Chiwa Lee, M.A. student in China Studies, studied French this summer with Alliance Française to support his study of the Canada, China, U.S. relationship.
“Most of the time, language study is not solely about the language itself. It always helps us to discover different thinking, logic, and cultures behind different languages. This summer, with the help of a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship from the Canadian Studies Center, I attended an eight-week intensive French course at the Alliance Française, Seattle. This course was comprehensive. I especially enjoyed “Les Info RFI” – a course based on studying the news from Radio France International. This not only enhanced my French ability but also my understanding of the current social and political issues in the Francophone world including, importantly, Québec. In this course, we discussed the social and political implications of the Paris Olympics. For example, we examined how to interpret the differences between the unconstrained style of the opening ceremony in Paris and China’s promotion of its national strength at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. We also touched on how to understand efforts by Canada, China, and the United States to boost nationalism in their societies through the Olympics. The discussions were fun and memorable. It was a big challenge to use French to discuss these complicated topics. However, I am glad to have had this chance to enrich my research interest in the relationships between Canada, China, and the United States through studying French.”
As a second-year student in the MA program of China Studies at the Jackson School, Lee focuses on international conflicts among China, Canada, and the United States. Last year, through a case study on the “hostage diplomacy” of the Huawei Incident 2018-21 and the global disputes on semiconductors, he examined how the complexity of issues related to different concepts of “the rule of law” and “national security.” Lee hopes to extend his studies to “vaccine diplomacy” during the Covid-19 pandemic which illustrates different ideas about “public goods”. Through these studies, he wishes to explore how these various concepts lead to the conflicts between China and the West.