Cry for Freedom

Gong Yidong writing in state controlled China Daily:

He is hard of hearing and his right hand shakes. But Liu Daoyu, in his seventies, still works four hours a day, offering his thoughts on the weaknesses of higher education in China. His latest bombshell was a 7,000-word thesis in China’s most influential newspaper, Southern Weekend, in which he called for an overhaul of the country’s growing number of universities.
The former president of Wuhan University, or Wuda, is convinced that education should be based on mankind’s ultimate values and stripped of bureaucratic interference. “China’s education awaits a movement of enlightenment,” he says, sitting in his humble university residence.
Born in a village in northern Hubei province, Liu studied chemistry in Wuda in 1953, aspiring to become China’s Alfred Nobel. “Nobel’s story implanted a seed of innovation in me when I was just 14,” he recalls.
Before 1949, Wuda was ranked as one of the top five universities in China, on a par with the universities of Peking, Tsinghua, National Central (Nanjing) and Zhejiang. But a fast decline set in after 1953, in the wake of Left dominance. “Professors were caught with a sense of terror, some of them sent to the gymnasium to receive physical punishment, and nobody was in the mood to pursue research,” Liu recalls.
In the next few years, Wuda became a hotbed of factionalism, “a cart pulled by an old ox”, as Liu puts it. It slid to the 22nd of the 23 universities under the supervision of Ministry of Education (MoE). After graduating in 1957, Liu became a chemistry lecturer. The university sent him to pursue organic fluorine studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1962.