The China Situation

Draft
The short version:

In about 2008, University of Illinois was in deep financial poop. They 
were unable to fulfill their mission as a land-grant university: To
provide citizens of Illinois with a quality education at a reasonable
cost. 

To solve their financial problems, they recruited many thousands of 
Chinese international students, who were willing to pay very high tuition
rates to attend. But China is a bitter commercial rival, you say? 
Wouldn't educating Chinese nationals undermine our national interests,
you ask? Should Illinois taxpayers be paying to educate Chinese 
nationals? Well, those are certainly interesting questions.

By the early 2000's, something like 15%-20% of student population at
UIUC was Chinese nationals. We're not talking about people who fled to
the United States, worked hard to achieve the American Dream, and adopted
our culture. We're talking about foreign nationals came to extract 
whatever they can and take it home to compete against USA on the global 
stage.

The influx of Chinese nationals caused some changes on campus, and their
need for transportation to and from O'Hare Airport transformed the bus
business here.

A company named Bluebird, from the Chicago Suburbs, set up routes to ORD
and handled that market. Suburban Express was insulated from airport 
transportation of foreign students.

Bluebird gave way to a company named Lincolnland Express, which was shut
down by the Department of Transportation in 2012 for an astonishing number
of severe violations. 

Suddenly, Suburban Express was awash in foreign nationals wanting to travel
to O'Hare.

There was a great deal of friction with the foreign nationals over invalid
tickets, duplicate tickets, counterfeit tickets, overlimit luggage and so 
forth. Eventually, frustration on the part of Suburban Express and the
international students boiled over, and the Chinese nationals fled to a 
competing company that had started to provide O'Hare service. They stopped 
riding Suburban Express. It was a de facto boycott. 

At one point, we tried to make lemonade out of lemons, or maybe throw 
their boycott in their faces. We jokingly said that "you won't feel like
you're in China" on our buses. This statement sort of had two prongs to it.
The competitor's bus was heavily, almost exclusively at some times, patronized
by Chinese nationals. Ergo, their bus was like being in China. Simultaneously
our buses were completely devoid of Chinese nationals. Ergo, our buses were
not like being in China.

Social media went nuts over our statement, scumbag politicians lept into 
the spotlight and tried to exploit inclusivity messaging to their benefit, 
and the Attorney General of Illinois even came after us, in the hopes of
shaking us down for money and political trophies.

The Attorney General litigation ended in a draw. But that didn't prevent 
them from declaring victory. They made numerous false self-congratulatory 
claims that were completely contradicted by the language of the settlement
agreement.

Around the time that this situation reached its peak, the mother of the
owner of Suburban Express died. That made him reassess his priorities. He 
decided he'd had enough of college students and Illinois politicians. In 
May 2019, he closed Suburban Express and walked away.

Today, fares are nearly twice as much as they were when Suburban Express 
left the market, and there are far fewer departures from Champaign-
Urbana. 

Here's some reasonable press about the matter:

News-Gazette Article

Another News-Gazette Article

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Images and text copyright Dennis Toeppen 2017-2025