‘Wild Intellectuals’ In ‘COVID-1984’: Liberalism, freedom, and ‘normal lives’ in Contemporary China
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis focuses on contemporary Chinese liberal intellectuals, and the problems, paradoxes but also possibilities that :low from their commitments to liberal ideals in a context where those ideals clash with official ideological control and nationalist sentiments in the public sphere. Adopting an ethnographic approach, it aims to highlight how the deceptively familiar concepts of ‘liberalism’ and ‘freedom’ are encountered in these contexts, as a set of personal aspirations, ideologies, ethical commitments and dilemmas. It will shed new light on the lived reality of liberalism, at a time when the very idea is newly in question in a range of global discourses. ‘Liberal intellectuals’ here denotes individuals who exhibit a favourable evaluation of freedom and the individual, hold a critical stance towards the official ideology in China’s context, and who are engaged in knowledge production as part of their professional activities. This research examines what challenges and opportunities these individuals encounter in both their professional and personal lives, how they navigate them, and how these experiences, in turn, shape their understanding of and commitment to liberalism. Guided by these questions, I conducted 20 months of fieldwork in Chengdu, China, primarily from June 2021 to December 2022, with two follow-up trips in 2023. This period was marked with stringent Zero-COVID policies and heightened ideological control, underscored by the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China and Xi Jinping’s unprecedented third presidential term. The term ‘COVID-1984’, coined by Chinese netizens, aptly describes the tangible atmosphere on both mobility and ideology, resulting from top-down regulations and bottom-up patriotic sentiments. This thesis hence examines how liberal intellectuals responded to the ‘COVID-1984’ context, relocated themselves, and explored new possibilities. The study focuses on Dunbar, a pub that hosted over 200 public events during its brief…
abstract: This thesis focuses on contemporary Chinese liberal intellectuals, and the problems, paradoxes but also possibilities that :low from their commitments to liberal ideals in a context where those ideals clash with official ideological control and nationalist sentiments in the public sphere. Adopting an ethnographic approach, it aims to highlight how the deceptively familiar concepts of ‘liberalism’ and ‘freedom’ are encountered in these contexts, as a set of personal aspirations, ideologies, ethical commitments and dilemmas. It will shed new light on the lived reality of liberalism, at a time when the very idea is newly in question in a range of global discourses. ‘Liberal intellectuals’ here denotes individuals who exhibit a favourable evaluation of freedom and the individual, hold a critical stance towards the official ideology in China’s context, and who are engaged in knowledge production as part of their professional activities. This research examines what challenges and opportunities these individuals encounter in both their professional and personal lives, how they navigate them, and how these experiences, in turn, shape their understanding of and commitment to liberalism. Guided by these questions, I conducted 20 months of fieldwork in Chengdu, China, primarily from June 2021 to December 2022, with two follow-up trips in 2023. This period was marked with stringent Zero-COVID policies and heightened ideological control, underscored by the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China and Xi Jinping’s unprecedented third presidential term. The term ‘COVID-1984’, coined by Chinese netizens, aptly describes the tangible atmosphere on both mobility and ideology, resulting from top-down regulations and bottom-up patriotic sentiments. This thesis hence examines how liberal intellectuals responded to the ‘COVID-1984’ context, relocated themselves, and explored new possibilities. The study focuses on Dunbar, a pub that hosted over 200 public events during its brief…
author: Liu, Fang
language: eng
keywords: contemporary China, freedom, intellectuals, liberalism, normal life, 'Zero-COVID'
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/843d1f6e-717f-41e7-8719-559a194cfcb7/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-03-30
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:17Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.122310