Progressive educator Wang Zheng’s appointment as headmaster of Peking University High School has brought with it a spate of renovations to the campus. We’re constructing an International Division building—a four-storey building that will have a library, a coffeehouse, a kitchen, a media centre, a theatre, state-of-the-art laboratories, and fitness facilities.
It’s an ambitious and expensive project, and each time I meet with the architects the project seems to grow more ambitious and expensive. (They’re now suggesting oil paintings and chandeliers for the library, and SMART boards for every classroom.)
So you’d think the man who actually signs the cheques would be worried about the spiralling costs. But I was told that there are also plans to build a new gymnasium, a new soccer field, an indoor climbing wall, indoor tennis and squash courts.
My first response: How are we going to pay for all this? (Actually, my first response was that a velodrome would be nice.)
The answer? China needs to hit education spending of 4 percent of GDP this year, and so public schools have a mandate to spend as much money as possible.
In 1993, China announced it would boost education spending from 2 percent of GDP to 4 percent. Yet 17 years later, it has still failed to achieve this goal. As new skyscrapers and highways populate China, critics both external and internal have called for more education spending. The United Nations reports that China educates almost one-fifth of the world’s students on just one percent of the world’s education budget. The China Youth Daily says China spends five times more money wining and dining its government officials than in educating all its students from grades one to nine. And, as critics point out, 4 percent of GDP is still anyway well below the spending of developed nations. Even India spends 7 percent of its GDP on education.
So why is China so determined to reach 4 percent this year? Because the Communist Party cares about China’s children? Not likely. It’s because this year marks the end of China’s 11th five-year development plan, and government officials—like the patrolmen who stalk the highways at the end of each month to fill their monthly quota—must reach that 4 percent mark. In practical terms, this means building a lot of new schools.
But at least this will mean better education for students in China, right? Well, not necessarily.
In 1998, at Peking University’s 100th anniversary ceremony, President Jiang Zemin announced a government plan to turn China’s top universities into world-class institutions. More than a decade later, most people think that Chinese universities are still far from that distinction, and arguably with cheating and overcrowding, corruption and censorship running rampant, many schools may actually have gotten worse.
Back in 2002, when I was writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I reported on how Chinese university officials went abroad and took mental snapshots of the architecture of America’s best universities while ignoring their academic freedom; when they returned home, they built new science parks and libraries without growing the intellectual freedom and academic discipline necessary to power these facilities. It seemed that all that construction dust kept people from seeing that education was first and foremost about carving and shaping new intellectual spaces rather than about digging large holes and filling them.
I’m not going to deny I’ll enjoy all of Peking High’s new facilities, and I do believe that these new facilities could have real lasting educational value. But it would be better if we could use the money to hire and properly train young, smart graduates to become China’s new generation of teachers, to send students and faculty to South Africa and Russia (and any other place that challenges and expands their identity), and to bring in educators from everywhere to make Peking High a truly international school.
But the Chinese bureaucracy is too pre-occupied with statistics and five-year plans to bother with people and ideas.
Maybe I’ll ask Santa for that velodrome, after all.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
China: Please Study Abroad (Diplomat)
Last Friday, the Beijing education committee summoned representatives from Beijing’s 10 leading public high schools to discuss study abroad students. Among those invited were People’s University High School, Tsinghua University High, Peking University High, Beijing Number Four, and the Experimental School, all of which already have a sizable contingent of students in the Ivy League and alumni networks in the United States.
As the director of Peking University High’s study abroad programme, I attended on our school’s behalf. During the meeting, the education committee ordered all schools to better prepare students for studying abroad, to maintain contact with them once they’re in the United States, and to instill patriotism in them so they’ll return to help develop the motherland.
For me, the meeting marked a sudden change in government attitude towards the study abroad phenomenon. What was interesting was not what was said—it was that anything was said at all.
Previously, Chinese education officials had remained silent on the issue because Chinese students attending high school and university in the United States is such a sensitive and emotional topic here. Study abroad students tend to be either the very worst kind of student (spoiled and lazy rich kids who can’t cope with the rigour and discipline of Chinese schools) or the very best (brilliant and driven students who can’t cope with the rigour and discipline of Chinese schools), all of which invites a strange and volatile mix of condescension, scorn, anger, and jealousy among officials.
