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Imagining the Future with China: A Report of a Study Abroad Course

  Reading time 11 minutes

Riding on a train that whistled 217 miles per hour, sitting in a car that solely relied on solar power, wandering in a bookstore that had no cashiers on site, and viewing a trading system without currency and government involvement. Those were some of the adventures 13 students from DePaul experienced this winter break in a study abroad course called “Imagining the Future with China.”

Pairing “China” with “the Future” is an interesting idea. For a long time, China had been characterized by its ancient history and deeply rooted culture. It is one of the four most ancient civilizations in the world. It has a history of over five thousand years. Its cultural heritage has descended through eleven dynasties. It was not until two decades ago that China started to catch up on economic development. There are plenty of data to show its growth, but as a non-economist and someone who cannot handle numbers, I would use this GDP graph to demonstrate China’s astonishing takeoff:

China GDP Growth
China GDP Growth from 1960 to 2017 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CN)

Even though the population of 1.4 billion brought down China’s ranking from the second in the world in total GDP to the 71st by per capita, China’s speed of development is still so eye-catching that if we view the future as a target, this country is definitely racing in high gear. This makes it the best vehicle to hop on for our journey of imaging the future.

Our trip started in Shanghai, the New York City of China; followed by Suzhou and Hangzhou, the highlights of Chinese culture and literature and new development zones of high tech; and ended with Beijing, the capital city and the political center of the country. In 15 days, the group visited a number of companies in the fields of bio-tech, eCommerce, digital publishing, block-chain technology, and new energy development. As one of the co-directors of the program, I often found myself just as astonished as my students during my encounters with China, a country I was born in and had been away from for 26 years. To me, China has become a place where everything seemed to be bar-coded, where technology has penetrated people’s life, and where new energy is in desperate need because of the high density of pollution.

A World of Bar Code

Imagine yourself getting done with business on the toilet, reaching out for toilet paper, and finding that there isn’t any. Well, that was the case most of the time when I visited restrooms in China during my previous trips. In this trip, however, I was thrilled to see vending machines in some public restrooms with a sign saying “Free Toilet Paper, Scan Bar Code to Obtain!” There was even voice announcement (probably triggered by a motion sensor). As soon as someone walked in, a friendly reminder would come out of the speaker: “free toilet paper, scan bar code to obtain!”

How nice! Except I wasn’t sure if I could get it because my WeChat app was not bonded with a bank in China. That means I wouldn’t be able to use it to make a payment, even if it was a payment of zero. In one of the hotels we stayed, the snack cabinet was locked with a sign saying “Scan Bar Code to Open.” Taxi drivers in all of the cities we’ve visited had a bar code stick on the back of the seat for riders to scan and pay. Street vendors used bar code to get payment for ice creams and souvenirs. Every seat on the bullet train had a bar code for passengers to order food and for attendants to locate the passengers who had placed the orders. In one of the stores, when I handed a stack of cash to the seller, she said she had not touched any cash for a long time. As someone with prior experiences of PayPal and Mobile Wallet, I still felt like a complete alien. It made me believe that in this country, where facial recognition technology is being vastly adopted, the day may soon come when humans will also be transformed into a set of bar code and by then, people may simply pay by looking and blinking.

China’s Facial Recognition System
China’s Facial Recognition System (photo adopted from South China Morning Post).

A “Future” Led by Young Warriors

During the middle of the trip, our group visited the Alibaba Group Headquarter in Xixi District of Hangzhou. Founded in 1999, Alibaba Group is now a multinational conglomerate specializing in ecommerce, retail, Internet, AI, and technology. I interpreted Alibaba as an enterprise that encompassed the functions of Amazon, PayPal, eBay, and a part of Microsoft and Comcast.

At the entrance of its 44 acre company site, we received a badge with our names and the name of a martial art team – QinTong branch, a Taoist martial art group originated in QingTong Mountain! Apparently, all visiting groups are randomly assigned to Kong Fu teams that appeared in martial art literatures favored by Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba. Jack, who once was an English teacher in Hangzhou, founded the company with only 17 staff members. Alibaba is now the top enterprise in China with 93,397 employees. According to our tour guide, Alibaba’s management system registered over 200,000 employee IDs. This means some staff might have a permit to work in the company, but to be officially employed, they had to jump through multiple hoops to prove their abilities. Only one in three ID card holders survive the first year and stay in as formal employees. After that, they are continuously evaluated year by year. Very few last more than five years.

This talent filtering system has allowed Alibaba to recruit hardworking talents to help it stay strong in the fiercely competitive eCommerce market. Jack Ma, whose sayings were published online as guidance to success, once said “the only way to ensure that you won’t fail, won’t become obsolete, and won’t lose your mind is by trusting young people.” This explains why the average age of Alibaba employees is 27!

Jack Ma also set high expectations for the young people – “if you don’t want to bear the hardship, if you don’t want to fight hard, what’s the point of being young?” said another one of Ma’s quotations. Alibaba’s productivity practice is known by the nation as 996, meaning working from 9 am to 9 pm for 6 days a week.

A student posing in the same way a statue is posing.
The author and study abroad student Tim Parzyck posing with a sculpture in Alibaba that resembles young people bearing the burden of life.

On a micro scale, the story of Jack Ma and Alibaba told us a lot about the reason behind the economic leap on the data chart and the sacrifices people had made to make that happen.

Another sacrifice China has made for its rapid growth is damage to its environment.

Pollution and the Call for New Energy Sources

The experience of smog and the view of face masks made our visit to Hanergy especially memorable. Hanergy is a privately held multinational renewable energy company founded in 1994, headquartered in Beijing. The building of the company and its exhibit center were shielded with solar panels with a giant screen displaying live report of energies generated at the moment.

In the lobby of its exhibit center, a giant man-made sun, powered by solar energy, reminded us of the one in “The Three Body Problem.” This book was part of the curriculum for the second portion of the study abroad program, featuring Chinese science fictions. Underneath the sun were four fancy, James-Bond style cars (without shooting gear or a gasoline tank). Those cars, built by GM in collaboration with Hanergy, relied 100% on solar energy.

Students posing with a sun sculpture.
Students of the study abroad class and their co-directors, Dr. John Shanahan (second left in second row) and Dr. Sharon Guan (left in the first row) in the Exhibit Center of Hanergy.

Beyond the scheduled activities, I had a personal highlight of the trip: a mini class reunion with my college classmates in Beijing. We picked a place that had given us our first exposure to a Western cuisine thirty years ago. In 1987, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the first American Fast Food restaurant to open in Beijing. Our gathering was captured by my classmate, Li Peichun, in his story called “From the extraordinary to the ordinary: A story about KFC in China”. From another angle, he addressed changes that happened in China and how the once new-and-exotic products and experiences were quickly swiped away by the newer and the later.

Swiftly, the future is pushing its way into the present.

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About Sharon Guan

Sharon Guan is the Assistant Vice President of the Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul University. She has been working in the field of instructional technology for over 20 years. Her undergraduate major is international journalism and she has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in educational technology from Indiana State University. She has conducted research on interpersonal needs and communication preferences among distance learners (dissertation, 2000), problem-based learning, online collaboration, language instruction, interactive course design, and faculty development strategies. She also teaches Chinese at the Modern Language Department of DePaul, which allows her to practice what she preaches in terms of using technology and techniques to enhance teaching and learning.

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