Teaching Law in China, 1987-88

"Will you teach your classes in the Chinese or the American way?" asked the graduate student in the front seat of the car taking me to teach my first law class in the People's Republic of China. I had received a Fulbright Senior Lectureship grant to teach public international law at the College of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. "I don't know how to teach like a Chinese professor," I replied, "so I guess I will have to teach like an American." My student's look of eager anticipation, rather than doubt or consternation, was my first sign that "teaching like an American law teacher" was actually possible in China. In presentation after presentation in two orientations, and in several reports of others who had taught in China, I had been led to believe that Chinese students will not talk in class, may not even respond to direct questions, will not disagree with each other, will be reluctant to express an opinion, and certainly will never disagree with the teacher. In short, it was supposed to be extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, to base a class of Chinese students on class discussion.

All of this was simply untrue for me. I taught public international law to a class of graduate students in public international law, and American tort law to a class of graduate students in private international law. Each class had 10 or 12 students in their second year of a three-year graduate program in international law. All but one or two students in each class spoke remarkably fluent English. (The students with limited English ability had obtained fluency instead in Japanese, Russian, or French). I had decided to try to teach as much as possible the way I do in the United States--that is, demanding class participation, and that I would only with the greatest reluctance be forced to a lecture or "self-Socratic" method.

I was pleased to find that my Chinese students were fully as willing to participate vigorously in class as my students in the United States. Of course, that is not to say that they were all willing. Some were shy or reserved, some never volunteered but answered when called upon, and some got confused or flustered, but others volunteered, asked questions, disagreed with each other, disagreed with me, and were willing to back up their positions. The percentages were roughly equal to that of a good American law school class, and class discussion was almost always lively.

Why was I so lucky, after such dire predictions about the nature of Chinese students? First, the undergraduate majors of the students were either law or a foreign language, so many had had foreign teachers before, albeit not law teachers. In contrast, the classroom of a Chinese professor is reportedly by tradition one in which the professor lectures and the students listen.

Second, my class size was small, and the students knew each other well. Most of the students lived on campus, and for the male graduate students this meant living just down the hall from the classroom. The women lived just upstairs. Outside of class hours, the classroom was used as a lounge and recreation room, as a study room, and occasionally as a party room. One morning I arrived in class to find 20 or 30 beer bottles, some left over food, and a couple of students too ill to attend class. In short, the students were relatively comfortable with each other and with their surroundings.

Third, I used techniques acquired over the years trying to get American law students to participate in class. Many Americans teaching in China have had little teaching experience in the United States, and perhaps do not realize that American students are also reluctant to express their views in front of others. Other American teachers are perhaps not really comfortable with class discussion methods in the first place, and use the culture difference as an excuse to forego them in China. It is wise to call on students rather than to ask for volunteers, to avoid the student's fear of looking like a show-off. I also call on students randomly, to avoid the appearance of picking on people. (When my Chinese students heard that in America I use a deck of playing cards, one with the name of each student, shuffled daily, to pick students to call on, they insisted that I use the same system for them.) I start with a question that any student can answer (e.g., what happened in this case? or even, did you read this case?), to get the student started talking comfortably. And I try, not always successfully, to avoid intimidation, to be humorous, and so on.

These techniques are of course unremarkable. The point is merely that they can be made to work for at least some Chinese students with the same success as for American students. Of course other classes may have less motivated students, larger numbers of students, or students less fluent in English. But as long as the logical axiom still applies that a counterexample disproves the rule, then it is simply not true that Chinese culture precludes vigorous and extensive class participation.

While Chinese students proved to be less different from American students than expected in terms of class participation, there were noticeable differences in other respects. Of course the culture and the political and economic system result in fascinating differences in lifestyle, ambitions, extracurricular activities, dating customs, and so on. These occasionally, although not often, had an effect that was noticeable in the classroom.

