Try to log onto Facebook in mainland China, and you’ll get an error message. Ditto for YouTube, Instagram, and The New York Times. Search for a controversial term like “Falun Gong” or “June 4" — the date, in 1989, of the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square — and you’ll hit a dead end.
You’ve run into the Great Firewall, the Communist Party’s effort to censor what China’s citizens can see and say on the Internet. The country’s cyberpolice suppress online debate, shut down web pages and social-media accounts that mention sensitive subjects, and block access to foreign sites deemed harmful.
But a nondescript glass-and-steel building in the Pudong district of Shanghai is a portal to the world beyond the Great Firewall.
This is New York University’s two-year-old Shanghai campus, and here faculty members and students can go online without the constraints on users elsewhere in China. They can check Gmail, post photos on Snapchat, tweet their takes on the latest hot-button issues — or the details of last night’s dinner.
In striking the deal to open the NYU outpost, part of the university’s global network, Chinese officials pledged that not only would access to the Internet be unfettered but so, too, would be debate, study, and research on the campus. It would be an island of free speech and expression.
By contrast, ideological control over Chinese universities has increased under President Xi Jinping. Professors have been ordered to avoid a list of divisive topics, including press freedom and civil rights, in the classroom. Scholars have been fired or imprisoned, allegedly for their political activism.
Such clampdowns have engendered skepticism about overseas campuses and other academic programs that American universities operate abroad. As prominent American colleges have established footholds internationally — not just in China but also in places like Singapore and the Persian Gulf — critics have asked: How can universities that prize open inquiry as a fundamental tenet find a home in an authoritarian country without compromising their values?
Such issues have been argued in many forums: newspapers like The Chronicle, faculty meetings, academic conferences, even Congress. But often overlooked in these discussions is the experience of students. Instead of rehashing the debate, this is a story of two students, one from the United States and one from China, and their time navigating NYU-Shanghai.
The mission of a liberal-arts institution like NYU, after all, is to educate the next generation, to challenge students to consider new ideas, new perspectives, new possibilities. But can they express unpopular opinions and question orthodoxies, as NYU officials have vowed, in a place where to do so, at least publicly, is verboten? Can you learn to think in a country where thoughts are policed?
NYU-Shanghai may be an island for these two students, but it’s an island in China’s uncertain sea.
In one of Luke Noel’s first classes, first week, freshman year, they talked about Tiananmen Square.
He was a little startled. “Coming from the States,” he says, “the one picture I had of censorship in China was Tiananmen Square, so to use that as the first milestone — it was just, OK, we’re going straight there.”
The frankness of the class discussion wasn’t the only thing Luke was getting used to. Cosmopolitan China was a long way from where he grew up in central Pennsylvania. “Capital-S suburbia,” he calls it.
Unlike many of the others in NYU-Shanghai’s inaugural class, he didn’t have a longstanding interest in China. He took his first Chinese-language class only in his final year of high school, at the urging of a friend. The friend dropped the course, but Luke stuck with it. Studying in China seemed like an adventure. It would go against every expectation he, and everyone around him, had of the path he would take.
So he found himself in Shanghai in the fall of 2013, in a discussion seminar of a course on comparative intellectual history, being asked to talk about one of the most taboo subjects in modern China. Luke was particularly curious about what the students from China would say. “I really had no idea what Tiananmen meant to my Chinese classmates,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if we showed up, and no one knew a word about Tiananmen.”
Instead, after some hesitation, students began to talk. They didn’t just give the “party-speak answer,” he says. “They’d all found ways to have rounded opinions, much more full and nuanced than I’ll ever have.”
It was clear that his classmates had thought seriously about the crackdown and its aftermath and had discussed it with family and friends. But talking about it in a public setting, like a classroom, was a different matter. It was crossing a barrier. That early discussion set the tone, Luke says, letting students know that they could, and would, talk about a wide range of issues, no matter how controversial. If Tiananmen wasn’t off-limits, nothing was.
“We had to get past that,” Luke says. “We had to at one time say the words ‘Tiananmen Square’ in class.”
Ben Zhang, too, had a memorable classroom experience in his first weeks at NYU-Shanghai in the fall of 2014. But it initially left him seething.