Chinese school officials, for the most part, tend to oppose studying abroad because losing their best students would mean lower national examination scores, which, as bureaucrats, they live and die by. That’s why most Chinese students who want to study abroad do so secretly, cramming for the national examination during the week and cramming for the SAT and TOEFL on weekends.
Last Friday, though, the government explicitly told the top schools in Beijing they now had to help study abroad students (which, by the way, doesn’t mean they’ll actually do so). The government rarely issues clear directives, but here it was telling schools to open an office specifically to help potential study abroad students apply to American schools and to establish an alumni network.
Why?
The Chinese bureaucracy wouldn’t be a bureaucracy if it actually had explanations for its actions, so much of what follows is educated guessing.
I’m sure many readers have jumped quickly to the conclusion that the Communist Party wants to monitor and control study abroad students. But, as I explained last week, the Communist Party can easily do this already by reading each student’s personal profile on the Internet. In fact, the Party’s not worried about China’s study abroad students because they’re generally drawn from either the ruling elite or the middle class that’s the Communist Party’s main base of support.
So I think there are two more plausible explanations. First, as I’ve said before, the study abroad phenomenon is growing exponentially, forcing the government to speak out on the issue. But the more important reason, I believe, is that the Party’s realpolitik strategists have made a compelling case to Party leaders that China is losing out badly in the war for ‘knowledge workers’ to the United States, and if something isn’t done about this China can never properly challenge US hegemony.
This year, Premier Wen Jiabao promulgated China’s 10-year education development plan, which acknowledged that China’s education system wasn’t producing the creative and management talent necessary for China’s continued economic expansion and development. Despite the praise of Yale’s President Richard Levin, China’s higher education system is a mess. Cheating and plagiarism are rampant in Chinese universities and both Chinese companies and multinationals grumble about the arrogance and incompetence of Chinese university graduates. In turn, Chinese universities complain about how the national examination system often sends them narrow-minded and disinterested students who just want to play Counter-Strike all day.
In fact, recently, 11 of Peking’s top professors wrote a joint letter suggesting that the faculty ought to screen top exam scorers to determine their academic potential (i.e., to make sure the students’ minds are still intact after a decade of relentless and remorseless memorization and regurgitation).
It’s clear therefore that it will take decades for China’s higher education system to sort out its problems—if it ever can. So in the meantime a rising China’s only real option is to educate its best and brightest in US colleges and universities—and to encourage them to return.
Of course, the best long-term solution to China’s shortage of knowledge workers is for China to become an open and progressive, diverse and cosmopolitan society that celebrates one’s individuality and humanity as much as one’s power and wealth, and which encourages everyone—foreigners alongside Chinese—to experiment and to innovate.
But that would require imagination, a word which also happens to be the antonym of mandarinate. So the government’s first move in its strategy to win the hearts and minds of China’s study abroad students is to ask Chinese public schools to suck up to their very best study abroad students, just like they now suck up to their very best exam takers.
As the director of Peking University High’s study abroad programme, I attended on our school’s behalf. During the meeting, the education committee ordered all schools to better prepare students for studying abroad, to maintain contact with them once they’re in the United States, and to instill patriotism in them so they’ll return to help develop the motherland.
For me, the meeting marked a sudden change in government attitude towards the study abroad phenomenon. What was interesting was not what was said—it was that anything was said at all.
Previously, Chinese education officials had remained silent on the issue because Chinese students attending high school and university in the United States is such a sensitive and emotional topic here. Study abroad students tend to be either the very worst kind of student (spoiled and lazy rich kids who can’t cope with the rigour and discipline of Chinese schools) or the very best (brilliant and driven students who can’t cope with the rigour and discipline of Chinese schools), all of which invites a strange and volatile mix of condescension, scorn, anger, and jealousy among officials.
Chinese school officials, for the most part, tend to oppose studying abroad because losing their best students would mean lower national examination scores, which, as bureaucrats, they live and die by. That’s why most Chinese students who want to study abroad do so secretly, cramming for the national examination during the week and cramming for the SAT and TOEFL on weekends.
