November 7, 2017 Lecture: Speaking with the Silent Majority: the Rise of Grassroots Intellectuals."
The lecture of Prof. Sebastian Veg (SHSS Paris) will take place in the seminar room in Erbprinzenstraße 12 and begins at 18:15.
An abstract of the lecture follows:
"Whereas, throughout the 20th century, intellectuals in China definedthemselves through a posture of responsibility for the affairs of thenation and the state (“taking the world under the heavens as one’sresponsibility”), in the last twenty years, positions have become morediverse and more complex. Beginning in the 1990s, intellectuals were nolonger exclusively affiliated with state work units, and their incomesources became more diverse. Many began to question the “grandnarratives” of modernization and democracy, which had cemented theelite consensus over “reform” in the 1980s. Criticizing intellectuals'traditional elitist bias, they shifted their interests to concreteproblems, often associated with people situated not at the center butat the margins of society, famously described by Wang Xiaobo as the“silent majority” or “weak groups” (ruoshi qunti). Some of them beganto work for NGOs, or study sensitive topics, or produce documentaryfilms. As the public sphere broadened to include the internet andsocial media, new forms of interventions appeared, along withalternative spaces. This presentation will attempt to assess thechanges that have taken place and to connect them with severaltheoretical questions related to definitions of the intellectual and ofthe public sphere."