A Letter From Hangzhou, China

From Thomas Jefferson School of Law Professor Aaron Schwabach,
a 2007 Fulbright Scholar in Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

What surprised me most about teaching in China was not how different it was, but how different it wasn't.   The students are part of the new China.  The Cultural Revolution was over before they were born; from their point of view, the U.S. Embassy has always been in Beijing (not Taipei ), and to get rich has always been glorious.  I had come as a Fulbright Senior Scholar to teach a course in international environmental law at Zhejiang University (Zheda) College of Law in Hangzhou, China.  Although I'd visited China, and even Hangzhou, before, I'd never taught a course anywhere outside the U.S.   I'd been warned that Chinese students would be too shy or deferential to ask questions in class, but language turned out to be a bigger problem than cultural expectations. 

By the second class I realized that the half-dozen students who had asked all of the questions were the ones who spoke excellent English, while many of their silent classmates were struggling to figure out what I was saying.  I spent a day putting all of the course notes on PowerPoint slides, then copying them to the classroom computer for the students to copy to their flash drives.  From then on I displayed the relevant notes on the screen behind me as I taught, and the level of participation improved dramatically.

The students, with their QQ accounts and incessant texting (even during class), were as comfortable with information technology as their U.S. counterparts.  I confined my own communications to those old-school stand-bys, e-mail and telephone; I spent an hour or two each evening answering e-mails from students – some in Hangzhou, others back in San Diego.

Like U.S. students, the students at Zhejiang University (and Xinan) were deeply concerned about environmental problems, and often disagreed deeply with me and with each other on what should be done to address them.  They expressed worries both about the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol process and the effect of China 's economic growth on global greenhouse gas levels.  (Of course, in any environmental law class, there's some self-selection bias – students unconcerned about the environment are less likely to take the class.)  The students brought a subtly different perspective to almost every question, reminding me that I was there not only to teach, but also to learn.

In addition to teaching international environmental law, I ended up advising Zhejiang University's Jessup moot court team; one weekend I also flew off to deliver a paper at a conference on the World Trade Organization at the Xinan (Southwest) University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, a thousand miles away, on the Yangtze River not far from the foothills of the Tibetan plateau.  Chongqing was utterly different from Hangzhou. Hangzhou is a city of mostly not-so-tall buildings set among gentle hills and parkland; Chongqing is a city of densely packed skyscrapers built on steep hills along the banks of two rivers, stretching to the limits of vision in every direction. The hills make the buildings seem even taller; my hotel clung to the side of a cliff, with street-level exits at the eleventh, fourth and first floors.

Many of the professors at Xinan and Zheda had visited the U.S., and some had even been to San Diego. I was happy to hear from them that my hometown possessed wonders (the beaches! the Zoo!) to impress even residents of Hangzhou.  One – a professor of ancient Chinese law – attended the class; she was a hero to the students because of her role in efforts to save the Tibetan antelope.

Like any tourist in Hangzhou, I enjoyed the food, walked along the shore of the West Lake, and marveled at the juxtaposition of ancient temples and luxury-car dealerships.  A walk along the lakeshore is a walk through millennia of Chinese history and literature, but the city is not a fragile museum piece; the Ferrari dealership and Papa John's Pizza are just details in another chapter of Hangzhou's story. Surprises lie around every turn: A monument to the Chinese volunteers who fought for North Korea against the “American invaders” lies within a few minutes' walk of a redwood tree planted by Richard Nixon, of all people. An intriguing statue of a highly-stylized bull that I mistook for some piece of modern art turns out to be 3200 years old; the magnificently reconstructed Leifeng Pagoda, familiar to fans of Chinese literature from the legend of Lady White Snake, dominates the south shore of the lake as if it had been there a thousand years – which is only partly true. The current structure – the only wheelchair-accessible pagoda I've ever seen – dates from 2002. The original was built in 975, but burned and looted by invading Japanese forces in about 1550. Part of the ruined tower stood crumbling for nearly another four centuries, until its final collapse in 1924. The ruin featured in many paintings and nineteenth-century photographs of the lake, but at the time rebuilding began, no one under 80 had seen it in person.

The most interesting thing about Hangzhou is not architecture or scenery, but people. But I'd have to go on for another three thousand words – I'll try to focus on those stories when I post from Hangzhou again in May and June, during TJSL's summer study abroad program at Zheda.