In recent years, courses in public governance at Chinese universities have become a fiercely debated issue. The area of public governance has expanded on both the research and the teaching sides, and as the number of research topics has ballooned, so has available funding. As a result, many Chinese universities have expanded their course offerings on the subject. Given this trend, teachers often have little choice but to broaden their course offerings public governance, grabbing their respective pieces of the pie.
Public governance courses are offered with a mind to improving students’ acceptance and understanding of our existing political and administrative system, but in fact there’s little way of knowing what impact these courses actually have. My understanding is that most students have a strong aversion to
the courses. Those opting to take them do so only to satisfy basic requirements for the conferment of their degrees, and the teaching methods employed by course instructors are necessarily dull, constricted as they are by political necessity — if instructors attempt teach more openly and creatively, they risk “breaking with form” and are courting trouble. Instead, teachers stick rigidly to the rigid course materials.
Even more serious is the fact that the inflexible theories taught in these courses do not engender in students the idea that the study of politics is a process of truth seeking and rational exploration. Inevitably, certain precepts cannot be questioned. Facing a chasm between theory and practice, in fact, we’ve all become two faced. We engage in a kind of double-dealing, paying lip service to one set of facts and ideas, and harboring a completely different one in our hearts.
This disconnect concerns the mental integrity and health of everyone in our country, and this is an issue we should all confront.
Reforms to the political curriculum have always proceeded slowly. One important reason for this is that policy-makers in this area have their hands tied by a dominant pattern of discourse (话语模式) in our country that remains virtually unchanged. Breaking through old patterns of speaking and thinking is incredibly difficult.
For any nation, the basis for reaching new breakthroughs in political ideas is freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of social and scientific research. Without these basic preconditions, it is difficult to search for new ideas.
Even more, what we need in China’s university system are courses that urge students toward a higher path of knowledge, courses that elevate the spirit. What steps we can take to create such a curriculum is a question everyone at our universities, both teachers and administrators, should actively seek answers to.
In Taiwan in the past there were the “Three Principles of the People” — the principles of nationalism, democracy and the people’s livelihood — and education in the party line of the Kuomingtang, and these were utterly inflexible. Later, however, change gradually did come and university courses grappled with such questions as what it means to be a citizen, what makes for a fair nation and government, and how to use institutions and culture to ensure that all people can live in a society with dignity.
In order to change our own system, we must gain a new understanding of what kind of society we ultimately want to build, what our value goals ultimately are, and then we must think about how to organize our curriculum, how we can create a whole new generation of citizens who are sensible and have strong characters.
Students, regardless of their courses of study, should understand why we need a government, what obligations a government has toward its people, what sorts of limits must be placed on the power of government, why we must have freedom of speech and of the press, how we can protect those freedoms, and how we can maintain a balance between social order and individual freedom.
This article was part of a five-part September 2010 series by five writers on the issue of public governance education in China, its importance and present limitations. The full series, published in Guangzhou’s Time Weekly, can be found at China Elections and Governance.

Late last month Kong Qingdong (孔庆东), a China studies professor at Peking University known most recently for his part in the nationalist bestseller Unhappy China, courted criticism from journalists and intellectuals in China when he said point blank during an interview that, “Right now journalists are a major public nuisance in our country.” Not stopping there, Kong said that, “If these journalists were all lined up and shot, I would feel heartache for not a single one of them.”
The focus of Kong’s criticism was Guangdong’s Nanfang Media Group, which has long had a reputation for more outspoken coverage of hard news and a stronger tradition of in-depth and investigative coverage. Continuing his shower of invective, Kong said: “I believe that the people of China should sue the Nanfang newspaper group, which every day defiles the revolutionary martyrs [of the country], besmirches the Party and the national government, and debases the Chinese people.”
The Nanfang Media Group operates a number of what are arguably China’s most respected professional publications, including Southern Metropolis Daily, Southern Weekly, Southern Metropolis Weekly and the province’s official Nanfang Daily.
Kong’s remarks were in response to a question posed to him about statements made by Wang Lijun (王立军), the top official in Chongqing’s Public Security Bureau, during a police conference on October 16, 2010. In his speech, Wang Lijun said that in the future his agency would launch a lawsuit against any media and journalist who attacked the reputation of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau or the civil police force (民警). If individual civil police officers were singled out for attack, said Wang, the officers would bring a suit against the journalist responsible in the courts, and the Public Security Bureau would sue the media organization.
Wang Lijun’s threats, now referred to as his “double action theory,” or shuang qi lun (双起论), sparked a discussion in China’s media about increasing pressures facing the practice of “supervision by public opinion,” or yulun jiandu (舆论监督), the use of the media to monitor power.
Professor Kong’s remarks on the media and journalists essentially threw support behind the hardline attitude of Chongqing’s top police official.
Following Kong Qingdong’s attack on the media, Chinese came out on both sides of the argument, some agreeing that the media had become a problem and others arguing that the monitoring of social and political issues is an important role of the news media. Many Chinese seemed to agree, in any case, that the tenor of Kong’s criticism was uncivil — and unbefitting a professor at a leading Chinese university.
Kong’s suggestion that no one should have moral compunctions about the execution of professional journalists is backgrounded by the unfortunate fact that attacks on journalists have increased in recent years in China.
An editorial posted on the Guangming Daily website yesterday said that “‘double action’ supporter Kong Qingdong is way off base.” The editorial, which suggested Kong had gotten a dizzying injection of ego with the publication of Unhappy China, said: “In today’s China, we don’t have too much media reporting of government, police and other power organs, we have too little.”
Another editorial published in Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Evening News yesterday, cautioned readers about the not-so-subtle Cultural Revolution overtones in Professor Kong’s remarks.
“Kong Qingdong has made no secret of the fact that he is infatuated with the culture of the Cultural Revolution and beautifies the Cultural Revolution era,” the editorial said. “These calumnies that have so shocked people and filled them with unease are legacies of the language of the Cultural Revolution.”

Right now journalists are a major public nuisance in our country.