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No, views of Britain in language textbooks doesn’t make the cut.
The first – compulsory political thought classes comprise much too much study time – I’ve pretty much covered before. To clarify, my point has nothing to do with what is being taught in those classes. Let’s simplify things by leaving competing ideologies and above all the patronising word “brainwash” out of the debate. I only argue that the long hours students must spend in these classes every week is way out of proportion to their benefit. It’s an unjustifiable waste of study time: if a student spent two hours a month rather than two hours a week studying Marx-through-Jiang, that free time could be put to so much use.
The second: access is far from equal according to where you are and how rich you are.
This is the one criticism which an average Chinese person would agree with above all the others (that’s an educated guess … if you’ll forgive the pun). The money side of it is obvious: besides bribes and so forth, more money (or abused influence) gets your kids into the better schools and the better schools get them into the better universities.
But it’s also unfair by location: a top university like Peking University (PKU or Beida), where I study, accepts different quotas of students from province to province. Take Marie for example, who’s from Yunnan in China’s less-developed south-west. In her subject’s year, she tells me, there are 100+ students from Beijing, 100+ from Shanghai … and only 30 from Yunnan. Mind, I don’t have the figures on these quotas so this is anectodal for the moment. But it’s well known that this inequality exists, and Beida certainly takes more students from Beijing than from countryside provinces. Marie thinks the inequality is only worsening, and assumed things were the same at Oxford – she was surprised and delighted when I told her it isn’t.
Like Leonidas says, “the fact is that students in different provinces and cities have different opportunities to be educated”. He and I both wonder why the government isn’t pumping more money into scholarships and bursaries to address this problem, but I’ve no numbers to back this up so I’ll again zip up for now. I should also mention that we’re not talking about ethnicity here: in fact, students from ethnic minorities in China get an automatic percentage increase on their college entrance exam scores, helping them get into the best universities.
The third is more of a side-note than a productive criticism: the idea that China must educate its population better before it can be democratic. It’s Leonidas’ idea not mine:
“In a country whose population has [a] high education [standard], democracy is good. But if a people’s education is not high enough, it isn’t. If I’m not educated, I don’t know how to choose which opinion is right, which is wrong. … I would prefer to listen to only one opinion, and do it. Now, of course, it’s the government’s opinion.”
I disagree. High standards of education is necessary for a democracy to function well, but shouldn’t be taken as necessary to have a nascent democracy at all. And unless I’m misrepresenting Leonidas, he’s implying that until China’s education gets up to scratch (we’re mostly talking about the countryside here, which is comfortably over 50% of the population), democracy would be create more problems than it would fix. But that’s a great excuse for a single power to postpone indefinitely the ultimate curbing of its power. And surely the bigger stumbling block in choosing which opinion is right and which is wrong is not how educated you are but … there only being one opinion you’re told about.
Of course, the other point Leonidas is making is that education must be a priority for China. He thinks of it as China’s “biggest problem” and better education as the first step to freedom of speech. Well first step or no, freedom of speech tends to be more productive if the free speakers know what they’re talking about.
For the fourth – the system and teaching methods it promotes can stifle creative thought – I’ll let an email from Tony suffice to begin with. He’s in America at the moment doing a summer school at Yale, taking a Foreign Policy Decision Making course taught by a Yale professor. I asked him how the experience compared to the teaching at Beida. Here’s his word or two:
There are two interactive seminars each week, quite different from the lectures in PKU, which involves more people and less discussion. In Yale, we have more opportunities to raise questions and debate. …
I appreciate the learning style here. Students step into a specific field of study through reading the first-hand publications instead of learning from powerpoints prepared by their teacher. In PKU, too many courses are squeezed into one semester (7-8 for me, maybe more for students from other schools) so that students prefer to memorize the main points during final weeks rather than read the original writings. And many Chinese students have lost their interest in discovering. They want to know “what it is” or “what it should be” more than “why was that”. I guess the education system is responsible for this. Yet there are many factors standing behind it, including a large population, a planned social framework and a big government, almost equal to the size of the society. I understand that it’s easier to blame this system than to revise it.
