Despite their varied and sometimes startling architecture, Chinese university campuses are virtually indistinguishable from one another. The following pictures are taken from four different universities. The reader is invited to identify them.

As my Chinese improved and I met more people from within the institute and beyond, I was struck by the deep hostility toward foreigners among Chinese in authority. There was a lot of talk of friendship but very little to be found. (John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China)

1. By way of analogy

Let’s imagine a dystopian turn of events where the Far Right in the USA got the upper hand, and I mean really got the upper hand and took power, and once in power rammed through an authoritarian Christian agenda on the American people. The public schools are already primed for this, so instituting universal school prayer and Creationism in lieu of science classes would be a fait accompli. The main priority would be the archenemy in their university bastion, namely Liberals. What would the universities look like after being reconstituted along Christian lines? We needn’t go so far as to envision a reign of terror, with “heathen” professors hung from nooses in public executions, as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. That would be much too messy, when there is a simple and elegant solution – if we take a cue from the Chinese university.

If the American university were refashioned along Christian lines but with Chinese characteristics, what we could expect to see is a new mandatory course for all students, undergraduate and graduate alike, entitled Christian Morality (or if you will, Christian Ethics or Christian Principles). The students would be required to take this course not just once but every semester of every year, right up through doctoral study. Each student would have to faithfully attend and pass the course anywhere from eight to sixteen times – 360 to 720 class-time hours – depending on total years of study. The course itself wouldn’t change much with each new semester, just re-hashings of the same content – e.g. different passages from the Bible or new writings from contemporary evangelists to recite, even a stab or two at Biblical hermeneutics for the graduate-level courses.

The rest of the curriculum would remain largely intact. The heathen professors would retain their job, though they would of course now be required to “toe the line,” forewarned to stick closely to the relevant content of whatever they were hired to teach and avoid pushing any extreme (i.e. secular) ideas on the students. Most university courses in any case have always been of a bland technical nature – business, computing, engineering – and largely indoctrination proof. If you were already a Christian conservative or fundamentalist and familiar with the curriculum of private Catholic or evangelist Protestant universities today, you would be perfectly at home. For the rest, the mandatory Christian courses would be considerably more of a burden, but possibly something that could put up with or even gotten used to.

Meanwhile these Christian courses would give the school leaders a ready way to monitor and track the loyalty and dedication of each and every student. Unlike the rest of the curriculum, whose courses are merely of practical value to the students but of little value to the university (whose new focus would no longer be research and pedagogy but ideological control and religious conversion), the Christian Morality courses are symbolic: hundreds of hours of pointless class time serving the sole but nonetheless crucial purpose of reminding the students of who’s in charge. Thus while these courses would be of no practical value to the students, they would be of immense practical value to the leaders, precisely because the godless majority of students who found the courses hateful and a major inconvenience (given the amount of time spent on studies of no value to their chosen major), going through their motions and readily identifiable by their mediocre grades, would stand out in relief. It would then be clear which ones needed to be controlled – and if necessary disciplined. Never mind students’ individual Christian beliefs: official sanction as a “correct” Christian would require the appropriate devotional enthusiasm and conformity to doctrinaire code. (It goes without saying that no non-Christian religions would be tolerated on campus.) Arrayed against the latter majority would be a godly (or opportunistic) minority of students sympathetic with the university’s Christian mission who performed well in the courses and who could be recruited as foot soldiers to recruit more students in turn, as well as further extend the university’s means of surveillance by noting, if not exactly spying on, any troublemaking fellow students.

By this point it should be apparent to the reader that I am referring to the Communist Party’s stranglehold over Chinese universities, and the equivalent of the hypothetical Christian Morality courses is the mandatory “politics” courses taken by all students in every semester of every year. They have names like Mao Zedong Thought or Deng Xiaoping Thought or Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, but whatever they are called they recapitulate the same content and narrow spectrum of ideas over and over. Not much actual learning takes place in these courses. I have taught in various Chinese universities for eleven years and gotten to know many of the 1,500 or so students who have passed through my classrooms. Whenever I ask them in private conversations what they actually learn in their politics classes, I draw a blank. They scratch their head and for the life of them can’t remember a single valuable thing, or anything at all, that they got out of the courses. They have a hard time even remembering the names of the courses. Even students who are Party members can’t seem to recall anything about the courses (a surprising number of students I have befriended turned out to be Party members).