For instance, Chinese students are devoted to their afternoon nap, or xiu xi. A student is just as likely to oversleep and miss a 2 p.m. class as one that starts at 8 a.m. When I scheduled exams I had to take into account the need to leave time for a nap. I wanted to give a four-hour examination for each four-hour course, as I would in the States. To allow for the fact that English was not the students' native tongue, I allowed an additional two hours to read and translate the exam questions. This meant, in effect, administering a six-hour exam. This was accepted by the students without too much difficulty, as long as there was a break for lunch and xiu xi. When I explained to my Chinese director that I would be giving a test in two three-hour installments, she asked me to break the test into two discrete parts, to avoid the possibility of collaboration by students during the break. I took her suggestion, and broke each test into two two-hour questions, with an extra hour for each question to read and translate the problem. (Students whose first foreign language was not English were permitted to write their answers in Chinese; the others answered in English.) Most, if not all, of the students took a nap during the break.

Chinese students also seem to be able to endure longer classes than their American counterparts. My classes ran for two hours, though I insisted on a ten-minute break half-way through. This is long by American standards. (The Chinese language classes I was taking in the evening were the same length, and this stretched the limits of my attention span.) One day as the two hours drew to a close, I said that we would cover other aspects of a particular case at the beginning of the next class. One student raised his hand and said that none of the students had anything in particular to do for the next half hour, so it would be possible for me to continue. This naturally surprised me. No American student, no matter how interested, would dare make such a suggestion in front of other students, even after only one hour! I respectfully declined.

Other attitudes were remarkable. One might expect that ideas of privacy differ in a country where graduate student dorm rooms are relatively comfortable, compared to undergraduate dormitories in most schools, because only three students live in a room. Students (and teachers) seem much more aware of other students' (and teachers') personal lives than in the United States. Sometimes differing ideas of privacy would exhibit themselves in surprising ways. When I completed grading the first semester exams, I did not know where to turn in the grades. I asked a young teacher who was auditing my class to turn them in to the proper office. He agreed, and I handed the grades to him as I dismissed class. He proceeded immediately to show the list of all the grades to all the students. There they were, all crowding around him, finding out everyone else's grade, while I stood dumbfounded three or four feet away.

No one ever complained, even the person with the lowest grade. Indeed, when I pointed out that my even allowing this to happen in the United States would have resulted in a student uproar, the response of various students and young teachers was always mild: This was not unusual. Everyone would find out anyway.

Although students at Chinese institutions of higher education may be highly motivated and capable, the facilities available to students and teachers suffer greatly by comparison to ours. All floors are bare concrete, the hallways are dimly lighted, water covers the floors of washrooms, and winter heating is not always effective. One might as well be in the basement of a warehouse as in the hallway of a nationally-respected institution of higher learning. At my institution, almost every Tuesday the electricity would go off for several hours in the morning; we would simply continue class by windowlight.

Offices are sparsely furnished and rarely private. Teachers accordingly spend most of their nonteaching work hours at home. When I first arrived I requested an office, but was not assigned one until two months later. Perhaps even then I was assigned an office only because I had been noticed preparing for class in the classroom that the students use for a number of other purposes. In any event, I was given the key to an office to share with two other foreign professors. There were only two desks for the three of us, and the room was uncomfortably cold in the winter. The office did contain two upholstered chairs. This made it relatively luxurious compared to offices for Chinese faculty. Often when I would start to sit down on a wooden chair in an office for two or three young Chinese instructors, I would be immediately warned, "Do not sit there, your clothes will get dirty." So I accepted the common practice of spending nonteaching work hours at home, which in my case was a comfortable room at the Friendship Hotel.

I did not, however, yield to the temptation to dress down to the conditions. In the Fulbright orientation I was given the strong impression that it would rarely be appropriate to wear a coat and tie. I ignored this advice because I wanted to attempt to wear the same type of dress that I would wear in an American class. For me that is a coat and tie. In a way, dressing down to foreign classes is a little derogatory. Students take it as a sign of respect that you dress up to teach them. Of course, lack of laundry and dry cleaning facilities would make for a different story, but these were not a problem for me in Beijing.

