INTERNATIONAL

PIERRE M. PERROLLE

After Tiananmen: Science Relations with China

Continued U.S. interaction, not sanctions, will best serve the goal of reform.

A little over a decade ago, China embarked on an ambitious program of economic modernization, involving profound structural changes in China's economy and the unprecedented creation of a sizeable cadre of dedicated modernizers: scientists, engineers, economists, policy analysts, technocrats, modern enterprise managers, and even technological entrepreneurs. In order to fill the growing ranks of professionals, China's universities and other academic and research institutions were given new life following a decade of abuse during the Cultural Revolution.

Part and parcel of this intellectual revitalization was China's increased openness to foreign information, know-how, and ideas, through visits and study abroad by several hundred thousand Chinese students and academics, as well as through the welcoming to China of tens of thousands of professional visitors— predominantly scientists and engineers, but also a growing number of economists, legal scholars, and other specialists. Such interaction not only played a significant part in establishing the intellectual underpinnings of China's economic modernization, but also indirectly helped to create the 1989 pro-democracy movement. And that is likely to mean trouble for Chinese science and technology (S&T).

Now that a new conservative leadership has taken control in China and suppressed the pro-democracy movement, we can expect China to reassess the value of all forms of modernization. Scientific research and technological development are particularly vulnerable: Because the processes of education and intellectual pursuit central to scientific and technological activities are measured in decades rather than years, instability and discontinuities take heavy tolls. Tragically, in the course of the twentieth century, China has never enjoyed a period of political stability of more than about a decade; China's research and related higher education infrastructures have been repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt to suit the reigning ideological trend.

Does Chinese science and technology face another period of neglect or hostility? The dramatic pro-democracy demonstrations of the spring of 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and the brutal government response are important factors, but the question is more complex. Political and ideological forces that have been active for decades in China will play a critical role in the fate of S&T programs.

Roots of conflict

The pro-democracy movement brought to a head some latent fears of conservative leaders in two key areas. The first is the Chinese Communist Party's long-standing concern with the role of intellectuals in society. The other is a Chinese national concern, going back more than a century, about the appropriate limits of borrowing knowledge and institutions from overseas.

The Chinese recognize the importance of scientists, engineers, and other professionals to economic development. But the growth in the number and influence of intellectuals and their institutions poses a problem for China. In fact, policy toward intellectuals is the key to understanding much of what has occurred in China since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.

Even though a number of intellectuals, particularly university students, were actually sympathetic to the victorious Communist Party in 1949, the new leaders of Communist China, emerging as they did from rural bases, wasted little time in relegating intellectuals to the position of social outcasts, parasites, and threats to the newly established regime. The motivation was understandable: Intellectuals were part of the privileged classes, and most were heavily infused with foreign ideas and attitudes at variance with party ideology and tradition. But this mistrust created a dilemma for China's leaders: How could they develop the society's much-needed intellectual resources without creating a politically dangerous intellectual elite?

Much of the political history of the People's Republic has reflected this fundamental ambivalence. In 1955, in one of his most celebrated speeches on this subject, Premier Zhou Enlai took a relatively benign view of intellectuals, arguing that most did not pose a threat and that the new nation was greatly dependent on their contributions. Beginning in 1956, intellectuals were encouraged to speak out on political and social ills, “letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” In mid-1957, the ideological pendulum swung to the opposite view— that intellectuals were a destabilizing political force. Many intellectuals who had expressed their views found themselves the targets of an “anti-rightist” movement, and as many as half a million were imprisoned or sent to the countryside for political reeducation. Some of these individuals remained political and professional outcasts for more than twenty years.

In the early 1960s, Chinese leaders quietly and somewhat tentatively turned to intellectuals to pull China out of the economic difficulties that resulted from the 1958–59 socio-economic experiments of Mao Zedong's “Great Leap Forward,” which had relied on human will, mass mobilization, and self-reliance rather than on a trained elite applying technology developed abroad. But the attempt to right the balance was also rather short-lived. The pendulum swung back with a vengeance in 1966 when Mao launched the “Cultural Revolution,” one of history's most far-reaching anti-intellectual movements.

During that decade-long period, universities and research laboratories were effectively shut down for several years, S&T policy structures were dismantled, and virtually all intellectuals were vilified, physically and verbally attacked, and relegated to menial labor. In contrast, the 1980s witnessed an ambitious effort to rehabilitate virtually all of the nation's intellectual resources. In the process, intellectuals came to enjoy a degree of intellectual freedom and social status unprecedented since 1949. However, in the eyes of the political conservatives, the pendulum was evidently swinging too far toward liberalization. The pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen confirmed their worst fears.

