Beijing University of Chinese Medicine

[edelweis]

 

13 minutes ago, gwr71 said:

like you, many persons don't have that kind of funds to enroll in the best schools of TCM

 

Very interesting. According to you, which schools are the best schools of Traditional Chinese Medicine?

 

[gwr71]

I am quoting from him. He mentioned schools in the US which are very expensive.

[edelweis]

I see, thanks.

[bigtops]

I will point something out to readers of this thread:

 

• "gwr71," who apparently has zero firsthand experience related to the topic at hand, is attaching himself to this thread to criticize the style and substance of my descriptions of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine on the basis of some conjecture based on Cuban medical education.
• On the other hand, I studied in two TCM universities in the PRC for six years before graduating. I waited for five months after graduating to return to this page and make comments. While I may use strong words, I am certainly not ranting and raving.

 

I am not saying I am right about everything, but at least I am basing my comments on six years of firsthand experience, instead of... Cuban medical schools (!?). I honestly have no idea what "gwr71" is trying to accomplish other than trolling me... or perhaps earning a few mao.

 

Regarding the word "fraudulent," it is certainly fraudulent to tell students that they will receive 500 hours of hands-on acupuncture training, and then only provide ~5 hours of training. It is also fraudulent to print diplomas and transcripts which state that students participated in ~1500 hour clinical internships that essentially do not exist. The dictionary is clear on what fraud means: Deception deliberately practiced with a view to gaining an unlawful or unfair advantage; artifice by which the right or interest of another is injured; injurious stratagem; deceit; trick.

[Lu]

@gwr71, please stop posting about Cuban education in this thread. It is entirely offtopic and not relevant to this university. Further posts on this topic in this thread will be removed.

@bigtops, please just ignore posts on Cuban education in this thread and don't resort to ad hominems. Thanks for the extensive write-up, and especially for being specific on why you had such a bad experience.

[edelweis]

@bigtops Indeed, thanks for warning prospective students about fraud.

I understand that you don't want to derail this thread from the BUCM topic, but if you started another thread about master/apprentice relationship and other topics of interest to TCM students, I'm sure it would make for interesting reading.

[bigtops]

@Lu Ok. Thank you for getting involved and moderating this thread. I sincerely appreciate it. Also, I'm glad that you found my write-up useful. I hope that it may provide food for thought for some prospective students in the future. I feel quite strongly about this issue, because the problems with Beijing University of Chinese Medicine create an incredibly stressful environment that leaves many students dealing with serious anxiety, depression, anger, and exhaustion. Not only have I personally witnessed numerous worthy students lose their passion for the medical profession, but there were also numerous suicides on campus while I was a student. Of course, suicides happen at all universities and it would be incorrect for me to say that BUCM can be directly blamed for such tragedies. However, I think that the copious stresses of campus life may very well have been an important factor. In any event, I believe it is important for this information to be here, because what one hears from the recruitment staff is extremely disconnected from reality.

@edelweis If you have specific questions, please feel free to start another thread about them, and then send me a PM to let me know where to find it.

[mcdew9085]

This is a great topic, i can't wait to have more details unfold.

[Flickserve]

11 hours ago, edelweis said:

Thanks for the details. It's rather disappointing to hear that all unis have basically the same issues.

 

In HK, there is teaching of TCM under established Universities. I presume the quality control should be better in HK. Unfortunately, I don't know anybody to ask for an opinion.

[bigtops]

@Flickserve: I'm almost certain that HK schools (now and for the foreseeable near future) would provide a higher standard of TCM education than mainland ones. As the creep of Beijing's control extends further into HK education over the coming years, that might change.

 

@mcdew9085: I'm happy to provide more. Today I'll share a bit about the housing situation, not necessarily because I think the dorms are the biggest issue, but because how the following stories unfold reflects everything about the terrible attitude that almost all of the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine administration has.

 

To start this off, I'll rewind to 2013, when I visited BUCM while I was contemplating transferring there from Shanghai U of TCM. During my visit, the recruitment administrator I spoke to (* see aside below) told me that I would be able to live in on-campus housing, and that I should just sign up when I arrived in the fall. Since both Beijing Normal University (which was a great place to learn Chinese in 2009, by the way--I'm not all negative) and SHUTCM had worked this way, I figured I could trust her.

 

Well, five months later when I showed up in Beijing, I went and found said recruitment admin to inquire about the dorms. In addition to acting as though she'd never seen me before, she, naturally, "kicked the skin ball" (踢皮球), absolving herself of all responsibility for and knowledge of campus housing, and sending me down the hall to another office. Off I went, only to be told on no uncertain terms: there are no empty rooms in the dorm right now, you're on your own.

 

Now, luckily for me, I didn't mind the thought of living down in the hutongs between Dongzhimen and Yonghegong (后永康胡同 is where I ended up), so this wasn't the end of the world. But it was unsettling to get such an early glimpse of BUCM office staff's utter lack of concern for honesty, reliability, and responsibility. To make matters even more ludicrous, a few weeks later when I got to know my "vice-class chairwoman" (副班長), she heard my story and laughed, "but don't you realize that there are empty rooms in the dorm?" Whaaaaaa--? Well, I looked into it again, and there were! The person I asked that day evidently didn't give enough of a 屎t to help me... or was expecting a bribe (aside: until 2015, the BUCM dorms indeed did operate largely through petty graft. To the university's credit, they mostly fixed this problem in '15. To their discredit, the dorms worked far BETTER back when the fact that you'd paid a small bribe or given a gift meant that the person you were dealing with felt some onus to actually #&*^#ing do something! Ah, sweet PRC, how I miss you...).

 

Well, that brings us up to 2013 and to the end of that chapter of my own story, for now. Let's look at a story belonging to a good friend and classmate of mine, who I'll call George. George was a year ahead of me in the herb-centric program taught in Chinese (I was a needles and massage guy). He's fully fluent in Chinese, though he comes, comprehensively from "the West," as he hold passports for one South American and one European country, but grew up in North America. Now, about George--this dude just wanted to be able to study the TCM classics, practice taiji and qigong, and chill out. Low key kinda guy, so passionately dedicated to his studies that he regularly stayed up till 2 or 3 am reading this or that ancient tome. I'd guess he still does. So for him, having a small, simple, affordable home on campus was extremely important.

 

George--for reasons I won't get into, other than to say he got a full ride + stipend scholarship from the CSC to do it--ended up going into a master's program at BUCM right after he graduated. By then, thanks to skyrocketing housing prices in Beijing (some say it's now more expensive there than Manhattan, dunno if that's true or not), there was a huge demand to live in the BUCM International College's dorms, which cost around 30% to 50% less than most places you would to lay your head aboveground and inside of the 5th Ring ("O, 五---環，你比六環少一環，怎麽辦？"). Shortly before he graduated and summer break was to start, George visited the office of then-Dean of the International College, one Tang Minke/唐民科 (actual name--this extremely untrustworthy man who has actually been promoted should only be listened with serious caution). Dean Tang promised George that he could keep his dorm room, but said that George would need to move his stuff out for the summer holiday, because his room was scheduled to have its bathroom be renovated. George understood and cleared out, putting his things in a friend's house during the summer holiday.

