현대 중국 지식인의 위상

Abstract

Since Deng Hsiaoping seized the power of the Party, the Chinese goverrment adopted the Reform and Open Policy and re-introduced capitalist market economy. It insists that it is trying to construct Chinese characteristic socialism. In order to achieve this ulimate goal successfully the Chinese govrnment has attached great importance to the contribution by the scientists and technocrats, calling for intellectuals to construct a new spiritual civilization to meet the new situation.

The Chinese intellectuals, having traditionally acted as ruling elites, have thought that the matter of moral values and ideology is their proper task. However, their present situation is very different: they are no more regarded as leading elites, their knowledge is despised as a useless thing, and their income belong to the lowest class. Many intellectuals do not hesitate to confess a bitter feeling of embarassment that they have been fallen into the bottomless pit, and they are very skeptical to their newly assigned task.

Certainly, this situation resulted from the CCP policy oppressive to the intellectuals, especially the policy of liquidating them in the Great Cultural Revolution. Moreover the Party still insists on its dictatorship not tolerating political dissent. But their destiny was already foreboded in the New Culture Movement of the 1920s and the revolutionary movements of the following decades. The dominant trend in those years was oriented to radical anti-traditionalism, which was obsessed with excessive activism not based on solid scholarship and learning.

The revolutionary intellectuals advocated that the call for salvation of the nation was so urgent that thay had no choice but such activism, though not foreseeing how much price they had to pay. But the revolution, which they were so eagerly to support and participate in, forced corrupt and useless intellectuals to learn from innocent and pure people so that they could become good servant of the people. Following the path of the revoultion, they believed they could be reborn as major agents making new history.

The results, however, were almost total destruction of academic disciplines, in particular social sciences and humanities, and self-annhiliation of the intellectuals, which culminated in the Great Cultural Revolution. In retrospect of the past tragedy, the Chinese intellectuals have recently warned the danger of excessive concern for politics and radical idealism. Many of them have urged their collegues to abandon their presumptuous role as the supreme judge in the matter of ethics and moral values. But the author believes that the most urgent task of the intellectuals in contemporary China is to enhance their academic level up to the point corresponding to the rising status of New China.