I am currently in China on a multi-purpose visit. Something of the variety of activities can be discerned in the timetable of the last two days.
Wednesday 22 October
0630 Leave my hotel to travel by metro to Shanghai Railway Station. The metro is half full but there are no westerners at this time of the morning – tourists are probably still in bed.
0700 Arrive at the station and go through the airline-style security clearance to check in. Our group of three for a visit to Nanjing assembles from different hotels. We have all been told that the journey to the station, plus the security check, will take an hour and a half: in reality we could have done it all in 45 minutes. We have a long time to wait.
0800 The high speed train for Nanjing departs. I am very impressed by the style and speed of the train – but the wifi isn’t working. Spend the journey discussing the day’s itinerary with a colleague, and reading the excellent briefings prepared back in Sheffield.
0940 Arrive in Nanjing. Last time I travelled from Shanghai to Nanjing was in 2007, by car, taking nearly 4 hours on an empty motorway (it was early on a Sunday morning): this journey has been less than 2 hours by train. After some confusion over which station exit we are being met at, our group of three from Sheffield splits with two of us visiting Nanjing University and one heading to another institution.
1015 Arrive at Nanjing University campus after a ‘challenging’ car journey. I certainly wouldn’t like to drive in China. We are allocated a student guide for a campus tour. I am surprised how much I remember of the University’s beautiful campus from my visit 7 years ago – including some of the more interesting features that our guide would otherwise have omitted.
1100 We meet with three senior colleagues – a Vice-President (who is, like me, a geographer), a senior member of the Nanjing University international office team (a law professor) and an administrative assistant. At 1230 we head to a multi-course working lunch. Over a three-hour period we review all the activities that currently link Nanjing and Sheffield, talk about possible future developments, and discuss the wider higher education landscape in our countries. Sheffield has a long history of collaboration with Nanjing, and they are co-sponsors of our Confucius Institute (which we are currently considering expanding). But we also send to Nanjing many of our students taking degrees in Chinese. And we have a joint postgraduate degree in Applied Linguistics, as well as significant research collaborations in Physics and Engineering. My colleague and I both take extensive notes of the discussions, and we will need to spend some time afterwards writing them up and allocating who should take various actions.
1400 We are driven to our nearby hotel. My room is not ready so I spend an hour doing emails in the lobby. We have set up a Virtual Private Network on my laptop, so I can ‘pretend’ I am in Sheffield and thus avoid the ban the Chinese authorities are placing on the use of Google products.
1500 I can have my room. I spend the next three hours preparing a PowerPoint presentation to be given tomorrow in Shanghai.
1800 My colleague has been setting up an alumni event in a private room in the hotel. She has had some difficulties over the arrangements and has asked me to test whether the hotel concierge can give the right directions to the room (it has been changed from the invitation). In the lobby I meet the third member of our Sheffield party – she has spent the day on a quality assurance visit to another of the 53 universities in Nanjing, at which we have two articulated programmes whereby students spend 2 years in Nanjing and 2 in Sheffield.
1830 The alumni event starts. About 30 Sheffield graduates living in or around Nanjing arrive. They are superb networkers and a buzz very quickly develops, despite the fact that they are from very different cohorts – the oldest graduated around 25 years ago and the newest this year. They all exchange business cards, in the formal Chinese manner, and so do I. My card has my name in Mandarin (or at least a phonetic version) on the reverse. We have also asked our current students in Nanjing (those on the Chinese Studies degree in Sheffield) to come. They have only been here about 6 weeks and look a little shell-shocked by the culture change they are experiencing. I make a brief speech about what is happening in Sheffield, and about how important our international community of Sheffield friends is, and at the end of the event my colleague who has organised the evening indicates how we want to support an alumni network in Nanjing, and how it could be mutually beneficial to all concerned. She speaks Mandarin, and later shows me how active the network’s ‘We Chat’ pages are (We Chat is the Chinese version of Facebook).
2100 The event was badged as finishing at 2100, and on the dot our guests all leave. The three of us staff from Sheffield repair to the hotel buffet restaurant for a slightly dismal meal – everyone else in the hotel has eaten earlier and what is left has been kept heated for some time. It takes the waitress nearly half an hour to bring us a bottle of wine – but it’s good and we feel we deserve it. We split up to go to our rooms at 2230, the last to leave the restaurant.
Thursday 23 October
0630 I get up to do emails, including setting up a discussion forum for students on my module back in Sheffield for whom tomorrow is the day when I would normally be fully available all day for consultations about their projects. We are going to try to maintain communication via an internet discussion forum, but it will depend on me having wifi access and using the Virtual Private Network.
0845 The three of us meet in the hotel entrance to be driven back to Nanjing station through appalling traffic. On arrival there I buy a packet of biscuits which will have to suffice for breakfast. Our train leaves at 1000. En route I discuss a number of staffing issues with the colleague who visited the other university yesterday.
1140 We arrive at Shanghai and have to queue a long time for metro tickets to take us back to our respective hotels. It’s 1230 before I get back to mine. I get on the internet to take forward some of the issues discussed on the train.
1330 I now have a few hours of ‘down time’. With a colleague who has a similar break in schedule we have a bite of lunch, take the ferry across the river, visit a park, a market area and some of old Shanghai before catching the metro back to our hotel.
1700 I prepare for a graduation ceremony and symposium on global affairs this evening. The Sheffield party meets up at 1815 to get our robes on. Guests have been arriving since 1700 and eventually there are about 50 students to be graduated in front of their friends and family. In total there are around 200 people there, including some invitees from other universities and various alumni living in Shanghai.
1845 The degree ceremony. I am grateful that I am not reading out the names – we have a local person from the British Council to do that. I later find out that she took a postgraduate degree in Oxford and that we have a mutual acquaintance there – someone who taught me when I was an undergraduate many years ago. The ceremony does not exactly run in the same way as at Sheffield – parents are much more active in bouncing up and taking photographs, and one man contrives to cross the platform twice because the photos taken of him on his first visit were not deemed good enough. The Vice-Chancellor does part of his speech in Mandarin, which is greatly appreciated. At the end of the ceremony there is a queue of students wanting photographs of me and a colleague, both dressed in our academic robes.
1945 We have a brief pause, and then hold a symposium on global problems. I am the second speaker up, dealing with global population change. I am surprised and delighted by how attentive the audience is, despite the fact that some must have very limited English. I deliberately made my presentation quite visual, with a lot of illustrations, and it seems to have paid off.
2030 Following the symposium we move to a buffet reception. Many students and parents want to talk and they are all immensely grateful for having studied at Sheffield, and proud that their university has come out to Shanghai to visit them. They are all in employment and feel their degree got them there. (I suppose those who are now unemployed or underemployed probably wouldn’t have come along.) We move out onto the hotel terrace looking across the water to the Shanghai Bund (we are staying in Pudong, in the hotel where the ceremony has been held.). It is a warm and still evening, and the buildings are beautifully illuminated. There is something magical about the whole setting. The international friendships formed through education can do nothing but good in the world. But at 2200 the lights go out on the Bund (Shanghai goes to bed early). We stay talking – Sheffield staff, Chinese graduates, UK graduates from Sheffield who are now working here, colleagues from other local universities and from the British Council – and it looks as though some will make a late night of it. But at 2245 I collect my gown and head for the lift and my room on the 28th floor.
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