 

At the start of the next school year but six weeks later, George returned to Beijing planning to move back into his dorm room. He went to the "reformed" (no longer taking bribes) office of the dormitory and tried to register, only to meet a stone wall: "no, you can't move into the dorm. You already graduated from your undergraduate studies, and now you're a grad student. New grad students cannot move into the dorm." George at first wasn't worried--Dean Tang had given him his word, so Dean Tang would be able to quickly sort things out... right?

 

He went straight to Dean Tang's office, where Dean Tang proceeded to look him directly in the eyes and say, "no, I never promised you that you could keep your dorm room. I don't even remember talking to you about your dorm room. You're going to have to follow the rules and move out." While I was not present for either of George's conversations with Tang Minke 唐民科, I had quite a few personal interactions with him where he similarly lied to me. George's story, when I heard it, absolutely fit the man's modus operandi.

 

Naturally, George was quite livid, but losing his temper wasn't going to fix anything, so he swallowed his rage and managed, through the Department of Graduate Studies, to secure a dorm room a couple of miles away from our NE 3rd Ring Road campus, at BUCM's (now defunct?) satellite campus in 望京/Wangjing. Now, you'd think perhaps that would be the end of this story, but alas, it is only the end of a chapter for George. Suddenly, at the end of George's first semester as a grad student, Wangjing dormitory staff swung by his room to ^&^%ing evict him. Why? Well, they said, "the entire Wangjing campus is being sold off, and this entire dormitory building needs to be empty ASAP. You won't have a place to live on campus next semester." Those who have lived in China will know that getting this sort of news two weeks before the Spring Festival is mafan so far up the wazoo it's coming out your mouth, but whaddyagonnado? Now far more furious than he was in September, George made phone calls to his Chinese friends in Beijing, and luckily was able to find somebody who could give him a place to stay. His Chinese New Year holiday in tatters thanks to the school admin, he proceeded to move home, third time in six months.

 

If you've lived in the PRC long enough, you'll know that injury often comes with insult, and this story is no exception. When I saw George shortly after the 2017 Chinese New Year, he looked like he could've killed a man. Why? When he reached the end of the story I just told, the reason became clear: after he returned to school from vacation, he quickly noticed that the Wangjing campus and its dorm had not been sold. Furthermore, upon investigation (i.e., knocking on his old dorm room door), he found out that there were already NEW TENANTS living in it!!! Oh, man. Who were they? Ah, well, people of value to BUCM: short-term foreign TCM exchange students, meaning students from American or European TCM colleges in Beijing for a few weeks or months of training, or else foreign TCM professionals, also in town for a few weeks or months. Why boot George to let these people in? Well, there's a steady stream of them, they pay more for their rooms than long-term students, and it would be a major pain in the 屁股 for BUCM to help them find apartments or hotels... so some genius in middle management (or maybe the cynical 唐民科 himself) decided to empty the Wangjing dorm to make room for the short-term exchange students. Foul, foul, foul. But for George, just one of many instances where the university screwed him over. The only bright side is, it's nothing personal. They treat everybody like dirt. No exceptions. I guess you could call that equality, right?

 

Ok, now howzabout one last little chapter, this one about me? After more than 2 years at BUCM, I finally got a chance to move into the dorm myself, and I took it--I was tired of riding my bike in pollution and everybody-checking-WeChat-while-driving Beijing traffic, and med school is busy as hell--an extra hour of time each day means a lot. Most of my own time in the dorms was pleasant enough, except for the time they decided to renovate my bathroom without sealing off the sleeping area, and a layer of pulverized concrete and moldy filth literally covered everything I owned, causing me to verbally excoriate one of the dorm admins in a way I doubt he'll ever forget. But all in all, it was okay for me. I even manage to develop a reasonably friendly rapport with Teacher Su (苏老師--Su is her real surname, important to know if you end up becoming a student and she's still there), who appreciated that I "understood" when they wrecked my room, and who took note when I helped chase off a would-be thief, etc.

 

Fast forward to this summer, I was to graduate in late June, but my visa allowed me to stay in China till the end of July or the beginning of August, and I had already paid my rent for all of that time at the beginning of my last semester. I even went so far as to verbally confirm with Teacher Su that I would be able to stay in my dorm room till my visa expired and keep my stuff in my dorm room until September after the holiday, as I was originally planning to stay in the PRC (I left when I realized that my Social Credit Score would probably be -9,000,000 and even the staff Mr. Li's California Beef Noodles wouldn't want to serve me). Like I said, I thought Teacher Su and I were on good terms, as she really did seem to be a fairly reasonable and friendly administrator, especially when compared with her colleagues.

 

So, this year, June 28th I think it was, to be exact, I graduated. What a shitty affair--I took a photo with my pants down while wearing my graduation gown, giving a double middle finger, and mouthing the consonant "F." Captured the spirit. I was happy to realize that Dean Ding (丁院長; another pathological liar; beware) saw this pose, and looked like she was plum about go into shock. Anyway, sometime while we were baking in the sun waiting to get through the rigmarole (it's all downhill after they sing the 國歌), a classmate let it be known that we graduating students would need to be out of our dorms within three days! Well, that was a surprise, and I had already bought a plane ticket for late July, a month later. This bad news spread through the graduating foreign students like wildfire, and before the ceremony was over there were seven of us who realized we were just three days from eviction. But... was this rumor even true? Well, rather than do what normal people who just graduated from five years of F*CKING MED SCHOOL do (i.e., celebrate!), we banded together and marched down to see Teacher Su and get to the bottom of things. And you know what we found? Yep, we were all slated for eviction in three days. So you see, sometimes insult and injury come simultaneously, instead of one after another.

 

It was a blazing hot day and our graduation ceremony had started at 6:30 am (not a typo), to give all the university cadre functionaries plenty of time to blather on through their tinny mics in tidy sentences made out of four syllable constructions... 共同努力，往前發展，弘揚光大, blah-blah-blah-blah. Tempers were flaring. There was one positive development, though: we actually knew where to find the dean, because we'd seen him at the ceremony. Like some sort of Igmagnificent Seven, we cornered the guy (not 唐, who had by then been promoted), and began to read him the riot act. Since we'd all just graduated and were within inches of heat stroke, this was the first time I'd ever seen such an outpouring of unbridled rage, and at such volume. The dean could barely get a word in edgewise, as we gave no quarter to his stammering justifications and excuses. He did the only thing he could do, and dug up Teacher Su,  who was largely responsible for this mess because she (a) had told most of us face to face that we could stay till our visas expired, and (b) hadn't actually informed anybody of their impending evictions.

