THE CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE
You can begin to understand the Chinese educational system just from viewing its classrooms. Apart from being more crowded, they differ not all that much from those in other countries. The photos below show a high school I visited in Beijing in 1996, invited by a former student at the normal (i.e. teacher-training) college where I was then teaching. She had by then graduated and become a teacher herself, pictured at the lectern. It’s a typical classroom, holding about fifty students, seated at paired desks arranged six across and eight deep. The seating is generally fixed by the teacher. Some teachers award high-achieving students the choice of their own seats and seating partners; other teachers put taller students in back for better visibility (two boys are sitting in the back corners of this female-dominant classroom). It’s almost exactly the same layout I experienced as a high-school teacher in Japan, whose classrooms also held fifty students, though they wore sailor suits for the girls and military jackets for the boys, versus the unisex tracksuits in China. The classroom layouts are otherwise the same.
Apart from advances in technology, little has changed over the three decades since I visited that Chinese classroom. Computerized touch-sensitive LED screens have now pushed aside the old blackboard or are used in conjunction with blackboards or whiteboards. Eye-friendly ceiling lighting that filters out blue light has replaced fluorescent lighting. Classrooms are more spacious as they shift from six-across/eight-deep to eight-across/six-deep seating arrangements, bringing the students at rear closer to the teacher and the screen. The photo below was taken by a university student of mine of her former high-school classroom, from which she graduated in 2024. Notice at upper right the poster that their teacher chose to put up on the wall, featuring a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the “three metamorphoses of the spirit,” symbolized by the camel (self-discipline), the lion (independence and the challenging of authority), and the child (spiritual liberation and creativity).
But compared to public high school education in North America and Europe, the Chinese high school experience is far more rigorous and would be scarcely believable to those unfamiliar with it. Let’s go over the basics for the three years of senior high school, while noting that junior high school is similar. Most Chinese high schools are what we would call boarding schools, with dormitories for the students. This is logical for those from the countryside who’ve been accepted into a higher-ranked school rather than a lower-ranked one closer to home. But even where the students’ homes are in the same city, they are required to live at school, for the first year at least; they may apply to be day students during their second and third years. Even day students must remain at school for evening self-study before being allowed to go home, though these strictures can vary and some schools are laxer, laying the responsibility for completing homework on the students’ parents.
Since most students live at school, the school day begins not at the start of classes but at waking time and ends when the students are released from their classroom study in the evening. This means a sixteen-hour day, either 5:30 AM–9:30 PM or 6:30 AM–10:30 PM, seven days a week. They may arise an hour later on Saturdays and Sundays, and Sundays have only morning classes. A few luckier schools give students one and a half or two days off on the weekend. In other words, the vast majority of students have hardly any free time in their lives. This is intentional and I’ll return to this point below. It also explains much about students’ attitudes and behavior when they arrive at university.
THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM
During their first year of senior high, all students take the same compulsory subjects—Chinese, English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, politics, history, and geography; some schools have an additional course in information technology. In their second year they are tracked into Science or Humanities. They can then select relevant elective courses from among the first-year subjects to deepen their knowledge, while Chinese, English, and mathematics remain compulsory. Teachers have considerable leeway in deciding how much time to devote to scripted content and how much to digress. However, from the second semester of their second year, general course content shifts to preparation for the nation-wide, four-day university entrance examination, the gaokao. The same subjects are now “taught to the exam,” that is, with more emphasis on anticipating exam questions.
In their final year, schools that allowed them to carve out a bit of extra time for club activities or hobbies such as badminton, calligraphy, or piano, now strongly discourage or forbid the students from devoting their waking hours to anything but gaokao preparation. So much focus is there on the gaokao that many schools will even sacrifice physical education, except perhaps for making the students run a few laps around the track in the morning. (In November of 2025, the Ministry of Education required all primary and secondary schools to provide students with at least two hours of physical activity daily.) For an in-depth look at how one subject, history, is taught in Chinese high schools, see my Questioning China’s “5,000 years” master trope.
