Revised draft for editing, 1/16/2002

--FOR CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS ONLY--

URBAN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND DISCOURSES OF DISSENT

IN POST-IMPERIAL CHINA

Wen-hsin Yeh

Department of History

University of California at Berkeley

Paper presented at the conference on "Urban Cultural Institutions in Early Twentieth-Century China" (April 13, 2002, the Ohio State University).

　　　　　 This paper examines practices of dissent in public arena in early 20^th-century Chinese political life.　 By studying dissent I wish to make three points.

　　　　　 First, despite the presumed authoritarianism and repression in its political system, dissent was a central feature in urban Chinese politics under the emperors as well as the republics.　 The fall of the Qing in 1911, to be sure, put an end to the monarchical system.　 The new Republic of China failed however to deliver its promise, whether phrased in terms of rule by the people or as social justice to all.　 Chinese intellectuals did not desist in their dissenting practices under the successive Republican regimes.　 Post-imperial discourses of dissent were as rich and complex as before.

This brings us to the second point, about the seeming continuity in dissenting practice against the backdrop of significant institutional changes over the course of the twentieth century.　 The new Republic, as is well known, did not destroy the old imperial bureaucracy.　 The Party-states of the 20^th century were based, however, not only on a thorough overhaul of the political system but also on new sets of political ideology.　　 In addition, the early decades of the 20^th century witnessed the birth of the Chinese public intellectual, or of figures of culture or learning using words to exercise authority through the printed medium.　 The rise of modern printing, publishing, mass media and higher education in the cities provided the institutional backdrop for the rise of these men.　 Their engagement in public criticism in turn redefined the practice of dissent in post-imperial China.　

As an elaboration on this point, let us consider for a moment the old institution of bureaucratic censorship. Traditional critics of the regime had sometimes functioned in their capacity as official censors of the imperial state.　 It was a much-cherished Confucian ideal that, in attempts to save the regime from its own mistakes, loyal ministers should speak the truth while challenging the powerful. Censorial critics functioned, in this sense, within the bureaucratic as well as ideological systems and raised their voices for the purpose of shoring up the regime.　 They critiqued the failings of policies and individuals yet rarely questioned the underlying assumptions of governance.　 Twentieth-century Chinese Party-states, whether under the Nationalists or the Communists, continued such practice in some sense and employed the equivalent of official censors to monitor the misconduct of government officials and Party members.

But this continuity in the authorized self-policing of the state took place in the context of new developments in the public arena.　　 Chinese political press came into being at the turn of the century when members of the educated elite acquired the publicizing capacities of missionary publicists and commercial booksellers.　　 There was, at the same time, a rise in urban literacy, a proliferation of civic associations, and the birth of the "nation" as opposed to the state as an imagined community.　 Dissenting intellectuals mounted ideological challenges against the regime and raised questions that went beyond loyal opposition.　 Whether under the Nationalists or the Communists there were limits to the regime's tolerance of sweeping criticisms coming from outside the political system. How the Party-state responded to this modern version of intellectual dissent thus became a critical issue that defined the terms of political freedom in China's twentieth century.

This, then, brings us to the third point of this paper, about cultural institutions that went beyond the formally constituted in the urban arena, and about the links between institutions and discourses, or how the two in fact mutually constituted each other.　 On dissent in Chinese politics, there has been much continuity as well as discontinuity between the first scholars of the Warring States and the later ones in the People's Republic.　　 Yet when examined in its own context, each instance of dissent embodies a particular configuration of institutional possibilities and discursive imperatives.　　 This mutual constitution between discourse and institution is particularly evident if we consider the transformation of dissenting practices over time.

Dissent in Imperial China

Dissent in imperial China came in many forms and drew upon multiple systems of symbolic resources.　 There were Confucian acts of moral protests.　 There were also Daoist renunciations of power and an aesthetic embrace of the rustic.　 And, when combined with sectarian beliefs, mainstream intellectual value could even lend itself to popular protests that found expression in millenarian uprisings and peasant rebellion.　　　

Most scholars agree that, since the formation of the first imperial academies in the Former Han, there has long been a convention of political protest in China. [1] High-profile protests and principled stand of dissent that invoked Confucian classics had led repeatedly to the formation of elite factions in the late Han, in the Song, and in the Ming. There had been so many instances of such occurrences throughout China's dynastic records that political protests risked becoming an exalted convention by late imperial times.[2]

　　　　　 This is not to say that there had only been a convention without differentiation. New forms of social criticism, aimed either at social injustice, official corruption, tax levies, or bureaucratic extortion gained in scope, intensity, and frequency with the rise of urban wealth and the spread of popular literacy in the late Ming and early Qing.　 Paul Ropp, in his study of dissent in vernacular literature, saw the 17^th century as a new moment charged with a new spirit of protest.　 Social criticism in this context was fueled both by the iconoclastically egalitarian fervor in the Taizhou School of Wang Yang-ming philosophy and by Huang Zongxi's post-mortem critique of Ming autocracy.　 Ropp believes that the rise of vernacular literature, whether in the form of literary realism as in the case of Jinpingmei or in the social satire of Rulin waishi, contributed significantly to the circulation of dissenting views among the reading public.[3]　　 There were, in short, plenty of instances of social criticisms and intellectual dissent in a print culture of public reading that could be tied to the "sprouts of capitalism" in 17^th-century urban economy.　 When late Qing fictional writers used the vernacular to satirize the bureaucracy and to expose high-place corruption, they were not taking a "modern" departure from the past but following a well-established convention, which in turn reached back to a well entrenched romantic tradition of martial arts justice and knights-errand chivalry.[4]

Social criticisms in late imperial days rarely aimed at the system as such.　 They attacked, instead, the failings of individuals in positions of power.　 When Confucian ministers asserted their moral autonomy against figures of authority, they at the same time conducted themselves as guardians of principles that buttressed the system. The price of their autonomy, as Frederic Wakeman has argued, was precisely their unquestioned bond to the principles behind the system.[5]　 Late imperial dissent was thus hardly "progressive" in intent despite the radical potential.　 It was aimed not to change the ground rules but to rectify political practices via a fundamentalist insistence on the moral vision.　

It is useful for us to remember that, more often than not, traditional political debates and literati criticisms were framed in the conservative language of ritual propriety and dynastic precedents.　 Many critics were actually successful in having their day in court.[6]　 As the critics and the targets of their criticisms shared so much in basic beliefs, "dissent" was a result of impasse or failure to arrive at mutual political accommodation.　 But the cost of dissent to the dissenting individual could be high, as Wakeman shows, and tales of martyrdom did fill the pages of historical records.　 Officials who threw themselves on the paths of the powerful ran the risk of jeopardizing their careers and losing their lives.　 One might argue, nonetheless, that it was a function of the rules of good story-telling that only the spectacularly unsuccessful cases of dissent would receive the fullest benefit of narrative dramatization in historical annals.　

