Floating on uncertain waters: navigating ‘sensitivity’ while teaching politics and international relations in Mainland China
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957241236404 |
| Author | Ruairidh J Brown |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957241236404
Politics
2025, Vol. 45(1) 123 –140
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957241236404
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Floating on uncertain waters:
navigating ‘sensitivity’
while teaching politics and
international relations in
Mainland China
Ruairidh J Brown
Forward College, Portugal
Abstract
This article gives autoethnographic sketch of teaching International Relations in Mainland China.
Attention is given to the issue of ‘sensitivity’, a phenomenon typically associated with Chinese
State censorship. The article will however argue that sensitivity is much more complex than a
top-down State prohibition on certain topics, arguing instead that it is an opaque and continually
in flux phenomenon produced by multiple actors within society. The article will further argue that
the surest means of navigating this phenomenon for an academic is to listen to students and use
insights gained from them as a means of navigating sensitivity. These insights can provide both
further knowledge of how sensitivities are constructed as well as how to safely discuss them – an
awareness that can serve as inspiration for critical discussions on political issues. In completing
this sketch, the article fills the notable gap in pedagogical literature on Higher Education in
China concerning both politics as a challenge to teaching in mainland China, most studies almost
exclusively concerning themselves with the challenges posed by cultural Confucianism, and as
content, previous studies being almost completely contained within disciplines such as Business
Management and Foreign Languages.
Keywords
censorship, China, drama-based pedagogy, self-censorship, sensitivity
Received: 30th July 2023; Revised version received: 3th January 2024; Accepted: 16th January 2024
Despite the growth in research on higher education in China and the ‘Chinese learner’ in
recent decades, there remains a significant gap in the literature surrounding the dimension
of politics, both as a context to teaching and as content of what is being taught. In terms
of context, there has been little consideration of the political challenges to teaching in
Corresponding author:
Ruairidh J Brown, Politics & International Relations, Forward College, Rua das Flores, 71 1º, Lisboa 1200-
194, Portugal.
Email: ruairidh.brown@forward-college.eu
1236404POL0010.1177/02633957241236404PoliticsBrown
research-article2024
Learning and Teaching in Politics
and International Studies
124 Politics 45(1)
mainland China. Instead, focus has been almost exclusively on the challenges posed by
China’s Confucian cultural heritage, centring on the impact this has in cultivating passive
learning styles (Li and Cutting, 2011; Li and Wegerif, 2014; Tran, 2013; Yi, 2016). While
there have been some clear exemptions to this trend – most notably Winter et al. (2022)
study on the restrictions placed on teaching economic development by the prohibition
against criticising ‘historical wrongs’ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – such
studies remain very much in the minority, dwarfed by research on cultural challenges.
In terms of content, there has been almost silence in the literature on research or expe-
riences on teaching Political Science or International Relations (IR) in mainland China.
The literature instead clustering around disciplines such as Business Management (Wang,
2012; Wang et al., 2012; Whitla, 2011) and Foreign Languages (Liu et al., 2022; Martyn,
2018; Rao, 2018; Yi, 2016). In the few cases where the teaching of Politics and IR is the
focus, the challenges of the political situation are not extensively examined. David
Shambaugh’s (2011) survey of the IR discipline in China focuses largely on disciplinary
history, not pedagogy. When the latter is considered, again focus is given to Confucian
cultural issues. More recent research (see, for example, Toomey et al., 2020) has more
explicitly sought to explore strategies for teaching Political Science in mainland China.
While the research does acknowledge the issue of political sensitivity as a factor in con-
ducting lessons, this is framed more as a variable in Chinese classroom dynamics, one
among many, that does not exist in most western classrooms. Beyond simply mentioning
that some topics subsequently cannot be included in class discussion, the study does not
explore political sensitivity in any further depth; sensitive topics are bracketed off and
removed from discussion, rather than unpacked and explored.
This article will, in contrast, directly address the issue of sensitivity and consider its
relation to teaching IR on the Chinese mainland. It will seek to give an understanding of
what sensitivity is, how it is produced and maintained, and the implications of this for
teaching. It will do so by focusing on and analysing the autoethnographic experiences of
the author during his time teaching IR in a Sino-foreign University on the Chinese main-
land between 2017 and 2020.
Two central arguments will be advocated. The first is that sensitivity, in the Chinese
context, is a complex societal phenomenon produced by a multitude of actors within
Chinese society for a variety of motivations. Subsequently sensitivity cannot be
reduced to simply a list of topics censored by the CCP in a top-down fashion but is
rather a more opaque and fluid phenomenon which emerges out of society in the pro-
cess of everyday interactions. Sensitivity is thus frequently reinforced by citizens
themselves: the ‘censored’ simultaneously becomes ‘censor’, as in Judith Butler’s
(1998) classic formulation.
The second argument pertains to navigating sensitivity as a foreign IR teacher. The
article will stress that the surest means of navigating sensitivity in mainland China is by
listening to students who can both give indication to what topics are sensitive as well as
give insight into how to discuss them. Focus will be given to critical reflection of my use
of dramatic role-play to discuss sensitive topics, a method that was in part inspired by
students’ navigation of sensitivity. Critical reflection on this method will however reveal
that, despite some successes, this was far from a ‘silver bullet’ in circumnavigating sen-
sitivity. Rather, emphasis will be placed on how, through the choices about subjects to
teach and the approaches by which to teach them, the teacher ultimately becomes a co-
author of sensitivity themselves, reinforcing Butler’s formula that the ‘censored’
becomes the ‘censor’.
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