Beijing University at 100 Years: a Symbol of China’s Ferment

“I have just received great news,” blurted Ren Yanshen, the top Communist Party official at Beijing University, during a news conference the other day. “Our mountain climbing team has just conquered a peak in Nepal. Now there’s the spirit of Beijing University for you!”

In the festivities surrounding the 100th anniversary of China’s most famous and prestigious university--which will reach a crescendo Monday with a giant gala for 6,000 alumni and guests at the Great Hall of the People--the university administration and Chinese government have gone to great lengths, and heights, to mark the occasion.

At Monday’s event, Chinese President Jiang Zemin plans to deliver a keynote speech that will be broadcast live to the nation on China Central Television. The Post and Telecommunications Ministry has issued a set of commemorative stamps. The country’s astronomers have even named an asteroid after the school, so that “as it travels through space, it will leave a lasting memory of the university.”

Hidden amid the hoopla, however, is the delicate problem facing China’s leadership of how to celebrate the university centenary while ignoring or glossing over a substantial part of its early history--heavily influenced by the United States--as a bastion of free speech and academic freedom.

Equally troubling for the authorities is how to portray the university’s key role in one of the darkest periods of modern China, the 1966-76 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Finally, there is the unresolved question of the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, spotlighted by the government’s recent decision to free jailed former Beijing University history student Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen demonstrations, and allow him to travel to the United States on medical parole.

Open Atmosphere Ended in 1957

Until the second half of this century, Beijing University--known universally in China as “Beida”--was a hotbed of intellectual debate that embraced anarchists, nihilists, individualists, utilitarian philosophers, utopian socialists, Darwinists and liberal democrats. The American philosopher John Dewey taught there. So did Britain’s great intellectual and pacifist, Bertrand Russell.

That open academic atmosphere ended in 1957, when Chairman Mao Tse-tung launched the Anti-Rightist Movement, in which many of the university’s teachers lost their jobs.

“That period after the Korean War until 1957 was the best time at Beida after 1949” when the Communists took power, recalled physicist and dissident Fang Lizhi, who was on the campus at the time.

Fang and his wife kept an apartment at the university until 1989, when Fang--pursued by state police for his role in the 1989 democracy movement--sought political asylum at the U.S. Embassy and eventually fled to the United States.

“We are witness to the decline of Beida,” he said in a recent e-mail message to The Times.

The final blow to the liberal traditions of the university came in 1959, when, in a speech marking the school’s 60th anniversary, the late Communist Party leader Chen Boda declared the party’s intention to “use a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary spirit to continue to reform Beijing University, to build a new Communist Beijing University.”

But the liberal currents at the school still run deep, occasionally surfacing during critical moments of reform.

By the early 1930s, University of Colorado history professor Timothy Weston observed in a recent essay, “the university’s symbolic values had been more or less defined: The ideas the university was associated with were cultural and political progressivism, scientific thought, freedom of inquiry, leadership, heroism, sacrifice and ardent nationalism.”

Many of the early administrators at China’s first national university, founded under the Qing Dynasty in 1898, had studied in the United States or Japan.

Former Beijing University President Hu Shi, one of the most famous Chinese liberal intellectuals of this century, studied at Cornell and Columbia universities in New York before beginning a long career at Beida.

Even the university’s graceful, slightly decrepit campus on the northwest outskirts of the Chinese capital was expropriated in 1952 from an American missionary school, Yanjing University, built by the U.S. Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches. Another foreign-funded school, Fu Jen Catholic University, was absorbed by Beida at the same time. This still causes resentment among alumni, many of whom live in the U.S.

“I don’t have much to say about the anniversary. I’m happy for Beida. I respect the place,” said Richard Yang, a leader in the Los Angeles-based association of Yanjing alumni. “But as a loyal student of Yanda [Yanjing], I didn’t like Beida and the government taking over my alma mater.”

Beida’s rich, Western-oriented history is largely ignored in the reams of material pumped out by the authorities to mark the centenary.

Instead, the government has focused most of its attention on the central role played by the university in the “May 4th Movement”--student-led demonstrations in 1919 protesting territorial concessions that were granted the Japanese by the Treaty of Versailles.

The May 4th Movement has always been a politically safe subject for China’s Communist Party, which has embraced it as an example of enlightened patriotism. But it also established Beida forever as an activist campus, where students are unafraid to take to the streets, as they did many times in the 1920s and ‘30s, and as they did in 1989.

Publicly, Chinese officials are fond of describing Beijing University as the intellectual center of Chinese society.

“In the past 100 years,” Jiang said last week during a walking tour of the campus timed to coincide with the centenary, “generations of students and teachers at Beijing University have carried on the fine traditions of patriotism, progress, democracy and science.”

A Cradle for Chinese Communism

Underlying the glowing tributes, however, is an element of suspicion that if China’s most volatile campus is allowed to veer out of control, it could turn on its masters.