　　　　　 Death or dismissal in the case of failed criticism, meanwhile, was not totally devoid of rewards.　 A failed protest by the subject was almost by definition a bungled-up management by the ruler of the rhetoric and drama of dissent.　 Those who lost their fights in political struggles were thus paradoxically assured of an honored spot in literary or poetic justice.　 Above and beyond the power of the ruler there was always a higher realm of authority, whether in the principles of the dao or in the judgment of history.　 Political martyrs became venerated figures in popular lore or historical narratives; their integrity certified by the hardship they endured or the blood that they had shed.

　　　　　 Exile was another fate that awaited the dissidents.　 It, too, was a form of punishment with its reward.　 In the lore of Qu Yuan, the loyal minister of 3^rd-century B.C. who had spoken the unflattering truth was sent away (fang) on exile.　　 His subsequent roaming and wandering in the wilderness provided the backdrop for reflections on the human fate as well as dialogues with deities. Immortalized in the rhymed verses of Chuci (The Song of the South), the poet's divine communications directed attention away from the secular to the transcendental.　

In the annals of Neo-Confucian masters, the classicist Han Yu (768-824) denounced as an act of sheer folly the emperor's lavish worship of a piece of ossified bone allegedly from the Buddha's little finger.　 No sooner had the memorial been submitted, Han was banished to the diseased land of the malarial south.　 Thanks to the emperor's intemperate rejection of his argument, the master's ineffectual memorial had been canonized since as a classic at a critical juncture in medieval intellectual history.　

Exile similarly was the fate awaiting Lin Zexu, the governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi, in the aftermath of the first rounds of the Opium War (1839-1842).　 Lin's banishment to China's Muslim region in the Central Asian desert put an end to a distinguished career.　　 The downfall paradoxically secured for him a reputation as a staunch patriot in anti-British popular lore.

　　　　　 Exile as a form of punishment was thus of dubious value for the rulers who imposed it. The "wilderness" (ye), to which the offenders were banished, was no mere place of discomfort or barbarity.　 So long as ye could be opposed to the chao (court) as an alternative realm of significance, it was beyond the power of the court to dictate the terms of honor besides what was there in the political arena.　 On the margins where the capacity of the state failed to reach, there was open space for the inscription of alternative systems of meaning.　　 Institutionally this "counter-culture" found expression either in the form of local temples, county gazetteers, popular drama or vernacular tales.

　　　　　 Confucian canons and Daoist aestheticism, indeed, both applaud the strategy of yin or yi (to become invisible, to disengage) and bestow moral authority on those who turn their backs on seats of power.　 Exemplary hermits and recluses in periods of dynastic transition can be found in the Analects as well as in the Five Classics.　 A man of virtue serves only a worthy ruler who could live up to that virtue.　 It's a ruler's job, meanwhile, to recruit the able and talented (xian) from all four corner of the realm.　 In times of disorder, mountaintops and riverbanks become sites of purity and integrity and an ethical counterweight to the compromise at the center.　 Under the Southern Song and the Yuan, centers of private Confucian classical learning in places such as Jinhua and Yongjia in Zhejiang produced a disproportionately large number of scholars who had withdrawn from court politics and poured their energy, instead, into the moral ordering of the lineage and the locale.　 The academies and the ancestral halls that they built were tangible institutional expressions of a cultural space that was both public and local, that had been set apart from the power of the state in vocal as well quiet disapproval.[7]　 It is significant, however, that when a new dynasty came to power, these paragons of local virtue found themselves enshrined as "sages" in state Confucian temples first under the Ming and then under the Qing.　 The Song "withdrawal" was thus to a realm of purity away from the court of corruption; it was not a move towards a stand of opposition nor a system of alternative value irreconcilable to the principles functioning at the center.

　　　　　 Literary idealizations of recluse abound, meanwhile, in the records.　 There was Tao Qian in the Six Dynasties and his Daoist celebration, in poetry and rhymed prose, of the freedom of withdrawal.　 A thousand years later, the prologue to the 17^th-century novel Rulin waishi features the tale of Wang Mian, a man of natural integrity and wisdom whose exemplary conduct put to shame a whole host of self-promoting individuals who sought offices and curried favors.　　　

Prominent intellectual leaders, meanwhile, were often believed to be able to live up to this ideal of withdrawal during periods of turmoil and transition.　 The Ming-Qing transition provided the backdrop for the withdrawal of Huang Zongxi, who retired into the mountains of Zhejiang, of Gu Yanwu, who became a wandering traveler, and of Wang Fuzhi, hermit in the remote cave terrain of Hunan.　 These men rejected repeated attempts by the new dynasty to lure them to the court in Beijing.　 They turned the sites of their self-imposed exile into centers of vision and cultivation.　　 Daoist aestheticism, in particular, places high ethical value on nature as a source of beauty and meaning.　 The imperial court had at its disposal the service of official historians and offices of dynastic histories.　 But it was those in the "wilderness" who recounted tales that commanded public imagination.　　 Failed cases of dissent and exiled dissidents of late imperial China, in short, did not end up in oblivion.　　 Instead these became materials of symbolic representation charged with political tension.

The End of Imperial Discourse

In April 1895, Kang Youwei and eight thousand other provincial examination degree-holders assembled in Beijing to protest the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki.　　 By doing so, these examination candidates had acted against the convention of the dynasty that banned non-officials from interfering with the affairs of the state.　 Kang and his compatriots, driven by concern over the court's handling of China's humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Japanese, were interested not in adopting a grand gesture but in forcing upon the court a particular course of action.　 Rejected by the dynasty, Kang and his student Liang Qichao went on to organize a study society to agitate for reform and to stir up educated opinion.

In his study of Chinese democracy, Andrew Nathan named Kang and Liang the pioneering figures "who laid the foundation for the ideas of both the democracy activists and the party reformers of the late 1970s."[8]　 One may wish to quibble with Nathan's construction of historical genealogy.　 But the 1895 events were of watershed significance in modern Chinese political history.　 The protestors of the turn of the century not only submitted memorials to the throne but also published news articles and founded political press.　 They presented their case not simply by citing sacred canons and ancestral precedents but also by noting developments in foreign countries and around the world. [9]　　 They agitated not only for the court's adoption of their position but also for its recognition of their right to take part in such decisions.　 The events of the decade called into being a politicized public and an expanding political nation, which in turn set the stage for a new kind of political dissent in the following century.　　

If we see "dissent" as an informed and articulated criticism of the exercise of public power and a refusal to comply, we need to begin, before we turn to a reading of such practice, with some considerations about the changing social circumstances in which modern Chinese intellectuals found themselves.　　

In 1905, the Qing abolished the civil service examinations that for over ten centuries had functioned as a key instrument to recruit the educated into bureaucratic service. [10]　 This spelled the end of scholar officials as a distinct social group and separated the modern-day political activists from their imperial forebears.　 The most elitist of the modern educated had become, by the 1920s, urban-based and foreign-educated.　 From the turn of the century onward there had also been a steady fragmentation of the formal system of education at all levels.　 While some schools were founded and operated by Protestant or Catholic missions, others were supported by private or public Chinese sources.　 These schools offered different sorts of curricula and by the 1920s it became difficult to speak of a cultural consensus about what it meant to be an educated Chinese.　　 While some had persisted in the study of Chinese classics with little attention to new branches of knowledge, others had concentrated instead on foreign languages and "new learning" at the expense of the "old learning."　 New-style schools, first founded in coastal cities, only gradually made their appearance in hinterland provincial towns and county seats.　　 But to be modern and educated, it was also essential to leave behind one's old-style hometowns.

