Contra Trump

不平則鳴

 

On Heritage 遺 is an explanation of the rationale behind China Heritage. It features ‘Letter to Shan Tao’ 與山巨源絕交書 by Ji Kang 嵇康, one of the celebrated Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 竹林七賢, in which Ji famously broke off a friendship for political reasons.

In the first essay published in China Heritage, we discussed some of the unsettling aspects of the personalities, and political styles, of Mao Zedong and Donald J. Trump. Both Ji Kang’s ancient letter, as well as our consideration of the autocratic personality, came to mind when reading Why I’m Resigning by Alondra Nelson, published on 13 May 2025. Nelson was the principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from 2021 to 2023. She was the first African American and first woman of colour to lead OSTP.

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Ji Kang wrote his letter in the third century, during what Zhong Shuhe described as ‘a time of chaos and disunity’,

where the Confucian rites and laws have collapsed, scholars finally felt as though they were free to think and behave according to their natural propensities. It was an era in which people felt that they could act according to impulse and speak in a manner that was not circumscribed by the reactions of others, especially the power-holders.

Letters of resignation, bold protests of indignation and the retreat of high-minded officials and scholars from serving corrupt rulers are commonplace in Chinese letters. Even more frequent are stories of submission, complicity and betrayal. They can be summed up in the expression 逆來順受，須有通時 nì lái shùn shòu, xū yǒu tōng shí, ‘to survive adversity it is necessary to appreciate the times’. Other terms used to describe traditional survival skills include:

明哲保身、委曲求全、犯而不校、忍氣吞聲、曲意遷就、以求保全、順從、迎合, and so on.

They are all in evidence during the Xi Jinping era (2012-), just as they find echos in America’s Trump era (2016-).

The series Contra Trump is a continuation of our attempt over the years to note some of the discomforting parallels between the histories of modern China and America. We have pursued this parallax bilateralism in the spirit of what I think of as ‘Larrikin Sinology’ — the wary study of a serious subject undertaken in an irreverent mood. In our pursuit, we deploy some of the skills of China Watching to watch America.

With this in mind, we recommend Alondra Nelson’s letter to our readers. Even though he was supported by thousands of scholars, who petitioned the throne to vouchsafe his life, Ji Kang was ultimately executed for lèse-majesté.

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The Chinese rubric of this chapter — 不平則鳴 bù píng zé míng, ‘to clamour against injustice’ — echoes the rubric of our Contra Trump series, which is 不鳴則已 bù míng zé yǐ, ‘to remain silent is one thing…’, the implication of which is understood as being 一鳴驚人 yī míng jīng rén, ‘but people will be taken aback by the clamour’.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
16 May 2025

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Why I’m Resigning from Positions at the National Science Foundation and Library of Congress

Alondra Nelson

13 May 2025

Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a researcher, author, policy advisor, and nonprofit administrator.

Today, I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

Even as the White House threatens the foundational tenets of constitutional democracy and continues to slash funding for essential social services, it is tempting to hope that the public institutions charged with promoting and protecting knowledge will, nevertheless, soldier on with their mission. I did.

Since January 2025, scientists and librarians, program officers and policy analysts at the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, and other federal offices and agencies have focused on their work, despite an increasingly hostile political environment. We’ve also seen civil servants fired and accused of not making the mark, vendors’s contracts ignored, and grants and fellowships cancelled.

Perseverance has its limits. The erosion of these institutions’ integrity—and the growing realization that it is impossible to fulfill their missions in good faith—has made the cost of continuing untenable. This is why I must step away from my work with two federal institutions I care deeply about.

In both these roles, over the past few years, I’ve been asked to serve on diverse bodies that offer guidance about how the Executive and Legislative branches can be stewards of knowledge and create structure to enable discovery, innovation, and ingenuity. In the instance of the National Science Board, this ideal has dissolved so gradually, yet so completely, that I barely noticed its absence until confronted with its hollow simulacrum.

I have encountered increasing barriers to the exercise of honest counsel. These repeated obstacles of procedural circumvention, particularly insidious to those of us who have long advocated for more democratic and inclusive knowledge systems, represent not just personal frustration, but institutional regression.

Freedom of expression is not merely an abstract principle, or even a constitutional right, but a practical necessity for meaningful advisory work. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published as short stories in the late 1940s and as a novel in 1953, warned not only of the destruction of books, but of a society in which people had lost the desire to read them. The parallel today is not only the administration’s effort to destroy and suppress knowledge, but also the institution’s willingness to accept the cultivated irrelevance of it—a challenge that undermines any serious effort to conduct research, inform policy, or guide public institutions.

