Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with William Kirby.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to not only our great daily newsletter, The Daily Dispatch, but all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
My guest today is William Kirby, who, I’m guessing, requires absolutely no introduction to most of you listening as he is one of the most eminent scholars in the field of China studies. Bill is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University distinguished service professor, and for decades now has taught, along with Peter Bol, Harvard’s legendary Chinese history course — the one made famous by John King Fairbank. Bill is the author of many books, including Germany and Republican China. But today, we are going to focus on his latest book — Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China. Published last year, the book brings together Bill’s deep knowledge of the German, American, and Chinese higher education systems, and really draws on his many decades of experience in multiple institutions in each of these systems, not just as a professor, but in administrative capacities as well.
He has served as the chair of Harvard’s History Department and as director of the university’s famous Fairbank Center, as well as serving as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and has been deeply involved in many of the key academic American institutions in China, including in the founding of Duke Kunshan, and as the chair of the Academic Advisory Council of Schwarzman College at the Tsinghua. He also brings his business-school approach to the book. It’s really built on case studies, including case studies of what’s now called the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Free University of Berlin for the German Universities, Harvard, a Duke, which is just up the street from me right now, and my own alma mater, Cal Berkeley for the U.S., and Tsinghua, Nanjing University, and the University of Hong Kong for China.
It is no exaggeration at all to say that he is uniquely qualified to have written a book like this, a comparative study of the modern research university. It is truly eye-opening and you are going to find yourself surprised that reading about 19th-century German universities is so very interesting. William Kirby, Bill, welcome at last to Sinica.
Bill Kirby: My great pleasure, Kaiser. Thank you for having me.
Kaiser: So great to have you on the show finally. I’m so delighted that we could do this. Okay, so because this is a podcast about China, we will, of course, focus on the final third of the book about China’s universities. But because the story you tell is one in which each of these national protagonists, if you will, Germany, the U.S., China, builds on what came before. We do need to lay a little groundwork, at least summarizing what Germany and especially what’s now called Humboldt University of Berlin contributed to the creation of the modern research university and how that inspired and served as the foundation for American innovations in higher education. After that, we can talk about how in turn American universities went on to serve as a template for some Chinese universities, which, by the way, also drew on Germany quite directly as well. Why don’t we start off, as you do in the book, with Germany and this idea of Wissenschaft?
Bill: The idea of Wissenschaft of science in a broadly conceived way was that universities, Kaiser, are more than a millennium old, or institutions that call themselves universities are that old. But the modern research university is no more than 233 years old this year. It was founded in 1810 in Berlin in the aftermath of a terrific military defeat by Prussia at the hands of Napoleon, in which the monarch, Frederick William III said something, and I’ve never heard of political leader say since, he said, “We will replace with intellectual strength what we have lost in physical strength.” He deputed an Enlightenment intellectual, Wilhelm von Humboldt and an extraordinary cadre of individuals to create a modern teaching and research institution in Berlin, which had never had a university, and to focus that university on not simply the propagation of knowledge from one generation to the next, but the creation of knowledge, the first self-designed research university.
The work of a professor is not simply to teach, but to create knowledge, and to create it in the company of students, a unity of teaching and learning. An institution that would have, as it was said in German, Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach, and Lernfreiheit, the freedom to learn on the part of students. A university that, even if funded by the state, would be essentially autonomous in setting its own academic agendas, and a university, and this is the realm of Wissenschaft from historical science to literary science, as it would be called in Germany, to natural science. That the pursuit of knowledge would be at the heart of things across the university, and the heart of the university would not be any professional school, but rather what they called the philosophical faculty, what we would call today the faculty of arts and sciences. This model, when you think of it, you can now find everywhere in the world. There isn’t a major research university that does not, in large measure, follow the model established in Berlin in 1810.
Kaiser: Yeah. There’s no question at all that Germany really dominated the 19th century, just as the United States dominated the 20th. But you argue that the U.S. is rather squarely shooting itself in the foot as politicians of, let’s say one party in particular, are pushing to defund public higher education in the majority of American states right now. Ironically, it’s those same people who are always going on about how China threatens us, and then allegedly is poised to rob us of our primacy, when in fact, the universities are such an important piece of that. There’s another major way in which America of recent years seems hell meant on self-sabotage when it comes to this really extravagant advantage that we have right now of having the world’s best universities or so many of them anyway. That is in the way that the national security concerns, and sometimes outright xenophobia, and especially sinophobia — and not just on campuses, but really in the broader body politic — are pushing away Chinese students and scholars and making them feel unwelcome and even unsafe here. The DOJ’s China Initiative, which we talked about a lot on this program, may have changed its name and hopefully become more aware of the dangers of profiling, but there’s no question at all that America is still not the welcoming place that it was just 10 years ago for Chinese students. How much of an impact are we seeing so far? What do the enrollment numbers tell us?
Bill: Well, let me take a step back and say that American universities, just to follow the first part of your comment there, became great research universities by, in many ways, plagiarizing the norms of the University of Berlin and of other great German universities. If we had rankings of the kind we have today, as late as in the 19 teens probably, eight of the top 10 universities in the world would’ve been German, and the other two, Oxford and Cambridge. No American University close. The 20th century changes that dramatically. Of course, German universities collapse under Nazism and the war, and American universities rise, and rise to a level in which they now dominate these global rankings in an extraordinary way. And just as the best and the brightest of young Americans, and particularly anyone who wanted to pursue a profession in scholarship, went to Germany in the 19th century.
Today, much of the world, particularly those who wish to be in higher education, will come to the United States also for their education, because we have the drawing power today. That number, when you think about it, has just grown enormously over the last decade and is now beginning to slip. There were 130,000 or so Chinese students in American institutions in 2009, and it went up to as many as 360,000 in 2018. Now it’s dropped a little bit about 8% to about 290 something thousand. But you see warning signs as to where this may be going because of some of the issues that you’ve just raised. In 2015, about half of Chinese students planning to study abroad wanted to study in America, but now that’s about 30%, and more wish to study, not all can in the UK. And this has big implications.
There are financial implications, of course. $15 billion to the U.S. economy was contributed by Chinese students in 2018. But a bigger one is a sense of the loss of attractiveness of the United States and a little bit of a loss of competitiveness in this regard. Now, many Chinese parents would still want and prefer their children to come to American universities as distinct, for example, from Chinese universities, but we are, in many ways, shooting ourselves in the foot. There are quotas on many public universities for the number of outer state students, which automatically limits the number of international students who could come to them. You could see this very clearly at Berkeley and UCLA and other schools of the UC system. Above all, the biggest long-term weakness in the United States, and I’m speaking to you from a university that’s financially rather well off, Harvard, but there has been, particularly in this century, a steady defunding of public universities, of public higher education in the United States.
