Job Discussion Forums

[bradwelljackson]

Can anyone give the lowdown on the story going around about the English teacher who was fired in China for writing down "Taiwan" in a category of different country? Is this just an urban legend, or did it happen? Please share the details, and please share with us, as best as you know, where the line is drawn and what you can be fired for regarding any comments on Taiwan.
As far as I know the story, the teacher asked the students to shout out different countries, and when one kid said "Taiwan", he wrote it down as a country among all the others.

[nickpellatt]

Never heard the story...and from the way you have told it - I would suggest its definitely an urban legend, probably made up from someone who has never set foot in China!

[Zero]

The closes I heard was a guy who worked as an editor for state media -- probably China Daily, but possibly one of the others, I can't remember -- and included Taiwan in a list of countries participating in some event. The person, as I recall, was almost fired, but not actually. The sentence was changed to say "countries and regions participating."

[Gilka]

I've heard that one a few times, though the poor teacher always ends up deported. The first, it was on a blog. Can't remember the name now, but I took it as concrete fact. Now, I'm skeptical to say the least.

[Woopwoop]

There is a story on this forum (non job related) from an FT who got yelled at by a student for having written Taiwan in a list of countries on the board. Only he'd actually written Thailand.

[struelle]

[Teatime of Soul]

"One World One Dream"

[bradwelljackson]

Thank you all for your answers. I did smell an urban legend when I heard it. Do you think someone would ever get fired for this action? Where is the line drawn anyway?
By the way, I wanted to post this on "China - non-job related", but I can't find that group anymore. Has it been deleted? I also wanted to ask a question about Google pulling out of China on the non-job group.

[MisterButtkins]

I got in one really nasty argument with a Chinese woman (not one of my students, but fluent English) about this. She made the comment "Well China is the third largest country in the world, after Russia and Canada". I said, "Well actually the US is bigger if you don't count Taiwan as part of China". She got very angry and began yelling at me for several minutes.

Officially the people here seem to believe that Taiwan IS part of China and part of PRC, but is controlled by a different political party, which is one of the political parties which is part of the PRC.

The politically correct way to refer to Taiwan/Republic of China as opposed to PRC is 'Taiwan island' and 'mainland China'. Chinese people fully recognize that Taiwan and mainland China are very different and you can talk about them as such as long as you don't explicitly say that they are under different systems of government or are different countries. For example, when Chinese people ask me if my Chinese teachers in the US were Chinese, I say yes, they were from Taiwan. The implication here is that they are Chinese speakers, but aren't really from quite the same area. Chinese people understand this, I think.

[johntpartee]

I doubt seriously that anyone would ever get fired for saying something like that; it could be used as an excuse to get rid of someone, although the powers that be don't need a "reason" to get rid of a teacher. I recently met a teacher who told me that he criticizes the Chinese government and denigrates Chairman Mao in classroom discussions. He said he'd been teaching here for seven years. I didn't believe him.