All Posts Tagged With: "China"

Profs working in Canada “must have no record of Falun Gong”

Photo courtesy of IvanWalsh.com on Flickr

A rule imposed by Confucius Institutes — an educational arm of the Chinese government that operates on at least eight Canadian campuses — breaks “all human rights codes in Canada,” human rights lawyer Clive Ansley told The Epoch Times.

The main CI website says that overseas volunteer Chinese teachers must have “no record of participation in Falun Gong,” a spiritual practice with roots in Buddhism and Taoism. China’s government vehemently opposes the practice and has arrested and killed many adherents, according to Amnesty International.

Barb Pollock, vice president of external relations at the University of Regina, told The Epoch Times that she did not know about the rule, but promised that her school’s agreements with China “have everything to do with academic freedom.” She also said that although teachers are selected by their Chinese partner, Hunan University, “what they teach [here] is our business.”

In June, the University of Manitoba rejected the idea of a Confucius Institute on campus. The University of British Columbia has also declined. But more than 320 exist worldwide, where they offer credit and non-credit courses in language and history.

China says that the funding of CIs—$150,000 initially and up to $200,000 per year after that— is meant to promote cultural understanding. But along with the money, schools have signed constitutions that say that “institute activities must … respect cultural customs, and shall not contravene concerning laws and regulations in Canada and China.”

Terry Russell, an Asian Studies professor at Manitoba, says that such rules compromise academic freedom, because academics are dissuaded from discussing Taiwan, Tibet, Falun Gong, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. That could result in an unrealistically positive view of China among the students who pass through the credit courses they offer in Canada, he says.

Academics debate whether to accept Chinese cash

Photo courtesy of IvanWalsh.com on Flickr

When he first heard from a university administrator about a new Confucius Institute (CI) proposed at the University of Manitoba, Asian Studies professor Terry Russell asked for a meeting with the dean in charge. At that meeting, he asked her to carefully consider who was offering to pay for it. The money would come from the Hanban, an arm of the Chinese government that’s chaired by the minister of education. That’s the same government, as Russell put it, that jailed Nobel-prize winner Liu Xiaobo for 11 years, the same government who took the University of Calgary to task after it gave the Dalai Lama an honourary degree, and the same government that employs 50,000 citizens to scour the Internet in search of dissent. Russell says that Canadian universities shouldn’t take money from an education ministry that does such things.

Less than six months later, the university has announced that it will join a short-but-growing list of institutions that have decided against taking Chinese government money to set up CIs on campus. The university’s spokesman, John Danakas, says that “overtures were made” by Confucius Institutes earlier this year, but that “conversations have ended… for logistical reasons.” Pennsylvania State University, the University of British Columbia and the Republic of India, have also decided against CIs on campus.

But in the same month that Manitoba declined funding from China, the University of Regina and Brock University both inaugurated their new Confucius Institutes, bringing the total number at Canadian post-secondary schools to eight. More than 320 exist worldwide. China says that the funding of CIs—$150,000 initially and up to $200,000 per year after that— is meant to promote cultural understanding. But along with the money, schools, including Brock, have signed constitutions that says that “institute activities must … respect cultural customs, and shall not contravene concerning laws and regulations in Canada and China.”

Quite what that means is open to interpretation.

Russell says that means employees will feel dissuaded from mentioning Taiwan, Tibet independence, Falun Gong, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. If that’s true, the result could be an unrealistically positive view of China among the students who pass through the free language and history courses that they offer on Canadian campuses. He goes even further than that. “They’re nothing more than a propaganda and public relations exercise within the legitimizing framework of a university,” he says.

Sheila Young, Director of Brock International, takes the opposite view of their new CI. There isn’t any propaganda, she argues, but instead a fantastic opportunity for academic exchange with the world’s next superpower. “We’re in complete control of the curriculum and always have been, always will be,” says Young. The Chinese government offered to provide textbooks to them during at the Confucius Institutes Conference that she and other administrators attended in Beijing in December, but Brock has not decided which materials it will use. “Nothing has been shipped to us, where they said, ‘here these are prescribed texts,’” says Young.

