Posts by Charles Mabbett
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
BTW - the term Asian is defined by Statistics NZ as peoples from Afghanistan to Indonesia, including North Asia. How they classify people from the Central Asian Republics like the Stans is something Im unsure about but would assume is in the definition of Asian. However I think Russia, Turkey and Israel are outside the Stats NZ definition.
-
Apologies, Rich. Ive just skimmed through the paper. Interesting. I must say my inclination is to think that total Chinese students studying overseas would be higher than 120,000. Those figures are nearly four years old so it would be interesting to know what that combined figure is now.
-
BTW I really enjoyed those links posted by Mark. Very funny!
-
Hi Rich,
just a couple of suggested amendments to your figures - Asian student numbers studying in New Zealand peaked about 120,000 in 2003/2004.
But the Chinese student component of that was 55,000. Right now the numbers are down to about 30,000. Remember there are not insignificant numbers of Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese, Indians, Vietnamese etc also coming here to study.
There are several reasons for this - the high dollar, the improving capacity of Chinese educational institutions to provide an English language education, bad publicity over a number of high profile crime cases (think of the Wan Biao suitcase murder) and intensifying competition from other Western destinations such as Australia, the United States, Canada and the UK.
Also on another note, I take it that the 0.1 percent figure ostensibly only refers to those coming to New Zealand (much smaller if you adjust it as above). But if you look at it globally, there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying around the world. That's hundreds of thousands of 'patriots' that can be mobilised to take part in counter demonstrations to the pro-Tibet lobby.
This has been a really enjoyable discussion.
-
Don, we're hosting the Rugby World Cup in 2011 and you think we shouldn't have expressions of nationalism?
-
I think the "evil China" polemic is driven by ignorance. I was staggered by a letter to the editor of one of our metropolitan newspapers. it had been prompted by news of the possibility of Chinese nurses working in New Zealand hospitals - one of the possible consequences of the China-NZ FTA.
It expressed a fear that Chinese nurses would be coming from nursing environments where human rights abuses are routine. It really bothered me that someone might actually think this - that Chinese patients would not be accustomed to being healed in a Chinese hospital, that they would be abused in someway and have their organs removed.
This could possibly extend to other professions. Doctors, language teachers, martial arts tutors - what if they all come to NZ and started committing human rights abuses as they would in China?
My four year old goes to a Chinese-English language preschool. One of the teacher's comes from Beijing. She's a brilliant teacher.
To me that letter was a denial that people from mainland China could possibly share a common humanity with us. And that's what bothers me.
-
I havent read it but James Kynge's China Shakes the World is very highly regarded. He was interviewed by Chris Laidlaw about three weeks ago. Very interesting.
-
Come to think of it, many of the Chinese students in New Zealand do have part time jobs in supermarkets and other businesses. If they were all so rich and privileged, they would surely not have to work to support their studies in New Zealand.
At the moment China is our fourth largest inbound tourism market with 122,000 visitors and that's expected to double in five years.
-
Well, Rich. I think the main parties are doing it with this country's future in mind. It wouldn't exactly be regarded as a strategic masterstroke to piss off one of New Zealand's main economic lifelines.
That wouldn't make much sense as much as we would like to think of ourselves as a principled little South Seas battler, kicking against the pricks and all that. At some point, New Zealand has to get real - if we want to improve our standard of living and stem the flow of New Zealanders to Australia and beyond by becoming a high wage high skills economy.
To do that we need to arrest this country's economic decline and hitching a ride on the next superpower's wagon is one way to do it.
Mind you one Australian foreign policy academic did describe to me this current phenomenon of the world beating a path to China's door as the beginnings of a tributary system! Read into that what you want.
-
Thanks Russell. I've only been to China once and its a big place - contradictory and complicated, amazing and awful. Kind of like going to Russia or the United States or Brazil. It's easy to make simplistic generalisations but they become rather silly on closer analysis.