4

Intellectuals and Ideological Governance of the Chinese Communist Party

Timothy Cheek

Scholars have long noted, and debated, the close but troubled relationship between China’s educated elite and its modern political parties in general, and between modern intellectuals and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the century of its existence since 1921. Founded as an outgrowth of study societies convened by radical professors and students, the leadership of the Party was composed almost totally of individuals that most social scientists would describe as intellectuals or as military elites who chose, at one point or another, to take on the trappings of learned governance. And yet, intellectuals have been the subject of brutal repression by all modern Chinese governments, but especially the two Bolshevik parties, the Guomindang (GMD) or Nationalist Party and the CCP. The sufferings of intellectuals under Mao’s regime are widely known, from the Yan’an Rectification Movement of 1942–44 through the various campaigns of the 1950s and most especially in the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76/78). Indeed, Eddy U (2019), based on considerable research, has concluded that, by the 1950s, intellectuals had become a despised class in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China’s thinkers and writers from an ‘intellectual class’ in 1905 to ‘enlightened scholars’ in the 1920s to ‘intellectuals’ (zhishifenzi 知识分子) ever since. Barlow (1991, 216) 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, offering a service role to power, a ‘category of the state’. Nonetheless, Hung-yok Ip (2004) has traced the attractions of Party service for intellectuals in the Republican period as leaders, heroes and sophisticates. The definition of ‘intellectual’ not only developed over the twentieth century but also became significantly confounded with the category of Party cadre (ganbu 干部) under both the GMD and CCP. Hamrin and Cheek (1986) concluded that ‘establishment intellectuals’ from the Mao period onward were both high-level intellectuals and high-level cadres.

What do we make of this troubled relationship between China’s cultural and technological elites and the Leninist parties of China (and, in particular, the CCP)? I will argue that the CCP’s Leninist nature as an ideological organisation requires transformational bureaucrats to implement its form of rule – ideological governance. And intellectuals have been perfect for this role. Legitimated not by elections or by divine right but by ideology as well as performance, the Party needs ideologists to tell its story and mobilise popular support (including, as Kerry Brown has noted in his chapter in this volume, the management of emotions). Stalin called for ‘engineers of the soul’ and Chinese Communists have embraced the call. Over the century of its existence, a good number of intellectuals have chosen to serve or to speak for the Party as revolutionaries (gemingjia 革命家), thought workers (sixiang gongzuozhe 思想工作者) and, in more recent decades, experts (zhuanjia 专家). It is this fundamental political need – to implement ideological governance – that explains both the irreducible need of the Party for intellectual service and its constant vigilance to ensure that these self-regarding savants stay in line. In fact, the distinction between intellectuals and the party-state should not be reified because many Party leaders have been intellectuals. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik noted this in the 1980s: ‘In China, conflicts we normally regard as being conflicts between the Party and intellectuals are conflicts amongst intellectuals’ (quoted in Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 20). Likewise, Eddy U (2019, 11) contends ‘that the intellectual and Chinese communism were mutually constitutive’.

What motivates some intellectuals to take on service to, and even struggle for leadership in, the Party; and what exactly does the Party want them to do? In this chapter, we will meet a half dozen examples from three moments in the Party’s life: the years of war and revolution at mid-century, the Mao years and the most recent decades of reform and opening. Thoughtful scholars turned to Party service, both in the case of the journalist Chen Bulei with the GMD and the noted Ming historian Wu Han with the CCP. In the new People’s Republic, Yue Daiyun, a literature professor at Peking University, committed her life to the Party despite harsh setbacks; Zhang Chuqiao parlayed his expertise in Marxist ideology to high office by the 1970s; and Wang Ruoshui, a junior editor at People’s Daily who caught Mao’s admiring eye in the 1960s, survived the Cultural Revolution to become a rueful reformist promoting ‘socialist humanism’ in the 1980s. Finally, we will meet divergent responses to the challenges of reform: Wang Yuanhua, another ardent leftist intellectual who, by the 1990s, was offering a trenchant internal critique of his Party; and Jiang Shigong, a Peking University professor of a younger generation who embraced Xi Jinping thought enthusiastically. Why has this relationship continued for a century and why, despite indications of very real alienation from, and resistance to, the ideological rule of the Party today, does this ‘deal’ between the church and this priesthood still attract minds like Wang Huning’s (who, like Zhang Chunqiao 50 years earlier, has risen to the top Politburo Standing Committee of the CCP) and pens like Jiang Shigong’s?

