I believe most people in political science circles have heard of Professor Cheng. But this professor has recently called himself an economist. No one seems to be able to figure out what field of study this person is in and what he has done in his discipline.
A while ago, I was invited to attend a forum meeting, that is, the kind of bigwigs to talk eloquently, not to talk about thesis, only the views of the meeting. At the meeting, it is said that the recent parachute to the Chinese University of Hong Kong as the dean of Professor Cheng, very is a grand theory. I had some doubts about Professor Cheng’s grand thesis, but I did not dare to question it at the meeting, and only waited until after the meeting to ask a question. Professor Zheng’s answer, as far as I can see, may not understand the problem, even some donkey’s head does not match the horse’s mouth. However, I was slightly insensitive at the Time, and actually asked him if he had any relevant works to refer to. One of the staff members present, or his assistant, immediately jumped in and said, “(something to the effect of) we have many, many books by Mr. Zheng, all in English, and dozens of monographs.” The implication, I’m afraid, is that we are not foreign language, do not interfere, let one by one to retreat. Just. Shut up on the spot.
After thinking about the scene, I seem to be not very knowledgeable like. However, the logic of this Professor Zheng still has a lot of incomprehension, some places simply and political science and even common sense of ordinary people contradict. Since I don’t understand it, I should honestly look for Professor Zheng’s masterpiece to study it by myself. The main reason why I do not read Professor Zheng’s book first is that I cannot find it in the library. Professor Zheng’s Chinese book is quite a lot at the airport station, and that kind of book must not be a serious exposition. However, Professor Zheng’s English monographs are expensive and cannot be bought for a while, so I can only start from the free papers.
I am a poor teacher of liberal arts in the university, and I can’t do anything else, but I can find papers to read. The first search on the Internet: 362 articles! It is really different from the search results of 2 or 3 pages that I typed the name. The source journals are also varied, including “Resource Regeneration”, “Friends of Farmers”, “IT Times Weekly”, “Agricultural Technology and Equipment”, and “An Analysis of the Characteristics of the Crime of Trafficking in Women and Children” published in the “Journal of the Beijing Police Academy” and “A Preliminary Study on Improving the Quality of Lake Sheep Lamb Skins” in “Fur Animal Feeding”. It seems that there are a lot of people with the same name as Zheng Yongnian on KnowNet. But this is not afraid, first narrow the search to the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index, also known as the C Journal. According to the field of study, Professor Zheng generally issued should be social sciences, not what lake sheep or Taihu Goose, not to mention the crime of trafficking in women and children such as a more specialized technical subjects. This excludes scholars in other fields with the same name as Professor Zheng. According to the level of research, as long as it is an academic article, Professor Zheng always does not go to send the C journal below the tabloid magazine, that excludes the “love Marriage Family” such. Of course, Professor Zheng may be involved in amateur psychological research, but I only want to read Professor Zheng’s academic journal articles, as for other leisure and hobbies will not look at the moment.
Once the search was narrowed down, the number of Professor Zheng’s papers immediately became smaller, and the fields were basically changed back to political science. I downloaded all the articles one by one and confirmed that they were all the great works of Professor Zheng Yongnian. The total number of articles is 21. Professor Cheng started to publish papers in 86, among which there was no C journal publication from 89 to 06, so there was a gap of 18 years, and some sporadic publication in the rest of the Time basically every 1 or 2 years. In recent years, the only exception is a small empty window from 2015 to 2018.
In terms of quantity, Professor Zheng’s C-journal papers are small. 21 in total, there is still a bit of water in them. The first moisture is the three short essays Professor Zheng published in Readings in the 1980s. In the early days of Reading magazine, there were mostly articles of a translation nature, and it was more controversial in many schools whether articles published in Reading were considered essays. Especially in the 1980s, those articles did not look like essays, but more like essays. The second moisture, like Professor Zheng’s articles published in People’s Forum Academic Frontier and Economic Guide, is as short as 1 or 2 pages, and most schools treat them as newsletters. Scholars who have a little more self-respect generally do not treat these as publications. In this way, there are about 15 or 16 formal Chinese papers by Professor Zheng.
Of course, apart from his early years in Beijing, where he studied Marxism-Leninism, and his recent return to Shenzhen, Professor Zheng has said that he has spent most of his time overseas. So we can’t leave out the English papers. English papers are actually simpler than Chinese to get on JSTOR, and basically the quality of the social science field is not as high as long as JSTOR doesn’t have it. JSTOR’s search results show 48 papers by Professor Zheng. The search results of JSTOR showed 48 papers related to Professor Zheng, but many of them were book reviews or short reviews with only a few lines, so after filtering them out, there were 10 journal papers, 8 of which Professor Zheng was the first author, and several magazines with impact factors as low as 0.3 or 0.4, which should not be considered a significant publication. Among the English journals, the one with the most articles published by Professor Zheng is Asian Survey, with three articles in total. The journal itself is good, but the level of the articles published by Professor Zheng is obviously lower than other articles.
