First Post from Shanghai

I have just finished one and a half days of my course at Donghua University in Shanghai. There are three days left in the class and then three more days for sightseeing, but I have the afternoon off for New Year's Day and I think I've caught up with the missing sleep and it is drizzly and not particularly walking and picture-taking friendly. My computer is programmed with two clocks, one for local Shanghai time (13 hours ahead) and one for Eastern Standard Time. That helps me to figure out where and when I am. I've got the Internet working well enough so that RadioParadise.com is working on the computer while I compose this. The Internet has been problematical at best (See the Great Firewall of China below). Even with the problems, one wonders how people traveled before the Internet.

The trip started without much of a hitch. It was a pleasure at the airport since I flew Business Class. Given the conditions where we are staying near the University, I would guess that none of the past faculty who taught here would make the trip again without that upgrade. I am ahead of myself. The flight to Chicago got off to a slow start because of problems loading backage, but they made up the time and the connection at O'Hare went smoothly. The flight from Chicago to Shanghai left on time. I sat next to a woman from Belgium who works for Black and Decker in their Information Technology area. She was with a group from her firm doing software (Yes, SAP for those who are in the know) at one of their factories somewhere in China. She wasn't very talkative which was a shame because we had fourteen and a half hours to share the friendly skies of United. They were quite friendly. The primary flight attendant in our cabin was one of the nicest I've seen in a long time and I told her so. The food for us in the privledged section wasn't all that bad. It is amazing that those planes can hold enough fuel to fly that long.

I arrived at the new Pudong Shanghai airport on time after twenty-four hours of restless travel. The airport was clean and mostly empty which made it most interesting that it took nearly an hour for the bags to come off of the flight. When I finally got my bags and made my way out through their multi-phased customs I was supposed to be met by a student from Donghua University. There were lots of signs for arriving passengers, some in Chinese, some in various qualities of English, but none that even looked like YERMISH. After hanging around for another fifteen minutes, I got a cab for the half hour and not expensive cab ride to my hotel. The funniest thing for me was the first clearly recognizable sign was for Hooters, a version of which appears here. The highway was wide and modern. Most signs were in Chinese and English. The drive was through much of the industrial areas around Shanghai. As we approached the city I got confused as we crossed a bridge into the city. For some reason, I thought the hotel was in a different part of town. When we got into the city the traffic was horrendous and we slowed to a crawl which was a problem as I was in serious need of a bathroom. Finally, we got off the elevated road and there was the hotel, all shiney and welcome. They had my reservation and I was quickly escorted up to my room which of course was a smoking room.

I went down to the hotel desk and asked if I could get a room on a non-smoking floor. The reception clerk was apologetic. They were doing repairs on the non-smoking floor. It took about a day of keeping the window open but it's not a problem any more. Nothing special but serviceable and it does have the good fortune of being across the road from them University. However, it is far away from the interesting center of town. Originally, I was planning on staying here for three more days but I will move to a different hotel for those days despite the higher cost. This hotel is really not for American tourists or college professors who would like to think they weren't tourists.

Shortly after I checked in I got a call from one of the students that is assisting in the program and she apologized that the student who was supposed to pick me up was late and arrived after I left.

The view from my window that first evening wasn't very spectacular, just that elevated highway and some of the many tall buildings, most of which are pretty ugly. I figured out how to get connected onto the Internet, got out messages saying I was alive and went to bed. It was a long day. Sleep was moderately successful. I got up early, went down for the buffet breakfast which catered to Western, Chinese and Japanese guests adequately. It didn't matter as long as there was coffee and that was surprisingly good. I started wandering the streets but first I had to take a picture of that view, but in the daylight. You can see the traffic and the smog. Not very exciting.

This part of town is like most parts of town, mostly involved with business. There are new buildings sprouting around old buildings and lots of laundry hanging outside. I wandered the modern roads but did find a couple older back roads which were much more photogenic. There will be some good images from this trip like this one.

Of course it didn't take long before I found a very high fashion mall within a block complete with fancy designer stores. The classes are clearly evident in this part of town as you can see from this view of top floor of that mall. I did see many interesting and contrasting places. Clearly, the juxtapositions of the old and the new, the rich and the poor are a grand theme in China. I'm sure I will see much more of this when I move to the old part of town for the end of the visit.

On the venture I found the most important thing, a good market in the Friendship Mall which is not quite as high class as the first mall that I found. I will be out of snacks in short order.

At 1:00 PM, Cythia (really Jian Ye), the student who is the assistant at the program met me at the hotel and we proceeded across the street to Donghua University which once was the Textile Institute of China. It is a typical campus with old and new buildings, mostly bland and in need of repair.

