Thursday, April 29, 2010
hard to believe this is in a city of 21 million people
If you can remember, I posted a few months ago on the natural beauty of Yuan Ming Yuan park, which is a two minute walk from our campus. I went there yesterday with a coworker and was amazed by the natural beauty of the entire park in spring. The pictures really don't do it justice.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
China may ease up on one child policy
This is a pretty interesting article talking about the limiting population helped in the short term, but may have disastrous effects for China. It's a little bit lengthy, but it is a good read if you want to understand the cause and effects of population control and its effect on the average citizen.
China May Ease Long Hated One Child Rule
DAFENG, China - When asked why she and her husband do not want a second child, Shi Xiaomei smiles at her pudgy 9-year-old son and does a quick tally of the family budget.
Her salary as a cleaning lady and the income from a mahjong parlor in their spare room barely cover their son's school fees and other expenses.
"With just one, we can give him nicer things. But if you tried to split what we have between two or three, they would all end up with nothing," the 34-year-old says at her home in Dafeng, a prosperous but still-rural county north of Shanghai.
For years, China curbed its once-explosive population growth with a widely hated one-child limit that at its peak led to forced abortions, sterilizations and even infanticide. Now the long-sacrosanct policy may be on its way out, as some demographers warn that China is facing the opposite problem: not enough babies.
A stroll down the dirt path linking Shi's close-knit neighborhood suggests why.
Though a little-known exception allows a second child when both parents are single children themselves, there are few takers.
"Why would we want another one? That's just looking for trouble," said Huang Xiaochen, 28, mother of a year-old son.
"Kids are running in and out of here all the time," her husband Zhu Yingzhun said, pointing to his front door which, like many here, is often left open. "He doesn't need a sibling to have someone to play with."
Officially, the government remains committed to the one-child policy. But it also commissioned feasibility studies last year on what would happen should it eliminate the policy or do nothing. An official with the National Population and Family Planning Commission said privately that the agency is looking at ways to refine the limit without getting rid of it.
A people shortage may seem unlikely in a country of 1.3 billion, the most in the world. The concern, though, is not with the overall number. Rather, as the population shrinks, which is projected to begin in about 15 years, China may find itself with the wrong mix of people: too few young workers to support an aging population.
It is a combination that could slow or, in a worst-case scenario, even reverse China's surging economic growth. The government and families will have to tap savings to care for the elderly, reducing funds for investment and driving up interest rates. At the same time, labor costs probably will rise as the work force shrinks and squeeze out some industries.
In a survey of 18,638 women in Dafeng and six other counties in Jiangsu province, 69 percent of those eligible to have a second child said they would stop at one, with economics being the major factor. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences survey did not calculate a margin of error.
"Government control is no longer necessary to maintain low fertility," Zheng Zhenzhen, who headed the study, wrote in the November issue of Asian Population Studies magazine. "A carefully planned relaxation of the birth-control policy in China is unlikely to lead to an unwanted baby boom."
Family size has dropped dramatically since the 1970s, when the average Chinese woman had five to six children. Today, China's fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman. Most families have just one, but exceptions allow multiple children for ethnic minorities and a second one for rural families whose first baby is a girl.
If that fertility rate holds, China's population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2026 and then start shrinking, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By the end of this century, China's population would be cut almost in half to 750 million, according to a model developed by Wang Feng, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine. That would still be two and a half times bigger than the U.S. today.
Wang says the government's focus on slowing population growth has dangerous side effects.
In just 10 years, the age 20-24 population is expected to be half of today's 124 million, a shift that could hurt China's economic competitiveness by driving up wages. Over the same period, the proportion of the population over 60 is expected to climb from 12 percent — or 167 million people — to 17 percent.
"We feel like we're seismologists, you know," said Wang, who has helped lead a data-driven campaign to persuade the government to drop the one-child policy. "This earthquake is happening and most people don't see it. We feel we have the knowledge to detect this and we should tell the public."
Sonograms became more widely available in the 1990s, and some parents who wanted a son aborted their baby if they learned it was a girl.
Though the practice is illegal, statistics make clear that it is widespread. The male-female ratio at birth was 119 males to 100 females in 2009, compared with a global average of 107 to 100.
Experts fear that, in the years to come, the gender imbalance will create a frustrated generation of men unable to find spouses. That in turn could fuel the trafficking of women and girls to be sold as brides.
Still, not all experts agree the one-child rule should be dropped.
