In the fall of 1982 Deng Xiaoping officially launched the project to build Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. The object was "to blaze a new trail towards modernization by uniting the universal truths of Marxism with the realities of China". A new ideology was needed to explain the CCP's drive for modernization and underwrite the Party's right to rule. The Party leadership provided the intellectuals with the ideological space and sanctuary in which to forge the new ideology. This study hypothesizes models of what the CCP was looking for in this ideology crafting project and critically assesses the ideological visions worked out by Yan Jiaqi, Jin Guantao and Li Zehou respectively during the Post-Mao decade.; The CCP needed an ideological vision that anchored the Chinese identity in the past, prescribed a pragmatic socialist purpose for the present and was explained in the prose ideological mode. The new ideology also needed to be equipped to counter the challenges the Party was likely to face from Party dissidents, the intellectuals, the West, the people and the calendar. Yan Jiaqi's model favored adoption of Western liberalism, but lacked a creditable Chinese identity hence it was unsuitable for adoption by the Party. Jin Guantao's vision had a strong national identity, but its purpose was the empowerment of the scientific community. Li Zehou's world view offered what the CCP needed. His Xiti Zhongyong (Western essence, Chinese methods) blended Western thought--both liberalism and Marxism (the Xiti)--into a pragmatic socialist purpose and anchored the national essence in a reconstituted cultural disposition (the Zhongyong).
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