See this really good article in the NY Times titled, Chinese Students in U.S. Fight View of Their Home.

You need to read this article, not with the assignment of agreeing or disagreeing with the activity in question, but because an educated person digs deeper and always asks the “why?” to try to get at the root cause behind such human behavior.

Reading this article will also help you better understand a cultural difference and way of looking at the world that is different from ours. For that quiet student from China who sat in the front or back row in one of your undergraduate or graduate courses, and you made the mistake of not reaching out to him/her, this article gives you some insight as to how he/she may have had to bite their tongue as current events came up and were being discussed in their American college or graduate school classroom.

This article also dovetails nicely into some of the things I will speak to you about when we hit the ground running in China at our first on-the-road class meeting.

It also directly ties into the following book you might enjoy reading by Hanes and Sanello if you are a history buff, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (2004). Said book points out that these two wars (which the Chinese resoundingly lost) and the opium/drug running trade by the British in China (how many of you knew the British were once major drug runners who made today’s Columbian drug cartel look like lemonade stand pharmacists?), continue to have geopolitical reverberations for all of us, well over 150 years later. Part of what we see spilling out in classrooms such as the USC classroom described in the above article harken back to what happened in China between roughly 1830 and 1860.

You now have built up a base and learned enough about China in this course (or should have) so that you can start to connect the dots like the one I note above.

And watch out for those incoming water bottles.