Chinese International Students: Hostility from Home
In Helen Su’s 2020 interview, four Chinese international students in the U.S. shared their frustration upon hearing countless hostile opinions toward international students from Chinese social media. One of the interviewees, Yiwei Wu, admitted that such criticizers have become “very very common, especially on Chinese social media.” Indeed, the students who chose a higher education outside of China are being labeled as “精致的利己主义者”, or “self-serving elites’’, a sharply accusatory term famously coined by Qian Liqun, a former Chinese literature professor at Peking University. Professor Qian believed that many intelligent students who had made their way into the world’s top universities only cared about the benefits they received. The term “self-serving elites” is now being widely used to criticize the international students community, especially those who “betrayed” China by staying in the U.S. While hostility toward Chinese international students grows rapidly in the mainstream, I empathize with the interviewees and argue that this stereotype is largely wrong because most of us are caring and responsible young people who share a cultural bond with all other Chinese. This hostility must not become part of the social norm as it will not only cause more international students to leave, but also impede the democratic progress of Chinese society.
But wait, who exactly are these smart but extremely selfish “elite” students? As many people furiously comment on the internet, they are children of the rich and the powerful; they are careless, irresponsible, not studying at all, also escapers from Gaokao, which is the accepted pathway to success in China; they are the Westernized, a different “species” of people; they are “cultural traitors”, While some of these stereotype might communicate some degree of truth, for instance, international students coming from families wealthier than average, the other ones are simply prejudices. So, what made so many Chinese people believe these things?
People who accept this image are usually those who don’t make contact with international students; in other words, they are people, including many young students, retired people, and working-class people, who belong to social classes or social statuses that are distant from the upper-middle class. They are the majority. These people also have limited access to valid information about the international student community. For them, it is extremely hard to empathize with those young people who go to school in a foreign country more than 10,000 kilometers away from home. This is why public opinions toward international students are so easily pushed to the bad extreme when the mass media tries to manipulate the audience by making deliberate selections on what to report and how to report.
Typing in “留学生”, or “international students” in a Chinese search engine, it didn’t take me more than five seconds to spot news titles like these ones: “Parents of 15,000 young international students proposed charter flights back to China for the second time, netizens: these are no ordinary students”; “A package explosion at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, a local international student: course still running normally now”; “2016, the female international student from Sichuan murdered in Australia…”. These three articles are all written by Chinese media, published within a day before the time I wrote this paragraph. The nuances in the wording of their titles are more than obvious. International students are portrayed as a rich but careless and irresponsible population, and foreign countries are being described in a way to provoke xenophobia. These kinds of content and narratives have filled every inch of the Chinese internet now. My seventy-year-old grandma, having developed the habit of watching viral short videos on WeChat, would beg me from time to time not to “settle down in the U.S. in the future”. I don’t know what to say to her.
When I watched Helen Su’s interview and transcribed the interviewees’ responses for writing this essay, I asked myself: are we careless people? Are we westernized? Will we become “cultural traitors” and help the U.S.? My answers are no. Not all of us come from families of extreme wealth or power. For some of us, the chance of studying at an American university meant the entire-life savings of their parents and even grandparents. Most of us come with emotional burdens, with the responsibility to live healthy and safe, and with our strongest determination to make the best out of this education for ourselves. We are bounded by our families, and we are also bounded by our cultural roots simply because we grew up in China. Such a significant part of us is made up of Chinese culture that it must be inefficient and ineffective to replace it with any other culture. It only makes sense that we add new materials onto what already exists in us, learning new ways and absorbing new perspectives in order to become better people, not to become different people. Moreover, in 2020, the Ministry of Education of the PRC published this data: from 2016 to 2019, 2.518 million Chinese went abroad to study, and 2.013 million returned to China, accounting for 80% (79.9%) of the graduated students. Although this data doesn’t strictly show what percentage of students came back to China each year, it should be evident that they were the majority of the population. Therefore, the myth that most international students don’t come back is busted.
There is a great deal of problems within the “self-serving elites” stereotype of international students. For example, many blame the brilliant students who did choose to stay in the U.S. for betraying China and contributing their talents or knowledge to the U.S. The problem with this opinion is that the choice of staying or returning is not a simple matter of personal preference. The reason that is brought up the most times is the quality of life. To live a decently good life in China today, one needs to endure the fierce competition of the job market, suffer from the ever-rising housing market, and spend sharply increasing amounts of fortune on children. For people pursuing an academic career, the career environment in the U.S. is unarguably healthier and more beneficial. American companies also offer greater welfare and higher salaries. At a time when people have more freedom in choosing where to live, Chinese international students must be allowed to weigh the pros and cons of living in any country.
I saw that the four Chinese international students in the interview were hurt by this public hostility. When one girl said that, in the context of Covid-19, some complained that international students were “bringing the virus back”, I felt confused, and then ashamed as if we did something wrong. I always believed that I belonged to China as much as all other people who grew up in China do, but now I feel we are being pushed away.
The recent resurgence of socialist propaganda and the invisible growth of censorship are creating a perfect environment for public antagonism towards western countries and international students to thrive. With the U.S. displaying increasing hostility towards China since Trump’s presidency, which gives the mass media more motivation than ever to provoke hatred and patriotism in people, this antagonism is bound to become the mainstream of society. As a result of the prevailing hostility, fewer families will take the risk of sending their children abroad, and more international students will be scared of the idea of returning. But what’s worse, this will be merely one aspect of the macroscopic changes in the social atmosphere of China. The mainstream opinions will be much more close-minded, and the democratic progress of China will be largely impeded. People won’t be able to question the dualism between us and western countries. As the government seems satisfied with the current situation, the only chance for the hostile sentiment towards Chinese international students to wane will be the ease of tension between China and the U.S., which appears to be equally impossible.