I have addressed the idea of ideological governance in modern Chinese political thought and practice elsewhere (Cheek 2021a). Here, I will only briefly recap the longer history of this style of political life and its seminal articulation under Mao and other Party leaders in Yan’an. I want to spend more time looking at some examples of Party intellectuals over the century to see if this perspective helps make sense of their aspirations, their service and their resistance. Finally, I would like to reflect on what this history might portend for today’s style of political life under Xi Jinping and what the relationship between China’s intellectuals and power can possibly be in the future.

Ideological Governance in Modern China

It is worthwhile defining the key term in this analysis: ideological governance. Ideological governance asserts a role for the government as a pedagogical state that has the responsibility to provide order and prosperity through civilising its citizens according to the superior insights of certified transformational bureaucrats learned in a body of thought that, when applied properly, will bring great harmony to all under its sway, and that therefore requires and deserves freedom from competition from alternate (and presumed lesser) forms of political activity.

The resonance between this model of service and these cadres with late-imperial scholar officials in general, and GMD cadres under Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek in particular, will be noted in passing; however, we will focus on what has gone on in the CCP where we see the sinews of what John Fitzgerald (2021) has identified as the ‘cadre nation’.

Ideological governance can be identified in the ‘Sacred Edicts’ of the Ming and Qing emperors and village-level propagation of this wisdom through ‘Community Compacts’ (xiangyue 乡约). This style of political life continued apace in the varying regimes of twentieth-century China. The core approach shared by all governments in China down to today is political tutelage (xunzheng 训政). This was Sun Yat-sen’s explanation for putting democracy off for another day and the primary expression of the pedagogical state under his Nationalist Party. The founding father of China’s Republic, Sun came to feel by the 1920s that the Chinese people were not ready for democracy and required instead a period of political education or tutelage during which his one-party state would inculcate the masses in modern civility. This ‘Tutelary State’, as John Fitzgerald calls it in his study of Sun’s political model,¹ was meant to awaken the Chinese people and teach them how to be modern citizens (Fitzgerald 1996). Chiang Kai-shek echoed these pedagogical aspirations in his 1943 China’s Destiny (Zhongguo zhi mingyun 中國之命運) (Chiang 1947, 112).

The proximate and specific tradition that has defined Party practice since the 1940s is rectification politics, which dates most notably from the Yan’an Rectification Movement of 1942–44 and the nearly continuous set of political campaigns under the CCP since then. Generally considered a Maoist form of governance and associated with disruptive political campaigns, rectification owes as much to Liu Shaoqi and other less chiliastic Party leaders as it does to Mao. And, more importantly, it characterises regular politics in the Party as much as it does its many disruptive mass movements (Teiwes 1993). The core of rectification politics is the primacy of the human will when it is tempered, reformed and regulated by a superior doctrine and implemented by a capable cadre of trained administrators. It does not require democracy in the electoral sense; it requires a rectified political leadership. These claims, and the promise of Party service as a noble vocation, are famously articulated in the rectification documents of 1942 that became the ‘bible’ for the Yan’an Rectification Movement. The key voice, of course, was Mao Zedong’s in much studied texts such as ‘Reform Our Study’ and ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’. But much more detailed instructions and management techniques were articulated in the rectification documents by Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun and other Party leaders.²

Liu’s lectures on ‘Cultivation of the Communist Party Member’ offer the locus classicus for the Party’s claim for the ideological service of intellectuals. Liu begins by noting ‘why Communists must undertake self-cultivation’. Personal reform is necessary for a Communist since one’s upbringing in the ‘old society’ generally contradicts the goals of communism. The key to this reform is the thought, or the ‘ideological consciousness’ (sixiang yishi 思想意识), of each individual. Indeed, says Liu: ‘The cultivation of ideology is the basis of all other forms of cultivation.’ This is all necessary, Liu continues, because ‘the Communist Party is the political party of the proletariat and has no interests of its own other than those of the emancipation of the proletariat’. In fact, this noble image is central to Liu’s vision: ‘Unless the proletariat emancipates all working people and all nations – unless it emancipates humanity as a whole – it cannot fully emancipate itself’ (Liu 1981, 130; Liu 1947, 74–5). This is the clarion call to transformational bureaucrats who will implement the Party’s ideological governance.