But blame – lots of blame – is necessary to convince a bureaucracy to revise itself. Otherwise the system, like many of the over-pressurized and under-stimulated students it seems to produce, will continue to resemble this Ming dynasty civil service hopeful:
In the heat of a Beijing July, I’ve ironically been a bit snowed under recently, but here is a question which has been on my mind for a while:
Is there genuine justification (i.e. the time couldn’t be better used elsewise) for the number of hours China’s students spend note-taking while tired teachers give lectures on communist theory in their compulsory ‘Political Thought’ classes?
Matilda told me the more-or-less of how many hours this is, across China:
Primary school: 1hr a week
Middle school: 2 to 3hrs
High school: closer to 5hrs
University: 2hrs a week
Grad students: 1 to 2hr
N.B. A student risks being kicked out of school is he doesn’t show up for these classes. For a breakdown of what those classes consist of in university, here’s a sneak peak I had once of the class schedule of a Chinese friend doing her Masters at Beijing’s Mining and Technology University (in hours per semester):
Marxist Philosophy Principle (32hrs)
Marxist Political Economy Principle (32hrs)
Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought (24hrs)
Introduction to Deng Xiaoping Thought (40hrs)
Military Training (32hrs)
Anyway you tot that first set of numbers up, it comes to comfortably over a thousand hours by the time a Chinese student graduates from university. A thousand! Think of how a student could spend that time instead:
1) He could watch 666 episodes of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ on Youku.com and wonder at how much sex doctors have with their colleagues in American hospitals.
2) He could eat 7,347 packs of instant noodles.
3) He could mine 89,558,324 gold in World of Warcraft.
4) He could … oh I don’t know … study something else? Like Adam Smith! And the founding fathers of America! (Kidding.)
I will not be so cocky as to call this time wasted, but you all know I’m thinking it.
To understand communist ideology and how it has been applied by China’s leaders is, of course, to understand much of where modern China has come from. But this could surely be done in much less time. Leaving more time to study the other keystones which have built Chinese culture, state and society. A thousand hours could go a long way to ensuring the connection between China’s youth and the country’s long and rich history is not lost (as many Chinese intellectuals and, well, old people warn it is currently in danger of).
The problem, as I understand it, is not that China’s kids are being “brainwashed” (as much as many in the West seem to like the idea of China’s population being a homogenous Manchurian candidate in a Mao suit) but that many students attending these classes simply find them too boring to pay attention, and so zone out on a lot of hours they could better spend swotting the gao kao – or better still, getting enough sleep while swotting the gao kao.
Matilda described a typical homework assignment for one of these classes: take Marx’s saying “the road is long and with many obstacles” and apply it to different situations – the expected answer being how after last century’s revolutions China now has a bright future. My concern isn’t that this is communist propaganda so much that it sounds mind-numbingly boring. Matilda for one hates these “so so boring” classes, and would prefer to study her favourite philosopher Kant in them. And Tony tells me his politics teachers often use these classes to back-handedly (or up front) criticize current government policies.
Just some preliminary thoughts on a topic I’ve yet to really prod at…
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UPDATE: Tony just emailed me with this:
haha, I sometimes skip those classes (military training only appeared twice in that semester thus having a bad grade). Students usually surf the net or do other reading in class i.e. just physically appear in the classroom. But then the final week is tough and I forgot almost everything after finished the exams. However, I guess one of the strong influences of political education is the dialectical thinking pattern of the Chinese people.
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Oh, and Leonidas drives the point home:
These political classes are just for show, it doesn’t work. The students don’t take it seriously. The teachers don’t take it seriously.
On June 1st, Timothy Geithner came to Peking University and gave this speech. Yes, it’s now the 10th. I waited nine days before posting because 9 is an auspicious number in China, signifying eternity – like the eternal prosperity I wish for Sino-American relations. Obviously.
Two nicely consecutive articles about the speech are the Washington Post’s “Geithner Tells China Its Holdings Are Safe” and the Global Times’ “Geithner’s assurances fall on deaf ears“, which claims such assurances
even drew laughter from the primarily student audience at Peking University, where he studied Chinese in the 1980s, reflecting skepticism in China about the government’s huge holding of US government debt…
What’s for certain is that Geithner was all smiles and telling China exactly what it wanted to hear, whether they believed it or not. The speech clearly must have been mind-numbingly boring to sit through. There isn’t much chance of anything interesting in a political speech given to a country who is bankrolling the speaker’s treasury. Come to think of it, there isn’t much chance of anything interesting in a political speech, full stop.
