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The Girl From Harvard, the Girl From China
What it's like to live a double life.
- BY ZARA ZHANG
- NOVEMBER 30, 2015 - 10:03 AM
There are now over 300,000 Chinese students enrolled in American colleges or universities, up 10.8 percent from the year before and more than from any other country. The surge is bringing billions of dollars stateside and changing the face of American universities. It's also changing lives like mine. I recently started my junior year at Harvard, and I still sometimes feel like I'm living a double life. In China, I'm known as "the girl from Harvard." At Harvard, I'm known as "the girl from China." Neither truly tells my story.
China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education's role as a major and growing node of connection between the world's two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
In China, everyone puts too much stock in the fact that I go to Harvard — or more accurately, that I got in. I'm asked to review application essays, predict U.S. college admission results, help youngsters choose which American college to attend, and sometimes even dispense advice on romantic relationships (a subject on which Harvard, not surprisingly, lacks any particular curricular focus). High school students and their parents treat me as if I have an encyclopedic knowledge of America's higher education system, asking me what kind of students Princeton might like, or which SAT II subject tests a student should pursue. More than twice, I have been asked why Yale rejected me. (If I knew, of course, I would have already dropped out of Harvard and promptly gotten rich advising anxious parents.) In China, a U.S. education is often seen as superior, and a Harvard education is perceived as the best of those.
Yet I often find it hard to convey certain parts of Harvard life. For example, it is difficult to explain the notion of a "liberal arts education" to people who are conditioned to an education system that requires students to sign up for majors even before applying to college. It is harder still to convey the degree of freedom that we get in shaping our own college career in the United States. While my friends who are attending universities in China complain about a compulsory, dry course on Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, I get to choose from a wide variety of courses in the humanities, social sciences, and languages. Most Chinese people are also puzzled when they hear that I only spend, at most, half of my time on academic work, with the other half devoted to social life and extra-curricular activities. In China, a university (whose Chinese name literally translates into "big study") is a place where one studies, while in America, I'm conditioned to feel that I would be wasting my Harvard career if I spend all my time immersed in books.
Meanwhile, at Harvard, I'm just one of many, surrounded by world-class debaters and violinists, young CEOs of budding tech startups, and people with well-known last names. Whatever I feel I'm good at, there is always someone who's better. In China, I'm called "one in a thousand," which is supposed to mean I'm exceptional — but at Harvard the statement is literally true. The sheer concentration of talent far surpasses even top Chinese schools like Peking University. While competition to get into China's top universities is almost unimaginably steep, many students of those same institutions, upon finishing their undergraduate careers, flock to the United States to attend graduate school.
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At Harvard, where I operate mostly in English, I sometimes find it hard to make classmates and friends understand what it means to be one of relatively few Chinese undergraduates on Harvard's famed campus. (Many larger U.S. schools like Michigan State, Ohio State, and UCLA have significantly higher percentages of Chinese enrollment.) People in Cambridge, MA expect me to understand slang, get references to American pop culture, and appreciate jokes that involve irony, which plays a much smaller role in Chinese humor. Going to primary school back home, being different meant being punished by the teacher; but in America, being different is cool. Chinese culture prizes uniformity, whereas American culture prizes individuality. I was shocked when I met professors here who encouraged students to address them by their first names — something that is unthinkable in China, where concepts of authority and seniority draw nonnegotiable lines between students and teachers, children and parents, the young and the old.
I've also been struck by the "otherness" that each culture associates with the other, as well as the degree of mutual curiosity between two peoples who have heard so much about each other. In China, I'm responsible for representing the real America in front of people whose only sources of information about the United States are generally Hollywood movies and hearsay. At Harvard, by contrast, I'm faintly exotic, unlike the better-represented Chinese American students. I'm responsible for representing the real China, dispelling any myths or misconceptions about the People's Republic. Whenever the word "China" is mentioned in a class, the professor often throws a meaningful glance at me — the personification of the 1.4 billion.
Every day, a mild clash of civilizations plays out in my own life. I took a class called "the history of sexuality in the modern West" — something that could never be taught in China, where the word "sex" is rarely uttered in public.
I see my classmates enter into heated and informed debates about the current presidential election, and wonder at how much they care about their country's political future, because they have a stake in itI see my classmates enter into heated and informed debates about the current presidential election, and wonder at how much they care about their country's political future, because they have a stake in it — something that can hardly be said about my country, where presidents are picked through opaque backroom dealings years in advance. I worry about the political correctness of my diction in a diverse country where conversations surrounding race, gender, and sexual orientation can become sensitive — something that I hardly think about back home because they are not acceptable topics of national dialogue to start with. And for the first time in my life, I have found myself part of a minority called "Asian." Growing up in a fully Asian society, I had always been surrounded by people who shared my skin color and cultural heritage, and I look at the recent controversies surrounding racial tensions on American campuses with wide eyes.
Ultimately, neither "the girl from China" nor "the girl from Harvard" tells my story adequately. I am perhaps best described as "the girl who went from China to Harvard," a path that has become less unusual as the number of Chinese students in American universities continues to rise. If China will one day become a more democratic and open society, it will probably be a result of the effort of this large group of culturally hybrid individuals whose heads are now used to Western thinking — but whose hearts are unchangeably Chinese.
Photo credit: Getty Images News
Chinese Students in America: 300,000 and Counting
More Chinese students are studying in the U.S. than ever before.
- BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
- NOVEMBER 16, 2015 - 1:56 PM
- BETHANY.ALLEN
- @BETHANYALLENEBR
In 1981, when Erhfei Liu entered Brandeis University as an undergraduate, he was only the second student from mainland China in the school's history. "I was a rare animal from Red China," Liu said in a Sept. 1 interview with Foreign Policy, "an alien from the moon."
Now, Chinese students are by far the most visible international presence at many universities across the United States, and their numbers continue to grow. This year, during the 2014-2015 academic year, the number of Chinese students studying stateside was 304,040, a 10.8 percent increase over the 2013-2014 academic year, according to a just released report by the nonprofit Institute of International Education (IIE). This is the sixth year in a row that China has been the leading place of origin for international students in the United States. Out of the more than 974,000 international students currently in the United States, almost one in three is now Chinese.
The number of Chinese international students has increased nearly fivefold since the 2004-2005 academic year, when there were 62,523 Chinese students stateside. Evan Ryan, U.S. assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, attributed the huge increase to rising incomes in China, as well as the excellence of American education. "There's a growing [Chinese] middle class interested in their children's education," Ryan told FP in an interview. "Globally, people think that you will get the best education here in the United States. The Chinese want to be competitive in the 21st century."
Particularly remarkable is the fast rate of growth in the undergraduate student population. Chinese graduate students once far outnumbered their undergraduate counterparts at U.S. schools, but by 2015, 41 percent of Chinese students in the United States were undergraduates, compared with 39.6 percent for graduate students. Peggy Blumenthal, senior counselor to the president at IIE, attributes the increase in Chinese undergraduates to theexpansion of international high schools in China, where students improve their English and prepare for U.S. tests such as the SAT. "Rather than spending all their time preparing for Chinese tests," Blumenthal told FP in an interview, "they learn how to present themselves in ways which are much more helpful" for acceptance to U.S. universities.