The tall building in this picture is white tile and up close it really is quite in need of repair. She led me to the newish Glorious Sun School of Management. In the lobby were placques with pictures of J.M. Keynes, Peter Drucker, and other famous names in Management. Only their names were in English. We went to the third floor classroom which was small but newly equiped. I made it a point to get there a day early to test the facilities. This is China and I know things aren't quite up to our standards. The classroom podium computer was loaded with Windows XP, all in Chinese. I was glad that I brought my PowerBook. There was a wireless system in the classroom that the Apple found immediately, and I was able to get out onto the Internet, but it was treacherously slow. Fortunately, I could survive without it, but it was annoying. Then I discovered the REAL problem, "The Great Firewall of China".

The Great Firewall of China

When I setup my laptop in my room in the hotel I was able to make the standard AOL connection and was even able to connect to my old standby Radioparadise.com, but a couple of my standard sites, e.g., www.philly.com didn't seem to load. I didn't think very much about it until I was in the classroom and started to do some playing and found that their connection was even slower than a dialup line. I got a real kick out of that because on my way to class I noted the sign at the right. This was a Microsoft and Cisco training center yet their connections were really bad and unreliable. I closed up my equipment and went back to my hotel to see if I could get to the bottom of this issue.

After careful experimentation I noticed that I could read www.nytimes.com online but not www.philly.com which made no sense at all. However, if I opened the browser inside of AOL I could get to www.philly.com. I tried to use Google to see what was going on, but Google came up in Chinese. Finally I opened up Google from inside of AOL and searched for "Chinese Internet Filtering" and it all came back to me. It seems that to protect the morals of the Chinese people, the government has installed major firewalls to block all sites that they deem inappropriate. There was a wonderful article in wikipedia.org about the situation and about how the sites were selected. Interestingly enough, they had chosen not to block www.nytimes.com. One of the most interesting things I discovered was that all of the blogspot sites, like this one were blocked, though you could edit the blog, you couldn't see it! I had wondered why my Chinese students had written to me that they couldn't see this site but could see www.yermish.com. I guess I haven't posted any pornography in those pictures. So the American government lets us go to any sites we want and watches us do it and the Chinese just don't let you go there. It turns out there are lots of ways, like AOL, to get around the Great Firewall of China, but none of the students admitted that they knew about them. I wonder if there were any "party" members in the class. It reminded me of the Choral Arts trip to Poland before end of the cold war when members of the orchestra that we were traveled with were careful about what they said in front of whom. Remember, Orwell had it right: "All Animals are created equal, except that some animals are more equal than others."

The final incident in this interesting issue was when I tried to read www.nytimes.com this morning and it didn't come up. I hopped over to the browser in AOL and opened it and sure enough, on the first page was an article critical of China. I guess they are very dilligent in Beijing.

I finished preparing for my class, had dinner at the hotel and crashed.

On Saturday, December 31st, I met the class of thirty young Dongua University Chinese students in their late twenties. A couple of students were older. They were very friendly and welcoming. I did the appropriate apologies about not knowing all of the customs and would do my best to communicate. I told them that I would understand if they didn't get all of my jokes. Most of my jokes go over the heads of my English speaking students as well. We got underway and they were moderately attentive. I was concerned from reports of prior teachers that students were reluctant to speak English. I planned a structure of the course where the students would use Saint Joseph's on-line system. Unfortunately, that was unavailable with the technological problems. Finally, in the afternoon, I gave them an assignment to review a case and identify some of the issues in the case. Immediately, they went into their teams and the din started.

It was quite an experience to watch just about all of the students hovering over their laptops and pouring over the textbook to address the issues in the case. Then, I was taken aback by the competition of the teams to make their presentations first. No, their English is not all that good, but they seemed very willing to take the risks. The results of their work were excellent and I could see why some experts predict that China will outpace the United States, possibly in my lifetime. These are not the elite students of China, more like our regular MBA students at Saint Joseph's, but they showed unbelievable energy and enthusiasm. Though I had some trepidation about this course, I have none now. It is hard work explaining things several ways so that all of the students will understand but I can see progress already. Tomorrow, they will work on a case study about the Boston Red Sox and how they used information technology to build the 2004 World Series Championship team. I have a feeling they will get a great deal out of that material.

Oh, I forgot one thing ... If you look carefully at the Donghua University website you will find a picture of a nice rubber running track. I knew it was there and after checking out the classroom I wandered around the campus and found the track, but there was a problem. There was this high iron fence around it. Students were playing basketball, soccer and tennis on facilities all around the model track, but no one was on the track. Interesting. So, I've done all of my running on the treadmill in the hotel because running out on those streets with drivers who all seem to want to solve China's population problem would be less than a good idea, not to mention the smog.