Li Xiaoping, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, welcomes the coming population decline, saying it will ease food and water shortages and limit pollution. Writing in the state-run China Daily newspaper, Li said the government should stand firm on the one-child limit while finding ways to boost the earning power of a smaller work force.
A change would mark a turnaround from a 30-year-old policy that dates from an era when the Communist Party controlled every aspect of peoples' lives: where they lived and worked, who and when they married and how many children they could have.
The government credits the rule with raising millions out of poverty by preventing 400 million additional births. The gains have come at a cost, however. Families who violated the one-child rule were fined. Some lost their jobs or homes.
Others underwent forced abortions or sterilizations, the subject of well-known author Mo Yan's latest book, "Frog," the tale of a rural midwife who struggles with an emotional breakdown after a 30-year career performing such brutal procedures.
"Yes, our slowed population growth delivered economic prosperity, but needless to say, we've paid a great price," said Mo, whose book was inspired by his aunt, a country doctor. "No matter how you look at it, it's been a tragedy."Xie Zhenming, who heads the government-funded, research-oriented China Population Association, expects change within the next five years, gradually, in steps.
Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy's history, agrees. The anthropology professor at the University of California, Irvine, believes the government will avoid dramatic change, out of fear that it could revive bad memories and make people wonder whether such a harsh measure was ever necessary.
"My view is that it will gradually be taken apart, piece by piece, over the next few years," she said, "until we all wake up and discover that, lo and behold, the one-child policy has been dismantled to the point that it's no longer a one-child policy."
China May Ease Long Hated One Child Rule
DAFENG, China - When asked why she and her husband do not want a second child, Shi Xiaomei smiles at her pudgy 9-year-old son and does a quick tally of the family budget.
Her salary as a cleaning lady and the income from a mahjong parlor in their spare room barely cover their son's school fees and other expenses.
"With just one, we can give him nicer things. But if you tried to split what we have between two or three, they would all end up with nothing," the 34-year-old says at her home in Dafeng, a prosperous but still-rural county north of Shanghai.
For years, China curbed its once-explosive population growth with a widely hated one-child limit that at its peak led to forced abortions, sterilizations and even infanticide. Now the long-sacrosanct policy may be on its way out, as some demographers warn that China is facing the opposite problem: not enough babies.
A stroll down the dirt path linking Shi's close-knit neighborhood suggests why.
Though a little-known exception allows a second child when both parents are single children themselves, there are few takers.
"Why would we want another one? That's just looking for trouble," said Huang Xiaochen, 28, mother of a year-old son.
"Kids are running in and out of here all the time," her husband Zhu Yingzhun said, pointing to his front door which, like many here, is often left open. "He doesn't need a sibling to have someone to play with."
Officially, the government remains committed to the one-child policy. But it also commissioned feasibility studies last year on what would happen should it eliminate the policy or do nothing. An official with the National Population and Family Planning Commission said privately that the agency is looking at ways to refine the limit without getting rid of it.
A people shortage may seem unlikely in a country of 1.3 billion, the most in the world. The concern, though, is not with the overall number. Rather, as the population shrinks, which is projected to begin in about 15 years, China may find itself with the wrong mix of people: too few young workers to support an aging population.
It is a combination that could slow or, in a worst-case scenario, even reverse China's surging economic growth. The government and families will have to tap savings to care for the elderly, reducing funds for investment and driving up interest rates. At the same time, labor costs probably will rise as the work force shrinks and squeeze out some industries.
In a survey of 18,638 women in Dafeng and six other counties in Jiangsu province, 69 percent of those eligible to have a second child said they would stop at one, with economics being the major factor. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences survey did not calculate a margin of error.
"Government control is no longer necessary to maintain low fertility," Zheng Zhenzhen, who headed the study, wrote in the November issue of Asian Population Studies magazine. "A carefully planned relaxation of the birth-control policy in China is unlikely to lead to an unwanted baby boom."
Family size has dropped dramatically since the 1970s, when the average Chinese woman had five to six children. Today, China's fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman. Most families have just one, but exceptions allow multiple children for ethnic minorities and a second one for rural families whose first baby is a girl.
If that fertility rate holds, China's population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2026 and then start shrinking, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By the end of this century, China's population would be cut almost in half to 750 million, according to a model developed by Wang Feng, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine. That would still be two and a half times bigger than the U.S. today.
Wang says the government's focus on slowing population growth has dangerous side effects.
In just 10 years, the age 20-24 population is expected to be half of today's 124 million, a shift that could hurt China's economic competitiveness by driving up wages. Over the same period, the proportion of the population over 60 is expected to climb from 12 percent — or 167 million people — to 17 percent.
