The Trinity Reporter Fall 2004
  
Making the Exotic Familiar
Patricia Thornton, associate professor of political science, strives to bring home the political and social struggles of East Asian cultures


By Christine Palm
Photograph: Nick Lacy

Patricia Thornton’s work has taken her to such far-flung places as Taiwan, Beijing, Seattle, Cambridge, and Juneau, Alaska. But these days, the fruits of her political passion more often manifest themselves along Trinity’s Long Walk.


  Patricia Thornton, associate professor of political science
 

 

It’s there that students in her “Government and Politics of Contemporary China” class stage mock protests, fly the colors of the Cultural Revolution, excoriate—or support—the Communist Party, and lobby for the freedom of an imprisoned peasant. Thornton, associate professor of political science, finds iconoclastic ways to bring home the political and social struggles of East Asian cultures. At the beginning of the year, she gives each student a dossier with a full Chinese identity—name, class, and life circumstance. Some are assigned identities as pig thieves; others are powerful autocrats or members of the bourgeoisie. They are given topographical maps of their region, so they can enact land reform policies knowledgably. Thornton gives them daily e-mail updates that announce such manufactured news items as the death of a child, a flooded farm, or a family member’s arrest for insurrection. Each student must “stay in character” for the first semester, as a way of truly identifying with a formerly remote citizenry. Thornton has even been known to run onto the football field during practice to “arrest” a student athlete for removing his red party armband.

East Asia, a half-imagined place
“Like most young Americans, the students here have a series of remote and exotic images in their minds about East Asian cultures,” Thornton says. “I begin to change that through a multimedia approach. For example, we often listen to Chinese music and watch Japanese films.” From there, she moves on to historical manifestos and other written, documented sources “so there is less of a sense of East Asia as a half-imagined place. The idea is to get students to understand in a personal way the complex fabric of the different ways poverty and revolution affect everyday people. The role-playing often raises intense emotions, and through it, the students learn how cycles of violence become self-perpetuating.”
Thornton appreciates the fairly long leash given her by the College administration, and she is aware that some of her tactics are unorthodox. “I really wanted to be in a liberal arts environment and Trinity is a different kind of liberal arts institution,” she says. “I always learn from the students—teaching them gives me a whole new perspective on the implications of the systems I’ve studied.”

 

“Like most young Americans, the students here have a series of remote and exotic images in their minds about East Asian cultures,” Thornton says. “I begin to change that through a multimedia approach. For example, we often listen to Chinese music and watch Japanese films.”
 

Chinese Educational Mission formed in Hartford
While Thornton’s teaching methods might raise a few eyebrows—and certainly capture the attention of students in a palpable way—her own research focuses on a quieter figure in Chinese history. Yung Wing was a 19th-century scholar and missionary who established the first formal educational exchange program for Chinese to study in America. It was called the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM), formed in Hartford in 1872. Through a happy accident, Thornton became instrumental in a television documentary that was recently made on Yung.

While on a three-year faculty research grant in Hong Kong some years ago, Thornton met an influential Mainland Chinese journalist named Qian Gang. When she learned of Qian’s interest in Yung Wing and his Hartford connection, she offered Trinity’s resources to Qian and his colleague, journalist Hu Jingcao.

“Trinity’s involvement with this project is the result of a stroke of serendipitous good fortune, and I was just overjoyed that this particular opportunity fell into my lap,” Thornton says. “The College was immediately receptive to the idea of our hosting the journalist filmmakers, and the results are amazing. Film footage for the five-part documentary includes shots of various locations on the Trinity campus, including the interior of the Chapel, and excerpts of interviews with Associate Professor of History Susan Pennybacker and me. Trinity College is also gratefully acknowledged at the end of each episode. Having just finished watching the beautifully made third episode of this Ken Burns-style documentary on the CCTV Web site, I am moved and humbled to think that such a vast undertaking—viewed recently by a breathtaking 250 million people in the People’s Republic of China—had its roots in a casual conversation in a library in Hong Kong.”

After earning her B.A. in political science in 1985 from Swarthmore, Thornton went on to earn her M.A. in political science in 1990 from the University of Washington in Seattle and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997. She has been an instructor of Chinese language and guest lecturer at the University of Alaska, Southeast; a visiting scholar at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan; and a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

Thornton has been a New Century Scholar, J. William Fulbright Foundation in 2003-04; director of Asian Programs, Trinity College; an affiliate in research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research; a research assistant in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley; and acting director, East Asian Studies Program and International Programs, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana. She has a forthcoming book, Disciplining the State: Political Corruption, State-making and Local Resistance in Modern China (Harvard University East Asia Monograph Series, 2004). She is also the author of numerous articles on Chinese political culture, including “Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity and Metonymy,” which appeared in 2002 in The China Quarterly 171, and she authored several chapters in seminal texts, including “The New Cybersects: Resistance and Repression in the Reform era,” which is forthcoming in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden’s Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (second edition) (London and New York: Routledge).

(Editor’s Note: Both Qian and Hu wrote essays about their experiences filming the documentary. They are available on the CCTV Web site (in Chinese) at http://www.cctv.com/geography/special/C12107/01/index.shtml. Thornton says DVDs of the series (in both Chinese and English) will be available soon for faculty, students, and staff to view.

 



 


 

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