Prof. Potter examines the implications of the Charter 08 manifesto issued by leading Chinese intellectuals. The Communist Party is faced with a challenge that, in time, offers it a way around the governance roadblocks that threaten China’s further development.

Intellectual elites have been the collective agents responsible for many democratic transitions worldwide since the early twentieth century. Intellectuals, however, have also been blamed for the evils in modern times. Instead of engaging in abstract debates about who the intellectuals are and what they do, this project studies intellectuals and their ideas within historical contexts. More specifically, it examines the social forces behind the evolving political attitudes of Chinese intellectuals from the late 1970s to the present. Chinese politics has received an enormous amount of attention from social scientists, but intellectuals have been much less explored systematically in social sciences, despite their significant role in China’s political life. Chinese intellectuals have been more fully investigated in the humanities, but existing research either treats different “school of thought” as given, or gives insufficient attention to the division among the intellectuals. It should also be noted that many studies explicitly take sides by engaging in polemics. To date, little work has thoroughly addressed the diversity and evolution, let alone origins, of political ideas in post-Mao China. As a result, scholars unfamiliar with Chinese politics are often confused about the labels in the Chinese intelligentsia, such as the association of nationalism with the Left and human rights with the Right. More important, without considering how the ideas took shape, we would not adequately understand the political trajectory of communist China, where elite politics and local policies have been profoundly shaped by intellectual debates. This dissertation takes a relational approach to the intellectual debates in contemporary China by analyzing the formation of political ideas and crystallization of intellectual positions. It asks two questions: who are the Chinese liberals, and how were their distinctive bundles of political views formed? Drawing on 67 semi-structured interviews with Chinese intellectual elites across the ideological spectrum, as well as detailed historical and textual analyses, this dissertation examines the social forces that have shaped the political attitudes of liberal intellectuals in contemporary China. It argues against the prevailing attempts to define Chinese liberalism as a social category with a coherent ideology comparable to its Western counterpart; rather, as a community of discourse that contains a number of competing and contradictory discourses, it is embedded in China’s social reality as an authoritarian regime governed by a communist party, and contingent on China’s history straddling the Maoist and post-Mao eras. Rather than a monolithic or tight-knit group, Chinese liberals are comprised of an array of social actors, including scholars, journalists, lawyers, activists, and house church leaders. They are liberal not because of what they are for, but because of what they are against; more specifically, Chinese liberals are united by an anti-authoritarian mentality, which is a historical product of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. In addition to biographical factors, the views of Chinese liberals have been shaped by structural factors represented by the neoliberal reforms and the rise and growth of the intellectual field since the 1990s, as well as interactive factors manifested by the polar opposition between the liberals and the New Leftists. On the one hand, as state-driven capitalism unleashed China’s economic potential, China was well on its way to becoming a major player in the international community toward the end of the 1990s; on the other hand, the fusion of the free market and political power led to rampant corruption and social injustice. How to make sense of China’s crony capitalism became an important dividing line between the New Left and liberalism. As the intellectual debates were increasingly cast as part of global cultural production, how to appropriate Western thinkers and concepts became a site of contestation. While the dramatic expansion of higher education led to the growth of the intellectual field with its own logic and rules, in which both liberals and New Left intellectuals were struggling for symbolic power, the penetration of the political field remained, not only in terms of visible incentives and punishments, but also in terms of its subtle influence on the manner of problem construction and debate. Through combative interactions, the liberals and the New Leftists have defined themselves by reference to each other. In the process of binary opposition, the views of both sides have moved further and further apart with little overlap. This dissertation contributes to political sociology and the sociology of knowledge in three ways. First, departing from the conventional approach that takes political orientations for granted, it takes a relational approach by analyzing the dynamic processes of ideological formation and polarization. Second, it traces the process of ideological alignment and differentiation on three levels: structural, interactive, and biographical. Third, while it has been observed that intellectual elites have been the collective agents responsible for many democratic transitions worldwide since the early twentieth century, the internal division of the intellectuals has received much less attention. My work addresses this issue by analyzing how the Chinese intelligentsia has structuralized into binary opposition since the Tiananmen Square protests. In particular, I treat political ideas as historical contingencies, rather than fixed properties, that are internally shaped by “fractal distinctions.”

The dissertation studies the fictional journey of Zhang Xianliang from the viewpoint of political unconscious. Zhang has been under different kinds of labour reform and re-education in mainland China for twenty-two years. The experience is too painful to recall, yet too feared to be forgotten. The repressed trauma of Zhang is therefore displaced and disguised in the fictional language of reform, remembrance, love, sex and death. Each language fulfils one layer of Zhang's hidden wishes. Yet the desiring chain moves on with new forms of substitutions until death. The study investigates his unconscious psyche from the Historical subtexts of conflicting impulses between body and mind, self and Other, individual and socialist Ideological State Apparatuses, and the residual, dominant and emerging modes of production.