Government service and political parties continued to employ a significant number of the educated.　 But the new century witnessed the rise of private enterprises and urban professions in the cities.　 There were professional writers, professors, journalists, translators, artists, editors, publishers, and so forth that earned their livings in the marketplace.　 Compared with their imperial predecessors China's modern educated no longer depended exclusively on the officialdom for their careers.

Reform and revolution in the early decades of the century had meanwhile contributed to significant changes in governing assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.　 In the apt words of Joseph Levenson, the 1911 Revolution might have been a failure, but it was not a mistake.　 Beyond the symbolic changes in matters such as clothing, hairstyle, calendar, national anthem, political rituals, and official titles,　 there were distinct ideological and linguistic shifts that marked the birth of the republic and the end of the empire.[11]　 The first president of the Republic shared his power, albeit reluctantly, with a parliament of elected representatives and political parties.　 Despite incessant civil conflicts, the 1920s witnessed Sun Yat-sen's systematic elaboration of the Three Principles of the People.　 The Nationalist Government (1927-1949) of Chiang Kai-shek was a military regime aided by the secret service.　 It nonetheless grounded its legitimacy in terms of service to the nation and the people and had adopted, in 1947, a constitution that remained in effect on Taiwan after 1949.　 Compared with their imperial predecessors, Republican intellectuals were not only members of an educated elite but also citizens of a republic.　 It was their civic right rather than bureaucratic privilege that they should voice their views on public affairs.

A third area of change had to do with the birth of the political press, the affordability of printed materials, the creation of a postal system, and a steady rise in urban literacy rate.　 The early decades of the twentieth century had witnessed, furthermore, the invention of the vernacular, the proliferation of vernacular forms of communication, the rise of radio broadcasting and film making, the spread of photo studios, and the birth of the popular press along with the advertising industry.　 Andrew Nathan and Leo Lee estimated that in a city like Shanghai in the early 20^th century, literacy rate was over 80% among men and over 60% among women. [12] These urbanites were not only consumers of popular fiction -- the "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies" that Perry Link has studied, the courtesan tales that Gail Hershatter has examined, the martial arts stories that Jeffrey Kinkley and Christopher Hamm have researched;　 they were also audiences of popular theaters, story-telling, radio commentaries, movies, operas, and amusement shows.[13]　 By the mid-1930s films, plays, songs, cartoons, paintings, woodblock prints, and other forms of visual images had all become vehicles of political expression and targets of censorship action.　

The expansion of this literate audience -- and the diversification of the textual medium of communication -- was accompanied, meanwhile, by the rise of public speech and the organization of propaganda campaigns for civic education.　 Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionary comrades of the 1890s were perhaps among the first ones to deliver rousing speeches as a way to mobilize followers.　 During the May Fourth Movement in 1919 student activists organized themselves into lecture corps to explain patriotism to the people on the street.　 This new emphasis on verbal communication, which departed from an old bureaucratic emphasis on the written text, went hand in hand with the political discovery of the power of the people.　 Banners, posters, flyers, handbills, flags and pamphlets all became ubiquitous in Republican political culture.　　 These changes pointed to the rise of an urban public on city streets and a media in a broad sense, both or which emerging cultural practices with profound institutional ramifications.

Socio-economically as well as institutionally, elite Chinese intellectuals saw their circumstances changing significantly in the first decades of the twentieth century.　 With the rise of the city and the emergence of the cultural industry, the educated gained in autonomy both with their enhanced access to the means of public communication and their relative financial independence from the Chinese state.　 The 1920s and '30s saw the formation of civic associations of all sorts.　 In the city of Shanghai alone no fewer than three thousand journals and magazines were in circulation on the eve of the War of Resistance in 1937.　　 As citizens of the Republic Chinese intellectuals spoke up on behalf of themselves as well as the people.　 Dissent became a mainstream activity and intellectual leadership often entailed a critical stance.　 Broadly speaking, each decade in the first half of the century confronted a unique set of issues and produced its high point of dissent.　 This record in turn underscored the institutionalized capacities and the discursive richness of intellectual dissent prior to the founding of New China.

Lu Xun and the Cultural Critique of Public Speech

　　　　　 Old-style dissent involved Confucian officials speaking out of order yet within the bounds of the imperial bureaucracy.　 A weakened ruler deserved to hear what his minor officials had to say.　 One way to shore up support, meanwhile, was precisely the inclusion of all the ones otherwise excluded to speak their minds.　　 Among their first demands, nineteen-century Chinese reformers had called for changes in the means of communication within the political system.　 The yan lu or the "path of words" simply must be broadened in order to permit the unobstructed flow of ideas and information up and down the corridors of power.　

But the Qing yan lu proved to be blocked in many ways.　　 Sun Yat-sen's lengthy memorial to Governor-General Li Hongzhang in 1884 was a call for the provincial authorities to open their minds to the newly emergent merchant elite in maritime trade.[14]　 Yet the document succeeded neither in changing views nor in stimulating discussions.　 Even as the court gravitated towards constitutional monarchy in the 1900s, imperial bureaucracy remained restrictive in its willingness to entertain different ideas.　

　　　　　 With the gentry-elite spearheading a constitutional movement, leading reformers turned their attention to issues of communication in a different direction.　 Intellectual leaders of the 1890s believed that a nation's wealth and power rested upon the virtue, intelligence and physical strength of its people.　 A new mission was born to transform imperial subjects into citizens of the nation.　 Inspired by what he had seen in Meiji Japan, Liang Qichao was among the first to elaborate upon how popular fiction and drama could serve as vehicles of civic instruction.　 A leader of the constitutional movement and a founder of several influential political journals, Liang Qichao single-handedly fashioned a new prose style that was noted for its capacity to stir as well as to move.　 His political commentaries freely borrowed concepts and phrases from foreign languages.　　 When Chen Duxiu and Hu Shih launched a campaign for vernacular literature in the pages of New Youth in 1917, their attack on the "eight-legged essay" in classical Chinese was in some sense but an extension of a movement that had begun with Liang.　　　

　　　　　 The May Fourth Movement in 1919-1920 witnessed a mushrooming of vernacular journals on school campuses all across the country.　 In the newspaper language of their day, student activists denounced the "darkness" and "feudalism" of Chinese social customs and called for the "awakening" of the reading public to the new light of a new era. In speaking the new social "truth," these progressive youth settled upon a literary voice that supposedly allowed them to communicate directly with the people on the street. The vernacular, in short, was the medium for intellectual awakening as well as for social communication. With their vernacular revolution, their journal publications, their liberation from the bureaucratic conventions of the past, and their access to new political ideas from the West, New Culture elite of the May Fourth Movement believed that they had come upon a vehicle that was at once public and transparent.　 The vernacular in print was not only a tool of intellectual self-emancipation; it was also an instrument for social liberation.

