Saturday, April 1 (from Beijing)
Dear parents and friends of Beijing Seminar students,
I wrote last from Hanoi on our next-to-the last day in Vietnam. For a number of our students, our last day in that fascinating city encompassed a great deal of emotion. One of our students, Laura, had discovered that the Hanoi Symphony was giving one of its rare performances. She and a number of our students obtained tickets and-dressed to the hilt-attended what turned out to be a great occasion.
The single work on the program was Beethoven's 9th Symphony. The work had been chosen with great care, not only for its musical significance but for its themes of universal brotherhood. I quote directly from the program notes, exactly as they were written:
"The Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven is one of the greatest achievements of the mankind culture. The symphony's idea development has suggested that lyric insertion as the mankind's voice. …..By the ending part, its theme of victory has become a song of the pleasure and an appeal for global solidarity……The great musical work will be performed by the Hanoi National Conservatory Choir and Orchestra. Perhaps we will not be able to reach the work's large stature, however, the aspiration for praise Beethoven's thoughts 'Let everyone be Brothers' will certainly be fulfilled, it will be a great happiness because this thought is close to Vietnamese people. 'Vietnam will be a friend to all nations in the World.' A new millennium, the 'gladness' is approaching to us."
Mary Lewis wrote a wonderful account of the evening in her journal, and she has allowed me to quote a few of the paragraphs. In Mary Lewis's words:
"There was an air of anticipation in the hall, and the hall itself was beautiful.
"Before the music itself started, two women dressed in velvet came to the front of the concert hall and speaking into microphones, gave a rather long and formal introduction to the event. One spoke in Vietnamese and the other in French. From the French-speaker, I learned that the evening's performance was the first ever of Beethoven's 9th in Hanoi and that the chorus was made up of Hanoi Conservatory students. There were apologies: if this was not to be the best performance of Beethoven's 9th that could be given, we were to know that great deal of time, effort, and rehearsal had gone into its preparation. They talked about the work itself and Beethoven's wish that it express feelings of universal brotherhood……
"There was something profoundly touching about the whole evening: the many different nationalities represented in the concert hall, the faces of the musicians-especially those of the earnest young conservatory students who made up the chorus, the slightly tense expectancy of the four vocal soloists who smoothed their clothing, eyed the audience, and took deep breaths as they waited to perform, and the final burst of incredible sound as the chorus ended on its triumphal notes. …….
"The final movement with the chorus was astonishingly good and the applause swelled, became slow and rhythmic, and went on and on.
"The themes, the music, the setting, and all the musicians were trying to convey with this first-ever Hanoi performance of Beethoven's 9th tied together many of the complex emotions I'd been feeling all week in Vietnam: gratitude at the friendliness we'd encountered, amazement and near disbelief at Vietnamese forgiveness for the destruction and three million deaths the war cost them, and hope that the future will be kinder to this lovely country and graceful people.
"At several points during the concert, just thinking about where I was and what I was hearing, I was moved to tears.
"After the concert, several of us went to a little café for ice cream and soft drinks and-in a complete change of mood-we listened to a very good jazz band. Prior, Sara, Alex, and Akiko danced. They were terrific! Alex, Prior, Sara, and one or two others told us about the day they had spent visiting the village of a teacher they had met earlier in a park. Almost wistfully, Alex said 'If I were to find that our tickets out of Hanoi had been cancelled, I wouldn't be sorry.' It is with reluctance on the part of many of us that we leave Vietnam."
Mary Lewis's words catch the feeling that many of us had. But our tickets were there, and we arrived in Beijing on Saturday evening. Beijing has a brand new airport that was built in anticipation of the crowds that would be arriving for the 2000 Olympics games (awarded to Australia instead). The new airport is immense and dazzling, a real change from the two small, crowded rooms I flew in and out of only a few months ago.
We were met at the airport by our friend, Guo Jie, from the University of International Business and Economics. The University has strong relationships with the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the Bank of China (not the Peoples' Bank of China), two of China's most important reform bureaucracies. The Chinese students at the university are among the most internationally minded in China and most are preparing for careers in foreign trade and finance. We have a longstanding relationship with this school and returning here (for us oldsters) is like coming home.
