Abstract
William Callahan's conceptualization of Ai Weiwei as a “citizen intellectual” is the latest in a long-standing cottage industry seeking to make sense of and define China's intellectuals. Frederic Wakeman Jr. in 1972 offered “a typology of intellectual species” for Chinese thinkers and writers in late imperial China: statesman, administrator, ethical idealist, aesthete, and emirite or recluse (Wakeman 1972, 35). Hao Zhidong applies a Weberian lens on twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to identify nested categories of: professional, cultural, and (smallest of all) critical intellectuals (Hao 2003, 393). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China's thinkers and writers from “intellectual class” in 1905 to “enlightened scholars” in the 1920s to “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) ever since. Barlow identifies a tension between the social power of these knowledge specialists and their dangerous dance with the state in which they succumbed under both Nationalist and Communist regimes to a service role to power, a “category of the state” (Barlow 1991, 216). Merle Goldman has focused on critical intellectuals under the Chinese Communist Party, what most people think of as critics and dissidents. Carol Hamrin and I sought to go beyond Goldman's focus on dissidents to study “establishment intellectuals” by looking at “the motives and means for collaboration, as well as the sources of tension and conflict between leading intellectuals and the top Communist Party leadership” (Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 3). “Establishment intellectual” proved a useful category for opening up our understanding of intellectual participation at the elite level under Mao and during the 1980s. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4th massacre and crackdown changed everything. Merle Goldman usefully picked up on these changes by identifying the rise of “disestablished intellectuals” in the post-Tiananmen period, particularly intellectuals who had been active in the reformist administration of the CCP in the 1980s associated with disgraced General Secretary Hu Yaobang (Goldman 2007, 15ff, 86ff). These fallen establishment intellectuals populated the academic posts, publishing ventures, and new business opportunities that exploded after Deng Xiaoping's famous certification of economic reform in his 1992 “Southern Tour.”
William Callahan's conceptualization of Ai Weiwei as a “citizen intellectual” is the latest in a long-standing cottage industry seeking to make sense of and define China's intellectuals. Frederic Wakeman Jr. in 1972 offered “a typology of intellectual species” for Chinese thinkers and writers in late imperial China: statesman, administrator, ethical idealist, aesthete, and emirite or recluse (Wakeman 1972, 35). Hao Zhidong applies a Weberian lens on twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to identify nested categories of: professional, cultural, and (smallest of all) critical intellectuals (Hao 2003, 393). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China's thinkers and writers from “intellectual class” in 1905 to “enlightened scholars” in the 1920s to “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) ever since. Barlow identifies a tension between the social power of these knowledge specialists and their dangerous dance with the state in which they succumbed under both Nationalist and Communist regimes to a service role to power, a “category of the state” (Barlow 1991, 216). Merle Goldman has focused on critical intellectuals under the Chinese Communist Party, what most people think of as critics and dissidents.1 Carol Hamrin and I sought to go beyond Goldman's focus on dissidents to study “establishment intellectuals” by looking at “the motives and means for collaboration, as well as the sources of tension and conflict between leading intellectuals and the top Communist Party leadership” (Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 3). “Establishment intellectual” proved a useful category for opening up our understanding of intellectual participation at the elite level under Mao and during the 1980s. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4th massacre and crackdown changed everything. Merle Goldman usefully picked up on these changes by identifying the rise of “disestablished intellectuals” in the post-Tiananmen period, particularly intellectuals who had been active in the reformist administration of the CCP in the 1980s associated with disgraced General Secretary Hu Yaobang (Goldman 2007, 15ff, 86ff). These fallen establishment intellectuals populated the academic posts, publishing ventures, and new business opportunities that exploded after Deng Xiaoping's famous certification of economic reform in his 1992 “Southern Tour.”
