By H. Jay Burns
Photographs by Steve Stone ’83

Like the vivid hues of spring’s first flowers, the flashes of color in these images of China three decades ago signal big changes to come.

In spring 1981, Professor of Sociology George Fetter took 27 students to China to observe a country in transition. Looking at these photos, taken by trip participant Steve Stone ’83, you can see how reforms under Deng Xiaoping were steering the country toward world economic power.

You see, for example, billboards offering consumer products, like electronics and clothing, for the first time.

Stone kept his Ektachrome slides safe through the years, digitizing them recently and sharing them with Bates Magazine as the trip’s 30th anniversary got him thinking about the experience.

Another student on that landmark Short Term was Paul Marks ’83, and he was back on campus last fall for the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls as new academic centers.

Marks is now CEO of the global aerospace technology firm Argosy International Inc., based in Shanghai. He’s done business in China since 1988, and at the dedication he spoke about that transformational trip with Professor Fetter.

In 1981, Paul Marks ’83 listens to the Bates guide, Mr. Xu. Photograph by Steve Stone ’83.

Back in ’81, most Chinese citizens still had good reason to blend in with the crowd — politically, socially and even sartorially, by wearing bland clothing. The nation was wary after Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution, which had ended in 1976.

The lingering feeling was that “you didn’t want to be identified as the next possible target if the political winds changed again,” says Margaret Maurer-Fazio, the college’s Stangle Professor of Applied Economics and an expert on China.

Paul Marks, here talking with students during a Bates Career Development Center lunch during his visit in October 2011, has done business in China since 1988. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

If the winds shifted one way, “you wouldn’t want to be accused of being a bourgeois capitalist ‘roader,’” she says. If the wind shifted the other way, “you wouldn’t want to be accused of clinging to feudal Chinese culture.”

So the adults in these photos are wearing mostly unremarkable, drab clothing.

But look at the young children in a traditional classroom: They’re wearing bright orange, blue and rose-color sweaters. A little boy and girl watching a Bates student blow bubbles wear bold red and blue coats.

Like the billboards, it’s a sign of what’s to come.

“In traditional Chinese society, many people would consider themselves lucky to get one new set of clothing each year, on the Chinese New Year,” says Maurer-Fazio, who studies the dramatic impact that economic liberalization has had on China’s labor markets. “And in Mao’s day, the economy was focused on heavy industry, and consumer goods were in short supply.”

In the newly colorful clothing of these children, she says, “you see today’s modern, consumer society.”

“I watched peasants hoe fields adjacent to the runways. The only peasants nearby today are landscapers for the villas by the airport.”

Thirty-one years ago, when Fetter and his students landed at the Beijing Capital Airport to begin their Short Term, the airport wasn’t today’s glorious, gargantuan Norman Foster–designed facility. It was a simpler airport “and a simpler China,” Marks recalled during his address last fall.

“I watched peasants hoe fields adjacent to the runways. The only peasants nearby today are landscapers for the villas by the airport.”

Between Marks and Mike Bonney ’80, chairman of the Board of Trustees, there were jokes aplenty at the dedication ceremony about the Roger Williams’ former identity as a funkadelic dorm, where beer flowed like, well, beer.

As Marks quipped to his friend Liz Drolet ’84, “The contractors handled the remedial aspects of both asbestos removal and beer odor in a technically proficient manner.” The Bill and Hedge, he noted more soberly, are now enlightened by intellect rather than soaked with beer. “Now that’s progress,” Marks notes.

Roger Williams is home to the college’s language programs and Off Campus Study Office, while Hedge houses religious studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

Marks himself was an unenlightened student early in his Bates career. Then came the 1981 Short Term trip to China. It was the second in two years led by Fetter, who once said of his first trip that it was the product of “four years of negotiations and a lifetime of yearning.”

In fact, that first visit was notable enough that Sen. Ed Muskie ’36 spoke about it on the Senate floor. “It is a tribute to Professor Fetter’s commitment to educating American students about a culture so distant but so important in today’s world.”

Children in a classroom wear brightly colored sweaters, a sign of new socioeconomic forces at play.
Photograph by Steve Stone ’83.

