by Jianying Zha
Nevertheless, Cai was a special case. He was the first minister of education in China’s first republican government. He was a famous revolutionary and famously erudite—in both traditional Chinese and modern Western learning. Like many prominent intellectuals of that era, he was cosmopolitan yet deeply patriotic. And then he had just the right personality: he was charismatic and charming; he was gentle and open and tolerant. Everyone I talked with agreed that there can’t be another Cai Yuanpei today. It’s just not possible. And even if there is someone like Cai, he would not be allowed to have that sort of power—nor would any university president in China today. This is not a question of personality; it’s a question of the system. In the mid-1980s, there had been a short period when the liberals in the government talked about separating Party power from the president’s power in the university. That’s now gone after Tiananmen. Today the official policy is “the university president takes responsibility under the leadership of the Party Committee.” Min Weifang is Beida’s Party secretary. He is also the person behind Zhang Weiying’s reform plan. But if Min should concede to any talk of reforming the Party power away from running the university, he would be the first one to lose his job. No wonder Min has been emphasizing the importance of Party leadership in his speeches.
“Ultimately, a real university reform means a real political reform in China,” said Zhu Zhenglin, a former Beida graduate who now works for CCTV. “Precisely because of this, it won’t be allowed to happen—not yet.” His prediction of Beida reform’s fate had consisted of four words: hu tou she wei (虎头蛇尾, tiger head, snake tail)—start big, end small.
But then again, not everyone is resigned to simply waiting for the future. Like Zhang Weiying, Yang Dongping, a professor of education at the China Politics and Law University, wants to take action. Besides offering his “unreserved support” for Beida reform, Yang has launched “The Twenty-First-Century Education Development Research Institute,” a private research and advocacy group with the self-assigned mission of drafting education reform proposals for official review and public discussion. “We would be thorough,” Yang told me. “We propose to set up a new financial structure for public education, new education legislatures, civil and intermediate organizations, new evaluation systems, and so on. But the first step is university self-governance. The Education Ministry must let go of its grip on the universities.”
Yang considers Beida reform a very important event. The accusation of “Americanization,” he said, is narrow-minded and too nationalistic. “The question is: do we accept the institution of the university as the flower of human civilization and therefore a universal good? If we do, then we Chinese should learn and benefit from it.”
Yang said that even though the immediate effects of faculty system reform might be limited, Beida reform started the ball rolling and had a great symbolic impact. He thought the public debate was a very good thing, even though it had happened by accident. “Public debate is so rare in our country. And since this happened at a high-profile place like Beida, people are now much more aware of the issues. It’s created a momentum for a more general education reform.” He also views the creation of the professors’ committee in the Beida plan as a significant first step to give faculty more power.
Yang expects other universities to follow Beida’s lead. In fact, while media spotlights focused on the Beida controversy, a number of other universities were already making their own moves. In the north, Dongbei Normal University established their “professors’ committees.” In the south, Zhongshan University and Suzhou University reformed their faculty hiring system. Nearby, Qinghua University had also quietly made its own reform plans. The Party secretary of Wuhan University even re-proposed the 1980s liberal idea in a printed article: “Let the party govern the party, the president govern the university, and the professors govern the scholarship.” Professor Yang thinks that these are important, exciting signs.
“Beida reform has tossed a stone into a stagnant pond,” he said. “So far, Chinese education reform has lagged behind a lot of other areas, but it’s now emerging out of the water.”
When I had dinner again with Zhang Weiying, he brought me a copy of his new book in its somber blue jacket—a collection of his essays on university reform. But he said he’s been fighting another “war” lately: Guanghua’s old dean is retiring, and there has been a struggle over the changing of the guard. Issues such as meritocracy versus cronyism are being put to the test. “I want to prove that principles and fair play can work,” Zhang said gravely, hardly touching his food. “Otherwise there will be another big stir at Beida. I’ll take certain steps and I know a lot of the Guanghua faculty will be with me.” This is just like the Beida reform conflict, he added a moment later; it’s the same kind of battle. That evening he talked with an obsessive fervor, his salt-and-pepper hair and spectacles shining under the restaurant’s soft lamplight. He looked like a tired but determined warrior.
Postscript
In 2010, the Ministry of Education issued a new document, the “Middle- and Long-Term State Education Reform and Development Plan.” It was dutifully reported in the newspapers and posted on the Internet for feedback, but public interest was low. I pored over the long document full of dry official jargon and came away with a headache and a very foggy notion of what would actually be “reformed.” As far as I could tell, the most important item in the bill was increased funding: the state education fund will reach 4 percent of GDP by 2012.
This time, not even Zhang Weiying bothered to read the plan. He wasn’t impressed when I told him about the 4 percent GDP target: “They think money can solve all the problems, but it can’t.” He admitted that he was no longer enthusiastic about the Chinese education reform, and he didn’t think the state was serious about it. As long as the Party and the Education Ministry kept their control of all top-level university appointments, there would be no real academic autonomy, no real reform. Other administrative changes might only create unexpected new problems.
