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Sima Nan (司马南) (b. 1956) is a prominent social commentator and representative of China’s new left who first rose to prominence as a noted skeptic of new age qigong spiritualism.

Graduating from the Heilongjiang College of Business (黑龙江工商学院) in 1981, Sima Nan became caught up in the “qigong fever” (气功热) then gripping China. Like many of his contemporaries, Sima Nan was entranced by the purported health benefits of qigong practice and for eight years remained an avid practitioner. Yet by 1990 he found himself increasingly disillusioned by qigong masters who not only promised their disciples the health benefits of standard qigong techniques, but supernatural powers as well, all in exchange for exorbitant cash donations.

Sima Nan’s transformation into an apostate launched what would become a lifelong career as a professional skeptic. By the mid-1990s, Sima Nan was demonstrating to audiences across China such “supernatural” abilities as fire swallowing and telekinetic spoon bending, all before explaining the simple scientific principles that lay behind such tricks. Such exhibitions earned him the ire of numerous qigong masters and their disciples. But their vocal—and sometimes physical—attacks against him seemed only to strengthen his resolve. For Sima Nan, “fake qigong” (伪气功) was not only a ruse intended to profit off the gullible, but a threat to Chinese society, views which he publicized in such books as “Distinguishing Fake Miracles” (神功辩伪) (1997).

It was the Chinese government’s 1999 crackdown on the Falun Dafa (法轮大法) that launched Sima Nan to national prominence. Until that point, Sima Nan had been (in his own telling) engaged in a solitary crusade against ”fake qigong”. Yet with the CCP now designating the Falun Dafa and other qigong organizations as “evil cults” (邪教) and threats to national security, his skepticism was suddenly in political fashion. A confident public speaker, Sima Nan became a prominent fixture on China’s national broadcaster CCTV, where he inveighed against self-proclaimed qigong mystics and neo-spiritual practices. Following the government crackdown on the Falun Gong, Sima Nan began to take part in international conferences on cults and pseudo-science. He soon found an international ally in the form of American skeptic James Randi, whose own anti-cult beliefs led Randi to take a similarly dim view of the groups like the Falun Gong. Together the two went on to offer a $1.1 million prize to anyone, in or outside China, who could offer scientific proof of supernatural abilities.

Today, Sima Nan still rails against such targets as now-disgraced qigong master Wang Lin (王林) or the Christian-inspired millenarian movement Church of the Almighty God (全能神教会). Yet the last fifteen years have also marked the evolution of Sima Nan into an outspoken nationalist. In articles, microblog posts, and interviews, Sima Nan (a Communist Party member since 1977) has emerged as a fierce advocate for China’s one-party state. No longer content to direct his rhetorical barbs solely against his former qigong foes, Sima Nan has taken aim at those he views as China’s domestic and foreign enemies. Favourite targets have included China’s liberal intellectuals, the US government, and those who seek to promote in China the “universal values” (普适价值) of competitive elections and division of powers. In recent years, Sima Nan has served as an unofficial interlocutor for the Chinese government on the Voice of America’s and BBC’s Chinese-language services, respectively, where he has discussed everything from the fall of Bo Xilai (薄熙来), to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, to the rise of President Xi Jinping (习近平). Yet at the same time, he has taken pains to avoid the label “anti-American” (反美), countering that he is simply opposed to the hegemonic position of the US in international affairs.

Like many other nationalists in China, Sima Nan defends the country’s Maoist legacy and identifies as a leftist. Like his fellow traveller Peking University professor Kong Qingdong (孔庆东), Sima Nan frequently eulogizes the era of Maoist rule, when the Chinese people still spoke of their country as a socialist state based on an alliance between workers and peasants (“工人阶级领导的以工农联盟为基础的人民民主专政的社会主义国家”). And while careful to preface his views with statements of support for the Party, Sima Nan has expressed frustration at growing corruption in the government and the widening social and economic inequalities that post-Mao economic reforms have produced. For him, only a return to Maoist political ideals of the sort once championed by former Chongqing Mayor Bo Xilai can save China from political and moral collapse. (The years following Bo’s fall from power have put Sima Nan in the awkward position of continuing to champion Bo’s so-called “Chongqing Model” (重庆模式) of neo-Maoist governance while disavowing any connection to the man himself.)

