THE PARADOX OF CHINA’S POST-MAO REFORMS (3)
CHAPTER 13 -- THE EMERGENCE OF POLITICALLYT INDEPENDENT
INTELLECTUALS (MERLE GOLDMAN)
In the post Mao era the close, sometimes critical relationship of the politically engaged
older intellectuals with the state has resembled more that of their principled literati
ancestors and less that of the persecuted and cowed intellectuals of the Mao years.
Although members of this over-fifty generation were among the most persecuted under
Mao, when the Deng Xizoping leadership asked for their help and advice at the start of
the reform era, they quickly responded, sometimes with criticism.
The younger generation, those in their late teens and twenties, who members were too
young to have experienced the Cultural Revolution, were more like their May Fourth
predecessors in their search to absorb the new international intellectual and cultural
trends and go abroad to study, especially to the United States and Europe. Like their
counterparts, they too sought to offer advice to the government, especially to help China
recapture its one-time greatness.
A small but important segment of the middle generation of intellectuals, the Cultural
Revolution generation, whose members were in their thirties and forties in the post-Mao
era, resembled its East European counterparts during the Communist era. Members of
this group have engaged in more independent political activity than either the older or
younger generations. Their behavior has evolved more from their own experiences in the
Cultural Revolutions and its aftermath than from any direct contact or conscious
emulation of East European intellectuals or even Western intellectuals.
All three generations share certain attitudes, particularly the belief that only intellectuals
can bring about political change.
Similarities with Confucian Literati
Despite the continuance of a Leninist political structure, China’s move to the market, the
accompanying devolution of power, the opening to the outside world, the loosening of
controls over personal activities, and Deng Xizoping’s pragmatic leadership have made
possible a more open intellectual environment than at any time since 1949. As in most of
China’s pre-modern history, a de facto intellectual autonomy has developed in academia,
the arts, and popular culture. If anyone in these areas dares to challenge the leadership or
the government’s authority directly, the state, as in the imperial period, retain the will and
capacity to intervene forcefully to put down the challenge. But as long as intellectuals
remain within the limits of their discipline, they have been largely left alone.
Like Confucian literati, post-Mao intellectuals regard themselves as responsible for
defining and maintaining moral norms for the political leadership as well as for the
population at large. Through personal political contacts and articles in the official and
semi-official newspapers and journals that emerged in the Deng era, they sought to act as
the conscience of society, as they were unable to do under Mao.
The traditional pre-modern style of cooperation between the intellectuals and the
government, severed in the Mao era, resumed with Deng Xiaoping and his successor,
Jiang Zemin. Like their literati predecessors, as intellectuals have served and advised the
political leadership, they have been drawn into the policymaking process by their
political patrons, each group seeking to use the other for its own political purposes. Such
political-intellectual alliances have been held together in some cases by formal linkages
but, for the most part, by shared political views and values that have woven a variety of
informal intellectual and political networks rather than by purely organizational ties.
In the 1980s intellectuals discussed [policy matters relatively freely among themselves
and at conferences. They published their views and conducted debates publicly in
newspapers, journals, and books. But their ability to do this, as in traditional times, was
determined by political patronage. Like their literati forebears, there were no laws to
protect them. If their patrons were purged, their advice would be rejected.
In the 1990s, therefore, although discussions among colleagues with a variety of views
were still relatively free, the ability of reformist intellectuals to express themselves
publicly was quite limited.
Similarities with the May Fourth Generation
The pluralistic intellectual atmosphere of the post-Mao era, made possible by China’s
opening to the outside world and move to the market, has been comparable to the
pluralism of the early decades of the twentieth century. Intellectuals, like their May
Fourth predecessors, began to explore all kinds of new ideas and to question the orthodox
ideology. In the 1980s they sought intellectual inspiration from the West and from their
ethnic brethren and cultural cousins in East Asia. The interqacted with Western
intellectuals and overseas Chinese intellectuals, especially from Hong Kong and Taiwan,
the majority of whom were Western-trained.
Like the late Qing literati and the May Fourth generation, most post-Mao intellectuals
have been rationalists in the tradition of the Enlightenment. However, a substantial
minority, particularly those in the arts, have questioned this approach. Nonconformist
artists, writers, and poets have been prominent on the cultural scene and were especially
so in the early Deng years. The Cultural Revolution experience led them to question
whether there could be any rational or political solutions to China’s complex problems.
They concluded that the arts should not be used for political goals.
Despite the parlty’s periodic efforts to regain control over intellectual and cultural
discourse, the intellectuals and artists of the post-Mao era have developed a degree of
autonomy from party manipulation. The move to the market and international contacts
have made them less dependent on the state, economically as well as intellectually,
through modern means of communications such as telephone, television, computers,
faxes, film and e-mail.
Intellectuals have taken advantrage of the party’s loosening-grip to fill the public space
vacated by jthe state with informal salons, study groups, journals, and think tanks.
Politically Engaged Intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution Generation
The experience of the Cultural Revolution generation has diverged from that of the
traditional literati and the elite intellectuals of the Mao and Deng eras as well as from the
generation that came of age in the post-Mao period. Unlike the others, the education of
this generation, born after 1949, was interrupted by Mao’s 1966 summons to rebel
against authority. Most initially became Red Guards, following Mao’s orders to question
and overthrow bureaucratic and intellectual authorities, sometimes violently.
When Mao in the late 1960s condemned these activities, carried out in his name, and sent
the Red Guards to farms and factories to reform themselves through labor, he provoked
profound disillusionment not only with his leadership but also with the ideology and the
political system that had given the Chairman the power to manipulate their lives. This
experience of their formative years left them bereft of belief, a loss somewhat akin to
their late Qing literati predecessors’ loss of faith in Confucianism.
While the intellectual elite of the older generation and other Cultural Revolution
intellectuals continued to used ideological revisions, political discourse, and high-level
patronage to press for change from the top down, much in the tradition of their literati
predecessors, the new generation and the ex-Red Guard associates sought to bring about
political change from the bottom up with methods that they had been exposed to in the
Cultural Revolution.
Contacts with Workers and Other Classes
By 1987 it had been concluded that intellectuals could achieve political reforms only in
coalition with other social groups, specifically allying with industrialists, rural
entrepreneurs, and reform officials, but not with farmers or workers. The student
protestors in the Tiananmen Square 1989 demonstration revealed a similar elitism when
they literally locked arms to keep the workers from participating in their protest.
Although the students talked about sending delegations to the factories to link up with
workers as their May Fourth predecessors had done, few did so. In addition to their
elitism and their awareness of the fact that since 1980 the leadership’s greatest fear was
the formation of a Solidarity-like coalition between intellectuals and workers.
Conclusion
For independent political actors to re-emerge and survive, they will need much more
support from Chinese society than they had in the 1980s, and they will need laws to
protect their independence if they are to have an impact on policymaking.