USC Annenberg Professor responds to criticism of Chinese students studying abroad and media blowback.
Earlier this month, two USC students from China, Ming Qu and Ying Wu, were shot and killed while sitting in Ming’s BMW near campus.
In the US the news was greeted as you’d expect for a crime of this nature. But in mainland China, it unleashed a startling response.
On popular website 163.com, Chinese netizens piled on with comments such as: “Studying in America, driving BMW, a male and a female, let them die.”
The venom this tragedy has generated in China illustrates the country’s deep divisions. It is not the monolithic, rapidly-rising superpower so many Americans fear, but a divided country – one where the gap between the haves and the have nots has widened so much, Beijing stopped publishing economic data on its Gini coefficient-a measure of inequality-over a decade ago.
For many Chinese, the fact that it was a BMW may have also pushed a button – the car has taken on an awful symbolism in China after several well publicized hit-and-run incidents, a Gatsby-esque metaphor for the clash between rich and poor.
Never mind that the BMW was secondhand and not a $60,000 luxury model as the Associated Press had erroneously reported initially. Or that Ming and Ying were not especially rich or well-connected – Ming’s father is a manager at an insurance company, his mother a teacher; Ying’s father a police investigator and her mother, a retired factory worker.
Even after more accurate reports filtered out, the reaction in China remains largely unsympathetic, judging from the Internet commentary that hasn’t been scrubbed out by censors.
Americans are, on the whole, indifferent. But it opens a window onto the vulnerable position that many of the 160,000 or so Chinese students who come to the US to study every year find themselves in – caught between an America that wants their tuition dollars but isn’t creating enough jobs for them to stay and a China that often welcomes returning students with less-than-open arms.
It didn’t help matters that China’s biggest political scandal, involving the ouster of former party boss Bo Xilai, has recently brought to light stories of his high-living son Bo Guagua, a Harvard student who reportedly drives luxury cars.
These princelings, as they are dubbed in China, are but a drop in the ocean when you consider the huge wave of Chinese who have come here to study, but the shenanigans of the few are contributing to the disdain graduates are encountering back home.
This is a big, and relatively recent, turnaround in attitude. When China began its economic expansion in the 1980s, Chinese students educated abroad were feted for their skills and knowledge, which were then scarce back home. They were dubbed “hai gui,” or “sea turtles,” as opposed to the “land tortoises”: local graduates. Now, thanks to a vast expansion in education, China is awash with college graduates, both local and international, when what its export-oriented economy really needs are more factory workers. More run-of-the-mill Chinese students are studying abroad now, not just the best and brightest. Increasingly, employers in China see U.S. returnee graduates as problematic hires, with unrealistic salary expectations. Even the advantage of being able to speak English has waned as there are now so many Chinese students on U.S. campuses that many socialize almost exclusively among themselves and never improve their language skills.
The result: the sea turtles now sometimes become “hai dai,” or “seaweed”, which in Mandarin is a homonym for “jobless returnees”. In China, these prodigal children are increasingly envied and despised. “May you guys die abroad,” posted a netizen named lishihua88 in a typical comment on 163.com. “We should think about why a lot of families, even the poor ones, spend a lot to send their children abroad. This is meaningless. Studying abroad only contributes to American GDP, but what China gets is fake degrees like Tang Jun. (the former Microsoft China President accused of padding his CV.) Stop cheating us.”
As a lecturer at the USC’s Annenberg School, I have taught, counseled and mentored many graduate students from China, and encountered more than a few aspiring or newly-returned students when I lived in Beijing as a Wall Street Journal correspondent.
Having been a foreign student in America myself, I have great sympathy for the difficulties they face trying to chase their dreams in an alien land.