Likewise, student-centered group or pair work is much rarer in Chinese than in Western classrooms, since it’s considered less efficient than dispensing knowledge directly by the teacher. More enlightened teachers, particularly in English classes where speaking skills obviously can’t be developed without active participation, do encourage the students to speak up to a limited extent. The younger generation of teachers are more open to two-way interaction in the classroom, and some invite students to assert their own opinions and even point out the teacher’s errors. Most of the students I talked to had favorable impressions of their teachers, who tried their best to make their classes lively and memorable under the constraining pressures of exam-based education.
PRESSURE-COOKER EDUCATION
After talking to numerous students over the years about their school experiences, I have come away with two contradictory insights. On the one hand, beloved teachers aside, they were unanimous in their conviction that high school was tedious and exhausting. A common reaction was they had no memory of what they had learned, even after just graduating, once the entirety of their knowledge emptied out of their brains onto the gaokao examination paper, down the memory hole. Their only happy recollection was time spent with their friends.
On the other hand, many were grateful for the ordeal, precisely because it was so grueling. They admitted that the severe process honed the intelligence, formed character, and to a great extent better prepared them for study abroad than students from less rigorous backgrounds. I similarly recall, during my years teaching college composition in the U.S., the striking difference between my freshmen students and their slightly older classmates who had spent a couple years in the military before entering university and who were more mature, calm, and focused.
The Chinese high school system is designed as a merciless but efficient filtering device. Only those who survive it have the right stuff to advance up the socioeconomic ladder (this of course does not solve the problem today of overqualified university graduates unable to find jobs in a contracting, AI-driven economy). Some don’t survive the trial and emerge out of the meat grinder with severe personality distortions or other mental problems, often brought on by obsessive parents who since their childhood instilled in them the idea that anything less than getting into a top university would be a family disaster. Many students who haven’t fully individuated themselves psychologically from their parents suffer crushing anxiety and guilt over fear of letting them down. Many fall into depression even before the results of the gaokao exam are released.
What happens to the rebellious who fight back against the harshness of the system? Because almost all of the students I taught attended good universities and thus good high schools that enabled them to get into good universities, I wasn’t able to form a clear picture about this except the obvious: the better the high school, the fewer disciplinary problems.
I asked about cliques, so prevalent in American schools. Chinese has no exact equivalent of this word, and the phenomenon of girls being mean to girls is just not as common in China. They had heard of bullying but only secondhand, as something that occurred in vocational high schools. And what would happen to a female student—and the male student responsible—who got pregnant? None had heard rumors of this happening and thus had no idea what sort of punishment would be involved. Expulsion probably, and if the parents could convince the school authorities to hush it up, an abortion and a second chance at another high school.
INFANTILIZATION OF STUDENTS
Students who wanted to have sex would have found it difficult, with so little free time and private space in which to engage in trysts. That’s why they are given no time to themselves: to preempt such threatening activities as love and sex from taking root in the first place. In this context, it is understandable, if not humane, why fully grown, post-adolescent students must be treated as children. It’s necessary to the functioning of the system, which would fly apart if the students came to a collective realization that they were sexually mature adults.
Since they enter college at age 18 or 19, as opposed to American freshmen who enter a year earlier, many Chinese students are already legally adults in their final year of high school. The system needs to brainwash them into believing they are children in order to keep their explosive hormones tightly under wraps. Indeed, until recent decades, not just high-school but university students were forbidden, upon threat of expulsion, from having sex. The culture is aligned to this and Chinese females in particular continue to be regarded as grown children, as “pure” and “undamaged,” until they are married.
This of course shores up and benefits the sexist and patronizing ideology of patriarchy, quite common in the East and other traditional societies. When I was living in Japan, a Japanese female office worker related to me her experience as a senior high-school exchange student in the U.S. Her American classmates told her she looked “nine years old.” She wasn’t deliberately acting or dressing like a child. It was unconscious—until a different culture pointed it out to her.
