Coronavirus: Stranded student Tian Feng sick … of Aussie ban

Sydney University student Tian Feng is impressively good-humoured for someone stranded in virus-stricken China.

Sydney University student Tian Feng is frustrated at being stranded in Beijing by Australia’s virus-related ban. Picture: Li Xiaonan

Sydney University student Tian Feng is impressively good-­humoured for someone stranded in virus-stricken China and unsure if he will make it on time for the final semester of his five years of higher education in Australia.

But, while the 26-year-old master of data science student is polite, he is no fan of the Australian government’s ban that is stopping him — and about 100,000 other students similarly marooned in mainland China — from getting on with his life.

“This is my final semester. I want to graduate on time and go back to China and get a job. That’s very important,” he tells The Australian in an interview not far from his parents’ inner-northeast Beijing apartment. It is the bluntness of the policy that upsets him.

For weeks Mr Feng — who has already completed a full-fee-paying undergraduate science degree at Sydney Uni — has been taking precautions and wearing a face mask. He asks, why couldn’t he come to Australia and, just in case, quarantine himself in his apartment in Central Park, which neighbours the university?

A friend of Mr Feng, worried by the spreading virus, decided to bring his flight forward and got out just in time.

Mr Feng was not as fortunate.

“I had an internship so I had to wait,” he says. Mr Feng got an alert: the Qantas flight he was booked on from Beijing to Sydney on February 22 was cancelled.

Then came Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement last weekend banning all non-citizens and non-residents entering Australia from mainland China. There was no carve-out for the more than 150,000 mainland Chinese studying at Australian unis.

By then Mr Feng’s internship at a Beijing-based insurance company had also been cancelled.

“So that’s very terrible,” he says, laughing at his ill-fortune.

China has a ferociously competitive jobs market, which makes the current situation worse for students in their final year. Mr Feng says one friend got a good job offer at an IT firm in Chongqing, in China’s southwest. But he cannot start unless he completes his final semester in Australia.

Some student leaders in Australia are furious at the travel ­restriction. Abbey Shi, general secretary of the Students’ Representative Council at Sydney University, said there was “a lot of confusion about the ban and anger towards the government”.

“The education sector in Australia is being commercialised and students are being treated like cash cows,” she was quoted in the South China Morning Post.

The leadership of the university sector — terrified about upsetting a huge portion of its studentry and massive source of revenue — is ­attempting to find ways to reduce the disruption the policy causes.

“To our students still in China — our care, concern and empathy are with you,” said Universities Australia chair Deborah Terry in a statement after meeting with Education Minister Dan Tehan to discuss the ban.

For now, Mr Feng is getting a daily email update from Sydney University.

But he is not optimistic that he will get back in a hurry.