Young stresses that the CI will allow them to offer many more Mandarin courses than they would be able to otherwise, plus teacher-training certification and possibly Chinese history and political science courses in the future. “There are a lot of cutbacks in the economy we’re in now,” says Young. “So the idea of getting some funding to teach in an area that hasn’t been taught [in] before is appealing.”

Plan compared to Cultural Revolution

Peking University, often viewed as the Oxford or Harvard equivalent in China, plans to screen students for “radical thoughts.” A statement from the university announces that the program will target students for “consultations” who “frequently fail exams or encounter difficulties in their studies.”

However, categories of students that will be targeted for consultations, in areas other than academic preparedness, has prompted Chinese academics to raise concerns over academic freedom and to draw comparisons with the Cultural Revolution. The university would also screen “students with radical thoughts, psychological fragility, poverty, registration changes, eccentricity, Internet addiction, job difficulties, serious illnesses, and discipline violations.”

Zhang Ming, a politics professor at Beijing’s Renmin University was critical of the plan. “It is going too far for a respected university to openly control radical minds . . . Aren’t we going back to the days of the Cultural Revolution? This is hateful and terrible,” he told the South China Morning Post. Other academics have expressed a similar concern.

In an interview posted to Peking University’s website, Zha Jing, deputy director of the Office of Student Affairs, defended the plan. “We’ve noticed that some students having radical thoughts and bigoted character and encountering difficulties in interpersonal communication, social adaptiveness, and their studies,” he said.

University recruiters in Beijing to attract doctoral students–education Canada’s largest export to China

Representatives from 14 Canadian universities will try to attract Chinese doctoral students to their schools during a recruitment mission in Beijing starting Friday. They will be competing with institutions from eight other countries.

And while diversity on Canadian campuses is one reason behind the recruiting drive, putting more money into cash-strapped university coffers is another.

Dozens of institutions from various countries, including Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Germany and France, were invited to the PhD Workshop that runs Friday through Sunday, organized by the China Education Association for International Exchange and the Association of Chinese Graduate Schools.

The Canadian schools will meet with some of the 500 doctorate students attending the workshop and discuss areas of research, opportunities for innovation and the benefits of pursuing a PhD in Canada, a Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said.

Heather Kelly, director of student services with the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, said in an email from Beijing she plans to meet with more than 100 students.

“The University of Toronto recognizes that the key to innovation is collaboration, partnership, and co-operation with leading global institutions,” said Kelly. “So, our interest in working with top Chinese institutions is to develop targeted initiatives with universities, whether that be researcher to researcher, educational experiences, student internships or graduate student projects.”

Concordia University, Dalhousie University, McGill University, McMaster University, Queen’s University, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, Universite Laval, the University of Manitoba, Universite de Montreal, Universite de Sherbrooke, the University of Waterloo and York University will also participate, Foreign Affairs said.

Chinese official reportedly helps his daughter get into university by stealing a classmate’s name and ID number

According to the BBC’s China correspondent James Reynolds, members of the Chinese public are outraged that a police official helped his daughter get into university by stealing another student’s identity.

The state media is reporting that the official, Wang Zhengrong, stole the name and ID number of his daughter’s classmate, who scored much higher on the country’s national college entrance exam

That classmate, Luo Caixia, had to spend another year in school in order to re-take the exam, while Wang’s child took her spot in school.

Luo eventually got a spot at another university, and is now seeking “legal measures” to solve the problem.

She says that it has been impossible for her to earn the graduation and teaching certificates she is working towards because someone else is using her name.

Reynolds has provided some translated comments on the story, which include:

• “Well, if you want to start investigating all the faking problems created by the powerful and the rich, there’s too many to check.”

• “This is nothing. Two of my high school classmates didn’t get good enough scores, but they managed to fake their results so that they could be accepted by universities. Could it be better than this? This is a world that belongs to the powerful people.”

• “I’m sympathetic to what Luo Caixia is going through, but I don’t think she should seek revenge and push the other family. The official already said sorry, why does she have to push them off the cliff? The university graduates nowadays are just about revenge, it doesn’t solve any problems.”

• “If someone really looks into this, I bet there’re [sic] people who just do this as a profession, faking people’s identity.”