Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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The richest man in China opened his own Twitter account last month, in the middle of the Covid-19 outbreak. So far, every one of his posts has been devoted to his unrivalled campaign to deliver medical supplies to almost every country around the world.
“One world, one fight!” Jack Ma enthused in one of his first messages. “Together, we can do this!” he cheered in another.
The billionaire entrepreneur is the driving force behind a widespread operation to ship medical supplies to more than 150 countries so far, sending face masks and ventilators to many places that have been elbowed out of the global brawl over life-saving equipment.
But Ma’s critics and even some of his supporters aren’t sure what he’s getting himself into. Has this bold venture into global philanthropy unveiled him as the friendly face of China’s Communist Party? Or is he an independent player who is being used by the Party for propaganda purposes? He appears to be following China’s diplomatic rules, particularly when choosing which countries should benefit from his donations, but his growing clout might put him in the crosshairs of the jealous leaders at the top of China’s political pyramid.
Other tech billionaires have pledged more money to fight the effects of the virus – Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is giving $1bn (£0.8bn) to the cause. Candid, a US-based philanthropy watchdog that tracks private charitable donations, puts Alibaba 12th on a list of private Covid-19 donors. But that list doesn’t include shipments of vital supplies, which some countries might consider to be more important than money at this stage in the global outbreak.
The world’s top coronavirus financial donors
How Alibaba compares to the top five. No one else other than the effervescent Ma is capable of dispatching supplies directly to those who need them. Starting in March, the Jack Ma foundation and the related Alibaba foundation began airlifting supplies to Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and even to politically sensitive areas including Iran, Israel, Russia and the US.
Ma has also donated millions to coronavirus vaccine research and a handbook of medical expertise from doctors in his native Zhejiang province has been translated from Chinese into 16 languages. But it’s the medical shipments that have been making headlines, setting Ma apart.
“He has the ability and the money and the lifting power to get a Chinese supply plane out of Hangzhou to land in Addis Ababa, or wherever it needs to go,” explains Ma’s biographer, Duncan Clark. “This is logistics; this is what his company, his people and his province are all about.”
A friendly face
Jack Ma is famous for being the charismatic English teacher who went on to create China’s biggest technology company. Alibaba is now known as the “Amazon of the East”. Ma started the company inside his tiny apartment in the Chinese coastal city of Hangzhou, in the centre of China’s factory belt, back in 1999. Alibaba has since grown to become one of the dominant players in the world’s second largest economy, with key stakes in China’s online, banking and entertainment worlds. Ma himself is worth more than $40bn.
Officially, he stepped down as Alibaba’s chairman in 2018. He said he was going to focus on philanthropy. But Ma retained a permanent seat on Alibaba’s board. Coupled with his wealth and fame, he remains one of the most powerful men in China.
Media caption The BBC’s Secunder Kermani and Anne Soy compare how prepared Asian and African countries are
It appears that Ma’s donations are following Party guidelines: there is no evidence that any of the Jack Ma and Alibaba Foundation donations have gone to countries that have formal ties with Taiwan, China’s neighbour and diplomatic rival. Ma announced on Twitter that he was donating to 22 countries in Latin America. States that side with Taiwan but who have also called for medical supplies – from Honduras to Haiti – are among the few dozen countries that do not appear to be on the list of 150 countries. The foundations repeatedly refused to provide a detailed list of countries that have received donations, explaining that “at this moment in time, we are not sharing this level of detail”.
However, the donations that have been delivered have certainly generated a lot of goodwill. With the exception of problematic deliveries to Cuba and Eritrea, all of the foundations’ shipments dispatched from China appear to have been gratefully received. That success is giving Ma even more positive attention than usual. China’s state media has been mentioning Ma almost as often as the country’s autocratic leader, Xi Jinping.
AFP
So far…
Over 150 countries have received donations from Jack Ma, including about:
120.4mface masks
4,105,000testing kits
3,704ventilators
Source: Alizila
It’s an uncomfortable comparison. As Ma soaks up praise, Xi faces persistent questions about how he handled the early stages of the virus and where, exactly, the outbreak began.
The Chinese government has dispatched medical teams and donations of supplies to a large number of hard-hit countries, particularly in Europe and South-East Asia.
However, those efforts have sometimes fallen flat. China’s been accused of sending faulty supplies to several countries. In some cases, the tests it sent were being misused but in others, low-quality supplies went unused and the donations backfired.
In contrast, Jack Ma’s shipments have only boosted his reputation.
“It’s fair to say that Ma’s donation was universally celebrated across Africa,” says Eric Olander, managing editor of the China Africa Project website and podcast. Ma pledged to visit all countries in Africa and has been a frequent visitor since his retirement.
“What happens to the materials once they land in a country is up to the host government, so any complaints about how Nigeria’s materials were distributed are indeed a domestic Nigerian issue,” Olander adds. “But with respect to the donation itself, the Rwandan leader, Paul Kagame, called it a “shot in the arm” and pretty much everyone saw it for what it was which was: delivering badly-needed materials to a region of the world that nobody else is either willing or capable of helping at that scale.”
Walking the tightrope
But is Ma risking a backlash from Beijing? Xi Jinping isn’t known as someone who likes to share the spotlight and his government has certainly targeted famous faces before. In recent years, the country’s top actress, a celebrated news anchor and several other billionaire entrepreneurs have all “disappeared” for long periods. Some, including the news anchor, end up serving prison sentences. Others re-emerge from detention, chastened and pledging their allegiance to the Party.
“There’s a rumour that [Jack Ma] stepped down in 2018 from being the chairman of the Alibaba Group because he was seen as a homegrown entrepreneur whose popularity would eclipse that of the Communist Party,” explains Ashley Feng, research associate at the Centre for New American Security in Washington DC. Indeed, Ma surprised many when he suddenly announced his retirement in 2018. He has denied persistent rumours that Beijing forced him out of his position.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Ma discussed trade with then-President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017
Duncan Clark, Ma’s biographer, is also aware of reports that Ma was nudged away from Alibaba following a key incident in January 2017. The Chinese billionaire met with then-President-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower, ostensibly to discuss Sino-US trade. The Chinese president didn’t meet with Trump until months later.
“There was a lot of speculation of time that Jack Ma had moved too fast,” Clark says. “So, I think there’s lessons learned from both sides on the need to try to coordinate.”
“Jack Ma represents a sort of entrepreneurial soft power,” Clark adds. “That also creates challenges though, because the government is quite jealous or nervous of non-Party actors taking that kind of role.”
