Princeton University Career Services presents IMAGINE Speaker Series guest speaker Sara Judge McCalpin '82

Reflections on a China Journey

When people learn that I lived in China for several years in the early 1980s, the most common question I am asked is ‘how has China changed?’  A question that is both complex and simple, distinct and nuanced at the same time.  I’ve spent a good deal of time reflecting on the tremendous changes, trying to articulate what I have witnessed. 

When I first arrived in Beijing in 1982, it was a grim, grey, dusty city still reeling from the impact of the Cultural Revolution.  My days were spent working diligently on my Chinese language skills and trying to soak in Chinese culture.  I dodged a stream of bicycles outside the Western gate of the Peking University campus, heard roosters and the clip-clop of horses hooves on the road outside my dorm room, passed walls still covered with big character slogans, was followed by a small group of friendly small children as I made my daily run around Weiming Lake on the Peking University campus, and had weekly encounters with elderly women hobbling on small bound feet.  China's history juxtaposed against slow modernization.

When I returned to China in 2005, after a hiatus of fifteen years, what struck me most was the change in energy, the way that people carried themselves.   Heads high and shoulders back, there seemed to be a literal spring in their step – particularly young people.  Almost a personification of hope in the way that they moved and interacted.  Although I still saw older people shuffling along the streets of Beijing, the energy of youth was palpable.  Surely there were other changes –- high-rise buildings dwarfed the old Soviet style compounds scattered around the city. I no longer recognized the old neighborhood in Haidian where I used to live.

Another decade passed, fast forward to 2016.  I still see the energy – sometimes it is dramatically amplified with a bravado I couldn’t imagine witnessing thirty years ago.  But I also sense a weariness, a skepticism and reluctance to stand out – a strange cycling back to an earlier time in China’s history?