They are, for the most part, green. Most graduate students have come straight from college, with little or no working experience. They are sheltered, lacking the worldliness of American students of the same age, who get their first jolt of self-determination at 16 with their driving license. At that age, the average Chinese student is likely clambering through a crippling morass of standardized tests and shouldering the burden of being their parents’ only (because of China’s one-child policy) ticket in the lottery that is the nationwide “gao kao” university entrance exams — an event imbued with such importance that construction work is stopped, traffic diverted and parents given time off work leave to alternately coddle and bully their kids through it. (Some parents have even been known to put their daughters on birth control pills so they won’t be distracted with menstrual cramps during exams)
Even the most media-savvy Chinese students have a touching naiveté about what it means to study in America. A few years ago, one of our sharpest and smartest researchers at the Beijing Wall Street Journal bureau won a full scholarship to Columbia. I warned her to brace herself for rats and urine on the subway. She would not believe me – how could that happen in the world’s richest country? She later rang me, subdued, to complain that she couldn’t get cell phone coverage in her Manhattan apartment.
Most Chinese students I’ve talked to have dreams of working here in the U.S for a few years after graduation, burnishing their resumes and being able to pick and choose whether to stay or go home. Many aren’t succeeding. The job market’s brutal, and attitudes can be too. UCLA undergraduate Alexandra Wallace’s infamous YouTube rant about Asians in the library was justly derided, but it does echo what some Americans seem to think, if not say. I hear this refrain ever so often: Chinese students don’t contribute-to class discussions, or college social life in general. They are too insular. They cheat on their college admissions. They’re grabby.
In this clash of cultures, it is helpful to remember America’s historical openness to scholars from China -and the dividends it has paid. Over a century ago the Boxer Rebellion lead to the US government sponsoring China’s first generation of scholars sent to U.S. college. This first wave of students ended up building China’s first railroads and steamships, won Nobel prizes and helped create Tsinghua University, China’s equivalent of MIT. The first wave of sea turtles who returned following China’s economic opening in the 1980s-people like Charles Zhang and Robin Li-built China’s Internet.
The incomparable E.B White wrote in his classic essay on New York that the city is made great by people who are born elsewhere and come to it in a quest for something, embracing the city with the intense excitement of first love and absorbing it with the fresh eyes of an adventurer.
Apply that to Chinese students who come to America in search of a dream-the urbanites from Beijing and Shanghai, the provincials from places whose populations nonetheless exceed those of Chicago or Atlanta, the innocents who’ve dossed down six to a college dorm and never been behind the wheel of a car, the sophisticates with their Pradas and bejeweled phones, and those of more modest means, uneasily aware their parents and relatives have pooled their life savings just so they can study in the country that created Steve Jobs and Jeremy Lin.
So what about this generation, this seaweed tide?
Unlike the earlier generations of China scholars, they are not just majoring in the hard sciences. They are in creative writing programs, in art schools, even in journalism, despite media restrictions back home.
This is no small thing. Even as many Americans make the mistake of viewing China as a monolithic superpower, the Chinese, too, tend toward one-sided views of America. America the imperialist oppressor; America the violent. It’s a view that Qu’s and Wu’s tragedy unfortunately reinforces.
But there is also another dimension to the Chinese view of America. It is a country many admire as a place of hope and possibilities and opportunity, the land that created Steve Jobs and Jeremy Lin. This is the America that draws ever-growing numbers of Chinese students, who then take home a view of the United States that refutes the stereotypes.
Such an exercise of informal diplomacy on a grand scale cannot help but change U.S.-China relations. It may even change the world.
Mei Fong, formerly a China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is now a lecturer at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Another version of this article ran in the Los Angeles Times on April 26, 2012.