The dramatic rise in the number of Chinese students in the United States has led in some cases to concerns about the students' ability to integrate into U.S. campus and social life, which often centers on sports, social clubs, and community organizations that may be unfamiliar to Chinese students. College administrators and Chinese students themselves have noted their tendency to socialize primarily with each other rather than engaging with the broader student community. While it is normal to seek out others who share the same language and culture, "the bigger the cohort," said Blumenthal, "the easier it is to do that." In response, many campuses are being proactive about helping Chinese students engage in campus and community life.
The University of Illinois nowbroadcastsfootball games in Chinese.The University of Illinois now broadcasts football games in Chinese. Purdue University in Indiana has hiredChinese-speaking counselors to staff campus mental health centers. University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, where one in five students is Chinese, hasprovided instruction to professors on how to correctly pronounce Chinese names.
Even with the challenges, Blumenthal views the influx of Chinese students not just as a net positive for the Chinese students themselves, but also for their American classmates. "America is going to be dealing with China as a partner and as a competitor for years to come," she said. "By having the opportunity to engage with undergraduates as peers, it will provide Americans students with the skills they need to be effective in the workforce." U.S. authorities echo the sentiment, saying student exchanges form an important part of public diplomacy. "Having these Chinese students on U.S. campuses helps to build a bridge between China and the United States," said Ryan. "When we have qualified Chinese students on U.S. campuses and qualified Americans on Chinese campuses, we can build stronger connections between the two countries."
It's not just about bilateral bonhomie; the influx of Chinese students into the United States is also big business. In the 2014-2015 academic year, Chinese students pumped $9.8 billion into the U.S. economy through tuition and fees, according to the IIE report. That can make a big impact on the local level. In and around Iowa City alone, for example, it's estimated that Chinese studentscontribute around $100 million to the local economy.
Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images
The Eagle, the Dragon, and the 'Excellent Sheep'
Elite colleges in both the United States and China increasingly produce graduates with similar desires -- and similar flaws.
- BY JANET EOM
- OCTOBER 20, 2015 - 5:00 PM
Former Yale University English professor William Deresiewicz's book,Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, created a firestorm in the United States when it was released in August 2014. "The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them," Deresiewicz wrote of Ivy League students in an article in the New Republic about his book. "The result is a violent aversion to risk." A year later, Deresiewicz's ideas caught fire again — in China. In late July, a Chinese-language article titled "The Self-Serving Elite and Ivy League Sheep," published in Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend, went viral on WeChat, China's huge mobile messaging platform. It appropriated Deresiewicz's argument, but added a twist: Contrary to popular belief, American students are as terrified of failing as Chinese students, and the American universities that produce them are just as broken as their Chinese counterparts.
The Southern Weekend article compares two hypothetical students: Nerdy Chinese Xiaoming, who gets into elite Tsinghua University in Beijing by hitting the books, and an outgoing American named Joe who gains admission to Yale through his record of leadership and excellence in sports. According to the article, the two seem different but are not: a Chinese emphasis on grades, and an American emphasis on resume-enhancing extra-curricular activities, are both a form of "credentialism," which the Chinese-language piece identified as a "core value" of both Chinese and American elite students.
The comparison is not a stretch. In May 2012, Qian Liqun, a former Chinese literature professor at prestigious Peking University, famously coined the term "self-serving elite" to describe otherwise "intelligent, worldly, and experienced" Chinese students at schools like Peking and Tsinghua who "exploit a system to achieve their own goals." Once these people assume power, Qian believed, they are prone to becoming especially corrupt members of a bureaucracy already renowned for its corruption. For their part, elite American students, at least according to Deresiewicz, often enter the world with "no sense of purpose," or worse, "no understanding of how to go about finding one." That means they are easily co-opted. In her 2008address at Harvard's graduation, university President Drew Faust answered a question she said the school's graduates frequently asked her: Why are so many of them ending up on Wall Street? "I think you are worried because you want your lives not just to be conventionally successful, but to be meaningful, and you are not sure how those two goals fit together," the Harvard president answered.
Revealingly,
Faust's address to Harvard students in 2008 went viral online in China, albeit seven years later.Faust's address to Harvard students in 2008 went viral online in China, albeit seven years later.In March 2015, when Faust visited Beijing and met with President Xi Jinping, whose own daughter graduatedfrom Harvard in 2014, the two agreed to "promote educational exchanges and deepen cooperation, to better serve the development of Sino-U.S. relations." Faust and Xi shook hands for the cameras, and Chinese students circulated the photo, shown above, with a translation of Faust's 2008 Harvard Baccalaureate address pasted underneath.
As Xi's decision to send his daughter to Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests, Chinese have long admired American-style liberal arts education and its spirit of open-minded inquiry. Lately, they've taken to comparing their own system to it. "Nowadays, many people are disappointed with Chinese universities," the Southern Weekend article lamented, adding that students "think there is little creativity or sense of social responsibility." Many students have voted with their feet; in the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students have forsaken their country's education system to pursue degrees in the United States. In 2014, 274,439 Chinese students were studying in the United States, comprising 31 percent of all international students in the country; ten years ago, that figure was just 11 percent.
Chinese educators have been aware of student desire for a more critical education for some time, and have periodically pushed for more flexibility in Chinese curricula. The Yuanpei Program, a selective liberal arts track at Peking University founded in 2007, is meant to provide students with"freedom to explore and choose a professional space" towards the "pursuit of higher goals." Instead of immediately declaring a major, students spend two years replacing core courses with a range of literature and social science theory; rather than choosing courses according to requirements, they choose what interests them. Then there's Boya College at Sun Yat-Sen University, launched in 2009, which admits 30 college freshmen each year to study the humanities and social sciences in small classes. The program aims tocultivate "scholars instead of millionaires," individuals who place great value on cultural understanding, not just economic advancement. Similarprograms at two of Shanghai's most esteemed institutions, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, were established in 2005 and 2009.
The popularity of the remixed Excellent Sheep article says much about the convergence of values among younger Chinese and Americans.
Talking to middle- and upper-class young Chinese about their aspirations, one hears many of the same notes that a student at Stanford or Swarthmore might hit.Talking to middle- and upper-class young Chinese about their aspirations, one hears many of the same notes that a student at Stanford or Swarthmore might hit. Wu Qinyu, a senior government major at Peking University who previously spent a month living with a host family outside of Los Angeles, told me, "I still don't know what I want. I need to travel to new places and find my path." She's been to Japan, where she led a conference for students aspiring to political leadership, and spent a semester in Hong Kong as an exchange student. She has her own column on cultural and social issues in Asia Pacific Daily, a Hong Kong-based publication of China's state-run Xinhua News Agency; she will soon publish a book of her articles in English.
