Freedom to do What?

On a Wednesday, my teachers announced they had canceled our weekly Friday test, and instead of having our usual dictation the next day, we were going to discuss American and Chinese education systems with our Chinese roommates.

For three weeks before that, my weekdays have been pretty monotonous: Get up at 7am, make coffee, study for daily dictation, go to class at 8:30; have two classes, have a long break at 10:20, get a snack; have two more classes, get out at 12:30pm, have lunch at the cafeteria, have an individual session with a teacher; go to the gym, shower,  take a nap; get some fruit/eat out at 6pm, go to the office hours at 7pm; start doing homework around 8pm, go to bed around midnight.

But on that Wednesday, I had just one page worth of homework. At 5pm, I found myself very confused. I had gone to the gym, showered, tidied up my room, did laundry, and gone fruit-shopping.  I had exhausted my list of potential activities. My campus is far from the more exciting locales of Beijing, so going out to, say, shop is a almost a day trip. As I pondered my entertainment options, I realized that it was the first time I did not know what to do with my free time in this new, exciting city. For three weeks straight, I was given an inflexible schedule, and I was used to that. When you have been told what to do even for a short period of time, it seems very difficult to start making one’s own decisions all of a sudden.

This reminded me of the way Russians who study abroad often feel: they have too much freedom, and they often don’t like it.

Several Russian friends had been accepted to American colleges after many years of hard work at school, numerous English classes after school, grueling language and aptitude tests, and a long application process. But when they enrolled, they hated every day of it. Their schools had great facilities, friendly professors, and useful international student advisers; but my friends still didn’t know what to do with “all that freedom.”

In Russia and many Eastern European countries, the education system makes decisions for you. You cannot choose classes at any point in school (maybe a  foreign language if you are lucky, but the choice mostly varies between English and German). When you go to college, you are told what exams to take for the major for which you are applying. It’s virtually impossible to change your major after passing the entrance exam. Your college will then decide what classes you will be taking, and when you will be taking them. You professors tell you on what subjects to write your term papers. If you are a part of the Western education system, this description sounds like –um, a Russian boot camp? But you don’t see many Russian students complaining; they are used to the system and accept it the way it is.

China has a very similar education system, and I strongly suspect many Chinese students face similar problems when going to a Western-style university.

Freedom of choice can be daunting. When you — all of a sudden — have to make your own decisions, how do you do it? In Russia, students often enter college when they are 17 or 18, and many do not have distinct academic interests yet, so their parents choose their major and school and more for them.

“Why don’t you study engineering and become an engineer? They can always get jobs. I know you like writing, but that’s never going to make money.” — I have witnessed countless conversations like this in Eastern Europe. Many college graduates end up with jobs that don’t match their interests and personality, but some do, so the system is working. Mostly no one complains.

Have you noticed that many Eastern European students in the US liberal arts schools stick to majors like chemistry, math, computer science, economics, and biology? They tend to go for majors that have a very defined core curriculum and a more or less obvious post-graduation career path. That’s what happens when you are not used to the liberal arts system of studying a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and settling for a job that is probably not even related to your political science major.

It’s very different in China. It seems that Communism became such a successful ideology in China partly because the society there is used to obeying the authority. Historically, there  have been many rules in places that guard intersocietal interactions. If you are a woman, you were expected to obey, in turn, your father, your husband, and your son, and you were supposed to give birth to many sons. As a man, you were supposed to get married and bring your wife to live with your family. I am not going to deliver a Chinese studies lecture here, but these rules have always been much more clearly defined and much more often followed than, say, Western societal behavior standards. Many of these rules have now disintegrated or at least weakened, but the society is still very much ready to follow someone’s lead. You can’t really pull that trick on the Americans or Western Europeans.

Now, there is something about Russian culture that lends itself to a similar situation. I still can’t put my finger on it, but Russians are very comfortable with having a strong, paternal figure leading the nation — and essentially telling them what to do and what to think. It seems to go against all the teachings of Western political philosophers, so when I am in the US, I am always baffled to comprehend it, since the Western liberal arts tradition affects my thinking, but when I am in Russia, that question disappears. The situation and the way people accept it seems to be very natural.  Russians feel comfortable having a leader who has a strong opinion on what needs to be done; and to have a lot of freedom — in the Western, democratic sense of the world — means stepping out of that comfort zone. This is why Russians do not understand why the rest of the world criticizes their government for being authoritarian. If one doesn’t want freedom, why complain about lacking it?

