Background
Shaozhi Su was born in 1923 in Beijing, China.
蘇紹智
Shaozhi Su was born in 1923 in Beijing, China.
Shaozhi Su gained an orthodox academic education while China was falling apart during the 40s under Nationalist rule. He, already known as a brilliant student, was recruited by the economics research department of Nankai University, which had also moved to western China.
After the war Shaozhi Su joined the staff of Fudan University in Shanghai, where, during a brief period of cooperation between nationalists and communists, he discovered the works of Marxism and Mao Zedong. Impressed by the moderate programme known as "new democracy", he hoped to work towards a synthesis of liberal and Marxist economic theory.
Returning to Nankai University, he earned his doctorate in 1949 at the end of the civil war.
Shaozhi Su joined the enterprise of "new China". Before long he was attending lectures in Marxist economics at the Beijing People’s University. In 1953 he joined the Communist party, and as well as teaching political economy at Fudan University he became a party cadre.
In 1963, as the Sino-Soviet dispute came into the open, Shaozhi Su was moved to Beijing to join a team gathering material for a series of polemics proving that the Soviet Union had "betrayed Marxism". During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he was sent to a "cadre farm" in the countryside.
After Mao’s death and the rise to power of Deng, Shaozhi Su found his voice as Chinese intellectual life began to thaw under Deng’s protege Hu. At the path-breaking Wu Xu seminar on ideology organised by Hu in 1979, he produced a joint statement with the veteran philosopher Feng Yulan criticising the official line that China was moving seamlessly through the "socialist stage" towards communism.
Appointed the director of a leading theoretical thinktank at the Academy of Social Sciences, Su Shaozhi condemned the gap between party theory and reality. In the conservative backlash of 1987 hewas dismissed from his Academy post, but he continued to speak out.
When the Beijing massacre occurred, Su Shaozhi was expelled from the Communist party and placed on a blacklist. He was given temporary refuge at Princeton University, in New Jersey, with other exiled scholars, and later joined the editorial board of the dissident journal Beijing Spring.
In 1996, he published Shinian Fengyu (Ten Years of Storm) which gives a valuable account of the ideological struggle during the 80s in which he had played such a prominent part. Later, Su Shaozhi edited a memorial volume In Memory of Hu Yaobang (2006) lamenting the lost opportunity of that decade.
After more than two decades in vocal exile, Su Shaozhi finally accepted the need for silence if he was to return home. The importance of the efforts of Su and other scholars to reform Chinese socialism was forgotten as China embraced economic globalisation while retaining strict one-party rule. This has been taken further since 2012 under the leadership of Xi Jinping, whose repressive and neo-Maoist style of leadership is exactly what Su was arguing against in the 80s.