FOUR STUDENTS JOIN HISTORY PROFESSOR TO EXPLORE A DIFFERENT SIDE OF CHINA

Brian Johnson '08, Nina Roach BMC '07, Paul Jakov Smith, Richard von Glahn, Dylan Gasperik '09, and Stephanie Wu '09 atop the Great Wall.

Stephanie Wu ’09 was conferring with her traveling companions outside of a restaurant in Northwest China when she noticed the crowd. A small circle of local residents had gathered, standing with their hands behind their backs, necks craned, staring. To her surprise, Wu realized that her group was the attraction.

“The cities in this region don’t get many foreigners,” she says, “so they found us as fascinating as we found them.”

Wu was one of four students—including Dylan Gasperik ’09, Brian Johnson ’08, and Nina Roach BMC ’07—who joined Professor of History and East Asian Studies Paul Jakov Smith and his co-author Richard von Glahn (Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles) on a four-week exploration of Northwest China May 15-June 14. The trip was sponsored by the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, and all freshmen, sophomores, and juniors who had completed first-year Chinese by the start of the tour were eligible. Upon their return to campus in the fall, the students will take a one-credit independent study with Smith and complete a 20-page research paper drawing on experiences and observations from the trip.

“Traveling around China with [Smith] while I researched my thesis was something I thought I could only dream about,” says Nina Roach, who is studying the development of Chinese cities. “The whole trip was phenomenal from start to finish.”

The tour began in Beijing and included Xi’an (Shaanxi Province), former capital of the Han and Tang empires, the seat of imperial power and the eastern terminus of the trans-Eurasian Silk Road trade; Yan’an, base area for the communist resistance from 1936-1946; Yulin, site of the largest Great Wall beacon towers and now the center of a state-sponsored coal and natural gas industry; and Yinchuan (Ningxia Province), a region of mixed Hui (Chinese Muslim) and Han (ethnic Chinese) that was once capital of the powerful Tangut empire of the Western Xia. From Yinchuan the group continued to Xining (Qinghai Province), center of the Tibetan political federations of the 10th to 13th centuries, then headed back east to Lanzhou (Gansu Province) to catch the 26-hour train to Shanghai.

For years, Smith has been reading, writing, and lecturing about the region at the heart of the tour. “These places were all part of the Chinese imperial frontier,” he says. “It was a chance for me and the students to see what they actually look like, and to experience the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi, the intensive agriculture in the midst of arid wasteland made possible by the Yellow River, and the high grasslands of western Qinghai.” Students also witnessed the influence of China’s booming economy in the Northwest, where towns with valuable natural resources—like Yulin, with its gas and coal—have become centers of intensive state-sponsored development.

The cities of Northwest China are having growth spurts as more jobs are created by the economic and industrial boom, and even the smallest are now inhabited by more than one million people, a larger population than most American cities. They all boast transportation systems that, says Smith, put our country’s to shame: “Cheap, ample transportation is considered a public service.” The downside, he says, is that with increasing wealth, automobiles may soon overtake railroads as the favored form of travel, choking China’s cities with cars.

Dylan Gasperik sees China as a “country of the future.” Where American cities are somewhat complacent, focusing on maintaining rather than enhancing roads and buildings, Chinese cities are in constant states of progress. As an example, Gasperik points to the east side of the River Pudong district. “Before 1990 it was a farm area, nothing but swamps,” he says. “Now it’s the center of the business district in Shanghai. It’s amazing how much progress has been made in 15 years.”

But not all of the effects of economic development are positive, says Smith. China’s rules of eminent domain allow the government to seize land where natural resources have been discovered, and as a result towns like Yulin have been the site of many peasant demonstrations against the state’s appropriation of farmland. “It’s happening throughout China,” says Smith. “The government is only now seeing the peasant’s demands as legitimate.”

And despite the country’s prosperity, there remain regions of desperate poverty. “Because everyone talks about China’s rise so much, sometimes its lingering problems get overlooked,” says Brian Johnson. “China is getting wealthier, but I still saw plenty of homeless people and families living in shacks, and peasants slaving away on their small plots of land. It reminded me that China is still a developing country.”

Along with class contrasts, ethnic diversity is characteristic of several Northwest regions and towns, such as Qinghai Province and the city of Xining. The original inhabitants were Tibetan, but there has been a strong influx of Muslim and Han Chinese. “The Muslims have adapted very well, assimilating into Chinese society and maintaining their religious identities in ways that fit in with Chinese political and economic trends,” says Smith. The Tibetans, meanwhile, are pasturalists whose lives revolve around Buddhism, temples, and their herds of sheep and yak. “Their lifestyle is at odds with the urbanized thrust of modernization taking place in Qinghai,” says Smith.

