Michael
Michael
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Gone packin
We'll be back tomorrow from the U.S. to let you know about the last day of the trip.
Day Eight: Yalies descend on Shanghai
Wednesday was the much-awaited day of (relative) freedom in Shanghai, without any planned activities after lunch. But the day began early with a 7:30 breakfast with Shanghai-based Yale alums, at which a professor and two students discussed their experience on the trip so far. History of art professor Sandy Isenstadt mused on the connections that have sprung up between various Yalies on the trip, which he said will enable intercultural connections to continue beyond the end of the trip. “When we go to New Haven, we will have China,” he said. He also joked about the selection process for the trip, which excluded those who had already visited China. This was the first time he was ever qualified for something by virtue of his failure to do something else, he said. “When I think of all the things I haven’t done in my life, I see a great number of opportunities in front of me,” he said. After the breakfast event, we split into groups to visit various Shanghai institutions: the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Pudong New District Government, and GM China. With visions of the New York Stock Exchange dancing in our heads, many of us expected the Shanghai exchange to be an exciting place to visit and observe live trading. But when we were shown into the large on-site trading room, with hundreds of computer workstations and a vast electronic display, it was eerily silent. We first established that it was in fact a trading day — confirmed by the blinking changes to the market data displayed on the screen — and then learned that although the facility was built in 1997 to accommodate on-site trading, 99 percent of business on the exchange is now conducted remotely. Just a few traders wearing numbered red vests were present in the event of a problem with the network, surrounded by a sea of old and unused computers. We then had a meeting with officials of the exchange, who discussed the emergence of a capital market in China and the future of the Chinese economy. 895 companies are now listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, we were told, and the exchange has a market cap of 1.36 trillion RMB. The officials fielded questions ranging from the growth of mutual funds and pension plans in China to the access rural investors have to the markets. One Chinese student asked about the rapid increase in the number of investors and the quantity of investment in the Chinese capital market. While the officials said they are not seriously worried about the possibility of a crash, they did acknowledge that the market might be “a little bit overheated.” The visit was of particular interest because Yale is the only foreign institution allowed to invest directly in A shares of Chinese stocks; other foreign institutions are restricted to purchasing B shares or investing indirectly in the companies. After the Stock Exchange visit, we headed to another hotel for lunch and then broke into small groups for the first free time of the trip. While a number of professors and a few students headed to museums and other cultural sites, shopping was the order of the day for many in the group. Nine of us — including one incredibly tolerant translator and two prefrosh from Shanghai — headed out in search of luggage to replace someone’s broken bag and another to hold one student’s various purchases and swag acquired during the trip. We had gotten directions to a mall, but we should have realized our mistake when the two prefrosh told us they had never been to this neighborhood before. As our cabs pulled up to our destination, more than a dozen men swarmed around us, showing pictures of their wares and even grabbing onto our arms and trying to pull us toward their shops. Whether or not we displayed interest in their offers of “watch, bag,” they continued to surround us, even following us as we went into the mall in search of luggage. It was the closest thing I have felt to a threatening experience in China, although we never seemed in danger so much as seriously annoyed. Eventually, when the two students found bags to their satisfaction — and despite the fact that the negotiations were carried out by three Chinese speakers — they couldn’t get a “fair price.” So all of the non-Chinese students headed for the KFC to try to convince the bag vendors that the purchases weren’t for foreigners. An hour and a half later, mission (finally, and uncomfortably) accomplished, we headed away from the neighborhood for a little more shopping. Tomorrow is the last day of the trip, and we’ll be returning to serious programming: a visit to Fudan University, a tour of a new Pudong skyscraper and then a final boat cruise.
Day 7: A grain of salt, or a teaspoon of salt?
