China Project in U.S. Raises Ire 孔学堂后的邪恶目的

陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom." Patrick Henry

腐败的人们不可能成为优秀的自由公民。 当人们忘却了神（良知）的时候，专制暴政就将奴役的锁链加在他们的身上。 道德的残疾与灵魂的腐败是与自由的价值水火不相容的。 --- 帕特里克. 亨利 （美国国父之一）

China Project in U.S. Raises Ire:

孔学堂后的邪恶目的：

China pays for language classes; some say they will influence children

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Map of Confucius Institutes in America, Link: 孔学院在美分布图，链锁：

http://uschina.usc.edu/w_usct/showarticle.aspx?articleID=14774&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Published: April 25, 2010

HACIENDA HEIGHTS, Calif. - Bobby Fraker is taking a stand against what she perceives to be a sinister threat from across the Pacific, right here in her suburban Southern California community of tree-lined streets and stucco homes.

At a recent school-board meeting, Fraker and at least 12 older, mostly white opponents of a Chinese government program that will fund a middle-school language class delivered fist-shaking denunciations.

"These children have young brains that are very malleable and they can be indoctrinated with things that America would not like," Fraker, a diminutive woman with tight auburn curls, implored board members, who approved the plan in January.

Communities across the United States, from Smithfield, R.I., to Medford, Ore., have welcomed the so-called Confucius Classroom grants from the Chinese government, such as the one proposed here for Cedarlane Middle School.

But Confucius is not going down smoothly in Hacienda Heights, a middle-class town about 16 miles east of downtown Los Angeles with a history of racial tensions between longtime residents and relatively recent Chinese newcomers. Ethnic Chinese make up the majority of the school board.

The Cedarlane student body, meanwhile, is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with three out of every five students at the school qualifying for free or reduced-price meals, a poverty indicator, according to state data.

The dustup may portend trouble for China's efforts to expand its cultural clout by bankrolling language programs in primary and secondary schools across the United States.

"I'm sure this will become a standard dispute," said University of Southern California public policy professor Nicholas Cull, who tracks China's efforts to shape its image abroad through programs like Confucius Classrooms. "People in America are very suspicious of ideas from the outside."

Chen Zhunmin, who directs the Chinese consulate's education office in Los Angeles, insisted the program has nothing to do with communism, as some local critics contend. He said Confucius Classroom and other programs were created to address misunderstandings about his country.

"I feel that the concerns of the neighbors are mainly caused by lack of understanding of Chinese history and culture," he wrote in an e-mail.

There are 60 Confucius Classroom and university-level Confucius Institute programs in the U.S., according to the website of China's language-teaching agency, the Hanban. Each is administered through a patchwork of educational organizations and universities that have deals with the agency.

The Asia Society, which is based in New York, plans to help set up another 80 Confucius Classrooms over the next two years. An additional 45 are separately planned in North Carolina alone.

The expansion into more communities could expose existing cultural and political fault lines, as it has in Hacienda Heights, a community that has undergone demographic change in recent decades.

In 1970, Hacienda Heights was less than 2 percent Asian and otherwise almost entirely white, according to state figures. By 2008, after decades of Chinese immigration into the region, Asians made up more than a third of the population, the same portion as the city's non-Hispanic whites.

The new ethnic and racial makeup has provided a backdrop for a spate of community disputes.

Some neighbors opposed construction of a massive Buddhist temple complex on a city hillside in the late 1980s to serve the growing Asian community in the San Gabriel Valley. Opponents feared that animals would be sacrificed on the site and temple-goers would disturb the peace by banging gongs.

Racial tensions played a role in a failed 2003 ballot campaign to have the unincorporated part of Los Angeles County recognized as a city, with opponents whispering that an incorporated Hacienda Heights would be dominated by Asian-Americans.

The dispute over the Confucius Classroom program appears to be another such clash.

"China already owns and changed most of the shopping centers in Hacienda Heights," resident Sharon Pluth wrote in a letter to the town's closest newspaper, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. "Do we really want them to change our kids' minds, too?"

Under the deal with the Hanban, the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District is receiving $30,000 a year for language and culture programs at Cedarlane school, along with about 1,000 textbooks, CDs and other educational materials.

The city originally planned to accept an offer to have the Chinese government put a teaching assistant in Cedarlane and pay his or her salary, an overture that stoked strong resistance.

An editorial by the Tribune called the plan "tantamount to asking Hugo Chavez to send his cadres to teach little American kids economics."

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Anonymous parent said...

My child's school, Socrates Academy Charter School in Charlotte NC is ready to sign away our kids to this program for the the promise of funding. Socrates Academy is a Greek Charter School ran by a Board of Directors who have been pushing for more funds to raise capital to build a middle school. Due to the lack of donations to help reach our goal they are turning to programs like this based off of universities such as NC State that are offering a college version of the Confucius Institute.

Our Board is dominated by old world Greek men who have repeatedly may statements about wanting our students to look like little soldiers. The uniform policy has been since the start only khaki bottoms and either hunter green(military green was not available in polo shirts) or white shirts. Now they are ready and have the power to add the Confucius Institute's to our daily curriculum.

Every day for 50 minutes. Our school already goes 1 hour longer than all other primary schools. They plan to cut back on recess, other specials, and into core subjects (but not into any of the Greek language or math that is taught daily) to make room for this program. We need your help Kai Chen, as the Board has already armed itself with an expert to convince us how great the idea of exposing our children to this propaganda is at a special board session on Tuesday June 8th.

The board has repeatedly avoided addressing our concerns with our female principal and our female dominate PTA. They are regularly treated the same way that Kai mentioned in his response (with no respect and as second class citizens). Please send our board members your thoughts as we plan to offer them ours on Tuesday.

Janis Dellinger-Holton, Principal
janisdh@socratesacademy.us

Mr. Larry Peroulas, President of Board of Directors, lperoulas@Socratesacademy.us

Dr. Antonis Stylianou, Vice President of Board of Directors, astylianou@Socratesacademy.us

Any support would be much appreciated.

Sincerely,

Father of two gifted but innocent minded children

June 4, 2010 5:47 PM