Submitted by Aaron Tinkleman on the 2016 winter session program in China sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice...
The other day, the fifteen of us studying criminology and social control in China took a day trip to an elite party school. Not the I’m Shmacked sort of party, but the communist party. The school was China Youth University of Political Studies, which was partly a museum that we toured briefly. After our tour, we joined about twenty Chinese law undergrads and socialized for an hour or so. There was a significant language barrier between those students and us, but I had a translate app handy. There wasn’t any particular objective of the visit, other than to talk freely with the students.
I sat down and joined “Kevin,” as he told me to call him. Through Spotify (which worked for a few days, but has since been blocked), I showed him some of my favorite music – Ray Charles, Hiatus Kaiyote and others. He liked my choice, so he Shazammed and added the songs. We both had fun bonding, and I was happy to share our love of music despite our poor verbal efficacy.
Besides the music, we did attempt some conversation. I figured it’d be lame to rely on my phone too much… he wanted to practice English and I would enjoy helping him learn it. So, at some point I asked him (via the app’s Mandarin translation) why I was observing what seemed like rather disciplined, even timid emotional expression among the Chinese students (note: this is just descriptive, not exploratory, so I don’t want to try to explain deeper). His hand jerked to his forehead, brushing his hair upwards; I think that this question made him react strongly. I think he sensed that I caught on to how some students feel pressured by the rigidity of conventional academic expectations. This is my first assumption because I’ve learned in class that social control is much tighter in some ways in China than in the United States. It’s complicated. So, I can’t say much else about his reaction, but I’m curious about what he would have said had we had more time.
