“Yes, I do have a political agenda,” writes the political scientist Daniel A. Bell close to the front of his latest book. “I aim to de-demonize China’s political system.”
How does one prettify the ugliest regime on earth? Bell, once communist China’s leading apologist to Western audiences, offers a series of polished essays on the country’s culture and politics, all enlivened by snippets of memoir and admissions of personal and professional failings. Much of Bell’s The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University is hokum, but it is nonetheless informative, entertaining, and sometimes even insightful.1
Bell, a Canadian who tells us he has no Chinese ancestry, taught at two prestigious Chinese institutions: the University of Hong Kong and Beijing’s Tsinghua University. On the first day of 2017, he was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration of Shandong University, the first ever foreign dean of a political-science faculty in mainland China.
Why would Bell agree to move to the backwater province of Shandong from bustling Beijing? He admits he needed “a new intellectual challenge.” His decision, he says, was also the result of “some mixture of Jewish guilt, Catholic sin, and Confucian shame.”
Bell’s boss, a Communist Party secretary, thought the noted foreigner could help promote Confucianism while internationalizing and improving the school.
And there was the lure of going to Shandong. Bell has been, among other things, a prominent Confucius scholar, and
