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Chinese Universities

G. Rosenberg

When the cultural revolution began in 1966, Tsing Hua university must have been very much like any university in New Zealand. Certainly the buildings could have been placed on campus anywhere here without looking out of place, and the whole outlook of the place screams "university". We were told that the people in the university had seemed the same then. There had been very little change in university teaching methods since before the revolution. Certainly many more students came to the university from the countryside, and from workers' homes; to that extent the university was different. But the students, if poorer, were much the same in outlook. The story went that after the first year at University, the student from a peasant background still had links with the countryside, after the second year he had become a city slicker, and by the third year he was ashamed to know his parents. The university was turning out a race superior, intellectual snobs, who expected and gained a higher position in society because of their university education.

In 1958 there had been a move amongst some of the more politically conscious students to attempt to break out of this situation. During the great leap forward a number had gone out of the university to work in the factories in an attempt to learn something of the life of the workers in China, but in 1970 this was stopped by some members of the university administration, who said it was interfering too much with their academic work, so the movement to learn from the workers died down until 1966.

The university administration, like much of the Chinese bureaucracy at that time, had fallen under the influence of the then President of China Liu Shao Chi, who led a faction in the Communist Party and Government which opposed Mao Tse Tung. The general line of this faction was in some ways similar to the line taken by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, aiming at economic development by technological and managerial methods, rather than relying on the political consciousness and initiative of the ordinary people. In this structure, the university trained technician, of course, played an important part, and he was rewarded for the part he played by status and high pay.

In the Communist party and the government, the struggle between the two lines of thought came out into the open in 1966, when on June I the first big character poster, rumoured to have been written by Mao himself appeared at the Peking University. This struck an immediate choard at Tsing Hua and other universities, and by the next day hundreds of posters appeared in the university grounds and in the grounds of the middle school next to the university. The posters generally attacked the bureaucrat/technocrat approach of the Liu Shao Chi supporters in the University and the government.

There was an immediate attempt by Liu Shao Chi to stop this threat to his policies. Immediately after the first big character poster appeared, Liu sent his wife to the university in charge of a work-team, allegedly aiming to purify the university ideologically. Her team labelled 150 of the staff above department level as, 'sinister elements', and 800 teachers and students who disagreed with her were labelled counter-revolutionary. This temporarily quietened activity in the university, until a few days later, the middle school attached to the university received a letter addressed to the students by Mao. He stated in the letter "I warmly support your rebellion against reactionaries."

Following the receipt of this letter secret meetings were held in the school to form a red guard group, the aim of which was to support Mao Tse Tung, to support the revolutionary line (as opposed to the Liu Shao Chi line), and to support the PLA. Several articles were written, calling on the students to ebel, and these were posted up around the campus. Copies were sent to the cultural group of the Central Committee of the Communist party, and these were in turn passed on to Mao, who wrote another letter to the students on August 1.

The receipt of the letter produced a large increase in the membership of the red guards, and on August 18 representatives of the red guard were received by Mao and Lin Piao in Peking.

In December 1966, an alliance of the red guard groups was formed, but it was to be short lived. There were splits in the movement, and two factions formed. On April 14 1967, the red guard movement divided into two; the 414's and the Corps groups, both claiming to be following the true revolutionary line. In general the 414 group took a more extreme leftist standpoint, but both groups had their extremists and their moderates. The breach between the two groups was manifested at first by general slogan slinging; one group called the other extreme rightists, the other retorted by calling the first extreme leftists. One called the other Kuo Min Tang agents; the reply was that they were counter-revolutionary bandits. Ultimately a small group within each came to believe there was such a difference between the groups that they were respectively labelled the Communist Party and the Kuo Min Tang, and that the only way to settle the difference was by coercion.

In April 1968 a total of about 300 students began actually fighting. Being Engineering students they were able to bring a fair degree of realism into the fighting, making themselves armour from the materials available in the school, constructing rifles, hand-grenades, and land mines, and turning tractors into tanks, and cars into armoured cars. Road blocks were set up on the campus, and a general atmosphere of war prevailed. In the fighting some 10 people were killed, and the students lived in virtual state of seige for a period of over a month. One one occasion the two factions fought over a grain store, and one managed to take the upper storey, and the other the lower. The faction downstairs removed the faction upstairs by setting fire to the building.

