White Tiger Path 4.0 -The Year of the Rat has Arrived - January 2020
My schooling here in Shanghai has wrapped up this past week and with that, there was and has been a noticeable shift in my day to day life here in China.
Following the wrap of courses, I had the opportunity to go to Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the south of China. In total, 50 of us went, with the bulk of students coming from a master’s program. One girl on the trip, from somewhere in Eastern Europe, wore a pornhub shirt she picked up in the fake markets of shanghai the entire weekend.
In Guangzhou we toured some cultural sites, including a temple and military college (similar, but far less esteemed than West Point, although the Chinese would say it’s on par) which were pretty interesting to see. We also toured Sun Yet Sun University and attended a lecture on urban development and human geography. I wish Dalhousie University had the same athletic facilities available as SYSU did.
Following Guangzhou, we boarded our tour bus for the 5-hour drive to Shenzhen (the first special economic zone in China, created by my favourite leader, Deng Xiaoping, in 1980). On the drive to Shenzhen it looked like hundreds of boats were beached, liked struggling whales on sandy shores at low tide. They appeared out of commission and forgotten, useless and hopeless…or maybe just waiting to go fishing. There were also, like all over China, homes stuffed into apartment high-rises, reaching up towards the sky. Laundry shading every window except a few. A multi-coloured collage on an otherwise bleak and dirty building exterior.
Shenzhen is particularly impressive because of how rapidly it developed to its current state. For example, the Shenzhen University we visited was built in 6 months and had a full roster of students the following September; it is a modern campus with modern facilities like you might see in North America. We attended a lecture here as well, this time focused on globalization and how Shenzhen fits into this new world. It is funny to hear Chinese professors use the phrase, “Just google it” and mean it; I guess at some point in certain areas of China, there is an expectation of a VPN on your phone and computer.
I always like to throw in this example when I forgot how impressive China is when it comes to building things quickly. A full university in China: 6 months; 3 floors of a building: 1 day; a full subway line: 1 year. Consider the timelines for the for mentioned projects in your own country.
Shenzhen is somewhere you go, however, for a career, not a personal life. The motto of Shenzhen is Time is Money, Efficiency is Life. I’ve been told it can be extremely tough to find social things to do or friends there, especially if you’re a new arrival in the city, which the bulk of people there are. It is also extremely expensive to live there, something like $5,000 to $10,000 CDN per square metre to buy, but it is quite warm, quite orderly, and clean. If I wanted to start a business in China, Shenzhen would be one of the first places I would consider because it’s on the cutting edge of everything that China has to offer as a country.
It was a real privilege for me to be invited to participate on this trip and I really enjoyed getting to meet more student who also attend ECNU. Most of the other students were Russian, Eastern European, and South East Asian. Not a lot of kids from North America were signing up to complete a full Bachelors or Master’s degree here in Global Issues.
We returned from the South of China on a Monday evening and I had only 5 days in Shanghai before departing for Chongqing, Beibei District, to live with a host family and teach English at South West University. It was tough wrapping up this leg of our journey and saying goodbye to so many so quickly. These in a lot of ways, felt like the last 5 days of our exchange in China as we would be saying goodbye to a lot of the folks we had spent the previous months getting to know in Shanghai and who would return to their homes all over the world before our time wrapped up in Chongqing.
To make the most of these 5 days we held some closing dinners, attended a Gala, and threw a pretty huge party at Perry’s, our campus bar. Everyone attended our closing party on our final night and it was a pretty wicked fucking time. I really enjoyed it, and got the distinct impression that everyone else did too.
The next day, hangovers, tears, and luggage in tow, we climbed into our van at 2 pm to head to the airport. The second phase of China was about to begin for us.
End of Part #1
-Bai Hú