Pandering to Chinese money: Coquitlam School District (SD43) - and B.C.’s universities

Re: “Trip to China just business: SD43” Tri-City News, Thursday, July 18, 2019[1]

The Editor:

Letter writers to the Tri-City News (myself included) are only knocking their heads against a brick wall each time they wish to publish criticisms of SD43’s (Coquitlam School District 43) “business” relationship with China.  Nothing is going to change unless, maybe, there’s a Tiananmen-like repeat in Hong Kong, which would press the otherwise naïve mandarinate on Poirier Street.

The bureaucracy at SD43 – not unlike like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – is an institution, and all institutions want to enlarge themselves and then reward their members: that’s why our school trustees are the highest paid in B.C.  In other words, just by virtue of their salaries alone the trustees are in a conflict of interest.  They have paid themselves off for the hard work of their annual all-expense-paid excursions to China.

Both of these institutions, as the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott would like to say, are driven by “the politics of faith”: each of them has their own “mission statement”.  One treats the individual as a “blank slate” to be shaped into becoming a productive member of commercial or industrial society, the other wants to exercise minute control of the population by means of government or police apparatus.  Each shares a belief in the ability to master the world, but because of the CCP’s exclusive and iron-fisted rule within the Chinese mainland – and now given the size of China’s economy - it poses a problem for the rest of us.

While SD43 does pander to Chinese money, it is not the only educational institution in B.C. to do so.  SD43 is just mimicking their so-called betters, especially UBC (University of British Columbia) which is most egregious in this respect.  UBC is supposed to be a “public” first-tier research university, but it has built and staffed its own college to teach overseas students whose English is not good enough for first-year.  So one reason why UBC Vantage College exists is because UBC has around 5,000 mainland Chinese students – about one third of its overseas contingent – all of whom can afford the tuition fees and residence costs, and they come in reliable numbers.  Not to be outdone, SFU (Simon Fraser University) – at about 2,500 Chinese students - has a relationship with Fraser International College, but the latter has the merit of being private.

We ought to ask ourselves: who is coming over here? After Mao died in 1976, huge billboards that once wished him a long life were converted into conspicuous advertisements for consumer goods that were at the time unavailable in China.  Today at either our schools or universities, Chinese students are driving high-end luxury cars the values of which far exceeds any budget of their teachers or professors.  How do they pay for them?  What connections do they have with the CCP?  And, given their wealth where is the real academic incentive to learn? Finally, why do we continue to let our public institutions cater to the elite of a foreign country which doesn’t abide by the rules?

The answer appears to lie in the fact that even ivory towers in B.C. aren’t immune to pull of the “cash nexus” which is now so familiar to SD43.  In other words, there’s an exchange going on but it’s not very cultural, or so we like to think.

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[1] The Tri- City News serves Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada.  An edited version of this letter was published by the Tri-City News on Thursday, August 15, 2019.

From Dreyfus to Donald: Racism and Public Degradation of ‘the other’

France’s infamous Dreyfus Affair has bearing on Donald Trump’s apparent racism – particularly when comparing the element of public degradation, which was imposed by the French Army at a ceremony on the former Alsatian Jew, and which Donald Trump frequently chooses for his political enemies, notably: the Somali-born Ilhan Omar and Elijah Cummings, who is African-American.

The Dreyfus Affair began in the autumn of 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and charged with high treason.  The first Jew to do duty on the General Staff, and likely because of this – and his traits of non-conformity - he was considered the culprit and author of the bordereau (memorandum) containing information on French war plans, secrets that had actually been communicated to Germany.  Two handwriting experts determined that only Dreyfus could have authored the bordereau, and at the court-martial a secret dossier, supported by Commandant Henry, was presented to the jury while the court was adjourned (but not presented to the defendant or to his lawyer).  The Affair did not come into full public light until Emile Zola published “J’accuse” in 1898: the famous writer was quickly convicted of libel, Commandant Henry, who admitted to forging the secret dossier, was arrested and later committed suicide in jail, after slashing his throat, and the true author of the bordereau, Major Esterhazy, fled to England.  In 1899 Dreyfus returned to France from Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, to face another court-martial at Rennes in August where he was again condemned “with extenuating circumstances” but later pardoned in September of that same year.[1]

