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Waiting for Baixiao
Today is August 2007 and this story, six years and a half since it broke ground, is about a fight to reopen an independent and a self-paying Chinese primary school named baixiao (little white).
At a small Malaysian village in Damansara, children go to a school in a temple. The premises of their original school, SJKC Damansara, were forcibly closed on 3 Jan 2001. On orders of the government and the education ministry, the students were told to report to another school in another district. Their parents, the teachers and the school’s management board refused on the principle that mother tongue education is sacred and is non-negotiable. Since then, SJKC Damansara has held classes inside the premises of the village temple while all wait for the school, now padlocked, to reopen. Video presentation in five parts (Chinese with English subtitles).
“All the injustices have since been rationalised…. The movement will continue because Justice has not arrived.” — Bock Tai Hee, dongzong
To have to suffer again, never suffer the children. To have to sacrifice again, never sacrifice education” – Tang Ah Chai, advisor to Save Our School campaign committee.
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Chiu Sheung & the Education of Man
With education reforms etched into the Hong Kong consciousness, a switch is quietly made in 2007 at a primary school lodged on a hillside in one part of the island’s Western district. Why has Chiu Sheung, the quintessential Chinese school, begun reversing its mother-tongue curriculum in favour of centering primary education on the English language? Answer: An illicit brew of immigrant and language politics is seeping in to dislodge a culture that gave the school its birth. (Reproduced with permission.)
Part 2: A Chinese School in the Politics of Race & Language
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Humane Society without Human Rights Pt2
Drafting sessions for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were replays of meetings between Jesuits and Chinese and Koreans 300 years earlier. Then, the terms of the meeting were set inside a Judeo-Christian agenda, not Confucianism. The terms had not changed since, and certainly not in 1947 when the UN human rights project had become a Catholic ontology seminar in disguise. The disguise worked. But Chinese society remains rooted in foundations more established than Europe’s, and undermined only by enemies within, the choirboys of the Declaration’s founding fathers who have declared: No longer “created”, all humans must be equal, on the pain of jail. Article: A Humane Society without Human Rights, Pt 2.(reproduced with permission)
Humane Society without Human Rights Pt1
In a room full of Christians and Jesuits – Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, all notably absent – one Chinaman alone in 1947 challenged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by zeroing in on an idea that could have cancelled the fundamental basis for its western construction. It is that obligations may exist, but no rights are “inalienable”. Freedom and justice got into the wrong shoes and, today, they have consigned the name Chang Peng-chun to a footnote. Article: A Humane Society without Human Rights, Pt 1. (reproduced with permission)
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