 

When Teacher Su showed up, she immediately put on her friendly smile and started trying to smooth things over (和稀泥). On that day, since none of us had anything to lose, she was shocked to find that nobody was willing to politely play along (which we typically would have, for fear of losing everything if we somehow made an administrator lose too much face). At this point even the dean was upset, and demanded to know why she had dropped the ball so badly. Well, according to her, she hadn't. Standing in front of all of us, she began to flatly deny that she had ever even spoken to us about staying in the dorms through the summer. A soft-spoken female student, a woman I'd almost never seen in four years without a kind half-smile on her face, suddenly lost it and nearly shouting with exasperation pointed to Teacher Su and demanded, "I was so worried about this that I came and talked to you about it no fewer than three times!! Now you're denying that we even talked!?!" Teacher Su continued her denials, and with me as well. This was particularly infuriating, as she was one of two or three administrators I thought I could more or less trust in BUCM. But no. She lied directly to my face, claiming we'd never spoken about housing.

 

In the last paragraph of this long tract, I mention that one way of "getting to yes" in the PRC is by putting down roots and just refusing to physically move away from whomever you're dealing with. In this instance we employed an additional tactic, of screaming, shouting, and creating such a ruckus that soon news of Teacher Su and the dean would be impossible for them to contain. I mean, we were really animated, and an Aussie with quite a muscular frame, bless his soul, got so in the dean's face that I think all of us--not the least of which the slight-framed dean--half expected the student to start throwing punches. It really was that tense. And actually, in the end, we won. All of us who were there that day were allowed to remain in the housing (WHICH WE HAD LONG AGO ALREADY PAID FOR) till our visas expired. But, was that really a happy ending? Well, when I finally did go and grab a beer to "celebrate," my hands were still shaking from rage and adrenaline. I spent my f*cking graduation yelling at a liar who'd betrayed me. And you know what, there were many other graduated who didn't hear the eviction news during the ceremony, didn't join our posse, and didn't have the fluency in Mandarin and "social skills" necessary to defend themselves. What happened to them? Yep, out on their asses. You can be it's all roses and month cakes when they look back on our beloved alma mater, eh?

 

If you made it through that story, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I dis-enjoyed living through it. I also hope you walk away with one thing very clear in your mind: I am not telling these stories because they stand out as unique, memorable  events of my time at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine/北京中醫藥大學. I am telling them because that's how life there was day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. If it wasn't one thing, then it was another. If it wasn't another thing, then it was yet something else. Over, and over, and over again. Next time I write I may talk about the deception that the TCM majors who were taught in English faced. Their story is especially important to share, not only because their tuition costs are significantly higher than those of students who study in Chinese, but also because their inability to use spoken Mandarin to stand up for themselves makes them

vulnerable in ways that I wasn't.

 

* On the recruitment officer--she was the picture of churlishness. She bizarrely actually made me feel unwelcome at the university when I came to apply to transfer, constantly reminding me that I would probably fail out of the school, because it would be so much harder than Shanghai. In actuality, it was slightly less academically challenging than Shanghai was, but that's another story. In addition to her dishonesty, she was simply unfriendly to the point of absurdity. One day after I'd transferred to BUCM, my 班主任--the administrator in charge of my own class--was nowhere to be found and I needed to log into  the campus network to confirm that I had successfully registered for a course. BUCM's course registration website is a joke that often cannot be opened by any computers except the office's, so I walked over to the desk occupied by the woman I'm talking about to ask if she could quickly log into the system and confirm my course selection. At the time, I kid you not, she was sitting in her office chair leaning back as far as the thing would allow, with her monitor off, languidly clipping dead leaves off of a small pot plant she was holding in her hand. She was literally the picture of 閑, leisure, to the degree of actually being indoors fiddling around with a plant (for those of you who like Chinese characters haha). Amazingly, as soon as I presented my question, she looked up with the sourest glower I may ever have seen and sneered, "you students can't just think you can waltz in here any old time of day and expect us to drop everything we're doing so that we can deal with your personal issues with our computers. We have work. We're busy." Again, this woman was leant back so far in her chair you'd think she was sipping malt liquor, pruning her house plant! Unluckily for her, by then I'd already been in China a good five or six years, so I just said, "uh-huh, ok, got it, 好好好," and stood there presenting as an immobilized dumbass with no plans over leaving (that's one of the best ways to get things done in the PRC, for you greenhorns). Finally, she heaved a mighty sigh, put down the plant, and turned on her monitor to help me. Which took the "busy" woman all of one minute. So, moral of the story? Well, is this sort of asinine behavior commonplace at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine? Absolutely!!

[bigtops]

Ah, just sent the guests home from a lovely dinner party. As I digest my food and beverage, what better to do than tell a few stories?

 

Today I think I'll start with a brief vignette from the hospital internship portion of the BUCM edumacation, and then see where it takes me.

 

So, the year was probably 2016, springtime, and I was a fourth year student at BUCM (it was technically my fifth year of study; I had to repeat my second year to be allowed to transfer, and even as bad as BUCM was, I'm glad I left the Shanghai school--as I've stated before, its teachers were inferior to BUCM's, and to make matters worse, most doctors and patients in the hospitals only spoke Shanghainese, which a language unto itself, unintelligible even to most Chinese ears). During the fourth year at BUCM, in addition to endless days in the classroom staring at copied-and-pasted together PowerPoint presentations (many bore their dates of creation on the first slide, and could be a decade old or more!), we also had to cart ourselves to the hospitals once or twice a week for 见习/jianxi, which you might call "watching and doing," but which actually mostly involves "standing around watching the clock." I mean, literally. Numerous times we showed up at this or that department of the hospital to be met by staff who were rather shocked to suddenly see ten or fifteen laowai of various stripes show up expecting to be taught. "Huh, nobody told us you were coming today," they'd say, looking confused, overworked, and as though they desperately hoped we'd go away. Sometimes we did just leave; other times we stuck around, probably because there's not much fun to be had in the vicinity of 安贞门, and quite frequently the doctors would pleasantly surprise us (dripping sarcasm) by doing what? Why, by busting out a computer and one of those decade-old PPTs we'd already seen in the classroom and forcing us to sit through it a second time. Can you even really blame them? They probably really didn't get told we were coming, certainly don't get paid enough, and were more or less treated just the same way themselves back when they were students wasting the blossoms of their youths.

 

Anyway, on the day I'm thinking of, we actually happened to luck out and end up in a department that was organized enough to split our class into a few groups and have us follow different doctors as they went from sick bed to sick bed, making sure that people were still alive, taking their meds, etc. In all honesty, this sort of thing was boring beyond belief and often irrelevant to our education, because most of what we saw was almost 100% western medicine-based, and few of the docs really wanted to take the time to teach us anything. We were just tag-alongs. But whatever. That's not the point of the story. The point is to give you an image that will sear into your minds just what kind of work ethic one finds in Number Three Affiliated Hospital of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine (北京中医药大学第三附属医院, known to student as 三府医院). And I promise you, I'm about to do just that.

