'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Notes from Shanghai, I

So what about China meanwhile, since I've now been here for five whole days...

We've been in Shanghai, hosted by East China Normal University, which has a beautiful, large campus on the eastern edge of the city. We've been staying in their "Academic Exchange Center", which is also a place where they lodge high-school principals who come there for short courses of in-service training. ("Normal", in the school's name, signifies its original role as a teacher-training institute.)

The hosting has been generous and wonderful. ECNU has made Bill an "honorary professor", and our friend Brantly Womack with whom we're traveling an "advisory professor", so we had a short ceremony at which that happened, on Thursday evening. Prior to that on Thursday, we all--Bill, Brantly, his wife Ann Womack, and I--gave lectures at various parts of the unversity. Bill and I gave ours in the Russian Studies Center, which is the core of an international-studies center that they're planning. I talked about Israel/Palestine and Bill about Iraq. The audience was a group of around two dozen faculty members and grad students. We gave our talks in short bursts in English, and they were interpreted into Mandarin. The discussion was good. People seemed very concerned about both situations, and fairly well informed.

In the afternoon, I went along to Ann's lecture...

She teaches clinical psychology at an institute in Northern Virginia. Here, she was guest-teaching an undergraduate class in the psych department. I was so impressed with the 70 or so students in that class! Her host there threw Ann for a bit of a loop at the get-go, saying that she would NOT have rely on interpretation but that the students could understand her in English. English is their third or possibly for some of them their fourth, language! No-one in this region is a native Mandarin speaker; they do all their formal education in Mandarin, and start English in around third grade.

So here these eager 20-year-olds were during the discussion period, almost efortlessly throwing around technical terms in English like "attachment disorder", "ADHD", etc, etc... Evidently the post-Cultural Revolution effort to rebuild the country's shattered educational infrastructure has been--in at least this regard--stunningly successful.

When I jogged around the ECNU campus at 5:45 a.m. on Sunday, I circled the big, probably "statutory" statue of Chairman Mao on a lawn in front of one of the original buildings. Near it was a huge stone with a slogan carved into it saying--in Chinese and English--something like "Seek truth, encourage originality, and be worthy of the name Teacher". That's a pretty good slogan, in my book.

(At a conversation with one of the faculty members, he recalled how near the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he had joined a group of his elementary-school classmates in shouting derogatory slogans against his teacher. "How do you feel about that?" I asked. "Very guilty," he said. "Actually, much later later I went to speak to the teacher and say I was sorry. She said she did not bear any grudge against me-- though maybe against some of the others.")

Any Chinese person over the age of 35 has seen so much history in her or his life. We go to some of the beautiful parks here early in the morning, at the time that thousands of older people are out there doing their tai chi, or Chinese shadow-boxing, or fan dances, or yoga, or sword dances, or other exercizes-- sometimes in groups, sometimes alone--and I think, Wow, I wish I could speak to some of these wise, interesting-looking people and talk to them about their lives.

Shanghai has so many amazing things. I am writing this post, actually, from Hangzhou, another huge Chinese city (and provincial capital) that's about a 150-minute drive east from Shanghai. In both these cities, as well as in Beijing when I was there in December, I have been amazed by the massive scale of the completed and in-progress building works. Shanghai has a population of 17 million. They all need to live somewhere! But it's not just the private residences, office buildings, and huge shopping malls that amaze me: it's also the scale of the investment in infrastructure and public works. Shanghai is laced through by a vast, futuristic network of 120-foot-high freeways that swoop between and sometimes apparently right over the high-rises and the streets far below them. The barriers on the edges of these freeways are continuously lined with window-boxes bearing forsythia or small rose plants. In the downtown area, each side of the undersides of the freeways has a continuous line of blue fluorescent strips, the light from which gives the freeways a wonderfully artistic aspect as they swish between the (also intriguingly lit) high-rises at night.

And then, there are the incredible public parks, and the almost immaculate levels of public cleanliness. In these cities, China certainly doesn't look like a "developing" country-- in fact, it looks a lot more civilized than most "developed" countries I could name.

I'm sure I should write more about the intellectual/international-affairs "content" of the kinds of discussions I've been having here... I promise I'll try to do some of that later. We have had discussions with some really interesting people already, and we'll be having more after we get to Beijing, tomorrow. Three preliminary impressions of what I've found out here are, however:

(1) Just the huge scale and effectiveness of the national-construction effort China's leaders and people have undertaken since the end of the Cultural Revolution.

(2) The existence of a lot more diversity and creativity of opinion here than in, for example, Japan. In Japan, if you ask a person's opinion on something, they'll frequently and quite un-self-consciously say, "Japanese people think that... " I haven't heard a single Chinese person say, "Chinese people think that.... "

(3) A lot more, seemingly un-self-conscious gender equity in daily life than in Japan, certainly, and more than in many Western countries, too. We've been dealing with a number of people at the higher levels of ECNU administration. Maybe 30 percent of them are women. You see women and men mixing easily in public life: the women are not relegated to the roles of being "office ladies" or "arm candy". They speak directly and self-confidently to men, and can frequently be seen supervising them. Yay, 600 million Chinese women!