A wide-ranging interview with Penn’s resident China expert, political science professor—and alumnus—Avery Goldstein.
By Samuel Hughes
Sidebar | “Guess Who’s Coming to Tea?
It has never been easy for Westerners to understand China. Not during the ages of rule by emperors and warlords, when the land was more or less closed to foreigners; not during the tumultuous century now ending, when it went from being governed by the corrupt and moribund Qing dynasty to the troubled Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek to the often-brutally suppressive Communist Party of Mao Zedong and his successors.
But China continues to fascinate, even as it confounds. It is, after all, the world’s most populous nation, a sleeping economic giant that is finally waking up and smelling the tea, a military power that cannot be ignored. It is also — nominally — the last great communist power on the planet, albeit one that is quietly transforming its state-run economy to one embracing free-market principles. The Communist Party’s high-wire balancing act between (from our view) empowering change and repressive continuity, or (from its view) order and chaos — which came to a head 10 years ago at Tiananmen Square — continues to be the stuff of drama.
To get some insight into China today, Gazette Senior Editor Samuel Hughes spoke with Dr. Avery Goldstein, C’75, GEd’76, associate professor of political science and that department’s resident China hand, not to mention director of its Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics and director of the Asia Program for the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. Goldstein, who claims that he was “not a very serious political-science student” during his undergraduate days at Penn, nonetheless got bitten by the China bug during an independent-study course with Dr. Jack Nagel, then an assistant professor in the department. That bug led him (after a brief interlude teaching in the Philadelphia public-school system) to the University of California-Berkeley, where he earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. and garnered a prize as the “outstanding graduate student in political science.” He returned to Penn as an assistant professor in 1985.
The first interview took place in Goldstein’s Stiteler Hall office this past November (just as, quite coincidentally, Penn President Judith Rodin, CW’66, was in China on University business); the second, by phone, in January. The talks covered a wide range of issues: from President Jiang Zemin and the current Communist Party leadership, to the economy and such social issues as pollution and the effect of the Internet, to affairs of state. The last category includes the recent return of Hong Kong, held by Great Britain as a colony since 1897; the occupation of Tibet and the persecution of Buddhist monks by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army; and the long-simmering tensions over Taiwan, whose democratic Nationalist government has, with American support, remained independent from the mainland. That dispute almost boiled over in 1995 and 1996, when Beijing conducted military exercises in the Taiwan Straits and the United States sent in the Seventh Fleet as a warning.
Since it has been two years since the death of Deng Xiaoping, the last of the old Communist Revolutionary leaders of China, we began by looking at some significant developments — and non-developments — since Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, took the reins. For Goldstein, the biggest non-development was that, contrary to expectations, there has been no obvious power struggle among the leadership. (Given the amount of blood shed during earlier power struggles, that has to be considered good news for the Chinese people.) Under Jiang, Goldstein pointed out, China has continued to move toward a free-market economy, gradually divesting itself of its inefficient state-run enterprises along the way. And by naming Zhu Rongji as premier last year, “they appointed someone who has a reputation for getting things done.”
Unfortunately, Goldstein added, “just as those efforts got underway, the Asian financial crisis began to kick in, and any hopes that they could make such economic reforms work without creating significant unemployment were dashed.” On top of that, China had to cope with the catastrophic summer floods. As a result, he said, there has been a slowdown in economic reforms, and while the official numbers published by the government — including a 7.8-percent growth in the gross domestic product — indicate that the Chinese economy did quite well compared with other Asian economies, “people seem to have less confidence in the numbers for this year than the numbers they have gotten in the past.”
The other big change, he said, has been the “more active international strategy of the leadership, and particularly the attempt to strengthen relations with the United States.” In fact, he added, the current leadership has restored U.S.-China relations to their best point since prior to Tiananmen Square. Whether that will survive the recent report by a House subcommittee chaired by California Representative Christopher Cox — that some “militarily useful” technology has been transferred to China over the past 20 years — remains to be seen.
What follows is an edited version of those two interviews.
