Book Review: The Dean of Shandong

Not the book I was expecting, but maybe the one I deserved. Either way I’m frustrated.

I rarely read books for pleasure these days. Between work and family-ing, the most I have time for is books directly related to work, which usually means either 2,000-page tomes on the future of globalisation or 25-page journal articles on soil degradation in Qinghai province.

But over Christmas I decided to do something different and pick up a few books I’d actually like to read if I were someone who made time for it, mainly shorter fiction and non-fiction books about China. I haven’t been to China since 2020, and I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon, so I love reading books that remind me of what it was like to live and travel around there. Esoteric occurrences like finding the perfect bowl of liangpi and then being told off for paying in cash, being mistaken for a Uyghur after haggling for my life (my accent is just THAT good), and taking an afternoon stroll to watch pensioners practice taijijian with real swords are not things that can be explained to people who haven’t experienced them.

These are the types of experiences I was expecting to be recounted in Daniel Bell’s The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Here we go, I thought. Finally, someone is going to spill all the tea on those closed door meetings, tell us how the party really interferes at the university level, tell us how censorship works (or doesn’t), and explain why it’s simply impossible to maintain a bureaucratic position in a Chinese institution without completely turning off the part of your brain that needs reason and logic to exist.

But, there was little of that sort of storytelling to be found. What I thought from descriptions would be a chronological retelling of his time – peppered with funny anecdotes and an increasingly overbearing official presence – which would end with his having to resign, turned out to be more a meditation on why things were the way they were. Or are the way they are, depending on whether we’re talking about his specific situation or Chinese society as a whole.

Because the book is written at sort of two levels. The ‘high-level’ content discusses Chinese society as a whole: why high-level politicians dye their hair black every 2 weeks, why Marxism is making a comeback, why the Chinese PR department gets such a bad rep overseas, etc. Then there’s the more personal content, linking the grander theme to his experience: why he takes a gradualist approach to curriculum changes, why he gives up on trying to meet all his staff members individually, why he missed some important points in a meeting because he hadn’t quite got the Shandong dialect down (as someone who used to live in Sichuan, this was one of the most relatable moments). I don’t necessarily have a problem with this approach, but rather the way the time and space is divided between the two.

The average chapter is 3/4s high-level overview of the development of a particular policy or movement (e.g. the rise of the anti-corruption campaign under Xi) sprinkled with ¼ semi-personal anecdote(s) that may or may not be interesting depending on your existing knowledge of China (anti-corruption means only £10 a head at departmental banquets and no more unlimited drinks, quelle horreur!). And the more interesting the chapter title, the more disappointing the content. The few chapters I had high hopes for – “What’s wrong with corruption?” “Drinking without limits” “Censorship, formal and informal” – ended up being the most disappointing of all. This might be bordering on mean, but I actually wrote ‘boring’ in the margins on several occasions.

I suppose this is to be expected to an extent from a Confucian scholar. Not the boringness (that’s my own interpretation), but the reflective nature of the text. As someone who spent some time in that world myself, I’m very much used to ivory tower academics trying to connect their personal experiences with real world developments. But if I wanted a soliloquy on how unregulated AI and the proliferation of nuclear weapons may irrevocably change the course of history, I’d call up one of my old professors. I picked up this book to be entertained on a very particular subject, but I found myself skipping paragraphs just to see if I’d find anything juicy or even slightly tantalising. There’s some relief found in a section on his gradually being shunned by publications like New York Times and The Guardian for being too pro-China, but these anecdotes have nothing to do with his time at Shandong U, which is what the book is ostensibly about.

Perhaps, I thought, because he’s an actual academic with 30+ years of experience, married to a Chinese person, and evidently speaks really, really good Chinese, that explains why I’m not vibing with everything he’s writing. But then I realised no, it’s not me, it’s the dust jacket. The reviews on the back tell me specifically what the book is supposed to be about, but the contents do not match the description. Here is one of the mini reviews:

A leading interpreter of the Confucian tradition Daniel Bell takes us into the citadel of contemporary Chinese higher education. Honest and wise, entertaining and witty…The personal narrative sparkles, but Bell also analyzes with great clarity and insight the many challenges as well as promises facing China and Chinese intellectuals in the unfolding twenty-first century.

