The aim of this article is to provide western readers with the context regarding a recent murder case in China. Most reference is in Chinese.
In June 7th, 2021, in a university in Handan Road of Shanghai, a 39-year-old man named Jiang used a knife and injured his colleage, a 49-year-old man named Wang. Police quickly arrived at the scene and arrested Jiang. Wang has died when ambulance arrived¹.
This brief news shocked the Internet.
Although a lot of details were missing in the story, some elements were immediately confirmed. There is only one university in Handan Road of Shanghai. It is the Fudan University, which is one of the most prestigious universities in China. You can think of it as Berkeley or NYU in US. Rumors also indicated that the murderer is Wenhua Jiang, a lecturer in mathematical department of Fudan, and the victim is Yongzhen Wang, the party secretary of the same math department. Rumors also said that Jiang, who received the decision that his contract would not be renewed (i.e. he was fired), cut Wang’s throat out of passion.
Of course, this is a heinous crime and its nature (the job of the murderer and the victim) can certainly attract attentions from tabloids. But this is not the whole picture. As the title suggests, the discussion around this case became an outburst of discontents in Chinese universities.
For readers not familiar with Chinese political system, it is necessary to explain what is a “party secretary of the math department”. Due to a tradition which dates back to Stalin², it is usually the highest rank position of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a region or in a department. As a result, a party secretary of a math department is in charge of recruiting people in the department (from professors to undergraduates) to the parties and all other kinds of administrative work. In other words, if a freshman comes to Fudan and is eager to find his place in the complex system of Chinese political world, Wang is the boss he is about to know. This job is integrated into the university system, which means Wang has an office in the department and he has a say in the department meeting. Party secretaries in universities can be generally classified into two categories. Many of the party secretaries in Chinese universities are professors doing an additional part-time job and some of them are not really interested in any sorts of political game. Others got an full-time administrative position immeadiately after graduation and stayed in the university. After some years of work, they were promoted to the position of party secretary. Wang is one of them.
Furthermore, if someone is one step up and become a party secretary of the university, then he or she is certainly a full-time party official and exercises great power to any staff, faculties, and students in the university. Some Chinese universities have much more political significance than others. Xu Chen, the current party secretary of Tsinghua university, is also the alternate member of the Central Committee of the CCP, which place her into top 400 of the whole CCP ranking. Xi Chen, a former party secretary of Tsinghua university, is now the heads of Organization Department of CCP, one of the most prominent role in CCP. Although Fudan is not as important (politically) as Tsinghua, it is not very far behind.
That is all I want to say about the position, but as we will see, this position is not the most important part of the story.
When I said Jiang is a lecturer, I was actually translating the word “教师” to English. This word means literally teachers, and it can be used to denote a wide range of occupations from kindergarten teacher to university professor. Wang’s official title is “青年研究员”, which roughly translated as “Young Researcher”. This position might seem odd to western readers. For someone who is not familiar with Chinese universities, he or she might think it is some sorts of posdoc position/lecturer or even assistant professors.
The problem is, not one is sure what this “Young Researcher” means.
In the old time, China has no tenure-track system. From Mao’s era to 1990s, if you are a professor, teacher, doctor, or worker in a public-owned industry, once you got in, you have a job for life. Of course, this is no longer the case now. In the Reform in 1990s and 2000s, millions of workers (many of whom are in their 50s) in public-owned industry were laid off and it basically left them unemployed, despaired with little to no social welfare. On the other hand, the CCP are very careful dealing with middle class. The good old carrot-and-stick policy always works. CCP tries to allocate same or more budget, keep the education/health/public service system stable and reform them according to market principle at the same time. In the public service system, the bureaucrat, the police, and the whole public security industry received the most carrot with almost no stick. The life-time job before is still a life-time job now. In the health system, CCP is struggling to privatize more hospitals while keeping the cripple system together, limit the healthcare budget while facing an aging society. While the doctors usually still get a life-time job, a large part of the nurses get market-based contract jobs. In the K-12 education system, again, the situation is similar. The government tries to privatize schools to facilitate competition and raise the wages of teachers in the remaining public schools. Furthermore, in all of those industries, a large number of temporary, informal workers must be recruited to further reduce the cost and keep the wages of the people who already got good old life-time jobs high.
As you can imagine, all of the above measures creates a large group of the thriving middle-class (or upper-class) whose whole existense depends on the status quo while making the income and wealth inequality of the society even worse.
What about the universities?
As in any other capitalist society, university professors controls the most cultural capital and it is absolutely crucial to have the support of the intellectuals for CCP. As the result, the reform hits very gently at the universities. The professors never got laid off. The universities never got privatized. The temporal and informal contracts in universities were minimal (except for the campus workers, they are all temporal and informal workers). The tenure track reform in universities were carried out only recently. The professors are still the higher class. CCP made the sacred promise, and (unlike the same promise for other social groups) this promise is kept.
So what is going wrong?
The tenure track reform is going wild.
