Twenty years ago, Johns Hopkins became the first American university to open a branch in Communist China. “It was a bold idea,” Maria Blackburn writes in Johns Hopkins magazine. “No American University had ever established a campus in Communist China, much less a joint program with a Chinese university.”
Although the JHU officials who are first responders on the scene are a little more clear-eyed than many Western visitors to the Marxist dictatorship, they still look at the Far East through academic eyes that Red Chinese officials may yet pull the wool over.
And clarity of vision can get difficult in a communist country.
“After nearly two weeks, we have become fairly acclimated to life in Beijing,” JHU president William R. Brody writes of a recent visit to the capital. “The horrendous heat and humidity are tolerable to Baltimoreans but the world-class pollution beats us.”
“Some days we literally cannot see the buildings across the street.” In his article in the June 2007 issue of Johns Hopkins magazine, Brody offers a street scene that gives a fairly vivid illustration of how polluted China is.
“Behai [a public park in Beijing] has a very large lake, where people fish using very long bamboo poles, despite the prominently displayed ‘No Fishing’ signs,” Brody writes. “The lakes in China are generally very polluted, and while beautiful from a distance, up close they are filled with so much trash sometimes it looks like you could walk on them.”
“I certainly would not be eager to eat the fish from these polluted ponds.” That’s probably a good call.
Moreover, since Beijing is one of those cities in which the government is bending over backwards to impress visiting Western investors and journalists, one wonders what shape the rest of the country is in. “When we first visited Beijing in 1994, there were no private cars, only government limousines; no recognizable stores other than the government-operated ‘Friendship Stores,’ where Western visitors were forced to shop, attended by surly and unresponsive sales people.”
“Today, large modern shopping centers carry the latest goods from Europe, the United States and Japan.” More ominously, Brody ran across some circumstantial evidence that the communist one-child policy that led to forced abortions is still in place.
“The fruit seller’s younger daughter was named Duo-duo, which loosely translated means ‘too much,’” Brody recalls. “Her name perplexed me, until I discovered one day that the couple actually had a son as well, but because of the child restriction policy, their three children were never seen in the store together.”
“Duo-duo was perhaps the result of an unplanned pregnancy.” Indeed, Brody was exposed to some of the agonies of life under communism, although he did not always recognize them as such.
“I see an elderly woman driving a large tricycle piled about four feet high with flattened boxes,” Brody remembers of the first night of his latest China visit. “As the woman agonizingly peddles down the alley, she wails.”
“I get it—she is collecting cardboard for recycling.” He gets more than one of the angels bankrolling the effort.
“Our family has always believed you don’t have a right to impose your values on another society or country,” Hasbro, Inc., chairman Allen Hasenfield told Johns Hopkins magazine. Hasbro has helped finance the JHU Nanking Center in China since 1989.
“After two decades, the center is growing,” Sharon Congdon reports in the magazine. “The new building, part of a recently completed $21 million campus expansion, adds 100,000 square feet of space and also houses the new two-story library, which replaces the one that opened in 1986.”
That will help with Red China’s hard currency reserves. One wonders how much of China’s “economy” is bolstered by such Western largesse.
It certainly has not resulted in a better grade of imports for American consumers. Earlier this year, left-wing journalist Rick Perlstein reported that the contaminated pet food found in America was actually made in China.
He may have been the first to sound this alarm. The roster of defective products coming from the Mainland has since grown to include about a half a million truck tires and counting.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