Not only does Bell not let his “personal narrative sparkle”, he actively shies away from the personal when it suits him. At one point, when writing about how Xunzi’s student Han Feizi went on to betray his legacy (seriously, most of the book is about Confucian history) he literally writes “I had my own experience with what we might call an Oedipal student, but I won’t recount the story here. It’s too upsetting.” I’m sorry, then why the hell am I reading this book?! Isn’t the point to get insight into his personal experiences here? The back said it would be entertaining! Why tell me there’s something interesting behind the curtain and then not let me take a peak?!

OK, to be fair, it’s not completely devoid of personal retellings, and in fact one particular story he tells in chapter 2 had me relating hard. He recounts how one colleague in the faculty WeChat was consistently hating on him and his work, as well as picking on a few other people and generally just not being a good sport. No one did anything about it, and the faculty member eventually left, but wasn’t kicked out of the group chat and continued being an arsehole. Finally fed up, he decided to use his powers as dean to ask the admin to kick him out (he used the excuse that the guy was also anti-CCP as well as no longer there). But to his surprise, the admin said no – there were other ex-faculty in the chat, and it would rock the boat to just kick someone out. He was flabbergasted, but had no real comeback and just had to accept it.

For some reason, this reminded me of the last days of my PhD at CityU in Hong Kong. One of the professors had looked over my thesis and gave detailed notes, and after corrections I proceeded to print out 3 copies, handbind them, and give them to the faculty admin to prepare for my viva. The whole process took at least 6 hours and about £80. To my horror, I was told that not all of the professor’s changes had been incorporated (to my memory, the footnotes were in the wrong format). The only course of action was to reprint all three copies again at my own expense. I protested: I only had one day, no money, and it didn’t actually matter. Once I had passed the viva I would have to make more corrections anyway, why couldn’t I just do it then!? Alas, my protests fell on deaf ears. Another 80 quid down the drain.

Of course, I knew my compromise was reasonable, but reason wasn’t the issue here. The professor was a senior member of the department, and had taken time out of his schedule to review my – a lowly PhD student’s – work. On top of that, this professor had done a number of unprompted favours for me in the past, like giving me free books related to my research, and advising me on how to get around bureaucratic BS. In exchange, I helped him translate some of his work into English. We had a good rapport; if I didn’t reprint the copies again, it would look like I was slighting him, even though that wasn’t what was happening.

These sorts of minor inconveniences that drive you crazy are totally consistent with most people’s experience living in China. It’s like a wave of desperate logic meeting a cliff of reality, with the cliff being totally immovable because maintaining harmony and ‘the proper way of doing things’ supercedes everything else. If only there were more of this sort of content in the book.

I'm struggling to come up with a fair number score to give this book, as any rating I do give will be based on my projections on what I'd hoped it would be rather than what it is. I wanted fun, but instead I got to reflect on my own past. I wanted gossip, but instead I got nuance. I wanted to learn about the inner workings of bureaucracy in China, but instead I learnt a lot – a lot – about Confucianism.

It doesn’t help that I feel that the book fails at its stated core objective too. Bell writes that he wants to provide a balanced view of China, one that presents the good alongside the bad, so that western readers “can temporarily set aside preconceptions and judgements about “the” Chinese Communist Party.”

But the only people who are going to read this book (and I say this with all the love in the world) are academics and China heads who either already love and know China or who have spent their entire lives writing/reading about China and therefore don’t need their hand held when told that western media may be biased. I mean the top dust jacket review is by RANA MITTER for goodness sake (my academia bros know). What more do you need to know about the target audience?

Any newbie who stumbles across this book is going to get lost pretty quickly trying to connect the dots between Confucius’ legacy in Shandong and Bell’s inability to perform well as department head because he “didn’t have the energy for the job.” If you’ve never been to China and you don’t really know much about the culture, you won’t learn much. If you know a lot about China, you won’t learn anything new.

This is a great book if you want to know more about any of the following:

• The history of Confucianism

• The legacy of Marxism in modern China

• How long the average faculty meeting is at a university in Shandong

• How seating arrangements are decided at Chinese banquets

• Why you shouldn’t let your friends write your dust jacket reviews

If you’re hoping for a fun romp through a 5-year history of what it’s really like working at the top level of a Chinese university, with all its quirks, faults, and excitement, you might have to write that book yourself.

I dunno. 3 stars.