March 29, Morning at Tsinghua

Thursday, March 29, 2007

This morning we walked the campus of Tsinghua University for an hour or so, and Tsinghua has also done a great job of preserving and enhancing green, calm, space in the midst of a major urban campus. There is a wild mix of very old, and very new, and everything in between.

Last evening we walked a bit before dinner and saw two elderly lab-coated scientists filling a vessel with a liquid gas – I guess either oxygen or nitrogen, by pouring it from one container to another, out of the back seat of and older car – no gloves, a little insulation on the vessels, and lots of fog! Not something we see on our campuses everyday!

This morning outside our campus hotel I saw an older fellow pedal up to a lab building next door on a tricycle with a box on the back, and drag out a device that looked sort of like the transmogrifier that Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) used to use. A young woman technologist of some sort came out to get the thing so she could change Hobbes into something or other exotic, and the guy pedaled off.

I think these examples are a sort of theme for the whole experience. I’ve visited three really major universities where they are studying everything you can imagine. The students are serious; literally nothing is going on even in the early evenings because they are studying. Yet, part of the reason the places work is because people are willing to do what needs to be done, with whatever they have. In addition, they have vast labor resources to do the support work of the campuses.

At Zhejiang, there are 47,000 students and about 5,000 staff in the logistics division, just about 9.4 students per staff FTE. At St. Olaf College, if we added food service, facilities, and the bookstore to sort of equate to their logistics group, the number would be about 17.65 students per staff FTE.

Everywhere we go you can see this – the streets are swept clean constantly by poor people who need the work, whatever it is. The major cities depend on these folks, who are largely migrant workers from the countryside. However, it is not such a good deal for them for a variety of reasons. There is still a system of domicile registration in place - basically, people are accounted for where they are from, and they do not accrue any state benefits working somewhere else in these jobs. Cities and provinces have been trying to resolve this issue, but when the restrictions are lifted people flood to the cities too quickly and overcome the social services structure, so the controls go back.

All that said, China is seriously on the move. When these people decide to something you can count on it getting done! Almost nothing has been like anything I expected, and we in the U. S. have been seriously sheltered from what this country is all about.