Wang Huning: China’s Gray Eminence

In the seventeenth century, Cardinal Richelieu, a French religious and political figure, wielded extraordinary influence over the affairs of the French Kingdom. His authority over foreign and domestic policy was second only to that of Louis XIII, and throughout his tenure he often served as France’s preeminent statesman. During his political career, Richelieu was often accompanied by François Leclerc du Tremblay, a Capuchin friar who served as his confidant and advisor. In contrast to the imposing red worn by Richelieu, Tremblay wore the simple gray robes emblematic of his order. From this relationship, the term éminence grise (gray eminence) emerged. Used to denote a political figure who wields outsized influence behind the curtains of state affairs, éminences grises have often shaped state policy throughout history. In American politics, Henry Kissinger is sometimes referred to with this title. His exceptional influence on foreign policy in the Nixon and Ford administrations is a striking example of the power held by such figures. Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation on the Concert of Europe contextualizes his later Cold-War realpolitik, and a reading of Wang’s early work offers similar insight. [1]

 The modern world abounds with éminences grises; however, few have risen to such heights of consistent and powerful influence as Wang Huning has. In the spirit of Nixon and Kissinger, Wang is a key source of intellectual capital for Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a whole. [2] His most influential work, America against America, escaped relative obscurity in 2021 when the book was widely shared on Chinese social media following the Capitol riots in Washington, D.C. [3] While shocking to many within America, the underpinnings of the current political atmosphere were described in depth by Wang when America against America was originally published three decades ago. Wang’s analysis of Western democracy and the nature of American society have fueled Xi’s political projects and offer a deeper view into the foundations of the Chinese perspective on the bilateral relationship. His account reveals the foundational frameworks used to judge American power, and offers valuable context for analyzing contemporary US-China relations.

Early Life

Born in 1955, Wang grew up amid the turmoil of Maoist China. Wang’s father faced political persecution in 1959 over his ties with Peng Dehuai, then the defense minister and a rival to Mao. Seeing his father, a veteran of the revolution, lose status and position over political infighting at the highest levels of Chinese governance was a formative experience shared by many of China’s contemporary political elite. Wang was a sickly and quiet boy whose father spurred him to develop a deep appreciation for literature, reading banned foreign classics alongside Maoist texts. According to a biographer, his father would lock him and his brothers in their house to keep them out of trouble. A bookshelf served as their only reprieve. Unlike his future colleague Xi Jinping, Wang avoided Mao’s re-education initiative to send urban youth to communes in the Chinese countryside. His family’s political connections and his own poor health provided a different path. Wang took advantage of a government-sponsored program that began after Nixon’s visit to China exposed a shortage of foreign language experts, and studied French till 1977. [4]

 Wang’s childhood of solitude and reading served to make him a shining star amongst China’s first generation of political scholars. During the educational reforms enacted by China’s second paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978, Wang was admitted to Fudan University’s international relations master’s program, despite lacking a bachelor’s degree. His master’s dissertation focused on a Marxist analysis of Western theories of sovereignty, demonstrating a lasting focus on holistic views of the West imbued with Chinese characteristics. [5] Many who knew him at this time described Wang as an outwardly quiet scholar feverishly devoted to his career, yet also as an introspective man who loved classical Chinese poetry. His political beliefs in this period held a complexity often overlooked in studies of his life. Wang held a deep fear of China returning to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and therefore directly called for reforms that would protect the rights of individual citizens in his 1986 essay titled “Reflections on the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and Political Reform.” [6] Wang rose rapidly in the rigid ranks of early Chinese academia, and was promoted to Associate Professor at Fudan just as he turned thirty.

Beautiful Country

By 1989, Wang had gained a considerable reputation as one of China’s top political scientists. During this period, he traveled throughout the United States as a visiting professor and wrote about his experiences in America against America, his most widely read work. Published in 1991, with the collapse of the USSR ongoing and the Tiananmen Square incident still in recent memory, Wang’s conclusions resonated with the Chinese leadership’s many anxieties about the future. [7] Many CCP officials felt that the democratic surge of the late 1980s was a direct consequence of economic modernization. From this viewpoint, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms had produced an unintended mortal crisis for China: if economic inequality grew unchecked, social control would disintegrate. Within this inflection point, Wang looked to the United States as a valuable source of context for the future of China. America against America would be his own prescription for avoiding the worst ills of capitalism.

