The Intellectual and Chinese Society: From Past to Present

This chapter emphasizes that the relations between the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution went far beyond the conventional focus on people versus regime. Examining the intellectual as a widening classification of people permits recovery of critical aspects of life in areas such as social classification, bureaucratic organization, and political division. The chapter stresses that the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the revolution has left behind a visible legacy. The state continues to label a diversity of people as intellectuals; it suggests that these people are important but pose threats to China’s development. Official conduct has reproduced the divide between party cadres and professional workers, while political relaxation has encouraged different reinterpretations of the intellectual. The chapter concludes that the struggle to define the intellectual in twenty-first-century China permeates state and society.