At College in Red China

Chairman Mao has said that "education must serve proletarian politics and be combined with productive labor." The extent to which this is now being practiced in China would startle most Westerners. TIME's Jerrold Schecter, who was allowed to stay on in China after the departure of President Nixon, paid a visit to Futan University in Shanghai and cabled this report:

The ferocity of the Cultural Revolution has disappeared from the tree-lined walkway leading to the red brick dormitories. Wall posters now extol the virtues of serving the people and studying the thoughts of Chairman Mao. "Heighten our vigilance and defend our motherland," says one. Only tattered remains of the big posters from the revolution hint at the turmoil that closed Futan University for nearly three years. Reopened in November 1970, it has been transformed.

Novelties. Imagine a university director who is a political organizer from a textile mill; students who are mostly army privates or the children of factory workers; an American-trained academic with a world reputation in theoretical genetics turning all his energies to increasing the yield of wheat; physicists making transistors for portable radios.

All these things are actually happening at Futan, Shanghai's biggest and most prestigious center of higher education, and now a monument to Maoism. Formerly the French missionary Aurora College, Futan, with its student body reduced from 6,500 to 1,135, is still in the throes of change.

A 30-ft. pink statue of Chairman Mao stands at the university's entrance. Inside the building, the curriculum is being radically reshaped to reflect Mao's doctrine that colleges should combine "education, production and scientific research." In practice, this means that Futan has completely dropped the traditional courses in literature and science and replaced them with such subjects as electronics and optics--and it conducts those classes in its own factories. Built and operated by the university, the factories produce equipment ranging from quartz-tungsten lamps to logic circuits for third-generation computers. The university also plans a petrochemical plant. "The purpose of these factories is to serve as a base for scientific experiments," explains Tang Chin-wen, 39, the textile-mill technician whose ardent agitprop work won him the leadership of the university. "It is to change the situation that prevailed before the Cultural Revolution, when practical knowledge was divorced from theoretical knowledge."

Combining theory and practice proved easier in the six science departments than in the seven arts departments, according to Tang. In the department of Chinese literature, he says, students charged that the professors had created "a hotbed for the restoration of capitalism." Throughout the autumn of 1969, while the university remained closed, "struggle, criticism and transformation" sessions were held because the professors "did not see society as a factory and kept divorcing the students from the masses." As one pigtailed coed put it: "We were wearing new shoes, but still going on the old road."

Teachers soon learned to walk the new road. They agreed to take students to factories to discuss revolutionary experiences with older workers. The curriculum for the May 7 Class in Experimental Literature* now includes Mao's thoughts on literature, lectures on specialized subjects such as the poems of Mao and "foreign classics," of which Stendhal's The Red and the Black is the only work not by Marx, Lenin or Stalin. The main models for study are the revolutionary operas and ballets that depict struggle and sacrifice for Maoist "revolutionary heroism." In form Futan thus remains a university, but its curriculum has been violently revolutionized, and the institution is in fact an ideological trade school, with little or no intellectual distinction, at least by Western standards. Faculty members also must combine theory with practice by taking turns at planting crops and doing other manual chores.

How to Serve. This transformation is best illustrated by the case of Tan Chia-chen, better known in the West as C.C. Tan, who got his Ph.D. at Caltech in 1936 and later taught at Columbia. A gentle-mannered geneticist, with a reputation for his theoretical papers on drosophila, Tan is now applying radiation genetics to wheat and rice to develop higher yields. "For us older people, the Cultural Revolution has solved the problem of whom to serve and how to serve," says Tan, rather stiffly. "We must serve the people."

The students live four to a room. Their day begins at 6:30 a.m. when they arise from their double-decker bunks and do exercises. Classes last from 8 until 4:30, with time out for lunch and more exercises, and there are two hours of "self-study" after supper. Tuition, room and board are all free, and students get six yuan ($2.72) per month for spending money. Students range in age from 18 to over 30, and most have worked in factories or served in the army before being admitted. Factory workers are paid their full salaries by the state while they study.

The students are fervent and dedicated. Although the university has a library of 1.2 million volumes, with many books in English, French and German, foreign works remain virtually untouched except for technical engineering studies. The biggest reading room, a cavernous hall, is devoted primarily to Marxism and the thoughts of Mao.

Sitting around in easy chairs and sipping tea in covered cups, the students and faculty discuss their new style of education. For a Uighur girl from the steppes of Sinkiang, Futan represents "liberation from a sea of misery." A former Red Guard now on the faculty says: "The new curriculum has made us all feel closer to the workers and peasants. In the past we stayed in school; now we have the rich experience of working in the fields."

All argued that without the Cultural Revolution they would never have been permitted to obtain a higher education. But for the more sophisticated intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution is still a continuing trauma, although they appear to conform to the radical new style of education. "Some professors have not yet adapted to new teaching methods," as University Leader Tang put it. "There is too much book knowledge, not enough practical knowledge. The political revolution has just begun."

*So named because Chairman Mao issued instructions on May 7, 1966, that the Chinese army must "be a great school." China also has May 7 schools, at which errant party members engage in ideological self-criticism and reindoctrination, combined with manual labor.

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