With nearly two decades of further change, I think William Callahan has identified the most important inheritors of establishment intellectuals in his citizen intellectuals who operate beyond the political establishment but not necessarily at war with it. His picture of the contingent nature of citizen intellectuals (in contrast to the purity of dissidents) growing out of the uneven administrative terrain, changing policies, and other gaps in the state system is particularly helpful in making sense of intellectual activity in general and Chinese citizen intellectuals in particular. This study of the four roles (narratives) played by Ai Weiwei is a fine case in point. In addition, Callahan's insight that such intellectuals get played by the state just as much as they play the state comes out in Ai Weiwei's example, and this should be fundamental to our understanding of citizen intellectuals. The “unified” (yiyuanhua) role of “establishment intellectuals” under Mao has broken apart with the service role now limited to official intellectuals in the party-state establishment and the complex, negotiating, mediated agency (the “culture bearing” role for establishment intellectuals) (Cheek 1997) falling to the citizen intellectual, with only the most extreme (or unlucky) personalities falling into a monolithic dissident role.
Callahan defines the citizenship of a citizen intellectual in terms of a person's sense of social responsibility (Callahan 2014). Like Hamrin's and my “establishment intellectual,” the citizen intellectual is a social science category that is value neutral. We pointed out that establishment intellectuals included reprobates such as Kang Sheng (Mao's much-feared security chief) and Yao Wenyuan (notorious intellectual critic during the Cultural Revolution, later pegged as one of “The Gang of Four”) as well as people we tend to like such as Deng Tuo (critic of excesses of the Great Leap in the early 1960s) and Wang Ruoshui (famous for Marxian humanism in the 1980s). In like fashion, Callahan notes that citizen intellectuals include not just independent-minded troublemakers, like Ai Weiwei (sometimes), but also conservatives such as Colonel Liu Mingfu of the PLA and Peking University's Pan Wei.2 But even more importantly, Callahan's citizen intellectuals extend well beyond the party-state establishment to relatively independent artists, writers, and even articulate farmers and workers able to make art and offer commentary on life in China today. It is this relationship of an intellectual (or intellectual activity) to public life—no longer limited to state service, but at times including state service—that defines citizen intellectuals. They are public intellectuals with Chinese characteristics. Those characteristics, however, are neither culturally determined nor categorically different from public intellectuals in other parts of the world. Those Chinese characteristics, like North American, European, French, or Indian characteristics, are shaped by politics and history.3
Eddy U has usefully called attention to ordinary intellectuals in Mao's China, an often despised category of the modestly educated, originally populated by ex-Guomindang officials, petty clerks of dubious background, and even those convicted of civil crimes or of political unreliability (U 2003). His studies of Shanghai schoolteachers in the 1950s opens a window to the world of intellectual life in China beyond the famous writers and intellectual leaders, the Lu Xuns, Guo Moruos, or Liang Shumings. In Eddy U's story, these petty intellectuals were largely victims of an oppressive political order determined to control and “reform” them. Under Mao they had little public agency. Today there is some room to maneuver. Focusing on the post-Mao period, Callahan's citizen intellectuals encourage us to look beyond the formal activities of political life and elite intellectuals to look at spaces of public engagement, including cultural space and even pop culture, in social and economic life to find sites of intellectual engagement with public issues of concern to some, many, or all Chinese citizens. Art expositions, popular songs, websites and blogs, science fiction novels, argumentative essays on a range of specific topical social issues (from housing to food safety to traffic congestion)—these are the new homes of citizen intellectuals in China.4 Establishment intellectuals still exist in China, to be sure, but the establishment world of the party-state has receded from the high tide of Mao's years or even in the 1980s when the venues for public expression were monopolized by the CCP's propaganda and education system.
Today the public sphere in China is no longer dominated by the Party, rather it is managed. The world of China's citizen intellectuals today is a “directed public sphere” in which the Party endeavors to manage civil society in the manner that it tries to manage the market economy (Cheek 2010).5 This means considerable more latitude for China's intellectuals—establishment, professional, and citizen—but does not constitute freedom from interference, as the sorry fate of those who seriously anger the party-state demonstrates. We see this in the troubles Ai Weiwei encounters, and most people know of the imprisonment of Nobel Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. However, censorship, while considerably less intense than under the Mao years, is still a reality in China today, and hundreds of lawyers and social activists have felt the pressure and the steel of the state, from Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing academic and social activist arrested in July 2013 for his work on the Open Constitution Initiative and efforts to mobilize a New Citizens Movement, to Chen Guangcheng, the courageous local lawyer from Shandong, called “the barefoot lawyer” for his work for regular citizens, who continues his asylum in the United States after being hounded out of China.
