Engineering Stability asks a question that is significant for the world and for China. With all the troubling issues that have aroused student protest around the world in recent decades, why have there been no notable student protests in China since June 4 of 1989? Considering the importance of student activism in China’s development over the 20th century, from the May 4th Movement of 1919 and even earlier, the quietude on Chinese campuses over the past 36 years needs explanation.
Author Yan Xiaojun, an associate professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong, argues that the Chinese Communist leadership undertook a total reframing of university life on Chinese campuses to ensure that university-based protests should never again disrupt the stability of the Communist state. Drawing on a rich literature in political science and sociology, including authors such as Huntington, Geertz, Bourdieu, Habermas and Shils, as well as extensive Chinese-language sources, he unfolds a series of chapters that clarify and illustrate the dramatic changes in the structure of campus life for university students across China. They represent a large percentage of Chinese youth given the success of a dramatic move to mass higher education from the late 1990s, now reaching 47 million, one of the largest national enrolments in the world.
Chapter two, “Concentric circles,” depicts the “grid-like web structure” that creates a miniature state in the everyday life of students, with a total of 200,000 political counsellors shaping student life, assisted by the privileged five per cent of students who have gained Communist Party membership and the wider array of student cadres who implement the guidelines that control all student group activities on campus. Chapter three goes on to explain the metanarrative which naturalizes, in Bourdieu’s terms, the Significative Infrastructure of campus life, with all course materials used for political education completely rewritten, alongside political training activities, rituals and ceremonies, as well as military training. Chapter four moves to the “regulatory infrastructure” shaping public life, drawing on Habermas’s depiction of the public sphere, with the invention of a state-sponsored alternative set of cultural norms and standards that “can facilitate the state’s endeavour to secure its hold over the social space of the university without deploying outright violence or coercion” (p. 125). Chapter five turns to the “incentivization infrastructure” and details the various rewards provided for compliance, such as direct access to graduate programs for students who are Party members and support for scholarship applications as well as job references that are essential for most graduating students, all under direct political control. Finally, if this meticulously designed infrastructure integrating higher education within the state should fail, there is full preparation for dealing with possible emerging crises, and this is elaborated in chapter six, “At the perilous moment: critical and sensitive periods.”
The book ends with a compelling summary of this well-developed argument:
Over three decades the Chinese state build a tightly knit web of institutional control on university campuses that was directly connected to the larger state apparatus. This web was a grid-like structure with an internal operating system resembling the state, weaving together all of the actors but primarily the students in the political everyday life-world on university campuses… In this way the state re-established in post-Tiananmen universities a complete infrastructure of control with a renewed set of legitimating narratives, a revived capacity to signify the state’s narrative, a restrengthened capacity to regulate public life and a refreshed toolkit to reward loyalty, punish defiance and deter potential opposition. (p. 179)
This is certainly a persuasive explanation of an otherwise puzzling phenomenon. It is based on thorough research that included observation in multiple university contexts, interviews with students, political cadres and counsellors in various roles within this re-invented higher education infrastructure, access to and observation of the on-line world on university campuses, and to Chinese language publications, including some from internal and protected sources. The book thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of the success of the current regime in maintaining a remarkable stability in conditions where China’s achievements in surveillance technology are being used to reinforce this notable degree of conformity.
What remains puzzling, however, are the ways whereby university scholars manage to continue researching and publishing on themes that challenge the dominant metanarrative, as evident in a recent volume that included translations of recent Chinese-language publications relating to the continuing influence of China’s historic Christian universities (P. Ng et al. eds. Liberal Arts and the Legacy of China’s Christian Universities, Springer, 2023). Then there are the lively intellectual debates reported by international scholars visiting China’s top universities in recent years, and the fact that the China Scholarship Council continues to provide financial support for large numbers of doctoral students and scholars to spend a year abroad at universities in Europe and North America where they are able to reflect critically and comparatively on their own context from a distance. This gives hope that a unique Chinese capacity to identify and avoid dangerous red lines while keeping the mind open to alternative ideas and research endeavours, developed over many years, retains a lively, if low-key, presence in this all-embracing infrastructure. It would have been helpful if the author had given some attention to this surprising reality.
