Attention, Attention: I’m Back

I’d like to say I can’t believe I haven’t posted since May, but the truth is I totally believe it. It’s not as if I haven’t been busy blogging though. I maintain my Career-focused blog everyday at ThinkTalk. It’s a good place to find my thoughts on career advice and job searching for college students, but is not particularly analogous to my studies or what is suppose to go one here.

So, what have I been up to besides hard core work? This summer my study took me to China to learn, briefly and vaguely, about the country’s Communications system. It was a very good experience, as I tend to ensconce myself in travel, and I feel I learned about as much about a particular aspect of a country as you can in 3 weeks.

I’m not really going to go into the specifics of what I learned, experiences, musings, etc because it was back in June and just too much time has passed. However, my professor in China, Dr. Xu Wu of Arizona State University, wrote a cover story for Oriental Outlook magazine about his perceptions of our perceptions of China’s fenqing - which means Angry Youth. Angry Youth is a group of young (duh) ultra-right cyber-nationalists who are tech savvy and very sensitive to criticism about China.

The translation is pretty poor and the student quotes are a) perhaps taken a bit out of context and b) translated from English to Chinese and then back to English. So I’m not entirely sure one of us warned China’s Youth of being “drowned in world’s saliva.” But if she did, that’s kinda cool. In particular I had problems with the accusations of historical ignorance by Americans: “Chinese people often say ‘Forgetting the past means betrayal’, to Americans it means nothing – ‘After all, the United States itself is established by a group of rebels who want to forget the history’.”

And as a colleague from the trip reminds me, this from a society that was up-in-arms over our visit on June 4th (a phrase which, by the way, you cannot google in China), and refused to discuss or let us ask questions on this topic on a visit to a Nanjing Newspaper. When we pushed they responded with: most people have no knowledge of this event and there is no call to discuss it. It is history and it is past.

That doesn’t sound like a country embracing the axiom “Forgetting the past means betrayal,” but I will digress. It was a wonderful trip, China is a beautiful country, and it surely will have one of the most important roles in the future of our World. It is a nation I am still intensely interested in and I will certainly continue to learn about, study and hopefully revisit soon.