IN THE EYES OF CHINESE CHILDREN
They want to believe in America, but we’re not making it easy for them.
Note to readers: This column was written the day before Election Day.
In a courtyard house in Beijing, I teach the future Chinese elite the past failings of America. My history students, all Chinese, are bright high school seniors on course to study at top Western universities. AP U.S. history is a perpetually oversubscribed course at the after-school academy, pulling in five times the numbers of its European equivalent. But in the past few months, the rise of Donald Trump has given a worryingly eschatological feeling to the class, as if we were living through a long-predicted apocalypse.
In teaching history, it’s hard to escape the shadow of Trump. When we talked about the Founding Fathers’ fear of demagogues and the fickle mob, he was there. When we talked about the Know-Nothings, the anti-immigrant party of the late 1840s, or the fever of antiChinese hatred in California in the 1880s, he was there. When we talked about the wartime panic that marched Japanese families into internment camps as potential terrorists, he was there. I just hope the world is done with him by the time we get to the civil rights movement, or he’ll be there in every picture of hateful faces screaming at black children.
Racism is the single hardest part of the American experience for idealistic Chinese teenagers to grasp. China has plenty of ethnic prejudices of its own, but it has nothing that matches the poison of chattel slavery and its aftermath. Chinese historiography, as taught in schools and absorbed through media, is crudely Marxist; when I asked my students which factor determined voting preference more than any other in the United States, three-quarters of them said class — none said race. A gulf between the wealthy and the masses makes instinctive sense to them; they see it in the streets and hear it in their parents’ discussions every day. Race doesn’t.
In fairness, nor does a lot of U.S. politics. One of my favorite techniques is to find the most ridiculous parts of the system and unpick their historical origins with the class. There’s a particular “Wait, what!” face my kids make — something like a confused owl — when confronted with yet another absurdity, whether it’s gerrymandering, filibustering, or the fact that Wyoming, with about as many people as the average Beijing district, has as many senators as California, with about as many people as the average Chinese province.
They make these faces because they care about America, and they find its failings frustrating and scary. I assigned them “Hamilton” for homework over China’s national holidays, despite their skepticism about what exactly a musical was and why they should spend three hours listening to it. The week after, I asked them how it was and got a tumult of delighted responses: “Oh my god!” “Unbelievable!” “So good!” When I turned up early for class a few weeks later, they were playing it on their laptops. They argue about U.S. politics and history in Chinese after class. (“Was Andrew Jackson a Republican?” “No, you twat, he was way before the Republicans.”)
In most ways, my students are radically atypical: They are smart, well-traveled, and from families able to afford my extortionate fees, for starters. But their fascination with the United States is shared with a huge number of their peers. The United States is covered constantly in China — in papers, on TV, in books, in heated online discussions. Much of that is filtered through state media coverage that uses an increasingly sour and paranoid lens. Yet beneath that, a strain of Chinese faith in the United States survives — and my students, in their inquisitiveness and engagement, reflect that.
Throughout the 20th century, many educated Chinese maintained a deep, abiding belief in U.S. democracy. It wasn’t just a reference point for intellectual discussion, but a kind of faith, sometimes open, sometimes maintained in secret. In the early years of the People’s Republic, returnees from America, educated at Ivy League colleges, brought back with them a varied mixture of socialist idealism and trust in U.S. principles — only to be persecuted as spies or traitors in the Cultural Revolution.
One of them, 30 years later, described the years he spent locked in an improvised prison, a morgue, for being a “counter-revolutionary.” Speaking to the journalist Justin Mitchell, he said, “I would wake up every morning and go to the small window where I could see the sun and recite the Gettysburg Address.” My friend Ami Li, born in 1986 in the provincial town of Shijiazhuang, told me how his father had taught him about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln — “the great men of history.”
Faith in the United States produces some odd acolytes, like