INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY IN CHINA 1949

INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY IN CHINA AFTER 1949

This research paper analyzes the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after 1949.

The persecution, ostracism and general maltreatment meted out to Chinese intellectuals after the communists took power in China since 1949, which has partially abated since Deng Xiaoping (Deng) assumed the role of paramount leader in and about 1980 and under his successors, reflected the distrust in which most intellectuals were held by the CCP and its inexorable requirements of establishing control over the thought and conduct of the Chinese population and to pursue other doctrinnaire ideological imperatives of Mao Zhe Dong's peasant revolution, which required that the class struggle be kept alive even after the real internal enemies of the regime were eliminated. That repressive effort reached its most insane apogee during the Cultural Revolution for which no completely logical explanation can be offered. Intellectuals also served as convenient scapegoats for the economic and other failures of the CCP and the government of the People's Republic of China. The relaxation of restrictions on intellectuals since 1980 went hand in hand with the decision of the Party to modernize its economy and open it up to Western trade, technology and capital, which required the willing cooperation of intellectuals, but which has been kept within limited parameters to prevent them from becoming the focal point of oppos

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iled during the Cultural Revolution, 1964-1979. In Daiyun's case, her independence of thought may have been more important than her family background. She is disciplined in 1955 first for disobeying party orders by going out of town to vist family. Then she loses her post as a teacher at Beijing University (Beida), is suspended as Party secretary and sentenced to hard labor, carrying rocks in a communal piggery, in the countryside. Her husband, Lao Tang, who has a much more bourgeois background than she, avoids serious trouble until he becomes involved with the left-deviationist Gang of Four in the mid-1970s. Daiyun's only sin in 1956 is that she helps organize a literary magazine at the Beijing University in compliance with Mao's 'Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom' campaign of 1956. The magazine is never published, but she is nevertheless denounced by her colleagues as a rightist. She admits error but is throughout her ordeal reluctant to admit doing things which were not true. Condemnation of nonconformist intellectuals like Daiyun served the CCP's interests by enforcing group conformity of thought. Sending her to hard labor in the country was designed to impress on her the need to lose her bourgeois pretensions and immerse herself

Category: Foreign - I