Students walk around with palm-sized telephones to their ears.
Solar-powered cars zip around a campus dotted with satellite dishes. And genetic engineers in blue lab jackets walk by robots playing basketball. Welcome to Tsinghua University, China's brave new world designed to raise elite leaders for the 21st century. Tsinghua, long a gray bastion of Soviet-model teaching and discipline, is rapidly being transformed into the country's most open and globally linked center of learning. Now described as China's MIT, the school is becoming a curious hybrid of competing cultures and ideas, where advertisements for Apple Computer are posted alongside calls to study the Communist Party's latest directives.