Abstract
Since Xi Jinping came to power nearly three years ago, China has witnessed an intense campaign against anyone who criticises the party. Recently this campaign has moved into universities and sought to muffle both teachers and students alike. As this academic year comes to an end,
Chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution in China 1966
Credit: World History Archive / Alamy
“Strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials. By no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms,” Yuan told the gathering.
“Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms. Never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom, passing on their unhealthy emotions to students.”
Chinese universities were told that they must ensure that the ideas of Xi, China’s current leader, would “enter teaching materials, enter classrooms and enter minds”.
Chinese students and teachers alike have been quick to highlight the initiative’s flaws. Shen Kui, the former vice dean of Peking University Law School, was reported as questioning how you go about distinguishing Western and Chinese values. Besides the crossover and borrowing of ideas – as the opening joke about Marxism implies – there’s the fact that English language textbooks and their translations are frequently used in Chinese universities, especially in natural and social sciences, law, economics and journalism.
Shen also asked how it would be possible to distinguish slurs on the party from legitimate criticism and what legal backing Yuan has for his new proposals. Shen’s inquiry was not well received. Search engines quickly blocked terms related to it, while the communist youth league’s website accused Shen of “harbouring evil intentions”.
Shen’s comments and the subsequent backlash get to the crux of the issue. This crackdown is not about Western thought per se, it’s about the influence of Western, particularly democratic political values.
“Given that the call from the government was purposefully vague and threatening, I don’t think this new development has given rise to deep philosophical debate about what constitutes “Western” value systems. Rather, people perceive this as what it is, a threat, a coercion to force professors and students to kowtow and shut up about criticisms of the Chinese system,” David Moser, a long-time academic in China, told Index.
Last year, even before the latest government announcement, the dean of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Wang Weiguang wrote an article in the newspaper Fei Chang Dao in which he declared: “At home and abroad certain enemy forces make use of the term ‘universal values’ to smear the Chinese Communist Party, socialism with Chinese characteristics, and China’s mainstream ideology. They scheme to use Western value systems to change China, with the goal of letting Chinese people renounce the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, and allow China to once again become a colony of some developed capitalist country.”
Since Xi Jinping came to power at the end of 2012, universities have been a particular focus of Xi’s attempts to suppress freedom of expression. Xia Yeliang, an outspoken economics professor at Peking University and a signatory of the political change petition Charter 08, lost his job in 2013 when he was accused of being a bad teacher. He has said that the decision to dismiss him was deeply unreasonable and politically driven. Then there was Zhang Xuezhong, a law school lecturer, who was dismissed from the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, after he penned a series of articles questioning the legal legitimacy of the ruling communist party and calling for greater civil rights. State media labelled such views as a Western plot to overthrow the party. Zhang responded to this accusation on his WeChat account, one of China’s biggest social media platforms: “At the moment, I told them that writing and publishing the article was completely proper behaviour for a citizen exercising his freedom of expression; that if a faculty member of a higher education institution must give up his legitimate freedom of expression to be ethical, it would be a misfortune and shame for the country.”
Case Study
Chinese universities are “battlefields”
When Xia Yeliang was dismissed from his teaching post at Peking University (PKU) in 2013, he was told that he was a bad teacher. He knows there is more to the story.
Xia, born in 1960, had been teaching economics at PKU since 2000. In June 2013 he was informed by a party official at the school of economics that a faculty vote regarding termination of his position had been scheduled. In October he was formally dismissed. PKU issued the following announcement: “In recent years, Xia’s teaching evaluations have been consistently the lowest of the whole school of economics. The school has received more than 340 student complaints since 2006. The hiring and promotion committee voted against the renewal of his contract on Oct 26, 2012. As a courtesy, the school gave Xia a one-year extension for possible improvement. On Oct 11, 2013, the committee voted again. And 34 out of 37 members showed up, 3 voted yes, 1 abstained, and 30 voted no. The school, therefore, terminated the contract.”
Eighteen months later, Index talked to Xia about the course of events: “I was not totally surprised when I was dismissed, but one of the things that did surprise me was that they said I was one of the worst teachers at the university. But I was one of the best,” said Xia over the phone to Index. Xia was one of the early drafters and signers of Charter 08, which was a 2008 petition asking for an end to the one-party system in China. Xia believes that was one reason that he was laid off. Other reasons, which he thinks are relevant, could be that he wrote a letter accusing his superiors of ideological thought control, not exactly a way to win friends in China. He also said that while teaching at Peking University, several students reported him for saying things that were against the government.
“I heard students were being subsidised by the state and part of the condition of that is that they report on teachers and students,” he explained. “If anyone tries to challenge the Chinese Communist Party, they’ll make your life very difficult.”
