 Z Zhao Bin, presenter
L Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard University
Z: You first came to China in 1979, and this is the 9th time you came to this country. Can you summarize the changes you witness over the years?
L: When I first came to China it's not possible to make phone calls to the US. I met few people who could speak English. Nobody was talking about watching TV; people were hoping to get access to radios. When I first came to China there was no idea in anybody's mind of anything like the internet or email. The world has changed a great deal in twenty years, and China has changed even more.
Z: You came to China this time to participate in an opening ceremony of an advanced training program in public administration. Can you start with telling us something about this program?
L: Yes, I think it's a very important initiative between Harvard and Tsinghua University to train 30 scholars in public administration. People who actually work in local governments all over China will learn the tools of public management in everything from the proper measurement of costs, to thinking through the challenges of regional economic development, to dealing with environmental problems.
The program will give the students the chance to study for 6 weeks in Tsinghua University with some of Harvard faculty participating in their instruction. They will go to the US and study at Harvard for 5 weeks. So we give them a combination of international perspective. We will deepen our understanding of Chinese issues from participation in the program.
And we will also learn from some of the very important successes that Chinese officials have had, e.g. success issues like making literacy nearly universal, and issues in reducing mortality among mothers and children.
Z: The same question has been asked about programs like MBA & MPA. Is it possible to teach someone to become a leading civil servant in the classroom？
L: It's probably true that the greatest leaders have some special intangibles they are born with which may be very hard to teach in the classroom. But if you talk to anyone who's been a successful leader, you will learn that they've gained a lot from experience told by people who were mentors to them. They think they've gained a lot from their experience in practical situations. And all those are things that we can hope to do in classes not by lecturing at people but through case studies－－to engage in discussions with people who grappled with this problems before, to work together as a group, to find common solutions.
If you look at the success that training in business administration has had around the world, you will see that using a case method is now emulated all over the world. It wouldn't be happening if there wasn't some useful knowledge being conveyed. So I believe the program like this can make an important contribution.
Z: So it's still good for practitioners to pause in between their practices to theorize their experiences and share their experiences with others.
L: I certainly think so. When I was in the government I could learn very important things from those who were in the academic sector at a particular point. And I think many people find that as well. So I suspect that if you look at universities in the future, you will find even more than at present that they are involved in educating people who are in the middle of their careers.
We've had a traditional fill-tank theory of education－you fill yourself up with knowledge when you are young; you gradually run through the knowledge; you run out of gas and then retire. In a world where more and more people are changing careers, and a world where changes are constantly happening, there are more need for continuing education throughout life.
Z: Apart from this collaboration between Tsinghua University and Harvard University, what are the other projects actually going on between Harvard and Chinese universities？
L: Harvard has a number of projects. We have a very exciting project underway of environmental cooperation that seeks to bring new techniques to measuring environmental pollutants, so that we can come to the most accurate judgment as what their sources are and how they can be reduced in China. It is suggested that there' may be 200,000 people who die prematurely each year in China as a consequence of air pollution. It certainly has very important policy implications. And another project we've engaged in between Harvard Business school and Tsinghua University focuses on the training of business leaders, particularly those who are moving from middle positions to top positions. It focuses on the needs of selling an overall strategy, of managing finances as well as the needs of managing a company in an effective way.
These are all aspects that are covered in the course. I hope that in the years ahead we'll broaden our cooperation in all kinds of areas. I'd like to see it get stronger in the study in the Chinese language. More and more Americans need to study Chinese if they aim to take full part in the global economy. And you could also have some important work to do on the rule of law and legal foundations of our societies in the future as well.
Z: In Chinese education there is the crisis of humanities, because a lot of money are spent on economics and other pragmatic areas. How do you see the crisis of humanities in Chinese high education？
L: I can't prescribe for Chinese high education. If one looks at the great leaders of history, you will see very many of them were people who were deeply steeped in history, in literature, and people who thought about different paths, and about lessons for today. I think about the kind of reading that Abraham Lincoln did as a young man or kind of reading that Churchill did were a great deal of literature. So I think a society that wants to prepare people for positions of important leadership, a society that wants to be wise in the years ahead needs to be a society that has committed to the instrumental use of knowledge, whether it is accounting or engineering. It should also be committed to thinking of the eternal questions, of what it is to know, of what it is to love, of what is the nature of human nature.
Z: In the press conference held in March 2001 when you were first elected president of Harvard, you talked about a global economy that is increasingly shaped around knowledge, and you said that it was an extremely exciting time for high education. Can you expand a little bit on this remark？
L: For centuries value resided principally in land. In the most recent century, it resided most in machinery, in buildings. Increasingly today, it resides in ideas, intellectual property, and in organizations that bring people with knowledge together. So knowledge is in many ways the stuff of today's economy, in the way machinery was the stuff of earlier economy, and the way land was the stuff of the still earlier economy.
Of course the production of knowledge is what university is all about. People often say that universities are ivy-tower institutions. But today many other organizations, even the government in China, are slowly becoming more like universities. People feel free to argue with their bosses in a way that they once didn't. Hierarchy is giving rise to teamwork. The effort is increasingly to find the best possible ideas from whatever sources. It seems to me that the knowledge economy is a quite different economy and will be more different in the future. And the one we do in universities can make a particularly great contribution.
Recorded by Chai Haoran
Source: CCTV-9
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