The agenda was a visit to a village outside Xi’an, and the question of the day seemed to be: Would this village show us the true quality of life in rural China? From the beginning of the trip, it has been obvious that the trip is taking place under the auspices of the Chinese government. We go everywhere with a police escort (which periodically uses its sirens to get us out of sticky traffic situations) and are greeted with large red banners welcoming the “Yale 100.” This has engendered some skepticism about how accurate a portrayal we are receiving of the country, particularly because the packed schedule leaves us little room for exploration on our own. But today’s visit to the village put the question of representativeness on almost everyone’s lips. The 1,890-person village of Bai Cun was about a 90 minute drive from our hotel in Xi’an, and the ride took us through a series of suburban and rural communities. As we left the limits of Xi’an, the persistent traffic of the city subsided and small markets selling food and clothes cropped up on the sides of the roads. We could literally feel the move from urban to rural areas, as the roads became worse and the ride got bumpier. For the first time that I noticed, people were stopped along the side of the road to stare at our buses. On the bus, our guide — a representative of the All-China Youth Federation who has been with us for the entire trip — described Bai Cun as a “typical” village for this part of China. “Chinese villagers are very different from Western villagers,” he said. “They tend to be very content.” It was comments like these that made me wary of how accurately this village would represent rural life in China. Earlier on the trip, we had heard about how China was trying to deal with a mass migration to the cities in pursuit of better job opportunities. When we pulled into Bai Cun, we were greeted by a troupe of traditional drummers and cymbalists. Villagers were standing around the courtyard we drove into and watched as we got off the bus. We had been randomly divided into 10 groups while we were on the buses, and we quickly headed in different directions around the village. My group first went to a primary school, which we were told was built in 2003. It has 254 students and 14 teachers, nine of whom have a college degree. We were first taken to an English class for 10 and 11 year olds. When we walked in, they were learning how to say, “go skateboarding, go bike riding, go hiking, go rollerskating.” We were encouraged to talk to the students, but most were too shy to say much more than their names. We also saw a 6 Our guides then led us down the main street of the village, with stops in a China Telecom Internet café and a “scientific reading room” with books about farming. In response to a question, another guide from the ACYF gave a slightly different assessment of the village, which he called “a little bit better than the middle.” “There are man of the rural areas that have shabby houses [made of] clay,” he said. “This is built up by bricks, with paintings.” He also acknowledged that in western China — including the Xi’an area — young people do prefer to go to the city for construction or engineering jobs, where they can earn more than they would in agriculture. This differs from the more prosperous eastern regions of China, he said, where villages have shared in the country’s overall economic growth. He then led us to see the home of one village family. It belonged to an elderly man, who was a retired teacher, and his wife. We learned that their annual income is about 7,000 yuan, or $1,000. The couple’s two adult children had left the village to take government jobs in Xi’an, close enough to bring occasional gifts back home, he said. (Other groups visited multigenerational households, where elderly couples lived with a child and his or her family.) The house’s large living room — compared by one student to a “barn” — was sparsely decorated, with a bare concrete floor, three posters, six full-size chairs and several more stools. The small bedroom contained two beds and a dresser, as well as a television and stereo that were somewhat incongruous compared to the general lack of furnishings. But the most interesting part of the home tour was the small kitchen. There is running water in the village for four hours a day, so they fill a water cistern in the kitchen for use throughout the day. They use a wood-fired stove to cook, and had one wooden cabinet for storage. Some staples were stored on the floor, including bags of grain and about three dozen eggs. The man was most proud of his electric rice cooker, which like the TV was a surprising addition to a decidedly un-modern home. The Yale delegation then reunited and walked out of the village to nearby orchards, where we attempted to tie bags around young apples, a technique to protect them from bugs. The village switched from growing wheat and other grains to apples and pears as part of the government’s attempt to give each village a “key product” around which to structure their economy, our guide told us. We were then taken to a textile factory, which was little more than nine hand looms in a very large room. The availability of a gift shop and a rest area, as well as large photos of Westerners wearing scarves produced by the factory, suggested that the facility was at least partially a tourist destination. In fact, we were told, textile production for this company is a kind of cottage industry through which looms are distributed to individual workers to keep in their homes. The visit to the textile factory sparked much of the debate about the authenticity of the village visit, with one student terming it a “Potemkin village.” Others defended it as an innocuous example of China putting its best foot forward, akin to cleaning up one’s apartment before having guests (just as Yale-sponsored tours of New Haven focus on more middle-class neighborhoods). To my eyes, it seemed clear that Bai Cun had received substantial improvements compared to other villages that we drove past. The homes boasted more attractive exteriors than the relatively worn-down tan brick structures we could see from the bus windows. And one guide’s assertion that the villagers had never seen Beijingers, much less foreigners, before was just implausible, given the photos on display at the textile factory. But on the other hand, the village as we saw it was not Disneyland China (several other women told me that the public bathroom was just a series of holes in the ground, without dividers or doors), and its inhabitants still lived in much worse conditions than we saw in Chinese cities or in much of the U.S. It was not necessarily a false picture of rural Chinese life, but an incomplete one. On the bus from the village to the airport for our flight to Xi’an, someone raised an interesting question: Why were we all so eager to see China’s poverty, as opposed to its development? “I do think we want to see that everything’s not peachy,” Elissa Berwick ’09 said.