Gazette: What’s your gut feeling about Jiang? He seems to have a reasonably personable, non-threatening political persona, at least to Western eyes. How deep does that go, and how will he be able to translate that into policy?
Goldstein: People had a pretty low opinion of Jiang before Deng Xiaoping died. The only reason that he held the position he did was that he was a non-threatening guy Deng had brought in from Shanghai after Tiananmen Square, and the chances that he would outlast Deng’s death usually were estimated to be pretty low. So he surprised people by his ability to at least play the political game of building a base of support for himself, both in the military and in the party.
Reaction I heard from Chinese when I was there this summer was, “Well, you know, he turns out to not be as bad as we had feared.” So it’s one of those situations where he may not be a brilliant guy, but he seems to be a capable politician.
And one of the mysteries is — what’s the saying? “Still waters run deep” — whether that’s the case with him. There are some, anyway, who believe — it may be wishful thinking; you hear it mostly from more progressive young Chinese — that Jiang Zemin thinks that Deng Xiaoping’s accomplishment was to reform the economy, and that Jiang Zemin’s legacy will eventually be to reform the political system. He’s not ready to do it yet, but some think that this might be what he hopes to be known for.
There were reports this summer that, in fact, a group had been set up by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to draft an outline for political reform in China. The government immediately denied these reports, but they were probably accurate. So just like “only Nixon could go to China,” it may be the case that only this guy that seems safe and reliable is the sort of person that, if he chooses, can really try to shepherd more dramatic changes. But that may just be wishful thinking.
The real question is whether he and the premier, Zhu Rongji, can continue to co-exist. Zhu Rongji, unlike Jiang Zemin, everybody knows is brilliant. And the question is whether any jealousy develops on Jiang’s part.
Gazette: The government has stepped up its arrests of dissidents lately, with longer sentences meted out. Why?
Goldstein: The people they arrested were organizing a party, the Chinese Democratic Party, which some of these folks hoped would be able to get candidates on the ballots in local elections. That’s a red flag for the more conservative members, the older guard, in the Chinese Communist Party leadership. And the concern that they can raise now is that, with the economy going through a difficult stage of the reforms and the Asian financial crisis contributing to a slowdown, they’re worried about labor unrest. If there is some economic reason for social unrest to grow, the one thing they don’t want to have is a group of intellectuals that can serve as leadership for whatever develops.
The formation of an independent political party, or labor unions that are independent — those are the two things the Communist Party has just consistently cracked down on, whether they do it immediately or wait a few months.
The other question that people have raised is, “Why were the sentences so harsh?” It’s really two things. One is the belief that nobody’s paying attention right now, so they could get away with relatively harsh sentences because the U.S. has been busy with Iraq and impeachment. Also, if they could mete out a few very harsh sentences, that may scare off others who might have thought about joining in with this movement. And they’re probably right about that.
Gazette: Are there still any committed believers in the system below the age of about 70?
Goldstein: In China? No, not even over 70. No. The line that I’ve heard is, you’re more likely to find a true communist in — pick your city — Berkeley, California, or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, than you are in China.
I’m sure there are a couple of real old guys, but I’ve never met one. The problem is — I guess cognitive-dissonance theorists would help explain this — it’s real tough for this older generation. They know, basically, that they lived a lie for a long time, and they’re not willing to admit publicly that they lived a lie, because most of them believe it’s a necessary myth to preserve — because they believe it is critical that order be maintained while they’re freeing up the economy. And it’s a real problem. If the economy ever goes sour, they’ve got nothing to fall back on. Nobody’s willing to suffer through hard times because “at least we’re building socialism” or something like that.
Gazette: What sort of effect is the Internet having there — culturally, politically, economically?
Goldstein: The Chinese government publishes figures about how many people are using the Internet, and I think the latest one has something like 1.5 million users. Everybody knows that you have to multiply that by some other number, because each account is used by more than one Chinese. So nobody’s sure, but it is having a profound effect in terms of the ability of the outside world to communicate with China. When we have Chinese students apply to Penn — the graduate programs in particular — I routinely interact with them by e-mail to try to gauge their interests and the level of English ability and whatnot. So on that personal and direct level — and scholars exchanging research ideas — China is very much accessible to us and I guess the outside world is relatively accessible to them.
