People in the higher education field like to divide universities into two separate categories: teaching and research universities. The Hong Kong government often labels certain local universities as engaged in “applied research” and even uses outdated blue sky rhetoric to describe “non-applied research”. If the higher education sectors across the Strait want to catch up with world standards, they have to eliminate misconceptions or outdated thinking. They need to appreciate that the relationship between teaching and research is not a zero-sum game and make a sincere effort to integrate them. Learning has been a matter of faithfully receiving from the master his or her lifetime knowledge and wisdom that he or she had learned from predecessors, with great importance attached to annotating classical texts. The essence of learning lies in questioning. In the didactic education system of traditional China, independent investigating and questioning through ge zhi are not mainstream practices, as reported in news media.