4 July Geely University

Geely Automotive University is about is about an hour and a half outside of Beijing by bus. It seemed to be really far away, but traffic was really horrible, as we’ve come to expect from Beijing. They have about 20,000 students, and expect about 10,000 more to enroll next year. They recruit their students, and are a private university. Geely automotive group is a (shocking, I know) car manufacturing company. Their cars look a little bit like Toyotas (ok, that may be blasphemy, but it’s the best I can do on such short notice). They have invested their profit into creating this university, which has 16 colleges/schools, including the following:

a. Euro-American colleges (specializes in training young people to go abroad to further their studies)
b. Foreign language school
c. Law
d. Finance
e. Journalism
f. Automobile building (natch. One would HOPE that there would be an automotive school in a university funded by an automotive company!!!)

Geely means “Great Fortune” in Chinese, and with good reason. The campus is quite large, and it is vastly undeveloped at the moment. They are in the process of building their library, which has a distinct resemblance to the Capitol building in DC. I’m not sure if I got a picture of it…in all honesty, I am writing this days after the visit, and so my memory of the event is a bit fuzzy. I did take notes, so no fear, dear readers.

Geely is a private and independent car company, a rarity in China, to be sure. Most other companies work in a joint venture with the government. I think most businesses in China are still joint venture, although many more are becoming private, I think. The leader of our group, Jian Wang, is one of the founders of the university, along with the Vice President, Professor Chen. Prof. Chen spent two years at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and his English was excellent. Prof. Chen was among those who were to be “re-educated” by the Red Guard and his own students during the Cultural Revolution. What I find interesting about many of these experiences is that the people who were affected by this (Jian is one of those, more on that later), often will mention what happened to them in a casual way and then not want to discuss it any further. I completely understand them not wanting to discuss it, but I’m kind of surprised they’d mention it at all, especially given how private so many people are here. Anyway we got a ton of statistics about university life in China, and I promise I won’t bore you with them.

We did learn some interesting things about Chinese language instruction: in the 1950s and 60s, Chinese language instruction was really disjointed – you learn a particular set of things at the primary level, and then when you go onto the next level, you go back to the beginning, and so on and et cetera. (Sound familiar?) Zhou Enlai (who is quite revered in China… more on him later), said that language instruction in China needed to follow the “One Dragon” approach – you start at the head and continue in an organized fashion to the tail, making sure that it’s all connected and that it makes sense. I thought this was wonderful, and BOY do we need that in the States. And not just for language instruction, but for history instruction as well. Why is it, exactly, that school children need US history three times? Why do they have to learn about Egypt twice? Why not have an organized set of curricula that spirals upward and toward a common goal of creating a functioning citizen. More on that thought later too. I know, I’m making lots of promises.

Anyway, I think the best part about the whole trip to the university was the opportunity we had to meet with a student at the university. We met a young woman named Maggie who was incredibly sweet. She was at the end of her first year of studies. She was studying English, and was of course, very modest about her knowledge of the language. She reminded me of several students that I have had in the past – she was very chatty about everything. She is one of those students who in the States would probably talk all the time in class (and about nothing, really), but you can’t be mad at her because she’s just so sweet. She took us on a tour of the campus (a brief one, it was BLOODY hot that day, and incredibly smoggy…they ain’t got nothin’ on LA), and then we went back to the conference room. She was supposed to give a speech at their graduation ceremony which was held that afternoon. Turns out we were invited to that ceremony, which I was pretty horrified about, because we didn’t know that we’d been invited, and I was wearing jeans, as were many other people. Anyway, she asked if we would listen to her practice her speech. We said sure, and asked her if she’d written it, and she said no, her teacher had written it, and just told her to give the speech. She gave us the speech, and it was really wonderful. Pam gave her a couple of pencils as a thank you gift, and Maggie ran off to the store to get us these little friendship/luck charms.