Communist China: Freer than "Republic" of Singapore?

      Daniel A. Bell, an accomplished and careful political theorist, has an article in the most recent issue of Dissent, "Teaching Political Theory in Beijing."  He has spent some time in Singapore and makes some interesting comparisons between the PRC and the Lion City:

The willingness to put up with political constraints depends partly upon one’s history. In my case, I had taught at the National University of Singapore in the early 1990s. There, the head of the department was a member of the ruling People’s Action Party. He was soon replaced by another head, who asked to see my reading lists and informed me that I should teach more communitarianism (the subject of my doctoral thesis) and less John Stuart Mill. Naturally, this made me want to do the opposite. Strange people would show up in my classroom when I spoke about “politically sensitive” topics, such as Karl Marx’s thought. Students would clam up when I used examples from local politics to illustrate arguments. It came as no surprise when my contract was not renewed.

In comparison, China is a paradise of academic freedom. Among colleagues, anything goes (in Singapore, most local colleagues were very guarded when dealing with foreigners). Academic publications are surprisingly free: there aren’t any personal attacks on leaders or open calls for multiparty rule, but particular policies, such as the household registry system, which limits internal mobility, are subject to severe criticism. In 2004, state television, for the first time in history, broadcast the U.S. presidential elections live, without any obvious political slant. (I suspect that the turmoil surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential elections, along with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, discredited U.S.-style democracy among many Chinese, and the government has less to fear from the model.) More surprisingly, perhaps, I was not given any explicit (or implicit, as far as I could tell) guidance regarding what I could teach at Tsinghua. My course proposals have been approved as submitted.

    Not many comparisons would highlight the PRC as a "paradise of academic freedom."   He goes on:

I did have one experience with censorship imposed from outside. I gave an interview to a Chinese newspaper that is widely read in intellectual circles. The interview dealt with China’s role in international affairs, and I made some critical comments about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that were published. However, I also made some comments about the ancient thinker Mencius—I argued that he justified “punitive expeditions” that were functionally similar to modern-day humanitarian interventions—that were not published. The Chinese government does not support any infringements on state sovereignty, and the newspaper probably worried that readers would draw implications for contemporary debates. To my surprise, the editor of the newspaper phoned me to apologize, explaining that the article was “reviewed” by a party cadre and that he had no hand in the matter. He also offered to publish the interview in full in an academic publication that would not be subject to the same sorts of constraints. In Singapore, by contrast, it is hard to imagine that the editor of the pro-government Straits Times would apologize to contributors whose views were censored: public humiliation is a more common tactic for dealing with those who do not toe the party line.

 Maybe the stakes are higher in Singapore because there it is less a matter of maintaining ideological consistency, and more a matter of rationalizing dynastic rule...

Comments

[ChinaLawBlog]

Where would the politically correct American university fit into all of this?

[frank]

As paradoxical comparisons are not always intelligent comparisons, paradoxical questions are not always intelligent questions.