A Nation’s Conscience
Photograph by Lívia Machado Costa The chatter dialed up as the anniversary drew near. Peking University, crown jewel of China’s higher education system, was turning 120, and in the Chinese capital where stature is weighed by appearances, a subject measured by its ceremony, such a historic milestone demanded a big show.
On campus speculation became the popular pastime. The speaker would be big, the whispers promised, a name from the highest strata of the Chinese Communist Party. Some suggested it might be Xi Jinping himself; others Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier, among the university’s most illustrious alumni. Everyone understood that the brightest stars basked in each other’s light.
The university has always been more than just a school. Conceived as a vehicle for national resurgence, it was endowed from the beginning with an engine of liberalism, tasked with reforming an empire whose destiny had been called into question. The plan “bespoke tremendous intellectual ambition, a belief in possibility fueled by a sense of necessity,” writes Timothy B. Weston in The Power of Position, his rigorous account of the university’s early decades. Today, few surviving Chinese institutions have stood as witness—indeed, incubator—to more of the nation’s defining convulsions. “No university in the world shares as critical a relationship with its country and people,” wrote the Chinese dissident Guo Luoji. China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper, described the university’s ethos as “twentieth-century China’s spirit in a nutshell.”
Preparations for the anniversary celebrations, scheduled for May 4, had been underway for months. At the university’s centennial twenty years earlier, the Communist Party had dominated the show. Broadcast across the country, President and General Secretary Jiang Zemin delivered the keynote from inside the Great Hall of the People. He credited Beida, as the university is affectionately known, for nurturing China’s influential early Marxists, and paid homage to the intellectual firebrands who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, transformed the campus into the center of the nation’s political and cultural activity. He quoted Lu Xun, modern China’s most influential writer: “Beida always fights for the new. It is the vanguard of the movement for progress.”
Backlash to the speech was stifled but sharp. Jiang’s telling was boxy and choreographed, a caricature in the style of the Communist Party. Some of the university’s most prominent early figures had defected with the Nationalists to Taiwan; others had been purged. Lu Xun himself had remained deeply skeptical of the Communist project until his death, and never became a Party member himself.
In cherry-picking historical moments, one critic wrote, “the organizers of the celebration demonstrated [they were] willing to misrepresent history by placing political considerations above truth.”
