Abstract

To this day I still do not know exactly what sort of people are to be regarded as intellectuals, and what sort of people are not. When I was being re-educated in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, a military representative once told me that I was a "petty bourgeois intellectual." I was only seventeen at the time, had received six years of primary school education, and was barely literate, so I felt I did not deserve to be called an intellectual. By the way, I also felt I did not deserve the appellation "petty bourgeois." My family lived on wages from the government; even our furniture belonged to the government. We had not set up a stall to sell cigarettes in front of our house, so where did he get the term "petty bourgeois"? As for myself as an individual, it was only right and proper that I should belong to one social class or another, and I was not against doing so. However, to this day, I do not know in what class intellectual youths should be counted. In my opinion, if one insists on making comparisons or analogies, they should be counted as lumpen proletarians or the like. But this is taking the subject too far