Our students are housed in a brand new dormitory. The rooms are small and clean. Each has two beds, two desks and a small bathroom. What the bathroom does NOT have, however, is a bathtub…just a shower that comes directly out of the wall, Taiwan style. So the person taking the shower stands directly on the floor and, because there is no shower curtain, everything from toilet to towels gets a bit wet. And, of course, there is hot water for only a few hours each day and sometimes the electricity goes out. But, all in all, the building is very elegant by Chinese student standard. (Our students' rooms contrast, for example with the men's dorm a few buildings away, where the same size room is shared by seven young men in four sets of bunk beds-the 8th bed used as a sort of closet and storage area.)
On Sunday, our plan was to get out and about in order to give the students a general orientation to this immense old city. We started with a climb up Coal Hill, which is at the north end of the old historic area. From the top of the hill we could see the broad stretch of the city and we all looked in awe at the sheer scope of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.
The park where the Hill is located was filled with people on their weekend outings. The place is known for its group singing-large groups of people sort of spontaneously come together all over the park to sing in large and small groups. Some of us attached ourselves to a Chinese group of about 200 people who were singing revolutionary walking songs. These songs, not especially political in nature, were more like what you sang in camp as you walked along a trail. I remember especially "I tip my hat to China," a song that is accompanied by a lot of hand clapping, the tipping of your imaginary hat, etc. All of these groups singing across the park convey a sense of energy and exhilaration that is hard not to share.
We went from there to Tiananmen Square itself, reputed to be the largest paved open space in the world. We broke for lunch, then re-gathered, walked across the immense space, and posed for a group picture (at least that part of the group that made it back from lunch on time). Then we were off to the Forbidden City where we trekked through this awesome compound with a thousand buildings and, perhaps, 10,000 rooms. It is awe-inspiring. (If you want to see it on video, perhaps the best source is the first 20-30 minutes of The Last Emperor.)
At the end of the afternoon we returned to the dorm where everyone picked up a bicycle. Most of the bikes are sort of a basic Stalinist black of the old Schwinn style that was popular in the 1950's (except for Mary Lewis's bike---our university picked out for her a bright pink bike which she can spot immediately in a sea of a thousand parked black bicycles). These bikes are not fast or fancy. But they are just right for Beijing's broad bike-laned streets where you proceed in a sort of regal, slow processional style. Pretty soon we were all out and about, biking across our part of town.
On Monday evening, in the dorm lobby, our students met their Chinese pen pals with whom they had already exchanged letters and e-mails. There were a few awkward moments since our e-mail correspondence had not always included pictures and we did not recognize one another. It took a few minutes for the students to find one another and get over their initial shyness, but soon everyone was talking like old friends. After dinner, several of our students presented a small very spirited talent show: four students sang (very well) accompanied by Prior's violin and Jason's guitar and several others gave a lively, athletic demonstration of swing dancing.
The real core of the seminar, of course, is the academic program, and on Monday we started our formal classes-beyond the lecturing we had already done in hotel meeting rooms, on buses, walking along the streets, etc. Penny Prime teaches a course on Chinese economic development, focusing on both micro and macro-economic themes; I teach a course on Chinese government and decision-making, looking at the role of national and local political activity as well as at the role of state agencies in economic activity. These are not simply classroom courses. Since our goal is to get the students out into the field and into the Chinese economy itself, both of our courses are based on a series of site visits.
The 35 students on this program are divided into 16 teams that coincide, roughly, with the divisions on China's State Council and the State Planning Commission. (Finance, heavy industry, health care, food processing, transportation, education, etc.) On each of our site visits, the students are charged with discovering as much as possible about their specific team topic. They can do this by asking questions of our formal host, by wandering around the factory itself and looking, and by talking to anyone they run into in the factory. Afterward, we get together as a group and de-brief one another, trying to put together a composite picture of what we have seen and learned. There is an art to asking the right questions in these factories, and Penny and I were very pleasantly surprised at how quickly the students have acquired the knack of asking skilled questions.
We are using as a teaching device the important question that is hotly debated right now in China: should China join the World Trade Organization? From the perspective of my political science course, we are trying to follow the debate over this question-a debate that spills over into streets, factories, and farms, as well as most government offices. As we are seeing, Chinese politics involves more than a group of old men sitting in downtown Beijing offices deciding the direction of the entire country. Instead, we are becoming aware of the discussion about the pros and cons of entry into WTO and we are glimpsing some of the give-and-take of the political process. We will link this first-hand observation to the larger theoretical literature in my field having to do with interest group politics, leadership styles, and political transitions.
