Chinese hoping for Net college link
By Glenn Scott
Advertiser Staff Writer
One of China's wealthiest dealmakers is dangling a tantalizing idea in front of Hawai'i's academic and business leaders, proposing to send Chinese government leaders to graduate school through Internet programs run by institutions in Hawai'i.
The idea remains so ethereal that Lisa Sun returned to Beijing yesterday with more hope than commitments after spending five days conferring with officials here.
"The Chinese government hopes this can happen as soon as possible, but I think we really need to take some time," Sun, a U.S.-educated entrepreneur, said Friday at the Plaza Club in downtown Honolulu. "This is the beginning."
At issue is the kind of arrangement that state leaders, educators, high-tech innovators and tourism industry officials are seeking, in which Hawai'i strengthens its commercial and professional ties with China, as well as other Asian nations, by marketing its intellectual and technical know-how.
Some academic initiatives of the sort already are in the works. At the University of Hawai'i's College of Business Administration, for instance, managers from state-run organizations in Guangdong province participate in one-year programs aimed at building management skills for a globalizing world. Those students live and study in Honolulu.
In this case, Sun said the Chinese government has realized the critical value of Western business expertise and now insists that government leaders — from levels of
vice mayor up through provincial governor — have master's degrees. But with competition so keen in a rapidly changing China for those bureaucratic posts, many officeholders are reluctant to take extended leaves out of fear they'd be replaced.
Thus, Sun and another member of her delegation, Professor Sun Jian of the University of Science and Technology of China, said they are exploring ways to deliver academic programs over the Internet through broadband delivery systems that would provide realtime lectures, discussions and videoconferencing to key cities in China.
"They have the materials and the infrastructure," said Kate Zhou, a University of Hawai'i political science professor who helped arrange the delegation's visit. "By next year, China will be the world's No. 1 producer of broadband cable. China has become capitalistic quietly."
Said to be among China's richest woman capitalists, Lisa Sun won an early chance in China to go abroad, moving to New York City in 1984 to study environmental engineering at Manhattan College. After returning to China, she set up an export company and later began investing heavily in real estate in Hong Kong and Beijing, including in the new mansions that characterize the ascendancy of the elite in China's private sector.
Recently, she has specialized in mergers and acquisitions involving emerging Chinese tech companies. On her Hawai'i trip, she represented the China National Training Net established by the Ministry of Personnel and Tsinghua University.
The delegation, though, came here on behalf of more than one eager party. Sun Jian, who directs the international economics institute at his university, said the Ministry of Education and the Qingdao Haier Refrigerator Co. Ltd., a major appliance manufacturer, also want to sponsor distance education programs to satisfy the huge demand for advanced study in the world's most populous country.
On Friday, the delegation greeted more than a dozen Hawai'i business people, many with ties to China, in the last conference of the trip. It was a roundtable session arranged by Charlotte Vick, chairwoman of the Hawai'i Pacific Export Council. By then, the visitors could summarize both the benefits and the difficulties of linking an Internet education network with Hawai'i.
The difficulties would lie in the careful creation of a meaningful academic program. Gaining accreditation for a graduate-degree program, they said, could take a few years. And the parties would need to iron out residency issues: How many months or semesters should the Chinese students be expected to study in person in Hawai'i — or at an equivalent campus in China?
The benefits were equally obvious. As Zhou pointed out, bringing China's rising class of political leaders to Hawai'i, even for just three months, would do wonders to seal key commercial relationships and boost the Islands' status as an Asian-Pacific meeting place.
Hawai'i's attraction to China also was clear. It's relatively close and near enough that real-time teaching — often in Chinese — could occur via the Internet during appropriate hours at both ends.
Russell Leu, a lawyer who has been involved in other initiatives with China, said the Internet has made Hawai'i's location more valuable as a halfway point where parties can work with New York in the morning and Beijing in the evening of the same business day.
Viata Online Chairman Carl Chang also found hope in the discussion. "Once you have an objective," he said, "you find a way."
The visitors said they intend to keep in touch with state officials to promote the idea. "It's a very big challenge," said Professor Sun, "but it's a very big opportunity."
Glenn Scott can be reached by phone at 525-8064, or by mail at gscott@honoluluadvertiser.com.
