Confucius classroom, a program from the Chinese government aimed at teaching high school students Chinese culture and language, is expanding rapidly around the world.

As communities across the United States face declining revenues and shrinking budgets, local school officials are laying off teachers, increasing classroom sizes and eliminating classes in a wide variety of subjects. But in the northwestern state of Oregon, lawmakers are hoping to add a new subject to the school curriculum – Mandarin Chinese. And they’re looking to the Beijing government as a source of funding for Chinese language education.

At St. Mary’s School in Medford, Oregon, an 11th-grade class is running through a list of words for traditional Chinese instruments. These 16 and 17-year olds are in their fourth year of learning Mandarin Chinese.

Mandarin Chinese language classes are a popular choice

Carly Irvine is not sure when she’ll use her Chinese language skills outside the classroom. But she figures that day will come. “Since China and America are working so closely and our relationship is growing more and more,” she points out. “I think it will be very important in the future to know Chinese,” Irvine adds.

St. Mary’s added Mandarin to its foreign language curriculum in 2005, and two years ago, became the first school in the country to sign up for the Confucius classroom program.

Here’s how it works: The Chinese ministry of education sends a teacher to a school in the United States, pays about half of that teacher’s salary and living expenses, and supplies educational materials such as books and computer programs.

St. Mary’s principal, Frank Phillips, says parents of some of the students at the private college-prep school were skeptical when Mandarin classes were first offered. “It was so off-beat and weird then,” he recalls. “We got a lot of feedback from parents, ‘Why would you teach Chinese off all things? Why not Spanish?’” St. Mary’s does offer Spanish, along with German and Latin. But Phillips says knowing Chinese will give his students an advantage in a world where China is fast becoming a global economic superpower.

Funding source worries some, wins support of others

He admits the idea of accepting money from the government in Beijing raises eyebrows in his southern Oregon community. “The question I always get is, ‘Is this a gigantic propaganda move, is this an evil Communist plot on the part of China?’ That’s the number one kind of lingering Cold War suspicion about this program. From what I can detect, having been involved in it for two years, I see none of that,” Phillips says.

In fact, the Chinese language education program has won the support of the community’s representative in the state legislature. Dennis Richardson even sat in on some classes. He has his own concerns over alleged human rights violations by the Chinese government. But he thinks it’s okay to take the money. “We can do more good [by] setting an example and being friends and business associates than we can by ostracizing them,” he reasons.

Richardson is among several Oregon lawmakers who have been pushing their colleagues to fund more Chinese language education in Oregon’s public schools. While a handful of districts do offer it, efforts to expand the classes have fallen flat in the legislature, in part due to concerns over cost. Richardson says the Confucius classroom program is a way around much of the funding dilemma.

Language forms the basis for broader exchange

Back at St. Mary’s, teacher Zheng Ling continues her lesson on Chinese music by playing examples of each instrument. She came to Medford from China in 2008 to teach. She says one of her goals is to help American students learn more about her homeland. “People do not know much about China, especially the latest developments. So I think this is a chance for them to know more about China, what China is really like. It’s quite different from what it was 20 years ago,” Ling says.

And 20 years from now, say advocates of teaching Mandarin, China will play an even bigger role on the global stage.

For now, St. Mary’s remains the only school in Oregon to take part in the Confucius classroom program. But the program is offered in more than 50 other schools and universities across the United States and around the world and in more than three dozen countries including Argentina, Pakistan, Kenya and Russia.

Via

(zonaeuropa) This is my second time in Xiamen. The weather here is great. No wonder people like to go outside and stroll. Hmmm … I just heard Teacher Deng spoke about certain issues on nationalism. I was reminded of a couple of sayings which I came across them previously. They are other people’s words, not mine. The first saying is, “Nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” The second sentence is, “True patriotism is to protect this country so that it will not suffer any harm.”

For today’s talk, I have brought along a written speech in order to constrain myself. Mainly, I don’t want you to suffer any harm because I may stray all over the place. Let me begin.

