Informants in the classroom

Source: Forbes (6/28/17)
Chinese Informants In The Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies
By Andrs Corr

Children play chess on a giant chess board at a primary school in Handan in China’s northern Hebei province on June 19, 2017. The ‘live’ chess game was played by 32 students to promote chess at the school. Credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images

For about a month, the media has reported on Chinese influence in Australian politics and universities. The news led to discussions among China experts on the role of government-linked Chinese student organizations that allegedly monitor and report on Chinese student speech in the classroom, and pedagogical strategies to encourage safe spaces for the intellectual growth of Chinese students abroad. These pedagogical antidotes include the banning of government-linked Chinese student organizations, free speech activists seeking to join Chinese student organizations, anonymous student classroom participation groups, mandatory debating team assignments on “sensitive” topics, and frank classroom discussions of student speech monitoring by Chinese authorities.

Two Australian professors with whom I communicated confirmed reports of Chinese political influence activities in universities, not only among students, but against professors. There are also stories of corruption being ignored by university administrators and enforced rebates, or Chinese government clawbacks, of student scholarships awarded to Chinese students studying abroad. These scholarships are typically much more than would be received in China. According to Professor Bruce Jacobs of Monash University in Melbourne, the Chinese government has taken a portion of scholarships from students as government revenue. This could be countered by seeking to provide such scholarship through in-kind rather than cash transfers.

According to Associate Professor Sally Sargeson, Senior Fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, China’s surveillance of overseas students is, “a much broader problem than dobbing in [informing on] compatriots who participate in ‘human rights protests’ in Australia (or anywhere else).” Sargeson said that, “this is a problem not confined to ANU, or indeed all Australian universities. I know from conversations with U.S. academics and from having worked at the University of Nottingham [in the U.K.], that there is a significant effort by Chinese embassies, and CCP [Chinese Communist Party]–linked companies and prominent citizens, to stifle expressions of opinion (not to mention dissent) among Chinese citizen students” in these locations.

Sargeson stated that surveillance “extends to embassy stooges recording and reporting on what other Chinese citizen students say in their classes and social events.” She gave an example:

I teach an undergrad class on Chinese politics. Part of the assessment for this class is based on students’ contributions to tutorial discussions. Every year, a significant proportion of the class is made up of Chinese citizens, and increasingly over the past few years, some of these students have come to me asking to be included in a tutorial group that contains no other Chinese citizens, so they can speak freely. Other Chinese students in mixed nationality classes have said they dare not speak up, because they fear their compatriots will report on them. Some have become extremely upset and frightened, because though they are pressured to join in with Chinese student association activities, they cannot trust their compatriots. And even non-Chinese students in mixed classes sometimes complain because their Chinese peers remain silent. In other words, surveillance is restricting Chinese students’ learning experiences and stifling freedom of expression on Australian campuses.

I heard similar complaints from a non-Chinese Columbia student about silent Chinese students in the classroom. But Chinese student silence may be a defensive mechanism, or one of silent protest against the Chinese state. It could even be in the interests of other students in the class by not exposing them to what is essentially state propaganda. Rather than repeat the propaganda their Chinese peers enforce, silent Chinese students collectively choose to remain silent and thereby refuse to participate in China’s efforts at propaganda in western classrooms. These students’ silence allows other more liberal discourse to fill the classroom space.

Sargeson invented a pedagogical response to perceived Chinese surveillance in her classroom. “To enable class discussions, I’m introducing anonymized online discussion boards, and classroom debates where I randomly allocate students to teams (so they don’t have to ‘own’ their positions).”

Sargeson said that these pedagogies are nevertheless insufficient to address the problem of surveillance, which she said is well known among students at ANU. Sargeson has spoken to multiple Chinese students about inter-student surveillance at ANU, and she wrote that they “ALL said they know they are being monitored, and adjust their speech so they will not get into trouble.”

To the extent that such artificial pro-China speech is in the classroom and university-sponsored events, it affects not only Chinese but all students. It is state-mandated propaganda in the classroom, and so interferes with the efficiency and impartiality of university instruction. All students and dues-paying parents have an interest in removing such Chinese state influence and propaganda from their universities.