PARTISAN REVIEW
251
need of academic intellectuals. Indeed, Guillain
claims
that "China's
need for university-educated personnel is still relatively limited . . .
[and] the country even had a glut of graduates before the Cultural
Revolution."
Maoism's policies toward intellectuals have in
part
to be under–
stood, then, in the light of China's limited need for them at this stage
of its development. Mao's unique policy of economic development is
the grounding of his policy concerning the intellectuals. Nonetheless,
the central fact remains that Mao's policies were
militantly
antiin–
tellectual. They were inspired less by market considerations of supply
and demand than by
political
considerations: they were inspired, spe–
cifically, by the intellectuals' tendency to suspect and to resist Mao's
fundamental policy of limiting urbanization and decentralizing in–
dustry.
It
is, I believe, the intellectuals' resistance to
this
unique con–
ception of development that Mao regards as proof of their abiding
bourgeois and antisocialist character. It is, above
all,
intellectuals'
resistance to a new and un-Western form of development that led
Mao to seek the radical transformation of intellectuals. As GuiRain
describes it:
In the Chainnan's view the inrt:elleotuals are suspeot because ...
they have been a source of resistance or reac1Jion to Comrnuoot
ideas. . . . A characteristic Mao statement given wide publicity
during the Cultural Revolution ran: "I shall always believe
thaJt
the
vast majority of intellectuals, both within and outside the party, are
basically bourgeois."
Mao's attack upon intellectuals is also grounded in an impulse
to make a great rupture with the past, to make a vast leap forward
away from it.
It
is thus not simply that intellectuals had a different,
more Westernizing, conception of economic development but, also,
that their link to the past was so profound, that led Mao to come
down against them. Inevitably, intellectuals do embody the heritage
of the past. However radical they are, intellectuals are, in the history–
rootedness of their learning, inevitably
if
unwittingly engaged in the
preservation
of the past. Their very "bookishness" marks them
~
the
agents of cultural continuity. Mao, however, wanted to make a break
with the history of China; more than that, he also wanted to make a
break with the history of
s8cialism
itself and with the history of revolu–
tions past. Mao's antiintellectuaIism, then, is a way of destroying the
