Abstract
Eddy U has a perspective on 20th-century China. He wants to convince you that a class of people who came to be known as intellectuals in Mao’s time and beyond have been victimized specifically due to the conceptual rubric of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). U wants to conduct an objective academic study that discloses a ‘mutually constitutive relationship between the intellectual and Chinese Communism’ (p. xv), meaning, in a way, that U believes he has his finger on a significant narrative thread largely ignored in contemporary writings about 20th-century China. Although focusing specifically on the years between ‘the early 1920s to the end of 1964’ (p. 16), U insists that the effects of the ‘objectification of the intellectual’ under Communist rule are ‘still visible today’ (p. 16): No previous study has illustrated how the party identified members of this population [intellectuals] in practice, let alone with the same rigor as has been mustered to describe the appearance of landlords or other classes or categories of people under CCP rule. (p. 160)
In short, existing literature describes well and good the practical effects of Communist labeling and subsequent persecution of other class enemies; but the pernicious construction and employment of a fluid conceptual term ‘intellectual’, or what eventually comes to be known as ‘zhishifenzi’ (p. 25; 知识分子), replacing an earlier term (once in wider circulation) ‘zhishi jieji’ (p. 24; 知识阶级), results in the persecution of all ‘educated persons’ (p. 2) rather than the mere ‘intellectual class’ (p. 24). What at first seems to be an attempt by the CCP to maximize whom in society is viewed as ‘educated’ is actually, in U’s narrative, the means by which the CCP goes on to inflict maximum punishment against a broader segment of the population.
Before that, in his fourth chapter entitled ‘The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of a Registration Drive’ (p. 68), U describes how the ‘Shanghai Municipal Commission for Handling Unemployed Intellectuals’ (SCHUI; p. 75) sought to draw on the special set of skills of its educated population in Shanghai. The concurrent business closures resulting from the ‘Five Anti Campaign’ (p. 77) ‘pushed large numbers of office workers with different levels of knowledge and skills into the ranks of the unemployed’ (p. 72). The subsequent ‘way in which the CCP offered jobs and opportunities after seizing Shanghai depressed the average educational level of those who would register as unemployed intellectuals’ (p. 73). One wonders at the word choice ‘seizure’ (i.e. seized from whom exactly?). Despite noting that educated homemakers were also registered as unemployed intellectuals, with ‘women constitut[ing] a moderate majority (57 percent)’ (p. 80; what might be construed as an admirably progressive development), U deems the commission’s failure largely ‘inevitable [as the] state had set junior high school graduation . . . as the minimum educational requirement for anyone to register as an unemployed intellectual’ (p. 81).
In the fifth chapter, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Education (SBE) wreaks havoc on the nation’s middle schools, extending its bureaucratic reach to Yan’an to condemn the ‘[s]ix party cadres . . . [who] served as school principals, personnel executives . . . and other influential posts’ (p. 105). Their accusation is simply that party cadres are exploiting ‘the enthusiasm and energy’ of the true progressives on campus. This occurrence, which ‘reportedly occurred at Yan’an Secondary School during the mid-1950s is instructive’ (my emphasis, p. 105). U seems happy sketching out the dark hues of some bureaucratic specter; but without any further details of either his source or the actual incidents which took place, what this event is instructive of remains unclear.
In addition, U never squarely addresses an elephant in the room. U, who is of Chinese descent and an accomplished intellectual, has surely questioned his own prospects of intellectual success in both Mao’s and contemporary China. Yet, one need not resort to biography to see this elephant. U states that his ‘desire to reexamine the intellectual in contemporary Chinese society arose while [he] was a graduate student’ (p. xvi) – that is, while he himself was training to join the class of people he wishes to describe with objectively scholarly acumen. Surely this does not invalidate his ability to do so, but the cavalierness of the above description is telling, as though the project simply fell in his lap through ‘encouragement and advice’ (p. xvi) from others within the same class.
U is a clear writer and excellent storyteller. He gathers together anecdotes and presents a compelling narrative. Yet, he does not engage in sustained theoretical discussion of any kind. Allusions to Bourdieu, Foucault, Fitzpatrick, Bauman, Gramsci, and even Lenin are scattered throughout without articulation of a working methodology through their thought. His etymological discussion on the word ‘intellectual’ in Chapter 2 is interesting, though it is difficult to see how an ‘historic voyage’ traveled together by ‘the classification [of intellectuals] and Chinese society’ (p. xvi) leads inexorably to the Cultural Revolution.
U does have ambitions to take his critique to rural China as well, titling his third chapter ‘Visible Subjects in the Countryside’ (p. 42). Yet, he takes what is today (and was then) a prefecture-level city (Yan’an) and construes it as representative of rural China. Perhaps the CCP’s policies were disastrous in many ways (in urban areas especially), but U’s inability to grant any modicum of success to anything at all carried out by the bureaucratic state organs during Mao’s time makes the entire work read like caricature. U ignores 21st-century scholarship by Eisenman (2018), Gao (2007, 2018), and Han (2008), for instance, that contest the blanket condemnation of Mao-era policies, especially for the lives and livelihoods of Chinese villagers.
Intellectuals likely faced hard times in China’s cities, and many material causes are worth analyzing and discussing. But to paint with broad strokes about nation-wide reverberations across China’s rural periphery resulting from a classification error of a small slice of China’s human population at the center seems something of a stretch.