According to a New York Times article last week, fraud is as familiar a fixture on Chinese campuses as gothic architecture is on American ones:
‘Pressure on scholars by administrators of state-run universities to earn journal citations — a measure of innovation — has produced a deluge of plagiarized or fabricated research. In December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor.
‘In an editorial published earlier this year, The Lancet, the British medical journal, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a “research superpower” by 2020.’
Fraud has always been a problem in Chinese academia, and when US academics encounter it in China, they often respond with shock and disgust, as Yale professor Stephen Stearns did after teaching only one semester at Peking University, where he failed three of his students for plagiarism.
What particularly upset Stearns about the academic dishonesty he encountered in China was how little Chinese university administrators and professors seemed upset by it.
Ten years ago, when I was working as the China correspondent for the Washington-based Chronicle of Higher Education, I reported on how a Peking University sociologist Wang Mingming was accused of plagiarizing from a US textbook, a case that ignited a firestorm in Chinese academia.
I interviewed many Chinese about the case, but for them it wasn’t a question of whether Wang Mingming was guilty, but who Wang had angered to get into trouble in the first place. (The story has a happy ending: Wang is still at Peking.)
Americans like Stearns can’t be faulted for being angry at academic dishonesty. But just as they can’t understand why Chinese academics aren’t angry, many Chinese can’t see why foreign critics are so fired up either.
The fundamental issue is that while Stearns sees Peking as an academic institution, Chinese know that first and foremost Peking is a bureaucracy, and in many ways an extension of the Communist Party. (In fact, some say it’s more like a de facto government ministry.) And what matters in a bureaucracy are interpersonal relationships, which can be the antithesis of academic integrity.
But as Zhang Ming, a People’s University professor tells the New York Times: ‘We need to focus on seeking truth, not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for personal profit.’
The thing is, though, we tend to forget that it was only after World War II that US universities themselves became world-class research universities—only a century ago, they had the same academic reputation as, well, Chinese ones today. For example, US medical schools used to be unregulated diploma mills (they took anyone who would pay the tuition), producing doctors who did more harm than good. Then a handful of European-educated visionaries founded John Hopkins, and revolutionized medical research and education in the United States. After World War II, the Ivy League transformed from being a set of party schools for American rich kids, into serious academic institutions.
Because many of the United States’ universities are private, they have the autonomy to choose to improve. But in China, higher education reform is directed from the top down by party officials rather than by academics. It was Jiang Zemin in 1998 who called for ‘world-class universities,’ and it was Hu Jintao who called for China to become a ‘research superpower’ by 2020.
Yet, as long as the Communist Party controls the universities, they’ll continue to be political bureaucracies where professors care more about serving the agenda of some bureaucrat and fraud and cheating will become even more pervasive ‘non-problems’.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
China's English Learning Industry (Diplomat)
The Economist has reported that Disney has entered China’s English-learning market. This seems like a sure-fire way for Disney to leverage its brand because learning English is a national obsession and a lucrative industry in China. It’s China’s de facto second language, and a prerequisite for getting into the right schools and the right companies. How to learn English is, literally, the billion-dollar question right now in China.
But as someone who’s taught English on and off for the past 12 years to Chinese students I know that they have a love-hate relationship with the language: they know how important it is to learn, but no one’s figured out how they can learn it effectively, making Chinese too often feel frustrated and impotent.
In the public school system, students study mainly grammar to learn one of the world’s most ungrammatical languages (to learn English via grammar is like Van Gogh trying to paint with a ruler). Everyone knows this, but no one can do anything about it because grammar can be tested, and to even attempt to test real English ability would be to discriminate heavily in favour of China’s already too-heavily favoured coastal cities, which can invest in small classes and foreign English teachers.
One of the major schools is literally an industry in itself, and only in China could a test preparation centre be the number one brand in the private education world. Unfortunately, students don’t go there to learn English (although English classes are offered), but how to do well on the myriad of examinations to get into English-speaking universities. Every student who even thinks of going abroad one day will pass through it, but its popularity both reveals and reinforces the dominant mentality among Chinese students: that English isn’t a language, but a series of tests.
