He Weifang, "The Return of the True Scholar"

Interview with He Weifang, “The Return of the True Scholar:  A Reflection on the University”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

He Weifang (b. 1960), is a professor of law at Peking University, a prominent Liberal public intellectual, and—when possible—an activist for judicial reform in China, meaning among other things the establishment of an independent judiciary.  Given his age, He’s childhood was largely consumed by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (which he experienced in the Shandong countryside), and when he entered Southwest College of Political Science and Law in Chongqing in 1978, part of his motive in studying law was to make sure that the lawlessness he had known as a youth would never recur.  He taught at his alma mater for ten years after earning his Master’s degree in 1985, and moved to Peking University ten years later, in 1995, where he has remained  ever since.

He’s central conviction, from which he has never wavered, is that law in the Western sense is the key element of modernity in that it protects the individual, particularly but not exclusively from abuses by authority.  This kind of law is a product of the Western experience and is not found in the Chinese tradition, a fact that appears not to bother He in the slightest.  Countries import things that they need but don’t have, be it iron ore or an independent judiciary.  There is nothing culturally or intellectually complicated about the adoption of Western legal practices; Taiwan, the product of similar historical forces as mainland China, did it, which means that China can do it too.  All it takes is the political will, or in the absence of political will, pressure on the government to create that political will. 

Law as an intellectual discipline and an object of study is almost wholly a product of the reform and opening period, and I suspect that China’s law faculties are full of people who think more or less in the way He Weifang does.  This surely explains the July 9, 2015 crackdown, when Chinese authorities suddenly detained some 200 lawyers.  The crackdown continues today.

As a scholar, He is straightforward and relentless, hammering over and over again his basic point:  China needs Western law.  He makes no excuses for China, and does not look for Chinese precedents or equivalents to Western legal practices.  He makes no claims about Western cultural superiority in broader terms, and much of his writing strikes the tone of an engineer looking to solve structural problems.  For the most part, he simply does not engage with issues of nationalism or cultural identity, which surely infuriates those for whom such issues are important.  To me, his scholarship reads like how-to manuals for those who are already convinced, as He is, that Western law is what China needs.

He is in fact better known for his activism than for his scholarship, and it is his activism that attracted the attention of the authorities and eventually led to his current marginalization. Part of his activism involved a hands-on use of the law to solve social problems, as in his 2003 intervention to defend migrant laborers from the abuse they received at the hands of municipal authorities throughout China (see here for a similar intervention some years later). 

In addition, beginning in the late 1990s, He decided to become a public speaker promoting basic judicial concepts, and gave some 30 to 50 public lectures or panel discussions at various Chinese universities and law schools every year (until 2013, when Xi Jinping came to power).  He was also a very popular blogger, his sites attracting millions of hits, and has written and given interviews in many popular journals.  At the time, people talked about the “He Weifang phenomenon,” and he was the very image of the engaged public intellectual.

It is jarring in the present context to recall that He Weifang the activist was a very big deal not very long ago; Foreign Policy recognized him as one of the 100 top global thinkers in 2011.  In the introduction to a collection of English translations of a number of He’s writings, Cheng Li, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, recounts listening to a panel discussion on China’s judicial reforms in an auditorium of the Law Faculty of Peking University in the fall of 2011.  He Weifang was one of the featured speakers, addressing several hundred students, faculty, and journalists.  In Li’s words:  “What struck me…was not only that the entire discussion was explicitly critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its resistance to any meaningful judicial reform but also that the atmosphere was calm, reasonable, and marked by a sense of humor and sophistication in the expression of ideas.  [The] professors criticized the CCP’s omnipresent role in the country’s legal system…In the words of He Weifang, many recent well-known cases of injustice were largely due to the ‘invisible hand’ of the Central Commission of Politics and Law.” 

Nor was this an exceptional event, but rather just another day in the busy life of He Weifang, who was part of a much larger movement advocating legal reform.  “Never before in the six-decade history of the PRC,” Li continues, has the Chinese general public, and especially the rapidly growing legal community, expressed such serious concerns about the need to restrain the power of the CCP and to create a much more independent judicial system.”

He’s clarity of vision, good humor, optimism, and confidence that change was at hand have not prevailed in the short term.  His support for the Charter 08 document, a blueprint for fundamental political change in China, modeled on the Czech Charter 77, and signed by more than 300 Chinese intellectuals in 2008, gave authorities the an excuse to exile He to a small law school in Xinjiang for two years as punishment.  Although, as we have seen, He was alive and kicking in 2011, the Xi era has not been kind to him, and by May of 2017 he admitted that he would no longer attempt to publish on social media because authorities continued to take down his posts and cancel his accounts.  In China as elsewhere, activism is basically impossible without social media, and He appears to be biding his time.

The text translated here is an interview He gave on June 23, 2020 at the Consensus Salon 共识沙龙, which appears to be a Youtube channel and/or a podcast (which simply retransmits the Youtube talks) providing a platform for liberal voices in China (click here to listen to He’s talk; there are also talks by Qin Hui, Zhang Qianfan, and many others).  The text is also available on the website of Chinese Pen International, which is presumably not available in China without the use of a VPN.  The person interviewing He is Huang Wei 黄微, who is identified as being part of the important Chinese intellectual journal Reading 读书, and who also interviews many other Chinese figures for Chinese Pen International.  I do not know if the talk or the text is readily available in China; I suspect that those “in the know” can find it but that it does not circulate widely.

The subject discussed is “The Return of the True Scholar:  A Reflection on the University.”  My impression is that the topic comes from a media exhibition of the same name put together by the documentary film maker Deng Kangyan 邓康延 (b. 1958) which toured several of China’s major cities in 2012 (see here for more details), although Deng’s work is not mentioned in He’s interview.  In any event, both the exhibition and the talk address the world of education—particularly university education—in the Republican period, the idea being that educators of that period were “true scholars” who possessed personal dignity and freedom of thought.  

The tone of the interview is one of nostalgia and regret.  The “interview” is in fact a pretext to reflect on the glories of the scholars and scholarship of the Republican period; Huang Wei’s grandfather was a Republican-period educator, if a minor figure, and all of her questions are in fact invitations to He Weifang to elaborate on what was achieved during the Republican period and what China has since lost.  He does not disappoint, and uses the topic to make the same or similar points that he is accustomed to making more directly when talking about legal issues:  that intellectual freedom is something to be prized, and that China only had it during the Republican period, despite its ancient history and current power; that Western ideas and institutions once played a positive role in China’s development; that the Party has too much control, which stifles intellectual inquiry.  This is of course an exercise in oblique criticism (指桑骂槐) of the present regime and its practices.  There were indeed towering intellectual figures in Republican China who navigated the world and accomplished great things.  There are similar intellects in China today, it is just that He cannot mention them without putting them at risk.

In any event, the talk is interesting because it shines some light on what He Weifang is doing and thinking now that he has put his activism on ice, as well as providing somewhat unusual perspectives on topics as diverse as the positive role of missionary education in China, the limits of China’s traditional system of knowledge classification, and the stupidity of the current system by which China evaluates its university professors, among much else.

For other texts on this site treating the theme of "intellectuals," click here.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“As a result of this knowledge revolution, the civilization and culture of the Republican period was richer and more varied than over the course of the previous two thousand years. I myself feel that reading works of the remarkable scholars of this period, you discover a rich, varied world, with different people, different fields of study, whether in the study of Western learning, or the study of existing Chinese learning, or using Western methods to reexamine Chinese learning, or studying Western learning from a Chinese perspective, all of it produced quite fruitful results. Therefore, I think that the splendid civilization created in the 30-40 years after the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911 is in fact much more developed and substantial than that of the pre-Qin period.”

“After 1949, Chinese universities faced a different kind of change. Strictly speaking, a campaign to reform the thought of intellectuals began in 1950. In 1952, a massive educational reform was carried out under the name of "faculty restructuring," in which all church universities were abolished and merged into other universities; private universities such as Nankai and Fudan were also nationalized. In this way, all universities became state-run universities, some under central government control and some managed by local governments. In short, universities have become a government-controlled enterprise. This was a huge setback for Chinese universities.”

“In retrospect, the main elements of the educational reforms after 1949 (or 1952), to name a few, were, first, the nationalization or public ownership of all universities, as I just mentioned, and the complete elimination of private and church universities. In this way, the competition between universities of different types of ownership was completely wiped out. This monopoly that replaced the competition was not only administrative, but more importantly, ideological, meaning that the goal has been to establish a unified thought or ideology, which stifles academic freedom as well as the vitality of universities.”

