 "Photo: Hudson Lockett/The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Hudson Lockett/The Daily Texan")
BEIJING — A year ago, Zhou Shuang was studying public affairs at a U.S. university and said she was uninterested in the roots of China’s Internet censorship. Close to the end of her studies in America, Zhou said she was slightly irked when she visited China on vacation and found access to certain sites — such as Blogspot — blocked by Chinese firewalls.
“I think at first, I just thought it was really inconvenient for me,” Zhou said of China’s Internet-filtering policies, which intensified in late May and early June leading up to the 20th anniversary of the government’s June 4, 1989 bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
Zhou has been back in Beijing since May and said she is suffering culture shock from readjusting to a less independent lifestyle while living with her parents.
Preparing for another sojourn to the U.S. with ambitions of a master’s degree, Zhou said she knows full well of the significance of the June 4 Internet censorship. She was out with friends on the most recent anniversary, discussing it over dinner.
Zhou and her friends, some of whom have studied abroad in Hong Kong, support most of the government’s policies. But having watched news reports and documentaries about Tiananmen while abroad, including the Frontline-produced “Tank Man,” Zhou no longer sees the point in blocking information on it.
“In this matter, we feel it makes us really look stupid,” she said.
Study abroad a business tactic
Despite a growing number of Chinese students going abroad to the U.S. for college, they are not doing so for the love of liberal Western political values.
According to 2008 data from the China Scholarship Council, a nonprofit institution affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, a total of 144,000 students left the mainland to study abroad. And the most recent data available from the Institute of International Education shows the United States as the top destination for Chinese citizens seeking to study at an overseas university — more than 93,000 in 2006.
A growing number of expatriate students are choosing to stay on after their studies are completed.
“There’s no doubt there are a lot of Chinese students who aren’t going home,” said James Aldridge, China director for the Canadian Education Network.
At a recent study abroad fair in Xi’an, Aldridge said relaxed visa policies in Canada and the U.S. have made it easier for Chinese students not just to study abroad, but also to remain there after they complete their programs.
Yet Aldridge said he didn’t get the sense that students were going abroad — or staying there — out of a longing for any political freedoms denied them at home. Rather, they were motivated by the desire to lay the groundwork for successful careers — given the fact that companies in China and the West were more likely to hire them because of their international experience.
Tony Zeng, a representative for Canada’s York University English Language Institute, said he is adamant about the attraction of education in the U.S. for Chinese students’ families. A Chinese citizen and York graduate, Zeng said that the U.S. had a draw for potential study abroad candidates in China that few other countries could match. From a practical standpoint, he attributed it to the teaching of field-specific skills, such as the application of critical thinking, which gives job applicants a competitive edge in an economically minded China.
Chinese media access key
Zeng said the rise of Chinese-language media accessibility via the Internet may ease the anxieties of those who would study abroad. He said that those students unfamiliar with American culture are unlikely to brave watching shows or reading news that depend on foreign context.
“Their solution is to stick to Chinese media,” Zeng said.
This phenomenon isn’t unusual, said Chinese media expert Pan Zhangdong, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“When they go abroad, [their] emotional center is in China,” Pan said.
As a result, critical coverage of China in the U.S. news media can sour Chinese international students to the whole of the Western press. Those who are used to seeing news through the nationalistic lens of government-owned media in China are more easily agitated by such stories, Pan said.
Pan said such reports present a distorted picture of China thanks to the superficial efforts of news correspondents, who tend to concentrate on the developed and developing China as seen from Shanghai and Beijing, rather than the vast poverty-stricken areas of the countryside.
In some cases, Chinese students do become smitten with Western political ideas. Wang Yong, assistant editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper Shanghai Daily, said he was exposed to what he considered the best of Western journalism well before he went abroad to study law at Stanford.
“I was poisoned by American media a long time ago,” Wang said with a wry smile.
Wang said that his study of law had a significant effect on how much Western coverage of his home country he absorbed. He was quick to point out that the degree to which students may experience a change in their world views “all depends on what kind of major you are taking.”
Kang Xin, a first-year civil-engineering graduate student in Xi’an who was accepted to the University of Missouri, said he hoped to finish his dissertation while in the U.S., where he believes that compared to China, “technology and science are very strong, especially in my major.”
“Every day, we’re always preparing for exams and experiments, we don’t have a lot of time for reading news,” he said. Kang said he got most of his news through Baidu, the government-owned search engine whose scale and information services are akin to those of Google in the U.S.
Kang said students, especially those in graduate programs, had little trouble getting around Internet filters efforts like those that cropped up in China in early June. He also said he and students like him didn’t seek “prolonged and tedious” coverage of China by Western sources.
”We aren’t concerned too much about politics,” Kang said.
