The Wenke Dilemma: Is China’s Humanities Education Facing a Crisis?

Okay, settle in, grab a cup of coffee (or maybe some good Chinese tea), because we need to talk about something brewing here in China – something that resonates with anxieties back home but has its own unique, complex flavor. I’m talking about the future of the humanities, or as they call it here, wenke (文科).

As an American running an English-language magazine blog here, I try to bridge the gap, explaining the intricacies of Chinese life to folks back Stateside. And lately, the buzz – sometimes a worried murmur, sometimes a loud debate – is all about the perceived “crisis” facing students who choose literature, history, philosophy, law, economics, and the arts over the seemingly more pragmatic path of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), known here as like (理科).

If you’ve paid any attention to higher education debates in the US, you’ve heard echoes of this: the “liberal arts are dying,” the focus on job-ready skills, the questioning of value for money. But here in China, this debate feels turbocharged, tangled up with rapid economic shifts, intense competition, government priorities, and even the looming shadow of Artificial Intelligence. We’re talking about headlines declaring a “Global Humanities Rout?” and viral articles asking, “Where Should Humanities Go?”

The Heart of the Matter: “What’s the Use?”

The fundamental question lobbed at wenke students and programs is brutally simple: 有什么用? – “What’s the use?”

In a society laser-focused on development, modernization, and tangible results, the value proposition of STEM fields seems self-evident. They build bridges, write code, cure diseases, design technologies. Their output is often measurable, quantifiable, directly linkable to economic growth or national power.

Wenke, on the other hand, deals in the less tangible: critical thinking, cultural understanding, historical perspective, ethical reasoning, communication, creativity. These are harder to measure on a quarterly report. As one local commentary put it, humanities can’t directly reveal the laws of nature or advance technology by ten years. This leads to a kind of “contempt chain” (鄙视链), an unspoken hierarchy where wenke is sometimes seen as the “consolation prize” for those who couldn’t cut it in the more rigorous like fields. Stereotypes abound: the wenke grad is either a smooth-talking charlatan or an impractical, “sour scholar” (酸儒), echoing the old saying “百无一用是书生” – “scholars are useless.”

The job market stats seem to bear out these anxieties. Recent reports, like one discussed in the commentary piece “Where Should Humanities Go?”, highlighted data for the 2024 graduating class showing humanities and social science majors having a lower offer rate and generally lower starting salaries compared to their STEM counterparts. One widely circulated anecdote from 2022, mentioned in the fiery “Humanities Students Should Be High-Paid” article, claimed the average job signing rate for humanities grads was a startlingly low 12.4%. While specific numbers can fluctuate, the overall trend is clear: wenke graduates often face a tougher path to employment, sometimes feeling their degrees lack the specialized “hard skills” employers prioritize. The pressure is so intense that “转码” – switching to coding, often via bootcamps – has become a common, if sometimes reluctant, path for wenke grads seeking better prospects.

How Did We Get Here? The Supply Glut

But here’s where the Chinese context adds crucial layers. The current situation isn’t just about a societal preference for STEM. It’s also deeply rooted in the history of China’s higher education expansion.

Think back to 1999. China kicked off a massive expansion of university enrollment, known as kuozhao (扩招). The goal was multifaceted: stimulate the economy after the Asian Financial Crisis, absorb potential youth unemployment pressure (especially with state-owned enterprise reforms causing layoffs), and move towards mass higher education. This expansion was explosive. Enrollment numbers ballooned year after year.

Now, how do you rapidly scale up universities? As the analysis in “Global Humanities Rout?” points out, expanding wenke programs is significantly cheaper and faster than scaling up like programs. You don’t need expensive labs, specialized equipment, or vast amounts of consumables. You need classrooms, libraries, and faculty. Relatively speaking, the marginal cost of adding a wenke student is much lower.

The result? Universities across the country, especially local institutions eager to upgrade their status (from technical colleges to comprehensive universities), leaned heavily into wenke expansion. Even traditionally STEM-focused universities jumped on the bandwagon, sometimes, as one university president noted, using STEM funding to build out their wenke offerings. This wasn’t necessarily driven by market demand for these specific graduates, but by the economics and incentives of expansion itself.

Fast forward two decades. Data cited in “Global Humanities Rout?” shows that by 2022, humanities and social science graduates made up over half (around 51.7%) of all undergraduate degree recipients in China. This is a dramatic shift from ~20 years prior when STEM grads were the clear majority. While the growing service sector did create demand for some wenke skills, this massive, supply-driven expansion created a significant imbalance. Too many graduates were chasing too few suitable jobs, leading inevitably to the intense competition (内卷, or involution) and wage stagnation we see today.