　　　　　 Against the euphoria in favor of this emerging cultural ideology, the writer Lu Xun spoke up against the seeming transparency of the new language and the pitfalls in the discursive field.　 He was skeptical, first of all, whether the vernacular would permit meaningful mass communication, let alone the communication of "truth."　 He was deeply suspicious, furthermore, both of the nature of public speech and the possibilities for open exchanges in the public arena.　

In his famous speech "Silent China," Lu Xun presented the picture of a public domain in which speech was the privilege of those with special access. [15]　 He noted that for decades there had been warfare, revolution, famine, and flood devastating many parts of China.　 The Chinese people were presumably suffering.　 Yet they had been remarkably silent about their feelings.　 Few had ever given voice, according to Lu Xun, to their joys or sorrow, sufferings or delight.　　 This was, first, because only a privileged minority among the educated had acquired the ability of self expression in writing, which had been made deliberately difficult by centuries of bureaucratic obfuscation of the Chinese language in its written form.　 Most common folks simply used the spoken form.　 But there were hundreds of spoken dialects in China, and people were simply isolated into mutually incommunicative communities.　 When they spoke, their plain expressions rarely went beyond the face-to-face interactions in their village.　　

But the deafening silence of China had an even deeper root.　 For centuries, the Chinese had lived under the harsh discipline of the censorship and punishment of their rulers.　 This condition had deprived them, over time, of their habit of speech.　 As a result of that, even when the Chinese of modern days have been shown the use of the vernacular that presumably emulated the spoken language, it remained a problem for people to find their own voice.　 To break the deep silence of China, Lu Xun suggested, it was imperative that the people recognize their subject position in public discourse and regain their power, as citizens of the nation, to speak.

The discursive domain -- the journals, newspapers, public addresses and lectures, etc. of the new era -- was also a politicized arena, according to Lu Xun.　 Expressions in the vernacular might have appeared direct and transparent. But the modern vernacular served as a vehicle for lies, distortions, half-truth and misinformation just as readily as it would of messages of value.　 The publishing industry, indeed, inevitably meant a separation between what an author might be preaching versus what the same person was practicing.　 Little could be true, in fact, in this very system of communication that produced the "public."　 A "revolutionary café," for instance, was a hotbed of radical ideas for revolutionary intellectuals who produced words that incited others to action.　 It was also a place where the authors themselves sipped coffee and enjoyed their book proceeds.[16]　 Similarly, a personal diary was presumably valuable because it recorded inner truth.　 But a published diary must never be accepted on those same terms, and this was because a diarist writing for a public could never be quite true to the self.　 Intrinsic in the process of publishing, in other words, was both the objectification of the author and the manipulation of the reader.　 Far from being an instrument of full communication, the print medium and the publishing industry functioned just as readily to conceal and distort the truth.[17]

Even if an author spoke nothing but the full truth, Lu Xun went on, there remained the problem with audience.　 No utterance guaranteed its own audience or reception.[18]　 A lone protestor might wish to raise his javelin to the sky and let out a cry.　 But this cry might have been met with total indifference.　　 Sheer opposition often would not crush a protestor's spirit.　 It was the deep silence from the unfathomable indifference that annihilated the significance of his endeavor.[19]　

Lu Xun's profound skepticism towards the vernacular stemmed, in the final analysis, from a deep distrust of public speech, especially when the development of such speech was driven by a search for influence or power.　　 The author of hundreds of zawen essays, he was a master of literary satire and subversion.　 He placed himself consistently on the sideline vis-à-vis the leaders of contemporary intellectual scene, and, with a profound and unrelenting suspicion, watched those who wielded their influence in the limelight.　　 He was no friend, as left-wing critics were delighted to note, of the Nationalist authorities of his day.　 Nor, as Leo Lee shows, was he much of a follower of the Communists and their agenda.[20]　 His powerful presence and strong views on literature sowed the seeds, according to Merle Goldman, of factional struggles and literary dissent in China in the 1950s. [21]　 Whether his pessimism derived ultimately from his perception of the human conditions of modernity, Lu Xun projected images of uprooted individuals in isolation.　 He was equally despairing of the possibility for meaningful communication.　 By the logic of Lu Xun's cultural criticism, the rise of the modern publishing industry and the means of mass communication simply enhanced the capacity for those in positions of power to distort and to deceive.

Hu Shih and the Quest for Constitutional Government

In the first decade of the Republic, a new generation of educated Chinese returned home from Europe and America.　 Unlike those who had picked up professional subjects in Japan, these were students who were drawn to the constitutional law and political philosophy in the Anglo-American system.　 Many of them achieved considerable scholarly reputation and held distinguished academic position.　 Although small in number, they spoke with a distinct voice and wielded intellectual influence disproportionate to their numbers.　

The most influential figure among them was undoubtedly the intellectual historian and philosopher Hu Shih.[22]　 While still a student at Columbia University in 1918, Hu Shih earned a large reputation with his call for literary revolution in the pages of the journal New Youth.　 Upon joining the faculty of Beijing University, Hu Shih emerged, in 1919, to become one of the leading spokesperson for the New Culture Movement.　 Hu Shih believed in the public role of a modern intellectual and consistently maintained an active interest in current events.　 To create a forum, Hu Shih and fellow intellectuals launched a series of periodicals from the early 1920s on.　 These journals -- Endeavor, Crescent Moon, Weekly Review and Independent Review -- were devoted to political commentaries in a broad sense.　 They argued -- whether during the turmoil of the warlord era, the heavy-handed suppression under the Nationalist government, or against the intensification of Japanese military presence in China -- in favor of principles of constitutional governance and rule of law.　 The tireless advocacy and fearless criticism of these intellectuals testified to their steadfast insistence on the freedom of speech.[23]

In April 1928, the new Nationalist government, which had just conducted a bloody purge of Communist supporters from its ranks, issued an order to protect human rights.　 An order aimed at local magnates, the new law threatened legal action against anyone outside the Nationalist government or Party who controlled the "body, freedom, and property" of anyone else.　 In response to the proclamation, Hu Shih published two sharply worded essays:　 “Constitution and Human Rights,” and “When May We have a Constitution?”　

Hu called the government’s proclamation on human rights "remarkable" and made three points.　 What did the Nationalists mean by the protection of the "body, freedom, and property" of the citizens, Hu asked, and what seemed to be the definition of these terms?　 The law banned "individuals" and "societies" from the infringement of such rights.　 Yet why did it exempt the government and the ruling Nationalist Party from the injunctions in this law?　 The law, thirdly, threatened the violators with "severe punishment” according to law."　 Yet what law was to apply in this case or was there such law in place?　 Contrary to the image of human rights protector that this law would lend, Hu Shih argued, the Nationalist Party and its government had departed from the teachings of Sun Yat-sen and were the principal violators of human rights in China.　 Hu Shih offered multiple examples of arbitrary punishment and arrests by the Nationalists to paint a picture of government invasion of civic rights.　 He warned that without constitutional guidelines, the Nationalists would be no more than a military dictatorship.　 Hu concluded his essay by urging the Nationalists to adopt a constitution and to place the power of the state under a basic law. [24]　　

Nationalist authorities reacted in ways that showed little tolerance for criticism.　 The propaganda department warned all newspapers not to print any of Hu Shih's essays or responses. Nationalist military authorities threatened to put Hu in jail.　 The Ministry of Education held up the certification application of China College, where Hu Shih was the president.　 Irate, Hu Shih mailed a full set of his journal to the deputy minister of education Chen Bulei.　 He demanded that the latter examine the materials himself instead of delegating such investigations to "some ignorant Party followers."　

