Last month, my niece left for China to pursue a medical course, having performed extremely well in her Malawi School Certificate of Education.
She, and two other Malawian girls, will spend their first year studying the
Chinese language. I don't quite envy them in the position they find themselves in - having to learn new vocabulary, new grammar, new characters and everything else that goes with learning a new language. It must be a very daunting task.
Their courses will be delivered in the Chinese language, hence the necessity for them to spend a whole year studying the language.
Thanks to the generosity of the Chinese government, people from underprivileged corners of the world are able to afford university education in a foreign country. This is truly an act of unconditional love. Or, so it seems at face value.
Agreed, my niece and her compatriots are the ones to benefit from this act of generosity. But in the long run, it is the Chinese that stand to reap the full benefits. In neo-imperialistic fashion, they (the Chinese) are spreading their culture, their way of life, to unsuspecting young, brilliant minds.
Sooner or later the Chinese will wield a lot of power and control over the sections of the world from where the beneficiaries of their generosity will have been drawn. These Chinese speaking young graduates will subconsciously become sympathetic to anything Chinese.
The Greek language was once extensively used in academia, in business and in religion. Dr Kamuzu Banda used to believe that noone could be truly educated unless they had some knowledge of Greek [... and Latin]. There is every likelihood that the Chinese language will take the place of Greek, in the years to come, thanks to the deliberate policy of the Chinese government to offer scholarships to brilliant, young people to pursue their university education in China and in the Chinese language.
Language is power. If you can get a whole community to speak your language, you will gain the ability to control that community. The Afrikaner regime in South Africa was aware of this and attempted to make Afrikaans a compulsory language in all schools in the Republic, which sparked off the infamous Soweto uprising. The rest is history.
The Chinese have chosen a more subtle, and more benign way of doing it. But, search me, they know precisely what they are doing. They deliberately target brilliant, young minds,knowing that come ten, fifteen years from now these young people will be in influential positions, and will almost certainly not "bite the finger that will have fed them."