In terms of Web sites, however, it’s much more difficult. The government wants to control the Internet as much as it can. And the way they’ve done it so far is to limit the — I don’t know what the right Internet term is — the nodes, or whatever: the entry points into China. So, for example, I’ve been told that in Beijing there’s only one exit-point and entry-point for all information coming in on the Internet. And what the government tries to do is select the sites it wants to block.
That means two things, actually. One is, it slows down transmission, which is a headache for everybody. The second thing it does is create a cat-and-mouse game. In China, as everywhere, if you’re resourceful enough, you can always work around the rules. When I was there they’d block access to TheNew York Times Web site.
So I decided to do an experiment, try to get The New York Times. I got the response, “server not available.” But it turns out that there’s another site you can go through, and no one can know what else you’re accessing. So I went to this site, and again tried to access The New York Times, and sure enough, I could get right to TheNew York Times, a very simple matter.
My guess is that the government is usually one step behind, but they’ll try to block what they can. The problem is that the Internet’s so redundant that eventually people are going to penetrate the barriers.
Near Beijing University there’s a block and a half they call their own Silicon Valley, with rows and rows of computer shops. You go in, and there are used computer parts — when I was there, Windows 98 wasn’t out in the States yet, but bootleg versions were already on the streets.
So the Internet and its technology are penetrating China. The government’s trying its cat-and-mouse game, trying to control it, but they’re failing and they will fail. Just like they failed to control satellite dishes. [Note: a couple of weeks after our final interview, a Shanghai court sentenced a man to two years in prison for subversion. His crime: sending 30,000 e-mail addresses to an electronic publication based in the U.S.]
Gazette:
What effect on U.S.-China relations will the House committee’s report
that militarily-useful technology has been transferred to China have,
and how significant do you think those revelations are?
Goldstein: I think it’s potentially very significant, for at least
two reasons. One is that it rubs the Chinese the wrong way, because they
see it as an accusation that they can’t do this stuff on their own —
that the only way they can possibly modernize their military and technology
in general is to steal it from the United States. The other reason why
it’s potentially very dangerous is the way it links up with the accusations
about campaign contributions to the Clinton campaign. That’s the sort
of thing in American domestic politics that can turn the China issue into
whatever it was back in the 1950s: “You’ve got to take a stand on
this. Where do you stand on China?” Especially if what’s involved
here is bribery, or the attempt to use money to influence technology transfers
from the U.S. to China. It also matters to what extent it hurt American
national security.
There are real questions about how significant the damage
was. What the Chinese obtained probably will make it easier to modernize
a little more quickly, but they’re so far behind us that it’s not as though
this would be the missing screw — now they just put it into the machine
and all of a sudden they’ve got a modern military — it’s not like that.
What it will enable the Chinese to do is avoid pursuing a lot of dead
ends when it comes to modernizing their nuclear warheads.
Gazette: Some of these transfers have been going on for 20 years.
Goldstein: Well, the good side to that, if there is one, is that this
cuts across both parties — in terms of the executive branch, anyway.
So that should preclude the possibility of one party accusing the other
of being soft on China or somehow responsible for this.
But the reason it goes back 20 years is that for more
than 20 years the U.S. and China have had a much closer relationship than
the U.S. ever had with the old Soviet Union, in terms of economic interactions
and scholarly exchanges. Some of this is going to happen almost inadvertantly.
Given the numbers of Chinese scholars that have been in the United States,
there is going to be some fraction that are engaged in espionage. Maybe
everybody doesn’t do it, but many countries do. The real question is,
how much of this has gone on? And at least in the reports I saw, there
was some feeling that the one serious accusation about providing the Chinese
with information about nuclear-warhead miniaturization was an isolated
incident. One particular individual, whose name has not been released
— an American — passed this on to the Chinese.
Gazette:What are the best and worst features of university
life in China?