While not immediately apparent, a connection could be drawn between Sima Nan’s new left nationalism and his longstanding vendetta against “fake qigong”. Whether in his anti-cult diatribes (the Falun Gong’s media threatens to turn a “once fantastically ambitious China into a chaotic and hopeless China” — “…后果就是一个本来具有伟大进取心的中国变成一个混乱和绝望中国…”) or his vigorous defence of one-party rule (“If China departs from the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, China will inevitably fall to pieces” — “今天，一旦离开了中国共产党的领导，中国必然陷入四分五裂”), Sima Nan presents himself as a man battling for the future of his country. To Sima Nan, these struggle are intimately linked. Those cults which first cheat the Chinese people are the same cults which will one day seek to “overturn China’s [political] system” (“当搞大了之后它就生出政治野心来，要颠覆中国的制度”). The fight against these cults thus takes on a strong political hue: groups like the Church of the Almighty God and the Falun Gong “aren’t only opposed to society, they’re also trying to seize power” (“…中国这个邪教它不是但反社会，而且它还试图夺取最高权利”). While his career as a professional skeptic predates the campaign against the Falun Gong, he has certainly professionally profited from—and personally embraced—the Chinese state’s aggressive stance against the group. In this respect, Sima Nan differs from his American peer James Randi. Unlike Randi, Sima Nan’s skepticism reflects not only a personal philosophy; it is also imbued with a partisan political commitment to his country’s ruling party.

While commanding a firm following amongst China’s nationalists, Sima Nan has been subjected to relentless criticism from China’s liberal wing, for whom Sima Nan is nothing more than “the biggest Fifty Cent-er” (“最大五毛”). There was no shortage of schadenfreude when a video of a university student hurling a shoe at Sima Nan while the latter was giving a talk at Hainan University went viral in 2012. And earlier this year, Sima Nan was forced to fight off rumours that he had compromised his patriotic principles by applying for a US green card for himself and his family. In spite of such criticism, Sima Nan continues his work as a regular commentator on Chinese-language programs both in and outside the PRC.

Additional Links:

• Sima Nan’s Weibo account.
• Sima Nan’s blog.
• Sima Nan’s Youku account.
• Sima Nan’s column on Red Song Society Online.

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Shen’s intellectual career is reflective of the tumult and opportunity that characterised the early reform years under Deng Xiaoping. Shen achieved professorial stature without tertiary qualifications as his youthful attempts at further education were stymied. In 1976, he successfully expunged a fabricated murder rap inserted into his personal file, only to be labelled a counter-revolutionary. This made him ineligible for the university entrance examinations that were reinstated in 1977. Nonetheless, he was eventually accepted for graduate studies at CASS, owing, as he later recalled, to the good offices of  Deng Liqun, then a Vice-President of CASS and China’s propaganda chief in the early 1980s. In 1983, however, Shen was arrested on the charge of leaking state secrets and received a two-year jail sentence. Released early in May 1984, he found himself a pariah and unable to return to his studies. In the spring of 1985, he went to Shenzhen to pursue an export business opportunity and was soon enjoying a comfortable living. The resumption of his academic career began with his return to Beijing in 1988 to help a publisher friend edit manuscripts. He realised that he could follow an independent intellectual career provided he had the funds to do so. Shen returned to the south to start a gold trading business in Guangzhou and soon made a fortune. In 1993, he founded his own research institute in Beijing, laboriously named the Centre for Oriental Historical Research and Association of Chinese Historical Studies 中国史学会东方历史研究中心 (which operates today as the Association for Oriental Historical Studies 东方历史学会). Shen and his wife Li Danhui 李丹慧, who is also a noted Cold War historian, run this private research institute which has hosted numerous conferences, seminars and other forms of scholarly activity. The institute has also sponsored the publication of dozens of books and articles on China during the Cold War years. Shen is currently Director of the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He holds adjunct professorial positions at CASS, Peking University, Renmin University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has a five-year appointment as a public policy scholar (2009-2014) at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (or The Wilson Centre).  Below we present some highlights of Shen’s scholarship:

In Mao, Stalin and the Korean War 毛泽东、斯大林与韩战 (1998), Shen provided a rich empirical study of the relations between China and the Soviet Union in the period preceding China’s intervention in the war. This was a follow-up to his 1995 book, Secrets of the Korean War 朝鲜战争揭密. Shen’s scholarship in the mid- to late 1990s was strikingly at odds with that of Party historians and he was widely praised among his peers for offering an evidence-based and critical perspective on how Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated in the late 1950s. Using archival materials, he traced the decision-making process leading to China’s intervention in the Korean War. He also drew extensively on published memoirs and monographs as well as on diplomatic documents that he had gathered from both Russia and the US.

