China’s Gen Z overconfident and thinks West is ‘evil’, top academic says
- Students have ‘make-believe mindset, thinking it’s very easy for China to achieve its foreign policy goals’, Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University tells conference
- Lecturers should help them recognise diversity and strengthen critical thinking, he says, cautioning against nationalism driven by key opinion leaders
“Post-millennial students usually have a strong sense of superiority and confidence, and they tend to look at other countries from a condescending perspective,” Yan Xuetong, director of Tsinghua University’s international studies institute, said at a conference in Beijing last Saturday.
“[They] look at international affairs with a make-believe mindset, thinking it’s very easy for China to achieve its foreign policy goals. They think only China is just and innocent, while other countries, especially Western countries, are evil and thus have natural hatred towards Westerners.”
He added that students tended to divide the world into China and the rest, viewing all other countries as the same.
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Published by his university’s website on Monday, Yan’s remarks were made at a conference it hosted about political science and international relations education, attended by more than 100 professors and researchers from dozens of universities and institutes.