Harvard University is moving its Mandarin summer program from China to Taiwan next year, student publication The Harvard Crimson reported on Thursday last week. The program’s director, Jennifer Liu (劉力嘉), cited “perceived unfriendliness” on the part of the Chinese school hosting the program, such as prohibiting American students from celebrating the Fourth of July on campus, and a failure to provide adequate student housing and teaching space.
The move is just the latest in a shift in educational exchanges away from China due to an increasingly antagonistic Beijing and worsening US-China relations. Several US states in 2019 closed Confucius Institutes over concerns of censorship and espionage, and last year the US canceled its Fulbright program in China and Hong Kong. Last year, Washington also canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese research students over concerns they were “stealing and otherwise appropriating sensitive research” for the Chinese military, then-acting US secretary of homeland security Chad Wolf said.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) was quoted in the New York Times on Wednesday as saying that Beijing “oppose[s] any effort to politicize people-to-people exchanges.”
However, it is China itself that has mixed education and politics by censoring exchange students in China, and censoring students and faculty at universities in other countries through funding and coercion. The BBC on Sept. 7, 2019, reported that in 2018, a keynote speaker at an event at Savannah State University had a reference to Taiwan removed from her biography by the university at the request of the Confucius Institute on the university’s campus.
On Wednesday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said: “Only in a free environment where speech is not censored can the best results of learning be achieved.”
No truer words could have been spoken. Having educational exchanges with authoritarian China inherently limits the learning experience for exchange students. US students would benefit more from exchanges with countries that do not limit the speech of students and faculty, or breach students’ rights on a whim over political factors.
The arbitrary arrests of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in 2018 following Ottawa’s arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) for allegedly breaching US sanctions on Iran should serve as a sober reminder that China takes retaliatory actions against innocent people.
When it comes to Mandarin learning in particular, Taiwan offers a much better experience than China, especially as it uses traditional Chinese characters. Experts have said that much of the meaning in the Chinese logographic writing system is lost in the simplification of the characters used in China. Moreover, going from the traditional writing system to the simplified one is a much simpler process than the reverse for learners of Chinese.
With the launch on Dec. 3 last year of the US-Taiwan Education Initiative, the US has signaled its desire and willingness to strengthen educational exchanges with Taiwan. The Ministry of Education has also begun to act on that initiative through the signing on Sept. 28 of a memorandum of cooperation between 12 Taiwanese and US universities.
The memorandum would help establish Chinese-language learning centers in the US where Mandarin would be taught by Taiwanese teachers as part of the Taiwan Huayu Best (台灣優華語計畫) program, and US students would come to Taiwan.
With no signs of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” abating, it would be prudent for more countries that have educational exchanges with China to look at Taiwan as a good alternative that protects students’ democratic and free-speech rights.
Taiwan should continue to seek new opportunities for educational exchanges with like-minded countries, with an eye to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opening of borders.
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