 

But before I do, let me set the scene just a bit more. The inpatient building in Number Three Affiliated Hospital is definitely not the grimmest, dirtiest, crowdedest, or darkest hospital I've been to in China, but it's not exactly what I'd call a happy place, either. It's in an old, ill-kept building, insufficiently lit, and grimy to the point that I swear to you: I once took a panorama photograph of a bathroom that looked like an improvised explosive device had gone off in the middle of it. No, seriously. It was that, or else somebody on methamphetamines had jump kicked every single damageable surface while imagining he was Bruce Lee handing it to a roomful of Japanese ghosties. And no, that bathroom wasn't "temporarily out of order." It was always like that; that's where you went if you wanted to piss while on that floor and in that department, any day of the week, forever. Don't even ask if there was soap in there. Actually, don't even ask if there was soap in any of the bathrooms in the entire Beijing University of Chinese Medicine campus, save for one single bathroom in the Int'l College that got soap about a year ago. Somehow when Our Glorious Leader Mao Zedong came up with the brilliant idea of combining Chinese and western medicine, somebody missed the little memo about hand washing. Or maybe Mao just didn't like to wash his hands and secretly banned soap. Who knows. (But seriously: a 21st century med school with no f*cking soap in the bathrooms? Pffffft.)

 

So, back to my story, it's a beautiful spring day, I'm in some dark, dank Number Three Hospital gomer ward, a doctor who couldn't care less is droning on, and I begin to lose focus on the lecture. I let my eyes start to wander around the room, and suddenly I notice an odd, Jackson Pollock-esque splotch on the wall in front of me, perhaps eight feet off the ground. It's an interesting mostly brown, rust-colored apparition, the sort of shape you might expect to see on a Rorscharch test. Something about the way it spread its tendrils onto the filthy, ex-white paint suggested movement, and as I was absent-mindedly gazing into its center, I suddenly noticed that it had a brother. Yes, a mere two feet above, there was another Jackson Pollock splatter awaiting my eyes. Most interesting. Now, if there's one thing I can say nice about the Stalinist architecture style that buildings from that era of Beijing reflect, it's that they often had high ceilings. This hospital is no exception, and at about 12 feet off of the ground, I notice, hey, a third splotch! By now I was like Hansel and Gretel on a trail of crumbs, and as I reached the corner between the wall and ceiling, my eyes were practically sprinting with curious expectation: would there be even more blobs on the ceiling, too?

 

Why, yes there were! Several of them, in fact, all the same brownish-reddish color, all of them looking like what you'd get if you filled a Super Soaker with ketchup and squeezed the trigger for half a second at a point on the wall, and then let the ketchup just sit there forever and gradually oxidize and turn brown and you never clean it up. But then again, what kind of nutjob would bring a Super Soaker full of ketchup to Number Three Affiliated Hospital of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine? Can you even get Super Soakers in Beijing, or are they classified as subversive, or perhaps as potential flame throwers? And why didn't anybody clean... wait a seconnnddd...

 

As I was having that thought, the medical sleuth in me--call me 家医生, if you will--suddenly realized. Whoa. Son. We ain't in Kansas, and that ain't ketchup. No sir. Sir, I do believe that what you're looking at is the high-pressure spray of arterial blood, pumped out from a gaping puncture on some mortally wounded patient's body, hitting the wall and then ceiling at intervals perfectly timed to the poor, unfortunate soul's last, dying heartbeats. One, two, three, four, five, six... no more, no less. Did they close the wound? Did the massive blood loss mean that there was insufficient fluid or pressure for a seventh blood splatter to have made it onto the ceiling? Did... did... did...

 

I snapped myself out of it and tapped another American classmate--I'ma call him Jean--on the shoulder. Looking at me through the bleary eyes of a man who couldn't be more bored if he was putting coversheets on his TPS Reports, Jean said, "huh, what?" I nodded my chin in the direction of the first splat. Again, "yeah, huh, so, what?" I nodded my chin again, this time higher. Jean's eyes began the slow and then ever quickening crawl up the wall, to the ceiling, and then right back to meet my gaze. Trust me, these were some big, vigorous splashes. The moment you noticed them, your brain immediately started whirring, asking the question Jean immediately presented me with: "what the $#*& is that?"

 

"I dunno man. I think it's aterial blood spray," I said, trying to sound scientific. I didn't want to look stupid in front of Jean, who had in fact studied pre-med when he was an undergrad in the States.

 

Jean took another look up, and then back at me, his lips now curled in total disgust. I guess my science was on point, because he was somehow both nodding in agreement and shaking his head in disgust and disappointment at the very same time. "How... the $*&^... does this hospital let somebody spray blood all over the room... and then never... ever... clean it up?"

 

"How long do you think that blood has been up there, man," I asked.

 

"I dunno, looks like it could be years. Maybe longer." Remember, these markings were not red. They were the color of old iron. At least we know that the victim likely wasn't anemic. Lots of healthy hemoglobin. Till said hemoglobin was ejected at 120mmHg of pressure onto the wall, that is.

 

I looked around the claustrophobic room. There were four beds, two on each wall, with just enough room for a small table at the head of each of them. Between the beds was a distance of no more than 1.5 meters, which was currently crammed with about seven or eight students and a doctor or two, not to mention a few patients' family members perched on tiny stools. I imagined being a patient in one of those chipped, dingy old beds, ticking the hours in that moribund hospital away, contemplating my own frailty and mortality, wondering if I could trust the quality of medical care I was getting... and all the while, gazing endlessly upwards at a ceiling that had been painted in defiance of gravity by a previous patient's heart as its own desperate attempts to combat rapidly falling blood pressure inadvertently sped the rate at which the stuff of life was ejected from the body and onto the cold, fluorescent light-lit plaster. I imagined being a very unhappy and very afraid patient in that hospital.

 

Then I thought about how, over the years, how not once or twice but hundreds and, yes, thousands of times, doctors, administrators, nurses, cleaners, and all other types of staff had passed in and out of that room, and nobody had managed to say, "hey, somebody get this damn gigantic blood stain off the wall and ceiling--stat!" No, the blood was just left there to fade into the background of a place where, "not my problem" and "don't give a f*ck" might as well be the mantras... though if we're to be more accurate and use Chinese, then we should say, "算了吧，没办法，这毕竟也不是我的责任."

 

And you see, it is that attitude--that "we'll just leave gushing blood here for Father Time to take care of" attitude--which awaits you for your hospital internships at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. You are Time's responsibility. You arrive in July, and you will leave in June. In all the months between, the only thing that prevents you from remaining in an eternal limbo like some sort of errant shade too poor to cross the River Styx or unbaptized baby, is Time itself. For there is no promise that anybody there will even so much as notice if you skip one month of your internship or two... or perhaps even nine months, as I estimate was the number in the case of one the young woman who had been the hardest working, highest achieving, highest grade-receiving student in my class before she became utterly jaded and broken down and cynical by the BUCM farce. And if nobody even notices if you exist or not, do you think your chances of finding people who can and will teach you anything of value in those hospitals are high?

 

If you're thinking about enrolling in BUCM, or wondering if maybe you should drop out while you're still in your first year... well... consider those odds.

