Xi’an was the original capital of China, another of those 13 Million population cities in China which most of us could not point to on a map. Interestingly, its Muslim Quarter is a big tourist attraction – although not as big an attraction as the famous terracotta army which defends the dead emperor. It is also home to a number of universities.
Xi’an Jiaotong University, one of the top public research universities in China, has confirmed that it has removed a requirement for students to undertake a mandatory College English Test (CET) to join or graduate from the institution. …
Plans to reduce requirements for students to learn English have been gathering pace for several years. National People’s Congress deputy Tuo Qingming said earlier this year at a legislative session in Beijing that fluency in English has “little practical value for many people.” …
And our fascist (new-and-improved, lemon-freshened variety) overlords are working flat out to ensure that English becomes completely irrelevant (except, maybe, on international debt recordadtions. Hell, they have so tortured the meaning of words so as to have nearly created Babel for the native speakers within our former borders. If. Indeed, English/grammar are taught in the states’ propaganda mills - formerly schools - like the “vaccines” there are only side effects - no intended effects, like literacy or an ability to read.
That statement reverberates with me – because within living memory, university students studying Chemistry were required to take “Technical German” courses, so that they could understand the German-language scientific literature which was (not so very long ago) critical to that discipline. And now that is gone, all gone.
It is very easy for us to assume that English will always be the world’s Lingua Franca. The pre-eminence of the English language was based first on the then-successful imperialism of English colonialists and later on the post-WWII overwhelming dominance of US industrial and financial power. Going, going, …
Fortunately for the near-term happiness of denizens of the West, most don’t care too much about science, technology, or engineering. For the few of us who do care, the decline of the West becomes more obvious with each passing day. Here are snippets from the kind of news item on which CNN & BBC will probably pass:
“Chinese universities in 2019 produced 49,498 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) PhDs as compared with 33,759 for the US.”
Of course, the gross numbers are only part of the problem. Anyone who has been to a US university STEM department in recent years knows that a big slice of those 33,759 US PhDs were actually Chinese nationals – and many of the rest were Indian.
But let’s look further down the educational pipeline:
“In the Organization for Cooperation and Development’s triennial test across 79 countries involving 600,000 15-year-olds, Chinese students “far outstripped peers in every other country in a survey of reading, math and science ability,” Forbes reported.”
But US universities are far, far ahead in gender, grievance, and critical studies which research clearly shows that, along with diversity, are our strength. In fact, we’re so far ahead that the Chinese will never catch up. So, sleep well!