Uncomfortable silences aren’t new to my classrooms.
"That's right. In which other countries is Chinese spoken?"
"Singapore."
"Good, where else?"
"Hong Kong," a student says.
"Hong Kong is part of China," another one adds quickly.
"Taiwan," someone says without raising their hand.
Before I can validate the answer, it happens, "Taiwan is part of China."
Deep uncomfortable silence. I fight back a smile.
The students at Suzhou International Foreign Language School are not your typical Chinese kids. By nature of being a private school, their parents are well off, many of them owners of the Chinese factories we often generalize about (and I don't mean that rhetorically).
So we start with a few soft pitches to the class: What's a good work to leisure time ratio? What profession would or wouldn't you like to have? Then I evoke a couple literal head scratches across the room. Do men and women have equal job opportunities? In three out of four of my high school classes, there were voices to repudiate the knee-jerk "yes's!"
Should people be allowed to form workers' unions? Everyone seemed indifferent to the concept. Should they be allowed to strike? "No, because factories can close," echoed as the first answer each time, then silence.
This time, I was the one who found the subsequent silence irksome, almost bewildering. Momentarily glancing at the Chinese teachers conducting my evaluation, I trudged on. Why do workers strike? Okay, why do they want more money? To get rich? Who depends on the worker? What kind of expenditures do families have (especially ones who work in factories)?
So I'm in Marxist China, admittedly at a privileged institution, trying to provoke one of my commie students into defending the notion that workers should have the right to negotiate fair wages. I have ideas about what makes China communist, but it sure as hell is not the redistribution of wealth.
Happy 60th birthday People's Republic of China.