It would be one thing if these courses genuinely addressed current or contested issues of ethics and politics. There is an argument for making ethics courses a universal requirement for university students anywhere. Some US universities offer such courses or their equivalents at the freshman level, and with all the financial corruption presently running American society into the ground, I personally feel American students could use a solid education in ethics. In order to be pedagogically effective, however, an ethics course must present competing visions of society and the students encouraged to debate the various positions in a searching and dialogic way that stimulates their critical thinking and builds internal knowledge structures. But if the purpose, on the contrary, is not the cultivation of intellectual independence and moral character but rather obedience for its own sake, then you will do the opposite: design courses to be essentially contentless, with boilerplate language for relatively straightforward if tedious memorization and regurgitation on exams. The duller the content the better, in fact, to standardize the processing of the content and even out any knotty distractions requiring more specialized acuity.

2. The upside-down curriculum

It is also not by accident that courses in Chinese universities are hierarchically stratified into three levels in terms of importance, with the mandatory politics courses at the top, being the only courses that all students must take, each and every semester. Their importance is also underscored when bachelor students apply for graduate-level study. For this, two exam essays are typically required, one based on the content of their undergraduate politics courses and one on their major. Their acceptance into a graduate program, in other words, depends as much on rote recitation of this irrelevant material as on the relevant preparation in their major. The second level in the hierarchy consists of the training courses in the various majors (e.g. Intensive Reading and Extensive Reading for English majors). Both the politics courses and the training courses are covered on the final “comprehensive examination” the students must take in their senior year in order to graduate.

Not covered on this exam are the courses of the third level, the so-called selective or optional courses. Ironically, it is often these “selective” courses that are the most important for the students’ preparation in their major – at least for those students applying for graduate study abroad. It is the selective courses that the visiting foreign professors are usually hired to teach and that require more advanced and up-to-date knowledge than their Chinese counterparts generally have, e.g., for English literature majors, courses on critical theory, women’s studies, the contemporary novel, and the like. As these courses depend on the temporary hiring of foreign instructors to teach them, they are regarded as occasional courses, not part of the fixed curriculum but grouped into the selective category.

It might seem that one mandatory politics course per semester is not the worst of fates befalling the students, when most consider themselves lucky enough to have made it this far and the important thing is they are now better positioned to find a good job with their university degree, whatever the quality of the education they happen to be receiving. But the ramifications of this hierarchy are profound and far-reaching, permeating every aspect of Chinese university life, down to the experiences of foreign teachers. When the least useful courses are treated as inviolable and the most useful courses trivialized as one-off affairs not even worthy of inclusion on the graduating exam, it conveys to the students the message that their education is likewise trivial and unimportant, whereupon every other dreary aspect of Chinese university life makes sense and falls into place. Above all it has the momentous consequence of demoralizing the students (and teachers as well) and leaving them utterly cynical at the outset. Let’s go into more detail.

The first major effect of this upside-down curriculum is to short-circuit communication and stop up the flow of information. I don’t mean a conspiracy from on high to prevent student access to certain kinds of ideas deemed volatile or politically sensitive (though this occurs as well). I mean something more insidious because it is normative: an operative disconnect at every conceivable interactive node. When education is no longer the purpose of the university but this purpose is, on the contrary, mocked, energy dissipates, meaning deflates, and people deflate as well and become passive. Passivity engenders indifference and apathy, and nothing is more poisonous to social discourse than apathy.

There is a telling instance of this in Rosemary Mahoney’s The Early Arrival of Dreams, her account of a year in China as a teacher at Hangzhou University, when upon arriving at the airport on her flight to China, found no one there to pick her up, despite having been told someone would pick her up (as is standard procedure). While she never finally got to the bottom of the lapse, I have no trouble understanding it, from my years in China. It follows from institutionalized apathy. This is more than mere dispersed responsibility, the mix-ups that can happen anywhere because responsibility was mistakenly never clearly assigned in the first place. It is worse, and it is systemic: all of the concerned parties may in fact have been aware of her arrival but simply decided not to follow through and take the major step of actually picking up the laowai at the airport, for the simple reason that there was nothing personally to gain from doing so.