本月早些时候，南加州大学的两名中国留学生瞿铭和吴颖在校园附近遭枪击身亡，遇难时两人同坐在瞿铭的宝马车里。
在美国，媒体像往常一样按照刑事犯罪案件性质来处理和报道这则新闻。然而在中国大陆，这起不幸的事件却掀起了惊人的波澜。
在中国的流行网站网易上，网评的戾气堆积如山：“在美国享福，开宝马兜风，孤男寡女，让他们去死。”
在中国，这场悲剧所激发的毒液揭露了这个国家内部深刻的分歧。这不是众多美国人所害怕的单一僵化却迅速崛起的超级大国，而是一个四分五裂的国家—— 一个穷人与富人之间鸿沟如此显著的国家。
对于许多中国人，事发于宝马车内的事实成为一触即发的导火索：经过几次广为人知的撞人逃逸事件后，“宝马”在中国已然成为一个盖茨比式隐喻贫富冲突的新象征。
可似乎没有人在意它是二手的，而不是如美联社最初错误报告的那样，价值6万美元的豪华型号；也没有人在意瞿铭和吴颖并不是富二代或官二代：瞿铭的父亲是一家保险公司经理，母亲是老师；吴颖的父亲是一名人民警察，母亲是退休工人。
即使在更精准的报导出炉后，从互联网上还没有被审查抹去的评论来看，中国民众的反应大多仍然十分冷漠。
在美国，民众整体上则是无动于衷。
然而这起事件却打开了一扇窗，让每年约16万赴美求学的中国留学生们看到了自己所处的困窘境地 ——在一个希望他们缴纳大笔大笔学费却不愿为他们创造足够就业机会留下的美国与一个同样不欢迎海归的祖国之间进退两难。
而近来前中共重庆市委书记薄熙来下台引发的中国的最大的政治丑闻，连同随后曝光的其子薄瓜瓜在哈佛留学生活奢侈驾驶豪华跑车的报导，更让这样的局面雪上加霜。
这些在中国被称为太子党的二世祖们只是来美求学的广大留学生队伍中的沧海一粟，然而恰恰是这些少数的捣蛋者使得归国学生们遭受到种种藐视与不公。
这是一场巨大并且十分新近的态度与观念转变。
在20世纪80年代中国刚开始经济扩张之时，在海外接受教育后归国的留学生尚且稀少，并且由于其所具备的知识与技能受到极好的待遇。他们被称为“海归”或“海龟”，与“陆龟”形成鲜明对比。 然而现在，当由于教育迅猛发展，无论本地的还是海归的毕业生都泛滥成灾时，中国出口导向型经济真正需要的却是更多的工厂工人。
现今的时代，越来越多资质平平的学生开始出国留学，而不仅仅只是最好的和最聪明的。
在中国的雇主眼里，雇用有着不切实际薪水期望的海归们越来越成为一个棘手的问题。再者鉴于现在有这么多在美留学的中国学生，许多人的社交圈也只局限在中国人的小圈子里，他们的语言能力永远得不到提升，如此这般，甚至连能说英语的优势也逐渐减退至无了。
结果是：“海龟”现在时常成了“海带”或“海藻”，在普通话里是“失业海归”的谐音。
在中国，这些游子们越来越多地遭受嫉妒与鄙视。“祝你们全死在国外，”一位名为lishihua88的网友在网易上评论。“我们应该想想，为什么很多家庭，甚至贫困的，花了这么多钱送孩子出国。这是毫无意义的。出国留学只是帮美国国内生产总值作贡献而已，中国得到的回报却是假文凭，像唐骏（被控简历作假的前微软中国区总裁）。别骗我们拉。“
作为南加州大学安娜堡学院的讲师，我辅导指引过许多来自中国的研究生。当我还生活在北京担任华尔街日报驻华记者时，也遇到过好些胸怀抱负或新近归国的学生。
我也曾是一名留学美国的外国学生，所以对于这些试图在异乡追逐自己梦想的孩子们怀有极大同情。
