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Observers often note the glaring contrast between China's economic progress and its stalled political reforms. This volume, written by experienced scholars, explores a range of grassroots efforts--initiated by the state and society alike--to restrain corrupt behavior and enhance the accountability of local authorities. While the authors offer varying views on the larger significance of these developments, their case studies point to a more dynamic Chinese political system than is often acknowledged.

With the establishment of the People's Republic of China, headed by the leader of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong, China was ruled by a totalitarian political system. Mao and the party had not only dominated the country's political life, but also the economic, intellectual, artistic and personal lives of its subjects. With Mao's death in 1 976, his successor and former Long March comrade, Deng Xiaoping, became China's paramount leader until his death in 1997. During this period, China moved from a totalitarian to an authoritarian regime. Public intellectuals have played a major role throughout Chinese history. China's pre-modern intellectuals, the Confucian literati, not only advised the emperor and ran the governmental bureaucracies, they were also viewed as the conscience of society. Public intellectuals also helped to bring about the end of China's dynastic system during the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898 in the late Qing dynasty and they prepared the way for the 1911 revolution, whose leader Sun Yat-sen personified a public intellectual.

This paper discusses dissent in the People's Republic of China, especially in the post-Mao era. It begins historically with a discussion of the role of public intellectuals, as personified by Sun Yat-sen, in bringing about the end of China's dynastic system in 1911 and the failed attempt by the Kuomintang government to silence dissident intellectuals. It explains that it was only under Mao Zedong's rule (1949-1976) that China's public intellectuals were silenced and unable to play their traditional role as critics as well as upholders of the political system. Examining the transition from Mao's totalitarian rule to the era of restricted freedom in the post-Mao authoritarian state, the paper explores the vicissitudes of China's dissident intellectuals consecutively under the rule of the third and fourth generation of Chinese Communist Party leaders, epitomized by the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, who launched the signature campaign, called Charter 08, that sought to establish a democratic China. Nevertheless, compared with the Mao era, when intellectual dissenters were brutally suppressed and silenced, despite continuing crackdowns on political dissent in today's China, intellectuals are not completely silenced. Periodically, they are able to engage in vigorous debates on ideological and political issues and participate in the international academic community. At times, they join with other political groups in political demonstrations and calls for political reforms. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, China was no longer governed by a totalitarian political system. As China moved to a market economy and opened up to the outside world, the Chinese people enjoyed increasing freedom in their personal, economic, cultural and intellectual lives. However, the Chinese Communist Party still controlled the political system, which meant that when a number of China's intellectuals in the post-Mao period publicly criticized or deviated from party policies, they lost their positions, were ostracized from society and were sometimes imprisoned. Thus, while the post-Mao government allows more artistic and personal freedom, intellectuals who criticize the party's policies and seek fundamental political reforms are demoted, isolated and sometimes imprisoned. Nevertheless, despite the threat of punishment, a small number of them continue to comment on public policies and call for political reforms. Adapted from the source document.

This edited volume describes the intellectual world that developed in China in the last decade of the twentieth century. How, as China's economy changed from a centrally planned to a market one, and as China opened up to the outside world and was influenced by the outside world, Chinese intellectual activity became more wide-ranging, more independent, more professionalized and more commercially oriented than ever before. The future impact of this activity on Chinese civil society is discussed in the last chapter.

Although dissident intellectuals and students continued to be persecuted in the post-Mao Zedong regimes of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, China's intellectuals were no longer denigrated as a class, harassed, suppressed, imprisoned and persecuted to death as they had been during the Mao era. Like the 19th-century self-strengtheners, Deng and his appointed successors regarded intellectuals as essential to achieve their goal of economic modernization and make China once again “rich and powerful.” Those intellectuals involved in the sciences, technology and economics in particular enjoyed elite status as advisers to the government, similar to that which intellectuals had enjoyed throughout most of Chinese history until the 1949 revolution.