44 out of 50 American states are today disinvesting in higher education since 2008. This is a very dangerous moment, it strikes me, in which both politicians and the general public are refusing to support institutions that did as much, or more, actually a great deal more than famous older institutions like my own, to make this country the economic powerhouse that it is. California today would not be the California we know without the great University of California system.
Kaiser: Right.
Bill: There are many aspects of how we become less welcoming: the China initiative, the sense of the social issues in American cities, gun violence, anti-Asian racism — all of this contributes to an image that is a darker one to the outside than we would’ve had even a decade ago.
Kaiser: Yeah. It’s a terrible pity. There’s so much in your book about the American higher education system, and I really enjoin everyone to read it. It’s just fantastic if you’re at all interested in tertiary education. But this being a show about China, I do want to turn to China’s universities. But before we get into too much of the history of them, I guess I want to give listeners a sense of the scale of the ambition right now of Chinese universities, the sheer scale of it and the sense of what’s already been accomplished. Because I keep an eye on such things, or I like to think so, but still, some of the statistics that I came across in the early chapters of your book were just mind-blowing to me. What is happening right now in terms of the level of investment, the enrollments in higher education? Last time I looked, I seem to remember that less than 10% of 18- to 24-year-olds in China were enrolled in universities. Now, I think it’s actually higher than the percentage of Americans of the same age.
Bill: That’s absolutely right, Kaiser. Education in Chinese universities, since they were founded in the late 19th century, has historically been for an elite, for a very small number of individuals. This number was taken to the vanishing point during the Cultural Revolution, but it began in the reform era to come back. But think of these numbers. In the year 1990, there were 2 million university students in China. By the end of that decade, by the year 2000, there were 6 million university students. I went to lunch with the Minister of Education around 2008, and I asked him, “How many students are there today in Chinese universities?” And he said, “Oh, 23 million.”
Kaiser: Oh my God.
Bill: This was one of these long and endless and wonderful Chinese banquets, many, many courses. By the time dessert came around, the number was 26 million. Somebody came and whispered a new number into the minister’s ear. Today, that number is 44.3 million. China has gone, in the course of this century, from about half the size of the United States higher education system to more than twice the size of it. And the number of students, 44.3 million today and rising. No country is investing more than China in higher education. Nearly 60% of high school age students, or 18- to 24-year-old students in China enroll in one or another form of higher education. That is roughly equivalent to the number in the United States that enroll in some form of higher education from junior college on. In the United States, and we don’t yet have the kind of completion figures for all of those in China, but in the United States, less than 40%, but about 40% complete higher education.
China is outpacing us in many ways, both in investment in its elite universities, but also in educating the large masses of the citizenry to be educated and productive members of the workforce. This is a real challenge for the United States and a real success story for China’s investment in higher education.
Kaiser: Absolutely. Although I do wonder whether these sort of youth unemployment figures that we keep reading about in China are maybe a result of elite overproduction in China. I often wonder whether maybe they’re graduating too many people. Yeah.
Bill: Well, that’s just it. Of course, when parents spend a lot of money to send their children, and they don’t… Now, the elite universities in China, they’re not terribly expensive, but it can cost you a great deal in the education of your child before that time, to get them into an elite university. And private universities in China which take up about a quarter of the institutions and of the students, they are very expensive and can be very expensive indeed. Certainly, the historical expectation is that a spot in an elite university, or in any university, would be a pathway to a professional success, a successful professional career. That can no longer be guaranteed given the numbers that we’ve just discussed and given the slowdown of the Chinese economy. Particularly, it can’t be assumed that you will automatically land either the private sector or cushy state sector job that might have been expected even 10 years ago.
Kaiser: Right. That’s an interesting paradox that you just brought up that Chinese universities, the most highly selective of them still functionally kind of operate on a quota system that gives preference to people in that geography, in that locale. Since most of those best schools are in Beijing and then in Shanghai, and they’re basically free or very low-cost universities, you end up with people from the wealthiest cities paying little and people from poorer areas actually paying a lot for these private universities, which, arguably, don’t equip them as well for the job market. There’s a real irony here.
Bill: There’s so many areas in which China is rather like the United States, particularly equality of opportunity in education is lacking in China as it is in the United States. Where you are born, who your parents are matters enormously. Success comes much more readily to the well off and to the well-connected there as here.
Kaiser: And so it has been for a very long time, I mean, even though there was this ladder of success in imperial China. That’s one of the things I want to get into maybe as we begin looking at the history of universities in China. I’ve always been fascinated by the continuities, and I don’t know if we can talk about how extensive they are, but I’ve always been really interested in the place of the university educated, who are functionally the intelligentsia, the 知识分子 zhīshì fēnzǐ, right? People who are university educated in Chinese society. I’m interested in how continuous this is with the old imperial civil service examination and the imperial bureaucracy that it produced? With your historian’s hat on, Bill, maybe you can talk a little bit about the continuities in so far as there are any, and maybe about the limits to how useful it is to think in terms of those continuities.
Bill: I think there are continuities, and then obviously in terms of massification, rather significant discontinuities. But in continuities, of course, the universities are founded just as the old examination system is foundering, in the late 19th century. The first university to be founded is what’s today called Wuhan University in 1893, founded as the self-strengthening institute. A place to help modernize China’s military. In fact, and its industry, in the wake of the incursions of the West over the course of the 19th century, and by 1905, the old examination system is abandoned by the Qing government, and in place already are institutes like Wuhan and then the Imperial University, which becomes Peking University. It takes on the role of educating people who should have a natural leadership role in society, not quite in the way the old Hanlin Academy might have done, because one is not automatically in the bureaucracy.
But when the great president of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei, established that university on the model of the University of Berlin in many ways, in the 19 teens, reestablished it on Humboldtian values, the freedom to teach, freedom to learn, institutional autonomy, and so on, he did so in the midst of the so-called Warlord Era in China, but was determined that this be a place where the elite of China could come together and learn and grow together, educated at once in China’s great tradition, but also in the meeting areas of scholarship of modern universities in Europe, North America, and in Japan. Peking University students, not just Peking University, but perhaps especially Peking University students have had a sense of what you might call a public purpose ever since that moment.
