The world according to Lu Xinghua, China’s renegade philosopher

In a cramped but tidy workshop in Yiwu in 2013, a Frenchman in a rumpled blazer stands patiently before a table piled with sheets of green plastic. Men jostle around him, pointing out aspects of the production process and interpreting the remarks of the foreman. Patterns will be cut out of the sheets, they explain, and the millions of leaves will be sent out along with polyester petals to workers paid by the piece to turn them into flowers.

The employees of the factory, accustomed to wholesalers on junkets, would not have guessed that they were witnessing the first visit to the country of Jacques Rancière, one of the West’s earliest and most radical interpreters of Maoism, who had earned minor celebrityhood in China after his later work on the politics of aesthetics (and the aesthetics of politics) started to be translated in the early 2000s.

But was Rancière the central figure — or perhaps the target — of an elaborate prank? Prior to his trip to Yiwu, he toured shoe factories and carpet shops in Jiaxing, inspected banners with quotes from Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝, and heard from export industry professionals on the state of affairs in the Yangtze River Delta. Or maybe the prank was on his devoted Chinese fans, who followed his itinerary closely, looking forward to news about lectures, book signings, and dialogue with local interlocutors — little of which would materialize. Commenters on Douban, and the Art-Ba-Ba forum, home to a thriving community of online art and theory gadflies, demanded to know why Rancière was being shown around like a foreign rug merchant rather than a legendary cultural theorist.

Suspicion fell on philosopher Lù Xìnghuá 陆兴华. He was interpreting for Rancière and seemed to always be at the Frenchman’s elbow in photographs from the tour. He was accused of shamelessly serving as Rancière’s agent on the China tour, and also of compromising “dignity and reason as a local scholar.” But the greatest crime was his attempt to curate the event as his own, turning Rancière into a player in a Lu Xinghua-composed drama. He took care to make sure that he conducted and publicized his own interviews with Rancière, leading him toward meditations on Yiwu, the role of Chinese production in global capitalism, prompting the Frenchman to confirm some of Lu Xinghua’s own philosophical conclusions. In a country with great respect among critics, academics, and amateur critical theory buffs for the pantheon of contemporary European philosophy, and in particular the group abbreviated on the Chinese-language internet as ABRZ (Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek), Lu Xinghua’s hijacking of the tour was provocative.

But Lu Xinghua had learned a key lesson from these superstars of European theory. None of them had earned their status by evading publicity or steering clear of controversy.

The birth of a Chinese provocateur

Like one of the artificial flowers in Yiwu mimicking the real thing, Lu Xinghua has attempted to turn himself into the made-in-China version of the European philosopher.

He is the sort of individual that the outside world might find difficult to imagine existing in contemporary China. He is a renegade philosopher, disconnected from both mainstream politics and the usual currents of dissent; a radical thinker on art and cinema, he is also a respected lecturer who holds down a job at a Shanghai university; and he speaks foreign languages, is conversant in the theoretical lingo of the European academy, and counts legendary cultural theorists among his colleagues — all while choosing to remain in China. He is a complicated figure who complicates our vision of the country.

He cultivates an image: his bare scalp and utilitarian spectacles might have been chosen first out of convenience (he has never admitted to imitating Michel Foucault), but this look has now become his trademark. He speaks about the need to “self-theatricalize” (自我剧场化 zìwǒ jùchǎnghuà), to address not only the cognoscenti but also the crowd. Like Bernard Stiegler, whose gruff but sensitive popular image was built on his time in prison for armed robbery, Lu Xinghua has leavened the theoretical bulk of his public remarks with proletarian straight talk. He implicitly evokes the “culture fever” (文化热 wénhuà rè) of the 1980s and the thwarted desires of campus protests (his Baidu Baike entry notes that he was the head of the Nanjing University student union during what is described euphemistically as a “well-known incident,” referring to protests beginning in late 1988 as riots against African students and leading into the countrywide movement of 1989). And like his European idols, he has perfected the art of provocation — turning a flamethrower on domestic art and theory heroes, lambasting both state regulators and well-known critics of the state, adopting, wherever possible, a contradictory stance, and even once composing a lament for Osama bin Laden.

All this was not intended merely to attain the modest stardom that a critical theorist might hope to achieve, or to force out his beloved Europeans — but to ignite in China a new age of theory.

Lu Xinghua’s apparition as made-in-China ABRZ is improbable. After leaving Nanjing University in 1990, he went on to a modestly successful academic career, returning to his home province to teach in the English department of Zhejiang University of Technology, and publishing translations of French and German thinkers. His exile in peripheral institutions, whether by choice or, as has been speculated, because of his involvement in the events of 1988 and 1989, served to isolate him from intellectual goings-on that were already limited by the post-Tiananmen chill, as well as the capture of critical discourse by debates between the liberals and the New Left. But then the internet arrived…

While doing a doctorate at the University of Wales in the early 2000s, Lu Xinghua began posting semi-anonymously (his username — LuX — was close enough to his own name, but he did not betray any academic affiliations) on philosophy forums, including the barebones Shìjì Salon 世纪沙龙 (here’s a circa 2004 archive snapshot), sharing opinions on contemporary theory, art, and politics. These posts, with few exceptions, have been lost, or shuffled into archives circulating among WeChat friends.

