A Quote

Last night we spent about an hour debriefing our experience so far in China. One of the themes we have all picked up on while studying and learning about this country is that there are many China's, and these various "China'" can often be in conflict with each other. Dick, one of the Fulbrighter's, shared this quote from a book he is reading called China Airborn: The Test of China's Future by James Fallows. I think it sums up what I am learning about this country much more eloquently than I ever could:

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Millions of Chinese people are now very rich, and hundreds of millions are still very poor. Their country is a success and a failure, an opportunity and a threat, an inspiring model to the world and a nightmarish cautionary example. It is tightly controlled and out of control; it is futuristic and it is backward; its system is both robust and shaky. Its leaders are skillful and clumsy, supple and stubborn, visionary and foolishly shortsighted.

This is a brand new building at Beihang University. It is massive. I'm not sure I've captured the scale of it in this photo, but trust me--massive.

This isn't the best photo to juxtapose modern China and old China except that I took this photo in a Hutong, which are the old neighborhoods in Beijing that are causing conflicts in terms of development in the city.