[quote]Netizens from Taiwan and China have been engaged in a heated debate over the appropriateness of Taiwanese singer-songwriter Deserts Chang (張懸) bringing a Republic of China (ROC) national flag on stage at her concert in the UK on Saturday, a move that was met with angry shouts from a Chinese woman in the audience.
The conflict broke out in the middle of the show at the University of Manchester when Chang took an ROC flag from a group of Taiwanese students in the front row and unfurled it on stage, saying: “I see there are also people who bring a national flag to the concert. I have not felt so patriotic for a while … and I am from Taiwan.”
The singer’s gesture apparently enraged the Chinese fan, who shouted: “There are students from mainland [China] here. No politics today.”
To which Chang said: “It’s not politics, it is just a flag that represents where I am from.” taipeitimes.com/News/front/a … 2003576243[/quote]
Chinese fans are FANATIC. They hate the ROC with PASSION. Much more so then Taiwanese hate the Mainlanders and their govt.
A different response from Beijing than in the past. In years gone by, Beijing would have condemned Deserts Chang along with many of its citizens, canceled Deserts’ concert for her and barred her from entering the PRC.
Her father is ex head of the straits commission, which handles or did handle a lot of exchanges, so that be working in her favour somewhat.
What’s interesting is that only one Chinese fan was screaming, they are not all rude arseholes. I’d love to be there to tell her to shut up you are not in China now stop acting like a pig.
I used to work there. The students generally behave well towards eachother. They are so jingoistic that they are generally very keen to ‘respect the Britain culture’, so very little of that sort of whining goes on. And they’d get absolutely zero quarter from the uni for any kind of visa jeopardising incident, either.
They were probably at the International Society and too snooty to be put in the same category as the Iraqis and Libyans: always kicking off about something.
I’ve seen similar poor behavior from our compatriots across the sea. One or more of these future consultants and merchant bankers to the world ripped the Taiwanese flag off the wall of the Asian Students Society ripped the Taiwanese flag off the wall. And the Greater China Club ended up not being so great.
What was really amusing was to watch the internal struggle the ML students had between their patriotism and wanting to work in New York for Goldman Sachs. It really put some student’s heads in. I think in the end for many, sort of credo quia absurdum, it became; my personally getting wealthy is patriotic.
I remember some Korean(?) students relabelled the sea of Japan on a map in the language centre. Ridiculous children. But then again … they are college kids. I would have been too polite to deface university property as a kid myself, but I was sure that all the ‘causes’ I believed in were absolutely true. They get a pass on being unsophisticated dicks until they graduate, surely? Life will sort 'em out, after that.
If they cross the line, they’ll get booted from uni. Mind you, Manchester Uni is one of those unis that has a ‘Confucius Centre’. Presumably they have to do a certain amount of sucking up to China. It’s actually pretty outrageous that they’re even there. Wonder what the deal is?
The deal is they pay for the teachers and support a lot of the costs, they probably throw in some guanxi in terms of getting more Chinese student through their doors or opening a campus in China too.
It is outrageous but that’s modern profit oriented society for you, with funding cutbacks they are probably welcomed with open arms.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]The deal is they pay for the teachers and support a lot of the costs, they probably throw in some guanxi in terms of getting more Chinese student through their doors or opening a campus in China too.
It is outrageous but that’s modern profit oriented society for you, with funding cutbacks they are probably welcomed with open arms.[/quote]
Manchester doesn’t have a campus in China though, and whatever cutbacks there might be, Manchester’s one of the most oversubscribed unis in Britain. Kabillions of domestic and overseas students are turned away every year. It’s a very rich uni. That could be true in some of the low end places but the Confucius Centres are in Glasgow and SOAS: places that certainly admit foreign students but don’t break their backs to ‘attract’ them.
The Confucius Centre is crap and doesn’t run many classes: certainly a lot fewer than the university’s own LEAP classes. Not enough people want to learn Chinese to support a centre in a northern English city to support it as a free-standing enterprise. I wonder whether it’s some kind of quid pro quo deal with HSK and IELTS? That makes sense in terms of numbers: The British Council and Cambridge ESOL want to peddle their crap in China and China wants to promote HSK through running it at semi-prestigious unis in Britain? Or a misguided British Council-esque soft power fantasy from Beijing?
I guess they have them in other countries, too. It just seems like a bit of an expensive waste of time for China.
[quote=“Ermintrude”][quote=“headhonchoII”]The deal is they pay for the teachers and support a lot of the costs, they probably throw in some guanxi in terms of getting more Chinese student through their doors or opening a campus in China too.
It is outrageous but that’s modern profit oriented society for you, with funding cutbacks they are probably welcomed with open arms.[/quote]
Manchester doesn’t have a campus in China though, and whatever cutbacks there might be, Manchester’s one of the most oversubscribed unis in Britain. Kabillions of domestic and overseas students are turned away every year. It’s a very rich uni. That could be true in some of the low end places but the Confucius Centres are in Glasgow and SOAS: places that certainly admit foreign students but don’t break their backs to ‘attract’ them.
The Confucius Centre is crap and doesn’t run many classes: certainly a lot fewer than the university’s own LEAP classes. Not enough people want to learn Chinese to support a centre in a northern English city to support it as a free-standing enterprise. I wonder whether it’s some kind of quid pro quo deal with HSK and IELTS? That makes sense in terms of numbers: The British Council and Cambridge ESOL want to peddle their crap in China and China wants to promote HSK through running it at semi-prestigious unis in Britain? Or a misguided British Council-esque soft power fantasy from Beijing?