[abcdefg]

Reminds me of "House of God." It was a popular read when I was in medical school, even though our situation was a thousand times better than yours.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_God 

[Simple truth]

Hi. I am a current student of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine BUCM. I am doing integrated Chinese and Western medicine bachelors program taught in English. I came here only with one agenda to warn everyone who is thinking of signing up for any program offered by that institution. Honestly i wouldn't even know where to start telling my story if i wanted to. So many bad, weird and unpleasant memories from my years of study in here. The teaching system, the ridiculous attitude of the teachers who are not able to speak in the language that program is actually held in (not all of them of course), the administration, accommodation, the constant pressure u had to deal with and on top of that the most polluted city in the world is just not worth it. Seriously unless you are receiving the full scholarship and that is the only option on earth that is left for you avoid BUCM at all cost. I have seen a previous post from BIGTOPS and i agree 100% with his message. Believe me that 90% of students are ending up really unsatisfied after getting to know the policies that BUCM is made upon. I hope that there will be more of our school mates to share their stories in the future but honestly i think most of the people are so burned out after graduation that they just simply want to forget about all that said experience. I say it once again AVOID BUCM...

[bigtops]

@abcdefg, yes, I read that book--that's where I got the term "gomer" from, and indeed learned what a gomer is. Ah, what a terrible word--but yes, they exist in Chinese hospitals, too, but no doctors will ever tell you what they are if you're a foreign student. I kept wondering why they kept moving from ward to ward, their weird diagnoses changing, and the doctors hemming and hawing when I asked why they were taking meds that had nothing to do with their diagnoses. Then I read House of God and everything started to make sense. Now, as for how that book compares with my experience, I'll put it this way: take House of God, stir in some Kafka and some One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and well, that's pretty much it.

 

@Simple truth, I feel your pain, believe me. I am grateful that you took the time to register here and share your opinion. It's important for the word to spread about Beijing University of Chinese Medicine/北京中医药大学, otherwise they'll continue defrauding unlucky students for years to come. I hope that you manage to make it out of there with your health and sanity intact, and that you manage to learn some of what you came seeking, in spite of all the bad things there. If you ever have any questions, feel free to shoot me a private message.

[SoSimple]

Came here to offer my first hand experience at BUCM.  I read all of Bigtop's posts and I can verify as a first hand witness many of the accounts he spoke of.  Although I don't have as much of a knack for eloquent story telling as him, I'll offer my personal experiences in the hopes that I may save some poor soul from going through what I had to.  I would like to add that I'm the kind of person that never posts to forums, but I feel compelled in this situation.

 

To start off, I'd like to reiterate that although Bigtop's posts may seem far fetched and unbelievable, I can assure you that the truth is stranger than fiction sometimes.  Sadly, this is one of those cases.

 

My education started Fall 2011 and ended 2016.  I chose to enroll in the herbal TCM program.  There's only two choices anyhow: acupuncture or herbs.  They are close enough and the education is bad enough that it really doesn't matter which one you choose.  You won't be able to treat anyone with either herbs or acupuncture when you graduate.

 

I lived off campus for five years so I can't personally attest to any of the dorm room horror stories.  However, I knew enough people living in the dorms to confirm the horrid state of on campus housing.  In retrospect, it's kind of ironic that people lost years of their life stressing over housing when the housing itself really wasn't very nice.  I mean, it's passable, you get your own bathroom, but that's about it.  It's not particularly spacious, the furniture is old and decrepit, overall a 6/10 if I'm being generous.

 

I'm not even sure where to begin so I'll just offer up my thoughts on a few topics related to the university.

 

1) Education

Those wishing to learn authentic TCM will be very disappointed.  The majority of studying hours is spent initially on language.  The overall curriculum is more than 50% biomedicine.  It seems as if they are more worried about their students being able to sound smart in terms of modern scientific medicine rather than actually teaching what we went to the university to learn.  Unfortunately the biomed part of the program is just not enough for you to have any real depth of knowledge.  

 

As far as the TCM portion, it flat out stinks.  The basis of TCM lies in understanding the laws of nature.  When you apply those laws to the human body and health and disease, that's what we call TCM.  Unfortunately for us, the cultural revolution came along and largely wiped out anything traditional.  In their attempt to "catch up" to the west, they eradicated people, traditions, and ways of thinking related to ancient wisdom (that includes TCM).  In fact, they almost wiped out TCM entirely until a few doctors fought for its survival and proved that it did indeed have clinical value.  So now you have this situation where the current institution wants to wipe out traditional knowledge, but on the other hand, this traditional medicine does seem to work.  What do we do now?  How can we show that biomedicine and TCM are actually the same thing?  How can we prove that our stuff works and at the same time not get laughed at by the westerners?  MORE SCIENCE!!  So the powers to be quite literally molded the current TCM education (the one they teach currently at all universities) with a huge emphasis on the current western biomedical paradigm (i'll save my rant on bio medicine for another time, but I'm sure you all are aware of its shortcomings).  Long story short, if you enroll at BUCM, your core base of knowledge will be bio medicine, but on the outside you will be wearing a coat of TCM.  You will use acupuncture and herbs, but you will never understand with a true depth of knowledge and wisdom how the body really works.

 

2) Administration

Imagine a bunch of people that don't give a fuck about you and you need their help.

 

3) Food

You'd think the cafeterias at the Beijing University of Chinese MEDICINE would have a slightly healthier option.  NOPE.

 

4) Nightlife

Ain't gonna lie, it's pretty dope.  Clubs are usually free for foreigners, plenty of nice dining options if you got some cash to spare, very safe at night, overall a great vibe.  Too bad they moved all the new students to the new campus location at the outskirts of the city and it takes a 2 hour bus ride to get anywhere with any semblance of a nightlife.  Yea I'm serious.  

 

5) What you need to do to actually learn this medicine

Forgot to talk about this earlier.  I will say, without exaggeration, that 95% of my actual clinical training and hands on experience came OUTSIDE of the university.  Those that truly love this medicine will find a way.  In my case, I attended seminars held outside the school and practiced with students on my own time.  The bulk of what I consider my true TCM knowledge came from self study.  You need to find someone to help you along because this medicine is too damn confusing for you to decipher yourself.  If you stick to the school curriculum you will be doomed to a life of shallow and poor results after you start practicing.  Fortunately, we live in the information age.  Unfortunately, google and youtube are blocked in China so you need to get a vpn.  

 

In closing, I went there for a diploma.  I learned very little from the school curriculum.  You will have zero confidence in your skills after you graduate unless you find another way.  You will have zero knowledge on what TCM really is and how it's meant to be practiced.  BUT, you will have taken the prerequisite steps for you to be on this path.  You will have paid your dues.  You will most likely meet wonderful people along the way.  You will get the experience of living in a foreign country.  (Notice how all the positives have nothing to do with the university itself)

[Zbigniew]

3 hours ago, SoSimple said:

How can we prove that our stuff works and at the same time not get laughed at by the westerners?  MORE SCIENCE!!  So the powers to be quite literally molded the current TCM education (the one they teach currently at all universities) with a huge emphasis on the current western biomedical paradigm (i'll save my rant on bio medicine for another time, but I'm sure you all are aware of its shortcomings).  Long story short, if you enroll at BUCM, your core base of knowledge will be bio medicine, but on the outside you will be wearing a coat of TCM.  You will use acupuncture and herbs, but you will never understand with a true depth of knowledge and wisdom how the body really works.

