VietNamNet Bridge - VietNamNet has just held an online interview between Vietnamese readers and Prof. Anthony Saich from Harvard University on the topic, “Reform in China – the unveiled things”, where Prof. Saich answered many questions about numerous issues in China such as corruption, tertiary education and what experience that Vietnam could learn from China. 

Is the model of development in China now is a socialist? 

I think that is a very interesting question to start with but not an easy one to answer. Essentially the model of development I would say in recent years looks more like the part of development genuinely in East Asia than it looks like a socialist model of development. 

What I mean by that is the essentially in the economic room, the idea of liberalism, opening the economy to the outside world, trying to introduce more market forces to regulate commodity circulations to make more efficient allocation of resources has increasingly become the dominant idea.

And I think if we look at those areas of the Chinese economy that have been most successful there precisely those areas which had come to look more like western style of economic development. 

On the other side that increasing openness, flexibility and liberalism within the economy has been accompanied by strong authoritarian political control, again really resembling the earliest stages of development in countries in the region like South Korea for example. So the bottom line is the model of development that tries to combine increasing market equitisation of the economy with strong political control. 

And that of course is precisely now where the main challenges for the future that more look development like that can you, as the economy, grow as the population become more wealthy as you produce more interest groups as the population become more sophisticated can you still maintain such the strong centralized control of the political system. 

Do you think the model of development in China is the one that Vietnam should follow? And what challenges Vietnam will face if we follow this model? 

I don’t think it’s the only model to follow. I think for a country, which is transitioning from a traditional style planned economy to the market driven economy I think Chinese experiences have a lot of attractions to other countries such as Vietnam. I think the main problem with following the model lies in a number of areas. 

First of all if you take a very slow and gradual process to economic transition you run the risk to build up new interest groups that they will resist further reforms that become beneficial for the system. So for example in China we see now that there are still a lot of debates about the reform of state financial system and state owned enterprises and where you still have very close relationship between lending and state ownership. And I think at the local level that becomes particularly problematic because you get the system where a lot of lending of money is done on the basis of political factors rather than economic factors. 

So the gradual approach has advantages but at the certain points I think it begins to build its own positions by creating the interests to the next phase of reform. And that may be something that Vietnam needs to think about how do you keep the reform’s momentum going so you don’t build that interest that exists somewhere between planned and somewhere between market that they begin to resist further reform, the one more rationalized economy and to bring great benefits to Vietnamese people. 

I think the second area of problem is with organization within the society and how one deals with that.

In China where the more authoritarian political system and also concerns about autonomous organization in society. And I think one of the big challenges there is for the government to learn to trust the people to be able to make many of the key decisions on their own behalf. 

If I look at China and I know nothing about Vietnam, if I look at China one of the problems is that the government has a very paternalistic attitude that the party knows best what is in the interests for its people. And that often leads sometimes to a mistrusting the development of the precisely the kinds of institutions and organizations those will become very important in the next phase of reform. 

In China it is quite clear that the government cannot manage all the areas that need to be coordinated, the government cannot provide all the social services and facilities that people expect. And as the result if you stop development within society of those kinds of organizations to provide those services, you are actually beginning to undermine the party own intentions to maintain social stability and harmonious development. So you know basically yes it is a really good thing to learn from the Chinese experience, but I think there are also some more things to take note about how you keep going to the future. 

What do you see as the major changes in China after joining WTO and what other countries can learn from the changes? 

That is a very important question and I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about what happened before and after China joined WTO. 

Let’s me first go back to say one thing about the decision to join WTO. I think president Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rong Ji recognized that without external pressures the reform would stop in China and that by joining WTO that brought international pressures to keep moving ahead with the reform. So it was a very significant decision. It also had a huge advantage that any politician loves. That is if anyone complains in the front they can say well it not us, it is the pressure from foreign countries. So that is great for any politician in any system to be able to say that. So I think it is a very very smart decision. 