 America against America begins with a clear goal in mind: to analyze the United States beyond the ideologically driven facsimile that was dominant in Chinese political science at the time. In the twilight of the Cold War, Wang built a framework that assumed a new bipolar system, one dominated by the two “special phenomena of humanity in the 20th century.” [8] His analysis sought to understand the U.S.-China relationship as a defining factor in the history of mankind. Even some of the most educated and powerful Chinese decision makers in the late eighties saw America as little more than a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” [9] a kind of myopia analogous to American perspectives of China as a backward communist blip in the grand march of history towards liberal democracy. [10] Despite this view, the Gulf War demonstrated the depth of American global strategic dominance and produced a renewed interest in comparative perspectives of the U.S.

 In this respect, Wang’s work could be read as a companion to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. The two books focus extensively on societal cohesion and the influence of ideology on political systems. [11] Both were published within a year of one another and take the Hegelian approach towards history as a linear progression towards a final perfect system of governance. Where Fukuyama saw twilight, Wang saw dawn.

 A central motif in America against America is contradiction. Wang was deeply fascinated by the duality of class within the US. When Wang came to the US he first flew into San Francisco. On the night of President George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, he saw Bush Street lined with scores of homeless people sleeping in doorways. [12] While it is unclear if Wang knew Bush Street had existed for over a century and holds no connection to the Bush Family, this juxtaposition is what Wang identifies as America against itself. Young Chinese absorbed the idea that America is a place of unchecked capitalist excess, of materialist obsession to the point of delusion. American metropolises were simultaneously an enviable testament to a modernity yet to be achieved in China, and a confusing manifestation of a system said to be inferior to the Chinese model. How can a place with so much wealth also be one of such impoverished despair? In Wang’s words, “Isn’t this America? Is this America? I’m afraid I can’t answer that with a single word.” [13]

 It would be unfair to claim Wang was the first to identify this contradiction. Daniel Bell’s Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) presented a similar thesis to Wang’s, that capitalism produces an inherent contradiction wherein the values of hard work and diligence required to generate capital are eventually eroded by the later state of the capital they form. [14] Bell argues that modern society was formed by clashing cultural realms governed by different rules and processes. The lobbyist, the senator, and the voter exist within different spheres, and cultural disjunction is formed by the inevitable clashing of these aspects. Wang echoes this idea early on in his work with a quote by Marx: “the very basis on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates … [is that it] produces first of all its own gravediggers.” Where Wang differs from the work of American social philosophers like Bell is that he was able to enter the US with the perspective of its future rival: “My idea is to oppose the imaginary America with the factual America.” [15] 

The purpose of America against America is not to provide evidence for the overly reductionist Maoist view of America as a bourgeois hellscape bent on its own destruction, but to call for a holistic approach towards analysis, one in which America is governed by the same complex intersections of progress, equality, and power that have defined China’s own history.

 Much of Wang’s fascination and where the most brilliant portions of this work come from is in his analysis of how America manages the contradictions it produces. America against America restrains itself from merely cataloging issues in American society; instead, it tries to understand how these contradictions have failed to curtail American global dominance. The “imaginary America” that was presented to Wang prior to his journey was one in which the government is ruled by popular sovereignty alone. [16] The actual America, in Wang’s view, is one ruled by a small oligarchy of elite decision makers who drive the path of the nation. The contradiction here is between the symbolic power of documents like the Constitution and the actual material power to effect change within society. While the governmental structure was designed to empower citizens to direct change via electoral representation, Wang sees the American electoral system as having settled in a mode of containment: The system has adapted to remain capable in a time when vast economic disparity has separated those who theoretically hold power from those who actually do.