So, when universities recently announced cuts to wenke programs – one source mentioned 1,422 wenke undergraduate programs were eliminated between 2019 and 2022 – it’s framed by some analysts not as the death of humanities, but as a necessary, perhaps overdue, market correction: “squeezing the bubble” (挤泡沫).

The AI Factor: DeepSeek and the New Anxiety

Just as this structural reckoning was underway, along came the AI revolution, epitomized by models like the recently popular DeepSeek. If wenke grads were already worried, AI seemed like the potential knockout blow.

Suddenly, AI could write reports, draft documents, generate marketing copy, translate languages, summarize research, even create art, music, and video. The fear: AI would automate away the very tasks that formed the core of many entry-level wenke jobs. Discussions exploded online, with hashtags like “DeepSeek Wenke” trending. The question intensified: If AI can do it faster and cheaper, why hire a human wenke grad?

However, digging deeper into the AI discussion reveals a more nuanced picture, as explored in “Will DeepSeeks Make Humanities Useless?”. The argument flips: AI might actually need humanities. DeepSeek’s viral success wasn’t just about its technical prowess; it was praised for its “human-like” conversational style, its humor, its occasional poetic flair – qualities likely stemming from high-quality, diverse wenke-infused training data carefully curated by humans.

Consider other examples: Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan model is reportedly favored by civil servants and teachers for its ability to generate appropriately formal and structured official documents (公文), demonstrating an understanding of specific communication norms. And the struggle for many Chinese AI image generators to match the aesthetic quality of models like Midjourney is often attributed to a lack of high-quality artistic training data – a wenke bottleneck.

The counter-argument, then, is that AI doesn’t eliminate the need for wenke skills; it changes it. Instead of replacing human writers or artists entirely, it might create new roles:

• AI Content Curators/Officers: Ensuring AI models are trained on diverse, high-quality, ethically sound data requires strong humanities judgment.
• Prompt Engineers: Crafting effective prompts to elicit desired AI outputs is becoming an art and science in itself, demanding linguistic precision and creative thinking.
• AI Ethicists: Guiding the responsible development and deployment of AI requires deep understanding of philosophy, law, and social impact.
• Augmented Creators: Wenke professionals can use AI as a powerful tool to overcome technical barriers (e.g., a historian using AI to visualize data, a writer using AI to generate illustrations). AI could become the great equalizer, allowing those with strong ideas but lacking technical skills (like coding or video editing) to bring their visions to life. New job titles like “Agent Developer” or “Multimodal Content Creator” are being envisioned.

This perspective reframes AI not as a destroyer, but as a potential catalyst for redefining and even elevating certain wenke skills, particularly creativity, critical judgment, and ethical reasoning – things AI currently struggles with.

A Crisis of Content and Confidence?

Beyond the market forces and technological shifts, there’s also an internal critique happening within China’s wenke education itself. Some commentators, including those cited in “Where Should Humanities Go?”, admit that criticisms aren’t entirely baseless. Some university courses are seen as “water courses” (水课), lacking rigor or relevance. Some academic research falls into low-level repetition or becomes overly theoretical, disconnected from societal needs – a point vividly illustrated in “Silent Humanities Student.”

This article “Silent Humanities Student” tells the story of Zhang Yuping, a young lecturer who spent years doing ethnographic research on China’s deaf community and their communication challenges. Her work won prestigious academic recognition (a national grant, publication in a top journal). But she felt this academic success didn’t translate into real-world impact. The deaf individuals she collaborated with wouldn’t read the dense academic paper. She painstakingly re-edited her fieldwork footage into a 90-minute documentary, hoping to share the lived experiences of the deaf community with a broader audience. Yet, finding a public venue proved difficult. She felt awkward showing it in her own classes.

Eventually, she screened it at a small, independent community space in Guangzhou called “Qiantai OSF.” The response was overwhelming. The audience, young and engaged, stayed late, asked insightful questions, and shared their own experiences. The event highlighted a deep hunger for meaningful public dialogue and connection, something often missing in formal academic settings or the polarized online world. It also underscored the value of these small, often precarious, independent spaces that try to bridge the gap between academic inquiry and public life. Zhang’s experience reflects a broader challenge: how can wenke research and teaching connect more effectively with society’s concerns?

This internal critique takes a much sharper, more provocative turn in the piece “Humanities Students Should Be High-Paid.” The author argues forcefully that the problem isn’t wenke itself, but the current state of wenke education in China, which they deem “backward” (落后). The core accusation is that many Chinese wenke programs and scholars have become detached from China’s own needs and narratives. They are accused of primarily studying and replicating Western theories and frameworks, acting as “translators” or “repeaters” (复读机) of foreign ideas, rather than developing unique Chinese perspectives or effectively telling China’s own story.