An anecdote will convey the heavy-handedness of Chinese high schools in the face of smoldering sexual anxiety. It took place in the early 2000s at a top “key” six-year high school (combining junior and senior high) attached to a university in Beijing. A teacher in her mid-thirties, whom I’ll call Rose, was attending a class of mine in a master’s program in applied linguistics for adult teachers to spruce up her credentials. Rose was a very attractive woman, with big, gorgeous eyes and a winning smile, and she had an equally bubbly, enthusiastic personality—well suited to being a teacher. In fact, she was deemed the best teacher of her school and had won a number of city-wide teaching awards and recognitions.
What could go wrong? You might suppose a cabal of envious colleagues engineered a bogus scandal to get her in trouble, but the incident was more bizarre. She taught seniors—sixteen to eighteen years old. Simply for being a beautiful and captivating teacher, it was inevitable that some students would develop crushes on her. One admiring but naive female student fell in love with her began and writing her love letters, depositing locks of her hair in the letters. Rose didn’t know what to do with these letters; she may have sat the girl down for a private and firm talk. Somehow the principle got wind of the letters. He never blamed Rose, for she hadn’t committed any indiscretion. But for the sake of all the senior students’ safety, he transferred her to teaching the junior-high students.
We laugh at such a ridiculous treatment of teaching staff and congratulate ourselves on our far more sensible and relaxed Western high-school systems. Yet I should add here that schools in the West used to be quite strict about sexual delinquency. My mother was kicked out of a major midwestern U.S. university in her sophomore year after being caught in a sexual relationship with another student. This was back in the 1950s, not all that far removed from our era.
HIGH SCHOOLS IN THE WEST
If I were to describe to Chinese students and educators the high-school experience I went through in Canada (where my family moved in my teens), they would surely find it dysfunctional and depraved. This was back in the 1970s at a typical public high school, and I have no reason to believe things have greatly changed (unlike U.S. high schools which have turned paranoid and policed due to gang and gun violence). The students fell into two groups: the “straights” or “goodie-goodies,” who formed the majority, and a solid minority of “freaks.” I counted myself among the latter. It was after all the ‘70s, the height of liberalism and freedom. One entrance to the school building had a spacious two-story foyer, separated from the hallways by an inner set of glass-paned doors. Smoking was allowed in this foyer. Teachers could espy us at a glance but never entered our space. They were afraid to, since they could smell the hash oil we dripped onto our cigarette butts before class in the morning, while those of us who were high on acid never made it out of the foyer or spent the day at the pool hall across the street. I didn’t learn much during those years nor remember ever spending time on homework, except once having to ask my mother’s help in cracking Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
One advantage of the relatively lax North-American high school system, however, is it allows you to drop out, if necessary, and recalibrate before reattending later with a more mature mindset. Before my senior year, my father, a university professor, went on sabbatical to (then) West Germany and took us along for the year. I was a guest student at a Gymnasium—an academic high school for those being tracked into university. I returned to Canada the following year and completed my high-school degree part-time over the next two years, as I had to work to support myself. I now applied myself and earned much better grades, good enough to be accepted into university. Then I buckled down and studied hard, eventually earning two Master’s degrees and a PhD from solid universities in the U.S.
The German high school experience was as different yet from the Canadian as both were from the Chinese. Rather than treating the students as children as in China and East Asia, North-American schools treat the students as budding adults, as provisional, protected adults in their own ecosystem, who still need a way to go before entering the adult world. In Germany, by contrast, high schools really treat the students as full-fledged de facto adults. We had classes in calculus (of which I was so ignorant I could only use the class as passive German practice), physics, chemistry, biology, social studies, German, and English. Chinese high-school students receive a solid grounding in calculus as well but nothing serious in the humanities, nothing close to what Europeans get. In German class, we read Günther Grass’s novel Cat and Mouse. In English class, we read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The sophistication of Huxley’s English was as hard for them as Grass’s German was for me, and I remember my classmates complaining about it to the teacher, who trudged determinedly along with the book anyway, as teachers do.
