Collaborations and confrontations accompany a growing Chinese presence in American academe
As higher education in China booms, collaborations between American and Chinese institutions are multiplying rapidly — a fact underscored by the visit of China’s president, Hu Jintao, to Yale University in April. Yale has a long and well-established history of joint ventures with Chinese scholars and institutions, including more than 80 academic partnerships with Chinese universities and 26 study sites in China itself.
But along with those opportunities, a series of clashes over depictions of China on American campuses illustrate the growing pains that accompany the burgeoning partnership.
Such tensions have emerged on both sides of the relationship. Protests by Chinese students in April caused the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to temporarily shut down an educational Web site that explores cross-cultural divides. On the other side of the ledger, complaints that a photo exhibit about Tibet at Princeton University’s International Center was Chinese-government propaganda led to the display’s removal.
Indeed, President Hu’s visit to Yale was greeted by protesters hoping to draw attention to China’s domination of Tibet, its campaign against the spiritual group Falun Gong, and Yale’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Chinese government, which includes the rare opportunity to trade on the rapidly expanding Chinese securities market. (Yale is the first foreign university to enjoy that privilege.)
In his address at Yale, China’s president observed that “Yale’s motto, ‘Light and Truth,’ which is a calling for human progress, represents the aspiration of every motivated young man and woman.” But the events at MIT and elsewhere may be harbingers of clashes that could accompany the growth in the number of Chinese students in the United States, says Peter C. Perdue, a professor of Asian civilizations and history at MIT who has taught many Chinese students. The protests there, he says, were “a case of extreme sensitivity to criticism of China, from a sense of wounded nationalism that causes certain of the students to act in irrational ways.”
Clashing Cultures
Human-rights activists in the United States have long protested China’s policies on a variety of issues, including Tibet.
The dispute at Princeton centered on an exhibit marking the 40th anniversary of the Tibet Autonomous Region last month. (The Chinese government established the jurisdiction in 1965, after its invasion of Tibet in 1949.) When a Tibet-born librarian at Princeton objected to the photographs’ depiction of life there as a happy one under Chinese rule, officials at the center removed the display.
In the fracas over the MIT Web site, Visualizing Cultures, vigorous protests by Chinese students inside and outside the university led the two professors who created the educational site, John W. Dower, a professor of history, and Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and Japanese language and culture, to shut it down.
Visualizing Cultures grew out of a course created by Mr. Dower, who won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 2000 for his study of post-World War II Japan, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). Both the course and the Web site were designed to inspect “cultures in the broadest sense, including the cultures of war, racism, nationalism, and propaganda.”
In one section of the project, subtitled “Throwing Off Asia,” Mr. Dower described the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and included images to illustrate the issues and the times. The Chinese students objected bitterly to some of those images, particularly a 19th-century wood-block print that shows Japanese soldiers lining up and beheading Chinese prisoners. The students’ campaign quickly spread to China itself, via the Internet. Indeed, many of the protesters who sent e-mail messages to MIT apparently reacted without actually having seen the Web site.
In a letter to the university’s president, Susan Hockfield, the Chinese Student and Scholar Association at MIT called for the two professors to provide fuller explanations of the execution scene and to post a warning that the Web site included graphic and “racist” images. (The group added that it was “strongly opposed to any irrational behavior” — apparently a reference to threatening phone calls and e-mail messages the two professors had received.)
In response to the protests, MIT replaced Visualizing Cultures with English and Chinese statements from the institution and the professors, saying they were sorry “that a section of this Web site has caused distress and pain to members of the Chinese community.” (MIT’s Committee on Campus Race Relations also held a panel discussion on the issue for May 11, after this issue of The Chronicle had gone to press.)
The Chronicle’s calls to Mr. Dower and Mr. Miyagawa were diverted to Ms. Hockfield’s office and were not returned. But the professors’ statement said that “these historical images do not reflect our beliefs. To the contrary, our intent was to illuminate aspects of the human experience — including imperialism, racism, violence, and war — that we must confront squarely if we are to create a better world. These complex issues are addressed in the long text that accompanies the images.”
MIT’s chancellor, Phillip L. Clay, told The Chronicle that the images most likely would be returned to the site soon, after revisions to make the context clearer. He added that the institution would emphasize “over and over again” that the professors “didn’t do anything wrong and did exercise good judgment.” (Ms. Hockfield has posted a statement on the site echoing those comments.)
Destroying Dialogue?
The two professors expressed “deep regret,” but not everyone at MIT was as conciliatory to the student protesters. Mr. Perdue, a professor of Asian civilizations and history, wrote an “Open Letter to Chinese Students at MIT,” which took to task “highly irresponsible” Chinese graduate students who, he said, had instigated the protests. He described Mr. Dower as “the most outstanding scholar of Japanese history in the country” — one who had, like Mr. Miyagawa, promoted “mutual understanding of what are often very painful subjects on which people hold passionate views.”
Mr. Perdue called the protests “despicable” and said they “threaten to destroy possibilities for productive dialogue.” He said Chinese student leaders had engaged in “deliberate misrepresentation” of the Web site. “Some students ripped one picture alone out of hundreds of pictures and accompanying textual explanation and broadcast it on the Internet,” he wrote. He told MIT’s Chinese students that, as likely “leading participants in China’s future,” they owed it to their country to be responsible. “You, despite your passion, are not specialists in East Asian history,” he wrote. “Those of you who think that you know the history of East Asia better than these distinguished scholars lack the authority to make this claim.”