I’m not the only uninterested one here. Tony and I were chatting about the speech, which didn’t attend (although he was at John McCain’s similarly soporific one on campus last month), partly due to the draconian control on who could get in. The student audience who “laughed” at Geithner were selected by the Office of International Relations (I’d be surprise if the Global Times journalist wasn’t exaggerating the facts to fit his argument). And the questions were pre-selected, reminding Tony of Bill Clinton’s speech at Beida in 1999 – shortly after the NATO bombing – where the questions were supposedly allocated to students by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
All in all, Tony tells me, he can’t bring himself to care much about what Timothy Geithner said. So for anyone thinking the visit of Timothy Geithner sent ripples through the student population at Peking University – whether in reassuring them ala the Washington Post’s headline or angering them as in the Global Times’ – think again. Granted, I’m at the far edge of the Beida pond, but no ripples reached me.
Stay online for an essay by Zhangning which spins off this topic at another angle, after the jump.
To no one’s surprise, there’s nothing more than a quiet breeze on the campus of Peking University twenty years after hundreds of its students were killed. To mark the occasion, a few quick thoughts on the back of a year studying Chinese in Beida (short-hand for PKU) as a foreign student:
- What strikes me in terms of students speaking out openly is the absence not only of the anti-authority voices which identified their predecessors twenty years ago, but the absence of any kind of open engagement with contemporary politics that you expect in a top university, and see in universities everywhere else in the world. Their silence over the Sun Dongdong incident on their own campus is a good example (I blogged about it here).
- It’s not just that they know their futures will be better served in a stable political environment and they have more to lose than previous generations (the obvious point). It’s that the majority has an iron belief in the current administration as working successfully to give them a better life. And it was talking with students on May 4th which made it clear to me the extent to which their priorities have changed from patriotism to individualism.
- This all isn’t to say, of course, that there’s no kind of political discussion going on about the “incident” in Beida. There’s a lot. It just isn’t out in the open air for the world – and it’s reporters – to witness. It’s in quiet dorms and crowded canteens. I think the angle of students being intimidated into silence is wildly overplayed in some of the Western media (not to name names or anything). Yes, students are acutely aware of the risks of speaking up, but our press should stop feeding the misconception that China is something out of ‘1984’ where 1989 is concerned.
- There is a very clear control in China over information about what happened twenty years ago last night (James Fallows discusses this on his blog). As Leonidas put it to me, “sometimes a student won’t talk about it not because he doesn’t want to, but because he doesn’t know about it”. Tony, on the other hand, dismissed off-hand the idea that Beida students are in the dark: information seeps easily enough onto the internet.
- But it’s apparent that their dorm discussions are in a different ballpark to those of their counterparts two decades ago. While democracy is still an appealing model, Western ideas no longer hold sway for them purely on merit of being Western. Most consider themselves less naive than their predecessors, and believe that radical reform or protesting simply isn’t the way to fix China’s problems – just as some think of their futures as brighter for the failure of 1989 and the economic miracle which followed it.
All in all, two points: PKU today is as far from 1989 as it is from Orwell’s 1984. I’ll leave the final words with Tony on how fast the game is changing:
I recognise that the government now just does not want to mention [the incident], only to escape from it. … Ten years in the future [they] will probably just need to publish a conclusion on the 80s, mentioning ‘something really bad in 1989, which was the only choice we could take’. And then the problem is over.
My thoughts go out to the families of those who were killed that day. We will not forget it.
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P.S. While I’m on topic, Tony tells me from a friend of his doing an internship with CNN Beijing that CNN will be coming onto PKU campus today to conduct interviews with students. What exactly do they expect the students to say? Surely not anything … oh I don’t know, mildly interesting? Expect lots of Communist Youth League members smiling into camera.
And to those kind folks who have recently blocked Twitter and Flickr in China: besides my twitter-box top-left, I use Flickr to display all photos on this blog, now invisible to anyone in China without a proxy until I move them. I see you are branching out into web design, internet police. Thanks for your constructive criticism: I really did need more white space.
