Web Excursions 2022-05-15
A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression
The students’ off-campus research had been a highlight of the semester. I had already decided that the following week we would proceed to a local Porsche salesman, the profile subject of a student named Anna. The salesman told Anna that it was pointless to try to rip off his customers, because of everything a Sichuanese person must have gone through in order to accumulate enough money for a Porsche. “The people who are capable of buying luxury cars have exhausted every means to earn profits and they have coped with all kinds of people,” he said. “It’s impossible to deceive them.”
Among all my students that fall, nearly ninety per cent were only children. I learned that when asking this question I had to clarify what I meant by the word “sibling,” because otherwise students might include cousins in their responses. As families shrank, the term broadened—for many young people, a cousin was a kind of substitute brother or sister.
I found it hard to teach [the essay “The Three Gorges Project Is Beneficial”] for various reasons. First, nobody was allowed to argue about the Three Gorges Dam. An infinitely smaller problem, but one that occupied infinitely more of my energy, was that transition sentence [that goes “Their worries and warnings are well justified,” the essay continued, and then proceeded to the transition: “But we should not give up eating for fear of choking.”]
Chinese education traditionally emphasizes imitation of models and rote literary phrases, and my Fuling students diligently incorporated the transition into their argumentative papers. It infected other writing, too: personal narratives, dialogues, literary essays. I might be reading a paper about “Hamlet,” when suddenly a voice would boom out, worse than Polonius’s: “But we should not give up eating for fear of choking.” The words are a direct translation of yinyefeishi, a Chinese literary phrase. Over and over, I tried to explain that this sounds terrible in English.
Even if a student took a pro-government stance on a sensitive topic, he couldn’t fully engage with a counter-argument. And there was some risk for a teacher who played devil’s advocate while editing.
Some of my most powerful memories from the classroom in Fuling involve incidents in which I made a statement that touched, even obliquely, on a sensitive aspect of Chinese history or politics. At such moments, the room would fall silent, and students would stare at their desks. It was a visceral response, and it became the same for me—looking out over the bowed heads, my heart raced and my face grew hot. Initially, I considered these to be the instances when I felt most like a foreigner. But I came to realize it was the opposite: my body was experiencing something that must be common to young Chinese. The Party had created a climate so intense that the political became physical.
[With] the phrase “China and Taiwan,” [a student of mine] had stumbled into a forbidden zone: those two proper nouns can be linked by history, culture, geography, politics—but never by the conjunction “and.” Even the act of connecting these places linguistically implies that they are separate.
At the institute, I was provided with a list of unblocked English-language search engines, which I dutifully passed on to my classes, although, with the exception of Bing, I had never heard of any of these sites. They sounded like obscure rock bands: Dogpile, Yandex, WolframAlpha, Swisscows, DuckDuckGo. Even this third-tier-festival lineup was subject to cancellation: in 2019, during the first week of fall semester, a student could still do a DuckDuckGo search, but by week four the firewall made it DuckDuckGone. A site could be accessed only if it allowed content to be censored, like Bing, or if it remained so lightly trafficked that it didn’t draw attention.
students seemed accustomed to contradictions and mixed messages. They weren’t shocked that the university required classes in Xi Jinping Thought while tacitly encouraging students to contract with illegal-V.P.N. dealers, just as they weren’t shocked when one of those dealers turned out to be somebody with a sideline in art history.
That month, my department held a meeting about the incident with a Party official from the university. I explained what had happened, and an American professor asked if any topics were explicitly forbidden in our classrooms. In response, the Party official read from a statement, in English: “These include sex in a graphic or degrading manner, political opinion that may not be generally agreed upon, religious material promoting or degrading the tenets within, and topics deemed politically sensitive.”
the fear ran in two directions. Administrators were afraid of what students might do, and they also feared higher officials. With the parameters deliberately left undefined, outcomes were also uncertain
Personal essays about childhood often described devilishly designed competitions. One boy wrote about how, as a third grader, he had been enrolled in a supplementary math program that had six hundred applicants. An exam quickly winnowed the group down to sixty children, who were divided into an A team and a B team. From there, the program embarked on an endless series of examinations, with kids constantly demoted and promoted, like Premier League franchises.
The ultimate campus élite, the Brahmins of Sichuan University, occupied the School of Stomatology. At first, this mystified me—why such a fuss about oral medicine? But the School of Stomatology at Sichuan University’s West China Medical School is recognized as the best in the nation, and it took a remarkable 696 points to enter its program in clinical medicine. Other undergrads resented the stomatologists; my students said they held themselves apart. If asked about his major, a stomatologist might coyly avoid answering, like a Harvard grad who says he went to school “in Boston.”
despite their youth, many students were realists. A nonfiction student named Sarinstein—he created this name because he admired Sartre and Einstein—profiled a ten-year-old schoolboy. He observed how, in the classroom, the boy’s cohort had been seated, from front to back, according to their exam scores. Sarinstein wrote:
my students at Sichuan University were old souls. They knew how things worked; they understood the system’s flaws and also its benefits. The environment they were entering was essentially the same one in which their parents had worked: for the first time, China has been both stable and prosperous for a period that’s longer than a university student’s memory. When they wrote about their parents’ generation, and about the society that they would someday inherit, they could be completely cold-eyed
They are characterized by firm patriotism and nonchalant cynicism. Yet they seldom admire China with passion. They have witnessed corruption in Chinese bureaucracy as well as injustice in society, which they are not able to redress, so they always say, “Things are just like that.” . . .
Reading words like that felt heartbreaking but also inspiring: even the act of describing a situation with no easy solution is a kind of agency. Despite the stifling political climate and the soul-crushing gaokao routines, the Chinese educational system produced no small number of people who could observe and analyze, think and write.
But Li emphasizes that this is not a sign of dissidence. “They see Western democratic institutions as better than China’s current systems,” she writes. “But they see little value in immediately instituting a Western-style democratic order, because China’s current situation seems to demand the institutions that it has.”
In China, nationalistic propaganda might be effective for children and other people at a lower level, but there’s a tacit understanding that it won’t work as well for the highly educated. As long as these individuals have opportunities to advance and improve their lives, they are less likely to oppose authority. And the system doesn’t need to be hermetically sealed in the manner of “1984.” The vast majority of Chinese students who go abroad choose to return—for them, it’s as simple as yinyefeishi. If they were truly afraid of choking, they would remain in the United States.
I said that I had been impressed with my students’ understanding and analysis of the system around them. “But I don’t know what this means for the future,” I said. “Maybe it means that they figure out how to change the system. But maybe they just figure out how to adapt to the system. What do you think?” “We will adapt,” somebody said, and several others nodded. A third woman, one of the smallest in the group, said, “We will change it.”