Gao Xiqing a conscientious civil servant

I would like to comment on Monday's column by Kristin Butler and Ed Rickards entitled: "Chinese Trustee Carries Too Much Baggage." I have known Duke's new trustee, Gao Xiqing, since we were both students at Duke in the mid-1980s. We continued our friendship after graduating and returning to Beijing, me to work as a foreign correspondent and Xiqing to help found China's securities industry. Xiqing is one of the most honest, ethical human beings I have ever had the privilege of knowing. He has honored his status as the first PRC citizen to earn a J.D. from a U.S. law school (Duke Law '86) in his pioneering work in China since his 1986 graduation.

It is conscientious civil servants like him that are changing China's authoritarian political culture from the inside out, and these agents of change should be actively engaged, not ostracized on grounds of ideological purity. In my humble opinion, it would be a huge mistake to let the perfect be the enemy of the practical and not engage someone like Gao just because he serves in a Chinese government that has a less than spotless record on human rights.

Butler and Rickards may not know that during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 I regularly saw Gao delivering food and water to his Chinese University of International Business and Economics students while they were occupying the Square. Whenever we made eye contact Gao would wink at me, a silent Duke salute that said, "I cannot be seen with you, an American reporter, in these sensitive circumstances, but we both know where my real sympathies lie, with my protesting students."

Gao continued to show his true blue Duke colors in the years following the massacre, regularly accepting my interviews and privately briefing my visiting American colleagues as he rose up the ranks of the Chinese bureaucracy. China's political culture is changing rapidly, and what is required by concerned interlocutors from the West is constructive engagement-critically constructive engagement of course-but engagement nonetheless.

A principled stance of having nothing to do with China and not working with agents of change like Xiqing because China's human rights record is less than perfect would be tragic, and ironically play directly into the hands of the hardliners in China who really do want to turn the clock back to the days of Maoist totalitarianism.

In short, I applaud the appointment of Gao Xiqing to Duke's Board of Trustees, and am confident that if Butler and Rickards met Gao they would concur with my assessment of his impeccable integrity.

Scott Savitt

Trinity '85