大多数研究生都是大学一毕业就直接来到这里留学，很少或根本没有工作经验。与16岁起拿到驾照就开始在俗世颠簸摸爬滚打的同龄美国孩子相比，他们被庇护得太好了。同样是16岁，肩负着作为自己父母唯一（因为中国的计划生育政策）一张中头奖彩票的重担，中国学生们可能大多还在通过全国标准化大学入学考试的泥沼里扑腾 ——“高考”被赋予如此大的重要性以至于工程建设活动暂停，交通改道，连带家长们用尽功夫软硬兼施只为孩子顺利通过它（有些父母为了防止女儿月经来潮而考试分心甚至給她们服用避孕药）。
即使是最精通媒体的中国学生，对于在美国留学究竟意味着什么都抱有令人感触的天真。几年前，我们北京华尔街日报部门一个最犀利聪明的研究员获得了哥伦比亚大学全额奖学金。我警告她做好在地铁里迎接老鼠和尿液的准备。她不肯相信我——怎么可能发生世界上最富有的国家呢？对于她来说，美利坚等于拿铁咖啡和豪华跑车。后来她打电话给我，彻底信服了我当初的忠告，抱怨说在她的曼哈顿公寓里甚至无法获得手机通讯覆盖。
大多数和我聊过的中国学生都有毕业后在美国工作几年的想法，觉得这样可以把自己的简历打磨得更漂亮，并且能为将来抉择究竟是去是留增加历练资本。但很多人都不能成功如愿。就业市场是残酷的，人心亦是如此。
虽然前不久加州大学洛杉矶分校本科生亚历山德拉·华莱士对亚洲人在图书馆的公开叫嚣得到了应有的鄙视与耻笑，这段臭名昭著的YouTube视频的确反映了一些美国人的内心所想——即使他们嘴上不说。我太经常听到这些老生常谈了：中国学生不会参与课堂讨论，或是任何校园社交生活。他们太孤立太隔绝了。他们靠作弊才被录取。他们都贪心不足急功近利。
在这样文化冲突的情况下，铭记历史上美国对来自中国学者的开放态度和因此而引发的裨益是十分有帮助的。早在一个世纪前，义和团运动致使美国政府赞助中国第一代学者赴美深造。这批学生之后修建了中国最早的铁路和轮船，获得了诺贝尔奖，并帮助建立了相当于中国麻省理工学院的清华大学。20世纪80年代改革开放时期，第一批回国的海龟,如张朝阳和李彦宏,创造了中国的互联网。
无与伦比的E.B.怀特曾在一篇关于纽约的经典随笔里写道，是那些生于别处的人们造就了这座城市的伟大，他们因为有所追求而来到这里，带着初恋的强烈兴奋之感拥抱着它，用冒险家的新奇眼光吸收着它的一点一滴。
将这段话应用到来美国寻梦的中国学生身上，不难发现他们亦来自五湖四海，形形色色：有的出身成长在大都市如北京和上海，有的家在人口仍超过芝加哥或亚特兰大的地方省份；有的很傻很天真，习惯于六人一间宿舍的生活，从没换过车胎，有的很城府很贵气，拎着prada包，握着珠光宝气的手机；当然更多的是那些中不溜的，每天都不安地意识到自己的父母亲戚汇集了毕生的积蓄，只为使他们可以在一个缔造史蒂夫·乔布斯和林书豪的国度学习。
所以这一代，这场海藻的浪潮，究竟特别在何处？
不同于前几代的中国学者，他们的专业不再局限于科学，而是活跃在创作项目和艺术学院中，甚至是在新闻传播专业里，尽管国内对媒体有着重重约束。还有数以千计的中国学生在这里学习着美国生活的方方面面，数量远大于在中国留学的美国人。
这绝不是件小事。虽然许多美国人对中国抱有独当一面超级大国的错误看法，中国人也倾向于以偏概全地定义美国。帝国主义压迫者的美国，暴力的美国——瞿铭和吴颖的悲剧不幸地确认和加深了这样的观点。当然，在他们心中还有另一个令人钦佩的美国，吸引芸芸学子们的美国，充满希望和可能的美国，民主竞选产生了第一位黑人总统的美国，一个在大多数情况下仍然因机会无限而充满刺激的国度。这才是那个持续吸引越来越多中国留学生的美国。他们来到并体验这里，然后把与老套观念截然不同的观感带回家。
这样规模宏大的非正式外交无法不改变中美关系。它甚至可以改变世界。（全文完）
