Spring Break Research Trip to China’s Borders

Student blogger Cady Deck, Certificate ’19, shares her experience participating in a student-led research trip to the China- Myanmar border for the China on the Border: Provincial Relations on the Periphery course. Other student groups planned trips to China’s borders with Russia and North Korea. 
 

During the spring semester, I took China on the Border: Provincial Relations on the Periphery, which is a class about China’s relations with its neighboring countries. After taking Chinese and American Thought: Bilingual Perspectives in the fall, I was looking forward to another course that involved both field research and opportunities to collaborate with my Chinese classmates. Similar to the Bilingual Perspectives class, the China on the Border class also has a fairly even mix of Chinese and international students. We started the semester with a historical background of the region and international relations theories specifically related to border management before moving on to China’s specific relationships with other countries such as Russia, Myanmar, and North Korea.

In addition to class lectures and discussions, a significant part of this class is to design and plan a research trip to a border region. The class split up into several groups, depending on what (and which) region students wanted to study. Two groups went north, either to Jilin and Liaoning provinces or to Heilongjiang province, and one group (my group) went south to Yunnan province. After determining our groups, we came up with our own individual research proposals related to the border region. My group chose to research Yunnan-Myanmar relations. Two students were interested in analyzing dam diplomacy in Myanmar, two students wanted to examine the prevalence of animal trafficking across the border, and two students decided to research vulnerable populations, including human trafficking victims and refugees from Myanmar. The groups that went north also had a variety of topics related to either China-North Korea relations or to China-Russia relations.

After developing our topics, each group began the labor-intensive project of planning exactly where to go, how to get there, where to stay, and what to do once we arrived. My group spent many afternoons and late nights navigating these decisions as we all had different topics that we wanted to study. After settling on several locations and determining our modes of transportation and lodging, we researched the specific places to go and reached out to people for interviews. My team decided to go to Kunming first to interview professors and students at Yunnan University before heading to Ruili, a border town on the Yunnan-Myanmar border, to conduct more in-depth field research.

Yunnan Group (China-Myanmar Border) 

In Kunming, we conducted several interviews, including one with Yunnan University graduate students about border residents in Yunnan. We also organized a private guided tour with Kunming’s Wildlife Zoo media representative to learn about rescued animals. Although unplanned, wandering around downtown Kunming talking to local shopkeepers about our topics was quite helpful and gave us an idea of what to expect when we went to the border town of Ruili.

Interviewing graduate students at Yunnan University about border residents on the China-Myanmar border

 

 

Visiting the Kunming Wildlife Zoo

Talking to a local traditional Chinese medicine shopkeeper

Our next stop was Ruili, where we hoped to gain first-hand knowledge of our topics. We visited the Jiegao border port, interviewed people in the supermarket, and learned about a variety of activities happening at the border. We also went to “一寨两国” (One Village Two Countries), which is a half-Chinese, half-Burmese village split down the middle by the national border. We went there to learn about the close cross-border connections between peoples, cultures, and trade in the border region. One of my favorite parts was visiting Yinjing primary school. I had done a lot of reading about cross-border education and this school stood out as one of the shining examples of cross-border education initiatives. The school is composed of both students from Myanmar and China, most of whom are ethnically Dai. We talked with students about their experience at the school and how they interacted with their peers across the border.

View of Myanmar from the Jiegao Border Port

Chatting with a few women from Myanmar

Standing on the China-Myanmar border

Talking with students at a local primary school

The other two groups also had exciting trips to the China-North Korea border and the China-Russia border. Below are some highlights from the students who participated on those trips.

Jilin-Liaoning Group (China-North Korea Border):
Members from this group researched cross-border trade, tourism, branding, and seafood imports.

Students visited Yanbian University to discuss tourism between China, North Korea, and South Korea

Visiting the Hunchun Border Economic Cooperation Zone

Visiting the Dandong International Ferry Company

Heilongjiang Group (China-Russia Border):
Students researched logging on the China-Russia border, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the 代购 (daigou, or a person who buys products abroad on client’s behalf) business, along with several other topics.

Interviewing an Oroqen (鄂伦春族) woman in her house to learn about Oroqen traditions, culture, and survival in northern China

Students standing next to the Heihe-Blagoveschensk Bridge, a Sino-Russia joint development project

Conducting an interview at Boris Economic and Trade Co., ltd

Taking collaborative classes that have both Chinese and international students has been one of the best parts of my Hopkins-Nanjing Center experience. In addition to making some of my best friends in these classes, I also engaged in meaningful discussions with my Chinese classmates in an academic setting that is only possible at a place like the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. Participating in research fieldtrips both semesters encouraged me to develop and pursue interests in specific topics and regions, such as ethnic minorities (fall semester) and China-Myanmar relations (spring semester), while also teaching me about field research techniques that I hope to apply in the future. I highly recommend that incoming students take one of the collaborative classes offered next year!


