2024 China Liase Official Website

“Wish you every day of Double Happiness(重庆)!”

We’ve finally arrived in the beautiful megacity of Chongqing! All the hypes were worth it as we are welcomed by the most warm and bright sunlight. On our way to Liziba on the bus, our local guide Windy introduced us to the bomb shelters hidden in the mountain. It’s interesting they are turned into wine storages now. But I cannot help but think about the reason Windy provided for why Chongqing has its unique 8D landscape as it is. Not only is it naturally located in mountainous areas but also because it has endured for six years of air bombings due to Sino-Japanese war. The forming of an urban landscape as well as its subsequent city planning is a complicated development due to both environmental and historical conditions.

It’s hard to imagine a sense of “old Chongqing” from the modern high-rises we see from the beautiful view of E-ling Park Tower later in the day. I learned from the taxi driver that E-ling (鹅岭) Park gains its name from the shape of the central peninsula assembling that of a goose. The park is built on the “back” of the goose with the highest peak. We passed by a parachute tower on our way to the park, and the taxi driver introduced me that the tower was used as training base for pilots to jump from their planes. He laughed about how it’s only 30m high, and they expected the pilots to have good trainings. Again, the image of the wartime Chongqing, where one can only pick up traces left on the city occasionally, stuck in my head.

What it takes for a city to transform from that to where it is today? What is being front-loaded as the image of modernity and what is being lost in the process? I think this is a question that I will think about for a long time.

What a day in Enshi Grand Canyon! As an ambitious and accomplished group, we walked for 7 hours in the mountains, covering both the crack and the valley trails. I’m writing as my calves are still sore, but I would trade anything for seeing the amazing view and this “stairs-trauma” bonding experience. 

Thinking about how many years it would take for this landscape to form is beyond breathtaking. I enjoyed touching the cliff stone and feeling the vapor coming out of the waterfall. Of course we have to periodically take breaks to catch some breaths, but that also prompts some of our encounters with the local carriers who are waiting to carry customers up to mountain top. 

After our long day in the canyon, we met up with Prof. Xie from CCNU and heard her talk more about Enshi tourism. So she explained that the service workers are mostly from Tu ethnic group, and the carriers were farmers in the past but they could not generate income from farming alone. Now they make money because of the development of tourism. 

As I reflect upon her observation, I feel a little conflicted about the development of tourism. I do think the tourism would generate more employment opportunities for local residents, but they are never high-level jobs. It’s mainly manual labor that is easily replaceable. As a state-owned park, most of the generated revenue from tourism still goes to the government. And now since everything inside the park is state-owned, local people who used to live in or around the mountains can no longer use the resources from the area. 

I wonder if we think in terms of sustainability, is the way our tourism is structured here in Enshi a sustainable way to use the environment or the ethnic human capital?

Liana Tortora and Malia Weiss

We started off our morning in Wuhan bright and early. Many people tried the local breakfast specialty: hot and dry noodles. The hotel chefs made these noodles on the spot and customized each order!

After breakfast, we met up with two university students–Angel and Jeanius–who showed us around Central China Normal University. Angel and Jeanius were kind and welcoming; they were generous in answering our many questions and were curious about our lives, too. The CCNU grounds cover a very large area, and we learned that it was gated only after COVID. Before then, anyone could walk onto campus without a student ID. The buildings themselves were a beautiful mixture of old and new; some were only constructed in the past few months. It was interesting to see the different residential buildings and learn that students’ parents also had separate housing available. 

In our welcome lecture with several professors of biological sciences and urban and environmental sciences, we learned that CCNU is a “normal” university, which means it is especially designed to train students to become teachers and leaders. Professor Xie informed us about the aquatic situation of Wuhan, including the history of the city’s utilization of the Han and Yangtze rivers, its recent recreational use of these rivers, and challenges the city will face in the future regarding its relationship with the rivers. 

On our way to the biological museum, we walked through cherry blossom trees, a student organization/community service fair, and a courtyard of parents and young children painting. We began to get a better sense of the vastness of CCNU’s campus and the breadth of the community it serves. At the museum, we learned about the kinds of bug, fish, plant, and animal species that live in Hubei Province. 

We then attended a lecture by Professor Xiong. She explained Wuhan’s situation as the “city of a hundred lakes” and discussed its dealings with urban flooding through strategies such as the “sponge city” model. Professor Xiong also spoke about Wuhan’s water quality, management, and testing systems.

At lunch, professors and students sat together. We were able to ask the CCNU professors and deans many questions and learn about the school from their perspective as educators. We also watched the chef prepare Pecking Duck right in front of us! 

