As a fellow Australian any person who would laugh at a non-native English speaker saying I'm fine thank you and you? is a complete and total jerk. As for why teachers use the phrase over others such as fine thanks, it has a great sing-song style to it takes makes kids enjoy saying it and when I reply I'm fine two my ... Full Comment>>

If you read the comment above you can see that the line was taken directly from it, it was a parody of that. Also, way to ignore the point though and focus on an unimportant aspect of the comment. Full Comment>>

Typical foreign elitist behaviour, taking something where the reaction would be the same in any western country and pretending that this is somehow only a problem that would occur in China. I would suspect that most of the negative comments on this story come from people who have a inflated sense of western ... Full Comment>>

Yes I agree, I hate it when people are arrested for breaking the law, such a BS reason to arrest a person. Full Comment>>

not saying one is better than the other but you should read up on Tibet pre-China, is was basically still a fedual society and with the Lamas as the land owners and the rest of the population were peasants. Full Comment>>

For decades the Australian Government refused to apologise to the Aboriginals for their treatment after the British arrived until Kevin Rudd was elected and he very quickly made a public apology for what the past governments did. He was not responsible for what happened but he understood that as the leader of our ... Full Comment>>

Thank you for taking almost 3 months to answer my long and detailed post with something you read on the back of a fortune cookie once. Come back with a real response that adresses my points if you want a real debate. I assume you won't as can be seen in your pervious responses you just say what you want to say and ... Full Comment>>

If you are talking about the report with the student with "special needs" then the issue was most likely more to do with how the information was presented rather than that it was said at all. I work at a primary school and have seen first hand multiple instances of parents being brought to the school for a ... Full Comment>>

How exactly do you know anything about what is happening in MY classes and how interested MY students are and how well MY students perform when you have never seen any of MY classes. Maybe the foreign teachers that you see are terrible, there are a lot of them in China and I doubt that anyone will deny that. But to ... Full Comment>>

No one deserves to have dug addicts as their teachers that goes without saying (if any of what you said is even true as you provided no links to the story) but that has nothing to do with what we are talking about and for that matter crime is not limited to only white people. There are good and bad people of all ... Full Comment>>

I think you misread my post, no where did I say that someone changes from a native speaker of one language to a native speaker of another language. I said that immirgrants come to Australia with their native language and then their children speak English and possibly their parents native language also. But then when ... Full Comment>>

You are painting with a very broard brush here. Yes there are probably people here from America or England (or Australia where I am from) that came to China because it provided more opportunities than were available at home. However to say that everyone is here because of desperation is clearly untrue. Some people ... Full Comment>>

If you live in Shanghai stay here and enjoy the best time of the year because so many people go home and the city is much emptier in general. Still probably a good idea to skip any big tourist destinations though Full Comment>>

People taking photos of their food always seemed dumb to me but its easy to ignore so I don't care one way or the other. But I have to say as an Australian I have seen people take photos of their food much more in Australia than China. Full Comment>>

My wife is from Shanghai and she does not want to move to Australia until both her parents are retired. Also we like living here so we are not in a rush to leave. Full Comment>>

The point is that no countries hands are clean, be it a Western, Middle Eastern, Asian, it does not matter. Ever country has things in is history, be it recent or current, that it should regret. To say that China has done some terrible things is not wrong, but to pretend that they are somehow different to America or ... Full Comment>>

Overall I found this blog interesting Hadley but there is one point that really sticks out to me. You mention that English teachers in China are privileged to work in China and that if we were not for certain counties we would not be able to do this job. Now while it is true that many English teachers in China did ... Full Comment>>

I would say that this line was what caused the down votes "One thing that’s really struck me about being a parent in Guangzhou is the friendliness of the locals, and their lack of inhibitions, especially from other parents" There are people who are very anti-china or chinese so saying something positive ... Full Comment>>

You, my friend, are presenting information inaccurately so that it supports your pre-existing notions of how China is. Full Comment>>

Working while on a tourist Visa is illegal plain and simple, who said anything about national security? Full Comment>>

There are so many mistaken assumptions in this article but I'll stick to one, the reason that the amount of money everyone gives is written down is because the family needs to know how much money everyone gave so when they go to that person's son or daughter's wedding in the future they will give the same amount ... Full Comment>>