Posts tagged ‘Peking University’

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30/09/2014

Education in China: Online learning is becoming more popular | The Economist

NEARLY 7m students began their courses at Chinese universities at the start of a new academic year this month. In line behind them, a new cohort is already cramming for next year’s university entrance-examination, the notorious gaokao. But some young Chinese see drawbacks in bricks-and-mortar tuition in China because of a rigid style of teaching, the funnelling of students into courses they do not enjoy, the cost and dim job prospects for many graduates. Small but growing numbers are considering options online.

Internet-based methods of teaching, known as Massive Online Open Courses or MOOCs, are already gaining in popularity in other countries. Typically, MOOCs offer students free access to instructional videos but charge for certificates showing satisfactory completion of coursework. In China, despite deeply ingrained reverence for traditional institutions, the trend is also beginning to catch on.

One startup in the field is a non-profit organisation in Beijing calling itself One-Man University. It is not officially recognised as a university, but it has gained a big leg-up with backing from non-state companies that see MOOCs as a potentially large new market. To attract viewers, 56.com, a video-streaming website, is distributing the service’s instructional videos without advertisements. Since it opened in 2011, One-Man University has acquired 130,000 registered members.

The organisation’s 27-year-old founder, Tong Zhe, studied physics at Peking University. He decided to offer online courses because he felt that the Chinese approach to higher education was too formulaic. Mr Tong’s 15-minute videos are prepared by professional teachers whose delivery is livelier than what is usually experienced in the dour lecture-halls of Chinese universities. Within three years Mr Tong aims to offer all university and high-school subjects. (The service’s name in Chinese, Wanmen Daxue, is a pun on the English that also means “ten thousand subjects”.)

Universities do not seem opposed to the idea. The principal of Southern University of Science and Technology, Zhu Qingshi, has said of One-Man University: “Education in the internet age can make everyone equal. I believe it will bring a revolution to education.” They are also getting into the business themselves. The government has allowed a first wave of open online courses—such as those provided by Xuetang, a MOOC supported by Tsinghua University—to be hosted on EdX, a non-profit platform, which is sponsored by Harvard and MIT. In May Chen Jin, Nanjing University’s president, said the university intended to work with Coursera, an American MOOC provider which has signed a deal with NetEase, a Chinese distributor, to host online courses.

via Education in China: Online learning is becoming more popular | The Economist.

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15/08/2014

Rule of law: Realigning justice in China | The Economist

IN JULY Zhou Qiang, the president of China’s Supreme People’s Court, visited Yan’an, the spiritual home of the Communist Party in rural Shaanxi province, to lead local court officials there in an old communist ritual: self-criticism. “I have grown accustomed to having the final say and often have preconceived ideas when making decisions,” one local judge told the meeting. “I try to avoid taking a stand in major cases,” said a judicial colleague. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

In China’s judiciary such shortcomings are the norm. But change may be coming. On July 29th it was announced that the party’s Central Committee, comprising more than 370 leaders, will gather in October to discuss ways of strengthening the rule of law, a novelty for such a gathering. President Xi Jinping, who is waging a sweeping campaign against corruption, says he wants the courts to help him “lock power in a cage”. Officials have begun to recognise that this will mean changing the kind of habits that prevail in Yan’an and throughout the judicial system.

Long before Mr Xi, leaders had often talked about the importance of the rule of law. But they showed little enthusiasm for reforms that would take judicial authority away from party officials and give it to judges. The court system in China is often just a rubber-stamp for decisions made in secret by party committees in cahoots with police and prosecutors. The party still cannot abide the idea of letting a freely elected legislature write the laws, nor even of relinquishing its control over the appointment of judges. But it is talking up the idea of making the judiciary serve as the constitution says it should: “independently … and not subject to interference”.

In June state media revealed that six provincial-level jurisdictions would become testing grounds for reforms. Full details have not been announced, but they appear aimed at allowing judges to decide more for themselves, at least in cases that are not politically sensitive.

There is a lot of room for improvement. Judges are generally beholden to local interests. They are hired and promoted at the will of their jurisdiction’s party secretary (or people who report to him), and they usually spend their entire careers at the same court in which they started. They have less power in their localities than do the police or prosecutors, or even politically connected local businessmen. A judge is often one of the least powerful figures in his own courtroom.

