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The academic element of this trip included 20 UW students who signed up for an Exploration Seminar called “Entrepreneurial Explosion in Modern China.”  The goal of the seminar was to expose students first-hand to the incredible economic growth happening in China, to help them understand the forces driving that growth, and to get them thinking about the impact that growth will have on the world economy and on their own futures. 

The students were mostly business and economics majors (undergrads) and about half came from Chinese or Asian heritage.  Most had only a cursory knowledge of recent Chinese history, so we spent the first week seeing an excellent PBS documentary on China’s “Century of Revolution” and touring Shanghai.  The second week we spent visiting companies in Shanghai and getting educated on key economic changes and the drivers behind them – the domestic banking system, foreign investment, manufacturing outsourcing, state-owned enterprises, and the emerging legal infrastructure.  The last 2 weeks we travelled to other places – Hangzhou, Wenzhou, and Yandang Shan – to meet with Chinese entrepreneurs, observe the rural-to-urban contrast and migration, and to have some fun.  Students learned a great deal, as I’m now seeing as I read their final papers.

For me, as the instructor, this seminar provided a tremendous opportunity to explore and learn about China alongside the students.  While I’d spent the last year or two reading lots about China’s recent history and growth, I’ve now had a chance to “live” the experience of that growth – to see the construction cranes in action everywhere, to view the entirely new skyline of Shanghai, to hear directly from entrepreneurs who’ve built and grown their companies in the unique atmosphere of the last 20 years, to ‘feel’ the sense of opportunity and hope that permeates the streets, to smell and taste the smog, to speak with recent rural-to-urban migrants about their experience – and from all this, to draw my own conclusions about China.  In addition to learning a lot, I found the interactions with students to be much more gratifying than any classroom teaching I’ve done at UW back in Seattle.   First, our daily proximity allowed us to learn more about each other and I could relate to students as whole people rather than just members of a class.  Second, many of the students came from Chinese families and could relate personal stories about China’s recent history and cultural mindset that added a rich and enlivening perspective to the discussions (not to mention fluent Mandarin translating!).   And third, students were more comfortable in this relaxed environment to bring their own personal passions – about environmental concerns, about poverty vs. plenty, about moral issues of government control vs. personal freedom – into our daily discussions, giving them an intensity and personal relevance that caused some real deep thinking.   I was impressed by how seriously students treated the subjects we covered and how thoughtful they were in their comments.