WEI, Jian’s blog

This is not only for students in physics major. 10 years ago, my wife was studying international corporation management in a prestigious University, she and her classmates had problem reading those Chinese Textbooks, which are no more than just translation and editing of standard textbooks in English. However, the translation is very difficult to understand and most of the students were just confused and lost their interest.

That was 10 years ago but I am pretty sure the same thing happens now as long as there are no enough professors who can teach with the textbooks in English.

The situation probably is better for physics major because it is somewhat dissociated from the society context. However, although students had no problem learning most of the fundamental courses in the undergraduate level, but later on it is a big obstacle when they do research since English is the communication language, and mostly people will refer to textbook in English if they need.

Not only that affects the learning process, it also makes interdisciplinary research quite difficult. For example, I am doing condensed matter physics, if I want to do something related organic thin films, or bio-related experiments. Reading related literature will be difficult since I do not know the specific terms in English. Of cause you can say if I am very determined I should spend time to re-learn these, but everyone knows the life of a researcher nowadays is busy. Another example, I’ve a friend in biology department doing some research with stem cell project and he uses some equipment with amplifiers, and he found it a problem to understand all the electronics since he already forgot those things learned in college. If the manual is in Chinese, probably he can still understand something, but since it is in English he felt it is too time consuming to understand it at all.  

I am not saying I do not like Chinese language. In fact, I do believe Chinese characters have their own beauty and can express much more feelings than alphabet characters. However, as when the center of science moved from Europe to American, the communication language is changed from German to English, the only way to catch the progress is to learn as much as possible with the current communication language. For China, it is an easier choice to teach things in Chinese, but later on the students have to pay more to be able to do real research. Many Chinese textbooks are just a concise version of the English textbook (or Russian textbook), although similar but lost the favor of original text. And sometimes, the historic context is omitted which makes the book very technical and the students do not know where the stuff comes from.

Recently, when coming back to China in 2005, I noticed improvements that new “auxiliary” books with more historic backgrounds are available, and the English names of the theories are included within parentheses. This helps since at least students can recognize the corresponding English names of the theory. But I still prefer to use the current original textbooks, and if the professors do have their opinions they can publish some notes. The bad thing is some professors just consider publishing a textbook as a big achievement and can be used to get higher salaries etc.

One more step ahead, is to utilize the resource in this Internet era. There are online videos courses taught by some first-class scholars (e.g. linear algebra http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/Video/video-fall-99.html ). I can’t see any reason why not use this as the standard “class material” and the professors are just responsible to answer questions and provide more specific guidance to the students. That would be a big change of the classroom, but I believe that is far more efficient for spreading knowledge.

For future students exposed to English textbooks earlier, I believe they will have more interest and more contributions later.

A few months ago, one friend brought to my wife a few books from China. One of them is Peter Drucker’s “Adventures of A Bystander”, already translated into Chinese (my wife is doing accounting, so I have the opportunity to meet people and read book outside physics). It is really a lot of fun to read this book, although I know that sometimes when it is easy and fun to read, it could mean the book is not deep or just used some exaggeration to attract attentions. Anyway I like this book very much, probably because I haven’t seen many books that could explain how the society evolves with time in such clarity and at such a high level and from many first-hand materials.

I hope some Chinese thinker/economist can write down something similar for the past century of China. However, I doubt it is possible because it is a sensitive topic. Most people at my age already knew the history we’ve leaned in school is not objective, and there are very few books out there on this topic. This is understandable since the government worries about its legitimacy and wants people to focus on developing economics. In a society emphasis “harmony”, deep and critical thinking is not encouraged. However, without reviewing the history, it might be difficult to find the right way to lead the country as well as to shape the society norm. (Another bad thing as suggested by one of the best economists in China Heng-fu Zou, http://zou.hengfu.blog.163.com/ (his blog in Chinese),  http://www.bjreview.com/newsmaker/txt/2007-06/25/content_67194.htm  is that most economists in China are not independent, they work for big companies or government and busy with making moneys.)

In Drucker’s book, there is a story about a girl named Mousie Polanyis, who initialed “rural sociology” and influenced many countries (like Croatia and Rumania etc. even later “kibbutz”), but after her marriage in her middle twenties she just quitted politics.  When describing the story, Peter  Drucker is really like a bystander, he just described how this little girl affects the history without pondering too much about the reason why she quitted.  

A sharp comparison to this bystander attitude is presented in a recent film Se, Jie (Lust, Caution) http://imdb.com/title/tt0808357/ by the famous director Lee Ang. (Btw, this film is again suggested to me by my wife, I wouldn’t know that by myself.) The director is trying to touch the prohibited topic of the love between a traitor and the girl who wanted to assassinate him. This topic could be considered as untraditional or even unethical for people both in Mainland and Taiwan. Ang wanted to try to show in that special time when China is invaded by Japan, there is the mixed feeling between love an hate, the always there humanity and the unpredicted and sometimes ridiculous reality. Although this film has a prototype based on a real assassination. But Ang modified a lot the story and eventually the history is just a background for this film.

In fact, people say that in Hollywood films the real history is always modified to enhance the plots of the film and to get audience emotionally involved, e.g. “the brave heart”. I think Ang is better than that because what he wants to express is the “true” feeling of some people at that time and he is very careful about the details. He hopes the audience will remember the scene of the film as a record of history, which I think he did pretty well.

Over, I must confess that as an ordinary person, I enjoy watching Hollywood films although I would definitely encourage everyone to read books like Adventures of A Bystander, which is closer to true history.