Questions in Classes New to Professor From China

There are some fundamental differences between Peking University and UC Irvine in teaching politics and international relations, according to Wang Binguan.

For one thing, the Chinese academic--who UCI officials believe was the first political scientist from China to teach at an American university--is unaccustomed to students interrupting his lecture with questions about points they do not understand.

“I can’t control the process, but I enjoy it,” said Wang, 54. “The students here not only listen to my speech, they think about it at the same time. Chinese students just listen.”

Serious Business

In China, especially at Peking University, the nation’s leading institution of higher learning, politics is a serious business. An American student who speaks out of turn is unlikely to disappear from the campus for two decades, as did one of Wang’s students. The young man voiced some criticism during the “Hundred Flowers” period in 1957, when dissent was encouraged, only to be arrested several months later in the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” that followed.

In 1969 and 1970, during the height of the Great Cultural Revolution, Wang himself was taken from the university and sent to the countryside to do manual labor for nearly a year. Even today, some of the research articles on the history of imperialism listed on Wang’s resume are identified as being for “inside circulation,” which means access to them is limited to higher-ranking Chinese academics and government officials.

Grading in China, Wang said, is based equally on three factors: knowledge of the material, organization of the student’s thesis and grasp of Marxism. In the United States, ideology is not supposed to be a consideration.

But the most striking difference between Chinese and American students, Wang found in the two quarters he taught at UCI, is the time they like to go to class. Last spring, when his class was scheduled at 10 a.m., Wang had 30 students; this fall, when he changed the time to what in China is considered the most desirable time, 8 a.m., enrollment dropped by half.

In an unsigned evaluation, passed out by Wang when the course was completed, one of his students tactfully suggested that Wang “give the class at a later hour than 8 a.m. as most college students stay up late studying and are not at their best” so early.

Wang, who is vice director of the international relations teaching section of Peking University’s International Politics Department, got mostly enthusiastic reviews from his students on the anonymous evaluations.

One student, who mentioned a love of Chinese food, said the class was “an educational and a cultural experience as well.” Another offered thanks “for putting up with our occasional impatience--U.S. natives are awfully insensitive to language and cultural differences.” (Wang had a Chinese-American translator in the spring, but did not need one this fall.)

The same student wrote:

“I enjoyed learning about the People’s Republic of China from a perspective of someone from that country. It was interesting to learn about the history and current life styles of the people of China from a non-capitalist viewpoint. Too often, we have classes where a country’s political and cultural systems are taught from a purely U.S. perspective--instead of a perspective from that country.”

However, there were a few demurrers.

For some students, the course was not ideological enough. One wrote to the specialist in Marxism-Leninism that “I was looking forward to at least a discussion on Chinese socialist ideology,” which apparently did not materialize. Another wrote: “I would have liked to know a little bit more about the exact structure of the central government, about power relations and who served who.”

Too Ideological

At least one other student found Wang too ideological, both in style and substance.

Was the late Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek “a real monster?” the student asked. “Chiang was never portrayed any other way. Wasn’t he human? What were his motivations? How could someone in the same organization as Dr. Sun Yat-sen be so ideologically different?”

On a stylistic point, the student asked: “Rather than saying, ‘the correct policy,’ couldn’t you say, ‘the policy that seemed to be the best alternative at the time’? Have there been any ‘correct’ policies which have turned out to be incorrect?”

Like some Americans who teach at Chinese institutions and bring their own materials, Wang brought with him history texts and English translations of government and Communist Party documents.

Wang said he was pleased to find ethnic Chinese--from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand--in his classes and was surprised at how often he was invited to visit and share meals with his students.