An Open Day for a Closed Campus

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Today (April 18, 2026), Peking University—one of China’s two most famous universities, together with Tsinghua University—benevolently stages a “Campus Open Day,” inviting the public to “walk into PKU and encounter infinite possibilities.” It is, in fact, an undergraduate admissions event: prospective high school applicants and their parents are allowed onto campus so they can speak with current students and faculty. Even on this exceptionally generous occasion, however, the university’s official notice makes clear what “open” means in practice: students and parents must enter on foot by swiping their government-issued ID documents, admission is limited to a single entry, and students must also bring their student IDs—provided, of course, that they were fortunate enough to secure a reservation at one of four designated times before all the slots vanished.In other words, the annual “Open Day” does not so much demonstrate openness as commemorate its absence. It serves as a polite yearly reminder that Peking University, like Tsinghua University, remains closed to the general Chinese public.This is now four years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the country’s two most prestigious universities—both overwhelmingly funded by taxpayer money—continue to cling stubbornly to the closed-campus habits of the Covid era, as though ordinary citizens wandering through a university quad posed an intolerable institutional threat.There was, to be fair, a burst of public criticism in 2023. Chinese media voices called on these universities to reopen their gates and stop treating the pu…