Xi Jinping leads members of the Standing Committee to an exhibition on the CPC Central Committee at the Yan'an Revolutionary Memorial Hall in Shaanxi Province, October 27, 2022. Credit: Xinhua via Alamy
I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet I served as dean of a large faculty of political science at a Chinese university that trains students and provincial cadres to serve the country as Communist Party officials. It’s typically a post reserved for members of the CCP, given the political sensitivity of the work.
Shandong University is the premier university in a province of more than one hundred million people that is famed for being the home of Confucian culture. I was appointed as dean not because of a commitment to China’s official Marxist ideology but rather because of my scholarly work on Confucianism. I was supposed to promote Confucianism via teaching and research. As a foreigner, I was also supposed to help internationalize our faculty and upgrade our academic output according to international standards.
The president of Shandong University handing over the official certificate making Daniel the dean, January 1,
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