When the default condition is to do nothing unless one is forced to do otherwise, the simplest acts of communication fall through. It’s a common experience of many foreign teachers in China on the first day of the semester not to be informed where their classroom is. The Chinese teachers all seem to know, but the foreigners often fall through the cracks of the leaky communication apparatus, unless – again – those charged with this task have enough personal incentive to inform them (“foreigners” or laowai fall into a special category of university animal, to be discussed below). I could spend the rest of this essay listing countless instances when apathy prevented vital communication that I needed for the most basic purposes from reaching me. I will only mention a few. I will not single out which university was involved in each case; there’s little point, as the pattern is the same in all Chinese universities.

Several months after arriving at my first university, I received a slip from the Department secretary sent from the downtown post office, indicating that a package addressed to me had been returned to the US undelivered due to my failure to pick it up in time. This was the first notice I received about the printer I had shipped from home and was eagerly expecting. The campus mailroom had disregarded the previous notices from the post office, perhaps, one speculates, because they didn’t personally know me or had never received any previous favors from me; somehow I managed to receive this notice.

Several weeks into the spring semester of my second year at the same university, I was informed one day by the Foreign Affairs Office that I owed the Public Security Bureau 4,000 yuan in penalties ($500 at the time) for failing to renew my overdue visa. The previous year they had taken care of my visa and I had no idea the latest visa had expired (I had assumed it to be a 12-month visa like my job contract rather than a 6-month visa). Clearly they should have attended to it again or at least alerted me to the situation in a timely way. But the person formerly in charge of us had been replaced and the new person didn’t yet know the ropes. However, as the fine would have to come out of their coffers, they tried to make me responsible. Fortunately, I was able to resolve the standoff with my immediate boss’s help, more or less to the satisfaction of both sides.

At another university, I was once asked to teach a course on Modern Drama for the following fall semester, and I happily accepted. As I normally taught Shakespeare, I spent the entire summer reading up on modern plays. Only a week before the fall semester was due to start I found out that the course was cancelled. In fact it had been cancelled back in the spring, shortly after I was invited to teach it, due to insufficient student enrollment, which was due in turn to the failure of the relevant person to list the course in the electronic catalog. No one informed me of any of these developments. Only upon inquiring before the start of the fall semester on the location of my classroom, after my syllabus had been lovingly prepared and the course ready to go, did I learn about the cancellation.

3. Low-quality scholarship and teaching

Another consequence of the upside-down curriculum is the low quality of Chinese scholarship. When the priority of scholars is their allegiance to political formations instead of academic research or excellence in teaching, genuine scholarship has no place. Like the students, professors go through the motions. As with scholars everywhere, Chinese scholars must continually publish to earn promotions. But academic publishing in China is wholly confined to the quantitative model. It’s not your contribution to knowledge that counts, only how many articles you publish. There is no systematic peer-reviewer system for books or journal publications. It’s common knowledge that professors get their articles accepted into journals through connections or monetary payments. Academic plagiarism is also commonplace and flagrant. There was a funny story that once made it into the mainstream Chinese press of a graduate student caught plagiarizing his thesis from a well-known scholar; it was then discovered that this scholar had himself plagiarized the same content from another scholar.

Chinese academics are for the most part locked out of the international academic marketplace. They simply can’t compete. There are exceptions in the sciences and technology, which increasingly receive vast infusions of government cash for research and development, mostly showered on a few select institutions – Peking and Qinghua Universities – improving their international rankings to a modest degree. From the Chinese perspective, however, it doesn’t particularly matter that they’re locked out of the global academic market, since they have their own domestic academic market to contend with, and this keeps them busy enough. There are benefits to succeeding in this market: lucrative relationships with government VIPs and other important people in the public and private sectors. There is also a great deal of moonlighting, such as consulting jobs professors take on to help them earn a respectable living. Most government workers in China earn kickbacks of various sorts and corruption is rife everywhere. Doctors routinely accept envelopes of cash from patients to get preferential treatment, and it’s not surprising that the same goes on in the universities, notably in departments with close ties to the public sector. The parents of graduating majors in journalism, for example, are expected to give a cash gift (typically 20,000 kuai or $3,000) to well-connected professors to secure for their son or daughter a letter of introduction to a major media firm.

