Claire Moran’s recent column about a trip to China demonstrated clearly the imperial ignorance and arrogance that gives U.S. study abroad students a bad reputation. Moran bemoans China’s “censorship” as “oppressive” both to her and, apparently, to every single Chinese person. Moran gathered this evidence during her 2-week trip.

First, the author wasn’t able to access social media, a tragedy through which she was heroically able to soldier.

We first encounter her ill-informed view of the People’s Republic of China in the second paragraph, when Moran refers to the “infamous portrait” of Mao Tse-Tung. Why is it that the portrait of the Republic’s founder—a man who led soldiers in the countryside for decades until the country was liberated in 1949—is “infamous”?

Moran denounces the fact that she was not able to speak or hear about the “massacre” that took place at Tiananmen Square. Had our SU student done any research at all, it would have quickly become apparent that there was no massacre at Tiananmen Square. There is universal consensus that there was no blood shed in the square in June 1989. How, exactly, does China censor what did not happen?

Now, there was a battle that took place June 3-4 around Tiananmen Square, but it was no massacre. In a June 5, 1989 article in the Wall Street Journal three reports on the grounded stated, “dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square.”

Pesky facts aside, what gives Moran the right to condemn China for censorship and oppression? Does our author know, for example, that the genocide of this country’s Indigenous population is not part of any mainstream U.S. history textbook? Is our author aware that, while China has four times the population of the U.S., it has 640,000 fewer prisoners?

This is not to say that China is perfect or off limits for critique. It is to say, however, that 1) students need to research and think before they study abroad, and 2) if they want to condemn oppression and censorship they need not leave their dorms nor give up Snapchat.

Derek R. Ford, PhD
Syracuse University 2015

Published on February 5, 2016 at 6:18 pm