Schwarzman Scholars, Class of 2018 - It’s Already November
China: Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province and Beijing (November 2017)
1 module and nearly 3 months in, November presented a number of firsts in travel, professional opportunities and personal awareness. The month started as usual, classes, lectures, guest speakers, dinners and loads of conversations (spanning personal life goals, observations from the 19th National Party Congress of the Communist Party of China, foreigner’s experience in China, language progression and so on). But then mid-month, it was time for the long-awaited Deep Dive, the programme sponsored, educational trip to somewhere far from Beijing!
After learning about the amazing backstory of China business mogul Jack Ma (Alibaba cofounder) and the tech evolution of the city of Hangzhou, I knew I had to be on the excursion headed to this southern beauty. 12 hours after leaving Beijing, I - and ~40 other scholars and staff - arrived Hangzhou. There were a few immediately striking differences between Hangzhou and Beijing, the most obvious being warm weather and unbelievably light, sweet foods (I even had sugarcane, my Jamaican heart was happy!). The less overt subtleties, such as infectious city spirit of entrepreneurship, magnitude of government-sponsored innovation programmes (+success), and wide-sweeping reach of large Chinese corporations - like Alibaba - on local and national stages, all urged me to re-evaluate successful models of innovation as well as utility of government-populace cooperation. The projects, lectures, tours, trips and discussions fired me up and instilled an incredibly rewarding sense of ‘I can do this too!’ I will be forever grateful for the lessons from this trip.
After the week in Hangzhou, the rest of the month really flew by with interesting events (ambassadorial celebration for 45th anniversary of China-Jamaica relations), extremely moving speakers (such as the formidable Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation) and just really smart guest lecturers (like Joseph Nye, renowned political scientist and father of the term ‘soft power’).
This was definitely a hard-hitting month of ‘out-of-classroom’ learning that I soon won’t forget.