The China Connection : CSUN Fears Program’s Demise After ‘Golden Era’ of Exchanges

After years of living in the shadows of more famous Los Angeles-area schools, officials of Cal State Northridge regarded the opening of China to the West as a chance for the San Fernando Valley campus to finally get on the map.

To that end, the school sent scores of delegates and students to China, hosted Chinese students and visiting scholars, and shipped tens of thousands of English-language books. The campus established ties with 17 Chinese universities in nine cities. Chinese alumni of the CSUN China exchange program include famous mathematicians, big-city college presidents and the mayor of Baotou, Inner Mongolia.

CSUN President James W. Cleary even persuaded China’s most famous movie star to enroll at the Northridge campus.

Famous in China

What’s happened since those efforts began more than a decade ago is that the Valley school, which for years has produced first-rate graduates in schools such as engineering and business but has little national prestige, is now more famous in China than in the United States, CSUN professors say.

“We are a well-known academic institution in China,” said Kwang-non Chow, a CSUN mathematics professor and former head of the school’s China Institute. “In many cases when Chinese scholars need to initiate contact for anything in the U. S., we are the first ones they call.”

But because of the crackdown against pro-democracy forces by China’s Communist Party officials, the future of CSUN’s aggressive China program is in jeopardy.

“Some trustees and college presidents have called to say what a shame that all of our work will be wasted,” Cleary said. “At first I was depressed about it; but now I just regard it as a temporary suspension of our activities.”

Attesting to the scope of CSUN’s China ambitions, the school was selected as a finalist in a World Bank competition to revamp the secondary educational system for the world’s most populous nation. The winning school would share in a $50-million award to develop programs to train Chinese secondary school teachers. It is unclear now when the bank will make a decision, which had been expected in the fall.

Carl Zachrisson, West Coast director of the nonprofit Institute of International Education, said CSUN has over the years earned a growing reputation for its exchanges with China.

Promotes Studies Abroad

CSUN officials say they are not competing with colleges such as UCLA and UC Berkeley, which have prestigious China research departments. Instead, CSUN hopes only to open its campus to growing numbers of Chinese scholars and to expose greater numbers of its own students to China through semesters abroad, officials said.

“Our purpose really is for both sides to become more appreciative of their own culture,” said I-Shou Wang, chairman of CSUN’s geography department and past director of the school’s China Institute.

The incentive for students to take part in CSUN’S China program was economic as well as cultural. At about $2,000 for transportation, tuition, meals and accommodations, the school’s student exchange program to China costs less than a semester on the Northridge campus, officials said.

Exhibits, Concerts

The campus has also sponsored seminars, as well as Chinese art exhibits and concerts for students in Northridge. This winter, a CSUN debate team toured China, staging for the first time in many cities Western-style debates against teams of Chinese students. Spectators filled auditoriums, school officials said.

But the violence in China that culminated in the shooting of students by army forces in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square earlier this month prompted the cancellation of a planned tour by the CSUN women’s volleyball team. School officials ordered two visiting faculty groups to cut short their China tours, and more than 25 students who had finished a semester of study there were asked to come home.

Some of the 30 or so Chinese students now pursuing advanced degrees at CSUN say they are worried about friends and family in their troubled homeland. But most say they have months or even years worth of courses required for their degrees before they will be asked to return to China.

Shifting Focus

In the meantime, some CSUN professors say that now is a good time for campus officials to re-evaluate what the school should be doing to advance China’s educational system.

“My suggestion is that we should perhaps concentrate a little bit more on certain areas of study or certain universities so that we don’t spread ourselves too thin,” said Wang, who has traveled to China nearly every year for the past decade. “You can’t have a sister relationship with 14 universities and do it that well with our limited personnel and resources.”

CSUN also has exchange agreements with three additional Chinese schools, without formal sister school status.

Wang, along with other Chinese-American CSUN faculty members such as math professor Chow and physics professor Paul Chow, are credited with forging the first links in CSUN’s growing ties with China, campus officials said.

Began in 1978

Wang played host to a group of visiting Chinese geographers in 1978, a year before the normalization of relations with China. That visit laid the foundation for two Chinese academic delegations that visited CSUN over the following two years, Wang said. “We are on the Pacific Coast; we were in the process of internationalizing our curriculum. All these things came together because the timing was right,” he said.

In 1979, CSUN history professor Sheldon Harris inadvertently made the school’s first research trip to China. He had planned to go only to Hong Kong to look over a videotape collection of Chinese television programs that had been broadcast from Canton during the 1970s. He traveled with Chinese history professor Joseph Chen.

“I was teaching Hollywood film so Chen said, ‘You tell me what films are worth saving and I will tell you if they have any historical value,’ ” Harris said.

Once in Hong Kong, Harris, at the suggestion of CSUN physicist Chow, visited a man who turned out to be a former high-ranking Chinese official. “He said that I needed to see the real China and went to make a telephone call; five minutes later he came back and said, ‘You are going to China,’ ” Harris said.

Film Actress

A year later, the school organized a Chinese film festival and paid for actress Joan Chen to fly in from a university that she had been attending in New York. Chen, already proclaimed the most popular actress in China, later became known to American audiences for her starring role in “The Last Emperor.”

“I’d heard that Joan was unhappy in New York so I introduced myself and we talked,” Cleary said. “She said that she thought California is the place to come for cinema and she ended up transferring here.”

Cleary led three CSUN delegations to China. He said that during the first trip in 1981, he and his wife, Mary, were invited to sleep in former Chairman Mao Zedong’s suite at the summer palace in Hangzhou. During Cleary’s last trip, in 1988, he spoke before a gathering of Chinese scholars who formed a CSUN alumni chapter that now numbers about 50.

“We’ve had 12 years of a ‘golden era’ with China,” Cleary said. “We’ve participated in Chinese educational reform, and we must look for every opportunity to help them promote a democratic society. I’m just afraid that institutions will say that there are no longer opportunities in China and that they will start looking to other places. I don’t want to see that happening here.”

But for now, Cleary and other campus officials say it is impossible to predict what will happen in China.

“Anybody that knows anything about it knows that there is no way to tell,” said Morton Auerbach, a longtime CSUN professor of Chinese politics. He had worked in China for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, at the end of World War II and said he maintained some valued contacts that have helped CSUN officials there.

“The Chinese in general have been very ready intellectuals, many eager to get over to the U.S.; we seemed to be receptive and people there picked that up,” Auerbach said of CSUN’s growing reputation in China. “It was the right time.”