Today we had our second Chinese culture lecture and visited Capital Bio. The lecture today was on Chinese religions. I had already learned all the facts we had covered in today's lesson in my ninth-grade world cultures class. I'm glad that I already had that background so I could compare how a Westerner describes the religions and how a native believer views them. Yun He of course had a much more limited time frame to cover a lot of issues, but she still was able to shed a different light on some issues. Again Yun He stressed the impact of the cultural revolution on the traditional values and history of China. She said that the informant culture created by Mao, along with the constant attacks and challenges to Confucian ideals had made neighbors distrustful of each other and destroyed loyalty and harmony within the nuclear family. She also claimed that Chinese society was still hindered by the effects of these changes as the grudges they caused were passed from generation to generation. I don't agree with this claim for two reasons: it is very difficult to measure the extent to which these relationships were damaged by the cultural revolution, and it is impossible to say that the huge changes China has gone through since then have not had their own impact on these areas. I think that the rapid shift towards free-wheeling capitalism and rising consumerism has depersonalized China somewhat. The prevalence and thus necessary tenacity of street dealers also detracts from their credibility.
It was interesting to look back on the original values of Chinese and imported religions and see how they mixed with traditional Chinese folk religion. Yun He did not talk about this, but the original values of Taoism have little to do with mystical spirits and Gods, but as the religion evolved from its philosophical form, the traditional Chinese god worship attached itself to this essentially secular belief system. Yun He did talk about this for Buddhism as it was imported to China, but it was interesting to note how a native religion could get changed as it was adopted by the populace.
For lunch, I got a dehydrated noodle meal from a local supermarket since I didn't have much time to eat and didn't want to go through the song-and-dance of ordering food in a language you do not speak. I used the water boiler that came in the room and was very impressed that it was able to boil 3 cups of refrigerated water in around 2 minutes. I guess boiled water is a serious concern when you can't drink from the tap.
Later on, we visited Capital Bio, which is a biotech firm concentrated on the patenting and manufacture of biochips.It holds a near monopoly in China and has patent-sharing agreements with several large foreign biotech firms. It was impressive to see that the company, composed largely of graduates or professors at Tsinghua University had come up with 141 patents since its founding in September of 2000. The marketing officer who showed us around had a strange grasp of the English language. When he spoke, he had perfect grammar, but had a seriously limited vocabulary. The campus was very nice, and the product demos helpful. It appeared to me that Capital Bio was not really equivalent to other biotech firms I know. Most American biotech firms are either fairly small manufacture and research firms that each do a small bit of the total research production of the country, or large mass producers like GE Healthcare. Capital Bio seems to hold a humongous amount of the nation's research in the area and sells largely only to domestic laboratories.
My father would be very upset about the state of bicycling in China. Not only are bikes' chains all rusted through, but I have never seen a bike whose seat is raised above its lowest position. Maybe they're all too short to need it higher.