Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  On that day, Chen Pingyuan handled it calmly. After Danqing’s speech, he simply said: “Today’s speeches are excellent,” and wrapped up the day. Later on, he told Danqing that he intended to include his speech in the planned conference volume. Danqing said that he didn’t want to cause him any “trouble,” but Chen Pingyuan replied that he would do “some prepublishing treatment.” That meant, of course, that he, as the volume editor, would cut out whatever lines were unfit to print. Danqing said that would be fine, that he could cut whatever was necessary.

  Days went by, then weeks, then months. Nothing happened. No punishment. The excitement of the moment was over. The incident also faded. It didn’t seem to have left any traces.

  A friend of mine, a magazine editor, made this observation about the incident: “Chen Danqing managed to keep a certain freshness and edge by staying abroad all these years, but he might not understand what the Chinese intellectuals have been through in the years since Tiananmen. So he did his show, and people watched his performance and smiled. Then it’s over.”

  I talked with Danqing later on. He said he “totally understood” what Chinese intellectuals had been through in the 1990s. “It’s not that they don’t like what I said. I think they don’t like themselves—they don’t like the circumstances that made them not say what I said.” He sighed. “All of us are pitiable. We all have to make a living off this bowl of rice.”

  He continued: “University life nowadays is all about personal interests and careers. Unless you really step inside, become a member of the system, like I did when I got this job—which means that I’m on the university’s payroll and depend on the university for housing and so on—you won’t understand the real picture.” The picture he painted is rather unattractive. The professors generally appear as selfish careerists, hypocritical philistines, or timid weaklings. Unmoved by higher ideals or true intellectual passion, they are petty creatures chiefly motivated by protecting and advancing their own economic and political advantages. Real intellectual or scholarly debates don’t exist anymore; what professors really fight over are power and material gains.

  “I understand now why my students have a certain contempt for their teachers, because they’ve watched them behave like cowards and hypocrites.” Chen Danqing said. He said he also realized that he would never be fully trusted or allowed to get close to any position of power at the university, since he has been away for so long. “When I had just returned from the United States, a friend asked me what my plans were: to really do something, or just to get by. I said of course to really do something. But now I know I could never make any difference within the system.”

  Liu Dong would never agree with Chen Danqing’s verdict. Even though he himself has stayed within the system, paid a price for it, and been through plenty of ups and downs, he remains convinced that one could, yes, not only make a difference, but also help make history.

  In the 1980s Liu used to be one of the active public intellectuals: he was on the editorial boards of two very influential book series that translated and introduced important Western intellectual works to general readers in China. Then, in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, he was investigated and left jobless and nearly homeless. His wife left him and took their apartment, and for years he moved from one borrowed apartment to another. He was kicked out from these apartments three times. Now he owns three apartments and a car. Remarried, he and his young, pretty wife live in a 269-square-meter (around 3,000 square feet) nicely renovated penthouse apartment with a rooftop garden, an ornamental waterfall, a Japanese-style dining room, a movie-screening room, a giant jacuzzi bathtub, and a huge library.

  Once, while we were drinking tea and chatting by the grape trellises on his deck, I said to Liu Dong, “This is probably how professors back in the republican era used to live. Now you are finally living as comfortably as them!” Liu beamed. There was pride and satisfaction on his face.

  Later on, Liu said to me: “You know why I made my home such a plush place? It’s for my students. I invite them over a lot; sometimes I hold seminars here. Nowadays so many students want to go abroad or go into business when they graduate. I want to show them a scholar can also live well.”

  But Liu is touchy about the compromises a Chinese scholar has to make to stay within the system. He likes to tell his story about the American general Patton and the Soviet general Zhukov. Once he asked his students which general they admired the most; all the students chose Patton. But Liu told them Zhukov was the more admirable hero because, being Stalin’s general, he had to fight both on the war front and back home. Stalin never trusted Zhukov and was on the verge of killing him, even though Zhukov had won the war for the country. Patton, with all his military genius and principles, had a single focus; Zhukov had to overcome tougher, far more complicated circumstances, since he had to fight not only against the country’s enemies but also for his own survival!

  After telling me this story, Liu told me, almost in the same breath, about a visit he made to an old Chinese academic friend. The friend left China after the Tiananmen massacre, declaring that he would never return as long as the government refused to reverse its stance on the incident. Liu had recently seen him in London, where the friend has been teaching and residing. “I admired his high moral principles and integrity,” Liu told me. “He still sticks to his decision. But this means he will probably spend the rest of his life in this selfexile in a foreign country, doing some inconsequential teaching. No influence. If he had stayed in China, how much more he could do! With his knowledge, his ideas, he could do so much work to help change the system!”

  Do not leave China, stay close to the homeland, or your work will lose meaning, your life will become weightless, and you will be irrelevant to those who care about and value you until you fade into oblivion in some faraway corner of the earth (which includes New York, London, Paris). This notion, this fear, is so central, so deep, that it justifies a lot of the compromises one has to make in order to stay “in.”

