Xia
Yeliang: The China Americans Don't See
By FBWorld Team
A
Peking University economics professor who was sacked for
his political views explains the underside of elite Chinese
higher education.
The
21st-century romance between America's universities and
China continues to blossom, with New York University opening
a Shanghai campus last month and Duke to follow next year.
Nearly 100 U.S. campuses host "Confucius Institutes"
funded by the Chinese government, and President Obama
has set a goal for next year of seeing 100,000 American
students studying in the Middle Kingdom.
Meanwhile,
Peking University last week purged economics professor
Xia Yeliang, an outspoken liberal, with hardly a peep
of protest from American academics.
"During
more than 30 years, no single faculty member has been
driven out like this," Mr. Xia says the day after
his sacking from the university, known as China's best,
where he has taught economics since 2000.
He'll
be out at the end of the semester. The professor's case
is a window into the Chinese academic world that America's
elite institutions are so eager to join-a world governed
not by respect for free inquiry but by the political imperatives
of a one-party state. Call it higher education with Chinese
characteristics.
"All
universities are under the party's leadership," Mr.
Xia says by telephone from his Beijing home. "In
Peking University, the No. 1 leader is not the president.
It's the party secretary of Peking University."
Which
is problematic for a professor loudly advocating political
change. In 2008, Mr. Xia was among the original 303 signatories
of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for democracy, civil
liberties and the rule of law in China. "Our political
system continues to produce human rights disasters and
social crises," declared the charter, written primarily
by Mr. Xia's friend Liu
Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate who is
currently serving an 11-year prison term for "inciting
subversion of state power."
Mr.
Xi, 53, says he had a mostly apolitical youth in Anhui
province, west of Shanghai, where both of his parents
were shipyard workers for China's navy. He never considered
himself a communist and says he always felt drawn to the
West, thanks partly to foreign picture books from his
childhood. He imagined life as a painter or translator,
and after graduating college in 1984 went to work as an
interpreter for the government's Foreign Affairs Office.
His
political awakening came later, in 1987-89, when he studied
management at the University of Toronto, visited several
European democracies-and read Milton Friedman's "Free
to Choose." Friedman's writing helped make Mr. Xia
a classical liberal and, by the mid-1990s, a student of
economics. Today he cites F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,
James Buchanan and Gary Becker among his intellectual
idols. The list also includes Xiakoai Yang, the Chinese
economist-and Mao-era political prisoner-who convinced
him that China cannot thrive without imitating the institutions,
and not just the technologies, of the West.
Institutions
like multiparty constitutional democracy, which Mr. Xia
and his Charter 08 comrades demanded five years ago.
The
following year, Mr. Xia went out on his own to condemn
government censorship in an open letter to Communist Party
propaganda chief Liu
Yunshan, who now sits on Beijing's seven-man
supreme decision-making body. Last year the professor
helped start an online petition demanding an investigation
into the suspicious death of democracy activist Li Wangyang,
and more recently he has taken to Weibo (China's Twitter)
to criticize new President Xi
Jinping and his signature "Chinese dream"
vision of party-led national greatness.
Such
is the context for Mr. Xia's firing, but Peking University
insists that the matter is purely academic. "Xia
Yeliang's teaching evaluation scores were for many years
in a row the lowest of the entire university," school
officials said this week, adding that 25 professors have
been similarly fired since 2008.
"Slander,"
replies Mr. Xia, who says that his evaluation scores were
stronger, and that in any case the school's dismissal
process was a sham based on "no written rule."
Mr.
Xia says he first heard of the dismissal proceedings in
June, when the party secretary of the school of economics
gave him a dressing-down over the telephone: "You
could make suggestions and recommendations and we can
send that to the leaders," Mr. Xia recalls being
told, "but you don't have to say it this way in public.
This is ruining the image of the party and the government."
He
had been hearing similar messages since 2009, when university
authorities warned him to "take good care" of
his position on the faculty (as he told the Associated
Press at the time). The state-run Global Times newspaper,
for its part, denounced the professor last month as an
"extremist liberal . . . advocating freedom and democracy,"
even as it too claimed that his professional troubles
are entirely nonpolitical.
This
claim would be easier to credit if Mr. Xia hadn't already
endured years of intimidation and abuse, on campus and
off: blacklisted from providing commentary on state television,
fired from two research institutes, tailed by plainclothes
police, detained and interrogated repeatedly, harassed
by nighttime phone calls, kept under house arrest for
days, constantly monitored and occasionally hacked online.
With these measures failing to silence him, denying him
a livelihood is an obvious way for the government to escalate.
