Busy university time

Entrance Gate of Capitol Normal University Beijing

Michi and I travelled to Beijing, she did research while I met the others and did the “out-of-Shanghai”-activities of our exchange program Media and Communication Management. After that we had a lot of excursions, interesting guest lectures and reports from guys already working in our field of study…

(China Daily, Oriental Sports Daily, Dragon Boat Festival, Communication and Global justice, Right to Information Movement and Social Change)

Labs Working Place at CNU

Michi / Diplomarbeit

I had a guest lecture at the BFSU – Beijing Foreign Studies University and a research visit at the CNU – Capitol Normal University Beijing at the College of Information Engineering and College of Education. Furthermore, we made excursions to the Xinhua News Agency, the Capitol Museum and 749 Art Zone.

After returning from Beijing we organized the Austrian representing booth at the Mini Expo which was a lot of organizatoric work, then directly had to catch up with the lectures from the 3-day May-holiday. Furthermore, we listened to a lot of interesting Guest lectures and excursions.

On 27th of May several representatives from one of Chinas most important newspapers, China Daily, came to our class. Patrick Whiteley, an American which is Deputy editor of the Features Departement is one of these persons who are motivated intrinsically by what they are doing and can transfer that enthusiasm to others. I really like that kind of presentation style, how motivation and own confiction can persuade and convince others. He showed us what interesting jobs they are doing and offered freelance-jobs for writing articles to the feature-section of the paper.

On 28th of May we visited Oriental Sports Daily in Shanghai, the only sports newspaper published daily within whole China. First we got around inside the editors, conference and headquarters rooms, then we had a round table discussion with fife of the head employees. It was a really open discussion with the older boss e.g. he told us that after his visit at the Euro2008 in Austria he got “inspired” to change the previous really big format of the newspaper to a small, about A4-format… 🙂 Or about the tradition, that an old guy has to be boss of a newspaper – even if he is old, he doubts that and lets his (younger) right-hand-employee do most of the coordination work…

Actually this day was a public holiday – Dragon Boat Festival. This is the day to remember for the patriotic poet Chu Yuan who died at this day. There are two different stories about it, the first one is that he loved the Kings wife and decided to do suicide with jumping into a river. The second, more spectacular one, is that the King caught them, wrapped him into linen and threw him into the water. That’s why on this day everybody eats tzungtzu and rice dumpling – fish/meat wrapped in rice and wrapped with leafs, bound with strings. read more

Communication, global justice and the moral economy by Prof. Andrew Calabrese from the School of Journalism and communication, University of Colorado at the 4th of June. He was talking about the globalization and the fact that previous national dominated justice needs to get globalized to reach worldwide development and avoid to increase the divide between rich and poor (countries) and to strengthen “3rd world countries” instead of exploit them more and more.

The Right to Information Movement and Social Change: Experiences from Australia and India by Prof. Pradip Thomas, dean of School of Journalism, The University of Queensland, Australia. Prof Pradip has Indian origins and lives in Australia. In his very interesting presentation he compared the Top-Down Information Movement Policies of Austrialia with the Bottom-Up-Revolutions made in India.