Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  At our dinner that evening, Zhang seemed reserved at first. I mentioned that some people got very upset about the Beida reform because they saw it as a hai gui plot: that the real agenda was replacing Beida’s current tu bie (locally trained) faculty with a mostly hai gui faculty. “Some tu bie scholars feel that your plan gives hai gui a certain advantage—global search, outsider review, English skills. It will let more hai gui into Beida to grab tu bies’ rice bowls. This is serious, like a life-and-death class struggle!” I said.

  Zhang listened to this with a half-amused, half-frowning expression. But when I mentioned the one item in Zhang’s draft that attracted the most virulent attack—that Beida professors should lecture in English—his face fell. “What I meant,” he said flatly, “was simply that a Beida professor should be able to give a talk in English at an international conference. Is that so unreasonable?”

  I guess not, in this day and age. But in the heat of the controversy, Zhang’s point was exaggerated beyond recognition. It was interpreted as an evidence of the reformers’ inferiority complex: only a real colonial subject would worship a foreign language like this! In three widely cited articles, Gan Yang, an influential critic with a New Leftist leaning, charged that Zhang’s plan would turn Beida into a “prep school for American universities for the next ten thousand years.” It is “a design to mess up Beida and China’s higher education,” Gan concluded. And he pointed out that this kind of reform would make China’s universities “abandon their scholarly independence and become other people’s tribal states.” By “other people” he clearly meant Americans.

  “Their arguments lack logic,” Zhang said in a tone of suppressed anger. For emphasis he used the English word for “logic.” He had said the same thing when we first spoke on the phone. In a long interview recently published in a newspaper, Zhang pleaded for gong gong li xing, the rational, reasonable spirit in a public debate. Obviously this was important for Zhang. You could criticize and disagree, but please take a dispassionate, disinterested position and make your position coherent and clear. Please don’t take things out of their context and attack. Please don’t get personal.

  And I understood why. He had taken some nasty shots: besides the signed articles in print, there were loads of venomous remarks on the Web by pen-named critics—a prevalent phenomenon that was a part of China’s new Internet culture. Everything about Zhang was subject to the darkest speculation and questioning: his loyalty to Beida, his commitment to Chinese language and culture, his motives for action, his credentials as an economist. There were even doubts about his Oxford degree—was it real or fake? I got a taste of this in a private discussion with a Beida professor who, though he wasn’t an economist, dismissed Zhang’s scholarship as “superficial” and “watery.” He was convinced that Zhang’s true ambition lay in dang guan (当官), to be an official. It was to that end that Zhang designed the “reform plan,” the professor said. The plan gives the present Beida leadership something to boast about—it’s their zheng ji gong cheng (政绩工程), their official achievements project—so they can climb to higher positions. It also gives officials a new tool with which to control scholars—by rewarding the obedient and punishing the unruly in the name of the new standards. “He’s selling out the intellectuals to climb up,” the professor concluded firmly.

  Xu Youyu, a well-known political philosopher at the Academy of Social Sciences, also warned me not to be naive. “Beida reform is all about zheng ji gong cheng,” he said in the tone of someone wellseasoned in Chinese politics. “If you don’t see this, you haven’t seen through it.” Xu liked Gan Yang’s articles against the Beida reform—to his own surprise. Just a short few years earlier, the two men were on the opposite sides of a ferocious debate between the “Liberals” and the “New Leftists”; but this time, Xu admitted that Gan was the opposition camp’s rightful flag holder. He particularly approved Gan’s questioning of Beida reform’s legal legitimacy. Gan had written that since Beida is a state university, any reform would be illegal unless the state passes new laws to sanction it. To a Liberal like Xu, the notion of law is extremely important.

  So, basically, Zhang Weiying stands to be a treble traitor: as an official servant, he betrays the intellectuals for his own political ambition; as a comprador for the West, he betrays Chinese culture and Chinese dignity; as a designer of an illegal reform, he betrays the Chinese state.

  “He seemed defensive,” one of Zhang’s old friends noted to me. “I think this controversy must be hurting him.”

  I told her that the opposition, so far, has been much louder than the support.

  “It’s very hard to push reform in China,” she said finally. “I think he’ll be sacrificed in the end.”

  “Sacrificed? By whom?”

  “Who else? By the higher-ups.”

  6.

  After our dinner, Zhang Weiying e-mailed me a number of his articles on university reform. Unlike the author of the cool, technical, official Beida documents, Zhang in these articles was more frank and more thoughtful.

  He was also quietly passionate, as a man who was fully aware of the weight of his task and the importance of careful reasoning. The central piece was a long essay entitled “The University’s Logic,” based on an interview Zhang gave to a Beijing newspaper. Here Zhang offered an incisive, bold analysis of the problems of Chinese higher education. In his view, nearly all the problems could be tracked to two sources: government control and the unsatisfactory quality of the professors. He did not mince his words about either one.