Hu's colleagues at the journal, determined that they were not to be silenced, printed more articles on human rights.　 The Nationalists banned the distribution of the magazine and forced it out of existence.　 The authors then collected their essays and issued a volume on human rights.[25]　 The accreditation application for China College meanwhile continued to stall.　 Heated debates erupted on the college's board of directors over what to do.　 Hu Shih resigned from the presidency and left Shanghai for Beijing.　 But not even this departure was sufficient to restore the college to the good grace of the Nationalists.　 It was forced out of existence in 1932.　

From the mid-1920s onward, the Nationalist Party introduced measures that was to result in the "Partification" of education and culture.　　 A key element of this campaign was the indoctrination of students at all levels of schools, including colleges and universities, in aspects of Sun Yat-sen's social and political teachings as interpreted by Chiang Kai-shek's trusted Nationalist ideologue Dai Jitao.　 As part of this push to transform campus culture across the country, faculty and students were organized into groups to study these writings and to take part in public rituals that required bowing to the portraits of national leaders and saluting the national and Party flags.　 Students were required to pledge their allegiance to the Party and were issued uniforms to attend semi-military training.　　 The Ministry of Education, through a sleuth of accreditation and certification requirements, tightened up its control of the various aspects of institutional life by actively inserting itself into critical educational decisions.　 Ministry decisions ranged from the selection of textbooks, the establishment of curricular requirements, the hiring of faculty members, the certification of degrees, the determination of admissions quota and criteria, to the allocation of funding within each institution.　 Schools that failed to comply were punished with the de-recognition of the degrees that they had conferred and the banning of their graduates from government service -- measures of major economic consequences in the context of the Republican decades.[26]

Along with fellow academics and intellectuals, Hu Shih fought these measures of control and resisted the spread of the Party's influence into the intellectual arena.[27]　 He treated Sun Yat-sen's writings as yet another corpus of materials for close reading and critical analysis.　 He offered measured endorsement for Sun's vision of a Republic with a five-power constitution.　 He was however quick to denounce the Nationalist authorities for departing from Sun's intent.　 And he was furiously opposed to the Nationalist campaign to produce blind followers of the words of Sun Yat-sen.　 In a day and age when even the words of God could be called into question, Hu asked, on what ground did the Nationalists stand when the authorities insisted that words of Sun and its government should be placed beyond questioning?　　　

Instead of a Party-state with an all-powerful military leader, Hu insisted upon a civilian government in which all men, rational and thinking, stood equal before law.　 In the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the Nationalists moved towards a policy of accommodation with leaders of the intellectual community.　 Chiang Kai-shek summoned Hu Shih for personal meetings and showered attention upon him.　 Hu Shih made famous his advice to the generalisimo on that occasion by presenting to him a copy of Xunzi.　 Master Xunzi, Hu explained, produced disciples who became legalists rather than moralists, and laid the foundation of a philosophy that placed law before ethics.　 So long as it was a matter beyond the bounds of law, Hu believed, a responsible ruler must refrain not only from doing evil but also from doing good.　 It was the integrity of the law rather than the intention of the ruler that would ultimately guarantee the common good.　

Scholarly friends advised Hu Shih to spend more time on ancient texts rather than current events.　 Hu responded by quoting an ancient tale about a parrot.　 Once there was a parrot atop a mountain tree, the tale went.　 The branches afforded shelter and the forest his sustenance.　 The bird called the treetop his home.　 One day the forest caught fire.　 The bird rushed to the rescue by dipping its wings in the ocean and sprinkling　 drops of water over the mountain.　 To the parched bird the deity asked:　 Why do you not see the futility of this effort and why do you not desist?　 The bird replied:　 It is not that I do not see the futility.　 This mountain was once my homeland and I just cannot bear to see it burn.[28]　

"Even in ashes," wrote Hu Shih, "we remain Chinese.　 And our forest is burning."　 It was with the pathos of "burning forest" that Hu Shih, professor, journal editor, college president and foundation chairman, spoke up on public issues in the voice of a common citizen.

Zou Taofen and the Critique of Patriotism

In the 1930s, Japanese military stepped up pressure against the Chinese. Within the span of three years, large parts of north China came under Japanese control.　 The occupation of Manchuria in September 1931 cut off from the rest of the country a major source of raw materials and tax revenue.　 This was followed in the next year by the creation of an autonomy region in Inner Mongolia, and, after that, by the de-militarization, or the removal of Chinese troops from North China.[29]　 Beijing intellectuals and their students now found their campuses directly exposed to the enemy's line of fire. On more than one occasion, college students poured unto Beijing streets and demonstrated in favor of armed resistance against the approaching enemy.　 Their calls for patriotic mobilization and their criticism of the Nationalist government were heard nationally.　 Students in Shanghai, Tianjin, Xi'an, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and elsewhere also left their classrooms.　 Many boarded trains and headed towards the seat of the government in Nanjing.　 During the height of the December 9^th Movement in 1935 tens of thousands poured into the capital to submit petitions and to demand a reversal in government policy.[30]

But the Nationalist Military Council, under the chairmanship of Chiang Kai-shek, was gaining momentum in its military campaign against Chinese Communist forces, which in 1935 had just withdrawn to China's northwest.　 In response to student activism, the Ministry of Education, under the firm hand of Chen Lifu, stepped up its　 "Partification" measures in schools and imposed additional accreditation examinations.　 Political instructors on college campuses were placed in charge of military training for men and nursing classes for women.　 College administrations were encouraged to build programs in sciences and technology to help save the nation.　 Programs in liberal arts and legal studies were denied admissions quota as these studies were viewed as hotbeds of anti-government agitation.

But critical sentiments against the Nationalists had spilled unto the streets and could no longer be contained within college campuses.　　 Modern means of mass communication, journals and radios included, had spread words to a much larger sector of the population in cities and towns.　　 The use of pictorial images -- films, photographs, posters, cartoons, prints, and so forth -- had sent messages even to those who were not fluently literate, or had difficulty devoting time to news and books.　 Critics of the government found a receptive audience in the 1930s as the effects of economic recession took hold, and many in industries and commerce experienced hardship.　 Against this backdrop the editor Zou Taofen emerged as one of the most vigorous advocates of a national policy of resistance and patriotism.　

Zou Taofen's career as an editor began in the mid-1920s, upon his graduation from Shanghai's St. John's University.[31]　 He worked as an English secretary for Shanghai's Cotton Exchange and also for its Vocational Education Association.　 The Association, with the support of a group of Shanghai industrialists and education reformers, was the publisher of a weekly magazine for Shanghai's "vocational youth."　 The latter included shop clerks and apprentices in finance, commerce, and industry, who had attended middle schools and yet were unable to continue with their education.　 There were tens of thousands of these white-collar workers all over the city.　 They worked long hours, lived in dormitories or on shop floors, rented cheap fictions, and gambled if they could.　 The mission of the Association was to teach moral and to impart knowledge.　 The Association's well-intentioned yet humdrum and lackluster magazine preached in vain to a dwindling audience until Zou Taofen took over the editorship in 1926.　 In the next few years he turned the journal, Shenghuo, into one of the liveliest and most widely circulated publication in the city.

