Letters from China No 11

31st August 2008

Well, the Olympics are all but over, the Paralympics getting next to no coverage on TV. I did notice that the Hong Kongers are giving away tickets to students and others to encourage attendance at the dressage event, the only equestrian event available to disabled riders. During the “other” games the spectators were seen dozing off en masse as most of them had bought tickets just to be able to see an Olympic event, not knowing in the least what dressage was. Dancing horses indeed!

Just as the games have ended, so has our summer break and it’ll be back to our college tomorrow, just to register as being there. We don’t actually start teaching for another three weeks. Our freshmen (first-year) students will first have to complete two weeks military training as a substitute for national service, I believe. The poor sods have twelve hours of marching and parading in the heat being ordered around by army trainers. This happens in every tertiary education institution. The end result is an assembly and march-past before local dignitaries in the sports field. After that we take over and try to re-instill some sense of liberalism and freedom as we coax them to divulge their abilities in speaking English – all good fun. A new type of schedule awaits us with the possibility of having around two hundred new faces in our classes, not all at once, twenty at a time. With the recent shenanigans over visas during the games, many foreigners just gave up and went elsewhere. So, I believe that recruitment of new teachers is becoming more and more difficult. Bering in mind too that there are colleges and universities springing up all over the country. There are more people in China learning English than there are people in the rest of the world who speak it already! So that might give you an idea of what things are like. For our college to have around eighty foreign teachers, some of whom having more than five years service, is nothing short of a miracle.

So, tomorrow, it will be an early rise and a taxi ride to the Sun Yat-sen memorial park where a bus will take us to college. Sun Yat-sen is considered to be the father of modern China, not Mao Ze Dong as most people believe. A little bit of background info -

“In the West he is considered the most important figure of Chinese history in the twentieth century. As a revolutionary, he lived most of his life in disappointment. For over twenty years he struggled to bring a nationalist and democratic revolution to China and when he finally triumphed with the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912 with him as president, he had it cruelly snatched from him by the dictatorial and ambitious Yüan Shih-kai. He died in 1924, with China in ruins, torn by the anarchy and violence of competing warlords. His ideas, however, fueled the revolutionary fervor of the early twentieth century and became the basis of the Nationalist government established by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928.”

He believed that “Government should be republican and democratically elected.” Not quite the current situation here...