While in Xining, the group took an overnight trip to Qinghai Hu (Lake Kokonor), the immense saltwater lake 10,000 feet above sealevel that is at the center of the region’s pastoral economy. There they were welcomed to a Tibetan temple by young monks who were happy to show them around. “Many of the more popular religious sites are regulated—you can’t touch anything or take pictures,” says Stephanie Wu. “Here, it was different. I even got to light incense candles.”

A group plays games in the Muslim district of Xi'an.

The group also saw yaks—many, many yaks, used by the Tibetan people for everything from farming to food to transportation. “At first we were excited to see them, pointing them out all the time,” says Wu. “But once we started seeing them everywhere, it wasn’t such a big deal.” They even feasted on barbecued yak inside a small tent called a yert.

Wu, whose family is from Beijing, was pleased to discover a China she didn’t know, a country where most of the outside world has never set foot. “I’d been to China before, but never out of the city,” she says.

Dylan Gasperik was awed by the Alpine beauty of Qinghai Hu: “It was amazing to find this raw landscape that still existed in the modern country.” The people were friendly, and eager to sell their hand-made crafts and trinkets. “They don’t see as many tourists as the more eastern places,” says Gasperik, who wonders if China’s much-heralded economic development has irrevocably altered the lives of the pastoral Tibetans in less than beneficial ways.

“Without all of this development, the Tibetans would live simply, cultivating farmland, owning sheep,” he says. “Now they are conditioned to depend on the few foreigners who come through to buy their trinkets. They might have been better off living as nomadic shepherds.” In the fall, he’ll be writing his research paper on this very subject.

On the historical front, the group saw several former residences of Mao Zedong in Yan’an (“That guy moved around a lot,” cracks Gasperik) and the Army of Terracotta Soldiers in Xi’an. “I’d seen them in history books,” says Wu, “but getting to see them up close and personal was much more meaningful.” They also visited historical sites along the Great Wall, including the Zhenbei Beacon Tower and a Ming Dynasty fort.

“We could see miles into the desert, and I tried to imagine fires smoking in the distance from Mongol camps,” says Brian Johnson, who was struck by the desert’s encroachment across the once-green area: “I could see some trees planted to reduce erosion, but you could tell there had been much more vegetation in the past. It was kind of scary.”

Throughout the journey, the students kept journals detailing their experiences. “I filled half of a small moleskin notebook,” says Nina Roach. “It doesn’t even matter what sort of paper or thesis or further research grows out of that little notebook—all that matters to me is that everything I saw and did is now in that book to keep.”

During the fourth week of the trip, after Smith had departed, students were free to explore the cities of the Yangzi River Delta on their own. Gasperik remained in Shanghai, touring museums—including an urban planning exhibit showing a full-scale model of the city and outlining growth plans for the future—and making excursions to northern suburban areas like Chongming Island, which will soon transform itself into a self-contained, environmentally sustainable village. He also took advantage of the largest skateboard park in the world, yet to be used by the students of the adjacent, newly built campus of Pudong University. Gasperik relished Shanghai’s status as an international city, popular with European tourists. “No one paid attention to me walking down the street—unlike the smaller cities, where a tall white guy carrying a skateboard really stood out.”

Wu also stayed on in Shanghai, visiting historic communist sites like the former residence of Sun Yat-sen, the “Father of the Chinese Revolution,” in order to gather information for her research paper on how the history of communism in certain cities affects its role in these places today. “I really learned to be independent and self-sufficient in Shanghai,” she says. “I was alone in a big, unfamiliar city, but after a few days it became perfectly natural to walk a few blocks, get on a subway, transfer, and walk to lunch in the French Concession.” She also spent one night in the smaller city of Suzhou (population two million), long noted for its silk production, lush gardens, and stone bridges.

Brian Johnson and Nina Roach also remained in Shanghai for a few days, before heading north to begin eight-week long intensive Chinese language programs in Beijing and Harbin (Heilongjiang Province) respectively. Johnson is studying with CET Academic Programs, a private study-abroad organization based in Washington, D.C. He takes four hours of language classes every weekday and is bound by a full-time language pledge: “No English, or CET will send you home!” he reports. During weekends he and his fellow students visit places of historical interest, like the Great Wall and the Temple of Heaven; they recently ventured to Inner Mongolia, where they received a taste of the traditional Mongolian lifestyle (complete with horseback riding).

“It’s an intense program,” he says. “I can’t wait to impress my teachers at Haverford with my new language skills.”

In Harbin, Roach is also learning to let go of her native tongue. “I have spoken no English here except for a few phone calls home and a proper noun here and there,” she says. “Because of this, I’ve been able to make Chinese friends, and my listening comprehension has improved so much.”

Back in the United States, Paul Smith wants to work with the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship to arrange volunteer and internship opportunities for Haverford students with various nonprofits in China.

“We’ve given students the chance to learn about the issues that most concern the Chinese,” says Smith. “We want to give them future opportunities to learn more about China from its people, and to experience first-hand the prospects and problems of rapid development in the world’s most populous nation.”

— Brenna McBride