Hacker offers fresh view of China's university system

BEIJING: With its tightly controlled media and cowed intellectual culture, you don't often see much written satire in China, so it's refreshing when it does occur. In what has become one of my favorite China blogs lately,ChinaSmack has a translation of a fake news report that appeared on the Tsinghua University (one of the most prestigious universities in China) website titled: "Tsinghua President Gu Binglin -- China university education is pouring shit into students' minds." It hits pretty hard at the problems within China's university system, issues that likely won't be resolved by these kinds of reforms, but can only be fixed in a freer, more democratic climate. In the first major paragraph, the hacker basically has Tsinghua president Gu Binglin say that after the Communists took power universities in China went down the drain.

Principal Gu Binglin indicated that the 1900s-1940s could be considered the golden age for Chinese education circles. During this short period of time, China's universities trained large quantities of outstanding talents for society, amongst them great thinkers and educators, righteous political revolutionaries and anti-Japanese resistance heroes, and the backbone of scientific knowledge and national elites. But this flourising situation began to deteriorate following the Liberation and especially during the 1990s.

The reference "especially during the 1990s" is an obvious pointer to the post-Tiananmen climate of the "patriotic education campaign" which, after the 1980s intellectual opening up, cracked down by using nationalism and a well-controlled, constantly repeated view of key historical aspects (foreign involvement in ruining China, Japanese aggression, KMT betrayal and Chiang Kai-shek's brutality during the civil war, an overinflated view of the part China played in defeat of the Japanese in WWII, the whitewashing of Mao's failures and brutalities, to resurrecting Confucianism, and heralding '5000 years of Chinese history' - which wasn't always 'Chinese' anyway). These moves post-Tiananmen signaled China's move from a "Communist" system to a "Nationalist" system that we see today, morphing into what has perhaps become a fully realized fascist state.

It's also worth reading the comments from regular Chinese people on what the hacker at Tsinghua posted toward the bottom of the page, translated from major websites in China.

*Oh, and this is a bit of a mistake: "Up to now, China has no Nobel prize winners" ...

That might not be true, exactly. There's Gao Xingjian, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. Though at the time he was an exile (he wasn't treated particularly well here) and is now a French citizen, so he might not count. And technically, since Tibet is part of China, you could probably include the 14th Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, and of course now lives in exile in India.

Comments

[Amalek]

Tsinghua #1? Surely you jest. Peking University (Beida) has no peers.