The rivals sized up one another across the dais, four teenagers in pressed shirts and suits they had yet to fully grow into. They cleared their throats. They read through their notes one last time.
Once the timer sounded and the debate began, nerves were replaced with a fierce competitiveness. Each side laid out its best case, enumerating points in rat-a-tat-tat fashion, then sought to dismantle its opponent’s claims with sharp counterstrikes.
Powerful nations have a moral obligation to intervene when human rights are being violated in other countries, argued one team. Wait, the other parried, recent history is littered with examples of the intercession of Western governments, however well-intentioned, leading to an escalation of violence. Look at Somalia, at Kosovo. Look at the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS.
“The hostage might be killed,” came the retort, “but it doesn’t mean the policeman doesn’t have the responsibility to try to rescue the hostage!”
At the end of the round, the packed auditorium, hushed for much of an hour, broke into applause. The winning team would be crowned champion of the National High School Debate League of China.
With so many young Chinese studying abroad, students are seeking to polish their English and burnish their college applications.
Yes, China. In a country that’s come to be almost synonymous with the stifling of speech, competitive debate is becoming one of the most popular extracurricular activities among top high-school students. Competing in English, the students tackle subjects that, at first glance, would seem touchy — air pollution, casino gambling, nuclear weapons. Students have referenced Mao and Marx in debating the death penalty. Far from operating in the shadows, the league, started by a pair of Americans, is embraced by principals at many of China’s high schools.
The reason debate is flourishing? With so many young Chinese studying abroad — nearly a quarter of a million in the United States alone — students are seeking to polish their English and burnish their college applications.
In debate, says Yang Jingxin, a high-school senior in Beijing, “you have to think on your feet in English.”
Ms. Yang helped start her school’s debate club and next year plans to attend college in America, maybe Scripps, the California liberal-arts institution. Debate, she hopes, will help her “transfer from a Chinese mind-set to an English one.”
Arguing in English
David Weeks was bitten early by two bugs: debate and China. He studied in Shanghai while at Swarthmore College, and after graduation, in 2010, he returned to China to teach English. It was supposed to be a gap year, one last adventure before law school.
Mr. Weeks’s students would ask him for advice about how to improve their conversational English. Public speaking, he thought, might help. He’d reconnected with a friend from the collegiate debating circuit, Gavin Newton-Tanzer, a Columbia graduate who was also in China running student-exchange programs. The two of them hatched the idea to start a debate tournament, strictly in their spare time, and recruited about two dozen schools in Beijing and Tianjin, where Mr. Weeks taught, to participate.
Needing a place to hold their event, Mr. Newton-Tanzer approached some contacts at Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions. Not only did the university agree to give the organizers some space on campus, but it mailed out a letter to the best high schools across the country, inviting them to take part. In the end, some 120 schools sent debaters.
The critical thinking necessary for debate, where participants can be called on to argue contrary positions from round to round, doesn’t always come naturally to Chinese students.
Two years later, the league is active in 400 schools nationwide, and about 12,000 students participate annually in its regional or national tournaments. Its top debaters have gone to American competitions and more than held their own against opponents whose first language is English — they’ve made the elimination rounds at Harvard and Stanford Universities and placed second in Harvard’s international division; they were the first foreign team to earn a bid to the U.S. national championship.
Yang Shao, a 17-year-old who goes by the English name Victoria, was one of the Harvard finalists. At first, she says, she was nervous about debating native speakers, but “it helps improve your skills and your guts a lot.” Her rebuttal speech at the tournament, she adds, was the best she’s ever delivered.
For Mr. Weeks and Mr. Newton-Tanzer, debate is now a full-time gig. They employ more than 40 staff members who coordinate tournaments, hold workshops, and sign up new schools. (They charge a nominal fee, of 200 renminbi, or about $30, per student for a two-day tournament.) Lately, they’ve branched out to run other extracurricular activities, including drama clubs, business-simulation contests, and robotics and coding camps.
In China, where university admission is decided on the basis of a single national exam, the gaokao, few schools offer the raft of afterschool activities commonplace at the typical American high school. That can disadvantage students applying to colleges abroad where prospective students are expected to have a well-rounded résumé.
Indeed, more than two-thirds of the students who signed up on the debate league’s website during the last academic year said they planned to study overseas. And American college representatives are beginning to include its tournaments on the itineraries of their China recruiting trips.
As enrollments from China have soared, admissions officials have become increasingly dismayed that students’ scores on English-proficiency tests often outpace their actual ability — either because they excel more at test-taking than speaking or because of outright cheating. They are looking for assurances that students will be able to succeed in an American classroom.
No Single Right Answer
Still, the critical thinking necessary for debate, where participants can be called on to argue contrary positions from round to round, doesn’t always come naturally to Chinese students. The country’s educational system emphasizes rote learning, and its classrooms feature little discussion. For the Chinese student, says Ms. Yang, the Beijing debater, “every problem has a certain answer.”
At times, this belief has come out in debates. Mr. Weeks recalls one tournament when he repeatedly heard students make the case that China shouldn’t abolish the death penalty because the country is in the early stages of socialist development and violence might still be needed to achieve the perfect Communist state. It struck him, “as a very particular reading of Marxism,” he says. Essentially, it was, “in order to make the revolutionary omelet, you have to crack some eggs.”
Mr. Weeks later discovered that the students’ argument was lifted verbatim from the section in their politics textbook on the death penalty, down to the phrase, “China is in the early stages of socialist development.” Such students, he says, are under the impression that “because it is in the textbook it’s just true and it’s just the right answer and the judge won’t accept anything different.”
It is heartening, he says, to see students who’ve taken this approach and lost then rethink their argument or, better still, examine what they’ve been taught. “It’s fascinating to see this intersection of curriculum that is designed to indoctrinate,” Mr. Weeks says, “with this tradition that is sort of fundamentally iconoclastic.”
One might expect that such practices could get the league in trouble with authorities, but they have not. At another tournament, the local Communist Party Youth League chairman was in the audience when one of the finalists posited that the death penalty should be eliminated because Mao Zedong, the founder of Communist China, used it to purge political opponents, and future leaders could do the same. Mr. Weeks, sitting next to the official, turned white, but his guest merely nodded and said of the student, “He speaks great English.”
“Either he was completely fine with what was being said and understood that it was a purely educational discussion being had in the classroom and not a call to action of any kind,” Mr. Weeks says, “or he had no idea what the kid was saying.”
Mr. Weeks suggests that the very things that attract students to debate — that it’s in English and is seen as college-application fodder — reinforce its educational nature and insulate it from criticism. Still, he acknowledges that organizers have stayed away from the most-sensitive issues in China today, the “Three T’s,” Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan. Though, like a good debater, he also argues that certain subjects, like affirmative action or sexual assault on campus, would very likely be deemed off limits for an American tournament. In fact, whenever possible, the Chinese league adopts the same topic as the major American competitions. When they’ve deviated, it hasn’t been because of politics but because the resolutions wouldn’t make sense in the Chinese context, Mr. Weeks says; arguments about banning automatic weapons, for example, don’t resonate in a country where it’s illegal for a citizen to own a gun.
Fu Huizhi, Yang Jingxin’s classmate, says that to research debate topics, he has “jumped outside the Great Firewall,” using technology to circumvent the Chinese government’s online censorship of controversial issues or websites. Next year, he hopes to be doing his debate research in America, at college there.
One thing’s for certain: Mr. Fu plans to continue debate. “It’s part of my life,” he says. “I can’t give it up.”
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.
