridge in place, the journey took just fifteen minutes.
I thought that was an important point. But it was still only an objective description of what had changed. Behind that objective description lies a more important question: How do we explain the connectivity created by these Belt and Road projects? How can these projects transform people’s identities and the way they understand their place in the world?
This is precisely where we need to do more of the smaller, more targeted work.
We in Fudan are undertaking one such initiative: establishing a Center for Development and Governance.
What is the purpose of studying development? Development is not simply a matter of economic growth. It is also about how we tell the story of development, and how we promote progress toward a form of development and governance that is integrated, organic, and comprehensive. And this kind of development requires people everywhere in the world to work with us in resonance, moving forward together.
What I hope to build through this Center for Development and Governance is a network. The idea is not that everyone must listen to China. You can establish your own Center for Development and Governance in your own country.
My hope is to extend this model across the world, so that every place has its own center for development and governance.
We can then communicate with one another, exchange ideas, and, through the accumulation of practical experience and knowledge, transform our understanding of the world, especially the wider world beyond our immediate surroundings.
On that foundation, we can turn things right side up again. We can put things back on their feet and work, in a grounded and practical way, to transform how we learn and understand the world.
Editor: Zhiyu Wang