  Or not get kicked out. Chen Danqing is not afraid of speaking out as he did at the Beida conference. In fact, he views it as the duty that comes with his privileges. “Precisely because I have a U.S. passport, I’m in a position to say things that my colleagues cannot say.” Though he was disappointed about the university life, about not being able to “really do things” as a professor, he still feels excited by China’s changes. “Even if I quit teaching and go back to my freelance artist life, as long as I live in Beijing, I can walk on Changan Avenue, feel the energy, observe what’s happening. That way I am a part of this historical moment.”

  And he can go on painting, writing, and speaking out. He worries about one thing only: “I don’t want things to get to the point where they won’t allow me to stay in China.”

  4.

  Nobody doubts that China is undergoing an important historical moment. After over two decades of remarkable economic growth, the world is waking up, finally, to the fact that a dominant event of the twenty-first century may be the extraordinary transformation of the world’s most populous country. While others are busy analyzing whether this is a threat or a blessing to the international economy and geopolitical balance, the Chinese government has been busy with its own agenda. It wants to cultivate a new image: China is a “peacefully rising” nation who wants to “link tracks” (接轨, jie gui) rather than clash with the world. Jie gui has become the slogan of the day in China.

  Another new slogan is 科教兴国 (ke jiao xing guo), “raise the country by science and education.”

  Peacefully rising. Link tracks. Raising the country by science and education. All of this points to a new image of China. This is our new path. We are not in an arms race—that’s proven to be a losing cause. Military is not our focus. Economy is—so we are trading on the world market. Science is—so we are building a manned spaceship. Education is—so we are trying to build world-class universities.

  The phrase “building world-class universities” is supp
osed to have been dreamed up by some Beida officials at a meeting. By now it has become a state policy, an official goal set to be accomplished within a deadline of about twenty-five years. The question is: how?

  The central government under Jiang Zemin, in its own blind, condescending manner, seemed to consider funding the crucial factor.

  In May 1998, when Beida commemorated her one hundredth anniversary, Jiang showed up on campus at the celebrations. His speech, which lauded Beida above all for its “tradition of patriotism,” was much highlighted in the media. The occasion, in the eyes of many critics, was a symbolic moment of China’s most celebrated liberal bastion hijacked by big politics, the intellectuals’ voices made weak and subservient to the voice of the Party. But it turned out that Jiang Zemin, who had a childlike love of the limelight, came to the campus to perform a double role: Boss and Santa. Calling on Beida to lead other Chinese universities in the drive to “build world-class universities,” the general Party secretary also announced that the state would dole out, on top of the routine support, 1.8 billion yuan (about $150 million) in the following three years to help Beida achieve the goal. Considering the paltriness of state support—200 million yuan a year, about one-third of Beida’s annual operating expenses—this was a big bag of money.

  By now, this fund, known as the “985 Project,” is more or less used up. It has helped increase faculty income and add some new buildings and new facilities on campus. But has Beida gotten very close to becoming a “world-class university”? On a campus where few could agree on anything, that’s a question to which everyone would have the same answer: “no.” And many professors I talked with thought the slogan itself was absurd.

  “What’s a world-class university?” Liu Dong demanded over our lunch. “Let’s pick an obvious one: Harvard. Now, the government gives us this 985 money and asks us to compete with Harvard. But what’s Harvard’s annual budget? This is like giving an old broken car—say, my little Renault—a tank of gas and ordering it to race with a Rolls-Royce. Isn’t that a joke?”

  This is a point noted by a lot of observers. Funding is not the solution to Beida’s problems. Beida has always been number one in China, but if it wants to become a truly first-rate university by international standards, it needs a deep structural treatment, not merely a cash injection. This is where the current reformists—the Beida reform plan drafters—come in. To them, the key is faculty: since faculty is the heart of a university, it follows naturally that if you design a system that filters out those not up to the standards and keeps only the first-rate scholars, then Beida would be a world-class university.

  But the critics cried foul: this is another terrible misdiagnosis!

  Yung Ho Chang, a professor of architecture at Beida, explained it to me: “The most corrupt, rotten part of Beida is the administrative sections. Why don’t they reform that first? Because it’s too fat and too powerful, so they turn to the professors, who are weak and powerless!”

  Liu Dong put it this way: “Let’s say Beida is sick—seriously sick. But here comes a doctor who takes a look at this patient, with all his troubled organs, and decides to take a jab at the heart first! It’s ridiculous! Because in fact the heart is the only part that functions relatively well—at least better than the other organs. This sort of surgery might just kill the patient!”

  This remark reminded me of a popular expression in the late 1980s. It was about the dilemma China faced then: to reform, or not to reform? And it went: “Not to reform is waiting for death. To reform is looking for death.”

  Back then, this applied mainly to the big, failing state enterprises such as large factories. And for a while, when political reform looked hopeful, people applied it to the Party. This time, it has shifted to the universities.

  5.

  To the doctor, the “brute surgeon” who drafted the Beida reform plan, a Chinese university is in many ways like a big, failing state enterprise. And as such, it has a lot of the same problems and needs similar treatment.