The Affair divided the nation – almost to the point of civil war – between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.  The defenders of the honour of the Army faced off against the defenders of Truth, for the facts proved an injustice had been done. Below is an excerpt from Alfred Dreyfus’s memoire Five Years of My Life, and I have chosen to focus on the Dreyfus degradation, where he was publicly paraded and stripped of his rank.  The atmosphere in France at the time of the Affair (even before and especially after) was rife with anti-Semitism, and the “howls of a deluded mob” as experienced by Dreyfus in January 1895 compare to the racist pro-Trump rally chanting “send her back” in July 2019. Also at work in each case is the similar effort by ‘official’ dimensions of the respective Republics which are supposed to unite the nation – France’s Army recalling the glory of the Revolution’s levée en masse and the American Presidency as the so-called leading voice of the ‘free world’ – end up dividing the country which is in no small degree pitted against ‘the other’.

Dreyfus’s degradation was made almost complete by five years of solitude on Devil’s Island, baking in the heat of a confined space close to the equator, cooking for himself without proper utensils and eating out of tinned cans, guarded day and night (often immobilized in irons), deprived and censored throughout, a physical and near mental wreck by the end, but he never quite gave up hope – military man that he was - that his honour would be restored to him.  While Donald Trump has not gone this far  in terms of degrading his domestic political ‘enemies’, who tend to be elected Democrats, he is inducing violence and hate crimes against them: most recently, for example, two police officers from Louisiana posted on Facebook suggesting that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.[2]  Members of Congress, notably four freshman women of colour known as ‘the squad’, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar among them, now require extra security precautions because Trump sees ‘white supremacy’ as the path to the White House in 2020.  This pattern continued when Trump called Congressman Elijah Cumming’s constituency in Baltimore in a Twitter rant a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live”.[3] This is how the President likes to treat his foes.

In other words, the traditional Left-Right horizontal axis of political competition since the French Revolution is gone, replaced by Populism’s vertical axis with a so-called uncontaminated people standing above ‘the other’ which intrudes from below.[4]  Revolutionary equality has been replaced by the idea of rank, with white men at the top of the hierarchy, and who better to epitomize this shift in mood than a misogynist and racist billionaire President - ‘the lying King’- of the U.S.A. who happened to inherit wealth, as well.  Here is Dreyfus remembering his own very public loss of rank at a ceremony of degradation in fin-de-siècle France well over a century ago.  Just imagine the crowd wanting to chant “send him back” to Alsace, then in German hands, where Dreyfus's father was born:

A Sergeant of the Republican Guard came up to me.  He tore off rapidly buttons, trousers-stripes, the signs of my rank from cap and sleeves, and then broke my sword across his knee.  I saw all the material emblems of my honor fall at my feet.  Then, my whole being racked by a fearful paroxysm, but with body erect and head held high, I shouted again and again to the soldiers and to the assembled crowd the cry of my soul.

“I am innocent!”

The parade continued.  I was compelled to make the whole round of the square.  I heard the howls of a deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France; and I struggled to transmit to their hearts another thrill, - belief in my innocence.[5]

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[1] Alfred Dreyfus, Five Years of My Life, 1894-1899. (Cambridge, MA: University Press, nd [Wentworth Press Reprint]), p. 307.  See the Editor’s Preface for a general introduction to the Affair.  See also: Ruth Harris, Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), pp. 1, 2 ff.  Also helpful is: Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), p. 332 ff.

[2] Lawrence Martin, “Trump is in full bigot mode,” The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, July 31, 2019, p. A11.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Marco Revelli, The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss, tr. David Broder (London: Verso: 2019), p. 15.

[5] Dreyfus, Five Years of my Life, pp. 50,51.