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China Initiatives at the University of Michigan |
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| Historical Exchanges
(contributed by Weiying Wan, Asia Library) |
The University of Michigan's involvement with China has a long and complex history, beginning with the Angell ministry in Peking in 1880. In 1976, UM Regents and administrative officers sent a delegation to China towards the end of the "Cultural Revolution". This might be the first American delegation invited to The People抯 Republic of China. In 1981, U-M scholars Mike Oksenberg and Weiying Wan were members of the Michigan delegation invited by Jiang Nanxiang, the Chinese Minister of Education. President Shapiro led the delegation and signed an agreement for exchange and cooperation with ten major institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Science, Peking University, Nanjing University, Fudan University, Jiaotong University, Sichuan University, and the Department of Higher Education of Shanxi Province. |
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Education and Student Exchange |
The University of Michigan has trained hundreds of graduate
students from the People抯 Republic of China.
One person the Governor may wish to meet is SHEN Mingming, who received his
Ph.D. in Political Science from U-M . He
is at the Research Center for
Contemporary China at Beijing University, 416 Library Building, phone:
6275-5443. Not only is Professor Shen a graduate of our University, but he
continues to work with scholars from our University in various collaborative
research projects. |
| The Office of International Programs, International Institute | The University of Michigan's Office of International Programs
(OIP)
administers over 70 programs in 36 countries on six continents. The Peking
University (PU) and Beijing Normal University (BNU) programs both begin at BNU
with a mandatory seven-week intensive language training session focused on
developing skills at the intermediate and advanced levels. UM students who wish
to spend only the fall semester in China remain at BNU, where they take
continuing courses in written and spoken Chinese, and in Chinese literature and
history covering the period 1900-1949. Those who elect to stay for an academic
year may do so at BNU or, following the summer program, move to Peking
University. At PU抯 Center for Teaching Chinese to Foreigners, the language
and literature curriculum emphasizes improvement of spoken and written Mandarin
and deepening one抯 understanding of Chinese society and culture. Students
with sufficient proficiency may audit or take regular university courses in
history, the social sciences, and other fields on both campuses. Supervised
independent study for credit is possible and encouraged.
Students with at least elementary Mandarin Chinese take humanities and
social science courses at Beijing
University or Beijing
Normal University
through the University of California Education Abroad Program, Includes mandatory summer language
training at Tsinghua
University. |
| The University of Michigan Business School |
UMBS has a student exchange agreement with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The University of Michigan Business School (UMBS) is a member of the academic council for the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. The academic council is composed of representatives from leading business and academic institutions in Europe, China and the United States. Professor Stewart Black is the representative from the UMBS. The newly constructed campus of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) is located in Pudong, Shanghai's fastest growing economic region. The CEIBS campus has become one of the largest in the region and the first international business school with its own campus in the history of China. UMBS is also a member in the Pacific Asian Consortium for International Business Education and Research, a group of North American and Asian business schools devoted to collaboration in student exchanges, collaborative research, and jointly sponsored degree programs. PACIBER includes a number of leading business schools from mainland China. |
| Collaboration with the UNIVERSITAS 21 Network | The University of Michigan is the only U.S. member of UNIVERSITAS
21. The network was formed at an historic meeting held in Melbourne in March
1997, and its objective is to assist the capabilities and aspirations of its
members to become global universities and to advance their plans for
internationalization. Members from China include Fudan University, Peking University and the University of Hong Kong. |
| The College of Engineering | President Bollinger recently signed a formal
university-wide collaborative agreement with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (December 1999). The College of
Engineering has had extensive relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong University in
the last five to ten years. Professor Jun Ni has been serving as an
endowed professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University since March 1999. Directed by
Professor Jun Ni, the S. M. Wu Manufacturing Research Center at the College of
Engineering has established close collaborative relationship with the following
institutions in China: Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, Tsinghua University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology,
Tianjing University, Dalian University of Technology, Beijing University of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, Xian Jiao Tong University, Jilin University of
Technology, and Haerbin University of Technology. |
| Community-Based International Learning
Programs
The School of Nursing |
Funded
by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Community-Based International Learning
Programs between the Beijing Medical
University (BMU) Department of Nursing and the University of Michigan (UM)
School of Nursing was initiated in 1996. The University of Michigan School of
Nursing (UMSN) signed a Partnership Agreement with the Beijing Medical
University School of Nursing (BMUSN). The project has the following objectives:
(1) to provide information and materials to enhance nursing education about the
most effective community-based care that is relevant to the Chinese situation;
and (2) to build long-term faculty relationships that contribute to ongoing use
of the most up-to-date, culturally relevant knowledge in effective health care.