“When there is only one person who discovers and pronounces the truth, we no longer need universities to expand students' intellectual horizons and cultivate their critical spirit; all we need are skilled craftsmen. We do not need a comprehensive university to train generalists, instead we call on the agricultural institute to train agronomists, including veterinarians or whatever you call them, for forestry we have forestry colleges, in medicine we have medical schools, judges, prosecutors, lawyers are trained through the Institute of Political Science and Law.  Students are better off with a narrower vision, they just lower their heads and pull the cart, rather than raising their eyes and looking at the road or asking questions.  They don’t need a critical spirit, which is how we will ensure that the Party's leadership will not waver and that socialism can proceed smoothly."

"At the ceremony of the 50th anniversary of the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, the university arranged for me to speak as an alumni representative, and I said that the 50th anniversary of the founding of my alma mater looked like the birthday of any institution, which marks the beginning of a great undertaking. But it seems to me that the founding of Southwestern Law School 50 years ago actually meant not the beginning of a cause, but the end of a cause. The goal of the law school was not the establishment of a true rule of law, and the talents trained by the law school were only the swordsmen of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the legal talents in the Western sense.”

“Once the Cultural Revolution was over and the university entrance exams reinstated, the people of my generation were extremely lucky in that when universities started back up in 1978, we benefited from a rare moment of openness in the period since the CCP took control.  China opened its doors—not completely or all at once, of course—at the beginning it was just a crack or two, but the openness was gradually enlarged, and Western knowledge came pouring in. On the one hand, we carried forward the intellectual tradition of the Republic period, for example, when we were studying at university, many of the teachers who taught us were scholars who were educated during the Republican period, and some scholars had studied in the West. At that time, those of us who enrolled in law school discovered something surprising:  we had high school classmates who studied Chinese language and others studied history, and they found that China had both Chinese language and Chinese history available to be studied.  But as students of law, we were surprised to learn that our field is very special, because China is a country without law.  What were we meant to study?”
 
“When it comes to an intellectual’s style, the very notion implies spiritual independence, but where does this originate? For example, you asked whether a combination of the traditional thinking of the scholarly class and the independent spirit and freedom of thought advocated by Western culture came together shape the mentality of Republican period intellectuals.  I personally am somewhat suspicious about the ‘style’ of traditional literati.  If we look back a little further, we can say that over the course of China's long history, starting from the Qin Dynasty, that is, from the end of the pre-Qin era, especially after the Han Dynasty when Confucianism came to  be favored as state ideology, Chinese intellectuals have been in a very difficult position. If you want to maintain an independent spirit, sometimes you may choose to live a wandering life like that of the ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’…But if you want to get involved in the political and secular affairs of the world, yet still maintain your independence, what kind of choice do you have?”

Translation

Huang Wei:  My earliest impressions about the Republican period come from a group photograph of my grandparents.  They, and the other people in the photograph, were teachers during the Republican period, and the grandfather that appears in the photo displays a cool elegance that I never saw.  He died after the establishment of New China, during the three years of natural disasters [i.e., the Great Leap Forward] leaving behind a school that he founded with his own hands, a book entitled "Sowing Seeds" and several pictures and photos. What my father had engraved on his tombstone is my grandfather’s poem from the cover of his book:

Do you want to be a sower of seeds?
Around you is nothing but sand and rocks.
One day there will be a place where the seeds will grow.
But on what day and in what place?
Who can know?

Later, when I interviewed my father, he mentioned three of his middle school teachers, who were also, like those in the photograph, Republican period scholarly gentlemen.  This was at the Number Fourteen High School in Chengdu, Sichuan, the first public school in China, a famous school during the Republican period.  These three teachers all wrote personal messages of encouragement 题词 for my father, and my father said that he kept those messages throughout his entire life, and that whenever we saw their familiar handwriting , the smiling faces of those teachers would reappear before his eyes.  They were his physics teacher, his Chinese language teacher and his math teacher…With the establishment of the new regime, they, like all Republican-period intellectuals, began to be treated as objects to be “unified” in the process of educational reform, or perhaps simply labeled as part of the ranks of the bourgeoisie who were resisting reform along with the capitalist bosses.

But after all, the three teachers were teaching in an ordinary high school, and were in no way famous, and it is impossible to know what happened to them after in the wake of the many changes implemented by the new government. I hope that through this interview, I can ask Mr. He Weifang to take us into the distant past so that I can add to the little that I know about the Republican period.

Intellectual Traditions and the Discovery of the University

Huang Wei:  The first question I would like to ask Mr. He in today's interview is the following:  The Republican period of Chinese history, from 1912 until 1949, when the People’s Republic was founded, has been called a "recent spring and autumn"[2] period.  I would like to ask Mr. He if the Republican period “spring and autumn” period can be compared to that of the pre-Qin Warring States period, when “a hundred flowers bloomed and a hundred schools of thought contended” more than two thousand years ago? 

He Weifang:  Good evening, everyone. Today's lecture is a bit special. Usually, the speaker gives a keynote speech for an hour or an hour and a half, followed by questions from the netizens and answers from the speaker, but today's lecture goes directly to the Q&A session.  Ms. Huang Wei has planned the topic out carefully, which we will explore through the dozen or so questions she has prepared.  I think this is a very unique format.

Today's topic is intellectuals and education, especially university education, and I personally am very happy to talk about it because I have been a university professor for almost 35 years since graduating from China University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, where I earned my graduate degree in 1985.  I taught first at my alma mater and then at the Faculty of Law of Peking University, where I moved ten years later in 1995.  I am now approaching retirement age.   Looking back, my life has been made up of reading, teaching, and doing research, and the existence of the university made this possible.  At the same time, I have personally suffered from the shortcomings of China’s universities.  So this topic is more personal to me than some others. 

Personally, of course, I am also very concerned about the history of education and the history of the university, because these are subjects that are closely related to my career and my livelihood. I have read many books on the history  of the university and on education, and have even edited a volume entitled The Road to Legal Education in China, which is a collection of articles discussing legal education, a very important field of university education, and which deals with the history of legal education, the situation of legal education in certain other countries, and the difficulties or challenges legal education is currently facing. Of course, I have also had the opportunity to travel around the world to observe different universities, such as Harvard University and the University of Bologna in Italy, the earliest university established in modern times. I like to think about and study higher education issues, and I hope to promote a more reasonable direction for university education in China.

Ms. Huang Wei’s first question immediately reveals a very deep sense of history, extending the topic to ancient times in the hopes that I can make a grand comparison between the hundred schools of thought of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods and the educational or scholarly activities in China during the Republican period  (that is, from the founding of the Republic of China through 1949), which I think is quite interesting.

University education is, of course, a completely imported product in China. The Chinese university was born out of the movement of Western knowledge toward the East, and Western civilization’s serious challenge to China came after the Opium War in 1840, when there occurred in China what the Qing dynasty statesman Li Hongzhang (1823-1901) called "a great change not seen in 3,000 years." In the process, the Chinese people discovered that the West was different from the “barbarian,” somewhat Sinicized civilizations the Tang and Song dynasty courts had dealt with, and which they viewed as inferior to Chinese civilization.  The Western civilization we encountered was very different. In terms of ships and weaponry, in fact, as early as the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, there were Western missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1599-1666), who came to China and more or less made the Chinese people realize that Western civilization was actually a very highly developed civilization. For example, the astronomy taught by Matteo Ricci and the other Jesuits, like their knowledge of the calendar, mathematics, geometry, etc.,  including some of their literary knowledge, made Chinese scholars like Xu Guangqi 徐光启 (1562-1633) feel that they were a civilization that was thoroughly comparable to ours, and even more developed than ours in many respects.

After the Opium War, the oppression visited on us by Western civilization became all the more severe, which forced us to truly examine and puzzle out what the ideas behind such a civilization were, how its system worked; we needed to understand all of it in detail.  This need led to a certain intellectual curiosity, the impact of which led to the emergence of a new model of education in China, and the spread of this new knowledge allowed us to understand this foreign civilization and the things it was based on. This is how the "great change not seen in 3,000 years " was reflected in knowledge and education.

If we look back at mainstream traditional Chinese civilization, i.e., Confucian thought, and if we read the Analects of Confucius, or the works of Xunzi and Mencius, we find that their discussions basically focus on the relationship between people in human society, and treat subjects such as family, marriage, and the relationship between the monarch and his subjects. They show a keen interest in these social institutional arrangements. However, they clearly displayed little interest in knowledge that goes beyond such social relations and the empirical world, such as astronomy, mathematics, and logic.

