7-Day China University Programme: Beijing & Shanghai

Morning/Afternoon — Arrival in Beijing
Arrive in Beijing, check into your hotel, and meet your guide and driver. Settle in and get oriented to the city before heading out.

Afternoon — Nanluoguxiang Hutongs
Explore the vibrant Nanluoguxiang area, a labyrinth of beautifully preserved hutongs (narrow alleys) dating back to the Yuan Dynasty, mixing traditional courtyard homes with boutiques, cafes, and bars. Enjoy a snack at a small family-run restaurant in the lanes.

Evening — Dinner & Free Time
Try Zha Jiang Mian, Beijing's comforting noodles with savory soybean-paste sauce, then enjoy free time to absorb the blend of old and new Beijing.

Accommodation
Your hotel in Beijing.

Morning — campus walk, north-west Beijing
Your academic liaison travels with the group from the hotel to the district in the north-west of the city where a large part of Beijing's higher education and research capacity is concentrated; more than a dozen universities and institutes sit within a few kilometres of one another. The morning begins on foot. The teaching buildings from the 1950s and 1960s are heavy, symmetrical and arranged on a north-south axis borrowed from Soviet campus planning; behind them stand the laboratories, libraries and lecture halls of the last thirty years, and beyond them the dormitories and canteens where most of the student body actually lives. Your host explains how a campus is organised: colleges and departments, the separation between undergraduate teaching and research groups, the gates, and the passport registration that every visitor now completes.

Late morning — a department seminar
The seminar is arranged through our academic liaison at a local university, and the department and its programme are confirmed before you travel, because teaching timetables, examination periods and vacation dates move. The usual format is two short talks by faculty, followed by questions, with postgraduate students present. A typical session covers how the discipline is taught in China, the shape of a four-year bachelor's degree followed by a two- or three-year master's, and what research training looks like in practice. Students answer questions about their own projects, and questions can be submitted in writing beforehand. Interpretation is arranged when the speakers do not work in English.

Lunch
A student canteen, where meals are paid for by campus card and served from counters by the portion or by weight: rice and noodles, a dozen hot dishes, soup, steamed bread. The point of eating here rather than in a restaurant is that at noon the canteen is the busiest and most representative place on any Chinese campus.

Afternoon — a teaching laboratory and the library
The laboratory session begins with a safety induction, and it is not a formality: exit routes, the emergency shower and eyewash, fire equipment, the gas and power isolation points, and the laboratory's own rules on coats, goggles and gloves. Visitors do not operate equipment, do not handle or remove samples, and do not enter areas the staff mark as restricted; photography is allowed only where the department has agreed. You then move to the library, where a subject librarian explains the reading rooms, the closed stacks and how a book is requested, the split between Chinese and foreign-language collections, and the study culture that fills the reading rooms until they close.

Cultural Insight — how a Chinese university is put together
China has roughly three thousand higher education institutions enrolling something on the order of forty-seven million students, and the system is layered: a small group of research-intensive universities at the top, provincial universities beneath them, and vocational colleges below that. Entry runs through the gaokao, the national college entrance examination, taken by more than thirteen million candidates a year and decisive for where a student studies. The examination was suspended in 1966 and restored in the winter of 1977, and the scale of the system explains the campus you have just walked through: large, self-contained, and built around study rather than around the city around it.

Safeguarding and conduct
Where participants are under 18, they remain with the group's own accompanying teachers and are supervised under a two-adult rule throughout; nobody works or travels alone with local students or staff, no private contact details are exchanged, and no photograph of a minor is taken or published without written consent from a parent or guardian.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — pairing and preparation
The group is split into mixed teams, each with visiting and local students, and each team is given a topic a week or more before the session so there is time to read: a comparison of two education systems, a question in the discipline you are studying, or a small piece of joint research that can be finished in a morning. Each team has a room, a whiteboard and an hour to agree on a structure, divide the work and rehearse. The role of the visiting students is to contribute and present, not to teach, mark or assess anyone; where a team of school-age students is involved, a teacher from each side is present in the room at all times.

Late morning — presentations and questions
Each team presents for around ten minutes and takes questions, in English, with consecutive interpretation where it is needed. The rules are set out at the start: keep to time, cite what you use, disagree with the argument and not the person, and write your questions down rather than calling out. Faculty or senior students comment briefly on each presentation. Participants receive written feedback from their own teachers afterwards; nothing is graded by the host department, and no certificate of academic achievement is issued. Two habits are enforced on the day and are the reason the session takes a full morning: every claim made on a slide has to name its source, and every team has to state one thing it could not establish, which is the question the audience is instructed to ask about.

Lunch
In the canteen with the student partners, which by the second day has stopped being a novelty and started being an ordinary part of the routine.

