This January I taught a class on doing business in China. The course was mainly conducted in Hong Kong, with a day trip across the border to Shenzhen. The students were 28 undergraduates of the University of Maryland. All were business majors; nearly all were honors students.
In Hong Kong they heard presentations from U.S. government staff based in Hong Kong, including speakers from the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service and the Department of Agriculture (who talked about biological trade issues, including bird flu, “mad cow” disease, and SARS).
They also went to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. The SFC’s Laurence Li gave them a presentation there.
The next day they heard a speaker from Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption.
In Shenzhen they visited the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. A SZSE staff member gave them a presentation, enabling them to compare the HK and mainland markets.
The students were required before they left the U.S. to read two books, produce an oral and written book report and take a brief examination based on preliminary readings and lecturers I gave. While in Hong Kong they were required to keep a daily journal. Once we returned to the U.S. they had to write a research paper on a topic related to doing business in greater China. Thus in terms of workload it wasn’t an “easy” class, but their formal schedule in Hong Kong was purposefully kept light, leaving them ample time to explore.
From reading their journals I know they made good use of that freedom. They made excursions to Lantau and Macao, went to museums and discovered how vibrant and interesting the various districts of the HK SAR can be. Many of them also made modest contributions to the HK economy. They shopped a lot, and some visited the Jockey Club in Happy Valley.
Elanna Tam, US Foreign Commercial Service
Laurence Li, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission
ICAC
USDA
Gordon Cleveland, USDA.
Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
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Teaching the course was very rewarding (perhaps “orchestrating” is a better word, since I did only a minor part of the lecturing). For me this experience completed a meaningful circle. Fifteen years ago I made my own first trip to Asia as an undergraduate on a study-abroad class. We went to Hong Kong and then into the PRC. We happened to arrive on the mainland just days before tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
We were in Anhui Province, far from Beijing, in the small city of Wuhu. That’s the home of Anhui Normal University, an institution with which my Alabama college expected to develop an exchange program.
Even in Wuhu there were protests. The day after tanks cleared the Square in Beijing, An Shi Da students marched onto the streets outside their campus. They wore white to express mourning. They carried wreaths they’d made from tissue paper. They wanted to inspire a general strike. Many had friends in Beijing whose fates they didn’t know. They’d been boycotting classes throughout the spring.
Watching the violence on CNN, our parents were of course distraught. It was unclear what would happen next. There were rumors of splits within the army, talk of possible civil war. In any case, blood was already on the square in Beijing. Nobody’s parents would be assuaged just because violence hadn’t yet erupted in Wuhu. We had to cut the visit short. But foreigners were stampeding out of China. You couldn’t easily book a flight home. We traveled from Wuhu to Anhui’s capital Hefei, then on to Nanjing. From there we got a flight back to Hong Kong. After a night there, we flew back to the U.S.
Reporters met our plane in Birmingham; we were big local news–locals trapped “behind the lines” as history unfolded. I had no comment. I had nothing coherent to say; I felt conflicted and overwhelmed, unable to process what I’d experienced. I’ve spent much of the last 15 years studying China, trying to sort it out.
China is now vastly different than it was in 1989. At least in some ways. Transformation hasn’t come to all areas.
This January, leading my own class trip to China, I awoke to find the headline, “Zhao Ziyang is finally free” on the front page of the South China Morning Post.
Later that day I met two young mainlanders in Hong Kong. Both were recent graduates of PRC colleges. I mentioned Zhao Ziyang’s death to them. They’d not yet heard about it. Worse, they didn’t know who he was. The memory of Zhao, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party, had been effectively erased from their world. That gave me chills, recalling some of what I felt in the PRC 15 and a half years before.
broadband service to be hooked up there (I finally called Comcast over the weekend; maybe I’ll be surfing there by next week). In the meantime, since there’s no network to be routed in my apartment, wirelessly or otherwise, I connected the router that I bought for my apartment to the computer of my x-wife. 
This man, a teacher and administrator in a Baltimore private school, was murded recently in a mall parking lot. I didn’t know him, but I happened to see 