That’s uncharacteristic of the 20-year-old Shanghai native, whose Chinese name is Weilun. Animated and energetic, he is constantly racing to share an observation, an opinion, an enthusiasm.
And Ben was especially enthusiastic about a course he’d signed up for, “The Concept of China,” taught by Joanna Waley-Cohen, a noted China scholar and provost at NYU-Shanghai. It was his sole elective in a semester otherwise crammed with language requirements — all students must be proficient in both English and Chinese by graduation — and core courses.
But rather than Professor Waley-Cohen’s lectures, he found himself listening as his fellow students proffered their thoughts on China. While NYU-Shanghai’s student body is slightly more than 50-percent Chinese, Ben was far outnumbered in that course, where just four of the 22 students were from China. He was being told about his own country by outsiders, and he found their observations wrongheaded and simplistic.
It was all Tiananmen, air pollution, “Made in China,” the Great Wall. “A one-sided China,” he thought. “They were talking about BS.”
The discussion didn’t reflect China’s dynamism, he felt, how its people were constantly changing and redefining themselves. The China he knew wasn’t as resistant to outside ideas as was being portrayed in that classroom — after all, China had invited in NYU.
For Ben, the opening of NYU-Shanghai was a welcome opportunity. Though a strong student, he’d chafed at the rigidity of his Chinese high school. Studying abroad was appealing but out of reach; his parents, both schoolteachers, didn’t have the money.
The idea of a Western-style classroom, however, was proving more attractive than the reality. Finally, after three classes, he went to see Ms. Waley-Cohen to pour out his frustrations. She was sympathetic but firm: Speak up, she told him.
That’s not an easy lesson for Chinese students, even for one as voluble as Ben, as the professor acknowledges. In Chinese classrooms, teachers do most of the talking, and what they say is the one and only correct answer. Speaking out isn’t encouraged; it can even be harshly judged. “That’s not right in this society,” Ben says. “People will say you’re showing off.”
But he took Ms. Waley-Cohen’s advice to heart. Before the next class, he readied his argument, writing down what he wanted to say because he worried that his English wasn’t good enough for him to make his points extemporaneously.
Over the course of the semester, Ben grew more comfortable with class discussions and lost much of his defensiveness. He came to realize, he says, that there wasn’t a single right answer, that there was much to be gained from other viewpoints. After hearing how Americans, how Pakistanis, how Spaniards saw China, he started to think about his own country a little differently.
“American students only learn what they were taught,” he says, “and we only learn what we are taught.”
Qilai Shen for The Chronicle
“One misconception I had was that censorship and the Great Firewall mean absence of dialogue, which is absolutely turned upside-down when you look at what is going on on the Chinese Internet,” says Luke Noel, who went from high school in central Pennsylvania to college in Shanghai.
The success of the partnership between NYU and China depends in large part on what happens in classrooms like Ben’s and Luke’s. Chinese authorities hope that an American-style education will produce graduates who can help its economy innovate, bringing that spark of creativity that has helped make places like Silicon Valley so dynamic. For its part, NYU, which has used its global reach as a way to burnish its academic standing, needs to show that students in Shanghai receive the same top-quality — and unrestricted — education as do those in New York, or it risks damaging its reputation and its ambitious plan for a network of connected campuses around the world.
But the partnership could be jeopardized if NYU-Shanghai students were to take their newfound freedoms from the classroom to the streets.
In the fall of Luke’s sophomore year, university students in Hong Kong did just that, igniting what came to be known as the Umbrella Revolution.
At NYU-Shanghai, there was great interest in the pro-democracy protests. . The Chinese students were split. Some defended the government and its crackdown on those occupying the streets of central Hong Kong. Others, though, backed the thousands of young Hong Kongese who boycotted classes to call for electoral reform. They changed the profile pictures on their Facebook accounts to symbols of the demonstrations. A few went to Hong Kong.
The Chinese students, Luke says, “took much bolder moves than any of us did.”
He hung back. It’s not that he felt that as a guest in China he had to refrain from criticism of the government. He’d never censored himself in China, not even when off campus, where NYU’s guarantees of protected speech don’t apply. That might be his privilege as an international student, he concedes: not having to mind his words in public.