Written by Cady Deck, Certificate ’19

Meet the Hopkins-Nanjing Center’s 2019-2020 U.S.-China Exchange Scholars

The Hopkins-Nanjing Center offers the U.S.-China Exchange Scholarship to alumni of U.S. government-supported programs for Chinese language study. These programs include, but are not limited to, the Critical Language Scholarship, Boren Award for International Study, Chinese Language Flagship Program, Peace Corps, Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship, and the National Security Language Initiative for Youth. Meet the third group of U.S.-China Exchange Scholars below:

Freya Quist

Master of Arts in International Studies ’21
National Security Language Initiative for Youth
(NSLI-Y) Program

Freya has been fascinated by language her whole life. She was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Costa Rica learning Spanish and English simultaneously. After moving to the U.S., she was struck by how many doors opened to her just by virtue of speaking a language other than English. With that in mind, she started studying Mandarin. As a junior in high school, she studied for a year at the Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages in Kaohsiung, Taiwan through the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y). While in Taiwan, she worked on her accent, learned to tolerate stinky tofu, and forged relationships that she will treasure forever.

Her time with NSLI-Y was her first meaningful look into the world of international relations. In Taiwan she decided two things: first, she wanted to become a Foreign Service Officer; and second, she wanted to complete her bachelor’s degree abroad. She felt that the outside perspective unique to living abroad afforded her valuable and relatively rare insight into U.S. diplomatic relations.

After returning to the U.S., she packed her bags once more and moved to Europe, where she recently completed her Bachelor of Arts in Diplomacy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. At the University of Groningen, Freya had the opportunity to design her own three-year intensive degree and worked closely with her professors on several research projects as well as hand-picked courses with the aim of developing practical skills relevant to a career in the State Department. She feels learning about U.S. politics and foreign policy from a European perspective added new depth to her insight on the world’s understanding of the U.S. as an international actor. This is something she finds fascinating as an aspiring Foreign Service Officer. Freya looks forward to continuing to broaden her understanding of diverse international perspectives in Nanjing.

Freya learned about the Hopkins-Nanjing Center through her NSLI-Y alumni network and is ecstatic that it will be her next step. She feels the Hopkins-Nanjing Center offers the perfect combination of both academic and cultural enrichment.

   
Joe Wojciechowski 

Peace Corps
Master of Arts in International Studies ‘20

Joe Wojciechowski started studying Mandarin in his first year of undergraduate studies at Ursinus College. This decision to study Mandarin was made on a whim, as he figured a Chinese course was as good as any for completing the school’s language requirement. Little did he know the consequences of this decision would reverberate outwards even to this day, culminating in Joe living in Mainland China for over three years. After studying Mandarin for three years at Ursinus College, Joe decided to study abroad in the Nanjing CIEE program; this would be his first contact both with Chinese life and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. The concept of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center left an indelible mark on Joe, and he decided from that point on to devote his future studies to Chinese culture and politics.

After graduating from Ursinus College with a BA in History, Joe enrolled in the U.S. Peace Corps China program. In this program, Joe spent over two years as a vocational English teacher in Tongren, Guizhou. Tongren is a tier-5 city with a population around 300,000. As an inland city, Tongren had largely been left out of the economic boom experienced in coastal areas, and this gave Joe a China experience quite unlike one many other foreigners’ experience. As one of only five Americans living in the city, most of Joe’s day-to-day interactions were entirely in Mandarin or the local dialect. Learning to acclimate to life in Tongren was not easy, as Joe was forced to confront his fundamental preconceptions about China. In turn, Joe’s presence in Tongren led many in his local community to also confront their own biases regarding the United States. This experience gave Joe a high-level of cultural and linguistic understanding. Peace Corps allowed him to view a different China than most; where many foreigners are limited to frequent interactions with English speakers or bilingual academics, Joe primarily interacted with average Chinese people. This exposure to everyday Chinese life has given Joe a deep appreciation for many aspects of Chinese culture often overlooked by others.

After completing Peace Corps, Joe returned to Nanjing – the place where his interest in China started. He is currently pursuing his Master of Arts in International Studies at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and is eager to continue pursuing a more comprehensive understanding of Chinese life, culture, and politics.


Nicholas A. Henderson
 
Master of Arts in International Studies ’21
Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship Recipient

In 2015, dizzy, sensitive to bright light, and with a massive headache, Nicholas (Nick) walked off the football field for the last time his junior year. A student athlete at the time, Nick had been studying Chinese for two and a half years and had just sustained a career-ending concussion, sidelining him from football and Chinese studies. Nick had dreams of attending the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and studying Chinese at the highest levels, but now, that dream was in jeopardy.


