The PRC has pumped enormous amounts of funding into this endeavor via centrally mandated programs such as Project 211 (initiated in 1995) and Project 985 (1998). A driving motivation behind China’s contemporary higher education reforms, first unveiled in 1998, has been the effort to catapult the country’s leading universities into the upper echelons of “world-class universities,” as reflected in the Times Higher Education, Shanghai Jiaotong, QS, and other rankings of top research universities in the world. At the core of these evaluation procedures is a fixation with scaling, or quantifiable ratings of “quality,” that pervade (and pervert) both official and unofficial criteria of scholarly excellence. Ironically, among the most powerful weapons in the PRC’s arsenal of control mechanisms is the promotion of a battery of assessment measures – by no means unique to China – that are internationally recognized as standard metrics for any globally competitive system of higher education. The result of this associational activism is to relieve the state of some of its onerous welfare burden while at the same time providing an outlet for student engagement that is supportive, rather than subversive, of the political system. The guidance counselors also help mobilize students to participate in various “voluntary associations,” often under the direct or indirect auspices of the Communist Party or Youth League, which deliver a range of social services, including eldercare for senior citizens and education for migrant children.
Typically advanced graduate students and young instructors in their late twenties or early thirties, the counselors (assisted by student informants) report to the deputy party secretaries responsible for student work at all levels of the university structure. Dissemination of officially approved messages is not confined to the classroom: social media are used extensively (and often unobtrusively) as a means to communicate the party line.Ī dense network of “guidance counselors” ( fudaoyuan) – trained personnel tasked with keeping close tabs on their student charges to ensure that their beliefs and behaviors do not violate approved boundaries – forms a mainstay of the control regimen at PRC universities. These techniques include mental health screening and military training, as well as formal and informal instruction in political ideology, moral values, and Chinese history and culture. The party-state’s methods of control are multifaceted and dynamic, continually evolving to reflect the latest developments in international pedagogy and information technology. My current research seeks to explain the means by which the Chinese Communist party-state maintains campus calm, despite the many unpopular and potentially unsettling higher education reforms – from the introduction of student tuition fees to the imposition of faculty publication requirements – that the Ministry of Education has implemented in recent years. Moreover, the recent “sunflower movement” in Taiwan and the “occupy central” demonstrations in Hong Kong indicate the continuing capacity of university students in other parts of Greater China to mobilize large-scale political protests in direct opposition to PRC policies. Prior to Tiananmen, every generation of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals engaged in consequential political protest. Such acquiescence cannot be attributed to any inherent passivity on the part of Chinese academics. The only significant student participation in protest activity has taken the form of regime-sponsored nationalistic demonstrations against Japanese claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
Yet, in the midst of this widespread social ferment, college students and their professors have remained conspicuously compliant. Land conflicts by rural villagers, labor disputes by urban workers, environmental protests by a rising middle class – to name only some of the most prominent varieties of popular resistance – contribute to an impressive level of contention in contemporary China. The situation is particularly striking in light of the veritable explosion of popular protest found among virtually all other sectors of post-Tiananmen Chinese society. In the more than twenty-five years since the momentous student-led Tiananmen uprising of 1989, university campuses in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been notably tranquil.
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