A very small number of them caused a big trouble for the government on May 4th, 1919, beginning a major political movement that nearly brought down the Beijing government of that day. They’ve been causing trouble for governments ever since — big demonstrations in 1935, of course, most famously in 1989, and also most recently, in last October and November in China, protesting the zero Covid policies that in part, as a result, came to an end.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Bill: The sense that these individuals are part of China’s future has always mattered to governments, and it has given them, not a perfect by any means, but a certain degree of political immunity to be critics of the emperor.
Kaiser: Yeah. I’ve always been drawn, emotionally and intellectually, to the ferment of the New Culture and the May 4th era. I think it was great to just read about Cai Yuanpei in your book. That period that he was there at Beida, he brought in people like Li Dazhao and then Chen Duxiu, who were the co-founders of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Zedong was the librarian there at the Peking University Library at that time. Then, of course, there were also liberals that he brought in, like Hu Shih, who were just seminal luminaries of China’s Enlightenment. As you say, he very much left a stamp there, and we’ll talk more about that stamp. Maybe we can save our discussion of universities during the Nanjing decade for when we talk about Nanjing University itself.
Bill: Sure.
Kaiser: Let’s skip forward, though. I think there’s a tendency in accounts of universities in China to skip right past the war years, and even through the early PRC, pausing only to talk about the wreckage that was done during the Cultural Revolution before, of course, they get to the rebirth, the revival of higher ed in Deng Xiaoping’s time. But maybe let’s stop and talk a little bit about the state of Chinese universities before the Cultural Revolution. Was the party able, in the 1950s, to restore semblance of the past greatness to the major universities?
Bill: Not really. That is to say, at least my very strong belief is that the foundation of the rise of Chinese universities is set, not so much in the early years of the People’s Republic, but in the Beijing and Republican period, where China was home to a very small but truly dynamic system of higher education — institutions that were Chinese and foreign, institutions that were public and private, institutions that educated the elites and sent them to all corners of the world. The foundations of that excellence are really remembered by the leaders of Chinese universities today. After 1949, these universities, which were very diverse in scope and style became more uniform in scope and style and became Sovietized, became on the Soviet model very much geared toward fulfilling five-year plans, individuals were assigned their jobs upon graduation, and so on.
We have to remember that in education, as well as in so many other ways, there is a Soviet DNA in the People’s Republic of China that is pretty much indelible, and it certainly exists in the political controls that you see in Chinese universities today. But if you go back in the earlier period, one of the remarkable things is how universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University rise to be great universities in China while defending the values of universities, the world over, even during the great crisis of China’s modern age, the war with Japan, in which they maintained international principles of freedom of speech, freedom of dissent at these universities in the face of an earlier party-state, the Nationalist Party-state, which sought to impose its own discipline.
When you think of the importance of these universities, Tsinghua University, for example, was founded as a prep school to send young Chinese away on Boxer indemnity scholarships.
Kaiser: Just so that people understand what that means is that the United States actually provided these scholarships with funds that China ostensibly owed to it because of the Boxer settlement after 1901.
Bill: That’s right. That actually China had paid to it. They’re remitted back.
Kaiser: Had paid to it already. Right.
Bill: So, it’s Chinese money in American largesse of a certain sort that leads to this operation. So, a place designed to send people away. One of those people was a young man named Tsiang Tingfu. Tsiang Tingfu became a great historian and chairman of the history department at Tsinghua University in the 1930s. He would go on to be a great diplomat and China’s ambassador to the United Nations for more than 20 years for both the Republic of China on the Mainland and on Taiwan. But I think of him also as, in a direct lineage to me, because he was the teacher of my teacher, John Fairbank, who learned his Chinese history at Tsinghua University when it was home to some of the greatest historians anywhere in the world. People trained and educated abroad. Tsiang Tingfu was educated at Obermann and at Columbia. Virtually, all the Tsinghua faculty, the meeting faculty in that department had international PhDs, or a deep level of international training in disciplines that were then very new and very modern. A remarkable institution. That would be destroyed in the Soviet period in order to be rebuilt in the Reform period, and now has been largely rebuilt at Tsinghua University.
Kaiser: It’s astonishing to me. I mean, it’s a testimony to the enduring institutional spirit to these schools that after a 40-year hiatus, they were able to sort of rebound back with a lot of that old spirit intact after 1978, after the Marco Polo Bridge, until 1978, really, as you say, they are gutted and then Sovietized and then completely abandoned, and only come back to life in the very late 1970s. That’s astonishing.
Bill: If I can, Kaiser, give you one example of that kind of enduring spirit from that time, there was a great scholar named Wang Guowei, who committed suicide in 1927 as the nationalist troops were coming in to unify the country, coming to Beijing at that time, fearful that they would end the academic freedom of the university and academic life as he understood it. On a memorial to him, his good friend, the great scholar, Chen Yinque, wrote that his was a spirit independent and a mind unfettered. His was a 独立之精神，自由之思想 dúlì zhī jīngshén, zìyóu zhī sīxiǎng. And these are characters that every scholar at Tsinghua University knows today.
Kaiser: Absolutely.
Bill: To this day. It is part of the, I guess you would call it the internal DNA of the Tsinghua faculty today.
Kaiser: We’ve all taken pictures standing by that steel, right? Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, it’s exactly that spirit. And as we will get to, that sits uncomfortably next to what the party wants the university to be, and we will absolutely get to that. Bill, your book notes how Chinese universities and their administrators really looked to American universities, to that model in the Reform and Opening period. Can you talk about what in particular they borrowed as they sought to revive Chinese higher education in the early years of Reform and Opening?
Bill: Well, I think one of the surprising things that I think that well, people will find is that many individuals and the leaders of these universities sought to revive education in the arts and sciences, broadly conceived, not simply in science, technology, engineering, medicine, and so on. I’ll never forget, back when I was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, this was in the early 2000s, president of a major Chinese University came to visit me in my office, in University Hall here, and he wanted to adopt Harvard’s core curriculum. And I had a joke with him. Well, I offered to sell it to him because we were getting rid of it. But once he heard that we were getting rid of it and starting off with a new program in general of education, he didn’t want our old curriculum, he wanted the newest one. I have to tell you that our curricular, many, many curricular reform plans at Harvard, were probably more carefully read in Beijing than they were by my comrades here in the Boston Area. It’s not a high bar to be sure.
