China: campus reactions to the NATO bombing in 1999

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2003 by Garreth Byrne

Editor's Note: China's attitude, especially any use of its veto in the UN Security Council, could be crucial in the current crisis about Iraq. It is useful to look at Chinese reactions in another recent international crisis.

I WORKED as a foreign teacher of English in a Chinese university between 1997 and 1999. My TEFL job was arranged through a church-related educational charity based in Hong Kong. After orientation courses in Dublin and Hong Kong I was posted, along with a number of other Irish TEFL teachers, to the university that had decided to offer me the job.

A comfortable 90-minutes journey by express train took me to the huge East Station in Guangzhou, a thriving polluted urban sprawl with industries and commercial enterprises in the South China province of Guangdong. This city with its outlying satellite towns may have a population touching 10 million people. Producing 42 per cent of China's export revenue, it is modem China's richest province and has been in the forefront of the communist country's dramatic capitalist-leaning new economic policies after Deng Zhao Ping came to power in the early 1980s.

Guangzhou was formerly known as Canton. Its lingua franca is Cantonese, a dialect that has six tones compared to the four tones of standard mandarin Chinese. Students at my university from other provinces told me that they strained to understand the speech of local taxi drivers, shop assistants and civic officials.

Emerging down the escalator from the customs areas of the East Station, I was greeted by a woman from the foreign affairs office of the university. A red taxi wound its way through the vehicle-crowded maze of streets to the main entrance of a treelined avenue that stretched past lecture and administration buildings, student dormitories, canteens and shops and an irregularly shaped artificial lake and finally over an ornate replica of a dynastic bridge to the steps of the centrally located university guest house. Here on the first three floors stayed visiting lecturers and students from other parts of China. On the top fourth and fifth floors were the foreign teachers, in this instance five Americans sent by a Mormon academic charity based in Utah, and one Irishman sent by a Columban-founded educational charity based in Hong Kong.

I was installed in a simply furnished but spacious air-conditioned apartment on the fourth floor. The white walls needed a lick of paint and had traces of bluetak used by a previous occupant to decorate the sitting room with paper posters and other mementoes. The kitchenette was cramped and equipped with basic culinary utensils. An antique washing machine stood in a dry corner of the shower room. Frayed beige cotton curtains could be drawn at night in the bedroom and sitting room. My apartment looked out over the large artificial lake in mid-campus that was surrounded by red flowered willow trees, tall palms and assorted shrubbery. It was a pleasant sight as I arose at 6 a.m. each workday, but on closer eye level inspection the water betrayed a sick green colour caused by scum and algae. There was a continuous drainage of raw sewage, kitchen dishwasher and open stormdrain runoff into the lake.

I sometimes saw kitchen staff dumping uneaten rice and vegetables into the lake from the ornamental bridge -- food for the tilapia and other species of fish being farmed in the water. Campus staff occasionally rowed out to the lake centre in a wooden boat to spread fish food more evenly onto the lake surface. Twice a year one saw a vanette with a large canvas water container at the rear pull up to the lakeside, whereupon a team of men in gumboots and tatty clothing spread out across the lake with netting and corralled the fish to a corner from where they could be lifted by handnets and tossed into the canvas tank ready for sale and delivery to downtown restaurants. At restaurant entrances you could see live fish in glass tanks waiting to be ordered from comprehensive menus. Diners got the impression that water in glass tanks was of a more pure aspect than campus lake water!

The campus of the technical university, founded in the late 1940s, stretched from east to west to a length of more than 4 kilometres. There were 18,000 students including postgraduate researchers and up to 2000 teaching staff. The physical sciences, architecture, engineering and information technology dominated the curriculum, but there was a busy foreign languages department with the main emphasis on English.

Students majoring in technical subjects were anxious to take semester-long modules of conversational English and functional writing so that they could eventually apply for jobs with multinational companies, or look for foreign university study scholarships. The ambition of some was eventually to be cherry picked by Canada or some other immigration friendly country and given visas to quit China for new lives in affluent upwardly mobile societies.

I gave conversation classes to young undergraduates straight out of high school. My workload in the first four weeks of the first semester was light while the young men and women did compulsory military training under the direction of junior officers from the People's Liberation Army (PLA). In dull green khaki uniforms several hundred students were drilled and redrilled on sweltering sunlit mornings and afternoons on various open spaces throughout the campus. Even Saturdays were full tests of endurance from 8 a.m. until near 6 p.m. For the final three weeks they did rifle instruction with no ammunition. It was eerie to stroll along the lakeshore from apartment to classroom and back past dozens of small thin reclining military figures taking aim at imaginary targets with outstretched rifles. Weary but compliant men and women slaked their thirst by taking slugs of water from plastic bottles. Four weeks of relentless drilling, instruction and patriotic indoctrination culminated in a weekend tattoo held in a univ ersity sports stadium. They were glad to attend classes after that and blend into the placid tenor of campus life.