Year-End Summary Report

Before I knew it, I’ve been studying in Hong Kong for nearly half a year. After a full day’s work today, I finished my Computer Networks report. This semester is pretty much over. I’ve been wanting to write something comparing my experiences in mainland universities with what I’ve seen in Hong Kong. But I felt I hadn’t been here long enough — what I wrote might not be objective enough. Now it’s year-end, and I received the annual assessment notice from home — everyone has to write a summary report. We all know it’s nonsense, but we have to do it. So I’ll write something too. Consider this my year-end summary report. Of course, I won’t submit this to the Party. Like many companies that keep two sets of books, my year-end summary also comes in two versions. The one for the Party contains what they want to hear — “Under the guidance of xxx thought, under the leadership of xx, our teaching career has achieved one breakthrough after another…” This one is private — just for myself and my blog readers.

In research, everything needs a Motivation. This post also has one. My motivation is not to expose the problems in mainland, or Tongji’s education system, not to criticize the socialist education system with Chinese characteristics under the Party’s leadership. I just want to compare the differences without any emotional coloring — you decide which is better. As for my personal bias, of course I must expose and criticize the evil capitalist society, recall the warm family atmosphere of my motherland’s campus life, and demonstrate a Party member’s noble quality of being physically in the enemy camp while loyal at heart. Let’s begin. To keep my thoughts from wandering too much, I’ll roughly follow the organizational structure of Tongji’s website.

School Introduction:

Hong Kong Polytechnic University is only a second-tier school in Hong Kong, but its engineering is strong, and its global ranking still leaves Tongji far behind. A phrase you often see on campus is “Where application meets innovation.” Overall, they really value “learning for application” — whether in research or teaching, everything revolves around application. That’s one reason I chose PolyU. I think this is very similar to Tongji, or the Software School. It’s an educational philosophy I agree with. The school has a very short history — nothing compared to Tongji’s century. The campus is tiny — all the buildings combined probably equal the size of Jiading campus’s sports field. Infrastructure is poor. To save space, they built a platform called Podium in the air, connecting the third floors of all buildings. People walk on the platform while cars drive below. Imagine Jiading campus’s toilet-shaped building — oops, I mean the 45-degree-angle-stargazing building — infinitely extended to cover all buildings, and that’s Podium. So when I first arrived, I got lost easily — you enter the school on the third floor. Coming out of a building, you press P instead of G (Hong Kong buildings follow the British system — there’s a Ground floor below 1st floor), or you end up who knows where. One night after studying late, I went back at 2 AM, groggily pressed G, and instantly woke up — I thought I was seeing ghosts because cars were driving on the pedestrian platform. The school is so small that many details make you feel cramped — completely incomparable to Tongji’s Jiading campus’s generous 3,500 mu of land. The funniest thing is that the school ran out of space and rented several floors of a nearby office building, putting students and teachers in there. When I first arrived, I sat in that office building for two months. My neighbors were a cosmetics shop, a pharmacy, and an insurance company. Apparently, City University of Hong Kong has it worse — the entire school is half a building: first floor is a mall, second floor is a supermarket, third floor and above is the school. I haven’t been there myself, so I won’t elaborate.

Campus Scenery:

The campus is too cramped to write much about. One thing that shows capitalism’s profit-driven nature is that every building is named after a capitalist. There’s Stanley Ho Building (the casino king), Li Ka-shing Building (the big capitalist), and some I don’t even know — like the one I’m in, Mong Man Wai. Compared to this, Tsinghua’s “Jeanswest Building” is nothing. Not just buildings — every chair, patch of grass, tree, podium, even every tile on the wall bears the name of whoever donated money. And our beloved Premier Wen Jiabao’s calligraphy is placed in such an inconspicuous spot, next to the casino king’s name, that it’s so small even a soon-to-graduate senior didn’t know it existed. Back home, it would be gilded and carved, set to music as the school song, and sung by all students and faculty.

Around the school are several famous landmarks. One is the Hong Kong Coliseum — where concerts are held. I’d heard of it long before coming to Hong Kong. Once here, the reality didn’t match the reputation — absolutely outclassed by many mainland school gyms. Small and uninspired. I’m not into entertainment, so I’ve never been inside. Another is the Hung Hom Train Station — I pass by it every day going to and from school. Built in 1975, while mainland was still in revolution, founded by the Queen of England. But now it has clear military fortress features — the windows look like sniper positions. Since this is the terminus of the Beijing-Kowloon Railway, there are tons of mainlanders. So many, in fact, that it’s the only place in Hong Kong I’ve found where people walk on the right. At the station exit, Falun Gong often sets up propaganda, handing out the Epoch Times — so you step off the train and immediately know: ah, I’ve finally arrived in a democratic society. The third landmark is the crematorium — I think Hong Kong has only one, called the International Funeral Parlor, right next to the school. Many windows on campus have a direct view of the large characters “International Funeral Parlor.” Usually, these windows are assigned to foreign staff — since they can’t read Chinese, they don’t know what those black characters mean. This funeral parlor appears in many gangster films, like the scene in Infernal Affairs where Superintendent Wong’s funeral is held — a famous movie location.