Zou Taofen's secret to success combined elements of content with that of style. The journal engaged in intimate discussions of personal life choices on matters ranging from romance, study, health, career, to money and family. It also developed an essay style that was simple, accessible, and straightforward.

Zou personally authored a majority of these articles, each of which a few hundred characters in length.　 He wrote for people with jobs to do and he saw them as reading on the run.　　 His essays convey simple messages with clarity.　 They mixed preaching with storytelling, the prescriptive with the dramatic or even the graphic.　 Shenghuo articles, furthermore, addressed issues of pragmatic utility.　 The journal sold volumes not just by telling people why they were discontented, but giving advice about how to find feasible remedies. It cajoled, aroused, entertained, and sympathized all at once, speaking in an avuncular voice that sent warnings as well as assurances, earning confidence while giving directions. A journal that sought to capture an audience on the move, Shenghuo came to its own when successfully capturing the chaotic dynamism of the commercial hub.　 Zou Taofen in that sense was among the very first to land upon a literary formula that permitted effective communication with a mass audience with short attention span and limited sophistication.　

The dissenting potential of Zou Taofen's enterprise was realized in the early 1930s, when, after the creation of the Manchukuo in 1931, he turned his publishing activities into crusades against the Japanese as well as the Nationalists.　 The war drove home a sense of doom among a population already struggling with the woes of recession.　 Left-wing journals gained popularity in the city, presenting images of flood, famine, rural bankruptcy, and displaced provincials.　 It was a widely accepted notion among treaty-port intellectuals, that the government of Chiang Kai-shek had not only ignored the founding doctrines of Sun Yat-sen but was also about to betray the interest of the Chinese people.　 In addition to essays, Shenghuo turned to the use of photographed images to help portray the humiliation of defeat and the incompetence of the Nationalist authorities.　 The journal's circulation hit a record high in the aftermath of the Battle of Shanghai in early 1932, selling more than 150,000 copies each issue.　　 It ran special editions on the war, with page after page of pictures accompanied by simple captions.　 It called for an end of power struggle and an immediate cease-fire between the government and its domestic rivals.　 It urged the creation of a broad and firm alliance in a war of resistance against the real enemy.　 Shenghuo was banned from further publication in the spring of 1932.　　 Zou Taofen's plan to launch a daily newspaper was also forced to cancel despite popular support.　 For nearly a whole year Zou was forced to travel away from China and tour around the world. Yet he launched new journals almost as soon as he returned to Shanghai and persisted in his critique throughout the rest of his career.

In 1934, in the aftermath of the pull-out of Chinese troops from the Beijing area, Zou and six other public figures organized a National Salvation Association in Shanghai.　 The "seven gentlemen" who led the association included lawyers, bankers, publishers, and educational reformers. The Association called upon the support of white-collar employees working in the city's financial, professional, and commercial sectors.　 These employees formed vocational associations by firms and by trade.　 They built social networks through the organization of cultural activities ranging from song festivals, drama groups, literacy classes, night schools, to reading clubs and correspondence societies. They staged street rallies and held public gatherings.　 Some of these song festivals, held at sports stadium and featuring songs of patriotism, drew a crowd of tens of thousands of people.　 Pamphlets and bi-weeklies were widely distributed calling for war and national salvation.　 Plays were written satirizing Chinese officials bending to the will of foreign powers.　

Zou and his colleagues led the Association under the banner of two slogans: the "emancipation of the Chinese people" from Japanese and all colonial powers, and "the democratic reconstruction of Chinese polity" against all dictatorial regimes including the Nationalists.　 During the December 9^th Movement of 1935 the National Salvation Association was at the center of the mass demonstrations in Shanghai calling for the Nationalists to reform and to reverse policies. Zou and his colleagues represented themselves as the "voice of the people" and showed a growing empathy with the Chinese Communist movement.　　 Nationalist authorities banned the activities of the Association, placed all seven leaders under arrest, put them on trial, and sentenced them all to jail.　 It was not until after the Xi'an Incident in December 1936, when the Nationalist government, under pressure, reversed its policies on war, that the Seven Gentlemen were allowed to go free.　　 The civic associations that they had fostered, with all their institutionalized cultural activities, meanwhile became strongholds for left-wing patriotic mobilization once the war broke out.

Wu Han and the Use of History

With the outbreak of the War of Resistance in the summer of 1937, significant changes took place in Chinese intellectual arena. That September returning students of Beijing's leading public universities were asked to report to temporary campus locations in Changsha.　 Military developments soon made it necessary that the universities relocate even further into China’s southwest.　 After a few more moves, a group of college seniors, predominantly male and escorted by a dozen or so faculty members, embarked upon a thousand-mile journey on foot that took them, after three months, to Kunming.[32]　 Displaced and isolated, these intellectuals found themselves dependent upon the state for support.　 The Ministry of Education issued clothing and shoes in addition to stipends. Tuition was free as was room and board.　 Still, as the war dragged on, rampant inflation eroded income and crippled the economy.　 To make ends meet, Chen Yinke, Qinghua's most distinguished historian and classicist, sold whole collections of books and reference works in exchange of hard currency.　 Wen Yiduo, a poet and literary scholar, took orders cutting seals to support his large family. Others resorted to what impoverished scholars traditionally did, selling calligraphy and looking for editorial assignments. Economic hardship spelled the end of urban civic associations if not also the pursuit of scholarship.

Censorship control intensified meanwhile as the state now had at its disposal one of the largest military intelligence apparatus that had ever been built in China's long history.[33]　 The special service was created to fight the Japanese yet the machinery was just as often turned towards internal surveillance.　 Almost as soon as the war broke out, meanwhile, long lists of goods came under the control of special economic agencies armed with new regulations and laws.　 The supply of paper, for instance, became a matter of rationing.　 Travel, telecommunication, transportation and postal service were matters that drew attention from the secret service.　 The growing power of the military and the rise of the bureaucracy in the everyday life of the ordinary people afforded many opportunities for abuse as well as corruption.

A group of historians turned their scholarship into biting criticisms of the circumstances of their time. The leading figure among them was the Qinghua historian Wu Han.　 A specialist of Ming (1368-1644) dynastic history, Wu Han's work of this period included a biography of the dynasty's founder Zhu Yuanzhang.[34]　 Wu depicted the Ming founder as an autocrat who built a reign of terror through the spying of his subjects, the torture and imprisonment of college students, the execution of able ministers, and the suppression of the freedom of public speech.　 In Wu's judgment the first emperor of Ming had put in place one of the most repressive regimes in Chinese history.　 It was only natural, as depicted in the late Ming fiction Jingpingmei, that the dynasty should preside, at the height of its material affluence, over a society rotten to the core.　 It was a matter of time that the regime would crumble.[35]

Wu Han delved into historical materials not only for scholarly essays but also for the zawen, commentaries on current events that covered a whole range of miscellaneous topics. Was there tyranny in China's past, he asked rhetorically?　 The tyrants and despots of the past were far more constrained, he concluded, than the ones of the present, for the former empowered censors and controlled themselves.　　 How did dynastic rulers cope with issues of official corruption?　 During the Song, by paying its officials well thus buying their integrity; during the Ming, by swift and cruel punishment thus intimidating them into integrity.　 But neither approach produced long-lasting effects over time, and corrupt officials inevitably brought down dynasties.　 Dynastic rulers, in short, heeded the voice of their critics and curbed the abuse of power. It was modern rulers who had broken all rules of decency.

