Carol Rifelj Lecture Series, Jessica Teets

Liberated Minds? How Chinese International Students Interpret Democracy

Do youth who were raised and educated in authoritarian states become socialized to embrace democratic values when attending college in a democracy? Or do they retain or even deepen their commitments to authoritarian values and norms? Based on focus group interviews and follow-up surveys with Chinese international students in Canada (University of Toronto) and the United States (Middlebury College), this study analyzes the political socialization process of university education on students’ political attitudes. A close examination of their interpretive narratives of democratic values and life reveals complex and internally contradictory views such that it becomes harder to disentangle the “authoritarian” versus “democratic” values that they embrace. On the one hand, Chinese international students embrace the democratic values including equality, ideological pluralism, civic engagement, and privacy. To the extent that they criticize certain features of a democracy, such as the prevalence of racial and wealth inequality, it is in reaction to the failure of democracies to deliver on their liberal promises captured by ‘democratic disillusionment’ (Norris and Inglehart 2019). On the other hand, certain authoritarian political values remain “sticky” in so far as they also prize personal safety and security over political freedoms, a tradeoff that has fundamentally altered the nature of citizenship in the modern state (Turner 2015). Combined, these results suggest universities’ socialization process is not a unidirectional impact of promoting more support for democratic values.

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