Scholars from China joined Carleton professors Sept. 30 at a panel to talk about the successes and challenges faced by the world’s most populous country, as it gradually opens up its economy to the rest of the world.
“The issues are way more complex than they’re often presented . . . it’s not a question of saying, ‘Oh they are authoritarian, they have a one-party state, that’s their problem, and we are democratic, we have political competition, and therefore we don’t have that problem,” said Manfred Bienefeld, professor emeritus at the School of Public Policy and Administration. He was one of the panelists at the inaugural Canada-China Forum on China Studies and Research.
“No, that’s a nonsensical view,” he said. “What we need to do is think, ‘What is the relationship between government and people? To what degree is government responsive to the needs of people?’”
The panel was put on by Carleton’s Confucius Institute, an international partnership between the university and Chinese universities. The Confucius Institute is a non-profit organization based in Beijing that is affiliated with the Chinese government and runs language and culture programs in universities across the world, according to their website.
The Carleton event saw three speakers from universities in China and visiting professors at Carleton speak about topics that ranged from the Chinese bureaucracy to the country’s shadow banking system.
“You can see, from central government and local government, they arrested a lot of high-grade cadres and put them into prison,” said Xuehua Shi from Beijing Normal University. “This is a signal against political corruption.”
Shi is the deputy dean of the School of Government at Beijing Normal, and currently advises several Chinese government departments, including part of the Communist Party of China (CPC) that handles the assignments of its millions of party workers.
“In China, it’s impossible for us to separate the CPC and the Chinese government,” Shi said.
“Perhaps it’s an advantage, not a disadvantage for China today. Perhaps . . . in 40 or 30 years we can say, ‘We will do the separation of the CPC and the Chinese government.’ But now, this is our advantage,” Shi said.
He said he had recommended to the CPC that they should give more space and opportunity for social organizations. He spoke on various other topics regarding Chinese public policy, including Chinese foreign policy, where he claimed that China was not interested in acquiring foreign territory, but simply protecting its own.
There are currently about 11 Confucius Institutes at campuses in Canada, and reaction to them has been mixed. Touted by universities as useful partnerships that are largely used to provide Chinese language classes, the institutes have not been universally embraced.
McMaster University recently closed its Confucius Institute, citing concerns regarding its hiring policies for instructors. A Confucius instructor at McMaster quit her job and filed a human rights complaint against the university, after revealing that practitioners of the minority Falun Gong sect are excluded from the hiring process, according to a release from McMaster University.
In addition to panel events, Carleton’s Confucius Institute provides Chinese language courses and a course on Chinese culture and society taught by a visiting professor from China.
“I don’t think that there was any limitation,” said Jeremy Paltiel, a Carleton political science professor specializing in China.
“If you listened to them carefully, [both the speakers] had positive things to say about their government, and they also had some criticisms,” he said.