Goldstein: Well, the best feature is that it’s improved since 20
years ago, especially on nonsensitive topics. There’s pretty much freedom
of academic inquiry in exchanges with foreign scholars. But on subjects
like political science or international relations, there are still sensitive
topics. When students come to the United States to study political science,
you discover that most of them did not have access to a very broad range
of journals, so they’re a little bit behind the curve.
Another bad thing about China’s higher-educational system
is the extent to which seniority still matters, and so a lot of the best
and brightest minds in China have to wait until the old people — they
don’t retire — really turn up their toes.
The curriculum’s also a problem, especially in the social
sciences. Even though nobody believes in it, they have to teach and study
Communist Party theory about international relations and take courses
in Marxism and communist history.
And the living standards are appalling, both for faculty
and students. Too many students in dorm rooms, not enough lights. If you
want to study at night, just finding a place with a light to study by
can be difficult.
Many faculty are essentially living like graduate students
even though they’re 50 or 55 years old. There’s a lot of jealousy because
these very, at least in theory, well-respected intellectuals have realized
that a taxi driver or a carpenter is making more money than they are and
living better. So what you’ve had — and this is actually a problem now
at universities — is that many of the academics are not doing academic
work, or at least they’re not really doing their university work, but
they’re, as they say in China, “jumping into the sea” — meaning
moonlighting.
Gazette: How much of a problem is the environment for a government that’s trying to grow a backward economy? I gather that pollution and other environmental degradation are almost life-threatening in places, and yet it costs a lot of money to clean up.
Goldstein: The government realizes that it’s a major problem; they’ve got a lot of initiatives about how to clean up China’s environment. It’s not just in a few places that it’s a life-threatening situation; the whole country is in horrible shape.
One story that I’ve read from a reliable China hand claimed that there is zero clean water, potable water, in China — I mean, other than that which is processed. None of the rivers or lakes are any longer producing potable water. Air pollution is absolutely horrendous, and the government has not revealed the true figures. Most analysts who focus on environmental issues say that the air quality in Beijing is the worst of any city in the world. China claims it’s not quite as bad as Mexico City. But it probably is worse.
The government realizes it; all Chinese people realize it. The average person in the street complains about pollution in ways that you don’t hear average people complain about it in the United States.
I met with some academics and was talking about lofty intellectual issues like democracy and voting and human rights, and people who were very sympathetic to those problems said, “But you know, that pales in comparison” — I expected them to say “to the economy” but they didn’t; they said “to the environmental disasters in China.” They really thought that was the one issue that was really going to cause what may be insoluble problems for the country.
But you’re right in focusing on the real issue, which is, “Yes, we want to clean up the environment, but that probably a) will be costly and b) will slow down growth.” And the government’s priority is on growth right now. So if there’s that trade-off, they’re not going to ignore environmental problems, but they’re not going to give them top priority.
Gazette: How important has the return of Hong Kong been for the Chinese psyche — and its economy?
Goldstein: Well, unfortunately, it’s coincided with the Asian financial crisis, so my guess is that it hasn’t been as valuable an economic asset as Beijing would have hoped. The good news is that Beijing’s pretty much living up to its promise — they’ve let Hong Kong fend for itself. Which, given the current circumstances, is not necessarily that attractive! [Laughs] So it seems as though they’re determined not to kill the golden goose.
Part of the lenient treatment of Hong Kong, and the reason why it’s important to China, is not so much Hong Kong per se as what bringing Hong Kong back under Chinese sovereignty says about completing the task of resolving China’s historical legacies — Hong Kong being one, Macao the next one, and, of course, Taiwan. So it’s not that this is the culmination of something; it’s the beginning of the culmination — they hope. And many people say that part of the reason why China will continue to be lenient towards Hong Kong and respect its autonomy is to avoid providing ammunition to those who would say that this is a reason that Taiwan shouldn’t accept reunification with the mainland. They don’t want to have Hong Kong as an example people can point to and say, “Look what’s going to happen.”
Gazette: A couple of years ago, China’s more militantly nationalistic streak was reaching worrisome proportions vis-à-vis Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia [which also has been seeking more autonomy], etc. Were you alarmed then and do you think things are more settled now?