The UMSN has hosted six visiting scholars from the BMUSN since 1996. |
| The UM Museum of Arts | The UM Museum of Arts
(UMMA) has a very close relationship with the
National Cultural Relics Bureau in Beijing and many of the leading Museums in
China, including the Palace Museum in
Beijing, the Historical Museum in Xian, the Shanghai Municipal Museum, and
several other major art academies in Nanjing, Beijing and Hangzhou. Two
conservators were hired by the UMMA from the Palace Museum in Beijing. Two of UM
graduate students majoring in Chinese Art History studied at the Central Art
Academy in Beijing. The UM Museum
of Arts has a special relationship with the Shaanxi
Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau and the Museums in Xian. The UMMA invited
three directors from Xian to attend the UM Museumology session in 1992.
Meanwhile those invited visitors brought three terra cotta statues, two figures
and one horse, for exhibition at the Museum, which was one of the most
successful Asian shows at UMMA. |
| The Cultural Map of China | Collaborating with the Institute
of Religion Studies and the Institute of Buddhism of China, this pilot
project is to help students and the American public understand the
cultural/artistic traditions of China by developing an Internet GIS
(Geographical Information Systems)-based cultural map of the Silkroad. This
project aims to collect and digitize representative works of Chinese Buddhist
monuments and to publish them on the web. Most important sites, including Kizil,
Turfan, Dunhuang, Binglinsi, Maijishan in the northwestern region, Dazu,
Anyue, Bazhong, Guangyuan, Leshan, Dali in the southwestern region, and
Yungang, Longmeng, Xiangtangshan in central China, will be covered. In addition to the
representative images and textual introductions, this project also compiles a
detailed bibliography to help scholars for their further studies on these
monuments. The Institute of Religion Studies and the Institute of Buddhism have
developed a comprehensive database on Buddhist studies in China. This pilot
project will develop a prototype for the Internet GIS-based China religion map
with a focus on the Silkroad. |
| The Jobs in China Project | Co-sponsored by the Chinese
Ministry of Labor and directed by Professor Richard H. Price, the project of
"JOBS IN CHINA" works through two principal partners: the Michigan
Prevention Research Center at the Institute for Social Research, University of
Michigan and the Institute of Psychology
(Professor Fang Liluo), National Academy
of Sciences of China. The project is conducting a study of unemployed
workers and their families who have been laid off from State Owned Enterprises
in seven Chinese cities. They are also testing a program for teaching them job
search skills. The project also has trained human service workers from each city
to deliver the program. The program has served about 2000 workers as a first
step demonstration of the program's effectiveness. |
| The Population Studies Center |
Professor Yu Xie is
involved in several projects concerned with the dramatic social and economic
changes that have been taking place in China since the inception of the economic
reform in 1978. Collaborating with Professor Pan Zhongdang at the Chinese
University in Hong Kong and Dr. Yu Xuejun at the China Population Information
and Research Center in Beijing, Yu Xie conducted a survey of about 1000 families
in three Chinese cities: Wuhan, Shanghai, and Xi'an. The three cities were
chosen to reflect varying degrees of market penetration, with Shanghai the most
marketized, Xi'an the least marketized, and Wuhan in between. The fieldwork was
conducted in summer 1999. Detailed
information was collected about the respondents' residence history, education
history, work history, fertility history, health status, consumption, and family
support. Yu Xie, his Chinese collaborators, and other Michigan researchers will
be using data from the survey for further analyses in the coming years.
