Hi again, Mr Duke - touched a nerve or two have I?

Your Para 1 - Bullshit! You have earlier made it clear as day that you consider practically all schools in China to be crooks, across the board. It is beyond your mindset to criticise any teacher even when it is obvious that criticism is deserved.

Your Para 2 - Of course I take issue with complaints where I "personally" feel there is something wrong with them or their content. Are you suggesting that I should first check with you to see whether my "personal" opinion is acceptable for publication? Moreover, I have only suggested dishonesty where it is evidently present. The two long postings I have taken issue with so far, were not accused of dishonesty for being long and Mr Hemingway was not accused of dishonesty at all - do please check up on these things!

Your Para 3 - You are wrong again Mr Duke - I did not "jump into the middle of Mr Hemingway's account" (of Huabei Coal Industry College). Here again you have failed to do a single shred of research. Well, I have.

Mr Hemingway made his first (and only) posting back in March. This was followed over a period of several weeks by eleven replies including several that were attacking him quite sharply. Only two of those eleven postings were mine - and one of them was in response to someone else rather than Mr Hemingway himself - though it was connected with Mr Hemingway.

I entered the scene with posting No.6 a long time after Mr Hemingway had made his own and I stuck ONLY to the presentation of his complaint, which I thought was un-necessarily long for such a simple matter. You have put into quotes the sentence "deliberately untrue and misrepresented information" as if I had accused Mr Hemingway of such. In fact I said no such thing about Mr Hemingway nor did I imply it. Indeed if you care to go back and read that first posting of mine in direct response to him you will see that I roundly accepted his remarks about the town, the college, its staff and their attitudes etc. The words you quote were said to you in general unspecific terms well after the Hemingway matter had gone away and therefore you cannot possibly claim that I intended them to include him.

A problem with you, Mr Duke, is that you can only read what you want to read - and if what you want to read isn't there to read, well, Hell! you'll quote it anyway.

My response to Mr Hemingway was then attacked by "OverseasTeacher" but only in the context of my statement that I had never been jostled or jeered at by any students as had Mr and Mrs Hemingway. Overseas teacher said that he had been jeered at and jostled many times and claimed it was normal in China for this to happen. (In fact it is not!) Here again what reference I made to Mr Hemingway's posting in my response to "OverseasTeacher" again accepted Mr Hemingway's earlier remarks about his conditions though I did point out that they were not unique to his college but pretty well typical of such establishments all over China.

Now go check on both postings I made in connection with Mr Hemingway and stop trying to convey incorrect impressions. I am now certain you are doing this deliberately and it diminishes you and brings your objectivity into question.

Your Para 4 - Your comments about "Mr Yi" and Nanhai Neusoft are grossly inaccurate and your latest posting to him is bordering on being obsequious. Further information has since emerged and Mr Yi (if that is his real name) has dug himself an even bigger hole. Moreover, have you considered checking on the pedigree of the establishment that you so glibly call a "bunch of lying crooks"? This is called "research", an activity alien to you is it not? I suggest you take the trouble to have a look and you'll find it is a large and highly reputable organisation with affiliations to many overseas universities - notably in the United Kingdom. The college itself is set up by Neusoft, the biggest computer software company in China with thousands of employees on its books. I am aware of course that even the best run establishments can sometimes act strangely or wrongly - but not so often as you would wish to believe. Reading the Nanhai-Neusoft website - as I have, Mr Duke, I simply cannot believe that they are "lying crooks" and I stand by my claim that there is a lot wrong with what Mr Yi has said. (If his name is Yi- and I have very good reason to doubt that too).

Here we have a major institution of international renown, backed up by impeccable credentials and supported by some really major worldwide educational institutions of the very highest repute. Do you seriously think that such an organisation would jeopardise all this by deliberately victimising a small group of temporary teachers for no good reason? Why don;' you try asking a question or two of your own - or might that get you some answers you could not live with?

