Min Jian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals

Abstract

In China, the shock of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Massacre abruptly terminated a post-Mao decade of rapid socioeconomic change and halting political liberalization. Deng Xiaoping and old-guard communist leaders decisively rebuffed young and old reform-minded intellectuals who were devoted to the imperial tradition of loyal literati remonstrating with rulers to effect urgently needed changes. This deeply researched and consistently thought-provoking study explores a new turn that Chinese intellectual life took after this debacle. The heterogeneous individuals and groups that Veg subsumes under the deliberately loose-fitting and protean label of min jian (popular, grassroots) intellectuals significantly expanded discursive ground in the 1990s and early 2000s. Whether as freelance writers, independent filmmakers, unofficial and amateur historians, rights lawyers, or journalists and bloggers, their work was facilitated by the internet, the rise of social media, and the availability of new technology (notably, digital video recorders) as well as their own new approaches to addressing persistent social problems.What most of the min jian intellectuals, including many women, had in common was financial independence or, at least, a disdain for material goods in China's increasingly consumerist society. They were impatient with abstract philosophical principles and dogmatism of any kind. Rejecting Marxist class analysis, they were committed to investigating, publicizing, and expediting social change for China's vast number of disadvantaged, exploited, and despised rural dwellers, urban migrants, religious worshippers, vagrants, and sex workers—in short, the lowest rungs of a hierarchical and vastly unequal society dominated by a bureaucratic official caste and nouveaux riches entrepreneurs. Locating themselves between the state and the market economy, the min jian intellectuals focused on concrete problems that individuals were confronting. For example, rights lawyers (weiquan) were bent on helping rural petitioners—dispossessed by avaricious local officials and interred in “black prisons” (invisible and unofficial places of confinement) before being returned home without a proper hearing—to seek justice in Beijing. Unofficial historians gathered the stories of surviving victims of the anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and the Great Famine of 1959 – 61, most of whose victims were not elite intellectuals but ordinary people crushed by a punitive state. Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, a monumental history of the Great Famine, is one of many books on these disasters that Veg discusses. Independent filmmakers chronicled marginal persons and, in some cases, armed them with digital video recorders to empower them and chronicle their own lives. Whatever the medium of expression, min jian intellectuals provided a counterpoint to the ingrained Chinese tradition of official history and the centrally controlled state monopoly of the media.What is most evident from Veg's copiously footnoted discussion is the vitality, pluralism, and spirited contention among all the different varieties of min jian intellectuals. They did not form a school of thought, nor did they seek consensus. They embodied the free spirit of unfettered inquiry, grounded for many of them in identification with elements of society that Dostoevsky called “the insulted and the injured” in his 1861 novel of that title. Although they were not overtly political and did not pose a frontal threat to the state system but rather worked within its confines to ameliorate its worst features, they were barely tolerated in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the second decade of our century, they were subjected to the intensifying repression that characterizes the reign of Xi Jinping, supreme leader of the Chinese Communist Party. But the spirit that animated the grassroots intellectuals is unlikely to be extirpated and may reemerge, in perhaps different forms, at some time in the future.