The Trans-Atlantic College Search

LONDONâ€"At least I didn’t have to whack anybody.

When I told a cousin that I was taking my daughter to look at U.S. colleges this spring she sent me a DVD of “The Sopranos” episode in which Tony, embarking on a similar tour, encounters a former associate and strangles him wire while his daughter is visiting Colby. Although Maine is home to several superb schools, it seemed safer to skip the whole state.

I was grateful for anything that helped narrow down the list. You might think I’d have a better handle on this process than most parents. I write about higher education for a living and graduated from both British and American universities. But I’m just as confused as any dad, even though I went through a version of this five years ago with my son. But he wanted to remain in Britain and knew what he wanted to study, which renders the British system, with its successive filtering from 10 or 11 GCSEs (nationwide subject exams taken at 16) down to 4 A-levels (taken at 17 and 18) to finally applying to “read” (study) a single subject at university, uniquely attractive. For my daughter, the choice of subjects in a liberal arts education was reason enough to make American colleges worth a serious look.

The line at the Fulbright Commission’s American college fair last fall stretched around the block. And though all the schools there seemed eager for foreign students, some seemed to have little idea how to make sense of British grades, the different school calendar and a very different culture, where the relentless pursuit of exam results tends to reduce extracurricular activities to an afterthought.

I was hit by the explosion of anxiety familiar to any parent faced with the college maze. There was also a financial question: Is the probable higher cost of an American education worth it? Undergraduate courses at British universities typically take just three years, and the 9,000 pounds, or $12,000, annual tuition is covered by a government loan that doesn’t have to be repaid until she starts earning a decent salary.

As we lugged home a shopping bag filled with brochures we realized some serious reconnaissance was in order, along with some guidelines. We agreed to stay east of the Mississippi and ruled out any place that wasn’t co-ed. We’d visit colleges scattered between Chicago and New England.

Here I offer some advice from our U.S. road trip: You can just about manage two schools a day if (a) you pick two that are no more than an hour apart, (b) you don’t get lost on the way (c) you don’t mind eating lunch in the car and (d) your child doesn’t fall in love with your first stop of the day.

But we didn’t really have enough time. Unlike the SAT, which can be taken many times, British A-level exams, whose first part, known as AS-levels, are given just once for the whole country. So the pressure to do well is intenseâ€"doubly so for students who are considering applying to selective American colleges, which expect high scores on the SATs as well. Since my daughter hasn’t ruled out staying in Britain she had too much work to allow for a leisurely amble through the groves of academe.

And here, perhaps I can eliminate a myth. Ever since Laura Spence made headlines in England when she got into Harvard in 2000 despite being rejected by Oxford some British parents have gazed wistfully across the Atlantic. But the truth is that Oxford and Cambridge both accept a much higher percentage of their applicants than comparable schools in the U.S. There are plenty of good arguments for American colleges, but being easier to get into isn’t one of them.

All of the 10 schools we saw were impressiveâ€"but then, the first job of the admissions office is to sell you on the school.

We got lost once. We also got to one school too late for the last tour, but after a chance encounter with a student learned more about what it felt like to go thereâ€"and how the students thought about themselvesâ€"than we could have in any “information session.” We ate in college cafeterias, chatted with college librariansâ€"we share a passion for librariesâ€"and, when permitted, traipsed through dormitories.

Whenever possible my daughter sat in on classes. In several cases this resulted in her falling in love â€" with a school, or a teacher, or a subject she’d given up for A-Level but realized she could take in college. But I also realized (better late than never) that picking a college was about more than just education. It was also about deciding where and with what kind of people you wanted to live.

We returned to London with every school still on her listâ€"evidence, perhaps, of careful advance workâ€"but with a much clearer idea of what it would actually be like to attend each. My daughter had a notebook filled with impressions of each campus, plusses and minuses, and questions to be followed up later.

And I had a sense of how much this is her process, her decision, her life.I learned a lot about how colleges present themselvesâ€"the way schools with a core curriculum celebrate that, and how schools with more freedom emphasize that, and how everyone seems to talk a good game when it comes to balancing teaching and research.

But more important than any of thatâ€"and the reason I’d advise anyone who can spare the time and money to go on their own college tour, even if it’s just in one country, or your home stateâ€"is what I learned about my daughter.

Our 10 days were the most time we’d ever spent together without the rest of our family. We listened to her iPod playlist, talked about books and movies and math puzzles and Mexican food and the importance of timing in comedy. I don’t know where she’ll go to college, but I’m a lot more certain that she’ll make the most of wherever she ends up.

