Making the grade
Feng Jianhua

WHILE proud of its double-digit growth and preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games, China feels lacking in one area that is regarded as being of enormous importance within the country-education.
A huge amount of emphasis is placed on education in China, yet the country’s universities rank poorly when compared to the world’s best. In May 1998, the then Chinese President Jiang Zemin congratulated Peking University, one of China’s oldest universities, on its 100 year anniversary, saying, “In order to realize its modernization drive, China must have a handful of internationally renowned universities.”
After Jiang’s speech, several prestigious Chinese universities put forward the ambitious goal of becoming top-ranking world universities. For example, Tsinghua University, China’s MIT, announced a plan to join the list of top universities by 2011, the establishment’s 100th birthday. Wang Dazhong, former President of Tsinghua who first formulated the goal, said, “Building top-ranking universities will not only drive China’s higher education as a whole to a higher level, but will also have strategic significance for boosting China’s comprehensive national strength and international competitiveness and promoting sustainable economic and social development.”
Yang Fujia, former President of Shanghai-based Fudan University and Chancellor of the University of Nottingham in Britain, said since the late 1990s Chinese universities have progressed at such a rate that joining the ranks of the world’s best is no longer just a dream.
Yet Yang also admitted that Chinese universities, without exception, are not in the same league as world top-ranking universities in terms of academic and technological research, although the education level of some of them reaches the standard of the globe’s best, and has played an important role in promoting China’s social development.
Yang added that China’s high school graduates every year provide a huge talent pool, which makes the necessity for building first-rate universities and higher education institutions more urgent. “Excellent universities are like melting pots, which will produce excellent refined steel out of good iron. China doesn’t lack good iron, but needs good melting pots,” Yang said.
Disheartening reality
In April 2007, the Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation of Wuhan University released its rankings of the world’s most competitive universities. Peking University was ranked 192nd and Tsinghua University was 196th, despite the rankings of the two best universities in China having risen by 61 and 68 places respectively compared with last year’s list from the same institution. In an earlier Newsweek ranking, no Chinese university appeared among the top 100.
The results were disappointing. “I have always believed that building a top university in China would be more difficult than building an internationally successful business or a world renowned research institution. Most barriers are external rather than internal,” said Ling Zhijun, a senior editor at People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China Central Committee. Yang Dongping, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) specializing in studying China’s higher education system, said, “Chinese universities still lag far behind the world’s top universities if evaluated on their efforts to establish modern education systems.”
Where are the gaps?
Amid the fervor to build world-class universities in China, many universities are borrowing huge amounts of money to expand their campuses and build new facilities, which has left some on the verge of bankruptcy. To cope with the financial strain, some universities have raised their tuition fees and significantly enlarged their annual enrollment, which has triggered concern about a potential decline in the quality of the education they can provide. Meanwhile, many universities have started to build their academic and research prestige by pushing their teaching staff to yield more papers as research products. Some universities have even linked teaching staff benefits and bonuses with the number of papers they published. This pragmatic approach has created a fake prosperity in China’s academic arena where the newly launched inventions and discoveries of scientific research actually show little innovation and rarely have any international influence.
“China’s expansion of college enrollment in recent years has enabled one out of every five middle school graduates to receive higher education. This means Chinese higher education has achieved an expansion in a couple of years, which has taken most developing countries dozens of years or even hundreds. However, the speedy expansion and businesslike trend have made some universities no longer real universities,” said Professor Ding Xueliang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Professor Yang from BIT also believes that the enlargement of universities has corrupted their quality. He said Chinese education authorities have realized the seriousness of this problem and have started to formulate policies to redress the trend. The Ministry of Education announced in a June press conference that no university is allowed to raise its tuition or accommodation fees over a period of five years from the fall semester 2006.
Professor Ding said a world top university must meet all three standards of excellent facilities, institutions and spirit. He elaborated that the third standard of spirit is the spirit of universalism, which is reflected by three aspects. First is the diversification of the teaching staff’s backgrounds and nationalities. Second is the diversification of students’ nationalities, temperaments and specialties. Third is that curriculum designing and teaching methods must be universal and up to international standards.
“At the current stage Chinese universities lack this universalism spirit,” said Ding.
Professor Yang believes that institutional loopholes have greatly hindered Chinese universities’ pursuit for excellence. “University is the product of civilized institutions, thus money is not the main problem,” he said. He went on further to refute the idea that lack of capital is to blame for the absence of world top universities in China. Instead, he believes what universities lack most now is a spirit of independence.
Professor Yang explained that a university is essentially a self-governing body of scholars, which is the core of the modern education system. However, the administration of Chinese universities is painted with strong ideological colors and essentially administrator-centered. He said he knew due to the low status of scholars in universities, some young scholars have given up their promising academic career to compete for heading the logistics department of their universities.
Yang compared China’s higher education institutions to pre-reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the 1980s. “The reform of SOEs, which has made them players in the market economy that manage their operations, has greatly contributed to the rapid economic growth of China. Yet China’s higher education has so far not experienced a similar reform, which has resulted in its lasting backwardness,” he said. He added that the current education system has mistakenly let education authorities rather than educators play the central role.
Yang said universities’ lack of self-governing power has led to the lack of an incentive system for the leadership of universities. Thus some university presidents and principals only care about the education authorities’ evaluation of them in the short-term, rather than really concentrating on building up their university comprehensively. Professor Ding pointed out, “If a university is administrated and controlled by professional administrators, who can call the shots in the promotion of lecturers and discipline development of different departments, this is a university with no future.”
Initiatives
Some education experts believe the key to creating first-class universities in China is a transition from an administrator-dominated system to a scholar-dominated one. In the process, two problems must be addressed. The first is how to maintain the independent operation of universities. Second is how to create transparent, fair and strict rules on hiring teaching staff and evaluating their academic performance. A handful of Chinese universities have already begun to reform in this direction. For example, Tsinghua University has put forward a policy of inviting scholars and professors to play a more active role in the university’s administration.
Professor Yan Xuyang, head of Canvard Institute of Beijing Technology and Business University, suggested that China should take the emphasis off world university rankings as such rampant ambition could in fact prove detrimental to reaching the goal of improvement. Yang of BIT is also pessimistic about China’s ambition to build world-class universities. He thinks the most urgent task is to recover the true essence of universities. Boao Forum for Asia Executive Director Yao Wang suggests three areas for development. First, the study of Chinese culture and tradition must be cherished and developed.
Secondly, universities should seek breakthroughs in small areas. For example, China doesn’t have a top-ranking business school, but Chinese universities can build a first-rate case reservoir since China’s economic growth has spurred many economic miracles. Having a top-notch case reservoir can be the first step toward building an excellent business school.
Thirdly, China should map out goals for different periods and move toward these goals step by step. For instance, before building world top-ranking universities, China must start by building universities that rank top in the developing world.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

