By Howard Husock
Friday, May 08, 2020
Twenty years ago, as a lowly adjunct professor, I taught
crisis management for Harvard in China. My memories, and some qualms about
doing so, have flooded back as the world ponders whether China’s political
system enabled the virus’s spread by discouraging local officials from reporting
bad news. During those “executive education” programs at Tsinghua University in
Beijing, I hoped that my colleagues and I might help nudge the Chinese system
toward greater openness. But even back then — at a time when China was
“ascending” to the WTO and optimism reigned among us globalists — our
experiences of the country left me with doubts.
How to handle crisis was part of the curriculum when the
Harvard Kennedy School struck a deal with the Beijing government to provide
public-management education for local officials from across China. I have no
idea whether the mayor of Wuhan was in the group I helped teach, but it’s quite
possible. Our goal was to expose local and regional officials to Kennedy
School-style techniques, which combine technocratic policy analysis with
political leadership. It didn’t take long to see that the school’s dedication
to fostering “freer” societies was going to be tested in the weeks a group of
faculty spent at Tsinghua, thanks to what I understood to be the cooperation of
the opaquely named Organization Department of the Central Committee.
It was above my pay grade to question whether the school
should have entered into such a relationship in the first place. As I reflect,
it’s possible that we planted some seeds for a freer society — but it’s just as
likely that we helped provide legitimacy for a totalitarian government.
My role was to teach classes by the famous Harvard case
method, in which narratives (cases) framed political or policy decisions to be
discussed and argued over. Open debate alone represented the possibility of
progress for China, or so I told myself. Of course, we were using cases set in
other countries, in order, we hoped, not to upset Chinese government officials.
One such case directly foreshadowed the coronavirus
pandemic. It dealt with Hong Kong’s response to the bird-flu epidemic of 1997,
and it was meant to provoke discussion about how officials speak to the public
at times of crisis: Can reassurance and candor be reconciled?
The central figure in the case was Hong Kong’s
public-health commissioner, Margaret Chan, who went on to become the head of
the World Health Organization. When it was revealed that live-market chickens
were the likely cause of the bird flu, Chan told Hong Kong residents, “I eat
chicken every day.” Eventually, Hong Kong chose to kill every chicken in the
territory, a decision widely judged to have saved the world from the illness.
Our students mocked Chan’s statement as the Hong Kong public had, thus opening
the door to the idea of accountability for public officials and citizen
influence over public policy, both foreign concepts in China. And because the
story had a relatively happy ending, another essential principle was made
plain: It’s possible to make mistakes in handling a public-health crisis but
they are best openly acknowledged and corrected.
Despite such promising signs, the program, it turned out,
also took some ominous turns that made clear the serious limitations of outside
efforts to reform China — and foreshadowed the COVID-19 crisis.
I recall specifically our discussion of a case I wrote
myself, about police corruption in La Paz, Bolivia. It tells the story of a
reform-minded mayor of La Paz dealing with a largely illiterate and corrupt
local police force. The mayor, Ronald MacLean, who went on to co-found
Transparency International, considered a variety of ways to weed out the
corrupt from the force and motivate the rest. But his approach was not embraced
by the class. One official had a dramatically different and revealing
perspective. The mayor, he said, should simply assemble a “secret army of
replacement police” and, without warning one morning, have them swoop in and
take over, replacing all the current cops, who would be brought up on charges.
Might that not spark popular resentment? Would police work improve? The
questions did not resonate.
I’d never encountered that sort of response to the La Paz
case before, although I’d taught it around the world. The important thing, it
seemed, was for the Chinese government’s middle managers to demonstrate to
officials higher up the food chain that the corruption problem was contained.
In the People’s Republic, the “people” really didn’t play a role in the
government’s thinking. Arguably, the same systemic weakness could be seen in
the belated response in Wuhan. Secrecy is a feature, not a bug, of the CCP
system, and it has real consequences.
As the class went on, it became clear that Harvard’s
involvement had unforeseen effects on the enterprise we were all engaged in.
Chinese officials would now be able to boast of having been trained by Harvard
professors, and local officials who were participating were getting the message
that the Communist Party had, in some sense, the approval of Harvard. What’s
more, officials from the Organization Department — the HR branch of the Party
Central Committee — were in the class, likely evaluating the hand-picked
up-and-comers who were our students on grounds of political correctness. Over
time, we noticed that participants were looking to senior officials for
guidance as to what to say.
Of course, one never knows what seeds one plants, perhaps
even over informal dinner discussions. I recall quietly citing the work of
Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, finding that economic growth is more likely to
be sustained over time in democratic societies. Perhaps the right person was
listening. But I fear not: Cooperation between Harvard and the Chinese
Communist Party government continues today, even as it is increasingly clear
that the country is becoming less, not more, free.
Yale, NYU, Duke, and UC Berkeley, among other prestigious
American universities, have also established campuses in China. As a recent
Department of Education complaint about universities reporting income from
China makes clear, there is big money involved: Yale alone may, according to
the DOE, have failed to report $375 million in overall foreign financial
support. So, too, is there the risk that intellectual cooperation is a one-way
street, as seen in the recent case of a Harvard chemistry professor charged
with lying to federal officials about being paid to share his research with the
Chinese government. But the greatest risk of all may be selling legitimacy to
an illegitimate regime.
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