Goldstein: Yes, I was alarmed then. And I think things have calmed down. But I think nationalism is a hot-button issue in China, and the leaders can press it when they want to. Not so much over Tibet and Mongolia, but easily over Taiwan. The Taiwan issue relates to the history that has to do with Japanese imperialism, and the dark side to China’s nationalism is its anti-Japanese streak — which is justifiable in many respects. It’s easy for the government, if they want to get people riled up on nationalist grounds, to raise something that relates to Japan and/or Taiwan. What the government discovered, however, is that in stirring up that nationalist fervor, they have a hard time controlling it. And when they really were stirring this up in 1996 — students were ready to go out to the street and demonstrate — the government was afraid that once they get in the streets and start demonstrating, they may start demonstrating about other things as well. And so they began to say, “This is the sort of thing we’ll handle government to government — we’ll express the nation’s anger on these issues.”
You mentioned Tibet and Mongolia, and also they have these disputes in the South China Sea with the Philippines [which has a competing claim to the Spratly Islands] and other southeast Asian countries. It’s pretty clear now that the Taiwan issue is separate and different from all those other things, mainly because of the Japanese connection but also the fact that it’s a remnant of the Chinese Civil War and American intervention in it. In some interviews I did this summer with foreign-policy types in China — they may be analysts, not government officials, but they said, “We can talk about Tibet, and we can talk about Mongolia, we can talk about the Spratly Islands — those things we can talk about. But there’s no compromising on Taiwan.”
Gazette: With Japan, is that because, unlike Germany, they never really owned up to what they did, and everybody just sort of shut up about it for a long time?
Goldstein: Yeah. The Chinese explicitly compare the Japanese attitude since World War II with the German attitude. Their view is that the Germans have atoned for their sins, and have come to terms with what they did, and they’ve admitted it, and no two ways about it — there’s no reservations. Whereas their feeling is that the Japanese, although formally recognizing the war was a mistake, haven’t gone that extra step to admit that what they did was wrong and apologize. And a formal apology is a big deal. That’s the real problem for China. They just don’t believe the Japanese leadership is sincere in having changed its ways, and in the lessons it’s drawing from history.
And unfortunately, every time it seems as though Sino-Japanese relations are improving, some comment from some Japanese politician saying the wrong thing leaks out, and just triggers all of the old problems.
Gazette: In Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, FDR was quoted as saying something to the effect of “We may think we can have an effect on China’s policies, but we never really will. They pretty much do what they’re going to do regardless of what we do.” Is there any truth to that, or is that just a simplistic Western view of the “mysterious Oriental mind”?
Goldstein: I think we clearly have an effect on China’s behavior, but probably not so much by directly attempting to influence China. In fact, the one sure way to get the Chinese not to do what you want is to insist that they do it. It didn’t work when the Soviets tried to do it when they were China’s ally; they thought, “Well, we’ll withdraw all of our military and economic assistance and then China will come crawling back to us, because they need us.” And of course the Chinese reaction was exactly the opposite. They said, “We can’t trust you. You’re not reliable. You’re trying to treat us like the old Imperialists treated us — we’ll fend for ourselves, thank you very much.”
I think that any effort to really put pressure on the Chinese strikes that sensitive nationalist chord. But simply being the United States puts a degree of pressure on the Chinese to behave better than they would otherwise. For example: you don’t have to tell the Chinese, “Don’t go near Taiwan or we’ll send the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits.” They know that. They know how powerful the U.S. is. What we did in 1996 was enough to let them know that yes, even today we will still run that risk.
Economically, we don’t have to threaten to cut off Most Favored Nation status. They know if they go too far, they run that risk. And they know they absolutely need at this point in their development to maintain ties to, not just the West but to the United States in particular. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping basically told the Chinese foreign-policy elite: “We’re going to have to do whatever it takes [in the wake of Tiananmen] to ensure that we mend relations with the United States. We absolutely must have good relations with the United States.” The only way in which China’s economic development can stay on track is to have a reasonably good economic relationship with the United States, and in order to do that, they have to have a reasonably good diplomatic relationship with the United States.