And
why wouldn't Peking University play enforcer? Well, perhaps
the school could be discouraged if it had to pay a price-within
China, where it still maintains some reputation for relative
liberalism, or more likely abroad, where it has established
lucrative partnerships with Western universities that
supposedly cherish liberal principles. These include Columbia,
Stanford, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn
State, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University
of Chicago, the London School of Economics and the University
of Toronto.
But
as he waited between his June conversation with the Communist
Party secretary and the university's ruling, only Wellesley
College in Massachusetts took up his cause (with 40% of
professors calling to make his fair treatment a condition
of the school's continued ties with Peking University).
No other Western schools have raised their voices in the
days since his ouster.
"I
don't want to encourage them to cut off the exchanges
and the cooperation," says Mr. Xia of Peking University's
partners in the West. "I don't want to be blamed
by people from both sides. I think that they have the
freedom to choose."
OK,
but if he were among the deciders? "If I were working
in the U.S., I would say always take academic freedom
as a basic principle. I don't want to sacrifice the principle
to have some kind of cooperation or exchange."
He
continues: "Some American faculty members and leaders
like to favor the Chinese Communist Party and the government.
Because those guys, when they come to China, sometimes
they are treated as honored guests." That includes,
he says, fat speaking fees, grand banquets and five-star
accommodations.
Of
the Wellesley faculty, Mr. Xia says, "I'm very grateful
for their support." Yet clearly it wasn't enough.
"If Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia [and] Chicago
did the same thing," he notes, Peking University
might have held off: "The top leaders would seriously
consider it." Even now some outside pressure might
help: "I don't know whether they could call me back
or not, but they might try to make some kind of compensation."
Mr.
Xia speaks pointedly about the broader matter of China
and the West.
Westerners
have a mistaken impression of his homeland, he says, "because
the Chinese economy looks so good, and people are getting
a better material life. But I think that we have very
huge social costs. With pollution, with poisonous food,
with a very bad, party-controlled ideological education
system. I think that it's very dangerous."
He
is scathing about what he sees in universities: "The
nature of the scientific research in China is just unbearable.
We expend huge expenditures for scientific research, but
there's very little real scientific research done."
Some 70% of research funds, he says, goes to personal
use-"travel, hotels, meals, computers, mobile phones,
iPads, printers, all things you can imagine"-and
professors routinely falsify invoices. "Universities
have the same problem" as the China
Railway Construction Corp. 601186.SH +0.39%
, he says, where officials were recently disciplined for
spending $135 million on receptions for guests last year.
Which
brings us back to the U.S.-China academic romance. Chinese
universities, Mr. Xia argues, "need famous foreign
brand names to protect their very vulnerable capabilities
for research and teaching."
The
Chinese may "boast" that Peking University is
one of the world's best, "but no people really believe
that." Nowadays in China, he says, "the middle-class
and rich persons and officials' children-they're sent
to the U.S. to study. They know which schools are good
and which are worse." President Xi and his disgraced
former rival, Bo
Xilai, chose Harvard for their children.
Western
academic ties provide China with "a kind of coating
or makeup," says the professor. "Because in
Chinese universities we don't have real freedom of academic
research, so there's no way to train great masters. Whether
it's in science or in humanities and arts-no way."
Asked
about China's prospects for change in light of recent
events, Mr. Xia surprises with some optimism. Waiting
for a Chinese Gorbachev would be like "Waiting for
Godot," he argues, but there are stirrings from below,
including the Internet's power to educate citizens, expose
officials and organize movements; the increasing willingness
of business leaders to challenge the political status
quo; and the roughly 200,000 local-level protests a year
against injustices such as unpaid military compensation,
environmental degradation and illegal land seizures.
"Within
10 to 15 years," he believes, China's Communist Party
will collapse. "I'm very optimistic about that."
The
professor's personal situation is another story. He'd
like to continue teaching, "but I don't think any
university in China would dare to accept me."
His
wife works as an accountant-at Peking University, of all
places. And he accuses the administrators who fired him
of threatening her job, too, by warning that his treatment
could worsen if he spoke out publicly. "I feel sorry
for my family members," he says. "In China if
you want to make institutional change, you must prepare
to sacrifice or pay some high cost."
It's
admirable, then, that on Thursday Wellesley College said
it wants to host Mr. Xia as a visiting scholar through
its aptly named Freedom Project. The brave economist could
be a powerful presence in an American academy that often
checks its principles at the door when it enters China.
Mr.
Feith is a Journal editorial writer based in Hong Kong.
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