I guess they have them in other countries, too. It just seems like a bit of an expensive waste of time for China.[/quote]
Hah! A lot of these phantom Confucius Centres have been cropping up at unis across UK. There was one in Newcastle University. A mysterious classroom bearing the Confucius Centre plaque appeared in 2011 and was still there when I left this year… I’m sure it’s still empty now. Newcastle Uni already had a Chinese department, which is still running. I have no idea what the Confucius Centre was for.
[quote=“Dr Jellyfish”][quote=“Ermintrude”][quote=“headhonchoII”]The deal is they pay for the teachers and support a lot of the costs, they probably throw in some guanxi in terms of getting more Chinese student through their doors or opening a campus in China too.
It is outrageous but that’s modern profit oriented society for you, with funding cutbacks they are probably welcomed with open arms.[/quote]
Manchester doesn’t have a campus in China though, and whatever cutbacks there might be, Manchester’s one of the most oversubscribed unis in Britain. Kabillions of domestic and overseas students are turned away every year. It’s a very rich uni. That could be true in some of the low end places but the Confucius Centres are in Glasgow and SOAS: places that certainly admit foreign students but don’t break their backs to ‘attract’ them.
The Confucius Centre is crap and doesn’t run many classes: certainly a lot fewer than the university’s own LEAP classes. Not enough people want to learn Chinese to support a centre in a northern English city to support it as a free-standing enterprise. I wonder whether it’s some kind of quid pro quo deal with HSK and IELTS? That makes sense in terms of numbers: The British Council and Cambridge ESOL want to peddle their crap in China and China wants to promote HSK through running it at semi-prestigious unis in Britain? Or a misguided British Council-esque soft power fantasy from Beijing?
I guess they have them in other countries, too. It just seems like a bit of an expensive waste of time for China.[/quote]
Hah! A lot of these phantom Confucius Centres have been cropping up at unis across UK. There was one in Newcastle University. A mysterious classroom bearing the Confucius Centre plaque appeared in 2011 and was still there when I left this year… I’m sure it’s still empty now. Newcastle Uni already had a Chinese department, which is still running. I have no idea what the Confucius Centre was for.[/quote]
It’s about promoting the soft power of China through hijacked caricatures of ancient historical figures.
Soft power eh? What does China have that other countries want? Hard to imagine that all of these Confucius Institutes are there to meet an insatiable demand for teacher-centered learning.
Yes, I know what is googlable, I’m looking for some kind of insider info, if anyone has any. They say ‘soft power’, but their activities are limited. They do almost nothing. Manchester Uni is one of the biggest unis in the country, in one of the biggest cities. They run four or five classes a term, with a handful of people in. The university’s continuing education dept runs more classes in Chinese for the public, on the same floor of the same building. They maintain a staff of half a dozen teachers, bought over from China, in a city that has the one of the largest Chinese populations in Europe. The classes are shit (I’ve taken one) using the non-methods that most Chinese classes use. The ‘resource room’ is a shelf, when Manchester City library already has a Chinese library with tens of thousands of items.
It just seems so ineffective and pointless. They have a lot to learn about working with local partners, I guess. They should try and copy the British Council, in that respect.
I guess they just don’t want to lose face by pulling out.
Yeah. I’m just not sure what the Confucius Institute get out of it in Britain. The teaching and cultural stuff’s obviously a front, at least in Britain, as they put so little time and energy into it. Not money: they are at rich and prestigious unis only, and their operations are very small-scale. They are not making money and the institutions aren’t getting much out of the deal either. Not cultural legitimacy because everyone that comes into contact with them knows they are kind of crap, but you have to be polite to your guests. What is it they are buying, in Britain? Why are universities allowing this, particularly state funded ones? Is it about access to research? It’d be great to get some information.
I guess it’s just a subliminal kind of endorsement. There’s no Goethe centre in the uni, even though the German department’s much bigger. Why aren’t the Israeli government and the Japanese government setting up wee kiosks as well? Chinese is worth learning, even though you sure as shit won’t learn it in our crappy classes, because China is an economic world power. Seems slightly desperate and imitative. Why emulate European post-war diplomacy models?
[quote=“Ermintrude”]I remember some Korean(?) students relabelled the sea of Japan on a map in the language centre. Ridiculous children. But then again … they are college kids. I would have been too polite to deface university property as a kid myself, but I was sure that all the ‘causes’ I believed in were absolutely true. They get a pass on being unsophisticated dicks until they graduate, surely? Life will sort 'em out, after that.
If they cross the line, they’ll get booted from uni. Mind you, Manchester Uni is one of those unis that has a ‘Confucius Centre’. Presumably they have to do a certain amount of sucking up to China. It’s actually pretty outrageous that they’re even there. Wonder what the deal is?[/quote]
Don’t be callin the East Sea, the Sea of Japan, no way, no sir.
Shrug. Maybe you just have to admire governments that can make 19 year olds give a shit about what a body of water is called on a map in another country?
It hobbles them in the long run, though. There’s no spark in China, no humour. Everything’s a copy of other countries, from cellphones, to tv, to the space program. ‘Gangnam Style’ did more for Korea than 1000 shitty languages classes or po-faced whines about ‘the hurt feelings of the x people’, as much as it made me want to burst my own eardrums.
Anyway, not sure what I’m entirely saying, other than ‘Stop whining about stupid crap, especially when you’re overseas, because it makes you look like idiots. Stop demanding respect when you aren’t even courteous and make East Asian students famous for something other than causing trouble, plagiarism, and racism.’ And ‘Confucius Centres are shit’.
