Educational Issues and Race Relations

I enrolled and picked up my textbooks today. I've opted to try out the highest class out of 9 which is lettered G (for some reason, classes A and C also have A+ and C+ counterparts). My reasoning is that it's normally got fewer people and (difficulty swallowing my pride aside) it's always easier to move down.

The six textbooks aren't hugely reassuring though, with names like Newspaper Listening, High Level Chinese Listening (3), Ancient Chinese (2), and Chinese Traditional Culture and Modern Life (II). Ancient Chinese in particular looks like it'll be tough, with each text's notes alone outweighing the text itself.

According to the dormitory staff when I first got here, of students studying Chinese, 60% are Korean, 30% are Russian, and the remainder are Europeans and Americans. Notably, there was no mention of any Japanese (unlike in Shanghai, which had a sizeable contingent at East China Normal University).

At enrollment, of the dozens of people milling about, I counted exactly two Russians, someone that I guessed was Central Asian (she looked Chinese but was speaking to the Russians in Russian). The rest were all Korean! Now, I've got nothing against Koreans at all - the Korean 太太 (house-wives) in Shanghai were willing to adopt you as their own son and feed you snacks at the drop of a cheeky smile - but it does seem a little unbalanced.

Wendy theorised that there are fewer Japanese in Harbin because of wartime atrocities such as those committed by the notorious Unit 731. Sentiment does seem to bubble to the surface on occasion. I remember all too vividly the anti-Japanese marches a bit over a year ago, in which mobs ran riot, Japanese cars were overturned and sushi restaurants attacked.

Then again, those events were country-wide, and now that I think about it, the reasons for the imbalance here are probably more economic - there are plenty of Japanese multinationals in Shanghai - and geographic - Heilongjiang province does, after all, border Korea (albeit the 'Democratic People's Republic' bit).

Certainly, locals have brought up the topic unbidden and stressed that most Harbiners today feel no ill will towards the people, although feelings towards the government are a different matter altogether.

... And then I saw the inside cover of my Culture textbook. Bear in mind that this is published by 北京大学出版社 (Peking University Press) which is an arm of the government, and that controversy over Japanese textbooks has in no small way fuelled previous popular uprisings.

The captions state the characters' names in character and romanised form, their gender, and their nationality. Notably, they are all rendered in fairly realistic line drawings...

...except for the fifth character 山本惠, who, apart from originating from the Land of the Rising Sun, has been drawn as a potato-faced monster. An editing mistake? An illustrator's joke? Or something a bit more deliberate and vicious?