I arrived back in Syracuse at 9:45 on Friday night, after a twelve-hour flight from Beijing and a hop from Chicago. As you might expect, my weekend has been pretty busy with such exciting post-trip necessities as laundry, mail, shopping and intermittent sleep at times that are only slowly becoming normal.
The last two weeks have been a remarkably busy, fascinating and exhausting experience. As promised, I intend to write in some detail about them here, but I don’t really want to do it in one huge post, so it may take a few.
The Summer Institute, at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, continued in much the same fashion as the first day, on which I already reported. I thought all my co-lecturers did great jobs, and the students were really quite impressive. (Can you spot which of the figures in the photo below isn’t a lecturer?)
My talks at the Institute were on Thursday and Friday, titled The Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe, and Connecting Cosmology and Colliders, respectively. Those of us who work in universities in the U.S. often encounter graduate students from China. Usually, these students are clearly talented and score very impressively on written tests. However, it is often the case that, early in their graduate careers, Chinese graduate students are quiet in class, and do not speak up in discussions, or ask questions about crucial points. Obviously, this is not true of all Chinese graduate students, but it is a trend that I, and many of my colleagues, have noticed. I went to Hangzhou fully expecting that, if anything, this trend would be even more pronounced there. However, it was a delightful surprise that this did not turn out to be the case. The students at the Summer Institute were extremely lively and asked multiple questions, many of them quite sophisticated, of each of the lecturers.
I expect that the pressures of moving to an unfamiliar country, far away from family, play a role in the attitudes of some of the students we see in our universities. But perhaps the behavior of the students I saw in Hangzhou represents something of the changes that China is going through. Whatever the reason, the students were a major reason that I enjoyed my time at Zhejiang University so much.
And it wasn’t just the students. On further exploration, Hangzhou really is a beautiful place. Even with temperatures in the high nineties (as they were for us), it was lush and green, with tree-lined roads, extensive walking and cycling paths, elegant, manicured parks and, as I mentioned before, the lovely West Lake.
The Institute ended on the morning of Thursday, August 18th. That afternoon, we boarded a small bus for a three-hour trip to Qiandaohu (Thousand Islands Lake), a famous tourist spot in the Zhejiang region. The lake is a huge reservoir, created in 1959 when a valley was deliberately flooded as part of an early hydroelectric project. At the bottom of this lake are two intact villages that were flooded when the reservoir was created. One can even dive down to see them, although we didn’t. The islands are the places where the hills that were previously in this place still stick up above the lake, and in recent years, there have been attempts to exploit them for tourism.
We arrived in the area on Thursday evening and checked into our hotel. Unfortunately, the hotel was pretty bad (an error of the tour company, not our hosts). We had dinner, went for a long walk, and then I got a fitful night’s sleep. The next morning, after a quick breakfast, we then set off on a boat tour of the lake, which turned out to be both interesting and amusing.
We visited four islands in all. The first was called “Snake Island”, and consisted of many different enclosures and displays, containing a wide variety of snakes. Quite odd really. The weirdness didn’t end there though, because the second island was called “Ostrich Island”, with both Asian and Australian ostriches to see. Again, pretty odd. I was completely at a loss to understand why one would choose to populate a couple of islands with snakes and ostriches until Henry Tye explained to me that they were meant to represent the dragon and the phoenix, respectively.
The third island was the real find. It wasn’t really the island that was impressive, rather it was the view. We took a chair-lift up to the top of the island, from which one got a breathtaking view of a large part of the lake and many of the other islands that dot its surface. In the photo below, taken atop this island, you can see Bing-Lin Young, me, Henry Tye, Ira Wasserman and Joe Silk, all wearing the same ridiculous hat that we bought on the shore just before the trip.
After lunch on our boat, we visited a fourth island, exhibiting a collection of interesting stone formations, then traveled back to Hangzhou and checked into a hotel for the evening, to rest before our flight to Beijing the next afternoon.
I’ll write more about my second week in China in a future post. I have a lot to tell you about Beijing, both about the science I was involved in there and about the city and its surroundings.
August 28th, 2005 at 9:34 pm
Did you hear any mention of the Qiantang River Tidal Bore while you were in Hangzhou? Some photos of it (at its most extreme) were mistaken for tsunami photos shortly after the events of December 26, 2004.