"Americans have this picture of what Chinese students must be like," said Alyssa Farrelly, who studied abroad at Peking University in 2009 while getting her bachelor's degree in International Studies at American University. "But when they meet a fellow classmate in China, they realize 'Oh, this person also likes running or theater or whatever outside of school too. They're not robots.'" Farrelly now works at Project Pengyou, a non-profit building a network of young Americans with first-hand experience in China. Matt DeButts, who taught undergraduate English and international relations at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing as a Princeton in Asia Fellow, had a similar impression, telling Foreign Policy that he felt his students "were quite similar to American students, just operating in different parameters." In his view, the school put a higher emphasis on test scores, memorization, and ideological courses like Leninism and Marxism. "But the students were often doing incredible things on their own, translating poetry, attending game theory courses at other universities, or looking into veterinary science." He said that kind of ranginess is still viewed in China as a "cocked eyebrow kind of thing" whereas in the United States, "there's almost a race to see who's more quirky."
Education that encourages far-flung curiosity, however, is still a limited phenomenon in China. Now, some Chinese students are trying to change that. Fang Jun, a first-year sociology Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University in Illinois, who holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from China and has spent a year teaching at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, is part of a cohort of liberal arts ambassadors sharing their U.S. liberal arts experiences with an audience back home. Chinese education is "more a tool of controlling, than a tool to cultivate your mind," he said. Fang believes cultivating students who can think outside the box is important for the country's future. "Most policymakers don't have this long-run outlook; they want to focus on the current moment. I can't blame them because they are practical," Fang acknowledged. "But I feel I have this responsibility to share with people what a true education is."
In 2009, Chen Yongfang, a Chinese student at Bowdoin College, published a Chinese-language book, A True Liberal Arts Education, which he co-authored with fellow students Lin Nie of Franklin and Marshall College and Li Wan of Bucknell University. In it, he urges Chinese society to embrace the kind of education he received in the United States, one that will "foster your identity." In 2013, Chen published another book, Traverse the Ivory Tower: My Academic Journey at Bowdoin, which is a collection of his undergraduate essays and interviews with college administrators. Lin Feng, who spent two years at Peking University before transferring to Swarthmore College in the United States where he now studies political science and economics, is already thinking about what he can do when he returns to China. "If I have a chance to return to Peking University, I will try to introduce this liberal arts experience," he said, noting that despite the existence of Yuanpei, Chinese students still aren't used to challenging conventional ideas and speaking up in class. "The first thing I can do is open a course that is taught to encourage student participation and devotion," he said.
China's educational problems, unlike America's, at least have the convenience of a single nemesis: the gaokao, an extremely competitive national college entrance exam instituted in 1952, that determines who gets in where. As a result, "students are not going to take risks to do something different, to challenge the way gaokao essays work. They are not able to take risks because the gaokao is so important," said Fang. Some think that this kind of training stunts critical thinking. "We are taught a right way to write. We aren't trained to have our own thoughts," said Xin An, a junior English major at Peking University who has studied in both the United States and the United Kingdom. She added that her high school teachers in China had advised her to copy the style of famous writers.
Even the gaokao's victors can become its victims. As a Peking undergraduate, Huang Qiuyuan studied finance and international relations. The year she took the gaokao, she had the highest score in Shandong Province, the second-most populous province in China with nearly 96 million people. "Shandong is famous for competitive education," Huang said. "I had this feeling. I know if I want a change in my life, I need to do very well." Her score was so impressive that the Peking University admissions officer for Shandong Province flew from Beijing to her high school. But even for top students like Huang, their gaokao score determines their departments — high-scoring students receive priority to get into lucrative majors, such as finance and economics, while low-scoring students are relegated to unpopular departments, in most cases arts and language. Students often know little to nothing about their major when they enroll. When Huang and her parents ate lunch with the Peking admissions officer, he told her she would major in finance, even though the subject was not her first love.
While China takes baby steps towards a more American education model, the United States appears to be moving a bit in China's direction.While China takes baby steps towards a more American education model, the United States appears to be moving a bit in China's direction. In his English-language book published in 2014, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World, University of Oregon professor Yong Zhao, born and educated in China, argues that today's U.S. education reforms towards more standardized testing actually resemble the Chinese kejusystem, a centrally administrated examination for government positions in ancient China. Zhao cites U.S. President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, President Barack Obama's Race to the Top initiative in 2009, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative as evidence that test-based accountability has become the "yardstick of American education." In 2010, when Shanghai outscorednumerous countries on the Program for International Student Assessment, an international assessment given to 15-year-olds, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged Americans to "face the brutal truth that we're being out-educated." In his book, Zhao cautions that China's reliance on thekeju system stems from factors unique to that country, part of a strategy "to cope with thousands of years of authoritarian rule," which resulted in "social control" and "homogeneous thinking."
Macroeconomic factors appear to underlie the convergence. Fang wrote in a September 1 Chinese-language column for Bloomberg Businessweek that U.S. education is "industrializing," meaning that between rocketing tuition and a bleak job market, liberal arts colleges have gradually given way to ushering students through revenue-generating majors such as finance, engineering, law, and accounting. Fang thinks true liberal arts education has effectively vanished from all but a few dozen U.S. universities, "becoming a privilege for rich kids." Xin described the struggle to find personal meaning in college as a "worldwide" one. "People are becoming profit-oriented," she said. "You cannot cope without conforming somewhat to the system."
Photo credit: Getty
Can 1 Million American Students Learn Mandarin?
Obama just announced a new initiative promising just that — and all by 2020.
- BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
- SEPTEMBER 25, 2015 - 1:38 PM
- BETHANY.ALLEN
- @BETHANYALLENEBR
When U.S. President Barack Obama announced the 100,000 Strong Initiative in November 2009, setting the goal of sending 100,000 American students to study in China by 2014, it seemed like a lofty aspiration. In the 2008-2009 academic year, only 13,674 American students studied abroad in China. But that number rose steadily over the next five years, with help from private donations and Chinese governmentscholarships, and in July 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the goal had been met.
Now the American president's back with an even bigger goal and one closer to home. On Sept. 25, in a joint press conference with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is wrapping up an official state visit, Obama announced the launch of "1 Million Strong," an initiative that aims to bring the total number of stateside learners of Mandarin Chinese to 1 million by the year 2020. "If our countries are going to do more together around the world," said Obama, "then speaking each other's language, truly understanding each other, is a good place to start."
One million may seem like a lot, but it's just under 2 percent of the total number of U.S. students; in fall 2015, there were about 55 million studentsenrolled in U.S. public and private primary and secondary schools. Still, there's much catching up to do. "Estimates suggest that between 300 and 400 million Chinese students are learning English today, while only about 200,000 American students are studying Chinese," Travis Tanner, senior vice president and chief operating officer at the 100,000 Strong Foundation, told Foreign Policy in an email. "We must bridge that gap."
