‘We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn’: the reality of lecturing Chinese students
Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China, was made a federal offence in 1915, but every summer the university where I teach draws reverse inspiration from it when the Dean flies to China to round up students. Though it’s unlikely that he cruises the teen hangouts of Yichang or Xingtai, slipping laudanum into school leavers’ bubble teas, the demand for Chinese freshers is such that the use of press gangs by British universities would be neither unexpected nor much out of character. More than one in 20 students in Britain are Chinese. They contribute billions to the UK economy annually and without them several universities would go bankrupt and most would struggle.
