On paper, China has the world’s largest higher education system with a total enrolment of 20 million full-time tertiary students. It is also the largest producer of PhD graduates, engineers and scientists. Yet China still lags behind the West in scientific discovery and technological innovation. This embarrassment is nowhere more apparent than in China’s unrequited love affair with the Nobel Prize. Despite an illustrious list of Chinese names on the honour roll, none of them have had much association with the educational and research institutions of the People’s Republic. This anomaly is a brutal reminder that despite China’s growing stature as an economic giant, it is still a light-weight in the important arena of ideas and innovation.

An editorial on the official Xinhua net touched upon an aspect of this issue, a Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Science, remarking that China’s current examination-driven, educational system is unlikely to yield any Nobel Prize winners. The fallacies of standardised tests and antiquated rote learning were blamed for China’s intellectual underperformance. An opinion column in the official People’s Daily also lauded the absence of material considerations and egocentricity as the necessary ingredients for the seeds of creativity — an indirect criticism of China’s more materially-minded professors. Charles Kao’s liberal pedagogical philosophy during his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was also attributed as a factor in his great success.

However, no-ones dares to question the institutional framework underpinning China’s mammoth educational system. Beijing sees universities and schools largely from an instrumentalist perspective, as a training ground to produce engineers and scientists that feed China’s economic engine. It also exercises a tight grip over ideological development in higher education system: alongside English, Marxism is still compulsory for all freshman. The raison d’être of Chinese universities is to serve the party-state, not to be a laboratory for free-thinking and liberal enquiry. Despite the largely apolitical nature of scientific enquiry, the universities and research institutes still suffer from the pervading ideological straitjacket.

The failings of the highly bureaucratised higher education system are an open secret in China. Academic corruption has reached an endemic level that ranges from star professors at Chinese Ivy League institutions to humble undergraduates at degree mills. Bribery and sexual innuendos are becoming a commonplace in the Ivory Tower; the Vice-President of one of China’s leading universities has just been arrested on allegations of bribery. It seems that the higher education system in China is not immune from the lack of transparency and accountability that pervades other institutions of the state bureaucracy.

It is perhaps instructive to quote the advice given to a Xinhua journalist by the Nobel Prize selection committee in physics that ‘a relaxed research environment, liberal and free academic environment and the audacity to accept challenges are the fertile soils that would produce Nobel Prize winners’. As a great and rising power, Beijing should gradually relax the ideological shackles that it imposes on the creative genius of the Chinese people. Only then can they dare to dream the impossible Nobel dream.