By Daniel Mootz
Four years after opening in 2012, Xing Wei College, a private liberal arts school in Shanghai, partnered with Evergreen to develop an overseas exchange program. For four years that program has been going strong, and has expanded to include independent Evergreen courses, such as Arts, Culture, and Spirit on Silk Roads, taught by Hirsh Diamant. That class, which focuses on creative sociology, gift-making, and “New Silk Roads,” will be visiting Xing Wei this winter as part of its study abroad option. By bridging unprecedented divides, the possibilities of a truly universal education are becoming more and more a reality.
English is the primary language spoken at Xing Wei, and there is a productive emphasis placed on non-Chinese students, ideas, creativity, and culture. In this way it is unlike any other school in the country, which is why it’s a lot like Evergreen. Relationships built across borders help foster innovative opportunities for students to pursue academic, cultural, and professional interests, at home and abroad. The friendship between Xing Wei and Evergreen is increasingly important because all too often, among academic institutions, the experience of difference, joy, and experiment is clouded by bureaucracy and boring adult stuff. The thing is, Xing Wei college is entirely student-run. Everyone, and everything on campus, from staffing, to administration, to classes and their curriculums, is decided by student organizing committees.
The institution was first conceived in 2005, when Harvard-educated investor Weiming Chen acquired the land and began construction, according to the Huffington Post. Two years later, Chinese public policy changed to allow private colleges to become certified, and sustain themselves through tuition. Two years after that, Xing Wei became the first nonprofit, liberal arts school in China. That means it is on the crest of a new wave of liberalization of Chinese society, and Shanghai in particular. However, there is no real certainty regarding the future of the policies which allow its existence, similar to many U.S. schools which face precarious financial conditions and insolvency.
Zepeng Jin, an Evergreen senior who goes by the name King, began studying at Xing Wei after passing his government test, choosing the progressive new school for its benefits and potential. “The opportunities you receive at a school like Xing Wei, or Evergreen, are more like the top ranked schools, in China and the U.S., and less like others in its bracket,” he told me. King is graduating next quarter from Evergreen, and plans to return to China to give back some of what he’s gained by being here. “I feel like a traitor sometimes,” he said, grinning, “I abandoned my school.” But he knows he owes it to himself, and others in his region, to bring some of the Evergreen spirit back with him to Shanghai. In a way, he is evincing what a truly autonomous institution should aspire to, namely, a diversity of individual commitments. His Evergreen degree will, ideally, land him a good teaching position back in China. He’s hopeful, working now as a teacher’s assistant, and is intent on finishing producing ethnographic studies before graduating in spring. First, however, he is going to help guide his American classmates on a two week journey through China.
Along with Hirsh, and Hirsh’s wife Jennie, King will be acting as class interpreter. He is most looking forward to not only hosting Evergreen students at Xing Wei, a role he has previously served, but also to being somewhat of a guest at his old school. Shanghai, he said, is an up-and-coming region in the country more attuned to “openness” and youth culture. The group will spend two days visiting and experiencing Xing Wei’s campus, and culture. Structurally, the school is made up of multiple branches of study and organizing committees, each comprised of a “coach-figure” from the community and a solid group of interested participants. The school is committed to catering to first-generation, non-traditional students from, as King described them, surrounding rural or exurban areas. Something like 80% of the student body is originally from the poorer farmlands, King mentioned. According to its website, Xing Wei offers courses in aesthetics, ethics, Shanghai Modernism, physics, acting, and design, and allows students to create their own major within four unique concentrations: “entrepreneurship, leadership, creativity, [and] innovation and invention.”
King’s interest in ethnography and communication aligns well with Hirsh’s Silk Roads Studies, a morphological program designed for artists, writers, and students of Chinese. A painter and player of Tai Chi himself, Hirsh expounded on the “pen pal” connection he has seen form between Chinese and American students through academic partnership. He is clearly fond of being able to use real time video conferencing in class, which allows him to host live exchanges between his students and their Chinese counterparts. “We have an exercise,” Hirsh said, “where Chinese and American students pick a hero to write about, whether it’s Chuang Tzu or Ba Jin, or whether it’s Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Bezos, and then they correspond back and forth between each other about their choice.”
In essence, the interscholastic relationship currently being formed across the Pacific is a radical pedagogical experiment, though when I asked King whether he thinks the concept of a self-governed education will pan out, he told me he doesn’t know. “Time will tell,” he said, “Xing Wei came about on this wave of social change, so there’s always the question ‘is it working?’ which is a burden to bear. We are always making mistakes,” he added, “but we are able to learn from them and become better.” For example, Xing Wei is many times more expensive than the average Chinese college, and yet the emergence of its integrated educational model indicates a future of democratic equanimity, a refuge from the ordinary and mundane.
Internationalism is a prelude to equity, diversity, and the common wellspring of creation. Inclusion, by necessity, offers up unthought of resources, like so many constellations, aligned to the beacon of awareness and organized by natural flows and cycles. When students are in positions of power, together, they are able to inform themselves and engage in solidarity. By becoming their own advocates, they are less likely to be relegated to the disposable status of sheep. Such lessons in activism and decision making are liberating, such work is life-affirming, and such agreements help forge the crucial point of student life.