The National Science Foundation (NSF)—established as an independent agency through the National Science Act of 1950 and marking its 75th anniversary this week—traces its roots to Vannevar Bush’s landmark report, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” addressed to President Harry S. Truman. But we might also see the establishment of this premier research institution as reflecting a response to fears depicted by Bradbury. The NSF can be understood not only as a catalyst of scientific promise for national purpose, but also as a guarded response to fears about centralized control over knowledge and thought, shaped by the dark shadows of the Third Reich and the emerging Red Scare.

The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission.

But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.

Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.

Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a “consultant” in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.

This episode reflects a deeper concern: the erosion of meaningful guidance. I was still free to discuss my concerns at the board meeting, but it was increasingly clear that it was just a performance without any impact. The advisory body had been transformed into a ceremonial assemblage. Consultation occurred without consequence. When grant applications are vetoed and whole organizations restructured, the freedom to speak becomes meaningless when disconnected from the possibility of being heard.

All of this is threatened by the creeping normalization of authoritarian approaches to knowledge management and academic freedom. The National Science Board has not been disbanded like so many other statutorily established, independent agencies in the federal government. But preservation of form provides little consolation when function has been strategically neutralized, mirroring the backsliding that scholars have thoroughly documented: maintaining legitimacy for institutions that no longer honor their founding purposes. This hollowing out is not just about governance in the abstract, it has material consequences for which research questions get asked, which datasets get produced, which knowledge gets produced, and which perspectives shape our understanding of pressing societal challenges. It has consequences for the integrity of knowledge itself.

The second institution from which I am departing is also demonstrating symptoms of democratic decay. In 2023, I was appointed by the Librarian of Congress to the Scholars Council, which advises the Kluge Chairs program, the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity, and other library programming intended to get ideas out of the stacks and into society by “reinvigorat[ing] the interconnection between thought and action,” “bridging the divide between knowledge and power,” and “narrow[ing] the gap between thinkers and doers.”

Last week, the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, was summarily dismissed via an email addressed to “Carla” from a White House HR administrator. The Trump Administration claimed that she was fired for “things she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” It is true that Hayden was repeatedly on record as saying the Library should be for all Americans. And it is false that the Library, which is intended to hold all books published in the United States, lends books to children. The ouster of Hayden is part of a broader pattern of political targeting of women and Black public servants across the federal government.

Dr. Carla Hayden was a leader in the digitization of libraries and a steadfast advocate for their public mission. Her dismissal signals more than a routine personnel shift—it reflects a deeper contest over who controls the curation and dissemination of knowledge in the digital age. That contest became even more apparent two days later, when the Trump Administration fired her direct supervisor, Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights. Perlmutter’s office had just released a report concluding that while generative AI poses novel challenges to copyright law, these could be addressed through voluntary licensing and market-based solutions—rather than statutory changes to the fair use doctrine. At a time when questions about AI and intellectual property are front of mind, the Library of Congress’s oversight of the U.S. copyright system is more consequential than ever.

The steady accumulation of procedural adjustments, each seemingly minor, stand to systematically and collectively alter the purpose and impact of our institutions. The dismissal of Hayden, who took the helm of the Library of Congress with a vow to extend its resources to all of us, represents not merely a personnel change but a statement about what kind of knowledge stewardship is deemed acceptable.

To watch these changes unfold without naming them for what they are is to participate in a collective amnesia about how knowledge infrastructures shape power relations. Like the shopkeeper in an authoritarian society described by Vaclav Havel in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” who participates in his own oppression through small daily acts of complicity, placing a party slogan in his window not out of conviction but out of habit. To remain on advisory boards that have been stripped of meaningful advisory function is to become that shopkeeper, to lend legitimacy to a process that has been systematically delegitimized.

What then, is the responsible course of action? For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging. My resignation represents such a refusal, not a surrender of responsibility but an assertion of it.

This is not to condemn those who remain. There is value in continued presence, in bearing witness, in working for reform from within. But there comes a point when presence itself becomes an endorsement, when working within the system becomes indistinguishable from working for it.

In her Nobel lecture in 1993, the writer Toni Morrison observed:

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed.

The aim of my resignation is to break free of powers that seek to limit knowledge and silence voice. To signal that certain boundary lines have been crossed. To insist that advisory roles must expand knowledge and be more than appendages to predetermined decisions.

I follow political economist Albert O. Hirschman, in his seminal work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, who offered a framework for understanding responses to institutional decline. Exit (leaving) and voice (speaking up) need not be mutually exclusive strategies. My resignations are both, an exit that amplifies the voice of others. By departing these advisory roles, I aim to speak more clearly in my own language about what they have become and what they ought to be. This is not an abandonment of loyalty to these institutions’ missions, but rather, its highest expression.

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Source:

• Alondra Nelson, Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress, TIME, 13 May 2025

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