By John Webster, Life Member, Professor Emeritus, Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Editor’s Note: Xi’an Jiaotong University School of Life Sciences and Technology (SLST) was founded in 1978 and is a pioneer in the field of biomedical engineering in China. Two of its eight affiliated teaching hospitals are ranked among China’s top 100 hospitals. It is one of two Universities in Western China that rank in the top 15 comprehensive research universities worldwide. They have an alliance with Washington University in St. Louis.
In 1980, I received an invitation to come to China for a month. A group of Chinese biomedical engineers and officials met us upon arrival and greeted us. We flew to Xi’an, far up the Yangtze River in the Chinese interior. Our host, Dazong Jiang of Xian Jiaotung University, assembled a conference of 300 biomedical engineers from all over China. Each morning, a private car with a white-gloved driver navigated through heavy throngs of bicyclists, taking me from the Russian-built hotel for foreigners to Xi’an Jiaotung University.
I lectured using slides from my textbook. After I would speak a sentence, a translator would repeat it in Chinese. I could tell how many listeners knew English because, occasionally, I would tell a joke, and about one-third of the class would immediately laugh; many Chinese people had served as translators for the United States during World War II.
During my visit to their research labs, I saw a U.S. or European electrocardiograph with about 15 workers disassembling and analyzing it so that they could learn to design and manufacture their own. In the next lab, that sequence of activity was repeated for a ventilator and continued for other medical devices such as an X-ray machine, anesthesia machine, and electrosurgical unit, among others.
Exploring China
After the lectures, both my wife Nancy and I very much enjoyed being taken to Chinese schools and meeting staff, touring electronics factories, attending musical performances, and going to dinners and historical sites, such as Banpo Neolithic Village, Wild Goose Pagoda, Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Warriors, and Tang Tombs. In the countryside, we saw farmers winnowing wheat by tossing it into the air from woven trays and then spreading the berries on the road so that trucks and cars could run over them, separating the wheat from the chaff.
During our stay in Xi’an, I would jog around the streets in the early morning, passing groups doing tai chi, the ancient Chinese graceful exercise. In the hot summer, people would bring out their mattresses to sleep on the sidewalk. They would cook on braziers and eat in front of their small houses. Each city block had a single central running water pipe and a central latrine. I saw the beginnings of free enterprise near our hotel. Communists did not permit hiring an assistant because that would be practicing exploitation of labor. But an individual farmer could grow cabbages, bring them in a cart to the city, and sell them on street corners.
We were flown to Beijing to see the Summer Palace and walk the Great Wall, and then to Shanghai to visit hospitals. Our hosts kindly took us on a Yangtze River boat tour to see the notably colorful one-eyed junks. There, we found that in this classless society, there was a first class on the top deck, followed by second and third class decks below.
An Enduring Relationship
Back home, we received requests from our hosts and other faculty to visit us for one or two years at the University of Wisconsin. We welcomed about 12 people during subsequent years, and they attended our class lectures and became involved in our research.
One group had never seen a farm. I drove them about 15 minutes outside Madison, Wisconsin, turned into the first farm, and knocked on the door. The farmer answered the door, and I said, “These people came all the way from China to see your farm: Can you show them your farm?” The farmer seemed to enjoy showing our guests everything—his cows, milking machines, and silos.
A later wave of younger Chinese students came to earn graduate degrees, and it continues to this day.
