Liu Yu and Murong Xuecun on Public Intellectuals

A New York Times Conversation between Liu Yu and Murong Xuecun:  “How Did the Concept of 'Public Intellectual' Come to be Stigmatized?”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
In 2013, the New York Times organized a conversation between Tsinghua political scientist Liu Yu (b. 1975) and the writer Murong Xuecun (b. 1974) on the subject of how the term “public intellectual” came to be a bad word, the equivalent of “talking head” or perhaps even “egghead.”  The conversation was published on the Chinese-language website of the New York Times which was launched in 2012 and which continues today, but is available in China only to readers with a VPN.
 
Liu and Murong were good choices.  Both were—and perhaps still are, to the extent possible in the Xi Jinping era—outspoken proponents of democracy and critics of censorship.  In addition, both were very familiar with China’s Internet culture; much of the criticism of public intellectuals occurs online.  In addition to her scholarly production, Liu Yu has also written widely on social issues for important print and online publications in China, and some of her books are in fact reprints of these essays, leading some to criticize her as “not serious” (see here for an example of such criticism).  Murong’s first novel, eventually translated into English as Leave Me Alone:  A Novel of Chengdu, was originally published serially online on the Tianya.cn BBS (which is now an app).  Both Liu and Murong had active online profiles in 2013, although Murong’s accounts were shut down later that year because of his frequent and vehement denunciations of censorship (see here for an interview with Murong where he discusses such issues).
 
The stigmatization of the term “public intellectual” is part of the broader saga of what Chinese intellectuals see as their declining influence in an increasingly professionalized academy and an increasingly wired society.  The “public or perish” culture of China’s universities has, in the eyes of many Chinese intellectuals, forced them to become as specialized as their Western counterparts, and hence just as irrelevant.  Even in the absence of hyper-specialization, no one would read them anyway, their argument goes, because the popularization of the Internet has fueled the rise of an anti-intellectual populism that has no time for experts and expertise (see Xu Jilin on this topic). 
  
The idea of “public intellectuals gongong zhishifenzi公共知识分子” is quite new in China.  There were surely public intellectuals during the Republican period, but while certain establishment intellectuals served the Party during the Maoist period, there was little “public space” to speak of and hence no public intellectuals.  Some sources identify the invention of the term with the 2004 publication of a list of “China’s 50 most influential public intellectuals” by Southern Weekend, the liberal, Guangzhou-based newspaper.  For Southern Weekend, there was considerable overlap between the categories of “public intellectual” and “government critic.”
 
Gongong zhishifenzi is quite a mouthful, and the abbreviated form of “public intellectual” came to be gongzhi 公知.  Around 2009, this abbreviated term took on a second, pejorative meaning, that of “talking head” or “egghead,” in other words, it came to be the term used by detractors of public intellectuals to denigrate and stigmatize them.  In the conversation translated here, Murong Xuecun argues that this campaign of stigmatization was organized by the Chinese government as part of its extensive censorship efforts, the dirty work being carried out largely by what Murong calls the “50 Cent Party 五毛党”—referring to the army of trolls that purportedly receives 50 cents for every Internet comment defending the Chinese government or attacking its “enemies.”

This is quite likely true, but as the Youthology text translated on this site suggests, by 2021, Internet invective and speech polarization have become increasingly widespread in China, following the same “organic” logic that drives Internet comment sections elsewhere in the world.

In any event, the tone of the conversation is quite different from what we can read in China in 2021, in large part because it was organized by the New York Times, which to my mind would be unthinkable now. 
 
Translation
 
Murong Xuecun: There’s one question I'd really like to ask you. You were once known as the “goddess of democracy” and as the very symbol of a “public intellectual.”  Were you unhappy when the term was gradually stigmatized and turned into a bad word?
 
