The Dean of Shandong

By Daniel A. Bell (贝淡宁) (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Overview

This is an interesting book that genuinely surprised me. Few foreigners, I dare to say, know China and the Chinese culture better than Bell. The book is less about Bell’s personal experience as the dean of Shandong university but more about some opinions and lessons (especially Confucian, one of Bell’s expertises) that Bell accumulated through his decade-long stay in China.

Introduction

• I think much thinking and policy making in Western countries is based on crude stereotypes about China’s political system, much as the view that the CCP exercises total control over intellectual discourse and there is no room for independent thinking.

• the demonization reinforces repressive trends in China and benefits security-obsessed hard-liners in China’s political system. China’s leaders are not about to take serious political risks and promote democratic experimentation when they feel that the whole political establishment of the world’s most powerful country seems united in its fight against them. Chinese leaders may be paranoid, but their paranoia is well-founded. So both sides are locked in a vicious political cycle, with the United States and its Western allies growing more antagonistic and warlike, and China reinforcing its walls and repressing alternative political voices.

• if the worrisome political developments in China of the past few years really do threaten the West. China has neither the intention nor the ability to export its political system abroad. … China hasn’t gone to war with anybody since 1979, and even the most hawkish voices in the Chinese military establishment do not threaten war against the United States. The idea that China would seek to go to war against the United States anywhere near its territory is crazy (on the other hand, China is surrounded by US military bases, and it’s not absurd for Chinese policy makers to worry that US and its allies might launch a war against China).

• It’s also worth asking why the CCP has so much support at home if it’s as evil as advertised. Cynics will say that it’s because the Chinese people are brainwashed by media propaganda and an educational system that praises the government and stifles critical thinking. But that can’t be the whole, or even the main, story. Similar views are held by sophisticated intellectuals in China who have good knowledge of alternative viewpoints, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in the US and the 130 million Chinese tourists who went abroad every tear before the pandemic. The main reason for support is that the CCP has presided over the most spectacular economic growth story in global history, with more than 8 hundred million people lifted out of poverty. The spread of literacy and university education under the CCP, not to mention extended life expectancy, is an extraordinary achievement. … a more balanced picture of the CCP is necessary to counter demonization of China’s political system.

Chapter 1: Dye and Dynamism

• The more I thought about it, the more it seemed unjust that it was okay for women to dye their hair but not for men to do so. Surely it was a legacy of the patriarchal age, when women were viewed as sex objects made for men’s pleasure? If men dye their hair, it’s a way of breaking down those patriarchal norms. We should also be judged by our appearances; it’s not just the prerogative of oppressed women! Downgrading men is a way of upgrading women. The day when men are viewed as just as vain as women, it will break down the stereotype that men are more rational, and both sexes can be viewed as equals in other spheres of social life.

Chapter 2: The Harmony Secretary

• Why can’t the West see both sides of the story? How can we pose an existential threat to the West? They have their own history, culture, and political system, and we have neither the desire nor the ability to challenge their way of life. Why can’t they leave us alone, let us develop peacefully, and we can work together on dealing with global challenges such as pandemics and climate change?

• Chinese must do a better job of reducing the gap between what we say and what we do.

• In the nineteenth century, liberals such as John Stuart Mill could question the value of one person, one vote and propose alternatives such as extra votes for educated citizens. But today, such views are seen as beyond the moral pale.

• Unfortunately, Westerners don’t see things that way because they have the view that only the adoption of electoral democracy counts as “real” political reform; the rest is all fake. Worse, if China’s political model proves to be successful—if it better provides for the needs of its citizens and impresses other developing countries—Westerners worry that the democratic political model will retreat, if not implode.

• The official name for Xuanchuanbu, now known as the Publicity Department was, for many years, called The Propaganda Department… Speaking of bad translations! Bell suggested that Communications or Public Engagement might be a more appropriate name, which I agree.

• Another bad translation is United Front. To the contrary, the purpose of united front is to bring everyone together and tolerate different opinions and practices. It is not meant to stiffen people to adhere to the same doctrine.

• argues that new psychotherapeutic technologies in China draw on older forms of “thought work” (思想工作) and extend beyond the clinical sphere of treating mental illness into other social domains.

Chapter 3: On Collective Leadership

• The mother of all powers is the power to delay.

• Hard work; concern for efficiency; inequality is good (to avoid any stalemate); need for free expression and critical viewpoints

Chapter 4: What’s Wrong with Corruption?

Corruption is bad, and anti-corruption is worse when it causes inconveniences for ME.

• In the past, I could have invited guests to lavish meals, including exclusive “white liquor”, all at public expense, and then treated my guests to karaoke with beautiful hostesses.

• The excessive Legalism really got on my nerves when I hosted meals. We could not order meals that cost more than 98 rmb per person. We had to write down the name of every dish we ordered and we had to pay for our own liquor.