Last Friday, though, the government explicitly told the top schools in Beijing they now had to help study abroad students (which, by the way, doesn’t mean they’ll actually do so). The government rarely issues clear directives, but here it was telling schools to open an office specifically to help potential study abroad students apply to American schools and to establish an alumni network.
Why?
The Chinese bureaucracy wouldn’t be a bureaucracy if it actually had explanations for its actions, so much of what follows is educated guessing.
I’m sure many readers have jumped quickly to the conclusion that the Communist Party wants to monitor and control study abroad students. But, as I explained last week, the Communist Party can easily do this already by reading each student’s personal profile on the Internet. In fact, the Party’s not worried about China’s study abroad students because they’re generally drawn from either the ruling elite or the middle class that’s the Communist Party’s main base of support.
So I think there are two more plausible explanations. First, as I’ve said before, the study abroad phenomenon is growing exponentially, forcing the government to speak out on the issue. But the more important reason, I believe, is that the Party’s realpolitik strategists have made a compelling case to Party leaders that China is losing out badly in the war for ‘knowledge workers’ to the United States, and if something isn’t done about this China can never properly challenge US hegemony.
This year, Premier Wen Jiabao promulgated China’s 10-year education development plan, which acknowledged that China’s education system wasn’t producing the creative and management talent necessary for China’s continued economic expansion and development. Despite the praise of Yale’s President Richard Levin, China’s higher education system is a mess. Cheating and plagiarism are rampant in Chinese universities and both Chinese companies and multinationals grumble about the arrogance and incompetence of Chinese university graduates. In turn, Chinese universities complain about how the national examination system often sends them narrow-minded and disinterested students who just want to play Counter-Strike all day.
In fact, recently, 11 of Peking’s top professors wrote a joint letter suggesting that the faculty ought to screen top exam scorers to determine their academic potential (i.e., to make sure the students’ minds are still intact after a decade of relentless and remorseless memorization and regurgitation).
It’s clear therefore that it will take decades for China’s higher education system to sort out its problems—if it ever can. So in the meantime a rising China’s only real option is to educate its best and brightest in US colleges and universities—and to encourage them to return.
Of course, the best long-term solution to China’s shortage of knowledge workers is for China to become an open and progressive, diverse and cosmopolitan society that celebrates one’s individuality and humanity as much as one’s power and wealth, and which encourages everyone—foreigners alongside Chinese—to experiment and to innovate.
But that would require imagination, a word which also happens to be the antonym of mandarinate. So the government’s first move in its strategy to win the hearts and minds of China’s study abroad students is to ask Chinese public schools to suck up to their very best study abroad students, just like they now suck up to their very best exam takers.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Youth Indifference in China (Diplomat)
Last month, Zhou Yeran, a former student of mine whom I’ve written about before, published a piece in his university’s newspaper discussing his Chinese classmates’ reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to a Chinese citizen for the first time.
If the award had been for chemistry or physics, there would have been a surge of nationalistic pride in China. But it was the Peace Prize, and it was awarded to a Chinese citizen that the Communist Party had sentenced to 11 years in prison for 'inciting subversion of state power.' So the Party understandably saw it as a slap in the face, and enforced an awkward quiet throughout the country.
At Peking University High School, the most progressive school in Beijing (which is admittedly much like saying Vietnam has the best ski programme in South-east Asia), one student tried to organise a symposium on Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, but was reprimanded by the school authorities. Even the student editors of the school’s daily newspaper, which published the symposium announcement, were given an angry tongue lashing.
You'd think that in contrast, Chinese students who have opted to study at university or college in the United States would be open-minded about discussing Liu. Yet Zhou wrote that when he mentioned Liu's name over lunch with six of his Chinese University of Illinois classmates, an until then suppressed silence turned into outright anger:
'After a long awkward silence, one of (my Chinese classmates) said, “I can’t offer much comment. I just don’t know much about him, or the Nobel Prize.” He sounded wary and defensive.
'“I don’t care about this whole thing at all,” another joined in, “I don’t think the situation in China is as bad as the Western media makes it seem!”…Others nodded and concurred.
'“The true problem is, do we really want this ‘Western-styled’ democracy?” my Chinese classmate continued, quite assertively, “Look how it has failed in India, Thailand and many other Asian countries!” There was another round of nodding.