Following on from Jack’s thoughts on the ten year anniversary of the NATO bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, I asked the younger Tony (former secretary general of the model UN, if you remember) for his take. I myself find how Tony’s classmates seemed to have been indoctrinated against the US in ’99, and then reacted to 9/11 as a result, fascinating…
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I was still in primary school when the accident happened. That was a gloomy Monday, May 10th, 1999. Early in the morning after the flag-raising ceremony, the headmaster came to the front, protested against the US-lead NATO, and asked all the students to repeat him, sentence after sentence. I guessed primary schools, junior and senior highs and universities were using the same protesting words, full of various “-isms”. We could not grab the whole meaning of the slogans. We just repeated them.
On my way back home, buses were rushing on the street, sending protesting college students to the US embassy. Dazzling red flags hung on the outside of the buses, indicating which university they belonged to. Later on came the evening newspaper, in which Xinhua published photos of furious citizens throwing stones to the embassy.
I wasn’t exited at that time, nor indifferent. Just like many other classmates, I was watching the fun.
That reminds me of the day after September 11th, 2001, when I was in junior high. At that time, it was routine for us to write short articles and hand them in every week to our Chinese teacher, who was a middle-aged lady, strict but respectable. I cannot explain why, all of a sudden, everyone was writing under the title “US was bombed” unanimously. Even more ridiculous, all told the story with a cynical tone, saying “this was the revenge that the US deserved to get”, without a single word related to terrorism, without any feeling of compassion. After all, the mass media didn’t say such things, and neither did my family members.
We were scolded by our teacher the next day. “Don’t you have friends and relatives in the US? How can you be so cold, indifferent, or even teasing when you saw families losing their members and desperate people anxiously waiting for their relatives to be rescued out of ruins. You are taking pleasure in other’s misfortune. That is shameful.” These are the words I will never forget in my life.
In regards to Chinese nationalism, it is too vague a concept for me to define. The Chinese are prone to describe the Western world as “diversified”, without noticing its universal ethics and beliefs. Similarly, when it comes to nationalism, the western side tends to take China as a single monolithic actor, but they overlook its diversity of ideas, mixed and disorderly during the transformation era.
I began to understand that my two experiences are inter-related. Yes, the United States had done shameful things and China has the right to protest, to impose pressure against the US government.
But it doesn’t mean that I, as an independent individual, should hate all US citizens.
It doesn’t mean I have been granted legitimacy to throw stones into their embassy, regardless of existing international law.
It doesn’t justify the actions of Milosevic, under the hidden logic, “we support all the things imperialists oppose”.
I’m not talking about common sense, but it is a formidable task for Chinese people to separate man and state, to recognize the principles of international practice, to strengthen the immovable belief in humanism and rationalism. Such a tortuous journey started as early as the 1840s. The cost has been tremendous but we are still on our way.
Let’s move on.
Tony is a humblingly politically aware friend of mine at Beida (short hand for Peking University). No surprises, I guess, as his dad works in the Foreign Ministry. He’s 21, a Beijinger – grandparents from Hubei – in his third year of a Politics and International Relations course here. And last week, he was secretary general of the United Nations.
Yes, yes, the model UN – where students take on the roles of diplomats of other countries and battle out the issues of the day. It’s incarnation on Chinese soil is held at Beida each spring (they have a website). I first got wind that Tony was this year’s secretary general when I saw him walking across campus in a suit, shuai as Shanghai, followed by a small army of delegates passing him half a dozen mobiles to answer like a troupe of bizarrely up-market phone hawkers.
So I asked Tony to tell us a bit about his experience, in particular how Chinese students react to the diplomatic setting of model UN. He very kindly sent me this long email:
I cannot express to you how delighted I am to see nearly 500 delegates coming from five continents to discuss global issues and exchange their point of views. During a whole year’s preparation, what continuously comes to my mind is a question like this: how can we Chinese students understand ourselves better in this international event? 170 years ago, China was drawn into the tide of globalization. Because of the lack of knowledge about the outside world, the uneasy feeling towards open-up lasts till now. In China, there is a old saying: it is commendable for a man to know himself truly.
