Teaching High School in China: Jiangdu

On my second trip to China, in 2003, I was teaching at Jiangdu High School in Jiangsu Province. It was here that I became aware of foreign predators preying on Chinese high school students, infanticide, the Chinese student army and the city’s links to my home town of Goulburn.

I was teaching English as part of the Victorian Education Curriculum, an Australian accredited high school program, to the Middle and Senior High School students.

The students could obtain the Victorian Year 12 Certificate of Education, which would then allow them to study at university in Australia, USA, UK, Canada or New Zealand.

Apart from English, they also studied Mathematics, Science, Design and Technology, Music, Arts and French. A key challenge was that critical and creative thinking and freedom of thought are incorporated in all aspects of the Australian curriculum, but these are banned in China.

We managed to overcome that by convincing the Chinese authorities that we had removed these aspects from the teaching materials (we hadn’t).

On my first meeting with the school board, there was a lot of excitement from the faculty that I had gone to school in Goulburn, NSW.

It eventuated that Goulburn and Jiangdu had a Friendship Agreement, and the mayor of Goulburn, Margaret O’Neill, had visited the school the previous year (that’s Margaret in the photo at left, standing centre with the bright shirt).

Delegates from the school had also visited Goulburn, and we ended up having a lot to talk about.

By the time I had started teaching, the students had pretty well grasped the concepts of critical and creative thinking, with the curriculum having already been taught there the previous year.

However, we still had to work together with the school administration, parents, students and Chinese teachers to ensure that the Chinese authorities did not know this.

This was no easy feat, with the school’s senior high principal being married to the city’s deputy mayor. She asked me on several occasions if we were teaching this, and just smiled kindly when I said no. She knew, but secretly approved.

The students also had to study the Chinese curriculum, which meant their workload was twice as much as what Australian students have to undertake. They had very little life outside of school.

The Chinese curriculum included Language, Culture, Politics and Mao Thought, which put it at odds with the critical and creative thinking that the Australian curriculum encouraged. Still, the students seemed to navigate it quite well.

One thing that surprised me was when I awoke one morning, and all the students were wearing army fatigues.

As I was to learn, all middle and senior high school students in China undertake compulsory military training throughout their school years.

This means that every single person in China is a trained soldier, having trained during high school.

Admittedly, the discipline is very poor, as most of the students just go through the motions to keep the Chinese authorities happy, but it shows an alarming mindset by the Chinese government.

The training is conducted by Chinese officers and the teachers, bearing in mind that all the teachers are also trained soldiers as well, from their high school and university days.

One thing that was both a little amusing and a little sad was the student back right in the photo, who was wearing army fatigues and her favourite pink shoes.

These are babies being taught how to be killers.

Another thing that quite shocked me was that infanticide by parents is not that rare in China.

Parents, especially in poorer regions of China, were known to kill their first child if it was a girl, so they could have a second child who would perhaps be a boy.

This was a result of China’s One Child Policy, which has now thankfully ceased. Estimates put the number of “missing girls” at between 30-60 million. These were late term abortions, or what the Chinese call “post-birth abortions.”

I had formed a friendship with a third year university student, who told me that she was actually the third-born girl child to her parents. The first two had been smothered by her parents, in the hopes that the next child would be a boy.

Her parents were planning on disposing of her as well, but her grandmother snatched her in the middle of the night and fled to Shanghai, were she secretly raised the child as her own.

But perhaps the worst eye-opener of all was when I saw a thirteen year old female student leaving the on-campus apartment of a Canadian teacher. Her clothes and hair were dishevelled, and I knew immediately what had happened.

I confronted the teacher, and he admitted that he had been abusing her for several months. I suggested to him that if he didn’t want to end up in a hospital bed, he would leave China that night. He decided that was in his best interests, and he packed his bags.

I knew it was not in my best interests to create waves with the authorities in a country where foreigners are treated with distrust.

When I spoke to the school principal about it, he admitted that he suspected what was going on, but didn’t want to lose a foreign teacher. He also explained that thousands of foreign teachers went to China, many without any qualifications, with the aim of preying on the students.

I was to find out, during my many future trips to China, that what he said was correct. Child abuse by foreign predators is rampant in China, or at least was until recently.

China have made it almost impossible for unqualified foreigners to get teaching jobs in China now, largely because of this problem, and this seems like a good thing. The problem still exists, but not on the scale it once did.

The combination of these things, and SARS running rampant in the local area, persuaded me to leave Jiangdu and travel to the south of China.

Jiangdu was a great place, and the people were fantastic, but it was also heartbreaking seeing what the students had to endure.

So I packed my bags and headed off to Guangzhou, where I worked as a university lecturer and journalist. But that’s a story for another day.

Craig Hill is a Brisbane-based Social Justice Campaigner, Writer, Teacher and Business Consultant. He has campaigned for social justice in Australia, promoted human rights in China and worked with the homeless in Honolulu. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Education and a degree in Management.