I urge you not to vote Siyang Wei for CUSU President
Edit: Since posting this article I have received messages from the CUSU Election Committee requesting I take this article down:
I have to say, I am disappointed with the CUSU Elections committee, for sending my an officious message demanding I remove the article I wrote yesterday, that has received over 500 views (on medium — and countless more on Facebook). I have not received a single piece of negative feedback, only countless messages of support from people who didn’t know/felt bad about what had happened at the AGM, and often also wanted to express their appreciation for all I have done for ABACUS for the last year. I would also question that CUSU is overstretching their remit by trying to stifle individual student’s freedom of speech.
Link to election committee messages
It has also been featured on the tabs live blog
Original Article:
I don’t really mind who you vote for CUSU President, but I would advise you not to vote for Siyang Wei, due to the discriminatory attitudes they displayed at the ABACUS Annual General Meeting (AGM) last year.
As many of you know, I have been Secretary of The Association of British And Chinese University Students (ABACUS) for the last 12 months and have given my all to making the society more fun, more professional, and more inclusive than ever before. It is a role I have really enjoyed, with a focus this year on collaborating with more societies than before, including Asian societies like CUKS and ThaiSoc, but we also ran a Traditional Chinese Pastry Masterclass with Sidney JCR, demonstrating our commitment to sharing Chinese culture with all students.
I was elected to the position of Secretary at our AGM last year. Siyang turned up, despite not being a life member (which is completely fine, if a bit odd, they just couldn’t vote). When it was my turn (alongside all the other Vice-Presidential candidates — the position I ran for) to answer questions from the floor, they asked me, point blank: “What do you think the role of white people is in ABACUS?” (to which I responded something along the lines of ‘the same as anyone else, we are all members of ABACUS’). They followed up with a comment accusing me of ‘invading Asian safe spaces’. I completely understand and support the need for safe spaces, however, ABACUS is all about sharing culture and having fun, its role is just fundamentally not that of a safe space.
I reached out to Siyang after the AGM, as I could tell they had serious concerns, and I wanted to work with them to both understand and address them. However, they never got back to me. I’m not sure why they did this, as it seems to show that they don’t really care about effecting real change to what they see as the real issues (as a member of the executive committee, I could have been persuaded to enact changes that they felt were necessary), instead only caring about what they can be seen to have done personally to enact change (regardless of how effective it is). They have also never apologised for telling me that I didn’t belong in ABACUS, in a room filled with some of my best friends at Cambridge.
It was brought to my attention the day after the AGM that Siyang had posted shortly after the AGM: “as ever, white men get everything and I get maybe 2 things”. I sincerely hope this wasn’t in direct response to me winning a democratic election through my skills and expertise, especially given it is one they didn’t even enter. I fully accept the obvious fact that, to achieve equality in all forms, the ‘haves’ are going to have to give something up. However, any form of presumption that one is a ‘have’ based on their race is often misguided and is almost always an over simplification of the situation. As far as I’m concerned, such presumptions, although accurate, have no place in honest polite discussion, which instead should be geared towards dismantling assumptions in order to deal with the underlying issue.
I am a firm believer in equality (something that made their personal attacks hurt more). However, I don’t believe that this backwards, inflammatory, and authoritarian approach is a valid or effective way of achieving anything worthwhile. If we want to see real social change to the issues that face society today, sharing, explanation, and inclusiveness should be valued.
More importantly, they are someone with firebrand and aggressive approaches to social change, by which I mean they refuse to listen to people who do not agree with them. I don’t believe such a person can either enact real change in university culture, nor effectively lead CUSU through the year ahead.
In short, I would advise you to vote for Evie and Connor instead (if you weren’t planning on voting, and just don’t like the idea of Siyang as CUSU president, vote for ALL the other candidates in any order you like).
(Note: I have used ‘they’ as the singular third person pronoun in this piece, if this is all new to you, take a look at this article which explains it much better than I can here (and is also an example of the fantastic resources that cusu provides): here)
