@Tom: My point is that it's all promoted in the name of nationalism, which is the smokescreen, and a necessary one, to cover the kind of unacceptable truth that you discuss.
As for conservative opposition in Europe, and the 'patriotic freedom loving revolutionary spirit' in the US (what might these words actually relate to - the US Democratic Party? Or the Republicans? I think they're all Republicrats), which seem pretty much the same to me, I pretty much see people, or at the very least, their governments, as operating behind the smokescreen too, although there are perhaps more people in Europe who can see a least a little bit through it.
The student who made the speech is deep behind the smokescreen as well. Obviously, no?

@Haali, I think that's weird too. Note that the English on the sign in the toilets of trains states: "Please flush closet pot" - train cars built & designed many years ago, yet nobody bothered to offer 100rmb or so to some average wandering native-English speaker before they put these signs in virtually every toilet in train car on one of the world's largest RR networks - wtf?
Same syndrome everywhere in China - yet, although I can read and write Chinese, I seriously doubt that I'd design any sign in Chinese characters for exhibition in another country without bothering to find a native Chinese speaker to advise me.
Self-reliance is wonderful.

No particular historical justice that everybody's got to learn English these days, but that's the international language we have, and that's why foreigners can get teaching jobs here, as well as in so many other places.

@Peter: All respects to Orwell. However, if you want to jump on somebody for not telling the truth, or what they believe to be the truth, there's no point in concentrating on universities when our entire media environment, from the advertising industry to government spin-PR to other, numerous types of insidious media, the goals of all of which are to bend what is believed to be truth when it is not a straightforward matter of lying, I think the universities come off well - in most places, for that matter - relative to the media environment around them, which is fueled primarily by the desire to gain or maintain wealth and/or power - and yes, academics are subject to this too, but most do not put themselves into the serious acquire-wealth/power professions, where deceit becomes not-yet-quite universal. Competitive-rational arguments in universities are more likely, I think, to expose deceit than asking questions at press conferences or complaining to people engaged heavily in economic competition.
But hey! no guarantees.

My comment above is on my previous comment, not on Peter's.