Teaching Political Theory in Beijing
By Daniel A. Bell
Few Western academics would aspire to teach political theory in an authoritarian setting. Surely the free, uninhibited flow of discussion is crucial to our enterprise. When I tell my Western friends that I gave up a tenured, high-paying job in relatively free Hong Kong for a contractual post at Tsinghua University in Beijing, they think I’ve gone off my rocker. I explain that it’s a unique opportunity for me: it’s the first time Tsinghua has hired a foreigner in the humanities since the revolution; Tsinghua trains much of China’s political elite, and I might be able to make a difference by teaching that elite; the students are talented, curious, hardworking, and it’s a pleasure to engage with them; the political future of China is wide open, and I’ll be well placed to observe the changes when they happen. Still, I do not deny that teaching political theory in China has been challenging. This has to do partly with political constraints. But it’s not all about politics. Even if China became a Western-style liberal democracy overnight, there would still be cultural obstacles to deal with. In this essay, I will discuss some of these political and cultural challenges.
Political Constraints
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In comparison, China is a paradise of academic freedom. Among colleagues, anything goes (in Singapore, most local colleagues were very guarded when dealing with foreigners). Academic publications are surprisingly free: there aren’t any personal attacks on leaders or open calls for multiparty rule, but particular policies, such as the household registry system, which limits internal mobility, are subject to severe criticism.
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Forms of Censorship
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It seems that the Chinese authorities rarely care about English-language material, which allows more scope for intellectual freedom.
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Politics in the Classroom
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At Tsinghua, I teach a graduate seminar on “Just and Unjust War.” The “realist paradigm”—the idea that states are motivated by nothing other than self-interest in international affairs and that morality is not and should not be used to judge the international behavior of states—seems to be dominant in China. I think there’s a need to consider theories that allow for moral evaluation of wars, especially as China becomes a more dominant power in the international arena. After the first class, the same student from the party school stayed behind to ask if he could audit that class too. I agreed.
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I mumbled a bit, until finally I thought of the “right” answer: that our seminar deals with the morally justified use of violence, and that nobody argues that foreign powers should have intervened militarily after June 4, because the costs of intervening against a nuclear power would likely outweigh the benefits. It’s the same reason no sane person calls for military intervention against Russia to protect the people of Chechnya.
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I wanted to respond that the moral case for foreign intervention turns more on the number of people killed than on the reason they were killed,
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Teaching in a Foreign Language Environment
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Status of Teachers
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I was shocked at first by the unabashed flouting of intellectual copyright laws: students openly sell or distribute photocopied versions of whole books. But it’s unrealistic to expect them to pay for English-language books (Chinese-language books, in contrast, are much cheaper, typically around US$2 or $3 per book). For what it’s worth, fellow authors, I lend my own books to students so that they can be photocopied.
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Postscript: A Talk at the Party School
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Daniel A. Bell’s most recent book is Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2006). He can be reached at daniel.a.bell@gmail.com.
个人认为是篇很值得读的文章，Vaughan推荐我看的。