On July 27 1968, the workers of the factories in the surrounding area decided that this fighting should not go on any longer. A "Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team" was formed with army assistance, and 30,00 unarmed workers entered the university in an attempt to persuade the students to stop their fighting. The students would have nothing of it, and in fact fired on the workers, killing 5 and wounding 700. There was no violence used in retaliation by the workers, who began to demolish the students' barricades and draw them into study classes to try and explain to them that their behaviour was ridiculous. The process of reform was helped by the pacifist example of the workers, and by a meeting which Mao called of the leaders of the two factions, in which he told them they should support the propaganda team. By the evening of July 28 the fighting had stopped, and the process of, 'criticism struggle and transformation" could begin.

On August 5th Mao sent a gift to the propaganda team of a mango which he had been given by some foreign friends. This made it quite clear that he supported the actions of the team against the students, and by August 16 unity was restored and the long process of understanding what had gone wrong was begun.

On January 25 1969, this process culminated in the establishment of a Revolutionary Committee to run the University. Throughout China the establishment of such committees is taken as the indication that the aims of the Cultural Revolution have been achieved. In accordance with the usual structure, the committee was made in the form of the "three-in-one combination", consisting of Peoples' Liberation Army representatives, representatives of the cadres, and representatives of the masses. In Tsing-hua university there is a double three-in-one combination, as there is also an old-middle aged-young cross section. The committee has 31 members, five of whom are from the PLA, three are workers from the Mao Tsetung Propaganda team, 3 are cadres, seven represent the staff, seven the students and the red guards, five the workers in the university, and one the families of staff members. Indications are that the domination of university life by the intellectuals has ended as a result of the setting up of the committee.

A lot of re-education was necessary not only for the students, but also for the teachers, both in the political sphere and in educational work. Many of the teachers spent up to a year working in factories and on communes to give some practical meat to their theoretical knowledge, and to enable them to understand the outlook of the workers and peasants from wh they had isolated themselves in the past. One old professor we spoke to, by the name of Chien Wei-chang, teaches dynamics at the University, he confesses that he was influenced by the education he received in America "to take the road of bourgeois intellectuals." In general this meant that the education he gave his students was geared to a high academic level, which inevitably created social differences between the university graduate and the rest of society. Over the past two years he had spent time working in three steel plants in the Peking area, learning the realities of working life, and getting to know of the real problems he should be solving. As a result he considered that he was better equipped to teach students who were to go out to work in a socialist society. He explained that the idea of education was no longer to teach a student to sit behind a desk and solve problems of engineering in an abstract way, but to teach him to solve problems of people on the job with them. And to be able to do this they had to know what those problems were, and had to be able to express the solutions in everyday language. The system of education in the university now was that of integrating theory with practice, which involved the students spending much of their course engaging in actual productive, practical activities. The universtiy has links with 40 factories, and runs factories and a farm of its own. When construction work is done on the farm the buildings are designed by architects from the universtiy, who not only draw up the plans but actually assist In the construction.

The real basis of the new system of education is the new type of student who made up the first intake of 2,800, and who will make up future intakes, Some of the professors said that they found it hard to keep up with the changes. No student now arrives at the university fresh from middle (high) school. Before they can continue to university every potential student must spend three or more years working in a factory or commune. If he wishes to come to university the worker, peasant or soldier sends in an application to the leadership of the unit in which he works, the applications are then discussed among the applicant's workmates, and recommendations are made. The leadership of the unit gives approval, and then the university examines and gives final approval. The general qualifications of a successful applicant are that he "studies and applies Mao Tsetung Thought in a living way", that he has "close contact with the masses", that he has been woring for two or three years, that he is at least a graduate of junior middle school (3 years secondary schooling), and he is usually about 20, unmarried and healthy. This new system has meant that an air of practicality has been brought into the university. The professors say that the questions they are now asked are more closely related to reality. They have noticed a vast increase in the students' ability to analyse problems. The three year gap between school and university means a small loss of theory, but this is quickly picked up, when taught again in the context of practical education.

The university has cut back the length of its degree courses from 6 or more years to two or three. Once again the purpose is to remove the university from its ivory tower, and prevent the students turning into a theory trained, but practice deprived, elite. The period in the work units before, and the immediate return to those work units afterwards, prevents the development of a privileged intellectual class.

If Tsinghua University is at all typical of the post-Cultural Revolution University in China, there is every reason to hope that China has forever abolished the risk of creating a new class of privileged bureaucrats, who by their education reach standards of living, and positions of power unattainable to the ordinary worker or peasant in that society.