Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

The MIT of China

When I was a teacher in Xi'an, I taught in what was an old steel factory. Warehouses had been converted into classrooms while a few leftover smokestacks still puffed pollution into the air. I was fond of the place, but admittedly it was uglier than a typical university. I remember one of my students telling me: "We bring our girlfriends to anywhere but our university."

Tsinghua University, is a very different place. Founded in 1911, it's one of the country's best colleges.

Back in Xi’an, when I told my students I’d be going there to study, many of them were in envy. In China, students all have to take a nine-hour test to gain entrance into the country’s universities, with only the best test takers being accepted into the top schools.

The college I taught at in Xi'an was a third-tier school, and thus rather low on the college rankings. As for me, I only had to fill out an application and attach my college transcript to get into Tsinghua. "I'm just going there to study Chinese," I've told my students. "It's not a big deal."

The school has a lot of history. It was built around a former Qing Dynasty garden, making some of the areas quite scenic looking. From what I read Mao Ze Dong used to take swims in one of the recreational pools at the university. And plenty of influential people, like China's current President Hu Jintao, are alums of the school. It's even been referred to as the MIT of China, in part because the school specializes in the sciences.

One thing that's striking about the campus is how large it is. Just walking from one end to the next feels like it can take 45 minutes to an hour. A bicycle is a must have, and I've never seen so many concentrated in one area before. In Xi'an, most of my students just walked or didn't feel like spending the money on one.

Military training is mandatory for all college students in China. Lately I've been seeing platoons of camouflaged students marching through the campus streets. Here a few students are receiving instruction on fighting stances. Their chants can be heard all the way to the foreign student dorms, which stand far in the background.

This is where I live. Pretty cozy. One nice perk is that the cleaning staff come by every other day and wipe the floors and change our bedding. There are, of course, some drawbacks. Me and my roommate clean our clothes in the lone washer on the other end of the hallway. We then hang our clothes out to dry, old school style. I don't understand why laundry dryers aren't more popular in China; something I'll have to investigate one day.

I've only been in Beijing for about a week. But from what I can tell it's a very different place than Xi'an. Really, it's just the little things. During my year in Xi'an, I had grown so used to seeing the occasional child pee on the streets that it became a norm. Now I feel it somewhat bizarre that I haven't witnessed anything like that yet. (Not that I'm looking forward to that kind of thing.)

Due to what I've read and seen, I get the sense that things are more modern, up-and-coming in Beijing. While McDonald's, KFC and Pizza Hut were common in Xi'an, Beijing has its own Google office just south of my campus. When I went to grab dinner at a noodle restaurant the server placed my order wirelessly via a cellphone pad. Everyone here uses cards for everything, whether to ride the bus or buy groceries at the store. Not like in Xi'an where most transactions revolved around cash.

It's the reason why I came to Beijing. In Xi'an it felt like you could only be one of two things foreigners in China have usually always been relegated to: a teacher or a student. But in Beijing, things are moving faster and the career opportunities are more. So I decided to come and give it a shot. We'll see how things go. But at the very least it so far looks like I won't have to worry about seeing any displays of public urination.