  Chinese universities, Zhang wrote, are the product of China’s old planned economy. They are in fact special institutions set up by the government. When all the fundamentals of a university—funding, appointment of the president, organizational structure, size of faculty, curriculum, degree programs, enrollment quota, admission, and tuition—are determined and controlled by the government, the university has very little autonomy. It is not a real university. The only competition within such a system is the unhealthy battling—often through personal connections—for government funding and quotas; and because these battles often depend on the skills of the administrators, it makes them overly powerful and results in a swollen bureaucracy. The officials clamor everyday about “world-class university” and “academic prosperity,” but they themselves are the roadblocks of academic progress. “If China wants to produce world-class universities,” Zhang wrote, “I think the way of government controlling the university must be truly, thoroughly changed, and the university must be allowed to govern [itself]. Otherwise, there is no hope for a first-rate university.”

  This was sharp and direct. Unfortunately, Zhang admitted, changing this basic paradigm is beyond any Chinese university’s power. Commenting on the trends of university reform in Europe and Japan, where the state also plays a heavy role in higher education, Zhang noted that the situation is much worse in China. Unlike in Europe, Chinese universities have almost no tradition of self-governance and therefore few resources with which to confront the government. So, as important and urgent as it is, we can only urge the government to be more liberal.

  But Zhang isn’t satisfied to be merely a finger-pointing critic. His philosophy is that one should do whatever is within one’s power to improve the situation. What the Chinese university can do, he thought, is a kind of partial reform. If we can’t alter the university’s relationship with the government, we can perhaps try to handle the other problem: the unsatisfactory quality of the professors. China’s reform of the big state factories, Zhang pointed out, had also started with small steps, such as introducing the bonus system and encouraging worker mobility. Later it went deeper. At the university, Zhang thought, faculty is the most crucial element, so if we were to design a system that promotes more openness, mobility, and competition on scholarship rather than playing politics, it would help raise the quality level of the faculty. This may not solve the problem of government control, but it would help break down academic tribalism (the powers
of older mentors over their students who stay on to teach in the same department). It may not make a world-class university, but it would help put the pressure on incompetent scholars and attract good scholars to join. In short, it may not be perfect, but it would help push things ahead.

  The intense reaction to this partial reform, Zhang felt, was a sign that it had indeed touched a nerve. It might even be a tupokou, (突破口), a breakthrough point, for deeper reform later.

  And finally, Zhang believed this reform would get the higher officials’ attention. How can they “ignore the wind and waves and just sit still in their fishing boat!” Zhang said.

  Is he a shrewd strategist or a naive dreamer?

  7.

  A week later I met with Zhang Weiying again in his Beida office. I wanted to see him in his own work environment.

  Arriving early on a cold morning, I entered the campus from the south gate. Beida looked very different from the days when I was a student there in the early 1980s. The old part of the campus—the part around Weiming Lake, with the pagoda, the willows and bamboo, the sloppy pine forest, the lovely Chinese courtyard houses and elegant republican-era brick mansions that Liu Dong loves to show off to visitors to prove that the aristocratic spirit is still alive in China—is still there, but it is now surrounded and broken up by the new campus. The new campus consists of modern-style concrete and glass buildings: classrooms, offices, lecture and concert halls, cafeterias, and an expanded library. These are bigger, taller, architecturally mediocre affairs, topped occasionally by a huge tile roof as a nod to tradition. Then, beyond the campus walls, rows of high-rises are visible: these house various business companies Beida built and owned in the 1990s. These new giants, while aesthetically unappealing, stand around with an air of bravado, as though completely confident of their own stature and power in a new era of money and practicality. In 1993, in a gesture of “opening the campus to face the market,” the university took down its southern wall. The wall was erected again in 2001, but the “market wind” had already blown in. “Beida’s campus soil is no longer pure,” an old professor put it to me.

  Zhang Weiying’s office was on the second floor of the Guanghua School of Management, housed in one of the new contemporary building complexes.

  On the lobby wall an introduction of Guanghua’s faculty was posted. It showed many hai gui with doctorate degrees from Western universities. Later Zhang told me that about half of Guanghua’s existing faculty is hai gui, many personally recruited by him—“at a much higher salary than mine.” This seems to confirm what I had heard before: Zhang Weiying is simply trying to expand to the whole of Beida the “reform” he had already implemented at Guanghua.

  Zhang was on the phone when I walked in. Dressed in a dark suit with a purple tie, he was having a typically busy workday: as the vice dean, he had to oversee many of Guanghua’s administrative affairs. That morning he was trying to enlist a Beida vice president’s attendance at the school’s upcoming e-MBA graduation ceremony. “Please help us,” I heard him plead. “It’s a very important occasion for the students.”

  There are more than ten vice presidents, but he couldn’t find one to attend. He shook his head; again I detected frustration.

  His office was spacious but unpretentious; everything in it was functional. Economics books in Chinese or English filled the bookcases. The only personal item was a photo of him in his hometown. When I asked about this, Zhang took out a photo album and showed me some more pictures taken during his last visit to Shaanxi. His village is still very poor and you could see it in these pictures: Barren yellow earth. Mud caves for homes. His illiterate parents. His old elementary school principal. A crowd of peasant folks with weather-beaten faces, and Zhang in his polo shirt and spectacles, looking almost like a character from outer space. This peasant’s son has come a long way.

