In general, its advocates wanted to curb Western-inspired liberal ideas among the Chinese populace, a by-product of nascent economic reforms and the "New Enlightenment" movement which began in 1978.
[2][3] Spiritual pollution has been called "a deliberately vague term that embraces every manner of bourgeois import from erotica to existentialism", and is supposed to refer to "obscene, barbarous or reactionary materials, vulgar taste in artistic performances, indulgence in individualism" and statements that "run counter to the country's social system" according to Deng Liqun, the Party's Propaganda Chief at the time of the campaign.
[5] The campaign against spiritual pollution can be said to have its origins in the Twelfth Party Congress held in September 1982, during which Deng Xiaoping stated his intention to continue China's march towards economic modernization and liberalization, a process that he initiated in 1978.
Attempting to maintain a balance between the conservative and moderate factions in the Party, Deng tempered his emphasis on continued economic development with a call to build up China's "socialist spiritual civilization" so as to preserve its socialist ideological orientation and protect it against the unwanted societal impacts of "bourgeois liberalism", which had begun trickling in since the policy of opening up began in 1978.
The constitution rejected the ultra-left ideology of the Mao era, provided for greater protection of citizens' dignity and civil liberties, and advocated for an orderly, institutionalized and accountable system of justice.
The new constitution carried significant caveats, however; it specified, for instance, that citizens' freedom of privacy and correspondence were protected, except in cases where it was of interest to the state.
[8] Although some Chinese officials, including Deng Liqun, saw some value in the writings of the humanist intellectuals, by June 1983, fears were growing that criticism of this nature had the potential to severely undermine the political and ideological basis for the Communist Party's legitimacy.
In June 1983, premier Zhao Ziyang delivered an address at the opening of the Sixth National People's Congress warning against the growing liberal tendencies in academic and artistic circles, and criticized such trends as being representative of a decadent ideology at odds with the goals of socialism.
[9] Following Zhao's speech, conservative Party journals began linking the recent crime wave with the scholarly discourse on humanism.
The editors of Red Flag, for instance, declared that "Various kinds of crime are bound to occur where the influence of bourgeois extreme individualism...is still present.
[12] The campaign against spiritual pollution came as a response to an unprecedented public intellectual discussion that heated up in the early 1980s on the question of "alienation" and "humanism".
[16] As Wang Jing argues, "What was remembered was not only personal wounds inflicted upon each individual by the Revolution and the Gang of Four--a cliche that outlived its appeal by the mid-1980s--but also the repressed memory of the early history of Marxism, specifically, the humanist epistemology of the young Marx epitomized in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844".
There were "orthodox Marxist-Leninists", commonly found among power holders in the high establishment; "revisionists", widely regarded by the West as reformists or progressives; and the young humanist Marxists, recognized by a continuously critical voice.
Based on Wang's argument, Bill Brugger and David Kelly, in their Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era, interpret it as the idea that "A Marxist view of human nature should be not pre-social in the manner of the social contract theorists but trans-social"[20]: 161.
[25] In Brugger and Kelly's conception, the critical elements within the alienation school's theories "have played an important historical role"[20]: 169 and that "humanism was in fact taking a new turn in Wang Ruoshui's hands".
[20]: 5 Because of the ideological undertone his view has, Wang came to provide an "important intellectual support" for students who participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations in late 1986 and early 1987.
[20]: 5 Zhou Yang's view that the presence of alienation shows merely a malfunction of socialism rather than the inherent shortcoming of the system itself became one of the major targets of critiques from later scholars.
[18]:18 For Wang Jing, the fact that the alienation school remains theoretically limited stems from their belief that "de-alienation could be achieved simply by resorting to the objective emancipatory means implemented by a revitalized socialist system and an enlightened Party leadership,"[18]: 18 while foreign commentators like Jing Wang may suggest that the communist party, which has the monopoly over the materials and course of production, might be "the real problem".
For Kelly, who wrote as early as in 1987, there seemed to be a "moral conviction" among intellectuals like Wang Ruoshui to develop, within the framework of Marxism itself, a remedy to the calamities in the fanatical periods of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.