“OH NO … now I understand why they don’t want us to read this stuff.”
 
Yu is looking a little downcast. She holds my phone and checks the screen again, the Guardian article on China she’s just finished reading.
 
If you believe the Guardian journalist, borders are currently thronged with “desperate” Chinese migrants trying to “escape” their country. The article is a dissonant read for those of us comfortably seated under trees in a quiet corner of Beijing, one of the most modern, well-run cities in the world.
 
To be more precise, we’re on a campus, in the green spaces between halls of residence. Since I began life as a mature student here, I have counted four large cats, overfed by a keen student population, and five hedgehogs, including the babies, which is five times more than I ever spotted in Somerset when I lived there.
 
It’s the evening, and Yu and I are surrounded by young students walking back to their dorms from the showers building, many of them already in pyjamas. She points at the article again. “They take one truth, and they say something completely false about it. Look, they write about ‘runxue’. It’s a made-up word that combines the English, to run, and the Chinese xue, to study.”
 
The Guardian journalist hasn’t bothered to translate the word, of course, because it becomes quite benign when you know its meaning. It was coined for students from well-off families who feel “it’s too competitive in China and decide to go abroad to study,” Yu says. The image of “desperate” Chinese migrants is receding further away.
 
I have a few runxue among my friends. One did an MA in computer studies, the other a PhD in philosophy, both in Britain, and both left after a few years to return to China. They did so for a variety of reasons.

The most business-minded saw that China, not London was the land of economic opportunity after all, and it was time to go back. The philosopher got sick of the anti-China propaganda and constant misreading of his culture and history, not only by British society but by his socialist friends, his professors. He got tired of having to explain himself to people.
 
If you meet Chinese people in Britain, you will notice that they will often decline all political discussions by ignoring them. As if they haven’t even heard your question. Why should they talk with people who don’t even bother to scratch behind the headlines?

There’s one way to break the ice though, which I use all the time. I told my online Chinese teacher once, “I don’t read the BBC, why bother?” She asked, “Because they lie?” I said, “Yes, it’s all bullshit.” So she taught me how to say “fake news” in Chinese: jia xinwen.
 
I didn’t see Yu yesterday because she spent most of the day in bed. It was National Day in China, and 75 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

With three friends, they left the campus just after midnight yesterday morning, hired shared bikes — extremely cheap, plentiful, super convenient — and cycled 10 miles to the centre of Beijing. They stopped at restaurants on the way, or stalls selling grilled meat skewers — my favourite — or to take night photos along the canals. I can picture it all because we did that same trip to Tiananmen three months ago to watch the daily ceremony.
 
But yesterday was extra special. Once they reached the centre, they will have returned their bikes and queued with their reservations to enter Tiananmen and wait for sunrise. They will have joined the tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who have come on this ultra-patriotic day to watch the flag being raised, and sing the national anthem at the first rays of dawn.
 
When you come from a former colonial empire, you have a difficult relationship with flags. You would not ever, ever, see me wave a French flag about, especially now that our blue-white-red tricolore has become synonymous with the far right.
 
But when you live in a country that has fought back, again and again, against invasion and was pretty successful in the end at kicking the Brits and the French out, China’s red flag becomes a very moving sight.

And the patriotism is also real. Yu and her friends are having a great time, just the kind of night adventures you expect 19-year-olds to crave. But once on Tiananmen, they know why they biked all the way there. They know what the day means.
 
I’ve had similar moments with my teachers here.
 
One day, after learning how to name Beijing’s various means of transport, I told Wang Laoshi during the break that I was amazed at crowd movements in this big city. So many of us, 25 million, and yet the flow is so smooth.

Whether in the corridors of the metro at rush hour or trying to cross a crossroad on my bike in a giant herd of electric scooters and bikes, people are only just paying attention to their surroundings. I have yet to see a collision.

To me, it feels like a deep practice and understanding of teamwork and trust in the group. “I think you guys have more flow because you have less ego,” I told her. To my surprise, she went pink and just replied, “Thank you.”
 
Another time was with Liu Laoshi, when they took us to visit Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor used to pray for his country’s prosperity by asking heaven for a mandate.

I said to her, I wish foreigners really understood what the Mandate from Heaven implies. It’s 3,000 years old, and deeply rooted in the Chinese psyche. More than any birthright, emperors had to demonstrate that they had a mandate to hold on to power.

A bad harvest and you could be screwed. If your people started to die on you, clearly the gods were not on your side, never mind how much incense you burned, or whether your dad sat on that throne before you. The people were justified to rebel against unjust rulers and had a right to overturn them.
 
“Foreigners really don’t see,” I said to her, unprompted by the way, but then I’m French and awfully blunt, with a habit of starting conversations that people don’t necessarily want. “They don’t understand that if a society runs well and is fair and prosperous, of course a staggering majority support their government.”

I even mentioned the famous Harvard-led Ash Centre report, which found, to the researchers’ immense and irritated surprise I always imagine, that 95 per cent of Chinese citizens are relatively satisfied to very satisfied with their government.
 
Liu Laoshi and I stood in the square yard that symbolises the earth. We stared up at the wooden circular temple, the beautiful triple gables that end in a point and symbolise the sky, which was at that moment very blue and crisp. She threw me a side-way glance and smiled as much to herself as to me, “I also believe Xi Jinping has the Mandate of Heaven.”

Pascale Gillet is a student currently living in Beijing.