Chinese

After a whole morning of discussion, we lunched with our friends from China. The casual conversation inevitably touched on the problems faced by our next VC.

The man from Pluto sighed, "You know, one question that kept coming up when I saw the students, alumni, as well as teaching staff is: Should we use Chinese for teaching ? After all, we are the Chinese University ! Many alumni and senior members also pointed out that one of the mission of our university is to promote Chinese culture."

As an onlooker, I said nothing. Nonetheless, I consider it a straw man to advocate teaching in Chinese because we want to promote our culture. The two does not have a direct link - in fact, they could be quite independent of each other.

After all, even the most vigorous fans of Chinese culture would not insist on preserving our tradition of foot binding (纏足) in women. Right, we remove the barbarian traits from our culture and keep the nice bit. Chinese language is good for poetry and literature but less desirable for scientific communication. Why should we waste the effort on our weakness when there are better ways to show our edge ?

PS. I forget who told me this very truth: a people must be confident with their own culture before they could be open-minded to the others - look at the Tang (唐) empire.