Everything was more overtly political in Germany. During class breaks we stepped outside to smoke cigarettes and chat with the teachers about the news of the day. I was frequently pulled along when the whole school was let out to participate in some march or demonstration through the city, though I never had any idea what the protesting was about. German high-school students were not just allowed to engage in romance and sex; many were living together in rented rooms with the full support of their parents. There were bars for teenagers and no regulated drinking age. Germany was and still is the most open of societies with regard to bodily freedom. One day some classmates—four girls and another boy—invited me to a Sunday picnic in the countryside, where they proceeded, with complete unselfconsciousness, to strip naked and skinny-dip in a nearby pond.
Which of these three dissimilar high-school systems—the Chinese, the Canadian, and the German—is the best? A more pertinent question to ask is to what extent can students graduating from any country’s high school discourse knowledgeably about present-day politics? I have to say the German (and other European) high-school system win hands down. Unless and until American students no longer need to undergo active-shooter drills to survive mass shootings, the U.S. is not morally qualified to comment on high-school education. The Chinese high-school system is among the toughest and most totalitarian of any in the world. The Japanese system is similar to the Chinese in many respects, with the curious difference that Japanese teachers have even more power over their students. A Japanese teacher told me how he would rush to the home of any student under his charge missing class, drag him out of bed and march him to school. Japanese parents are required to apologize in person to the principal for their children’s misbehavior. Yet what can be said about the totalitarian Asian high school, ironically in its favor, is that it never wholly succeeds in crushing the students and turning them into mindless robots. I have met countless Chinese and Japanese who have gone through the system and turned out just fine, their imaginations and creativity intact. The only major criticisms are the system’s failings in teaching politics, history, and English. The former two are trivialized, deemed the exclusive business of grownups—politicians and historians—and the latter is taught without much competence.
THE CONFUCIAN QUESTION
An intriguing article by a Chinese Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, entitled “Language as play: Why Chinese students study hard but speak softly,” argues that a Confucian-based education in which student silence is seen not as a problem but as normalized behavior is primarily to blame for poor English proficiency among the Chinese: “In East Asia—China especially—this restraint is cultural. It flows from a Confucian inheritance that prizes discipline and harmony over spontaneity. Education is moral formation before it is communication. The ideal student is diligent, modest and self-controlled….The cost is emotional as well as linguistic. Language becomes an exam subject, not a living bond.” This idea is hardly new. Chinese educators have long acknowledged that the teacher-centered language classroom is fundamentally at odds with language learning, even as major reforms never materialize. What’s interesting is the author’s focus not simply on the importance of oral communication but on play itself as a means to this, holding up the casual classroom talk of African students in Moscow learning Russian as an example for the Chinese to emulate.
I would zero in on something else: the rigidified, essentialized concept of Confucianism as an inviolable feature (or roadblock) of Chinese education. This timeworn and clichéd version of Confucianism, shared by many Chinese, and Western observers of the Chinese, represents the most calcified and frightful form of patriarchy ever devised. Developed through twists and turns over the millennia, with the historical figure of Confucius long left behind, it consists in a nested, military-like framework of control operating at all levels of society, from the emperor down to the family itself, with the father receiving automatic obedience and respect from sons, elder sons receiving the same from younger sons, and all males in the household receiving the same from their mother and sisters.
In the traditional Confucian classroom, the teacher’s role is to command the same obedience and respect from the students. Since obedience for its own sake is paramount, anything of truly pedagogical concern is incidental and irrelevant. To be sure, this caricatures what actually goes on in the classroom, but it nonetheless forms the doctrinal ground on which learning must exert itself.
It also has little to do with the real Confucius. In his classic English introduction, Confucius as a Teacher, Chen Jingpan reminds us that Confucius prioritized not obedience but study (xue) and questioning (wen)—with an emphasis on questioning as a means of mutual enlightenment. Genuine learning occurs only when students are given the space and initiative not just to listen but to communicate meaningfully through dialogic interaction. Far from a stern authoritarian, Confucius was the Asian counterpart of Socrates and the Socratic method of learning. Sheer obedience is contrary to learning. The notion of “obedience” has been exaggerated and distorted to serve the interests of authorities and keep their power unchecked. Its only historical veracity isn’t even related to education but to filial piety (xiao) in the domestic sphere—respect for one’s parents and ancestors.
