Recently, over lunch with a friend who has chosen to study in Hong Kong and Taiwan in order to get, as he explained, “a fresh understanding of China,” he confessed that the experience only hardened his attitude toward these societies. The protesters in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong were likely instigated by “foreign forces,” he argued. Otherwise, how could they “not see for themselves the benefit of China’s stable and efficient political system?”

In other cases, students who diligently memorized for exams the textbook statements they did not believe in continued to see learning as primarily a means to a personal end. The Western ideal of the pursuit of the truth affords little benefit in China. In a cutthroat environment that places a low premium on originality and integrity, students learn to justify, under the pressure to succeed, the using of work that represents neither their honest opinions nor products of their intellectual labor.

While I was in college in America, my school abruptly canceled a joint academic program with Peking University, one of China’s top education institutions. Among other controversies, an American biology professor in Beijing complained of the rampant plagiarism among students at the university. My friends who went there readily admitted that the cheating existed, but argued that the students were simply being practical. “We swap test answers and share papers for classes like Marxist political philosophy, so we can have more time to focus on the subjects that actually matter,” one told me.

Last winter, when I turned on the television in Beijing to watch a popular speech contest organized by a state channel, I saw a high school friend standing on stage. With a solemn expression, he delivered a speech accusing Western media of waging a “cultural war” against China that “attacks the confidence and dignity of the Chinese people.” In the next round, he donned a Mongolian robe and declared his heartfelt wish for the long lasting of China’s territorial unity.

Eventually, my friend won the contest, prompting a chorus of congratulation from our classmates on social media. I recalled the time we had spent together in high school after class, griping about the monotony of the curriculum and mocking the irrelevance of the test questions. It was hard to settle those memories with his performance on television.

A few weeks ago, I ran into him at a class reunion. I approached him, hoping to bring up the contest and ask for his true thoughts about politics: Did he really believe what he said on television? I paused. Out of nowhere, the speech I had written in fifth grade, after the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, entered my mind. I swallowed my words.

Helen Gao, a native of Beijing, is a master’s student in East Asian Studies at Harvard.