Day 6: Terracotta Soldiers (!!!)
So you’ll have to forgive me if I gush a bit in this post — our main activity today was a visit to the Terracotta Soldiers, which I’ve wanted to ever since I first read about them in about the fifth grade. An estimated 8,000 clay horses and warriors — each of which has a unique face — were buried near the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shihuang around 210 B.C., and they were intended to protect the emperor in the afterlife. But the project was not mentioned in historical records and was only discovered in March 1974 by farmers attempting to dig a well on the site. The excavation site is about an hour’s drive outside Xi’an, and the three pits are in various states of completion. In total, about 2,000 figures have been uncovered so far. The largest, Pit One, has ranks of reconstructed soldiers in place, while Pit Two has little more than shards of soldiers and their accoutrements. Pit Three is the smallest, but it contains a partially reconstructed terracotta chariot with accompanying steeds and rider. The visit to the Terracotta Soldiers was the high point of the day, which had just one official event — a dinner banquet with provincial leaders — after a slew of tourist activities. We began the day with a visit to the History Museum of Shaanxi Province, which proved to contain a surprisingly interesting array of archeological finds from millennia of Chinese history. Its collections included the earliest paper fragments discovered in China, which date to 140-87 B.C. Made of hemp fiber, they were actually used as packing material, not for writing. Later in our tour of the museum exhibits, we also saw an early example of block printing. Paper and printing are considered to be two of China’s great inventions, along with compasses and gunpowder. Among the more surprising items on display at the museum were pottery figures of polo players dating to 618-907 A.D. We were told that the game was brought to China from Persia (now Iran) around this time. “Emperors liked polo … because it was a leisure activity that also improved riding skills,” our tour guide told us. After the museum, we made a short drive to the Big Goose Pagoda, an ancient Buddhist temple in Xi’an. And then before setting off for the Terracotta Soldiers, we were treated to a feast of dumplings for lunch. The meal featured 14 different kinds of dumplings; The general consensus among the students was that this was one of the best meals we have had all trip. After a few days of heavy, formal food, it was refreshing to taste something a little more ordinary. This was especially desirable in Xi’an, as the street food on offer everywhere — but especially in the Islamic night market — was sorely tempting. But instead of opening our wallets for meat skewers and flatbread cooked outside, most of us bought souvenirs: miniature warriors, jewelry, various Mao-related paraphernalia. The night market, which was still humming at 11 and 12 each night, was one of my favorite parts of our stay in Xi’an, and probably of the entire trip so far. One of the few downsides of the trip is that the tightly programmed schedule leaves us with few opportunities to strike out on our own. It is discoveries like the night market that make me sure that I will want to come back to China — not necessarily as a student, as Yale is heavily pushing us, but certainly as a visitor.