Other than that, there is another good article by Professor Zheng, “Women’s Participation in Village Autonomy in China”, published in The China Quarterly in 2009 (I translate it as “Women’s Participation in Village Autonomy in China”, which probably means But Professor Zheng is not the first author, and judging from his other publications, he does not have any other research on women’s issues, unless the article in Love, Marriage, and Family that I found earlier was actually written by Professor Zheng himself. So whether this article is his temporary cross-border, or a human titling, it is unknown. To the extent that the first author has also written a number of papers in the same field, Professor Zheng does not appear in the list of authors.
Professor Zheng’s own papers in English and Chinese add up to more than 20 papers. This number is not bad for my second-rate school to evaluate a professor, plus a little seniority. But I’m afraid it’s a little difficult to be among the famous professors of the first-class universities, and even the big names in academia. Professor Zheng has no achievements in basic political science theory, and the number of papers is not very proud, so I really don’t know how to have the courage to rebuke Fang Zun, raging against the inferiority of Chinese intellectuals, the whole era of the lament. However, these are not the problems, the bigger problem in Professor Zheng Yongnian’s political science papers is that most of his articles are not serious “papers” at all.
Whether it is an ordinary teacher in a university like me or a doctoral student, there are generally two types of social science articles. The first kind, that is in the theoretical breakthrough, this kind is considered difficult, we ordinary scholars may not have a chance in Life. Then there is one, that is, using real examples or data, to verify the existing theory. Nowadays, there are many new mathematical tools coming in from statistics, and the political science discipline has made a lot of progress in this area, and the younger faculty members in my political science department are quite capable of tinkering with this foreign stuff. Of course, many papers are a combination of these two directions, advancing the theory a little, expanding the scope of its application a little, and then verifying it.
But then, most of Professor Zheng’s papers are in two other forms altogether: reading notes and general descriptions of the situation. Professor Zheng’s essays are reading notes, and nothing is more representative than the essays he wrote in the 1980s in the magazine “Reading”. Of course, in those days it was remarkable to be able to read and understand English articles. At that time, people all over the country were thirsty for knowledge, and any article that was somewhat translated was very popular. However, it is really puzzling that Professor Cheng is still creating similar essays as he enters the 21st century. His article “The Construction of Interstate Relations in China,” published in the journal Contemporary Asia-Pacific, is a reading note on Wang Gungwu’s work. I wonder what is the origin of this Wang professor that he can get this kind of licking dog treatment for the article published in the C-journal in the style of a teacher’s wife? From the online introduction, this Mr. Wang is a Chinese historian in Southeast Asia and is the superior of Prof. Jung. Perhaps this is the reason for Professor Cheng’s dog-licking. Professor Cheng also has a few pieces of reading notes-style “essays,” such as his 2007 article “Soft Power in International Politics and Observations on China’s Soft Power,” most of which are notes on Joseph Nye and related treatises, interspersed with some associations. Of course, Professor Zheng’s Chinese article has some particular irregularities in the references and lines that almost constitute academic unethics. This will be discussed later.
Professor Zheng’s various situation general description “thesis” is more obvious. In earlier years, college professors were often invited to give classes to leaders, and my humble self would occasionally be pulled in to make up a number. At that time, most of the lectures we wrote were such overviews. The leaders were busy, so we took over and introduced the world situation first, and then used the more basic political science or international relations theory to organize some general framework for the leaders. Professor Zheng’s great works, such as his 2011 Foreign Affairs Review article “Frontiers, Geopolitics, and China’s International Relations Studies,” are an obvious example. It’s just that we are not as smart as Prof. Zheng, and since this kind of manuscript has been presented to the leaders, it’s a bit of a leak, so we didn’t think of publishing it. Among Professor Zheng’s English papers, there are two annual summaries in the Asian Survey magazine mentioned above, China in 2011 and China in 2012. To be fair, anyone who reads these two articles cannot help but ask, “What is it that makes this magazine put water to such a shameless extent?”
In addition to these two, there is another style of Professor Zheng’s essay that is not very numerous and is also rather special, that is, the large-print style. The essence of this form of paper is his “The Lack of Chinese Knowledge System and the Problem of Construction” published in Academia in 2012. As I have experienced the Cultural Revolution, I am familiar with this style of writing. Perhaps the editors of Academia are young and have not seen much of this style of creating a hypothetical target for criticism, beating it with a big stick while secretly praising oneself. In this article, Prof. Zheng creates a fictitious “Chinese intellectual community” and then insists on using this “Chinese intellectual community” to criticize us, the “old niners,” while bragging that he is the one with the “intellectual system” and the “magnificent” knowledge. The “intellectual system” and “grand discourse” of the thinkers and saviors. I occasionally go on Weibo, and there are many online users who do this, however, everyone is just online to have a keyboard addiction. The same as Professor Zheng, in academic publications, openly take off their pants and masturbate to call the cool really never seen.