Therefore, if we compare the foreign, imported culture of the Republican period with the Chinese civilization of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period, which can be said to be the axial era of classical Chinese civilization, the new civilization possesses a broader and deeper transcendence, and examines the issue of the resolution of conflicts between the new and old civilizations, or the integration of the two.  Many ideas and classic works produced in this process were unprecedented.  We might say despite that the richness and variety of pre-Qin thought, when we look at this thought from the perspective of a later generation, Chinese civilization actually had great limitations in the sense that the thought of pre-Qin thinkers lacks an idea of transcendence, or abstraction, and remains too focused on human life.  Famous sayings by Confucius, such as “The Master did not speak of strange occurrences, feats of strength, political disruptions, and spirits,” or  " Be attentively respectful towards ghosts and spirits but keep them at a distance," illustrate just such an approach.

The influence of the intellectual predispositions of the pre-Qin thinkers was huge, and it set the baselines for the later development of the entire history of Chinese thought and knowledge.  It is clear that all subsequent discussions of knowledge and social issues occurred within the space and boundaries established by the pre-Qin thinkers.

For example, logic was particularly underdeveloped in the later history of Chinese scholarship.  Natural sciences, such as mathematics and geometry, also remained basically at a very preliminary or embryonic stage, with no way to make important progress.  This is closely related to the epistemological and intellectual foundations established by pre-Qin thinkers.  If you compare Confucius with Aristotle, or Mencius with Aristotle, you will see that Aristotle's works include not only political science, not only ethics, but also rhetoric, zoology, and physics, and the broad range of subjects covered is an important distinction with China’s pre-Qin thought world.  Therefore, when one looks at the theories of China’s pre-Qin thinkers  from a Western perspective, one may well conclude that in terms of scope, breadth, depth, and in terms of a capacity for abstraction and rationalization, a comparison between classical Chinese civilization and the West illustrates that there were important gaps between the two.

This is also related to the question of how different people divide up their understanding of the world. The classification of knowledge in China, and in fact the classification of books in China, is a four-part division—classics, histories, the writings of the pre-Qin thinkers, and literary collections.  In fact, there is not much difference between the study of the classics and the study of the pre-Qin thinkers, and in terms of historical studies, of course, we have a very long and unbroken tradition of historical writing. A few years ago, a Chinese translation of the Japanese historian Naitō Konan’s (1866-1934) History of Chinese Historiography was published, in which he sorts things out very clearly.  Collections of course lean toward literary content. 

The production of knowledge in China was long restricted to the model defined by this four-part division, and the exam system employed from Tang-Song times forward basically measured the extent to which someone mastered these areas of knowledge and their ability to use this knowledge to analyze problems. Therefore, the imperial examinations were subject to the limits of this classification system, and to a great extent, further inhibited the development of a more rational division of knowledge and research.

We have just mentioned Aristotle's classification of knowledge, which later became increasingly complex as the West evolved, trends we can observe in various encyclopedias, and the university was actually a product of this classification of knowledge, requiring the establishment of different faculties corresponding to the division of the fields of knowledge and an intellectual division of labor among scholars. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that China did not develop the university, a unique academic and educational institution, and instead it is closely related to the classification and structure of knowledge that lasted for thousands of years in China. From this perspective, the spread of Western learning to the East was truly a revolution in our perception of knowledge, of the world, of nature, and of human beings themselves, and is certainly a core element in the “great change not seen in 3,000 years.”

As a result of this knowledge revolution, the civilization and culture of the Republican period was richer and more varied than over the course of the previous two thousand years. I myself feel that reading works from the Republican period—when we say “Republican period” it’s a little strange, because Taiwan still calls itself the Republic of China, while our Republican period stops in 1949—let's just say that reading the works of the remarkable scholars of this period, you discover a rich, varied world, with different people, different fields of study, whether in the study of Western learning, or the study of existing Chinese learning, or using Western methods to reexamine Chinese learning, or studying Western learning from a Chinese perspective, all of it produced quite fruitful results. Therefore, I think that the splendid civilization created in the 30-40 years after the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911 is in fact much more developed and substantial than that of the pre-Qin period.

From Missionary Universities to "Faculty Realignment"

Huang Wei:  My next question is:  China has been importing the Western educational system for over two centuries.  What are the differences between the successes and failures of this experiment in the three historical periods of the Qing Dynasty, the Republican period, and New China? Why do we hear complaints, both during the Qing period and after liberation, like that of the Qing Confucian Gong Zizhen 龚自珍 (1792-1841), who said that “there were no talented ministers or talented historians,” or even talented people, workers, thieves and robbers, or like that of the famous contemporary scientist Qian Xuesen 钱学森 (1911-2009), to the effect that “our schools are incapable of cultivating talent,” while during the war-torn Republican period we saw the emergence of one group of great masters after another?

He Weifang:  When it comes to Qian Xuesen, I admit to having mixed feelings. I think Qian Xuesen's question is of course a very important one, but he was also a person who played a very complicated role in China's university education or scientific research after 1949, especially in the occurrence of the what is called the "three years of natural disasters [i.e., the Great Leap Forward],” and he was one of the key figures who exacerbated this man-made disaster in the name of science.

The history of university education in China is not really two centuries, as you suggested in your question, but less than that, so, more than a century, or to be precise, close to a century and a half.  The first Chinese universities were born in in the 1880s, and the period between this beginning and the early 1920s, ten years after the birth of the Republic, can be seen as the foundational period. The first universities were set up by Westerners, which is unlike the case of Japan, where the earliest university was Tokyo University, founded in 1877, which was called the Imperial University because it was established in the middle of the Meiji period. As long as there was only one university in Japan, it was the Imperial University, without the name "Tokyo," and it was only when Kyoto University and other imperial universities were added later on that it came to be called Tokyo Imperial University. Japanese universities appear to have been founded by the government at the outset, although they were also a product of Western influence, but it was common for universities to be either national, public or private (founded by  Japanese citizens), so there was a tendency to nationalize universities.

The situation was very different in China, where universities were first established and administered by Western missionaries. We all know the history of Western missions in China, during the Ming Dynasty, with Matteo Ricci and the others I just talked about, but there was no introduction of university education at that time. In the late Qing Dynasty, the number of missionaries coming to China kept increasing. The earliest were Robert Morrison (1782-1834) and others who began to preach in Guangzhou and other places in the 1820s, and later, as a result of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and later related treaties, missionary work was allowed. An American missionary named Peter Parker (1804-1888) first set up a medical clinic in Guangzhou to treat eye diseases, called the Xindoulan Medical Bureau, which was the predecessor of the present Zhongshan University Hospital.

Parker and his colleagues discovered that being a missionary in China was extremely difficult, because it was not easy to convince people to believe in God.  Relying solely on preaching the Bible and theology was not very effective. So the missionaries began to think of other ways to induce people to believe in religion. One of the main strategies they hit on was to run hospitals, treating patients and convincing them to come to Christianity once they were healed. Later on, they realized that medicine alone was not enough, so they set up schools to educate Chinese students, "starting with the children," so that the young minds could feel the light of God even as they absorbed secular knowledge, so that they could understand and accept Western civilization more readily. The missionaries believed that such education was a very beneficial thing for the faith.

While English missionaries focused more on education at the high school level, the American missionaries concentrated more on the development of university education. The American Presbyterian church sent a missionary named Calvin Mateer (1836-1908), who was part of the wave of American missionaries arriving in China after the Treaty of Beijing in 1860, most of whom were Protestant missionaries.  Many of them came to Dengzhou, an open port in Shandong Province, which is now part of Penglai, in Yantai City. Mateer also brought his wife, whom he had just married, with him to Dengzhou, and they soon realized the importance of education.  The couple was so enthusiastic about teaching that they founded a school called the Tengchow College 登州文会馆, an unassuming school for boys which was the origin of Chinese universities.

The original English name of the school was Tengchow Boys High School. Also in Dengzhou at that time, missionaries founded the first school in Chinese history to teach the deaf and dumb, which was a great pioneering contribution. After twenty years of hard work by the Mateers , the Tengchow College received the approval of the Presbyterian Church in North America in 1882, and changed its English name to Shantung College, which was recognized as a university that could admit graduate students, which marked the birth of the first university in China.

In the past few years, I visited the archives of Penglai city, where some textbooks of the original school are still kept. One of the very remarkable things about Mateer was that he focused both on theological education and the training of indigenous preachers, while at the same time paying special attention to the dissemination of modern natural scientific knowledge, and the school offered courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and astronomy, etc. He and his colleagues also worked on the Sinicization of such Western courses, translating or transcribing Western textbooks into easy-to-read Chinese and teaching the courses in Chinese. These materials were soon adopted by new schools throughout China and laid a very important foundation for the development of modern education and science in China.

