I am reading River Town by Peter Hessler. This book is packed with insights about what I call the “Chinese system”.

The story takes place in a small town of Sichuan province, around 1997. The author worked there as a teacher. He wrote about his observations and tried to make sense of them. Granted, Chinese students from other provinces may have gone through different experiences, but generally speaking the Chinese education system is very homogeneous. I reproduced four excepts that I found particularly revealing.

Respect of authority

Can students challenge a professor? Are factory workers allowed to suggest improvements in the operations? No way.

Chinese teaching styles are also significantly different from western methods, which made my tutorials even more frustrating. In China, a teacher is absolutely respected without question, and the teacher-student relationship tends to be formal. The teacher teaches and is right, and the student studies and is wrong. But this isn’t our tradition in America, as my own students noticed. I encouraged informality in our classes, and if a student was wrong I pointed out what she had done right and praised her for making a good effort. To them, this praise was meaningless. What was the point of that? If a student was wrong, she needed to be corrected without any quibbling or softening—that was the Chinese way.

Following the rules without asking questions

Ever wondered why the Chinese were so good a following clear rules? Here is what Hessler’s students were expected to do:

The room was their responsibility. They washed the blackboards between classes, and twice a week they washed the floors and windows. If the class wasn’t adequate, the class was fined. That was how everything worked at the college—students were fined for missing morning exercise, for skipping class, for failing examinations, for returning late to their dormitories at night.

Copying IP

Why does it seem so difficult for Chinese people to understand the concept of intellectual property?

They were accustomed to learning by rote, which meant that they often followed models to the point of plagiarism. They were also inveterate copiers; it wasn’t uncommon to receive the exact same paper from two or three students. There wasn’t really a sense of wrong associated with these acts–all through school they had been taught to imitate models, and copy things, and accept what they were told without question, and often that was what they did.

Forget about business ethics

As I wrote earlier, foreigners should not expect their Chinese suppliers to follow some kind of moral code. If you are not part of their family, they will not watch over your interests.

Everybody know there were pickpockets working the buses, but nobody did anything about it. According to my students, people were afraid to resist, but it seemed there was more to it than that. As long as the pickpocket did not affect you personally, or affect somebody in your family, it was not your business.