The families of Russian journalists who were murdered after investigating sensitive topics complain about the lack of freedom of speech that results in democratic freedoms being limited. But average Russians are not affected by that; they gladly let the government guide their opinion on foreign affairs.

The New York Times recently had a feature on the Chinese equivalent of the SATs — the gao kao (高考).

When I read that article, I thought the gao kao was a terrible system.  In China, you don’t get any choice while applying to college: if you want to go to a good college, your sole option is to put in hundreds of hours of studying time and to hope that others have studied less than you.

The American system seemed much more superior. While applying, you do need to take some exam  — the SAT’s and the SAT Subject Tests, but you also need to submit essays and recommendations. And some colleges don’t even require SAT’s anymore. You get more freedom that way, right? Theoretically, you can get into any college just because of your interesting life. Ideally, in high school, you are free to choose volunteering over frequenting the library — and you can still go to great school. Even if you don’t go to brand-name school, you can still get a great education and have an amazing career. If you do go to a famous school, you can probably drop out halfway through and become a billionaire. You are free to make your own choices.

What strikes me about China is that no one seems to mind what Westerners deem to be the terrible lack of freedom.

I always thought that the poor, oppressed Chinese masses are so very sad over banned YouTube and Wikipedia — and now Facebook and Twitter — and are dying to get to use them. So here I am in China, with Yale’s VPN access that allows me to freely use said services, and no one else wants to take advantage of that. I spotted a YouTube-enabled camera at the store and asked my roommate if she knew what it was; she did. Would she like to use it on my laptop, I asked. Nah, she said, she can get most of the videos she wants to watch off of Chinese YouTube substitutes (with content carefully screened and censored, of course).

I don’t know if it’s my rebellious personality or the Western ideals of having access to whatever information we please, but if It were me, I would be on YouTube 24/7 in China. Just to get the government angry and express my protest.

In the USSR, the government banned many books, but many people copied them by hand and secretly passed copies around. My parents claim that over 95% of their friends (not a very reactionary crowd, to be honest) had read all the banned authors weeks before they were banned. The government was of course unhappy, but it’s difficult to control was every household is reading.

I always thought that in China, with its 1.5-billon-strong population, the government would find it much harder to control these things; also, with the new technologies, a VPN access or a basic proxy service would easily provide one with access to everything that the government is trying to hide. I was half-expecting engaging in heated discussions with the locals on Wikipedia articles that go against the Party’s ideology or The Secret Life of Chairman Mao. But no one is really discussing them, or even interested in discussing them. Well, I am sure there are some people who are, but they are either few in number or mostly invisible.

And no one minds the gao kao, either. Most people who have been through are quick to criticize it, but I personally complain about the SAT’s more than most Chinese students complain about the gao kao.  I got to hear some complains about the education system, but if you read The Yale Daily News or any other college newspaper, you come across much more criticism.

I used to think locals were reluctant to criticize anything government-imposed, but there is a lot of government criticism present, although it’s really mellow. I can see why the political apathy would be predominant over here. In the USSR, countless political education classes and meetings and memorizing valuable Communist works made many hate the politics; but their hatred had a direction. People told jokes making fun of the leaders and made fun of the newspapers’ empty mottos. This dissatisfaction with the government facilitated the collapse of the USSR.

But here, it’s often apathy through and through. I haven’t met that many Chinese, but among many people my age there was only one who was interested in politics; and that was limited to claiming that that Taiwan belongs to China. And most young people are much more interested in contemplating schemes to import iPhones into China than in answering questions about Chinese politics that I have to ask the locals for my homework.  After all, why care about elusive freedom if you can be a satisfied consumer?

The YouTube app on those black market iPhones doesn’t work. No one minds; they just install the Chinese YouTube analogue app that does.

Author: Anna Ershova

I am a rising senior at Yale who is originally from Russia/Ukraine. I was mostly educated in Hong Kong and Germany, and now attend Yale University in the U.S. I blog on and off about things that interest me: Russia, China, politics, and law. View all posts by Anna Ershova