In Penny's course, students are looking at the economic winners and losers in the WTO question. While China as a whole might benefit from this entry, clearly some groups (such as those in the old state run enterprises) will be "disadvantaged" by WTO entry and these latter groups feel threatened and scared. Other groups, such as the nimble export industries, will clearly benefit, while for yet others, such as Chinese banks, the issue is still in doubt.
Penny's and my courses are, therefore, linked as we try to teach the interaction of economics and politics in any policy debate.
There is, as well, a third "Social Institutions" class designed to give students on-site visits to various parts of the Chinese system. For this course, we've asked the students to prepare a photo essay on some aspect of Chinese life. Looking for potential pictures around a special topic or theme-through the lens of a camera or, for some, via watercolors or pencil drawings-makes our students more active and creative observers of the passing Chinese scene and adds to their own in-depth knowledge of a particular segment of Chinese life here.
Our first site visit was to Capital Iron and Steel on the outskirts of Beijing. This is an enormous complex that employs well over 100,000 people. Capitol Iron and Steel had once been in the forefront of the reform movement; it was a vigorous and energetic state enterprise. On visiting the steel complex in 1989, Mikhail Gorbochev said that "if only we could have 1,000 such plants, our reform effort would be complete." But the rapidity of reform and the development of a really fast-paced and open market economy have begun to leave Capital behind. We wanted the students to see the enormous complex that provides everything from apartments to grocery stores, schools, and banks for its workers. Even more, we want them to understand just how great a threat entry into the WTO poses for such companies that may get left behind in the new economic order. We want them to realize the social as well as economic dislocation that the threat to such enterprises poses and, relatedly, the political impact that such wide dislocation could cause.
The officials at the firm were wonderful to our group. We received a brief presentation, watched a video, asked questions for about 45 minutes (with no question "out of bounds") and then went off to see the production facilities themselves. We went to a blast furnace operation, a cintering mill, and watched the beginnings of the making of a new batch of steel at another furnace. In college, I had worked for four long summers as a laborer in a steel factory and, at the ground level, I worked on blast furnaces, strip finishing lines, furnace repair, and the like. So I was able to give the students a bit of an insight about steel production and how the technologies here did and did not diverge from those in the West.
One of the highlights of this first week in China was our first meeting with a touring group of Carleton alums. About a year and a half ago, Becky Zrimsek (of the Alumni office) and I had sat at a holiday party and had outlined a pipedream about bringing an alumni group to China at the same time that our student Beijing Seminar was here. We talked about how much fun it would be for the "old Carls" to see the young in action, and how valuable it would be for the young Carls to rub shoulders with their more experienced alums. We envisioned a program where past and present Carls could meet one another, travel a few days together, and share their different perspectives on China.
To my great surprise and delight, we actually made it happen. 60 Carleton alums arrived in Beijing on Wednesday. This alumni group has some extraordinary lecturing and teaching resources with it. AMBASSADOR BURT LEVIN has over thirty years experience with the Dept. of State, and most of that experience has been on site in Asia. Burt is fluent in Chinese and has served in virtually every Dept. of State office connected with China. Burt is now retired from State and lives in Massachusetts. He and I teach several joint courses together at Carleton, and he has a wonderful ability to make foreign policy come alive. Burt is accompanied on this trip by his wife, LILY LI LEVIN. Lily was born in Beijing, knows China from the inside, writes about Chinese cuisine and has published a beautiful Chinese cookbook. The third member of the lecturing group is LYMAN VAN SLYKE (known as Van) a just retired famed China historian from Stanford and a Carleton grad from the class of 1952. Van has written extensively on Chinese history, including several of the best books in the west on the Yangzi River.
On Friday, the alumni group left the traditional Chinese tourist track to come out to our section of town. First they visited the Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Then they came out to our University. We made quite a group-over 100 young and old Carls. University officials greeted us and then our students took small groups to some of the small mom-and-pop restaurants that surround our campus. Our hope was to show the alums how our students live and learn in China, and to give them a sense of the "real China" that lies beyond the reach of the grand hotels and air conditioned buses most tours use to keep tourists in line. Ours is a real neighborhood with fruit stands, groceries, little streets and alleys branching off the main roads. The alums seemed to love this foray onto our students' turf and the students played the role of hosts and resident guides to perfection.