But he is an optimist about China’s future in general. He had won the smaller battle at Guanghua Management School and has been focused on his work there as the dean. As an economist and a consistent advocate for the free market and privatization, Zhang continues to stir controversy but remains an active, outspoken figure in all the important Chinese debates on economic policy and modes of development. He has been reading a lot of history books in recent years. Understanding the past, he told me, has helped him to put the present and the future in perspectives: “When you squat down, you see a lot of bumps; but if you stand up and look around, you will see that the earth is quite flat. Take American history: only a few decades ago black people couldn’t vote or share a bus with white people. But today Obama is the president. Every Chinese intellectual carries an idealized world in his head, so he sees disharmony all around him. But I believe China is making progress, slowly but surely, because I am looking at the long-term trajectory, and I can see history’s great curves.”
Liu Dong shares no such optimism, especially when it comes to present-day Beida. In 2010, Liu left Beida and moved to Tsinghua University, Beida’s neighbor and often considered to be its rival. “When I first joined Beida faculty, everyone teased me about my Beida hang-up,” he told me. “But I wasn’t reluctant to leave. It’s becoming more and more like an empty shell of what it once was.”
Enemy of the State
Beijing Second Prison is on the outskirts of the city for which it is named, and you can drive past the drab compound without ever noticing it. It’s set about a tenth of a mile off the highway, and when I visit I usually have to tell the cabdriver about the exit on the left, because it’s easy to miss. The first thing you see, after the turnoff, is a heavy, dun-colored metal gate framed by a white tiled arch, and then the guards standing in front with long-barreled automatic weapons. Electrified wires are stretched taut along the top of the outer wall; it’s a maximum-security facility. Inside the waiting room, adjoining the gate, I
stow my purse and cell phone in a locker, present my documents, and wait to be called. The guards recognize me but maintain a professional remoteness. This is 2007; I’m visiting my brother, Zha Jianguo, a democracy activist serving a nine-year sentence for “subverting the state.”
Jianguo was arrested and tried in the summer of 1999, and I remember with perfect clarity the moment I learned what had happened. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend’s country house outside Montreal, drinking a cup of freshly made coffee and glancing at a story on the front page of the local newspaper. It was about aNote: Most of this chapter was written in 2007.
missile China had just test-launched that was supposed to be able to hit Alaska; in the last paragraph, Jianguo’s trial was reported. I was astonished and outraged, and, as his little sister, I was fiercely proud as well: Jianguo’s act of subversion was to have helped start an opposition party, the China Democracy Party (CDP). It was the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that anyone had dared to form and register an independent party. Jianguo and his fellow activists had done so openly, peacefully. Now they were going to prison for it.
My first visits, back in 2000, were particularly arduous. I had to obtain special permits each time, and during our thirty-minute meetings Jianguo and I were flanked by two or three guards, including an officer in charge of “special” prisoners. I was shocked by how changed Jianguo was from when I’d last seen him, two years earlier. It wasn’t just his prisoner’s crewcut and uniform of coarse cotton, vertical white stripes on gray; his eyes were rheumy and infected, his hands and face were swollen, and his fingernails were purple, evidently from poor circulation and nutrition. We sat on opposite sides of a thick Plexiglas panel and spoke through handsets—they were an incongruous Day-Glo yellow, like a toy phone you’d give a child. Our exchanges, in those days, seemed fraught with urgency and significance. After the first few visits, I also met with the warden, who turned out to be a surprisingly cordial young man. (“You expected a green-faced, long-toothed monster, didn’t you?” he said to me, smiling.) We discussed various issues regarding Jianguo’s health. Within weeks, he granted my two main requests. Jianguo was taken out of the prison in a van with armed guards to a good city hospital, where he received a medical checkup, and he was moved from a noisy cell with eleven murderers to a less crowded, quieter cell.
Since I moved back to Beijing, the monthly trip to Beijing Second Prison has become a routine. I try to make conversation with the officer at the “book desk,” where you can leave reading material for the prisoner you’re visiting; he excludes whatever he deems “inappropriate.” Anything political is likely to be rejected, although a collection of essays by Václav Havel got through: the officer peered at the head shot of the gloomy foreigner, but didn’t know who he was.
The so-called “interview room” is a bland, tidy space, with rows of sky-blue plastic chairs along the Plexiglas divider; you can see a well-tended garden outside, with two heart-shaped flower beds. Farther away, there’s a row of buildings, gray concrete boxes, where the inmates live and work. (They’re allowed outdoors twice a week for two-hour periods of open-air exercise.) You can even see the unit captain lead the prisoners, in single file, from those buildings to the interview room.
Gradually, I have become just another visiting relative, and, though the phones are monitored, the guards have long ago lost interest in watching my brother and me. Time passes quickly. Jianguo and I often chat like two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while. I start by inquiring after his health and general condition, then report some news about relatives or friends. After that, we might talk about the books he’s read recently or discuss something in the news, such as the war in Iraq or Beijing’s preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Sometimes we even exchange carefully phrased opinions on China’s political situation. Finally, I make a shopping list. Each month, a prisoner is allowed about eighty yuan in spending money (about ten dollars) and a hundred and fifty yuan of extra food if a visiting relative buys it at the prison shop; this is for security reasons, but it also provides a source of income for the prison. Jianguo often asks me to buy a box of cookies. Another prisoner, who is serving a ten-year sentence for being a “Taiwanese spy,” has been teaching him English. The man’s wife left him, and no one comes to visit. Apparently, he really likes the cookies.
