MCLC: educational detente

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: educational detente
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/25/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/world/asia/educational-detente-across-tai
wan-strait.html

Educational Détente Across Taiwan Strait
By NAOMI ROVNICK

TAIPEI — Last January, Chao Ying, a student from northeasternChina,
stepped out of the train station into the rain at Jiufen, a picturesque
former gold mining town in northern Taiwan, and saw something that puzzled
her.

A politician from the governing Kuomintang party, who had won a
legislative seat in Taiwan’s elections the day before, was standing in the
back of an open van that was driving up and down the road outside the
station, shouting his thanks through a loudspeaker to passers-by.

“At first I didn’t know who this might be, or what exactly he was doing,”
said Ms. Chao, 25, who is studying veterinary sciences at National Chung
Hsing University in Taichung, in central Taiwan. “I had to ask someone on
the street.”

“I thought it was very good to see a politician thanking the people,” she
said. “The Taiwanese must be very touched when they see such a thing.”

It was one more eye-opening experience for a mainland Chinese student in
Taiwan. Ms. Chao is among more than 1,000 mainlanders who, for the first
time, have been permitted to study for academic degrees in Taiwan and have
just completed their inaugural academic year.

The government of Taiwan, the self-ruling island over which Beijing claims
sovereignty, has been inching toward more amicable relations with the
mainland in recent years. The full opening of the island’s universities to
students from across the strait last year followed more limited academic
exchange programs and the expansion of tourism and direct flights from the
Chinese mainland.

The new admissions policy has been hailed as a success by universities and
officials in Taiwan. Allowing young people who could eventually rise to
influential positions in Communist-ruled China to immerse themselves in
Taiwan society, they say, should enhance sympathy for the mainland’s
democratic neighbor.

“Many Taiwanese students go to the U.S. and return very pro-American. We
want to generate that same kind of effect,” said Ho Jow-fei, director
general of higher education in the Ministry of Education. He added, “It is
possible that some of the mainland students who come to study here may one
day become political leaders.”

Taiwan also sees a partial solution to the problem of maintaining
enrollments and standards as a falling birth rate shrinks the pool of
applicants at home.

As for the motives of the students from mainland China, several cited an
education system modeled on that of the United States that could position
them well for a career abroad, but at a more reasonable cost and offered
in Mandarin.

Xu Jincheng, 22, of Shanghai, who is studying engineering at Feng Chia
University, said that in Taiwan he was learning to think on his feet. At
his mainland university, which he did not want to identify for fear of
embarrassing his former teachers, the approach was “too narrow and
theoretical.”

His tutors in Taiwan, he said, push him to come up with creative solutions
to real-life challenges. This was useful, he added, because “in many
companies the boss expects employees to solve practical problems.”

The mainland students have grown up hearing their government’s oft-stated
position that Taiwan, separately ruled since the end of the Chinese civil
war in 1949, rightfully belongs to China and that no means, including
military force, can be excluded to achieve eventual reunification.

Still, Joseph Wong, a University of Toronto political science professor,
said the students were likely to return home with the message that “these
two societies are unlikely to become one.”

“These mainland Chinese students tend to experience Taiwan as a
fundamentally different place,” said Mr. Wong, who also teaches at Fudan
University in Shanghai and says he visits Taiwan at least twice a year.

One student who has noted sharp contrasts is Zhu Haoqing, a 24-year-old
from Hebei Province who is studying for a master’s degree in land
management at Feng Chia University in Taichung.

Mr. Zhu said he chose to study in Taiwan because he thought a similar
master’s program in China would focus primarily on “government
administration,” a reference to China’s top-down approach to urban
planning, in which the state can evict residents, with little
compensation, for infrastructure and other development projects.

In Taiwan, by contrast, Mr. Zhu said, he has noticed that residents have
property rights protected by law and that development plans are more
influenced by “the needs of existing householders and businesses.”

Some mainland students said in interviews that they felt it their duty to
return home after their studies and tell their peers and families how
democracy works.