D.D. Guttenplan writes about higher education for the International Herald Tribune.

Has your family navigated a bicontinental college search? Tell us your stories.

Satirizing China with the ‘China Daily Show’

BEIJING â€" As China watches the spread of a new type of a deadly bird flu with unease, there’s a chicken farmer in Henan province who’s feeling lonely.

Well, maybe.

“It started about a month ago,” Zhao Chunlu tells the, er, China Daily Show.

“All of a sudden, the weekly telegrams stopped coming. My pager stopped beeping,” and “even the hermit has stopped making the two-hour journey by horseback to shoot the breeze,” Mr. Zhao says in an article on its Web site, called: “Poultry farmer has the distinct impression people avoiding him these days.”

“Alone in his yard, Zhao gazes thoughtfully at a pristine biohazard warning, hanging from a nearby tree. ‘You know, I really get the impression that people are now avoiding me for some reason,’ Mr. Zhao says. ‘Maybe it’s something I did?’ he continues. ‘I mean, I got drunk at a dinner a few weeks back and said a few things. But I assumed everyone else was blind drunk too, and wouldn’t remember.’”

There’s the China Daily, the government’s straitlaced, censored, flagship English-language daily, now sold widely overseas too.

There’s The Daily Show, America’s popular satirical TV show that is proving increasingly popular here too, its host, Jon Stewart, has discovered, to his delight, as the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos wrote recently.

Then there’s the China Daily Show, a “fake news” Web site in a country that is crying out for satire, where reality is so skewed by propaganda and inadvertent humor that it can be hard to tell the difference, says its creator, an Englishman and Beijing resident who asked to be identified as “Mr. R.” In his early 30s, he asked for the anonymity for reasons of cultural and political sensitivity towards his host, the Chinese state. (Warning: some of the language and comical images on the site may be considered by some to be offensive, so click at your own risk.)

A slogan underneath the newspaper’s red masthead makes its stance clear: “The only news source visible from outer space,” it says, spoofing the claim that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from there; as does its Chinese-language translation, “Madman’s Daily”.

Traditionally, authoritarian states resent satire - laughter is powerfully subversive - and China is no exception, carefully controlling critical chuckles in the media with a wide range of technological tools including tens of thousands of online censors who can, and do, wipe satirical Chinese-language jokes, comments or videos within minutes.

That leaves a true gap in the market for “fake news” in English, which the government may care about less since far fewer people can read it. And about two years ago Mr. R. stepped up.

In two interviews, Mr. R., who works in the media, last lived in London and says he is an admirer of the British satirical publication Private Eye, said he was inspired to do it by “affection for China, as much as anything else,” adding: “People unfamiliar with the country can realize that, however strange it might sometimes seem, China is a place like any other. It, too, can be explained and seen for what it is. You can’t really have satire without understanding.”

In story after story, the China Daily Show pummels the political fixation or social scandal of the day, whether that’s the “China Dream” of Xi Jinping, the new president; thousands of pigs found mysteriously dead in a Shanghai river; or the chronic secrecy of a state that recently told a lawyer who asked for information on the condition of the country’s soil that even that was a “state secret.” “Answer phone at Chinese Ministry denies Everything,” ran a recent story.

“A new answering service from the Chinese government has already issued a series of firm denials, sources confirmed yesterday,” the spoof ran.

“Reporters who dial the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Hacking are now greeted with an electronic message asking them to press a specified button to direct their inquiry.”

“Press One if your call concerns ‘purchase of organs harvested from executed criminals,’ Two for ‘mysterious deaths linked to Chinese-owned tech firm abroad,’ Three for ‘kid got crushed by official,’ Four for ‘inexplicably banned from Twitter…’ the 47-minute message begins.”

Mr. R. makes fun of everyone, including non-Chinese who develop a sentimental attachment to the country and talk about it endlessly after they leave.

The New York Times has been the butt of his jokes too, with a recent story about an “ace reporter, Chase Ketterman,” who was “found crushed under 40 tons of incriminating documents”, a reference to a story by the Times about the wealth of the family of the former prime minister, Wen Jiabao, which won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.

I interviewed Mr. R. by email about what he’s doing, and about Chinese-language satire, too.

DKT: Is China surreal? More so than elsewhere?

Mr. R.: Yes, often and (it) will probably remain so for years to come - it’s always bedazzled and befuddled foreigners, after all. Step out of any high-speed rail station today and find steaming pork intestines being hawked from a donkey, next to a branch of ‘Star*****.’ Just relatively speaking, there are always going to be more weird things happening because there are so many more people. And the state itself is both authoritarian and lawless; the government pays so much attention to keeping a grip at the top that it effectively has to let the rest take care of itself. So there are a lot of institutions and people who are effectively running wild.

