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Education was in the news in China recently, with articles about whether those born in the countryside should have the opportunity to go to college and about corruption at the highest level of China’s universities. The two topics have aroused widespread discontent among the Chinese people.
Academic Corruption
An unwritten rule about the selection of a member of the Chinese Academy of Science was made public. A successful candidate would need to spend several million yuan (one million yuan equals US$153,000) in public relations and enhance his or her credentials by taking individual credit for a team’s work.
Many prestigious professors and academic leaders have not focused their time on actual academic research, but on building good relationships with state officials in charge of governing scientific research. Those who can bribe state officials can control the officials’ academic appraisals.
Academics form factions in the academic arena to protect each other’s interests. These power players determine who would be awarded, given a title, or blessed with a scientific project.
When they make a decision about whom to give an award to, they pour all the relevant resources into backing the candidacy of the chosen one. Either this academic would then be able to meet the criteria, or the criteria would be tailored to ensure the chosen one would succeed.
When it comes to a large project, an important title, or a national award, one would have to have connections with the power group. A lot of monetary investment is required, but this investment definitely gives a good return.
It is unfair to judge a person based on his birthplace instead of his character
Because of the favored treatment given those who are connected, most academics in China face an increasingly deteriorating academic environment where their time, energy, and dignity are drained away by state officials and corrupt academics. For most academics, their research has become a resource that corrupt scholars trade for personal profit.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is content to see intellectuals busy with such matters—this keeps them from challenging the CCP’s authority.
Farmers’ Children
At the annual meeting of the National Political Consultative Conference, a delegate argued that farmers’ children should not go to college.
The delegate’s comments reveal an overwhelming problem in Chinese society. A farmer’s family would be impoverished if their children left the village for college because farmers’ incomes are far lower than that of residents in the city.
Moreover, when farmers’ children graduated from college, they would not want to return to their villages. But finding a job in the city is challenging. Even if farmers’ children found a job, they would be unhappy because of the high living expenses in the cities. They would not make enough money to buy a home.
The delegate who pointed these things out has been widely condemned on the Internet. The fact is that farmers’ children cannot afford the expense of college, and, due to the social injustice faced by farmers’ children, cannot find a job after graduation.
If China did not have an ID system for the city and the countryside that requires those with rural IDs to live in their designated areas, if the resources were justly distributed between villages and cities, if there were equal opportunities in the villages and in the cities, and if China were a free society that takes part in modern civilization and governs itself according to universal values, China’s human resources would be better utilized and villagers would not need to fight for a chance to live in a city.
That a youth is sent to a school that meets his intellectual level is a prerequisite to a country’s modernization. It is unfair to judge a person based on his birthplace instead of his character. Doing so is an academic injustice and wastes China’s intellectual resources.
If a society is unable to give opportunity to those who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, then it loses the basis for stability.
The CCP promulgated a slogan that science and education will make China prosper. However, China has never spent close to 4 percent of its GDP on education budgets. In 2009, the public education expenditure in China was $42 per capita. In 2010, China’s education system experienced another budget cut, as the state used the financial crisis as an excuse.
Compounding the problems faced by education in China is the strict ideological control enforced by the CCP. Under the current institutions installed by the Party, China’s educational and research institutions will never develop as they should.Dr. Sun Yanjun is an analyst of Chinese politics. Formerly an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Capital Normal University in Beijing, in 2009 he publicly renounced the Chinese Communist Party and now lives in the United States.