Shen’s Realpolitik analysis was to have a profound impact on subsequent mainland scholarship about the Korean War. Up until then, official accounts had presented two main reasons for China’s intervention in the war: preemptive self-defense to ensure that the war did not spill across the border; and, support for a neighbourly ally in defense of communist internationalism. In contrast, Shen advanced the view that China, as a fledgling member of the Communist bloc, needed to prove itself to the Soviet Union in order to secure protection and assistance for its planned military campaign to ‘liberate’ Taiwan. He also argued that Stalin had endorsed Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea partly because of the Sino-Soviet Treaty negotiations in 1950. The result of these negotiations was that the Soviet Union would have to vacate its military base at Lushun (Port Arthur) in 1955, leaving North Korea as its only option for an ice-free Pacific port. According to Shen, China’s involvement in the Korean War reflected its inability to negotiate with the Soviet Union as an equal. By focusing on the different interests involved in the triangular relationship between China, Korea and the Soviet Union, Shen substantially undermined the official account of China’s decision to enter the Korean War. Highlighting the hollowness of the Chinese government’s claims of a ‘teeth and lips’ relationship with North Korea, Shen also argued that North Korea’s subsequent policy of radical isolationism was a direct consequence of China’s involvement in the war. (He presents a summary of these points in a lecture on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV, 朝鲜对抗心态从何而来, 凤凰网讲座, 25 February 2013).

Shen was widely acknowledged as China’s foremost Cold War historian by the late 1990s. In 2011, Stanford University Press published a collection of translated essays by Shen and Li Danhui under the title After Leaning to One Side. The essays examine China’s relationships with its allies during and after the Korean War and argue that the war shaped Chinese official policy, thereafter reinforcing the consensus of the Party leadership that ‘the only way for China to achieve an independent position among the world’s powers was to struggle continuously.’ The anthology has enabled the scholarship of this husband-and-wife team to reach a wider international readership.

Online biographies of Shen frequently include the line, ‘Personnel files broke his rice bowl in the first half of his life but became his soul food in his later years.’ Shen’s business talents, his personal wealth and his willingness to spend enormous sums of money in furthering Chinese scholarship have earned him many fans in China. He has spoken freely about how he exploited loopholes in China’s transitional economic system in the 1980s to gain a reputation as China’s biggest gold trafficker. He reminisced in a 2008 interview about how, as a frequent flyer in the 1980s, he brazenly carried bags of gold bars between north and south, explaining that while gold was a heavily regulated commodity in China at the time, it was easily obtained through ‘connections’ (see this Southern People Weekly interview).

The Chinese media make frequent reference to Shen’s ‘legendary’ purchase of declassified Soviet archives in the 1990s. He has spoken of how he successfully bypassed a Russian bureaucracy that levied high fees and tough restrictions on foreign access to archival materials by recruiting a team of Russian scholars to photocopy, collate and ship several suitcases worth of documents to his home in Daxin, Beijing.

In 2013, Shen attracted media notice again. First, there was much publicity in January surrounding the eight book-length works he published in 2012, Shen Zhihua’s Five Books on the Cold War 沈志华冷战五书, a five-volume anthology of his writings, A Forced Choice: The Cold War and the Fate of the Sino-Soviet Alliance 无奈的选择：冷战与中苏同盟的命运, a two-volume anthology, and At the Crossroads: China from 1956 to 1957 处在十字路口的选择：1956-1957年的中国.  Then in an interview in March with the Chinese journal Time-Weekly 时代周报, Shen reflected on the situation of historical scholarship in China, noting that mainland scholars were at a distinct disadvantage by comparison with their foreign counterparts. He referred to Ezra Vogel’s magisterial 928-page work, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2011), praising it as scholarship that Chinese people simply could not achieve for the time being. He added, ‘Actually, if Chinese people could really research this topic, they would surely reach depths that he couldn’t.’  The remark, and Shen’s interview, was soon widely relayed on the Chinese Internet.

Additional links

• Profile in Southern Metropolis Daily 南方都市报, 沈志华：想写的太多，差的是时间, 5 May 2013.
• Kramer, Mark, ‘Review of Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, “The Whirlwind of China: Zhou Enlai’s Shuttle Diplomacy in 1957 and Its Effects” ‘, H-Diplo, 4 November 2011. Online in PDF version.
• Shen Zhihua, ‘Sino-Soviet Relations and the Origins of the Korean War: Stalin’s Strategic Goals in the Far East’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 44–68. Online in PDF version.

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