The new program, administered by the 100,000 Strong Foundation, a nonprofit that also oversees the 2009 initiative, recognizes the growing importance of the U.S.-China relationship and aims to prepare a new generation of U.S. leaders to engage effectively with China.
Increasing the number of American students who study Mandarinwill "create a pipeline of China-savvy employees in a range of fields"Increasing the number of American students who study Mandarin will "create a pipeline of China-savvy employees in a range of fields" and, Tanner remarked, will "ensure our trade relationship with China continues to benefit the American economy and that the future generation of American entrepreneurs, business owners, journalists, engineers, scientists, doctors, as well as government officials at both the national and state levels, understand China."
The new initiative also aims to create a standardized national Chinese curriculum, flexible enough to allow for adaptations at the local school board level but comprehensive enough to prepare students for the AP Chinese-language exam and later advanced study. One Million Strong will also promote advances in language-learning technology and online instruction, promote investment in teachers colleges, and establish a consortium of governors who support Mandarin learning in public schools.
Such a huge goal, of course, also comes with huge challenges, not the least of which is funding. Though both Presidents Obama and Xi have endorsed the initiative, it will rely primarily on private funding, according to Tanner, who hopes that the official state-level endorsement will "inspire" financial support from "individuals, organizations and corporations."
Attempts to bring Mandarin into the classroom haven't been free from controversy in the past. China's own huge soft power initiative to increase Mandarin learning around the globe, the Confucius Institutes, also operates primary and secondary education initiatives called Confucius Classrooms, which receive Chinese government funding. There are 357 such classrooms stateside, according to Chinese government data. But according to a January 2011 CNN report, community members in school districts in Ohio and California objected to the use of Chinese government funds to provide instruction to American students, with one calling it "communist propaganda." A domestic push to increase Chinese-language instruction and adopt a nationally accepted Mandarin curriculum may help depoliticize the issue.
The importance and practicality of mastering Chinese has lately become more apparent. When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg met with Xi during the president's recent visit to business and technology leaders in Seattle, the founder held a conversation with the Chinese president entirely in Mandarin. (Facebook is blocked in China and would benefit handsomely if allowed to operate there.)
"This is such an inspiring example of how important linguistic and cultural understanding is to enrich U.S.-China relationships in business and beyond," said Jessica Beinecke, founder of Chinese-language learning platform Crazy Fresh Chinese. "Zuckerberg's a busy guy. If he has time to learn Mandarin, so do American high school students."
Photo credit: Getty Images
China's Nouveau Riche Have Landed on America's Campuses
Chinese students abroad used to be seen as diligent, penny-pinching, and idealistic. No longer.
- BY YI-LING LIU
- SEPTEMBER 1, 2015 - 3:10 PM
When Lingjia Hu arrived in the United States from China in 1996, she did so thanks to a scholarship that would allow her to pursue post-doctorate training at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Raised by a family of doctors, Hu told Foreign Policy she wanted to "save the country with science," but there were no opportunities for her back home. At Xiangya Hospital in Hu's native city of Changsha, the best medical institution in China at the time, the lights would intermittently turn off because electricity was unreliable. When Hu moved to Colorado, she did a homestay with an American family. It would be six months before her first bite of Chinese food in the United States, only after learning how to drive to the local take-out restaurant. She then married, raised a son, and has lived in Denver ever since.
China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education's role as a major and growing node of connection between the world's two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
Fast-forward to Boston in 2015, where Yikun Wang will soon enter his senior year as an undergraduate at Northeastern University. Wang hails from Anhui province, a historically impoverished region of China, but pays full tuition at the private school — whichcharges over $44,000 per year — and lives in a co-op with two other Chinese students. Wang said he often sees young Chinese peers cutting class, driving luxury cars, and going into the city for extravagant weekend shopping trips. He is an economics and finance major, and hopes to pursue a career in investment banking. While he thinks that he may stay and work in the United States after graduation, he is an anomaly: For many of his peers, the American higher education experience, Wang said, is a bit like a four-year vacation.
In less than two decades, the image of Chinese students studying in the United States has transformed drastically. While Hu and Wang are just two of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who have made the trans-Pacific journey, they embody the archetypes of each generation. The Chinese students who arrived in the early 1980s — when then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping first announced his "open door" policy, which allowed Chinese scholars and students to study in the United States after decades of national isolation — represented some of the nation's best and brightest. Funded by international scholarships and money from Beijing, they sought to escape poverty and instability for a land of opportunity. The majority wanted to stay in the United States, where they could get a green card, land a job, and integrate themselves into American society. They were, in other words, pursuing the American dream.
But for many Chinese studying in the United States in 2015, time spent stateside is but a steppingstone to a Chinese dream — one that's for sale.But for many Chinese studying in the United States in 2015, time spent stateside is but a steppingstone to a Chinese dream — one that's for sale. Thanks to the immense purchasing power of the growing Chinese middle class, the image of the humble and diligent Chinese student of the 1980s has been replaced by that of the entitled fu'erdai, or the second-generation scion in a wealthy family, who studies abroad in order to return home to run the family business. The fu'erdai pay full tuition, often study finance, business management, or economics, and spend their time clustered together. At the University of California Los Angeles, rising seniorJing Li said that many Chinese students have "formed a sub campus," capable of living a life apart from their classmates.
Their relative isolation isn't hard to understand, given that Chinese students are part of a massive influx that dwarfs anything that has come before. When Erhfei Liu entered Brandeis University, a private research university in Massachusetts, as a sophomore in 1981, he was the second Chinese student the university had ever admitted; his Chinese-ness was simply an interesting addition of diversity to the student body. "I was a rare animal from Red China," said Liu, "an alien from the moon." (Liu ended up pursuing a career in finance, a rarity among Chinese graduates in his time.) By contrast, in the 2014-2015 academic year, there were 423 graduate and 248 undergraduate Chinese-born students studying at Brandeis. It's just as crowded in America's heartland. As of 2014, there were over 2,800 Chinese students studying in Colorado and even more in Illinois. "Walk around the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign" — which enrolled nearly 5,000 Chinese students last year — "and it will feel like you're walking around the busiest shopping district in Shanghai," said Mark Montgomery, founder of American Academic Advisors, a consultancy based in Hong Kong that works with Chinese students.
The generation gap goes deeper than sheer numbers, to the very root of China's recent transformation from economic basket case to global titan.
"We came penniless. We didn't go out to dinner, didn't go to parties, and assumed that American students were all really rich," said Brandeis graduate Liu"We came penniless. We didn't go out to dinner, didn't go to parties, and assumed that American students were all really rich," said Brandeis graduate Liu, looking back on his undergraduate days in the 1980s. "At the time, the U.S. minimum wage seemed astronomically high to us," he explained. "A friend of mine was the daughter of one of the top ten most powerful officials in China and yet, in America, she worked three years as a part-time house maid to pay for her student loans." The year that Liu graduated, according to the World Bank, China's per capita GDP was $249 per year.