“It’s not a career that gets much respect,” says Ms Sun, a former judge in Shanghai who quit her job this year (and who asked to be identified only by her surname). The port city is one of the reform test-beds. “Courts are not independent so as a result they don’t have credibility, and people don’t believe in the law.” She says people often assume judges are corrupt.

Career prospects are unappealing for the young and well-educated like Ms Sun, who got her law degree from Peking University. The overall quality of judges has risen dramatically in recent decades, but there are still plenty of older, senior judges with next to no formal legal training. Seeing no opportunity for advancement after eight years, Ms Sun left for a law firm and a big multiple of her judge’s salary of about 120,000 yuan ($19,000) a year. She says many other young judges are leaving.

It is unclear how much the mooted changes will alleviate these concerns. Those Shanghai courts that are participating in the pilot reforms (not all are) are expected to raise judges’ pay. They are also expected greatly to reduce the number of judges, though younger ones fear they are more likely to be culled than their less qualified but better connected seniors.

The most important reforms will affect the bureaucracies that control how judges are hired and promoted. Responsibility will be taken away from the cities and counties where judges try their cases, or from the districts in the case of provincial-level megacities like Shanghai. It will be shifted upwards to provincial-level authorities—in theory making it more difficult for local officials to persuade or order judges to see things their way on illegal land seizures, polluting factories and so on.

Central leaders have a keen interest in stamping out such behaviour because it tarnishes the party’s image. But many local officials, some of whom make a lot of money from land-grabs and dirty factories, will resist change. With the help of the police they will probably find other means to make life difficult for unco-operative judges. And provincial authorities are still likely to interfere in some cases handled by lower-level courts, sometimes in order to help out county-level officials.

via Rule of law: Realigning justice | The Economist.

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30/07/2014

China’s 1 Percent vs. America’s 1 Percent – Businessweek

A new study by Peking University’s Social Science Research Center pulls back the curtain a bit on China’s überwealthy. The richest 1 percent of Chinese households control more than a third of the country’s wealth, according to the July 26 study.

Most of that is tied up in real estate. In 2012, the study says, real estate accounted for 70 percent of all household wealth in China. (The bottom quarter of households, tellingly, control just 1 percent of China’s wealth.) The outsize reliance on real estate as an investment vehicle for both individuals and enterprises is troubling, given widespread concerns about a property bubble. In June, apartment prices fell in 55 of China’s 70 largest cities, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, property prices dipped 1.7 percent that month.

But how do China’s rich stack up against America’s? The U.S. Internal Revenue Service analyzes income, not household net wealth, and in 2012, America’s richest 1 percent took home 19.3 percent of household income. But incomes rose almost 20 percent for the top 1 percent, whereas they inched up just 1 percent for the bottom 99 percent.

via China’s 1 Percent vs. America’s 1 Percent – Businessweek.

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01/05/2014

China’s Income-Inequality Gap Widens Beyond U.S. Levels – Businessweek

The gap between China’s rich and poor is now one of the world’s highest, surpassing even that in the U.S., according to a report being released this week by researchers at the University of Michigan.

The metric used in these studies, the Gini coefficient, would be zero in a society in which all income is equally distributed, while a score of one would reflect a society in which all income is concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Over a three-decade period starting in 1980—shortly after China’s economic reform and opening commenced—the Gini coefficient has grown from 0.3 to 0.55 in 2010.

In the U.S., by contrast, the index reads 0.45. Anything over 0.50 is considered “severe disparity,” says the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors used data from seven separate surveys conducted by a number of Chinese university-affiliated organizations, including Peking University’s Institute of Social Sciences.

via China’s Income-Inequality Gap Widens Beyond U.S. Levels – Businessweek.

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12/02/2014

Old palace columns coming home[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn

A Norwegian museum will return seven marble columns, taken about 150 years ago from western Beijing’s Imperial Yuanmingyuan Garden, or the Old Summer Palace.

Old palace columns coming home

The deal was reached under a trilateral agreement made by the museum, Chinese tycoon Huang Nubo and Peking University. The columns will return to China in September and be publicly exhibited at Peking University after maintenance and restoration work.

