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The Intellectual and the State: Social Dynamics of Intellectual Autonomy During the Post-Mao Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Michel Bonnin  and
Yves Chevrier
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Extract

The relationship between the Chinese intellectual and the communist state experienced some significant changes during the 1980s, although some of the basic patterns established since the 1930s and 1940s were not altered. This contrast is in line with the overall impact of Deng Xiaoping's limited reforms, which gave more room, and more weight, to society vis-à-vis the state, while the basic structures of the latter were left untouched. Social change was the new element which allowed the intellectuals to enjoy more autonomy in organizing their associations and in articulating new ideas. The intellectual with an autonomous base in a more autonomous society emerged from the prevalent pattern of technocratic intellectuals operating within the state framework, a state whose totalitarian scope had deprived them of any social base.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 127 , September 1991 , pp. 569 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1991

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References

1. Our information was mainly gathered from personal interviews with participants contacted mostly outside China after Tiananmen. In some cases, interviewees are deliberately not identified. We do not claim, of course, that the contents of the interviews and the actual social position of the interviewees are representative of the Chinese intelligentsia in general in the 1980s. As is made clear in the article, the decade saw a continuum of change, and we are dealing only with the more marked developments at one end of the spectrum. These developments became clearer at the end of the decade. We believe the sample is representative within these limits.

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12. Under western influence, of course, but with the difference that the politization of the very late imperial public sphere did not curtail its managerial functions, which are not to be found in the post-Mao public sphere. On the pre-modern public sphere and its transformations, see Rankin, Mary B., Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China, Zhejiang Province, 1865–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and “The origins of a Chinese public sphere,” Etudes chinoises, IX–2 (Autumn 1990)Google Scholar.

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16. It should be noted, however, that no declared organization was totally free of any institutional link, since each one needed a “tutelage unit” (guakao danwei) to be registered. In some cases, however, this tutelage was purely formal, because, firstly, the minjian organization was completely independent financially, and, secondly, the leaders of the protecting unit accepted from the beginning to serve only as a “shop sign” (paizi). This was the case for our main example of a category I organization, the Beijing Research Institute for Sociology and Economics, whose guakao danwei was the Centre for Expertise communication (Rencai jiaoliu zhongxin) under the State Commission for Science and Technology; interview of ZL, 28 April 1991, Paris.

17. Each of the first meetings was the occasion for Hu Ping to present a part of the long article he was writing on “Freedom of speech,” which was to become one of the most influential expressions of dissident thinking in the 1980s; interviews with ZY, 19 November and 11 December 1990.

18. Interviews with YS, 16 June 1990 and with ZG, 14 January 1991.

19. Interviews in Shanghai, March 1989, and in Paris, December 1990, February 1991.

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21. Interview with CC, 11 December 1990.

22. Two issues published post-Tiananmen, in August and September. The latter was claimed as making up for no. 2 that had not been published; interview with HS, 23 April 1991.

23. We leave aside the interesting problem of the cultural connotation of this transfer in the Chinese tradition, from Legalism (government is meant to increase the power of the state) to Confucianism (government is meant to increase the moral quality of the people).

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25. Interviews in Beijing, November 1985; and Chevrier, Yves, “Managers and micropolitics: the factory director responsibility system, 1984–1987,” in Vogel, Ezra and Davis, Deborah (eds.), Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen: The Impact of Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 127–28Google Scholar.

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27. Interviews with ZY, 19 November and 26 November 1990, Paris.

28. Interviews with ZY and WR, 19 November 1990 and 11 December 1990, Paris.

29. Ibid.

30. Interview with ZY, 19 November 1990, Paris.

31. Interviews in Beijing, February 1988.

32. See Wan Runnan's interview in Béja, J. P., Bonnin, M. and Peyraube, A., Le tremblement de terre de Pékin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 527–550Google Scholar.

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35. Burns, includes the weekly in his list of quasi-governmental media owned by provincial academies, “China's governance,” pp. 505–506Google Scholar.

36. The managers in state enterprise under the factory director responsibility system implemented since 1984 have been the targets of similar charges levelled against them by local bureaucrats who were trying to defend their vested interests; see Chevrier, “Managers and micropolitics”.

37. China Daily, 1 November 1989.

38. Interviews with WR and ZY, 26 November 1990, and with ZL, 22 April 1991, Paris.

39. Interviews in Shanghai, March 1989.

40. Seen. 18.

41. Chevrier, , “Managers and micropolitics,” p. 127Google Scholar.

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44. See the interview with Chen Yizi in Béja, , Bonnin, and Peyraube, , Le tremblement de terre, pp. 505–526Google Scholar.

45. Interviews with WR and ZY, 19 and 26 November 1990, and with ZL, 22 April 1991, Paris.

46. Interview with WR, 19 November 1990.

47. Bergère, Marie-Claire, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

48. Darnton, Robert, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

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