Life as a Young Chinese Scholar: a Personal Account by Liu Tao

"Once those who were exploited by the system become part of the academic elite, they often require little emotional adjustment to become staunch defenders of the very system that once exploited them."

Today’s edition opens with an introduction by Matt Ferchen, Lecturer at Leiden University, Senior Fellow at the Leiden Asia Centre and my former head of programme at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS). Matt spent nine years at Tsinghua University from 2008 to 2017, both as an Associate Professor at Tsinghua's Department of International Relations and as a Resident Scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy (now Carnegie China). — Thomas

In this essay by Liu Tao, a young university scholar in an unspecified humanities discipline, we are presented with an overwhelmingly pessimistic view of a career in Chinese academia today. While some of Liu’s concerns, including the stresses of publishing and teaching or dealing with arrogant and entitled senior colleagues, are certainly a source of anxiety for junior faculty the world over, others are more specific to the realities of China in 2024.

For example, Liu is disappointed with unserious and impolite students. One…