'“I think this is just Western countries trying to mess with China again,” another classmate inserted, rubbing his glasses, “you know, like what they did in 2008.” He was referring to the boycotting of the Beijing Olympic Games.
'Eventually, a girl joined the discussion. “I don’t think Liu Xiaobo deserves the prize,” she said. “How has he made a contribution to China’s democracy? No Chinese has even heard of him! Liu is just too naïve.”
Sadly, Zhou’s classmates’ angry, almost xenophobic words are too often stock responses to any Western criticism of China, responses instilled in students by their Chinese teachers and the state media, and reinforced by the social spaces they inhabit.
Over two decades after students marched on Tiananmen Square to challenge the Communist Party, the Party, as Ian Johnson wrote in the New York Review of Books last month, has become more firmly entrenched in power than ever.
And the Party has done so, ironically enough, by co-opting the very forces that were supposed to undermine it: the free market and globalization, the Internet and the media, and above all China’s educated and internationalized youth -- Zhou's classmates.
Thanks to the free market and globalization, Zhou and his classmates have only known stability and prosperity. And because they spend all their time on Renren, China’s version of Facebook (if you see a young Chinese entranced with his laptop or mobile phone he’s most probably logged on to it), their innermost thoughts and habits can be monitored and analyzed by the Party for any possibility of potentially subversive behaviour, just as Google and Amazon mine personal data for consumer preferences.
Just like Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan’s film 'Inception,' the Communist Party’s virtual army works to extract information from, and burrow itself into, the sub-consciousness of today’s Chinese youth, to implant thoughts and opinions through repetition of message.
The Party doesn't need China’s youth to obey it, or even like it. All it needs is for China’s youth to believe there’s no alternative to the Communist Party, and that they needn’t concern themselves with politics at all.
Sadly, one of Zhou's classmates likely spoke for many Chinese students in the United States when he said: 'I didn’t come to America to learn their politics. I came here to get their diploma. Then I’ll (go home, and) get a nice job.'
If the award had been for chemistry or physics, there would have been a surge of nationalistic pride in China. But it was the Peace Prize, and it was awarded to a Chinese citizen that the Communist Party had sentenced to 11 years in prison for 'inciting subversion of state power.' So the Party understandably saw it as a slap in the face, and enforced an awkward quiet throughout the country.
At Peking University High School, the most progressive school in Beijing (which is admittedly much like saying Vietnam has the best ski programme in South-east Asia), one student tried to organise a symposium on Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, but was reprimanded by the school authorities. Even the student editors of the school’s daily newspaper, which published the symposium announcement, were given an angry tongue lashing.
You'd think that in contrast, Chinese students who have opted to study at university or college in the United States would be open-minded about discussing Liu. Yet Zhou wrote that when he mentioned Liu's name over lunch with six of his Chinese University of Illinois classmates, an until then suppressed silence turned into outright anger:
'After a long awkward silence, one of (my Chinese classmates) said, “I can’t offer much comment. I just don’t know much about him, or the Nobel Prize.” He sounded wary and defensive.
'“I don’t care about this whole thing at all,” another joined in, “I don’t think the situation in China is as bad as the Western media makes it seem!”…Others nodded and concurred.
'“The true problem is, do we really want this ‘Western-styled’ democracy?” my Chinese classmate continued, quite assertively, “Look how it has failed in India, Thailand and many other Asian countries!” There was another round of nodding.
'“I think this is just Western countries trying to mess with China again,” another classmate inserted, rubbing his glasses, “you know, like what they did in 2008.” He was referring to the boycotting of the Beijing Olympic Games.
'Eventually, a girl joined the discussion. “I don’t think Liu Xiaobo deserves the prize,” she said. “How has he made a contribution to China’s democracy? No Chinese has even heard of him! Liu is just too naïve.”
Sadly, Zhou’s classmates’ angry, almost xenophobic words are too often stock responses to any Western criticism of China, responses instilled in students by their Chinese teachers and the state media, and reinforced by the social spaces they inhabit.
Over two decades after students marched on Tiananmen Square to challenge the Communist Party, the Party, as Ian Johnson wrote in the New York Review of Books last month, has become more firmly entrenched in power than ever.