Technically, Ma isn’t a Communist outsider: China’s wealthiest capitalist has actually been a member of the Communist Party since the 1980s, when he was a university student.
But Ma’s always had a tricky relationship with the Party, famously saying that Alibaba’s attitude towards the Party was to “be in love with it but not to marry it”.
Even if Ma and the foundations connected to him are making decisions without Beijing’s advance blessing, the Chinese government has certainly done what it can to capitalise on Ma’s generosity. Chinese ambassadors are frequently on hand at airport ceremonies to receive the medical supplies shipped over by Ma, from Sierra Leone to Cambodia.
China has also used Ma’s largesse in its critiques of the United States. “The State Department said Taiwan is a true friend as it donated 2 million masks,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry tweeted in early April. “Wonder if @StateDept has any comment on Jack Ma’s donation of 1 million masks and 500k testing kits as well as Chinese companies’ and provinces’ assistance?”
Perhaps Ma can rise above what’s happened to so many others who ran afoul of the Party. China might just need a popular global Chinese figure so much that Ma has done what no one else can: make himself indispensable.
“Here’s the one key takeaway from all that happened with Jack Ma and Africa: he said he would do something and it got done,” explains Eric Olander. “That is an incredibly powerful optic in a place where foreigners often come, make big promises and often fail to deliver. So, the huge Covid-19 donation that he did fit within that pattern. He said he would do it and mere weeks later, those masks were in the hands of healthcare workers.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Ma at an Electronic World Trade Platform event with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed last year
Duncan Clark argues that Ma already had a seat at China’s high table because of Alibaba’s economic heft. However, his first-name familiarity with world leaders makes him even more valuable to Beijing as China tries to repair its battered image.
“He has demonstrated the ability, with multiple IPOs under his belt, and multiple friendships overseas, to win friends and influence people. He’s the Dale Carnegie of China and that certainly, we’ve seen that that’s irritated some in the Chinese government but now it’s almost an all hands on deck situation,” Clark says.
There’s no doubt that China’s wider reputation is benefiting from the charitable work of Ma and other wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs. Andrew Grabois from Candid, the philanthropic watchdog that’s been measuring global donations in relation to Covid-19, says that the private donations coming from China are impossible to ignore.
“They’re taking a leadership role, the kind of thing that used to be done by the United States,” he says. “The most obvious past example is the response to Ebola, the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The US sent in doctors and everything to West Africa to help contain that virus before it left West Africa.”
Chinese donors are taking on that role with this virus.
“They are projecting soft power beyond their borders, going into areas, providing aid, monetary aid and expertise,” Grabois adds.
So, it’s not the right time for Beijing to stand in Jack Ma’s way.
“You know, this is a major crisis for the world right now,” Duncan Clark concludes. “But obviously, it’s also a crisis for China’s relationship with the rest of the world. So they need anybody who can help dampen down some of these those pressures.”
Israeli medical equipment firm IceCure Medical, with an initial US$4 million sales and marketing effort, will open its first Chinese office in Shanghai
English shopping outlet company Value Retail sees the chance to lure consumers who have been under lockdowns aimed at halting the spread of the coronavirus
Foreign firms, including Israeli medical equipment maker IceCure Medical and English shopping outlet company Value Retail, still see opportunities in China despite the coronavirus. Photo: AFP
Not only has the coronavirus pandemic not watered down one company’s expansion plans for China, it has given it even greater reason to push forward into the Chinese market.
Israeli company IceCure Medical is forging ahead with opening its first Chinese office in Shanghai, with plans to spend up to US$4 million for the initial sales and marketing effort for its non-surgical breast cancer treatments.
Chief executive Eyal Shamir said he has seen an uptick in Chinese interest in the company’s ProSense product, which allows the freezing of tumours outside a hospital environment, because it can free up facilities badly needed for Covid-19 patients.
The government approval of the company’s Chinese subsidiary is now only days away following a successful product console registration, according to Shamir, and it has already sold two units to the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Centre for a clinical study.
World Health Organisation warns the ‘worst still ahead’ in coronavirus pandemic
“We are planning a full launch of the product in China for both breast cancer and breast benign tumours as well as other organs,” Shamir said.
“Post Covid-19, there will be a backlog of many surgeries and not only for breast cancer patients.”
IceCure Medical, though, is not the only foreign company eyeing expansion into China despite the risk of secondary outbreaks of coronavirus.
West of Shanghai, English shopping outlet company Value Retail is also expanding its retail space, banking on Chinese shoppers re-emerging from lockdowns to begin
After being cooped at home for weeks, people want to be outdoors to enjoy the beautiful spring weather – Value Retail
Value Retail is proceeding with plans to enlarge its Suzhou Village shopping centre from 35,000 square metres (378,000 sq ft) to over 50,000 square metres, while also increasing the number of shops from 120 to 200, which will make it the largest of the 11 venues its controls globally.
It is working closely with the Yang Cheng Lake Peninsula government on a date for construction to start, after seeing a surprising increase in retail sales at its centres in early April. The company’s Chinese subsidiary, Value Retail China, attributed the rise to an increasing number of consumers wanting to “get outside” of their homes after being isolated for several weeks.
Suzhou Village sales have increased 40 per cent each week since the start of April, the company said.
“Thanks to the positive recovery [in spending] over the past several weeks, we are going ahead with the Suzhou Village expansion,” the company said in a statement. “After being cooped at home for weeks, people want to be outdoors to enjoy the beautiful spring weather. We provide a shopping experience for guests in an outdoor environment … the motivation for such an experience after isolation is huge. [Being] outdoors is seen as a luxury now.”
In addition, customers are flocking to both its Suzhou and Shanghai Village centres as a form of domestic tourism because of the curb on overseas travel, Value Retail China said.
Despite the economic destruction that the coronavirus pandemic has caused in China, it also is opening up expansion opportunities for entrepreneurial firms in several industries, such as e-commerce and online delivery, life sciences and infrastructure construction, said EY Asia-Pacific transaction advisory services leader Harsha Basnayake.
However, while businesses within Asia-Pacific expressed a desire for opportunistic expansions, most companies still held a pessimistic view of economic recovery that would drag on into 2021.
American companies already operating in China were even less optimistic with over 70 per cent of businesses surveyed by the American Chamber of Commerce in March saying they were reluctant about expanding in the coming year.
