The Dean of Shandong by Daniel A. Bell;

Author:Daniel A. Bell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

8

Censorship, Formal and Informal

JOHN STUART MILL’S On Liberty, first published in 1859, is the most influential defense of free speech ever written. What is less well known is that Mill worried more about “public opinion” than about state censorship. As Mill puts it, the tyranny of public opinion is “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”1 Yes, he was writing in Victorian England and our time may not be as conformist. But it’s worth asking if his worries are still relevant today. My own experience writing about Chinese politics suggests that it depends on the context. Today, Mill’s thesis is right about the West but wrong about China.

In China, it will come as no great surprise that the heavy hand of state censorship is the biggest problem. And things have gotten worse the past few years. In 2015, Education Minister Yuan Guiren called for the strengthening of Marxist ideology in universities and a ban on “teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.”2 On the face of it, such regulations are absurd. It would mean banning not just the ideas of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls but also those of thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Pronouncements against the influence of Western values contradict what’s really happening in higher education in China. There have been recurrent campaigns against foreign interference since the 1980s, and yet the trend has been consistent: more international links with Western universities, more academic meritocracy and less political ideology in the selection and promotion of professors, and experimentation with different modes of liberal arts education. In my faculty, an academic committee selects and promotes professors based on academic merit, and political considerations rarely intervene.3 Of course, the government could reverse these trends, but the nation’s leaders know full well that a modern educational system needs to learn as much as it can from abroad.

In my case, I’ve been teaching political theory in mainland China for two decades—thirteen years at Tsinghua University, then six years at Shandong University—and I continue to be pleasantly surprised by the amount of freedom in the classroom.4 I recognize that the classics are less subject to censorship than works in contemporary political science and theory. I also recognize that English-language books are not censored as heavily as works in Chinese.5 Still, I routinely discuss politically sensitive topics, and much of what I teach would fall in the “prohibited” category if official warnings were enforced to the letter. At Shandong University, I’ve been teaching an advanced undergraduate course in political philosophy. Here is what I say in the syllabus:

This course is a basic introduction to the main principles of political philosophy. The history of political philosophy, whether in China or the West, is a history of debates about contrasting political values: What matters more, freedom or community? Equality or hierarchy?

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