I'm sorry to hear about your and others' negative experience of the college. However, I'm struggling to see how cross-fertilisation between the biomedical and TCM fields can be a bad thing. I'm also confused how, ultimately, you can "understand with a true depth of knowledge and wisdom how the body really works" without relying on empirical scientific methodology. 

[SoSimple]

33 minutes ago, Zbigniew said:

I'm sorry to hear about your and others' negative experience of the college. However, I'm struggling to see how cross-fertilisation between the biomedical and TCM fields can be a bad thing. I'm also confused how, ultimately, you can "understand with a true depth of knowledge and wisdom how the body really works" without relying on empirical scientific methodology. 

 

I wasn't very careful in my wording.  And this isn't really the venue for really delving into this topic in detail.

 

I'll try to keep it short and sweet.  TCM is scientific, but not by modern science's standards.  It's basis lies in philosophy, in particular, the philosophy of yin/yang, or the duality of the universe.  I personally think it's more of a scientific philosophy as it describes all material phenomena in the universe.  It's just more open ended and less microscopic than the modern definition of science.  Therefore it allows for more freedom and flexibility in how you can apply it (which is crucial in something as complex as medicine).  

 

The crux of delving into the deepest knowledge of TCM relies as much on intuitive reflection and meditation than it does on intellectual study.  It requires the practitioner to have a mind that can tune into the finer rhythms of the universe as a source of wisdom and knowledge.  It is refined by intellectual study which is in turn refined once again through emptying the mind.

 

By entirely dismissing this portion of the medicine (which I personally believe is far more important than the intellectual side) there is no way to gain access to a deeper knowledge.  By trying to meld this natural philosophical science into modern day's material science you lose what makes TCM so effective and marvelous (it's ability to turn the complex into simple).  Material science by definition is exact, and that is exactly its problem.  It is too exact and it often times misses the point entirely.

 

Of course you want to verify your results as scientifically as possible in order to not fool yourself into believing something erroneous.  This is another topic for another time.

[Avaloki]

BUCM is a fucking joke, don't go there. 

 

I attended this university for 8 YEARS (5 for bachelors, 3 for masters) and apart from the great time I've had with friends, you learn JACK SHIT in this university. The only reasons I stuck around was because I found good doctors outside the university to learn from, and I met a great number of fantastic friends. Onto the topic, the entire education system here is a FRAUD. To be honest, I don't even know where to begin to start telling you guys how bad of a joke this university is. They teach you ONLY book knowledge, but guess what? Patients don't fall sick according to what the TCM textbooks say, so after learning for 8 years, if I hadn't been learning from great doctors outside the university, I would be a clueless dick as to how to treat patients, because none of them look like they fit into any of the categories in the books. I know many people who graduated from the university, and they are clueless as to how to treat patients. 

 

Before I get started, first thing you have to understand about Chinese people currently residing in the mainland is that 99.5% of them are cosplayers. They pretend to be friendly, hard working, and diligent, except nothing could be further from the truth. They want NO RESPONSIBILITIES thrown on their shoulders, and will not give you a helping hand if they can help it. They will pass all responsibilities to the next person, and make you go around in a huge circle only for you to come back and finally tell them that they are the only one who can help you with your problem, and then they will reluctantly give you a hand. True testimony: Friend went to apply for something at some office in Beijing, and calls beforehand asking what materials he needed to bring. Woman speaks like she just wants to hang up and get the convo over with, and  tells some wishy washy info. Friend goes to office, and finds out she didn't mention several piece of paper he needed to print out. Woman has a printer next to her, but tells  friend to go home and print it out and then bring it over. Friend told her he took over an hour to get here by bus. Woman doesn't give a shit and tells him to go back and print it. Friend stays there and argues with her for 30 minutes, finally making her lose enough face that she reluctantly printed it out. Took her 30 seconds. But no, they just don't want to help you if they can help it. 

 

1. Most of the staff there are NOT HELPFUL. As I said, they don't want to help you with your problems. They tell you to go find someone else. You go find that other person, only to have to wait for one hr for them to come back from whatever the fuck they're doing （I'm sure it isn't work） or for them to tell you to go find someone else, or find the person who told you to come find this person, because it was their responsibility after all. So, too bad so sad for you, you're stuck with a bunch of people who don't want to help you, especially if you're a newcomer.

 

2.The campus itself is run down. When I first entered the campus, it was like some run down old town. The buildings smell like piss and shit, and you climb stairs to get to your classrooms. There are only like 3 buildings with elevators in the entire campus. I often see handicapped students struggling to climb up the stairs to get to their classrooms. The gymnasium is rented out to outsiders to play badminton all day, because this gets them money. The gymnasium is not for students to use, sorry. If you want to rent a badminton court, cough up 60 RMB per hour like everyone else, or see ya later. The cafeteria food sucks, full of MSG, you get so thirsty after eating there.

 

3. They promise you a dorm, yet they rent it out first come first serve, and if you're not put in a room, you either share rooms with people, or are asked to find a place off campus, by yourself. Imagine if you don't speak Chinese. Oh, and by the way, the staff of the International department of BUCM, about 95% of them don't speak English. And when you graduate from bachelors, they kick you out of dorm because they want to replace you with new students, because, of course, the new students are more important than the ones that have stuck around for 5 years and are really into TCM and trying to do a master's degree. 

 

4. They tell you you're going to get lots of hands on practice. You're NOT. You spend your time in the hospitals doing jack shit, because the doctors and teachers there think you're an international student, and you're here just to get a diploma, and they're not going to let you do shit. Come now, what if you needle someone and they get some punctured organ? They don't want to be the doctor in charge of a student who makes this accident. You think the doctors there are going to teach all of you one by one and walk you through everything step by step, when they got so many patients they need to needle, as well as many students they need to take care of? No, they're not. So they're going to get you to clean and scrub the cupping and scraping equipment WITHOUT GLOVES, and attach electrical nodes to the needles, and pull needles out. That's all you're going to be doing, for months. Free labor, period. You're paying a whooping 35k to 38k rmb per year, to do free labor for doctors and learn nothing. The only way you're going to learn real things is if you go out and find classes by yourself, or if you find a good teacher who actually is willing to teach you and help you understand things.

