Our ancestors liked to build walls. They built walls in Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing and many other cities, and they built the Great Wall, which snakes across half our country. They built walls to protect against enemies and evil spirits. This tradition has survived to this day: we still have many parks and schools walled off from the public.
For a long time, walls were one of the most natural things in the world to me.
My perceptions, however, changed after I made a hiking trip to the eastern suburbs of my city. My CLASSmates and I were walking with some foreign students. As we walked out of the city, we found ourselves flanked by tall trees, which formed a wide canopy above our heads. Suddenly one foreign student asked me, “Where is the entrance to the eastern suburbs?”
“We’re already in the eastern suburbs,” I replied. He seemed taken aback, “I thought you Chinese had walls for everything.” His remark set off a heated debate. At one point, he likened our walled cities to “jails”, while I insisted that the eastern suburbs were one of the many places in China that had no walls.
That debate had no winners, but I did learn a lot from this student. For instance, he told me that some major universities like Oxford and Cambridge were not surrounded by walls. I have to admit that we do have many walls in China, and as we develop our country, we must look carefully at them and decide whether they are physical or intangible. We will keep some walls but tear down those that impede our development.
Let me give another example.
A year ago, when I was working on a term paper, I needed a book on business law and found a copy in the law school library. However, the librarian coldly rejected my request to borrow it, saying, “You can’t borrow this book, you’re not a student here.” In the end, I had to spend 200 yuan to buy a copy. Meanwhile, the copy in
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