When we are not travelling our weekly schedule is fairly consistent. Every morning we have class from 8am to around 10 or 11 am. Then we take a break until 2pm, during which time we eat lunch. We have our second class of the day at 2pm and it usually lasts until around 4pm. All seven of us, along with our two group leaders, have class together. The subjects we study along with the professors who instruct us change every day, with the exception of our Cultural Psychology class and our Chinese language class.
Our recent Chinese culture classes have dealt with a wide variety of topics including use of social media, the economy, professional sports, modes of entertainment and the movie industry just to name a few. In the social media lecture we learned about the development of “new new media” in China and how the Chinese population interacts with this media. The professor provided us with many interesting statistics on what particular kinds of media are most popularly used in China, including WeChat, QQ, as well as other forms of social networking services, microblogging platforms, and instant messaging apps. These statistics also included information about what portions of the Chinese populations used each kind of media.
The economy lecture dealt with another interesting aspect of contemporary China as it allowed us insight into the rapid development of the Chinese economy that has occurred over the last thirty years. The Chinese government’s goals involving the development of market economy and the challenges China now faces in terms of resources, and economic deceleration were something that I had never studied before and found very enlightening. During our lecture on entertainment activities in China we learned about both traditional and contemporary modes of entertainment such as enjoyment of teahouses, opera performances, mahjong and kite flying as well as the more modern activities such as watching movies, going to karaoke, attending sports games and square dancing. The best part of this lecture was when our professor taught us about paper cutting (imagine making a snowflake) and let us try it out for ourselves. The aforementioned enjoyment of sports was given its own lecture entirely. It covered the subject of competitive sports and national psychology. In this lecture we learned about what it means to be a professional athlete in China today and how the National System functions. It was surprising to learn how bureaucratic professional sports are in China and how serious China as a nation about its athletic performance. Another aspect of entertainment that we learned about was the Chinese movie industry. Our first lecturer on Chinese movies taught us about who goes to movies, how often they go and what kind of films they are watching. We also learned about the three periods of Chinese film that have occurred since the late 1980s. The first of these was the Folk Movie Period (late 1980s-1990s) during which time Chinese films first attracted the attention of an international audience by describing representative symbols of China. This period of film produced movies such as Farewell My Concubine and Red Sorghum. The next period was the Independent Movie Period (mid 1990s). These films typically told stories about the lives of common Chinese people and the conflict between new and old values. The most recent period is the Transnational Period which includes movies such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero and other works by Zhang Yimou. In a subsequent lecture we learned about the portrayal of Americans in Chinese movies throughout history and how it has changed, which I found to be one of the most interesting lectures we received.
Here I describe only a few of the many lectures we have received during our time here. They have all been very interesting and we deeply appreciate the professors who have spoken to us, especially because of the special effort it requires to lecture in English. My only regret is that we couldn’t go more in depth in most of the subjects because we received only one lecture on that topic.