 

5. The dorms suck ass. you can hear what people are doing in their rooms 3 doors next to you. People play guitars, blast speakers, and sing in the hallways. How do you block this out？ Of course, blast your own speakers louder! A lot of the times during winter, you get no hot water to shower with. One winter, there was no hot water for 2 weeks. And after complaining to the staff for 2 weeks with no fucking results (because they kept saying, Oh its not our fault, it's the boiler room's fault, or its the electrician's fault, or its the fault of the Chinese students using up all the hot water in the boilers. Turns out the school wouldn't turn on a boiler for our dormitory because it was going to cost too much electricity. For fucks sake, we pay 2100 per month in our dorm, and the Chinese students pay 900 per YEAR).  I was lucky enough to get the principal's email from having a private talk with him by chance, so I decided to email the principal because shit in China doesn't get done without pressure from the higher ranks. Principal tells me problem solved. That day, I could see all the staff scurrying like little rats and getting their asses to work because they can no longer pass off responsibilities. Hot water was restored one day later. It was that easy.

 

6. Ever heard of SCI? Science Citation Index  (Wikipedia: These are alternatively described as the world's leading journals of science and technology, because of a rigorous selection process). In this University, to graduate from a master's or doctorate program, you need to publish at least one of these papers pertaining to TCM. You first need to know that China's medical system is stupid enough to make every doctor have to write and publish papers to garner attention, receive praise, rise in rank in hospitals, or just to look good. There is tremendous pressure in the entire medical system for wannabe or would-be doctors to write and publish papers. The more papers you publish, the more awesome you look and the more praise (no mainland Chinese doctor that I've met can live without this) you receive. And everyone is under so much pressure to publish papers. So what happens? Data fabrication (Well damn, son, you can't do research on TCM like you do for western medicine. Everyone has their own TCM constitution, and there are so many factors you need to look at and take into consideration in TCM, and plus every single individual is so unique by themselves, that it is impossible to do a standardized data collection and analyze all of this shit and put it in a paper with good looking data without editing the data to make it look good, because it never looks very good, and GUESS WHAT? Your teacher or superiors don't take "bad looking data" for a yes, so you edit it to make it look good, because you don't publish papers in China that tells something doesn't work. I'm  dead serious about this), stupid research ideas, and paying people to write papers for you. This happens everywhere in China, and  in America, Chinese SCI papers are known as Stupid Chinese Ideas. I was forced to change some data for a paper I wrote for my professor during my graduate studies.

 

7. Cheating is everywhere in BUCM. The front of your desk is stuck to the back of the seat in front of you, so by reaching your hand out, you can touch the back of the guy sitting in front of you. So what do you do during tests? Look over his shoulder and copy! Or bring textbooks and cheat sheets into class, and go for it! Why? Because when you get caught, there is no record, and you just get a 0, but you can retake the test next term! Small risk for huge reward. Sometimes the teachers just take away your cheat sheets and you're allowed to keep writing. Glad to know many doctors you see in Chinese hospitals graduated from cheating over and over again. I've witnessed no less than 20-30 people cheat on tests during my time in BUCM, and I've witnessed over 10 get caught red handed, but no real reprimands. They still got their scholarships from the school. How very thoughtful. So, are you going to be the non-cheater? You get good on tests and the school rewards you with a fat wad of cash. You gonna compete against the cheaters by not cheating on a test that requires you to memorize the properties of 300 herbs? They're gonna get 90+ and you'll end up with 70+ and they will finish the year with a fat 25,000 RMB scholarship, while honest you are going to walk away empty handed?

 

8. On the plus side, the teachers, for the most part, do teach well in classes, but they teach whatever is on the textbook. That's nothing special, you can read the textbooks yourself and ask a senior and they'll be able to teach you the stuff just as well. 

 

9. The teachers take attendance! If in one term you miss out on 3 attendances for a particular course, the teachers have the right to give you 0 on your finals. So much for treating us like adults?

 

10. The university just built a new sub campus. The sub campus is way in the suburbs, near the factories, full of smog away from city center. As of last year, when you arrive at the school,. you're going to be stuck in a campus in the middle of nowhere, with practically no city life, breathing in deep lungfuls of pm 2.5, and not knowing what Beijing City life is really like. It takes you at least one hour to get to city center. The only people you'll know are your classmates and teachers. So much for life after class. You go back to dorm and study and sleep. Walk out of campus, and there's only a bus stop. Believe me, it's ugly

 

I can keep going on, but I'm tired of spewing out shit about the university, but there really aren't much good things to say about BUCM, so what else can I say?

Do yourself a favor, and don't get tricked to coming to to this university. Or if you do, go find a good doctor outside of the hospital system, and learn real TCM from them, and go to good seminars and classes outside the school that actually teach stuff.

 

TL;DR     This university sucks, don't go. Save precious time for yourself. Everything there is superficial. Deeper down, it's all shit.

 

[roddy]

The above post (from Avaloki) got delayed as I'd suggested toning it down substantially for the sake of credibility (which hasn't happened). And then I forgot about it while I was on holiday. Apologies for said delay.

 

Generally I'm dubious about long angry rants - they seem often to be coming from people who had unreasonable expectations in the first place. BUCM does however seem to have some particular issues, as more calmly presented by bigtops on the previous page.

[bigtops]

@roddy @Avaloki

 

Roddy, thank you for putting that up. Avaloki, thanks for the time and the effort it took you to write all that. I know some readers might be put off by the strong language, but I know Avaloki well and personally witnessed a lot of what he described. I'm inspired to add a few thoughts here.

 

The freezing showers in the winter for no good reason?

Yep, I was there for all of that. This entirely preventable problem dragged on and on and on until Avaloki got in touch with the president of the university, which was only possible because they happened to know each other personally. This was just one of many dorm catastrophes. The summer before last I told that my dorm room bathroom would be renovated. This took three full weeks, because numerous bathrooms were being renovated at once. When the work started, workers put a cloth in the tiny hallway between my bedroom and bathroom--it barely covered the entire space, and had a fist-sized hole in the middle of it. I asked the administrator overseeing this project what the cloth was for and he said to keep dust out and for privacy. I said there was no way that this hanging sheet could stop dust from getting into my bedroom, but he insisted, "there won't be much dust."

 

Well, that night when I came home I realized that they had been pulverizing and power sawing all the (black mold-covered) masonry in the bathroom all day long--as a result of this, literally every inch of my bedroom was covered in a thick layer of dust. It really looked like somebody stuck a hand grenade into a bag of concrete and let it go BOOM in the middle of my room. Can you imagine my emotional state? Not happy. Of course, when I got the administrator in charge all I heard was one of his (and many other BUCM admistrators') favorite refrains, "you must understand, you must understand!" (你得理解，你得理解！) Understand? I had to browbeat him and another administrator into giving me another place to stay for three weeks, but other people weren't so lucky--there weren't enough free rooms to go around, and many other students had to find a way to sleep in that dusty, unhealthy filth! "你得理解!" Like Avaloki said, you're paying ~$300US/month for the "privilege" of living there!

 

Handicapped students pulling themselves up along hand railings to fourth floor classrooms?