China's per capita GDP now exceeds $7,593 per year, more than 30 times the 1984 tally. The country's breathtakingly rapid economic growth has minted dozens of billionaires and lifted hundreds of millions into a burgeoning middle class, whose members can often afford to send their children abroad and even pay full college tuition. It's showing. Upscale department stores Bergdorf Goodman and Bloomingdale's have sponsored events aimed specifically at wooing the pocketbooks of Chinese students, the former sponsoring Chinese New Year celebrations in January 2014 at New York University and Columbia University — where Chinese students number in the thousands — and the latter holding a fashion show for Chinese students in Chicago in November 2014.
As these anecdotes might suggest, on-campus Chinese are often richer than their American classmates. Jing, the UCLA senior, told FP that the disparity is particularly stark at public universities like hers: Tuition fees for international students are far higher than for Californians, and the cost of living in the Beverly Hills area is particularly demanding. "My Californian friends were shocked when I told them how much I have to pay [to study at UCLA]," Jing said.
It's not just a thickening wallet that separates yesterday's overseas Chinese student from today's. Many have noted a shift in the academic goals and underlying motivations pulling Chinese scholars stateside. A common observation among the Chinese interviewed for this article is that the students of the previous generation were more idealistic and patriotic. Danchi Wang, a graduate of Wellesley College's class of 1989 (no relation to Yikun Wang), said she pursued education in America because she "wanted to improve [herself], so that [she] could contribute to the modernization of China." Wang recalled wanting to be "the Chinese Madame Curie," an aspiration she said many of her peers shared.
Chinese students studying abroad today aren't generally looking to cure cancer or serve their homeland.Chinese students studying abroad today aren't generally looking to cure cancer or serve their homeland.According to Danchi Wang, many young Chinese come to the United States to make themselves more marketable, a goal reflected in the growingproportion of Chinese students who are choosing to study business, finance, or management. For Zhao Yong, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry, "there are really only two paths for a Chinese graduate in the United States: Go into finance or join a large IT firm." Zhao said this jokingly, and although he himself took neither path, his words appear to ring true. When people ask Yikun Wang what he is studying at Northeastern, they often give him a choice of one of two answers: finance or economics. (Wang studies both.) "They'd be totally surprised if you tell them you're majoring in art," he said.
Parents are often equally, if not more invested in the pragmatic value and marketability of their children's education. Jiang Xueqin, educator and author of Creative China, a book published in China about the country's education system, explained in an August 2014 interview with theHuffington Post that parents in China want to "hedge their bets and diversify their assets" — and a child overseas makes a "good pretext for capital flight." Paying for an American education is also a way to elevate a family's social status. "Having a child attend an overseas school is now seen as the equivalent of driving a BMW and carrying an [Louis Vuitton] handbag in China," said Jiang. Montgomery said that he has clients that pull children out of the Chinese college entrance exam, or gaokao, prep stream as early as preschool and place them into the international division of select schools to chart their path to higher education abroad. Forums on massive Chinese mobile chat platform WeChat and online microblogging websites are nowpeppered with stories of grandparents pooling their resources to send their grandchild to college. A recent article on microblogging platform Weibo featured an interview with a taxi driver from the central province of Henan, who sold his house and plowed all of his annual $12,885 salary into sending his son abroad. Montgomery said many Chinese parents send children abroad "to see how quickly they can get into Goldman Sachs," an investment bank.
Not everyone is happy with the influx of Chinese students flowing into U.S. higher education. At Michigan State University, vandals spray-painted the words "go back home" on a Chinese student's car. At UCLA in 2011, an undergraduate student posted an anti-Asian video rant, where she mocked people speaking an Asian language and said, "The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year."
Some of the criticism of Chinese students appears to stem, at least in part, from anxiety over an increasingly fraught U.S.-China relationship.Some of the criticism of Chinese students appears to stem, at least in part, from anxiety over an increasingly fraught U.S.-China relationship. At Kansas State University, a student newspaper published a column (later appended with an apology) in response to the rising numbers of international students — Chinese students, in particular — attending the school. The piece went so far as to argue that U.S. tax dollars should not be used to fund the education of "citizens from Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq or Turkey … students who could, in the near future, become the enemy."
Montgomery invited critics to put the shoe on the other foot and imagine they were preparing to send their children to China. "Maybe you've been to Beijing or Shanghai, maybe you have one Chinese friend, maybe you've eaten some General Tso's Chicken," he said. "Now you're sending your kid to China — how are you going to do that? Who are you going to talk to? You're going to look at the rankings, you're going to pay whatever it takes to trust somebody who will help your kid out, and when he's there, your kid is going to hang out with other Americans."
Much of the criticism also fails to consider that many Chinese students are engaged in pathbreaking, self-expressive pursuits that many young Americans would find familiar. Yong, the Yale Forestry graduate student, for example, eschewed finance and IT and instead partnered with the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute to create Junzi Kitchen, a restaurant serving Chinese food in a Chipotle-style service line. Min Yang, a health policy major at UNC Chapel Hill from the southern province of Guangdong, who wants to pursue a career in healthcare, studied approaches to increase HIV testing uptake in South China and designed health and science classes for Tibetan children in Yunnan province as part of his work with the NGO Machik. And Cathy Jiang, a 27-year-old marketing analyst turned producer and a graduate of Fordham University's MBA program, has tried to challenge the stereotype of the wealthy and entitled overseas Chinese student by producing short films. One of her films, Study Abroad, focuses on the day-to-day challenges Chinese students face in the United States, from making new friends, to having the courage to speak up in seminars, to pursuing one's passions and shaking off sometimes onerous parental expectations. The sequel, The Daydreaming Bunny, chronicles the life of an art student who tries to earn money for her graduation exhibition and prove to her conservative family that her paintings have a purpose.
The previous generation of Chinese students in America was no doubt different from today's crop, a fact Jiang acknowledges. "Sure, they had more difficulties paying tuition, taking on student jobs, and dealing with student loans," said Jiang. But she added, "Just because we are different does not mean we don't have our own unique set of challenges to overcome." And among the Chinese students pouring into the United States every year, there will be countless students like her who will tackle these obstacles in innovative ways their predecessors could never have envisioned.
Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images
Corrections, Sept. 1, 2015: Over 2,800 Chinese students studied at Colorado in 2014; this article originally stated 2,880 students studied there. Erhfei Liu enrolled in Brandeis as a sophomore in 1981, not 1984. 423 graduate and 248 undergraduate Chinese-born students studied at Brandeis in the 2014-2015 academic year, not 250 and 200.
I'm Chinese, and I Know Why There Aren't More Asians in the Ivy League
Affirmative Action has turned around to bite some of the people it was designed to benefit.
- BY ZHANG TIANPU
- AUGUST 26, 2015 - 8:41 AM
This article originally appeared in Chinese under the headline "Getting into a Famous School Is Hard in China — Is it Even Harder in the U.S.?" on the website of U.S.-China Dialogue, a project of Asia Society, edited by Zheng Huiwen. Foreign Policy translates, with edits for clarity and length.