As the number of graduates from the Tengchow College grew, many of them became highly sought-after instructors in schools around the country. When Peking University's predecessor, the Capital Normal University 京师大学, was founded in 1898, W. A. P. Martin (1827-1916), the Rector of the university, also a Presbyterian, especially valued the achievements of the Dengzhou school, and almost all of the Western education instructors he hired came from there. In 1901, Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), who was then Governor of Shandong, founded Shandong University, whose first president was Watson M. Hayes (1857-1944), who was also a professor and principal of the Dengzhou school, and he transferred its entire model to the provincial-level university, which was then approved by the Qing court and imitated by all other provincial universities.

The earliest national university in China can be traced back to Beiyang University 北洋大学, which was founded in Tianjin in 1895, the year of China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, and was one of the earliest institutions of legal education in China. After Beiyang University, Peking University, or Beijing Normal University, was a very important achievement of the Hundred Days Reform in 1898, and in fact it is also the only reform to survive the failure of the reform initiative.

In terms of the overall process of the development of Chinese universities, the development of national universities has been very slow. According to the statistics in published in a Shenbao article entitled "The Last Fifty Years" in 1920, there were only five national universities in China, namely, Peking University, Southeast University 东南大学, Beiyang University, Shanxi University 山西大学, and Shanghai University of Commerce 上海商科大学, which means that a century ago, there were only these five state-run universities in China’s 9.6 million square kilometers. There were seven private universities, namely Nankai University 南开大学, Xiamen University 厦门大学, Zhongguo University 中国大学, Zhonghua University 中华大学, Chaoyang University 朝阳大学, Fudan University 复旦大学, and Datong College 大同学院. Other institutions were either quite weak or very specialized.

However, at the same time the Chinese Christian (i.e., Protestant) University Associated Fellowship 中国的基督教大学联谊会 had more universities under their umbrella than the state and private universities in China combined. We all know that schools like Qilu University 齐鲁大学, St. John's University 圣约翰大学, Yanjing University 燕京大学, Dongwu University 东吴大学, Lingnan University 岭南大学, Jinling Union University 金陵协和大学, Huaxi Medical University 华西医科大学, etc., all exhibited strong development and great vitality, and were an important feature of the history of Chinese universities during the Republic of China, in the sense that church-run universities were the trend-setters, in which China’s university system rested on a tripartite division of national universities, private universities, an  church-run universities.  By the 1930s and 1940s, we can see the emergence of some superior Chinese universities that distinguished themselves on the world stage.

Among these, in addition to national universities like Peking University and Tsinghua University, private schools like Nankai and the church-run Yanjing University were truly remarkable examples in the history of universities, proving that a university can achieve brilliant educational achievements in quite a short period of time. Dongwu University is another example, founded in 1907 by an American lawyer in Suzhou. The headquarters or main campus of Dongwu University was in Suzhou, but the law school was located in Shanghai, because there were many foreign concessions in Shanghai, and many legal professionals working in the foreign concessions, so locating the law school in Shanghai made it is very convenient to invite prominent legal professionals to come and give lectures to law students. Dongwu University's legal education and research gradually become part of its brand as a famous university. In the past, there was a saying that "in the north there is Chaoyang and the south there is Dongwu," and Dongwu was really quite remarkable.

Of course, the setbacks in the development of Chinese universities did not begin in 1949; in fact, the Japanese war was a major event.  The full-scale expansion of the Japanese war of aggression against China in 1937 completely interrupted the modernization of China, which is something that can never be forgiven. The Japanese invasion not only resulted in the destruction of lives, but also interrupted China's golden decade from 1928 to 1937, and university education and cultural development in general suffered great losses.

The Southwest Associated University, formed jointly by Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University, drifted around from place to place, and set up shop in Changsha, but the Japanese struck again and the university eventually retreated all the way to Kunming. Tongji University 同济大学 fled to Lizhuang 李庄 in Sichuan, which I once visited. Especially after the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Japan became the enemy of the United States and Britain. So church schools like Yanjing and Qilu were confiscated as enemy property; the schools were closed and the teachers were imprisoned until the defeat of Japan in 1945.

After 1949, Chinese universities faced a different kind of change. Strictly speaking, a campaign to reform the thought of intellectuals began in 1950. In 1952, a massive educational reform was carried out under the name of "faculty restructuring," in which all church universities were abolished and merged into other universities; private universities such as Nankai and Fudan were also nationalized. In this way, all universities became state-run universities, some under central government control and some managed by local governments. In short, universities have become a government-controlled enterprise. This was a huge setback for Chinese universities.

In retrospect, the main elements of the educational reforms after 1949 (or 1952), to name a few, were, first, the nationalization or public ownership of all universities, as I just mentioned, and the complete elimination of private and church universities. In this way, the competition between universities of different types of ownership was completely wiped out. This monopoly that replaced the competition was not only administrative, but more importantly, ideological, meaning that the goal has been to establish a unified thought or ideology, which stifles academic freedom as well as the vitality of universities.

Secondly, the goal of the restructuring of faculties was to gradually break up what used to be a comprehensive university into many single-subject faculties. For example, the agricultural department of Peking University became the Beijing Agricultural College, and the medical department of Peking University became the Beijing Medical College. Before 1952, Tsinghua University was also a university with a comprehensive offering of arts, science and engineering disciplines, but after the faculty restructuring, arts and science departments were transferred to Peking University, while the engineering departments of Peking University were merged into Tsinghua, and Tsinghua became a purely engineering university, which was jokingly called the Wudaokou Technical School.[3] At the same time, in 1952, the law and political science departments of Peking University, Yanjing, Tsinghua, and Furen University 辅仁大学were eliminated and the Beijing Institute of Political Science and Law was established.

Why convert comprehensive universities into single-subject faculties? I think there was a very profound reflection behind this, which is that, in a socialist country, with the leadership of the Party and the great leader showing us the direction, we have entered a state where we do not need to cultivate citizens with ideas and a critical spirit through university education. Because our way forward is shown to us by the Great Leader. During the Cultural Revolution, we all came to be familiar with Lin Biao’s (1907-1971) saying that “every sentence of Chairman Mao’s is truth, and carries more weight 10,000 ordinary sentences.” When there is only one person who discovers and pronounces the truth, we no longer need universities to expand students' intellectual horizons and cultivate their critical spirit; all we need are skilled craftsmen. We do not need a comprehensive university to train generalists, instead we call on the agricultural institute to train agronomists, including veterinarians or whatever you call them, for forestry we have forestry colleges, in medicine we have medical schools, judges, prosecutors, lawyers are trained through the Institute of Political Science and Law. 

Students are better off with a narrower vision, they just lower their heads and pull the cart, rather than raising their eyes and looking at the road or asking questions.  They don’t need a critical spirit, which is how we will ensure that the Party's leadership will not waver and that socialism can proceed smoothly. At the ceremony of the 50th anniversary of the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, the university arranged for me to speak as an alumni representative, and I said that the 50th anniversary of the founding of my alma mater looked like the birthday of any institution, which marks the beginning of a great undertaking. But it seems to me that the founding of Southwestern Law School 50 years ago actually meant not the beginning of a cause, but the end of a cause. The goal of the law school was not the establishment of a true rule of law, and the talents trained by the law school were only the swordsmen of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the legal talents in the Western sense.

The third aspect is that the restructuring of the faculties has also strengthened the Party's control over the university in all respects. Of course, the establishment of party organizations in universities was not an invention of the Chinese Communist Party, but rather of the Kuomintang. During the war, the Kuomintang set up party departments in major Chinese universities in order to strengthen the party influence on education, and set up party cells in some of China’s major universities, in which some professors suddenly became KMT party members, like the well known philosophy professor Feng Youlan 冯友兰 (1895-1990).  This was actually a very bad example, but under the socialist system, the leadership of the Party became even further beyond the reach of questioning.

Finally, in line with the Party's leadership, the institutional arrangements that used to prevail in universities, such as professorial rule and university autonomy, became completely unthinkable. Therefore, the universities in China after 1949 no longer have autonomy, nor do they have professorial rule, and the school mottoes that used to include the word "freedom" (e.g., Peking University's "freedom of thought and an all embracing attitude 兼容并包，思想自由") have been abandoned. What we have is a university that is subordinate to politics, to the central work of the Party, and to the orders of the government.

Against this background, you can see why great masters no longer appear in Chinese universities.

Why Were There So Many Scholarly Gentlemen?

Huang Wei:  My third question concerns the great scholars of the Republican period, which include:  Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868-1940), Hu Shih 胡适 (1891-1962), Ma Xiangbo 胡适 (1840-1939), Zhang Boling 张伯苓 (1876-1951), Mei Yiqi 梅贻琦 (1889-1962), Zhu Kezhen 竺可桢 (1890-1974), Yan Yangchu 晏阳初 (James Yen 1883-1990), Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 (1891-1946), Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893-1988), Chen Yinke 陈寅恪 (1890-1969), and so on.[4] My grandfather and the three Republican gentlemen I mentioned at the beginning of our interview are, of course, far from being famous, but they seem to have the same gracious, upright, erudite and dedicated image as those famous figures in the Republican academy. So, does Mr. He think that all Republican period gentlemen were like this. Why?