Liu Yu:  I feel unhappy and even angry about the way the concept of "public intellectual" is being treated, but at a personal level I don’t care that much.  If they want to call us “talking heads,” then let them do it.  Even if they call us “mother hen intellectuals” that’s not my problem.  In addition, the idea of the public intellectual has not disappeared as a result of the stigmatization, and the function of this group in setting public issues and leading the discussion of proper values has not been lost, and has instead become quite strong.
 
Murong Xuecun: For my part, at the beginning I was a little hurt, with so many people berating me.  But later on, I decided to embrace more completely my identity as a public intellectual.[2]  I did not do so in the past, feeling that I was not knowledgeable enough to be an “intellectual,” but after it became a bad word, I started to call myself a public intellectual more often.
 
Liu Yu: I know exactly what you mean. When people used to ask me, "Are you a public intellectual?” I would hesitate, not because it's a bad word, but because sometimes I wondered if I was qualified. A public intellectual needs to be both in the public domain and sufficiently knowledgeable. I used to think that public intellectuals were people like Jean Paul Sartre and Paul Krugman, who had very a solid grasp on a particular field of knowledge as well as great public influence. But with the stigmatization of public intellectuals, if I denied being one it would look like I was afraid, which was not the case at all. 
 
Murong Xuecun: What exactly is a "public intellectual"? I think that in the current situation in China, public intellectuals are people who are willing to speak out on public issues, have a certain amount of insight, as well as a certain amount of basic knowledge. Because China is a bizarre kind of society, most public intellectuals will talk about flaws in the system, which means that being a public intellectual basically means criticizing the government, belonging to a group of people with "ulterior motives," to use the official term.
 
Liu Yu:  In general, public affairs can be divided into two categories.  In one of these, you don't need any professional background, and can distinguish right from wrong through common sense. It does not take a lot of thought to understand that when the censors brutally interfere with a newspaper or other media and constantly suppress or edit publications, this is not right.  Another example is the  Tang Hui case 唐慧事件, where an 11 year-old child is raped and her mother winds up in labor reform in the course of the trial.  Do you really need specialized knowledge to see that this is wrong?  Another example is the case of Ren Jianyu 任建宇, who was jailed for a few remarks he made on Weibo, which is obviously not right. Then there is a second category of things that require some background or expertise, such as incidents involving chemical plants, genetic modification, fine particulate matter, or some economic issues, etc.
 
I think we need to seek out the causes of the stigmatization of public intellectuals. Part of the reason may be that some people who call themselves “public intellectuals” speak out in a rash way on issues that in fact require professional knowledge, leading many people to think that they are irresponsible and have crossed the line. There are also some public intellectuals who are highly emotional, and their outbursts against those who hold different opinions can be offensive. But you can't single out one or two of the most unpleasant people in the community of public intellectuals to attack the group as a whole, just like you can't attack Henan Province as a whole because of the actions of a few people from Henan. If this is how you debate, then you will never lose, because in every group, there are some people who on occasion do not watch what they say. But in any event, it is not wise to criticize the community of public intellectuals in this sense. To conclude that no one should speak out on issues involving only morality and common sense simply  because certain public intellectuals do not exercise sufficient restraint when discussing issues on which they are professionally qualified, then this is going too far.  These people they are not used to people talking about cases like Ren Jianyu and Tang Hui.  I personally think this is overkill or even confusing right and wrong.
 
Murong Xuecun: On China's public speech platforms, people expect those who speak out to be almost perfect, which means that in addition to having proper viewpoints, your private life must also be impeccable.  Whether inadvertently or perhaps on purpose, people always mix these two together, so that if your private life is not flawless, then none of your opinions are worthy of attention.  Similarly, if one of your views is problematic, then all of your views are suspect. In the past few years, the term "public intellectual" has gone from bad to worse.  At the outset, only a few people were criticizing, but then almost everyone joined in. Judging from the collective nature and intensity of the attacks, I highly suspect that all of this is organized and deliberate. Looking at China's history over the past 60 years or so, whenever the need was felt to bring someone down, efforts were always made to prepare public opinion for what was coming. The stigmatization of public intellectuals is more or less same, except that in the Internet era, the ways they go about it appear to be more innovative.

