Some suggested that they practiced a lot with previous exam problem sets, and think that might be considered as cheating in American standards.

I just want to point out one obvious reason that many people in US might neglect. That is, for most physics majors, all the textbooks they used are in Chinese. So if one student does not study those previous GRE physics problem sets. He or she has no other way to quickly master all those special terms in physics.

If the exam problem sets were translated into Chinese, the level of difficulty is not a problem for advanced Chinese undergraduate students. About 10 years ago, I myself was preparing GRE physics while also preparing GRE general exam, TOEFL, and doing my experiments as a master degree student in Beijing University. I scored 970 (the maximum is 990) and was still laughed by a bunch of my classmates who got 990 without much effort. It was rare at that time to see someone got GRE physics score below 900 if he or she prepared for it seriously. I agree with those commented in the aforementioned blog that GRE physics score doesn’t have much correlation with future success in physics, which seems to be more about opportunities/luck to work in a productive group/area, and maybe the ability to manage research group. Otherwise we would see more successful Chinese PIs. And as a matter of fact many of my classmates left physics (for a richer life etc) and only a few are still struggling (as far as I know only one is exceptional and got an AP position in a good place).

People from Russian and many other European countries seem to have no problem with English literature. I learned to speak Russian during my college years. At that time Russian literature still had a strong influence in China for historic reasons, and I was too ambitious / naive and thought I should learn a second foreign language besides English. Today, I forgot most of what I learned, but one impression is that most scientific words are pronounced very similarly in Russian as in English. Also for Russian students, they usually have a very strong physics education and many of their textbooks, like the Landau theoretical physics series was translated into English and is considered one among the best textbook series.

Other countries/regions in Asia, like Korea, Taiwan, and Hongkong have a different situation than China. I leaned from a new Korea graduate student in our group that in Korea, they are using textbooks in English, and he says that he is more familiar with physics terms in English than the words translated into Korea, and most literature he read are in English. I also heard from a Korea laundry shop owner that she can teach her ABK (American born Korean) kid basic Korea in half a year, probably because Korean language can be spelled like English, while Chinese characters are more difficult from her experience. That could also explain why many ABC (American Born Chinese) have difficult to learn Chinese.

Right now in most Chinese universities textbooks in Chinese is still the only choice. Chinese people tend to follow traditions and resist changes. It is kind of a dilemma: if we use textbooks in English our own language might be consider inferior, which is not something people can be proud of; if keep Chinese as the working language, that means for most of the researchers they are disconnected from the rest of the world. China is a large country, in principle it is possible to develop our own system and keep using our own language. Historically, we have done that before in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the empire of China had the largest GDP in the world. But in recent centuries, the scientific development happened so fast, and closing the door was proved not the choice. Recently my former MS degree advisor in Beijing University, now a retired professor, told me he is spending time on a committee in charge of translation between English and Chinese words in physics. I think that is a really meaningful effort.

In the future, when there are more and more returnees with PhD degree from US and other English speaking countries join the faculty, those young professors may start using textbooks in English, like what happened in Korea, Hongkong, and Taiwan. Hopefully then, the language barrier for Chinese students is not a problem any more.

The back page of Mar 2008 APS news features a preliminary report by the AAA&S committee about “physics tomorrow”. The authors discussed what needs to be done in terms of funding strategies. Two focuses are about supporting young physicists and supporting high-risk high-reward research.

One of the authors, Steve Chu, recently visited Northwestern to give the Heilborn lecture series. Students and postdocs were given a time slot to chat with him. I took the chance to ask him how, for young physicists, to embark on a high-risk high-reward (high impact) research, or how to find such a topic. He first clarified that h-r h-r research topics probably should be chosen by experienced PIs, and then he went on to talk about his own experience as a graduate student at Berkeley and as a researcher at Bell lab.

Then I and someone else asked whether or not it boils down to the money issue, i.e., if you have lots of money, can buy top-of-the-line equipment and hire talented people, then you can try thing risky. His answer is not necessary, again he use his own research as example, for bio related research, they only need some microscopes, no fancy equipments. However, he emphasized that talking to the right people (in bio) is very important.

He also says he encourages moonlight, i.e., to try your own ideas in evenings and weekends. Although useful for some, these suggestions probably are not practical for people in high energy experiment, or even people doing liquid helium experiment.

