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Wesley Student Reflects on Trip to China
As some of you may know, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to China for a month this summer with an ASU study abroad program. I wish I could tell you some great lesson I learned in China, some beautiful insight about the way the country works, some little phrase that sums up the Chinese people. I can't do that, though, because it's impossible to reduce a country of 1.3 billion people to a few pithy sentences. It's not that I didn't learn anything; on the contrary, I learned enough to fill two journals with notes, and more that I couldn't express. We often have all of these preconceived ideas about China - that Chinese people are much more conformist than Americans, that the factories are sweatshops run by evil managers, that everyone is an atheist there. And sometimes that's true, but the generalizations are dangerous. I can't tell you what all Chinese people think, or most Chinese, but only what the few that I was lucky enough to come in contact with think. All of these generalizations I mentioned came up one day when we were talking with some college students in Guangdong Province. We had heard that Chinese people are more conformist (or perhaps, respectful) than Americans, and we asked some college students if they would challenge something that a professor said. A few of them said no, definitely not, but one bold girl said that she wouldn't hesitate at all. The students laughed at the difference in their own responses, attributing it to their five-year age gap, being from separate parts of the country, and the subjects they were studying (it was more acceptable to question a law professor than a history professor). We visited a few shoe factories with these students, and the range of their responses to what we saw was somewhat surprising. Of course, no one was going to show a large group of Americans an awful sweat shop, but I am under the impression that what we saw was about average. The workers worked long hours, about sixty per week, and the chemicals smelled terrible, but the conditions were not the worst of the worst that we read about in papers here. We visited the workers' dorm, as factory employees are generally paid partly with room and board, and they lived 2 to a room, with fewer belongings than most of us had brought on the trip. We learned they lived frugally in order to send any extra money back to their families. It's true that they had little in terms of material possessions, but it is also true that they are guaranteed food and housing with their jobs and that the factory owner had started out as one of them. The college students' reactions to this factory tour varied. One older student who had previously been a factory worker said that he thought these workers were probably pretty happy about their jobs, while one more privileged student said that she'd never seen anything like their dorm. Worse conditions undoubtedly exist in China, but many of us had made the mistake of generalizing those conditions to all of China and assuming that all Chinese felt the same way about them.
Martha Wetzel
Published Thursday, October 30, 2008.
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