LinkChinese UK News

Australia’s opposition leader Kevin Rudd announced in his budget replay speech that his party, Labour, would spend $65 million over four years to re-establish a strategy for Asian languages and studies in Australian schools. This is to help the economic and political engagement between Australia and Asian countries. Kevin Rudd can speak Mandarin Chinese fluently himself.

However in a radio report broadcasted on Austrialia’s Radio National, reporter Paula Kruger interviewed students learning Asian languages and found for Australian students, learning the tonal Asian languages is not easy. Moreover Australian employers still don’t see their language skills as necessary.

A transcript of the program can be read here.

 

Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle reports that some schools in the northeast England have started to give Mandarin lessons to their pupils. Some have organised or are preparing school trips to China. Hilary French, the headmistress of Central Newcastle High School, whose pupils are just back from a trip to Beijing, said GDST (The Girls’ Day School Trust, which Central High is part of) is planning to open two new schools in Shanghai.

Another school, Park View Community School, in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, has fromed a partnership with Suzhou High School near Shanghai. What’s more, young children at Bedewell Primary, in Hebburn, South Tyneside, having been learning Mandarin for the last two years, after the school formed a link with one in China.
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Former BBC correpondent, the author of the newly published book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, Duncan Hewitt reads this book in BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week this week (7-11 May).

Book of the Week is broadcast 9:45am-10:00am, and repeated 00:30am-00:45am. You can also listen for seven days after broadcast from BBC website.

From the book’s synopsis:

The peasant revolutionary turned lifestyle guru, the former Shaolin monk working on a Shanghai building site, the once-conservative father running a gay hotline - and the teenagers who just want to dress up as their favourite Japanese cartoon characters. Welcome to the new China, a nation in motion, where whole streets are rebuilt in a week, car ownership is soaring, education goes private and rural workers migrate to the cities in search of a better life. It is a transformation that has swept through the country since the first economic reforms of the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping announced that China would have to ‘let some of the people get rich first’. But while many have benefited under the new ‘aspiration nation,’ others are struggling to keep up in what is now one of the most divided societies on earth. Former BBC correspondent Duncan Hewitt lives and works in China and has witnessed first hand the impact and speed of these vast social and economic upheavals. His timely book speaks with the voices of everyday people as they learn to adapt to one of the most rapid transformations in human history.

 

Journey to the West, the opera, written by Damon Albarn, will be shown at the coming Manchester International Festival.

The British singer and song-writer Damon Albarn has written a new opera Monkey: Journey to the West, in Mandarin, to be shown at the inaugurating Manchester International Festival.

The opera is based on a well known 16 century book Journey to the West (西游记), centering around the odyssey of the Monkey. Considered to be one of the four Chinese classical literature masterpieces, it has been adopted into various forms, including Chinese opera, movie and TV, many times, but not Western opera. British audiences have familiarised with the story from the 70s TV series of Japanese import. Damon Albarn and the set and costume designer Jamie Hewlett, were invited by the Chinese-American director Chen Shi-Zheng into the project. Before they started, they had traveled around China for three weeks to understand and learn the music.

The Sunday Times’s Andrew Smith interviewed Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett, and Chen Shi-Zheng:

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A local newspaper in London, Muswell Hill Journal

reports:

Children as young as three are taking up Mandarin at a Muswell Hill language school.

The Hua Hsia Chinese School, which first opened in Swiss Cottage, has now started classes in Muswell Hill as demand has exploded.

Katja Ting, originally from Taiwan, who runs the school, said: “China has become powerful and people want to trade with them. If you have that language on your CV you will get a job because not many people have it.

Read the full report.

 

A study by New Zealand’s Waikato University suggests Chinese students are generally satisfied with their education, but a big gap remains between students’ expection and the reality of life in New Zealand.

Radio New Zealand reports that the survey indicates that the reputation of New Zealand is recovering in China, after suffered bad publicity a few years ago. Almost half of the Chinese students want to live in Zealand permanently.

According to newspaper The Dominion Post, the number of fee-paying Chinese students in New Zealand has plummeted from the peak of 53,340 in 2002 after many incidents involving Chinese students, including one murder case. Since 2003, the New Zealand government has worked to rebuild the industry. In 2006 the number is 34,870 which is the lowest but there have been various signs of recovery.

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The new IGS (International Graduate Scheme) form and guidance document are available from the new Border & Immigration Agency website’s application forms page. This forms page is different from the previous Working in the UK forms page.

The IGS form can be used by any international students of non-EEA nationals graduated after 1 May 2007 to apply for a visa which enables them to work in the UK for up to 12 monthes after their graduation. This replaces the previous SEGS visa.