AMABHUNGANE: Chinese puzzle for Malawian students on foreign scholarships By amaBhungane
Zipporah Bvalani hoped that when she got home to Malawi after studying in China under a highly-regarded Chinese government bursary scheme she would immediately begin working as a chemical engineer.
After studying the Chinese language for a year, she said she did well in her HSK Level 4 test, a requirement for foreign students intending to study at a Chinese university. She also felt unhappy about being conscripted into a two-week programme of quasi-military training that was a requirement for all students at this Chinese university.
She suspected this was because the university did not want to forfeit the subsidy paid by the government for foreign students.Having decided to go home, she had to find resources to fund her return air ticket. Back in Malawi after two-and-a-half years in China, she started studying chemical engineering from scratch. She is now a second-year student at the Malawi University of Science and Technology.
On arriving in China, she was warmly welcomed by officials at the Malawian embassy in Beijing and moved to Shandong University, where she was scheduled to study the Chinese language for a year.But she discovered that this preparation was woefully inadequate when the China Scholarship Council moved her to the medical school at Jiamusi Medical University to begin her studies.I literally got nothing out of what was being taught,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t understand the lecturer.
She resorted to learning by watching YouTube videos and tried to source English translations of the Chinese textbooks they were using, to no avail., she restarted her medical studies from scratch. Now 22, she is in her third year at the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine. She claimed foreign students did not have the necessary orientation and suffered from lack of information and the lecturers’ preference for Chinese students.We were not informed when our classes would start and missed lots of lectures in the first year due to lack of information,” she said.
Kamanga said another problem was the lack of clinical experience, as medical students at Southeast University were only allowed into hospitals in their final year. These included a course in environmental politics which he had never studied, but for which he was given 80% in his final results. He said that for one gender studies assignment, a non-English speaker simply downloaded a biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the internet and got 90% for it.
None of seven scholarship beneficiaries we spoke to were chosen by the foreign affairs department. They and three journalists who have visited China told amaBhungane that many bursary students are connected to high-ranking members of Malawi’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party or the government. Asked for details of the bursary programme, Chinese embassy spokesperson Cui Jian Feng said that since the programme was initiated in about 2013 more than 900 Malawian students had studied in China.
Former bursary recipients said that after amaBhungane put questions to it about the scholarship programme, ZBS called an impromptu get-together with all students whose study it had facilitated in China, attended by China’s ambassador to Malawi, Liu Hu Yang, and the education ministry’s principal secretary, Justin Saidi.
He said that when some Malawian girls wrote petitions complaining about the language barrier, the ZBS, the education ministry and student representatives met officials of the Chinese embassy, who told them it was the policy to teach undergraduates in Chinese.ZBS had to ask parents or guardians to sign forms that they agreed to have their wards take up scholarships,” he said.
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