What cultural shocks have you experienced both in China and US? And how did you interpret them? 1 страница

In China, the cultural shock would always be the people; there are tons of people everywhere so it took me a little while to get used to the crowd after I got back. What’s more, there are regional culture shocks among China.

When I got to America, I found America is basically less urbanized than China because besides big city like NYC, LA, Chicago. Most state’s capital city is nothing like a real city. Moreover, without a vehicle, visitors like me find it hard to get themselves around since most places are lack public transportation. I think it attribute to the life-style of most American family because most of them having even their own vehicle and it make no profit for bus or taxi companies.

Another cultural shock is this country’s attitude towards alcohol. It’s weird that a country like China has no drinking age and has less of a drinking problem, compared to America, which does have many restrictions have been legislated. I think it is an issue dated back to the “Prohibition,” so drinking issue might have been rooted from the culture and history.

A good education has always been highly valued in China, as the people believe that education ensures not only the future and development of the individual but also the family and the country as a whole.

Passed down from ancient times, the maxim from the Three-Character Scripture that says 'if no proper education is given to children, their nature will go bad' has proved to be true. The great master Confucius taught us that 'it is a pleasure to learn something and to try it out at intervals'. Similarly, numerous students have been convinced that 'reading books excels all other careers'. The records tell us that Mencius' mother became an example to millions of mothers who were keen for their children to be talented. - she moved her home three times in order to choose a fine neighborhood in which Mencius could be effectively influenced.

As far back as the Shang Dynasty (16th century BC - 11th century BC), inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells were the simple records of teaching and learning. In the Western Zhou Dynasty (11th century BC - 771 BC), nobles built schools to teach their children, as their offsprings would be the officials of the future, while those who were gifted but of poor families could but dream of approaching state affairs. The development of education system led to a form of evaluation that became the means by which dynastic China appointed those with talents as officials. In general, this process can be divided into three periods - 'chaju' and 'zhengpi' in the Han Dynasty, the 'jiupin zhongzheng' system from Han to the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and the Imperial Examination which survived from the Sui Dynasty (589 - 618) right through to the last feudal dynasty Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911).

After that, China's education system fell into something of a state of confusion due to the changes in national government. However, with the foundation of modern China the new order introduced a fresh approach to education and brought is into a new phase. Through long-term endeavor, the provision of educational has taken on a prosperous process.

Education in China is a state-run system of public education run by the Ministry of Education. All citizens must attend school for at least nine years. The government provides primary education for six to nine years, starting at age six or seven, followed by six years of secondary education for ages 12 to 18.^{[ clarification needed ]} Some provinces may have five years of primary school but four years for middle school. There are three years of middle school and three years of high school. The Ministry of Education reported a 99 percent attendance rate for primary school and an 80 percent rate for both primary and middle schools.^{[ citation needed ]} In 1985, the government abolished tax-funded higher education, requiring university applicants to compete for scholarships based on academic ability. In the early 1980s the government allowed the establishment of the first private school, increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees fivefold from 1995 to 2005.^[4] In 2003 China supported 1,552 institutions of higher learning (colleges and universities) and their 725,000 professors and 11 million students (see List of universities in China). There are over 100 National Key Universities, including Peking University and Tsinghua University. Chinese spending has grown by 20% per year since 1999, now reaching over $100bn, and as many as 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated from Chinese universities in 2006. China published 184,080 papers as of 2008.^[5]

Laws regulating the system of education include the Regulation on Academic Degrees, the Compulsory Education Law, the Teachers Law, the Education Law, the Law on Vocational Education, and the Law on Higher Education. See also: Law of the People's Republic of China