Q: What inspired you to start doing this?

A: It’s one way to express thoughts that couldn’t be properly articulated anywhere else. The site was actually born out of affection for China, as much as anything else. When you like a place, you want to see it get better. But many of the engines of social improvement, like a free press or independent judiciary, simply don’t exist here. Instead, China retains a feudal culture of deference towards officials or bosses, however incompetent. People are waiting for someone to point out that their emperors have no clothes - and I’m more than happy to be that person.

Q: Is there a lot of satire in China, do you feel â€" in English or Chinese?

A: In English, not much that I’m aware of. In China, there is, but it’s almost nothing like the ruthless, Swiftian take-no-prisoners definition, unlike you count Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, which is often pretty puerile. A mainland comic might perform a spooky, dead-on impersonation of Mao or Deng but that’s as far as it usually goes - the voice and mannerisms. He couldn’t possibly do a ruthless critique of Maoist policy or Tiananmen; I daresay he wouldn’t even want to. On television, you have the likes of Zhou Libo and Guo Degang, who are hugely popular stand-up comics. Naturally, they do topical jokes. Zhou does softball stuff for the older generations, who seem to have a taste for that stuff. Guo has a coarser northern style, and that has actually gotten him into trouble. A couple of years back, he was the victim of a politically motivated ‘Three Vulgarities’ campaign, which saw Guo’s BTV show cancelled and his DVDs yanked from shelves.

Away from the mainstream, you’ll find a lot of stuff on the Internet that’s funny and edgy by local standards - memes, jokes about bacon-flavored water, that kind of thing. Pictures of Jiang Zemin yawning and gawping at waitresses at the Two Sessions are always popular.

Little Rabbit, be Good: a satirical video about abuse of power in China

The best satire usually comes from well-channeled fury, like the allegorical ‘Little Rabbit, Be Good’ video, a South Park-esque animation that depicts ordinary Chinese as rabbits being systematically suppressed by tigers (Communist thugs) in a variety of scenarios based on real-life incidents, until they finally rebel in a gory uprising. It’s shocking because you so rarely see that kind of savage venting here: it’s just a hint of the emotions swirling beneath the surface. But the system currently won’t allow it - that video was wiped from the Chinese web very quickly - even though allowing such outlets is probably more beneficial for ‘stability’ than not.

IHT Quick Read: April 25

NEWS With any decision about closing down the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, put on the back burner, inmates there have lost hope that they will ever be released. A hunger strike is now in its third month, with 93 prisoners considered to be participating â€" more than half the inmates. Charlie Savage reports from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

After months of political paralysis capped by a week of turmoil, President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday named Enrico Letta, a high-ranking official in the center-left Democratic Party, to form a broad coalition government to try to steer Italy out of political chaos and its worst recession since World War II. Rachel Donadio reports from Rome.

Paraguay’s economic boom, fueled by bountiful harvests of export commodities like soybeans and corn, exists only in pockets. More than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the central bank, and Paraguay ranks near the bottom among South American countries in reducing poverty over the last decade, according to the United Nations. Simon Romero reports from Asunción, Paraguay.

Confident they can sell their message, Syrian government officials have eased their reluctance to allow foreign reporters into the country, paraded prisoners they described as extremist fighters and relied unofficially on a Syrian-American businessman to help tap into American fears of groups like Al Qaeda. Anne Barnard reports from Damascus.

A building housing several factories making clothing for European and American consumers collapsed into a deadly heap on Wednesday, only five months after a horrific fire at a similar facility prompted leading multinational brands to pledge to work to improve safety in the country’s booming but poorly regulated garment industry. Julfikar Ali Manik reports from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi.

A Japanese scientist has warned for years that deaths of pine trees on Yakushima island is caused by pollution from China. Now he is being taken more seriously. Martin Fackler reports from Yakushima, Japan.

In what appeared to be a new phase in an intensifying conflict that has raised fears of greater bloodshed and a wider sectarian war, Iraqi soldiers opened fire from helicopters on Sunni gunmen hiding in a northern village on Wednesday, officials said. Tim Arango reports from Baghdad.

ARTS The world’s leading ballet companies are adding the Gulf region to their itineraries, performing the classics to sold-out houses. Sarah Hamdan reports from Dubai.

SPORTS Barcelona had a mesmerizing run as the premier club in soccer, but it is clear that Bayern Munich is now the top power after it beat the Catalan club by four goals in the Champions League. Rob Hughes reports from London.