After dropping Chinese language and fighting through a semester of depression, and concussion protocol, he bounced back, earning both the PACIE-Asia Institute Global Education Scholarship and the Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship in the process. Because of their assistance, Nick was awarded the opportunity to increase his Chinese proficiency, and watched American foreign policy take shape in Shanghai while studying abroad in the spring of 2016. He found the experience so vital to his language development that he chose to stay in China for the summer and continue improving his language proficiency.

Nick returned to the U.S. to finish his undergraduate degree and was subsequently accepted into the esteemed program Princeton in Asia (PIA) program. As a PIA fellow, he spent the past two years in Shanghai as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. and Princeton University, and continued sharpening his language skills in preparation for the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. Nick looks forward to joining his future classmates in Nanjing as a student in the Master of Arts in International Studies program, while continuing to study U.S.-China relations with the goal of facilitating healthy cooperation and competition between the two countries.

Hopkins-Nanjing Center Alumni Profile: Brian Linden

Brian Linden, Certificate ’88, is the co-founder of the Linden Centre in Dali, Yunnan province, China. He and his wife Jeanee restored and repurposed a national heritage site into the Linden Centre, which they operate as both a hotel and a venue for community development. He is also currently developing other projects based on the same values of sustainability and cultural heritage preservation that he draws on at the Linden Centre.

Can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing now? What exactly is the Linden Centre and what inspired you to establish it?
 [My wife and I] came to China with the hopes of creating a social enterprise--more specifically, a values-driven business that could serve as a model for more socially responsible development in rural China. The goal was to preserve China’s national heritage, demonstrating its economic value and ambient meaning to the community, while incorporating the region into our projects via sustainable tourism, intangible heritage preservation, education, and microfinance.  We want our brand to stand for these values, to embody integrity and reverence, and we used our restored hotels as the social enterprise upon which we pursued this mission. We were not hoteliers, we had no experience in tourism, but we felt that developing a more balanced approach to tourism was the best way we could start our efforts. 

We came with passion, patience, and respect. We had limited personal financial resources.
By engaging with perplexing, tangible assets like national heritage sites and incorporating the local community in our projects via restoration, planning and management, we have demonstrated to the government that value-driven businesses can have long-term impacts. It takes time to build friendships and relationships in the community. The government put us in a very good position because we demonstrated right from the start that we were able to achieve our sustainability goals. Nobody can question our success in preserving and revitalizing the tangible. That is clearly manifested in our historic complexes that will live for centuries after we have gone. The intangible was kind of icing on the cake.  We did not realize how closely we would be embraced by the government, media and local community.  They inspired us to do more.  Clearly the Chinese government sees how much [we’ve done for] the community, how much buy-in and support we’ve had, and how values-driven businesses can make a difference in rural areas.

How did you become interested in China and end up at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center?
China should never have been on my radar...I was cleaning carpets and doing other odd jobs as a high school student, 30-40 hours a week. Then I went to community college because my family had never had anyone who went to university and we did not have the financial resources to go immediately to a four year school. My father didn’t have the opportunity to finish high school. In 1983 I was cleaning carpets in a University of Chicago professor’s home. He asked me to put a pin in China because he had just returned from China, but I didn’t know where it was on the map. He pulled me over and said, “Is this all you want to do with the rest of your life, clean carpets?” I told him I [didn’t] have many options and he said, “Why don’t you consider China?”

The next day I went to the night school international office and saw there was an opportunity to study in China through the Ministry of Education. I applied and figured China didn’t want me. Yet three months later, I received the opportunity to go to China. I asked, “Why did you choose me?” I was told I was selected because I was from a working-class family and that this was seen as a great opportunity for me.

The second day I was in China, I was stopped and recruited by the head of the Beijing Film Studio. I was out jogging and [the studio head], a movie director, and an actress saw me. They said they were making the first movie to star a foreigner since 1949. They want[ed] me to play the role. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese, but they said they’d dub the movie.

I filmed for four months, made the movie, and CBS came and interviewed me. After getting a one-month internship opportunity at CBS, I transferred over to CBS [full-time]. From then on, I met with many Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping. Suddenly, I’m the carpet cleaner who’s a leading actor who has met famous Chinese people, including Chinese leaders. China changed my life. The idea of pursuing my dream in China happened more quickly than I imagined it could. After further study and completing a master’s degree in Asian Studies in the U.S., I went to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center mainly because I wanted to come back to China and continue my education. The Hopkins-Nanjing Center gave me a wonderful scholarship to come back.