Limited physical conditions in Chinese institutions may be attributed simply to lack of financial resources in a country that is not rich. Library facilities, on the other hand, suffer not only from lack of funds (especially lack of foreign exchange-convertible funds), but also from an extraordinary bureaucratic tendency to make access to books difficult. All libraries have to balance to some extent the need to make books accessible with the need to keep them secure. In China, this balance is struck way, way over at the security end of the scale. On this count the predictions at the Fulbright orientation proved correct. We had been told, for instance, stories of treasure troves of library books locked away, with virtually unobtainable keys.

Under the Fulbright program, senior lecturers in China are allocated a substantial sum as part of their grants to purchase books. Textbooks for all of the students must be provided from this fund, and leftover amounts are supposed to be used to enrich the library resources of the host institution. I had relatively few students to buy international law casebooks for, and Foundation Press kindly donated 22 copies of a recently superseded edition of their torts casebook. So I had a significant amount of remaining money with which to purchase library books. I donated about 10 years' worth of International Legal Materials, the Restatements of Conflicts of Law and of Foreign Relations Law of the United States, various treatises, and complete sets of Moore's and Hackworth's Digests of International Law.

Less than a month after donating all of my back issues of the American Journal of International Law to the department library, I went down to the library (to prove a point to a French colleague), and asked if I could have a particular issue. The simple but surprising answer was, "No." Because the department head was concerned with security, the key to the bookcase in which the journals were held was being kept personally by the department head, who was at home. Of course I eventually obtained what I wanted, since I knew it was there, having donated it, and everybody at my institution was eager to be helpful to me. But often students, unaware of the presence of materials in their own college and department libraries, would tell me that certain resources were not available when I happened to know that they were.

In the College library, stacks were generally closed, with the exception of some reading rooms. The reference reading room was open only for periods of 2-3 hours each in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Even then, I found that at 10 a.m. in the middle of the morning period, the reading room was closed in order for the librarian to have a rest. During the summer months I was told that the library is only open one day per week.

It is therefore easy to see why students tend to prepare for class in their dorm rooms, even though these rooms are crowded by our standards. In these circumstances, one might expect it to be difficult to get students to prepare regularly and thoroughly for class. Yet my students prepared admirably. In both classes I made assignments for a two-hour class that would equal or exceed what I would assign to a one-hour class of native English-speaking law students in the United States. In the torts class, in a total of six semester hours, we covered the same amount of Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz's torts casebook that I cover in four semester hours in the United States. In public international law I taught a total of eight semester hours, whereas in the United States I normally teach only three. I covered almost all of Sweeney, Oliver, and Leech's The International Legal System, with time left to cover about 2/3 of the self-prepared materials that I now use in the United States.

The students seemed to enjoy the torts class even more than the international law class. While they had not taken international law from a foreigner or in a foreign language before, most of the public international law students had taken the course in Chinese, and were familiar with the doctrines. It was valuable to them to discuss a broad range of international legal issues in English, with a foreign professor, but in most cases it was not terra incognita.

The torts class on the other hand made them think about things they had never thought about to a much greater extent, and that seemed to excite them. A torts class also gives foreign students enormous insight into the everyday nature of our society, our expectations with respect to property, freedom of action, personal inviolability, and so on. A class in American tort law also imparts a lot of knowledge about how the American court system works. Many doctrines of American tort law, for instance res ipsa loquitur, require an understanding of the differing roles of judge and jury. Finally, the students enjoyed explanations sometimes necessary to understand the facts of cases, such as the rules of baseball, or what it means to say that a car started when the gear indicator was in "park." (None of my students had ever driven an automobile.)

In short, teaching international or American law in China can be an extraordinarily rewarding experience. Where one expects to find differences, there may be universal student characteristics. But as soon as one expects students to react like "all" students, they may surprise you. Differences may result from cultural attitudes that have been Chinese for centuries, from the experience of having grown up under a tightly controlled but extraordinarily fluctuating Communist dictatorship, or from more immediate environmental factors like living conditions. They may also result from the fact that my students were not necessarily looking forward to a bar exam. It is often hard to say. In any event, China is an invigorating environment for a teacher, even apart from the fascinating sparetime activities that an American can engage in living in a very foreign land.

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