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The Economics Weekly, the Public Space and the Voices of Chinese Independent Intellectuals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

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Although after the 4 June crackdown on the Tiananmen protest movement in 1989 many newspapers were banned, their previous issues remained accessible in public libraries. However, there were two exceptions, the Shanghai-based World Economic Herald (hereafter abbreviated as the Herald) and the Beijing-based Economics Weekly (hereafter abbreviated as the Weekly). It is obvious that the intention of the authorities was to make people forget the existence and influence of these two newspapers before 4 June. At the very beginning of the student movement, the editor-in-chief of the Herald, Qin Benli, was dismissed from his post by Jiang Zemin, then Party head of Shanghai. Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, respectively former manager and former vice-editor-in-chief of the Weekly, were accused of being black hands of the student movement, and were sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment in 1991, the heaviest punishment on non-conformist intellectuals.

Type
Private Sector and Public Sphere in Urban China
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 147 , September 1996 , pp. 860 - 888
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1996

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References

2 See Kate Wright, The political fortunes of Shanghai's World Economic Herald, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 23 (January 1990), pp. 121–132; Seth, Faison, The changing role of the Chinese media, in Tony, Saich (ed.), The Chinese People's Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1980 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 145163; and Li Cheng and Lynn T. White III, China's technocratic movement and the World Economic Herald Modern China, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July 1991), pp. 342–388.Google Scholar

3 See Tang, Tsou, The Tiananmen tragedy: the state-society relationship, choices, and mechanisms in historical perspective, in Brantly, Womack (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 280;Google ScholarDavid, Kelly and He Baogang, Emergent civil society and the intellectuals in China, inRobert F., Miller (ed.), The Development of Civil Society in Communist Systems (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), p. 30;Google ScholarMerle, Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and X.L. Ding, The Decline of Communism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 1977–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

4 Author's interview with Feng Lanrui in December 1994. Feng Lanrui was the former general secretary of the CUES.

5 See the Weekly, the first issue, 4 January 1982, p. 1.

6 The information about the circulation of the Herald is available in Li and White, China's technocratic movement, p. 351. The information about the Weekly is provided by Feng Lanrui, former head of the newspaper's editorial office.

7 See Kelly and He, Emergent civil society and the intellectuals in China, p. 30; He Baogang, Dual roles of semi-civil society in Chinese democratization, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 154–171; and Goldman, Sowing the Seeds, pp. 358–360.

8 See Min Qi, Cong zhinangtuan dao sixiangku (From the [establishment] brain trust to the [non-establishment] think-tank), Ming bao (Hong Kong), 26 July 1993.

9 See The agreement on investing and running the newspaper. This archival material would be kept in the library of the Sinological Institute, Leiden University.

10 Merle Goldman's statement that He was the publisher is inaccurate, see Goldman, Sowing the Seeds, p. 341.

11 See Li and White, China's technocratic movement, pp. 356–369.

12 All the data about the Herald quoted here are taken from Li and White's article.

13 Li and White, China's technocratic movement, pp. 344, 380.

14 X.L. Ding, Decline of Communism, p. 61, n. 27.

15 According to their own quantitative analysis, there was only one item on science and technology in the Herald of 1989. See Li and White, China's technocratic movement, pp. 366–67, table 7.

16 Ibid. p. 353

17 See Goldman, Sowing the Seeds, ch. 2; also Ding, Decline of Communism, pp. 83–113.

18 See Li and White, China's technocratic movement,” p. 378.

19 See the Weekly, 19 January 1989, p. 2.

20 See Li and White, China's technocratic movement, p. 350.

21 Ibid. p. 351, table 3.

22 See the Weekly, 17 July, p. 1, and 24 July, p. 3.

23 See the Weekly, 28 August 1988, p. 1, 9 October 1988, p. 1 and 1 January 1989, p. 1. For the titles of these essays, see Table 6.

24 See the Herald, 23 January 1989, pp. 1, 11.

25 See the Weekly, 28 August 1988, p. 1, 1 January 1989, p. 1.

26 See the Weekly, 11 September 1988, p. 2.

27 See the Weekly, 5 March 1989, pp. 5-6, 12 March, p. 5, 26 March, pp. 5, 7

28 See the Weekly, 26 March 1989, p. 7, 9 April, p. 5, 23 April, p. 7.

29 This depiction was presented by Xu Liangying, a member of the democratic elite and an unremitting fighter against any forms of elitism. See his Anti-democratic counter-current in China, which was published in the Herald, 8 May 1989, p. 18. As a Chinese saying says, when a rat runs across the street, everybody cries, ‘kill it’.

30 See the Weekly, 30 April 1989, p. 5. This article has been never mentioned in any existing studies of the neo-authoritarianism debate. It also has not yet been translated into English.

31 See the Weekly, 30 April 1989, p. 7; also see FBIS-CHI 89–095 (18 May 1989), pp. 83–86.

32 See Chen Ziming, Chen Ziming fansi shinian gaige (Chen Ziming's Reflections on the Ten-year Reforms) (Hong Kong: Dangdai yuekan, 1992), pp. 232–38, 265–274

33 See the Weekly, 4 June 1989, pp. 6 and 7; also see JPRS-CAR 89–071 (7 July 1989), pp. 3–6.

34 See Liu Xiaobo, Mori xingcunzhe de dubai: guanyu wo he liusi (The Monologue of a Survivor in the Doomsday: land the June Fourth Incident) (Taipei: Shibao wenhua chuban qiye youxian gongsi, 1992), p. 155.

35 See the Weekly, 20 March 1988, p. 6.

36 See the Weekly, 22 January 1989, p. 5.

37 For example, see Seth Faison, The changing role of the Chinese media, in Saich, The Chinese People's Movement, pp. 155–161. Merle Goldman in her Sowing the Seeds has written a great deal on the Weekly, but has not presented a systematic analysis of its response to the movement.

38 See the Weekly, 14 May 1989, p. 1.

39 See the Weekly, 14 May 1989, p. 5.

40 See Tang Tsou, The Tiananmen tragedy, pp. 302–316.

41 From the angles of the rational choice and new institutionalism, I present a detailed analysis of the involvement in the People's Movement by Chinese intellectuals, including Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, in my forthcoming article Towards the new institutional pluralism: an analysis of the intellectual groups and their relations to the state in China (1979–1989).

42 See the Weekly, 21 May 1989, p. 1.

43 Ibid. p. 8. For a brief discussion of Cao Siyuan's proposal of the so-called socialist parliamentary democracy, see Andrew J., Nathan, China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 172.Google Scholar

44 See the Weekly, 4 June 1989, p. 1.