Few Western academics would aspire to teach political theory in an authoritarian setting. Surely the free, uninhibited flow of discussion is crucial to our enterprise. When I tell my Western friends that I gave up a tenured, high-paying job in relatively free Hong Kong for a contractual post at Tsinghua University in Beijing, they think I’ve gone off my rocker. I explain that it’s a unique opportunity for me: it’s the first time Tsinghua has hired a foreigner in the humanities since the revolution; Tsinghua trains much of China’s political elite, and I might be able to make a difference by teaching that elite; the students are talented, curious, hardworking, and it’s a pleasure to engage with them; the political future of China is wide open, and I’ll be well placed to observe the changes when they happen. Still, I do not deny that teaching political theory in China has been challenging. This has to do partly with political constraints. But it’s not all about politics. Even if China became ...

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] The pre-university compulsory military training at Beijing University has since been reduced to one month, in line with other Chinese universities. It is worth noting that mainland China does not have an extended period of compulsory military service (unlike Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore), but periods of military training are widespread in schools: my own son, who attends grade five at the primary school attached to Tsinghua University, underwent a military training period of one week prior to the start of the school year.
• [2] To be more precise, huge numbers (tens if not hundreds of thousands) would have to be killed (or under imminent threat of being killed) before the moral case for foreign military intervention would begin to seem plausible. (That’s another reason nobody called for foreign military intervention after June 4; the number of people killed was small in comparison to Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia.) State sovereignty does serve, on the whole, to secure people’s vital interests in life and security, and the barriers to foreign military intervention should be high. But I don’t see any moral difference if, say, huge numbers are being killed because they belong to a certain class (as in Stalin’s liquidation of Kulaks) rather than an ethnic group.
• [3] There is no such risk in written communication. Some students write papers and send e-mails in Chinese (I usually comment and respond in English), and if I’m missing something I can consult the dictionary.
• [4] It’s worth noting that the idea of a “syllabus,” with the particular week’s reading and discussion decided long before term-time, is less common in Chinese universities. Most teachers assign a general reading list of a few topics and related books and articles, without trying to fit X amount of material in a particular week.
• [5] This expectation may be partly due to the fact that my first book on (Western) communitarianism has been translated into Chinese, and some students know me as a (Western) communitarian. But after my interest in Chinese philosophy becomes more apparent, there is more willingness to discuss Chinese material. And there is no such prejudice among Chinese academics when I discuss Chinese and comparative philosophy.
• [6] With the exception of Kymlicka’s chapter on Marxism: the normally curious and critical students did not object to (or even mention) this discrepancy.
• [7] There is a literal translation for “professor,” but I once introduced myself as a professor and my (Chinese) wife said it sounded arrogant, I should say that I’m a “teacher.” I’ve since learned that most professors refer to each other as “teacher,” the same term that is used to refer to teachers of all levels. The term is also used to refer to departmental administrators (for example, students would call our departmental administrator “Teacher Bai”). Such linguistic practices may stem from a mixture of Confucian humility and Maoist egalitarianism.
• [8] There is also an order to the seating arrangement. The senior professor should sit at the part of the round table that gives him (or, more rarely, “her”), a view of the whole dining room.
• [9] A few weeks after I gave my talk, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave a talk to mid-career Communist Party officials preparing for senior leadership positions at the Central Party School (the school has two parts—one for graduate students and one for mid-level cadres—but both groups meet on Friday mornings for a joint lecture). The Pentagon specifically requested this setting for Rumsfeld’s talk. Rumsfeld criticized China’s military expansion saying that it prompted “questions [about] whether China will make the right choices—choices that will serve the world’s real interests in regional peace and stability,” though one wonders if he was so self-deluded as to think members of the crowd would look to his administration for guidance regarding “the world’s interests in regional peace and stability.” The only defense of the invasion of Iraq I’ve heard in China came from a party official who was pleased that the U.S. forces were stretched in Iraq, thus reducing the likelihood that the United States would lend military support to pro-independence forces in Taiwan.
• [10] The main reason for the relative freedom of speech at the Central Party School may be that students and professors can be trusted as committed nationalists and communists. They are not likely to rock the boat no matter what kind of critical information they are exposed to.
• [11] The lake at nearby Beijing University is called “Unnamed Lake,” but this lake really doesn’t seem to have a name.
• [12] Middlebury College in Vermont is famous for its intensive summer language programs: students live on campus and must sign a language pledge that bars them from speaking English the whole summer.