It seems like a day doesn’t pass without a news article, political speech, or editorial about the rise of China on the world stage and what it means for the West. In higher education, similar speculation about Chinese universities abounds.
But occasionally those institutions are misunderstood, especially when compared with their American peers. What is often overlooked is that the universities are trying to develop in a distinctly Chinese fashion.
I was recently in Beijing doing research for a documentary film about the two universities generally viewed as the best in China: Peking University, known as “Beida,” and Tsinghua University. Both have demanding entrance requirements and draw the best and the brightest from all over China. Since the 1950s, they have developed complementary areas of specialization; Beida is associated with the liberal arts and Tsinghua with applied science. Those universities are fascinating places for an educator to visit, and though my time at each was short, I came away with some definite impressions about how the country’s two most esteemed institutions are evolving.
Fifteen years ago, the Chinese government made a major decision to bolster higher education. It started Project 211, which designated 100 universities in the country as the principal recipients of state and local financing. In 1998, another government mandate, Project 985, narrowed the focus to 10 universities to create a core set of institutions that could compete effectively in the global arena. That number later grew to nearly 40. Peking University and Tsinghua University were the first and most generously supported under the new efforts. The intention: to elevate those venerable institutions as quickly as possible to “world class” status.
From what I could tell through informal discussion with educators in China, the narrowly focused Project 211 and the even narrower Project 985 have not been without controversy. The Chinese often refer to two principles that drive their national agenda: “development"—making the country competitive on a world stage; and “harmony"—maintaining the principles of equality inherent in Communist ideology. With thousands of institutions of higher learning languishing for lack of funds, the support of only 100, subsequently reduced even further, seems to place development far ahead of harmony. Yet defenders of the approach say it is a necessary first step in making Chinese higher education globally competitive.
During my visit, Peking University and Tsinghua University were often referred to as the Harvard and the MIT of China. Those designations, however, seem misleading. According to the many Chinese faculty members I spoke to, their universities are not yet on a par with our top universities, nor are the historical trajectories of their institutions comparable to ours.
Shifting Influences
Both Beida and Tsinghua were initially influenced by American universities (Tsinghua was founded through the fund-raising efforts of an American missionary), but during the new republic, German and Japanese influences came into play, and with the People’s Revolution of 1949, the Soviet Union became the major source of influence. Throughout the 1950s, China followed the Soviet lead of creating specialized institutions as the best means of supporting industrial development. Thus, Tsinghua specialized in engineering, while the older and more traditional Beida specialized in literature and pure science. Each developed within those parameters until the late 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution brought all educational advances to a halt.
The piecemeal and shifting nature of this history might seem to be a handicap to Beida and Tsinghua as they seek to meet the needs of an information-driven, interdisciplinary world. But a closer look reveals that their checkered history may be an advantage. American universities, for all their many and diverse offerings, often seem stuck in institutional habits that are out of step with larger economic and social realities. The Chinese universities, owing to the structural alterations they have had to make over the years, are arguably more flexible and accommodating to change.
Chinese universities have been accused of copying American models as they seek to evolve, but there is evidence that they are also altering our models in original and effective ways. One noteworthy example is tenure, recently introduced in China but in a slightly different form from what we know in America. Contracts are granted not for life but for three-year periods, and while tenured professors are largely assured sustained employment, they undergo regular review. There are obvious political reasons for that approach, but it also has clear benefits, prodding faculty to remain engaged and productive for the length of their careers.
Incentives to Teach Well
A related innovation has to do with teaching. Those university professors not judged to be good teachers are placed on a research track, which, far from being a reward as in the United States, prevents those assigned to it from achieving the highest rank in their fields. The result is to create good researchers who work hard to become good teachers.
I was also impressed by innovative developments in the academic disciplines. Take, for example, the Tsinghua English department. During the Soviet-dominated period, Tsinghua University’s best English professors were transferred to Peking University in accordance with the agenda of specialization. Over the past two decades, with that agenda reversed, Tsinghua has sought to rebuild its English department. But instead of duplicating the traditional orientation of Beida, which focuses on canonical English and American texts, Tsinghua has taken a broader approach, applying the latest Western literary methodologies—feminist theory, ecocriticism, and translation studies—to Chinese literature and culture. The goal, as Ning Wang, one of the more widely published and internationally known professors in the department told me, is to establish not an imitation of the West but a uniquely Chinese contribution to narrative theory and practice. That not only gives the Tsinghua English department a presence at foreign conferences and in edited volumes (something that the government looks favorably upon), it also inflects postmodern theory with a uniquely Chinese perspective.
Something similar seems to be under way in the area of technology. I was introduced to Qining Wang, a researcher in robotics at Peking University who, when asked why he was not at Tsinghua, as might be expected for an applied researcher, explained that he was receiving exceptional support where he was. I noted that his office was a self-standing structure located directly outside the gates of the university and that a private company had a share in underwriting his research. Like Tsinghua, Beida was finding innovative ways of opening itself both to a larger world and to wider disciplinary pursuits. (Mr. Wang’s business card, significantly, identified him as a member of the university’s Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies.)
One could say that Beida and Tsinghua are trying to evolve from lesser, fragmented institutions into Yale and Harvard. But this is to put things in Western terms. The drive to comprehensiveness also harks back to an earlier and uniquely Chinese tradition associated with Confucian teaching that acknowledges the interconnectedness of things and the importance of accommodation to context and to change. Just as the politics of the nation is now commonly referred to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” those universities seeking to integrate their disparate pasts with elements necessary to compete globally in the future seem on their way to becoming “world-class universities with Chinese characteristics.”
Paula Marantz Cohen is a distinguished professor of English at Drexel University.
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