Huang, chairman of Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group, will donate 10 million Norwegian kroner ($1.63 million) to the museum.

Huang told China Daily that the museum donation is not a trade or “throwing away money”, but “a very meaningful action that shows patriotism, as well as a way of repaying back the mother country, which made me rich”.

Karin Hindsbo, director of the Kode Art Museum in Bergen, told China Daily that “the donation shall be used on academic research and the general care of our collections of Chinese art“.

“A donation like this makes a world of difference for Kode,” Hindsbo said.

Huang said he was invited to visit the art museum in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, by then-director Erlend G. Hoyersten when Huang was at a Sino-Scandinavian poets’ exchange event in Norway last year.

“The moment I saw the columns, my eyes teared up. After all, the lost relics from Yuanmingyuan represent an indelible history for all Chinese,” Huang said. “I told the museum staff the relics should not be on show, and they were sympathetic to my feelings.”

During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), British and French expeditionary forces invaded the garden in 1860, removing its precious imperial collections and burning the rest.

Norwegian cavalry officer Johan W.N. Munthe got some of them from unknown sources and donated 2,500 Chinese artifacts to the Kode museum in the early 20th century.

via Old palace columns coming home[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn.

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13/12/2013

Guess What? The U.S. and China Don’t Trust Each Other Much – Businessweek

And the Chinese trust Americans even less. That’s the conclusion of the U.S.-China Security Perceptions Survey (PDF) released on Dec. 11 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Beijing-based research organization China Strategic Culture Promotion Association (CSCPA). “There is a low level of strategic trust between the United States and China, which could make bilateral relations more turbulent,” warns the survey.

A tourist wearing a face mask visits Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Nov. 23

Working with the Pew Research Center and the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University, as well as the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Carnegie-CSCPA survey canvassed the general public and elites in government, business, academia, the military, and the media last year. In the U.S., it surveyed 1,004 adults among the general public and 305 elites. In China, it canvassed 2,597 adults in urban areas and 358 elites.

The tendency among the general public to label the other country an outright enemy was encouragingly low; only 15 percent of Americans and 12 percent of Chinese believe that. Notable, however, was the comparative lack of trust shown by Chinese elites, with 27 percent viewing the U.S. as a foe, compared with just 2 percent of American elites saying that about China.

via Guess What? The U.S. and China Don’t Trust Each Other Much – Businessweek.

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19/09/2013

Peking and Tsinghua universities to offer free courses online

SCMP: “Two of the mainland’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, Peking and Tsinghua universities, will start offering free online courses in partnership with EdX, a major open-course provider.

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Peking University announced earlier this week it would make four courses, including electronic circuits and the study of folklore, available to students around the world through the EdX web platform starting on Monday. Tsinghua University will make available two courses – the history of Chinese architecture and principles of electric circuits, starting on October 18, according to an EdX schedule.

The introduction of Chinese-language courses from Peking and Tsinghua comes after the two universities signed a deal with EdX in May and spent subsequent months preparing the courses.

Li Xiaoming , an online and information systems professor overseeing the web offerings at Peking University, was previously quoted by mainland media as saying the university planned to offer about 100 courses through EdX within five years. EdX, a major provider of massive online open courses, or Mooc, was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. It has signed up 29 global universities – including Harvard, MIT and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – as partners.

Its competitor Coursera, which was founded in April last year by two computer science professors at Stanford University and which has more than 60 partner schools, signed up two additional mainland institutions, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in July.

But neither institution has announced plans about which courses it would offer or when their programme would begin.

While it is free to access non-profit Mooc platforms, Coursera said it would charge students between US$60 and US$90 for exams proctored by a third party.

EdX said it also offered students the option of having their final exams proctored for a fee at official testing centres.

Cheng Fangping , a professor at Renmin University who specialises in tertiary education, said Chinese universities could not afford to be left out of the online education trend in an increasingly globalised world of higher learning.

Traditional universities should not regard such online courses as a challenge but an opportunity to boost their global competitiveness by devising courses that met international standards and by further diversifying and broadening their curriculum.

Cheng said that as the nation rose to prominence on the economic and political global stage, studying topics that focused on Chinese issues such as the environment, could become highly prized by people in many other countries.”

via Peking and Tsinghua universities to offer free courses online | South China Morning Post.

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