The Transpacific Experiment. Matt Sheehan
it. When she tried to argue with him, he offered her a bet: he would give her $200 if she could find ten Americans who had heard of the Monkey King. She scavenged the event for people who knew about this treasure of Chinese culture. She came up empty, unable to find a single American who had any idea what she was talking about.
It felt like a slap in the face. It reminded her that “mainstream” or “global” culture is basically defined by what American people like. But the more she thought about it, the more she put the blame on her own people.
“Chinese people aren’t confident enough,” she tells our panel of three judges. “With something like the Monkey King—the essence of our culture—we’re embarrassed to bring it out and show it to our American classmates.”
It’s clear that this touches a nerve with Linghong. Her Mandarin keeps picking up speed as she talks, and I put down my pen to listen closely. For just a moment, I think that she’s on the verge of bursting into tears. Linghong has lived in America for several years, learned a new language, and earned admission to one of the country’s best universities. But despite all that—or maybe because of it—she feels ever more acutely that on a deep level, Chinese people lack confidence in their own country.
“That’s why we always think foreign culture is better than our own. That’s why we”—and here she switches to English—“try to fit in.”
“WHAT A BIG TREE”
Tensions over assimilation spanned both the personal and the political. Chinese students in the United States have long served as a screen on which the two countries project their hopes and fears when it comes to technology, theology, and politics.
Many Americans have imagined that these students’ time in the United States will give them an eye-opening introduction to the wonders of liberal democracy. Finally free to read, think, and say what they want, these students will learn the truth about political repression in their home country. Many will choose to stay in this land of the free, and those who return home could well turn into seeds for a movement that will finally bring democracy to the People’s Republic of China. In the end, these students and their home country will become “more like us.”
There’s a historical basis for these kinds of hopes. Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the revolutionary movement that overthrew China’s last dynasty in 1911, was deeply influenced by Western political ideas, having studied under British missionaries in Hawaii and converted to Christianity in Hong Kong. Sun was actually in Denver on a fund-raising trip when he learned the revolution he was plotting had broken out unexpectedly.
Many of the men who would go on to lead the Chinese Communist Party itself had their political awakenings while studying in the West. Deng Xiaoping—a longtime CCP leader who both spearheaded China’s economic reforms and ordered the tanks toward Tiananmen Square—first encountered Marxism in France in the 1920s. There he met other young intellectuals like Zhou Enlai, who sought to study the political and social structures of Western countries and use that foreign knowledge to “save China.” They ended up forming Chinese Communist cells, laying the groundwork for the eventual overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party and the creation of a “new China” led by the CCP.
During the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese students in the U.S. engaged in vigorous public debates about democracy and the future of China. Professor Stanley Kwong used to drop in on these debates at UC Berkeley, with some conservative students arguing for the more incremental reforms and others calling for full-on transition to a democratic political system. Following the CCP’s violent crackdown in Beijing, the U.S. government allowed any Chinese students who were in the U.S. at the time to obtain permanent residency here if they feared persecution in their home country.
Students in the most recent wave have shown far less interest in fomenting revolution. Most of them have known nothing but rising standards of living and a steady elevation of China’s place in the world, changes that have opened up vast new life possibilities for them and their parents.
But the CCP has remained suspicious of what these students are learning overseas and what they’re bringing home. The Ministry of Education and other organs of the Chinese state have regularly singled out overseas students as priority targets for “political education” that will imbue them with greater levels of “patriotic energy” while overseas and after returning home. That brand of paternalistic “guidance” has sometimes taken the form of censorship.
On June 4, 2016, Tim Lin’s College Daily published what looked like a relatively innocuous post: a picture of a tree. Above it was written, “Today we’re suspending publication for one day. Reply with the words ‘What a Big Tree’ to read yesterday’s story.”
Readers who replied to the post with the prescribed phrase were sent a small commemoration of Hu Yaobang, the relatively liberal general secretary of the CCP during the early 1980s. Hu had worked toward greater political reforms but had been forced to resign in 1987 after refusing to discipline the leaders of pro-democracy demonstrations on college campuses. When Hu died in 1989, commemorations of his life had been the spark that ignited the student protest movement in Tiananmen Square. During the movement, a poem memorializing Hu was set to music and sung in both mourning and hope. The title: “What a Big Tree.” The College Daily post on June 4—the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown—was a not-so-subtle commemoration of that movement and those who lost their lives.
The response was swift. The post was quickly taken down and College Daily was blocked from publishing anything for one month. The punishment was something between a slap on the wrist and truly damaging retaliation. During that month, Tim’s team opened other accounts that allowed them to continue publishing, though the work didn’t reach nearly as many readers. When the month was up and College Daily went back to publishing, Tim put out a post boasting that their subscribers had actually increased during the publishing blackout.
Behind the scenes, Tim was more cautious. He told me he’d learned his lesson and wouldn’t be putting something like that out again. What had begun as a passion project was now a business, one with a responsibility to its investors and the employees who counted on it for their salary every month.
But even that caution was no guarantee against interference. A couple months after getting publishing privileges back, Tim began planning College Daily’s election-night coverage for the showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He planned and advertised a live stream from the publication’s New York office, with College Daily writers and editors explaining the mechanics of the electoral college and breaking down returns in real time. And then, just a couple hours before the stream was set to begin, they got a call from the relevant authorities. There was to be no live stream. No explanation was given, and the decision was not up for debate.
#CHINESESTUDENTSMATTER
Censoring public discussion in China is one thing, but after the 2016 election, worries began to mount that China was exporting some of those restrictions to U.S. campuses—and Chinese students were acting as the conduit.
The issue made national headlines in the spring of 2017, when UC San Diego announced its pick to deliver that year’s commencement address: His Holiness the Dalai Lama. UCSD’s administration probably thought they’d scored a major coup by securing the long-exiled Tibetan leader. If they did, the feeling didn’t last long.
Within hours of the announcement, Chinese student groups were issuing statements of protest, claiming that the invitation “contravened the spirit of respect, tolerance, equality, and earnestness” upon which the university was built. They demanded a meeting with the UC chancellor and vowed to protest the speech. The leader of those calls was the local chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which declared that it had already contacted the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles regarding the matter.
What was all the fuss about? In the West, the Dalai Lama is viewed as an apolitical symbol of universal love, a mascot for world peace and Buddhist wisdom. But the Chinese government still views and portrays him as an enemy of the state and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” At issue is the status of Tibet, a region that for centuries has seesawed between independence and Chinese rule. The