More Stick than Carrot?: Xi’s Policy toward Establishment Intellectuals

After President Xi Jinping came to office, the Chinese government tightened its ideological control over establishment intellectuals and particularly the university teachers. This project aims to answer the question of why and when an authoritarian state chooses to do so. It focuses on the CCP’s policy toward establishment intellectuals under Xi and explores the most applicable explanation for this policy shift. Based on the existing literature on the cyclical model of state-intellectual relations in China, we propose a new model of “Dual Methods in State-Intellectual Relations.” The model demonstrates that the CCP has employed dual methods of repression and co-optation on intellectuals adopting different roles. Leaders choose repression when they perceive that the legitimacy of their rule is challenged externally or internally by criticism and collective actions led by intellectuals. In this case, the goal of repression is to either set up a new “red line” or warn intellectuals that they have crossed it.