One of China's leading technology colleges has teamed up with DIT - and become the envy of other universities, writes Fintan O'Toole
'Ireland," says Prof Xu Xiaofei in his eloquently fluent English, "is a kind of hero story for us. Thirty years ago it was a small agricultural country. Since 1999, it's the largest exporter of software in the world. But it's also a bit of a mystery story. We wondered how this transformation was possible, how, as my Irish friends put it, Ireland developed from potatoes to chips. In the late 1990s, the Chinese government started thinking seriously about the development of high-tech industry and began to pay attention to two countries in particular: India and Ireland. That's when we began to look actively for a partner in Ireland." The "we" in this case is Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), one of China's top 10 third-level institutions.
It is based in Harbin, a formerly Russian city that is now the capital of the province of Heilongjiang in the vast northeastern region that used to be known as Manchuria, though it also has campuses in Weihei on the Pacific coast and in Shenzhen and Zhuhai in the far south. Harbin, which is home to almost 10 million people, has been a Chinese city for only a little longer than it has been ruled by Russia and Japan. In the 19th century it was little more than a cluster of obscure villages.
Then, when Tsarist Russia extracted from a weak imperial China the right to construct a train line through Manchuria to link up with the trans-Siberian railroad, Harbin became a key railhead and a flourishing cosmopolitan city, with at least 20,000 Russians and a large and vibrant Jewish community. Even today, its main shopping street is largely made up of 1920s and 1930s art deco and neo-Renaissance buildings, and Russian Orthodox churches, among them a fine cathedral, have survived all the upheavals that followed.
There is a much darker side, though, to Harbin's history as an international city in China.
Along with the rest of Manchuria, the city was seized by the Japanese in 1932. They established one of the 20th century's most grotesque scientific research centres, the notorious Unit 731 germ warfare laboratory, just outside Harbin, and, as a parting gift when the Russian invasion of Manchuria in 1945 forced them out, released rats infected with bubonic plague that killed 300,000 people. Harbin was then handed over to the Communist Party by the Soviets, becoming in the process the first big city to be run by the party and a pivotal base for Mao's victory in the civil war. Along with the rest of Manchuria, Harbin gave the new People's Republic its most advanced industrial base. An institution like the Harbin Institute of Technology, which had been founded by the Russians, could have been a key foothold on international modernity for the new state.
HIT has had a computer science school since 1956 and its researchers developed their own model of an early analogue computer. But Chinese history was not then running in the direction of a cosmopolitan scientific culture. Manchuria was valued for its classic heavy industries. As a result, it suffered very heavily from the modernisation of the Chinese economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Its old, technologically outmoded state industries were poorly prepared for life in a market system, and many of them closed. A decade ago, 70 per cent of Harbin's state-owned factories were reckoned to be effectively bankrupt. While newly industrialised areas of China were able to leap ahead, much of Manchuria, like the old industrial heartlands of Europe and the US, became a rust belt.
THIS IS THE context in which Harbin is seeking to recover the positive, cosmopolitan side of its complex history. HIT is a national pilot school for software, putting it at the forefront of China's ambitions to make its own leap from rice to chips, from a peasant society to the leading edge of information technology. And, says Xu Xiaofei, who is dean of both its computer science and its software schools, its most important international collaborator is an institution that Irish people might not regard as the most glamorous star in the higher education firmament, Dublin Institute of Technology.
With 3,000 teachers and 40,000 students, HIT is a much bigger deal than DIT. And any patronising assumptions that Chinese institutions are merely learning the ropes of computer technology are, at least in this case, utterly misplaced. Harbin's research capacity is vastly greater than that of any Irish university and its products have been consistently utilised both by major commercial companies and by the Chinese space programme. With 11 research centres, each employing between 40 and 120 scientists, HIT is a much bigger player in the game of technological innovation than any of its Irish, and indeed most of its European, counterparts. Why should it see an institution like DIT, which doesn't even have the university status so beloved of academic snobs, as a key collaborator?
When Xu Xiaofei first visited Ireland in 1995, he went to see universities in Dublin and Galway and happily admits that he had never heard of DIT. He also knows from his contacts with Irish universities that they tend to look down on institutes of technology and find it difficult to understand why a prestigious institution like HIT would be more interested in collaborating with the likes of DIT than with a "proper" university.
"But you know," he says, "we don't really need to learn very much about academic study. What we were interested in was the problem of how to link education to business, how to bridge the gap between industry and the university. Because we are very young, we have to develop very fast, and so we want to collaborate with the best in the world. And we looked at DIT and found an outstanding example of industry-related education from which we could learn."
