Sino File | China’s Xi Jinping wants both academic excellence and tighter grip on campuses. Go figure
Amid a push for academic greatness, the country’s leadership is also setting up constraints on academic and teaching activities that could seriously inhibit these ambitions, writes Cary Huang
China is making serious efforts to boost its universities’ global rankings as part of a strategy to promote the nation’s international competitiveness and knowledge economy, investing more resources to attract the brightest and best teachers and students.
However, amid the push for greatness, the country’s leadership is also setting up constraints on academic and teaching activities that could seriously inhibit these ambitions.
In his latest effort to tighten the country’s grip on education, President Xi Jinping (習近平) vowed last week at a high-profile meeting to turn universities into “strongholds of the party’s leadership” and make orthodox Marxism dominate the minds of its scholars and students.
China’s President Xi Jinping warns Communist Party schools against ‘Western capitalist’ values
The party has tightened its grip on the academic world in recent years, setting up restrictions on academic activities, building a strong firewall to resist foreign-funded schemes from penetrating classrooms, lectures, forums and book clubs, and kicking scholars out if they spread “Western values” in campuses. There is also a fundamental shift in tone regarding the utility and desirability of foreign ideas and knowledge. Last week’s high-level leadership meeting was just a further effort to strengthen such controls.
Theoretical study and historic experiences show that academic freedom is vital to creating world-class research and teaching institutes. The unfettered search for truth by scholars and scientists is essential for excellence in any first-class academic institution.
The United States offered the best example of how the greatest universities are built and run, as the super power also occupies the vast majority of the world’s top 100 universities and the lion’s share of the top 25. The idea of academic freedom is enshrined as the raison d’être of academic life in their campuses, which is also widely accepted as a core value of universities elsewhere in developed free democracies.
Xi calls for more thought control on China’s campuses
The freedom to learn and teach is also essential for the training of the best future talents.
