Diversification Among Mainland Chinese Intellectuals

The bumpiness or "zigs and zags" of state policy might partly be measured in terms of fluctuating support for the process that creates "intellectuals," defined in Communist China&s;s standard way as people with some college education. Chinese intellectuals during the modernization reforms are increasingly differentiated. Although mainland Chinese thinkers have received moderately increasing official support in the decade after 1978, technical intellectuals have benefited more than humanists and social scientists. In mainland China, "red" and "expert" intellectuals were nurtured as different during the 1950s and 1960s—often trained for their political or technical roles in separate sets of schools. The health of Peking intellectuals, as surveyed in 1983 by the Chinese Medical Association, was also objectively worse than that of other residents. Mainland Chinese intellectuals differ on the extent to which they worry that Communist China may adopt Western cultural styles too broadly and reject traditional Chinese forms too quickly.