Who Liu jiming is

A Comparative Analysis of Liu Jiming’s 2010 Hubei University Lecture and His Positions Today

By Tumen
Bohuozhe, Debate Forum, October 22, 2026

Liu Jiming’s 2010 lecture at Hubei University’s Sirui Forum, “‘De-Lu Xun-ization’ and China’s Intellectual and Cultural Crisis” (https://bohuozhe.pages.dev/a/forum-90011), is the text through which many people first became aware of his “turn to the left.”[1] Many assume that the Liu Jiming of today is “still the same Liu Jiming,” only “bolder in speaking out.” But a careful comparison of his essays, interviews, and practical work over the past decade and more tells a different story. His spiritual core shows real continuity, yet his theoretical coordinates, his vision of struggle, and his understanding of the intellectual’s place have all gone through a crucial “iteration.” This was not a simple about-face. It was a long road of steady digging, one that kept pushing his questions to deeper ground.

A note on method: what follows is a comparative reading of his published texts. It is an analysis at the level of ideas and literature, not a final verdict on matters of fact. In 2010 he was a “New Left writer.” Today he has become a “people’s writer” and a “proletarian intellectual” who holds firmly to a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist position. This change follows a clearly traceable path.

I. The Constant Ground: A Line of Inquiry That Never Wavered

Let us begin with what has stayed the same, so as not to overstate any “rupture”:

• He has always been alert to the infiltration of neoliberalism into culture, education, and literature.

• He has always taken Lu Xun as his most important spiritual reference point, defending Lu Xun’s fighting spirit: sympathy for the insulted and the injured, and criticism that never stops.

• He has always opposed the deification of market logic, and has remained wary of the way capital has devoured spiritual life since the 1990s.

• He has always insisted that literature must not retreat into the sealed ivory tower of “pure literature,” but must answer to the suffering of its time.

None of these starting points from the 2010 lecture has been overturned by Liu himself. What has been completely renewed is the “toolbox” he uses to diagnose the disease and point to a way out.

II. Five Major Changes (2010 → Today)

Change 1: Theoretical resources. From a Western Marxism centered on Gramsci to a framework built on Mao Zedong’s thought on literature and art.

The 2010 Hubei University lecture: His central analytical tool was Gramsci’s concept of “cultural hegemony.” He read “de-Lu Xun-ization” as a battle in which neoliberal elites were fighting for cultural leadership. His Marxism was largely of the academic New Left variety, with cultural critique coming first: he spoke of ideology, of discursive struggle, of the hidden taming at work in education. But he seldom drew systematically on the Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,[2] and rarely made class struggle, the people as historical subject, or continuing revolution his overall framework. He did read Mao at the time, but treated him mainly as a great historical symbol of the twentieth century, not as a complete method for dissecting the present.

In short: back then, he was “looking at Lu Xun through Gramsci’s eyes.”

Liu Jiming today: He still mentions Gramsci, but Gramsci has moved to the background. At center stage now are Mao Zedong’s view of history, the Yan’an path in literature and art, the mass line in historiography, and the concern with combating and preventing revisionism. He repeatedly stresses the remolding of intellectuals, and insists that working people are the subjects of history, not “material” to be gazed at. He has re-evaluated Liu Qing and his novel The Builders, as well as Chen Yingzhen,[3] and has explained again and again “why Lu Xun cannot be treated merely as a great man of letters, but must be placed within the lineage of the people’s revolution.” He states clearly that “cultural critique” alone is far from enough. If the left avoids the economic base, the relations of production, and the reproduction of class, it easily turns into “sophisticated griping.”

Now it is: “rereading Lu Xun from the ground of the people’s revolutionary tradition.”

Change 2: His view of the system. From “there is still room to maneuver inside” to “no longer expecting the literary establishment to reform itself.”

