Update Thing

Just a quick, boring, photo-less update of what I have been up to the past week.

As you may have noticed I never say anything about my classes here. For the most part I keep the more mundane everyday happenings out of the blog. Not to say that my classes are mundane I enjoy them, but they are not interesting to write or read about. I will say that all of the subject material that may be considered controversial in regard to Chinese history or culture is taught in a very balanced way and critical viewpoints are not left out of lectures.

I made a new Chinese friend recently. She chose the English name Sandy (many Chinese students here pick and English name in addition to their actual name) and is a law student at Fudan and we are working together as language partners. Law school is different in China, students enter straight into it from high school like it is a college instead of treating it like a graduate school as we do. She wanted to discuss American and Chinese politics with me but did not have the vocabulary to appropriately express her thoughts. I hope we can make progress in this area because I would like to hear more from a Chinese perspective on both of these topics. I learned some Chinese phrases but really need to keep improving my base level in order to talk and learn more. I was dubbed with the nickname curvy hair but forget how it was pronounced in Chinese.

Over the weekend I saw what looked like a small demonstration contained by a rather large police force, probably more than 50 officers. There were maybe less than 10 people involved, they all wore white linen tied around their waist and had a banner. I only saw it as it was being broken up, it seemed to be about as non-violent as these sorts of things can be and just involved a bit of pushing. I gathered with the huge crowd to watch what was happening. Those who were demonstrating were not handcuffed or anything so I am not sure if they ended up getting arrested or anything, I left after watching for a while and did not see the final outcome. Unfortunately I did not have my camera for this.

Today I visited the Chinese propaganda museum. It was really interesting to look at and I will post some pictures up eventually. I purchased my first keepsake here. It is an original copy of the little red book that was extremely popular during the cultural revolution, you even see them in many of the propaganda posters. It consists solely of quotes from Mao and the original plan was to have 99% of China to have read this book. There is a lot to say about its history but I did sort of promise to keep this post short. The version I got was in English. It was printed in many languages to be distributed around the world, as the goals of communist ideology are always centered around the eventual revolution of the working class around the world.

That is all for now, not as short as I may have promised but it never is.