Living with Xi? Intellectuals and Public Life in China Today

In 2018, Timothy Cheek and David Ownby joined forces to write an article in Dissent, “Make China Marxist Again” that addressed Xi Jinping’s efforts at reviving the CCP’s ideology on the anniversary of Marx’s birth and the response of some of China’s establishment intellectuals, particularly the orthodox legal scholar, Jiang Shigong. What has happened to intellectual life in China in the five years since, particularly for intellectuals interested in big issues of governance? In this discussion we review some examples of the range and diversity of intellectual engagement in China today, a body of views often obscured by the omnipresent Party propaganda and media censorship.

Timothy Cheek is Professor and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Department of History at the University of British Columbia. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Most recent publication: The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2021) (with Hans van de Ven and Klaus Mühlhahn).

David Ownby recently retired from the History Department of the Université of Montréal and is currently a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.  His most recent work focuses on intellectual life in contemporary China and he is the founder of the Reading the China Dream website.