A documentary premiere at Beijing Foreign Studies University — chronicling the life and work of foreign expert Elizabeth Crook, a recipient of China’s Friendship Medal — provided a human entry point to a broader classroom project: teaching young Chinese how their country’s diplomacy connects to everyday life. Students packed the screening not merely to watch a biography but to see how a lifetime of choices can be translated into a practical sense of national purpose and international engagement.
Across China’s universities, instructors are reworking traditional political education into experiential lessons that link high-level foreign policy to personal livelihoods. Professors stage classroom debates on the South China Sea, trace supply-chain consequences from sanctions and security incidents, and use local vignettes — from shared-bike payments that impress foreign visitors to the arrival of durian via the China–Laos railway — to make abstract diplomatic aims tangible.
The pedagogical approach is deliberately micro-to-macro. Teachers at Beijing Foreign Studies University, China University of Political Science and Law, Hunan Normal University and others use recent evacuations of Chinese students from Israel, cross-border market scenes in Guangxi, and students’ own interviews with foreign residents in Beijing neighborhoods to show how state capacity and international ties alter ordinary lives.
Fieldwork is central. Programs such as the “China border ten-thousand-li” project send undergraduates to border counties, ports and cross-border markets to observe customs queues, e‑commerce flows and the operations of China-Europe freight corridors. Overseas internships and research trips complement these domestic excursions, giving students comparative perspectives on governance and development.
Instructors frame these experiences as necessary to build what one professor calls a “world story database” — a repertoire of real-world encounters and discrete facts that students can deploy when explaining China abroad. The emphasis is on empirical stories rather than sloganising: students learn to marshal historical records, legal arguments and cooperation data when responding to international queries.
Students, for their part, are adapting storytelling techniques to foreign audiences. One team reworked the Mao-era figure Lei Feng into a contemporary, multimedia narrative emphasizing voluntary public service, after discovering a straight translation failed to resonate overseas. Another student described how teaching a foreign friend to use mobile payments crystallised the persuasive power of everyday convenience as a form of soft power.
This curricular pivot serves multiple aims: it cultivates patriots who can also navigate and explain global systems, supplies Beijing with a distributed corps of interlocutors capable of person-to-person diplomacy, and converts grand strategic initiatives such as the Belt and Road into relatable benefits — lower logistics costs, fresher fruit, new jobs.
At the same time, the strategy faces limits. Turning students into credible international communicators requires authenticity and exposure to diverse viewpoints; state-framed narratives risk appearing engineered if they are not paired with transparent engagement abroad. The educators highlighted in these classrooms counter that risk by privileging empirical fieldwork, comparative study and direct contact with foreign peers, thereby attempting to ground national narratives in verifiable lived experience.
For international observers, the significance is twofold. Domestically, Beijing is investing in soft power from the bottom up — training citizens to be both witnesses to and advocates for the state’s global role. Internationally, China’s method suggests a long-term tactic: seed positive impressions through micro-interactions and local projects that cumulatively underwrite larger geopolitical aims. How persuasive that tactic will be beyond receptive audiences remains an open question.