Another trick as Steve claimed is to steer your research to some new technology. He again talked about his own experience. In fact, in the autobiography by another Nobel laureate, Ahmed Zewail, it is also mentioned that combination of technique breakthrough and new concepts leads to high impact research.

One interesting remark by Steve: “try it out and fail fast. Fail in three weeks you have some fun; fail after three years is painful”. Again, this type of quick turnaround experiments doesn’t fit for all subfields but certainly fit for some.

In summary, I find this one hour meeting worthwhile and appreciate Steve to spend time with us and to share his research philosophy.

On April 2, 2008, GuangMing Daily (one major newspaper of the China government) published an article by professor RAO Yi and SHI Yigong on how to transform China’s top universities into the world’s best (a short summary in English).

The solution by them can be summarized to two measures: 1) Recruit more top scholars from abroad to form a critical mass (see also an old NYtimes article ). 2) Make new rules so faculty members have more academic freedom and have more say on management.

Apparently the second one is more difficult, since as many people doubted, it is hard for the universities to be independent and have the right atmosphere for academic freedom while everything is under control of the government.

I searched the internet and to my surprise, there are not too many discussions after this article. There seem a lot people in China think democracy and political reform is the penicillin for everything, and without that nothing could be done even for higher ed. For my point of view, that is not true and there are still concrete things that can be done even in current situation:

1. In the long run we need to cultivate the spirit of science from the earlier age of our students so later they will do research because of their interest in pursuing science, not just to get a degree. Only with long-last interest and self motivation, can we have great scientists and thinkers, not just good ones. For this purpose, one important and concrete thing that the government can do is to build more public libraries (and fill them) for each town or village, as those in the United States.

2. Open a few universities to the world and make them the central portals for knowledge and training center for more faculty members. By open to the world I mean the working language should be English, and the recruiting is open to any people in the world, not limited to Chinese. These universities should be similar to those in Hongkong and compete with the best in the world. I believe this is the fastest way to become competitive in this English dominated environment.

3. Make use of the internet. For example, in the states many students use wiki/google to search useful information and use the department homepage to find interesting research project and faculty member’s publications etc, in China, however, wiki can not be accessed, and even for the best universities there are not much to see on their department homepage (I once inquired the webmaster of the department I was in, but got no response, which is natural since the webmaster has no power at all to make the changes). Plus, making things available online (also in English) enhances the transparency of management and may even help to prevent scientific misconduct, which is a serious problem for many universities in China now.

That is all I can think of now. I hope the policy makers, deans and professors in China can have more discussion on this topic. In US, there are in fact a lot interesting stories about higher education on Chronicle of higher ed and http://www.insidehighered.com/.

Since 2004, I’ve been using phpbb forum to write down my thoughts and interesting ideas, also other things like modifications of the major equipments I was responsible for, and stuff related to some of our papers, like from which Origin file the figure was exported, and useful comments by others etc.

The phpbb forum is an open source software created in 2000. A friend of mine (Lifeng) first used it for the Chinese student community at Rutgers, and then I followed him to become the administrator of the forum in 2002. It is based on mySQL database and people can search the posts by keyword, by user name, and can also limit the range of search.

After playing with phpbb for a while, and become comfortable with php programming, I started to using it as my online lab notebook since 2004. After I graduated from Rutgers and started a postdoc at Northwestern, I paid $4 a month for a commercial webhosting service to continue my online notebook.  With commercial webhosting, the setting is much easier, and actually there are a lot other software available but I do not have time to explore them.

I’ve noticed that some groups are using internal wiki to keep useful information. From my point of view, phpbb forum is better than wiki for the purpose of a searchable notebook.  Although wiki is also based on database, you can only search for the entry words, not all the words in the posts. That is not what I wanted and I believe other researchers would also prefer to search the whole posts.  The wiki is more useful when people want to record the changes that had been done for editing the entries, which maybe important for a dictionary but not important for a lab notebook.

Comparing to online blogging software, again phpbb forum is more suitable for note saving.  In a phpbb forum, you can have a quite complicated hierarchy structure, like several different categories and then many forums under each category, and can set different privileges for users, and set the forums private or public accessible. For example, in a sub- forum of one particular equipment, other people in your group can also start a topic, e.g., about recent maintenance of the equipment, or some recent accident with the equipment etc.  In comparison, blogging is most of time a one man show and not very useful if you want more involvement from other group members. Also I am not sure about the searching function of the blog software.

