Beijing Student Life

As my time as an exchange student in Beijing comes to an end, I continue to spend most of my time on campus in Wu Dao Kou. Nan nan has just returned from Shanghai. We are both moving out on Friday 13th, what a lucky day. I’m moving into the dorms. Because I still have a valid student visa and student card, Tsinghua has no problem taking my money even though my MBA classes are done.

In my Chinese classes are a lot of Koreans, several young boys, an elderly couple from Wisconsin. It is too easy, I’m way back at the beginning, I might take a harder class or I might take a second class. I’m also doing language exchanges.

While on campus today I met the very very pretty assistant of the TA. I’m not saying she is unattractive. However it is possible to meet just as or if not more attractive Chinese women randomly say working behind the counter at the desk of foreign students dorm.

On my way to the foreign students dorm I saw a police SWAT motor home. This was the first time I’ve seen one since National Day at Tienanmen Square. I took a picture, I have no idea what it was doing on campus over by the foreign student dorms.

I’m off to Nanjing this weekend. I’m traveling by myself via night train. Something Chi-Wei would advise against doing. However it is a well known fact I have no one to travel with. I’m not even sure why I’m going to Nanjing. I don’t know why I do anything anymore. I am reading “1421” right now and that probably had a lot do to with it. Apparently Cynthia Yu, one of my female Chinese classmates, is from Nanjing. Danna insisted I email her. It was the first time I’d ever emailed Cynthia. She is running out of time to email me back. Apparently not emailing people back is popular among Sauder MBA students.

Danna had a big meeting with a client of her new consulting company. I hope this isn’t the same company at which I’ve been working for free. I mean I still haven’t been introduced to the professor whose paper I did a lot of rewriting of, and that was part of the deal. Of course lots of people, Chinese people, are all too happy to accept favours but not all of them grasp the concept of reciprocity. Something I’ve written about many times before. There is further irony in that the Chinese have at least one special saying for this: 不识抬举.

I showed Danna some more SMS messages I got in Chinese. This time I was sure who they were from. They were sent to be by a reporter for the Economic Information Daily whom I briefly met at the MMEC conference. As part of my standing operating procedure I always follow up the exchange of business cards with an email. I made extra sure to email her, though it took me a week to get around to it, due to how busy I was that week.

Danna of course asked if she was “pretty”. I replied “She was pretty enough for me”. I also mentioned that she was perhaps even busty, something I also promise not to complain about. I hope she secretly speaks a lot more English, we met when I noticed her listening in on a conversation I was having with others at the table we were sitting at for lunch.

My mom also asked about the free dinners I won. They have not expired, but my time in China may well be. So maybe I should just go for broke and ask the pretty busty Chinese reporter to dinner at the St. Regis hotel. That really isn’t my style. My style is to over-analysis, do nothing or not enough, fail miserably, and then mope. My style isn’t very effective.

Beijing Student Life 2026

I’m not sure what it is like being an exchange student in Beijing in 2026. I was an exchange student in Beijing over twenty years ago. Someone recently visited this blog post and obviously did not find the information they were looking for. Life in China has changed a lot over the years. Finding someone who lived there as a foreigner before the Chinese Communist Party took over or before the war is harder and harder.

Being an expat in China in the past

One person I know of who lived in China in the past and wrote about it was J. G. Ballard. They made a movie of his experience back in the 1980s so even the behind the scenes filming of that movie and the DVD extras are illuminating. Another Western author who wrote about life in China extensively was Pearl S. Buck, so I would also recommend her book about the China in the past. I read “The Good Earth” back in high school, a retiring teacher was basically asking students to read some of her favourite books and write one last book report on them. I was the only person who volunteered to read “The Good Earth”.

For a while there were no students on exchange in Beijing, but there were students on exchange in the 1980s, though there may have been a notable decline after 1989. There is at least one reporter I may yet still follow on Twitter who was an exchange student even more back in the day than me. By the time I made it to China it was no longer the 80s or even the 90s, it was 2005. So the Internet was around, I had a laptop unlike while I lived in Japan. What I didn’t have was an iPhone and what didn’t exist was WeChat.

Changes to China over time

There is a big difference in China from the time written about by Pearl S. Buck up to WW2 and then after the various revolutions. China was closed to foreigners for a while, but relations were normalized and exchange students returned. Again 1989, despite however much censorship some may want to retroactively apply totally happened, eye witnesses and video exists. In the 1990s there were exchange students but no blogs. I did use public Internet cafes extensively in Beijing, however if you’re going to write thousands of words and upload hundreds of pictures you’re going to need a personal electronic device and you’re going to have to get around the Great Firewall of China.

I actually lived in Shanghai longer than I did in Beijing however that was over a decade later so I know what a big difference having a smartphone with a map and a dictionary makes. When I lived in Bejing or Japan I had to use paper maps, ask directions in a foreign language and use a physical dictionary to look up Chinese characters. I actually went back to Japan for the first time in over twenty years, my language skills were rusty and sometimes I used Chinese by mistake. People rely so much on their smart phones when traveling now, so having travelled and lived in China before this major development and witnessing the rise of apps is one thing my blog documents, however imperfectly.

Sorry if ramblings from a lonely soul twenty plus years ago do not match your expectations random Internet surfer. I do believe COVID-19 has cut down on the number of foreigners living in China, though I personally know many people who toughed it out. I also believe the rise of President Trump curtailed a lot of foreign exchanges, Canada has many, many people who came from China but I believe there are less exchange students at Canadian universities now. So perhaps the golden age of studying abroad is over, the golden age of blogging is definitely over.

Studying Abroad

Students from China first started studying abroad officially again in 1978. You can see the number of exchange students rose from 860 to over 500,000 per year in this paper. The number of students going the other way is probably a lot less, so finding a foreigner who studied in the China in the 70s is likely rare, 80s less rare but still rare, finding someone who studied in China after 1989 should also reveal a noticeable decline, so my time in 2006 is not uncommon, but likely more extensively documented than people who studied earlier and I documented my time in China contemporaneously and often with way too little filtering or editing, something I’ve corrected to a degree over time.

In 2026, China Daily is reporting that there were “380,000 international students from 191 countries and regions studying in China during the 2024–2025 academic year”. The number of blogs has likely declined, I know there was a crackdown at some point and even before I went to China there were limitations on what you could write about. Now there is considerably more videos and images on the ‘Gram, YouTube, and TikTok. However, I’m not confident that people who rush towards Instafame give it a lot thought, let alone revisit their thinking twenty plus years later.

I have more important things to do than update old blog posts but I try to maintain some level of Quality and through the miracles of the Internet this post got read recently, so I gave it a refresh to see if I could make it more useful. I did not make it more economical. Shout out to the Peking Duck, who I don’t think I ever met in the real world and may or may not have been the journalist I was thinking about a few paragraphs above, maintaining a blog for twenty plus years is hard.

I’m gradually updating old posts and including more pictures, that’s me on the left on exchange at Tsinghua University in Beijing. I dug up another one to serve as the featured image of this blog post. I’m still Facebook friends with most of the people pictured, though I haven’t talked to any of them in a while. My time as an exchange student was not a happy time, it is amazing that I and this blog survived. I digitized my official exchange report so that might be of interest to anyone who stumbled upon this blog twenty or more years later wanting to know more about being an exchange student in Beijing.

This entry was originaly posted on January 5th, 2006, it was last edited on June 28th, 2026 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Beijing, Expat, Tsinghua.