The Changing Face of Youth Services in China: October 1998
By Leonard Kniffel
On Tiananmen Square, American school and youth services delegates pose for a group shot beneath the only portrait of Chairman Mao that is allowed to be displayed in China.
Classes have ended for the day. Two uniformed students with short-handled brooms are happily sweeping around their desks. Others are wiping the blackboard with a damp cloth. A teenaged boy cheerfully carries in a pail of water and starts mopping the classroom floor.
No, it's not a scene from some hokey 1950s television show; it's October 21, 1998, at Beijing No. 5 High School in the eastern district of China's capital, where a People to People delegation of American librarians is spending the afternoon.
The librarians enter the classroom and within minutes the students have eagerly engaged them in conversations. Only two of the 38 American delegates speak any Chinese; all of the students speak some English, and shyly at first, tentatively, and then excitedly they relish the opportunity to practice, many for the first time, with native speakers.
The students are orderly and respectful in the library, says Ann Yue-Ming, the school librarian. “Students like this place,” she says of the unadorned room that seats “sometimes up to 350 people. It is often difficult to get a seat.” What about discipline problems? “Basically none,” she says, and there are no missing books at the end of the school year.
Presenting a gift of books, delegation leader Ann Carlson Weeks apologizes for the fact that they are all in English, but school principal Wu Chang Shun observes slyly that it's okay, since “more of my staff read English than your staff read Chinese.” Although he is speaking through a translator, his point of pride is well taken. English is becoming the second language of China, and in airports and city streets much signage is bilingual.
Not only is English widely understood in China, so is the American dollar. There is little on the streets that it cannot buy. “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar,” vendors shout up at the bus windows, offering colorful strings of appliqué butterflies each time the delegation makes its way through tourist stops in Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, and Guangzhou on a two-week jaunt that includes nine professional meetings.
Communism is just a word
The effects of China's 20-year march toward capitalism are evident in a building boom that is sweeping the country. “Communism is just a word now,” says a guide. “China is 50% capitalism and 50% communism,” he boasts, asserting that the government-enforced “4-2-1” birth-control policy has changed the nation. With four grandparents and two parents doting on one child, “he can get anything he wants.” Children are in charge, he says.
Nestled in a ramshackle neighborhood, the ultra-modern, five-story West District Juvenile and Children's Library opened June 1. Director Ji Xiao Ping proudly shows off the library's play area (which resembles those at some McDonald's restaurants) and language lab (with fees charged by time used) and its 280-seat cinema, where Hollywood movies are shown, with proceeds used to support the library. The director says the library will offer computers to users soon and already does for staff use.
There are three such libraries, devoted to young people under 18, in the Chinese capital.
“The biggest difference I saw in the youth library was that it had a whole floor for play and exercise. Some libraries in the U.S. are trying this, but not many,” said delegate Jane New, youth services librarian at the new Weingart City Heights branch of San Diego Public Library, “and I have yet to see a commercial movie theater in a library in the United States.”
Of the youth library's 42 “librarians,” only 10 have library degrees. The average age of staff members is 20. All the staff look remarkably young, until one realizes that retirement age in China is 60 for most people.
At Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, Huang Xiaobin, associate professor in the department of library and information science, explains that the biggest difference between library education in the United States and China is that it is an undergraduate degree in China. Youth services librarianship is a two-year program, he notes.
At the youth library and other stops, the delegation asks questions about programming for children. “Do librarians read to the children?” asked one. “Normally it's the parents who read to their children,” both Ji and Huang explain.
“The youth library was more like a nursery school,” observed Diane Walker, region librarian with the Chicago Public Schools. “I saw a lot of toys, but I didn't see them working with children the way we do.”
On the other hand, observed Doris Hicks, a retired school librarian from Maryland, “if you were to say 50 students to a classroom, which is the average number we were told, to almost any teacher in the United States, that teacher would probably pass out. Here the students we observed were eager to learn, they were attentive, and the teachers seemed very comfortable with that number.”
At the university, the delegation fields questions from some 25 library school students. They are curious about exactly what it is that American children's librarians do and baffled by the idea that anyone with a postgraduate degree would choose what Zhongshan program officer David Kuong calls “babysitting” as a profession. “Most work in big city or national libraries,” says Ji Xiao Ping at the juvenile library. “To work here would be a waste of knowledge.”