Although phpforum is better than wiki and blog, I am not fully satisfied with it. It by all means was not designed for a scientific lab notebook. The ideal software for a lab notebook that I was hoping to find, should combine all the important things, like the links to device fabrication details, the links to devices SEM images, and test results, and other related comments for each single sample. And when I need the information for that sample or need to compare parameters for all related samples, the database will help to sort that out.

So far I haven’t found such software. Maybe it is already available for big companies. I’ve played with some open source software that available on the hosting website, like a Coppermine online photo album and a 4images online photo album (both similar to phpbb but designed for better handling of images) to store device images as well as some photos of instrument during maintenance.  However, they are not as useful as the phpbb forum for me since those images are not well linked, e.g., to the device description and data.

 Most professors probably have spent quite some time on how to store their group’s data and how to organize them, and many students and postdocs probably have the experience of struggling with poor documented equipments. I am wondering, is it feasible that the University can provide each group some database service like the phpbb forum I’ve been using, but maybe more powerful. That would certainly improve the productivity of the research and has also other benefits like prevent scientific misconducts because all the data are in the database and nobody can say that his databook was eaten by mice or lost to nowhere.

In fact, at Rutgers before I left, I’ve noticed that the administration have made a better university homepage and tried to standardize all the department homepages, and also started a new myRutgers portal for every student with integrated services like email, calendar, course registration etc. That portal service probably could be modified and be useful for a research group.  However, since the service is provided by a department within the administration, I am not sure whether they could be as efficient as commercial service provider, although they may provide more customized service.   At Northwetsern, I’ve noticed that the old university email system has been replaced with service by gmail, which is very helpful because gmail has a large mailbox and has database functions like search and categorization etc.

Another useful and very simple tool for a group is an email listserv. I’ve been the listserv administrator for Chinese student Association at Rutgers from 2000 to maybe 2004, so I am also familiar with this tool.  With a listserv, the group members won’t need to collect a bunch of email addresses and each individual can also change their email address without worrying about missing emails.  I noticed some professors with a large group are using this tool, e.g., Tobin Marks’ group at NWU, http://chemgroups.northwestern.edu/marks/directory.html.

Some departments have used event calendars, research description, and alumni info etc, based on database.  One of the exceptional is the UIUC chemistry department; they even have nice photos of every faculty members, http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/chem/.  I think that is a very good strategy in terms of recruiting new students and new faculty members.

In summary, I think that using database software can help individual researchers, research groups, and departments to be better organized.  And I believe better organized means improved productivity and more chance to success.

I believe that a good educator has to be well-trained and well-prepared. I probably got that belief from my earlier unsuccessful mentoring experience. More than 10 years ago, started from my college years, I always wanted to give my younger sister (then in high school) and other younger relatives some useful suggestions in terms of study and career plan etc. However, since I myself didn’t have much experience so I had little to offer, although I really wished to be a good mentor.  At that time, my sister was thankful for my encourage and supports, but probably also felt bored by my useless suggestions

Back to the topic of professor/undergraduate student issue, here are my opinions about being a good (physics) teacher.

About teaching: When teaching a course, always give a detailed syllabus. Tell the students the reason that you choose the particular textbook; what is your strength in teaching this course, e.g.,  the parts related to your research; what do you want them to grasp from this course and the connections with other parts of the field. If you know there are some good online sources, like lectures videos by some wonderful teachers, ask the students to watch and read. Sometimes, a study group is more useful than class teaching in terms of answering specific questions of a student.

About research: Encourage collaboration between students while also reward individual creativity.  Should let students know, that any advance of science is based on a lot of work by others, and if they are interested in doing science they should learn to collaborate with each other and learn to initiate collaboration (as in other businesses). When doing real research project, for most undergraduates, the first project is better to be a small topic, and should be in collaboration with senior members (gs, postdoc, prof) in the group.  Publishing a first-author paper certainly can be a strong incentive for an undergraduate student, but without input from others, the process can be very slow and painful.  For an undergraduate with limited time, he/she can collaborate with other students and finish one project together, and all as co-authors.  They should be informed that the main purpose for an undergraduate project is to get a taste of doing research and understand the physics. Usually only for simple projects exploring new fields (e.g., nano stuff), can they make substantial contributions.  For more difficult projects in those more matured fields, the undergraduate’s involvement probably won’t contribute too much, or even may delay the progress.

