THE NAB: ONE BEIJING TO RULE THEM ALL, ONE BEIJING TO BIND THEM
Beaver Issue 828 | 17.02.15
the
newspaper of the LSE Students’ Union
50 Years On: When Malcolm X Spoke at LSE
Rayhan Uddin LSESU Democracy Committee
“contrary to what was previously insinuated in The Beaver, this doesn’t mean it is a secret”. The spokesperson stressed that “the money does not come from the Chinese state” In October 2014, The Beaver ran an interview with the journalist and LSE alumnus John Sweeney, who produced the documentary ‘North Korea Undercover’ after accompanying LSE students on a trip organised by the Grimshaw International Relations club in April 2013.
ON THIS DAY 50 YEARS AGO, human rights activist Malcolm X delivered a talk to LSE students in the Old Theatre. Invited by the Africa Society, Malcolm addressed the topic of ‘the relationship between the African states today and the Black Muslim movement’. The event was part of his tour of Africa and Europe which took place from late 1964 to early 1965, and included academic institutions such as Oxford University and the University of Ghana. The talk on February 11th 1965 at LSE was one of Malcolm X’s last ever public addresses. He was assassinated 10 days later in New York City. The full content of Malcolm X’s speech at LSE can be read on page 9. Speaking on the conflict which occurred in Congo during its decolonisation from Belgian rule, Malcolm notes “If you recall reading in the paper, they never talked about the Congolese who were being slaughtered. But as soon as a few whites, the lives of a few whites were at stake, they began to speak of ‘white hostages’, ‘white missionaries’, ‘white priests’, ‘white nuns’—as if a white life, one white life, was of such greater value than a Black life, than a thousand Black lives.” Such rhetoric will no doubt resonate with many today, not least within the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign which formed in response to the deaths of unarmed black Americans at the hands of white police officers. More recently, it also strikes a chord with the ‘Nigerian Lives Matter’ movement which rallied in response to the lack of media publicity of over 2000 Nigerians killed by Boko Haram, in comparison to the media response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre which killed 12 people in Paris.
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Hague Against the Machine: Hollywood actress and Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Angelina Jolie joined former UK Foreign Secretary William Hague last week to launch a new centre for the study of violence against women in war zones. News, page 5
LSE China Programme Funded by Mining Giant • BHP Billiton Funds Civil Servant Training Scheme • Chinese state pays over £850 000 for Confucius Institute Jon Allsop, Executive Editor Mike Pearson, Staff Writer
THE EXECUTIVE PUBLIC Policy Training Programme (EPPTP), an LSE hosted centre training “senior Chinese government officials” is paid for by BHP Billiton, an Australian-based multinational mining and petroleum company, according to freedom of information requests (FOIs) seen by The Beaver. It has also emerged that the LSE has received over £850 000 to
date from the Chinese government to fund its Confucius Centre. For their role in running the EPPTP, which is based at the University of Peking and run jointly by the LSE, Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris, LSE receives US$33 000 a year from BHP Billiton, an Anglo-Australian firm which is one of the highest earning mining companies in the world. BHP Billiton has recently been striving to develop close ties with China. In December 2014, after announcing the shipment of the one billionth tonne of iron ore to the
country, Chief Executive Andrew Mackenzie said that “China is of immense importance to BHP Billiton and to Australia” and that the company “always strives to develop closer ties to China”. An article from the Financial Times written last June, meanwhile, argued that the company has been “pin(ning) its hopes on China’s energy demand”. An LSE spokesperson admitted that the BHP Billiton funding is “so small it doesn’t show up as a particular budget line in the School’s Annual Accounts” but argued that
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