Two tendencies stand out in higher education in China. One is that the humanities and liberal arts are granted ever less importance in academic curricula and evaluations. The second is that the humanities and liberal arts studies are completely incorporated into officialized programmes. The former marginalizes the studies of humanities and liberal arts in higher education. The latter changes the essence of academic research in the humanities and liberal arts. These two tendencies bring about changes to the values traditionally fostered by a university education, and they confuse the administration of China’s higher education. A major reason for these two tendencies lies in the educational authority’s unremitting efforts to pursue and practice so-called ‘administerization’, or rather centralization, which ultimately results in educational bureaucracy and totalitarianism. Thus, ‘de-administerization’ in higher education becomes a touchstone for the current efforts towards the reform of China’s higher education.
De-administerization: A Controversial Issue
Along with the marginalization of the humanities and liberal arts, a controversial issue in terms of China’s higher education in recent years has been so-called ‘de-administerization’. Some observers argue that China’s ‘administerization’ of higher education results in the over-centralization of power and resources and therefore, begets bureaucracy and rigidity in daily administration. Others defend that it would be not ‘convenient’ for administrators of universities to deal with the government officials without holding a certain administrative rank. Still others attempt to reach a compromise: the presidents of universities could keep their administrative rank, department leaders could be de-officialized.
The question is why the issue of administrative ranks is so important for China’s higher education. There might be many answers to this question, such as the above-mentioned convenience for dealing with government officials and, moreover, the university’s position – the higher a university president’s administrative rank, the better the position of the university. Some also stress financial advantage and political efficacy, believing that the higher the administrative rank of a university the better it will be funded, and trusted politically. Yet these answers fail to grasp the crux of the matter. As a matter of fact, China’s administrative system of higher education features an increasing focus on the over-centralization of powers and resources and thus leads not only to the administrators’ arbitrary change of the setup of curricula, but also to the manipulation of powers to affect the faculty’s academic life. Without taking this fact into consideration, no answer will be persuasive or valid.
To a great degree, it is the officially-proposed conception of higher education and the systems structured accordingly that have gone astray. One of the consequences is that the current higher education administrators have a blind faith in centralized management, boasting that centralization can make things happen as they have planned, and that China’s education cannot be successful without their leadership. Therefore, from financial matters such as the allocation of money and budgets for specific expenditures to the enrolment of new students, the set-up of curricula, and academic assessment, etc., the administrators very much like to have close control. Universities under such a kind of control have to be managed according to the standards that they have stipulated. In consequence, management is replaced with control; flexibility, personality or specific characteristics are superseded by rigid standardization; students are forged up to the standard rather than cultivated as individuals.
This is not to say that the administrators are not aware of the lack of logic and the awkward manoeuvres of standardization under their control. It is rather to say that they misunderstand the essence of higher education. They ignore the most fundamental purpose of higher education in their straightforward defence of their control and therefore push higher education into at least two wrong corners. One is the identification of higher education with skills that basically come down to vocational training – training students how to make money and a career. Another is the exaggerated emphasis on the importance attached to publications and to applications for academic research programmes.
Vocational training by nature is an organic whole that is rich with educational elements, such as morality, value orientation, manpower, knowledge, technique, skill and so on. However, since vocational training in China is often misunderstood as only a way to learn some techniques or skills with which to make a living, some of the basic issues such as the nature, the position and the function of China’s vocational training are misinterpreted and wrongly applied, dismantling the proper form of knowledge and structure of vocational training as a result.
Even though they are systematically furnished with know-how, the students are forced into a life predesigned by the administrators of higher education – a life that they might not really anticipate or aspire to. The result is that their individualities become (pre)fabricated in their predesigned courses and their participation in predesigned activities. They are not trained and encouraged to develop critical thinking, but rather standardized as products of instrumental rationality. Students who are not up to the standardization per se are either doomed to be sifted out in social life, or become vulnerable in the face of difficulties or disasters. In either case their education is said to be a failure.
