That China has a “forum on improving ideological work in universities and colleges” reveals something about the nature of the relationship between the State and universities. At the forum in January, education minister Yuan Guiren warned the country’s universities and colleges “to maintain political integrity and never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes”, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
Earlier that month, the Chinese Communist Party had issued “a guideline on ideological work in colleges, which underscored faculty’s role as facilitators on the front line of championing the concepts of Marxism, Chinese Dream, socialist core values and traditional culture”, Xinhua reported. In December, President Xi Jinping said “the higher learning institutions shoulder the important tasks of studying, researching and publicising Marxism, as well as training builders and successors of the socialist cause with Chinese characteristics”.
Why have senior Communist Party officials apparently stepped up ideological pressure on universities in recent months?
“The Chinese authorities are surely concerned about the possibility of an escalation and politicisation of popular protest as economic growth slows and social problems intensify,” says Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky professor of government at Harvard University whose current research focus includes the politics of higher education in contemporary China.
Prof. Perry says that since the suppression of the student-led Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and ensuing “battery of stringent party controls” on universities, “students and professors have been among the few social groups notably absent from the rising tide of popular protest that has swept across China in the last couple of decades”. “That campus compliance cannot be taken for granted was made clear by the recent Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong, in which university students played a prominent role,” she adds.
Mike Gow, global postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai, whose Ph D thesis examined the relationship between Chinese universities and the State discerns a different motivation. He argues that the Chinese Communist Party views “higher education as being a key sector in which consensus to their overarching view can be negotiated”, particularly in relation to president Xi’s ‘China Dream’ discourse.
In Xi’s first address to the nation as president in 2013, he called for an effort to “push forward the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and strive to achieve the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
Since then, the China Dream has become the defining slogan of his presidency, while remaining vaguely defined as a concept. Attempts have been made to make it integral to people’s thoughts via billboards, chart-topping songs and textbooks, with universities seen as a key means of promoting the concept. The 12 “core socialist values” linked to the China Dream, as articulated by Xi, include prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony and freedom.
“The ‘announcements’ are clearly aimed at party officials in universities and colleges charged with overseeing the higher education sector, not necessarily directed at academic staff,” says Dr. Gow. A Communist Party secretary is the head official in Chinese universities, while the university president is responsible for the day-to-day running of the institution.
Given the prizing of university autonomy in much of the West, does the series of interventions from party figures present a problem for the standing of China’s universities internationally?
According to Perry, “the party specifically tailors its policies to the Times Higher Education and other rankings”. “Unless these rankings are revised to include credit for autonomy, intellectual freedom, and other values the academy holds dear, the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy for ascending in the global rankings of world-class universities is likely to encounter few obstacles,” she says.
(Excerpted and adapted from )