After Rape of Child, Indian Media and Protestors Make Common Cause

NEW DELHIâ€"Over the past few days, following the rape of a five-year-old girl, the Indian government has been rocked once again by the alliance of the news media and Delhi’s street protesters. In my latest Letter From India I argue that Delhi’s new breed of demonstrators are getting better at street protests and sustaining the interest of journalists, while the government has yet to learn how to create a smart and dignified self-defense.

The child was not only raped, but tortured. The word “depravity” was used by several commentators. It was a crime the Delhi police could not have prevented, but the manner in which the police had conducted the investigation gave the protesters the opportunity to cast the capital’s police commissioner as the villain of the story. But there were public figures who reminded the nation that the incident also pointed a finger at Indian society and its deeply flawed analysis of the origins of its many evils.

A particularly obtuse analysis of why rapes occur in India was propounded by Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the right-wing Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In January, as the nation mourned the death of a young woman who was raped by six men in a moving bus in Delhi, he said, “Such crimes hardly take place in ‘Bharat’, but they occur frequently in ‘India.” What he meant was that rapes do not occur in traditional India, but they do in Westernized, urbanized, modern India.

In response to such views, which are repeated in different forms by several politicians, Javed Akhtar, a poet, film writer and a nominee for Parliament, said a few things in Parliament on Monday that are usually not said in that big, white building. He said that the real problem was that Indian society separates men and women in “an unnatural way,” leading most young Indian men to perceive women as if they were “animals.” He said that Indian society worships women by claiming they are goddesses, but that women would be better off if Indian society instead regarded them as human beings.

Could Syria’s Civil War Create European and American Jihadis?

LONDON â€" Two Belgian mothers, worried for the fate of sons who left home to join Islamist rebels in Syria, reportedly traveled to Turkey this week to urge the authorities there to stem the transit of foreign volunteers heading for the conflict.

The mission by two Moroccan-born women, reported by Belgium’s La Libre, was the latest twist in an issue that has drawn attention since nationwide raids last week on individuals alleged to be involved in a jihadist recruitment drive for the insurgency in Syria.

Hundreds of young European Muslims are believed to have made the journey to join the two-year-old rebellion against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad.

My colleagues James Kanter and Rick Gladstone wrote at the time of the Belgian raids, in which six suspects were detained, that the foreign jihadist element in the insurgency has alarmed Western powers. The West wants to be rid of Mr. Assad but does not want him replaced by “an Islamist militant government or stateless mayhem.”

A further concern, in Belgium and elsewhere, is that young volunteers will return to Europe radicalized by their experiences, posing a potential terrorist threat to their own countries.

It is a threat that is focusing the attention of European counterterrorism agencies.

But there are also concerns that the perceived threat of radicalization is being overstated, and even exploited by the Damascus regime as it seeks to dilute Western support for the rebellion.

Mr. Assad himself said last week that Western support for the Syrian rebels risked backfiring.

“Just as the West financed Al Qaida in Afghanistan in its beginnings, and later paid a heavy price,” he told Syrian state-run television, “today it is supporting it in Syria, Libya and other places and will pay the price later in the heart of Europe and the United States.”

Western counterterrorism officials have acknowledged the threat and European intelligence agencies have reportedly stepped up measures to track recruits.

Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counterterrorism coordinator, told Le Monde that not all the volunteers’ profiles were identical. “There are ideologists, idealists, but also some who just want to show their support for a rebellion that - don’t forget - we support officially.”

Khaled Diab, a self-declared secular pacifist, wrote for the Huffington Post that there was a danger in overestimating a relatively small phenomenon that would draw yet more unwelcome attention to Muslim communities in the West.

“Worrying as this trend may seem, it is important to place it in its proper perspective,” he wrote, “and not allow bigots, racists, Islamophobes, or those with vested interests, including radical Muslims themselves, to blow the situation out of all proportion.”

Evelyne Huytebroeck, a Belgian minister for youth, also cautioned authorities not to overreact until they knew the full extent of the volunteer phenomenon.

She was speaking as the government was due to consider a plan to combat youth radicalization.

According to estimates this month by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, a partnership of academic institutions based in London, 140 to 600 Europeans have gone to Syria since early 2011, representing 7 percent to 11 percent of the total number of foreign fighters.

It acknowledged rising alarm about European Muslims joining the Syrian rebels.

But it also noted, “The Syrian government has â€" at various times and for different reasons â€" claimed that many fighters that are involved in the current conflict are foreigners. Our numbers do not support this assertion.”