Day 3: Examining Chinese education reform
Friday brought the Yale 100 delegates face-to-face with ongoing reforms to the Chinese education system, which are beginning to transform Chinese universities along American lines. At a speech to the Yale delegation Friday morning, Vice Minister of Education Zhang Xinsheng outlined the “great change” underway in Chinese higher education. Since 1998, Zhang said, the proportion of college-aged students enrolled in degree programs increased from 9.8 percent to 22 percent. At the moment, supply cannot meet demand for higher education, which he said is driven by economic growth and the parental pressure for success. Beyond the massive expansion in postsecondary students, Zhang said, the government has made structural reforms to decentralize the education sector from the national to the provincial level and to promote private colleges and universities. China is now focused on building new colleges and raising a few of its universities to world-class status, he said. “The competition mechanism has been introduced to the higher education system,” Zhang said. As part of this strategy, Zhang said, Chinese universities are focusing more on research, in a move from European to American models of higher education. The Yuanpei Honors Program at Peking University is a recent experiment in a more American style of college education, offering a liberal arts education rather than early specialization to a select group of Chinese students. We saw the program firsthand during our visit to PKU on Friday. In his welcome address, PKU President Xu Zhihong said programs that require students to declare their specialty early — still common outside the Yuanpei program — are problematic. “[Chinese students] have been deprived of the free space and the time needed to find their own interests and sense of self,” Xu said. And Yuanpei students appear to be taking advantage of the added time to explore their options. PKU students told me that now, about 10 percent of students change their majors after entering college. I had lunch with Lenna Chen, a Yuanpei junior, who came into college having completed the “classics” track in high school (as opposed to the science track). She had been involved in an intensive Russian program in high school, so she did not speak English, which was required of other top academic programs. With two years of college before she had to declare her major, she used the time to learn English and to take an intensive math course. This period of additional preparation allowed her to finally declare a major in PKU’s popular School of Economics. Chen said she did not think her high school preparation would have allowed her to get into the economics program straight out of high school, so one attraction of Yuanpei was the option to defer selecting a major. For Zhang Sihui, a Yuanpei sophomore who is currently enrolled in the Yale-PKU joint program, the first two years of college convinced her to pursue an interest in linguistics. She also took classes in business, but her choice — which she said she finalized only last week — was mainly between literature and linguistics. “It seems like a paradox,” Zhang said. “At first I think I was interested in both [linguistics and business], but I think liberal arts is where we should go deep, not superficial.” Of course, some Yuanpei students still make up their minds right away, as sophomore Huang Chenyi did when she chose to major in Chinese language and literature. And Chen was quick to point out that Yuanpei is “still a pilot program,” so students in other schools of the university still select their majors at the beginning of college. One downside of the late choice of major is that completing the requirements in two years can be overwhelming, she said. But overall, Chen said, China’s education reform should continue to add flexibility for students. In high schools, she suggested, students should not necessarily be rigidly grouped in the science or classics tracks. “If there’s some student who wants to do both, you have to let them,” she said. Tsinghua University, which we visited in the afternoon, is embarked on its own path of changes to offer students more options. Tsinghua, the alma mater of Chinese President Hu Jintao, is referred to as the “MIT of China.” In 1949, after the Communist Party took power in China, the University was transformed from a comprehensive university to just an engineering school. Now, it is adding back non-engineering departments to offer students more choice. “Today, Tsinghua has a full portfolio of programs and schools,” Yale President Richard Levin said at the welcome ceremony. These efforts to remake Chinese education along more American lines are accompanied by a greater focus on study abroad and joint education programs. The visit to PKU offered delegates a glimpse of the Yale-PKU Joint Undergraduate Program, which was launched last fall. The program offers Yale students the chance to live in dorms with students from Yuanpei and to take classes taught by Yale professors with the Chinese students. Kate Aitken ’09, a staff reporter for the News, delivered a speech about her experience in Beijing at the welcome ceremonies at PKU. The full text is available At a panel discussion about cross-cultural education and the first year of the Yale-PKU program, professors from both universities discussed the value and challenges of teaching