Besides the low quality of scholarship, there is the low quality of the teaching. The proverbial bad teacher buries his or her head in the textbook at the lectern and reads the assigned passages out loud in a drone, while the students carry on with their own business – studying for another class, playing with their cellphones, chatting, completely oblivious of the teacher’s odd gestures and annoying presence, as if the teacher wasn’t even there. Again, the Big Disconnect. If the teacher is not too strict about attendance, the students simply don’t show up to class. In reality, not all teachers are this bad, and there are always reports of serious and dedicated Chinese teachers. I can vouch that the easiest route is actually to be a good teacher, since by preparing your classes well everything flows smoothly, whereas bluffing your way through classes unprepared is embarrassing and exhausting. Most teachers do a satisfactory job if only because it’s the only way to justify their existence to themselves and get through the day.

Yet I am always struck by the repeated compliment from my surprised students of how “responsible” I am as a teacher. It’s never that I’m a knowledgeable, or an easy, or a funny teacher, though such qualities never hurt. It’s simply that I am actually willing to read the papers they turn in and make comments on them, or that I show up to class with an agenda that I have obviously worked hard to prepare; that I am not wasting their time and am conscientious in treating and grading them as fairly as I can; that I am actually willing to write them a recommendation letter for their graduate study applications instead of merely signing my name on the fake letter they write up in my name, as is customary with their Chinese professors. The implication is that many or most Chinese teachers lack some basic sense of responsibility, a thing that perpetually grates on the students, even the low achievers.

4. Student apathy

The lack of teacher quality, unfortunately though not uniformly, gets passed on to the students themselves. The full continuum is always apparent in every school. The students at the better or so-called “key” universities tend to be higher achievers than those at lesser institutions. But within any institution, even at the very best, there is a broad continuum. I have little patience with the sappy sort of foreign teachers who praise all of their wonderful and marvelous students, every one of whom is a saint and their good friend to boot. I also have little patience with foreign teachers who lay into all of their students as lazy brats. Both extremes manifest themselves with perfect symmetry in every class, and they physically place themselves accordingly, the best students sitting at the front of the room and worst at the back. Chinese classrooms enable this, being rectangular in shape and arrayed lengthwise. If it’s a large classroom with fifty or more seats, it’s easier for the low achievers to congregate at the back and pretend to be invisible. They even try to carry on this ruse when I call on them and they ignore me; they pretend I’m calling on the student next to them and keep bluffing by looking from side to side.

In any case it’s a standard expectation of the students, at least on first acquaintance with a foreign teacher, not to have to do any work for the course – until the distressing evidence to the contrary appears. The minority of really serious bootstrap students, those intent on pursuing graduate study abroad, who know no one is going to help them acquire the necessary knowledge but themselves – are ready to buckle down at the first sign I mean business (and through sheer determination and hard work they do frequently excel and are a force to reckon with at the top foreign universities). At the other extreme are the students who show up to class for the very first time on final exam day and are genuinely flabbergasted to discover that I have no intention of passing them (be prepared to present your syllabus spelling out your course requirements to the Dean when these students’ parents come complaining about your harsh and unreasonable treatment).

One explanation for this widespread student apathy applies to universities throughout East Asia, with its grueling system of secondary school education, culminating in the university entrance exam, which determines what rank of university the students can make it into and hence their subsequent career trajectory. Since this life-determining event occurs before they enter the university, their actual performance in university is almost a formality, as even the low achievers are guaranteed to graduate, as they while away their “four-year vacation.” But in Chinese universities there is another factor compounding the apathy of the students: the university hates them. This contempt is evident in an entrenched, institutionalized infantilization of all aspects of the undergraduate experience and that treats the students as naughty children.