Here Xia is not just referencing his dismissal. Prior to October 2013, he was under house arrest for a spell, had his phone tapped and his computer hacked.
When he was eventually fired, Xia was not able to retaliate. Any articles in defence of Xia were blocked from being published and he was given the cold shoulder when he approached publications, all of which were quick to run stories against him. Amongst those who attacked him were colleagues from PKU.
“No one there spoke up for me in public. I just received a few private calls,” said Xia.
For Xia, Chinese universities are “battlefields”, and this is nothing new. “For many years the CCP has exerted ideological control over education and youth.”
That said, he is concerned about an escalation in recent years. “I think many of my friends and colleagues are frightened recently. Even when they talk with friends they need to be careful.”
Despite Xia’s ordeal he is optimistic about the future in China. He is currently based in Washington DC at the Cato Institute. He continues to strive for democracy and freedom of expression in his home country through the work he does at Cato and through using Chinese social media to apply pressure. He says some old academics continue to speak out which is another reason to not lose heart, even if the system does look particularly set against Xia and his more outspoken, reformist cohort.
Index tried to reach Zhang to get a statement, but Zhang’s WeChat account no longer exists and information online only pertained to positions he previously held.
The crackdown has also taken aim at ethnic minority academics. In the most famous example, Ilham Tohti, a well-known Uyghur economist at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, was jailed in September 2014 following accusations that he was spreading separatist thought and inciting racial hatred.
Guizhou province has plans to install closed circuit cameras in its universities to cover all classroom lectures and tutorials
Meanwhile, efforts to detect other critical parties have seen Guizhou province announce plans to install closed circuit cameras in its universities to cover all classroom lectures and tutorials, supposedly in order to perform “quality control” checks. Liaoning Daily, a party-run newspaper in north-east China, dispatched reporters to spy on teachers in university classrooms in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenyang and Wuhan. Another subsequent article criticised some teachers for holding a dismissive attitude towards socialist theory, comparing Mao with Chinese emperors, arguing in favour of Western-style political systems with separation of powers and questioning decisions of the party.
“There have been rumblings and grumblings for the last decade, but nothing this intimidating and clearly stated. Nothing like this happened under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Academics are spooked, for sure, and I would say that most of the more outspoken professors have muted their message,” said Moser.
Since the party came to power in 1949, Chinese universities have never been able to exercise full freedom of expression. During the cultural revolution, universities all but ground to a halt, as student militia, called Red Guards, effectively silenced the profession in their quest for ideological synchronicity. Today several topics still remain out-of-bounds such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and subsequent massacre.
Since the 1970s, 3.05 million Chinese people have studied abroad, wanting to leave for a mixture of reasons including to avoid censorship. Only half of these have returned.
Index spoke to charity worker Wei Wei, who was initially enrolled at Beida, Beijing’s top university. “I dropped out because it’s a horrible school. It’s meant to be the most liberal school in the country, a place to create poets. But it’s not like that at all. It’s very mind-controlling.” He managed one term there before applying to study in the USA.
Since the 1970s, just over three million Chinese people have studied abroad, wanting to leave for a mixture of reasons, including to avoid censorship
Of course, not everyone can afford the luxury of foreign study, and fortunately for those who stay, while certain topics still remain off-bounds in the lecture halls, Chinese universities have become more free-thinking in general. Recent modernisation has translated into students who are more open to Western influences and have more social and economic freedoms.
“Professors have become increasingly bold about mentioning the flaws in the Chinese system and extolling the values of Western systems,” said Moser.
This scares the communist party. Universities are known the world over as hotbeds for political activism and plurality and this has also been the case in China. It was after all students who took to Tiananmen Square in 1989. Just last year, it was predominantly students who protested in Hong Kong.
President Xi Jinping shakes hands with teachers and students at Beijing Normal University, September 2014
Credit: Xinhua / Alamy
Despite the recent crackdown, Moser is cautiously optimistic about the future of universities in China, believing the storm will pass. He’s not the only one. Nailene Chou Wiest, an academic who has worked in both China and the USA, told Index that “the ‘cleansing of Western ideas’ comes every several years” and can lead to arrests and imprisonment at worst, but the vast majority are left alone. For several years she taped everything she said in the classroom for self-protection. Since nothing happened, she stopped taping.
“The control of academics is exerted in other ways: withholding lucrative grants, promotion, foreign travel. Pre-publication censorship is de rigueur.” That said, she doesn’t believe there will be a significant exodus of students and staff.
“By many measures professors fare better than in the US. Even a junior faculty member enjoys job security and benefits. Moreover, the Chinese society still has a healthy respect for men and women of learning. Despite ‘censorship’, there are many safety valves, publishing abroad being one of them.”
© Jemimah Steinfeld