My Chinese students were steeped in Confucian precepts, though they had quite varied responses to which precepts seemed most vital to them. Some stressed the importance of politeness and respect, others diligence in study, and others still social harmony and collectivism. Some reiterated the five traditional Confucian virtues of benevolence (ren), righteousness (yi), propriety (li), wisdom (zhi), and spiritual piety (xin). Chen notes that benevolence is mentioned in Confucius’s Analects far more than the other four and is the master virtue from which all other virtues flow. Besides the English term benevolence, ren can also be rendered as agape (unconditional love), generosity, sincerity, earnestness, kindness, humanity, philanthropy, and empathy, or in Chen’s definition, “an earnest desire and beneficent action, both active and passive, for the well-being of the one loved.” This interpretation giving precedence to benevolence is at odds with the usual notion of stern respect for and humble supplication to authority. Benevolence implies mutual humility and the fostering of well-being to bring people closer together as equals. It is thus more aligned with the student-centered than the traditional teacher-centered classroom.
Is Confucianism necessary at all to explain Chinese education? Whichever Confucian precept one wishes to belabor—diligence, questioning, propriety, wisdom, harmony, respect, benevolence—more or less the same virtues are taken for granted in education the world over. One could just as well call them Christian virtues, or good old Puritan virtues, or communist virtues for that matter. Confucianism, finally, is whatever the student makes of it.
Regardless of what it means upon analysis, Confucianism does have the benefit of giving Chinese students a sense of historical and spiritual grounding in their culture. It also serves, in the classroom context, to remind students that they are situated in an educational community that involves collective responsibilities. Confucianism is not some special quality that resides in the DNA of the Chinese while the rest of the world flounders in moral confusion. It’s standard pedagogical philosophy and common sense, though other cultures can draw on their own historical figures to exemplify these virtues.
A word on Asian student silence. This dogged phenomenon has resisted every attempt to explain and solve it. Some blame bastardized Confucianism: one should never speak up even when prompted, because it’s not the student’s place to speak up. Combine this with reluctance to show off among one’s peers. Or simply that many students, in the West as well, aren’t sure of the right answer. But the best explanation, in my view, is youth. Teenagers tend to be intimidated in formal settings—and the classroom is as formal as any—no matter how relaxed and cheerful their teacher. I spent years teaching in U.S. colleges trying to figure out how to get my American freshmen to speak up in class; they were more talkative than their Chinese counterparts but not by a huge margin. By contrast, the older the students are, the more spontaneous they are. Some of my most garrulous students were adult Russian refugees with their unstoppable stream of charmingly broken English in beginner’s oral English class. The adult students I taught in China too conversed readily and were a joy to teach.
UNIVERSITY: DORM LIFE
Let’s begin with Chinese dorms, and then you will understand Chinese university classrooms. In the 1990s, dormitories were crowded and stuffy, with barely enough space to walk around. Eight students slept in four bunk beds and shared a single table in lieu of individual desks. Until recent years, electric kettles and hot plates were prohibited in dorm rooms due to limited electricity and fire hazards; large thermoses supplied hot water for drinking. There was no air conditioning in hot weather, and lights were cut at 11 PM. Bathing took place in the campus public shower, and students had to pay for shower tickets. Accommodation today has vastly improved. Dorm rooms now have their own shower stall, air conditioning, and loft-bed units with a desk under the bed. Four to six students share a room rather than eight.
Other things haven’t changed. As in the past, male and females are segregated either on different floors or in separate buildings. Chinese universities don’t have fraternities or sororities, and it’s uncommon for students to live off campus. With no tradition of off-campus partying, except for occasional restaurant or KTV outings, the students are accustomed to a much more sheltered and sedentary lifestyle than university students elsewhere.
