Student Activities in China

 

“Social Practice” 

Although both Hong Kong and mainland China use Chinese, I learned a lot of new Chinese terms when I first came to Beijing. Some of these terms originate from the special cultural environment. “Social Practice” is one of them. In Chinese pronunciation, it is very similar to Internship, but the content is rather different. The aim of social practice is to let students go to somewhere else in China and do something meaningful– this definition seems vague, but it should be quite descriptive. Let me list some examples. The most common “practice” is to go to the “poorest areas in China” and teach the primary or secondary school students a few lessons. Some practices are to investigate the changes occurred in “New Villages of Communism”. These practices are generally organized by the students themselves, thus I feel that quite a lot of them are subject to flaws, such as lack of planning and organization. Another problem is that there is no salary, so it’s just “compulsory volunteers” and many students are not very motivated. Once the students arrive at the destination, practice becomes travelling. Of course, there’re still some high quality practices, but it is not easy to find one.

I took part in a practice of visiting medicine factories in Yunnan Province, southwest of China. Most of the time we’re doing travelling. It’s fun anyway. The building in the photo is the historical site of “National Southwest Union University”, a temporary university established when Japan dominated eastern part of China.

You may wonder why don’t the students take part in internships instead. To me, there’re three main reasons: very few companies in Beijing are willing to provide positions for inexperienced undergraduates, it just takes a lot of opportunity costs; education in secondary school is too exam-oriented, mainland students do not have sufficient social skills or courage to work in the society, it would be easier for them to keep on doing math exercises and prepare for exams; in summer vacation, the university still arranges some compulsory “mini courses” for students, thus it is hard for them to have two free consecutive months for internship.

 

 

Class activities

Again, it is the first time for me to know that university students in the same department are grouped into classes for management. The idea is just more or less the same as the classes in high schools. I explain more about it in Beijing Experience. As a whole class, we sometimes have picnics or visit tourist spots for “building up friendship” (感情建设)—this is an official Chinese term describing such class activities. An advantage of holding these activities in Beijing is that there are too many tourist spots around.

 

 

Girls’ Festival

Boys’ and Girls’ Festival are special traditions in Tsinghua. In Girls’ Festival, the boys have to prepare presents and arrange activties for the girls to make them feel good, and vice versa. I regard it as a “pressure releasing day”. Tsinghua students are always too busy with study, and most of them are under high pressure. Every day is just the same: classrooms – canteens – dormitory, we call it “three stations in a lane” (三点一线). In the Festival, students can finally have a reasonable excuse to leave the desk for a while and make some transient changes in life. In the right picture, boys were giving roses publicly to their female classmates during the recess of a lecture. In the left picture, they are shouting and singing to catch the attention of their girls under the dormitory building. The Festival is a part of invaluable memory for many Tsinghua students.

 

 

Sleeping during the break

You can see how hardworking Tsinghua students are (when they are still freshmen). They grab hold of every chance to take a nap, including the 5min break in a class.

 

 

Volunteer teaching

We went to a primary school in Beijing and volunteered to be “teachers” for one day. It is actually very hard for a Hong Kong student like me to imagine that there’re so few teaching facilities in the school, and actually this school is not the poorest in the area. Although we just played some games with the children and talked with them, they felt very satisfactory. Their smiles are innocent. It seems it is evil to destroy their childhood dreams by forcing them to merely live for exams and target on Peking and Tsinghua University and persuading them that entering these prestigious schools is the only way to fulfill their dreams. Contradictorily, I have found that many of my schoolmates have already forgotten their dreams.

 

 

95th Anniversary of Tsinghua

Alumni of different decades had very different experiences. Probably some of these old people have taken part in wars and Cultural Revolution. I just wonder what our faces and hearts will look like when we take a reunion photo 50 years later.
(Left is a famous tourist spot in Tsinghua. “Tsing Hua Garden” was written on the gate. Right is the Great Hall.)

 

 

Seed funding – a freshman research project

This is a small amount funding supporting Year 1 and 2 students to do some creative experiments. All the students in my group had not yet taken biology courses, and not learnt how to search for and read literature. Without any practical ideas, without the support of any professors, without the experiences of doing experiments, it is a total failure as expected. We learnt the lesson: be practical. And we consumed all the samples – strawberries – by ourselves.

 

Physical Education – a special point of Tsinghua

A group of girls is doing ‘aerobics’ under the logo “Working for the motherland healthily for fifty years”. Tsinghua students have a very good tradition of doing physical exercises. I was told that, many years ago in Tsinghua, when the bell rang at 4pm every day, all the students and teachers would leave their work and go out to have sports together. Although this custom does not exist anymore, Physical Education courses are still compulsory every semester. That means we have to take a minimum of 8 PE courses within the four years. PE exams are also terrible: we have to accomplish a 3000m run within 17min, and do 15 pull-ups at one time. Grabbing hold of the chance, I have learnt some new sports: basketball, handball, cricket and bowling.

To encourage students to take part in the Beijing Marathon, students who could accomplish 21km can get full score in PE exam. Over half of the students took part in this activity. Interestingly, after the school cancelled such policy, the number of participants dropped over 50%.

I remembered that a Tsinghua student cried in front of many students just because the PE teacher deducted a few marks in his PE exam. I always feel pity on this type of student.

 

 

Big dinners (班搓)

It should also be a special tradition in mainland China that a student should give a treat to all his classmates during his birthday. A prerequisite for this tradition is that the food here is cheap. It is just too difficult for a student to give a treat to twenty people at the same time in Hong Kong.

It is quite nice to have such big dinners occasionally, but I still prefer one-to-one dinner, in which real communication can really take place. Friendship is not commodity. It requires time and attention.

 

 

English Summer Camp

All Tsinghua freshmen have to take part in a 3 weeks English Summer Camp during their first summer vacation. Foreign volunteers are invited to hold activities and play games with them. Because many non-Tsinghua students are eager to take part in this camp, the university gives the real Tsinghua students some special T-shirts, and only those who wear it can enter the building. Interestingly, “3 smiling children faces” are printed on this T-shirt. It is rather strange for university students to wear it. Perhaps the designer mean that we can only learn a language well if we have the heart of a child.

(above) Once the activities end, the road is full of students wearing red and yellow T-shirts.

 

 

Have fun with apparatus

We always have to wait between steps during biology experiments. Some students like to have some fun with the apparatus.

 

 

Students’ Festival

My classmates are practicing dance performance for the student’s festival. A student festival is generally held in the Great Hall, and every class in the same department gives a show for the audience, generally singing, dancing and performing a drama. Again, it is another chance for Tsinghua students to exploit their creativity and express their thoughts, besides the Girls’ and Boys’ Festival. People have to find a stage to show their ability. Many Tsinghua students have switched to computer games, TV or students activities, after they realized that they cannot find their stage in exam scripts.

 

 

Collective birthday parties

It means we have a birthday party for all classmates whose birthdays are near. It reminds me of the birthday parties I had when I was in kindergarten. Fun and innocent. I hoped it was not deliberately organized for the League presentation.