Education long game
Regarding the editorial about Harvard’s decision to relocate its summer language program from Beijing to Taipei (“Learning thrives where it is free,” Oct. 16, page 8), it is hard to overestimate the potential long-term positive impact actions like that will have on US-Taiwan relations. It is imperative that the government finds ways to convince more US universities to follow suit.
One only has to look at the history of the old Sanford Center, a consortium of a half-dozen leading US universities with significant Chinese studies and language programs that operated at National Taiwan University between 1963 and 1997.
Dozens of students from those schools spent a year in intensive advanced Chinese-language study at “Tai Da,” spending four hours a day in classes and the other hours studying, exploring the city and otherwise being exposed to the country and the people — and in most cases getting to love both.
Significantly, many of those students after graduation became government policymakers, academics, journalists and other professionals who were often instrumental in forming and maintaining US policy toward China and Taiwan.
It is hard to think of any of them who became detractors of Taiwan or doubters of Taiwan’s right to exist as an independent entity.
That in the face of the fact that many, if not most, held jaundiced views of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) era of martial law terror.
While there were other language training centers in Taipei after Stanford left, it was the most prestigious and important.
It is hard to know just how the Stanford Center’s move to Beijing affected US policy toward Taiwan, but it could not have been positive.
However, with the chilling of US-China relations, the increasing authoritarianism of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) regime in Beijing, and the Chinese Communist Party’s crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, there is a great opportunity for the leaders in Taipei to make an all-out effort to get other US institutions to follow Harvard’s example.
It might not make a tangible difference now, but in 10, 20 or 30 years, when the graduates have top positions in their crucial fields, it will be clearly evident.
We tend to cherish the wonderful experiences we had when we were younger.
I know that I did (class of 1969).
Charles Snyder
Retired Taipei Times correspondent
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