The author contrasts this with Western wenke, which they argue excels at creating value through storytelling and branding – citing examples like the markup on luxury goods (LV bags made in China sold for fortunes abroad) or the manufactured mystique around products like diamonds or Spanish ham. The argument is that Western wenke effectively serves Western economic and cultural interests. In contrast, this critique suggests, much of Chinese wenke is stuck in a mode of self-criticism (反思) and admiration for the West (崇媚洋外), a relic of a past era when China felt it needed to learn from abroad. Now, in an era of national confidence and competition with the US, this orientation is seen as counterproductive, failing to help build Chinese brands, shape a positive national image, or provide the cultural and ideological support the country needs. The author even uses the example of Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts & Design (清华美院) getting criticized for aesthetics perceived as unflattering or catering to Western stereotypes, suggesting such graduates lack value in the domestic market.

This is a strong, arguably nationalistic take, but it taps into a real debate about the direction and purpose of humanities education in contemporary China. Should it focus more on indigenous traditions and contemporary Chinese issues? Should it play a more active role in nation-building and cultural export? The low pay and perceived lack of value, from this perspective, stem directly from this alleged failure to align with national priorities and market needs.

The Enduring Value: Beyond Utility

Amidst all this anxiety and criticism, defenders of the humanities – both in China and globally – push back against a purely utilitarian view of education. As the article “Are Salary and Job Placement Rates Low…” asks, quoting thinkers like John Dewey and contemporary scholars, is the sole purpose of education to prepare “tool people” (工具人) for the job market?

The arguments for wenke‘s enduring value are familiar, yet crucial:

• Cultivating the “Whole Person”: Humanities foster critical thinking, empathy, historical consciousness, and ethical reasoning – essential components of informed citizenship and personal growth, not just job skills.
• Navigating Complexity: In a rapidly changing world filled with “fake news,” biased algorithms, and complex social challenges, the ability to analyze information critically, understand different perspectives, and make nuanced judgments is more important than ever.
• Meaning and Purpose: Humanities explore fundamental questions about human existence, values, and culture, providing sources of meaning and resilience in an often materialistic and anxious world. As one article asks, if imagination and ideas are secondary in a democracy, what’s the point of living in such a society?
• Driving Innovation: Even in tech, humanistic understanding is key. Steve Jobs famously attributed Apple’s success to the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Understanding human needs, desires, and experiences is crucial for designing truly useful and engaging products and services.
• Mitigating Risk: Economist Chen Zhiwu’s concept of “risk-mitigating human capital” (化险性人力资本) suggests that wenke disciplines are vital for creating social order, trust, and institutions that help societies manage risks – from financial crises to social conflicts to the ethical dilemmas posed by new technologies like AI.

Think back to Zhang Yuping’s documentary screening. The value wasn’t just in the academic research, but in the connection, the shared understanding, the “life impacting life” moment that unfolded in that small room – something difficult to quantify but deeply human.

The Path Forward: Reform, Relevance, and Reconnection

So, what’s the takeaway from all this? The “crisis” facing China’s wenke students is real, but it’s multi-layered. It’s partly a market correction after rapid, supply-driven expansion. It’s partly the universal challenge humanities face in proving their “utility” in a tech-centric world. It’s amplified by the disruptive potential of AI. And, importantly, it involves internal questions about the relevance, quality, and orientation of wenke education in China today.

The solution likely isn’t to declare wenke dead, but to reimagine its role. This might involve:

• Curriculum Reform: Making courses more relevant, incorporating interdisciplinary approaches (“New Humanities” – 新文科), integrating digital literacy and AI tools.
• Strengthening Public Engagement: Finding more ways for academic work to connect with society, like the efforts of Qiantai OSF, fostering dialogue beyond the campus walls.
• Focusing on Core Skills: Emphasizing transferable skills like critical thinking, complex problem-solving, communication, and cross-cultural understanding, which are valuable across industries.
• Addressing the “Relevance” Critique: Engaging with the debate about whether wenke education needs to be more grounded in Chinese context and contribute more directly to contemporary challenges and national narratives (though balancing this with academic freedom and universal values is key).

For young Chinese people weighing their futures, the choice of major feels heavier than ever. The pressures are immense. But the conversations happening now, however fraught, are vital. They force a reckoning with what society truly values, what kind of future it wants to build, and what role knowledge – in all its forms – should play in getting there. It’s a story still unfolding, one that reflects not just the anxieties of a generation, but the deeper soul-searching of a nation navigating its path in the 21st century. And you can bet we’ll keep watching, and reporting, from here.