Good Students of China

By Michael Goldfarb
Published April 10, 2007 3:22pm ET
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Tim Johnson, the China correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, also runs his own blog, China Rises, which is a must-read for those following events in the world’s most populous country. Yesterday Johnson linked to a story titled “Have All China Scholars Been Bought?” from the Far Eastern Economic Review. The author, Carson A. Holz, writes:

Academics who study China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. Our incentives are to conform, and we do so in numerous ways: through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach.

Foreign academics must cooperate with academics in China to collect data and co-author research. Surveys are conducted in a manner that is acceptable to the Party, and their content is limited to politically acceptable questions. For academics in China, such choices come naturally. The Western side plays along.

China researchers are equally constrained in their solo research. Some Western China scholars have relatives in China. Others own apartments there. Those China scholars whose mother tongue is not Chinese have studied the language for years and have built their careers on this large and nontransferable investment. We benefit from our connections in China to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections. Everybody is happy, Western readers for the up-to-date view from academia, we ourselves for prospering in our jobs, and the Party for getting us to do its advertising. China is fairly unique in that the incentives for academics all go one way: One does not upset the Party.

You get the gist–if one wants to study China, he had better not get on the wrong side of the Communist party. If he does, he runs the risk of losing his access, and his job. For his part, Johnson locks onto this particularly disturbing paragraph from the story:

We ignore the fact that of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2,932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors -­ finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities — 85% to 90% are held by children of high-level cadres.

Johnson is suspicious–“It’s a pretty extraordinary statistic. But is it true? I have my serious doubts.” Jennifer Chou posted here yesterday on two “children of high-level cadres,” one of whom is the vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration and the other the head of Huaneng Power International, China’s largest power producer. THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD thus makes its contribution of anecdotal evidence to support Holz’s claim. But Johnson does not really challenge the thrust of Holz’s argument, that Western scholars have, out of self-interest, largely conformed to the wishes of the Communist party on issues large and small.

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