Although it is too early to say if retail property will rise – particularly when we are seeing new habits forming, going from shopfronts to online and how far this new behaviour will stick. China will gives us lots of lessons on this. – Harsha Basnayake
“We are expecting opportunities in real estate, particularly in commercial property and logistics, and we think industries in life sciences, some parts of health care and infrastructure will be interesting,” Basnayake said.
“Although it is too early to say if retail property will rise – particularly when we are seeing new habits forming, going from shopfronts to online and how far this new behaviour will stick. China will gives us lots of lessons on this.”
The Chinese government’s move to increase infrastructure spending to boost the economy will also benefit certain industries, such as cement production.
Despite suffering a 24 per cent drop in sales in the first quarter due to virus-related delays in construction activities, China’s largest cement manufacturer, Anhui Conch Cement, is likely to move forward with plans to expand in part due to its participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, according to analysts at S&P Global.
Though no one would be able to tell exactly what will happen when the Covid-19 uncertainties are not completely gone, signs of recovery in China have brought encouragement to us – Justin Channe
Desires to expand are also not limited to these industries, and even the hard-hit hotel industry is starting to show green shoots.
International hotel chain IHG said that the coronavirus would not derail its new Regent-branded hotel project in Chengdu, which is expected to start construction later this year.
“Though no one would be able to tell exactly what will happen when the Covid-19 uncertainties are not completely gone, signs of recovery in China have brought encouragement to us,” said Regent Hotels & Resorts managing director Justin Channe.
“While we saw business pickup across China over the past Qing Ming Festival holiday, Chengdu and its nearby destinations were among the leading ones. In the long run, we stay confident of the outlook for the China hotel industry, including the luxury segment.”
Analysing how coronavirus broke China’s historic economic growth run
Beyond the crisis, there will be ample opportunities for new merger and acquisitions (M&A) amid business restructures and failures, particularly in China, Basnayake added.
A new EY survey found 52 per cent of Asia-Pacific businesses planned on pursuing M&A in the next year.
“While the crisis is having a severe impact on M&A sentiment, there’s evidence from the survey that M&A activity intentions remain steady in the long term. There are many who recognise this is a time where valuations will be reset, and there will be stressed and distressed acquisition opportunities,” Basnayake said.
“For example, from our interviews with corporations in China, a majority said that Covid-19 has not impacted their M&A strategies, noting that the situation has not led to any cancellations or withdrawals from deals, but only in delays in closing deals.”
Image copyright PEMILLE KLEMPImage caption A group of Indian troopers who fought for the English, Ghulam Ali Khan, 1815-16
The English East India Company, founded in 1600, was established for trading. But as the powerful multinational corporation expanded its control over India in the late 18th Century, it commissioned many remarkable artworks from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Writer and historian William Dalrymple writes about these hybrid paintings which explore life and nature.
Calcutta in the late 1770s was Asia’s biggest boom town: known as the City of Palaces, the East India Company’s bridgehead in Bengal had doubled in size to 400,000 inhabitants in a decade.
It was now unquestionably the richest and largest colonial city in the East – though certainly not the most orderly.
“It would have been so easy to turn it into one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” wrote the Count de Modave, a friend of Voltaire who passed through at this time. “One cannot fathom why the English allowed everyone the freedom to build in the most bizarre taste, with the most outlandish planning.”
Nor were visitors much taken by its English inhabitants. Most had come East with just one idea: to amass a fortune in the quickest possible time.
Image caption An Indian trooper who fought for the English, Ghulam Ali Khan, 1819Calcutta (now Kolkata) was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and the constant presence of mortality made men hard and callous.
Rising with Olympian detachment above the mercantile bawdiness of his contemporaries was the rotund figure of the chief justice of the new Supreme Court, Sir Elijah Impey.
A portrait of him by Johan Zoffany still hangs, a little lopsidedly, in the Kolkata High Court. It shows him pale and plump, ermine gowned and dustily bewigged.
Impey was, however, a serious scholar and unusual in taking a serious interest in the land to which he had been posted.
Image copyright PEMILLE KLEMPImage caption Indian villagers by Ghulam Ali Khan, 1815-16
On the journey out to India, a munshi (administrator) had accompanied him to teach him Bengali and Urdu, and on arrival the new chief justice began to learn Persian and collect Indian paintings. His house became a meeting place where the more cultured elements of Calcutta society could discuss history and literature.
Impey and his wife Mary were also greatly interested in natural history and began to collect a menagerie of rare Indian animals.
At some stage in the mid-1770s, the Impeys decided to bring a group of leading Mughal artists – Sheikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das and Ram Das – to paint their private zoo.
It was probably not the first commission of Indian artists by British patrons. “The Study of Botany is of late Years become a very general Amusement,” noted one enthusiast, and we know that the Scottish nurseryman James Kerr was sending Indian-painted botanical drawings back to Edinburgh as early as 1773.
But the Impeys’ albums of natural history painting remain among the most dazzlingly successful of all such commissions: today, a single page usually reaches prices of more than £330,000 ($387,000) at auctions, and the 197 images from the Impey Album are now widely recognised as among the very greatest glories of Indian painting.
Image copyright FRANCIS WAREImage caption English child seated on a pony and surrounded by three Indian servants by Shaikh Muhammad Amir
This month, for the first time since the Impey Album was split up in the 18th Century, around 30 of its pages will be reassembled for a major exhibition in the Wallace Collection in London.
Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company celebrates some of the extraordinary work which resulted from commissions made by East India Company patrons from master Indian artists between the 1770s and 1840s.
It will be a unique chance to see some of the finest Indian paintings which are now scattered in private collections around the world.
The three artists who Impey summoned to his fine classical house in Middleton Street were all from Patna, 200 miles (320km) up the Ganges.
The most prolific was a Muslim, Shaikh Zain-al-Din, while his two colleagues, Bhawani Das and Ram Das, were both Hindus.
Image caption A finely painted miniature depicting four British officers with their wives taking refreshments at a table, artist unknown
Trained in the late Mughal style and patronised by the Nawabs of Murshidabad and Patna, they quickly learned to use English watercolours on English Watman watercolour paper, and take English botanical still lives as their models. In this way an extraordinary fusion of English and Mughal artistic impulses took place.
Zain ud-Din’s best works reveal a superb synthesis between a coldly scientific European natural history specimen illustration, warmed with a profoundly Indian sensibility and vital feeling for nature.
At his best – whether by instinct or inherited knowledge and training – he channels the outstanding Mughal achievement in natural history painting of 150 years earlier, when the great Mughal artist Mansur painted animals and birds for the Emperor Jahangir.