In dormitory life today, male students have a penchant for turning their rooms into pigsties. This is the Chinese version of freshman rebellion, equivalent to American frat kids waking up in their drunken vomit. If they are Party members or have been spoiled by well-connected parents, they won’t have trouble finding a job after graduating. Combine this casual attitude toward their education with the explosive freedom of their newly won independence from high-school incarceration, and the dorm room turns into a morning-after frat house.
In addition to my teaching duties at my most recent Chinese university job in the 2020s, I was a personal tutor to close to a hundred freshmen. My male tutees often confided to me their annoyance at their often filthy, academically underachieving roommates who give up from the get-go in their first semester to wallow in computer-game addiction. They leave their room only to go to class or pick up food deliveries from the nearest campus gate, easier than walking all the way to the cafeteria. Garbage in the room accumulates and the odors are horrific. Clothes are never washed but worn until they disintegrate. Some never bathe. Dorm-administration student teams making spot checks on room hygiene are blown back by the stench when they open the door. The flashing lights and noise from all-night gaming sessions also disrupt the sleep of their more studious roommates. If quarreling doesn’t produce results, they can apply as a last resort to change dorm rooms, at the risk of finding the new room situation even worse. Or they move off campus to find peace.
The gender differences are striking. Female students on the whole seem to survive high-school hell better and emerge more intact. No need to sabotage their university education with chaotic acting out. They are all addicted to their cellphones, but the girls get along better with their dormmates and get better sleep. They are more sanitary, collectively working out a system for removing their trash and hitting the lights and the noise at night. They bathe. They are more organized. Some turn their dorm room into their online-business office, stocking the space with their inventory.
Many—not all—male students display problems the moment they walk into the classroom, often late and in a daze. They spend the first hour of class orienting themselves, asking their adjacent classmates in a whisper what they are supposed to be doing. Constantly short of sleep, they struggle and fail to stay awake. Shy and self-conscious, they huddle in self-protective solidarity around their own table or in the back of the classroom. They don’t speak up unless called on, mortified more by their linguistically superior female classmates than by their teacher. Most just go through the motions, hoping to earn a grade high enough to pass. If they aren’t the easiest to teach, it’s because they hate to be there.
My students were business majors, and the males made up a quarter to a third of each class I taught. Females dominate business and the humanities in China. In foreign-language and teacher-training universities, females may make up 80 to 90 percent of the student body, whereas science, technology, and engineering schools are male-dominated, and their male students are more serious and fare better. Both male and female high achievers are the nation’s future and success story. They are the ones designing the world’s most advanced infrastructure—China’s wind and solar-energy fields, towering bridges, high-speed trains, luxury EVs, and cutting-edge AI companies. I’m not sure what goes on in the dorm rooms of the better male students, but probably less gaming, more study, and better sleep.
The “four-year vacation” of college, after the six grinding years of secondary school, is a term I first heard in Japan, which also has a career-determining university entrance exam similar to the Chinese gaokao. Japanese high-school students complained to me that they rarely had a full night of sleep during their final year of preparation for the exam. Evening cram school was de rigueur. After going through this “examination hell,” you can imagine what university feels like when for the first time in your life, you’re away from teacher surveillance and helicopter moms. To some extent the same occurs everywhere.
Not every student blows off their college years. Most get their act together and buckle down. American students have more reason than most to be serious about study, with the astronomical tuition fees at U.S. universities. Flunking out means throwing away thousands of dollars of their parents’ money. If you’re going to flunk out, do it fast—in the first semester—to stop the financial hemorrhaging. Travel the world, get a job for a few years, or go into the army. Go back to school when you’re ready.
