6 - Jiang Zemin's rise to power

Summary

The Introduction addressed the issue of the state and intellectuals in broad terms; we are now in a position to consider the issue more specifically. As we saw in the first two chapters, elite politics in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen was an inside game. This was a period in which a relatively small number of political elites sharply contested the basic issues of the day: the definition (in terms of policy) of reform and opening up, and the relative balance of power between Deng Xiaoping and like-minded reformers on the one hand and Chen Yun and ideological and economic conservatives on the other. Intellectuals had an extremely limited role in this period. Economists could and did advise the government to “increase the weight of reform,” but a fundamental re-evaluation of the importance of the market economy had to wait for Deng Xiaoping's trip to the south in 1992 and the subsequent convocation of the Fourteenth Party Congress.

If intellectuals were excluded from meaningful political participation in this period, they nevertheless began a painful process of re-evaluating the course of reform, what had led to the tragedy of Tiananmen, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary China. As a result, a very different intellectual atmosphere began to emerge in the 1990s. This new intellectual discourse was largely independent of politics, a genuinely societal discourse.