Since the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the education system in China has been geared toward economic modernization.^{[ citation needed ]} In 1985, the national government ceded responsibility for basic education to local governments through the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party's "Decision on the Reform of the Educational Structure." In unveiling the education reform plan in May 1985, the authorities called for nine years of compulsory education and the establishment of the State Education Commission (created the following month). Official commitment to improved education was nowhere more evident than in the substantial increase in funds for education in the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1986–90), which amounted to 72 percent more than funds allotted to education in the previous plan period (1981–85). In 1986 some 16.8 percent of the state budget was earmarked for education, compared with 10.4 percent in 1984. Since 1949, education has been a focus of controversy in China. As a result of continual intraparty realignments, official policy alternated between ideological imperatives and practical efforts to further national development. But ideology and pragmatism often have been incompatible. The Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Socialist Education Movement (1962–65) sought to end deeply rooted academic elitism, to narrow social and cultural gaps between workers and peasants and between urban and rural populations, and to eliminate the tendency of scholars and intellectuals to disdain manual labor. During the Cultural Revolution, universal fostering of social equality was an overriding priority.

The city government of Beijing brings thebasics of differential calculus to the masses

The post-Mao Zedong Chinese Communist Party leadership viewed education as the foundation of the Four Modernizations. In the early 1980s, science and technology education became an important focus of education policy. By 1986 training skilled personnel and expanding scientific and technical knowledge had been assigned the highest priority. Although the humanities were considered important, vocational and technical skills were considered paramount for meeting China's modernization goals. The reorientation of educational priorities paralleled Deng Xiaoping's strategy for economic development. Emphasis also was placed on the further training of the already-educated elite, who would carry on the modernization program in the coming decades. Renewed emphasis on modern science and technology led to the adoption, beginning in 1976, of an outward-looking policy that encouraged learning and borrowing from abroad for advanced training in a wide range of scientific fields.

Beginning at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee in December 1978, intellectuals were encouraged to pursueresearch in support of the Four Modernizations and, as long as they complied with the party's "Four Cardinal Principles" they were given relatively free rein. But when the party and the government determined that the strictures of the four cardinal principles had been stretched beyond tolerable limits, they did not hesitate to restrict intellectual expression.

Literature and the arts also experienced a great revival in the late 1970s and 1980s. Traditional forms flourished once again, and many new kinds of literature and cultural expression were introduced from abroad.

Development[edit source | editbeta]

Tsinghua University is a top university in China

Since the 1950s, China has been providing a nine-year compulsory education to what amounts to a fifth of the world's population. By 1999, primary school education had become generalized in 90% of China, and mandatory nine-year compulsory education now effectively covered 85% of the population.^[6] While the central and provincial governments provide some funding for education, this varies from province to province, and funding in the rural areas is notably lower than in major urban municipalities. Families must supplement monies provided to school by government with tuition fees, which means that some children have much less education than others. However, parents place a very high value on education, and make great personal sacrifices to send their children to school and to university. Illiteracy in the young and mid-aged population has fallen from over 80 percent down to five percent. The system trained some 60 million mid- or high-level professionals and near 400 million laborers to junior or senior high school level. Today, 250 million Chinese get three levels of school education, (elementary, junior and senior high school) doubling the rate of increase in the rest of the world during the same period. Net elementary school enrollment has reached 98.9 percent, and the gross enrollment rate in junior high schools 94.1 percent.

China's educational horizons are expanding. Ten years ago the MBA was virtually unknown but by 2004 there were 47,000 MBAs, trained at 62 MBA schools. Many people also apply for international professional qualifications, such as EMBA and MPA; close to 10,000 MPA students are enrolled in 47 schools of higher learning, includingPeking University and Tsinghua University. The education market has rocketed, with training and testing for professional qualifications, such as computer and foreign languages, thriving.Continuing education is the trend, once in one's life schooling has become lifelong learning.

International cooperation and education exchanges increase every year. China has more students studying abroad than any other country; since 1979, there have been 697,000 Chinese students studying in 103 countries and regions, of whom 185,000 have returned after finishing their studies. The number of foreign students studying in China has also increased rapidly; in 2004, over 110,000 students from 178 countries were studying at China's universities.

