Xia Yeliang: The China
Americans Don't See
By David Feith of the
Wall Street Journal
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,
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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