Yesterday’s stray dog, today’s guard dog

Scholar Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage website has posted a translation of a 2007 essay by  “the irrepressible thinker, critic, and essayist Liú Xiǎobō 劉曉波.” Written in 2007, the essay reviews the controversy surrounding a 2007 book on the Confucian Analects, and “then discusses the history and fate of China’s intellectuals as Homeless Dogs, Guard Dogs, Lap Dogs, Whipping Dogs and even Running Dogs.”

Barmé notes that “Liu’s observations on State Confucianism, as well as on the benighted state of China’s intelligentsia, are even more relevant today, in 2019, than when he made them in 2007.”