This research will document how the economic reform has influenced the
economic, social, family, and health well-being of urban Chinese, with an
heightened emphasis on the impact of marketization on social inequality and
family relationships. |
| Population Studies on China | Professor
Barbara Anderson has been working with the Capital University of Economics and
Business (formerly Beijing College of Economics) since 1988. She also has
been working with the China State Statistical Bureau and statistical bureaus in
Xinjiang, Yunnan, Guangxi, Tibet, Jilin, and Beijing Municipality since 1988.
She has also been working with Tibet University for the past two years. |
| The Collaboration with the Institute of Psychology of China | The Collaborative Research Center of the Institute of Psychology and the University of Michigan coordinates the cooperative work between the Institute of Psychology and University of Michigan in psychological studies, exchanges and training. Some joint cross-cultural projects have been carried out. The University of Michigan sends professors and students to the Institute of Psychology for a short-term working visit every year. This training program began in 1994. |
| Rural Studies of China | Collaborative
research project on Rural Poverty Alleviation Strategies in China (studies of
nutrition, education, credit and investment, govt. programs in poor areas based
on household surveys), with China Poverty Research Association (including
members of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural
Sciences, China Leading Group for Poverty Alleviation), 1997-99. |
| School of Public Health-Asthma Self-Management Project | The Asthma Self-Management project deals with developing a model for controlling and preventing diseases in schools in Beijing China. The goal of the project is to evaluate ten educational program in asthma management for children in schools adopted from the US (Detroit area) in Beijing. As of today, all educational programs have been completed in the test schools. The program is a 6 session (6 weeks) asthma self-management course. We plan to collect follow-up data in the coming Fall. |
| Center for Chinese Studies Publications | CCS publishes scholarly monograghs on China, included titles in history, literature and criticism, economics, medicine, philosophy and religion, political science and art. We also publish texts for classroom use including a general survey on contemporary China, language learning guides, and reprints of important older studies. Authors are from U of M, from other US and Canandian institutions, and from Singapore, at present. |
| World Values Survey | The World Values Survey is a
worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It has
carried out representative national surveys of the basic values and
beliefs of publics in more than 65 societies on all six inhabited
continents, containing almost 80 percent of the world's population. It
builds on the European Values Surveys, first carried out in 1981. A second
wave of surveys, designed for global use, was completed in 1990-1991, a
third wave was carried out in 1995-1996 and a fourth wave is taking place
in 1999-2000. This investigation has produced evidence of gradual but
pervasive changes in what people want out of life, and the basic direction
of these changes is, to some extent, predictable. This study has given
rise to more than 300 publications, in 16 languages. This project is being carried out by an international network of social scientists, with local funding for each survey (though in some cases, it has been possible to raise supplementary funds from outside sources). In exchange for providing the data from interviews with a representative national sample of at least 1,000 people in their own society, each participating group gets immediate access to the data from all of the other participating societies. Thus, they are able to compare the basic values and beliefs of the people of their own society with those of more than 60 other societies. In addition, they are invited to international meetings at which they can compare findings and interpretations with other members of the WVS network. The World values survey was carried out in China in 1990 and 1995, in Taiwan in 1995, and will be carried out in both countries in 2000/2001. |
| Tibetan Plateau | A collaborative project that aims to investigate the geologically recent uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. This of great interest , because the high elevation of the Plateau is the cause of the climatological conditions in central China that are of the great relevance to the socio-economic conditions for the area. Our project will study the last 15 million years or so of climate chance, and relate this change to the enormous uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, which has occurred in this interval. Summer fieldwork in China and laboratory measurements in Ann Arbor by scientists from U-M and visitors from Lanzhou are planned for 1997-2000, to be followed by publication of the results. Funding is being sought from the US National Science Foundation and Chinese government |
| School of Business | A collaborative project between Prof Schipanai and Prof Liu JunHai of the Institute of Law at the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing studying corporate governance. The project is sponsored by the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan Business School |
| Other University of Michigan Scholarly Commitments to China: |
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Center for Chinese Studies
China Data Center
Business School
School of Nursing
Department of Anesthesiology
Department of Mathematics
Institute of Gerontology
Institute of Social Research
Transportation Research Institute
Department of Urban Planning
School of Music
School of Natural Resources and Environment
School of Law
Chinese Studies
Department of Geological Sciences
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