He Weifang:  On the topic of Republican period scholars, I need to add something to what I said about Qian Xuesen a few minutes ago. I recall that the great linguist and scholar Ji Xianlin 季羡林 (1911-2009) once also asked the premier why it is that China’s universities are currently unable to produce great masters.  I have heard that the Chinese scientific community has a kind of "Nobel complex," meaning that every year when the Nobel Prize is announced, the scientific community is eagerly awaiting, but in the end is always rewarded with disappointment and anxiety.

In fact, looking back at the history of scholarship and thought, great masters are discovered rather than produced. Right now the coronavirus is raging, and educational activities in the schools at a halt.  Schools are all trying to find a way to give classes via the Internet, and I am reminded of a story told by the well-known essayist Chen Zhifan 陈之藩 (1925-2012) about the time that the plague came to England one year, and Cambridge University had to close for a year to avoid infection. There was an undergraduate student named Newton who stayed at home and thought about mathematics. When the plague ended a year later, Newton returned to the university, and the mathematics professor was surprised to see the young genius in the classroom, and "gave up his professorship to Newton on the spot."

The people you mentioned in your question just now—Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi, Ma Xiangbo, Mei Yiqi and the others—these people were indeed some of the most active people in the Chinese university world during the Republican period, and many were among the first members of Academia Sinica.  They were the stars in the firmament of the history of Chinese universities and scholarship, and their emergence is somewhat mysterious, in that they appeared all together, part of a great wave.

We need to think about why these people emerged. How did they make their mark in history? First of all, if we take a closer look at the family background and education of these people when they were young, we will find that most of them were born in Jiangnan, the area south of the Yangtze River.  Between the 1920s and 1940s, except for Westerners who taught in China, university education in China seemed to have been the world of the southerners. In the 1930s, more than 70% of the professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University were from the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, a percentage so high that there was a joke that Peking University’s “native place” was in Zhejiang.  Cai Yuanpei, Shen Yinmo 沈尹默 (1883-1971), Ma Xiangbo, Lu Xun, etc. were all from Zhejiang. This may be related to the southward movement of China's cultural center after the Southern Song period, and looking at the state of the imperial examinations in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, you can see that education in south China was more developed than in the north.

In addition, if you look at their family situations, they were are from well-off families, even scholarly families, in which the literati tradition was handed down from generation to generation.  In that era, only a small number of people could receive higher education. Their families were well-off or well-educated, which lent them a tendency to be cultural aristocrats, and they were more measured and less eager to make quick profits. Moreover, they were the product of the intermingling of two cultures. During the Republican period, they maintained the tradition of classical Chinese culture, including the academic training of the imperial examinations era, meaning the style of learning of Gu Yanwu 顾炎武(1613-1682) and Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲 (1610-1695) dating to the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, as well as the kaozheng tradition associated with Wang Niansun 王念孙 (1744-1832) and Wang Yinzhi 王引之 (1766-1834), father and son from Gaoyao 高邮 county, both of which were familiar to Republican period scholars. Therefore, they were not completely Westernized.

In addition to their Chinese knowledge, another characteristic of these figures is that most of them had the experience of studying in the West. For example, Chen Yinke studied in Japan, the United States, and Europe for more than fifteen years, and even if he did not earn a degree despite the amount of time spent, he nonetheless learned a dozen different languages and learned to use these languages and methods of historical research. This was a very important foundation for the remarkable academic achievements of this generation of scholars. Therefore, we can say that this generation, both in terms of classical Chinese and modern Western scholarship, including exchanges between Chinese and foreign scholars, was situated at a very high level and was extremely active. But this positive academic heritage and the close academic relations between China and the West, with people constantly studying in the West, came to an abrupt end in 1949.

China once again closed itself off.  Of course, there was one narrow channel open to the outside:  the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  It was commonly called “leaning to one side,” which meant that study abroad was confined to a minority of socialist countries, including the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as in the case of Jiang Ping 江平 (b. 1930), whom I greatly respect, who, before graduating from Yanjing University, was sent by the government to the Soviet Union to study law.  The Soviet Union in the 1950s was the darkest of times, it was the Stalinist era, and the Eastern European satellite countries under the Soviet Empire were in a state of extreme rejection of Western culture. Chinese people's access to the West, including study in Japan, was completely cut off.

In addition, there was no meaningful academic exchange, and China’s culture prior to the construction the Communist regime was regarded as a scourge, and the entire higher education in China was extremely closed off. The kind of free thinking and independent spirit that people advocated during the Republican period were things of the past. Universities existed only in name, and many even closed down for a long period of time during the Cultural Revolution.  It was a desolate period.

Once the Cultural Revolution was over and the university entrance exams reinstated, the people of my generation were extremely lucky in that when universities started back up in 1978, we benefited from a rare moment of openness in the period since the CCP took control.  China opened its doors—not completely or all at once, of course—at the beginning it was just a crack or two, but the openness was gradually enlarged, and Western knowledge came pouring in. On the one hand, we carried forward the intellectual tradition of the Republic period, for example, when we were studying at university, many of the teachers who taught us were scholars who were educated during the Republican period, and some scholars had studied in the West. At that time, those of us who enrolled in law school discovered something surprising:  we had high school classmates who studied Chinese language and others studied history, and they found that China had both Chinese language and Chinese history available to be studied.  But as students of law, we were surprised to learn that our field is very special, because China is a country without law.  What were we meant to study? 

We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but really, there were not enough songs for the opera to function.  But what China doesn't have is precisely what we need to learn from the West, so we needed to read books on Western law. For example, there was a person named Li Keqiang 李克强 (b. 1955) [China’s current Premier], who was studying in the Law Faculty of Peking University at that time, and was said to have been very fond of reading Western books on constitutional law. All of this is to say that, after opening up, our window to the West reopened, and our minds were ready to receive new knowledge.  Of course, the situation in recent years is a bit discouraging, and in many areas there is a tendency to close the door or to turn inward.  Transportation and communications are much more developed than during the Republican period, but the control over access to information has also greatly increased. There are still many difficult obstacles to overcome in the way of true openness, and perhaps trade negotiations will bring opportunities for openness.

The Importance the Nationalist Government Accorded to Education

Huang Wei:  My next question has to do with the fact that during the war, many universities moved to the southwest and northwest. At that time, although money was very tight, it seems that the government attached great importance to education, including the protection of teachers and students, and did its best to protect them.  Is this indeed the case? My father said that before the War of Resistance, the situation was quite good, but in 1948 and 1949, it was very difficult, and he joined a movement whose goal was for teachers to be paid the money they were owed for unpaid wages in 1949. Was the social status of teachers high at that point? Were their incomes high?

He Weifang:  We have just talked about the very serious damage that the Japanese invasion of China did to Chinese education and to modernization in general. During the war, many schools had to move to places where the Japanese could not fight, to the Southwest Associated University. It moved to Kunming, Yunnan, and to Mengzi 蒙自 and other places. I once had the opportunity to visit the current campus of Yunnan Normal University, where there are still some of the humble classrooms from the time of the Southwest Associated University. The simplicity of the classrooms reminds me of the fact that in such a difficult environment, scholars were still teaching and doing their studies seriously.

It is worth reflecting on what caused China to be so defenseless, considering that our vast country with 40 million people was defeated by the much smaller Japanese invading army. I think this reflection should have been launched beginning from the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and that what we have done remains insufficient.  The country truly needs to think about why it has such a miserable fate.

The task facing the Nationalist government was not only to resist foreign invaders, but also to preserve the sparks of culture, to preserve Chinese knowledge, Chinese intellectuals, and there are many records reflecting the fact that the Nationalist government made considerable efforts, which of course has something to do with the structure of the national government since 1912. One example would be what Hu Shih called “a government of good people,” but in the make-up of the successive Nationalist governments, we can see that the cabinet members were very well-educated. People like Wu Tingfang 伍廷芳(1842-1922) who studied in the UK, Minister of Justice, and great figures like Liang Qichao were the Finance Minister. Jiang Tingfu 蒋廷黻 (1895-1965) was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Mr. Hu Shi was the ambassador to the United States.

The Nationalist government paid great attention to knowledge in the construction of the government and the appointment of officials. Many people possessed great knowledge and had made significant accomplishments. Only people with a background of studying abroad could serve as cabinet members. This is very different from the selection of officials after the establishment of the Communist control.

