Readers of the highbrow British monthly journal Prospect probably thought little of it, but the 100th issue was about to set off political fireworks in faraway China. Prospect’s theme for July 2004 was "public intellectuals." Introduced by the journal’s editor, it listed and profiled a mixture of figures drawn from all kinds of disciplines and interests.

In September, two months later, Guangzhou’s Southern Group echoed the London journal with a special issue of its Southern Personalities Weekly, from the same stable as the hugely popular Southern Weekend newspaper. Entitled "Fifty Influential Public Intellectuals" (FIPI hereafter), everyone listed was Chinese, though not all of Mainland origin. And while there was a similar spread of disciplines, interests and popular appeal, to the attentive reader the selection was discernibly politically loaded, far more than in the Prospect piece. Attentive readers were not long in reacting. FIPI was simultaneously made available on the Internet (http://business.sohu.com/s2004/zhishifenzi50.shtml), unlike Prospect, where full contents access comes at not inconsiderable cost. There was a buzz of comment. Some of the people on the list appeared embarrassed and tried to laugh it off, or offered alternative "worthier" lists.

The Stinking Ninth: "Knowledge Workers" in the PRC
Although in a Chinese context the term "intellectual" (zhishifenzi) often means no more than someone with a high school education or above, it does not produce the same embarrassment in contemporary China as it might in Western societies. Indeed, considerable status is attached to it, carrying considerable rewards, but also the risk of persecution for anyone choosing not to toe the line. Emerging as a stratum around the symbolic date of 1905 when the imperial examination system was dissolved, intellectuals helped dig the grave of traditional China. A small but influential corps of "knowledge workers" played major roles in subsequent events. They accepted much of post-Enlightenment Western social teleology, summed up in the May Fourth icons of Mr Science and Mr Democracy (see Rana Mitter, China Review Issue 29).

Marxism in its Chinese version regarded the intellectuals as a Formula One driver might regard his gearbox: I need it, I don’t understand how it works, but it better do what I tell it. The theory was that knowledge workers were inferior to "real" workers, who produce "real things" as opposed to ideas. This was expressed as follows: real workers are a class. Intellectuals are not a class but a "stratum" attached to the working class - in fact to its political vanguard, the Communist Party, but they might well be attached to any class in power. In the Cultural Revolution this dependent nature was seen as shameful, and insulting labels for intellectuals ("the stinking ninth category") were the order of the day.

This was bound to change, especially as the gap between China and the developed world grew blindingly apparent after the death of Mao. Think about software. Traditional materialists expect "real things" to weigh so many grams, which MS Word or Windows sadly fail to do. It is hard to see someone like Bill Gates, who tinkers with software and goes on to found Microsoft, as producing things which are not "real." Yet seeing Gates, or the thousands who resemble him, as part of a necessarily dependent stratum is ludicrous. In the digital age "ideas" are "things," and Marxists, like everyone else, have to live with it (or them).

But the Communist Party still sought to keep the gearbox where it belonged: thoroughly in the drivers grip. Despite the inroads of commerce that emerged and grew strongly in the reform era, a certain esprit de corps (not to say elitism) carried down from earlier times to the present and foreseeable future. At the same time, intellectuals retained and reinvented certain age-old, but in the modern context often mutually antagonistic, classical Chinese values, described in a recent book by Hao Zhidong, in terms borrowed from Max Weber, as an ethic of responsibility versus one of ultimate ends. The first of these requires the intellectual to contribute to society and take part in politics even if the government is less than perfect. The second asserts that there are ethical standards in which the state has no right to meddle.

Choosing between the two became particularly agonising in modern times. Under totalitarian regimes even posing the distinction could, and did, constitute a thought-crime. Offered up as sacrificial victims of the power structure they had created, the intellectuals' fate in the waves of persecution launched by Mao and his followers in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was often miserable in the extreme.

