[Six]

For anyone interested, I have a new post on the China Beat, introducing the new generation of young driven Chinese by way of the six characters I follow here. They’ve been called “the stupid generation”. I beg to differ.

With a new academic year looming tomorrow, I’ll take this opportunity to say a big thanks to everyone who has helped Six this last year: first and foremost to Ben, Jack, Leonidas, Marie, Mary, Matilda, Tony and William; also to the sites (especially China Beat, CDT and CNReviews) which have given links; to my brother for his design and technical help; mama and papa for telling people about it even if they don’t want to know; and finally thank you to everyone other than my immediate family who reads Six!

Plenty of blogging to come this year, from Tsinghua campus as well as Beida …

In The Huffington Post, I’ve collected some of my thoughts at the end of a year in Peking University here. I will be taking my last deep breath of fresh Californian air tomorrow, before I fly back to Beijing tomorrow to continue my Chinese studies in the IUP program in Tsinghua university. It’s right next to PKU, so I’ll be blogging as before.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, I like this joke by Chinese American comic Joe Wong, giving his answer to a question on his US citizenship test (his full skit here):

Q: What’s Roe vs. Wade?

A: Two ways of coming to the US.

• Yours truly and his humble blog gets a mention from Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the end of his latest Huffington Post article, ‘Illuminating and Misleading Takes on China 20 Years Since Tiananmen‘. Whether I am illuminating or misleading I will leave unclarified for greater suspense.
• I saw Nanjing! Nanjing! the other night in Beida’s packed-to-the-rafters auditorium. I can assure you from the atmosphere at the screening that anger at the Japanese runs deep in this generation, as it has in previous ones. Mind you, the mouth-to-mouth memory of the war seems to have faded enough to allow one group of students a couple of rows behind me laugh blindly at the comedy of a Japanese officer struggling to pull up his trousers … after raping a Chinese girl.
• School’s out for summer, and in a couple of hours – oh joy – I will be boarding a 40 hour train to Kunming. During two weeks traveling in Yunnan and Sichuan, blogging is likely to be thinner than the air at Shangri La.

A couple of Peking University themed stories. First, a reminder of why 2009 is not 1989:

• I usually link to articles in the left hand column, under ‘6 things I’m reading’. But given the focus of this blog, I’ll press the point with two pieces on modern students at Beida and Tsinghua, in the New York Times and the FT. Both argue, rightly, that the class of ’09 is a world apart from that of ’89. The FT piece is better: the NY Times overplays the angle of students being scared into inaction. Journalists have even cited the heavy security presence on the gates at PKU as evidence of this. What rubbish: noone who goes to Beida gives a second glance to those guards, like they never go further than the first glance at your ID. More on this topic soon.

Next, a reminder that the more things change the more they stay the same:

• Here’s a telling news story from Beida (a month old, sorry), which I heard from a contact in its administration. A PKU student went into one of the many little photocopying stores on campus to copy a legal letter of protest to a computing company who sold him a faulty computer. Nothing big. Nothing political. But they refused to let him copy the letter when they saw it was legal in nature. As did every one of the other campus copying stores he tried. Evidently some kind of restriction passed down from university administration, which deems students writing legal letters too sensitive. Really shocking. This was picked up by Chinese media I gather, but I can’t find a link.

Happy dragon boat festival! Remember, don’t drown yourself in a river unless you’ve first written some beautiful poetry and been wrongly accused of treason.

• The China Beat blog today republished my post about the Model UN, introducing this blog to their readers. Thank you China Beat!
• So Huang Yueqin, the director of the National Centre for Mental Health, has said that 100 million people, or 7% of China’s population, is mentally ill. That’s funny: in a recent Beida lecture aimed at foreign students, my teacher told us the total figure of all kinds of disabilities was 6.3%. Get your story straight. (And a response a Chinese friend wrote me on facebook to that 100 million statistic: “Let’s put another zero and it’s not far from the truth, hoho”.)
• I couldn’t resist putting up this clever illustration, from a Japanese blog:

Three bits and bobs…

• I’m delighted 6 gets a spot in CNReview’s list of ‘Ten Eclectic China blogs you should follow‘. Cheers!
• Danwei notices that Beida requires its medical school students be not too short and not too fat … presumably not too clumsy enters the mix, also?
• A friend and I recently did a napkin calcution of how many students applying to university in a high school year group will get into Beida or Tsinghua (if Chinese), compared to students who’ll get into Oxbridge (if English). The results … 1 in 100 for the UK, 1 in 10,000 for China.