Opinion & Commentary
China’s complicit universities
It is true that intellectuals tend to give more weight to their role in society than is generally warranted. But it is also true that intellectuals are one of the first groups targeted by authoritarian regimes striving to hold on to power. Usually it is their oppression that occurs. It was the oppression of intellectuals – academics, authors, poets, playwrights - that led to their disillusionment with the regime in the Soviet Union. Notably, it was these same intellectuals that rejoiced when the Soviet Union imploded.
China too has seen recent history of intellectual repression. In 1957, Mao Zedong infamously asked of the country’s intellectuals to express themselves and let ‘a hundred flowers bloom’. They did and the regime subsequently arrested many of them for fomenting dissent against the Party.
That was fifty years ago. China has changed a great deal since. But in still-authoritarian China today, it is not the repression of intellectuals – especially academics and students - that is striking but the co-optation and even creation of them by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Academic activity in China is flourishing as is debate about economics, society, culture, and even politics. For example, there are over fifty research centres of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, covering 260 disciplines with four thousand full-time researchers. These are not faceless, talentless Party hacks in grey cement rooms churning out Party propaganda. They are a group of highly able and qualified individuals engaged in genuine and open debate about policy and the future of their country. There are over ten million Chinese students in universities and around 140,000 Chinese students studying overseas – many in the best universities in America, Europe and Australia.
Education tends to bring with it intellectual confidence, capacity to reason and argue, as well as suspicion of existing doctrine and ideology. As these educated classes grew in size and became more prosperous, we assumed they would lead increasingly loud calls for political reform and even democracy. After all, the Tiananmen protests in 1989 were led by 150,000 mainly students and intellectuals calling for political change and erected a statue they named the ‘Goddess of Democracy’. Twenty years ago, many of China’s best academics associated democracy with social justice and prosperity. But now they associate it with risk, chaos and loss of privilege. All surveys, studies, and anecdotes suggest that most prefer to stay out of politics. When pressed for an opinion, they overwhelmingly prefer one-Party rule. In fact, students and academics (along with businesspeople) are the fastest growing groups applying for Party membership. Almost a third of graduate university students are card-carrying CCP members.
This has not occurred by chance but by design. The CCP learnt important lessons from the Tiananmen protests as well as from the collapse of Communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Those latter regimes antagonized and isolated the highly educated within their own societies. Worse still, those regimes became more and more irrelevant as social and economic structures changed. The failures of these authoritarian regimes to adapt were their undoing and the disenfranchised educated classes were the first in line to dance on these regimes’ graves.
In contrast, the CCP has conducted a tireless and largely successful campaign to remain relevant and get academics and students on side.
The first step has been to preserve its economic relevance. The regime has gone to great lengths to maintain control of the major levers of economic power and this control is at the heart of an economic structure that entrenches the role and position of Party members in Chinese economy and society.
Vast resources are directed toward the creation and enrichment of the educated classes. By controlling the lion-share of economic resources of the country, by retaining control of institutions that intellectuals work within, and by overseeing an extensive system of awards, promotions, and regulation, the regime continues to dispense a dominant share of the most valued economic, professional, and intellectual opportunities.
Students who want to get ahead do much better by working closely with rather than independently of Party officials and state-run institutions. For example, the best students are offered special stipends by the regime while academic appointments are made by Party insiders. Scholarships are handed out by CCP-staffed committees. In think-tanks and bureaucracies, academics are asked to perform the legitimate task of debating important social issues. They are rightly rewarded for coming up with useful ideas and policies. But if they call for a reassessment of one-Party rule in China, they are warned, dismissed, or arrested. At best, they are shunned and ignored by state-funded institutions depriving them of a livelihood. Subsequently, these four thousand researchers in the state-sponsored Academies debate what the government should do in order to solve the many problems within the country – poverty, inequality, economic imbalances, environmental degradation, and so on - but they never advocate multi-party and democratic reform as a solution. Given that they are offered a comfortable living if they play by the rules, why would these intellectuals choose to upset the political apple cart?
The regime remains able to take away success, livelihood, and professional recognition, just as it remains able to offer these things. The political conservatism of China’s tertiary educated elites is based mainly on a combination of financial and professional inducements, as well as selective ostracism and repression of those who do not tow the political line. Furthermore, given that this group is one of the main beneficiaries of the state-led development model, genuine democratisation would inevitably lead to some redistribution of the country’s resources and opportunities. Far from an independent class, why would China’s state-sponsored thinkers want to change to a democratic system when it could leads to their own dispossession?
But it is not just about carrot and sticks. Patriotism and nationalism also play an important role. China’s academics and particularly students are amongst the most patriotic of any group within Chinese society. They feel justifiably proud of China’s achievements and see themselves as representative of China’s new found success, wealth and prestige.
These sentiments have also been used by the regime to build a consensus that places the CCP as the guardians of China’s historic return to greatness. Criticism of China’s political system, especially by outsiders, is treated by these elites as criticism of ‘China’ itself.
With the Cold War still in recent memory, many in the West assumed that Chinese academics and students would be the ones to lead the cry for political reform, just as many did in the Soviet Union. However, China’s economic growth has in many respects enhanced the capacity of the CCP to remain in power. It has at least allowed the CCP to co-opt and even create many of the educated elite and its capacity to continue to do so is deeply entrenched. Far from agitators for democracy, we need to face the reality that most of these highly educated elites see a one-Party state as the better bet for themselves and the country in the foreseeable future.
Dr. John Lee is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. His paper, Putting Democracy in China on Hold, was released by CIS on the 28 May.