In the Department of Library and Information Science library, Director Luo Chun Rong shows off the computer room. “Why are the ports taped over?” asks one of the delegates. “To protect from viruses,” she says. Students are charged for printing and downloading, all of which is monitored by a librarian in a control booth.
At the Yucai Kindergarten in Guangzhou, many of the American delegates are equally baffled by the idea of a boarding school for children aged 3 to 6½. A prestigious school for the crème de la crème of government employees, the kindergarten has 800 students, 600 of whom board there and go home only on Wednesdays and Fridays. A tour of the facility reveals a beautiful environment with happy, socially well-adjusted children playing on the grounds, their tidy little beds waiting for them in dormitory rows.
Despite the kindergarten's one-to-seven adult-child ratio, it has no library per se, but in “reading rooms” teachers are working with kids and a variety of reading-readiness and early-reading materials.
At Shaanxi Normal University in Xi'an, a class of future teachers of English greets the American delegation with applause. Debra Hallisey, a computer-training specialist from New Jersey, and Peg Walther, dean of library services at City University Library in Renton, Washington, lead off the discussion with brief introductions to the uses of technology in libraries.
“How can I put my magazine on the Internet?” asks one student immediately.
Hallisey gives him her card and suggests they talk later. “At 11 or 11:30 that night he called the hotel,” she said, “and wanted to get together right then, so I could show him how to design a Web page.” She agreed to send him a book.
“What I observed,” Hallisey said, “is that there is not a lot of technology available in libraries. The instructors are even farther behind than the students are. Every place that I've been, the service provider that the Chinese institution will dial out on is something called Chinanet, and it serves as a wall between the people who are trying to access the Internet.
Ann Weeks, who is director of libraries for Chicago Public Schools, observes, “They're just beginning to get into technology, which is similar to many schools in the States. It does not appear, however, that there is the kind of collaboration between the librarians and the teachers that we try to encourage in American schools. These libraries seem to be much more on the basis of individuals coming in and doing research and being very teacher-directed or self-directed, rather than a cooperative effort.”
“A young man that I was talking to,” said Jean Mendel, director of the Jericho Town Library in Jericho Center, Vermont, “was saying that he and some of his friends got together to buy 30 minutes of Internet time and it cost them five yuan, which to them is a lot of money. So they prepare everything they are going to do with the Internet before they do it. They are amazed that our students have free access and that our public libraries have computers with access that the whole town can come and use at no cost.”
The attitude among many educators and library directors, however, is a sort of Catch 22: There is no need to connect to the Internet because there is “too much useless material like the Starr Report” and “not enough in Chinese”; but there is not enough “useful” material in Chinese because China won't connect.
One Shaanxi student said that although the school's library is “one of the largest in the northwest of China, with 294,000 books, the books are too old and there are no computers in the library.” To get access, students go through the “computer club,” which is “very expensive.” The most popular taboo topic: the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.
Observed Chris Mayer, librarian at Monterey County Free Library in California, “The political consciousness is very different here. I don't consider myself a politically minded person, but here I really see the influence of government in every part of life.”
20 years of reform
Any assessment of library service in China today must be tempered by the knowledge that the country is a mere 20 years away from the Cultural Revolution, during which schools and libraries at all levels were closed, books were either burned or locked up, and intellectuals in every profession were condemned, and a mere 50 years away from the Communist triumph of 1949, when the government decided the sole mission of libraries was to serve politics (according to Libraries and Librarianship in China by Sharon Chien Lin, Greenwood Press, 1998).
It wasn't until 1978 that the government recognized the need to develop libraries and information services in order to accelerate the modernization of Chinese society. These modernizations have followed Western models. The nation's first library school was, in fact, founded by an American, Mary Elizabeth Wood, in 1920.
“School libraries were once judged by the number of books,” says Wang Dingua of the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Beijing, “but now, the students' ability to find answers in a reasonable amount of time—this is the new way to judge the qualifications of a library.”
Asked what was the major difference between Chinese and American libraries, MOE Senior Program Officer Zhang Xiaodong, who studied for four years at the University of Michigan, says Chinese libraries “suffer from a lack of creativity.” China is “a nation of test-takers,” he adds, citing a game youngsters play called “Wooden Boy,” the sole objective of which is “to never move.”