Every major Chinese University, even as China has grown in strength in science and technology, and it has been a central aspect of the rise of Chinese universities over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, every university has experimented new forms of general education programs, trying, believing our propaganda, as it were, that we don’t train people. We educate people to be critical thinkers. We educate people to be independent of mind, to know what they don’t know, and to figure out how to find out what they don’t know, to question authority to some degree, and to be productive and inquisitive citizens of a modern world.
The leaders of Chinese universities, in the same way, do not wish their students to be trained in the nice, best technology or the best systems of engineering, they want them also to be innovative and problem solvers. Every one of them has experimented with liberal arts in one form or another, and each one with different models. Peking University has a Yuanpei Program, an elite and very small program that is in both the humanities, sciences and social sciences. That is really, I would say, the most difficult such program I’ve encountered anywhere in the world in terms of what it asks students to do.
Kaiser: It’s named after Cai Yuanpei.
Bill: Named after Cai Yuanpei. So, this is a time of what they wish to do, and of course, depending on political circumstances, the leaders of Chinese universities are not always able to do what they wish.
Kaiser: Yeah. I think some of this might be surprising to listeners who have certain notions about China’s pedagogical traditions and maybe even imagine that universities are also guilty of those things, the emphasis on rote learning and on sort of unquestioned listening to the authority of the man delivering the lecture, invariably a man. But one thing that they probably all know about, and which is still very much a fixture, is in the admissions process, the gaokao, the immovable gaokao — that grueling college entry exam that’s given to high school seniors over multiple days. Can you give us a sense of why it’s been so difficult to reform a system that seems, at least to me, anecdotally, to be just so wildly unpopular? I mean, everyone I know grumbles about how terrible this thing is, and yet it remains there fixed and unmovable, even during the years when the United States basically stopped asking students to submit their SAT scores on admissions.
Bill: Yeah. Just think of a world, and this is the world of Chinese education, think of a world in which SAT scores are the only things that matter for your admission to college. And you get one shot at them. Today, it’s a little bit better than that in China, and there are some alternative ways of getting into particularly elite universities. But on the whole, the gaokao still rules. Why does it rule? Because it is one of the very few institutions in Chinese life that people, and particularly the people we’re talking about here are parents, it’s the one thing they believe is honest and honestly administered. By all evidence, it has been very honestly administered. At the same time, for the reasons you discussed before, it’s much easier to get into a university in Beijing if you live in Beijing. You have to have a much higher score to get into Tsinghua or Beida if you live far away in Yunnan or in Guizhou, much, much more difficult. Success and examinations are geared for those, everywhere, who are from families that have the resources to educate their students at a very high level. Now, mind you, that pine field is a little bit more equal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago because the quality of urban public high schools in China, in the bidding schools, is among the highest in the world.
You also have extraordinary private schools, and you have tutors, until very recently, very successful online tutoring companies — rich families can afford their own tutors to bring in-house to assist a child in success in higher education. That said, people believe that the gaokao is fairer. For example, what’s fair about admissions to American universities when 20% or 15 to 20% of Harvard undergraduates are recruited athletes, or X number of Harvard students are legacy admits? At least China doesn’t have football teams that it has to fill. And perhaps they’re better off for that. Of course, I say that from a university that last won a national championship in football in 1920. So, it’s been a while for us. You have so many Americans who try to get their own children into colleges on the basis of whatever sport they’re playing in high school for a partial and perhaps only one or two-year assistance in fellowship support, a sport that they will never play the rest of their life as a professional.
People in China would worry that if they didn’t have Gaokao, they would have many other ways around. People would 走后门 (zǒu hòumén), people would go through the back door, not the front door into universities. People would do so and gain in through donations. I’m sure, enough to its own devices, Chinese parents are second to none in their support of their children’s educational ambitions. They would certainly have the capacity to well outdo the so-called Varsity Blues efforts that we’ve seen in the United States.
Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely.
Bill: The gaokao is there as a protector of honesty, even if it is badly flawed.
Kaiser: Yeah. It’s flawed, but still a kind of vaguely meritocratic system that at least is not thoroughly corrupt. Look, there are a couple of crucial and ambitious programs that I think a lot of people have heard of that the central government launched in the effort to build China’s universities in the world-class institutions. They are, of course, Project 985, which was launched, as the name suggests, in May of 1998, and Project 211, which confusingly is not about a date at all, but to ready 100 universities for the 21st century, so 211, right? 100. What do these programs tell us about the priority given to higher ed in China in the ’90s and the aughts, and what did these programs really do functionally besides to sort of say, “Ah, here are our goals?”
Bill: They functionally privilege universities that are successfully in internal competition, one with another. They privilege, without question, preexisting elite universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University, perhaps above all. China, as far as I can tell, will always have two number one universities. So significant has government support and so important is the history of these universities to China. But what it has done is to raise the bar for many, many other institutions to be not just competitive domestically, but competitive in the larger world of universities. Places like Nanjing University, Fudan University, Nankai University, Zhejiang University, Sun Yat-sen University, across the country in this regard. It’s interesting that in each case, the big investments came at times of economic downturns — 1997, the Asian financial crisis, and 2008, ‘9, ’10, in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.
A man that I think we should credit a great deal for starting this enormous investment is President Jiang Zemin, who believed in education very strongly, and he begins the building up of the Chinese higher education system in the second half of the 1990s and takes it to a level far beyond what anyone could imagine at that time. President Hu Jintao takes it further still in his 10 years as president. It’s an interesting story about Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin was educated at what was then called National Central University, established by the nationalists in Nanjing, but had the misfortune of being there during the Japanese war and when the university came under Japanese control. When the nationalists came back in 1945, they refused to recognize Jiang Zemin’s degree from the Japanese so-called puppet university of National Central.
So, he joined the Communist Party and went and completed his degree underground at Shanghai Jiaotong University, but a man who believed very strongly in the power of education to shape a society and did more than any other leader to begin this trajectory of Chinese higher education. I think of this because he just passed away last year and was not as widely praised internationally as I believe he ought to have been.
