UCSD Scholars Are Split on U.S. Policy Toward China After Visit

By heading seminars on U.S. history and culture for Chinese scholars and graduate students in Nanjing earlier this month, eight UC San Diego academics say, they sent a strong signal of encouragement to those Chinese who support continued ties to America at a time of strained Sino-American relations.

The professors both lectured and brainstormed informally with 37 Chinese specialists on U.S. history from throughout China as well as 35 Chinese graduate students during a nine-day program originally scheduled two years ago but placed in jeopardy after the June 3-4 massacre of Chinese student reformers in Beijing’s Tien An Men Square.

“The 100 scholars made it abundantly clear, over and over, how much they deeply appreciated our” being there, Paul Pickowicz said Friday. The UCSD associate professor of history led the delegation, the largest single contingent of American scholars to visit China since June, to the joint Nanjing University-Johns Hopkins University Center for American and Chinese studies.

There was no doubt among any of the UCSD professors Friday that the Chinese in attendance did not believe their government’s version of the June events and that they still wish for reforms along the lines of those sweeping Eastern Europe. Despite newspaper censorship and electronic jamming of foreign news broadcasts, most people are well aware of the changes in Eastern Europe and seem quite cynical toward their own government, the group agreed.

“They were very cautious in public statements, but in private were remarkably warm, open and frank,” Pickowicz said. Only Pickowicz, whose wife Li Huai is a Chinese artist, had been in China before.

Economic historian Michael Bernstein said the intellectual energy of his Chinese counterparts surprised him. He recounted being bluntly asked whether “a free market is the only path to prosperity and whether private property is the only way to create a free market,” questions at the heart of much of the political tension within China today.

“And the warmth of people toward us was astounding. . . . When they found out we were American, they would give you a thumbs up, walk with you a little. . . . The depth of feeling and good will was palpable among everyone, young or old, male or female,” Bernstein said.

The UCSD group was less unanimous, however, about how American government policy could best encourage reform tendencies within China and ensure continued international academic exchanges.

The Bush Administration has come under strong criticism this month for sending top diplomats to China, easing trade restrictions and vetoing legislation to ease immigration for Chinese students now in the U.S., as a violation of American political principles without receiving any concessions by the Chinese government to ease repression.

Bernstein said his visit persuaded him “that isolation for China would be disastrous . . . a terrible mistake,” referring to threats by the Chinese government to end all student and academic exchanges if President Bush signed the congressional bill making long-term visas easier for students to obtain.

Pickowicz said he doubts U.S. policy can have a major effect on Chinese leaders, acknowledging that he has changed his mind about sanctions and immigration legislation because he “does not want to see (academic) exchanges grind to a halt . . . and the Chinese people from their perspective do not want to see relations worsen. They see programs like ours as a source of hope and do not understand the American domestic political situation.”

But John Dower, a UCSD specialist both in American and Japanese history, disagreed, saying that he found “such great uncertainty and pessimism about the future” among the Chinese he had met, and in particular such “great cynicism toward the existing government,” that “to the extent the U.S. aligns itself with the existing regime, it will be divorcing itself from reform forces.”

William Speidel, director of the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing program, said Friday that the UCSD group was selected because of the quality it offered in including seminars on American economic history, civil rights movements, women’s studies and development of democratic institutions.

Reached by phone at his home in Virginia, Speidel, reflecting the caution of many American scholars anxious to continue their programs in China, said he would prefer to characterize the UCSD effort as “more scholarly communication such as discussing the meaning of history” and not to “nurture incipient revolution or to get people to think all the time of the wonders of participatory democracy or a two-party system.”