As a foreigner, Luke also didn’t feel that he had the same stake in the Umbrella Revolution’s outcome that his classmates did. Still, he closely followed the news, and a course on Chinese cyberculture, taught by the new-media thinker Clay Shirky, gave him an unexpected window on events. Because of NYU-Shanghai’s opening in the Great Firewall, Luke could see how Western media were reporting on Hong Kong and what was suppressed in China’s state-controlled news outlets. At one point, he says, Chinese television aired footage of the protests but claimed that they were National Day demonstrations in support of the government.
In the middle of the sit-ins, Chinese authorities abruptly shut down access to the photo-sharing site Instagram, which hadn’t previously been blocked. In Luke’s cyberculture class, they discussed the nature of Chinese online censorship. That’s typically how it works, they learned: Sites are OK until specific events — in this case, users posting real-time snapshots of the rallies in Hong Kong — cause them to go dark.
Luke also came to see just how robust the online debate in China really was, despite government controls. Web users spoke in a kind of code, substituting homophones for banned words. They circulated political memes, like a tweaked version of the Kentucky Fried Chicken logo, with Colonel Sanders’s image replaced by that of Chen Guangcheng, the blind, dissident lawyer.
“One misconception I had was that censorship and the Great Firewall mean absence of dialogue,” Luke says, “which is absolutely turned upside-down when you look at what is going on on the Chinese Internet.”
Political conversation in China may be confined to the corners of the Internet, but the Spring Festival Gala, during the Lunar New Year, is one of the country’s most public events. Broadcast to nearly 700 million homes, it is like the Super Bowl halftime show without the football, a four-hour mash-up of musical numbers, skits, and dance performances.
Ben watched the television program at home with his family, in Hubei province, where his mother grew up. What he saw offended him. One sketch compared an average-looking woman with a model, mocking the ordinary woman as manly and unmarriageable. Another suggested that female public officials get ahead only by sleeping their way to the top.
Ben turned to his phone and opened up WeChat, a messaging app. His screen lit up with the angry commentary of his NYU-Shanghai classmates, watching the broadcast with their own families. Rather than talking with their relatives about the program, they commiserated among themselves.
Ben was finding that there were certain subjects he couldn’t talk about with his extended family (his more-urbane parents were fine). When relatives teased him about whether he was going to get a white girlfriend, or called his Pakistani friends “smelly,” he bit his tongue.
“I had a huge tension when I was talking to my relatives,” he says. “I have to really control myself.”
Almost every teenager who goes away to college feels culture shock upon returning home that first time, but the international aspect of NYU-Shanghai made Ben’s perhaps more profound. Back with his family, he had to be a “traditional Chinese kid,” he says, but at college he was becoming someone else.
“I’m in two worlds,” he says.
There were no-go areas with his family as well as online. He was considering a journalism career and wondered if he could pursue such work in a country where it matters what you say, where you say it, and to whom. That is part of being Chinese, he says, carrying that internal censor with you.
NYU-Shanghai was different, though, and it drove Ben crazy to hear critics of the campus, Americans in particular, say it was closed off to real discussion. “I don’t really know how they define academic speech,” he says. Is it just China-bashing, “Talking about Tiananmen Square all the time? Is that a true, open academic discussion?”
He heard about a student at another university in Shanghai who had gotten in trouble for writing his dissertation on Mao Zedong Sixiang, or Mao Zedong Thought, a sensitive matter in today’s China. At NYU he read Mao’s essay “On Contradiction” and spent a whole class talking about Maoism in the context of Western political ideas.
“If you talk about tough topics,” Ben says, “I think that is a true definition of academic freedom.”
When it comes to talking about foreign outposts like NYU-Shanghai, it can be difficult to have a nuanced conversation. The educational isolationists retreat to their corner, the bullish globalists to theirs. Spending time with students like Luke and Ben suggests that the reality is more complicated. In the closed society that is NYU-Shanghai, the promise of open debate appears, so far, to be realized.
It remains to be seen, however, what impact, if any, the university will have on broader Chinese society.
In off-hours, Ben worked in the admissions office, where, during a recent question-and-answer session with a group of Chinese high-school principals, the issue of academic freedom came up. NYU-Shanghai, he thought, was gaining a reputation in China as a place where free thinking was prized. Could it, he wondered, lead other Chinese universities to become more open as well?
Perhaps the college would cause ripples in China’s sea. Or maybe it would remain just one island.
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.