Image caption Portrait of a Mughal artist, by Yellapah Of Vellore, 1832-1835
Nowhere are the merits of Company Painting better illustrated than in Zain ud-Din’s astonishing portrait of a Black Headed Oriole (No. 27).
At first glance, it could pass for a remarkably skilful English natural history painting. Only gradually does its hybrid origins become manifest.
The brilliance and simplicity of the colours, the meticulous attention to detail, the gem-like highlights, the way the picture seems to glow, all these point unmistakably towards Zain ud-Din’s Mughal training.
Image caption Portrait of a black headed oriole by Zain ud-Din
An idiosyncratic approach to perspective also hints at this background: the tree trunk is rounded, yet the grasshopper which sits on it is as flat as a pressed flower, with only a hint of outline shading to give it depth – the same technique used by Mansur.
Yet no artist working in a normal Mughal atelier would have placed his bird detached from a landscape against a white background, with the jackfruit tree on which its sits cut into a perfect, scientific cross-section.
Equally no English artist would have thought of painting the bark of that cross section the same brilliant yellow as the oriole; the tentative washes of a memsahib’s watercolour are a world away.
The two traditions have met head on, and from that blinding impact an inspirational new fusion has taken place.
Bhawani Das, who seems to have started off as an assistant to Zain ud-Din, is almost as fine an artist as Zain ud-Din.
Image caption Indian trooper holding a spear by Ghulam Ali Khan, 1815-186
He is acutely sensitive to shape, texture and expression, as for example in his celebrated study of a great fruit bat with the contrast between its soft, furry body with the angular precision of its blackly outstretched wings, as if it were some caped Commendatore ushering a woman into a Venetian opera rather than a creature in a colonial menagerie.
Now, for the first time, the work of these great Indian artists painting in this brilliantly hybrid Anglo-Indian style are beginning to get the attention they deserve.
The first-ever museum show of this work in the UK aims to highlight and showcase the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency. Indeed the greatest among them – such as Zain ud-Din- deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.
William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company and Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company (Bloomsbury)
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption The Giant salamander is ironically referred to as a “baby fish” in China
What do you get when you cross a baby with a fish?
It’s not the start of a dad joke, but one of a series of pictures drawn by Shanghai-based illustrator Frankie Huang.
Chinese is already one of the most pictorial languages in the world, but she’s taking it to the next level – by literally turning words into pictures. Her series, Putong Animals, re-imagines animals according to what they’re called in Mandarin Chinese – or Putonghua – the official language of China.
In Mandarin a zebra, for example, is literally a “patterned horse”. The dolphin has unflatteringly been turned into a “sea pig”.
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption The Zebra is referred to literally as a “patterned horse” in Mandarin
Frankie says she came up with the idea for the series after seeing people on Twitter discussing how some animals had “really funny names when you translate them literally”.
“I realised no-one had done a series of this and I thought to myself ‘I suppose it’s time then’,” she told the BBC. “I wanted to create something that was not just pretty but also interesting.”
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption Turkeys are “fire chickens” in Mandarin
“The turkey – or fire chicken – was the first one I drew. It was just a bunch of chickens on fire and a guy in a hazmat suit feeding them,” she said. “You can see that my technique actually developed as I got more into it.”
Frankie was born in the Chinese capital, Beijing, but grew up in the US, exposing her to both English and Mandarin from a young age.
“I’m both an outsider and insider [to the Chinese language] because of my upbringing, I think sometimes you need to be an outsider in order to really appreciate something,” said the illustrator.
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption The celestial lobster is known as a “dragon prawn”
Another one of Frankie’s favourite illustrations is the “dragon prawn” – or lobster.
“I wanted to make it look really majestic and godlike,” said Frankie. “Someone commented that it’s a celestial crustacean, I thought that was such a nice name for it.”
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption While the dolphin is given the less than graceful name of “sea pig”
It takes Frankie around three hours to produce one illustration, from conceptualisation to sketching it out and eventually colouring it in.
She has for now completed her series on Putong Animals, but she is looking into turning the animals into characters of their own.
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption Kangaroos are known as “pocket mice”, though they are far from tiny
“Even as far back as ancient Greece with Aesop’s fables, people were telling stories through animals,” she said.
“I actually started to write a story about the lives of the fire chicken. They’re on a planet where people use them in their lives, [like] putting them under their beds during winter to keep them warm. I want to eventually give them more personality.”
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption The tiny gecko on the other hand, has earned the imposing name of “Wall Tiger”
But it’s not just animals that she illustrates – she’s also delved into Chinese phrases.
This picture showing a cat in a pipe is meant to illustrate the Chinese phrase “xi mao”, which literally translated, means to “inhale cat”.
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption If someone is addicted to cats, they are “inhaling cat”
It’s a phrase that’s spread across young people in China, to describe someone who is a cat addict.
Another one she’s done shows stuffing spilling out of a dumpling – a literal translation of the Chinese phrase “lou xian”, or “for stuffing to leak out”. The phrase refers to a situation where truth is revealed.
“If you look closer, you’ll actually see some tentacles coming out of the dumpling, because I drew it after I watched Stranger Things 3,” Frankie laughingly admits.
Image copyright FRANKIE HUANGImage caption And the stuffing is out on this one
But she’s of course not the first person to have put a clever play on Chinese words – and sometimes others have done so for more political reasons.
Social media in China is heavily censored, and it’s not uncommon for social media companies in China to remove “sensitive” content. This was one of the obstacles that #MeToo – the movement that encouraged people to openly talk about their experiences of sexual harassment – faced in China.
The phrase #MeToo was heavily censored but to get around this, many instead began posting the Chinese words “rice bunny”, which is pronounced “mi tu” in Mandarin.
“One of the things that made me look more closer into pulling together and dissecting the Chinese language was the [phrase] mi tu,” said Frankie.
“The censorship forces [Chinese people] to constantly stay ahead of the government so they come up with these wonderful creations, sort of like how diamonds are created under enormous pressure. All these gems of wit are found on the Chinese internet.”
This is part of what Frankie hopes her illustrations will do – help people to recognise “humour and wit of the Chinese culture”.
“I want to hopefully reach more people to help them be interested in the Chinese language and culture,” she said.
“In this day and age, China is in the press constantly. [I want to show] there’s so much more to China than just the politics.