Chinese Intellectuals’ Response to the Party’s Call

How have Chinese intellectuals responded to these calls? It makes sense to begin with what intellectuals in Yan’an and after have made of this call to take part in the ideological governance of the CCP. A surprisingly large number of intellectuals found this call attractive enough to engage their energies. However, that engagement was neither simple nor uniform. We can think of intellectual engagement with the Party in terms of a continuum from those who sincerely embraced the cultivation Liu Shaoqi offered in ‘The Cultivation of the Communist Party Member’, to those who did so with ambivalence or reservations, to those who were compelled to go through the motions, to those who resisted passively, to those who actively criticised the whole endeavour or just ran away. To this we should add those who embraced Liu’s cultivation cynically for self-promotion and to gain political power. Indeed, most of these responses are itemised by Liu himself in ‘Cultivation’! (Liu 1981, 136–48; Liu 1947, 83–98). By the 1930s, Party intellectuals mostly served as cadres (ganbu 干部), intellectual cadres.

I have studied the cases of Deng Tuo (邓拓) and Wang Shiwei (王实味). Deng Tuo embraced what became the Yan’an orthodoxy before it was fully formulated and saw intellectual service to the Party (beginning in the Jin-Cha-Ji base area) as a noble vocation. Around the same time, Wang Shiwei, an established translator and Party theorist in Yan’an’s Central Research Institute, made a trenchant critique of the abuses of power in the Party and offered a Marxist alternative to Mao’s version of rectification (Cheek 1997, 2021c). Both saw themselves as revolutionaries and thought workers. Over the years I have looked further to see if these patterns hold for other intellectuals who took up the Party’s call.

To begin with, we have some reports of what the experience of the Yan’an rectification itself was like for ‘ordinary’ cadres in 1942–44. Tony Saich and David Apter included a fair number of reminiscences of Yan’an cadres they interviewed in the 1980s. Focusing on Party political culture, they reported particularly on experienced CCP cadres’ view that the Yan’an zhengfeng (整风) was a lot milder than the murderous campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries (sufan 肃反) of the early 1930s in Jiangxi (Apter and Saich 1994, 147–58). More recently, scholars in China have been mining diaries and reflection reports from the 1940s. Huang Daoxuan (黄道炫) at Peking University, for example, has focused on the ‘interior worlds’ of more ordinary cadres, including intellectuals, from the perspective of xinling shi (心灵史), something between the history of emotions and intellectual history. He cites the diary notes of Shen Xia (沈霞), the 20-year-old daughter of the famous writer Mao Dun, who had come to Yan’an with his family in 1940. At the end of 1943, the rectification training class organised by the East Gansu sub-bureau of the Party set its cadres to studying what Huang describes as two ‘foundational texts’: Mao’s ‘Combat Liberalism’ and Liu’s ‘Cultivation’. Huang cites Shen Xia’s diary from 1943 to show how an intellectual could internalise the challenge to subordinate oneself to the Party as a ‘screw in the revolutionary machine’, an ideal laid out in Liu’s ‘Cultivation’. Shen writes:

Even on sleepless nights, the corners of my lips slide upwards and a genuine smile, though rare in daytime, appears on my face whenever I think about myself being a useful screw – even a very, very tiny one.³

But, is the Yan’an experience exceptional? On the attraction of intellectual service, we will consider the seven intellectuals introduced at the start of this chapter in the context of war, revolution and reform.

The examples below reflect the agency intellectuals found in service to the Party. In them we can identify three themes that help us make sense of Chinese intellectuals and the Party in terms of participation in the ideological governance of China:

1. the attractiveness of intellectual service to an ideological regime – a chance to save China, rebuild China and to preserve and extend Chinese civilisation; to be teachers of the nation
2. the agency of intellectual cadres – service was not necessarily submission
3. the enduring tensions (different views of what service to an ideological regime can require of an individual) and variant exegeses of what the doctrine means; different levels of engagement, some ‘critical’ and some ‘organic’ (in Gramsci’s sense).

Loyalty to the Leader: Chen Bulei and Wu Han

Chen Bulei (陈布雷) (1890–1948) was a classic New Culture intellectual and mid-level modern intellectual. His life exemplifies the challenges of state service for intellectuals in China’s Republic. After years of dispiriting warlord rule, the completion of the Northern Expedition in 1927 and its nationalist revolution offered the prospect of a real national revolution and a government worth serving. Although Chen was a successful journalist in Shanghai and embraced the professional identity of an independent intellectual, clearly part of him hankered to get beyond the world of words, to make a difference and to belong to something bigger than himself.⁴ He passed on the Communists when they came calling in 1925; class struggle did not seem right to Chen. When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek sent feelers two years later, Chen’s newspaper had disappointed him (by cosying up to the local warlord, Sun Chuanfang). A personal meeting with Chiang clinched the deal. Indeed, Chen’s two decades of service to the Nationalist Party was really personal service to Chiang Kai-shek, a leader he deeply admired and for whom he felt great loyalty. Chen wrote brilliantly as Chiang’s speech writer, ghostwriting, for example, Chiang’s famous account of his December 1936 capture in Xi’an, Fortnight in Sian, that led to the second united front with the Communists.

