American students will put on a play this summer based on the life of Martin Luther King Jr., to be performed in Chinese before the students of Peking University. In preparation, the members of the Stanford University study-abroad programme at Peking University have been trying to learn how much Chinese students know about the American civil rights movement.
Feelers were first put out at the end of November: a small group of Stanford exchange students gave a presentation on American race relations to anyone who cared to attend. It got off to a good start, with the Americans talking on various subjects such as King's life and the disparities between blacks and whites in America.
When the talk turned to education, one Chinese student asked: 'If schooling is so important to racial equality, why isn't the US government doing more to help black and white students get equal education?' The Stanford student nodded his head, as though he had been wondering that very same thing, and did his best to answer.
Later, a female undergraduate raised her hand and began to speak hesitantly. 'As you know, in China we study Marxism, and Marxism says that economics is the basis of everything.' She winced as she spoke, deeply sceptical about what she was saying. 'Do you think this is true? Is it only economics that decides race relations?' That was asking a lot of the presenter. He hemmed and hawed, until a Chinese graduate student interrupted him.
'I think that's exactly right,' he said enthusiastically. 'An American friend of mine said that in America the Chinese are looked down on because they're poor, but the Japanese aren't, because they're rich.' There was a murmur of general protest, not least from the girl who had asked the original question, and an awkward conversation got off the ground.
When it comes to cross-cultural contact between Americans and Chinese, it's hard to imagine a discussion topic more fraught with potential disaster than race relations. America's guilt-ridden agonising over the subject often appears peculiarly self-defeating to the Chinese.