Kaiser: Just now, you joked about how China will always have two top universities, two number ones. Tsinghua, of course, is one of your three case studies, and we’ll talk about that quite a bit. I imagine that most of our listeners know the respective reputations of Peking University and Tsinghua University. But I thought it was really amazing in your book that you have no less individual than Li Daokui, the founding dean of Schwarzman College, who was a very eminent economist who taught at the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua. Summing up the difference between the two, just so candidly, can you talk about how Li Daokui characterized the difference between Peking University and Tsinghua? You said, “as Li Daokui once explained to me, PKU’s tradition is to be critical of the government far away from politics.” Tsinghua, on the other hand…
Bill: That’s definitely, and particularly true in the post-1949 and post-1982 eras. That is to say Peking University has a strong sense of its own national mission dating back to the late Imperial times. Tsinghua University, particularly in the communist period, has become much more closely aligned with national priorities and the priorities of the party state. That said, you find, as I was saying before, spirits independent and minds unfettered at Tsinghua, just as you do at Peking Universe. He said something that’s very similar to what Harvard President Neil Rudenstine once told me about the difference between Harvard and Princeton universities. Harvard, a vastly decentralized operation, and Princeton, a highly centralized and smaller and potent teaching and research institution, he said, and I think this is true of Tsinghua, when Princeton works, I should say when Tsinghua works, it works like a great orchestra. People really are part of the community, and they pull together as one.
Harvard, I think pretty much like Peking University, is a great collection of soloists. You would never put them and imagine them to be an orchestra. Yet they may have enormous contributions in multiple different ways across the university and across the world.
Kaiser: The way that Tsinghua is so integral to China’s technological ecosystem, often, very much as you suggested, in harmony with national goals and national priorities, it reminds me a lot of the way that Stanford and, to an extent, Cal Berkeley are integral to Silicon Valley. Can you talk a little bit about institutional entrepreneurship at Tsinghua, what Tsinghua does to foster tech innovation? Because anywhere you go in Zhongguancun, and this has been the case for a very, very long time, there are all these Tsinghua-funded, basically startup facilities, where they give space to and funding to, and infrastructural assistance to startups.
Bill: Right. Well, Tsinghua, again, has this great preexisting history, but it also became a center of science and technology, particularly in the beginning of communist period because the leading scientists and engineers zoned from Peking universities from a number of other universities were transferred to Tsinghua University in the 1950s to have kind of role differentiation between the different universities very clear. That has been a strength of Tsinghua, although not connected in those days to the private sector at all, but it has also become a highly, however centralized, a very entrepreneurial place. A place whose graduates go off to both the public and the private sector. An institution that has had spinoffs that, if you look at the area around Tsinghua, it reminds me a bit of the area around MIT.
That is to say a highly vibrant set of startups and now biotechnology companies that have come out of the university or are affiliated with faculty at the university. It is part of, without question, part of the sense of what it means to be at Tsinghua today. It’s interesting to note that when Tsinghua University established, celebrated its 100th birthday in 2011, it did not do so by the valorization of all that it has done in science and technology, but by establishing a new, the original Tsinghua building was called Tsinghua Xuetang, Tsinghua Academy, and they established a new Tsinghua Xuetang Academy, Xin Tsinghua Xuetang, which was to the arts and to the humanities — theaters, art museum, and so on. To show that this university was much more than science and technology.
Kaiser: Yeah. I saved that bundle of questions about that sometimes uncomfortable relationship for last, but I want to ask you a little bit about rankings. My daughter, when she was applying to university just a little over, well, I guess a couple years ago now, I was reminded of just how conscious so many Chinese people are when it comes to university rankings. I was interested to see how my Chinese friends and family reacted to recent rankings that now place Tsinghua above all, but two Ivy League schools, and both Tsinghua and Peking University are in the top 25 globally. Some of them were inordinately proud, of course, and others were completely dismissive of this. They just thought that was just absolute nonsense. How seriously should we take rankings such as these? How seriously do you take them?
Bill: Well, on the one hand, rankings rank only what can be measured. They rank scientific output, they rank scholarship in international journals, they rank many, many other things, but they primarily rank scholarship in international journals. That’s the most important thing that they do, and then the reputation of faculty, and so on and so forth. That said, you don’t have to believe, you could believe, and I think it’s plausible that Peking University and Tsinghua University are the equal or superior to many of the so-called Ivy League in the United States. Certainly, given the scope of their enterprises, scope of their research and the depth of it in many, many fields, that may well be true. But what is above all obvious and true is that we are seeing today a tectonic shift in the rise of Chinese universities compared to others.
As I said before, eight of the top 10 universities in the 19 teens would’ve been German, in my view. Today, it is very difficult for a German university to regularly get into the top 50 in the world by these rankings. American universities, today, still dominate these rankings, and yet they are comparatively falling compared with others, and Chinese universities are rising in these rankings. There’s nothing absolutely scientific about this. We have to remember that there were no university rankings in the United States that anybody took seriously until about 1983 when a failing news magazine, U.S. News and World Report decided it needed a new business model. They created, in part, this industry, which is now absolutely out of control and global in scope.
But it does tell you about the direction. Doesn’t tell you exactly who is number one, or number five, or number 15, or anything of that sort, but it does show you that the trajectory is one in which more and more Chinese universities, five now in the top 50, two in the top 15, according to the QS Rankings, one of the leading ranking systems, it shows you that they need to be taken seriously.
Kaiser: I want to get into some potted histories of the universities that you selected for your case studies. We’ve already talked quite a bit about Tsinghua and its origin, so maybe we’ll move on and talk about Nanjing University, which also stands out. Maybe it doesn’t rank so high in terms of those measurable things like scientific output, number of peer-reviewed papers because it’s focus is on something that’s intangible, but also to me, extraordinarily valuable, which is on teaching, as you make clear. Let’s talk a little bit about the origins of Nanjing University and how it evolved. A couple of things jumped out, Nanda, under Luo Jialun in the Nanjing Decade, and then under Kuang Yaming in the 1960s. And again, under his continued leadership after the end of the Cultural Revolution as he tries to revive historical scholarship, which is also a very dicey thing to do in the PRC, where the control of historical narratives are just seen as so integral to the exercise of power. Can you talk about those things and, of course, about the Nanjing Hopkins Center, which you talk quite a bit about in that chapter — really fascinating.
Bill: Well, Nanjing University, the reason I chose to write about it is that I didn’t want to write about only the two elite universities, but also one of the leading, you might think of it as one of the leading provincial universities in China. Nanjing University is in many ways an excellent mirror of the history of Chinese higher education because it has so many predecessor organizations that became part of it. On the cover of my book is a building that is today known as the Great Northern building, the Bei Da Lou of Nanjing University. It’s a beautiful building in Chinese style. Built originally for what was called the University of Nanking or Jinling Daxue in 1919, by an American architect in Chinese style. That university, affiliated with it also was a place called 金陵女子大学 (Jīnlíng nǚzǐ dàxué), Jinling Girls College, which was a sister college of Smith College in the United States. But perhaps the most famous immediate predecessor of today’s Nanjing University was established by Chiang Kai-shek as National Central University, to be the leading university in China, established very directly on the model of the University of Berlin in 1930.
