Amazement aside, the majority of Chinese students, busy adjusting to the new environment, spare little attention to American political bickering as long as their homeland is not involved. However, as America's attention shifts toward China, they often find themselves caught between two more or less opposing ideological camps.

Chinese students typically choose to withhold their opinions for fear of remafan ­-- causing trouble. When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010, liberal intellectuals in mainland China held underground celebrations and threw secret banquets (despite the government's attempt to block them), while Chinese students in America seemed to remain eerily silent. "We shouldn't talk about it," a Chinese student at Yale University told me in a private message at the time. "We should focus on studying and doing things we can do. Truth comes from practice." The habit of self-censoring, common among China's post-1980s youth, can feel both frustrating and bewildering, even to some within the generation. Jiang Fangzhou, a 23-year-old Chinese writer, calls this phenomenon an "active effort to maintain status quo." These students, she said in an interview with the Financial Times, "dare not stray from the orthodoxy for even one millimeter when they are still 10 meters away from crossing the line."

Though their silence on politics could be mistaken for nonchalance, it's anything but. When a fellow Chinese student in the U.S. deviates from the political orthodoxy, the otherwise quiet community can sometimes erupt. In April 2008, a month after a bloody clash between ethnic Tibetans and Han Chinese in the Tibetan city of Lhasa, a Duke freshmen named Wang Qianyuan became a household name among the Chinese community in America. During a confrontation between Tibetan and Han Chinese students during a pro-Tibet vigil on campus, she agreed to write "Free Tibet, Save Tibet" on one Tibetan student's back. Witnessing the scene, her fellow Chinese schoolmates lashed out, calling her a traitor and ostracizing her.

"They said that I had mental problems and that I would go to hell," she writes in a personal account published by the Washington Post. "There's a strong Chinese view nowadays that critical thinking and dissidence create problems, so everyone should just keep quiet and maintain harmony."

Many students shrug off the incongruity of choosing a Western education at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year and resisting the ideological environment that comes with it. For them, the primary draw of an American education is the socially recognized prestige that brightens their job prospects. Serena Zhang, a Georgetown junior from Shanghai, said she applied to U.S. colleges because she considers herself "qualified for them" and "they bring more opportunities." She beamed as she recounted working alongside a senior boss in the American consulting firm that employed her, something she feels would be "hardly possible in China without a connection." Although she grumbled about the "arbitrary and alienating" U.S. media coverage of China, she said it was "unnecessary to dwell upon the details."

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As a student in the United States, I yearned for a forum to talk and share thoughts on events back in China: an earthquake in Sichuan, the Olympic Games in Beijing, a Uighur uprising in Xinjiang. But the silence of the campus Chinese community, initially disappointing, became almost suffocating. So I turned to Western media, hoping its open civil discourse could help me make sense of my country. The daily headlines on China gave me feelings of liberation as well as unease: "On Our Radar: China's Environmental Woes," "In Restive Chinese Area, Cameras Keep Watch," "Behind a Military Chill: A More Forceful China."