The change I think has been far less disruptive to the Chinese economy adversely to anybody’s prediction. There was a huge debate within China about the possible job losses, the destruction of certain industries in China, but I think what we see are a number of things. One is Chinese enterprises now are being forced to become more efficient. Chinese financial institutions are under huge pressures to make much more effective allocations of capital. And the thirdly service sector in China has developed enormously and in fact there has been major job growth in those areas rather than jobs loss that some people had predicted. 

One more thing the problem with joining WTO is the people who often mistaken problems within the economy as being the problems of WTO. What I mean by that is the China itself decided to have economic restructuring and economic readjustment. No foreigner, no WTO tried to do that. 

The problem is the affections of that restructuring are immediate and visible such as unemployment, people losing a lot of their guaranties. So people see that immediately. The advantages tend to be invisible and very long term. That is financial institutions and more effective long-term economic restructure, which will carry you into the global market and into the global constitution. So that is much more long-term and much more institutional. And those individuals don’t see it that way. And what you have in China was people putting these things together joining WTO and the negative effects of economic restructure. It was not but it is easy to understand why people look at the problems in that way. 

Based on your experience in education with China, through the cooperation of Harvard University with China, what do you think is the main focus of China on public policy training? 

Over the last 20 years China has built up high quality analysis in economic, in sociology and in political sciences a lot of that have been done through international collaboration, a lot of that has been through sending people abroad to study and trying to provide a good environment for them to come back to China. The problem though was a very poorly lead to public policy analysis. So one of the things that has been developing over the last 10 years is in the universities and also in the government research centres. It is trying to use those extremely strong technical skills to provide better influences in the public policy analysis. And I would say that it has been achieved. China actually has tremendous researchers providing excellent critical public policy advice across the whole range of public policies. 

For Harvard, we have been working in a number of ways with China. We have the partnership with Tsinghua University to help them design curriculums that provide them with much better objective tools for public policy analysis, to think about statistically formulating key questions for public policy analysis. We have also developed the programme with Tsinghua University and the development research centre of the state council to train 60 senior government officials a year in a three-month programme. And that is to focus on trying to improve of their capacity in public administration. 

So I think the foreign engagement has been very helpful, but there has been serious commitment with in China to provide an autonomy and independent intellectual state to allow the very talented researchers to provide good critical public policy analysis. And I think the Chinese leadership has been very wise in allowing that to develop. You know in many ways China’s government doesn’t need foreigners they have really developed a fabulous critical capacity for looking at their public policy challenges. And I would say outside the very specific areas to do with political structure, intellectual debates in China are extremely open, very critical and very challenging. And that has been very helpful to the government in formulating new policies. 

Could you talk about some key elements of higher education reform in China, and what Vietnam should learn from higher education reform in China? 

I think the first thing is if you really want the world-class universities you have to give autonomy to the academic community. You cannot dictate the kinds of areas that need to be researched. I think that it is very hard to build up global institutions while trying to restrain the kinds of question that can be researched. And I think China is learning that quite well. 

That is one of the first thing I would say. The second thing is to create a good atmosphere to attract talents back from oversea. I don’t say that everybody should be from oversea, but I think that China has begun to realize that it needs to create a good academic environment for people to come back from outside of China to train. And that has not been restricted to the natural sciences. China has some fabulous centers looking at economic, research, sociology, public survey and political science.

And it provided more than just the environment. I think that is very important. I think you can do it in the existing institutions. If you do it in existing institutions I think you almost have to build the thorough wall around those centers of most institutes otherwise they will be dragged down by the traditions of the institutions. And a lot of these traditions are very negative in terms of good scholarship. You can also do this of course by creating new institutions. And one of the things that China has allowed are a number of independent think-tanks with many of them by people coming out from the government and setting up their own think-tanks or coming out of universities. And those certain things are very important for providing critical analysis. 

Professor Anthony Saich.