 Wang argues that by offloading much of the responsibility of governance onto capital itself, America is able to function. While it is ostensibly the responsibility of a modern government to provide for its citizens’ basic needs, the American capitalist system puts this responsibility onto the individual. [17] The homeless people he saw in San Francisco were not homeless because they were innately politically different than any other American citizen; they were homeless because they failed to succeed within the economic avenue by which housing is gained. Because transportation, food, housing, and employment have become commodities rather than rights, Wang sees the contradiction as being mitigated by the production of “self-organizing systems.” [18] Within a society “managed through the power of money,” there is no class consciousness or revolutionary drive as would emerge through a traditional Marxist framework, as the American state has evolved to distribute its responsibility throughout the system. [19] To Wang, this state is one of arrested development; he sees American society as having found a way to ignore the problems that should force it to change. Once he has identified this process of contradiction management, Wang examines the costs it places on society.

In Wang’s mind, the American system has managed to maintain itself through increased pressure on the individual rather than the state. The self-reliance that is embedded into American culture has produced a system in which inequality is not an accidental cost, but the enabler for the system to function as a whole. [20] In the American system, the individual is atomized as a consumer rather than a citizen. The stability that is purchased by this mechanism is then solidified by a political apparatus designed to alienate those within it. In this view, isolation and cultural degradation are required for the system to continue functioning. The actual mechanical process by which this occurs is technology.

Wang was amazed at the complexity and efficiency of American technological systems, and saw them as being capable of driving the individual to a state of malign contentment within the irrationality of the system they inhabit. Technology is capable of what Wang calls “dehumanizing coercion,” the ability of a technological system to force acceptance of material conditions better than a human can do. [21] To be fired by a manager invites direct ire towards the managerial system; to be fired for failing to meet the efficiency quota determined by a technological system produces a faceless bureaucratic wall that blocks any desire for remediation. Wang visited a factory and was impressed by the speed of production enabled by automation, but was equally fascinated with the ability of technology to act as a rationalizing mechanism throughout the U.S. [22] The mass media enterprises of the American 1990s were a stark contrast to the nascent state television and news apparatus of China. Television and advertising were capable of producing and enforcing the citizen-as-consumer process. Technology allowed America to function as a society ruled by money and image rather than force. Technology simultaneously enables the system to better function, providing communication between disparate spheres of power, and the means to enforce their scattered wills.

An Ideologue In The Imperial Garden

America against America was widely read across China at the time of its publication, and this success brought the attention of high-ranking CCP members. Two of the most powerful figures in Chinese politics at the time, Wu Bangguo and Zeng Qinghong, were so taken with the young academic that he was soon called to Beijing to join Jiang Zemin’s staff. Jiang himself spoke proudly of Wang’s work to President Bill Clinton during a 1998 dinner. During this period, Wang worked as a member of the Central Policy Research Office (CPRO), a government body that acts as an internal think tank tasked with writing speeches, developing policy, and progressing ideology. The 2002 transition from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao saw Wang rise to head the CPRO and join the central committee; in a decade, Wang advanced from a precocious academic to a burgeoning éminence grise.

 In a political landscape that is dominated by those with military or technocratic experience, Wang stood alone in the Imperial Garden. While the CPRO lacks the hard power of bodies like the central military commission, it provides a unique conduit by which ideology can be formed into policy. Under Hu, there was a strong party focus on achieving a “harmonious society” that was able to manage the issues that emerged from the Chinese economic miracle. Top-down efforts at building social cohesion and managing economic inequality lest it drive political instability echoed many of Wang’s conclusions about preventing China from catching America’s perceived sickness. The quiet modernization of the Hu era saw factional infighting grow, and in 2012 the next leader of China was chosen by compromise. Xi Jinping held a pragmatic appeal to Chinese leadership, competent and experienced, but lacking strong factional connections or a personal base of power within the party. [23] The sweeping centralization reforms that soon followed Xi’s ascension quickly destroyed any image of him as a meek provincial politician. By 2017, Xi had begun to reshape the party to a degree unseen since the early days of the people’s republic, and at the 19th Party Congress Wang Huning was chosen to ascend to the politburo standing committee alongside him. [24]