However, Chen Bulei experienced service to his great leader as an unreconcilable tension between his identity as a professional journalist and his service to the Party. In the end, it wore him down. In his suicide note in November 1948, Chen wrote:

Ever since I left journalism, I have not been free to use my pen to express my own words. In truth, I am nothing more than a scribe, at most a secretary. (quoted in Ho 2007, 22)

And yet, those who worked within the Nationalist Party in the 1940s conceded that Chen Bulei, as the grand secretary in Chiang’s cabinet, was a powerful gatekeeper and a major influence on the generalissimo. In Chen’s case, he could not reconcile identity and service. However, as the biographer of his suicide, Dahpon Ho, notes:

[Chen] sheds light on the mundane world of functionaries … probably closer to the experience of most literate Chinese who served the multitude of parties, factions, warlords, or governments through the decades of war and revolution. (Ho 2007, 48)

Liberals turned to the Communist Party, as well. The case of Wu Han (吳晗) (1909–1969) shows both the attraction of state service under the Communists for a Chinese liberal and the personal charisma of Mao Zedong for some intellectuals. Wu Han was a liberal historian, a noted specialist on the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and a wunderkind professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.⁵ Wu became a leading member of the Democratic League – the effort of liberals to form a ‘third road’ in Chinese politics. His criticisms of the Nationalists and his apparent sympathies for the Communists got Wu Han on the Nationalist’s blacklist. He just managed to escape arrest when police swept Beijing’s university campuses in August 1948 by fleeing south. On his way, he accepted a league request to carry a letter to the Communist authorities in their ‘liberated area’ in the Hebei city of Shijiazhuang, about 170 miles southwest of Beijing. He went to the Communist area with some 55 other league and independent democratic figures invited by the CCP to talk about China’s future. As was the case with Chen Bulei and Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, so it was for Wu Han in 1948 that two personal meetings with Mao Zedong convinced him that he wanted to serve. ‘Wu Han left the sessions with Mao exhilarated by the charismatic leader,’ says his biographer, Mary Mazur, ‘and inspired to study Lenin’s and Mao’s writings’ (Mazur 2009, 347). It was a case of loyalty to a leader and a revolution that seemed to Wu Han to be worthy. It was also a case that Mao had flattered Wu Han, asking for and reading the historian’s writings. Mao called on Wu Han’s sense of loyalty to the cause of saving China but also offered him a respected role as an intellectual leader and teacher of the people. Wu Han was so impressed he immediately wrote to Mao asking to join the Party.

But the Party had other plans for Wu Han. Wu Han was asked to serve the Party that had attracted his loyalty as a leader of the Democratic League, but not as a Communist Party member. This Wu Han did, serving as chair of the league’s Beijing branch from 1949 until 1966. In the new PRC, Wu Han became vice-mayor of Beijing and was active in the confidential meetings of the city’s Party committee and received classified documents, although publicly he was a league official and serving as such in the municipal government under the auspices of the united front. Privately, Wu Han was known among Party leaders as a ‘key party member outside of the party’ (Mazur 2009, 377). Wu Han was finally allowed to join the CCP in March 1957, though even then his membership was kept secret (until all was revealed in the Cultural Revolution).

Wu Han’s service was not nearly as tortured as Chen Bulei’s. Wu Han continued his professional identity as academic historian and served as a high-ranking public official of some considerable prestige. It was not, however, a service without tribulations. Wu Han had to cope with the many political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. His was a moderate voice, but in the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, Wu Han was an enthusiastic participant and willingly criticised his old league comrades Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji, claiming to preserve the league for another day. By 1957, Wu Han could say that he had balanced intellectual integrity and political service as a liberal. But if he had joined the CCP by then, how could he say that? A careful reading of Wu Han’s many writings since 1949, according to Mazur:

does not substantiate characterizing him as having adopted Communist ideology across the board … He was selectively influenced by Marxism–Leninism and Mao Zedong’s Thought in thinking about China … Wu was loyal to Communism as he chose to understand it, not because the powerful central authority decreed it. (Mazur 2009, 393, original emphasis)

Yue Daiyun, Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Ruoshui

These were older intellectuals, born around the turn of the century. During these same years, a new generation came of age while people such as Chen Bulei and Wu Han were in the midst of their careers. Yue Daiyun would show how a provincial girl could become a noted professor and Party activist, Zhang Chunqiao rose from Shanghai labour work to top leadership in Beijing and Wang Ruoshui embraced Communist journalism and rethought Marxism in the post-Mao era.