Sadly I witnessed this sight plenty of times. Whenever problems with the physical plant at the university would come up (which was all the time), we would be told, "but our university doesn't have enough money to fix these problems!" I kid you not that even the guys in charge of “后勤" (i.e., they are the ones who distribute the water for showers, make sure electricity gets delivered to the dorms) drive gold-colored 7 series BMWs. Luxury cars line the crowded lanes of the BUCM campus--huge Jaguars, Mercedes, you name it. But there's no elevator in many buildings for the many students who had polio, and the smell of shit wafts so heavily from the library bathrooms that life in the study rooms can be downright nauseating if the wind is going in the wrong direction. 但是你得理解哦！

 

Mean-spirited office staff? Yep.

There is something seriously sick about the BUCM office culture, as I imagine that only people who themselves are treated like dirt find it necessary to in turn bully, sneer at, and lie to the very people whose presence in the school is needed for them to even have a job in the first place! It is truly baffling, because, as I've said before, I had very pleasant interactions with all of the office staff at the Shanghai University of TCM's international school for two years, and I had pleasant personal interactions (and heard good things from friends who graduated there) with the Zhejiang Chinese Medicine University in Hangzhou.

 

Here's a specific example: in 2013, the year I transferred from Shanghai to Beijing (aside: why would I do that? The teaching in SH was unacceptable, because many teachers were not clinicians whatsoever! At least they were honest enough to admit it!), I missed out on the chance to get a 50% discount Beijing public transit card, which international students are eligible for. Nobody told me such a thing even existed (it didn't in Shanghai, so I didn't think to ask) until after I had missed the application deadline. I went to ask my class admin (班主任) about it, and she confirmed lackadaisically that I would have to wait till next year. I politely pointed out that there really needed to be some sort of orientation, or at the very least an info pamphlet, for transfer students, since we didn't get any of the info that freshmen did. She took this as an offense and barked at me, "well, I'm not your nanny!" (那我不是你的保姆呀！) Now, first of all, asking for a new student orientation is not the like asking for some milk and cookies. But beyond that, the whole job of banzhuren IS to be the person who looks out for the well-being of one's students!!! It just made no sense that somebody would be so unnecessarily churlish--and it was a pattern that earned this individual much enmity throughout the student body.

 

Utter lack of clinical training? Yep.

I will reemphasize Avaloki's point about free labor. I personally got lucky, because I was sent to a hospital in my fifth year that didn't really exploit its international students. They didn't teach me a got-damn thing, but hey, evidently nobody told them that was their job. Conversely, there are hospitals like "The Third Affiliated Hospital of BUCM" (第三附屬醫院/better known as "三附" among students) where foreign students are literally treated like corvee labor (now that's a word you don't get to use everyday!). What do I mean? It's just like Avaloki said: for the months that int'l "interns" rotated through the acupuncture clinic, they were given one task and one task only for the entire time: DISHWASHER! Excuse my French, but FUCKING DISHWASHER???!!! No joke. The glass "cups" that are used in TCM "cupping therapy" tend to get gunked up very quickly, because patients are slathered with oil before the cups are affixed, and the cups themselves are filled with soot from the burning cotton wads whose fire creates a vacuum in them before they're affixed to the patients' bodies. Sometimes sweat and ooze comes out of the patients' bodies, and if there is bloodletting involved, there can be quite a lot of blood in the cups after they're used. Since nearly two dozen cups gets used on a patient and since the patients are in and out of there like it was a fast food joint at lunch time, there ends up being a lot of "dishes" that need washing. The docs don't want to do it and the Chinese students generally get a few more clinical responsibilities (well, usually more like clerical responsibilities, to be more accurate--only doctors get to do doctoring, never interns) so they don't have to clean the bloody, sweaty, oily, sooty cups. Thus I cannot tell you how many times I saw my exhausted friends who were assigned to "Third Affiliated Hospital" coming home at the end of a long day angry as all hell. WOULDN'T YOU BE IF YOU PLONKED 35,000RMB ON THE TABLE FOR FIVE YEARS WITH THE PROMISE TO LEARN MEDICINE AND ALL YOU GOT WAS A STIFF LOWER BACK AND RAISINY SKIN DOING SOMEBODY'S DISHES!? I mean, it really and truly baffles the mind that this university gets away with this crap year in and year out.

 

Rampant cheating? Yep.

Some of the cheating in our tests was so blatant that people were talking about test questions without bothering to lower their voices. Sometimes it was so blatant that students sat and looked things up on their phones on Baidu. It was endemic. When I once suggested to the "I'm not your nanny" administrator that the school should really change the way it designs its tests so that they assess students' ability to think and demonstrate clinical skill instead of the ability to blindly memorize mostly-useless factoids, she told me that I should try and "stop worrying and love the bomb" like a particular Canadian student in my year. She told me that he, like me, used to see the tests as tremendous wastes of time that yielded nothing of value to aspiring clinicians. However, according to her, he had not "come to see the light," and no longer complained about the tests, and was even getting great grades. So happy this young man! My jaw was almost on his desk as I heard her extolling this guy's virtues, because he was one of the most blatant cheaters anybody could think of, and he certainly had a very low opinion of the university. I kept my mouth shut rather than sell him out... what would've been the point? The place is beyond fixing, anyway.

 

Since I (thankfully) did not to grad school there, the only thing I can say I saw firsthand was the problems with falsification of research for publication in SCI journals, but...

Early on in my TCM studies, around 2012 or so, I listened to a lecture given by a PhD student at the Shanghai University of TCM. I noticed that all of the research she referenced on her PowerPoint presentation came from the early 80s or before. That seemed odd, because science is supposed to make progress, and tens if not hundreds of millions (or billions?) of dollars have gone into the "scientificization of TCM" since the gory days of Mao. I asked her why she was using 30-year-old research, and she replied, "after the Reform and Opening Up" program in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, academia became too polluted with the desire for money, and research stopped being trustworthy. In TCM we generally don't trust anything published after 1983 or 1984. I encountered this exact sentiment time and time again all the way up till my graduation in 2017!

 

Taking attendance

Not only is it weird and annoying to have one's attendance be taken by professors who just sit and read PowerPoint presentations that other people made via Copy-and-Paste 10 years ago, but it is arbitrary. Two quick examples. The woman in my class with the highest grades and best attendance (till she became utterly jaded in her final two years and stopped giving a shit) was once given a very low grade in a class because supposedly she had missed a high number of classes. She had no recourse. The professor's arbitrary word was final, even though anybody could tell you that she was almost never absent. The second story is worse. For quite awhile my class had a "class chairman" (班長) who was a weird, conniving asshole in his 50s who loved snitching and getting in people's business. He took distinct pleasure in his duty to take role. One day in the classroom where a final exam was to be administered he boldly marched to the front of the room, handed the professor a list of which students in the class he'd determined had missed more than three days, and insisted that they not be allowed to sit for the exam. At first she demured--she truly didn't give a shit about attendance--but the weird "chairman" who was older than her persisted until she gave in and forbade the students (who had all studied, or at least prepared to cheat, for the exam they believed they would be taking that day!!) from taking the test. As a result, they failed the semester and had to deal with all that mess later on. In these two anecdotes one sees one thing that is rife at BUCM in full effect: arbitrariness. Caprice reigns supreme there, and it will do wonders to raise your blood pressure.