Wu Han and his colleagues believed that given time, all truth would come out on its own accord, and that the judgment of the "people" contained no error.　 Power-holders might succeed in silencing the voice of the people in the short run. But there was no escape from the judgment of history.　 If any further proof was necessary, the sort of work that he produced -- the kind of historical judgment he passed -- attested to the rising voice of the people in history.

With his twin emphases on "history" and the "people," Wu Han established his reputation as a leading progressive intellectual of the 1940s.　 A notable figure in the democratic league, he also offered his sympathy to the Chinese Communist movement.　 More than anyone else among his contemporaries, Wu Han pioneered the technique of "shadowy history" (yingshe lishi), i.e. the use of historical parallels to deliver a critical point on current events.　　 A strategy devised to circumvent obstacles in an environment in which government censorship suppressed the open expression of dissenting views, "shadowy history" amounted to an encoded language that depended upon the participation of an initiated audience to infer and to interpret in order to decode the message.　 The discrepancy between the surface and the hidden texts opened up an interpretive space.　 This enabled the authors not only to elude the censors but also to ridicule the presumably literal-minded authorities.　　 The text, in other words, functioned as a vehicle of dissent not for what had been stated in the open but for the interpretive readings that it elicited -- readings that took place surreptitiously as well as subversively.　

Wu Han escaped the fate of other critics of the Nationalist regime -- Li Gongpu and Wen Yiduo, for example, who were gunned down in 1946 by the bullets of military intelligence agents.　　 After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, he accepted an appointment as a deputy mayor of Beijing and continued with his writings on history.　 In the late 1950s Mao Zedong mounted a massive campaign to collectivize Chinese agriculture and to induce a Great Leap Forward in production.　 Mao's measures, thanks to inexplicable factional struggles and bureaucratic contortion, led to an economic disaster and one of the most severe famine in recorded human history.[36]　 Wu Han published a series of articles on Hai Rui, a minor official in the late Ming who fought his bureaucratic superiors and gave up his career to protect the lawful rights of the people.　 In 1961 Wu Han finished a play, "Hai Rui's Dismissal from Office."[37]　 It dramatized the official's popularity with the people.　 It also ended on a high note celebrating Hai Rui's audacious confrontation with the emperor.　 The first performance of the play, by leading Peking opera performers, drew praise from no less a figure than Mao Zedong himself.　

Yet for Wu Han in the 1960s, the interpretive space that had once existed between the surface and the hidden structures of the text, between the writing in the open and the reading practice in private, had now been compressed under the new regime.　 Mao chose to read the play as a veiled attack on himself, the "emperor," and a show of sympathy for the disgraced Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai who had confronted him at a party conference held on Lushan.　 The play, so it went, projected Peng as a modern "Hai Rui" pleading for the people and against the policies of the Leap.[38]　 Mao's reading of the play's subversive intent, far from being a secret shared in private among the initiated, became the declared line of interpretation in the Party's political press.　 Wu Han soon found himself a target of concerted attack in print. Denunciations of Wu served to launch intensive campaigns against the intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Communist Literary System and Dissenting Practice

Chinese intellectuals continued to "advise and dissent" throughout the course of the 20^th century.[39]　 The founding of the People's Republic in 1949, however, marked the rise to power of a Party-state under a self-proclaimed philosopher/historian Mao Zedong.[40]　 State management of "differences within the people" entered a new era and the ramifications proved to be broad and profound.[41]　

Institutionally, printing and publishing industries underwent socialization in the 1950s.　　 The reorganization brought to an end commercial publishing that had responded to audience responses and market signals.　 Printing and publishing, furthermore, were subjected to intensified Party censorship and state control that spelled the end of a free press.　 Writers, artists, journalists, and intellectuals found themselves drawing a fixed income either as members of national associations or as employees in individual "work units."　　　　 Although efforts had been made in the 1940s by the Nationalist Ministry of Education as well as by progressive intellectuals to form rival camps of Chinese historical associations, it was not until 1952 that the very first national Chinese Historical Association was successfully organized under the auspices of the new state.　 The "bureaucratization" of writing and publishing that ensued amounted to a socialization of literary, artistic and scholarly production under Party supervision.[42]　

The 1950s witnessed, in addition, a series of reeducation campaigns in higher education that were aimed to convert established intellectuals to the official Marxism-Leninism of the Chinese Communist Party and the literary and artistic doctrines of chairman Mao.　　 The endeavor to reeducate was punctuated by campaigns of outright assault, including a major attack on a group of writers and literary theorists -- Hu Feng, Feng Xuefeng, and Lu Ling -- whose eminence and left-wing sympathy dated back to the 1930s and '40s.　 Merle Goldman suggested that the Party's ability to mount ideological campaigns was much aided by factional discord within the ranks of the intellectuals; that dissent was closely connected with discord that stemmed in turn from pre-Communist personal differences in social connections, educational background, cultural styles, and political patronage. [43]　 But Hu Feng's literary dissent and Lu Ling's literary production were no mere perpetuation of age-old Confucian practices, according to Kirk Denton.　 Nor were they simply by-products of old-fashioned factional struggles. These authors' offending texts revealed the profound influence of Western literary theories in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement.　　 Along with institutional changes in Chinese intellectual lives there were, in short, also significant shifts in the intellectual resources available for dissenting discourse.　 For the purpose of this discussion we note the following two points.

　 There was, first, a subtle but important shift in the dynamics of compliance and dissent between individuals and the state.　 Roughly speaking, dissent was not just a matter of individuals making explicit his or her difference in political opinion.　 It included, in addition, a failure to comply.　 In campaigns of thought reform or cultural criticisms, silence or inactivity carried dissenting connotations, because passivity implied a lack of total commitment to the uncompromising truth.　　 As Mao himself had quite famously made clear, at any given point in time there was but one correct reading of the primary and secondary contradictions relevant to the historical missions at hand.[44]　 There was no gray zone, nor middle ground, between right and wrong.　　 Dissent was tantamount to deviance and rectification was the only appropriate remedy.

While Lu Xun had seen ignorance in the silence of "silent China," Communist political culture under Mao suspected in silence a distancing intent from the line of the masses.　　　 Some of this has to do with the rise of the Party-state, under the Nationalists as well as the Communists, and the development of a new political culture in which citizenship obligations entailed public pronouncement of one's political allegiance for the consumption of a targeted audience.　 Decades of revolutionary mobilization yielded a proliferation of slogans, banners, marches, rallies, speeches and public statements.　 By the mid-century Chinese citizenship eventually became a matter of self-declaration (biaotai) for the notation by the authorities in charge.