 The influence of Wang’s ideas can be traced throughout much of contemporary Chinese policy, but his touch has become far more visible in the past decade. [25] The CCP’s renewed focus on cultural factors, as evidenced by the state sponsored revival of traditional culture via the Hanfu, continues to press forward towards total “cultural sovereignty.” [26] The party has repeatedly signaled that it holds absolute power over the nation, meeting any challenger with brutal alacrity. The party has never been a stranger to social-engineering megaprojects, and has adapted beyond the visible brutish horror of the one-child policy era. The Uyghurs represent less than one percent of the Chinese population, yet their perceived cultural incompatibility with China has provoked a quiet genocide. [27] The Chinese tech sector has become a driving force in the global economy, and this growth has precipitated a sweeping regulatory crackdown of tech firms in a bid by the CCP to reassert control and prevent Chinese tech giants from gaining the power held by their western counterparts. [28] Xi Jinping Thought has taken far more than passing inspiration from Wang’s work; it was formed out of it. The policy solution to Wang’s new world blues is being operationalized, all with the goal of outlasting an America that some think cannot maintain itself in the twenty-first century.

Gray Crane Flies Over The Pine Forest

The observations made by Wang in America against America cannot be easily dismissed. Civic participation within the US has declined steadily, and the culture war is an ongoing testament to his argument about an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis.” [29] Technology has atomized social and political will far beyond what the car radios and CRT TVs of the nineties could have ever been capable of, and the U.S. faces a severe challenge in managing the rapid ascension of economic inequality. [30] But to predict a collapse of America is a categorical error, and demonstrates that despite his attempts Wang was unable to wholly understand the U.S.-China relationship.

 China has sought to manage its own contradiction through intense state control under the logic that, if the party can dominate every node, then none of them can exist in opposition to it. A contemporary reading of America against America produces an eerie sense of irony. In trying to avoid the future of America, Wang has pushed China far closer to the very sort of symptoms he described. It is difficult to find a chapter within the book that does not now speak as much to Chinese societal woes as it does to American ones. The most poignant example is in Wang’s views on loneliness; Wang describes loneliness as a disease of developed societies yet failed to envision China falling gravely ill. The demographic bottleneck formed by the One Child Policy has built loneliness into the social fabric of Chinese society. [31] Young Chinese citizens have entered a world drastically different from just a generation before; while their parents saw the GDP double every decade, they now sit in a dreary job market with increasingly sparse opportunities for college graduates and unskilled factory workers alike. [32] Steady population flows to urban centers in search of economic opportunity have left an elderly Chinese population larger than Russia’s entire population, alone in the rural villages that once served as the center of Chinese family life. [33] In the CCP’s attempt to extend tendrils into every sphere of its society, they have failed to fully shoulder the responsibility inherent to such a venture. [34]

 American decline has become a keystone in Chinese grand strategy. Chinese foreign policy seeks to build the foundations needed to assume hegemony once America reaches an unstable social supercriticality, and eagerly awaits the day when America concedes its near-global hegemony. Much of the irregular warfare conducted by China against the US focuses on disrupting social harmony as much as possible in pursuit of accelerating the outcome they have presupposed. [35] This prophecy fails to account for an America triumphant. The U.S.-China relationship is a special phenomenon without historical parallel; in neither nation’s history has either faced a rival of such magnitude. China has looked to its own recent past, and gleefully predicted that the century of humiliation it suffered will now be placed onto the powers that inflicted it. In doing so, it may come to understand that fate cares little for historical analogy. Wang himself is an unparalleled figure; his rise and longevity within the highest ranks of Chinese politics are astounding. What remains to be seen is how far his diagnosis will reach. America Against America has become an integral part of the Chinese political canon, and Wang has become integral to the party itself alongside it. Regardless of whether Xi seeks a fourth term at the 21st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2027, it is clear that his approach, influenced by Wang, has become institutionalized within Chinese governance. When the post-Xi era comes, whether through blood or ink, one gray crane may yet remain perched atop the highest pines of Beijing. H

Wells Benjamin ’26 served as a Campus Officer of the AHS chapter at the University of Georgia, where he majored in International Relations and Affairs.

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NOTES:

[1] Henry A. Kissinger, “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium: A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich,” 1954. Harvard University, PhD dissertation.

[2] N.S. Lyons,  “The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning.” Palladium Magazine, 11 Oct. 2021, www.palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/.

