When you finally surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.

I find it amazing that most Chinese students willingly engage in discussions about controversial topics, even though they'll probably never have the right to speak publicly about them -let alone act on them - in any meaningful way. This semester I have led my freshmen in discussions of such touchy topics as religious freedom, multi-party democratic elections, gay marriage, gender equality, press freedom, fair treatment of minorities, and differing political ideologies in one state. The one thing that all of those topics have in common is that China lacks them, but no matter; the key to a fruitful discussion is to simply discuss other countries - in this case, the United States. Although they often seem to be treading on unfamiliar ground, I find little indication that they have been inculcated to avoid these topics. Rather, they have become content with the government's various excuses for its own existence (China is still developing, China is different from the West) in combination with a vaguely defined belief that gradual change is the road to salvation.

Sometimes, however, small bits of Newspeak creep into their writing, and it is all I can do to ignore it. In writing a journal entry about Affirmative Action recently, one student wrote that because people disagree about its fairness, "we should correct the policy to make it better." Alas, in China, it is that easy.