The super-revolutionaries
Fidel Castro Ruz

EVERY day I carefully read the opinions about Cuba in the traditional press agency releases, including those from the peoples which were part of the USSR, those from the People’s Republic of China and others. News reaches me from the Latin America press, from Spain and the rest of Europe.
The picture is increasingly uncertain as we face the fear of a prolonged recession like that of the 1930s. On July 22, 1944, the United States government received the privileges granted in Bretton Woods to the most powerful military power, that of minting the dollar as the international exchange currency. After the war, in 1945, with its economy intact, that country had at its disposal almost 70 percent of the world gold reserves. On August 15, 1971, Nixon unilaterally decided to suspend the gold backing for each dollar minted. With this he financed the slaughter in Vietnam in a war that cost more than 20 times the real value of its remaining gold reserves. Since then, the United States economy is sustained by natural resources and the savings of the rest of the world.
The theory of continuous growth from investment and consumption, applied by the most developed to the countries where the vast majority is poor, surrounded by luxuries and the wastefulness of a tiny minority of wealthy individuals, is not only humiliating but destructive, too. That pillage, and its disastrous consequences, is the cause of peoples’ growing rebelliousness, even though very few are aware of the history behind the events.
The most gifted and cultivated intellects are included on the list of natural resources and they have their price tags on the world market of goods and services. What is happening with the super-revolutionaries of the so-called far left? Some simply lack realism while others enjoy the pleasure of dreaming sweet dreams. Others still are far from being dreamers and are experts in the subject; they know what they are saying and why they are saying it. It is a well conceived trap that should be avoided. They recognize our breakthroughs as if it were a favor to us. Are they really short of information? That is not how it is. I can assure you that they are absolutely well informed. In certain cases, the alleged friendship with Cuba allows them to attend numerous international meetings and chat with as many people from abroad or from the country as they want, without any objection from our imperial neighbor just 90 miles away from the Cuban shores.
What is their advice to the Revolution? It’s pure poison; the most typical of the neoliberal formulae. The blockade does not exist; it would appear to be a Cuban invention. They underestimate the Revolution’s most colossal achievement, its work in education, the massive cultivation of peoples’ talents. They sustain that some must live doing simple and rough work. They underestimate the results and exaggerate the costs of scientific investments. Even worse: they overlook the value of the healthcare services that Cuba provides to the world; actually, with modest resources the Revolution is stripping bare the system imposed by imperialism which is lacking the human personnel to carry it out. They advise investments which are ruinous, and the services they provide, such as rent, are practically free. If foreign investments in housing had not been stopped in time, they would have constructed tens of thousands without any more resources than the prior sales of that same housing to foreign residents in Cuba or abroad. Furthermore, they were joint enterprises governed by a legislation intended for productive companies. There were no limits for the authority of the buyers as owners. The country would supply services to those residents or clients, without the need of being knowledgeable in science or computers. Many of the dwellings could be acquired by the enemy intelligence agencies or their allies.
We need some of the joint enterprises since they control very necessary markets. But you can hardly flood the country with money and not sell our sovereignty. The super-revolutionaries who prescribe such medication deliberately ignore other resources which are truly decisive for the economy, such as the growing production of gas which, when purified, becomes an invaluable source of electricity without affecting the environment and brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars each year. About the Energy Revolution promoted by Cuba, of vital and decisive importance for the world, not one word is spoken. They go even further: they see an energy advantage for the island in the production of sugarcane —a crop that was grown in Cuba with semi-slave labor— to counter the high cost of diesel being guzzled by the automobiles of the United States, Western Europe and other developed countries. The egotistical instinct is being fostered in human beings while the price of food is doubling and tripling.
Nobody has been more critical of our own revolutionary work than I have, but they shall never see me hoping for favors or apologies from the worst of the empires.
 

