State Behavior and the Intensification of Intellectual Criticism in China

Abstract

This article suggests that despite the state’s extensive efforts to curtail Chinese intellectuals’ expression, other state behaviors also stimulate and enable boundary-pushers to expand the limits of the permissible. It argues that intensifying intellectual criticism in the domain of social stability and protest during the Hu Jintao era was an unintended consequence of the political leadership’s accommodating responses to rising societal pressures. First, leaders became considerably more outspoken on proliferating protests and articulated stricter prescriptions for local official behavior. Second, adapting to a more assertive Internet and news media, censorship was relaxed and major protests became much more visible. The resulting discursive opportunities enabled trailblazing academics to question the prevailing logic of stability and open the sensitive topic to a broad circle of commentators. Subsequently, the central government has initiated a round of ongoing policy and institutional adjustments. Criticism thus has both stabilizing and destabilizing implications. It contributes to the rectification of policy and institutional failure, but it weakens the Communist Party’s legitimatory narrative and has pushed regime-defining questions, in particular the lack of protest institutionalization, onto the public agenda.