On the other hand, the strong emphasis on academic research and publication, in the social sciences and humanities and liberal arts, in most cases as part of a larger group programme, is heavily officialized, i.e. processed and evaluated by governmental organizations, which are looking for quick success and instant benefits. Thus, in order to obtain a good position on the ranking list, and favours from the even higher government administrators, the administrators of universities regard academic research as an arena where they compete for more than what the word ‘academic’ usually includes. As a consequence, the final cause of academic research in the name of higher education, that is, instilling the students with universal values such as justice, democracy, freedom, equality and the like in the course of their education, is to a great degree ignored or distorted. In the meantime, under the pressure of publishing or perishing, scholars suffer from various kinds of anxiety syndromes: they are anxious to apply for variously-funded projects for their academic promotion; anxious to get their essays or books published both for their promotion and the authorities’ examination of the completion of their projects; anxious to check the impact that their published essays have; anxious to spend the money they applied for and obtained, and then to get the invoices reimbursed; anxious to participate in various conferences to improve their academic record, or to get inspiration from other scholars; anxious to complete their programmes and wait for official assessment and the like, all of this resulting in varieties of anxious delirium, and a split between a scholar aspiring for knowledge and happiness and a scholar being subjected to obedience and any form of pressure.
One might ask, ‘what for if not publish as a scholar?’ Yes, to publish means to survive – this seems to be a golden rule not only for scholars but also for universities in the world. But, one might also ask, ‘what for if you survive in this way?’ It does not make sense to argue from the logic that ‘survival is survival’ unless it means survival as human beings in the current situation. A perilous paradox is obvious here: in order to survive, scholars have to perish – not only to ruin their health, their family life, and all the other interests that normal scholars might have, but also someone else’s in the competition since they have to abide by the rule that the one who comes in lowest in the rank will fall by the wayside. Thus, the previously-asked question might be revised as ‘is this a university’s or a scholar’s final cause to survive?’
Perhaps one might say that the civilization of human beings is developed in the competition that is based on the rule of ‘the fittest survives’. But I would say that the idea of the fittest in terms of higher education has to be redefined in the context of commitment to the idea of human nature and reconsidered within different contexts and for different purposes. That is, when we talk about ‘the fittest’, we should also talk about ‘the cultural universals in human history (religion, property, marriage, trade), namely, the various institutionalized ways in which human beings organize their lives and come to terms with the world.’Reference Kazepides 1 In this sense, ‘the fittest’ can be taken into our consideration in the context that ‘how human needs, desires, and values come together to form the specific communal institutions and practices in order for humans to cope with the complex configurations of diverse conditions in particular times and places’ (Ref. Reference Kazepides1, p. 164). Since a particular society or an area is contingent on a particular culture that includes particular historical, geographical, economic and political conditions, students from particular societies or areas could be significantly different from each other, ranging from beliefs to practices. These differences together with the different influences that scholars receive from an enormously complex set of circumstances in different societies or areas and periods of history, determine that scholars demand something fundamental from academic life and, therefore, to be scholars properly. This fundamental aspect to academic life is basically the universally accepted value orientation and outlook on life and the world – freedom, democracy, equality and universal love.
Next to the above-mentioned strong preferences for vocational training and academic research and publication, the particular attention given in China to the physical sciences in general, resulting from an ‘administerization’ and over-centralization that strive for quick successes and instant benefits, also unbalances the development of higher education, and thereby disturbs and disorients the mission of higher education. Thus, the crux is to take measures to abrogate the present system of administerization, which misapplies the special attributes of vocational training and academic research and publication in terms of higher education, and to counter the view that the humanities and liberal arts are of even lower than so-called nuisance value. In effect, if it would not be for the fear of the administrators that instilling in students ideas such as freedom, democracy and equality might awaken and thus undermine the authority of the officials, the latter would realize that the humanities and liberal arts can be valuable additions to various management (or control) measures, including political and ideological education. To say the least, the humanities and liberal arts can not only enhance the students’ knowledge, but also improve their moral standard and cultivate their humanity as a whole. Thus, there should be nothing to be afraid of for the officials when it comes to the humanities and liberal arts. Students would be more capable of being more noble, and less inclined to challenge the authorities if the latter really or actually work for the students’ welfare.
Humanities and Liberal Arts: Fundamentals for Proper Higher Education
Higher education in China at present is characterized by an increasing emphasis on science and technology and an increasing rejection of the humanities and liberal arts in general and the study of foreign literature and Western literary theories in particular. The humanities and liberal arts are seen as non-essential segments in the university curricula. The students who study science and technology have better job prospects and, hence, better potential fortune, as compared with those who study humanities and liberal arts. In consequence, what we see is an excess of instrumental rationalism, which in practice governs the students’ value orientation, justifies the administrators’ various rationalized indexes for the evaluation of students, and turns the students into either blind followers of what the authorities advise them to study, or cold-blooded profit-seekers. This is not the aim of education and it is far removed from what should be a student’s’ original expectation: to be a person of meaning, significant and interesting.
