Gaining trust in the academics again

As you might have noticed, I'm currently traveling and visiting a set of academic projects in different parts of China.
When I started to work in China in the 1990s I found that discussions with academics were rather useless as most of them were not even willing to confirm what I had been reading in the China Daily. To a large degree I gave up talking to them.
Now, more than ten years later, the situation has changed dramatically. The academics I talked to are not only more open, they have risen to an international standard that was clearly lacking ten years ago. The efforts of the Chinese government to lure back overseas scholars has at least partly been a great success. The number of academics with an international background is rather high and the international exchanges at the few institutes I have been at are huge.
More later.