Thus, while HIT's software school has structured collaborations with Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Seattle in the US, with the Universities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton in the UK and with the University of Bordeaux in France, Professor Xu has no qualms about saying that "we regard our relationship with DIT as our most important international collaboration." HIT has taken, more or less directly from DIT, some of its key practices, like the recruitment of teachers from industry, the emphasis on practical project work and the placement of students with companies. It has also largely adopted DIT's system of quality assurance. The value it places on the relationship can be judged from the fact that the first honorary degree awarded in HIT's history was given to President Mary McAleese in 2003.
THE RELATIONSHIP IS extraordinarily close. HIT has sent 10 staff members to Dublin for substantial periods to watch the delivery of courses. The two institutions run a joint bachelor's degree course in software engineering, with some Harbin students studying in Dublin. (The first group graduated last year.) DIT in turn sends staff members to Harbin to teach for a semester at a time. With fees in Dublin out of the reach of many Chinese students, the joint programme has developed a flexible range of options, allowing students to study entirely in Harbin or to study for anything from a year to three years in Dublin.
Prof Li Haifeng, an artificial intelligence expert and assistant dean at the HIT school of software (he has doctorates from Harbin and from the Sorbonne in Paris) finds that the DIT courses are highly effective. "From a global point of view, the syllabus in DIT is very outcome-oriented. Each small activity has a very definite aim, a clear sense of what kind of knowledge is to be transferred. Our students initially found the DIT courses relatively simpler than those at HIT, but later found that they could learn better, with less pressure but with an ability to grasp a core technique very quickly. Several semesters ago, we organised a test to see how students could adapt in practice to working in industry. We found that the students from the DIT classes did better than those from other classes."
According to Carrie Guo, who administers much of the collaborative work, the Harbin students she deals with are enthusiastic about their time in Dublin. "This year, almost all of the students in the joint programme will go to Dublin because the feedback they have been getting is very good. They like the city and consider it very technologically advanced. They find the people and their fellow students friendly. And the ones who have graduated from the programme are doing very well. Most are working for big companies like Siemens and Ericsson."
Xu Xiaofei says that the collaboration between the two institutions is itself becoming a model for Chinese universities. "They recognise our model as one of the most successful in the world. Big companies like IBM and Microsoft have sent people to come and have a look. We've also had people from Korean and Japanese institutions wanting to learn about what we're doing. And Harbin is a national institution, not just a local one. We distribute graduates to the whole of the country - about two-thirds of them end up working outside Heilongjiang. Most of the deans of computer science schools in China were educated here. So the impact of this collaboration is very big."
ASIDE FROM THE obvious fact that DIT's methods seem to work well for Chinese students, there seem to be two important reasons for the extraordinary success of the collaboration. One is that it is at least as important for DIT as it is for HIT. More glamorous institutions of learning in the West tended to see their relations with Chinese universities as a one-way process, with the Western colleges as the teachers and the Chinese as the students.
"Ten years ago," says Prof Xu, "European universities didn't want to learn anything from us, just to teach us. They didn't want to get advanced technology from us, just to learn how they could apply their own advanced technology to China." But for DIT, the relationship with Harbin is a huge boost to its own international standing. As Professor Xu puts it: "There is a mutual benefit. DIT's strength was in industry-related education, ours was in research. They've helped us to develop an industry-related model, and we've helped them by telling them how we do innovative research. And DIT has become more prestigious by its collaboration with us. DIT is now famous in China."
The other factor is that, from a Chinese perspective at least, Ireland's development of a high-tech economy hasn't eroded its people's capacity for warmth. "Usually, in this kind of collaboration," says Prof Xu, "it's a professional relationship of institution to institution. For us, with DIT, it's person-to-person. One of my colleagues at DIT said to me 'I only spend time with people I like' and I feel the same. We actually enjoy coming together with our Irish colleagues. I like Ireland very much, it's very beautiful and very peaceful. People are very kindly and open, and it's easy to become friends very quickly. I call Dublin my second home in Europe. With this collaboration, we don't just enjoy the achievements, we enjoy the process."
From an Irish perspective, the pleasures of the process are not unmixed with a degree of self-interest. Ireland has benefited greatly from its vast legacy of personal connections with one economic power, the United States - connections which arose largely from the circumstances of history. If the 21st century is to be almost as much a Chinese century as the 20th was American, a new set of connections has to be created practically from scratch. An ability to teach and learn, to communicate knowledge and forge friendships, may be all we've got to offer.