Organizational Structure:

PolyU’s president is named Tang. I met him once before coming to PolyU and chatted briefly. Same as in China — the president isn’t the highest authority. There’s a “secretary” above. For all Hong Kong public schools, the “secretary” is the same person: the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Like mainland secretaries, PolyU’s secretary is a figurehead — reportedly only appears once a year at graduation to award doctoral degrees. I wonder which “hero” will award me my degree when I graduate.

Another thing is how flat the management structure is here. The school directly manages each Department. The Faculty is a virtual concept here — there’s a Dean, but it’s also a figurehead position. Apart from the Dean, there are probably no other Faculty-level positions. The Department Head is the big boss. Departments within the same Faculty don’t even share office space. The Faculty organization is quite amusing — I feel like they just randomly grouped Departments together. For example, our Faculty of Engineering includes a Department of Real Estate. And Mathematics is in the same Faculty as Fashion and Textiles.

My department, the Department of Computing, has about 50 faculty members — about the same size as Tongji’s Software School. The ratio of academic to administrative staff is about 4:1. At Tongji’s Software School, it’s about 1:1. You can understand why: there are class advisors and counselors for psychologically fragile students, academic affairs for course selection and withdrawal, international cooperation office, general affairs office, Party branch for ideological work, drivers, accountants, and lab managers. None of these exist in the Computing Department. There’s only one administrative office called General Office, staffed by about 10 people who handle everything. They don’t seem overworked — maybe because there’s less passing of the buck. I haven’t yet discovered the secret to their efficiency. Other administrative roles are filled by professors part-time — like the Academic Committee Chair, Teaching Deputy Dean, Research Deputy Dean, International Cooperation Deputy Dean — all concurrent positions. There are no dedicated Dean’s offices, Deputy Dean’s offices, Director’s offices, or Expert’s offices. Everyone gets a room of the same size, except the Head’s room is slightly bigger (to accommodate a secretary). This difference also reflects the cult of power back home.

Among the faculty, Assistant Professors make up about half — that’s Kaifu Lee’s position, non-tenure. The remaining Associate Professors number about 10, and there are only about 3 full Professors — a classic pyramid. In many mainland schools, full Professors are the most numerous, Associate Professors second, and Lecturers the least — an inverted pyramid. The department also has a handful of Lecturers — those who only teach and don’t do research.

Admissions and Employment:

I don’t know much about Hong Kong undergrads — they’re similar to mainland. So I won’t say much. The biggest difference is at the postgraduate level. Hong Kong strictly separates research and non-research students. Research students do research, have supervisors, and write theses; non-research students just take courses. For example, master’s degrees are divided into MSc and MPhil — the former requires only coursework, the latter requires a thesis and publications. Since there’s no such distinction in China, MSc is very popular among mainland students. Many come to get an MSc — classes only in the evenings, play during the day, finish in one year with a master’s degree. Back in China, MSc and MPhil are both recognized as master’s degrees — most people don’t know the difference. But the difficulty of obtaining an MPhil vs. an MSc is worlds apart. Chinese people like to squeeze the soft persimmon. So many come to spend money on an MSc — one year and done. Back home it takes two and a half years or even three — that’s a bargain. Doctoral students are, of course, research students. When they graduate, they receive a diploma with no anti-counterfeiting marks, written in traditional Chinese, congratulating them on obtaining a “Doctor of Philosophy” degree. I’m afraid that when I go back, people will think I studied liberal arts, specializing in “Marxist Philosophy,” hence a PhD. Do mainland students know there are other philosophies besides Marxist philosophy?

Furthermore, the line between PhD and MPhil isn’t very clear. Undergraduates can also apply for a PhD directly. MPhil students can transfer to PhD after one year. The scholarship amount is the same. Several people around me came straight from mainland undergraduate degrees to PhD programs. This would be unimaginable in China.

All students are admitted by application — no exams required. As long as someone is willing to give you a 500,000 HKD scholarship, you can enroll. The mainland should adopt application-based admission too — but they need to do it right. Let supervisors pay 500,000 from their own pockets before recruiting. Right now, PhD students in China are publicly funded. Since taxpayers foot the bill, supervisors don’t care — any slot is the same to them. It inevitably turns into a competition of who has the most powerful daddy. There’s no time limit for PhD enrollment — you can register anytime and graduate in three years.

Talent Development:

Let’s talk about classes. Here, undergrads have their own schedule; master’s and PhD students share one. That shows the blurry line between MPhil and PhD. All courses are taught in English. I chose three courses this semester: Computer Networks, Human-Computer Interaction, and Research Ethics. Classes are with part-time students, so they’re in the evenings — I study during the day and attend classes at night. The pressure is intense — if you don’t get a B or above, you lose your degree. My supervisor said, “If you don’t get an A, you’re not my student.”

