Mainland students who have been changed by Taiwan

Mainland students who have been changed by Taiwan Taipei Zao In January, Chao Ying (transliteration), a student from Northeast China, walked out of Jiufen Railway Station, a windy town in northern Taiwan...

Taipei Zao In January, Chao Ying (transliteration), a student from Northeast China, walked out of Jiufen Railway Station, a picturesque town in northern Taiwan that once had a gold mine. Chao Ying stood in the rain, confused by the scene before her.

A Kuomintang politician stood on an open pickup truck, driving back and forth on the road outside the train station, shouting thanks to passers-by through the loudspeaker. He just won a seat in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan yesterday.

"At first I didn't know who he was or what he was doing," said 25-year-old Chao Ying. She studied veterinary medicine at National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, central Taiwan. "I had to ask people on the street."

"I'm happy to see politicians thanking the people," she said. "The people of Taiwan should be very moved when they see something like this."

For mainland students in Taiwan, this is an eye-opening experience. Chao Ying and more than 1,000 other mainland students were allowed to come to Taiwan to study for degrees for the first time. They had just completed their first academic year.

The island of Taiwan is autonomous but claimed by Beijing. In recent years, Taiwan has gradually established more friendly relations with the mainland. After the opening of tourism and direct flights, Taiwan has completely opened its university doors to students from across the Taiwan Strait, unlike before, which only had limited academic exchange programs.

This new admission policy has been praised by Taiwan universities and officials as a great success. They say that integrating young people who may eventually assume important positions in the Chinese government into Taiwanese society will increase the mainland's favorable impression of democratic Taiwan.

"Many Taiwanese students went to the United States and became very pro-American when they came back. We want to trigger the same effect," said Ho Zhuofei, director of the Department of Higher Education of Taiwan's Ministry of Education. "Some students who come to Taiwan to study may become China's political leaders in the future."

Taiwan also regards this move as one of the plans to maintain the island's enrollment scale and education quality. Locally, falling birthrates have led to shrinking college applications.

What are the motivations for mainland Chinese students to study in Taiwan? Some students believe that Taiwan's education system imitates the United States, which will be beneficial to their future career development abroad. However, compared with foreign countries, Taiwan's tuition fees are more reasonable and the teaching language is Mandarin.

22-year-old Xu Jincheng (transliteration) is from Shanghai and studies engineering at Fengjia University. He said he was able to learn how to think quickly in Taiwan. The teaching methods at his mainland school were "quite narrow and theoretical." He did not reveal the name of the mainland school for fear of embarrassing his previous teacher.

Mainland students have been growing up with the government repeatedly emphasizing that Taiwan implemented autonomy after the end of the civil war in 1949, but it has always been China's inherent territory. However, these students are more likely to go home with the idea that "these two societies cannot be one," said Joseph Wang, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.

"Those students from mainland China are more likely to feel that Taiwan is a completely different place," Professor Wang said. He also teaches at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Some mainland students said in interviews that they felt they had a responsibility to go home after completing their studies and tell their peers and family members how democracy works.

"I feel like I came to Taiwan to understand this society," said Gavin Wu, a 19-year-old business student at Feng Chia University. "I think people expect us to go back and help society develop after we finish our studies."

Other students were thinking about how difficult it would be to introduce democratic practices to the mainland.

22-year-old Tai Zhao (transliteration) is studying for a master's degree in public administration at National Chung Hsing University. He said that due to the huge population, universal suffrage is not practical in mainland China.

He said that what impressed him most about the January election was that the campaigners walked the streets of Taichung holding high colorful slogans. "You can't do that on the mainland," he said. "It would take candidates too much time to print enough placards to cover all the streets in China."

However, after watching Taiwan's elections, some students revised their original understanding and discovered that Taiwanese democracy is not the chaotic process often portrayed by Chinese state media. “I thought Taiwan’s elections would be more violent than they actually were,” said 19-year-old Harry Zhang. He studied engineering at Fengjia University. "The election process was very peaceful."

Some students said that one of Taiwan's attractions is that the Internet is not censored by the mainland. "It's like I can unlock all the secrets of our country," said a graduate student at National Chung Hsing University. He asked that his name not be used to protect his career prospects.

Professor Wang of the University of Toronto said the view is widely held by Taiwanese education officials that accepting mainland students can "targetly showcase Taiwan to Chinese youth who are educated and expected to become high-level members of the Communist Party."

Dai Wanqin, vice president of international affairs at Tamkang University in Taipei, also agrees with this view. "Mainland students have found that Taiwan has a good living and learning environment." The school admitted 78 mainland students last year.

Bo Lai (transliteration), 22, a graduate student in marine biology at National Chung Hsing University, seems to have finished this lesson.

"In mainland China, we are not willing to be left behind," he said. "Mainland has less educational resources, a huge population and limited opportunities, so competition is very fierce."

In Taiwan, he said, "The pace of life is slower. People don't bump into each other when they walk. People have medical insurance and financial affluence. So they can look around and think about the interests of others."