Conditional Democracy

The Contemporary Debate on Political Reform in Chinese Universities

Émilie Frenkiel

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781910259511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Démocratie

Little is known about the political views of non-dissident Chinese intellectuals.For this book, Émilie Frenkiel has been granted unprecedented access to the discussions of politically committed Chinese who have been part of the intellectual debate on post-Tiananmen reform.Her in-depth research elicits lively views that reflect the yearnings and fears of the country's political elite, and reveal the diversity of approaches to China's democratisation.'In the west, where most of us think that democracy based on competitive elections is mankind's ultimate and inevitable political journey's end, we tend to hear only the opinions of Chinese who share our beliefs. Émilie Frenkiel's book gives voice to a large number of prominent Chinese academics, helping us better understand ? without reinforcing our prejudices ? what that country's academic elite thinks about their present and prospective political system. This rich, informative and refreshing inquiry will help us view the contemporary political debate in China through less distorted lenses.'Pasquale Pasquino, New York UniversityÉmilie Frenkiel's book thoroughly renews our understanding of the Chinese debate on democracy and political reform – a debate often simplistically presented in the West through typologies differentiating 'liberalism', 'new left' or 'cultural nationalism'. She studies the biographical itineraries, the works, the modes of involvement in public debate and the relationship with the political authorities of twenty prominent intellectuals, and she uncovers rarely studied realities: how the 'market of ideas' works, how to have influence on leaders, and in particular how to spell out acceptable criticisms in the Chinese context. She also originally shows that beyond the diversity of viewpoints, Chinese intellectuals share a technocratic vision of politics, an obsession with the meritocratic ideal and an approach to democracy based on capacity – on the conviction that the Chinese population is not yet up to the task of electing its leaders. A milestone.'Pierre Rosanvallon, Collégrave;ge de France'The official political discourse in China is uniform and, to be frank, boring. Over the last three decades, however, Chinese intellectuals have been carrying out fascinating and often heated debates about China's political future. Drawing on extensive interviews with the key players, Émilie Frenkiel brings these debates to light. Thought-provoking and balanced, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn more about China's political possibilities.'Daniel A Bell, Tsinghua University, BeijingÉmilie Frenkiel's book is fascinating for all scholars that work on, or are interested in, China, but it will also be of interest for political theorists. The debate among Chinese intellectuals – especially political scientists active in the public sphere – shows how they are trying to conceptualise an original path to democracy in the twenty-first century, and demonstrates clearly that beyond the rule of the CCP, the country is moving politically very fast. This provincialises Europe and the USA: part of this debate is highly specific, but another one echoes the search for an answer to the crisis of political representation in Western countries. A book that helps us to better understand the world we live in.'Yves Sintomer, Université; Paris 8

Chapter One

Horses in a Pen? The Situation of Chinese Academics

For a few years, humanities and social sciences departments in the three most prestigious universities in China – that is, Peking University, Tsinghua (Beijing) and Fudan University (Shanghai) – have been ranked among the top 50 in international rankings like Times Higher Education-QS World University. However, while these long-neglected and even censored disciplines are in the process of being normalised, the international media coverage of the more or less intense pressures academics have faced in these last few years reminds us that their working conditions differ radically from those of their European and North American counterparts. This chapter makes an assessment of their situation. It aims to understand the status currently granted to Chinese academics. In that perspective, I will rely on the example of academics engaged in political science and reflection on political change in government studies, public administration, international relations and history departments; in particular, I will focus on the trajectories of 20 or so influential academics who push for political reform proposals through their research and publications. Scrutinising the Chinese academics dedicated to such a ‘sensitive’ subject as political reform has the advantage of uncovering the contradictions with which they struggle while conducting their research. They are indeed torn between constraints on academic freedom, official demands, professionalisation, internationalisation, opening to the market, patriotism and political commitment.

Reopening humanities departments: ‘The great leap forward’ (1978–2010)