A Velvet Prison
Yet the state continued to rely on them, and as the Maoists departed the political centre in the early days of reform and opening up, this reliance grew ever more acute. Deng Xiaoping in particular made special efforts to recreate a kind of social contract that rewarded their efforts and provided a variety of political firewalls around their work. Faithful adherence to the leadership’s "correct line" was dropped as unworkable, and a huge range of previously heretical ideas were vigorously pursued. The Party no longer sought to back winners on a host of scientific and cultural issues, and, in the 1990s, texts of every imaginable ideological flavour were to flood in from overseas, where they predictably lost a great deal of their political edge, along with their novelty and the frisson of being forbidden.

But the public sphere remained a minefield. The implicit deal struck in the 1980s, and renewed after the Tiananmen "incident" of 1989, was that open arenas of discussion would remain subject to state control. The media and its explosive new extensions in the Internet were frequently reminded not to bite the hand that fed them, even when it ceased to feed them as well as before, and encouraged them to rely more and more on the market.

…and an Iron Fist
Some weeks after the publication of FIPI, a broadside under the byline of Ji Fangping (reportedly the penname of long-time Liberation Daily scribe Sima Xin) appeared in Shanghai’s Liberation Daily, which was reprinted in full in the national People’s Daily. As summarized by China scholar David Cowhig:

To the naïve reader, the tone of this attack may seem little more than vituperative. To mainland Chinese readers it is loaded with threat, a blast from the deadly past conjuring up bitter memories of purge campaigns led by Mao’s followers - often beginning in Shanghai, transferred to Beijing, and thence the nation, just as in this case. Many times the denouement came in the form of rigidly applied quotas of victims - targets for abuse, imprisonment, occasionally capital punishment - which each and every cell of the party state had to fulfil. Not that attempts to bring back this style of "campaign politics" has not been tried at irregular intervals through the reform period. They rarely achieved the heights of the Mao era when huge numbers of people calmly accepted the word of the People’s Daily as gospel truth. In some of the recent cases the attempts resulted in public ridicule for the propaganda agencies.

No more Mr Nice Guys?
Yet when the damage is counted, the advantage, many observers have felt, has lain with the government. Former Party chief Jiang Zemin actually improved the state’s control of the written and spoken word. This achievement was blurred by a paradoxical fact: the Party sought less and less to provide the last word on absolutely all areas of social existence. Allowing the media to respond to the market - particularly to the urban well-to-do, who provided an important new constituency - the power holders tightened their grip on more strategic matters. Journalists, indeed whole newsrooms, could be summarily dismissed for reporting on topics regarded as sensitive - AIDS, official corruption, dirty environmental deals and popular protests.
In early 2003, the incoming administration of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao was confronted with stalling tactics from the outgoing group around Jiang Zemin. A heaven-sent gift was presented to them by SARS, which saw leading figures attached to the old group display appalling public mendacity. A whistleblower, military surgeon Jiang Yanyong, showed that old style information control could be rendered powerless in the age of globalised risk and publicity. The sun thereupon shone for the public intellectuals and they promptly started making hay. Many of the figures listed in the FIPI have been active in the ensuing period. All this was greatly assisted by the exploding popularity of the Internet, which multiplied the channels available for exchanging information and opinion.

It would be a plausible reading of the current savage attack on FIPI to suggest that now that Wen and Hu have fairly comprehensively sidelined Jiang Zemin’s party faction, they no longer welcome the antics of the chattering classes. Indeed, voices within their own councils will be advising them to even things up in the traditional manner by few judicious arrests.

A foretaste of this took place in mid-December 2004, when the writers Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo were taken in for questioning. They were later released, but warned that their writings were deemed illegal. Neither was on the FIPI list, but Wang Yi, who is listed there, had included them on his "alternative FIPI." Wang made stark comments to the effect that "we had underestimated the Party’s ferocity and stupidity," and a resurgence of authoritarianism following the accession to power of Hu and Wen.

Will China return to the old campaign politics? It appears unlikely, but public debate may very well head back to the status quo ante SARS, when the government expected people to jolly well shut up when it gave the order.

Dr David Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. He studied in China in the 1970s, and worked there in the 1990s. His publications include Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era (Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) and Asian Freedoms (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).