“It is time to have some qualified teachers to teach politics class. We should let children participate more in politics, care more about politics, instead of telling them those boring and abstract concepts.”

Mandarin may be booming in the U.S., but the numbers still aren’t that impressive:

“From the way the U.S. media talk about the boom in Mandarin classes, it’s easy to get the impression that Mandarin is about to become the most studied language in the United States. So I offer the following overdue reality check.
The data come from the results of a large survey of foreign-language enrollments in U.S. post-secondary schools. The survey was conducted by the Modern Language Association. I started work on this post when the results were released in November 2007; but, well, I got distracted.”

In Beijing, students of all ages learn English before the Olympics:

“I love”

“I love”

“the”

“the”

“swimming”

“swimming”

“events.”

“events.”

School children from three years on learn Confucius in Zhengzhou:

“To learn and to practice what is learned time and again is pleasure, is it not? To have friends from afar is happiness, is it not?”

Personal profiles of Chinese professors and students at the University of Michigan reveal the ups and downs of leaving China:

“Seth Yee left a Beijing law firm to come study in America because, as he jokingly puts it, he ‘wasn’t a good enough lawyer.’ Yee studied social work at the University of Georgia, then worked in Washington, DC, for an Asian Youth association, where he saw his first dragon boat festival. ‘I’ve been to more Chinese cultural events in the U.S. than I ever attended in China,’ Yee says. Yee, who has returned to U-M to study law, says that he has come to a more “complete” view on China since leaving the country. ‘Chinese legal studies at Michigan are 20 years ahead of Chinese legal studies in China,’ he says. Still, Yee worries that Chinese academics rely too heavily on Western models. ‘One sad thing is that no one reflects on what we’re adopting,’ he said. ‘It is assumed that a Chinese scholar is necessarily a Western scholar.’

A Michigan chemistry professor enthuses about China’s changes:

“As American scientists, my colleagues and I have been accustomed to thinking of the United States as the destination for scientific training for the past 60 years. The caricature of science in China is what we disparagingly call doing ‘turn the crank’ experiments: no invention, perhaps not even a strong sense for the fundamental theory behind the buttons being pushed on the equipment, and the generation of experimental data without a strong critical sense to sort out the wheat from the chaff. In fact, this was neither universal nor the norm. Placed in the context of history, the progress made by Chinese science was spectacular. Especially when you consider that it effectively did not exist from 1949-1980, a time during which Western science grew enormously. In twenty years’ time, 1980-2000, much of science had rebooted to levels that were in places only about a decade behind us, and in other places right up to date. In the past eight years, this gap has narrowed.

Politically and socially, I was not prepared for the openness I found. As an elementary school kid in the 1960s, I learned how to crouch under my desk to protect myself from the fallout from Commie bombs. I think I still had lingering impressions of what life in a Communist State would look and sound like. I had lots of frank questions for my hosts and guides, and the candid answers surprised me. I recall being particularly curious about the one-child policy, and the endless array of exceptions to it. The provision that mixed marriages were excluded, for example, seemed at least consistent with the obvious number of young Chinese girls on the arms of Western boys.”