“I was here five years ago,” commented Julie Bourquin Irwin, library information specialist at Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado, “and there's been a dramatic change. There were no computers, except at the national level. They never talked about openness in contacting the Internet or any outside influences at all. And conditions are so much nicer and cleaner than they were that I'm just totally amazed and impressed with where they are going.”
At the Teenager Publishing Company, editor Chin Hai Ye talks of the company's difficulties in adjusting to the contradictions of the new “planned economy” that has eliminated government subsidies. Other editors commiserate with the delegation over the low quality of some reading materials (“like ghost stories”) and ask for tips on how to foster a love of reading in children.
“I was really surprised when I saw the books in the school libraries,” said Mary Christmas, youth services librarian at Mercer County Library in New Jersery. “They are all paperbacks, and there was nothing in the books that I saw that was inviting, nothing enticing, nothing seductive, nothing that screams `Read Me!'”
Bonnie Tollefson, librarian at Sandia Base Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said, “I was just astounded that they had to pay a deposit equal to the value of the book before they could take it home.”
Fast forward to Hong Kong
“Welcome to civilization,” says the guide facetiously as the delegation arrives in Hong Kong. He knows that to Westerners the contrast between austere Communist mainland China and the familiar bustling capitalism of the former British colony will strike them immediately.
The first school visit is to LaSalle College, a Catholic preparatory high school for boys run in “the British tradition,” according to Brother Patrick. Funded by the government, the school typifies the cultural hybrid that is Hong Kong. The student body of 1,000 is “99.9% Chinese,” he says, and the school “is permitted to teach in English.”
Despite the prosperity that surrounds the school, LaSalle Librarian Edith Loong paints a picture that is all too familiar. She has no budget, she says, apart from her salary. Rather, she must work with department heads and convince them to part with portions of their budgets in order for her to buy materials. “The library is the last place to get any funding.”
Loong also tells the group that school librarians generally “have something wrong with them. As a job, it's not attractive; you don't get people opting for the job as a first choice.” It is her mission to change that image. Although their library time is also highly regimented, students at LaSalle have “Internet access available through Netscape Navigator, any time, no charge, no Chinanet,” and “they take over this place and run it the way they want,” says Loong.
Hong Kong librarians were uniformly optimistic about reverting back to China. Loong believes “they will keep this place free. They need business to survive.” She also notes that “news is very sensitive in China.” No newspapers or magazines from Hong Kong are allowed; “we must surrender them when we cross the border.”
A meeting with seven members of the Hong Kong Teacher-Librarian Association reinforces the impression that although Hong Kong is economically decades ahead of the rest of China, its appreciation of school librarians remains primitive.
Urban Council Public Libraries Chief Librarian Lee Yukman painted a somewhat rosier picture of public libraries in Hong Kong. Construction on a new central library is about to begin, and the branches delegates visited were humming and strikingly similar to city branches at home. “We are not the same as China,” says Lee. “One country, two systems.”
“As far as school librarians are concerned,” observed Martha Walke, head librarian at the Pike School in Andover, Massachusetts, “the fact still is that nobody wants to be one. College students want to continue their education in the big cities or in the United States. They want to go into higher education instead of going home, so to speak, to teach or be a librarian.”
TLA President Tan Eng Beng talks of the association's goals enthusiastically, but acknowledges that for students in school libraries “everything is working for exams according to the syllabus.” She and other teacher-librarians long for the budgets, automation, parent involvement, and variety that their American colleagues reveal about their work.
“In China, they are struggling to get to the place that we were probably 15, maybe 20 years ago, in terms of connecting to the curriculum, services, and recognition,” said Sherrill Pryor, associate professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. “The enthusiasm of the people themselves is part of what's making their library programs successful. The biggest surprise for me is how much they are doing with so few resources. We think we endure hardships, but it's not even a contest.”
American delegate Kan Wou, a branch librarian at New York Public Library, was born in Hong Kong and left in 1966 at age 20. She has visited China frequently and noted on this trip that “a lot of change has occurred over the past five or six years. When I visited before, people had very little access to circulating material. That's changing. In terms of technology, they have made a lot of progress.”
Whatever the future holds, it seems that China is determined to admit what it sees as good from the West and forbid what is bad. But that will not be easy. Even the great reformer Deng Xiaoping is said to have warned as he opened China to the West in 1978, “When you open the door, you let in the mosquitoes as well as the fresh air.”
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