Academic Freedom and Public Intellectuals in China

Abstract

Academic freedom has always been viewed as problematic in China. The recent academic integrity crisis on university campuses and governmental intervention have once again brought this issue to the fore. Since 2002, China's Ministry of Education has promulgated a series of policies aiming to clean up academic corruption on university campuses. Most recently, in March 2009, it announced severe penalties for academic misbehavior. Then, what is the status quo of academic freedom in Chinese universities? To consider this issue, it is necessary to go back to the Confucian intellectual tradition, as it viewed the relations between academics and the state in a quite different way from the Western notion. This article starts by offering a historical perspective on academic freedom in China, followed by an effort at discerning the trajectory of its evolution over the last century, as a way of exploring the causes of corruption among contemporary Chinese university scholars.