The dilemma of Western learning

Whereas the distrust of intellectuals arose only recently with the adoption of Marxist ideology, Chinese leaders have been wary of foreign ideas and knowledge for more than a century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, high officials of imperial China, reacting to the neocolonial demands of the Western powers, endeavored to adopt some of the elements that made the Western challengers strong, while avoiding a wholesale jettisoning of the fundamental precepts of a two-thousand-year-old empire. The proponents of learning from the West sought to draw a clear distinction between those elements, such as technology, that China ought to borrow from the West and those, such as foreign value systems and political institutions, for which China had no use. The formula they used was “zhong xue wei ti, xi xue wei yong,” which translates roughly as “Chinese learning for essential matters (ti), Western learning for practical matters (yong).”

Surprises are possible, but China is not about to replay the Cultural Revolution or make fundamental shifts in S&T policy.

That formula appears reasonable in the abstract. In practice, however, where one draws the line at borrowing from abroad has been a thorny and, at times, very controversial issue. Though the phrase has not been invoked since the fall of the Chinese Empire in the early twentieth century, the ti-yong dilemma is still very much alive in China today. That is arguably the crux of the current leadership debate: China needs the practical learning from abroad, but how does one distinguish the practical from the essential? To those currently in power, it is clear that the reformers, such as former Party head Zhao Ziyang, imported too much. Now, they are attempting to move China back to where foreign ideas cease to impinge on the essential (read ideological) underpinnings of China's political system. The fundamental question is how far will they seek to roll back the changes of the past decade in order to preserve what they view as the integrity of their political system.

The prognosis forS&T

It is important to note that, at the time of this writing, no overt overall shifts in S&T policy have been announced. Universities reopened in the fall, and laboratories have remained in operation—albeit with faculties and research personnel apparently spending considerable time in “political education” meetings. The current leadership has gone to some lengths to assert that the “open door” is still open and that “business as usual” prevails in China. But the new leadership has introduced some policies that clearly reduce academic freedom: requiring the entering freshman class at Beijing University (Beida) to receive a year of army-managed “patriotic education” courses; reducing the size of the entering class at Beida, particularly among those intending to study law and the social sciences; suspending the Fulbright teaching program in China; and halting plans for the first cohort of U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers to begin teaching in China. These decisions focus on the educational sector, and the most severe ones appear to be aimed at China's historic center of intellectual and political ferment, Beijing University.

The absence of major policy changes implies a lack of consensus within the leadership. Surprises are possible, but most observers agree that China is not on the verge of a replay of the Cultural Revolution, or any broad fundamental S&T policy shift. A long series of lesser decisions could, nevertheless, seriously affect the future development of China's S&T activities.

For one thing, the entire personnel structure of China's S&T system—bureaucrats, heads of academic and research institutions, R&D personnel, teaching faculties, and students—is potentially at risk in the conservative reaction to the Tiananmen demonstrations. Chinese officials can discipline individual scientists and engineers through the country's bureaucratically controlled (and thus potentially politically controlled) job assignment and promotion system.

Of course, untold numbers of Tiananmen participants have already been executed or imprisoned. In addition, the well-known dissident scientists Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian are, at the time of this writing, still in refuge at the American Embassy in Beijing. But what about the vast majority of the S&T community, which has not been politically active?

Chinese research and education administrators are apparently at the mercy of political forces. We have reason to believe, for instance, that the dismissal of some of the top leaders of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in early 1987 (in the wake of student demonstrations at the CAS-managed University of Science and Technology) resulted at least in part from factional conflicts at very high political levels. It is worth noting that officials are held accountable for political order within their scope of authority. Insofar as students and faculty from academic institutions were key participants in the Tiananmen demonstrations, leaders of those institutions, outspoken or not, may be as much at risk as the participants themselves. Officials are even deemed responsible for the actions of people who were abroad but may have provided moral, intellectual, or financial support to the pro-democracy movement.

Some Chinese fear that having resided overseas is in itself likely to be a factor in the fate of individual scholars. At the risk of being excessively speculative on this point, it would seem, at this stage, that those who did not become overtly entangled with foreign political ideas are not likely to be tainted by their overseas experience per se. We must remind ourselves that although our news media gave wide coverage to a few impassioned and articulate spokespersons of the pro-democracy movement in the United States, the bulk of Chinese scholars overseas have led a very apolitical existence.

