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!