“I want to be independent of all these things and show people that you can love and enjoy the culture without all the politics. The politics are new, but this [language] is not.”
Priority carriages on underground trains have not solved the problem of sexual harassment for female passengers
A woman is surrounded by men in a priority carriage on the Shenzhen metro. Photo: Sam Tsang
The first time Wanda was groped by a man on a Beijing bus she was a college student, travelling to school in her gym uniform on a summer’s day. Ten years – and numerous examples of sexual harassment on public transport – later, she is still haunted by the memory.
Now 31, Wanda – who asked to be identified only by her first name – remembers every detail of the incident. The bus was not crowded but the man, who appeared to be in his 40s, went straight over to stand uncomfortably close to her.
Then he pressed himself tightly against her and began making a thrusting motion with his lower body. Wanda said she froze, terrified by the encounter and unsure how to act. Just then, the bus took a sharp turn, the man was thrown aside and she quickly moved away.
“Afterwards, for a period, I looked at every adult man I saw as if he was aggressive,” she said.
Since then, Wanda said she had been flashed at in public and just last year was forced to block a man with her purse when he tried to touch her leg on a train.
118 Chinese men detained for groping women on subway trains
Wanda’s experience is not unusual but attempts to address the problem of sexual harassment on public transport in China have met with mixed results, as well as claims by feminists that they are restrictive to women.
Two major cities in southern China, for example, introduced priority carriages for women on their underground trains in 2017.
and Guangzhou, both in Guangdong province, established two designated carriages – one at each end of the train – during peak times.
The carriages are decorated with pink stickers which say, in Chinese and English, “priority carriages for women” and while men are not barred from using them
they are encouraged to leave them to women passengers.
While the authorities did not specifically say they were intended to prevent sexual harassment – saying only that the scheme was meant to “give more care and respect to women” – the carriages followed a precedent set by Japan and Europe for that reason.
Shenzhen is currently considering an update to its priority carriages with an amended law designating them for people with disabilities and minors, as well as women, and only during rush hour. Other passengers who do not meet these criteria can be asked to leave by rail staff.
A priority carriage for women on the Shenzhen underground system. Photo: Phoebe Zhang
But in reality the restrictions on the priority carriages are seldom enforced and they have been used by men since their launch. Furthermore, feminists say the scheme is a form of segregation, rather than an attempt to solve the cause of the issue.
One reason the priority carriages have failed in their purpose could be the size of the crowds using public transport each day. According to government data, there are roughly 5 million passenger trips on the Shenzhen underground every day and 8 million in Guangzhou.
It is also hard for staff to enforce the regulation.
“When it first came out, subway staff vehemently advocated for women to use it, so many people did,” said Zhang Ying, a piano teacher in Guangzhou. Staff would hold loud speakers and gesture for women to get on the priority carriages. But now, everybody just treats it like an ordinary carriage, she said.
Zhang said she rarely uses the priority carriages because of the inconvenience of having to walk all the way to the end of the train.
Women call for convenience in all areas, but [the government] only wants to draw you a little corner to play in.Xiao Meili, Guangzhou-based feminist
Feminists have opposed the scheme from the start.
“The logic behind the scheme is wrong to begin with,” said Xiao Meili, a Guangzhou-based feminist. “When noticing the dangers women face in public spaces, women call for convenience in all areas, but [the government] only wants to draw you a little corner to play in, signalling they still will neglect you in most places.”
Although it may appear well-intentioned, Xiao said the scheme was restricting women’s space.
“Most of the sexual harassers and rapists are men, so wouldn’t it be more effective to put these offenders in a limited space?” she asked.
In a survey of 443 people conducted by a group of feminists in Shenzhen in 2017, 42 per cent of women said they had been harassed on public transport, compared with just 6 per cent of men.
Most of the interviewees said they were dissatisfied with the police response and 65 per cent said they thought police should be most responsible for handling sexual harassment in public.
Six ways Japanese women can deter gropers on trains
Xiao and others have repeatedly written to government representatives about sexual harassment on public transport. In 2016, Xiao’s feminist group received 40,000 yuan (US$5,650) in public donations – just enough to buy an advertisement slot.
For two years, the group tried to put up anti-harassment billboards in the Guangzhou and Shenzhen underground systems, but they were repeatedly blocked by the authorities who said the advertisements would cause panic.
But in 2018 Xiao’s group spotted advertisements in the subways in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, some placed by news organisations and others by local governments. One advertisement in Chengdu, put up by rail officials, said: “There’s no groping hand here.”
Another, in Beijing, said: “Prevent sexual harassment, be vocal.”
Xiao said she was happy to see the changes, but described the current policy of updating the carriages in Shenzhen as an example of “lazy politics”.
There needed to be more than a pink bumper sticker on carriage windows, she said.
Instead, policymakers needed to think about the actual mechanisms of stopping harassment and how to handle culprits once they were caught.
“Women do not demand special care as if they are a soft and weak group,” Xiao said.
“They demand the safety they deserve and the right to travel conveniently.”
Military stresses combat readiness and war mentality in production released just weeks before 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic
China’s air force shows a more assertive side in a new propaganda video. Photo: Handout
The Chinese air force has ramped up its combat rhetoric in its latest propaganda video, with pilots warning enemies in English and top brass stressing the need for crisis mode.
The four-minute video was posted on the Ministry of National Defence’s website on Wednesday and begins with two J-20 stealth fighters taking off from an unidentified airbase.
At least three missile-carrying J-11 jets are then shown make low passes and various aerobatics at sea.
After that, a pilot shouts in English: “This is the PLA Air Force speaking. You are about to enter Chinese airspace. Leave immediately. Leave immediately.”
The video also features members of an elite brigade called the “Eagles of Liaoning province”, a frequent winner of PLA Air Force competitions.
PLA Air Force formation ‘a sign of stealth fighter mass production’ in China
Brigade member Bai Long, a J-20 fighter pilot, says the team have a higher calling.
“Winning over enemies is more important than winning competitions,” Bai says.
Also featured is Wang Hai, a 93-year-old combat veteran from the Korean war, who encourages air force personnel to fear nothing during combat.
“You cannot do anything if you are not brave enough. You can’t be a pilot if you fear death,” Wang says.
Wang Yongtong, a brigade commander, is also quoted as saying that the Chinese air force is using war games to strengthen its combat readiness.
“We will meticulously prepare for war and improve our combat capacity to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, security and interests,” he says.
The video’s release comes just a few weeks before China marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic with a massive military parade showcasing its military weapons.