Science and technology are indeed important for national economic prosperity, social development and human welfare. But without being properly educated in the humanities and liberal arts, students will be narrowly oriented only in terms of these goals. Instead, the humanities and liberal arts should be seen in a larger context, with the belief that no issue is separate but that all are inscribed in a complex system of stimulating references and cross-fertilizations.
Theoretically, the humanities and liberal arts by definition refer to not only a system of knowledge but also a system of value. As a crystallization of human wisdom, the knowledge of human society, and the various laws of social development, these two systems play an important role in human social practice and development. As a kind of spiritual phenomenon that comes along with human social practice, these two systems are indispensable for human existence, development, and to satisfy the emotional and rational demands of human beings. Emotional demands function in the system of value; rational demands do so in that of knowledge. A well-balanced education in these two systems can make a man, if not noble or perfect, at least conscious of the basics of his social and family responsibilities, and thus enables him to make right moral choices. An unbalanced education, lopsidedly leaning towards one or the other system, will produce bigoted or even paranoid human beings.
In this sense, students can obtain the correct outlook on life and the world from the system of value, which finds its embodiment mostly in the humanities and liberal arts. The Chinese cultural tradition has it that the ‘six arts’ (rites, music, arrow-shooting, carriage-driving, reading and arithmetic) are essential elements for self-cultivation, family harmony, nation management and world peace. Music and rites in particular can mediate the relationships between man and man, man and society, and man and nature. In other words, in the Chinese cultural tradition, to know how to appreciate the beauty of music, the natural scenery, the noble spirit, etc. is a watershed that differentiates humans from animals. The purpose of citing Chinese cultural tradition is quite clear here, that is, to cultivate and develop this ability demands an education in the humanities and liberal arts.
Specifically, the wide range of courses and perspectives the humanities and liberal arts offer on issues of human beliefs, human emotion, morality, aesthetic perception, etc., can not only prepare students for a variety of occupations, but also cultivate in them qualities invaluable for their future and vital to their success. Furthermore, the humanities and liberal arts can help cultivate students’ critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, sense of innovation, and the like. They can also provide students with superior insight and help them to know themselves and the world, and to challenge what is taken for granted. Even more importantly, the humanities and liberal arts can also train students to apprehend the eternal and universally-accepted values, to appreciate the supreme human virtues, and the simple decencies of life. Words and talk are too often cheap and deceptive claims violate truth. Utterances in daily life, particularly in the vernacular, are sometimes sardonic, cheating, mawkish, truculent, vulgar, or histrionic, and sometimes mournful, plaintive, adoring or nonchalant, or satirical, all of which may convey overtones of strong passions. Yet, without proper education in the humanities and liberal arts, students, particularly students of the physical sciences who usually have less access to humanities and liberal arts, may find it hard to figure out or master the actual meanings of these words or expressions, and, furthermore, to address them properly. The same thing holds for political, ideological, or literary speeches and writings.
Education in the humanities and liberal arts for students is a path to a meaningful life. After graduation, students will engage in various occupations. Some might go into business or financials, others politics or education, but everyone anticipates success. However, occupational success is not the only thing that students seek to achieve. Besides occupational success, students also seek meaningful lives – a life that can not only satisfy their individual requirements, but also create values for others. These qualities find expression in their critical thinking, ability of judgement, appreciation and innovation, and other self-perceived talents. Students can achieve these qualities and abilities through an education in the humanities and liberal arts at university.
To put it in other words, an education in humanities and liberal arts, for one thing, can ensure students a pathway to occupational success; for another, provide them with knowledge for polishing their social conduct, character, critically independent thinking, and self-respect. The greatest gift in fact is the set of values that is imparted to all of them. No students like to be enslaved, confined, tormented, starved, distressed, injured or offended. Nonetheless, the reality is that they are, more or less, directly or indirectly, suffering at least one of these. A case in point can illustrate how students are ‘enslaved’ before they enter university. In order to get enrolled by colleges or universities, students at high school have to confine themselves within classrooms, bury themselves in piles of books and lots of homework and exercises, stay up late at night, and stay away from any entertainment; they are not allowed to watch TV programmes, to see films, to do exercise, to play games, or to talk love – not allowed to do anything but reading piles of books and doing a sea of homework. This kind of enslavement suppresses students’ talents, their impulses for creation, their courage for critical thinking, even their anger, love and any other emotion. Their living space is confined; time is reset; character is reshaped or even somewhat distorted. They know that their family and relatives worry about their future lives. In this case, they would think of no other thing but enrolment – they become ‘study machine’ slaves.