In a socialist democracy that stressed the representation of the people over their participation, furthermore, it was imperative that the represented periodically perform their consent to that representation. Mass political culture of incessant campaigns of education and mobilization led to a saturation of the "politically correct" language and gestures among the people.　　 Recent research has shown, that the "Speak Bitterness" campaigns of the 1950s had profoundly altered not only the way Chinese peasants told stories about themselves, but also the way they had organized their personal memory.[45]　 Kevin O'Brien, in his study of Chinese village elections in the 1990s, similarly found that Chinese villagers had become so fluent in the official language of the Party-state, that they were even able to bend it to their own purpose when permitted by circumstances. [46]　 Through campaigns and education, the new regime introduced a new political language and placed the relationship between the individual and the state on a new footing.　 This is not to suggest, to be sure, that there was no room for freedom or withdrawal even at the height of Mao's Cultural Revolution.　 Elizabeth Perry's research shows that many had in fact removed themselves from the campaign struggles and opted for xiaoyao rather than choosing sides between the warring factions.　 It was nonetheless a form of escape that "Mao's children" should withdraw from full participation in this new culture.　 Those who kept their silence ran the risk of being understood by the authorities for what they had resisted to embrace.

A second point of departure had to do with the disappearance of the wilderness and, with that, the collapsing of realms of power and meaning into one, resulting, paradoxically, in the corruption and subversion of both.　 When the writer Zhang Xianliang lived his life in 1969 as a "sent-down youth" among the sheep and the horses at the foot of the mountains in the northwestern Chinese region of Ningxia, he found no escape from the reach of the state in this barren area.　 With the combined use of print, media, statistics, and other technologies of control, the state was able to project its presence far and wide into the remote and the unreachable in the old days under the emperors.　　　　

The "wilderness," more importantly, had ceased to be an alternative site of value or integrity.　 In the 1930s and '40s, the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was able to permit himself, in the heat of a political struggle, the grand gesture of "going into wilderness" (xiaye) withdrawing to his countryside home. Chiang's Communist successors, by contrast, could only be "sent down" (xiafang) regardless of their choices.　 For political underdogs, the ye had disappeared in post-1949 China as a separate domain that gave them sustenance.　 The "out" had been tamed to become merely the "low" or "base" -- the "base stratum" (jiceng) and lower echelon under the leadership at the center.

Where it was "low" or "base," vital dimensions of human existence were also reduced to numeral representations.　 With collectivization, villagers became quantifiable "labor force" and counted up along with food rations, cloth coupons, cropping schedules, grain output, and so forth.　 These were indexed, in turn, to credited work points, allotted space, released hours, and permitted visits that added up, not insignificantly, to life prospects.　 Individuals were counted up in this process and appeared in government representations as constituent units in statistical categories and documented records.　 Thanks to the integrated use of print, statistics, and technology,[47] banishment from the center entailed no lateral movement to the wilderness of integrity.　　 As the center was not only the organizational locus of power but also the font of political truth, neither yin nor yi, which for centuries had sustained Daoist hermits and Confucian dissidents, was a viable option in the People's Republic.　 Despite valiant efforts by some to discover in this state of existence a post-modern aestheticism of meaninglessness or absurdity, the sent-down in the second half of the 20^th century had been banished to a backwater of insularity.　　

Zhang Xianliang pities, meanwhile, the hapless GMD spy who sought to cover his tracks by disappearing into this tight-knit system of numerical grid.　　 Anyone who sought disguise in the crowd was surely to be detected, as the bright vision of the masses permitted no deception.　 Despite the vastness of the wilderness in a place like Ningxia in the 1960s, the system rarely made it possible for a non-conformer to find either solace or invisibility.　

Conclusion

From Lu Xun's dark skepticism to Hu Shih's measured reasoning, Zou Taofen's impassioned plea to Wu Han's submerged anger, there was a rich and vibrant tradition of political criticism in the first half of China's 20^th century.　 Against the backdrop of profound institutional and ideological changes, intellectuals from a broad spectrum of political opinion spoke up on matters of public concern.　 Their criticisms covered a whole range of issues from culture, language, social justice, state policies, to national polity.　 Their critical voice persisted despite the intensification of the state's power to control.

Those who spoke up under the Nationalists often found themselves targets of violence or suppression.　　 Some were jailed and others lost their lives.　 But the power of intellectuals in modern Chinese society was not to be underestimated after all.　　 Republican intellectuals played a crucial role setting the tone of public discussion.　 The disaffection of progressive intellectuals, Zou Taofen and Wu Han included, corroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist Government and contributed to its ultimate downfall in 1949.[48]

Through the modern publishing industry, the press, and academic institutions, Republican Chinese intellectuals maintained the elite standing of their Confucian predecessors and found new ways to turn their words into power.　 After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, institutional and ideological changes continued to transform the conditions under which Chinese intellectuals worked.　 The bureaucratization of culture and the "work unit" system put in place an intricate set of relationships that bound the intellectuals, their selves as well as their families, to the new state.　 When de-collectivization occurred in the 1980s, the creation of the "velvet prison" underscored the centrality of the intellectuals to the socialist political system that had functioned both to empower and to define their limits as "cultural workers."　　　

In the early decades of the People's Republic, critique and criticisms became central features in intellectual lives.　 Post-1949 criticisms followed Party lines rather than dissident conscience.　 No longer a loner's javelin pointed to the sky or a muted cry drowned in the silence of wilderness, these critiques, institutionalized either in the Party press or political rituals, became inextricable components of political campaigns of far-reaching ramifications.

It was both a paradox and an irony, that public criticisms, which early 20^th-century intellectuals had mounted against political authorities, should have become, half a century later, tools in the hands of the authorities against the intellectuals.　 The May Fourth generation, in launching the vernacular revolution, had invested much hope in a new language that, by giving voice to the voiceless, promised to unleash the power of the people.　 In those heady days of youthful optimism, few seemed to heed Lu Xun's dark warnings that it was a potent formula of unpredictable consequences if words were to become power and vice versa.　 The power of the institutionalized "voice of the People," indeed, was only for those who had lived through Mao's campaigns to know.

Early Republican streets of Beijing, David Strand notes, constituted not only a space for the city's rickshaw pullers and their feuds; they were also a domain for the policemen walking their beat, contesting the elements on the street and demanding conformity to lawful conduct.[49] Since the early decades of the Republican period there had been a proliferation of urban cultural institutions in major Chinese cities.　 This proliferation expanded the urban civic space for intellectual criticisms.　 It also enhanced the capacity of the emerging Party-state to propagate its doctrines and to demand conformity to its ideology.　 The history of dissenting practice suggests, however, that it was the state and not the people nor the market force that ultimately succeeded in dictating the terms of utterance and communication in the public domain.　　 A mere proliferation of urban cultural institutions, despite the civic origins and associative nature, thus gave us but part of the story. It was the contest between the state machinery and the civic organizations, discursively as well as institutionally, that defined the nature of cultured life in Republican China.

NOTES