American Academia For Sale

One of the barriers to Americans having a clearer knowledge and view about China may be the extent to which America’s China scholars are influenced by Chinese funding or by China’s internal restrictions on information.

This affects Americans and America’s international interests in major ways: Our economy floats on waves of cheap Chinese imports, which restrain domestic inflation and increase purchasing power of our poor and middle class. But, the huge resulting trade deficits may lead to a major stock market downdraft (via a devalued dollar, already down to over $1.35 per Euro, reduced foreign investment in our bonds, and reactive Fed interest raising) that would inflate prices, and reduce the personal finances, security and purchasing of the middle and upper class, plunging the U.S. into serious recession.

Our stretched military faces a rising Chinese military spending and capacity, which may at some point outmatch our ability to protect Taiwan or keep vital sea lanes open.

Our diplomacy in favor of human rights, even policing against ongoing genocide in Darfur, is repeatedly stymied by China, and Russia (another burgeoning problem), in the UN Security Council, while China pursues mercantile politics throughout the Middle East, Africa and Latin America to feed China’s basic materials needs. Even otherwise outspoken environmentalists are quieted about the humongous negative effects of China’s pollution, watershed despoiling, and mass migrations of population onto indigenous peoples’ land to displace their culture (like in Tibet).

This sell out by American academia is not unique to China. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are, similarly, funding many U.S. chairs, professors, foundations, and think tanks. Their views are appearing with regularity in the U.S. media, and their undermining of Israel and of basic U.S. foreign policy is increasing.

The article highlighted below could, as well, be written about the MidEast satrapies’ influence on American academia and public discourse.

With HT to Daniel Drezner (Are China Scholars Bought and Paid For by Beijing?), I linked to what Drezner called a must read” at the Far Eastern Economic Review by Carsten Holz, an economist and professor in the social science division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Some extended excerpts, but the whole article is a “must read”:

Academics who study China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. Our incentives are to conform, and we do so in numerous ways: through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach.

Foreign academics must cooperate with academics in China to collect data and co-author research. Surveys are conducted in a manner that is acceptable to the Party, and their content is limited to politically acceptable questions. For academics in China, such choices come naturally. The Western side plays along.

China researchers are equally constrained in their solo research. Some Western China scholars have relatives in China. Others own apartments there. Those China scholars whose mother tongue is not Chinese have studied the language for years and have built their careers on this large and nontransferable investment. We benefit from our connections in China to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections. Everybody is happy, Western readers for the up-to-date view from academia, we ourselves for prospering in our jobs, and the Party for getting us to do its advertising. China is fairly unique in that the incentives for academics all go one way: One does not upset the Party.

What happens when we don’t play along is all too obvious. We can’t attract Chinese collaborators. When we poke around in China to do research we run into trouble….

With the introduction of each new element of reform and transition, cadres enrich themselves: the dual track price system, the nonperforming loans, the asset-stripping of SOEs, the misuse of funds in investment companies and in private pension accounts. The overwhelmingly irregular transformation of rural into urban land may well qualify as “systematic looting” by local “leaders.” Local cadres are heavily invested in the small, unsafe coal mines they are supposed to close, and nobody knows how they obtained their stakes in these operations….

We speak of the Chinese “government” without further qualification when more than 95% of the “leadership cadres” are Party members, key decisions are reached by leadership cadres in their function as members of Party work committees…

We see the “ends”—successful reform—and don’t question the “means.” The Party’s growth mantra is faithfully accepted as the overarching objective for the country and the one measure of successful reform. Nobody lingers on the political mechanisms through which growth is achieved. The mafia runs China rather efficiently, so why worry about how it is done, and what the “side effects” are? We obviously know of the labor camps into which people disappear without judiciary review, of torture inflicted by the personnel of state “security” organs, and of the treatment of Falun Gong, but choose to move on with our sterilized research and teaching. We ignore that China’s political system is responsible for 30 million dead from starvation in the Great Leap Forward, and 750,000 to 1.5 million murders during the Cultural Revolution. What can make Western academics stop and think twice about who they have bedded down with?

If academics don’t, who will? The World Bank and other international organizations won’t because they profit from dealing with China. Their banking relationship depends on amicable cooperation with the Party, and a de facto requirement of their research collaboration is that the final report and the public statements are acceptable to Party censors. The research departments of Western investment banks won’t because the banks’ other arms likely depend on business with China.

Does this all matter? Does it matter if China researchers ignore the political context in which they operate and the political constraints that shape their work? Does it matter if we present China to the West the way the Party leadership must like us to present China, providing narrow answers to our self-censored research questions and offering a sanitized picture of China’s political system?

The size of China’s economy will exceed that of the U.S., in purchasing power terms, by 2008 or 2009. China is a country with which Western economies are increasingly intertwined: A quarter of Chinese industry is foreign-owned and we depend on Chinese industry for cheap consumer goods. Ultimately, our pensions, invested in multinationals that increasingly produce in China, depend on the continued economic rise of China. But does the West understand that country and its rulers? At what point, and through what channels, will the Party leadership with its different views of human rights and the citizens’ rights affect our choices of political organization and political freedoms in the West (as it has affected academic research and teaching)? And to what extent are China researchers guilty of putting their own rice bowl before honest thinking and teaching?

I will be writing more about China in the near future.