• Any political system must balance constraining government officials from doing bad and empowering them to do good.

• … the constraints on drinking alcohol at mealtime have been relaxed. I could order cheap beer at public expense (I never found out if there was an official change of policy, nor did I ask).

Chapter 5: Drinking without Limits

• Policemen (I’ve yet to see a policewoman)

  This is not true in my experience.

• On the way, we were stopped by a policeman who gave me a breathalyzer test. … How could I fail a test when I had imbibed “only” a (double) gin and tonic and a couple of glasses of wine over the course of three hours? … The policeman said that he’d have to take my license away. I pleaded, “Is there any other way?” and assumed a cute and vulnerable expression.

Chapter 6: Teaching Confucianism in China

• Kongzi did more than argue that students should have equal opportunity to be educated regardless of social background. … He tailored what he taught to the needs of each individual student.

• If there’s one takeaway from Kongzi’s teaching method, it’s that teaching needs to be intensively focused on the particularity of each student, with lots of give and take between teacher and student. … Kongzi didn’t think that students can be improved by being treated as an undifferentiated mass who have no opportunity to question the teacher. … For teaching to be effective, the teacher should learn about the unique character of each student, which requires prolonged interaction in different contexts.

• The Confucian teaching ideal is not just to help talented students improve but also to identify students with the potential to surpass the teacher’s teachings. As Kongzi put it, “The younger generation should be held in awe: After all, how do we know that those yet to come will not surpass our contemporaries? It’s only when one reaches forty or fifty years of age and still has done nothing of note that we should withdraw our sense of awe.”

Chapter 7: The Communist Comeback

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.” — Mikhail Bakunin

Chapter 8: Censorship, Formal and Informal

“the tyranny of public opinion is more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually uphold by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.” — John Stuart Mill

• … I wanted to teach a course on Marxism but was told that it would not be advisable because my interpretation might differ from official ideology. Human rights and democracy are fine to teach, but not Marxism. I learned to get around that constraint by teaching the material without putting the word “Marxism” in the course title.

“A world where nobody argues about political ideals may be peaceful, but it’s boring.” — Francis Fukuyama

• I left Singapore in 1994 just as it was getting more repressive, with growing constraints on the freedom of speech. I couldn’t even teach Mill’s On Liberty in class: The head of the department, a member of parliament for the ruling People’s Action Party, told me that it was too politically sensitive for undergraduates. At the time, Singapore’s universities were far more repressive than those in China.

• Might we look back one day at China’s current clampdown on freedom of speech as the tail end of a repressive political environment? If it happens in my lifetime, I will offer a free glass of bai jiu to anyone who reminds me of this promise.

  Noted.

• The demonization of China has exploded to a point I could barely imagine in 2008. In those days, I worried about extreme right-wing militarists in the US who planned for a long-term confrontation with China. Today all leading voices in the West agree on the “China threat.” There is almost universal consensus in the West that China is led by an evil government that is bad to its own people and dangerous to people in other countries.

• It was perfectly fine to support China’s economic and political development so long as “they” were viewed as a somewhat inferior civilization that would eventually learn the truth about the superiority of Western-style capitalism and liberal democracy.

• there may be something to be learned from Chinese style censorship: The censors in China usually tell authors that they can’t publish this or that because it’s too politically sensitive. In contrast, Western editors will almost never say that they can’t publish submissions for political reasons. … I sometimes wish editors at leading media outlets in the West would just come clean and tell me that they can’t publish my submissions because their own editorial policies have become more “anti-CCP” of late. But I guess it’s harder to admit to constraining freedom of speech if one is committed to its values.

Chapter 9: Academic Meritocracy, Chinese-Style

• If CCP leaders are so great, I asked, why not be more open about the leadership selection process to show that it is as rigorous and meritocratic as advertised? The Organization Department leader asked how professors select candidates in academia. I replied that the relevant department establishes a committee that aims to select the best candidates, and committee members deliberates among themselves. The leader asked if deliberations are open. I replied, “Of course not: open deliberations would set constraints on what’s said, nor would it be fair to the candidates who are not selected.” The leader smiled and said, “the same goes for us.”

Chapter 10: A Critique of Cuteness

• The use of cute emojis in digital conversation may be more widespread in East Asian countries that prioritize politeness and indirect talk because online communication cannot be softened by facial expressions of deference or hierarchical rituals such as bowing. Hence, East Asians like to use cute or funny images to relax the communication atmosphere and minimize the risk of misunderstandings of hurting other people’s feelings.

• The Confucian test of academic success, I half-joked, is how many students show up at my funeral.

“Vanity is the least bad human sin.” — Daniel Bell.

Chapter 11: The Case for Symbolic Leadership

“good things are easier to destroy than to preserve, and hard to recover once they have been lost.”

Notes

Only those with a good understanding of Chinese politics could guess right, he added: It’s the index; they just want to make it harder for people to find what has been said about whom.