Evolution of Chinese intellectuals' thought over two decades

• Source: The Global Times
• [23:54 May 31 2009]
• Comments

Deng’s trip to South China

Such worries were dispelled three years later in 1992 by Deng Xiaoping’s visit to South China.

“Deng’s speech reignited people’s hope and restored their confidence,” said Zhang Liping. In his speech, Deng emphasized the importance of economic reform and open-mindedness.

In 1990s, “economic development” was no longer a slogan. People witnessed their living standards improve day by day. “The Chinese market economy gave individuals, especially those at the grass roots, an opportunity to change their life,” said Zhang Yiwu, author of Xin Xin Zhongguo de Xingxiang (Image of “New New China”).

Zhang’s uncle became wealthy, whereas before the policy, he had often sought financial help from Zhang’s family. Zhang himself also benefited. He no longer had to line up for three hours in the cold just to buy five pieces of tofu to entertain a guest.

Disintegration of the Soviet Union and political changes in Eastern Europe shocked Zhang Yiwu. After reading some French theoreticians, Zhang turned to what he called a more “rational” way of thinking. He began to gain a clearer idea of China’s development in the early 1990s and no longer considered Western models as total solutions.

After 1989, intellectuals became “more moderate and rational,” Zhang Liping said. “People realized that China would not change overnight.”

He “knew” the student movement would not change China, said Ding Yifan, “even with the lure of Western cultural influence in the 1980s.”

China changed fast after 1992, making some intellectuals anxious. Along with increasing wealth, the socialist market economy also brought utilitarian benefit and mammonism to China.

Many focused on wealth creation. Intellectuals found their elite culture replaced by secular culture and felt pushed to the margins of society from being at the center of thought in the 1980s.

In the 1990s, fewer people cared about what intellectuals had to say, and many intellectuals left academic circles and threw themselves into business instead.

Worrying about this new materialism in the ’90s, some intellectuals represented by Wang Xiaoming, a professor of modern Chinese literature and now a director of the Center for Contemporary Culture Studies at Shanghai University, published “Ruins on the Open Field” in 1993, an article which sparked heated discussion about “humanistic spirit”.

Intellectuals reflected upon themselves and discussed how to adjust their sense of worth in the new decade and regain their lost “humanistic spirit”.

“If the ideology of culture in the 1980s was radical or idealistically aiming to achieve reform, then there had to follow a social phenomena called ‘constructive criticism’ to reflect on humanity and the reality of society in China in the 1990s,” said Xu Youyu, a former researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.