And the Party has done so, ironically enough, by co-opting the very forces that were supposed to undermine it: the free market and globalization, the Internet and the media, and above all China’s educated and internationalized youth -- Zhou's classmates.
Thanks to the free market and globalization, Zhou and his classmates have only known stability and prosperity. And because they spend all their time on Renren, China’s version of Facebook (if you see a young Chinese entranced with his laptop or mobile phone he’s most probably logged on to it), their innermost thoughts and habits can be monitored and analyzed by the Party for any possibility of potentially subversive behaviour, just as Google and Amazon mine personal data for consumer preferences.
Just like Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan’s film 'Inception,' the Communist Party’s virtual army works to extract information from, and burrow itself into, the sub-consciousness of today’s Chinese youth, to implant thoughts and opinions through repetition of message.
The Party doesn't need China’s youth to obey it, or even like it. All it needs is for China’s youth to believe there’s no alternative to the Communist Party, and that they needn’t concern themselves with politics at all.
Sadly, one of Zhou's classmates likely spoke for many Chinese students in the United States when he said: 'I didn’t come to America to learn their politics. I came here to get their diploma. Then I’ll (go home, and) get a nice job.'
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
China's Education Gold Rush (Diplomat)
In his book The China Dream, Joe Studwell chronicled the ambitions and delusions of foreign entrepreneurs scrambling to get into China. The absolute article of faith was that if only one in every hundred Chinese bought a razor, that this would still be a hell of a lot of razors sold.
Today’s China gold rush is in education. In his book The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy pointed out that historically, the Chinese have spent their capital either on land or in education. And, as a Beijing public school official, I can confirm from experience that Chinese parents will sacrifice everything for their child’s education.
It’s something US colleges and high schools have discovered to their delight, with at least 100,000 Chinese students currently enrolled in the United States, many of whom are paying around $50,000 a year for the privilege. That’s probably why the US embassy in Beijing seems keen to rush through student visa applications, and why Chinese education fairs draw so many foreign participants.
If Joe Studwell were to write a sequel to The China Dream, it would likely focus on education, China’s last great untapped market, and he would probably write that while there’s been an increasing trickle of US schools entering the China market ever since the late 1990s, the deluge will really have started after Dr. Kenneth Smith, a short and bespectacled educator who seldom ventured outside his native New England, decided to visit China.
The superintendent of the Millinocket, Maine public school system has been looking to enroll Chinese teenagers to save his financially-troubled school system. The New York Times is rightfully curious as to why Chinese parents ‘would spend $27,000 to send their children to Stearns High, which is housed in a 1960s building, has only one Advanced Placement course and classroom maps so outdated they still show the Soviet Union, and where more than half of the 200 students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch’. But, Dr. Smith assures us, there’s fresh air, a tall mountain to hike, and ‘a great’ performing arts programme. (And to make Stearns High even more appetizing, the school cafeteria will soon offer lo mein.)
Yes, it sounds like a crazy idea. But it’ll probably work because, well, China is a crazy place.
And it’s also a big place where you have demanding parents who plan obsessively and meticulously over their child’s schooling, career, and family and where you have thoughtless parents who ship their child off overseas with a lot of money and freedom because he was too spoiled and undisciplined at home. So you can bet that unscrupulous Chinese agents working on commission will make a more convincing pitch than Dr. Smith does to Chinese parents on the value of a Maine education.
Regardless of what happens in Maine, there are going to be a lot of Chinese students attending American high schools in the coming years -- and I know from personal experience there’s as much peril as promise in such a trend.
As a six-year old Chinese immigrant to Toronto, I had an unhappy and traumatic experience in the public school system, but as a 21st century educator I believe it’s crucial that Chinese students learn to be global citizens. The trick, though, is to educate students at an early age to be confident and outward-looking, to welcome difference and diversity, and to send them to a Western school that will both push and support them.
A year ago, an experimental programme I started called Foundation aimed to prepare seven Chinese middle-school students for American high school. The programme has taught them how to write a five-paragraph essay and how to cook a Chinese dinner for their future American host family, as well as the joy of team sports and of quiet reading. Having witnessed these kids, repressed by an often soul-crushing education system, blossom, we looked for a school in the United States that would love them as much as we did. When we felt we found a good partner school, we invited their principal, maths teacher, a student, and his mother to China, where they spent a week hiking the Great Wall and eating Peking Duck with our students and their families.
