Why was modern China history course cancelled? Trinity Western University won’t say

Victor Ho was set to teach a non-credit course for Cantonese-speaking seniors at Trinity Western University’s Richmond campus. It was to be eight classes, looking at five case studies in the history of modern China.

Now, 18 months after he was quietly told the course wouldn’t be going ahead, he doesn’t have an official explanation for why this happened.

Posters with the TWU logo advertising the course were distributed online, displayed on campus and at some senior homes, said Ho. There was also a Chinese-language press release to local media, detailing how the course material would start with the 1911 revolution against the Qing dynasty and continue to the Sino-Japanese war between 1937 and 1945.

A few weeks before the course was to begin in the fall of 2021, a program co-ordinator took Ho out for coffee at Tim Hortons and told him that “some professors and administrators from mainland China object to launching (the course) because the outline (of the content) could be opposite to the viewpoints of the Chinese Communist Party.”