This thesis explores three aspects of the relationship between U.S. news media and the Chinese pro-democracy movement in 1989. These three aspects are: How much attention did u.s. newspapers give to the Chinese pro-democracy movement in 1989? How did u.s. newspapers portray the power struggle in the Chinese government during the time when the Chinese pro-democracy movement took place? Has there been any change in the image of China during and after the Chinese pro-democracy movement in 1989? Research data are drawn from the following three U.S. newspapers: The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Content analysis is adopted as the research method in this study. This research method is carried out in three parts targeting the three research questions mentioned above. The first part shows the total front-page space and number of news stories in the three u.s. newspapers. The front-page space and number of news stories in each newspaper is utilized to measure the degree of attention that each newspaper gave to the Chinese pro-democracy movement in 1989. The second part illustrates the power struggle in the Chinese government. Top Chinese officials are presented as either losing or gaining power based on the treatment they received from the three u.s. newspapers. The third part demonstrates the change in the image of China during and after the Chinese pro-democracy movement in 1989. Both positive and negative changes in the image of China are determined by the use of ideological and non-ideological symbolic representations of China in news stories. Research findings on the first research question show that both front-page space and number of news stories related to events in China increased dramatically in all three u.s. newspapers. Research findings on the power struggle in the Chinese government showed that, in general, all three u.s. newspapers viewed the three top Chinese officials as losing power before military troops were used to control the situation in Beijing on June 4, 1989. Finally, research findings showed a negative change in the image of China during and the Chinese pro-democracy movement, especially after the Chinese government regained control of Tiananmen Square by using military force on June 4, 1989. Implications for future research in mass communication are discussed and, finally, the thesis concludes with suggestions for further research in mass media and communication.

This thesis explores one particular facet of contemporary state-society relationship in China, i.e. state-student relationship. By arguing against the popular observation that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retreated from Chinese universities as a way of winning students’ support, this thesis claims that the party-state has adopted a “bird cage” strategy in post-Tiananmen university governance. That is to say, the party-state has not only re-established and strengthened its control institutions in universities, but at same time expanded its zone of tolerance and created new outlets for students’ political enthusiasm and participation. A four-city, seven-university field survey was conducted, the result of which supports the view that the CCP’s post-Tiananmen governance strategy has been effective. Respondents agree that party’s governing institutions are resilient and play important roles in students’ life. They also seem to be in agreement with, at least as the survey results indicate, important political ideas promoted by the party-state.

This thesis explores one particular facet of contemporary state-society relationship in China, i.e. state-student relationship. By arguing against the popular observation that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retreated from Chinese universities as a way of winning students’ support, this thesis claims that the party-state has adopted a “bird cage” strategy in post-Tiananmen university governance. That is to say, the party-state has not only re-established and strengthened its control institutions in universities, but at same time expanded its zone of tolerance and created new outlets for students’ political enthusiasm and participation. A four-city, seven-university field survey was conducted, the result of which supports the view that the CCP’s post-Tiananmen governance strategy has been effective. Respondents agree that party’s governing institutions are resilient and play important roles in students’ life. They also seem to be in agreement with, at least as the survey results indicate, important political ideas promoted by the party-state.

Chinese media control has been repressive, systematic, and successful. This thesis explores how it has been achieved in Post-Tiananmen China. Many outstanding scholars and authors of Chinese media politics assert that such a Chinese media control has been attained by the Party censorship system. Though this was the case before the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and during the suppressive period from June 1989 to January 1992, I argue that the major part of Chinese media control since 1992 has been accomplished not by the Party censorship, but by marketizing media control. Marketizing media control is triggered by the job responsibility system. Job responsibility for media managers or contract responsibility for journalists in Chinese media imposes both a survival pressure and a compliance pressure on media professionals and organizations. Under the backdrop of the predatory Chinese political economy, the “Survival of the Fittest” logic encourages media professionals to begin their psychological transformation for pursuing their personal interests. The rich material compensation resulting from marketizing media control consolidates such a psychological transformation. Collective interest protection of media organizations reinforces collective self-censorship. Yet punishment pushes them further into compliance with the Party ideology. Marketizing media control works well as long as the Party-state structure remains unchanged and as long as the Chinese economy is still running.

This thesis examines the role of the Chinese news media in the 1989 pro-democracy movement. The three functions of this thesis are: 1) to provide evidence of changes in the pro-democracy movement; 2) to identify corresponding changes in the press coverage of the movement; 3) to examine what relationship exists between changes in the movement and changes in the press coverage of the movement.

The central argument of this thesis is that a series of China's state policies, before and during the reform era, were conducive to the rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement (CSM). The most important of these were (1) leftist policies during Mao's era which fostered the formation of pro-democratic yet impractical intellectuals and created a university ecology that was remarkably conducive to student movements, and (2) the state-led reform which over produced students on the one hand, and blocked upward mobility channels for intellectuals and students on the other hand. These and other conducive factors to the rise of the 1989 CSM were not simply state mistakes. To a large extent, they were characteristic of the regime. / The thesis does not reject non-state centered factors such as anomic feelings toward uncertainties brought by the reform, the conflict between reformers and hardliners within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the rise of civil society during the eighties, the impact of Western ideologies following the open door policy or the intrinsic character of Chinese culture, that have all been hitherto proposed to explain the rise of the CSM. Rather, it incorporates these explanations under a state-centered paradigm in light of a general model (the DSSI model) that I am proposing to explain the general causes, and to a lesser extent, the dynamics of large scale social movements.

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