In the spring, our students will be going to the US -- and that’s when our work will really begin; we plan to communicate weekly with our students and our US counterparts, and we’ll try to mediate if any cross-cultural problems arise.
We’ve invested so much time and thought into our seven students because, more than commodities and consumers, we see them first and foremost as children. They are innocent and impressionable, and they trust us adults to love them as human beings with unlimited potential, and not as a source of endless profit or as a quick fix to budget shortfalls. It’s a principle I’m afraid Dr. Kenneth Smith and others involved in China’s great education gold rush may forget.
Today’s China gold rush is in education. In his book The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy pointed out that historically, the Chinese have spent their capital either on land or in education. And, as a Beijing public school official, I can confirm from experience that Chinese parents will sacrifice everything for their child’s education.
It’s something US colleges and high schools have discovered to their delight, with at least 100,000 Chinese students currently enrolled in the United States, many of whom are paying around $50,000 a year for the privilege. That’s probably why the US embassy in Beijing seems keen to rush through student visa applications, and why Chinese education fairs draw so many foreign participants.
If Joe Studwell were to write a sequel to The China Dream, it would likely focus on education, China’s last great untapped market, and he would probably write that while there’s been an increasing trickle of US schools entering the China market ever since the late 1990s, the deluge will really have started after Dr. Kenneth Smith, a short and bespectacled educator who seldom ventured outside his native New England, decided to visit China.
The superintendent of the Millinocket, Maine public school system has been looking to enroll Chinese teenagers to save his financially-troubled school system. The New York Times is rightfully curious as to why Chinese parents ‘would spend $27,000 to send their children to Stearns High, which is housed in a 1960s building, has only one Advanced Placement course and classroom maps so outdated they still show the Soviet Union, and where more than half of the 200 students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch’. But, Dr. Smith assures us, there’s fresh air, a tall mountain to hike, and ‘a great’ performing arts programme. (And to make Stearns High even more appetizing, the school cafeteria will soon offer lo mein.)
Yes, it sounds like a crazy idea. But it’ll probably work because, well, China is a crazy place.
And it’s also a big place where you have demanding parents who plan obsessively and meticulously over their child’s schooling, career, and family and where you have thoughtless parents who ship their child off overseas with a lot of money and freedom because he was too spoiled and undisciplined at home. So you can bet that unscrupulous Chinese agents working on commission will make a more convincing pitch than Dr. Smith does to Chinese parents on the value of a Maine education.
Regardless of what happens in Maine, there are going to be a lot of Chinese students attending American high schools in the coming years -- and I know from personal experience there’s as much peril as promise in such a trend.
As a six-year old Chinese immigrant to Toronto, I had an unhappy and traumatic experience in the public school system, but as a 21st century educator I believe it’s crucial that Chinese students learn to be global citizens. The trick, though, is to educate students at an early age to be confident and outward-looking, to welcome difference and diversity, and to send them to a Western school that will both push and support them.
A year ago, an experimental programme I started called Foundation aimed to prepare seven Chinese middle-school students for American high school. The programme has taught them how to write a five-paragraph essay and how to cook a Chinese dinner for their future American host family, as well as the joy of team sports and of quiet reading. Having witnessed these kids, repressed by an often soul-crushing education system, blossom, we looked for a school in the United States that would love them as much as we did. When we felt we found a good partner school, we invited their principal, maths teacher, a student, and his mother to China, where they spent a week hiking the Great Wall and eating Peking Duck with our students and their families.
In the spring, our students will be going to the US -- and that’s when our work will really begin; we plan to communicate weekly with our students and our US counterparts, and we’ll try to mediate if any cross-cultural problems arise.
We’ve invested so much time and thought into our seven students because, more than commodities and consumers, we see them first and foremost as children. They are innocent and impressionable, and they trust us adults to love them as human beings with unlimited potential, and not as a source of endless profit or as a quick fix to budget shortfalls. It’s a principle I’m afraid Dr. Kenneth Smith and others involved in China’s great education gold rush may forget.
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