Teaching in China

Travelling is exciting in itself but if you can add in some thing extra, like losing your e-ticket and travel itinerary somewhere on the plane to Beijing, it becomes almost thrilling. How to explain to people with a limited command of English, but a thorough knowledge of the rules of travel, that I need to get Shenyang but I don’t have a ticket? I spent the last hour of the flight worrying about the possibilities, remembering similar travel mishaps in the past. Like the time we arrived in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico and I suddenly realized that I had left all our reservation details for our rental in Bucerias at home. All I could remember of them was the first name of the rental agent I had talked to and the town where the rental was. With that information we took a taxi to Bucerias and arrived at a poverty-stricken fishing village.

The layout of the Beijing airport further complicates the situation of the idiot traveler without a ticket. The baggage recovery area is a ten-minute train ride from the arrivals area. Terminal 2, where in-country flights depart, is a 30-minute bus ride from the baggage area. Fortunately, I found on my suitcase the name of the airline I was booked on, China Southern. Using that, and my passport, I was able to convince the China Southern ticket agent to print out the remainder of my journey.

The luggage itself was the next obstacle. Having packed for six months and weighed it to conform exactly to British Airways limit of 70 lbs I was told that China Southern’s limit was 20 kilos. I was approximately 46 lbs over the limit. The ticket agent was inscrutable. I couldn’t tell if she was going to bounce me off the flight, tell me I could take only 20 kilos, or suggest something more reasonable. Happily, she opted for the last choice. The surcharge for the extra weight was only 121 renminbi, about $10 or 5 pounds. I took the bill to another desk, paid my money, and returned to collect my passport, which she had held as security for payment. The flight left on time, arrived on time, and Crystal Chen was at Shenyang airport to meet me. An hour later I was in my one-bedroom apartment at the University.

One of the other English language teachers here told me that the average Chinese family occupies about 30 square meters. The apartments provided by the University for its foreign staff are approximately 45 square meters and furnished quite comfortably, though the mattress on the double bed feels like it might have iron bars somewhere in it. That’s about the only negative comment I can think of. The kitchen has a new fridge, a ceramic stove, and a microwave. All the furniture in the living room, except for two school desks and chairs, is new as is the television. The cable service provides 50 channels, two of which are English language – BBC World News and the Australian Broadcasting Network. The Aussie channel conforms to my impression of Aussie values and provides almost non-stop Aussie rules football games, rugby league and cricket matches, Australian soccer and news bulletins on the progress of the remaining Aussie players at the US Tennis Open. Last Saturday night they advertised the Wallabies versus Springboks Tri-Nations Rugby Union game. I waited all day for it and at 9 pm it came on but then the screen froze on a picture of a South African supporter waving a banner that said “Wasting Matilda”. This must have blasted all the power out of the Australian end of the feed because that’s where the screen stayed for the next 45 minutes. No sound, no movement, no explanation. I gave up and went to bed. The next morning I asked one of the Australian teachers if he’d seen any of the game and he confirmed that nothing had happened. The score turned out to have been Australia’s worst ever beating by any team, 53 – 8, which I would have enjoyed seeing though I don’t much care for the South Africans and their brutal style of play.

The lead language teacher here, a Canadian named Harry, has been teaching at Shenyang for all five years of its existence and has experienced the kind of local change that must have been occurring throughout China during that time. Five years ago, he says, the Central Government ordered that all Shenyang’s universities be relocated to the same area about 30 minutes north of the city center. One can speculate about the reasons for this but providing employment for the multitudes of rural villagers who have been migrating to the towns and cities of this country may have been one of them. On Sunday night I took a walk around the campus and out on to the street and headed east, beyond what used to be the Shenyang city limits. Harry said there used to be a village out where they are building apartment houses. I am not sure who “they” are, whether private or government contractors, but they certainly are building apartment blocks. And at 6:30 on a Sunday evening, in failing light, they still were. The “weekend” here does not mean, as Westerners think of it, as the end of the workweek. Outside of business and government, whose employees operate officially on a six-day week, Chinese workers work as long as employers will pay them, as long as whatever jobs they have last.

The apartment complexes they are building are collectively called “New University City” and the project is the size of a small city in its scope. The construction goes as far literally as the eye can see in the smoggy Shenyang dusk. Each apartment block is 7 floors high, one apartment wide, and 20 apartments long for a total in each unit of 140 apartments. There is no way of knowing how many people each will house since though each nuclear family numbers no more than 3, or occasionally 4, the extended family members who have been displaced by projects like “New University City” – like the former villagers who lived here – may double or triple that number. In the complex itself, I counted twenty more units under construction to the north of the one I was standing in front of and ten more lines of twenty to the east, for a total of 200 buildings containing 28,000 apartment units. According to the site map at the crossroads where I terminated my walk, this is the first of a four-phase project that is planned to occupy all the remaining bare land one could see in each direction from that point. So during the next 4 to 6 years, some one hundred thousand new apartment units housing perhaps as many as half a million people will appear at the end of this one street in Shenyang. And Shenyang itself is just one of many hundreds, if not thousands, of cities in China where projects like this are occurring. Though they may end up being crowded, at least by Western standards, these apartments are clean and modern and the living conditions represent a huge improvement for the mass of the population. It should not be surprising then that a Pew Foundation poll taken before the 2008 Olympics found that 86% of Chinese were satisfied with the state of their society. But what might happen if this progress suddenly came to a painful halt?

Though some of the money that is paying for employees’ wages and construction materials must be coming from increased Chinese productivity, most of it is certainly coming from China’s export earnings. The bulk of those earnings come from the North American and European economies, all of which seem headed into recessions. As the consumers in those economies spend more of their decreasing income on food, utilities and fuel it will be the kind of goods made in China today – few of which are essential – that will inevitably be dropped from household budgets in the West. This prospect must seriously concern the Chinese leadership, who are managing China’s ongoing Industrial Revolution. The media in the West have long reported the fact of rural Chinese migration from the poverty of the countryside to the relative prosperity, or at least opportunity, of China’s cities. They number in the “millions” we have been told but you can’t really appreciate the reality of the people hidden in that number until you have watched hundreds of laborers pouring from worksites, like this one in Shenyang, at the end of a working day. I noticed that many of them carried their own shovels with them as they walked back to the shantytown of shacks that line the western border of “New University City.