RE: China #2 - The bad...Part 2 中国的缺点
Yeah, I got nothing to complain about with this post. You've hit the nails on the heads.
Worth mentioning, though, is the extremes mainlanders will go through to get food items, cosmetics, baby diapers and formula, and medicines from Hong Kong and elsewhere. I have several friends who make a decent living selling such items on Taobao and WeChat. Other Chinese will visit Hong Kong, Taiwan or Korea (South, not North) to buy merchandise to sell back home or just to use themselves. Hong Kong had to impose limits on how many packages of disposable diapers and infant formula mainlanders could import across the checkpoints. I've seen people wheeling carts piled with baby stuff from HK to Shenzhen Futian crossing, even with the quotas imposed. And a friend once asked me to bring back tins of infant formula for her baby.
Why? Because Chinese don't trust the domestic stuff they buy is either healthy or real.
But I have to say I've never gotten sick from the food I have eaten here (except once, from a greasy spoon serving very oily fried eggs).
The air where I live is decent, but on my last visit to Beijing, the air was so bad my eyes and throat started to sting.
Hmm yeah maybe I can start a business on Taobao selling, I dunno, unadulterated cats?
But yeah the importing even goes as far as examinations. Students around the country flee to Japan, Hong Kong and other surrounding places to take exams due to the high percentage of cheating that goes on. In fact, it's so high that SATs are often completely cancelled and all students' attempts are voided. It's quite tragic.
Shanghai air can be really bad in the mornings, clears up during the day, but averages around 150-ish 2.5. Higher in the winter, naturally.
Thanks for reading!
Shanghai has the advantage of being near the ocean. Beijing is not so lucky. Changsha can get pretty bad, too, especially when there's an inversion and the smog gets trapped over the city. But I only visit there, not work there.
I have lots of stories to tell about cheating on exams in China, from personal observations. If you're a teacher, just assume your students will try to cheat, even the ones you think are goody-two-shoes. There is no penalty, really. At worst, the school administration will make them take another exam. Or in the case of national exams, the scores will be thrown out and they have to wait another year to take it again.
I was saving my school post for the next part of this, but man... that's a story to tell... The lies, corruption, face-value bullshit... phew.
I would not have believed it if someone had told me about it. I had to see it for myself.
A little known fact about my university is, for many years, it had one of the highest cheating rates on the CET4 and CET6. Several of my former graduates told me they paid several thousand RMB for the answers to the TEM8. One year, such cheaters ended up unknowingly buying the wrong answers, and naturally they flunked big time. I had to laugh.
Shocking, lol. But they really are quite creative. There are businesses that students can just pay to do their essays for them, and all sorts of loops and twirls.
Thankfully I only teach a fairly small number and I'm not a robot, so I know when a potato gives me homework with English more eloquent than my own, I don't need much investigating. I imagine it's a lot harder at Uni
Nah. I can tell, too. When someone who can barely speak a full sentence turns in an essay worthy of a B from an American college prof, I can tell he didn't write it. Google and Baidu are my secret weapons. Copy a section of the suspected plagiarism, paste into the search engine, and see what turns up. I taught academic writing for two semesters, and I checked at least half the papers that way.
Oddly, I was never asked to teach that subject again.
Hahaha, yeah...Thankfully they aren't too savvy on the power of Google heh
They seemed surprised when I caught them. :grinning: