Loading "Most Chinese students here have nothing to do with the Chinese government," she said. "If they [Australians] were educated and have actually been to China they wouldn't have that impression. They have been brainwashed by the media to think China is very suspicious." The 20-year-old thought studying in Australia would give her an edge in finding a job. "The study quality is better here and I get to practise English which is an advantage," Ms Jiang, who did not take part in the study, said. Many of the 20 students interviewed were unaware of some of the most severe ruptures in 20th century Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

"I don’t know anything about it," one student said of the 1989 democracy protests. "I never heard these events spoken about in family conversations. We just don’t talk about it." But the students were open to educating themselves online and discussing their findings with peers between the interviews with researchers. I don't know anything about it ... I never heard these events spoken about in family conversations. We just don't talk about it. A Chinese student in Melbourne University on the Tiananmen Square Massacre "I didn’t know about it first time," the student who was unaware of the Tiananmen Square Massacre said of the Great Leap Forward when they returned for a second interview. "Now I think it was a bad time for China." Others were more forthright. "It was a disaster," one said.

Loading One Chinese student at the University of Sydney said she broadly agreed with the points raised by the research. "Me and my friends, we don't talk about [China's historical conflicts] a lot. With the majority of them, we never touch on the topic," the student, who did not want to be named, said. But she said she discussed more recent controversies, like the rallies in Hong Kong, and said going to a school in China with Tibetan students had made her aware of China's repression in the region. "That was my first experience learning that people from Tibet have different views," she said.

Loading In general though, the students were proud of China and consigned history to a distant past. "Any notion that China may be open to the ideals of global citizenship or that the students would see themselves as agents of cosmopolitanism were absent from the interviews," the authors wrote. University of Melbourne Associate Professor Allan Patience, one of the study's authors, said universities had failed at overcoming gaps between domestic and international students. "We really need at first year level a whole lot of innovative curricula to introduce these two groups of students to each other," Dr Patience said.