Whatever happened there was because something went wrong once he and his colleagues got to China. Until Mr Yi can bring himself to come clean about every step of the way which he certainly has not done to date I will choose to put my money on Nanhai-Neusoft Information Institute (Its proper name!). All he needs to do is to produce a relatively simple and truthful time-line of the events and procedures he and various parties performed along the way. If he cannot or will not do that then he has something to hide.

If you think differently, thats your privilege.

Then, Mr Richard Prouty climbed aboard and claimed among other things that Nanhai-Neusoft has a notorious reputation in Guangdong. I did my research on that too and searched the review boards back as far as 2004. I found not a single complaint about Nanhai-Neusoft. If they are so "notorious" in Guangdong, where there are thousands of foreign teachers, surely a fair number of complaints would have been made. But not one can be found. They also have similar educational institutions in Chongqing and Dalian but no complaints appear about them either. These people aren't notorious at all.

Your Para 5 I Dont think Dr Cross made any mistake at all. If he had made a genuine mistake in doing whatever it was that was serious enough for the University to repeatedly try to stop him doing, then he would not have been complaining about it. Instead he would have corrected it instead of making a dispute about it. Why also did he see fit not to tell us what it was - and the one person who posted in his favour claimed to know him well and also confirmed that Dr Cross's privacy was not respected. He too failed to say what it was all about, however - and it evidently didn't apply to him either, otherwise he would have complained too. So it only applied to Dr Cross.

His receiving a letter of confirmation that he could break his contract was not as a result of any mistake on his part. His decision to run away was not a mistake either. He did that quite deliberately and illegally. The fact that he was found by the police and ordered to leave the country was no mistake either. It was a clear and well deserved response from the authorities, to Dr Crosss illegal behaviour. He even considered that to be unfair!

Many of the countries I have visited and/or lived in over the years would not look on Dr Cross so benignly as the Chinese did. Moreover, his Consulate in China would not wave some magic wand of absolution in a case such as his. All they would do would be to ensure that he got fair and proper treatment under Chinese law for his transgression. But then he seems to have got this without his Consulate's intervention.

Your Para 6 My case for exposing suspicious complaints is that they are at least morally wrong. It is not acceptable to tell lies or mislead your audience by quoting only part of the causes of your complaint or telling lies. This is only being done to whitewash the plaintiffs who have no interest in "warning" us but appear to be bent only on wreaking personal revenge. If they have a real and serious complaint it should stand alone on its own strengths but if it has to be constructed, modified and contrapted in the ways I see going on here. If really important details are kept concealed and have to be extracted like pulling teeth, then such complaints are usually misrepresented.

Your Para 7 Frank is a better guy than you are, Mr Duke, at least he is prepared to listen, consider and then offer his own opinions in a measured way. Neither does he seek to spread false impressions by making untrue statements such as you do. I have however taken issue with Frank insofar that if his takes on Chinese schools are genuinely intended to introduce a little humour then why does he not be fair and do a few takes on teachers resumes too. I can assure him and you that there is plenty of humour there too. But neither Frank nor you will hear of that will you? Thats because your attitudes are solidly biased. They are founded on your warped belief that you have the right to declare war on schools in general for no good reason other than that some of them are dishonest and devious. How unfair and unbalanced can you get you guys arent running a forum - you especially would be more aptly described, where the issue of schools vs teachers is concerned, as preferring to run a Star Chamber the second time I have used that term today.

Your Para 8 In this paragraph you say that I have stooped to a level of nastiness Please justify that accusation without weakening yourself further by claiming that the principle of challenging bullshit complaints is itself being nasty Instead, accept that at no time have I been nasty towards anyone. I have made not a single aggressive, abusive or gratuitous attack on anyone. That is more than I can say for some of you guys who are basically incapable of viewing this subject objectively. I await your substantiation, please.

Yes I did say that I would ignore your further postings but I have changed my mind. What intrigues me though, is that if you really want me to ignore your postings, then why did you go to the trouble of writing your latest one?

John