The prospect of lying on a hot beach left me indifferent and the CERIUM summer school – one week of classes on a specific theme or country – had peaked my interest for a while. Scandinavia, China, the United States, the Arab Spring, environmental rights, were all extremely tempting options.
I had visited some Middle Eastern countries in the past but never set foot in Asia. I therefore opted for the class “China: the superpower.”
To be frank, I didn’t know what to expect. But immersing myself in the Middle Kingdom would help me better understand the extent of the changes the country is undergoing. I would open a window on a world imagined but unknown that is both revered and vilified. Certainly, many preconceptions would be challenged. In fact, from the get go, one of the organizers of the program encouraged participants to “keep an open mind about China.”
The program included: the challenge of China’s energy supply, the rise of the middle class, US-China relations, the future of Chinese capitalism and the inevitable question of human rights and the taboo of pluralism. At the very least, I told myself, this would be more than enough to provide me with a solid foundation in addition to the substantial required reading as preparation.
The format of the six summer school programs is efficient and has remained practically unchanged since it launched in 2006: two three-hour conferences per day, the second of which is given by a different expert offering an alternative point of view. For instance, following the presentation of Professor Jean-François Huchet on China’s emerging middle class, David Ownby of the Université de Montréal Centre d'études de l'Asie de l'Est (CETASE), shared his experiences on the living conditions of professors he has known since 1980, conditions that thirty years ago were precarious and that today are comparable to North American standards. This middle class is a mere…180 million people. Not very big when you consider that China’s population is 1.3 billion!
Fred Bild, Canada’s ex-ambassador to China and also a member of CETASE, captivated his audience by explaining the historical role Pierre Elliott Trudeau played in opening the United States to China, and even more significantly, with his great storytelling abilities, the reasons why China moved away from the USSR which in turn led to the visit by Richard Nixon in 1972.
Each summer school program has its manager or managers. For China, Jean-Francois Lisée, the executive director of the CERIUM, called upon Jean-Francois Huchet and Stéphanie Balme. The former runs the Centre d'études français sur la Chine contemporaine in Hong Kong (and was a student in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989), while the latter is an invited professor at Tsinghua University and director of the Law, Justice and Society in China program.
A variety of specialists also participated and the range of perspectives is one of the program’s strengths. For instance, Ting-Sheng Lin, a professor of political science at UQAM, spoke about migrant workers and the various residential permits they are given upon arriving in urban areas. Like many others, he also spoke about the swift transition to a market economy. Professor Claude Comtois gave us chills upon providing an overview of China’s future energy challenges. All that needs to be said is that energy consumption doubles every decade.
Our group was made up of 60 percent students and 40 percent adults. Among them, a Quebec civil servant, a teacher from a CEGEP organizing a trip to China in the upcoming year, a husband and wife who travel to Asia annually, a Quebecer who works as a guide in China, and a curious medical student…
As you may have surmised, I was delighted by the experience. Criticisms? Perhaps the historical facet was a bit weak. The rise of religion, particularly Confucianism, could have been on the menu. But every presentation was relevant. And I definitely plan on signing up again next summer, and until then, I’m excitedly off to discover the joys of Asian cinema!
This text was translated from an article originally written in French by Paule des Rivières
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