How did your experience at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center prepare you for your future endeavors?
The Hopkins-Nanjing Center provided me with the real education, the history, economics, and political science knowledge that I needed to function effectively and long-term in China. Language is not enough. China respects familiarity with its history and culture. The Hopkins-Nanjing Center provided this. My interactions pre-Hopkins-Nanjing Center were all in the workplace. I really didn’t have a strong feel or understanding of China. Studying in Nanjing gave me that foundation. By doing things in Chinese such as writing papers and attending classes, I realized that China could be a place where I could function as effectively as I would be able to in the States. I am forever grateful that during my time at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center I also had the opportunity to meet my wife. It’s so important that I’ve had a partner who is equally passionate about China. Without the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, none of this would have happened.

What was your most memorable moment while you were in Nanjing?
I think that my most memorable moments at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center revolved around the interaction with the professors. 1980s China was still fairly closed, but I remember how open the professors were. They inspired me through their curiosity in us as students and their willingness to share their stories at a time when very few local people had interacted with foreigners. Their willingness to open themselves personally to us inspires me to this day. That type of genuine interaction, between professors and students, between students and students, is the soul of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center.

What advice would you give to current or future Hopkins-Nanjing Center students?
I want to remind future students that Hopkins-Nanjing Center graduates will return to their home countries and share their views about China. They will be the cultural ambassadors that inform many countries about the values of China. Unless we gain a well-balanced understanding of this vast country, we are limited in how much we can objectively share. Many of us focus on certain subjects like finance or business or, in other words, how to monetize our time spent studying. We do not venture beyond the network-building activities in the big cities. China is so diverse and inspiring outside of its coastal, urban veneers. I want to encourage more students to take their skills and passions to areas that may not lead to immediate monetary gains, but will provide them with unmatched social and spiritual rewards. Get out and see China beyond the walls of a classroom.  The Hopkins-Nanjing Center provides students with the platform to fully immerse themselves in China’s noble culture and promising future.

Interview by Cady Deck, Certificate ’19

Student Activities at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center

Cady Deck, Certificate ’19, reflects back on some of the activities she has been involved in at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center this past semester.

These past few weeks at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center have been super busy, both in terms of academic events and extracurricular activities. Below is an overview of what’s been going on recently.

Last semester, the banwei (student committee) organized a ping pong tournament. This semester they hosted a giant badminton tournament. The top four teams advanced to the next round. An intense battle determined first, second, and third place. I managed to win second place with my partner!

The field of competitors

The final four teams

A group of students arranged a Super Smash Bros. tournament in the student lounge, which was intense. In addition to the players, there were play-by-play announcers and a captive audience. I didn’t participate, but I was part of the captive audience.

Left: Play-by-play commentators; Right: Smash Tournament participants and spectators

Dragon boat practice has begun. This year, the dragon boat festival falls before the end of the semester, so the Hopkins-Nanjing Center is entering not one, but two dragon boat teams! Every weekend we practice at Nanjing University’s 仙林 (Xianlin) campus, which is about an hour away by metro. We will compete against many other teams from around Nanjing on 百家湖 (Baijia Lake) on June 7.

Dragon Boat Team One: The 龙 (long, or dragon) Shots

Dragon Boat Team Two：龙舟的船人 (Dragon Boaters)

Academically, there have also been a lot of organized activities.

I recently participated in a criminology mini-course. City University of Hong Kong Professor Eric Chui came to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center to teach a three-day class. His class focused on three main questions: why people commit crimes, why criminals desist from crime, and why there are drastic differences in reported crime rates in Asian countries compared to those of Western societies. In addition to introducing us to criminology theories, he frequently paused to pose critical questions. We broke into smaller groups to discuss our opinions and present them to the class.

Criminology mini-course participants

 Students in the course on Islamic Fundamentalism took a field trip to a mosque in Nanjing. The course includes a general introduction to Islam and Islamic practice, and this field trip was an opportunity to learn more broadly about Islam and Muslims in China. We took a tour of the mosque and spoke with a scholar there.

Learning about the history of Muslims in China

The Criminal Law class took a field trip to the江苏人民检察院司法鉴定中心 (Jiangsu People's Procuratorate Forensic Center), which is within walking distance from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. We took a tour of the facilities and had a question and answer session with several of the officials. I’m not enrolled in the class, but the professor allowed me to tag along.

Chinese Criminal Law class at the Jiangsu People's Procuratorate Forensic Center

One of the things I enjoy about being at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center is that there’s never a shortage of activities, both academic and extracurricular. Academically, I really enjoyed the criminology mini-course because it gave me insight into an interesting field that I have never studied in-depth. In terms of extracurriculars, I am super excited for the dragon boat festival. As one of the team captains, I can safely say that while it is definitely a lot of work, it is also a lot of fun to struggle through practices with everyone.

Written by Cady Deck, Certificate ’19