Don Clarke Piece: Shen Kui and his Three Questions

Nice commentary about Beijing’s anti-western though pronouncements this past week…

Saturday, January 31, 2015
Shen Kui and his Three Questions

By Donald Clarke
Just when you start getting depressed about the way things are going in China, along comes Shen Kui, an associate professor and vice dean at Peking University Law School, to show that at least some of China’s thinking people are not going to take the government’s policy of intellectual anesthesia in higher education lying down.

On Jan. 30, Minister of Education Yuan GuirenĀ  spoke at a conference on ideological and propaganda work in higher education, declaring that it was necessary “to strengthen control over the use of original-edition [i.e., not processed through some Party-controlled mechanism] Western materials. We must by no means allow materials that propagate Western values into our classrooms; it is absolutely forbidden for all kinds of speech that attacks and slanders the Party’s leadership and blackens socialism to appear in university classrooms; it is absolutely forbidden to have all kinds of speech that violates the Constitution and the law spread in university classrooms; it is absolutely forbidden for teachers to complain and vent in the classroom and to transmit all kinds of harmful moods to students.”

In response, Prof. Shen posed three questions. The first is especially subversive, since it reminds us of the obvious and exposes the whole anti-Western-values campaign for the ridiculous charade that it is:

How do we distinguish “Western values” from “Chinese values”? As everyone knows, the specter of Communism that hovered over Europe almost two centuries ago, after crossing mountains and seas to get to China, helped bring about the birth of the Chinese Communist Party; the Marxism that our current Constitution stipulates we must uphold, and the education in internationalism, communism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism that the current Constitution stipulates we must undertake, are all from the West and have influenced China. There are countless examples of Western learning travelling east. Let me ask Minister Yuan, would it be possible for you to clearly delineate the line between “Western values” from “Chinese values”?

Here’s his second question:

How do we distinguish “attacking and slandering the Party’s leadership and blackening socialism” from “reflecting on the bends in the road in the Party’s past and exposing dark facts”? No political party would dare to declare that it never did and never would make errors, and no society, whether socialist or capitalist, would dare to declare that it has no dark side. Let me ask Minister Yuan, would it be possible for you to clearly give us the standard for distinguishing between “attack” and “reflect”, and between “blacken” and “expose darkness”?

And finally, the third question:

How should the Education Ministry that you lead implement the policy of governing the country according to the Constitution and the law? If you have a clear and understandable answer to the above two questions, please publish another speech in good time; if you still don’t have a clear answer, then please henceforth be cautious in your words and actions, because the Education Ministry that you lead relates to “the scientific and cultural level of the people of the whole nation” (Constitution, Art. 19), “the development of the natural and social sciences” (Constitution, Art. 20), and the citizens’ “freedom to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation, and other cultural pursuits” (Constitution, Art. 47); in short, it relates to the renaissance of the Chinese people. If you casually talk about what can be done and what can’t be done, then the least bit of incaution could mean a violation of the Constitution or the law.

Good stuff.