Afternoon — campus life, led by students
The afternoon is handed over to the local students, who take their visitors through the parts of campus that a formal tour never reaches: the sports ground and the table tennis hall, a club room for calligraphy or traditional instruments, the workshop of a student engineering team, the bike parking outside a lecture hall that has just emptied, the corner of the dormitory block where parcels are collected. Sport is the quickest way in, and most groups end up playing something. The day closes with tea or a cold drink and a discussion of what campus life is actually like, led by the students rather than by staff.

Cultural Insight — the shape of the student year
The academic year runs in two semesters, from early September to mid-January and from late February to early July, with a long winter break around the Spring Festival and a summer vacation long enough for fieldwork, internships or preparation for the postgraduate entrance examination. Undergraduates commonly share a room with four to six classmates, classes are 45 minutes long, and the class group rather than the individual timetable is the basic social unit, with a class adviser responsible for a cohort through its four years. Canteens, clinics, shops and sports facilities on campus mean that a student can live a full week without leaving the gates, which is exactly what many of them do.

Safeguarding and conduct
Participants under 18 stay with their own teachers under a two-adult rule, are never alone with local students or staff, and do not exchange private contact details; group photographs are taken only with the consent of everyone in them and are not published where any person in the frame is a minor without written parental consent.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning - High-speed rail, Beijing to Shanghai
Transfer to the railway station for a G-series high-speed train to Shanghai Hongqiao. The line runs about 1,318 kilometres and takes roughly four and a half to six hours depending on the service, so the journey is itself worth watching: stations the size of airports, boarding completed in a few minutes, and punctuality measured in minutes rather than hours. Complimentary water and a snack box are provided on board; your programme leader will confirm your seats and second-class or first-class allocation in advance. Delegates who prefer to fly can be rebooked, but the rail journey is the better introduction to how the two cities relate.

Early afternoon - Arrival and the Shanghai partner school
You are met at Shanghai Hongqiao and driven to the partner school for an introductory session with its leadership team. The shape of the visit differs deliberately from Beijing: Chinese schooling is set nationally but delivered locally, and Beijing and Shanghai have noticeably different traditions of school autonomy, principal appointment and teacher development. This first afternoon sets the contrast up so that you can test it over the following two days.

Afternoon - Boarding life and pastoral care
If the partner school takes boarding students, this is the day to see that side of the operation. Boarding management in Chinese schools is a distinct discipline and an area many visiting school leaders find genuinely instructive:

• The house structure - who is on duty, including at night, and how the boarding team relates to the teaching staff.
• Dormitory rules, room allocation by year group, and how the school handles homesickness, illness and disputes.
• Pastoral provision: the counselling room, the class teacher's role as first point of contact for a family, and how concerns are escalated.
• Mealtimes, curfews and screen and mobile-phone policy.

We confirm in writing whether the partner school for your dates is day-only, boarding, or both, before your delegation commits to travel.

Evening - The evening study period, and a walk on the Bund
Where the school's schedule allows, you are invited to look in briefly on the supervised evening study period, which many Chinese secondary schools run for boarders. It is a quiet, highly structured hour or so, and the questions it raises about homework, independent study and staff rostering are usually lively.

Afterwards, dinner, then a walk along the Bund for your first sight of the Pudong skyline from the west bank. The contrast between the 1920s banking facades on one side of the Huangpu and the towers on the other is Shanghai in one view.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
4-star hotel in central Shanghai, twin share, breakfast included.

Morning — campus and city
Shanghai's universities grew out of three very different traditions: the missionary colleges founded in the late nineteenth century, the technical and commercial schools that served the treaty port, and the large national institutions built after 1949 to feed the city's industry. That history is visible in the fabric of the campuses, where 1920s brick and tile sits beside 1960s concrete and the glass and steel of the last two decades. Your host walks you through the main quadrangle and explains how the campus relates to the city around it: the science park gates in the perimeter wall, the hospital attached to the medical school, the alumni companies that recruit on site, and the metro station that most of the student body pours through every morning.

Late morning — a department seminar
The seminar is arranged through our academic liaison at a local university; the department, the speakers and the topic are confirmed before you travel and can change with teaching and examination schedules. Sessions have covered materials and manufacturing, medicine and public health, computing and data, and the economics of the Yangtze delta, but the useful part is usually the discussion: how a research group is funded, how long a project takes from proposal to publication, what industry collaboration looks like in practice, and what graduates actually do next. Postgraduate students join and answer questions about their own work. Interpretation is arranged where needed.

Lunch
In a campus canteen, where the noodle and rice counters, the soup station and the trays of steamed buns make the same point in Shanghai as they do in Beijing: this is a system that feeds tens of thousands of people twice a day, quickly.

Afternoon — laboratory, library and reading room
The afternoon begins with a supervised visit to a teaching laboratory, preceded by the usual safety induction and followed to the letter: visitors observe, do not operate instruments, do not handle or remove samples, and stay out of areas marked as restricted. Photography only where the department agrees. You then move to a university library and its reading rooms, where a librarian explains how a Chinese research library is used: the discovery system, the split between Chinese and foreign-language holdings, the electronic journal subscriptions that most reading actually happens through, the interlibrary loan routes, and the way the reading rooms fill in the weeks before the postgraduate entrance examination.

