After Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, said twice in a month and a half that China could produce masters, university presidents and the official media were greatly encouraged, saying that with the General Secretary’s instructions and care, the advantage of the Party’s overall leadership, and the time and momentum of national development, the emergence of world-class universities and masters are just around the corner. What Joseph Li’s problem, what Qian Xuesen’s question, in the new era to solve the why difficult? As to whether you believe it or not, I believe it anyway: China can definitely cultivate a new generation of masters – masters of horseshit.
On April 19, on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping visited the university and said, “Chinese education is capable of producing masters. We have to have this confidence.” On May 28, when the congresses of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering opened, Xi Jinping repeated in his speech, “China’s education is capable of producing masters, and we have to have this confidence!” Chinese universities and ministries then set off a fervor to study and implement the spirit of Xi’s important speech. Some universities repeatedly organized teachers and students to watch the video of Xi Jinping’s speech to “feel the General Secretary’s kind care and great inspiration”; some officials wrote an article detailing “General Secretary Xi’s insightful analysis”, emphasizing the need to grasp the time and momentum of building world-class universities; some presidents said that they would A president said that to implement Xi Jinping’s instruction, building a strong country of higher education “should adhere to the political principle of the Party’s comprehensive leadership”.
Then there is the bright prospect that “Chinese education is the time to produce masters and superstars” and “the future is promising with the gathering of masters”. Back then, it was “Chairman Mao waved me forward”, and now it is “Chairman Xi waved his hand and masters emerged”. The problem of Joseph Li that plagued the world and the question of Qian Xuesen that plagued former Premier Wen Jiabao and the Chinese education sector seem to have been solved. This is the road confidence, theory confidence, system confidence, cultural confidence. Do you believe it or not?
However, today in China, I’m afraid that not many people know about Joseph Lee’s problem and Qian Xuesen’s question, right? Joseph Lee, a British scholar, compiled 15 volumes of the History of Science and Technology in China, in which he posed the “Joseph Lee’s Question”, which is: Why did the modern scientific and industrial revolution not start in China, despite the fact that China made many important contributions to the development of human science and technology in ancient times? Qian Xuesen, the father of Chinese spaceflight and missiles, lamented when Wen Jiabao visited him in 2005 that “none of the students I have trained over the years has had academic achievements comparable to those of the masters trained in the Republic of China.” The old man also asked the Chinese premier, “Why do our schools always fail to produce outstanding talents?”
In fact, as early as 2013, Xi Jinping raised the issue of China’s serious shortage of leading talents in major scientific research projects, major projects, key disciplines and other fields during the collective study of the Central Political Bureau. when the last General Assembly of the two Academies was held in 2018, Xi again admitted: “There is still a shortage of high-level innovative talents in China, especially the lack of leading talents in science and technology. ” These are the continuation of Qian Xuesen’s questions, and he also tried to propose ways to answer them, including this time, when training talents “to pay attention to the cultivation of scientific spirit, innovation ability, critical thinking cultivation.
Where is the critical thinking in politics, science and education?
However, in China’s political, scientific and educational circles today, all they see is ass-kissing, but where is the critical thinking? The Chinese Communist Party has failed to produce masters comparable to those of the Republican era, simply because education is far less independent and academic freedom is far less than it was then. Cai Yuanpei, the president of Peking University, repeatedly confronted the authorities with the threat of hanging up his crown to defend campus autonomy, academic freedom, and the safety of students and teachers. Moreover, nowadays, under the political system, it is already a capital offense to deliberately discuss the central government, so how can one be allowed to eat the party’s food and smash the party’s pot? And Zhang Boling, the father of Nankai University, said, “Running education with the warlord’s silver is like pouring fresh cabbage with dung.”
What’s more, with the north wind moving south, campus autonomy and academic freedom in Hong Kong have also been lost, and some epidemic prevention experts and professors have been reduced to government spokesmen, specifically endorsing the government on epidemic prevention measures and vaccine safety issues. Professor Guan Yi of the University of Hong Kong, who visited Wuhan early last year to study the epidemic, criticized the cleaning of the South China seafood market as “a ‘crime scene’ all gone” and predicted that the scale of the new pneumonia infection would be “ten times higher than that of SARS”. Many people on Twitter are asking, “Where is Master Guan Yi, who has been in hiding for over a year? It doesn’t matter where Guan Yi is, what matters is that China and Hong Kong need to cultivate a new generation of red and professional horseshit masters.
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