  I asked him about his work as the assistant to the president. His special charge was Beida’s commercial companies, which had been a thorny issue. These companies, founded mostly in the 1990s, were important sources of Beida’s “income creation”; annual sales revenue in 2002 reached 20 billion yuan, by far the highest in China among university companies. Yet in Zhang’s view, by investing so much energy and resources into profit-seeking business, with its endemic corruption and other managerial problems, Beida has paid a heavy price. The university’s image has been tarnished.

  “In the last ten years,” Zhang told me in a disapproving tone, “there were more media reports about Beida’s companies than about Beida’s scholars.” So he had been working to get Beida to gradually phase out its involvement in so many businesses. He had already shut down twenty to thirty Beida companies. “This made a lot of people unhappy, but for me the number one issue is protecting Beida’s reputation. Plus,” he smiled, “I have an iron face. Coffee is okay, but I don’t go to banquets, and I don’t take money. So there is nothing they can do.... So many resources are being wasted at Beida. If my plan gets implemented, it will be worth at least half a billion yuan a year.”

  I don’t know how he arrived at this sum, but at that moment he did sound like an economist with a calculator in hand. And I remembered professor Li Qiang’s retort to the critics: “They say a university is not a chicken farm, because if it is, then those chickens who don’t lay eggs should get the hell out! But I say a university is not a retirement home either!” Li Qiang, a professor of political science with a PhD from London University, was also a member of the reform plan draft team. He didn’t like being labeled a hai gui because, like Zhang Weiying, he too had grown up in the poor northern countryside. “We know how starved of funding rural schools are. China’s educational spending is so pitiful. Yet the state gives so much money to a few famous universities like Beida.”

  This was no exaggeration. According to a September 2003 United Nations report, China’s average educational spending per person is less than—get ready—Uganda’s! Education spending takes up merely 2 percent of China’s GDP, with 53 percent of it coming from the state budget. But Li said that at Beida, this precious state fund is spent without efficiency. “Why not give some to help the peasants and workers? Weiying and I just want to help save some money!”

  Nevertheless, certain “waste of the resources,” such as Beida’s overemployment, was a messy business to tackle. Besides a swelling bureaucracy, much of it is a socialist legacy, and so the problems are especially severe in the older, bigger departments. The Chinese department, for instance, has always been Beida’s flagship department and has more faculty members than, say, Harvard’s English department. But it has used up nearly all its quota for full professors, with dozens of associate professors waiting in the wings to be promoted. A wide age gap caused by the hiring freeze during the Cultural Revolution has resulted in too few retirements in the next ten years to accommodate new promotions. But firing people because of a quota problem? This is still unacceptable in China, at least at a university—especially when these untenured younger professors are often better trained and therefore better teachers and scholars than some of the full professors who got there chiefly due to seniority. Also, the Chinese department, along with other humanities departments such as philosophy, history, and religion, has suffered a drastic enrollment decline. Since the late 1990s, about half of the Chinese department freshmen were students “reallocated” to the department after failing to get in their first-choice departments such as economics and law. History and philosophy have done even worse. At some universities, the entire freshman class in history and philosophy are “reallocation” students.

  Newer departments such as Guanghua or Beida’s China Center for Economic Research (CCER) don’t have problems like this. They are leaner and financially more independent. Guanghua’s e-MBA program, for instance, charges a U.S. private school rate since it is jointly taught by Guanghua’s faculty and visiting American professors, and its students are mostly wealthy Chinese CEOs. CCER also has lucrative joint-venture course offerings and workshops. Initiated by
a group of U.S.-trained young economists, it was founded in the early 1990s with Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and American money, and all of its present twenty faculty members have PhDs from abroad. Some hold visiting positions at other universities; many earn extra income from research projects commissioned by private companies, regional governments, and foreign foundations.

  Support for Zhang Weiying is strong in these departments. I talked with three professors at CCER; all enthusiastically endorsed the reform plan. Zhou Qiren, an economist with a PhD from UCLA, told me, “The Beida reform is not about hai gui and tu bie. It’s about how to distribute resources, whether by the market or by the state. So all my arguments point ultimately to the state domination.” Zhou admitted that he was inspired by Milton Freedman’s “education voucher”—by the idea of turning the choices of higher education to the customers—the parents and children. Bai Lanzhi, an urban planning specialist with a Berkeley PhD, said, “Those humanities scholars don’t like the government—that I understand. But they don’t like the market either. Is there something they do like?” Chen Ping, with a PhD from the University of Texas, called Beida “a forest of feudal fiefdoms” and the reform plan “a very small step to change.” He told me, “I’d go much further if I were doing it.”

  Their sentiments are hardly surprising. As Western-trained experts in a field in great demands nowadays, they have a confidence and optimism that have everything to do with their advantage on the current market. Faced with marginalization and dwindling influence, their colleagues in the humanities naturally have very different perspectives.