Foreigners encountering Chinese universities for the first time are commonly struck by the high school-like atmosphere. There are countless rules, many of them reminiscent of the military barracks. Dormitories are segregated and students of the opposite sex not allowed to visit even in daytime (grad student dormitories are less stringent at some schools but not at others). Until a few years ago, it was illegal for university students to have sex, and those caught were expelled. At one campus where I taught, no benches or places to sit down outside were provided, apparently because the school leaders wanted to discourage students from romance. Students may not use any electrical devices for heating food or drink in their dorm rooms and lights are out at 11 pm. Classes are suddenly cancelled for impromptu meetings or events. At another school, grad students who missed a meeting were fined 500 yuan ($80).

No study halls are provided in most Chinese universities, leaving only the library, which invariably closes early in the evening, or the noisy dorm rooms for study (undergrad dorm rooms house 5-8 students in bunks). Some campuses permit evening study in unoccupied classrooms – a privilege that was withdrawn at one campus when two students were caught having sex in an empty classroom. Library study space is limited and there is a daily struggle to find and keep a spot. With mystifying overkill, libraries invent all manner of ways to make access difficult. Students surrender their ID when using library study space. They are not allowed to bring in their books, materials, or laptop. Borrowing privileges reek of the most rigid class-based society, with professors granted full privileges, grad students partial privileges and undergrads the least privileges – in terms of which collections are available for borrowing, the number of items they are allowed to borrow at a time, length of borrowing period, etc. Professors typically have first-serve access to the latest books and journals and simply stock them in their offices as long as they wish with impunity, while granting favored students access, as if operating their own mini library. I speak of the better-equipped libraries at the more prestigious universities. At one less fortunate campus where I taught, the library’s book collection was smaller than the middle school library I remember from my youth in the US; meanwhile, the school leaders had built a spiffy new karaoke party hall on campus for their own use.

An object study in the pedagogy of infantilization is the English speech contest, a regular event on all campuses, to which the foreign teachers and a few Chinese English teachers are invited to act as judges. These speeches are pure exercises in form, with only the trappings of content. The topics chosen are so banal and trite, childlike and anodyne – “To Believe is To Achieve,” “My Grandmother’s Advice,” “Fond Memories of Summer Camp” – that one suspects the students may not choose their own topic but must select one from an approved list. One recalls Henry James’ famous caricature of public oratory in Olive Chancellor from The Bostonians, whose rabble-rousing speeches were so effective because neither her passionate audiences nor she herself had any idea what she was talking about. Some universities have “debate” clubs, but the better among these Chinese debaters who venture into international competitions tend not to fare very well and are often crushed by competitors from the rest of the world accustomed to genuine debate.

Chinese universities are unique in the world (well, North Korea excepted) in absolutely not tolerating student protesting or unofficial organizing of any kind. From what I gather, even repressive regimes in the Middle East allow students to gather and protest on universities campuses. Not even organizing something constructive like Green or environmental awareness groups is allowed without going through official channels, which usually get rejected out of hand, however benign the cause. When students really do share a legitimate grievance or outrage and there is no outlet, violence can erupt. Several years ago graduating students at a business college in Henan Province rioted when they discovered that their diplomas did not list affiliation with the prestigious Zhengzhou University, as had been promised when they entered the college. College and even high school campuses frequently riot over appalling cafeteria conditions, e.g., the practice of pressuring or forcing students to eat in the cafeteria rather than in outside restaurants and then overpricing the food.

The norm is an atmosphere of fear. I don’t mean you see students appearing visibly afraid or scurrying uneasily around campus or cowering in their dorms. You will see lots of smiling, laughing students as on campuses anywhere in the world. Chinese students also freely voice their feelings or complaints about their school, curriculum, or teachers. I refer rather to the subconscious fear that gets expressed as group behavior, that compels them to tiptoe carefully around the taboo and avoid overstepping the innumerable invisible boundaries placed all around them. The students may individually complain, but they would never speak up as a group.