“What makes Beijing University great in most people’s minds,” said Weston, a specialist in Chinese political culture of the early 20th century, “is also what makes it most threatening to the Communist Party.”

The other main focus of the official history is the role of Beida as a cradle for Chinese communism. Of this, there is no dispute.

Most historians identify China’s first Marxist as Li Dazhao, onetime head librarian at Beida. Working as a clerk in the library at the same time was a young intellectual from Hunan province named Mao Tse-tung, China’s future leader.

Mao had come to Beijing with strong leanings toward anarchism. But under Li’s influence, he later confided to American journalist Edgar Snow, he left the capital a few months later a budding Marxist.

More troubling for the party historians are the details.

In the official history, for example, the scholar Hu Shi (1891-1962) is properly placed in the pantheon of Beida greats. What is not mentioned, however, is that in 1949, when the Communists took power, Hu fled to Taiwan with the defeated Nationalists. In Taiwan, he continued his devotion to liberal education by founding Academia Sinica in 1957.

Likewise, the firebrand scholar Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), who while serving as dean at Beida founded the New Youth journal that greatly influenced Mao and other future Chinese leaders, is remembered as the first general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, in 1921. Not mentioned is the fact that he was later branded a “Trotskyist” and kicked out of the party.

Much is made in the centenary publicity about the important speech delivered in 1957 by Beijing University President Ma Yinchu detailing China’s population problem. Not mentioned is that Ma was purged later that same year in the Anti-Rightist campaign.

Campus Used by Mao to Launch Campaigns

On a bigger scale, mostly ignored in the centenary tributes, are the university’s equally key roles in the bloody decade-long Cultural Revolution and in the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Once installed as China’s leader, Mao frequently used the Beida campus to launch political and ideological crusades. That was the case in 1966, when the campus was the site of the first skirmish in the Cultural Revolution.

In May of that year, a young teaching assistant at Beida, Nieh Yuan-tzu, wrote a wall poster criticizing the university administration. The administration quickly acted to suppress the dissent. But Mao sided with the teaching assistant and ordered that the text of the poster be broadcast and published in the official Communist organ, People’s Daily.

Shortly after that, Mao ordered a reorganization of the university administration, citing “revisionist” tendencies. Similar poster campaigns and reorganizations spread to campuses and high schools across the country. The Cultural Revolution was launched. Beida was once again center stage.

Perhaps the most telling moment leading up to the lavish centenary celebrations was the release from prison and subsequent exile to the United States of Wang Dan.

In an interview published last month in New York, Wang, whose father is a retired Beida geology professor and who literally grew up on the university campus, said his greatest dream was to finish his education in the U.S. and return to Beijing University--as president.

The century of history at Beida, Wang wrote in a short essay for this article, is a tribute to the Chinese “liberal intellectual’s strong sense of responsibility toward society.”

“To commemorate Beida’s founding,” Wang wrote, “is to celebrate the spark of idealism that is passed down through the hearts of Chinese youth and intellectuals from generation to generation.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

100 Years of Learning

Beijing University (also known as Peking University)

Enrollment: 22,854 selected by examination

Foreign students: 1,007 from 72 countries

Faculty and research staff: 2,900

****

December 1898: Founded under Qing Emperor Guangxu as Metropolitan University

May 1912: Changes name to Peking (Beijing) University. Yan Fu, translator of English texts on evolutionary theory, becomes first president.

1916: Cai Yuanpei named president of university, vows “to follow the principle of freedom of thought and incorporate learning from diverse sources.”

1919: Mao Tse-tung, future leader of China, takes post as research assistant at university library. May Fourth Movement. Students protest Treaty of Versailles.

1920: Admits three female students to become first Chinese coeducational university. Beijing Party Group, precursor of Chinese Communist Party, founded.

1937: Japanese occupy Beijing. University moves to temporary campus in Changsha, Hunan province.

1946: After defeat of Japan, university returns to Beijing. Liberal scholar Hu Shi becomes president.

1949: Communists defeat Nationalists. People’s Republic of China is founded. Hu Shi flees to Taiwan.

1951: Official anniversary changed from Dec. 17 to May 4 to commemorate May 4th Movement.

1952: On order of Mao, university moves from downtown to suburban campus of Yanjing University, an American missionary school.

1957: Anti-Rightist Movement. Administration and faculty are purged.

1959: Politburo member Chen Boda gives 60th anniversary speech calling for “new Communist Beijing University.”

1966: Cultural Revolution is launched with wall poster at Beijing University.

1989: Beijing Spring demonstrations. Army crackdown at Tiananmen Square. Many university students are arrested. University president resigns.

1998: Student leader Wang Dan is released from prison, exiled to U.S.

May 4, 1998: Beijing University celebrates 100th anniversary.

Researched by RONE TEMPEST / Los Angeles Times