The China Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall 2004)
Intellectuals at a Crossroads: The Changing Politics of China's Knowledge Workers, by Zhidong Hao. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. 496 pp. US$86.50 (Hardcover), US$29.95 (Paperback); ISBN 0-7914-5579-3 (Hardcover), ISBN 0-7914-5580-7 (Paperback)
The topic of what Chinese intellectuals have been up to since 1989 is one that engages the attention of academics in the China field as well as Chinese intellectuals themselves. Zhidong Hao's contribution to this burgeoning research industry is an innovative attempt at melding the interests of these two distinct but closely related modes of discourse: he provides, on the one hand, a clear map of the activities and concerns of Chinese intellectuals from the vantage point of an external professional observer while often speaking, on the other hand, in the voice of a participant Chinese intellectual assessing and commenting on the work of his contemporaries and predecessors. Indeed, as I read this book, I was struck by how easily it would translate into Chinese, and how it reflects a growing proximity between Anglophone and Sinophone scholarly discourses, as a consequence of the significantly increased participation of mainland-born scholars in the former arena. The foreword written by Merle Goldman for this book, which includes a short biographical account of Hao's metamorphosis from cement worker in 1970, to worker-peasantsoldier-student of English in 1972, to teaching positions first at a middle school in 1975 and then at Hebei Teachers University in 1980, followed thereafter by graduate studies in Shanghai and then New York, would tend to confirm that it is the author's (and publisher's) intention for us to read this book as a scholarly contribution from an insider. Understood in these terms, this book makes a very useful contribution to how contemporary Chinese intellectual life can be examined from within a standard sociological framework (based in historical-comparative and ethnographic methods) as well as to how the trends and concerns so identified matter to those who wish to maintain their identity as Chinese intellectuals.
The clarity and confidence with which Hao proposes a typology of contemporary Chinese intellectuals based on the degree of their involvement in party-state politics — namely, revolutionary intellectuals in power ; organic; critical; and unattached (professional) intellectuals — allows for an efficient analysis of both historical and contemporary intellectual scenes using these classificatory terms. For instance, by
Book Reviews 197
casting Confucian literati in the role of organic intellectuals, Hao produces an interesting historicization of certain enduring values that are commonly associated with and that, as he argues, have been profoundly internalized by members of China's educated elite, across different times and places. The drawback of relying so firmly on a typology is that the data one encounters can always be reduced to fit a given description, at the expense of the heterogeneous excess for which the typology does not account.
Hao is clearly aware of the limitations of this somewhat modular approach to analysis, since he takes some pains to show how an individual, starting out as one type early in his career, can be re-classified as a different type later on. This also leads him to postulate dual and split personalities as the perennial lot of intellectuals (pp. 61-68), which, to my mind, is less the truth about what Chinese intellectuals face than a condition that Hao's model requires in order to justify its coherence. In this regard, Hao casts Chinese intellectuals in the implicitly tragic-heroic role of being constantly […] torn between their need and desire for active political involvement, their instinct to be independent and autonomous, and their dependence on, and subordination to, the ruling bodies. (p. 67) This, indeed, is the standard view of Chinese intellectuals in contemporary Chinese scholarship, and Hao's treatment of this description as a self-evident fact excludes any consideration of this tragic-heroic figure in terms of a kind of ambivalent self-valorization at work within Chinese intellectual discourse.
It should be noted that this observation is not intended as a criticism of the quality of Hao's scholarship. Rather, it enables us to see that Hao adopts a voice complexly informed by both the detached professional tenor of sociological discourse and the affective idiom of Chinese thought (as sixiang). The great value of this book is its inclusion of substantive comments obtained through field-interviews and other sources with a diverse range of intellectuals (such as professional academics, writers, editors, journalists, party theorists, officials and lawyers). These comments demonstrate a prevailing concern with discharging one's moral responsibility as a Chinese intellectual, and Hao writes both evocatively and ably of how the critically engaged have sought to maintain this stance in their varying political attitudes to the ongoing development of China's market economy.
He is keen to stress the importance of critical engagement on the part of some in relation to the bourgeoisification and professionalization of
The China Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall 2004)
intellectuals as further economic development proceeds apace. Overall, Hao affirms the idea of viewing intellectuals as a class (as the title of the book's penultimate chapter tellingly puts it), in order to facilitate the formation of a collective identity among disparate types, based on their traditionally-derived sense of having a calling and their subscription to the humanist spirit. Using Stanley Aronowitz's account of intellectuals as a cultural class formation, Hao avers (in the voice of a Chinese intellectual) that Chinese intellectuals should actively probe their current limitations and flaws with a view to realizing their potential as a powerful class agency for effecting social change towards substantive democracy: [I]ntellectuals must accept the fact that they are not superior interest groups […] As equals, they must be willing to ally with other classes in furthering their cause (p. 343).
It should be noted that in his discussion of Geremie R. Barmé's essay, To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic, Hao observes that For some Chinese students and for a group of other Chinese mainlanders in Australia, the phrase, to screw a foreign cunt is a kind of patriotism' was a familiar idiom. (p. 134) Barmé explains in his essay's concluding paragraph that this is a quotation taken from an interview with a Chinese prostitute, to which he juxtaposes the controversial poem Sex Notice by the Melbourne-based litterateur Ouyang Yu, in order to demonstrate a certain rhetorical resonance between the two. To read one singular catchy quotation as constitutive of a familiar idiom (since Ouyang's poem, quoted in Barmé's essay, does not contain this line) is at best highly risky. Indeed there is no evidence at all of this being a familiar idiom among mainland Chinese in Australia. To some extent, this error reflects the risks that can attend over-reliance on a typology of intellectuals, since one is led to read each singular act pre-emptively as an instance of an already predetermined general type. Setting these risks to one side, this book is clearly a valuable contribution to both China studies and sociological studies of intellectuals. It provides a substantive account of present-day Chinese intellectuals, their changed socio-economic circumstances and their relations with the coercive power of a market-driven but still highly authoritarian party-state.
Gloria Davies Monash University