After a 16 hour plane ride, getting my temperature checked twice for Swine Flu and walking through heat detectors, I arrived in Beijing exhausted but excited. My groupmates Amanda, Mary, Will, Ben and our advisor Professor Huang were already at the Piao HOME Inn in Wangfujing, at the center of Beijing.
The first thing we decided to do as a group was to get business cards. Nothing fancy but something professional-looking, we told the store owners. And they are quite professional! I just gave a business card (mingpian in Chinese) to a potential interviewee today and by the look on his face and his agreement to be interviewed, our purchases were more than justified.
Anyways, Beijing is bustling, and the sky is grayer than I remember it being last summer I came. The food has given some of us….”bathroom trouble” … but hey at least it’s cheap and good!
As for our research topics, here’s what we sent the fellowship:
The overall title of this research endeavor is “Living Near the Central Power: Government Policy and the Realities of Life in Contemporary Beijing.” The goal is to “evaluate how concrete government actions affect residents in Beijing,” and “how Beijingers work with, around, and through government policy.”
- Miyuki Baker, ’12, “The Effects of the Chinese Government in Training Contemporary Artists in Beijing Higher Education”
- William Lin, ’12, “The Changing Nature of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment in Contemporary China”
- Amanda Ling Morrison, ’11, “Disparate Impact: Looking at the Effects of the One-Child Policy across Socio-Economic Strata”
- Mary Ayn Prager, ’11, “Outsiders and Insiders: Comparing Perspectives on Faith of Chinese Christians and Non-Christian Chinese on the Streets of Beijing”
- Benjamin Yelsey, ’11, “Government Impact on Public High School Science Education in Beijing”
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Well that’s all for today, but keep an eye out for new entries. We’re planning on writing about our research of course, but also things that we’ve noticed about daily life in Beijing–food, housing, the people and other miscellaneous topics.
-Miyuki