A fascinating instance of this group coercion was on display at a university in Beijing where I was teaching in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. All campuses in Beijing at the time mobilized their students to serve as “volunteers” at the Olympics events. While most students eagerly participated – it was after all a rare opportunity for them to network, meet professionals and soak in the exciting atmosphere – I knew of students who had no interest in sports or desire to participate but dared not decline. Meanwhile, the English Department faculty went into a bizarre, self-imposed lockdown, as if the event were something ominous like a mobilization for war, and exhibited a greater anxiety than I had ever witnessed from any of the students. The most innocent queries to my supervisors concerning, say, whether classes would be cancelled on certain days due to volunteer training, went unanswered. During this national emergency, nothing was confirmed or announced without approval from on high.

5. Contempt for foreign teachers

As for the attitude of Chinese universities toward foreign teachers, they hate us too. Generally schools haven’t the slightest interest in hiring foreign teachers but do so only because public universities are required to fulfill a minimum quota of native-speaking foreign teachers. Let me qualify that. I haven’t seen actual evidence of such a quota (and it would never be officially acknowledged), but it is the only conclusion I can come to, when after repeated conversations with Chinese faculty over the years I have not once heard any of them state that we are really needed; native teachers of Spanish or Romanian for the benefit of students learning those languages, maybe, but not foreign English teachers. Why are we not needed? Because they have perfected their own methods of teaching English to Chinese students and (they claim) can do a better job at it than we can. That doesn’t mean that they can’t make use of us to fill in various gaps in the curriculum (usually to teach the dreaded English writing courses, which no Chinese teachers want to teach as they involve the tedious grading of student papers).

Though the scenarios vary widely from school to school, the prototypical situation works like this. Let’s say an English Department is seeking a qualified foreign teacher to teach English literature, one with experience and an MA or PhD. When they have a candidate, they submit it to the Foreign Affairs Office for approval. The FAO is the Party apparatus that interfaces with foreign teachers and foreign exchange students (you will never actually meet the Party official running the office, as they don’t deign to show themselves to foreigners but delegate this role to their secretary). Traditionally since 1949, foreign teachers, especially those from the US and other developed countries, were regarded as potential or actual spies. The earliest “Foreign Experts” to be hired by Chinese universities in the 1950s-60s were exclusively Soviets, and even they were corralled into the “Friendship Hotel” each major city built for this purpose in order to monitor them. To prevent spies from getting too cozy with locals, foreign teachers used to only be hired for a year at a time. Later, this was extended to two years, and finally to five years, the current limit. When you reach this limit, you must leave the university where you are teaching, regardless of your popularity or value to the school. Today we are no longer regarded as spies, but we continue to be barred from permanent or tenured hiring by any public institution, the obvious reason being they don’t want the responsibility of having to provide us with a pension and the inevitable long-term healthcare, and they wouldn’t be able to afford decent care in any case, if our meager salaries are anything to go by.

Back to the FAO. It operates quite independently of the academic departments, which it has authority over. It has its own operating budget and capital that it fiercely protects. It also couldn’t care less about our qualifications. It is thus known to reject the English Department’s suggestions for a new foreign teacher and hire a younger and more malleable foreigner of its own choice, one less likely to complain about the low salary. The standard salary for Foreign Experts, by the way, still hasn’t increased much since the 1990s – typically 4,000 or 5,000 yuan ($630-$785) per month, with free housing (I do not refer to the private or joint-venture schools that pay more or pay in hard currency through the respective outside country). The FAO also doesn’t care how much teaching experience you have, whether you have a BA, MA or PhD (the salary is the same or only marginally different in each case), or what specialties you may have to offer the school.

I could not avoid feeling the contempt directed toward me as a foreigner by the FAO in the shabby conditions of my apartment in the “Foreigner Guest House” of one university I sojourned in. The carpet was moldy and disintegrating after years of use. The sofa raised a cloud of dust and fleas whenever I sat down in it. The hot water was intermittent. Maids were assigned to come in every morning at 8am (I was expected to be up and ready) to clean yet couldn’t seem to do this simplest of jobs, using dirty and smelly water to mop the floor and leaving mop strings caught on furniture legs everywhere (yes, the carpet was cleaned with a dirty wet mop). Whenever I complained to the FAO about the fleas, I encountered the Great Silence and was ignored as usual.

