ABSTRACT
Until the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4, 1989, the position of Chinese intellectuals had improved considerably since the Mao years. In China there are about 6 million high-level intellectuals, defined as those with university degrees or some university education. Although these intellectuals form a proportionately small group, the Deng regime regards them as the key to China's modernization. True, in sharp contrast to Mao Zedong's hostility toward the intellectuals after mid-1957, Deng Xiaoping and other reform leaders encouraged the intellectuals to participate in policymaking. The Deng regime continued Mao's contradictory approach toward the intellectuals: On the one hand, it wanted them to be productive and creative in their professions in order to modernize China. On the other, it set limits on their ideas and indoctrinated them in the party line, whatever it was at any given time. Although political control of high literary culture continued, the Deng regime showed greater restraint than Mao in coercing the whole literary profession.