The 2010 lecture: He criticized cultural trends and many mainstream intellectual elites, but still assumed that the existing literary and cultural institutions contained room for struggle. When the lecture mentioned the Wang Hui affair,[4] his reasoning ran: “There are still upright scholars, there are still positions to hold. We must keep debating and keep contending for discursive power.” As a vice-chairman of the provincial Writers’ Association at the time, he still believed it was possible, from within this establishment, to halt the further spread of “de-Lu Xun-ization” through essays, lectures, and dialogue. His stance was that of a “critic and voice of warning within the system,” hoping the system would “return to a better version of itself.” At that point, he had not yet imagined “deliberately cutting off every institutional channel.”

Liu Jiming today: After the storm of 2018[5] and a string of hard experiences, his judgment has changed completely. He believes the mainstream literary world has been thoroughly tamed by neoliberal logic, and can hardly be turned around by internal reform. So he chose to open up independent ground of his own: the internet as his trench, writing workshops, the Human Realm platform, and the Midstream journal series.[6] This is a line of “building people’s literature outside the system,” devoted to uniting young people and rebuilding a grassroots ecology of people’s literature and art. He has given up the reformist illusion that “I can slowly win it back from the inside.” He has gone from “loyal critic within” to “builder at the margins.”

Change 3: The intellectual’s place. From “critical conscience” to “the necessity of remolding one’s own standpoint.”

The 2010 lecture: It was deeply moving, yet it still carried a limitation common to that generation of “critical intellectuals.” It cast the intellectual chiefly as “the conscience of society, the clear-eyed sentinel,” one who stands up to expose “de-Lu Xun-ization” and tells everyone that danger is coming. The logic was: if only more intellectuals dared to tell the truth, the cultural crisis could be checked. This was an “elite leftism,” in which intellectuals are the main movers and the people are objects to be “awakened and informed.”

Liu Jiming today: He has repeatedly examined and criticized this stance. In many essays and workshop lectures he argues that being merely a “witness of conscience” is far from enough. Intellectuals must transform their standpoint: not “speaking for the lower classes” from on high, but placing themselves within the ranks of working people. He sharply criticizes the “academic left,” whose papers are elegant and whose slogans are textbook-correct, but whose way of life and structure of feeling remain cut off from workers and peasants. He emphasizes that the greatness of the later Lu Xun lay precisely in having “moved from evolutionism to class theory, breaking out of his old self.”[7] He also settles accounts with his own past, admitting that the self of the 1980s and of his avant-garde period carried heavy elitist baggage too. His writing today is an ongoing struggle against that old self.

Change 4: Historical vision. From “criticizing what came after the 1990s” to “a full revisiting of the twentieth-century revolutionary legacy.”

The 2010 lecture: His critique was aimed mainly at the expansion of neoliberalism after the 1990s. As for the first thirty years of the People’s Republic and the Chinese revolution as a whole, he largely “took its justice for granted,” without actively and systematically revisiting it. His narrative was closer to: “things were fine, and then after the nineties they were ruined.”

Liu Jiming today: His line of inquiry has pushed much further back and much deeper. He argues that the revolution cannot be treated as “a finished matter, a job accomplished and done with.” One must see that the revolution had victories, but also setbacks, interruptions, and struggles that came round again and again. He writes about and discusses land reform, agricultural collectivization, and the Yan’an path at length, refusing the popular narrative that reduces the twentieth-century revolution to a series of “disasters to repent of.” At the same time, he makes clear that revisiting is not nostalgia, nor an attempt to copy historical practices wholesale. It is about recovering the resources of popular subjectivity that have been forcibly “soft-buried,”[8] in order to understand the capitalist reality of today. It is precisely this dimension that has opened a decisive gap between him and the path represented by Fang Fang, which takes the Enlightenment of the 1980s as its final horizon.[9]

Change 5: The logic of action. From “a critic working mainly through publications and lectures” to “an organizer who also builds positions.”

2010: His mode of struggle was entirely typical: writing essays, giving public lectures, publishing commentary in established media. He believed that the force of ideas alone could change public opinion. He had not yet formed a plan of practice involving “running a platform, running workshops, and sustaining a community of young people.”

