With President Hu visiting the country, perhaps he’ll take a moment to use America’s open Internet to read this article about history and academic freedom by columnist Ding Dong of China’s state-controlled Nan Fang Daily.
Did the United States achieve most of its scientific and industrial prowess by absorbing the Jewish intellectual elite from Hitler’s Germany and the rest of Europe? It’s a suggestion that’s been made before, but never in such glowing terms – and never as an argument for greater academic freedom in China.
According to Ding Dong, a man whose name sounds a lot like a wake-up call and is described as a ‘Beijing Scholar’ by the Nan Fang Daily, America’s wartime absorption of European Jewry should be a lesson for Beijing. The scholar then makes the bold statement that this should also induce China to allow far greater academic freedom, which, he argues, is what permitted these Jewish intellectuals to make America what it is today.
For the Nan Fang Daily, scholar Ding Ding writes in part:
The United States is undoubtedly the center of the scientific and educational world today. Who made the U.S. such a center? If one were to answer Hitler, some people would find it inconceivable. But that is indeed the case. As one American scientist put it, “We ought to erect a monument to Hitler to thank him for promoting the development of science and culture in the U.S.”!
By 1937, German universities had lost 39 percent of their teaching staffs, and by the outbreak of World War II in 1939, 45 percent of all university instructors were Nazi Party officials. Hitler’s crazy short term behavior, with the cooperation of mainstream German society, did grievous harm to the long-term vitality of the country’s science education and cultural vitality.
In Germany before Hitler, the world’s center of science and education was not the U.S. – it was Germany. By the second half of the 19th century, Germany had entered a golden age of science and education, surpassing Britain and France as the world’s scientific and cultural center. Entering the 20th century, the United States became the world’s largest economy, but in science and education, German students were still number one.
America has always had an environment of cultural inclusion and free competition, and at a time when science, education, and culture were all on the rise, it might be said that having these world-class intellectuals “on the team” put America in the fast lane to scientific and cultural dominance.
although investment in higher education and research is burgeoning, respect for academic freedom still lags behind. Administrators hold all the influence, so that flatterers of power and money are the ones who rise. The atmosphere at Chinese universities is growing ever-more corrupt.
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