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University’s one-year Master’s program in Chinese studies smacks of money
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LIU Dingning, an excellent college admission test taker from Liaoning Province, was admitted to the University of Hong Kong (HKU) with a HK$700,000 (US$89,600) scholarship last year.
Citing the curriculum she found unsatisfying, the Cantonese dialect she was unacquainted with, and the amount of time she had to spend online, Liu opted out after only a month at HKU.
She sat for the test again this year, and was recently accepted as a Chinese Language Department student at Peking University (Beida), her dream school where she expected to learn guoxue (traditional Chinese studies) in its pristine state.
She deserves salutation for her choice — she has chosen to major in a discipline of dismal employment prospects and rarely favored by high scorers like her.
It would be another matter if Beida was deserving of the obeisance paid by Liu, if inadvertently. As a matter of fact, the university has been recently embroiled in a heated controversy that might compromise Beida’s name.
On May 5 Beida formally launched its Yenching Academy project, a one-year Master’s program in Chinese studies expected to start in 2015. Yenching University was a premier Christian institution set up early last century with John Leighton Stuart (1876-1962) serving as its first president. It was closed in 1952, its campus taken by Beida.
The first objections to the one-year program are about its location. According to school sources, the Yenching Academy will be located at the Jingyuan Courtyard on Beida, where “six historical buildings in the courtyard will be renovated to provide state-of-the-art teaching and learning facilities.”
A leaked plan for renovation, involving extensive makeover both above and underground, provoked such a backlash among the faculty that on June 5 the authority decided to scale back the planned changes, restricting the remodeling to within the existing buildings above the ground. That concession did little to assuage popular unease. An online poll conducted June 8-19 showed 2,729 people opposed to the location, against 83 in favor.
There are worries that the reconstruction will encroach on some of the remaining public area in the core campus space where students can walk, chat, and gather together. Given Beida’s past, the public space is quite a cultural legacy, rich in collective memory.
Some teachers openly challenge the idea of providing a one-year Master’s program and even the very concept of “Chinese studies.” As some pointed out, Chinese studies is a field of inquiry created in American universities and institutions during the Cold War era in reference to China-related studies.
“What is Chinese studies in the first place? How can you conduct any lectures before you have worked out the very concept? It is also unconventional to confer a one-year Master’s degree, for any study would entail a decent period of buildup and digestion of relevant knowledge,” said Li Ling, a Beida professor.
There is also criticism that the lectures will be chiefly delivered in English.
Unnatural requirement
To anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Chinese, it would sound bizarre to conduct Chinese studies at a Chinese university in a foreign language. The subtle textual analysis central to classic studies would be lost with a foreign language. Modern philosophers also believe that our outlook and way of thinking are dictated by the concepts peculiar to our mother tongue.
But professor Tang Xiaofeng from Beida provides an incisive insider’s rationalization of Beida’s choice.
“English will come in handy with overseas lecturers. With the use of English as the medium of instruction and then academic papers published in English, you have all the appearance of being international,” explained Tang.
If anything, this unnatural requirement about English as the medium of instruction does suggest a disturbing absence of Chinese influence, or a tacit disdain for the Chinese language.
For a typical Chinese, Confucianism provides a basic view about life. It defies simple cost-efficient analysis. It never prides itself on being utilitarian.
One of most learned classic scholars, Qian Zhongshu, once said, “Scholarship is born of deliberations among a few simple-living scholars in a hut in a backwater village. When it is elevated into a learning of fashion, it cannot but become vulgarized.”
In that Yenching Academy program, the Chinese studies have all the fancy trappings of pursuing a discipline of high fashion. It is a cutting-edge program where scholars are to “work with the pioneers in their field to develop and apply innovative research in the areas of humanities and social sciences.”
That deviates from the cardinal Confucian doctrine about self-cultivation, which leads to the management of household, then the government of the state and universal peace. This program looks more like a standard investment.
Think about the costs of renovations, the costs of providing an expensive international faculty, the funding to be supplied by entrepreneurs from China and abroad.
The products it turns out promise to be highly competitive, evincing a passionate engagement with the society and services. Invest the money, produce, and sell — quickly — at a premium. That’s the standard process in the business world. Whether you like it or not, it does suggest some of China’s “top” universities are aggressively embracing the market with unstoppable momentum.
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