Science alone can't propel Chinese schools to top
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Social sciences help the country understand itself. History helps it understand its past and look to the future. Subjects like art and literature help produce a powerful cultural industry and contribute to soft power.
Good humanities education also affects national attitudes and values, breaking people out of small-town prejudices and giving them a wider view on the world that goes beyond just materialism.
Take a concrete example, like the view of ethnic minorities in China, who some Han Chinese cannot treat with equality and respect.
That's tied to anthropological textbooks that, in the words of one foreign scholar to me, "read like they were written in the 1920s" and portray the ethnic minorities in stereotyped and outdated terms. Isabel Hilton, the presenter of Flowers in the Backyard, a BBC Radio show on minorities in China, described many of the professors she talked to at Chinese universities as "sounding like the British describing the 'natives' in India."
Richer and more nuanced scholarship could produce a generation of students who would shift wider social attitudes and break down stereotypes, as it did in the West.
There are powerful factors holding Chinese humanities departments back. One is imposed political correctness and nationalism, which are simply not acceptable in an international intellectual context.
Language barriers block many efforts at scholarship; science is something of a language of its own, but the fluency needed for the humanities is much higher. Because of the long-term emphasis on science, there is also much less of a pool of talented and experienced students and teachers to draw on.
Another problem is the respect given to age. Academic conferences are, at their best, a buzz of ideas and argument, but I've witnessed what happens in China; as soon as the most senior professor there gives his opinion, the others fall into line behind him, and disagreement results in social and professional shunning.
All this can change, but it will take time, effort, a willingness to relax controls, and funding.
In the meantime, trying to produce first-class universities on the basis of science alone is like trying to win a marathon while running with one leg hobbled.
The author is a historian and a copy editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn
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