“I think I am here in Taiwan to learn about this society,” said Gavin Wu,
19, who studies business at Feng Chia and is from the eastern Chinese city
of Hangzhou. “I think I’m expected to go back home to help society
develop.”

Other students wondered how easy it would be to introduce democratic
practices to mainland China.

Tai Zhao, 22, who is from the southern city of Xiamen and is working on a
master’s degree in public administration at Chung Hsing, said universal
suffrage would be logistically unachievable on the mainland because of its
huge population.

What struck him about the elections in January, he said, was campaigners
for the governing Kuomintang and the opposition Democratic Progressive
Party lining the streets of Taichung holding large, colorful placards.
“You couldn’t do that on the mainland,” Mr. Tai said. “It would take a
candidate far too long to print enough placards for all the streets in
China.”

Harry Zhang, a 19-year-old from Jiangsu Province studying engineering at
Feng Chia, had similar views about what he perceived as the impracticality
of holding national elections on the mainland because of the assumed high
cost for candidates.

“The candidates must pay to go on television and for all their
campaigners’ signs,” he said. “I’m not sure that in mainland China, with
all our people, candidates could afford to compete in costly elections.”

Watching an election in Taiwan, however, had disabused some of the
students of the belief that democracy on the island is a chaotic process,
as it is often portrayed by the Chinese state media. “I thought the Taiwan
election would be more violent than it was,” Mr. Zhang said. “It was very
peaceful.”

Zhu Ziqian, 25, a business student at Feng Chia who is from Beijing, said
he had expected his classmates in Taiwan to be far more excited about the
national election than they were. For him, elections were a fascinating
novelty. “I watched the live TV coverage of the Taiwan elections for three
days, for as many hours as I could,” he said. “To see it in real life,
that was really something.”

Some students said one of the attractions of Taiwan was access to an
Internet unfettered by mainland censors. “It’s like I can unlock all my
country’s secrets,” said a graduate student at Chung Hsing, who asked that
his name not be used to protect his career prospects.

“As soon as I arrived in Taoyuan,” he said, referring to Taiwan’s main
international airport, “I logged onto the Internet and searched for
information about June 4, 1989.” He was speaking of the date of the
military crackdown on student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in
Beijing.

A business student at Feng Chia, who did not want his name used for
similar reasons, said that he, too, has spent time reading “international
media to find out about mainland China.”

“Since I moved here,” he said, “I have watched videos on YouTube about the
Cultural Revolution,” he said of the decade of political turmoil unleashed
by Mao Zedong in 1966, when traditional culture came under assault.

“One thing I have enjoyed a lot about Taiwan is seeing many old buildings,
even though Taiwanese society is not very old,” he said. “In mainland
China we have a much older society but we have destroyed many of our old
buildings. I don’t know why, on the mainland, we haven’t preserved much of
our heritage.”

One widely held view among educators in Taiwan, said Mr. Wong of the
University of Toronto, is that admitting mainland students “showcases
Taiwan strategically in the minds of young and educated Chinese, who could
themselves become senior Communist Party members.”

Wan Chin-tai, vice president of international affairs at Tamkang
University, a private institution in Taipei that took in 78 mainland
students this past year, echoed that sentiment. “The mainland students are
discovering that Taiwan is a wonderful environment in which to live and
learn,” he said.

That lesson seems to have been absorbed by Bo Lai, 22, a graduate student
in marine biology at Chung Hsing.
“On the mainland, we’re all fighting to get ahead,” he said. “There are
fewer educational resources, such a big population and very few
opportunities. Competition is fierce.”

In Taiwan, he said, “the pace of life is slower. They don’t push others
when they’re walking. They have health care and enough money. So they can
look around, and think about the welfare of others.”

Of course, one obstacle to these students’ exerting influence on the
mainland is that they might not want to go back, even though they are not
permitted to stay in Taiwan after they complete their degrees.

“When I return to the mainland, I want to share my experiences of Taiwan,”
said Susan Chen, 18, a marketing student at Feng Chia. “But then I’d like
to use this international education I have received in Taiwan to move
abroad.”

“My parents also want to move abroad,” she said.