Graduation

Before talking about CET’s closing ceremony, I need to wind back the clock by about two weeks, then by about two months, and then forward again to two weeks ago. So, during my last two weeks at CET Kunming, my class’s topic was Chinese attitudes towards the USA. My class had not discussed politics very explicitly before, but the syllabus plunged us straight into some very turbulent waters. On quite a few occasions, our teacher would begin to talk about recent events in Hong Kong, or our textbook would discuss American “霸权主义” (hegemonism), or we would hold class debates on media bias across the globe.

Now to the two-month jump: Ever since I decided to study in China, I have been conflicted as to what to make of my time here. Does residing in and spending money in a country like China have a moral valence? And if it does, what can someone who disagrees with many Chinese policies do to live morally in this system – or, to put it more bluntly, what can someone who disagrees with many Chinese policies do to ease their conscience?

From the very beginning my answer to the first question was yes. As to the second question, I believe that these past few days, I have been getting closer to an answer.

During the course of the many conversations we have had with our teachers, I found out that the average Chinese person – as far as one can consider a graduate student an average Chinese person, of course – holds a number of preconceptions quite mindboggling to a foreigner, even a foreigner from a post-socialist country. Perhaps the most frustrating among them is the fundamental equivalence of political issues across Eastern and Western boundaries. To my teachers, for example, Western media bias and Chinese censorship were basically the same thing. Sometimes, this fundamental equivalence would escalate into an all-encompassing cultural relativism. One week’s essay prompt, for example, asked us to examine the differences between “Eastern” and “Western” democracy. The assumption, I believe, being that Chinese-style communism is simply the inevitable way democracy happens in “the East.”

Confronted with this set of sometimes very staunchly held views, I had to readjust my 中国观 (way of viewing China). Before discussing politics in depth with my teachers, I think I subconsciously believed most Chinese people to be living in a state of late-stage Socialism like that of Václav Havel’s “the Power of the Powerless” – or like that of my parents’ memories. In Eastern Europe, the state practiced widespread repression against its citizens to maintain power, but of course in so doing, it undermined the public’s trust in the system. All that remained was conformity and fear, along with lip service to a dead ideology.

I expected many of the Chinese people I would meet to be just as cynical as people in books and films set in the seventies and eighties. Yet many of the people I met inhabited a very different world from one where the truth was concealed and people were forced to live in a lie. A remarkable achievement of the Chinese government is convincing its citizens that there is no single truth, and that all, in fact, is simply a matter of perspective. The West has its system, we have our own. The West has its media, we have our own. The West has its values, we have our own – and from individual to individual, they are, of course, all the same. While Eastern Europeans believed the truth was out there, the Chinese believe the truth is everywhere and nowhere at once. The best one can do in such scenario is simply to stick to one’s own truth, which is the truth of one’s country. It is a communist system propped up by an avid insistence on nationalism.

In no small part, this philosophy, and indeed the whole system, stands on China’s growing economy – and the cynicism of Eastern Europe in large part owed to a failing one. I cannot help but wonder whether, if the demographic consequences of China’s one-child policy hit the country very hard in the future, the rosy glasses of Chinese nationalist communism will break and people will start to care about human rights again. For now, however, those who dare to speak up are silenced, and a rampant consumer culture keeps the rest from asking uncomfortable questions.

What one can do in a system such as this, I have come to believe, is to help people deconstruct the lies behind it. It is in no way a monumental revolutionary task, but the one thing I have taken away from singing in the Russian Chorus is that a little change even in the thinking of one individual goes a long way. That, I think, is the answer to my second question.

The few weeks before leaving the mainland, therefore, much aided by the circumstances of our curriculum, I tried to reason past the many walls between me and my teachers. In response to our prompt, I argued that there was no such thing as a distinction between “Eastern” and “Western” democracy, or else Eastern Europeans were Asians until 1989 and the Japanese are American. In another essay, I tried to persuade my teachers that the Hong Kong protestors aren’t simply stone-throwing hooligans but people fighting for the survival of the second of the “two systems” in “one country.” The biggest act of self-sabotage on my grade, though, was when I argued with our main teacher about Western coverage of protests in Hong Kong in our class’s WeChat group.

I am not sure how far any of my efforts have gone. In one class discussion, I kept trying to push one of the assistant teachers to explain why she continues to trust a government that is actively, and with her own knowledge, censoring practically every piece of news she receives. To my frustration, she would always respond with something along the lines of “on Chinese issues, the Chinese government just knows better than Western reporters.” Yet I think my class did score some points. We explained – to the great shock of some teachers – that there are actual laws in Western countries that are meant to keep the government from influencing media and that the US government in fact financially supports outlets that criticise it (such as NPR, one of the few news sources not blocked in China).

During the closing ceremony, many of these discussions were still on my mind. As our roommates from Yunnan University gathered to sing us a farewell song, a strange feeling came over me. In this outburst of love and friendship, how many participants could eventually end up on the opposite sides of a trade war, or even a second cold war? Could our newly formed friendships withstand such a test, or influence how any of us would approach it? Are these friendships a triumph on a path towards reconciliation or a lonely footnote before a dark chapter of the history of the world?