For Yue Daiyun (乐黛云) (b. 1931), the CCP was her hope and her pathway to success. From a provincial family of modest means, by the mid-1950s she had a brilliant career as a promising young literature professor at Peking University: Party branch leader in her department, married to a prominent philosophy professor, Tang Yijie, two children and a pleasant house on campus (Yue and Wakeman 1985). Yue loyally supported the revolution in which she believed, moved cautiously through the Hundred Flowers agitations and served with her branch committee in designating rightists in the ensuing Anti-Rightist Campaign. Her life was turned upside down when she herself was pegged as a rightist in a resurgence of the campaign in 1958 for some mild comments she had raised the previous year (Yue and Wakeman 1985). She endured life as a second-class citizen in the 1960s until the Cultural Revolution got both herself and her husband sent to the rural areas of Jiangxi Province. Yue and Tang were back on campus in the early 1970s, but were in need of showing their loyalty. Thus, when her husband was invited to join the radical writing group Liangxiao to help criticise the recently deposed Lin Biao, Yue was pleased and relieved. The Liangxiao scholars were given access to all sorts of restricted materials, and even a field visit to Lin Biao’s opulent Beijing residence, Maojiawan (to gather evidence against him).

This kind of access to inside information in a society dominated by secrecy contributed crucially to Liangxiao’s prestige and ensured that the pieces they wrote, collective efforts often published in People’s Daily or Red Flag and signed with one of the group’s pen names, were automatically accepted as definitive. (Yue and Wakeman 1985, 323, 326)

What could be more satisfying for a revolutionary scholar?

Meanwhile, Yue spent much of her time trying to save her two children from the worst of the chaos and the rigours of life under rustication, particularly her teenage daughter. Such considerations, and being reduced to humiliating pleading and petty bribery, were hardly the revolution that had inspired Yue Daiyun when she arrived at Peking University in 1948. Neither was the tortured scholarship that Tang Yijie contributed to Liangxiao the glorious resurgence of Chinese civilisation under socialism that had inspired him. Yue and Tang were paying the price for their engagement in Mao’s revolutions, but the full bill was not yet in. After further twists and turns, in 1978, Yue Daiyun’s conviction as a rightist was overturned and she was offered the opportunity to rejoin the CCP. Yue hesitated:

But I still could not forget all those who had died for its cause, sacrificing their lives for the ideals of Liberation. Surely the hardships, the losses suffered together, would not be redeemed unless we strove to keep that flame alive. I would join in the efforts to rebuild the Party. (Yue and Wakeman 1985, 385–7)

Zhang Chunqiao (张春桥) (1917–2005) was among those who took Mao’s call to radical policies as a ticket to advancement; he was ready to ‘continue the revolution’. Zhang rose to national prominence in the early years of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai. In bitter factional fighting in 1966, Zhang appeared to play a leading role in ending the street violence (Walder 1977). This successful ‘cleansing of the Party’ in China’s most important commercial and industrial city emphatically got the attention of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution Group. Zhang Chunqiao was ‘helicoptered up’ to national leadership.

In January 1975, at the peak of his Party career on the standing committee of the CCP Central Committee Politburo, Zhang Chunqiao made what would be the last major defence of radical faith Maoism. Zhang made his case for continuing the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution. ‘Politics is the concentrated expression of economics’, Zhang declared, ‘and whether the ideological and political line is correct or incorrect, and which class holds the leadership, decides which class owns those factories in actual fact.’ He cited Lenin chapter and verse on the need to exercise dictatorship.⁶ Zhang then made his case for defining who the enemy is – his competitors inside the CCP:

These people generally have a good class background; almost all of them were brought up under the red flag; they have joined the Communist Party organisationally, received college training and become so-called red experts. However, they are new poisonous weeds engendered by the old soil of capitalism.⁷

How did good Party cadres become agents of bourgeois restorationism? By adopting incorrect thought, declared Zhang. The unfortunates have betrayed their class by doing ‘exactly what Khrushchev and Brezhnev have done … [putting] forward the revisionist programme of “the state of the whole people” and “party of the entire people”’. What is to be done? Zhang outlined his mission:

so long as the few hundred members of our Party Central Committee and the several thousand senior cadres take the lead and join the vast numbers of other cadres and the masses in reading and studying assiduously, carrying on the investigation and analysis and summing up experience, we can certainly translate Chairman Mao’s call [to exercise dictatorship over the bourgeoisie] into reality.⁸

Zhang had, after all, ‘applied’ Mao’s revolutionary ideology successfully to corral his competitors in Shanghai in 1967, parlaying knowledge into political power.