The exceptions are interesting, however. They include a 2011 ode to Osama bin Laden, which stands out superficially as sheer provocation — a wild howl celebrating the attacks of September 11th — but contains some of Lu’s most poignant meditations on ethics and justice:

You want to know what I think about September 11th? I’m sorry, but I am going to upset you. I saw how smug and self-satisfied Obama and the Americans were after killing bin Laden […] They got what was coming to them: no more, no less. When I compare him to these ghouls, I can’t help but feel sympathy for my Osama.

In his famous interview about September 11th, Derrida said that international justice cannot be left up to Anglo-Americans, or their institutions and their proclamations, but will be imposed on us by the messianic power promised by the internet, the telephone, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants, and the bin Ladens. It will be proclaimed and enforced by the spirits of those that have suffered injustice, by the refugees, by the migrant workers, by the Qian Yunhuis, and by the Zhang Miaos. We and the Americans cannot investigate, negotiate, and collaborate our way to international justice. We can only attempt to study that force. This means we have regressed to a point where it might be fatal to attempt to come to terms with it. But that is the only solution. […] Maybe there is someone that can come and save us, but maybe there isn’t.

Around the time that he returned to China and took a job at Tongji University, Lu was among those that washed up on Weibo, posting short essays, elliptical aphorisms, and provocations to his Theory Workshop (理论车间 lǐlùn chējiān) and then Theory Workshop Backdoor (理论车间后门 lǐlùn chējiān hòumén) accounts. There was more freedom on the forums, but Weibo was a place to build a following. It rewarded intellectual scuffling and provocation, too.

Art, politics, and “art-politics”

Lu Xinghua came to the attention of a wider audience after going viral for a diatribe against New Left intellectual Wāng Huī 汪辉, and for making waves in the online art criticism world. He used the controversy to stoke interest in his online presence, driving followers to his Weibo and setting keyboards clacking on Art-Ba-Ba and Douban. This turned into real-world opportunities, as he took part as a curator at shows around Shanghai, and published a book, What Does Contemporary Art Do? (当代艺术做什么? dāngdài yìshù zuò shénme), which attempted to inject philosophy back into a Chinese contemporary art world bleached of theoretical seriousness.

Lu called for artistic intervention in theory and politics — not simply political intervention in the arts, which is what he charged Ai Weiwei with undertaking in numerous broadsides posted online…It was art, he argued, that would create meaningful political change.

In his book and his Weibo posts, Lu launched a committed attack on the art world, accusing ironic pop art of the 1980s and 1990s of commodifying the revolutionary legacy, and criticizing the mainstream avant-garde works of the 2000s for being purely commercial. His call was for artistic intervention in theory and politics — not simply political intervention in the arts, which is what he charged Ài Wèiwèi 艾未未 with undertaking in numerous broadsides posted online — arguing, after Rancière, that artistic expression should be maintained as a mode of resistance against the aesthetics of politics. He described his ideal form of contemporary art as that which “subverts and liberates,” citing as examples Bertolt Brecht and Michelangelo Antonioni. “The greatest storyteller is an internal enemy,” he wrote, “and the contemporary artist is our society’s Iago (the dark and vicious traitor of Othello), whose task is to sell out and overturn our shared community, and, as it becomes more and more like a concentration camp, leading us out.” Lu was calling for radical art, made by those that were excluded from power. It was art, he argued, that would create meaningful political change.

This intervention by Lu, something of an outsider in the art world, touched off a wider debate, which was mostly played out on Weibo and other platforms in 2011 and 2012. Guō Juān 郭娟, writing for LEAP (艺术界 yìshù jiè), summed it up this way:

Putting aside for a moment the insults traded by Lu’s supporters and detractors, and how a debate previously academic and social in nature devolved into mutual condemnations of character, the gigabytes of evidence all indicate that theory had once again entered the art world’s field of vision, even if in this instance theory was only being talked about, not analyzed or debated.

The call to bring theory back into criticism was heeded, as posters took to Weibo, Douban, and Art-Ba-Ba to debate the state of contemporary art with the language of not only ABRZ and other Western thinkers, like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, and Boris Groys, but also homegrown theorists, including Lu Xinghua.

The visit by Rancière in 2013 took on extra meaning: in the question-and-answer portion of a lecture at the China Academy of Art, he was, whether he knew it or not, being called on to adjudicate the debates of the previous two years. Lu, serving as an interpreter at most of these events, had to have been heartened to see the French critical theorist repeatedly confirming his own radical conclusions on contemporary art. Lu’s next book, The Future of Art-Politics (艺术-政治的未来 yìshù-zhèngzhì de wèilái), covering his interpretation of Rancière’s work on artistic and political aesthetics, was a victory lap.

“Urban philosophy” and the role of technology in life

Having achieved some success in his art world interventions (and having his Weibo shuttered), Lu Xinghua found himself, as he says in the foreword to The Anthropocene and Platform Cities, “fatally snared” by questions concerning “the future of Chinese urbanization and globalized urbanism.” This was a chance to inject theory into debate or — in the Chinese context, especially — the lack thereof around surveillance, platform capitalism, financialization, and smart city concepts.