And you know it was established on the model of Berlin because there is a Brandenburg Gate welcoming you into that campus. It became the centerpiece of the nationalist effort to put their stamp on Chinese higher education and to be a meeting center, aspirationally, of science and technology during the 1930s. These universities and these predecessor organizations all became part of what is today Nanjing University, a great comprehensive, now multi-campus university that, however, carries the great burden of history. The burden of being the capital. After all, Nanjing was the capital of the Republic of China during the nationalist period. Nanjing University at National Central University was to be the university compared to Beida or Tsinghua or other universities later on in the People’s Republic. And just as Nanjing itself became not the center of the country, politically or otherwise, but rather on the periphery politically, it also became somewhat on the periphery educationally as well.
Its loyalty, as the center of the old national regime, the old national government certainly could and would be questioned at various periods of time. It had some of the most brutal battles of any university during the Cultural Revolution. It emerged from that dedicating itself not to compete on every level with all of the leading universities, and it has been less successful in competing in the areas of the heart of hard science, but competing in the humanities and social sciences, and remarkably as an institution that probably pays more attention to teaching and mentorship than any other leading Chinese research university. It has, like Peking University, very idealistic students. These students, for example, several years ago, I think it was in 2018, took President Xi Jinping’s words to heart that they should study Marxism.
But rather than studying the official Marxist texts of the Party, they went out and formed their own independent Marxist study groups, and then they went to South China to establish neighbor unions in sweatshops down south. This, according to the Party, is actually not what Marxism is all about. They were severely punished. The Party’s secretary took early retirement, just as was the case at several other universities that had such idealistic students, Marxist students, and Nanjing University had to redo, this is just a few years ago, its school constitution in order to show its fealty to the Chinese Communist Party. Most recently, and most bizarrely for a university with a great international history, Nanjing University has withdrawn from global rankings, saying that it was to pursue a 中国特色教育 Zhōngguó tèsè jiàoyù, an education with Chinese characteristics.
I have no idea exactly what they mean by that, but I think it has a lot to do with President Xi’s thought and what is politically correct today, but they’re under enormous, and really for much of their history of the People’s Republic, because of where they are in the former capital and what they had been, under enormous political pressure.
Kaiser: Ironically, as you say in your book, it was Nanda’s inclusion on Xi Jinping’s shortlist of Chinese universities that were slated for world-class status that actually kind of brought this, well, frankly, unwanted attention from the center to Nanda, right?
Bill: That is true. It is a great university. It has extraordinary scars. It has, for example, one of the best European studies programs in China, particularly on Britain, but also on other things. If you want to study the history of pre-Communist Party, of pre-Communist China, particularly the Republican period, Nanjing University is the absolute center of that study.
Kaiser: That’s right. I mean, I suggested that this was where the very ambitious effort to write the history of Republican China and to write the 25th dynastic history was centered in. And that is always a fraught undertaking.
Bill: Still waiting for it too.
Kaiser: Let’s shift now, in the interest of time, to talk a little bit about the University of Hong Kong, HKU, which is the third of the Chinese universities that you include as a case study. Would it be fair to say that you use Hong Kong as a way of talking about the importance of governance and management of the university? That seems to be the emphasis in that chapter.
Bill: It is. In some sense, governance is central to every chapter of this book because, in universities, there are so many different ways in which universities are governed public and private, but different private ones have different approaches as well. Successful governance is really the most important aspect of what it takes for enduring success of an institution of higher education. How can you make decisions that really poise you for leadership going forward? How are you insulated, to some degree at least, from the whims of the state, which can change every several years? How do you bring the best faculty and the best students together so that they can learn with and from another? The University of Hong Kong, when I began writing this book, my sense was this was going to be the chapter about the greatest research university in China, in greater China that was not under the Chinese Communist Party.
Kaiser: So much for that.
Bill: Today, I found it, in many ways, the most sad and depressing chapter in the book. It is and remains a great research university. It has had extraordinary leadership over much of the recent decades. It survived and thrived after 1997 and with Hong Kong’s return to China. But in the current environment, it has become highly politicized and subject to political intrusions by the state, in this case, not so much Beijing, but perhaps acting for Beijing from the Hong Kong government. This is a great shame for Hong Kong’s universities. I served for 10 years on what is called the University Grants Committee, which is designed to be a buffer between the government and the eight public universities in Hong Kong, eight really extraordinary institutions, including Hong Kong University. Gradually and steadily, as political tensions in Hong Kong grew, even before the great demonstrations of 2018, ’19, you would see more and more political intrusion onto basic decision-making at the university — who could be appointed a dean, who could get an honorary degree, and so on.
I was struck by the sense of distrust between the university and its constituents on the one hand, and the government on the other when I was part of a three-person governance review body of the University of Hong Kong in 2016 to look, and our job was really to make a series of recommendations, to try to insulate the university from politics and insulate it from political-based decision-making. It’s one of these wonderful things about Hong Kong that you never quite know what’s confidential and what’s not. If you have read enough James Bond novels or seen enough movies or Le Carré novels, not much in Hong Kong stays secret for long. The three of us were meeting in a small room at the university at that time, coming up with our recommendations, one of which was to encourage the chief executive of Hong Kong to recuse himself from political intrusion or political, to recuse himself from decision-making of certain types with the university.
He’s, by law, the chancellor of the university, but it is supposed to be an honorific position, not an executive position. We wanted to relieve him of the broadly held suspicion that he was interfering left, right, and center in the university. As it turned out, we met in this small room, just the three of us, and yet, at some point, we were summoned at the government house to meet with the chief executive who, turned out, knew exactly what we were planning, even though we had told no one. So, rooms have ears in Hong Kong. We were berated by the chief executive at the time and told that he would not allow us to do what we wished and that Beijing would not allow us, etc. In any event, sadly, that university is under, like all the other Hong Kong universities today, under much greater political pressure than it has been really since the Japanese period of the 1940s.
Books have been disappearing from library shelves that are, in some sense, critical, for example, books about Tiananmen at that university and at other universities across Hong Kong. And one worries about its future, even though it has, at the present, an excellent president, a strong faculty, an extraordinary student body, it is not immune from the massive political changes that are ongoing in Hong Kong today. And one shouldn’t underestimate the nature of those changes.