It also underlines China’s increasingly assertive efforts to defend its interests.
On Wednesday, China hit out at Canada for sending a warship to traverse the Taiwan Strait.
And in late July, South Korea claimed that two Chinese warplanes entered South Korea’s air defence identification zone, a claimed denied by the Chinese foreign ministry.
And in late January, a Chinese surveillance plane crossed the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea via the Tsushima Strait, prompting the Japanese air self-defense force to scramble fighter jets.
Expensive presents are officially discouraged but have become the norm at many schools on day of appreciation for educators
Students at Yangzhou Technical Vocational College form the Chinese characters for “Hello Teacher” to mark China’s Teachers’ Day. Photo: Handout
Despite a decade of official discouragement, parents in China have been struggling with one of the biggest dilemmas of the school year – how to mark the country’s annual Teacher’s Day.
Ellen Yuan agonised for a day and a night before sending her son off to kindergarten on Tuesday with a 1,000 yuan (US$140) gift card in his bag for the teacher.
It was the boy’s second week of attendance and Yuan had given no thought to any Teacher’s Day obligations –until she learned that several of her friends had been busy over the weekend preparing gifts for their children’s teachers.
“It makes me feel that I am being a drag on my son if I don’t do so,” said Yuan, who works for a foreign company in Shanghai.
Respecting teachers has traditionally been a fundamental social norm in China but gift giving on the special day for educators has gone beyond an expression of appreciation by their students, as parents have taken over with ever more expensive gifts – and sometimes cash – which they hope will mean their kids are well taken care of while at school.
What gift, how expensive it should be, and how to deliver it have become the biggest questions for many parents in the run-up to September 10 each year, even though the education ministry and its subordinate bodies have repeatedly issued directives over the past decade to ban teachers accepting gifts.
Yuan said one of her friends had bought a body care set worth more than 600 yuan for each of her child’s three teachers, another had bought an 800 yuan gift card, while a third had given the head teacher a 1,000 yuan bottle of perfume.
Some parents had delivered the presents directly to the school, while others had asked their children to take the gifts to their teachers. Yuan’s plan was to message the teacher and tell her to take the gift card from her son’s bag.
“I know it’s bad. I don’t want my kid to know that,” Yuan said.
Hundreds of teachers protest in China over poor pay
The question of whether parents should give gifts on Teacher’s Day was one of the hottest topics on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, attracting more than 15 million views as of Tuesday afternoon.
“Of course we should not, but I don’t dare to ignore it,” one user said, winning more than 10,000 likes.
Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences, said the gift-giving trend had been partly driven by a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality.
“Everybody has given a gift. Would my child be specially treated if I don’t? This is a common concern,” Chu said. As a result, the purpose of gift giving on Teacher’s Day had become about protecting the children’s interests instead of a sincere expression of gratitude, he said.
But not every teacher gets presents – with gifts usually reserved for those teaching the “main subjects” of mathematics, Chinese and English, which count the most in high school and college entrance examinations.
Emily Shen, an English teacher from a middle school in Hangzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, said she also prepared gifts for the teachers of her two kids. “Some chocolate for them to take to school. And I myself would give a gift card to each of those who teach the main subjects,” she said.
Zhuang Ke, a music teacher at a primary school in Jiaxing, also in Zhejiang province, admitted she was embarrassed by the parents’ different treatment of teachers of “less important” subjects like her’s. “It’s always nice to receive presents. But teachers who teach music, art and PE are often forgotten,” she said.
Chinese kindergarten teacher fired for hot sun punishment
State broadcaster CCTV said in a commentary on its website on Sunday that “all forms of behavior that attempt to ruin normal teaching order and interfere in equality by sending gifts should be resolutely abandoned”. A similar message was run by a series of official media outlets at local level.
“The most fundamental way to stop parents from sending gifts is to treat the students equally and fairly every day, so that parents conclude it makes no difference whether they give a gift,” Rednet.cn, the official news portal of Hunan province, said on Monday.
Although some teachers have made it explicit to students that they will refuse presents on Teacher’s Day, Yuan said her son’s teacher accepted the gift, as did the teachers of her three friends’ children.
Chief executive Rupert Hogg says staff who ‘support or participate in illegal protests’ would face disciplinary action that ‘may include termination of employment’
Airline’s shares down 4.37 per cent on Monday morning to lowest level in 10 years, despite it complying with orders on Friday from China’s aviation authority
Cathay Pacific moved over the weekend to comply with new orders from China’s aviation authority. Photo: Bloomberg
Cathay Pacific has warned that it would sack staff taking part in illegal protests in Hong Kong, saying it would take a “zero tolerance” approach, as its shares slumped to their lowest level in 10 years in morning trading on Monday.
In a note to staff on Monday, chief executive Rupert Hogg said staff who “support or participate in illegal protests” would face disciplinary action that “could be serious and may include termination of employment”.
His warning indicated an escalation by the company, under pressure to crack down on employees after China’s civil aviation regulator said on Friday that airline staff supporting the Hong Kong protests would be barred from flights going to, from or through mainland China.
“We are all obliged to abide by law at all times,” Hogg said. “Cathay Pacific Group has a zero-tolerance approach to illegal activities. Specifically, in the current context, there will be disciplinary consequences for employees who support or participate in illegal protests. These consequences could be serious and may include termination of employment.”
By noon in Hong Kong, the stock had fallen 4.37 per cent to HK$9.85 (US$1.26), its lowest level since June 2009. Losses dragged the carrier’s parent company Swire Pacific down 5.4 per cent to HK$77.50, making it the worst performer on Hong Kong’s stock market during morning trading.
This was the lowest price since October 2018 for Swire, which owns 45 per cent of the airline. Air China, which owns 22.7 per cent of Cathay, also fell 1.53 per cent in Hong
On Friday, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) told Hong Kong’s flagship carrier that any staff members who had taken part in what it called “illegal protests”, “violent actions” and “overly radical activities” would not be allowed to fly to or from the mainland, in a first warning shot at a Hong Kong-based corporate giant.
The CAAC also said that the airline would have to submit identification details of all crew operating all services using mainland China airspace, and that flights with unapproved crew lists would be barred. It gave the airline until Thursday to submit a detailed plan to improve its procedures.
Anti-extradition bill protesters join a sit-in protest at Hong Kong International Airport on Sunday. Photo: Reuters
Cathay Pacific had earlier said it would not stop staff members from taking part in demonstrations.
