How Are You Treated In Your Own Country?

It's a tricky situation.

China wants to be taken seriously as an emerging power. For the most part, China is heading in the right direction; it is leading where the West is declining, thanks to the UK's parochial bickering over Brexit and Donald Trump's America First policies.

Unfortunately, in its zest to attract foreign investment and international respect, it has sidelined its own.

One massively glaring example is Wuxi Institute of Technology that gave overseas students preferential treatment, by forcing the local Chinese students to give up their rooms to foreigners and move to inferior accommodation.

That is a constant gripe in Malaysia; the Malays frequently complain that they are 'lost in their own land'. This is their basis for instituting affirmative action, or preserving their special rights.

I sympathise with Malays being treated badly in their own land. Actually, I sympathise with every other Malaysian as well, who was born in this country, paid their taxes, contributed to the well-being of the nation and still remains sidelined despite their best efforts.

In the case of the Wuxi students, they were not merely given older, less fancy accommodation to live in, the facilities were also inferior, in that the bathrooms did not have hot running water 24 hours a day. That, in most countries, is a basic human right. To send off students in your own country to less adequate accommodation is just miserable behaviour and most unbecoming of any country that wishes to take itself seriously.

A teacher was seen in a video, urging students to move out of the building, and quarrelling with them as they refuse to leave. "This is the school’s property," yells the teacher in the video. "Who are you?"

I hope this will never happen in Malaysia and that whatever befalls, however we seek to progress, we will, at the very least, protect our own.