Professor Zheng Yongnian when a work of the C journal and English journal articles, in the following to do a classification, you can roughly see the academic trajectory of Professor Zheng Yongnian.
It is worth noting that all of Professor Zheng’s articles that can be classified as “academic papers” (4 articles) were published in the 1990s. It seems that Professor Zheng is too happy to be an official, too happy to be a celebrity, and has not been doing academic work alone for a long time.
As mentioned earlier, the academic irregularities in Professor Zheng’s papers are quite obvious. We can take his 2009 article “The Chinese Model in the International Development Landscape” as an example. In this article of his, almost all of Prof. Zheng’s citations are books, and all the details citing other authors’ books are not given chapter numbers or page numbers. Only when citing his own book are chapter numbers given. If my graduate student handed in a paper like this, I could accuse him of not reading and fooling the teacher with something that is not there. Who is Professor Cheng fooling? The answer is the reviewer.
In the above classification, I classify this 2009 Chinese article of Prof. Zheng as “reading notes” because some of the main analysis in this article actually comes from his two English papers in 1999. Some statements are directly translated. However, Professor Zheng did not cite his two most critical English articles, but rather some large books with no specific sources. Obviously, Professor Zheng himself knows that there is too much self-duplication, so if he takes it out, it will not be an “original” paper, but if he does not take it out, it will not look good, so what should we do? Delete the citation! The reviewers did not see the relevant citation literature, nor did they download all of Professor Cheng’s articles and read them one by one like I did, so naturally they did not think that Professor Cheng’s paper ten years ago actually had the same phrases and content. By the way, this paper was published in Chinese Social Sciences, one of the few top publications in Chinese by Professor Zheng Yongnian, but this series of Chinese Social Sciences is a special issue called “China’s Road in Global Perspective”. One can imagine Professor Zheng’s complex state of mind when he got the contract but could not write anything new, and could not throw away the great “opportunity”, so he had to take the risk of “stealing the chicken”. Here, tens of thousands of words are omitted.
After reading the article, Professor Zheng’s book I do not have the energy to read. Moreover, a while ago there were many rumors that his book was paid for, or exploited students wrote. It is understandable to spend money on it, it is not easy to publish academic works, and we sometimes have to spend a little on publishing fees. However, when I was bored at the airport, I also flipped through a few pages of Prof. Zheng’s great works in Chinese translation, which cannot be described as academic masterpieces in any way. The large amount of money spent on publishing, and all of them are books that are just a mouthful, so one can only envy the wealth of both New Zealand and Hong Kong. As for the exploitation of students, that is also understandable. I am a nobody, so I do not have many opportunities to attend conferences, and I have a few meetings with Professor Cheng every year. A year to write several books, but also in the sky to fly around, do not use a few bottom of the academic people, it is not justified. Of course, the academic exploitation is even, but also molest students, that is a little too much.
From a political science point of view, Professor Zheng Yongnian is simply not cur. Professor Zheng’s dozens of articles, can read only 4 or 5 of the last century. Perhaps at that time, Professor Zheng Yongnian himself was still a bottom-level academic and did not dare to make a fuss. It is just that Professor Zheng has made good use of the information gap between domestic and foreign, English and Chinese circles looking at each other. At Home, Professor Cheng held himself in high esteem as an overseas Chinese expert, and he would always say that he was a foreigner, how he was in Singapore, how he was in British and American imperialism, and how he was scared to move. In the English-speaking world, Prof. Cheng immediately changed his position and held himself in high regard for foreigners. Writing articles are about the domestic situation, he studied how China in the line, as if only he understands China. This point is the former Ma Baoguo master type God all ready. Master Ma straddled China and Britain, teaching foreigners boxing, a lightning whip to four or five foreigners swung around. It was a great achievement. Of course, Professor Zheng Yongnian is after all a scholar, than Master Ma this purely walking in the world or a little more intelligent. At least he knows how to write China columns in the Chinese media in Singapore, one after another, pointing out the mountains, than journalists are also good!
The Chinese University of Hong Kong is pathetic and hateful. In my humble opinion, there are so many political science experts in the Chinese of Hong Kong that it is impossible not to see the fact that Jung is a waterboy. The Chinese University of Hong Kong is willing to let Prof. Zheng Yongnian to be the director of its so-called research institute, just because it sees Zheng’s first-class ability to fool around. Anyway, Shenzhen has plenty of money, Professor Zheng in Shenzhen to fool around, with the benefits of the Chinese Hong Kong to share the benefits, in case something happens and can not hurt the Chinese Hong Kong. Even if Prof. Cheng had taught his students badly and submarined his subordinates, they would still be mainlanders. Anyway, the death of others is not the death of our own son, what do you think?
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