Without abandoning his arsenal of ABRZ, Derrida, and Barthes, as well as Alexandre Kojève, Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze and Foucault, Lu entered into conversation with a new generation anchored by Stiegler, a thinker in the tradition of the post-1968 French radicals but more closely tied to Gilbert Simondon, a revolutionary philosopher of technology, who was among the first to tackle the emerging field of cybernetics. Stiegler, as well as the American Benjamin Bratton and Yuk Hui, were theorizing a world completely disconnected from the 20th century, where digital and network technologies had begun to profoundly change the way that individuals and groups behaved, remaking the meaning of art, politics, and culture. There were lessons to be drawn from these thinkers, but Lu Xinghua identified peculiarly Chinese iterations of digital and network technologies, as well as Chinese contributions to globalized urbanism.

The Anthropocene and Platform Cities, published in 2021, was presented as a guide to talk about what Lu called urban philosophy (城市哲学 chéngshì zhéxué):

Lefebvre cautions us that we not differentiate in our study of the city its past, present, and possible future states; the city must be studied as a virtual object, so we must employ new modes of thinking. Urban philosophy must be this new mode: it proceeds at present from the dead-end of urban studies, taking up the task of providing a new discursive-ideological platform, and becoming itself one aspect of the future Anthropocene urban society. Globalized capital markets and philosophical spheres have both been incorporated into Anthropocene urban society, meaning that the site of our theoretical and social struggle has changed.

The book and the idea of urban philosophy were doorways into theoretical discussion of the modern city, and, borrowing from Bratton, the planetary system of hard and soft systems that defined Anthropocene urban society. Lu Xinghua conceived, after Bratton, of the city as part of a global system, integrated into a system global capital; the modern city is a digital utopia in service of the logic of financialization, which institutes proletarianization and systematic stupidity; and it is through aesthetic intervention that this can be resisted.

It is a book intended to critique planetary systems, but also distinctly Chinese innovations, as with the sustained attack on Alibaba smart city concepts:

[A]t present, the history of the city, and even its physical reality, is being converted into data. The city is already inside of our phones. The entire city has disappeared into an active data swarm, while at the same time being constantly edited by the phones in the hands of pedestrians. Everyone is engaged in rewriting and editing the city. Alibaba, however, comes in like a subletting landlord to coldly tell us that they can use big data to govern the city. They tell us: This must be left to us, since we have the best big data technology, have collected the most data so far, and will maintain a stranglehold on data in the future. And [Alibaba chief technology officer] Wang Jian has said that big data is the only way to plan and govern the city. There is no other solution. We must let Aliyun do what they want. It appears that we have already become so many stacks of flesh on Alibaba’s cutting board.

Lu’s book made unique and startling statements about the technologies, like cloud computing, surveillance, and big data, that sit at the core of popular Chinese techno-optimism and state plans. This was not mere dystopian doom and gloom but was, like his art world provocations, a call to return philosophical depth to the proceedings.

This was not mere dystopian doom and gloom but was, like his art world provocations, a call to return philosophical depth to the proceedings.

Although the frequently dense language of the book — which assumes moderate familiarity with at least Simondon, Bratton, Stiegler, as well as tolerance for lengthy footnotes — can be off-putting, it is being presented to a readership already trained on critical theory. This means that its novel criticisms of utopian Chinese urban planning concepts kitted out with surveillance and all the bells and whistles of latter-day platform capitalism, still rare in the techno-optimist Chinese context, have some real weight.

The questions raised by Lu’s work are not simplistic, asking the reader, in a way that is rarely done by boosters or detractors of networked urban governance, to ponder the nature of humanity itself, the connection between the individual and the group, and the true meaning of technological progress.

A uniquely Chinese critic

Apart from his performance of theory, rare in the Chinese context, if not among European peers, Lu Xinghua stands out from the Chinese intellectual mainstream as a critic of global liberalism (not particularly Chinese or Western strains), who is also not attracted by local models of digital governance or high-tech authoritarianism, and generally hostile to extant leftist political projects in China, whether emanating from Communist Party theorists or the remnants of the New Left. Given his own fanbase, and the passion for figures like Žižek in particular, Lu Xinghua represents a modest but vocal intellectual undercurrent less concerned with Chinese problems than planetary systems.

Whatever headlines the newspapers carry and whichever voices get media hits, the story of the past three decades has been one of convergence between China and the West. This is reflected in financial and cultural linkages, and the movement of people between the two spheres, but also in the fact that both places now share the same problems brought about by the financialization of the economy, the omnipresence of digital and network technologies, and the degradation of the environment. Lu Xinghua’s conversations with Western philosophers of technology reflect this: they are talking about the same thing — algorithms and automation, the power of technology to remake society, and novel systems of control.

This is the lesson of Yiwu and its fake plastic flowers, destined for sitting rooms in Iowa or niches in Sicily or hotel dining rooms in Karnataka. If supply chains, financial systems, and logics of control can be globalized, then theory must be equally expansive.