ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interaction between the intellectual community and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime in the period from 1986 to the present. The social status of intellectuals is prescribed by the CCP as the lowest in its political strata. The material rewards of intellectuals are legally reduced to a level lower than that of the workers. In the academic community and literary circles, some intellectuals hope to further the liberalization of human thought. On January 17, the CCP authorities publicized seven points used to censure Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the CCP, for the proliferation of bourgeois liberal thought among the intellectual community, particularly in 1986. During most of 1986, the CCP encouraged intellectuals to freely express their ideas on the economic reform program. The CCP sponsored an anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign to correct deviant individual cases within the intellectual community.
