Students Explore "China: Past, Present, and Future"

Release date: January 04, 2006 |

Click here to see a slideshow of photos from "China: Past, Present, and Future."

Porsha-Ni Dofat was initially thrilled about visiting the Great Wall of China. A senior accounting major from Severna Park, MD, she was among 11 Goucher students taking “China: Past, Present, and Future," the college’s first-ever Asian intensive course abroad.

“I was really excited to be on the wall, and really proud, because I was the only girl who was up there at the very top,” says Dofat.

Her excitement turned to dismay, however, when her backpack slipped off of her shoulder and landed on the Mongolian side of the wall. Any hopes she may have had of retrieving it were dashed as she asked around for locals who might know a path to where her pack lay.

“They all said, ‘We’re not going down there,’” Dofat says. So there her backpack remains, holding food, a few rolls of film, and an early edition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

In a way, it’s not surprising that she couldn’t find a way down. When they designed the course, philosophy Assistant Professor Steven DeCaroli and English Assistant Professor Antje Rauwerda made a conscious effort to avoid China’s booming tourist industry, instead taking their students to more unspoiled, remote places where most foreigners—and even some locals—never set foot.

“Normally, when you have a major tourist industry, as they have in China, they shunt you into the big cities, like Shanghai, and keep you along the coast,” explains Rauwerda, who grew up in Singapore. “But 75 percent of China’s population lives in the countryside. With a population of 1.3 billion people, that’s more than a half billion people. So we really wanted to expose the students to that way of life, in addition to the cities.”

“China: Past, Present, and Future” grew out of DeCaroli’s interest in Eastern philosophy and the intimate familiarity with Chinese culture and geography that he acquired during a stint teaching English in China. He worked with Rauwerda and a native guide named Lucky Wang to develop a trip itinerary that would explore “China from above and below”—examining the country’s political, economic, and social structures and policies not only at a national level, but also in terms of the way that these structures affect the everyday lives of Chinese citizens in cities and villages alike.

DeCaroli says that the dichotomies that have arisen as China has tried to reconcile the command economy of its past with the global economy it now seeks to join make the country an ideal case study.

“It’s a communist country with capitalist trappings,” he explains. “You’ve got the economic boomtowns of Shanghai and Beijing, but you’ve also got the rural countryside. There’s a lot of economic development in the coastal areas, but in the rural communities, you have people who are not seeing those kinds of advancements. When you’re in Shanghai, for instance, you’re looking at marble floors and skyscrapers paneled with mirrored glass, and everything’s gilded. But then, you go to the countryside, and people are still making their tools by hand, using millstones to grind their own flour.”

The students had a chance to explore life in rural China firsthand during a day trip to Dong Ye village, where they split into pairs and prepared homemade garlic dumplings with local farmers and their families. The meal was a particularly eye-opening experience for Dofat, who learned a lot about how women are viewed in Chinese culture. Even though she was paired with Paris Law, a senior philosophy major from Silver Spring, MD, Dofat’s host family encouraged her to do most of the cooking. The family also served Law and the other men at the table before serving any of the women.

“In the cities, they’re very liberal about women’s roles, but in the rural areas, they’re much more conservative,” says Dofat. “The daughter of the household, who served us, didn’t eat until everyone else was done. Little social customs like that really struck me.”

Things are different in the cities, Dofat says. The women are more independent—and very aware of the world beyond their homeland.

“They know so much about our country,” she says. “I didn’t see any local news on the TV there, just CNN.”

This sounds like praise at first—but Dofat goes on to point out that, in some important ways, Chinese citizens literally have no other choice.

“All they see is world news, because they can’t really talk about anything their own government is doing,” she adds. “It’s very dangerous to say anything about it.”

Despite the dangers of speaking out against the Chinese government, officially known as the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, DeCaroli and Rauwerda were able to find a Chinese professor who was willing to talk about the country’s political system—but the lecture took place behind locked doors, and the professor made the group promise not to reveal his identity to anyone. Rauwerda was particularly stunned to hear about the government’s policy regarding curriculum and other university affairs.