The post-Mao period after the tribulations of the Cultural Revolution was a challenging time for the Party faithful. Zhang Chunqiao was purged in 1976 as a member of the ‘Gang of Four’, was tried and imprisoned. The leadership set about reinstating Leninist norms and rehabilitating loyal cadres purged over previous decades. Under these conditions, reformist Party intellectuals sought to address deeper causes for the excesses of Mao’s later revolutions. Among the most prominent was Wang Ruoshui.

Wang Ruoshui (王若水) (1926–2002) had become an intellectual cadre in the Communist system. He had prospered during the early years of the PRC and survived the Cultural Revolution. He was a government servant and a teacher of the people in the Communist system. He was not a fiction writer or poet, but a theorist, more in the mould of his mentor at People’s Daily, Deng Tuo. As a guilty member of the generation that partially supported and partially endured the Cultural Revolution, Wang was among those who sought to set things right in the years after Mao died. By the early 1980s, Wang was famous as the voice for ‘socialist humanism’. In the early 1980s, reform intellectuals backed by one or another Party leader pushed for a latitudinarian interpretation of Maoism that focused on the need to protect individual and collective rights against the abuses of those in power (Goldman, Cheek and Hamrin 1987; Brugger and Kelly 1991). The bottom line of advocates of Marxist humanism was to push for some form of accountability and to strengthen the norms of inner-Party democracy. These theorists were not dissidents; they were Party members and in positions of influence, several working for the Party’s reformist general secretary, Hu Yaobang, and to a lesser degree for the head of the state administration, Premier Zhao Ziyang.

Wang Ruoshui’s signal service was to provide the philosophical justification for the most daring ideological reforms of the post-Mao period, reforms that promised to create ‘communism with a human face’. Since he was a theorist for the Party, Wang wrote theory, but it was theory for a general reader (including Party leaders), not for professional philosophers. The key term in Wang’s reformist Marxist analysis was ‘alienation’. In Marxist theory, the ‘alienation’ of labour that workers experience under capitalism – commonly referred to as ‘exploitation’ – drives their struggle for socialist revolution. Under Stalin and Mao, the Communists declared that this alienation was a thing of the past under the glorious rule of the Party. Wang spoke for a generation of Party theorists who survived the Cultural Revolution, and they disagreed. Wang wrote:

In the past, we did many stupid things in economic construction due to our lack of experience … and in the end, we ate our own bitter fruit; this is alienation in the economic realm … [T]he people’s servants sometimes made indiscriminate use of the power conferred on them by the people, and turned into their masters; this is alienation in the political realm, also called the alienation of power. As for alienation in the intellectual realm, the classic example is the personality cult.⁹

Wang’s critique of the ‘personality cult’, of course, pointed to Mao. Wang saw the personality cult as the willing transfer to the leader of powers and dignities that rightfully belonged to ‘the people’. Referring to the Cultural Revolution adoration of Mao, Wang confessed: ‘Many people, including myself, also propagated the superstition, out of adoration, totally out of adoration then’ (quoted in Kelly 1987, 167). Wang Ruoshui was no dissident at this time. He was part of what Peter Ludz called the ‘counter-elite’, in-house critics within Communist parties in Eastern Europe in the 1980s (Lutz 1972, 62). Indeed, as David Kelly notes, Wang Ruoshui and his colleagues were aware of developments in Eastern Europe and cited the writings of Eastern Europeans (Kelly 1987). We often think of communism as monolithic, but this was demonstrably not the case. Nonetheless, Wang’s humanistic approach did not prevail and he was purged in 1987. Yet the Party, still under Deng Xiaoping, took on board some of the ideas of this counter-elite in the ongoing policy of ‘reform and opening’.

Into the Twenty-First Century: Wang Yuanhua’s Reflections and Jiang Shigong’s Triumphalism

How to capture the changes in ideological governance and intellectual service once the massive economic and social changes of ‘reform and opening’ gained critical mass in the post-Tiananmen 1990s? Here, I merely choose two opposing forms of engagement with the Party’s evolving orthodoxy: the critical reflections and cosmopolitan mindset of the senior Party intellectual Wang Yuanhua in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the post-2012 triumphalism and unrepentant nationalism of Jiang Shigong. Ironically, Wang was a homegrown intellectual who never left China but loved nineteenth-century European literature, while Jiang is quite international, has engaged with Western academics, is widely read in Western theory (from Carl Schmitt to Michel Foucault), but embraces the new China-centrism of Xi Jinping.