I chose networks thinking it’d be an easy target — I took networks in both undergrad and grad school. Big mistake. It was much harder than expected. The professor has years of research experience in networking — this is different from the mainland self-promotion where “experience with Cisco routers” counts as research experience. He’s been doing networking research, reading and writing papers — he’s witnessed every step of networking’s evolution. So he doesn’t waste time lecturing us on “what TCP is.” Instead, he decomposes everything into small, understandable problems that designers or architects faced. He asks us: if you were the designer or the coder, how would you solve this? For example: you receive a packet and want to acknowledge receipt — what’s the most scientific ACK method? What are the pros and cons of your approach? The current solution is just one option — you should know it, but also know the alternatives, what problem each solves, and how to work around or avoid issues. This is impressive. In all my years studying and teaching in China, it’s mostly been rote灌输. This course showed me what “heuristic teaching” really means — compared to this, so-called heuristic teaching in China is laughably weak. It made me want to go back and teach networking myself. But I suspect it wouldn’t be popular in China — too few people participate in discussions. It might end up benefiting only 3-5 students while everyone else coasts.

The exam for this course is terrifying too: open book, 5 hours, 7 PM to midnight. You can eat, drink, or listen to music. But whether it’s open book or not makes no difference — all the questions require your own analysis and thinking. No answers in the textbook. For example: here’s a packet capture — why did it send this packet? Or why send two consecutive packets instead of three? Or: you’re a hacker who has taken over a router — how far can your damage spread? Or questions about tunneling and VPN circumvention. I finished the 5-hour exam barely in time. And the exam is only 30% of the grade — there’s also a project with a report. Every report here goes through an anti-plagiarism system. If you have too many consecutive identical words, you’re done. It’s not just a redo or a failed course — you’re expelled and sent back to mainland. In contrast, the courses in China where you just submit a project and write a paper to pass are essentially giving out free passes. Even if plagiarism is caught, it doesn’t matter. Of course, this is related to the overall social credit system. You can’t hold students to a high standard while ignoring dishonesty in society at large. The four project topics the professor gave were all very up-to-date — nothing like the mainland’s software engineering project that could use the same small drawing board for ten years. Options were: Google’s SPDY project (already supported in Chrome, Firefox just announced support), one-way ping, blocking and unblocking BitTorrent, and a software switch for cloud computing environments (XEN Server 6.0 just integrated it by default). I chose the fourth one. I had to set up a XEN Server cloud platform, build an open-source project called Open vSwitch into the Linux kernel, design experiments to test its soft switching, 802.1q VLAN, QoS, and evaluate its performance. None of this was taught in class — you have to learn it yourself. If such an assignment were given in China, even to full-time students, someone would be complaining to the leadership or wanting to beat up the professor.

The other course is HCI — Human-Computer Interaction. I thought it would be a liberal arts course about analyzing what looks good or bad. Turns out it’s also very demanding — you need solid math skills for quantitative and qualitative analysis, and formal verification. If this were offered in China, students would flee, just like the Digital Signal Processing course at the Software School — as soon as math appears, the course can’t survive. The highlight of this course is the project. We had to develop a pervasive application using their in-house sensor network called eToy. This project showed me the level of Hong Kong’s part-time students — incomparable to the “diploma-selling” part-time postgraduate students in China. Some students produced very professional work, both technically and creatively. One group hacked iPhone 4S’s Siri and made it understand their commands — for finding a dog and even controlling the dog. They put sensors and a speaker on the dog. iPhone programming was all self-taught. Another group made a hat to help blind people navigate — it detects obstacles and tells the blind person how to walk through earphones. The project demo was very entertaining. The exam for this course was also terrifying — 30 pages long, like reading comprehension; with nerves, you couldn’t even understand the questions. And the questions were very innovative, including quantitative analysis of iPad design.

Finally, Research Ethics — similar to mainland political classes, it’s a required course for all research students, about ethics in research. But the biggest difference from mainland political classes is that results come through discussion. They don’t tell us “Capitalism will inevitably perish for reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, memorize them.” Instead, they give us phenomena to discuss. In class, we discussed Kaifu Lee, China’s shanzhai culture, backroom dealings, and issues of plagiarism and infringement. I feel these might be “dragon-slaying skills” — useful for these three years but inapplicable back home. Different rules apply. If you don’t give gifts, you’ll be a soldier forever; if you don’t wine and dine, you can’t get certain resources. I discussed with the teacher (a Scottish woman) about what to do when you know something is unethical but you have to do it anyway, like the situations I listed above. She said that’s when your moral fiber shows — like finding a wallet and having to decide whether to return it to the police when nobody’s watching. I thought: back in China, moral fiber doesn’t mean shit. That’s like saying nothing. I don’t think I’m a bad person — I just can’t stay unstained in the mud. And I wish this mud would disappear.

More on research later — I don’t have time now. Let’s save it for another post. Speaking of research, that’s a whole sob story in itself — enough for an entire article.