In search of genuine intellectuals

Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell, translated into Chinese and published in August 2013, provides some insight into the verifiability of ideas. To be precise, the book talks about how ideas of some intellectuals in the West have had a negative impact on society. Although Sowell talks about intellectuals in the West, the role that intellectuals play in China is as important as that in the West.

Intellectuals were held in great esteem in China because they comprised a fraction of the population and because of the examples they set in moral and social mores until they were berated as being inferior to farmers and workers from the 1950s to 1970s, which necessitated the transformation of their outlook from the bourgeois to the proletarian.

Fortunately, this period did not last long, and intellectuals reoccupied their superior social status after 1978, known as the "spring for knowledge". Respect for knowledge became a slogan that revived the traditional respect for intellectuals and the ideas they provided.