One of the most "wonderful" things about our government is that it is always learning and always keeping up with the times, in ways that I would not have been able to imagine ten years ago.  It has built the most technologically advanced firewall in the world, successfully keeping Google, Twitter, and Facebook out; it has insisted on following the mass line, mobilizing the unemployed and young students to defend the regime and attack its enemies, what is known as the "Fifty Cent Party 五毛党"[3] plan.  It has built the world's largest database of sensitive words. Some time ago, because of the "Southern Weekend Incident,"[4] the four words "Nan, Fang, Zhou and Mo [which mean Southern Weekend]" all became sensitive words. Do you know how many people in China are surnamed Fang and Zhou? There are about 5 million people surnamed Fang and 25 million people surnamed Zhou. Because of the Southern Weekend incident, 30 million people cannot say their own names.
 
The process of the stigmatization of public intellectuals is also accompanied by sarcasm, and some of the jokes are pretty funny, such as this one:

  A teacher is teaching students to learn to read, and the teacher says, “In the word ‘phoenix’ (fenghuang  凤凰), the first character (feng, which means ‘male phoenix’) is male, and the second character (huang, which means female phoenix) is female.’ The students said, ‘Right, the male phoenix mates with the female phoenix 公凤配母凰.’ The teacher continued:  ‘In the word ‘mandarin duck’ (yuanyang 鸳鸯), the first character (yuan, which means ‘male duck’) is male, and the second character (yang, which means female duck) is female.’ The students said, ‘Right, the male duck mates with the female duck 公鸳配母鸯.’ The teacher continued:  ‘In the word spider (zhizhu 蜘蛛), the first character (zhu, which means ‘male spider’) is male, and the second character (zhu, which means ‘female spider’) is female.’ The students said, ‘Right, the public intellectual mates with his mistress [a play on words or pronunciations:  orally, gongzhi can mean either ‘male spider’ or ‘public intellectual,’ and muzhu can mean either ‘female spider’ or mistress ].’”[5] 

I have no proof that the 50 Cent Party made this up to attack public intellectuals, but ridiculing and denigrating public intellectuals has become a trend, and ordinary people have joined in, making the term “public intellectual” into something laughable.
 
Liu Yu: I have found that many people who ridicule public intellectuals are actually public intellectuals themselves, but they are probably marginalized public intellectuals, or what are called "second-tier public intellectuals." These are the ones who the fiercest in their ridicule of public intellectuals, and they seem much more worked up that people who care about love affairs or the cost of living.  Wu Fatian 吴法天(b. 1978) is constantly making fun of public intellectuals, but isn't he a typical public intellectual? He has a little bit of knowledge and a certain professional background, speaks frequently on public issues, and tries to influence public opinion and even public policies.  Isn’t this exactly what a public intellectual is? But he is extremely critical of public intellectuals.
 
At the same time, the term "public intellectual” has been expanded to the point of losing much of its meaning.  Over the past 60 years, China has not made close distinctions between different kinds of intellectuals, for example treating specialized technicians as intellectuals, although the two are not exactly the same thing.
 
Liu Yu: In fact, it is a citizen’s basic right and even obligation to speak out on public issues, and it has nothing much to do with whether you are an intellectual or have a professional background. Just because you have spoken out, you are identified as one of the stigmatized public intellectuals, which is a sufficient pretext for passing judgement. It’s like some of the actress Yao Chen’s 姚晨(b. 1979) or the singer Annie Yi’s 伊能静 (b. 1968) statements, in which they simply express sympathy for something that is unfair, and are not pretending to be public intellectuals or to hype themselves, and it is just their artistic sensitivity reacting to injustice.  But people who lack this sense insist that is has to be some kind of conspiracy to hype themselves and put on a show, which is quite sad.
 
