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For the past several months, I have noticed a trend where China and the Chinese have been given undue deference by Western media and cultural institutions. In fact, just this evening, the Toronto public television, Television Ontario, had a panel discussing the twenty million dollars scholarship program allocated by the Ontario government to bring in up to 300 foreign students per year (it apparently starts with 75/year and will go up as high as 300) to study in Ontario's universities. A Macleans magazine report says that Dalton McGuinty, the province's premier, went to Hong Kong recently to announce this initiative. The article, which is generally against this initiative, is titled: "McGuinty's solutions aren't in China" so I presume that the majority of these scholarships will go to students of Chinese origin, whether from Hong Kong or from mainland China. The TVO panel rationalized this huge government funding by saying that the Chinese students will "pay back" the generous Ontario government by staying on and working miracles for the Ontario government.
This is of course lop-sided thinking. Chinese students don't even need a $40,000/year scholarship to go to university in Ontario, and later on to be specially hired as a gesture of gratitude in lucrative engineering or technical jobs with high salaries. Chinese are applying as immigrants to Canada by the thousands, and many are bringing their life's savings just to be given a chance to get here. They are paying to come here.
One of the arguments the conservative panelist, Jim Wilson, brought up was that all this scholarship money is being siphoned off from funds that would go to students from Ontario instead. He kept asking why bring in students from China, train them, and have them build the bridges and highways, when Ontario students can do all that just as well. These points were unceremoniously dismissed by the rest of the panel members.
I think this all goes back to this strange infatuation the West, at least North America, is having with the Chinese. If I were to analyze it and give it a syndrome, I would say it is a fear of the bogey-dragon. China has waved its tail around, and we have taken fright. It is the "China rising" perception I have blogged about here and here.
Yet, everything China has done so far has been on the backs of the West. Sending masses of people to immigrate to Canada is a form of colonization, not only to take advantage of the country, but also to have Chinese representatives in the West who can feed the "motherland" with important information. This is called spying, and Chinese students and immigrants have been caught doing just that. But, it is more far-reaching than that. Second and third generation offspring of Chinese immigrants predominantly associate with their Chinese heritage. Even the high Chinese/White marriages in Canada (usually Chinese women with white men, although that is reversing now, and I'm seeing many more black/Chinese couples) results with half Chinese offspring, who associate far more with their Chinese parentage. This is understandable because they look more Chinese than anything else.
All this has implications for a country. If a country cannot even trust its own citizens to be loyal to it, then it surely is the beginning of its demise. And worse, if it starts accepting foreigners who have shown a lack of deference and loyalty to it, then it is surely a form of suicide. This is where I think the Chinese story I've been trying to unravel for the past several weeks is leading. Canada has diluted is sense of country and peoples so much, through decades of multicultural policies and high immigration rates, that a stronger and more confident group is simply waiting in the wings to take over. And why not the Chinese, in all their variations, immigrants, several-generation citizens, half white/black/French/Polish, and so on.