Environment and Education Class and "Hollywood"

June 30, 2008- Monday

We woke up and went running before our environmental class. We have been eating peanut butter and bread sandwiches for breakfast and sometimes getting a popsicle or ice cream bar from the little shop across the way from the hotel during the breaks. We don’t feel like eating Chinese food for breakfast and we really don’t want to use our meal plans on it either. We are completely satisfied with good ole fashioned peanut butter and have deemed it as God’s gift to the earth.

Our fist class today was on the environment of China. We had a guest speaker and he talked about how most of the major rivers are in the Southern part of China, which makes water distribution very unbalanced. The government has worked to transfer water from the South to the North through a variety of ways, one being the Three Georges Dam. The Three Georges dam is a damming of the Yangtze river and it is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. It was finished in May of 2006 and 1.3 million people lost their homes as a result. It is very controversial.

She showed us pictures of a dust storm that occurred in Beijing in 2005 due to lack of water and soil erosion. She asked us our individual opinions of the Beijing environment and we told him that it is so smoggy all the time. You can never tell if it is going to rain or not nor can you ever see most of the buildings. She hit on the climate change and the things the world needs to do to combat those problems.

She talked about surveying six villages and gave us a list of the factors that impact farmer income which include: cereal price, planting area, disaster, ability to sell, feed price, fertilizer price, and others. She explained that a lot of farming communities have to adapt to drought through diversification of crops and work activities, specialization such as livestock breeding, changing crop types, rain water harvesting, and using soil moisture conservation methods. The soil moisture conservation methods were very interesting; she showed a picture of clear plastic film covering the grown to protect the earth from drying. She said that dispite having ideas and options some rural communities have a more difficult time adapting than others due to location, economic development, transportation, education, gender of leaders, poverty, and age. She said that some people depend on recycling for their living and we have seen many people collecting plastic bottles at tourist attractions.

She also talked a great deal about China’s natural resources. Arable land loss is a big issue since China is operating with less than 10% of the world’s land and feeding more than 22% of the world’s population. In 2003 they lost 2.53 million hectares (a hectare is 2.5 acres) to construction, disaster, ecological safeguard, and transfer usage. We talked for quite a while about lack of water and the steps they are taking to provide more where needed. At the end of the class we did a group debate on controlling fertilizer pollution with one group being the farmers (Ashe, Deryck, Mark and I), another group being the government, and another group being environmentalists. It didn’t get too heated, but it was interesting to hear the responses of most groups. We had a whole list of good ideas, but for some reason after hearing form the other groups she didn’t solicit our answers. We said they could rotate the crops so certain nutrients are put back in the ground, collect water vial tiling, collect and use waste from animals as fertilizer, improve irrigation systems for waste management, use hybrid crops that are drought resistant, not tilling the land, fertilizer needs to be available to the farmers, combine the smaller farms for more efficient use, educate the farmers, and make sure they don’t use too much.

During lunch we just went to our rooms and ate snacks we had from the store. I worked on some emails and the girls napped. We usually have time off from 11:30 a.m. until 2:00 p.m..

Our afternoon class was on the education system and was taught by Dr. Lee, a very good English speaking man who is very interesting. One real interesting point about the Chinese education system is that in the 1970’s all of the students were sent to the countryside to learn from the farmers during the Cultural Revolution. This is because the existing education system was questioned and criticized and the National Entrance Examination was abolished. All of the universities were actually forced to closed and university teachers were sent to the countryside for “re-education.” Students who wanted to go to school after the reform had to be recommended by their factory leaders or the people in the countryside they had worked with. Dr. Lee highlighted the fact that in Sichuan, where the earthquake was, the school buildings collapsed, but the government buildings stood standing. This shows the lack of investment in the schools.

He talked about how the children are under so much pressure to perform well in school since there are so many people competing for university positions that lead to actual jobs. He said that children in preschool are happy because there is no pressure. He said that preschool lines out the basics, only occurs in the rural areas of China. The tuition for preschool is 6000 yuan, which is about $800 and the fee doesn’t include food or lunch.

China has a nine year compulsory system of education and students start school at the age of six. He talked of his granddaughter who has a very heavy load of homework every night. He said that richer families send their children to private tutors and lessons on Saturdays and Sundays so they can do better on college entrance exams. The higher schooling entrance exams are something we hear about often. Many schools offer practice exams and they have a test between middle school and high school and high school and the university. The whole process is important because if you do well in primary school, you are able to go to better middles schools, and then better high schools and then better universities. He says that some students have way too much homework and they never have time to go to an interesting museum or park. As a professor, he says that some of his students do not have quality English and they are not getting the basics in their former schooling.

They do have special education and vocational education, but it is very minimal. He said that a lot of young people learn by chatting on the internet and discussion on discussion boards. He said that most students learn English as their second language, but with the onset of the Olympics they are looking for people who speak other “small” languages to act as volunteers.

He said that unlike the United States, undergraduate students get little help from academic advisors because there are too many of them, but graduate students may get some direction.

He also opened up to us saying that all of the positive things happening in china like the up in the GDP and the building of all of the Olympic venues do not help the small peasants in the countryside. I wondered to myself if we have anything similar to this in our American countryside. He said the big cities are the so called “windows” to China, but they do not show the interesting things. China is a big country; a country in transition. You can see lots of interesting things on the rail roads (and we will when we ride a train to Inner Mongolia in a couple of weeks) or on the subway. The cities are great, but just beyond the boundary things are different. This reminded me of when we visited Mick and Nora Suman at their hotel during the first couple of weeks. That area was on the edge of Beijing, near the airport and it reminded me of the poor communities we saw when I traveled to the Dominican Republic during winter 2007. He said that just 100 km from this big, booming city that is going to be showcased to the world in about a month it is very poor. They have no good roads, no water, and poor people living in terrible conditions. He said the central government (I guess he means “the party”) looks at big ideas not the rural communities. Agricultural economists go to the rural communities and see how rural people live. He said New York is similar to Beijing, but the countryside’s of China and the U.S. are not similar at all.

This is when he went on a rant about how he hates how people waste water. He said that in Beijing there are about 7 million dogs. I’d believe it because we’ve seen lots of them with people out on walks. It is amazing to me that people can walk their dogs in a big city with no leash and have no problem. He said it is a complete waste for all those dogs to have all that water. He said pet food requires more leashes and resources. He thinks there should be a tax for having dogs. Now, I don’t know if I agree with him on this whole shebang because a lot of these people are only able to have one child and their dogs are part of their family, but I see his point. A lot of older people have dogs as their child may be living in a far away area or not around at all. He also thinks that the government officials should not have their own cars. He went on about spending oodles of money one Olympic venues, signs, landscaping, and everything else, while the poor people are suffering.

After that very interesting class, we were all pretty hungry and we knew that we wanted to do something quick since we had an early field trip on Tuesday. Johanna and Greg had found a couple of restaurants in the basement of the shopping mall that we live really, really close to. We all walked over there as a big group and scoured the menu. We went to a restaurant called, “Hollywood.” It took a long time for the one waitress to take all of our orders, but eventually we finally got through to her. Some people got cheese burgers, others got Philly steak, and others go Chinese. I got the French bread pizza. It wasn’t that good, but it tasted like home, nonetheless. After eating, we all milled around the mall for a little while. This mall had separate stores, but they weren’t separated by a wall or anything. The New Balance store butted up right next to the Puma store. The clothes were neat looking, but not any cheaper than something you’d find at home.

After walking around for quite a while, we eventually came home and worked on our journals and just hung out in our rooms.