Since the senior government officials themselves were well educated, they may have had difficulty understanding some of the hardships of the people, but we can see that they paid a lot of attention to ensuring the quality of education in the country and preserving the intellectual elite.   For example, in the realm of high school education, we know that a number of high schools from Shandong, Jiangsu, and other coastal areas first moved to Henan, and when the Japanese invaded Henan, and they fled further West to Shaanxi and Sichuan.  But what is really touching is that as long as the high school students remained enrolled in school, they were able to receive monthly stipends from the government.

The Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tai 龙应台 (b. 1952) once told me that there were many debatable things about Chiang Kai-shek, but the importance he attached to education was hard to imagine and worthy of respect. In fact, moving the universities inland was a very difficult thing to do. The relocation of library materials and laboratory equipment is very hard. I sometimes try to imagine what I would do with my books if, because of a foreign invasion, I had to relocate within China, and what I feel is panic.  In the process of fleeing, many scholars' collections, including Mr. Chen Yinke's, were lost, and too many manuscripts were lost in floods. The Commercial Press in Shanghai and the entire Hanfen Building were all burned down during the Japanese bombing of the city.  Cultural losses were extremely heavy.

However, even under such a difficult conditions, including frequent enemy bombing, scholars kept up their research and teaching, which is really a very remarkable thing. After the war, Peking University and Tsinghua University returned to Beijing, and Nankai University returned to Tianjin, and began to reorganize the education sector. The teachers of Yanjing University who had been arrested by the Japanese also returned to their campuses. It seemed that everything was going in the right direction, but unexpectedly the civil war started again. When the civil war started, the economic situation became worse and worse, and the government's investment in education was gradually stretched to the limit. The currency continued to depreciate, and the life of scholars became even harder than during the war in Kunming, Chongqing, Xi'an, and Chengdu, because the currency depreciated to an extreme degree. So many intellectuals finally decided to stay on the mainland and not to follow Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, in fact, to a large extent because their miserable experience during this period made lose faith the Nationalist government, and they thought that if there is nothing to eat then what are we going to do? They did not know that what was more valuable than bread was freedom.

The Establishment of A Scholar’s Independent Character

Huang Wei:  In terms of teaching style, did the scholars of the Republican period combine the traditional approach of the Confucian literati and the independent spirit and free thinking advocated by Western culture?

He Weifang:  This is not an easy question to answer. When it comes to an intellectual’s style, the very notion implies spiritual independence, but where does this originate? For example, you asked whether a combination of the traditional thinking of the scholarly class and the independent spirit and freedom of thought advocated by Western culture came together shape the mentality of Republican period intellectuals.  I personally am somewhat suspicious about the “style” of traditional literati. 

If we look back a little further, we can say that over the course of China's long history, starting from the Qin Dynasty, that is, from the end of the pre-Qin era, especially after the Han Dynasty when Confucianism came to  be favored as state ideology, Chinese intellectuals have been in a very difficult position. If you want to maintain an independent spirit, sometimes you may choose to live a wandering life like that of the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,"[5] or of course you may choose, like the poet Tao Yuanming 陶渊明 (365-427), to renounce politics, and live a life that is "leisurely and carefree, within the sight of the Southern Mountains." But if you want to get involved in the political and secular affairs of the world, yet still maintain your independence, what kind of choice do you have?  I think this is a difficult question.

We mentioned earlier the constraining effect of the imperial examinations on the division of intellectual labor in China. In order to prepare for the exams, beginning in childhood, people had to focus on the knowledge and abilities the exams tested. The goal of taking the imperial examination is to become an official, which meant that becoming an official became the goal of learning, the most important marker of the values to be realized in life. In this way, knowledge itself became a tool and an appendage, and the spirit of exploration for the sake of knowledge itself could hardly exist, which left no room for independence.

In the Tang Dynasty, there were still some great families who prized their family heritage, and functioned as a kind of noble class with a certain independent spirit. Of course it was desirable to be an official, but in any event, they had an excellent lifestyle, and they would develop their own aesthetic tastes and cultural pursuits. They did not need to be completely dependent on politics or the regime. But once the Song dynasty came to power, this class completely disappeared. So everyone had to try to squeeze through the same bottleneck, and focus exclusively on studying hard to become an official. The government servants produced by the imperial examinations constituted an evil bureaucratic class, which possessed nothing of the stability of social status of the former hereditary, and became more and more dependent on imperial power. For those who did not pass through the bottleneck, life was a failure. Those who focused on knowledge unrelated to the imperial examinations were extremely marginalized.

Representative figures among our traditional Confucians were good at making grand statements, such that of the Song dynasty figure Zhang Zai 張載(1020-1077):  “To ordain conscience for Heaven and Earth, to secure life and fortune for the people, to continue the lost teachings of past sages, and to establish peace for all future generations.” These words are, in my opinion, empty and impractical slogans. Of course, not everyone will agree with me, but I think that the situation of Chinese intellectuals after the Song period was one in which they became ever more dependent on imperial power. Therefore, intellectuals should be independent, and this independence does not mean that they are always at odds with politics.   I can study things that have nothing to do with politics, such as botany, physiology, land sales, the acquisition of property, the inheritance system, etc..  There is nothing grandiose about any of this, but it goes toward making human life more reasonable, and it is a form of independence.

To determine which is the best university, one important criterion is whether you can find, in the universities in question, the highest level of talent in various fields of study.  For example, in an excellent university there will be scholars who study the ancient languages of Central Asia, such as Sogdian, Bactrian, and Tocharian, which are long dead, scholars who spend their lives studying distant asteroids, scholars who study the ancient Greek art of navigation, in short, many subjects that have nothing to do with practicality. In short, the best university is the one where there are the best scholars working on many non-practical topics, and where they do not have to worry about food and clothing because their research is "useless.” The independence of university intellectuals is often understood in terms of their ability to maintain independent political opinions, but it is not entirely about political confrontation, and has more to do with their capacity to choose their own orientation, their possession of their own measure of values.

But in traditional Chinese society, there is no way that a person who studies animals, who spends his whole life observing them and analyzing their habits, can also achieve recognition. A poet, Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) for example, a great poet, was actually known as "Du Gongbu 杜工部."  What is this? It is a the name of a minor official, an "inspector of the Ministry of Public Works," or in modern language, an inspector in a certain division of the Engineering Department.  He was a great poet and brought great fame to the whole country, in the same way that Shakespeare is the eternal glory of the British prefer, but we prefer to call him by the name of his official office, and his collected works are actually entitled "The Collected Works of Inspector Du," which really shows the extent to which officialdom ruled the roost. I think this is the worst thing about classical Chinese culture.

From this perspective, the spread of Western learning to China and the spread of the Western university system to China in modern times has brought us a space for intellectuals to survive and to realize the value of our lives. In the introduction to one of my books I noted that I was very fortunate to live in an era when there were universities. If we were to go back three centuries, I would be utterly useless, as I am someone who is not diligent, who dislikes farm work and carpentry, who is not good with his hands or with numbers, and who particularly hates hierarchical relationships within official organizations. But today, because of the university, I can find a space where I am comfortable, and this is one of the things for which I feel most grateful.

Of course, there remain serious problems with today's universities, mainly whether they can allow our intellectuals to maintain their freedom of thought, their independence of spirit, and proper job security, as in Western or Japanese universities. In fact, progress has been made in some areas. For example, at the Law School of Peking University, where I work, we have a particularly good practice: more than ten years ago, we built an office building for the professors, in which each professor of the Law Faculty has his own office.  In all, there are more than 90 professors, but everyone has an office with the same dimensions—thirty square feet—and no distinction is made between full professors, associate professors, and assistant professors.  The offices are the same size, and the only difference is the floor they are on.  Young teachers, even if they are only 30 years old, have the same space as a senior teacher like me, so that everyone can see that teachers are equal, that we are a group of equal people, not a small bureaucratic hierarchical society. So I think we need to push for similar things in all aspects of the system so that Chinese universities can move in a more rational and healthy direction.

There are also some outstanding issues, such as the organization of university research fields, the division of university disciplines and the establishment of research institutions in ways that respect the proper classification of knowledge.  There is also the question of whether politics will lead us around by the nose, as when research institutes are set up specifically to study some leader’s thought, which does great harm to the dignity of the university. From the day the university was created, it has paid special attention to setting up faculties and disciplines according to the proper classification of knowledge, the earliest divisions being law, theology, medicine, to which natural science disciplines were added later.  In the Republican period, universities were divided into faculties of letters, science, and engineering in a way that was quite stable.

In addition, in recent years, there is a tendency for universities to become think tanks. In the West, a think tank is usually associated with a political party or a political movement, but a university is an institution of learning that transcends party affiliation and secular power. However, given that the word “think tank” is fashionable, many universities follow the trends and set them up anyway, which really does not fit in with the mission of the university.

