SPEAKING
FREELY Self-censorship stifles China's
student elite By Sam Sussman
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
"My parents miss the
Cultural Revolution," Henry tells my research
partner and I on a Thursday afternoon at Peking
University, where students pace through
traditional Chinese pagodas with smart phones in
hand. "It was a simpler time. Now everybody is
under so much pressure to compete."
It is
the fourth interview of the day in a month-long
research project to evaluate the attitudes of
elite Chinese students toward the United States,
international institutions, and China's changing
role in the world. "Henry's" remark illustrates
the unfortunate trend
in self-censorship,
evident time and again in a series of 50
interviews with students at Peking and Tsinghua
Universities. The trend is child of a bizarre
marriage of the ideological inelasticity of
Leninist Party politics and the unforgiving
competition of China's nascent capitalism.
The tenacity of elite university
competition illustrates much. Henry and his Peking
peers are winners in the fierce race for a coveted
spot at China's most elite university, the
promising gateway to professional success that
accepts only one of every 100,000 applicants
(Harvard accepts one of every seventeen). Students
are reputed to study as much as 12 to 15 hours per
day in the year preceding the goukou,
China's famed university admissions examination.
So it is no wonder that by the time China's elite
students are bustling through the architecturally
stunning gates of Peking to sign up for thirty
weekly hours of classroom time per term, they are
hardly chatting over the Foucault - Chomsky
debate.
Once at Peking, there is little
time for celebration. To score the best jobs after
graduation - with Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, or
any of the dozen other Western investment and
management firms that recruit at elite Chinese
universities - students must become fluent in
English and Western graduate-level mathematics and
economics. Sprinkle in the extracurricular
commitments necessary to build sufficient
"guanxi," or social capital, and Henry's
explanation for the week he spent between the end
of a full month of final examinations and a GRE
preparatory class makes sense: "I just stayed in
my room, sleeping and surfing Renren (Chinese
Facebook). I did not even know what I was looking
for. I was too tired to think."
So it is
understandable when one student says what others
hint at but will not voice directly, and candidly
admits that while he can access Western press
online, he prefers to read the party paper. Only
12% of students interviewed as part of our
research read foreign press, despite their
widespread availability online.
The
curious collision of ideological coercion and
material opportunity births a conformity-breeding
exhaustion. To resist the constant current of
ideological homogeneity requires relentless energy
and vigilance: to remember that no matter how
compelling the words of the anchor on the nightly
news, certain facts have been blacked out by the
pernicious party pen; to read and trust media
published in countries that you have been taught
have interests antithetical to your own; to
sustain beliefs that cannot be given voice beyond
your own scattered thoughts. The few students who
voice dissenting views emphasize that they have
never raised these concerns beyond hushed
conversations with one or two close friends.
Socially, emotionally and academically, it is
easier to follow the path of least resistance.
Who has time for anything else?
When it is not the challenging academic
workload that keeps students too busy to engage
with the world beyond, it is the self-imposed
rigidity that is bedfellow to political ambition.
For those who wish to join the Party, it is safer
never to be exposed to foreign thought. To balance
curious inquiry with the party line implies
unacceptable risks. What if the wrong word slips
out at the wrong time? It is safer, easier not to
engage, to accept the party line no matter how
absurd. And so it has become typical in the course
of my research for a Peking student with more
mathematical ability in his thumb than there is in
my ancestral line to insinuate that the United
States is orchestrating the Arab Spring, just as
it ostensibly orchestrated Ukraine's Orange
Revolution.
Only in this context is
China's minimal censorship explicable. Every major
western newspaper is accessible online, sometimes
even in Chinese. I watch MSNBC on my computer each
morning as I stretch and dress. My research
partner in Beijing has read more articles than I
think healthy on the logic of Russia and China's
obstinacy on sanctions against Syria. But for the
most part these sites go unaccessed and unread,
colossal vaults of inconvenient information fallen
victim to the worst of modern coercion: the
corrosive effect on free thinking of the taxing
competition brought by global capitalism and the
ideological inflexibility of the one-party system.
Sam Sussman is a student
researcher and columnist at Swarthmore College. He
is currently researching Chinese student
nationalism through the J Roland Pennock
Fellowships in Public Affairs.
(Copyright 2012 Sam Sussman)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular
contributors.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
