Bulletin Number Three

role but it is their duty to do so. They can do this in two ways: first, they give a firm response to society's call; second, they must be prepared to critisize the society to which they belong; the former response works towards consensus, while the latter gives expression to their concern and involvement. But looking back at the history of the development of scholarship and ideas in the East, we see that the value of scholarship was mainly based on the assumption that ideological conformity should come before political authority, and that the mission to teach should be more important than the mission to govern. Thus when there was political disorder above, there was still a possibility of learning being promoted below: the Confucian orthodoxy at the lower political stratum can influence the upper political stratum in whose hands the powers of government rested. Let us take a few examples from the history of China. In the second century A.D., the student body of the Imperial Academy joined the outer court officials in a struggle against the corrupt eunuch clique then in power; at the end of the Northern Sung, hundreds of students of the Imperial Academy staged mass demonstrations condemning the non-resistance policy of the court towards the invading Jurchens; the well-known political and social protest of the Dong-lin intellectuals in the early seventeenth century spread to the entire country like a tidal wave; even the intellectual revolution centered at Peking University during the May Fourth period was radically anti-traditional in nature. In short, all these intellectual movements demonstrated their attempts to safegaurd and to pursue the ideals of the ideological orthodoxy. In an article entitled The Sense of Mission in Modem Intellectuals, Jiang Tingfu argues that ‘ninety per cent of the Government officials in China are intellectuals, but intellectuals are particularly fond of critisizing Government officials; the intellectuals who hold office at court and those who hold no office therefore form opposing camps.' According to him, ‘The community tends to think that they are being oppressed by Government officials, not realizing that officials, for their part, feel they are oppressed by the community.' I think this is the way progress comes about in a society. This is also the reason why in an open society, academic achievements are usually greater than in a closed society. But looking at the matter from the point of view of academic temperament, I would like to say that for myself, I am rather inclined to a moderate way of expressing our views on social problems; I think for the benefit of society, for the benefit of our country, the more there are people with a sense of responsibility and the spirit of enterprise, the better it is for society and the country, and the healthier the direction for academic research work. Q. In 1984 ， China and Great Britain initialled a Draft Agreement on the future of Hong Kong, in which it was stated that Hong Kong would be made a Special Administrative Region with its own highly autonomous Government composed of local people and with a commitment to maintaining the present socio-political system of Hong Kong basically unchanged for fifty years. On 6th December that same year, you pointed out when you addressed the Twenty-Eighth Congregation for the Conferment of First Degrees that the value of an intellectual does not merely lie in his ability to solve practical problems through 5