On Wednesday, Cathay Pacific chairman John Slosar said the company would not rein in staff for openly supporting the protests. “We certainly wouldn’t dream of telling them what they have to think about something,” Slosar said.
But in his second statement in two days in relations to the CAAC’s sanctions, Hogg said the “actions and words” of staff outside of work hours could have a “significant effect on the company”, adding that the actions of a few of Cathay’s 34,000 employees would be seen as a company position.
He also asked staff to not “support or participate” in the illegal protest at the airport, saying the carrier was concerned that the protests could become disorderly and violent.
No flights by Cathay Pacific, nor by its subsidiaries Cathay Dragon or HK Express, were delayed or cancelled on Saturday or Sunday, the company said.
The CAAC’s move was widely seen as a clear warning to Hong Kong’s business community to toe Beijing’s line to pressure ongoing anti-government protests in the city that have been taking place for over two months.
Despite the airline acting over the weekend to comply with the rules, Chinese state media continued to put pressure on the company.
Global Times, a tabloid associated with Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said on Sunday the airline had still not allayed all concerns despite its adjustments to comply with the ruling.
Carrie Lam’s remarks about Beijing’s sovereignty ‘add fuel to the fire’, analysts warn
“These are only small steps [showing] that Cathay Pacific is heading towards the right direction, and their sincerity will need to be tested over time,” the tabloid said in an opinion article on Sunday.
It said 2,000 company staff joined citywide strikes last Monday, and cited the case of a pilot who was arrested and charged with rioting during a demonstration on July 28.
“Cathay Pacific has touched on this behaviour lightly, which has a huge impact on the trust the industry and the public have towards the company,” the article said.
State broadcaster CCTV published a short video on Weibo on Monday morning of its anchor issuing further warnings to the airline, saying there were reports of staff continuing to join “illegal gatherings” and asking tourists not to go to Hong Kong.
“If this continues, it’s not a matter of whether or not people would still want to come to Hong Kong, but whether they would still want to be on your airline,” Kang Hui said in a one-minute video.
“Let me send a friendly reminder: one would not be in trouble had one not asked for it,” Kang said, in Mandarin and then in English, translating the popular Chinese internet meme phrase “No zuo no die” and claiming some Cathay Pacific staff pretended not to understand Mandarin. Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong.
Elsewhere, the company announced that two of its airport employees
for leaking passenger information about a Hong Kong police soccer team who had been on a flight to mainland China. It has also suspended the pilot who was among 44 people charged with rioting on July 28.
Although the company does not clearly specify its country-by-country performance, China and Hong Kong produced half of all its 2018 revenue – HK$57 billion of a total of HK$111 billion. A fifth of all the carrier’s flight are to and from the mainland.
Annual tests still an academic pressure cooker for students wanting to get into the nation’s top universities, despite efforts to change the system
The gruelling exam is the sole criteria for admission to university in China
After months of study, China’s high school students are about to be put to the test in the annual “university entrance examinations which begin on Friday. Photo: EPA-EFE
For the past six months, the life of 18-year-old Shanghai student Xiao Qing has revolved around preparation for one of China’s annual rites of passage.
Every day at school, from 7.20am to 5.30pm, the final-year secondary school student in Changning district has studied previous test papers for the gaokao, officially known as the National Higher Education Entrance Examination.
“Sometimes I feel my bottom hurts from sitting for so many hours,” she said. “We feel like we are test machines.”
Xiao Qing will put all of that preparation to the real test from Friday, when over two to three days she will be among more than 10 million people trying to qualify for one of the spots at a Chinese university.
Most students get just one shot at the gaokao, the sole criteria for admission to university in China. It’s a gruelling process that has been criticised over the years as too focused on rote learning, putting too much pressure on students and privileging applicants living near the best universities.
Education authorities have gone some way to try to address these problems. In 2014, the Ministry of Education started letting students choose half of their subjects to introduce some flexibility into the system.
Apart from the compulsory subjects of Chinese, mathematics and English, students are now supposed to be able to choose any three of six other subjects: physics, chemistry, biology, politics, history and geography.
Previously, secondary school students had been split strictly into liberal arts or science majors in a system that was introduced in 1952 and revived in 1977 after being suspended during the Cultural Revolution.
Last go at exam success for China’s ‘gaokao grandpa’
Wen Dongmao, a professor from Peking University’s Graduate School of Education, said the changes expanded the opportunity for students to follow their interests.
“The new gaokao gives students plenty of choices of subjects to learn and to be evaluated on. I think people should choose which subject to learn based on what they are interested in,” Wen said.
“Gaokao reform is designed according to some methods by overseas universities, like American and Hong Kong schools. Its direction is right, but there will be inevitable problems brought by it.”
One of the problems is the uneven implementation of the changes throughout the country, with just 14 of China’s 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions having introduced them.
In the eastern province of Anhui, for example, the reforms were supposed to go in effect from September last year but were postponed without reason, news portal Caixin.com reported.
The report quoted a teacher from Hefei No 1 Middle School in the provincial capital as saying the school was not ready for the changes.
Is the university entrance exam in China the worst anywhere?
“Shanghai and Zhejiang are economically advanced and we are not at that level,” he was quoted as saying. “It’s a big challenge for us to manage so many students’ choices of gaokao subjects.”
In neighbouring Jiangxi province, a high school history teacher said many places opposed the reform mainly “because of the shortage of resources”.
“It’s hard to roll out gaokao reform because we don’t have enough teachers or classrooms to handle the students’ various choices of subjects. Students can choose three out of six courses and that means there are 20 potential combinations,” the teacher was quoted as saying.
Chinese high school students study late into the night for the National Higher Education Entrance Examination. Photo: EPA-EFE
In addition, the system allows students to take the tests in more than one year and submit the highest scores when applying to universities.
“I heard from teachers in other provinces that students will take the tests of the selected subjects again and again for fear that other students will overtake them. That’s exhausting and will just put more burden on the students,” the Jiangxi teacher said.
He also said the gaokao process put extra pressure on teachers who feared the tests would push students to extremes. One of his students contemplated jumping from a bridge after she thought she had done poorly in the Chinese section of the exam.
“She called me, saying she felt it was the end of the world. I was shocked and hurried to the bridge,” he was quoted as saying. He spoke to her for more than an hour about before the girl came down, going on to get a decent score.
Critics also say the system is weighted in favour of students in bigger cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, home to the country’s top universities.
