Preparing to Teach In China

Preparing to Teach In China

January 2012

Phoenix, Arizona

Pre-Trip Discussions

Someone who has given lectures in China told me that a member of the Communist Party was going to be in my classroom, taking notes on me, the whole time I would be teaching. Initially, I thought I would have fun with this person. But as I got closer to my trip, the idea of a person taking notes on everything I said began to worry me a little bit.

Then, a few days before I left for China, I went to a meeting in Arizona. I met a man who was advising me about my upcoming trip. He had taught in the USSR for several years. We were talking about the Communist Party and freedom of speech and how all of this would affect my teaching in China. I expressed my worry about the communist note-taker.

“They can’t impose that much restriction” the man assured me. “There are just too many people to monitor. So they have to give the illusion of oppression. No government is large enough to monitor 1 billion people. So they do things to let people think they are being watched. They create fear as a way to control people”.

That made sense to me and offered me a moment of relief. But then, later that afternoon, I had a conversation with a woman who just spent 6 months in China. She was walking around a town and discovered that she had lost her purse. It slipped out from under her arm. Because her passport was in her purse, she went to the police station to report that it was missing. She was taken in to a large room that was filled with over a hundred monitored televisions. The police took out an area map and asked her to trace her path for that day. They assured her that they could find the purse by going back through their video and sure enough, her purse was returned to her within four hours. The purse had been picked up by a man who took all of the cash and credit cards but left the passport intact. He then threw the purse in an alleyway.

Maybe the Chinese government does have enough people to monitor a billion people. And maybe I had better watch what I say.