As Callahan notes, the world in which China's citizen intellectuals must operate is the world so vividly described by Chan Koonchung in the dystopian science fiction novel, The Fat Years: “90 percent freedom.” Indeed, for many in China 90 percent may be enough, especially for well-educated, technical specialists, academics, and scientists, as well as those who identify as intellectuals in a broader sense—there is a comfortable life with professional satisfaction and personal pleasures on offer in China today. As the lead character in Chan's novel, Old Chen, muses in a Beijing bookstore that is awash with books (and a pleasant café in which to read them) but seems to lack some critical titles he used to see:
We are already very free now: 90 per cent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 per cent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn't that enough? The vast majority of the population cannot even handle 90 per cent freedom, they think it's too much. Aren't they already complaining about information overload and being entertained to death? (Chan 2011, 170)
What defines Callahan's citizen intellectuals, of course, is that the 90 percent freedom is not enough if that means pressing social issues of public concern cannot be addressed. Their civil society, be it a cultural, economic, or social stage, is not always or even predominantly engaging the state but nonetheless does engage issues of public concern. This emerging public in China may be political (addressing the legitimate use of force in the public arena), but Callahan's citizen intellectuals (as profiled in his China Dreams, 2013) show that this public need not be either state-run or locked into engagement with the state.
A longer historical perspective helps make sense of this politics of citizen intellectuals. The efforts of China's intellectuals under the authoritarian Nationalist Party state of Chiang Kaishek in the 1930s and 1940s come to mind. But the vibrancy of Chinese “everyday politics” goes back further in time and beyond the literati class.6 For centuries China's social life carried on merrily without the state but with a respectful eye toward local enforcers. It is well to remember that the massive migration of Chinese to Southeast Asia (the Nanyang) from the fifteenth century and the vibrant two-way trade it engendered for the next four centuries was for the most part illegal and expressly forbidden under both the Ming and the Qing. And yet a de facto accommodation was achieved wherein for the most part the state was rigid, exclusive, and inward-looking and society was flexible, adaptable, and open to the wider world.7 Strictly speaking, these were utterly incompatible approaches to public life. The point of this longue durée history is not to normalize, much less endorse, the dictatorial aspects of Chinese statecraft—whether of Ming Taizu in the fourteenth century, Qianlong's “Literary Inquisition” in the eighteenth century, or the depredations of the Maoist state in China. Rather, it is to bring into view the long-term coexistence of this rigid and exclusive state and a flexible and diverse society. Thus, while political scientists tend to see the loosening of CCP propaganda control and the greater range of expression in Chinese society today as “political secularization” away from Maoist orthodoxy, we can say from this historical perspective that, as with the resurgence of China's key role in the global economy, the current growth of the social agency we see exemplified in China's citizen intellectuals is but a resurgence of the vibrancy of Ming-Qing social life, a return to a previous period of Chinese political life under the later empires in which an orthodox state and a heterodox society coexisted for centuries. Ai Weiwei and China's citizen intellectuals continue this venerable Chinese tradition of social insubordination.
Notes
Among Merle Goldman's major works, all on Harvard University Press: Literary Dissent in Communist China (1967), China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (1981), Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (1994), and From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (2007).
These and a whole range of citizen intellectuals are profiled and quoted in Callahan (2013).
The political history of public intellectuals in Europe and America since Zola's J'Accuse in the 1898 Dreyfus Affair is nicely surveyed in Chametzky (2004).
Other scholars have been tracking popular culture in China and its political aspects, such as the fine collections edited by Perry Link and colleagues, most recently, Link, Madsen, and Pickowicz (2013). In a word, Callahan's citizen intellectuals join the world of Merle Goldman's politically active intellectuals and these popular culture studies.
An excellent picture of the new propaganda order is given in Brady (2008).
The best survey remains Grieder (1981). The “everyday” perspective on political culture in twentieth-century China is usefully explored in Dong and Goldstein (2006).
This image is drawn from co-teaching a survey history course with Tim Brook (see Brook 1998, 2007). Connecting this history to the early twentieth century is Cook (2006).
