A semester in Nanjing

I’m now in Nanjing, living in a dormitory room on the Nanjing Normal University campus. Earlier this week I registered, took a placement test, and walked around to find the essentials like cheap street food, wireless internet, and the nearest Wal-Mart and Carrefour. I also showed a couple students with limited Chinese who just stepped off the plane around and helped them pick up all kinds of stuff.

I thought the placement test was pretty easy. Each section – grammar, vocabulary, and reading – got progressively more difficult but I was pretty confident of my answers on even the most difficult questions. And I skipped ahead to do the last section, an essay, first to make sure I had time to write a lot.

I was shocked to learn the next day that I was placed into a class at the low end of year three; in other words, a fifth semester course for students who have taken two years of Chinese. I was pretty surprised because I have only spent three semesters teaching in China while studying on my own (studying only year one level books). I took a Chinese class last year for all of one and a half months.

It turns out the placement test isn’t very good at measuring anything beyond the very beginner level and somehow my exam was interpreted as that of a third year student. I’m pretty good at taking language exams now and I prepared and tried as hard as I could. As soon as I bought the books for that level (advanced writing, ancient Chinese, modern literature) I realized it was way beyond my level and I switched to year two. The course involves eight classes a week of speaking, five classes of listening, and three classes of writing, all at the intermediate level. There’s also four classes of newspaper reading, two classes of business Chinese, and three classes of Chinese for tourism each week. The level of the textbooks and the coursework still seem pretty challenging, but doable. Certainly a better fit than fifth semester ancient Chinese.

Charity in China

“In the United States, [charitable] giving represents about 2.1 percent of gross domestic product; in China, it's closer to 0.35 percent.”

The movie star Jet Li, among others, is trying to expand philanthropy in China, where civil society is much smaller and less active than in western countries. Charitable giving was one of the silver linings in the Sichuan earthquake last May. The natural disaster triggered a flood of donations from people around the country. For the wealthy urban residents and corporations who contributed large sums of money, it was a significant development because private philanthropy had been almost non-existent before then.

Fireworks during the Chinese New Year, as seen from my window.

on YouTube.

Chinese New Year pictures

These pictures from the Boston Globe are much better than my pictures of the Chinese New Year. Some of the celebrations, including fireworks, incense, red lanterns and feasts with family, are shown in these pictures from across China and in Chinese communities around the world.

Freedom of information

The satellite box in my house, which was out of service for about half a year, was fixed the other day. We now have some good English channels that are broadcast in many Asian and European countries, such as CNN International, the BBC, and Sky Sports, and some American stations like ESPN, HBO, Discovery, and National Geographic. Satellite TV outside of hotels and other specially designated places is illegal in China, but anyone can easily get set up with satellite service from the Philippines, so we get several Filipino channels also. It’s way better than Chinese TV, which is a lot of unwatcheable Chinese programs and news (soap operas, old war movies, and 10 minute cycles of news on endless repeat), and one English channel (cooking shows and cheery news clips on repeat), and some of the movies are highly censored for sex and violence and worse, some of the news is censored for anything that is anti-China.

So it’s not hard for a Chinese person to get free access to movies and news on television but its mostly in English, in addition to a few channels in other Asian languages, and one each in French and German. It’s the same for the internet; a good number of Chinese websites are blocked, but it seems that 99% of English websites are accessible, so I rarely have a problem surfing online.

The social networking tools on Facebook are facilitating a youth political movement in Egypt. The U.S. State Department is following social networking sites and learning how they can play a role in democratization.

I thought how young people are using Facebook and the internet to organize and create a political movement in Egypt was pretty cool. Facebook played a role in last year’s elections in the U.S. as every candidate had a profile in addition to online fundraising and organization. Obama’s website, myBarack.com, was a full featured social networking site and certainly helped get his younger supporters more involved and organized.

Facebook is catching on among young people here, and there is a Chinese site, xiaonei.com, for high school and university students, and it is almost exactly like Facebook. I don’t know how much political organizing or discussion happens on social networking sites like Facebook in China, but blogs and chat rooms have been used for free expression for years and are probably more effective because they're anonymous, unlike social networking sites where the point is to explicitly identify yourself in your profile. Social networking sites are not only less private but also less fluid than blogs, forums, and chatrooms, which are easy to recreate or relocate if blocked, whereas networking sites are a fixed website and only are useful if they have a critical number of users.

It seems that a lot of good things will come out of the growing access to communication tools like cell phones and the internet in the struggles to expand wealth, knowledge, and democratic and transparent governance.