Murong Xuecun:  How hard is it to judge a case on its merits? It's really quite simple. On the Internet, people often confuse a person's opinions with their self-presentation. The pundit Sima Nan 司马南 (b. 1956) and the journalist Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (b. 1960) of the Global Times know how to present themselves online, but you have to look carefully at their views. 
 
Liu Yu:  At the same time, we should beware of their sophistry. For example, after the Southern Weekend incident, all Wu Fatian cared about whether the key passage was written by Tuo Zhen 庹震 (b. 1959), [who supposedly intervened as a representative of the Party Center] .  This was the most important fact for him, as if the censorship behind the incident was not a problem if Tuo did not himself write the paragraph in question. To my mind, this is indeed important, but even more important is the censorship system behind it, and the pent-up resentment censorship cultivates. It's like focusing on whether someone was punched 588 times or 589 times, and that if you say 588, then you’re lying, and that you’re the kind of no-class person no one should listen to.  
 
Murong Xuecun:   It’s like if someone shot someone, and what Wu cared about was not the fact that someone had been killed, but whether the gun used was a Browning or a Chinese-made 55 or 64.  If you got the brand of the gun wrong, then Wu calls you a liar, and if one detail is out of place, then the whole story of the murder if fake.  This is how Wu Fatian thinks.
 
Once I was giving a speech in Guangdong, and somebody asked me, "If we disregard the truth, aren't we just like them?" I replied that it is sometimes much harder than we think to grasp the whole truth. The angle from which you observe something often determines what you see.  If there are two people fighting, and you can only see one of them, who is constantly punching and kicking, you will probably say he is violent, but if you see the whole picture, it will be clear that it is a fight. Journalism is another example.  If a journalist cites someone’s recollections of an event, this recollection may not capture the reality of the thing in question, even if the person’s memory is accurate, which means that his narrative, the journalist’s understanding of this narrative, and the journalist’s final copy will be at some distance from what really happened.  It is extremely difficult to capture all of the details relating to an event. But the point is, you can't doubt the larger truth because of some small discrepancies. 
 
Liu Yu: There’s nothing wrong with caring about details, the question is whether you lose site of the big picture in your preoccupation with the details.  In other words, there should be a sense of proportion in evaluating something’s importance. Just because you find a hole in the description, doesn’t mean you can dismiss the argument as whole. This is a kind of sophistry that avoids what is important, and can also give rise to a tragic sense of personal heroism. 
 
Murong Xuecun: I see that in your new book The State of the Art, there is a chapter "The Aristocratic Style," talking about intellectuals who do not care about public affairs.  What is your view of such intellectuals?
 
Liu Yu: There is nothing wrong with not caring about public affairs, and there are many such people in life. But if these people decide nonetheless to ruthlessly criticize the people who do want to talk about public affairs, then this is really too bad. In a society like China, it requires a certain amount of courage and even sacrifice to talk about public affairs, as in the case of the writer and activist Ran Yunfei 冉云飞 (b. 1965). It is okay not to be a public intellectual, but I cannot accept the sarcasm and low blows directed at those that are.
 
Murong Xuecun: A few days ago I published an article about the Great Leap Forward [lit., the Great Famine 大饥荒], and a journalist came to interview me and we talked about the same thing you just mentioned.  For example, if a humanitarian tragedy happened somewhere near me, of course I have the right to say I don't care about it, and then go home to listen to my classical music and read my Raymond Carver novels. But if I have a basic sense of morality, I can hardly turn a blind eye to it.
 