Dear leaders, dear teachers, dear students, how are you? Do you know why China cannot become a grand cultural nation? It is because most of the time when we speak, we put “Dear leaders” first and those leaders are uncultured. Not only that, for they are also afraid of culture, they censor culture and they control culture. So how can such a nation become a grand cultural nation? Dear leaders, what do you say?

Actually, China has the potential to become a grand cultural nation. Let me tell you a story. I am the chief editor of a magazine which has yet to be published. The Constitution states that every citizen has the freedom to publish, but the law also says that the leaders has the freedom not to let you publish. This magazine encountered certain problems during the review process. There is a cartoon drawing. In it, there is a man without clothes — of course, this is unacceptable because the law says that we cannot exhibit the private parts in a publicly available magazine. I agree with that and I don’t have a problem with it. Therefore, I intentionally created an extra-large magazine logo to place at the illegal spot of the cartoon. But unexpectedly, the publisher and the censor told us that this was unacceptable too — when you cover up the middle part of a person, you are referring to the “Party Central” (note: “party” is a homonym for “block/shield” and “central” can mean either “center” or “middle”). My reaction was like yours — I was awed and shocked. I thought to myself, “Friend, it would be so wonderful if you could put your awe-inspiring imagination into literary creation instead of literary censorship.”

I use this story to tell you that everybody has good imagination. Yet we can only imagine many things but we cannot do them, we cannot write about them and we cannot even talk about them in many situations. We have too many restrictions. This is a restricted country. How can a restricted country produce a rich and abundant culture? I am a comrade who has few restrictions. But when I write, I cannot help but think: I can’t write about the police, I can’t write about the leaders, I can’t write about government policies, I can’t write about the system, I can’t write about the judiciary, I can’t write about many pieces of history, I cannot write about Tibet, I cannot write about Xinjiang, I cannot write about assemblies, I cannot write about demonstration marches, I cannot write about pornography, I cannot write about censorship, I cannot write about art. I am unable to write anything elegant. I am really incapable of writing anything elegant because I am not Yu Qiuyu.

Internet essays have more room. Many friends who write scripts. I know some friends who write scripts (such as Ning Caishen’s theatre scripts) and others who write movie scripts. They suffer a lot. Under such a cultural environment, I wonder how can China be a grand cultural nation. Maybe if the world is reduced down to China, North Korea and Afghanistan. Everybody knows that culture is out of bounds in North Korea. In Afghanistan, the situation with the nation is still unclear so they can’t be bothered with culture for now. Even so, they have a writer who wrote , which unfortunately was not published in Afghanistan. I think that once Afghanistan sorts itself out, it may possibly surpass China.

In our so-called international exchanges, we cannot keep bringing out the Four Great Works or the sayings of Confucius and Mencius. We know that this is like a conversation during a marriage interview. The girl’s side asks you if you are rich and you reply that your ancestors eighteen generations ago were very rich. That won’t help you now. We did not cause this tragedy, even though it is said that the road to North Korea is paved by the silence of everybody. On one hand, we are better than North Korea because we know what it is like there. On the other hand, I think that many of you present today are not silent — it is just that we are being harmonized.

In the history of the war against pornography in China, many fellow students are aware (even though these facts have been disappeared from the teaching materials) that Teresa Deng and Liu Wenzheng were pornographic, vulgar and indecent once up a time. When too many people listened to them sing, they became pornographic, vulgar and indecent. But when every Chinese person listened to them sing, they were no longer pornographic, vulgar or indecent anymore. If we all oppose cultural censorship so that the the only words left in the database of banned words are anti-human ones, we can create a grand cultural nation. It does not matter if my name or yours get added into the database. I believe that the database has a maximum capacity and every additional word will accelerate its destruction.

I hope that our news media workers, our students, our teachers, our cultural workers and our cultural lovers will try our best to reduce the censorship, and our leaders (who are not the same as our parents) and our government may have sufficient self-confidence to become more open. I know that our leaders like to export our culture because this is a sign of a strong nation. But I feel that our present culture is not exportable. In this creative environment, all writers/workers are constantly censoring themselves. How can any respectable work be produced in this environment? Around the world, you attempt to export Chinese culture by offering works that have been castrated like to foreigners. Do you think these foreigners are aliens from outer space? On the issue of whether China has truly risen up economically, I think we should wait until the real estate industry collapses because we cannot tell right now. But if a nation truly rises up culturally, it will be a strong nation and it will never have any fear of collapsing.