Kings of the coal habit
Jermy Leggett

THROUGH his long years of greenhouse denial, George Bush must have been particularly grateful to John Howard. The Australian prime minister was quick to join Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and has batted for his country’s coal interests as trenchantly as Bush has batted for US coal and oil interests. Now Bush has had to deal with the impact on American public opinion of Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s movie, and can no longer afford to ignore climate change. Howard, contending with a killer drought, is similarly finding that greenhouse denial is out of bounds. The flow of Australian rivers has fallen by a staggering 70 per cent in recent decades. All Australia’s major cities are in drought. The “big dry” in the Murray-Darling basin threatens 40 per cent of food production. Global warming has become an issue in the January elections.
Howard hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Sydney this week. Bush will be one of the leaders attending. Everyone who cares about the greenhouse threat should train a microscope on their actions. The fate of human civilisation will probably hinge on the fossil-fuel decisions of just six nations, and five of them are members of Apec. If we are to avoid tipping the planet over a widely accepted danger threshold of 450 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide, we can only afford to burn fossil fuels in a quantity measured in low hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon. Industry estimates suggest that remaining oil deposits alone exceed this figure, if we include unconventional sources such as Canada’s tar sands.
As for coal, the energy industry suggests several thousand billion tonnes remain to be burned. Even if we believe fossil-fuel proponents tend to exaggerate estimates of the size of deposits, it is clear that most of the remaining coal has to stay in the ground if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Three-quarters of coal reserves are in five nations: the US, Russia, China, India and Australia.
Add Canada, because of the scale of the oil deposits in the Athabasca tar sands, and there you have it: the fate of human civilisation will probably hinge on the resource decisions of just six nations. Those who place their hopes in bolt-on adjustments to the fossil-fuel status quo, notably carbon capture and storage technology, face the problem that mass production of the necessary technology is more than a decade off. What can we expect of Howard, Bush and their fellow coal leaders this week? Howard has said he will instigate a carbon-trading scheme if re-elected, but will not be drawn on the all-important issue of caps. Bush opposes an energy bill passed recently in the House of Representatives that would place an obligation on electric utilities to use more renewables and less coal. He is endeavouring to run his own international negotiations in competition with the UN’s long-running Kyoto process. On this kind of running, it would be surprising if the Apec summit offered any hope of the world kicking the coal habit.
Would different leaders in the Big Six make any difference? In Australia, Labor is ahead in the polls, but strong on defence of coal interests. In America, the Democratic challenger Barack Obama, from the coal state of Ohio, has co-sponsored a bill to boost technology that makes gasoline from coal via a process that would be ruinous for the climate. Meanwhile, those not in the coal big league and best placed to lead the way to a different energy future are not doing so. In the UK, coal use is rising, renewables investment is derisory, and even investment in carbon capture and storage would pave but a short stretch of motorway. —Khaleej Times