Looking back on China, Jiang and history

Next week, retired prof Gu Yixui will reunite with his former pupil, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. The man who will play host to journalists, the Secret Service and Chinese President Jiang Zemin next week nonetheless says he leads "a simple life." At 95, Engineering Professor Emeritus Gu Yuxiu spends most of his days in his Center City apartment reading. He stopped driving, so he doesn't get to his office -- or Chinatown -- as often as he used to. And the owners of Noodle Heaven, the Chinese restaurant down the block, deliver food now. Yet while he claims his memory isn't good, Gu remembers the momentous May 4th movement of 1919 like it was last Moon Festival. He was just 17, Sun Yat Sen's democracy had already fizzled and the Treaty of Versailles had handed a big chunk of China over to Japan. Students in China were beginning to resent the West, Japan and the Confucian values they had been brought up with -- and Gu was among them. So he understands that students protest when controversy rises. And he knows that his former pupil Jiang, who is visiting campus briefly next Thursday, is not a wholly benign figure. "It's probably a good thing for U.P. to try to keep [Jiang's visit] confidential," he said. "Maybe they think there will be demonstrations. But it's a free country." After extending Jiang an invitation in July, University officials said they will make a formal announcement today about the details of his visit. But Gu defends Jiang, whom he taught Electrical Engineering at Shanghai's Jiaotong University in the 1930s. "Jiang is good. He didn't have anything to do with Tiananmen," Gu said, referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Chinese army quashed a pro-democracy revolt and killed several demonstrators on June 4, 1989. "Jiang was mayor of Shanghai then. In Shanghai, [June 4] was peaceful," he added. Now that he's retired, the emeritus professor reads four newspapers daily. The Renmin Ribao, the premier Chinese newspaper, started sending him his subscription for free after he'd lived in Philadelphia for 45 years. But while his apartment is crammed with various media publications, Gu maintains he is "not a politician." "I am an engineer," said the 1925 Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, pointing to various accolades from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. But on the same wall with his scientific awards and pictures of his children are shelves of his own published poems and plays -- a testament that Gu is truly a "Renaissance man." Despite his position in China's Ministry of Education in the pre-communist 1940s, and his emigration to the United States, Gu's accomplishments have earned him several invitations back to his homeland. In 1973, just a year after President Richard Nixon made his ground-breaking visit, Gu was one of the first American citizens allowed in China, where he was honored by Premier Zhou Enlai. "I've met Zhou, Deng [Xiaoping, former president who died last year] and of course Jiang -- three Chinese leaders, but I never met Mao? [he was] a dangerous man." Not wanting to be detained in China, however, Gu became a U.S. citizen "for protection" that year. Retired since 1972, Gu still keeps tabs on the University, where all five of his children attended school. "We keep moving up? number seven this year!" he said of the infamous U.S. News & World Report college rankings. "But we can do better, we don't have to be number one, but maybe three or four. We need to not spend all our money on buildings and pay the faculty more!" Gu said he loved teaching, and although he might have made more money working for General Electric or RCA, for which he consulted in 1950, he wanted to be in academics. So was Jiang, one of the first he taught, a stellar student? "It doesn't matter," Gu said. "Look where he is now."

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