The Great Contributions of the Church-Run Schools

Huang Wei:  How many schools were run by foreigners during the Republican period, Mr. He? Did these foreign-run kindergartens, elementary schools, high schools, and universities contribute to the development of talent, technology, and culture in China?  Or was this a form of cultural invasion?

He Weifang:  I don’t know the exact percentages, especially in the case of middle schools and elementary schools. There were actually very few foreign-run elementary schools, but one excellent example of a foreign-run combined elementary and middle school was the Zhifu (Chefoo) 芝罘 School in Yantai, which was founded by the British missionary organization, the China Inland Mission, expressly for the sons and daughters of Western missionaries, diplomats or businessmen, so that they could receive a purely British education, despite being in distant China. It was an educational enclave of sorts. Some of the alumni of this school became particularly famous, such as Henry Luce (1898-1967), the son of the American missionary Henry Winters Luce (1868-1941), who was born in Dengzhou, attended the Zhifu School, and went on to become one of the most remarkable American publishers of the twentieth century, founding magazines such as Time and Life.

I also know of a few secondary schools, including some very good church-run high schools administered by Westerners, such as Chongde High 崇德School in Beijing, from which many of China's leading scholars and scientists graduated, including Mr. Jiang Ping, whom I already mentioned, and the film artist Sun Daolin 孙道临 (1921-2007). There was a Pei Zheng 培正High School in Guangdong, which was also a church-run high school, but it was run by Chinese Christians. There is a well-known scholar in contemporary law, Mr. Pan Handian 潘汉典 (1920-2019), who is the translator of Machiavelli's The Prince, published by the Commercial Press.

When you look at that book, on the copyright page, it notes that “this book was translated from the Italian,” but also notes that the English-language, French-language, German-language, and Japanese-language translations of the volume were also produced by Pan Handian.  How could he speak so many languages?  Pan studied at the Peizheng High School in Guangzhou.  He was born in 1920, and his education at Pei Cheng High School had already made him very proficient in English. Then he enrolled in Dongwu University, another church-run school. He wanted to study German at Dongwu, but there were only two or three first-year students who wanted to learn German.  Nonetheless, Dongwu found a German teacher for these two or three students. 

The way they studied at Dongwu University was that they used English textbooks when studying English law, and American textbooks when they studied American law, so the Law Faculty at Dongwu was called China’s institute of comparative law.  Later on, during the Tokyo trial, as you know, all the personnel of the victorious countries who participated in this trial, including judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and support staff, had a very important prerequisite, which was that they had to be very proficient in English as well as in law. They had to be very proficient, fully professional in English. Almost all of the Chinese officials and support staff who attended the Tokyo trial were graduates of the Dongwu Law School, and I think this is quite remarkable. Mr. Pan Handian himself has always been proud of the fact that he graduated from Dongwu because this school is indeed an excellent model of education and training to cultivate talent.

Another very remarkable example is Yanjing University. In recent years, as the deeds of people like the American missionary John Leighton Stuart (1876-1962) have received increasing attention, more and more people want to know about Yanjing University, and some historical materials related to its history have been unearthed. For example, a biography of the historian William Hung 洪业 (1893-1980), a long-time faculty member at Yanjing University, was published by the Commercial Press a few years ago. Stuart and Henry W. Luce, who was the vice-president of Yanjing University, worked hard to establish and develop the university, buying land, building buildings, going to the United States to raise funds, and a lot of money flowed into China to support the university, which soon became a highly reputable school well-known throughout all of East Asia.

The Department of Journalism at Yanching was the best journalism school in Asia at the time. Yanjing's theology department was also very impressive, establishing a very good tradition of Christian theological education and research in China. And the History Department did a remarkable job by setting up the Citation and Compilation Division, in which scholars like Nie Chongqi 聂崇岐 (1903-1962), William Hung, and others, worked to compile indexes to the ancient Chinese texts. As everyone knows, there are vast numbers of these books, and it's a real pain to cite them, because there's no way for anyone to remember exactly where a particular sentence came from. You are trying to look something up, and you think it might be from Mozi, but you can’t remember where in the text.

For more than 2,000 years, no one in China had compiled what in English is called an “index,” which was translated phonetically into Chinese as "yinde 引得." Without such an index, it is very difficult to look things up in old Chinese texts, nor is there any way, for example, to count how many times a particular rhetorical device has been used in classical Chinese poetry. For example, there is a line in a Wang Anshi poem, "The spring breeze has once again ‘greened’ the southern shore of the Yangzi river," in which the use of the word “green” as a verb is wonderful.  But is there a precedent for this?  Average readers are clueless, and only someone like the polymath Qian Zhongshu 钱锺书 (1910-1998), who read everything and had a photographic memory, could tell us clearly what the precedents are for using "green" as a verb. But with an index, this scholarly tool invented by Westerners, it is much easier. These historians in Yanjing really put a huge amount of effort into editing this index, and with the financial support of American institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and with the cooperation of Harvard University, they carried out an important, fundamental cultural project. Even in today's computer age, when we have more accurate and extensive databases, the pioneering work of the Yanjing scholars should not be forgotten.

Toward a Rationally Designed Examination System

Huang Wei:  I heard from people of my father’s generation that in the Republican period, the examination questions did not have standard answers for all subjects, and the government did not impose uniform teaching materials.  Is this true?  So what materials did children use and was questions did they prepare in order to get ready for the exams? 

He Weifang:  In fact, there are perhaps two types of knowledge or skills that are tested in exams, one is mathematical or logical, and will have one correct answer. Four is definitely the only answer for what is two plus two, there is no doubt about this. But the other type of knowledge requires a kind of answer that is open-ended and can be argued in different ways. If this kind of question has a single answer, then it will stifle the human brain. The most beautiful and creative feature of human thought is its layers, its diversity.

I think it would be frightening if every question had a single correct answer. For example, the position or influence of Sun Yat-sen in Chinese history, or, something everyone has been talking about in the past few days, the relationship between the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the traditional international order in East Asia, or how to solve China’s agricultural problems, or how to fix the boundaries of freedom of speech? These are questions that I am sure many people will debate, and there can be no standard answers.

Another example is our law exams, where there are objective questions and subjective questions. Objective questions require rote memorization, and the correction can generally be done by computers.  But the subjective questions sometimes have to do with a case, like a few days ago when somebody stabbed a person to death because that person insulted his mother.  How should such a case be handled? I think there are actually very many possible arguments, and there is no need to have a standard answer for such questions.

So, the best way to deal with knowledge in a rigid manner, or to imprison people's minds, is to turn all exams into the type with fixed answers.

What about college entrance exams? What is best way to select talent? I think this question is worth studying, and is indeed an urgent matter given that the fairness of the college entrance exam is currently being questioned. I think we can set up a kind of national examination system, in which all students applying to university will take a unified national screening examination, which will not be particularly difficult, so that any moderately talented student can pass.  After the screening exam, the next step will be exams offered by the universities themselves.  Let's say you want to apply to Peking University, then you will take the examination made up by Peking University. Of course, you feel a little insecure about applying only to Peking University, you can also apply to other universities. Obviously, this would mean that the exams of different universities could not be given at the same time, but there are a great many schools and colleges in the country, and we cannot drag things out too long. 

So we could organize and mix the universities into groups according to their level, then, according to the level of the university, like brackets in a sports tournament, maybe five different groups, with two days of exams every four days.  This way, students could apply to different universities, and those who are confident can take just one exam, while those who are less confident, or who felt like they did not do well during the first exam, can sit for another, or even several more.  Maybe the student will wind up being accepted by three universities, and would have the right to choose the one he prefers. 

Organizing the system in this manner would not only relieve the pressure on the students, but would also highlight the individuality of different universities and meet the different needs of different students, while also closing the loopholes frequently taken advantage of by imposters. In China's current college entrance exam system, where everyone takes the exam at the same time, if on that day  you suddenly catch a cold or have an upset stomach, years of work simply go down the drain.

Another way to make up for the flaws in the examination system is to allow students to change departments or schools. Ping-Ti Ho 何炳棣 (1917-2012), the Chinese-American historian, took the college entrance examination in 1933, and he was admitted to the chemistry department of Shandong University, which at the time was located in Qingdao. The university offered excellent instruction in English, as well as a beautiful seaside environment, but there was one thing that He could not stand, which was that people from Shandong like to eat garlic.  The aroma of garlic was everywhere—in the cafeteria, in the classrooms, and in the library—and he could not stand the smell, so he had no choice but to find a way to transfer to another school. So after a year, he took the entrance exam to Tsinghua University and was admitted to the chemistry department, as he had hoped. But after another academic year, he found that his real interest was in history, so he changed his mind again and switched to the history department.

