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Last month an article appeared in "The Sunday Times" about unofficial quotas some British schools have on the number of Chinese pupils they will admit.
This was preceded by another article the week before with the headline "Chinese students oust UK pupils from top universities."
It seems there is a growing pattern in Western countries like the United Kingdom, where the Chinese in particular are seen to be infringing on that most valuable and socially crucial resource: education.
Ostensibly the schools claim these quotas are a practical issue of business-need. The schools mentioned were highly elite, private schools - traditionally a bastion of British life stretching back to the days of the empire.
The argument provided by the schools is that both foreign and British parents, their customers, come to these schools for a distinctly "British" education, so it is in the interests of both to keep numbers of Chinese below 10 percent and thus maintain their original character.
But I wonder if they would say the same if the incoming 10 percent of foreign students were white American or European. Or, on the other hand, if they would welcome a large number of legally British pupils who were ethnically Chinese.
It's true that British schools are not obliged to provide places for international students, and that the selling point of certain schools are their distinctively British history.
But in this case it is only fair to set a flat limit to all international students, not just the Chinese. Another point I find questionable is what exactly they mean by "British" anyway. This is a tricky issue.
Does being British refer only to the legacy of the white people that built Britain in the past, or does it include the multicultural Britain of today that was built by a plethora of races and immigrants?
It seems absurdly outdated to insist on the former. To use the latter definition, then, schools with a healthy mix of international students would be more British than ones that are 90 percent white.
Since neither the business-need argument nor the British-ness argument stands up to scrutiny, I have no choice but to conclude that it is an issue of race or, less politely, racism.
Racism is an ugly word, and the organizers of the school programs have tried to side-step it by bringing in the issue of culture.
They cite examples of groups of Chinese kids sticking together and refusing to speak in English. A British parent may then not want to send their kids in to an environment where they were the only white kids. This may be the case in maths and physics as those subjects are popular with Chinese kids.
It may seem fair enough that, if large numbers of foreign students come into a country and then refuse to integrate into that society, they arouse resentment.
Yet who said creating a multicultural society would be easy and frictionless?
Self-contradiction
Isn't it better to set an example for how different cultures can work together by finding solutions rather than undermining the very principles of multiculturalism by discriminating against a certain group specifically based on their race?
Slapping a 10 percent limit on the Chinese pupils is simply taking the easy way out, with the ironic side-effect of contradicting what it means to be British by contradicting its current multicultural nature.
One final issue that needs to be addressed is why the Chinese race in particular has been targeted.
If these schools had discriminated against black students, the ensuing uproar and controversy would have been unthinkable. Yet not only do these principals feel unashamed to do the same to the Chinese, but it seems they feel positively justified.
It's even more puzzling because, as stereotypes go, the geeky Chinese kids pressurized by their parents to spend all their time doing homework, hardly form a threatening or violent image.
Yet why is it where education is concerned, where university places and elite, private school admissions are involved, foreign governments and schools alike display a distinct sense of threat from the Chinese?
Perhaps it's disconcerting when many of a country's domestic students fail to gain a decent education to see so many Chinese students overcome enormous financial and language barriers to make it to the best schools and universities in the West.
Or perhaps the threat comes from the fact that education is so crucial a social resource, capable of changing the makeup of an economy and an individual's destiny.
(The author is a British born Chinese who grew up in Britain and attended private British school, Imperial College and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. The views are her own.)
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