It is only some two years since Wang Ruoshui shot to prominence in China, when official condemnation of the gathering wave of interest in humanism and "socialist alienation" came to a head in the campaign to eliminate spiritual pollution of October-December 1983.1 Wang was dismissed from his politically sensitive post of deputy editor of the People's Daily at the height of the campaign, reportedly by the preeminent party spokesperson on ideological matters, Hu Qiaomu himself. In mid-1984 he was nominally reinstated, (...) having in the meantime circulated a strong defense of his views, explicitly directed against the official line promoted by Hu. (shrink)