Thus, as soon as they are indeed enrolled for college or university, students are eager to restore their normal lives: to free themselves from the constraints of this kind of enslavement and discharge those extra energies that, turned into poisonous factors, have damaged their health, affected their emotions, and stifled their vitality. But in practice they might not know how to achieve this freedom righteously and healthily. The only way out for the students is to learn about what it means to be human, learn about society, the environment, ideology, freedom, etc., from the courses in the humanities and liberal arts. For example, they can learn from these courses how to understand things such as smiles, sweet in happiness or wry in humility, and tears, bitter in desperation but glittering with hope and gratitude. In this aspect, literature is especially useful for students’ understanding. Morris Bishop observes,
Literature tells us all the past of our race and of other races; it reveals to us the mysteries of universes seen and unseen. Literature is the repository of all wisdom, garnered in every age, in every corner of the earth. Men of old have written their joys for our delight, their woes to save us from their sins and errors. In literature we find strength against the world’s assaults, and solace for our grief and despair. In her, beauty lies captured, ready for release by the desirous spirit. Literature preserves the truth that men have pursued and found, and all the wonder and amazement which assuredly bear the mark of the divine.Reference Bishop 2
More specifically, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet can teach students about two young, star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families; William Wordsworth’s lyric poems can show them the tranquillity of the soul in the beauty of nature; T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland can alert them to the decline and decadence of modern Western society; Ernest Hemingway’s novels offer good examples of how to be graceful under pressure, particularly in the face of loss of faith in the central institutions of Western civilization; Gary Snyder’s poems can manifest to them how the ‘power-vision in solitude’ enables one to possess the innermost pure and divine wisdom in one’s self;Reference Snyder 3 Saul Bellow’s novels register the despairing vision of life; Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories may awaken sympathy with the fate of the wandering Jews; and so on. No wonder that
the educational fund of the state of Michigan is to this day known as the Literary Fund, a phrase that points to the time when school and college curricula were thought of in terms of the printed and written word, science getting under the main tent as ‘natural philosophy,’ which in turn was a branch of literary learning we call philosophy.Reference Jones 4
To sum up, as one of the major representative subjects in the humanities and liberal arts, literature has many functions, such as (1) to entertain students with various interesting stories; (2) to release students’ pent-up feelings, particularly when they grieve a loss; (3) to provide students with various knowledges, senses and sensibilities that literary texts represent or portray; (4) to cultivate their aesthetic perception and strike their sympathetic chords; (5) to enable students to know what virtues are and to be wise enough and make the right (moral) decision at a certain critical moment, to name but a few. Students of both the social and physical sciences can bathe in the sea of literary texts as dancers bathe in luscious strains – their minds and souls are transcended or purified in the charm of beauty and nobility. In other words, as an important part of humanities and liberal arts, good literature that glitters with the brilliance of humanity teaches students to be humane, cultivates them to know love, and navigates them in the right direction for their life.
Vague Prospects and Possible Ways-out
Ancient Chinese sages compare renwen (more or less covering the current education in the humanities and liberal arts) to ways of managing the world. They believe that renwen represents the achievements that humans have made through mental activities, the laws that humans have recognized in their practice, the values that humans have treasured, and the styles and devices that humans have employed to express themselves. Therefore, they attach importance to the education of renwen, which they maintain can bring peace and harmony to the world. For them, education of renwen will transform and perfect human beings and therefore the world, because they believe that such education of renwen can keep humans aware of how they should behave and what kind of world they ought to live in, and thus lead them to aspire to a noble life. This noble life for them means beauty for one as well as for others, beauty shared with each other, and beauty appreciated and enjoyed by all human beings. It also means justice and fairness, self-respect and self-improvement, the defence of righteousness and public welfare, not to take advantage of or bully the poor and the weak; not to harm others in order to benefit oneself. Thus, education of renwen for the ancient Chinese sages by nature can further endow students with humanistic feelings and a sense of responsibility toward their fellow people and their motherland and therefore cultivate them to live a noble life.
