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.

We’ve become like Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s poem about the swan, the pike and the crawfish trying to pull a loaded cart off in different directions. We’ve become embroiled in a pointless and protracted war of attrition.

When we say that “China is complicated” we don’t necessarily mean this as a negative thing. Change is happening all around us. Our society is opening up more and more by the day. Chinese are exploring their own ideas and moving in their own directions, each seeking their own position in life. Gone are the days when we all sported the same face and were all of a single mind.
Having said that, we should be concerned with the fact that civil exchange and the sharing of our respective ideas and opinions is getting more difficult all the time. It’s hard to detect in our society any sort of “consensus of the times” or other commonly-held foundation of thought or belief.
That at least is the impression I have.
Take for example the extreme language we have seen in such cases as the [self-immolation] in Yihuang, in which one official said that, “Without demolition and removal there can be no new China,” a sentiment flatly rejected by ordinary Chinese.
Generally speaking, misunderstandings between the government and the people have still not been eliminated in our country. The left side [of the CCP] has its own discourse, and the right has its own discourse, and the two sides seem to have completely lost the capacity to speak frankly about issues. Each regards the other side with disgust, and they are incapable of friendly exchange.
Many of us seek out people with whom we can share our views over a cup of tea — but most often this is to have a good laugh, not to arrive at a consensus about how to solve this or that problem. You might even say we are altogether disillusioned with this process, the product of our constant and unending disappointment. We don’t suppose those exercising power will give even a nod of consideration to our ideas. This is the way the media generally feel as well.
There is no-one we can count on to dissolve our differences or bring reconciliation, not between the government and the people, and not between the so-called left and the so-called right.
How is it that we now have ever more advanced tools for discussion at our fingertips, but the tangible results of this have only been a deterioration of the discussion?
More and more people are hungry to express themselves and have the means, but fewer seem willing to listen. Instead, everyone is speaking in his or her own corner, soliloquizing. We hear nothing, and other voices are no longer important. Even though parts of our society have reached a consensus on some key issues, like the need to abolish the existing regulation on demolition of urban housing, such action faces immense hurdles on the government level.
It seems we can only engage in a completely fruitless sort of dialogue.
Actually, this mess is worse than just ineffectiveness. We’ve become like Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s poem about the swan, the pike and the crawfish trying to pull a loaded cart off in different directions. We’ve become embroiled in a pointless and protracted war of attrition.
Who are you? Are you a swan, a pike or a crawfish? This is no longer the point. The point is that we’re all exhausting ourselves and facing extreme hardship, without any sense of security. We push off in our own directions, but its a zero-sum game. In this tug-of-war pattern, strength is of no avail in solving anything.
At such a time, what we really need is to sit still for a moment and really think. We need to sit down and have a really good talk, seeking the real means of change. In the end, we’re all concrete individuals, whether we’re system insiders or system outsiders.
Just a few days ago, a student of mine, a lively thinker, said: “Teacher, isn’t it bad too for so many media to put attention on [Chinese Academy of Social Sciences professor and CMP fellow] Yu Jianrong (于建嵘).” Yu Jianrong is a rare sort of scholar in contemporary China. In my view, his value like less in his academic work per se, or in his public addresses, than in his efforts to work toward a “China consensus.” Yu is willing to preach to government leaders to defend the interests of China’s disadvantaged.
Thinking of this, I answered the inquisitive student: “The core problem isn’t that too many have paid attention to Yu Jianrong, but that in China scholars of Yu Jianrong’s mettle are few and far between. The work that should be done by a whole class of people is bravely sustained by a handful, and they have become like stars in a tragedy. This is really what China today must work to change.”
This editorial was originally published in Chinese at The Beijing News.