There's an American-born Chinese person in California by the name of Wang Zili. Like a lot of determined youth envisioning the American Dream, Zili hopes to leave a legacy of hard work, and create four years worth of beautiful memories, along the banks of the Charles Rivers in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education's role as a major and growing node of connection between the world's two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
When Zili applied to Harvard, he submitted these marks to the admissions officer: 2,230 on the SAT (out of 2,400); captain of his high school debate team; third place in an international piano competition; participation in school chorus, which sang at President Obama's inauguration party; and rich volunteer experience, including tutoring for immigrants and poor children.
If hard work pays off, should Zili's dream come true? Nope. Zili was rejected, and harshly. Many other minority applicants without shiny credentials got their wish, receiving an offer; many white Americans (who are not supposed to receive special treatment) also got accepted. Their backgrounds all paled in comparison to Zili's.
If you have all of the other requirements to be a highly competitive applicant, but you aren't selected, the only result left is that you have suffered "racial discrimination."If you have all of the other requirements to be a highly competitive applicant, but you aren't selected, the only result left is that you have suffered "racial discrimination." You're not in, because you're Asian. In an age when all of American society flaunts racial equality — and when university acceptance is such an important matter — how can the historical relic of "racial discrimination" occur so openly?
It started with a U.S. national policy: affirmative action. Everyone knows that the United States once had an extremely serious racial discrimination problem. The civil rights movement of the sixties created a great wave against racial discrimination, and many sympathetic people who had received unequal treatment themselves thought that a serious illness required strong medicine: as the first offenders, white people would have to pay the price!
As a result of this, schools at every level — which are the most important determinant of economic status — became the main weapons in the counter-strike against racism. Many policies came out that stripped white people of their opportunities and distributed them to racial minorities.
It's important to reiterate that black people were the main force in the civil rights movement. Asians didn't even contribute soy sauce. So all of the legal rulings spurred by civil rights were written in response to the relationship between blacks and whites. That has made it harder for other minorities to protect their rights.
It's said that the point of affirmative action is to look after racial minorities. Asians have suffered the kinds of historical wrongs that the policy is meant to address; so how come affirmative action has become the main culprit in holding Asians back?
Truth is, in terms of their economic status and academic accomplishments, Asians have already mostly drawn even with white people, even surpassed them.Truth is, in terms of their economic status and academic accomplishments, Asians have already mostly drawn even with white people, even surpassed them. As a minority that takes seriously education and hard work, Asians have improved their lives immensely since coming to America just generations ago, and Asian students have quickly stood out. America, a society still led by white people, has started to call Asians a "model minority," who have already realized "quasi-whiteness" in their economic and intellectual lives. This is meant as praise, however it means that Asians must pay a price at the school gates.
Asian students were once a class protected under affirmative action, along with African-Americans and other minorities. But because Asian students have performed better and better, with higher and higher grades, they've opened light-years' worth of distance between themselves and other racial minorities.
Therefore, every major school has discovered that Asian applicants are too outstanding, and if their applications were considered equally alongside other minorities, it would lead to two results: First, the proportion of Asian students among minority students would become greater and greater. Second, the proportion of Asian students among all students would also get larger and larger. Many schools, even those with many outstanding Asian students, have held onto some completely illogical prejudices about Asian students. For example, they think that Asian people can only study engineering, lack leadership, are too quiet, lack guts, are too conservative, etc.
So with the number of Asian students growing, schools felt they had to do something. So they did. In simple terms, they revoked the protection that affirmative action had afforded Asians, and, under the guise of affirmative action, suppressed Asian applicants.
Look at the example of Zili. Among an Asian, a white person, and another racial minority, all of equal credentials, we are very likely to see their likelihood of acceptance like this: Other minority > White > Asian. Many statistics prove that, at least out of a student population with identical grades, Asians have the lowest acceptance rate, and other racial minorities the highest, with white people in the middle.
Some sociologists studying this phenomenon have termed American treatment of Asian students "negative action." The result of negative action is that a white person always has a higher chance of acceptance than an Asian with equal, and perhaps even superior credentials.
Asians are being discriminated against by the very same schools that were supposed to protect them in the name of the justice, freedom, and equality that they claim to espouse.Asians are being discriminated against by the very same schools that were supposed to protect them in the name of the justice, freedom, and equality that they claim to espouse. And a policy originally intended to protect Asians has become a guise permitting discrimination against them. It's truly laughable.
Now that they've become aware of this in recent years, many Asian groups have been challenging these unfair selection practices. In the United States, there have been two types of legal challenges against "negative action" in higher education. The first is conventional lawsuitsunder the 14th amendment to the U.S. constitution. The other is complaints directed at the U.S. Department of Education and the civil rights division of the Department of Justice.
At its root, the discrimination against racial minorities, including Asians, traces to a longstanding estrangement that still exists. But as Asians become more common in America, mainstream culture is going to slowly accept Asians, and itself be affected by Asian culture. In this way, Asians will sooner or later stop being "quasi white" and instead become the cultural "whites."
In the meantime, there may need to be a second civil rights movement, but one that I hope has both Asians and other racial minorities in the lead role. Asia may again be called the world's center, and the issue may not become the whitening of Asian Americans, but the Asian-ing of white Americans.
Photo credit: Getty Images
Correction, Aug. 28, 2015: The Chinese-language version of the article translated above was edited by Zheng Huiwen. An earlier version of this article attributed editorship to Zhu Xi.
A Chinese Feminist, Made in America
How four years at Amherst College changed my perception of my home country, and myself.
- BY NANCY TANG
- JUNE 24, 2015 - 2:37 PM
In August 2010, two weeks after turning 18, I traveled about 6,700 miles from Beijing, China to attend Amherst, a liberal-arts college in Massachusetts in the northeastern United States. I packed a copy of Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw's textbook Principles of Economics in my carry-on luggage to peruse on the plane. Having aced both the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the gaokao, China's college entrance exam, I expected to continue my straightforward path: I would study hard, major in economics, and get good grades. Upon graduation, I'd enter investment banking, a much sought-after and lucrative career option among Chinese students in the United States.
China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education's role as a major and growing node of connection between the world's two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
But in May 2014, when I graduated, I did so having completed a degree in political science and a senior thesis on the gender injustice wrought by China's so-called "One-Child Policy". On my flight back home to Beijing, I devoured Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Even though the novel discusses the Nigerian diaspora rather than my Chinese one, the woman author who titles her talks "The Danger of a Single Story" and "We Should All be Feminists" manages to capture my own experience.
Before coming to the United States, I thought I was already quite Americanized. In fact, I knew very little about this place. Like a typical Chinese middle-class millennial, I had been a consumer of American pop culture — music, TV shows, and Hollywood movies — long before college. My version of the American life was singular: people were affluent, lived in urban places, and looked like the cast of Friends, a 1990s sitcom that's still unbelievably popular in China.