Beyond concerns about personnel, the fate of S&T institutional reforms themselves is in question. Although the common judgment of China watchers is that most of the institutional changes that have been introduced in China's S&T system over the past decade are likely to remain in place, a few are likely to be direct targets of conservative reaction and some others may be indirectly affected by the current political atmosphere and trends. Reforms most likely to withstand shifting political winds include:

Merit-based research funding. Over the past decade China has established several new funding institutions, the most significant of which is the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which is patterned after the U.S. National Science Foundation. Although these institutions are likely to survive, political factors could easily begin to intrude on merit-based decisions. This issue bears watching.
The shift from Soviet-style institute-based research to research universities. It is worth watching whether universities whose students were prominently involved in the Tiananmen demonstrations, or even a broader cross-section of China's more than one thousand colleges and universities, suffer for apparently punitive reasons. The teaching side at Beida is clearly already being affected by the political education requirements for incoming students. The research side may be somewhat more protected.
The encouragement of commercialization of research results through enhancement of institutions and processes such as contract research, spin-off technology companies, and incubator arrangements. These should be safe.

The institutional reforms most likely to suffer reversals include:

New “soft science” institutions, such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (whose headquarters were occupied by the military at the time of the crackdown on Tiananmen) and its constituent institutes, as well as various policy “think tanks.” These institutions, which have come into being only in the past dozen years, are vulnerable not only because they are intellectual centers of economic and political reform but also because virtually all are closely linked to high-level political leaders. As with individuals who may be in the “wrong” political network, these institutions may vanish with any political leaders or factions they have served. A case in point is the closing down of the Party's Rural Policy Research Center, closely associated with ousted Party leader Zhao Ziyang, who had risen to power on the basis of successful agricultural reforms.
The growing managerial autonomy of R&D institutions. A major trend of the past decade has been to depoliticize R&D institutions by dismantling the Communist Party institutions within them and placing management in the hands of scientists and engineers. China's conservative leadership can be expected to reintroduce elements of political control against the perceived threat of politically subversive ideas.
Demilitarization of R&D. Over the past decade of S&T modernization, civilian R&D received priority over military R&D, and the military was pressured to “civilianize” some of its R&D and to commercialize some of the dual-use technologies it produced. If, as it appears, China's armed forces have increased their political power, the civilianization trend may be reversed.

Intellectual ambience

Besides institutional developments, the past decade has witnessed some fundamental changes in the atmosphere in which S&T activities are conducted in China. Scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals became confident that they could exchange information and discuss ideas without fear of government reprisal. The conservative leadership, in an effort to quell the ferment of political ideas, may try to stifle communication among intellectuals and thus create an atmosphere detrimental to the conduct of scientific research. It took many years to overcome the fears created by the Cultural Revolution. Any sustained government effort at restraint threatens to drive intellectuals back into harmful self-isolation.

Continuing to cooperate in adverse times will be long remembered as a gesture of deep friendship.

Intellectual openness, scientific as well as political, has, of course, been fostered by international contacts. And this is the area in which the current leadership is most likely to bring about changes. Even before the pro-democracy movement emerged, Chinese officialdom had considered curtailing the decade-old practice of sending large numbers of students and scholars for long-term stays overseas. They were concerned about exporting brain power as well as importing subversive ideas. Now that the events of 1989 have reinforced the fear of ideological contamination, we can expect to see severe constraints placed on the outflow of students and scholars from China: lower numbers overall; relatively fewer students compared to the number of established scholars (over whom the Chinese government can exert greater control through the workplace); few, if any, students and scholars in the social sciences; and a decline in the numbers coming to the United States (where the pro-democracy movement in exile is particularly strong). In fact, as relations between China and the Soviet Union improve, conservatives might have an alternative destination more to their liking. (Ironically, China's leaders may find Soviet notions of political reform in a Communist system at least as threatening as political ideas from the West.)

Finally, the past two or three years in China have seen the vigorous development of technological entrepreneurship in China. Although sanctioned in principle, the establishment of most new technological enterprises in China, especially by individuals, remains uncharted legal territory. A number of factors could compel China's current leadership to regulate these entrepreneurial efforts more closely: the desire to curb official corruption (a problem widely acknowledged well before the Tiananmen demonstrations); a long historical tradition of heavy government regulation of economic affairs, combined with an uncomfortable lack of familiarity with private enterprise; and direct punitive action against individual entrepreneurs, who supported the pro-democracy movement or advocated far-reaching economic reforms important to their business. For instance, the founder of the Stone Corporation, a highly successful electronics and computer firm, was targeted for arrest but managed to escape overseas. Cutting back the budding entrepreneurial atmosphere would be a major setback for a critically important dimension of S&T modernization and the application of R&D to economic production.

The U.S. response

The Tiananmen Massacre was a morally repugnant event. Its aftermath, a retrogression along what had been a slow but steady path of improving human rights, has also been very disquieting. These events have been particularly disturbing to the United States, which has, as a matter of national policy as well as popular inclination, played a vital role in China's efforts to modernize. We have, of course, not been alone in this process—Japan and the Western European nations, for example, have also been active partners of China—but a number of factors have made us first among equals. Among these are the openness and flexibility of our higher education system, historical academic ties to China reaching back to the 1930s and 1940s, and the important bridge formed by a relatively large proportion of ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers in our universities and industries.

