I am posting this essay my Dad asked me to read, I think it's informative for those of you who have never been to China, this will tell you or explain what China is like. Notice my father writes that he used to travel through Abu Dhabi from Dublin to Shanghai. I have never done this. Whenever I travelled there it was always over Siberia from Amsterdam to Beijing, including the time we went to Shanghai did we fly over Russia and The Gobi Desert.
Working in China
by
my Father
I was invited to work in China on 6 occasions: 1989,1994,1999,2000, 2004 and 2006. The first time in Beijing and Siajiazhang, the second and third time in Beijing and the remaining in Shanghai.
In my presentation on working in Australia some months ago I described my first visit to China in 1989. But it is a good story so I will give you a brief version of it again today.
In mid 1979 I was sitting in my office as head of distance education in Adelaide, South Australia, when I got a letter from the British Council in Sydney. It was an official invitation from the government of China to attend an international conference in Beijing for the 10th anniversary celebrations of the foundation in 1979 of the Chinese DIANDA (Radio and Television) distance education system.
As it was only a few months since the killings in Tienanmin Square I knew I would not be allowed to go so I gave the invitation into the Premier’s office. About a week later I got their decision which had obviously been decided by the Federal Government in Canberra: ‘We want you to go. We consider the President, Mr Bob Hawke, has taken a sufficiently hostile attitude to China so that your attendance will soften our stance’.
When I got to Beijing I was met at the airport and was taken to the MinZu hotel on Fushunmenai Street quite close to Tienanmin Square. On my arrival I was met in my hotel room by 3 officials of the Chinese Ministry of Education who said to me ‘We know you have prepared a presentation for our international conference, we want you to prepare 2 more presentations in your hotel room at night because only 2 of the 20 leading experts we invited have turned up’. I knew this was true because at that time I knew many of the world leaders whom I had rung up before leaving Australia.
The answer was always the same: ‘Yes, we were invited. No, we are not going either for personal reasons or government refusal of travel visas’. One thing I learned was that the Chinese were meticulous in their planning. They had identified the 20 leading distance educators in the world and sent invitations to all of them to attend their conference.
The presentations given at the conference were published in both Chinese and English, the Chinese version has 3 presentations by me, the English version 2. This shows that I prepared one speech in my room at night and had libbed the other one.
The second thing that happened to me on my arrival in the hotel was that I bumped into a young Chinese lady in a bright red coat on the landing outside my room who spoke to me in quite good English and whom I agreed to meet in the restaurant. The result was that I was in the conference all day, I was preparing 2 more speeches in my room at night and meeting the Chinese lady, who is now my wife, and who told me that it was a Chinese custom that we had to meet each other until dawn each morning.
In China I accomplished a feat which is quite impossible. The population of China is 1.4 billion of which 21 million are in Beijing and none of the rest of the population have the hukou for Beijing. The houkou is the residence qualification for residence in a city in China: it is necessary to buy a house, it is necessary to buy a car, it is necessary for medical expenses, it is necessary for social security. As there is a terrible problem in China of country citizens moving to the cities the hukou is one way the government controls some of this migration as it takes 5 years residence in Beijing to qualify for the hukou. No foreigner can buy a house in China as they certainly do not have the hukou.
When I left Australia to return to Ireland I set myself 3 goals:
(i) To buy a family home in Dublin, Ireland, where i was brought up.
(ii) To buy a holiday home in Europe for the family – this I bought 20 years ago in France near Poitiers which I still own
(iii) To buy a holiday home for the family in Asia- which I bought in Silo City, in the eastern suburbs of Beijing though I did not have the hukou.
How did I do it? I gave the money to my future father-in-law, my wife’s father – and he bought it for me. I do not have a picture of it to show you but I do have the plan of the property that I can show you which I received when I was buying it. As the price of property in Beijing has rocketed the value of my house went up 500%. Unfortunately I did not get this money.
In August 2008 my wife, my son and myself travelled to Beijing for the Olympic Games and lived in our own house for the duration of the Games. We found a bus stop quite near our house which brought us to the Olympic stadium which was located in the northern suburbs of Beijing. We had quite good seats in the stadium, quite near the start of most of the races.