Investment in education has increased in recent years; the proportion of the overall budget allocated to education has been increased by one percentage point every year since 1998. According to a Ministry of Education program, the government will set up an educational finance system in line with the public finance system, strengthen the responsibility of governments at all levels in educational investment, and ensure that their financial allocation for educational expenditure grows faster than their regular revenue. The program also set out the government's aim that educational investment should account for four percent of GDP in a relatively short period of time.

For non-compulsory education, China adopts a shared-cost mechanism, charging tuition at a certain percentage of the cost. Meanwhile, to ensure that students from low-income families have access to higher education, the government has initiated effective ways of assistance, with policies and measures as scholarships, work-study programs, subsidies for students with special economic difficulties, tuition reduction or exemption and state stipends.

The government has committed itself to markedly raising educational levels generally, as evidenced in a Ministry of Education program; by 2020, of every 100,000 people, 13,500 will have had junior college education or above and some 31,000 will have had senior high school schooling; rates for illiteracy and semi-literacy rate will fall below three percent; and average schooling duration across the population will increase from today's eight years to nearly 11.

In the 2009 test of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance by the OECD, Chinese students from Shanghai achieved the best results in mathematics, science and reading.^[7][8] The OECD also found that even in some of the very poor rural areas the performance is close to the OECD average.^[9] However, controversy has surrounded the high scores achieved by the Chinese students due to the unusual spread of the numerical data, with suggestions that schools were 'gaming' students for the exams.^[10]

Education policy[edit source | editbeta]

See also: Education policy

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The overthrow of the Kuomintang regime in 1949 ended China's "feudal capitalist" system in which education was effectively closed to workers, peasants, and generally females in practical terms^{[ citation needed ]} despite Sun Yat-Sen's support of general education in principle.

However, the Marxist ideology of the post-1949 government, in reacting to the overly literary and classical tradition of China, overstressed in turn "practical applications" and the superior wisdom of the worker and peasant, whose hand-skill was assumed to be the "base" to the "superstructure" of science and learning in general.^[11] This resulted in various experiments in which peasants and industrial workers were made "teachers" overnight but were unable to gain respect or communicate their tacit knowledge.^{[ citation needed ]}

The new Communist government created wide access to some form of education for all, except children of people under suspicion for "landlordism" and other bourgeois crimes. The possibility however of re-education and service to the "masses" was held out to bourgeois families as long as they proved their good faith by service to the workers and peasants. This meant that even before the Cultural Revolution, there was a continuum, in China, between the prison, the re-education camp, and the school, a continuum which also exists in the West. Formally speaking, the opportunity was extended to all classes to join China's project on its Leninist terms.

The education provided was practical and made accessible, for example by simplifying many characters for quick learning and by training people in skills they could use, including the basic medical training provided "barefoot doctors", actually paramedics that provided medical care, midwifery and instruction on the evils of footbinding and female infanticide in such rural areas where those practices still existed.

Like most serious^{[ clarification needed ]} Communist and socialist governments before and since,^{[ citation needed ]} the Chinese Communist government provided "the goods" to the bottom of society in good faith and for this reason received broad support before the Cultural Revolution from the people at the bottom.^{[ citation needed ]} The general populace was unaware of, and indifferent to,^{[ citation needed ]} the fate of intellectuals during the Great Leap Forward and the Hundred Flowers epochs of the late 1950s, but seems on balance that for the first time in Chinese history, something was being done for his children's education and welfare,^{[ citation needed ]} as it was being done contemporaneously in Russia and in the 1960s in Cuba.

Some of the practices taught were adopted by Westerners without much acknowledgement^{[ citation needed ]} including the Lamaze method of drug-free childbirth and the training of paramedics: American emergency medicine in particular owes much, not only to military "medevac" procedures refined during the Vietnam War, but a Chinese-influenced break^{[ citation needed ]} in the hold of the medical profession has over practitioner qualification, which allowed nurses and paramedics to fill in for doctors at straightforward procedures.^{[ citation needed ]}

Other practical results of education reform prior to the Cultural Revolution of 1966 included practical instruction in the evils of opium addiction (cf. Opium Regimes, Timothy Brook and Bobby Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., University of California Press, 2000). The Japanese and to an extent the Guomindang had fostered or ignored opium and other forms of addiction as a way of social control whereas the educational system and government of China eradicated opium, in part by education and also by harsh penalties (including death for repeat offenders) which are still in use.

