Crowd Control

Appologies, first of all, for the enormous delay. I am once again writing from an internet cafe because I still have not gotten a working connection in my appartment (I've been a little too busy and a little to lazy to deal with that). Therefore, the pictures I took to go along with this will have to wait.

Shengda has a student body of about 15,000 crammed into a campus about twice the size of Swarthmore. This creates an enormous problem of control that must be very familiar to the Chinese, given the enormous population of pretty much the entire Eastern Seaboard of the country. I knew that it would be like this, coming here, but it is nevertheless amazing to see the vast groups in person. And it is even more amazing to see the ways in which they are controlled.

Every morning at 6 o'clock, the students are woken up by a broadcast on the PA. They are essentially kicked out of their dorms, at which point they procede en masse to the cafeterias. They have a chance to go back to their dorms to wash up afterword, untill they are locked out untill about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Then, they get an hour and a half for a nap before being kicked out of the dorms again until after dinner. Finally, they must all be in by 10:30, when the gates are locked, with concequenses for any students caught outside. They are only allowed off campus on the weekends or with special permissions or if they are with a teacher.

The rules do not end here, however. Students are not allowed to bring any books into the library. The reason stated is that this makes it clear if they are trying to steal a library book. The actual reason is that the library is way too small for all the students to study in it's relative comfort. It is about the size of the main Swarthmore library (McCabe). Keep in mind that Swarthmore also has a separate Science library almost as big as McCabe, as well as smaller libraries in the music building, the women's resource center, the black cultural center, the educational materials center, and probably some other centers that I never went to. For 1/10th the population of Shengda! Instead, the students have to study in their classrooms.

The library is undersized largely (pardon the pun) because it was designed with a smaller student body in mind. Remember that Shengda is a for-profit college, so it is constantly expanding its enrollment in an attempt to make more money. The library is not the only resource that is squeezed. The cafeterias are completely mad during lunch-time. In fact, this has reached the point where the students are not allowed to use one of the cafeterias during certain periods so that the teachers and staff are assured the possibility of getting a seat. The impact of all of these rules is enormous.

First of all, the students all seem to internalize the rules to an astounding degree. The main road through campus is a mob scene starting about 1/2 hour before classes in the morning, for most of lunch hour, and starting about 1/2 hour before classes in the evening. It is almost completely deserted during the rest of the day. This is despite the fact that some of the student are not in class during this time. In the evening at about 9 o'clock, it is a mob scene again, althogh I'm not really sure why. The massing of students at lunch time and such is not that surprising. The same pattern can be seen at Swarthmore. What is strange is that there is almost never a medium amount of students hanging out, walking leasurely along; the streets are either packed or almost deserted. And you will never find students waiting to have a slightly later lunch. Even though the cafeterias tend to clear out a bit around 12:30, they go from packed to empty; there are no students coming in half an hour late to avoid the worst of the crowds. When I decided to hold my English corner at 1 o'clock, the students were mystified. 1 o'clock is their nap time, and it was totally foreign to consider doing anything else then.

The student mob plays a major role in the order of the community in LongHu Village as well. Because the students are not allowed out during the week, business on the nearby streets is a moderate trickle. There are maybe six or eight street vendors out and small groups of locals in the conveniance stores and restaurants. Starting Friday afternoon, the students descend onto the streets, and a croud of small businesses take up residence to meet their demand. Six street vendors becomes thirty. They sell sandwiches and wraps of various types, skewers of lamb, chicken, eggs and vegetables, skewers of fruit, skewers of fruit dipped in syrup, peanuts, sunflower seeds, fried noodles, fried rice, cold noodles, cold rice noodles, stinky tofu... Four fruit carts becomes twenty, selling apples, pears, plums, little apple-like fruit, kiwis, grapes, oranges, melon... Other carts appear selling tea, crackers (by the half-kilo), house plants, goldfish. Other vendors set up blankets on the ground, selling big thermoses, water bottles, toilet paper, bowls, towels, shoes, trinkets, magazines, socks, basins for doing laundry, soap, basketball jerseys (this last rack, in fact, operated by a student, a friend of mine from the basketball courts). Suddenly, busses cannot pass, people dismount their bicycles, etc. The population of the street probably increases one-hundred-fold for these three days.

The community is institutionalized to an enormous degree that can be a little depressing in class. Individualism and creativity are not traditionally celebrated virtues in China. Given the mob-like behaviour of the students around campus, I can hardly be surprised that they don't like to speak out when they know something, let alone when they don't. They are unhappy to write about anything remotely political that requires thought as opposed to regurgitation. Threre are, of course, exceptions, but on the whole, Shengda is doing an amazing job preparing these mindless drones of students to be mindless drones of businessmen.