Before leaving Australia I had read all I could find on distance education in China. There was only a couple of articles by British OU visiting consultants. When I read the articles I said to myself ‘This system cannot work’. So when I got to China I found a professor who spoke reasonable English and took him out to what we would call a pub. By now I knew distance systems well and I knew what questions to ask. I asked what do the professors do Monday to Friday and what do the students do Monday to Friday. And then the penny dropped. 3 years study leave on full pay- that’s what the British consultants had missed. In other words
If you were chosen by the party to do a distance education qualification you went to your factory as before but instead of going into the factory as before you went into the factory education centre where you followed lectures on TV beamed out from Beijing to all the 45 DIANDA universities and on completion of your course you were promoted to a management position in your company. With this information I became the Western world’s expert on distance education in China.
The province of China in which Beijing is situated is called the Hebei province and its capital is Shijiazhang. There is a Dianda university in Beijing where the 1989 conference was held and another Dianda in Shijiazhang. The head of the Shijiazhang Dianda sent a car about 200 km across China to bring me to his university where he had organised a large ceremony to make me a Visiting Professor of the university. After the ceremony I learned something about the Chinese that I did not know – they are mad about ballroom dancing. The university vice-chancellor was a brilliant dancer and he danced with all the ladies on his staff. All the ladies wanted to dance with me too and I did my best but I wasn’t much good.
A few years later, as part of my job as Visiting Professor, I wrote a book for them which they translated into Chinese and published in Shijiazhang. I called it The study of distance education. It has never been published in English. In addition I gave two of my books to Chinese universities to translate into Chinese and start the literature of distance education in China. I gave Theoretical principles of distance education to Beijing Dianda and Foundations of distance education, my Ph.D. thesis, to both Beijing Dianda and Shanghai Dianda. Beijing Dianda translated it into Classical Chinese and Shanghai Dianda into Simplified Chinese. I do not know what the difference between the two is.
In 1999 I was again invited to Beijing to give a keynote address at an international conference on the theme ‘Distance education models at the dawn of the 3rd millenium’.
My last three invitations to work in China were to the Shanghai Dianda, which is a dynamic institution with very advanced technologies in abundance. I can always remember flying into Shanghai (population 24,000,000) from Beijing. One reaches the outskirts of the city and then one goes on and on for ages and ages. As most of the buildings are 30 stories high this is surprising. Also surprising is that the motorways in Shanghai are at the level of the first floor of the buildings and not at ground level. In the year 2000 I was invited to Shanghai to give a keynote address at a congress to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the foundation in 1960 of the Shanghai TV University, which I titled ‘from dlearning to elearning to mlearning’, by which I meant from distance learning to electronic learning to mobile learning. I was astonished to read on Google recently a number of Chinese professors stating that this lecture was the start of mobile learning in China.
I had observed Chinese citizens on buses reading novels from mobile phone screens. I said to myself if citizens can read novels from mobile phone screens they can study university courses from them. As a result my company in 1999 applied for research funding from the EU in Brussels for mobile learning for the first time. We eventually received funding from Brussels 4 times for research on mobile learning. The last time I checked China was the world leader for mobile learning.
The traffic in Beijing was a good indicator of the progress in China in recent years. When I went there first in 1989 there were always bicycles everywhere and one had to wait at the traffic lights for the bicycles to go through first. When I went back the final time the major roads through Beijing were 10 lanes wide with five lines going bumper to bumper each way.
Actually the roads were 12 lanes wide but the 2 outside lanes were for police use only. From about 4 pm onwards the traffic often came to a standstill and I have often sat stationary in a car with 10 lines of traffic stopped around us. Many of the cars were big black Audis, which seemed to be a status symbol in Beijing at the time.
In conclusion it is worth noting that when the Chinese invite you to give a keynote address at one of their international conference it is an all expenses paid trip. From Australia they flew me to Hong Kong in business class and Hong Kong to Beijing in first class, from Dublin it was usually Dublin to Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi to Shanghai. Then they put you up in a five star hotel and Chinese 5 star hotels are superb. Then in the evenings there are always banquets, not meals. On occasion I have also been given an envelope containing a certain amount of Yuan as payment for my presentation.
Incidentally it is Beijing in English rather than Pékin in French. Bei means north and jing means city. Nan means south. It is very important to realise that China is ruled from the north, which is lost if you use Pékin.
Photo of Siajiazhang