That did not prepare me for life in the United States. Whether it was talking to fellow classmates about their lives in places I had never heard of, or listening to upperclassmen talk about safe sex, the kind of displacement I felt during my college orientation would continue to smash the simple narratives I'd been fed. When I found myself on a school-run trip to the nearby Holyoke, Massachusetts, I encountered pockets of post-industrial poverty that looked nothing like the "America" I had previously watched on How I Met Your Mother or Big Bang Theory.
Even though "class struggles" was a ubiquitous jargon in the Marxist-themed textbooks I had read growing up, I had never actually had to think about class before I arrived at Amherst. I am the daughter of two professors and rarely left our middle-class, college-educated neighborhood. Amherst, renowned for its diverse student body, instead taught me about "class" as a lived reality through the socioeconomic disparities manifest among my peers. On the one hand, I was appalled by the wealth, status and access to power enjoyed by some Amherst students, who would attend debutante balls worthy of aGossip Girl episode or off-handedly mention "servants" at home. On the other hand, friends who were first-generation college students or hailed from working-class backgrounds amazed and humbled me. While my family is not rich, I had never had to think twice about the cost of a good cup of coffee or a movie ticket. I had never thought I'd be the spoiled middle-class only child — but there I was, comparing myself to peers working to support themselves (and even their families) while undertaking the same course-load as mine. By sophomore year, I'd decided to cross investment banking off my list of career options.
Studying in the United States has complicated my perception of China, and of my own years there.
I appreciate the irony that I have learned more about Chinese social inequality and political turmoil while in the U.S. than I ever did at home.I appreciate the irony that I have learned more about Chinese social inequality and political turmoil while in the U.S. than I ever did at home. Thanks to freer access to information and a heightened awareness of my Chinese identity in a foreign context, I have started to ask questions about urban-rural disparities in China, to think about the migrant workers in my home neighborhood, who used to be invisible to me, and to read about the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen, and ethnic injustice that no amount of forced amnesia can erase from history.
I have also come to see my identity as a Chinese woman in a new light. In March 2015, five Chinese feminists were arrested for protesting against sexual harassment on public transportation, which led to domestic rallies and international outcry, which apparently resulted in their release — quite unusual, given the government's usually refractory response to international criticism. I worried anxiously about the feminists, two of whom I met through mutual friends while studying at Amherst. I was frustrated and terrified — though ashamed to feel terrified — when I learned my e-mail and wechat (a popular Chinese messaging app) were being monitored, since I had been actively involved in calling for the activists' release and translating their words. I am enraged that, rather than addressing prevalent gender injustice, the Chinese government prefers to silence the brave few who dare to speak out about it.
I gradually become a feminist after coming to the United States. It was a natural and empowering process. Having studied feminist theory, co-directed the Amherst rendition of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues, and served as a sexual respect advocate on campus, I had obtained the vocabulary and framework to analyze why some of my earlier experiences in China felt wrong. It's because they were wrong, and the manifestations of gender injustice. I could see it in how teachers would openly comment that boys were "superior" to girls at math and science; how my loving father would express his unconscious preference for a son by intending "if only you were a boy" as a compliment; how my female cousins and I were encouraged to stop eating after a while to "keep in shape," while male cousins were left alone at the dinner table; and how my 22-year-old female cousin was set up to go on series of blind dates, while her male counterpart was expected to go to graduate school.
As a result of being vocal about my feminism, I have been repeatedly asked by Chinese acquaintances, "why are you a feminist?" in an accusatory, privy or pitiful tone. I have occasionally heard another more direct and less polite version of the same inquiry: "have all of you feminists been hurt by men?" The truth is that I was sexually assaulted by a family acquaintance at age 7. Despite experiencing shock, discomfort and tremendous guilt at the time, I did not know what it was because I had not been taught to recognize it. In 2012, when my former Amherst classmate Angie Epifano's account of sexual assault was published, I had a conversation with a friend about traumatic early experiences, and I named what happened to me as an "assault" to myself for the first time.
I am not defined by my assault, even though I have struggled with internalized shame and guilt. I certainly don't ascribe my experience to bad luck. In a recent Chinese Internet survey of over 17,000 anonymous respondents who self-reported having been sexually assaulted as children, over 94 percent of the victims were female, and respondents identified over 97 percent of the perpetrators as male. Like me, over 82 percent of respondents say they did not recognize their experience as sexual assault at the time, even though many were aware that something was wrong. Over 70 percent of the victims say they have never disclosed their experiences to anyone.
Being a vocal feminist exposes me to unexpected challenges whenever I interact with my Chinese communities in the States and back home in China.Being a vocal feminist exposes me to unexpected challenges whenever I interact with my Chinese communities in the States and back home in China. I have been told by multiple heterosexual male Chinese friends — many also U.S.-educated, I must add — that "women should keep their grievances private." I have been lectured by a high-school-classmate-turned-popular-blogger that "sexual assault doesn't happen in China; it only happens in promiscuous societies like America." My own family worries about my public identification as a feminist. Women relatives ask me if I can be a feminist "silently," lest I drive all the boys away. Like any topic that could potentially become political in China, apathy and avoidance are the highest hurdles.
Today, feminism constitutes my core identity. Not only has it given me an understanding of my early experiences, it helps me navigate my position as a woman in a male-dominated world. Feminism has also freed me from the fear of becoming a "leftover woman," defined as a single woman over the age of 27 by the state-run All-China Women's Federation. Having researched problematic dating and marriage norms in China and having written about them for an English-language outlet, I can separate love from the pressure to marry in my personal life. I no longer feel guilty about enjoying singlehood.
This fall, I will remain Stateside to study law. I already have a long feminist wish list for the Chinese legal reforms I'd like to see, ranging from formal legislation against gender discrimination in hiring practices, to nation-wide access to temporary restraining orders for victims of domestic violence, to official acknowledgement of LGBTQ rights. Perhaps my ideals result from my immaturity, hubris, and ignorance. But I feel inspired by Chinese peers who are utilizing their privileges to fulfill their social responsibilities.
During her commencement speech to the Wellesley College class of 2015, Adichie reminded graduates of their educational privileges. Having found a role model in novelist Adichie, I believe her when she encourages younger women to at least try to dream big. The transformation I underwent through my elite liberal-arts education is a painful bliss: it entails the loss of simpler narrative and a coming to terms with personal history. But it's also given me tolerance, empathy, and more nuanced ways to situate myself in my world. I am privileged, and grateful.
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American Students in China: It's Not as Authoritarian as We Thought
An FP survey finds surprise at a country that's often less strict than outsiders imagine.
- BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
- JUNE 15, 2015 - 4:56 PM
- BETHANY.ALLEN
- @BETHANYALLENEBR
For some American students about to embark on a study abroad trip to China, U.S. media reports of Chinese Internet censorship, jailing of dissidents, and draconian population control laws may dominate their perception of the country. But after more than 30 years of reform and opening, the nominally communist country now combines economic liberalization, lumbering social and legal reforms, and spurts of ideological entrenchment to create a dynamic mix of restriction and freedom that's hard to parse.