[3] “A $2,500 Book on U.S. Decline Is Suddenly a Must-Read in China.” Bloomberg, 13 Jan. 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/a-2-500-book-on-u-s-decline-is-suddenly-a-must-read-in-china. 

[4] “Wang Huning 王沪宁.” Brookings Institution, Oct. 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20thpartycongress_wang_huning.pdf.

[5] Haig Patapan and Yi Wang. “The hidden ruler: Wang Huning and the making of contemporary China.” Journal of Contemporary China, 27.109 (2018): 47-60.

[6] Wang Huning, “Reflections on the Cultural Revolution and the Reform of China’s Political System.” Introduction by Matthew D. Johnson, translated by David Ownby, in Reading the China Dream, www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-huning-the-cul ture-revolution-and-reform-of-chinas-political-system.html. Accessed 22 June 2026.

[7] Wang Huning, Meiguo fandui meiguo ［美国反对美国］Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House ［上海文艺出版社, 1991.

[8] Wang Huning, America against America, Unofficial English translation, (2021) 3.

[9] Huning, America against America, 3. 

[10] Wang, Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition. Edited by Theodore Huters, Harvard University Press, 2003.

[11] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992.

[12] Huning, America against America, 5.

[13] Huning, America against America, 6.

[14] Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books, 1976.

[15] Huning, America against America, 6.

[16] Huning, America against America, 162.

[17] Huning, America against America, 19.

[18] Huning, America against America, 19.

[19] Huning, America against America, 243.

[20] Huning, America against America, 311. 

[21] Huning, America against America, 240.

[22] Huning, America against America, 241.

[23] Cheng Li, Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessment, Recognition, and Misconception, Brookings Institution Press, 2016.

[24] Joseph Fewsmith, “The 19th Party Congress: Centralization of Power and Changing Institutional Rules.” China Leadership Monitor, no. 55, 2018, pp. 1–9.

[25] Edward Wong,, “Xi Jinping’s Inner Circle Offers Cold Shoulders to Western Officials.” The New York Times, 26 Sept. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-president-inner-circle-western-officials.html.

[26] Anagnost, Ann. “The Corporeal Politics of Cultural Sovereignty.” Radical History Review, no. 142, 2022, pp. 35–56. 

[27] Zenz, Adrian. “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards Newness’: An Assessment of Xinjiang’s Detention and Political Re-Education Campaign.” China Quarterly, vol. 242, 2020, pp. 401–28.

[28] Gruin, Julian. “The Political Economy of China’s Tech Crackdown: Reasserting Party-State Primacy.” New Political Economy, vol. 28, no. 3, 2023, pp. 412–29.

[29] Huning, America against America, 349.

[30] Lucas Chancel, et al., editors. World Inequality Report 2026. World Inequality Lab, 2026, wir2026.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2026/04/World_Inequality_Report_2026.pdf.

[31] Vanessa L. Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy. Stanford University Press, 2004.

[32] Ching Kwan Lee, “The Structural Trap: China’s College Graduate Labor Market in the Slowdown Era.” China Quarterly, vol. 256, 2023, pp. 812–33.

[33] Jingzhong Ye, et al. “Left-Behind Elderly in Rural China: Home Alone with Diminishing Care.” Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 49, no. 5, 2022, pp. 1012–35.

[34] “How ‘Lying Flat’ Went from a Niche Subculture to a Mainstream Phenomenon.” South China Morning Post, 2024, www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3357771/how-lying-flat-went-niche-subculture-mainstream-phenomenon.

[35] Lindsay, James M. “Election 2024: China’s Efforts to Interfere in the U.S. Presidential Election.” Council on Foreign Relations, 5 Apr. 2024, www.cfr.org/articles/election-2024-chinas-efforts-interfere-us-presidential-election.

Image: “Ketua DPR RI Dr. (H.C.) Puan Maharani saat melakukan pertemuan bilateral dengan CPPCC diterima langsung oleh Ketua CPPCC, Wang Huning di Gedung Great Hall of The People (Balai Agung Rakyat).” by Ist/vel, retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puan_Maharani_Wang_Huning.jpg. Public domain. This file is in the public domain in Indonesia, because it is published and distributed by the Government of Republic of Indonesia, according to Article 43 of Law 28 of 2014 on copyrights.