After China

Spent a day in China visiting old friends and sitting in on a digital convergence lab that was set up by my old journalism school director, Ying Chan.

The school of journalism there is backed by Li Ka Shing Foundation, so it's an interesting case for China. Its probably the only public university in China funded by private dollars. Lots of implications here.

What does that mean for American investors who want to put money down on building up private education in China?

What happens with American or other foreign money in China? Just because you put private money into a state run and state-funded operation, it doesn't mean you are going to get that money back. There is always that risk.

So how can Ying Chan do it? Aside from having the backing of Li Ka Shing, Asia's richest man, she's also got ties to Hong Kong and is backed by solid partners. It's an interesting education about education in China. I am glad I got to see it first hand.

I learned two things about this:

Shantou University is on the cutting edge of how education will be done in China. I will be writing more about this later, but in a nutshell:

First university in China to use an open source, Chinese language-friendly digital publishing and curriculum tool. It started out in the Journalism School, but now the university itself wants to run it for the whole institution of 8,000 students.

If that is open source, there is no problem to think that they would make this expansion down to other schools in China and in Asia. Jeremiah Foo, CTO of the school said that he is already in talks with Malaysian schools to spread this technology.

They are working with Apple to launch something in March. More on that in March. I can't talk about it.

It is totally feasible that corporations in the United States can partner with a school like this and actually teach classes on the corporate culture, on business, and on everything from engineering, to accounting and more to these students. It's very possible we might see a day where actual global companies have teaching units inside some of these public universities in China. What does that mean? It's hard to even fathom how revolutionary that kind of education system would be.

There is so much more to talk about, and I will be mentioning some if it off and on in the next few weeks.

Now it is time to go back out into Hong Kong, and have some yum cha and talk with my friends. Good to be back "home" again.

By the way, for those of you in New York, it's 55 degrees today and I got sunburn. Suckers!

ABC News Installs News Bureau at Chinese University

How's this for a foreign exchange program? Coming to a Chinese university campus near you: an official ABC News bureau.

No kidding. Seems that the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong, China just inked the world's first deal to have an ABC News broadcasting bureau installed on the campus, so that J-school students can pitch stories directly to editors in the United States. The deal will allow "roving" Asia reporters to pitch stories directly to a commissioning editor at the ABC News bureau in New York. The deal is similar to six others already in place at US universities.

Received this story in an email from Ying Chan at University of Hong Kong:

The American Broadcasting Company cooperates with six US universities already to provide online and on-air news. HKU’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre is the first international branch of the venture.

Director of the Broadcasting Programme at the JMSC, Jim Laurie, who worked at ABC for more than twenty years, has compiled a team of thirteen students to take part. MJ student Zela Chin and BJ student Liyi Chen will coordinate the project here in Hong Kong and are in charge of pitching ideas to the commissioning editor in New York, Christina Caron.

Thirteen students take part in this project led by Laurie, and they have already pitched their first stories.

They are pitching stories about Hong Kong and also across Asia. The first idea up for grabs is about white collar workers in Hong Kong who are bankers by day and boxers by night. Liyi [Chen, a first year Bachelors in Journalism major] was pleased with the team’s first pitch.

“Lorea’s White Collar Fight Night story went quite well. ABC accepted it pretty much immediately, so it was really encouraging. I think we have a lot of interesting stories to tell from Asia, and we’ve had a good start, so I’m hopeful!”

Pretty soon, American students are going to want to go to China to learn how to do journalism here.

A Town Hall, A Wall, Opportunity for All

There is a saying in Cantonese, that when you cross the ocean you will be kings. [ed. note: I have looked all over the internet and not found the Cantonese phrase, so any help would be appreciated]

President Barack Obama was either a puppet or a truly naive country mouse making his way through China and East Asia for the first time earlier this month, when he held a staged town hall, visited the Great Wall and seemed disoriented, and claimed that he never touched Twitter, even though he apparently has his own twitter feed.

For America's first "Pacific" president, he didn't seem to know a whole lot about China, America's certainly largest, and relatively speaking nearest neighbor, if you don't count the Philippines, Russia or Taiwan.

Much has already been written about what a fool's game the whole diplomatic trip to East Asia appeared to the rest of the world. I won't hash over it. Read through the link if you like.

However, Obama presented one gleaming and golden opportunity for America's youth, for-profit education and the future of China - U.S. bilateral relations and the possible creation of a new multilateral regulatory and financial system.

China and the United States agreed that they would renew efforts to bring at least 100,000 students from the United States to China. Currently, there are only 20,000 American students studying in China while there are nearly 100,000 Chinese students in the United States, and nearly 100,000 students from India studying in the United States.

I'm sure the effort was started in the hopes that these students would bring all the democracy and hope and glory back with them to their countries of origin. So why don't we send more students to China?

Do they just not want to go? Are they unable to go, because of finances? How is the government going to pay for these expected 80,000 students to go to China? Does the federal loans program enable that right now? I don't think it does.

Efforts have been made to extend this cross-cultural partnership before. I am a by-product of one of those efforts. So is 27 - year old Cornelius Rahn, a journalism student at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

The vision there is simple: train foreign students to be journalists in China. Introduce them to China, spread the word about China, help China at the same time enrich and develop its burgeoning media.

Ying Chan, a celebrated investigative journalist, who has won many awards for her reporting, especially on the snakeheads that traffic humans into the United States from China, laid out this vision several years ago and has been steadily building on it. She not only directs the program in Hong Kong, she also, with backing from Li Ka-shing, helps run his journalism school at Shantou University in mainland China.

Ying always says, "Learn Chinese. The future is in China." I never doubt her. "Understand China," she also says. And she is right. Obama's trip to China shows the perils of not knowing the people you should and could be doing business and politics with.

Why did people pay Chinese snakeheads thousands of dollars to travel illegally and covertly to America? There was opportunity there. For some it was to be forever. For others, as China began to open up, it was temporary. Take what is best in America and bring it back. They call these people Sea Turtles, in Chinese.

But now, the future is going to be shaped by a strong China and US relationship, which could produce a much stronger multilateral global financial system.

As I always say, it's already tomorrow in China. And it started out as a joke.