Gazette: What are likely to be the biggest snag-points for good U.S.-China relations?
Goldstein: I think the biggest issues are likely to be the ones we used to have with Japan: the trade imbalance and so forth. In terms of dangerous problems, the Taiwan issue is probably at the top. Because that is one that involves at least three parties, each of whose domestic politics drives the situation as much as anything else. I mean, Taiwan’s a democratic country, and its internal domestic politics are going to affect what Taiwan’s stance is on independence from the mainland. In China, no member of the Chinese Communist Party leadership can afford to be soft on Taiwan. So they have to react anytime something happens on Taiwan. And then in the United States you have basically a split between the executive branch and the legislative branch. Usually, the president and executive branch — the State Department in particular, but also the civilian part of the Defense Department — take the line that “We need to maintain good relations with China, that’s a priority,” whereas in Congress the sentiment is very much pro-Taiwan. And the Taiwanese understand this, and they exploit their connections with Congress. So I think that’s really an issue that’s not going to go away — and it’s potentially very dangerous.
Gazette: You’ve suggested that only when a crisis comes will we be able to see whether the Chinese government can “manage the tensions inherent in an approach that simultaneously seeks change and continuity.” Any guesses to what the nature of that crisis might be?
Goldstein: Probably it will have an economic origin — large-scale demonstrations about a deteriorating economic situation. How do they manage it? Do they call out the troops or do they try to negotiate and reach political compromise along the lines of what we think a modern political leadership does? And I think we just don’t know until we see this happen. Because if these folks think that they’re pushed into a corner, we know that someone like Deng Xiaoping had no qualms about shedding blood — and he said it many times. “If we have to shed some blood, well, we’ll shed some blood. Let the West react; eventually they’ll come back.”
I suspect that the current leadership is not of that same mind-set. They’re not the guys who fought in the bad days of the Revolution when things were tough. They’re guys who joined the movement really in the late forties and fifties, and it was not so much a life-risking decision; it was a career-enhancing decision. They’re not the same head-cracking sort of guys. Maybe that’s wishful thinking. But I suspect that’s the way things will play out, now that all the old revolutionaries are gone.
SIDEBAR
“Guess Who’s Coming to Tea?
On October 30, 1997, Dr. Yu Hsiu Ku, Hon’72, emeritus professor of electrical engineering, and his wife Wei-Zing played host to a visitor who had arrived in Philadelphia that afternoon and would leave that evening. For more than half an hour, the visitor shared talk and green tea and pastries with the Kus in their high-rise apartment behind Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.
His name was Jiang Zemin; his occupation, president of the People’s Republic of China.
Word quickly got out that Jiang had been a student of Ku’s at Shanghai Jiao-Tong University back in the 1930s — though it was a typically distant student-teacher relationship of that era, one that Ku does not even remember. (Another student of Ku’s from his earlier life is the current premier of China, Zhu Rongji.) But since Ku has kept a low profile over the years, most people in the Philadelphia area were surprised by the visit and the brief flurry of press coverage that followed. Surprise turned to astonishment when it came out that Ku had also been friends with former Prime Minister Zhou Enlai — a relationship that began in 1938, when Zhou was deputy minister under Mao Zedong and Ku vice minister of education under former Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, during the brief wartime alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists. More recently, we found out, Ku had met the late Deng Xiaoping, last of the Communist Revolutionary leaders. And he had a poem on his wall written by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui in honor of Ku’s 90th birthday. (For Jiang’s visit, Ku diplomatically replaced the poem with a painting, and moved a scroll of Jiang’s calligraphy to a more prominent spot.)
Some six weeks after Jiang’s visit, I met Ku in his apartment, agreeably cluttered with books and adorned with his wife’s striking paintings in the classical Chinese style. Dressed in a dark suit and seated on a couch, he was then a couple of weeks short of his 95th birthday. Often I could only catch fragments of his faint, heavily accented answers, and although he politely addressed most of my questions, a cultural reticence informed his answers, and I came away knowing that I had barely scratched the surface of the man and his life.
