Chinese New Left

Neo-leftism arose as a political idea in opposition to liberalism during the mid-1990s in the People's Republic of China. Most members of this camp are scholars in their 30s to early 40s. Neo-leftism is seen as being more appealing to students in China today than liberalism, as problems faced by China during its modernisation such as inequality and the widening gap between the rich and the poor are becoming more serious.

The neo-leftist can usually be divided into two main groups: the believers of postmodernism and those who support Chinese nationalism. The first group consists mainly of scholars who came back to China in the mid-1990s. They were heavily influenced by the idea of postmodernism in western universities and they tend to think that the social problems faced by China are caused by capitalist loopholes and corruption, and see it necessary to pull China back to the road of socialism. Another group of neo-leftists are more radical, believing firmly that China is moving away from the communist path which will result in the rise of capitalists, who will further exploit peasants and workers just like what happened in China before 1949. They are against the government's policy of openess and economic reforms, and do not consider Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward to have been a complete failure. Neo-leftists are also against democracy, which is seen as a foreign invention that will not work well in China.

Neo-leftists are often criticised by liberal intellectuals, who consider China not to be liberal enough, both economically and politically. Liberals tend to agree that inequality and the widening gap between the rich and the poor are serious problems, but exist in every developing country and are a stage of development that must be gone through. Liberals also criticise postmodernism, which they argue does not apply to China because it is still not developed enough, and at the moment does not yet face some of the particular problems that have occurred in some developed countries. Democracy and personal freedoms are seen by them to be important, although perhaps not attainable in the near future. These two competing camps have fiercely debated throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s.