As we know, the tenure track system in North America is not a tradition³. It is subjected to social and political change of the society. The tenure track system nowadays is a result of marketization of universities combining with the increasing pressure of competition in the last 50 years. The systems in different countries are different. The career path of a professor in a US university can be very different from the that in a Germany university.
Because China is alway looking for the best (and the most capitalist) one, it is natural that the American model became the default for tenure track reform. Tsinghua and Peking University introduced the tenure track system gradually with high acceptance rate (the rate of people who will eventually get tenure). Although it seems to have done little to improve the research and teaching ability of the university⁴, but the reform is done, and everyone seems to be fine with it.
And then the infamous Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) reform came. The Internet discussion⁵ usually attributes the reform to Jun Luo, the president of SYSU⁶. In 6 years, SYSU recruited more than 8000 people from the job market, gave them titles includes postdoc, young researcher, associated researcher, lecturer, assistant professor, promised a tenure track and finally only less than 10% of those newcomers stayed in SYSU.
The reform in Wuhan University paints a even darker picture. In 2015, more than 200 people entered Wuhan University with a tenure track, while only 6 remains after 3 years, which makes the so-called tenure track more like a death march.
Other universities that adopts the tenure track in recent years might have a slightly less cruel remaining rate. Tianjin University, for example, sets the standard that only the top 50% people in the tenure track can be promoted.
As a comparison, Harvard, one of the the most pretigeous and competitive universities in US, has a higher acceptance rate⁷.
The reason the university would do those reform is that those reform can meet little resistence and gain a lot. Due to the extreme power asymmetry, there is simply no way of ensure the universities would keep any of its tenure track promises rather than fire as many people as it likes. After the reform, the university can use those young researchers as disposable trash. The university lures them using beatiful future and low wages, push them for as many publication as possible, and pick the best of best.
Because organized protests and unions are impossible in China, people⁸ usually has three options to cope with this extreme uncertainty. One is simply avoid of any academic job in China. They can try to find an academic job abroad, enter the industry and so on. The second is to join the Internet and try to expose the untrustworthiness of the universities. And this has made the tenure track reform one of the top topics in online forums. Young job seekers in recent years have learned the lesson and often cast great doubts on those claims and standards made by different universities. The third and last option is sliding into violence. In 2016, a young scholar Li in SYSU slapped the department chair in the face⁹ due to conflicts in the promotion process. Li was subsequently fired, but most online discussion expressed sympathy towards Li and hatred againt the chair.
The case of Jiang and Wang is the peak of this development. The violence is the symptom, not the problem. People starts to take sides and express all kinds of opinion. Often they will justify the violence by various reasons and discontents. The “party secretary” title is certainly hated, but this card is not played very often because many people know very clearly that the most aggressive tenure track reform is often initiated by professors, not party officials. Jun Luo, the aforementioned president of SUSY, is a professor of physics and an Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences (the top honor for Chinese academics). But he still launch the most bold reform that I doubt a party official would dare to do. The great and authoritarian power corrupts capitalistically. The online discussion of the Fudan case often involves “greetings” to Jun Luo, i.e., “I hope Jun Luo is safe and no one is trying to cut this throat”. Readers can see what is between the lines.
People also starts to speculates about other sides of the lives of the murderer and the victim. People has no faith on the review process and they believed Jiang is probably tricked into the tenure track by Wang just like the case happened all over the nation, and they really want to know if the review process and the contract is fair or not. Other speculations are purely baseless and not relavent to my discussion so I would not mention them here.
Recently, Fudan University made a statement regarding this case, it can be regarded as the official statement of CCP. The statement try to make some clarifications against online rumors, but it also left out many details. The only useful new informationi is that Jiang has faild the review of the tenure track in third year in Fudan, but the university let him stay for additional two years with yearly-renewed contract. The previous story about the rejection is not true and we still don’t know what triggers the murder. Any new information might be released after the trial of Jiang, and it may be a closed trial and the documents may not be available to public. So It is possible that we have got all the details which public can get in a foreseeable future. The case will stay in this limbo for a quite a long time.
It is clear that the discontents in Chinese universities can not be wiped away easily. It is also clear it is just a matter of time that another violence happened again.
- https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E5%B9%B4%E5%BE%A9%E6%97%A6%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%B8%E6%95%B8%E5%AD%B8%E7%A7%91%E5%AD%B8%E5%AD%B8%E9%99%A2%E6%AE%BA%E4%BA%BA%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6
- After Lenin died, Stalin used his position as the general secretary of Bolsheviks (a rather trivial position at the time) to consolidate power and defeat his political rivals.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_tenure_in_North_America
- There is no evidence or research that suggests that it does. And I don’t even think it is possible to show it does using any statistical tools. Speaking from personal experience, I did not see any significant difference between professors in a tenure track and professors in the old system.
- https://www.zhihu.com/question/452365547
- https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BD%97%E4%BF%8A/29286
- https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/dont-worry-too-much-about-whether-youll-get-tenure-because-you-probably-will/
- In this article, “People” often means “online platform users”. Readers can easily determine when I am using this meaning. Note that there is a strong sampling bias here.
- https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%9D%8E%E6%80%9D%E6%B6%AF