Far from the fluorescent lights of Shanghai and the history-laden streets of Beijing lies a starkly different China — a China where bicycles are more prevalent than cars and where private family homes with adjoining small farms are more common than sky-high apartment buildings.

Like a waving silk ribbon, the crowd flowed up and down, up and down with a rhythm of passion and consistency. There were infants, parents, students, grandparents, workers, vagabonds, sports teams, security guards, corporate sponsors, ambassadors and too many other attendees to count or describe.

“Adversities only make our country stronger,” the leadership of the All-China Students Federation told the Ivy League Student Delegation in a heartfelt recap of the devastation caused by the Wenchuan Earthquake – a natural disaster that has since left over 65,000 Chinese residents of the Sichuan Province dead, over 4.8 million homeless and over 23,000 missing.

The air was damp and the view clouded by smog, but at about 10:30 p.m. on May 27, 25 students from eight U.S. colleges and universities entered the Capital Hotel in the central city of Beijing, the capital of China. After travelling for 13 hours before landing at the ultra-sustainable Beijing Airport, the students, part of the first-ever Ivy League Student Delegation, enthusiastically began their 10-day excursion through Mainland China.

After a relaxing two-hour flight from Beijing to Pudong International, we made our way to the heart of Central Shanghai. Although our expectations certainly ran high now that we had entered a cosmopolitan metropolis, nothing could prepare us for the glitz and glam of the Shanghai night skyline — which, we concluded, made Times Square look like a haphazardly decorated Christmas tree.

On one day in late December, the view from an airplane window at the Beijing airport was clouded by air so thick with pollution it was white. Walking out of the airport was like walking into a crowd of smokers, intensified by the large numbers of people smoking cigarettes as they waited in lines for cabs and buses.

The following day, the pollution ranked 500 out of a maximum 500 on a government scale. About 10 years ago, Beijing developed the Blue Sky days program to monitor air pollution above the city. The highest rating in the Blue Sky system is 500, but the pollution level could actually be higher than the rating system goes.

BEIJING, China — With China’s ever-growing role in world politics and the global economy, its decision to move away from isolationism in the late 1970s may seem like it was inevitable.

Jianyou Wu, the senior editor of the International News Department at Guangming Daily, which was founded as a newspaper for intellectuals in 1949, credits much of that decision to a front page article entitled “Practice is the Only Way to Judge the Truth” that ran in 1978.

1644-1912: Qing Dynasty

1912: End of dynastic rule, founding of the Republic of China under Sun Yat Sen.

1919: May Fourth Movement against European presence and control in certain parts of China.

1921: Founding of the Communist Party of China.

1927: Start of the Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Nationalist Party, Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

1937: Beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II).

1949: Founding of the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party; KMT retreats to Taiwan with about 1.3 million people from Mainland China, rules Taiwan under the name of the Republic of China.

The influence of American culture in China can be found anywhere from conversations about the popular television show Prison Break to the plethora of KFCs and pizza restaurants. As many people in China have embraced a more consumer culture, American-style malls have cropped up in cities.

In Beijing and Shanghai large malls have been opened with American, European and Chinese stores. The prices are generally lower than the same item would be at the same store in the U.S., but much more expensive than goods outside the malls.

CHINA — Disliked your freshman dorm experiences? Imagine having lived your whole life as an only child only to move into a room with three other students — all of whom are also only children.

Most Chinese university students live like this for their four undergraduate years; several students at different universities also said that their dorm is assigned during this whole time.