In the West, when we think of Chinese intellectuals, the figures that come to mind are dissidents and democrats, activists and idealists. Often, the ones on our radar are those who have been imprisoned or persecuted for their ideas and beliefs. This includes individuals like Ai Weiwei a popular artist and social critic under house arrest; Xu Zhiyong an intellectual sentenced to four years in prison because of his work on the Open Constitution project; and Liu Xiaobo, the intellectual and Nobel Peace Prize recipient imprisoned for his work on Charter 08. The problem, Professor Timothy Cheek, Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research and Director, Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia, declared during his January 23, 2015 lecture at the Asian Institute, is that this focus on dissidents and activists leads us to overlook the important contributions of the Chinese intellectual sphere as a whole.
Yet this was only the first of Professor Cheek’s “three Ps”; he also presented the attendees with a plan and a product. The plan, Professor Cheek explained, was to employ a framework of three tools to organize Chinese intellectual history: ideological moments, worlds of intellectual life, and enduring ideas.
Professor Cheek subdivided Chinese intellectual history from 1895-2015 into six ideological moments, each of which is organized around a central guiding challenge or question. Each ideological moment also embodies a certain orientation of that time, such as reform or revolution. As the ideological moment changes, so does the idea of what is necessary and what it means for intellectuals to serve the people.
These ideas also shift across different worlds of intellectual life, Professor Cheek’s second tool to analyze modern Chinese intellectual history. Worlds of intellectual life feature intellectuals engaging in four varieties of public participation: ordering society, educating society (or propagandizing), criticizing society, and mobilizing society.
The third and final tool in this re-conceptualization of modern Chinese intellectual history is the role of enduring ideas, the set of concerns and themes that permeate the boundaries between ideological moments. Professor Cheek’s analysis explores three of these enduring ideas, namely the role of the people, the meaning of “Chinese”, and how to make democracy work.
Ultimately, employing what he describes as Mao-inspired homiletics, Professor Cheek announced that the product of his analysis amounted to six ideological moments, three public spheres, two classes, and one world. This product is meant to represent a reevaluation of modern Chinese intellectual history with refreshed eyes. By stripping away familiar and comfortable narratives, such as the rise of communism and the struggle for democracy, Professor Cheek’s tools of analysis have enabled him to reveal new patterns and themes that may have otherwise been difficult to detect.
He notes, however, that these categories and subcategories are not separated by clean dividing lines. Intellectual moments may bleed into one another, discussions of enduring ideas may overlap and so on. This should not detract from the overall value of the analysis, however; as Professor Cheek warns, it is wise to “fear beautiful models” because they so rarely map perfectly onto reality.
The big lesson to emerge from this exercise in historical re-conceptualization is that, while the ideals entrenched in the Chinese intellectual sphere may differ across ideological moments, the drive and intellectual idealism embodied by these individuals remains. This lesson, and the entire analysis that leads to it, will be expanded upon in detail in Professor Cheek’s forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, titled The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History.
-written by Fatin Tawfig, a third year student double majoring in psychology and political science at the University of Toronto.
This article is part of a series of articles written by undergraduate students affiliated with the Asian Institute about events hosted by the Asian Institute.