One additional thought about the collaboration with others: besides participating student organizations, I think the ability could be also acquired from participating sports like soccer etc. I myself like to play soccer, and feel organizing an offense attack is pretty much like collaboration in a project, although for me most of time the former is easier and more fun

The playwright of this show (http://blog.sina.com.cn/ningcaishen) is almost at the same age as me, but he is kind of “star” (Wuan4) now and has many fans. Many plots of his show were initially from online novels, and online jokes which the playwright was very familiar as a website content editor. From this show and his blog, I can see why this sitcom was so popular: there are a lot in common among him and others at my age group, e.g., the attitude towards kids’ education, and the general attitude towards happiness etc, which the playwright intertwined with traditional swordsman stories into this 80-episodes sitcom.

Interestingly, from the sitcom it is possible to characterize the typical thinking of young people in China and that may even tell us about the future of the country, here are some of my thoughts:

This sitcom was again put in a historic background and adopted a lot from those novels and plays of swordsman/ martial artist (by the famous novelist Jing Yong and others, see e.g. http://www.spcnet.tv/readingrooms/default.php ). Although the playwright mixed a lot materials from modern society and even some foreign elements, but it is still a very traditional Chinese story, in the sense that eventually it comes back to the idea that after all the struggles people realized that the best life is to live is the life of an ordinary people, an honest worker, and there is nothing you can gain by competing/fighting with others. This is probably very comforting for most people, and helps to build a harmonious society. But for a country, it will definitely leads to failure of competition in world market.

There is also nationalism, or ignorance of the outside world. This is especially clear in one episode where a young guy who chosen to immigrate to other country was made fun of, just plain jokes without any deep meaning. This actually reflects some general sentiment toward people who have overboard experience. There are many reasons for this, I believe one of them is related to the depreciation (or lost of trust) of the foreign degree holders because many of them brag a lot but couldn’t deliver real results. In his blog, the playwright also mentioned that he does not like the aggressive style of Japanese sitcom where the hero always vows to be the best. He and probably many young people in China may think that aggressiveness is too narrow-minded, and want to avoid such cruel competition.

The problem is, in the 21^st century, we can not avoid the competition (there is a bestseller book: the world is flat). Why in China we lack the healthy spirit of competition, I do not know the answer. Some general reason could be that we do not have the right rules for competition, and it could ultimately relate to the old question: why it is not China, see also another bestseller: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Whatsoever, I do believe it is useful to import/project a healthy spirit of competition to the young audience, e.g., try to be the best of yourself, earn a lot experience even from your losing, make friends during competition, and understand that healthy competition (like in sports) can actually leads to a win-win situation, and is crucial for the development of a country. It is easier said than done, but I wish that those playwrights, especially those with overboard experience, can come up with something in this direction.

Another observation, a little annoying, is that the police officers (or government officials) were always made fun of. They were always depicted as stupid and heartless, e.g., they eat in the hotel/restaurant without paying money, and they kiss ass of their boss, although they are not very bad. One sad thing is probably most people may agree it is close to the real situation in China. This is probably similar to the old American “Godfather” movies, where policemen are usually bad/stupid people. One might worry the quality of future policemen/government officials in China if such impression prevails.

In fact, it is noticeable that this kind of “unhealthy” sarcasm towards specific groups is popular in Chinese culture. Even in the national grand gala of the spring festival, some people pointed out that some talk shows (Xian4 Sheng1) and short comedy shows (Xiao3 Pin3) are made funny due to the sarcasm/discrimination towards poor people/uneducated people/handicapped people etc, which should be considered as “politically incorrect” in US. However, probably like talk shows in US, if you do not make fun of yourself or others, then there is no fun. There might be a subtle line between political correct and incorrect. In this sense, the sitcoms with historic background have advantages because there is no direct complicit with current administration. In those Hollywood style films, there is also a similar problem about demonization of the administration. Since in China most imported films are those Hollywood style, while those more realistic programs like PBS etc were rarely imported, the audience in China may not have enough comparison to distinguish the exaggeration from reality, which is not good.

Our own movie directors in China like ZHOU Xinchi (or Stephen Chow) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159507/, who is very popular among young people, we see that they were struggling to present something different and deep. However, probably because there is no good novels, or no such culture background for asking deep questions (or for healthy competition in that matter), it seems hard for them to come up with something resonating deeply, and something close to a masterpiece, even if they are rich and do not need to worry about the box. Sometimes the playwrights and producers are just making some story up from nowhere or probably from their day dreaming (stories like Kill Bill), which can not be much different from what they already familiar.

