12 September 2006: Yawnz

If you are reading this to catch a glimpse of Taiwan, please skip this post. It has been raining all afternoon! With rain like this, who needs reservoirs and freshwater imports?! Anyway, I had done nothing much today, and I coop myself up in my room surfing the net, playing PC games, and penning down my reflections on the Beijing leg of the Lee Shiu Summer Programme. I am in the University Scholars Programme (USP) of NUS, and had participated in the 2006 Lee Shiu Summer Programme just recently. I had mentioned about the Programme in some of my previous posts, and the following is more or less a replica of what I will be submitting to USP as a post-Programme assignment. Memories of the Programme are still fresh in my mind, so the assignment is not really a daunting task to complete.

The 2006 Lee Shiu Summer Programme was one of the most significant programmes that I had embarked on, with a clear focus on both realizing possible opportunities presented by an emergent China and tackling potential problems that may plague the nation and hence impede its progress. The Programme had comprised three legs that were conducted in the cities of Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing, aimed at introducing fresh perspectives of what China will become in the next few decades. I really enjoyed the last leg of Beijing, and would deem it the best one that I had gone for in the Programme. It was there that I personally witnessed the development of China into a global political and economic power, and this valuable experience coupled with a sense of loss as we were approaching the Programme’s end made the Beijing experience both an enriching and memorable one.

Three seminars were conducted in Beijing for the delegation, and they offered us an informative avenue to interpret China’s rise in the future more accurately. Despite the vast amount of knowledge that we had received from these talks, they were conducted in Mandarin, and many of the delegates failed to understand them comprehensively. It was a slight pity that the English medium was not adopted for the seminars, and we hope that organizers of the next Lee Shiu Summer Programme would consider this and make the appropriate arrangements.

We traveled on fieldtrips to the famous Great Wall of China and the Temple of Heaven, and marveled at their spectacular and haunting beauty. The grandeur and scales of these historical sites testify to the former power and wealth of their builders, and we may see comparable feats performed by descendants of the builders within the next two generations of our times. We went to Lenovo and the Olympics Committee Building as well, and saw how China has engaged itself in preparations to engage the global economy and the world at large. However, accelerating environmental damage poses a grave threat, and China may require bold corrective policies to rectify it.

I miss my Lee Shiu friends from China, Hong Kong, and the United States (the Princeton students). Many weeks have passed, but a feeling of nostalgia still lingers in me. We parted with the other delegates at the farewell lunch in Beijing, after the Programme’s finale of the Young Leaders’ Forum. I sincerely hope that our parting will translate into enduring friendships that transgress all boundaries and cultures.