“Any university decision needs to be approved by a mirror official from the government,” she says. “All levels of life in China are affected by the Communist Party.”

Even as American citizens, the Goucher students constantly found themselves affected by the government’s control over free speech—even when they were just having their picture taken.

“I think that a lot of people in China don’t like Communism, but they’re afraid to voice their opinions,” says Dofat. “For example, everyone over there makes a peace sign when you take their picture, so when Chinese tourists wanted to take our picture, we started holding up three fingers, just as a joke, and told people that it stood for ‘Peace, love, and democracy.’ And they were like, ‘Ha, ha, don’t say that.’ You can definitely feel the tension.”

During a stop at a teahouse in Chengdu, DeCaroli and Rauwerda used the Chinese tourists’ constant interest in photographing the students as the basis for a discussion about what it means to experience a country’s culture, politics, and religion from an outsider’s perspective.

“One of the things we wanted to talk about during the trip was, how do you go from being a tourist, in a bubble, or on a bus, to actually participating in the culture? And to what extent can you participate?” explains DeCaroli. “The students really stepped up to the challenge posed by that question, and realized that cultural immersion happens both ways. You’re collecting just as much as you’re being collected. It was absolutely fascinating to hear the students discuss this halfway through the trip. Antje and I didn’t say a word, hardly.”

The professors’ commitment to balancing China’s famous sights with off-the-beaten-path destinations meant that the students spent much of the trip doing and seeing things that most tourists don’t get to experience—including an important Buddhist abbot’s arrival at a temple in Emei, a lesson in Chinese calligraphy, and a bike ride through the Yangshuo countryside. The group didn’t reach China’s most famous cultural icons until the last few days of their stay—and by the time they got there, many of the students’ perspectives had been irrevocably colored by what they’d seen in the days before. To them, the experiences that they’d had in the country’s rural areas seemed more authentic, more in step with the “real” China, and they viewed the famous sights more critically as a result.

“The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Mao Mausoleum—these icons came last in the trip,” explains DeCaroli. “We saw so much of China, that when we got to those iconic places, they were still powerful, but we realized that China isn’t just the glossy images that ornament the covers of books and magazines.”

Dofat found the contrast between the agrarian culture of the Chinese countryside and the tourism-driven atmosphere of the cities particularly affecting—especially when the group visited the preserved body of communist leader Mao Tse-Tung, on public display in a crystalline casket at the Mao Mausoleum, located at the southern end of Tian’anmen Square. Even though Tse-Tung died in 1976, he is still venerated throughout rural China, which remains largely disconnected from the urban emphasis on globalization and economics. Many Chinese pilgrims travel to the Mao Mausoleum every year to pay their respects.

“I don’t want to say it was like a cult, but the Chinese really worship him,” says Dofat. “There were so many flowers, and people buying Mao’s little red book, and saying that it’s like the Chinese Bible. We saw the little red book everywhere. They idolize him like he’s a god, almost.”

Adds DeCaroli: “When you leave the mausoleum, there’s a phalanx of vendors selling every conceivable item of Mao paraphernalia you could possibly want, from Mao lighters that play revolutionary songs when you open the lid to T-shirts, clocks, keychains, and watches. You have multiple ways of consuming Chairman Mao, so to speak. And it’s all done with reverence, but it’s a reverence that now has to be measured against a kind of cynicism. Behind the mausoleum, the very same objects that are being purchased by people who think it’s kitsch to have them—people like us, perhaps—are being bought by people from China’s countryside who see these objects as representative of a political father figure.”

Several students are eager to revisit the East, including Dofat, who thinks she’d like to spend a year teaching English in China, like DeCaroli did. What’s more, her experience has sparked lasting enthusiasm about the whole concept of studying abroad, and she says she definitely wouldn’t rule out taking another three-week intensive course.

“I definitely got out of my little box, and I didn’t even realize I was in one,” says Dofat. “We weren’t in classrooms. We were moving around all the time, trying new foods, meeting people, learning different Chinese dialects. We learned so much. I’d recommend studying abroad to anyone. When you come back, you’re just so much more aware of the world around you.”