Our Life in Nanjing
[May 2011 Issue]
By Michael Carbone & Ray Wang
Inside the Hopkins-Nanjing Center (HNC), a co-run academic institution which formed in 1986 between Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Nanjing University in Nanjing, China, SAIS students get to sharpen their Mandarin skills while exploring a country rising on the global stage.
With a student population split evenly between Chinese and international students, the HNC provides a unique environment for interacting with international affairs. Students are offered a variety of classes to better understand Chinese society and related areas such as international politics, law, and economics, with courses challenging international students to take everything they have learned from past language classes and travelling experiences and apply it to contemporary issues in a modern day society in their target language: Chinese. Opportunities to travel around the Nanjing area and beyond, such as doing field interviews in the rural Anhui province for a rural development class, allow students to gain a new perspective in applying their class work to the world around them. While the HNC offers a rich learning environment, there is more to Center life than coursework.
The Center regularly invites speakers to the Nanjing Center to speak about various issues regarding Chinese and international affairs. Speakers this year included New York Times journalist Sewell Chan, former ambassador Chas Freeman, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration County Director Chris Hickey. Topics discussed in these lectures are just as varied, with current American Co-Director David Davies doing a recent lecture on the culture changes at Walmart in China. In addition to these opportunities to listen and discuss, the HNC offers other activities for students to engage in and enjoy.
For sports, the HNC has a long tradition of basketball and dragonboat. The basketball team, a mixture of Chinese and international students, continued tradition and won the annual tournament between universities in Nanjing this year. “At the HNC both Chinese and international students have such an affinity for basketball,” said David Lewis, a certificate student here. “It gives us the edge to be extremely competitive in the tournament.” During the Dragonboat Festival every year, a competitive boat race is held and the Center does its best against amateur and professional racing teams, last year scoring sixth and gaining the quip, “the best of the teams that can’t row straight.” Students engage in the Nanjing community outside the Center in a variety of ways, such as the Migrant School Initiative and the Five Project. Begun this year, the Migrant School Initiative teaches English to the children of migrant workers in Nanjing, whose opportunities for public education in the city are limited due to the hukou household registration system that discourages migration in China. The Five Project in turn works with individuals with developmental disorders in the local community, who are often excluded from local schools. “Everyone seems to really appreciate our efforts,” says Laura Dow, a first-year master’s student at the Center.
Extra-curriculars aren’t just limited to volunteer opportunities. Justin Yang, an HNC certificate student, notes that he is “a firm believer in putting [him]self out there and taking risks,” and it seems that among HNCers the feeling is shared. Three international students this year including Yang have so far appeared on Chinese television shows: one on “Our World,” where the student’s dream of dueling the girl he likes from the gym for a date comes true (unfortunately she’s a blackbelt in gongfu); and two on “If You’re the One,” an extremely popular competitive dating show where both HNC students won free trips to Hawaii.
Appearing on game shows may not be high on the list of things students do, but for HNC students it has proved to be a unique way of immersing oneself in Chinese culture and practicing their Chinese at a much higher level. Although the Center does not specialize in international law, this has not stopped students from taking on the challenge of arguing cases in court, with the HNC participating in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition for the first time this year. After successfully arguing for the participation of international SAIS students in the competition, the HNC team faced off against teams from Chinese law schools and specialized law programs and placed sixth in the nationals, with the four team members individually placing first, third, ninth, and twelfth places (no other team had more than one member in the top fifteen). As one of the professors who headed the Jessup team Steven Hill noted, this was “incredible and really unprecedented.” If the group and individual results seems rather disconnected, just remember that one of the components of an education at the HNC is how politics is never too far away in the Middle Kingdom.
Every year seems to bring a new political controversy to the Center, and this year was no different, with protests over the cutting down of historic trees by the new city mayor to help expedite the building of a subway line, which caused much controversy within the city. Add to it the sensitive political environment created by the Chinese government’s over-reaction to the national Jasmine non-protests, and the local arbor protests became that much more sensitive, with some Chinese students at the Center being interrogated by the police. The mayor ended up suspending his new policy. While not as internationally well-known as Shanghai or Beijing, Nanjing’s non-stop high-speed rail link to Shanghai is another effort by the Chinese government to propel the city into the global conscience. The most recent G20 seminar was held in the city, with a group of 19 nations plus the European Union representing around 90 per cent of global gross national product coming together to discuss the international monetary system. Those in attendance included French President Sarkozy, SAIS alumnus U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, and one of our very own HNC students, Laure Pallez, who said that, as expected, “it was extremely interesting with high level discussions on financial topics.”
Although the Hopkins-Nanjing Center is the youngest of the international institutions connected to SAIS, the Center already has a vibrant alumni network, with his year yielding the largest alumni weekend turnout to date, with well over one hundred alumni in attendance. As the Chinese co-director Madame Huang says, “we are a family here,” with Center traditions and a Center network throughout the world, yet the HNC manages also be a unique and an important part of the larger SAIS community. We welcome you to inquire about studying at HNC if China Studies is part of your path at SAIS, and if not, you are still welcome to visit us in Nanjing anytime.
Michael and Ray are SAIS students studying at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China.
Filed Under: All Featured Articles