"We feel like we're seismologists, you know," said Wang, who has helped lead a data-driven campaign to persuade the government to drop the one-child policy. "This earthquake is happening and most people don't see it. We feel we have the knowledge to detect this and we should tell the public."
Sonograms became more widely available in the 1990s, and some parents who wanted a son aborted their baby if they learned it was a girl.
Though the practice is illegal, statistics make clear that it is widespread. The male-female ratio at birth was 119 males to 100 females in 2009, compared with a global average of 107 to 100.
Experts fear that, in the years to come, the gender imbalance will create a frustrated generation of men unable to find spouses. That in turn could fuel the trafficking of women and girls to be sold as brides.
Still, not all experts agree the one-child rule should be dropped.
Li Xiaoping, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, welcomes the coming population decline, saying it will ease food and water shortages and limit pollution. Writing in the state-run China Daily newspaper, Li said the government should stand firm on the one-child limit while finding ways to boost the earning power of a smaller work force.
A change would mark a turnaround from a 30-year-old policy that dates from an era when the Communist Party controlled every aspect of peoples' lives: where they lived and worked, who and when they married and how many children they could have.
The government credits the rule with raising millions out of poverty by preventing 400 million additional births. The gains have come at a cost, however. Families who violated the one-child rule were fined. Some lost their jobs or homes.
Others underwent forced abortions or sterilizations, the subject of well-known author Mo Yan's latest book, "Frog," the tale of a rural midwife who struggles with an emotional breakdown after a 30-year career performing such brutal procedures.
"Yes, our slowed population growth delivered economic prosperity, but needless to say, we've paid a great price," said Mo, whose book was inspired by his aunt, a country doctor. "No matter how you look at it, it's been a tragedy."Xie Zhenming, who heads the government-funded, research-oriented China Population Association, expects change within the next five years, gradually, in steps.
Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy's history, agrees. The anthropology professor at the University of California, Irvine, believes the government will avoid dramatic change, out of fear that it could revive bad memories and make people wonder whether such a harsh measure was ever necessary.
"My view is that it will gradually be taken apart, piece by piece, over the next few years," she said, "until we all wake up and discover that, lo and behold, the one-child policy has been dismantled to the point that it's no longer a one-child policy."
Monday, April 19, 2010
Still on the book...
I am spending another month away from the classroom to work on this book for our founder. I am learning more than I ever thought existed in the realm of education, and language arts but I will be glad to get back to the classroom, hopefully sometime this summer. The sheer size of this book is amazing and how many people are now involved. The primary research role is finished, now we're looking for practical ways to take what we do here into the average Chinese teachers classroom. Hopefully finishing up by June.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Qinghai update
The death toll from the Qinghai earthquake has now risen to about 600 people. However, none of our students or their families in Qinghai are affected.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Qinghai Earthquake
Earlier today, a 6.9 earthquake hit Qinghai province, near Tibet. This region is especially poor, known for its beautiful scenery and rich culture of the people. Many, many students have come from this province in the past and several are here now. As of right now, the best the media will say is two people injured, but some other international media sources are saying that around 70 people were killed. This area is very high up in the mountains and typically communication is a little tricky anyway into there, but now it's almost impossible. Please pray for the students who came here from Qinghai as they try to reach loved ones back home.
You know you've lived in China too long when..
-You use a chopstick to stir your coffee in the morning and don't think anything of it.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The Purpose of Research
Today is nice. Maybe 70 degrees outside, it's the first day I've been able to hang my clothes outside to dry. There's hardly any pollution and nary a cloud in the sky. Beautiful day, but I'm stuck inside doing research on theoretical linguistics reading scanned in texts from books written when my parents were infants (or before) that combine language study with psychology and mathematics. A sample is as follows:
Yeah, as you can tell, it's riveting reading.
So as I was sitting here trying to stay awake and desperately avoid distractions (like this one) I was inevitably wondering why I'm doing this. I mean, I never recall seeing Chomsky's notes on mathematical linguistics on any recruiting poster for ESEC. Then, I had a thought. Since being over here, I've firmly established that I want to be in the field of education as my career. This revelation may have came thousands of dollars and five or six years after it should, but I'm just happy to have that figured out now. Eventually, sometime in the future (don't press me for details, because your guess is as good as mine) I will return to the US permanently. Maybe in 2012 or 2016 or anytime in between when government for, and, of and by the people is restored. When this happens I'd like to get my Masters in Education, and I've discovered a few really nice schools that can offer this without too many digits before the comma (another distraction) and I figure all this reading, everything from the Audio-lingual Method to our guy Chomsky here will be in the curriculum. It will be nice to vaguely recognize some of the names and theories.