But the 21st century is an epoch in which we can only know ourselves until we know the world. The Chinese are now building up new identities through comparison with other countries, through conflict and compromise when dealing with various challenges on the global agenda. This is exactly what we do in the model UN. In China, in fact, the activity itself is on the rise and students are now learning to express themselves according to international rules, trying their best to enter into the common language system, putting themselves in other’s shoes and then look back at their own country.
But I digress. What I would like to share with you is the setbacks faced by Chinese students in the model UN and probably also the obstacles faced by China in becoming a responsible stakeholder.
The Asian International Model UN (AIMUN) is neither an English contest nor a competition in choosing for the best delegate. Many Chinese participants speak fluent English, acquire the rules of procedure and devote themselves in every discussion. But they still face obstacles in communication. On the last day of the conference, a faculty advisor from South America expressed to me her concern that many Chinese delegates speak out of point and always use Chinese during unmoderated caucus, thus forming small blocks in the conference room.
I also mentioned to you last time about the “draft resolution (DR)” issue. In AIMUN, there could be only one DR passed per topic area. For many Chinese students, sponsoring a DR and persuading other delegates to vote for it into the final resolution is a great pride and an expression of the contribution he/she has made in solving a certain global problem. I guess there are basically two reasons why the Chinese care about being the sponsor of DR a lot. Firstly, some students/universities become too utilitarian when it comes to awards.
Many of them take AIMUN a competition held by Beida and their goal is to win the best delegate/delegation award. As an organizer, I understand that many students come to Beijing funded by local schools, so they need to bring a certain “title” home. In fact, many Chinese universities treat it quite seriously as if this is an award given by PKU officials.
The second reason is simple, the Chinese students used to be minorities in model UN conferences. For example, when asked about their experience in Harvard US National model UN, the Chinese participants will often express to you the annoyance of their well-prepared DRs being separated by aggressive Western delegates so that they can never gain the leadership in shaping the final outcome. Though AIMUN is an international conference, most of the delegates are coming from Asian countries. After all, many Chinese delegates think this is a conference held in China and they have some advantages to let others rally around the Chinese flags.
This may seem interesting, but it did give me a headache last week. In 2-3 committees, piles of DRs were of poor quality, conflicts rode over cooperation, but no one would compromise. Last week in our model ASEAN 10+3 Ministerial Summit, when discussing about the pirates in Malacca, two DRs were backed by different country blocks and both were not willing to give in or merge their resolutions with the other. The debate nearly led to personal attack between two Chinese delegates (and in fact, the boy made that girl cry because of his harsh words). Fortunately, they combined the two DRs into a new one because the meeting was coming to an end.
I also found out that Chinese delegates became somehow out of mind when involved in discussions about international law/institutions. That could be explained in some part by the lack of multilateral diplomatic practice of China. This year, we had the UN General Assembly-Legal, which involves 134 delegates discussing international law and global terrorism. This is the largest committee among 12 in AIMUN 2009. In fact, whether we should set up a legal committee this year raised heated discussion among the secretariat, because most of the delegates are not familiar with how a legal committee works.
Not to our surprise, the discussion was not at all “legal” and consensus became more difficult to build among such a number of delegates. But anyway, I think it is a step forward in China to raise university students’ awareness about how IR and international law are interrelated.
I must to confess that organizing international model UN activities is not without embarrassments. I think there’s no need for me to list a few, but some topics are indeed not welcome here in Beida and the school also forbid the association to send delegations abroad when such topics was chosen in other model UN conferences (I remembered the Harvard National model UN once modeled a committee after the 1952 CPPCC and Beida refused to issue students approvals). We also invited 15 delegates representing NGOs in AIMUN, which irritated the university a lot.
The problem is, the organizing committee involves a lot of foreign students in Beida, it is indeed an embarrassment for me to explain to them what is allowed and what is not. Sometimes I am the person who negotiates and compromises with various bureaus, cuts down sensitive topics and lessens the number of foreign delegates in order to make AIMUN survive. After all, it is not that serious like National People’s Congress, right? We are just running a student activity. See if we can discuss these issues next time, Alec. I hope it will interest you as it interests me.
Any thoughts or takes on this? Is this model UN for China’s leaders of tomorrow as important as the National People’s Congress? Do the actions of these Chinese delegates representing foreign countries say anything about attitudes towards multilateral diplomacy in China? Tony would love to hear some reactions, as he is considering writing his thesis on this…
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