Writing in the 1990s and early 2000s, after the social impact of economic reform began to be apparent, Wang Yuanhua (王元化) (1920–2008) offered a series of cogent reflections on the Party’s and his own history of revolution. Wang had joined the Communist Party in 1938 and worked in the realms of propaganda, thought, art and culture. After the revolution, he served in the Shanghai Writers Association and did editorial work for different newspapers and magazines. He was caught up in a major purge in 1955 against Hu Feng (胡风), who had dared to argue that Mao Zedong’s theories of art and literature were too narrow and repressive. Wang was incarcerated and interrogated for some time, and was not finally rehabilitated until 1981, which meant that he had 16 years to reflect on his thought and experiences. Once rehabilitated, he published a series of books – often composed of notes, commentaries and brief essays – that have been immensely influential among Chinese intellectuals because of his willingness to use his personal experience to question received wisdom.¹⁰ In order to make sense of the political turmoil he has lived through, Wang turned to an earlier debate between two Chinese scholars of the early twentieth century, Du Yaquan and Jiang Menglin, over the role of attitude in thought (sixiang 思想). Wang’s account focused on taidu (态度 correct attitude), that complex blend of thought and feeling that is usually translated as ‘attitude’ (Cheek 2016). For Wang, the taidu approach to Chinese politics was the root cause of the troubles that had bedevilled China’s revolution in general and the Party’s efforts in particular.¹¹

In the 1990s, Wang Yuanhua recounted this earlier debate as an object lesson:

This discussion is of universal significance. Many people still think that thought (sixiang) is determined by a correct attitude (taidu) … This is precisely what Max Weber calls the ‘ethic of ultimate ends.’ We know all too well the nature and the danger of this ethic of intentions. It causes scholarship to be based not on the search for truth but to become a tool for various intentions. Theory articles that serve as such intentional tools overflow with arbitrary and factional prejudice and reduce what should be a scholarly sense of responsibility to a factional mentality. (Wang 2004, 24–5, 7–8)

Wang Yuanhua invoked the dangers of the taidu approach that his readers in the 1990s and 2000s in China (the text is widely available on the Chinese web) ‘[knew] all too well’ – that is, the abuses of Maoist politics. He wrote as a Party intellectual, but citing Weber as a theoretical resource signalled his cosmopolitan thinking.

While such doubts and cosmopolitan thinking continue to engage China’s establishment intellectuals, by no means all or even the most prominent are affected.¹² An essay published in China in January 2018 that created a great deal of buzz illustrates this. The essay is by Jiang Shigong (强世功) (b. 1967) and titled ‘Philosophy and History: Interpreting the “Xi Jinping Era” through Xi’s Report to the 19th National Congress of the CCP’.¹³ Here, Jiang is clearly operating as an organic intellectual speaking for the Party, and his appreciation of the lessons of Party history is a far cry from that of Wang Yuanhua.

Jiang Shigong himself is no mere propagandist; he is a well-respected legal scholar and professor at Peking University Law School, focusing on constitutional law.¹⁴ His academic work has attracted the attention of international China scholars, culminating in a special 2014 issue of the research journal Modern China, in which Western scholars engaged Professor Jiang on his ideas about Chinese constitutionalism. He is also a well-known defender of China’s position on the proper management of the Hong Kong question, and in 2017 published an English-language book entitled China’s Hong Kong: A Political and Cultural Perspective.

Jiang seeks to systemise Xi Thought. His argument is basically historical, providing a new periodisation of modern and contemporary Chinese history that restores the Party to its central role: China ‘stood up’ under Mao Zedong, ‘got rich’ under Deng Xiaoping and is ‘becoming powerful’ under Xi Jinping. The three pillars of Jiang’s argument are: first, the living value of Chinese Marxism, or socialism with Chinese characteristics, as an analytical system or political theory; second, the fundamental role of traditional Chinese cultural resources in the creation of Chinese socialism; and, finally, the creative role played by Xi Jinping, China’s current and future ‘supreme leader’. Jiang’s defence of Marxist state ideology is likely the most robust we have seen since Zhang Chunqiao made the case for his quite different reading of Mao Zedong Thought in 1975. Jiang’s argument is, of course, very different from Zhang’s (and both are partial and incomplete). Jiang emphasises history, not class struggle, and his goal is essentially conservative and constructive. Still, Jiang employs the tools of dialectical materialism with great skill and rewrites modern Chinese history as the product of the ongoing dialectical relationship between theory and practice in the context of state-building and world-building.

