Day Five – Beijing to Tianjin
You can follow Michael Russell’s journey here.
Yesterday’s blog was written before the reception at the British Embassy which celebrated Scottish Education and showcased the work of Heriot Watt University’s Galashiels campus, which is undertaking a joint project with a University here based on cashmere and the materials produced by Johnston’s of Elgin, which has the oldest cashmere tradition in Scotland.
The Ambassador, Sebastian Wood, was very helpful and interesting and most hospitable. He also provided facilities for an in-depth interview I undertook with China Education Daily. Their correspondent was very well informed about Curriculum for Excellence and her wide ranging piece about Scottish education (the third she has written in less than two years) will reach more than 300,000 educationalists in China.
This morning we left the hotel at 7.45am with the skies still grey and a distinct chill in the air. By 8.30am we were at the new Beijing South station where we were received by an immaculately-uniformed Chinese Railways official, who gave me a detailed presentation on the immense investment going into high speed railways in China.
Then it was on the bullet train which took under half an hour to get to Tianjin – the smoothest possible ride that did not even shake the glass of green tea we were given en route.
The First Minister signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Mayor of Tianjin in July this year and our purpose in visiting was to build upon the memorandum and ensure that there was ever-deepening co-operation in the field of education. One sign of this is the formal tie-up that exists between Bathgate Academy and the No 41 High School in Tianjin. The No 41 school was our first visit of the day and as we got out of the bus we were greeted by the school principal and his team, whilst behind them the senior pupils went through one of the two formal exercise periods of the day.
The principal’s translator was a teacher at the school who will be spending several months in Bathgate very shortly and after a formal discussion we toured the classrooms, in the first of which a DVD of Bathgate pupils was being shown, with the Chinese children answering questions raised by the Scottish ones. It was a great example of cultural exchange.
Our meeting with the Tianjin Education Commission resulted in a further step forward with an agreement to exchange university and vocational education delegations and to follow up with a plan of action drawn up by our officials. Both sides expressed themselves very pleased with this progress.
After lunch we visited the Tianjin Planning Centre to see the most extraordinary vision of the future of a city I have ever witnessed. Starting with the largest scale model it is possible to imagine we worked our way through exhibit after exhibit all showing breathtaking ambition and full of exciting ideas. The tour finished with a digital film which was shown in wrap-around and which swept us through history and geography in a futuristic fashion.
The display was stunning but even more stunning was the fact that much of this has already come to pass – these buildings are being built and these neighbourhoods are being laid out. In China the future is being made before your eyes.
The bullet train proves it – our journey back reached a speed of 351 kilometres per hour. However, I doubt the Beijing traffic allowed us to reach a tenth of that on the trip from the station to the Sina.com.cn studio where I was interviewed about Scottish education with a specific emphasis on recruitment of Chinese students to Scottish universities. The interview will be broadcast online, and a transcript of it is already available at http://edu.sina.com.cn The website gets up to 30 million hits a day!
This evening I will meet some Chinese alumni of Scottish universities and I know that they will want to help to spread the word about the high quality of what is on offer here.
Michael Russell: Cabinet Secretary for Education & Lifelong Learning, from China