Educating Emigrants

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

Although very high examination scores are required to enter Peking University (北京大学, PKU, ‘Běi Dà’), its infrastructure has only recently started to receive much investment, its attitude to its students remains one of ensuring that they know it’s run for the administration’s benefit and not for theirs, and care is taken to keep the curriculum as unimaginative and uncontroversial as possible. Rote learning and the uncritical acceptance of established texts are still required.

Foreign exchange students may find themselves dragooned into teaching courses in subjects they are still struggling to master themselves, and for no pay. Neither failing to turn up to a course at all, nor turning in weak exam papers, prevents students from getting a degree, and foreign teachers who mark poor or lazy students down just find their marks adjusted upwards — only political activism of the wrong kind fails students.

Those who have a serious interest in an education must seek out the truly qualified teachers from among the politically acceptable time-servers (only a small proportion of university lecturers in China have doctorates) and demonstrate enough devotion to the subjects they teach to gain attention. Inevitably it’s those with the drive to achieve this who go abroad for postgraduate studies and never return.

Following the Cultural Revolution’s complete destruction of the education system, the Communist Party, only recently reconverted to the idea that you can’t stick any old peasant in a cadre’s job and expect results, nevertheless still prefers political conformism to brains, and has created a system in which only the brightest and most determined get anything other than brainwashed and are then driven overseas.

Běi Dà (PKU) is traditionally the principal home of student activism, including some of the leaders of the bloodily suppressed demonstrations of 1989, (although the starting point is thought to have been the People’s University, Rén Dà). One of the forerunners of the university, originally located at a site called the Red Building to the north of the Forbidden City, was a college for interpreters, set up by Sir Robert Hart at the end of the 19th century when he was in charge of the Imperial Customs.

The Imperial University, which absorbed the college, was where the strange adventurer and diary forger Edmund Backhouse taught for a while (see Pride and a Fall, and A Foreign Journalist in Peking) and was one of the few of the Guāngxù emperor’s Hundred Days’ Reforms to last. Later it moved out to its current location, taking over the site of a university already set up by American missionaries in an area well beyond the city walls. Dotted with temples, the area had become popular with eunuchs who had grown fat on squeeze (corruption) and who built estates for their retirement. The grounds of two of these estates, one of which originally belonged to Qiánlóng’s favourite, Héshēn (see Prince Gōng’s Mansion), became the university campus.

In 1999 the university celebrated its centennial, and newspaper articles made great play of its important role in the development of communism in China. One of the founders of the Communist Party had been librarian there and a major influence on Máo Zédōng, who also worked in the library at the Red Building. Its revolutionary credentials included the 4 May demonstrations, when students took to the streets (and Tiān’ān Mén Square) to protest at the results of the Versailles conference, which handed over Chinese territory formerly occupied by Germany to the Japanese rather than returning it to Chinese control. The demonstration was against the spinelessness of the Nationalist government then in Nánjīng, but also in favour of proper democratic reform, which the Communist Party promised but has never supplied.

Nevertheless, in a bid to make 4 May a pro-communist anniversary, the Party has anachronistically designated this Běi Dà’s birthday, although the demonstrations didn’t occur until 1919, 20 years after the university’s founding. The articles lauding student activism must have made bitter reading to those who demonstrated in favour of democracy in 1989 and who faced the tanks on the night of 3–4 June.

All students have to do some military training but, in an effort to crush the independent-mindedness of Běi Dà, entrance has sometimes required not only the highest test scores but also a year in the army rather than the five to 20 days required for other universities.

In 2011 the university decided to start screening its students for ten different kinds of ‘troubles’, among them eccentricity and radical thinking.

Until recently visitors to Běi Dà needed an invitation from a student or member of staff, and had to sign in at the gate, but strolling past the guards in an unconcerned manner usually avoided this problem. Such regulations are reinstituted at politically tricky times, such as around Liù Sì, the 4 June anniversary of the Tiān’ān Mén massacre. Now tours to the campus are promoted in conjunction with a visit to the ‘Old’ Summer Palace not far away.

The pagoda that looks so impressive from a distance is actually a 1924 water tower, but the campus is also home to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology (赛克勒考古与艺术博物馆, Sàikèlè Kǎogǔ yǔ Yìshù Bówùguǎn, t 6275 1661, open 9–4.30). Ironically, one of the campus streets is called Mínzhǔ Lù (民主路, Democracy Road).

According to UNESCO, China’s record on education spending continues to be abysmal, even compared with considerably poorer countries. A few years ago it still ranked 145th out of 153 countries in terms of per capita spending, and 101st out of 120 in terms of the number of university graduates — a mere 2% of the population. Spending has officially risen to about 3.3% of GDP, although less than two thirds of that is public money, and as these are government figures the situation is in reality certainly worse. Nevertheless, shiny new buildings have sprouted on many campuses in an arc across the north of the city, and it is claimed that the number of university graduates rose from 1.5 million in 2002 to 4.2 million in 2007, with two million graduating expensively only to find themselves unemployed, a figure that has worsened with the economic recession in 2008.

Qualifying to enter university remains problematic, and large sections of the population are at a serious disadvantage. In 2008 the government officially relieved the rural population of the need to pay for its children’s primary and secondary education, but charges and bribery are rife, and many continue to drop out of education for lack of funds. City authorities have been instructed make room for the children of migrants, but have not been given the funds to open new schools. So some have closed the schools the migrants had organised for themselves in order to hide their failure to follow orders, leaving migrant children untaught.

Pressure on children to pass the gāokǎo (高考) university entrance examination is now intense and contributes to the fact that the most common cause of death among 20–35-year-olds is suicide, and Chinese researchers claim that over 25% of university students have suicidal thoughts. Cheating is rife, with online adverts for technological and other assistance to success commonplace. The contents of the test paper envelope are officially designated juémì (绝密, top secret), but this makes little difference.

Universities give a disproportionate number of places to urban candidates, and supposedly top universities such as PKU give a disproportionate number to local students. In 2012 an applicant from Hénán Province who had been denied a place demonstrated outside the university’s main gate with a plaque imitating its logo but reading ‘Beijingers’ University.’

He was granted a re-examination, but in the form of seven hours’ police interrogation, after which he was taken home.

Next in Northwest Beyond the Zoo: Běijīng Zoo
Previously: Introduction to Northwest Beyond the Zoo
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.

For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.