Since I am a physicist, I noticed a remotely related discussion about the influence of media on Science education. In one of last year’s Physics Today, there was some column saying that right now since the Cartoonists in U.S. always portrait bad/mad Scientists, probably fewer and fewer kids would be interested in Science career. For me, I think the situation is not that serious in U.S. because there are still a lot public TV programs like Discovery, history, Animal, NOVA etc besides the cartoon networks, which many kids would like to watch. But I do think this is a problem for the developing countries like China (and India maybe), where there are not many interesting programs for kids. So again, I wish there are stronger governmental supports and maybe more private foundations for this sort of programs. We can’t rely on commercial program producers for this purpose (probably we can think Yang2 Lan2’s sunshine satellite TV program as one unsuccessful try in this direction).

In summary, people at my age in China, many have the good will for a peaceful society, but may be haven’t thought too much about the balance between the competition and collaboration, and about improving the relationship between people and the administration, etc. And as always, I am hoping the government can do better.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200712/asktheethicist.cfm

Basically, it says it is ok the student write the first draft, and it is the teacher’s problem “ if your reference was unwilling to scrap a ghostwritten letter when necessary”.

In my opinion, this will cause unease to the students and teachers who insist to hold higher standards since the disadvantage of not doing so is obvious. Maybe, it will be fairer if there is a special remark in the beginning of the recommendation letter that states it is based on the draft written by the student himself/herself.

Recently, in Beijing University, one of the most prestigious Universities in China, there were some discussions about student cheating on term papers initiated by the criticism of a visiting professor from Yale:

http://fangzhouzi-xys.blogspot.com/2007/12/yale-professor-criticizes-wide-spread.html

During this time, professor Yi Rao, dean and vice president, also expressed his opinion about writing recommendation letter:

http://fangzhouzi-xys.blogspot.com/2007/12/rao-yi-professors-should-write.html 

I am happy to know that he “agrees that there should be no reason for professors asking their students to write their own recommendation letters. They should write themselves, or at least ask their secretaries or assistants for help.”

However, although I am impressed by professor Yi Rao’s attitude, I am not sure how much influence his words will have. I don’t see there is any way to “force” professors to write the letter by themselves. Maybe, at best, it will end up with the same situation as that exemplified in APS news. 

In fact, rl for all kinds of application, or even president’s speech, are probably ghostwritten.

More interesting links about rl:

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/MJ/feat/scha.htm

http://philosophersplayground.blogspot.com/2007/12/ethics-of-letters-of-recommendation.html

In this sense, now there are excellent complementary resources for learning on wiki, since one entry usually links to many related entries, even in different disciplines, e.g., math and physics. Here is an example.

http://www.answers.com/topic/wkb-approximation

Another one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp

It combines engineering, invention, surface science, biophysics all together. In fact, the in situ plasma etching used in the evaporators in our lab are based on similar principles.

For current students and teachers, another wonderful thing is online book reviews. It can bring relief when you see many people have similar confusions, and understand there are probably always some problems and limitations with even the very popular textbooks. Sometimes, the reviewer seems has deeper understanding of the material than most of us, and the reviews seem truly illuminating, e.g.

http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Mechanics-3rd-Herbert-Goldstein/dp/0201657023

Most of the textbooks have many homework problems. My personal opinion, more homework won’t help students to understand deeper the physics. Right now the life of undergraduates is more than ever busy, if spend more than a few hours and still couldn’t get a hint to solve the problem, then it is not worthy it. I guess the tradition of problem solving is rooted back to applying the knowledge to solve practical issues. Although it is very useful to actually solve a few problems, it is not worth the time to try many of them just to be familiar with the problem solving technique. Instead, it might be better to spend the time to read some historic context, or related mathematics, so can have a more coherent picture. As for the technique, you will forget it anyway unless you use it all the time.

It is not uncommon to hear about complains that undergraduate courses are difficult to teach, and the students always hate to solve problems. Some said it is important to choose how much/deep the material in textbook should be covered. I think it is not how much the students have learned that matters, but how well they understand the derivation of the subject and its position in the broader physics/science context. Of cause, it is easier said that done.

About learning physics, and keep the students’ interest in physics, professor Carl Wieman has some very interesting opinion: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200711/backpage.cfm

(Though, I am curious about the percentage of faculty members who “have the desire to have a clear and sincere desire to have their students learn physics and appreciate its usefulness and inherent intellectual beauty.”)

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.