Bo po mo fo! Shanghai's universities will be offering preparatory courses for incoming foreign students soon, with 'one or two' universities taking part in a pilot program this September. Currently only offered at Tongji University, the prep courses mostly focus on acclimating students to Chinese language and 'culture' (which most likely means making dumplings, fumbling through calligraphy and the odd chengyu here and there). Special 'academic shortfall' makeup courses in math, physics and chemistry will also be available for quantitatively disinclined Western humanistic education products. Not that we could quantify it or anything, but we'd argue that the square root of certain countries' national debt problems might be a widespread cultural aversion to mathematic thinking. But then again, there's something to be said for de-emphasizing cold numbers in favor of artsy-fartsiness, no? Any sensitive poet would be within their rights to poo-poo the People's Square metro for not 'singing' enough. more ›

A new study looking at the Overseas Chinese experience edited by Fujian's Huaqiao University (华侨大学) claims that less than a third of Chinese students who've studied abroad since 1978 eventually return to China. From 1978 to 2009, only 497,400 students out of the 1.62 million who've left have made their way back to China. The new findings are in line with the trend of everyone and their corrupt fifth uncle wanting to get out of China, which leads us to suspect that for the majority of Chinese, the true meaning of the Chinese Dream is to simply find a way to leave. more ›

An update about the student who stabbed his mom at Pudong Airport upon returning from Japan - his mother asked for her son not to be punished, arguing that the kid was just "disturbed" and there was no "quarrel" over tuition fees, according to Global Times: "Yes, he did ask me why I transferred the money to him so late last month," she told the [Oriental Morning Post]. "He also said that he was always hearing someone talking to him as if an instrument was installed in his ear"... The mother, who gained consciousness after several days in a coma, was transferred to a regular ward from the intensive care unit on Friday last week... Her stomach and liver had been damaged but her condition was now stable. more ›

• Arrests made over audio porn [Shanghai Daily] "City police approved the arrest of a Shanghai native surnamed Gong, 30, the general manager of ilisten.cn, for allegedly making a profit by spreading pornography. Other suspects in custody include two of Gong's employees - a local in charge of the company's technical department, and an Anhui Province native who worked in the department. A 23-year-old Shandong Province woman surnamed Ma was caught in Beijing. She was allegedly hired to record some of the audio books, police said."
• The world’s most lucrative social network? China’s Tencent beats $1 billion revenue mark [VentureBeat] "A billion dollars in revenue in a single year? Not even MySpace, currently the most profitable social network outside China, has managed to accomplish that. But publicly traded Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, instant message client, social network, game developer and more has done it, and largely through the use of virtual goods and other 'Internet valued-added services,' like avatars, dating services, online memberships, music and community sites."
• Dissident warns Taiwan on China [Taipei Times] Yuan Hongbing (袁紅冰), a Chinese democracy activist living in exile in Australia, yesterday warned Taiwanese to beware of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “two-faced” approach to diplomacy. Yuan made the remarks at a press conference in Taipei after 15 Chinese academics were blocked from leaving the country to take part in a conference on the development of liberalism in China, despite calls for more cross-strait cultural and intellectual exchange by the Chinese leadership.

It didn't take long for Chinese netizens to get on the case of the brutal Virginia Tech murder. Almost immediately, forum members human flesh searched the killer, Zhu Haiyang, and sussed out his university scores, his QQ number and - most importantly - his blog. While nobody can know for sure why he decapitated 22-year-old Yang Xin in the middle of a public cafe, there are now a few more guesses as to what caused an otherwise affable and studious PhD student to snap. more ›

On Wednesday night, a Virginia Tech (维吉尼亚理工大学) graduate student from Beijing was decapitated in a cafe on the campus of the university. Yang Xin, 22-years-old, was starting her first semester as an accounting graduate student. She had only been on the campus for 13 days. more ›