Confrontation is not the type of interaction you expect in a small, seminar-style master’s class at the London School of Economics. Polite debate, perhaps, but not confrontation. Yet when I was in a LSE classroom just a few years ago, just such a pattern developed. The professor would point out the negatives of China’s approach to the developing world, highlighting issues like rising debt burdens and corruption in places like Sri Lanka and Zambia. A handful of Chinese nationals in the class would respond aggressively, accusing the professor and other students in agreement of spreading anti-Chinese propaganda or, even worse, being racist against Chinese people.  My professor is not an anti-China ideologue; he is certainly not a racist. He is a careful long-time scholar of China’s relationship with countries across the developing world. My Chinese classmates were not uncritical thinkers, either; but years of centralized Chinese education — coupled with state propaganda