China Study Tour: Northwest University Visit

Our visit to Northwest University was intended as a comparison with the Beijing International MBA visit in Beijing. It ended up being a valuable experience, in terms of learning the kinds of students who chose Northwest University, and also the faculty.

The first speaker required our tour guide, Peter, to translate (and Peter did an excellent job), but I found it interesting as this is the first official person we’ve run into so far who has not chosen to speak English. Our second speaker was another professor who had recently returned from a Fulbright scholarship in the U.S., in Los Angeles. Her English was excellent, and she did a great job attempting to sell us on Xi’an.

Two thins became obvious to me fairly quickly during the presentations and subsequent Q&A. People from Xi’an are very proud of their city and what the government is doing to improve it, and the Northwest University students were much more willing to engage and listen to what we had to say.

To address Xi’an and governmental influence in greater depth: Chinese people we’ve met here are universally pleased with how the government is improving infrastructure and job opportunities in Xi’an. I expect that we would likely find a lot more discontent were we to meet people not benefitting from this deliberate investment. However, it is indisputably true that companies are moving to China, and that the Chinese economy is growing at a very fast clip, and the average wages of both rural and urban residents has increased significantly in recent decades, even if there is still a huge gap between them.

I still am undecided as to the wisdom of their method, given that the growth here still seems very artificial to me, being that it is forced almost entirely by government action and intervention. That, to me, is not sustainable business. However, another piece of the sustainability puzzle is infrastructure, and the United States is faced with an aging infrastructure system that is too heavily dependent upon roads for transportation of goods and people, and an electricity grid incapable of truly harnessing the power that exists in the U.S. for national use. This lack of investment in needed infrastructure will hamper growth in cities that do not make it possible for employees to get to work, and transportation hubs that cost companies time and money, rather than providing a seamless transportation network.

During out lunch, our hostess at the University treated us to a beautiful Chinese love song. As with Jackie’s singing on the bus, I could detect neither embarrassment nor vanity in their actions, merely a love of singing and true talent. It reminds me of what we read in China Road about the importance of singing in a culture where so little is spoken openly. We are still planning to get Jared to sing, but perhaps there are too few evenings left to make it happen.