Thread by @BeijingPalmer

a story I've told before which encapsulates my experience with foreign 'experts' touring China. friends of my family, very experienced UK headteachers, went to Beijing on an exchange visit. I met them, they were raving about how good the schools were, how fluent kids' English ...

It was an ordinary public school? I asked. Oh yes, a totally ordinary, typical school, as they had been told by their hosts.

They showed me the brochures.

It was Beijing No. 4 High School, the single most prestigious in China, where the leadership send their kids.

Three things here that I've seen *repeated* through visits by foreign experts -

a) They're unused to being lied to directly.
b) They're led to believe that the careful set-ups they see are normal or common.
c) They have no understanding of everyday context.

This was a pattern I saw repeated over and over again by foreign visitors who spent a week or two in China, from educators to NGO staff to biologists to UK MPs. The ones who were *disillusioned*, OTOH, were those that actually did daily work.

Most of all, it didn't matter how qualified or experienced these people were back home. It was their experience with China - or with authoritarian systems in general - that mattered for their ability to evaluate what was going on.

I found, for instance, Eastern Europeans understood things a *lot* better than the English or Americans.

I remember sitting with a German correspondent whose mother - also a prominent educator - was visiting. Her mum said that she'd seen some kids 'who had only been learning German for three months and they were fluent.' Instantly, her daughter and I both said 'Oh, that was a lie'

She was *shocked.* The idea that people could lie straight to her face about an education program was *more improbable* to her than the idea of kids magically acquiring fluency. To us, it was obvious.