Why do they consider racism, orientalism and lies disputed long ago “valid criticism”. Not even mentioning the lack of humility or a will to learn, just constant snarkiness, smugness and an unrelenting feeling of superiority. Just please, engage with us on equal terms and don’t be dismissive.
Edit: Don’t go into the comments if you value your day…
People like those in the comments are why I worry about my students from the PRC who want to study in the imperial core.
I had a few classmates from the PRC when I was in college. At the time I criticized them and thought they were weird for only keeping to themselves and not wanting to socialize with people outside their group. Now I think I know why they were like that, and i don’t blame them.
I’d be more worried about the savvy propagandists. Idiots in that thread can’t even comprehend the perspectives your students would have from actually living in the PRC, so there will most likely just be a communication breakdown.
True, true. I shouldn’t worry about most of them. Perhaps the students are genuinely inoculated against such stupidity.
Hadn’t thought of it that way. Could you expand on it?
Sure. A little background first, my students are relatively well-off and mostly did not succeed during their time in compulsory education. So, they decided to study outside the PRC, mostly because they had a small chance of making it into the better domestic universities.
Most students, at least at this school, go to either the UK or Australia. Though a few occasionally do go to Canada or the US. Of course, I don’t feel comfortable actively dissuading the students from going (they get enough pressure from parents and other staff at the school), but sometimes I wonder if I should.
Anyway, looking at comments that infantalises an entire group of people just because they were born on a different piece of dirt, not to mention downright genocidal rhetoric, makes me think that students from the PRC isolating themselves from that sort of brain rot is a successful self-preservation technique.
Which, while answering the question of “why do Chinese students seem to only stick together.” It feels like people who would comment in such a provocative way are just minutes from doing actual bodily harm to others.
But maybe I’m over thinking it and these folks have little or no chance of coming into contact with PRC citizens.
My best friend did education outside of China (her entire family has been living in US for a while but they keep declining her visa in spite of having no relatives anywhere else) and currently works in Europe. Two men from Poland kept harassing her at work with racists comments. No manager has ever done anything. They apparently won’t get their contracts prolonged which is nice but for fuck’s sake… She follows the Chinese community in the country she lives in and apparently racism got even worse as of late. I remember an ethnically Asian old lady got thrown from a high bridge into water a few years ago around there. My blood boils when I see sinophobes.
Yeah Poland is mega racist and I hate having to ignore that shit sometimes due to managers also propagating racist stereotypes and using them for “jokes”. Oh and don’t let me forget the constant badmouthing behind people’s backs…
I have an Indian friend, and when we were visiting a the city close to my home village he was getting looks, people were even looking behind themselves after we passed them. He felt uncomfortable to say the least.
Yea I had a Polish manager who literally banned an employee for making a communist joke (the employee wasn’t even a commie and it was one of the low hanging “our” type jokes). He’d go on an unironic rant how black history month is racist towards white people and how he was oppressed because they wrote black with uppercase and white with lowercase. Polish coworkers joked how a person’s gender cannot be told because they’re Chinese and then they concluded Chinese is a gender… I don’t like holding any grudges against groups but shit like this makes me wary.
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It might be worth just mentioning about your perspective on the racism issue, but you’re right to avoid adding pressure.
I did have a fun conversation the other day about racism in the US with a student, but such topics really only come up in one-on-one discussions. And they don’t have time for many of those throughout the year.