Looking back at the Chinese cultural tradition, the rulers would have different ways of making sure of things. They would regard renwen as providing the best tools to be employed in administrating state affairs. Whether during the agricultural or feudalist era in ancient China, or even in the contemporary era, both orthodox Confucianism and ethical politics have a strong human-centred spirit, the core of which is the ideal personality based on the idea of ‘inner sageliness and outer kingliness’. This ideal personality fulfils the political ideal in ancient China. The Great Learning (one of the ancient classics of the Four Books – The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Confucian Analects and The Works of Mencius) that constrains every ancient Chinese person, including the emperor, focuses on individual accomplishment as the starting point, and comprehensively exposes the basic concepts of self-cultivation, family harmony, state management, and world peace. In other words, the ancient Chinese sages had already realized the significance of the humanities and liberal arts. For them, the major task of the humanities and liberal arts is to enable man to develop the ideal personality.
It seems, though, that both the above-mentioned noble life and the cultivation of such an ideal personality at present remain utopian ideals, due to the marginalization, or rather the neglect, of education in the humanities and liberal arts in the Chinese system of education, and particularly in higher education. As the saying goes, when nothing is sure, everything is possible. Since the abolition of the imperial examinations in 1905, education in the humanities and liberal arts in China in a sense has met with an unprecedented crisis. The May Fourth Movement in 1919 brought down the icon of Confucius and at the same time crumbled the Chinese cultural tradition, which directly or indirectly led to national confusion and disorder, particularly in the area of culture and education, in the first three decades of the twentieth century. From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, confusion and disorder turned into chaos – education in various forms was turned into a kind of ‘political camp’. In recent years, it has been said that some students or young people turned out into the streets to celebrate the 9/11 event just because it happened in America; and some others were aroused to the point of damaging Japan-made cars when a conflict broke out between the two nations. In the field of higher education, there has been a general setback – strict regulations with strict ‘terms and conditions’ to govern textbook publication and the teachings of the so-called Western ideologies and cultures. Scholars of the humanities and liberal arts are marginalized due to their failure to conform closely to the requirements of the authorities, and so on. These individual events have a cumulative effect, and lead to a setback in China’s humanistic environment and to a general corruption of reality: spiritual concerns and commitments are metamorphosed into a kind of show; knowledge, soul, passion and friendship are heavily endowed with commercial attributes. Some cases in point are that university students poison a roommate to death; officials rape underage girls; newspapers, multimedia and websites go wild reporting on a boxing match, but do not get angry at corrupt officials who treat poor but honest citizens with contempt and make an ass of the law and a mockery of justice.
The humanistic environment of higher education in China will further worsen, and thus endanger the whole nation, if the authorities fail to understand the essence of education and are reluctant to change their blind belief in ‘centralization’, ‘administerization’, bureaucratization and ‘instrumental rationalism’, which altogether is in essence a belief in totalitarianism. This statement is not meant as a shock to attract attention, but as an alarm to alert people to the need to solve the problem. The efforts made by ‘The Group for the Coordination of Reinforcement of Cultural Education in Higher Education’ sponsored by China’s Ministry of Education since 1995 have proved that any educational reform will achieve little if it is based on a deliberately general marginalization of the humanities and liberal arts.
The possible ways-out to make a change may be many: for example, to gain a correct understanding of the significance of education in the humanities and liberal arts in the system of education, particularly in the system of higher education, and further to change the ways of management – to de-regulate, de-centralize and de-administerize higher educational management. Yet none of them seem possible if the authority is besotted with power and insists on bringing everything under its control. It is no secret that some administrators in the system of education are unsure of the scholars in higher education, nervous at, or even averse to, their diversified ideas. With a belief that they can manipulate everything, including the scholars’ minds and souls, the administrators make it mandatory for scholars to follow the ‘standardized’ ways of teaching and thinking and speaking and therefore to live a ‘standardized’ academic life. Furthermore, they ritually ask scholars to observe the rules by urging them to apply for officialized research programmes and accept the officialized professional titles, and therefore to regulate and conform their innovative thought and critical spirit according to laid-out paths.
It is a matter of course that higher education is part of a nation’s major concerns. The nation needs support from higher education both for the dynamics of innovation and to compete internationally. Therefore, it is understandable that governments take measures to make sure that higher education moves in the right direction. Yet, the question is whether the present administerization and bureaucracy make things amenable to the current situation.