Since the reforms Deng Xiaoping launched in the wake of the Eleventh Party Congress of August 1977, the Chinese government has repeatedly underlined the importance of knowledge and expertise as the foundation of political decision-making. As a result, official hostility towards law and political science studies has gradually receded. These disciplines have become truly indispensible to the juridical reforms that have been undertaken, which are themselves vital to the opening up of the market economy. Social sciences were also publicly recognised again. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the highest institution in academic research in the field of philosophy and the social sciences, was founded in 1977, to allow the government to meet the objectives established by the Four Modernisations policy.¹ The reorganisation of departments led to the creation of 18 research institutes – in philosophy, economics, industrial and agricultural economics, finance and trade, world economics, law, literature, linguistics, history, modern history, world history, archaeology, world religion, ethnology, journalism and information. The application of social science knowledge to the setting up of policies and social programmes intensified. New disciplines such as international relations, demography, law, sociology, anthropology and political science emerged and the work of academics from these fields was encouraged: through sending academics for studying and training abroad; publishing translations of major reference books and giving academics new responsibilities. Simultaneously with the Open and Reform policy, a true charm offensive has been launched towards intellectual professions for the last 30 years. The income of academics has been increased considerably and they have recovered the prestigious status they lost during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards called them the ‘stinking ninth category’ (chou lao jiu), stigmatising them as of low status and their contribution to the advancement of society as insignificant. As for teachers, academics were promoted to the rank of ‘soul engineers’, equal to workers and peasants. Their salaries have risen and their living conditions improved, with better access to accommodation, schools for their children and the reorganisation of unions.

Consequences of the Open and Reform policy for higher education

In April 1978, a conference on national education discarded the priority given to class struggle and replaced it with modernisation as the ultimate aim of education. This decision was passed simultaneously with the return of the university entrance examination and signalled the beginning of higher education’s rapid expansion. This new era was stamped by the idea, which Hu Yaobang notably emphasised, that the Four Modernisations (of agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology) could not be achieved without the help of a large contingent of scientists and experts. Science and technology have been closely associated with China’s modernisation because they are vital to the Four Modernisations and the improvement of the population’s living conditions. As a result, new departments have been opened to train new scientists and technocrats.² People debate the inconvenience of academic politicisation in a non-democratic context, since academic freedom relies on a democratic system. As early as 1979, Li Shu wrote in an article published in Historical Research that an ‘environment where a scientist can work without fearing and dare express his opinions’ is the prior condition for the development of science and culture. He added that academic work couldn’t be limited to explaining policies. Intellectuals must be allowed to make proposals and bring advice regarding economic and social policies.³ Reforming the system of the intellectual professions was officially connected to successful economic reforms in Zhao Ziyang’s speech at the third plenary session of the Twelfth Central Committee in October 1984, condemning persisting forms of anti-intellectualism in China:

In our drive for socialist modernisation we must respect knowledge and talented people. We must combat all ideas and practices that belittle science and technology, the cultivation of intellectual resources and the role of intellectuals. We must take resolute action to redress cases of discrimination against intellectuals which still exist in many localities.⁴

In the early 1980s, exchange programmes with many foreign countries were reinstated and most OECD countries launched development-aid programmes, to enhance opportunities for Chinese students to study abroad. The World Bank financed many projects aiming at encouraging training visits abroad for the higher education teaching community. It was indeed crucial at the time for Chinese universities to start catching up with other universities in the world. Under Soviet influence, the development of higher education since 1949 was supposed to ‘serve economic construction, which is the foundation for any construction (whether political, cultural or of national defence)’.⁵ The whole system, which was extremely centralised, was therefore structured to ensure higher education would directly contribute to the economic and social objectives of the first Five-Year Plan. The main aim was to train a disciplined elite corps of specialists in all the fields that were necessary to the new socialist state and industrialisation, which led to the decline and restructuring of social sciences and humanities. The consequences of the Cultural Revolution and the radical desire to overthrow experts and top-down policies and ‘cleanse’ the elitist selective system so as to open up peasants’ and workers’ access to education were extreme: mass primary and secondary schooling were introduced but access to higher education totally frozen.⁶ Besides, most university faculty were sent to ‘May Seventh Schools’ (wu qi ganxiao) for cadres’ re-education through rural labour at that time. As a result, academics were distanced from their work for a long period of time. This can help explain why so few, among the interviewed scholars, aligned themselves with major professors who had impressed them during those years.⁷

Consequently, in the early 1980s, the task ahead was daunting: everything had to be started from scratch. In Chinese universities, that era was one of hope and promise. In 1985, the education reform officially promised more autonomy to universities in terms of curricula and textbook selection.⁸ Universities became not only teaching but also research centres, in contrast to the Soviet model which had limited them to professional training and teaching. However, from the mid 1980s, disappointment and demoralisation began to creep in. Awareness that job opportunities were scarce for young graduates, who were more and more numerous, and that the top professional and bureaucratic positions had been monopolised by former graduates, enticed the most talented students to study and work abroad.