Also, should I pull off the impossible here and actually get this work finished and everything else goes according to plan, I will have helped to have write a book that will be part of a series of mandatory textbooks in Chinese universities. That looks darn good on a resume when applying to schools to teach. So that right now is what has been getting me through all this research.
Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) operates with two basic operations, Merge and Move. Although there is current debate on exactly how Move is to be formulated, the differences between the current proposals are minute. The following discussion follows Chomsky's original proposal. Merge is a function that takes two objects (say α and β) and merges them into an unordered set with a label (either α or β, in this case α). The label identifies the properties of the phrase.
Merge (α, β) → {α, {α, β}}
For example, Merge can operate on the lexical items 'drink' and 'water' to give 'drink water'. Note that the phrase 'drink water' behaves more like the verb 'drink' than like the noun 'water'. That is, wherever we can put the verb 'drink' we can also put the phrase 'drink water'. This can be represented in the algorithm:
X NP AUX Y => X AUX NP Y
(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)
Yeah, as you can tell, it's riveting reading.
So as I was sitting here trying to stay awake and desperately avoid distractions (like this one) I was inevitably wondering why I'm doing this. I mean, I never recall seeing Chomsky's notes on mathematical linguistics on any recruiting poster for ESEC. Then, I had a thought. Since being over here, I've firmly established that I want to be in the field of education as my career. This revelation may have came thousands of dollars and five or six years after it should, but I'm just happy to have that figured out now. Eventually, sometime in the future (don't press me for details, because your guess is as good as mine) I will return to the US permanently. Maybe in 2012 or 2016 or anytime in between when government for, and, of and by the people is restored. When this happens I'd like to get my Masters in Education, and I've discovered a few really nice schools that can offer this without too many digits before the comma (another distraction) and I figure all this reading, everything from the Audio-lingual Method to our guy Chomsky here will be in the curriculum. It will be nice to vaguely recognize some of the names and theories.
Also, should I pull off the impossible here and actually get this work finished and everything else goes according to plan, I will have helped to have write a book that will be part of a series of mandatory textbooks in Chinese universities. That looks darn good on a resume when applying to schools to teach. So that right now is what has been getting me through all this research.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Easter Update
I apologize for not having an update shortly after Easter, however it is the start of the new session and with that as well as still working for Dr. Yu, I have been a little distracted. Easter Sunday, nearly all of us went to Haidian for a really good message and dynamic worship service with well over one thousand people, mostly Chinese. The church showed bits of The Gospel of John in between hymns and it was incredibly powerful. Afterward, the church revealed a surprise. They had groups of volunteers hand painting 5,000 eggs individually with intricate detail, most with scripture references in flowing Chinese calligraphy. The eggs in the picture I have attached are not from the church, but come from an article in the China Daily. I tried to get a picture of these but have you ever seen an easter egg hunt among a thousand people? After you got an egg, the church wanted you to give it to anybody else in the city and tell them the reason for why. This was probably the best Easter for me in memory.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Prepare for Educational Principles!
As some of you know, I've been pretty sick the past few days. Fortunately, I'm feeling a little better today. As part of my down time, I've been going through lesson plans and educational theories as well as curriculum structure. I knew I needed to break from this when I started to watch 300 and automatically devised a lesson plan for the Persian messenger. The teacher is King Leonidas (on the left) and the Persian messenger (on the right.)
Lesson Plan
Objectives: After completing this lesson, the student will be able to:
Lesson PlanObjectives: After completing this lesson, the student will be able to:
- Identify that this is Sparta, not madness.
- Be able to find earth and water, using the teacher guided, self-discovery method.
- Understand and develop tolerances for the differences in other cultures and as a result become more sensitive to people who are different than him.
- Understand that showing off the skulls of conquered kings and insulting queens are not adequate ways of negotiating with foreign cities.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Video Tour of Campus
So this winter Riley and Geoff filmed some footage of our daily life in Beijing, China, and what its like living here. After a long time of not really doing anything with it, and since we're (or should I say, he's) on break now, Geoff compiled it so you could see from more of a "promotional" perspective of what goes on here. It's a pretty quick video, and it, unfortunately, leaves a lot of the details out, but I think it may help you get a better understanding of some of the things we do.
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