Chinese colleges caught between politics and raising global profile

BEIJING — It is hard to know exactly which transgression propelled Mr Xia Yeliang (picture), an accomplished Peking University economist, from opinionated irritant to a marked enemy of the ruling Communist Party.

There was his 2009 public letter that ridiculed the technical school degree held by the nation’s Propaganda Minister and the interview he gave last year to Radio Free Asia, describing China as a “Communist one-party dictatorship”.

But Mr Xia, a former teenage Red Guard turned free-market advocate, said he most likely crossed a line last year when he posted an online jeremiad calling on Chinese intellectuals to gather in public squares to debate political reform.

“That seemed to really upset school administrators,” he said recently. It also apparently upset powerful figures in the party.

In the coming weeks, 53-year-old Xia said he is likely to be dismissed from his teaching post at Peking University, one of the nation’s most prestigious, a move he and others said reflects the government’s determination to control intellectual discourse at the nation’s leading educational institutions.

The effort to silence him has thrown into sharp relief the challenges facing elite colleges and universities like Peking University, caught between political controls at home and their ambitions to gain international respect as grand centres of learning.

In recent years, the university has waged a muscular and well-financed effort to raise its global profile through partnerships and exchanges with some of the world’s top institutions.

Last year, Stanford University opened a US$7-million (S$8.7 million) research centre on the Peking University campus, and a growing list of other colleges and universities, including Cornell, Yale and the London School of Economics, have established dual-degree programmes or enhanced academic collaboration.

Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan said punishing Mr Xia would most likely harm the university’s efforts at elevating its stature abroad. “It would send out a message that the university is not able to resist political interference and is unable to separate politics from academics, which is a basic requirement for those trying to carry out decent academic work,” he said.

The campaign to silence Mr Xia has not gone unnoticed overseas. The Committee of Concerned Scientists has taken up his plight, and last month, more than 130 faculty members at Wellesley College signed an open letter calling on administrators to reconsider their partnership with Peking University should he be fired.

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