In an interview, Mr. Perdue said that some protesters had apologized for their actions, but that most of the others “had a lot of trouble understanding my point. Their immediate reaction was that I was insulting them, that I should not disrespect their own experience, because they suffered, or at least their parents and forebears suffered, and who was I to lecture them?” Many Chinese students, he said, are “just not being socialized before they come to the U.S. to be aware of what it is like to be in an open society.”
Culture clashes can occur between scholars and students of any nationality, several observers noted, but Chinese students who have been schooled in extreme nationalist sentiment are likely to present special challenges.
Mr. Perdue has recommended to the MIT administration that it set up orientation programs for foreign students who arrive on a campus where they may “have to face difficult, painful questions about their history.”
Diplomatic Maneuvering
One veteran of programs involving Chinese and other foreign students agrees that such efforts are worth exploring. Successful inclusion of any foreign students in American colleges’ programs is “all about diplomacy,” said Saul Sosnowski, director of international programs at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Like many other American universities, Maryland has welcomed an increasing number of Chinese higher-education delegations. Over the past couple of years, for example, it has received delegations of senior officials from several Chinese universities and from the central government’s education agencies. It has also become the first American site of the Confucius Institute, a language-and-culture educational project that the Chinese government is financing in China, the United States, and other countries.
“We view it as part of a general drive we have to internationalize the experience of students, faculty members, and the community at large,” said Mr. Sosnowski. “And it’s a way of strengthening the relationships that we have with China and Chinese institutions.” The programs, he said, are also responding to growing interest in China on the campus.
He and his colleagues are cautious, however, about the possibility of offending the cultural sensibilities of program participants, both in China and at Maryland, he said. The university has been teaching courses about China and Chinese people not just on the mainland but also in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he noted. “When you’re touching issues like that, you should expect controversy,” he said. “You have to be sensitive to the world in general.” Whether Chinese or American, “students have to see that we do not all see the world with the same eyes.”
Harvard University boasts many collaborations with Chinese institutions and scholars. William C. Kirby, dean of arts and sciences and an expert on Chinese politics, said the success of such programs requires establishing “some pretty hard and fast ground rules” to maintain academic freedom, such as following normal admissions procedures for a program regardless of who finances it.
Also important to emphasize, he said, is something he has often stated publicly of his institution: “Harvard has no foreign policy. It’s a meeting place where you get different perspectives, some of which we as individuals will violently disagree with. If not here, where can we do that?” The rule of thumb at Harvard, he said, is that while foreign governments may be involved in such collaborations, “governments have no role in what fields students are admitted to, nor who is admitted.”
One irony of the protests against Yale’s having welcomed President Hu to the campus — and the suspicions that the university is becoming too close to the Chinese government — is that Yale has, like some other large institutions, recently divested its investments in Chinese companies that operate in the Sudan, the scene of mass killings in recent years. Yale has also divested from companies that have been implicated in Chinese support for the Sudanese government.
Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, argues that maintaining open dialogue with China is the only way to effect change in Chinese policies that the United States opposes. In his campus address to the Chinese president last month, he said he hoped “that the development of your economy will be accompanied by a continued expansion of the rule of law and strengthening of the rights of individuals.”
Gambling on Exchange
For some observers, open dialogue alone may amount to appeasement. They say the core assumption of recent U.S. policy toward China — that openness in the form of foreign investment and scholarly exchanges will foster liberalization — is simply not borne out by developments there.
In her book Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton University Press, 2005), Mary Elizabeth Gallagher, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, argues that the changes that have occurred in China have actually weakened the position of labor organizations and other manifestations of civil society, by strengthening the state apparatus of power. It has, for example, shored up the rule of China’s foundering Communist Party.
How that will play out, Ms. Gallagher said in an interview, “is a good question to raise.” For example, will the Chinese government try to limit academic freedom? Will American institutions accept that abridgment in the interest of financial gains or gains in prestige? Many of the academic exchanges are new, she noted, and “we don’t know yet what the effect will be either way — whether there’ll be political pressures from either side.”
Ms. Gallagher will travel to Peking University, in Beijing, this year to teach social-science courses that will test those pressures. She will cover such topics as Chinese urban government, migrant workers, rights of citizenship, financial reform, and the development of the legal system.
“We certainly will touch on issues that are sensitive,” she said. “This will be a test case to see if that can work in a Chinese setting. I haven’t heard of cases, yet, where issues of academic freedom come up.”
Harvard’s Mr. Kirby agrees, however, that the dangers do require close monitoring. He pointed to interference during the cold war by “some American allies in East Asia” who manipulated student exchanges and engaged in surveillance of their students in the United States. “This is an era that needs some significant research,” he said, “because universities and students would have been confronted with significant pressures then. Lots of dissent could not be uttered abroad or at home, and this would have given challenges to academic administrators in that era.”
The United States and China, he observed, are entering into a sort of second wave of exchanges that began in the 1980s. “It’s part of the chain of human cultural interchange that was fostered years ago,” he said. “That’s going to increase now, as Chinese universities are becoming among the leading ones in the world in the sciences, technology, and so forth.”
As exchanges and collaborations increase, disputes such as the one at MIT may be inevitable, some observers say. And they note that when fierce nationalists act as if they were an aggrieved minority on an American campus, an institution may end up acceding to their demands, even if they are unjustified.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 52, Issue 37, Page A14