The ones we know we know

The issue of what constitutes a debatable proposition becomes predictably fraught in a society where all of the most salient ones are treated as settled questions. But Chinese students don’t really buy into those formulations. In fact, they know when they’re being duped; they just don’t seem to mind all that much. Dozens of students can openly and vigorously debate topics like “Is the stability of society rooted in law or morality?” for hours without managing to evince, or even graze the surface of, a single opinion about their country’s public policy. When one class was prompted to produce controversial topics for persuasive speeches, almost everyone wrote down some (mangled) version of “Should Hunan University make us do [onerous activity] even in the frigid winter from which there is no escape?”, yet not a single person raised the most obvious objection that arises in these conditions: shouldn’t the government pull us out of the nineteenth century and just give Hunan some damn heat? There is no detectable source of censorship at HuDa, but in China, it usually seems to enforce itself, and that kind is of course the strongest of all.