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.
[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.
No comments:
Post a Comment