Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China

* Book: Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. By Xudong Zhang (Editor). Duke University Press, 2001

URL = https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/539/chapter-abstract/123995/The-Making-of-the-Post-Tiananmen-Intellectual?

Excerpts

From the first introductory chapter, i.e. the

* Article / Book Chapter: The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview. Xudong Zhang.

we have selected:

• The Rural Industrial Revolution in China as Expression of an Alternative Modernity

• The Second Intellectual Liberation Theory in China‎

• State Capacity Theory in China‎‎

• The New Left in China‎

Context of the authors discussed above, by Xudong Zhang:

"All three of these discourses — “New Left,” “liberal,” and neoliberal— came to the fore as an ideological opposition and theoretical critique of prevalent neoclassical economic orthodoxy, which resulted in the myth of the market and private ownership. Wang and Hu focused on progressive government policy-making. Cui Zhiyuan sought to deconstruct problematic notions pertaining to the ideological totality of laissez-faire capitalism and to reappropriate or theoretically develop on a worldwide basis the innovative ideas and practices in contemporary socioeconomic and political life. Gan Yang, in addition to his attentions to the social-cultural reconstruction of rural China, emphasizes the dialectic between popular democracy and social order. In many ways, the arguments of all of these scholars can be regarded as a negative response to the disastrous Russian privatization after the end of the Cold War and positive, occasionally idealistic view of Chinese economic strategy and its democratic potential. The approaches of these scholars also represent the first attempt by Chinese intellectuals to evaluate and theorize Chinese reality in a global context, but with a particular Chinese perspective and sensibility."