Kaiser: The Hopkins program at Nanjing, it had its own library that was supposed to be insulated from the sort of the Bowdlerizing forces of the Party, has that remained intact?
Bill: Yes. By every account, it has remained intact. As we look today, in an era in which so much alleged, or so-called decoupling exists between China and the United States, and as we look, at least as I look, to ways in which we can re-engage with our Chinese comrades in areas of research and teaching, the Hopkins Nanjing program is, I think, an excellent wonder study as a successful and enduring example. Originally bringing 50 Americans in 50 Chinese in residential settings, in a residential setting on the Nanjing University campus, but as a separate program to study with each other for two years in advanced language training for both sides. It has produced extraordinary students who have gone on to work for both governments, but also for the private sector. And it has been insulated from these winds every which way. This is a source, I think, the Nanjing Hopkins program is an example of what I hope we will continue to see in the joint venture universities that exist in China, whether it’s NYU Shanghai or Duke Kunshan University, or the Schwartzman program in Beijing.
Kaiser: Or the Yenching program at Beida. Yeah.
Bill: The superb Yenching program at Peking University. These programs have been largely immune from the political wins that have done so much under President Xi’s tenure to shape Chinese higher education or to at least limit discussion on the campuses of Chinese universities. They have not been subject to, for example, to the so-called Seven Nos, the seven things you are not supposed to talk about at Chinese universities that were decreed by the Central Committee in 2013.
Kaiser: Right. Part of Document Number Nine. Now, I know that you’ve been uncritical of the way the party has interfered in or tried to interfere in some of these programs, but you’ve been equally critical about the way some American universities have pulled out of joint programs with their Chinese counterparts over things like the expulsion of activist students from partnering universities. I’m thinking here of Cornell and 人民大学 (Rénmín dàxué), Renmin University in Beijing. They ended their joint program there. We’ve seen a lot of programs like NYU and Shanghai, for example, come under pressure for supposedly knuckling under the censorship demands. But often this is coming from the American side. What is your position on this? Should American universities be sort of holding fast to this, as you say, maybe that last best hope for continued engagement?
Bill: I think we should because we should be humble enough to realize that we have our own major challenges when it comes to academic freedom in this country. In part, under some threat in different parts of the country, where different governments, state governments in particular are seeking ever more political control of what can and can’t be taught at universities. Whenever I say in a public talk that there are seven things you can’t talk about at a Chinese university, somebody in the audience will raise their hand and say, “Well, there are at least seven things you can’t talk about at Berkeley or Harvard — and they’re not wrong. We have different forms of censorship in this country. It’s not the same thing. It’s not censorship from above, but it is a form of collective censorship that one sees in student bodies across the country.
If we had a perfect record, for example, in free speech and American universities, you would never have had a free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960s. So, we need a little bit of humility as we look abroad. That case that you gave is one excellent example to me of the kind of Americans getting on a high moral horse. Here, this was at Renmin University in Beijing, which also had this extraordinary group of young students studying Marx, going off to start neighbor unions and to help workers in terrible conditions in sweatshops. These students would be punished. And because these students were punished, they were actually treated much better, I should tell you, as students because they were students than if they had not been students. They were largely not arrested, but many, several were dismissed from the university.
These students were punished. Cornell University decided that it would end its program on labor law with Renmin University as a retaliation or as a sign of Cornell’s outrage over this activity.
Kaiser: My sense was that Renmin tried its best to protect those students.
Bill: Exactly. They had no idea how much the President and Party Secretary at Renda admired these students and how they had tried to protect them. And one of those two lost this position over the set of incidents. Americans are very good at sanctioning and very good at criticizing others and very slow to do the hard work of trying to understand what’s really going on. Because the fact is that the values of the leaders of Chinese universities today, and here, I mean, not just presidents, but very often also party secretaries, these are much closer to the values of American university presidents than they are different. We punish those who are closest to us at our own peril.
Kaiser: A very good case in point of the similarities between American university administrators and their Chinese counterparts is their commitment to general education, art sciences. At a really fundamental level, though, the Party has, well, a fraught relationship with this, especially with the social sciences and the humanities, but really with the whole idea of liberal arts education. In your book, you note how, and we’ve talked about this already just earlier, about how that steel, honoring Wang Guowei, one of the four great tutors reads 独立之精神，自由之思想 (Dúlì zhī jīngshén, zìyóu zhī sīxiǎng), but this independent spirit and unfettered thought, as you discuss, is not so easy in the Chinese context, right? I mean, let’s not kid ourselves. Where do these things stand right now, and what is the direction things are moving in? I mean, because I think we’re not wrong to see the walls closing in. It feels harder and harder to do this, it feels like there’s this persistent tension, right? I mean, we’re aware of this between, on the one hand, the desire of the party state to, you can put it much most charitably, to create educated youngsters who are working for the collective good of the country. On the other, the desire of these university administrators, of the professors, of course, to educate critical thinkers.
Bill: I get what you’re saying. Absolutely. There’s a creative tension, and there is real tension between the demands of those who seek to impose political orthodoxy. This is less important in the sciences than it is in the social sciences or humanities to impose political orthodoxy on, and political controls on what can be said and taught at Chinese universities. I think most Americans would be very surprised to see how much can be said and is said on a daily basis within the walls of Chinese universities and how much activity can happen and does happen within the walls of these universities, and how clued in, to how the rest of the world is going, the students and faculty at these universities are whether through VPNs or through other forms. You have a tension between what the Party wants and what educators want.
For example, there was a textbook at a major Chinese business school that had been used for years on the Chinese economy. It was an international textbook on the Chinese economy. Suddenly, the postal sensors said that it was no longer appropriate to be used, even though it was a very unpolitical textbook. The dean of that school, at the time, then arranged for the author of that textbook to send .pdf copies, free, to every student in his class. The censors had done their job and the dean had done his job. In some sense, everything was fine in this regard. This happens on a daily basis. This is not the first time that Chinese universities have been under great pressure. This is nothing compared to the Maoist period.
Kaiser: Sure. Yeah.
Bill: We have to remember that these institutions, just like American universities and perhaps, above all European universities, but just like universities everywhere, these institutions outlast political regimes, and they certainly outlast political leaders. Chinese universities were born in the late Qing, under the Empress Dowager. They grow and thrive in the Republican period, particularly under the nationalist regime. They are Sovietized in the early communist period. They survive even the destructive and crazed policies of Mao Zedong. They have survived and thrived into the Reform era, and they will survive this moment as well and emerge from it, I believe, stronger than ever. However, the challenges of politics, you can’t underestimate them. The fact that young Chinese, even at meeting universities, are taught a comic book version of their own country’s history and are forced to take all these required political courses, as their parents and grandparents did in the communist period, all these political courses.