All visitors had to register at the building entrance, surrender their ID, and bring me a slip to sign. They had to be out by 11 pm. The only guests allowed to stay overnight were immediate family members. Even a male American friend of mine visiting me in China was not permitted to sleep in my apartment, despite my having an extra bed. They put him in another suite in the building and charged him 250 yuan per night – for the sake of my safety, they said. Also for our safety, they padlocked the building’s front door at night. All these precautions notwithstanding, one foreigner’s apartment got broken into and valuable items stolen. To be fair, other university housing I have stayed in fared better, and there is now a trend of providing foreign teachers with a stipend for renting their own apartment off campus. Most on-campus housing for foreigners, however, still maintains a guest curfew, especially for Chinese visitors of the opposite sex who would otherwise want to stay overnight.

In contrast to the FAO, the faculty of your typical English or Foreign Languages Department will probably deal with you in a friendlier manner, but here too there are limits. First, only those assigned to deal with you – the assistant dean, the secretary – will tend to be friendly. Most of the rest of the Department faculty, you won’t ever meet. I was never taken around to be introduced to the Chinese faculty at any of the four universities where I taught. They tend not to hang out much anyway, since office hours are not a requirement for Chinese teachers and they quickly head home after teaching their classes. With the exception of a handful of Chinese teachers who may approach you with questions about English grammar, there is little collegial atmosphere or friendly occasions for chitchat. One almost feels as if the Chinese faculty are expressly forbidden from interacting with us. This surely cannot be the case. Still, the old group coercion does seem to be operative to some extent, tacitly dictating, in short, that it’s not cool to hang out with the foreign teachers.

Other things reinforce this separation. We are never invited to Departmental meetings with the Chinese faculty but only the occasional meeting for our own affairs conducted by the supervisor in charge. Of course, most foreign teachers can’t speak Chinese, which is the obvious explanation for this, but an equally important explanation is that we are the heathen, not one of them and not Party members. The only faculty with decision-making powers are the senior faculty, who are almost always Party members. When they talk, the junior Chinese faculty shut up and listen. What could possibly be our role in this, when most of the faculty don’t even want to be in the same room with us meddlesome foreigners and our naive suggestions and demands? As if to make this point crystal clear, foreign teachers are never placed in an office with Chinese teachers but packed into the designated “Foreigners Office” (with a handful of old computers discarded by the Chinese faculty whenever they get new ones).

As a result, sightings of Chinese teachers are few and far between. Male foreign teachers hoping to meet a few hot female Chinese colleagues will be disappointed; you could spend years teaching at an institution without ever seeing any of them. As for those you do succeed in buttonholing, you’ll probably not want to take things further. There is a culture of propriety discouraging female teachers (and in many high schools forbidding them outright) from using cosmetics, wearing jewelry, and dressing fashionably, much less even mildly provocatively, in order to set the proper example for students. This dour atmosphere has the effect of cultivating in them what I call the “gray look,” which even young female teachers quickly assume, consciously or not: a gray pallor to their skin from hours indoors and lack of sunlight, merging with the dull colors of their dowdy clothes, aging them faster than any group I have ever witnessed in any locale.

I expect I may hear some objections from foreign teachers or Chinese students who have found no reason to complain and take exception to my account. I cannot vouch for other people’s experiences, though I do think I can claim some validity given the depth of my encounter with Chinese higher education. Others may wonder why I have stuck it out for so long if everything is so grim. The answer is that China is a challenge, and I like challenges. I am not about to leave my university teaching job simply because the experience is egregious at times, any more than the students are about to leave. You deal with it, learn from it, and that in itself is worthwhile. There are always enough inspiring students in every class to make teaching meaningful, just as there are enough teachers, Chinese and foreign, to make learning meaningful for the students. Let’s also understand that we’re talking about institutionalized hatred here, not that of individuals. The problem with the Chinese university is not the people, it is the system in control, which paralyzes, demotivates and demoralizes. There is an immense amount of talent and energy in the huge Chinese student body that is not being allowed to self-actualize. Once the blight of the Party’s control is removed, Chinese universities could flourish.

Related posts:
Questioning China’s “5,000 years” master trope (lynchpin of the Chinese secondary school indoctrination system)
From struggle sessions to public dressing-downs: China’s continuity of psychological control (virtual slavery at the workplace)