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favor with the Communists Party or one's immediate supervisors (though
there were still sharp limits to how free from one's danwei or unit one could
become). Third, and centrally, the very economic ambitions of the Party and
government made them reliant on highly educated workers, professionals,
scientists, and scholars.
A very wide range of people are categorized by the Chinese term
translated as "intellectual"-that is, nearly everyone with a university
education. Deng Xiaoping and all the other proponents of economic
"modernization" needed them. This realization had to contend, however, with
the ambivalence which the leadership of the Communist Party and for that
matter the people ofChina had always shown toward intellectuals.
In traditional China, intellectuals were respected masters of Confucian
thought, calligraphy, and classical Chinese style. Yet, scholars were either lo–
cal gentry or imperial bureaucrats or both. Westernization perpetuated this
ambivalence. Intellectual ranks grew, but in the role as purveyors of West–
ern culture made others uneasy. The struggle to respond to the challenge of
Western economic and military power helped to rouse reform-oriented intel–
lectual movements which might be seen as the first stirrings of the formation
of a nationwide intellectual class independent of the government; on the other
hand, the official intellectuals of the bureaucracy by and large proved them–
selves inadequate to the challenge of reforming their own administration and
strengthening China. Thousands of intellectuals returned from study abroad
to help build a new China after the 1949 Revolution. Most, however, were
treated with suspicion from the start and attacked repeatedly in campaigns of
rectification and anti-rightism and ultimately the Cultural Revolution. Though
Mao himself was an intellectual of a sort, a proud author of classical poetry,
he was unwilling to encourage such activities in others.
Deng Xiaoping, by contrast, had fewer intellectual pretensions but was
much readier to grant intellectuals a central place.
As
the main agent in end–
ing and undoing the Cultural Revolution, he was deeply revered by many
Chinese intellectuals. In 1984, for example, students told me how he had
personally saved them from bleak years ofworking with (and in some cases
being tormented by) the peasants, how he had brought a large dose of meri–
tocratic decision-making to a university admissions process which had been
dominated by political, class and other non-intellectual criteria. Hundreds of
professors had been restored to their senior university positions; writers had
been able to publish again; scientists had returned to their laboratories.
But as the 1980s and the reforms progressed, two partially correlated
tensions began to develop. The first was a split between two sorts of
intellectuals. On the one side were technocrats who worked in engineering,
demography, econometrics, or other applied sciences to try to modernize