Liu Yu: Yes, it takes deliberate effort to be this oblivious. It's like pretending the sun is shining in the middle of a storm, which is a kind of dishonesty. It’s normal not to care about this or that public matter, but if you turn a blind eye to everything, it's deliberate avoidance. To put it bluntly, perhaps your judgement is limited, and you are not seeing the relevance of their issues to your own life. For example, some people say that only intellectuals care about freedom of speech, and what does it have to do with me?  This is a short-sighted view. The freedom that Southern Weekend is fighting for is not only editorial freedom.  Southern Weekend is a platform, and people who file petitions need this platform, people whose houses are destroyed need this platform, Ren Jianyu needs this platform to talk about the cases of injustice he has uncovered...So these freedoms are not editorial freedoms, but the freedom of the whole society, including your freedom. So I think that people who never discuss public affairs are either deliberately turning a blind eye or have limited analytical skills.
 
Murong Xuecun: When I started to speak out on Weibo it was because I was exasperated, so I may be an example of what you are talking about.  I truly admire your poise, how you manage to always stay calm and peaceful, but I can’t do this. In the past, I didn't care much about public affairs, and more or less adopted the "Aristocratic Style" that you criticized,  because I thought that literature had a longer life than politics. But then later on Tan Zuoren[6] 谭作人(b. 1954) was arrested.  I had only met him once, so he was not quite a friend, so I could remain silent. Then when I published my book The Missing Ingredient 中国少了一味药, about a multilevel marketing scheme to sell fake medicine, I kept arguing with my editor, who insisted that I delete certain words, phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs.  For things that were sensitive I could understand, but he forced me to change even insignificant words and passages, making me change them over and over, which ultimately exasperated me. 

Living in a country like China, I think everyone has a sense of having been humiliated. You are driving down the road and suddenly a military police car cuts you off so that you have to swerve suddenly; you run a small company and have to deal with tax collectors, license offices, fire and health inspectors every day; you work in some government office and attend all kinds of boring meetings and listen to all kinds of bullshit every day.  More importantly, you are a citizen and deal with nonsense and lies all the time.  To my way of thinking, sensitive people will to a certain extent take this as an insult, and the question is when the insult leads to an explosion. In an unfair society, it is normal to feel insulted, and I think this applies even to people like Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. 
 
Liu Yu: As to the "Aristocratic Style" and the sense of intellectual superiority that some intellectuals have, what I want to say is the only real difference is between real and fake problems, not between “high-level” and “low-level” problems. Intellectuals can't spend their days fretting over problems with little basis in reality merely to satisfy their vanity and their sense of intellectual superiority. For example, I just saw a photo on Weibo, which of course has yet to be confirmed: a director of a housing authority in Henan pointing a gun at a reporter, presumably meaning that if you dare to try to interview me again I will shoot you. When you see such a photo, do you think a sense of intellectual superiority makes any difference?   Any ordinary citizen, to say nothing of a public intellectual, should condemn such a thing out of hand on basic human terms.  Someone who stops to think how Kant or Raymond Carver would have reacted to such a thing is ridiculous.  However, I think China is full of images much like this one, and it's just a matter of whether you face up to that fact or not. Of course it is not hard to trot out an elitist stance on the matter, and spout out an endless list of unknown books and authors to blunt the true pain we are feeling, but that’s not very important to me, even if it is a technique I am familiar with. 
 
Murong Xuecun: I used to be like that, and for awhile I only read philosophy and literature, and even now I think that literature has a longer shelf life and a greater value than commenting on current events. When I look at Lu Xun's writings now, I feel that some of his literary writings are of much higher value than others. But intellectuals cannot remain outside of society, and cannot ignore everything that happens around them.
 
Liu Yu: I don't know whether intellectuals should be responsible to the public or not. Two days ago I read Xiao Han's 萧瀚 book about the Dreyfus Affair, in which Zola defended the wrongly accused officer in the Dreyfus Affair with great vehemence, in the course of which mentioning Voltaire's defense of a Protestant farmer. If Chinese elite intellectuals today were to evaluate what Zola and Voltaire did in their time, people would surely say that they were engaging with issues whose intellectual stakes were low, trying to be hype themselves and show off.  But aren’t such issues important on occasion? Of course they are, and sometimes power finds itself in the expression of the most innocent and direct emotions. 
 