He took to Tsinghua like a fish to water. Not only was there no smell of garlic, Beijing’s rich cultural atmosphere was delightful to him. He bought a new edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in Dong'an Market.  We all know this is Edward Gibbon's great historical work, and this was the original, huge, English edition available on the market.  So he bought this book, and read it carefully while an undergraduate, and later when he entered the Ph.D. program in history in Columbia University in the United States, and his classmates and teachers heard that he had actually read that book, they were amazed that Chinese universities had reached that level.  This is just a little story I wanted like to add. Also, when Dongwu University was closed because of the student strikes, many students went north and transferred to Yanjing and Tsinghua.

How Can We Encourage the Return of the True Scholar 

Huang Wei:  Finally, I would like to ask Mr. He Weifang to summarize for us what is a true scholar and what is real education? Many people would like to see scholars like those of the Republican period appear today, to serve as a mirror for present-day educators. May I ask Mr. He, can the true scholars really come back?

He Weifang:  In China, the word you are using for “true scholar” (xiansheng 先生) has a special meaning, and does not correspond exactly to the English word “Mr.” (although it also has that meaning), and in some instances it can also be used to refer elderly and respected women, and it can also mean “husband.”  In the current context, what we are talking about is not only an intellectual of great learning and achievement, but it is often assumed that a person who can be called a xiansheng must have integrity, broad-mindedness, and adherence to good human values.

In fact, we can indeed see many remarkable people during the Republican period, but there were also some people who are actually not so good, so that it is not the case that whenever the Republic is mentioned we immediately think of a world where everyone was perfect and wonderful.  On the basis of what we have already said, we can conclude that the Republic of China, from its inception through 1949, was the most successful period in the cultural and educational history of China in the past two millennia, and by far the best time in terms of educational standards of universities, academic and intellectual contributions, and the independent nature of intellectuals. Can such a time be repeated?

I think that in order to recreate the glory of Chinese higher education, we must first make the university a real university. Frankly speaking, I am particularly unconvinced by the idea of running a “world-class university.” We have to start by making what we’ve got here on the ground in China into real universities, which is particularly urgent.  What is a university? What kind of institution finally is a university? What is its spiritual state? How is it managed?  What do people feel when they are a part of it, this is something that I believe to be very important.  Then, with freedom of thought and spiritual independence as our starting point, we are facing many challenges, some of which have become more serious or difficult in recent years.

One very important aspect of overcoming these difficulties is to elevate the consensus on the orientation of the university in social knowledge as a whole. Over the decades, translations of many classic works on universities have been published in China, such as John Henry Newman's The Idea of the University (1858), Jaroslav Jan Pelikan’s The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (1992), several works on the history of European universities, case studies of famous universities such as Harvard, Chicago, and Cambridge written by Henry Rosowski and others, and reading such books have helped to boil down our basic notions about universities.

At the same time, we need to rebuild the relationship between government and universities. What should be the relationship between government and universities? As we said earlier, the founding of Chinese universities, especially public universities, was closely tied to the mission of saving the world. That is why people are so willing to emphasize that universities should be patriotic and serve the goals pursued by the government, and universities have become a kind of vassal of the government, losing their basic independence. Today, we must find ways to make universities less dependent on the government. Some years ago, the essayist Li Ao 李敖 (1935-2018) came to Peking University to give a speech, and said something very interesting.  Li said that when Cai Yuanpei was the president of Peking University, the university was really arrogant, the government sent document the university demanding that it do something and President Cai refused.  The government said “we are the ones sending you money,” and President Cai said, “so take it back!”  This was Peking University’s bull-headedness.  But now, however, Peking University, and all universities are the same, of course, cannot possibly stand up to the government and refuse something that ought to be refused.  The university lost its independent character long ago.

Then, there is the idea that has been running through this talk, that the biggest drawback of Chinese universities now is that all universities are state universities.  There are no private universities, and no church-run universities, and this single "ownership" of universities has seriously stifled the their vitality and dynamism. I wonder if China could at some point allow ecclesiastical universities like Yanjing University to be reinstated and still be managed by the church, and also allow real private universities to be established, which would be independent and maintain their own characteristics in terms of teaching materials, teaching methods, faculty selection, training objectives, etc., so that there would be a completely different type of university in the country to compete with the state or public universities?

In addition, when we discuss universities, we may be thinking that they are elite universities, research universities, but in a country with a large population like China, we cannot imagine that all universities will be research universities, and there must be others who will train government workers or those who work in companies and enterprises.  It is also crucial for these general universities to maintain a basic level and the motivation to improve. Therefore, we must maintain a balance. It is important to promote research-oriented universities that produce high quality academic results, but at the same time, it is not conceivable that all universities will share these goals. Sometimes there is a need for a hierarchy, but even if there is a hierarchy, it should not become entrenched, which means that competition must be encouraged at all times. U.S. universities are a particularly good example of this, because even if Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton are always at the top in annual rankings, there is still movement.  Think about the University of Chicago, founded at about the same time as Peking University, a little more than a century ago, which has now risen to become a top university in the world, and there are others like Stanford University, which are also rising rapidly.

So I personally don't like the entrenched group of universities designated as “985” or “211” [shorthand for central government projects designed to produce world class universities in China], in which a small group of elite Chinese universities seems to be set in stone.  This is particularly hurtful for those enterprising educators who find themselves in schools that in the past were less distinguished, but which through their own continuous efforts to improve the system, to attract talent, with an eye toward raising overall university standards, but continue to face the existing stratification.  This means that there won’t be that many of this kind of enterprising educator.
 
In addition, if we strive for the return of the genuine scholar, or the return of the soul of the university, a problem that must be confronted is that the loss of it soul is also related to the tendency of the university to become more and more commercialized. In addition to the regular classes, universities are constantly running all kinds of training courses, and on weekends university campuses are full of luxury cars, parked everywhere, and those with the power and money can easily get a diploma that students struggle greatly to obtain. This is a very strange and wicked path that Chinese universities have taken under the slogan of the so-called “industrialization 产业化” of universities. So it is important to resist the commercialization of universities. Of course we need universities to influence society, but universities should not become indistinguishable from society, with scholars becoming social actors like businessmen. So we should revisit the tradition of German universities, and reflect on how we can maintain a certain purity of learning and scholars in universities, which is an aspect that deserves our particular attention.

The last point is that if we hope to bring “genuine scholars” back to Chinese universities, the criteria for evaluating such scholars deserve serious consideration. For example, in the Republican period, when Tsinghua University established the School of National Studies 国学, it hired Mr. Chen Yinke as a daoshi 导师, which at the time was a very distinguished position, meaning the professor of the professors. It was Liang Qichao, the previous daoshi, that recommended this choice to the school president, but Chen Yinke, despite having studied in Japan, the United States, and Germany for more than ten years, had no degree and had published nothing.

But Liang Qichao strongly recommended Chen, saying that despite his lack of degree and lack of publications, the few hundred characters he had written surpassed in value all of Liang’s collected works. Such a recommendation really shocked the principal. In the end,  they made an exception and Chen was hired as daoshi Tsinghua University, which added a glorious name to the roster of the university. I believe there were such exceptions made during the Republic that contributed to the quality of the universities. There was also the appointment of Liang Shuming by Mr. Cai Yuanpei to teach at Peking University, something that would never happen today.

In addition to faculty appointments, there is also the annual quantitative assessment of the teaching faculty, which looks at how many articles you have published each year, counting the number of words, counting the number of articles, and discussing the merits. This is actually extremely meaningless, because it is a bureaucratic management style that is incapable of examining the caliber of a scholar. It is really ridiculous to count in this simplistic way whether you have undertaken national projects, whether you have won any awards, how many papers you have published in top-tier journals and how many in lesser journals. Of course people should publish, but the advancement of academic research is not like planting and selling cabbages where you quibble over their weight, because one great paper or a classic book may lead to a new academic or ideological paradigm.  As the saying has it "it is better to kill with an inch of iron than to deploy a million troops," and numbers are often meaningless.

That is all I have to say today. I would like to thank you all for your patience in listening to me ramble on, as I reflect some of my inner conflicts and desultory thoughts as a university teacher for thirty-five years.
 
 
Notes

[1] 贺卫方访谈, “先生归来——大学反思录,” available online at https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/152530.

[2] Translator’s note:  The Spring and Autumn (approx. 771-476 BCE) period was part of China’s “axial age,” marked by considerable intellectual debate and diversity.

[3] Translator’s note:  Wudaokao is the neighborhood of Beijing where Tsinghua was located at the time.  This is the rough equivalent of referring to MIT as the “Cambridge Technical School.”

[4] Translator’s note:  These figures were all important in the world of Republican-period university education.

[5] Translator’s note:  A group of artists and intellectuals from the 3rd century, often identified as Daoist, who withdrew from court life to live in rural simplicity.