Travels in China: Post-Mao Halls of Knowledge and the Children of the Silk Road
by Jacquelyn Ford Morie
June 2004
We set off for Hangzhou, one of the most beautiful cities in China. The Chinese say “heaven above, Hangzhou below” to summarize the wonders of this cultural and commercial center in southeast China. Hangzhou is also the home of Zhejiang University and its State Key Lab for Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Graphics, a world-class science and engineering center. The campus is calm and peaceful, and it could easily be accepted as a university in any American city if it were not for the tremendous statue of Chairman Mao with raised hand in the center of the grounds. The gesture is familiar to westerners and to the increasingly westernized students, who have nicknamed the statue “Taxi!” It is one of the few Mao statues left on Chinese campuses. Most others have been torn down.
We are here to attend a Zhejiang University-hosted workshop on Visual Learning for Science and Engineering Students. Experts from the world over have assembled for the workshop, funded by ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics, two of the most prestigious professional groups in computer graphics. A significant percentage of our group are Chinese professors and students, and their viewpoints are important. They all speak English, though some are unsure of their abilities. Only three of the westerners speak any Chinese.
One of the highlights of our visit was a tour of the university's new campus north of the city, an expansive area that includes technology incubators in addition to labs and classrooms. The architecture is exceptional, as are the facilities and the students. In the new theater, we saw a dress rehearsal for a variety show the architecture students had put together: skits, musical performances, and ethnic dances. These artistic and cultural talents are often developed along with technical skills in China, even though the arts have not been the primary focus of most higher education in recent decades. However, this is changing. Throughout China there is a new move to bring the creative side of the brain into play, and most campuses are adding arts and media programs. The Chinese want to change the perception that they are technically competent but not very inventive. Promoting the arts in universities is the first step to fostering a creative workforce.
Everywhere we went, the emphasis on education was evident. University students know they are privileged to be attending classes. One told us that students would never think of missing a class. In fact, such absences could lead to dismissal from the university. Studies are taken very seriously, and students pay far more attention to them than to other activities that American students take for granted, like dating and "hanging out". In China, student life is group life, and serious dating is usually postponed until after graduation.
  In Hangzhou, Dunhuang, and all our other stops in China, children were the main attraction, from tiny boys studying in their parents’ shops (the big red book is the Chinese dictionary), to their spontaneous and charming songs and dances. We were as intriguing to them as they were to us, and we needed no other language than that essential human interest to make the communication perfect. We learned so much in this way, bringing the spirit and beauty of China home with us in our hearts, except for those bits of our hearts we left there, at the edge of the Gobi Desert, singing with the children.
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