Richard Nixon had made his historic visit back in 1972, but it was a trend toward people’s diplomacy — nongovernmental exchanges such as those by Fetter and his students — that did much of the real work of normalizing relations between the U.S. and China through the 1970s and into the ’80s.

Marks’ parents initially objected to his going to China. Up to that point, “my academic performance was not stellar,” Marks said. A long trip to China looked like a boondoggle.

But Fetter had faith in Marks even though there was little obvious reason for it (which is the whole point of faith, anyway). He called Marks’ parents, promising that the experience would change the course of their son’s life.

It did. “Everything was different and amazing,” Marks recalled. During five weeks in Beijing and other cities, “I became hooked on China. I wanted to understand this chaotic, totally different world.” Marks had grown up in New York City, where the music of the city was honking horns and emergency sirens. Beijing was a “city of bicycle bells — not the Beijing of today.”

In cities and villages in 1981, bicycles were still the dominant mode of transportation. Beijing was “a city of bicycle bells,” Marks recalls, “not the Beijing of today.” Photograph by Steve Stone ’83.

Marks returned to Bates eager to learn Chinese, but Bates didn’t have a Chinese language program. What the college had, as noted in the 1981 Catalog, was a “Self-Instructional Program in Less Commonly Taught Languages.”

In practice, the “program” was a black book in French professor and foreign-language chair Dick Williamson’s office, which he would flip through to find someone able or willing to teach a language not offered in the curriculum of French, German, Russian and Spanish.

Marks’ first instructor was the wife of a Taiwanese dentist in town. She tried to teach him Mandarin, “and I tried to teach her how to teach.” Marks was soon joined by CJ May ’80 as the college’s first students of Mandarin.

For Marks, the late Williamson’s help, along with Fetter’s and history professor Ernest Muller’s, represented the college’s can-do spirit. It’s also “typical,” Marks says. “Professors go beyond the call of duty to find opportun-ities for their students to engage, explore and find themselves.”

Today, Marks says he’s encouraged by strides in Chinese instruction and Asian-focused academic programs and opportunities at Bates. “You can be quite proud — I am quite proud — to see where the college’s journey has arrived.”

Back in 1981, the Bates group’s official guide, Mr. Xu, told Marks that foreigners never learn their language. Marks rose to the challenge, betting the guide five bucks that he could indeed learn Mandarin.

“Mr. Xu owes me five bucks. Or 31.7 RMB.”

Professor of Philosophy Mark Okrent gets a close look as board chairman Mike Bonney '80 (left) and President Nancy Cable do the ribbon cutting. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

The journey of Paul Marks ’83 from Bates to China, and from being “a fairly unengaged student” to an international business leader, made an ideal narrative for the ceremonial reopening of Roger Williams and Hedge halls, facilities newly repurposed for the academic exploration of border crossings — borders national, cultural, philosophical, spiritual, disciplinary.

• Video: Paul Marks ’83 and fellow speakers at the dedication

Now based in Shanghai and CEO of the global aerospace technology firm Argosy Inc., Marks was one of Bates’ first students to graduate with a China-focused history major. His address at the dedication ceremony recounted how a Short Term trip to China in 1981, 30 years ago this year, was the challenge that set him on his life’s path.

Remarks by Bates board chair Michael Bonney ’80, college President Nancy Cable and Student Government President Cosmin Ghita ’12 were also on the program for the dedication late Thursday afternoon. Two symbolic acts completed the ceremony, as the faculty and staff who are the buildings’ stakeholders received honorary keys to Hedge and the Bill, and a ribbon-cutting made their reopening official.

Paul Marks '83 speaks to the dedication audience about his defining experience in China in 1981. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

As Marks recalled, his parents were not thrilled about the notion of his going to China. It took the persuasive powers of Professor of Sociology George Fetter, who had arranged Bates’ first-ever Short Term expedition to China two years previous, to bring them around.

Fetter had promised Marks that the trip would “change his life.” That prediction came true. During five weeks in China, Marks told his listeners, “I became hooked on China. I wanted to understand this chaotic, totally different world.”

Part of the attraction was a spur to his competitive spirit from the group’s Chinese guide, who insisted that the foreigners couldn’t learn the language. Marks rose to the challenge, betting the guide five bucks that he could indeed learn Mandarin. With his first instructor at Bates an adjunct faculty member who was the wife of a local Taiwanese dentist, Marks became Bates’ first student of the Chinese language, and continued his studies as a postgraduate.