Yet even the surface of a life like Ku’s is remarkable. Before coming to the United States in 1950, he had served as president of two universities (National Central University, 1944-45, and National Chengchi University in Nanking, 1947-49). Having earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just four and a half years back in the 1920s, he came to Penn in 1952 and became a celebrated professor of electrical engineering. His engineering achievements earned him the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Lamme Medal for his “outstanding contributions to analysis of transient behavior of a-c machines and systems.”
But it was his relationships with the great and powerful that caused the sudden glare of publicity. Was it, I asked, a little strange to find himself in the spotlight with Jiang after so many years of relative anonymity?
“No,” he replied in a whispery voice. “Because it was the Chinese way. It seems very strange to an American audience.”
For the Chinese, he explained, because he was a friend of Zhou Enlai, then he was a friend of Zhou’s successor, Deng Xiaoping — and thus a friend of Deng’s successor, Jiang. Similarly, having been an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, he has had the confidence of the Nationalist government in Taiwan.
“Both the Communists and the Nationalists trust me, and they value my opinion,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Because they know I am totally objective. I am not on either side.”
Jiang had had other business in Philadelphia during that late-October visit. He gave a short speech at the University Museum, praising the new agreement between the Chinese government and Penn — specifically the Wharton School and the Graduate School of Education — which resulted in a sort of crash-course in capitalism for government officials and executives of state-run enterprises. (He also made a brief visit to Drexel University.) But it was still part of a state visit, and the only private stop he made was his visit to the Kus’ apartment.
“He wants to come here and relax,” said Ku. “Just the two of us. He didn’t say anything important. Because it was after his meeting with Clinton. All the serious things had been talked over.
“But he listened to my advice, and he’s going to think about it. You see, I think all other things are minor compared to world peace. And all the universities are for world peace, right? Benjamin Franklin was for world peace, and Harvard himself — John Harvard — was for world peace. So all educators are for world peace.
“I am nonpolitical,” he added. “I do have my ideas, but only as a retired professor. I just enjoy life. I don’t try to influence anybody.”
Yet 60 years earlier, during the Japanese occupation, he had written politically charged plays protesting the invasion. In his autobiography, One Family — Two Worlds, he describes how, as dean of the Engineering College of Tsing Hua University, he organized a group of professors and students to “make and deliver 8,000 gas masks to the Military Commission’s Peiping Headquarters for emergency use in the defense of North China against Japanese aggression.” By accident, they found a way to get activated carbon to absorb the poison gas by passing steam through burning coconut shells. “We were successful in getting young men and young ladies from Tsing Hua University campus to do all kinds of volunteer work,” he noted matter-of-factly, “including wearing the gas mask to go through a tear-gas chamber to do the final testing.” Today’s undergraduates, take note.
In addition to his scientific papers, Ku also published 12 volumes of literary works (poems, novels, plays, and essays) in 1961, followed by eight volumes of poems from 1963 to 1973. One was his “Ode to Nanking,” written in honor of the city that was brutally invaded by the Japanese:
Rain fell on the Terrace Wall outside the Temple.
All the lotus in Lake Hsuan Wu withered.
The Rouge Well remained,
While the palace and court ladies’ fashions
Were gone for one thousand years.
Nothing could be said in front of the parrots.
By the Red Sparrow Bridge swallows murmured.
Remember the famous River of Nanking!
Old friends were no more and no-where to meet again!
Frost came to the Lin-Ko Valley.
Autumn leaves on the mountains fell and danced to the clouds.
One should not forget the old, old pine tree
Alive since the Six Dynasties!
Let the moon shine and the wind
Welcome the beautiful birds!
Many years later, during his speech at the University Museum, Jiang Zemin also quoted from a Chinese poem: “You never know where you will meet your old friend in your long life.” He had not seen Ku since he graduated from the university, he said in halting English. But the meeting “reminded me of our university life, which is the golden age of one’s life — and one cannot but cherish it so much.”
— SH
