China View: Respect For The Power Of Education Tempers China’s Heavy Hand
Barcroft Media
The private English school in the French Concession of Shanghai where I taught was in an elegant compound that had been built and owned by an Italian lawyer. Though the tuition was expensive, I felt that we provided an intimate and high-quality English learning education. The Chinese staff was competent but sometimes the gap between the Chinese staff and Western staff was insurmountable. This, of course, varied by situation or person. I arrived in Shanghai in 2008; as the months passed, I became increasingly able to navigate the split between Western and Chinese staff, but it was clear we were in separate systems.
In China, foreign businesses and educational institutions are, for the most part, required to have a Chinese partner. Of special importance is the highest-ranking Communist Party official on the Chinese side. The relationship was explained to me as follows. The person in this position is like the Queen of England in the United Kingdom; she is technically not supposed to have much influence on day-to-day affairs. However, she is symbolically important, and it would be a bad idea for her to be unhappy with the direction of the organization. I found the highest-ranking Communist Party representative at my English school to be an extremely helpful and thoughtful person. She was willing to debate the merits of democracy versus China’s communist system of government with me whenever I so desired. She was also the person who dealt with work visas, which I never had an issue obtaining while teaching full time.
The Shanghai students whom I taught sought to study in a Western educational institution and were eager learners. I taught my students how to set up Facebook accounts and I gave them assignments to look up videos on Youtube that reinforced grammatical lessons I had just taught. Such openness was ephemeral. When I first arrived in China in 2008, Facebook, YouTube, and Google were all available. In the decade that followed, it became clear from protests in other countries that social media could be used to enhance dissent. In Iran, one could see how revolutionary thoughts were transmitted over Facebook— and one could see that America encouraged this kind of protest. China’s leaders became anxious, and this led to a significant crackdown; this contrasted with current Chinese leader Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao’s more moderate leadership.
The limiting of foreign influence was further enhanced by the advent of the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, which provided an opportunity to showcase Chinese civilizational purity by purging Western ideas from Chinese textbooks. The study of Xi Jinping Thought is now encouraged throughout the Chinese education system. There has been a purge of Western materials and authors. Even Steve Jobs, whose death inspired a touchingly large memorial at the Apple store in Shanghai, or Bill Gates, revered for his philanthropy, have had their biographies banned. Education in China is now much less cosmopolitan than it was in the 2000s. In addition, like many countries during the COVID-19 Pandemic, China has limited the number of foreigners that can enter the country. This, combined with a general sense among the foreign population that the country has become less hospitable to them, has created a foreign teacher shortage.
Nevertheless, the Chinese state recognizes the power of foreign ideas. New York University’s campus in Shanghai is still in place, though there have been police sweeps of student parties. The Hopkins-Nanjing Program in Nanjing, where I spent a year studying, was founded in 1986, in a more closed period in China’s history. In contrast, as a student in the late 2000s, I found that intellectual debate was encouraged there to a certain extent. The Chinese students, much like the Communist Party representative at the English school where I taught in Shanghai, are willing to debate the merits of Chinese versus Western culture. However, the students are ideologically vetted through an interview process. They have a key understanding of the balance between Western and Eastern society and an explicit understanding of what China’s interests are. While there are likely limits to what could be taught or said, the system of control relies on an understanding of what is and isn’t appropriate. Among my fellow Chinese students, there were some that I felt would not fit into the increasingly dogmatic system that was being constituted around us. There were also some who had developed an affinity for Western values and institutions, such as human rights and Christianity. Many of these students left China. This was also the case for several of my students whom I had taught in Shanghai.
There is a broad movement in the Western press to paint the Chinese people as brainwashed and unthinking about the problems of their society. This is not accurate. From my experience, their view tends to be that they have a little political impact on their country and so political discourse is at best futile, and at worst, risky.
Every society has some element of this. The difference is that in China the government is run by a single political party. Tempering this is the fact that education is highly valued and recognized as the key to a better future. The state values the role of foreign innovation in creating a more effective educational system. Among the companies that have benefitted from this fact is none other than Disney. In addition to their theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Disney has dozens of high-tech multimedia English schools in China and in no other country. The ideal model of foreign education for China’s leadership may be a Disneyesque one -- sterilized of nuance, with a façade of adventure and freshness. My cynical perspective tells me this, but it provides hope that leads to optimism. The elite, Xi Jinping among them, will not be satisfied with their children lacking exposure to foreign ideas. They will send them abroad. These people-to-people ties can prevent China’s relations with the outside world from becoming too strident. The key is for the outside world to not indulge itself in the simplicity of seeing Chinese people as a monolithic other and recognize their desire to broaden their understanding of the outside world. Certainly, my students in Shanghai and my experience at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center represent a more optimistic picture of US-China relations than the media depicts.