Finally, I want to return to the database of banned words. The more words are in that database, the weaker the culture of that nation will be. But our government gives you plenty of explanations. They tell you that this is being done to protect young people and to maintain social stability. Culture is free, so they have the right to censor any information or culture that may endanger young people or destroy social stability. But if you agree with that, then sooner or later that when you complain about what happened to you one day, they will censor you because you are destroying social stability. Any opinion that is disadvantageous to the ruling class or their interests destroys social stability and endangers young people. If we had put up with the Green Dam software back then, we would have Green Dam operating now. When that time comes, we will not just be looking at the demise of culture. So fellow students, we cannot let this day arrive. Otherwise, we will be the laughing stock in the electronic history books that our grandchildren will receive via satellite many years from now.

Thank you, everybody.

Via zonaeuropa.com
Translated by Roland Soong

Via news.duke.edu

DURHAM, N.C. — Duke University has forged new cooperative partnerships in China which will significantly increase the university’s presence in that country and create new opportunities for education, research and public service.

The partnership agreements were formally announced today (Friday) during Duke President Richard H. Brodhead’s trip to China, which culminated in a groundbreaking ceremony at the site of a planned Duke University campus in the city of Kunshan. Kunshan, located in the Yangtze River Delta, boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in China.

The Duke-Kunshan campus, a partnership between the university and the municipal government, will include a five-building teaching, research and residential center built by the municipal government.

Duke’s Fuqua School of Business will lead the first phase, which will focus on executive MBA and non-degree executive education programs, a pre-experience management training master’s degree, training of Ph.D. students and the recruitment of top faculty.

The campus, which will eventually encompass 200 acres, will feature classroom and meeting space, faculty offices, conference center space, an incubator building offering wet and dry laboratory space and faculty office space, and lodging for students, faculty and staff.

Construction of the five buildings, designed by the architectural firm Gensler, will begin immediately and is expected to be complete in 2011.’ Q, |. I; M: v! `

“We look forward to working with the Ministry of Education, the government of Kunshan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University to support education and business development in this most dynamic region of China,” Brodhead said.
“The Duke-Kunshan campus will create great learning opportunities for our students, and represents a new model of international educational collaboration.”

Future activity on the Duke-Kunshan campus will include programs from Duke’s schools of public policy and environment, and its global health institute, among others, as education and research opportunities are developed.

“The world will increasingly rely on university graduates and faculty members who have been trained in global settings,” Sheppard said. “It is our true pleasure to enter into partnerships that will help China address its immediate needs for talent development, while also creating unique opportunities to educate future leaders.”

Duke already has a significant and historical connection to China. More than 600 Chinese students are currently enrolled at Duke, and the university operates a number of collaborative programs with Chinese institutions in medicine, global health, law and international development.

29th, November, more than one million people took the national civil service exam to compete for 15000 jobs, the admission ratio approaches to 69:1. Exam results will be published on the official websites of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the State Administration of Civil Service in mid-January, and those who passed will be interviewed. Considering the world economic crisis, corporate layoffs and pay cuts, it appears that only civil servants hold solid position and decent wage.

Some people claimed that China had been ruled by poets for over a thousand years, as the civil service exam is a tradition deeply rooted in Chinese culture. The order of social classes in Chinese feudal society is “士农工学商” (civil servant, farmer, worker, student, businessman). Today civil servants are still highly respected and well paid. Recent years China has deployed a so called “Sunshine Wage System” to eliminate the inefficiency and enhance financial transparency of bureaucratic system. In a changing society like China, people show great preference of risk avoidance to hedge the uncertainty and ambiguity of health care system, educational system and social insurance system. The civil service exam system also stimulates social mobility, which is very important to China today.