Margherita D'Ascanio - SLI participant in 2011
"The teaching style and contents were more interactive than the ones we were used to...and much more participation on behalf of the students was expected in the lectures."
The Summer Law Institute 2011 in Beijing on Intellectual Property and Climate Change has been meaningful, both from a personal and an academic point of view. Among other things, it has confirmed and developed my interest in Human Rights’matters. Indeed the courses of the summer school also offered the opportunity to study and think over some areas that are different from IP and Environmental Law. Problems concerning Fundamental Rights are strongly interrelated to Sustainable Development and International Competition Law and all have interconnected results.
Furthermore, living for one month in a country where human rights violation is a hard subject to argue about, can be useful for all western students to make additional consideration: e.g the claim for universality of Human Rights cannot remain unquestioned. From this point of view, professor Farah also offered to some of us the possibility to get enrolled for an internship within an Administrative Law Firm in Beijing, in order to give us an inside view of the Public Legislation in China.
I highly appreciated the valuable opportunity to discover Chinese professors’and students’ ideas about China’s role in the world, and the chance to ask about their views on Chinese politics and other controversial issues. The teaching style and contents were more interactive than the ones we were used to at the State University in Milan, and much more participation on behalf of the students was expected in the lectures. The effort to find answers, or before this, to guess the right questions, within complex and rich of challenges disciplines, in a context that is not without contrasts, have represented for me the real meaning of travelling: the sense of a research.
After this experience, one of my desires is to work in China for a few months and this brought me to learn Chinese. Learning this language can be an agreeable experience through which you can really get yourself in a different culture and try, little by little, to understand it. Unlike most languages, Chinese has a unique ideographic writing system, which provides visual comprehensibility. The grammatical structure of Chinese is not only logical, but also pragmatic, related to the particular way the Chinese think.
Last, but not least, the People's Republic of China currently shows the fastest growing economy in the world and is widely regarded as the potentially biggest global market player in the twenty-first century. After the Irish crack, it is China that is buying the European countries’ public debt, supporting our currency, and obviously it is not a matter of benevolence. That is why it is well worth to go, no matter which kind of International career we want to undertake.