Abstract
This article investigates the intense debate on the figure of “Chinese public intellectuals,” which has gained increasing importance, both inside and outside Mainland China, during the last decade. The climax was reached in the year 2004, when the debate on the search for and against a role for the “public intellectuals” became the litmus test of the intellectual intersections between the State actors and the public. Through a close reading of the crucial documents, this article critically engages with the terminology and the interpretive paradigms employed. Thus the article highlights the contribution of the scholars examined to a dialogue on the role of critical thinking within China as well as globally. In fact, the exploration of the diversity of contemporary Chinese thought on the topic of “public intellectuals” can be inscribed within the framework of the following questions: How is the social category of “public intellectuals” used and why? And, ultimately, what does it really means to be an intellectual for the public in China today? In this sense, the article sheds light on the indigenous and foreign understandings of “public” and “intellectual.”
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Notes
Wang Yi is a Chengdu-based liberal intellectual, legal scholar, and website organizer.
Wang Ruoshui (1926-2002) was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in 1987.
Ji Fangping is the penname of the writer Sima Xin, chief editorial writer of the Shanghai-based Jiefang Ribao.
Various Chinese-English media and websites, such as www.xinhuanet.com , reveal the progressive tendency to translate the compound word xuanchuanbu with “Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party,” as opposed to the previously accepted “Propaganda Department.” This tendency became particularly evident around the time of the XVI Party Congress (Beijing, 8-14 November 2002). Etymologically, xuanchuanbu could be literally translated as the Department to disseminate and transmit ideas [about Party policies], more precisely indicating the department in charge of propaganda and ideological control or supervision.
The political essayist Ash is in the list published by Prospect, in the top 20.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249. Accessed 10/02/2007.
These two categories occupy an important role in the symbolic spaces of Chinese culture and society, even though their boundaries are rarely fixed.
Emic refers to the cultural characteristics “pertaining to or being a significant unit that functions in contrast with other units in a language or other system of behavior,” while etic refers to the cultural characteristics “pertaining to or being the raw data of a language or other area of behavior, without considering the data as significant units functioning within a system” (Random House 1987, pp. 637, 666).
Knowledge (zhishi) is the fundamental semantic element that defines intellectuals (zhishifenzi).
Cheek clarifies: “The state, that is, the party-state under the CCP, is still very much with us. Just ask any Chinese academic. Nonetheless, the authority of the state is more than matched, on a day-to-day level, by the requirements of profession (universities, institutes and businesses), and the financial inducements of commercial publishing” (Cheek 2007, p. 276).
Zhu Yong refers to the inability of the intellectuals to escape the “original sin”. (Zhu 1999b, p. 1).
Habitus refers to a system of practical knowledge acquired over time that creates in the social agents the tendency to perceive, act, and react with certain naturalness within a specific social universe, without any need to be coordinated or governed by rules.
“L’habitus, comme le mot le dit, c’est ce que l’on a acquis…. Mais pourquoi ne pas avoir dit habitude ? L’habitude est considérée spontanément comme répétitive, mécanique, automatique, plutôt reproductive que productrice. Or, je voulais insister sur l’idée que l’habitus est quelque chose de puissamment générateur.” (Bourdieu 1980, p. 134).
Xu Jilin is one of the members of the list published by NRZ (Cheek 2006, pp. 401–420).
Examining different sources, Gloria Davies poignantly observes that “ … in Sinophone critical discourse, the idea that one can speak the truth … remains largely unexamined, along with the ideality of the notion that the intellectual is someone who speaks the truth on everyone’s behalf” (Davies 2007a, b, p. 29).
This song became the anthem of the students demonstrating in the Spring 1989—the Beijing demonstration were then brutally repressed on the night between the 3 and 4 June.
On the representation of “public” (gongong) in late Qing China, see, Zhang 2001, pp. 192-220.
“Intellectual: masculine name, social and cultural category perished in Paris at the end of the twentieth century; apparently it did not survive to the decline of the universal.” (Bernard-Henri Levy cited in Delporte 1996, p.117).
The famous axiom is part of the essay “Remarks of Yueyang Tower” (Yueyanglouji), that Fan had been invited to compose during the fifth year of the reign of Song Emperor Qingli (1045).
Goldman claims that: “Sun Yatsen personified a public intellectual”, betraying, in this way, the interpretive juxtaposition of the category of ‘public’ with a charismatic political figure. See, Goldman 2005).
Lu Xun (1881-1936), in the Preface to Calls to Arms (Nahan), his first collection of short stories (1922), wrote:
“Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?” “But if a few awake, you cannot say there is no hope of destroying the iron house” (Lu, 1985).
Translingual practice refers to the necessity to reinvent the meaning of words in a different context.
For a critique of the “say no” phenomenon and the relevant conceptual framework, see, Xiao 1997.
This definition is also analyzed by Yu Richang who quotes Du forgetting the word “dissemination (chuangbo)” which is important as it carries – in Chinese – a connotation of “popularization” (Yu 2002).
The substitution is actually advocated by other scholars; see, Xie 1999, p. 2.
www.xys.org/hanlin/bestseller/xishu. Accessed 15/10/09.
“Public sphere” indicates, for Habermas, a space where individuals are able freely to exchange their views, or in Dana R. Villa’s words: “a discursive arena that is home to citizen debate, deliberation, agreement and action” (Villa 1992, pp. 712-721). On the reception and dissemination of Habermas’s writings in China see Davies G. 2007, pp. 61-85.
Zhu Suli is the Dean of the Faculty of Law at Beijing University.
Liu Junning was the editor of Gonggong luncong (Res Publica) and researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Science until April 2000 when he was denounced by Party Secretary General Jiang Zemin and was, as a consequence, removed. His journal was closed down and writers like Qin Hui and Qian Liqun were castigated.
Jacobi’s definition of the last intellectuals refers to the American intellectuals born in the 1920s.
Authors’ Preface to the English version, p. ix. In the Preface it is evident the public function that the authors attribute to this book since it narrates of facts and cases “which have alarmed the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee but about which the public has been kept in the dark” (p. xii). The two authors intend to “give voice to the voiceless” and admit to be “more in sorrow than in anger” when they witness and therefore question the lack of “rule of law” (xiv).
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The author would like to express his grateful thanks to the Senior Editors of Theory and Society for their thought-provoking comments and suggestions. The paper has also benefited from advice and insightful comments from two anonymous peer-reviewers.
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Marinelli, M. On the public commitment of intellectuals in late socialist China. Theor Soc 41, 425–449 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9174-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-012-9174-8