The Emergence of the Public Intellectual in the Sinophone World

The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of a new public phenomenon: the intellectual. Following the Dreyfus-affair in France, prominent figures such as Émile Zola or Émile Durkheim, publicly defended the falsely accused jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus and exposed the anti-Semitic views of the accusers in their public statements and writings. Originally used as an insult against the “dreyfusards”, the notion of the intellectual gained increasing recognition and developed into a central institution of public discourse in the West. But the intellectual did not emerge ex nihilo, freedom of expression, autonomous fields of academia and culture, and a thriving press, were all necessary institutional prerequisites for the intellectual to emerge. In China, after the fall of the Qing-court and the adjacent Imperial Examination System, the establishment of newly found universities and publishing houses, and especially after the May 4th Movement, the country likewise experienced the rise of a new class of intellectuals during the beginning of the 20th century. Worried about China's future and enabled through the recent institutional changes, Communists, Liberals, and Confucians rose as three distinct intellectual camps during the 1920s, vigorously defending their visions of the past and future. Forced into a hiatus during the 1930s and 40s due to the Japanese invasion and the civil war, the intellectuals again emerged in Taiwan during the 1950s as driving forces of public discourse. This presentation aims at exploring how the intellectuals who left the mainland after the communist takeover in 1949 attempted to find a new home for themselves, their ideas, and their past, meandering between the promotion of modern, Western-style democracy, liberal freedoms, and the struggle to conserve the traditions of their forebears.