Strafella, GiorgioGiorgioStrafella2023-04-132023-04-132012-09-05https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/91052The Chinese ‘debate on the spirit of the humanities' (renwen jingshen taolun) in 1993-95 mainly addressed two issues, viz. the public function of humanist inquiry and cultural production, and the intellectuals' response to commercialised mass culture. The participants in the debate were mainly humanist scholars and literary authors. In this sense, this paper suggests that the renwen jingshen debate can be considered an intellectual meta-discursive event. Even though the debate forged divisions among China's intellectuals that persist to this day, virtually every participant agreed that mutations of great scope and depth were occurring in the country's culture and society. This paper analyses the representations of social and cultural change as found in a corpus of 100 articles from the renwen jingshen debate. The analysis explores the rhetorical strategies that intellectuals employed to express their viewpoint on these changes and their position on the wenren's appropriate response to them. To do so, the paper elaborates on the theoretical perspective developed by Norman Fairclough in his analyses of the language of ‘change' and "‘transition' in the political discourse of late Twentieth century Britain and Eastern Europe. The paper argues that the representations of change in the debate reflect the intellectuals' retreat from the discussion and critique of the effects of Reform and Opening up on China's social and cultural life. Even when they disapproved of them, the participants consistently adopted rhetorical strategies that background agency and responsibility in the processes they observed, while portraying such processes as necessary and already accomplished. Such strategies mainly include passivation, metaphorical language, nominalisation, and the rhetoric's of transition and modernisation. The findings suggest an acute "depoliticisation' (RancieÌ�re) in the Chinese intellectual field. While existing literature on the debate in Chinese, English, and French focuses on the participants' division in factions and refers to a small number of articles, this paper identifies shared elements within a corpus that better reflects the scale of the renwen jingshen debate. By doing so, it sheds light on a crucial phase of contemporary Chinese intellectual history.enChinaIntellectuals1990sCritical Discourse Analysisconference paper