For the Chinese, July 1 means the return of Hong Kong. Saddam did not deserve the Death Penalty say the students.

The big news for the Chinese students was the anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China.  They were not brazen enough to call it a liberation.  They did not give a tinker's tuss about Canada Day. 

I asked the students in my Sunday afternoon Speakers' Corner to tell me what came to mind when I said the word Canada.  The common responses were: Norman Bethune, Snow, Lots of Land, and I don't know.  Another student said that Canada was a way to get to America.  I remember back in the day when I was in Canada it was a great joke among Canadians to tell stories about how ignorant Americans were about Canada.  Living in China, I see that ignorance of things Canadian is universal.  They never mentioned Beavers, Ice Hockey, U.N. peacekeeping, Wayne Gretzky, Pierre Trudeau, the RCMP or Multiculturalism.

In my crime and punishment salon class, I asked the students if Saddam deserved the death penalty.  All of them said no.  They said the Americans should not have killed the leader of  a  foreign country.  No point in telling them that the Iraqis did it themselves and that no one pined for him since he was dead.