The West’s leading authority on the role of intellectuals in contemporary China presents a percipient account of the efforts at political reform in the Deng Xiaoping era. Merle Goldman describes a group of highly placed intellectuals who, with the patronage of Deng Xiaoping’s designated successors Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang, attempted to reshape both China’s Marxist–Leninist ideology and its political system.