It's little wonder first-timers don't have it all figured out when they're still fresh off the plane. In a recent survey, Foreign Policy asked American students and alumni who had spent time in China to share revealing anecdotes from their experiences in the country. The 385 responses often portray American students struggling to understand a country where behavior that is legal on paper is, in practice, prohibited; or conversely, where ostensibly illegal behavior or speech is often tolerated. From freedom of expression to LGBT activism to real estate deals, young Americans found that their time in the world's largest authoritarian country helped them sketch an outline of what is — and is not — acceptable there.
China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education's role as a major and growing node of connection between the world's two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
"Before I went to China," wrote Rowland Coleman, who studied at Nankai University in the northeastern city of Tianjin in 2011 while he was enrolled at American University, "I had the idea in my mind that it really was an Orwellian world where any dissent was quickly and harshly hunted down." That's hardly a wild supposition; Chinese authorities maintain strict controls on media, keep civil society on a tight leash, and have arrested numerous Chinese bloggers for posting sensitive content online. Currently a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, Coleman recalls one day early in his trip when he and a classmate, both with ROTC experience, were discussing Army training while waiting at a bus stop. Another classmate came up to them and quietly urged, "Hey, watch what you say. Ears everywhere." For the first few weeks, Coleman and his classmates would speak in whispers whenever discussing something that they thought might be sensitive. "If that didn't look suspicious on its own," Coleman wrote, "I don't know what did."
But over the course of his time in China, as he interacted with Chinese professors and made local friends, he discovered that not only was it not necessarily forbidden for Chinese to discuss sensitive issues and express dissenting opinions — it was fairly commonplace, though laws prohibiting critical speech were more likely to be enforced in certain circumstances. "There was a practicality to [citizen] dissent," wrote Coleman. He noted that voiced criticisms seemed to focus on obstacles that caused difficulty in daily life and hampered economic progress, rather than large-scale political change or vague ideals. "The times that I saw people stepping out of bounds," observed Coleman, "were when they organized, blogged about it online, or unleashed personal attacks again specific party members."
Other survey respondents also traced out their impression of the blurry lines that divide acceptable from illicit speech in China. "I was frequently shocked to meet Chinese people who freely shared their dim views of their government," wrote Christian Curriden, who studied in the southern city of Nanjing through a program with Brigham Young University.
"Restrictions on freedom of speech seem to depend not on what you say, but on how many people are listening.""Restrictions on freedom of speech seem to depend not on what you say, but on how many people are listening." Curriden's observation isn't far off the mark — authorities often don't concern themselves with private comments by average citizens who aren't calling for action.
And while non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other civil society organizations — technically legal — have faced increasing pressure under Chinese President Xi Jinping, this pressure has not been applied evenly. Brandon Kemp, who studied in Beijing in 2015 with CET Academic Programs, became friends with a number of Chinese nationals who were active in the Beijing and Shanghai LGBT communities. Kemp was surprised to learn that despite the recent crackdown on NGOs, grassroots movements to support the LGBT community and make inroads into China's often sternly traditional family values have not only escaped the axe — they have even begun to mainstream. "As recently as 2014 China was close to banning 'reparative therapy' for queer and trans youth," wrote Kemp.Shanghai Pride, the week-long annual gay pride festival in the sprawling coastal city, "continues to go off yearly without incident," Kemp wrote, "and groups like the Beijing LGBT Center continue to operate" though authorities have raided the offices of other NGOs such as Yirenping, a human rights center in Beijing, and detained feminist activists for planning activities of far smaller scope than a parade.
Perhaps China's most notorious example of tolerance for illegal practices is encapsulated in the well-known Chinese maxim, "the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away" — referring to the tendency of local government officials to ignore laws that don't suit them, knowing that they are unlikely to face repercussions from central authorities. Thorstan Fries spent a year studying Chinese at the Inter-University Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2013. But in his first stint in China, before heading to the capital, he worked doing business development for a Chinese resort in the remote mountainous countryside of Guilin, while taking Chinese classes on the weekends at the Chinese Language Institute. There, he got a taste of the murky relationship between business and local officials that can characterize dealings in the swiftly developing country.
"We were in the midst of negotiating a management contract with a Western resort company," Fries recounted, "and they asked me to send them all of our official licenses from relevant departments in China — construction licenses, hotel licenses, zoning papers." But when Fries told his boss that they would need to send that documentation to the international firm, the man just gave him a blank look. "He then proceeded to unroll a large plan of the entire property," wrote Fries, "showing me the various buildings we had erected in non-construction zones."
Fries was bewildered. "The government allowed us to put up these buildings, but they didn't provide licenses?" he asked his boss.
In response, his boss put one hand over his eye and said, "They do like this," indicating that local authorities turned a "blind eye" to the illegal buildings.In response, his boss put one hand over his eye and said, "They do like this," indicating that local authorities turned a "blind eye" to the illegal buildings.
And yet, while China's sometimes porous implementation of laws can at times allow its citizens greater freedom than they may appear to enjoy on paper, the inverse can also be true. Kyle Lawlor studied at Capital Normal University in Beijing in 2009, during the celebrations surrounding the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. He witnessed ostentatious military parades and stunning shows of state power, but one memory in particular stands out. Lawlor wrote that he observed an older woman "crying in front of Tiananmen" — the site of a bloody crackdown on student protests in 1989, now erased from official histories — who was then "swiftly carried away by some guards." Though laws do not prohibit simple displays of emotion in public places, the Chinese friends accompanying him were "more-or-less unsympathetic, saying she was disturbing people with her emotional display," wrote Lawlor, who now works at a tech start-up in Connecticut. He indicated that he still finds the memory "disturbing."
Perhaps it's the difficulty of tracing the outlines of law in China that makes some American students act as if there aren't any. Yolanda Eng, who grew up in the United States, studied at East China Normal University in Shanghai in 2010 while a student at the University of Washington. On the night of July 4, several of her classmates purchased a large box of fireworks and shot Roman candles out of the dorm room window in celebration of the American holiday. They then went outside to an area crowded with vendors and shoppers, one of the group members donning an American flag as a cape, and lit fireworks despite the danger and confusion the explosions created for the local Chinese. Feeling ashamed of the "sense of entitlement" her classmates displayed, Eng wrote, "They treated China like their playground."
Ugly Americans aside, experiences abroad have helped some students develop a better grasp on the complexity that underlies the country's often monolithic façade. China's porous laws make life in the world's most populous country both more livable, and less predictable, than outsiders might imagine. For a new generation of Americans, living in a world where China plays an increasingly important role, that knowledge is likely to come in handy.
Update: This article has been clarified to reflect the fact that Shanghai Pride comprises a week of events and festivities, rather than a single parade.
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