Those are the kind of courses where there’s real rote learning, not so much outside of the political curriculum. The real risk is that, given the extraordinary students that come to Chinese universities, and China is home to more of the best human capital of any place on earth, given these extraordinary students, the risk is that the great places like Tsinghua or Beida or Nanda will end up with two types of graduates — people who will say or do anything in order to graduate, people who will be either cynics, believing in nothing, or opportunists taking their way forward through this. That’s simply not good enough for China’s great universities, and the leaders of these universities know that.
Kaiser: Bill Kirby, thank you so much for helping us to make sense of this. I knew that you could be counted on to right-size these sorts of tensions and dilemmas that the universities face. Well, what a fantastic book. To remind everyone, the book is called Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China, and it’s published by Harvard University Press.
Bill, we do want to move out to recommendations, but before we do that, let me just offer a quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is part of The China project. If you like the work that we do here with Sinica and with the other shows in the network, or with The China Project more generally, then the best thing that you can do to help us keep going is to subscribe to Access from thechinaproject.com. You get access to this show early on Monday’s East Coast Time, and of course, to our Daily Dispatch, our excellent newsletter edited by Jeremy Goldkorn and his crack team. No paywall on the many great stories that we run on the website as well. It’s affordable, pitch in, help us out, become a member. All right, let’s move on now to recommendations. Bill, I’m really excited to hear what you have for us.
Bill: Okay. One of the books that I’ve been reading recently is a terrific book by a guy named Peter Hamilton. It’s called Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization. And it’s an extraordinary, I would think of it as a social and business history of Hong Kong’s modern development, how elites in particular from Shanghai were reincarnated, as it were, after 1949 to make an altogether new Hong Kong that would become first an industrial and then business and financial center, and an extraordinary home to great universities in the second half of the 20th century.
A sequel to that would be interesting to see because I think no place in China is changing faster at the moment than Hong Kong. Another terrific book also on the theme of education is by a friend of mine, Daniel Bell, it’s called The Dean of Shandong: The Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Daniel Bell, who had been a professor at Tsinghua University was made Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University, the first foreigner to hold a position like that in the history of the People’s Republic of China. This is a very entertaining and insightful short memoir of what it’s like to run part of a university, being neither a Chinese citizen nor a member of the Party, and having to deal with issues that are the kind of issues that administrators all over the world deal with — drinking, for example, not just by students, but mostly by administrators, and other issues as well. So, Dean of Shandong is a cool book.
My colleagues here at Harvard, Wendy Fishman and Howard Gardner have a terrific book called The Real World of College, finding out what really matters to college students today. What they found out was that students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college — they’re much more concerned about their GPA and their resumes. There are both challenges and advice to be given as ways forward to improve our basic education in American colleges and universities. The subtitle is What Higher Education is and What It Can Be.
The last thing is, one of the things I like to do on occasion, and I certainly like to research it, but I like to also taste it has to do with wine. I was given by my brother, who always, every year, gives me a new wine book, and wonderful books. This year’s book is 9,000 Years of Wine: A World History . The author is a guy named Rod Phillips. And turns out, if I read it correctly, you see, I’m only a thousand years into it, so I have another 8,000 years to go.
The first wines were grown, it appears, in part of what is today Xinjiang in western People’s Republic of China. So, this is yet another Chinese, or shall we say, in this case, Xinjiang contribution to global civilization.
Kaiser: And what a contribution it is. It’s funny, Daniel Bell’s book, I want to read that. Daniel used to co-own a Thai restaurant in Beijing that I would frequent. It was very good. It’s called Purple Haze, which is pretty funny. He co-owned it with this Swedish bass player named Tobias, or Toby, who I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a stage with a few times. Played occasionally with this band that he was in called Never Say Die. It was kind of a classic metal cover band, and it was a lot of fun. Got up there and played some Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath with them. A lot of fun. All right. Yeah, I got to read his book. It’s been recommended to me a few times.
Bill: Yeah. Well, maybe Purple Haze, maybe he got the idea of that name from drinking with other administrators in Shandong, which places very high 白酒 (báijiǔ) drinking.
Kaiser: It could very well be that indeed. Okay. So, my recommendation, I stumbled across a podcast radio drama adaptation of something I loved since I was really young, The C. S. Forester Horatio Hornblower novels. It’s based on four of them. He’s this naval officer who was created by Forester. He set in the time of the Napoleonic War. I can’t remember the names of the other two admirals he serves under, but Admiral Nelson, of course, he’s part of Nelson’s Navy. Each episode is 30 minutes long, very kind of easily digestible, really old-school radio drama with great sound effects and good voice acting. Perfect for long car trips. It is available on Audible Podcasts for free if you are a fan of the books or of the many different movie and TV adaptations of the Hornblower books, which were really the inspiration for Star Trek, by the way. I mean, Gene Roddenberry has talked about that. This is just great stuff. I very, very much enjoy it.
Well, Bill, what a pleasure to talk to you.
Bill: Yeah, just one nice thought, if you have a moment, on the area of fiction, I don’t read a great deal of fiction now except Le Carré, but my favorite on the Chinese side there would be the novels of Qiu Xiaolong, who writes these Shanghai murder mysteries, Inspector Chen Mysteries. And some years ago, the one that I admire the most, it’s called Death in a Red Mandarin Dress, which I remember very well, but I won’t give away the pot.
Kaiser: Those are great. And by the way, they’re written in English. I originally thought they were written in Chinese and translated.
Bill: Were written in English.
Kaiser: But they’re actually written originally in English by Qiu Xiaolong, who I hope to get onto the show one of these days. I think it would be a really fun show to do with him.
Bill: Yeah.
Kaiser: If he speaks half as well as he writes, I think it would be a really fun episode.
Bill: He’s a remarkable guy. He was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, in comparative literature when I was a faculty member there, and a remarkable talent even then.
Kaiser: My gosh. Okay, great. Well, you’ll have to make an introduction for me.
Bill: Sure.
Kaiser: Thanks so much, Bill. What a pleasure it was to have you on the show.
Bill: My great pleasure, Kaiser. Thank you so much for having me.
Kaiser: Yeah. Please, everyone, check out the book. It’s just fantastic. You will absolutely learn a ton. The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows on the Sinica Network. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week. Take care.
