With everything that is good about a study abroad experience, like the food, there is also the bad. While my complaint may seem petty I have found that the Chinese internet is the most infuriating part of my experience so far. If very few of my friends were on Facebook I could live without it. If I grew up speaking Chinese I heard Baidu is totally comparable to Google in many respects. If I had to plan around "internet maintenance days" I could grow to deal with it. But the internet speeds in China are almost insultingly bad. After quickly Googling on Bing I came across Wikipedia's handy list of global internet speeds, "list of countries by internet connection speeds". The US has an average internet speed of 12.6mb/s according to the Wikipedia article. While Hong Kong SAR's internet speeds beet the US's at 15.8mb/s, mainland China's far lag behind with a slow 3.7mb/s. While I am assuming the mainland's average internet speeds is heeled back by some of the more rural parts of the country, the internet in Shanghai does not seem very fast from my personal experience. I feel truly sorry for the people of Venezuela and Bolivia who's connection speeds according to the article are 1.5mb/s and 1.8mb/s respectively. I also feel sorry for the South Korean students at ECNU who previously had a full 20.5mb/s use. If you are like many of the international students and try to add a VPN or a proxy server to the mix you can only pray that your connection is solid and fast enough to survive. So if I don't get to posting everyday or my posts seem a bit rushed, now you know why.
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Yesterday I went to the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pudong, Shanghai for Shabbat dinner and a lecture by Yael Farjun, an Israeli resident of Shanghai and a graduate of the University of Haifa in Chinese Studies, who told the story of Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi. I have also heard this story from Prof. Xu Xin (徐新) of the University of Nanjing's Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute of Jewish Studies so I am inclined to believe it.
Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi was a Russian Chabad-Lubavitch who served as the Chief Rabbi of Shanghai, which at the time has a somewhat sizeable community of Russian and Baghdadi Sephardic Jews, during the waning days of World War II. As the story goes, the Nazi German government repeatedly asked Imperial Japan to liquidate the Jewish community of Shanghai. The Japanese, confused as to why the Nazis cared so much about small group of people on another continent, called a meeting of the Shanghai Jewish leadership to try and figure out the Nazis hated these people so. When asked to speak, Rabbi Ashkenazi told the Japanese that the Nazis hated the Jews because the Jews, like the Japanese, were an Asian people, all be it from the land of Israel not East Asia. He then warned the Japanese that the Nazis had no love for them ether; he told the Japanese that as soon as the Nazis were able, they would invade Asia and do to the Japanese, and all the people of Asia, what they did to the Jews. The Japanese, having some of their fears about an eventual Nazi invasion of Asia confirmed, dismissed the Jewish delegates and never bothered any of the Jewish communities under their administration for the rest of the war. The Jewish community of Shanghai survived the war but eventually disintegrated as its members moved away, mostly to Israel, the United States, and Australia. But to this day there is still evidence of former Shanghai Jewish community scattered around the city, available to anyone who knows where to look. On this day, September 9th, in 1972 Chairman Mao Zedong died after a period of poor health in Beijing, China at the age of 82. Despite his important role in founding the Communist Party and the People's Republic, the anniversary of his death has gone almost completely unmentioned at ECNU. Nothing out of the ordinary happened by Mao's statue on the ECNU campus nor was anything mentioned at ECNU's International Opening Ceremony. While the Communist Party has admitted some, but not all, of the many failings of the Mao years and has tried to keep celebrations around him low key, individual Maoists, both in and out of the government, have organized their own events commemorating the 40th anniversary of his death. According to Chinese newspaper The Global Times "an online flower-laying campaign on WeChat, a popular mobile networking app, has garnered 2,451,833 participants." Update: |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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