Ideological ‘rectification’ hits social sciences research

Social sciences research in China, not as well funded in the past as the hard sciences, is undergoing an even further narrowing so that research more closely serves the purposes of the state, experts have said, with some going as far as to say social sciences in China have undergone political rectification under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

As part of China’s control over the intelligentsia, there has been greater focus on moulding the social sciences, including law, economics, political science, sociology and ethnic studies, to be politically correct, according to Carl Minzner, professor of law at Fordham University, New York, and an expert on Chinese law and politics.

“In the past four or five years they [the Chinese leadership] have been in an effort to politically sanitise the social sciences in China,” Minzner told University World News. “They were worried that they had lost control over the narrative, and that there were too many critical voices emerging within university classrooms in China.”

While grants for major social science fields such as law or management have stagnated or declined compared to 2011 before Xi took the helm, research awards for Communist Party ideology research has surged, Minzner says in his analysis of social science research funding in a just-released paper, “Intelligentsia in the crosshairs: Xi Jinping’s ideological rectification of higher education in China”, published by China Leadership Monitor this month.

The focus on social sciences follows a removal of law academics from university posts some years ago for espousing reforms in constitutional law and more recently the removal of economics scholars in 2018 for “politically inappropriate” or critical comments.

Minzner notes “sanctions on individual academics are merely the tip of the iceberg, part of a much more comprehensive reassertion of control”.

The ideological campaign is beginning to bear fruit, particularly in social sciences like law, journalism and political science, he says. “It is now beginning to have the effect party officials are looking for – to chill the discussion within classes,” although he noted that it is also beginning to spread to other sciences.

Research funding focused on ideological topics

Minzner says “the imprint of China’s top leader on academia” is even more in the topics of research projects selected for funding by the country’s National Social Science Fund. His paper compares funding approved for social science topics in 2019 with those funded in 2011, before Xi came to power.

This year project grants for research into socialism and Marxism, Communist Party history and party-building have doubled or tripled, while for fields such as law and management they have stagnated or declined compared to 2011.

It is also no longer “simply a question of detecting occasional references to the top leaders’ pet political philosophy in a few projects. Xi’s name is literally stamped all over research projects in every field,” Minzner writes. “Out of a total of 23 fields of study, there are only eight (including linguistics, library science and archaeology) in which the first-listed project does not explicitly bear Xi’s name.”

Mike Gow, lecturer at Coventry University’s School of Strategy and Leadership in the United Kingdom, who previously taught at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and at NYU Shanghai, confirmed the type of projects being supported by the National Social Science Fund. “What’s been approved is all related to Xi Jinping thought and current ideologies.”

“It’s about discourse control. Only the things that the state wants discussed get discussed but it is not done in a very coercive manner; it is more encouraged through strategic funding projects and research in those areas,” Gow says.

Resources are being driven towards certain topics and subjects and “academics have to compete for that. Anybody that sticks to their guns and wants to look at Western liberalism or participatory democracy – they are not getting funded anymore,” he says.

Research awards “serve as an important signalling function regarding Beijing’s attitudes and values towards academia,” Minzner writes, adding that they feed into faculty politics and are important for professional advancement and promotions. It will affect academic behaviour, driving research into “even more anodyne directions”.

“Controversial subjects will be avoided like the plague,” he writes.

No way round a party-directed approach

“In the past there have been experiments with degrees of academic and managerial freedom. But now there seems to be no way around a party-directed approach in social science research,” says Jørgen Delman, professor in China studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

While the party has always asked universities and researchers for ideological compliance, he notes there are particular pressures on the social sciences “since they often deal with issues considered politically sensitive and may even challenge the power monopoly and legitimacy of the Chinese party-state,” he told University World News.

“China has a highly qualified cadre of social scientists and they are still able to publish good social science research, in China and abroad; so long as it addresses topics that are of interest to the party-state and official political processes, they will still be rewarded for it,” Delman says.

But more and more topics are being shut off. Delman notes that a few years ago research on vested interests linked to powerful groups in certain sectors, especially related to state-owned enterprises and their relationship with powerful decision-makers, was still possible. “But right now it does not seem to be possible to do research on that.”

In the past, academics could publish abroad to escape some constraints. But with increasing pressure by China on overseas academic publishers to eliminate papers on topics they deem sensitive, this is no longer an easy way out.

“Foreign publishers are being blocked partially for ideological reasons, and the overseas route to publishing back into China is thus being closed to Chinese researchers who publish on sensitive topics,” says Delman in a paper entitled “Social science in China: Between a rock and a hard place”, published in October

“The effect of all of this has been to tie the knot even tighter,” says Delman, adding that scope for academic freedom “seems to become constantly narrower, and the prospects for critical and path-breaking social science in China are quite bleak”.

Not a ‘rectification’ campaign

But he stops short of describing it as a rectification campaign. The party leadership and universities are “using instruments that are well known in rectification movements, but they’ve not brought out their entire repertoire as far as I can see”, Delman says.

“Often a rectification takes out entire groups of people and sends them somewhere for re-education. There could be very harsh measures associated with rectification, so I don’t think we’ve seen that yet.”

And he says some fields of social sciences have escaped the clampdown so far, such as environmental research. “You see a lot of interesting research from Chinese scholars, both in Chinese and also in international publications – it goes all the way from the hard sciences to the soft social sciences in environmental issues,” Delman says.

Political, sociological and anthropological aspects of environmental issues have become popular in China, notes Delman. “Originally it was seen as a hard science field, but now more and more social scientists are engaged in it and they are still able to produce good material.”

Minzner also says the space for social sciences research has not been completely choked off. “There are still many research topics on the 2019 list that are not explicitly political. And, as always, many Chinese social science researchers will find ways to cloak useful research in carefully couched language to satisfy the prevailing political dictates of the time.”