  Zhang Weiying is a forty-four-year-old economist. He joined the Beida faculty in 1994 after receiving a PhD in economics from Oxford, which put him in the swelling ranks of hai gui—海龟, sea turtles, or 海归, returnees from abroad. Since 1997 he has been serving as the vice dean of Beida’s Guanghua School of Management. Then, in 2002, he was appointed assistant to the president, and his special duty was to be in charge of all the business companies under Beida’s name. Min Weifang, the current number-one leader at Beida, is also a hai gui and had been promoted exactly through that route: after receiving a PhD in the economics of education from Stanford, Min had come to Beida and served as an assistant to the president in charge of Beida’s companies before becoming vice president and Party secretary.

  But then came the Beida reform, and Zhang was appointed the chief drafter of the document. His life suddenly changed.

  In the fury of the controversy, Zhang Weiying became the primary target. Two things about him earned the distrust—and often palpable dislike—of the critics (who are mostly scholars in humanities): he is an economist, and he is a hai gui. For these critics, Zhang is walking proof of China’s warped reform—a Western-trained economist who brings home a wannabe mentality and half-baked formulas he learned from the West and who, instead of solving old problems, makes a mess of things and creates new problems. Like a typical economist, he marches on stridently by the logic of the market and tries to turn the university into an efficient production line, a lean and mean academic market. He is bent on standardizing and downsizing because he sees running the university essentially as a management affair, not a supple and subtle art which requires, among other things, a laissez-faire tolerance and the ability to recognize idiosyncratic geniuses who don’t fit a cookie-cutter plan.

  This is, partly, a backlash from the intensified management in the Chinese universities. Since the early 1990s, officials introduced all sorts of new measures: ranking disciplines, departments, and professors; selecting “PhD and MA sites”; naming “core journals” for publications; subcontracting research projects; and grading awards. This web of “quantifiable standards” and “digital indexing” was then pegged to money: they were used to evaluate and decide a professor’s promotion and pay. So, a professor’s promotion or annual bonus depended on, say, the number of papers he published in the officially designated “core journals” and the number of officially approved “research projects” he participated in. An endless stream of forms and reports were imposed on the faculty so their performance was regularly assessed and monitored. Then, in the past few years, there was also a wave of “merging” universities into “superuniversities” and “upgrading” departments into colleges.

  The rationale for all this was “reform”: to battle sloth, to run universities in a more “scientific” manner, and to divide funds by “objective” standards. But one consequence was a swelling of administrative offices and staff, including “officials with a scholar’s hat”—officials who also take on academic titles such as professors and doctorate advisors.

  Scholars in the humanities fields are especially bitter. “This is not ‘world-class university’ but ‘world-class bureaucracy’!” wrote Deng Xiaomang, a philosophy professor at Wuhan University. “A university is not a chicken farm,” Li Ling, a Beida professor specializing in ancient Chinese language, wrote in a scathing article. Li called it “academic Taylorism.” In his article entitled “From Beida to McBeida,” Huang Ziping, a former Beida professor of Chinese literature now teaching in Hong Kong, called it “McEducation.” Huang noted that Chinese universities have contracted a new disease on top of the old one: before they can get rid of the problem of official control, they are also suffering the problems of the market.

  To all of these critics, Zhang Weiying’s reform plan is another step in this misguided direction. It is worse in some ways, because in this age of “globalization,” hai gui, playing the role of the cultural comprador, appear to be gaining more influence in shaping Chin
a’s future.

  Nothing I had heard about Zhang Weiying prepared me for the man I actually met for dinner. I arrived on time to find Zhang already sitting at an upstairs corner table. I recognized him right away: in my folder was a July issue of Shenghuo Weekly, with a huge head shot of him on the cover and the boldfaced words, “北大改革” (Beida Gaige, “Beida Reform”) printed right bellow his chin. That evening Zhang was dressed in a well-tailored navy blue suit, a white dress shirt, and no tie. He looked younger than his age, with a kind, faintly Buddhalike face and clear, regular features. But his salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses gave him a distinguished, scholarly air. He reminded me of those well-groomed, clean-cut Hong Kong professors until he opened his mouth: he spoke with a northern country accent.

  Zhang Weiying comes from Shaanxi, a very poor part of the Chinese countryside. His parents and grandparents were illiterate peasants. As a kid he used to earn cornbread by helping others with their homework. He was always a brilliant student. While still at graduate school, he wrote a paper proposing a “double track” price system to pave the way for gradual economic reform. It became a big hit at a national economists conference and ended up influencing government policy. Zhang was only twenty-five. That article got him a research job at Tigaisuo (体改所), the important State Council think tank under the liberal premier Zhao Ziyang. From there on Zhang became a player at the forefront of China’s economic reform, quickly establishing himself in the double role of scholar and policy advisor. But, a year spent at Oxford in 1987-88 as a visiting scholar made him realize that he needed deeper training. So, in 1990, a year after Tiananmen, Zhang went to Oxford again on a World Bank scholarship. This time he spent four years there, receiving a PhD in 1995.