In Belgium, Bahar Kimyongur, a Belgian-born former militant of a Turkish far-left group, has reportedly been involved in the efforts to stem the volunteer tide. La Libre identified him as the initiator of this week’s trip to Turkey by the two unnamed Belgian mothers.

Mr. Kimyongur is spokesman for an organization, the Committee Against Intervention in Syria, which opposes foreign involvement and argues for a peaceful solution.

Some of his public statements, however, have been markedly favorable to the Assad regime in a conflict that he has blamed on a combination of U.S. warmongering and Al Qaeda-led jihadism.

Jailed Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo Reading on Communism, Christianity, Gaining Weight

BEIJING â€" Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Nobel Peace laureate serving an 11-year term for subversion after calling for an end to one-party rule and greater democracy in China, has recently been reading a popular nonfiction book about the history of Soviet Communism and Russian intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Christian philosophical texts. He has also gained weight, said Mo Shaoping, a Beijing lawyer.

“He’s gotten fatter,” said Mr. Mo, citing Mr Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who is allowed to visit her husband for about half an hour each month in jail in Jinzhou, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. “It’s visible,” he added.

Mr. Mo spoke by telephone one day after meeting with Liu Xia on Tuesday for the first time in nearly two years, he said. Mr. Mo, a high-profile lawyer who has taken on many politically sensitive cases, has known the Lius for years and was in court to defend Ms. Liu’s brother, Liu Hui, against business fraud charges. Mr. Mo says Liu Hui is innocent and entered a not guilty plea Tuesday on his client’s behalf.

It was a dramatic morning in the Beijing suburb of Huairou, where Liu Hui’s trial was held, according to Mr. Mo and others present.

Coming out of the court after the morning’s trial, which Mr. Mo said was conducted properly â€" Liu Hui was allowed to speak, he said â€" Liu Xia, who has been held under strict house arrest for more than two years, spoke to a waiting crowd of reporters and diplomats, saying, “I have no freedom” and “I love you, I miss you a lot,” according to people present. Visibly excited to be out, she jumped up and down and waved, they said.

The Associated Press reported that she said: “I’m not free. When they tell you I’m free, tell them I’m not,” in words that were confirmed by others present.

Mr. Mo also confirmed many of her words.

“Yesterday she said, ‘I have no freedom.’ She has no telephone, no Internet, she can’t see friends, every week she can see her parents once but her freedom is limited,” he said. At any one time, there may be up to 30 police or security officials outside her home in Beijing to prevent her from leaving and visitors from arriving, he said. “It’s completely illegal to do this because Liu Xia didn’t commit any crime. It’s per se just terrible.”

If Liu Hui (the fact that the Nobel laureate’s brother-in-law, and his wife, share his surname is a coincidence) is convicted, he faces as much as 12 to 14 years in prison, Mr. Mo warned â€" certainly more than 10. He said he expected a verdict within about 10 days to two weeks.

“If the court listens to the government, then he may get 12 to 14 years. If they listen to us he’ll be freed. There is a middle road, where they don’t call it fraud but another kind of business crime,” which may result in three to five years in jail, he said.

Mr. Mo said Liu Hui’s mother doted on her youngest son and was “extremely worried.”

Supporters say the charges, which revolve around 3 million renminbi, or $50,000, tied to a business deal over property, were trumped up to persecute the Liu family. Liu Xia has been under house arrest since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, barely able to leave their apartment. Her husband is being kept alone in a cell and doesn’t meet people when he is permitted out, said Mr. Mo. Ms. Liu travels to the jail each month for a half an hour meeting that is conducted via telephone through a glass partition, he said. Their conversations are closely controlled by prison officials and Ms. Liu is not allowed to speak of her conditions at home, he said.

Ms. Liu, who is very close to her younger brother, was allowed to attend the trial only after security officials asked her older brother to act as a guarantor and he agreed, Mr. Mo said.

Mr. Mo said that in jail, Mr. Liu was reading “popular books,” singling out one that is current among Chinese intellectuals, by the Chinese female scholar of Russia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Jin Yan, called “Rewinding the Red Wheel: Revisiting the Ideas of Russia’s Intellectuals.”

Last November, the Shenzhen Daily chose it as one of the Top Ten Books of the Year for 2012.

The author, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, said she wrote the book to set straight many misunderstandings in China about the thinking of Russian intellectuals, according to a Chinese books Web site, Sohu.com’s Reading Party.

China and Russia share not only a land border, but also an often-intense political history, with Russian members of the Comintern instrumental in setting up the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. The two countries fell out in the late 1950s, but their intellectual and political histories are intertwined in ways that make the story of Russian intellectuals especially interesting for China.