Murong Xuecun:  Now that “public intellectual” has become a bad word, they have become the target of attacks.  Critics say things like: "That’s a typical opinion for a public intellectual" or "you public intellectuals are all alike," with the goal of creating the impression that everything public intellectuals say is wrong. In fact, in today’s China, people who criticize the system and the government and speak out on public affairs make up an indispensable force society. A society where criticism is absent is unthinkable.
 
Liu Yu: The very idea of a "public intellectual" is also part of the process of Chinese citizens learning to speak out in public. I think in China, there is no space for professional criticism to develop. For example, in the United States, there is a website called "Open Secrets" for monitoring public finances, which is dedicated to collecting and analyzing information on all campaign donations, including detailed records of who donated how much to whom, and how they spent it. This kind of criticism is very professional, but it presupposes that the government allows these professional criticism groups to be established and provides full and transparent information to these so-called "watchdog" organizations. In contrast, in China, because there is no space for professional watchdogs to survive, ordinary citizens are forced into that role, and we cannot expect the general public to produce the same results.
 
Speaking out with precision and rigor is also a learning process. I think the process of interacting on Weibo might quietly lead both the right and the left realize that if they accidentally spread rumors, it could backfire, so that maybe they will become more cautious. I think this is a process, we can't ask everyone to make no mistakes on any issue from the outset; and it's not a big deal for people to make a little mistake in criticizing the government, because if the government is not transparent and open, how can we possibly be clear on all issues?
 
At first, I was really put off by the criticism of public intellectuals, but later on, I felt a bit better because it seems to me that their social function has not really been affected. Public intellectuals continue to organize public discussions, and for example, in the Southern Weekend incident, the public intellectuals’ discussion and retweeting still made the government think, "maybe we’ve gone too far.” In the Ren Jianyu case, for example, the discussion on Weibo made people think that things might loosen up on the issue of re-education through labor. And on the particulate matter issue, if it hadn't been for the attention that public intellectuals generated on Weibo, things probably wouldn't have festered to this point. People criticize public intellectuals sure enough, but their role in guiding social values and creating social issues continues.
 
Notes

[1] 刘瑜对谈慕容雪村,“公知”如何被污名化”, published in the online Chinese-language edition of the New York Times on Feb. 20, 2013.  This is actually part one of a two-part conversation.  The second, published the following day, is available here.  

[2]Translator’s note:  It is impossible to know if Murong says “public intellectual” or “talking head” here, because gongzhi can mean both.

[3]Translator’s note:  The reference here is to paid “trolls,” who, according to rumor, receive 50 cents for every message they send supporting the regime or attacking its detractors.

[4]Translator’s note:  The Southern Weekend Incident occurred in early January, 2013, when central authorities intervened to modify the New Year’s greeting composed by the staff of the liberal journal Southern Weekend, based in Guangzhou.  This was a much discussed example of censorship, and perhaps signalled the beginning of the end of the relatively liberal period that had characterized the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabao era.

[5]Translator’s note:  Actually this is what is known in Chinese as a xiehouyu 歇后语, which is often translated as “allegory,” but which is better understood as a proverb in which only the first half of the proposition is spoken, leaving the listener to supply the second.  In English, we might say “an eye for an eye” omitting “and a tooth for a tooth.” Chinese has many of these.  For example, should you say “when trees get old they have many roots 树老根多,” your listener will immediately supply the following clause, which is “when people are old they have a lot to say 人老话多,” the sort of thing that is said when Uncle Joe is telling his high school football stories for the umpteenth time.  The joke translated above stopped at ‘The teacher continued:  ‘In the word spider (zhizhu 蜘蛛), the first character (zhu which means ‘male spider’) is male, and the second character (zhu which means ‘female spider’) is female,’ to be followed by three points, and the reader figured out the joke. 

[6]Translator’s note:  Tan was an environmental activist who was eventually jailed for investigating the causes of the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008.