In principle, of course, the United States would prefer to react in ways that might move China back onto a path of economic and political reform. But it should be clear by now that any U.S. attempts to pressure China to return quickly to “pre-Tiananmen” conditions have virtually no chance of success. Instead, the United States should be guided by the long-term view that maintaining a viable working relationship with China is of overarching national strategic importance.

The building of our relationship with China since the Nixon-Kissinger initiatives of 1971 has received a remarkable degree of bipartisan support and continuity over five administrations. The geostrategic basis for that relationship remains unchanged by 1989 events in Beijing: China continues to be a crucial element in the global balance. Furthermore, our relations with China have been aimed at encouraging China's modernization on the assumption that an economically weak China could be extremely destabilizing to the entire Asian-Pacific region. Finally, China continues to play a key role in diplomatic dialogues on regional issues of high foreign policy interest to the United States, such as the future of Cambodia and further reduction of tension on the Korean peninsula.

The United States must weigh the long-term costs of alienating China against the gains from strong reprisals in reaction to the suppression of the pro-democracy movement. Actions that have been taken— bans on arms sales, temporary suspension of cooperation in military technology, holding off on any further export control liberalization measures, and postponing certain high-level meetings—have had little visible impact. For science and technology institutions, it is difficult to know what effect curtailing or terminating programs will have; it could simply add to the difficulties of research scientists being oppressed by new leadership. Moral grandstanding is personally satisfying, but government and institutional policy should be made on the basis of its practical impact in China, and on U.S./China relations.

In weaving the fabric of U.S.-China relations over the past two decades, much emphasis has been placed on balance and mutuality of benefits in areas such as trade and the S&T relationship. Thus, any sanctions bear a potential cost to the United States. Given the fact that Chinese students and visiting scholars have become a vital human resource in our research laboratories, reducing their numbers could inflict as much harm on the United States as on China. In addition, as China opened its doors, it opened them not only to the United States but to all the advanced industrial countries in the world, weakening the potential leverage of any single country. Thus, one country or institution closing off programs of S&T cooperation or academic exchange may not serve as a very effective sanction unless others act in concert.

Each situation will be different, and no U.S. institution can expect to have anywhere near the level of information needed to act with predictable results in China. Given this uncertainty, American should be humble in their attempts to influence Chinese policy. We should remember that the type of broad-based progress reflected in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square are not the result of U.S. pronouncements on democracy and human rights but the outgrowth of extensive direct contacts between Americans and Chinese.

Because each institutional and individual relationship is unique in some way, no general course of action is applicable to all. But I do want to propose a set of general principles to guide responses by the U.S. S&T community to current conditions in China:

Maintain individual cooperative efforts. Curtailment of cooperation is likely to be perceived as a lack of U.S. interest and commitment to China's S&T community, thus weakening their professional resources, exacerbating their demoralization, and increasing their vulnerability. Conversely, continuing to cooperate in adverse times will be long remembered by Chinese colleagues as a gesture of deep friendship. If cooperation becomes a political liability, the Chinese partners will make it known.
Avoid preaching. Chinese intellectuals have survived setbacks more difficult than most Americans can imagine. They tend to “tough things out” quietly rather than to engage in heroics. Moral pronouncements by Americans, as sincere as they might be, could be misunderstood as gratuitous gestures by outsiders and thus may not have the desired effect.
Continue dialogue wherever possible. Only in this way can U.S. organizations begin to identify victims and perpetrators, the nature of the victimization, and what future courses of action may be most useful and effective.
Test the official Chinese position that the “open door” is indeed still open. Over the past ten years, China moved a very long way toward increasing direct contact between its scientists and academics and those from the United States and other open societies. U.S. organizations should at least keep up the pressure to ensure against retrogression and preferably should work toward increased openness. This may be difficult to achieve, but to relent can only serve to reinforce some of the unfortunate trends we perceive in China.

To some who have watched China for a long time, Tiananmen represents the shattering of the last hope for progress. I am not so pessimistic. The courageous and broad-based manifestations of the pro-democracy movement seemed a much more powerful force than the current forces of repression, as harsh as they might be. Despite past twists and turns and numerous setbacks, the long-term trend in China has been for the better. We should look ahead to a brighter future for our Chinese colleagues and increased U.S.-Chinese cooperation that will benefit both countries. As we await that brighter future, we must stand by our Chinese colleagues and take care that our actions are understood as a measure of support to them in trying times.