Cultural Insight — Shanghai as a research city
Shanghai's research economy is inseparable from its port and its industrial base: shipbuilding and steel in the twentieth century, then automobiles, integrated circuits, biotech and finance. Much of that capacity sits in planned clusters - the science parks and the technology district on the eastern side of the river - where universities, institutes and companies are physically adjacent on purpose. The city also draws heavily on researchers trained abroad, and a large share of faculty in the sciences have spent part of their careers outside China. The result is a research culture that is unusually close to industry, and a seminar discussion that will keep returning to the question of who pays for the work and who owns the result.

Safeguarding and conduct
Participants under 18 remain with their own accompanying teachers under a two-adult rule and are never alone with local students or staff; no private contact details are exchanged, and no image of a minor is taken or published without written parental consent.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — colloquium
The day is organised like a small conference. Participants who wish to present submit an abstract the evening before, and the session runs in blocks of three talks of eight minutes each, with five minutes of questions: the question time is what the day is for. Local research students present alongside them, which changes the temperature of the room considerably, since their work is further along and the questions are correspondingly sharper. A faculty discussant closes each block with two or three observations. Slides are circulated afterwards so that nobody is writing while they should be listening.

Late morning — methods and research ethics workshop
The workshop works through the parts of research practice that a short visit usually skips: how to search a literature database and record what you found, how to keep a lab or field notebook that another person could follow, how to present a measurement with its uncertainty rather than as a bare number, and how to cite. The ethics half is deliberately unbending: who counts as an author and who does not, why a result that cannot be reproduced is not a result, what plagiarism looks like in a Chinese and an English source at the same time, and what a data-sharing agreement has to say before data leaves a laboratory. Participants then draft a two-page summary of their own project with a methods paragraph they can defend.

Lunch
On campus with the research students who presented in the morning; the arguments started at the colloquium usually continue over the table.

Afternoon — joint poster session
Mixed teams build a poster from work they have done during the week - measurements from a laboratory session, a small survey, a literature comparison - to a fixed template: title, question, method, results, limits, references. The rule that makes the exercise work is the limits section: every team has to state what its data cannot support. Posters go up, everyone walks the room, and each team answers questions from two other teams and from a postgraduate reviewer, who gives written comments. The best posters in most groups are the ones that admitted the most.

Cultural Insight — the research group
Chinese science is organised to a large extent through the research group, the keti zu, built around a supervisor and made up of doctoral students, master's students and postdocs who share a laboratory, a budget and a weekly meeting. The group meeting is where progress is reported, problems are exposed and the supervisor's priorities are communicated, and it shapes a student's working life far more than any central timetable. English is the working language of publication in most sciences, which means a student may read, write and present in English all week and speak Chinese only in the corridor - one of the reasons a joint session like this one is easier for them than it looks.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — final presentations
Each participant or team presents for ten minutes to a panel made up of the academic liaison, a faculty member and a postgraduate reviewer, followed by questions. The panel is asked to be direct, and it usually is: which claim is actually supported, which source was not read, which number is doing more work than it can bear. Notes are returned to each presenter in writing before departure. The point is not ranking - no marks are given - but the habit of defending a conclusion in front of people who are not being polite about it.

Late morning — closing session
A short closing session reviews what was covered, collects the participants' own written evaluation and hands out a certificate of attendance recording the dates, the host institutions' general description and the number of academic contact hours. It is worth being plain about status at this point: the programme is a study visit, not a matriculated course, and it is not credit-bearing unless a separate agreement has been made in advance between the participant's own institution and the host department. No grades, transcripts, references or research placements are offered, and the panel's comments are advisory rather than a mark. Attendance hours are recorded because some schools and universities require them for their own internal files, and the certificate states exactly what was done and where.

Lunch
A farewell lunch, and the last chance to exchange contacts through the liaison rather than by handing round personal details.

Afternoon — departure
Transfer to Pudong International Airport for long-haul departures, or to Hongqiao for domestic flights and high-speed rail. Your guide confirms the terminal, the check-in deadline and the rail platform in advance, and travels with the group to the departure point. Luggage can be stored at the hotel if the flight is late in the evening, and the group leaves with all project notebooks, the posters produced during the week and the written panel comments; anything supplied by a host laboratory stays with that laboratory unless permission has been given in writing. Allow three hours before a long-haul departure from Pudong and two before a domestic flight, since the check-in and security queues at both airports are long at most times of day.

Cultural Insight — what ten days can and cannot do
A visit of this length does not make anyone a researcher on China, and it is not meant to. What it can do is put a working laboratory, a departmental seminar, a canteen at noon and a graduate student with three years of a project behind them in front of you, and let you ask questions that a journal article will never answer. Participants who get the most out of it are the ones who arrive with a specific question about their own discipline, ask it of five different people during the week, and write down where the answers disagreed.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Day ends on departure - no hotel night included.