Fudan University is an example, designated as one of the favored institutions of higher learning around the county, of the new relative openness.
"We couldn't have invited you here as a visiting scholar 10 years ago," said Professor Xie Xide, at a luncheon she hosted at the East Garden Foreign Experts' Hotel just off campus. She was referring to a new mood that allowed lectures like my "The Role of the U.S. Media in Foreign Policy Formulation" and "Media Perspective: Hong Kong After the handover" to proceed without censorship and be followed by students' questions.
Another American, Walter Friedenberg, teaches U.S.-style journalism under a Fulbright grant and reports no interference.
At one point during a lecture I displayed the front page of the English-language South China Morning Post of Hong Kong which devoted the entire space to the freeing of dissident Wei Jingsheng. Only two students out of about 200 had even heard the news - one from a newsmagazine and one from the Internet - because the story was banned in the mainland press. (Example supposedly of "one country, two systems")
The freeing of Wei was hailed in the U.S. as a reason for the success of the President Jiang Zemin visit. Jiang's visit was called a success in China, but for other reasons. The public-at-large didn't know the reason nor that another dissident, Wang Dan, may be released as a sort of Frequent Flyer bonus for President Clinton's trip to China in 1998.
The point is that while the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing is still controlling the press, open debates on such contradictions as the Wei coverage are allowed in academic and intellectual environments. One student shrugged his shoulders and said resignedly "That's our government! " There were no jack-booted monitors on the premises and another student said "change must come slowly."
A female student in the front row, whose attractiveness would turn heads in Beverly Hills, said she was surprised to find an American journalist giving an open evening lecture on the campus.
Skeptics may disagree, but I see this as a faintly positive sign, the fine side of the wedge.
The rumored suspicions, jealousy and resentment, among certain epaulet-wearing hardliners in Shanghai, for Fudan's Center for American Studies which she heads are deflected by professor Xie's towering academic persona. She knew the "first generation" of the Ma Zedong and Zhou Enlai coterie and "second generation" of Deng Xiaoping & Co.