Our aim here is not to get into the details of the upheavals affecting Chinese universities since the Open and Reform policy but to understand the key features of higher-education reform: that is, reinstating research as the central mission of universities; reopening social sciences like sociology and anthropology, which had been forbidden since the 1950s; official recognition of the major contribution of ‘soft sciences’ and applied social sciences; questioning ultra-specialisation; and a more global approach to knowledge and greater freedom for universities to select academic curricula.

How Chinese universities operate

What makes the Chinese case singular is that any university or higher-education institution is always managed by two authorities: the Party and the administration. University presidents and Party secretaries depend on the CCP’s Organisation Department (zhongguo gongchandang zhongyang zuzhi bu), in charge of nominating and overseeing bureaucrats. From the point of view of human resources and institutions, the organisation of Chinese universities is not so different from that of ministries. The system is highly hierarchical. All public universities are administratively ranked according to their level of excellence. The best universities are ranked as vice-ministries and their presidents as vice-ministers (fubuzhang).⁹ There were 14 at first; by 2000 there were 31 of them. The other universities are ranked as bureaux (ju) and the least prestigious institutions as vice-bureaux. Debates on universities’ administrative rank have discussed whether this ‘bureaucratisation’ is harmful to their quality. This actually signals the central role the state plays in allocating resources, recruiting the staff and ordering the hierarchy of institutions. As a result, a university president is hierarchically subordinate to the Party secretary, even though, from an administrative perspective, he or she is ranked general director or vice-minister. This structure guaranteeing the Party’s domination of higher education was set up in 1949, when all private education was abolished and schools were merged into public ones. The Party therefore had authority over any education institution’s political principles and orientations and over teachers’ hiring. Since 1985, however, a university president has had the final say over non-political decisions; political decisions being reserved to the university’s Party secretary. Defining what is political or not is subject to interpretation but a political dimension can be found in all major decisions.¹⁰ Consequently, public universities are all under the control of regional or national public authority.¹¹

From the late 1980s on, universities started to face scarce public financing and intense economic pressure, and inflation reduced the modest salaries of academics, which led the latter to look for alternative sources of income. The term ‘chuangshou’, (creating income) designates very diverse lucrative activities, ranging from teaching and research activities based on academic expertise to purely commercial occupations, which individuals, departments and sometimes whole universities undertake. The benefits harvested by companies founded within universities like Tsinghua or Peking University are anything but insignificant.¹² This leads to great income inequalities between academics, disciplines and institutions, which we will later focus on.

In some universities, up to 80 per cent of academics are Party members and academic research is ruthlessly oriented by government policies and ‘national subjects’ (guojia keti). A complete political-orientation guidebook, the guidelines for national research projects (keti zhinan) and the subjects that are publicly funded guide social sciences researchers away from fundamental towards applied research.¹³ However, research is manifestly becoming more professionalised, with academics taking refuge in key universities (zhongdian daxue): top-rated institutions and social sciences academies subjected to strict academic norms modelled on international standards.

Limits to academic freedom

Chinese academics cannot express themselves in a totally autonomous way since censorship still exists and careers can be threatened at any time if comments or research displease some official. In this context, what is the nature of academics’ freedom of action? How can they fulfil their mission of developing and spreading critical knowledge, which, a priori, implies the effective and strict respect of academic freedom?

As to publication, it is easier to publish in internal (neibu) outlets, which are less affected by censorship because they address a more select readership than mainstream journals and magazines.¹⁴ It is also easier to publish in specialised journals than in the mass media. According to People’s University Kang Xiaoguang, rules are straightforward.

An official slogan explains that research is free but publications are controlled [yanjiu you ziyou, chuban you jilu]. This means that you can undertake all the research you want, no one will pay heed, but if you try to publish them, especially in the mass media, things will get more complex. When you write a challenging article in People’s Daily, you are not the one in trouble. The newspaper is. As a result, researchers are completely free to conduct their research. Academic freedom is a fact. No one is afraid of focusing on one specific issue, but the opportunities for publication are limited. For instance, my books cannot be published on the Chinese mainland. They are published in Singapore or Hong Kong and the government does not pay attention. I won’t be persecuted for that. On the contrary, leaders will rather buy the book and read it. Therefore, the government, the Party and academia are in no trouble to communicate. Academic freedom is under no constraint, contrary to publications. On the other hand, purely academic research is rarely under control. For instance, specialised journals such as Sociological Studies [shehuixue yanjiu] and Economic Studies [jingji yanjiu] are never censored even if some articles can be quite radical. Censorship affects popular media, addressing a large public. The essential element is that if power believes one scholar is important, he will look for him and ask him what the findings of his latest research are.¹⁵

As a matter of fact, the standards to be...