The way-out might be to appeal to the nation’s consciousness, namely, to regard the humanities and liberal arts as tao and the normal administration as tactics. Tao in this sense refers to the nature of higher education and the law of educating. The essence of higher education is to follow its own nature and observe the law. One of this educational tao’s major concerns is with virtues, morals and humanity, which can be made into an in-built quality that enables the educators and the educated to be holy and noble. This educational tao works on man’s perceptual demands, affecting man’s ways of thinking, his moral orientation, and his manners. However, the tactics can be regarded as the ways for realizing the tao. Tao is the essentials and the tactics is the trifles. We should not attend to the trifles and neglect the essentials. For example, if a president of a certain university delivers a speech at the end of the year emphasizing student enrolment is up 5%, yearly income 10%, research funding 20%, and publications 30%, he does not talk as a university president but as the managing director of a trading company – he gains the trifles (figures) but loses the essentials (tao), since for him virtues or morals and humanity weigh less than interests.
One of the reasons that the university president attaches more importance to the statistic figures than to the virtues, morals and humanity, is due to the ‘traditional view’ on evaluating a university’s achievements imposed by the authorities since 1985. The attendant effects of this view in turn initiate bureaucratization and marketization, further degrading and exacerbating university environments. There would be no way-out if this view continues. The proper terms of academic evaluation are faulted by the authority’s insistence on ‘centralization’ and ‘standardization’, which they believe can protect higher education from transgressions. The consequence is that their blind faith in control foils the basic functions of evaluation.
However, this is not to say that academic evaluation should be ignored or called off, but to say that academic evaluation should not be officially-based, politically-determined and quantitatively-oriented. In fact, some of the evaluation indicators, such as managerial guiding concepts and teaching reforms, are just for show, since managerial guiding concepts have already been decided by the authority concerned and no one can make any substantial change to it. Teaching reforms have more to do with whether to use PowerPoint or a blackboard and a piece of chalk, than with whether the teaching is aspiring and inspiring, whether it can instil in the students noble ideas and manners, and elevate their minds and souls so as to enable them to consciously make the right choices for their future.
Academic evaluation by nature should be concerned more with innovative academic contributions and the humanistic spirit that is concretely embodied in the academic life of the university faculty and the students, and less with numbers: of publications, teaching, research funds, expenditures, etc. Although it might be a bit abstract or metaphysical, the emphasis on innovative academic contributions as well as the humanistic spirit is, in effect, sensible, palpable and feasible, because it frees the faculty’s and students’ minds and encourages them to enter forbidden areas and explore the truth. In other words, innovative academic contributions can never devolve from enslaved or tamed minds, but only from free and critical minds. Yet it would be impossible for the faculty and students to affirm the sense of a free and critical mind, and a sense of hope without humility, if they are strictly regulated in a bureaucratic way that strangles free minds and suppresses critical thinking. At the present political juncture, if we are not able to reconstruct the whole system of education, for the time being we can find a way-out at least by deregulating and de-overcentralizing the powers and resources in the field of higher education. Higher education of democracy and freedom demands free and lenient circumstances, with great attention given to the teaching of courses in the humanities and liberal arts, and stresses the universally-accepted concepts of democracy and freedom, independence and equality, and so on. The paradox is that, on the one hand, education of humanities and liberal arts will help promote nationwide awareness of such universally-accepted concepts, and thus lessen the harm regulation and administerization have done to higher education, while on the other hand, education of humanities and liberal arts is at present to a great degree ignored or at least marginalized. This paradox will not be solved without nationwide awareness of the significance of the humanities and liberal arts and common continuous efforts to make the relevant deregulation and de-administerization happen.
Guoqiang Qiao is Changjiang Distinguished Professor of English at Shanghai International Studies University; director of the Center for British and American Literary Studies and Associate Editor of British and American Literary Studies; Leverhulme Trust Professor at the University of Leicester, UK (2013–2016). He is the author of several books, such as From the Margin to the Main Stream: Studies of American Jewish Writers (2015), A Study of the History of Saul Bellow Studies (2014), American Jewish Literature (2008), Isaac Bashevis Singer Studies (2008), The Jewishness of Isaac Bashevis Singer (2003, in English), All You Required in Vain (1999), and so on. He is also the author of more 130 articles particularly in the fields of American literature and literary theory and narratological studies, some of which are published in English.