But during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), higher education in particular suffered tremendous losses; the system was almost shut down, and a rising generation of college and graduate students, academics and technicians, professionals and teachers, was lost. The result was a lack of trained talent to meet the needs of society, an irrationally structured higher education system unequal to the needs of the economic and technological boom, and an uneven development in secondary technical and vocational education. In the post-Mao period, China's education policy continued to evolve. The pragmatist leadership, under Deng Xiaoping, recognized that to meet the goals of modernization it was necessary to develop science, technology, and intellectual resources and to raise the population's education level. Demands on education - for new technology, information science, and advanced management expertise - were levied as a result of the reform of the economic structure and the emergence of new economic forms. In particular, China needed an educated labor force to feed and provision its one billion plus population.

By 1980, achievement was once again accepted as the basis for admission and promotion in education. This fundamental change reflected the critical role of scientific and technical knowledge and professional skills in the Four Modernizations. Also, political activism was no longer regarded as an important measure of individual performance, and even the development of commonly approved political attitudes and political background was secondary to achievement. Education policy promoted expanded enrollments, with the long-term objective of achieving universal primary and secondary education. This policy contrasted with the previous one, which touted increased enrollments for egalitarian reasons. In 1985 the commitment to modernization was reinforced by plans for nine-year compulsory education and for providing good quality higher education.

Deng Xiaoping's far-ranging educational reform policy, which involved all levels of the education system, aimed to narrow the gap between China and other developing countries. Modernizing education was critical to modernizing China. Devolution of educational management from the central to the local level was the means chosen to improve the education system. Centralized authority was not abandoned, however, as evidenced by the creation of the State Education Commission. Academically, the goals of reform were to enhance and universalize elementary and junior middle school education; to increase the number of schools and qualified teachers; and to develop vocational and technical education. A uniform standard for curricula, textbooks, examinations, and teacher qualifications (especially at the middle-school level) was established, and considerable autonomy and variations in and among the autonomous regions, provinces, and special municipalities were allowed.^[12] Further, the system of enrollment and job assignment in higher education was changed, and excessive government control over colleges and universities was reduced. However the education system of the PRC still discourages innovation and independent thinking, causing delays in even such high profile national projects as the J-XX fifth-generation jet fighters.^{[ citation needed ][13]}

Education system[edit source | editbeta]

Stages [edit source | editbeta]

Educational stages in China
Typical Age	Education	Levels	Compulsory
18-22	University or college	Varies	No
15-17	Senior high school (middle school) or Vocational school	Grades 10-12	No
12-14	Junior middle school	Grades 7-9	Yes
6-11	Primary school	Grades 1-6	Yes

To provide for its population, China has a vast and varied school system. There are preschools, kindergartens, schools for the deaf and blind, key schools (si,cultural and vocational schools, regular secondary schools, secondary teachers' schools, secondary technical schools, and secondary professional schools), and various institutions of higher learning (consisting of regular colleges and universities, professional colleges, and short-term vocational universities). In terms of access to education, China's system represented a pyramid; because of the scarcity of resources allotted to higher education, student numbers decreased sharply at the higher levels. Although there were dramatic advances in primary education after 1949, achievements in secondary and higher education were not as great.

Although the government has authority over the education system, the Chinese Communist Party has played a role in managing education since 1949. The party established broad education policies and under Deng Xiaoping, tied improvements in the quality of education to its modernization plan. The party also monitored the government's implementation of its policies at the local level and within educational institutions through its party committees. Party members within educational institutions, who often have a leading management role, are responsible for steering their schools in the direction mandated by party policy.

