MCLC: seven silences (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Sun Saiyin <sunsaiyin at tsinghua.edu.cn>
Subject: seven silences (1)
***********************************************************

As a university teacher in China myself, I can verify that I have never
received such instructions, or anything similar. I hope MCLC is not
helping circulating "a rumor". None of the listed "seven topics" are ever
deliberately avoided in my classroom. This following article may help
illustrate the degree of freedom at least one Chinese university actually
has.

Saiyin

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Source: News of the National Humanities Center (Fall/Winter 2012):
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsletter2012/nhcnewsfallwinter2012.pd
f

From the President and Director
By Geoffrey Harpham


Things were going so well, until they weren’t.

I had just given a lecture to a full house in a magnificent room at
Tsinghua University in Beijing, and, looking at the thoughtful and
attentive faces of my audience, and listening to their articulate and
informed questions, I had persuaded myself that the lecture had gone well.
 With an acceptance rate reportedly far lower than that of Harvard or
Yale, Tsinghua, sometimes referred to as “China’s MIT,” is one of the
leading universities in China.  In recent years, Tsinghua, like a number
of other top Chinese universities, has become committed to strengthening
its profile in the humanities—hence my appearance last May, talking to an
audience of faculty and exceptionally bright and focused students.

Eventually, it came time for the last question.  A young woman rose,
thanked me for my lecture, and, in perfect English, said, “Professor
Harpham, what do you say to our government when they tell us that the
country is not ready for human rights, that we have not yet reached that
state of development that is required for us to be concerned about this
issue?  What do you say?”

What indeed, Professor?

What does a visitor, especially one who knows only what he reads in the
Western press—widely regarded in China as an instrument of propaganda—say
to the Chinese government on this issue?  What did that forthright young
woman really want from me?  And what—given Western reporting about the
Chinese record on human rights and freedom of expression in
particular—might be at risk in this exchange, both for her and possibly
for me?  What to do?   Should I strike boldly for freedom and human
rights, counsel patience, pretend not to understand the question, feign a
coughing fit?  

For a few but seemingly interminable moments, I did nothing at all.
Pitched into a space of pure jangling uncertainty, I had no idea what to
say.  What right, after all, did I have to weigh in on such a subject?
What were my rights here, and what were my responsibilities?  In the
United States, I would have felt free to lecture the government, since
rights to freedom of thought and expression represent venerable traditions
protected by the Constitution.  But in China, I suspected that the only
right to American-style “free” expression I might plausibly claim would be
not a legal right but a “human” right, the very kind the government had
apparently said the country was not ready for.

Eventually, I—or rather, some survival-oriented mechanism in my memory—set
out on a response whose rationale grew on me sentence by sentence.

“I haven’t come here to criticize your government,” I began, “especially
on matters I know little about.  But I can recall a time in my own
country’s history when a similar question was raised.”  The time was 1963,
when the civil rights leader Martin Luther King was thrown in jail in
Birmingham, Alabama for leading demonstrations in favor of basic civil
rights for African-Americans.  Eight white ministers in Birmingham had
written to Dr. King, saying that his demonstrations were “unwise and
untimely.”  In response, he wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one
of the great documents in American civil rights history.

In it, King noted that he had never yet engaged in a campaign that was
considered by those opposed to his cause to be “well timed.”  I did my
best to quote the famous sentences:  “For years now, I have heard the word
‘Wait!’  It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.
This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’  We must come to see, with
one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is
justice denied.’ ”

“The situations are, of course, not the same,” I told my Chinese
listeners.  “But perhaps you will find points of comparison that might be
instructive.”  

And with that, the event was brought to a close, the crowd filed out, and
my pulse rate began a slow descent to normal.  Apparently, there is
greater freedom of speech in China than some have alleged.  But I have
continued to find instructive points in the incident.  Last spring in this
space, I mentioned the Center’s three-year initiative on “Human Rights and
the Humanities,” which was launched with an international conference in
March 2012.  I had concluded with the comment that, “We cannot predict
exactly what course the conversation will take.  Scholarship is a wager on
an open future in which work done for its own sake can be taken up and put
to uses never imagined by the author.”  At the time I wrote those words, I
did not imagine that very shortly, I myself would be in an unpredicted and
perhaps unprotected open space where questions of rights were hanging in
the air, and a deeper knowledge of local history and cultural practice
would have been useful to say the least.

Sometimes scholarship proudly claims that it exists for its own sake and
does not need any external justification.  But on other occasions, the
cost of ignorance becomes uncomfortably clear.