In the first couple of years, I kept asking Jianguo whether he was ever beaten or hurt in any way. “I’m on pretty good terms with all the officers,” he would tell me. “They are just following orders, but they all know why I got here, and they’ve never touched me. My cellmates have fights among themselves but never with me. They all kind of respect me.” He told me that the jailers let it drop when he refused to answer if he was addressed as fan ren (犯人, “convict”) So-and-So; he objects to the title because he doesn’t believe that he committed a crime. He has also refused to take part in the manual work that all prisoners in his unit are supposed to do: packing disposable chopsticks and similar chores.
A family friend told me that Jianguo might be able to leave China on medical parole, and I asked him many times if he would consider it. He wouldn’t. “I will not leave China unless my freedom of return is guaranteed,” he insisted. I have stopped asking. Jianguo repeatedly mentions the predicament of exiled Chinese dissidents in the West, who, in the post-Tiananmen era, have lost their political effectiveness. “Once they leave Chinese soil, their role is very limited,” Jianguo says. But how politically effective is it to sit in a tiny cell for nine years—especially when most of your countrymen don’t even know of your existence?
That’s something I’ve never had the heart to bring up. The mainland Chinese press didn’t report the 1999 CDP roundup, so few people in China ever knew what had happened. Outside China, there was some media coverage at the time, and some protests from human-rights groups, but the incident was soon eclipsed by the Falun Gong story. After almost eight years of incarceration, Jianguo is unrepentant, resolute, and forgotten.
Jianguo is the older of two sons my father had from his first marriage. He was seven when my father divorced his mother and married mine. Although my father had custody of Jianguo, the eight years that separated us meant that my childhood memories of him are mostly dim. As was the fashion at the time, he went to a boarding school and came home only on Sundays. He remained a gangly, reticent figure hovering at the edge of our family life.
Divorce was uncommon in China at the time, and no doubt it cast a shadow on Jianguo’s childhood. My mother recalls that, when Jianguo slept in the house, she sometimes heard him sobbing under his quilt. In letters written from prison, he described those weekends as “visiting someone else’s home” and said that he “felt like a Lin Daiyu”—referring to the tragic heroine in the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, who, orphaned at a young age, has to live in her uncle’s house and compete with her cousins for love and attention. But his mother, whom I call Aunt Zhong, says that Jianguo was ambitious from a very young age. When she first told him the story of Yue Fei, a legendary general of the Song dynasty who was betrayed and died tragically, Jianguo looked up at her with tears in his eyes and said, “But I’m still too young to be a Yue Fei!” She was startled. “I didn’t expect him to become a Yue Fei!” she told me.
She probably expected him to become a scholar. After all, the boy was surrounded not by military men but by academics and artists. My father was a philosopher. Aunt Zhong is an opera scholar and librettist from a distinguished intellectual family; her father was a university vice president, her mother a painter who studied with the famous master Qi Baishi. Aunt Zhong’s stepfather, Li Jinxi, whose elegant courtyard house Jianguo frequently visited as a boy, was a renowned linguist who used to be Mao Zedong’s teacher. But in another letter from prison, Jianguo described those primary-school years as “uneventful,” aside from a vivid memory he has of a great summer storm that struck while he walked back to school one Sunday afternoon. In heated language, he recalled
how he fought the wind and the downpour all the way, how he was drenched, alone in the deserted streets, but, oh, the awesome beauty of the thunder and lightning and the ecstasy he felt when he finally reached the school gate, the feeling he had of having beaten the monstrous storm all by himself!
Jianguo was also a voracious reader and a brilliant Go player. At the age of fourteen, he was accepted to an elite boarding middle school in Beijing, receiving the top score in his class on the entrance exam. Yet he felt restless. School life was confining, and he disliked the petty authorities he had to contend with. During this period, he began to worship Mao Zedong. He read Mao’s biography closely and tried to imitate his example: taking cold showers in winter, reading philosophy, and pondering the big questions of politics and society, which he debated with a group of friends. His first political act was to write a letter to the school administration attacking the rigidity of the curriculum and certain “bourgeois sentiments” it enshrined. This was something that Jianguo is still proud of: even before the Cultural Revolution, he had challenged the system, alone.
My own sheltered childhood ended with the Cultural Revolution. My parents were denounced as “stinking intellectuals” and “counterrevolutionaries.” Our house was ransacked. Under the new policy, I went to a nearby school of workers’ children, some of whom threw rocks at me and even left human excrement on our balcony. But Jianguo thrived amid the social turmoil, and became a leader of a Red Guard faction at his school. He seldom came home. When he did, he dressed in full Red Guard fashion: the faded green army jacket and cap, the Mao button on the shirt pocket, the bright-red armband. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and, with his manly good looks, he seemed to me larger than life. I was shy and tonguetied in his presence.