New directions [edit source | editbeta]

The May 1985 National Conference on Education recognized five fundamental areas for reform to be discussed in connection with implementing the party Central Committee's "Draft Decision on Reforming the Education System." The reforms were intended to produce "more able people"; to make the localities responsible for developing "basic education" and systematically implement a nine-year compulsory education program; to improve secondary education develop vocational and technical education; to reform and the graduate-assignment system of institutions of higher education and to expand their management and decision-making powers; and to give administrators the necessary encouragement and authority to ensure smooth progress in educational reform.

The National Conference on Education paved the way for reorganization of the Ministry of Education, which occurred in June 1985. Created to coordinate education policy, it also assumed the role previously played by the State Planning Commission and as a State Council commission, the new Ministry had greater status and was in charge of all education organizations except militaryones. Although the new Ministry assumed a central role in the administration of education, the reform decentralized much of the power it previously wielded and its constituent offices and bureaus, which had established curriculum and admissions policies in response to the State Planning Commission's requirements.

The Ministry of Education, with its expanded administrative scope and power, was responsible for formulating guiding principles for education, establishing regulations, planning the progress of educational projects, coordinating the educational programs of different departments, and standardization educational reforms. Simplification of administration and delegation of authority were made the bases for improving the education system. This devolution of management to the autonomous regions, provinces, and special municipalities meant local governments had more decision-making power and were able to develop basic education. State-owned enterprises, mass organizations, and individuals were encouraged to pool funds to accomplish education reform. Local authorities used state appropriations and a percentage of local reserve financial resources (basically township financial revenues) to finance educational projects. Distance education is promoted not only within the educational sector but among basic service sectors such as agriculture and health.

Compulsory education law [edit source | editbeta]

The Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education (中华人民共和国义务教育法), which took effect on July 1, 1986, established requirements and deadlines for attaining universal education tailored to local conditions and guaranteed school-age children the right to receive at least nine years of education (six-year primary education and three years secondary education). People's congresses at various local levels were, within certain guidelines and according to local conditions, to decide the steps, methods, and deadlines for implementing nine-year compulsory education in accordance with the guidelines formulated by the central authorities. The program sought to bring rural areas, which had four to six years of compulsory schooling, into line with their urban counterparts. Education departments were exhorted to train millions of skilled workers for all trades and professions and to offer guidelines, curricula, and methods to comply with the reform program and modernization needs.

Provincial-level authorities were to develop plans, enact decrees and rules, distribute funds to counties, and administer directly a few key secondary schools. County authorities were to distribute funds to each township government, which were to make up for any deficiencies. County authorities were to supervise education and teaching and to manage their own senior middle schools, teachers' schools, teachers' in-service training schools, agricultural vocational schools, and exemplary primary and junior middle schools. The remaining schools were to be managed separately by the county and township authorities.

The compulsory education law divided China into three categories: cities and economically developed areas in coastal provinces and a small number of developed areas in the hinterland; towns and villages with medium development; and economically backward areas.

By November 1985 the first category - the larger cities and approximately 20 percent of the counties (mainly in the more developed coastal and southeastern areas of China) had achieved universal 9-year education. By 1990 cities, economically developed areas in coastal provincial-level units, and a small number of developed interior areas (approximately 25 percent of China's population) and areas where junior middle schools were already popularized were targeted to have universal junior-middle-school education. Education planners had envisioned that by the mid-1990s all workers and staff in coastal areas, inland cities, and moderately developed areas (with a combined population of 300 million to 400 million people) would have either compulsory 9-year or vocational education and that 5 percent of the people in these areas would have a college education - building a solid intellectual foundation for China. Further, the planners expected that secondary education and university entrants would also have increased by the year 2000.

The second category targeted under the 9-year compulsory education law consisted of towns and villages with medium-level development (around 50 percent of China's population), where universal education was expected to reach the junior-middle-school level by 1995. Technical and higher education was projected to develop at the same rate.

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