After the Illusory Carnival

When The Economist published its July 2024 Chaguan column “The Nationalism of Ideas,” it offered a familiar interpretation of China’s latest intellectual movement: Xi Jinping calls for an “independent Chinese system of knowledge,” and a disciplined academic world promptly begins to theorize it. The piece was written in the magazine’s well-known register—sharp, ironic, and faintly amused. That tone is not unique to China coverage; it is the publication’s house style, applied with equal skepticism to Washington’s moralizing, Brussels’s bureaucracy, and Beijing’s ambitions alike. Still, its framing touched on a real and difficult question: are China’s scholars thinking freely, or are they simply moving in step with political cues?

The truth, as usual, resists neat summary. China’s social sciences occupy a peculiar position—highly institutionalized, closely watched, and yet full of genuine curiosity about the country’s transformation. Many leading scholars have studied and taught abroad, absorbed international methods, and later found those same methods oddly inadequate for explaining their own society. Others work entirely within domestic systems, balancing intellectual pursuit with institutional expectation. The result is a dense mix of conviction, adaptation, and self-censorship, where professional and political incentives constantly overlap.

Figures such as Yao Yang, Zheng Yongnian, and Tang Shiping have at different times voiced dissatisfaction with what they see as the limitations of their disciplines: that Chinese economics and political science rely too heavily on Western frameworks, that local realities are often shoehorned into foreign models, that academic prestige sometimes outweighs substantive understanding. Whether these reflections consciously echo the leadership’s vocabulary of “independence” and “self-confidence” is hard to say. For some, the resonance is incidental; for others, it may be strategic. But in many cases the criticism itself—of excessive imitation, of weak empirical grounding, of detachment from social practice—predates the political slogans now attached to it.

At the same time, not every voice in the conversation carries equal weight. Alongside those offering thoughtful, evidence-based critique are others who treat the same themes as little more than an opportunity to demonstrate political sensitivity. The line between sincere engagement and formulaic compliance remains thin. Yet it would be a mistake to assume there is no thinking taking place at all. For many Chinese scholars, these debates are also a search for professional purpose: how to make their disciplines relevant to a society still changing faster than its theories can explain.

Against this background, Fudan University’s Tang Shiping recently published a ...