Jiang Shigong’s confidence could not contrast more strongly with Wang Yuanhua’s self-critical reflections:

‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ is not adding Chinese characteristics to an already defined ‘socialist framework’. Rather, it uses China’s lived experience to explore and define what, in the final analysis, ‘socialism’ is … For this reason, the report of the Eighteenth National Congress correctly talked about ‘self-confidence in the path’, ‘self-confidence in the theory’, and ‘self-confidence in the institutions’ involved in the construction of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.¹⁵

Jiang’s fulsome paean to Xi Jinping Thought (still in its longer, awkward phrasing) reflects the latest change in the relationship between the party-state and intellectuals in China. Increasingly over the past six years we have seen greater censorship, enforced orthodoxy and repression of dissenting voices in public – be they academic and theoretical or social and activist, from university professors, lawyers, ethnic minorities or women. These are perhaps the most perilous days for China’s loyal and critical intellectuals since the Cultural Revolution. How long they will have to endure Xi Jinping’s demand for ‘unity’ is open to question.

Conclusion

This review of the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the CCP from a long-term perspective has suggested that both the Party and some intellectuals have shared the same assumptions about governance in China in which the state is a pedagogical state uplifting a population not yet ready to speak for itself nor yet qualified to be active political subjects in a constitutional polity. All share the fundamental assumptions – if not the details – of Sun Yat-sen’s ‘political tutelage’.

As we are focusing on the history of the CCP in this volume, another reflection from the world of state socialism is appropriate. Both the Bolshevik Party and participating intellectuals contributed to a directed culture. China’s propaganda state used the propaganda system as this ‘directed public sphere’ in which the Party directly manages the public arena and controls public associations of ‘civil society’ (Cheek 1998). The concept of ‘directed’ comes from Victor Serge’s description of ‘directed culture’ in Stalin’s Soviet Union in which the state controls the arts, ethics and ideas ‘for the good of the people’. Miklós Haraszti has shown the appeal of directed culture for intellectuals under state socialism in Hungary. In his ironic novel The Velvet Prison, Haraszti’s cynical censor concludes:

Socialism, contrary to appearances, does not suppress the artists’ Nietzschean desires but satisfies them … The state prevents my art from becoming a commodity, and it guarantees my status as a teacher of the nation.¹⁶

Clearly, the intellectual attraction to Party service was not limited to the Chinese.

In China, the propaganda under the CCP provided the venue for this service. The propaganda system came to include the arts and universities, as well as the media. Writers, professors, researchers, as well as journalists – indeed, all professions – were incorporated into the propaganda and education system under the direct management of the Propaganda Department of the CCP.¹⁷ But a ‘unified’ or shared view of the pedagogical mission of intellectuals and the Party is not all. As Kuhn noted for eighteenth-century China, so, too, twentieth-century Chinese political culture and today’s have not been homogeneous (Kuhn 1990, 223).¹⁸ There have been significantly different responses within that unified field of the pedagogical state and the transformational bureaucrat. We have seen significant variations from the strident faith in the Party policies of the day – from Zhang Chunqiao to Jiang Shigong (never mind that the content of the orthodoxy is significantly different for each), to the Marxist critiques or revisions raised by Wang Shiwei, Wang Ruoshui or Wang Yuanhua. Across these variations we see our three themes: the attractiveness of the ‘deal’ offered to intellectuals by the Party (staffed, as Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik and Eddy U have noted, by many fellow intellectuals); the agency various intellectuals demonstrated in their practice as transformational bureaucrats; and the variation and tensions within that relationship, often managed by divergent exegeses of the current orthodoxy. Since it is the Party line today at the centenary of the CCP to emphasise the continuities or connections with traditional Chinese culture, it may be acceptable to note that a similar conclusion has been made about the relationship between Confucian ‘scholars’ (shi 士) and the imperial state, at least from Song times. Chinese scholars have long noted the echoes of the ‘scholar official’ (shidaifu 士大夫) social role and personal identity in the public lives of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals (Xu 1999, 2015; Yü 2016). Peter Bol has traced intellectual service to the state and its tensions since the Tang, and Joseph Levenson has concluded that when a tradition no longer evinces such internal tensions, it is dead, ‘museum-ified’ (Bol 1994; Levenson 1968). So, continuing tensions in intellectual service in China today should satisfy Xi Jinping with this contribution to his Four Histories (sishi 四史) by China’s divergent and debating establishment intellectuals.¹⁹ The pedagogical state lives.

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