In his welcome, Bonney, CEO of the pharmaceuticals firm Cubist, stated the theme for this celebration of two new academic buildings. “Faculty at Bates are helping students [prepare] to live, to work, to think, to lead and ultimately to solve problems in the global society. These two buildings are spaces that foster that kind of learning.”

“The decision to renovate these buildings was not an easy decision, Bonney said, owing to their age and condition after years of hard use as residence halls. “And yet we stand here today with two remarkable buildings that do honor to our history, but also position us beautifully for the future.”

Bonney was the right person to situate the buildings’ symbolic role in the context of time, as his family has been associated with Bates for nearly a century, roughly the same amount of time that the Bill and Hedge have been here. (And he and Marks, who were both students during Roger Bill’s heyday as a meeting place for, let’s say, joie de vivre, took the opportunity to point out that a benefit of the renovation was the elimination of the spilled-beer smell.)

Board chair Mike Bonney presents a symbolic key to Roger Williams Hall to Spanish professor Claudia Aburto Guzmán. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

“These two academic buildings, and the campus at large, are powered by Bates faculty,” Cable told the 175 or so listeners gathered in a tent on Alumni Walk, near the Bill and Hedge. “It is the faculty’s attention to the individual that makes the Bates experience so vitally special and distinctive academically.

“Paul’s stories inform our sense of what lasts over time, from the simple connection of a faculty member to a student, the heart of what we do.”

The ceremony began with international students Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12 of Kabul, Afghanistan, and Romina Istratii ’12 of Athens, Greece, welcoming the Bates community in their native languages (Istratii, anticipating Marks’ subject, also offered a greeting in Chinese, which she is studying at Bates).

Ghita, of Bucharest, Romania, touched on the chilly dampness of the day in his remarks, bringing the thought neatly around to the ceremony’s theme of global citizenship. “Cultures around the world perceive rain as an omen of good fortune,” he pointed out. “I never would have known that had I not immersed myself in the study of another language.”

Speaking at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26, following an Olin Arts Center screening of the documentary Food, Inc., Gary Hirshberg P’13 is president and “CE-Yo” of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s leading organic yogurt producer.

Hirshberg is the husband of freelance writer Meg Hirshberg and the father of three yogurt eaters, including Bates junior Ethan Hirshberg. Gary Hirshberg is the author of Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World (Hyperion Books, 2008) and a frequent speaker on topics including sustainability, climate change, the profitability of green and socially responsible business, organic agriculture and sustainable economic development.

Offering remarks at the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, Paul Marks ’83 was the first student to study Chinese at Bates. He is chairman and CEO of the aerospace materials maker Argosy International Inc.

Founded in 1988 and headquartered in New York City, Argosy is a leading global supplier and manufacturer of aerospace composite materials, supporting such major aerospace companies as Boeing, Sikorsky and Airbus.

Also on Thursday, George Mitchell offers the Bates Unbounded: Open to the World keynote address at 5:30 p.m.in the Chapel. Mitchell, who served as U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace from January 2009 to May 2011, is one of the most accomplished politicians and diplomats that Maine has produced in recent decades. In 2008 Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential persons in the world.

Mitchell received an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center. He served as U.S. attorney for Maine from 1977 until 1979, and U.S. district judge for Maine in 1979 and 1980.

He was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1980 to complete the unexpired term of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (a member of the Bates class of 1936), who resigned to become secretary of state. Mitchell was elected to a full term in the Senate in 1982 in a stunning come-from-behind victory.

Mitchell left the Senate in 1995 as majority leader after an illustrious career in that body. He led the successful 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, including new controls on acid rain toxins, and wrote the first national oil spill prevention and clean-up law. He was a key player in legislation including the nation’s first child care bill, the low-income housing tax credit program and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

From 1996 to 2000 Mitchell served as the independent chairman of the Northern Ireland Peace Talks. Under his leadership the Good Friday Agreement, a historic accord ending decades of conflict, was agreed to by the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom and the political parties of Northern Ireland.

Mitchell has published four books, including Making Peace (Knopf, 1999), an account of his experience in Northern Ireland.