China Gets Punk'd.So often we read complaints from westerners who come to China and find that things aren't exactly as promised and they scream bloody murder about the cunning, inscrutable Chinese who exploited them in revenge for something that happened a Century-and-a-half ago, say, the first Opium War. Well, here's an amusing example of the opposite.
Mathew Richardson is in trouble on two continents. The 23-year-old fourth-year engineering student at St. Peters College, Oxford, was invited to fly to Beijing to teach a few classes. He claims that he thought that he would be teaching a group of high school students. The fact that it might be a bit unusual for a fourth-year to be paid UK 1,000 and set up in a luxury Beijing hotel didn't seem to throw up any flags for Richardson.
However, when he showed up at Beijing University, he was informed that not only would he be lecturing scholars from all over China, but the lecture series was going to be on economics, a subject that Richardson knew nothing about. So, what did Richardson do? He gave it the proverbial college try and faked his way through the lectures.
Using materials he copped from an A-Level econ textbook, Richardson began his lectures. He was two days into the series when he realized that he was fast running out of material from the text and his interpreter may have been onto him. Feeling that his luck was about to run out, Richardson flew the coop during a coffee break and returned to Britain, where what he describes as a "media storm" on his blog broke around him.
The beginning of the saga can probably be attributed to mistaken identity -- officials in China had tried to arrange for Matthew Richardson, associate professor of finance at New York University, who has quite a resume in international financial markets. Unfortunately, they missed that Matthew Richardson by an ocean.
So the British Matthew Richardson is back home, and Beijing University and the Chinese government are officially pissed at him. Bad enough? No. He has been referred to the dean at Oxford for discipline by the master at St. Peters. Among the possible punishments is expulsion -- according to the master, "undergraduates are not allowed to be absent in term time without prior permission."
Wouldn't you know it had to be a blogger with that much...chutzpah. Or is it a larcenous heart?
