The Chinese Controversy Over Higher Education

Abstract

THE CURRENT CHINESE leadership has been particularly vehement in its denunciations of the radical experiments in higher education of the early 1970s. No other single issue gained equal attention in the 1977-78 campaign to pillory the Gang of Four, and no other sphere of governmental activity since Mao's death was so quick to be overhauled. This ought not to have been surprising, since even before Mao's death the controversy among the leadership over higher-education policies was evident in China's newspapers. Essentially the dispute concerned whether China should use higher schooling more as a redistributive mechanism or more as a development tool. The Chinese revolution had come to power in 1949 on the strength of two appeals that had won mass national backing: a nationalist promise to restore Chinese pride and prosperity; and a social revolutionary pledge to increase the opportunities available to China's great majority of havenots. From the early 1950s onward all of the Party leaders supported both goals. But whenever new policies were determined, there was controversy over where and how to draw the balance between the goals. The moderates-the several groupings within the leadership which presently share power in China-have defined the revolution more in terms of its nationalist/development goals; Mao and the radicals, on the other hand, seem to have become willing by the midand late-i1960s to sacrifice fast development if such development meant abandoning the redistributive goals which favored the proletarian classes. This issue of development versus redistribution had begun to focus in the 1960s on China's university-admissions policies-and for a simple reason. The mass education efforts of the 1950s had allowed greatly expanded numbers of children into high school, and for the first time there were far more candidates for enrollment in China's universities than there were university openings available. For the