From TravelChinaGuide.com:
August 28th, 2005 at 10:47 pm
Hi Chris. I didn’t hear about this – thanks for pointing it out. I took a look at the site you linked to – great picture!
August 28th, 2005 at 11:04 pm
Hey Mark,
Hope you had fun in China. One comment on the Chinese students (though my experience is somewhat different)- I suspect language limitations may be part of it, many have had much less exposure to English than you would in western countries. This problem usually disappears pretty quickly (as I can testify, you need to learn pronouncing about a dozen words to start communicating about physics).
(Also,something about summer schools makes students more relaxed, or at least that is the hope…)
best,
Moshe
August 29th, 2005 at 9:23 am
Hi Mark!
For a lefty your comments about chinese grad students are not politically correct enough. May I paraphrase you as saying that there is an innate difference in the ability to discuss between Chineses and Westerners? If not, please clarify what you meant to say.
Best,
Trevor
PS: No doubt you are right. I have been aware of this for a long time…
August 29th, 2005 at 10:46 am
No, most certainly not a good paraphrasing (I don’t think one could read it into what I wrote). Rather, I suspect there are many different forces, including something of a more hierarchical structure in the education system, which means that students are very respectful, which can also translate into being less comfortable challenging professors.
I agree partially with Moshe that language plays some role. It is certainly true that the students change quite quickly when they attend our graduate schools – I wasn’t suggesting it was a long-term issue for us. The only point I was making was that giving these talks in China, to students who are graduate students there, meant that they had had less exposure to English and to our educational system that students we see in the U.S., and yet I found them refreshingly interactive.
I don’t have a deep point to make here, since I don’t pretend to fully appreciate all the different forces that lead to the trend that many U.S. faculty notice.
August 29th, 2005 at 11:00 am
Mark, you’re giving Trevor far too much credit for a sensible query. Only an ideological hallucination would cause anyone to read anything about “innate difference” into what you wrote.
August 29th, 2005 at 11:02 am
So what you’re saying, Sean, is that Mark is an old-fashioned racial supremacist?
Reading between the lines, and all.
August 29th, 2005 at 11:06 am
Adam, you have perceived the deep meanings hidden behind my politically correct rhetoric! How can we forces of leftist hegemonization hope to prevail in the face of such powerful truth-telling?
August 29th, 2005 at 11:16 am
You’ll have to disrupt the supply of tinfoil, leaving your enemies hatless.
And order more black helicopters.
August 29th, 2005 at 11:46 am
Oh boy, I certainly did not mean to say anything deep, just recalled not being able to express myself very clearly at first (though apparently things have not improved much…) .
Anyhow, the trip sounds fascinating, I’ll look forward to reading more.
best,
Moshe
August 29th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
I imagine part of the reticence one sees in Chinese students probably results from growing up in a dictatorship that in the past systematically murdered millions of its own citizens. It’s pretty clear that rebelling against authority or asking questions are not encouraged in China.
August 29th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
I don’t wish to get into a long political discussion about China, Hektor, but let me just point out one clear observation. In my very short experience with students these last two weeks, what was very clear to me, was that the Chinese faculty in the two universities I visited were bending over backwards to encourage the students to ask questions and questions the speakers.
August 29th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
Mark, I don’t really want to get into a long political discussion about China either. But it is ludicrous to assume that the larger political and cultural forces in a country won’t have an effect on the way education occurs in that country. So if you are genuinely interested in how and why Chinese education works, you can’t avoid the larger political, cultural, and economic currents in Chinese society.
August 29th, 2005 at 1:26 pm
Yes Hektor, ludicrous indeed. That’s why I’m not doing it, and instead am just reporting on what I experienced. Try to read what I wrote before putting fingers to keyboard please. Don’t put words in my mouth or assumptions into my head.
August 31st, 2005 at 4:10 am
My Second Week in China – Beijing
A few days ago I promised I’d report on my second week in China, so here goes.
On Saturday the 21st, we flew to Beijing and checked into the Jade Palace Hotel, near the Institute for Theoretical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The same…
August 31st, 2005 at 4:14 am
[...] A few days ago I promised I’d report on my second week in China, so here goes. [...]