The highlight of the day came after lunch, when we met up with several volunteer students from CCNU and explored East Lake together, one of the largest urban lakes in China. We split up into three groups of Vassar and CCNU students and went our separate ways. One group stayed at the lake to watch the city light show, while another group found a street to do some shopping. Our group was accompanied by students Eden, Jina, Sarah, Miriam, and Hoshi.

We first walked along the lake and decided to take a boat to the other side to ride the cable cars! We stood on the top of the boat and were able to see Wuhan’s impressive buildings and even some fish! As we rode the cable cars, we saw the beautiful nature surrounding the lake from above. Many of the trees had left broken branches along the paths. We learned from our CCNU friends that just a week ago there was a very damaging frozen rain and a snow storm that impacted many of the trees and farming infrastructure in the area.

From our cable car vantage point, we were also able to see the East Lake Greenway, a cycling and pedestrian path that runs through the lake. As we learned from Professor Xie, the greenway was built as part of a larger city initiative to promote ecological restoration, clean water management, and human interaction with nature in an urban setting. We noticed many families enjoying the bike paths, play structures, and street food surrounding the lake, so this third goal of encouraging local tourism seemed to be achieved.

After cable cars, Demi (a local from Wuhan who truly led this adventurous afternoon!) helped arrange a few motorcycles to drive us all to the subway station. Riding motorcycles in China was a first for most of us and will definitely be one of the most memorable parts of the trip.

We then purchased our ride tokens and took the subway to Chu River Han street. We all got delicious tea along with an assortment of street food! We ate together and walked around for a bit until Vassar and CCNU students departed at the hotel. At that moment, we realized how much we had connected with our new friends. Despite different life experiences and occasional language barriers, we found many commonalities and moments of laughter. It was a very bittersweet goodbye, and an afternoon we will never forget.

Qianjiang was striking—the showstopping giant Crayfish at the center of town and the towering residential buildings, hotel, and luxury spa surrounding it, and just outside of that, the dramatic shift to a rural farming landscape. Where in Wuhan I could understand the endless construction of towering residential buildings as an anticipatory measure for the exponentially growing population of big cities globally, and especially in China as rural-to-urban migration continues to be a prominent trend—in Qianjiang the construction of these buildings was not anticipatory or to fulfill a future need. It appears that Qianjiang, like many cities and places I’ve visited in the U.S, is trying to materialize a “place-identity” and profit from it. Create a central attraction and image, a food culture, construct hotels for domestic tourism, create a crayfish cooking training resource, and all these tall surrounding residential buildings—the local government seems to be trying to build a bustling city from the original small-town identity surrounding crayfish farming.

From a purely tourist and aesthetic perspective, I think this “place-making” strategy has been more successful than in cities in NYS like Poughkeepsie where certain themes like the restored waterfront are a bit of an overused concept to center an identity around. “Place-making” can have a real market advantage that can put money into the pockets of ethnic communities (not exclusively but cultural uniqueness is sometimes an advantage e.g. China Town and Flushing)—so in that light—I see it as a beneficial thing for the farming villagers because it is bringing profit to the city, and I would assume to the farmers too. However, who benefits, how many people benefit, who carries the burden, whose livelihood is sacrificed in this development of the city—is very unclear right now—just financially speaking. Some displacement often takes place to develop a city, for instance in NYC and the development of Central Park, however there is state compensation in the form of apartments and perhaps something else. How desirable or undesirable that exchange is, is lost to me, but there is compensation. I wonder if the farmers who are pushed out and receive compensation find a new livelihood elsewhere and can continue to support themselves after being uprooted.

Also, BIRD SURVEILLENCE was my favorite part of today. It is actually just a very advanced high-resolution camera system to monitor bird populations in this wetland and not deserving of the term “surveillance”. But how sheerly advanced it was, surpassing anything that I or Prof. Lampasona has seen in natural preserves, parks, and conservation institutions in the United States, I think is possibly (and partially) attributed to China’s larger technological and surveillance systems. I emphasize how much I love this bird footage camera, and how beneficial it is for ecological conservation. However, it begs the question, why don’t we have this in the U.S.? Perhaps, this technology is cheaper, more accessible, more widespread and that partly makes this bird monitoring system possible. Prof. John Elrick mentioned the CCNU Professor Zhou informed him that the building we were in was a conservancy police station, in essence, the camera system partly aids the green police to catch illegal bird poachers with a courthouse nearby. All this to say, many of the technologies that we find convenient and useful today (e.g. google maps, satellite imagery, GIS,  the internet) historically rooted in a militaristic purpose but may not be intrinsically violent or bad. Technologies are tools, sometimes they can be designed in an intrinsically political way (e.g. a ship needs a hierarchy, captain and crew to function), but sometimes they can be neutral and be used for positive and negative purposes alike. This bird monitoring system seems to me, a positive development from an otherwise negative system.

Chiara