This mentality doesn’t help when Chinese actually have to use the language in an interview with a multinational in Beijing, to do some shopping in the United States, or even saying hello to a Westerner. This frustration and insecurity has partly fuelled the growth of that unique Chinese phenomenon called ‘Crazy English,’ whereby whole crowds gather to learn English by shouting it out. Its founder, Li Yang, believes it works because it builds confidence. But as the New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent Evan Osnos points out, there are also some that suggest it encourages nationalism and xenophobia.
There are a couple of big schools that are popular with white collar Chinese that offer foreign teachers and small classes to improve a student’s oral English ability. I’ve had two of my high school students enrol in their programmes, and they do come back with exceptionally strong oral English. Unfortunately, their Chinglish (expressing English with Chinese grammar and thinking) is still intact, and they’ve picked up a lot of bad habits along the way.
Bad grammar, speed and length of speech at the expense of clarity and precision, and the unnecessary and incorrect usage of complex vocabulary are all obvious bad habits, but the most fatal flaw is the aggressive confidence that these schools instil in their students so that students are blind to their weaknesses and deficiencies. (Disney shouldn’t have any of these issues because it’ll be teaching little children oral English.)
And then, finally, there’s that most expensive and ostensibly more assured way of learning English: going abroad. There are expatriates in Beijing who lived here for years who don’t speak a word of Chinese, but they didn’t come to Beijing for either the language or the culture. Chinese who go abroad for high school are better in that they can at least converse, although most still have difficulties reading and writing.
So what could be the problem with learning abroad? The problem overseas is the most common refrain at home as well: there are too many Chinese. Chinese who are abroad tend to cluster together, and have limited interaction with the Western world, hindering their language learning. In fact, Canada, where I’m from, has even made Chinese its third language!
But as someone who’s taught English on and off for the past 12 years to Chinese students I know that they have a love-hate relationship with the language: they know how important it is to learn, but no one’s figured out how they can learn it effectively, making Chinese too often feel frustrated and impotent.
In the public school system, students study mainly grammar to learn one of the world’s most ungrammatical languages (to learn English via grammar is like Van Gogh trying to paint with a ruler). Everyone knows this, but no one can do anything about it because grammar can be tested, and to even attempt to test real English ability would be to discriminate heavily in favour of China’s already too-heavily favoured coastal cities, which can invest in small classes and foreign English teachers.
One of the major schools is literally an industry in itself, and only in China could a test preparation centre be the number one brand in the private education world. Unfortunately, students don’t go there to learn English (although English classes are offered), but how to do well on the myriad of examinations to get into English-speaking universities. Every student who even thinks of going abroad one day will pass through it, but its popularity both reveals and reinforces the dominant mentality among Chinese students: that English isn’t a language, but a series of tests.
This mentality doesn’t help when Chinese actually have to use the language in an interview with a multinational in Beijing, to do some shopping in the United States, or even saying hello to a Westerner. This frustration and insecurity has partly fuelled the growth of that unique Chinese phenomenon called ‘Crazy English,’ whereby whole crowds gather to learn English by shouting it out. Its founder, Li Yang, believes it works because it builds confidence. But as the New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent Evan Osnos points out, there are also some that suggest it encourages nationalism and xenophobia.
There are a couple of big schools that are popular with white collar Chinese that offer foreign teachers and small classes to improve a student’s oral English ability. I’ve had two of my high school students enrol in their programmes, and they do come back with exceptionally strong oral English. Unfortunately, their Chinglish (expressing English with Chinese grammar and thinking) is still intact, and they’ve picked up a lot of bad habits along the way.
Bad grammar, speed and length of speech at the expense of clarity and precision, and the unnecessary and incorrect usage of complex vocabulary are all obvious bad habits, but the most fatal flaw is the aggressive confidence that these schools instil in their students so that students are blind to their weaknesses and deficiencies. (Disney shouldn’t have any of these issues because it’ll be teaching little children oral English.)
And then, finally, there’s that most expensive and ostensibly more assured way of learning English: going abroad. There are expatriates in Beijing who lived here for years who don’t speak a word of Chinese, but they didn’t come to Beijing for either the language or the culture. Chinese who go abroad for high school are better in that they can at least converse, although most still have difficulties reading and writing.
So what could be the problem with learning abroad? The problem overseas is the most common refrain at home as well: there are too many Chinese. Chinese who are abroad tend to cluster together, and have limited interaction with the Western world, hindering their language learning. In fact, Canada, where I’m from, has even made Chinese its third language!
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