• 91 • Then, in 2010, two years after hosting the Olympics, China was put in charge of another world event, viz. the World Expo. With relevance to the World Expo, the theme of the program was “China and World Expo: Study on Socio-economic Development of the East China Region”. This gave all the participants an opportunity to reflect on the 2002 theme, and perhaps to connect the dots backward: Has China opened itself to the world? Has the world been introduced to China? Based on these, students had a series of seminars and discussions on the historical background, economics, human resources, infrastructure and environmental effects of the World Expo. Besides classroom lectures and discussions, a variety of visits and tours helped supplement students’ understanding of the local historical culture, business structure and major theme of the program. Thus, in addition to the various university visits, our group was privileged enough to be able to see museums, banks, manufacturing factories, science parks, monetary institutes, and even judiciary organization, many of which are specially arranged for us because, as you can imagine, they are usually not opened to public. Moreover, with the Expo theme, the 2010 Program included a bonus side trip to the Shanghai Expo. Compared with the many previous CC-ZJU Student Visitor Programs, the 2010 one was definitely more than educational. Needless to say, this Program is a very good experience for the students of both hosting institutes. Not only do they have to understand the hard core academic materials in the classroom, but they also need to be aware of the way how their peers behave and present themselves. One thing I observed about the students is that in 2002, the two groups of students showed very different preferences in their choices in games, songs, hobbies and even lifestyles. To me, it was very easy to distinguish who belonged to which group judging Two of the activities in the 2010 Program: (left) visiting a factory in Hong Kong; (right) visiting the Shanghai Expo together with another group of Student Visitor Program
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