Rational middle ground needed

Editor's Note: Financial crises, economic uncertainties, splintering social groups and interests, and changing mass culture - what a world we're living in. This makes it all the more important for China to be guided toward a "rational middle ground" rather than toward increasing polarization, a leading political theorist Xiao Gongqin told China Daily's Zhang Zhouxiang.

The 68-year-old professor with the Shanghai Normal University was famous in the 1980s as one of China's champions of the so-called neo-authoritarian approach in managing the nation's changes. Recently he has been in the news again with his call for a rational middle ground between the left and the right, at a time when he sees growing risks from a war of ideals and values.

In general the left promotes "equality" and the public good, while the right advocates "liberty" and "personal rights". When those conflicting ideals grow into mutually exclusive extremes, as they did during China's "cultural revolution" (1966-76), society will be paralyzed by impractical goals, and disasters will happen, Xiao said.

The conflict between the two camps is often belligerent in China, which is not good in a society of increasingly diverse interests. A healthy, reasonable interaction between the two camps, rather than endless, and at times reckless mutual mud-slinging, is essential if China is to navigate a less risky course of development, he cautioned.

Extremism has emerged time and again in the course of China's reform, noted Xiao, who is also a historian, citing examples such as the call for "total Westernization" in the 1980s and the yearning for the allegedly "golden egalitarian days of the past" since the late 1990s. Every time extremism occurs, it tends to slow down, if not jeopardize, the country's economic reform and development.

A society's transformation is by nature a highly fragile process, in which consensus is hard to build but easy to break down. Just as a volcano will tend to erupt where the Earth's shell is thin, a society tends to fall into chaos when it begins to have more expectations than its government can deliver, Xiao said.