American and Chinese students in the same classroom. “We’re trying to get students to look at the world from the perspective of Beijing and China, rather than separating China from the rest of the world,” said Charles Laughlin, the resident director of the joint program. The Chinese and American students may have widely different levels of background knowledge about the course material, professors said, and some Chinese students have expressed discomfort with some of the assumptions made in humanities classes. Laughlin said in his course on contemporary Beijing culture, some of the PKU students thought the subjects covered in the course reflected a Western conception of culture rather than the experience of Beijing residents. This discomfort did not become clear until late in the semester when he first taught the course, he said, so he has since tried to tease out those concerns and keep them on the table from the very beginning. Even the way courses are taught exposes differences between the Chinese and American students, professors said. Almost all classes at PKU are lectures, Laughlin said, and the PKU facilities were not even configured for seminar-style teaching when the program began. But art history professor Ann Dunlop, who taught in the program this semester, said she was impressed by the Chinese students’ quick adaptation to participating in seminars. “They have absolutely run with it,” she said. The day ended on a lighter note for the Yale 100, with a visit to the Garden of the Palace of Established Happiness in the Forbidden City. Recently restored by the China Heritage Fund, the garden is not open to the public but was made available to the Yalies by Ronnie Chan, who led the restoration effort. Chan, a Hong Kong-based real estate developer, sits on Levin’s Council on International Activities. Chan gave the students a tour of the garden, originally built in 1740 by the emperor Qianlong for his personal use. The garden was destroyed by a fire in 1923, and it was unearthed in 1994. After 12 years of renovation, it has been fully restored both inside and out.
President Hu welcomes Yale 100 to China
Four hours after we arrived at Beijing Airport on Wednesday, Yale faculty and students were welcomed to China by President Hu Jintao in a brief address at the Great Hall of the People. For virtually all of the students and some of the faculty, the audience with Hu — perhaps the highlight of the trip — followed nearly 24 hours of bus and air travel, beginning at 6 a.m. on Tuesday in New Haven. Our day would not end until 9 p.m. Beijing time, following Hu’s address, a photo op, and a Welcome Banquet, also at the Great Hall. In his remarks, Hu echoed both U.S. President George W. Bush and Yale President Richard Levin when he emphasized the importance of “people to people” diplomacy between the United States and China — one of the goals of the Yale 100 trip. Young people are particularly important in these efforts, Hu said, citing a Chinese proverb: “Heroes always come from young people.” “Further developing the cooperative U.S.-China relationship is in the fundamental interests of the two countries and peoples,” Hu said. At the Welcome Banquet, which Hu did not attend, Levin reiterated his appreciation for the Chinese government’s financial support for the trip. Eighty-five of the 100 students, faculty and staff in the Yale delegation have never been to China, he said. But for students, the menu may have proved more interesting than the toasts by Levin and other Chinese officials. Other than the airline’s attempt at Asian-inflected cuisine — including a particularly dismal rendition of dim sum just before landing — the dinner was the group’s first meal of the trip. Although my Chinese-speaking tablemate translated the printed menu loosely as “scallops, shrimp, chicken, beef, vegetables, ice cream,” what arrived on the lazy Susan turned out to be a vast array of dishes, such as abalone, that would have been foreign to most American Chinese restaurants. We had been warned in advance not to eat too much of the first courses at such banquets, but it proved virtually impossible. What I thought was a winding-down of the dishes turned out to be merely a half-time break, and the flow of dishes continued unabated out of the kitchen for close to two hours. Students and faculty were seated with Chinese officials at the banquet. Although conversation dwindled as jet lag gradually took hold of the Yalies, we managed to get in topics ranging from the structure of the Chinese education system to secret society tap. Representatives from Yale and the All-China Student Federation and the All-China Youth Federation — which coordinated the group’s schedule in China — were making a valiant effort to keep the trip running smoothly. From personalized first-day schedules distributed on the plane to room keys handed out en route to the hotel (on preassigned, color-coded buses), their efforts were largely successful. But the first day of the trip was also a reminder that Yale cannot control everything. The buses departed New Haven just after 6:30 a.m. — right on time and more than six hours before scheduled takeoff — but they ran into an accident on I-95 that set them back nearly an hour and a half. Once aloft, it turned out that the in-flight video system in the coach cabin was broken — seemingly a minor inconvenience, but one that can feel like a calamity by the 12