Today: He still writes fiction and essays, but has added a very deliberate main line: building positions and training red writers. He says again and again that a few brilliant essays written by a lone gunman are not enough. Neoliberalism infiltrates in an organized, long-term way, and people’s literature must likewise rebuild its own ecology bit by bit. The Human Realm website, the writing workshops, and the Midstream series are all products of this thinking. He calls himself “a guerrilla fighter,” with the internet as his trench. This vision of action is entirely absent from the 2010 lecture.

III. A Necessary Distinction: Intellectual Evolution, Not a Sudden Swerve Forced by Events

Two oversimplifications popular online should be avoided here:

• The first: “In 2010 he was still normal; only after being provoked in 2018 did he turn left.” This is wrong. As we have argued more than once, the turn was organic and gradual. The 2010 lecture was itself an important milestone in his departure from pure literature toward the left, and his sustained rereading of the classics and the writing of The Human Realm between 2012 and 2017 were key intermediate stages. The 2018 storm was an accelerant, not a starting point.

• The second: “He never changed; he was always like this.” This is not accurate either. If you set the full text of the 2010 lecture beside his recent Random Thoughts and the lectures he has given at Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, Shanghai University, and other institutions, you find real and significant advances in his theoretical framework, his judgment of the system, his self-reflection as an intellectual, and his attitude toward the revolutionary legacy.

The writer who rose at Hubei University in 2010 to defend Lu Xun, and the writer who today declares that he “writes for the proletariat,” are one and the same spiritual life in its “growth and fulfillment,” not two unrelated people.

A line of his own may serve as a footnote to this road:

“It took me a long time to truly understand Lu Xun. Not to understand his literary brilliance, but to understand why he ultimately chose to stand on the side of the worker-peasant revolution.”

Translator’s notes

[1] “De-Lu Xun-ization” (去鲁迅化): refers to the removal or reduction of Lu Xun’s essays in Chinese school textbooks, which was widely debated around 2009–2010 and seen by critics as a retreat from his critical, left-wing legacy.

[2] Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》, 1942): Mao’s foundational statement that literature and art should serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and that writers must remold themselves by joining the masses.

[3] Liu Qing (柳青) and Chen Yingzhen (陈映真): Liu Qing’s The Builders (《创业史》) is the classic novel of agricultural collectivization in Shaanxi; Liu Qing famously lived among peasants for fourteen years to write it. Chen Yingzhen (1937–2016) was Taiwan’s most prominent leftist writer and was imprisoned for his political views.

[4] The Wang Hui affair (汪晖事件): in 2010, Wang Hui, a leading New Left scholar at Tsinghua University, was accused of plagiarism in his early work, setting off a fierce public debate largely divided along ideological lines.

[5] The storm of 2018 (2018风波): refers to the controversy surrounding Liu’s public support that year for young people detained in connection with a labor dispute (see his essay “A Remembrance That Must Not Be Forgotten,” mentioned in I Cannot Remain Silent).

[6] Midstream (《中流丛刊》): the title 中流 echoes Mao’s 1925 poem “Changsha,” with its image of striking the water in midstream, a byword for youthful daring against the current.

[7] “From evolutionism to class theory” (从进化论走到阶级论): echoes Lu Xun’s own account, in his 1932 preface to Three Leisures (《三闲集》), of how his thinking moved from a faith in evolutionary progress to class analysis.

[8] “Soft-buried” (软埋): a pointed allusion to Fang Fang’s 2016 novel Soft Burial (《软埋》), which depicts the violence of land reform. The term originally means burial without a coffin. Here the author turns it back on its source: what has been “buried” is not the trauma of the revolution but the people’s agency within it.

[9] Fang Fang (方方): Wuhan novelist, former chair of the Hubei Writers’ Association, internationally known for Wuhan Diary (2020). She and Liu Jiming, both Hubei writers, represent opposing camps in Chinese literary debate.

A few choices you may want to adjust:

• 高级吐槽 → “sophisticated griping.” Alternatives: “high-minded venting” or “highbrow complaining.”

• 内部诤友 / 边缘建设者 → “loyal critic within” / “builder at the margins.” 诤友 has no exact English equivalent; “a friend who remonstrates” is more literal but stiffer.