The U.S. university system is cleverly, ruthlessly structured to make a lot of money off floundering students. It’s the reverse of the Asian system. Instead of grinding high school years followed by a four-year vacation on a college campus, American students who haven’t had the benefit of a good high school find themselves in a four-year nightmare. Many are even less prepared for study than the most undermotivated Chinese students. Only 55% of undergraduates at U.S. universities complete a four-year degree after four years; the percentage rises to 65% after eight years. That is, some get out early and return to university years later, now more mature and studious, to finish their degree. Still, one third of American bachelor students never finish their degree.
ADMINISTRATIVE HURDLES
Marched through their four years in lockstep, Chinese students don’t have the luxury of escaping and finishing college later. Since they all enter the job market upon graduation as the same cohort, and prospective employers expect this, those who take time off, even just one or two years, are passed over as already “old.” In China, 90-95% of undergraduate students complete their degree in four years.
It was closer to 100 percent in years past, with a bit of fudging by school administrators and parents with good guanxi, or connections. I once failed a senior student at a top Beijing university who showed up to class for the first time in the semester on final exam day. Her parents had the failing grade changed to a passing one in back-room dealings I was not a party to. At another university, a graduating student asked me to write her a recommendation letter to a U.S. university where she was applying to study abroad. As some of her course grades were wanting, she merely went to a campus office and ask the staff there to print out a new transcript with the grades changed to order. Over recent decades, Chinese universities have been straightening out such flagrant practices. But guanxi is always important and parents routinely curry favor with influential professors and administrators with monetary gifts.
The problem for foreign teachers is not manipulated transcripts or back-room shenanigans. Why in the world would you bang your head on the wall over academic dishonesty that doesn’t concern you? It’s enough to be a good teacher and do your job, treat your own students well, assign grades fairly, and not worry about what may happen to the grades after you assign them. The biggest issue for foreign teachers is that Chinese university administrations don’t have a stellar reputation for treating us well. The country’s uneasy, suspicious relationship with foreigners in its domain has a long history going back to the 1950s. For anecdotes and examples, see my essay The Chinese university: A primer for prospective foreign teachers. The obverse problem was that many foreign teachers had questionable qualifications and teaching skills.
This, again, is improving. Since the mid-2010s, the Chinese Government has required all foreign teachers to prove their credentials with third-party verification of their diplomas, along with home-country criminal-record checks (FBI check in the case of U.S. teachers), to be further authenticated by the respective country’s Chinese Embassy. In demanding worthy foreign faculty, universities for their part began to demonstrate more commitment and professionalism toward them.
Yet foreigners are still and will always be regarded as outsiders. Senior Chinese faculty are invariably Communist Party members, and every university administration is overseen by a Party office. Virtually every decision in every departmental meeting requires Party approval. Every new foreign hire must be signed off by Party staff in the university’s Foreign Affairs Office, overriding the department’s recommendations if it so chooses. Foreign teachers are invited to departmental parties and events for hospitality purposes but not to departmental meetings. Even if the foreign faculty were fluent in Chinese, they would neither be welcome nor given any say. The Chinese public university remains a closed system under the Party’s thumb.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following teachers for the information they provided on Chinese education: Feng Yihan, Hu Xiaoyu, Wu Linna, Gao Mingzhe, and Zhang Weiwei. And to the following students for their equally informative insights: Wang Qingyi, Zhou Ziyue, Wang Xiaohan, Lei Ziyuan, Guo Peiyan, Liu Xiangying, Yang Jingjing, and Emily Chen.
* * *
Other posts in this series:
Insights into China, Part 1: A walk down the street
Insights into China, Part 2: A meal in a restaurant
Insights into China, Part 3: An invitation to a party
Insights into China, Part 4: A stay in a hotel
Insights into China, Part 6: A visit to the library
Insights into China, Part 7: An immersion in a museum
Insights into China, Part 8: An afternoon in a café
Insights into China, Part 9: A journey to the hinterland
Insights into China, Part 10: A vision in a concert hall
Insights into China, Part 11: A timeslip to the glorious Qing
Insights into China, Part 12: An idyll in paradise
BUY THE BOOK. FORTHCOMING THIS FALL:
At the Police Café: China in Twelve Scenes
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