A group of Chinese international students say they take little notice of politics or historical events, with one admitting to not having heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
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A Melbourne University study based on interviews with the Chinese students found they had largely come to Australia to increase their employability at home.
The students, whose testimonies were published anonymously in this month's edition of the Journal of Australian Studies, tended to distrust Chinese and Western media, seeing both as biased in different ways.
Manjun Jiang, who is studying science at the University of Melbourne, told the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age she believed media bias contributed to suspicion towards Chinese students.
"Most Chinese students here have nothing to do with the Chinese government," she said.
"If they [Australians] were educated and have actually been to China they wouldn't have that impression. They have been brainwashed by the media to think China is very suspicious."
The 20-year-old thought studying in Australia would give her an edge in finding a job. "The study quality is better here and I get to practise English which is an advantage," Ms Jiang, who did not take part in the study, said.
Many of the 20 students interviewed were unaware of some of the most severe ruptures in 20th century Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
"I don't know anything about it," one student said of the 1989 democracy protests. "I never heard these events spoken about in family conversations. We just don't talk about it."
But the students were open to educating themselves online and discussing their findings with peers between the interviews with researchers.
"I didn't know about it first time," the student who was unaware of the Tiananmen Square Massacre said of the Great Leap Forward when they returned for a second interview. "Now I think it was a bad time for China."
I never heard these events spoken about in family conversations. We just don't talk about it.
- A Chinese student at Melbourne University
Others were more forthright. "It was a disaster," one said.
One Chinese student at the University of Sydney said she broadly agreed with the points raised by the research.
"Me and my friends, we don't talk about [China's historical conflicts] a lot. With the majority of them, we never touch on the topic," the student, who did not want to be named, said.
But she said she discussed more recent controversies, like the rallies in Hong Kong, and said going to a school in China with Tibetan students had made her aware of China's repression in the region.
"That was my first experience learning that people from Tibet have different views," she said.
In general though, the students were proud of China and consigned history to a distant past.
"Any notion that China may be open to the ideals of global citizenship or that the students would see themselves as agents of cosmopolitanism were absent from the interviews," the authors wrote.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor Allan Patience, one of the study's authors, said universities had failed at overcoming gaps between domestic and international students.
"We really need at first year level a whole lot of innovative curricula to introduce these two groups of students to each other," Dr Patience said.
Language, racism and social barriers all prompt many international students to throw themselves into their studies, thus denying them opportunities to mix with Australian students, Dr Patience said.
"There is no attempt by unis to educate each side about the other," he said.
- SMH/The Age