Friday night, Carleton's Alumni Association and my seminar hosted a grand banquet at Beihai Park in one of China's most famous restaurants. We had a fifteen-course meal served in the old Manchu imperial style. Again, the students and alums sat together, shared their experiences and toasted one another according to Chinese banquet protocol.
We had some special guests at the dinner, including previous graduates of this seminar who now work in Beijing. One honored guest was the President of our Chinese University, Chen Zhunlin. President Chen gave a short speech and talked about the relationship between our two schools and how much this group of alums and students meant to his university.
Another special guest was Dr. Pu Shan, one of our oldest and dearest China friends. Shan has taught at Carleton three times, the first in 1947, as he was finishing work on his Harvard PhD in Economics. Shan returned to China, joined the revolution, and quickly became an important figure in China's foreign policy establishment. He was private secretary to Zhou Enlai, and traveled to most of the major important China foreign policy events of the 1950's. Then he got caught in the Cultural Revolution and, as he says of the period, "spent a great deal of time growing potatoes." After the Cultural Revolution, he became a member of the reform coalition that emerged in the 1970's, and headed one of the major reform "think tanks" that shaped the policies the new coalition was introducing. His second teaching stint at Carleton was from 1980-81, the first academic from the People's Republic to hold a fully paid academic position in the United States. In the late 1980's, Shan was on to even more important tasks, helping engineer China's entry into the world financial community, becoming Vice Director of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Commission, and President of the graduate university of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Shan taught again at Carleton several years ago.
On Tuesday, our students will travel south by train to Wuhan, where will rejoin the alumni group for a five-day trip up the Yangzi River. On the river, we will see the spectacular gorges, visit several of the small towns, and look at the construction of the dam site. Because of our numbers, we have almost the entire boat to ourselves, this time will provide opportunity for lectures by Burt, Lily, Van, Penny, John, and me. And the students themselves will do some teaching with their older counterparts. It promises to be a feast for eyes and intellect.
Because today is April 1, a small delegation of students came to our apartment this morning to suggest an appropriate prank. As our student group was on the bus, heading for dinner at the house of 19th century Manchu royal figure Prince Gong, (the Manchu prince centrally involved in the reform efforts of the late 1800's) John told the story of the abortive reform movement and Prince Gong's role in it. Then John elaborated a bit. He told the students of how Prince Gong and his friends, wanting to counter the sense that they were trying to rise above the emperor, developed a custom suggesting humility: whenever they entered Prince Gong's house, they would enter by walking backward (showing their opposition) and bowing to the outside world. John explained this in a most serious historically respectful manner, and then said that the tradition continued to this day at the restaurant located in Prince Gong's former house. He said that it had become a tradition to enter this restaurant by walking backward and bowing to those on the sidewalk in the same manner as the officials in the 1800's.
So we did. And people on the sidewalk and in the restaurant stared in amazement as all 42 of us walked backward into the restaurant-bowing as we went. In the restaurant, we proposed a toast to Prince Gong and to "April Fools." At first, we thought there would be serious reprisals. But decorum, forgiveness, and laughter won. I will treasure (and am laughing out loud as I write this part of the letter) the memory of restaurant patrons and passers by watching open-mouthed as we backed and bowed our way into the building. The stories they must be telling!
Finally, I want to report on the reaction of the alumni to our student group. At the end of the banquet Mary Lewis and I greeted each of the departing alums individually. To a person, these alums were brimming with enthusiasm about our young people. They spoke of our students' grace and energy, their sense of adventure, and the special nature of a school that would give so many of its students the opportunity (in China and in the two dozen other programs run directly by Carleton in other parts of the world) to involve themselves in such a first-hand learning experience. The day had brought many of the alums fresh contact with the excitement of what Carleton students are all about, and how much fun it is to be with them.
Beginning on Wednesday, all 100 of us join forces again as we begin our journey up the Yangzi River. I will write again from somewhere in central China, and will try again to include as many pictures as possible.
Roy
p.s., As before, have sent a pile of pictures back which should be on the web site. Pictures are a bit difficult to send from here, some just would not go through. Even more difficult is trying to get these fast-moving students to stand still long enough to catch them with a camera. Always miss a few, can't seem to get pictures of all in every batch. And somebody always seems to be missing from our group pictures. Will try to do my best to have someone sit on the fastest moving of these students, so that eventually we send pictures back of everyone.
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Last updated April 5, 2000 by Tricia Peterson