Despite his invocation of socialist principles, Wang was quick to tell me that he dislikes the New Left label, even though he has used it himself. "Intellectuals reacted against 'leftism' in the 80's, blaming it for all of China's problems," he said, "and right-wing radicals use the words 'New Left' to discredit us, make us look like remnants from the Maoist days." Wang also doesn't care to be identified with the radical intellectuals of the 60's in America and Europe, to whom the term New Left was originally applied. Many of them, he said, had passion and slogans but very little practical politics, and not surprisingly, more than a few ended up with the neoconservatives, supporting "fantasy projects" like democracy in Iraq.

Wang prefers the term "critical intellectual" for himself and like-minded colleagues, some of whom are also part of China's nascent activist movement in the countryside, working to alleviate rural poverty and environmental damage. Though broadly left wing, Dushu publishes writing from across the ideological spectrum. Wang's own work draws on a broad range of Western thinkers, from the French historian Fernand Braudel to the globalization theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. "Intellectual quality is important to me," Wang said. "I don't want to run just any left-wing garbage." The magazine has carried abstract debates on postcolonial theory as well as, he claims, some of the most interesting analyses in China of how the government's urban-oriented reforms have damaged rural society. There are restrictions on what Dushu can publish, of course, and Wang is frank about them. As with all intellectual journals in mainland China, authors and editors at Dushu have to exercise a degree of self-censorship. Articles cannot directly criticize the leadership or deviate much from the official line on subjects that the Chinese government considers most sensitive — Taiwan or restive Muslim and Buddhist minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet.

"I get asked in Western countries, 'How do you define your position?"' Wang said. "'Are you a dissident?' I say no. What is a dissident? It is a cold-war category. And it has no meaning now. Many of the Chinese dissidents in America can return to China. But they don't want to. They are doing well in the U.S. To people who ask me if we are dissidents, I say, we are critical intellectuals. Some government policies we support. Others, we oppose. It really depends on the content of the policy."

Born in Yangzhou in the southeast province of Jiangsu, Wang was just 7 and entering primary school when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. The decade-long chaos, which traumatized older generations, seems to have left benign memories for Wang. He remembers being taken by his school to work in the villages for a week or two during the school year. "My generation of urban intellectuals," he said, with a hint of pride, "is the last to have firsthand experience of conditions in the countryside."

He counts the 20 months he spent working in factories around Yangzhou after middle school as a valuable experience. In 1977, he took the first university entrance exams to be held after the Cultural Revolution, during which many universities were either shut or would admit only peasants, workers and soldiers. "Thousands of aspiring students," he reminisced, "were competing for a single place."

When he moved from Yangzhou to Beijing to begin his doctoral studies in the mid-80's, Wang found himself part of an even more privileged class. "Intellectuals," he said, "had been targeted during Mao's time; now, post-Mao, they were the elite again." And by then, Wang said, they all agreed on what needed to be done: China had to abandon its "feudal" and socialist traditions and catch up with the capitalist West. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals saw socialism in China as a failure. Consequently, they had, Wang argues, no real debate on whether a Western-style consumerist society could be successfully recreated or was environmentally sustainable in China. The West, especially the United States, was idealized.

Wang first began to develop his own views on contemporary China while working on a dissertation about one of the most admired of modern Chinese writers, Lu Xun (1881 1936). Lu Xun, Wang explained to me, was a writer of the left, but he was very critical of left-wing writers and activists. He criticized Chinese tradition, but was also an excellent classical scholar. He welcomed the Western idea of progress, but was also skeptical of it. The paradoxes in Lu Xun helped Wang to see that Chinese modernity could not be a simple matter of abandoning the old and embracing the new — as it had been for both Maoists and free-market capitalists.

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For Wang, the problems associated with China's uneven development were