The third thing I would say to learn from is one of the negative assets of Chinese education reform. That is the thing we say in a beautiful way in English “small is good”. The big move in China is to create major universities by pushing together different institutions. The idea is that if you are bigger you are going to be better. And I think that has led to many internal political problems in higher education institutions and I think it has led to poor education in many cases. So I think that there is still very strong case that may force more focused institutions that provide good general undergraduate training for example. 

I think the fourth lesson I would say is the international collaboration. For example in Vietnam you have the HCM City the Fulbright economic training programme and I think that provides very interesting model for Vietnam to look at further. It is rather similar to that China has pushed quite aggressively, strong partnership with international groups to help bring in new thinking about curriculums, or not just curriculum but the way of teaching. I think that is something for Vietnam to look at more how to use international partnerships constructively to meet Vietnam’s those needs, objectives. 

The other negative thing that I would say Vietnam should not learn from is the academic corruption. It is a huge problem in China. In a lot of cases not just the students cheat but cheating is also a prevalent in the cycle of teaching. Some examples are basically ignore their main duties, you know working outside of the universities to earn extra money, often publishing the works under their own name but that are not done on their own etc. So I think you need therefore to build not only a morality within the academic community but also very strict guidelines about what are ethical behaviors, and then punish people or throw them out of the universities which China is now starting to build when people are being found they are being thrown out of the universities. But it becomes an embarrassment for some of the Chinese institutions, the level of corruption is very high. 

Regarding the model of the Fulbright economic training programme in HCM City in Vietnam in comparison to the cooperation programme of Harvard with Tsinghua or Johns Hopkins with Nanning universities I think they share similarities which are further commitments to the excellence. The commitments to the excellence also mean to make them quality of faculties. I think in all of those institutions there has been a genuine commitment to strengthening the capacity of local faculties so that they eventually take over more responsibilities for the research and the teaching. I think all three of them have struggled very hard to preserve the intellectual independence and I think that is extremely important in the success of all three of them. In all three instances, they have not been given any different political pressures or financial pressures to behave in a particular way. That those factors are my first point that all three of them have put at the core of their work excellence. And you don’t get excellence unless you are critical, open and inquiry. 

Again on the issue of cheating, my personal view is if you relax your own standards it is the time to stop the cooperation. 

A couple of months ago we talked to Prof. Malcolm Gillis from Rice University and he said that absolutely Vietnam must have top tier universities. What is your view on the issue? And what model Vietnam should adopt to have top tier Universities? 

Vietnam must eventually develop its own top tier universities. That’s obvious. The issue is you can rely for a certain period of time on outsourcing. But I think the real answer for that is the political choice. You know you can pretend and you say you want top tier universities and then continuing interfere with them, then you will never have top tier universities. 

Or you can show which is a very brave decision as I said before genuine commitments to independence and excellence. And that will be really shaking up a lot of the established universities. Let’s me just go back to China. It is not easy in China. You have a group of people who were trained in a very different system and have very different expectations about what account the success. They are frightened. When people are frightened they tend to want to stop change happening. It is not that they are bad people. It is just that they were trained in a very different system. And those values do not operate anymore or those values are not useful anymore. So it really comes down to the political decision. You know, do the Vietnam’s leadership want to have top tier institutions or not. If they do they may have to find the way to breakthrough that. 

My view might mean that setting up new institutions. Some of the most successful institutions in China have been new ones, not all of them. Many of them have been new. This is to go back to the point I made earlier. Even if they are ones of the top long term established universities like Tsinghua or Beijing the universities agreed to build the wall around them and the authorities give them the independence and autonomy that other institutions don’t have. One of the things that is very important is they don’t apply the hardship of the whole load of bureaucracy of the system into new institutions because that will kill them. So it is perfectly possible. There is no reason why Vietnam can’t do it. Nothing is mystical or magical about it. It just requires a political view.  

 VietNamNet Bridge