China private education industry is booming despite economic slowdown
Li Tao, an academic from the China Rural Development Institute at Northeast China Normal University in Changchun, Jilin province, said about 20-25 per cent of gaokao candidates from Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai were admitted to China’s elite universities, compared with just 5 or 6 per cent in places like Sichuan, Henan and Guangdong.
Li said that was because the top universities were funded by local governments and gave preference to applicants from those areas.
“To make it fairer, the Ministry of Education has insisted over the years that elite universities cannot have more than 30 per cent of incoming students from the area in which it is located,” he said.
Despite these challenges, gaokao was still a “fair” way to get admitted to university in China, Li said.
“Gaokao is the fairest channel to screen applicants on such a large scale, to my knowledge,” he said. “It does not check your family background and every student does the same test paper [if they are from the same region]. Its score is the only factor in evaluating a university applicant.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Tamils argue that imposing Hindi will jeopardise their language
The Indian government has revised a controversial draft bill to make Hindi a mandatory third language to be taught in schools across the country.
The draft bill had met particularly strong opposition in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, which has always resisted the “imposition” of Hindi.
In 1965, it saw violent protests against a proposal that Hindi would be India’s only official language.
Tamil is one of the oldest languages and evokes a lot of pride in the state.
However the government decision has not calmed tensions in Tamil Nadu.
The two main political parties in the state, the DMK and AIADMK, have both said that simply revising the draft to say Hindi would not be mandatory is not enough.
The state teaches only two languages – Tamil and English – in the government school curriculum, and the parties do not want a third language introduced at all.
A DMK spokesman told the NDTV news channel that the third language clause would be used as a “back door” to introduce Hindi anyway.
Their rivals, the AIADMK, which allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the general elections but lost badly in the state, had a similar view.
“Our party has always been clear in our stand. We have always followed a two-language policy. Though mandatory Hindi has been revised in the draft now, we still cannot support this three-language system. Our government will talk to the union government for our rights,” former state education minister and AIADMK spokesman Vaigaichelvan told BBC Tamil.
On Monday, #HindiIsNotTheNationalLanguage began trending on Twitter in India, which saw many from Tamil Nadu facing off against people from other parts of the country and asserting their right not to have the language “imposed” on them.
The BJP government’s real face is beginning to emerge…Hindi is being imposed on South Indians. Tamil Nadu has rebelled against BJP-Govt. Let’s join them to fight the imposition of Hindi! #HindiIsNotTheNationalLanguage
Picture speaks a thousand words! In a diverse country like India, learning a new language should be a choice and not compulsion/imposition.
Declaring any Indian language as a national language will be a joke. #HindiImposition#HindiIsNotTheNationalLanguage
“There is no opposition to actually learning Hindi. In fact with the recent IT boom in the south, so many people from the north have migrated here that its use has become more widespread here. It is true that if you know Hindi you will find it easier to get work in other parts of India, so there are also many people here who willingly learn it. But that should be their choice. What people are opposing is the imposition of it,” senior journalist and political analyst KN Arun told the BBC.
Mr Arun also warned that there was a chance that the issue could lead to further protests in the state, saying that a few hardline Tamil groups had been using the issue to whip up anger among the people.
It is also a particularly emotive issue. Politics in the state is still centred around the ideas and principles of the Dravidian movement, which among other things reveres the Tamil language and links it closely to regional identity.
“Tamil is very rich in literature and different to other languages like Hindi which branched out of Sanskrit. There is fear that the Indian government is trying to slowly introduce Hindi, which will threaten the status of Tamil,” author and journalist Vaasanthi told the BBC.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 
Chinese parents struggle with Teacher’s Day gift etiquette
Despite a decade of official discouragement, parents in China have been struggling with one of the biggest dilemmas of the school year – how to mark the country’s annual Teacher’s Day.
Ellen Yuan agonised for a day and a night before sending her son off to kindergarten on Tuesday with a 1,000 yuan (US$140) gift card in his bag for the teacher.
It was the boy’s second week of attendance and Yuan had given no thought to any Teacher’s Day obligations –until she learned that several of her friends had been busy over the weekend preparing gifts for their children’s teachers.
“It makes me feel that I am being a drag on my son if I don’t do so,” said Yuan, who works for a foreign company in Shanghai.
Respecting teachers has traditionally been a fundamental social norm in China but gift giving on the special day for educators has gone beyond an expression of appreciation by their students, as parents have taken over with ever more expensive gifts – and sometimes cash – which they hope will mean their kids are well taken care of while at school.
What gift, how expensive it should be, and how to deliver it have become the biggest questions for many parents in the run-up to September 10 each year, even though the education ministry and its subordinate bodies have repeatedly issued directives over the past decade to ban teachers accepting gifts.
Yuan said one of her friends had bought a body care set worth more than 600 yuan for each of her child’s three teachers, another had bought an 800 yuan gift card, while a third had given the head teacher a 1,000 yuan bottle of perfume.
Some parents had delivered the presents directly to the school, while others had asked their children to take the gifts to their teachers. Yuan’s plan was to message the teacher and tell her to take the gift card from her son’s bag.
“I know it’s bad. I don’t want my kid to know that,” Yuan said.
But not every teacher gets presents – with gifts usually reserved for those teaching the “main subjects” of mathematics, Chinese and English, which count the most in high school and college entrance examinations.
Emily Shen, an English teacher from a middle school in Hangzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, said she also prepared gifts for the teachers of her two kids. “Some chocolate for them to take to school. And I myself would give a gift card to each of those who teach the main subjects,” she said.
Zhuang Ke, a music teacher at a primary school in Jiaxing, also in Zhejiang province, admitted she was embarrassed by the parents’ different treatment of teachers of “less important” subjects like her’s. “It’s always nice to receive presents. But teachers who teach music, art and PE are often forgotten,” she said.
Chinese kindergarten teacher fired for hot sun punishment
State broadcaster CCTV said in a commentary on its website on Sunday that “all forms of behavior that attempt to ruin normal teaching order and interfere in equality by sending gifts should be resolutely abandoned”. A similar message was run by a series of official media outlets at local level.
“The most fundamental way to stop parents from sending gifts is to treat the students equally and fairly every day, so that parents conclude it makes no difference whether they give a gift,” Rednet.cn, the official news portal of Hunan province, said on Monday.
Although some teachers have made it explicit to students that they will refuse presents on Teacher’s Day, Yuan said her son’s teacher accepted the gift, as did the teachers of her three friends’ children.
Source: SCMP
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